Dog bone, stapler, cribbage board, garlic press  because this window is loose—lacks suction, lacks grip. Bungee cord, bootstrap, dog leash, leather belt  because this window had sash cords. They frayed. They broke. Feather duster, thatch of straw, empty bottle of Elmer's glue  because this window is loud—its hinges clack open, clack shut. Stuffed bear, baby blanket, single crib newel  because this window is split. It's dividing in two. Velvet moss, sagebrush, willow branch, robin's wing  because this window, it's pane-less. It's only a frame of air.
The old cupola glinted above the clouds, shone among fir trees, but it took him an hour for the half mile all the way up the hill. As he trailed, the village passed him by, greeted him, asked about his health, but everybody hurried to catch the mass, left him leaning against fences, measuring the road with the walking stick he sculpted. He yearned for the day when the new church would be built—right across the road. Now it rises above the moon: saints in frescoes meet the eye, and only the rain has started to cut through the shingles on the roof of his empty house. The apple trees have taken over the sky, sequestered the gate, sidled over the porch.
Look for me under the hood of that old Chevrolet settled in weeds at the end of the pasture. I'm the radiator that spent its years bolted in front of an engine shoving me forward into the wind. Whatever was in me in those days has mostly leaked away, but my cap's still screwed on tight and I know the names of all these tattered moths and broken grasshoppers the rest of you've forgotten.
Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit hunches like a giant spider with strange calm: six tiny babies beneath, each clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk. This may sound cute to you, reading from your pulpit of plenty, but one small one was left out of reach, a knife of fur barging between the others. I watched behind a turret of sand. If I could have cautioned the mother rabbit I would. If I could summon the Bunnies to fit him in beneath the belly's swell I would. But instead, I stood frozen, wishing for some equity. This must be why it's called Wild Life because of all the crazed emotions tangled up in the underbrush within us. Did I tell you how the smallest one, black and trembling, hopped behind the kudzu still filigreed with wanting? Should we talk now of animal heritage, their species, creature development? And what do we say about form and focus— writing this when a stray goes hungry, and away.
When I push your button you fly off the handle, old skin and bones, black bat wing. We're alike, you and I. Both of us resemble my mother, so fierce in her advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable child who'll catch his death in this tempest. Such a headwind! Sometimes it requires all my strength just to end a line. But when the wind is at my back, we're likely to get carried away, and say something we can never retract, something saturated from the ribs down, an old stony word like ruin. You're what roof I have, frail thing, you're my argument against the whole sky. You're the fundamental difference between wet and dry.
You are the start of the week or the end of it, and according to The Beatles you creep in like a nun. You're the second full day the kids have been away with their father, the second full day of an empty house. Sunday, I've missed you. I've been sitting in the backyard with a glass of Pinot waiting for your arrival. Did you know the first Sweet 100s are turning red in the garden, but the lettuce has grown too bitter to eat. I am looking up at the bluest sky I have ever seen, cerulean blue, a heaven sky no one would believe I was under. You are my witness. No day is promised. You are absolution. You are my unwritten to-do list, my dishes in the sink, my brownie breakfast, my braless day.
Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ decendants, who are going to the store.
Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.
Is anything central? Orchards flung out on the land, Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills? Are place names central? Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm? As they concur with a rush at eye level Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough Thank you, no more thank you. And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness The damp plains, overgrown suburbs, Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.   These are connected to my version of America But the juice is elsewhere. This morning as I walked out of your room After breakfast crosshatched with Backward and forward glances, backward into light, Forward into unfamiliar light, Was it our doing, and was it The material, the lumber of life, or of lives We were measuring, counting? A mood soon to be forgotten In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow In this morning that has seized us again?   I know that I braid too much on my own Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me. They are private and always will be. Where then are the private turns of event Destined to bloom later like golden chimes Released over a city from a highest tower? The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you, And you know instantly what I mean? What remote orchard reached by winding roads Hides them? Where are these roots?   It is the lumps and trials That tell us whether we shall be known And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star. All the rest is waiting For a letter that never arrives, Day after day, the exasperation Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is, The two envelope halves lying on a plate. The message was wise, and seemingly Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited Steps that can be taken against danger Now and in the future, in cool yards, In quiet small houses in the country, Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
Hour in which I consider hydrangea, a salt or sand plant, varietal, the question of varietals, the diet of every mother I know, 5 pounds feels like 20, I have lost … I have lost, yes, a sense of my own possible beauty, grown external, I externalize beauty. Beauty occurs on the surface of plants; the sun darkens the skin of my child, he is so small, he is beautiful (I can see; it is obvious) and everything about him is beautiful. His hand swells from the bite [spread?] of some insect[’s] venom because he is small. He appears to feel nothing. He smashes his skull against the floor. He screams. I hold him in my lap on the kitchen floor in front of an open freezer, pressing a pack of frozen clay against his forehead. He likes the cold. I see; it is so obvious. Hydrangea. When I move, when I walk pushing my child’s stroller (it is both walking and pushing or hauling, sometimes, also, lifting; it is having another body, an adjunct body composed of errand and weight and tenderness and no small amount of power), I imagine I can feel this small amount of weight, this 5 pounds like 20, interfering with the twitch of every muscle in my body. As an object, a mother is confusing, a middle-aged mother with little spare flesh, I feel every inch of major muscle pulling against gravity and against the weight of my child, now sleeping. This is the hour for thinking hydrangea. Let no man look at me. I stop to brush the drowsy child’s little eye. His face. He barely considers his mother. I am all around him. Why should he consider what is all around him? Perhaps what is missing is a subtle power of differentiation. I am in, therefore, a time of mass apprehensions.
She couldn't help but sting my finger, clinging a moment before I flung her to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick evening light plays on my roses. She curls into herself, stinger twitching, gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks, and my pain subsided in a moment. In the cold, she hardly had her wits to buzz. No warning from either of us: she sleeping in the richness of those petals, then the hand, my hand, cupping the bloom in devastating force, crushing the petals for the scent. And she mortally threatened, wholly unaware that I do this daily, alone with the gold last light, in what seems to me an act of love.
I will not speak ill of Jack Flick. I will rarely look at the scar he made on my cheek one summer at the lake. I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles and gangly legs are gone. So is the drained face I saw when he saw what he'd done with a sharp rock nonchalantly skipped. I will speak well, for it was somewhat sweet to lie on the dock while Jack and his friends bent down and wiped my face with a sandy towel. I will speak well of them, for most are gone and the wound proved small. I will speak well, for the rock missed my eye. I can hardly find the scar. Jack went into the air corps, fought in one of the wars, retired, and lived less than a year before his tender heart gave out. I will speak well of Jack.
How quiet is the spruce, the wind twills through the uppermost tier of splayed leaves. Now the song of a bird like the squeaky lock over a canoe's oar, followed by startling chirps, the sky pushing its clouds like sailboats, and I think, what kind of God keeps himself secret so that to find him out we have to seek, as children do for something like the beetle scuttling between grass, hidden in plain sight.
You think we are the pointed argument, the man drunk at the party showing off his gun collection, the bed of nettles.   What we really are is hidden from you: girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather's boots; tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby in the landfill; boy with the shy mouth playing his guitar at the picnic table, out in the dirt yard.   We slide into this world benign and pliable, quills pressed down smooth over back and tail. Only one hour here stiffens the barbs into thousands of quick retorts. Everything this well-guarded remembers being soft once.
I planted an apple tree in memory of my mother, who is not gone,   but whose memory has become so transparent that she remembers   slicing apples with her grandmother (yellow apples; blue bowl) better than   the fruit that I hand her today. Still, she polishes the surface with her thumb,   holds it to the light and says with no hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .   they're so fragile, you can almost seeto the core. She no longer remembers how   to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.   And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core— to that little cathedral to memory—where   the seeds remember everything they need to know to become yellow and transparent.
The entrance at the back of the complex led onto a road, where an upended couch tilted into a ditch and a washing machine gleamed avocado beneath pine needles.   From the end, you turned left and left again, then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far as we dared before a man pushing a mower   might stop to ask, "whadda you boys need?" That was a question we could never answer. I loved the name of the place, White Hall, imagined that each interior was a stretch   of marble perfect wall adorned by smiling photos of the family. Our own halls were brailled with nail holes of former tenants, the spackled rounds of fists.   But doesn't longing clarify the body? The boys I left behind: Tommy, wearing the World War II trenching tool; Danny, whose father, so much older   than the other parents, died in his recliner one sunny afternoon while watching baseball; Duke, who stole his mother's car and crashed into a wall. Boys who knew when you were posing,   waiting for someone to say, "smile." Boys who, on those latch-key days, held themselves in narrow passages when no one was there to show them what to do.
my father’s body is a map a record of his journey   he carries a bullet lodged in his left thigh there is a hollow where it entered a protruding bump where it sleeps the doctors say it will never awaken   it is the one souvenir he insists on keeping mother has her own opinionsbố cùa con điên—your father is crazy   as a child i wanted a scar just like my father’s bold and appalling a mushroom explosion that said i too was at war instead i settled for a grain of rice a scar so small look closely there here between the eyes a bit to the right there on the bridge of my nose   father says i was too young to remember it happened while i was sleeping leaking roof the pounding rain drop after drop after drop
it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels she too will share in this act of love my own mother says it was not meant to be cruel when cruelty she tells me is a child’s lips torn from breast as proof back home the women wear teeth marks
Why are you still seventeen and drifting like a dog after dark, dragging a shadow you’ve found?   Put it back where it belongs, and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road you want, though you have it to yourself.   Gone are the cars that crawl to town from the reactors, a parade of insects, metallic, fuming along the one four-lane street.   The poplars of the shelterbelt lean away from the bypass that never had much to pass by but coyote and rabbitbrush.   Pinpricks stabbed in a map too dark to read— I stared at stars light-years away. Listen. That hissing? Just a sprinkler   damping down yesterday until it’s today. The cottonwoods shiver, or I do, every leaf rustling as if it’s the one   about to tear itself, not I. Memory takes the graveyard shift.
Yes, your childhood now a legend of fountains  —jorge gullén Yes, your childhood, now a legend gone to weeds, still remembers the gray road that set out to cross the desert of the future.   And how, always just ahead, gray water glittered, happy to be just a mirage. Who steps off the gray bus at the depot?   Sidewalks shudder all the way home. Blinds close their scratchy eyes. Who settles in your old room?   Sniffy air sprawls as if it owns the place, and now your teenage secrets have no one to tell. For the spider laying claim to the corner,   there is a stickiness to spin, that the living may beg to be wrapped in silk and devoured, leaving not even the flinch from memory.
I got a call from the White House, from the President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr. President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?” “Why, sure, Mr. President, you’ve got it. Normal, that’s how I’m going to act. I won’t let on, even if I’m tortured,” I said, immediately regretting that “tortured” bit. He thanked me several times and hung up. I was dying to tell someone that the President himself called me, but I knew I couldn’t. The sudden pressure to act normal was killing me. And what was going on anyway. I didn’t know anything was going on. I saw the President on TV yesterday. He was shaking hands with a farmer. What if it wasn’t really a farmer? I needed to buy some milk, but suddenly I was afraid to go out. I checked what I had on. I looked “normal” to me, but maybe I looked more like I was trying to be normal. That’s pretty suspicious. I opened the door and looked around. What was going on? There was a car parked in front of my car that I had never seen before, a car that was trying to look normal, but I wasn’t fooled. If you need milk, you have to get milk, otherwise people will think something’s going on. I got into my car and sped down the road. I could feel those little radar guns popping behind every tree and bush, but, apparently, they were under orders not to stop me. I ran into Kirsten in the store. “Hey, what’s going on, Leon?” she said. She had a very nice smile. I hated to lie to her. “Nothing’s going on. Just getting milk for my cat,” I said. “I didn’t know you had a cat,” she said. “I meant to say coffee. You’re right, I don’t have a cat. Sometimes I refer to my coffee as my cat. It’s just a private joke. Sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Nothing’s going on, Kirsten. I promise you. Everything is normal. The President shook hands with a farmer, a real farmer. Is that such a big deal?” I said. “I saw that,” she said, “and that man was definitely not a farmer.” “Yeah, I know,” I said, feeling better.
Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin and of course organs, some members dismembered to shake at strangers and their evil, and there is no way to imagine that a man shaking a dried penis would ever utter the word darling. Of course personal, add starch for pain, add bluing, of course hang the laundry in the basement, there are thieves in the backyard, of course departing trains, carload after carload of sorrow, the man on top of a boxcar waving, his rifle silhouetted against the white sky, its color draining the way warmth left the Bosnian after he’d burned the last page of the last book, knowing he had reached the end of something though it was not end enough. Of course kisses, the stages of kissing like running borders, endless conversations, stations of the cross, till even the promise of kissing bores you, of course teeth gnashing, ethnic cleansing. The cynical will shrug off the past, the future, the whole left hip of Ecuador slashed for six days of oil, of course an X on the coats of the sick so they would stand apart for deportation, of course rogue tumors over the body politic, the same bodies that took Egyptian mummies and powdered them to use as food seasoning, bon vivant cannibalism, and yes civilized men tossed living penguins into furnaces to fuel their ships. Of course partitions so that after the new territories were defined, families had to line up on a cliff with bullhorns to talk to their people on the other side, of course courage, at times a weapon against yearning, surrender another, a mother of course goes on setting the table, even if it’s with broken plates, and a friend will say gently of course I want to ride with you to the funeral, of course of course of course of course, now then, negotiations, whatever, palisades, the end of whimsy, but then one evening though it is wartime, a man climbs the hill to an amphitheater to play his cello at twilight and history stops talking for a moment and sighs while the melancholy of Albinoni passes from heart to heart and each lifts a little, the way passing a baby around a room can be sacramental, and the memories of simple pleasures become more beautiful, the memory of your joy on a highway to see in the next lane in a neighboring car a clown take off his nose at the end of the day, the memory of how your mother laid roses, sweetheart roses, on the cold grate of the fireplace, and the sudden rain one afternoon in fall after you’d hiked far into the dells and you huddled deep in your overcoat in the wet, waiting out the storm with a sheep that had come up to lean against your side like a rock.
If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore, say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand, a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you eight at a time. If they ask you how it felt, say solitary, at first the ease of sleeping alone, warm without even a sheet, then the nonchalance of a dirt road leading down the hill, its dust raised and re-raised in plumes as each guest departed, and later, say it was like the blind cat that came out of nowhere to lie on your tile floor, lifting its face to stare with white marble eyes. If they ask what you heard, tell them the single note of the watchman, who coughed his one syllable when you went to bed, and at the end of every dream when you woke with a simple plea—stay, go—again, the cough of the watchman. If they ask about thirst, tell them no one could carry water as far as it had to go, so that when it was time to rest, people went to the spigot at the edge of the train tracks and cupped their hands under the water, lowering their faces to drink. Tell them a man could stand at noon in the park wearing nothing but underwear and beg for hours with his cup empty. Tell them you could sit quietly while phrases you didn't know you knew
 rose up in the language there and on an undisturbed lake in your mind
 you could back float—that weightless prayer that prays
Let me die with my toes pointing up at the sun. When they ask what people will eventually get around to asking,
 How was the food? Tell them batata, mamón, guanábana, maní, indigenous crops exchanging places with hunger, giving up to the dark store window whose inventory is one hand of bananas sold one banana at a time, giving up to little pyramids of limes by the side of the road and the kids who tend them, dreaming of a few coins tossed down in the dirt.
The prisoner can’t go any longer, but he does. The beggar can’t go on begging, but watch— Tomorrow he’ll be in the alley, holding out a bowl To everyone, to even a young, possibly poorer, child. The mother can’t go on believing, But she will kneel for hours in the cathedral, Holding silence in her arms. The rain goes on, daily, sometimes, and we cry, As often as not alone. The fishmonger, the bell ringer, the cook, each Can be corrupted in a less than dire way. Nothing can replace the sea breezes you were born to. Nothing can stay the shy ache in the palm you hold out to the fortune-teller. The concrete lions on her steps go on Making bloodless journeys, they go on Hunting in air longer than any of you will live to watch, Hunting still after your futures become all irises and blamelessness.
After Octavio Paz What’s most human must drive an arrow to the heart.   Ghosts, too, must abide by this directive & remain transparent,   going about their business in old houses. Before I was an I, I longed to be ethereal.   Sprouting wings at will & gliding through cul-de-sacs and malls around the valley.   My hands, too, would gradually disappear followed by my arms, then neck & head   until my whole body was slight as allergen. Before I was an I, I spoke an old language   that would return on drowsy afternoons. Therefore I struggled to say   the simplest sentences. So much so that the maligned semicolon   became an ardent ally, an island of pause and the deep breath.   The comma, too, bless its tiny soul, was the crumb which the god   of small favors multiplied tenfold for my morning pie.   Before I was an I, knowledge clung to me like burrs & hunger   guided my ship like the barefoot light on the sleeping land & sea.
The fearless blackbirds see me again at the footpath beside the tall grasses sprouting like unruly morning hair. They caw and caw like vulgar boys on street corners making love to girls with their “hey mama this” and their “hey mama that.” But this gang of birds is much too slick. They are my homeys of the air with their mousse-backed hair and Crayola black coats like small fry hoods who smoke and joke about each other’s mothers, virginal sisters, and the sweet arc of revenge. These birds spurn my uneaten celery sticks, feckless gestures, ineffective hosannas. They tag one another, shrill and terrible, caroling each to each my weekly wages. But they let me pass, then flit away. They won’t mess with me this time— they know where I live.
But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth.  –The Sphinx In the garden of Père Lachaise, city of the dead, we passed angels covering their faces in shame, & nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed as if their only purpose was to grieve, & crossed the Transversales to Wilde’s grave.   When lovers leave, they leave their kisses glistening on the gray slab, on impressions of lips themselves, a tissue of strangers’ cells the conservators cannot leave alone, & scrub the graffiti, as the plaque decrees by law, no one can deface this tomb, & still the images of lips remain, dark gray stains of animal fat imprisoned in limestone.   Lips are pressed as high as lovers climb, against the Sphinx’s ridiculous headdress, on the carved trumpet of fame, & on the cheeks of its voracious face of mindless passion flying with eyes pinched tight, that some farsighted lover tried to open with lines from a red pen, like a blepharoplasty, while others kissed its sybaritic mouth to make a poem a prophecy.   So here is love alive surviving the wreckage it survives, a lipstick envelope of hearts on their flight to some other place, less aware, more receiving, a final Champ de Grâce.
This is the poem of death. There is only one and no other.   Every one is an occasion, one way or another, and the last poem is this poem of death.   It is an occasion like no other. I will no longer lope after elegance, beauty’s body, or love’s wonder.   I will be sorry for everything I was, and for everything I was not. I speak to you as if you were my brother.   I will forgive everyone. Death will make this possible. There will be no other.   Death was in the mind before thought or love, in ourselves, and in our lovers.   The poem of death is speechless. A companion will appear again like another self, like your brother.   Enough now, enough has been said. The spinning leaf will spin like no other.
Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel, or what life itself eventually reveals.   No more studies of kindness or courtesy, nor grace or charity, all is needless now.   All is needless now, sky, world, family grieving for their bundles of purity,   now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets, or whatever attacks, and then retreats.   Classrooms emptied of children’s things, paper and paste, and love’s imaginings,   bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed with the unborn and the dead at rest,   nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel or what life itself eventually reveals.
Among physicians rich in their death watch In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs, Cradles of a century’s platitudes, The stale air smelling of disinfectant And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses, Among the staring insomniacs of the day room, The stroke victims on their rented gurneys, Complaining orderlies and rattling carts   Among these in this place my father lay At the end of everything   In the curved landscapes of white sheets Abandoned finally by parents, his son,   The loyal company, old friends, his death A sign of other deaths too soon to come   Unable to recall one life, his thoughts, Features, he lay unknown to himself,   The tall hunter of pheasants out with his boy In vellum corn and brassy orchards   In an autumn that never was, the proud White-collared Ford employee lay on a bed   Too short for legs tattooed with red burn-rings From daily syringes of Cytosar   Considered useless, still a requirement For state funding for a body described   Leukemic waiting for Saturday's fiddlers Who came to raise the spirits of the dead   With a music he never cared for turned Suddenly attractive, he found genius,   Theirs or his like some lyrical phosphor That shapes itself in the dry night air   To make a thing then make it disappear He lay listening to the county fiddlers   At the end of every purpose, act and form I leave you here, my father, in perfect accord.
Imagine half your face rubbed out yet you are suited up and walking to the office.   How will your mates greet you? with heavy hearts, flowers, rosary beads? How shall we greet the orphan boy, the husband whose hand slipped, children and wife swept away?   How to greet our new years and our birthdays? Shall we always light a candle?   Do we remember that time erases the shore, grass grows, pain’s modified?   At Hikkaduwa in 1980 I wrote a ditty, a sailor’s song about rain in sunny Ceylon.   I don’t know what Calypsonians would compose about this monstrous wave, this blind hatchet man;   don’t know the Baila singers’ reply; we are a “happy and go” people yet the fisherman’s wife   knows that her grandfather was eaten by the ocean— fisher communities have suffered in time   and what’s happened now is just another feast for that bloody, sleeping mother lapping at our island;   but what if the ocean were innocent, the tectonic plates innocent, what if God were innocent?    *   I do not know how to walk upon the beach, how to lift corpse after corpse until I am exhausted,   how to stop the tears when half my face has been rubbed out beyond the railroad tracks   and this anaesthetic, this calypso come to the last verse. What shall we write in the sand?   Where are gravestones incinerated? Whose ashes are these urned and floating through a house throttled by water?   Shall we build a memorial some calculated distance from the sea, in a park, in the shape of a giant wave   where we can write the names of the dead? Has the wave lost its beauty? Is it now considered obscene?    *   Yet tomorrow we must go to the ocean and refresh ourselves in the sea breeze down in Hikkaduwa   where it is raining in sunny Ceylon. Tomorrow, we must renew our vows at sunrise, at sunset.   Let us say the next time the ocean recedes and parrots gawk and flee, and restless dogs insist their humans   wake up, we will not peer at the revelation of the ocean bed, nor seek photographs. We will run to higher ground,   and gathered there with our children, our cats, dogs, pigs, with what we’ve carried in our hands   —albums, letters— we will make a circle, kneel, sit, stand in no particular direction, pray   and be silent, open our lungs and shout thanks to our gods thanks to our dogs.
Jesus did not ride that monstrous wave, not Yahweh, Jah, Allah, none of the major   Gods or the minor ones, not even the godless strode that bugger which sliced our lives   in two: the past where we danced ballroom while the children played carom, and mangos   stained our lapels, and today, hobbling, scavenging in ash heaps, how easy   the arithmetic, day and night, two by two. Bring on the mind workers.   Let a thousand doctors bloom. I lived right here on the x, my name   is blue: sea green blue blue green I do not speak in tongues. I am not   disordered, a babbler. I did not lose anybody close to me, just 30,000   fellow island bees, not to worry, machan, old fellow, I will subscribe tomorrow,   the order of every day, skip and jump rope, whistle, talk to aid workers, even swim.
The elephants of reckoning are bunches of scruff men and women picking up thrown out antennae from the rubbish bins of the city   to fix on their tubular bells and horn about by oil can fires in the freezing midnight of the old new year   We ride by their music every hour in cabs on trains hearing the pit pat of our grown-wise pulse shut in shut out   from the animals of the dry season the losers and boozers, we must not admit our eyes into the courtyard   the whimsy of chance and our other excuses— dollars in pocket— to write beautiful songs is all I ask, God   to do right with friends and love a woman and live to eighty have people listen to the story of my trip to America   The elephants of reckoning are beaten and hungry and walk their solitary horrors out every sunrise slurping coffee bought with change   while in some houses freedom-bound lovers embrace late and read Tagore about the people working underneath the falling of empires.
The King Cobra slides through our jungles, and tucked in bushes by the riverbanks the grand Kabaragoya holds court among lizards—   but if you want to swim at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites on Galle Face Green, or ride horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula of your ancestors, or bear a child in Colombo General Hospital,   or sleep in Cinnamon Gardens under a mango tree, or beg in the Borella Market, or ride for historical reasons on patrol boats in the Bay, or stilt-fish off Matara down South,   just remember here everywhere   there is only man burning and woman burning   here everywhere   in shallow graves in deep graves floating out of salt water washing down the sands   the dead have tongues the dead have ears tongues are speaking to ears   What are they saying? What are they saying?   Tell us, brown bear bolting out of your cave.   Tell us, leopard leaning on your branch.   Tell us, flamingos. Bend your necks and pour wine pour wine   Hoopoes, kingfishers, cranes, have you got your messages on the bill, are you ready to sing? Are you going to sing?   Monsoon.   Are you going to sing?   Monsoon.   Are you going to sing?   Monsoon. Monsoon.
Kissing your lips I try to forget roses or the fruit of palmyra trees sweet and strong   Tongue lolling upon tongue heart beating against heart beating, these are my words signifying our human bodies which poetry does not capture, the absolute desire I have to kiss your lips on this hot and sunny afternoon.   I do not know how much longer I can walk about the garden kissing roses,   or perambulate the toddy tavern of my dreams where black faces and white toddy mix in black and white memories of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, my Tamil countrymen far away on an island across the sea.   Far away and far away the palmyra fruit and your lips. To drink toddy now. To kiss your rosy lips now. To uproot the roses in my garden and offer them upon my tongue now.   To fly to Sri Lanka and grab the last fruit on the tree before history throws the Tamils into the sea as is said it will do;   before all this and everything else, before the apocalypse, I do so sincerely wish, though my words may not fit, to rest my head in your hair and kiss your lips.
in florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future the hamster has bad eyesight and many other problems later that night the hamster drives its car around listening to sad music; the master lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel the hamster is alone but not for long: at home three waffle friends wait cooling inside a countertop oven in the kitchen
in the evening the hamster sits at the computer watermelon juice and coffee sit by the computer the hamster drinks all of the coffee after a few minutes the hamster drinks all of the watermelon juice the hamster lays its paw atop a neatly folded to-do list; this is a resourceful hamster with a strong will, a sincere and loving hamster friend, and a confident nature we do not need to spend any more time or empathy on this hamster
notice how my forehead approaches you at a high speed notice the contortions on my face; hear and feel the impact of my forehead against your eyebrow never get angry if someone doesn’t do things for you react to disappointment by being quiet and nice and alone, not by being confrontational or frustrated in 1952 a DSM copy-editor removed ‘headbutting’ from the entry for ‘psychopathic behavior’ thereafter the headbutt has thrived across all social, political, and elementary school gym classes today the headbutt is a sign of friendship, stability, and inner calm the exponential effect of your repeated lies makes me afraid what will happen to us; ‘the perfect headbutt’ destroys both participants and impresses even the severely disillusioned, and the phrase ‘giant poem’ reverberates through my head with the austerity of ancient ruins, the off-centered beauty of repressed veganism, and the lord of the rings trilogy I forgot what this poem was about
The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled Cuban rumba dancer's fancy dress. In my California kindergarten class, the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT. It's the moment when I first begin to learn that teachers can be wrong. They have never seen the dancing plants of Cuba.
Two sets of family stories, one long and detailed, about many centuries of island ancestors, all living on the same tropical farm... The other side of the family tells stories that are brief and vague, about violence in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents had to flee forever, leaving all their loved ones behind. They don't even know if anyone survived. When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba, she fills the twining words with relatives. But when I ask my Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma about her childhood in a village near snowy Kiev, all she reveals is a single memory of ice-skating on a frozen pond. Apparently, the length of a grown-up's growing-up story is determined by the difference between immigration and escape.
Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find.   She is so determined, and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork from supper.   Mad and I used to do everything together, but now I need a project all my own, so I roam the green fields, finding bones.   The skull of a wild boar. The jawbone of a mule.   Older cousins show me how to shake the mule’s quijada, to make the blunt teeth rattle.   Guitars. Drums. Gourds. Sticks.   A cow bell. A washboard. Pretty soon, we have a whole orchestra.   On Cuban farms, even death can turn into music.
Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom.
I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling. Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now. It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries, I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.
And both the girls cried bitterly (though they hardly knew why) and clung to the Lion and kissed his mane and his nose and his paws and his great, sad eyes. Then he turned from them and walked out onto the top of the hill. And Lucy and Susan, crouching in the bushes, looked after him and this is what they saw. —C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Tonight we will function like women. The snow has gone away, the ice with its amniotic glare. I clasp my sister’s tiny hand. We will not turn away Though spring, spring with its black appetite, Comes seeping out of the earth.   The lion was sad. He suffered us To touch him. When I placed the bread of my hands In his mammalian heat, I was reminded That the world outside this world Is all vinegar and gall, that to be a young girl at the foot of a god Requires patience. Timing.   The White Witch has mustered her partisans. Because I am fascinated by her bracelets strung with baby teeth, I will remember her as the woman Who grins with her wrists. From my thicket of heather I note that in her own congenital way She is pure, that tonight she ushers something new into the world.   I cannot stop it. I cannot stop it just as in that other place I could not keep the planes with their spiked fires from coming. Though in this closed realm the smell of camphor is overwhelming I have nothing but my hands to use In ministering to the dead. Here too My hands must suffice.   Hush now while I testify. They are shaving him. The corona of his mane falls away Like pieces of money. In the moon’s milk light Her bangled wrists grin as she raises the blade. Something is diffused. In whatever world he comes again There will be women like us who choose to.
Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day. Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember. In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map, Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on. Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves. Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out, saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom. Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is, the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle the school-turned-prison where only seven escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried. How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell? The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper. Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well of her childhood home, and how her mother told herdon’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.
Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful   because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but to understand.” Did she want us to let her be, or does she want   to be there walking the grounds of the old prison on the hill of the poison tree where comparatively a paltry twenty thousand died? In the first room with the blown up   black-and-white of a human body gone abstract someone has to turn and face the wall not because of the human pain represented in the photo but because of her calmness,   the tranquility with which she tells us that her father and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach   thrown in the face and the question of whether or not the author could write, “The full moon sat in the window like a calcified eye, the woman’s face aglow with a knowingness.”   I felt it come over me and I couldn’t stop. I tried to pull myself together and I couldn’t. They were children. An army of child soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge   picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents were killed so that they would be left alone in the world to do the grisly work that precedes paradise.   And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case the vise an instrument not of torture   but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear and total hopelessness as exists   in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world. For three $US per person she will guide you through what was Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree.   Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how her father and her sister and her brother went among the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms   of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.
Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there. The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see  the meaning in their hands,   palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them by their names, Light that Shines Throughout the Universe  and His consort, but there were stories   of travelers lost in the foothills of the Hindu Kush and a distant brilliance that led them home. The way a candle physically enters  your body after it has been   snuffed out. The pearly smoke suffused in the air. In one school hundreds of miles away all the girls my age were poisoned,  and last week outside the capital   a woman like my sister was shot dead in front of a crowd by two men who forced their bodies into her body and then judged her an infidel  so they could kill her   and be done with it. After the visitors were blasted I had a dream. I saw a human man standing by a lake and no one was looking at him  directly. His image   on the surface of the water cleaner than anything in this world. In my dream the man said, “Thousands of lifetimes ago  when my body was cut   into pieces by an evil king, I was not caught up in the idea of the self.” Then in my dream someone picked up a rock and I woke up.  It took almost a month,   the great heads drilled with holes, then anti-aircraft tanks rolled in. Each hundred-foot niche now empty but each cavity left shaped like us,  like a person. Before it happened   we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven? Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven  but in exile.
The first great poet of the crisis the one whose generation was left as if firebombed though if you look back at the seminal work you will see that only a handful of   of the poems explicitly
 touch on that dark time
 the blood filling with
 virulence and the night
 always black and spangled with stars says
 when faced with   difficult material the
 poet should begin obliquely creeping in
 from the edge a square
 of light moving imperceptibly across the floor as the earth turns   and so I will tell you
 that ever since I saw the
 footage of the journalists hiding in the attic the rope ladder pulled up after them only the one with   foreign papers left to stand her ground down below the journalist at first calmly sitting on the couch but then huddling in a cabinet as the soldiers enter the   apartment next door, the cries of the mother floating through the wall ib’ni ib’ni the language ancient like something whetted on stone the way I image   language would have sounded in the broken mouth of King DavidAbsalom Absalom the man-child hanging by the shining black noose of his own hair in the   fragrant woods of Ephraim ib’ni ib’ni next door the sound of
 a body being dragged
 from the apartment as
 his mother wails into the dark how   many mothers and how
 many sons dragged out
 into a night spangled
 with stars where everything is a metaphor for virulence my son my son and ever since I   saw a clip of the footage the foreign journalist managed to smuggle out of the country images of the journalist herself hiding in a space meant for buckets and rags as   next door the soldiers
 drag away a young boy
 please hear it again a
 child of no more than
 twelve his mother’s lamentations forever seared in the blood of   this thing I call my life but really what is it what is this light I hold so dear it wants to move imperceptibly across the floor as the earth turns so as not to become   too aware of itself?
Nowhere in the Halakha’s five thousand years of rules
 does it specifically state Thou shall not [ ] but sometimes tradition carries more weight than law   and so for much of the past year we have not talked about what will happen on Thursday, how the cervix will start its slow yawn, the pelvic floor straining   as the head crowns, the fontanelles allowing the bony panes of the skull to pass through until, over the next 24 months, the five cranial plates   gradually ossify, the head forming its own helmet as structures harden over the soft meats of the brain, nor do we talk about the colostrum sunny as egg yolks   now collecting in your breasts, the thing’s first nutrients already ready and waiting, the event just days away and still we do not talk about it, the mass growing inside you   tucked up safe in the leeward side under the heart because sometimes our god is a jealous god, the evil eye lidless and all-seeing. Instead we will wait until it is done,   until the creature has been cleaned and wrapped in soft cloth, the bloody cord that binds you severed. And maybe you will name it Dolores, which means grief,   or perhaps you will call it Mara, the Hebrew name for bitterness because this is how we protect what we love, by hiding what it truly means to us, the little bag of gold   we keep buried in the yard, the thing we will do anything to keep safe, even going so far as to pretend it doesn’t exist, that there’s nothing massing in the dark   despite the steady light emanating from your face, a radiance so bright sometimes I can’t look at you, the joy so overpowering you want to shout it from the highest mountaintop   straight into God’s ear.
One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness  needless, consumable.   How everything here naturally passes into night, a room  w/o walls.   Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors?   Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her father  being shot in the head. Imagine needing to believe the one you love  has been destroyed.   Now it is after midnight—the spindrift lunar & diaphanous. Here alone on deck  could I make peace w/it all in thirty seconds—the water’s inherent rising, the gasping  for air?   I have never seen such omnipresence, such vast dreamlessness—   but I too am such things.   What does it mean to be eroded? What would be the significance of slipping one leg  over the rail & straddling the indifference?   Yes. Once upon a time we spent three days on a boat out of Kobé, Japan.   All night the waves. All night the somnambulistic urges.   Or how as children we would swim in a hard rain—the lake’s surface ragged & torn,  but underneath   the roots of the water lilies like ladders  trailing down into the marvelous.
Shagged-gold, at rest the great haunches as if axled, fur sleeked like a butter rug. In the Serengeti sun, the male’s harem   like a solar system, each lady kept exclusive, her seasonal heat for him alone, estrous belly pressed to the ground,   then the male’s riding her musculature— throughout evolution the cat’s barbed penis nicking his breached mate as he dismounts.   See the deliberate walk, cool as a criminal, the multi-jointed forepaws placed consciously even by the usurped king, his eye teeth blacked,   his tail rotted off, tired wag of a bloody stump as he finally falls dying, the crucified face bedded in its wheel of hair, the tawny miscegenated eyes   binocular in breadth. Shark in the long grasses. Shark in the long grass. Smell everywhere, the gazelle with its small-headed splendor gracing the plains   is ambushed, devoured, its horned bone rack souvenired, the murderer’s ripping muzzle crimsoned. In the despot’s sons’ palace of pure gold   the three in the iron cage lazing like statues. When the American unlocks the hinged door our shackled hearts contract. Unhooded and naked   we are pushed into their presence, and for a shining moment the animals study us, these fabulous aliens.   Here in a desert captivity snatched from the baobab’s sour fruit, their swagged bellies shifted, broken, and resignedly   the ancient drive rose up only in one— its head wreathed beyond sorrow as it slouched out of the habitual darkness,   the permanent rictus of its terrible mouth pain-struck. The thing came toward me with its ruined light, and I saw affliction in it.   Dream of mastery. Dream of being wholly consumed, freed. I am the lion and the lion is me. Then the American pulls us out.
Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind. Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go? I am in a car driving to the northernmost point on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Door. Literally where my grandmother lives. Her 89-year-old cousin has just fallen out a window but is all right, the bruises   like stained glass. Enthusiasm. To be in God. My grandmother says it is proof, and I nod my head because I too would like to live in such a world where an eighty-nine year old crawls out a window and falls seven feet to the ground, in turn the miracle of her body stained a deep blue, vitreous. In one room of the unfinished mansion where we will celebrate the day, the ninety-year-old matriarch sleeps in her four-poster bed   under the canopy of a wedding dress, its hundred eyelets a fallacy. After dinner someone will hand around an indulgence of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the lady’s dark cheek marred as if she has been scratched. Who at this table fled the police? Who left that place in flames, the rubble of infinite hearths? The deer’s eyes like perfect cataracts, the evidence cooling. When I think of my room in the earth, I can’t breathe. A friend of a friend recently hit a small bear   with his car. At the end of my favorite novel a bear is dancing on a makeshift stage, the bear a grotesquerie like the rest of us. No one stopped to help, said my friend. Traffic barely slowed. I do not judge this,   or even the surreptitious footage of the workers somewhere on the killing floor, stomping the breast-heavy creatures with their rubber boots. How we raise them not to fly, what should waft   gnostically through the air, the hollowness of evolving. My heart is doing that thing again, saying climb the stairs on your knees. I tell a friend a man halfway across the world has been killed, torn apart by motorbikes, each limb tied in a different direction. Could a universe be born this way? One minute you are scarping the silvery bark off a birch when it comes to you forever and there you lie in the bed of a blood-smeared truck at a stoplight   on Highway 41 because this is the season of messages. The man was a teacher. He taught girls. When they came for him he told his children not to cry. Then the men took out half his bowel, the viscera steaming as they do, and they tied him ingeniously in such a way that they tore him apart. In that other place three million of us died. When I left, I left them all behind. In the unfinished mansion   someone will ask me what I’m thankful for. What to say? That one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was a paper nest secreted by wasps, and that in the summer I would sleep under it, the runnelled mass turning like a planet in the moonlight? I will admit I was in favor of war and now look what’s happened. At the end of the road the man driving the truck will eat the deer. If I had to watch someone be torn apart by motorbikes   I would still be me, which is the horror of it all.
I am ten. My mother sits in a black rocking chair in the parlor and tells stories of a country school surrounded by ricefields and no roads.   I stand in the kerosene light behind her, earning my allowance. A penny for each white hair I pull.
—for James I. Ina 1. The emotion of trucks, buses & troop trains brings them here, to the wrong side of another state. A woman at the Klamath Falls depot calls it the wrong side of the ocean.   2 Crumbs hide around the table legs in the mess hall, dishes & silverware clink a strange song. Families talk across long tables. Questions drop like puzzles to the unfinished floor.   3 Blocks away from their new home a woman finds a latrine not backed up. Stands in line, waiting her turn in the wind. Down the center of the open room: 12 toilet stools, six pair, back to back. Sits down and asks for privacy, holding a towel in front of her with trembling hands.   4 In a North Dakota prisoner-of-war camp, surrounded by Germans & Italians, a quiet man hammers a samurai sword from scrap metal at night in a boiler room. A secret edge to hold against the dark mornings.   He sends love notes to his pregnant wife in Tule Lake sewn in pants mailed home for mending. His censored letters mention a torn pocket. She finds the paper near the rip, folded & secret in the lining.   White voices claim the other side of the ocean is so crowded the people want to find death across the phantom river. Headlines shake their nervous words. Out on the coast beach birds print their calligraphy in the sand. It is such a small country.
—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is morning even though the iron cell is in a basement with no windows.   In the center of the painting the devil blows a whistle and his pitchfork drips blood. Above in the night a man has taken off in a Buck Rogers spaceship heading for a yellow one-eyed moon. He grips the steering wheel in the open cockpit and doesn’t look back.   In a lower corner under a naked tree a satyr sits and plays his pan-flute. The notes weave all around the painting, twist around a girl dancing in veils.   The man who dreams all this pulls at his covers, drowses at the bottom of the painting.   The man who painted this died in his dreams.
—after Frank O’Hara You have been smiling across the table at your date with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth.   You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup.   In your next life you will be a teacher and no one will ever call you by your first name.   After your next vacation you will come home and discover that your neighbors have redecorated in the style of Iowa trailer court.   If you feel like you’re getting old, secretly plant zucchini in your neighbor’s flowerbeds.   Avoid people who iron their sheets or roll their socks & underwear.   Painting and poetry and music will show us where we should be going, not the senate or tv news.   The next thermos bottle you see will actually be a listening device made in Korea.   All the people in this restaurant are glad that they are not you.
The sky wants the water to turn grey, but if I notice how waves   play with the clumps of yellow flags, or the way turtles share logs,   or even try to understand a friend’s decision to walk onto a glacier   and end her life—I will be ready for any poems that have been waiting.   The horizon opens as I walk, escorted by swans and Canada geese.   I need to stop backpedaling into the present. In my old life people would straighten   the truth, but the river flows in curves.   The names of my father and my mother rest next to each other in Greenwood Cemetery.   The distance between me and the mountains measures an uneven thought: I feel like an orphan.   An early moon is just a piece of change in the softening sky.   Light is such an actress. Time to seek Hopper’s wish to simply paint sunlight   on the wooden wall of a house. I am growing older. Maru in Japanese means   the ship will make it back home.
No, I am not deformed. I wear these socks Because I haven't any gloves, And my fingers are bitten with frost. They feel like stumps. Luckily, I finished covering The citrus tree with sheets of burlap. Before darkness, I will light a smudge pot Near the mummified trunk, Then anoint my hands in a blue salve. Yesterday was cold But the freeze is on now. I must remind myself Not to lick any cars. Mr. Nishizawa, a house over, Told me his nephew Lost a fourth of his tongue For that reason. Years ago, The rosebushes were ruined to a freeze And have never come back. If needed, I will stay up all night And pray, will let the hoarfrost Burn in my chest. My grandfather Ate the yield from this tree After he died. I saw him.
That boy, the champion breath holder, Kenji Takezo, lost his title This year to Mack Stanton A retired truck driver New to the area. Held in the town swimming pool Thirty-five participants inhaled Deeply all at once Submerged the depth. The contest went on into twilight. One by one each person Came up sucking air. Kenji was the town favorite. We wanted him to win again. He trained so hard, It was the only real talent He had Other than surfing and making Trouble. When he surfaced Second to last Gulping the night Then vomiting water, We were disappointed. He was doing so well. He had his lucky twenty-pound brick Cradled in his lap. It kept him down. But that trucker Mack was too good. He read Comic books, aloud, underwater. We watched from the bleachers His laughter bursting above him. Kenji saw this too. He never had anybody Read to him Not even his mother, And he wanted to hear What was being read What his opponent found so funny.
After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave, The turbulence of whitewash confused His sense of direction. He breathed in When he should have   Held tight. By accident, he swallowed The Pacific. The water poured down his throat, A blue cascade he could not see. He felt in his stomach The heavy life of the ocean.   It wasn’t funny, but he giggled When a school of fish tickled his ribs. He went home, the surf not rideable, It was no longer there, The water weighted in his belly.   That night, while he slept, the tide moved. The long arms of the moon Reached inside him pulling the Pacific free. When he woke the next morning, He lay in a puddle of ocean that was his.
Steel horses nodding In the petroleum field are beasts That suck The crude of earth. They have lived here for as long as I Remember. This moment,   I smell wild incense: Heather, abducted by a desert wind. Its growth hides The rain-carved ribs of the foothills. Evening swallows The city fasting on late fall.   Years ago, after hearing the story About a boy who lost Both legs while playing on an oil pump, I was dared to straddle one. All my friends were there to watch The Pacific behind me burning with dusk.   The brute lifted me to the sky, Where I merged with the twilight, A warm breeze embracing my back. None of them noticed The world stopped to breathe. When I looked, they disappeared.   Nearby in pink-flowered bushes Someone found The girl who’d been missing for weeks. They stood in awe, the body Decomposing, while I rode The slow bucking animal.   Two months later, off the same pump, A man dove, An imperfect swan into night. He landed in the dirt gully Breaking the soft, white wings He never had.   Today, I catch in my hand An insect charged with lightning. It tickles The obscure scoop of my palm As I hold it to my mouth and explain A wish so simple   By morning I will have forgotten it. I release The bug to a desert wind That is racing toward the sea, A brutal dryness in its wake. Fire in the hills everywhere.
About the only thing I thought I knew was that nothing I’d ever know would do any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part of the horse’s hoof that most resembles a human palm is called the frog; certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use; the abstruse circuitry of an envelope quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation.   Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made, I took heart in the pointlessness of stars and lay there until my teeth chattered. I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge building a birdhouse out of license plates manufactured by felons in the big house. No more paramilitary organizations for me, I said, ten years before I was drafted.   I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend, his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid through the church service among the pipes of the organ and still did not have faith, although my ears rang until Monday.   I began to know that little worth knowing was knowable and faith was delusion. I began to believe I believed in believing nothing I was supposed to believe in, except the stars, which, like me, were not significant, except for their light, meaning I loved them for their pointlessness. I believed I owned them somehow.   A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare. The horse I loved foundered and had to be put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right. In cold air a nipple horripilates and rises, the sun comes up and up and up, a star that bakes the eggs in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse.   God was in music and music was God. A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag chain and threatened to beat me to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags, the one he said they’d leave in my mouth before they zipped the body bag closed. Yet one more thing I’d come to know.   He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass, no more true than my ownership of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord in five or six places on the neck of a guitar. A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s becomes a callus, smooth as leather. Stars are invisible in rainy weather, something any fool knows, of course.
The first space shuttle launch got delayed until Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black & white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted sideways & down for better reception. That same day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same day, Cynthia peed her jeans instead of going to the bathroom & letting Garrett steal her pencil box. Both of us too upset to answer questions about space flight, so we got sent to the back of the class. I smelled like the kind of shame that starts a fight on a Tuesday afternoon. Cynthia smelled like pee & everyday Jordache. The shuttle made its slick way back to Earth, peeling clouds from the monochromatic sky & we all—even the astronomically marginal— were winners. American, because a few days before, a failed songwriter put a bullet in the president in the name of Jodie Foster. The shuttle looked like a bullet, only with wings & a cockpit, & when it finally landed, the class broke into applause & the teacher snatched a thinning American flag from the corner, waved it back & forth in honor of our wounded president & those astronauts.
blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side, jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn & behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones & the whole, snowy world waiting outside like ghost stories whispered around the last sputtering match. & later, top sheets pulled up over heads from fear of mirrors at midnight or some backfired beater’s rusty pop pop pop after the key twists at the edge of the week. No doubt: Tuesday is the scariest day in Section 8, but Friday is right after it in the suburbs. & after those trembling weekdays, even more blacks with money disappearing & reappearing as unexpectedly as poltergeists inside of TVs & haunted trees with fast fingers in West Side yards. & still not a wavelength of any kind for a black to put in the bank. The inks in everybody’s hatted & contracting checkbooks don’t change black. Some front-row architecture might. Some guns, too, & their loud, colorful opportunities: whatever version of black is inside a fist around a grip. Not a color, really—more like the face a man makes in the glinting face of a gun pointed at him every single day.
This is the g-dropping vernacular  I am stuck in. This is the polyphone where my head is an agrarian gang  sign pointing like a percussion mallet to a corn maze in one of the smaller  Indiana suburbs where there aren’t supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try  to grin it off. Be cool & try to lean it off. Find a kind of black & bet on it.  I’m grinning to this vernacular like the big drum laugh tracks a patriotic  marching band. Be cool & try to ride the beat the same way me, Pryor,  & Ra did driving across the 30th Street Bridge, laughing at these two dudes  with big afros like it’s 1981 peeing into the water & looking at the stars. Right  before Officer Friendly hit his lights.Face the car, fingers locked behind  your heads. Right after the fireworks started popping off. Do I need to call   the drug dog? Right after the rattling windows, mosquitoes as busy in my ears  as 4th of July traffic cops. Right before the thrill of real planets & pretend planets  spun high into the sky, Ra throwing up three West Side fingers, each ringed  by pyrotechnic glory & the misnomer of the three of us grinning at the cop’s club  down swinging at almost the exact same time Pryor says, Cops put a hurting on your  ass, man. & fireworks light up in the same colors as angry knuckles if you don’t  duck on the double. Especially on the West Side—more carnivorous than almost any  other part of Earth Voyager saw when it snapped a blue picture on its way out  of this violently Technicolor heliosphere.
Leaves scarcely breathing in the black breeze; the flickering swallow draws circles in the dusk.   In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching.   And over the evening forest the bronze moon climbs to its place. Why has the music stopped? Why is there such silence?
The clock-cricket singing, that’s the fever rustling. The dry stove hissing, that’s the fire in red silk.   The teeth of mice milling the thin supports of life, that’s the swallow my daughter who unmoored my boat.   Rain-mumble on the roof— that’s the fire in black silk. But even at the bottom of the sea the bird-cherry will hear ‘good-bye’.   For death is innocent, and the heart, all through the nightingale-fever, however it turns, is still warm.
Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers, the great year of twilight! A thick forest of nets has been let down into the seething waters of night. O sun, judge, people, desolate are the years into which you are rising!   Let us praise the momentous burden that the people’s leader assumes, in tears. Let us praise the twilight burden of power, its weight too great to be borne. Time, whoever has a heart will hear your ship going down.   We have roped swallows together into legions. Now we can’t see the sun. Everywhere nature twitters as it moves. In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets and the sun can’t be seen.   But what can we lose if we try one groaning, wide, ungainly sweep of the rudder? The earth swims. Courage, brothers, as the cleft sea falls back from our plow. Even as we freeze in Lethe we’ll remember the ten heavens the earth cost us.
Let me be in your service like the others mumbling predictions, mouth dry with jealousy. Parched tongue thirsting, not even for the word— for me the dry air is empty again without you.   I’m not jealous any more but I want you. I carry myself like a victim to the hangman. I will not call you either joy or love. All my own blood is gone. Something strange paces there now. Another moment and I will tell you: it's not joy but torture you give me. I'm drawn to you as to a crime— to your ragged mouth, to the soft bitten cherry. Come back to me, I'm frightened without you. Never had you such power over me as now. Everything I desire appears to me. I'm not jealous any more. I'm calling you.
Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head will remember later, like a loving son, how the old man lay down to sleep in the drift of wheat outside the window. He who has opened the eyes of the age, two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, hears forever after the roar of rivers swollen with the wasted, lying times.   The age is a despot with two sleepy apples to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth. When he dies he’ll sink onto the numb arm of his son, who’s already senile. I know the breath growing weaker by the day Not long not till the simple song of the wrongs of earth is cut off, and a tin seal put on the lips.   O life of earth! O dying age! I’m afraid no one will understand you but the man with the helpless smile of one who has lost himself. O the pain of peeling back the raw eyelids to look for a lost word, and with lime slaking in the veins, to hunt for night herbs for a tribe of strangers!   The age. In the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime is hardening. Moscow’s sleeping like a wooden coffin. There’s no escaping the tyrant century. After all these years the snow still smells of apples. I want to run away from my own doorstep, but where? Out in the street it’s dark, and my conscience glitters ahead of me like salt strewn on the pavement.   Somehow I’ve got myself set for a short journey through the back lanes, past thatched eaves, starling houses, an everyday passer-by, in a flimsy coat, forever trying to button the lap-robe. Street after street flashes past, the frozen runners crunch like apples; can’t get the button through the button-hole, it keeps slipping out of my fingers.   The winter night thunders like iron hardware through the Moscow streets. Knocks like a frozen fish, or billows in steam, flashing like a carp in a rosy tea-room. Moscow is Moscow again. I say hello to her. ‘Don’t be stern with me; never mind. I still respect the brotherhood of the deep frost, and the pike’s justice.’   The pharmacy’s raspberry globe shines onto the snow. Somewhere an Underwood typewriter’s rattled. The sleigh-driver’s back, the snow knee-deep, what more do you want? They won't touch you, won’t kill you. Beautiful winter, and the goat sky has crumbled into stars and is burning with milk. And the lap-robe flaps and rings like horse-hair against the frozen runners.   And the lanes smoked like kerosene stoves, swallowed snow, raspberry, ice, endlessly peeling, like a Soviet sonatina, recalling nineteen-twenty. The frost is smelling of apples again. Could I ever betray to gossip-mongers the great vow to the Fourth Estate and oaths solemn enough for tears?   Who else will you kill? Who else will you worship? What other lie will you dream up? There’s the Underwood’s cartilage. Hurry, rip out a key, you’ll find a little bone of a pike. And in the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter. But the simple sonatina of typewriters is only a faint shade of those great sonatas.
Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words.   But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,   the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight,   the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims.   Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men.   One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.   He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.   He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
Many months have passed since the diagnosis, and you’re still grieving for her. She’s not dead yet. But she’s lost, like a child is lost— her mind the ocean floor, where she kicks up sand and churns in the water.   Al, we call it, or AD— never by its real name as if mentioning the word would bring bad luck— the need to cross one’s self across the heart, throw back to the ocean half of one’s catch, turn three times and pray to the East.   Papa’s and her letters, written during their courtship, are tied with a faded, red ribbon and sunk in a safe deposit box at Bishop Trust. Long ago, she gave them to you for safekeeping. At the time   she exacted a promise from you, that you would not read them until she was dead. We twist down the spiral staircase curled like a strand of seaweed into the cold room of vaults, the heavy thud of door distinct as your sadness following us everywhere. There, you turn over the bundle of letters in your hand like unbelievable money. “I’m so tempted to read them,” you say.   You want her back, the feisty and independent one, the one who could, at eighty, do ten knee bends in aerobics class, dance a smooth jitterbug and shuttle like the tide to and from the house about her business. Not this Elizabeth you mourn, the one who can no longer reason, who points and giggles at fat people and smells, sometimes, like the ocean. Time slides like Dali’s clock. Elizabeth is surprised that she once was married and had a husband, that she once gave birth to sons.
In her illness Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately, the washing of her body. She blames me, her Japanese daughter-in-law for having made keeping her clean a fetish. Angry, she says we do this to torment her soul, the shower a hot spray of needles we subject on her moon-colored skin. She hates it even more if I’m there to wash her. She wants her son, the person she thinks of these days as her lover, or husband, or father. Memory and privacy, she cries at their loss as I soap her down like an old car. What protestations! And as I listen to her, I think of these bodies we have given so freely to men, yet feel ashamed of when in the eyes of another woman. How she fawns when she thinks a man’s around. Today, she bangs the walls. “I hate you! The water’s too wet!” Hanging onto the safety bars, she pitches back and forth like a child, wanting to be let out at the gate. I wash her back. She spins around in my soap-lathered hands, and loosening her face in mine, she glares. She sticks out her tongue, and biting down on it, she squeals, jowls swinging, arms jiggling. Then, in a dive of both hands between her legs, she drops to a semi-squat, simian posture and thrusts her pelvis bones forward like mountains in an antediluvian upheaval. In a gesture of obscenity, she unfolds her petals and displays her withered sex to me— the same way boys moon, flip the bird or grab their crotch and waggle their tongues— the profane she feels but can’t articulate.
When I was three, a tsunami hit town. “Daddy, Daddy, save me, don’t let me drown.” He saved me and my common-type dolls.   When I was sixteen, another tsunami hit town. I cried to my daddy, “Daddy, Daddy, please save me, don’t let me drown!” But he let go of my hand!   I still dance to what broke on my life.
My son lives on the streets. We don’t see each other much. Like a mother who puts white lilies on the headstone of a dead child, I put money into his bank account, clothes into E-Z Access storage and pretend he’s far away— at a boarding school, or in a foreign country. Nights, I dream fairy tales about him. I dream he becomes a prince, scholar or warrior who rescues me from sorrow, the way he rescued me when he was a child and said, “Mommy, don’t cry,” and brought tea into the room of his father’s acrimony— brave, standing tall in the forest fire of his father’s scorn. I wake to the empty sound of wind in the trees. He says he wants to live with me. I say I can’t live with him— boy whose words crash like branches in a rain storm. Nothing can hold him in, the walls of a house too thin. Back home, I had seen the “study-hard-so-you-don’t-become-like-them” street bums on Mamo Street, and he’s like them. These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him, I circle the city. One day, I see him on his bike. People give him wide berth, the same way birds avoid power lines, oncoming cars or trees. I park on a side street. Wild-eyed, he flies the block as if in a holding pattern. Not of my body, not of my hopes, he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.
In college, people were always breaking up. We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains. Two people broke up across a table from me at the library. I could not sit at that table again though I did not know them. I studied bees, who were able to convey messages through dancing and could find their ways home to their hives even if someone put up a blockade of sheets and boards and wire. Bees had radar in their wings and brains that humans could barely understand. I wrote a paper proclaiming their brilliance and superiority and revised it at a small café featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers in silver honeypots at every table.
From the remains of his cremation, the monks recovered   the seat of Thich Quang Duc’s consciousness —   a bloodless protest to awaken the heart of the oppressor   offered at the crossing of Phanh Dinh Phung  & Le Van Duyet doused in gasoline & immolated by 4-meter flames the orange-robed   arhat folded in the stillness of full lotus   his body withering his crown blackening   his flesh charring his corpse collapsing   his heart refusing to burn his heart refusing to burn his heart refusing to burn
in the shooter’s face, she recognizes   her sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair,   his yellow skin, & vacant stare,   the year her brother broke down, she was   still in high school, seventeen —   w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands   & arms any outlet to escape   this “community”   denies illness, a family reacts —   against crying out loudlet it be some other Asian   in the shooter’s face, I recognize   my sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair,   his yellow skin, & vacant stare,   the year my brother broke down, I was   still in high school, seventeen —   w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands   & arms any outlet to escape   this “community”   denies illness, a family reacts —   against crying out loudlet it be some other Asian
At Pearl Street station, two brown-skinned men   in painter’s pants stand out in a sea of white   I am just one more face sticking out in a crowd   & it is my privilege   that prevents me from understanding why   the workers want to know how to buy one-way trips   the automated machine sells only one roundtrip fee,   back to where you came from   he isn’t asking me for change says it clear enough so that   there can be no mistakeSí. Yo sé.  But a dollar fifty is a lot of money.
For James Kim (1971 — 2006) it could have happened to any of us   a wrong turn down a logging road tires tunneled into snow   a man’s undying love for his children   moves satellites maps aerial images   eighteen care packages dropped over 16 miles of the Siskiyou,   bearing handwritten notes from a father to his son   the signs you left for those who came after you   a red t-shirt a wool sock, a child’s blue skirt   layers of a life, stripped down to a family’s fate —   the weight of being unseen — to travel a path back to   what you knew at birth, the warmth of being held close   brought home
We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama about wild horses that roamed the ancient Arctic Circle. Surprisingly sleek, built for speed and not the weather, they were remarkable for their recklessness. They careen headlong down ice bluffs to fall into a broken heap. We can hear the small, tinny sounds of their terror as they plunge across vast, glowing glacial faces. All of this takes place alongside an abstractly relentless gunmetal sea. I can feel you turn to me, wetness marking the corners of your lips and eyes. I, too, am mesmerized, my vision limited to a sense of motion on the peripheries. Later, I am summoned for an impromptu scan and, miraculously, I pass.
My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synced me to coronal flares. During my morning tea, at the gym, during the drive back home. A simple turn transforms into an avalanching pinprick of tremors one millimeter thick. I’d have preferred a suppurative response—one that collects under the skin—to this invisible, blistering, cracklesome lightning scar. One can’t choose the mood that gathers, the body’s response.   The brightest moments of the day rarely correlate to a discharge. Gray sky or blackness, a foggy haze aswirl between stars and nothing halts. Some moments tear my teeth.   The news feed portends rolling blackouts across the state. I read over the last of my messages: A blanket request for a plasma donation, Sasha asking if I want a ride to the wake.
How much chemical disorder  can be survived depends on medical technology.  A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible.  People were called dead  when their heart stopped beating.  Today death is believed to occur 4  to 6 minutes after the heart stops beating  because after several minutes it is difficult  to resuscitate the brain.  However, with new experimental  treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac  arrest can now be survived without  brain injury. Future technologies  for molecular repair may extend the      frontiers of resuscitation beyond  60 minutes or more,  making today’s beliefs about  when death occurs  obsolete      merely transitory evidence a stray boundary between  a much longer-lasting (invisible opposite polarities  feature the fields annihilate  the field tries to one another  repel the intruder rapidly        velocities directly shine in emission  visible shortly      in terms of before  brightness totality
I. MORPHO MENELAUS   Foiled acqua- moiré wings the butterfly’s beauty- mark hydraulic in its purposes his hair’s flame lifts you snarls you   II. MORPHO ACHILLES   Sea-bed in semaphore / an eyepiece wing-span delft dye vat-dipped shingle scintilla : truant and acclimate enfold or infuriate: SOS:Don’t surroundDon’t surroundyourself with yourself   III. MORPHO RHETENOR HELENA   Neon heather sky- lit bluer than moiré:   inseam of street trash lush mask-   contour soul- strait fungible   as raiment in the crawlspace radiating   amatory birds’ egg bulls-eye
Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass? Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.
The coal-dust hushed parameters of the room.   Outside, my mother stitched whole dresses for $3.00 a piece.   I slept in a bedroom which faced the street.   A cheerleader was killed in a drive-by that year.   She died in her sleep.   I watched the headlights sweep overhead.    *   It felt like skin.   It did not feel obscene.   When that boy tongue-kissed me   and wiped his mouth,   it was a coming into knowledge.    *   When my mother whispered,Has anyone touched you there? I had to pick.  Alan, I said.   I was seven. The training wheels were coming off.   Between the couch and wall, the ceiling was white with popcorn bits. The boys stood   and watched. I lay there, my eyes open like a doll’s. Someone said, Let me try.   He pulled down his pants and rode on top, then abruptly stopped.   The boys laughed, said Shhh and stood me up.
I see my mother, at thirteen, in a village so small it’s never given a name.   Monsoon season drying up— steam lifting in full-bodied waves. She chops bắp chuối for the hogs.   Her hair dips to the small of her back as if smeared in black and polished to a shine.   She wears a deep side-part that splits her hair into two uneven planes.   They come to watch her: Americans, Marines, just boys, eighteen or nineteen.   With scissor-fingers, they snip the air, point at their helmets   and then at her hair. All they want is a small lock— something for a bit of good luck.   Days later, my mother is sent to the city for safekeeping.   She will return home once, only to be given away to my father.   In the pictures, the cake is sweet and round.   My mother’s hair which spans the length of her áo dài   is long, washed, and uncut.
My father does his own dental work. A power drill and epoxy and steady hands—   On Christmas Day, he mistook the Macy’s star for the Viet Cong flag.   While watchingForrest Gump, he told me how he too carried a friend.  He squeezedaround my throat so tight,I thought I’d die with him.
She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a market fish. And now, she dropped like laundry on the bed.   The furniture moved toward her, the kitchen knives and spoons, the vibrating spoons—they dragged the tablecloth, the corner tilting in, her mouth a sinkhole. She wanted all of it: the house and the car too, and the flowers she planted, narcissus and hoa mai, which cracked open each spring—the sky, she brought it low until the air was hot and wet and broke into a rain—   the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn’t. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings. I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin.
Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms has changed early, burning with a light grown accustomed to its own magnificence,   imperceptible until this moment when it becomes more than itself, more than a ritual of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice   as nourishment, the light feeding bark and veins and blood and skin, the tree better off for wanting nothing more. I used to imagine   the chakra like this—a hole in the soul from the top of the head, where the light of knowing can shimmer through. In the summer of 1979   I saw that light shoot from my brother’s forehead as we sat chanting in a temple in Manila. He didn’t see it pulsing like a bulb in a storm,   but he said he felt the warmth that wasn’t warmth but peace. And I, who have never been so privileged, since then have wondered   if we believed everything because not to believe was to be unhappy. I’ve seen that light elsewhere —on a river in Bangkok, or pixeled across   the shattered façades of Prague—but it is here where I perceive its keenest rarity, where I know it has passed over all the world, has given shape   to cities, cast glamour over the eyes of the skeptic, so that it comes to me informed with the wonder of many beings. I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel,   as though I were one of many a weightless absence touches, and out of this a strange transformation: the soul ringed with changes, as old as a tree,   as old as light. I am always learning the same thing: there is no other way to live than this, still, and grateful, and full of longing.
The dry basin of the moon must have held the bones of a race, radiant minerals, or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy, idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it,   our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen. Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures digging dirt in outer space—while mother repeated Neil Armstrong’s words, like a prayer   electronically conveyed. The dunes were lit like ancient silk, like clandestine pearl. In the constant lunar night this luminescence was all we hoped for. A creature unto itself,   it poured into the room like a gradual flood of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out Manila would be blank ether, way station,   a breathless abeyance. It didn’t matter, at that moment, where our lives would lead: father would disown one brother, one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy,   we were ready to walk on the moon. Reckless in our need for the possible, we knew there was no turning back, our bags already packed, the future a religion we could believe in.
It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin. So goes the history of love. At the end of the day we tally the casualties of war, victory for the one who gets wounded   the least. You say it’s time for a change but I don’t know to what end, change being just the skin of some incandescent creature whose grotesque beauty is what we adore,   whom some people call love, whom we venerate because it consumes us, slim pickings for its huge soul. My people say, don’t look or you’ll go blind. You say the end was always   just around the bend. I say all we have is unconditional surrender to the future. So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves   that may have scorched into our hearts the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say, look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards, if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City   to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point we hit the factory of souls—a thousand tombstones from which a silk-like canopy of smoke rose to meet God knows what—a spacious emptiness, the end.   I’ve heard the world’s never going to end. I’ve heard it will go on and on, and we will be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our live not worth a footnote, our grandest schemes   no more than feeble whispers, all memory shifting like the continental plates. In the future, all science will finally come around; genetic engineering, I’ve been told, will be all the rage,   and we will be a super race in a world infallibly perfected, where trains run on time, love never dies, and hope can be purchased by the pound. It’s called immortalization  of the cell lines. We will choose what will survive. Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world contemplating itself, like the young Narcissus, one hand about to touch the pool, his body   lurched towards that marvelous reflection. I suppose we’ve always felt compelled to desensitize our failures. My people say, to go unnoticed, you play dead. I myself   may have chosen to forget a face, a name, some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not, after all the harm is done, intending any pain. And many others may have chosen to forget me.   It works both ways. My people say, nasa huliang pagsisi: regret is the final emotion. It’s what you see when you look back. It’s what’s no longer there.
You are running away from everyone who loves you, from your family, from old lovers, from friends.   They run after you with accumulations of a former life, copper earrings, plates of noodles, banners of many lost revolutions.   You love to say the trees are naked now because it never happens in your country. This is a mystery from which you will never   recover. And yes, the trees are naked now, everything that still breathes in them lies silent and stark and waiting. You love October most   of all, how there is no word for so much splendor. This, too, is a source of consolation. Between you and memory   everything is water. Names of the dead, or saints, or history. There is a realm in which —no, forget it,   it’s still too early to make anyone understand. A man drives a stake through his own heart and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia   begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves and the leaves take over and again he has learned to let go.
If there is a god, let it be the hyena who plunges her mouth into the river after eating our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who, dark with thirst, poisons the river unbeknownst to both of them.   Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called already through “time” out of our houses. She tells her stories. We tell her ours. We all clean our teeth with what is sharp. She asks, Will you add this story to your stories of history & land & peace? Yes, we will add this story. We ask her,Will you add these poems to your repertoire of songsabout hunger & thirst & fur? & she, being wiser than we, says, Yes, I will sing them ifyou grant me your permissionto turn them into poems abouta mercy.
Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost, in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours, your family or parent, even grabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for “Father,” only to see the face look strangely down, utterly foreign, utterly not the one who loves you, you who are a bird suddenly stunned by the glass partitions of rooms.  How far the world you knew, & tall, & filled, finally, with strangers.
after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden  Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was  confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to  study stars. “I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.”  —NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007    Body of space. Body of dark.  Body of light. The Skyview apartments  circa 1973, a boy is kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who  (it is important to mention here his skin  is brown) prepares his telescope, the weights & rods,  to better see the moon. His neighbor (it is important to mention here  that she is white) calls the police because she suspects the brown boy  of something, she does not know what at first, then turns, with her looking, his telescope into a gun,  his duffel into a bag of objects thieved from the neighbors’ houses  (maybe even hers) & the police (it is important to mention  that statistically they are also white) arrive to find  the boy who has been turned, by now, into “the suspect,” on the roof  with a long, black lens, which is, in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &  depending on who you are, reading this, you know that the boy is in grave danger,  & you might have known somewhere quiet in your gut,  you might have worried for him in the white space between lines 5 & 6, or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding your breath for him right now  because you know this story, it’s a true story, though,  miraculously, in this version of the story, anyway,  the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives to tell the police that he is studying  the night & moon & lives long enough to offer them (the cops) a view  through his telescope’s long, black eye, which, if I am spelling it out anyway,  is the instrument he borrowed & the beautiful “trouble” he went through  lugging it up to the roof to better see the leopard body of  space speckled with stars & the moon far off, much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing  out) the distance between the white neighbor who cannot see the boy  who is her neighbor, who, in fact, is much nearer  to her than to the moon, the boy who wants to understand the large  & gloriously un-human mysteries of the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”  has not been killed by the murderous jury of his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof. This boy on the roof of this poem  with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body as I write this poem my body  is making a boy even as the radio calls out the Missouri coroner’s news,  the Ohio coroner’s news. 2015. My boy will nod  for his milk & close his mouth around the black eye of my nipple.  We will survive. How did it happen? The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.  My milk pulling down into droplets of light as the baby drinks & drinks them down  into the body that is his own, see it, splayed & sighing as a star in my arms. Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars. Maybe he will be (say it)  the boy on the coroner’s table splayed & spangled  by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last.     Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning, splendored with breaths, turned, by time, into, at least, this song.   This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul” caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net, then, whoosh, back into the sea of space.   The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing only things ordinary as water & light.
I adore you: you’re a harrowing event. I like you very ugly, condensed to one deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest question, your hold is all clutch and sinker.  Cannibal old me, with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver. How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you, the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today.  Curiouser and curiouser, your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes. In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry.  You put on my heat, (that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly, hungering down the valley, no one question to cover all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use.  You’re wrong and right at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring chopping down the back door. You slap my attention all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime? Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.
Taking on an aspect of the Orient, Skies full of hatchets and oranges Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood: But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor?   Skies full of hatchets and oranges Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor, As the nights grow steadily into mountains.   Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— The princess braids these into a necklace As the nights grow steadily into mountains, Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly.   The princess braids these into a necklace: Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace. Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly In a solitude full of wars and songs.   Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace Never converge in that vast landscape; In a solitude full of wars and songs, The words remain light and fugitive.   Never converge in that vast landscape In the way that stars keep their distance. The words remain light and fugitive In an anticipation crossed with absence. In the way that stars keep their distance, Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood In an anticipation crossed with absence, Taking on an aspect of the Orient.
We stopped to watch the accident. Fire! It had finally come to pass. Just as surely as I was a coward carrying a wolf. It stepped out from me, it was paradise leaving me, running towards the giant idea of that melting house. So often you don’t think, “Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it.”
Be large with those small fears. The whole sky has fallen on you and all you can do about it is shout, dragging your fear-ettes by their pinked ears.   They dance a number now: consequence without sequence. Lovingly broadminded in their realization and ruin, expert at the parting shot.   Not so small after all, we micro to macro, swelling to the horror shows lifted from the sly ways of life.   You, both scorched and shining in the terror of the equivocal moment, its box of cheeky logics rattling cold certainties out of bounds   and into the plaits of a girl’s desirous ends. A little debauched, the flirt in a freckling, wondering spun to falling comes to this   pert contract of a paradox: saying things because they will do no good, ringing change in frumpy mono-determination, fruity and fruitless.   Exploded out of shelter, the tides come roaring in. Let in the hoarse Cassandras and the dull pain of the storyteller. You’ve needed those eyes all along.   We thought them disconcerting at first, but it’s the only way. You live here now having exchanged etiquette for energy.   Don’t be clever, don’t be shy! Participate today. Yesterday you say everything for their own sake, and soon enough, tomorrow, you learn a lot from them.
On the morning of the 20th National Day my uncle came home and told us: “All our troops have got into position, for the Russians may throw an atom-bomb on us today.”   After breakfast he returned to the headquarters, but I had to go to school and join the celebration.   The fear oppressed my back like a bag of sand. I could not raise the little triangle flag in my hand, nor could I shout slogans with my classmates.   During the break I called together my best friends and told them what would occur on this day. Benli said, “I must go home and tell my dad to kill all our chickens.” Qingping said, “I must tell my aunt not to buy a sewing machine. Who would care about clothes if that happens.” Yimin and I said nothing, but we knew what we were going to do.   We decided to go to the army, for we did not want to be roasted at home like little pigs.
The sound of a guitar drifts through the air. Cupped in my hand, a snowflake quivers lightly. Thick patches of fog draw back to reveal A mountain range, rolling like a melody. I have gathered the inheritance of the four seasons. There is no sign of man in the valley. Picked wild flowers continue to grow, Their flowering is their time of death. Along the path in the primordial wood Green sunlight flows through the slits. A russet hawk interprets into bird cries The mountain's tale of terror. Abruptly I cry out, "Hello, Bai—hua—Mountain." "Hello, my—child," comes the echo From a distant waterfall. It was a wind within a wind, drawing A restless response from the land, I whispered, and the snowflake Drifted from my hand down the abyss.
for Yu Luoke Perhaps the final hour is come I have left no testament Only a pen, for my mother I am no hero In an age without heroes I just want to be a man The still horizon Divides the ranks of the living and the dead I can only choose the sky I will not kneel on the ground Allowing the executioners to look tall The better to obstruct the wind of freedom From star-like bullet holes shall flow A blood-red dawn
in the end, cold crows piece together the night: a black map I've come home—the way back longer than the wrong road long as a life bring the heart of winter when spring water and horse pills become the words of night when memory barks a rainbow haunts the black market my father's life-spark small as a pea I am his echo turning the corner of encounters a former lover hides in a wind swirling with letters Beijing, let me toast your lamplights let my white hair lead the way through the black map as though a storm were taking you to fly I wait in line until the small window shuts: O the bright moon I go home—reunions are one less fewer than goodbyes
The best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact. My mother took my heart out. She banked it on top of her stove. It glowed white. She put it back in my chest.   Tita knew that overseas workers often had affairs. He licked me and I pretended it pinged through my body like a swift idea That I wrote about and considered like a bell of good craftsmanship. He also knew that their kids ate better   He said your belly is like a cat’s. He said with his bowl up to his chin More please.   At night the fireflies come out. They flock to my window. I put my hands up against the screen. I think how fragile it is to be inside a house. They say I want permission   I paint my face. I say—just take it. Easy. If equally matched, we can offer battle. If unequal in any way, we can flee from him.   Deprived of their father while sustained by his wages. I thought a lot about walking around at night. By myself. Just to think. But I never did. I thought I could just flick a switch.   When I was born, my mother and father gave me a gardenia like personal star. Don’t you hate it when someone apologizes all the time? It’s like they are not even sorry.
She brightens at the evidence. Like a strong appliance.   You can make it hot.   Grown ass people having tantrums.   I’m unbought, unheated. Like a perfectly square morsel of lasagna.   A wrathful rubics cube.   To realize, I wish to ridicule people interested in martial arts.   That I’m not getting better.       My uncle would prank call my father, “Immigration!”   He’d crow. And my father would fall to silence.   No matter the heavy accent.   No matter the voice he’d known unto boredom.   One wing swigging out to its brother on the other bird.   I measured this silence when I was a girl.   The quality of the joke and how it rested   on the bad stomach of a tensile citizenry.   The joke was that, in an instant,  We Lost Everything.       It is important to remember who would laugh first—   the perpetrator/uncle/jokester or the assailed/father/feather.   Or maybe, it isn’t.   Maybe what you should know is that   they told this joke over and over and ever.   My uncle crowed. My father disbelieved. We lost everything.   And then, the svelte, sweet brier laughter.
The art of war teaches us to rely not on the chance of the enemy not attacking but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.  —Sun Tzu My father called me a chink so I’d know how to receive it. So I wouldn’t be surprised.  Therefore the good soldier will be terrible in his onset and prompt in his decision.   In the wall, I bricked up my secret. So it would gush forth. I did this for effect. So you would know me.  On the day of battle your soldiers might weep bedewing their garments.   But it grew like a bullet loving its flowerstain. It happened nonetheless.  But let them at once be brought to bay.   Because you are simply my medic watching me. I’m a poem someone else wrote for me. All of the characters “beautiful and flawed.”  When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far.   My sister said, you can forget our way of life? I said yes and was annoyed. She ran away and I was desperate for her. I was screaming into the mindspeaker.  When far away, we must make him believe we are near.   I said, Christine, christine, christine.
All birds—even those that do not fly —have wings   A constant confession Admission of omission   This is your punctuated equilibrium And everything in between Slow it down   The moment of extinction The death of the last individual of a species (Let’s put it aside for now) Stay with it   This is our gene flow How do you like our genetic drift A riff, a rift, a raft… Too rough for the second half   Take us under, take us downhill Paint pangenesis all over your dancing body The new party god Keep the beat going, don’t stop, you can’t stop   Crick & Watson Evo-devo This is your mother’s local phenomenon   If this is racial hygiene Why do I feel so dirty?   Microcosmic soul It’s an involutionary wonderland This living matter A modern synthesis 4.6 billion years of biology Can’t stop the ideology Graduate from meet/mate To fitness landscape of sexual selection   From land over sea It’s a hard lyric The impression of a key in a bar of soap A transitional fossil   Keep camping Plant the flag Bury the burial mound Put the pop in popular And the sigh in science
Some(where a) woman wears   the face once given. Possessions   scarce we go halves on slant   of eye & span of palm with cousin & other   ghosts. Where is the man with the face lent   mother? Fathers rare; infant found  at Shinkyo police station box—official   shoes careened around fortune of Name  & birth, pin &  note. Elsewhere (Norway, Australia)   another Korean   National bears the imprint   of my din. Cribs, nurse, hands, rice-milk powder, down   & rocked—carefully dated   checks. American/Father   asks Why. We don’t speak. Years   burn to decades, this permanent   occupation.
This is you—Titanus giganteus, your maw snapping pencils in half and cutting through human flesh. My encyclopedia chokes on your bulk. My camera, timid, afraid to look, as if you’re naked—not one adult male, but millions.   Few garments sound as fine as flak jacket, the best of the tagmata the thorax, more prime than brains as the body can keep mating, cracking its margins. Your shield like a wing, protects your bulletproof heart from the wind, your right arm black in the cloth of your brothers. Full face visor. Baby gladiator.   Beyond the screen, memorized—jawbone like a scandal reflecting all the thieves and beggars. Insect lord, insect mind. This is my fear. You look like my brother, my son. You could kill me with your looks.
Like a wedding ring, or the bride’s green ribbon, you shelter me. No business but war. You remind me of a kind of heaven.   A cairn of rocks casting shadows in the shape of a man.   Thou art the table before me in the sight of my adversaries, thou dost anoint my head: oil and rain, thou art a ghost with a girl’s mouth, thou art not the making of my dreams—under water, under cliff, under this long suitcase of earth and bombs. More than any mortal could gather beneath the skirt of the sky.   You are never eager, nor famished, nor pale with a craving for white clothes or my nocturnes.   Let your lynx approach, even tiger, even its wild outline.   You need no ferryman or the obolus of the dead. If I put a coin in my mouth I taste copper, not the corpse. They say that bodies fertilized the ground so well the trees grow bright and tall. The bones blur. We return alive.
Because of time being an arrow, I had to imagine everything.   I had to fold the song with my mind because of the time being. Wash the rice here, in the present.   Because of the arrow I pent up the fourth wall as though I were diapering my own newborn.   I put time to the breast, though I feared it was not an arrow but an asp.   Being time I kept that fear under my tongue like a thermometer. I felt its mercury rolling under my teeth, boiling like language.   A deaf man, an old man, I am his hand, rough and gentle, an arrow here and then.   Time, I can see what I feel.   In the future even your future becomes my past. Arrow, I have died. There is peace. I pull it from me like a blanket.   As in a dream, because of time being an arrow, I put on the dress of a young, lovely mother. Because of her, because of the time, here I am, always watching over you.
No more hangings, no more gas chambers. No one allowed to remain in the center of the labyrinth, guarding their dna from the world, from the future. No more contemplation, no more waste. Everyone leaning toward paradise. Shields down and the word enemy will pass from memory. You are my kind.
The last time he cut his mother’s hair  the rude morning sun left no corner of her kitchen private,  the light surgically clean where it fell on his scissors.  Her hair fell in a blonde circle on the lake blue tile—smell of coffee  and cinnamon; her laughing shook her head, Hold still, he said,  his hands surfeit with the curl and softness of her hair.    Three weeks after her death, a stranger entered the salon  and settled in the chair. She had the color and shape  of his mother’s hair, and when he sunk his hands in it,  the texture, even cowlicks, individual as freckles—same.  Twice he had to leave the room, and twice, he returned—still,  when he touched her hair, it blurred.Hold still, he said, hold still.
Nevermind that keeping ashes  on the mantel feels ghoulish, and comically impractical:   not just another thing,  a miniature memento urn, to dust, but dust to dust—   I dread the conversational  Hara-kiri, not, that’s what’s leftof my brother, but, he died of suicide:   the chasm of silence following the leap—  so the cremains stay in the office closet till they migrate   through no will of their own  to a moving box I haven’t unpacked and likely won’t.
One among the shifting mass  of humanity intent on countless destinations,  one hungry stomach   and dry mouth among many,  one brain dazed by the speed and altitude  of flights unnatural   to any animal, by herding,  followed by waiting succeeded by rushing,  waiting, herding—   and more flight  incomprehensible to any body contained  in this seemingly unwieldy   mass of metal lifting  improbably over Chicago, where a misty orange aura  hovers over the city’s   brighter lights, as if  its soul sought ascension it could only attempt,  as if the aura   might break free  and follow us, wherever we might fly,  wheresoever we may rest—   one with the multitude  of humans en route through mystery,  to mystery.
I wanted to give you something for your pain. But not the drug du jour or the kind word this side of cliché. Something you wouldn’t find on a talk show, in a department store or dark alleyway. I wanted to give you something for your pain   but I couldn’t imagine what. Frankincense, myrrh—even gold seemed too plain (too plain and too gross). I needed something that wouldn’t have occurred to you or me, or even Nature: a creature more fabulous, more imaginary   than you’d find in a rain forest or tapestry or pixel-loaded screen. Some exotic anodyne an alchemist or astrophysicist would be envious of: a chemical reaction, an astral refraction, an out-of-body, out-of-mind, one-of-a-kind   transport from your pain, that would last longer than a day, go deeper than the past. I would have founded a whole new religion if I thought that would suffice. As for love—sacred, profane, or both— I wanted to give you something   that didn’t arrive with a roll of the dice and was hard to maintain and had a knack for disappointing. I wanted to give you something for your pain that didn’t smack of a sorcerer’s trick, or a poet’s swoon, or a psychiatrist’s quip. Nothing too heavy   or spacey or glib. I’d have given you the moon but it’s been done (and besides, its desolate dust and relentless tendency to wane might have only exacerbated your pain). If I could have given you something you could depend on, could always trust   without a second thought, I would have. A splendid view, perhaps, or a strain of music. A favorite dish. A familiar tree. A visit from a genie who, in lieu of granting you a wish, would tend subtly to your every need, and never once tire, never complain.   But when all was said and done (or hardly said, not nearly done) I was as helpless as you. Could you tell— or were you so overcome your pain was all that mattered? It seemed to me we were a kind of kin: willing the mind its bold suspensions,   but the heart, once shattered, never quite matching its old dimensions. And yet you persevered in spite of pain, you knew to hold hope as lightly as you held my hand (a phantom grasp, a clasp that seemed to come from the other side). And your genial smile made it plain: you were pleased by my wish to please. And then you died.
after Hokusai and Hiroshige I dreamt half my life was spent in wonder, and never suspected.   So immersed in the moment I forgot I was ever there.   Red-tailed hawk turning resistance into ecstasy.   The patrolmen joking with the drunk whose butt seemed glued to the sidewalk.   A coral quince blossom in winter, pink as a lover’s present.   And tilting my bamboo umbrella against the warm slant   of rain, was I not a happy peasant crossing the great bay on a bridge that began   who knows when, and will end who knows when?
One spring night, at the end of my street God was lying in wait.   A friend and I were sitting in his new sedan like a couple of cops on surveillance, shooting the breeze to pass the time, chatting up the daydreams, the raw deals, all the wouda-coulda-shoulda’s, the latest “Can you believe that?” As well as the little strokes of luck, the so-called triumphs, small and unforeseen, that kept us from cashing it all in.   And God, who’s famous for working in mysterious ways and capable of anything, took the form of a woman and a man, each dressed in dark clothes and desperate enough to walk up to the car and open the doors.   And God put a gun to the head of my friend— right against the brain stem, where the orders go out not only to the heart and the lungs but to consciousness itself—a cold muzzle aimed at where the oldest urges still have their day: the one that says eat whatever’s at hand, the one that wants only to fuck, the one that will kill if it has to…   And God said not to look at him or he’d blow us straight to kingdom come, and God told us to keep our hands to ourselves, as if she weren’t that kind of girl.   Suddenly time was nothing, our lives were cheap, the light in the car cold, light from a hospital, light from a morgue. And the moments that followed—if that’s what they were— arrived with a nearly unbearable weight, until we had acquired a center of gravity as great as the planet itself.   My friend could hardly speak— he was too busy trying not to die— which made me chatter all the more, as if words, even the most ordinary ones, had the power to return us to our lives.   And behind my ad-libbed incantation, my counterspell to fear, the orders still went out: keep beating, keep breathing, you are not permitted to disappear,   even as one half of God kept bitching to the other half that we didn’t have hardly no money at all, and the other half barked, “I’m telling you to shut your mouth!” and went on rummaging through the back seat. And no one at all looking out their window, no one coming home or going out…   Until two tall neighbors came walking toward us like unsuspecting saviors… And God grabbed the little we’d been given, the little we still had, and hustled on to the next dark street.
—St. John of the Cross And it won’t be multiple choice, though some of us would prefer it that way. Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on when we should be sticking to the point, if not together. In the evening there shall be implications our fear will change to complications. No cheating, we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure the cost of being true to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested like defendants on trial, cross-examined till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No, in the evening, after the day has refused to testify, we shall be examined on love like students who don’t even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart and not off the top of their heads. And when the evening is over and it’s late, the student body asleep, even the great teachers retired for the night, we shall stay up and run back over the questions, each in our own way: what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now to look back and know we did not fail.
The pleasure of walking a long time on the mountain without seeing a human being, much less speaking to one.   And the pleasure of speaking when one is suddenly there. The upgrade from wary to tolerant to convivial, so unlike two brisk bodies on a busy street for whom a sudden magnetic attraction is a mistake, awkwardness, something to be sorry for.   But to loiter, however briefly, in a clearing where two paths intersect in the matrix of chance. To stop here speaking the few words that come to mind. A greeting. Some earnest talk of weather. A little history of the day.   To stand there then and say nothing. To slowly look around past each other. Notice the green tang pines exude in the heat and the denser sweat of human effort.   To have nothing left to say but not wanting just yet to move on. The tension between you, a gossamer thread. It trembles in the breeze, holding the thin light it transmits.   To be held in that line of force, however briefly, as if it were all that mattered.   And then to move on. With equal energy, with equal pleasure.
for TNH There are those who will never return to us as we knew them. Who if they return at all visit our sleep, or daydreams, or turn up in the features of total strangers. Or greet us face to face in the middle of some rush hour street, but from a great distance—and not in the full flush of bodies that once wanted nothing more from us than the laying of our hands upon them, as a healer lays hands upon the afflicted. There are those who by their absence are an affliction.   I imagine that sometimes in your dark bed you still want to know why. Why the man you were just coming to love, who liked you close as he raced through the city at night, why he had to swerve suddenly. Why he had to end up on an operating table, dead. Why you of all people had to live, to repeat this unanswerable question.   I could tell you about a woman good at ritual who, hardly believing in herself, was good at making vows the two of us could believe. Then one day I had to drive her to an early flight. The dawn was blinding. She was off to look for the soul no one else could provide. But was this the way to do it? She didn’t know. She wanted me to tell her. Tears down her face. And I kept driving. I can look back and say: on that day, that’s when I died.   Since then, you and I have had a hard time believing anything could bring us back. And yet your brown body breathes new life into a cotton print from the fifties, and picks parsley from the garden for spaghetti carbonara,   and cues up Mozart’s French horn solo, and fills up the kitchen with the aroma of sourdough, and gets my body to anticipate the taste of malt as the tops of American beer cans pop: good rituals all, because they waited out our every loss, patient with the slow coming back to our senses, undeterred by our neglect. As if they knew all along how much we would need them.
Whitman thought he could live with animals, they were so placid and self-contained, not one of them dissatisfied. I have lived with animals. They kept me up all night. Not only tom cats on the prowl, and neurotic rats behind my baseboards, scratching out a slim existence. There were cattle next door in the butcher’s pen, great longhorns lowing in the dark. Their numbers had come up and they knew it. I let their rough tongues lick my sorry palm. Nothing else I could do for them, or they for me.   Walt can live with the animals. I’ll take these vegetables on parade: string-beans and cabbage heads and pea brains, who negotiate a busy crosswalk and feel brilliant, the smallest act accomplished no mean feat, each one guiding them to other small acts that will add up, in time, to something like steady purpose. They cling to this fate, clutch it along with their brownbag lunches: none of us would choose it, but this is their portion, this moment, then this one, then the next. Little as it is, pitiful as it seems, this is what they were given, and they don’t want to lose it.   The gawky and the slow, the motley and the misshapen… What bliss to be walking in their midst as if I were one of them, just ride this gentle wave of idiocy, forget those who profess an interest in my welfare, look passing strangers in the eye for something we might have in common, and be unconcerned if nothing’s there. And now we peek into a dark café, and now we mug at the waitress whose feet are sore, whose smile makes up for the tacky carnations and white uniform makes it easy to mistake her for a nurse, even makes it necessary, given the state of the world.   And when the giant with three teeth harangues us to hurry up, what comfort to know he’s a friend, what pleasure to be agreeable, small wonders of acquiescence, like obedient pets. Except animals don’t have our comic hope, witless as it is. They don’t get to wave madly at the waitress, as though conducting a symphony of ecstatic expectations. If I turned and lived with animals I’d only be a creature of habit, I’d go to where the food is and the warmth. But I wouldn’t get to say to my troubled friend, “Your eyes are so beautiful. I could live in them.”
Inside me lived a small donkey. I didn’t believe in magic, but the donkey was a sucker for the stuff. Psychics, illusionists, arthritics who’d predict the rainfall. That was the year I had trouble walking. I over-thought it and couldn’t get the rhythm right. The donkey re-taught me. “This foot. Yes, then that one. And swing your arms as if you’re going to trial to be exonerated of a crime you’ve most definitely committed.” Next, trouble sleeping because I’d need to crank the generator in my chest so frequently. Seeing I was overworked, the donkey finally hauled it out— it looked shiny and new, a silver dollar— and tossed it into a flock of birds who had to fly a long way to find safety. I knew then I was a large and dangerous man, what with this donkey living inside me, but felt futile. One day, during a final lesson on breathing, the donkey asked what kind of jeans I was wearing. I said, “The somber ones.” “Poor kid.” “So will you be staying on for a third year, donkey?” “No. I think I should be leaving soon. I think I should go and await your arrival beside the crumpled river.” “Yes, I suppose you have many important matters to attend to, but maybe one day I will come and join you for a drink or, perhaps, for a brief nap.”
pulse light     starts there starts getting smaller All that you can’t remember, Claire says. , With two glass eyes I’m wobbling down  a walkway inflecting aloha no thumbtacks,  attached no pins, To feel. Good by. among crimson and silver turnstiles, all the folks In orange,  Silvery hats and thermal The madmen mad getting madder daisies all done Again me strolling, me fuming, slipping, the stream frozen. the matter of face. the quasars    huffing on. In December no summery mask, No, just the shimmering scene, the firmament. a blackbird indicating, nods  Maybe a change dust of a brick maybe I remember, I recall. a cyclotron. An ingenuous ramrod  The flay of her hair fall sinking Rowboat turning to winter, rowboat, rowboat Chatter of the breakage   iii. verb forms of a neutron bomb   starts sloe gin over time Fermenting in the firmament  red shifting with Claire waking with Claire, betweening and vaguing Claire the embassies exchanging airs. lily white,  glittery photons , spark at the bottom working iamb iamb iamb iamb iamb Claire don’t care reminiscing Tuscaloosa in. A corner of the soiree. , standing so bluntly  you resemble no one, Precisely, as if receding over a hill,   you resembles everyone. corralling , the bulky idea of the hill into.  an encampment, a tiny cranium.  And it’s as if, Spying you through  a whiskey on rocks. a mass hysteria I struttle along, Making commonplace. Ubnutterances,  and guts your house is blue with two glass eyes     iii. quantum entanglement   starts with a single shot. fired not the year of my fathers.  slow, death starts. year my mother goes terminal, The vacuous scene chattering, Like an elephant  collapsing the animals fuming, weird winged bugs  The serious business of. squishing them, they simply regroup. And reappear. , Claire. I’m stumbling down the thoroughfare. in a dark, Pinching what few glittering photons, I’m trolling. murky and building up. start at the bottom, working a way   Upwards Evening, like a tumbler. folding. itself over  Feeling contented all around. squinting, started clawing with two glass eyes feeling for thumbtacks. Among the broad vagaries. among the wild visions, Claire. . I say I know you better, , than. You could imagine,  or some other, but you sock me. Hard. In the gut instead.     i. aimed by magnets      starts redundant Futile with a screwdriver, among the wrecks. , I am having a ball comma Describe the house comma paint the doorjamb end-stop these months spent a-chatter.  the sidewalk spinal column of a mule that carries me. Through the broad making-world. one universe over, We are inseparable. And own many cats the city. Large.  like viewing an egg, From the egg’s interior. I go about the serious business strolling, The firmament   Claire. your pocket watch, A frayed yellow. T-shirt. on the narrative fringe. of the narrative, the weightless photons say Holding hands One universe over. You do not forgive  me. , all that I can’t but Maybe a small change maybe something less than the sky,  maybe something. More than the sky could conjure.   ii. if this were a sonnet, I    start with all that you can’t remember. The gutters Overloaded. the funky trinkets, Weird winged bugs  on the sill. In the air, When I go about the business , strolling home Claire. riding the slipstream sloe gin. All drink and whiskey. the old ferry, a rowboat , in my gut. smooth as a mirror Every mad Artifact everyone I’ve ever met, resembling Claire dissembling My wintered axe. start at the bottom   Work your way upwards. like a signature saying I’ve been here,  strolling past, these fumes, on the air smell like a letter. All thermal , all water Quasars  bleating, blackbird saying, The search light pauses Pluck The wings out one at a time. Chicago and blackbird, blackbird, I unaware. of ours, the recombinant bodies of the gods.     i. focused by a lens   starts with the scene starts. December, Smooth as a mirror Hard in the gut feels like a tumbler.  Claire, inflecting good, by. walking. Claire. the scene of sparks. among the while, the fission  The house is blue. with two glass eyes among the firmament   no pins to pin you No, thumbtacks to hold you But photons and  all the things that you can’t . Among the sloe gin, your frayed yellow T-shirt. I returned to you, but you wanting   In a corner of the soiree. a corner of the prairie, more than the sky  This is where the elephant toppled. when what you remember is Collided, with Often under the webbed foot  Of my imagining, you are the entire throng. Wearing  your face, Dust of a brick, what’s left is What when the particle accelerator paints its disastered portrait     iv. scatter   many phrases starts with shatter. , crossing  the parking lot, my skin pixilated in the sodium light, harsh corundum skin a vapor trail edging  the slipstream. Tidy up the floorboards. the wiggling infrastructure of a signature. says, I’ve been here  before All airs as if a unified field. of  night. of Claire. Collapse, arrangement  of bones where the elephant toppled. spells are cast,   Luster in clusters, stone I toss Chicago, the old ferry through the house’s eye, through the firmament Light  bulbs wilting, carnations flickering, Like a cyst the crick dribbles outward toward a shore my lady trickles, my lady pours Give up give up, my sweet canteen Been taken to the forest. Honey. Among the wild fission.
I’m standing in field 17 of the long series, employing my scythe. Sometimes a conceptual dog bounds past me, though it’s never my conceptual dog. Occasionally future laureates gather for colloquium, though they’re rarely my future laureates. Thus, evening proceeds precisely the way the handbook describes it: as a proceeding: a runnel: shallow and babbling.   Into it a stranger appears. He looks like my friend. I ask him, Are you my friend? Gravity telegraphs its heavy message through the lolling vines. The strangers says, I’ve sold all my clothes and am considering, for a career, perpetual suffering. The sun slides a tongue down the nape of the grain elevator. Lowing cattle. It’s the fourth of July. In Spain. I say, You are most vague and mysterious, friend. The dog paces. I set my scythe aside and tell him, I have employed this scythe mercilessly all my life and still everywhere these stalks extend. He says, Someone is always worse off than us even at our most pitiable. Yes, I say. I read it once in a magazine. And we laugh, let our enormous bellies jangle. It is good to laugh with my friend and let the scythe cool, I say. Yes, he says. Good.
NYTimes headline for September 4th 2012: Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy As Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits  They return to the site whence they came with eyes tearful, with psalms trumpeting the air. They stand ever so watchful; guarding the graves of their ghosts and their kind. They shall not forget. They shall not want. They lie down in green silky pastures and finding their way to the still waters. They restore and nourish their soul. They walk through the dark valleys; always the shadows of death lurking behind them. Always striding till they reach the comforting light. They fear no evil. Man fears. They forage for food and they eat amongst their enemies because they fear not. They are the happiest. The honey is under their tongue. The winter is past, the rain is over and gone. Their hearts awaken. They know no violence. Even in the waning light they tower over all else. They are the landscape. They are the trees. They throw up the dust in their dance. The skies become misty. They rise up and lead each other away into the dusk.
Toward summer or its dependence On demarcations in the sandy vial Some tree spelling astronaut onto a Planet’s arm, it stopped making sense. I am not an apothecary or a wave Or a dog by the 15th hole, I am not A light sparking a whole country’s demise. I will never be a towel holding someone’s Sunscreen while they wash it off in foreign Seas. My hair goes up and down, it’s true As it is I am not a bag of tea nor will I ever Be exceptionally happy. Let the director Know I was distressed by the construction Noise, that I had no known allergies that My parents convinced me I was wanted And why wouldn’t you believe them. If the earth when it opened dragged away Our sense of faith, doubt was an Invention I preferred to ignore in the Manner of solicitations by mail.
After “She was the song of my dark hour,” a photograph by Paul Tañedo I woke up and I was old—   It’s hard to judge if this new country   was worth its costs—   Fil and Eileen educated themselves—   They blessed me with their happiness—   Roy and Glen lost themselves   to a car accident and something worse   (that I will not reveal even for a poem)—   When I see myself reflected in a mirror   I turn away to hide both my eyes, all of my self—   when half of your children are destroyed   the half who flourish cannot compensate   exactly  as if   a heart breaksexactly down the middle.
All that's left is the shroud  the back wings. Roaches scurrying in the kitchen. There’s no greater threat than this time at hand.  Drunken cackles from the street. Still damp  from 4 AM rain. I missed the instructions for this part. The trap. The deflate of dream. Utopia was always supposed to be right at hand. Right and left. Any which way we’d make of it.  Marine layer won’t budge for the rumble under our feet. Sky tears open in the north. Sirens on high. A small pool forms in the buckle of asphalt. In its gentle tremble the reflection of the grey white mass overhead with a perfect seam of blue. The rift where the dead speak how-tos.
The number of bodies i have is equal to the number of gurney transfers that are televised.   If we’re all “just human”  then who is responsible?   A fire station drying out from addiction. outside the drizzling of firepower, lowballing suns   it’s like a sauna in here. the strain of a charred bladder. bottled water bad wiring,   that spark is no good come sit with me for a minute. my feet full of diluted axe fluid   thought I heard you say everything is medicine but that’s just hearin what you wanna hear
November 9, 2016 University of Notre Dame minutes felt like hours   "deplorables knocking at your door"   he shouted the day after—“build   the wall— we're building   a wall around your room!"   minutes felt like hours   "cowards!" you managed, catching   a glimpse by cracking your door:   there were three of them scurrying   down the hall, their faces obscured…   your back against the wall, you slid   to the floor— "Hail Mary..." you began   whispering to yourself and back   they came their laughter  louder   minutes felt like hours   and the thumping in your chest— his fist   pounding the door      for Gregory Jenn ('18)
it doesn’t matter when I cross. two seconds and they’re gone. the ferry facing Ulus. the trees that spanked of green. the narrow bags of temples. beyond that – just – these Peri scenes    when the human body sweats the skin produce an oil    when Peri bodies sweat it does not produce the oil   the ropes fall to the pavement their waters slap me still their green glow sweats into the pavement waters slap me still –    I could curl among the roses  I would make an aqualung   we will reach the edge of this walk soon. all lights torn out for fuel.    move my fingers in the dark   awoke without a start. Peri here – my name is Peri –   my name is Perihan
Spoiler alert: in this all-but-forgotten masterwork, Jean Stafford—who was once widely regarded as the leading novelist   of her generation, and who wrote this perverse, short, lyrical novel, her second, during   the flailing failings of her marriage to my hero Robert Lowell—kills   Molly, her child-alter ego, a girl too unloved and unloving to survive puberty, too   pure and awful—like Stafford, who died pickled and childish three decades later after winning   the Pulitzer with her devastating, hurtfully compassionate Collected Stories—for this or any other world,   especially the necessarily allegorical one of fiction. I am broken now, hopeless; hope   is proved by this book to be a contrivance. I have just read the last pages in which   Molly’s brother, Ralph—who, to live, cannot love either, has no spare love—shoots   her, aiming for the wild mountain lion whose stuffed corpse was to be the triumph   of his new manhood. I don’t hate Ralph—how can I, a boy, mistaken, like me? And can I hate   Molly, who so needed Ralph and everyone, still young enough to savor the bittersweet of her anger?   What about Stafford, who hurt herself, all our selves, with this ending, her classic tragedy, writing,   decades later, Poor old Molly! I loved her dearly and I hope she rests in peace.   Fuck insight and analysis: my heart is shot. Why did she have to die? Why does   anyone? Why do you, do I? Because of what Ralph was feeling just before he accidentally   slaughtered the future? This book must have ravaged the already sleepless poet Gregory Orr,   who shot his brother, too, and suffers that endless error in poetry and prose. And because Molly   refused everything, she stood between Ralph and tomorrow. But he grew, he changed. Confused? Read   the book. In novels people die because of what they feel. In life, people die when   their bodies conk out, exhausted machines that living expends. And what   happens when people feel their feelings in life? Nothing? Anything? Brenda,   dear Brenda, my love, nothing happens, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. And afraid. A small breeze born in the heart   gently bends a blade of grass and no one hears a word. No one reads Stafford anymore—I asked   on Facebook. Stafford died, her legacy gently dispatched into the low air. O, life   is terrible, literature ridiculous. Stafford’s prose, teeming and rich as loam,   could take Famous Franzen’s for a walk, feed it biscuits. But who cares? Who remembers?   O, to have been Jean Stafford, in the past I idealize, when the world was less self-conscious, less   precise. I could be dead already, warmish beneath a blanket of dust. Joyful   are the faded, the once-greats whose afterlives slipped out a hole in posterity's pocket:   they are loved poignantly by a needy few. O, to be kept cozy in the bosoms of those   desperate and proud, forgotten for all the good I do. Love is sunlight streaming unevenly   through the canopy of leaves overhead. We can only grow in the brighter patches below, fading   where light is thin. Molly, we are with you, nowhere and gone. Mostly we are forgotten, too.
I live with the small shame of not knowing the multiple names for blue to describe the nightsky over New Mexico to describe the light in my lover’s eyes.   It is a small shame that grows.   I live with the small shame which resides in the absences of my speech as I pause to search for the word in Spanish to translate a poem to my Father who sits there waiting who scans my eyes to see what I cannot fully describe who waits for the word from me the word that escapes me in the moment the word I fear has never resided within me.   It is a small shame that grows when indigo and cerulean are merely azul and not añil and cerúleo.
Let us praise the immigrant who leaves the tropics and arrives in Chicago in the dead of winter.   Let us praise the immigrant who has never worn coats who must bundle up against an unimaginable cold.   For they will write letters home that speak of it like Norse sagas with claims that if a frigid hell exists the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city.   Let us praise the immigrant who fears the depths of the subway the disappearance of landmarks to guide them through the labyrinth.   Let us praise the immigrant who dreams of the pleasures of sunstroke who wakes each morning to the alien sight of their breath suspended in the cold city air.
Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.  —Che Guevara   Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué, I have a Che t-shirt and I don’t know why.  —Contemporary Argentine saying I see the red shirt at the peace rally and think of my parents who left everyone and every thing they knew and loved save for the coin forgotten in my brother’s baby jacket.   Men like me in Cuba failed the test of this symbol’s manhood, were called “Western perversions” were imprisoned and made to labor.   Thousands, like these assembled, were rounded up in the middle of the night driven to the far countryside to cut sugarcane for a revolution’s economic quotas.   Tio Alberto’s eyes go blank when he speaks of the price he paid: three years of forced hard labor to work like a dog in the sun for the privilege of leaving his own country.   I think of the chain of caudillos that promised one thing and delivered another.
In that very first episode the transmission is received on the starship Enterprise that Space Commander Dominguez urgently needs his supplies. Kirk tells Uhura to assure him that the peppers are “prime Mexican reds but he won’t die if he goes a few more days without ’em.”Calm down Mexican.You can wait a few more days to get your chile peppers.   In the corner of my eye I see Uhura’s back hand twitch and though I never see him on the screen I image José giving Kirk a soplamoco to the face.   But this is the year 2266 and there are Latinos in Outer Space! We never see them, but they’ve survived with their surnames and their desire, deep in the farthest interplanetary reaches, for a little heat to warm the bland food on the starbase at Corinth 4. As it is on earth so it shall be in heaven.   Ricardo Montalbán will show up 21 episodes later to play a crazy mutant Indio, superhuman and supersmart who survived two centuries to slap Kirk around and take over his ship.
when i was 7, i hoped rocks would whisper the secret to being hard. fascinated by Keisha’s skin so soft, i seduced her into humping even though she was five years my senior and my babysitter—click of the light covers snatched away like a magic trick reveal i could hear Keisha wail one floor up through the radiator pipes—i was the victim.   at 7, i decided i should’ve been born a boy, a he, a him. blamed my mama for her mistake. prayed for a penis and practiced peeing standing up until it came: aim, angle of lean, and straddle were crucial. toilet seat up, knees clamping the cool rim i let go of the golden flow feeling the warm wet trickle down my legs darkening my dungarees a new shade of blue.   at 7, i was never afraid of putting things in my mouth: i chewed my fingernails till they bled, chewed pencils till the yellow paint flaked me a crusty mustache, chewed pen caps into odd sculptures, chewed pens until the inky cylinders leaked a Rorschach on my face kids pointing as i ran to the bathroomoooh a butterfly! no, a thundercloud …   i wore my iron-on Bruce Lee sweatshirt till his face cracked and faded invisible. still, i felt invincible when i wore it kicking lunch tables with my shins. karate-chopping pencils in two. forever trying to impress the skirts with my awkward brand of goof. punching my arm to make lumps rise out of the bony sinew. at 7, i knew how to make a girl cry.
be born: black as ants on a chicken bone black   as Nina Simone and Mahalia’s moan black as rock pile smile and resilience black   as resistance and rhythm and Sonny’s blues black as no shoes and dirt floors black   as whore and Hottentot foxtrot Lindy Hop and Watusi pussy and pyramids black   as darkness under your eyelids black between your legs black   as dregs of rum sugarcane summer plums holyghost hum black   as bruised throat fieldholla wading in the shallow black as ocean river stream creek running black   transparent translucent transatlantic slanted shanties planted in red clay black   as funky chickens and chitlins and kinfolk sold away black as auction block and slop and hip-hop and rock and roll   and chop shop and cop cars and parole and overseer patrols and one drop rules and pools of blood black   as beige and good hair and sounding white and light-skindeded and my grandmamma is Cherokee, Iroquois, Choctaw black   as pit bulls and lockjaw and rage and hoodies black eyes and black-eyed peas peasy heads and loose tracks black   as trees and noose and hounds let loose in the night black as fist and fight Sojourner and Nat Turner and righteousness black   as fuck and not giving a fuck mud-stuck and quicksand quick hand hustle thigh muscle and hurdle black   as cotton and tobacco and indigo black as wind and bad weather and feather   and tar and snap beans in mason jars black as nigga please and hallelujah black   asses and black strap molasses and turn your black back on audiences black   as banjo and djembe and porch and stoop and spooks sitting by the door black   as roaches in front of company and lawn jockeys and latchkey kids and high bids and spades and shittalk black   as cakewalk and second line and black magic and tap dance, lapdance and alla that ass black   as jazz and juke and juju and spirit disguised as harmonica spit black   as cast-iron skillets and grits and watermelon seeds flitting from lips black   as tambourines hitting cornbread hips black batons splitting lips and Martin Luther King, Jr.   boulevards and downtown beatdowns black sit-ins and come-ups and oops upside yo’ heads   and we shall overcomes and get down on it black get into it black let’s get it on and get it   while the getting is good black as white hoods and backwood revivals black   as survival and Trayvon and Tyrone and Josephus and amen and Moses and Jesus and getting over   black—
for those of us who can’t quite quit her when the poem flirts similes hugging her thighs   like a tight skirt: consider the possibilities.   if the poem follows you home, whiskey   pickling her tongue: make her coffee, black.   if the poem arrives dressed as metaphor,   begging for candy: trick or retreat till the mask falls.   should the poem slink outta panties, stand   naked demanding touch: finger her lines   till her stanzas beg for an encore: come   again, explore, imagine odd positions of sweet revision.   and whenever she whispers,stop: listen and leave her be.
July 13, 2013 Saturday afternoon: in the driveway between buildings they blow up balloons—yellow, red, blue—for a 3-year-old’s party.   The intermittent pops startle me like random gunfire—remind me of birthdays brown boys will no longer celebrate.   The DJ, having set up the speakers, begins to play—the music, a rapid fire of bass thump, commandeers the apartment. We have no choice but leave.   An art show: canvases colored with boxes and lines—a grid of red on a backdrop of yellow. We speak of the abstract with wine in our mouths.   Meanwhile, in an antechamber, six are sequestered. They speak of mali- cious intent, blood, evidence, testimony—murder versus manslaughter.   We arrive home to a throng of brown bodies, hands clutching red cups, and music: its insistent treble stabbing the ears.   Inside, we slam all windows, but the music still blares as my niece shoots people on the video game—its sounds are too realistic to bear.   Instead, the news, a verdict is in: not guilty. And everything is a blur of sound, my heart beating so fast I put a hand to my chest.   I watch the TV screen: a collage of abstractions—spotlights, microphones, smiles, handwritten signs. I stare, as if it were a painting—   a smear of twisted faces smothered in gesso and oil, a grid of red on a backdrop of yellow—to make sense of.   The party continues. The 3-year-old probably in bed dreaming of melted ice cream, and I am tired of partying.   There is a police station a half block away and I want it to burn. Instead, only the smoke of weed, the meaningless music droning on,   the popping of balloons. Sunday morning, the birds are angry—their chirping a noisy chant: NO NO NO NO. Outside, the rubbery flesh   of balloons color the driveway like splotches of paint. In an instant, those still lives of heave and breath—gone in a pop.
It showed the War was as my father said: boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping low and not freezing. “You wore your helmet   square,” he said, not “at some stupid angle, like that draft-dodger Wayne,” who died so photogenically in The Sands of Iwa Jima.   Those nights I heard shouts from the dark of my parents’ room, he was back down in his foxhole, barking orders, taking fire   that followed him from France and Germany, then slipped into the house, where it hunkered in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept   our helmets on, my mother and I, but there was no cover, and our helmets always tilted. He’d lump us with the ones   he called “JohnDoes,” lazy, stupid, useless. We needed to straighten up and fly right, pick it up, chop chop, not get “nervous   in the service.” We’d duck down like GIs where German snipers might be crouched in haylofts, their breaths held for the clean shot.   “Bang,” my father said, “the dead went down, some like dying swans, some like puppets with their strings cut.” I wanted to hear more,   but he’d change the subject, talk about the pennant, the Cards’ shaky odds, how Musial was worth the whole JohnDoe lot of them.
How burdensome they seemed, wartime oldies that could drive our parents teary:   “I’ll Be Seeing You,” with its hint of being swept off in a global riptide;   or the shaky follow-up of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” followed by a shakier   “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else But Me),” “Comin’   in on a Wing and a Prayer,” or “Ac- Cent-Tchu-Are the Positive.” We suffered   them on the old cathedral radio, crooned by Crosby and Sinatra, had to watch them   strangled on The Lawrence Welk Show or laced with Como’s heavy dose   of sedative. Dad told us, “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Mom hummed, “Keep   the Home Fires Burning”—till our music cut the cord. Brash and free of corn,   it hailed rock ‘n’ roll, caught Maybellene at the top of the hill, moaned “m’ baby-doll,   m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll.” We played it loud and often, but they never understood.
You better rap, my brother says—he can b-box his ass off. Got DJ scratches and spins,   will drop it on the two and four, the three and four. Whatever you need.   Me posing my bars: My flowsare second to none, come here,son. See how it’s done.   Wanted to be a rapper? Check. Thought I was going to the NBA? Check. Father went to prison? Check. Brother too? Check. Mother died when I was eight? Check. Hung pictures of Luke Perry on my bedroom wall?  What?   Yep, give me a bit, and I’ll sprinkle some subjectivity on it.   I loved that dude, his whisper-voice, his lean. Auntie worried on the phone:Girl, he got photos of some white boyall over his walls. Me rocking out to Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”   Silent head nods do more than throw shade.  All black people are fluent  in silence. Mangled Baldwin quote? Let’s keep wrenching. Everybody’s   fluent in silence.   You know what a switchblade glare means. No need to read the look she gave me   as I sang, Let me run with you tonight.
When the junkies my father sold crack to got too close to me, he told them to back up   six dicks’ lengths. This is the man who when I was seven caught me under the bed crying and said:  Save those tears. You’ll need them later. The man who told me he smoked crack   because he liked it, the man sitting on his couch now watching the History Channel, scratching   the nub beneath his knee where his leg used to be, gumming plums, his false teeth   soaking in vinegar on the table. I’m sitting across the room trying to conjure each version   he’s shown of himself, trying to lie in water warm enough   to soak away the switch he hit me with. To help me summon love for the man   who just asked me if he can borrow 200 dollars, the man who once told me: Wish  in one hand, then shit in the other,and see which one fills up the quickest.
We shouldn’t raise mixed babiesin the South, Kay says as I drive up the crest of another hill on our way into Kentucky.   The South, where humidity leaves a sweat mustache, where a truck with a Confederate flag painted   on the back windshield skitters in front of us. In its bed, avoiding our eyes, a boy with blond hair   split down the middle like a Bible left open to the Book of Psalms. His shirtless, sun-licked skin drapes,   a thin coat for his bones, his clavicles sharp. I want to know who’s driving this raggedy truck. I want the boy to look at us. I want   to spray paint a black fist over that flag. I want the truck to find its way into the ravine. I want to—   Stepping on the gas, I pass the truck, Kay and I turn our heads. The boy smiles and waves. The man driving doesn’t   turn his head, keeps his eyes on the road. Kay turns red as she draws her fingers into fists. I stare at the whites of her eyes.
I swear on the melody of trumpet vines, ants feasting through animal crackers, Burt’s Bees, Tyler Perry movies, my daddy’s .38 slug, footie-socks inside high-top Jordans, disidentification, drag queens, blond dreadlocks, headstones salt-and-peppering the grass, vanilla wafers in banana pudding, Zeus-swan chasing, blunt-guts, sharp thumbnails, keloid scars, cash-only bars, R&B songs, on what the pot called the kettle. I put that on my mama’s good hair, on playing solitaire with a phantom limb, the white woman I go home to, my auntie’s face when she says: You knowhe always loved them pink toes. I put that on everything, on the signifiers I gobble up, candlesticks blown out by whistling lips. I put that on dervishing records scratched on down-beats, empty beehives, fresh-fade head-slaps, hand claps, bamboo shoots, liminality, mestizos, the purple-black crook of my arm, split sternums, on You can’t savehim now. I put that on skinny jeans, get rich quick schemes—Gotta get that C.R.E.A.M. Know whatI mean?—freckled black faces, leafless trees throwing up gang signs, phlegm hocked onto streets. I swear I catch more stones than catfish. I lose more collard greens than sleep. I think nothing is here but us darkies, high yellows, red bones, cocoa butters. Someone, no, everyone has jungle fever.Don’t touch my forehead. Blond as moonshine, mute trombone choking. I put that on Instagram. Post me to the endless chain of signifiers. Strawberry gashes on kneecaps, Let meget some dap, Newports, Kool’s, and folding chairs instead of barstools, that white drool caked on your face. Mommy please wipe awaythe veil. I thought I was passing into the eyeof the streetlamp. I swear. I promise on frondless palm trees, long pinkie nails, sixteen years, serve eight, and Miss Addie’s red beans and rice, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the brother on the Cream of Wheat box. It don’t meana thing if it don’t buckle your knees. Open your hands. I’ll give you a song, give you the Holy Ghost from a preacher’s greasy palm—When he hit me, I didn’t fall, felt eyes jabbing me, tagging me. Oh no he didn’t!— give you the om from the small of her back. I put that on double consciousness, multiple jeopardy, and performativity. Please make sure my fettersand manacles are tight. Yea baby, I like bottomlessbullet chambers. I swear on the creation of Uncle Tom— some white woman's gospel. She got blue eyes? I loveme some—on Josiah Henson, the real Uncle Tom, on us still believing in Uncle Tom. Lord, have mercy! Put that on the black man standing on my shoulders holding his balls. Put that on the black man I am—I am not—on the black man I wish I was.
She cannot imagine it otherwise. She wakes in the morning and twists her ring, loves how every night in their bed he lies   breathing warm in the dark and never shies away. He lets her talk, he lets her sing. She cannot imagine it otherwise.   One night she’s surprised how gently he tries to move her arm when he thinks she’s sleeping. In the night, in their bed, she sees he lies   watching the ceiling long before sunrise. Too much coffee, too many late nights working. She cannot imagine it otherwise.   He quiets. The more she worries and pries the less he tells her about anything. She’s sure every night in their bed he lies   wanting a room beyond reach of her eyes. He sighs—she cries so much, Over nothing. She cannot imagine it otherwise: Every night in their bed, he lies.
There was a bucket, there was a wall, there was a woman and a man.   The woman carried the bucket and the man was the wall. There was no place else to go.   It was a long, long time for there was much to carry and there was much to wall.   There was a path ran straight from the well to the hole in the wall. There was a path ran crooked from the well to the wood.   There was something in the wood bigger than the bucket.   Woe to the man, woe to the wall. Woe to the bucket at the edge of the wood.
Let it finally be Friday, let me drive downtown before five, park in the one space left open in front and feed the meter the exact change it needs. Let me go into the office, sit and nod, unfold my check on the table and sign. Let the line not be dotted, let it be solid. Let it be my name. Let it be final.   Let me pull into the driveway while it is still light. It’s well past five and well into October and they are just about to change the time. Saturday night on the local news they’ll remind us all to Fall Back, but I make it in under the wire. There is still light. There is still time.   I am up the back porch steps, under the awning, my hand on the back door lock the realtor left on. Let me remember rightly the numbers he gave me. Let this not be the dream of the high school locker with the Master Lock whose combination you forgot or fumbled, turning too fast, going too far, everything you’d locked up irretrievable, lost. Let the lock fall open, let me leave it on the steps for the realtor to pick up. Let him pull up the flimsy stakes of the sign in the yard that says I can be bought, let him drive away. Let no Master enter through my door.   Let the house be a disaster, I don’t care. Let the smoke-framed blanks where another woman’s pictures marked the wall be the story of how my edges caught fire and the ash at last let me see where I stood. Let the cracked kitchen floor make a map to teach me where not to step, how not to fall through and break my very own back. Let the broken window be a way out, the broken door a way in. Let me go to the hardware store and buy the tools to take the chain off the bedroom door, let me paint the bathroom pink without asking, walk naked and unafraid through all my rooms.   Let me pick up a broom and sweep nothing under the rug. Let me sweep it all into the light. Let me do it. Let there be time. Let there be light.
doesn’t come with feathers. It lives in flip-flops and, in cold weather, a hooded sweatshirt, like a heavyweight in training, or a monk who has taken a half-hearted vow of perseverance. It only has half a heart, the hope I know. The other half it flings to every stalking hurt. It wears a poker face, quietly reciting the laws of probability, and gladly takes a back seat to faith and love, it’s that many times removed from when it had youth on its side and beauty. Half the world wishes to stay as it is, half to become whatever it can dream, while the hope I know struggles to keep its eyes open and its mind from combing an unpeopled beach. Congregations sway and croon, constituents vote across their party line, rescue parties wait for a break in the weather. And who goes to sleep with a prayer on the lips or half a smile knows some kind of hope. Though not the hope I know, which slinks from dream to dream without ID or ally, traveling best at night, keeping to the back roads and the shadows, approaching the radiant city without ever quite arriving.
The god in me does not honor the god in you. The god in you murdered me once, and once was more than enough. So the god in me, adept at keeping my nature warm and inspired to love the benign, now prefers the chilly air of indifference, something picked up like a virus from the most vicious of mortals. The god in me regards the god in you as suspect, though sad to say, it wasn’t always so. There were the generous days in the beginning, when every word was made flesh. In the beginning the gods in us were content to let us go on behaving like perfect mortals, which is to say imperfectly, which is to say with our tenderness fully intact: the good kind that let us gladly undress our trepidations, and pleasure our solitude into a blissful oblivion; and the bad kind— invisible woundings no compliment or hot kiss, no confession of the amorous could soothe for long. And then, when the mortals we were had done enough to remind us that to be mortal is to be susceptible to the secret agenda, the cruel caprice, the soft but eviscerating voice— “at the mercy of a nuance”— the god in you decided it was time to act. A dark god, in need of a human sacrifice, smoothly turning your back on the earnest and their pathetic pleas. So the god in me, no stranger to the aberrant and the abhorrent, now has no choice but to respond in kind. A pity, really, since it has been the dream of so many gods to find themselves in some quiet room, the burden of power slipped off and scattered like clothes across the floor, the light of late afternoon a kind of benediction, and everywhere the gratitude for the privilege of feeling almost human.
When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here (which really ought to be We are here), and see that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think   of those ancient paintings and rock engravings, discovered all over our celestial body, of that one line which begins at whatever point it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing anyone can define—the oldest shape revered by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician   and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike, and even accorded a place of honor among the mess of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper. But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm, and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell,   and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation. Call it what you will—“God's fingerprint,” “the soul unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”— I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation   on our sidereal drift, our existential pain. And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos we thought we had just escaped, one town burning a decade behind us, a millennium before that,   and into next week, next year, next whenever. And when the two of us took that winding road an infinity of others had wound down before us and would wind down again, our spirits hushed by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other,   wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning?
Elle’s writing her book of wisdom. She writes until she cannot hold her pen. The labyrinth miraculously is uncovered.   An American woman’s progressing on her knees. She read something but not Elle’s book. No one will read Elle’s book.   I walk the circular path, first the left side, then the right, casting petals to the north, east, south, and west (this intuitively).   A diminutive prelate shoos me away. When he leaves, I return to the center. The organist, practicing, strikes up Phantom.   Elle says she cannot hear him.Elle! I cry, I cannot see you.I had prayed Death spare you.  Remember our meal among the termitesof Arcadia Street, that cottage of spiritswith its riddled beams and long veranda  bordered by plantain trees, and the spiralyou traced for me on scrap-paper?I kept it for such a long time.   The organist, of course, is playing Bach. A boy has scattered the petals I threw. Elle’s voice surrounds me.    The quiet hills I lift mine eyes.
There was an ancient well-site beneath the labyrinth I did not reach, the part underground, labeled (what else?) The Crypt.   But labels always hide something about what they seem to define. They set the thing apart   without disclosing why. Alive costs a pretty penny to see The Crypt now.
Everything looped, spiraled, circular (thought) But the labyrinth’s not a maze but a singular way to strike “the profoundest chord”across aspire   Those who enter the labyrinth can leave (pilgrims sometime don’t) (Elle did not) Inside the largest circle   (the labyrinth itself) splits into equal parts (demi-arcs or waves) No, silly, Elle whispers, petals    If measured through the centre of the petals there should be two parts for each  petal and one for the entry, but calculations from the measurements show that this is not so. The difference is about ½”. There is no way around this problem.   We must seek a solution to the geometry of petals, the consequential mystery of Elle’s message:  I was sick and am nothealed. I am not blindbut dead. I am not deadbut silenced. Alone, in love.
Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main The pealing thunder shook the heav'nly plain; Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr's wing, Exhales the incense of the blooming spring. Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes, And through the air their mingled music floats. Through all the heav'ns what beauteous dies are spread! But the west glories in the deepest red: So may our breasts with ev'ry virtue glow, The living temples of our God below! Fill'd with the praise of him who gives the light, And draws the sable curtains of the night, Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind, At morn to wake more heav'nly, more refin'd; So shall the labours of the day begin More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin. Night's leaden sceptre seals my drowsy eyes, Then cease, my song, till fair Aurora rise.
This morning I was walking upstairs from the kitchen, carrying your beautiful flowers, the flowers you   brought me last night, calla lilies and something else, I am not sure what to call them, white flowers,   of course you had no way of knowing it has been years since I bought white flowers—but now you have   and here they are again. I was carrying your flowers and a coffee cup and a soft yellow handbag and a book   of poems by a Chinese poet, in which I had just read the words “come or go but don’t just stand there   in the doorway,” as usual I was carrying too many things, you would have laughed if you saw me.   It seemed especially important not to spill the coffee as I usually do, as I turned up the stairs,   inside the whorl of the house as if I were walking up inside the lilies. I do not know how to hold all   the beauty and sorrow of my life.
for Max Ritvo I   Three weeks until summer and then—what? Midsummer’s gravity makes our heads spin each hour a gilt thread spool, winding through the second hand, gossamer fin de semaine,fin de siècle, fin slicing the water of the too-cold-to-breathe bay, molten silver, then receding as if we hadn’t seen it, sultan of so long, see you tomorrow.  Dead man’s fingers, lady’s slippers, a seal who swims too close—too close for what? The needle swerves. Our element chooses us. Water fire, air, earth—the rosebush, Lazarus, hot to the touch, gold reticulate, is love’s bull’s-eye, attar rising from the rafters.     II   If I could make it stop I would. Was it the crocodile Hook feared, or was it time? The hour’s arrow never misses, the gnomon, glinting, cuts the Day-Glo sun to pieces. In the ultraviolet palace of the Mermaid King his girls wear scallop shells, one for each year on their turquoise tails. Even they have birthdays, why not you? Death, hold your ponies with one hand, and stay awhile. On my desk, the lion’s paw lamps scavenged from the winter beach, its poppy-colored shells like the lit scales of an enormous Trojan fish … teeth chattering, its metronome time bomb tsk tsk— when is giving up not giving in?     III (child’s pose)   When Alice pulled the stopper, did she get smaller, or did the world get larger? In the bath, your nose bleeds a bouquet of tissue roses, white stained red—adolescence is to overdo it, but really? Thirty stories up, our birds’-eye view is the hummingbird tattoo on your bare head, wings beating, too tiny and too big to see, your wire-thin profile drawn upright, bones  daring the air, marionette running on the brain’s dark marrow, tungsten for the fireflies’ freeze tag. Due south, the Chrysler Building’s gauntlet holds a lit syringe. We do and do not change. Let me go from here to anywhere.     IV   That’s it for now. And so we turn the page your poems standing in for you, or—that’s not it, what’s left of you, mediating between what you’d call mind and body and I, by now biting my lip, call grief,  the lines netting the enormous air like silver threads, the tails of Mr. Edwards’s spiders with which they sail from ledge to branch “as when the soul feels jarred by nervous thoughts and catch on air.” Pace. Your trousers worn to mouse fur dragging on the stoop, your hip prongs barely holding them aloft, the past a phaeton, its sunlit reins bucking at before and after, but there is no after.     V   Or is there? For once, when you rock back on the chair I don’t say don’t do that, forelegs lifting, hooves pawing the air— Every departure’s an elopement, the shy cat fiddling while Rome sizzles, spoon mirror flipping us upside down.  Son of Helios, rainbow fairy lights blazing, when one light goes out they all go out. At the top of the dune, the thorny crowns of buried trees, their teeter-totter branches a candelabra for the spiders’ silvery halo of threads. What a terrible business it is, saying what you mean.  Speak, sky, the horizon scored by talons.
Between the bent boughs of the splayed sumac the silver owl rests his head.   The perimeter left by your absence is long to walk in one day.   The angel in her credenza of extreme beauty dogs swim the river   I look for my heart by the lamp where the light is skitter in the wet black leaves
Our labor realized in the crowns of marigolds, blue eyes of the hydrangeas, smell of lavender and late bloom of the hosta’s erect purple flower with its marvel of thick green leaves. In our twilight every year we trimmed back and the garden grew more lustrous and untamable as if the eternal woods and animals asleep at night in its beds were claiming it back. The water in the pool shimmered an icy Tuscan blue.   When we arrived we swam until the stress from the grueling life in the city released our bodies. Later we sat under the umbrella and watched a garter snake slip into the water, careful not to startle its flight-or-fight response. Its barbed-wire coil. Comet of danger, serpent of the water, how long we had thwarted the venom of its secret lures and seductions. It swam by arching then releasing its slithery mercurial form. Through the lanky trees we heard the excited cries of the neighbor’s children—ours, the boy in our late youth, of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager.   It was a miracle, our ignorance. It was grace incarnate, how we never knew.
We loved them. We got up early to toast their bagels. Wrapped them in foil. We filled their water bottles and canteens. We washed and bleached their uniforms, the mud and dirt and blood washed clean of brutality. We marveled at their bodies, thighs thick as the trunk of a spindle pine, shoulders broad and able, the way their arms filled out. The milk they drank. At the plate we could make out their particular stance, though each wore the same uniform as if they were cadets training for war. If by chance one looked up at us and gave us a rise with his chin, or lifted a hand, we beamed. We had grown used to their grunts, mumbles, and refusal to form a full sentence. We made their beds and rifled through their pockets and smelled their shirts to see if they were clean. How else would we know them? We tried to not ask too many questions and not to overpraise. Sometimes they were ashamed of us; if we laughed too loud, if one of us talked too long to their friend, of our faces that had grown coarser.Can’t you put on lipstick? We let them roll their eyes, curse, and grumble at us after a game if they’d missed a play or lost. We knew to keep quiet; the car silent the entire ride home. What they were to us was inexplicable. Late at night, after they were home in their beds, we sat by the window and wondered when they would leave us and who they would become when they left the cocoon of our instruction. What kind of girl they liked. We sat in a group and drank our coffee and prayed that they’d get a hit. If they fumbled a ball or struck out we felt sour in the pit of our stomach. We paced. We couldn’t sit still or talk. Throughout summer we watched the trees behind the field grow fuller and more vibrant and each fall slowly lose their foliage— it was as if we wanted to hold on to every and each leaf.
“A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.” —northanger abbey I awoke from the tunnel to the fields of yellow rape, seventeenth-century buildings, and cobbled streets as she would have seen them. It was rainy; the rain came and went, came and went so that you could not escape its dampness. I understood the need for tea and the luxury of cremes and pastries and why the ladies longed for a strong shoulder to see them through the winter. The seagulls cried overhead, though there was no sea, only a muddy river from Bath to Bristol. The scavengers lived on the rooftops and if desperate enough would swoop down and take a sandwich from your hand. I secured my room at the Royal Bath Hotel. It was a hovel, really, with a carpet as old as the early century. Walking through the hotel, I sensed something lurid in the air, every eye upon me as if they knew I was a foreigner in a strange land. Over the bed, a burgundy bedspread dusty and faded as vintage wine, made me long for the bright color of red. In the next room, sleepless, I heard through thin walls the sounds of an un-tender coupling. I looked in the warped mirror and found myself ugly and when I turned from it, could not escape the vision. It lingered. The rain came and went, came and went. I took an umbrella and began my walk, hoping to come upon her quarters. I passed the Roman Baths, the statues not beautiful, but puckered and fossilled and the Pump Room where her protagonist, other self, doppelgänger, good, strong, loyal Catherine, longing for companionship, fell under the seduction of Isabella and her reprehensible brother. Even then her coming out seemed less magisterial, and Bath a representation of the emptiness and evils of society where a woman’s dowry might confine her forever, than a reprieve from country life. I gave up my search. Images were everywhere. And my mind had been made up. I perceived no romance in the wind, no comfort in the hard glances of strangers, girls with chipped nail polish, lads unkempt as if there were no hope of glory. The next morning I boarded the train to the modern world and it wasn’t until a sheet of blue slipped out like a love letter from its envelope of dark gray sky that I knew the journey had ended and, like Catherine, I was finally safe.
Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief and anger in the very place, whoever comes to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how the bookcase slides aside, then walks through shadow into sunlit room, can never help   but break her secrecy again. Just listening is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats itself outside, as if all time worked round towards her fear, and made each stroke die down on guarded streets. Imagine it—   four years of whispering, and loneliness, and plotting, day by day, the Allied line in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope she had for ordinary love and interest survives her here, displayed above the bed   as pictures of her family; some actors; fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth. And those who stoop to see them find not only patience missing its reward, but one enduring wish for chances   like my own: to leave as simply as I do, and walk at ease up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch a silent barge come clear of bridges settling their reflections in the blue canal.
By noon your breathing had changed from normal to shallow and panicky. That’s when the nurse saidNearly there now, in the gentle voice of a parent comforting a child used to failure, slipping her arms beneath your shoulders to hoist you up the pillows, then pressing a startling gauze pad under your jaw.   Nearly there now. The whole world seemed to agree— as the late April sky deepened through the afternoon into high August blue, the vapour trails of two planes converged to sketch a cross on the brow of heaven. My brother Kit and I kept our backs turned to that except now and again. It was the room I wanted to see,   because it contained your last example of everything: the broken metal window-catch that meant no fresh air; your toothbrush standing to attention in its plastic mug; the neutral pink walls flushed into definite pale red by sunlight rejoicing in the flowering cherry outside; your dressing-gown like a stranger within the wardrobe   eavesdropping. That should have been a sign to warn us, but unhappiness made us brave, or do I mean cowardly, and Kit and I talked as if we were already quite certain you could no longer hear us, saying how easy you were to love, but how difficult always to satisfy and relax— how impossible to talk to, in fact, how expert with silence.   You breathed more easily by the time we were done, although the thought you might have heard us after all, and our words be settling into your soft brain like stones onto the bed of a stream—that made our own breathing tighter. Then the nurse looked in: Nothing will changehere for a while boys, and we ducked out like criminals.   I was ordering two large gins in the pub half a mile off when my mobile rang. It was the hospital. You had died. I put my drink down, then thought again and finished it. Five minutes later we were back at the door of your room wondering whether to knock. Would everything we said be written on your face, like the white cross on the heavens?   Of course not. It was written in us, where no one could find it except ourselves. Your own face was wiped entirely clean— and so, with your particular worries solved, and your sadness, I could see more clearly than ever how like mine it was, and therefore how my head will eventually look on the pillow when the wall opens behind me, and I depart with my failings.
28 June 1914 Although an assassin has tried and failed to blow him to pieces earlier this morning, Archduke Ferdinand has let it be known he will very soon complete his journey as planned along the quay in Sarajevo.   For a moment, however, he has paused to recover his composure at the window of a private room in the Town Hall, after finding the blood of his aide-de-camp spattered over the manuscript of the speech he was previously unable to complete.   And indeed, the prospect of an Austrian brewery in the distance is reassuring, likewise the handsome bulk of the barracks filled with several thousand soldiers of the fatherland.   This is how those who survive today will remember him:   a man thinking his thoughts until his wife has finished her duties— the Countess Chotek, with her pinched yet puddingy features, to whom he will whisper shortly, ‘Sophie, live for our children’, although she will not hear.   As for his own memories:   the Head of the local Tourist Bureau has now arrived and taken it upon himself to suggest the Archduke might be happy to recall the fact that only last week he bagged his three thousandth stag.   Was this, the Head dares to enquire, with the double-barrelled Mannlicher made for him especially— the same weapon he used to dispatch two thousand one hundred and fifty game birds in a single day, and sixty boars in a hunt led by the Kaiser?   These are remarkable achievements the Head continues, on the same level as the improvement the Archduke has suggested in the hunting of hare, by which the beaters, forming themselves into a wedge-shape, squeeze those notoriously elusive creatures towards a particular spot where he can exceed the tally of every other gun.   In the silence that follows it is not obvious whether the Archduke has heard the question.   He has heard it.   He is more interested, however, in what these questions bring to mind:   an almost infinite number of woodcock, pigeon, quail, pheasant and partridge, wild boars bristling flank to flank, mallard and teal and geese dangling from the antlers of stags, layer and layer of rabbits and other creatures that are mere vermin—   a haul that he predicts will increase once the business of today has been completed.
General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‘The truth is you never do get used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes,   and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’— leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol,   tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball, but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking, all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be   reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said, correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’
I am downstairs early looking for something to do   when I find my father on his knees at the fireplace in the sitting-room sweeping ash from around and beneath the grate with the soft brown hand-brush he keeps especially for this.   Has he been here all night waiting to catch me out? So far as I can tell I have done nothing wrong.   I think so again when he calls my name without turning round;   he must have seen me with the eyes in the back of his head.   ‘What’s the matter old boy? Couldn’t sleep?’   His voice is kinder than I expect, as though he knows we have in common a sadness I do not feel yet.   I skate towards him in my grey socks over the polished boards of the sitting-room,   negotiating the rugs with their patterns of almost-dragons.   He still does not turn round.   He is concentrating now on arranging a stack of kindling on crumpled newspaper in the fire basket,   pressing small lumps of coal carefully between the sticks as though he is decorating a cake.   Then he spurts a match, and chucks it on any old how,   before spreading a fresh sheet of newspaper over the whole mouth of the fireplace to make the flames take hold.   Why this fresh sheet does not also catch alight I cannot think.   The flames are very close.   I can see them and hear them raging through yesterday’s cartoon of President Kennedy   and President Khrushchev racing towards each other in their motorcars both shouting I’m sure he’s going to stop first!   But there’s no need to worry. Everything is just as my father wants it to be, and in due time, when the fire is burning nicely, he whisks the newspaper clear,   folds it under his arm,   and picks up the dustpan with the debris of the night before.   Has he just spoken to me again? I do not think so. I do not know. I was thinking how neat he is. I was asking myself: will I be like this? How will I manage?   After that he chooses a log from the wicker wood-basket to balance on the coals, and admires his handiwork.   When the time comes to follow him, glide, glide over the polished floor, he leads the way to the dustbins.   A breath of ash pours continuously over his shoulder from the pan he carries before him like a man bearing a gift in a picture of a man bearing a gift.
In my little room, the emperor removes his robe and we chat about the mechanics of winning an election. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he says. When the moon comes out above the dilapidated warehouse, he asks me the profundity of going to the moon and back again to the same ghetto room.   If it pleases your majesty, I say, the gods make the ghettos. “I am King,” says the emperor, “I shall have no gods.” And he shakes, nearly spilling his oolong tea. When he has calmed down enough, I drop two lumps of sugar into his cup. He marvels at my calculus book and integration theory and digital watch. “Had I one of those,” he says, “I would have timed my crossing of the Rubicon at eighteen, and what barbarian woman would not have given herself for that!”   He yawns imperially over my utensils, books, and cot and asks me to cross the Rubicon with him. And I nod while doing tax equations for his majesty because the hour is late. He is delighted with the hot chocolate that I make on a hot plate and, after making a rough estimate of the roaches on the wall, he sleeps on my cot as any sovereign would.   I rattle my typewriter like a machine- gun all night, partly because it is my habit, and partly to protect my friend, the emperor. For though he has crossed the Rubicon with the bravest of men, he has yet to sleep a single night in the ghetto.
Let them sleep and dream the dream of lobsters; I am likewise at peace in my little cottage trying to become Mr. Five Willows.   I figure a crabapple is useful to no one but itself, but my safety depends on having no place where death can enter and not acting on every rustling of the smallest branch.   My abode is at the bank of a river, a river that comes out of the marsh where the river merchant’s wife has pined for her departed husband for the last 300 years.   Beetles fight on a dung heap; that’s the essence of war. With axes and arrows, a superior force approaches my door; let them knock lightly, so as not to disturb the   bird in the cage, which I am coaxing to sing, while the candle burns to illumine the midnight lore whose frayed texts drive me to the brink of insanity.   Let them all sleep and dream that the God of War has brought them riches in the shape of gold nuggets only to find in the morning an empty store.   You can be in my dreams if I can be in yours. In any case, let the Chinese mafia sleep tonight so I can be at peace   and in the morning, open wide my door.
The goldfish in my bowl turns into a carp each night. Swimming in circles in the day, regal, admired by emperors, but each night, while I sleep, it turns into silver, a dagger cold and sharp, couched at one spot, enough to frighten cats.   The rest of the furniture squats in the cold and dark, complains of being a lone man’s furnishings, and plots a revolt. I can hear myself snore, but not their infidelity. Sometimes I wake with a start; silently they move back into their places.   I have been unpopular with myself, pacing in my small, square room. But my uncle said, “Even in a palace, you can but sleep in one room.” With this I become humble as a simple preacher, saying, “I have no powers; they emanate from God.” With this I sleep soundly,   Fish or no fish, dagger or no dagger. When I wake, my fish is gold, it pleases me with a trail of bubbles. My furniture has been loyal all night, waiting to provide me comfort. There was no conspiracy against a poor man. With this I consider myself king.
Measure two handfuls for a prosperous man. Place in pot and wash by rubbing palms together as if you can’t quite get yourself to pray, or by squeezing it in one fist. Wash several times to get rid of the cloudy water; when you are too high in Heaven, looking down at the clouds, you can’t see what’s precious below. Rinse with cold water and keep enough so that it will barely cover your hand placed on the rice. Don’t use hot water, there are metallic diseases colliding in it. This method of measuring water will work regardless of the size of the pot; if the pot is large, use both hands palms down as if to pat your own belly. Now place on high heat without cover and cook until the water has been boiled away except in craters resembling those of the moon, important in ancient times for growing rice. Now place lid on top and reduce heat to medium, go read your newspaper until you get to the comics, then come back and turn it down to low. The heat has been gradually traveling from the outside to the inside of the rice, giving it texture; a similar thing happens with people, I suppose.   Go back to your newspaper, finish the comics, and read the financial page. Now the rice is done, but before you eat, consider the peasant who arcs in leech-infested paddies and who carefully plants the rice seedlings one by one; on this night, you are eating better than he. If you still don’t know how to cook rice, buy a Japanese automatic rice cooker; it makes perfect rice every time!
I don’t recall when I first understood why you stiffen at the roar of low flying jets—   Did you tell me, Mother, or did I just know? When you refused to show me the caves like eyes in the hills behind Bah-chan’s house—   Did I only dream it, how when the sirens began the trains stopped dead in their tracks, unleashing a stream of thousands to rush blind and headlong toward those sheltering hills—   The damp press of strange bodies in darkness rank with the stench of war’s leavings, only imagine a young girl’s cries drowned in the tumult, urgent groping of unseen hands—   the bombs raining d0wn on Yokohama Harbor all through the night, hothouse blooms crackling in a seething sky, then hissing into a boiling sea—   Was it a millennium that passed before the sirens ceased their wailing, only to be taken up again by the dogs and the dying?   But you talk of none of this today. We walk slowly, saying little, as if less said will keep the heat at bay. The air is wet, heavy with summer smells carried aloft on the hypnotic drone of cicadas.   You show me where as a girl you played in other summers, catching kabuto beetles and dragonflies in bamboo cages.   What must go through you when we pass them at a distance, those black maws yawning out of the hillside, exhaling the unspeakable?
When Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s defeat over national radio, his divinity was broken, fell away and settled in fine gold dust at his feet.   His people understood the gravity of the occasion—a god does not speak over the airwaves with a human voice, ordinary and flecked with static. A god does not speak in the common voice of the earthbound, thick with shame.   At the station, my mother, a schoolgirl, looked on as men in uniform lurched from the platform into the path of incoming trains, their slack bodies landing on the tracks without sound.
Near dusk I find her in a newly mown field, lying still and face down in the coarse stubble. Her arms   are splayed out on either side of her body, palms open and turned upward like two lilies, the slender fingers   gently curling, as if holding onto something. Her legs are drawn up underneath her, as if she fell asleep there   on her knees, perhaps while praying, perhaps intoxicated by the sweet liquid odor of sheared grass.   Her small ankles, white and unscarred, are crossed one on top of the other, as if arranged so in ritual fashion.   Her feet are bare. I cannot see her face, turned toward the ground as it is,   but her long black hair is lovelier than I remember it, spilling across her back and down onto the felled stalks   like a pour of glossy tar. Her flesh is smooth and cool, slightly resistant to my touch.   I begin to look around me for something with which to carry her back—carry her back, I hear myself say,   as if the words spoken aloud, even in a dream, will somehow make it possible.   I am alone in a field, at dusk, the light leaving the way it has to, leaking away the way it has to   behind a ridge of swiftly blackening hills. I lie down on the ground beside my mother under falling darkness   and draw my coat over our bodies. We sleep there like that.
Near the end of my searching  I came to a door.   Entering, I found the story  of her life, laid out like a cake   on an ebony table, as if waiting there  for the lost bride—pages flat   and placid, blank as a lake  asleep in winter. Hoping   for answers, some knowledge of her,  perhaps—I’m not sure what—   I placed my palm upon the surface.   It sank through and disappeared  beneath a cloud of snowy powder.
Stepping crow. Moon at half mast. Dawn horse, horse, blanket and mule. The fool knows something you don’t.   Stepping crow. Both feet in the boat. Books stacked up, and nowhere to store ’em. Decorum is spontaneous order.   Stepping crow. Gone north of the Border. Magic in motion and magic at rest. Only divest, no need to announce it.   Stepping crow. Locked in from the outset. Feet in the boat and we’re already rowing. I don’t like thinking, I like already knowing.   Stepping crow. Take hammer to coin. Anvil to anvil, and figure to ground. Hateful, the sound of recriminations.   Stepping crow. Uncountable Haitians. Hospital, barracks; Harvard and prison. Give the rhythm what it wants. And the people.   Stepping crow. Horace primeval. Wrist-deep in sheep’s guts, breaking the set. But memory is the better poet.   Stepping crow. Clogged is the conduit. Explain and explain, you try and get on with it: You just give ’em something to fight with.   Stepping crow. Christian Enlightenment. A bubble, sluggish, in a carpenter’s level. But bad’s not the Devil. Bad can be good.   Stepping crow. They misunderstood. Nobody rightly prefers a surprise. The wise like looking forward.   Stepping crow. Don’t try to ignore it: The strain in the closet and school letting out. I doubt it’ll ever be casual.   Stepping crow. I just happen to know. I don’t happen to trust the self I’m serving. This pleasure’s a lie, unless it’s permanent.   Stepping crow. And thirteenth tercet. The place where the Wall tunnels into the sea. It’s not not me you’re aiming at.   Stepping crow. Gotta add and subtract. I see now we have no choice but to leave The brutal honesty to the brutes.   Stepping crow. I know it’s no use. The Sport of Kings and the Book of Love. They’re not above irregular perquisites.   Stepping crow. Can never be sure of it. Blood orange, orange; persimmon and onion; And women are young men too …   Stepping crow. Oh, say it ain’t so. A fist full of leaves and another of arrows: I’m setting the trap where the passage narrows.
The ampalaya, no matter how bitter, Is sweet to those who like it. The hardest person to awaken Is a lover feigning sleep.   The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. Easily split asunder is that Which never was united.   The water is cold at first, for it Takes time to heat the pipe. The kids run away from home, only to Sit through endless classes.   You take the battery out of a watch, You turn it into a liar. You strip the sheet off a drinking straw And stab it into the scalp.   The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. The one who reads the sutra is not The one who knows what is said.   My life is as unchanging As the surface of the moon. And I give you the same reason: I have no atmosphere.   El hacha ya está puesta A la raíz de los árboles, Y todo árbol que no produzca buen fruto Is hewn down and cast into the fire.   You take a rose by the throat. How much blood comes out your hand Is how recklessly you took hold, Is how shamelessly.   Who wants to be great or holy Has no lust for peace. For peace is a thread only spools on a thing That’s good for nothing else.
Has it coming, the pest. Gets irritated, the stuck up. Gets approval, the dimpled. Gets cold, the talk.   The sidewalk separates from the curb. Frogs peek out there. There are passages there, channels.   Gardens, orderly, get respect; no one hurts them. Only animals, insects, beings without comprehension.   A house on a corner lot, good to look up at from the corner, compels. Branches of live oak reach across the way. There must be acorns, black, green, green with earth yellow.   The wind cools the walker. There is nothing to stop the wind up. It finds every walker in its path, cools him, cools her.   Director must direct and make decisions. Buildings on the edges of developments look out over edges. The other world never nearer.   Between towns, roads are lonely. Lonely, too, who cannot bear being lied to. The angry become less intelligent. Do and undo, the day is long enough.   Liars do not think they are lying; that’s how they do it. The nut gives way to the teeth; the teeth crush it.   Smashed frog in the parking lot turns colors, becomes flat, extends its fingers, does not come back to life when it rains, yet disappears.   Wonderfully, beliefs antedate evidence. Wonderfully, people seldom believe a thing unless they already wanted it.   Many cry when signaled, not pursuant to cognition. What is offered as proof is suspect.   Summer makes strategic. Strategy is a pleasure. Whatever people say, to obey, of itself, does not hurt.   Stray feline must lie in shade, under tree, distrust her well-wisher first. Grackle must shelter under car, direct its thirsty attention to the water there.   Cut of meat must lose its color on the fire, exchange it, be seasoned. To be accused, rightly or wrongly, feels the same.   Old man must speak against his own best interests, for he cannot swallow his complaints, not all of them. Glassware touching glassware gets chipped, broken into triangles, in the move.   Vital sheet of paper must sometimes be lost. Papers are many. The thing learned at length, the memorized rigmarole, must fade from memory, in time.   The kind word given unexpectedly is good. The hearer must be relieved. The thought that nothing can ever go right again must depart for a time.   The light must change. The waiting person wait longer. The walker must step out of the summer heat wet to the hair roots, the shirt wet.   The sky is the same but seems grander where no buildings are. Colored clouds are remarked; white ones less.   One’s looks, one’s skin color matter less if money has its feet in it. The hated one, the cheated many, are the poor.   Lean grackle must stalk a branch, mouth open like scissors. Striped raptors, wings in fixed positions, must kite, must circle.   Beautiful Soul wants a world in which he or she has no place. Godspeed, sweet intent. Love will creep where it cannot go.   Stick-figure reptiles, black, must cross the sidewalk by the pool, dartingly. They weigh one paperclip.   Beauty enslaves on contact. Better have it than hear of it. Sweet and cunningly seldom meet.   In dragging a bamboo tree, one must snatch it by the eyebrows. The rusty sword and the empty purse plead performance of covenants.   Even Graceful must sometimes, in putting on her coat, sweep everything off the table and into the floor. If many strike on an anvil, they must in meter.   He, only, pursues honesty honestly, who has destroyed any possibility of good repute. Whether you boil snow or pound it, you can only have water out of it.   Cities must have boulevards, vast channels not possible or dangerous to cross. There must be holes in the decomposing concrete, paint invisible at sunrise and sunset, guardrails, median strips, shrines.   The student must wait to do the assignment, wait beyond the advisable point, stay up against a deadline. Must turn in a paper never read, not by the writer, not by the friend.   Must muster, thunder, one or two times in a life, a sound to frighten the unfrightenable. Must pour, from the sky, rarely, chips and balls and coins and smooth clusters of partly white, partly clear ice.   Some believe, helplessly. Others, less. Some count, tabulate, helplessly. They check calendars. They can’t shake it.   Winter travels, hides, shelters. It pursues the lightly dressed into buildings during summer. It lies in wait in restaurants, miscalculates.   The pill and its coating, obnoxious to the child, are welcome enough to the grown swallower. First deserve and then desire. Blow first and sip afterwards.   The wise let it go a great deal. Sorrow is wondrously clinging; clouds glide. The friend who comes apologizing and promising must be received. He is sorry and not sorry and sorry.   Courage comes up. Sacrifice, oftener. The disintegrating parking lot is witness to the exchange. Drugs are traded, caresses.   The dog in its heavy coat must lie, half dead, on the porch. Eyes like a bear, tongue like a lion, lethargy.   One must consciously retire. Comes off a train none but was on it. The heirloom ring, wrong-gendered, trash, gets rescued.   When the spirit of praising is upon him, a man will judge linen by candlelight. Burr oaks yield fewer fruit, but bigger, shag-capped.   One must consciously retire. A helve must fit its ax head. Most laugh before understanding. Fame is best.
Mirror, mirror on the wall show me in succession all my faces, that I may view and choose which I would like as true.   Teach me skill to disguise what’s not pleasing to the eyes, with faith, that life obeys the rules, in man or God or football pools.   Always keep me well content to decorate attitude and event so that somehow behind the scene I may believe my actions mean;   that one can exercise control in playing out a chosen role; rub clouded glass and then, at will, write self on it again.   But if, in some unlucky glance, I should glimpse naked circumstance in all its nowhere-going-to, may you crack before I do.
I remember them saying, these poems, their something for someone at sometime for me too, at one time.   That got in the way; so I sent them away back into history— just temporarily.   They won’t come back now. I can’t remember how the words spoke, or what they said, except: We are all dead
For the centenary of Girton College i hyphen (Gk. together, in one) a short dash or line used to connect two words together as a compound 1869- 1969 to connect Chapel Wing and Library. But also: to divide for etymological or other purpose. A gap in stone makes actual the paradox of a centenary. “It was a hyphen connecting different races.” and to the library “a bridge for migrations”. In search of an etymology  for compound lives, this architecture,  an exercise in paleography (Victorian Gothic)  asserts the same intention. Portraits busts and books  the “context in which we occur” that teaches us our meaning,  ignore the lacunae of a century  in their state- ment of our need to hyphenate.
homage to William Empson It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Landing every poem like a fish. Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.   Glittering scales require the deadly tolls Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.   Yet languages are apt to miss on souls If reason only guts them. Applying the wish, Unhuman forms must not assert their roles,   Ignores the fact that poems have two poles That must be opposite. Hard then to finish It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,   Without a sense of lining up for doles From other kitchens that give us the garnish: Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.   And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, “Unhuman forms must not assert their roles”.
All day we packed boxes. We read birth and death certificates. The yellowed telegrams that announced our births, the cards of congratulations and condolences, the deeds and debts, love letters, valentines with a heart ripped out, the obituaries. We opened the divorce decree, a terrible document of division and subtraction. We leafed through scrapbooks: corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet, racetrack, theatre—joy and frivolity parceled in one volume— painstakingly arranged, preserved and pasted with crusted glue. We sat in the room in which the beloved had departed. We remembered her yellow hair and her mind free of paradox. We sat together side by side on the empty floor and did not speak. There were no words between us other than the essence of the words from the correspondences, our inheritance—plain speak, bereft of poetry.
At the high school football game, the boys stroke their new muscles, the girls sweeten their lips with gloss that smells of bubblegum, candy cane, or cinnamon. In pleated cheerleader skirts they walk home with each other, practicing yells, their long bare legs forming in the dark. Under the arched field lights a girl in a velvet prom dress stands near the chainlink, a cone of roses held between her breasts. Her lanky father, in a corduroy suit, leans against the fence. While they talk, she slips a foot in and out of a new white pump, fingers the weave of her French braid, the glittering earrings. They could be a couple on their first date, she, a little shy, he, trying to impress her with his casual stance. This is the moment when she learns what she will love: a warm night, the feel of nylon between her thighs, the fine hairs on her arms lifting when a breeze sifts in through the bleachers, cars igniting their engines, a man bending over her, smelling the flowers pressed against her neck.
You will leave your home: nothing will hold you. You will wear dresses of gold; skins of silver, copper, and bronze. The sky above you will shift in meaning each time you think you understand. You will spend a lifetime chipping away layers of flesh. The shadow of your scales will always remain. You will be marked by sulphur and salt. You will bathe endlessly in clear streams and fail to rid yourself of that scent. Your feet will never be your own. Stone will be your path. Storms will follow in your wake, destroying all those who take you in. You will desert your children kill your lovers and devour their flesh. You will love no one but the wind and ache of your bones. Neither will love you in return. With age, your hair will grow matted and dull, your skin will gape and hang in long folds, your eyes will cease to shine. But nothing will be enough. The sea will never take you back.
Of course now children take it for granted but once we watched boxes on a conveyor belt, sliding by, magically filled and closed, packed and wrapped. We couldn't get enough of it, running alongside the machine. In kindergarten Miss Haynes walked our class down Stuyvesant Avenue, then up Prospect Street to the hot dog factory. Only the girls got to go as the boys were too wild. We stood in line, wiggling with excitement as the man talked about how they made hot dogs, then he handed us one, and Jan dropped hers, so I broke mine in half. This was the happiest day of our lives, children whose mothers didn't drive, and had nowhere to go but school and home, to be taken to that street to watch the glittering steel and shining rubber belts moving, moving meats, readymade. I wish I could talk with Jan, recalling the miracle and thrill of the hot dog factory, when she was alive, before it all stopped— bright lights, glistening motors, spinning wheels.
The cat has the chance to make the sunlight Beautiful, to stop it and turn it immediately Into black fur and motion, to take it As shifting branch and brown feather Into the back of the brain forever. The cardinal has flown the sun in red Through the oak forest to the lawn. The finch has caught it in yellow And taken it among the thorns. By the spider It has been bound tightly and tied In an eight-stringed knot. The sun has been intercepted in its one Basic state and changed to a million varieties Of green stick and tassel. It has been broken Into pieces by glass rings, by mist Over the river. Its heat Has been given the board fence for body, The desert rock for fact. On winter hills It has been laid down in white like a martyr. This afternoon we could spread gold scarves Clear across the field and say in truth, "Sun you are silk." Imagine the sun totally isolated, Its brightness shot in continuous streaks straight out Into the black, never arrested, Never once being made light. Someone should take note Of how the earth has saved the sun from oblivion.
I'd search for Philippines in History class. The index named one page, moved on to Pierce.The Making of America marched past my enigmatic father's place of birth. The week he died some man we didn't know called up. This is his brother, one more shock,phoning for him. "He died three days ago." The leaden black receiver did not talk. My uncle never gave his name or town, we never heard from him. Was it a dream? The earpiece roar dissolved to crackling sounds, a dial tone erased the Philippines. And yet my world grows huge with maps, crisscrossed, my History alive with all I've lost.
Not, in the saying of you, are you said. Baffled and like a root stopped by a stone you turn back questioning the tree you feed. But what the leaves hear is not what the roots ask. Inexhaustibly, being at one time what was to be said and at another time what has been said the saying of you remains the living of you never to be said. But, enduring, you change with the change that changes and yet are not of the changing of any of you. Ever yourself, you are always about to be yourself in something else ever with me.
For the earth has spoken, to you, her magma Creole. Full-throated syllables, up- rising from deep down, an honest elocution — rudimentary sound: guttural nouns, forthright, strong, the rumbled conviction of verbs unfettered by reticence as the first poetry of creation. A secret has passed between you so wonderfully terrible, it laid your cities prostrate, raptured your citizenry. Now, we look to your remnant courtesy cable TV and garble theories thinking ourselves saved. Only the wise among us pin our ears to the ground, listening in hope of catching even a half syllable of the language forming like a new world on your tongue.
when i look at my life i feel like bursting into tears marriage and mental illness vintage washed michael jackson graphic spiritual disco grieving ritual sell your body to your horse-eyed past little fictions somebody got to sing and somebody got to play the squaw last time i saw him last time i saw my honey buried your dead lack of afro exit wounds cut off whole limbs of generational desire the death of cleopatra hell or high water get some fucking love in your life girl ghost chant you’ve got to die if you want to live amidst and against  the things we are
 rubbed into the cloth wrapped around their faces now white men are black men too the ways we can’t say no i call you queen not as a term of endearment but as a reminder our histories meet on the inside we all be black moses slave for the river same river twice sometimes have to emphasize the brown part hey there beautiful brown girl we don't usually change until things are so painful that we must
I am totally enamored of every person passing in this unseasonably warm mid-March evening near 39th and Park   The young women, of course, with their lives in front of them, and the young men too, just standing here as I am, checking it out, hanging out, talking   But everyone here, every age, every type, is beautiful, the moment, somehow, the weather, has made them all real and for this moment, before it turns to night, they're all fantastic   The light is such that I can see everyone and can imagine what they are imagining for the night ahead, what dreams, what fulfilled fantasies of togetherness   And the two guys who were here a moment ago, paused, have moved on, and the light is deepening, every moment or so, actually falling into a deeper stupor, which is night   But if I look south I still see the pink flush of desire there at the bottom, the southness of all our lives, and it's okay that it's darkening here, people accept it as they concoct plans for tonight, Thursday   Soon I'll have to go too, lose this spot, this moment, but some we've met and some experience we had somewhere else is becoming ever more important
What if I ate too much food there being Not enough money immigranty And save all the ketchup  packets George Carlin record on the record player saying how many ways you can curse and they are all funny (small brown bird with a black neck and a beak full of fluff for a nest)    The old joke: “How many feet do you have?” Instead of “How tall are you?”   This looks like joy a joke who looked at you and laughed   Look at the map upside down so that south Is north and north is south  it’s the other way around because it’s the commonly agreed to thing (visual language of the colonizer) or snowful awful tearful wishful
Imaginary book on Imaginary paper in Imaginary hands   Imaginary dance on Imaginary floor in Imaginary lands   Imaginary phone and Imaginary car   Imaginary raising of Imaginary bar   Imaginary kid Imaginary tree Imaginary you makes Imaginary three   Imaginary soul Imaginary death Imaginary line Imaginary breath   Imaginary neighbors with Imaginary friends Imaginary road with Imaginary bends   Imaginary pot Imaginary beer Imaginary death Imaginary fear   Imaginary love that stops you dead Imaginary bullet of Imaginary lead   Imaginary day and Imaginary night Imaginary wind Imaginary kite   Imaginary heat and Imaginary ice Imaginary toppings on Imaginary slice   Imaginary Emerson meet Imaginary Poe Imaginary poet Imaginary crow     1-9-16
Many nights while walking home  after work, from downtown to  an apartment below a market,  I’d think of Alfred Espinas: “We do not get together to die, but to live and to improve life.” Sudden changes of weather and contagious diseases nearly broke the spirits of many friends that winter, but charmingly we made  habits of dancing and sharing meals in our cramped rooms. Our landlords were thieves and our bosses were pessimists, yet we dreamed of a new phase of civilization, one of kindness and goodwill. “We need communes,” Oscar exclaimed. Silvia argued, “But islands are corpses, let’s think instead of syndicates.” Mondays  we’d return to dirty dishes, copy machines, and dull knives, and  we spent the next three centuries doing what we were paid to do.
and who are you now   in this different blue space without pain  remarking on chemtrails and snowmelt, misreading the “sea” whose letters cease to arrive    remain transfixed in midflight turbulent coasts aloft as a principle of life--    count invisible clams under nameless sands  cut apostrophes into the air announcements  send far-flung greetings to strangers for days   keep the magma enigma at bay daily joys    effaced vaporous pale generous smoke rising    so cling to the dark hand inside you  its basalt fingers, rounded
Family, lover, colleague. Notions, veneers, nation. Teeth of no health insurance.   A boom can be a microphone affixed to a pole and not an explosion.   Shadows, we sweep at them constantly and on the table is chocolate, newspapers, commentary, and vastly different pay stubs.         I lean in to you and wish to love you perfectly.   Suffer, tumble, strive, the right shoes, and vacation.   At the table, conference and always pretty, the fixed.   Shimmer of repulsion or fairy tale of cleavage.         I count pleasures like cream, sipping, speaking. I like fashion as well.     All the hymns you and I know as his headboard knocks against our wall, the slap when he coughs, our neighbor.         The most racist of all positions at the staff meeting is to tell us about your shocking talent if there is a most. A prayer dangles over this bitter.         Looping coves of sympathy. How to history.         My flat speech in variously adopted professional tones.   Merger of you and me and take whatever you want.   Her beautiful poetry face. His intellectual arms.   I worry about the ferocious place in you while framing it.         A person as diversion, a thing beautiful, a small green-blue egg in a spring next and now the field is gendered.           Have you seen the moment of last light? It means something to me.           Assuming my gender qualifies your hearing and therefore my speech, you overlap words with mine in what appears to be a neutral manner but your speech acts as solvent.           Down the hall, high heels as metronome, watched.   Out of our bodies comes speech as clouds, flag, windsock, bandage.       Dear— You could make more money if you wanted to. Such as a day of beauty, persuasive levels of caring. For example: doing both brow and lip.       Are you spending or quiet?         Let’s go to lunch would mean exchanging speech and then carrying warm food in plastic bags.         Coherence as my mother sleeps after a complicated surgery.   And if I were, would you be generous with me as well?           Race ran the organization which one.   We socialize in this real estate of gerrymandered potlucks.   I think there exists silence as a legitimate response and I will say that now.       The caring for our souls by old black women in the narrative of a college president, passing. Excuse me for not knowing passing.   You remember but only after the spine is broken.         Something in chemistry called suspension equals your ghosts caught in my air.         The Bronx is horning was a line they wrote where I was educated, teaching.         Response to migration: the pullback of the form remains as a hum, a tongue.
As I leave for work she holds out her arms, and I bend to lift her . . . always heavier than I remember, because in my mind she is still that seedling bough I used to cradle in one elbow. Her hug is honest, fierce, forgiving. I think of Oregon's coastal pines, wind-bent even on quiet days; they've grown in ways the Pacific breeze has blown them all their lives. And how will my daughter grow? Last night, I dreamed of a mid-ocean gale, a howl among writhing waterspouts; I don't know what it meant, or if it's still distant, or already here. I know only how I hug my daughter, my arms grown taut with the thought of that wind.
In her last notes, when her hand began to tremble, my mother tried to teach it   the penmanship she was known for, how to make the slanted stems   of the p's and d's, the descending roundness of the capital m's, the long   loops of the f's crossed at the center, sending it back again and again   until each message was the same: a record of her insistence that the hand   return her to the way she was before, and of all the ways the hand had disobeyed.
Everyone burned coal in our neighborhood, soft coal they called it from the mountains of western Pennsylvania where my father grew up and fled as soon as he could, where my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark.   The furnace it fed stood in the dank basement, its many arms upraised like Godzilla or some other monster. It was my job to pull out clinkers and carry them to the alley bin.   Mornings were chilly, frost on windows etching magic landscapes. I liked to stand over the hot air registers the warmth blowing up my skirts. But the basement scared me at night.   The fire glowed like a red eye through the furnace door and the clinkers fell loud and the shadows came at me as mice scampered. The washing machine was tame but the furnace was always hungry.
I would drive to your grave but your grave is the crash the froth foam pebbles small rocks the sand smoothed soothed each rising each leaving tide you lie in the ocean the water in the waves your home the stern the back the wake of a boat those curled white lines of leaving I would visit your grave but your grave is a single blue afternoon of passing isles the green and granite shores I would come to your grave but your grave is the fire oh mother it is cold tonight and I have no heart for this burning for the fine sift of ash which is all that comes back all that comes after I would visit your house but your things are missing are missing your touch as your eyes failed I brought you lights and I would see again that brightness I would drive to your grave but I am your grave your marker oh mother I am your stone
For I have loved the blade with all my crippled with all my awkward soul loved it for the shine sheen for the ease and grace of doing what it was made to do for I have loved the stubborn womb its beloved intent have loved the hope and then learned to love the lack for I have loved the water the way it comes to me comes for me in all its liquid mystery for I have loved what the water loves its myriad vessels sky basin runnel channel and vein for all it claims and contains for I have loved its muscular flex its rise coil and fall so like Leviathan's mighty desperate heart for I have loved Leviathan for being only for being exactly what god hated and what he made for being water's own knife this wild unholy blade
I said love because it came closest said leave because you did we do this peeling off each from each each from suddenly other said come back but meant don't go I said dead and meant every one of those instances of vanishment how the dead swim away from us in time their tide their closed wooden boats I said tide but tide was never right said tide because we have no word for that kind of unforgiving away I said tether when I meant anchor when I meant stay but when I said stay one thing I meant was against confusion against yet another loss I meant two-faced Janus January's god of fallen gates of trying to look both ways and when I said farewell I meant again don't go but it was too late I was here in the hall this tunnel full of mirrors glass and strange made-up faces and when I thought funhouse I meant its opposite I meant this rusty carnival town the men so sad they paint their smiles in place they paint their faces white paint their eyes wide and full of crying
That this is the morning in which nothing much that the sky is still there and the water dresses accordingly that only at night does the water rest vanish from sight that the stars are too small too far to register there that all our names too are writ invisibly on water that abiding requires more hope than I can possibly acquire that hope is not a thing with feathers that hope is a thing with a fist a thin crust sketched over oceans that hope is what despair uses for bait come in hope says the water's fine that hope is the blood with which you write letters that start dear sea dear ocean stop asking so fucking much that hope is a telegram delivered by men in pairs men in uniform a telegram that says missing stop that says once again presumed lost stop
One tiny tree frog with big eyes sings happily, “Kokee! Kokee!” His brother comes to bother. Coquí doesn't push him. Coquí doesn't bite him. Coquí tells him, “Kokee-Kee! Kokee-Kee!” Two tiny tree frogs with big eyes sing happily, “Kokee! Kokee!”
The dragonfly at rest on the doorbell— too weak to ring and glad of it, but well mannered and cautious, thinking it best to observe us quietly before flying in, and who knows if he will find the way out? Cautious of traps, this one. A winged cross, plain, the body straight as a thermometer, the old glass kind that could kill us with mercury if our teeth did not respect its brittle body. Slim as an eel but a solitary glider, a pilot without bombs or weapons, and wings clear and small as a wish to see over our heads, to see the whole picture. And when our gaze grazes over it and moves on, the dragonfly changes its clothes, sheds its old skin, shriveled like laundry, and steps forth, polished black, with two circles buttoned like epaulettes taking the last space at the edge of its eyes.
We dressed for church. I had a white hat and white gloves when I was fifteen, no joke. You had to do that to show God you cared.   God's eyes were stained glass, and his voice was pipe organ. He was immortal, invisible, while my panty-hose itched and my atheist   father chewed his tongue and threatened to run out the door but didn't for my mother's sake, and she swallowed her fate, this marriage,   like a communion cracker, and my brain- damaged brother lurched around the church nursery, and my sweeter sister watched me   with huge brown eyes to see what I'd do next. My God, why did I turn my eyes upward when we were all there, then, in the flesh? I am so   sorry about God, sorry we fastened that word to the sky. God's not even legal in Hebrew. If you get the vowel caught between the two   consonants of your lips, it can carry you dangerously up like a balloon over what you'd give anything to be in the middle of, now.
I wore Grandma Liz's pearls for play, a plastic strand long enough to pool on the carpet over my stubbed toes. When I pull them over my head now, I smell phantoms: cigarettes, Esteé Lauder. I don't smoke or spritz on perfume. I don't layer polyester or perm my hair. I've slipped off my wedding ring as she did, signed divorce. What advice would she offer for life between husbands? Wear redlipstick and always leave it behind.
Outside in the creek that feeds the lake and never freezes, an otter slaps the water with his paw to feel the current's pulse—Slip in, lie back. Slip in, lie back. He shuts his eyes and obeys, knowing the layers of hair and underfur will warm him while he floats on a faith we wish could carry us.   The sound of his splashing fades, but not his joy in being pushed, light as driftwood, back to the mouth of the den I have seen carved out beneath the roots of a fallen fir now packed with snow and lined with leaves that promise his sleep will be deep.   Because no dreams wait softly for me, I open the woodstove and strike a match, hold the bloom of the flame to kindling that catches quick as my wish: To be that slick body sliding into the lake that holds the moon, bright portal to glide through without so much as a shiver, no doubt about where I'm going, how to get there.
The fish are drifting calmly in their tank between the green reeds, lit by a white glow that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank glass that holds them in displays their slow progress from end to end, familiar rocks set into the gravel, murmuring rows of filters, a universe the flying fox and glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose pleocostemus all take for granted. Yet the platys, gold and red, persist in leaping occasionally, as if they can't quite let alone a possibility—of wings, maybe, once they reach the air? They die on the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise.
at the third floor window of the tenement, the street looks shiny. It has been washed and rinsed by rain. Beyond the silver streaks of the streetcar tracks a single streetlight stands in a pool of wet light. It is night. St. Louis. Nineteen forty-seven. I have just come home from the orphanage to stay. Years later, I will be another person. I will almost not remember this summerónot at all. But for nowówith the streetlight reflecting an aura on the wet sidewalk, with dark behind me in the dirty two rooms we call home, for now, I see it all. Tomorrow I will begin to try to forget. But in this moment everything is clear: who I am, where I am, and the clean place that I have left behind. As clear as the streetlight: how distinct its limits in the vast dark and the rain.
We used to play, long before we bought real houses. A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail. The money was pink, blue, gold, as well as green, and we could own a whole railroad or speculate in hotels where others dreaded staying: the cost was extortionary.   At last one person would own everything, every teaspoon in the dining car, every spike driven into the planks by immigrants, every crooked mayor. But then, with only the clothes on our backs, we ran outside, laughing.
After my father died, my mother and my sisters picked the shirt, the tie; he had just the one suit. I left them to it, I didn't want to choose, I loved him all those years. They took a shirt from the closet, I don't remember which one, I'm sure he had worn it to church and hung it up again. They held a tie against the cloth of the shirt. They decided, finally. It's like that. Things come down to the pale blue or the white, or some other. Someone buttoned it over him, those buttons he had unbuttoned.
We walked at the edge of the sea, the dog, still young then, running ahead of us.   Few people. Gulls. A flock of pelicans circled beyond the swells, then closed their wings and dropped head-long into the dazzle of light and sea. You clapped your hands; the day grew brilliant.   Later we sat at a small table with wine and food that tasted of the sea.   A perfect day, we said to one another, so that even when the day ended and the lights of houses among the hills came on like a scattering of embers, we watched it leave without regret.   That night, easing myself toward sleep, I thought how blindly we stumble ahead with such hope, a light flares briefly—Ah, Happiness! then we turn and go on our way again.   But happiness, too, goes on its way, and years from where we were, I lie awake in the dark and suddenly it returns— that day by the sea, that happiness,   though it is not the same happiness, not the same darkness.
When one thing is becoming another, when writing is morphing, when the writing of an hour becomes the desire to write at all hours and into the night, fueled on caffeine or wine and desiring instruments of writing; typewriters, even a nib and ink well, and considering all the ways of stretching a space, digital or hard copy; hard copy, an ugly expression for printed matter, and for that matter, printed matter is efficient but lacks beauty. Page, a soft and elongated word; page, an extension at the end of my fingers; page, a screen that holds dreams and desires; the page of legal document that bind. The page is a promise. I read all sides, turning the page counterclockwise and turning the page over for what I may have missed. Desire is a stick for scratching words into the dirt and for chiseling stone until the words become solid. The pen is a body, an anatomy, not an earthworm with indecipherable ends; the pen has a head and tail, and inky guts. And the brain of the pen belongs to the maker of marks. later hours/another hour/late hours/early hours/happy hour/visiting hours. All the elements of the dying hour surround my laptop, in the dying blades of cut grass and in the dying battery. Finches continue their making of a nest of twigs and grasses, but I know the nest is early paper, the raw ingredients and pulp. I know the world is a page turner, a paper globe, and I know that the birds are the great writers of the sky.
Some people like to relax and kick back with their friends just talking and having a drink   which is obviously highly pleasurable.   Some people like to be entertained by music or a movie; some people like to make some jokes with people they like, maybe at a bar or at someone’s house.   Some people like to lay around with another person, just touching,   or to prepare food, alone or with others while listening to music that they feel a particular affinity for.   But sometimes people like to thrust themselves into the howling wind and snow, arms tied behind their backs.   I prefer to open my mouth wide open knowing what will happen if I’m just holding my mouth open,   ready to respond or yell or whatever seems appropriate.   You know, I keep my mouth at the ready to make a lot of noise.   And sometimes it becomes filled with hard packed snow or with sand,   sand being more of a problem, since, you know, it won’t melt.
Drawn by ceremonial obligation up from sleep I woke and stepped  into the borrowed black robes all ghost bureaucrats trained  to redirect dreaming pretend  we do not like to wear. I drove  my black car to the stadium  to sit on stage and be watched  watching young expectant spirits  one by one with dread certainty  pass before me, clouded  in their names. Then listened  to no one in their speeches say  you’re welcome for allowing  us not to tell you it’s already  too late to learn anything  or defend whatever accidental  instrument in us causes  all these useless thoughts.  Like if you walked for hours  through the vast black avenues  of those server farms all of us  with our endless attention built, you could almost feel the same  peaceful disinterest as when  your parents talking and smoking  raised their heads for a moment  to smile and tell you go back  upstairs and read the book  you love about myths that explain  weather and death. Now it is  almost June and they are finally  the children they always were.  So more precise than anyone  has ever had to be, go forget everything we told you so you can fix what we kept destroying by calling the future.
I was humbled when my boss mocked me for calling from vacation I’m broke again until Friday from my bed I see the lights, I see the party lights it’s torture a post-Fordist allegory? I appropriated a corporate apology and saved it in case something happened but my end date came and my vacation days paid out I bought pills from the intern I’d hired on my way out by the seaport I texted you we made plans to drink I like your poochie print workout clothes the credit card you keep for emergencies I bought a book from Strand Annex though the poetics weren’t to my taste later the author died I was nervous in those days always in need my dark heart, my secret poetry, my drug-filler cut into my life and love that it and I may last
if you like let the body feel all its own evolution inside, opening flagella & feathers & fingers door by door, a ragged   neuron dangling like a participle to hear a bare sound   on the path, find a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat of the bulbous stalk pecked out to the core so you can   bore back to the salamander you once were straggling under the skin grope toward the protozoa snagging on the rise toward placental knowing   who developed eyes for you agape in open waters   the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your hagfish spine who   will bury your bones investigate a redwood rain or tap the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put your flat needles on dry ice to inquire after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring next to you, find you are most closely related to grass your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when did you begin your coexistence with flowering plants from which arose the bee before the African honey badger but after the dark protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the sun become the earth you had no nouns, did you
When he called, there were 261 emotions at play. I thought there were only wistfulness, humiliation, and mere bitterness left, but lo, I see now the brilliance in the numbers.  Emotions 75 and 78 made me happy just to know they existed. I felt less alone, more impervious.  I was emboldened by the existence of 152.  Though, how was I supposed to accept 9, 14, and 179? We deserved better, distress and indigence aside.  Something about 260 broke the spell inside me and offered up a tiny shift: I opened my eyes in the fog and tore off the surfaces of 261 and 4 with a great shout.
Inside every world there is another world trying to get out, and there is something in you that would like to discount this world.  The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts,  and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one.  You could claim professional fondness for the world around you;  the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive, and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors.  Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one— is this the great world, which is whatever is the case? The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning.  Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life? Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some,  and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.
Perhaps you can tell children that the world is always a more beautiful place than you can suppose, and then you release them into their future, the black row of trees in the distance.  She died suddenly in midwinter, in the same bed in which her husband died years earlier; it still sagged on his side. Her second husband remained in Japan with his first family.  She used to say, what my three girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me.  My mother is the middle daughter, a garden of inaudible tunes. The four of them lived in a mean house in Seoul.  One yellowing picture of my grandmother remains, and her face turns away from the camera, as the rabbit senses the hound;  she was said to be a solitary eater, an inner thing. What did she promise the world that she wasn’t able to make good on?  A child who abruptly feels the frontiers of experience assert themselves in her: at the funeral my mother cries so hard she can’t feel her hands for days,  it explains how she scratches herself raw, meaningless.  You have always believed these are your themes: fate, the negative pleasures of dipping oneself in acid.  You think it will rescue you from your simplicity, remarks my mother from the doorway, but art is never the ace in the hole.  I am not a stupid child. I am not even a child any longer, with her hesitant, then terrible certainty, that loss is tragic, not only pointless.  When she is lonely, my mother cooks; and when she is happy, she knows to hide it.
You hear the sun in the morning through closed shutters. As you sleep the early sky is colored in fish scales, and you open your eyes like a street already lined with fruit.
A lamb blinking over a patch of earth does not know what you have done. Feed it,  and it will eat from your hand as if you wore the skin of a washed grape.
Your husband is stretched out on the ground as if he were listening for something.  Ask him to come back to the table.  Whatever was there is now here.
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.  We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.  We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.  We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.  Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.  In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.  Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.  If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.  In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.  Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case.  You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.  You are not presumed to be innocent if the police  have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.  It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.  It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.  Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.  You have no rights we are bound to respect.  Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible  for what happens to you.
I try not to cast too much shade. Sin would be to use the excuse of her growth in my womb, to imagine her as a limb of myself. She is her own tree, late-winter’s indomitable shoot. She takes cupfuls of sun. I stand well clear as the branches stretch like flutes playing allegros. Not for anything would I poison her with an act of possession, conceal her from the woodsman whose task is to make room for all.
'Life passes through places.' –P.J. Duffy, Landscapes of South Ulster Patrick Farrell, of Lackagh, who was able to mow one acre and one rood Irish in a day. Tom Gallagher, Cornamucklagh, could walk 50 Irish miles in one day. Patrick Mulligan, Cremartin, was a great oarsman. Tommy Atkinson, Lismagunshin, was very good at highjumping—he could jump six feet high. John Duffy, Corley, was able to dig half an Irish acre in one day. Edward Monaghan, Annagh, who could stand on his head on a pint tumbler or on the rigging of a house.  –1938 folklore survey to record the local people who occupied the South Ulster parish landscape.  * * *        Kathleen McKenna, Annagola, who was able to wash a week’s sheets, shirts  and swaddling, bake bread and clean the house  all of a Monday.  Birdy McMahon, of Faulkland, walked to Monaghan for a sack of flour two days before her eighth child was born.  Cepta Duffy, Glennan, very good at sewing—embroidered a set of vestments in five days.  Mary McCabe, of Derrynashallog, who cared for her husband’s mother in dotage, fed ten children, the youngest still at the breast during hay-making.   Mary Conlon, Tullyree,  who wrote poems at night.  Assumpta Meehan, Tonygarvey, saw many visions and was committed to the asylum.   Martha McGinn, of Emy, who swam Cornamunden Lough in one hour and a quarter.   Marita McHugh, Foxhole, whose sponge cakes won First Prize at Cloncaw Show.   Miss Harper, Corley, female problems rarely ceased, pleasant in ill-health.   Patricia Curley, Corlatt, whose joints ached and swelled though she was young, who bore three children.  Dora Heuston, Strananny, died in childbirth, aged 14 years, last words ‘Mammy, O Mammy!’  Rosie McCrudden, Aghabog noted for clean boots, winter or summer, often beaten by her father.  Maggie Traynor, Donagh, got no breakfasts, fed by the nuns, batch loaf with jam, the best speller in the school.  Phyllis McCrudden, Knockaphubble, who buried two husbands, reared five children, and farmed her own land.  Ann Moffett, of Enagh, who taught people to read and did not charge.
We Had Stalked the Doe  Commerce. Production. Consumption. Who makes? Who takes?  It's useless to give up cashmere shawls, gold armatures, SUVs, furs and silks to achieve cross-cultural pollination or transcendence.  Since we've ceased to celebrate works-in-progress or cutting-edge sound bites, we photo commodities to provide a permanent record of desire in the grass and under the elms.  Turkey on the chairlift.  Rooster in the coop.  Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of authority. We recall the limited palette of ashen tones when we drove through Eastern Europe. Billboards, even in Estonia, summoned up fascinations with dieting, alcoholism and psychotherapy.  Should we have eaten those salads of language?  Should we have risked teased hairstyles and gained weight? Should we have giggled amidst severest woe? Mimicry, idolatry, fanaticism, greed. Oh, fervid tangled brushwork, what can we do to hold you at bay? I am old. I am old. The good day grows cold.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN TORTURE  WITHOUT REALLY TRYING 1. FIRST THINGS FIRST:  Surprise,  catch your source off balance when he least expects it: At the moment he opens his eyes in the morning While he shits on the can.  Detain and confine,  quickly, quickly ​cut him off from the known.  Plunge your source into the strange,   the invisible wells gone dry in his bones Drained by his eyes  He’s in occupied territory—  he could walk a long time and find nowhere, nothing, nada  no doors, no tunnels, windows  2. KEEP IT SIMPLE:     Familiar clothing reinforces identity.   Replace the source
A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. . . . Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people . . . made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area. —Nature, October 2004 Light: lifted, I stretch my brief body. Color: blaze of day behind blank eyes. Sound: birds stab greedy beaks Into trunk and seed, spill husk Onto the heap where my dreaming And my loving live. Every day I wake to this. Tracks follow the heavy beasts Back to where they huddle, herd. Hunt: a dance against hunger. Music: feast and fear. This island becomes us. Trees cap our sky. It rustles with delight In a voice green as lust. Reptiles Drag night from their tails, Live by the dark. A rage of waves Protects the horizon, which we would devour. One day I want to dive in and drift, Legs and arms wracked with danger. Like a dark star. I want to last.
I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being Locate an irritation without It is within  Within It is without The sensitized area Is identical with the extensity Of intension I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait painter Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment Sings  “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly  All the girls are nice  Whether they wear their hair in curls  Or —” At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization The conception Brute Why?  The irresponsibility of the male Leaves woman her superior Inferiority. He is running upstairs I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself Something in the delirium of night hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself There is a climax in sensibility When pain surpassing itself Becomes exotic And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation Uniting the opposing and resisting forces In lascivious revelation Relaxation Negation of myself as a unit  Vacuum interlude I should have been emptied of life Giving life For consciousness in crises races Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes Have I not Somewhere Scrutinized A dead white feathered moth Laying eggs? A moment Being realization Can Vitalized by cosmic initiation Furnish an adequate apology For the objective Agglomeration of activities Of a life LIFE A leap with nature Into the essence Of unpredicted Maternity Against my thigh Tough of infinitesimal motion Scarcely perceptible Undulation Warmth moisture Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity  Indivisible  Acutely  I am absorbed  Into The was—is—ever—shall—be Of cosmic reproductivity Rises from the subconscious Impression of a cat With blind kittens Among her legs Same undulating life-stir I am that cat Rises from the sub-conscious Impression of small animal carcass Covered with blue bottles—Epicurean— And through the insects Waves that same undulation of living Death Life I am knowing All about  Unfolding The next morning Each woman-of-the-people Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet Doing hushed service Each woman-of-the-people Wearing a halo A ludicrous little halo Of which she is sublimely unaware I once heard in a church—Man and woman God made them—  Thank God.
I saw you fall to the ground. I saw the oaks fall. The clouds collapsed. I saw a wildness twist through your limbs and fly off. The river fell, the grasses fell.  The backs of six drowned cattle rose to the surface ice—nothing moved. But a wind touched my ankles when the snow began. You left that night and we stayed, our arms braced with weight. What power there was was over. But I switched on the light by the porch to see if anything was falling— and it fell, a few glints in the air, catching sun although there was no sun, and the long descent over hours, all night, seemed like years, and we buried our faces in what came to rest on the ground or moved our feet over it, effortless, as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.
after Neruda   Go ahead, ask: where are the pomegranates, the dates, the girls with skin brown as hash, the hash?   Listen to what’s happening   One morning bonfires began to leap from the earth, devouring human beings, lit by matches flicked across the sky with joysticks. And from then on fire, from then on burning hair, from then on limbs and meat. Invisible bandits, pickpockets from ten-thousand feet, faceless, thoughtless, dumb except for humming, bandits marked with tiny flags, controlled from continents away by children, child bandits with letter jackets left hanging in their girlfriends' closets, child bandits with bibles thumbed and highlighted, spear missiles through the sky to kill other children and the blood of children runs through the streets, neither seen nor heard, obedient, simply, like children's blood.   Ask away: why doesn’t his poetry describe our urban loneliness, the body drenched in metaphor?   There’s nothing to see here, nothing to see, just blood in the sand, blood in the streets, nothing to see.
This is a demon that can take a grown brain and squash it to sponge. There is no loving the state of a decrepit mind that encourages a decrepit body. Is he sleeping or just not there? States of awareness flicker inside a gauzy lens. We’ve seen this before—in a film, the man disappearing as he stands right there, his body stolid.   Let’s say this man worked as an Assistant Principal and admired his own IQ. Let’s say this man had a brutish body but was not a brute. All of this becomes portraiture but there can be fractures of truth. Looking at him you think: Am I in this film or is this a vapory memory?
for JA   I flutter in order to enter the phrase’s silver.  Jackdaws have launched nearby this time, silk green and ripped, the movement a kind of chafing thinking.   Oh he’s marking terrain right there— right there with his   unmade song. The shadow kids whip fronds, froth air up into heat, pure and simple   “violence of the eye.” Wild iris ink, wet in the margin’s stage. Well, hadn’t this testament begun   to carry its chime in stripes? That’s when I knew he was going away from me, towards the sound.   Like the ring on the table it can’t be decentered. Rim around the recent.   Ashes, ashes, A bright tangled seeming.
You are as even tempered as a frying pan In a sudden downpour
 A campsite in disarray
 A long time coming Laughter from two yards over
 The neighborhood a claim on space Involving multiple parties   It must be Father’s Day
 Judging by the heightened attentions of daughters and sons
 Thus a man enjoys solitude, stillness, pink petals of the carrier rose And in a certain light
 The sonic continuum of tires against the road
 The sensation of being carried along toward the end of a sentence After the disappearance of the period   Air to breathe, water to drink
 The suggestion box is empty
 Obsolete equipment piles up in nooks and crannies This is all wrong, that’s messed up
 We go on in and make ourselves comfortable
 The movie has just begun
 It’s Nick and Nora Charles and their little dog Asta   They’re visiting Nick’s parents in the suburbs
 He’s on the wagon and trying to keep a low profile
 But of course she brags about him to the local paper
 And soon he’s embroiled in detective work despite himself There is crime everywhere, even here in the suburbs
 It must be human nature Desperate characters on the loose   “Yoke yourself to your strongest conviction” Was a piece of advice derived from the Y in JOY But Pam doesn’t buy that
 And I say it sounds too slavish
 Remember the Groucho line
 “These are my principles If you don’t like them I have others”   When the pen runs out of ink
 You simply replace the cartridge
 And continue writing
 To the sound of jet planes overhead
 It’s time to revive the typewriter
 For the benefit of kids
 Now entering the ranks of the scribe force Sliding the paper under the roller
 Striking the surface with heavy metal blows
 History curls right into the future
 A Möbius strip
 That brings bygone media around and back
 With all the drama, character, sound, light and destiny Alive in an imagination of living
It’s unbearable to shadowdrift along the seabed. It’s unbearable to grieve when sleeping is more important.   The boat is a hammock without strings. As the body is a sleeve not strung to the soul. The boat is chained to the shadow; when the shadow drifts, the boat drifts too.   Is it at sea? Or is it just in air? Can a boat live on air alone?   The man’s back bleeds. This is all expected of creatures who sacrifice their nudity for solitude and immortality.   The flesh is eager to float, fully captivated by the impulse to preserve an array of stillness. The horizon is not skirring and nothing can move on that river made of air. This boat. This boat.   This boat that the horizon can’t coat with its own monolithic entreaty.   The man bathes in all blemishes of the moon. The man’s body can take imperfection, as he feels complete. His white-grey hair is a type of condensed cloud he can rest his head on. If he must commit suicide, he knows he will rest on a very comfortable pillow, one that he grows from the ovoid base of his skull.   It’s good to get all the hard work done first and then unbutton one’s corporeal flesh calmly before the undiluted enterprise of air.   His penis is one finger pointing to the line that separates his thighs. Everything is hidden deliciously inside his pituitary gland.
I have become wealthy in a foreign land gravity makes me sick in my slippery throat the devil makes me lousy with summer like I'm buried in the sun in its sounds with my mother there's something about having a heart beat like traffic like wind I did it afterall: I had a sweaty body in Berlin it was all right I'm taking some time out from being alive with daughters It's OK I'm impersonating a kiss of lilacs a murder of crows are settling over my corpse the dust covers my photographs I only ever write about childhood because that was before I died and now the devil has brought me back to Berlin in summer in Stockholm I'm starting to make sense of my body which is becoming buried in pop music and now ooh-ooh I have to rebuild the wall an erotics based on occupation I write you a letter ett brev about my body as if it were split between foreign words whispered by stringy angels and soldiers who march in through the eye of a needle I write my body with the eye of a needle with nålen I write when I'm sick with gravity in summer in summer I'm sick in light summer light musical light from hell and you dare call it heaven my body you dare to call it heaven
Miracle fruit changes the tongue. One bite,  and for hours all you eat is sweet. Placed alone on a saucer, it quivers like it's cold  from the ceramic, even in this Florida heat.  Small as a coffee bean, red as jam— I can't believe. The man who sold it to my father on Interstate 542 had one tooth, one sandal, and called me "Duttah, Duttah." I wanted to ask what is that, but the red buds teased me  into our car and away from his fruit stand. One bite. And if you eat it whole, it softens and swells your teeth like a mouthful of mallow. So how long before you lose a sandal and still walk? How long before you lose the sweetness?
Fredonia, NY Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season.  Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs  of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones (a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful,  nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses.  I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, saidOkay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee.
To keep me from staying out late at night,  my mother warned of the Hell Pig. Black and full of hot drool, eyes the color of a lung—it'd follow me home if I stayed past my curfew. How to tell my friends to press Pause in the middle of a video, say their good-byes while I shuffled up the stairs and into my father's waiting blue car? How to explain this to my dates, whisper why we could not finish this dance? It's not like the pig had any special powers or could take a tiny bite from my leg—only assurances that it was simply scandal to be followed home. When my date and I pull into my driveway and dim the lights, we take care to make all the small noises that get made in times like these even smaller: squeaks in the seats,  a slow spin of the radio dial, the silver click of my belt.  Too late. A single black hair flickers awake the ear of the dark animal waiting for me at the end of the walk.  My fumbling of keys and various straps a wild dance to the door—the pig grunting in tune to each hurried step, each of his wet breaths puffing into tiny clouds, a small storm brewing.
Flour on the floor makes my sandals  slip and I tumble into your arms.  Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb  plotted a whole pie. The windows are blown open and a thickfruit tang sneaks through the wire screen and into the home of the scowly lady who lives next door. Yesterday, a man  in the city was rescued from his apartment which was filled with a thousand rats.  Something about being angry because his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom  of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug,  over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops and pip through each cabinet, snip at the stumpy bags of sugar, the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter.  So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet the angry voices next door, if only for a brief whiff. I want our summers to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.
In those days, though, I never analysed Myself even. All analysis comes late. You catch a sight of Nature, earliest, In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink And drop before the wonder of ‘t; you miss The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days, And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else: My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour’s field, Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth. We play at leap-frog over the god Term; The love within us and the love without Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love, We scarce distinguish. So, with other power. Being acted on and acting seem the same: In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels, We know not if the forests move or we. And so, like most young poets, in a flush Of individual life, I poured myself Along the veins of others, and achieved Mere lifeless imitations of life verse, And made the living answer for the dead, Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste, Nor handle,’–we’re too legal, who write young: We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs, As if still ignorant of counterpoint; We call the Muse ... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’– As if we had seen her purple-braided head. With the eyes in it start between the boughs As often as a stag’s. What make-believe, With so much earnest! what effete results, From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven Against the heels of what the master said; And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps A babe might blow between two straining cheeks Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh; And elegiac griefs, and songs of love, Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road, The worse for being warm: all these things, writ On happy mornings, with a morning heart, That leaps for love, is active for resolve, Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped, Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in. Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine. By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young,–(the life of a long life, Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong excepted soul, I count it strange, and hard to understand, That nearly all young poets should write old; That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen, And beardless Byron academical, And so with others. It may be, perhaps, Such have not settled long and deep enough In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still The memory mixes with the vision, spoils, And works it turbid.  Or perhaps, again, In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx, The melancholy desert must sweep round, Behind you, as before.– For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true. Because myself was true in writing them. I, peradventure, have writ true ones since With less complacence.  But I could not hide My quickening inner life from those at watch. They saw a light at a window now and then, They had not set there. Who had set it there? My father’s sister started when she caught My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say I had no business with a sort of soul, But plainly she objected,–and demurred, That souls were dangerous things to carry straight Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world. She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done Your task this morning?–have you read that book? And are you ready for the crochet here?’– As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong, I know I have not ground you down enough To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust For household uses and proprieties, Before the rain has got into my barn And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’ To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task, And verify my abstract of the book? And should I sit down to the crochet work? Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teased The patient needle til it split the thread, Which oozed off from it in meandering lace From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad; My soul was singing at a work apart Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight, In vortices of glory and blue air. And so, through forced work and spontaneous work, The inner life informed the outer life, Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms, Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams, And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks, Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass, And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong. The dogs are on us–but we will not die.’
'There it is!– You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise, Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang, Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up A whole life at each wound; incapable Of deepening, widening a large lap of life To hold the world-full woe. The human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,– All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard To general suffering. Here's the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalised With civilization, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too! ... does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?–does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls And pine and die, because of the great sum Of universal anguish?–Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours, Because the world is mad? You cannot count, That you should weep for this account, not you! You weep for what you know. A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping! but a million sick . . You could as soon weep for the rule of three, Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world Uncomprehended by you must remain Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives. Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,–and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.' 'With which conclusion you conclude' . .  'But this– That you, Aurora, with the large live brow And steady eyelids, cannot condescend To play at art, as children play at swords, To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired Because true action is impossible. You never can be satisfied with praise Which men give women when they judge a book Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work, Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent! 'What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps! 'What delicate discernment ... almost thought! 'The book does honour to the sex, we hold. 'Among our female authors we make room 'For this fair writer, and congratulate 'The country that produces in these times 'Such women, competent to ... spell.''  'Stop there!' I answered–burning through his thread of talk With a quick flame of emotion,–'You have read My soul, if not my book, and argue well I would not condescend ... we will not say To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use Of holy art and golden life. I am young, And peradventure weak–you tell me so– Through being a woman. And, for all the rest, Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped Their gingerbread for joy,–than shift the types For tolerable verse, intolerable To men who act and suffer. Better far, Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, Than a sublime art frivolously.' * Then I spoke. 'I have not stood long on the strand of life, And these salt waters have had scarcely time To creep so high up as to wet my feet. I cannot judge these tides–I shall, perhaps. A woman's always younger than a man At equal years, because she is disallowed Maturing by the outdoor sun and air, And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk. Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise! You think a woman ripens as a peach,– In the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now; I'm young in age, and younger still, I think, As a woman. But a child may say amen To a bishop's prayer and see the way it goes; And I, incapable to loose the knot Of social questions, can approve, applaud August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot Beyond the vulgar white of personal aims. Accept my reverence.'  There he glowed on me With all his face and eyes. 'No other help?' Said he–'no more than so?'  'What help?' I asked. 'You'd scorn my help,–as Nature's self, you say, Has scorned to put her music in my mouth, Because a woman's. Do you now turn round And ask for what a woman cannot give?' 'For what she only can, I turn and ask,' He answered, catching up my hands in his, And dropping on me from his high-eaved brow The full weight of his soul,–'I ask for love, And that, she can; for life in fellowship Through bitter duties–that, I know she can; For wifehood ... will she?'  'Now,' I said, 'may God Be witness 'twixt us two!' and with the word, Meseemed I floated into a sudden light Above his stature,–'am I proved too weak To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think, Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought? Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can, Yet competent to love, like HIM?'  I paused: Perhaps I darkened, as the lighthouse will That turns upon the sea. 'It's always so! Anything does for a wife.'  'Aurora, dear, And dearly honoured' ... he pressed in at once With eager utterance,–'you translate me ill. I do not contradict my thought of you Which is most reverent, with another thought Found less so. If your sex is weak for art, (And I who said so, did but honour you By using truth in courtship) it is strong For life and duty. Place your fecund heart In mine, and let us blossom for the world That wants love's colour in the grey of time. With all my talk I can but set you where You look down coldly on the arena-heaps Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct! The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his way Through such a heap of generalised distress, To the individual man with lips and eyes– Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down, And, hand in hand, we'll go where yours shall touch These victims, one by one! till one by one, The formless, nameless trunk of every man Shall seem to wear a head, with hair you know, And every woman catch your mother's face To melt you into passion.'  'I am a girl,' I answered slowly; 'you do well to name My mother's face. Though far too early, alas, God's hand did interpose 'twixt it and me, I know so much of love, as used to shine In that face and another. Just so much; No more indeed at all. I have not seen So much love since, I pray you pardon me, As answers even to make a marriage with, In this cold land of England. What you love, Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,– A wife to help your ends ... in her no end! Your cause is noble, your ends excellent, But I, being most unworthy of these and that, Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.' 'Farewell, Aurora, you reject me thus?' He said.  'Why, sir, you are married long ago. You have a wife already whom you love, Your social theory. Bless you both, I say. For my part, I am scarcely meek enough To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse. Do I look a Hagar, think you?'  'So, you jest!' 'Nay so, I speak in earnest,' I replied. 'You treat of marriage too much like, at least, A chief apostle; you would bear with you A wife ... a sister ... shall we speak it out? A sister of charity.'  'Then, must it be Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong In hope and in illusion, when I took The woman to be nobler than the man, Yourself the noblest woman,–in the use And comprehension of what love is,–love, That generates the likeness of itself Through all heroic duties? so far wrong In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love, 'Come, human creature, love and work with me,'– Instead of, 'Lady, thou art wondrous fair, 'And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse 'Will follow at the lighting of the eyes, 'And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep 'Turn round and love me, or I die of love.'' With quiet indignation I broke in. 'You misconceive the question like a man, Who sees a woman as the complement Of his sex merely. You forget too much That every creature, female as the male, Stands single in responsible act and thought As also in birth and death. Whoever says To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,' Will get fair answers, if the work and love Being good themselves, are good for her–the best She was born for. Women of a softer mood, Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life, Will sometimes only hear the first word, love, And catch up with it any kind of work, Indifferent, so that dear love go with it: I do not blame such women, though, for love, They pick much oakum; earth's fanatics make Too frequently heaven's saints. But me, your work Is not the best for,–nor your love the best, Nor able to commend the kind of work For love's sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir, To be over-bold in speaking of myself,– I, too, have my vocation,–work to do, The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed My father's face for theirs,–and though your world Were twice as wretched as you represent Most serious work, most necessary work, As any of the economists'. Reform, Make trade a Christian possibility, And individual right no general wrong; Wipe out earth's furrows of the Thine and Mine, And leave one green, for men to play at bowls; With innings for them all! ... what then, indeed, If mortals were not greater by the head Than any of their prosperities? what then, Unless the artist keep up open roads Betwixt the seen and unseen,–bursting through The best of your conventions with his best The unspeakable, imaginable best God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond Both speech and imagination? A starved man Exceeds a fat beast: we'll not barter, sir, The beautiful for barley.–And, even so, I hold you will not compass your poor ends Of barley-feeding and material ease, Without a poet's individualism To work your universal. It takes a soul, To move a body: it takes a high-souled man, To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye: It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off The dust of the actual.–ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within.–For me, Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say, Of work like this! ... perhaps a woman's soul Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire, And yet I'll try out your perhapses, sir; And if I fail ... why, burn me up my straw Like other false works–I'll not ask for grace, Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I Who love my art, would never wish it lower To suit my stature. I may love my art, You'll grant that even a woman may love art, Seeing that to waste true love on anything, Is womanly, past question.'
Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,– A mere, mere woman,–a mere flaccid nerve,- A kerchief left out all night in the rain, Turned soft so,–overtasked and overstrained And overlived in this close London life! And yet I should be stronger.  Never burn Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare With red seals from the table, saying each, 'Here's something that you know not.'
falling into unearthed light or something like that is who I was last night. you brought me a drink you didn’t know the name of & told me I could get it. you not the drink which I downed even though it was my 9th of the night the drink not you. dancehall. always dancehall. a manner of movement learned & not easily lost so I wind my hips anyway & something is happening to you. you bout to startsome shit & I say good. not because it would be. I haven’t been touched in a while.don’t start something you can’t finish is maybe the worst advice I’ve ever heard as you drop a handful of my ass thudding down a small flight of stairs. that’s what I am. a small flight of stairs, a small flight, down.
As fresh garbage is. As dirt sucked out of a fingernail. As a wall clean of prostitutes. When I am this I am at the mercy of my nakedness. A pillar of undress whose power I do not know how to wield. I watch porn. I study the geometry of limbs splayed. Not the moan but the angle of a moan. I swallow. In this way I am a thief. Sometimes I forget my body & go untouched until I am touched & scream. Sometimes I want to eat my breasts down to their bitter rind & spit them out. I want to be the bitter rind without suck and easily thrown. Easily thrown I want to be the pebble thumbed & wished upon before enveloping the lake I sink in. I sink in you the lake & by lake I mean gutter a water that does not hold me well. Here we are not the bodies our mothers made. If you are to hold me hold me as a gun. Grip me & profit the dark. The unattended purse. The pair of heels darting from us in dull claps sharpening against the concrete as teeth against a stone.
bijan been dead 11 months & my blue margin reduced to arterial, there’s a party at my house, a house held by legislation vocabulary & trill. but hell, it’s ours & it sparkle on the corner of view park, a channel of blk electric. danny wants to walk to the ledge up the block, & we an open river of flex: we know what time it is. on the ledge, folk give up neck & dismantle gray navigation for some slice of body. it’s june. it’s what we do.   walk down the middle of our road, & given view park, a lining of dubois’ 10th, a jack n jill feast, & good blk area, it be our road. we own it. I’m sayin’ with money. our milk neighbors, collaborate in the happy task of surveillance. they new. they pivot function. they call the khaki uniforms. i swift. review the architecture of desire spun clean, & I could see how we all look like ghosts.   3 squad cars roll up at my door & it’s a fucking joke cuz exactly no squad cars rolled up to the mcdonald’s bijan was shot at & exactly no squad cars rolled up to find the murders & exactly no one did what could be categorized as they “job,” depending on how you define time spent for money earned for property & it didn’t make me feel like I could see less of the gun in her holster because she was blk & short & a woman, too. she go,  this your house?  I say yeah. she go,can you prove it?  It say it mine.  she go ID? I say it mine.  she go backup on the sly & interview me going all what’s your address—don’t look!& hugh say I feel wild disrespected.  & white go can you explain that?  & danny say how far the nearest precinct?  & christian say fuck that.  & white go can you explain that?   I cross my arms. I’m bored & headlights quit being interesting after I called 911 when I was 2 years old because it was the only phone number I knew by heart.
On the side of the road a deer, frozen, frigid.Go back to your life, the voice said.What is my life? she wondered. For months she lost herself in work—Freud said work is as important as love to the soul—and at night she sat with a boy, forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes. Then the ice thawed and the deer came to life. She saw her jump over the fence, she saw her in the twilight, how free she looked. She saw her eyes shiny as marbles, as much a part of this world as the fence a worker pounds into the earth. At night she still sat with the boy. He’s learning “Au Claire de la Lune.” Do you know it? He has established a relationship with his violin. He knows that it takes practice to master it: the accuracy of each note, to wrestle his feelings to the listener. But he’s impatient. Sometimes what he hears and feels are not always the same. Again, the poet says. She knows if he tries to silence his fervor, he might not ever know who he is. The poet contemplates whether a deer can dream. Rich blood-red berries on a branch, pachysandra in the garden. A soft warm bed in the leaves.
In syrup, in syrup, In syrup we drown,   Who sell ourselves With a sparkling smile.   Padded with pathos Our winding sheet.   The bomb bounded By buxom beauties.   Horror gelded By the happy ending.   How can we swim Who hold to our haloes?   Down we go, down In syrup, in syrup.
…When that joy is gone for good I move the arms beneath the blood.   When my blood is running wild I sew the clothing of a child.   When that child is never born I lean my breast against a thorn.   When the thorn brings no reprieve I rise and live, I rise and live.   When I live from hand to hand Nude in the marketplace I stand.   When I stand and am not sold I build a fire against the cold.   When the cold does not destroy I leap from ambush on my joy…
—after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking.   I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions   and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk out of this house wearing nothing but wind.   I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts   of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind.   I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging   screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals,   your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit,   I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip.   I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter   every room in a strange electrified city and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh   at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror,  but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph   or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song.
If you subtract the minor losses, you can return to your childhood too: the blackboard chalked with crosses,   the math teacher’s toe ring. You can be the black boy not even the buck- toothed girls took a liking to:   this match box, these bones in their funk machine, this thumb worn smooth as the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump.   Thump. Everything I hold takes root. I remember what the world was like before I heard the tide humping the shore smooth,   and the lyrics asking: How long has your door been closed? I remember a garter belt wrung like a snake around a thigh in the shadows   of a wedding gown before it was flung out into the bluest part of the night. Suppose you were nothing but a song   in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipe sweat from the brow of a righteous woman, but all you owned was a dirty rag? That’s why   the blues will never go out of fashion: their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of consequence; that’s why when they call, Boy, you’re in trouble. Especially if you love as I love falling to the earth. Especially if you’re a little bit high strung and a little bit gutted balloon. I love   watching the sky regret nothing but its self, though only my lover knows it to be so, and only after watching me sit   and stare off past Heaven. I love the word No  for its prudence, but I love the romantic who submits finally to sex in a burning row-   house more. That’s why nothing’s more romantic than working your teeth through the muscle. Nothing’s more romantic   than the way good love can take leave of you. That’s why I’m so doggone lonesome, Baby, yes, I’m lonesome and I’m blue.
Did your father come home after fighting through the week at work? Did the sweat change to salt in his ears? Was that bitter white   grain the only music he’d hear? Is this why you were quiet when other poets sang of the black man’s beauty? Is this why   you choked on the tonsil of Negro Duty? Were there as many offices for pain as love? Should a black man never be shy?   Was your father a mountain twenty shovels couldn’t bury? Was he a train leaving a lone column of smoke? Was he   a black magnolia singing at your feet? Was he a blackjack smashed against your throat?
In standing position with arms to the side,   jump while spreading the legs and lift arms above the head.   Jump back into standing position and up again, spreading the legs and lifting the arms above the head.   Repeat   When a M16 landmine is triggered, it will spring into the air and explode with a capacity to level everything in a 150 metre radius.   Deadly shrapnel spreading a further 350 metres.   Metal casings from an unexploded bomb can fetch 25,000 Vietnamese dong or $1   for a poor family in Vietnam.   Men comb the forests and beaches of Quang Tri looking for the metal that will feed their family, risking their lives.   Children working in the fields think it’s a toy they’ve found.   Nguyen was hoeing a small piece of land his parents gave him when an unexploded U.S. military bomb was triggered and blew off both his hands.
"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing."—Vincent Van Gogh   A missile is shaped like a pencil— its long, slender body and pointed end creates history.   A girl walking down the street a few steps ahead of her sister and friend, two medics who were trying to help injured people, the parked ambulance— all were annihilated by the same weapon.   Above, drones—silent, unmanned planes. A metal, predatory bird that shoots a missile with precision, identifying the colors of a shirt, the features on a face—the shape of a nose, the color and length of a mustache.   In a room far away, in another country, a man sits at a desk and looks at a screen; he strokes his thick, dark mustache as he carefully contemplates, then pushes a button.   There is a charred hole in the ground where the girl once stood.   There are pencils that write and erase, write and erase, so that there is nothing to be read on the page. The page blank as the desert sky, blank as the smooth shell of a drone.   There is a family drinking mint tea in a living room. The man holds a cup to his lips, the glass touches his mustache. A silent bird hovers above. In a split second, everyone is dead, the house is in rubbles—arms, legs, splattered organs among broken concrete.   Soon, there will be no trace.
I close my eyes so that I can see it. What we so freely eliminate. Who is   not guilty of it? We reek of paper. Everywhere we go is paper. Our   hands are stained with paper. Walls. What echoes from our walls.   The sweet whisper of rainforest— even the name makes the sound of   rushing water or perhaps it’s a ghost that haunts us. They say the dead   that did not die a peaceful death are doomed forever to wander the earth.   But perhaps this earth is for them already a cemetery—stacks and   stacks of flesh on a desk. Which one belongs to which tree?   Already, we’ve traded oxygen for so much.
I am tired of having five different names; - Having to change them when I enter   A new country or take on a new life. My First name is my truest, I suppose, but I   Never use it and nobody calls me by this Vietnamese Name though it is on my birth certificate—   Tue My Chuc. It makes the sound of a twang of a String pulled. My parents tell me my name in Cantonese   is Chuc Mei Wai. Three soft bird chirps and they call me Ah Wai. Shortly after I moved to the U.S., I became   Teresa My Chuc, then Teresa Mei Chuc. “Teresa” is the sound Water makes when one is washing one’s hands. After my first   Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. After my second marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Dowell.   Now I am back to Teresa Mei Chuc, but I want to go way back. Reclaim that name once given and lost so quickly in its attempt   to become someone that would fit in. Who is Tue My Chuc? I don’t really know. I was never really her and her birthday   on March 16, I never celebrate because it’s not my real birthday though it is on my birth certificate. My birthday is on January 26,   really, but I have to pretend that it’s on March 16 because my mother was late registering me after the war.   Or it’s in December, the date changing every year according to the lunar calendar—this is the one my parents celebrate   because it’s my Chinese birthday. All these names and birthdays make me dizzy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like a   Teresa anymore; Tue (pronounced Twe) isn’t so embarrassing. A fruit learns to love its juice. Anyways, I’d like to be string...   resonating. Pulled back tensely like a bow   Then reverberate in the arrow’s release straight for the heart.
Is it you on the other end of the line  hesitant to speak to me, pausing for a moment to register my hello so you know my number  stayed the same, my last name remains mine? Though my voice isn’t young as when we last spoke,  don’t you hear a familiar timbre? Still you hesitate so as not to startle me  after all this time. Dots string out like an ellipsis in the endless sentence of your absence.  I hear static-filled ticking, then a friendly stranger mispronounces my name.  Recognizing a pitch to sell something and feeling foolish, I hang up quickly.  Won’t you ever break your long silence? Sorrow and anger keep my line open to you.
Come home, our sons, young drivers, tell us you’re safe, not detained again by police for your dark color, sprocketed hair and a crime you didn’t commit. Maybe your car’s the wrong make or rusty in a neighborhood where cars park in garages at night.   Once, when you saw a squad car you remembered Officer Smiley and his dog that did tricks in read-aloud books at J.J. Hill School. Now, as you reach for your license with shaking hands, tension raises the chance something will go wrong.   This poem is for you, sons, and for everyone who is afraid— citizens of police, police of citizens. It’s for Philando Castile, a black school lunch supervisor in an inner city school who memorized children’s names and their food allergies. And it’s for the policeman who stopped a car with a damaged taillight. After he used his gun, his voice broke like a frightened child’s.   Come home, sons, to mothers like me, alert at night waiting for car lights to beam in front of our house, for the car to belong to our sons, and our sons to still belong to the world.
Blue numbers on my bedside clock tell I forgot to change the hour. This sets routines on haywire.   Like a domestic goat staked to its circle of earth. I don’t do well untethered.   I have no hunger for early dinner, become confused by the sound of children who seem out   too late for a school night. They’ve found an extra helping of daylight to romp on new grass   and can’t contain themselves, strip off jackets, scatter like a rag of ponies.   Whatever time says, their joy insists on springing forward.
Weeks after ice-out, last fall’s leaves make a pathway to the lake, radiant blue and still deathly cold.   I press my hot forehead to the window, smudging it. Blow and the glass steams. As if looking at a photo through parchment, I’m detached, the way I saw his body in the CAT scan from a foggy distance.   I’d like to open the window, release a wounded bird nursed to health. Wiping the glass with my sleeve I see white pelicans wheel and flash in the sky.
It's hard to be humble when you're 235 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal with a body women love and men fear. —Sputnik Monroe When my father died, he left me a trove  of video tapes, a warped memorial for those men he watched with my mother  before she left for parts unknown, for those fights he relived once he was laid  off from the plane yards. We watched men like Sputnik Monroe bleed the hard way,  shook our fists as he broke rules against guys who were easier to cheer.  He was a bad Elvis, greased-back hair with a shock of white, Sputnik Monroe  mixed it up everywhere, a rodeo fistfight, a henhouse tornado. My mother  picked a fight in an Idaho truck stop once, stabbed a man’s chest with her middle  finger, then stepped to one side so my father could fight him in the parking lot.  Afterwards, my mother was silent all the way back to Seattle, her disgust  with him—the way he wrapped his arm around her shoulder, guided her to the car,  and sped back to the freeway—hanging between them from that point forward.  Sputnik Monroe clobbered men wherever he went, sneered at those fists  raised against him in Memphis. Some nights, as my wife sleeps upstairs,  I watch my father’s video tapes and imagine what I would have done that day  if I knew that my marriage depended on what I did with my hands.
13. After the dinosaurs fell asleep, after those terrible lizards began their slow decay into mythology, Andre the Giant was there to cradle their bodies in his soft hands and weep.    24. Andre the Giant wrestled the Earth into a globe, carved his name into the ocean floor with his pinky to remind the whales who taught them to sing.    32. Andre the Giant was a village. Then he became a dragon. Then he became an army. Then he became a king. Now, he is the wind.    40. A man can’t bodyslam Andre the Giant unless he’s worthy of slaying a monster, unless the giant decides it’s time to lie down.    58. Andre the Giant stole fire from Heaven, hid it in his mouth, fed it to monkeys one lick at a time until they learned to pronounce his name.    67. Before there were boys with magic beanstalks, with slingshots or singing swords, Andre the Giant brawled with sooty angels, volcanoes spouting from where he buried their hearts    75.  Andre the Giant scaled the Empire State Building with Marilyn Monroe in one hand, Cleopatra in the other. They marveled at how small we are.    81. Andre the Giant once cracked the sky’s ribs. Then he was thunder churning like trout. Then he was an avalanche of fists and knees. Then he was a fire burning through the forest. Then he was a tidal wave seething offshore. Now, he will not be a metaphor.    93. When Andre the Giant pitched a man over the top rope and out into the crowd, he aimed at the moon.    100. A man never tells a lie, always treats a promise like his mother’s name. Andre the Giant once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, hit a buffalo in the eye and killed it as it grazed.    116. Andre the Giant drank three bottles of whiskey and grappled with the Devil in a bingo hall in Memphis. Then he invented the blues.    125. On television, Andre the Giant grinned with a mouthful of shark’s teeth. He devoured mortal men ten-at-a-time, laughed and spit their bones into our living rooms.    137. Andre the Giant was a Frenchman. Then he became an ogre. Then he became a movie star. Now, he is the constellations. All of them.
1. A man can stand with both feet touching the ground until his legs no longer reach that far, until the ground disappears.    2. Giant Baba stands six feet ten inches tall, taller in Japan. It doesn’t matter how tall you are.  3. A man can hold a woman, can’t stand to lose her to the heart’s wreckage. His body will fall apart one day—a rock crab’s chassis stripped clean by seagulls, a dandelion gone to seed.    4. Giant Baba stands over seven feet tall. When he lifts you over his head, you will be eight and a half feet above the ground.    5. A man can stand for anything when seen from below—fatherhood, majesty, satisfaction after conquest. In the end all men are seen from above—patch of lawn, chunk of stone.    6. Giant Baba towers above your house, dangles you by the ankle. Your life looks so small from the sky.    7. A man and a woman can wrestle together in the same bed. A man and a woman and a marriage can brawl all night.    8. Giant Baba looms dark against the stars, back blotting out the Milky Way, arms cradling you and your family history. Listen to his mammoth heartbeat, war drum, earthquake. Just listen.    9. A man can stand naked in a foreign country, can search for meaning in strange tongues. He tries to find himself in stories about famous battles, about giants. It doesn’t matter where he stands.    10. Giant Baba’s body is made of girders and mastodon bones. When you stand outside to look at your house from new angles, when you think of how your father died, the giant will be there to catch you.
When I open the door and reach to the light switch the world opens as it did each time.   The garlic jar on the ledge, the ceramic cup holding cheese cutters and paring knives.   Outside a branch from the ash tree worries the window.   It was a place where I knew the drawer pulls, the feel of steps to the basement, the smell of cool cement.   If I open the middle cabinet, the linen is there as you left it, well-ordered, none of it fine.
Given over to love, she un-balls the socks,   lets fall debris of days, leaf litter, sand grain,   slub of some sticky substance, picks it all for the sake   of the stainless tub of the gleaming new front loader.   Given over to love long ago, when her own exasperated moan bounced off   the quaint speckled enamel of the top loader   vowing: she'd do this always and well. She fell in love then, she fell in line—   in a march of millions, you pair them, two by two, you marry the socks.
I've become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie, Honeybunch, Snugglebear—and that’s just for my children. What I call my husband is unprintable. You’re welcome. I am his sweetheart, and finally, finally—I answer to his call and his alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out into the evening’s first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras, a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl and sleep, when shadows of moons we don’t yet know brush across our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying to remember a path or a river we’ve only visited in our dreams.
I blush quicker than a school of blue jack mackerel arranging itself into an orb of dazzle to avoid  nips and gulps from the dolphins who’ve been silently trailing them, waiting for them to relax. When I hear  her growl—her scratch-thirst and giggle when she drops swear words pressed to wax—I can’t even look him  in the eye when I ask him to give it a good listen with me. But he does, ever patient, and we both get  a light bless of sweat on, a bright address that still maps us to each other after all this time. When I read him  the lyrics, the pink of my cheeks is like the pink of an orchid mantis. Just when you least expect it,  the pretend flower will reach out and snatch a butterfly from the air. When I say flower I mean how her song  blooms in the cicada-electric Mississippi night. When I say pink I mean nectar I mean a long kiss good and sweet.
Breathe deep even if it means you wrinkle your nose from the fake-lemon antiseptic  of the mopped floors and wiped-down doorknobs. The freshly soaped necks  and armpits. Your teacher means well, even if he butchers your name like  he has a bloody sausage casing stuck between his teeth, handprints  on his white, sloppy apron. And when everyone turns around to check out  your face, no need to fush red and warm. Just picture all the eyes as if your classroom  is one big scallop with its dozens of icy blues and you will remember that winter your family  took you to the China Sea and you sank your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars  the size of your outstretched hand. And when all those necks start to crane, try not to forget  someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes  for the first day of school. Think of their pencil cases from third grade, full of sharp pencils, a pink pearl eraser.  Think of their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade.
I don't love my son the way I thought my mother should love me so I handed him a shoe box to put the dead bird in and shut the door.  It was a mistake,  not to be sure he buried it,  not to grab the children gathered at my back door by their shoulders to push them into a half-circle and a prayer.  Should have made them take turns digging the hole, each one of their pudgy hands finger stiff red's box to lower it to the ground.  It wasn't my place to teach other women's children about death, so my own son snuck the shoe box into his backpack, dead-eyed bird rolling like a plastic prize ball, told the principal this cold puff of field bird had been his pet.  See him clutching a coffin the size of his feet, eyes wide over a pout, giving a man a reason good enough to hold him.   after Louise Glück
What is skin, if not a taut swaddle loosening, body if not a warm swaddle cooling, blood if not thread in a swaddle made of body, horizons if not lines where sky swaddles Earth. See father.Stars, if not swaddled matter emitting light. See spirit.Wind, if it does not trace paths around bodies. See blood.Universe, if not outermost concentric circle. See mother. A kiss, if not mouths pressed into wet twists, taste if not flavor swaddling  tongue, father if not the option to swaddle, spirit if not the smallest unit of the swaddled, mother if not hips swaddling womb. See skin. See body. See wind. See universe. See blood.  ​after Nin Andrews
A mouth is a sideways woman, her curves and dips, the way she opens, how her hollow center can sing. Mother, your mouth is a fallen cello, your husband's hands— a casket. Full of me.
II.  The first time I had you killed I made you a hero of the Vietnam War.  The third grade social studies textbook said young foreign boys hid grenades  during corner games, seamstresses doubled as spies. Why wouldn't you have died on those streets, clutching my mother's photo with your thumb pressed cold  against her belly, wishing you'd had a chance  to propose, hoping for a girl? But that war ended before I was born. Next, I had a drunk driver end you. Said I visited him in prison to spit in his face. Forgave him for a speech during health class. In eighth grade, I made you die young of natural causes, so I could teach a grieving classmate the proper way to mourn.
When bombs are exploding outside,  it means that there are implosions.  Vibrations travel through air and liquid. My amniotic fluid is imprinted with airplanes dropping bombs and screams and fire.  In the bomb shelter in Saigon,  my father teaches my two-year-old brother French. "Je m'appelle Chuc Nai Dat." "Je m'appelle…"
A bullet is made of copper or lead.  Gunpowder is poured into the case.  The firing pin hits the primer at the back of the bullet which starts the explosion. Altogether,  the bullet and the case are typically about two inches in length and weigh a few ounces. My father said that the Vietcongs told him and the other  prisoners while in  "re-education" camp that they were not worth a bullet. They would work for the Vietcongs and then die. A bamboo tree is smooth, long with roots that hold the earth  with the strong grip of green knuckles and fingers. They are used to build houses, fences, etc. A bamboo tree can weigh sixty pounds or more and be twenty feet tall.  The prisoners were forced to walk barefoot up the mountains and carry bamboo back to the camp. Due to the weight of the bamboo, they were only able to carry one at a time.
are real. They jump from roof-top to roof-top, do a backward flip down to the concrete floor and land perfectly on two feet.  The metal of swords clang, the body moves with the precision of a praying mantis striking  its prey. Their dresses are colorful, long and lacy, billow and flair with each turn and twist.  Jewelry in the hair dangles and sparkles. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes are smart, fight bad guys, do good deeds, and risk their lives. They appear when least expected. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes never give up. They travel often alone by foot through mountains. They work hard training to master various martial arts forms. They do not care about Barbies, those plastic dolls of only one hair color that just looked pretty in the 80's. They aren't impressed; they do not want a boring life.  Chinese female kung-fu superheroes venture out and save cities against villains. They steal into the night in their black ninja-like suits, soundlessly through a house to recover a magical sword and to release a prisoner, knowing exactly where to press with their two fingertips to freeze the guards and to accomplish their mission.   After Jeannine Hall Gailey's
My doggy ate my essay. He picked up all my mail. He cleaned my dirty closet and dusted with his tail.   He straightened out my posters and swept my wooden floor. My parents almost fainted when he fixed my bedroom door.   I did not try to stop him. He made my windows shine. My room looked like a palace, and my dresser smelled like pine.   He fluffed up every pillow. He folded all my clothes. He even cleaned my fish tank with a toothbrush and a hose.   I thought it was amazing to see him use a broom. I’m glad he ate my essay on “How to Clean My Room.”
The letter A is awesome! It simply is the best. Without an A, you could not get an A+ on a test. You’d never see an acrobat or eat an apple pie. You couldn’t be an astronaut or kiss your aunt goodbye. An antelope would not exist. An ape would be unknown. You’d never hear a person say “Afraid” or “All Alone”. The A’s in avocado would completely disappear and certain words would be forgot like “ankle”, “arm”, and “ear”.   Without the A, you couldn’t aim an arrow in the air. You wouldn’t ask for apricots or almonds at a fair. Aruba and Australia would be missing from a map. You’d never use an ATM, an apron, or an app. The arctic fox and aardvark would be absent from the zoo, and vowels, as you know them, would be E, I, O, and U. There wouldn’t be an A chord on the instruments you play. Let’s appreciate, admire, and applaud the letter A!
Recess! Oh, Recess! We love you! You rule! You keep us away from the teachers in school. Your swings are refreshing. Your slides are the best. You give us a break from a really hard test.   Recess! Oh, Recess! We want you to know, you’re sweeter than syrup, you’re special like snow. You don’t assign homework. You make the day fun. You let us play kickball and run in the sun.   Recess! Oh, Recess! You’re first on our list. We’d be in despair if you didn’t exist. We’re happy we have you. You’re awesome and cool. Recess! Oh, Recess! We love you! You rule!
Our grandma kissed a pumpkin on a Friday afternoon. She also kissed a crayon and a giant red balloon. I saw her kiss a chipmunk eating cookies with a queen. She kissed us in these costumes at our house on Halloween!
Our teacher gave detention to the fountains in the hall. She handed extra homework to the artwork on the wall.   We saw her point a finger at a banner and a sign. She said their bad behavior was completely out of line.   The principal approached her and said, “What is all this fuss? I heard you tried to punish all the tires on a bus.   “You’ve made the teachers angry by disrupting all their classes, so if you want to keep this job, you have to wear your glasses!”
I strip the porch roof, pick out the used nails, and toss the shingles down onto   a drop cloth, remembering when I shingled my grandmother's roof fifty years ago:   the tar smell, the brackets, planks, and ladders all the same, but level now   with hemlock limbs instead of locust. I lug four shingles up the ladder, kneel   and drive the old nails home, slide another shingle into place, pound,   toes bent, knees creaking. Miserliness, a friend jokes about the nails, but I call it  caring, thinking of the man who gave us this land on the cove, the cottage, the boat-   house full of boats. The only time I saw him he was at his work bench, a rich   man straightening nails, moving from the bent can to the anvil to the straight.
For days now a red-breasted bird has been trying to break in. She tests a low branch, violet blossoms swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies straight at my window, beak and breast held back, claws raking the pane. Maybe she longs for the tree she sees reflected in the glass, but I'm only guessing. I watch until she gives up and swoops off. I wait for her return, the familiar click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee and scan the room, trying to see it new, through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed. Books piled in a corner, coats hooked over chair backs, paper plates, a cup half-filled with sour milk. The children are in school. The man is at work. I'm alone with dead roses in a jam jar. What do I have that she could want enough to risk such failure, again and again?
She could be a Norman Rockwell painting, the small girl on my front porch with her eager face, her wind-burned cheeks red as cherries. Her father waits by the curb, ready to rescue his child should danger threaten, his shadow reaching halfway across the yard. I take the booklet from the girl's outstretched hand, peruse the color photos of candy bars and caramel-coated popcorn, pretend to read it. I have no use for what she's selling, but I can count the freckles on her nose, the scars like fat worms on knobby knees that ought to be covered on a cold day like this, when the wind is blowing and the trees are losing their grip on the last of their leaves. I'll taketwo of these and one of those, I say, pointing, thinking I won't eat them, but I probably will. It's worth the coming calories to see her joy, how hard she works to spell my name right, taking down my information. Then she turns and gives a thumbs-up sign to her father, who grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has finally come—his heart like a glove, opening.
4But you had the sense that he was always competing with your father for your affection.   Not only my father. He didn’t understand my need to develop ties in these new worlds. He tried to legislate over my feelings. He was subject to extraordinarily inappropriate fits of jealousy.  How are you the judge of that?   Many small incidents.  Such as…    *   The boy’s name was Warren. He was an orphan. As we pulled into the weed lot of the camp in the uncertain March air and patented silence, I could see him peeking down at us from a second story dormer window, like someone who had been dreaming of escape from the run-down resort: torn up turf; dirt basketball court, net hanging for its life by one thin strand of rope; horseshoes, shuffle board; musty, mildewed cabins with wet bedding; the stars pressing too hard against our faces in the catastrophic silence of the nights… I’d never been left so happily alone, alone, that is, in Warren’s wonderful company. His talk mimicked the cadence of the stones he kicked. Warren showed me the mica glow in the arrowheads and quartz-tipped spears he'd unearthed. Warren's cigar box overflowed with other people's souvenirs, miniature monuments, key chains, lighters, and initialed items like cuff links and bracelets. He scoured the corners of the rooms of the departed while his “mother,” slip of the tongue there, vacuumed. “People always leave something behind,” he said. I knew what he meant: taking their clothes on and off so many times something had to go. I wanted an initial bracelet even with someone else’s initials. The kids at summer camp in the Poconos all had initialed bracelets, except for me, but who among them had been west of the Mississippi? Warren wanted a home. I didn’t know what I wanted. I asked to bring Warren home and give him a home. “That’s ridiculous, he has a home here. Besides, you only just met.” My mother lamented his stick-thin, soot-blackened frame, the smell he gave off and his yellow teeth, his urchin eating with his hands, his short and choppy hair, his blousy shirt and baggy fatigues that gave him a bulk, a volume, he didn’t otherwise possess. What about his fits of giddy delight? As the days passed I forgot myself. I became more and more like Warren. I would brook no insults about my brother. It would no longer be me, but me and Warren. I’d share my meals with Warren, and my desk at school. Warren could stay and I would just—slip away. Next to Warren, I felt like I was on a clipper ship lifted out of the water by the powerful wind-breath of my two distant coastal families; my warring mother and “blood” father, her lovely companionable family in Los Angeles and Manhattan; his friendly, compliant relations in Manhattan and Bensonhurst… I dreamt both families were jammed on the deck of the ship, waving, gesticulating, shouting, and that I clung to a raft’s rope as a great wave flung me back and back, but the truth was I wasn’t sure I wanted to be near. I wanted to fly apart—in the nowhere—. When our two-door Chrysler Windsor edged off the gravel onto the highway I thrust my head right where the plush fabric of the front seat parted like the Red Sea, and said to my new dad. “You know what. I love Warren more than I love you.” “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he snapped. “He’s just a little putz, and I can get rid of him with a snap of my fingers. Presto. See. Now—where is he?” The seat beside me was empty. I was empty. And my heart pounded in wild longing for its fullness lost. I should have kept my mouth shut but I thought my heart would burst with that secret locked in it: why doesn’t he understand? It wasn’t that I loved him less than I had but that I loved Warren more. He had the same reaction several years later, in Chicago, when I announced my love for Carol, a round-faced, soft spoken blond girl I’d brought home to play with my electric trains and drink hot chocolate one brutal winter afternoon. I loved her and I kissed her in the elevator on the way up. I wanted him to say: I’m so happy for you,let’s put on some 45’s and dance. He said, “You don't know what love is.” And for the first time slapped me in the face. I wrote my “blood” father of my love and he wrote back he was glad I was “making friends out there.” Why didn’t these men understand, I know what words mean, by love I meant love, however transitory. One word, two fathers, two red stone faces, unblinking, dismayed.
Dropouts   Mace had the kind of courage you could easily mistake for brawn. I don’t know why I call it courage.   Sure, he stood up to greasers. And didn’t visibly fret on the days when his report card made hard fact   of what was already apparent from his absences. Yet Mace was gifted with an uninflected quickness, a fine   intelligence of his own despair, a knowledge— as he gunned the engine of his once white ’58 Chevy,   with a four-on-the-floor he’d installed himself, to climb higher into the hills above the city—   of where nowhere was… Light shadow cutting brusquely across the canyons—    * Like everyone else in our class, Mace was a year older than me. He had stubble on his chin.   I dragged a razor up and down my cheeks to inspire fast, early growth.   “Don’t shave your jowls,” friends warned, knowing I overdid everything,   “or you’ll grow hair there later.”Later was a word I disdained, its insistence   on the future tense, postponement— life on the back burner.    *   Mace seemed incapable of worry. His coolness and insouciance made girls stare.   He was always brushing back the shock of raven- black hair that fell over his right eyebrow.   The same teacher who sent me lickety split to the principal’s office   would lean over Mace’s desk and whisper warmly, compassionately in his ear.   They would nod together. I could fill in every blank. “What’s the matter Richard?”   “Nothing.” “If you’re having trouble,” this is where the whispering grew most intense,   “I want you to feel you can talk to me as a friend. Your work in class is so good, you have so much ability,  Richard…”   Mace would never protest, never defend himself. Indignation was a country where he’d never been.   “You may hate me,” I thought, praying she would not double the insult of the absence of her concern   for me with a glance in my direction, “but deep down Mace and I are the same.”    *   Mace and I were running into the same problem at the same time. Mathematical   wizards that we were we couldn’t solve advanced algebraic equations in our head;   we were vexed by an added integer. We had gotten this far without lifting a pencil.   History was being sold to us as a dead language of fixed events and we wouldn’t buy.   What is a fact, I wondered, and I could see the same question wrinkling Mace’s brow.    *   Mace’s problems weren’t academic. His disgust thrummed like telephone wires in the wind, even his saturnine   presence was deceptive, like his beat-up Chevy with its secret store of power concealed under the hood.   Mace too began the year in the front row, placed there on the strength of pure ability.   He sank slowly, buoyed as I was, by the one assigned book we read, Great Expectations.   Mace attended to his tasks in the classroom. I dreamt of escape via the window’s easy access.   There were unknown roads to be driven, gulleys to be plumbed; girls: a world of lovely distractions.    * For all the years I lived in Salt Lake City I can’t remember seeing a single bird.   I felt watched in Salt Lake City ever since that first day when the old geezer stepped   out of the shadows, on a street vast and empty and without verticals, to reprimand my Double-  mint gum wrapper for lighting in the gutter. But only around the time of Hitchcock’s The Birds   did I start to withdraw from sight. I was keen to see The Birds the Wednesday   afternoon it opened and I wanted the other—“good”—“Mark R.,” the irreproachable blond Mormon angel everyone loved, to join us.   Our growling engine brought his mother to the porch. The sun glared on her helmet of curlers.   Mark had “homework and chores,” she said, he “can’t come down.” But he had already descended. And stood framed in the doorway.   I couldn’t get accustomed to the light in the trampled meadows around his house,   the glow of dandelions, thistles, weeds. Mark’s red cheeks reeked of aspiration and I could read   his thoughts: why couldn’t I wait until night?Why was I dragging myself down?  Why skip history and rifle assembly?The movie would wait.   But I would not. I was keen, and, seeking a purging terror to cleanse   me of my dread, I sat alone with Mace in the vast empty theater alive to each   click and flicker in the projection room, and the radiant impalpable dust   caught in the unstinting beam; released from the limits of our world   until the screeching stopped and, looked at askance by strangers,   we stepped into an iron dark which held no trace of the light we’d left.     * I forked over whatever change I had to fuel each day’s free-wheeling splendor.   One morning, knowing Mace was down to smoking butts, I brought a pack of my mother’s Kents   as an offering. Mace scorned them. He only smoked Marlboros.   Yet later, desperate and broke in the maze of roads through the hills overlooking the city,   he broke off the filters and smoked in silence. I was used to doing the talking   for the two of us but this was different. He pulled up besides a long driveway.   A vaulted roof jutted above columns of tall firs. This was where he lived. He’d be   “a sec”—he had “some smokes” stashed in a drawer. I followed him past the plaster jockey and the massy trees   toward an opulent, utterly contemporary house, fronted by oak door and gold bell-knocker,   angular, white, high-ceilinged, skylit… Our apartment could have fit into the living room…   Now I understood: Mace lived in the clouds. Though I couldn’t see beyond the back yard   through the landscaping I knew what the view must be like: that was the reason to live there;   for the nights, when the city, innocent as it was, still blazed through its grid of interlocking lights.  *   On May Day, Mace and I, long ago tossed out of R.O.T.C. for “insubordination,”   but required to attend the final show-of-arms sat together in the bleachers,   in splendid isolation, and watched as the rule-followers—led   by the many-striped, other Mark R.— in their woolen khaki uniforms,   shouldering their M 1 rifles, dropped like flies in the insuperable heat.
because a box is a box: humans are cultivated into said box without choice or clarification, specimens only existing—as in: (you—i—us). flesh & frame— restricted bone matter comprising a box reluctant not to be a box. but nurtured inside the box, let’s say form which is shaped by & indigenous, to, the box & the creator of the holy box—only leading to another question about, of course, the infamous box—form turns deceitful inside the box like any [thing] caged, leaning to a non-empathetic approach steeped in revolt —is judas in waiting. note: the box is not universal nor the universal. whatever hopes of otherworldliness lies in the box itself. the box will not elongate, dissolve or vanish without reaction to an action & here within lies problem of perspective as in—there is none—zero. along time’s continuum, color, too, is encouraged for the sake of the construction of the box, which is precious as flickering light, but cannot be verified since darkness is the original concept of all things human.
korea might be gay but I do not think you are. korea is a peninsula. you and I are people meaning that we have hair we comb and things to look at. our lips pout and take on the fullness of an adopted meaning.  the fact of the matter is that relentlessness is a hand- shake, a limp fish or glass of lukewarm tea. the fact of  the matter is that standing on a stage everything is comic, meaning small and memorable, of the insubstan- tial "universe," a minor disaster or floating chord.  the darkness is outside when I see you, not in.  I laugh when the funny thing gets said, and mostly I laugh inside. on the inside is without curves and artifi- cial spaces, many of them not gay or korea. but when I  see you they all run and speech is maybe stammer, sometimes slur.  margaret cho, your tongue might wreak more havoc than in speaks, outside being from the vantage point of escalating stairs, from dark glasses and escapades. the vantage being from a great height, a lighter space on the inside that was formerly before the dark and laugh. we really wait for the funny things before they are said and let go for ever after.  margaret, there are many funny sisters and there are many porn stores. I too think woo lae ok is really petri- fied of its own fish. that there are babies and there are dykes, that this little piggy has something, that a pubic mound transforms into a public space, not being gay or with outstanding curves, prayerful and abashed, facing the tide, grown over, rediscovered in the woods by strangers and haunted for years and years.
a perfect symmetry of both parts animal, feline and quizzical, and man,  made (undone) sworn in stormed again electric, transmitted from the foreground into  appropriate weather the skin being elastic cause for several considerations contrite ((argued over) aren't we of beautiful tangents beautiful ox blood, black sand morning from small wire filigree, a gesture
we aren't differentiable with bangs and hooded lids. I know the likeness doesn't stop right there. what's so great about being horny? the joke is insatiable. it rips and roars between and through.  we both have found our mother's jewels. buried in closets, rolled in silk thread and bunting.  done in scarlet, fortunately found, never for the men  in sharing. these are our secrets. our punch lines and couplets. I went to bed thinking "pixies." the bliss and after-  math of a spiritual kiss. how you resonate without rooms, maintaining perfect  valences.  where is the disaster at the end of this dread? in my dream state you were queen, a reigning  bodhisattva without a sprig. I climbed inside your belly. punched inside you  laughed and laughed, converting persimmons into a freedom jelly. Slathered all over, I found us exuberant, happy to swing or go both ways.
And yesterday something shattering happened. Not yesterday, but several (that’s becoming a favorite word) weeks ago I came across Kitaj’s The Jewish Rider and wept: there he was in the very image of my stepfather; the pate where a few strands of hair still frolic, the same skinny legs, the same misguided attempt to dress in a sporty way (who’s watching?), the same abstractedness, the same shlumpy—boneless—posture, gazing not at the landscape flashing past with wires lashed to the treetops as if with one tug the countryside would vanish, or listening to the tick of the rails, but fixed—distractedly—on his lower extremities, white loafers and the crease in his pants and nylon socks to see whether or not he should roll them up … ; no: looking both beyond and through physical space into an inner dark. Why else draw the eyes as shadows? It’s his glimpse into another world.    *   My mother’s father hunted and rode.  My father rode and fished. My stepfather never budged  from his Barca Lounger once the amber liquid began to pour. He had a spiritual life and a social life and no  physical life. But he liked it that I was always outside:  maybe that’s why he never got on my back about grades;  he might have thought that this boy has to be outside  at this time in his life.  Maybe it’s more important  that he roam the canyons and the hills  that he know the streets   that he come home  covered with leaves and bark and mud,  than that he sit there  like a good young scholar   like I was, a Rabbi  at twenty giving money home  to my parents in their cabbagy tenement  in the Bronx. This is a boy  who needs space. One time— I think I had my learner's permit—  he rented a Mustang convertible in L.A. and for several  days I drove around past the long rows of used car lots  and the bruised facades of restaurants digging up relatives, my hoarse-voiced  arthritic aunt in the shadows of her goldenrod colored ranch house,  limping like Ruffian after her last run  in the wet dirt at Belmont Stakes.    *   But I’ve said nothing about what made me weep.   It's in the contrast between Kitaj's alter cocker seeking comfort on a train, and Rembrandt’s taut youth setting off into the rampant amber on horseback; it’s in the image of active life juxtaposed with the image of sedentary contemplation— though no one travels on horseback now and heroism has become attending AIDS patients or sheltering the homeless. The raw youth’s feet are planted lightly yet firmly in his stirrups. His coat glows with many colors.   Not so The Jewish Rider. And yet—there's something more.    *   Michael Hoffman writes that New York is not what it was when I was too young to have marked the existence of The Blue Note, but I can pick up this trail by walking across the park to the Frick. And Barbara Hershey wouldn’t have been at the Frick in 1959 (they don’t allow children under sixteen) in black skin tight pants, black sweater, (the female uniform of our generation whose male version substitutes black jeans, baseball hat, and bomber jacket— though who knows what decorous garments she’d checked in the cloakroom), and white boots with plenty of Elizabethan ruff at the edges, pausing to look at The Polish Rider while I scribbled notes. Her white boots stood out against the dominant dark like the Jewish Rider’s white loafers.   And that was good because the light in the painting is brief whatever the time of day, sunrise or sunset, and the rider’s gaze, looking out over unknown space, is inward. I followed his eyes through the archway toward canvases where clouds roll over harbors against the whiteness of sails or toward gilded robes and velvet-hung rooms, then back to meet wisdom’s bared breast in Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength… (Why didn’t Veronese have the nerve to call his painting Woman With Bare Breasts, like Tintoretto? Why an allegorical title when the bare flesh and bones and sinew would have done?) He spends his life looking not at far off hills or citadels or the lights in the village below: he has no choice but to fix on her one bared breast, her swelling nipple. I can’t figure out what landscape he might be facing in the painted world. The clatter of rocks and hooves echoes over the stony plain.    *   I was no rider, but a pretend horse and rider always rode beside my train window—at a canter no matter how fast the rails clicked by— and though he wore a bandana and leaned slightly forward in the saddle to pull himself aboard, his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent, was like the Polish Rider’s.   Even as an only child I was never lonely.   My mother's father rode until he was old and on a narrow pass his horse jammed him up against rockface. In his narrative of his life this collision marked the ruin of his hip the rise of his cataracts.   My father rode “every morning before work.”   I never witnessed that, but at a ranch in upper New York State while I bloodied my hands tugging the reins of a frothing giant who would not budge from a weedpatch, I watched him disappear in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs as he galloped over a far off hill: more at ease in the saddle—in the air— than I’d ever seen him in civilian life.   My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride.   Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride!    *   That’s the stuff of events. What about the signature inscribed by the sun, the dark clouds sinister in just being there; thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below, candles lit in the deep interiors, bread, wine, the plate making its way around the table; what about—   leaping centuries ahead— the energy from generators blazing like auras through the clouds the scattered lights, the rotating tops of ambulances; the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese   making the rounds, apple sauce passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate, children eating, heads down, in silence, communicating through eye movements, the mother wiping her lips, the father grinning stupidly and drooling;   the television quacking in the background, the perfect suburban night unfolding in bedroom and drive-in and den, the sprinkler system ticking. The snipers in the tower—. This is what the riders, guests everywhere and nowhere,   say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter as night comes down. And last night, driving to Connecticut, I understood that the Polish Rider gleans the permutations of light after dusk, that its olive-gray smudges reflect the absence of pitch-darkness. I was wrong   about the Polish Rider all along: he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?) in the night, because, as the faint light rimming the edges of the sky makes clear, night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious. The rider lives in order to depart.      The Woman Who Rode   She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house. Bare trees, frost, the whole bit.   I wanted our lives to be like that: as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting.   She came to me in her stride. Dropped her crop on the chair.   Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled under the covers.   Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.” I felt like an accessory.   The wound was open. Drowsily I rolled onto her, no longer caring if she   was using me. As the new year wore on and black ice made riding   a fast track to certain death or paralysis, she grew tense.   Came to me now with clinical terms, “schi” words I worked hard to break down.   The good news was she was not a true “split personality”—the glitch   that “she was divorced from herself, and could not love or care.”    *   The light in her house was like the light before dawn.   On the last of my rare visits her mother jarred preserves while we watched   instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die. Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps   testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter; or taking precautions I would not overhear   what words were ricocheting on his “hot line” to the patent office.    *   Any objective observer standing back from the distraction of the impinging present   could see that her torment overleapt any visible signs and that she was—   as a WASP “rider”—the wrong person for the place she was in.   Her resilience could not be in question. She lived to stray from known paths   to leap stone fences and break into open fields. When her horse went down in an Irish bog   and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek— the next day she up and mounted him again.    *   When she came to me in the dream last night her smile had loosened.   How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse. How well it lit up the colors of her hair.
Under the roof is the empty room papered in requiem blue.   Partiers crowd the burned kitchen, gold fixtures hook to cheap lath.   What is it they can tell you about absence how it abates, takes names   Becomes a wall with windows faced on a formal garden, content   To accept the thin rain. The syllable forgives the words that need it, a sentence   Badly written, epigraphs scrawled thoughtlessly in books. Book where the hero   confronts a dark riddle, book where the suitors stand at the gate and are stumped.   What force brought them forward stooping at the lintel, up the chipped steps   To the blue door in the unbuilt tower, half-built, the new stone.
I can’t get rid of useful things and nobody wants to pick them up, I keep forgetting where I lay my umbrella.   I don’t leave footprints in the snow anymore, we haven’t had a war on domestic soil in so long I wonder if I still got it. Because once I had it.   I heard about a boy who once tied a string to his brother, he tied his brother to the ocean and the ocean to the blackbird—   from the ground all the birds look like blackbirds from the ground a Stealth Bomber looks like a spaceship.   The aliens are coming, they walk through birthday parties and basically go unnoticed.   And this is kind of how I go through life, once I heated up a spoon in the microwave the fish have so much mercury in them they spark.   I was handed a bayonet from the Civil War and a copper penny corroded with rust. When they take the Statue of Liberty apart to clean her her neck explodes with a million little spiders.   Meanwhile in a forest somewhere someone cut open my grandmother’s belly and filled it with bricks   something is coming soon I keep a bucket of lambs blood by the front door.
Like nights we knelt on the dirt floor of a dugout, leaned our heads back, eyes twitching gone, and popped nitrous canisters into the communion shapes of our mouths, slipped inside where everything seemed to be falling snow, ice, the time split between chasing flies through a darkened park and sprawling in sycamore bark—how clean that abyss we drifted in, like dew, more like pollen, on our skins; and, beneath, a want for touch, a kiss, a return. Like nothing back then, to break an arm latching on to the bumper of an Impala, or settling back  as the car took us as far as the salted bridge, before letting the ride go with a mitten caught behind the chrome waving from the other side of the river. Like this,  you said, sliding a needle, watching dope plunge, the body's rush and tow until you felt something like an angel hovering above, but it was only pigeon feathers deviling the air. Those friends are gone: some dead, dying, locked up or jailed in themselves; and when I see some kids running in the heat of a taillight swirling behind them, I remember we wanted only to quiet our bodies, their  unnatural hum, a vague pull inward, some thin furrows gliding over the snow.
All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost  nothing else mattered but to learn some new trick, to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting  around our bodies when we flew off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted into a 180, kicking  a leg out and landing it, the only way to run through the neighborhood was to run through it together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost don't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum and how they smelled so different from us, sitting in some kid's basement drinking his parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack, jumped in when some one of us  got jumped, so when a man we had never seen before came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked over to the man like someone walking into a bank and stabbed him. The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt, right in the middle of his new consciousness, kind of looking around.
My mother and I are on the front porch lighting each other's cigarettes as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs at being a mother and son, just ten minutes to steal a moment of freedom before clocking back in, before putting the aprons back on, the paper hats, washing our hands twice and then standing behind the counter again, hoping for tips, hoping the customers will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool front yard before us and the dogs  in the backyard shitting on everything. We are hunched over, two extras on the set of The Night of the Hunter. I am pulling a second cigarette out of the pack, a swimmer rising from a pool of other swimmers. Soon we will go back inside and sit in the yellow kitchen and drink the rest of the coffee  and what is coming to kill us will pour milk into mine and sugar into hers.
One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: "loot." WILLIAM DALRYMPLE  It sits with a fork made from a lotus on an ivory chair eating an elephant steak in the company of bears and feral nautch girls on a monsoon evening incandescent with an appetite as mighty as railroads spann’d across seas and reclines, its cheeks burnished, its ass varnished by suns setting on bronze and sugared with saltpetre, its torso a tableaux for the annals of rectitude, the theatre for roiling or robust passage, a veritable Suez Canal towards missionary victories which thrust from such bejeweled and oiled loins anointed by coin— that emission of plump plums, lump sums into the Ganges, that coiling coy virgin maiden winding her languid locks, batting her lashes to its lashes— its spine a gentle wire. Supine, its belly swells with salt and figs with meat and treaties, it corks open a profound song— itself it sings into books heavy with truths on the chair dressed with leather and raw hides kissed by ox blood smeared with beef dung lined with raw silk woven from worms plucked from boughs basted across its pious beaming eyes its spidery ghosted lids, and its byzantine glance unmoors from its Chinese porcelain and crosses the ebony table polished with lac secreted from the cloaca of the kerria lacca set with glazed cakes eaten by pinked mouths wearing crimson robes, to its guests polished and glossed and stained by the ooze drawn to color the uncolored raw linen, the wood, the human. Then its wrist cuffed by gold and cowries and studded with coral draws a whisper- thin muslin veil dyed carmine— sucked from crushed scale of cochineal boiled in ammonia and bled into curds and rouge glinting sanguineous and turbid between bug and rug snug a thug in redcoat or a turncoat carrying urns of this stuff— from estates of cocoa coconut calico— across its face while soft éclairs of chocolate bumble out from its plumed rump choked with gum and linseed flax and cassia cinnamon and pepper like so many lines of blood underwriting the mutton and not the goat so it can sell them with a name of a place like scarves or garlanded whores moored to wharves suckled by mother of pearl or teas named after Earls and they with whole scores to settle settle for homemade cures nettles ginger turmeric— a paste or to taste—and it steals and seals in letters scented with sandal sent abroad waxed and pressed with cornelian gems honed from ground it owns and makes stone from their flesh ekes ink from their sweat soaks indigo in lye fermented with time and makes color so it can bid for its own passage, the passage, O of this soul, to India!
There once lived a great king whose twin wives could bear him no children. A wandering sage saw the king’s grief and offered him a magical mango. She who ate the mango would be with child. As he had two wives, the king cut the mango into two perfect halves and offered one half to each wife. After nine months, each wife gave birth to one lifeless half. Horrified, the king ordered these clots of flesh to be left in the forest. A wandering demon found the two lifeless halves and cupped one in each palm. When she brought them together, the two halves fused and a whole child was made in front of her eyes—the demon named the child Jarasandha. Years passed by and this child grew to be an intimidating and invincible warrior. In a fight with Bhim, an equally invincible warrior, Jarasandha was ripped in half by his enemy. But, each time he was ripped apart, his halves found a way to meet up and become whole. Krishna, who witnessed how Jarasandha’s flesh found its own way back to flesh, motioned to his own cousin with his fingers: toss the halves of his body in opposite directions, he suggested. So, when Bhim ripped Jarasandha apart once again, he swung his left half to the right side of the arena and his right half to the left. And his body found no way to return to itself. In the Toronto airport, where I’ve arrived for a conference, I watch an older Punjabi lady—made to sit in a wheelchair behind two lines of customs officials, a security guard, a translator, and a service-staff member—scream that her son is outside the airport may she please just go tell him she is here she is here she is here please. I stand there holding her hand, my own luggage reluctantly traveling in loops on the belt. Beta—child— she says to me: please tell them my son is here and I am here what is the problem let me go let me go to him.
In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley recounts meeting a pensive Malcolm at the Kennedy airport, watching newly immigrated children “romping and playing” in their sudden home. “By tomorrow night,” Malcolm says to Alex, “they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger.” Before cable television arrived in India, America was a white nation. I imagined New England snows dusting California and Miami’s beaches stretched across Appalachia. America was a papier-mâché parody patched together by a cheaply hired prop maker. Geographic accuracy was sacrificed to the interpersonal dramas of Betty and Veronica, and the American banquet was limited to the malted and fried offerings in Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, where the Riverdale gang solved the real geopolitical problems of how to get Reggie off Moose’s back with the help of Archie’s fumbling charms. Here, class warfare came with a side of fries. There were rumors of distant family members “settling” in “North Dakota” or “Oklahoma”—names that put themselves together like Lego castles: hard-edged and jutting out with an abrupt L or a particularly pokey K. Blackness was just a rumor too. Blackness flickered in the background of photographs they sent back from these mysterious locations: here’s an uncle waving at us from a glittering Times Square (Los Angeles); here’s an aunt waving at us mid-way through the soft-focus neon breakfasts with Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup (made from maple leaves); here’s a nephew waving at us next to the poster of a red and white Michael Jordan in a quilted bedroom, his rotund brown body snuggled in tie-dye and tucked into tartan flannel sheets. Blackness was a rumor, that is, until Michael Jackson’s Bad ripped into our consciousness and suddenly, knobby-kneed pre-teens found a way to make stringy curls with coconut oil stolen from their mothers’ kitchens and started moonwalking backwards into my Social Studies classrooms, all snappy crotch and jaunty limbs. We girls rolled our eyes but we kept on watching. It wasn’t long before Jackson’s unsparing gaze, draped in slick black leather, began replacing the glowing pastel Ganeshes and Saraswatis hanging above study desks. But replacing an elephantine god’s soft paunch with lean, mean celebrity did not save us from our own ignorance of how blackness and brownness were connected through a struggle for economic self-realization and human rights. While kids in Chennai were rehearsing Michael Peters’ signature choreography for “Thriller” and pretending to be zombies—little exemplary half-dead spectacles—Union Carbide was industriously shirking responsibility for the Bhopal Tragedy, which choked thousands of Indians to death, and black mortality was spiking in violent, homicidal protest of the US DEA’s drug buys and cocaine busts. In other words, Tamilians blinked away Michael Jackson’s blackness. We kept the heat and thunder of his fat synth bass, which found its way into Ilayaraaja’s electric disco in films of the late 1980s like Vetri Vizha and Agni Natchathiram. We kept the ebullient automation of his moves, which became a muscular theme in Prabhu Deva’s blend of baggy breakdance and whimsical terukoothu folk dancing in the 1990s. But we forgot his blackness. In time, the lightning of his presence was replaced by the grey hum of CNN, Cops, Law & Order, and the dull horror of handcuffs on dark wrists. Posters yellowed, cassettes spooled out, and my moonwalking classmates found their scientific calculators and study guides again. But the rumors of racial difference in George Bush Sr.’s America continued to bloom and wilt in morose cycles in my childhood homes into the 1990s. In damp clusters, it grew like moss under rocks. Rootless, it stretched its stringy arms and held us by the ankles; it grew like mold between bathroom tiles; it spun itself fine and strong, webbing into corners where our brooms couldn’t reach. In time, the mossy rocks lined our after-dinner walks past the hibiscus bushes. In time, a grandmother slipped on the bathroom tiles and stayed in bed, fed conjee by a fatherless girl brought in from the village and the moss grew between her toes and drew her into the earth where they buried the nameless pets and tossed the chicken feathers. In time, the spiders hung so low they fell into pickle jars every time a child fished for a gooseberry or a slice of stony green mango from the brine. And from this brine, in time, we learned to believe that it existed. And as Tamilian families began drifting from the flashy monsoons of India to the June gloom of the California bay or to the sharp wet summers of the Keys, they carried the damp and stench in suitcases and buried it in hushed conversations. They made a poultice of moss and spider web and lodged it in the prayer books, hung it around the children’s necks like a talisman, and they said—as long as she doesn’t marry a black man.
It was hard to sit there with my father, watching one of my sister's girls playing a set of tennis against my son or daughter because he'd forget himself and with a groan of disappointment or a grunt of sympathetic exertion make it clear that he was rooting for my sister's child and against mine. There was no use calling him on it, because he'd deny it and get angry. So I would get angry but try not to show it, until I couldn't stand it any longer and would get up and walk away. That was how it worked between us, the unspoken building up like thunderheads above the tennis court, where the kids played on, not caring who won and hardly noticing the sky had darkened.
There goes the aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium,  the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and  the tin.  There goes that job spraying lawns with chemicals, driving the Merc three-quarter ton  with a tank on the back and no brakes through West Vancouver, bouncing the wheels against the curb to stop and on the steep majesterial streets that afford such views that they could hire two talentless dickbrains to weed and feed front and back and back again  in two weeks.  That was a heavy metal job that probably killed a lot of salmon too.  There goes the shotgun pellets from the pheasants we shot out in Abbotsford and Langley plucked and hung in the concrete basement in New Westminster fresh with the stink of pheasant guts. Oily, delicious pheasants roasted always with a little buckshot after a day off.  There goes those summers painting houses with my brother wire-brushing off the old paint, breathing it in on the wooden ladders white guys working on a tan and saving up for the Peugot ten speed. There goes the seventies out from my body. Led Zep Humble Pie Burning Spear, and Marley too, adidas, big E Levis  from Lee's Men's Wear on Sixth Street there goes that brown house paint, broken down  and pissed out.  There goes those years beachcombing along the Fraser from New West to Lulu Island pulling out cedar blocks that had floated free from the shake factory booms.  Pulling the blocks out of that industrial muck grey green and foamy  down near Scott Paper, the mill that Larry worked in until it moved production south.  Then stacking and drying the blocks to split them into shakes with a birchwood hammer and an adze. There goes that industrial mix from the Fraser  from the riverbank from the bars by the river. There goes sucking on a hose to get some gas into that golden sixty-six Valiant convertible with the leaky roof and the 273 and putting it right into the carb to sputter the piece of shit to life Again. Still, pretty great  to have a convertible with a radio (turn the radio on  roadrunner roadrunner!) and a five-gallon gas can and a piece of garden hose and a mouthful of Regular, a mouthful of Regular Leaded from the Chevron in the strip mall across Tenth Ave. There goes working on a printing press under the sidewalk of the storefront at Cambie and Hastings that was later the Caribbean place and is now going to be gentrified. There goes that time.  There goes all the shitty renos on Broadway, on Hastings, on Commercial Drive, there goes the dust from that wall Mike took down with a chain saw when Talonbooks was above the foundry and there goes the foundry dust and the sweep of chemicals that would take your head off like six beers later at the Waldorf.  There goes the mystery unmarked jars of cleaners and solvents and grease that Larry nicked from the mill and we used on the cars and bikes and on our hands.  There goes that job at the self-serve Shell with a car wash across from the college when it was in temporary trailers just to show that education for the masses was taken seriously. And there goes, hopefully, the dust and everything from that week  in September when what was stored in the three buildings of the World Trade Centre was pulverized and burnt Into the air and Nancy and I stayed in the apartment with t-shirts tied  over our mouth and nose and didn't go out until we went to Milano's where the Fireman drank for free with the IRA guys leaning at the bar. There goes that time.  There goes the Aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium,  the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and  the tin. Broken down pissed out.  There goes those jobs, those times there goes those relations of inside and outside, of work and nerves and fat and soft tissue and synapses.  There goes that set of relationsinside and outside. There goes that body that use and surplus
Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home.   Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet Nam sold those years, so many strange sounding places.   One of us holds a magnifying glass to McCarroll, McMorris, McNabb, small print in the polished stone, the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga, Illinois might have done, late at night searching that faraway land on his kitchen table,   hearing again the morning paper thump against the front door, that boy on his bike in the dark grown and gone—what was his name,that kid from down the block?— Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi.   --for PFC William "Willie" Searle
Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the shopping, I searched only for labels that saidlow sodium and no preservatives, instead bringing home heads of broccoli, turkey burgers, shredded wheat. And when he died anyway, guilt gnawed me like an ulcer— how could I have denied him his few final pleasures?— until I found Big Mac wrappers stuffed under the car seat, jars of pickles in the hall closet, and hidden among wads of tissues near the night stand, his stash— a half-used canister of salt. I sat down on his sagging mattress now stripped of stained sheets and studied that blue label with the girl in the yellow dress holding her umbrella against a rain of salt still falling from the sky.
I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the dogs paddling after their prized sticks. Fall is when the only things you know because I’ve named them begin to end. Soon I’ll have another season to offer you: frost soft on the window and a porthole sighed there, ice sleeving the bare gray branches. The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.
my daughter says. Unless the car could float. Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean turned to ice and promised not to crack. Unless Greenland floated over here, having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row our country there. Our whole continent would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw could we use for that? What kind of oars could deliver one country to another? She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland if it’s not green? Why is Iceland called Iceland if it’s greener than Greenland? Unless it’s a trick, a lie: the name Greenland is an ad for Greenland. Who would go promised nothing but ice? Who would cut her home to pieces and row away for that?
Because a lie is not a lie if the teller believes it, the way beautiful things   reassure us of the world’s wholeness, of our wholeness, is not quite a lie.   Beautiful things believe their own narrative, the narrative that makes them   beautiful. I almost believed it until the new mother strapped   her infant to her chest, opened the eighth-floor window,   and jumped. My daughter tells me, after her preschool field trip   to the Firefighter Museum, about the elephant mask, its hose   like a trunk, and the video of a man on fire being smothered in blankets.   She asks me if she knows anyone who got dead in a fire, anyone who  got fired. When will I die? she asks. When I was a child, I churched   my hands, I steepled my hands, and all the people were inside,   each finger a man, a woman, a child. When I die, will you  still love me? she asks. The mother cracked on the pavement—   how did the baby live? Look, he smiles and totters around   the apartment eight stories up. Beautiful things reassure us   of the world’s wholeness: each child sliding down the pole   into the fire captain’s arms. But what’s whole doesn’t sell   itself as such: buy this whole apple, this whole car. Live this whole life.   A lie is not a lie if the teller believes it? Next time the man   in the video will not ignite. The baby will open like a parachute.
I carried my fear of the world to my children, but they refused it.   I carried my fear of the world on my chest, where I once carried my children, where some nights it slept as newborns sleep, where it purred but mostly growled, where it licked sweat from my clavicles.   I carried my fear of the world and apprenticed myself to the fear.   I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. I carried it, and it repaid me by teaching me how to carry it.   I carried my fear of the world the way an animal carries a kill in its jaws but in reverse: I was the kill, the gift. Whose feet would I be left at?   I carried my fear of the world as if it could protect me from the world.   I carried my fear of the world and for my children modeled marveling at its beauty but keeping my hands still— keeping my eyes on its mouth, its teeth.   I carried my fear of the world. I stroked it or I did not dare to stroke it.   I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. It taught me how to keep quiet and still   I carried my fear of the world and my love for the world. I carried my terrible awe.   I carried my fear of the world without knowing how to set it down.   I carried my fear of the world and let it nuzzle close to me, and when it nipped, when it bit down hard to taste me, part of me shined: I had been right.   I carried my fear of the world and it taught me I had been right. I carried it and loved it for making me right.   I carried my fear of the world and it taught me how to carry it.   I carried my fear of the world to my children and laid it down at their feet, a kill, a gift. Or I was laid at their feet.
She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor,   an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it   might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great sense   that she should fall in love with him. He was Adán. Before the Fall and afterward, her invert twin.   And she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust, like Liv Ullmann. I loved her honey hair, her full   lips; her green eyes a nameless sin. (Not that I worried all that much— the church was Presbyterian.)   In Sunday school, her way to teach us kids to pray was to comment on all the beauty we could touch   or see in our environment. My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment.   Since other kids considered prayer a chore, the floor was usually mine. My list of joys left out her hair   but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows while others bowed their heads. Her heart I schemed to win   with purple prose on meringue clouds. —For who was Adán, anyway, I thought, but nada spelled backward?   While hers, reversed, called out, Ave! Ave! The lyric of a bird born and airborne on the same day.   But it was night when I saw her outside the church for the last time: yellow light, mosquitoes, summer.   I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair of wings with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones   to my parents. The next day I would find myself up north, in a strange house, without my tongue and almost blind,   there was so much to see. This caused Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed in time, but Eva stayed, a loss.  Ave, I learned, meant also this:Farewell! I haven’t seen her since.
In art, politics, school, church, business, love  or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career— strongly spent is synonymous with kept.   —Robert Frost She taught me the names of flowers: calendula, ranunculus, Iceland poppy. And the medicinal uses of herbs: Fenugreek opens up a stuffy head; goldenseal lubricates the cracked mucous membranes. Over a circa 1820 American dropleaf table, she told me asparagus was the broom of the kidneys. I hadn't understood at first and thought she'd used a German word I pictured as brüm and not as the little stalks standing on their heads, sweeping out the impurities. I learned to make the perfect roux for soufflé and became her efficient assistant in the kitchen—dicing and chopping, she once told me, with unparalleled patience. Then one day she began to accidentally break my Depression glassware, and I recalled how she'd giggled when she told me that in two years of marriage she had single-handedly decimated her husband's glass collection dating from 1790 to 1810, including a rare wedding goblet. In the doorway to the back porch she stated simply that my presence made her feel strangled, it was nothing I was doing or could do. We saw a therapist for six years, while my collection dwindled then became memory. With unparalleled patience I jumped through hoop after burning hoop, the therapist pointed out, but I heard that as praise for my prowess and continued to balance Bauer plates on my nose on command; hold growling tigers off with Windsor dining room chairs; juggle career, job, hope, and nightly tempests with unparalleled dexterity. I could reassemble anything: shattered pictures of us crossing the street with canes in the future, my hand under her elbow. My heart. But what I lacked, I can see now, was the ability to dissemble. Finally, she brought home a Cuisinart food processor, and I started hearing the minutes slicing away with ferocious velocity, time doing its soft-shoe faster and faster like Fred Astaire on amphetamines. Memories of flowers and herbs were sacrificed to the angry god of its vortex. Your voice is like acid on my skin, she said after twelve years, then grabbed her Cuisinart and left me behind like so much history.
V.  A. There are no doors between the rooms. The archways bore through the house like a tunnel through a mountain. The room one falls into after my parents’ is the largest and serves as two bedrooms divided by an invisible wall. Half of it is my brother’s and the other half my sister and I share, but not at first.   Earlier, I have a bed to myself on the side of the room nearest the kitchen. My bed is low and on one side a wooden rail can be dragged up noisily and clicked into place.    It is here my little goat wakes me, grabbing the covers off  me with her teeth. We play in the empty pig shelter at the  far end of the patio while my mother washes clothes in a  palangana and throws the soapy water across the concrete,  where it steams.    But my father is a butcher by profession, and my family  has other plans for my goat: a Sunday picnic at the zoo in  Havana. The day is huge and blue and breezy. My sister  teases me for not eating and says my goat is delicious. I  stray away to watch the monkeys.    I give one of the monkeys near the fence my banana. As it  finishes peeling it meticulously, another monkey appears  behind it and shoves the banana into its own mouth. The  first monkey turns around, slaps it in the face with the  empty peel, but that monkey isn’t sorry and starts jumping  and screeching and showing its yellow teeth.    For many years, those monkeys are all I can remember  about the picnic at the zoo.      B. Later, when my sister and I share a bed on the other side of the room, I can see the tall narrow cabinet right inside my parents’ room. My father always puts his hat on top of it as he walks in. And at night, through the mosquito netting, it is a tall thin man wearing a straw hat, lurking just outside the door, watching me in a sinister way. The dead weight of my sister’s habitual leg thrown across my body is no talisman. I have to keep waking myself up, sweaty and tense, to make sure he hasn’t moved any closer.
Regla lesbia: Flexible rule that may be adjusted to any body to be measured. Compare regla fija: standard.   —The Velázquez Dictionary I. In the garden, it’s there. Even when you’re inside you feel it, as though it were you standing naked among the weeds,   the tips of the bougainvillea bursting into flame, your nipples ruffled like the skin of a lake by a breeze.   You worship the invisible body like an old-fashioned lover, from afar, loving the specificity of space between you.   Sometimes at night it stretches out on the empty side of the bed, stares at you with the length of its invisible surface.   Every contour of your body not filled by you is molded by the attentiveness of the invisible body, whose breath surrounds  you.   It’s more than prayer it wants—more than language, with its  conditions. The invisible body demands you invent new senses to receive it,   new places on your body to marvel at its subtlety, like the eyes of the deaf percussionist that perceive sound.   II. The invisible body wants you to become a satellite dish, tuned to what exists only because your body calls to it.   Like the woman who had her kitchen remodeled to make room for the microwave she’d entered a contest for. Then won.   III. When asked whether falling in love was about acquisitiveness, about the ego, the seventy-five-year-old poet   responded that the ego had nothing to do with it; it was the need for union with the beloved.   Rumi asks, Who is it we spend our entire lives loving?    IV. How, then, do you measure the invisible body, which resists commitment but is faithful?   Is it clear who the beloved is, when no clear body exists that can be measured against a standard?   V. The invisible body sometimes acquires a body—it’s so convincing, it takes you a while to figure out it’s really the invisible body.   Like someone who has been reading your journal, it has decoded from your petty, daily complaints the open sesame   that slides the stone from the hidden cave’s opening and cleans you out while you sleep, leaving a sarcastic note.   It wants you to know it was doing you a favor, besides, how else did you think you’d discover the cave’s precise location?   When Aphrodite sharpens you, you sacrifice a little of yourself, willingly, as a knife does, so that you may become better at it.   VI. This is the point at which the invisible body speaks in italics, the Ouija board of poetry.  In my mind, says the invisible body, that time capsule shuttlingthrough space, I hold, in all the languages of the world,  your love, rushed like holographic platters to a table,steaming into the future long after you’ve ceased to shine,  the silver faces of your beloved bobbing out of the darkness,the black velvet pillow of your life on which you offer them for view.   VII. The invisible body is created out of your longing, your longing compressing invisible molecules together into an absence you  recognize.   That is the way one blind man sees the world—after the fact, in photographs he took, once he had passed through it.
Recycled over and over people born look like parents, grandparents, sister or brother, or perhaps a throwback from an earlier ancestor, the hawk nose, a hard ridged forehead, the cleft in the chin or a blue birthmark on the arm, the stomach, the dainty fresh bum of a newborn each unique like a snowflake never can you guess what’s on their mind sometimes I can feel what they’re feeling detect it like hairs on the back of my arms, together we live, talk, walk the same sidewalks, to die buried in a foreign cemetery for others to sit upon ponder their own light, why am I free, what must I do, does someone love me like I do, new skin gives way to wrinkles, hair fades to gray, bones grow strong then decay, strength seeps every time one pees, sleeps, ages, loves, muscles grow then shrink the body a temporary vessel destination unknown.   April 28, 2002
If the ashes of Mark Twain lie in the Mississippi River then I’m sure he does rise up some days emerge from dark polluted depths to walk over water to land and scans the horizon for change being a curious sort, he sees the crisis rise again another war on the horizon and shakes his craggy head to say no not again he hopes truth-sayers still exist who don’t have to wait until their dead.   December 2002
A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens
Outside  outside myself   there is a world,  he rumbled, subject to my incursions  —William Carlos Williams, Paterson i.  impossible.  sterile extrusion the rigour of its beauty its crumpled geometry worked to defeat. light, stopped. locked in its form shuttered and windless in dry rifts, split, furrowed, mottled, creased. ii.  trundling bulging from behind,  its too heavy body its natural carapace shelving green, sinking the sea beneath it the difficulty piling up, rising to the surface.  iii.  swirling backward on blue flowering currents rolling up sudden, in spray and mist —like the turning of a page that leaves us blinded for a second— unlocked in a milky scum half hid, long on its axis growing open wounds of violet, emerald, silver. a point of astonishment. lapses of silence. air.
from Pia Arke's exhibition Arctic Hysteria at Greenland's  National Museum & Archives, Nuuk, 2010 i. I am in my body. I am here, in front of you. I am the temperature in this room. I am undressed in my nudity; I am the light and shade you feel. I am more like other people than like you. I have before and after. I am my self, entirely and only. My outside and inside are continuous. I am muscle, organ, fluid, bone. I am monumental. You are the only one who sees me. ii.  I am not naked as I am; I am naked as you see me. I am transparent, almost visible. I have a time and a place. I am tribal and exotic. I must always carry objects. You are heroic. I am a complete museum, the story of my own making. I am a mirror to you; you are reflected in the looking at me. At best, I mimic you. You write me. When you leave, I will no longer exist. iii.  I am a single conscious point. I am indifferent. I am unself, like a photogram. I am prehistoric, before definition. Your body falls over me. I have depth and luminescence. I am neither here nor there; I have infinite extension. I live inside the lived world, the light and dark inside my head like dream substance. I am camera obscura, the room itself. I both adore and resist.
GUITH  a greylag morning,  the sea a conscious blue. CALF SOUND  orca  in a sea blue room,  breathing pearls that rise to the surface. GROATHA  the plenum of the shed:  every part infilled with flutter,  glass, sheep turd, gusts of damp. GREENTOFT  gunshot punctures a field  of geese, their clackety rise  a flock of helicopters. THE SETTER STONE  an old man steps out of the ground  all lines and angles,  sun snagged in his beard.  MILLCROFT  a tree softened house:  red willow, alder, pine,  eucalyptus rooting. WARNESS  a stream hole  a pure, dense fall;   one ocean falling into another. PLANTATION  wren, silver lark, crow  woody snipe, curlew, hen hawk  day owl, starling.  SOUTH END  the Varagen, beaded with spotlights  curves through the dark  round great holes in the sea WARD HILL  climbing with the moon,  the wind blowing round my mouth—  a low note, like an owl.
One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more or less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
Three sang of love together: one with lips  Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow, Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;  And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow  Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show; And one was blue with famine after love,  Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low The burden of what those were singing of. One shamed herself in love; one temperately  Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife; One famished died for love. Thus two of three  Took death for love and won him after strife; One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:  All on the threshold, yet all short of life.
It's a weary life, it is, she said: Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better then any being, were not: Were nothing at all in all the world, Not a body and not a soul: Not so much as a grain of dust Or a drop of water from pole to pole. Still the world would wag on the same, Still the seasons go and come: Blossoms bloom as in days of old, Cherries ripen and wild bees hum. None would miss me in all the world, How much less would care or weep: I should be nothing, while all the rest Would wake and weary and fall asleep.
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I; Perhaps some day, who knows? But not today; it froze, and blows and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But only just my fun. Today’s a nipping day, a biting day; In which one wants a shawl, A veil, a cloak, and other wraps: I cannot ope to everyone who taps, And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall; Come bounding and surrounding me, Come buffeting, astounding me, Nipping and clipping thro’ my wraps and all. I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows His nose to Russian snows To be pecked at by every wind that blows? You would not peck? I thank you for good will, Believe, but leave the truth untested still. Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust March with its peck of dust, Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers, Nor even May, whose flowers One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours. Perhaps some languid summer day, When drowsy birds sing less and less, And golden fruit is ripening to excess, If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud, And the warm wind is neither still nor loud, Perhaps my secret I may say, Or you may guess.
I never said I loved you, John:  Why will you tease me, day by day, And wax a weariness to think upon  With always "do" and "pray"? You know I never loved you, John;  No fault of mine made me your toast: Why will you haunt me with a face as wan  As shows an hour-old ghost? I dare say Meg or Moll would take  Pity upon you, if you'd ask: And pray don't remain single for my sake  Who can't perform that task. I have no heart?—Perhaps I have not;  But then you're mad to take offence That I don't give you what I have not got:  Use your common sense. Let bygones be bygones:  Don't call me false, who owed not to be true: I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns  Than answer "Yes" to you. Let's mar our pleasant days no more,  Song-birds of passage, days of youth: Catch at to-day, forget the days before:  I'll wink at your untruth. Let us strike hands as hearty friends;  No more, no less: and friendship's good: Only don't keep in view ulterior ends,  And points not understood In open treaty. Rise above  Quibbles and shuffling off and on: Here's friendship for you if you like; but love,—  No, thank you, John.
She stands as pale as Parian statues stand; Like Cleopatra when she turned at bay, And felt her strength above the Roman sway, And felt the aspic writhing in her hand. Her face is steadfast toward the shadowy land, For dim beyond it looms the light of day; Her feet are steadfast; all the arduous way That foot-track hath not wavered on the sand. She stands there like a beacon thro' the night, A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is; She stands alone, a wonder deathly white; She stands there patient, nerved with inner might, Indomitable in her feebleness, Her face and will athirst against the light.
1. I was born on a Tuesday in April. I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad. I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude inside the belly for nine months straight. Two workers welded bunk beds at the end of the delivery room. One on top of the other. My universe might have been the white lime ceiling, or the embodiment of Einstein's bent space in the aluminum springs of the bed above that curved toward the center. Neither cold, nor warm. "It was a clear day," my mother told me. It's hard to believe there were a few romantic evenings when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina and red-laced magma decadently peeling off a silver candlestick. Infants' cries and milk fever turned to salt from the stench of bleach— abrasive, unequivocal. With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick, the janitor casually extends the negative space of the black-and-white tiled floor like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness sieving out new human destinies.     2. 1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East dumped punctured rice bags, mice and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution. A couple of men in uniform cleared out the church in the middle of the night. The locals saw the priest in the yard wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold. Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another: "Wasn't he the one who pardoned our sins?"   Icons burned in front of their eyes, icons and the holy scriptures. Witnesses stepped farther back, as if looking at love letters nobody dared to claim.   Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth spilled irreversible promises: mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down sooner or later.   Children dragged church bells by the tongue. (Why didn’t they think of this before?) Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd like flies on a dead horse.   And what could replace Sunday mass now? Women brought cauldrons into the yard. Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose into the air, against gravity's pull. Nails in worn out shoes exposed stigmata that bled in the wrong places— a new code of sanctification, of man, by man.     3. "Read!"—I was told. Who said that? Angel Gabriel, or my first-grade teacher who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls?   Language arrived fragmentary split in syllables, spasmodic like code in times of war.   "Continue where your classmate left off!" A long sentence tied us to one another without connotation as if inside an idiom. Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb, a third one a pronoun. . . I always got the exclamation mark at the end— a mere grimace, a small curse.   A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator, puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone. On the blackboard,  leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before rubbed against one another like kittens.   After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window, my eyes glued to a constellation (they call these types "dreamers") my discovery possibly a journey into the past, toward a galaxy already dead, nonexistent, the kind of news that needs millions of years to reach me.   "Read!"—the angel shook me for a third time her finger pointing to an arbitrary word a million light years apart from its object. (It didn't matter who  was first). Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.     4. Language is erosive. It makes us recluses, a wind through the canyons carving our paleontological eras for everyone to read.   Under the revised testament of my skin bellows a gold-cast bull, an alluring object, a need for attention. Then comes the unleavened bread and a last supper, which, remarkably, is repeated several times between ice ages. Lower yet, Sodom. I recognize it from the stench of sulfur.   I hold my nose. Freud would have done the same. And then Cain, a crow taught him how to bury his own brother. . . And at the bottom, Adam’s gentlemanlike sin under which scientists discover earlier epochs of famine.   Between unidentified layers, wanderings in the sand, the search for a new prophet. . .   I try to understand my people. Their language is plain. Some words, were actually never uttered, like pages stuck together in a book fresh off the press and long after it sits on a shelf.   This, too, lives inside me within insidious bubbles of air, negative spaces where I can find little historical rest, but also where utter ruin may originate.   5. Little left of the snow three days ago. Its blanket ripped away, exposing dog shit and the bruises of routine.   Negative space gives form to the woods and to the mad woman—a silhouette of the goddess Athena wearing a pair of flip flops, an owl on her shoulder.   It’s minus zero. The factory’s gate gnashes its teeth behind the back of the last worker. Blowing noses, shivering,  mucus. . . A virus circulates through the workplace, secretly, intimately touching one person after another, a current of sensuality. It softens the tone. But nothing unites them more than their frailty, The one-sizes-fits-all shoes you must grow accustomed to By filling the extra space with cotton, Or curling your ill-fitting toes.   6. In Halil’s yard, rules were sacrilege. His eight children entertained themselves by carrying famine on their shoulders, recalling St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin. Starving, filthy, hazel-eyed— three qualities that unexpectedly coalesce in the bright light, strung together like sneezes.   One’s famine was another’s consolation. “Look at them! It’s a sin for us to complain. They’re even worse off than us!” But even Halil found his own consolation in the old woman Zyra, “barren and paralyzed,” the root origin of despair.   This was our highlands landscape, hierarchical, where each family would make out a different expiration date on the roof below their own.  Schadenfreude was the only river that could turn mills.   But if this hierarchy shifted, and our roof gave signs of ruin, my mother would plant tulips in the garden, white tulips, our false image, a scarecrow to keep predators away.     7. Nearly nothing was mentioned in the letters he sent from prison, just two lines, on top of the page: “I am well. . .” and “If you can, please send me a pair of woolen socks.”   From them, I learned to read between the lines: negative spaces, the unsaid, gestures, insomnia that like a hat’s shadow fails to shade your chin and ears.   And in the photographs’ white background, acrophobia adds to the color of their eyes: blue, green, gray, and ultimately, chesnut brown, as, earthward, we lower our gaze.   I learned to read the empty spaces the dead left behind—a pair of folded glasses after the reading’s done and discourse commences.   Or the musical chairs game called "love," where there are less empty seats than people. If you don’t want to be the last one standing you must predict when the music will stop. (Who, though, has really succeeded?)   Perhaps a little practice can be useful in this case. I don’t mean squatting, jumping, stretching, but listening to the same music every day from the start, the same miserable vinyl record so that you’ll recognize its cracks before it recognizes yours.     8. Midnight. Snoring, meaningless sounds that stain the side of the wall that belongs to no one. So where are we? What dimension? Who foots the bill at a time like this without lambs or sinners, when even angels record nothing?   The street’s clearly visible under the neon 24-hour-service sign above the funeral home. There was a music shop next to it that closed down a few months ago; the shop shared a wall with the funeral home, shared the same water pipes and the same gate to heaven. But the coffins won, the wide-shouldered coffins that narrow down in the shape of a mummy, not a human. Wood of the highest quality, swears the owner, and pure silk inside, pleated like a stomach that can digest even a bulldozer.   When asleep we're simply five limbs. Starfish. If you cut one limb, it will grow back. Even a single limb could recreate us from the beginning,  a single hope. Negative space is always fertile.     9. No one knows if it was simply a matter of mixed or some other reason why I used to see what I wasn't supposed to see— the ending of things. It wasn’t a mystical gift, but like a blood clot in the darkness of a vein, I held on to reason, as it circulated from the bottom up and not the other way around as we were told. I used to start from the edges and with my left hand or a croupier’s stick gather the balls and dice from the corners and then watch the bettors as neither a winner nor a loser. There's nothing sillier than watching a film in reverse where after the climax, the protagonists are replaced by circumstances, and circumstances replaced by minor characters, their tongues plastered behind a single, fatal smirk Life and my short lunar calendar slipped away like carbon paper sending off as much light as necessary, skipping the details, the contrast and sharp colors. Lunar time is short. Until the actual end, there are years enough, the negative spaces. What to do with them when the verb has already been uttered, a conclusive sentence with Latin syntax, or more than that: didactic.
I grew up in a big house where weakness and expressions of joy deserved punishment. And I was raised on the via politica with the grease of yesterday’s glories, a thick grease collected under arctic skies. I was lit up. My notebooks, my hair, my heart reeked of smoke.   That’s when we saw each other clearly. Or rather, what remained of us. Damaged like lottery numbers scratched away with a blade.   How different we were!   Those with round faces were righteous; those with narrow faces were cautious.   One listened secretly to Puccini, another to silence, the music’s music. The oldest one declaimed monologues inside a ten-by-ten-foot cell he had built for himself.   And the mysterious one simply had diabetes.   But how similar we were in severe circumstances!   Alarmed like a flock of magpies that the smallest stone sends into the sky toward the mouth of the abyss.   Then it became obvious there wasn’t enough space for everyone. We separated. Some went on living in via verbum, telling of what they knew, what they witnessed, and so, through their narrative, creating their own grease.   The others crossed over the ocean.   And those in particular who went farthest away never speak of their annoying history of wretched survival, burying it in the darkest crevices on their being. Unfortunately, as with perfume, its scent lingers there for much, much longer.
Among the personal objects inside a 2100-year-old Chinese tomb, archaeologists found nine acupuncture needles, four gold and five silver. Long before knowing why, ancient doctors knew that pain must be fought with pain.   It’s quite simple: an array of needles pricking your arm for a properly functioning heart and lungs. Needles in the feet to ease insomnia and stress. Needles between your eyes to fight infertility. A little pain here, and the effect is felt elsewhere Once, a group of explorers set out to plant a flag on the South  Pole, a needle at the heel of the globe, in the middle of nowhere. But before the mission was completed a new world war had begun. The impact of the needle was felt in the world’s brain, in the lobe responsible for short-term memory. When Russia used ideology as acupuncture—a needle over the  Urals— it impacted the pancreas and the control of blood sugar: America paid tenfold for whiskey during Prohibition, and at post offices, copies of Joyce’s “immoral” Ulysses were stored for burning. The universe functions as a single body. Stars form lines of  needles carefully pinned to a broad hairy back. Their impact is felt in the digestive tract, each day a new beginning. How can you begin a new day not having fully absorbed yesterday’s protein? I was a child when my first teacher mispronounced my last name twice. That pricked me  like a needle. A small needle in the earlobe. And suddenly, my vision cleared— I saw poetry, the perfect disguise.
"The wild will keep calling and calling forever in your ears. You cannot escape the 'little voices.'" —Frank Wild 1. Here I rest, in South Georgia. A few feet of evolution away lie the graves of whale hunters, pointing north. A white fence shields them from elephant seals and their apocalyptic screams that each day warn of the end of the world, or maybe the beginning. . .   I survived five expeditions to the Pole. The one before last, “Imperial Trans-Antarctica,” nearly killed me. For two years I put up with the ice—no man can reap or sow  these fields. And, unlike farmers, I didn’t even need to ask God for rain, because ice is sated and more desolate than the Sahara.   I survived distance. Wrote one message after another beginning with a capital letter and a "PS." at the end. My own personal post office under my pillow closed for two years already, on holiday.   I survived six month-long polar days and nights; to this day, I don't know which one was worse.   My epitaph is simple. Carved in granite:  FRANK WILD  18 April 1873  19 August 1939  “Shackleton’s  Right Hand Man” From those cast away here by a defect in the engine of the ship or nostalgia of the womb.   2. Ah yes. . . in the beginning was the ship. The ship stuck in ice.  Endurance.  Ships are women. They prefer soft seas. In the best-case scenario, she’s called La Santa Maria  and she throws you, like Columbus, on some foreign shore.   But if you get too close to her. . .   The very day after we washed her deck with warm water and soap, warmed her arteries with gin, stroked her lower back with our surrogate songs, shaved our beards and exposed the illiterate lines on our faces, she took off.   And from the shore, we saw how she broke her ribs, sinking, aft first, so fast we didn’t even have time to pray, leaving behind her ash-tree fragrance and faux pearls on the water.   “Such a woman!” someone laughed bitterly, “She knows when to leave so as not to be forgotten.”   3. A woman, naturally, has no business there. Antarctica is a masculine continent— male penguins keep the eggs warm, the moon stands up on the street to urinate after being kicked out of the tavern, the cold like a cut-throat razor, dulled for three thousand years, and the sled dogs, the Huskies, we kill with a single bullet so they won’t starve to death. In this way we instill a little character into the new land before the arrival of Conquistadors, thieves, assassins, missionaries, prostitutes, the first invading army of every continent.   Antarctica is a man’s continent, because only a man chooses to break into the darkness of the mind by conquering the body, as Amundsen and Scott did, their glory reaching to the apex of ecstasy. Zero degree of geographical latitude, utter collapse.   4. Hunger is overestimated. The stomach functions much like the  brain: when it has nothing to think about, it feeds off memories. It can last three days just thinking of a single biscuit. But those who have a better memory, meaning a much stronger  acidity, can go on for months remembering a slice of prosciutto, two fried eggs, sweetly folding their eyelids like napkins after a meal.   Then hallucinations begin. Banquets. Easter supper. Feet move impatiently under the table; the scent of rosemary wafts from a platter and two clean serving hands with burns here and there. That's when you feel grief-stricken and you attack the seals and penguins with your alpine knives and shoes like a madman in an empty amphitheater. Or is this, too, a hallucination, and in this case not ours but Antarctica's?   And when clarity finally returns, both stomach and brain notice only their own deep wrinkles.     5. Blubber, blubber, seal's blubber. Blubber that keeps your spirits alive, rendering it for fuel, for light, blubber to mask the body's foul odor, —a mixture of doubt, hope, and ammonia. And if you have nothing better to do, think of a cow's thigh hanging at the butcher's, its delicate streak of fat like a silk ribbon.   I survived even this sarcasm.   And every night, before bed, we read recipes to each other one of a few things we secretly rescued from the ship before she sank, as if these items were her lingerie.   What a show it was! What pathos in pronouncing prosciutto, sugar, omelet! What sensuality in milk, parsley, cinnamon! We made these words up ourselves. Nothing exists until its moment of absence.   But first, in order to warm up our mouths like actors before going on stage, we'd repeat mechanically, palates dry, "Bless us, O Lord, and this food we've received through your mercy.”     6. It was the Romans who spoiled the word studying rhetoric before anatomy and mathematics:Vir bonus dicendi peritus “The good man skilled in speaking" (Marcus Porcius Cato)   But in Antarctica, words are measured differently: by calories! With a simple greeting you lose five calories, just as many to keep a fire burning for a full minute. And a Ciceronian argument can consume a whole day’s  nutrition; think carefully before you open your mouth.   The word is overestimated.   Sometimes it’s enough to avert your eyes from your shoes to imply “gangrene”; and a vague exchange of glances between men is enough to understand that the ice is cracking beneath your feet and death is closer than your fingers.   7. Stretched smooth from end to end—such is Antarctica. In fact, even a baby’s skin looks withered by comparison.  No emotions. No regrets. No warnings. Either fight or die.   My father was like this more or less. A teacher at a village school. In classrooms that smelled of sheep-wool pullovers drying on the body. And eyes that moved freely in their hollows, like toes inside an older sibling’s shoes.   Unlike the Romans, my father preached about justice and honor his hands folded behind his back. His shoulders seemed twice as wide as his worn jacket.   I inherited his sharp, gray gaze and his soft voice. Eyes that say “Go” and a voice that says “Stay.” You never know which one to trust.     8. And mother? Oh, she was simply Captain Cook’s niece, —the great James Cook— from morning to night when she washed, swept, dug potatoes from the garden, fixed her husband’s tie on Sundays even from her bed, while in labor. She never spoke of this. As it wasn’t necessary. People speak of what they have, not what they are.   She was a tailor. Measured everyone's perimeter with a glance; erred only on the width of one’s neck, an unknown strength. Her large scissors followed the white chalk line on the cloth so precisely. "Snip!" She said little. Her silence followed the white outlines of another tailor, over a fabric much older than she was.   But now that I think of it, how did the poor woman respond to her friends asking, "Where is your son?" "He's exploring the world." "And what does he bring back from there?" "Himself, alive, I hope." "What's the point of returning empty-handed after two years?”   Was she at least a little proud of me? Of her Frank? Certainly not. She was Captain Cook's niece. The past always conquers.     9. I was the first of thirteen children. And as a rule, each of them eyed one of my belongings. One eyed my bed near the window that overlooked the water where frogs lived and asparagus grew on the shore. Another eyed my green jacket bought with borrowed money, poker cards, a fishing net, my wicker chair with the damaged back. Another whistled my favorite tune: "What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” without reaching the refrain. And yet another envied the basement —that place I occupied in my father’s heart—  with its elm door hanging by a single hinge.   But the time hasn't come to leave home just yet, until your own brother begins to use your shaving kit and dreams of the same girl.     10. What shaving kit? Antarctica makes you grow a double-beard as if you were a hundred-year-old grave. And, while you remember wasting time waiting in line at  barber's another beard grows, a red one.   Here, each body part works for itself: the stomach, hands, intestines, eyes. . . The unity of the body is overestimated, too.   Only skin pulls everything together like a sled. The skin? Which skin? Man loses his first skin to his first love, like the snake early in spring on a thorn-apple bush that blocks the way. From that point on he stops counting the rest.   11.  I don’t know why it was named “Elephant Island,” when it answered the ocean with the cries of a she-wolf. We could only make out her sly teats under her belly. After  some time, if she didn’t kill us first, we’d begin to cry like wolves ourselves.   Twenty-two people. Packed next to one another under two  inverted boats like notes in Bach’s “Come, Sweet Death, Come Blessed Rest,” with more pauses, a dramatic suffocation between breaths. A dry, calcic cough was a sign of life. Or the delirious mutterings  of someone dreaming aloud of “ice” in the middle of ice, after they had cut off his toes.   But the hardest moment arrives in the morning, when, with shut eyes and plugged nostrils, as if drinking your own urine you recycle the same lie for four months straight: “Men, pack up your stuff! The boss might arrive today!”   And they obeyed me. Packed carefully each day from the start, leaving nothing shap in the folds of their bags, nothing that would spoil the line between fact and fiction.   It was a time when routine grew more powerful than hope.     12. Fish in the ocean toyed with our citizenship. On the seventh mile, we left our medals behind, class ranks, along with the dogs, potatoes, and a camera. We made fire out of money and kept only a single metal coin each so that archaeologists might trace us more easily centuries later. On Elephant Island, we had to bid farewell even to tobacco, tobacco which reminded us of village alleyways and walks home after midnight.   Time glided above us without touching a single strand of our  hair— nonexistent, as if gliding above ancient cities, exposing the solemnity of our white bones and crickets on absent walls.   That’s when the ten commandments deserted us: “Do not steal,” “Do not lie,” “Do not covet,” “Honor your parents”. . . save one of them perhaps, the one about the holiness of Sunday.   We already had nothing. We belonged to no one. An entirely new species: HOMO ANTARCTICUS. A scientific proof that “forgotten” and “free” mean the same thing.     13. Two years after returning from the world of the dead, you find your house taken over by another tenant and the rent tripled, the commemorative plaque nailed to the gate: “Here lived F.W.” And your lover, or better, ex-lover, for the same reason, in the arms of another three times more handsome.   You see your own image sold at an auction. Artifact. Original. “Brrramp. Sold!” The price so high you can’t afford it. But even if you could, you're an illegal customer, holding a death certificate in your hand.   And you find your parents turned into winter trees their eyes fixed on a large cloud of plaster. They don’t expect visitors. Best not disturb them. Let their leaves fall quietly where they will let the crow's nest remain in the armpit of a branch, where it has always been.   Perhaps you should take a shortcut, start over. Or you know what? There’s a war going on nearby, they say. Go there instead! But this time die better.     14. War’s never satisfied with flesh; Fresh, branded, smoked, with or without blood blue blood, dark, thick, whatever kind. And frozen blood like yours could store at minus 40 degrees Celsius, viruses from 1914 unscathed, and the map of the old Empire  and Scott's hurt ego  and old coins minted with the head of Edward VII, and Browning’s poetry and the epic of the unknown, like an envelope inside an envelope, all making you the ideal candidate.   Back on the ship, ammunition everywhere, sailing through the cold Northern seas where you had to learn a new language. A new language is like a fish: first, you need to remove its spine in order to chew it.   Unlike in Antarctica, one’s purpose in war is clear: kill or be killed, though sometimes it’s the same difference.   Baltic nights gave you what Antarctica refused you: the other half of the celestial sphere. You meet Vera, the widow of a tea plantation owner, a character out of a Baroque novel, her pupils blurred with dusk, and the ritual of mourning fitted perfectly to her body like a final journey.      15. A man charmed by a glacier, who knows too well the flawless forms of her body, feels her eavesdropping gaze even when asleep, her clean and distant breath and her heart, a piece of ice, that melts inside a cigarette case heated for drinking water, finds it difficult to marry a real woman, to marry Vera. And Africa.   I bought land. Barren. Hundreds of acres. In Zululand. I didn’t fare well with tobacco. Planted cotton instead, chose bodily peace rather than meditation. My nearest neighbor lived 45 miles away. White, of course. And my fate, never blended with the blacks, those beautiful statues, wrapped in straw. I heard them nod off during lunch break, like the oars of a boat, in complete sync. They knew where they were heading. But I didn’t.   And I was right. It didn’t take long before drought, floods, worms destroyed everything. The bank left me only my own beard and the malarial shadow of a baobab. Apart from other things, Vera filled out divorce papers. The woman in the yellow dress, yellow as quinine, yellow as the sigh of a hinge at dusk, the woman married to the hero who now can’t even manage a small plot of land.     16. The man in front of me —my master I call "Boss"— is newly shaved, and dressed in a striped tie and jacket as if the Prince of Wales or Fred Astaire, a style that arrives here two years late. He asks me to serve whiskey to clients at the bar and chat them up using their jargon, gestures, sentences uninterrupted by mosquitoes, and the abstract rhetoric of the Depression years. And, to be frank, he pays me for the latter.   But what do I know, what does a survivor know about the art of living, for which new instincts are needed, new muscles and other kinds of heart valves?   Furthermore, how can I obey such a spick-and-span boss, having known the smoky gods of Antarctica who recognize each other solely by the nose and can end rebellions with a glance and count the deaths as members of the crew? How can I take orders from a boss whose name isn't Shackleton?     17. "Second in command,” “Lieutenant,” “Shackleton’s right hand”   What did she see so clearly in me, my drama teacher in elementary school when she'd always assign me the role of Father Joseph, of Gaspar the Magi offering Jesus frankincense, or of John the Baptist always there to clear the path? What did she see in my metallic pupils, baritone voice,  infrequent speech as if scissors, bandage, and iodine inside a first aid kit?   Under Antarctica's naked sky, each of us followed his own star. Even the carpenter, his own heraldic calling. You didn’t need much to feed them;  just a few crusts of insomnia and the tents' punctured holes.   My star was weak; you could hardly see it hidden behind another larger, troubled star like a calm valley that appears behind jagged peaks more attractive when absent.     18. What happened afterward can be told in a few words: I worked in a mine; earth’s warm heart, happened to be crueler than her frozen brain. I laid railroad tracks South, always toward the Unknown. It was like playing only two strings on a violin: joy and sorrow, fatefully blending at the horizon.   I repaired houses. Another waste of time. I never understood their weak points, just as you can't make out eyes from genitals or mouth in some underwater creatures.   And when I was left penniless, I gave lectures about Antarctica, water gurgling in my gullet every five words, for those few who listened patiently to an adventure of survival.   Then Bea arrived. Or sweet Beatrice. It was easy to grant her what I had left in my heart —that set of heavy museum keys— with no fear she might lose them.   Tired lungs and liver could barely follow my split image of bust and bottle of booze. Like a prophet in the last circle of Dante’s Inferno, I carried my own decapitated head in hand.   My ashes were lost at the base of a church. No one  thought of them. It was a time of war. Another world war. The second one not knowing what to do with her own ashes either.   19. Some of us died in the war. Others took to the sea again, the gray, cracked waters of the South, decks perspiring fuel and alcohol. Our random itineraries. Full-time melancholics.   For months in Antarctica, we waited for our shadow to return and consumed that question you ask yourself only once in your  lifetime, the way one consumes chickenpox.   And the rest of the time, we counted the scars left on our faces, with a gesture you could call indifferent and epic, or childlike.
Last time I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez  A 17 year old brown queer // who was sleeping in their car Yesterday I saw myself die again // Fifty times I died in Orlando // &  I remember reading // Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before he passed I was studying at NYU // where he was teaching // where he wrote shit  That made me feel like a queer brown survival was possible // But he didn’t Survive & now // on the dancefloor // in the restroom // on the news // in my chest  There are another fifty bodies that look like mine // & are Dead // & I’ve been marching for Black Lives & talking about police brutality  Against Native communities too // for years now // but this morning I feel it // I really feel it again // How can we imagine ourselves // We being black native  Today // Brown people // How can we imagine ourselves When All the Dead Boys Look Like Us? // Once I asked my nephew where he wanted  To go to College // What career he would like // as if The whole world was his for the choosing // Once he answered me without fearing  Tombstones or cages or the hands from a father // The hands of my lover Yesterday praised my whole body // Made angels from my lips // Ave Maria  Full of Grace // He propped me up like the roof of a cathedral // in NYC Before we opened the news & read // & read about people who think two brown queers  Can’t build cathedrals // only cemeteries // & each time we kiss A funeral plot opens // In the bedroom I accept his kiss // & I lose my reflection  I’m tired of writing this poem // but I want to say one last word about Yesterday // my father called // I heard him cry for only the second time in my life  He sounded like he loved me // it’s something I’m rarely able to hear & I hope // if anything // his sound is what my body remembers first.
Work out. Ten laps. Chin ups. Look good.   Steam room. Dress warm. Call home. Fresh air.   Eat right. Rest well. Sweetheart. Safe sex.   Sore throat. Long flu. Hard nodes. Beware.   Test blood. Count cells. Reds thin. Whites low.   Dress warm. Eat well. Short breath. Fatigue.   Night sweats. Dry cough. Loose stools. Weight loss.  Get mad. Fight back. Call home. Rest well. Don't cry. Take charge. No sex. Eat right. Call home. Talk slow. Chin up. No air. Arms wide. Nodes hard. Cough dry. Hold on. Mouth wide. Drink this. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. Breathe in. Breathe in. No air. Black out. White rooms. Head hot. Feet cold. No work. Eat right. CAT scan. Chin up. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. No air. Thin blood. Sore lungs. Mouth dry. Mind gone. Six months? Three weeks? Can't eat. No air. Today? Tonight? It waits. For me. Sweet heart. Don't stop. Breathe in. Breathe out.
You can't fake it. You know when I fail  to achieve the expected: palm the becoming-  comatose bullfrog, legs collapsing as they may, and chuck it (we used to say) high as you can.   Let it fly stone-like to the skylight in the low  dome of fog—another requirement of the game:  a foggy day and a bullfrog and you, Vincent. The old code goes back and forth between us   as we take our turns, childhood pals, engaged  by the game we once called Kamikaze—now,  a nameless ceremony. Nameless not because a boy's play calcifies in a man's conviction;   not because, despite our promise, you've become  a mid-rank fighter pilot, and I a minor poet;  and not because it's too unpleasant to name what brings to hand that astonished muscle   only to leave it, later, sprawled on the current.  The perfect toss sends the critter shattering  for an instant, beyond fog, into the invisible. Disappearance is success. Once you said, "My insides   tickle whenever it happens," and so I know  you've been tickled five times, and I three.  That's the score; the score matters little. The name is gone because we're from here,   and, being native, cannot visit how it is  that an urge to which we tend tends to us—  how we are cruel, inscrutable, indefensible, yet holy. How we send up bodies of praise from   our right hand, only to gather eventual elegies—  flesh stunned still as words—in our left.  Once again the center of the heavens is earth. We've thrown as high as we can   for as long as we can remember, only to await  some return: a revelation, plummet, explosive  splash. So it is that two grown men may stand again in stillness, awaiting word,   friends who glimpse for seconds at a time  earth as it is in heaven, ankle-deep  in Rowan Creek with eyes uplifted, reflecting the fog to the fog itself.
I look for you early, my rock and my refuge,  offering you worship  morning and night; before your vastness I come confused  and afraid, for you see  the thoughts of my heart.   What could the heart and tongue compose,  or spirit’s strength  within me to suit you? But song soothes you and so I’ll give praise  to your being as long  as your breath-in-me moves.
Send your spirit  to revive our corpses, and ripple the longed-for  land again.   The crops come from you;  you’re good to all— and always return  to restore what has been.
all my desire is here before you,  whether or not I speak of it: I'd seek your favor, for an instant, then die—  if only you would grant my wish. I'd place my spirit in your hand,  then sleep—and in that sleep find sweetness.   I wander from you—and die alive;  the closer I cling—I live to die. How to approach I still don't know,  nor on what words I might rely. Instruct me, Lord: advise and guide me.  Free me from my prison of lies.   Teach me while I can bear the affliction—  do not, Lord, despise my plea; before I've become my own burden  and the little I am weighs on me, and against my will, I give in  as worms eat bones that weary of me.   I'll come to the place my forefathers reached,  and by their place of rest find rest. Earth's back to me is foreign;  my one true home is in its dust. Till now my youth has done what it would:  When will I provide for myself?   The world He placed in my heart has kept me  from tending to my end and after. How could I come to serve my Lord,  when I am still desire's prisoner? How could I ask for a place on high,  when I know the worm will be my sister?   How at that end could my heart be glad,  when I do not know what death will bring? Day after day and night after night  reduce the flesh upon me to nothing. Into the winds they'll scatter my spirit.  To dust they'll return the little remaining.   What can I say—with desire my enemy,  from boyhood till now pursuing me: What is Time to me but your Will?  If you're not with me, what will I be? I stand bereft of any virtue:  only your justice and mercy shield me.   But why should I speak, or even aspire?  Lord, before you is all my desire.
Lord of wondrous workings,grant us understanding— now at the hour of closing.   A chosen few are called,  their eyes toward you lifting— they stand exalted in their trembling now, at the hour of closing.   They pour forth their souls;  erase, then, their straying— and grant them, Lord, your absolution now at the hour of closing.   Be a shelter for them  through all their suffering; consign them only to rejoicing now, at the hour of closing.   Show them your compassion,  in your justice turning on all who brought oppression to them— now at the hour of closing.   Recall their fathers’ merit  and count it as merit for them; renew their days as once they were, now, at the hour of closing.   Call for the year of grace—  the remnant flock’s returning to Oholìbah and Oholàh— now at the hour of closing.
For all the pain   passed down the genes   or latent in the very grain   of being; for the lordless   mornings, the smear   of spirit words intuit   and inter; for all   the nightfall neverness   inking into me even now, my prayer   is that a mind blurred   by anxiety or despair   might find here   a trace of peace.
the target is a record of the past history of the target or forever hold your or told you so complacent mention repeats numerous trills in memory sugar and spice in the bag suppressed supposedly on an axis allow for the idea to rest
a bullet has passed through spent the time elsewhere to need, tenderly, potential does not need to be bought, cannot in fact refute the cause, rather catches
I’m waiting for a poem, something rough, not elaborate or out of control, something undisturbed by curses, a white raven released from darkness.   Words that come naturally, without aiming at anything, a bullet without a target, warning shots to the sky in newly occupied lands.   A poem that will well up in my chest   and until it arrives I will listen to my children fighting in the next room and cast my gaze down at the table at an empty glass of milk with a trace of white along its rim my throat wrapped in silver a napkin in a napkin ring waiting for late guests to arrive. . . .
Prisoners guilty or not always look the same when they are released— patriarchs dethroned.   This one just passed through the gate head bowed despite not being tall his gestures like a Bedouin’s entering the tent he carried on his back all day long.   Cotton curtains, stone walls, the smell of burnt lime take him back to the moment the cold war ended.   The other day his sheet was hung up in the courtyard as if to flaunt the blood stain after a wedding night.   Faces tarnished by sun surround him, all eyes and ears: “What did you dream of last night?” A prisoner’s dreams are parchment made sacred by its missing passages.   His sister is still discovering his odd habits: the bits of bread hidden in pockets and under his bed the relentless chopping of wood for winter.   Why this fear? What can be worse than life in prison?   Having choices but being unable to choose.
We lived in the long intolerable called God. We seemed happy.   I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy, donkey dentures,   I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws   I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture   I mean to be mean.   Dear Lord forgive the love I have for you and your fervent servants.   I have so long sojourned Lord among the mild ironies and tolerable gods   that what comes first to mind when I’m of a mind to witness   is muriatic acid eating through the veins   of one whose pains were so great she wanted only out, Lord, out.   She too worshipped you. She too popped her little pill of soul.   Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone is that a prayer that’s every instance answered?   I remember one Wednesday witness told of a time his smack-freaked friends lashed him   to the back of a Brahman bull that bucked and shook until like great bleeding wings the man’s collarbones   exploded out of his skin. Long pause.   “It was then,” the man said, “right then…” Yes. And how long before that man-   turned-deacon-turned-scourge-of-sin began his ruinous and (one would guess) Holy Spirit-less affair?   At what point did this poem abandon even the pretense of prayer?   Imagine a man alive in the long intolerable time made of nothing but rut and rot,   a wormward gaze even to his days’ sudden heavens.   There is the suffering existence answers: it carves from cheeks and choices the faces   we in fact are; and there is the suffering of primal silence,   which seeps and drifts like a long fog that when it lifts   leaves nothing but the same poor sod.   Dear God—
Somehow, I am still here, long after transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared   driving from town to town across Ohio selling things, the music where we danced   just to keep alive. I now understand I was not supposed to leave so soon, half a century   a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed up the hill & now for a moment, like Sisyphus   I watch it roll. I walk through the snow.   I breathe the dirty East Side wind pushing past the Russian church, the scent   of fish & freighters & the refinery filling the hole in my chest—how many years   have piled since I last stumbled out onto the ice & sat down to die.   Only to look up at the geometry of sky—& stood   to face whoever might need me—
When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Baraka  on the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff, more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince.  How back in those drunken days when I still ran in bars & played schoolyard ball  & wagered fives & tens, me & my colleague the psych-prof drove across Eastern Ohio  just to see this kid from powerhouse St. Vincent, grown out of rust-belt-bent-rims, tripped  with the hype & hope & hip hop blaring from his headphones, all rubber soled  & grit as the city which birthed him. We watched him rise that night scoring over 35,  drove back across the quiet cut cornfields & small towns of Ohio, back to the places  where we slept knowing that Jesus had been reborn, black & beautiful with a sweatband crown rimming his brow.  He was so much more than flipping burgers & fries, more than 12-hour shifts at the steel plant in Cleveland.  More than the shut-down mill in Youngstown. More than that kid selling meth in Ashtabula.  He was every kid, every street, every silo, he was white & black & brown & migrant kids working farms.  He was the prince of stutter-step & pause. He was the new King. We knew he was coming back the day after he left  his house in Bath Township. He never sold it. Someone fed his fish for years. Perhaps our hope? Fuck Miami. Leave Wade to wade through the Hurricane rain. LeBron is remembering that woman washing the linoleum floor, that man  punching his punch card. He drives a Camaro, the cool kid Ohio car driving through any Main Street. He is the toll-taker, &  he is the ticket out. He keeps index cards documenting  his opponents’ moves. One leans forward before he drives. One always swipes with his left hand. The details like a preacher  studying the gospel. He studies the game like a mathematician conjugating equations, but when he moves he is a  choreography, a conductor passing the ball like a baton. He is a burst of cinders  at the mill. He is a chorus of children calling his name.  The blistered hands of man stacking boxes in Sandusky, the long wait for work in Lorain. A sapling bends  & reaches in all directions before it becomes a tree. A ball is a key to a lock.  A ball is the opposite of Glock. America who sings your praises,  while tying the rope, everyone waiting for Caesar to fall, back-stabbing media hype city betrayed  by white people with racist signs.  I watch the kids play ball in the Heights, witness this they say. We will rise. I watched  LeBron arrive & leave, I walked, I gave up drinking as he went off & won a ring. The children’s chorus calls out sing  brother, sing. Everything is black. Storm clouds gather out on Lake Erie. But the old flower-hatted women  at the Baptist church are heading out praise cards, registering teenagers to vote. To turn a few words into a sentence. He is a glossary of jam, & yes he is corporate  chugging down green bubbly Sprite, running in Beats head phones, he is Dunkin his donut, he is Nike, witness, ripped.  On a spring day in Akron a  chorus of children is chanting his name on the court by the chain-link fence. He is forged steel, turning his skinny body into  muscle, years of nights lifting, chiseling, cutting, studying. Watching the tape. To make a new kind of sentence. He is passing  out T-shirts, this long hot bloody summer he was returned to the rusted rim along the big lake. He is stutter-step. He is  spinning wheel. He has a cool new hat. He is speaking of dead black children. He is giving his time. To make the crowd  sway like wind through a field of corn.  Does LeBron think of dying?  Does the grape think of dying as it withers on the vine by the lake? Or does it dream of the wine it will become? He is wearing a shirt that says I Can’t Breathe. They said he was arrogant. I said he was just Ohio.  He married his high school sweetheart. Bravado laid out on the court. No back down, he is Biggie with a basketball inside  of a mic, no ballistics, just ballet. He is Miles Davis cool, quietly cerebral, turning his back, tossing up  chalk like blue smoke, blue notes, blues. He is Akron, Columbus, he is heart & Heat turned to lake effect blizzards,  freighters frozen in ice, looking for work & no money to eat. He is Ashtabula & Toledo. He is carrying so many across the  river, up through Marietta.  The grapevines are ripe in Geneva.  He returns, Man-child, Man-strong, Man-smart, Man- mountain, Mansfield to East Akron, minus into Man, or should we  say Mamma raised? Single mother fed, shy child, quiet child who grew, who suffered & taught his body to sing, his  mother worked how many shifts, doing this, doing that, never gave up for her son. He is third shift at the rubber  plant in winter, he is farm hands & auto parts piecework & long nights the men at the bar, eyes on the television.  The lake tonight is black as newly laid asphalt. There are no ellipses. He is turning paragraphs  into chapters. Long ago the hoop Gods made this deal at the crossroads, Old Scratch is flipping the pages  of his program & waiting high in the stands—to belong to a place most people would call  nowhere, to show the world how tough we truly are, twelve-hour shifts at the Rubber plant in Akron. How he is, how  he is a part of this asphalt court we call Ohio, & how we suffer, & how we shine.
In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack cordoned-off spines: he has been granted permission, his agent’s call his pedigree. So the tour itself is only the docent and me. He is docile, eager to please, leads me up the stairs and takes me to the bed.The coverlet is authentic, he says. He lectures me on the heating system, offers an anecdote of a broken casserole, recites all of the Welty lore he has rehearsed. She taught him when he was young, and now he serves her legend, lets me lean in toward the books—I cross the line of what’s allowed, never touching. He shows me photos—two loves lost, one a married man—then on the way down, pauses before a feather in a box, reciting Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He begins to weep at Let her drop, adds,Like Welty’s loves! Now I stop— is he comparing her to the god, or Leda? He cannot bear her, her Unfulfilled Love. I cannot bear this either—how dare he conjure up for her such disappointment, such wasted longing? I want to be the mirror of her photographs, to be her figure of my own conjuring. I want to believe I, too, could be happy here, in this solitary house, in this small town, amidst the rows and stacks of books. Untouched.
When you walked in it was like recognizing   the moon when he returns. His lover bites his cheek; she   has no choice. All we see is the dissolution, then await   the reconstruction. Each time, the sky   yanks her into his orbit. I want to say I’m sorry.   I want to sayYou win. Our bodies are like   the confessional booth these poems are stuck in. Even   the priest can see that sin. You’ll be all spit and honey—   or maybe I’m the poisoned flower gnawing on its own   lip because it has no hands to reach for you. Only words   that are as useless as the pollen for saying anything. I continue   to serve them even with your hands around my throat from across   the room. Your voice is home, I answer it like a bat guided   across the atmosphere. This is a narrative that cannot end   well but wants to, but must. I’ll continue to go down kicking   and you’ll be sweet as anything until you bite back. No, it can’t   end here—we won’t let it. Billions of years have passed   since an asteroid last hit the moon: clearly some   magnetic fields can be sustained.
When you asked if it rained bees or poison you were asking the wrong question. Again.   You still didn’t understand the difference between hurricanes and flooding. Thus between   gods and humans. Between your slum- lordy digs and the shacks I pass that cling   to old boards and huddle around each family. The yards marking the care of home.   Everywhere something is falling on someone and I watch like an autumn   tourist tripping through the Berkshires. I reach to catch a leaf. I try to straighten   a Pisa-like sapling. The wind wraps around us both like a question mark and leaves   me standing, the sole witness on this end. I’m telling you about a place of silence.   You want it all to be a metaphor. I’m watching a front porch crumble. Still, someone sits there.
I. Serious smiles a lot. At least that’s what they say, His Mum and Pop Trying to be proud As all the nurses gather round To squint into the cloud Of little Serious on the ultrasound.It’s likely just the way he’s bent, The head nurse finally thunders Into the awe and argument Swirling through the crowd Where someone mutters half-aloudIn all my years…   Serious never hears. Serious spins and spins With his dumb dolphin grin In the best bed there is, Where there’s no guilt and no sin, No child more inner than this; Nothing to will And nothing to want, No body you both are and haunt; No drug of disappointment Or feeling that there’s never now (Or do these seep in somehow?); No suffering the world’s idiocy   Like a saint its pains; No traffic and no planes; No debts, no taxes, No phones and no faxes; No rockslide of information Called the Internet.   Serious isn’t. Yet.     2. Serious hears a sound. Not unusual, in itself, nothing to be concerned about. Here and there there’s been a shout, A song he seemed to be inside, The weird whale-calls of her gas. This, too, shall pass.   Then it comes again, And with a far-off force Which a shrink less serious than he Will have him dream is a drain That all his impurity Is slowly drifting toward(Down, Serious says, down!)  Beyond which he’ll be clean, Feel no pain…   Then the dark erupts in a rain Of blood and muck He seems to mostly be, Holding on for all he’s worth, Which isn’t much, finally, Little wizened thing Plopping out to an earth Where cries of agony Dwindle to equivocal joy(It’s, it’s…is it a boy?)  And some clear world lies Just beyond the eyes You can’t quite open;   And everything is wet, And loud, and broken; And all of life is one huge tit You’re meant to somehow suck.   Serious staggers to his feet, Slaps himself harder than the doctor did And says, I’m fucked.     3. Serious is learning silence In the way most children learn to speak.Poshlust! He gasps after his first feeding,Götterdämmerung in his first dusk, His whole body writhing with a kind of violence As if the world had wounded him, Words his bleeding.  Anomie, Deus absconditus Drift into the air above his crib;Accursed progenitor, quintessence of dust Dribble with the pap onto his bib; As day by day, and week by week, Serious wrestles with this difficult gift, Forgetting, which, it seems, he is on this earth to do.  Boob, ass, oaf, Riving out of him like greatness going off;Ninny, crackpate, clunkhead, gorm, Leaving him gasping and bent;fragments, sheep, rabble, All falling, falling from him Backwards into babble...   Finally Serious lies there, spent, Language like some immense ghostly mobile Bobbing just above his bed, All power of movement gone as well:   Useless little buglike arms, buglike little fingers, This heavy, heavy head.   And now if there’s something Serious can’t quite taste, Or if he feels too acutely his own waste, Or knows too acutely what he can’t tell, He screams and screams Until the world knows what Serious means.     4. Serious goes to school.Just try it, his Mum says As she lets go his hand And wipes a last glaze Of doughnut from his nose, And Serious, insofar as Serious can, Does give it a good try, Though it’s hard to understand Why they keep taking a break From taking breaks, or why They can’t simply walk In line down the hall, Or what, finally, is at stake In a game of kickball.   It’s time to draw a tree. What a relief to work alone, Serious thinks, as he picks a scab For just the right tinge of sky, Breaks his sugar cookie To make a place of stone, And fashions out of bread A man with a huge head And huge, ruined wings, Gasping at all the ruined things To which he’s tumbled. And calls it: Cookie, Crumbled.  Oh my, the teacher says When she walks by,Those are interesting trees.  Serious closes his eyes and sees As in a vision of doom Himself drowning in schools, A whole ocean of fools Nipping, nipping at him With their tiny, tiny teeth. And Serious sighs With a prophet’s wisdom As he climbs up into his seat, Stares out across the room And like a prophet cries:You’re all going to die!   The class is a tomb. Serious, rigid, waits. A girl in pigtails giggles, Then another near the back. And as if along a fuse The giggling goes Up and down the rows Till someone makes a crack About his coat and tie And the laughter detonates.   Serious climbs slowly down Into that inferno of sound Which the teacher’s shouts Are only driving higher, Packs up his lunchbox, his dignity, And his copy of Sartre,   And strides with a prophet’s gaze Through all that derisive fire. Only once does he turn, Briefly, to look back through the blaze At the iron fact of his art, Smaller from here, but unburned.     5. Serious loves his Mum. And then he doesn’t, quite. It’s that way with everything— Baths and plums, The blessèd silence of night.  Would you like to help with this? His mother asks As she rolls out biscuit dough And cuts it with a glass Or folds the clothes Still warm from the sun. But Serious knows He was born with a task, And though he touches the clothes And tastes the dough, Serious says, No.   Serious stays in the bath Until his skin is shriveled and cold, Eats himself sick on plums, Feels in the dark The dark he becomes, And cries out in the night for his Mum.     6. Serious is older now. He just is.Thank God, Serious says, For whom childhood, that stupid carousel that never stops, Always had an element of disingenuousness: The tristesse of lollipops, The sham of naps; Fools dandling you on their laps So you can play horsey, which damn sure isn’t serious; And all that endless business Of pretending to be curious About the most obvious things: What’s night? Where’s Mama-Cat? What’s wrong with Pop? Can God die? Why, why, why?   To hell with that, Serious thinks, as he sits incinerating memories One by one, Saying their names as he feeds them Like photographs to a fire: Here he is in a baseball uniform Squinting back the sun; Here in a blue tuxedo with a ruffled front; And here, Lord, with pimples. He pauses a moment. Do memories have names? And what, exactly, are these flames? To hell with that! Done.   Serious owns a car, pays taxes, Contemplates a pension, Has a crease of gray along his temples, But he is young, young. He develops headaches, begins sleeping badly, and relaxes, You might say, into the constant tension That he really always was, With far, far too much to do To look anywhere but onward, Or to answer the questions of a child With anything true.     7. Serious isn’t Stupid, Though they go to the same gym. Serious sees him dropping weights Or picking his butt and thinks, At least I’m not him. Nor is he Mean or Vain, Those chiseled twins With matching boots and belts, Nor Smug who notes their sins, Nor Shallow noting something else; He isn’t useless Timid Who no matter what won’t complain, Nor fat-assed Nice sweating honey On all the machines, Nor Self-Loathing who smudges mirrors, Nor Whacked who licks them clean. Serious isn’t Funny.   Serious spreads his towel on the bench, Sits down in front of his own image, And Serious strains at a serious weight. And never, not once, when he’s seen In myriad mirrors around the room That everyone else is straining too, Has he caught himself too late And finished with a roar And more strength Than he’s ever had before:I AM NOT YOU!     8. Serious has a date with Doom. It’s not the first, and seems unlikely to be the last, For they get on quite well, Doom and he, Share similar pasts And similar ideas about what life should be. It seems, in fact, that this might just bloom.   And what a relief. After Morose and Mad and Neurotic; After almost falling for Grief, Who was so exotic She made all the others seem tame. Then to discover she even lied about her name. And to sleep with another Serious! That was odd, Like wrestling with an angel, Though it was hard to tell from that rough unsated tangle Which one was Serious, and which one God.   But how easy it is to be himself with Doom, Serious thinks, as he puts the wine in to chill And sets two glasses on a tray, Who always wants whatever Serious wants And always agrees with what he has to say; Who doesn’t need to hear that whole spiel About “going too fast” or “needing more room”; And who doesn’t probe and pry that long needle into his brain —What do you feel? What do you feel?— Until it’s all Serious can do not to stand up and scream: Pain!   Lucky to be alive. And if he still has no clear idea where she lives, And never knows quite when she’ll arrive, Still, something about Doom feels right To Serious, and he looks forward to their dates. He checks himself in the mirror, dims the light, And waits.     9. Serious is a traveler. “Traveling broadens the mind,” The man beside him says, His tray table down and seat reclined Even as they're taking off, And Serious, who has his eyes closed So he can do what Serious does, Begins to cough.    What do they say, what do they fear,   Is this song joy or grief?   This is a man, this is a god.   Who are you and why are you here?   To leave, to leave.   The meal is over, Which Serious declined. In the shell-roar of the cabin He eases somewhat, is surprised to find He could almost drift away. “What line of work are you in?” He hears the man beside him say, And Serious begins coughing wildly again.    What is that smell, what was that sound,   Isn’t that ice on the wings?   This is the air, there is the water,   But what do you do on the way down?   You scream, you scream.   How far they must have gone by now, That old familiar world miles behind, The man eats an orange, And now he eats the rind. He eats his plate, his plastic fork, chews With animal relish his Styrofoam cup, Leans over to eat bittersweet Serious too, Who startles and wakes up.    Look at the desert, look at the green,   Is there an end to that ice?   Here is a place, and here is a place,   But what is the space between?   It’s life, it’s life.     10. Serious is married. What a weird wind this is, He thinks, so still at times, Then stinging the eyes to tears. And how he seems both more and less Himself, and how it seems at once all of loneliness And something he can hold. Or is it he who's being carried? He shivers, and reaches out for her again. Or is it she who reaches, she who's cold? What is this wind? Where are these years?     11. Serious experiences loss. Just like that. Flat. Serious experiences loss,   As if he’d come to some sheer cliff There was no way around, No way to cross, And found, On the other side Of a deep canyon, himself, Experiencing loss.   Serious, when the man is gone, Tells himself that he tried, Tells himself that he cried and cried For all he was worth To the man sitting on the other side Experiencing loss, Who one day simply vanished, or moved on, Or slipped off the edge of the earth And died.     12. Serious doesn’t speak French. This embarrasses Serious, Because insofar as he lives anywhere, Serious lives in Paris.   He feels the city stare, Feels himself sweat, and shake, as he tries to wrench The little that he’s gleaned Into the lot that he desires; Feels shopkeepers look at him as if he were a liar, Waiters as if he were unclean;   And feels, in truth, not at all serious, As if he had a huge balloon for a head And helium squeaks for a voice, As if gravity could be merely a choice He were making, and he might instead Simply stop, let go, and drift away.   Finally Serious, opposed to epiphanies, Has one he can’t resist. He is Serious, and to be Serious Is to know something utterly or not at all, And to know, moreover, That as you let your half-knowledge fall From you, it does not exist.   Just like that Serious is himself again, Saying weighty things About the flowers in the stalls, Pondering a splendid mirage Called the Seine.   And if he wakes saying fromage, Or in some shop feels Right on the verge of translating please, Serious knows it’s a dream, And knows from childhood what to do. Point and scream Until the damn fools give you cheese.     13. Serious has some culture. He knows some things. And if, as he begins to speak, He should feel the immense wings Of ignorance shadowing him, that dirty vulture That squawks in drawl and drips tobacco juice, Serious knows what shelter to seek.   Pick a name and Bach is better. Modernism was powerful but diffuse. Life’s drained out of pictures since the Renaissance. Technique! Technique! Technique! And about all that spastic flatulence Called contemporary art, Well, Serious hardly knows where to start.   Serious sits through opera without a yawn, Chews up books on which weaker teeth would shatter; He can tell you where one brushstroke lies, List the reasons courtly love is gone, Pluck the speck of subject matter From Henry James. Serious knows some things.   He thinks and thinks and thinks Until his ignorance shrinks To the tiniest of flies Alighting somewhere in the Louvre. Carefully, carefully, Serious creeps With his massive swatter, Saying, Don’t move. Don’t move.     14. Serious believes in nothing. It’s a nice day, what should we do? What are you thinking? What’s been bothering you? What’s that you’re drinking?   Serious spreads the paper on his lap To confirm what’s new under the sun, Hears a tap, tap, tap  Against the windowpane.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Floats up from childhood like a bit of ash, And Serious, pausing, can almost see His old preacher, that atom bomb of idiocy Who every Sunday would explode. Still, Serious thinks, there’s a truth to set you free. But who could survive the blast?  Tap, tap, tap.   Serious skims the sports pages, Reads about a storm that rages Far out at sea. Some talking dog is taking office, Some country wiping out monuments, expunging its past.  Tap, tap, tap.  Goddammit, Serious says, midway through a war, And thinks again of that old bore Who talked and talked and talked Until you felt your head loll and sway Like some huge flower on a tiny stalk That one good breeze would break;   And how you’d see him afterwards eating chicken fried steak, Chicken fried man, With a tiny transistor radio in his hand So he could listen to the football game; And how his face seethed and writhed with what seemed pain If he saw you coming to his booth, And he stared off as if some great truth Were finally, finally coming clear in that chicken fried brain And like a prophet he was going to stand up and shout— Until what plopped innocuously out Was your own name.  Tap, tap, tap.   Serious puts aside the news of the day And walks to the only window there is. But there’s no wind, not even the grass stirs. And anyway, there’s no tree. Serious shrugs and turns away. Must just be me.     13. Serious sees a child In the playground across the street, Sees his huge stupid head and huge stupid feet As he tries to keep up with the games, And hears his sonar screams Of delight amid the other children's screams, And hears his timid weeping when they call him names.   Serious sees the child standing apart sometimes Driveling to himself in silly rhymes, And sees him pretend to look intently at the sky If Serious walks by, Or sees him simply stop and stare.   Gradually Serious starts seeing the child everywhere, In a store standing in an aisle, In the subway while Serious is trying to work on the way home, Or laughing with his family in a restaurant Where Serious eats alone.   Serious knows the truth. This child wants something, his whole nature is want. And it begins to be annoying, This novice cringing, all the imbecilic and cloying Tactics of being cute, The whole hangdog way he has of panhandling pity With his freckles and his missing tooth, Sitting all fidgety in his Sunday suit Or babbling happily as he’s leaking snot;   And then the air he suddenly puts on of being serious When it’s so obvious he’s not.   Serious sees the child in the playground Standing to the side, Sees his face whiten and his eyes go wide As Serious crosses the street and strides Until his shadow swallows the child And leans down close enough for them to kiss.I don’t have time for this, Serious says,I’ve got too much to do.   And the child says, Who are you?     16. Serious kills himself.No, no, Shivering out of a dream, Starlight and the hard glitter Under the bridge’s beam, Serious, Serious, Don’t go.   Serious crawls out of bed, Feels the cold in the floor And thinks, suddenly, of lovely Mad (Where can she be?) Who’d bolt out of sleep and screamFarmers get up at four! It’s three.   Serious makes himself a cup of coffee, Which he doesn’t drink; Tries and fails to read, Tries and fails to think. Serious sits, and holds himself still, Minute by minute; Until the dawn finally comes And he is in it.     17. Serious lives alone. It’s better this way, he tells himself, As he takes a pan from the pan shelf, A spatula from the spatula drawer, And fries two eggs the way he likes them: Yolks of stone.   No more gnats of chatter over breakfast. No more breakfast. It’s noon. No one prancing by with only panties on When he’s almost, almost broken through, Or singsonging outside his doorSerious, O Serious, where are you? No more!   But what, finally, does Serious do? He sits, ignores the ringing phone, Looks at a wall On one of the last warm days of the year, And settles back into the lifelong call Of being serious, Which is to see, within that whiteness, Leaves being gently blown, And to feel their colors as they fall.     18. Serious gives a speech. He sets his papers on the podium, His glass within easy reach,Tap, tap, taps the microphone. How vast this venue is. How absolute this darkness.  To be serious is to be alone! Serious cries out with a triumphant look on his face, Waiting for the echoes to end Out there in all that space, Which the words at once define and extend. It takes a while, but they do die. The spotlight lasers in. He blinks hard, starts again.  To know in every hand another’s touch, To hear a silence words only intensify, To feel not too little but too much This attenuated world—   Serious begins to sweat, Feels the back of his shirt grow wet; Looks down to see his papers swirled And scattered, the glass on the floor, broken. What’s with this fucking light, he thinks, Or was it spoken? He glares out at the dark, impassive crowd And as if by force he could make them wake Hears his voice growing loud:  Whatever you most treasure you will break, Whatever you hold closest you will let go, There is no place that you will not leave! But to be serious—  Serious says, Quietly now, because he has them, they are his—  To be serious, to be truly serious, is to know That what you call your losses you cannot grieve, For it was never quite these things that you wanted—This treasure, this touch, this one place—But by such life to be haunted.   Brilliant! No notes, no flaws. Serious stands back and waits for applause. The hall is silent, utterly silent, The heat tropic.   Serious looks around, confused, Turns to the man who introduced him Then can’t remember being introduced; And even given his credentials, This suddenly seems a most unlikely topic.   Serious tries to get out of the light, But the light goes where Serious goes. He blunders to the edge of the stage, A cliff Breaking off into a dark in which there's no movement, no voices, not one sigh.   Serious feels the rage Draining out of him, and feels a chill, and whispers,Where am I?     19. Serious nears an end. It’s cold and getting colder, And Serious, older, Sits outside thinking of his good friend, Who like so much of Serious is gone, And thinking of that godforsaken dawn After the one night of his life he spent outdoors.  Tell me, His good friend said When Serious staggered out to the fire,Which form would you say is higher,Tragedy or comedy?   And Serious, who had stumbled full-bladdered In the night from a dream of bears, Then dreamed himself the object Of a dozen hungry stares, Who had swiveled, pissed into the tent, And sworn such things it would take a life to repent, Serious, exhausted Serious, Was silent.  Because it’s been troubling me,Serious, that the answer can only be tragedy.To be conscious is to be conscious ofLosing whatever it is that you most love,And thus an art that's truly greatWill always have one deepest truth to tell,Which is, my friend, this life is hell.   Serious looks at the sky. It’s late. A small wind blows The trees, and Serious, shivering, knows He should head inside, That he is not well. But sitting here, letting his eyes close, Serious can almost see that lake Aflame with the early sun, and smell The sweet burn of that wood, And feel the way it seemed his heart would surely break Were it not for the strange lightness in his head As his friend smiled and said,But maybe earth is the heaven of the good.     20. Serious talks to God. There’s no one else left. His mind is mash, His world is ash, And Serious occasionally forgets himself, Though he is not, not Bereft, That sniveling idiot two doors down Who sits up late With only ashes in the grate And talks to God.  See? Serious says. See?Nothing. Serious spreads his arms magnanimously As if to give God the floor. God declines.Thou know’st the first time that we smell the airWe wawl and cry, Serious says, louder than before.And then we wawl and cry some more,And then we die,And then we rot! Again he waits in case There’s disagreement. There’s not.   Serious scoffs, goes to brush his teeth, Forgets briefly to avert his eye From the mirror’s glare And finds his father there,   That gentle baffled man Who, when there was no hope, When he couldn’t even stand, Carved from a piece of soap A silly yellow duck And set it in a little yellow dish. Serious feels a tingling in his hair And mutters something close to a prayer,I wish, I wish...   The lights go out.Goddammit, Serious shouts As he trips and falls To his knees on the floor, Banging his head on the door As he tries to rise.GodDAMMIT! Serious cries.   The lights come on. His father’s gone, But there, at the edge of the sink, Balances the little duck in the little dish No serious person would ever keep. Serious tries to think, Steadies himself as if at some brink, Decides he needs sleep, That’s what he needs, Crawling fully clothed into his bed And pulling the covers to his chin Because, it seems, there’s some strange wind   That’s somehow gotten inside. So unlike Serious, To leave a door unclosed.   Yet here it is, gathering strength As it blows his books On the floor and it blows Right through his body and it blows Behind and below and above And out of the whirlwind a voice cries    Love  What? Serious says, as he tries To sit upright and looks Wildly around him, Raising his fist in the air.The things...I have lost—   Immediately he is tossed Back against the wall By the force of a storm That has no source, no form, And hears again the call Out of nowhere:    Love  My God! Serious screams, Unable to help himself,What maundering politician,What decerebrated pop star, What stupid puling poet Couldn’t tell me that?  Struggling to get out of bed He starts to cough, then choke, A riot in his heart, A riot in his head As he falls off the edge to the floor.Who do you think you are,  He gasps. Is this... Is this some sort of JOKE?   Suddenly the strange wind is quiet, But no less strange the calm that comes after.  I’m serious, the voice says.   And Serious dies of laughter.     EPILOGUE The dead man’s famous. No one now remembers him alive, Or knows his name, or anything he did. Still, a few stories survive After all this while Of a weird-looking man With a weird-looking smile That had, it’s said, Almost a kind of life to it, Though the man was seriously dead.   And some remember how all the flies Vanished for miles; And some say no, no, but the buzzards had weird smiles As if they knew something. And some tell of an old woman Who would come and whisper in the dead man’s ear, And smooth the dead man’s hair, And if the door opened, disappear. There are even stories of that grim mortician Who thought the smile undignified And tugged and tugged so hard He slipped and fell inside Right on top of the dead man, Whose lips, he swore, seemed to soften, Seemed to somehow kiss. And some remember this: Before the lid was sealed on that coffin And the nails driven, There were on that face real tears. And some say he smiled like a man forgiven.   The dead man never hears. The dead man spins and spins With his dumb dolphin grin Through all the places where he is When people talk of him again: In classrooms or in planes, In boredom or in pain; In front of screens Or in the spotlight’s glare; In days too mild to bear And in the long nights where The dark grows steep, The wind wild, And a mother rises from her sleep To calm her serious child.
It is not pain that holds me back, but time With its sad prefigurations and smell,­­­ Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime. Even now, without a future, I tell Myself lies in future tense. As my hair Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan. The falling world finds pleasure in despair Because to suffer means to be alone, And I suffer through all the accidents Of change as though I were settling a score, As if to disinvent what death invents. I once built a castle, now I do chores. To pass the time I rearrange my things. To fall asleep I recite names of kings.
Love of air and water Joined in apprehension, Perhaps you know what's there By way of fear, for while   Living in pursuit of And going always forth Toward something that trembles. Its knowledge is your mind.   What do you think about The great ocean's sullen Aristocrats—these small Headaches and dark affairs   That bathe themselves in your Staging grounds, where you go To contemplate how what You want became your mind?   The black oblivion Offers no reprieve for You, hunter—in its keep Your ears have grown too sharp,   So sharp you almost hear Your own heartbeat over The subtle whispers of Water’s dismal gardens.   Everything about you Is overblown, even Your mouth is uniquely Talented at its tasks,   Gathering for slaughter Animals in their sleep, Speaking without a sound. Noah had seven laws,   You have only one—eat To build life out of death, Survive above all things. The fatalistic moon   Filtered down upon you Seems an imitation Of lives you will not live. Would you be its hero?   Would you call out against The morning’s weaving light That shames the night before The passing of its cool?   Would you be at the beach When the invisible Becomes a glow, to surprise? Inland, workers dreaming   Of unitarian Proposals lose no sleep To fear about your mouth. It is their wayward friends,   Who wandered too far west Into fevered chaos, That wake up with your name As screams exploding dreams.   The inland ether holds Clouds in your dismal shape. Lucky are those who know Nothing, who cannot see   Hell outlined in vapor. Somewhere a piano Plays a sorrowful song Half-written by the hate   That a grieving loved one Would stick into your heart. Such are the arts of men. Beware. Your time is near.   Someone has learned lessons You didn’t mean to teach. A crowd is gathering. Your skull is their kingdom.
You hold onto life like a hostage. You're deeply embedded. You're an actor slipping into a new script. You're a comma Whose purpose is to mark the moment when prose is suspended, Where begins a poem's pensive silence or some dark drama.   You're a Charles Dickens character in the opium den Of a long life. All you want is to sleep through the nights after Satisfying intercourse, but your mimesis may have been Caught by sexually transmitted diseases. Disaster   Is an evening when you're so hungry every apple core Evokes grocery stores. Being the only one and only, They can't clone or disown you. The only thing you lack is your Adult teeth, beneath the rotten teeth of what makes you lonely.   And the truth is that devolution concurs with disposal Till it emerges, when entourage lobbies for Decalogue, And hype is the new preparation before its proposal, Calling for the removal of all shoes, shirts, and demagogues,   And the zealous anti-Orientalists who refuse to Use anyone's last names first when denying them service at The sperm bank, where the preferred euphemism is "super glue." Remember the joke about the butcher who couldn't get fat?   Rejuvenated vaginas and enhanced penises squeak Thanks to Puritanism gone gaga vis-à-vis bling-bling À la bada bing. People piled up form a sexual peak. Two condoms put up their dukes inside a contraceptive ring.   Champagne is the new organizer for your political Campaign to conceive something tantamount to FASD Of the spirit. Were you surprised or did you wax critical When you emerged from the driveway to your domesticity   Without any disease but your family's questionable Cultural history? Is it such a mystery that your Mediocrity's latently poised to emerge? That you're full Of traditional vulnerability? You'll pace the floor   Until you face (at a number of paces proportional To the gravity of the insults that have been thrown your way) Yourself dressed like a clown. Your brain will halt to urbanely sprawl And then catapult your past beyond your future like a clay   Pigeon across a clear blue sky, toward a lemonade stand At which the theory of other minds attempts to explain Why petroleum prices fluctuate with body count and Meaningful relationships end in kaleidoscopic pain.
I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability. That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention. My love for you is a monolith of try.   The woman I love pays an inordinate amount of attention to large and small objects. She is not described by anything. Because I could not mean anything else, she knows exactly what I mean.   Once upon a time a line saw itself clear to its end. I have seen the shape of happiness. (y=mx+b) I am holding it. It is your hand.
You said I will pull you out of my body in 237 ways. What you wanted was beautifully to sever things. Here love: the same things. changed.   Finally: a taxonomy of afterthoughts. As though you were the one who was sleeping. Breathing in the marrow of would.   You, who are a valley of no, I hear the music leaking. (How she. How she. How I.) You say low key and I do not believe you. I forgive everything: the perseveration of skin.   My hands that are a chopping block and I cannot touch him. I cannot touch him without not touching me.   Because if you leave, and you are already leaving, there are three. But you say less than three. And the couch, in your absence, is crenellated. And who is going to watch us as we leave.   To add to the list of changing things: life preservers are no longer about preservation. They have become less holy. P F D = personal flotation device. Endlessly possible. Unlike wood.   Stacey May Fowles wants a lover who will hit her. (I do not believe in submission.) I want you to erase me. This is a kindness. A kindness you tell me. A kindness I do not deserve.   On the floor. By the bed. Hotel Congress. March 19, 2005. Room #23. We are a long way from disintegrated. You said Now. Look at me. And I did. And you bloomed.   (When my mother died, I will say. Many years after my mother has died. But I will not believe her. I'll be like my grandmother who   despite my parade of girlfriends and her profession that nobody should be mean to them, stilldoesn't believe in being queer.  I don't believe in being dead, I'll tell my dead mother. And just like you she'll repeat herself. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New.)   I expect there will be a morning when you walk up to this very gate while I am sitting here. I know this. I know you less each time I see you.  I know this like I know you are more lonely than glass.   To your languishing. To your bubbly. To your recent. To your hologram. To your desperately. To your seeking. To your dictaphone. To your you.   Neuromuscular facilitation is just another way of saying Vancouver. Always is yet a matter of roller derby. Just in love with you. You, more than sleep.   In the top drawer is a photograph of them touching. It is not so much that it is a photograph. It is that it is a depiction of what. not could.   I want to tell you about my body. About testosterone as unwitting art historian. About recovery. Me(n). What it feels like underneath there. The part you cannot know. but should.   Either way. It's a house. It's a house like everyone else has. I take things away. I don't take them for good.   How delirious must we sound when we are falling.I miss you, you can't even imagine. And how bad at math. Less than three. Less than three. Less than three.   And what if. I completely remember it wrong. What if I remember there were two of us. And then what if. there was only one death.   I do not believe in the existence of holes that lead to nowhere. Muscle memory remains an enigma. Still, you can touch her. You cannot touch her without not touching me.   (And still) you are not not a part of me. The world is uncharacteristically unresponsive. I could thank you. You stay with me. like grass.
Because the only view we have is the one that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective. Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom at the dinner table; polite conversation; lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting a dog's heart won't change the way it thinks. Praise redirected traffic. Praise the gnarled lip that defends the gentle bones. Because your mother was a seahorse. And to think of her thin is to empty all the ice from the tea glasses; to strain the soup by driving it through your hand. Praise tablecloths; sway-back chairs; the plastic folds that protect slice after slice of cheese.
For Alma Banda Goddard my cynical feet ambled prepared for indigestion & blank faces of outrageous innocence knowing I'd have to walk over years of media declaring we're vanished or savage or pitiful or noble My toes twitched when I saw so few brown faces but really when one eats racism every time one goes out one’s door the appeal of talking about it is minuscule I sat with my back to the wall facing the door after I changed the chairs to a circle This doesn't really protect me but I con myself into believing it does One of the first speakers piped upI'm only here because my friend is Black & wantedme to do this with herI've already done300 too many racism workshops Let it be entered into the Book of Stars that I did not kill her or shoot a scathing reply from the hip I let it pass because I could tell she was very interested in taking up all the space with herself & would do it if I said a word They all said something that I could turn into a poem but I got tired & went to sleep behind my interested eyes I've learned that the most important part of these tortures is for them to speak about racism at all Even showing up is heresy because as we all know racism is some vague thing that really doesn't exist or is only the skinheads on a bad day or isn't really a crucial problem not as important certainly as queers being able to marry or get insurance for each other When they turned to me as resident expert on the subject which quite honestly I can't for the life of me understand or make any sense out of I spoke from my feet things I didn't know I knew of our connections of the deadly poison that racism is for all of us Maybe some of them were touched but my bitch voice jumps in to sayNOT MUCH! I heard back that someone thought I was brilliant Does that mean that I speak well Or that she was changed It's only her change I need
For Kelly Morgan ever do is die Her brother was thrown out the window by Black men he was drinking with His cousin was stabbed near the store She got shot Nobody knows where he ended up She hasn’t heard from her brother in 17 years He killed himself when his wife left Her son was hit by a car of drunk whites Her uncle went off a cliff in the dark Her grandmother died in the hospital because they gave her the wrong medicine Her baby was born addicted & died My brother died as a baby Her mother died of an overdose She doesn’t know how her mother died but no one has seen her for a long time She was put in foster care because her parents died in a car wreck I close my eyes & keep praying sometimes there’s nothing to do but brush back the tears & keep on folding the laundry
I can smell the sweet scent of my own sweat as I blow high with the breeze and swing, I pump my legs like a child again my skinny kid’s butt holds me down, keeps me grounded when adults threaten to pull me off. My chain breaks as I tempt to kiss the sun, my knees have a life of their own bending as if my very existence depended on it, and it does, for I’d rather be a nut flying high over people’s heads than on the ground dying touching the earth, staining the water with my unclean mind, my hands washing red off the money so I can sleep off my power trip and back stabbing toys. I was an old soul at five spouting off about the filth of my generation. I knew greed was the root of all evil, competition in close cousin. I had my doubts about civilization as I found it and convinced my sister Tricia to wear flannel jammies zipped to the throat in the summer to protect us from the babysitter’s bloodsucking husband while our parents went out for supper.   July 2, 1998
White-Mexican looks like a Latina, not my label a question from a Guatemalan student who's come undone in my ESL class, doesn't get my kind I try to describe how I grew up in Caucasian corn country surrounded by houses on cul-de-sacs that all looked the same, how we were alone in a town of 5000, one black family, one Indian family, one Asian family, and one household of Mexicans, no two, us and the Renterias to whom we were related by marriage before and after my divorce, and they were mixed; still, it was a good living, happy in our cocooness, our oneness, separated by money one direction color on the other: classes, classes, classes, day and night we took lessons: piano, jazz, tap, ballet, the dance team, trumpet, trombone, tennis, Finishing School, and one awful summer golf; Christened, Confirmed, Cathechismized; it all cut me in several places, molding of head and heart making me ultrasensitive, then and now, an observer of the outside, an outsider among my own kind, my very shade, mysterious aloof black haired beauty who can't speak Spanish, living among blue eyed dyed blond bombshells, who held up her head higher because she's shy not stuck-up, understood, undenied, sacrificed to at any price by my beloved little brown parents who taught me well gave up so much so their daughters could shine and they'd swell with pride at the life they had given us, on Sundays we basked in mutual admiration after mass singing our church songs while making breakfast, according to the unspoken doctrine in our house of: fast first eat later after communion, we intruded with our Mexican music bellowing out the open windows the smell of bacon frying, pancakes baking, coffee and eggs scrambled to order it wafted out on beautiful summer mornings out of our house in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, perched on the highest spot one could reach on the East Side of the street for first and second generation immigrants.   January 25, 2001
Flaunting in the atrium, ostentatious at the gates I saw a shooting star thru a window on Alcatraz Ave & cladding struck up against those who demand We stomach the stick and tend the commode They're selling trees in the paint store! trees in the paint store Datebook chips in the soft skin of our wrists On NBC, CNN, and NPR broken windows are weeping We'll have 35 apples and shrieking in the thickets Aloft in the air golden and golden the dial among the mounds So much is stunted in understanding of what a light can be They storm the scrimmage line and clear-cut bran and germ We want the petal unto itself, the unalterable vessel The arc end of the precipice grows 1.9% annually What was popular music like before the crisis?
Habits accrue in circular pattern and living occasion swollen among what the dead have to teach us   So, ear, be an instrument for thought Tide, bring some little green thing to dust behind my eyes   Touch the hotpoint and drag the tongue over the fat belly of a flapping fish   Sticker book of farm animals Sticker book of ole timey cats What is life and how shall it be governed?   With blind devotion and endurance in the impossible for guts in everything for roots in plain sight   Share a lung Accumulate none Say hello to the crow   There are certain chord progressions one should avoid
Sound of the rain so I know there's constraint sound of the train so I know commerce has not come to a standstill now they raise the barrier now they set it back in place   What coats the bottom of the surface of the sound when the swifts come in when the clerks come home who will bathe the children who will bake the bread   when the luff is tight when the mainsheet starts the boat underway   whatever you do don't let the tongue slip from its moorings   what's that song? love lift us up where we belong   I ate the pill and the pill was real
After a winter of gluttony & grief I'm back on plan for good this time. I’ve ballooned to a specific kind of ugly   the kind you hope to hide with body spray. But it gets worse after a winter of gluttony & grief.   I’ve shown up for meatballs. For lemons whipped to weeping. Now I land my balloon for the specific kind of ugly   salad oil is. Happy date night, darling. Happy coconut water + nutritional yeast. After this winter of gluttony & grief   spring comes, stabbing her hard stem of anger in the throat. Even garlic scapes are flat balloons, their ugliness specific   as my penmanship: green tubes of spice & hate. My body speaks the ugly testament that took all winter. It says: Gluttony & grief balloon, darling. Only kindness is specific.
It's true: I have it though I hardly approve of anything it does.   Supposed bend of light or smudge where two odd angles cross. I hardly see—   can hardly do a thing with it. White zone of no flesh pressing   into no. So low, I can’t scale or measure it. I used to think: OK! A clean sharp place  to keep. Or: I'll growa thing! to keep, for me! But no. It's just a ward   to mark & mount, a loop I lope around with, so I count   myself a realm of realms. I vote & vote. Turns out, we agree   with everything we do, almost. We sweep the precincts   of ourselves: the rooms between each rib & under them   till we reach the fat red condo where our blood leans in.   We live here now. Half heart, half townhouse. Come on down.   Turn on that sweet TV. Our mise en place, our rugs & nooks: we’re full   of stuff. We paint the furniture we couldn’t live without. It’s true   at last: we have it all though we hardly know what any of it does.
I’ll conjure the perfect Easter & we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard— my pink gloves & your green gloves   like parrots from an opera over the earth— We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths. I’ll conjure the perfect Easter   dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair & my pink gloves. Your gloves are green   & transparent like the skin of Christ when He returned, filmed over with moss roses— I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter:   provolone cut from the whole ball woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves   wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead & it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body with my pink gloves, my green gloves.
how can I tell you baby, oh honey, you'll never know the ride the ride of a lowered chevy slithering through the blue dotted night along Riverside Drive Española   poetry rides the wings of a ’59 Impala yes, it does and it points chrome antennae towards   ’Burque stations rocking oldies Van Morrison brown eyed girls Creedence and a bad moon rising over Chimayo   and I guess it also rides on muddy Subarus tuned into new-age radio on the frigid road to Taos on weekend ski trips   yes, baby you and I are two kinds of wheels on the same road   listen, listen to the lonesome humming of the tracks we leave behind
woodstove of my childhood   where potatoes cut like triangle chips were fried in manteca de marrano   woodstove of lazy autumn smoke swirling away to nowhere   woodstove of December evacuating the cold chill at sunrise   woodstove of celebration and mourning   of post-World War II Korea y Vietnam   woodstove corner that kept vigil over drunken nodding remembrance   woodstove corner where uncles primos compadres gathered on visits from Califas   woodstove corner with a warm ear for nostalgia   where Mama Ane stirred the atole and wrung her hands thumb over thumb praying for her children's children's children   woodstove that witnessed six decades washing its face at the vandeja that saw western swing dancing in dim lantern flame   that watched Elvis come in from across the llano strumming a mail-order Stella and singing in Spanish   woodstove of the feast lamb tied up under the crabapple tree   of early sour cherries ripening above the cornstalk horizon   of neighbors bartering a cup of sugar in exchange for mitote and conversation   woodstove of rain tenderly pouring into the afternoon and salt sprinkling onto the patio from the mouth of the porch   woodstove of the nighttime crackling softly   of harmonious harmonica medleys blowing before bedtime prayer   woodstove facing John F. Kennedy's picture on the wall   woodstove of Protestant Sundays ringing without bells   woodstove of dark earth fat worms and acequias   woodstove of 1960s propaganda and all the rich hippies knocking poorly at the screen door   woodstove of private crazy laughter   of woodpeckers pecking through rough-hewn barn timbers only to meet the sky   of rabbits nervously nibbling evening away in the arroyo   of the water bucket banging and splashing all the way home   woodstove of the water drop sizzle   of buñuelos and biscochitos and flour on the chin   of chokecherry jam dropping out from the end of a tortilla   woodstove that heard Mentorcito's violin bringing in the new year   that saw Tío Eliseo bring in an armload of wood   that heard Tío Antonio coming down the road whistling a corrido and swinging his cane   woodstove of the blessed noontime and Grandma Juanita heating up the caldito   woodstove of the sanctified and untamed holy spirit   of the dream awake dreamers prophesizing in the beginning how the end would come   of creaking trochil gates left open forever   of twisted caved-in gallineros rocking in weeping April wind   of abandoned orchards waist deep in desánimo   of teardrops that held back the laughter   of the penitente procession moving through the hills for the soul of the village   woodstove of the wounded faithful proudly concealing their scars   woodstove of armpit farts and bedtime giggles   of pitchforks and axes under the bed in case of intruders   of coffee cans filled with everything but coffee   of ten cents for a cream soda at Corrina's   of strawberry Nehis and a bag of chili chips at Medina's   of a handful of bubble gum acá Santos's   woodstove of genius wisdom dressed up as the village idiot   of hand-me-down stories locked away in the dispensa   of bien loco local heroes cracking homeruns Saturday afternoons en la cañada   woodstove of all that and more of all that disappearing   as children played hide 'n' seek in that abandoned goodtime feeling while stumbling on the footsteps of tradition   woodstove that heard the fall of a people rising in silence   that died of a loneliness without cure that cured itself in the company   of the so many more lonely   woodstove of my childhood
I still see those men haphazardly standing around the comps’ floor, mostly silent, lost in their latest urgent jobs, looking up and down as if nodding yes   from what they call their composers’ sticks as they set inverse words and lines of each page that could be taken for Greek scripture, declaring:   In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made cold type and the Word was coldness, darkness, shiny greyness and light—and the Word dwelt amongst us.    *   Oh, I know these men would laugh this off. They’d say, if they simply didn’t throw their eyes to heaven, that they were just ordinary characters trying to keep the devil from the door,   and with luck have enough left over each week to back a few nags, and go for a few jars. But they can’t say anything or set anything now. They are scattered from that place that’s not   the same any more and many have left any place we know of in this life, calling to mind the old names for printing:The Mysterious Craft or simply The Mystery.    *   I set them up in another city, another country that’s as far away in distance from that city as it’s far in time. But they are still composing,   cracking the odd joke above their sticks and galleys on some floor of some building that is eternally busy inside me even when I’ve forgotten   that I’ve forgotten them; forgetting the world behind the word— every time I read the word world I wonder is it a typo and should I delete the l.    *   Now again I hanker to know the quality of each letter: the weight, the texture, the smell, the shiny new type, the ink-dark shades of old, the different types of type, the various sizes   within the same font, the measures in ems, picas, points and units. I’d set the words up, making something out of all this that stays standing—all set as masterly   as the words those men set that reveal something of the mystery behind and within these letters and the wonder and the darkness, but with the lightest touch.    * And the umpteen ways things can foul up are beyond telling. Maybe the type is off, or the typesetter may not be up to the work, if only out of a hangover   setting an ! where there should be a ? or a b where there should be a d, or miss aspace or a line or dingbat. And the proofreaders don't catch the error,   passing the copy on as clean, or the make-up man fouls the assembly page, or the stoneman errs as he fastens the page of cold type and furniture with the chase, turning the quoin’s key.    *   Not to speak of the evil eye cast by fellow composers ready to knock the words of others, or the bosses writing on the composition: Kill.   Old Shades, keep my words from such eyes and fretting about that pied world and let me go on regardless. And even if I foul up and the stewards are right to set Kill on my last page and my words   are distributed and thrown in the hellbox, the real achievement will be that I tried to set the words right; that I did it with much labor and not without a font of love. But that said,    *   grant me the skill to free the leaden words from the words I set, undo their awkwardness, the weight of each letter of each word so that the words disappear, fall away   or are forgotten and what remains is the metal of feeling and thought behind and beyond the cast of words dissolving in their own ink wash.   Within this solution we find ourselves, meeting only here, through The Mystery, but relieved nonetheless to meet, if only behind the characters of one fly-boy’s words.
I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way   of your ultrasound, scanning the dark   matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say   is chockablock with quarks and squarks, gravitons and gravatini, photons and photinos. Our sprout,    who art there inside the spacecraft   of your Ma, the time capsule of this printout,   hurling and whirling towards us, it’s all daft   on this earth. Our alien who art in the heavens, our Martian, our little green man, we’re anxious    to make contact, to ask divers questions   about the heavendom you hail from, to discuss   the whole shebang of the beginning and end,   the pre-big bang untime before you forget the why and lie of thy first place. And, our friend,    to say Welcome, that we mean no harm, we’d die   for you even, that we pray you’re not here   to subdue us, that we’d put away   our ray guns, missiles, attitude and share our world with you, little big head, if only you stay.
When I was a troubadour When I was an astronaut When I was a pirate You should have seen my closet You would have loved my shoes. Kindly consider my application Even though your position is filled. This is my stash of snow globes This is my favorite whip This is a picture of me with a macaw This is a song I almost could sing. When I was a freight train When I was a satellite When I was a campfire You should have seen the starburst You should have tasted my tomato. I feel sorry for you I’m unqualified This is my finest tube of toothpaste This is when I rode like the raj on a yak This is the gasoline this is the match. When I was Hegel’s dialectic When I was something Rothko forgot When I was moonlight paving the street You should have seen the roiling shore You should have heard the swarm of bees.
Your first dog is ever your one dog And no story has a happy ending anymore. We have all wasted lives, sometimes we waste Our own. Some nights are long ones, some Never end at all. I don’t know how we canfall in love, which implies landing, Whereas love promises everything but. That’s why I like to listen to birds call At dusk to each other from the acacias But then I recall it’s still daylight and I Hear them in the absence of the trees. When I am traveling by train over mountains All I think of is the sea. My father was Never quite so alive until he died and now He’s immortal. Somebody must do the calculus, Somebody must work out the logic of the logic Of this spectacle because spectacle’s the last Word anyone would use for dreams that don’t cease, For the sound of weeping coming from the next room, Only there’s no next room and we’re the only ones There, though just for a moment and a lifetime more. Listen, I will tell you a secret, the secret you told Me once on the train into the mountains On the journey to the shore, a time long ago when We spoke and never met. That secret, which is ours. Some nights are so long the old dog comes home To us who remain there waiting and waiting Even if we’ve never been here before, where we are.
If you care about yourself at all, come to your own aid while   there's still time.   Marcus Aurelius 3.14 Citizen of Rome, you are the center of the universe. Problem is, circumference is—take a guess—me.   “Some things are impatient to be born While others are impatient to die.” Don’t say   I did not warn you. Next time they swear Shit happens, pop them square in the nose.   This will not help anybody, but helping is The farthest thing from my imperial mind.   If you keep your spirit blameless and pure People will drape you with laurels but   No one will have sex with you in backseats Or marble mausoleums or anywhere else,   A small price to pay for honor and respect Though not for me, being an emperor with no clothes.   Just pretend today is the last day of your life And act accordingly—not that such strictures   Apply to Yours Truly, sports fans. The forces of evil march on the fortress   Of your self. I wish I could explain why. But what if evil did not exist and what if   Your self was no fortress, see what I mean? Stoics get a bad name. Not in touch with feelings.  Too rigid. Know-it-all cocksure mothers. So the Stoics retain PR firms, don’t tell a soul.   If you really knew what was good for you, And you do, why do you care I’ll flail you alive?   True, pissing off your emperor is a poor plan, Even one like me mounted bare-assed on a steed.   Once upon a time, children…The story peters out. Circus revels and gladiatorial raves—   Seen one, seem them all. Life is tiresome, When will it end and will we ever notice?   I wish I knew. Really, I wish I cared. My pal, Marcus Aurelius, natters day and night:   “Living is more like wrestling than dancing.” Guess he never saw me take Molly at the club.   And he says we always have the option of Having no opinion. Right. Like he knows.   OK, then, where did I put my pants?
#1 [COLLEGE]   We packed your satchel with sweatshirts, Soccer equipment, and The Elements of Style, Loaded up the Hum Vee, a sad drive to JFK And the cross-country flight to starting college, where fortunately due to Advanced Placement Courses you’ve already been awarded your MFA And published your first book. As we pulled out of the driveway, I slammed On the brakes, and not on account of Jubilation, The neighbor’s cat. “Stacey,” I said, “we have jumped the gun.” “I didn’t know we had a gun, Pops,” you said. “This is a figure of speech, a melonaphore. But you can’t go to college yet, Stacey, you’re barely by my count five years old.” “That’s all right, Daddy-O, nice try. But my name’s not Stacey.”    #2 [PUPPY]   Love this puppy and your love will be repaid. I can’t stress how little this will teach you about life. Which it will. Which is a lot. Sometimes, when you’re sad, I won’t know what to say. Desire will cut into the bone. So much we need to cover before you’re on your own. This is a tea kettle, where goldfish won’t feel at home. When I was your age, before you were born, A war was almost certainly about to break out. The Russians turned out to be just like us, Only worse drivers, which is a lot like us, too. I had a pet once, too, you know. An accordion. Very tough to train, stained with fluids as it was About which nothing further need be said. Your questions matter. No, they really do. I have no clue as to the white carnations, No reason to suppose the stars were not meant for you.    #3 [FISH]   “Do fish sleep?” I am so glad you asked. Once Upon a time fish did not even catnap. Childhood has reached a certain point. More specific than that, I cannot be, Or less. When you drive to Chartres You can see it coming at you far away. Never pass up a cathedral if you can. Drink lots of water with the strawberries. Leap before you look too hard, which makes Things swim in your head, like fish that never sleep.    #4 [BIRDS…]   “Time’s come to talk to you about the birds.” “And the bees?” “What do you know about the bees?” “Was just asking.” “A falcon is one bird you can’t keep in a cage, I can’t explain why, though I might point To history for many instructive precedents.” “You have trouble explaining, Dad.” “Anyway, what I like about birds is, they’re much Like dreams—they fly in through a window Where you didn’t know there was a window before.” “I get it. We open to the known and discover Mysteries left in their place, like putting under the pillow A tooth that fell out and you come up with the cash When you need it in the morning, for school.” “Let’s stay focussed, Amy.” “Sure, Reginald.” “I mind it that you call me Reginald, who’s he?” “Someday, Dad, I may fall in love.” “Let’s go back to the birds. I don’t want to say Love is for the ornithologists, though such thoughts occur. Maybe the real topic is experience.” “I knew that.” “When?” “You told me.” “I never.” “Didn’t have to.” “That’s how, you just know?” “Life’s a vale of tears, Pops, except when it’s not.” “Hence, sweetheart, some birds thrive in cages.” “Name three.” “I want you to try on some wings. I want you to take flight. Like the day I gave birth…” “What?” “The day I gave birth to you was the day of days.” “You feeling OK?” “The epidural worked like a charm, I felt like I was swimming in air.” “I think you’re confused.” “I wouldn’t be the first, but when they handed you to me You nursed till you fell asleep.” “You’re talking about love.” “And some bees sting.”    #5 [BOND]   Once we had a bond, a sacred trust. I carried you on my shoulders, we watched The finches dart and feed, I read The Odyssey  To you, which OK was a stretch, but who cared You did not exist? Certainly, not me. But take the example of Homer. Would you just give me a chance? There’s an old dog called Argus Who waits for the hero to show before he dies. I’m getting to the point. If we never had a dog I would wait for you to arrive from a journey Forced upon you by chance and fate. You see, the whole thing’s about waiting. There you are off-stage readying yourself For a grand entrance into a life none of us Heretofore presumed. I myself ache Barometrically in concert with the coming storms. If you never are, I have something left over Even if it’s only me, watching you wade in, as if You were a great swimmer and this world another shore.
I found my father’s favorite Swiss army knife in a box he sent me with no note, just James Bond videos, nothing else. What was the message?   The message was there wasn’t one.   This world violent, full of sex, the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond double-o-seven-ing in.   Divorced dad Sundays at The Greenwich watching the British Secret Service save the world.   I thought he sent the knife inadvertently, but now I see it was code—   he was boxed in without a knife to cut himself out.
The goal of the Meisner acting technique has often been described   as getting actors to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances."  Here are some acting games we have found useful.  I. THE REPETITION GAME: The Moment is a Tricky Fucker
Prologue Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly,fluttering like a silk-moth behind me  blocking my life, my scenesin whichever stage direction she wants.  Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me,her ringing calls like an imperial decree.  When she sleeps she crashes, like a carinto the guardrail of my ambition.  Her curse like a poison I cannot smell,an asphyxiation of the self by the self, that hell and hard sell.  Split personalities, we dream through the night,of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light,  Not even my husband can feelher there between us—a secret contract under seal.  When I awaken, her irises touch mine;an awful, indecipherable fault line.  She’s a character in search of an author, a devotee,trying to recount her history through me,  until I channel her. She’s like a phantom limb,hymn to the invisible. Her shameless whims,  the subtext of my lies. Under her tinted hairthe forest murmurs, becomes a thought, or prayer.  Until her thoughts tumble into mine;colors bleed. In the morning, I’m overwrought—  My patrilineal kin, she begins to wear thin,when she undoes hospital corners I’ve tucked so gently in.  Her cool white rising is meringue completing—the high-pitched silence of our congealing.  She was always ceremonially unfoldinghis white shirts, unpressing the folds  in my circumstance. I did and didn’t want her. I kepttrying to catch her, then let her slip. Any intent  to have her near made her more invisible. Her electricbreasts overfilled my brassieres. An interaction, our dialectic—  She never removes her hat upon entering the doorto my personality. Ma semblable, ma soeur!
lunatuna  fluttering below belly pasiones swooping  down deep gathering storms  treasuring rainergías pacíficas marítimas, montañescas  abotona tu vientre, maja easles b ready  to capture flight entre tus aguas claras  allow flow  …reflect…  clama la milpa  eye your center cherish thigh  hug torso  b one  with duende within  discover  sun risa raza roja
what for the rush and bloody pain  what for the blooming and the rain  what for the quest and odyssey  what for the swimming and the sea, see  there b no shore or beach that anyone can reach  and breathe, inhale, exhale, and love all seems to ooze the stress that greed has carved in us surely our species should be meek  before our motherearth’s volcanoes  storms and huracanes  tornadoes, floods and tremors and there we b secreting poisons for all leggeds, wingeds, fish and even trees    what for the rush and bloody pain  we’ll surely die, but then    we dig deeper in our heartmindspiritbody and nurture glow and warmth  and light and peace and patience and gladness and gardens  and gather all in oneness and end the pain and bloody rush  desiring naught  expecting naught  missing naught simply being being    we truly have no choice…though   we imagine, dream, hope, want  being all that we are we are all that is  and that is all there b     césar and corky  this b my writ to chávez y gonzález  carnales de las sonrisas grandes  de las carcajadas llenas  de murales  de cuadros, ensayos  matadors de pendejadas  terminators of guandajos and juanabees  hermanos, jefes  your “death” is but our “birth”  porque amasteis  entregasteis y hoy, como siempre,  sois imprescindibles
As the father turns away from the thought of his failure, the hands remove his glasses and rub his eyes over   and over, drying the nonexistent tears. Unknown to the one who is troubled about losing his hair, his fingers stroke   his baldness as he speaks. The body, our constant companion, understands the loneliness of the hostess in her dark   driveway, embracing herself after the guests who promised more and soon have gone, and even visits the old schoolteacher   who reads the same happy ending to each new class, working her toes in her shoes. How could the people of the kingdom   not have known the curse of sorrow was nothing more than a long sleep they had only to wake from? In dreams   the body, which longs for transformation too, suddenly lifts us above the dark roofs of our houses, and far above   the streets of the town, until they seem like any other small things fastened to earth.
In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem   waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind,   shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind,   the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem   the pond’s alive— its beauty (the sudden scintillation of a hundred thousand wavelets)   and music (the percussion of a beaver’s tail) arising from what is. And when the pond   accumulates the darkness, which it loves, it challenges your eyes   to find the light that without darkness you could not see. Wild campsites   you never noticed now appear along the far shore. It’s not only itself   the poem waits for moving line by line into its own dark. It waits for you.
It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itself? Or is God more like us, made in His image—shaking His head because He can’t be expected to keep track of which voice goes with what name and address, He being just one God. Either way, we seem to be left here to discover our losses, everything from car keys to larger items we can’t search our pockets for, destined to face them on our own. Even though the dentist gives us music to listen to and the assistant looks down with her lovely smile, it’s still our tooth he yanks out, leaving a soft spot we ponder with our tongue for days. Left to ourselves, we always go over and over what’s missing— tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop reaching for on the other side of his bed a year later. Then one odd afternoon, watching something as common as the way light from the window lingers over a vase on the table, or how the leaves on his backyard tree change colors all at once in a quick wind, he begins to feel a lightness, as if all his loss has led to finding just this. Only God knows where the feeling came from, or maybe God’s not some knower off on a cloud, but there in the eye, which tears up now at the strangest moments, over the smallest things.
Dawn marks the wall   a thin flange of off-blue   An imagined silence   Always an imagined silence   The speed at which sleep’s fogged dialogue withers   into the present noun-scape   This rift valley   A volley of seasonal beacons   Window where mind   finds orbit    +   All a world can do is appear   The window intones   A room whose walls   warp with sun   What’s seen is dreamed   We think ourselves here
In a patch of sunlight a decapitated grasshopper twitches. The sunlight twitches. Sky the size of a sky imagined.   Squint to see the quarter moon —shallow gash on blue horizon. Squint to hear beyond windows wafting muzak. I’m half-awake   in this field of turned-on particulars. A wreck of yellow blossoms under a barn-door window.   A barn door without the barn.
To imagine a morning   the first sounds from the street   and the house, its halls   scarifying consciousness   Antique glass smudges limbs   (more blue than green)   flared out over a roof   To imagine the raw circumference   of a field as it wakes   what we make of it   where our senses send us     Gray oscillates gray and the mountain   a line lodged within it   gone slack at the end     No need to mention weather   The yard— the measure   An unkempt garden bed convulses   synchronous with traffic   flashing through the fence     Stone bench in a ring of weeds   Shadows ring— a sound   Bees doused in viscous sun, erased
What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door is where it leads to or from. Communication of vessel, vial, capsule, hull, a tiniest nil fires the neurons from their swooning stall, is not a healing but adaptation to same a quickening in deleting of sensation a prior sizing. Stacked leaves (green shadows) are givens in the columned garden, what work is needed to determine that shape? Some hysteric trope of repetition, rage for accretion, dazed by its own mute replication, like the minute lines of a hand. They are its cries (writes Ponge, among others), the tongue inseparable from its utterance (langue). We weep to hear it, a language forgot. I was saying I keep speaking from some chamber sound deleted, which is why I never call or write. In that theatre are many eclipses and moons refracted in pinholes and wheels wherein revolve astonished birds, and the Queen of Night sleeps a rest restorative and profitable, and andante allegro, the dead ships never sail.
1. Bridge’s absence gave the creek a new aspect. Uncrossable, irascible. Crosser stems on the bank with her will and form, extension “Phantom of incapacity which is me.” Bright roar of water, x of indomitability.     2.   The bridge is not an x. It bridges nothing. The turmoil is only a portion.     3.   Bridge on the grass is brideless. Tufts of terra like a bloom in air. Rational slats, a surface’s accretion, slat system. Grass tints it, heliotropic emanation, sharp, up, or complex occupation in shiving rain.     4.   Creek’s uncrossability, a new beauty. “It looked like the process of a thinking, deep run.” It became the suffering of form and mute suggestion. The syllables were not perennial. They broke and grew.     5.   The blue pants of the crosser were neither sky nor water. They orient to the body as form and boundary. The crosser’s green shirt neither grass nor leaf-thought. Desire to not get wet, another hurt.     6.   “Glamour of limit, where the rocks just slant” down the bank, in a wet   stratification, and the creek spills blows and goings and is omniform leaving, a prime of seem.     7.   High water as a contour of relation swells, hurls. The creek which was other but not antipodal, or refusal. “The wish to touch it with my phenomenal hand” loves it as material.     8.   The bridge made the force containable. Bridgeless the crosser sits, and very still. “My phenomenal body crosses and longs.” Ceaseless body of the audible.
with a mournful but driving feel, in Bm, 2/2 time in the dark, in the bitter wind listen to a dream grandmothers stand shoulder to shoulder, on the rim of a hill bend as one, and grasp one thing together ask them, in the dream world, why do they cry? they will show you in reply their shawls of many colours, spread these wings sweep you in, teach you how once a year, in the dark of the year we wash the whole world in a day—for one day, we cry until they're home, until they all are home  from one dawn to the next mourning for the broken wailing for regrets love lost, wrong words, wrong actions unbalanced moments and all the cracks between heart and heart, parent and child lover and beloved friend, nation and nation creature, and creature of another kind for what we choose and what we neglect to choose for what we wish we'd known for each hand unclasped tongue unbridled one whisper falling short of hearduntil they're home, until they are all home  the bread far from the hunger the apology the confusion the broken road    these things we gather in this blanket bone and sand and sage we wash the world, between us hold this blanket, fill it with our tears and when we have cried from one dawn to the next then we will rise, and we will dance until they're home, until they all are home  lay your hands upon the truth of beauty's loss heavy, soft as moss, this blanket full of tears and dust and dying becomes ocean cradle, healing, dark the promise, washed clean by our sorrow today crying out, as we're birthing tomorrow not so much redemption as the law of moon and season calls for justice one day, the lawmakers must exit their echoing halls, fall in with the grandmothers dancing carry it cry it clean until they're home, until they are all home  until light through their bodies translates to rainbows hung over the land until light through their bodies translates to rainbows strung over this land until light through our bodies translates to rainbows shining over our land until we're home, until we all are home
(Skellig Michael) does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world…then (heading back) we were pursued by terrors, ghost from Michael…  George Bernard Shaw  I   The ferry furrows the foam, leaving a wake that quickly settles and forgets us, as it has forgotten all those who’ve opened these waters: fisherman, monk, pilgrim and pagan, some foundering here. Our mainland world diminishes. There is respite. A cloud engulfs us out of nowhere as if the miraculous were about to appear. The veil lifts to reveal the small Skellig and Skellig Michael rising like chapel and cathedral.    II   We forget speech, hypnotized by the climb, concentrating on narrow, rock-hewn steps that spiral up like the gyres of the Book of Kells, whirling in labyrinths of knowledge, turmoil and eternity. They lead to the beehive huts and oratories packed with a congregation of sightseers who whisper in disbelief and reverence at how those sometime monks lived in this wind-tugged cloister of shells.   We browse in each dome’s live absence and picnic above the graveyard that’s no bigger than a currach with a crucifix for helmsman navigating his crew to the island of the dead. We’re eyed by the staunch, monkish puffins. Our tongues loosen, but, in keeping with the somberness of this sun-haloed place, we chat about the world with an earnestness that would embarrass us on the mainland.   You tell of medieval monks charting world maps with countries drawn as humans gorging upon each other’s entangled bodies. We go on to the lands and demons of the world of poetry. I’m flummoxed when you ask what poetry is. I recall how the earliest musical instruments were hewn out of bones, and that poets carve their words out of those gone before. They are the primitive musicians who beat and blow words back to life. More than that I don’t know.    III   […]   That dusk at Dún an Óir we slaughtered even the pregnant, whimpering women methodically while a bloodstained sun drowned in the ocean. Each fetus struggled in the belly of each slain mother as desperately as a lobster dropped in a boiling pot. Had shed blood been ink, I could still be quilling The Faerie Queene, but I did not allow a drop to blot a mere sonnet that you, trapped in complicity, can never quite break free of. Admit it, hypocrite! In your time few are not guilty of slaughter. Even the page you’ll pen this upon is of pine that Amazonians were shot for. I could go on.  (Edmund Spenser) I lifted the pitch of my grief  above the storm-lashing waves for my world breaking on the reefs  of foreign, land-grabbing knaves,   who ignore dependence upon  the lowliest plants and creatures as the hermit crab and cloak anemone  depend on one another.   But no matter what, you must  keen for the world’s theft as I keened mine, despite knowing  soon no one may be left.    (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille) Lend an ear to one of your own kind  and do not let yourself be caught by the winds of lust, like Dante’s starlings  blown this way and that by every gust.   I myself was borne on this wind  as I rode across country, always wary that around the next bend  my life would catch up with me. My rakish ways squandered energy  that I should have instilled in song, more worthy of the muse-gift given to me  than my odd aisling,   Pay particular heed to me, especially  since your word-talent is less than mine. I’m still too bushed to eke out a last line.  (Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Sing up front, cold-shouldering the fashionable low key of your time, closed, cautious and crabbit as a farmer.   Sing as open-throated as my curlew keen. I supped the red wine of Art’s blood as he lay slain, already becoming Cork mud.   Sing as full-throated as my unmatched plaint; matching my words to his cold body that would never again rouse to my touch. My hands wept that day’s icy rain as I swore to undo that kowtowing dribble of a man who slew my Art of the winged white horse.   The spirit of that mare I rode fleeter than any hare, fleeter than any deer, fleeter than the wind through Munster’s open country.   Sing your provenance, our elder province.  (Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill) I sang not for my own or for beauty's sake as much as to keep our spirits fired,  knowing as long as we sang we'd not break,  refusing to allow the country be shired. But it was too much when even our lands turned hostile and drove us like lapwings in the hard winter, together in dying bands, our swollen bellies pregnant with nothing.  Even the birds seemed to give up singing.  So I lay down and relinquished song. But I should have kept up my amhrán-ing,  adapting and transmuting their tongue.  Transform the spirit of where you belong,  make something right out of what's wrong.   (Tomás Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Tell of those weather-sketched  Attic islanders who half-tamed their school  of rocky Blaskets, water spouting from the blowholes  of cliffs.  Tell how they were forced  from their Ithaca, still dreaming in the surf-rush   of Irish, the inland longing for the lilt  of the sea. In them uncover the destiny  of everyone, for all are exiled and in search   of a home, as you settle the eroding   island of each poem.   (Robin Flower) […] The islands' standing army of gannets fiercely snap, stab and peck one another. Few could match the spite I unleashed  on any who encroached  into my territory. I spat  with petrel accuracy.  I should have had the wisdom  of the sad-eyed puffins  who let everyone come close, sensing few mean hurt,  though when forced to tussle they'll show their worth.  So learn from me.  When I come to mind don't recall how, feisty,  I knocked nests of words over the edge, splattering on the rocks  the crude squwaks of other  ravaging, wing-elbowing birds;  rather think of the winged poems  I hatched, seen,  regardless of time and place,  gliding and gyring  with their own grace.   (Patrick Kavanagh) Life when it is gone is like a woman you were glad to be quit of only to find yourself years later longing for her, catching her scent on a crowded street.  Tell us of the seagull plundering your picnic  before it wakes you. Tell us of the rain tapping a pane while you're ensconced by the fire cradling a pregnant brandy glass.   (Louis MacNeice) Can you still hear a distant train whistle blow?  Wet my whistle with a slug of Guinness. What is the texture of fresh-fallen snow? Do girls still wear their hair in braid? What's tea? What's the smell of the sea? Tell me. Tell me. I am beginning to fade.    (Dylan Thomas)  IV The alarming, silhouetted bird has a preternatural quality  as it flutters about my head, drawing me from sleep's underworld.  I resist its pull.  Everything turns into dream's usual montage.  Another figure emerges  but says nothing,  as if that's what he came to say.  His face merges into one of a gagged female.  She shimmers and vanishes.  Dolphins break beyond Blind Man's Cove, returning the dead to Bull Island, transmitting their encrypted, underwater Morse.  The savant local ferryman informs us that Skellig Michael was once a druidic site.  His oil-wrinkled hands tug the engine cord, coaxing our boat out of the cliff-shaded cove. We withdraw into the distance,  leaving a disgruntling sense that we've only touched the tip of these dark icebergs.
That sound Arvo Pärt does with one piano note stars split, fade, wander in cosmic expansion—   First responder’s genesis and torch of metadatacrunch tumbling in a  burnt and weedy churchyard equal parts Lethe and lithe— Grass, is it hollow, hallow to wake no longer among mortals? The woman her dress flowered from a blown ceiling silver-rosed— Flat plasm’s archangel coming clear out of sheetrock and screen shield and spear in hand let us do all the cooking  if she will lead the pack, remember the route, read the waters— After the great fire we tread river’s late cream and flare. We woke in a city. Where who slew us into portions on a block out of earth gathered our limbs  and we were allowed to continue  unhunted. If “if” is the one word one is given with God  to explain how one survived. Oh. Ah. Siren, white cockatoo meets deep blue.  Fog. Pour ammonia on coyote  scat.
It was a vertical time. It was the expression, a spirit giving way onto an electric barren. We circled and were encircled and had no cause. It was a time of the self come on in a field of apparatuses. It was vignetted by sleep, and the sleep was in its center breached. Cold moving through the smell of gas. The big-leafed enclosure. It was a time that clattered at the horizons, whose recounting was already foreclosed, as in a numeral smudged in powder, as in a thin water making of the atmosphere a disc. It was a time of guzzling. A time amid what has been kept, a time of calendered trust, repeated appeal, erasures of flight. We begin with a weedy stem drawn against the winter sky. Dear hierophant, our decision initialed. The muffled sound of the closet and the machine.
The bottoms of my shoes   are clean  From walking in the rain
In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age
Useless! Useless!  —heavy rain driving into the sea
I broke at last the terror-fringed fascination that bound my ancient gaze to those crowding faces of plunder and seized my remnant life in a miracle of decision between white- collar hands and shook it like a cheap watch in my ear and threw it down beside me on the earth floor and rose to my feet. I made of their shoulders and heads bobbing up and down a new ladder and leaned it on their sweating flanks and ascended till midair my hands so new to harshness could grapple the roughness of a prickly day and quench the source that fed turbulence to their feet. I made a dramatic descent that day landing backways into crouching shadows into potsherds of broken trance. I flung open long-disused windows and doors and saw my hut new-swept by rainbow brooms of sunlight become my home again on whose trysting floor waited my proud vibrant life.
Hurrah! to them who do nothing see nothing feel nothing whose hearts are fitted with prudence like a diaphragm across womb’s beckoning doorway to bar the scandal of seminal rage. I’m told the owl too wears wisdom in a ring of defense round each vulnerable eye securing it fast against the darts of sight. Long ago in the Middle East Pontius Pilate openly washed involvement off his white hands and became famous. (Of all the Roman officials before him and after who else is talked about every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed?) And talking of apostles that other fellow Judas wasn’t such a fool either; though much maligned by succeeding generations the fact remains he alone in that motley crowd had sense enough to tell a doomed movement when he saw one and get out quick, a nice little packet bulging his coat pocket into the bargain—sensible fellow.  September 1970
(for Niyi Osundare) Something in altitude kindles power-thirst Mere horse-height suffices the emir Bestowing from rich folds of prodigious turban Upon crawling peasants in the dust Rare imperceptible nods enwrapped In princely boredom.   I too have known A parching of that primordial palate, A quickening to manifest life Of a long recessive appetite. Though strapped and manacled That day I commanded from the pinnacle Of a three-tiered world a bridge befitting The proud deranged deity I had become. A magic rug of rushing clouds Billowed and rubbed its white softness Like practiced houri fingers on my sole And through filters of its gauzy fabric Revealed wonders of a metropolis Magic-struck to fairyland proportions. By different adjustments of vision I caused the clouds to float Over a stilled landscape, over towers And masts and smoke-plumed chimneys; Or turned the very earth, unleashed From itself, a roaming fugitive Beneath a constant sky. Then came A sudden brightness over the world, A rare winter’s smile it was, and printed On my cloud carpet a black cross Set in an orb of rainbows. To which Splendid nativity came–who else would come But gray unsporting Reason, faithless Pedant offering a bald refractory annunciation? But oh what beauty! What speed! A chariot of night in panic flight From Our Royal Proclamation of the rites Of day! And riding out Our procession Of fantasy We slaked an ancient Vestigial greed shriveled by ages of dormancy Till the eyes exhausted by glorious pageantries Returned to rest on that puny Legend of the life jacket stowed away Of all places under my seat.   Now I think I know why gods Are so partial to heights—to mountain Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees And thorn-guarded holy bombax, Why petty household divinities Will sooner perch on a rude board Strung precariously from brittle rafters Of a thatched roof than sit squarely On safe earth.
I don’t mind the ring roads or the strange intersections,   filled in with radio music tarmac skirting streetlight and the dissolving moon.   Wing mirrors tell of running trees.   My heart races in the heave of the wind.   In the pivot of glass everything is so small and manageable.   I think of an old song, of purple cows in far fields,   I wonder what it’d take to cover miles and miles with no maps or destination.   It is not easy anymore   to forget or be free of the bear that roams the place where I come from.
Among heart-shaped leaves the white fish gleams, red tail.  Soft lotuses sleep.
''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.'  Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety:  desk floor lamp flowers  tatami, my underwear   then dares to paw across  Mother’s face, so smilingdelirious.   Twenty years in a twelve square metre room with the thuds of tennis balls the only music   tells me that suffering is necessary   and more powerful than healing   and I wish to cover all territory for once—hospital beds, chinaware, bed linen, your bland skin   with the pattern and fear of all my dots— by the old wharf on Naoshima I make my yellow wartime pumpkins.   I know my home is not a country anymore, just a festering colony of the mind:   these shuddering trees that come and talk to me each night, the whispers of the white nurses and the star-dances of my Japanese kaleidoscope. Come haunt me still. Do what you may. I won’t return. I’m not afraid.
I’m terrified of a number of fates, Poisoned water under a tyrant’s wage, Being fired for doing nothing, my parents dying, Committing a thought like this to the page, The splash of acid to the face The Queens non-profit boss received Leaving work one blue August evening. Hell’s So eloquent and poetry’s no fate at all Unless you count the story of the divided sea Waiting to wash its assassins away. Says the Pharaoh, “That’s so sad.” But that story is less fate than news, whereas That Queens boss? Permanently burned, the Times Says one eye won’t stop weeping.
Know no name Why this holy day honed Hollow day haul I lost wind when wooden I can’t bear to be Unaided in hunt unhanded To haunt when strewn sound Who will be held in hand Brought sent Mooring at the shore Who’re you for For what fewer who wore Be called this wooer More who are the ones In horror to light will strew then sue for war
Silence is the sound the knife makes slitting the skin. Can you identify my weakness, a pricking sensation and numbness in one limb? Can you hold this tongue? Tell me, what is the function of meticulous courage. You are the most yourself when you are in the motion. One can be quick and too quick. I have a stomach too. It gets hungry. If I be of necessity opportunity, if there be the slightest chance of success, why have a mind, if? Does that scream in the night across the alley beg an answer? Are we crowning into the sludge of an injury and its repair? An elephant is larger and stronger than a horse; but it is not preferred as a beast of burden. Strength is a wee umbrella in the storm. This the friction sound heard in inspiration, expiration, or both. For convenience of description, blood is bright red and frothy. Have you earned the privilege of making mistakes? There really is no sex in science. The nomenclature lifts delicate subjects up from the plane in which language places them. Man has more strength, woman, more endurance. The hands and the instruments are the chief sources of danger. This fever. There is no subject on which so much has been written  and so little known.
At the top of a hill each morning, I wait for the bus by the donut store. Its pink sign looks hot, curls, like a rope, a stem to a brain. You turn toward a jade at the height of your neighborhood, stop at a light in its gut. The sun starts to seep up, reaching all grasses and grooves of the city. A white bus with black windows passes. A few minutes later, the city bus arrives like a room. It crawls warm and dull to the west edge, breathing its heat, a few baby hands warming wide glass. The billboard at my stop displays a large number to call. A man walks his sniffing dog below it, sharp legs brushing wild onion. At the base of the hill, I enter my code, push the gray gate open, allow the worn loop of my bag down my arm, walk to my station. I drop the metal end of a hose into a bucket, turn the tough faucet. Traveling after the sound, the cold rushes out full force from the rubber, breaking into itself, interrupting and filling the round plastic space. Hungry, I pick up the water.
I am so done with feeling Xmas Amaryllis grow in places where thralls go free I am not quite enough for the woodland; promoting myself again after all accused men have been named In Casablanca I wait for livestock to come through luxe doors for thighs to grow less through absorption My killer is not going to be invited to this Ornamenting party and I am blue daisies casting O’s wide in anointment Now that he’s gone I am free to torch down the Valley la spiaggia of pure Purple small neck in hand
Bless Tuesday, blessed Monday. Bless the word week, its seven small days trail with y. Bless the men whose words I was too young to hear. A whisper loves a canal. Bless my laugh, lent by grief, I have so little left to borrow. But my hair, it grows— if hair be gold, cut mine so I might rid my beloved of his student loans. Bless thieves, universities, those hands caress what’s not theirs. Bless thinking it was yours. Here are hands, blessed one. Bless them holding the door. Bless each crier on the F train before and after me as they blush, as they transfer into tunnels for the red line. Oh bless, bless wildly, what remains to be done. Bless the one who told me so, the ones who didn’t. Even weak breaths bless. Bless weakness, fragile fortress, my friend’s body absent of soundness. Bless the sound of someone reliable answering your call, saying If you’re going through hell, Hello.
when the cultivators of corpses are busy seeding plague across vast acres of the land, choking schools  and churches in the motley toxins of grief, breeding virile shoots of violence so soon verdant even fools  fear to tread in their wake :: when all known tools of resistance are clutched in the hands of the vile  like a wilting bouquet, cut from their roots, while   the disempowered slice smiles across their own faces  and hide the wet knives in writhing thickets of hair for future use :: when breathing in the ashen traces  of dreams deferred, the detonator’s ticking a queer echo that amplifies instead of fading :: when there-  you-are is where-you-were and the sunset groans into the atlantic, setting blue fire to dark white bones.
the 14-year-old girl was treated like:  (a) a grown woman.  (b) a grown man.   the bikini-clad girl was handled by the cop like:  (a) a prostitute.  (b) a prostitute by her pimp.   the girl was slung to the ground like:  (a) a sack of garbage into a dumpster.  (b) somebody had something to prove.   the girl’s braids flew around her head like:  (a) helicopter blades.  (b) she’d been slapped.   the black girl was pinned to the ground like:  (a) an amateur wrestler in a professional fight.  (b) swimming in a private pool is a threat to national security.   the girl’s cries sounded like:  (a) the shrieks of children on a playground.  (b) the shrieks of children being torn from their mothers.   the protesting girl was shackled like:  (a) a criminal.  (b) a runaway slave.  liken it or not    —mckinney, texas, june 2015
And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. Asia Graves looks straight ahead as she calmly recalls the night a man paid $200 on a Boston street to have sex with her.      The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame. “If you   want attention and you see that you’re getting it, you just follow your   feelings,” senior Araceli Figueroa, 17, said. “It’s sad.”     It pains me to tell you of it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may. A plague more commonly associated with other countries has been taking young victims in the United States, one by one.
To each orphaned child—so long as you remain close enough to walk to your living kin you will dance, feast, feel community in food. This cannot stand. Eighty acres allotted.   To each head of household—so long as you remember your tribal words for village you will recollect that the grasses still grow and the rivers still flow. So long as you teach your children these words they will remember as well. This we cannot allow. One hundred and sixty acres allotted.   To each elder unable to till or hunt—so long as your old and injurious habits sing out over the drum or flicker near the fire you cripple our reward. We seek to hasten your end. Eighty acres allotted.   To each widowed wife—so long as you can make your mark, your land may be leased. A blessing on your mark when you sign it and walk closer to your favored white sister. Eighty acres allotted.   To each full blood—so long as you have an open hand, we shall fill it with a broken ploughshare. One hundred and sixty acres allotted.   To each half blood, each quarter strain—so long as you yearn for the broken ploughshare, you will be provided a spade honed to razor in its place. When every acre of your allotment has been leased or sold, you will turn it on yourself. From that date begins our real and permanent progress.
I use a trick to teach students how to avoid passive voice.   Circle the verbs. Imagine inserting “by zombies” after each one.   Have the words been claimed by the flesh-hungry undead? If so, passive voice.   I wonder if these sixth graders will recollect, on summer vacation, as they stretch their legs on the way home from Yellowstone or Yosemite and the byway’s historical marker beckons them to the site of an Indian village—   Where trouble was brewing. Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter.  Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred. Where most were women and children.   Riveted bramble of passive verbs etched in wood— stripped hands breaking up from the dry ground to pinch the meat of their young red tongues.
We are so honored that  you are here, they said. We know that this is  your homeland, they said. The admission price  is five dollars, they said. Here is your button  for the event, they said. It means so much to us that  you are here, they said. We want to write  an apology letter, they said. Tell us what to say.
Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation, before me appeared Benjamin Franklin, who magnetized his French paramours at dinner parties as an amusing diversion from his most serious studies of electricity and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp and clap for the blue spark between them. I believe in an honest and forthright manner, a democracy of plain speech, so I have to find a way to explain I don’t care to have sex anymore. Once I was a high school teacher and there was a boy who everyday came in late, who only came to school at all to sell drugs out of his backpack, upon which he laid his head like a pillow and closed his eyes while I pointed at a chart diagramming the anatomy of a sparrow. The vice principal was watching and taking notes as I taught this class, so I slid the bag from under his cheek, as if not to wake him, wrapped his fingers around a pen. I was trying to be a gentle mother and also trying to show I was in control of an unstable situation. The boy, also trying to be in control of himself, walked so slow to my desk and we stood to watch him push everything—binders, piles of ungraded papers, a beaker of red pens to the floor. He was so calm. How do you like it when I touch your things. I do not like it. I live in a house with many blue mason jars, each containing a feather collection or starfish collection or vertebrae collection, and also there is a fully articulated fetal alligator skeleton. Each window is pressed by the design of a sweet-gum branch, all the little orange and red stars of its leaves, you can’t see the perfect geometry this close, just haphazard parabolas, but beneath the foundation the roots mirror the branching. I have a chart of this to pull down. The view is flat and so quiet on the inside. Have I been forthright yet? What I want to know is what happens if I decide to never have sex again? Or more precisely, can I decide to not have sex again and still be kind? And be a joy to others? I should mention I am a wife. I should mention I was told my sole purpose is to be joy to others. The sidewalks outside are very full of people and when I look at them I feel hopeless. Benjamin Franklin was so jolly with his kite and his key and his scandalous electricity. He was so in love with women and drink and democracy. Before I was this way, I was not a house, I was just a jar and what I wanted was to be broken. A cool trick you can do that I once showed a class is crank a wheel covered in felt against another felt wheel. Static bristles and sparks and makes your hair stand on end. But hook it to a Leyden jar and the electricity fills up in there, invisible as air. Becomes a glass battery, until you too much the thing, then wow! broken glass everywhere. I remember wanting that. Do I have to always want that? My house is blue and quiet. I can hardly hear the squirrel in my sweet-gum tree dancing like a sunbeam to sing his riddles: “A house full, a hole full, but you cannot gather a bowl full.” The air of everywhere is wet with electric fluid, you can’t even tell, but pop, whiz, everywhere. “In this field,” Ben says, “the soul has room enough to expand, to display all of her extravagances.” The sweet gum has 10,000 sticky, spiky seed balls. They start green but grow black and fall for want of a barren season. They look like sea urchins. I call them tree urchins and think it’s a funny joke. I don’t tell it to anyone, as I am tired of being told what is not. Such a secret, I know, is an extravagance, and I like best how it’s an extravagance so small you must keep it in a jar with others of its kind for it to ever mean anything at all.
My child is sitting cross-legged on the floor reading to herself. Sometimes she is so full of need I push her to the floor. Only once I did that and I don’t even remember the moment right, but I was trying to wipe urine off my leg and she was naughty like a squirrel and jumping and singing and her head slammed into my chin, which hurt and even more than that, it pissed me off, because she’s my beautiful child, but in that button snap of a moment she was suddenly just one more person and I pushed her away in a way that felt to me like setting her down, but awkwardly, because of how she was also balancing her feet on my feet as I tried to pour out a bowl of pee from her little potty as a toothbrush dangled foaming from my mouth. Somewhere in the mess of that morning she’d become person enough to, in the space between us, create force of momentum, and then I did not set her down, but pushed her and she fell away from it against the wall and was crying because I, her mommy, pushed her. And I know this should be the poem about how I’m horrified at myself, the poem about what in ourselves we have to live with, but in that moment which followed two years of breastfeeding and baby-wearing and sixty-nine hours of natural childbirth and the hemorrhaging and the uncertain operation, after which I pumped every two hours, careful not to let the cord tangle in the IV. Even then when she cried and no matter what and no matter and no matter and no matter and no matter what, I held her all night if she cried so she would not ever know someday you’ll cry alone, but I held her and ached and leaked and bled too as long as it took. Of course there’ve been nights since but sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been asleep again, so when I say I pushed my two-year-old against a wall and I don’t remember it happening that way but it happened and I did and I’ve been wondering a long time now what the limit is and when I would find the end of myself, and that day, which was yesterday, was the end. And this day, when we played hide-and-seek with Daddy, and touched bugs, and readFrog and Toad Are Friends twice together before she read it to herself as I wrote this, this is the day that comes after.
The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is in her eighties and she underestimates the value of everything, for which I am grateful.   Lightly used snow suits, size 2T, are $6 and snow boots are $3.   There is a little girl, maybe seven, fiddling with a tea set. Her mother inspects drapes for stains.   Sometimes the very old and lonely are looking for an opening.   She glances up from her pricing and says something about the tea set and a baby doll long ago.   I am careful not to make eye contact, but the mother with drapes has such softness in her shoulders and her face and she knows how to say the perfect kind thing—“What a wonderful mother you had.”   “Yes, she was.”   Why do children sometimes notice us and sometimes not?   From the bin of dolls: “What happened to your mother?”   “She died.”   The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is crying a little. She seems surprised to be crying. “It’s been eighty years and I still miss her.”   When my daughter was born I couldn’t stop thinking about how we were going to die. If we were drowning, would it be better to hold her to me even as she fought away or should I let her float off to wonder why her mother didn’t help her? What if it’s fire and I have one bullet left? I made sure my husband knew if there were death squads and he had to choose, I’d never love him again if he didn’t choose her. If I’m lucky, her crying face is the last thing I’ll see.   The mother with drapes is squeezing her daughter’s shoulder, trying to send a silent message, but children are children. “Why did she die?”   “She was going to have a baby and—And she died.”   “But she was a wonderful mother.”   I’m holding a stack of four wooden jigsaw puzzles of farm animals, dinosaurs, jungle animals, and pets. Each for a quarter.   “It’s silly how much I still miss her.” She takes out a tissue and wipes her eyes and then her nose.   When my grandmother threw her sister, Susie, a 90th birthday party, one hundred people came, including 5 of the 6 brothers and sisters. At dusk only a few of us were left, nursing beers with our feet kicked up on the bottom rungs of various walkers.   Susie said then to my grandmother, “Can you think of all the people watching us in heaven now? And our mother must be in the front row.”   Grandma took her sister’s hand. “Our mother—Estelle.”   “Yes—her name was Estelle. I forgot that.”   They looked so happy then, saying her name back and forth to each other. Estelle. Estelle.
We were given a curfew on the second day. Clouds filling windows were replaced by soot and ash from the burned out market on the corner. We lost the smell of buttered beetroot, Wissotzky tea and kishke; a tendril of root infiltrated a crack in the floorboards. We kept our distance and let it grow in disbelief. Someone said we should kill it before it gets too strong. Hours, maybe even days, went by as we hid waiting for attacks and looting to end. At times, when the door opened, a waft of wind made its way to those unfolding leaves waving like the curtains out of blown out windows.
San José, Costa Rica Tortillas clap against floured palms, steaming bowls of avena, frijoles black as the rumbling sky,arroz con pollo simmers. Against the kitchen   window, small clouds rise. Papá dances to the electric beat of the marimba, his cheek bristly against Mamá’s neck; his thick fingers sift   through her wispy hair. I am nowhere to be found, neither in the foreground nor background. Today I sit in this chair, in the corner of my house, covered with a poncho of blue flowers, looking out at asphalt roads overflowing with rain, fogging the glass. Along the road, steam rises like blotchy fingerprints.
As a kid the only black woman in my life was my fourth-grade teacher— I remember her not because she was black but mostly because of her copper-colored bob that never changed, as if a piece of bronze had been chiseled onto her head and neither I nor my classmates could prove it was a wig, but we knew it was too perfect to be real. Then you came in- ­to my home—but not the way someone came in one afternoon while we were away grocery shopping, leaving the side door wide open releasing my white-winged parakeet, my mother’s jewelry and our television, gone. And for years I watched you go from analog into digital; you were the modicum of motherhood I encountered daily while my mother stood on a production line mouthing prayers for prosperity and health in a room of air compressors. You’re a super galactic hologram—scattered light reconstructed through the dark matter, ever-shrinking pixels—shifting the cosmology of the world with gigs of Gayle, and revolutionary road trips. And now will you quietly fade out into the space- time continuum where not even my imagination will find you? Your last broadcast like the final song of our beloved parakeet as it flew past the leafless trees toward the vast dome of heaven.
For James Welch The first harvest of wheat in flatlands along the Milk startled me into thoughts of you and this place we both remember and also forget as home. Maybe it was the familiarity or maybe it was my own need to ask if you have ever regretted leaving. What bends, what gives? And have you ever missed this wind?—it has now grown warm with late summer, but soon it will be as dangerous as the bobcat stalking calves and pets just south of the river. Men take out their dogs, a case of beer and wait in their pickups for dawn, for a chance with their rifles. They don’t understand that she isn’t going to make any mistakes. With winter my need for an answer grows more desperate and there are only four roads out.  One is the same cat hunters drive with mannish glory and return along, gun still oil-shined and unshot. Another goes deeper into Assiniboine territory: This is the one I should talk myself into taking next. I haven’t much traveled the third except to visit a hospital where, after the first time, my mother had refused chemotherapy. And the last road you know as well as I do— past the coral-painted Catholic church, its doors long ago sealed shut to the mouth of Mission Canyon, then south just a ways, to where the Rockies cut open  and forgive. There you and I are on the ascent. After that, the arrival is what matters most.
Some lamp sputters its dusty light across some desk. Some hand, shaking, works the strained rope, twisting and knifing, weaving, tugging tight a bellowing circle. Randy Travis, steamy drawl and hiccup on the staticky AM, backs the ritual of drooping loop. Sweat drips an awful hallelujah. God glares askance, but the artist doesn’t waver—wrists click cadence, knots become a path to what makes saviors. The sagging hoop bemoans a need to squeeze, its craving for a breath within the ring.
Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.   Who shot you, baby?I don’t know. I was playing. You didn’t see anyone?I was playing with my friend Sharon.I was on the swingand she was— Are you sure you didn’t—No, I ain’t seen nobody but Sharon. I heardpeople yelling though, and—   Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked you a little sideways, made you need air differently. You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard.I ain’t seen nobody, I told you. And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street, or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway, we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:   an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren’t all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything, no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.   Oh, and they’ve finally located your mama, who will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering Jesus’ name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls shut. Perky ol’ Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums a wry tune no one will admit they’ve already heard.   Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through Sharon’s body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.
When black, men drown. They spend their whole lifetimes justifying the gall of springing the trap, the inconvenience of slouched denim, of coupling beyond romance or aim. All the while, the rising murk edges toward their chins. Hurriedly, someone crafts another scientific tome, a giddy exploration of the curious dysfunction identifying black men first as possible, then as necessary. Elegant equations succumb to a river that blurs quotient and theory, rendering them unreadable, and the overwhelm easily disappears the men, their wiry heads glistening, then gulped. All that’s left is the fathers’ last wisdom, soaked wreckage on silver:Girl, that water ain’t nothing but wet. I’m gon’ be alright.   When black men drown, their daughters turn to their mothers and ask What should I do with this misnamed shiver in myleft shoulder? How should I dress in public? They are weary of standing at the shore, hands shading their eyes, trying to make out their own fathers among the thousands bobbing in the current. The mothers mumble and point to any flailing that seems familiar. Mostly, they’re wrong. Buoyed by church moans and comfort food of meat and cream, the daughters try on other names that sound oddly broken when pressed against the dank syllables of the fathers’. Drained, with justforward in mind, they walk using the hip of only one parent. They scratch in their sleep. Black water wells up in the wound.   When black men drown, their daughters are fascinated with the politics of water, how gorgeously a surface breaks to receive, how it weeps so sanely shut. And the thrashing of hands, shrieking of names: I was Otis, I was Willie Earl,they called me Catfish. Obsessed by the waltzing of tides, the daughters remember their fathers—the scorch of beard electrifying the once-in-a-while kiss, the welts in thick arms, eyes wearied with so many of the same days wedged behind them. When black men drown, their daughters memorize all the steps involved in the deluge. They know how long it takes for a weakened man to dissolve. A muted light, in the shape of a little girl, used to be enough to light a daddy’s way home.   When black men drown, their daughters drag the water’s floor with rotting nets, pull in whatever still breathes. They insist their still-dripping daddies sit down for cups of insanely sweetened tea, sniffs of rotgut, tangled dinners based on improbable swine. The girls hope to reacquaint their drowned fathers with the concept of body, but outlines slosh in drift and retreat. The men can’t get dry. Parched, they scrub flooded hollows and weep for water to give them name and measure as mere blood once did. Knocking over those spindly-legged dinette chairs, they interrupt the failed feast and mutter Baby girl, gotta go, baby gotta go, their eyes misted with their own murders. Grabbing their girls, they spit out love in reverse and stumble toward the banks of some river.   When black men drown their daughters, the rash act is the only plausible response to the brain’s tenacious mouth and its dare: Yes, yes, open your ashed hands and release that wingless child. Note the arc of the sun-drenched nosedive, the first syllable of the child’s name unwilling from the man’s mouth, the melody of billow that begins as blessed clutch. Someone crouching inside the father waits impatiently for the shutting, the lethargic envelop, and wonders if the daughter’s wide and realizing eye will ever close to loose him. It never will, and the man and his child and the daughter and her father gaze calmly into the wrecked science of each other’s lives. The sun struggles to spit a perfect gold upon the quieting splash. The river pulses stylish circles of its filth around the swallow.
It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in schoolday morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled   at the thought of her mouth filled for a moment with both of our short names. I don’t know what we saw when we saw her face, but at fifteen there’s so much left to believe in,   that a girl with sunset in her eyes, with a kind smile, and a bright blue miniskirt softly shading her bare thighs really could be The Goddess. Even the gloss on her lips sighedKiss me and you’ll never  do homework again. Some Saturdays my ace, Terry, would say, “Guess who was buying Teaberry gum in the drugstore on Stenton?” And I could see the sweet epiphany still stunning his eyes   and I knew that he knew that I knew he knew I knew— especially once summer had come, and the sun stayed up till we had nothing else to do but wish and wonder about fine sistas   in flimsy culottes and those hotpants!  James Brown screamed about: Crystal Berry, Diane Ramsey, Kim Graves, and her. This was around 1970: Vietnam to the left of us, Black Muslims to the right, big afros all over my   Philadelphia. We had no idea where we were, how much history had come before us—how much cruelty, how much more dying was on the way. For me and Terry, it was a time when everything said  maybe, and maybe being blinded by the beauty of a tenth grader was proof that, for a little while, we were safe from the teeth that keep chewing up the world. I’d like to commend   my parents for keeping calm, for not quitting their jobs or grabbing guns and for never letting up about the amazing “so many doors open to good students.” I wish   I had kissed Delores Jepps. I wish I could have some small memory of her warm and spicy mouth to wrap these hungry words around. I   would like to have danced with her, to have slow-cooked to a slow song in her sleek, toffee arms: her body balanced between the Temptations’  five voices and me—a boy anointed   with puberty, a kid with a B average and a cool best friend. I don’t think I’ve ever understood how lonely I am, but I was   closer to it at fifteen because I didn’t know anything: my heart so near the surface of my skin   I could have moved it with my hand.
It’s true: I almost never smile, but that doesn’t mean   I’m not in love: my heart is that black violin played slowly. You know that   moment late in the solo when the voice is so pure you feel the blood in it: the wound   between rage and complete surrender. That’s where I’m smiling. You just can’t see it—the sound   bleeding perfectly inside me. The first time I killed a vampire I was   sad: I mean we were almost family.   But that’s so many lives ago. I believe   in the cry that cuts into the melody, the strings calling back the forgotten world.   When I think of the madness that has made me and the midnight I walk inside—all day long:   when I think of that one note that breaks what’s left of what’s human in me, man,   I love everything
I remember that first time: the empty auditorium, her voice, the dark all around us, her mouth reaching into mine. She was Freddy’s foxy older sister, and I didn’t know why she wanted to kiss me. She had already finished high school and probably shouldn’t have been walking the halls, but she always called me her friend. So one Monday after gym,   I found myself beside myself in front of her house—with my trench coat and lunch bag— probably not looking much like Shaft. Inside, the air held warm milk and we talked a bit about her baby and her Aunt who paid the rent painting cars.   Maybe she liked me because we were both black and mostly alone in the suburbs, but I hadn’t thought about that. It was her voice that got me—banked fire, the color of dusk—her voice, and my name was smoke in her mouth.   I think about it more than I should now, that January noon—an hour before algebra—how most days I’d be thinking football or replaying the seventy-some kisses I’d gotten over those lean years, but that day   Donna and me were on the couch munching potato chips. Rrruffles have rrridges, she kidded coming from checking the baby who’d slipped into a nap. I was kind of disappointed that we hadn’t done anything, but I needed time to get back to school, so I started to stand. She said wait, look at this mess,   and with her left hand, she brushed the crumbs from my lap the way you’d whisk away lint— then, swept over my pants again— to be thorough, I guessed, but slower and then some more, as if her hand   were getting drowsy. You know how sometimes you see something but just can’t believe it—like a squirrel bobbling a biscuit on your kitchen counter or a cricket creeping the red feathers of your mother’s Sunday hat?   Her hand there, on my lap, could easily have been a five-fingered flying saucer from the fifth dimension. For awhile, I just watched and wondered if she knew where her hand had landed but it was me who didn’t know: me with my six dozen kisses and the great Eden of my virginity. How do we not talk about it   every day: the ways we were changed by the gift in someone’s touch—your body, suddenly a bright instrument played by an otherwise silent divinity.   When I heard my zipper, I couldn’t have said where my arms were or what a clock was for: I had no idea I could be such a stranger and still be myself. How could I have known what a girl   might do to a boy with her mouth if she felt like doing what her mouth could do? It was a kind of miracle: the dreamedimpossible—my soul finally called to my flesh. I didn’t know what I didn’t know and then I knew.
I used to think that if I loved hard enough and long enough passion would always win out   like the way I loved cologne, venturing teenaged into congested malls, abusing testers only a salesperson surly enough   inquiring if he or she could help me in any way, spitting the prices of even the smallest bottles of the scents I had   slathered on, forcing me out in a cloud of confidence that I was the Calvin Klein Man, not the Old Spice   Man, not the Zest Man, and certainly not the My Drafty House Is Warmed Badly by Kerosene Heaters Man   impervious to my real life where I would sneak down in the middle of the night, passing   snow collecting on the inside of the window sill, trying to descend the stairs silently   to complete the night lying before the stove’s vents blowing sooty warm air deep into my sleeping lungs, clutching   a broken lacrosse stick to intimidate rats so brazen our housecats accepted them as equal occupants   until I exit those automatic doors, leave fountains where just out of range I envy white families tossing entire   cigarette packs’ worth of what they call spare change, wishing for things they could already buy if they wanted   laughing as those presidential faces fall sometimes up and sometimes down, all drowning in three inches of chlorinated well water   return to the reservation where my sister- in-law embraces me later the same day, drawing   deeply, saying she loves the scent of burned heating oil on men, that it reminds her of when she and my brother   dated and she would hold him long in those last moments before allowing him to walk out her door, meander through snowy   grooves, finding his way home while she looked out windows where ice crystals gathered on the proper side of the pane   holding her breath as long as she dared, letting his presence seep out only when she could no longer bear, leaving him to be a vapor ghost   on her window, a fog sure to vanish even before she turned from the window and here I am years later living in that same   state, you miles away and I, knowing how presence disperses into air, wonder how long I can hold my breath.
The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now, leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous, jutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements, caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances, like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across a thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back. But I could not move. And then the music was gone. All that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down, their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt, gliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise, an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.
Some lunatic with a gun killed some people at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Liz Rosenberg and her family live up there and David, her husband, teaches in the middle school which is close to all the action (the way, in any smallish town, everything is close to all the action). I called Liz to see if everyone was all right and she was in her car driving to the elementary school to pick up Lily, her young daughter she brought back from China a few years ago. Lily was fine, but Liz wanted to move her outside the question of how to make sense of the broken pieces of “someone” with a gun walking into a public space and then firing. There’s something called (I learned from a news report the day of the shootings at Virginia Tech) The Talking Day which refers to the day immediately following the day when something wildly violent happens. No one quite grasps the reality of the situation and everyone spends that first day talking about what happened and reliving it as language— not so much to understand the violence but to make a kind of recording of it: talking about it, letting go of it, putting it down. And so I imagine it must be with Liz and Lily and David in Binghamton, New York today: letting “something” go. Liz is in her car after having just picked up Lily at school and driving back home through a town that suddenly makes no sense and she is telling the story about what happened when a young man walked into a building with a gun. And for Lily, who’s had a pretty serene, un- violent United States time so far and whose endless joy has made her an adorable chatterbox, tomorrow could be her first talking day. Or, if not tomorrow, some other day. We live in a talking day world.
The radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America, Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not A man who kills fifty people in five minutes With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists Are mentally ill. Because if killing large numbers of people With sophisticated weapons is a sign of sickness— You might want to begin with fire, our early ancestors Drawn to the warmth of it—from lightning, Must have been, the great booming flashes of it From the sky, the tree shriveled and sizzling, Must have been, an awful power, the odor Of ozone a god’s breath; or grass fires, The wind whipping them, the animals stampeding, Furious, driving hard on their haunches from the terror Of it, so that to fashion some campfire of burning wood, Old logs, must have felt like feeding on the crumbs Of the god’s power and they would tell the story Of Prometheus the thief, and the eagle that feasted On his liver, told it around a campfire, must have been, And then—centuries, millennia—some tribe Of meticulous gatherers, some medicine woman, Or craftsman of metal discovered some sands that, Tossed into the fire, burned blue or flared green, So simple the children could do it, must have been, Or some soft stone rubbed to a powder that tossed Into the fire gave off a white phosphorescent glow. The word for chemistry from a Greek—some say Arabic— Stem associated with metal work. But it was in China Two thousand years ago that fireworks were invented— Fire and mineral in a confined space to produce power— They knew already about the power of fire and water And the power of steam: 100 BC, Julius Caesar’s day. In Alexandria, a Greek mathematician produced A steam-powered turbine engine. Contain, explode. “The earliest depiction of a gunpowder weapon Is the illustration of a fire-lance on a mid-12th-century Silk banner from Dunhuang.” Silk and the silk road. First Arab guns in the early fourteenth century. The English Used cannons and a siege gun at Calais in 1346. Cerigna, 1503: the first battle won by the power of rifles When Spanish “arquebusiers” cut down Swiss pikemen And French cavalry in a battle in southern Italy. (Explosions of blood and smoke, lead balls tearing open The flesh of horses and young men, peasants mostly, Farm boys recruited to the armies of their feudal overlords.) How did guns come to North America? 2014, A headline: DIVERS DISCOVER THE SANTA MARIA One of the ship’s Lombard cannons may have been stolen By salvage pirates off the Haitian reef where it had sunk. And Cortes took Mexico with 600 men, 17 horses, 12 cannons. And LaSalle, 1679, constructed a seven-cannon barque, Le Griffon, and fired his cannons upon first entering the  continent’s Interior. The sky darkened by the terror of the birds. In the dream time, they are still rising, swarming, Darkening the sky, the chorus of their cries sharpening As the echo of that first astounding explosion shimmers On the waters, the crew blinking at the wind of their wings. Springfield Arsenal, 1777. Rock Island Arsenal, 1862. The original Henry rifle: a sixteen shot .44 caliber rimfire Lever-action, breech-loading rifle patented—it was an age Of tinkerers—by one Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860, Just in time for the Civil War. Confederate casualties In battle: about 95,000. Union casualties in battle: About 110,000. Contain, explode. They were throwing Sand into the fire, a blue flare, an incandescent green. The Maxim machine gun, 1914, 400-600 small caliber rounds Per minute. The deaths in combat, all sides, 1914-1918 Was 8,042,189. Someone was counting. Must have been. They could send things whistling into the air by boiling water. The children around the fire must have shrieked with delight 1920: Iraq, the peoples of that place were “restive,” Under British rule and the young Winston Churchill Invented the new policy of “aerial policing,” which amounted, Sources say, to bombing civilians and then pacifying them With ground troops. Which led to the tactic of terrorizing  civilian Populations in World War II. Total casualties in that war, Worldwide: soldiers, 21 million; civilians, 27 million. They were throwing sand into the fire. The ancestor who stole Lightning from the sky had his guts eaten by an eagle. Spread-eagled on a rock, the great bird feasting. They are wondering if he is a terrorist or mentally ill. London, Dresden. Berlin. Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The casualties difficult to estimate. Hiroshima: 66,000 dead, 70,000 injured. In a minute. Nagasaki: 39,000 dead, 25,000 injured. There were more people killed, 100,000, in more terrifying fashion in the firebombing Of Tokyo. Two arms races after the ashes settled. The other industrial countries couldn’t get there Fast enough. Contain, burn. One scramble was For the rocket that delivers the explosion that burns humans By the tens of thousands and poisons the earth in the process. They were wondering if the terrorist was crazy. If he was A terrorist, maybe he was just unhappy. The other Challenge afterwards was how to construct machine guns A man or a boy could carry: lightweight, compact, easy to  assemble. First a Russian sergeant, a Kalashnikov, clever with guns Built one on a German model. Now the heavy machine gun. The weapon of European imperialism through which A few men trained in gunnery could slaughter native armies In Africa and India and the mountains of Afghanistan, Became “a portable weapon a child can operate.” The equalizer. So the undergunned Vietnamese insurgents Fought off the greatest army in the world. So the Afghans Fought off the Soviet army using Kalashnikovs the CIA Provided to them. They were throwing powders in the fire And dancing. Children’s armies in Africa toting AK-47s That fire thirty rounds a minute. A round is a bullet. An estimated 500 million firearms on the earth. 100 million of them are Kalashnikov-style semi-automatics. They were dancing in Orlando, in a club. Spring night. Gay Pride. The relation of the total casualties to the history Of the weapon that sent exploded metal into their bodies— 30 rounds a minute, or 40, is a beautifully made instrument, And in America you can buy it anywhere—and into the history Of the shaming culture that produced the idea of Gay Pride— They were mostly young men, they were dancing in a club, A spring night. The radio clicks on. Green fire. Blue fire. The immense flocks of terrified birds still rising In wave after wave above the waters in the dream time. Crying out sharply. As the French ship breasted the vast  interior Of the new land. America. A radio clicks on. The Arabs, A commentator is saying, require a heavy hand. Dancing.
who by the time it arrived had made its plan heretofore stonewall it had not a penny thats not true it had several pennies   can you make a sovereign nation a national park how condescending instead just tell them to honor the treaty   what can poetry do it cant not not do nothing it must undulate w/ the 2:30 pm dance music the sole patrons at stonewall   there was a shooting in ohio today the music made me feel a little anxious it was hard thumping dance music a notch upwards of 100 bpm notoriously the beat of life the optimum tempo for cpr I consider downloading a metronome real quick to test it to tap it out but I don’t want to be ‘anywhere near’ my phone meaning it’s in my bag on the stool 2 feet from me   there is an amy winehouse video on no sound at least I think it is amy winehouse she is at a funeral black and white there is a stuffed bird slightly obscuring my view of the tv it looks like a kind of tall pigeon w/ mottled brown and russet with a white ringlet necklace and black dots is it a carrier pigeon I wonder I sent a text to jocelyn at standing rock several texts   are you still on the road ariana and i r gonna go out there in december sending love to you tried calling bt yr mailbox is full send a sign when u can xoxo howdy. thinking of u w love. hope all is well. send smoke signal telegram carrier pigeon  send love to my twospirits at the winyan camp.   last night we prayed for her and for zephyr and l. frank & the twospirits especially at standing rock there’s no sign of that struggle here but they are selling tshirts  commemorating the other and the six days of riots led by transwomen of color they later tried to whitewash in that  terrible movie like it was all these hot angry upright downright forthright white gays  so ready for the revolution  and now people are treating standing rock like burning man   a drink called goslings videos by the pigeon misaligned with the music the smell of booze in the air made both of us recoil slightly I saw or felt it   I’m here to make a poem I was already paid for when I had less than $2 in my bank account (and I joked I would go right to the bar and buy every- body drinks ) not even enough for a subway ride and I used the 58 cents I’d gotten for busking for the first time alone in the long hallway between the library at bryant park and the orange line trains by the ovid quote ‘gutta cavat lapidem’ water (or a drop of water really) hollows out a stone. lapidum a stone or rock ariana once described cd wright’s style  as ‘lapidary’ I loved this as a description of writing like the hieroglyphics are literally lapidary and I told my grandmother about it as we were driving from mescalero to albuquerque she knew all about the plants and the names for all the rockforms mesas or buttes or ziggurats and I said how do you know all these she said by long observation and I used to study geology in college I wanted to major in it but they wouldn’t allow women to major in the hard sciences then so she began to study religion tho she already had medicine   ricky martin on the beach or is it someone younger sexier the grand canyon splitting apart is it an ad is it a video even the sands at the beach are bouncing with the beat the tempo has stayed very similar this whole time a tick up I suspect from 100bpm
Lord, it’s not true That my faith is cooling. It’s just that people Are saying that candle smoke Has caused cancer in church mice. And I also worry that candle light Is too weak to reach your cloud.   Do I need a hydrogen candle? Are the Angels into lasers?   Lord, as I think about it, Lately I haven’t had much to thank you for.   Are you on vacation?
Alan drives a cab at night, Has cab driver’s elbow In his left arm, Sells real estate by day.   Alan dreams of a big deal, Of opening a classy poolhall. Has a four million dollar deal Which will probably fall through, Has a big land deal with the Post Office But it will take 20 years to deliver Because they are so slow.   Alan collects baseball cards and comic books Hates condos and townhouses Though he lives in one. Was a trader for nineteen and one-half years Then fired when the market melted.   Alan, even if he was rich, Would not let his stepdaughter By his second wife Have her own phone and private line Like her rich friend Rebecca has Because after all she is only twelve.   Alan, half Jewish, has three tattoos. “I got them recently because I wanted them. My Jewish aunt nearly had a stroke When she saw them.”   Alan admits he is a pack rat saving Everything, loves wood, restoration, and antiques. Alan admires the people who buy old houses And fix them up. Hates the development of Staten Island Blaming it on the people from Brooklyn.   Alan was cooking sausages and onions (His other half is Italian) In his back yard When a woman knocked his parked car Into the next block, Totaled it; he got $1,200 more Than it was worth.   Alan found a turtle and put It in a safe stream, Stopped a dog from killing a cock In historic Richmondtown.   Alan hates the dump— ninety-four percent of the garbage there Is dropped by the other boroughs— Likes the idea of secession, Staten Island free and independent.   Alan apologetically asks If he didn’t talk too much As he brings me to my destination.   He leaves me a great silence And I wish I had one million American bucks To tip the exuberant Alan.   Alan, take this million bucks Strip the paint off the good wood of your dreams And tattoo the tedious days.
First: Brother, remove the tool marks on your scathed skin, brush your tattoos with  nettles, smear bearberry juice in the gashes. Crack open the jail-seed.   Second: Tear away the bars which restrain  your lean, spare life. Bend your curves in a knot. Brother, smudge your  saw-tooth edges.   Third: Cut red seaweed to conceal your gray cadaver;  start wetting your skin down; after scraping,  drip your bowels of blood, change into wolf.   Fourth: The savannah sparrow flies north.  In speech, smell fine-grained hawthorn.  Collapse your voice into bark and howl.
She and I make a bladder bag to draw water from the ice trench. She/I chain stitch/es a skin dressed in oil to make a new pot of soup. She/I sew/s a badger hair rough around the top of her/my kamiks to make the steps windward, toward the limits of woman. She/I eat/s club root and white clover to strengthen her/my silver body to bear a child. She/I map/s, following 1 degree from the North Star and 60 degrees from the end of the earth’s axis on rotation for Ukpeagvik she/I use/s a small arc of ice, cleaving into parts, reduced to simple curves fitted with serrated edges of white flesh. She/I mold/s to the fretted neck of frozen water into a deep urn, made like a rock shelter or a cavern. She/I construct/s a hole on the surface of a glacier formed by melting particles of roe and pan reservoir dust from a shelter for the ice worms. Because the earth is molding, burning, laughing, and purging its crust.
Why is it, in Bristol Bay, a sea cormorant hovers, sings a two-fold song with a hinged cover   for a mouth, teeth set in sockets, with a hissing grind of spikelets biting the air? Dip one.   The lips of vanished flames in lava coals glow vermillion as an egg cracks. Dip two.   She/I feel/s a chimera leaving the eider duck. Dip three. While still in the embryo, separating the body   from death she/I smell/s of arsenic, the Chugach Range in unnatural bitterness. Why is it, man’s/woman’s nerve scarcely   stifled and sane, comes to prey? While they swoon minerals of crude oil and sea spiders for tricking a way for gold.   Will they crawl around her/me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea, ravaging the ecosphere and the ore gold for fuel. Drill.
Thinking to see them there, captains industrious in morning sun, I crack the egg’s tender yellow head   Love comes to me un- ­repentant, toward it all vectors converge repeating, like   moment of the necessary form I pluck a feather from your neck   On the page one alights without permission, or love is an assemblage   beginning each day identical, palpable I remarks of, is it that music or need edits my body   two people leave a shopping mall with goods, death squad hovering high a streetlamp Call your mother, stay up late   to watch the neighborhood undressing light, like multiple phone calls connected then hung up, get the family together soon, watch   American bison overtake the field filling a vehicle lane in early snow obstructed I paused To see it, their dark furs shaking enormous out of trees they descended from the line of sky respond to a much deeper instinct   we were then back on our way input later to the search bar I love keywords, like love is an exodus   I imagine you sleeping, then a pyramid or chandelier throwing sunlight   An absence emerges, sharp I regard the whole practice of it   touch it
Moved all the way here to watch television alone, swallowed by the grim   news grinning. Fuck a five year plan, first one passes through Tiananmen the gate   of heavenly peace, emptied public square finery in summer, purple cupping red azaleas   Happy birth upon a time, Nation! Reveling in my love for him coquettish   worried, approaching paranoia for the home country removed that June   The cropped photo best dilated in our pockets black and white   It was a long hard road continuously reading analysis metrics, my father knew a guy   worked in sales, was there and saw them roll in like nothing else   Black pillars to the effective dispersal   I felt nothing pulling from the airport’s narrowing gate In the photo we still get perfectly centered   Longview the idiot’s consumption guide, naturally then   my love for was only
Such were they, a dumb stuffed thing to say, if truth is we all grow old un-   observed, limbs flail only halfway up a flight, where does dark begin settling   my little bones. I dream and do love to have them, blue fish   in a lake, my head more tipped up than down under damp earth. Some days others like deer   from the shot, peeled back, how I find trees dressed in wild   green light. The years come, unstitched a face, saddled as one would a heavy beast   for walking. Likely I became then a member of heaven, put up, the years come and reaching   their long wet hands.
The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty is symmetry so rare it’s a mystery. My left eye is smaller than my right, my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly aligned like Muslims in prayer. My lips an accordion. Each sneeze a facial thumbprint. One corner of my mouth hangs downward when I want to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s palsy perhaps or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting, that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush in a young beauty’s face without thinking it could be a fever, a malar rash, a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie facedown now as cadavers posed on first anatomy lesson? I didn’t know mine was a woman until three weeks later we turned her over. Out of reverence there was to be no untimely exposure of donors, our patrons who were covered in patches of scrubs-green dish towels, and by semester’s end we were sick of all that, tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts into lab air and caught them. My body was Margaret. That’s what the death certificate said when it was released before finals. The cause of her death? Nothing memorable, frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit were there skull cracks to condemn the house of death, no shattered glass in the brain, only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely. He had the most beautiful muscles of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged, zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred. Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed. Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance, he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war. I had come across that which will end me, ex­- tend me, at least once, without knowing it.
The sudden pink shape surfacing in black-water lagoons shocked explorers. All dolphins share man’s thumb and fingerbones, but these also wear his flesh. When the river overflows and floods the varzea,  these dolphins travel miles to splash in the shallows amongst buttress-roots of giant rainforest trees. The waters abate, trapping fish, dolphins never.   A lamp burning dolphin oil blinds. At night the pink-flesh contours melt and blur. The flipper extends the hidden hand to lift its woman’s torso to the land. An Eve, born each night from the black Amazon, roams the dark banks for victims to draw to the water and death. Taboo to the Indians, this pink daughter of the river’s magic always looks, to explorers, like she’s smiling.
We set up an assembly line. I heat the tortillas in manteca  after Crystal dips them in chile ancho  and drains them. Niles carries full plates of hot tortillas to his father, who rolls them around spoonfuls of filling. When we’ve finished the hot, greasy work, I pour the last of the sauce over neat rows of stuffed tortillas, sprinkle them with cheese, clean the stove and counters. The kids help their father rinse plates and pans. They don’t know this is the last time. The cheese melts. Crystal dances to “No More Lonely Nights” on the radio. Niles and his dad joke and wrestle. After grace, we sit before steaming plates. The kids stuff their mouths, insult each other, and laugh. We can’t avoid their eyes forever. Their father and I stare at each other across the table.
A mother possum crawled down the chimney the spring Donny came to us because both sets of his parents had kicked him out, the same April after your dad and I divorced when you kicked a hole in the dining room wall. The possum was swollen with young she would later carry, half-grown, on her back or hanging from her thick, hairless tail. “An oversized rat with maternal instincts,” your dad once said.   Instead of one angry son, I now had two– fifteen and seventeen– two forged signatures on absence excuses, two discipline committee meetings, two conferences with the principal. While I worked, you shared contraband beer, as well as the basement bedroom with its fieldstone fireplace in which you found the possum one cool evening.   Laughing and cheering, you teamed up to cage her with a trash can, carry her to the alley out back and dump her. The possum squeezed back down the chimney twice more. The third time you threw her out on Troost Avenue, screaming for a car to smash her beneath its tires. She must have been near her time, desperate for a nest, to crawl back down after that. The noise woke me after midnight. Donny had clubbed her with his nunchuks. You both kicked and stomped her head as she lurched, stumbled between your feet. Halfway down the basement steps I stopped, seeing your faces. The possum fell limp. I backed slowly up the stairs.   In the morning, you couldn’t meet my eyes. I just made you clean up the mess.
his eyelids like a moth’s fringed wings. Arms flail against the Ninja Turtle sheet and suddenly-long legs race time.   Awake, he’s a water-leak detector, a recycling ranger who bans Styrofoam and asks for beeswax crayons, a renewable resource. He wants to adopt the Missouri river, write the president to make factories stop polluting.   They’re old friends, he and George Bush. He writes and scolds the president, every month or so, about the bombing the children of Iraq (he made his own sign to carry in protest), about the plight of the California condor and northern gray wolf, about more shelters and aid for the homeless. The lion-shaped bulletin board in his room is covered with pictures and letters from George, who must be nice, even if he is a slow learner.   Joseph is a mystery fan, owns 54 Nancy Drews. Nancy’s his friend, along with Jo, Meg, and Amy and poor Beth, of course, whom he still mourns. He also reads of knights and wizards, superheroes, and how to win at Nintendo.   The cats and houseplants are his to feed and water and the sunflower blooming in the driveway’s border of weeds. He drew our backyard to scale, using map symbols, sent off to have it declared an official wildlife refuge, left a good-night note on my pillow, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs.   In my life, I have done one good thing.
in my house. Days we’re ordinary, affectionate, a close, happy couple, but nights require a passport and serious immunizations, warnings about security and guerilla attacks. You are a foreign ruler, quite possibly benevolent in intention – but we know how these things always play out, don’t we? – with needs alien to and hostile to your citizenry, me, without power except to say, “No more,” and hope to survive the fallout from the battles in the streets. Days, we’re the peaceful, devoted pair all our friends envy. Nights are always tense around the DMZ that is our bed with occasional forays into the bush where the enemy is always lying in wait. Sleep is hard, fearful and troubled. I dream us going down in flames.
Watts bleeds leaving stained reminders on dusty sidewalks.   Here where I strut alone as glass lies broken by my feet and a blanket of darkness is slung across the wooden shacks of nuetsra colonia.   Watts bleeds dripping from carcasses of dreams: Where despair is old people sitting on torn patio sofas with empty eyes and children running down alleys with big sticks.   Watts bleeds on vacant lots and burned-out buildings– temples desolated by a people’s rage.   Where fear is a deep river. Where hate is an overgrown weed.   Watts bleeds even as we laugh, recall good times, drink and welcome daylight through the broken windshield of an old Impala.   Here is the Watts of my youth, where teachers threw me from classroom to classroom, not knowing where I could fit in.   Where I learned to fight or run, where I zigzagged down alleys, jumped over fences, and raced by graffiti on crumbling factory walls.   Where we played between boxcars, bleeding from broken limbs and torn flesh, and where years later we shot up carga  in the playground of our childhood.   Watts bleeds as the shadow of the damned engulfs all the chinga of our lives.   In the warmth of a summer night, gunshots echo their deadly song through the silence of fear; prelude to a heartbeat.   Watts bleeds as I bled getting laid-off from work, standing by my baby’s crib, touching his soft check and fingering his small hand as dreams shatter again, dreams of fathers for little men.   Watts bleeds and the city hemorrhages, unable to stop the flow from this swollen and festering sore.   Oh bloom, you trampled flower! Come alive as once you tried to do from the ashes.   Watts, bleeding and angry, you will be free.
All night vigil. My two-and-a-half-year-old boy and his 10-month-old sister lay on the same bed, facing opposite ends; their feet touching. They looked soft, peaceful, bundled there in strands of blankets. I brushed away roaches that meandered across their faces, but not even that could wake them. Outside, the dark cover of night tore as daybreak bloomed like a rose on a stem of thorns. I sat down on the backsteps, gazing across the yellowed yard. A 1954 Chevy Bel-Air stared back. It was my favorite possession. I hated it just then. It didn’t start when I tried to get it going earlier that night. It had a bad solenoid. I held a 12-gauge shotgun across my lap. I expected trouble from the Paragons gang of the west Lynwood barrio. Somebody said I dove the car that dudes from Colonia Watts used to shoot up the Paragons’ neighborhood. But I got more than trouble that night. My wife had left around 10 p.m. to take a friend of mine home. She didn’t come back. I wanted to kill somebody. At moments, it had nothing to do with the Paragons. It had to do with a woman I loved. But who to kill? Not her– sweet allure wrapped in a black skirt. I’d kill myself first. Kill me first? But she was the one who quit! Kill her? No, think man! I was hurt, angry. . . but to kill her? To kill a Paragon? To kill anybody? I went into the house and put the gun away.   Later that morning, my wife came for her things: some clothes, the babies. . . their toys. A radio, broken TV, and some dishes remained. I didn’t stop her. There was nothing to say that my face didn’t explain already. Nothing to do. . . but run.   So I drove the long haul to Downey and parked near an enclosed area alongside the Los Angeles River. I got out of the car, climbed over the fence and stumbled down the slopes. A small line of water rippled in the middle. On rainy days this place flooded and flowed, but most of the time it was dry with dumped garbage and dismembered furniture. Since a child, the river and its veins of canals were places for me to think. Places to heal. Once on the river’s bed, I began to cleanse. I ran.   I ran into the mist of morning, carrying the heat of emotion through the sun’s rays; I ran past the factories that lay smack in the middle of somebody’s backyard. I ran past alleys with overturned trashcans and mounds of tires. Debris lay underfoot. Overgrown weeds scraped my legs as I streamed past; recalling the song of bullets that whirred in the wind.   I ran across bridges, beneath overhead passes, and then back alongside the infested walls of the concrete river; splashing rainwater as I threaded, my heels colliding against the pavement. So much energy propelled my legs and, just like the river, it went on for miles.   When all was gone, the concrete river was always there and me, always running.
When Heavy tells a story the millwright shanty under the electric furnaces chokes with quiet, amid the roar, as Heavy pauses, adjusts his mountainous weight over a creaky grease-stained metal chair and looks up at the whirling ceiling fan next to fluorescent lights hanging by wires. His fingers lace like so many sausages across the canvas of blue workshirt on his chest.   Heavy tells his story and the voice of reason quickens the demise of foulness from red-faced millwrights just back from a repair job and sitting around for the five air whistles that again call them to combat on the furnace floor.   All laughter stops, all nonsense sayings and cuts of wisdom cease their echo when Heavy tells a story.   Heavy talks about the Mexican melter who once had an affair with the Pit Boss’s wife. The heart of the problem–and the fact from which the story’s plot revolves– was that the melter lived across the street from the Pit Boss. One night just before the graveyard shift, the melter left his home, kissed his wife’s round face and proceeded to walk to the bus stop. But a bullet pierced through his hardhat and he fell, like an overturned stack of fire bricks, onto the pavement. The moral of this story: Never have an affair with someone whose old man lives within shooting distance.   Heavy tells a story about a furnace foreman who always yelled at the laborers for failing to clean the bag house of the built-up filth from hours of cooking scrap iron and ore. The men told him it was too dangerous to walk on the tin-roofed panels; their weight could cause them to fall some 30 feet into the gaping mouth of a flaming furnace below. “Nonsense,” the foreman yelled, “you’re all just lazy Polacks.” (he called everyone Polacks). The foreman then proceeded to walk across the roof as the men stood nearby, with mouths open, near the safety of side beams. “You see,” he said standing in the middle as hydraulics moved shutters up and down to capture the sulphur dust.   Then the foreman moved forward and before anyone could shout, he crashed through the roof, screaming into a reddened pot of molten metal; the oxygen in his body making popping sounds as it entered. The furnace operates continued to pour ladles of scrap iron and to melt the steel. They skimmed the slag off the top and when it was ready, they poured the molten mass into ingot molds. There was nothing they could do for the foreman, they said. Production had to keep going.   Heavy looks into the eyes of his listeners and says: Somewhere there’s a skyscraper in downtown LA with steel beams made from the ingot with the foreman’s body in it. Somewhere there’s a bridge or underground pipe with the man’s remains chemically bound within the molecular structure.   Heavy tells a story. . .   and the men lay down their tools, and coffee is poured into heavy ceramic cups, the shanty stills beneath the rumbling, and even foremen stop by to pay a listen when Heavy tells a story.
Continue to pour my thoughts out on this topic of discussion Slow down, I keep gettin the feeling that I’m rushin Like my cousin’s dying breaths, or the decision that was made But lemme backtrack, letting feelings get in the way A normal adolescent, aspiring for the highest Goals that were attainable, wanted to be the flyest We all searchin for something we’ve made a pact to do The drive of ambition, it’s in us, it’s in you Now snatch every dream that a mother had for her son And replace that with a breath, “Baby, just take another one!” A white man’s gun, the very courier of evil He left, enjoyed his night, but the gunshots were lethal Deceitful, everything we’ve been told from the start We’ve more than just some ghetto thugs, these thoughts split us  apart What you must understand is our culture bore from oppression The Hip Hop inside of us a form of expression I wish I had the chance to explain to Jordan’s killer That the song “Beef” by Lil Reese shouldn’t label him a dealer Or is he ignorant or another ghetto thug? Do you understand that your ignorance filled him with 3 slugs? I don’t want sympathy and I don’t want affection I want this country to head in the right direction Instead of discussin who the Grammys should be awardin Work to prevent murders like those of my cousin, Jordan.
after Miller Williams This is to say we continued. As though continuing changed us. As though continuing brought happiness as we had known.   On a dry field without cover, his skin blistered raw in the sun. Not one among us came, as though he had no relations.   What did we say to our brother? How could we leave him alone while soldiers guarded his corpse as though precious to them?   One of the women, in darkness, crept to the field where he died, prayed for him, covered him up. Dust over what was not dust.   We would have ventured out with her if we had loved ourselves less. We had to think of our children, and he was not coming back.   How could we live with the silence, live with our grief and our shame? Death did not heal what he suffered. He was making demands.   We did not want him to be there, asking the question he asked us, changing the sound of his name. He had embarrassed us.   This is the memory we carried, avoiding the thought that he remained face down among the charred grasses, holding the earth with his hands.
I.  The first question is always phrased this way:  “So. How much Indian are you?”   II.  We did not live in tepees.  We did not braid our hair.  We did not fringe our shirts.  We did not wear war bonnets.  We did not chase the buffalo.  We did not carry shields.  We were never Plains Indians.  We tried to ride,  but we kept falling off of our dogs.   III.  A local official came to our office to ask our help with a city event. He had a splendid idea, he said. To kick off the event and show everyone in town that our tribe was still around, we should go up to the bluff overlooking the city and make a big smoke signal. Then they would know we were here.  Who ever heard of smoke signals in the forests? I imagined us upon the bluff, lighting one of those firestarter bricks. We haven’t made fire since the Boy Scouts took over. And how would the citizens know it was us? They’d probably call the fire department.   IV.  As they ask, they think, yes, I can see it in her face. High cheekbones  (whatever those are) and dark hair.     Here’s a thought: don’t we all have  high cheekbones? If we didn’t,  our faces would cave in.  (But I do have a colonized nose.)    I’m sick of explaining myself.    “You know,” I finally say,  “It doesn’t matter to my people.”  I ride off to my ranch-style home.  Time to weave a basket, or something.
When I learned I might have cancer, I bought fifteen white lilies. Easter was gone: the trumpets were wilted, plants crooked with roots bound in pots. I dug them into the garden, knowing they would not bloom for another year. All summer, the stalks stood like ramshackle posts while I waited for results. By autumn, the stalks had flopped down. More biopsies, laser incisions, the cancer in my tongue a sprawling mass. Outside, the earth remained bare, rhizomes shrunken below the frost line. Spring shoots appeared in bright green skins, and lilies bloomed in July, their waxed trumpets pure white, dusting gold pollen to the ground.  This year, tripled in number, they are popping up again. I wait, a ceremony, for the lilies to open, for the serpentine length of the garden to bloom in the shape of my tongue’s scar, a white path with one end leading into brilliant air, the other down the throat’s canyon, black and unforgiving. I try to imagine what could grow in such darkness. I am waiting for the lilies to open.
at the unemployment office I know it can be a two hour deathly wait before one’s name is called out so I find a chair and bury my head in a book that I brought to read   sitting beside me, a man and a woman converse talk of years past, of people they knew    and Leonard, is he still in prison?   yeah, he’s still doing time well, that’s good, I guess, means he’s still alive   a young girl walks in, short black halter top and airbrushed-on jeans her breasts pouting up past a too-low neckline the men, the women, all stare whether they’d like to or not   Leonard’s friends exchange stories  yeah, my ex, she just wants my money I tell her, well, go work then!    and they laugh between the ironylife, huh, she tells him, it’s crazy, the things we get into,  he agrees the rest of us caught silently in their exchange agree, as well   his arms are thick with hair and tattoos of skills and scrawled out indecipherable letters of the alphabet    yeah, this chick that was riding with me once, he tells her  got her jacket belt caught on my wheel I didn’t even know it until I got to the next light  I went back, she was alright, just fell off, didn’t get hurt or nothing she was pissed though.    “just fell off, didn’t get hurt,” what does he mean? this story just drops off, I want to know a little more, a lot more I mean, how fast was the bike going when she fell off did she ruin the belt, scrape her nose did they drink a lot of beer afterwards?   and so the time drags by, the line lengthens now and then people unbury their heads from their midmorning dragging into noon thoughts women adjust their bra straps scold their kids with unfulfilled warnings the folks behind the counter look at us holding their half empty cups of coffee   ah, if only there was a dollar for every story
throughout the years I have designed high-end custom homes crafting spatial poetics with vigas and latillas  hand peeled by mojados  whose sweat translates into profit for developers working at a nifty rate   sometimes I go visit these homes as they are being finished  may I help you?  I am asked by the realtor standing at the door, thinking that I may be the guy who mixed the mud and pushed the wheelbarrow   I introduce myself as the designer  oh, well, it’s so nice to meet you, what a wonderful job!please, come in.    I was once asked by a home magazine journalist if I felt insulted by such incidentswell, no, I said, my mind mixing for an answera good batch of cement is never accidental    last year on my way up through Santa Fe I made a detour and drove by a house of my design the season’s first snow on the ground, smoke rising out of the fireplace chimney   inch by inch I know that house through its X, Y, and Z axis   but, I cannot approach the front door knock and expect to be invited in to sit in the corner of my pleasing and lounge around with the owner as we sip on cups of hot herbal tea making small talk about the weather or discussing a reading by the latest author come through as the sun’s last light streams in gallantly through the window just where I placed it and for that reason   I take a handful of snow to my mouth toss another into the air my blessings upon the inhabitantsque Dios los bendiga y les dé más  my grandfather would have said   I turn my car toward home to my mother’s house a place near and far to me she, my mother, is bedridden and my brother is the self-appointed caretaker to bathe and feed her bring her morsels of conversation   it is their own world now   ruled by a juxtaposition of understanding against what I have come to know, now here, so far and away I am greeted at her front yard by an old, propped up trunk hood proclaiming my brother’s spray-painted inscription  Jesus Saves  on the opposite side it reads  Keep Out!   I guess it just depends on what kind of day he’s having,  someone once remarked like a rattlesnake it’s a fair warning   years ago I accepted this madness and called it not my ownit’s better that he be drunk on Christ, said my motherthan on what he used to drink    we all agreed
Now begins the festival and rivalry of late fall, the weird debauch and daring debacle of frat-boy parties as students parade foggy streets in mock processions, bearing on shoulders scrawny effigies of dead, defeated Indians cut from trees, where, in the twilight, they had earlier been hung.   "Just dummies," laughs our dad, "Red Indians hung or burned—it's only in jest." Every fall brings the Big Game against Stanford, where young scholars let off steam before the debacle they may face of failed exams. "You're dead wrong," he says to Mom. "They don't mock   real, live Indians." Around UC campus, mock lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead from the merrymaking. On Bancroft Way, one has fallen indecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle that happened three generations ago in California's hills, where   Native peoples were strung up. (A way of having fun? Where did they go, those Indian ghosts?) "Their kids perform mock war dances, whooping, re-enacting scenes of a debacle white folks let loose," chides Mom. "Meanwhile we hang portraits of presidents on school walls and never let fall the old red, white, and blue. My dear brother is dead   because he fought in a White man's war. How many dead Indians do they need to feel okay? This whole thing wears on my soul." In the dark car we go silent, and the fall night gets chillier. In yards, blazing bonfires mock the stars that glow palely somewhere above. A thin moon hangs over the tule fogs. I've never heard the word "debacle”   before and wonder what it means. "What's a debacle, Mom? " I ask. "Oh, honey, it's a terrible and deadly collapse. Complete ruin." I've noticed how the hung Indians have their heads slumped forward. They wear old clothes, headbands with feathers, face paint, moc- casins instead of boots. Little do we know, this fall,   living Indians at Feather Falls leave tobacco to mark that, indeed, we're still here, lungs full of indigenous air.
We could hear her knocking down strands of cobweb from ceilings—sticky filaments, sacs of eggs—as we woke most mornings to a worm of discontent. It lodged beneath the heart, rubbed our frayed nerves, gnawed at the gut, spleen, ovaries. Filth   was Mom's first enemy, so each day began with ritual cleaning: the stab and sweep of the broom down the dark hall, over the stained and scratched oak floors.   For weeks, she held her dust mop one-handed, and with the other cupped a hernia, while she swore at us kids in that hard voice—a litany of our sins and failures: sloth, stupidity, secrecy.   We watched her smash the spiders that ran, herky-jerky, along the baseboards, while we ran, too.   Glaring at each other, we gathered up the scattered laundry, our father’s shoes, his newspapers and tools, our books, drawings, music, sweatshirts, and jackets, whatever we’d left lying around.   We were guilty, but good at evasion. We cultivated shrewish or obsessive behaviors of our own: my tough older sister sneered and stalked out of the house to meet her boyfriend; my sweet younger sister trembled and cried, comforted by one of our many dogs. I slammed doors, pounded them with my fists, screamed, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She couldn’t   leave us alone. She loved us too much.   Though we were quick, she was quicker. Her words stung.   We must have deserved it.
1 Desert heat, high clouds, and sky the color of lapis. On this journey, anything seems possible, so we stop by an ancient cottonwood to kiss. The beauty trembles, doesn't say a word, just watches me, so open. Small birds fly by, flock in the shady tree above us. What settles in her heart? What congeals? Hope? Despair? Far off, the river churns in its sandy banks, swallows veer, turn in fiery air. Will these kisses seal her to me? I her lover, she my wife? Is all of this a dream, my whole life?   2 She is just this side of wonderful, and suddenly the glamorous world fills itself with shining and we laugh at highway monuments that explain how hard the trek had been for Franciscans in the Indian wilderness, poor fellows— conversion is the devil's own work! Then the stones of her dream turn up under her feet, the back of a huge land turtle. I know we must be circling Paradise because the ants enter the fleshy petals of the roadside flowers with evident joy and purpose (oh, my dark, pretty one).   3 Music, my adored. When is there never music? My accordion puffs up with drinkable melodies. I spill her tunes into your listening ear, one after the other: the squeeze-box enters the dance of the plaintive gypsy with its hard rhythms, lilts the back- breaking labor song the worker croons to earth, warbles romantic notes of dissolving borders. You melt like a woman beneath her lover's touch. Music is happy and pitiless when it sets fire to combustible souls. Even the raspy bandoneon's voice is lyric.   4 Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. (Speak in a whisper.) We slip into this space half cognizant. The land is very large indeed: bones of the earth worn down, though she is a living thing. See how she exposes her grace? Antelopes graze on the far plain—their high, white tails—the red soil throbs its slow heartbeat, and the blue sky clears so smartly, perfectly, like radiance. Are the ancestors near? What can we know? We decide to wander around this prairie, mistaken for Utes, buy commodities in little towns.   5 Late afternoon we head west along the willow-banked Malheur after the long curve of the Snake River plain. (Above the falls where the Shoshone went to pray we soaked our feet in cold water, and I observed the arch of her brown foot.) Rabbitbrush and sage along the highway, juniper on far hills and bluffs. Sundown, and dusk falls over the wide basin of land. In Burns we eat eggs in a cafe, take a room in the Motel 6. In the dark, I can see her black hair, black against the pillows. Its clean scent makes me think of corn. At dawn, I hold her and there are kisses. Then more kisses. Then more. The day is cold; a north wind blew last night. But the land is open. Rain falls in showers of light.   6 Her hand on my thigh, my shoulder, in my hair. She leans over to kiss my cheek. We look at each other, smile. For miles we travel this way, nearly silent, point with eyes or chins at the circling hawk, the king- fisher on the snag above the swollen creek. One night I weep in her arms as she cries, "Oh, oh, oh!" because I have touched her scars lightly: throat, belly, breasts. In that communion of lovers, thick sobs break from me as I think of my love back home, all that I have done and cannot say. This is the first time I have left her so completely, so alone.
Ours was a play-filled childhood; irrigation ditches ran deep during the summers. We played in the water and dirt, then inscribed ABCs and numbers onto the smooth ground. Our cat Polly died of rabies; then all the pets had to be shot, some in the rib cage as they thrashed in panic. There was a pink bruise on my forehead from pressing against the wall. We couldn't figure   out how such a thing could happen. The dogs were steadfast figures around the farm. They chased strange cars and sometimes invoked deep panic among visitors and passersby. They had cuts and bruises from scuffles with roaming packs. No tags were inscribed with their random Navajo names. Snazzy was skinny; his rib cage obvious through thin fur. He looked as if he might die   from hunger, but he ate like nobody's business. Who knew he would die of rabies with the rest? The main thing was to figure out how they contracted it, my parents said. We cried until our rib cages ached; our eyes stayed swollen. This first loss was too deep to even talk about. Decades later, I can finally describe how that summer led us into a grief that felt like a bruise   that would last forever. But our neighbor suffered worse bruises: their huge dog, named Dog, was the first to die and was the cause of all this. Their home and fields are inscribed in our memories as "the rabies place." Over time, they must have figured it was too much to live down. Childhood losses run deep, even though we are grandparents now. The memory is an invisible cage   of anguished sobs, gunshots, yelping howls, canine rib cages exploding. Sometimes we reminisce and notice that the bruises of grief have turned pale like smoothed-over scars. That initial deep hurt was the start, we found, of how love could die right before us, even as we watched: stunned figures pleading for mercy, urgent prayers saying, "Let God's scribe   mark this down. We've paid our dues. Our hearts are inscribed with loss after loss." For some reason, after everything, our rib cages held up and continued to cradle tender hearts. They must have figured that all the prayers and careful teachings would prevent bruises that would weaken us. Our love for those homely animals was deep   and would figure in the knowledge that such bruises aren't endless, and that our rib cages are not mere bones. One can die from grief, so now we can describe loss and love as the Holy Twins.
For the graduates of the University of Arizona. This morning we gather in gratitude for all aspects of sacredness: the air, the warmth of fire, bodies of water, plants, the land, and all animals and humankind. We gather to honor our students who have achieved the extraordinary accomplishment of earning doctoral or master's degrees. We gather to honor their parents, grandparents, children, family members, and friends who have traveled with them on their path to success. They have traveled far distances to be here this morning: we honor their devotion.   May we remember that holiness exists in the ordinary elements of our lives.   We are grateful for a homeland that has always thrived on a glorious array of people and their diverse cultures, histories, and beliefs. We acknowledge the generosity of the Tohono O'odham in granting this land on which we learn, teach, celebrate accomplishments, and sometimes mourn losses.   May we always cherish our ancestors as we prepare for the days ahead. May we remember that we exist because of their prayers and their faith.   We are blessed with distinct and melodious tongues. Our languages are treasures of stories, songs, ceremonies, and memories. May each of us remember to share our stories with one another, because it is only through stories that we live full lives.   May the words we speak go forth as bright beads of comfort, joy, humor, and inspiration. We have faith that the graduates will inspire others to explore and follow their interests.   Today we reflect a rainbow of creation: Some of us came from the east, where bright crystals of creativity reside. They are the white streaks of early morning light when all is born again. We understand that, in Tucson, the Rincon Mountains are our inspiration for beginning each day. The Rincons are everlasting and always present.   Those who came from the south embody the strength of the blue mountains that encircle us. The Santa Ritas instill in us the vigorous spirit of youthful learning.   Others came from the west; they are imbued with the quiet, yellow glow of dusk. They help us achieve our goals. Here in the middle of the valley, the ts'aa', the basket of life, the Tucson Mountains teach us to value our families.   The ones from the north bring the deep, restorative powers of night's darkness; their presence renews us. The Santa Catalina Mountains teach us that, though the past may be fraught with sorrow, it was strengthened by the prayers of our forebearers. We witnessed the recent fires the mountains suffered, and in their recovery we see ourselves on our own journeys. We understand that we are surrounded by mountains, dziił, and thus that we are made of strength, dziił, nihí níhídziił. We are strong ourselves. We are surrounded by mountains that help us negotiate our daily lives.   May we always recognize the multitude of gifts that surround us. May our homes, schools, and communities be filled with the wisdom and optimism that reflect a generous spirit.   We are grateful for all blessings, seen and unseen.   May we fulfill the lives envisioned for us at our birth. May we realize that our actions affect all people and the earth. May we live in the way of beauty and help others in need. May we always remember that we were created as people who believe in one another. We are grateful, Holy Ones, for the graduates, as they will strengthen our future.   All is beautiful again. Hózhǫ́ nááhasdłíí’. Hózhǫ́ nááhasdłíí’. Hózhǫ́ nááhasdłíí’. Hózhǫ́ nááhasdłíí’.
For Marilynn  Nihideezhí, it was a moist June afternoon when we buried you. The Oak Springs Valley was dense with sage, cedar, and chamisa; and gray, green, and brown shrubs cradled the small cemetery. The sky was huge overhead. Your son said later, "Did you see the sky? It was purple. I knew it would rain," he said.   The dark Carrizo Mountains were so clear.   There were so many people, Sister. Many of your friends whom we didn't know, and your former schoolmates whom we remembered as children, and Sister, we met many relatives for the first time.   We cried, not wanting to leave you in that serene place. We hesitated, though our father, his parents, and their parents are buried there. Our older sisters thought ahead to bring flowers for them. They huddled quietly over their graves a few feet away.   Shideezhí, remember how red the sand is? The men—your sons, our nephews, grandsons, and various in-laws— took turns filling your grave. Their necks and arms were streaked with dusty sweat. They kept their heads down; their faces were damp and eyes, swollen.   We had to get it all out; we cried and held each other. My granddaughters hovered near me as if I might faint or fall unexpectedly.   Did you see, Sister, the way the grandchildren fed and served everyone? They guided the grandparents and the elderly to their chairs. Once seated, they served plates filled with mutton ribs, potato salad, corn, thick slabs of oven bread, crispy fry bread, and Jell-O salad. They placed the salt and pepper—that enduring couple— before us and implored us to eat. The two delights we relished were good— hot, strong coffee and cold, crisp diet pop.   We ate for you; we consumed your meal, Shideezhí. We ate to honor the times you cooked for us— those tasty dishes, scrumptious pastries combined with laughter, silly childhood memories, and always teasing jokes. Sister, I didn't know how we would make it; it is still too much to think of you not being here.
We had a grief we didn't understand while  standing at the edge of  some low scrub hills as if humans were extra  or already gone;—   what had been in us before?  a life that asks for mostly  wanting freedom to get things done in order to feel less  helpless about the end of things alone—;   when i think of time on earth,  i feel the angle of gray minutes  entering the medium days  yet not "built-up":: our work together: groups, the willing  burden of an old belief,    & beyond them love, as of  a great life going like fast creatures peeling back marked  seeds, gold-brown integuments  the color time  will be when we are gone—
—kept losing self control   but how could one lose the self  after reading so much literary theory? The shorter "i" stood under the cork trees,  the taller "I" remained rather passive;  the brendas were angry at the greed, angry that the trees would die, had lost interest  in the posturing of the privileged,    the gaps between can't & won't...  Stood outside the gate of permissible  sound & the wind came soughing  through the doubt debris(soughing comes from swāgh—to resound... echo actually comes from this also—)  we thought of old Hegel across the sea—the Weltgeist—& clouds   went by like the bones of a Kleenex...  it's too late for countries but it's not too late for trees...  & the wind kept soughing with its sound sash, wind with  its sound sash, increasing bold wind with its sound sash,  increasing bold—
Sometimes , when i'm  very tired , i think  of extremophiles , chemolithoautotrophs  & others with power for changing  not-life into lives , of those that eat rock & fire in volcanoes , before the death  of the world but after the death of a human  , of their taste for ammonia or iron , sulfur & carbon  , somehow  enough of it to go on ... As workers  taste revolt , they grow at the vents of oceans , turning mute vapor into respiration , changing unhinged  matter to hinges , near the rims of sea trenches or the caves ... Our friend wrote  of writers living in gray hiding,  , of those who love glass  & early freedom , steep sand  & late freedom , sex among gentle  or bitter grasses , those with a taste for  blue or belligerence , obscure lives, she called them , the writers  of radical mind … The living prefer life , mostly they do  , they are ravenous  , making shapes in groups  as the dying grow one thought  until the end , wanting more  specifics , desert or delay   until the i drops away into i am not here , the mineral other pumps & vast vapors , ridges & shadows beyond  the single life it had not thought of—
Perhaps is a new and sudden way of being.   Like satisfaction not yet begun or some other kind of kindness:   a more gentle one?   Night makes us all into the middle of something until we aren't   anything anymore. The sky isn't any color here. It's OK because consolation is color enough   for your cheeks, wind bitten and glorified by the light of the wine in this glass draining   toward a better time, a better space. I invented a notion of hell, and you invented a notion of hello.   Amazing similarities and bizarrely coincidental snow   Like a twig falling from an oak's tallest point,   I keep wondering when forgiveness found its way into this world   in a time before bargaining and beckoning.   It's quiet again and now the sky is a tangled mess of rags seeking out the bored and unwilling.   I'd like to make a map not of the land but of the path I took to arrive in this place,   a map with no idealized purpose, a map of a thousand airless pines.
Shadows lengthened while we sat stuck in traffic just beyond San Rafael. Headlights had begun to flare in the cool dusk. The hum of the car's engine lulled me, and I put my forehead against the glass, looking out over a darkening landscape. We were headed to the Bishop's Ranch, a weekend retreat for Episcopal Young Churchmen in hilly country that would someday produce superlative wines with garnet hues that stain the inside of a glass. I was queasy from the lurching of the car, the stops and starts, the smell of exhaust. Though trembling with cold, I was too shy to ask the lady, the mother of one of the other girls, to turn on the heater. I imagined pale pink blossoms on the Japanese plum, apple trees laden with white flowers, and north of Sebastapol the vibrant yellow of daffodils on slender, pleated stems. That night I slept in a single bunk made up with thin sheets and blankets.   A warm sun the next day restored me, but in the evening, seated by the fire that crackled in the fireplace of the big lodge, I felt flushed. Our recently ordained curate (we were not to know he was gay till some years later) had asked me to bring my guitar, and now he wanted me to sing about the girl who decides to sleep next to her mother her whole life long instead of falling for an unfaithful suitor. I sang; we all sang together. Young Father W. had a wonderful tenor voice. His smile reassured me, but now I was tired and, earlier than the others, I decided to return to the dorm.   In that clear March night, the sky gleamed like black ink and stars blazed, bright and alive. Walking downhill, guitar in hand, I suddenly stumbled with dizziness, and the slope swam before me. “Hold on, hold on,” I told myself as I nearly fell onto the dew-slick lawn. For a moment I could sense myself floating away from my body. Back in the dorm, I crawled into bed and lay shuddering with cold, bones aching. The room seemed to spin. I wanted to be home, but the thought of facing my mother filled me with terrible dismay. I knew the blue failure notice mailed by the school would have arrived.   Sure enough, it lay open on the dining table when I got home the following afternoon. A Sunday fog, hardly a mist, had blown in from the bay and was gathering in the eucalyptus across the ravine. The house was steamy. A basket of clean laundry occupied a chair atop a stack of San Francisco Chronicles. Mom sat at the table sewing, but I knew she was scowling. I thought it wise to look industrious, so I began to fold towels and pillowcases. “What I want to know,” began my mother, “is whether you have any ambition? Obviously, you will never get to college. What do you expect to do with your life?” She paused, and I shrugged. “Go ahead and shrug. Do you think your girlfriend is going to take care of you? That won’t last long. And why is it you only fall in love with girls? Well, I suppose you want to be a boy.” What an unutterable failure I am. I retreated, burned by her ferocious, upright anger. “Oh, yes, I’m sure you’re sick! But you will go to school tomorrow!”   That night, wracked again with cold, unable to stop my trembling, I sought my parents’ bed, stood moaning till Mom woke and let me under the covers, where she tried to warm me with her body. Weeks later we learned that one of my classmates, a robust girl who shot baskets as well as any boy, had succumbed to the illness and died. That night, my mother placed her hand on my forehead–her smooth palm, her touch, gentle–and said to my barely awake dad, “Our daughter has a raging fever.” Like a miracle, I was still her child. Comforted, I slept.
What might all songs lean into?    You scramble eggs one moment, and in the next minute    you're eating them with dry toast and black coffee    in silence.    On a day like any day, your voice is not your own:   the grass clippings disrupt   a robin too large to fly from worm to worm.   We don't know why we speak,    but yet our voices persist, even when void of substance—  like a dream you'd like    to recall throughout the day,   but you don't or you can't and after a week, it's gone forever.   Of course our voices evolve years before our bodies—   our vocal cords vibrate like a heartbeat,  senselessly. No explanation needed.   Eventually all languages converge.  Each thought falls   into all others. And what thought  resists being built by words?    Perhaps fear placed us  here in this room together:   a fear of fire at one point turned into a fear of God. After that, a fear   of godlessness, a room where a word before    another word and another   word after the first was all we had, all we could imagine. Somehow   an image means more than the object itself but not because    it's made of words. Most likely it's because the act of creation   sets the mind down like a bird  in a field   where the speed of the invasive cannot exist.
If an idea exists but is never found, then the stained-glass windows   will reflect nothing back to the ear. Most days filter through the mind,   waiting not for movement but for a road to be built,   brick by brick, word by word,   weariness replaced with joy, but what is joy without the years   and the way they open constantly, two or three hearts pumping a volume of blood   meant for just one?    Our disbelief in the ordinary emerges from the way we color routine:   leaves pile up depending on the wind, but why pause to notice?   Eventually the seasons embrace what our words will not, the illuminated day   just one of a thousand others, and the names we give back to the world   mean ultimately little against the way   the sun pleads sense from the smallest cradle of dew.
All at once that stubborn dog of a heart stopped barking at Lady Poetry, jumped over the wall where the sacred crows of Kashmir dwelt and said: I've come into this world to stay. It can't be, protested the daffy nurses of Pickapoon Hospital. It can't be, the guardians of the public order responded in chorus. All at once that heart stopped leaping, not in his beloved Buenos Aires where he'd mis- placed his violin for good or in Ukraine where José sawed timber and memorized train schedules. That stubborn dog of a heart kept singing in the face of turbulence, never knowing whether the Lady would arrive. He put bars on his verses because of issues with his lungs and thanked the little birds that ate from his hand. He fed the crows as well—"breadcrumbing," he'd call it—ringing a bell while quoting mystics in their native tongues. This is why I've come, he'd say, but all at once that stubborn dog of a heart stopped speaking and drew a giant moustache high up in the spheres. You can see it if you dare listen to their music.
If someone tells you that your poem is nostalgic, take it as a compliment. There's no greater praise. In Greek, nostos means "return" andalgia "pain." What's a poem without the return of pain? If they tell you that your poem is melancholic, take that as a compliment, too. In Greek, melan means "black" and khole "bile." What's a poem without the most pernicious disorder of the body and soul? Pain and illness. If your poem is nostalgic and melancholic, see a doctor.
There's no cause for vanity and none for pride: it's just a matter of assembling words in lines, then dividing them up (or letting them divide themselves), hoping they sound good or bad. (What's important is that they sound like something.) It's all a question of staying alert so that red doesn't bleed into orange or orange into yellow or yellow into silence. There's no cause for rejecting silence and none for accepting it, either. We should speak when there's noth- ing to say and be quiet when others talk. That's the poet's business, so get used to it. There's nothing glorious about it. The future doesn't count for anything and the past just laughs at us. There's no cause for writing this poem and none for deleting it, either.
Empty air has its own mechanism, me dijo.  Its gears accord to whim.   We go out only when we have to, me dijo.  We have hidden things for breathing.   You can't understand it prepped that way, me dijo.  It always changes, but never readily enough.   Some things we say more of and then again, me dijo.  They always mean less once pre-written.   The context connections are far too frail, me dijo.  To make them you need to pixel-point time.   There are no click-in-n-out pictures, me dijo.  You facet your eyes to see them multiply.   There are hands held out everywhere, me dijo.  We have to be careful what to step around/in.   Sometimes we come this close too late, me dijo.  Then we have to wait for inertia to embrace us.   We are the hungry, hungry: so ravenous, me dijo.  We will tear at your insides and lick them clean.
I would have come. When you called. But. I had the most beautiful pale pink rose. Its healthy stem was clenched between my teeth. And. Its thorns bit sharply into my tender wet flesh. So.   I couldn't answer you. Still. My lips moved at you silently. They offered words you never heard. They screamed inside my crazed brain. Only. It could do nothing for you.   In time the petals wilted. They blew away. And. They became compost in someone else's garden. The tough, fibrous stem withered. I bit down hard to snap its grip on me. Then.   My teeth fell out. Its thorns had burrowed into my cheeks. They had implanted themselves permanently. They were suckling on my softest tissues. And. Not long after they sprouted tiny shoots.   They coiled their way down. I still held the memory of your call. And. The long stemmed beauty lodged next to it. They cleaved unto the long roots curling down my neck. My body held tight and listened. Hard.
The plump lemon, the spoon's metal cuts off the shadow,   the bursting overflow of pleasure, the dark night of the shriek, a nameless fire in the street, some blackened breadcrumbs...
Did you know there were hundreds of little night moths crowded against the window pane to catch a glimmer of light?   It was the scent of a strange perfume, from fallen cocoons, sticky sincerity that made them flee.   In this world of protected ruins, in this circular world where people tell and re-tell the same stories, in this world where people forgot that the dyke wouldn't be massive enough to hold back the sea swell; in this world where each and every one would flee in panic in the end; even the old lady sold spun silver birds while she whispered...   The tiny, translucent and elegant night moths like freshly picked pumpkin seeds crowded in the corner of that half-open window clinging to the cold glass, light eager, while the vapor filled the room reaching the nostrils of colleagues   who didn't recognize each other but intertwining their fingers, waited for someone else's words to atone and explain and bestow meaning to words.
Three women survive. One hides in a bedroom of a house, sharpening blades in the bathroom, her night. Another disinfects the cloth her older sister contaminates. The third, more tender and insecure, proud and serene,  takes her first steps, surrounded by palm trees, lemon trees, pomegranate trees,  bougainvilleas, birds of paradise...
He plays a train. She plays a whistle. They move away.   He plays a rope. She plays a tree. They swing.   He plays a dream. She plays a feather. They fly.   He plays a general. She plays people. They declare war.
—I want to draw the sky. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And why do you spread the colors this way? —Because the sky has no edges. . . . —I want to draw the earth. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And who is this? —She is my friend. —And where is the earth? —In her handbag. . . . —I want to draw the moon. —Draw it, my darling. —I can't. —Why? —The waves shatter it continuously. . . . —I want to draw paradise. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —But I don't see any colors. —It is colorless. . . . —I want to draw the war. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And what is this circle? —Guess. —A drop of blood? —No. —A bullet? —No. —Then, what? —The button that turns off the lights.
Yesterday I lost a country. I was in a hurry, and didn't notice when it fell from me like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. Please, if anyone passes by and stumbles across it, perhaps in a suitcase open to the sky, or engraved on a rock like a gaping wound, or wrapped in the blankets of emigrants, or canceled like a losing lottery ticket, or helplessly forgotten in Purgatory, or rushing forward without a goal like the questions of children, or rising with the smoke of war, or rolling in a helmet on the sand, or stolen in Ali Baba's jar, or disguised in the uniform of a policeman who stirred up the prisoners and fled, or squatting in the mind of a woman who tries to smile, or scattered like the dreams of new immigrants in America. If anyone stumbles across it, return it to me, please. Please return it, sir. Please return it, madam. It is my country. . . I was in a hurry when I lost it yesterday.
Shook the box like a maraca.   Stood around like a dope in my punch-colored dress, clutching your box to my chest.   Opened your plastic receptacle, the size of a jack-in-the-box. But instead of gaudy stripes, your box is sober-suit blue, hymnal blue.   Tasted them. You've gained a statue's flavor, like licking the pyramids, or kissing sandstone shoulders. I mean boulders.   Remarked to your box: "REINCARNATION comes from roots meaning 'to be made flesh again.'"   Stowed your box under my bed for a week to seed dreams in which you advise me. (This didn't work.)   Opened the Babylonian Talmud at random. Read aloud to your gritty, gray-white powder: "There are three keys which the Holy One, blessed be He, has not entrusted into the hands of any messenger. These are: the key of rain, the key of birth, and the key of the resurrection of the dead." Worked myself up to watery eyes. Any intensity evaporated the instant I stopped reading.   Tried to intuit your format, sift it from tides of void. Does shape play a role? My watch ticked in an exaggerated way. Closed my eyes, sent forth mental tendrils seeking the nothing of you. They curled back on them- selves, weaving around the wing chair, a dog's leg, a lamp stand, eventu- ally heading back toward the nothing of me.
lives on an island of last-ditch attempts and ancient consolations   after the shipwreck she swam ashore near naked hands scraped raw on coral bra and panties soaked through sand in her teeth lapped by aftermath lying exhausted slowly approaching the condition of music   he loved her stubborn luster sure they argued sometimes the word "argue" from Latin meaning to make clear while she sat quietly in the wing chair her eyes closed police ransacked his desk the note turned up in his pocket with the letter for his sister a baseball ticket stub receipts for two "taco platters"he whose soul was bound up with mine and part of a bookmark   six weeks later she looks great thin and translucent a statue of justice sans blindfold she wears beautiful blouses now peach, gold, seedling green her complexion has never been better lushness nips at the heels of destruction   tonight's lurid sunset's a cocktail of too many boozes she'd like to switch it off via remote control but there's no antidote for celestial events   a frantic bat takes a wrong turn from the attic veers into her living room, bounces off walls a sick flut-thud each time it hits the suicide's wife pulls out her roasting pan climbs the kitchen counter teeters and grabs for twenty minutes at last claps on the lid walks her prize outside   releases the creature into the trees where the lawn peters out where the idea that at death something is liberated can flap blackly away.
The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while science was the music of our minds. Our sexual identities glittery as tinsel, we fretted about god's difficulties with intimacy, waiting for day's luster to fade so we could slip into something less venerated. Like sea anemones at high tide our minds snatched at whatever rushed by. Hush, hush, my love. These things happened a long time ago. You needn't be afraid of them, now.
All the kids came rumbling down the wood tenement Shaky stairs, sneakers slapping against the worn Tin tread edges, downhall came Pepo, Chino, Cojo, Curly bursting from the door like shells exploding Singing "I'm a Rican Doodle Dandy" and "What shall We be today, Doctors or Junkies, Soldiers or Winos?"   Pepo put a milk crate on a Spanish Harlem johnny pump And drops opened like paratroopers carrying war news.   Then Urban Renewal attacked the pump, cleared the slums Blamed Puerto Rico and dispersed the Spies, blasting Them into the Army or Anywhere Avenue in the Bronx.   And nobody, but nobody, came back from that summer.   Just as Korea was death in service to the warring Nation The Bronx was death in service to the negligent Nation
Puerto Rico was created when the pumpkin on top of The turtle burst and its teeming waters poured out With all mankind and beastkind riding on the waves Until the water drained leaving a tropical paradise.   Puerto Rico was stumbled on by lost vampires bearing Crucifix in one hand, arquebus in the other, sucking The veins of land and men, tossing the pulp into the Compost heap which they used as the foundation for Their fortifications and other vainglorious temples.   Puerto Rico was arrested just as it broke out of the Spanish jail and, renamed a trusty, it was put in an American cell. When the prisoner hollered, "Yankee, Go Home," Puerto Rico was referred to the United Nations.   Puerto Rico, to get to paradise now, you have to ride blood.
Monterosa, your body is dead on Avenue A. Angelo, They found you eyes open staring at the beer Soaked floorboards. Did you want that? Did You mind them filling your back with buckshot?   Angelo, I am angry with them all, and you Monterosa Killed and killers, killing and dealing dope. No good You were, no good they are. Still, I wish their fate To be bodies stacking under the same blue smoke.   Monterosa, there is blood on your song, blood on the juke Box. The cowbell, the conga, and your corpse form the trio That is the rhinestone pin of my failure, your failure, Our failure, who loved, but did not rescue Angelo.   Angel, hold him, while I bury him in these clean words, And pray to see the resurrection of the rose mountain.
We feel the volt inside our veins, inside the vines, inside the rain, and through the capillaries of a tree. We feel the pulse above in storms, vibrato of thunder, the whispering rhythms of a river, magnetic currents in the earth, the alternating flow of breath, the push of tides, reversing air from caves, dilating hum and dance of bees, the chant of auctioneer. All oscillate together, or they seem to, in this play of chance, beneath the stars' indifference.
What a surprise it is to hear that locusts come the thirteenth year and not the seventeenth as told for ages and enshrined in old folklore and rhymes and family lies. The species similar otherwise: cicadas books call periodic, found here in our southern district. They grow from eggs pressed into twigs. The nymphs that hatch then start to dig at least ten inches into soil, and live by sucking juicy oil from roots and stems, sweet sap that nourishes through the giant nap, and then the lucky thirteenth year they grow a polished armor and crawl into the summer air and, louder than a Mahler choir, fill meadow, hedge, and orchard grove with necessary calls for love, then leave their eggs to fortune's whim with Philip Glass-like requiem.
He brings me chocolate from the Pentagon, dark chocolates shaped like tanks and fighter jets, milk chocolate tomahawks, a bonbon like a kirsch grenade, mint chocolate bayonets. He brings me chocolate ships, a submarine descending in a chocolate sea, a drone unmanned and filled with hazelnut praline. He brings me cocoa powder, like chocolate blown to bits. Or chocolate squares of pepper heat. Or if perhaps we've fought, he brings a box of truffles home, missiles of semisweet dissolving on the tongue. He brings me Glocks and chocolate mines, a tiny transport plane, a bomb that looks delicious in its cellophane.
I can enter the morning with traces of an eternal dream: to live on a planet of women. we sing in the fertile forest, caress on lavender hills, bathe beneath cascades of clear waters. and just like that, nude and wet, we mount each other’s bodies. our desire is a whale that searches for calm in the depth of the sea.   I smell sex in my hair when I awaken.   the dream perfumes all of my days. I go to the post office and look for stamps with etchings of flowers and fruits so that I can send letters to the women who loved me in my sleep.   we are in a world that is not ours. what do we do with the dreams that touch our consciousness in the nude each night?   our planet of women is nothing more than a dream. who knows how many of us bathe in the woods or which ones of us have wings that let us fly with our flesh? it’s not for anyone to know. fortunately, we always dream paradise, we make it ours. there, we find each other and live in our collective memory.   and so, I smell sex in my hair when I awaken.
For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours;   For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive.   And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid   So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
I hear a book being written, my sister says, or is it a poem?   Her eyes are closed.   It has a lot of semicolons.     One sentence or two? she wants to know. Comma? Period.   Well, I say, semicolons join and separate.     Grammar, my sister says, is very interesting.
Chemo Tarceva prayer meditation affirmation Xanax Avastin Nebulizer Zofran Zoloft Vicodin notebooks nurses oxygen tank pastina magical thinking PET scans movies therapy phone calls candles acceptance denial meatloaf doctors rosary beads sleep Irish soda bread internet incantations visitors sesame oil pain patches CAT scans massage shopping thin sliced Italian bread with melted mozzarella St. Anthony oil Lourdes water St. Peregrine tea spring water get well cards relaxation tapes recliner cooking shows cotton T-shirts lawn furniture a new baby giving up Paris giving up Miami charts bargaining not bargaining connections counting with her breathing for her willPride and Prejudice Downton Abbey prayer watching TV not watching TV prayer prayer prayer prayer lists
We start stopping when she’s afraid something bad will happen. Don’t worry, I say, all will be well.   How could she know? She’s never read it, never heard of Elizabeth and Jane, never wanted Mr. Darcy. Like me   she needs to know how things will end. I know Elizabeth will be fine. As I knew, last week, my sister weeping, that Elinor–   sobbing, begging–wouldn’t lose Marianne. It’s Jane Austen! My sister doesn’t know that in Austen nothing really bad happens. I leave her   on the couch with the last hours. How much my sister will have to endure, alone, with this new drama.   Later her message. The last one in which she will sound like herself.Hi, it’s me. The movie was unbelievable.   Unbelievable.
and you press into the dark, imagine the stranger two rows back, that fragile chance you’ll forget in the second trailer.   Now it’s quiet, still this burden of being watcher and screen and what floats across it–light pouring out   its time and necklines and train wrecks. What a relief to yield to the EXIT sign red “I” blinking like a candle.   Soon the enormous figures moving across rooms, the emphatic narrative arcs. (There’s the thrum of the subway,   its engine of extras.) Here now the beginning of trivia tests. Warning puppets with brown-bag faces and fringy hair.   You’re almost here. But what you want is the after. How yourself you are now walking into the night, full moon over Houston Street,   at the bright fruit stand touching the yellow mums. Here you are: Woman with Cilantro listening to the rattle of the wrap,   the paper sound paper makes after you have heard movie paper. Apples are more apples. Paper more paper. Cilantro, its sweaty green self.
I wait for you to come to brush your shoe against the blade of grass I'm sitting on touch me with your hand as you reach for one last violet to take home   or pick up a worm to place gracefully in the garden   even better if you lie on a hillside to watch the sunset or breathe in stars   I will feel your warmth, bury my head next to that freckle on your calf, that hair on your forearm, or just behind the lobe of your left ear   I promise not to take too much blood into my swelling body   only what I think I need   and I will never let you know I am here though I will love you   deeply
My cousin, Milton, worked for a cable company. The boy I knew when we were children   had fists that were often clenched, his face set like an old man whose life had been so hard,   it hardened him. But the man's hands opened to let more of the world in. He sent the funniest   cards to family and friends at Christmas, laid down cable so others could connect. Yet, he lived   alone, kept to himself much of the time, so when his sister found his body, he'd been gone   a good while. He died young at fifty-seven, without fuss or bother. No sitting by the bedside   or feeding him soup. He just laid himself down like a trunk line and let the signal pass through.
I'm just an assistant with the Vanishing Act. My spangled wand points out the disappeared. It's only a poor thing made of words, and lacks the illusive power to light the darkling year.   Not prophecy, not elegy, but fact: the thing that's gone is never coming back.   Late or soon a guttering silence will ring down a curtain like woven smoke on thickening air. The audience will strain to see what's there, the old magician nowhere to be found.   For now, I wear a costume and dance obliquely. The applause you hear is not for me, its rabid sound like angry rain—as one by one the known forms cease to be: childhood, the farm, the river, forested ground; the tiger and the condor, the whale, the honeybee; the village, the book, the lantern. Then you. Then me.
I prefer warm fur, a perfect fire to lie beside, a cozy lap where I can nap, an empty chair when she's not there. I want heat  on my feet  on my nose  on my hide. No cat I remember dislikes December  inside.
april is a dog's dream the soft grass is growing the sweet breeze is blowing the air all full of singing feels just right so no excuses now we're going to the park to chase and charge and chew and I will make you see what spring is all about
—in memory of   Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance,   Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor,   Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney,   Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr.,   Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Myra Thompson   Shot and killed while at church.   Charleston, SC (6-18-2015), RIP    poem by poem we can end the violence every day after  every other day 9 killed in Charleston, South Carolina they are not 9 they are each one  alive we do not know  you have a poem to offer it is made of action—you must search for it run outside and give your life to it when you find it walk it back—blow upon it carry it taller than the city where you live when the blood comes down do not ask if  it is your blood it is made of  9 drops  honor them wash them stop them from falling
Last night, I went to a gay bar with a man I love a little. After dinner, we had a drink. We sat in the far-back of the big backyard and he asked, What will we do when this place closes? I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon, I said, though the crowd was slow for a Saturday, and he said—Yes, but one day. Where will we go? He walked me the half-block home and kissed me goodnight on my stoop— properly: not too quick, close enough our stomachs pressed together in a second sort of kiss. I live next to a bar that's not a gay bar —we just call those bars, I guess— and because it is popular and because I live on a busy street, there are always people who aren't queer people on the sidewalk on weekend nights. Just people, I guess. They were there last night. As I kissed this man I was aware of them watching and of myself wondering whether or not they were just. But I didn't let myself feel scared, I kissed him exactly as I wanted to, as I would have without an audience, because I decided many years ago to refuse this fear— an act of resistance. I left the idea of hate out on the stoop and went inside, to sleep, early and drunk and happy. While I slept, a man went to a gay club with two guns and killed forty-nine people. Today in an interview, his father said he had been disturbed recently by the sight of two men kissing. What a strange power to be cursed with: for the proof of men's desire to move men to violence. What's a single kiss? I've had kisses no one has ever known about, so many kisses without consequence— but there is a place you can't outrun, whoever you are. There will be a time when. It might be a bullet, suddenly. The sound of it. Many. One man, two guns, fifty dead— Two men kissing. Last night I can't get away from, imagining it, them, the people there to dance and laugh and drink, who didn't believe they'd die, who couldn't have. How else can you have a good time? How else can you live? There must have been two men kissing for the first time last night, and for the last, and two women, too, and two people who were neither. Brown people, which cannot be a coincidence in this country which is a racist country, which is gun country. Today I'm thinking of the Bernie Boston photograph Flower Power, of the Vietnam protestor placing carnations in the rifles of the National Guard, and wishing for a gesture as queer and simple. The protester in the photo was gay, you know, he went by Hibiscus and died of AIDS, which I am also thinking about today because (the government's response to) AIDS was a hate crime. Now we have a president who names us, the big and imperfectly lettered us, and here we are getting kissed on stoops, getting married some of us, some of us getting killed. We must love one another whether or not we die. Love can't block a bullet but neither can it be shot down, and love is, for the most part, what makes us— in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul. We will be everywhere, always; there's nowhere else for us, or you, to go. Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you. Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.
Before clock hands showed the time time ceased, and looking glasses were veiled as if they still held familiar faces, in those last moments when breath shallowed like a wellspring running dry, God-words quickened, only then the dying left death-beds borne on the arms of the gathered, lowered to the floor so they might press close, as though a door through which to listen and know the earth's old secrets before it opened, and they entered.
All that once was is this, shattered glass, a rot of tin and wood, the hum of limp-legged wasps that ascend like mote swirls in the heatlight.   Out front a cherry tree buckles in fruit, harvested by yellow jackets and starlings, the wind, the rain, and the sun.
Here was no place for illumination the cotton dust thick window-strained light. The metal squall drowned what could not be shouted everything geared warping and filling.   Though surely there were some times that he paused my grandfather thinking This is my life and catching himself before he was caught lost wages or fingers the risk of reflection.   Or another recalled in those reckoning moments remembering the mountains the hardscrabble farm where a workday as long bought no guarantee of money come fall full bellies in winter.   To earn extra pay each spring he would climb the mill's water tower repaint the one word. That vowel heavy word defined the horizon a word my grandfather could not even read.
Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you it might turn out instead to be about me or any one of my female relatives it might turn out to be about this young native girl growing up in rural Alberta in a town with fewer Indians than ideas about Indians, in a town just south of the 'Aryan Nations'    it might turn out to be about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall or Richard Cardinal, it might even turn out to be about our grandmothers, beasts of burden in the fur trade skinning, scraping, pounding, packing, left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,' left for white-melting-skinned women, not bits-of-brown women left here in this wilderness, this colony.    Betty, if I start to write a poem about you it might turn out to be about hunting season instead, about 'open season' on native women it might turn out to be about your face young and hopeful staring back at me hollow now from a black and white page it might be about the 'townsfolk' (gentle word) townsfolk who 'believed native girls were easy' and 'less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence.'    Betty, if I write this poem.
The story goes from in a rainfall to sister walking a field browned autumn. And when she arrives winter has come, so the old man rises from his chair, picks up matches, pipes and tools, and walks out to begin again.   The sculptures grow by the day, birds in ice, recognizable eagles, a bear who began as a man in a moment of dance. He does this in ice, all winter carving at dawn, carving at dusk.   And sister after walking a field browned autumn, arrives, watches from the east window, waits, goes out to him in spring, taps him on the shoulder and points to the pools of water he's standing over.
More than a hundred dollars of them.   It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff  them in.   Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner   of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my  dining table—   each fresh-faced, extending delicate leaves   into the crush. Didn't I watch   children shuffle strictly in line, cradle   candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers,   chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla's Easter? Wasn't I sad?  Didn't I use to   go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage  raising   bursting violet spears?—Look, the afternoon dies   as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up   their fluted throats until it fills the room   and my lights have to be not switched on.   And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet,   so strong, that it could slice me open. It does.   I know I'm not the only one whose life is a conditional clause   hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room  and the tremble of my phone.   I'm not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen   flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.   When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for  decades.   God, I am so transparent.   So light.
I. ADMIRAL   Laid out on vellum, the past is a long wound. It unfolds five centuries later, beneath the heavy pens of scholars. The world shifts and spins as the Admiral's bronze astrolabe measures the paths between stars. The sky is written in the sea's uneasy mirror, and mermaids comb their hair in the distance.They are not, he writes, so beautifulas I have heard. He dreams of his own circuitous route to the Heavens. God and the Crown. Both want too much.   II. GOVERNOR   At Guanahani, they swam to the caravel bearing parrots and balls of cotton thread, these people so unlike him they could not not be saved.  Too angry to sleep, the Governor haunts every room in his castle. The servants whisper in their own tongue.   The severed hands of the Taino wave in clear salt water, in pink-tinted water. They wave as the gold mines dry up, as the Governor leaves Hispaniola in chains.   Mermaids, dog-headed men and women with breastplates of copper— They draw their bows, and arrows cover the shore of Columbus's dream. No, not the Taino, whom he once called in dios. They touch his white skin. They have the faces of Christian angels.
I. The people who watch me hang my coat on a peg at the office don't even know about that other life, the life when there was you, it, however briefly. To them my body is a fact casual as the weather. I could tell them: That day it rained the way it rains in the New World. Leaves struck the window like daggers. I didn't think about God but the ones we used to worship the ones who want your heart still beating, who load you with gold and lure you to sleep deep in the cenote.   II. A girl, he said, and I nodded though we couldn't have known. I would have left him then for ten thousand pesos. I don't know what world you inhabit, swimming there, baby, not-baby, part of my body, not me, swept aside like locks of hair or toenail parings. It's ten years today and you who were never alive pull a face in the leaves of jacaranda, the only tree that lives outside my window. It must be your voice whistling through the office window, though I can't understand your words. Comfort or accusation, I can't understand your words.
How can we die when we're already prone to leaving the table mid-meal like Ancient Ones gone to breathe elsewhere. Salt sits still, but pepper's gone rolled off in a rush. We've practiced dying for a long time: when we skip dance or town, when we chew. We've rounded out like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten through by wind—Sorry we rushed off; the food wasn't ours. Sorry the grease sits white on our plates, and the jam that didn't set— use it as syrup to cover every theory of us.
Be willing to dismantle for the purpose  of rebuilding on more solid structure.  —Horoscope   First you must lift the idea (be careful it may be heavy) and haul it out to the dumpster. Next locate the meaning—it may not come easily, though if you have the right tools and they are good tools you should have no difficulty. Now it is the sentences' turn: take each one strip it of grammar (you may need abrasives here) and hang them all on a line. When thoroughly dried, lay each one down on the grass or if you live in the city, the sidewalk will do. The point is, make sure you put them in harm's way, wherever you are. Don't try to protect them. It may be they will go to war, or wander the desert or haunt the streets like beggars or run from the police or suffer loneliness and despair. Remember: they must make their own way. The best you can do is to stay out of theirs and take them back in if they return.
This is a paean to relief and ecstasy. A man's poem of course—the electric ah! in the long stream arcing a rainbow under the spotlight moon, a covenant between mv body and the earth's.  I think of Li Po smiling silently on Green Mountain and can hear Rumi drunk on rapture—drink my brother he calls to me, think of the elephant loosening a great ebullient stream that floats a river past your house and drop turds so immense you could build a hut from them along the shore to shelter your children.  What release! Think of your child pedaling under your hand and of a sudden—it just happens—you let go and he's off on his own, free for that first time— the achieve of, the mastery of the child. See the stalwart trees in their silence the stones resting in the driveway, the cat curled asleep on the front porch, the smear of blood on the lion's mouth sitting over his fresh gazelle the morning paper and its stories shouting for attention. The plenitude of it all.  And perhaps  somewhere a friend is dreaming of me, or someone a stranger is peeing ecstatic under the same moon. A covenant then between us.  True or not. It is no matter.
That summer night Was hot Steaming like a crab Luscious under the shell   Televisions gone bleary Blinked In front of men In undershirts drinking beer   Wives upstairs took showers Caught A glimpse of their backs In hallway mirrors   I sat in the dark Invisible On the backporch Drinking in the night   And it tasted good So good Going down And somebody like me   Blew night through an alto sax Blew and blew His cooling breath His hot cool breath on me—   And I came alive Glowing In the dark Listening like a fool
But keep writing. Write by the glow of the windows, the roof alight like a red-haired girl, you in the back yard, safe.   The ladybug's flown away. Recall her flit and armored crawl. To the last breath of summer. Upon the circular of winter.   The man may have left. This doesn't stop the writing. Between the pages, a slight blur. The man may have been old and ill, or young who stopped trying to be with you. Ghost days.   You're swimming across a deep lake with a soul you're making. You save the swimmer, the sailor, the drowned, the damned and the beloved.
My ancestors were not diligent and so they lived beside the fort that's neither on the maps of Heaven, Nor of Hell. In these lands, there is no difference between a star and thrown car keys. Chicken nuggets hatch from the eggs of eagles. I grow dirty while bathing in bottled water. My bed comforter is a wet parking lot, I wrap myself up in. If I eat in the morning, there's nothing left in the evening My dish of grass and cigarette butts topped with expired coupons. Stir all I like; I never swallow it down. All the while, my rabbit's foot runs about from Las Cruces to West Memphis searching for flawless luck. The more one cries, the more one prospers . . . O' ancestral demon, may my lamentation become verbal sorcery.
I come from Inuit oil money, From instruments of chance and divination. The most loose, shut in, wavering mind, Recording my day with recitations, antennae, Narration and figure, my phone might die. I'm walking dirty. Shop and mob cops, not to touch my mother's breast Or the queen's royal crown signature Izzy Juju—hijacked, forsaking all others. The untamed scotch is mine. It cost the picture a fortune To say nothing of my turban, costume copies Of topaz bracelets, the umpteenth translation. Did you ever know Micah, Gay Sunshine, Grace Cathedral, Coconut? I went from heels at Barneys to the depths of the bins. Who could be like dropping in? I'll fold both my hands In gloves and wait, Hope Diamond peeking out.
photos of her father in enemy uniform— the taste of almonds
It was wartime Daisies and Maisies in overalls Worked in factories Snapping gum in their teeth Ration spunk To keep them going   Through weekend tours At the local USO Or late nights Checking hats For the Willard rooftop garden It was rough   Making ends meet While their men were at war In radio worlds And newspaper print Nights at home were spent reading   Letters over and over Like prayers Mouths shaped To the words And Hershey bars Melted on radiators
I carry my spikes and step on the field an hour ahead of the others. Last day of March with April offering tickets for the new season. I'm full of sun on wet grass, in love with blistered benches.A sparrow sits on the backstop, watching, ready to dart if I catch its eye. I drop my bag on home plate and swirl my foot in the dust the way my cousin does with his fingers on the skin of a drum head. Next yearhe'll be released with the others who spent mornings breaking windows and trashing vacation homes like drunks in the right field bleachers. Here, I'm alone with a sparrow and the smell of a baseball morningsettling around me like a comforter. I start trotting to first base, the ankles loosening, then the knees, as the dust begins to lift into the breaking light. Around second and third I stretch my armsin a rotary motion ready to fly. A hand waves back from a passing car, someone who knows me or remembers rising one morning when the game of who you are is played out in your mind,and around you a stadium full of fans begs youto do what you usually do in the clutch. The bat I pullfrom the bag for the first time is my father's Louisville Slugger, thirty-three inches, wood barrel.I thought enough time had passed, the attic dust hard in the grooves. I stroke it slowly like a weaponyou love to touch but would never use. He hit .304at Omaha the season he was drafted, all-starrookie-of-the-year. He said we'd join him soon.Then that other draft. He would have been here.I swear he would. The silence feels oppressive now.I dig for a scuffed ball and throw it up, shoulder high,but let it fall. A natural hitter, my father said, holdingmy hands. I grip the tar-stained handle. Tears blurthe wall that's so far away it looks warped. I aimfor marrow deep inside, April hungry for the kill.
Tell me how you die and I will tell you   who you are.  Octavio Paz I stand in line. The woman ahead of me, blowzy-haired and angry, is told that grace is the act of restraint and road-kill is not a sport. She can choose to wait or test the judgment at another entrance. I know that morality, penance, a kind heart don't matter, nor the faith I embraced or didn't, the people I saved. I know the key is where I land on the scale of commitment.Earnhardt, Sr., died for the game, and got in. Many ancient Egyptians buried juggling balls with them, as though endless practice and craft were their gifts to the next world. They entered. I ask if I can peek in, maybe stand on the edge and look into the vast canyon of pits, arenas, fields, fairways, pools, rings, tables, tracks, courts, beaches, forests, mountainswhere war is forbidden. Here is what I bring for review: a nasty fastball, a runner-up ring, individual initiative, a contrary attitude, the heart of a poet. I bring a willingness to run like an outlaw, honor the Greeks and Makahiki, invent new games, practice past dusk, play on the second squad, and keep score until I can get in the game with eternity left on the clock. I hope it is enough.
Mary Magdalene Virgin Mother Mary, Sister of Martha
Mahogany maple syrup runs in spider web lines.My father never uses the stuff, heeats pancakes, powdered, butter moist.When I was a child, he knew more of straightness. Lines and razors were friends.One night he tried to die by his hand. A girljumped before he walked to the ledge.Her mangled body wore the rails like a girdle,her limbs so thin they became a blood putty. Angel,her name. They had to lift the train to take her out.
I. I borrow wings from other angels, coastthe streets to find feathers loosely attachedto slender silver ties. With care, I close the catchand fasten cardboard stiffened form so closeI cannot breathe or fly for the airpushed out into a world in masquerade.I am African. I am goddess with flaresounding the trumpets. I call out God.Meaning changes like sea water in storm.I part the crowds until, beaten, my wingsfly, fall, litter the streets. I cradle the newborntwins and realize that I am fallen,a lesser angel, wingless and depressed.I am seductress unpetaled, undressed.II.dress her navel in lotus flowersto swim in the pool of her abdomentwine orange blossoms in her hairand smell the scent of oils and natural perfumekiss her nipples so that they become pyramidswet from a summer rain of tonguepress her down into soft linens with hardbody folding into hers like tributary waterswarm her hands against heated chestthat covers drum rhythms resoundingmen, worship your women this waywomen, flush at the adorationand you will know how I feelwhen he touches my hand
I.The time has come for the nation to turna new page by righting wrongs of the past.We apologise for laws and policies that inflictedprofound grief, suffering, and loss and for the removalof children from families, communities, and country.For the pain of these, their descendants, and for familiesleft behind, to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,for indignity inflicted on a proud people, we say sorry.We resolve that the injustices of the past must never,never happen again and look to a future based on mutualrespect, where all, whatever their origins, are equal partners.Spoken by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,introduced in January and delivered November 29, 2008,the day after he was sworn into office
Some nights we feel the furred darknessof an ancient one's breath and are trappedin awakening, dismemberedby events we no longer recall.We can touch the windowsill,where October air gathersas hours slip past in thin robes,the forest a concert of voices.The last crickets let go of their songs.The land speaks, its language arisingfrom its own geography—the mountains' hulked shapesare blue whales, rememberingwhen they were undersea ridges,and rivers are serpentine strands hammered from silver, and dark treestalk to the wind—weaving mortal lives,drumbeats, pillars of smoke,voices wavering into updraft,the storyteller shifting the present.
There are too many of us for youto believe you are either alone or responsible. No woman asks for this. Some are children. Some areboys. Every one of us should havebeen heard. This is for Anna, age 17,who was then beaten and left to die;for Nathan, who at 11 admired the basketball coach; for Rosaline, whosees in her baby the face of a rapistand who finds that face difficult tolove; for sisters when soldiers came,mothers imprisoned among guards,for aunties grandmas daughters sons,for one who was tied and one who triedto scream, one whose husband watched,one violated time after time, one tornapart, who called the police whodid not call her back, who went tothe clinic where there were no kits,who numbed her shame with drugs,who could not drink enough to forget,who took her life, who believed shewas an object, who said nothing, whoknew no one was there and that no one would ever be there. Know this: thereare so many that if we could speak,our voices might spread like floodwatersover their boots and swell past securitystations; that if we cried out togetherwe might finally understand it as anassault on all people, all creation, andmaybe then there would be justice inthis war to claim yourself, a strugglemapped all over the flesh of every womanor child who has known what it is to be used, as you were, your sacred body.
All this time I've been looking for words for certain difficult womenbecause they aren't able to speak for themselves, and now theClinton Foundation has come up with a brilliant campaign—theydecided, for International Women's Day, through digital magic to erase women on the cover of Condé Nast, posters, billboards, thosefigures replaced by empty space because women have not yet achievedgender equity, as noted on a website, not-there.org, and they're right. Wehaven't. But when I read about not-there.org and saw its flashy graphics,I wasn't thinking about how women are not-there-yet, metaphorically, I just thought about women who are really not there, women and girls whokeep disappearing (not from magazines, who don't make news in Manhattan)like they've evaporated, like illusions, hundreds in Juárez, twelve hundred missing and murdered Native women across Canada. The hands of men.Now you see her. Not. Not-there. Not here, either,or anywhere. Maybe only part of the problem is the predatory perpetrator-prestidigitator who more often than not knows her, knows how to keep herquiet, who may claim to love her, even, maybe getting even—or the serialrapist-killer in the bushes who bushwhacks her in the dark. You're always safe,says the forensic psychiatrist, unless a monster happens to show up, andthen you're not. Not-there. Maybe a lonely mandible, maxilla, fibula, or ulna shows up, or a bagged body gets dragged from the river. Or not. Is this thevalue we permit a woman's life to have (or not-have) throughout a wrongworld, a global idea of her as disposable parts? In the end, this is not a xenophobic poem, not specific—it's everywhere. Not-there. Right here.Yes, the sun rises anyway, but now the parents are staring past each other, thatzero between them like a chalked outline in their family photograph. Or not.
What we built to hold us, the year's memory,menus and daytrips, after a whilecame loose. Those nightswe balanced on each other's mistakes,cradling our wine:twigs those branches now.Who knew what lived there?She she she called one bird.What lived there knew its place.Another bird splits its nest wide,hinges the gap with spider silk, learningto give, to give, to give until breaking. Only then—either one gives until breaking or one does not.
After a while the 500-year-old village became a secret,carved into the wall of the forest where it met the Pacific,eleven long houses and their racks of drying fish, theirdogs. No roads to this town, only boats and the memory ofboaters. Blankets made from woodpecker feathers, cattailfluff, cedar bark and dog hair woven into a plaid pattern.At least that's what I remember of the museum's diorama.When the mud came down the mountain and covered the village, no one had lived there for years. It was a boaterwho remembered, after a while, that the village was gone,and also that it had once existed. Archaeologists broughtgarden hoses to wash the mud off and hooked the hoses upto the sea. Some of what had been preserved in the mudwas destroyed that day by the water pressure, and then latermost else was ruined by the wind and rain, but at least fora few weeks they could hold the bones in their hands. Thearchaeologists brought their dogs, they lived there a while.
You’re right. I meant “midst,” not “mist.” I don’t know what I was stinking, I mean thinking, soap speaks intimately to my skin every day. Most days. Depending if darkness has risen to my skull like smoke up a chimney floe. Flue. Then no stepping nude into the shower, no mist turning the bathroom mirror into frosted glass where my face would float coldly in the oval. Picture a caveman encased in ice. Good. I like how your mind works, how your eyes inside your mind works, and your actual eyes reading this, their icy precision, nothing slips by them. Even now I can feel you hovering silently above these lines, hawkish, Godlike, each period a lone figure kneeling in the snow. That’s too solemn. I would like to send search parties and rescue choppers to every period ever printed. I would like to apologize to my wife for not showering on Monday and Tuesday. I was stinking. I was simultaneously numb and needled with anxiety, in the midst of a depressive episode. Although “mist” would work too, metaphorically speaking, in the mist of, in the fog of, this gray haze that followed me relentlessly from room to room until every red bell inside my head was wrong. Rung.
No daylight for two months, an ice chisel sliversfrozen lake water refracting blue cinders.By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow:cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor.A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads throughthe meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines.One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip ofa birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown.On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoonwaits to launch: bowhead sings to krill.Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing linepulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish.A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribouhindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty.Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshorea thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin.Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigoldflattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane.A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream;underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury.Picked before the fall migration, cloudberriesdrench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke.A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel rum;she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.
Shoot in 16 mm film, capture her sitting underan olive-green archway. Loop the sound of steel striking glass. When you blink, the camera captures the frame of her kin, walking upside down. Loop the sound of tundra grass sprouting.Her hairline marks her shift from caribou to woman. Standing in front of three white spotlights the silhouette of five black arrowheads departs from her lips. Splice together her eyelashes and frozen lids exaggerate the strain of her freckles coiled into song.Inukshuks tumble from the tips of her fingernails guiding the landing strip for twin otters; they watch their children travel to the moon, or perhaps they erase our oiled webs. Chart sixteen luminaries into the Beaufort Sea. Wait. Wait. Wait. The shutter will remember their white crested etchings.They resurface in the lyric of your documentary.
I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywherein between, and everywhere in betweenbony and overweight, my shadow cannot holdone shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen. My skin is mocha brown, two shades darkerthan taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige,I’m not offended by your question at all.Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight?Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveledhis eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to churchin Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite stained glass, the one with a white spirelike the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churchescreep me out, I never step inside one,never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh with camouflage and hunt. I don’t huntbut wish every deer wore a bulletproof vestand fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin,it’s more sandstone than any color I know. I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was tooapathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block,two blocks to the voting booth For or against a women’s right to choose? Yes, for and against.For waterboarding, for strapping detainees with snorkels and diving masks. Against burningfossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacksfor eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls, but build more smokestacks, we need jobshere in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Againstgun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing a better fence along the border, let’s raise concrete toward the sky, why does it needall that space to begin with? For creatingholes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re nothere to steal work from us, no one dreamsof crab walking for hours across a lettuce fieldso someone could order the Caesar salad. No one dreams of sliding a squeegee downthe cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise, but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers. Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefullysteer a mower around the cemetery grounds.Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor the power grid. Some of us ring you up while some of us crisscross a parking lotto gather the shopping carts into one long,rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.
We the people, we the one times 320 million, I’m rounding up, there’s really too many grass blades to count, wheat plants to tally, just see the whole field swaying from here to that shy blue mountain. Swaying as in rocking, but also the other definition of the verb: we sway, we influence, we impress. Unless we’re asleep, the field’s asleep, more a postcard than a real field, portrait of the people unmoved. You know that shooting last week? I will admit the number dead was too low to startle me if you admit you felt the same, and the person standing by you agrees, and the person beside that person. It has to be double digits, don’t you think? To really shake up your afternoon? I’m troubled by how untroubled I felt, my mind’s humdrum regarding the total coffins, five if you care to know, five still even if you don’t. I’m angry I’m getting used to it, the daily gunned down, pop-pop on Wednesday, Thursday’s spent casings pinging on the sidewalk. It all sounds so industrial, there’s nothing metal that won’t make a noise, I’m thinking every gun should come with a microphone, each street with loudspeakers to broadcast their banging. We would never sleep, the field always awake, acres of swaying up to that shy blue mountain, no wonder why it cowers on the horizon, I mean look at us, look with the mountain’s eyes we the people putting holes in the people.
Look who’s whistling through bleached teeth now, one hand on svelte hip, one fist pumping the air– Pittsburgh–once that madcap & zany joke factory   now chosen for her fetching comeback tale & her earth-sheltered welcome center & her Warhol & her Tropical Forest Conservatory   & her Rosemont, working farm of the moguls of ketchup. Rarely since the global credit crisis do Pittsburghers cross bridges or rivers or the thresholds   of stunningly profitable ventures. Yet tonight, as global output contracts at a pace not seen since the 1930s, as the French president proposes reform   of the International Monetary Fund & the US president delights in the local crepes with crispy edges, & as Greenpeace commandos drape a WHAT THE FUCK?   banner from the deck of the West End Bridge (above which Chinook & Black Hawk helicopter hover), & as police use the LRAD sound cannon on protesters for the first time in the United States or Canada–   a Pittsburgh Pirate homers into the Allegheny River & sets the esplanade ablaze with the flash & fizzle of fireworks launched at the flat lozenge   of the moon, a ghostly azure, suspended low above the sweep of the cantilevered roofs on the opposite shoreline–the poured concrete,   the glass towers, the obelisks–a costly parody of bygone days when confidence in the future, evinced by our sixty miles of integrated mills, was illustrated   by a time capsule, a chamber “hermetically” sealed in Steel City alloys, bicentennially filled with newsprint & artifacts of 1958 Pittsburgh to be cracked open   & savored in some distant epoch, an idea first embraced by Esarhaddon, son of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, Babylonia, & Egypt, & reenacted now   in waves of sound & light–the roar of fireworks night for a losing franchise, the hoarse voices of Pittsburghers– wafting into the void, accelerated by Jupiter’s pull,   & then hurled by Jupiter out of the solar system, yet another urban missive from a noisy planet, a comingling of mathematics and human music, charming   & powerful, a murmur preserved of our city-state that once flourished–before its citizens dispersed to other lands, to greater deeds on the blue Earth.
My father was four years in the war, and afterward, according to my mother, had nothing to say. She says he trembled in his sleep the next four years. My father was twice the father of sons miscarried, and afterward said nothing. My mother keeps this silence also. Four times my father was on strike, and according to my mother; had nothing to say. She says the company didn’t understand, nor can her son, the meaning of an extra fifteen cents an hour in 1956 to a man tending a glass furnace in August.   I have always remembered him a tired man. I have respected him like a guest and expected nothing. It is April now. My life lies before me, enticing as the woman at my side. Now, in April, I want him to speak. I want to stand against the worn body of his pain. I want to try it on like a coat that does not fit.
Someone is looking for us. I sensed it earlier at the creek while floating on my back, and again on Route 8 near Brookline. So we’ve detoured to this hillside eroding and crazy with markers. We’re looking for row mm or nn or something like that. I lug the baby; my wife runs ahead. This neighborhood knows her– she passes so easily between stones. She finds the grave, her father dead ten years now. In the time it takes to say kaddish the sun’s dropped. I set down my son and he crawls in the dimness, pulling himself up on the headstone. How delicately he fingers the marble. Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes. I’m thinking: grass, stone, quiet– then babbling from another world.
Does my little son miss the smell of his first mother? I wonder as the mewl of his mouth opens toward a plastic bottle that is not her breast.   Sudden new mother, I bury my nose deep into his skullcap of ringlets, his starry cheesiness.   In her good-bye letter to him sealed in his album with a birth certificate, which now list my name as Mother,   his first mother writes she nursed him briefly after he emerged into the second room of his world.   I think of milk, volcanic and insistent, answering the newborn’s gigantic thirst, a primal agreement between generosity and greed.   Sometimes I press my nose to the glass of that place where a mother and my child belong to each other; I cannot imagine coming between them.   But then I want to lick him all over with a cow’s thick tongue, to taste him and mark him as mine so if the other mother returns, she will refuse her handled calf smeared with my smell.
The bus steps are high, but William clambers up gamely. Doors shut. He peers out a print-marked window. From the street corner, I wave, wistful as a soldier’s bride as his bus pulls away and turns a corner.   At noon the yellow bus returns him to the same place where I’m standing again. He thinks I stood there all day, waiting in his absence. When he finds out I left to play tennis,   his forehead crumples like paper in a wastebasket. Now he knows I can move on my own without him. Tears drawn from the well of desertion form in his eyes. I’m his first love and his greatest disappointment.
The Roman candle of a yard light caramelizes the old snow. The glow trespasses the dark hold of December, dimming the view   of the night sky with its winter triangle a boy strains to see through the haze, as he lets his jacket hang open, unzipped to the cold.   He knows to return through the black cleft between buildings, below electric wires that seem to carry a little train of snow   on their slim rails, where he throws the switch that shuts off the bulb on its pole, that opens the dome to a blast of stars in outer space,   to the pinpoint of Jupiter, to the constellation of Orion hunting the Great Bear that the boy follows to find a smudge of gray–he can gaze   through that peep hole to another galaxy also spangled with radiance from stars that traveled two and a half million light years   before appearing as a signal in the rod cells of his eyes that pass impulses through neurons and nerves   to his brain that creates images. He draws in a sharp breath, the high voltage power box of his chest hot and humming.
Once again, someone falls in their first falling–fall of two bodies, of two eyes, of four green eyes or eight green eyes if we count those born in the mirror (at midnight, in the purest fear, in the loss), you haven’t been able to recognize the voice of your dull silence, to see the earthly messages scrawled in the middle of one mad state, when the body is a glass and from ourselves and from the other we drink some kind of impossible water.  Desire needlessly spills on me a cursed liqueur. For my thirsty thirst, what can the promise of eyes do? I speak of something not in this world. I speak of someone whose purpose is elsewhere.  And I was naked in memory of the white night. Drunk and I made love all night, just like a sick dog.  Sometimes we suffer too much reality in the space of a single night. We get undressed, we’re horrified. We’re aware the mirror sounds like a watch, the mirror from which your cry will pour out, your laceration.  Night opens itself only once. It’s enough. You see. You’ve seen. Fear of being two in the mirror, and suddenly we’re four. We cry, we moan, my fear, my joy more horrible than my fear, my visceral words, my words are keys that lock me into a mirror, with you, but ever alone. And I am well aware what night is made of. We’ve fallen so completely into jaws that didn’t expect this sacrifice, this condemnation of my eyes which have seen. I speak of a discovery: felt the I in sex, sex in the I. I speak of burying everyday fear to secure the fear of an instant. The purest loss. But who’ll say: you don’t cry anymore at night? Because madness is also a lie. Like night. Like death.
My hands hold, my father’s older the wires– picture rolls once, then steadies… an English castle! A voice-over drones about Edward I, who, to subdue the Welsh, built castles. Some sixty years, dozens of engineers, the masses conscripted from the villages.   My father moves on to a Zenith with a bad tuner. TVs interest him, not English with their damp, historical programming.    * * *   Here there were Indians, mound builders. Here, an English fort, a few farmers. And here the industrialist settled his ass, John Ford on the river dredging sand for making glass. Plate glass. (Why should America buy from Europe?) Some half dozen years, German engineers, and hundreds of Slavic peasants.   Grandfather sat on his samovar warming himself and making excuses, but finally, he set off. Got a room, became a shoveler. Got a wife, a company house. Ford City: a valley filling with properties.   No one got along– Not Labor and Capital, not Germans and Slavs, not husband and wives, for that matter.    * * *   Edward’s castles were ruins by the fifteenth century. Not from Welsh armies, but the rise of the middle class. The towns around a castle thrived: tailors, smithies, cobblers, coopers. Drawing in the Welsh peasants. And what with intermarriage and the rise of capitalism… a castle grew obsolescent.   I turn off the set. My father hunts cigarettes at the Kwik-Mart on the corner. Overhead, my mother’s footsteps, the tonk of bottles, the scraping of plates.    * * *   During Eisenhower’s reign my grandfather retired and mowed his lawn until I took over. He primed the filter, set the choke, then we took turns pulling till the sputtering engine caught. (“Somanabitch,” he spit) And watched me as I mowed back and forth for two dollars.   Once in the garage he showed me a scythe. He mowed hay in the old country, and the women would follow, raking it in windrows.    * * * The factories today are mostly closed down, or full of robots or far off in Asia. Ford City lives through the mail: compensation, a thin pension, and, of course, Social Security.   I always drive along the factory, windows rolled down; I want my kids in the back seat to see. Seven or eight, probably pensioners, congregate on the corner, each man dressed quite alike: Sears jacket, cigarette, salt-and-pepper hair.   “Honk the horn,” my oldest begs. He waves and waves zealously until a man turns–a man with my face, but full of sweetness now, silence and clarity.
All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me, I make the day that begins on my account, that sobs because day falls like water through night.  All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.  The noise of steps in the circle near this choleric light birthed from my insomnia. Steps of someone who no longer writhes, who no longer writes. All night someone holds back, then crosses the circle of bitter light.  All night I drown in your eyes become my eyes. All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing.  Absence blows grayly and night goes dense. Night, the shade of the eyelids of the dead, viscous night, exhaling some black oil that blows me forward and prompts me to search out an empty space without warmth, without cold. All night I flee from someone. I lead the chase, I lead the fugue. I sing a song of mourning. Black birds over black shrouds. My brain cries. Demented wind. I leave the tense and strained hand, I don’t want to know anything but this perpetual wailing, this clatter in the night, this delay, this infamy, this pursuit, this inexistence.  All night I see that abandonment is me, that the sole sobbing voice is me. We can search with lanterns, cross the shadow’s lie. We can feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart.  All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.
The wall of identical boxes into which our Aunt Sticky sorted the daily mail was at the far end of her dining room, and from the private side looked like a fancy wallpaper upon which peonies pushed through a white wooden trellis, or sometimes like crates of chickens stacked all the way to the ceiling. I'd learned by then – I was a little boy – that a thing can look like one thing on one day and another on another, depending on how you might be feeling. There were times when we were there, having our coffee and sweet rolls, when some woman on the lobby side would with a click unlock her box and leaning down, peer inside to see if she had mail, and see us at the table, Mother and Father, my sister and I and our postmistress aunt, and call out, "Yoohoo, Sticky! I see you have company!" and waggle her fingers, waving hello.
After a funeral, they were covered with black cloth, some draped with shawls like a scalloped valance. Leftover sewing scraps, wool, linen, synthetic, anything to shroud the odd-shaped mirrors, though sometimes a corner was exposed like a woman whose ankle peeks forbidden from under a long skirt.   A mourner must shun vanity during shiva, focusing inward but as a child I wondered if this were to avoid ghosts, for don't the dead take their time leaving? I'm of a generation where grandparents disappeared, great aunts with European accents, rarely an explanation provided to us children.   My mother died too young. With a baby in arms I couldn't bear to fling that dark cloth over the glass. After all she had come back from the dead so often, even the doctors could not explain it. Each time I looked in a mirror my mother gazed back. I could never tell if she were trying to tell me something or to take the baby with her.
In the evening she comes to me like a child ready for bed. She slips under covers, curls into my curves or stretches against my spine. Some have said they fear I might crush her, but we're a tender pair, each aware of the warmth and the other.   I knew a woman once who kept an orphaned antelope, let it roam her kitchen, sleep in her bed, musky scent and hooves.   This dog looks like a small deer, poised and silent in the lawn, but at night, she is a dark body, lean and long against the lavender cotton of my summer sleeping. We are bone and bone, muscle and muscle, and underneath each surface a quiet and insistent pulse.
The ground cracked like the rough pit of a peach and snapped in two. The sun behind the mountains turned into an olive-green glow.   To niña Gloria this was home. She continued to sell her bowl of lemons, rubbing a cold, thin silver Christ pocketed in her apron. Others like Lito and Marvin played soldiers in the ruins of a school, running around mounds of bricks,  shooting chickens and pigs.   No one knows exactly how a light film of ash appeared on everyone’s eyelids  early in the morning or how trout and mackerel plunged from the sky, twitched, leaped through the streets.   Some say the skin of trees felt like old newspaper, dry and yellow. Others believe the soapsuds washed aside in rivers began to rise in their milk.   One Monday morning, a rain fell and the cemetery washed into the city. Bones began to knock  and knock at our doors. Streets became muddy rivers waiting for bodies to drop  among piles of dead fish.   In a year, everyone stabbed flowers on a grave.   This explains why women thought and moved like lizards under stones, why men heard bees buzzing inside their skulls, why dogs lost their sense of smell sniffing piles of rubble to get back home.   In a few years, no one cared about turtles banging their heads against rocks, bulls with their sad, busted eyes, parrots that kept diving into creeks, the dark swelling of the open ground  or at night a knife  stained the kitchen cloth.   Instead, niña Gloria swept the ground, the broom licking her feet at each stroke.   At the bus station, Marvin shined military boots,  twenty-five cents a pair, reduced his words to a spit, a splutter of broken sentences  on shoe polish, leather.   In the evenings, he counted coins he’d tossed in a jar, then walked home, one step closer to the cracked bone clenched in the yellow jaw of a dog.
As I punch the time-clock, I know men will be gunned down at dawn in a distant continent, someone will dart into a café with a bomb nestled   in the belly, by the roadside a woman will moan over the body of a man, shrunken, stretched on the earth, that God will finger the forehead of a dying country,   all of it funneled through the news on TV. But tonight, instead of tuning in, I’m going to kneel beside the window, recognize myself in the croak of the crow, high above the black tree   of winter, claws hooked and rough, wings swept back and hunched, face masked with exhaust. I’m going to try, even if I fail, to see myself whole, complete in the cry, in the beak of the crow.
On the Pan American Highway, somewhere between the north and south continent, you come across a chain of volcanoes,   a coast with a thick growth of palm trees, crunching waves of the sea; an isthmus Neruda called “slender earth like a whip.”   When the road bends, turns into a street, the walls splattered with “Yanqui Go Home!!!” you see a boy fifteen years old,   barefoot, sniffing glue in a small plastic bag. An old woman in an apron will step out, say, “This is the right street.”   In the public square, there will be no friend from school to welcome you, no drive to Sonsonate, city of coconuts,   no one to order cold Pilseners, oyster cocktails, or convince the waitress into dancing a cumbia or two with you.   Instead, at the local bar, you’ll raise a bottle next to strangers, stub your cigarette out on the floor.   You’ll watch a country ten years after the civil war: an old man sitting on the curb, head between knees,   open hand stretched out. Everything will hurt, your hair, your toenails, even your shoes.   You’ll curse dusty streets, demented sun slowly burning the nape of your neck, stray dogs following you to the park.   By nightfall, you drag yourself back to the bars, looking for a lost country in a shot of Tíc Táck. Against the wall, three men with their guitars.   When you lie on a hotel bed, too tired to sleep, when you feel torn, twisted like an old newspaper, blown   from city to city, you have reached the place. You have begun to speak like a man by the side of the road, barefoot.
After seven lean years we are promised seven fat ones, if the cows do not die first. Some care must be taken to prevent their demise in the scrub or the slaughterhouse. There must be enough bones to throw and to bury.   The skull of a cow, I put it on. There are many strewn in the field, there has not been much rain. I look through the eyes, that is, my eyes replace the eyes that death has taken. I can see out or through. It is not a bad fate to be a cow, to be, at once, so awkward, so full of grace, so full of milk.   Everywhere the udders are full, the teats are ready, the mouth of the calf is soft and deep. I would thrust my hand in it for the wet joy of being so used.   My own breasts are marked from the time the milk came in too fast;   I did not have time to grow to the moment of giving. It is fitting that beauty leaves such scars.   Milk has passed through my fingers, has spurted through my fingers, but not once during these seven lean years.
This is the silence around the poem of the death of my father. This is the silence before the poem.   While my father was dying, the Challenger was exploding on TV Again and again. I watched it happen. In his hospital room, I followed his breath. Then it stopped.   This is the silence in a poem about the dying of the father.     We’re burning the earth. We’re burning the sky.   Here is another silence in the middle of the poem about the immolation of the Fathers.   The pyres of bodies in Saigon. The burned air The charred limbs. Ash. Rancid flames. Heat Light Fire    We turn away.   Here is another silence within the poem about the burial of the fire.   When my father died, the rains poured down the moment I picked up the shovel of earth. I staggered under the weight of the water.   Another silence please.     I have always wanted to be a woman of fire. I will have to learn how to rain. Gently, I will learn how to rain.   I have set fire to your green fields, May I be water to your burning lands.   Please join me in this last silence at the end of the poem of fire.
Everything dies. Without you I saw one million flamingos   ignite a lake in Africa. The same darkness   descended everywhere. When you dropped your body,   I hoped you would tremble for the beak of God.   Why did we wash you three times tearing off the girl’s white dress   to swaddle you in an austere shroud? Some say, dying, not death, teaches.   You gained nothing from that reduction.   Months in the narrow foxhole of disease– you dug it; we filled it in.   My father is thin as you were in his hospital bed,   both of you let everything go, care for nothing   except that barbed hook– life.   It grabbed you like a thorn until you begged me, “Pull it out.”
I wanted to have a poem and I was pregnant. I was very thin. As if I’d lived on air. A poet must be able to live on air, but a mother must not attempt it. My mother wanted me to buy a set of matching pots, Wearever aluminum, like the ones she had. They were heavy and had well fitting lids so my suppers wouldn’t burn. My husband wanted me to give dinner parties. John F. Kennedy was running for office.   I sensed danger. Kennedy wasn’t against the Bomb or for nuclear disarmament. I joined SANE at its inception. Also Concerned Scientists. I spoke with Linus Pauling and encouraged my husband to help his partner organize Physicians for Social Responsibility.   There was a baby in my belly. I wanted to write poems. I had a crazy idea that a woman could write a real novel, the kind that shook the world. I hallucinated that a woman could be a poet, but she would have to be free. I couldn’t imagine that freedom for myself even though I could see it in Isla Negra when I followed Pablo Neruda. I could see it in the way he walked. Even if he were walking inside a dictatorship, among guns, soldiers and spies, there was nothing between him and his vision. Anything he saw, he was able to take into himself–there was no sight, no image, no vision to which he didn’t feel entitled. In his heart, everything–everything–belonged to him. Pablo Neruda was–more than anything–a poet, and so he was an entitled man.   I was a woman and entitled to nothing. I had nothing except a husband, a rented house, a set of pots, living room furniture, a frenzy of obligations, credit cards, anxious relatives, too many acquaintances, a gift of future diaper service, two telephones, no time to read, a plastic wrapped cookbook of recipes gleaned from the pages of the New York Times, and a hunger, a terrible hunger for the unimaginable, unlimited freedom of being a poet, and a baby in my belly.   I would have called Pablo long distance if I had the courage, if I had the ability to speak Spanish fluently, if we had ever talked about real things. But, what would a man know about a baby in the belly? And what did it matter if there were to be one poet more or less in the world when so many in his country were dying?   I woke up one morning and thought–I can’t have this child. My husband said, “You’ll have to get a job after it’s born so we can buy a house. You’ll need an advanced degree so you can do something.” I thought, I can’t. I have to write poems. My mother found a crib. Someone painted it white. A friend sent a pastel mobile with tame wood animals. I thought about blue curtains, making bedspreads, and abortions.   Pablo was silent. He was walking so far from me, I couldn’t hear him. My husband objected to donating more free medical care to the Black Panthers. I tried to make dolmades from scratch and located grape leaves preserved in brine at the Boys’ Market twenty miles away. I organized a write-in campaign for peace to challenge JFK. My husband thought it would be nice to have teatime with the children and romantic dinners by ourselves. The new formula bottles lined up on the sink like tiny bombs. The U.S. was pursuing over ground testing; I was afraid the radiation would cross the milk barrier. I had a poem in me howling for real life but no language to write in. The fog came in thick, flapping about my feet like blankets unraveling. I became afraid to have a daughter.   I called Pablo Neruda in the middle of the night as he walked underwater by Isla Negra. He moved like a dream porpoise. He seemed pregnant with words. They came out of his penis in long miraculous strings. The sea creatures quivered with joy. I said, “Pablo, I want to know how to bear the child in my belly onto this bed of uranium and I want to know if a woman can a be a poet.” He was large as a whale. He drank the sea and spouted it in glistening odes, black and shiny. I said, “I can’t have this child,” and he laughed as if he had never done anything but carry and birth children.   So I packed my little bag as if I were going to the hospital and I left a note and the Wearever pots and sterilized nipples upon the glass missiles, and took the cradle board than an American Indian friend had given me for the baby and that had made my husband snort– “You’re not going to carry the thing on your back, are you?” I took some money, the car, some books, paper and pens, my walking shoes, an unwieldly IBM electric typewriter, my pregnant belly and a dozen cloth diapers, and I went out.   I knew how to carry a baby and how to carry a poem and I would learn how to have a baby and even how to have a poem. I would have enough milk for both. I would learn how to walk with them. But I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know, how to have a husband and a matched set of Wearever pots.
We were made to understand it would be Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge, Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.    Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful  Dream. The worst in us having taken over  And broken the rest utterly down.     A long age  Passed. When at last we knew how little  Would survive us—how little we had mended    Or built that was not now lost—something  Large and old awoke. And then our singing  Brought on a different manner of weather.    Then animals long believed gone crept down  From trees. We took new stock of one another.  We wept to be reminded of such color.
In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.   Who have taught us. Who have guided us. Who have sustained us. Who have healed us.   Please heal the animals.   In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.   Whom we have slaughtered. Whom we have feared. Whom we have caged. Whom we have persecuted. Whom we have slandered. Whom we have cursed. Whom we have tortured.   Protect the animals.   In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.   Whose habitat we have stolen. Whose territory we have plundered. Whose feeding grounds we have paved and netted. Whose domain we have poisoned. Whose food we have eaten. Whose young we have killed. Whose lives and ways of life we threaten.   Restore the animals.   In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.   Forgive us. Have mercy. May the animals return. Not as a resurrection but as living beings. Here. On earth. On this earth that is also theirs.   Oh Great Spirit. Heal the animals. Protect the animals. Restore the animals.   Our lives will also be healed. Our souls will be protected. Our spirits will be restored.   Oh Spirit of Raven. Oh Spirit of Wolf. Oh Spirit of Whale. Oh Spirit of Elephant. Oh Spirit of Snake.   Teach us, again, how to live.
What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, Usually only after therapy Elbow sore at the crook From a handbasket filled To capacity. The glossy pastries! Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Once, a bag of black beluga Lentils spilt a trail behind me While I labored to find A tea they refused to carry. It was Brooklyn. My thirties. Everyone I knew was living The same desolate luxury, Each ashamed of the same things: Innocence and privacy. I'd lug Home the paper bags, doing Bank-balance math and counting days. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face— The known sun setting On the dawning century.
for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters One of the women greeted me. I love you, she said. She didn't Know me, but I believed her, And a terrible new ache Rolled over in my chest, Like in a room where the drapes Have been swept back. I love you, I love you, as she continued Down the hall past other strangers, Each feeling pierced suddenly By pillars of heavy light. I love you, throughout The performance, in every Handclap, every stomp. I love you in the rusted iron Chains someone was made To drag until love let them be Unclasped and left empty In the center of the ring. I love you in the water Where they pretended to wade, Singing that old blood-deep song That dragged us to those banks And cast us in. I love you, The angles of it scraping at Each throat, shouldering past The swirling dust motes In those beams of light That whatever we now knew We could let ourselves feel, knew To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—  O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run— O Miraculous Many Gone— O Lord—O Lord—O Lord— Is this love the trouble you promised?
He has   sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people  He has plundered our—  ravaged our—  destroyed the lives of our—  taking away our­— abolishing our most valuable—and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned forRedress in the most humble terms:    Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.  We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigrationand settlement here.    —taken Captive    on the high Seas  to bear—
Why and by whose power were you sent? What do you see that you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies Drink up all the light? What are you demanding That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then What is that leaping in your chest? What is The nature of your mission? Do you seek To offer a confession? Have you anything to do With others brought by us to harm? Then Why are you afraid? And why do you invade Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess? Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?
What woke to war in me those years When my daughter had first grown into A solid self-centered self? I’d watch her Sit at the table—well, not quite sit, More like stand on one leg while The other knee hovered just over the chair. She wouldn't lower herself, as if There might be a fire, or a great black Blizzard of waves let loose in the kitchen, And she'd need to make her escape. No, She'd trust no one but herself, her own New lean always jittering legs to carry her— Where exactly? Where would a child go? To there. There alone. She'd rest one elbow On the table—the opposite one to the bent leg Skimming the solid expensive tasteful chair. And even though we were together, her eyes Would go half-dome, shades dropped Like a screen at some cinema the old aren't Let into. I thought I'd have more time! I thought My body would have taken longer going About the inevitable feat of repelling her, But now, I could see even in what food She left untouched, food I'd bought and made And all but ferried to her lips, I could see How it smacked of all that had grown slack And loose in me. Her other arm Would wave the fork around just above The surface of the plate, casting about For the least possible morsel, the tiniest Grain of unseasoned rice. She'd dip Into the food like one of those shoddy Metal claws poised over a valley of rubber Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. The narrow untouched hips. The shoulders Still so naïve as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open Onto the darkening dusk.
If you don't get too close to people you can't disappoint them, which would be so much worse than letting them disappoint you.   To the extent that you gain a perch that means other people look up to you, to just that extent you can never tell them how you feel.   You can warble, or follow a siren, or a Shenandoah vireo, into the shade, or take advice from the lights: be a child, or be like a child. You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.
What will survive us has already begun   Oak galls Two termites’ curious self-perpetuating bodies   Letting the light through the gaps   They lay out their allegiances under the roots of an overturned tree   Almost always better to build than to wreck   You can build in a wreck   Under the roots of an overturned tree   Consider the martin that hefts herself over traffic cones   Consider her shadow misaligned over parking-lot cement Saran Wrap scrap in her beak   Nothing lasts forever not even the future we want   The President has never owned the rain
I can remember when I wanted X more than anything ever—for X fill in from your own childhood   [balloon, pencil lead, trading card, shoelaces, a bow or not to have to wear a bow]   and now I am moved to action, when I am moved, principally by a memory of what to want.   The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are,   or to keep your own tools, so that you can pretend.   And so it was no surprise, to me at least, when Cooper, who is two, collapsed in fortissimo fits when he could not have a $20, three-foot-long stuffed frog in the image of Frog from Frog and Toad, since he is Toad.   That morning, needing a nap, he had thrown, from the third-story balcony of Miller's Cafe and Bakery, into the whistling rapids and shallows of the Ammonoosuc River, with its arrowheads and caravans of stones, his Red Sox cap. His hair was shining like another planet's second sun, as he explained, looking up, "I threw my hat in the river. I would like my hat back now."
1   I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order. I didn’t mail myself like a letter some other kids already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb without any glue. I didn’t have any permission.  2   There was a snowstorm that lasted three days and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a  pencil-and-paper game where the object was to figure out the object of the game. There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar, and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different since they all started out black and white, and all the same.  3   O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look, up there on the uneven climbing bars, too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring,   the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors and thin swings that make no decision, like weathervanes.   O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.
The Inside Out Mermaid is fine with letting it all hang out–veins, muscles, the bits of fat at her belly, her small gray spleen. At first her lover loves it–with her organs on the outside, she's the ultimate open book. He can pump her lungs like two bellows and make her gasp; ask her difficult questions and study the synapses firing in her brain as she answers to see if she's lying; poke a pleasure center in the frontal lobe and watch her squirm. No need for bouquets or sad stories about his childhood. He just plucks a pulmonary vein and watches the left ventricle flounder. But before long, she starts to sense that her lover, like all the others before him, is getting restless. This is when she starts showing them her collections–the basket of keys from all over the world, the box of zippers with teeth of every imaginable size–all chosen to convey a sense of openness. As a last resort, she’ll even read out loud the entries from her diary about him to him. But eventually he’ll become convinced she’s hiding things from him and she is. Her perfect skin. Her long black hair. Her red mouth, never chapped from exposure to sun or wind, how she secretly loves that he can’t touch her here or here.
When my hole-punch drizzles tiny paper circles onto the carpet, my wolf sister moans and bites it, covering her ears with her paws. I think she’s tired of the moon. She takes a stack of dinner plates from my cupboard and slinks off to the park to break them. Our brother shows up a week later, collapses on the sofa like a fur throw. Why have they come here when everything I do is wrong? They howl in the shower together but the water doesn’t mask the sound. I go in afterwards with paper towels to mop the droplets–I know there’ll be water all over–but the room is bone dry. Maybe this time things will be different. I hide the home movies in case they ask for them. In the one I always watch, there’s some wobbly footage of the sky, then my father lowers the camera’s eye to mother teaching my sister and brother to “tell time.” They’re following a mother hare on her sunset rounds–one leveret mouthful at 12 o’clock, another at 3, 6, 9. Then the camera zooms in on me–I’ve spat out my pacifier made of fur and I’m on the porch surrounded by bonsai trees, killing or saving Barbie.
Sunday, awake with this headache. I pull apart the evening with a fork. White clot behind the eyes.     Someone once told me, before and after is just another false binary. The warmed-over bones of January. I had no passport. Beneath the stove, two mice made a paradise out of a button of peanut butter.     Suffering operates by its own logic. Its gropings and reversals. Ample, in ways that are exquisite. And how it leaves—not unlike how it arrives, without clear notice.     These days, I've had my fill of Chinatown and its wet markets. Gutted fish. Overcooked chattering. The stench making me look hard at everything.     Summer mornings before the heat has moved in. Joy has been buried in me overnight, but builds in the early hours. My attention elastic.     The babbling streets of Causeway Bay, out of which the sharp taste of the city emerges. Nothing can stay dry here. The dark cherries of eyes come and go, as they please.     Let there be no more braiding of words. I want a spare mouth.     My father taught me wherever you are, always be looking for a way out: this opening or that one. Or a question. Sharp enough to slice a hole for you to slip through.     Long car trips where I sat in the back of our family's used Nissan. The stale odor of plush seats and sun-warmed cola. My parents' and my words do not touch. I grow adept at tunneling inward, a habit I have yet to let go of.     I am protective of what eyes cannot pry open. The unannounced. The infinite places within language to hide.     A Zen priest once told me that without snagging on a storyline, the body can only take loss for ninety seconds. The physical body has its limits, is what I heard. The imagination can break through them.     Boiled peanuts. Leather of daybreak. Cotton thinning out into thread. Dried vomit. Ice water from the spigot. The sacred and profane share a border. In the desert, small droppings of unknown origin.     Even when I was young, I loved peering at faces in films. The pleasure of watching and of not being watched.     Black koi fish open their mouths at the skin of the pond for oxygen. At the edge of the water, I hold two lines from Ikkyū in my mouth. Make my way slowly.     Nights when I shared a bed in a small room. Another’s body to the left, hooked by a heavy dream.     Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it.     I can shake out the imprint of my body on the sheets each morning. But the mind–the mind is a different matter.     When I was four, I ate spoonfuls of powdered milk straight from the canis- ter. The powder was sweet. There wasn't enough money for fresh milk. Seven hundred years ago, Chang Yang-hao wrote, All my life seems / like yesterday morning.
I.   The face of Chinatown returns its color, plucked from July's industrial steamer.  Dry the cup! So we do.   Four noodle shops on East Broadway release their belches collectively. They breed in me a hankering for family life.   Here, there's no logic to melons and spring onions exchanging hands. No rhythm to men's briefs clothes-pinned to the fire escape.   Retirees beneath the Manhattan Bridge leak hearsay.   The woman in Apartment #18 on Bayard washes her feet in pot of boiled water each evening before bedtime. But every handful of weeks she lapses.   I lean into the throat of summer.   Perched above these streets with whom I share verbs and adjectives.   II.   Faces knotted, bangs softened with grease. The East River pulls along a thread of sun.   While Sunday slides in. Again, in those plain trousers.   How the heat is driven off course. How one can make out the clarified vowels of bridges.   Who’s keeping count of what’s given against what’s stolen?   There's nothing I can't trace back to my coarse immigrant blood.   Uncles tipple wine on the streets of Mott and Bayard. Night shifts meet day shifts in passing.   Sweat seasons the body that labors.   And in each noodle shop, bowls dusted with salt.
Ice, entire cakes of it. Crows feed on sand.   So poor is this season the ground steals color from the tree-shadows.        •       Can it be that nothing is as far as here?   Just look!   How much past we have to cover this evening–      •       Come to think of it don't forget to pick off this self and that self along the way.   Though that’s not right– you spit them out like pits.      •       If there is a partition between the outer and inner worlds, how is it that some water in me churns between the mountain ranges?   How is it we are absorbed so easily by the ground—      •       Long nights for simple words.      •       Slant rhyme of current thinking and past thinking.   A chewed over hour, late. Where the long ago past and the future come to settle scores.      •       Traveling and traveling, but so much interior unpicked over by the eyes.        •       Nothing is as far as here.
I’m not yet comfortable with the word, its short clean woosh that sounds like life. At dinner last night my single girls said in admonition, “It’s not wife-approved” about a friend’s upcoming trip. Their eyes rolled up and over and out their pretty young heads. Wife, why does it sound like a job? “I need a wife” the famous feminist wrote, “a wife that will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced if need be.” A word that could be made easily into maid. A wife that does, fixes soothes, honors, obeys, Housewife, fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what’s the word for someone who stares long into the morning, unable to even fix tea some days, the kettle steaming over loud like a train whistle, she who cries in the mornings, she who tears a hole in the earth and cannot stop grieving, the one who wants to love you, but often isn’t good at even that, the one who doesn’t want to be diminished by how much she wants to be yours.
When you come, bring your brown- ness so we can be sure to please   the funders. Will you check this box; we’re applying for a grant.   Do you have any poems that speak to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.   Would you like to come to dinner with the patrons and sip Patrón?   Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?   Don’t read the one where you are just like us. Born to a green house,   garden, don’t tell us how you picked tomatoes and ate them in the dirt   watching vultures pick apart another bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one   about your father stealing hubcaps after a colleague said that’s what his   kind did. Tell us how he came to the meeting wearing a poncho   and tried to sell the man his hubcaps back. Don’t mention your father   was a teacher, spoke English, loved making beer, loved baseball, tell us   again about the poncho, the hubcaps, how he stole them, how he did the thing   he was trying to prove he didn’t do.
I can’t undress from the pressure of leaves, the lobed edges leaning toward the window like an unwanted male gaze on the backside, (they wish to bless and bless and hush). What if I want to go devil instead? Bow down to the madness that makes me. Drone of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag erected, a dog bark from three houses over, and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting, dead branch breaking, but not breaking, stones from the sea next to stones from the river, unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat, a siren whining high toward town repeating that the emergency is not here, repeating that this loud silence is only where you live.
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear the frantic automatic weapons unleashed, the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands, that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing? The truth is: I don’t know. But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks break-necking down the road, because she thinks she loves them, because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud roaring things will love her back, her soft small self alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm, until I yank the leash back to save her because I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say, and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth. Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?
There is a river under this poem. It flows blue and icy And carries these lines down the page. Somewhere beneath its surface Lying chained to the silt Harry holds his breath And slowly files His fingernails into moons. He wonders who still waits at the dock If the breasts of those young girls Have developed since he sank. He thinks of his parents Of listening to the tumblers Of his mother's womb Of escaping upward out of puberty Out of the pupils in his father's eyes And those hot Wisconsin fields. He dreams of escaping From this poem Of cracking the combinations To his own body And those warm young safes Of every girl on the dock. Jiggling his chains Harry scares a carp that circles And nibbles at his feet. He feels the blue rush of the current Sweeping across his body Stripping his chains of their rust Until each link softens And glows like a tiny eel. And Harry decides to ascend. He slips with the water Through his chains And climbing over and over His own air bubbles He waves to the fish To his chains glittering And squirming in the silt. He pauses to pick a bouquet Of seaweed for the young girls on the dock. Rising He bursts the surface of this poem. He listens for shouts. He hears only the night And a buoy sloshing in the blue.
Swimming the English Channel, struggling to make it to Calais, I swam into Laura halfway across. My body oiled for warmth, black rubber cap on my head, eyes hidden behind goggles, I was exhausted, ready to drown, when I saw her coming toward me, bobbing up and down between waves, effortlessly doing a breaststroke, headed for Dover. Treading water, I asked in French if she spoke English, and she said, “Yes, I’m an American.” I said, “Hey, me too,” then asked her out for coffee.
In the tower the bell is alone, like a man in his room, thinking and thinking.   The bell is made of iron. It takes the weight of a man to make the bell move.   Far below, the bell feels hands on a rope. It considers this. It turns its head.   Miles away, a man in his room hears the clear sound, and lifts his head to listen.
What I envy in the open eyes of the dead deer hanging down from the rafters, its eyes still wet and glassy, but locked now into a vision of another life, is the way it seems to be staring at the moment when it died. The blue light falling through the window into this smoke-filled room is the same color as the mist coming down off the mountain that morning: the deer sees men with guns but also sees, beyond them, the endless mountains.
My mother–half-deaf, a small metal box pinned to her blouse,   and beneath the gray locks the hidden earphone, the wire running across   her heart to its home in her ear–can barely hear me anymore. I’m   just someone’s voice lost years ago, trying now to make myself clear,   deliberately now, so she will see how hard the words come.   Bent to her breast, I speak to the heart, almost hopeless, where hardly anyone   is ever heard.
Even C.P. Cavafy– cynical, ascetic, unknown in his day– printed at his own expense poems no one would publish, poems intimate, personal, to share with readers he called friends.   But I have hundreds of poems hidden away in a box. Even when I know Cavafy once wrapped verse with black and gold ribbons to give away as a gift.
Valentine’s Day breakfast at Baker’s Square: Laura drinks coffee while I watch Andrew, who refuses to sit but chooses instead to stay in the restaurant’s vestibule where he opens and closes the big double doors over and over again, as if he’s practicing a grand entrance–entering, crossing the threshold, and letting the doors close behind him. I’m thinking,   it wasn’t so long ago I carried my tiny son piggyback through the woods to a waterfall; wasn’t long ago I kissed Laura for the first time; wasn’t long ago I lived in the house with my dog and sat with my notebook at the kitchen table on Sunday morning after working all night– sipping burnt coffee and scratching out lines, lighting my hundredth cigarette, starting over again, determined to write a love poem.
Will the children forgive the generation that’s trampled by horses of war, by exile and preparation for departure?   Will they think of us as we were, a bunch of ambushes in ravines we’d shake our jealousy and carve trees into the earth's shirt to sit under, we, the factional fighters who’d shoo the clouds of war out of their vehicles and peer around our eternal siege or catch the dead like sudden fruit fallen on a wasteland?   Will the children forgive what we were, some missile shepherds and masters of exile and frenzied celebration, whenever a neighboring war gestured to us we rose to set up in its braids a place good for love and residence?    The bombing rarely took a rest the missile launchers rarely returned unharmed we rarely picked flowers for the dead or went on with our lives   If only that summer had given us a bit of time's space before our mad departure   Will they believe?
No dead on the streets today is a calm day, traffic is normal, there's ample room for the procession of yesterday's dead, room to add  a dream, an idea, a little boy,  an extra push for the beloved boat,  a nom de guerre for the cell,  a rose for a new love,  a hand to a comrade   Some room to stay alive for some time, enough time to shake your hands and reach the sun   Today is a calm day, a pedestrian day in Beirut dancing in the streets, obstructing buses and not buying newspapers:  the newspapers already went out to offices and the dead are resting on the Pavement of Martyrs at the outskirts of Sabra   A calm day, our neighbor will step out in her nightgown to hang some sleepiness around us, some sluggish waking she's too lethargic to gather letters into words   Where is life on this vast sauntering morning? We won't leave Out of the whiteness of her gown a reason will come to carry us down to the streets dead in her "Good morning"
1 I will cry to regret and slaughter my heart on a desolate rock in the steppe and run in the wilderness run in their illusions in the mirrors of bullets while shooing victory and defeat and also the dead with war's twig    2 I will arch my back like a noble wolf and howl in the plains until the plains go mad and the god of soldiers spots me lifeless in war's meanness I'd be pleased yet angry and forlorn of seas that have tolled for thirty centuries they come and go    3 I call to my friend and leave him standing in speech I call to my lover and leave her insomniac
And I will bend down to smell his desire his tomb's flowers and marble his wilting joy his swapping temptation for content   And I will keep him from the cold, visitors, oleander, and the sons of bitches and say: No one will resemble me like my father his white stumbling and the illusion that plucks words   A shout that walks on two feeble legs eyes me with the summer of discontent and sprinkles me with water, turns me green before it shakes the bitter dirt off its fingers … that's my father he cried from a darkness in the grave   And I will gather the house of your chucked absence as if we were alone on Earth … you die so I can fold the falcon's wings after its departure and believe the silence that remains
Near the camp was a river and in our house were absentees and hands that will one day wake us in vain   I had just turned seven while he was sitting in the shade ironing his clothes the blue jacket sagging over his shoulders   I paid no attention to the road or the three steps and didn't notice the carpet   I don't remember who was it that said to me or to another "When you grow up poetry will become your house"   The dust that eats the memories always distances those folks   yet their chairs appear from afar, from behind the hills and over the houses, to hang in an air of summer and holm oak, those shaded chairs that reach the heart on shoulders topped with five flowers   Which flowers are speech which flowers are silence?   And I can't remember whether it was my uncle who stood at the door, whether we had palm and lotus trees in our house in Karameh,   whether my mother who gave birth to me on the shelf was folding our clothes behind our father's back so he could sleep   The watchdogs used to cry from the heat, and poetry, Husseini of Jerusalem, and Khidr the mystic were all in our house as was my uncle who came from a pond within Hebron's walls   Twenty years would pass before a photo could tell us we have grown older and that's that   My father used to discompose his friends with his days, and women with the thread of seduction in his voice as he would sprinkle chatter in their rivers while walking about here or there with a lilt, he'd let his days fall off him and let others gather them as he walked on gold that came only for him   And I can't remember: in our courtyard there were holm oaks, a fountain, a tiled floor by a huge door, we were confused and in a hurry   The closet that faced us in the second room had a mirror the mirror we now seek   And my father was standing alone in the hall that led the stairs to the roof thanking his days or preparing for Wednesday's nap or Thursday's morning as he left, among the things he'd leave, the water can full of water while around his chairs our Saturdays rose   My father didn't want too much from life: a house, five boys who don't mess with his papers, which were already chaos, and two girls so that braids could float all around the house
my god all the days we have lived thru saying   not this one, not this, not now, not yet, this week doesn’t count, was lost, this month was shit, what a year, it sucked, it flew, that decade was for what? i raised my kids, they grew i lost two pasts–i am not made of them and they are through.   we forget what we remember:   each of the five the fevered few   days we used to fall in love.
O my Love sent me a lusty list, Did not compare me to a summer's day Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes But catalogued in a pretty detailed And comprehensive way the way(s) In which he was better than me. "More capable of extra- and inter- Polation. More well-traveled -rounded multi- Lingual! More practiced in so many matters More: physical, artistic, musical, Politic(al) academic (I dare say!) social (In many ways!) and (ditto!) sexual!” And yet these mores undid but his own plea(s)(e) And left, none-the-less, the Greater Moor of me.
If you can make a poem a farmer finds useful, you should be happy. A blacksmith you can never figure out. The worst to please is a carpenter.
When I was young, exorcisms were quite common, a remedy not unlike ice baths. Plus, devils were shorter in those days just as people were. They hadn't eaten enough fruits or vegetables, and lacked essential vitamins and iron, grew thin and pale, fell easily into brooding depressions. They looked more like deer than sheep, and when they possessed you it was usually because they were fleeing from someone else and didn't realize where they were until it was too late. It was more a question of giving directions than driving them out. "Turn right at the hairdresser's, go straight until you get to the abandoned schoolhouse, then turn left. You should see the exit from there." "Thank you. I was completely lost." "You're welcome. Good luck." "You too, and thanks again."
There is a hole. In the hole is everything people will do to each other.   The hole goes down and down. It has many rooms like graves and like graves they are all connected.   Roots hang from the dirt in craggy chandeliers. It's not clear where the hole stops   beginning and where it starts to end. It's warm and dark down there. The passages multiply.   There are ballrooms. There are dead ends. The air smells of iron and crushed flowers.   People will do anything. They will cut the hands off children. Children will do anything—   In the hole is everything.
It is easy to love a pig in a nightgown. See how he sleeps, white flannel straining his neck at the neckhole. His body swells and then deflates. The gown is nothing to be ashamed of, only the white clay of moonlight smeared over his hulk, original clothing, the milk of his loneliness. The flickering candle of a dream moves his warty eyelids. All sleeping things are children.
I Self-Portrait A house with three stories. In the basement, monsters. The upper floors were empty. No furniture, nothing. I had a magic pebble that I needed to hide. But where? Woke in a room with the bed breathing. Each day the same scandal—this body. These teeth and hands.           2 The Miniature Bed A miniature bed, and in it two tiny people not sleeping, not able to sleep because a small lie has flowered between them, fragile as a new, white crocus. The miniature bed holds them like a miniature boat making its slow, true course to morning. These tiny people, thoughts thrumming like mice, are quiet as the lie blooms over them in the night, fanning its moth petals, becoming to them like a moon hovering over their bed, a moon they might almost touch with their miniature hands, if they weren't certain that one wrong gesture might break the spindles of their small world, if their hearts were not drops of trembling quicksilver, if they were brave, if they could see that small is no smaller than big, that thimbles are deep as oceans for any god, they might even touch each other then, opening the dark, like a match, the sun's flaring.  3 Harvest   The fields are a book of uses. Near the house a combine takes the corn down in long rows. Dust rises up and replaces itself. A quick net of starlings drops to the furrows and sunshine pours like polished grain onto the feeding earth, this country.   In the kitchen, milk streams from the gallon thin and fresh as luck. We flourish. All around us, things flourish. Cows strain the fence with their abundance. The herd makes a sound like swelling.   Out in the cut field birds clean the fallen cobs into sets of teeth.  4 Sonnet for Lost Teeth   The combines were tearing off the field’s clothes. It was August, haying season. My tooth was loose, a snag in the clam of my mouth. I worked it like a pearl. I'd been out of school for sixty days. In the sweat of the barn I watched him shoot the calf in the head. He wiped the hide gently, like cleaning his glasses. Overnight, I grew a beard so I wouldn't have to get married. I let my feet go black from burned grasses. It never gets easier he said, kicking straw over the blood patch. She went down so quiet it was almost sad. Later, when my tooth fell out, I buried it under my pillow and it grew into money.  5 Talisman   Waiting for the school bus you find the femur of a baby animal on the ground. You carry that femur in your pocket the entire morning and touch it secretly through the cloth. When the teacher asks a question you don't raise your hand but quietly wrap your fingers around the thin shape, that bone without a mother.  6 On Waking   Half of everything is invisible. A river drifts below the river. A gesture lost in the body. Wind moves through the open windows of the trees.   Beyond the day, another day.   Dreamed I was drowning my mother's silk laundry in the river, kneeling on the wet rocks. Back and forth I drowned it in the gray clouds...  7 Eros   Each year fish run the green vein of the river. The bones of skunks lie buried in the riverbank upside down, waiting for rain.   From a fragment of a Greek statue you can tell the posture of the whole god. A skeleton has the same intelligence.   So that when a girl discovers it, loosened by summer rain, surfaced like a white instrument in the grass, she suddenly knows how to take it up and shake the strange rhythms from it like castanets.  8 A Childhood   The horse had been beaten and flies crawled excited on the beat marks. He held still in the sunblazed pasture. For a few minutes I stood at the wire fence. He was aware of me, but he did not turn— except his eye, slightly. He listened through the many ears of the grasses. A jay made a hole in the air with its cry. Everywhere, invisible as heat, the gods married each other and went to war. The excitement of it vibrated in the flies. As if we both were standing still inside some greater, more violent motion.
What is so pure as grief? A wreck set sail just to be wrecked again. To lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost and we just fetch it for a little while, a dandelion span, a quarter-note. Each day an envelope gummed shut with honey and mud. Foolish to think you can build a house from suffering. Even the hinges will be bitter. There will be no books in that house, only transfusions. And all the lemon and cedar in the world won't rid the walls of that hospital smell.
It’s all the rage to sport waxed moustaches and cure your own sausages in some mildewy basement that formerly would have hosted convulsively awkward parties with spin the bottle and seven minutes in the dark and terrifying closet (aka heaven) but now boasts soppressata strung on repurposed vintage drying racks and fat clay pots of kombucha and curdling hops. Personally I've never recovered from the sex-shaped void left in those closets by all the groping that should have occurred to me but didn't: right under my nose kids my age were creeping into adulthood one clammy, trembling palm on one breast at a time. There was also the horror of not being chosen in gym. It is conceivable that learning intricately how to butcher an entire hog and render every morsel might give one a feeling of mastery one lacked in childhood.It is the greatest immaturity to believe sufferingentitles you to something someone wiser and grayer than I once said. But in those basements and carpools and playgrounds as I assassinated one by one clandestinely my torturers abandoning their foul normal bodies to compost the astonishing tedium of the wending suburban lanes, I was transubstantiating to supernal fame and beauty and such eerie genius that entire books were written about my books. In fact it takes a long time to realize your suffering is of very little consequence to anyone but you. And by that time the future is already happening and you're pickling okra and starfruit and foraging for morels in urban forests and suspending artisan mozzarella in little wet nets and crafting small-batch, nitrite-free data and maybe even thinking about having children, which you swore in a million billion years you would never do.
I want to write my lover a poem but a very bad one. It'll include a giant squid and some loose change   and cuff links and two blue ferries chugging headfirst on the East River at twenty-six knots and only at the last minute averting   disaster through quick thinking and sure reflexes. Also a bow and arrow and glossy red apple I perch in front of my heart. To be honest   my lover doesn't really like poetry, which I guess is why I plan to write such a bad one, so he can feel right   and strong and good in his beliefs. Tonight when I go see my lover he’ll hold me as I've never been held   except by him and then I'll have to give him back. When you get new things you treat them like glass for a while   and then get used to them and manhandle them like everything else.   I don't want to give him back but partly it's not up to me and partly I don't want to be his   old sofa. I want to radiate and gleam arrestingly until the certain, premature end. You can compose a whole life   out of these rollercoasters. You can be everywhere and nowhere, over and over life slapping you in the face  till you’re newly burnished flat-out gasping and awake.
After three weeks of hot weather and drought,  we've had a week of cold and rain, just the way it ought to be here in the north,  in June, a fire going in the woodstove all day long, so you can go outside in the cold  and rain anytime and smell the wood smoke in the air.   This is the way I love it. This is why  I came here almost fifty years ago. What is June anyway  without cold and rain and a fire going in the stove all day?
I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you're in   is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything but your own pain, the rest of the world and all other life   don't matter.   I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good,   their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.
When I came to this mountainside almost fifty years ago it never occurred to me that there would be an end to it. I went along never thinking about the time when I would have to quit. I imagined—I guess — all this would last forever, if I imagined it at all. Now I'm in my seventies and all I can think about is the time when my life will be here no more.  For example, I love being in the woods felling and bucking hardwood trees, stacking and covering the blocks, then a year or two later, hauling them to the woodshed where I stack them again, and split them all winter long into the right size for the weather—then bring them into the house. Now this chore I love so much is seriously painful, and I can see, now, an end to it.
The eye’s desire for relief. I’m the tiger lily bobbing in the heat. And also the neighbor, shaved bald and lifting weights on the balcony. Each petal is the receipt of a shameful dream— a thought we hadn’t wanted to incorporate lolling from my parted mouth. But you know it’s mistakes that make life happen. A cardboard suitcase of beer for the traveler. And if we get too close to the words on this page they soften and warp into an animal lace, some net whose logic won’t reveal itself. I pull our eyes back because I love you. But then you draw them back further still because that sounds like an excuse. The whiny version of Love Hurts loops and curls like ribbon through a scissor, being pulled across the blade. The money in this poem’s easy, if you don’t mind having no thoughts and sitting in one place, while your body changes shape.
For js You were laughing no you weren't she was she was she wasn't These aren't the right words The people are waiting on the platform and the decisions are being themselves as usual  You could take this silver cord and wrap it around all of your ideas  You could you could What is the way to make meaning You're less busy than the machine has time for  I poured the world in for you  All the sun on that block Or at least I wanted to: Everyone is leaving but this would be an arrival your torso is a drum people come through and then they die you see the obituary in passing as the man next to you folds the paper and all these people at all these parties that cannot be the answer but what Back above ground and it's the same sun different block same world different world  Your friend is lying down with the thing he is carrying Everybody is somebody's family you think you forget the sun keeps going still you keep going the world rearranges itself just so False alarm you say and then you don't know what to say you wrap yourself in the future you wrap yourself in the past the woman gets in the taxi just in time Everybody is it's not an easy thing to understand False alarm you say and then you don't know what to say the sun keeps going.
I come from the nether regions   They serve me pomegranate seeds with morsels of flying fish   From time to time I wear a crown of blood streaked grass.     Mama beat me when I was a child for stealing honey from a honey pot   It swung from the rafters of the kitchen.   Why I stuffed my mouth with golden stuff, no one could tell.     King Midas wore a skin that killed him.   My nails are patterned ebony, Doxil will do that   They made a port under my collar bone with a plastic tube that runs into a blood vessel.       I set out with mama from Bombay harbor.   Our steamer was SS Jehangir, in honor of the World Conqueror —   They say he knelt on the battle field to stroke the Beloved’s shadow.    The waves were dark in Bombay harbor, Gandhi wrote in his Autobiography  Writing too is an experiment with truth.   No one knows my name in Arabic means port.     On board white people would not come near us   Were they scared our brown skin would sully them?   Mama tried to teach me English in a sing song voice.     So you can swim into your life she said.   Wee child, my language tutor muttered ruler in hand, ready to strike,   Just pronounce the words right:    Pluck, pluck Suck, suck      Duck, duck      Stuck, stuck.           May 12 - July 4, 2018, NYC
To map the consequences of regardless, of underestimate,  Of feverish faith, of the mechanical modernism of your false terrain. As if Port Sulphur remained nominal, its slick globules merely figurative  Between territories of wait and wetlands of trust.   To etch the shallow-water horizon— a techno-utopian tribute  To shrimp estuaries, bird rookeries, oyster bays, To tube worms & sea turtles. To watercolor these pelican grasses,  Oxidized, unapologetic executive marshes, roseated spoonbills.   For you who longed to smear concentric circles,  To have trusted you with longitude and latitude, To blur this sargassum border between mourning,  Fighting, and willful denying of objects and subjects. As if   Generations of fishermen, scaling orders of magnitude,  Navigated oily streaks of miles in a legend of inches, Skeletal, ghostly swarms of now-opaque, milky jellyfish. As if  to bury the blowout, rescind the rig. To fortify, to intone.   If naming were not violence, to witness an active verb: Top kill, junk shot, top hat, dance dance revolution. These wayward scripts a frontier province palimpsest.  Offshore yet another beacon, another account. Explosive violet iridescent.
Everyone wants to write about god but no one wants to imagine their god   as the finger trembling inside a grenade pin’s ring or the red vine of blood coughed into a child’s palm   while they cradle the head of a dying parent. Few things are more dangerous than a man   who is capable of dividing himself into several men, each of them with a unique river of desire   on their tongues. It is also magic to pray for a daughter and find yourself with an endless march of boys   who all have the smile of a motherfucker who wronged you and never apologized. No one wants to imagine their god   as the knuckles cracking on a father watching their son picking a good switch from the tree and certainly   no one wants to imagine their god as the tree. Enough with the foolishness of hope and how it bruises   the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love with the idea of staying. If one must pray, I imagine   it is most worthwhile to pray towards endings. The only difference between sunsets and funerals   is whether or not a town mistakes the howls of a crying woman for madness.
when it pushes shadow from the trees and presses it from their needles outside the Dye House and the bus is dark inside when it picks apart the lawn and you are here will you soften me? for the sun will you deflect it? I am blinking in the atrium the library I don’t know if you have a room for me or where on me you can lie down   but I want my anger easily exhausted the way fact takes the rug from an argument we both go on the floor I do feel your shade your wavy boughs you dream you are leaving me I would become an ordinary person if you did but you are awake and I am ordinary anyway and it pushes through me
Ya kut unta pishno ma*Ya kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno ma   So I moved to this place, Iowa City, Ioway Where green-headed mallards walk the streets day and night, and defecate on sidewalks. Greasy meat bags in wetsuits, disguise themselves as pets and are free as birds. Maybe Indians should have thought of that?  Ya kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno ma   Maybe you would have left us alone, if we put on rubber bills, and rubber feet, Quacked instead of complained, Swam instead of danced waddled away when you did what you did…  Ya kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno ma   So I moved to the Place The “Jewel of the Midwest” Where ghosts of ourselves Dance the sulphur trails.   Fumes emerge continuous from the mouths of Three-faced Deities who preach, “We absolve joy through suffering.”  Ya kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno ma   So I moved to this place where in 1992, up washed Columbus again like a pointy-chinned Son of Cannibals. His spin doctors rewrite his successes “After 500 years and 25 million dead, One out of 100 American Indians commit suicide One out of 10 American Indians are alcoholics 49 years is the average lifespan of American Indians.”   Each minute burns the useful and useless alike Sing Hallelujah Praise the Lord  Ya kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno ma   And when you foreigners build your off-world colonies and relocate in outer space This is what we will do We will dance, We will dance, We will dance to a duck’s tune.  Ya kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno maYa kut unta pishno ma
Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls, hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls. They scream revolt at what the body knows: all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no— another rose! another peony! break, flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow back through the crush of bodies, the lank air, to buses that inch us, sweating, across town. As though we were not dropped in silence there to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low, the crickets counting summer's seconds down.
His muddy rubber boots stood in the farmhouse mud room while he sat in the kitchen, unshaven, dealing solitaire.   His wife (we called her Auntie) rolled out dough in the kitchen for a pie, put up preserves and tidied, clearing her throat.   They listened to the TV at six, he with his fingers fumbling the hearing aids, she watching the kitchen clock.   Old age went on like that, a vegetable patch, a horse some neighbor kept in the barn, the miles of grass and fences.   After he died his boots stood muddy in the mud room as if he'd gone in socks, softly out to the meadow.
Some days her main job seems to be to welcome back the Red Admiral as it lights on a leaf of the yellow forsythia. It is her duty to stop & lean over to take in how it folds & opens its wings. Then, too, there is the common Tiger Swallowtail, which seems to her entirely uncommon in how it moves about the boundaries of this clearing we made so many years ago. If she leaves the compost bucket unwashed to rescue a single tattered wing from under the winter jasmine or the blue flowers of the periwinkle & then spends a whole afternoon at our round oak table surrounded by field guides & tea until she is sure—yes—that it belongs to a Lorquin's Admiral, or that singular mark is one of the great cat's eyes of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell, then she is simply practicing her true vocation learning the story behind the blue beads of the Mourning Cloak, the silver commas of the Satyr Anglewing, the complex shades of the Spring Azure, moving through this life letting her sweet, light attention land on one luminous thing after another.
He sees through stone he has the secret eyes this old black one who under prison skies sits pressed by the sun against the western wall his pipe between purple gums   the years fall like overripe plums bursting red flesh on the dark earth   his time is not my time but I have known him in a time gone   he led me trembling cold into the dark forest taught me the secret rites to make it with a woman to be true to my brothers to make my spear drink the blood of my enemies   now black cats circle him flash white teeth snarl at the air mashing green grass beneath shining muscles ears peeling his words he smiles he knows the hunt the enemy he has the secret eyes he sees through stone
Exchange in greed the ungraceful signs. Thrust The thick notes between green apple breasts. Then the shadow of the devil descends, The violent space cries and angel eyes, Large and dark, retreat in innocence and in ice. (Run sister run–the Bugga man comes!)   The violent space cries silently, Like you cried wide years ago In another space, speckled by the sun And the leaves of a green plum tree, And you were stung By a red wasp and we flew home. (Run sister run–the Bugga man comes!)   Well, hell, lil sis, wasps still sting. You are all of seventeen and as alone now In your pain as you were with the sting On your brow. Well, shit, lil sis, here we are: You are I and this poem. And what should I do? should I squat In the dust and make strange markings on the ground? Shall I chant a spell to drive the demon away? (Run sister run–the Bugga man comes!)   In the beginning you were the Virgin Mary, And you are the Virgin Mary now. But somewhere between Nazareth and Bethlehem You lost your name in the nameless void.“O Mary don’t you weep don’t you moan”  O Mary shake your butt to the violent juke, Absorb the demon puke and watch the white eyes pop, (Run sister run–the Bugga man comes!)   And what do I do. I boil my tears in a twisted spoon And dance like an angel on the point of a needle. I sit counting syllables like Midas gold. I am not bold. I cannot yet take hold of the demon And lift his weight from you black belly, So I grab the air and sing my song. (But the air cannot stand my singing long.)
She is girl. She is gravel. She is grabbed. She is grabbed like handfuls of gravel. Gravel grated by water. Her village is full of gravel fields. It is 1950. She is girl. She is grabbed. She is not my grandmother, though my grandmother is girl. My grandmother’s father closes the gates. Against American soldiers, though they jump over stone walls. To a girl who is not my grandmother. The girl is gravel grabbed. Her language is gravel because it means nothing. Hands full of girl. Fields full of gravel. Korea is gravel and graves. Girl is girl and she will never be a grandmother. She will be girl, girl is gravel and history will skip her like stone over water. Oh girl, oh glory. Girl.
There was a man. A Japanese soldier. One that did not believe in old superstitions. One that did not believe in sex before battle as charm against harm. He was an odd man. One that did not carry an amulet with pubic hair of a comfort woman. Or any piece of her. His comrades said, Be a man. The equation is, an odd man out is not man. There is no reason for logic in war. There is no reason. There was a man. His comrades said, Come raid, come pillage. Pushed him into the station. Their eyes on the holes in the wall. Watched as he came. Became. What is the equation here. There is a no equation. There was a man. One who said weeping, I am not a man, I am not a man.
I read a Korean poem with the line “Today you are the youngest you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest I have been. Today we drink buckwheat tea. Today I have heat in my apartment. Today I think about the word chada in Korean. It means cold. It means to be filled with.  It means to kick. To wear. Today we’re worn. Today you wear the cold. Your chilled skin. My heart knocks on my skin. Someone said winter has broken his windows. The heat inside and the cold outside sent lightning across glass. Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today it fills with you. The window in my room is full of leaves ready to fall. Chada, you say. It’s tea.  We drink. It is cold outside.
my school teacher asked me if I wanted   to go to Japan do something good for the Emperor we were led to a harbor a cargo ship a train  to a factory in Doyamaki where Food was so scarce we pulled grass, roots anything we could eat girls died of hunger some went crazy I ran away was found by a Japanese soldier   Kobayashi  took me  to a hut Every evening  soldiers countless soldiers on the wild mountainside  Kobayashi An unusually quiet day  I found Japan had lost the war I sailed to Korea jumped from the crates hit my stomach with fists I failed I named him Young-ju  left him at an orphanage met him every Sunday  one Sunday I saw another boy in his clothes Young-ju had died of pneumonia  already buried I thought of Kobayashi bringing me rice in his drunken stupor I thought of the piece of steel I took at the factory I found some of the steel so attractive I still believe he is alive somewhere I want to believe that all was just a terrible fate But then,  But then
The calm,  Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss.
Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.   (America never was America to me.)   Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.   (It never was America to me.)   O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.   (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")  Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
Upon reading PM newspaper’s account of Mr. Roosevelt’s statement on the recent race clashes: “I share your feeling that the recent outbreaks of violence in widely spread parts of the country endanger our national unity and comfort our enemies. I am sure that every true American regrets this.” What’d you get, black boy, When they knocked you down in the  gutter,  And they kicked your teeth out, And they broke your skull with clubs And they bashed your stomach in? What’d you get when the police shot  you in the back, And they chained you to the beds While they wiped the blood off? What’d you get when you cried out to  the Top Man? When you called on the man next to  God, so you thought, And asked him to speak out to save  you? What’d the Top Man say, black boy? “Mr. Roosevelt regrets. . . . . . .”
Now you are strong And we are but grapes aching with ripeness. Crush us! Squeeze from us all the brave life Contained in these full skins. But ours is a subtle strength Potent with centuries of yearning, Of being kegged and shut away In dark forgotten places.   We shall endure To steal your senses In that lonely twilight Of your winter’s grief.
Not by hammering the furious word, Nor bread stamped in the streets, Nor milk emptied in gutter, Shall we gain the gates of the city.   But I am a prophet without eyes to see; I do not know how we shall gain the gates  of the city.August, 1943
We are spendthrifts with words, We squander them, Toss them like pennies in the air– Arrogant words, Angry words, Cruel words, Comradely words, Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear.   But the slowly wrought words of love and the thunderous words of heartbreak– Those we hoard.
That field nag, old-penny swayback. Low hawk, to ducks in train to a quad of geese, in case. Last night, the long   moon lay it seemed a tissue of snow, but then dawn told that wasn't so. Late morning, now, the fire, the hearth, eggs   sitting for the mute plate and fork, this pen making a thing of them. Two more nights— waterfowl safe and noisy   in the dusk, the low rails running flank to the river at midnight—find what they'll make of that river, this moon.
Most have been plowed up or paved over but you can still find them, tracks cut  deep into the earth by prairie schooners crossing that great green ocean, pitching  waves of pasture out where there's nothing else to do but live. Concealing their detritus—  a piece of sun-bleached buffalo skull, a button from a cavalry soldier's coat—the ruts wind  their way beneath leafy suburban streets, lie buried under a Phillips 66 and the corner  of a Pizza Hut where a couple sits slumped in their booth. Yet here and there, like a fish  head breaking the surface of the water, they emerge in a school teacher's back yard or a  farmer's field, evidence of wagons packed with hardtack and hard money, thousands of  draft animals tended by traders with blistered feet, their journey both bleak and romantic.  That's the kind of proof I like, a scar I can put my hand to, history that will dust my fingers  with a little bit of suffering, a little bit of bone.
Each night after reading three books to my two children— we each picked one—to unwind them into dreamland, I'd turn off the light and sit between their beds in the wide junk-shop rocker I'd reupholstered blue, still feeling the close-reading warmth of their bodies beside me, and ask them to talk about the day—we did this,we did that, sometimes leading somewhere, sometimes not, but always ending up at the happy ending of now.Now, in still darkness, listening to their breath slow and ease into sleep's regular rhythm.  Grown now, you might've guessed. The past tense solid, unyielding, against the acidic drip of recent years. But how it calmed us then, rewinding the gentle loop, and in the trusting darkness, pressing play.
St. Joseph’s Hospital, Tacoma WA, 1969-74. A headache makes your mouth plunge, then it pulls away. The smell of diesel or the smell of rain. Now you are a thick suburb. Under the pressure of a credit card. Your body is a box of mirrors, a mercury mine. You have blossomed and spread, white mystery of spring. All your blood and treasure is spent. O rose, you are sick. The morning rain does not nourish you. Your mouth is caught in a rigid O. Where only deficit is at home. You stand beneath a white hospital, almost drunk. You cannot say why your sense is drenched: exhaustion or debt. What’s the difference again? A braid of eyes. Curtains the color of a dove’s wing. Ceramic lips framed against seismic shatter. “Soft zone.” Meanwhile your uncle is dying in San Francisco and you do not know it. You are standing in front of another hospital whose patients are strangers. You unwind a rope of carbon so that you can post pictures of it on the internet. How much damage does your life do and how can you refuse? O rose, you are sick. Only injury sustains you.
as the early morning light reflected off leaves against my window I called you to say I was moving back and I cried so deeply the way I cried for weeks after I moved losing my breath hovering between waking and sleep on the day I left I stood on your balcony facing the Pacific Ocean watching the sea stretch past a gauze of power lines into a green horizon this summer I began to awaken with my body covered in a cold sweat a whippoorwill calling from beyond the ramshackle fence kept me calm through the darkness and earlier this spring my dear friend Charlie had mysteriously died and like so many secrets we shared he loved to tan turning a tone the color of a young Toni Tennille he loved to dance he loved to pray every night I lie and recite the Act of Contrition to settle my head I am sorry for my sins with all my heart in choosing to do wrong and failing to do good I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things and almost every night I’ve dreamt of Charlie reading by candlelight he is old his skin sags like the arms of a tulip tree how easy it is to listen to his voice I cradle my chin into his neck our beards brush together now as you answer the phone I hear the discordant steam of cargo ships murmur in the distance there is no reason to lie to you I have been dying since we met
At sunrise the deer eat pieces of the quiet, they eat spaces between the quiet  & the sounds—;  & the numbers on the calendar lie flat in their boxes,  they leak through tiny holes  in the minutes,  evenly so, so evenly,  an active sense, before  the sense was made…   There, now, opposite to set down,  the agreed-upon, the shape  of the obvious  drawn by an earlier  enchantment before the new  anxiety set in:  the workers are safe;  the terror stilled for an hour; a lover’s outline, dreamed or imagined,  before you read the one-page book  again, what was that book,  it had no copyright—   & what was before?  a life, the dazzler, the dark,  the singing dust, it turned when you turned, it orpheus-knew what you forgot when you took the bowl  of burning time across the room—  & if the previous is closer  to you now, should you look, doesn’t matter if you do,  you carry the some of it with it, out into it—    for LG
She says she had a baby but I don’t believe her Let me tell you the feeling of relief when I started to believe her baby wasn’t real “What’s she getting out of it?” I surrender without a fight Ok, you can have your baby   Sometimes all you can do is reify your worst fears What if I can’t have healthy relationships Ever With anything Even your cat   Undressing in the open window Like being in public Is it not knowing or not caring?   I’m offended reading memoir advertised as essay I give a mini-lecture on insecure attachment from the living room As if to ask Is that what you wanted? Who you think I am Improving my senses You see I was siding with the baby
a tiny blue metal race car grandma gave to me when I was 32. There’s an obelisk now in Skeleton Canyon. Maybe you’re too close to the speaker. Tell the Arthur Lee of Love confrontation story. The tender does not approve of our vulgarity. Double vocal for airports, weekends and holidays. Numb grids that represent human inaction. An incidental arrival? Why that landing? The speaker of the poem seems baffled to be in his/her time continuum. Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, playing together on the street corner. Turn down the harp and make it feel more distant. The next few minutes could hardly be identified as words. A few fireman later, the benefit of a lifelong love was clear. A locus Of abnormal sensation. Harder to keep an indiscriminate man from slaughter. Off state extemporaneous crushed weight. Consulting the at-bats for ideas of speed. I will be home when my shirt is too dirty to wear.
Born again on a Monday under a broken zodiac.   My father the woodman, a surgeon among snags, could read the living trail of blades rebounding in the field, the mopped-matte passage through the dew.   He woke a brush pile with fire throwing shadows on the child, I was thrown over.   Father, it was a pleasure to meet you on this luminous route between two lives.   In this impromptu pool reaped from rain where mosquitos multiply.   Though survival, I’m told, is impersonal and without teleological purpose. Malaria is just trying to maximize its own fitness   as are the corporations who, for palm oil set the peatlands ablaze and drained the water table.     Dense haze from the sea  choked the light from day    suffused our mountain in a numinous red corona. And as for the getting over   there will be no ascension, no circumambulation, there is only going through.   We must go through it.
The soul descends once more in bitter love…  —Richard Wilbur   The eyes open to the cries of police.   Skirting sleep, the soul industrial   as laundry— realities like bad checks,   burning like new sex. Dinner   is the better half of someone’s lunch. Someone’s   playing a guessing game:   Psychosis or Handsfree. Local fame.   Praying to a calf, or debt ceiling,   keeps us grounded.  You can take   the kid out the food court, but child support won’t upgrade from buy to buy—   outbid, I am my financial aide.   Astounded, we wake and take.   Let every boy Tolstoy with disease   have a chance. Liabilities, let’s dance.   We’re clean— or rather, not unclean—   doxycycline our balance sheet.   Our spirits, neat.
It was Adolphe Sax, remember, not Saxo Grammaticus, who gets the ovation. And by the time he had brought all the components together–the serpentine shape, the single reed, the fit of the fingers, the upward tilt of the golden bell– it was already 1842, and one gets the feeling that it was also very late at night.   There is something nocturnal about the sound, something literally horny, as some may have noticed on that historic date when the first odd notes wobbled out of his studio into the small, darkened town,   summoning the insomniacs (who were up waiting for the invention of jazz) to their windows, but leaving the sleepers undisturbed, evening deepening and warming the waters of their dreams.   For this is not the valved instrument of waking, more the smoky voice of longing and loss, the porpoise cry of the subconscious. No one would ever think of blowing reveille on a tenor without irony. The men would only lie in their metal bunks, fingers twined behind their heads, afloat on pools of memory and desire.   And when the time has come to rouse the dead, you will not see Gabriel clipping an alto around his numinous neck.   An angel playing the world’s last song on a glistening saxophone might be enough to lift them back into the light of earth, but really no further.   Once resurrected, they would only lie down in the long cemetery grass or lean alone against a lugubrious yew and let the music do the ascending– curling snakes charmed from their baskets– while they wait for the shrill trumpet solo, that will blow them all to kingdom come.
The earth shakes just enough to remind us.
For Judy Williams Fraser  1963-69 I lived on the corner of Yew & York on the 2nd floor above a corner store with my sister Leni & boyfriend soon to be husband Neap Hoover her friend Jo-Ann Huffman & her boyfriend Mike Sawyer then Elsa Young (just left Robert who was with Maxine) who met her lover Jack Wise next door then my sister Mary and my boyfriend soon to be (later to unbe) husband Cliff Andstein below us bill bissett & martina & oolya then painter-jogger Gordon Payne & Merrilyn (who becomes my friend later) then bill again then Gordon again next to us Bing Thom, Jay Bancroft & often Marian Penner, Rick Clarke across the landing John and Susan Newlove & children fathered by gerry gilbert later the Ridgeways and next to them directly opposite us: Gerry Geisler (New Design Gallery) and Helen Sturdy & children our kitchen faced theirs apple pies in my oven & stew or toast in theirs we cd smell everything like the time we fell asleep as pork hocks simmered in my big red pot charred and burned almost caught on fire would have if Gerry hadnt woken us up and that building a total tinderbox always worried bill wd start one my bedroom / study faced the Molson’s sign and Burrard Street Bridge and I could watch the west end and highrises and planetarium grow and white sheets on a clothesline across the street dry as I’d sit at my bay window and write and mark on a smooth board cut to fit exactly the sill I’d glance up and see people like you & Jamie & Carol & Joan & Marcia & the Trumans and the Gadds and the Lathams and Lanny Beckman walking up and down Yew Street open the window & shout drop by on your way back dropping by everybody did it days filled with coffee, tea, poetry, cigarette smoke crises, trips, talkedy talk talk painting hard edged strong coloured also intricate silver point mandalas and collages a gallon of Calogna Red one summery Saturday night became a party of 100 or even more dancing in my bedroom to one music on a tape recorder dancing in the other to another drumming in the kitchen talking in the room with the blue-tile fireplace so many bodies I couldnt hear the music from inside the hallway just saw the taller heads moving together to different beats in almost darkness that crazy night at the Wahs’ place if that wasnt a party of this kind everybody landing on that bed everybody kissing everybody we had to go outside to pee because the lineup for the can so long somehow to do with that small space that it was so tight that everybody had to rub every body simply to go anywhere It was gorgeous after the Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963) Roy Kiyooka started dropping by when he left his studio there’d always be a light on somewhere in our building and he could visit any of us separately or clustered one time he told me he had a painting he wanted to give me but it was big and heavy he borrowed a truck and someone helped him up the dusty always dirty long stairs with Hoarfrost which we hung on a wall in a room just big enough to hold my round oak table (used to be Bowerings’ they bought a whole household of furniture for $80 and when they moved they gave it to Joan and then when she moved she stored it with me) a wall that later Elsa and I tore apart with a screwdriver and hammer shouting angry hexes at Robert all the way after and during that conference-- Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Avison, Whalen, Ginsberg-- Roy and I became friends and there were readings in my room every second Sunday red cast iron pot full of bean soup, corn chowder, spicey meatball vegetable stew simmering and then cheese scones in the oven people would come and read their new work one week and the next week there’d be a Tish meeting with Daphne Marlatt, Dan MacLeod, Pete Auxier, David Cull & David Dawson rent $60 a month didnt change and some years it was cold the wind so cold on side facing the North Shore that Hydro was $60 per month and that wall frozen behind my pillows the police were something else they felt they had a right to question anybody so Cliff would be up at the laundromat on 4th or at Jackson’s to get some hamburger and be walking back with an economics book in one hand and meat wrapped in brown paper in the other and they’d stop him and ask him what he was doing and my friend Ray Wargo would get stopped almost every second time he’d drop in to visit where are you going and why and how long will you be someone was always getting busted someone was always tripping out someone was always visiting from or going to Europe or Japan here is a journal entry on June 9: evening of the first ever national leaders debate on TV “I am looking forward to seeing Trudeau--hope he gets pushed into/onto answering more directly than he has in the past. I, like many others including every gay man I know, do have a crush on him: he has much more style than any Canadian politician so far. I mean style in the true sense of the word, it is him, not affected… Cliff, of course, doesn’t trust him at all and thinks he’s a sell- out. I don’t go that far, yet. But I do think that compromising is the only way a politician can work this country and I do not like all the PR, razzmatazz, fundraising, and allegiances that go into just getting elected: our system seems to be based on gullibility…” coming home at night up Yew Street whether from downtown or the beach or Paul the butcher’s or Elsie the baker’s I loved looking up at my North-facing windows goldy gold mesh curtains light filtering through so warm and so inviting
No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year   Nor collateral white skin   No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard   Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend   New York trophy parts among  the limbs of decent people    Being an enraged artist is like  entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of    My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears  I might as well be an activist    Called my girlfriend and described  All the bottles segregationists had thrown at me that day    Described recent blues sites and soothing prosecutions  I feared for my poetry   You have to make art every once in a while  While in the company of sell-outs  Accountant books in deified bulk  Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier    Or in your last lobby as a wanderer    The prison foot-races the museum    My instrument ends    I mean, what is a calendar to the slave?  Also, what is a crystal prism?    “He bought this bullet, bought its flight, then bought two more”
“A skeleton’s mouth makes few concessions to prettiness.”  —Jacques Joubert Because your mouth is violet and you cannot speak Because maybe I like Thursdays the way I used to hate baths, and baths are boundaries whose sharpness will be blurred with more information Because movement itself is a form of currency Frozen in articulations Because don’t indulge yourself in the idea of restraint The blackened patches could have been pubic hair on dead bodies, or simply the wildness of neglect without horizons or spaces Because it’s a comfort to know waste is the fuel of contradictions a knife rusted before its first use Because in the barest of rooms, nothing is comprehensible Neither fanatic nor mystic Because the first weeks of September came and went and the weather held Not woven by innocent hands Because this stasis is preparation Because you’re deceased, maimed or in Philadelphia
I am forced to sleepwalk much of the time. We hold on to these old ways, are troubled sometimes and then the geyser goes away, time gutted. In and of itself there is no great roar, force pitted against force that makes up in time what it loses in speed. The waterfalls, the canyon, a royal I-told-you-so comes back to greet us at the beginning. How was your trip? Oh I didn’t last you see, folded over like the margin of a dream of the thing-in-itself. Well, and what have we come to? A paper-thin past, just so, and ‘tis pity. We regurgitate old anthems and what has come to pass, and why dwell on these. Why make things more difficult than they already are? Because if it’s boring in a different way, that’ll be interesting too. That’s what I say.   That rascal, he jumped over the fence. I’m wiping my pince-nez now. Did you ever hear from the one who said he’d be back once it was over, who eluded me even in my sleep? That was a particularly promising time, we thought. Now the sun’s out and it’s raining again. Just like a day from the compendium. I’ll vouch for you, and we can go on scrolling as though nothing had risen, the horizon forest looks back at us. The preacher shook his head, the evangelist balanced two spools at the end of his little makeshift rope. We’d gone too far. We’d have to come back in a day or so.
after Tafisha Edwards To disappear Black girls at a low volume of sustained public panic is to insinuate the inconstancy of Black girls. The disposability of Black girls who are prone to disappearance. A body bag somewhere waits with little hoopla about its lot. Absence becomes the lot of Black girls.   _________ will eventually accept as fact that absence becomes a lot of Black girls. In what becomes the normal day-to-day, Black girls are harder to find, _________ would think first, not that there are few attempts to find them. The question isn’t whether Black girls often go missing. If no one else, Black girls miss each other.   _________ would be remiss to not recognize how everything is made less in the absence of Black girls, if _________ could miss what _________ have never been required to recognize, such as:   Unlike missing Black girls, taking Black girls is a Western custom. It seems likely that such a statement will soon appear inaccurate: the white space in new textbook editions will have nothing to say about it, if the white spaces behind those textbooks have anything to say about it. That Black girls are quintessential American palimpsests is not a question but an anxiety. _________ would rather forget that Black girls were made receptacles for what the authors of Liberty and Independence would not speak. That Liberty and Independence were imaginable only in the absent-presence of taken Black girls, enslaved Black girls, Black girls on whom a foundational economic system so depended that white men would kill each other and take taken Black girls.   The constancy of Black girls is someone’s anxiety. The soil is thick with hidden Black girls, the myth that only quiet Black girls are worthwhile Black girls. The soil turns as _________ turn away from loud Black girls and their cacophonic insistence on Black girls.   _________ have not insisted enough upon the fact of Black girls, are often loudly shocked to find Black girls disappeared. Loud, unsustainable shock has a way of disappearing Black girls. Outrage, too, has a way of being disappeared.
The first step is to stop just beyond the weight of organs. The sense of gravity sitting in tissue is like the space between carcass and curb, before the reek worms into rock pores: a sleeplessness there, that continual niche-trash. You too   once knew what it was to feel impressive. As the bed dissolves into the walls, the walls disrobe themselves of their edges and your resolve is now acute in the locking jaw of darkness. Beg to be let. You, like bravery, leave behind the breath-inflated   lump, its depths, and its refusal to lace the cells of scars over even the metaphorical guttings. To manage the act exceeds the box- and-whisker of lately’s along-going. You’ve grown so accustomed to mereness that what you call a life no longer houses the sublime.   It seems easy to leave. It seems this easy to leave. After a second you’ll want to consider the centimeters of resistance stitching air between here and all of elsewhere. But, still, inhabit the bodiless second. To possess it is a bearable joy.
Let the blood if your belly must have it, but let it not be of me and mine. Let my momma sleep. Let her pray. Let them eat. Let the reverend’s devil pass over me. Let the odds at least acknowledge us. Let the breasts be intact, the insulin faithfully not far, and let the deep red pinpoint puddle its urgency on a pricked fingertip. Let the nurse find the vein the first time.   Let the kerosene flow and let my grandma praise her bedside lord for letting her miss another winter. Let me be just a little bit bitter so I remember: Your columns and borders aint but the fractured, the broke clean, the brownest gouges in the blades of our great-great-great-shoulders. Let me leave and come back when my chest opens for you wider than your ditches did to engorge my placeless body.   The mosquito-thick breath in your throat coats my skin and it almost feels as if you love me. Let the AC drown out the TV. Let the lotion bottle keep a secret corner til Friday. Let Ike, Wan, D-Block, all my brother’s brothers ride through the weekend. Let the cop car swerve its nose into night and not see none of them. Let us smell rain. Let the breeze through an oak hymn the promise that keeps us waking. Let the cicada unwind while hushpuppy steam slips out the knot of a tourist’s hand, and let him hear in it legends of how hot grease kept the hounds and the lash at bay.
Tagus, farewell, that westward, with thy streams, Turns up the grains of gold already tried, With spur and sail for I go seek the Thames, Gainward the sun that show'th her wealthy pride, And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams, Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side. My King, my Country, alone for whom I live, Of mighty love the wings for this me give.
Strange to remember a visit, really not so Long ago, which now seems, finally, past. Always, it’s a Kind of obvious thing I guess, amazed by that Cycle: that first you anticipate a thing & it seems Far off, the distance has a weight you can feel Hanging on you, & then it’s there – that Point – whatever – which, now, while It’s happening seems to be constantly slipping away, “Like the sand through your fingers in an old movie,” until You can only look back on it, & yet you’re still there, staring At your thoughts in the window of the fire you find yourself before. We’ve gone over this a thousand times: & here again, combing that Same section of beach or inseam for that – I’m no Longer sure when or exactly where – “& yet” the peering, Unrewarding as it is, in terms of tangible results, Seems so necessary.   Hope, which is, after all, no more than a splint of thought Projected outwards, “looking to catch” somewhere – What can I say here? – that the ease or Difficulty of such memories doesn’t preclude “That harsher necessity” of going on always in A new place, under different circumstances: & yet we don’t seem to have changed, it’s As if these years that have gone by are All a matter of record, “but if the real Facts were known” we were still reeling from What seems to have just happened, but which, “By the accountant’s keeping” occurred years. Ago. Years ago. It hardly seems possible, So little, really, has happened.   We shore ourselves hour by hour In anticipation that soon there will be Nothing to do. “Pack a sandwich & let’s eat later.” And of course, The anticipation is quite appropriate, accounting, For the most part, for whatever activity We do manage. Eternally buzzing over the time, Unable to live in it…   “Maybe if we go upaways we can get a better View.” But, of course, in that sense, views don’t Improve. “In the present moment” (if we could only see It, which is to say, to begin with, stop looking with Such anticipation) what is enfolding before us puts to Rest any necessity for “progression”.   So, more of these tracings, as if by some magic Of the phonetic properties of these squiggles… Or Does that only mystify the “power” of “presence" which Is, as well, a sort of postponement.
My economy is circular: I earn money from an institution that owns most of the businesses where I tend to spend most of my money.   My economy is quasi-medieval, trade-centered, and guild-like.   My economy is not canonical.   My economy is a misfortune that recently befell me.   My economy admits foundational narratives.   My economy is language.   My economy is the executioner’s reversal of fortune.   My economy has no essential features.   My economy admits parallax critiques of ideology.   My economy owes something to over 4,136 dead soldiers.   My economy does not intimate and would rather not split hairs about what belongs to whom.   My economy can’t stay out of things, but can’t make it into the thick of things either.   My economy has questionable purchasing power.   My economy has no surrogate.   My economy has no interpretative skills but is rife with interpretative communi- ties.   My economy is of trees chopped down in Brooklyn, and the gradual encir- cling of brick.   My economy is the new red.   My economy thrives on shades of gray.   My economy is an unremarkable tuna sandwich that is missing the slices of tomato that I had asked for.   My economy is a liter bottle of Poland Spring water coming not from Poland but from Maine and bought at a university cafeteria in Uptown Manhattan where there are quite a number of water foundations that deliver water with a funky metallic aftertaste.   My economy is a poem called “First Purchase of the Month” consisting of two stanzas with six eight-word lines each within a larger poem that could be endless but won’t be:    Could’ve been an outfit for the Whitney Biennial    Couldn’t afford one, nor did I need it.    Who cares how you look at the zoo;    it’s about the animals, stupid. Which reminds me,    could’ve been the trail mix I snacked on    & which I managed not to purchase myself.      It was tuna on whole wheat, lettuce, jalapeños;    a one liter bottle of water (Poland Spring.)    Asked for tomato too, which the lady forgot.    You Puerto Rican, she asked? Don’t think so,    said another one in Spanish. Let me answer.    No, what made you think so? The peppers?     My economy needs contractions and abbreviations.   My economy is not fixed.   My economy is broken, mispronounced.   My economy has cold feet, even if there are plenty of socks at home.   My economy would like to be wholesome and sound.   My economy is a gift certificate that is not enough for what I’d like to have, so I end up spending money at a store that I dislike in the first place and will never visit again.   My economy is a business lunch where I end up paying the bill instead of the person who’d like me to work with her.   My economy consists of performing tasks for which I receive no quantifi- able pay.   My economy grows when it’s enough to buy someone else a drink, or a meal.   My economy does not allow me to say no.   My economy pretends to be booming, but instead, is shaky and imploding.   It doesn’t matter, because my economy is predicated on virtue, and it posits that it’s purer than yours.   My economy has no exchange value.   I’d like to think of my economy as one of resistance and tactical difference.   My economy is not a disposable good.   There are no surpluses in my economy.   I already owe what I just wrote.   My economy is derivative, parasitical, and residual.   My economy is a hand-me-down.   My economy is not environmentally friendly, although it’s not ravaging non-renewable resources either.   My economy doesn’t force me to put my money where my mouth is. Were I to pay for what I say, it would be a different story.   Thirteen cents a word is not fair trade.   My economy mistakes what it means to trade in futures.   In theory my economy is not the result of deliberate choice, it is makeshift and a tag-along.   My economy has double standards.   My economy has attention deficit disorder.   My economy is the symptom of an incurable disease.   My economy is not even mine.     Word count: 682
The tide pool crumples like a woman into the smallest version of herself, bleeding onto whatever touches her.   The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing point, something brown breaks the surface—human,   maybe, a hand or foot or an island of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp. A wild life.   This is a prayer like the sea urchin is a prayer, like the sea star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber—   as if I know what prayer means.    I call this the difficulty of the non-believer, or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god.    How to understand, then, what deserves rescue and what deserves to suffer.   Who.   Or should I say, what must be sheltered and what abandoned.    Who.   I might ask you to imagine a young girl, no older than ten but also no younger, on a field trip to a rescue. Can you   see her? She is lead to the gates that separate the wounded sea lions from their home and the class. How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself:   to claim her own barking voice, to revel in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers woven into the cyclone fence.
I hate the word, and I guess that’s why it is said? People love to hurt one another. It is what makes us human. I do love dogs. They don’t seem to be evil unless humans make them that way. Dogs can maul and they can sniff out bombs. They’ll get as close to you as they can while you’re sleeping. They’ll share heat and scent in the crook of your knees. Is there really a thing such as innocence? I have desired from birth to live. Daily, I wrestle the tight arms of guilt. At the shelter, the adoption coach told us that our new dog was highly food motivated. I have been called a bitch. Our dog trembles when he’s afraid and the only thing we can do is wait for the fear to leave. There’s no comforting him. In a dream they held me down, scrawled BITCH across my chest in old embers. They covered my head as a weapon was raised. I had a dog who once kept me from walking into the arroyo. She blocked my path and wouldn’t move. I’ll never know what, or who, she saved me from.
It will be windy for a while until it isn’t. The waves will shoal. A red-legged cormorant will trace her double along glassy water, forgetting they are hungry. The sea will play this motif over and over, but there will be no preparing for it otherwise. Water will quiver in driftwood. Sound preceding absence, a white dog trailing a smaller one: ghost and noon shadow, two motes disappearing into surf. And when the low tide comes lapping and clear, the curled fronds of seaweed will furl and splay, their algal sisters brushing strands against sands where littleneck clams feed underwater. Light rain will fall and one cannot help but lean into the uncertainty of the sea. Bow: a knot of two loops, two loose ends, our bodies on either side of this shore where we will dip our hands to feel what can’t be seen. Horseshoe crabs whose blue blood rich in copper will reach for cover, hinged between clouds and sea. It will never be enough, the bull kelp like a whip coiling in tender hands, hands who know to take or be taken, but take nothing with them: I will marry you. I will marry you. So we can owe what we own to every beautiful thing.
at night you stumble, dreaming cross-eyed of a chase scene three yellow wasps on your chest the city you turned around in a chase that quickly lands into a fight   the nagging anxiety of a stain somewhere a tickle at the back of the throat a song’s bridge playing over and over in the head maybe the stain is at the bottom of your lung maybe this white crusting along the edge of the bed   I lay an icepack on your head one of the old ones that look like a lazy waterdrop unable to pop, I’m waiting for a more complete courage, a peeled orange, a halogen lamp   believe it or not, we’re recreating someone from the 19th century’s sin, by proceeding mounted on the edge of our bed like a permanent display, matching burdens to caramels   the thin plant over the dresser is belonging here you picture yourself with pedals removed and ask why you were not born gracious I do a different dance in the same mirror   in the ultra-rendering of these buildings I could snap my fingers and every window would close an accordion we accompany
i had scarcely got acquainted when they took me by the paw & made me even-minded nor did i mind i had exactly enough window i had exactly enough to get started wine makes a person weak that is not to say that wine is not delightful, only that it makes a person weak a person can be made weak with whiskey and this was the mexicans’ military tactic with the chiricahua apache and the dutch with the lenape down in manahatta there was a dog named charlie cally called it an ‘it’ when we had our pronoun circle-jerk i told the group they could call me ‘it’ you know like the sky and the grass and a bird where you can’t tell what it is it, its, itself but then i sort of chickened out and said if ‘it’ ‘made them feel weird’ as a pronoun for a human they could call me ‘they’ or any gender-neutral pronoun i said xe or zae or e or shim-sham or two head-cocks and a click i joked looking at charlie’s belly as charlie rolled on its back
Seventeen suns rising in seventeen bedroom windows. Thirty-four eyes blooming open with the light of one more morning. Seventeen reflections in the bathroom mirror. Seventeen backpacks or briefcases stuffed with textbooks or lesson plans. Seventeen good mornings at kitchen breakfasts and seventeen goodbyes at front doors. Seventeen drives through palm-lined streets and miles of crammed highways to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School at 5901 Pine Island Road. The first bell ringing-in one last school day on February fourteenth, 2018. Seventeen echoes of footsteps down hallways for five class periods: algebra, poetry, biology, art, history. Seventeen hands writing on whiteboards or taking notes at their desks until the first gunshot at 2:21pm. One AR-15 rifle in the hands of a nineteen year old mind turning hate for himself into hate for others, into one-hundred fifty bullets fired in six minutes through building number twelve. Seventeen dead carried down hallways they walked, past cases of trophies they won, flyers for clubs they belonged to, lockers they won’t open again. Seventeen Valentine’s Day dates broken and cards unopened. Seventeen bodies to identify, dozens of photo albums to page through and remember their lives. Seventeen caskets and burial garments to choose for them. Seventeen funerals to attend in twelve days. Seventeen graves dug and headstones placed—all marked with the same date of death. Seventeen names: Alyssa. Helena. Scott. Martin—seventeen absentees forever—Nicholas. Aaron. Jamie. Luke—seventeen closets to clear out—Christopher. Cara. Gina. Joaquin—seventeen empty beds—Alaina. Meadow. Alex. Carmen. Peter—seventeen reasons to rebel with the hope these will be the last seventeen to be taken by one of three-hundred-ninety-three-million guns in America.
AUTUMN gold of amber red of ember brown of umber all September  MCCOY CREEK   Over the bright shallows now no flights of swallows. Leaves of the sheltering willow dangle thin and yellow.    OCTOBER   At four in the morning the west wind moved in the leaves of the beech tree with a long rush and patter of water, first wave of the dark tide coming in.    SOLSTICE   On the longest night of all the year in the forests up the hill, the little owl spoke soft and clear to bid the night be longer still.    THE WINDS OF MAY   are soft and restless in their leafy garments that rustle and sway making every moment movement.    HAIL   The dogwood cowered under the thunder and the lilacs burned like light itself against the storm-black sky until the hail whitened the grass with petals.
Bibiana:At night I dreamt that I belonged to a basement-flock of girls just as terrified and feverish as me. We could communicate with each other byknocking on the walls.
Bibiana:Wanting to get close to one’s abuser is no sickness. Wanting to create a cocoon of normalcy when one is subjected to a crime is no syndrome.
Will haul this gelatinous body, will lash forward this non-form, will push this organism of gas through the gray regions.   A sour wind tears through the thin white hair. A wind of vinegar and henbane tears in the rustling, discarded bird-shells that were abandoned empty and fragile when the throbbing bird-boils moved on toward so-called life. Now I see the cunning needle-trees sling these clumps of heavy pouch-flesh back and forth between them: small feather-birds “fly” above my heads.   I haul myself, I haul myself, I haul my dragging structure along the river furrow’s muddy, sloppily overlapping slopes. I am so bitter, so wet, so the mouth smears the inside with the sweetness of the chewed-up blood-chisel. Out of this blood I am going to suck my nourishment for some time.   I haul, I urge my dissolved substance, slowly forward across the metal of calm stones, the hovering thread-glue’s suction toward a point in the distant middle of the perspective. Where the river’s banks will meet and like the thinnest needle of silver of liquid will drill its dark tunnel-water straight into the heart of the dying image, this moistly broken-up surface of paper to which we cling.   I haul I haul I touch myself, touch the skin-rind with chafed-up viscous fingers. Little mermaid from ocean foam molded–I haul my long veils, layers of elastic cartilage, of slippery, shimmering membranes, chlorophyll. The gills shudder and glow deep down in this chasm of tissue–constantly rustling, squeaking, gasping for air. This whirling, howling, desperate lack of oxygen; the scream–if it had had enough oxygen to scream and a mouth with which to scream–the scream to swallow the entire lung full of clear wind.   Lizards play, glitter green, blue, and red between the skin membranes of the body dress. Where does this mass end? I search inward through strata to find the core of my plasma wet from juices, to find the core of body-flesh despite the outer, surrounding flesh, the naked body’s stable surface, a kind of human here inside the bluing, plant-becoming. Something to hold on to behind the spread of the sickness of mud, fermentation. But there is nothing to grasp beneath this mantle of slippery webbed skin, burst through by a pounding net of veins.   I now lick my tongue against the outer claws of the fingers to tear life into the ions, to make sores bitter in the tongue’s blue ventricles. A kind of pain therefore radiates against the inner glands, a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system’s last chance to communicate with the dying I. The mists smart, shimmer, the lumps of blue cobalt from the mustard gas corrode through the otherwise red shroud-clouds that drag their bellies against the river’s surface. In one of the skin-folds between the pockets of the genital dress, lizards gather in heaps of glimmering scales.   But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me. That is why I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths. I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.
Behind the house in a field there's a metal box I buried full of childhood treasure, a map of my secret place, a few lead pennies from 1943. The rest I've forgotten, forgotten even the exact spot I covered with moss and loam.   Now I'm back and twenty years have made so little difference I suspect they never happened, this face in the mirror aged with pencil and putty. I suspect even the box has moved as a mole would move to a new place long ago.
I have scrawled audible lifelines along the edges of the lint trap, dropping the ball of towel fuzz in the blue bin lined with a thirteen-gallon bag. My sons' wardrobes lounge on their bedroom floors, then sidle down to the basement, where I look forward to the warmth of their waistbands when I pluck them from the dryer. Sometimes I wonder why my husband worries about debt and I wish he wouldn't. Sometimes I wonder how high the alfalfa will grow. Sometimes I wonder if the dog will throw up in the night. Like my mother, I'm learning not to tamper with anger. It appears as reliably as the washing machine thumps and threatens to lurch across the floor away from the electrical outlet. Nothing's worth getting worked up about, except for death. And when I think of the people I have lost, I wish them back into their button-down shirts, their raspberry tights.
Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.
Mother rain, manifold, measureless, falling on fallow, on field and forest, on house-roof, low hovel, high tower, downwelling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling: return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root, to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.
Up on the roof, waiting for the fireworks to begin in warm winter rain, a moment ago I stepped from the elevator into the black air of an almost New Year and need a minute to catch my breath at the spread of city open to my eye. I can't go to the edge; I never could. The old fear of height still troubles me, the sensation that nothing can be under me if I am surrounded by mist and rain and all of the dark night air we breathe. Even a glimpse at the treetops in the park, with its slick crisscrossing roads that plunge into the jumbled panorama of East Side Manhattan, hysterical tonight with its own incandescence, gives me the willies. I feel as if I were standing on the deck of a showboat of a cloud as it drifts down some dark river, waiting for it to bang into some other building's fifteenth floor. How can these old people hunch the railing, hoisting their plastic glasses of champagne from under dripping umbrellas, as if they drank the rain as they laugh their analyses of the weather? Maybe now, like me, they have nothing to lose. I moved in three weeks ago; this is my first trip to the roof. I don't want to die tonight, the first fatality of 1990! There's too much of me I left in pieces last year, oh, the whole last decade: But I'm up here to distract myself, temporarily, from what I don't want or can't have in the way of love. . . . That must be the Triborough Bridge, tied in its strings of blue lights, and I can see in Central Park the skating rink, like a scoured mirror below, where some madman waves a red lantern; he must be drunk. I have only sipped a speck of Drambuie, which I didn't carry in my Coca-Cola glass up to these festivities. This is the first New Year's I've spent alone in twenty, twenty-two years. I never could go to the edge; but I did. Out there in the dark: my marriage, the woman I loved badly, as she did me, or none too well; the places we lived; the apartment I once half-owned; the thousands of books I had to leave behind (though I am to be granted library privileges) and the black and white cat I really miss. My wife's with her friends tonight somewhere in Brooklyn; friends of mine out there, too, though I don't know where. It's just like me to move in the middle of a telephone company strike. Thus, no calls from anyone—and I don't even have a telephone yet, so who could call? Damp but trying to smile, I eye the revelers. Two young men and their enormous girlfriends have joined us, really large women who carry balloons, all ready to froth in merry champagne. We check our watches to the screams from swarms of apartment windows to the west as the sky lights up with the first furious bombardment of colored shells. I can see that red lantern swinging toward the rockets—aha! So it wasn't a drunk, but the fireworks engineer preparing to blow the year's last sky to smithereens for our delight! I like to follow the tiny spurts of flame from the launching pad in their heavenward trajectory as much as I like the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, which give proof to the night that I am still here, hands jammed in the pockets of my sodden raincoat, face dripping with rain, hat soaked, wondering if the skinny guy in the army jacket behind me (who looks just like I did in the sixties) is mumbling his way into a combat flashback and ready to hurl me over the edge of the roof and into kingdom come. I guess not yet. We've survived the first blasts of spinning green, corkscrews of spangled flame, buds of fireballs spewed in arching gold sprays, the whistling fire-fish that curl and howl as they flare, falling to ash. Screaming its head off, the New York New Year enters. I feel sad that beautiful things must die, even shadows made of smoke and flame, whatever I thought I had made out of my life— music, poems, books, kisses, a little useless fame. The army guy behind me grumbles at the haze of rocket smoke that coils around the trees, then tumbles up into the air toward Harlem. That bump and thud and bump sound everywhere, more clouds smacking each other head-on. The flashes of the explosions are close enough to touch if you wanted to burn your fingers on the sky, and the glare rocks our shadows back against the brick, as if chaos snapped our pictures in the dark. I smile for my portrait, curious at the New Year, smelling the acrid smoke of the one we've just destroyed. Then I squeeze into the tiny elevator car with the others, anonymous, reconciled to be so, back to my little apartment and the waiting glass of amber drink I'll raise, only half in jest, to my new life.
For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler That's what the first line says of the song I've been playing all summer at the keyboard—trying to get my hands around its dark, melancholy chords, its story line of a melody that twists up like snakes from melodic minor scales that I've also been trying to learn, though I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales. Come to think of it, neither am I much when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean. Not that I haven't had my chances. Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband, half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby than a grown man, the poet laureate of the self-induced coma when it came to doing anything for anybody but me. "Now and then he took his thumb out of his mouth to write an ode to or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day." That's what I imagined my ex-wife said to our therapist near the end. She did say: "It's all about Bill." She was right. And suddenly it frightens me, remembering how, at our wedding, our poet friends read poems of (mostly) utter depression to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love had double-crossed our union, if strange snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden had hissed at us, and now I worry, on your wedding day, if I'm not doing the same damned thing . . . . I haven't come to spring up and put my curse on your bliss. Here's what I want to say: You're young. You don’t know what love is. And as the next line of the song goes, you won't —"Until you know the meaning of the blues." Darlings, the blues will come (though not often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords against your paradise. A little of that you unwittingly got today, when it rained and you couldn't be married outside under the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard. But paradise doesn't have to be structured so that we can never reenter it. After you've kicked each other out of it once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course), teach yourself how to say a few kind words to each other. Don't stand there angry, stony. Each of you let the other know what you are feeling and thinking and then it may be possible to return to each other smiling, hand in hand. For arm in arm, you are your best Eden. Remember the advice the old poet sang to you on the afternoon of August 4, 2001, the day you got married. May you enjoy a good laugh thinking of him and his silver thumb now that you've turned the key into your new life in the beautiful Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!
Not long after you had told me, gently, that you still grieved for your last love, though that had ended almost a year before, and that you could have no intimate relationship with me, maybe not with anyone for a time, I stopped my fork in the air with whatever hung on the end of it that I was eating. My throat wouldn't swallow. I felt weak and sick, as if it were myself that I devoured, piece by piece, as you talked away the hopes that I had put in your lovely face. It was the old story coming true for me once more, though you were hardly mine. . . . When we finished I walked you back to your car; I don't remember having much to say. Why would I? Buildings drifted by, and cars, and faces. Then we arrived at the place where, afterwards, I would never see you again, at a parking lot near Times Square. There I marked the sidewalk with X's visible only to me: "At this place I was lost again," they'd say to me when I walked there in the future. "Dig here and find what's left of me, or what I left behind, where X marks the spot." I felt like the death's-head and crossed bones that surmount the treasure chest. I only felt a little like gold coins and jewels. I have signed the City with these sphinxes —in parks, in streets, in bedrooms, in my own apartments. And there we stood, you and I, hemmed in by the stitches of X's that could not hold you to me. But X's mean kisses, I realized, as well as what is lost: all the kisses I couldn't give you chalked like symbols on the sidewalk. After all, you yourself had been marked by loss, even in your laughter that afternoon at the show I had taken you to. Bright-eyed and smiling in the seat beside me, you stole my glances with your dark, dark eyes and your long hair. I thought that I had not been this happy in a long time with a woman and was ready to become even more happy, ready to do anything that you wanted in order to please you, to see that smile come up, not knowing what you were soon to say to me as we dined. And when you spoke, I felt life fall away from me. Again I felt that I would never be happy. I felt the words that I had wanted to say to you leaving me, rushing out of my chest like dead air, until I had no more words to say. I seemed to cut and swallow my food as if it were me myself that stuck in pieces on the end of the fork I had raised to my mouth. Had I been chewing on my own flesh? Self-Pity the Devourer took me by the hand that held the fork, and once again I feasted on all that was dark and hopeless in myself, in lieu of all that was beautiful, desirable, and unattainable in you. And then I stood beside you in the lot where you had parked your car, with the X's buzzing in the air, sticking themselves to you and me and the blacktop and the cars. When you reached out to embrace me, I moved to embrace you in return—and then came the part that I don't want to remember, the part I hate: I caught a glimpse of your face as we put our arms around each other, and your face said everything to me about how you had wasted the afternoon, how eager you were to speed away in your car, a mixture of disgust and relief that the thing would soon be over, that I would be crossed out forever from your life—and everything that I hated about myself, my stupid chin, my ugly nose, my hopeless balded head, my stuck-out ears, my wreck of a heart, crashed over me, spinning me into the vortex of a palpable self-hate that I have only ever let myself feel a little bit at a time, though it is always there
like the lost car that a river knows like the heat of an ointment in pinpoints of breathing like the unknown western in mountains of tar like a knot in each word for comfort like a horse on a face with four hooves like the knives that a heart squirms into like the feel that the last day pushes, that a fire paints red like the shower that a plain divides in snakes like a frozen torso pining for food like the ammunition that a pair of wings makes dry like a shirt that plants seeds under worn out skin like the clouds of mistakes, pouring through sleep like the walls that crack open like a wake in a spin like the exits of oceans that a salmon knows like the dust that is written with number like a trust full of beacons of light like the negative shade of a fungus like the promise that a lie gives out like the pulse of a trap like the rainbow that cuts off a hand like a psychic intent full of negative calls like salt for the season that covers the fields with jail like the round word that a star pisser pulls like the plains that a crossed out calendar day will mourn like the fate of the wrong side of talking like hills under snow that a letter revolves like the husky reflections of leeches that writhe like a sword in Toledo like the animals growing a vent in a cage like the sequence of nights dropping straw for a cipher like the trade in the fair full of cycles and ends like the cattle that heat all the drains with green grass like the nipples of outdoor intentions like a wing on the door that a glass makes arise like the underground fluid of digitized words like the ice in a cavern like a ride through the green light of dying like the yellowish herd of relational cards like the face that a wallet becomes like the wrong line of radios making a rule like the crust on the last day of hunger like the rodeo riding the real for a cut like the cells in the spread of the fall like an ape for the circle of color like reflections that turn on a wheel like the freezer of sweethearts like a change for the current that makes a return like the pause on the shore full of rattles like the oxygen tent making holes in a lung the face of friendly fire is knotted for a smile deleted for a smile that saves the executioner the face intended jail, by rocking through the holes that fear the clear blue family of dots the face resembles next to nothing in the network full of incremental touches that a string intends to limit by the light the face of arctic evolutions, a hunt that people came to read instead of mapping all the flights of sleep without a sound the face of terrible returns will fade outside the pouring crowd of animal relation in the mineral of wealth the face of providence is making shores for surfers in the foam of magnifying eyes that are the opposite of winter calm the face is never there in each intention that the worst reliance knows to ask for heat the face is after every opening that makes a number count for all of what is good like a robot that falls and makes good for a switch like the breasts of a mop that soaks blood like a magnifying glass for the sun like the picture of radar in space like a misery flood on the phone like electrical laughter that the pointed shake like enemies held in a double embrace like extinctions returning like a handshake of style for the heat like the flower that bottles a fly for a mouth like the still dunes of dust on a beautiful girl like the crack in an oven like a moon that gets brighter with age
Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. —Susan Sontag   I place a photograph of my uncle on my computer desktop, which means I learn to ignore it. He stands by a tank, helmet tilting to his right, bootlaces tightened as if stitching together a wound. Alive the hand brings up a cigarette we won't see him taste. Last night I smoked one on the steps outside my barn apartment. A promise I broke myself. He promised himself he wouldn't and did. I smell my fingers and I am smelling his. Hands of smoke and gunpowder. Hands that promised they wouldn't, but did.  This album is a stop-loss. By a dim lantern or in the latrine he flips through it. He looks at himself looking nearly as he does— closest to himself then as he could be, just learning how to lean into his new body. He suspends there by standing order, a spreading fire in his chest, his groin. He is on stage for us to see him, see him? He stands in the noontime sun.   A young soldier (pictured above) the son of an imam, brother to six, is among the latest casualties in the military campaign of Susangerd.    your whole body in a photo your whole body sitting on a crate pressing your eyesocket to the viewfinder of a bazooka crouched as you balance the metal tube on your shoulder in one you guide a belt of ammo into the untiring weapon proud your elbow out as if mid-waltz your frame strong and lightly supporting the gun a kind of smile ruining the picture  You’re posing. You’re scared. A body falls and you learn to step over a loosened head. You begin to appreciate the heft of your boot soles, how they propel you, how they can kick in a face– the collapse of a canopy bed in an aerial bombardment, mosquito netting doused in napalm–cheekbones fragile as moth wings beneath the heel. You tighten your laces until they hold together a capable man. Whatever rains, the weight of your feet swings you forward, goose-stepping pendulums a body less and less yours– a body, God knows, is not what makes you anyway. So the hands that said they never would begin finding grenade pins around their fingers, begin flipping through this album with soot under their nails you were not ready But they issued the shovel and the rifle and you dug But to watch you sitting there between the sandbags But to watch the sand spilling out the bullet holes But what did they expect But what did they really think a sheet of metal could prevent But I sat rolling little ears of pasta off my thumb like helmets But it was not a table of fallen men But my hand registered fatigue But the men in fatigues were tired of sleeping in shifts But you snuck into town and dialed home until you wrote your fingers  were tired But the code for Shiraz was down But all of Shiraz was down But the sheet lightning above the Ferris wheel of rusted bolts But I am sure they are alright you wrote Well to reassure yourself But the wind like an old mouth shaking the unnamed evergreen outside  my window But what I mean is I'd like very much to talk a bitHello    Operation Ramadan was an offensive in the Iran-Iraq War. It was launched by Iran in July 1982 near Basra and featured the use of human wave attacks in one of the largest land battles since World War II. Aftermath: The operation was the first of many disastrous offensives which cost thousands of lives on both sides. This one in general boosted the casualty limit up to 80,000 killed, 200,000 wounded, and 45,000 captured. In retrospect, the Iranians lacked effective command and control, air support, and logistics to sustain an attack in the first place. Saddam Hussein offered several ceasefire attempts in the following year, none of which were accepted by the Revolutionary regime. [6] [dead link]   Congratulations and condolences They would sayThat's the house of a martyr pointing with their noseThat's the mother of a martyr They are building a museum for the martyrs. Some metal shelf a white archival box with his personal effects. I am attempting my own myth-making.He didn’t want to have  anything
Do not hang your head or clench your fists when even your friend, after hearing the story, says, My mother would never put up with that. Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that, more often, a woman who chooses to leave is then murdered. The hundredth time your father says, But she hated violence, why would she marry a guy like that?—
When he tells the story now he's at the center of it, everyone else in the house falling into the backdrop— my mother, grandmother, an uncle, all dead now—props in our story: father and daughter caught in memory's half-light. I'm too young to recall it, so his story becomes the story: 1969, Hurricane Camille bearing down, the old house shuddering as if it will collapse. Rain pours into every room and he has to keep moving, keep me out of harm's way— a father's first duty: to protect. And so, in the story, he does: I am small in his arms, perhaps even sleeping. Water is rising around us and there is no higher place he can take me than this, memory forged in the storm's eye: a girl clinging to her father. What can I do but this? Let him tell it again and again as if it's always been only us, and that, when it mattered, he was the one who saved me.
1 In which I try to decipher  the story it tells, this syntax of monuments flanking the old courthouse:  here, a rough outline like the torso of a woman great with child— a steatite boulder from which the Indians girdled the core  to make of it a bowl, and left in the stone a wound; here, the bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson, quill in hand, inscribing a language of freedom, a creation story— his hand poised at the word happiness. There is not yet an ending, no period—the single mark, intended or misprinted, that changes the meaning of everything. Here too, for the Confederacy,  an obelisk, oblivious  in its name—a word that also meant the symbol to denote, in ancient manuscripts, the spurious, corrupt, or doubtful;  at its base, forged in concrete, a narrative of valor, virtue, states' rights.  Here, it is only the history of a word, obelisk, that points us toward what's not there; all of it palimpsest, each mute object repeating a single refrain: Remember this.
To kill correctly takes calculation.   Down to a science. Arsenic cacodylic acid.   Know water and rice on a cellular level.   Make sure no surviving seed can be collected and planted.   Because even a small seed assures survival.   Because mortars, grenades and bombs cannot destroy a grain.   Because our heart is made of seeds.   Know what it takes to kill the seeds.   Know what it takes to deprive the plant of water, to dehydrate it.   To be surrounded by love but unable to absorb it.
this morning weaving Chi in the garden invisible ball in my hand     *     Halong Bay battle distant memory smoke from Gulf of Tonkin     *     did the atom ever know its destiny how our hands create?                     A student asked me, “Why do your people believe in dragons?”     *     river birch – undressing in the wind     *     the solid bones of elk antlers or branches of a limber pine – memory                     bobcat with mange unwatered plants also dying     *     mountain lion her land, before ours invasive plants     *     scent of orange blossoms – memories of my late grandma who planted this tree                   yarrow seedlings pop up a week later – each moment a small beginning     *     stopped in my tracks by a primrose blooming – I, too, will overcome this     *     dinner a bowl of rice and soy sauce food to survive on     *     my heart the Santa Ana winds today branches fall to the ground
Thus, weary of life, in view of the great consummation which awaits us — tomorrow, we rush among our friends congratulating ourselves upon the joy soon to be. Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. It seems that there is not time enough in which to speak the full of our exaltation. Only a day is left, one miserable day, before the world comes into its own. Let us hurry ! Why bother for this man or that ? In the offices of the great newspapers a mad joy reigns as they prepare the final extras. Rushing about, men bump each other into the whirring presses. How funny it seems. All thought of misery has left us. Why should we care ? Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth. Someone has written a poem.    Oh life, bizarre fowl, what color are your wings ? Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, brown, orange, black, grey ? In the imagination, flying above the wreck of ten thousand million souls, I see you departing sadly for the land of plants and insects, already far out to sea. (Thank you, I know well what I am plagiarising) Your great wings flap as you disappear in the distance over the pre-Columbian acres of floating weed.    The new cathedral overlooking the park, looked down from its towers today, with great eyes, and saw by the decorative lake a group of people staring curiously at the corpse of a suicide : Peaceful, dead young man, the money they have put into the stones has been spent to teach men of life’s austerity. You died and teach us the same lesson. You seem a cathedral, celebrant of the spring which shivers for me among the long black trees.
The farmer in deep thought is pacing through the rain among his blank fields, with hands in pockets, in his head the harvest already planted. A cold wind ruffles the water among the browned weeds. On all sides the world rolls coldly away : black orchards darkened by the March clouds — leaving room for thought. Down past the brushwood bristling by the rainsluiced wagonroad looms the artist figure of the farmer — composing — antagonist.
In passing with my mind on nothing in the world   but the right of way I enjoy on the road by   virtue of the law — I saw   an elderly man who smiled and looked away   to the north past a house — a woman in blue   who was laughing and leaning forward to look up   into the man’s half averted face   and a boy of eight who was looking at the middle of   the man’s belly at a watchchain —   The supreme importance of this nameless spectacle   sped me by them without a word —   Why bother where I went ? for I went spinning on the   four wheels of my car along the wet road until   I saw a girl with one leg over the rail of a balcony
Of death the barber the barber talked to me   cutting my life with sleep to trim my hair —   It’s just a moment he said, we die every night —   And of the newest ways to grow hair on   bald death – I told him of the quartz lamp   and of old men with third sets of teeth to the cue   of an old man who said at the door — Sunshine today!   for which death shaves him twice a week
This is the time of year when boys fifteen and seventeen wear two horned lilac blossoms in their caps — or over one ear   What is it that does this ?   It is a certain sort — drivers for grocers or taxidrivers white and colored —   fellows that let their hair grow long in a curve over one eye —    Horned purple   Dirty satyrs, it is vulgarity raised to the last power   They have stolen them broken the bushes apart with a curse for the owner —    Lilacs —    They stand in the doorways on the business streets with a sneer on their faces   adorned with blossoms   Out of their sweet heads dark kisses — rough faces
Somebody dies every four minutes in New York State —    To hell with you and your poetry —  You will rot and be blown through the next solar system with the rest of the gases —    What the hell do you know about it ?   AXIOMS   Do not get killed   Careful Crossing Campaign Cross Crossings Cautiously   THE HORSES black  & PRANCED white   What’s the use of sweating over this sort of thing, Carl ; here it is all set up —    Outings in New York City   Ho for the open country   Dont’t stay shut up in hot rooms Go to one of the Great Parks Pelham Bay for example   It’s on Long Island sound with bathing, boating tennis, baseball, golf, etc.   Acres and acres of green grass wonderful shade trees, rippling brooks    Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch  of the Lexington Ave. (East Side)  Line and you are there in a few  minutes   Interborough Rapid Transit Co.
You tell me I am wrong. Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong? I am not wrong.   In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women, No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate trees in flower, Oh so red, and such a lot of them.   Whereas at Venice, Abhorrent, green, slippery city Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes, In the dense foliage of the inner garden Pomegranates like bright green stone, And barbed, barbed with a crown. Oh, crown of spiked green metal Actually growing!   Now, in Tuscany, Pomegranates to warm your hands at; And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns Over the left eyebrow.   And, if you dare, the fissure!   Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure? Do you prefer to look on the plain side?   For all that, the setting suns are open. The end cracks open with the beginning: Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.   Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure? No glittering, compact drops of dawn? Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,  shown ruptured?   For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.    San Gervasio in Tuscany
Would you like to throw a stone at me? Here, take all that’s left of my peach.   Blood-red, deep: Heaven knows how it came to pass. Somebody’s pound of flesh rendered up.   Wrinkled with secrets And hard with the intention to keep them.   Why, from silvery peach-bloom, From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem This rolling, dropping, heavy globule?   I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.   Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy? Why hanging with such inordinate weight? Why so indented?   Why the groove? Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses? Why the ripple down the sphere? Why the suggestion of incision?   Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball? It would have been if man had made it. Though I’ve eaten it now.   But it wasn’t round and finished like a billiard ball; And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.   Here, you can have my peach stone.  San Gervasio
I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness.   I love to suck you out from your skins So brown and soft and coming suave, So morbid, as the Italians say.   What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay: Stream within stream.   Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine Or vulgar Marsala.   Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity Soon in the pussy-foot West.   What is it? What is it, in the grape turning raisin, In the medlar, in the sorb-apple, Wineskins of brown morbidity, Autumnal excrementa; What is it that reminds us of white gods?   Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels, Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant As if with sweat, And drenched with mystery.   Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns. I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.   A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture, Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning. And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain, A new gasp of further isolation, A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.   Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone, The fibres of the heart parting one after the other And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied Like a flame blown whiter and whiter In a deeper and deeper darkness, Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.   So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples The distilled essence of hell. The exquisite odour of leave-taking. Jamque vale! Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.   Each soul departing with its own isolation. Strangest of all strange companions, And best.   Medlars, sorb-apples More than sweet Flux of autumn Sucked out of your empty bladders And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its music to yours, Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell And the ego sum of Dionysos The sono io of perfect drunkenness Intoxication of final loneliness.  San Gervasio
Who gave us flowers?Heaven? The white God?   Nonsense! Up out of hell, From Hades; Infernal Dis!  Jesus the god of flowers—? Not he.Or sun-bright Apollo, him so musical? Him neither.  Who then?Say who. Say it—and it is Pluto, Dis The dark one Proserpine’s master.  Who contradicts—?   When she broke forth from below, Flowers came, hell-hounds on her heels. Dis, the dark, the jealous god, the husband, Flower-sumptuous-blooded.  Go then, he said. And in Sicily, on the meadows of Enna, She thought she had left him; But opened around her purple anemones, Caverns, Little hells of color, caves of darkness, Hell, risen in pursuit of her; royal, sumptuous Pit-falls.   All at her feet Hell opening; At her white ankles Hell rearing its husband-splendid, serpent heads, Hell-purple, to get at her—Why did he let her go? So he could track her down again, white victim.   Ah mastery! Hell’s husband-blossoms Out on earth again.   Look out, Persephone! You, Madame Ceres, mind yourself, the enemy is upon you. About your feet spontaneous aconite, Hell-glamorous, and purple husband-tyranny Enveloping your late-enfranchised plains.   You thought your daughter had escaped? No more stockings to darn for the flower-roots, down in hell? But ah my dear!   Aha, the stripe-cheeked whelps, whippet-slim crocuses,At ’em, boys, at ’em!Ho golden-spaniel, sweet alert narcissus,Smell ’em, smell ’em out! Those two enfranchised women.   Somebody is coming!Oho there!   Dark blue anemones! Hell is up! Hell on earth, and Dis within the depths!  Run, Persephone, he is after you already.  Why did he let her go? To track her down; All the sport of summer and spring, and flowers snapping  at her ankles and catching her by the hair! Poor Persephone and her rights for women.  Husband-snared hell-queen,It is spring.   It is spring, And pomp of husband-strategy on earth.  Ceres, kiss your girl, you think you’ve got her back.The bit of husband-tilth she is,Persephone!   Poor mothers-in-law! They are always sold.   It is spring.    Taormina
When he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow: When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it  in a knob behind  —O act of fearful temerity! When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven,  their eyes revealed: When they left the light of heaven brandished like a knife at  their defenceless eyes And the sea like a blade at their face, Mediterranean savages: When they came out, face-revealed, under heaven, from  the shaggy undergrowth of their own hair For the first time, They saw tiny rose cyclamens between their toes, growing Where the slow toads sat brooding on the past.   Slow toads, and cyclamen leaves Stickily glistening with eternal shadow Keeping to earth. Cyclamen leaves Toad-filmy, earth-iridescent Beautiful Frost-filigreed Spumed with mud Snail-nacreous Low down.   The shaking aspect of the sea And man’s defenceless bare face And cyclamens putting their ears back.   Long, pensive, slim-muzzled greyhound buds Dreamy, not yet present, Drawn out of earth At his toes.   Dawn-rose Sub-delighted, stone engendered Cyclamens, young cyclamens Arching Waking, pricking their ears Like delicate very-young greyhound bitches Half-yawning at the open, inexperienced Vistas of day, Folding back their soundless petalled ears.   Greyhound bitches Bending their rosy muzzles pensive down, And breathing soft, unwilling to wake to the new day Yet sub-delighted.   Ah Mediterranean morning, when our world began! Far-off Mediterranean mornings, Pelasgic faces uncovered And unbudding cyclamens.   The hare suddenly goes uphill Laying back her long ears with unwinking bliss.   And up the pallid, sea-blenched Mediterranean stone-slopes Rose cyclamen, ecstatic fore-runner! Cyclamens, ruddy-muzzled cyclamens In little bunches like bunches of wild hares Muzzles together, ears-aprick   Whispering witchcraft Like women at a well, the dawn-fountain.   Greece, and the world’s morning While all the Parthenon marbles still fostered the roots of the cyclamen. Violets Pagan, rosy-muzzled violets Autumnal Dawn-pink, Dawn-pale Among squat toad-leaves sprinkling the unborn Erechtheion marbles.    Taormina
A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there.   In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree I came down the steps with my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough  before me.   He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over  the edge of the stone trough And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.   Someone was before me at my water-trough, And I, like a second-comer, waiting.   He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused  a moment, And stooped and drank a little more, Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels  of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.   The voice of my education said to me He must be killed, For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold  are venomous.   And voices in me said, If you were a man You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.   But must I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink  at my water-trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, Into the burning bowels of this earth?   Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured? I felt so honoured.   And yet those voices:If you were not afraid, you would kill him!   And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more That he should seek my hospitality From out the dark door of the secret earth.   He drank enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, Seeming to lick his lips, And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, And slowly turned his head, And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.   And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,  and entered farther, A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into  that horrid black hole, Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing  himself after, Overcame me now his back was turned.   I looked round, I put down my pitcher, I picked up a clumsy log And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.   I think it did not hit him, But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed  in an undignified haste, Writhed like lightning, and was gone Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.   And immediately I regretted it. I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.   And I thought of the albatross, And I wished he would come back, my snake.   For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.   And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate: A pettiness.    Taormina
Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters   A flock of dreams browse on Necropolis   From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient   Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros obsolete   And "Immortality" mildews in the museums of the moon
The Normal Monster sings in the Green Sahara   The voice and offal of the image of God   make Celtic noises in these lyrical hells   Hurricanes of reasoned musics reap the uncensored earth   The loquent consciousness of living things pours in torrential languages   The elderly colloquists the Spirit and the Flesh are out of tongue   The Spirit is impaled upon the phallus   Phoenix of Irish fires lighten the Occident   with Ireland's wings flap pandemoniums of Olympian prose   and satinize the imperial Rose of Gaelic perfumes — England the sadistic mother embraces Erin   Master of meteoric idiom present   The word made flesh and feeding upon itself with erudite fangs The sanguine introspection of the womb   Don Juan of Judea upon a pilgrimage to the Libido   The press purring its lullabies to sanity   Christ capitalized scourging incontrite usurers of destiny in hole and corner temples   And hang The soul's advertisements outside the ecclesiast's Zoo   A gravid day spawns gutteral gargoyles upon the Tower of Babel   Empyrean emporium where the rejector-recreator Joyce flashes the giant reflector on the sub rosa
Little tapers leaning lighted diagonally Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant Leaning to the breath of baited bodies Like young poplars fringing the Loire   Eyes that are full of love And eyes that are full of kohl Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente Trailing the rest of the animal behind them Telling of tales without words And lies of no consequence One way or another   The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black To black cravat To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat What color could have been your bodies When last you put them away   Nostalgic youth Holding your mistress's pricked finger In the indifferent flame of the taper Synthetic symbol of LIFE In this factitious chamber of DEATH The woman As usual Is smiling as bravely As it is given to her to be brave   While the brandy cherries In winking glasses Are decomposing Harmoniously With the flesh of spectators And at a given spot There is one Who Having the concentric lighting focussed precisely upon her Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction Yet there are cabs outside the door.
Man of absolute physical equilibrium You stand so straight on your legs Every plank or clod you plant your feet on Becomes roots for those limbs   Among the men you accrete to yourself You are more heavy And more light Force being most equitably disposed Is easiest to lift from the ground So at the same time Your movements Unassailable Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet The essence of a Mademoiselle Genée Winks in the to-and-fro of your cuff-links   Your projectile nose Has meddled in the more serious business Of the battle-field With the same incautious aloofness Of intense occupation That it snuffles the trail of the female And the comfortable Passing odors of love   Your genius So much less in your brain   Than in your body Reinforcing the hitherto negligible   Qualities Of life Deals so exclusively with The vital That it is equally happy expressing itself Through the activity of pushing THINGS In the opposite direction To that which they are lethargically willing to go As in the amative language Of the eyes   Fundamentally unreliable You leave others their initial strength Concentrating On stretching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions Till the extent is adequate To the hooking on Of any — or all Forms of creative idiosyncrasy While the occasional snap Of actual production Stings the face of the public.
I   Spawn of fantasies Sifting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage "Once upon a time" Pulls a weed white star-topped Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane I would an eye in a Bengal light Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva   These are suspect places   I must live in my lantern Trimming subliminal flicker Virginal to the bellows Of experience Colored glass.       II   At your mercy Our Universe Is only A colorless onion You derobe Sheath by sheath Remaining A disheartening odour About your nervy hands       III   Night Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares --------------------------------------------- Noon Curled to the solitaire Core of the Sun       IV   Evolution fall foul of Sexual equality Prettily miscalculate Similitude   Unnatural selection Breed such sons and daughters As shall jibber at each other Uninterpretable cryptonyms Under the moon   Give them some way of braying brassily For caressive calling Or to homophonous hiccoughs Transpose the laugh Let them suppose that tears Are snowdrops or molasses Or anything Than human insufficiences Begging dorsal vertebrae   Let meeting be the turning To the antipodean And Form a blur Anything Than to seduce them To the one As simple satisfaction For the other       V   Shuttle-cock and battle-door A little pink-love And feathers are strewn       VI   Let Joy go solace-winged To flutter whom she may concern       VII   Once in a mezzanino The starry ceiling Vaulted an unimaginable family Bird-like abortions With human throats And Wisdom's eyes Who wore lamp-shade red dresses And woolen hair   One bore a baby In a padded porte-enfant Tied with a sarsenet ribbon To her goose's wings   But for the abominable shadows I would have lived Among their fearful furniture To teach them to tell me their secrets Before I guessed -- Sweeping the brood clean out       VIII   Midnight empties the street --- --- --- To the left a boy --- One wing has been washed in rain The other will never be clean any more --- Pulling door-bells to remind Those that are snug To the right a haloed ascetic Threading houses Probes wounds for souls --- The poor can't wash in hot water --- And I don't know which turning to take ---       IX   We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment Or broken flesh with one another At the profane communion table Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips   We might have given birth to a butterfly With the daily-news Printed in blood on its wings       X   In some Prenatal plagiarism Foetal buffoons Caught tricks --- --- --- --- --- From archetypal pantomime Stringing emotions Looped aloft --- --- --- --- For the blind eyes That Nature knows us with And most of Nature is green --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---       XI   Green things grow Salads For the cerebral Forager's revival And flowered flummery Upon bossed bellies Of mountains Rolling in the sun       XII   Shedding our petty pruderies From slit eyes   We sidle up To Nature --- --- --- that irate pornographist       XIII   The wind stuffs the scum of the white street Into my lungs and my nostrils Exhilarated birds Prolonging flight into the night Never reaching --- --- --- --- ------ --- ---
My body is opaque to the soul. Driven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s  longing, But my mind, too, is opaque to the soul. O Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger, Direct it to the lid of its flesh-eye. I am weak with much giving. I am weak the desire to give more. (How strong a thing is the little finger!) So weak that I have confused the body with the soul, And the body with its little finger. (How frail is the little finger.) My voice could not carry to you did you dwell in stars, O spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger . .
Hair–braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope, Eye–fagots, Lips–old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath–the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash  of black flesh after flame.
Within this black hive to-night There swarm a million bees; Bees passing in and out the moon, Bees escaping out the moon, Bees returning through the moon, Silver bees intently buzzing, Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb, And I, a drone, Lying on my back, Lipping honey, Getting drunk with that silver honey, Wish that I might fly out past the moon And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.
Tell me, dear beauty of the dusk,  When purple ribbons bind the hill,  Do dreams your secret wish fulfill, Do prayers, like kernels from the husk   Come from your lips? Tell me if when  The mountains loom at night, giant shades  Of softer shadow, swift like blades Of grass seeds come to flower. Then   Tell me if the night winds bend  Them towards me, if the Shenandoah  As it ripples past your shore, Catches the soul of what you send.
into the strenuous briefness Life: handorgans and April darkness,friends   i charge laughing. Into the hair-thin tints of yellow dawn, into the women-coloured twilight   i smilingly glide. I into the big vermilion departure swim,sayingly;   (Do you think?)the i do,world is probably made of roses & hello:   (of solongs and,ashes)
All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.   four lean hounds crouched low and smiling the merry deer ran before.   Fleeter be they than dappled dreams the swift sweet deer the red rare deer.   Four red roebuck at a white water the cruel bugle sang before.   Horn at hip went my love riding riding the echo down into the silver dawn.   four lean hounds crouched low and smiling the level meadows ran before.   Softer be they than slippered sleep the lean lithe deer the fleet flown deer.   Four fleet does at a gold valley the famished arrow sang before.   Bow at belt went my love riding riding the mountain down into the silver dawn.   four lean hounds crouched low and smiling the sheer peaks ran before.   Paler be they than daunting death the sleek slim deer the tall tense deer.   Four tall stags at a green mountain the lucky hunter sang before.   All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.   four lean hounds crouched low and smiling my heart fell dead before.
the bigness of cannon is skilful,   but i have seen death’s clever enormous voice which hides in a fragility of poppies. . . .   i say that sometimes on these long talkative animals are laid fists of huger silence.   I have seen all the silence filled with vivid noiseless boys   at Roupy i have seen between barrages,   the night utter ripe unspeaking girls.
O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting    fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked   thee ,has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy    beauty how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and   buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods  (but true   to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover    thou answerest     them only with    spring)
Every morning, my grandmother cleaned the Fischer stove in the back of the trailer, lifted ash in a shovel, careful   not to spill the white-gray dust. Precious, she said, her breath smoking in the cold. Precious in winter's first lavender   not-quite-light—and you could smell it, the faintest acrid hint of ash, a crispness calling you from bed. You could watch her   cap it in a chicory coffee can to stack among others, back bent from a long-gone fever. For the garden in spring, she said.
When you, that at this moment are to me Dearer than words on paper, shall depart, And be no more the warder of my heart, Whereof again myself shall hold the key; And be no more—what now you seem to be— The sun, from which all excellences start In a round nimbus, nor a broken dart Of moonlight, even, splintered on the sea; I shall remember only of this hour— And weep somewhat, as now you see me weep— The pathos of your love, that, like a flower, Fearful of death yet amorous of sleep, Droops for a moment and beholds, dismayed, The wind whereon its petals shall be laid.
Pity me not because the light of day At close of day no longer walks the sky; Pity me not for beauties passed away From field and thicket as the year goes by; Pity me not the waning of the moon, Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea, Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon, And you no longer look with love on me. This have I known always: Love is no more Than the wide blossom which the wind assails, Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore, Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales: Pity me that the heart is slow to learn What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word! Give back my book and take my kiss instead. Was it my enemy or my friend I heard, “What a big book for such a little head!” Come, I will show you now my newest hat, And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink! Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that. I never again shall tell you what I think. I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly; You will not catch me reading any more: I shall be called a wife to pattern by; And some day when you knock and push the door, Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy, I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.
I shall go back again to the bleak shore And build a little shanty on the sand, In such a way that the extremest band Of brittle seaweed will escape my door But by a yard or two; and nevermore Shall I return to take you by the hand; I shall be gone to what I understand, And happier than I ever was before. The love that stood a moment in your eyes, The words that lay a moment on your tongue, Are one with all that in a moment dies, A little under-said and over-sung. But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies Unchanged from what they were when I was young.
Loving you less than life, a little less Than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall Or brush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess I cannot swear I love you not at all. For there is that about you in this light— A yellow darkness, sinister of rain— Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight To dwell on you, and dwell on you again. And I am made aware of many a week I shall consume, remembering in what way Your brown hair grows about your brow and cheek And what divine absurdities you say: Till all the world, and I, and surely you, Will know I love you, whether or not I do.
I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind, Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear your body’s weight upon my breast: So subtly is the fume of life designed, To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind, And leave me once again undone, possessed. Think not for this, however, the poor treason Of my stout blood against my staggering brain, I shall remember you with love, or season My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain: I find this frenzy insufficient reason For conversation when we meet again.
Still will I harvest beauty where it grows: In coloured fungus and the spotted fog Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows Of rust and oil, where half a city throws Its empty tins; and in some spongy log Whence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog. . . . And a black pupil in the green scum shows. Her the inhabiter of divers places Surmising at all doors, I push them all. Oh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge Turn back forevermore with craven faces, I tell you Beauty bears an ultra fringe Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air. O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized! Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
The white bark writhed and sputtered like a fish Upon the coals, exuding odorous smoke She knelt and blew, in a surging desolate wish For comfort; and the sleeping ashes woke And scattered to the hearth, but no thin fire Broke suddenly, the wood was wet with rain. Then, softly stepping forth from her desire, (Being mindful of like passion hurled in vain Upon a similar task, in other days) She thrust her breath against the stubborn coal, Bringing to bear upon its hilt the whole Of her still body. . . there sprang a little blaze. . . A pack of hounds, the flame swept up the flue!— And the blue night stood flattened against the window,  staring through.
She had forgotten how the August night Was level as a lake beneath the moon, In which she swam a little, losing sight Of shore; and how the boy, who was at noon Simple enough, not different from the rest, Wore now a pleasant mystery as he went, Which seemed to her an honest enough test Whether she loved him, and she was content. So loud, so loud the million crickets’ choir. . . So sweet the night, so long-drawn-out and late. . . And if the man were not her spirit’s mate, Why was her body sluggish with desire? Stark on the open field the moonlight fell, But the oak tree’s shadow was deep and black and  secret as a well.
Then said a teacher, Speak to us of Teach- ing.  And he said:  No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawn- ing of your knowledge.  The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.  If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.  The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.  The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.  And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.  For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.  And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.
Then a hermit, who visited the city once a year, came forth and said, Speak to us of Pleasure.  And he answered, saying:  Pleasure is a freedom-song,  But it is not freedom.  It is the blossoming of your desires,  But it is not their fruit.  It is a depth calling unto a height,  But it is not the deep nor the high.  It is the caged taking wing,  But it is not space encompassed.  Ay, in very truth, pleasure is a freedom- song.  And I fain would have you sing it with fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing.    Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are judged and rebuked.  I would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have them seek.  For they shall find pleasure, but not her alone;  Seven are her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure.  Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure?    And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs com- mitted in drunkenness.  But regret is the beclouding of the mind  and not its chastisement.  They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.  Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted.    And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember;  And in their fear of seeking and remem- bering they shun all pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it.  But even in their foregoing is their pleasure.  And thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands.  But tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit?  Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars?  And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?  Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff?    Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.  Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?  Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.  And your body is the harp of your soul,  And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.    And now you ask in your heart, “How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?”  Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,  But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.  For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,  And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,  And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.    People of Orphalese, be in your pleas- ures like the flowers and the bees.
And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.  And he answered:  Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?  And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?    The aggrieved and the injured say, “Beauty is kind and gentle.  Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us.”  And the passionate say, “Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.  Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.”    The tired and the weary say, “Beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.  Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”  But the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains,  And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”    At night the watchmen of the city say, “Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east.”  And at noontide the toilers and the way- farers say, “We have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset.”    In winter say the snow-bound, “She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.”  And in the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.”  All these things have you said of beauty,  Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,  And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.  It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,  But rather a heart enflamed and a soul en- chanted.  It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,  But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.  It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,  But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.    People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.  But you are life and you are the veil.  Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mir- ror.  But you are eternity and you are the mir- ror.
Then a lawyer said, But what of our Laws, master?  And he answered:  You delight in laying down laws,  Yet you delight more in breaking them.  Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter.  But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore,  And when you destroy them the ocean laughs with you.  Verily the ocean laughs always with the innocent.    But what of those to whom life is not an ocean, and man-made laws are not sand- towers,  But to whom life is a rock, and the law a chisel with which they would carve it in their own likeness?  What of the cripple who hates dancers?  What of the ox who loves his yoke and deems the elk and deer of the forest stray and vagrant things?  What of the old serpent who cannot shed his skin, and calls all others naked and shameless?  And of him who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters lawbreakers?    What shall I say of these save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun?  They see only their shadows, and their shadows are their laws.  And what is the sun to them but a caster of shadows?  And what is it to acknowledge the laws but to stoop down and trace their shadows upon the earth?  But you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you?  You who travel with the wind, what weather-vane shall direct your course?  What man’s law shall bind you if you break your yoke but upon no man's prison door?  What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man’s iron chains?  And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man’s path?    People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?
And an orator said, Speak to us of Free- dom.  And he answered:  At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,  Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.  Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.  And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment.    You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights with- out a want and a grief,  But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.    And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your under- standing have fastened around your noon hour?  In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.    And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?  If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead.  You cannot erase it by burning your law  books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them.  And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.  For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride?  And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you.  And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.    Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.  These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.  And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.  And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.
And the weaver said, Speak to us of Clothes.  And he answered:  Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.  And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.  Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,  For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.    Some of you say, “It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.”  And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,  But shame was his loom, and the soften- ing of the sinews was his thread.  And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.  Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.  And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?  And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
And a merchant said, Speak to us of Buying and Selling.  And he answered and said:  To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.  It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.  Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.    When in the market place you toilers of the sea and fields and vineyards meet the weavers and the potters and the gatherers of spices,—  Invoke then the master spirit of the earth, to come into your midst and sanctify the scales and the reckoning that weighs value against value.    And suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labour.  To such men you should say,  “Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net;  For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us.”    And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players,—buy of their gifts also.  For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment  and food for your soul.    And before you leave the market place, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.  For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the needs of the least of you are satisfied.
Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master?  And he answered saying:  You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.  You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.  Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.  But let there be spaces in your togetherness,  And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.    Love one another, but make not a bond of love:  Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.  Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.  Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.  Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,  Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.    Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.  For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.  And stand together yet not too near together:  For the pillars of the temple stand apart,  And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.  And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:  When love beckons to you, follow him,  Though his ways are hard and steep.  And when his wings enfold you yield to him,  Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.  And when he speaks to you believe in him,  Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.    For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.  Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,  So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.  •  Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.  He threshes you to make you naked.  He sifts you to free you from your husks.  He grinds you to whiteness.  He kneads you until you are pliant;  And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.    All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.    But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,  Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,  Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.  •  Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.  Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;  For love is sufficient unto love.    When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”  And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.    Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.  But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:  To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.  To know the pain of too much tenderness.  To be wounded by your own under- standing of love;  And to bleed willingly and joyfully.  To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;  To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;  To return home at eventide with grati- tude;  And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
There is big excitement in C block today. On the window sill, in a plastic ice cream cup a little plant is growing. This is all the men want to talk about: how an apple seed germinated in a crack of damp concrete; how they tore open tea bags to collect the leaves, leached them in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed made of Lipton. How this finger of spring dug one delicate root down into the dark fannings and now two small sleeves of green are pushing out from the emerging tip. The men are tipsy with this miracle. Each morning, one by one, they go to the window and check the progress of the struggling plant. All through the day they return to stand over the seedling and whisper.
When we got close enough we could hear   rivers inside the ice heaving splits   the groaning of a ledge about to   calve. Strewn in the moraine fresh moose sign—   tawny oblong pellets breaking up   sharp black shale. In one breath ice and air—   history, the record of breaking—   prophecy, the warning of what's yet to break   out from under four stories   of bone-crushing turquoise retreating.
Holy the days of the prune face junkie men Holy the scag pumped arms Holy the Harlem faces looking for space in the dead rock valleys of the City   Holy the flowers sing holy for the raped holidays and Bessie’s guts spilling on the Mississippi road   Sing holy for all of the faces that inched toward freedom, followed the North Star like Harriet and Douglass   Sing holy for all our singers and sinners for all the shapes and forms of our liberation   Holy, holy, holy for the midnight hassles for the gods of our Ancestors bellowing sunsets and blues that gave us vision  O God make us strong and ready    Holy, holy, holy for the day we dig ourselves and rise in the sun of our own peace and place and space, yes Lord.      1969/70
The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds.  Loren Eiseley A door opens in the wilderness. People cross through it—bloused women families   Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn—   Street aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into Moons—and everything I’d known—   Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs In the capillaries of my eyes a blood   Glancing through the hatches— If I said I would always be grateful   If I lied or touched with spite If night is just a foamline of shadows   Though we were both lost—the door Opening—the fear of being shown   Whole to the one who must love you still— And stopped as if on a walk to say  Look at that and what matters what really counts  And I’ll tell you everything if you promise I promise   I stood at door and behind me heard Snow-plows scrape against roads   At the center of night—unknown to yourself  And the word I said out-loud to no one   That meant it was all to no purpose  The word for the desire inside destruction    For everything that can never be brought back— Loose snow blown hard to each bank   And the common reel of those who To avoid one extreme rush toward its opposite—   Snow blasted to piles—and never opened up to Anything that could reach me until you reached me—   Which hours belonged to us When was I unknowingly alone   Why did you always return to walk here a path Behind my closed eyes shedding salt   Dry snowfall and sticks—still were you here With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window   The red-haired boy across the street has learned to ride his bike There are still picnics there are fountains   And the world I am leaving behind saysOne learns to see one learns to be kind—   I closed my eyes I closed my hands I shut down the fields in my arms   The cattle on the plains veins ditches Blue ravines a gray bird   Sailing through a poplar brake kids Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos   Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized   The river the town I shut down The hard muscles of sleep farmlands   Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines On the ridge animals scattering across slopes I closed   The smooth bone of evening a storm On the hills white and noiseless spindled   Prairies where I was born I shut I seized The clouds I closed in anger—fervor—ardor
I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house Of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over A hundred square miles round it in the mountains: And that not dwelt in now by men or women. (It never had been dwelt in, though, by women, So what is this I make a sorrow of?) I came as census-taker to the waste To count the people in it and found none, None in the hundred miles, none in the house, Where I came last with some hope, but not much, After hours’ overlooking from the cliffs An emptiness flayed to the very stone. I found no people that dared show themselves, None not in hiding from the outward eye. The time was autumn, but how anyone Could tell the time of year when every tree That could have dropped a leaf was down itself And nothing but the stump of it was left Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch; And every tree up stood a rotting trunk Without a single leaf to spend on autumn, Or branch to whistle after what was spent. Perhaps the wind the more without the help Of breathing trees said something of the time Of year or day the way it swung a door Forever off the latch, as if rude men Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him For the next one to open for himself. I counted nine I had no right to count (But this was dreamy unofficial counting) Before I made the tenth across the threshold. Where was my supper? Where was anyone’s? No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table. The stove was cold—the stove was off the chimney— And down by one side where it lacked a leg. The people that had loudly passed the door Were people to the ear but not the eye. They were not on the table with their elbows. They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks. I saw no men there and no bones of men there. I armed myself against such bones as might be With the pitch-blackened stub of an ax-handle I picked up off the straw-dust covered floor. Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled. The door was still because I held it shut While I thought what to do that could be done— About the house—about the people not there. This house in one year fallen to decay Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe. Nothing was left to do that I could see Unless to find that there was no one there And declare to the cliffs too far for echo, “The place is desert, and let whoso lurks In silence, if in this he is aggrieved, Break silence now or be forever silent. Let him say why it should not be declared so.” The melancholy of having to count souls Where they grow fewer and fewer every year Is extreme where they shrink to none at all. It must be I want life to go on living.
Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?   Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)— Though some savants make earth include the sky; And blue so far above us comes so high, It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never any more the dead.   The verses in it say and say: ‘The ones who living come today To read the stones and go away Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’   So sure of death the marbles rhyme, Yet can’t help marking all the time How no one dead will seem to come. What is it men are shrinking from?   It would be easy to be clever And tell the stones: Men hate to die And have stopped dying now forever. I think they would believe the lie.
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall, We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, ‘Whose colt?’ A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall, The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt. We heard the miniature thunder where he fled, And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey, Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes. ‘I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow. He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play With the little fellow at all. He’s running away. I doubt if even his mother could tell him, “Sakes, It’s only weather.” He’d think she didn’t know! Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.’ And now he comes again with a clatter of stone And mounts the wall again with whited eyes And all his tail that isn't hair up straight. He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies. ‘Whoever it is that leaves him out so late, When other creatures have gone to stall and bin, Ought to be told to come and take him in.’
Before man came to blow it right  The wind once blew itself untaught, And did its loudest day and night  In any rough place where it caught.   Man came to tell it what was wrong:  It hadn’t found the place to blow; It blew too hard—the aim was song.  And listen—how it ought to go!   He took a little in his mouth,  And held it long enough for north To be converted into south,  And then by measure blew it forth.   By measure. It was word and note,  The wind the wind had meant to be— A little through the lips and throat.  The aim was song—the wind could see.
They sent him back to her. The letter came Saying . . . And she could have him. And before She could be sure there was no hidden ill Under the formal writing, he was there, Living. They gave him back to her alive— How else? They are not known to send the dead— And not disfigured visibly. His face? His hands? She had to look, and ask, ‘What was it, dear?’ And she had given all And still she had all—they had—they the lucky! Wasn’t she glad now? Everything seemed won, And all the rest for them permissible ease. She had to ask, ‘What was it, dear?’    ‘Enough Yet not enough. A bullet through and through, High in the breast. Nothing but what good care And medicine and rest, and you a week, Can cure me of to go again.’ The same Grim giving to do over for them both. She dared no more than ask him with her eyes How was it with him for a second trial. And with his eyes he asked her not to ask. They had given him back to her, but not to keep.
Spades take up leaves No better than spoons, And bags full of leaves Are light as balloons.   I make a great noise Of rustling all day Like rabbit and deer Running away.   But the mountains I raise Elude my embrace, Flowing over my arms And into my face.   I may load and unload Again and again Till I fill the whole shed, And what have I then?   Next to nothing for weight, And since they grew duller From contact with earth, Next to nothing for color.   Next to nothing for use, But a crop is a crop, And who’s to say where The harvest shall stop?
The house had gone to bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go.   The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place’s name.   No more it opened with all one end For teams that came by the stony road To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs And brush the mow with the summer load.   The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh From too much dwelling on what has been.   Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf, And the aged elm, though touched with fire; And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm; And the fence post carried a strand of wire. For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept.
We did not want to be unblessed, so we were blessed.   Long, thin wire, a little patch where we might lay our   heads. It was this way, this looking fore and back, a pole   held tightly in our hands. You want to tell me   what went wrong? Confusing shapes across a wall, depression   in the ground. The gorgeous soldiers fought and fell. Hie   unto hell. How we will lie in that brave grave apart,   our aperture: a heart that has been ruptured   absolutely by a passing God.
what is at first a bodily impression turns out to be a condition of knowing —Judith Butler  in the airport terminal I sit down in a row of chairs without looking at the man in the chair beside me… my chair is adjacent to a narrow formica table where I set the coffee and muffin I’ve bought… I’m tempted to look at the man sitting on the other side of the formica table but I do not want to take a chance and meet his eyes… a familiar animosity must be what warns me off… warnings that I realize are chewable I’m learning are better swallowed… I watch how this man expresses affront toward me without interrupting his focus on his cell phone… the formica table between us isn’t wide enough for him to have the distance from me he requires… this next sensation has nothing to do with what he knows… though I react as if it could… his disgust is my own as I lie on my side my knees to my chest… in a bed I am a child with my mother her body moving… her body wrapped too close around me… nothing about this should surprise me… nothing is the space between one breath and the next… even if the space is decades long…
God started small At the first showdown between good and evil God didn’t come at anyone like a cowboy God didn’t open with solar flares or asteroids or mass extinction or planetary heat death God didn’t outgun anyone God outmanned them God made man in the face of the beast And in the face of the beast God made —from inside  the great and gaping maw while languishing in the hot damp In the face of that  great terror God summoned the smallest— adrenaline serotonin hemoglobin oxytocin motes of possibility God started by making— light into land masses sand into vessels preservation as civilization and sometimes God won
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.   A bronze rain from the sun descending marks The death of summer, which that time endures   Like one who scrawls a listless testament Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,   Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon And giving your bland motions to the air.   Behold, already on the long parades The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.   And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.
It’s a strange courageyou give me, ancient star:  Shine alone in the sunrisetoward which you lend no part!    I Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze, that reflects neither my face nor any inner part of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.    II Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses you in its own light. Be not chimera of morning, Half-man, half-star. Be not an intelligence, Like a widow’s bird Or an old horse.
Everything you thought you knew must be relearned overnight.   How to walk. Walk, not trip, over cords, 2x4s, used coffee cups, concrete cores. Walk, 40 pounds on your shoulder, across rebar or a wood plank; glide, not wobble, not look like the bounce beneath each bootstep scares you.   How to dress yourself to work outdoors all day midwinter and keep warm, keep working, fingers moving; or midsummer, with no hint of breasts.   How to climb ladders– not a stepstool or a 4-footer– ladders that stretch up two stories where someone’s impatient for that bundle of pipe.   How to get coffee– hot and how they like it–to a crew spread out 10 floors; to carry muffins three blocks in a paper sack through sheets of rain.   How to look. To never go back empty-handed when you’re told, Grab me a This/Thatfrom the gangbox, if all you’ve done is move things around, poke here and there; if you haven’t emptied out the full contents so the journeyman won’t shame you by finding This/That in a quick minute, after you’ve said, We don’t have any.    How to be dependable but not predictable-provokable. Not the lunch break entertainment.   How to read blueprints, delivery orders, the mood on the job; how long it’s okay to sit down for coffee; how early you can start rolling up cords.   How to do well in school from the back row of a seats-assigned-Jim-Crow classroom How to learn tricks-of-the-trade from someone who does not like you.   How to listen, to act-don’t-ask. To duck when someone motions, Duck!  Or when someone tells you, Don’t talk to Zeke, to know what they mean so you don’t even look at Zeke, the ironworker who’s always first out, last in, standing there, so four times a day– start, lunch, quit–all the workers walk past him, like a sandbar, waves washing back and forth, that catches debris.   How to pick up the phone and call your friend, the only one of the women not at class the night the apprenticeship director met you all at the door carrying the nervous rumor that one of the women had been raped and you all look at each other and it wasn’t any of you five.   How to respond–within protocol– when someone takes your ladder or tools, imitates your voices on the loudspeaker, spraypaints Cunt on your Baker staging, urinates in your hardhat, drives to your home where you live alone with your daughter and keys your truck parked in your own driveway.   Later, you’ll need the advanced skills: how–without dislodging the keystone– to humiliate a person, how to threaten a person. Deftly. So no one’s certain for absolute that’s what happened. Not even you.
Her sister was shot, and hers found bludgeoned dead in her car trunk; her mother was alcoholic, and hers a suicide; her daughter killed by an uncle, and hers stayed alive thanks to prison. Before the term, date-raped, she was. Beforedomestic violence, love punched her face.   We wanted the career. Not just skills and money, but structure, focus, printed plans, the rowdy order of raising buildings that years later would still stand right where you left them. We joined a tradition, expected a well-marked path and a welcome. The earnest ads never mentioned   we’d be human minesweepers steering around barricades, sinkholes, lethal instructions, We learned Solidarity was a corporation privately held. Some left in shock. Some were maimed. Some went missing. A few found gold.   Those with talent for sifting real threat from bluff, or detecting hair-triggers before the blast, fared best, We taught ourselves to disarm booby traps, shared hand-drawn maps, and prepared for a long winter. We lied on postcards home.
In the moonlight I met Berserk, In the moonlight On the bushy plain.   Oh, sharp he was As the sleepless!   And, “Why are you red In this milky blue?” I said. “Why sun-colored, As if awake In the midst of sleep?”   “You that wander,” So he said, “On the bushy plain, Forget so soon. But I set my traps In the midst of dreams.”   I knew from this That the blue ground Was full of blocks And blocking steel. I knew the dread Of the bushy plain, And the beauty Of the moonlight Falling there, Falling As sleep falls In the innocent air.
This is how the wind shifts: Like the thoughts of an old human, Who still thinks eagerly And despairingly. The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her. The wind shifts like this: Like humans approaching proudly, Like humans approaching angrily. This is how the wind shifts: Like a human, heavy and heavy, Who does not care.
Sister and mother and diviner love, And of the sisterhood of the living dead Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom, And of the fragrant mothers the most dear And queen, and of diviner love the day And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown Its venom of renown, and on your head No crown is simpler than the simple hair.   Now of the music summoned by the birth That separates us from the wind and sea, Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes, By being so much of the things we are, Gross effigy and simulacrum, none Gives motion to perfection more serene Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought, Most rare, or ever of more kindred air In the laborious weaving that you wear.   For so retentive of themselves are men That music is intensest which proclaims The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom, And of all vigils musing the obscure, That apprehends the most which sees and names, As in your name, an image that is sure, Among the arrant spices of the sun, O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom We give ourselves our likest issuance.   Yet not too like, yet not so like to be Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence  springs The difference that heavenly pity brings. For this, musician, in your girdle fixed Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear A band entwining, set with fatal stones. Unreal, give back to us what once you gave: The imagination that we spurned and crave.
Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls.   He does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp.   Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops,   When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction.
Capitán profundo, capitán geloso, Ask us not to sing standing in the sun, Hairy-backed and hump-armed, Flat-ribbed and big-bagged.   There is no pith in music Except in something false.   Bellissimo, pomposo, Sing a song of serpent-kin, Necks among the thousand leaves, Tongues around the fruit. Sing in clownish boots Strapped and buckled bright.   Wear the breeches of a mask, Coat half-flare and half galloon; Wear a helmet without reason, Tufted, tilted, twirled, and twisted. Start the singing in a voice Rougher than a grinding shale.   Hang a feather by your eye, Nod and look a little sly. This must be the vent of pity, Deeper than a truer ditty Of the real that wrenches, Of the quick that’s wry.
I was cold and leaned against the big oak tree as if it were my mother wearing a rough apron of bark, her upraised arms warning of danger. Through those boughs and leaves I saw dark patches of sky. I thought a brooding witch waited to catch me up from under branches and take me, careening on her broom, to her home in the jaundiced moon. I looked to the roof of mom and dad's house and wondered if the paisley couch patterns would change during the day. My brother peeked from a window and waved. When the bus came, I pawed away from the trunk, fumbled, and took my first step toward not returning.
My favorite is the cream puff lie, the kind inflated with hot air, expanded to make an heroic-sized story.   Another is the cannoli, a long lie, well-packed with nutty details, lightly wrapped in flakey truth.   A macaroon isn't a little white lie, but it's covered with self-serving coconut.   The apple tart carries slices of sour gossip, only slightly sweetened with truth.   Then there's the napoleon, an Iago lie of pernicious intent, layer upon layer of dark deceit.
My lost sister used to try the trick with the tablecloth, waiting until the wine had been poured, the gravy boat filled, before snapping the linen her way   smug as a matador, staring down silver and crystal that would dare move, paying no mind to the ancestor gloom gliding across the wallpaper like clouds   of a disapproving front—no hutch or bureau spared, no lost sister sure the trick would work this time, all those she loved in another room, nibbling saltines,   or in the kitchen, plating the last of the roast beef. How amazed they would be to be called to the mahogany room for supper, to find something missing,   something beautiful, finally, they could never explain, the wine twittering in its half-globes, candles aflutter, each thing in its place, or so it seemed then,   even though their lives had changed for good.
"A cradle thief," my mother called the man we'd see in shops, cafes, parks, even church, with "that poor girl" beside him. Hand in hand, they'd walk as if they didn't feel the scorch of people's stares. The day we saw him press his lips to hers, my mother blocked my eyes as if his mouth (I longed for my first kiss) against her mouth was smothering her cries. All week, I ran a fever that wouldn't break. "A cradle thief"—a voice I only half knew as my own surprised me in the dark, my sick-bed wet with shivers. "A cradle thief," I said again, as if the words could will my window broken, footprint on the sill.
So it has come to this – insomnia at 3:15 A.M., the clock tolling its engine   like a frog following a sundial yet having an electric seizure at the quarter hour.   The business of words keeps me awake. I am drinking cocoa, the warm brown mama.   I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box.   It is my immortality box, my lay-away plan, my coffin.   All night dark wings flopping in my heart. Each an ambition bird.   The bird wants to be dropped from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.   He wants to light a kitchen match and immolate himself.   He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo and come out painted on a ceiling.   He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest and come out with a long godhead.   He wants to take bread and wine and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean.   He wants to be pressed out like a key so he can unlock the Magi.   He wants to take leave among strangers passing out bits of his heart like hors d’oeuvres.   He wants to die changing his clothes and bolt for the sun like a diamond.   He wants, I want. Dear God, wouldn’t it be good enough just to drink cocoa?   I must get a new bird and a new immortality box. There is folly enough inside this one.
1.   hear them cry the long dead the long gone speak to us from beyond the grave guide us that we may learn all the ways to hold tender this land hard clay direct rock upon rock charred earth in time strong green growth will rise here trees back to life native flowers pushing the fragrance of hope the promise of resurrection   2.   such then is beauty surrendered against all hope you are here again turning slowly nature as chameleon all life change and changing again awakening hearts steady moving from unnamed loss into fierce deep grief that can bear all burdens even the long passage into a shadowy dark where no light enters   3.   night moves through the thick dark a heavy silence outside near the front window a black bear stamps down plants pushing back brush fleeing manmade confinement roaming unfettered confident any place can become home strutting down a steep hill as though freedom is all in the now no past no present   4.   earth works thick brown mud clinging pulling a body down heard wounded earth cry bequeath to me the hoe the hope ancestral rights to turn the ground over to shovel and sift until history rewritten resurrected returns to its rightful owners a past to claim yet another stone lifted to throw against the enemy making way for new endings random seeds spreading over the hillside wild roses come by fierce wind and hard rain unleashed furies here in this touched wood a dirge a lamentation for earth to live again earth that is all at once a grave a resting place a bed of new beginnings avalanche of splendor   5.   small horses ride me carry my dreams of prairies and frontiers where once the first people roamed claimed union with the earth no right to own or possess no sense of territory all boundaries placed by unseen ones here I will give you thunder shatter your hearts with rain let snow soothe you make your healing water clear sweet a sacred spring where the thirsty may drink animals all   6.   listen little sister angels make their hope here in these hills follow me I will guide you careful now no trespass I will guide you word for word mouth for mouth all the holy ones embracing us all our kin making home here renegade marooned lawless fugitives grace these mountains we have earth to bind us the covenant between us can never be broken vows to live and let live
When ice outside makes daggers of the grass, I come to where the tides of life still flow. The water here still moves behind the glass.   In here, the seasons never seem to pass— the sullen shark and rays still come and go. Outside the ice makes daggers of the grass   and coats the roads. The meditative bass won't puzzle how the blustery blizzards blow. The water here still moves. Behind the glass,   rose-tinted corals house a teeming mass of busy neon creatures who don't know "outside." The ice makes daggers of the grass   and oily puddles into mirrors. Gas freezes in its lines; my car won't go, but water here still moves behind the glass.   No piles of valentines, no heart held fast— just sea stars under lights kept soft and low. Outside, the ice makes daggers of the grass; in here, the water moves behind the glass.
Dreamer of purified fury and fabulous habit, your eyes of deserted white afternoons target, stiffen, riot with unicorn candor so I swallow your body like meanings or whisky or as you swallow me.   Break rhythm here: your kiss is my justice: look then now how orange blooms of jubilation unfold in satisfied air! This sex is more than sex, under the will of the God of sex, so I softly invoke transformation of your rueful image of haven –those frozen rocks, that guilty lighthouse isolate from temptation– to warm Flemish landscape green and brighteyed with daisies of  dizzying color where pilgrims are dancing after gospelling bird who sing of  new springs, good water.
Extricate, but not too much, unfaithful digger of concordances, let be the whole tasty clutch of it, rhyme of I’m, not, awake, child, bequeathing willow trees beside a stream. Not only old ravines but Euclid Avenue, my first escalator (Hal-ease Department Store) were woven in the mat where sat the cat. I say Department, was a sexual story because Mother’s store it was, her bailiwick, father absent in a void called “Work.” Precarious. Don’t try get it all in. Bailey’s was another tasty store, such glitterglass. And later learned that testicles was store, alaya-vijnana. O dark dirty Cleveland, the Viking Club, the mysteries! All I want is loving you and blank-blank blank-blank blank-blank It’s only unmentionable because there’s no end to chasing it the tale of it and you and sustenance. Hundreds are fleeing, but not hurricanes. Violets, I always brought her wild violets in spring. Breathless romanzas secret in the Flats. Percolate the spiderwebs. Not what you expected, eh? I could bite you back, you furry thing, but you’d never understand.
All life long you are unhanding unhanding and unhanding what was handed you.   All life long you throw out the line of life. You throw out the line, stinging up from your guts.   Were they planting trees, your father and your mother? Did they ever plant? Is that a line of trees far away green line?   All life long you include something that includes your life. You are in the egg.    ( In the center of a picture,  two angels hold a transparent crystal  egg of teardrop shape. In the egg  the ocean god is throned, left leg  crossed over right, trident in right  hand. Under his outstretched arms two  children or little people stand, a boy  at his right, a girl at his left. The  boy’s head is crowned with a sun, the  girl’s, with a crescent moon.    That’s the middle level of  the picture. At the top a blazing  sun with human features dominates the  vertical axis. At the bottom a man  and a woman kneel on either side a  furnace, man to the right of the  furnace, woman to the left. In the  furnace itself, directly below the egg  containing the god, is suspended a  similar egg, empty. )   All life long the dew falls from heaven all life long trees climb up from underground waters.   In the seed of the old god the new gods are swarming.   Earth is ready for planting.   The shut eye is opening.   The heat.
I came here, being stricken, stumbling out At last from streets; the sun, decreasing, took me For days, the time being the last of autumn, The thickets not yet stark, but quivering With tiny colors, like some brush strokes in The manner of the pointillists; small yellows Dart shaped, little reds in different pattern, Clicks and notches of color on threaded bushes, A cracked and fluent heaven, and a brown earth. I had these, and my food and sleep—enough.   This is a countryside of roofless houses,— Taverns to rain,—doorsteps of millstones, lintels Leaning and delicate, foundations sprung to lilacs. Orchards where boughs like roots strike into the sky. Here I could well devise the journey to nothing, At night getting down from the wagon by the black barns, The zenith a point of darkness, breaking to bits, Showering motionless stars over the houses. Scenes relentless—the black and white grooves of a woodcut.   But why the journey to nothing or any desire? Why the heart taken by even senseless adventure, The goal a coffer of dust? Give my mouth to the air, Let arrogant pain lick my flesh with a tongue Rough as a cat’s; remember the smell of cold mornings, The dried beauty of women, the exquisite skin Under the chins of young girls, young men’s rough beards,— The cringing promise of this one, that one’s apology For the knife struck down to the bone, gladioli in sick rooms, Asters and dahlias, flowers like ruches, rosettes. . .   Forever enough to part grass over the stones By some brook or well, the lovely seed-shedding stalks; To hear in the single wind diverse branches Repeating their sounds to the sky—that sky like scaled mackerel, Fleeing the fields—to be defended from silence, To feel my body as arid, as safe as a twig Broken away from whatever growth could snare it Up to a spring, or hold it softly in summer Or beat it under in snow.    I must get well. Walk on strong legs, leap the hurdles of sense,  Reason again, come back to my old patchwork logic, Addition, subtraction, money, clothes, clocks, Memories (freesias, smelling slightly of snow and of flesh In a room with blue curtains) ambition, despair. I must feel again who had given feeling over, Challenge laughter, take tears, play the piano, Form judgments, blame a crude world for disaster.   To escape is nothing. Not to escape is nothing. The farmer’s wife stands with a halo of darkness Rounding her head. Water drips in the kitchen Tapping the sink. To-day the maples have split Limb from the trunk with the ice, a fresh wooden wound. The vines are distorted with ice, ice burdens the breaking Roofs I have told you of.
You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth, You have said my name as a prayer. Here where trees are planted by the water I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret, And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,    My mother remembers the agony of her womb  And long years that seemed to promise more than this.  She says, “You do not love me,  You do not want me,  You will go away.”    In the country whereto I go  I shall not see the face of my friend  Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;  Together we shall not find  The land on whose hills bends the new moon  In air traversed of birds.   What have I thought of love? I have said, “It is beauty and sorrow.” I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor As a wind out of old time. . .   But there is only the evening here, And the sound of willows Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.
Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten. When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer   pavements, The window-sills were wet from rain in the night, Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots As among grotesque trees.   Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond. Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour, The afternoon sifted coolness And people drew together in streets becoming deserted. There was a moon, and light in a shop-front, And dusk falling like precipitous water.   Hand clasped hand Forehead still bowed to forehead— Nothing was lost, nothing possessed There was no gift nor denial.   2. I have remembered you. You were not the town visited once, Nor the road falling behind running feet.   You were as awkward as flesh And lighter than frost or ashes.   You were the rind, And the white-juiced apple, The song, and the words waiting for music.   3. You have learned the beginning; Go from mine to the other.   Be together; eat, dance, despair, Sleep, be threatened, endure. You will know the way of that.   But at the end, be insolent; Be absurd—strike the thing short off; Be mad—only do not let talk Wear the bloom from silence.   And go away without fire or lantern Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.
Now that I know How passion warms little Of flesh in the mould, And treasure is brittle,—   I’ll lie here and learn How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound.
I burned my life, that I might find A passion wholly of the mind, Thought divorced from eye and bone, Ecstasy come to breath alone. I broke my life, to seek relief From the flawed light of love and grief.   With mounting beat the utter fire Charred existence and desire. It died low, ceased its sudden thresh. I had found unmysterious flesh— Not the mind’s avid substance—still Passionate beyond the will.
My voice, not being proud Like a strong woman’s, that cries Imperiously aloud That death disarm her, lull her— Screams for no mourning color Laid menacingly, like fire, Over my long desire. It will end, and leave no print. As you lie, I shall lie: Separate, eased, and cured. Whatever is wasted or wanted In this country of glass and flint Some garden will use, once planted. As you lie alone, I shall lie, O, in singleness assured, Deafened by mire and lime. I remember, while there is time.
Love me because I am lost; Love me that I am undone. That is brave,—no man has wished it, Not one.   Be strong, to look on my heart As others look on my face. Love me,—I tell you that it is a ravaged Terrible place.
I You may have all things from me, save my breath, The slight life in my throat will not give pause For your love, nor your loss, nor any cause. Shall I be made a panderer to death, Dig the green ground for darkness underneath, Let the dust serve me, covering all that was With all that will be? Better, from time’s claws, The hardened face under the subtle wreath.   Cooler than stones in wells, sweeter, more kind Than hot, perfidious words, my breathing moves Close to my plunging blood. Be strong, and hang Unriven mist over my breast and mind, My breath! We shall forget the heart that loves, Though in my body beat its blade, and its fang.    II I erred, when I thought loneliness the wide Scent of mown grass over forsaken fields, Or any shadow isolation yields. Loneliness was the heart within your side. Your thought, beyond my touch, was tilted air Ringed with as many borders as the wind. How could I judge you gentle or unkind When all bright flying space was in your care?   Now that I leave you, I shall be made lonely By simple empty days, never that chill Resonant heart to strike between my arms Again, as though distraught for distance,­–only Levels of evening, now, behind a hill, Or a late cock-crow from the darkening farms.
Since you would claim the sources of my thoughtRecall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,The reedy traps which other hands have timedTo close upon it. Conjure up the hotBlaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snowDevised to strike it down. It will be free.Whatever nets draw in to prison meAt length your eyes must turn to watch it go.  My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,My body hear no echo save its own,Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spellThat we obey, strain to the wind, be thrownStraight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud.
The wind of night is mighty on the deep—  A presence haunting sea and land again.  That wind upon the watery waste hath been; That wind upon the desert soon shall sweep. O vast and mournful spirit, wherefore keep  Thy vigil at the fleeting homes of men,  Who need no voice of thine to tell them when Is come the hour to labor or to sleep?   From waste to waste thou goest, and art dumb  Before the morning. Patient in her tree  The bird awaits until thy strength hath passed, Forgetting darkness when the day is come.  With other tidings hast thou burdened me,  Whom desolations harbor at the last.
I Without how small, within how strangely vast!  What stars of terror had their path in thee!  What music of the heavens and the sea Lived in a sigh or thundered on the blast! Here swept the gleam and pageant of the Past,  As Beauty trembled to her fate’s decree;  Here swords were forged for armies yet to be, And tears were found too dreadful not to last.   Here stood the seats of judgment and its light,  To whose assizes all our dreams were led—  Our best and worst, our Paradise and Hell; And in this room delivered now to night,  The mortal put its question to the dead,  And worlds were weighed, and God’s deep shadow fell.   II Here an immortal river had its rise,  Though dusty now the fountain whence it ran  So swift and beautiful with good to man. Here the foundation of an empire lies— The ruins of a realm seen not with eyes,  That now the vision of a gnat could scan.  Here wars were fought within a little span, Whose echoes yet resound on human skies.   Life, on her rainbow road from dust to dust,  Spilt here her wildest iris, still thine own,  Master, and with thy soul and ashes one! Thy wings are distant from our years of lust,  Yet he who liveth not by bread alone  Shall see thee as that angel in the sun.
My mother the queen is dead.  My father the king is old.  He fumbles his cirque of gold And dreams of a year long fled. The young men stare at my face,  But cannot meet my glance—  Cavan tall as a lance, Orra swift in the race.   Death was ever my price,  Since my maidenhood began:  At the thought of a Gaelic man My heart is sister of ice. ’Tis another for whom I wait,  Though I have not kissed his sword:  He or none is my lord, Though our night be soon or late.   The star grows great in my breast:  It is crying clearly now  To the star on the burnished prow Of his galley far in the West. The capes of the North are dim,  And the windward beaches smoke  Where the last long roller spoke The tidings it held of him.   Sorrow I know he brings,  Battle, despair and change,—  Beauty cruel and strange, And the shed bright blood of kings. Breast, be white for his sake!  Mouth, be red for the kiss!  Soul, be strong for your bliss! Heart, be ready to break!
THE ORE   Before Man’s labouring wisdom gave me birth I had not even seen the light of day; Down in the central darkness of the earth, Crushed by the weight of continents I lay, Ground by the weight to heat, not knowing then The air, the light, the noise, the world of men.    THE TREES We grew on mountains where the glaciers cry, Infinite sombre armies of us stood Below the snow-peaks which defy the sky; A song like the gods moaning filled our wood; We knew no men—our life was to stand staunch, Singing our song, against the avalanche.    THE HEMP AND FLAX   We were a million grasses on the hill, A million herbs which bowed as the wind blew, Trembling in every fibre, never still; Out of the summer earth sweet life we drew. Little blue-flowered grasses up the glen, Glad of the sun, what did we know of men?    THE WORKERS   We tore the iron from the mountain’s hold, By blasting fires we smithied it to steel; Out of the shapeless stone we learned to mould The sweeping bow, the rectilinear keel; We hewed the pine to plank, we split the fir, We pulled the myriad flax to fashion her.   Out of a million lives our knowledge came, A million subtle craftsmen forged the means; Steam was our handmaid and our servant flame, Water our strength, all bowed to our machines. Out of the rock, the tree, the springing herb We built this wandering beauty so superb.    THE SAILORS   We, who were born on earth and live by air, Make this thing pass across the fatal floor, The speechless sea; alone we commune there Jesting with death, that ever open door. Sun, moon and stars are signs by which we drive This wind-blown iron like a thing alive.    THE SHIP   I march across great waters like a queen, I whom so many wisdoms helped to make; Over the uncruddled billows of seas green I blanch the bubbled highway of my wake. By me my wandering tenants clasp the hands, And know the thoughts of men in other lands.
As unto lighter strains a boy might turn  From where great altars burn And Music’s grave archangels tread the night,  So I, in seasons past,  Loved not the bitter might  And merciless control Of thy bleak trumpets calling to the soul.  Their consummating blast  Held inspirations of affright,  As when a faun  Hears mournful thunders roll On breathless, wide transparencies of dawn.  Nor would I hear  With thee, superb and clear The indomitable laughter of the race;  Nor would I face Clean Truth, with her cold agates of the well,  Nor with thee trace Her footprints passing upward to the snows,  But sought a phantom rose And islands where the ghostly siren sings;  Nor would I dwell  Where star-forsaking wings On mortal thresholds hide their mystery,  Nor watch with thee The light of Heaven cast on common things.   But now in dreams of day I see thee stand A grey, great sentry on the encompassed wall That fronts the Night forever, in thy hand  A consecrated spear To test the dragons of man's ancient fear  From secret gulfs that crawl—  A captain of that choral band Whose reverend faces, anxious of the Dark,  Yet undismayed By rain of ruined worlds against the night,  Turned evermore to hark The music of God's silence, and were stayed By something other than the reason’s light.  And I have seen thee as  An eagle, strong to pass Where tempest-shapen clouds go to and fro  And winds and noons have birth, But whose regard is on the lands below  And wingless things of earth.  And yet not thine for long The feignéd passion of the nightingale, Nor shards of haliotis, nor the song Of cymballed fountains hidden in the dale, Nor gardens where the feet of Fragrance steal:  ’Twas thine the laying-on to feel Of tragic hands imperious and cold, That grasping, led thee from the dreams of old,  Making thee voyager Of seas within the cosmic solitude, Whose moons the long-familiar stars occlude,—  Whose living sunsets stir With visions of the timelessness we crave.  And thou didst ride a wave That gathered solemn music to its breast, And breaking, shook our strand with thought’s unrest, Till men far inland heard its mighty call Where the young mornings leap the world’s blue wall.    * * *   Nature hath lonely voices at her heart  And some thou heardst, for at thine own  Were chords beyond all Art That thrill but to the eternal undertone.  But not necessitous to thee The dreams that were when Arcady began Or Paphos soared in iris from the sea;  For thou couldst guess The rainbows hidden in the frustrate slime,  And sawst in crownless Man  A Titan scourged thro’ Time With pains and raptures of his loneliness.  And thou wast wanderer In that dim House that is the human heart,  Where thou didst roam apart,  Seeing what pillars were Between its deep foundations and the sun,  What halls of dream undone, What seraphs hold compassionate their wings Between the youth and bitterness of things,  Ere all see clear The gain in loss, the triumph in the tear.   Time’s whitest loves lie radiant in thy song, Like starlight on an ocean, for thine own  Was as a deathless lily grown In Paradise—ethereal and strong.  And to thine eyes Earth had no earth that held not haughty dust, And seeds of future harvestings in trust, And hidden azures of eventual skies.  Yet hadst thou sharper strains, Even as the Power determines us with pains, And seeing harvests, sawst as well the chaff, And seeing Beauty, sawst her shames no less,  Loosing the sweet,  High thunder of thy Jovian laugh On souls purblind in their self-righteousness.  O vision wide and keen! Which knew, untaught, that pains to joyance are  As night unto the star That on the effacing dawn must burn unseen.  And thou didst know what meat  Was torn to give us milk, What countless worms made possible the silk  That robes the mind, what plan Drew as a bubble from old infamies  And fen-pools of the past The shy and many-colored soul of man.  Yea! thou hast seen the lees In that rich cup we lift against the day, Seen the man-child at his disastrous play—  His shafts without a mark, His fountains flowing downward to the dark,  His maiming and his bars,  Then turned to see His vatic shadow cast athwart the stars, And his strange challenge to infinity.    But who am I to speak, Far down the mountain, of its altar-peak,  Or cross on feeble wings, Adventurous, the oceans in thy mind? We of a wider day’s bewilderings  For very light seem blind, And fearful of the gods our hands have formed.  Some lift their eyes and seem To see at last the lofty human scheme Fading and topping as a sunset stormed By wind and evening, with the stars in doubt. And some cry, “On to Brotherhood!” And some  (Their Dream's high music dumb):“Nay! let us hide in roses all our chains, Tho’ all the lamps go out! Let us accept our lords! Time’s tensions move not save to subtler pains.”  And over all the Silence is as swords. … Wherefore be near us in our day of choice,  Lest Hell’s red choirs rejoice;  And may our counsels be More wise, more kindly, for the thought of thee;  And may our deeds attest  Thy covenant of fame To men of after-years that see thy name Held like a flower by Honor to her breast. Thy station in our hearts long since was won—  Safe from the jealous years— Thou of whose love, thou of whose thews and tears We rest most certain when the day is done
 And formless shadows close upon the sun!
 Thou wast a star ere death’s long night shut down,  And for thy brows the crown Was graven ere the birth-pangs, and thy bed
 Is now of hallowed marble, and a fane
  Among the mightier dead:
 More blameless than thine own what soul hath stood?
 Dost thou lie deaf until another Reign,
  Or hear as music o’er thy head The ceaseless trumpets of the war for Good?  Ah, thou! ah, thou!  Stills God thy question now?
I saw the racer coming to the jump,  Staring with fiery eyeballs as he rusht, I heard the blood within his body thump,  I saw him launch, I heard the toppings crusht. And as he landed I beheld his soul  Kindle, because, in front, he saw the Straight With all its thousands roaring at the goal,  He laughed, he took the moment for his mate. Would that the passionate moods on which we ride  Might kindle thus to oneness with the will; Would we might see the end to which we stride,  And feel, not strain in struggle, only thrill, And laugh like him and know in all our nerves Beauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves.
Here, in this darkened room of this old house,  I sit beside the fire. I hear again, Within, the scutter where the mice carouse,  Without, the gutter dropping with the rain. Opposite, are black shelves of wormy books,  To left, glazed cases, dusty with the same, Behind, a wall, with rusty guns on hooks,  To right, the fire, that chokes one panting flame. Over the mantel, black as funeral cloth,  A portrait hangs, a man, whose flesh the worm Has mawed this hundred years, whose clothes the moth  A century since, has channelled to a term. I cannot see his face : I only know He stares at me, that man of long ago.   I light the candles in the long brass sticks,  I see him now, a pale-eyed, simpering man, Framed in carved wood, wherein the death-watch ticks,  A most dead face : yet when the work began That face, the pale puce coat, the simpering smile,  The hands that hold a book, the eyes that gaze, Moved to the touch of mind a little while.  The painter sat in judgment on his ways : The painter turned him to and from the light,  Talked about art, or bade him lift his head. Judged the lips’ paleness and the temples’ white,  And now his work abides ; the man is dead. But is he dead ? This dusty study drear Creaks in its panels that the man is here.   Here, beyond doubt, he lived, in that old day.  “He was a Doctor here,” the student thought. Here, when the puce was new, that now is grey,  That simpering man his daily practice wrought. Here he let blood, prescribed the pill and drop,  The leech, the diet ; here his verdict given Brought agonies of hoping to a stop,  Here his condemned confessioners were shriven. What is that book he holds, the key, too dim  To read, to know ; some little book he wrote, Forgotten now, but still the key to him.  He sacrificed his vision for his coat. I see the man ; a simpering mask that hid A seeing mind that simpering men forbid.   Those are his books no doubt, untoucht, undusted,  Unread, since last he left them on the shelves, Octavo sermons that the fox has rusted,  Sides splitting off from brown decaying twelves. This was his room, this darkness of old death,  This coffin-room with lights like embrasures, The place is poisonous with him ; like a breath  On glass, he stains the spirit ; he endures. Here is his name within the sermon book,  And verse, “When hungry Worms my Body eat” ; He leans across my shoulder as I look,  He who is God or pasture to the wheat. He who is Dead is still upon the soul  A check, an inhibition, a control.   I draw the bolts. I am alone within.  The moonlight through the coloured glass comes faint, Mottling the passage wall like human skin,  Pale with the breathings left of withered paint. But others walk the empty house with me,  There is no loneliness within these walls No more than there is stillness in the sea  Or silence in the eternal waterfalls. There in the room, to right, they sit at feast ;  The dropping grey-beard with the cold blue eye, The lad, his son, that should have been a priest,  And he, the rake, who made his mother die. And he, the gambling man, who staked the throw, They look me through, they follow when I go.   They follow with still footing down the hall,  I know their souls, those fellow-tenants mine, Their shadows dim those colours on the wall,  They point my every gesture with a sign. That grey-beard cast his aged servant forth  After his forty years of service done, The gambler supped up riches as the north  Sups with his death the glories of the sun. The lad betrayed his trust ; the rake was he  Who broke two women’s hearts to ease his own : They nudge each other as they look at me,  Shadows, all our, and yet as hard as stone. And there, he comes, that simpering man, who sold His mind for coat of puce and penny gold.   O ruinous house, within whose corridors  None but the wicked and the mad go free. (On the dark stairs they wait, behind the doors  They crouch, they watch, or creep to follow me.) Deep in old blood your ominous bricks are red,  Firm in old bones your walls’ foundations stand, With dead men’s passions built upon the dead,  With broken hearts for lime and oaths for sand. Terrible house, whose horror I have built,  Sin after sin, unseen, as sand that slips Telling the time, till now the heaped guilt  Cries, and the planets circle to eclipse. You only are the Daunter, you alone Clutch, till I feel your ivy on the bone.
Before the unseen cock had called the time,  Those workers left their beds and stumbled out Into the street, where dust lay white as lime  Under the last star that keeps bats about. Then blinking still from bed, they trod the street,  The doors closed up and down ; the traveller heard Doors opened, closed, then silence, then men’s feet  Moving to toil, the men too drowsed for word. The bean-field was a greyness as they passed,  The darkness of the hedge was starred with flowers, The moth, with wings like dead leaves, sucked his last,  The triumphing cock cried out with all his powers ; His fire of crying made the twilight quick, Then clink, clink, clink, men’s trowels tapped the brick.   I saw the delicate man who built the tower  Look from the turret at the ground below, The granite column wavered like a flower,  But stood in air whatever winds might blow. Its roots were in the rock, its head stood proud,  No earthly forest reared a head so high ; Sometimes the eagle came there, sometimes cloud,  It was man’s ultimate footstep to the sky. And in that peak the builder kept his treasure,  Books with the symbols of his art, the signs Of knowledge in excitement, skill in pleasure,  The edge that cut, the rule that kept the lines. He who had seen his tower beneath the grass, Rock in the earth, now smiled, because it was.   How many thousand men had done his will,   Men who had hands, or arms, or strength to spend, Or cunning with machines, or art, or skill !  All had obeyed him, working to this end.  Hundreds in distant lands had given their share  Of power, to deck it ; on its every stone Their oddity of pleasure was laid bare,  Yet was the tower his offspring, his alone. His inner eye had seen, his will had made it,  All the opposing army of men’s minds Had bowed, had turned, had striven as he bade it,  Each to his purpose in their myriad kinds. Now it was done, and in the peak he stood Seeing his work, and smiled to find it good.   It had been stone, earth’s body, hidden deep,  Lightless and shapeless, where it cooled and hardened. Now it was as the banner on man’s keep  Or as the Apple in Eden where God gardened. Lilies of stone ran round it, and like fires  The tongues of crockets shot from it and paused, Horsemen who raced were carven on’t, the spires  Were bright with gold ; all this the builder caused. And standing there, it seemed that all the hive  Of human skill which now it had become, Was stone no more, nor building, but alive,  Trying to speak, this tower that was dumb,  Trying to speak, nay, speaking, soul to soul With powers who are, to raven or control
Part of suffering is the useless urge to announce that you’re suffering.   There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say “I suffer” helps.   I read somewhere, “we become lyrical when we suffer.”   Happiness is suffering for the right reasons.   First-order suffering is second-order happiness.   You have to suffer for beauty? Because you have to suffer.   We pride ourselves on a high quality of suffering.   Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Province of Orel, and suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother.   In the past their suffering was less absurd.   The problem is, everything’s worse. Like, paper or plastic? We’re all still going to die suffering.   I value being alone with my thoughts, but it’s weird to say, “This thing that makes us suffer less, we have to stop doing it.”   Isn’t it kind of the point of culture to assuage our feeling needless and alone?   How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly?   At least the rich get to suffer in comfort.   It makes the life feel longer. Live to suffer another day.   One’s past suffering can be a great source of comfort. A torturous luxury. Velvet upholstery.   Suffering is happiness, after forty minutes of desolate shuffling. The point is, life is suffering.   About suffering, no one is ever wrong.
growing into ourselves earnest and funny we were angels of some kind, smiling visitors the light we lived in was gorgeous we looked up and into the camera the ordinary things we did with our hands or how we turned and walked or looked back we lifted the child spooned food into his mouth the camera held it, stayed it there we are in our lives as if we had all time as if we would stand in that room and wear that shirt those glasses as if that light without end would shine on us and from us.
First day of February, and in the far corner of the yard the Adirondack chair, blown over by the wind at Christmas, is still on its back, the snow too deep for me to traipse out and right it, the ice too sheer to risk slamming these old bones to the ground. In a hospital bed in her room where her bed used to be, and her husband, my Aunt Millie keeps reaching up for the far corner of the room, whispering That is so interesting.I will go now. In April I will walk out across the warming grass, and right the chair as if there had never been anything to stop me in the first place, listening for the buzz of hummingbirds which reminds me of how fast things are capable of moving.
Abandoned house roofless three walls no floor a ruin if you think house—   to brown towhees a place to scratch in the leaves for bugs and worms,   for the male to sing a territorial song from what remains of the chimney—   an imagination problem like the time friends said we must be very happy   in the beautiful house we built because they couldn't see the ruins inside us.
Where in the world does my mother go, eyes shut so tight her lower lashes curl in toward a view that's hers alone? Yesterday she told me—after the rains, the windscame, and this morning that's what they do.
The storm was headed in our direction— big loom of gray like the absolute West leaned over us. Reports of damage in the neighboring counties—a silo unfurled and took wing, a house trailer twisted loose. On the Doppler screen the storm looked alive, yellow and green at the fringes, with a fierce red heart trending to violet. Sirens swept over to scare it away, like songbirds grow strident, circle and bluff at the sight of an owl. When the rain came in sheets, I regretted my sins. When lightning cracked the red pine's half-rotted heart, I wished the world more joy in general. When the worst was over and the grass lay flat, but alive, and the sky was a waning bruise, I thought of that silo, how it wasn't mine, and all that grain cast back into the world's wind, maybe some of it still flying.
the unknown has hold of me and its grip is strong as honey on the underside of a spoon    the unknown i mean is not the usual one the future the tomorrow of survival    but the past and what happened in the name of the name after mine and in the name of the name before mine    i do not know enough to speak i do not know enough to remain silent    there is a fear that holds me and it sounds like wind it sounds like katydids in catalpa    ah the tall grass of the days before i knew there was a before me    where do i live if there’s no home remaining   where do i live if the home i helped build can never be mine and the one i was born into never was
magnolias & forsythia blossom from yr Sugar Hill/ Ray Drummond plays nasty riffs & i imagine alla the Palm Cafe turns out when you glow at dusk on Convent Avenue/ slidin easily by the just-for-us propositions Gylan Kain fashioned at every other Harlem corner/ we usedta leave deluxe issues of love potions/ remedies even insinuations danglin from Baptist steeples/ Methodist steps jump back/ jump up/ beatin down/ flyin yng wenches whose skirts still tease solos over to the Savoy/    (you cd make yrself irresistible/ be my  Willis Avenue Bridge/ floatin/ Rican wet  su lengua dulce/ over an East River of  gardenias/ remember the minor sixth) you hummed to me while I was reachin for the/ ceilin/ where our folks was carryin on before Michelangelo or Lionel Richie/ some where round there where you brush up gainst baobabs/ well  (you know where my beauty marks are/ all over HARLEM) we sing like flowers/ i see round brown honies giggle at us/ the silly/ niggahness of yr quick light kisses/ cómo fresh/ mi chabalo negro/ mi propio Tito Puente/  my own rhythm section/ that petal  opening every time yr lips/ let love/ cada vez / yr lips let love fall/ all over Sugar Hill
it hasnt always been this way ellington was not a street robeson no mere memory du bois walked up my father’s stairs hummed some tune over me sleeping in the company of men who changed the world   it wasnt always like this why ray barretto used to be a side-man & dizzy’s hair was not always grey i remember i was there i listened in the company of men politics as necessary as collards music even in our dreams   our house was filled with all kinda folks our windows were not cement or steel our doors opened like our daddy’s arms held us safe & loved children growing in the company of men old southern men & young slick ones sonny til was not a boy the clovers no rag-tag orphans our crooners/ we belonged to a whole world nkrumah was no foreigner virgil aikens was not the only fighter   it hasnt always been this way ellington was not a street
(for gail, tracie & viola) whatever shall i do with my dead my tombs & mausoleums these potted plants tended by strangers over yr eyes closed maybe dreaming dead/ loved so particularly i dont know what to do with you   shall i see you dancin/ hold yr child askin/ what’s mammy like should i sleep with yr husband who sees yr childself in my memories yr mother will she bosom talk me to death with you pretend she has been no mother our smokey robinson fantasies set aside recollections comin to no good end   grandma/ grandma must i ride with yr daughters to sit in the cemetery on sunny days/ weedin yr womb/ wdnt it be better if i stayed in my kitchen/ makin gumbo/ codfish cakes watchin edge of nite/ rubbin me hands of my apron/ hummin his eye is on the sparrow yr photograph at 25 is on my wall awready you had given yr woman over/ no one wd know you/ only mama is remembered when waz there more i shall not lie fondling a dead man’s love bakin apples for a locket jammed with hair from a head no longer arrogant but what shall i do with my dead/ loved so particularly leavin me/ specifically   some never stop breathin wantin kisses some disappear/ slammin the door bangin the phone one went off in a VW bus/ another stole my sleep   i sit here drinking memories entertainin ghosts/ longin for arms no longer warm/ too enchanted to tend the pulse pushin me on to go off from you/ my dead & loved ones   when i meet a someone/ i must know i place you round me like a court of holy seers if this stranger is to have a space in my life she must pull yr spirits to her own for i wander regularly in moments of the dead if you wd have me speak you must learn the tongue of my dead & loved ones i have been left behind a survivor holdin out for more
my grandpa waz a doughboy from carolina the other a garveyite from lakewood i got talked to abt the race & achievement bout color & propriety/ nobody spoke to me about the moon   daddy talked abt music & mama bout christians my sisters/ we always talked & talked there waz never quiet trees were status symbols   i’ve taken to fog/ the moon still surprisin me
(for beverly) when i write i think of my friends the people of my visions but how cd i presume to think of men who leave so little behind i find them in my wash cloth in the dirty dishes by my unmade bed when i write i erase these dark halls lone subway stops the car followin too closely how cd i presume to address my self to men they leave so little behind & still i dont remember.   once a poet delivered valentino on a tie-dyed sheet w/ tequila passion the sheik gallopin a desert for me another sketched me in the midst of bougainvillea another saturated my basement with painted skeletons long ago a poet telephoned from ny to have breakfast in seattle   i’ve waded in hidden creeks with the men i remember the others had no sense of humor
st. louis/ such a colored town/ a whiskey black space of history & neighborhood/ forever ours/  to lawrenceville/ where the only road open to me/ waz cleared by colonial slaves/ whose children never moved/ never seems like/ mended the torments of the Depression the stains of demented spittle/ dropped from lips of crystal women/ still makin independence flags/  from st. louis/ on a halloween’s eve to the veiled prophet/ usurpin the mystery of mardi gras/ made it mine tho the queen waz always fair/ that parade/ of pagan floats & tambourines/ commemoratin me/ unlike the lonely walks wit liberal trick or treaters/ back to my front door/ bag half empty/  my face enuf to scare anyone i passed/ a colored kid/ whatta gas 1) here a tree wonderin the horizon dipped in blues & untended bones usedta hugs drawls rhythm & decency here a tree waitin to be hanged    sumner high school/ squat & pale on the corner/ like our vision/ waz to be vague/ our memory of the war/ that made us free to be forgotten becomin paler/ a linear movement from south carolina to missouri/ freedman/ landin in jackie wilson’s yelp/ daughters of the manumitted swimmin in tina turner’s grinds/ this is chuck berry’s town/ disavowin misega-nation/ in any situation/ & they let us be/ electric blues & bo diddley’s cant/ rockin pneumonia & boogie-woogie flu/ the slop & short-fried heads/ running always to the river    / from chambersbourg/ lil italy/ i passed everyday at the sweet shoppe/ & waz afraid/ the cops raided truants/ regularly/ after dark i wd not be seen/ wit any other colored/ sane/ lovin my life/  in the 'bourg/ seriously expectin to be gnarled/ hey niggah/ over here/  & behind the truck lay five hands claspin chains/ round the trees/ 4 more sucklin steel/  hey niggah/ over here/ this is the borderline/ a territorial dispute/    hey/ niggah/ over here/  cars loaded wit families/ fellas from the factory/ one or two practical nurses/ black/ become our trenches/ some dig into cement wit elbows/ under engines/ do not be seen/ in yr hometown/ after sunset we suck up our shadows/  2) i will sit here  my shoulders brace an enormous oak dreams waddle in my lap round to miz bertha’s where lil richard gets his process runs backwards to the rosebushes/ a drunk man/ lyin down the block to the nuns in pink habits prayin in a pink chapel my dreams run to meet aunt marie my dreams draw blood from ol sores these stains & scars are mine this is my space i am not movin
(for david) these kisses are clandestine no one can see them i hold them in my hand shd i be discovered/ i stick them in my hair & my head gets hot so i haveta excuse myself   under no circumstances can the legs that slip over my hips leave tellin marks/ scents of love/ this wd be unpardonable so i am all the time rubbin my arms/ exposing myself to river mists/ to mask the sweetness you leave me swillin in   i cant allow you to look at me how you do so i am naked & wantin to be explored like a honeysuckle patch when you look at me how you do so i am all lips & thigh/ my cover is blown & the kisses run free/ only to hover sulkin over yr cheek/ while i pretend they are not mine cuz its happenin/ but you dont know abt it   this kisses they take a slow blues walk back to me in the palm of my hand they spread out/ scratch kick curse & punch til my skin cries/ kisses raisin hell/ in my fists/ they fly out mad & eager they’ll fly out mad & eager if you look at me how you do so i am naked & wantin/ if you look at me how you do so i am all lips & thigh/ they gonna fly out mad & eager they fly out & climb on you the kisses/ they flyin if you look at me how you do so
In zero cold the engine's slow to turn over, coughing awake like my father sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the blue linoleum floor, coughing again, lifting his heavy body into another day on the railroad section gang, the icy wind through Lehigh Gap blasting down on him as he raises the sledge hammer and strains against the crowbar. But now he's drinking coffee, looking toward the dark window, thinking of what? Maybe watching Friday Night Fights or ordering tomato seeds, maybe the ghostly face in the window staring back at him.
A bed sheet hung out to dry became a screen for shadow animals. But of all laundry days in the neighborhood the windy ones were best, the clothespins like little men riding lines that tried to buck them off. One at a time we ran down the aisles between snapping sheets that wanted to put us in our place. Timing them, you faked and cut like famous halfbacks. But if a sheet tagged you it put you down, pinned by the whiteness floating against a sky washed by the bluing our mothers added to the wash water. Could anyone make it through those days untouched? You waited for your chance, then jumped up and finished the course, rising if you fell again. Later, let the sky darken suddenly and we'd be sent out to empty the lines. All up and down the block, kids running with bed sheets in their arms, running like firemen rescuing children. All night those sheets lay draped over furniture, as though we were leaving and would not return for a long time.
I will donate my head I will uncover the seams I will acknowledge my dust  as silver elixir to be fed to the masses I’ve never been more dead than now more a product of misspent music  halted at the border  flicking seeds sent through a blister in the wall I plant movements that carry all the king’s men through a crack in the planet where monkeys sink into a song their fathers grew  on filaments of language & certain birds are mad to hunt a spectrum  of only one meaning where handmade clouds sound  free from ligament  released beyond bounds offering steam to relax gem I can float here combing my hair into waterfall I am a human fly wings slick with telepathic goo an archive of earth piled on my back This is theater ... so please assume the role of curtain I am the director of this fuzz a tardy imago: the result of clandestine flare When we returned to your house we noticed that it wasn’t there so we built a human pyramid without flesh without internal radar or private song  a formation known to drain the color of black suns and toward this stone we lean where birds are higher than sapphire mammatus where we speak of things mouth-less, bare
I pass a woman on the beach. We both wear graying hair, feel sand between our toes, hear surf, and see blue sky. I came with a smile. She came to get one. No. I'm wrong. She sits on a boulder by a cairn of stacked rocks. Hands over her heart, she stares out to sea. Today's my turn to hold the joy, hers the sorrow.
I rocked in a chair of charred Grand Dragon’s bones, legs silent as molasses drooling from a cloud of linen. My fat white maid in her potholder hat did not watch me watch her sons molt like dandelions in la-di-da noon standing squarely on the blacks of their own shadows as they willed. She crushed lemons in her bear claw fists and pushed a sugar dust around the pitcher. The mister started in on the mare, phantasm of a centaur where it splinters. Three latticed glasses harmonized on the platter: my quiet kindness to the albess for where I sent her daughter. It was Saturday. There was salt in his seams and the slip between my knees slumped with heat and sheets jedidiah-teething the clothesline already. Followed hours full of our trying to be full of each other and sunlight yearning like egg white through the cracked curtains and the usual evidence of bluegrass his shoulders shed beneath my nails, the rooms in me he could not enter branching annexes: my elderberry privacies. Out of the yard’s farthest hem, darkness from the world’s first days braided into the tobacco and I could only imagine tomorrow if I expected to be slaughtered in my sleep.
All my life I’ve asked my master Why I am unable to choose This sweet man or fancy shoes Over this stranger, more difficult lover And these expensive but practical loafers And why I am unable to author A book exhibiting my full potential And have focused instead on inconsequential Letters to strange and difficult lovers Who by my letters were never changed. I certainly haven’t been constrained By terrible parents or trauma or poverty And even if I had it wouldn’t explain My propensity for misery Anymore than it would my Propensity for joy. Maybe I’m just a procrastinator As life is a procrastination of death And each breath just a procrastination of breath And friends a procrastination of work And work a procrastination of love And love a procrastination I’m just not above.
Grab lunch Polish your silver Try a new flavor of yogurt Burn in a lake of fire Smoke some weed Overeat Finally understand some things Talk to Steve Cry out breathlessly Pay the electric bill Go to the aquarium in the mall Worry over the shape and color of your moles Sell out the people you used to call friends Learn how to bake bread Feed the ducks at the lake by the highway Exaggerate your earnings Get elected Mull things over Attend a livestock auction Pull down the statues of people who tortured your ancestors Seek employment Knit Regret mostly everything Paint the windows shut Pull down the statues of your ancestors Get down on your knees Read Kierkegaard Pick the kids up from Montessori Lose your appetite Linger Imagine that hell is only an abstraction DVR Homeland Take another free breath mint Cry out endlessly Blame those closest to you Love even the barest light pissing through the trees
The commentator's rabbiting on and on about how it's so easy for Roger, resentment thick as butter still in a box. Yet word from those who've done their homework is how the man loves to train—how much he relishes putting in the hours just as magicians shuffle card after card, countless to mere humans but carefully all accounted for. At hearing "luck" again, I stop until my hands relax their clutch on the cone from which a dozen more peonies are to materialize. I make it look easy to grow a garden on top of a sheet of fondant, and that's how it should appear: as natural and as meant-to-be as the spin of a ball from the sweetest spot of a racquet whisked through the air like a wand.
The stone dolls, found in an Egyptian tomb, are eyeless, armless, heavy for a child to hold. Not like the dolls that lined the room my sister and I shared, their bodies light and made for being bent, their eyelids mobile, hair that tangled with our own. "At night," our father winked at us, "they come to life." We never pressed our cheeks against cold stone as pharoah's daughters did. The doctor's knife could not have caught my sister more off-guard or left me less alone; I had my dolls. Though, soon, they lay on tables in the yard with price tags. Even then they looked alive, survivors with no sickness to survive.
When they entered the house, which was a very large house the way a cloud is large, the pages of their story seemed like cracks in the earth, a man's shirt, or a woman's blouse, and the stranger in the house told them to make themselves at home in the house that was not their house, and told them to write down the three most important gifts in each of their lives, and then continued to explain how there were three doors in the house and at each door they must forfeit one of these gifts, and how the real story always begins at the third door, where each of them will pause and begin to crawl, leaving the field of time, where now you pause, touching the door of this page, wiping away each word, waiting to enter.
Even now it idles outside the houses where we failed to get better at piano lessons, visits the parking lot of the ballet school   where my sister and I stood awkwardly at the back. My mother's van was orange with a door we slid open to reveal beheaded plastic dragons and bunches   of black, half-eaten bananas; it was where her sketchbooks tarried among abandoned coffee cups and   science projects. She meant to go places in it: camp in its back seat and cook on its stove while   painting the coast of Nova Scotia, or capturing the cold beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains at dawn. Instead, she waited behind its wheel while we scraped violins,   made digestive sounds with trumpets, danced badly at recitals where grandmothers recorded us   with unsteady cameras. Sometimes, now, I look out a window and believe I see it, see her, waiting for me beside a curb,   under a tree, and I think I could open the door, clear off a seat, look at the drawing in her lap, which she began, but never seemed to finish.
I sit with my thermos of coffee on the mall: a mile-long promenade, arcades of elms flanking a generous aliquot of benches.   But at this early hour it starts to dawn: I am the only one without a dog. So, a witness to an ancient symbiosis, as it's evolved within a modern city:   The dogs, I note, are smaller, the owners less ferocious. The former sniff then poop, the latter, like potty-training parents, pat their heads, gather it in plastic doggy-bags.   It's no longer for the hunt or for protection; both species have adapted to survive hard loneliness inside a small apartment.
Somewhere recently I lost my short-term memory. It was there and then it moved like the flash of a red fox along a line fence.   My short-term memory has no address but here no time but now. It is a straight-man, waiting to speak to fill in empty space with name, date, trivia, punch line. And then it fails to show.   It is lost, hiding somewhere out back a dried ragweed stalk on the Kansas Prairie holding the shadow of its life against a January wind.   How am I to go on? I wake up a hundred times a day. Who am I waiting for what am I looking for why do I have this empty cup on the porch or in the yard? I greet my neighbor, who smiles. I turn a slow, lazy Susan in my mind, looking for some clue, anything to break the spell of being lost in plain sight.
“I’m interested in feminist oratory,” we think Jess should say “Specifically that.”   Yellow-breasted engine sounds on the Joshua tree Joshua tree mid-shimmy   I think every bird is mad at me. Does that make me an alcoholic?   Let’s take a break, after the great San Bernardino sculpture party   sparkling toilet pieces lay tiled into the pavilion, silver flushers too.   TV piles. I am uneasy. So what? No match for the always sand and always   Air. I find a pair of leather pants Hanging in a hut & touch them. Definitely not leather.   I can see the sunscreen on your face not rubbed in, rivulets wet   the under-chin. Let’s get this next pitch right, guys, decades left of percolation.
I find the heavens beautiful, I find the earth so too, the seas and the ground, the furling of water and gas, the bright distant points of our isolation. I take comfort in the swinging pendant traffic lights, the slurry of wet raw flour. I am programmed to this language, and can only voice my rejection of it in the same language. This is the power of diaspora, the difficulty in finding alternative. Let us send messages to the half-existent. To excuse oneself, to claim not knowing the future, is inhuman. I am so worthless that my body serves as brick, conscripted to build up my prison until it is time to lay my own body down for the walls. It is mechanical, snipping into the loop of every lace, separating from every link the cold wrapped bud. At first the skin is thick and bright, then darkly collapses. Nothing keeps its shape, nothing stands itself upright, we keep sliding apart into smaller and smaller components, and it is in the air above us now, we do not mingle with the outcome of ideas any longer, the energy that knows whether cruelty is disinterested or rightful. They are so happy while we laugh at them, their eyes enthused and shining while we trick them into hurting themselves.
It tastes like all my night when I'm at the bottom of the borough sheets burn around me through the night Consecrate me Consecrate me Conserve me lover In the sills of your love in the cells of your palms from the womb to cell break me from the belly of ship let me crash upon you Consecrate me my lover in your rectum in a rehabilitation center where athletes seek the best care I break into you Consecrate me I want to love you in Syracuse woods in Sonnino love me against lamb’s wool I am my sister's wife keeper Consecrate me in the discretion of sisters nuns loving and hating jobs that ask with fangs barred
(for Daniel, because   the Catacombs)  You’re leaving Las Vegas, except In German. Point. Point. Point. Gave it out, beautiful gentilhommeComme vous êtes, toujours, Unforgettable, circa 2008 how You made me cum like that - She got so mad in the bed - the Hotel bathroom floor, The bathtub, the apartment where I was the crying queen   Those o’s still unforgettable And now Paris. I cried today OW! Your Antarctica cold last Night. You told me they fucked You up / I told you he broke My heart and OW! Freeze Dried my bandaid right off. And then the glasses shopping Memories today yada yada Wasn’t about the cum shot Where or if, was about the Islands and how you said in the langue d’enemie No less: “DON’T TOUCH”   Don’t Touch!? We just … They fucked you up all right. You give so clearly but have iced Out all the incoming gifts. WELL PING my darling Walden island. I can’t take that kind of cold.I’m leaving Las Vegas. Just a moon in Taurus trying To sing the sweet and It’s not a great user experience   But I just want you to know How unforgettable you are     When the candles call to Hera I hope they melt your I hope a goddess or many Wash that loneliness away And when I see you again (in 15 years) There’s only joy and more   I prefer you laughing to tears The good way. Drink us when We’re done. Well, I guess I did Almost kill you with a Razor shave once so it Seems silly to say I’m sorry I Lost the phantom thread. Maybe everything’s a ridiculous never-ending non-planet Tho, u did kiss me like unicorns Exist and bond our skin Like the organ it deserves to be Known as     To know how unforgettable you are because there lies the bridge to the Mainland. & baby, you Deserve it all.
of waves dropped into froth Jellyfish a jar of innards half-buried in sand Dead nature What are these things and who are they for? This blue rug is its own genre And these painted apples round out the essence of what can be made into what can be eaten Winter interest 3.9 APR April come She will not swipe the sun into sky Limits of credentialed credit “At least you’re not the janitor’s azaleas of the everyday dustpan” There’s the problem It’s like a concussive grenade at the end of the mine Mind the income gap Let’s activate the fact that every word means go back to the back of the line because that is where the front leads Years of the postmodern translated by the annuity of spring Hello My name is the first person I I am indebted I am indented I insist on remaining unidentified
I wait and wonder what I’d do  if someone said pick your 60 best poems. Pick all of them? Or any? Maybe commit suicide, but everyone would say “It’s because he’s really gay,” or maybe “really not gay.”      *   Read Anne Waldman and Terence Winch, Bruce Andrews and Adrienne Rich, wonder what might happen to me this summer if I go away, or stay here in Washington DC where you can see Watergate live!  *   If you want to know the truth today’s my birthday and though I often feel older, and sometimes appear younger I’m 31, and like everything else that too can be fun or a bummer, a drain on the cosmic energy, depending on what? If you know the answer you win the future; if you don’t the future is ours to lose or— whatever happened to the old way of construction? Well, one line still follows another, and my voices moves between each space, and when I think of you I sweat, or maybe just imagine myself like a cartoon troublemaker big beads of perspiration jumping out from my skin as I cringe behind the fence that the bully is about to throw a bomb over, or drop an anvil over, or just put his meaty fist through and right on into my scared shitless grin, the analogy resting on our mutual vulnerability— that’s poetry isn’t it?  *   Of course I don’t talk like this. I talk like this.    * And now it’s time to go back to THE HISTORY OF ROCK’N’ROLL which means it’s my night to cook dinner for “the house”— collective—and it’s gonna be smoked sausage cooked in peppers and mushrooms and carrots, maybe some onions, and beans for protein, or something nutritional. I picked the sausage because it seemed to be looking at me in the Safeway, not exactly the way I was looking at one of the cashiers, a young man with curly blonde hair and nice build who seemed to have a down home kind of friendliness, or the woman with the little girl the same sizes as Miles, who is a little smaller than Caitlin, both of whom were pulling on my pants leg for pennies for gumballs as I watched the curve of the woman’s arm as she placed each well thought over item on the counter behind my vibrational buying and didn’t even notice how much I fell in love with her arm and felt guilty for objectifying a part of her although she might all be like her arm and then I might fall in love with all of her, but that would cause problems, she probably is already in love with at least one person, and I’m already in love with about fourteen on a regular basis, and that keeps causing all kinds of problems because people who are attracted to my style don’t like my ways—that sounded like a pretentious folk singing prodigy’s idea of an early Dylan line, but what I meant would never be explained right in a poem like this, or one like Anne Waldman’s either though I like to read hers because they make me want to write, and in my world that’s what “great” writers are supposed to do–make everyone else, or at least me, feel like I can write too, and then make me feel, like I will, and then I do.  *   After dinner we’ll eat the cake Atticus made for my birthday there’ll be some presents from some of the people in the house, and maybe Annie will stop over, or Matthew might call from work, or we might all go down to watch him make salads at  FOOD FOR THOUGHT, and maybe eat some too, all along getting stoned on the house doobie, which goes too fast these days but never fast enough, which is about the way I feel on my birthday about my life, either that or the way I’m easily satisfied but never feel I can get too much– sometimes everything is enough, you know?  *   HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, I THINK I JUST HEARD CHUCK COME IN, CAITLIN’S ANGRY WITH ME AND THROWING A TANTRUM IN HER ROOM, IT’S RAINING BUT I HEAR THE DISHES BEING DONE FINALLY BY SOMEONE ELSE HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME    * Resolution: No more guilt trips from outside or inside going either direction –is everybody happy?
There’s coffee and pie with a widow from church. Why do you sit in the back pew? she asks. I’m close enough, I say. Can I sit back there with you? I’ve always sat there, I tell her, with my same two friends, and their clicking oxygen pumps. One sat next to me for years, called herself my church girlfriend, who metastasized, telling me she was tired of waiting to die. Now, there’s just my 88-year-old friend, his pump echoing in the sanctuary, and there’s that empty space between us. I’d like to invite the widow to sit there, but I miss my dead friend’s laugh, her loving stories about her husband, and how we were always glad to see one another. I tell the widow all this. What if I just sat there? she asks. It’s a free country, I tell her, and she smiles.
In the pink light, haloes of cloud form over the mountains; lightning, two valleys away, then, not an hour later,   the explosion of thunder. The roadrunners pecking for breadcrumbs on the porch have long since fled into the rabbitbrush,   into the endless ocean of grass. Driving in every direction down licks of red road, I have lost myself in a militarized topography;   everything named after army units, generals, scouts, miners…The Dragoon Mountains,Cochise Stronghold; defunct  Gleeson and Pearce, weird, rusty ghost towns, the only non-derelict structure for miles, the local school,   its polished windows and well-kept lawn, a source of great local pride. No mountain monograms for these desiccated whistle-stops,   no giant Q or C or W in bright white paint to mark the township's still functional sorta functional breathing, no   carving for them into the planet's bark; and thus they are blesséd to me like no other;   every successful city is a flimsy affair with civility, its eternalness, like Paris or Rome, mere hypocrisy.   MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, BUY REAL ESTATE! Hail follows rain. Nearby, the township of Sunsites, once billed as the safest   spot to survive the inevitable nuclear winter, actually topped Soviet Russia's list of high-priority targets… Enter   the Orange Duck Candidate. A haboob sweeps across the Valley of the Senile. In a week, the mountains   have switched from brown to purple to green. The desert is human endeavour's most fitting graveyard;   the slow bleaching, the gradual eroding into sand, the heat stifling sound as it leaps into the air. IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. But it always does.      Sulphur Springs Valley
We must have known, Even as we reached Down to touch them Where we'd found them   Shut-eyed and trembling Under a straw bale In the haymow, that She would move them   That night under cover Of darkness, and that By finding them We were making certain   We wouldn't see them again Until we saw them Crouching under the pickup Like sullen teens, having gone   As wild by then as they'd gone Still in her mouth that night She made a decision Any mother might make   Upon guessing the intentions Of the state: to go and to Go now, taking everything You love between your teeth.
In the next scene Walt Whitman is walking around Boston Common. He’s young. It’s winter. Emerson is there. They walk and talk for hours, or really Emerson talks. He scolds Whitman for slavering after tree knots and bobbing with the swimmer. Whitman nods but in his head he’s busy tallying his orgasms. At the carousel an ancient Puritan is passing his hat, singing, “Kill It Babe.” Dozens of geese have gathered on the frozen pond, standing on one leg, tucking the other like a dagger into their feathery centers. Well, Emerson asks the poet, what do you have to say for yourself? And Whitman, respectfully, but sure now all the way down in his bones where the deep, frontier feeling of disobedience lives, says, essentially, go fuck yourself. I’ll go my own way.
lady in brown  de library waz right down from de trolly tracks cross from de laundry-mat thru de big shinin floors & granite pillars ol st. louis is famous for i found toussaint but not til after months uv cajun katie/ pippi longstockin christopher robin/ eddie heyward & a pooh bear in the children’s room only pioneer girls & magic rabbits & big city white boys i knew i waznt sposedta but i ran inta the ADULT READING ROOM  & came across    TOUSSAINT    my first blk man (i never counted george washington carver cuz i didnt like peanuts)  still TOUSSAINT waz a blk man a negro like my mama say who refused to be a slave & he spoke french & didnt low no white man to tell him nothin  not napolean  not maximillien  not robespierre   TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE waz the beginnin uv reality for me in the summer contest for who colored child can read 15 books in three weeks i won & raved abt TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE at the afternoon ceremony waz disqualified  cuz Toussaint  belonged in the ADULT READING ROOM  & i cried & carried dead Touissant home in the book he waz dead & livin to me cuz TOUSSAINT & them they held the citadel gainst the french wid the spirits of ol dead africans from outta the ground TOUSSAINT led they army of zombies walkin cannon ball shootin spirits to free Haiti & they waznt slaves no more    TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE became my secret lover at the age of 8 i entertained him in my bedroom widda flashlight under my covers way inta the night/ we discussed strategies how to remove white girls from my hopscotch games & etc. TOUSSAINT waz laying in bed wit me next to raggedy ann the night i decided to run away from my  integrated home  integrated street  integrated school 1955 waz not a good year for lil blk girls   Toussaint said ‘lets go to haiti’ i said ‘awright’ & packed some very important things in a brown paper bag so i wdnt haveta come back then Toussaint & i took the hodiamont streetcar to the river last stop only 15¢ cuz there waznt nobody cd see Toussaint cept me & we walked all down thru north st. louis where the french settlers usedta live in tiny brick houses all huddled together wit barely missin windows & shingles uneven wit colored kids playin & women on low porches sippin beer   i cd talk to Toussaint down by the river like this waz where we waz gonna stow away on a boat for new orleans & catch a creole fishin-rig for port-au-prince then we waz just gonna read & talk all the time & eat fried bananas  we waz just walkin & skippin past ol drunk men when dis ol young boy jumped out at me sayin ‘HEY GIRL YA BETTAH COME OVAH HEAH N TALK TO ME’ well i turned to TOUSSAINT (who waz furious) & i shouted ‘ya silly old boy ya bettah leave me alone or TOUSSAINT’S gonna get yr ass’ de silly ol boy came round de corner laughin all in my face ‘yellah gal ya sure must be somebody to know my name so quick’ i waz disgusted & wanted to get on to haiti widout some tacky ol boy botherin me still he kept standin there kickin milk cartons & bits of brick tryin to get all in my business  i mumbled to L’OUVERTURE ‘what shd I do’ finally i asked this silly ol boy ‘WELL WHO ARE YOU?’ he say ‘MY NAME IS TOUSSAINT JONES’ well i looked right at him those skidded out cordoroy pants a striped teashirt wid holes in both elbows a new scab over his left eye & i said  ‘what’s yr name again’ he say ‘i’m toussaint jones’ ‘wow i am on my way to see TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE in HAITI are ya any kin to him he dont take no stuff from white folks & they gotta country all they own & there aint no slaves’ that silly ol boy squinted his face all up looka heah girl i am TOUSSAINT JONES & i’m right heah lookin at ya & i dont take no stuff from no white folks ya dont see none round heah do ya?’ & he sorta pushed out his chest then he say ‘come on lets go on down to the docks & look at the boats’ i waz real puzzled goin down to the docks wit my paper bag & my books i felt TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE sorta leave me & i was sad til i realized TOUSSAINT JONES waznt too different from TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE cept the ol one waz in haiti & this one wid me speakin english & eatin apples yeah. toussaint jones waz awright wit me no tellin what all spirits we cd move down by the river st. louis 1955 hey wait.
at 4:30 AM she rose movin the arms & legs that trapped her she sighed affirmin the sculptured man & made herself a bath of dark musk oil egyptian crystals & florida water to remove his smell to wash away the glitter to watch the butterflies melt into suds & the rhinestones fall beneath her buttocks like smooth pebbles in a missouri creek layin in water she became herself ordinary brown braided woman with big legs & full lips reglar seriously intendin to finish her night’s work she quickly walked to her guest straddled on her pillows & began      ‘you’ll have to go now/ i’ve  a lot of work to do/ & i cant  with a man around/ here are yr pants/  there’s coffee on the stove/ its been  very nice/ but i cant see you again/  you got what you came for/ didnt you’ & she smiled he wd either mumble curses bout crazy bitches or sit dumbfounded while she repeated  ‘i cdnt possibly wake up/ with  a strange man in my bed/ why  dont you go home’ she cda been slapped upside the head or verbally challenged but she never waz & the ones who fell prey to the dazzle of hips painted with orange blossoms & magnolia scented wrists had wanted no more than to lay between her sparklin thighs & had planned on leavin before dawn & she had been so divine devastatingly bizarre the way her mouth fit round & now she stood a reglar colored girl fulla the same malice livid indifference as a sistah worn from supportin a wd be hornplayer or waitin by the window  & they knew  & left in a hurry she wd gather her tinsel & jewels from the tub & laugh gayly or vengeful she stored her silk roses by her bed & when she finished writin the account of her exploit in a diary embroidered with lilies & moonstones she placed the rose behind her ear & cried herself to sleep.
there was no air/ the sheets made ripples under his body like crumpled paper napkins in a summer park/ & lil specks of somethin from tween his toes or the biscuits from the day before ran in the sweat that tucked the sheet into his limbs like he was an ol frozen bundle of chicken/ & he’d get up to make coffee, drink wine, drink water/ he wished one of his friends who knew where he waz wd come by with some blow or some shit/ anything/ there was no air/ he’d see the spotlights in the alleyways downstairs movin in the air/ cross his wall over his face/ & get under the covers & wait for an all clear or till he cd hear traffic again/   there waznt nothing wrong with him/ there waznt nothing wrong with him/ he kept tellin crystal/ any niggah wanna kill vietnamese children more n stay home & raise his own is sicker than a rabid dog/ that’s how their thing had been goin since he got back/ crystal just got inta sayin whatta fool niggah beau was & always had been/ didnt he go all over uptown sayin the child waznt his/ waz some no counts bastard/ & any ol city police cd come & get him if they wanted/ cuz as soon as the blood type & shit waz together/ everybody wd know that crystal waz a no good lyin whore/ and this after she’d been his girl since she waz thirteen/ when he caught her on the stairway/   he came home crazy as hell/ he tried to get veterans benefits to go to school & they kept right on puttin him in remedial classes/ he cdnt read wortha damn/ so beau cused the teachers of holdin him back & got himself a gypsy cab to drive/ but his cab kept breakin down/ & the cops was always messin wit him/ plus not getting much bread/   & crystal went & got pregnant again/ beau most beat her to death when she tol him/ she still gotta scar under her right tit where he cut her up/ still crystal went right on & had the baby/ so now beau willie had two children / a little girl/ naomi kenya & a boy/ kwame beau willie brown/ & there waz no air/   how in the hell did he get in this mess anyway/ somebody went & tol crystal that beau was spendin alla his money on the bartendin bitch down at the merry-go-round cafe/ beau sat straight up in the bed/ wrapped up in the sheets lookin like john the baptist or a huge baby wit stubble & nuts/ now he hadta get alla that shit outta crystal’s mind/ so she wd let him come home/ crystal had gone & got a court order saying beau willie brown had no access to his children/ if he showed his face he waz subject to arrest/ shit/ she’d been in his ass to marry her since she was 14 years old & here when she was 22/ she wanna throw him out cuz he say he’ll marry her/ she burst out laughin/ hollerin whatchu wanna marry me for now/ so i can support yr ass/ or come sit wit ya when they lock yr behind up/ cause they gonna come for ya/ ya goddamn lunatic/ they gonna come/ & i’m not gonna have a thing to do wit it/ o no i wdnt marry yr pitiful black ass for nothing & she went on to bed/   the next day beau willie came in blasted & got ta swingin chairs at crystal/ who cdnt figure out what the hell he waz doin/ til he got ta shoutin bout how she waz gonna marry him/ & get some more veterans benefits/ & he cd stop drivin them crazy spics round/ while they tryin to kill him for $15/ beau was sweatin terrible/ beatin on crystal/ & he cdnt do no more with the table n chairs/ so he went to get the high chair/ & lil kwame waz in it/ & beau was beatin crystal with the high chair & her son/ & some notion got inta him to stop/ an he run out/ crystal most died/ that’s why the police wdnt low beau near where she lived/ & she’d been tellin the kids their daddy tried to kill her & kwame/ & he just wanted to marry her/ that’s what/ he wanted to marry her/ & have a family/ but the bitch waz crazy/ beau willie waz sittin in this hotel in his drawers drinkin coffee & wine in the heat of the day spillin shit all over hisself/ laughin/ bout how we waz gonna get crystal to take him back/ & let him be a man in the house/ & she wdnt even have to go to work no more/ he got dressed all up in his ivory shirt & checkered pants to go see crystal & get this mess all cleared up/ he knocked on the door to crystal’s rooms/ & she didnt answer/ he beat on the door & crystal & naomi started cryin/ beau gotta shoutin again how he wanted to marry her/ & waz she always gonna be a whore/ or did she wanna husband/ & crystal just kept on screamin for him to leave us alone/ just leave us alone/ so beau broke the door down/ crystal held the children in fronta her/ she picked kwame off the floor/ in her arms/ & she held naomi by her shoulders/ & kept on sayin/ beau willie brown/ get outta here/ the police is gonna come for ya/ ya fool/ get outta here/ do you want the children to see you act the fool again you want kwame to brain damage from you throwin him round/ niggah/ get outta here/ get out & don’t show yr ass again or i’ll kill ya/ i swear i’ll kill ya/ he reached for naomi/ crystal grabbed the lil girl & stared at beau willie like he waz a leper or somethin/ dont you touch my children/ mothafucker/ or i’ll kill you/   beau willie jumped back all humble & apologetic/ i’m sorry/ i dont wanna hurt em/ i just wanna hold em & get on my way/ i dont wanna cuz you no more trouble/ i wanted to marry you & give ya things what you gonna give/ a broken jaw/ niggah get outta here/ he ignored crystal’s outburst & sat down motionin for naomi to come to him/ she smiled back at her daddy/ crystal felt naomi givin in & held her tighter/ naomi/ pushed away & ran to her daddy/ crying/ daddy, daddy come back daddy/ come back/ but be nice to mommy/ cause mommy loves you/ and ya gotta be nice/ he sat on his knee/ & played with her ribbons & they counted fingers & toes/ every so often he looked over to crystal holdin kwame/ like a statue/ & he’d say/ see crystal/ i can be a good father/ now let me see my son/ & she didn’t move/ & he coaxed her & he coaxed her/ tol her she waz still a hot lil ol thing & pretty & strong/ didnt she get right up after that lil ol fight they had & go back to work/ beau willie oozed kindness & crystal who had known so lil/ let beau hold kwame/   as soon as crystal let the baby outta her arms/ beau jumped up a laughin & a gigglin/ a hootin & a hollerin/ awright bitch/ awright bitch/ you gonna marry me/ you gonna marry me . . . i aint gonna marry ya/ i aint ever gonna marry ya/ for nothin/ you gonna be in the jail/ you gonna be under the jail for this/ now gimme my kids/ ya give me back my kids/   he kicked the screen outta the window/ & held the kids offa the sill/ you gonna marry me/ yeh, i’ll marry ya/ anything/ but bring the children back in the house/ he looked from where the kids were hangin from the fifth story/ at alla the people screamin at him/ & he started sweatin again/ say to alla the neighbors/ you gonna marry me/   i stood by beau in the window/ with naomi reachin for me/ kwame screamin mommy mommy from the fifth story/ but i cd only whisper/ & he dropped em
Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave your house or apartment. Go out into the world.   It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap one is best, with pages the color of weak tea and on the front a kitten or a space ship.   Avoid any enclosed space where more than three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks across the muffled tennis courts.   Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write. And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle where a child a year or two old is playing as his mother browses the ranks of the dead.   Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf. The title, the author's name, the brooding photo on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher it gets, the wider he grins.   You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."   Then start again.
I gather her head up in my sweater  and we crouch here   some dried ketchup where her lip turns down  a light crust of dirt on one eyebrow     the concrete stained and worn   surprise rain splattered in the gap  between here and the parking lot  our socks are wet     our feet itch  then her cough started  it’s going to be ok we can hide her for a minute  her damp head soaks the wool  the corners reek of urine  we do a sober trick  my body now a cradle     her hair touches my wrist   she trembles down to her cavity  a cough we love the careless future emerges from it  shaking like a star bracelet with elastic  in this other country  the contradictory music of our tears    what do wandering souls find  to live in here  what warm skin    in this stairwell  the air is cold    the earth moves  one bug survives    beyond their law    three of us hunched  up like a heaps of wet wool  in the leaky crook of a stair   you heard about us somewhere
In the grassy space between the wings of the elementary school and the trailers housing the fifth grade’s overflow classrooms, girls flip their hair in imitation of Cindy Crawford, sing Iko Iko. None of you know what it means or where the song comes from. It’s honor-roll season, a time of outings to TCBY and Outback Steakhouse. Your mother warns you against filling up on bread, but it’s hard to resist the little brown loaves brought warm to the table with soft butter – a luxury that cannot be imagined at home, with its always-refrigerated margarine and Pepperidge Farm sandwich loaves. Everyone knows what’s popular but nobody knows how to act. At ten, you lack any context. The world swims before you, and it constantly stings. Its favorite barb: “everybody knows that.” Beyond the grassy space of girls is more grass, a quarter-mile loop of track, a church with a painfully white spire, a fence, and a neighborhood maybe a little less nice than yours, crammed between the school and busy Great Neck Road. The fence is of chain link, instead of wooden slats. That’s how you know about the niceness – that and the something hard, like a grain of sand, you feel in your mother’s voice, when she takes you to the school’s Spring Fling, where you win another goldfish. They always die, but you’re getting better. Now, it takes a while.Loblollies shiverIn May heat. The world’s ending.The world’s a mirage.
What? You don’t feel at home in your country, almost overnight? All the simple things you cared about, maybe took for granted. . . you feel insulted, invisible? Almost as if you’re not there? But you’re there. Where before you mingled freely. . . appreciated people who weren’t just like you. . . divisions grow stronger. That’s what “chosen” and “unchosen” will do. (Just keep your eyes on your houses and gardens. Keep your eyes on that tree in bloom.) Yes, a wall. Ours came later but. . . who talks about how sad the land looks, marked by a massive wall? That’s not a normal shadow. It’s something else looming over your lives.
At the 100-year-old National Elk Refuge near Jackson Hole, we might ask,How long does an elk live?Who’s an old elk here?    We’d like to spend time with an elder elk please. Tell us how to balance our lives on this hard edge of human mean, mean temperatures, what we do and don’t want to mean.   Closing the door to the news will only make you stupid, snapped my friend who wanted everyone to know as much as she did. I’m hiding in old school books with information we never used yet. Before I drove, before I flew, before the principal went to jail. Sinking my eyes into tall wooden window sashes, dreaming of light arriving from far reaches, our teacher as shepherds, school a vessel of golden hope, you could lift your daily lesson in front of your eyes, stare hard and think, this will take me somewhere. O histories of India, geological formations of Australia, ancient poetries of China, Japan, someday we will be aligned in a place of wisdom, together.   Red deer, wapiti, running elk rising above yellow meadows at sundown. An elk bows her head. In the company of other elk, she feels at home. And we are lost on the horizon now, clumsy humanity, deeper into the next century than we can even believe, and they will not speak to us.
For Janna The tiny journalist will tell us what she sees.   Document the moves, the dust, soldiers blocking the road.   Yes, she knows how to take a picture with her phone. Holds it high   like a balloon. Yes, she would prefer to dance and play,   would prefer the world to be pink. It is her job to say   what she sees, what is happening. From her vantage point everything   is huge—but don’t look down on her. She’s bigger than you are.   If you stomp her garden each leaf expands its view.   Don’t hide what you do. She sees you at 2 a.m. adjusting your   impenetrable vest. What could she have   that you want? Her treasures, thing shiny buttons her grandmother loved.   Her cousin, her uncle.There might have been a shirt. . .   The tiny journalist notices action on far away roads   farther even than the next village. She takes counsel from bugs so   puffs of dust find her first.Could that be a friend?   They pretended not to see us.They came at night with weapons.   What was our crime? That we likedrespect as they do? That we have pride?    She stares through a hole in the fence, barricade of words and wire,   feels the rising fire before anyone strikes a match.   She has a better idea.
When people have a lot they want more   When people have nothing they will happily share it   *   Some people say never getting your way builds character By now our character must be deep and wide as a continent Africa, Australia giant cascade of stars spilling over our huge night   *   Where did the power go? Did it enjoy its break? Is power exhausted? What is real power? Who really has power? Did the generator break? Do we imagine silence more powerful because it might contain everything? Quiet always lives inside noise. But does it get much done?   *   Silence waits for truth to break it   *   Calendars can weep too They want us to have better days   *   Welcome to every minute Feel lucky you’re still in it   *   No bird builds a wall   *   Sky purse  jingling  change   *   Won’t give up our hopes  for anything!   *   Not your fault You didn’t make the world   *   How dare this go on and on? cried the person who believed in praying God willing God willing God willing There were others who prayed  to ruins & stumps   *   Open palms  hold more   *   Refuse to give  mistakes  too much power     * Annoying person? Person who told me to stay home and do what other girls do? If you disappeared I still might miss you   *   Babies want to help us They laugh for no reason   *   Pay close attention to a drop of water on the kitchen table   *   You cannot say one word about religion and exclude Ahmad
Each day I miss Japanese precision. Trying to arrange things  the way they would. I miss the call to prayer at Sharjah, the large collective pause. Or the shy strawberry vendor with rickety wooden cart, single small lightbulb pointed at a mound of berries.  In one of China’s great cities, before dawn.    Forever I miss my Arab father’s way with mint leaves  floating in a cup of sugared tea—his delicate hands arranging rinsed figs on a plate. What have we here?  said the wolf in the children’s story stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.  Is this small monster one of us?   When your country does not feel cozy, what do you do?  Teresa walks more now, to feel closer to her ground. If destination within two miles, she must  hike or take the bus. Carries apples,  extra bottles of chilled water to give away. Kim makes one positive move a day for someone else. I’m reading letters the ancestors wrote after arriving  in the land of freedom, words in perfect English script. . . describing gifts they gave one another for Christmas.  Even the listing seems oddly civilized, these 1906 Germans. . . hand-stitched embroideries for dressertops. Bow ties. Slippers, parlor croquet, gold ring, “pretty inkwell.”    How they comforted themselves! A giant roast  made them feel more at home.  Posthumous medals of honor for  coming, continuing––could we do that? And where would we go?  My father’s hope for Palestine stitching my bones, “no one wakes up and  dreams of fighting around the house”—   somebody soon the steady eyes of children in Gaza,  yearning for a little extra electricity to cool their lemons and cantaloupes, will be known.  Yes?  We talked for two hours via Google Chat, they did not complain once. Discussing stories,  books, families, a character who does  what you might do. Meanwhile secret diplomats are what we must be,  as a girl in Qatar once assured me,  each day slipping its blank visa into our hands.
for my granddaughter, Wahcawin I didn’t want to scold the sky that year, but  Grandma’s words taunted my senses. If there is a thirst, then you need to pity the flowers   in a loud voice. Ask the frogs why they are being punished, stomp on the ground and talk to the dried clay about cracking open the earth.   I know challenging the storm is risky. “Last but not least, burn cedar and pray the lightning doesn’t strike your town.” That night, the stars   disappeared, so did the birds. Perhaps it was the season for rain or the dance. In the western distance, we thought we heard cannon blasts,   looking over we watched the horizon fill with lightning strikes. Rain couldn’t pour hard enough over the thirsty plain. Accompanying clouds,   called to thunder’s voice in extreme decimals requesting all the water heaven could send forth, to come. Rain and more rain filled empty stream   bottoms. Rivers who had pulled their dry banks farther and farther from their center begged for a drink to startle dusty beds with a flooding roar.   Lives in dormant places begin to stir and awaken.  The lives of water beings, those that swim, the ones that hop, and the ones that fly, begin to stir.   That year all thirst was quenched.
Tracks are all that define these voices, hungry lives pulsing sacred ground. We are a journey of distressed shapes, red essence on parchment, occupying a life. We look for the fated four-legged that paced this way, a tested and well-worn path among storms, mud, into this shared hidden brush. Coyote, slipping by through old winter grass, warns in a pagan tongue, licking after our scent. We pick up pace, tighten our careless reins, snap back at the yellow-eyed clown with throat hunger, that gnawing bone that drives us on. Quieted, we hear the heart beating. A desperate breath crashes through dry branches, a silhouette give away. In an instant we let go of weapons and invite a quick death. We watch our knives glistening. Obsidian works for us. What image of blood on flesh, odor of iron. A vermilion sun heavy with spring looks upon reflections of death in hard visions, our favorable hunt— whitetail not quick enough for downwind lessons. Our horses burdened, deer shadows left on landscape, we push forward. These tracks ours now. Game will heal all. Our offspring dance, Grandmother prepares a fire and sharpens another knife. During the feast we thank any god absent from our table.
This morning we found ourselves skinning a deer, cutting meat, hanging some to dry and packaging some for the freezer. It was the dogs late last night   that set off a howling, the unexpected smell of fresh blood floating down the block, then a familiar car horn honking in the driveway. My nephew and his   friends were hunting and brought us a deer. Mother always said, “Cut up the meat right away, don’t let it sit.” I look at a front quarter, a hole filled with   coagulated blood. Grandma says not to eat the part next to the wound, “Cut it out; offer it to the earth for healing, a sacrifice to remember the hungering spirits.”   Auntie says to save the muscle along the back strap, “It makes good thread.” I carefully learned the exact place to cut the joints so the bones separate easily.   Mother said that is important—“It means you are a thoughtful person.” Auntie is at the door waiting for a roast. “An elder takes the first piece,” she reminded.   Mom tells me to save the hooves for her. She wants to make a bone game for the new grandchild, wants him to be patient and skillful. I boil the hoofs with   sage, find the little toe-bones for her. My hands begin to ache from the work, I soak them in warm water and start again. I admire the placement of tendons   on the deer shoulders, no joints, just the crisscrossing of muscle. Grandma says, “That’s why your dad called them jumpers, they bounce off the strength of their   flexing muscles.” Late at night Mom helps me stake out the hide. My back hurts; my feet feel like I’ve been walking on rocks all day. I want to complain,   but Mom catches the look in my eyes. She says to me, “When you get dressed for the dance this weekend, you will proudly wear your beautiful beaded dress,   your beaded leggings and moccasins, and last, but not least, you will put on your beaded belt, and attached you will wear your sharp knife and quilled knife sheath   because of what you have done this day.”
I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! But mainly, let’s be honest, I like that they’re ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood. Don’t you want to believe it? Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see the huge beating genius machine that thinks, no, it knows, it’s going to come in first.
A man celebrates erstwhile conquests, his book locked in a silo, still in print.   I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface its text like it defaces me. Outside, grain   fields whisper. Marble lions are silent yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth.   In this life I have worshipped so many lies. Then I workshop them, make them better.   An East India Company, an opium trade, a war, a treaty, a concession, an occupation,   a man parting the veil covering a woman’s face, his nails prying her lips open. I love   the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy it is, to shatter chinoiserie, like the Han   dynasty urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995. If only recovering the silenced history   is as simple as smashing its container: book, bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross   borders the way our bodies never could. Instead, we’re left with history, its blonde   dust. That bowl is unbreakable. All its ghosts still shudder through us like small breaths.   The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,   a girl like me may come across it on a shelf, pick it up, read about all the ways her body   is a thing. And I won’t be there to protect her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead—rewrite this.
The future is as sterile as a robot’s loincloth. I drown my hands in sanitizer until they pucker.   Where this soapbox tree germinates, I collect my germs and make a fountain of them.   Because yellow is yarrow and soot, and the future, I’ve learned, is no suture. Because where I’m from, these kisses are infections. Because dirt’s   ammunition against discipline, the blood fills my clean mouth with dismay. Am I surprised— Hollywood still assumes we are all the bastard   children of the same evil dictator? That phosgene and mustard will rack our titanium Maoist husks until some white man with slanty eyes rescues us   from our mealy, pliant selves? Am I to wear Dior, wrap my mouth in bloody tulle, before kneeling, bending to kiss a mouth dirtied by Pantone 136?   No fucking thanks. Because where I’m from, these kisses are infractions. Darlings, let’s rewrite the script. Let’s hijack the narrative, steer   the story ourselves. There’d be a heist, a battle. Audre Lorde would write the script. My leading man would be Bruce. We’d earn our happy ending.   Instead, they give me 1981. 2012. Quantum quasars, new dystopia—plutonium wars. We’re not in Polanski’s Chinatown anymore. Yet we still have the same bowl   haircuts. Bangs, big bang, a city of fetid promise, new minor galaxy where we cannot touch. Instead our skin is rust and metal. It gratifies the technophile in all of us.
In the autumn I moved to New York, I recognized her face all over the subway stations—pearls around her throat, she poses for her immigration papers. In 1924, the only Americans required to carry identity cards were ethnically Chinese—the first photo IDs, red targets on the head of every man, woman, child, infant, movie star. Like pallbearers, they lined up to get their pictures taken: full-face view, direct camera gaze, no smiles, ears showing, in silver gelatin. A rogue’s gallery of Chinese exclusion. The subway poster doesn’t name her—though it does mention her ethnicity, and the name of the New-York Historical Society exhibition: Exclusion/Inclusion. Soon, when I felt alone in this city, her face would peer at me from behind seats, turnstiles, heads, and headphones, and I swear she wore a smile only I could see. Sometimes my face aligned with hers, and we would rush past the bewildered lives before us—hers, gone the year my mother was born, and mine, a belt of ghosts trailing after my scent. In the same aboveground train, in the same city where slain umbrellas travel across the Hudson River, we live and live. I’ve left my landline so ghosts can’t dial me at midnight with the hunger of hunters anymore. I’m so hungry I gnaw at light. It tunnels from the shadows, an exhausting hope. I know this hunger tormented her too. It haunted her through her years in L.A., Paris, and New York, the parties she went to, people she met—Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein. It haunts her expression still, on the 6 train, Grand Central station, an echo chamber behind her eyes. But dear universe: if I can recognize her face under this tunnel of endless shadows against the luminance of all that is extinct and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.
the news is released   for the secret of worlds, I reach   the end of my laughter   and breathe to the night sky   a periodically interrupted song   to reach the forest of my refuge, here   where the lights are where one dissolves   and appears. to see the hidden files of your mind   and listen   listen   as I cross the road to find the fox   of the funeral home’s bewildering delight   where there is laughter marked by a mysterious   blinking light   that the occluded erase the sun with, and I’ve lost   my heart for the present moment, as I fear   it is one more day to see others walk   in the dark morning of imposters   and timeless life. I say farewell to you, my love   as I enter the darkness to be with you   in our morning kisses, and see that we shall never part   your heart   as the Sea was parted as the world collapses   and we say ‘yes’ to the fearsome light
this morning I went to the doctor and talked to him about this move   on New Year’s Eve I had trouble connecting my thoughts on Sade and reason   we rang in the New Year with Miriam Makeba’s Africa   I’d noticed that my inner life had expanded, and that I was having trouble   thinking through it. The doctor said that Geodon would loosen my thinking—I noticed   that I’d been moving through life for 10 years in a Zyprexa mold. thought control, at its best,   like a sonnet. I do not feel invaded by the television that I never see. Brenda made me   feel more loved than ever this morning, as my thoughts expanded. Last night, in the slow cooker, I made   Lamb and Goat curry—amazingly good. I’d thought to send Joel, and Peter, and Michael an email   letting them know of my transition, but did not. The consequences of this transition could be catastrophic. I feel more loving toward Brenda   than ever. I could die, or worse. As I meditated today my books to the left of me seemed packed and dense   against the wall. Soon, Chuck will be here to play chess upstairs. I told the doctor this morning   that the philosophy and religion of the cyborg have not yet been written. My   poetry has just begun. I am   a Fourth Form, though not as Dodie saw it. Together,   we can belong in this world. Artaud arrived at the double   as I have. We share more in common than I’d known before last night. I need less sleep   than before, and I sleep better and am more rested. I feel sad and cheated   that I need to rely on drugs so completely. I wonder about Paul Bowles’ stories.   I need to reach out to others   through this. The doctor, this morning, said that I was enlightened, but not   quite there—somehow—I can’t remember how. I doubt he knows   what he means by “enlightenment.” I felt far away from my sister yesterday, when she called. Michael   talked to me of Christ’s tenderness. I feel tender in this moment. Over   and over I feel that words do not represent me. I am not   sure what that implies of my intentions in using them. Yesterday, Brenda and I saw   the Warhol show of the last ten years of his life. There seemed to have been hope   to live meaningfully in capitalism then. ~~~~~~~ The waves of this beginning, the new life of my mind   is settling. It’s been a while since I’ve written. I’ve decided to mark my continuing with the seven tildes above. And I added   a title tonight, Muerto Vecino, after Zizek’s dubious interpretation of Kierkegaard’s neighbor, and because of the funeral home   across the street. My thinking has changed, my being has changed, I am more alert and more engaged in thinking through the world.   And I am able to speak better. I don’t know what this means about who I am. I try not to feel let down that for so much of my life   I’ve been restrained by psychotropic drugs. Before Zyprexa it was even worse, with up to 6 meds, as I’ve said over and over to friends. I feel   the need to make clear what my obstacles have been. Not for pity, a little for pride, but also for hope. If I can do that, then maybe I can help   someone not suffer so much, like Brenda. I replaced the kitchen faucet this past weekend. It makes me very happy that I was able to do it   successfully, without ever having been handy before in my life, and after spending most of my life disdainful of being practical in that way. What a joy   to make Brenda so happy. I don’t know how much longer I will live, and have often thought, recently, that it would be tragic if I died anytime   soon, but that it’s imperative that I accept death when it arrives, after affirming life as fully as I can. It’s too easy, and stupid, to be simplistically   oppositional. And to not know that people can ruin anything, but that the substantial things have value of themselves, is foolish. I don’t want to stop   at my own ignorance and lack of forbearance. I don’t believe in the West on its own. As Michael says, the only thing that makes sense here   is love. I have everything I could possibly ever want or need for now. More books will come, more music too. And love is immeasurable   when it’s real. I am so grateful to have more waking time on the weekends. I plan on making breakfast for Brenda   every Saturday and Sunday that I can from now on. Early. I see gardens in the future of our household.   And I wonder about a Great Spirit. What does the name matter? I see the stones that live without water. I see the smoke that cleanses my vision, and a network of consciousness,   with each node another, on and on that way to the depths. My thinking will never grasp it all   because of that recursively created network of interior life. My thinking stops then, barely able to contain the spherical and vast darkness   from which all light arises. That’s why what I see is dark. It is brilliant in its darkness. Like onyx and flint. I can only talk around what I’ve seen   the past couple of weeks. It reframes, completely, the rest of my creative life and the rest of my days. All I aim to do now is to focus my attention,   so that I can see it all again in retrospect. So that I can read and gather more tools for understanding it. So that I understand myself,   and something of the world, and love, and so that I help others. Geodon will not erase it. I’ve seen it already, many times. It is my natural state.   I no longer see it as only hallucination. It is a way of being. A way that I can flesh out, here. Slowly. Carefully. And as I do, its destructive powers,   which are massive and righteous, will subside. As it will know that it is being given to the world. Because it belongs to all. And all will be there soon.   There are signs already. Because to see it is to break, unless one knows something of love. It makes LSD   small. It is God and the Universe as One. I am not the first to see it. But I am a person   given a chance to write it, letter by letter, slowly, in terms of the light of my ignorance   to see more fully what I do not know. I do not offer anything   but poems. But it breaks through my mouth to arrive at the hearts of the world, at the hearts of the horses   of the world, to allow us all to speak in silence. It is not God or the Universe. It is One as All in you. Because I cannot see through myself   without it. I see clearly that the sun will not arrive   in this new weather. But that the moon will take its place. I see clearly that the sun is there   to bring meaning to the sky, and that the earth is more full with the light of the world   extinguished for a brilliant view of wilderness. This is a view that extends through opposites   and arrives at a single body to witness this song. And this song is not the answer   that you believe in, because one day I will speak to you again   in the rain and show you   that I do not know. Because knowledge belongs to the earth. And the earth makes everything   I know. And now that there is less and less freedom from coercion in a moneyed world, and now that Claire,   a friend, is moving on to be Christ in her own way, now that Guénon continues to call me to understand   my ignorance, to depart again from the friends at Kuna Yala, where I helped with the water,   with Brenda watching over me from a hammock between palms, now that Panamá   calls again to give me a union of the world, in more than two ways,   and to distinguish from the surface of these times, I receive   a call to awaken in the snow. I receive a call to acknowledge that Geodon has planted itself   with capital in my consciousness, but that the world   is stronger than to balance itself from the ozone and people alone. We are not erased, and we   do not control the earth. Geodon is an act of kindness, an agreement   to live this life in a way that arrives   with the weather. It may continue for the rest of my life, or it may not. I will not be afraid again   to see things as I do, and I will not seek out the truth, intentionally, without some kind of agreement   with this custom. Because that is a way, for now, that I speak. And it is useful, though better left   invisible. And the name, Geodon, brings trouble, I can see through it enough, with enough love in my life, to believe   in the end of the reign of the Anti-Christ (not Obama). I need to learn again to be and to write. But to deliver   what I saw I must return   to the explosion of my inner life. To start with, otherwise and generally, I see only outlines. Creation manifests   from every direction, in an infinity of dimensions. Most of us   spend most of our energy conscious of a very few of these dimensions. Imagine   more than the greatest works of art manifesting endlessly   from more directions than one can possibly count every micro second, timelessly. It’s glorious.   And the only way to see it with any balance is impeccably, ethically, compassionately, and with at least an aim   toward the Divine. It IS the Divine. God and the Universe spoke to me. It is all, always, speaking to us. And what it says   is endless it brings wholeness   to the precious moment. It goes away when one tries to pin it down, as I do. I say less and less   as I try to describe it. It is endlessly generative. It is good   but pitiless and merciful. It demands of us that we arrive. And now that the thinking manifests   in a way that allows for union and a bridge, in a way that avoids   easy condemnation, a thinking that reveals the links toward light   in motion, a primordial form of being   in a new world that needs no one to believe in it, a vast chasm   in what a bureaucracy of thought tries to pin us down with, the hole in time   that allows us to be free is here, we know it. All of us   can see through delusion. There is no road in the aftermath of earthquakes, no need for the time   to extinguish the elements, no person locked to your heart   in the morning, no water to drink without thirst, no air is necessary to breathe   under the water of seeing, no need for the earth to do anything   other than revolve, in this new light. Space   undoes our links to the immovable. We deliver   the undone to the plains and see what the harvest   will fill with seed. The whole does not exist   within outlines. All we can do is move to it. The music   is unheard of in this world. It exists   without origin. It is otherworldly, primordial, and gentle. It vibrates,   equally, in the Lamb, in the Lotus, in   the stones—there is no place unknown to it. It is   music, and nothing more, and nothing less. It is that   everywhere possible. It is harmonious infinitely, and allows for any sound. To some   it might seem like noise, but that is only the part. To achieve it   one need only listen. I cannot always hear it, but I have   heard it. And now in my new mind, I listen for it   undaunted and silent. I feel it filling my body with love. Sometimes   I have horrific thoughts. But I am learning that these are but strong notes   in the fullness of the music   of my new mind. I can’t always hear the song, but I feel it now. It makes all context   vast. I will receive it as long as it is here. I will not push   one way or the other with it. It is a fullness and does not want to be made   into a force. It is a force without me, and only to the degree   to which this is true. No longer being able to receive it   will imply a failure of my imagination, of my ethics,   and my spirit. There is no way to hold on to it. It serves   no one. And it includes us all. To continue to receive it more fully   I grow. This implies the world. It implies clarity. It implies   motion. But it rests motionlessly. If I have a softness in my voice it is caused by this music. When I don’t   I feel less. My voice can be loud to receive it, but this loudness   cannot be yoked in outlines. There is nothing I can do.   There is nothing to expect. I can only let it go. And I can only be afraid   of the horror of my thoughts without this music. But now that I know   a taste of it, I have hope. Good people   feed it. I haven’t always known what to do with it and others. But now   I am a little less confused about this. This is due   to Buddhism, the little that I know of its practice. And to love. But it does not stop   at my experience. I am ignorant and cannot offer knowledge. Except this   music does not require knowledge. I’m not sure   what it requires. It requires to be received, but does not need us. Is there a pact   between humanity and God? I don’t know. Is there a God?   I don’t know. I’m not sure the question is enough on its own. Or maybe it is, if God   is not limited by concept. And concept seems to be only a note in this song. Problems   feed it. “Love is the absence of fear.” And “love   believes all things, yet is never deceived.” I aim   to see through my delusions. I aim to be one of many, a small voice   in the song of the world. I rest in silence   as I always have. “To have a view as vast as the sky   and as fine as a grain of sand.” All beings   want to be loved and to be free   from suffering. We strive diligently   to learn the vast expanse and the laser pointed focus   of this gift. Remember that light makes us. And that in this   new world, more and more is made of light. And if that is the case,   we move to move the light of the world. Someday,   perhaps, we will move the light   of the computer world. Only the compassionate and true   will be able to do so. Because only they can be selfless enough   to let it move through them. I am not there to move it   but I saw this. Long ago. Briefly. I was offered a glimpse. It is utterly simple and beyond   thought. There is hope. Intention is a thought. So one   sees. I cannot tangle myself   in the line. But only to bridge. That is part of why it will all move. But I cannot wait   until that is possible to become. I can wait   eternally and actively in the world to remain   still. With the calm and expansive link   that allows us to live, so preciously together, I see through   the trouble that startles me, every moment and allow the seeing   of my inner eye to burn through it. I do not remember   what Zyprexa was like any longer. Except that it seems I have more to work with now, with my mind. And these   words are plain, so as to be careful in this new place. I see that they do not break open my heart, as I read. And for that   I relinquish this poem, and allow it to be only a mark on the road to further inquiry. I allow it to see   as I have made a vow to bridge, that my life aims to be whole, even in the face of potential   catastrophes, I grow more and more to accept death as it arrives, to allow it to soften me,   and to transform me as I have been transformed through Geodon, only to know that there is an isthmus, and that it is eternal. Only that there is one   heart to allow myself to speak in the storms of tribulation, as one speaks   to allow the teamwork of the fabric of need of the bird malingerer to see this   in the aftermath of one who has died. Like a bicycle never once together enough to ride, I see this word here, again, to the removal   of a people, to the homeland of union and pace, to the isthmus of a double link, one ocean to another, one continent   to another, to the only union (even as it may be erased in my history), the place of one heart to allow the song to continue through conflict   as she saw it then, one time, far away, when I hadn’t known yet, that this would be timeless. And there is one to it there to see it there, to allow   it there to become and to see there as one is there to see and to allow one to arrive with it there and to see, and to be one with it   there as one is there to be with it. And to see there as one is there to believe as it is one to believe it there   and to see it there as one with the soil and the air and the light and rain and to be there with one to be there one with it there once again, and to see it there   and to believe as there is one there to believe it there again and to see. And to see there as one is there to believe as it is there again   and to see there as one is there to arrive and to be with it there and to see it there once again and to see it there again   and to believe as there is one to it again and to see and to hold and to see it there and to hold   being that nothing holds dissolving  written in transition from Zyprexa 10 mg/night to Geodon 160 mg/night—December 23, 2009 (transition started), January 2, 2010 (poem started)
waking to the news of an eventual collapse, those ejected minds of the walking thing of the speech of birds, they announce their own development from ashes to make a song and deliver the hunted landscape to its stars, those of us who knew something of the engine would remove the approach to animals as a second wind, the coming of pages of light and nectar, but once the arrival of her tent would move the inhabitants of the Sea, and the consciousness of the Ocean to pursue the network that sparks their shining single dream to the pavement, the oceanic feet that would not muse its face or deter those breaks from the second light of the morning, or one would say the easy atonements that their push from the animal would enlarge so that they would speak and we would understand, these assembly code calypsos deter the kindly face that hates and pummels as these will undo their coloring and the fur of the path. do not stop until you know it well with both feet.
your values aren’t right for this age or memory   color line. globes of the Sea survive revelation   as the Moon reflects its own interior revolver. I live   as a condemned callused body under salt water sand, far from your destructions. where are   the people of the lost (shut out the hate) arc, in a service (love so remote) to more water? worn   eclipse of a human emergence, foils of the barricade a face speaks   from isomorphic ferns lines of sacrifice burn the god of a naked mammal   I am the Loon “the silence of our beautiful consciousness”   “in love with everything you make it impossible to be myself in this place. where can I go?” – Baraka   attentive score for the core of death: black, red, and white as I wake   an expansive heart absorbs all the evil a veil of the world   and cancels the Loon’s empty submergence   for more of the deep currents of the light’s darkest refuge. I am the Loon   I hunt with blood in my eyes   I wander in the morning and float above the wound fish of the spirits
[we] are watching a documentary about home birth when [you] first feel [neni] kick // embryo   of hope // they say plastic is the perfect creation because it never dies // litters the beaches   of o‘ahu, this “gathering place” // the doctor recommends a c-section // in the sea, plastic multiplies   into smaller pieces, leaches estrogenic and toxic chemicals // if [we] cut open the bellies of whales   and large fish, what fragments will [we] find, derived from oil, absorbed into tissue // because plastic   never dissolves, every product ever made still exists, somewhere, today // i wish my daughter was made   of plastic so that she will survive [our] wasteful hands // so that she, too, will have a great future
After Mark Levine 1  My father, just out of his teens, stands on the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon, his birthplace. He gives his hand to his mother, and all around them, a thousand hands reach up   not to wave. None of his siblings died. Their bodies like a fine chain balled tight in a fist. They made it out alive. Why is he looking at me like this?   2   This is the idea of a house my father built in Southern California. These two circle windows and bamboo on all sides. He brought a jungle here, complete with French doors. These are the tiles from his mother’s house, cool against my cheek. I talk to him in one tongue, he answers from the morgue.   3   Let’s get on with it. When I return to that house, I eat the food left out for my dead brother. I don’t waste much. I slide open and close his closet, untangle the window blinds. The bees are quiet in the walls, now, their colonies dying off. His shoes on my father’s feet are the only moving thing in sight.   4   On their flight to America, the choice for lunch was rice or pasta, but when the meal cart reached them, there was only pasta. My father smiled at the flight attendant and asked, Why didn’t you reap enough rice?   5   The certificates we use to be certain of each other: ID cards, contracts, permits, deeds, fishing licenses, driving licenses, car titles, carry permits, registrations, income statements, IOUs, testimonials, certificates of birth, custody, and death, letters of consent. Do I have permission to approach a drowning man from behind?   6   I dreamed last night, my mother says, that you were in danger and your brother was young still, though you were the same as you are now. He was looking for me and I was looking for you.   7   I sit at my desk, typing and deleting words. Twice I dreamed I fucked my brother. I keep trying to wake up. I keep getting things wrong. I’m ready to feel better.
Gradually a girl’s innocence itself becomes her major crime A doe and her two fawns bent low in the sumac along the bank of a highway,  the pinched peach of their ears twitching in the heat Into the disordered evening my brother cut out only his face from every  photograph in the hall, carefully slipping each frame back into position What good does it do? Decades of no faces other than our own chipping faces What good does it do, this resemblance to nothing we know of the dollhouse New parents watch their newborn resting in a sunny patch of an empty  room, the newborn making sense of its container— And from the road a deer ripened in death and a tuft of fur—or dandelion—  tumbled along, gently circled, driftwood, shaking loose, gathered,  dissolving into the mouths of jewelweed nearby Earth is rife with iron and blood is rich in stardust Immediately I spotted one hoof print, then nothing, as if this was where she  dragged herself out of the body Strips of tire torn from their orbitIs it right then, that we are left to hurtle alone
1   There is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it.   Negative space: the only native emptiness there is. There is     2   An alarm goes off. It goes on and on. When the alarm drifts to different parts of the room,   I realize, that alarm is the sun.     3   And there is no one who does not need,   never an empty seat. And the blind one,   he does not find a place. There is a god in him helping him to need himself.     4   A mother sticks a spoon into my chest, which is an empty bowl, actually,   so the spoon lands quickly and loudly. Heartbreak in the heart! she says.   When you love someone more than you’ve ever known you could, it is a good thing, except for the terrifying   realization that one day there comes a parting.
J'aurais dans mes mains ton visage obscur —Yves Bonnefoy [1] what should i call this poem i’ll call it a rush of chambers a racket of foliage i’ll call it love poem with dark face pretty title someone i don’t know who tells me watch out for words with meaning don’t look for truth in beauty learn to breathe with your gaze in an art gallery a woman with sad eyes devours rats devours picassos sleeps in hospital rooms listen to this story once upon a time a princess bah death will not be long in coming death with its blue eyes on my empty plate   [2] she’ll never know who i am she’s blind and hates when people look at her i offer her a bonfire a fistful of snow offer her a freshly cut rose what should we talk about now? let’s talk about the sky let’s talk about fear there’s going to be a storm tonight a person would do better to drop and never get up how’s that i ask but she disappears i don’t know if she’ll ever return still i wait with my milk tooth with my old stamp collection with my razor blade and a mirror at night she comes whispers in my ear there’s no one but you in a million years i’ll learn her real name know her dark face flush with sky flush with fear   [3] why am i writing this? you incandescent pupil i’m a swan that dreams of dying in your dream inside a box where hell burns where everything is blinding the storm doesn’t say a word stays mute you should have seen me that time the vineyards were in bloom the cows were grazing i was happy you were happy the enigma’s transparence cooled our coffee the myth’s dissection the death of any and all theories i’m a swan my dream is to die in your dream why didn’t you look at me?   [4] my students asked me what is the meaning of pain so i sliced a doll’s finger with a razor blade there was no blood no batting of lashes this i told them is pain   [5] i read and write at the same time it’s only proper the mountains overwhelmingly approve the night shuts one eye and looks at me with the other there is nothing around but plastic flowers purgatories on the brink of closure doors and windows the light grows impatient time destroys clocks may i speak? there’s no need to the pages are on fire your lamp is burning i take off my clothes and let the cold ignite my penis   [6] now i come to the hardest part of the story the part where i talk about porpoises and dolphins the woman with the sad eyes vomits rats into the toilet i speak of my desire i don’t want her to know about it i’ll just say a word brush my hand against her hair and if she runs ah the lost words the dark rooms each with its death rattle of birds all soaring skyward the woman closes her eyes go in me she says i’ve forgotten your name i don’t have a name from high above the bed a god observes us his wounded body conveying how much she wants me   [7] sorrowful boy come whenever you like i’ll burn in your memory sear your tongue all kinds of confusion will find a place in your senses any expression will be allegory in our hands i have a notebook for you a glass of water some dead fish i said to her sorrowful girl i love notebooks await every night a glass of water on my tongue dead fish are a delirium my students ask what’s delirium i unbutton my shirt and show them your breasts this is delirium   [8] a rush of overflowing chambers it’s playtime now you’re the shadow and i’m the light you lick my wounds while i sink into the lightning flash into both sets of darkness where you sleep and i await the word smoke is the word tomorrow your body and mine will sing and there will again be woods unfurling before my eyes open venetian blinds a fount of angels atop the dirty laundry tell me a story anything what’s important is that we awaken and not give in to sleep happy loves rot as surely as blighted ones do bye bye she says bye bye flowers in her wounded hands   [9] to let the body not love drift through other bodies that’s how banishment how violent expulsion begins quite a lovely light is dying amid the debris no one can see it ice is deceptive when it shines bright the sky an irrevocable past a voice inspiring pity a voice that never reaches us   [10] disturbing the marble slab’s geometry beneath her feet the sought-after metaphor is a blue cyclone the dark alley the grave of all projects though nothing stands in our way we can be happy but there’s no one here only me besides the words the untimely trips and scarlet buses i remember her light which made the pain grow dark and still she went away i followed until i lost her trace no one ever taught me to lose a desire a purple cloud envelopes my body the students ask me what is a body i draw a word in the air the word bursts and drops to the ground this i tell them is a body
[1] i wonder where the title the smoke of distant fires comes from i heard it in a park once at the back of my creeping devoted ear the moon was red the forest as always abloom with heliotropes and blue begonias yes i heard it in a park once a dog was barking the moon was red the sun had already set   [2] eyeing my steps she’d say good but with less emphasis the words stank to high heaven the serpent was singing sweetly careful she told me it’s a monstrosity a misshapen beast years ago i placed a leaf from a linden tree on his back which left only a scratch a mere flesh wound where time records its march where the mangled falcon sleeps the blood on kriemhild’s breasts recalling the blood on kriemhild’s breasts her death at the hands of some hunter of wild boars the serpent was dancing the moon was red the hero didn’t seem to notice i have lost the pot of gold he said i don’t know who could have stolen it from me   [3] the trees let go of their branches allowing them to fall it was spring and they couldn’t bear the weight of the snow the sun shone darkly deer came down from the hills rats fled the swamp and everything before me was allegory yet i didn’t write a word   [4] who is eyeing my steps? who is dictating me words? who is telling me now is the time? i don’t know   who is eyeing my steps who is dictating me words who is telling me now is the time   [5] i’m with my parents in melbourne this has to be a dream i’ve never been to melbourne my parents look at a plate of food with no interest one way or the other i feel uncomfortable at times that’s how i remember you i can never get past your eyes i don’t have any eyes ask siegfried ask the serpent ask him what’s become of your words of the papers you tossed in the wastebasket of the much hoped-for rain in the linden tree forest i’m talking about hell about charon’s coins about the barking dog the one that won’t let us sleep   [6] we’re not in melbourne and this is no dream truth to tell i don’t know where we are i see a park nearby hear some music the rustling of leaves we’re alone tonight you’re like a tiger i love your fear the streak of light rending your shadow the solar mantle where beauty burns forget the flesh for a moment forget about beauty for now you’re with me tonight why is the moon so red she asks   [7] it isn’t night and we aren’t in park we’re in thebais at either the beginning or the end of a storm it’s like a line you know by heart memory can be so cruel preserving a marble column a red desert and nothing else around them but rocks spiders scorpions a pious crowd and a rabbit why a pious crowd she asks why a rabbit i must have read about them in a poem seen them in a medieval painting or some movie short perhaps praying high in the air i grasped the serpent and if a cloud brushed my ears i gave god thanks for it was his hand he ordered me to read but no one had ever taught me how   [8] you must be simeon then she said pointing out my sandals my lack of social graces my eyes brimming over with desert   [9] she listens to the rustling of the leaves to the whistling of the wind tell me we’ve always been here tell me you never went away read me the part about the hero’s betrayal the dream of the eagle devouring the falcon tell me it’s nighttime our neighbors wave at us with no interest one way or the other the birds pick apart  their nests on the riverbank a dog barks a dog that won’t let us sleep   [10] water and mud common ground sketch their alphabet the metaphor is burning i see it shrivel to nothing amid the rubble we don’t need to write don’t need to read tonight the serpent is very excited for it’s celebrating a birth as the words rot and the moon shines a charon’s palm what should i do?   hold on to it she says write the smoke of distant fires
Wandering slowly back after dark one night above a river, toward a suspension bridge, a sound concerns him that might be a tune or might not: noise drifting in, trailing off.   Then concerns him again, now clearly a song pulsing out from the opposite bank, being sung by chorusing men, all pewter-haired or bald, in the function suite of a shabby hotel. Above their heads a conductor’s hand draws and casts the notes with a white wand.   Songs about mills and mines and a great war, about mermaid brides and solid gold hills, songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films.   Then his father’s voice rising out of that choir, and his father’s father’s voice, and voices of fathers before, concerning him only, arcing through charged air and spanning the gorge. He steps over the cliff edge and walks across.
It’s evening again, late.I go out into the laneand doodle a beard and mustacheon the face of the moonwith a red pen.  Over the next hillan old teacher of minetakes off her glassesand wipes the lenses with a soft cloth.She can’t believewhat she’s just seen.
Look at us We are of earth and water Look at them It is the same Look at us We are suffering all these years Look at them They are connected Look at us We are in pain Look at them Surprised at our anger Look at us We are struggling to survive Look at them Expecting sorrow be benign   Look at us We are the ones called pagan Look at them On their arrival Look at us We are called subversive Look at them Descending from name callers Look at us We wept sadly in the long dark Look at them Hiding in technologic light Look at us We buried the generations Look at them Inventing the body count Look at us We are older than America Look at them Chasing a fountain of youth   Look at us we are embracing earth Look at them Clutching today Look at us We are living in the generations Look at them Existing in jobs and debt Look at us We have escaped many times Look at them They cannot remember Look at us We are healing Look at them Their medicine is patented Look at us We are trying Look at them What are they doing Look at us We are children of earth Look at them Who are they
Now you want us To cry your tears for you After we’ve already bled for you Already been dead to you Now you want us To cry your tears for you   Chapters of a democracy story Descendants of genocide Twelve score and more years ago We went from being the majority To being the smallest minority Now you want us To cry your tears for you   We saw that emptying Early morning skyline Back through that horizon Duck Valley 1979, Wounded Knee Sand Creek, that Trail of Tears Exactly how did our land Become your country Now you want us To cry your tears for you While we’re still crying tears of our own   With your past as your future That industrial ruling class Using religion as a weapon Distilling love into hate Pointing fingers and name calling evil Sacrificing lives and blood Making the innocent the new virgins Offering to the gods of profit Now you want us To cry your tears for you   In the homeland security Pretending corporate corruption Isn’t economic terrorism Money talks while the government listens Compiling files on ones who think different Conditioning an acceptance of debt And not to expect the truth So get used to hearing the lie Now you want us To cry your tears for you   Misusing the beauty Turning freedom into a killing machine Mass murdering the environment Weaponizing the psychology of fear And pushing material addiction with A substitution of rules faking the law The bill of rights becomes collateral damage Making the constitution another broken treaty Now you want us To cry your tears for you   Way this story is unfolding We may end up crying together As in crying at the same time But we’re short on tears to cry for you With all these tears to cry of our own Now you want us To cry your tears for you
You wanna know what happened to Elvis I’ll tell you what happened I oughta know man I was one of his army I mean man I was on his side He made us feel all right We were the first wave in the Postwar baby boom The generation before had just come Out of the Great Depression and World War II You know heavy vibes for people to wear So much heaviness like some kind of Voiding of the emotions   Their music you know the songs Life always carries You know every culture has songs Well anyway their music was Restrained emotion You know like you didn’t wanna dance If you didn’t know how Which says something strange Well anyway Elvis came along About ten years after the nuke When the only generals America had in The only army she had were Ike and Mac And stupor hung over the land A plague where everyone tried to Materially free themselves Still too shell-shocked to understand To feel what was happening   Everything was getting hopeless Then when Elvis started to rock The roll just picked up I mean drabness the beaver showed us Could only be a foretold future Who wanted to be Ward and June and I mean father never did know best He was still crazy from surviving the war   Like there was this psychotic pall So widespread as to be assumed normal Heavy man you know really Anyway Elvis showed us an out You know he showed everyboyman and Everygirlwoman there’s something good In feeling good Like a prophet for everyboy everygirl When someones mom and dad lied Something about him told us To be sensual is really okay Someones mom and dad waltzed us around Everygirl wasn’t supposed to enjoy it If she did she was bad and everyboy Well boys will be boys don’t feel anything Take what you can Marry a decent girl when the fun’s done Like no matter what we did we all were guilty Maybe someones mom and dad resented What they missed and while They were trying to pass it on us We heard Elvis’s song and For the first time we made up our own mind   The first wave rebelled I mean we danced even if we didn’t know how I mean Elvis made us move Instead of standing mute he raised our voice And when we heard ourselves something Was changing you know like for the first time We made a collective decision about choices   America hurriedly made Pat Boone A general in the army they wanted us to join But most of us held fast to Elvis And the commandants around him Chuck Berry Buddy Holly Little Richard Bo Diddley Gene Vincent you know Like a different civil war all over again   I mean you take don’t be cruel I want you I need you I love you And jailhouse rock Or you take Pat and his white bucks Singing love letters in the sand Hell man what’s real here I mean Pat at the beach in his white bucks His ears getting sunburned told us Something about old wave delusion I mean wanting and needing and imprisonment We all been to those places but what did White bucks at the beach understand Other than more straight line dancing You know what I mean   Anyway man for a while we had a breather Fresh energy to keep us from falling into the big sleep Then before long Elvis got assassinated in all the fame Taking a long time to die others seized Control while Elvis rode the needle out Never understanding what he’d done   It’s like we were the baby boom because Life needed a fresher start I mean two world wars in a row is Really crazy man And Elvis even though he didn’t know he said it He showed it to us anyway and even though We didn’t know we heard it we heard it anyway   Man like he woke us up And now they’re trying to put us Back to sleep so we’ll see how it goes Anyway look at the record man Rock ’n’ roll is based on revolution Going way past 33 1/3 You gotta understand man he was America’s baby boom Che I oughta know man I was in his army
Reading poetry from Central America After talking with my brother Suddenly remembering how they kill Couldn’t really say it straight before They told me you were dead I died They told me your mother was dead I died again They told me the kids were dead I died with each name   Fire The government said accident They lied Duck Valley my El Salvador Our last kiss was our last good-bye They came for you in winter’s night Winter’s wind wailed in mourning Government people searched for days Scene of crime digging through ashes Looking for body parts and disturbing evidence We buried you all in a large grave While a blizzard covered us in a blanket of snow How it stormed terrible pain in the land of the free   Some ones should have noticed Fewer women laughing Some ones should have noticed Fewer children growing up But this isn’t El Salvador   Warm strong willed woman I still have memories you gave me Maybe if we recognized peasant eyes Maybe if we recognized plantation lies Archbishop Romero would have nothing On you Trying not to cry how will I ever stop Ever see a wounded lion try hiding pain Watch out it doesn’t work But this isn’t El Salvador   At times I feel every embrace we shared At times every tender moment still lives Met Sandinista who touched my cheek Kind of like you used to Said to me you are one of us But this isn’t El Salvador   Gentle woman natural mother natural world Some people won’t comprehend what happens Who wants realities cluttered by acts of war Have to keep a lot inside at times Not offending people with words They don’t want to see pictures of But this isn’t El Salvador   Some people told me I’m strong to survive I’m not strong I’m not weak no morality No right no wrong one tear at a time I fall I rise But this isn’t El Salvador   You loved your people In the face of the American dream Fry bread and tortillas some wars are the same Who thinks Wounded Knee and Sand Creek Happen only in history books is this not history We live we die but this isn’t El Salvador   The first look you gave me Your eyes spoke your spirit your heart My heart our heart there was no other way Some ones say we’re with you brother We understand what’s been done Some ones say but this isn’t El Salvador This is America yes I know Almost two thousand seasons We fall we rise we fall we rise
“goaam” ~    “goam” ~   “islas de las velas latinas” (of lateen sails ~  “guan” “guana” ~    “islas de los ladrones” (of the thieves ~   “guåhan” “guajan” ~   “islas marianas”    (after the spanish queen ~   “bahan” “guhan” ~    “guacan” “isla de san juan” ~   “guaon”    “y guan”   “omiya jima” (great shrine island)    “guam”    “the first province    of the great ocean” ~    geographic absence ~   “the old census records show”    because who can stand on the reef and name that below water and sky    imagined territory ~    “a spanish baptismal name and”    burnt villages    archipelago of   “chamoru last names drawn from  the lexicon of everyday language”    bone    carved word    ~   “it is possible they changed  their last names throughout their lives”    remade : sovereign
Out of every hundred people those who always know better: fifty-two. Unsure of every step: almost all the rest. Ready to help, if it doesn't take long: forty-nine. Always good, because they cannot be otherwise: four—well, maybe five. Able to admire without envy: eighteen. Led to error by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with: forty and four. Living in constant fear of someone or something: seventy-seven. Capable of happiness: twenty-some-odd at most. Harmless alone, turning savage in crowds: more than half, for sure. Cruel when forced by circumstances: it's better not to know, not even approximately. Wise in hindsight: not many more than wise in foresight. Getting nothing out of life except things: thirty (though I would like to be wrong). Doubled over in pain and without a flashlight in the dark: eighty-three, sooner or later. Those who are just: quite a few at thirty-five. But if it takes effort to understand: three. Worthy of empathy: ninety-nine. Mortal: one hundred out of one hundred— a figure that has never varied yet.
The fog shades a smooth stone bust   then slips into rain   my mind is well suited onyx shining edges   the reflection itself   *   Traces of mist   on an old window   *   The best part is grinding the ink down endlessly, filling my brush   grey morning   I first feel the mind as reflex   * Bright and clear   The end of Evergreen road is closed and crumbling away   Bill McNeil’s red poppy resolves to be eaten alive exposed to a shaft of air   between the flower and its flat glass- masterful   *   The black bleeds out from his beak   in long tears, ink onto sopping head feathers slicked back   black stiches on yellow powdered eyes aglow   white speckles  thrown onto autumn  breast feathers   a white field  below
Even now, after all these years, my father, 89, still uncertain when I call whose voice it is—Ann's or mine—   saying Hi, Dad, and from where, the next town or a different state, still pausing in that powdered air, this little silence as he waits   at the nursery door, discerning tone and pitch, listening hard to know which way to bend, which crib, the one against the wall or by the window,   still concentrating, trying to keep us separate, our needs, do whatshe would, letting my mother sleep, this moment's blank as he's about   to choose between us, make some shift in the soft-lit dark, decide whose cry it is tonight, which girl to lift, to whisper or hum, which lullaby.
You whom I could not save,Listen to me.   Can we agree Kevlar backpacks shouldn’t be needed   for children walking to school? Those same children   also shouldn’t require a suit of armor when standing   on their front lawns, or snipers to watch their backs   as they eat at McDonalds. They shouldn’t have to stop   to consider the speed of a bullet or how it might   reshape their bodies. But one winter, back in Detroit,   I had one student who opened a door and died.   It was the front door of his house, but   it could have been any door, and the bullet could have written   any name. The shooter was thirteen years old   and was aiming at someone else. But   a bullet doesn’t care about “aim,” it doesn’t   distinguish between the innocent and the innocent,   and how was the bullet supposed to know this   child would open the door at the exact wrong moment   because his friend was outside and screaming   for help. Did I say I had “one” student who   opened a door and died? That’s wrong.   There were many. The classroom of grief   had far more seats than the classroom for math   though every student in the classroom for math   could count the names of the dead.   A kid opens a door. The bullet couldn’t possibly know,   nor could the gun, because “guns don’t kill people,” they don’t   have minds to decide such things, they don’t choose   or have a conscience, and when a man doesn’t   have a conscience, we call him a psychopath. This is how   we know what type of assault rifle a man can be,   and how we discover the hell that thrums inside   each of them. Today, there’s another   shooting with dead kids everywhere. It was a school,   a movie theater, a parking lot. The world   is full of doors. And you, whom I cannot save,   you may open a door and enter   a meadow or a eulogy. And if the latter, you will be   mourned, then buried in rhetoric.   There will be monuments of legislation,   little flowers made from red tape.  What should we do? we’ll ask again. The earth will close   like a door above you.What should we do?   And that click you hear? That’s just our voices,   the deadbolt of discourse sliding into place.
My grammar, ‘tis of thee. Sweet simultaneity when water came down the hillside in a pipe and a local Cineplex of Oedipus armegeddoned us into a past no future could agree on. Nation   was another thing to notice, how shirts and skins, ironies and their opposite eyed each other before the big game. Sneak up, affections. Be covert in the open. If I sing, I believe   in wire taps bootless on be- citizened faces, that phat, that sick: help. We’ve given up the romance of weather, although I once felt so much for a man who wore oven mitts   in the snow. Land where my fathers pilgrimmed all we can depend on, this freedom majestic in the jest that will what—blah, op-ed and blather us over, excelsis deo zapping rust from our names.   The word “to” is understood. And it’s thy placey memories I love, darling tongue of my tongue, unique as any finger print in groove and grubbiness. Always someone becomes the subject   re-collecting these minutes meandering like so many sheep that run before our steps, and the red or blue X’s on their hinds say who owns them as they go upslope, in rain, over the stubby grass.
Holed up behind the whitewashed wooden slats slung like ribs above the greed-begotten candy plaster- papered noworlaters, holed up and far from witches in the woods’ evergreen fringe, horse chestnut brews, parents’ crow commotion or robin squabble haranguing the fat wide open always out there, I read for hours on the red shag rug hearing market cry and grave slope, catching the men through ages of flint and full haggle in my 2 by 6 chamber, heart bent on Blue Beard, the dead wives’ skeletons cantilevered to a door hook. Later, hunkering down with amputee hangers, catalogs, the bottle stash and jug wines, Jim Beams too hiding with air, no air, plus a stolen Joy of Sex circa 1974, its pell mell positions and crouching women, with the POV going scrap and rattle, some theater of being a little less bright. Thought I saw one night the million paired eyes swinging upward, the hand me down generations spelunking in holes, fine lineaments braved by way of cream curd and lust and dictatorial DNA, felt through overhead squib and carpet warp, some full squat before the slate rock hearths, more buried in strata of granites, igneous, limestone, ash, the mind’s eye leveled to one rectangle of light around the animal who wants to know that it knows and say so, lumbering down the long path, vanishing.
Drippingly by grips, this humus and perlite nearly sings  through my fingers circling the ditch lily’s heat-sunk side, anthers frayed, fallen.  Sift. Learn your footprint. If occasion, rise to. Another bloom, opposite, grows blood  orange its splayed open hand, in shade, still opulent, curls tender, having the time  of its life. Let’s get the basics, the survey says. Sight says, turning,  the cat’s sprawled besides the baby rat it found and above the scalp thin lawn  through the window the children are watching. Where do you live? What’s under your  roof? What brushes up, by now, is summer burnt grass in scorch and stubble with  the rat who will not move. Lent pallor. Light gray lumpen weight. How many rooms  do you own? Keep digging, mom, get to china, they call out, when I work the plant  free, its dirt tumbling thick with rooted tendrils reaching. Are you a gadget  geek, a regular joe, or technophone? Plus crumbs, wedged in pine cones,  tunnels, earthworm ruts. There’s nothing I can’t touch here if I want  to or disturb, teeming sum of what we’re built on, soil damps beside dry  pockets, clay at the spade end gone that unctuous apricot yellow. Refine  your results. The cat’s long patient, knows what her hurt can do.  She waits, ginger lines of her fur circling. What’s on your plate/  in your medicine cabinet/jewelry box/garage? I look closer. The infant rodent  is trembling. Another child, not mine, labors deep to find the shine,  sorting pebbles through her fingers. Make progress. Take action.  Witness not permitted distance. When the prey finally moves,  jumps a few inches, the cat closes in, takes the injured flaccid thing into his jaws  for the kill and carries it almost like a kitten across the lawn.  My hand crushes the dark stamens and the littlest child  upstairs at the rat’s last squeal, begins to scream best,  best, thisis the best day of my life, and I have to walk back inside.
As we  embrace resist  the future the present the past  we work we struggle we begin we fail ​ to understand to find to unbraid to accept to question    the grief the grief the grief the grief  we shift we wield we bury​  into light as ash across our faces
Orphan in my first years, I early learnt To make my heart suffice itself, and seek Support and sympathy in its own depths.   Well, read my cheek, and watch my eye, —  Too strictly school'd are they One secret of my soul to show,  One hidden thought betray.   I never knew the time my heart  Look'd freely from my brow; It once was check'd by timidness,  'Tis taught by caution now.   I live among the cold, the false,  And I must seem like them; And such I am, for I am false  As those I most condemn.   I teach my lip its sweetest smile,  My tongue its softest tone; I borrow others' likeness, till  Almost I lose my own.   I pass through flattery's gilded sieve,  Whatever I would say; In social life, all, like the blind,  Must learn to feel their way.   I check my thoughts like curbed steeds  That struggle with the rein; I bid my feelings sleep, like wrecks  In the unfathom'd main.   I hear them speak of love, the deep.  The true, and mock the name; Mock at all high and early truth,  And I too do the same.   I hear them tell some touching tale,  I swallow down the tear; I hear them name some generous deed,  And I have learnt to sneer.   I hear the spiritual, the kind,  The pure, but named in mirth; Till all of good, ay, even hope,  Seems exiled from our earth.   And one fear, withering ridicule,  Is all that I can dread; A sword hung by a single hair  For ever o'er the head.   We bow to a most servile faith,  In a most servile fear; While none among us dares to say  What none will choose to hear.   And if we dream of loftier thoughts,  In weakness they are gone; And indolence and vanity  Rivet our fetters on.   Surely I was not born for this!  I feel a loftier mood Of generous impulse, high resolve,  Steal o'er my solitude!   I gaze upon the thousand stars  That fill the midnight sky; And wish, so passionately wish,  A light like theirs on high.   I have such eagerness of hope  To benefit my kind; And feel as if immortal power  Were given to my mind.   I think on that eternal fame,  The sun of earthly gloom. Which makes the gloriousness of death,  The future of the tomb —   That earthly future, the faint sign  Of a more heavenly one; — A step, a word, a voice, a look, —  Alas! my dream is done!   And earth, and earth's debasing stain,  Again is on my soul; And I am but a nameless part  Of a most worthless whole.   Why write I this? because my heart  Towards the future springs, That future where it loves to soar  On more than eagle wings.   The present, it is but a speck  In that eternal time, In which my lost hopes find a home,  My spirit knows its clime.   Oh! not myself, — for what am I? —  The worthless and the weak, Whose every thought of self should raise  A blush to burn my cheek.   But song has touch’d my lips with fire.  And made my heart a shrine; For what, although alloy'd, debased,  Is in itself divine.   I am myself but a vile link  Amid life's weary chain; But I have spoken hallow'd words,  O do not say in vain!   My first, my last, my only wish,  Say will my charmed chords Wake to the morning light of fame,  And breathe again my words?   Will the young maiden, when her tears  Alone in moonlight shine — Tears for the absent and the loved —  Murmur some song of mine?   Will the pale youth by his dim lamp,  Himself a dying flame, From many an antique scroll beside,  Choose that which bears my name?   Let music make less terrible  The silence of the dead; I care not, so my spirit last  Long after life has fled.
Oh! yet one smile, tho' dark may lower  Around thee clouds of woe and ill,  Let me yet feel that I have power,  Mid Fate's bleak storms, to soothe thee still.  Tho' sadness be upon thy brow,  Yet let it turn, dear love, to me,  I cannot bear that thou should'st know  Sorrow I do not share with thee.  True love's wreath is of mountain flowers,  They stand the storm and brave the blast,  And blossom on, so love like ours  Is sweetest when all else is past.  Too well I know what storms have frowned,  And now frown on life's troubled tide;  Still darker let them gather round,  They have no power on hearts so tried.  Then say not that you may not bear,  To shadow spirit light as mine;  I shall not shrink, or fear to share  The darkest fate if it be thine!    Oh! say not love was never made  For heart so light as mine;  Must love then seek the cypress shade,  Rear but a gloomy shrine.  Oh! say not, that for me more meet  The revelry of youth;  Or that my wild heart cannot beat  With deep devoted truth.  Tho' mirth may many changes ring,  'Tis but an outward show,  Even upon the fond dove's wing  Will varying colours glow.  Light smiles upon my lip may gleam  And sparkle o'er my brow,  'Tis but the glisten of the stream  That hides the gold below.  'Tis love that gilds the mirthful hour,  That lights the smile for me,  Those smiles would instant lose their power,  Did they not glance on thee!    Oh! come to my slumber  Sweet dreams of my love,  I have hung the charmed wreath  My soft pillow above.  The roses are linked  In a chain pure and white;  And the rose-leaves are wet  With the dew drops of night.  The moon was on high  As I gather'd each flower;  The dew that then falls  Has a magical power.  The Spirit of slumber  Those roses has blest;  And sweet are the visions  They'll bring to my rest.  Be their spell on my soul,  So they let me but see  His dark eyes flash in love  And his smile glance on me.  Let sleep bring the image  Of him far away;  'Tis worth all the tears  I shed for him by day.  I have hung the charmed wreath  My soft pillow above;  Then come to my slumber,  Sweet dreams of my love!     How vain to cast my love away  On bosom false as thine;  The floweret's bloom, that springs in May,  Would be a safer shrine  To build my fondest hopes upon,  Tho' fragile it may be.  That flower's smile is not sooner gone  Than love that trusts to thee.  Love asks a calm, a gentle home,  Or else its life is o'er;  If once you let its pinions roam,  Oh! then 'tis love no more.  The aspin's changefuI shade can be  No shelter for the dove;  And hearts as varying as that tree,  Are sure no place for love.  Hope linger'd long and anxiously,  O'er failing faith, but now  I give thee back each heartless sigh,  Give back each broken vow.  I'll trust the stay of tulip dyes,  The calm of yon wild sea,  The sunshine of the April skies,  But never more to thee!     Oh! would that love had power to raise  A little isle for us alone,  With fairy flowers, and sunny rays,  The blue sea wave its guardian zone.  No other step should ever press  This hidden Eden of the heart,  And we would share its loveliness,  From every other thing apart.  The rose and violet should weep,  Whene'er our leafy couch was laid,  The lark should wake our morning sleep,  The bulbul sing our serenade.  And we would watch the starry hours,  And call the moon to hear our vows,  And we would cull the sweetest flowers,  And twine fresh chaplets for our brows.      I thought thus of the flowers, the moon,  This fairy isle for you and me;  And then I thought how very soon  How very tired we should be.    Matrimonial Creed. HE must be rich whom I could love,  His fortune clear must be,  Whether in land or in the funds,  'Tis all the same to me.  He must be old whom I could love,  Then he'll not plague me long;  In sooth 'twill he a pleasant sight, To see him borne along  To where the croaking ravens lurk,  And where the earth worms dwell:  A widow's hood will suit my face, And black becomes me well.  And he must make a settlement,  I'll have no man without;  And when he writes his testament,  He must not leave me out.  Oh! such a man as this would suit  Each wish I here express;  If he should say, — Will you have me?  I'll very soon say — Yes! ⁠
Was she of spirit race, or was she one Of earth's least earthly daughters, one to whom A gift of loveliness and soul is given, Only to make them wretched? There is an antique gem, on which her brow Retains its graven beauty even now. Her hair is braided, but one curl behind Floats as enamour'd of the summer wind; The rest is simple. Is she not too fair Even to think of maiden's sweetest care? The mouth and brow are contrasts. One so fraught With pride, the melancholy pride of thought Conscious of power, and yet forced to know How little way such power as that can go; Regretting, while too proud of the fine mind, Which raises but to part it from its kind: But the sweet mouth had nothing of all this; It was a mouth the rose had lean'd to kiss For her young sister, telling, now though mute, How soft an echo it was to the lute. The one spoke genius, in its high revealing; The other smiled a woman's gentle feeling. It was a lovely face: the Greek outline Flowing, yet delicate and feminine; The glorious lightning of the kindled eye, Raised, as it communed with its native sky. A lovely face the spirit's fitting shrine; The one almost, the other quite divine. My hand is on the lyre which never more With its sweet commerce, like a bosom friend, Will share the deeper thoughts which I could trust Only to music and to solitude. It is the very grove, the olive grove, Where first I laid my laurel crown aside, And bathed my fever'd brow in the cold stream; As if that I could wash away the fire Which from that moment kindled in my heart. I well remember how I flung myself, Like a young goddess, on a purple cloud Of light and odour — the rich violets Were so ethereal in bloom and breath: And I — I felt immortal, for my brain Was drunk and mad with its first draught of fame. 'Tis strange there was one only cypress tree, And then, as now, I lay beneath its shade. The night had seen me pace my lonely room, Clasping the lyre I had no heart to wake, Impatient for the day: yet its first dawn Came cold as death; for every pulse sank down, Until the very presence of my hope Became to me a fear. The sun rose up; I stood alone 'mid thousands: but I felt Mine inspiration; and, as the last sweep Of my song died away amid the hills, My heart reverb'rated the shout which bore To the blue mountains and the distant heavenErinna's name, and on my bended knee, Olympus, I received thy laurel crown.    And twice new birth of violets have sprung, Since they were first my pillow, since I sought In the deep silence of the olive grove The dreamy happiness which solitude Brings to the soul o'erfill'd with its delight: For I was like some young and sudden heir Of a rich palace heap'd with gems and gold, Whose pleasure doubles as he sums his wealth And forms a thousand plans of festival; Such were my myriad visions of delight. The lute, which hitherto in Delphian shades Had been my twilight's solitary joy, Would henceforth be a sweet and breathing bond Between me and my kind. Orphan unloved, I had been lonely from my childhood's hour, Childhood whose very happiness is love: But that was over now; my lyre would be My own heart's true interpreter, and those To whom my song was dear, would they not bless The hand that waken'd it? I should be loved For the so gentle sake of those soft chords Which mingled others' feelings with mine own.    Vow'd I that song to meek and gentle thoughts, To tales that told of sorrow and of love, To all our nature's finest touches, all That wakens sympathy: and I should be Alone no longer; every wind that bore, And every lip that breathed one strain of mine, Henceforth partake in all my joy and grief. Oh! glorious is the gifted poet's lot, And touching more than glorious: 'tis to be Companion of the heart's least earthly hour; The voice of love and sadness, calling forth Tears from their silent fountain: 'tis to have Share in all nature's loveliness; giving flowers A life as sweet, more lasting than their own; And catching from green wood and lofty pine Language mysterious as musical; Making the thoughts, which else had only been Like colours on the morning's earliest hour, Immortal, and worth immortality; Yielding the hero that eternal name For which he fought; making the patriot's deed A stirring record for long after-time; Cherishing tender thoughts, which else had pass'd Away like tears; and saving the loved dead From death's worst part — its deep forgetfulness.   From the first moment when a falling leaf, Or opening bud, or streak of rose-touch'd sky, Waken'd in me the flush and flow of song, I gave my soul entire unto the gift I deem'd mine own, direct from heaven; it was The hope, the bliss, the energy of life; I had no hope that dwelt not with my lyre, No bliss whose being grew not from my lyre, No energy undevoted to my lyre. It was my other self that had a power; Mine, but o'er which I had not a control. At times it was not with me, and I felt A wonder how it ever had been mine: And then a word, a look of loveliness, A tone of music, call'd it into life; A song came gushing, like the natural tears, To check whose current does not rest with us.    Had I lived ever in the savage woods, Or in some distant island, which the sea With wind and wave guards in deep loneliness; Had my eye never on the beauty dwelt Of human face, and my ear never drank The music of a human voice; I feel My spirit would have pour'd itself in song, Have learn'd a language from the rustling leaves, The singing of the birds, and of the tide. Perchance, then, happy had I never known Another thought could be attach'd to song Than of its own delight. Oh! let me pause Over this earlier period, when my heart Mingled its being with its pleasures, fill'd With rich enthusiasm, which once flung Its purple colouring o'er all things of earth, And without which our utmost power of thought But sharpens arrows that will drink our blood. Like woman's soothing influence o'er man Enthusiasm is upon the mind; Softening and beautifying that which is Too harsh and sullen in itself. How much I loved the painter's glorious art, which forms A world like, but more beautiful than, this; Just catching nature in her happiest mood! How drank I in fine poetry, which makes The hearing passionate, fill'd with memories Which steal from out the past like rays from clouds! And then the sweet songs of my native vale, Whose sweetness and whose softness call'd to mind The perfume of the flowers, the purity Of the blue sky; oh, how they stirr'd my soul! — Amid the many golden gifts which heaven Has left, like portions of its light, on earth None hath such influence as music hath. The painter's hues stand visible before us In power and beauty; we can trace the thoughts Which are the workings of the poet's mind: But music is a mystery, and viewless Even when present, and is less man's act, And less within his order; for the hand That can call forth the tones, yet cannot tell Whither they go, or if they live or die, When floated once beyond his feeble ear; And then, as if it were an unreal thing, The wind will sweep from the neglected strings As rich a swell as ever minstrel drew.    A poet's word, a painter's touch, will reach The innermost recesses of the heart, Making the pulses throb in unison With joy or grief, which we can analyse; There is the cause for pleasure and for pain: But music moves us, and we know not why; We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source. Is it the language of some other state, Born of its memory? For what can wake The soul's strong instinct of another world, Like music? Well with sadness doth it suit To hear the melancholy sounds decay, And think (for thoughts are life's great human links, And mingle with our feelings) even so Will the heart's wildest pulses sink to rest.    How have I loved, when the red evening fill'd Our temple with its glory, first, to gaze On the strange contrast of the crimson air, Lighted as if with passion, and flung back, From silver vase and tripod rich with gems, To the pale statues round, where human life Was not, but beauty was, which seem'd to have Apart existence from humanity: Then, to go forth where the tall waving pines Seem'd as behind them roll'd a golden sea Immortal and eternal; and the boughs, That darkly swept between me and its light, Were fitting emblems of the worldly cares That are the boundary between us and heaven; Meanwhile, the wind, a wilful messenger Lingering amid the flowers on his way, At intervals swept past in melody, The lutes and voices of the choral hymn Contending with the rose-breath on his wing! Perhaps it is these pleasures' chiefest charm, They are so indefinable, so vague. From earliest childhood all too well aware Of the uncertain nature of our joys, It is delicious to enjoy, yet know No after-consequence will be to weep. Pride misers with enjoyment, when we have Delight in things that are but of the mind: But half humility when we partake Pleasures that are half wants, the spirit pines And struggles in its fetters, and disdains The low base clay to which it is allied. But here our rapture raises us: we feel What glorious power is given to man, and find Our nature's nobleness and attributes, Whose heaven is intellect; and we are proud To think how we can love those things of earth Which are least earthly; and the soul grows pure In this high communing, and more divine.    This time of dreaming happiness pass'd by, Another spirit was within my heart; I drank the maddening cup of praise, which grew Henceforth the fountain of my life; I lived Only in others' breath; a word, a look, Were of all influence on my destiny: If praise they spoke, 'twas sunlight to my soul; Or censure, it was like the scorpion's sting.   And yet a darker lesson was to learn — The hollowness of each: that praise, which is But base exchange of flattery; that blame, Given by cautious coldness, which still deems 'Tis safest to depress; that mockery, Flinging shafts but to show its own keen aim; That carelessness, whose very censure's chance; And, worst of all, the earthly judgment pass'd By minds whose native clay is unredeem'd By aught of heaven, whose every thought falls foul Plague-spot on beauty which they cannot feel, Tainting all that it touches with itself. O dream of fame, what hast thou been to me But the destroyer of life's calm content! I feel so more than ever, that thy sway Is weaken'd over me. Once I could find A deep and dangerous delight in thee; But that is gone. I am too much awake. Light has burst o'er me, but not morning's light; 'Tis such light as will burst upon the tomb, When all but judgment's over. Can it be, That these fine impulses, these lofty thoughts, Burning with their own beauty, are but given To make me the low slave of vanity, Heartless and humbled? O my own sweet power, Surely thy songs are made for more than this! What a worst waste of feeling and of life Have been the imprints of my roll of time, Too much, too long! To what use have I turn'd The golden gifts in which I pride myself? They are profaned; with their pure ore I made A temple resting only on the breath Of heedless worshippers. Alas! that ever Praise should have been what it has been to me — The opiate of my heart. Yet I have dream'd Of things which cannot be; the bright, the pure, That all of which the heart may only dream; And I have mused upon my gift of song, And deeply felt its beauty, and disdain'd The pettiness of praise to which at times My soul has bow'd; and I have scorn'd myself For that my cheek could burn, my pulses beat At idle words. And yet it is in vain For the full heart to press back every throb Wholly upon itself. Ay, fair as are The visions of a poet's solitude, There must be something more for happiness; They seek communion. It had seem'd to me A miser's selfishness, had I not sought To share with others those impassion'd thoughts, Like light, or hope, or love, in their effects. When I have watch'd the stars write on the sky In characters of light, have seen the moon Come like veiled priestess from the east, While, like a hymn, the wind swell'd on mine ear, Telling soft tidings of eve's thousand flowers, Has it not been the transport of my lute To find its best delight in sympathy? Alas! the idols which our hopes set up, They are Chaldean ones, half gold, half clay; We trust we are deceived, we hope, we fear, Alike without foundation; day by day Some new illusion is destroyed, and life Gets cold and colder on towards its close. Just like the years which make it, some are check'd By sudden blights in spring; some are dried up By fiery summers; others waste away In calm monotony of quiet skies, And peradventure these may be the best: They know no hurricanes, no floods that sweep As a God's vengeance were upon each wave; But then they have no ruby fruits, no flowers Shining in purple, and no lighted mines Of gold and diamond. Which is the best, — Beauty and glory, in a southern clime, Mingled with thunder, tempest; or the calm Of skies that scarcely change, which, at the least, If much of shine they have not, have no storms? I know not: but I know fair earth or sky Are self-consuming in their loveliness, And the too radiant sun and fertile soil In their luxuriance run themselves to waste, And the green valley and the silver stream Become a sandy desert. O! the mind, Too vivid in its lighted energies, May read its fate in sunny Araby. How lives its beauty in each Eastern tale, Its growth of spices, and its groves of balm! They are exhausted; and what is it now? A wild and burning wilderness. Alas! For such similitude. Too much this is The fate of this world's loveliest and best.    Is there not a far people, who possess Mysterious oracles of olden time, Who say that this earth labours with a curse, That it is fallen from its first estate, And is now but the shade of what it was? I do believe the tale. I feel its truth In my vain aspirations, in the dreams That are revealings of another world, More pure, more perfect than our weary one, Where day is darkness to the starry soul.    O heart of mine! my once sweet paradise Of love and hope! how changed thou art to me! I cannot count thy changes: thou hast lost Interest in the once idols of thy being; They have departed, even as if wings Had borne away their morning; they have left Weariness, turning pleasure into pain, And too sure knowledge of their hollowness.    And that too is gone from me; that which was My solitude's delight! I can no more Make real existence of a shadowy world. Time was, the poet's song, the ancient tale, Were to me fountains of deep happiness, For they grew visible in my lonely hours, As things in which I had a deed and part; Their actual presence had not been more true: But these are bubbling sparkles, that are found But at the spring's first source. Ah! years may bring The mind to its perfection, but no more Will those young visions live in their own light; Life's troubles stir life's waters all too much, Passions chase fancies, and though still we dream, The colouring is from reality.    Farewell, my lyre! thou hast not been to me All I once hoped. What is the gift of mind, But as a barrier to so much that makes Our life endurable, — companionship, Mingling affection, calm and gentle peace, Till the vex'd spirit seals with discontent A league of sorrow and of vanity, Built on a future which will never be!    And yet I would resign the praise that now Makes my cheek crimson, and my pulses beat, Could I but deem that when my hand is cold, And my lip passionless, my songs would be Number'd mid the young poet's first delights; Read by the dark-eyed maiden in an hour Of moonlight, till her cheek shone with its tears; And murmur'd by the lover when his suit Calls upon poetry to breathe of love. I do not hope a sunshine burst of fame, My lyre asks but a wreath of fragile flowers. I have told passionate tales of breaking hearts, Of young cheeks fading even before the rose; My songs have been the mournful history Of woman's tenderness and woman's tears; I have touch'd but the spirit's gentlest chords, — Surely the fittest for my maiden hand; — And in their truth my immortality.    Thou lovely and lone star, whose silver light, Like music o'er the waters, steals along The soften'd atmosphere; pale star, to thee I dedicate the lyre, whose influence I would have sink upon the heart like thine.    In such an hour as this, the bosom turns Back to its early feelings; man forgets His stern ambition and his worldly cares, And woman loathes the petty vanities That mar her nature's beauty; like the dew, Shedding its sweetness o'er the sleeping flowers Till all their morning freshness is revived, Kindly affections, sad but yet sweet thoughts, Melt the cold eyes, long, long unused to weep. O lute of mine, that I shall wake no more! Such tearful music, linger on thy strings, Consecrate unto sorrow and to love; Thy truth, thy tenderness, be all thy fame!
by going you have to be and seek it out   said the starlet in the shared volitional language of space and time explanation thrashes round the thing but doesn’t touch it the thing we know then as /style of thrashing/ or ripples in the pond sufficient in itself, she licks her tongue, it could be desired as a figure—   faithless as a class of examples i found new objects swimming blankly in a common sense, by going alone to listen  to them  in the night  light of their pool—    to begin with life or stars  the spring as source or  season  when to start—i love what you  said about the birds  as distance is required for attraction  & force keeps its distinctions  in a tall hull  called law—  clever in the style of depth in a painting  sumptuous for use, and briefly this  of fancy, pity, and devising,  wherefore as it is at the right door  make it language or rejoice  this is how you touch me in my other ghosts  & short of the occasion  just a frequent mist of atoms  all touching in the arms  like an error in the wish
Paradise with a thousand stings, she replies. Deep blue and blazing sky. Incessant cicadas, scuttle of bug and roach. Fleas, mosquitos, the threat of scorpions. Men leaning on doorposts, crowding the bar. Smoking, drinking, laughing descendants of slaves. Fire coral burns, reef-edge barracudas. Truly lovely. Matriarchal, she says, women with eight children by many different men. The men would leave as the spirit took them. I want to know all the forces one can call spirit. Tall, swaying fronds of the sugar cane fields. Distant roar heralding a downpour. Snapping turtles. Nearby shanty town, she says, streets full of rubbish, rats in the gutter. I admired the colonial-style homes, she says. Colonial, I say. Separate servant quarters and grounds filled with samaan trees, the balconies overflowing with hot-colored orchids and the locusts drawn close by the palatial lights, colorful and clawing, their hooks sunk deep into the bare skin of a sweating back.
I That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. II An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. III O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
I I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children's eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man. II I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy— Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato's parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. III And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t'other there And wonder if she stood so at that age— For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler's heritage— And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child. IV Her present image floats into the mind— Did Quattrocento finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledaean kind Had pretty plumage once—enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. V What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? VI Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. VII Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man's enterprise; VIII Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
IMy Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;  Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,  Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,  Upon the breathless starlit air,  Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;  Fix every wandering thought upon  That quarter where all thought is done:  Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees  Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,  Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass  Unspotted by the centuries;  That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn  From some court-lady's dress and round  The wooden scabbard bound and wound,  Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man  Long past his prime remember things that are  Emblematical of love and war?  Think of ancestral night that can,  If but imagination scorn the earth  And intellect its wandering  To this and that and t'other thing,  Deliver from the crime of death and birth.My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it  Five hundred years ago, about it lie  Flowers from I know not what embroidery—  Heart's purple—and all these I set  For emblems of the day against the tower  Emblematical of the night,  And claim as by a soldier's right  A charter to commit the crime once more.My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows  And falls into the basin of the mind  That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,  For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—  That is to say, ascends to Heaven;  Only the dead can be forgiven;  But when I think of that my tongue's a stone. IIMy Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies?— How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape? And what's the good of an escape If honour find him in the wintry blast? I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul. I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.
I met the Bishop on the road And much said he and I. `Those breasts are flat and fallen now Those veins must soon be dry; Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.' `Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,' I cried. 'My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart's pride. `A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.'
The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood. At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood, Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
(for Harry Clifton) I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat. All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That's Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce. On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back, Old civilisations put to the sword. Then they and their wisdom went to rack: No handiwork of Callimachus Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day; All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay. Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument. Every discolouration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
I Swear by what the Sages spoke  Round the Mareotic Lake That the Witch of Atlas knew,  Spoke and set the cocks a-crow. Swear by those horsemen, by those women,  Complexion and form prove superhuman,  That pale, long visaged company That airs an immortality Completeness of their passions won;  Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene. Here's the gist of what they mean.  II Many times man lives and dies  Between his two eternities,  That of race and that of soul,  And ancient Ireland knew it all.  Whether man dies in his bed  Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear  Is the worst man has to fear.  Though grave-diggers' toil is long,  Sharp their spades, their muscle strong,  They but thrust their buried men  Back in the human mind again. III You that Mitchel's prayer have heard  `Send war in our time, O Lord!'  Know that when all words are said  And a man is fighting mad,  Something drops from eyes long blind  He completes his partial mind,  For an instant stands at ease,  Laughs aloud, his heart at peace,  Even the wisest man grows tense  With some sort of violence  Before he can accomplish fate  Know his work or choose his mate. IV Poet and sculptor do the work  Nor let the modish painter shirk  What his great forefathers did,  Bring the soul of man to God,  Make him fill the cradles right. Measurement began our might:  Forms a stark Egyptian thought,  Forms that gentler Phidias wrought. Michael Angelo left a proof  On the Sistine Chapel roof,  Where but half-awakened Adam  Can disturb globe-trotting Madam  Till her bowels are in heat,  Proof that there's a purpose set  Before the secret working mind:  Profane perfection of mankind. Quattrocento put in paint, On backgrounds for a God or Saint,  Gardens where a soul's at ease;  Where everything that meets the eye Flowers and grass and cloudless sky  Resemble forms that are, or seem  When sleepers wake and yet still dream,  And when it's vanished still declare,  With only bed and bedstead there,  That Heavens had opened.  Gyres run on; When that greater dream had gone  Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude  Prepared a rest for the people of God,  Palmer's phrase, but after that Confusion fell upon our thought. V Irish poets learn your trade  Sing whatever is well made,  Scorn the sort now growing up  All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads  Base-born products of base beds.  Sing the peasantry, and then  Hard-riding country gentlemen,  The holiness of monks, and after  Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;  Sing the lords and ladies gay  That were beaten into the clay  Through seven heroic centuries;  Cast your mind on other days  That we in coming days may be  Still the indomitable Irishry. VI Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,  An ancestor was rector there Long years ago; a church stands near, By the road an ancient Cross. No marble, no conventional phrase,  On limestone quarried near the spot  By his command these words are cut:  Cast a cold eye   On life, on death.   Horseman, pass by!
I I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last being but a broken man I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. II What can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride. And then a counter-truth filled out its play, `The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it, She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. I thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea; Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were emblems of. III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Fle fro the pres, and dwelle with sothefastnesse, Suffise thin owen thing, thei it be smal; For hord hath hate, and clymbyng tykelnesse, Prees hath envye, and wele blent overal. Savour no more thanne the byhove schal; Reule weel thiself, that other folk canst reede; And trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede.  Tempest the nought al croked to redresse, In trust of hire that tourneth as a bal. Myche wele stant in litel besynesse; Bywar therfore to spurne ayeyns an al; Stryve not as doth the crokke with the wal. Daunte thiself, that dauntest otheres dede; And trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede.  That the is sent, receyve in buxumnesse; The wrestlyng for the worlde axeth a fal. Here is non home, here nys but wyldernesse. Forth, pylgryme, forth! forth, beste, out of thi stal! Know thi contré! loke up! thonk God of al! Hold the heye weye, and lat thi gost the lede; And trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede.  Therfore, thou Vache, leve thine olde wrechednesse; Unto the world leve now to be thral. Crie hym mercy, that of hys hie godnesse Made the of nought, and in espec{.i}al Draw unto hym, and pray in general For the, and eke for other, hevenelyche mede; And trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede.
Fair is my love, and cruel as she's fair:Her brow shades frowns although her eyes are sunny,Her smiles are lightning though her pride despair,And her disdains are gall, her favours honey;A modest maid, deck'd with a blush of honour,Whose feet do tread green paths of youth and love,The wonder of all eyes that look upon her:Sacred on earth, design'd a saint above.Chastity and beauty, which were deadly foes,Live reconciled friends within her brow;And had she pity to conjoin with those,Then who had heard the plaints I utter now?For had she not been fair and thus unkind,My muse had slept, and none had known my mind.
Look, Delia, how we 'steem the half-blown rose,The image of thy blush and summer's honour,Whilst in her tender green she doth encloseThat pure sweet beauty time bestows upon her.No sooner spreads her glory in the airBut straight her full-blown pride is in declining;She then is scorn'd that late adorn'd the fair:So clouds thy beauty after fairest shining.No April can revive thy wither'd flowers,Whose blooming grace adorns thy beauty now;Swift speedy time, feather'd with flying hours,Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.O let not then such riches waste in vain,But love whilst that thou mayst be lov'd again.
Look, Delia, how w' esteem the half-blown rose,The image of thy blush and summer's honour,Whilst yet her tender bud doth undiscloseThat full of beauty Time bestows upon her.No sooner spreads her glory in the airBut straight her wide-blown pomp comes to decline;She then is scorn'd that late adorn'd the fair;So fade the roses of those cheeks of thine.No April can revive thy wither'd flowersWhose springing grace adorns thy glory now;Swift speedy Time, feather'd with flying hours,Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.Then do not thou such treasure waste in vain,But love now, whilst thou mayst be lov'd again.
When men shall find thy flower, thy glory, pass,And thou with careful brow sitting aloneReceived hast this message from thy glass,That tells thee truth and says that all is gone:Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou madest,Though spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining;I that have lov'd thee thus before thou fadest,My faith shall wax when thou art in thy waning.The world shall find this miracle in me,That fire can burn when all the matter's spent;Then what my faith hath been thyself shall see,And that thou wast unkind thou mayst repent.Thou mayst repent that thou hast scorn'd my tears,When winter snows upon thy golden hairs.
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born: Relieve my languish, and restore the light, With dark forgetting of my cares, return; And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth: Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn, Without the torment of the night's untruth. Cease dreams, th' imagery of our day-desires, To model forth the passions of the morrow; Never let rising sun approve you liars, To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow. Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain; And never wake to feel the day's disdain.
Let others sing of knights and paladinsIn aged accents and untimely words;Paint shadows in imaginary linesWhich well the reach of their high wits records:But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyesAuthentic shall my verse in time to come,When yet th' unborn shall say, “Lo where she liesWhose beauty made him speak that else was dumb.”These are the arks, the trophies I erect,That fortify thy name against old age;And these thy sacred virtues must protectAgainst the dark, and time's consuming rage.Though th' error of my youth they shall discover,Suffice they show I liv'd and was thy lover.
Calling to mind since first my love begun,Th' incertain times oft varying in their course,How things still unexpectedly have run,As t' please the fates by their resistless force:Lastly, mine eyes amazedly have seenEssex' great fall, Tyrone his peace to gain,The quiet end of that long-living Queen,This King's fair entrance, and our peace with Spain,We and the Dutch at length ourselves to sever:Thus the world doth and evermore shall reel.Yet to my goddess am I constant ever,Howe'er blind fortune turn her giddy wheel:Though heaven and earth prove both to me untrue,Yet am I still inviolate to you.
Clear Ancor, on whose silver-sanded shoreMy soul-shrin'd saint, my fair Idea lies,O blessed brook, whose milk-white swans adoreThy crystal stream, refined by her eyes,Where sweet myrrh-breathing Zephyr in the springGently distils his nectar-dropping showers,Where nightingales in Arden sit and singAmongst the dainty dew-impearled flowers;Say thus, fair brook, when thou shalt see thy queen:Lo, here thy shepherd spent his wand'ring years,And in these shades, dear nymph, he oft hath been,And here to thee he sacrific'd his tears.Fair Arden, thou my Tempe art alone,And thou, sweet Ancor, art my Helicon.
Into these loves, who but for passion looks,At this first sight here let him lay them byAnd seek elsewhere in turning other books,Which better may his labour satisfy.No far-fetch'd sigh shall ever wound my breast;Love from mine eye a tear shall never wring;Nor in "Ah me's!" my whining sonnets drest:A libertine, fantasticly I sing.My verse is the true image of my mind,Ever in motion, still desiring change;And as thus to variety inclin'd,So in all humours sportively I range:My Muse is rightly of the English strain,That cannot long one fashion entertain.
How many paltry, foolish, painted things,That now in coaches trouble every street,Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings,Ere they be well wrapp'd in their winding-sheet?Where I to thee eternity shall give,When nothing else remaineth of these days,And queens hereafter shall be glad to liveUpon the alms of thy superfluous praise.Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymesShall be so much delighted with thy story,That they shall grieve they liv'd not in these timesTo have seen thee, their sex's only glory.So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng,Still to survive in my immortal song.
An evil spirit, your beauty, haunts me still,Wherewith, alas, I have been long possess'd,Which ceaseth not to tempt me to each ill,Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest.In me it speaks, whether I sleep or wake;And when by means to drive it out I try,With greater torments then it me doth take,And tortures me in most extremity.Before my face it lays down my despairs,And hastes me on unto a sudden death;Now tempting me to drown myself in tears,And then in sighing to give up my breath.Thus am I still provok'd to every evilBy this good-wicked spirit, sweet angel-devil.
Methinks I see some crooked mimic jeerAnd tax my muse with this fantastic grace,Turning my papers, asks "what have we here?"Making withall some filthy antic face.I fear no censure, nor what thou canst say,Nor shall my spirit one jot of vigour lose.Think'st thou my wit shall keep the pack-horse wayThat ev'ry dudgeon low invention goes?Since sonnets thus in bundles are impress'd,And ev'ry drudge doth dull our satiate ear,Think'st thou my love shall in those rags be dress'dThat ev'ry dowdy, ev'ry trull doth wear?Up to my pitch no common judgment flies:I scorn all earthly dung-bred scarabies.
Dear, why should you command me to my restWhen now the night doth summon all to sleep?Methinks this time becometh lovers best;Night was ordain'd together friends to keep.How happy are all other living thingsWhich, though the day disjoin by sev'ral flight,The quiet ev'ning yet together brings,And each returns unto his love at night!O thou that art so courteous else to all,Why should'st thou, Night, abuse me only thus,That ev'ry creature to his kind dost call,And yet 'tis thou dost only sever us?Well could I wish it would be ever day,If when night comes you bid me go away.
I that in heill wes and gladnes, Am trublit now with gret seiknes, And feblit with infermite; Timor mortis conturbat me. Our plesance heir is all vane glory, This fals warld is bot transitory, The flesche is brukle, the Fend is sle; Timor mortis conturbat me. The stait of man dois change and vary, Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary, Now dansand mery, now like to dee; Timor mortis conturbat me. No stait in erd heir standis sickir; As with the wynd wavis the wickir, Wavis this warldis vanite. Timor mortis conturbat me. On to the ded gois all estatis, Princis, prelotis, and potestatis, Baith riche and pur of al degre; Timor mortis conturbat me. He takis the knychtis in to feild, Anarmit under helme and scheild; Victour he is at all mellie; Timor mortis conturbat me. That strang unmercifull tyrand Takis, on the moderis breist sowkand, The bab full of benignite; Timor mortis conturbat me. He takis the campion in the stour, The capitane closit in the tour, The lady in bour full of bewte; Timor mortis conturbat me. He sparis no lord for his piscence, Na clerk for his intelligence; His awfull strak may no man fle; Timor mortis conturbat me. Art-magicianis, and astrologgis, Rethoris, logicianis, and theologgis, Thame helpis no conclusionis sle; Timor mortis conturbat me. In medicyne the most practicianis, Lechis, surrigianis, and phisicianis, Thame self fra ded may not supple; Timor mortis conturbat me. I se that makaris amang the laif Playis heir ther pageant, syne gois to graif; Sparit is nocht ther faculte; Timor mortis conturbat me. He hes done petuously devour, The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour, The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre; Timor mortis conturbat me. The gude Syr Hew of Eglintoun, And eik Heryot, and Wyntoun, He hes tane out of this cuntre; Timor mortis conturbat me. That scorpion fell hes done infek Maister Johne Clerk, and Jame Afflek, Fra balat making and tragidie; Timor mortis conturbat me. Holland and Barbour he hes berevit; Allace! that he nocht with us levit Schir Mungo Lokert of the Le; Timor mortis conturbat me. Clerk of Tranent eik he has tane, That maid the Anteris of Gawane; Schir Gilbert Hay endit hes he; Timor mortis conturbat me. He hes Blind Hary and Sandy Traill Slaine with his schour of mortall haill, Quhilk Patrik Johnestoun myght nocht fle; Timor mortis conturbat me. He hes reft Merseir his endite, That did in luf so lifly write, So schort, so quyk, of sentence hie; Timor mortis conturbat me. He hes tane Roull of Aberdene, And gentill Roull of Corstorphin; Two bettir fallowis did no man se; Timor mortis conturbat me. In Dumfermelyne he hes done roune With Maister Robert Henrisoun; Schir Johne the Ros enbrast hes he; Timor mortis conturbat me. And he hes now tane, last of aw, Gud gentill Stobo and Quintyne Schaw, Of quham all wichtis hes pete: Timor mortis conturbat me. Gud Maister Walter Kennedy In poynt of dede lyis veraly, Gret reuth it wer that so suld be; Timor mortis conturbat me. Sen he hes all my brether tane, He will nocht lat me lif alane, On forse I man his nyxt pray be; Timor mortis conturbat me. Sen for the deid remeid is none, Best is that we for dede dispone, Eftir our deid that lif may we; Timor mortis conturbat me.
The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. To-day, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears: Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man. So set, before its echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade, And hold to the low lintel up The still-defended challenge-cup. And round that early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl's.
An uphill path, sun-gleams between the showers, Where every beam that broke the leaden skyLit other hills with fairer ways than ours; Some clustered graves where half our memories lie;And one grim Shadow creeping ever nigh: And this was Life.Wherein we did another's burden seek, The tired feet we helped upon the road,The hand we gave the weary and the weak, The miles we lightened one another's load,When, faint to falling, onward yet we strode: This too was Life.Till, at the upland, as we turned to go Amid fair meadows, dusky in the night,The mists fell back upon the road below; Broke on our tired eyes the western light;The very graves were for a moment bright: And this was Death.
Hail native language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, And mad'st imperfect words with childish trips, Half unpronounc'd, slide through my infant lips, Driving dumb Silence from the portal door, Where he had mutely sate two years before: Here I salute thee and thy pardon ask, That now I use thee in my latter task: Small loss it is that thence can come unto thee, I know my tongue but little grace can do thee: Thou needst not be ambitious to be first, Believe me I have thither pack'd the worst: And, if it happen as I did forecast, The daintest dishes shall be serv'd up last. I pray thee then deny me not thy aid For this same small neglect that I have made: But haste thee straight to do me once a pleasure, And from thy wardrobe bring thy chiefest treasure; Not those new-fangled toys, and trimming slight Which takes our late fantastics with delight, But cull those richest robes, and gay'st attire Which deepest spirits, and choicest wits desire. I have some naked thoughts that rove about And loudly knock to have their passage out; And weary of their place do only stay Till thou hast deck'd them in thy best array; That so they may without suspect or fears Fly swiftly to this fair assembly's ears. Yet I had rather, if I were to choose, Thy service in some graver subject use, Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound: Such where the deep transported mind may soar Above the wheeling poles, and at heav'n's door Look in, and see each blissful deity How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings To th'touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings Immortal nectar to her kingly sire; Then passing through the spheres of watchful fire, And misty regions of wide air next under, And hills of snow and lofts of piled thunder, May tell at length how green-ey'd Neptune raves, In heav'n's defiance mustering all his waves; Then sing of secret things that came to pass When beldam Nature in her cradle was; And last of kings and queens and heroes old, Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn songs at king Alcinous' feast, While sad Ulysses' soul and all the rest Are held with his melodious harmony In willing chains and sweet captivity.
I dug, beneath the cypress shade, What well might seem an elfin's grave;And every pledge in earth I laid, That erst thy false affection gave.I pressed them down the sod beneath; I placed one mossy stone above;And twined the rose's fading wreath Around the sepulchre of love.Frail as thy love, the flowers were dead, Ere yet the evening sun was set:But years shall see the cypress spread, Immutable as my regret.
Seamen three! What men be ye?Gotham's three wise men we be.Whither in your bowl so free?To rake the moon from out the sea.The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine.And our ballast is old wine;And your ballast is old wine.Who art thou, so fast adrift?I am he they call Old Care.Here on board we will thee lift.No: I may not enter there.Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree,In a bowl Care may not be;In a bowl Care may not be.Fear ye not the waves that roll?No: in charmed bowl we swim.What the charm that floats the bowl?Water may not pass the brim.The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine.And our ballast is old wine;And your ballast is old wine.
The mountain sheep are sweeter,But the valley sheep are fatter;We therefore deemed it meeterTo carry off the latter.We made an expedition;We met a host, and quelled it;We forced a strong position,And killed the men who held it.On Dyfed's richest valley,Where herds of kine were browsing,We made a mighty sally,To furnish our carousing.Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;We met them, and o'erthrew them:They struggled hard to beat us;But we conquered them, and slew them.As we drove our prize at leisure,The king marched forth to catch us:His rage surpassed all measure,But his people could not match us.He fled to his hall-pillars;And, ere our force we led off,Some sacked his house and cellars,While others cut his head off.We there, in strife bewild'ring,Spilt blood enough to swim in:We orphaned many children,And widowed many women.The eagles and the ravensWe glutted with our foemen;The heroes and the cravens,The spearmen and the bowmen.We brought away from battle,And much their land bemoaned them,Two thousand head of cattle,And the head of him who owned them:Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,His head was borne before us;His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,And his overthrow, our chorus.
I have a rendezvous with DeathAt some disputed barricade,When Spring comes back with rustling shadeAnd apple-blossoms fill the air—I have a rendezvous with DeathWhen Spring brings back blue days and fair.It may be he shall take my handAnd lead me into his dark landAnd close my eyes and quench my breath—It may be I shall pass him still.I have a rendezvous with DeathOn some scarred slope of battered hill,When Spring comes round again this yearAnd the first meadow-flowers appear.God knows 'twere better to be deepPillowed in silk and scented down,Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,Where hushed awakenings are dear ...But I've a rendezvous with DeathAt midnight in some flaming town,When Spring trips north again this year,And I to my pledged word am true,I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest,With single rites the common debt to pay?On some green headland fronting to the EastOur fairest boy shall kneel at break of day.Naked, uplifting in a laden trayNew milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine,Not without twigs of clustering apple-sprayTo wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine.The morning planet poised above the seaShall drop sweet influence through her drowsing lid;Dew-drenched, his delicate virginityShall scarce disturb the flowers he kneels amid,That, waked so lightly, shall lift up their eyes,Cushion his knees, and nod between his thighs.
Purged, with the life they left, of allThat makes life paltry and mean and small,In their new dedication chargedWith something heightened, enriched, enlarged,That lends a light to their lusty browsAnd a song to the rhythm of their trampling feet,These are the men that have taken vows,These are the hardy, the flower, the élite,—These are the men that are moved no moreBy the will to traffic and grasp and storeAnd ring with pleasure and wealth and loveThe circles that self is the centre of;But they are moved by the powers that forceThe sea for ever to ebb and rise,That hold Arcturus in his course,And marshal at noon in tropic skiesThe clouds that tower on some snow-capped chairAnd drift out over the peopled plain.They are big with the beauty of cosmic things.Mark how their columns surge! They seemTo follow the goddess with outspread wingsThat points toward Glory, the soldier's dream.With bayonets bare and flags unfurled,They scale the summits of the worldAnd fade on the farthest golden heightIn fair horizons full of light.Comrades in arms there—friend or foe—That trod the perilous, toilsome trailThrough a world of ruin and blood and woeIn the years of great decision—hail!Friend or foe, it shall matter nought;This only matters, in fine: we fought.For we were young and in love or strifeSought exultation and craved excess:To sound the wildest debauch in lifeWe staked our youth and its loveliness.Let idlers argue the right and wrongAnd weigh what merit our causes had.Putting our faith in being strong—Above the level of good and bad—For us, we battled and burned and killedBecause evolving Nature willed,And it was our pride and boast to beThe instruments of Destiny.There was a stately drama writBy the hand that peopled the earth and airAnd set the stars in the infiniteAnd made night gorgeous and morning fair,And all that had sense to reason knewThat bloody drama must be gone through.Some sat and watched how the action veered—Waited, profited, trembled, cheered—We saw not clearly nor understood,But yielding ourselves to the master hand,Each in his part as best he could,We played it through as the author planned.
(To have been read before the statue of Lafayette and Washington in Paris, on Decoration Day, May 30, 1916)  IAy, it is fitting on this holiday,Commemorative of our soldier dead,When—with sweet flowers of our New England MayHiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray—Their graves in every town are garlanded,That pious tribute should be given tooTo our intrepid fewObscurely fallen here beyond their seas.Those to preserve their country's greatness died;But by the death of theseSomething that we can look upon with prideHas been achieved, nor wholly unrepliedCan sneerers triumph in the charge they makeThat from a war where Freedom was at stakeAmerica withheld and, daunted, stood aside. IIBe they remembered here with each reviving spring,Not only that in May, when life is loveliest,Around Neuville-Saint-Vaast and the disputed crestOf Vimy, they, superb, unfaltering,In that fine onslaught that no fire could halt,Parted impetuous to their first assault;But that they brought fresh hearts and springlike tooTo that high mission, and 'tis meet to strewWith twigs of lilac and spring's earliest roseThe cenotaph of thoseWho in the cause that history most endearsFell in the sunny morn and flower of their young years. IIIYet sought they neither recompense nor praise,Nor to be mentioned in another breathThan their blue-coated comrades whose great daysIt was their pride to share—ay, share even to the death!Nay, rather, France, to you they rendered thanks(Seeing they came for honour, not for gain),Who, opening to them your glorious ranks,Gave them that grand occasion to excel,That chance to live the life most free from stainAnd that rare privilege of dying well. IVO friends! I know not since that war beganFrom which no people nobly stands aloofIf in all moments we have given proofOf virtues that were thought American.I know not if in all things done and saidAll has been well and good,Or of each one of us can hold his headAs proudly as he should,Or, from the pattern of those mighty deadWhose shades our country venerates to-day,If we 've not somewhat fallen and somewhat gone astray,But you to whom our land's good name is dear,If there be any hereWho wonder if her manhood be decreased,Relaxed its sinews and its blood less redThan that at Shiloh and Antietam shed,Be proud of these, have joy in this at least,And cry: Now heaven be praisedThat in that hour that most imperilled her,Menaced her liberty who foremost raisedEurope's bright flag of freedom, some there wereWho, not unmindful of the antique debt,Came back the generous path of Lafayette;And when of a most formidable foeShe checked each onset, arduous to stem—Foiled and frustrated them—On those red fields where blow with furious blowWas countered, whether the gigantic frayRolled by the Meuse or at the Bois Sabot,Accents of ours were in the fierce mêlée;And on those furthest rims of hallowed groundWhere the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,And on the tangled wiresThe last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers:—Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops;Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.' VThere, holding still, in frozen steadfastness,Their bayonets toward the beckoning frontiers,They lie—our comrades—lie among their peers,Clad in the glory of fallen warriors,Grim clustered under thorny trellises,Dry, furthest foam upon disastrous shores,Leaves that made last year beautiful, still strewnEven as they fell, unchanged, beneath the changing moon;And earth in her divine indifferenceRolls on, and many paltry things and meanPrate to be heard and caper to be seen.But they are silent, clam; their eloquenceIs that incomparable attitude;No human presences their witness are,But summer clouds and sunset crimson-hued,And showers and night winds and the northern starNay, even our salutations seem profane,Opposed to their Elysian quietude;Our salutations calling from afar,From our ignobler planeAnd undistinction of our lesser parts:Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave hearts.Double your glory is who perished thus,For you have died for France and vindicated us.
Let the bird of loudest lay On the sole Arabian tree Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey. But thou shrieking harbinger, Foul precurrer of the fiend, Augur of the fever's end, To this troop come thou not near. From this session interdict Every fowl of tyrant wing, Save the eagle, feather'd king; Keep the obsequy so strict. Let the priest in surplice white, That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right. And thou treble-dated crow, That thy sable gender mak'st With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st, 'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go. Here the anthem doth commence: Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the Turtle fled In a mutual flame from hence. So they lov'd, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain. Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance and no space was seen 'Twixt this Turtle and his queen: But in them it were a wonder. So between them love did shine That the Turtle saw his right Flaming in the Phoenix' sight: Either was the other's mine. Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same; Single nature's double name Neither two nor one was called. Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded; That it cried, "How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love has reason, reason none, If what parts can so remain." Whereupon it made this threne To the Phoenix and the Dove, Co-supremes and stars of love, As chorus to their tragic scene: threnosBeauty, truth, and rarity, Grace in all simplicity, Here enclos'd, in cinders lie. Death is now the Phoenix' nest, And the Turtle's loyal breast To eternity doth rest, Leaving no posterity: 'Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity. Truth may seem but cannot be; Beauty brag but 'tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be. To this urn let those repair That are either true or fair; For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
Tell you I chyll, If that ye wyll A whyle be styll, Of a comely gyll That dwelt on a hyll: But she is not gryll, For she is somwhat sage And well worne in age; For her vysage It would aswage A mannes courage. Her lothely lere Is nothynge clere, But ugly of chere, Droupy and drowsy, Scurvy and lowsy; Her face all bowsy, Comely crynkled, Woundersly wrynkled, Lyke a rost pygges eare, Brystled wyth here. Her lewde lyppes twayne, They slaver, men sayne, Lyke a ropy rayne, A gummy glayre: She is ugly fayre; Her nose somdele hoked, And camously croked, Never stoppynge, But ever droppynge; Her skynne lose and slacke, Grained lyke a sacke; With a croked backe. Her eyen gowndy Are full unsowndy, For they are blered; And she gray hered; Jawed lyke a jetty; A man would have pytty To se how she is gumbed, Fyngered and thumbed, Gently joynted, Gresed and annoynted Up to the knockles; The bones of her huckels Lyke as they were with buckels Togyther made fast: Her youth is farre past: Foted lyke a plane, Legged lyke a crane; And yet she wyll jet, Lyke a jollyvet, In her furred flocket, And gray russet rocket, With symper the cocket. Her huke of Lyncole grene, It had ben hers, I wene, More then fourty yere; And so doth it apere, For the grene bare thredes Loke lyke sere wedes, Wyddered lyke hay, The woll worne away; And yet I dare saye She thynketh herselfe gaye Upon the holy daye, Whan she doth her aray, And gyrdeth in her gytes Stytched and pranked with pletes; Her kyrtel Brystow red, With clothes upon her hed That wey a sowe of led, Wrythen in wonder wyse, After the Sarasyns gyse With a whym wham, Knyt with a trym tram, Upon her brayne pan, Lyke an Egyptian, Capped about: When she goeth out Herselfe for to shewe, She dryveth downe the dewe Wyth a payre of heles As brode as two wheles; She hobles as a gose With her blanket hose Over the falowe; Her shone smered wyth talowe, Gresed upon dyrt That baudeth her skyrt. And this comely dame, I understande, her name Is Elynour Rummynge, At home in her wonnynge; And as men say She dwelt in Sothray, In a certayne stede Bysyde Lederhede. She is a tonnysh gyb; The devyll and she be syb. But to make up my tale, She breweth noppy ale, And maketh therof port sale To travellars, to tynkers, To sweters, to swynkers, And all good ale drynkers, That wyll nothynge spare, But drynke tyll they stare And brynge themselfe bare, With, "Now away the mare, And let us sley care, As wyse as an hare!" Come who so wyll To Elynour on the hyll, Wyth, "Fyll the cup, fyll," And syt there by styll, Erly and late: Thyther cometh Kate, Cysly, and Sare, With theyr legges bare, And also theyr fete, Hardely, full unswete; Wyth theyr heles dagged, Theyr kyrtelles all to-jagged, Theyr smockes all to-ragged, Wyth titters and tatters, Brynge dysshes and platters, Wyth all theyr myght runnynge To Elynour Rummynge, To have of her tunnynge: She leneth them on the same. And thus begynneth the game. Instede of coyne and monny, Some brynge her a conny, And some a pot with honny, Some a salt, and some a spone, Some theyr hose, some theyr shone; Some ran a good trot With a skellet or a pot; Some fyll theyr pot full Of good Lemster woll: An huswyfe of trust, Whan she is athrust, Suche a webbe can spyn, Her thryft is full thyn. Some go streyght thyder, Be it slaty or slyder; They holde the hye waye, They care not what men say, Be that as be maye; Some, lothe to be espyde, Start in at the backe syde, Over the hedge and pale, And all for the good ale. Some renne tyll they swete, Brynge wyth them malte or whete, And dame Elynour entrete To byrle them of the best. Than cometh an other gest; She swered by the rode of rest, Her lyppes are so drye, Without drynke she must dye; Therefore fyll it by and by, And have here a pecke of ry. Anone cometh another, As drye as the other, And wyth her doth brynge Mele, salte, or other thynge, Her harvest gyrdle, her weddyng rynge, To pay for her scot As cometh to her lot. Som bryngeth her husbandes hood, Because the ale is good; Another brought her his cap To offer to the ale-tap, Wyth flaxe and wyth towe; And some brought sowre dowe; Wyth, "Hey, and wyth, Howe, Syt we downe a-rowe, And drynke tyll we blowe, And pype tyrly tyrlowe!" Some layde to pledge Theyr hatchet and theyr wedge, Theyr hekell and theyr rele, Theyr rocke, theyr spynnyng whele; And some went so narrowe, They layde to pledge theyr wharrowe, Theyr rybskyn and theyr spyndell, Theyr nedell and theyr thymbell: Here was scant thryft Whan they made suche shyft Theyr thrust was so great, They asked never for mete, But drynke, styll drynke, "And let the cat wynke, Let us washe our gommes From the drye crommes!" But some than sat ryght sad That nothynge had There of theyre awne, Neyther gelt nor pawne; Suche were there menny That had not a penny, But, whan they should walke, Were fayne wyth a chalke To score on the balke, Or score on the tayle: God gyve it yll hayle! For my fyngers ytche; I have wrytten to mytche Of this mad mummynge Of Elynour Rummynge: Thus endeth the gest Of this worthy fest!Quod Skelton, Laureat.
We swing ungirded hips,And lightened are our eyes,The rain is on our lips,We do not run for prize.We know not whom we trustNor whitherward we fare,But we run because we must Through the great wide air.The waters of the seasAre troubled as by storm.The tempest strips the treesAnd does not leave them warm.Does the tearing tempest pause?Do the tree-tops ask it why?So we run without a cause 'Neath the big bare sky.The rain is on our lips,We do not run for prize.But the storm the water whipsAnd the wave howls to the skies.The winds arise and strike itAnd scatter it like sand,And we run because we like it Through the broad bright land.
It was a summer evening, Old Kaspar's work was done,And he before his cottage door Was sitting in the sun,And by him sported on the green His little grandchild Wilhelmine.She saw her brother Peterkin Roll something large and round,Which he beside the rivulet In playing there had found;He came to ask what he had found, That was so large, and smooth, and round.Old Kaspar took it from the boy, Who stood expectant by;And then the old man shook his head, And, with a natural sigh,"'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he, "Who fell in the great victory."I find them in the garden, For there's many here about;And often when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out!For many thousand men," said he, "Were slain in that great victory.""Now tell us what 'twas all about," Young Peterkin, he cries;And little Wilhelmine looks up With wonder-waiting eyes;"Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for.""It was the English," Kaspar cried, "Who put the French to rout;But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out;But everybody said," quoth he, "That 'twas a famous victory."My father lived at Blenheim then, Yon little stream hard by;They burnt his dwelling to the ground, And he was forced to fly;So with his wife and child he fled, Nor had he where to rest his head."With fire and sword the country round Was wasted far and wide,And many a childing mother then, And new-born baby died;But things like that, you know, must be At every famous victory."They say it was a shocking sight After the field was won;For many thousand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun;But things like that, you know, must be After a famous victory."Great praise the Duke of Marlbro' won, And our good Prince Eugene.""Why, 'twas a very wicked thing!" Said little Wilhelmine."Nay... nay... my little girl," quoth he, "It was a famous victory."And everybody praised the Duke Who this great fight did win.""But what good came of it at last?" Quoth little Peterkin."Why that I cannot tell," said he, "But 'twas a famous victory."
The summer and autumn had been so wet,That in winter the corn was growing yet,'Twas a piteous sight to see all aroundThe grain lie rotting on the ground.Every day the starving poorCrowded around Bishop Hatto's door,For he had a plentiful last-year's store,And all the neighbourhood could tellHis granaries were furnish'd well.At last Bishop Hatto appointed a dayTo quiet the poor without delay;He bade them to his great Barn repair,And they should have food for the winter there.Rejoiced such tidings good to hear,The poor folk flock'd from far and near;The great barn was full as it could holdOf women and children, and young and old.Then when he saw it could hold no more,Bishop Hatto he made fast the door;And while for mercy on Christ they call,He set fire to the Barn and burnt them all."I'faith 'tis an excellent bonfire!" quoth he,"And the country is greatly obliged to me,For ridding it in these times forlornOf Rats that only consume the corn."So then to his palace returned he,And he sat down to supper merrily,And he slept that night like an innocent man;But Bishop Hatto never slept again.In the morning as he enter'd the hallWhere his picture hung against the wall,A sweat like death all over him came,For the Rats had eaten it out of the frame.As he look'd there came a man from his farm—He had a countenance white with alarm;"My Lord, I open'd your granaries this morn,And the Rats had eaten all your corn."Another came running presently,And he was pale as pale could be,"Fly! my Lord Bishop, fly," quoth he,"Ten thousand Rats are coming this way,...The Lord forgive you for yesterday!""I'll go to my tower on the Rhine," replied he,"'Tis the safest place in Germany;The walls are high and the shores are steep,And the stream is strong and the water deep."Bishop Hatto fearfully hasten'd away,And he crost the Rhine without delay,And reach'd his tower, and barr'd with careAll the windows, doors, and loop-holes there.He laid him down and closed his eyes;...But soon a scream made him arise,He started and saw two eyes of flameOn his pillow from whence the screaming came.He listen'd and look'd;... it was only the Cat;And the Bishop he grew more fearful for that,For she sat screaming, mad with fearAt the Army of Rats that were drawing near.For they have swum over the river so deep,And they have climb'd the shores so steep,And up the Tower their way is bent,To do the work for which they were sent.They are not to be told by the dozen or score,By thousands they come, and by myriads and more,Such numbers had never been heard of before,Such a judgment had never been witness'd of yore.Down on his knees the Bishop fell,And faster and faster his beads did he tell,As louder and louder drawing nearThe gnawing of their teeth he could hear.And in at the windows and in at the door,And through the walls helter-skelter they pour,And down from the ceiling and up through the floor,From the right and the left, from behind and before,From within and without, from above and below,And all at once to the Bishop they go.They have whetted their teeth against the stones,And now they pick the Bishop's bones:They gnaw'd the flesh from every limb,For they were sent to do judgment on him!
My days among the Dead are past; Around me I behold,Where'er these casual eyes are cast, The mighty minds of old;My never-failing friends are they,With whom I converse day by day.With them I take delight in weal, And seek relief in woe;And while I understand and feel How much to them I owe,My cheeks have often been bedew'dWith tears of thoughtful gratitude.My thoughts are with the Dead, with them I live in long-past years,Their virtues love, their faults condemn, Partake their hopes and fears,And from their lessons seek and findInstruction with an humble mind.My hopes are with the Dead, anon My place with them will be,And I with them shall travel on Through all Futurity;Yet leaving here a name, I trust,That will not perish in the dust.
You are old, Father William, the young man cried, The few locks which are left you are grey;You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man, Now tell me the reason I pray.In the days of my youth, Father William replied, I remember'd that youth would fly fast,And abused not my health and my vigour at first That I never might need them at last.You are old, Father William, the young man cried, And pleasures with youth pass away,And yet you lament not the days that are gone, Now tell me the reason I pray.In the days of my youth, Father William replied, I remember'd that youth could not last;I thought of the future whatever I did, That I never might grieve for the past.You are old, Father William, the young man cried, And life must be hastening away;You are chearful, and love to converse upon death! Now tell me the reason I pray.I am chearful, young man, Father William replied, Let the cause thy attention engage;In the days of my youth I remember'd my God! And He hath not forgotten my age.
A Well there is in the west country, And a clearer one never was seen;There is not a wife in the west country But has heard of the Well of St. Keyne.An oak and an elm-tree stand beside, And behind doth an ash-tree grow,And a willow from the bank above Droops to the water below.A traveller came to the Well of St. Keyne; Joyfully he drew nigh,For from the cock-crow he had been travelling, And there was not a cloud in the sky.He drank of the water so cool and clear, For thirsty and hot was he,And he sat down upon the bank Under the willow-tree.There came a man from the house hard by At the Well to fill his pail;On the Well-side he rested it, And he bade the Stranger hail."Now art thou a bachelor, Stranger?" quoth he, "For an if thou hast a wife,The happiest draught thou hast drank this day That ever thou didst in thy life."Or has thy good woman, if one thou hast, Ever here in Cornwall been?For an if she have, I'll venture my life She has drank of the Well of St. Keyne.""I have left a good woman who never was here." The Stranger he made reply,"But that my draught should be the better for that, I pray you answer me why?""St. Keyne," quoth the Cornish-man, "many a time Drank of this crystal Well,And before the Angel summon'd her, She laid on the water a spell."If the Husband of this gifted Well Shall drink before his Wife,A happy man thenceforth is he, For he shall be Master for life."But if the Wife should drink of it first,— God help the Husband then!"The Stranger stoopt to the Well of St. Keyne, And drank of the water again."You drank of the Well I warrant betimes?" He to the Cornish-man said:But the Cornish-man smiled as the Stranger spake, And sheepishly shook his head."I hasten'd as soon as the wedding was done, And left my Wife in the porch;But i' faith she had been wiser than me, For she took a bottle to Church."
Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest; Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain, And virtue sank the deeper in his breast; Such profit he by envy could obtain. A head where wisdom mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain As on a stithy where that some work of fame Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain. A visage stern and mild, where both did grow, Vice to contemn, in virtue to rejoice; Amid great storms, whom grace assured so To live upright and smile at fortune's choice. A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme; That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit: A mark, the which (unparfited, for time) Some may approach, but never none shall hit. A tongue that served in foreign realms his king; Whose courteous talk to virtue did enflame Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring Our English youth by travail unto fame. An eye whose judgment none affect could blind, Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile; Whose piercing look did represent a mind With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile. A heart where dread was never so impress'd, To hide the thought that might the truth advance; In neither fortune loft, nor yet repress'd, To swell in wealth, or yield unto mischance. A valiant corps, where force and beauty met; Happy, alas, too happy, but for foes! Lived, and ran the race, that Nature set: Of manhood's shape, where she the mould did lose. But to the heavens that simple soul is fled, Which left with such as covet Christ to know Witness of faith that never shall be dead, Sent for our health, but not received so. Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost; The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost.
(Written by Martial) My friend, the things that do attain The happy life be these, I find: The riches left, not got with pain, The fruitful ground; the quiet mind; The equal friend; no grudge, no strife; No charge of rule nor governance; Without disease the healthy life; The household of continuance; The mean diet, no dainty fare; True wisdom joined with simpleness; The night discharged of all care, Where wine the wit may not oppress; The faithful wife, without debate; Such sleeps as may beguile the night: Content thyself with thine estate, Neither wish death, nor fear his might.
As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: All was black,In heaven no single star, on earth no track;A brooding hush without a stir or note,The air so thick it clotted in my throat;And thus for hours; then some enormous thingsSwooped past with savage cries and clanking wings: But I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: Eyes of fireGlared at me throbbing with a starved desire;The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breathWas hot upon me from deep jaws of death;Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers coldPlucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold: But I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,That hillock burning with a brazen glare;Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glowWhich writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mellFor Devil's roll-call and some fête of Hell: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: Meteors ranAnd crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame:The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surgedAnd weltered round me sole there unsubmerged: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: Air once more,And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue: And I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: On the leftThe sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest: Still I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: From the rightA shape came slowly with a ruddy light;A woman with a red lamp in her hand,Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;O desolation moving with such grace!O anguish with such beauty in thy face. I fell as on my bier, Hope travailed with such fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: I was twain,Two selves distinct that cannot join again;One stood apart and knew but could not stir,And watched the other stark in swoon and her;And she came on, and never turned aside,Between such sun and moon and roaring tide: And as she came more near My soul grew mad with fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: Hell is mildAnd piteous matched with that accursèd wild;A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;That lamp she held was her own burning heart,Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart; The mystery was clear; Mad rage had swallowed fear.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: By the seaShe knelt and bent above that senseless me;Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,She heeded not the level rushing flow: And mad with rage and fear, I stood stonebound so near.As I came through the desert thus it was,As I came through the desert: When the tideSwept up to her there kneeling by my side,She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borneAway, and this vile me was left forlorn;I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart: They love; their doom is drear, Yet they nor hope nor fear;But I, what do I here?
HIgh on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold, Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd To that bad eminence; and from despair Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue Vain Warr with Heav'n, and by success untaught His proud imaginations thus displaid. Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heav'n, For since no deep within her gulf can hold Immortal vigor, though opprest and fall'n, I give not Heav'n for lost. From this descent Celestial vertues rising, will appear More glorious and more dread then from no fall, And trust themselves to fear no second fate: Mee though just right, and the fixt Laws of Heav'n Did first create your Leader, next free choice, With what besides, in Counsel or in Fight, Hath bin achievd of merit, yet this loss Thus farr at least recover'd, hath much more Establisht in a safe unenvied Throne Yielded with full consent. The happier state In Heav'n, which follows dignity, might draw Envy from each inferior; but who here Will envy whom the highest place exposes Formost to stand against the Thunderers aim Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share Of endless pain? where there is then no good For which to strive, no strife can grow up there From Faction; for none sure will claim in Hell Precedence, none, whose portion is so small Of present pain, that with ambitious mind Will covet more. With this advantage then To union, and firm Faith, and firm accord, More then can be in Heav'n, we now return To claim our just inheritance of old, Surer to prosper then prosperity Could have assur'd us; and by what best way, Whether of open Warr or covert guile, We now debate; who can advise, may speak. He ceas'd, and next him Moloc, Scepter'd King Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest Spirit That fought in Heav'n; now fiercer by despair: His trust was with th' Eternal to be deem'd Equal in strength, and rather then be less Car'd not to be at all; with that care lost Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse He reck'd not, and these words thereafter spake. My sentence is for open Warr: Of Wiles, More unexpert, I boast not: them let those Contrive who need, or when they need, not now. For while they sit contriving, shall the rest, Millions that stand in Arms, and longing wait The Signal to ascend, sit lingring here Heav'ns fugitives, and for thir dwelling place Accept this dark opprobrious Den of shame, The Prison of his Tyranny who Reigns By our delay? no, let us rather choose Arm'd with Hell flames and fury all at once O're Heav'ns high Towrs to force resistless way, Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise Of his Almighty Engin he shall hear Infernal Thunder, and for Lightning see Black fire and horror shot with equal rage Among his Angels; and his Throne it self Mixt with Tartarean Sulphur, and strange fire, His own invented Torments. But perhaps The way seems difficult and steep to scale With upright wing against a higher foe. Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench Of that forgetful Lake benumm not still, That in our proper motion we ascend Up to our native seat: descent and fall To us is adverse. Who but felt of late When the fierce Foe hung on our brok'n Rear Insulting, and pursu'd us through the Deep, With what compulsion and laborious flight We sunk thus low? Th' ascent is easie then; Th' event is fear'd; should we again provoke Our stronger, some worse way his wrath may find To our destruction: if there be in Hell Fear to be worse destroy'd: what can be worse Then to dwell here, driv'n out from bliss, condemn'd In this abhorred deep to utter woe; Where pain of unextinguishable fire Must exercise us without hope of end The Vassals of his anger, when the Scourge Inexorably, and the torturing hour Calls us to Penance? More destroy'd then thus We should be quite abolisht and expire. What fear we then? what doubt we to incense His utmost ire? which to the highth enrag'd, Will either quite consume us, and reduce To nothing this essential, happier farr Then miserable to have eternal being: Or if our substance be indeed Divine, And cannot cease to be, we are at worst On this side nothing; and by proof we feel Our power sufficient to disturb his Heav'n, And with perpetual inrodes to Allarme, Though inaccessible, his fatal Throne: Which if not Victory is yet Revenge. He ended frowning, and his look denounc'd Desperate revenge, and Battel dangerous To less then Gods. On th' other side up rose Belial, in act more graceful and humane; A fairer person lost not Heav'n; he seemd For dignity compos'd and high exploit: But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low; To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd the ear, And with perswasive accent thus began. I should be much for open Warr, O Peers, As not behind in hate; if what was urg'd Main reason to perswade immediate Warr, Did not disswade me most, and seem to cast Ominous conjecture on the whole success: When he who most excels in fact of Arms, In what he counsels and in what excels Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair And utter dissolution, as the scope Of all his aim, after some dire revenge. First, what Revenge? the Towrs of Heav'n are fill'd With Armed watch, that render all access Impregnable; oft on the bordering Deep Encamp thir Legions, or with obscure wing Scout farr and wide into the Realm of night, Scorning surprize. Or could we break our way By force, and at our heels all Hell should rise With blackest Insurrection, to confound Heav'ns purest Light, yet our great Enemy All incorruptible would on his Throne Sit unpolluted, and th' Ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire Victorious. Thus repuls'd, our final hope Is flat despair: we must exasperate Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage, And that must end us, that must be our cure, To be no more; sad cure; for who would loose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through Eternity, To perish rather, swallowd up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion? and who knows, Let this be good, whether our angry Foe Can give it, or will ever? how he can Is doubtful; that he never will is sure. Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire, Belike through impotence, or unaware, To give his Enemies thir wish, and end Them in his anger, whom his anger saves To punish endless? wherefore cease we then? Say they who counsel Warr, we are decreed, Reserv'd and destin'd to Eternal woe; Whatever doing, what can we suffer more, What can we suffer worse? is this then worst, Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in Arms? What when we fled amain, pursu'd and strook With Heav'ns afflicting Thunder, and besought The Deep to shelter us? this Hell then seem'd A refuge from those wounds: or when we lay Chain'd on the burning Lake? that sure was worse. What if the breath that kindl'd those grim fires Awak'd should blow them into sevenfold rage And plunge us in the flames? or from above Should intermitted vengeance arm again His red right hand to plague us? what if all Her stores were open'd, and this Firmament Of Hell should spout her Cataracts of Fire Impendent horrors, threatning hideous fall One day upon our heads; while we perhaps Designing or exhorting glorious warr, Caught in a fierie Tempest shall be hurl'd Each on his rock transfixt, the sport and prey Of racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk Under yon boyling Ocean, wrapt in Chains; There to converse with everlasting groans, Unrespited, unpitied, unrepreevd, Ages of hopeless end; this would be worse. Warr therefore, open or conceal'd, alike My voice disswades; for what can force or guile With him, or who deceive his mind, whose eye Views all things at one view? he from heav'ns highth All these our motions vain, sees and derides; Not more Almighty to resist our might Then wise to frustrate all our plots and wiles. Shall we then live thus vile, the Race of Heav'n Thus trampl'd, thus expell'd to suffer here Chains and these Torments? better these then worse By my advice; since fate inevitable Subdues us, and Omnipotent Decree, The Victors will. To suffer, as to doe, Our strength is equal, nor the Law unjust That so ordains: this was at first resolv'd, If we were wise, against so great a foe Contending, and so doubtful what might fall. I laugh, when those who at the Spear are bold And vent'rous, if that fail them, shrink and fear What yet they know must follow, to endure Exile, or ignominy, or bonds, or pain, The sentence of thir Conquerour: This is now Our doom; which if we can sustain and bear, Our Supream Foe in time may much remit His anger, and perhaps thus farr remov'd Not mind us not offending, satisfi'd With what is punish't; whence these raging fires Will slack'n, if his breath stir not thir flames. Our purer essence then will overcome Thir noxious vapour, or enur'd not feel, Or chang'd at length, and to the place conformd In temper and in nature, will receive Familiar the fierce heat, and void of pain; This horror will grow milde, this darkness light, Besides what hope the never-ending flight Of future dayes may bring, what chance, what change Worth waiting, since our present lot appeers For happy though but ill, for ill not worst, If we procure not to our selves more woe. Thus Belial with words cloath'd in reasons garb Counsel'd ignoble ease, and peaceful sloath, Not peace: and after him thus Mammon spake. Either to disinthrone the King of Heav'n We warr, if warr be best, or to regain Our own right lost: him to unthrone we then May hope when everlasting Fathe shall yeild To fickle Chance and Chaos judge the strife: The former vain to hope argues as vain The latter: for what place can be for us Within Heav'ns bound, unless Heav'ns Lord supream We overpower? Suppose he should relent And publish Grace to all, on promise made Of new Subjection; with what eyes could we Stand in his presence humble, and receive Strict Laws impos'd, to celebrate his Throne With warbl'd Hymns, and to his God head sing Forc't Halleluia's; while he Lordly sits Our envied Sovran, and his Altar breathes Ambrosial Odours and Ambrosial Flowers, Our servile offerings. This must be our task In Heav'n this our delight; how wearisom Eternity so spent in worship paid To whom we hate. Let us not then pursue By force impossible, by leave obtain'd Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek Our own good from our selves, and from our own Live to our selves, though in this vast recess, Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easie yoke Of servile Pomp. Our greatness will appeer Then most conspicuous, when great things of small, Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse We can create, and in what place so e're Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain Through labour and indurance. This deep world Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst Thick clouds and dark doth Heav'ns all-ruling Sire Choose to reside, his Glory unobscur'd, And with the Majesty of darkness round Covers his Throne; from whence deep thunders roar Must'ring thir rage, and Heav'n resembles Hell? As he our darkness, cannot we his Light Imitate when we please? This Desart soile Wants not her hidden lustre, Gemms and Gold; Nor want we skill or Art, from whence to raise Magnificence; and what can Heav'n shew more? Our torments also may in length of time Become our Elements, these piercing Fires As soft as now severe, our temper chang'd Into their temper; which must needs remove The sensible of pain. All things invite To peaceful Counsels, and the settl'd State Of order, how in safety best we may Compose our present evils, with regard Of what we are and were, dismissing quite All thoughts of warr: ye have what I advise. He scarce had finisht, when such murmur filld Th' Assembly, as when hollow Rocks retain The sound of blustring winds, which all night long Had rous'd the Sea, now with hoarse cadence lull Sea-faring men orewatcht, whose Bark by chance Or Pinnace anchors in a craggy Bay After the Tempest: Such applause was heard As Mammon ended, and his Sentence pleas'd, Advising peace: for such another Field They dreaded worse then Hell: so much the fear Of Thunder and the Sword of Michael Wrought still within them; and no less desire To found this nether Empire, which might rise By pollicy, and long process of time, In emulation opposite to Heav'n. Which when Beelzebub perceiv'd, then whom, Satan except, none higher sat, with grave Aspect he rose, and in his rising seem'd A Pillar of State; deep on his Front engraven Deliberation sat and public care; And Princely counsel in his face yet shon, Majestic though in ruin: sage he stood With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear The weight of mightiest Monarchies; his look Drew audience and attention still as Night Or Summers Noon-tide air, while thus he spake. Thrones and Imperial Powers, off-spring of heav'n Ethereal Vertues; or these Titles now Must we renounce, and changing stile be call'd Princes of Hell? for so the popular vote Inclines, here to continue, and build up here A growing Empire; doubtless; while we dream, And know not that the King of Heav'n hath doom'd This place our dungeon, not our safe retreat Beyond his Potent arm, to live exempt From Heav'ns high jurisdiction, in new League Banded against his Throne, but to remaine In strictest bondage, though thus far remov'd, Under th' inevitable curb, reserv'd His captive multitude: For he, be sure In heighth or depth, still first and last will Reign Sole King, and of his Kingdom loose no part By our revolt, but over Hell extend His Empire, and with Iron Scepter rule Us here, as with his Golden those in Heav'n. What sit we then projecting peace and Warr? Warr hath determin'd us, and foild with loss Irreparable; tearms of peace yet none Voutsaf't or sought; for what peace will be giv'n To us enslav'd, but custody severe, And stripes, and arbitrary punishment Inflicted? and what peace can we return, But to our power hostility and hate, Untam'd reluctance, and revenge though slow, Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least May reap his conquest, and may least rejoyce In doing what we most in suffering feel? Nor will occasion want, nor shall we need With dangerous expedition to invade Heav'n, whose high walls fear no assault or Siege, Or ambush from the Deep. What if we find Some easier enterprize? There is a place (If ancient and prophetic fame in Heav'n Err not) another World, the happy seat Of some new Race call'd Man, about this time To be created like to us, though less In power and excellence, but favour'd more Of him who rules above; so was his will Pronounc'd among the Gods, and by an Oath, That shook Heav'ns whol circumference, confirm'd. Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn What creatures there inhabit, of what mould, Or substance, how endu'd, and what thir Power, And where thir weakness, how attempted best, By force or suttlety: Though Heav'n be shut, And Heav'ns high Arbitrator sit secure In his own strength, this place may lye expos'd The utmost border of his Kingdom, left To their defence who hold it: here perhaps Som advantagious act may be achiev'd By sudden onset, either with Hell fire To waste his whole Creation, or possess All as our own, and drive as we were driven, The punie habitants, or if not drive, Seduce them to our Party, that thir God May prove thir foe, and with repenting hand Abolish his own works. This would surpass Common revenge, and interrupt his joy In our Confusion, and our joy upraise In his disturbance; when his darling Sons HurI'd headlong to partake with us, shall curse Thir frail Original, and faded bliss, Faded so soon. Advise if this be worth Attempting, or to sit in darkness here Hatching vain Empires. Thus Beelzebub Pleaded his devilish Counsel, first devis'd By Satan, and in part propos'd: for whence, But from the Author of all ill could Spring So deep a malice, to confound the race Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell To mingle and involve, done all to spite The great Creatour? But thir spite still serves His glory to augment. The bold design Pleas'd highly those infernal States, and joy Sparkl'd in all thir eyes; with full assent They vote: whereat his speech he thus renews. Well have ye judg'd, well ended long debate, Synod of Gods, and like to what ye are, Great things resolv'd; which from the lowest deep Will once more lift us up, in spight of Fate, Neerer our ancient Seat; perhaps in view Of those bright confines, whence with neighbouring Arms And opportune excursion we may chance Re-enter Heav'n; or else in some milde Zone Dwell not unvisited of Heav'ns fair Light Secure, and at the brightning Orient beam Purge off this gloom; the soft delicious Air, To heal the scarr of these corrosive Fires Shall breathe her balme. But first whom shall we send In search of this new world, whom shall we find Sufficient? who shall tempt with wandring feet The dark unbottom'd infinite Abyss And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight Upborn with indefatigable wings Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive The happy Ile; what strength, what art can then Suffice, or what evasion bear him safe Through the strict Senteries and Stations thick Of Angels watching round? Here he had need All circumspection, and we now no less Choice in our suffrage; for on whom we send, The weight of all and our last hope relies. This said, he sat; and expectation held His look suspence, awaiting who appeer'd To second, or oppose, or undertake The perilous attempt: but all sat mute, Pondering the danger with deep thoughts; and each In others count'nance read his own dismay Astonisht: none among the choice and prime Of those Heav'n-warring Champions could be found So hardie as to proffer or accept Alone the dreadful voyage; till at last Satan, whom now transcendent glory rais'd Above his fellows, with Monarchal pride Conscious of highest worth, unmov'd thus spake. O Progeny of Heav'n, Empyreal Thrones, With reason hath deep silence and demurr Seis'd us, though undismaid: long is the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light; Our prison strong, this huge convex of Fire, Outrageous to devour, immures us round Ninefold, and gates of burning Adamant Barr'd over us prohibit all egress. These past, if any pass, the void profound Of unessential Night receives him next Wide gaping, and with utter loss of being Threatens him, plung'd in that abortive gulf. If thence he scape into whatever world, Or unknown Region, what remains him less Then unknown dangers and as hard escape. But I should ill become this Throne, O Peers, And this Imperial Sov'ranty, adorn'd With splendor, arm'd with power, if aught propos'd And judg'd of public moment, in the shape Of difficulty or danger could deterr Mee from attempting. Wherefore do I assume These Royalties, and not refuse to Reign, Refusing to accept as great a share Of hazard as of honour, due alike To him who Reigns, and so much to him due Of hazard more, as he above the rest High honourd sits? Go therfore mighty Powers, Terror of Heav'n, though fall'n; intend at home, While here shall be our home, what best may ease The present misery, and render Hell More tollerable; if there be cure or charm To respite or deceive, or slack the pain Of this ill Mansion: intermit no watch Against a wakeful Foe, while I abroad Through all the Coasts of dark destruction seek Deliverance for us all: this enterprize None shall partake with me. Thus saying rose The Monarch, and prevented all reply, Prudent, least from his resolution rais'd Others among the chief might offer now (Certain to be refus'd) what erst they feard; And so refus'd might in opinion stand His Rivals, winning cheap the high repute Which he through hazard huge must earn. But they Dreaded not more th' adventure then his voice Forbidding; and at once with him they rose; Thir rising all at once was as the sound Of Thunder heard remote. Towards him they bend With awful reverence prone; and as a God Extoll him equal to the highest in Heav'n: Nor fail'd they to express how much they prais'd, That for the general safety he despis'd His own: for neither do the Spirits damn'd Loose all thir virtue; least bad men should boast Thir specious deeds on earth, which glory excites, Or clos ambition varnisht o're with zeal. Thus they thir doubtful consultations dark Ended rejoycing in thir matchless Chief: As when from mountain tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the North wind sleeps, o'respread Heav'ns chearful face, the lowring Element Scowls ore the dark'nd lantskip Snow, or showre; If chance the radiant Sun with farewell sweet Extend his ev'ning beam, the fields revive, The birds thir notes renew, and bleating herds Attest thir joy, that hill and valley rings. O shame to men! Devil with Devil damn'd Firm concord holds, men onely disagree Of Creatures rational, though under hope Of heavenly Grace: and God proclaiming peace, Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife Among themselves, and levie cruel warres, Wasting the Earth, each other to destroy: As if (which might induce us to accord) Man had not hellish foes anow besides, That day and night for his destruction waite. The Stygian Counsel thus dissolv'd; and forth In order came the grand infernal Peers, Midst came thir mighty Paramount, and seemd Alone th' Antagonist of Heav'n, nor less Than Hells dread Emperour with pomp Supream, And God-like imitated State; him round A Globe of fierie Seraphim inclos'd With bright imblazonrie, and horrent Arms. Then of thir Session ended they bid cry With Trumpets regal sound the great result: Toward the four winds four speedy Cherubim Put to thir mouths the sounding Alchymie By Haralds voice explain'd: the hollow Abyss Heard farr and wide, and all the host of Hell With deafning shout, return'd them loud acclaim. Thence more at ease thir minds and somwhat rais'd By false presumptuous hope, the ranged powers Disband, and wandring, each his several way Pursues, as inclination or sad choice Leads him perplext, where he may likeliest find Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain The irksom hours, till this great Chief return. Part on the Plain, or in the Air sublime Upon the wing, or in swift Race contend, As at th' Olympian Games or Pythian fields; Part curb thir fierie Steeds, or shun the Goal With rapid wheels, or fronted Brigads form. As when to warn proud Cities warr appears Wag'd in the troubl'd Skie, and Armies rush To Battel in the Clouds, before each Van Prick forth the Aerie Knights, and couch thir Spears Till thickest Legions close; with feats of Arms From either end of Heav'n the welkin burns. Others with vast Typhoean rage more fell Rend up both Rocks and Hills, and ride the Air In whirlwind; Hell scarce holds the wilde uproar. As when Alcides from Oechalia Crown'd With conquest, felt th' envenom'd robe, and tore Through pain up by the roots Thessalian Pines, And Lichas from the top of Oeta threw Into th' Euboic Sea. Others more milde, Retreated in a silent valley, sing With notes Angelical to many a Harp Thir own Heroic deeds and hapless fall By doom of Battel; and complain that Fate Free Vertue should enthrall to Force or Chance. Thir Song was partial, but the harmony (What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?) Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment The thronging audience. In discourse more sweet (For Eloquence the Soul, Song charms the Sense,) Others apart sat on a Hill retir'd, In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate, Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute, And found no end, in wandring mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argu'd then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and Apathie, and glory and shame, Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophie: Yet with a pleasing sorcerie could charm Pain for a while or anguish, and excite Fallacious hope, or arm th' obdured brest With stubborn patience as with triple steel. Another part in Squadrons and gross Bands, On bold adventure to discover wide That dismal world, if any Clime perhaps Might yield them easier habitation, bend Four ways thir flying March, along the Banks Of four infernal Rivers that disgorge Into the burning Lake thir baleful streams; Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate, Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep; Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud Heard on the ruful stream; fierce Phlegeton Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage. Farr off from these a slow and silent stream, Lethe the River of Oblivion roules Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks, Forthwith his former state and being forgets, Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. Beyond this flood a frozen Continent Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual storms Of Whirlwind and dire Hail, which on firm land Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice, A gulf profound as that Serbonian Bog Betwixt Damiata and mount Casius old, Where Armies whole have sunk: the parching Air Burns frore, and cold performs th' effect of Fire. Thither by harpy-footed Furies hail'd, At certain revolutions all the damn'd Are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change Of fierce extreams, extreams by change more fierce, From Beds of raging Fire to starve in Ice Thir soft Ethereal warmth, and there to pine Immovable, infixt, and frozen round, Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire. They ferry over this Lethean Sound Both to and fro, thir sorrow to augment, And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach The tempting stream, with one small drop to loose In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe, All in one moment, and so neer the brink; But Fate withstands, and to oppose th' attempt Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards The Ford, and of it self the water flies All taste of living wight, as once it fled The lip of Tantalus. Thus roving on In confus'd march forlorn, th' adventrous Bands With shuddring horror pale, and eyes agast View'd first thir lamentable lot, and found No rest: through many a dark and drearie Vaile They pass'd, and many a Region dolorous, O're many a Frozen, many a fierie Alpe, Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, Gorgons and Hydra's, and Chimera's dire. Mean while the Adversary of God and Man, Satan with thoughts inflam'd of highest design, Puts on swift wings, and towards the Gates of Hell Explores his solitary flight; som times He scours the right hand coast, som times the left, Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soares Up to the fiery Concave touring high. As when farr off at Sea a Fleet descri'd Hangs in the Clouds, by Aequinoctial Winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the Iles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring Thir spicie Drugs: they on the Trading Flood Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole. So seem'd Farr off the flying Fiend: at last appeer Hell bounds high reaching to the horrid Roof, And thrice threefold the Gates; three folds were Brass, Three Iron, three of Adamantine Rock, Impenetrable, impal'd with circling fire, Yet unconsum'd. Before the Gates there sat On either side a formidable shape; The one seem'd Woman to the waste, and fair, But ended foul in many a scaly fould Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm'd With mortal sting: about her middle round A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark'd With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep, If aught disturb'd thir noyse, into her woomb, And kennel there, yet there still bark'd and howl'd, Within unseen. Farr less abhorrd than these Vex'd Scylla bathing in the Sea that parts Calabria from the hoarce Trinacrian shore: Nor uglier follow the Night-Hag, when call'd In secret, riding through the Air she comes Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland Witches, while the labouring Moon Eclipses at thir charms. The other shape, If shape it might be call'd that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joynt, or limb, Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd, For each seem'd either; black it stood as Night, Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell, And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem'd his head The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on. Satan was now at hand, and from his seat The Monster moving onward came as fast With horrid strides, Hell trembled as he strode. Th' undaunted Fiend what this might be admir'd, Admir'd, not fear'd; God and his Son except, Created thing naught valu'd he nor shun'd; And with disdainful look thus first began. Whence and what art thou, execrable shape, That dar'st, though grim and terrible, advance Thy miscreated Front athwart my way To yonder Gates? through them I mean to pass, That be assur'd, without leave askt of thee: Retire, or taste thy folly, and learn by proof, Hell-born, not to contend with Spirits of Heav'n. To whom the Goblin full of wrauth reply'd, Art thou that Traitor Angel, art thou hee, Who first broke peace in Heav'n and Faith, till then Unbrok'n, and in proud rebellious Arms Drew after him the third part of Heav'ns Sons Conjur'd against the highest, for which both Thou And they outcast from God, are here condemn'd To waste Eternal dayes in woe and pain? And reck'n'st thou thy self with Spirits of Heav'n, Hell-doom'd, and breath'st defiance here and scorn Where I reign King, and to enrage thee more, Thy King and Lord? Back to thy punishment, False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings, Least with a whip of Scorpions I pursue Thy lingring, or with one stroke of this Dart Strange horror seise thee, and pangs unfelt before. So spake the grieslie terrour, and in shape, So speaking and so threatning, grew tenfold More dreadful and deform: on th' other side Incenst with indignation Satan stood Unterrifi'd, and like a Comet burn'd, That fires the length of Ophiucus huge In th' Artick Sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes Pestilence and Warr. Each at the Head Level'd his deadly aime; thir fatall hands No second stroke intend, and such a frown Each cast at th' other, as when two black Clouds With Heav'ns Artillery fraught, come rattling on Over the Caspian, then stand front to front Hov'ring a space, till Winds the signal blow To joyn thir dark Encounter in mid air: So frownd the mighty Combatants, that Hell Grew darker at thir frown, so matcht they stood; For never but once more was either like To meet so great a foe: and now great deeds Had been achiev'd, whereof all Hell had rung, Had not the Snakie Sorceress that sat Fast by Hell Gate, and kept the fatal Key, Ris'n, and with hideous outcry rush'd between. O Father, what intends thy hand, she cry'd, Against thy only Son? What fury O Son, Possesses thee to bend that mortal Dart Against thy Fathers head? and know'st for whom; For him who sits above and laughs the while At thee ordain'd his drudge, to execute What e're his wrath, which he calls justice, bids, His wrath which one day will destroy ye both. She spake, and at her words the hellish Pest Forbore, then these to her Satan return'd: So strange thy outcry, and thy words so strange Thou interposest, that my sudden hand Prevented spares to tell thee yet by deeds What it intends; till first I know of thee, What thing thou art, thus double-form'd, and why In this infernal Vaile first met thou call'st Me Father, and that Fantasm ca11'st my Son? I know thee not, nor ever saw till now Sight more detestable then him and thee. T' whom thus the Portress of Hell Gate reply'd; Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem Now in thine eyes so foul, once deemd so fair In Heav'n, when at th' Assembly, and in sight Of all the Seraphim with thee combin'd In bold conspiracy against Heav'ns King, All on a sudden miserable pain Surpris'd thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzie swumm In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast Threw forth, till on the left side op'ning wide, Likest to thee in shape and count'nance bright, Then shining heav'nly fair, a Goddess arm'd Out of thy head I sprung: amazement seis'd All th' Host of Heav'n; back they recoild affraid At first, and call'd me Sin, and for a Sign Portentous held me; but familiar grown, I pleas'd, and with attractive graces won The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing Becam'st enamour'd, and such joy thou took'st With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd A growing burden. Mean while Warr arose, And fields were fought in Heav'n; wherein remaind (For what could else) to our Almighty Foe Cleer Victory, to our part loss and rout Through all the Empyrean: down they fell Driv'n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven, down Into this Deep, and in the general fall I also; at which time this powerful Key Into my hand was giv'n, with charge to keep These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my op'ning. Pensive here I sat Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. At last this odious offspring whom thou seest Thine own begotten, breaking violent way Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew Transform'd: but he my inbred enemie Forth issu'd, brandishing his fatal Dart Made to destroy: I fled, and cry'd out Death; Hell trembl'd at the hideous Name, and sigh'd From all her Caves, and back resounded Death. I fled, but he pursu'd (though more, it seems, Inflam'd with lust then rage) and swifter far, Mee overtook his mother all dismaid, And in embraces forcible and foule Ingendring with me, of that rape begot These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv'd And hourly born, with sorrow infinite To me, for when they list into the womb That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth A fresh with conscious terrours vex me round, That rest or intermission none I find. Before mine eyes in opposition sits Grim Death my Son and foe, who sets them on, And me his Parent would full soon devour For want of other prey, but that he knows His end with mine involvd; and knows that I Should prove a bitter Morsel, and his bane, When ever that shall be; so Fate pronounc'd. But thou O Father, I forewarn thee, shun His deadly arrow; neither vainly hope To be invulnerable in those bright Arms, Though temper'd heav'nly, for that mortal dint, Save he who reigns above, none can resist. She finish'd, and the suttle Fiend his lore Soon learnd, now milder, and thus answerd smooth. Dear Daughter, since thou claim'st me for thy Sire, And my fair Son here showst me, the dear pledge Of dalliance had with thee in Heav'n, and joys Then sweet, now sad to mention, through dire change Befalln us unforeseen, unthought of, know I come no enemie, but to set free From out this dark and dismal house of pain, Both him and thee, and all the heav'nly Host Of Spirits that in our just pretenses arm'd Fell with us from on high: from them I go This uncouth errand sole, and one for all My self expose, with lonely steps to tread Th' unfounded deep, and through the void immense To search with wandring quest a place foretold Should be, and, by concurring signs, ere now Created vast and round, a place of bliss In the Pourlieues of Heav'n, and therein plac't A race of upstart Creatures, to supply Perhaps our vacant room, though more remov'd, Least Heav'n surcharg'd with potent multitude Might hap to move new broiles: Be this or aught Then this more secret now design'd, I haste To know, and this once known, shall soon return, And bring ye to the place where Thou and Death Shall dwell at ease, and up and down unseen Wing silently the buxom Air, imbalm'd With odours; there ye shall be fed and fill'd Immeasurably, all things shall be your prey. He ceas'd, for both seemd highly pleasd, and Death Grinnd horrible a gastly smile, to hear His famine should be fill'd, and blest his mawe Destin'd to that good hour: no less rejoyc'd His mother bad, and thus bespake her Sire. The key of this infernal Pit by due, And by command of Heav'ns all-powerful King I keep, by him forbidden to unlock These Adamantine Gates; against all force Death ready stands to interpose his dart, Fearless to be o'rmatcht by living might. But what ow I to his commands above Who hates me, and hath hither thrust me down Into this gloom of Tartarus profound, To sit in hateful Office here confin'd, Inhabitant of Heav'n, and heav'nlie-born, Here in perpetual agonie and pain, With terrors and with clamors compasst round Of mine own brood, that on my bowels feed: Thou art my Father, thou my Author, thou My being gav'st me; whom should I obey But thee, whom follow? thou wilt bring me soon To that new world of light and bliss, among The Gods who live at ease, where I shall Reign At thy right hand voluptuous, as beseems Thy daughter and thy darling, without end. Thus saying, from her side the fatal Key, Sad instrument of all our woe, she took; And towards the Gate rouling her bestial train, Forthwith the huge Porcullis high up drew, Which but her self not all the Stygian powers Could once have mov'd; then in the key-hole turns Th' intricate wards, and every Bolt and Bar Of massie Iron or sollid Rock with ease Unfast'ns: on a sudden op'n flie With impetuous recoile and jarring sound Th' infernal dores, and on thir hinges grate Harsh Thunder, that the lowest bottom shook Of Erebus. She op'nd, but to shut Excel'd her power; the Gates wide op'n stood, That with extended wings a Bannerd Host Under spread Ensigns marching might pass through With Horse and Chariots rankt in loose array; So wide they stood, and like a Furnace mouth Cast forth redounding smoak and ruddy flame. Before thir eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark Illimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, & highth, And time and place are lost; where eldest Night And Chaos. Ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise Of endless Warrs, and by confusion stand. For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring Thir embryon Atoms; they around the flag Of each his Faction, in thir several Clanns, Light-arm'd or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow, Swarm populous, unnumber'd as the Sands Of Barca or Cyrene's torrid soil, Levied to side with warring Winds, and poise Thir lighter wings. To whom these most adhere, Hee rules a moment; Chaos Umpire sits, And by decision more imbroiles the fray By which he Reigns: next him high Arbiter Chance governs all. Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds, Into this wild Abyss the warie fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while, Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith He had to cross. Nor was his eare less peal'd With noises loud and ruinous (to compare Great things with small) then when Bellona storms, With all her battering Engines bent to rase Som Capital City; or less then if this frame Of Heav'n were falling, and these Elements In mutinie had from her Axle torn The stedfast Earth. At last his Sail-broad Vannes He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoak Uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a League As in a cloudy Chair ascending rides Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuitie: all unawares Fluttring his pennons vain plumb down he drops Ten thousand fadom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not by ill chance The strong rebuff of som tumultuous cloud Instinct with Fire and Nitre hurried him As many miles aloft: that furie stay'd, Quencht in a Boggie Syrtis, neither Sea, Nor good dry Land: nigh founderd on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying; behoves him now both Oare and Saile. As when a Gryfon through the Wilderness With winged course ore Hill or moarie Dale, Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stelth Had from his wakeful custody purloind The guarded Gold: So eagerly the fiend Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes: At length a universal hubbub wilde Of stunning sounds and voices all confus'd Born through the hollow dark assaults his eare With loudest vehemence: thither he plyes, Undaunted to meet there what ever power Or Spirit of the nethermost Abyss Might in that noise reside, of whom to ask Which way the neerest coast of darkness lyes Bordering on light; when strait behold the Throne Of Chaos, and his dark Pavilion spread Wide on the wasteful Deep; with him Enthron'd Sat Sable-vested Night, eldest of things, The Consort of his Reign; and by them stood Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name Of Demogorgon; Rumor next and Chance, And Tumult and Confusion all imbroild, And Discord with a thousand various mouths. T' whom Satan turning boldly, thus. Ye Powers And Spirits of this nethermost Abyss, Chaos and ancient Night, I come no Spy, With purpose to explore or to disturb The secrets of your Realm, but by constraint Wandring this darksome Desart, as my way, Lies through your spacious Empire up to light, Alone, and without guide, half lost, I seek What readiest path leads where your gloomie bounds Confine with Heav'n; or if som other place From your Dominion won, th' Ethereal King Possesses lately, thither to arrive I travel this profound, direct my course; Directed no mean recompence it brings To your behoof, if I that Region lost, All usurpation thence expell'd, reduce To her original darkness and your sway (Which is my present journey) and once more Erect the Standard there of ancient Night; Yours be th' advantage all, mine the revenge. Thus Satan; and him thus the Anarch old With faultring speech and visage incompos'd Answer'd. I know thee, stranger, who thou art, That mighty leading Angel, who of late Made head against Heav'ns King, though overthrown. I saw and heard, for such a numerous Host Fled not in silence through the frighted deep With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded; and Heav'n Gates Pourd out by millions her victorious Bands Pursuing. I upon my Frontieres here Keep residence; if all I can will serve, That little which is left so to defend, Encroacht on still through our intestine broiles Weakning the Scepter of old Night: first Hell Your dungeon stretching far and wide beneath; Now lately Heaven and Earth, another World Hung ore my Realm, link'd in a golden Chain To that side Heav'n from whence your Legions fell: If that way be your walk, you have not farr; So much the neerer danger; go and speed; Havock and spoil and ruin are my gain. He ceas'd; and Satan staid not to reply, But glad that now his Sea should find a shore, With fresh alacritie and force renew'd Springs upward like a Pyramid of fire Into the wilde expanse, and through the shock Of fighting Elements, on all sides round Environ'd wins his way; harder beset And more endanger'd, then when Argo pass'd Through Bosporus betwixt the justling Rocks: Or when Ulysses on the Larbord shunnd Charybdis, and by th' other whirlpool steard. So he with difficulty and labour hard Mov'd on, with difficulty and labour hee; But hee once past, soon after when man fell, Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain Following his track, such was the will of Heav'n, Pav'd after him a broad and beat'n way Over the dark Abyss, whose boiling Gulf Tamely endur'd a Bridge of wondrous length From Hell continu'd reaching th' utmost Orbe Of this frail World; by which the Spirits perverse With easie intercourse pass to and fro To tempt or punish mortals, except whom God and good Angels guard by special grace. But now at last the sacred influence Of light appears, and from the walls of Heav'n Shoots farr into the bosom of dim Night A glimmering dawn; here Nature first begins Her fardest verge, and Chaos to retire As from her outmost works a brok'd foe With tumult less and with less hostile din, That Satan with less toil, and now with ease Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light And like a weather-beaten Vessel holds Gladly the Port, though Shrouds and Tackle torn; Or in the emptier waste, resembling Air, Weighs his spread wings, at leasure to behold Farr off th' Empyreal Heav'n, extended wide In circuit, undetermind square or round, With Opal Towrs and Battlements adorn'd Of living Saphire, once his native Seat; And fast by hanging in a golden Chain This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon. Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge, Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies.
HAil holy Light, ofspring of Heav'n first-born, Or of th' Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate. Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream, Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun, Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite. Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing, Escap't the Stygian Pool, though long detain'd In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne With other notes then to th' Orphean Lyre I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night, Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to reascend, Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe, And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou Revisit'st not these eyes, that rowle in vain To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn; So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs, Or dim suffusion veild. Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt Cleer Spring, or shadie Grove, or Sunnie Hill, Smit with the love of sacred Song; but chief Thee Sion and the flowrie Brooks beneath That wash thy hallowd feet, and warbling flow, Nightly I visit: nor somtimes forget Those other two equal'd with me in Fate, So were I equal'd with them in renown, Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus Prophets old. Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid Tunes her nocturnal Note. Thus with the Year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose, Or flocks, or heards, or human face divine; But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the chearful wayes of men Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair Presented with a Universal blanc Of Natures works to mee expung'd and ras'd, And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out. So much the rather thou Celestial light Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. Now had the Almighty Father from above, From the pure Empyrean where he sits High Thron'd above all highth, bent down his eye, His own works and their works at once to view: About him all the Sanctities of Heaven Stood thick as Starrs, and from his sight receiv'd Beatitude past utterance; on his right The radiant image of his Glory sat, His onely Son; On Earth he first beheld Our two first Parents, yet the onely two Of mankind, in the happie Garden plac't, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivald love In blissful solitude; he then survey'd Hell and the Gulf between, and Satan there Coasting the wall of Heav'n on this side Night In the dun Air sublime, and ready now To stoop with wearied wings, and willing feet On the bare outside of this World, that seem'd Firm land imbosom'd without Firmament, Uncertain which, in Ocean or in Air. Him God beholding from his prospect high, Wherein past, present, future he beholds, Thus to his onely Son foreseeing spake. Onely begotten Son, seest thou what rage Transports our adversarie, whom no bounds Prescrib'd, no barrs of Hell, nor all the chains Heapt on him there, nor yet the main Abyss Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems On desparate reveng, that shall redound Upon his own rebellious head. And now Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way Not farr off Heav'n, in the Precincts of light, Directly towards the new created World, And Man there plac't, with purpose to assay If him by force he can destroy, or worse, By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert For man will hark'n to his glozing lyes, And easily transgress the sole Command, Sole pledge of his obedience: So will fall, Hee and his faithless Progenie: whose fault? Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of mee All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all th' Ethereal Powers And Spirits, both them who stood and them who faild; Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have givn sincere Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love, Where onely what they needs must do, appeard, Not what they would? what praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid, When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice) Useless and vain, of freedom both despoild, Made passive both, had servd necessitie, Not mee. They therefore as to right belongd, So were created, nor can justly accuse Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate, As if predestination over-rul'd Thir will, dispos'd by absolute Decree Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Thir own revolt, not I: if I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less prov'd certain unforeknown. So without least impulse or shadow of Fate, Or aught by me immutablie foreseen, They trespass, Authors to themselves in all Both what they judge and what they choose; for so I formd them free, and free they must remain, Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordain'd Thir freedom, they themselves ordain'd thir fall. The first sort by thir own suggestion fell, Self-tempted, self-deprav'd: Man falls deceiv'd By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace, The other none: in Mercy and Justice both, Through Heav'n and Earth, so shall my glorie excel, But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine. Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance fill'd All Heav'n, and in the blessed Spirits elect Sense of new joy ineffable diffus'd: Beyond compare the Son of God was seen Most glorious, in him all his Father shon Substantially express'd, and in his face Divine compassion visibly appeerd, Love without end, and without measure Grace, Which uttering thus he to his Father spake. O Father, gracious was that word which clos'd Thy sovran sentence, that Man should find grace; For which both Heav'n and Earth shall high extoll Thy praises, with th' innumerable sound Of Hymns and sacred Songs, wherewith thy Throne Encompass'd shall resound thee ever blest. For should Man finally be lost, should Man Thy creature late so lov'd, thy youngest Son Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joynd With his own folly? that be from thee farr, That farr be from thee, Father, who art Judg Of all things made, and judgest onely right. Or shall the Adversarie thus obtain His end, and frustrate thine, shall he fulfill His malice, and thy goodness bring to naught, Or proud return though to his heavier doom, Yet with revenge accomplish't and to Hell Draw after him the whole Race of mankind, By him corrupted? or wilt thou thy self Abolish thy Creation, and unmake, For him, what for thy glorie thou hast made? So should thy goodness and thy greatness both Be questiond and blaspheam'd without defence. To whom the great Creatour thus reply'd. O Son, in whom my Soul hath chief delight, Son of my bosom, Son who art alone My word, my wisdom, and effectual might, All hast thou spok'n as my thoughts are, all As my Eternal purpose hath decreed: Man shall not quite be lost, but sav'd who will, Yet not of will in him, but grace in me Freely voutsaft; once more I will renew His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthrall'd By sin to foul exorbitant desires; Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand On even ground against his mortal foe, By me upheld, that he may know how frail His fall'n condition is, and to me ow All his deliv'rance, and to none but me. Some I have chosen of peculiar grace Elect above the rest; so is my will: The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warnd Thir sinful state, and to appease betimes Th' incensed Deitie, while offerd grace Invites; for I will cleer thir senses dark, What may sufflce, and soft'n stonie hearts To pray, repent, and bring obedience due. To Prayer, repentance, and obedience due, Though but endevord with sincere intent, Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut. And I will place within them as a guide My Umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear, Light after light well us'd they shall attain, And to the end persisting, safe arrive. This my long sufferance and my day of grace They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste; But hard be hard'nd, blind be blinded more, That they may stumble on, and deeper fall; And none but such from mercy I exclude. But yet all is not don; Man disobeying, Disloyal breaks his fealtie, and sinns Against the high Supremacie of Heav'n, Affecting God-head, and so loosing all, To expiate his Treason hath naught left, But to destruction sacred and devote, He with his whole posteritie must dye, Dye hee or Justice must; unless for him Som other able, and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death. Say Heav'nly powers, where shall we find such love, Which of ye will be mortal to redeem Mans mortal crime, and just th' unjust to save, Dwels in all Heaven charitie so deare? He ask'd, but all the Heav'nly Quire stood mute, And silence was in Heav'n: on mans behalf Patron or Intercessor none appeerd, Much less that durst upon his own head draw The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set. And now without redemption all mankind Must have bin lost, adjudg'd to Death and Hell By doom severe, had not the Son of God, In whom the fulness dwels of love divine, His dearest mediation thus renewd. Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace; And shall grace not find means, that finds her way, The speediest of thy winged messengers, To visit all thy creatures, and to all Comes unprevented, unimplor'd, unsought, Happie for man, so coming; he her aide Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost; Attonement for himself or offering meet, Indebted and undon, hath none to bring: Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life I offer, on mee let thine anger fall; Account mee man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glorie next to thee Freely put off, and for him lastly dye Well pleas'd, on me let Death wreck all his rage; Under his gloomie power I shall not long Lie vanquisht; thou hast givn me to possess Life in my self for ever, by thee I live, Though now to Death I yield, and am his due All that of me can die, yet that debt paid, Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsom grave His prey, nor suffer my unspotted Soule For ever with corruption there to dwell; But I shall rise Victorious, and subdue My vanquisher, spoild of his vanted spoile; Death his deaths wound shall then receive, and stoop Inglorious, of his mortall sting disarm'd. I through the ample Air in Triumph high Shall lead Hell Captive maugre Hell, and show The powers of darkness bound. Thou at the sight Pleas'd, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile, While by thee rais'd I ruin all my Foes, Death last, and with his Carcass glut the Grave: Then with the multitude of my redeemd Shall enter Heaven long absent, and returne, Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud Of anger shall remain, but peace assur'd, And reconcilement; wrauth shall be no more Thenceforth, but in thy presence joy entire. His words here ended, but his meek aspect Silent yet spake, and breath'd immortal love To mortal men, above which only shon Filial obedience: as a sacrifice Glad to be offer'd, he attends the will Of his great Father. Admiration seis'd All Heav'n, what this might mean, and whither tend Wondring; but soon th' Almighty thus reply'd: O thou in Heav'n and Earth the only peace Found out for mankind under wrauth, O thou My sole complacence! well thou know'st how dear, To me are all my works, nor Man the least Though last created, that for him I spare Thee from my bosom and right hand, to save, By loosing thee a while, the whole Race lost. Thou therefore whom thou only canst redeem, Thir Nature also to thy Nature joyn; And be thy self Man among men on Earth, Made flesh, when time shall be, of Virgin seed, By wondrous birth: Be thou in Adams room The Head of all mankind, though Adams Son. As in him perish all men, so in thee As from a second root shall be restor'd, As many as are restor'd, without thee none. His crime makes guiltie all his Sons, thy merit Imputed shall absolve them who renounce Thir own both righteous and unrighteous deeds, And live in thee transplanted, and from thee Receive new life. So Man, as is most just, Shall satisfie for Man, be judg'd and die, And dying rise, and rising with him raise His Brethren, ransomd with his own dear life. So Heav'nly love shall outdoo Hellish hate Giving to death, and dying to redeeme, So dearly to redeem what Hellish hate So easily destroy'd, and still destroyes In those who, when they may, accept not grace. Nor shalt thou by descending to assume Mans Nature, less'n or degrade thine owne. Because thou hast, though Thron'd in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying God-like fruition, quitted all to save A World from utter loss, and hast been found By Merit more then Birthright Son of God, Found worthiest to be so by being Good, Farr more then Great or High; because in thee Love hath abounded more then Glory abounds, Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne; Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man, Anointed universal King, all Power I give thee, reign for ever, and assume Thy Merits; under thee as Head Supream Thrones, Princedoms, Powers, Dominions I reduce: All knees to thee shall bow, of them that bide In Heaven, or Earth, or under Earth in Hell; When thou attended gloriously from Heav'n Shalt in the Sky appeer, and from thee send The summoning Arch-Angels to proclaime Thy dread Tribunal: forthwith from all Windes The living, and forthwith the cited dead Of all past Ages to the general Doom Shall hast'n, such a peal shall rouse thir sleep. Then all thy Saints assembl'd, thou shalt judge Bad men and Angels, they arraignd shall sink Beneath thy Sentence; Hell, her numbers full, Thenceforth shall be for ever shut. Mean while The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring New Heav'n and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell, And after all thir tribulations long See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds, With Joy and Love triumphing, and fair Truth. Then thou thy regal Scepter shalt lay by, For regal Scepter then no more shall need, God shall be All in All. But all ye Gods, Adore him, who to compass all this dies, Adore the Son, and honour him as mee. No sooner had th' Almighty ceas't, but all The multitude of Angels with a shout Loud as from numbers without number, sweet As from blest voices, uttering joy, Heav'n rung With Jubilee, and loud Hosanna's filld Th' eternal Regions: lowly reverent Towards either Throne they bow, and to the ground With solemn adoration down they cast Thir Crowns inwove with Amarant and Gold, Immortal Amarant, a Flour which once In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life Began to bloom, but soon for mans offence To Heav'n remov'd where first it grew, there grows, And flours aloft shading the Fount of Life, And where the river of Bliss through midst of Heavn Rowls o're Elisian Flours her Amber stream; With these that never fade the Spirits elect Bind thir resplendent locks inwreath'd with beams, Now in loose Garlands thick thrown off, the bright Pavement that like a Sea of Jasper shon Impurpl'd with Celestial Roses smil'd. Then Crown'd again thir gold'n Harps they took, Harps ever tun'd, that glittering by thir side Like Quivers hung, and with Praeamble sweet Of charming symphonie they introduce Thir sacred Song, and waken raptures high; No voice exempt, no voice but well could joine Melodious part, such concord is in Heav'n. Thee Father first they sung Omnipotent, Immutable, Immortal, Infinite, Eternal King; thee Author of all being, Fountain of Light, thy self invisible Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st Thron'd inaccessible, but when thou shad'st The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud Drawn round about thee like a radiant Shrine, Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer, Yet dazle Heav'n, that brightest Seraphim Approach not, but with both wings veil thir eyes. Thee next they sang of all Creation first, Begotten Son, Divine Similitude, In whose conspicuous count'nance, without cloud Made visible, th' Almighty Father shines, Whom else no Creature can behold; on thee Impresst the effulgence of his Glorie abides, Transfus'd on thee his ample Spirit rests. Hee Heav'n of Heavens and all the Powers therein By thee created, and by thee threw down Th' aspiring Dominations: thou that day Thy Fathers dreadful Thunder didst not spare, Nor stop thy flaming Chariot wheels, that shook Heav'ns everlasting Frame, while o're the necks Thou drov'st of warring Angels disarraid. Back from pursuit thy Powers with loud acclaime Thee only extoll'd, Son of thy Fathers might, To execute fierce vengeance on his foes, Not so on Man; him through their malice fall'n, Father of Mercie and Grace, thou didst not doome So strictly, but much more to pitie encline: No sooner did thy dear and onely Son Perceive thee purpos'd not to doom frail Man So strictly, but much more to pitie enclin'd, He to appease thy wrauth, and end the strife Of Mercy and justice in thy face discern'd, Regardless of the Bliss wherein hee sat Second to thee, offerd himself to die For mans offence. O unexampl'd love, Love no where to be found less then Divine! Hail Son of God, Saviour of Men, thy Name Shall be the copious matter of my Song Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise Forget, nor from thy Fathers praise disjoine. Thus they in Heav'n, above the starry Sphear, Thir happie hours in joy and hymning spent. Mean while upon the firm opacous Globe Of this round World, whose first convex divides The luminous inferior Orbs, enclos'd From Chaos and th' inroad of Darkness old, Satan alighted walks: a Globe farr off It seem'd, now seems a boundless Continent Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night Starless expos'd, and ever-threatning storms Of Chaos blustring round, inclement skie; Save on that side which from the wall of Heav'n Though distant farr som small reflection gaines Of glimmering air less vext with tempest loud: Here walk'd the Fiend at large in spacious field. As when a Vultur on Imaus bred, Whose snowie ridge the roving Tartar bounds, Dislodging from a Region scarce of prey To gorge the flesh of Lambs or yeanling Kids On Hills where Flocks are fed, flies toward the Springs Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams; But in his way lights on the barren Plaines Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With Sails and Wind thir canie Waggons light: So on this windie Sea of Land, the Fiend Walk'd up and down alone bent on his prey, Alone, for other Creature in this place Living or liveless to be found was none, None yet, but store hereafter from the earth Up hither like Aereal vapours flew Of all things transitorie and vain, when Sin With vanity had filld the works of men: Both all things vain, and all who in vain things Built thir fond hopes of Glorie or lasting fame, Or happiness in this or th' other life; All who have thir reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful Superstition and blind Zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, emptie as thir deeds; All th, unaccomplisht works of Natures hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixt, Dissolvd on Earth, fleet hither, and in vain, Till final dissolution, wander here, Not in the neighbouring Moon, as some have dreamd; Those argent Fields more likely habitants, Translated Saints, or middle Spirits hold Betwixt th' Angelical and Human kinde: Hither of ill-joynd Sons and Daughters born First from the ancient World those Giants came With many a vain exploit, though then renownd: The builders next of Babel on the Plain Of Sennaar, and still with vain designe New Babels, had they wherewithall, would build: Others came single; he who to be deemd A God, leap'd fondly into Aetna flames, Empedocles, and hee who to enjoy Plato's Elysium, leap'd into the Sea, Cleombrotus, and many more too long, Embryo's and Idiots, Eremits and Friers White, Black and Grey, with all thir trumperie. Here Pilgrims roam, that stray'd so farr to seek In Golgotha him dead, who lives in Heav'n; And they who to be sure of Paradise Dying put on the weeds of Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguis'd; They pass the Planets seven, and pass the fixt, And that Crystalline Sphear whose ballance weighs The Trepidation talkt, and that first mov'd; And now Saint Peter at Heav'ns Wicket seems To wait them with his Keys, and now at foot Of Heav'ns ascent they lift thir Feet, when loe A violent cross wind from either Coast Blows them transverse ten thousand Leagues awry Into the devious Air; then might ye see Cowles, Hoods and Habits with thir wearers tost And flutterd into Raggs, then Reliques, Beads, Indulgences, Dispenses, Pardons, Bulls, The sport of Winds: all these upwhirld aloft Fly o're the backside of the World farr off Into a Limbo large and broad, since calld The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown Long after, now unpeopl'd, and untrod; All this dark Globe the Fiend found as he pass'd, And long he wanderd, till at last a gleame Of dawning light turnd thither-ward in haste His travell'd steps; farr distant he descries Ascending by degrees magnificent Up to the wall of Heaven a Structure high, At top whereof, but farr more rich appeerd The work as of a Kingly Palace Gate With Frontispice of Diamond and Gold Imbellisht, thick with sparkling orient Gemmes The Portal shon, inimitable on Earth By Model, or by shading Pencil drawn. The Stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw Angels ascending and descending, bands Of Guardians bright, when he from Esau fled To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz, Dreaming by night under the open Skie, And waking cri'd, This is the Gate of Heav'n. Each Stair mysteriously was meant, nor stood There alwayes, but drawn up to Heav'n somtimes Viewless, and underneath a bright Sea flow'd Of Jasper, or of liquid Pearle, whereon Who after came from Earth, sayling arriv'd, Wafted by Angels, or flew o're the Lake Rapt in a Chariot drawn by fiery Steeds. The Stairs were then let down, whether to dare The Fiend by easie ascent, or aggravate His sad exclusion from the dores of Bliss. Direct against which op'nd from beneath, Just o're the blissful seat of Paradise, A passage down to th' Earth, a passage wide, Wider by farr then that of after-times Over Mount Sion, and, though that were large, Over the Promis'd Land to God so dear, By which, to visit oft those happy Tribes, On high behests his Angels to and fro Pass'd frequent, and his eye with choice regard From Paneas the fount of Jordans flood To Beersaba, where the Holy Land Borders on Aegypt and the Arabian shoare; So wide the op'ning seemd, where bounds were set To darkness, such as bound the Ocean wave. Satan from hence now on the lower stair That scal'd by steps of Gold to Heav'n Gate Looks down with wonder at the sudden view Of all this World at once. As when a Scout Through dark and desart wayes with peril gone All night; at last by break of chearful dawne Obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill, Which to his eye discovers unaware The goodly prospect of some forein land First-seen, or some renown'd Metropolis With glistering Spires and Pinnacles adornd, Which now the Rising Sun guilds with his beams. Such wonder seis'd, though after Heaven seen, The Spirit maligne, but much more envy seis'd At sight of all this World beheld so faire. Round he surveys, and well might, where he stood So high above the circling Canopie Of Nights extended shade; from Eastern Point Of Libra to the fleecie Starr that bears Andromeda farr off Atlantic Seas Beyond th' Horizon; then from Pole to Pole He views in bredth, and without longer pause Down right into the Worlds first Region throws His flight precipitant, and windes with ease Through the pure marble Air his oblique way Amongst innumerable Starrs, that shon Stars distant, but nigh hand seemd other Worlds, Or other Worlds they seemd, or happy Iles, Like those Hesperian Gardens fam'd of old, Fortunate Fields, and Groves and flourie Vales, Thrice happy Iles, but who dwelt happy there He stayd not to enquire: above them all The golden Sun in splendor likest Heaven Allur'd his eye: Thither his course he bends Through the calm Firmament; but up or downe By center, or eccentric, hard to tell, Or Longitude, where the great Luminarie Alooff the vulgar Constellations thick, That from his Lordly eye keep distance due, Dispenses Light from farr; they as they move Thir Starry dance in numbers that compute Days, months, & years, towards his all-chearing Lamp Turn swift thir various motions, or are turnd By his Magnetic beam, that gently warms The Univers, and to each inward part With gentle penetration, though unseen, Shoots invisible vertue even to the deep: So wondrously was set his Station bright. There lands the Fiend, a spot like which perhaps Astronomer in the Sun's lucent Orbe Through his glaz'd Optic Tube yet never saw. The place he found beyond expression bright, Compar'd with aught on Earth, Medal or Stone; Not all parts like, but all alike informd With radiant light, as glowing Iron with fire; If mettal, part seemd Gold, part Silver cleer; If stone, Carbuncle most or Chrysolite, Rubie or Topaz, to the Twelve that shon In Aarons Brest-plate, and a stone besides Imagind rather oft then elsewhere seen, That stone, or like to that which here below Philosophers in vain so long have sought, In vain, though by thir powerful Art they binde Volatil Hermes, and call up unbound In various shapes old Proteus from the Sea, Draind through a Limbec to his Native forme. What wonder then if fields and regions here Breathe forth Elixir pure, and Rivers run Potable Gold, when with one vertuous touch Th' Arch-chimic Sun so farr from us remote Produces with Terrestrial Humor mixt Here in the dark so many precious things Of colour glorious and effect so rare? Here matter new to gaze the Devil met Undazl'd, farr and wide his eye commands, For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade, But all Sun-shine, as when his Beams at Noon Culminate from th' Aequator, as they now Shot upward still direct, whence no way round Shadow from body opaque can fall, and the Aire, No where so cleer, sharp'nd his visual ray To objects distant farr, whereby he soon Saw within kenn a glorious Angel stand, The same whom John saw also in the Sun: His back was turnd, but not his brightness hid; Of beaming sunnie Raies, a golden tiar Circl'd his Head, nor less his Locks behind Illustrious on his Shoulders fledge with wings Lay waving round; on som great charge imploy'd He seemd, or fixt in cogitation deep. Glad was the Spirit impure as now in hope To find who might direct his wandring flight To Paradise the happie seat of Man, His journies end and our beginning woe. But first he casts to change his proper shape, Which else might work him danger or delay: And now a stripling Cherube he appeers, Not of the prime, yet such as in his face Youth smil'd Celestial, and to every Limb Sutable grace diffus'd, so well he feignd; Under a Coronet his flowing haire In curles on either cheek plaid, wings he wore Of many a colourd plume sprinkl'd with Gold, His habit fit for speed succinct, and held Before his decent steps a Silver wand. He drew not nigh unheard, the Angel bright, Ere he drew nigh, his radiant visage turnd, Admonisht by his ear, and strait was known Th' Arch-Angel Uriel, one of the seav'n Who in Gods presence, neerest to his Throne Stand ready at command, and are his Eyes That run through all the Heav'ns, or down to th' Earth Bear his swift errands over moist and dry, O're Sea and Land: him Satan thus accostes; Uriel, for thou of those seav'n Spirits that stand In sight of God's high Throne, gloriously bright, The first art wont his great authentic will Interpreter through highest Heav'n to bring, Where all his Sons thy Embassie attend; And here art likeliest by supream decree Like honour to obtain, and as his Eye To visit oft this new Creation round; Unspeakable desire to see, and know All these his wondrous works, but chiefly Man, His chief delight and favour, him for whom All these his works so wondrous he ordaind, Hath brought me from the Quires of Cherubim Alone thus wandring. Brightest Seraph tell In which of all these shining Orbes hath Man His fixed seat, or fixed seat hath none, But all these shining Orbes his choice to dwell; That I may find him, and with secret gaze, Or open admiration him behold On whom the great Creator hath bestowd Worlds, and on whom hath all these graces powrd; That both in him and all things, as is meet, The Universal Maker we may praise; Who justly hath drivn out his Rebell Foes To deepest Hell, and to repair that loss Created this new happie Race of Men To serve him better: wise are all his wayes. So spake the false dissembler unperceivd; For neither Man nor Angel can discern Hypocrisie, the onely evil that walks Invisible, except to God alone, By his permissive will, through Heav'n and Earth: And oft though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps At wisdoms Gate, and to simplicitie Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill Where no ill seems: Which now for once beguil'd Uriel, though Regent of the Sun, and held The sharpest sighted Spirit of all in Heav'n; Who to the fraudulent Impostor foule In his uprightness answer thus returnd. Fair Angel, thy desire which tends to know The works of God, thereby to glorifie The great Work-Maister, leads to no excess That reaches blame, but rather merits praise The more it seems excess, that led thee hither From thy Empyreal Mansion thus alone, To witness with thine eyes what some perhaps Contented with report hear onely in heav'n: For wonderful indeed are all his works, Pleasant to know, and worthiest to be all Had in remembrance alwayes with delight; But what created mind can comprehend Thir number, or the wisdom infinite That brought them forth, but hid thir causes deep. I saw when at his Word the formless Mass, This worlds material mould, came to a heap: Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar Stood rul'd, stood vast infinitude confin'd; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shon, and order from disorder sprung: Swift to thir several Quarters hasted then The cumbrous Elements, Earth, Flood, Aire, Fire, And this Ethereal quintessence of Heav'n Flew upward, spirited with various forms, That rowld orbicular, and turnd to Starrs Numberless, as thou seest, and how they move; Each had his place appointed, each his course, The rest in circuit walles this Universe. Look downward on that Globe whose hither side With light from hence, though but reflected, shines; That place is Earth the seat of Man, that light His day, which else as th' other Hemisphere Night would invade, but there the neighbouring Moon (So call that opposite fair Starr) her aide Timely interposes, and her monthly round Still ending, still renewing, through mid Heav'n; With borrowd light her countenance triform Hence fills and empties to enlighten th' Earth, And in her pale dominion checks the night. That spot to which I point is Paradise, Adams abode, those loftie shades his Bowre. Thy way thou canst not miss, me mine requires. Thus said, he turnd, and Satan bowing low, As to superior Spirits is wont in Heaven, Where honour due and reverence none neglects, Took leave, and toward the coast of Earth beneath, Down from th' Ecliptic, sped with hop'd success, Throws his steep flight in many an Aerie wheele, Nor staid, till on Niphates top he lights.
O For that warning voice, which he who saw Th' Apocalyps, heard cry in Heaven aloud, Then when the Dragon, put to second rout, Came furious down to be reveng'd on men, Wo to the inhabitants on Earth! that now, While time was, our first-Parents had bin warnd The coming of thir secret foe, and scap'd Haply so scap'd his mortal snare; for now Satan, now first inflam'd with rage, came down, The Tempter ere th' Accuser of man-kind, To wreck on innocent frail man his loss Of that first Battel, and his flight to Hell: Yet not rejoycing in his speed, though bold, Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast, Begins his dire attempt, which nigh the birth Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest, And like a devillish Engine back recoiles Upon himself; horror and doubt distract His troubl'd thoughts, and from the bottom stirr The Hell within him, for within him Hell He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more then from himself can fly By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue. Sometimes towards Eden which now in his view Lay pleasant, his grievd look he fixes sad, Sometimes towards Heav'n and the full-blazing Sun, Which now sat high in his Meridian Towre: Then much revolving, thus in sighs began. O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd, Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call, But with no friendly voice, and add thy name O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare; Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King: Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return From me, whom he created what I was In that bright eminence, and with his good Upbraided none; nor was his service hard. What could be less then to afford him praise, The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks, How due! yet all his good prov'd ill in me, And wrought but malice; lifted up so high I sdeind subjection, and thought one step higher Would set me highest, and in a moment quit The debt immense of endless gratitude, So burthensome still paying, still to ow; Forgetful what from him I still receivd, And understood not that a grateful mind By owing owes not, but still pays, at once Indebted and dischargd; what burden then? O had his powerful Destiny ordaind Me some inferiour Angel, I had stood Then happie; no unbounded hope had rais'd Ambition. Yet why not? som other Power As great might have aspir'd, and me though mean Drawn to his part; but other Powers as great Fell not, but stand unshak'n, from within Or from without, to all temptations arm'd. Hadst thou the same free Will and Power to stand? Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse, But Heav'ns free Love dealt equally to all? Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate, To me alike, it deals eternal woe. Nay curs'd be thou; since against his thy will Chose freely what it now so justly rues. Me miserable! which way shall I flie Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire? Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threatning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n. O then at last relent: is there no place Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left? None left but by submission; and that word Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame Among the spirits beneath, whom I seduc'd With other promises and other vaunts Then to submit, boasting I could subdue Th' Omnipotent. Ay me, they little know How dearly I abide that boast so vaine, Under what torments inwardly I groane; While they adore me on the Throne of Hell, With Diadem and Scepter high advanc'd The lower still I fall, onely Supream In miserie; such joy Ambition findes. But say I could repent and could obtaine By Act of Grace my former state; how soon Would higth recal high thoughts, how soon unsay What feign'd submission swore: ease would recant Vows made in pain, as violent and void. For never can true reconcilement grow Where wounds of deadly hate have peirc'd so deep: Which would but lead me to a worse relapse And heavier fall: so should I purchase deare Short intermission bought with double smart. This knows my punisher; therefore as farr From granting hee, as I from begging peace: All hope excluded thus, behold in stead Of us out-cast, exil'd, his new delight, Mankind created, and for him this World. So farwel Hope, and with Hope farwel Fear, Farwel Remorse: all Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least Divided Empire with Heav'ns King I hold By thee, and more then half perhaps will reigne; As Man ere long, and this new World shall know. Thus while he spake, each passion dimm'd his face Thrice chang'd with pale, ire, envie and despair, Which marrd his borrow'd visage, and betraid Him counterfet, if any eye beheld. For heav'nly mindes from such distempers foule Are ever cleer. Whereof hee soon aware, Each perturbation smooth'd with outward calme, Artificer of fraud; and was the first That practisd falshood under saintly shew, Deep malice to conceale, couch't with revenge: Yet not anough had practisd to deceive Uriel once warnd; whose eye pursu'd him down The way he went, and on th' Assyrian mount Saw him disfigur'd, more then could befall Spirit of happie sort: his gestures fierce He markd and mad demeanour, then alone, As he suppos'd, all unobserv'd, unseen. So on he fares, and to the border comes, Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, Crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound the champain head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairie sides With thicket overgrown, grottesque and wilde, Access deni'd; and over head up grew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, Cedar, and Pine, and Firr, and branching Palm, A Silvan Scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woodie Theatre Of stateliest view. Yet higher then thir tops The verdurous wall of paradise up sprung: Which to our general Sire gave prospect large Into his neather Empire neighbouring round. And higher then that Wall a circling row Of goodliest Trees loaden with fairest Fruit, Blossoms and Fruits at once of golden hue Appeerd, with gay enameld colours mixt: On which the Sun more glad impress'd his beams Then in fair Evening Cloud, or humid Bow, When God hath showrd the earth; so lovely seemd That Lantskip: And of pure now purer aire Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires Vernal delight and joy, able to drive All sadness but despair: now gentle gales Fanning thir odoriferous wings dispense Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole Those balmie spoiles. As when to them who saile Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambic, off at Sea North-East windes blow Sabean Odours from the spicie shoare Of Arabie the blest, with such delay Well pleas'd they slack thir course, and many a League Chear'd with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles. So entertaind those odorous sweets the Fiend Who came thir bane, though with them better pleas'd Then Asmodeus with the fishie fume, That drove him, though enamourd, from the Spouse Of Tobits Son, and with a vengeance sent From Media post to Aegypt, there fast bound. Now to th' ascent of that steep savage Hill Satan had journied on, pensive and slow; But further way found none, so thick entwin'd, As one continu'd brake, the undergrowth Of shrubs and tangling bushes had perplext All path of Man or Beast that past that way: One Gate there only was, and that look'd East On th' other side: which when th' arch-fellon saw Due entrance he disdaind, and in contempt, At one slight bound high over leap'd all bound Of Hill or highest Wall, and sheer within Lights on his feet. As when a prowling Wolfe, Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey, Watching where Shepherds pen thir Flocks at eeve In hurdl'd Cotes amid the field secure, Leaps o're the fence with ease into the Fould:. Or as a Thief bent to unhoord the cash Of some rich Burgher, whose substantial dores, Cross-barrd and bolted fast, fear no assault, In at the window climbs, or o're the tiles; So clomb this first grand Thief into Gods Fould: So since into his Church lewd Hirelings climbe. Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of Life, The middle Tree and highest there that grew, Sat like a Cormorant; yet not true Life Thereby regaind, but sat devising Death To them who liv'd; nor on the vertue thought Of that life-giving Plant, but only us'd For prospect, what well us'd had bin the pledge Of immortality. So little knows Any, but God alone, to value right The good before him, but perverts best things To worst abuse, or to thir meanest use. Beneath him with new wonder now he views To all delight of human sense expos'd In narrow room Natures whole wealth, yea more, A Heav'n on Earth, for blissful Paradise Of God the Garden was, by him in the East Of Eden planted; Eden stretchd her Line From Auran Eastward to the Royal Towrs Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian Kings, Or where the Sons of Eden long before Dwelt in Telassar: in this pleasant soile His farr more pleasant Garden God ordaind; Out of the fertil ground he caus'd to grow All Trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste; And all amid them stood the Tree of Life, High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit Of vegetable Gold; and next to Life Our Death the Tree of knowledge grew fast by, Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill. Southward through Eden went a River large, Nor chang'd his course, but through the shaggie hill Pass'd underneath ingulft, for God had thrown That Mountain as his Garden mould high rais'd Upon the rapid current, which through veins Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up drawn, Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill Waterd the Garden; thence united fell Down the steep glade, and met the neather Flood, Which from his darksom passage now appeers, And now divided into four main Streams, Runs divers, wandring many a famous Realme And Country whereof here needs no account, But rather to tell how, if Art could tell, How from that Saphire Fount the crisped Brooks, Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold, With mazie error under pendant shades Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon Powrd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine, Both where the morning Sun first warmly smote The open field, and where the unpierc't shade lmbround the noontide Bowrs: Thus was this place, A happy rural seat of various view; Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme, Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true, If true, here only, and of delicious taste: Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd, Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap Of som irriguous Valley spred her store, Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose: Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves Of coole recess, o're which the mantling vine Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake, That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crownd, Her chrystal mirror holds, unite thir streams. The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires, Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance Led on th' Eternal Spring. Not that faire field Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd Castalian Spring, might with this Paradise Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian Ile Girt with the River Triton, where old Cham, Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove, Hid Amalthea and her Florid Son Young Bacchus from his Stepdame Rhea's eye; Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard, Mount Amara, though this by som suppos'd True Paradise under the Ethiop Line By Nilus head, enclosd with shining Rock, A whole days journy high, but wide remote From this Assyrian Garden, where the Fiend Saw undelighted all delight, all kind Of living Creatures new to sight and strange: Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native Honour clad In naked Majestie seemd Lords of all, And worthie seemd, for in thir looks Divine The image of thir glorious Maker shon, Truth, wisdome, Sanctitude severe and pure, Severe but in true filial freedom plac't; Whence true autoritie in men; though both Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd; For contemplation hee and valour formd, For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace, Hee for God only, shee for God in him: His fair large Front and Eye sublime declar'd Absolute rule; and Hyacinthin Locks Round from his parted forelock manly hung Clustring, but not beneath his shoulders broad: Shee as a vail down to the slender waste Her unadorned golden tresses wore Dissheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav'd As the Vine curles her tendrils, which impli'd Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway, And by her yielded, by him best receivd, Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, And sweet reluctant amorous delay. Nor those mysterious parts were then conceald, Then was not guiltie shame, dishonest shame Of natures works, honor dishonorable, Sin-bred, how have ye troubl'd all mankind With shews instead, meer shews of seeming pure, And banisht from mans life his happiest life, Simplicitie and spotless innocence. So passd they naked on, nor shund the sight Of God or Angel, for they thought no ill: So hand in hand they passd, the lovliest pair That ever since in loves imbraces met, Adam the goodliest man of men since borne His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters Eve. Under a tuft of shade that on a green Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side They sat them down, and after no more toil Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd To recommend coole Zephyr, and made ease More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell, Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes Yielded them, side-long as they sat recline On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours: The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream; Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League, Alone as they. About them frisking playd All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den; Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards, Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant To make them mirth us'd all his might, and wreathd His Lithe Proboscis; close the Serpent sly Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine His breaded train, and of his fatal guile Gave proof unheeded; others on the grass Coucht, and now fild with pasture gazing sat, Or Bedward ruminating: for the Sun Declin'd was hasting now with prone carreer To th' Ocean Iles, and in th' ascending Scale Of Heav'n the Starrs that usher Evening rose: When Satan still in gaze, as first he stood, Scarce thus at length faild speech recoverd sad. O Hell! what doe mine eyes with grief behold, Into our room of bliss thus high advanc't Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps, Not Spirits, yet to heav'nly Spirits bright Little inferior; whom my thoughts pursue With wonder, and could love, so lively shines In them Divine resemblance, and such grace The hand that formd them on thir shape hath pourd. Ah gentle pair, yee little think how nigh Your change approaches, when all these delights Will vanish and deliver ye to woe, More woe, the more your taste is now of joy; Happie, but for so happie ill secur'd Long to continue, and this high seat your Heav'n Ill fenc't for Heav'n to keep out such a foe As now is enterd; yet no purpos'd foe To you whom I could pittie thus forlorne Though I unpittied: League with you I seek, And mutual amitie so streight, so close, That I with you must dwell, or you with me Henceforth; my dwelling haply may not please Like this fair Paradise, your sense, yet such Accept your Makers work; he gave it me, Which I as freely give; Hell shall unfold, To entertain you two, her widest Gates, And send forth all her Kings; there will be room, Not like these narrow limits, to receive ass Your numerous ofspring; if no better place, Thank him who puts me loath to this revenge On you who wrong me not for him who wrongd. And should I at your harmless innocence Melt, as I doe, yet public reason just, Honour and Empire with revenge enlarg'd, By conquering this new World, compels me now To do what else though damnd I should abhorre. So spake the Fiend, and with necessitie, The Tyrants plea, excus'd his devilish deeds. Then from his loftie stand on that high Tree Down he alights among the sportful Herd Of those fourfooted kindes, himself now one, Now other, as thir shape servd best his end Neerer to view his prey, and unespi'd To mark what of thir state he more might learn By word or action markt: about them round A Lion now he stalkes with fierie glare, Then as a Tyger, who by chance hath spi'd In some Purlieu two gentle Fawnes at play, Strait couches close, then rising changes oft His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground Whence rushing he might surest seize them both Grip't in each paw: When Adam first of men To first of women Eve thus moving speech, Turnd him all eare to hear new utterance flow. Sole partner and sole part of all these joyes, Dearer thy self then all; needs must the power That made us, and for us this ample World Be infinitly good, and of his good As liberal and free as infinite, That rais'd us from the dust and plac't us here In all this happiness, who at his hand Have nothing merited, nor can performe Aught whereof hee hath need, hee who requires From us no other service then to keep This one, this easie charge, of all the Trees In Paradise that bear delicious fruit So various, not to taste that onely Tree Of knowledge, planted by the Tree of Life, So neer grows Death to Life, what ere Death is, Som dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou knowst God hath pronounc't it death to taste that Tree, The only sign of our obedience left Among so many signes of power and rule Conferrd upon us, and Dominion giv'n Over all other Creatures that possess Earth, Aire, and Sea. Then let us not think hard One easie prohibition, who enjoy Free leave so large to all things else, and choice Unlimited of manifold delights: But let us ever praise him, and extoll His bountie, following our delightful task To prune these growing Plants, and tend these Flours, Which were it toilsom, yet with thee were sweet. To whom thus Eve repli'd. O thou for whom And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh, And without whom am to no end, my Guide And Head, what thou hast said is just and right. For wee to him indeed all praises owe, And daily thanks, I chiefly who enjoy So farr the happier Lot, enjoying thee Praeeminent by so much odds, while thou Like consort to thy self canst no where find. That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awak't, and found my self repos'd Under a shade of flours, much wondring where And what I was, whence thither brought, and how. Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound Of waters issu'd from a Cave and spread Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov'd Pure as th' expanse of Heav'n; I thither went With unexperienc't thought, and laid me downe On the green bank, to look into the cleer Smooth Lake, that to me seemd another Skie. As I bent down to look, just opposite, A Shape within the watry gleam appeerd Bending to look on me, I started back, It started back, but pleas'd I soon returnd, Pleas'd it returnd as soon with answering looks Of sympathie and love; there I had fixt Mine eyes till now, and pin'd with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warnd me, What thou seest, What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow staies Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy Inseparablie thine, to him shalt beare Multitudes like thy self, and thence be call'd Mother of human Race: what could I doe, But follow strait, invisibly thus led? Till I espi'd thee, fair indeed and tall, Under a Platan, yet methought less faire, Less winning soft, less amiablie milde, Then that smooth watry image; back I turnd, Thou following cryd'st aloud, Return faire Eve, Whom fli'st thou? whom thou fli'st, of him thou art, His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent Out of my side to thee, neerest my heart Substantial Life, to have thee by my side Henceforth an individual solace dear; Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim My other half: with that thy gentle hand Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excelld by manly grace And wisdom, which alone is truly fair. So spake our general Mother, and with eyes Of conjugal attraction unreprov'd, And meek surrender, half imbracing leand On our first Father, half her swelling Breast Naked met his under the flowing Gold Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight Both of her Beauty and submissive Charms Smil'd with superior Love, as Jupiter On Juno smiles, when he impregns the Clouds That shed May Flowers; and press'd her Matron lip With kisses pure: aside the Devil turnd For envie, yet with jealous leer maligne Ey'd them askance, and to himself thus plaind. Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two Imparadis't in one anothers arms The happier Eden, shall enjoy thir fill Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust, Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire, Among our other torments not the least, Still unfulfill'd with pain of longing pines; Yet let me not forget what I have gain'd From thir own mouths; all is not theirs it seems: One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge call'd, Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidd'n? Suspicious, reasonless. Why should thir Lord Envie them that? can it be sin to know, Can it be death? and do they onely stand By Ignorance, is that thir happie state, The proof of thir obedience and thir faith? O fair foundation laid whereon to build Thir ruine! Hence I will excite thir minds With more desire to know, and to reject Envious commands, invented with designe To keep them low whom knowledge might exalt Equal with Gods; aspiring to be such, They taste and die: what likelier can ensue? But first with narrow search I must walk round This Garden, and no corner leave unspi'd; A chance but chance may lead where I may meet Some wandring Spirit of Heav'n, by Fountain side, Or in thick shade retir'd, from him to draw What further would be learnt. Live while ye may, Yet happie pair; enjoy, till I return, Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed. So saying, his proud step he scornful turn'd, But with sly circumspection, and began Through wood, through waste, o're hill, o're dale his roam. Mean while in utmost Longitude, where Heav'n With Earth and Ocean meets, the setting Sun Slowly descended, and with right aspect Against the eastern Gate of Paradise Leveld his eevning Rayes: it was a Rock Of Alablaster, pil'd up to the Clouds, Conspicuous farr, winding with one ascent Accessible from Earth, one entrance high; The rest was craggie cliff, that overhung Still as it rose, impossible to climbe. Betwixt these rockie Pillars Gabriel sat Chief of th' Angelic Guards, awaiting night; About him exercis'd Heroic Games Th' unarmed Youth of Heav'n, but nigh at hand Celestial Armourie, Shields, Helmes, and Speares, Hung high with Diamond flaming, and with Gold. Thither came Uriel, gliding through the Eeven On a Sun beam, swift as a shooting Starr In Autumn thwarts the night, when vapors fir'd Impress the Air, and shews the Mariner From what point of his Compass to beware Impetuous winds: he thus began in haste. Gabriel, to thee thy course by Lot hath giv'n Charge and strict watch that to this happie Place No evil thing approach or enter in; This day at highth of Noon came to my Spheare A Spirit, zealous, as he seem'd, to know More of th' Almighties works, and chiefly Man Gods latest Image: I describ'd his way Bent all on speed, and markt his Aerie Gate; But in the Mount that lies from Eden North, Where he first lighted, soon discernd his looks Alien from Heav'n, with passions foul obscur'd: Mine eye pursu'd him still, but under shade Lost sight of him; one of the banisht crew I fear, hath ventur'd from the deep, to raise New troubles; him thy care must be to find. To whom the winged Warriour thus returnd: Uriel, no wonder if thy perfet sight, Amid the Suns bright circle where thou sitst, See farr and wide: in at this Gate none pass The vigilance here plac't, but such as come Well known from Heav'n; and since Meridian hour No Creature thence: if Spirit of other sort, So minded, have oreleapt these earthie bounds On purpose, hard thou knowst it to exclude Spiritual substance with corporeal barr. But if within the circuit of these walks, In whatsoever shape he lurk, of whom Thou tellst, by morrow dawning I shall know. So promis'd hee, and Uriel to his charge Returnd on that bright beam, whose point now raisd Bore him slope downward to the Sun now fall'n Beneath th' Azores; whither the prime Orb, Incredible how swift, had thither rowl'd Diurnal, or this less volubil Earth By shorter flight to th' East, had left him there Arraying with reflected Purple and Gold The Clouds that on his Western Throne attend: Now came still Eevning on, and Twilight gray Had in her sober Liverie all things clad; Silence accompanied, for Beast and Bird, They to thir grassie Couch, these to thir Nests Were slunk, all but the wakeful Nightingale; She all night long her amorous descant sung; Silence was pleas'd: now glow'd the Firmament With living Saphirs: Hesperus that led The starrie Host, rode brightest, till the Moon Rising in clouded Majestie, at length Apparent Queen unvaild her peerless light, And o're the dark her Silver Mantle threw. When Adam thus to Eve: Fair Consort, th' hour Of night, and all things now retir'd to rest Mind us of like repose, since God hath set Labour and rest, as day and night to men Successive, and the timely dew of sleep Now falling with soft slumbrous weight inclines Our eye-lids; other Creatures all day long Rove idle unimploid, and less need rest; Man hath his daily work of body or mind Appointed, which declares his Dignitie, And the regard of Heav'n on all his waies; While other Animals unactive range, And of thir doings God takes no account. To morrow ere fresh Morning streak the East With first approach of light, we must be ris'n, And at our pleasant labour, to reform Yon flourie Arbors, yonder Allies green, Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown, That mock our scant manuring, and require More hands then ours to lop thir wanton growth: Those Blossoms also, and those dropping Gumms, That lie bestrowne unsightly and unsmooth, Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease; Mean while, as Nature wills, Night bids us rest. To whom thus Eve with perfet beauty adornd. My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains, God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more Is womans happiest knowledge and her praise. With thee conversing I forget all time, All seasons and thir change, all please alike. Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest Birds; pleasant the Sun When first on this delightful Land he spreads His orient Beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flour, Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertil earth After soft showers; and sweet the coming on Of grateful Eevning milde, then silent Night With this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon, And these the Gemms of Heav'n, her starrie train: But neither breath of Morn when she ascends With charm of earliest Birds, nor rising Sun On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, floure, Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers, Nor grateful Eevning mild, nor silent Night With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon, Or glittering Starr-light without thee is sweet. But wherfore all night long shine these, for whom This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes? To whom our general Ancestor repli'd. Daughter of God and Man, accomplisht Eve, Those have thir course to finish, round the Earth, By morrow Eevning, and from Land to Land In order, though to Nations yet unborn, Ministring light prepar'd, they set and rise; Least total darkness should by Night regaine Her old possession, and extinguish life In Nature and all things, which these soft fires Not only enlighten, but with kindly heate Of various influence foment and warme, Temper or nourish, or in part shed down Thir stellar vertue on all kinds that grow On Earth, made hereby apter to receive Perfection from the Suns more potent Ray. These then, though unbeheld in deep of night, Shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none, That heav'n would want spectators, God want praise; Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:. All these with ceasless praise his works behold Both day and night: how often from the steep Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to others note Singing thir great Creator: oft in bands While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk With Heav'nly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joind, thir songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven. Thus talking hand in hand alone they pass'd On to thir blissful Bower; it was a place Chos'n by the sovran Planter, when he fram'd All things to mans delightful use; the roofe Of thickest covert was inwoven shade Laurel and Mirtle, and what higher grew Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side Acanthus, and each odorous bushie shrub Fenc'd up the verdant wall; each beauteous flour, Iris all hues, Roses, and Gessamin Rear'd high thir flourisht heads between, and wrought Mosaic; underfoot the Violet, Crocus, and Hyacinth with rich inlay Broiderd the ground, more colour'd then with stone Of costliest Emblem: other Creature here Beast, Bird, Insect, or Worm durst enter none; Such was thir awe of Man. In shadie Bower More sacred and sequesterd, though but feignd, Pan or Silvanus never slept, nor Nymph, Nor Faunus haunted. Here in close recess With Flowers, Garlands, and sweet-smelling Herbs Espoused Eve deckt first her nuptial Bed, And heav'nly Quires the Hymenaean sung, What day the genial Angel to our Sire Brought her in naked beauty more adorn'd, More lovely then Pandora, whom the Gods Endowd with all thir gifts, and O too like In sad event, when to the unwiser Son Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she ensnar'd Mankind with her faire looks, to be aveng'd On him who had stole Joves authentic fire. Thus at thir shadie Lodge arriv'd, both stood Both turnd, and under op'n Skie ador'd The God that made both Skie, Air, Earth and Heav'n Which they beheld, the Moons resplendent Globe And starrie Pole: Thou also mad'st the Night, Maker Omnipotent, and thou the Day, Which we in our appointed work imployd Have finisht happie in our mutual help And mutual love, the Crown of all our bliss Ordaind by thee, and this delicious place For us too large, where thy abundance wants Partakers, and uncropt falls to the ground. But thou hast promis'd from us two a Race To fill the Earth, who shall with us extoll Thy goodness infinite, both when we wake, And when we seek, as now, thy gift of sleep. This said unanimous, and other Rites Observing none, but adoration pure Which God likes best, into thir inmost bowre Handed they went; and eas'd the putting off These troublesom disguises which wee wear, Strait side by side were laid, nor turnd I weene Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites Mysterious of connubial Love refus'd: Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk Of puritie and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to som, leaves free to all. Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain But our destroyer, foe to God and Man? Haile wedded Love, mysterious Law, true source Of human ofspring, sole proprietie, In Paradise of all things common else. By thee adulterous lust was driv'n from men Among the bestial herds to raunge, by thee Founded in Reason, Loyal, just, and Pure, Relations dear, and all the Charities Of Father, Son, and Brother first were known. Farr be it, that I should write thee sin or blame, Or think thee unbefitting holiest place, Perpetual Fountain of Domestic sweets, Whose bed is undefil'd and chaste pronounc't, Present, or past, as Saints and Patriarchs us'd. Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard, Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Bal, Or Serenate, which the starv'd Lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. These lulld by Nightingales imbraceing slept, And on thir naked limbs the flourie roof Showrd Roses, which the Morn repair'd. Sleep on Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek No happier state, and know to know no more. Now had night measur'd with her shaddowie Cone Half way up Hill this vast Sublunar Vault, And from thir Ivorie Port the Cherubim Forth issuing at th' accustomd hour stood armd To thir night watches in warlike Parade, When Gabriel to his next in power thus spake. Uzziel, half these draw off, and coast the South With strictest watch; these other wheel the North, Our circuit meets full West. As flame they part Half wheeling to the Shield, half to the Spear. From these, two strong and suttle Spirits he calld That neer him stood, and gave them thus in charge. Ithuriel and Zephon, with wingd speed Search through this Garden, leave unsearcht no nook, But chiefly where those two fair Creatures Lodge, Now laid perhaps asleep secure of harme. This Eevning from the Sun's decline arriv'd Who tells of som infernal Spirit seen Hitherward bent (who could have thought?) escap'd The barrs of Hell, on errand bad no doubt: Such where ye find, seise fast, and hither bring. So saying, on he led his radiant Files, Daz'ling the Moon; these to the Bower direct In search of whom they sought: him there they found Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve; Assaying by his Devilish art to reach The Organs of her Fancie, and with them forge Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams, Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint Th' animal Spirits that from pure blood arise Like gentle breaths from Rivers pure, thence raise At least distemperd, discontented thoughts, Vaine hopes, vaine aimes, inordinate desires Blown up with high conceits ingendring pride. Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear Touch'd lightly; for no falshood can endure Touch of Celestial temper, but returns Of force to its own likeness: up he starts Discoverd and surpriz'd. As when a spark Lights on a heap of nitrous Powder, laid Fit for the Tun som Magazin to store Against a rumord Warr, the Smuttie graine With sudden blaze diffus'd, inflames the Aire: So started up in his own shape the Fiend. Back stept those two faire Angels half amaz'd So sudden to behold the grieslie King; Yet thus, unmovd with fear, accost him soon. Which of those rebell Spirits adjudg'd to Hell Com'st thou, escap'd thy prison, and transform'd, Why satst thou like an enemie in waite Here watching at the head of these that sleep? Know ye not then said Satan, fill'd with scorn, Know ye not mee? ye knew me once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soare; Not to know mee argues your selves unknown, The lowest of your throng; or if ye know, Why ask ye, and superfluous begin Your message, like to end as much in vain? To whom thus Zephon, answering scorn with scorn. Think not, revolted Spirit, thy shape the same, Or undiminisht brightness, to be known As when thou stoodst in Heav'n upright and pure; That Glorie then, when thou no more wast good, Departed from thee, and thou resembl'st now Thy sin and place of doom obscure and foule. But come, for thou, be sure, shalt give account To him who sent us, whose charge is to keep This place inviolable, and these from harm. So spake the Cherube, and his grave rebuke Severe in youthful beautie, added grace Invincible: abasht the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Vertue in her shape how lovly, saw, and pin'd His loss; but chiefly to find here observd His lustre visibly impar'd; yet seemd Undaunted. If I must contend, said he, Best with the best, the Sender not the sent, Or all at once; more glorie will be wonn, Or less be lost. Thy fear, said Zephon bold, Will save us trial what the least can doe Single against thee wicked, and thence weak. The Fiend repli'd not, overcome with rage; But like a proud Steed reind, went hautie on, Chaumping his iron curb: to strive or flie He held it vain; awe from above had quelld His heart, not else dismai'd. Now drew they nigh The western Point, where those half-rounding guard just met, and closing stood in squadron joind Awaiting next command. To whom thir Chief Gabriel from the Front thus calld aloud. O friends, I hear the tread of nimble feet Hasting this way, and now by glimps discerne Ithuriel and Zephon through the shade, And with them comes a third of Regal port, But faded splendor wan; who by his gate And fierce demeanour seems the Prince of Hell, Not likely to part hence without contest; Stand firm, for in his look defiance lours. He scarce had ended, when those two approachd And brief related whom they brought, where found, How busied, in what form and posture coucht. To whom with stern regard thus Gabriel spake. Why hast thou, Satan broke the bounds prescrib'd To thy transgressions, and disturbd the charge Of others, who approve not to transgress By thy example, but have power and right To question thy bold entrance on this place; Imploi'd it seems to violate sleep, and those Whose dwelling God hath planted here in bliss? To whom thus Satan, with contemptuous brow. Gabriel, thou hadst in Heav'n th' esteem of wise, And such I held thee; but this question askt Puts me in doubt. Lives ther who loves his pain? Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell, Though thither doomd? Thou wouldst thy self, no doubt, And boldly venture to whatever place Farthest from pain, where thou mightest hope to change Torment with ease, and soonest recompence Dole with delight, which in this place I sought; To thee no reason; who knowst only good, But evil hast not tri'd: and wilt object His will who bound us? let him surer barr His Iron Gates, if he intends our stay In that dark durance: thus much what was askt. The rest is true, they found me where they say; But that implies not violence or harme. Thus he in scorn.The warlike Angel mov'd, Disdainfully half smiling thus repli'd. O loss of one in Heav'n to judge of wise, Since Satan fell, whom follie overthrew, And now returns him from his prison scap't, Gravely in doubt whether to hold them wise Or not, who ask what boldness brought him hither Unlicenc't from his bounds in Hell prescrib'd; So wise he judges it to fly from pain However, and to scape his punishment. So judge thou still, presumptuous, till the wrauth, Which thou incurr'st by flying, meet thy flight Seavenfold, and scourge that wisdom back to Hell, Which taught thee yet no better, that no pain Can equal anger infinite provok't. But wherefore thou alone? wherefore with thee Came not all Hell broke loose? is pain to them Less pain, less to be fled, or thou then they Less hardie to endure? courageous Chief, The first in flight from pain, had'st thou alledg'd To thy deserted host this cause of flight, Thou surely hadst not come sole fugitive. To which the Fiend thus answerd frowning stern. Not that I less endure, or shrink from pain, Insulting Angel, well thou knowst I stood Thy fiercest, when in Battel to thy aide Thy blasting volied Thunder made all speed And seconded thy else not dreaded Spear. But still thy words at random, as before, Argue thy inexperience what behooves From hard assaies and ill successes past A faithful Leader, not to hazard all Through wayes of danger by himself untri'd. I therefore, I alone first undertook To wing the desolate Abyss, and spie This new created World, whereof in Hell Fame is not silent, here in hope to find Better abode, and my afflicted Powers To settle here on Earth, or in mid Aire; Though for possession put to try once more What thou and thy gay Legions dare against; Whose easier business were to serve thir Lord High up in Heav'n, with songs to hymne his Throne, And practis'd distances to cringe, not fight. To whom the warriour Angel, soon repli'd. To say and strait unsay, pretending first Wise to flie pain, professing next the Spie, Argues no Leader but a lyar trac't, Satan, and couldst thou faithful add? O name, O sacred name of faithfulness profan'd! Faithful to whom? to thy rebellious crew? Armie of Fiends, fit body to fit head; Was this your discipline and faith ingag'd, Your military obedience, to dissolve Allegeance to th' acknowldg'd Power supream? And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem Patron of liberty, who more then thou Once fawn'd, and cring'd, and servilly ador'd Heav'ns awful Monarch? wherefore but in hope To dispossess him, and thy self to reigne? But mark what I arreede thee now, avant; Flie thither whence thou fledst: if from this houre Within these hallowd limits thou appeer, Back to th' infernal pit I drag thee chaind, And Seale thee so, as henceforth not to scorne The facil gates of hell too slightly barrd. So threatn'd hee, but Satan to no threats Gave heed, but waxing more in rage repli'd. Then when I am thy captive talk of chaines, Proud limitarie Cherube, but ere then Farr heavier load thy self expect to feel From my prevailing arme, though Heavens King Ride on thy wings, and thou with thy Compeers, Us'd to the yoak, draw'st his triumphant wheels In progress through the rode of Heav'n Star-pav'd. While thus he spake, th' Angelic Squadron bright Turnd fierie red, sharpning in mooned hornes Thir Phalanx, and began to hemm him round With ported Spears, as thick as when a field Of Ceres ripe for harvest waving bends Her bearded Grove of ears, which way the wind Swayes them; the careful Plowman doubting stands Least on the threshing floore his hopeful sheaves Prove chaff. On th' other side Satan allarm'd Collecting all his might dilated stood, Like Teneriff or Atlas unremov'd: His stature reacht the Skie, and on his Crest Sat horror Plum'd; nor wanted in his graspe What seemd both Spear and Shield: now dreadful deeds Might have ensu'd, nor onely Paradise In this commotion, but the Starrie Cope Of Heav'n perhaps, or all the Elements At least had gon to rack, disturbd and torne With violence of this conflict, had not soon Th' Eternal to prevent such horrid fray Hung forth in Heav'n his golden Scales, yet seen Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion signe, Wherein all things created first he weighd, The pendulous round Earth with ballanc't Aire In counterpoise, now ponders all events, Battels and Realms: in these he put two weights The sequel each of parting and of fight; The latter quick up flew, and kickt the beam; Which Gabriel spying, thus bespake the Fiend. Satan, I know thy strength, and thou knowst mine, Neither our own but giv'n; what follie then To boast what Arms can doe, since thine no more Then Heav'n permits, nor mine, though doubld now To trample thee as mire: for proof look up, And read thy Lot in yon celestial Sign Where thou art weigh'd, and shown how light, how weak, If thou resist. The Fiend lookt up and knew His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night.
NOw Morn her rosie steps in th' Eastern ClimeAdvancing, sow'd the earth with Orient Pearle,When Adam wak't, so customd, for his sleepWas Aerie light from pure digestion bred,And temperat vapors bland, which th' only soundOf leaves and fuming rills, Aurora's fan,Lightly dispers'd, and the shrill Matin SongOf Birds on every bough; so much the moreHis wonder was to find unwak'nd EveWith Tresses discompos'd, and glowing Cheek,As through unquiet rest: he on his sideLeaning half-rais'd, with looks of cordial LoveHung over her enamour'd, and beheldBeautie, which whether waking or asleep,Shot forth peculiar Graces; then with voiceMilde, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,Her hand soft touching, whisperd thus. AwakeMy fairest, my espous'd, my latest found,Heav'ns last best gift, my ever new delight,Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh fieldCalls us, we lose the prime, to mark how springOur tended Plants, how blows the Citron Grove,What drops the Myrrhe, and what the balmie Reed,How Nature paints her colours, how the BeeSits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet.Such whispering wak'd her, but with startl'd eyeOn Adam, whom imbracing, thus she spake.O Sole in whom my thoughts find all repose,My Glorie, my Perfection, glad I seeThy face, and Morn return'd, for I this Night,Such night till this I never pass'd, have dream'd,If dream'd, not as I oft am wont, of thee,Works of day pass't, or morrows next designe,But of offence and trouble, which my mindKnew never till this irksom night; methoughtClose at mine ear one call'd me forth to walkWith gentle voice, I though it thine; it said,Why sleepst thou Eve? now is the pleasant time,The cool, the silent, save where silence yieldsTo the night-warbling Bird, that now awakeTunes sweetest his love-labor'd song; now reignesFull Orb'd the Moon, and with more pleasing lightShadowie sets off the face of things; in vain,If none regard; Heav'n wakes with all his eyes,Whom to behold but thee, Natures desire,In whose sight all things joy, with ravishmentAttracted by thy beauty still to gaze.I rose as at thy call, but found thee not;To find thee I directed then my walk;And on, methought, alone I pass'd through waysThat brought me on a sudden to the TreeOf interdicted Knowledge: fair it seem'd,Much fairer to my Fancie then by day:And as I wondring lookt, beside it stoodOne shap'd and wing'd like one of those from Heav'nBy us oft seen; his dewie locks distill'dAmbrosia; on that Tree he also gaz'd;And O fair Plant, said he, with fruit surcharg'd,Deigns none to ease thy load and taste thy sweet,Nor God, nor Man; is Knowledge so despis'd?Or envie, or what reserve forbids to taste?Forbid who will, none shall from me withholdLonger thy offerd good, why else set here?This said he paus'd not, but with ventrous ArmeHe pluckt, he tasted; mee damp horror chil'dAt such bold words voucht with a deed so bold:But he thus overjoy'd, O Fruit Divine,Sweet of thy self, but much more sweet thus cropt,Forbidd'n here, it seems, as onely fitFor God's, yet able to make Gods of Men:And why not Gods of Men, since good, the moreCommunicated, more abundant growes,The Author not impair'd, but honourd more?Here, happie Creature, fair Angelic Eve,Partake thou also; happie though thou art,Happier thou mayst be, worthier canst not be:Taste this, and be henceforth among the GodsThy self a Goddess, not to Earth confind,But somtimes in the Air, as wee, somtimesAscend to Heav'n, by merit thine, and seeWhat life the Gods live there, and such live thou.So saying, he drew nigh, and to me held,Even to my mouth of that same fruit held partWhich he had pluckt; the pleasant savourie smellSo quick'nd appetite, that I, methought,Could not but taste. Forthwith up to the CloudsWith him I flew, and underneath beheldThe Earth outstretcht immense, a prospect wideAnd various: wondring at my flight and changeTo this high exaltation; suddenlyMy Guide was gon, and I, me thought, sunk down,And fell asleep; but O how glad I wak'dTo find this but a dream! Thus Eve her NightRelated, and thus Adam answerd sad.Best image of my self and dearer half,The trouble of thy thoughts this night in sleepAffects me equally; nor can I likeThis uncouth dream, of evil sprung I fear;Yet evil whence? in thee can harbour none,Created pure. But know that in the SouleAre many lesser Faculties that serveReason as chief; among these Fansie nextHer office holds; of all external things,Which the five watchful Senses represent,She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, framesAll what we affirm or what deny, and callOur knowledge or opinion; then retiresInto her private Cell when Nature rests,Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakesTo imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams,Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.Som such resemblances methinks I findOf our last Eevnings talk, in this thy dream,But with addition strange; yet be not sad.Evil into the mind of God or ManMay come or go, so unapprov'd, and leaveNo spot or blame behind: Which gives me hopeThat what in sleep thou didst abhorr to dream,Waking thou never wilt consent to do.Be not disheart'nd then, nor cloud those looksThat wont to be more chearful and sereneThen when fair Morning first smiles on the World,And let us to our fresh imployments riseAmong the Groves, the Fountains, and the FloursThat open now thir choicest bosom'd smellsReservd from night, and kept for thee in store.So cheard he his fair Spouse, and she was cheard,But silently a gentle tear let fallFrom either eye, and wip'd them with her haire;Two other precious drops that ready stood,Each in thir Chrystal sluce, hee ere they fellKiss'd as the gracious signs of sweet remorseAnd pious awe, that feard to have offended.So all was cleard, and to the Field they haste.But first from under shadie arborous roof,Soon as they forth were come to open sightOf day-spring, and the Sun, who scarce up risenWith wheels yet hov'ring o're the Ocean brim,Shot paralel to the earth his dewie ray,Discovering in wide Lantskip all the EastOf Paradise and Edens happie Plains,Lowly they bow'd adoring, and beganThir Orisons, each Morning duly paidIn various style, for neither various styleNor holy rapture wanted they to praiseThir Maker, in fit strains pronounc't or sungUnmeditated, such prompt eloquenceFlowd from thir lips, in Prose or numerous Verse,More tuneable then needed Lute or HarpTo add more sweetness, and they thus began.These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,Almightie, thine this universal Frame,Thus wondrous fair; thy self how wondrous then!Unspeakable, who first above these HeavensTo us invisible or dimly seenIn these thy lowest works, yet these declareThy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine:Speak yee who best can tell, ye Sons of light,Angels, for yee behold him, and with songsAnd choral symphonies, Day without Night,Circle his Throne rejoycing, yee in Heav'n,On Earth joyn all ye Creatures to extollHim first, him last, him midst, and without end.Fairest of Starrs, last in the train of Night,If better thou belong not to the dawn,Sure pledge of day, that crownst the smiling MornWith thy bright Circlet, praise him in thy SpheareWhile day arises, that sweet hour of Prime.Thou Sun, of this great World both Eye and Soule,Acknowledge him thy Greater, sound his praiseIn thy eternal course, both when thou climb'st,And when high Noon hast gaind, and when thou fallst.Moon, that now meetst the orient Sun, now fli'stWith the fixt Starrs, fixt in thir Orb that flies,And yee five other wandring Fires that moveIn mystic Dance not without Song, resoundHis praise, who out of Darkness call'd up Light,Aire, and ye Elements the eldest birthOf Natures Womb, that in quaternion runPerpetual Circle, multiform; and mixAnd nourish all things, let your ceasless changeVarie to our great Maker still new praise.Ye Mists and Exhalations that now riseFrom Hill or steaming Lake, duskie or grey,Till the Sun paint your fleecie skirts with Gold,In honour to the Worlds great Author rise;Whether to deck with Clouds the uncolourd skie,Or wet the thirstie Earth with falling showers,Rising or falling still advance his praise.His praise ye Winds, that from four Quarters blow,Breathe soft or loud; and wave your tops, ye Pines,With every Plant, in sign of Worship wave.Fountains and yee, that warble, as ye flow,Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.Joyn voices all ye living Souls, ye Birds,That singing up to Heaven gate ascend,Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise;Yee that in Waters glide, and yee that walkThe Earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep;Witness if I be silent, Morn or Eeven,To Hill, or Valley, Fountain, or fresh shadeMade vocal by my Song, and taught his praise.Hail universal Lord, be bounteous stillTo give us onely good; and if the nightHave gathered aught of evil or conceald,Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark.So pray'd they innocent, and to thir thoughtsFirm peace recoverd soon and wonted calm.On to thir mornings rural work they hasteAmong sweet dewes and flours; where any rowOf Fruit-trees overwoodie reachd too farrThir pamperd boughes, and needed hands to checkFruitless imbraces: or they led the VineTo wed her Elm; she spous'd about him twinesHer mariageable arms, and with her bringsHer dowr th' adopted Clusters, to adornHis barren leaves. Them thus imploid beheldWith pittie Heav'ns high King, and to him call'dRaphael, the sociable Spirit, that deign'dTo travel with Tobias, and secur'dHis marriage with the seaventimes-wedded Maid.Raphael, said hee, thou hear'st what stir on EarthSatan from Hell scap't through the darksom GulfHath raisd in Paradise, and how disturbdThis night the human pair, how he designesIn them at once to ruin all mankind.Go therefore, half this day as friend with friendConverse with Adam, in what Bowre or shadeThou find'st him from the heat of Noon retir'd,To respit his day-labour with repast,Or with repose; and such discourse bring on,As may advise him of his happie state,Happiness in his power left free to will,Left to his own free Will, his Will though free,Yet mutable; whence warne him to bewareHe swerve not too secure: tell him withallHis danger, and from whom, what enemieLate falln himself from Heav'n, is plotting nowThe fall of others from like state of bliss;By violence, no, for that shall be withstood,But by deceit and lies; this let him know,Least wilfully transgressing he pretendSurprisal, unadmonisht, unforewarnd.So spake th' Eternal Father, and fulfilldAll Justice: nor delaid the winged SaintAfter his charge receivd, but from amongThousand Celestial Ardors, where he stoodVaild with his gorgeous wings, up springing lightFlew through the midst of Heav'n; th' angelic QuiresOn each hand parting, to his speed gave wayThrough all th' Empyreal road; till at the GateOf Heav'n arriv'd, the gate self-opend wideOn golden Hinges turning, as by workDivine the sov'ran Architect had fram'd.From hence, no cloud, or, to obstruct his sight,Starr interpos'd, however small he sees,Not unconform to the other shining Globes,Earth and the Gard'n of God, with Cedars crowndAbove all Hills. As when by night the GlassOf Galileo, less assur'd, observesImagind Lands and Regions in the Moon:Or Pilot from amidst the CycladesDelos or Samos first appeering kennsA cloudy spot. Down thither prone in flightHe speeds, and through the vast Ethereal SkieSailes between worlds and worlds, with steddie wingNow on the polar windes, then with quick FannWinnows the buxom Air; till within soareOf Towring Eagles, to all the Fowles he seemsA Phoenix, gaz'd by all, as that sole BiradWhen to enshrine his reliques in the Sun'sBright Temple, to Aegyptian Theb's he flies.At once on th' Eastern cliff of ParadiseHe lights, and to his proper shape returnsA Seraph wingd; six wings he wore, to shadeHis lineaments Divine; the pair that cladEach shoulder broad, came mantling o're his brestWith regal Ornament; the middle pairGirt like a Starrie Zone his waste, and roundSkirted his loines and thighes with downie GoldAnd colours dipt in Heav'n; the third his feetShaddowd from either heele with featherd maileSkie-tinctur'd grain. Like Maia's son he stood,And shook his Plumes, that Heav'nly fragrance filldThe circuit wide. Strait knew him all the BandsOf Angels under watch; and to his state,And to his message high in honour rise;For on som message high they guessd him bound.The glittering Tents he passd, and now is comeInto the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe,And flouring Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme;A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature hereWantond as in her prime, and plaid at willHer Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,Wilde above Rule or Art; enormous bliss.Him through the spicie Forrest onward comAdam discernd, as in the dore he satOf his coole Bowre, while now the mounted SunShot down direct his fervid Raies to warmeEarths inmost womb, more warmth then Adam needs;And Eve within, due at her hour prepar'dFor dinner savourie fruits, of taste to pleaseTrue appetite, and not disrelish thirstOf nectarous draughts between, from milkie stream,Berrie or Grape: to whom thus Adam call'd.Haste hither Eve, and worth thy sight beholdEastward among those Trees, what glorious shapeComes this way moving; seems another MornRis'n on mid-noon; some great behest from Heav'nTo us perhaps he brings, and will voutsafeThis day to be our Guest. But goe with speed,And what thy stores contain, bring forth and poureAbundance, fit to honour and receiveOur Heav'nly stranger; well we may affordOur givers thir own gifts, and large bestowFrom large bestowd, where Nature multipliesHer fertil growth, and by disburd'ning growsMore fruitful, which instructs us not to spare.To whom thus Eve. Adam, earths hallowd mouldOf God inspir'd, small store will serve, where store,All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk;Save what by frugal storing firmness gainsTo nourish, and superfluous moist consumes:But I will haste and from each bough and break,Each Plant and juciest Gourd will pluck such choiceTo entertain our Angel guest, as heeBeholding shall confess that here on EarthGod hath dispenst his bounties as in Heav'n.So saying, with dispatchful looks in hasteShe turns, on hospitable thoughts intentWhat choice to chuse for delicacie best,What order, so contriv'd as not to mixTastes, not well joynd, inelegant, but bringTaste after taste upheld with kindliest change,Bestirs her then, and from each tender stalkWhatever Earth all-bearing Mother yieldsIn India East or West, or middle shoareIn Pontus or the Punic Coast, or whereAlcinous reign'd, fruit of all kindes, in coate,Rough, or smooth rin'd, or bearded husk, or shellShe gathers, Tribute large, and on the boardHeaps with unsparing hand; for drink the GrapeShe crushes, inoffensive moust, and meathesFrom many a berrie, and from sweet kernels prestShe tempers dulcet creams, nor these to holdWants her fit vessels pure, then strews the groundWith Rose and Odours from the shrub unfum'd.Mean while our Primitive great Sire, to meetHis god-like Guest, walks forth, without more trainAccompani'd then with his own compleatPerfections, in himself was all his state,More solemn then the tedious pomp that waitsOn Princes, when thir rich Retinue longOf Horses led, and Grooms besmeard with GoldDazles the croud, and sets them all agape.Neerer his presence Adam though not awd,Yet with submiss approach and reverence meek,As to a superior Nature, bowing low,Thus said. Native of Heav'n, for other placeNone can then Heav'n such glorious shape contain;Since by descending from the Thrones above,Those happie places thou hast deignd a whileTo want, and honour these, voutsafe with usTwo onely, who yet by sov'ran gift possessThis spacious ground, in yonder shadie BowreTo rest, and what the Garden choicest bearsTo sit and taste, till this meridian heatBe over, and the Sun more coole decline.Whom thus the Angelic Vertue answerd milde.Adam, I therefore came, nor art thou suchCreated, or such place hast here to dwell,As may not oft invite, though Spirits of Heav'nTo visit thee; lead on then where thy BowreOreshades; for these mid-hours, till Eevning riseI have at will. So to the Silvan LodgeThey came, that like Pomona's Arbour smil'dWith flourets deck't and fragrant smells; but EveUndeckt, save with her self more lovely fairThen Wood-Nymph, or the fairest Goddess feign'dOf three that in Mount Ida naked strove,Stood to entertain her guest from Heav'n; no vaileShee needed, Vertue-proof, no thought infirmeAlterd her cheek. On whom the Angel HaileBestowd, the holy salutation us'dLong after to blest Marie, second Eve.Haile Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful WombShall fill the World more numerous with thy SonsThen with these various fruits the Trees of GodHave heap'd this Table. Rais'd of grassie terfThir Table was, and mossie seats had round,And on her ample Square from side to sideAll Autumn pil'd, though Spring and Autumn hereDanc'd hand in hand. A while discourse they hold;No fear lest Dinner coole; when thus beganOur Authour. Heav'nly stranger, please to tasteThese bounties which our Nourisher, from whomAll perfet good unmeasur'd out, descends,To us for food and for delight hath caus'dThe Earth to yield; unsavourie food perhapsTo spiritual Natures; only this I know,That one Celestial Father gives to all.To whom the Angel. Therefore what he gives(Whose praise be ever sung) to man in partSpiritual, may of purest Spirits be foundNo ingrateful food; and food alike those pureIntelligential substances requireAs doth your Rational; and both containWithin them every lower facultieOf sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,And corporeal to incorporeal turn.For know, whatever was created, needsTo be sustaind and fed; of ElementsThe grosser feeds the purer, Earth the Sea,Earth and the Sea feed Air, the Air those FiresEthereal, and as lowest first the Moon;Whence in her visage round those spots, unpurg'dVapours not yet into her substance turnd.Nor doth the Moon no nourishment exhaleFrom her moist Continent to higher Orbes.The Sun that light imparts to all, receivesFrom all his alimental recompenceIn humid exhalations, and at EvenSups with the Ocean: though in Heav'n the TreesOf life ambrosial frutage bear, and vinesYield Nectar, though from off the boughs each MornWe brush mellifluous Dewes, and find the groundCover'd with pearly grain: yet God hath hereVaried his bounty so with new delights,As may compare with Heaven; and to tasteThink not I shall be nice. So down they sat,And to thir viands fell, nor seeminglyThe Angel, nor in mist, the common glossOf Theologians, but with keen dispatchOf real hunger, and concoctive heate.To transubstantiate; what redounds, transpiresThrough Spirits with ease; nor wonder; if by fireOf sooty coal the Empiric AlchimistCan turn, or holds it possible to turnMetals of drossiest Ore to perfet GoldAs from the Mine. Mean while at Table EveMinisterd naked, and thir flowing cupsWith pleasant liquors crown'd: O innocenceDeserving Paradise! if ever, then,Then had the Sons of God excuse to have binEnamour'd at that sight; but in those heartsLove unlibidinous reign'd, nor jealousieWas understood, the injur'd Lovers Hell.Thus when with meats and drinks they had suffic'd,Not burd'nd Nature, sudden mind aroseIn Adam, not to let th' occasion passGiven him by this great Conference to knowOf things above his World, and of thir beingWho dwell in Heav'n, whose excellence he sawTranscend his own so farr, whose radiant formsDivine effulgence, whose high Power so farExceeded human, and his wary speechThus to th' Empyreal Minister he fram'd.Inhabitant with God, now know I wellThy favour, in this honour done to man,Under whose lowly roof thou hast voutsaf'tTo enter, and these earthly fruits to taste,Food not of Angels, yet accepted so,As that more willingly thou couldst not seemAs Heav'ns high feasts to have fed: yet what compare?To whom the winged Hierarch repli'd.O Adam, one Almightie is, from whomAll things proceed, and up to him return,If not deprav'd from good, created allSuch to perfection, one first matter all,Indu'd with various forms various degreesOf substance, and in things that live, of life;But more refin'd, more spiritous, and pure,As neerer to him plac't or neerer tendingEach in thir several active Sphears assignd,Till body up to spirit work, in boundsProportiond to each kind. So from the rootSprings lighter the green stalk, from thence the leavesMore aerie, last the bright consummate floureSpirits odorous breathes: flours and thir fruitMans nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'dTo vital Spirits aspire, to animal,To intellectual, give both life and sense,Fansie and understanding, whence the SouleReason receives, and reason is her being,Discursive, or Intuitive; discourseIs oftest yours, the latter most is ours,Differing but in degree, of kind the same.Wonder not then, what God for you saw goodIf I refuse not, but convert, as you,To proper substance; time may come when menWith Angels may participate, and findNo inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:And from these corporal nutriments perhapsYour bodies may at last turn all to Spirit,Improv'd by tract of time, and wingd ascendEthereal, as wee, or may at choiceHere or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell;If ye be found obedient, and retainUnalterably firm his love entireWhose progenie you are. Mean while enjoyYour fill what happiness this happie stateCan comprehend, incapable of more.To whom the Patriarch of mankind repli'd,O favourable spirit, propitious guest,Well hast thou taught the way that might directOur knowledge, and the scale of Nature setFrom center to circumference, whereonIn contemplation of created thingsBy steps we may ascend to God. But say,What meant that caution joind, if ye be foundObedient
ALL night the dreadless Angel unpursu'd Through Heav'ns wide Champain held his way, till Morn, Wak't by the circling Hours, with rosie hand Unbarr'd the gates of Light. There is a Cave Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne, Where light and darkness in perpetual round Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night; Light issues forth, and at the other dore Obsequious darkness enters, till her houre To veile the Heav'n, though darkness there might well Seem twilight here; and now went forth the Morn Such as in highest Heav'n, arrayd in Gold Empyreal, from before her vanisht Night, Shot through with orient Beams: when all the Plain Coverd with thick embatteld Squadrons bright, Chariots and flaming Armes, and fierie Steeds Reflecting blaze on blaze, first met his view: Warr he perceav'd, warr in procinct, and found Already known what he for news had thought To have reported: gladly then he mixt Among those friendly Powers who him receav'd With joy and acclamations loud, that one That of so many Myriads fall'n, yet one Returnd not lost: On to the sacred hill They led him high applauded, and present Before the seat supream; from whence a voice From midst a Golden Cloud thus milde was heard. Servant of God, well done, well hast thou fought The better fight, who single hast maintaind Against revolted multitudes the Cause Of Truth, in word mightier then they in Armes; And for the testimonie of Truth hast born Universal reproach, far worse to beare Then violence: for this was all thy care To stand approv'd in sight of God, though Worlds Judg'd thee perverse: the easier conquest now Remains thee, aided by this host of friends, Back on thy foes more glorious to return Then scornd thou didst depart, and to subdue By force, who reason for thir Law refuse, Right reason for thir Law, and for thir King Messiah, who by right of merit Reigns. Go Michael of Celestial Armies Prince, And thou in Military prowess next Gabriel, lead forth to Battel these my Sons Invincible, lead forth my armed Saints By Thousands and by Millions rang'd for fight; Equal in number to that Godless crew Rebellious, them with Fire and hostile Arms Fearless assault, and to the brow of Heav'n Pursuing drive them out from God and bliss, Into thir place of punishment, the Gulf Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide His fiery Chaos to receave thir fall. So spake the Sovran voice, and Clouds began To darken all the Hill, and smoak to rowl In duskie wreathes, reluctant flames, the signe Of wrauth awak't: nor with less dread the loud Ethereal Trumpet from on high gan blow: At which command the Powers Militant, That stood for Heav'n, in mighty Quadrate joyn"d Of Union irresistible, mov'd on In silence thir bright Legions, to the sound Of instrumental Harmonie that breath'd Heroic Ardor to advent'rous deeds Under thir God-like Leaders, in the Cause Of God and his Messiah. On they move Indissolubly firm; nor obvious Hill, Nor streit'ning Vale, nor Wood, nor Stream divides Thir perfet ranks; for high above the ground Thir march was, and the passive Air upbore Thir nimble tread, as when the total kind Of Birds in orderly array on wing Came summond over Eden to receive Thir names of thee; so over many a tract Of Heav'n they march'd, and many a Province wide Tenfold the length of this terrene: at last Farr in th' Horizon to the North appeer'd From skirt to skirt a fierie Region, stretcht In battailous aspect, and neerer view Bristl'd with upright beams innumerable Of rigid Spears, and Helmets throng'd, and Shields Various, with boastful Argument portraid, The banded Powers of Satan hasting on With furious expedition; for they weend That self same day by fight, or by surprize To win the Mount of God, and on his Throne To set the envier of his State, the proud Aspirer, but thir thoughts prov'd fond and vain In the mid way: though strange to us it seemd At first, that Angel should with Angel warr, And in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet So oft in Festivals of joy and love Unanimous, as sons of one great Sire Hymning th' Eternal Father: but the shout Of Battel now began, and rushing sound Of onset ended soon each milder thought. High in the midst exalted as a God Th' Apostat in his Sun-bright Chariot sate Idol of Majestie Divine, enclos'd With Flaming Cherubim, and golden Shields; Then lighted from his gorgeous Throne, for now 'Twixt Host and Host but narrow space was left, A dreadful intervall, and Front to Front Presented stood in terrible array Of hideous length: before the cloudie Van, On the rough edge of battel ere it joyn,d, Satan with vast and haughtie strides advanc't, Came towring, armd in Adamant and Gold; Abdiel that sight endur'd not, where he stood Among the mightiest, bent on highest deeds, And thus his own undaunted heart explores. O Heav'n! that such resemblance of the Highest Should yet remain, where faith and realtie Remain not; wherfore should not strength and might There fail where Vertue fails, or weakest prove Where boldest; though to sight unconquerable? His puissance, trusting in th' Almightie's aide, I mean to try, whose Reason I have tri'd Unsound and false; nor is it aught but just, That he who in debate of Truth hath won, Should win in Arms, in both disputes alike Victor; though brutish that contest and foule, When Reason hath to deal with force, yet so Most reason is that Reason overcome. So pondering, and from his armed Peers Forth stepping opposite, half way he met His daring foe, at this prevention more Incens't, and thus securely him defi'd. Proud, art thou met? thy hope was to have reacht The highth of thy aspiring unoppos'd, The Throne of God unguarded, and his side Abandond at the terror of thy Power Or potent tongue; fool, not to think how vain Against th' Omnipotent to rise in Arms; Who out of smallest things could without end Have rais'd incessant Armies to defeat Thy folly; or with solitarie hand Reaching beyond all limit at one blow Unaided could have finisht thee, and whelmd Thy Legions under darkness; but thou seest All are not of thy Train; there be who Faith Prefer, and Pietie to God, though then To thee not visible, when I alone Seemd in thy World erroneous to dissent From all: my Sect thou seest, now learn too late How few somtimes may know, when thousands err. Whom the grand foe with scornful eye askance Thus answerd. Ill for thee, but in wisht houre Of my revenge, first sought for thou returnst From flight, seditious Angel, to receave Thy merited reward, the first assay Of this right hand provok't, since first that tongue Inspir'd with contradiction durst oppose A third part of the Gods, in Synod met Thir Deities to assert, who while they feel Vigour Divine within them, can allow Omnipotence to none. But well thou comst Before thy fellows, ambitious to win From me som Plume, that thy success may show Destruction to the rest: this pause between (Unanswerd least thou boast) to let thee know; At first I thought that Libertie and Heav'n To heav'nly Soules had bin all one; but now I see that most through sloth had rather serve, Ministring Spirits, traind up in Feast and Song; Such hast thou arm'd, the Ministrelsie of Heav'n, Servilitie with freedom to contend, As both thir deeds compar'd this day shall prove. To whom in brief thus Abdiel stern repli'd. Apostat, still thou errst, nor end wilt find Of erring, from the path of truth remote: Unjustly thou deprav'st it with the name Of Servitude to serve whom God ordains, Or Nature; God and Nature bid the same, When he who rules is worthiest, and excells Them whom he governs. This is servitude, To serve th' unwise, or him who hath rebelld Against his worthier, as thine now serve thee, Thy self not free, but to thy self enthrall'd; Yet leudly dar'st our ministring upbraid. Reign thou in Hell thy Kingdom, let mee serve In Heav'n God ever blest, and his Divine Behests obey, worthiest to be obey'd, Yet Chains in Hell, not Realms expect: mean while From mee returnd, as erst thou saidst, from flight, This greeting on thy impious Crest receive. So saying, a noble stroke he lifted high, Which hung not, but so swift with tempest fell On the proud Crest of Satan, that no sight, Nor motion of swift thought, less could his Shield Such ruin intercept: ten paces huge He back recoild; the tenth on bended knee His massie Spear upstaid; as if on Earth Winds under ground or waters forcing way Sidelong, had push't a Mountain from his seat Half sunk with all his Pines. Amazement seis'd The Rebel Thrones, but greater rage to see Thus foil'd thir mightiest, ours joy filld, and shout, Presage of Victorie and fierce desire Of Battel: whereat Michael bid sound Th' Arch-Angel trumpet; through the vast of Heaven It sounded, and the faithful Armies rung Hosanna to the Highest: nor stood at gaze The adverse Legions, nor less hideous joyn'd The horrid shock: now storming furie rose, And clamour such as heard in Heav'n till now Was never, Arms on Armour clashing bray'd Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles Of brazen Chariots rag'd; dire was the noise Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss Of fiery Darts in flaming volies flew, And flying vaulted either Host with fire. So under fierie Cope together rush'd Both Battels maine, with ruinous assault And inextinguishable rage; all Heav'n Resounded, and had Earth bin then, all Earth Had to her Center shook. What wonder? when Millions of fierce encountring Angels fought On either side, the least of whom could weild These Elements, and arm him with the force Of all thir Regions: how much more of Power Armie against Armie numberless to raise Dreadful combustion warring, and disturb, Though not destroy, thir happie Native seat; Had not th' Eternal King Omnipotent From his strong hold of Heav'n high over-rul'd And limited thir might; though numberd such As each divided Legion might have seemd A numerous Host, in strength each armed hand A Legion; led in fight, yet Leader seemd Each Warriour single as in Chief, expert When to advance, or stand, or turn the sway Of Battel, open when, and when to close The ridges of grim Warr; no thought of flight, None of retreat, no unbecoming deed That argu'd fear; each on himself reli'd, As onely in his arm the moment lay Of victorie; deeds of eternal fame Were don, but infinite: for wide was spred That Warr and various; somtimes on firm ground A standing fight, then soaring on main wing Tormented all the Air; all Air seemd then Conflicting Fire: long time in eeven scale The Battel hung; till Satan, who that day Prodigious power had shewn, and met in Armes No equal, raunging through the dire attack Of fighting Seraphim confus'd, at length Saw where the Sword of Michael smote, and fell'd Squadrons at once, with huge two-handed sway Brandisht aloft the horrid edge came down Wide wasting; such destruction to withstand He hasted, and oppos'd the rockie Orb Of tenfold Adamant, his ample Shield A vast circumference: At his approach The great Arch-Angel from his warlike toile Surceas'd, and glad as hoping here to end Intestine War in Heav'n, the arch foe subdu'd Or Captive drag'd in Chains, with hostile frown And visage all enflam'd first thus began. Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt, Unnam'd in Heav'n, now plenteous, as thou seest These Acts of hateful strife, hateful to all, Though heaviest by just measure on thy self And thy adherents: how hast thou disturb d Heav'ns blessed peace, and into Nature brought Miserie, uncreated till the crime Of thy Rebellion? how hast thou instill'd Thy malice into thousands, once upright And faithful, now prov'd false. But think not here To trouble Holy Rest; Heav'n casts thee out From all her Confines. Heav'n the seat of bliss Brooks not the works of violence and Warr. Hence then, and evil go with thee along Thy ofspring, to the place of evil, Hell, Thou and thy wicked crew; there mingle broiles, Ere this avenging Sword begin thy doome, Or som more sudden vengeance wing'd from God Precipitate thee with augmented paine. So spake the Prince of Angels; to whom thus The Adversarie. Nor think thou with wind Of airie threats to aw whom yet with deeds Thou canst not. Hast thou turnd the least of these To flight, or if to fall, but that they rise Unvanquisht, easier to transact with mee That thou shouldst hope, imperious, and with threats To chase me hence? erre not that so shall end The strife which thou call'st evil, but wee style The strife of Glorie: which we mean to win, Or turn this Heav'n it self into the Hell Thou fablest, here however to dwell free, If not to reign: mean while thy utmost force, And join him nam'd Almighty to thy aid, I flie not, but have sought thee farr and nigh. They ended parle, and both addrest for fight Unspeakable; for who, though with the tongue Of Angels, can relate, or to what things Liken on Earth conspicuous, that may lift Human imagination to such highth Of Godlike Power: for likest Gods they seemd, Stood they or mov'd, in stature, motion, arms Fit to decide the Empire of great Heav'n. Now wav'd thir fierie Swords, and in the Aire Made horrid Circles; two broad Suns thir Shields Blaz'd opposite, while expectation stood In horror; from each hand with speed retir'd Where erst was thickest fight, th' Angelic throng, And left large field, unsafe within the wind Of such commotion, such as to set forth Great things by small, If Natures concord broke, Among the Constellations warr were sprung, Two Planets rushing from aspect maligne Of fiercest opposition in mid Skie, Should combat, and thir jarring Sphears confound. Together both with next to Almightie Arme, Uplifted imminent one stroke they aim'd That might determine, and not need repeate, As not of power, at once; nor odds appeerd In might or swift prevention; but the sword Of Michael from the Armorie of God Was giv'n him temperd so, that neither keen Nor solid might resist that edge: it met The sword of Satan with steep force to smite Descending, and in half cut sheere, nor staid, But with swift wheele reverse, deep entring shar'd All his right side; then Satan first knew pain, And writh'd him to and fro convolv'd; so sore The griding sword with discontinuous wound Pass'd through him, but th' Ethereal substance clos'd Not long divisible, and from the gash A stream of Nectarous humor issuing flow'd Sanguin, such as Celestial Spirits may bleed, And all his Armour staind ere while so bright. Forthwith on all sides to his aide was run By Angels many and strong, who interpos'd Defence, while others bore him on thir Shields Back to his Chariot; where it stood retir'd From off the files of warr; there they him laid Gnashing for anguish and despite and shame To find himself not matchless, and his pride Humbl'd by such rebuke, so farr beneath His confidence to equal God in power. Yet soon he heal'd; for Spirits that live throughout Vital in every part, not as frail man In Entrailes, Heart or Head, Liver or Reines; Cannot but by annihilating die; Nor in thir liquid texture mortal wound Receive, no more then can the fluid Aire: All Heart they live, all Head, all Eye, all Eare, All Intellect, all Sense, and as they please, They Limb themselves, and colour, shape or size Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare. Mean while in other parts like deeds deservd Memorial, where the might of Gabriel fought, And with fierce Ensignes pierc'd the deep array Of Moloc furious King, who him defi'd, And at his Chariot wheeles to drag him bound Threatn'd, nor from the Holie One of Heav'n Refrein'd his tongue blasphemous; but anon Down clov'n to the waste, with shatterd Armes And uncouth paine fled bellowing. On each wing Uriel and Raphael his vaunting foe, Though huge, and in a Rock of Diamond Armd, Vanquish'd Adramelec, and Asmadai, Two potent Thrones, that to be less then Gods Disdain'd, but meaner thoughts learnd in thir flight, Mangl'd with gastly wounds through Plate and Maile, Nor stood unmindful Abdiel to annoy The Atheist crew, but with redoubl'd blow Ariel and Arioc, and the violence Of Ramiel scorcht and blasted overthrew. I might relate of thousands, and thir names Eternize here on Earth; but those elect Angels contented with thir fame in Heav'n Seek not the praise of men: the other sort In might though wondrous and in Acts of Warr, Nor of Renown less eager, yet by doome Canceld from Heav'n and sacred memorie, Nameless in dark oblivion let them dwell. For strength from Truth divided and from Just, Illaudable, naught merits but dispraise And ignominie, yet to glorie aspires Vain glorious, and through infamie seeks fame: Therfore Eternal silence be thir doome. And now thir Mightiest quelld, the battel swerv'd, With many an inrode gor'd; deformed rout Enter'd, and foul disorder; all the ground With shiverd armour strow'n, and on a heap Chariot and Charioter lay overturnd And fierie foaming Steeds; what stood, recoyld Orewearied, through the faint Satanic Host Defensive scarse, or with pale fear surpris'd, Then first with fear surpris'd and sense of paine Fled ignominious, to such evil brought By sin of disobedience, till that hour Not liable to fear or flight or paine. Far otherwise th' inviolable Saints In Cubic Phalanx firm advanc't entire, Invulnerable, impenitrably arm'd: Such high advantages thir innocence Gave them above thir foes, not to have sinnd, Not to have disobei'd; in fight they stood Unwearied, unobnoxious to be pain'd By wound, though from thir place by violence mov'd. Now Night her course began, and over Heav'n Inducing darkness, grateful truce impos'd, And silence on the odious dinn of Warr: Under her Cloudie covert both retir'd, Victor and Vanquisht: on the foughten field Michael and his Angels prevalent Encamping, plac'd in Guard thir Watches round, Cherubic waving fires: on th' other part Satan with his rebellious disappeerd, Far in the dark dislodg'd, and void of rest, His Potentates to Councel call'd by night; And in the midst thus undismai'd began. O now in danger tri'd, now known in Armes Not to be overpowerd, Companions deare, Found worthy not of Libertie alone, Too mean pretense, but what we more affect, Honour, Dominion, Glorie, and renowne, Who have sustaind one day in doubtful fight (And if one day, why not Eternal dayes?) What Heavens Lord had powerfullest to send Against us from about his Throne, and judg'd Sufficient to subdue us to his will, But proves not so: then fallible, it seems, Of future we may deem him, though till now Omniscient thought. True is, less firmly arm'd, Some disadvantage we endur'd and paine, Till now not known, but known as soon contemnd, Since now we find this our Empyreal form Incapable of mortal injurie Imperishable, and though peirc'd with wound, Soon closing, and by native vigour heal'd. Of evil then so small as easie think The remedie; perhaps more valid Armes, Weapons more violent, when next we meet, May serve to better us, and worse our foes, Or equal what between us made the odds, In Nature none: if other hidden cause Left them Superiour, while we can preserve Unhurt our mindes, and understanding sound, Due search and consultation will disclose. He sat; and in th' assembly next upstood Nisroc of Principalities the prime; As one he stood escap't from cruel fight, Sore toild, his riv'n Armes to havoc hewn, And cIoudie in aspect thus answering spake. Deliverer from new Lords, leader to free Enjoyment of our right as Gods; yet hard For Gods, and too unequal work we find Against unequal armes to fight in paine, Against unpaind, impassive; from which evil Ruin must needs ensue; for what availes Valour or strength, though matchless, quelld with pain Which all subdues, and makes remiss the hands Of Mightiest. Sense of pleasure we may well Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine, But live content, which is the calmest life: But pain is perfet miserie, the worst Of evils, and excessive, overturnes All patience. He who therefore can invent With what more forcible we may offend Our yet unwounded Enemies, or arme Our selves with like defence, to me deserves No less then for deliverance what we owe. Whereto with look compos'd Satan repli'd. Not uninvented that, which thou aright Believst so main to our success, I bring; Which of us who beholds the bright surface Of this Ethereous mould whereon we stand, This continent of spacious Heav'n, adornd With Plant, Fruit, Flour Ambrosial, Gemms & Gold, Whose Eye so superficially surveyes These things, as not to mind from whence they grow Deep under ground, materials dark and crude, Of spiritous and fierie spume, till toucht With Heav'ns ray, and temperd they shoot forth So beauteous, op'ning to the ambient light. These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame, Which into hallow Engins long and round Thick-rammd, at th' other bore with touch of fire Dilated and infuriate shall send forth From far with thundring noise among our foes Such implements of mischief as shall dash To pieces, and orewhelm whatever stands Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt. Nor long shall be our labour, yet ere dawne, Effect shall end our wish. Mean while revive; Abandon fear; to strength and counsel joind Think nothing hard, much less to be despaird. He ended, and his words thir drooping chere Enlightn'd, and thir languisht hope reviv'd. Th' invention all admir'd, and each, how hee To be th' inventer miss'd, so easie it seemd Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought Impossible: yet haply of thy Race In future dayes, if Malice should aboun, Some one intent on mischief, or inspir'd With dev'lish machination might devise Like instrument to plague the Sons of men For sin, on warr and mutual slaughter bent. Forthwith from Councel to the work they flew, None arguing stood, innumerable hands Were ready, in a moment up they turnd Wide the Celestial soile, and saw beneath Th' originals of Nature in thir crude Conception; Sulphurous and Nitrous Foame They found, they mingl'd, and with suttle Art, Concocted and adusted they reduc'd To blackest grain, and into store convey'd: Part hidd'n veins diggd up (nor hath this Earth Entrails unlike) of Mineral and Stone, Whereof to found thir Engins and thir Balls Of missive ruin; part incentive reed Provide, pernicious with one touch to fire. So all ere day-spring, under conscious Night Secret they finish'd, and in order set, With silent circumspection unespi'd. Now when fair Morn Orient in Heav'n appeerd Up rose the Victor Angels, and to Arms The matin Trumpet Sung: in Arms they stood Of Golden Panoplie, refulgent Host, Soon banded; others from the dawning Hills Lookd round, and Scouts each Coast light-armed scoure, Each quarter, to descrie the distant foe, Where lodg'd, or whither fled, or if for fight, In motion or in alt: him soon they met Under spred Ensignes moving nigh, in slow But firm Battalion; back with speediest Sail Zophiel, of Cherubim the swiftest wing, Came flying, and in mid Aire aloud thus cri'd. Arme, Warriours, Arme for fight, the foe at hand, Whom fled we thought, will save us long pursuit This day, fear not his flight; so thick a Cloud He comes, and settl'd in his face I see Sad resolution and secure: let each His Adamantine coat gird well, and each Fit well his Helme, gripe fast his orbed Shield, Born eevn or high, for this day will pour down, If I conjecture aught, no drizling showr, But ratling storm of Arrows barbd with fire. So warnd he them aware themselves, and soon In order, quit of all impediment; Instant without disturb they took Allarm, And onward move Embattelld; when behold Not distant far with heavie pace the Foe Approaching gross and huge; in hollow Cube Training his devilish Enginrie, impal'd On every side with shaddowing Squadrons Deep, To hide the fraud. At interview both stood A while, but suddenly at head appeerd Satan: And thus was heard Commanding loud. Vanguard, to Right and Left the Front unfould; That all may see who hate us, how we seek Peace and composure, and with open brest Stand readie to receive them, if they like Our overture, and turn not back perverse; But that I doubt, however witness Heaven, Heav'n witness thou anon, while we discharge Freely our part; yee who appointed stand Do as you have in charge, and briefly touch What we propound, and loud that all may hear. So scoffing in ambiguous words, he scarce Had ended; when to Right and Left the Front Divided, and to either Flank retir'd. Which to our eyes discoverd new and strange, A triple mounted row of Pillars laid On Wheels (for like to Pillars most they seem'd Or hollow'd bodies made of Oak or Firr With branches lopt, in Wood or Mountain fell'd) Brass, Iron, Stonie mould, had not thir mouthes With hideous orifice gap't on us wide, Portending hollow truce; at each behind A Seraph stood, and in his hand a Reed Stood waving tipt with fire; while we suspense, Collected stood within our thoughts amus'd, Not long, for sudden all at once thir Reeds Put forth, and to a narrow vent appli'd With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame, But soon obscur'd with smoak, all Heav'n appeerd, From those deep throated Engins belcht, whose roar Emboweld with outragious noise the Air, And all her entrails tore, disgorging foule Thir devilish glut, chaind Thunderbolts and Hail Of Iron Globes, which on the Victor Host Level'd, with such impetuous furie smote, That whom they hit, none on thir feet might stand, Though standing else as Rocks, but down they fell By thousands, Angel on Arch-Angel rowl'd; The sooner for thir Arms, unarm'd they might Have easily as Spirits evaded swift By quick contraction or remove; but now Foule dissipation follow'd and forc't rout; Nor serv'd it to relax thir serried files. What should they do? if on they rusht, repulse Repeated, and indecent overthrow Doubl'd, would render them yet more despis'd, And to thir foes a laughter; for in view Stood rankt of Seraphim another row In posture to displode thir second tire Of Thunder: back defeated to return They worse abhorr'd. Satan beheld thir plight, And to his Mates thus in derision call'd. O Friends, why come not on these Victors proud? Ere while they fierce were coming, and when wee, To entertain them fair with open Front And Brest, (what could we more?) propounded terms Of composition, strait they chang'd thir minds, Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell, As they would dance, yet for a dance they seemd Somwhat extravagant and wilde, perhaps For joy of offerd peace: but I suppose If our proposals once again were heard We should compel them to a quick result. To whom thus Belial in like gamesom mood, Leader, the terms we sent were terms of weight, Of hard contents, and full of force urg'd home, Such as we might perceive amus'd them all, And stumbl'd many, who receives them right, Had need from head to foot well understand; Not understood, this gift they have besides, They shew us when our foes walk not upright. So they among themselves in pleasant veine Stood scoffing, highthn'd in thir thoughts beyond All doubt of Victorie, eternal might To match with thir inventions they presum'd So easie, and of his Thunder made a scorn, And all his Host derided, while they stood A while in trouble; but they stood not long, Rage prompted them at length, and found them arms Against such hellish mischief fit to oppose. Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power Which God hath in his mighty Angels plac'd) Thir Arms away they threw, and to the Hills (For Earth hath this variety from Heav'n Of pleasure situate in Hill and Dale) Light as the Lightning glimps they ran, they flew, From thir foundations loosning to and fro They pluckt the seated Hills with all thir load, Rocks, Waters, Woods, and by the shaggie tops Up lifting bore them in thir hands: Amaze, Be sure, and terrour seis'd the rebel Host, When coming towards them so dread they saw The bottom of the Mountains upward turn'd, Till on those cursed Engins triple-row They saw them whelm'd, and all thir confidence Under the weight of Mountains buried deep, Themselves invaded next, and on thir heads Main Promontories flung, which in the Air Came shadowing, and opprest whole Legions arm'd, Thir armor help'd thir harm, crush't in and bruis'd Into thir substance pent, which wrought them pain Implacable, and many a dolorous groan, Long strugling underneath, ere they could wind Out of such prison, though Spirits of purest light, Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown. The rest in imitation to like Armes Betook them, and the neighbouring Hills uptore; So Hills amid the Air encounterd Hills Hurl'd to and fro with jaculation dire That under ground, they fought in dismal shade; Infernal noise; Warr seem'd a civil Game To this uproar; horrid confusion heapt Upon confusion rose: and now all Heav'n Had gon to wrack, with ruin overspred, Had not th' Almightie Father where he sits Shrin'd in his Sanctuarie of Heav'n secure, Consulting on the sum of things, foreseen This tumult, and permitted all, advis'd: That his great purpose he might so fulfill, To honour his Anointed Son aveng'd Upon his enemies, and to declare All power on him transferr'd: whence to his Son Th' Assessor of his Throne he thus began. Effulgence of my Glorie, Son belov'd, Son in whose face invisible is beheld Visibly, what by Deitie I am, And in whose hand what by Decree I doe, Second Omnipotence, two dayes are past, Two dayes, as we compute the dayes of Heav'n, Since Michael and his Powers went forth to tame These disobedient; sore hath been thir fight, As likeliest was, when two such Foes met arm'd; For to themselves I left them, and thou knowst, Equal in their Creation they were form'd, Save what sin hath impaird, which yet hath wrought Insensibly, for I suspend thir doom; Whence in perpetual fight they needs must last Endless, and no solution will be found: Warr wearied hath perform'd what Warr can do, And to disorder'd rage let loose the reines, With Mountains as with Weapons arm'd, which makes Wild work in Heav'n, and dangerous to the maine. Two dayes are therefore past, the third is thine; For thee I have ordain'd it, and thus farr Have sufferd, that the Glorie may be thine Of ending this great Warr, since none but Thou Can end it. Into thee such Vertue and Grace Immense I have transfus'd, that all may know In Heav'n and Hell thy Power above compare, And this perverse Commotion governd thus, To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir Of all things, to be Heir and to be King By Sacred Unction, thy deserved right. Go then thou Mightiest in thy Fathers might, Ascend my Chariot, guide the rapid Wheeles That shake Heav'ns basis, bring forth all my Warr, My Bow and Thunder, my Almightie Arms Gird on, and Sword upon thy puissant Thigh; Pursue these sons of Darkness, drive them out From all Heav'ns bounds into the utter Deep: There let them learn, as likes them, to despise God and Messiah his anointed King. He said, and on his Son with Rayes direct Shon full, he all his Father full expresst Ineffably into his face receiv'd, And thus the filial Godhead answering spake. O Father, O Supream of heav'nly Thrones, First, Highest, Holiest, Best, thou alwayes seekst To glorifie thy Son, I alwayes thee, As is most just; this I my Glorie account, My exaltation, and my whole delight, That thou in me well pleas'd, declarst thy will Fulfill'd, which to fulfil is all my bliss. Scepter and Power, thy giving, I assume, And gladlier shall resign, when in the end Thou shalt be All in All, and I in thee For ever, and in mee all whom thou lov'st: But whom thou hat'st, I hate, and can put on Thy terrors, as I put thy mildness on, Image of thee in all things; and shall soon, Armd with thy might, rid heav'n of these rebell'd, To thir prepar'd ill Mansion driven down To chains of darkness, and th' undying Worm, That from thy just obedience could revolt, Whom to obey is happiness entire. Then shall thy Saints unmixt, and from th' impure Farr separate, circling thy holy Mount Unfained Halleluiahs to thee sing, Hymns of high praise, and I among them chief. So said, he o're his Scepter bowing, rose From the right hand of Glorie where he sate, And the third sacred Morn began to shine Dawning through Heav'n: forth rush'd with whirlwind sound The Chariot of Paternal Deitie, Flashing thick flames, Wheele within Wheele undrawn, It self instinct with Spirit, but convoyd By four Cherubic shapes, four Faces each Had wondrous, as with Starrs thir bodies all And Wings were set with Eyes, with Eyes the wheels Of Beril, and careering Fires between; Over thir heads a chrystal Firmament, Whereon a Saphir Throne, inlaid with pure Amber, and colours of the showrie Arch. Hee in Celestial Panoplie all armd Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought, Ascended, at his right hand Victorie Sate Eagle-wing'd, beside him hung his Bow And Quiver with three-bolted Thunder stor'd, And from about him fierce Effusion rowld Of smoak and bickering flame, and sparkles dire; Attended with ten thousand thousand Saints, He onward came, farr off his coming shon, And twentie thousand (I thir number heard) Chariots of God, half on each hand were seen: Hee on the wings of Cherub rode sublime On the Chrystallin Skie, in Saphir Thron'd. Illustrious farr and wide, but by his own First seen, them unexpected joy surpriz'd, When the great Ensign of Messiah blaz'd Aloft by Angels born, his Sign in Heav'n: Under whose conduct Michael soon reduc'd His Armie, circumfus'd on either Wing, Under thir Head imbodied all in one. Before him Power Divine his way prepar'd; At his command the uprooted Hills retir'd Each to his place, they heard his voice and went Obsequious, Heav'n his wonted face renewd, And with fresh Flourets Hill and Valley smil'd. This saw his hapless Foes but stood obdur'd, And to rebellious fight rallied thir Powers Insensate, hope conceiving from despair. In heav'nly Spirits could such perverseness dwell? But to convince the proud what Signs availe, Or Wonders move th' obdurate to relent? They hard'nd more by what might most reclame, Grieving to see his Glorie, at the sight Took envie, and aspiring to his highth, Stood reimbattell'd fierce, by force or fraud Weening to prosper, and at length prevaile Against God and Messiah, or to fall In universal ruin last, and now To final Battel drew, disdaining flight, Or faint retreat; when the great Son of God To all his Host on either hand thus spake. Stand still in bright array ye Saints, here stand Ye Angels arm'd, this day from Battel rest; Faithful hath been your warfare, and of God Accepted, fearless in his righteous Cause, And as ye have receivd, so have ye don Invincibly; but of this cursed crew The punishment to other hand belongs, Vengeance is his, or whose he sole appoints; Number to this dayes work is not ordain'd Nor multitude, stand onely and behold Gods indignation on these Godless pourd By mee, not you but mee they have despis'd, Yet envied; against mee is all thir rage, Because the Father, t' whom in Heav'n supream Kingdom and Power and Glorie appertains, Hath honourd me according to his will. Therefore to mee thir doom he hath assig'n'd; That they may have thir wish, to trie with mee In Battel which the stronger proves, they all, Or I alone against them, since by strength They measure all, of other excellence Not emulous, nor care who them excells; Nor other strife with them do I voutsafe. So spake the Son, and into terrour chang'd His count'nance too severe to be beheld And full of wrauth bent on his Enemies. At once the Four spred out thir Starrie wings With dreadful shade contiguous, and the Orbes Of his fierce Chariot rowld, as with the sound Of torrent Floods, or of a numerous Host. Hee on his impious Foes right onward drove, Gloomie as Night; under his burning Wheeles The stedfast Empyrean shook throughout, All but the Throne it self of God. Full soon Among them he arriv'd; in his right hand Grasping ten thousand Thunders, which he sent Before him, such as in thir Soules infix'd Plagues; they astonisht all resistance lost, All courage; down thir idle weapons drop'd; O're Shields and Helmes, and helmed heads he rode Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim prostrate, That wisht the Mountains now might be again Thrown on them as a shelter from his ire. Nor less on either side tempestuous fell His arrows, from the fourfold-visag'd Foure, Distinct with eyes, and from the living Wheels Distinct alike with multitude of eyes, One Spirit in them rul'd, and every eye Glar'd lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire Among th' accurst, that witherd all thir strength, And of thir wonted vigour left them draind, Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall'n. Yet half his strength he put not forth, but check'd His Thunder in mid Volie, for he meant Not to destroy, but root them out of Heav'n: The overthrown he rais'd, and as a Heard Of Goats or timerous flock together throngd Drove them before him Thunder-struck, pursu'd With terrors and with furies to the bounds And Chrystal wall of Heav'n, which op'ning wide, Rowld inward, and a spacious Gap disclos'd Into the wastful Deep; the monstrous sight Strook them with horror backward, but far worse Urg'd them behind; headlong themselves they threw Down from the verge of Heav'n, Eternal wrauth Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. Hell heard th' unsufferable noise, Hell saw Heav'n ruining from Heav'n and would have fled Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound. Nine dayes they fell; confounded Chaos roard, And felt tenfold confusion in thir fall Through his wilde Anarchie, so huge a rout Incumberd him with ruin: Hell at last Yawning receavd them whole, and on them clos'd, Hell thir fit habitation fraught with fire Unquenchable, the house of woe and paine. Disburd'nd Heav'n rejoic'd, and soon repaird Her mural breach, returning whence it rowld. Sole Victor from th' expulsion of his Foes Messiah his triumphal Chariot turnd: To meet him all his Saints, who silent stood Eye witnesses of his Almightie Acts, With Jubilie advanc'd; and as they went, Shaded with branching Palme, each order bright, Sung Triumph, and him sung Victorious King, Son, Heir, and Lord, to him Dominion giv'n, Worthiest to Reign: he celebrated rode Triumphant through mid Heav'n, into the Courts And Temple of his migihtie Father Thron'd On high: who into Glorie him receav'd, Where now he sits at the right hand of bliss. Thus measuring things in Heav'n by things on Earth At thy request, and that thou maist beware By what is past, to thee I have reveal'd What might have else to human Race bin hid; The discord which befel, and Warr in Heav'n Among th' Angelic Powers, and the deep fall Of those too high aspiring, who rebelld With Satan, hee who envies now thy state, Who now is plotting how he may seduce Thee also from obedience, that with him Bereavd of happiness thou maist partake His punishment, Eternal miserie; Which would be all his solace and revenge, As a despite don against the most High, Thee once to gaine Companion of his woe. But list'n not to his Temptations, warne Thy weaker; let it profit thee to have heard By terrible Example the reward Of disobedience; firm they might have stood, Yet fell; remember, and fear to transgress.
THE Angel ended, and in Adams Eare So Charming left his voice, that he a while Thought him still speaking, still stood fixt to hear; Then as new wak't thus gratefully repli'd. What thanks sufficient, or what recompence Equal have I to render thee, Divine Hystorian, who thus largely hast allayd The thirst I had of knowledge, and voutsaf't This friendly condescention to relate Things else by me unsearchable, now heard With wonder, but delight, and, as is due, With glorie attributed to the high Creator; something yet of doubt remaines, Which onely thy solution can resolve. When I behold this goodly Frame, this World Of Heav'n and Earth consisting, and compute, Thir magnitudes, this Earth a spot, a graine, An Atom, with the Firmament compar'd And all her numberd Starrs, that seem to rowle Spaces incomprehensible (for such Thir distance argues and thir swift return Diurnal) meerly to officiate light Round this opacous Earth, this punctual spot, One day and night; in all thir vast survey Useless besides, reasoning I oft admire, How Nature wise and frugal could commit Such disproportions, with superfluous hand So many nobler Bodies to create, Greater so manifold to this one use, For aught appeers, and on thir Orbs impose Such restless revolution day by day Repeated, while the sedentarie Earth, That better might with farr less compass move, Serv'd by more noble then her self, attaines Her end without least motion, and receaves, As Tribute such a sumless journey brought Of incorporeal speed, her warmth and light; Speed, to describe whose swiftness Number failes. So spake our Sire, and by his count'nance seemd Entring on studious thoughts abstruse, which Eve Perceaving where she sat retir'd in sight, With lowliness Majestic from her seat, And Grace that won who saw to wish her stay, Rose, and went forth among her Fruits and Flours, To visit how they prosper'd, bud and bloom, Her Nurserie; they at her coming sprung And toucht by her fair tendance gladlier grew. Yet went she not, as not with such discourse Delighted, or not capable her eare Of what was high: such pleasure she reserv'd, Adam relating, she sole Auditress; Her Husband the Relater she preferr'd Before the Angel, and of him to ask Chose rather; hee, she knew would intermix Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute With conjugal Caresses, from his Lip Not Words alone pleas'd her. O when meet now Such pairs, in Love and mutual Honour joyn'd? With Goddess-like demeanour forth she went; Not unattended, for on her as Queen A pomp of winning Graces waited still, And from about her shot Darts of desire Into all Eyes to wish her still in sight. And Raphael now to Adam's doubt propos'd Benevolent and facil thus repli'd. To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heav'n Is as the Book of God before thee set, Wherein to read his wondrous Works, and learne His Seasons, Hours, or Dayes, or Months, or Yeares: This to attain, whether Heav'n move or Earth, Imports not, if thou reck'n right, the rest From Man or Angel the great Architect Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge His secrets to be scann'd by them who ought Rather admire; or if they list to try Conjecture, he his Fabric of the Heav'ns Hath left to thir disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at thir quaint Opinions wide Hereafter, when they come to model Heav'n And calculate the Starrs, how they will weild The mightie frame, how build, unbuild, contrive To save appeerances, how gird the Sphear With Centric and Eccentric scribl'd o're, Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb: Alreadie by thy reasoning this I guess, Who art to lead thy ofspring, and supposest That bodies bright and greater should not serve The less not bright, nor Heav'n such journies run, Earth sitting still, when she alone receaves The benefit: consider first, that Great Or Bright inferrs not Excellence: the Earth Though, in comparison of Heav'n, so small, Nor glistering, may of solid good containe More plenty then the Sun that barren shines Whose vertue on it self workes no effect, But in the fruitful Earth; there first receavd His beams, unactive else, thir vigour find. Yet not to Earth are those bright Luminaries Officious, but to thee Earths habitant. And for the Heav'ns wide Circuit, let it speak The Makers high magnificence, who built So spacious, and his Line stretcht out so farr; That Man may know he dwells not in his own; An Edifice too large for him to fill, Lodg'd in a small partition, and the rest Ordain'd for uses to his Lord best known. The swiftness of those Circles attribute Though numberless, to his Omnipotence, That to corporeal substances could adde Speed almost Spiritual; mee thou thinkst not slow, Who since the Morning hour set out from Heav'n Where God resides, and ere mid-day arriv'd In Eden, distance inexpressible By Numbers that have name. But this I urge, Admitting Motion in the Heav'ns, to shew Invalid that which thee to doubt it mov'd; Not that I so affirm, though so it seem To thee who hast thy dwelling here on Earth. God to remove his wayes from human sense, Plac'd Heav'n from Earth so farr, that earthly sight, If it presume, might erre in things too high, And no advantage gaine. What if the Sun Be Center to the World, and other Starrs By his attractive vertue and thir own Incited, dance about him various rounds? Thir wandring course now high, now low, then hid, Progressive, retrograde, or standing still, In six thou seest, and what if sev'nth to these The Planet Earth, so stedfast though she seem, Insensibly three different Motions move? Which else to several Sphears thou must ascribe, Mov'd contrarie with thwart obliquities, Or save the Sun his labour, and that swift Nocturnal and Diurnal rhomb suppos'd, Invisible else above all Starrs, the Wheele Of Day and Night; which needs not thy beleefe, If Earth industrious of her self fetch Day Travelling East, and with her part averse From the Suns beam meet Night, her other part Still luminous by his ray. What if that light Sent from her through the wide transpicuous aire, To the terrestrial Moon be as a Starr Enlightning her by Day, as she by Night This Earth? reciprocal, if Land be there, Feilds and Inhabitants: Her spots thou seest As Clouds, and Clouds may rain, and Rain produce Fruits in her soft'nd Soile, for some to eate Allotted there; and other Suns perhaps With thir attendant Moons thou wilt descrie Communicating Male and Femal Light, Which two great Sexes animate the World, Stor'd in each Orb perhaps with some that live. For such vast room in Nature unpossest By living Soule, desert and desolate, Onely to shine, yet scarce to contribute Each Orb a glimps of Light, conveyd so farr Down to this habitable, which returnes Light back to them, is obvious to dispute. But whether thus these things, or whether not, Whether the Sun predominant in Heav'n Rise on the Earth, or Earth rise on the Sun Hee from the East his flaming rode begin, Or Shee from West her silent course advance With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps On her soft Axle, while she paces Eev'n, And beares thee soft with the smooth Air along, Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, Leave them to God above, him serve and feare; Of other Creatures, as him pleases best, Wherever plac't, let him dispose: joy thou In what he gives to thee, this Paradise And thy faire Eve; Heav'n is for thee too high To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:. Think onely what concernes thee and thy being; Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there Live, in what state, condition or degree, Contented that thus farr hath been reveal'd Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav'n. To whom thus Adam cleerd of doubt, repli'd. How fully hast thou satisfi'd mee, pure Intelligence of Heav'n, Angel serene, And freed from intricacies, taught to live, The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts To interrupt the sweet of Life, from which God hath bid dwell farr off all anxious cares, And not molest us, unless we our selves Seek them with wandring thoughts, and notions vain. But apt the Mind or Fancie is to roave Uncheckt, and of her roaving is no end; Till warn'd, or by experience taught, she learne, That not to know at large of things remote From use, obscure and suttle, but to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime Wisdom, what is more, is fume, Or emptiness, or fond impertinence, And renders us in things that most concerne Unpractis'd, unprepar'd, and still to seek. Therefore from this high pitch let us descend A lower flight, and speak of things at hand Useful, whence haply mention may arise Of somthing not unseasonable to ask By sufferance, and thy wonted favour deign'd. Thee I have heard relating what was don Ere my remembrance: now hear mee relate My Storie, which perhaps thou hast not heard; And Day is yet not spent; till then thou seest How suttly to detaine thee I devise, Inviting thee to hear while I relate, Fond, were it not in hope of thy reply: For while I sit with thee, I seem in Heav'n, And sweeter thy discourse is to my eare Then Fruits of Palm-tree pleasantest to thirst And hunger both, from labour, at the houre Of sweet repast; they satiate, and soon fill, Though pleasant, but thy words with Grace Divine Imbu'd, bring to thir sweetness no satietie. To whom thus Raphael answer'd heav'nly meek. Nor are thy lips ungraceful, Sire of men, Nor tongue ineloquent; for God on thee Abundantly his gifts hath also pour'd Inward and outward both, his image faire: Speaking or mute all comliness and grace Attends thee, and each word, each motion formes, Nor less think wee in Heav'n of thee on Earth Then of our fellow servant, and inquire Gladly into the wayes of God with Man: For God we see hath honour'd thee, and set On Man his Equal Love: say therefore on; For I that Day was absent, as befell, Bound on a voyage uncouth and obscure, Farr on excursion toward the Gates of Hell; Squar'd in full Legion (such command we had) To see that none thence issu'd forth a spie, Or enemie, while God was in his work, Least hee incenst at such eruption bold, Destruction with Creation might have mixt. Not that they durst without his leave attempt, But us he sends upon his high behests For state, as Sovran King, and to enure Our prompt obedience. Fast we found, fast shut The dismal Gates, and barricado'd strong; But long ere our approaching heard within Noise, other then the sound of Dance or Song, Torment, and loud lament, and furious rage. Glad we return'd up to the coasts of Light Ere Sabbath Eev'ning: so we had in charge. But thy relation now; for I attend, Pleas'd with thy words no less then thou with mine. So spake the Godlike Power, and thus our Sire. For Man to tell how human Life began Is hard; for who himself beginning knew? Desire with thee still longer to converse Induc'd me. As new wak't from soundest sleep Soft on the flourie herb I found me laid In Balmie Sweat, which with his Beames the Sun Soon dri'd, and on the reaking moisture fed. Strait toward Heav'n my wondring Eyes I turnd, And gaz'd a while the ample Skie, till rais'd By quick instinctive motion up I sprung, As thitherward endevoring, and upright Stood on my feet; about me round I saw Hill, Dale, and shadie Woods, and sunnie Plaines, And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these, Creatures that livd, and movd, and walk'd, or flew, Birds on the branches warbling; all things smil'd, With fragrance and with joy my heart oreflow'd. My self I then perus'd, and Limb by Limb Survey'd, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran With supple joints, and lively vigour led: But who I was, or where, or from what cause, Knew not; to speak I tri'd, and forthwith spake My Tongue obey'd and readily could name What e're I saw. Thou Sun, said I, faire Light, And thou enlight'nd Earth, so fresh and gay, Ye Hills and Dales, ye Rivers, Woods, and Plaines, And ye that live and move, fair Creatures, tell, Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here? Not of my self; by some great Maker then, In goodness and in power praeeminent; Tell me, how may I know him, how adore, From whom I have that thus I move and live, And feel that I am happier then I know. While thus I call'd, and stray'd I knew not whither, From where I first drew Aire, and first beheld This happie Light, when answer none return'd, On a green shadie Bank profuse of Flours Pensive I sate me down; there gentle sleep First found me, and with soft oppression seis'd My droused sense, untroubl'd, though I thought I then was passing to my former state Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve: When suddenly stood at my Head a dream, Whose inward apparition gently mov'd My fancy to believe I yet had being, And livd: One came, methought, of shape Divine, And said, thy Mansion wants thee, Adam, rise, First Man, of Men innumerable ordain'd First Father, call'd by thee I come thy Guide To the Garden of bliss, thy seat prepar'd. So saying, by the hand he took me rais'd, And over Fields and Waters, as in Aire Smooth sliding without step, last led me up A woodie Mountain; whose high top was plaine, A Circuit wide, enclos'd, with goodliest Trees Planted, with Walks, and Bowers, that what I saw Of Earth before scarce pleasant seemd. Each Tree Load'n with fairest Fruit that hung to the Eye Tempting, stirr'd in me sudden appetite To pluck and eate; whereat I wak'd, and found Before mine Eyes all real, as the dream Had lively shadowd: Here had new begun My wandring, had not hee who was my Guide Up hither, from among the Trees appeer'd Presence Divine. Rejoycing, but with aw In adoration at his feet I fell Submiss: he rear'd me, and Whom thou soughtst I am, Said mildely, Author of all this thou seest Above, or round about thee or beneath. This Paradise I give thee, count it thine To Till and keep, and of the Fruit to eate: Of every Tree that in the Garden growes Eate freely with glad heart; fear here no dearth: But of the Tree whose operation brings Knowledg of good and ill, which I have set The Pledge of thy Obedience and thy Faith Amid the Garden by the Tree of Life Remember what I warne thee, shun to taste, And shun the bitter consequence: for know, The day thou eat'st thereof, my sole command Transgrest, inevitably thou shalt dye; From that day mortal, and this happie State Shalt loose, expell'd from hence into a World Of woe and sorrow. Sternly he pronounc'd The rigid interdiction, which resounds Yet dreadful in mine eare, though in my choice Not to incur; but soon his cleer aspect Return'd and gracious purpose thus renew'd. Not onely these fair bounds, but all the Earth To thee and to thy Race I give; as Lords Possess it, and all things that therein live, Or live in Sea, or Aire, Beast, Fish, and Fowle. In signe whereof each Bird and Beast behold After thir kindes; I bring them to receave From thee thir Names, and pay thee fealtie With low subjection; understand the same Of Fish within thir watry residence, Not hither summond, since they cannot change Thir Element to draw the thinner Aire. As thus he spake, each Bird and Beast behold Approaching two and two, These cowring low With blandishment, each Bird stoop'd on his wing. I nam'd them, as they pass'd, and understood Thir Nature, with such knowledg God endu'd My sudden apprehension: but in these I found not what me thought I wanted still; And to the Heav'nly vision thus presum'd. O by what Name, for thou above all these, Above mankinde, or aught then mankinde higher, Surpassest farr my naming, how may I Adore thee, Author of this Universe, And all this good to man, for whose well being So amply, and with hands so liberal Thou hast provided all things: but with mee I see not who partakes. In solitude What happiness, who can enjoy alone, Or all enjoying, what contentment find? Thus I presumptuous; and the vision bright, As with a smile more bright'nd, thus repli'd. What call'st thou solitude, is not the Earth With various living creatures, and the Aire Replenisht, and all these at thy command To come and play before thee, know'st thou not Thir language and thir wayes, they also know, And reason not contemptibly; with these Find pastime, and beare rule; thy Realm is large. So spake the Universal Lord, and seem'd So ordering. I with leave of speech implor'd, And humble deprecation thus repli'd. Let not my words offend thee, Heav'nly Power, My Maker, be propitious while I speak. Hast thou not made me here thy substitute, And these inferiour farr beneath me set? Among unequals what societie Can sort, what harmonie or true delight? Which must be mutual, in proportion due Giv'n and receiv'd; but in disparitie The one intense, the other still remiss Cannot well suite with either, but soon prove Tedious alike: Of fellowship I speak Such as I seek, fit to participate All rational delight, wherein the brute Cannot be human consort; they rejoyce Each with thir kinde, Lion with Lioness; So fitly them in pairs thou hast combin'd; Much less can Bird with Beast, or Fish with Fowle So well converse, nor with the Ox the Ape; Wors then can Man with Beast, and least of all. Whereto th' Almighty answer'd, not displeas'd. A nice and suttle happiness I see Thou to thy self proposest, in the choice Of thy Associates, Adam, and wilt taste No pleasure, though in pleasure, solitarie. What thinkst thou then of mee, and this my State, Seem I to thee sufficiently possest Of happiness, or not? who am alone From all Eternitie, for none I know Second to me or like, equal much less. How have I then with whom to hold converse Save with the Creatures which I made, and those To me inferiour, infinite descents Beneath what other Creatures are to thee? He ceas'd, I lowly answer'd. To attaine The highth and depth of thy Eternal wayes All human thoughts come short, Supream of things; Thou in thy self art perfet, and in thee Is no deficience found; not so is Man, But in degree, the cause of his desire By conversation with his like to help, Or solace his defects. No need that thou Shouldst propagat, already infinite; And through all numbers absolute, though One; But Man by number is to manifest His single imperfection, and beget Like of his like, his Image multipli'd, In unitie defective, which requires Collateral love, and deerest amitie. Thou in thy secresie although alone, Best with thy self accompanied, seek'st not Social communication, yet so pleas'd, Canst raise thy Creature to what highth thou wilt Of Union or Communion, deifi'd; I by conversing cannot these erect From prone, nor in thir wayes complacence find. Thus I embold'nd spake, and freedom us'd Permissive, and acceptance found, which gain'd This answer from the gratious voice Divine. Thus farr to try thee, Adam, I was pleas'd, And finde thee knowing not of Beasts alone, Which thou hast rightly nam'd, but of thy self, Expressing well the spirit within thee free, My Image, not imparted to the Brute, Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike, And be so minded still; I, ere thou spak'st, Knew it not good for Man to be alone, And no such companie as then thou saw'st Intended thee, for trial onely brought, To see how thou could'st judge of fit and meet: What next I bring shall please thee, be assur'd, Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, Thy wish exactly to thy hearts desire. Hee ended, or I heard no more, for now My earthly by his Heav'nly overpowerd, Which it had long stood under, streind to the highth In that celestial Colloquie sublime, As with an object that excels the sense, Dazl d and spent, sunk down, and sought repair Of sleep, which instantly fell on me, call'd By Nature as in aide, and clos'd mine eyes. Mine eyes he clos'd, but op'n left the Cell Of Fancie my internal sight, by which Abstract as in a transe methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping op'nd my left side, and took From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme, And Life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly with flesh fill'd up and heal'd: The Rib he formd and fashond with his hands; Under his forming hands a Creature grew, Manlike, but different Sex, so lovly faire, That what seemd fair in all the World, seemd now Mean, or in her summd up, in her containd And in her looks, which from that time infus'd Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before, And into all things from her Aire inspir'd The spirit of love and amorous delight. Shee disappeerd, and left me dark, I wak'd To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure: When out of hope, behold her, not farr off, Such as I saw her in my dream, adornd With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow To make her amiable: On she came, Led by her Heav'nly Maker, though unseen, And guided by his voice, nor uninformd Of nuptial Sanctitie and marriage Rites: Grace was in all her steps, Heav'n in her Eye, In every gesture dignitie and love. I overjoyd could not forbear aloud. This turn hath made amends; thou hast fulfill'd Thy words, Creator bounteous and benigne, Giver of all things faire, but fairest this Of all thy gifts, nor enviest. I now see Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man Extracted; for this cause he shall forgoe Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere; And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soule. She heard me thus, and though divinely brought, Yet Innocence and Virgin Modestie, Her vertue and the conscience of her worth, That would be woo'd, and not unsought be won, Not obvious, not obtrusive, but retir'd, The more desirable, or to say all, Nature her self, though pure of sinful thought, Wrought in her so, that seeing me, she turn'd; I follow'd her, she what was Honour knew, And with obsequious Majestie approv'd My pleaded reason. To the Nuptial Bowre I led her blushing like the Morn: all Heav'n, And happie Constellations on that houre Shed thir selectest influence; the Earth Gave sign of gratulation, and each Hill; Joyous the Birds; fresh Gales and gentle Aires Whisper'd it to the Woods, and from thir wings Flung Rose, flung Odours from the spicie Shrub, Disporting, till the amorous Bird of Night Sung Spousal, and bid haste the Eevning Starr On his Hill top, to light the bridal Lamp. Thus I have told thee all my State, and brought My Storie to the sum of earthly bliss Which I enjoy, and must confess to find In all things else delight indeed, but such As us'd or not, works in the mind no change, Nor vehement desire, these delicacies I mean of Taste, Sight, Smell, Herbs, Fruits, and Flours, Walks, and the melodie of Birds; but here Farr otherwise, transported I behold, Transported touch; here passion first I felt, Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else Superiour and unmov'd, here onely weake Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance. Or Nature faild in mee, and left some part Not proof enough such Object to sustain, Or from my side subducting, took perhaps More then enough; at least on her bestow'd Too much of Ornament, in outward shew Elaborate, of inward less exact. For well I understand in the prime end Of Nature her th' inferiour, in the mind And inward Faculties, which most excell, In outward also her resembling less His Image who made both, and less expressing The character of that Dominion giv'n O're other Creatures; yet when I approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems And in her self compleat, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her Looses discount'nanc't, and like folly shewes; Authority and Reason on her waite, As one intended first, not after made Occasionally; and to consummate all, Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat Build in her loveliest, and create an awe About her, as a guard Angelic plac't. To whom the Angel with contracted brow. Accuse not Nature, she hath don her part; Do thou but thine, and be not diffident Of Wisdom, she deserts thee not, if thou Dismiss not her, when most thou needst her nigh, By attributing overmuch to things Less excellent, as thou thy self perceav'st. For what admir'st thou, what transports thee so, An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love, Not thy subjection: weigh with her thy self; Then value: Oft times nothing profits more Then self esteem, grounded on just and right Well manag'd; of that skill the more thou know'st, The more she will acknowledge thee her Head, And to realities yield all her shows: Made so adorn for thy delight the more, So awful, that with honour thou maist love Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise. But if the sense of touch whereby mankind Is propagated seem such dear delight Beyond all other, think the same voutsaf't To Cattel and each Beast; which would not be To them made common and divulg'd, if aught Therein enjoy'd were worthy to subdue The Soule of Man, or passion in him move. What higher in her societie thou findst Attractive, human, rational, love still; In loving thou dost well, in passion not, Wherein true Love consists not; love refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale By which to heav'nly Love thou maist ascend, Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause Among the Beasts no Mate for thee was found. To whom thus half abash't Adam repli'd. Neither her out-side formd so fair, nor aught In procreation common to all kindes (Though higher of the genial Bed by far, And with mysterious reverence I deem) So much delights me as those graceful acts, Those thousand decencies that daily flow From all her words and actions mixt with Love And sweet compliance, which declare unfeign'd Union of Mind, or in us both one Soule; Harmonie to behold in wedded pair More grateful then harmonious sound to the eare. Yet these subject not; I to thee disclose What inward thence I feel, not therefore foild, Who meet with various objects, from the sense Variously representing; yet still free Approve the best, and follow what I approve. To love thou blam'st me not, for love thou saist Leads up to Heav'n, is both the way and guide; Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask; Love not the heav'nly Spirits, and how thir Love Express they, by looks onely, or do they mix Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch? To whom the Angel with a smile that glow'd Celestial rosie red, Loves proper hue, Answer'd. Let it suffice thee that thou know'st Us happie, and without Love no happiness. Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy In eminence, and obstacle find none Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs: Easier then Air with Air; if Spirits embrace, Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure Desiring; nor restrain'd conveyance need As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul. But I can now no more; the parting Sun Beyond the Earths green Cape and verdant Isles Hesperean sets, my Signal to depart. Be strong, live happie, and love, but first of all Him whom to love is to obey, and keep His great command; take heed least Passion sway Thy judgement to do aught, which else free Will Would not admit; thine and of all thy Sons The weal or woe in thee is plac't; beware. I in thy persevering shall rejoyce, And all the Blest: stand fast; to stand or fall Free in thine own Arbitrement it lies. Perfet within, no outward aid require; And all temptation to transgress repel. So saying, he arose; whom Adam thus Follow'd with benediction. Since to part, Go heavenly Guest, Ethereal Messenger, Sent from whose sovran goodness I adore. Gentle to me and affable hath been Thy condescension, and shall be honour'd ever With grateful Memorie: thou to mankind Be good and friendly still, and oft return. So parted they, the Angel up to Heav'n From the thick shade, and Adam to his Bowre.
MEanwhile the hainous and despightfull act Of Satan done in Paradise, and how Hee in the Serpent, had perverted Eve, Her Husband shee, to taste the fatall fruit, Was known in Heav'n; for what can scape the Eye Of God All-seeing, or deceave his Heart Omniscient, who in all things wise and just, Hinder'd not Satan to attempt the minde Of Man, with strength entire, and free will arm'd, Complete to have discover'd and repulst Whatever wiles of Foe or seeming Friend. For still they knew, and ought to have still remember'd The high Injunction not to taste that Fruit, Whoever tempted; which they not obeying, Incurr'd, what could they less, the penaltie, And manifold in sin, deserv'd to fall. Up into Heav'n from Paradise in haste Th' Angelic Guards ascended, mute and sad For Man, for of his state by this they knew, Much wondring how the suttle Fiend had stoln Entrance unseen. Soon as th' unwelcome news From Earth arriv'd at Heaven Gate, displeas'd All were who heard, dim sadness did not spare That time Celestial visages, yet mixt With pitie, violated not thir bliss. About the new-arriv'd, in multitudes Th' ethereal People ran, to hear and know How all befell: they towards the Throne Supream Accountable made haste to make appear With righteous plea, thir utmost vigilance, And easily approv'd; when the most High Eternal Father from his secret Cloud, Amidst in Thunder utter'd thus his voice. Assembl'd Angels, and ye Powers return'd From unsuccessful charge, be not dismaid, Nor troubl'd at these tidings from the Earth, Which your sincerest care could not prevent, Foretold so lately what would come to pass, When first this Tempter cross'd the Gulf from Hell. I told ye then he should prevail and speed On his bad Errand, Man should be seduc't And flatter'd out of all, believing lies Against his Maker; no Decree of mine Concurring to necessitate his Fall, Or touch with lightest moment of impulse His free Will, to her own inclining left In eevn scale. But fall'n he is, and now What rests but that the mortal Sentence pass On his transgression, Death denounc't that day, Which he presumes already vain and void, Because not yet inflicted, as he fear'd, By some immediate stroak; but soon shall find Forbearance no acquittance ere day end. Justice shall not return as bountie scorn'd. But whom send I to judge them? whom but thee Vicegerent Son, to thee I have transferr'd All Judgement, whether in Heav'n, or Earth, or Hell. Easie it might be seen that I intend Mercie collegue with Justice, sending thee Mans Friend, his Mediator, his design'd Both Ransom and Redeemer voluntarie, And destin'd Man himself to judge Man fall'n. So spake the Father, and unfoulding bright Toward the right hand his Glorie, on the Son Blaz'd forth unclouded Deitie; he full Resplendent all his Father manifest Express'd, and thus divinely answer'd milde. Father Eternal, thine is to decree, Mine both in Heav'n and Earth to do thy will Supream, that thou in mee thy Son belov'd Mayst ever rest well pleas'd. I go to judge On Earth these thy transgressors, but thou knowst, Whoever judg'd, the worst on mee must light, When time shall be, for so I undertook Before thee; and not repenting, this obtaine Of right, that I may mitigate thir doom On me deriv'd, yet I shall temper so Justice with Mercie, as may illustrate most Them fully satisfied, and thee appease. Attendance none shall need, nor Train, where none Are to behold the Judgment, but the judg'd, Those two; the third best absent is condemn'd, Convict by flight, and Rebel to all Law Conviction to the Serpent none belongs. Thus saying, from his radiant Seat he rose Of high collateral glorie: him Thrones and Powers, Princedoms, and Dominations ministrant Accompanied to Heaven Gate, from whence Eden and all the Coast in prospect lay. Down he descended strait; the speed of Gods Time counts not, though with swiftest minutes wing'd. Now was the Sun in Western cadence low From Noon, and gentle Aires due at thir hour To fan the Earth now wak'd, and usher in The Eevning coole when he from wrauth more coole Came the mild Judge and Intercessor both To sentence Man: the voice of God they heard Now walking in the Garden, by soft windes Brought to thir Ears, while day declin'd, they heard, And from his presence hid themselves among The thickest Trees, both Man and Wife, till God Approaching, thus to Adam call'd aloud. Where art thou Adam, wont with joy to meet My coming seen far off? I miss thee here, Not pleas'd, thus entertaind with solitude, Where obvious dutie erewhile appear'd unsaught: Or come I less conspicuous, or what change Absents thee, or what chance detains? Come forth. He came, and with him Eve, more loth, though first To offend, discount'nanc't both, and discompos'd; Love was not in thir looks, either to God Or to each other, but apparent guilt, And shame, and perturbation, and despaire, Anger, and obstinacie, and hate, and guile. Whence Adam faultring long, thus answer'd brief. I heard thee in the Garden, and of thy voice Affraid, being naked, hid my self. To whom The gracious judge without revile repli'd. My voice thou oft hast heard, and hast not fear'd, But still rejoyc't, how is it now become So dreadful to thee? that thou art naked, who Hath told thee? hast thou eaten of the Tree Whereof I gave thee charge thou shouldst not eat? To whom thus Adam sore beset repli'd. O Heav'n! in evil strait this day I stand Before my judge, either to undergoe My self the total Crime, or to accuse My other self, the partner of my life; Whose failing, while her Faith to me remaines, I should conceal, and not expose to blame By my complaint; but strict necessitie Subdues me, and calamitous constraint Least on my head both sin and punishment, However insupportable, be all Devolv'd; though should I hold my peace, yet thou Wouldst easily detect what I conceale. This Woman whom thou mad'st to be my help, And gav'st me as thy perfet gift, so good, So fit, so acceptable, so Divine, That from her hand I could suspect no ill, And what she did, whatever in it self, Her doing seem'd to justifie the deed; Shee gave me of the Tree, and I did eate. To whom the sovran Presence thus repli'd. Was shee thy God, that her thou didst obey Before his voice, or was shee made thy guide, Superior, or but equal, that to her Thou did'st resigne thy Manhood, and the Place Wherein God set thee above her made of thee, And for thee, whose perfection farr excell'd Hers in all real dignitie: Adornd Shee was indeed, and lovely to attract Thy Love, not thy Subjection, and her Gifts Were such as under Government well seem'd, Unseemly to beare rule, which was thy part And person, had'st thou known thy self aright. So having said, he thus to Eve in few: Say Woman, what is this which thou hast done? To whom sad Eve with shame nigh overwhelm'd, Confessing soon, yet not before her judge Bold or loquacious, thus abasht repli'd. The Serpent me beguil'd and I did eate. Which when the Lord God heard, without delay To Judgement he proceeded on th' accus'd Serpent though brute, unable to transferre The Guilt on him who made him instrument Of mischief, and polluted from the end Of his Creation; justly then accurst, As vitiated in Nature: more to know Concern'd not Man (since he no further knew) Nor alter'd his offence; yet God at last To Satan first in sin his doom apply'd, Though in mysterious terms, judg'd as then best: And on the Serpent thus his curse let fall. Because thou hast done this, thou art accurst Above all Cattle, each Beast of the Field; Upon thy Belly groveling thou shalt goe, And dust shalt eat all the dayes of thy Life. Between Thee and the Woman I will put Enmitie, and between thine and her Seed; Her Seed shall bruse thy head, thou bruise his heel. So spake this Oracle, then verifi'd When Jesus son of Mary second Eve, Saw Satan fall like Lightning down from Heav'n, Prince of the Aire; then rising from his Grave Spoild Principalities and Powers, triumpht In open shew, and with ascention bright Captivity led captive through the Aire, The Realm it self of Satan long usurpt, Whom he shall tread at last under our feet; Eeven hee who now foretold his fatal bruise, And to the Woman thus his Sentence turn'd. Thy sorrow I will greatly multiplie By thy Conception; Children thou shalt bring In sorrow forth, and to thy Husbands will Thine shall submit, hee over thee shall rule. On Adam last thus judgement he pronounc'd. Because thou hast heark'nd to the voice of thy Wife, And eaten of the Tree concerning which I charg'd thee, saying: Thou shalt not eate thereof, Curs'd is the ground for thy sake, thou in sorrow Shalt eate thereof all the days of thy Life; Thorns also and Thistles it shall bring thee forth Unbid, and thou shalt eate th' Herb of th' Field, In the sweat of thy Face shalt thou eat Bread, Till thou return unto the ground, for thou Out of the ground wast taken, know thy Birth, For dust thou art, and shalt to dust returne. So judg'd he Man, both Judge and Saviour sent, And th' instant stroke of Death denounc't that day Remov'd farr off; then pittying how they stood Before him naked to the aire, that now Must suffer change, disdain'd not to begin Thenceforth the form of servant to assume, As when he wash'd his servants feet so now As Father of his Familie he clad Thir nakedness with Skins of Beasts, or slain, Or as the Snake with youthful Coate repaid; And thought not much to cloath his Enemies: Nor hee thir outward onely with the Skins Of Beasts, but inward nakedness, much more Opprobrious, with his Robe of righteousness, Araying cover'd from his Fathers sight. To him with swift ascent he up returnd, Into his blissful bosom reassum'd In glory as of old, to him appeas'd All, though all-knowing, what had past with Man Recounted, mixing intercession sweet. Meanwhile ere thus was sin'd and judg'd on Earth, Within the Gates of Hell sate Sin and Death, In counterview within the Gates, that now Stood open wide, belching outrageous flame Farr into Chaos, since the Fiend pass'd through, Sin opening, who thus now to Death began. O Son, why sit we here each other viewing Idlely, while Satan our great Author thrives In other Worlds, and happier Seat provides For us his ofspring deare; It cannot be But that success attends him; if mishap, Ere this he had return'd, with fury driv'n By his Avenger, since no place like this Can fit his punishment, or their revenge. Methinks I feel new strength within me rise, Wings growing, and Dominion giv'n me large Beyond this Deep; whatever drawes me on, Or sympathie, or som connatural force Powerful at greatest distance to unite With secret amity things of like kinde By secretest conveyance. Thou my Shade Inseparable must with mee along: For Death from Sin no power can separate. But least the difficultie of passing back Stay his return perhaps over this Gulfe Impassable, Impervious, let us try Adventrous work, yet to thy power and mine Not unagreeable, to found a path Over this Maine from Hell to that new World Where Satan now prevailes, a Monument Of merit high to all th' infernal Host, Easing thir passage hence, for intercourse, Or transmigration, as thir lot shall lead. Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn By this new felt attraction and instinct. Whom thus the meager Shadow answerd soon. Goe whither Fate and inclination strong Leads thee, I shall not lag behinde, nor erre The way, thou leading, such a sent I draw Of carnage, prey innumerable, and taste The savour of Death from all things there that live: Nor shall I to the work thou enterprisest Be wanting, but afford thee equal aid. So saying, with delight he snuff'd the smell Of mortal change on Earth. As when a flock Of ravenous Fowl, though many a League remote, Against the day of Battel, to a Field, Where Armies lie encampt, come flying, lur'd With sent of living Carcasses design'd For death, the following day, in bloodie fight. So sented the grim Feature, and upturn'd His Nostril wide into the murkie Air, Sagacious of his Quarry from so farr. Then Both from out Hell Gates into the waste Wide Anarchie of Chaos damp and dark Flew divers, and with Power (thir Power was great) Hovering upon the Waters; what they met Solid or slimie, as in raging Sea Tost up and down, together crowded drove From each side shoaling towards the mouth of Hell. As when two Polar Winds blowing adverse Upon the Cronian Sea, together drive Mountains of Ice, that stop th' imagin'd way Beyond Petsora Eastward, to the rich Cathaian Coast. The aggregated Soyle Death with his Mace petrific, cold and dry, As with a Trident smote, and fix't as firm As Delos floating once; the rest his look Bound with Gorgonian rigor not to move, And with Asphaltic slime; broad as the Gate, Deep to the Roots of Hell the gather'd beach They fasten'd, and the Mole immense wraught on Over the foaming deep high Archt, a Bridge Of length prodigious joyning to the Wall Immovable of this now fenceless world Forfeit to Death; from hence a passage broad, Smooth, easie, inoffensive down to Hell. So, if great things to small may be compar'd, Xerxes, the Libertie of Greece to yoke, From Susa his Memnonian Palace high Came to the Sea, and over Hellespont Bridging his way, Europe with Asia joyn'd, And scourg'd with many a stroak th' indignant waves. Now had they brought the work by wondrous Art Pontifical, a ridge of pendent Rock Over the vext Abyss, following the track Of Satan, to the self same place where hee First lighted from his Wing, and landed safe From out of Chaos to the out side bare Of this round World: with Pinns of Adamant And Chains they made all fast, too fast they made And durable; and now in little space The confines met of Empyrean Heav'n And of this World, and on the left hand Hell With long reach interpos'd; three sev'ral wayes In sight, to each of these three places led. And now thir way to Earth they had descri'd, To Paradise first tending, when behold Satan in likeness of an Angel bright Betwixt the Centaure and the Scorpion stearing His Zenith, while the Sun in Aries rose: Disguis'd he came, but those his Children dear Thir Parent soon discern'd, though in disguise. Hee after Eve seduc't, unminded slunk Into the Wood fast by, and changing shape To observe the sequel, saw his guileful act By Eve, though all unweeting, seconded Upon her Husband, saw thir shame that sought Vain covertures; but when he saw descend The Son of God to judge them terrifi'd Hee fled, not hoping to escape, but shun The present, fearing guiltie what his wrauth Might suddenly inflict; that past, return'd By Night, and listening where the hapless Paire Sate in thir sad discourse, and various plaint, Thence gatherd his own doom, which understood Not instant, but of future time. With joy And tidings fraught, to Hell he now return'd, And at the brink of Chaos, neer the foot Of this new wondrous Pontifice, unhop't Met who to meet him came, his Ofspring dear. Great joy was at thir meeting, and at sight Of that stupendious Bridge his joy encreas'd. Long hee admiring stood, till Sin, his faire Inchanting Daughter, thus the silence broke. O Parent, these are thy magnific deeds, Thy Trophies, which thou view'st as not thine own, Thou art thir Author and prime Architect: For I no sooner in my Heart divin'd, My Heart, which by a secret harmonie Still moves with thine, join'd in connexion sweet, That thou on Earth hadst prosper'd, which thy looks Now also evidence, but straight I felt Though distant from thee Worlds between, yet felt That I must after thee with this thy Son; Such fatal consequence unites us three: Hell could no longer hold us in her bounds, Nor this unvoyageable Gulf obscure Detain from following thy illustrious track. Thou hast atchiev'd our libertie, confin'd Within Hell Gates till, now, thou us impow'rd To fortifie thus farr, and overlay With this portentous Bridge the dark Abyss. Thine now is all this World, thy vertue hath won What thy hands builded not, thy Wisdom gain'd With odds what Warr hath lost, and fully aveng'd Our foile in Heav'n; here thou shalt Monarch reign, There didst not; there let him still Victor sway, As Battel hath adjudg'd, from this new World Retiring, by his own doom alienated, And henceforth Monarchie with thee divide Of all things parted by th' Empyreal bounds, His Quadrature, from thy Orbicular World, Or trie thee now more dang'rous to his Throne. Whom thus the Prince of Darkness answerd glad. Fair Daughter, and thou Son and Grandchild both, High proof ye now have giv'n to be the Race Of Satan (for I glorie in the name, Antagonist of Heav'ns Almightie King) Amply have merited of me, of all Th' infernal Empire, that so neer Heav'ns dore Triumphal with triumphal act have met, Mine with this glorious Work, and made one Realm Hell and this World, one Realm, one Continent Of easie thorough-fare. Therefore while I Descend through Darkness, on your Rode with ease To my associate Powers, them to acquaint With these successes, and with them rejoyce, You two this way, among these numerous Orbs All yours, right down to Paradise descend; There dwell and Reign in bliss, thence on the Earth Dominion exercise and in the Aire, Chiefly on Man, sole Lord of all declar'd, Him first make sure your thrall, and lastly kill. My Substitutes I send ye, and Create Plenipotent on Earth, of matchless might Issuing from mee: on your joynt vigor now My hold of this new Kingdom all depends, Through Sin to Death expos'd by my exploit. If your joynt power prevailes, th' affaires of Hell No detriment need feare, goe and be strong. So saying he dismiss'd them, they with speed Thir course through thickest Constellations held Spreading thir bane; the blasted Starrs lookt wan, And Planets, Planet-strook, real Eclips Then sufferd. Th' other way Satan went down The Causey to Hell Gate; on either side Disparted Chaos over built exclaimd, And with rebounding surge the barrs assaild, That scorn'd his indignation: through the Gate, Wide open and unguarded, Satan pass'd, And all about found desolate; for those Appointed to sit there, had left thir charge, Flown to the upper World; the rest were all Farr to the inland retir'd, about the walls Of Pandaemonium, Citie and proud seate Of Lucifer, so by allusion calld, Of that bright Starr to Satan paragond. There kept thir Watch the Legions, while the Grand In Council sate, sollicitous what chance Might intercept thir Emperour sent, so hee Departing gave command, and they observ'd. As when the Tartar from his Russian Foe By Astracan over the Snowie Plaines Retires, or Bactrian Sophi from the hornes Of Turkish Crescent, leaves all waste beyond The Realm of Aladule, in his retreate To Tauris or Casbeen. So these the late Heav'n-banisht Host, left desert utmost Hell Many a dark League, reduc't in careful Watch Round thir Metropolis, and now expecting Each hour their great adventurer from the search Of Forrein Worlds: he through the midst unmarkt, In shew Plebeian Angel militant Of lowest order, past; and from the dore Of that Plutonian Hall, invisible Ascended his high Throne, which under state Of richest texture spred, at th' upper end Was plac't in regal lustre. Down a while He sate, and round about him saw unseen: At last as from a Cloud his fulgent head And shape Starr bright appeer'd, or brighter, clad With what permissive glory since his fall Was left him, or false glitter: All amaz'd At that so sudden blaze the Stygian throng Bent thir aspect, and whom they wish'd beheld, Thir mighty Chief returnd: loud was th' acclaime: Forth rush'd in haste the great consulting Peers, Rais'd from thir Dark Divan, and with like joy Congratulant approach'd him, who with hand Silence, and with these words attention won. Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers, For in possession such, not onely of right, I call ye and declare ye now, returnd Successful beyond hope, to lead ye forth Triumphant out of this infernal Pit Abominable, accurst, the house of woe, And Dungeon of our Tyrant: Now possess, As Lords, a spacious World, to our native Heaven Little inferiour, by my adventure hard With peril great atchiev'd. Long were to tell What I have don, what sufferd, with what paine Voyag'd th' unreal, vast, unbounded deep Of horrible confusion, over which By Sin and Death a broad way now is pav'd To expedite your glorious march; but I Toild out my uncouth passage, forc't to ride Th' untractable Abysse, plung'd in the womb Of unoriginal Night and Chaos wilde, That jealous of thir secrets fiercely oppos'd My journey strange, with clamorous uproare Protesting Fate supreame; thence how I found The new created World, which fame in Heav'n Long had foretold, a Fabrick wonderful Of absolute perfection, therein Man Plac't in a Paradise, by our exile Made happie; Him by fraud I have seduc'd From his Creator, and the more to increase Your wonder, with an Apple; he thereat Offended, worth your laughter, hath giv'n up Both his beloved Man and all his World, To Sin and Death a prey, and so to us, Without our hazard, labour, or allarme, To range in, and to dwell, and over Man To rule, as over all he should have rul'd. True is, mee also he hath judg'd, or rather Mee not, but the brute Serpent in whose shape Man I deceav'd: that which to mee belongs, Is enmity, which he will put between Mee and Mankinde; I am to bruise his heel; His Seed, when is not set, shall bruise my head: A World who would not purchase with a bruise, Or much more grievous pain? Ye have th' account Of my performance: What remains, ye Gods, But up and enter now into full bliss. So having said, a while he stood, expecting Thir universal shout and high applause To fill his eare, when contrary he hears On all sides, from innumerable tongues A dismal universal hiss, the sound Of public scorn; he wonderd, but not long Had leasure, wondring at himself now more; His Visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare, His Armes clung to his Ribs, his Leggs entwining Each other, till supplanted down he fell A monstrous Serpent on his Belly prone, Reluctant, but in vaine, a greater power Now rul'd him, punisht in the shape he sin'd, According to his doom: he would have spoke, But hiss for hiss returnd with forked tongue To forked tongue, for now were all transform'd Alike, to Serpents all as accessories To his bold Riot: dreadful was the din Of hissing through the Hall, thick swarming now With complicated monsters head and taile, Scorpion and Asp, and Amphisbaena dire, Cerastes hornd, Hydrus, and Ellops drear, And Dipsas (not so thick swarm'd once the Soil Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the Isle Ophiusa) but still greatest hee the midst, Now Dragon grown, larger then whom the Sun Ingenderd in the Pythian Vale on slime, Huge Python, and his Power no less he seem'd Above the rest still to retain; they all Him follow'd issuing forth to th' open Field, Where all yet left of that revolted Rout Heav'n-fall'n, in station stood or just array, Sublime with expectation when to see ln Triumph issuing forth thir glorious Chief; They saw, but other sight instead, a crowd Of ugly Serpents; horror on them fell, And horrid sympathie; for what they saw, They felt themselvs now changing; down thir arms, Down fell both Spear and Shield, down they as fast, And the dire hiss renew'd, and the dire form Catcht by Contagion, like in punishment, As in thir crime. Thus was th' applause they meant, Turnd to exploding hiss, triumph to shame Cast on themselves from thir own mouths. There stood A Grove hard by, sprung up with this thir change, His will who reigns above, to aggravate Thir penance, laden with Fruit like that Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve Us'd by the Tempter: on that prospect strange Thir earnest eyes they fix'd, imagining For one forbidden Tree a multitude Now ris'n, to work them furder woe or shame; Yet parcht with scalding thurst and hunger fierce, Though to delude them sent, could not abstain, But on they rould in heaps, and up the Trees Climbing, sat thicker then the snakie locks That curld Megaera: greedily they pluck'd The Frutage fair to sight, like that which grew Neer that bituminous Lake where Sodom flam'd; This more delusive, not the touch, but taste Deceav'd; they fondly thinking to allay Thir appetite with gust, instead of Fruit Chewd bitter Ashes, which th' offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayd, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugd as oft, With hatefullest disrelish writh'd thir jaws With soot and cinders fill'd; so oft they fell Into the same illusion, not as Man Whom they triumph'd once lapst. Thus were they plagu'd And worn with Famin, long and ceasless hiss, Till thir lost shape, permitted, they resum'd, Yearly enjoynd, some say, to undergo This annual humbling certain number'd days, To dash thir pride, and joy for Man seduc't. However some tradition they dispers'd Among the Heathen of thir purchase got, And Fabl'd how the Serpent, whom they calld Ophion with Eurynome, the wide- Encroaching Eve perhaps, had first the rule Of high Olympus, thence by Saturn driv'n And Ops, ere yet Dictaean Jove was born. Mean while in Paradise the hellish pair Too soon arriv'd, Sin there in power before, Once actual, now in body, and to dwell Habitual habitant; behind her Death Close following pace for pace, not mounted yet On his pale Horse: to whom Sin thus began. Second of Satan sprung, all conquering Death, What thinkst thou of our Empire now, though earnd With travail difficult, not better farr Then stil at Hels dark threshold to have sate watch, Unnam'd, undreaded, and thy self half starv'd? Whom thus the Sin-born Monster answerd soon. To mee, who with eternal Famin pine, Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven, There best, where most with ravin I may meet; Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems To stuff this Maw, this vast unhide-bound Corps. To whom th' incestuous Mother thus repli'd. Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, and Flours Feed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowle, No homely morsels, and whatever thing The Sithe of Time mowes down, devour unspar'd, Till I in Man residing through the Race, His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect, And season him thy last and sweetest prey. This said, they both betook them several wayes, Both to destroy, or unimmortal make All kinds, and for destruction to mature Sooner or later; which th' Almightie seeing, From his transcendent Seat the Saints among, To those bright Orders utterd thus his voice. See with what heat these Dogs of Hell advance To waste and havoc yonder World, which I So fair and good created, and had still Kept in that State, had not the folly of Man Let in these wastful Furies, who impute Folly to mee, so doth the Prince of Hell And his Adherents, that with so much ease I suffer them to enter and possess A place so heav'nly, and conniving-seem To gratifie my scornful Enemies, That laugh, as if transported with some fit Of Passion, I to them had quitted all, At random yielded up to their misrule; And know not that I call'd and drew them thither My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth Which mans polluting Sin with taint hath shed On what was pure, till cramm'd and gorg'd, nigh burst With suckt and glutted offal, at one sling Of thy victorious Arm, well-pleasing Son, Both Sin, and Death, and yawning Grave at last Through Chaos hurld, obstruct the mouth of Hell For ever, and seal up his ravenous Jawes. Then Heav'n and Earth renewd shall be made pure To sanctitie that shall receive no staine: Till then the Curse pronounc't on both precedes. He ended, and the heav'nly Audience loud Sung Halleluia, as the sound of Seas, Through multitude that sung: Just are thy ways, Righteous are thy Decrees on all thy Works; Who can extenuate thee? Next, to the Son, Destin'd restorer of Mankind, by whom New Heav'n and Earth shall to the Ages rise, Or down from Heav'n descend. Such was thir song, While the Creator calling forth by name His mightie Angels gave them several charge, As sorted best with present things. The Sun Had first his precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the Earth with cold and heat Scarce tollerable, and from the North to call Decrepit Winter, from the South to bring Solstitial summers heat. To the blanc Moone Her office they prescrib'd, to th' other five Thir planetarie motions and aspects In Sextile, Square, and Trine, and Opposite, Of noxious efficacie, and when to joyne In Synod unbenigne, and taught the fixt Thir influence malignant when to showre, Which of them rising with the Sun, or falling, Should prove tempestuous: To the Winds they set Thir corners, when with bluster to confound Sea, Aire, and Shoar, the Thunder when to rowle With terror through the dark Aereal Hall. Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more From the Suns Axle; they with labour push'd Oblique the Centric Globe: Som say the Sun Was bid turn Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode Like distant breadth to Taurus with the Seav'n Atlantick Sisters, and the Spartan Twins Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amaine By Leo and the Virgin and the Scales, As deep as Capricorne, to bring in change Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring Perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flours, Equal in Days and Nights, except to those Beyond the Polar Circles; to them Day Had unbenighted shon, while the low Sun To recompence his distance, in thir sight Had rounded still th' Horizon, and not known Or East or West, which had forbid the Snow From cold Estotiland, and South as farr Beneath Magellan. At that tasted Fruit The Sun, as from Thyestean Banquet, turn'd His course intended; else how had the World Inhabited, though sinless, more then now, Avoided pinching cold and scorching heate? These changes in the Heav'ns, though slow, produc'd Like change on Sea and Land, sideral blast, Vapour, and Mist, and Exhalation hot, Corrupt and Pestilent: Now from the North Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shoar Bursting thir brazen Dungeon, armd with ice And snow and haile and stormie gust and flaw, Boreas and Caecias and Argestes loud And Thrascias rend the Woods and Seas upturn; With adverse blast upturns them from the South Notus and Afer black with thundrous Clouds From Serraliona; thwart of these as fierce Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent Windes Eurus and Zephir with thir lateral noise, Sirocco, and Libecchio, Thus began Outrage from liveless things; but Discord first Daughter of Sin, among th' irrational, Death introduc'd through fierce antipathie: Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowle with Fowle, And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving, Devourd each other; nor stood much in awe Of Man, but fled him, or with count'nance grim Glar'd on him passing: these were from without The growing miseries, which Adam saw Alreadie in part, though hid in gloomiest shade, To sorrow abandond, but worse felt within, And in a troubl'd Sea of passion tost, Thus to disburd'n sought with sad complaint. O miserable of happie! is this the end Of this new glorious World, and mee so late The Glory of that Glory, who now becom Accurst of blessed, hide me from the face Of God, whom to behold was then my highth Of happiness: yet well, if here would end The miserie, I deserv'd it, and would beare My own deservings; but this will not serve; All that I eat or drink, or shall beget, Is propagated curse. O voice once heard Delightfully, Encrease and multiply, Now death to heare! for what can I encrease Or multiplie, but curses on my head? Who of all Ages to succeed, but feeling The evil on him brought by me, will curse My Head, Ill fare our Ancestor impure, For this we may thank Adam; but his thanks Shall be the execration; so besides Mine own that bide upon me, all from mee Shall with a fierce reflux on mee redound, On mee as on thir natural center light Heavie, though in thir place. O fleeting joyes Of Paradise, deare bought with lasting woes! Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay To mould me Man, did I sollicite thee From darkness to promote me, or here place In this delicious Garden? as my Will Concurd not to my being, it were but right And equal to reduce me to my dust, Desirous to resigne, and render back All I receav'd, unable to performe Thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold The good I sought not. To the loss of that, Sufficient penaltie, why hast thou added The sense of endless woes? inexplicable Thy justice seems; yet to say truth, too late, I thus contest; then should have been refusd Those terms whatever, when they were propos'd: Thou didst accept them; wilt thou enjoy the good, Then cavil the conditions? and though God Made thee without thy leave, what if thy Son Prove disobedient, and reprov'd, retort, Wherefore didst thou beget me? I sought it not: Wouldst thou admit for his contempt of thee That proud excuse? yet him not thy election, But Natural necessity begot. God made thee of choice his own, and of his own To serve him, thy reward was of his grace, Thy punishment then justly is at his Will. Be it so, for I submit, his doom is fair, That dust I am, and shall to dust returne: O welcom hour whenever! why delayes His hand to execute what his Decree Fixd on this day? why do I overlive, Why am I mockt with death, and length'nd out To deathless pain? how gladly would I meet Mortalitie my sentence, and be Earth Insensible, how glad would lay me down As in my Mothers lap? there I should rest And sleep secure; his dreadful voice no more Would Thunder in my ears, no fear of worse To mee and to my ofspring would torment me With cruel expectation. Yet one doubt Pursues me still, least all I cannot die, Least that pure breath of Life, the Spirit of Man Which God inspir'd, cannot together perish With this corporeal Clod; then in the Grave, Or in some other dismal place who knows But I shall die a living Death? O thought Horrid, if true! yet why? it was but breath Of Life that sinn'd; what dies but what had life And sin? the Bodie properly hath neither. All of me then shall die: let this appease The doubt, since humane reach no further knows. For though the Lord of all be infinite, Is his wrauth also? be it, man is not so, But mortal doom'd. How can he exercise Wrath without end on Man whom Death must end? Can he make deathless Death? that were to make Strange contradiction, which to God himself Impossible is held, as Argument Of weakness, not of Power. Will he, draw out, For angers sake, finite to infinite In punisht man, to satisfie his rigour Satisfi'd never; that were to extend His Sentence beyond dust and Natures Law, By which all Causes else according still To the reception of thir matter act, Not to th' extent of thir own Spheare. But say That Death be not one stroak, as I suppos'd, Bereaving sense, but endless miserie From this day onward, which 1 feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuitie; Ay me, that fear Comes thundring back with dreadful revolution On my defensless head; both Death and I Am found Eternal, and incorporate both, Nor I on my part single, in mee all Posteritie stands curst: Fair Patrimonie That I must leave ye, Sons; O were I able To waste it all my self, and leave ye none! So disinherited how would ye bless Me now your curse! Ah, why should all mankind For one mans fault thus guiltless be condemn'd, If guiltless? But from me what can proceed, But all corrupt, both Mind and Will deprav'd, Not to do onely, but to will the same With me? how can they then acquitted stand In sight of God? Him after all Disputes Forc't I absolve: all my evasions vain, And reasonings, though through Mazes, lead me still But to my own conviction: first and last On mee, mee onely, as the sourse and spring Of all corruption, all the blame lights due; So might the wrauth. Fond wish! couldst thou support That burden heavier then the Earth to bear Then all the World much heavier, though divided With that bad Woman? Thus what thou desir'st And what thou fearst, alike destroyes all hope Of refuge, and concludes thee miserable Beyond all past example and future, To Satan only like both crime and doom. O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears And horrors hast thou driv'n me; out of which I find no way, from deep to deeper plung'd! Thus Adam to himself lamented loud Through the still Night, not now, as ere man fell, Wholsom and cool, and mild, but with black Air Accompanied, with damps and dreadful gloom, Which to his evil Conscience represented All things with double terror: On the Ground Outstretcht he lay, on the cold ground, and oft Curs'd his Creation, Death as oft accus'd Of tardie execution, since denounc't The day of his offence. Why comes not Death, Said hee, with one thrice acceptable stroke To end me? Shall Truth fail to keep her word, Justice Divine not hast'n to be just? But Death comes not at call, Justice Divine Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries. O Woods, O Fountains, Hillocks, Dales and Bowrs, With other echo late I taught your Shades To answer, and resound farr other Song. Whom thus afflicted when sad Eve bebeld, Desolate where she sate, approaching nigh, Soft words to his fierce passion she assay'd: But her with stern regard he thus repell'd. Out of my sight, thou Serpent, that name best Befits thee with him leagu'd, thy self as false And hateful; nothing wants, but that thy shape, Like his, and colour Serpentine may shew Thy inward fraud, to warn all Creatures from thee Henceforth; least that too heav'nly form, pretended To hellish falshood, snare them. But for thee I had persisted happie, had not thy pride And wandring vanitie, when lest was safe, Rejected my forewarning, and disdain'd Not to be trusted, longing to be seen Though by the Devil himself, him overweening To over-reach, but with the Serpent meeting Fool'd and beguil'd, by him thou, I by thee, To trust thee from my side, imagin'd wise, Constant, mature, proof against all assaults, And understood not all was but a shew Rather then solid vertu, all but a Rib Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears, More to the part sinister from me drawn, Well if thrown out, as supernumerarie To my just number found. O why did God, Creator wise, that peopl'd highest Heav'n With Spirits Masculine, create at last This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect Of Nature, and not fill the World at once With Men as Angels without Feminine, Or find some other way to generate Mankind? this mischief had not then befall'n, And more that shall befall, innumerable Disturbances on Earth through Femal snares, And straight conjunction with this Sex: for either He never shall find out fit Mate, but such As some misfortune brings him, or mistake, Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain Through her perversness, but shall see her gaind By a farr worse, or if she love, withheld By Parents, or his happiest choice too late Shall meet, alreadie linkt and Wedlock-bound To a fell Adversarie, his hate or shame: Which infinite calamitie shall cause To Humane life, and houshold peace confound. He added not, and from her turn'd, but Eve Not so repulst, with Tears that ceas'd not flowing, And tresses all disorderd, at his feet Fell humble, and imbracing them, besaught His peace, and thus proceeded in her plaint. Forsake me not thus, Adam, witness Heav'n What love sincere, and reverence in my heart I beare thee, and unweeting have offended, Unhappilie deceav'd; thy suppliant I beg, and clasp thy knees; bereave me not, Whereon I live, thy gentle looks, thy aid, Thy counsel in this uttermost distress, My onely strength and stay: forlorn of thee, Whither shall I betake me, where subsist? While yet we live, scarse one short hour perhaps, Between us two let there be peace, both joyning, As joyn'd in injuries, one enmitie Against a Foe by doom express assign'd us, That cruel Serpent: On me exercise not Thy hatred for this miserie befall'n, On me alreadie lost, mee then thy self More miserable; both have sin'd, but thou Against God onely, I against God and thee, And to the place of judgment will return, There with my cries importune Heaven, that all The sentence from thy head remov'd may light On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, Mee mee onely just object of his ire. She ended weeping, and her lowlie plight, Immoveable till peace obtain'd from fault Acknowledg'd and deplor'd, in Adam wraught Commiseration; soon his heart relented Towards her, his life so late and sole delight, Now at his feet submissive in distress, Creature so faire his reconcilement seeking, His counsel whom she had displeas'd, his aide; As one disarm'd, his anger all he lost, And thus with peaceful words uprais'd her soon. Unwarie, and too desirous, as before, So now of what thou knowst not, who desir'st The punishment all on thy self; alas, Beare thine own first, ill able to sustaine His full wrauth whose thou feelst as yet lest part, And my displeasure bearst so ill. If Prayers Could alter high Decrees, I to that place Would speed before thee, and be louder heard, That on my head all might be visited, Thy frailtie and infirmer Sex forgiv'n, To me committed and by me expos'd. But rise, let us no more contend, nor blame Each other, blam'd enough elsewhere, but strive In offices of Love, how we may light'n Each others burden in our share of woe; Since this days Death denounc't, if ought I see, Will prove no sudden, but a slow-pac't evill, A long days dying to augment our paine, And to our Seed (O hapless Seed!) deriv'd. To whom thus Eve, recovering heart, repli'd. Adam, by sad experiment I know How little weight my words with thee can finde, Found so erroneous, thence by just event Found so unfortunate; nevertheless, Restor'd by thee, vile as I am, to place Of new acceptance, hopeful to regaine Thy Love, the sole contentment of my heart Living or dying, from thee I will not hide What thoughts in my unquiet brest are ris'n, Tending to some relief of our extremes, Or end, though sharp and sad, yet tolerable, As in our evils, and of easier choice. If care of our descent perplex us most, Which must be born to certain woe, devourd By Death at last, and miserable it is To be to others cause of misery, Our own begotten, and of our Loines to bring Into this cursed World a woful Race, That after wretched Life must be at last Food for so foule a Monster, in thy power It lies, yet ere Conception to prevent The Race unblest, to being yet unbegot. Childless thou art, Childless remaine: so Death Shall be deceav'd his glut, and with us two Be forc'd to satisfie his Rav'nous Maw. But if thou judge it hard and difficult, Conversing, looking, loving, to abstain From Loves due Rites, Nuptial imbraces sweet, And with desire to languish without hope, Before the present object languishing With like desire, which would be meserie And torment less then none of what we dread, Then both our selves and Seed at once to free From what we fear for both, let us make short, Let us seek Death, or he not found, supply With our own hands his Office on our selves; Why stand we longer shivering under feares, That shew no end but Death, and have the power, Of many ways to die the shortest choosing, Destruction with destruction to destroy. She ended heer, or vehement despaire Broke off the rest; so much of Death her thoughts Had entertaind, as di'd her Cheeks with pale. But Adam with such counsel nothing sway'd, To better hopes his more attentive minde Labouring had rais'd, and thus to Eve repli'd. Eve, thy contempt of life and pleasure seems To argue in thee somthing more sublime And excellent then what thy minde contemnes; But self-destruction therefore saught, refutes That excellence thought in thee, and implies, Not thy contempt, but anguish and regret For loss of life and pleasure overlov'd. Or if thou covet death, as utmost end Of miserie, so thinking to evade The penaltie pronounc't, doubt not but God Hath wiselier arm'd his vengeful ire then so To be forestall'd; much more I fear least Death So snatcht will not exempt us from the paine We are by doom to pay; rather such acts Of contumacie will provoke the highest To make death in us live: Then let us seek Some safer resolution, which methinks I have in view, calling to minde with heed Part of our Sentence, that thy Seed shall bruise The Serpents head; piteous amends, unless Be meant, whom I conjecture, our grand Foe Satan, who in the Serpent hath contriv'd Against us this deceit: to crush his head Would be revenge indeed; which will be lost By death brought on our selves, or childless days Resolv'd, as thou proposest; so our Foe Shall scape his punishment ordain'd, and wee Instead shall double ours upon our heads. No more be mention'd then of violence Against our selves, and wilful barrenness, That cuts us off from hope, and savours onely Rancor and pride, impatience and despite, Reluctance against God and his just yoke Laid on our Necks. Remember with what mild And gracious temper he both heard and judg'd Without wrauth or reviling; wee expected Immediate dissolution, which we thought Was meant by Death that day, when lo, to thee Pains onely in Child-bearing were foretold, And bringing forth, soon recompenc't with joy, Fruit of thy Womb: On mee the Curse aslope Glanc'd on the ground, with labour I must earne My bread; what harm? Idleness had bin worse; My labour will sustain me; and least Cold Or Heat should injure us, his timely care Hath unbesaught provided, and his hands Cloath'd us unworthie, pitying while he judg'd; How much more, if we pray him, will his ear Be open, and his heart to pitie incline, And teach us further by what means to shun Th' inclement Seasons, Rain, Ice, Hail and Snow, Which now the Skie with various Face begins To shew us in this Mountain, while the Winds Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading Trees; which bids us seek Som better shroud, som better warmth to cherish Our Limbs benumm'd, ere this diurnal Starr Leave cold the Night, how we his gather'd beams Reflected, may with matter sere foment, Or by collision of two bodies grinde The Air attrite to Fire, as late the Clouds Justling or pusht with Winds rude in thir shock Tine the slant Lightning, whose thwart flame driv'n down Kindles the gummie bark of Firr or Pine, And sends a comfortable heat from farr, Which might supplie the Sun: such Fire to use, And what may else be remedie or cure To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought, Hee will instruct us praying, and of Grace Beseeching him, so as we need not fear To pass commodiously this life, sustain'd By him with many comforts, till we end In dust, our final rest and native home. What better can we do, then to the place Repairing where he judg'd us, prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground, and with our sighs the Air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeign'd, and humiliation meek. Undoubtedly he will relent and turn From his displeasure; in whose look serene, When angry most he seem'd and most severe, What else but favor, grace, and mercie shon? So spake our Father penitent, nor Eve Felt less remorse: they forthwith to the place Repairing where he judg'd them prostrate fell Before him reverent, and both confess'd Humbly thir faults, and pardon beg'd, with tears Watering the ground, and with thir sighs the Air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeign'd, and humiliation meek.
Hamelin Town's in Brunswick, By famous Hanover city; The river Weser, deep and wide, Washes its wall on the southern side; A pleasanter spot you never spied; But, when begins my ditty, Almost five hundred years ago, To see the townsfolk suffer so From vermin, was a pity. Rats! They fought the dogs, and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And eat the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, And even spoiled the women's chats By drowning their speaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and flats. At last the people in a body To the Town Hall came flocking: 'Tis clear, cried they, our Mayor's a noddy; And as for our Corporation — shocking To think we buy gowns lined with ermine For dolts that can't or won't determine What's like to rid us of our vermin! Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking To find the remedy we're lacking, Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing! At this the Mayor and Corporation Quaked with a mighty consternation. An hour they sate in council, At length the Mayor broke silence: For a guilder I'd my ermine gown sell; I wish I were a mile hence! It's easy to bid one rack one's brain — I'm sure my poor head aches again I've scratched it so, and all in vain. Oh for a trap, a trap, a trap! Just as he said this, what should hap At the chamber door but a gentle tap? Bless us, cried the Mayor, what's that? (With the Corporation as he sate, Looking little though wondrous fat); Only a scraping of shoes on the mat? Anything like the sound of a rat Makes my heart go pit-a-pat! Come in! — the Mayor cried, looking bigger: And in did come the strangest figure! His queer long coat from heel to head Was half of yellow and half of red; And he himself was tall and thin, With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin, And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin, No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, But lips where smiles went out and in — There was no guessing his kith and kin! And nobody could enough admire The tall man and his quaint attire: Quoth one: It's as my great-grandsire, Starting up at the Trump of Doom's tone, Had walked this way from his painted tombstone! He advanced to the council-table: And, Please your honours, said he, I'm able, By means of a secret charm, to draw All creatures living beneath the sun, That creep, or swim, or fly, or run, After me so as you never saw! And I chiefly use my charm On creatures that do people harm, The mole, and toad, and newt, and viper; And people call me the Pied Piper. (And here they noticed round his neck A scarf of red and yellow stripe, To match with his coat of the self-same cheque; And at the scarf's end hung a pipe; And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying As if impatient to be playing Upon this pipe, as low it dangled Over his vesture so old-fangled.) Yet, said he, poor piper as I am, In Tartary I freed the Cham, Last June, from his huge swarms of gnats; I eased in Asia the Nizam Of a monstrous brood of vampyre-bats: And, as for what your brain bewilders, If I can rid your town of rats Will you give me a thousand guilders? One? fifty thousand! — was the exclamation Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation. Into the street the Piper stept, Smiling first a little smile, As if he knew what magic slept In his quiet pipe the while; Then, like a musical adept, To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled, And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled, Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled; And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, You heard as if an army muttered; And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives — Followed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped advancing, And step for step they followed dancing, Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished — Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar, Swam across and lived to carry (As he the manuscript he cherished) To Rat-land home his commentary, Which was, At the first shrill notes of the pipe, I heard a sound as of scraping tripe, And putting apples, wondrous ripe, Into a cider-press's gripe: And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards, And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards, And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks, And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks; And it seemed as if a voice (Sweeter than by harp or by psaltery Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice! The world is grown to one vast drysaltery! 'So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, 'Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon! And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon, Ready staved, like a great sun shone Glorious scarce an inch before me, Just as methought it said, Come, bore me! — I found the Weser rolling o'er me. You should have heard the Hamelin people Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple; Go, cried the Mayor, and get long poles! Poke out the nests and block up the holes! Consult with carpenters and builders, And leave in our town not even a trace Of the rats! — when suddenly up the face Of the Piper perked in the market-place, With a, First, if you please, my thousand guilders! A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue; So did the Corporation too. For council dinners made rare havock With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock; And half the money would replenish Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish. To pay this sum to a wandering fellow With a gipsy coat of red and yellow! Beside, quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink, Our business was done at the river's brink; We saw with our eyes the vermin sink, And what's dead can't come to life, I think. So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink From the duty of giving you something for drink, And a matter of money to put in your poke; But, as for the guilders, what we spoke Of them, as you very well know, was in joke. Beside, our losses have made us thrifty; A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty! The Piper's face fell, and he cried, No trifling! I can't wait, beside! I've promised to visit by dinner time Bagdat, and accept the prime Of the Head Cook's pottage, all he's rich in, For having left, in the Caliph's kitchen, Of a nest of scorpions no survivor — With him I proved no bargain-driver, With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver! And folks who put me in a passion May find me pipe after another fashion. How? cried the Mayor, d'ye think I'll brook Being worse treated than a Cook? Insulted by a lazy ribald With idle pipe and vesture piebald? You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst, Blow your pipe there till you burst! Once more he stept into the street; And to his lips again Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane; And ere he blew three notes (such sweet Soft notes as yet musician's cunning Never gave th'enraptured air) There was a rustling, that seem'd like a bustling Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling, Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering, Little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering, And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering, Out came the children running. All the little boys and girls, With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls, Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after The wonderful music with shouting and laughter. The Mayor was dumb, and the Council stood As if they were changed into blocks of wood, Unable to move a step, or cry To the children merrily skipping by — Could only follow with the eye That joyous crowd at the Piper's back. But how the Mayor was on the rack, And the wretched Council's bosoms beat, As the Piper turned from the High Street To where the Weser rolled its waters Right in the way of their sons and daughters! However he turned from South to West, And to Coppelburg Hill his steps addressed, And after him the children pressed; Great was the joy in every breast. He never can cross that mighty top! He's forced to let the piping drop, And we shall see our children stop! When, lo, as they reached the mountain's side, A wondrous portal opened wide, As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed; And the Piper advanced and the children follow'd, And when all were in to the very last, The door in the mountain side shut fast. Did I say, all? No! One was lame, And could not dance the whole of the way; And in after years, if you would blame His sadness, he was used to say, — It's dull in our town since my playmates left! I can't forget that I'm bereft Of all the pleasant sights they see, Which the Piper also promised me; For he led us, he said, to a joyous land, Joining the town and just at hand, Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew, And flowers put forth a fairer hue, And every thing was strange and new; The sparrows were brighter than peacocks here, And their dogs outran our fallow deer, And honey-bees had lost their stings, And horses were born with eagles' wings: And just as I felt assured My lame foot would be speedily cured, The music stopped and I stood still, And found myself outside the Hill, Left alone against my will, To go now limping as before, And never hear of that country more! Alas, alas for Hamelin! There came into many a burgher's pate A text which says, that Heaven's Gate Opes to the Rich at as easy a rate As the needle's eye takes a camel in! The Mayor sent East, West, North, and South, To offer the Piper, by word of mouth, Wherever it was men's lot to find him, Silver and gold to his heart's content, If he'd only return the way he went, And bring the children behind him. But when they saw 'twas a lost endeavour, And Piper and dancers were gone for ever, They made a decree that lawyers never Should think their records dated duly If, after the day of the month and year, These words did not as well appear, "And so long after what happened here "On the Twenty-second of July, "Thirteen hundred and Seventy-six:" And the better in memory to fix The place of the Children's last retreat, They called it, The Pied Piper's Street — Where any one playing on pipe or tabor Was sure for the future to lose his labour. Nor suffered they Hostelry or Tavern To shock with mirth a street so solemn; But opposite the place of the cavern They wrote the story on a column, And on the Great Church Window painted The same, to make the world acquainted How their children were stolen away; And there it stands to this very day. And I must not omit to say That in Transylvania there's a tribe Of alien people who ascribe The outlandish ways and dress On which their neighbours lay such stress To their fathers and mothers having risen Out of some subterraneous prison Into which they were trepanned Long time ago in a mighty band Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land, But how or why, they don't understand. So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men — especially pipers: And, whether they pipe us from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise.
The time is come I must departe from thee, ah, famous Citie:I never yet, to rue my smart, did finde that thou hadst pitie,Wherefore small cause ther is, that I should greeve from thee to go:But many Women foolyshly, lyke me, and other moe.Doe such a fyxed fancy set, on those which least desarve,That long it is ere wit we get, away from them to swarve,But tyme with pittie oft wyl tel to those that wil her try:Whether it best be more to mell, or vtterly defye.And now hath time me put in mind, of thy great cruelnes:That never once a help wold finde, to ease me in distres.Thou never yet woldst credit geve to boord me for a yeare:Nor with Apparell me releve except thou payed weare.No, no, thou never didst me good, nor ever wilt, I know:Yet am I in no angry moode, but wyll, or ere I goe,In perfect love and charytie my Testament here write:And leave to thee such Treasurye, as I in it recyte.Now stand a side and geve me leave to write my latest Wyll:And see that none you do deceave, of that I leave them tyl.I whole in body, and in minde, but very weake in Purse:Doo make, and write my Testament for feare it wyll be wurse.And fyrst I wholy doo commend, my Soule and Body eke:To God the Father and the Son, so long as I can speake.And after speach: my Soule to hym, and Body to the Grave:Tyll time that all shall rise agayne, their Judgement for to have.And then I hope they both shal meete. to dwell for aye in ioye:Whereas I trust to see my Friends releast, from all annoy.Thus have you heard touching my soule, and body what I meane:I trust you all wyll witnes beare, I have a stedfast brayne.And now let mee dispose such things, as I shal leave behinde:That those which shall receave the same, may know my wylling minde.I firste of all to London leave because I there was bred:Braue buildyngs rare, of Churches store, and Pauls to the head.Betweene the same: fayre streats there bee, and people goodly store:Because their keeping craveth cost, I yet wil leave him more.First for their foode, I Butchers leave, that every day shall kyll:By Thames you shal have Brewers store, and Bakers at your wyll.And such as orders doo obserue, and eat fish thrice a weeke:I leave two Streets, full fraught therwith, they neede not farre to seeke.Watlyng Streete, and Canwyck streete, I full of Wollen leave:And Linnen store in Friday streete, if they mee not deceave.And those which are of callyng such, that costlier they require:I Mercers leave, with silke so rich, as any would desyre.In Cheape of them, they store shal finde and likewise in that streete:I Goldsmithes leave, with Iuels such, as are for Ladies meete.And Plate to furnysh Cubbards with, full braue there shall you finde:With Purle of Siluer and of Golde, to satisfye your minde.With Hoods, Bungraces, Hats or Caps, such store are in that streete:As if on ton side you should misse the tother serues you feete.For Nets of every kynd of sort, I leave within the pawne:French Ruffes, high Purles, Gorgets and Sleeves of any kind of Lawne.For Purse or Kniues, for Combe or Glasse, or any needeful knackeI by the Stoks have left a Boy, wil aske you what you lack.I Hose doo leave in Birchin Lane, of any kynd of syse:For Women stitchte, for men both Trunks and those of Gascoyne gise.Bootes, Shoes or Pantables good store, Saint Martins hath for you:In Cornwall, there I leave you Beds, and all that longs thereto.For Women shall you Taylors have, by Bow, the chiefest dwel:In every Lane you some shall finde, can doo indifferent well.And for the men, few Streetes or Lanes, but Bodymakers bee:And such as make the sweeping Cloakes, with Gardes beneth the Knee.Artyllery at Temple Bar, and Dagges at Tower hyll:Swords and Bucklers of the best, are nye the Fleete vntyll.Now when thy Folke are fed and clad with such as I have namde:For daynty mouthes, and stomacks weake some Iunckets must be framde.Wherfore I Poticaries leave, with Banquets in their Shop:Phisicians also for the sicke, Diseases for to stop.Some Roysters styll, must bide in thee, and such as cut it out:That with the guiltlesse quarel wyl, to let their blood about.For them I cunning Surgions leave, some Playsters to apply.That Ruffians may not styll be hangde, nor quiet persons dye.For Salt, Otemeale, Candles, Sope, or what you els doo want:In many places, Shops are full, I left you nothing scant.Yf they that keepe what I you leave, aske Mony: when they sell it:At Mint, there is such store, it is vnpossible to tell it.At Stiliarde store of Wines there bee, your dulled mindes to glad:And handsome men, that must not wed except they leave their trade.They oft shal seeke for proper Gyrles, and some perhaps shall fynde:(That neede compels, or lucre lures to satisfye their mind.)And neare the same, I houses leave, for people to repayre:To bathe themselues, so to preuent infection of the ayre.On Saturdayes I wish that those, which all the weeke doo drug:Shall thyther trudge, to trim them vp on Sondayes to looke smug.Yf any other thing be lackt in thee, I wysh them looke:For there it is: I little brought but nothyng from thee tooke.Now for the people in thee left, I have done as I may:And that the poore, when I am gone, have cause for me to pray.I wyll to prisons portions leave, what though but very small:Yet that they may remember me, occasion be it shall:And fyrst the Counter they shal have, least they should go to wrack:Some Coggers, and some honest men, that Sergantes draw a back.And such as Friends wyl not them bayle, whose coyne is very thin:For them I leave a certayne hole, and little ease within.The Newgate once a Monthe shal have a sessions for his share:Least being heapt, Infection might procure a further care.And at those sessions some shal skape, with burning nere the Thumb:And afterward to beg their fees, tyll they have got the some.And such whose deedes deserueth death, and twelue have found the same:They shall be drawne vp Holborne hill, to come to further shame:Well, yet to such I leave a Nag shal soone their sorowes cease:For he shal either breake their necks or gallop from the preace.The Fleete, not in their circuit is, yet if I geve him nought:It might procure his curse, ere I unto the ground be brought.Wherfore I leave some Papist olde to vnder prop his roofe:And to the poore within the same, a Boxe for their behoofe.What makes you standers by to smile. and laugh so in your sleeve:I thinke it is, because that I to Ludgate nothing geve.I am not now in case to lye, here is no place of iest:I dyd reserve, that for my selfe, yf I my health possest.And ever came in credit so a debtor for to bee.When dayes of paiment did approch, I thither ment to flee.To shroude my selfe amongst the rest, that chuse to dye in debt:Rather then any Creditor, should money from them get.Yet cause I feele my selfe so weake that none mee credit dare:I heere reuoke: and doo it leave, some Banckrupts to his share.To all the Bookebinders by Paulles because I lyke their Arte:They e'ry weeke shal mony have, when they from Bookes departe.Amongst them all, my Printer must, have somwhat to his share:I wyll my Friends these Bookes to bye of him, with other ware.For Maydens poore, I Widdoers ritch, do leave, that oft shall dote:And by that meanes shal mary them, to set the Girles aflote.And wealthy Widdowes wil I leave, to help yong Gentylmen:Which when you have, in any case be courteous to them then:And see their Plate and Iewells eake may not be mard with rust.Nor let their Bags too long be full, for feare that they doo burst.To e'ry Gate vnder the walles, that compas thee about:I Fruit wives leave to entertayne such as come in and out.To Smithfeelde I must something leave my Parents there did dwell:So carelesse for to be of it, none wolde accompt it well.Wherfore it thrice a weeke shall have, of Horse and neat good store,And in his Spitle, blynd and lame, to dwell for evermore.And Bedlem must not be forgot, for that was oft my walke:I people there too many leave, that out of tune doo talke.At Bridewel there shal Bedelles be, and Matrones that shal styllSee Chalke wel chopt, and spinning plyde, and turning of the Mill.For such as cannot quiet bee, but striue for House or Land:At Th' innes of Court, I Lawyers leave to take their cause in hand.And also leave I at ech Inne of Court, or Chauncerye:Of Gentylmen, a youthfull roote, full of Actiuytie:For whom I store of Bookes have left, at each Bookebinders stall:And parte of all that London hath to furnish them withall.And when they are with study cloyd: to recreate theyr minde:Of Tennis Courts, of dauncing Scooles, and fence they store shal finde.And every Sonday at the least, I leave to make them sport.In diuers places Players, that of wonders shall reporte.Now London have I (for thy sake) within thee, and without:As coms into my memory, dispearsed round aboutSuch needfull thinges, as they should have heere left now unto thee:When I am gon, with consience, let them dispearced bee.And though I nothing named have, to bury mee withall:Consider that aboue the ground, annoyance bee I shall.And let me have a shrowding Sheete to couer mee from shame:And in obliuyon bury mee and never more mee name.Ringings nor other Ceremonies, vse you not for cost:Nor at my buriall, make no feast, your mony were but lost.Reioyce in God that I am gon, out of this vale so vile.And that of ech thing, left such store, as may your wants exile.I make thee sole executor, because I lou'de thee best.And thee I put in trust, to geve the goodes unto the rest.Because thou shalt a helper neede, In this so great a chardge,I wysh good Fortune, be thy guide, least thou shouldst run at lardge.The happy dayes and quiet times, they both her Seruants bee.Which well wyll serue to fetch and bring, such things as neede to thee.Wherfore (good London) not refuse, for helper her to take:Thus being weake and wery both an end heere wyll I make.To all that aske what end I made, and how I went away:Thou answer maist like those which heere, no longer tary may.And unto all that wysh mee well, or rue that I am gon:Doo me comend, and bid them cease my absence for to mone.And tell them further, if they wolde, my presence styll have had:They should have sought to mend my luck; which ever was too bad.So fare thou well a thousand times, God sheelde thee from thy foe:And styll make thee victorious, of those that seeke thy woe.And (though I am perswade) that I shall never more thee see:Yet to the last, I shal not cease to wish much good to thee.This, xx. of October I, in ANNO DOMINI:A Thousand: v. hundred seuenty three as Alminacks descry.Did write this Wyll with mine owne hand and it to London gaue:In witnes of the standers by, whose names yf you wyll have.Paper, Pen and Standish were: at that same present by:With Time, who promised to reveale, so fast as she could hyeThe same: least of my nearer kyn, for any thing should vary:So finally I make an end no longer can I tary.
Because I to my brethern wrote and to my sisters two:Good sister Anne, you this might wote, if so I should not doTo you, or ere I parted hence,You vainly had bestowed expence.Yet is it not for that I write, for nature did you bindTo do me good, and to requite hath nature me inclined:Wherefore good sister take in greeThese simple lines that come from me.Wherein I wish you Nestor's days, in happy health to rest:With such success in all assays as those which God hath blest:Your husband with your pretty boys,God keep them free from all annoys.And grant if that my luck it be to linger here so longTill they be men, that I may see for learning them so strongThat they may march amongst the bestOf them which learning have possest.By that time will my aged years perhaps a staff require:And quakingly as still in fears my limbs draw to the fire:Yet joy I shall them so to see,If any joy in age there be.Good sister so I you commend to him that made us all:I know you huswifery intend, though I to writing fall:Wherefore no lenger shall you stayFrom business that profit may.Had I a husband, or a house, and all that longs thereto,My self could frame about to rouse, as other women do:But till some household cares me tie,My books and pen I will apply.
Those strokes which mates in mirth do give do seem to be but light,Although sometime they leave a sign seems grievous to the sight.He that is void of any friend, him company to keep,Walks in a world of wilderness, full fraught with dangers deep.Each lover knoweth what he likes and what he doth desire,But seld, or never, doth he know what thing he should require.Affection fond deceives the wise and love makes men such noddiesThat to their selves they seem as dead yet live in other bodies.Ask nothing of thy neighbour that thou wouldst not let him have:Nor say him nay of that which thou wouldst get if thou didst crave.Two eyes, two ears, and but one tongue Dame Nature hath us framedThat we might see and hear much more than should with tongue be named.Seek not each man to please, for that is more than God bids do:Please thou the best, and neuer care, what wicked say thereto.
decreed my mother-in-law as my husband passed the platter of inward-turning soft-skulled Martian baby heads around the table, and they were O so shyly slyly jostling each other with their boiled- green sardonic gossip (what was the news they told?) when he sharply answered, “Mother, have you ever eaten an artichoke?”  “No,” she said, majestic, “but I just know I don’t care for them, don’t care for them at all”— for truly, if they weren’t Martian they were at the least Italian from that land of “smelly cheese” she wouldn’t eat, that land of oily curves and stalks, unnerving pots of churning who knows what, and she, nice, Jewish, from the Bronx, had fattened on her Russian- Jewish mother’s kugel, kosher chicken, good rye bread .... Bearded, rosy, magisterial at forty-five, he laughed, kept plucking, kept on licking those narcissistic leaves, each with its razor point defending the plump, the tender secret at the center, each a greave or plate of edible armor, so she smiled too, in the flash of dispute, knowing he’d give her ice cream later, all she wanted, as the rich meal drew to an end with sweets dished out in the lamplit circle, to parents, children, grandma— the chocolate mint she craved, and rocky road he bought especially for her, whose knees were just beginning to crumble from arthritis, whose heart would pump more creakily each year, whose baby fat would sag and sorrow as her voice weakened, breathing failed until she too was gathered into the same blank center where her son at sixty bearded still, still laughing, magisterial (though pallid now) had just a year before inexplicably settled.
The naked earth is warm with Spring,And with green grass and bursting treesLeans to the sun's gaze glorying,And quivers in the sunny breeze;And life is Colour and Warmth and Light,And a striving evermore for these;And he is dead who will not fight,And who dies fighting has increase.The fighting man shall from the sunTake warmth, and life from glowing earth;Speed with the light-foot winds to runAnd with the trees to newer birth;And find, when fighting shall be done,Great rest, and fulness after dearth.All the bright company of HeavenHold him in their bright comradeship,The Dog star, and the Sisters Seven,Orion's belt and sworded hip:The woodland trees that stand together,They stand to him each one a friend;They gently speak in the windy weather;They guide to valley and ridges end.The kestrel hovering by day,And the little owls that call by night,Bid him be swift and keen as they,As keen of ear, as swift of sight.The blackbird sings to him: "Brother, brother,If this be the last song you shall sing,Sing well, for you may not sing another;Brother, sing."In dreary doubtful waiting hours,Before the brazen frenzy starts,The horses show him nobler powers; —O patient eyes, courageous hearts!And when the burning moment breaks,And all things else are out of mind,And only joy of battle takesHim by the throat and makes him blind,Through joy and blindness he shall know,Not caring much to know, that stillNor lead nor steel shall reach him, soThat it be not the Destined Will.The thundering line of battle stands,And in the air Death moans and sings;But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,And Night shall fold him in soft wings.
O! say can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there — O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,What is that which the breeze o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines on the stream — 'Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havock of war and the battle's confusionA home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash'd out their foul foot-steps' pollution, No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave; And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.O! thus be it ever when freemen shall stand Between their lov'd home, and the war's desolation,Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land Praise the power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — "In God is our trust!" And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.
In a somer sesun, whon softe was the sonne, I schop me into a shroud, as I a scheep were; In habite as an hermite unholy of werkes Wente I wyde in this world wondres to here; Bote in a Mayes morwnynge on Malverne hulles Me bifel a ferly, of fairie, me-thoughte. I was wery, forwandred, and wente me to reste Undur a brod banke bi a bourne side; And as I lay and leonede and lokede on the watres, I slumbrede in a slepynge, hit swyed so murie. Thenne gon I meeten a mervelous sweven, That I was in a wildernesse, wuste I never where; And as I beheold into the est an heigh to the sonne, I sauh a tour on a toft, tryelyche i-maket; A deop dale bineothe, a dungun ther-inne, With deop dich and derk and dredful of sighte. A feir feld full of folk fond I ther bitwene, Of alle maner of men, the mene and the riche, Worchinge and wandringe as the world asketh. Summe putten hem to the plough, pleiden ful seldene, In settynge and in sowynge swonken ful harde, And wonnen that theos wasturs with glotonye distruen. And summe putten hem to pruide, apparaylden hem ther-after, In cuntenaunce of clothinge comen disgisid. To preyeres and to penaunce putten hem monye, For love of ur Lord liveden ful streite, In hope for to have hevene-riche blisse; As ancres and hermytes that holdeth hem in heore celles, Coveyte not in cuntré to cairen aboute, For non likerous lyflode heore licam to plese. And summe chosen chaffare to cheeven the bettre, As hit semeth to ure sighte that suche men thryveth; And summe, murthhes to maken as munstrals cunne, And gete gold with here gle, giltles, I trowe. Bote japers and jangelers, Judas children, Founden hem fantasyes and fooles hem maaden, And habbeth wit at heore wille to worchen yif hem luste. That Poul precheth of hem, I dar not preoven heere;Qui loquitur turpiloquium he is Luciferes hyne. Bidders and beggers faste aboute eoden, Til heor bagges and heore balies weren bretful i-crommet; Feyneden hem for heore foode, foughten atte ale; In glotonye, God wot, gon heo to bedde, And ryseth up with ribaudye this roberdes knaves; Sleep and sleughthe suweth hem evere. Pilgrimes and palmers plihten hem togederes For to seche Seint Jame and seintes at Roome; Wenten forth in heore wey with mony wyse tales, And hedden leve to lyen al heore lyf aftir. Ermytes on an hep with hokide staves, Wenten to Walsyngham and here wenchis after; Grete lobres and longe that loth weore to swynke Clotheden hem in copes to beo knowen for bretheren; And summe schopen hem to hermytes heore ese to have. I fond there freres, all the foure ordres, Prechinge the peple for profyt of heore wombes, Glosynge the Gospel as hem good liketh, For covetyse of copes construeth hit ille; For monye of this maistres mowen clothen hem at lyking, For moneye and heore marchaundie meeten togedere; Seththe Charité hath be chapmon, and cheef to schriven lordes, Mony ferlyes han bifalle in a fewe yeres. But Holychirche and heo holde bet togedere, The moste mischeef on molde is mountyng up faste. Ther prechede a pardoner, as he a prest were, And brought forth a bulle with bisschopes seles, And seide that himself mighte asoylen hem alle Of falsnesse and fastinge and of vouwes i-broken. The lewede men levide him wel and likede his speche, And comen up knelynge to kissen his bulle; He bonchede hem with his brevet and blered heore eiyen, And raughte with his ragemon ringes and broches. Thus ye yiveth oure gold glotonis to helpen! And leveth hit to losels that lecherie haunten. Weore the bisschop i-blesset and worth bothe his eres, His sel shulde not be sent to deceyve the peple. It is not al bi the bisschop that the boye precheth, Bote the parisch prest and the pardoner parte the selver That the pore peple of the parisch schulde have yif that heo ne weore, Persones and parisch prestes playneth to heore bisschops, That heore parisch hath ben pore seththe the pestilence tyme, To have a lycence and leve at Londun to dwelle, To singe ther for simonye, for selver is swete. Ther hovide an hundret in houves of selke, Serjauns hit semide to serven atte barre; Pleden for pens and poundes the lawe, Not for love of ur Lord unloseth heore lippes ones, Thou mightest beter meten the myst on Malverne hulles Then geten a mom of heore mouth til moneye weore schewed! I saugh ther bisschops bolde and bachilers of divyne Bicoome clerkes of acounte the king for to serven. Erchedekenes and denis, that dignité haven To preche the peple and pore men to feede, Beon lopen to Londun, bi leve of heore bisschopes, To ben clerkes of the Kynges Benche the cuntré to schende Barouns and burgeis and bonde-men also I saugh in that semblé, as ye schul heren aftur, Bakers, bochers, and breusters monye, Wollene-websteris, and weveris of lynen, Taillours, tanneris, and tokkeris bothe, Masons, minours, and mony other craftes, Dykers, and delvers, that don heore dedes ille, And driveth forth the longe day with "Deu vous save, Dam Emme!" Cookes and heore knaves cryen "Hote pies, hote! "Goode gees and grys! Go we dyne, go we!" Taverners to hem tolde the same tale, With wyn of Oseye and win of Gaskoyne, Of the Ryn and of the Rochel, the rost to defye, Al this I saugh slepynge and seve sithes more.
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM, With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision. I could not turn from their revel in derision. THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. Then along that riverbank A thousand miles Tattooed cannibals danced in files; Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong. And “BLOOD” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors, “BLOOD” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors, “Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle, Harry the uplands, Steal all the cattle, Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, Bing. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,” A roaring, epic, rag-time tune From the mouth of the Congo To the Mountains of the Moon. Death is an Elephant, Torch-eyed and horrible, Foam-flanked and terrible. BOOM, steal the pygmies, BOOM, kill the Arabs, BOOM, kill the white men, HOO, HOO, HOO. Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell. Listen to the creepy proclamation, Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation, Blown past the white-ants’ hill of clay, Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play: — “Be careful what you do, Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, And all of the other Gods of the Congo, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” II. THEIR IRREPRESSIBLE HIGH SPIRITS Wild crap-shooters with a whoop and a call Danced the juba in their gambling-hall And laughed fit to kill, and shook the town, And guyed the policemen and laughed them down With a boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. A negro fairyland swung into view, A minstrel river Where dreams come true. The ebony palace soared on high Through the blossoming trees to the evening sky. The inlaid porches and casements shone With gold and ivory and elephant-bone. And the black crowd laughed till their sides were sore At the baboon butler in the agate door, And the well-known tunes of the parrot band That trilled on the bushes of that magic land. A troupe of skull-faced witch-men came Through the agate doorway in suits of flame, Yea, long-tailed coats with a gold-leaf crust And hats that were covered with diamond-dust. And the crowd in the court gave a whoop and a call And danced the juba from wall to wall. But the witch-men suddenly stilled the throng With a stern cold glare, and a stern old song: — “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” ... Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes, Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats, Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine, And tall silk hats that were red as wine. And they pranced with their butterfly partners there, Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair, Knee-skirts trimmed with the jassamine sweet, And bells on their ankles and little black-feet. And the couples railed at the chant and the frown Of the witch-men lean, and laughed them down. (O rare was the revel, and well worth while That made those glowering witch-men smile.) The cake-walk royalty then began To walk for a cake that was tall as a man To the tune of “Boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,” While the witch-men laughed, with a sinister air, And sang with the scalawags prancing there: — “Walk with care, walk with care, Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, And all the other Gods of the Congo, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you. Beware, beware, walk with care, Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.” Oh rare was the revel, and well worth while That made those glowering witch-men smile. III. THE HOPE OF THEIR RELIGION A good old negro in the slums of the town Preached at a sister for her velvet gown. Howled at a brother for his low-down ways, His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days. Beat on the Bible till he wore it out Starting the jubilee revival shout. And some had visions, as they stood on chairs, And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs, And they all repented, a thousand strong From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong And slammed with their hymn books till they shook the room With “glory, glory, glory,” And “Boom, boom, BOOM.” THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. And the gray sky opened like a new-rent veil And showed the Apostles with their coats of mail. In bright white steel they were seated round And their fire-eyes watched where the Congo wound. And the twelve Apostles, from their thrones on high Thrilled all the forest with their heavenly cry: — “Mumbo-Jumbo will die in the jungle; Never again will he hoo-doo you, Never again will he hoo-doo you.” Then along that river, a thousand miles The vine-snared trees fell down in files. Pioneer angels cleared the way For a Congo paradise, for babes at play, For sacred capitals, for temples clean. Gone were the skull-faced witch-men lean. There, where the wild ghost-gods had wailed A million boats of the angels sailed With oars of silver, and prows of blue And silken pennants that the sun shone through. ’Twas a land transfigured, ’twas a new creation. Oh, a singing wind swept the negro nation And on through the backwoods clearing flew: — “Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle. Never again will he hoo-doo you. Never again will he hoo-doo you. Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men, And only the vulture dared again By the far, lone mountains of the moon To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:— “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you. Mumbo ... Jumbo ... will ... hoo-doo ... you.”
In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, flyScarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
We burrowed night and day with tools of lead,Heaped the bank up and cast it in a ringAnd hurled the earth above. And Caesar said,"Why, it is excellent. I like the thing."We, who are dead,Made it, and wrought, and Caesar liked the thing.And here we strove, and here we felt each veinIce-bound, each limb fast-frozen, all night long.And here we held communion with the rainThat lashed us into manhood with its thong,Cleansing through pain.And the wind visited us and made us strong.Up from around us, numbers without name,Strong men and naked, vast, on either handPressing us in, they came. And the wind cameAnd bitter rain, turning grey all the land.That was our game,To fight with men and storms, and it was grand.For many days we fought them, and our sweatWatered the grass, making it spring up green,Blooming for us. And, if the wind was wet,Our blood wetted the wind, making it keenWith the hatredAnd wrath and courage that our blood had been.So, fighting men and winds and tempests, hotWith joy and hate and battle-lust, we fellWhere we fought. And God said, "Killed at last then? What!Ye that are too strong for heaven, too clean for hell,(God said) stir not.This be your heaven, or, if ye will, your hell."So again we fight and wrestle, and againHurl the earth up and cast it in a ring.But when the wind comes up, driving the rain(Each rain-drop a fiery steed), and the mists rollingUp from the plain,This wild procession, this impetuous thing.Hold us amazed. We mount the wind-cars, thenWhip up the steeds and drive through all the world,Searching to find somewhere some brethren,Sons of the winds and waters of the world.We, who were men,Have sought, and found no men in all this world.Wind, that has blown here always ceaselessly,Bringing, if any man can understand,Might to the mighty, freedom to the free;Wind, that has caught us, cleansed us, made us grand,Wind that is we(We that were men) — make men in all this land,That so may live and wrestle and hate that whenThey fall at last exultant, as we fell,And come to God, God may say, "Do you come thenMildly enquiring, is it heaven or hell?Why! Ye were men!Back to your winds and rains. Be these your heaven and hell!"
From morn to midnight, all day through,I laugh and play as others do,I sin and chatter, just the sameAs others with a different name.And all year long upon the stageI dance and tumble and do rageSo vehemently, I scarcely seeThe inner and eternal me.I have a temple I do notVisit, a heart I have forgot,A self that I have never met,A secret shrine—and yet, and yetThis sanctuary of my soulUnwitting I keep white and whole,Unlatched and lit, if Thou should'st careTo enter or to tarry there.With parted lips and outstretched handsAnd listening ears Thy servant stands,Call Thou early, call Thou late,To Thy great service dedicate.
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,And no man claimed the conquest of your land.But gropers both through fields of thought confinedWe stumble and we do not understand.You only saw your future bigly planned,And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,And in each other's dearest ways we stand,And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.When it is peace, then we may view againWith new-won eyes each other's truer formAnd wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warmWe'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,When it is peace. But until peace, the stormThe darkness and the thunder and the rain.
When you see millions of the mouthless deadAcross your dreams in pale battalions go,Say not soft things as other men have said,That you'll remember. For you need not so.Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they knowIt is not curses heaped on each gashed head?Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,“Yet many a better one has died before.”Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should youPerceive one face that you loved heretofore,It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.Great death has made all his for evermore.
i The World without Imagination Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates Of snails, musician of pears, principium And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig Of things, this nincompated pedagogue, Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes, Berries of villages, a barber's eye, An eye of land, of simple salad-beds, Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung On porpoises, instead of apricots, And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts Dibbled in waves that were mustachios, Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world. One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha. It was not so much the lost terrestrial, The snug hibernal from that sea and salt, That century of wind in a single puff. What counted was mythology of self, Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin, The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane, The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw Of hum, inquisitorial botanist, And general lexicographer of mute And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself, A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. What word split up in clickering syllables And storming under multitudinous tones Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? Crispin was washed away by magnitude. The whole of life that still remained in him Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear, Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust. Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea, The old age of a watery realist, Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age That whispered to the sun's compassion, made A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars, And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that Which made him Triton, nothing left of him, Except in faint, memorial gesturings, That were like arms and shoulders in the waves, Here, something in the rise and fall of wind That seemed hallucinating horn, and here, A sunken voice, both of remembering And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain. Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved. The valet in the tempest was annulled. Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt. Crispin, merest minuscule in the gates, Dejected his manner to the turbulence. The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, The dead brine melted in him like a dew Of winter, until nothing of himself Remained, except some starker, barer self In a starker, barer world, in which the sun Was not the sun because it never shone With bland complaisance on pale parasols, Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets. Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin Became an introspective voyager. Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last, Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing, But with a speech belched out of hoary darks Noway resembling his, a visible thing, And excepting negligible Triton, free From the unavoidable shadow of himself That lay elsewhere around him. Severance Was clear. The last distortion of romance Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea Severs not only lands but also selves. Here was no help before reality. Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. The imagination, here, could not evade, In poems of plums, the strict austerity Of one vast, subjugating, final tone. The drenching of stale lives no more fell down. What was this gaudy, gusty panoply? Out of what swift destruction did it spring? It was caparison of mind and cloud And something given to make whole among The ruses that were shattered by the large.    iiConcerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers Of the Caribbean amphitheatre, In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea, As if raspberry tanagers in palms, High up in orange air, were barbarous. But Crispin was too destitute to find In any commonplace the sought-for aid. He was a man made vivid by the sea, A man come out of luminous traversing, Much trumpeted, made desperately clear, Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies, To whom oracular rockings gave no rest. Into a savage color he went on. How greatly had he grown in his demesne, This auditor of insects! He that saw The stride of vanishing autumn in a park By way of decorous melancholy; he That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, As dissertation of profound delight, Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes, Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged His apprehension, made him intricate In moody rucks, and difficult and strange In all desires, his destitution's mark. He was in this as other freemen are, Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly. His violence was for aggrandizement And not for stupor, such as music makes For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived That coolness for his heat came suddenly, And only, in the fables that he scrawled With his own quill, in its indigenous dew, Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed, Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt, Green barbarism turning paradigm. Crispin foresaw a curious promenade Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate, And elemental potencies and pangs, And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen, Making the most of savagery of palms, Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread. The fabulous and its intrinsic verse Came like two spirits parlaying, adorned In radiance from the Atlantic coign, For Crispin and his quill to catechize. But they came parlaying of such an earth, So thick with sides and jagged lops of green, So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns, Scenting the jungle in their refuges, So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins, That earth was like a jostling festival Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth. So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found A new reality in parrot-squawks. Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd Discoverer walked through the harbor streets Inspecting the cabildo, the façade Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed, Approaching like a gasconade of drums. The white cabildo darkened, the façade, As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up In swift, successive shadows, dolefully. The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons. Gesticulating lightning, mystical, Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight. An annotator has his scruples, too. He knelt in the cathedral with the rest, This connoisseur of elemental fate, Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one Of many proclamations of the kind, Proclaiming something harsher than he learned From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights Or seeing the midsummer artifice Of heat upon his pane. This was the span Of force, the quintessential fact, the note Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own, The thing that makes him envious in phrase. And while the torrent on the roof still droned He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free And more than free, elate, intent, profound And studious of a self possessing him, That was not in him in the crusty town From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades, In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap, Let down gigantic quavers of its voice, For Crispin to vociferate again. iii Approaching Carolina The book of moonlight is not written yet Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire, Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage Through sweating changes, never could forget That wakefulness or meditating sleep, In which the sulky strophes willingly Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs. Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book For the legendary moonlight that once burned In Crispin's mind above a continent. America was always north to him, A northern west or western north, but north, And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled And lank, rising and slumping from a sea Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread In endless ledges, glittering, submerged And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon. The spring came there in clinking pannicles Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came, If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening, Before the winter's vacancy returned. The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed, Was like a glacial pink upon the air. The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians, Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn. How many poems he denied himself In his observant progress, lesser things Than the relentless contact he desired; How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts, Like jades affecting the sequestered bride; And what descants, he sent to banishment! Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave The liaison, the blissful liaison, Between himself and his environment, Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight, For him, and not for him alone. It seemed Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse, Wrong as a divagation to Peking, To him that postulated as his theme The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight, A passionately niggling nightingale. Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not, A minor meeting, facile, delicate. Thus he conceived his voyaging to be An up and down between two elements, A fluctuating between sun and moon, A sally into gold and crimson forms, As on this voyage, out of goblinry, And then retirement like a turning back And sinking down to the indulgences That in the moonlight have their habitude. But let these backward lapses, if they would, Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew It was a flourishing tropic he required For his refreshment, an abundant zone, Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious Yet with a harmony not rarefied Nor fined for the inhibited instruments Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed Between a Carolina of old time, A little juvenile, an ancient whim, And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn From what he saw across his vessel's prow. He came. The poetic hero without palms Or jugglery, without regalia. And as he came he saw that it was spring, A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum. The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring, Although contending featly in its veils, Irised in dew and early fragrancies, Was gemmy marionette to him that sought A sinewy nakedness. A river bore The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose, He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells Of dampened lumber, emanations blown From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes, Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks That helped him round his rude aesthetic out. He savored rankness like a sensualist. He marked the marshy ground around the dock, The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence, Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore. It purified. It made him see how much Of what he saw he never saw at all. He gripped more closely the essential prose As being, in a world so falsified, The one integrity for him, the one Discovery still possible to make, To which all poems were incident, unless That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. iv The Idea of a Colony Nota: his soil is man's intelligence. That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare His cloudy drift and planned a colony. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse: A still new continent in which to dwell. What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind, If not, when all is said, to drive away The shadow of his fellows from the skies, And, from their stale intelligence released, To make a new intelligence prevail? Hence the reverberations in the words Of his first central hymns, the celebrants Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength Of his aesthetic, his philosophy, The more invidious, the more desired. The florist asking aid from cabbages, The rich man going bare, the paladin Afraid, the blind man as astronomer, The appointed power unwielded from disdain. His western voyage ended and began. The torment of fastidious thought grew slack, Another, still more bellicose, came on. He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, And, being full of the caprice, inscribed Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. He made a singular collation. Thus: The natives of the rain are rainy men. Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes, And April hillsides wooded white and pink, Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. And in their music showering sounds intone. On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote, What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore, What pulpy dram distilled of innocence, That streaking gold should speak in him Or bask within his images and words? If these rude instances impeach themselves By force of rudeness, let the principle Be plain. For application Crispin strove, Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute As the marimba, the magnolia as rose. Upon these premises propounding, he Projected a colony that should extend To the dusk of a whistling south below the south. A comprehensive island hemisphere. The man in Georgia waking among pines Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, Planting his pristine cores in Florida, Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery, But on the banjo's categorical gut, Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays. Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal, Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs, Should make the intricate Sierra scan. And dark Brazilians in their cafés, Musing immaculate, pampean dits, Should scrawl a vigilant anthology, To be their latest, lucent paramour. These are the broadest instances. Crispin, Progenitor of such extensive scope, Was not indifferent to smart detail. The melon should have apposite ritual, Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, When its black branches came to bud, belle day, Should have an incantation. And again, When piled on salvers its aroma steeped The summer, it should have a sacrament And celebration. Shrewd novitiates Should be the clerks of our experience. These bland excursions into time to come, Related in romance to backward flights, However prodigal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the reproach That first drove Crispin to his wandering. He could not be content with counterfeit, With masquerade of thought, with hapless words That must belie the racking masquerade, With fictive flourishes that preordained His passion's permit, hang of coat, degree Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly. It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was, Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event, A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown. There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not The oncoming fantasies of better birth. The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way. All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged. But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim. Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets, With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener? No, no: veracious page on page, exact. v A Nice Shady Home Crispin as hermit, pure and capable, Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent Had kept him still the pricking realist, Choosing his element from droll confect Of was and is and shall or ought to be, Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come To colonize his polar planterdom And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee. But his emprize to that idea soon sped. Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there Slid from his continent by slow recess To things within his actual eye, alert To the difficulty of rebellious thought When the sky is blue. The blue infected will. It may be that the yarrow in his fields Sealed pensive purple under its concern. But day by day, now this thing and now that Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, Little by little, as if the suzerain soil Abashed him by carouse to humble yet Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement. He first, as realist, admitted that Whoever hunts a matinal continent May, after all, stop short before a plum And be content and still be realist. The words of things entangle and confuse. The plum survives its poems. It may hang In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground Obliquities of those who pass beneath, Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, For him, of shall or ought to be in is. Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Was he to company vastest things defunct With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong His active force in an inactive dirge, Which, let the tall musicians call and call, Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? Because he built a cabin who once planned Loquacious columns by the ructive sea? Because he turned to salad-beds again? Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape? Should he lay by the personal and make Of his own fate an instance of all fate? What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long? The very man despising honest quilts Lies quilted to his poll in his despite. For realists, what is is what should be. And so it came, his cabin shuffled up, His trees were planted, his duenna brought Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands, The curtains flittered and the door was closed. Crispin, magister of a single room, Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down It was as if the solitude concealed And covered him and his congenial sleep. So deep a sound fell down it grew to be A long soothsaying silence down and down. The crickets beat their tambours in the wind, Marching a motionless march, custodians. In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod, Each day, still curious, but in a round Less prickly and much more condign than that He once thought necessary. Like Candide, Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight, And cream for the fig and silver for the cream, A blonde to tip the silver and to taste The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries! Yet the quotidian saps philosophers And men like Crispin like them in intent, If not in will, to track the knaves of thought. But the quotidian composed as his, Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves, The tomtit and the cassia and the rose, Although the rose was not the noble thorn Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet, Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights In which those frail custodians watched, Indifferent to the tepid summer cold, While he poured out upon the lips of her That lay beside him, the quotidian Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner. For all it takes it gives a humped return Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed. vi And Daughters with Curls Portentous enunciation, syllable To blessed syllable affined, and sound Bubbling felicity in cantilene, Prolific and tormenting tenderness Of music, as it comes to unison, Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last Deduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur His grand pronunciamento and devise. The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed, Hands without touch yet touching poignantly, Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee, Prophetic joint, for its diviner young. The return to social nature, once begun, Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute, Involved him in midwifery so dense His cabin counted as phylactery, Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt Of children nibbling at the sugared void, Infants yet eminently old, then dome And halidom for the unbraided femes, Green crammers of the green fruits of the world, Bidders and biders for its ecstasies, True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. All this with many mulctings of the man, Effective colonizer sharply stopped In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom. But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex The stopper to indulgent fatalist Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant, She seemed, of a country of the capuchins, So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed, Attentive to a coronal of things Secret and singular. Second, upon A second similar counterpart, a maid Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake Excepting to the motherly footstep, but Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep. Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light, A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth, Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified, All din and gobble, blasphemously pink. A few years more and the vermeil capuchin Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was, The dulcet omen fit for such a house. The second sister dallying was shy To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself Out of her botches, hot embosomer. The third one gaping at the orioles Lettered herself demurely as became A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody. The fourth, pent now, a digit curious. Four daughters in a world too intricate In the beginning, four blithe instruments Of differing struts, four voices several In couch, four more personæ, intimate As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue That should be silver, four accustomed seeds Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, Four questioners and four sure answerers. Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout. The world, a turnip once so readily plucked, Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main, And sown again by the stiffest realist, Came reproduced in purple, family font, The same insoluble lump. The fatalist Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw, Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote Invented for its pith, not doctrinal In form though in design, as Crispin willed, Disguised pronunciamento, summary, Autumn's compendium, strident in itself But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved In those portentous accents, syllables, And sounds of music coming to accord Upon his law, like their inherent sphere, Seraphic proclamations of the pure Delivered with a deluging onwardness. Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote Is false, if Crispin is a profitless Philosopher, beginning with green brag, Concluding fadedly, if as a man Prone to distemper he abates in taste, Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure, Glozing his life with after-shining flicks, Illuminating, from a fancy gorged By apparition, plain and common things, Sequestering the fluster from the year, Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops, And so distorting, proving what he proves Is nothing, what can all this matter since The relation comes, benignly, to its end? So may the relation of each man be clipped.
This World is not Conclusion. A Species stands beyond -  Invisible, as Music - But positive, as Sound - It beckons, and it baffles -  Philosophy, dont know -  And through a Riddle, at the last -  Sagacity, must go - To guess it, puzzles scholars - To gain it, Men have borne Contempt of Generations And Crucifixion, shown - Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -  Blushes, if any see -  Plucks at a twig of Evidence -  And asks a Vane, the way -  Much Gesture, from the Pulpit - Strong Hallelujahs roll -  Narcotics cannot still the Tooth That nibbles at the soul -
As through marble or the lining of  certain fish split open and scooped  clean, this is the blue vein that rides, where the flesh is even  whiter than the rest of her, the splayed  thighs mother forgets, busy struggling  for command over bones: her own,  those of the chaise longue, all equally uncooperative, and there’s  the wind, too. This is her hair, gone  from white to blue in the air. This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark  daddy’s knuckles, that do not change, ever.  Which is to say they are no more pale  in anger than at rest, or when, as I imagine them now, they follow the same two fingers he has always used  to make the rim of every empty blue glass in the house sing. Always, the same blue-to-black sorrow no black surface can entirely hide. Under the night, somewhere between the white that is nothing so much as  blue, and the black that is, finally; nothing,  I am the man neither of you remembers.  Shielding, in the half-dark, the blue eyes I sometimes forget I don’t have. Pulling my own stoop- shouldered kind of blues across paper.  Apparently misinformed about the rumored  stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired,  I was told look for blue.
I’d have you known! It puzzles me forever  To hear, day in, day out, the words men use,  But never a single word about you, never.  Strange!—in your every gesture, worlds of news.  On busses people talk. On curbs I hear them;  In parks I listen, barbershop and bar.  In banks they murmur, and I sidle near them;  But none allude to you there. None so far. I read books too, and turn the pages, spying:  You must be there, one beautiful as you!  But never, not by name. No planes are flying  Your name in lacy trailers past the blue  Marquees of heaven. No trumpets cry your fame.  Strange!—how no constellations spell your name!
The toy become the aesthetic archetype As if some patient peasant God had rubbed and rubbed the Alpha and Omega of Form into a lump of metal A naked orientation unwinged unplumed the ultimate rhythm has lopped the extremities of crest and claw from the nucleus of flight The absolute act of art conformed to continent sculpture —bare as the brow of Osiris— this breast of revelation an incandescent curve licked by chromatic flames in labyrinths of reflections This gong of polished hyperaesthesia shrills with brass as the aggressive light strikes its significance The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence
In Jinotega women greeted us with thousands of flowers roses it was hard to tell the petals on our faces and arms falling then embraces and the Spanish language which is a little like a descent of petals pink and orange Suddenly out of the hallway our gathering place AMNLAE the Asociación de Mujeres women came running seat yourselves dear guests from the north we announce a play a dance a play the women their faces mountain river Indian European Spanish dark-haired women dance in gray-green fatigues they dance the Contra who circles the village waiting for the young teacher the health worker (these are the strategies) the farmer in the high village walks out into the morning toward the front which is a circle of terror they dance the work of women and men they dance the plowing of the fields they kneel to the harrowing with the machetes they dance the sowing of seed (which is always a dance) and the ripening of corn the flowers of grain they dance the harvest they raise their machetes for the harvest the machetes are high but no! out of the hallway in green and gray come those who dance the stealth of the Contra cruelly they dance the ambush the slaughter of the farmer they are the death dancers who found the schoolteacher they caught the boy who dancing brought seeds in his hat all the way from Matagalpa they dance the death of the mother the father the rape of the daughter they dance the child murdered the seeds spilled and trampled they dance sorrow sorrow they dance the search for the Contra and the defeat they dance a comic dance they make a joke of the puppetry of the Contra of Uncle Sam who is the handler of puppets they dance rage and revenge they place the dead child (the real sleeping baby) on two chairs which is the bier for the little actor they dance prayer bereavement sorrow they mourn Is there applause for such theater? Silence then come let us dance together now you know the usual dance of couples Spanish or North American let us dance in twos and threes let us make little circles let us dance as though at a festival or in peace- time together and alone whirling stamping our feet bowing to one another the children gather petals from the floor to throw at our knees we dance the children too banging into us into each other and one small boy dances alone pulling at our skirts wait he screams stop! he tugs at the strap of our camera Stop! stop dancing I’m Carlos take a picture of me No! Now! Right now! because soon Look! See Pepe! even tomorrow I could be dead like him the music catches its breath the music jumping in the guitar and phonograph holds still and waits no no we say Carlos not you we put our fingers on his little shoulder we touch his hair but one of us is afraid for god’s sake take his picture so we lift him up we photo- graph him we pass him from one to another we photograph him again and again with each of us crying or laughing with him in our arms we dance
I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out  over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds  where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight  into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark   And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest  coelenterates and praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces   You are everywhere partial and entire You are on the inside of everything and on the outside   I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down and if I find you I must go out deep into your  far resolutions and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.
Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead. It has my photograph in its soft pocket. It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind. I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.
Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?
Oh, Love, he went a-straying, A long time ago! I missed him in the Maying, When blossoms were of snow; So back I came by the old sweet way; And for I loved him so, wept that he came not with me, A long time ago! Wide open stood my chamber door, And one stepped forth to greet; Gray Grief, strange Grief, who turned me sore With words he spake so sweet. I gave him meat; I gave him drink; (And listened for Love’s feet.) How many years? I cannot think; In truth, I do not know— Ah, long time ago! Oh, love, he came not back again, Although I kept me fair; And each white May, in field and lane, I waited for him there! Yea, he forgot; but Grief stayed on, And in Love’s empty chair Doth sit and tell of days long gone— ’Tis more than I can bear!
I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust.  And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That’s why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.
When I see you, who were so wise and cool, Gazing with silly sickness on that fool You’ve given your love to, your adoring hands Touch his so intimately that each understands, I know, most hidden things; and when I know Your holiest dreams yield to the stupid bow Of his red lips, and that the empty grace Of those strong legs and arms, that rosy face, Has beaten your heart to such a flame of love, That you have given him every touch and move, Wrinkle and secret of you, all your life, —Oh! then I know I’m waiting, lover-wife, For the great time when love is at a close, And all its fruit’s to watch the thickening nose And sweaty neck and dulling face and eye, That are yours, and you, most surely, till you die! Day after day you’ll sit with him and note The greasier tie, the dingy wrinkling coat; As prettiness turns to pomp, and strength to fat, And love, love, love to habit! And after that, When all that’s fine in man is at an end, And you, that loved young life and clean, must tend A foul sick fumbling dribbling body and old, When his rare lips hang flabby and can’t hold Slobber, and you’re enduring that worst thing, Senility’s queasy furtive love-making, And searching those dear eyes for human meaning, Propping the bald and helpless head, and cleaning A scrap that life’s flung by, and love’s forgotten,— Then you’ll be tired; and passion dead and rotten; And he’ll be dirty, dirty! O lithe and free And lightfoot, that the poor heart cries to see, That’s how I’ll see your man and you!— But you —Oh, when that time comes, you’ll be dirty too!
Good-bye!—no, do not grieve that it is over,  The perfect hour; That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover,  Flits from the flower. Grieve not—it is the law. Love will be flying—  Yes, love and all. Glad was the living—blessed be the dying.  Let the leaves fall.
The time is important here—not because this  has been a long winter or because it is my first  at home since childhood—but because there is so much  else to be unsure of. We are on the brink of an invasion.  At a time like this how is it that when I left only a week ago there was three feet of snow on the ground, and now there is none, not even a single patch  on in the shadow of the fence-line.  And to think I paid a cousin twenty dollars  to shovel the walk. He and two of his buddies,  still smelling of an all-nighter, arrived at 7 am  to begin their work. When I left them a while later  and noticed their ungloved hands, winter made me feel  selfish and unsure. This ground seems unsure  of itself for its own reasons and we do not gauge enough of our lives  by changes in temperature. When I first began to write poems I was laying claim to battle. It started with a death that I tried to say was unjust, not because of the actual dying, but because of what was left. What time of year was that? I have still not yet learned to write of war. I have friends who speak out—as is necessary— with subtle and unsubtle force. But I am from this place and a great deal has been going wrong for some time now. The two young Indian boys who almost drowned last night in the fast-rising creek near school are casualties in any case. There have been too many just like them and I have no way to fix these things. A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week about not having the intelligence to take as subject for his poems anything other than his own life. For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood: This poem was never supposed to mention itself, other writers, or me. But I will not regret that those boys made it home, or that the cousins used the money at the bar. Still, there are no lights on this street. Still, there is so much mud outside that we carry it indoors with us.
for Darlene Wind and James Welch I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.   I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.   I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.
For ten days now, two luna moths remain silk-winged and lavish as a double broach pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin. Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green of copper weather vanes nosing the wind, the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen's green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore, the plush green peat that carpets the island, that hushes, sinks then holds a boot print for days, and the sapling-green of new pines sprouting through it. The miraculous green origami of their wings - false eyed, doomed and sensual as the mermaid's long green fins: a green siren calling from the moonlight. A green siren calling from the moonlight, from the sweet gum leaves and paper birches that shed, like tiny white decrees, scrolled bark. They emerge from cocoons like greased hinges, all pheromone and wing, instinct and flutter. They rise, hardwired, driven, through the creaking pine branches tufted with beard moss and fog. Two luna moths flitting like exotic birds towards only each other and light, in these their final few days, they mate, then starving they wait, inches apart, on my cabin wall to die, to share fully each pure and burning moment. They are, like desire itself, born without mouths. What, if not this, is love?
In the sixth grade I was chased home by the Gatlin kids, three skinny sisters in rolled-down bobby socks. HissingBrainiac! and Mrs. Stringbean!, they trod my heel. I knew my body was no big deal but never thought to retort: who's calling who skinny? (Besides, I knew they'd beat me up.) I survived their shoves across the schoolyard because my five-foot-zero mother drove up in her Caddie to shake them down to size. Nothing could get me into that car. I took the long way home, swore I'd show them all: I would grow up.
Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don't look back, the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits - eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You'll never know who's down there, frying those eggs, if you don't get up and see.
Luggage first, the lining of his suit jacket dangling As always, just when you’d given up hope Nimbly he backs out of the taxi Eyes nervously extending, like brave crabs Everywhere at once, keeping track of his papers He pilots himself into the home berth Like a small tug in a cloud of seagulls Worries flutter around him so thick It takes him some time to arrive And you wonder if he’s ever really been happy: When the blue eyes blur And stare out to sea Whether it’s only a daydream Or a long pain that silences him In such gray distances You’ll never know, but now Turning to you, the delicate mouth Like a magician Is curious, sensitive, playing tricks, Pouting like a wise turtle It seems he has a secret With the driver, With the stewardess on the airplane So that even when he opens his arms When the warm voice surrounds you, Wraps you in rough bliss, Just before you go under Suddenly you remember: The beloved does not come From nowhere: out of himself, alone Often he comes slowly, carefully After a long taxi ride Past many beautiful men and women And many dead bodies, Mysterious and important companions.
You’re worried, so you wake her & you talk into the dark: Do you think I have cancer, you say, or Were there worms in that meat
No matter how she tilts her head to hear she sees the irritation in their eyes. She knows how they can read a small rejection, a little judgment, in every What did you say? So now she doesn’t say What? or Come again? She lets the syllables settle, hoping they form some sort of shape that she might recognize. When they don’t, she smiles with everyone else, and then whoever was talking turns to her and says, “Break wooden coffee, don’t you know?” She pulls all she can focus into the face to know if she ought to nod or shake her head. In that long space her brain talks to itself. The person may turn away as an act of mercy, leaving her there in a room full of understanding with nothing to cover her, neither sound nor silence .
The gowns and dresses hang like fleece in their glaring whiteness, sheepskin-softness, the ruffled matrimonial love in which the brides- in-waiting dance around, expectantly, hummingbirds to tulips. I was dragged here: David’s Bridal, off the concrete-gray arterial highways of a naval town. I sink into the flush bachelors’ couch, along with other men sprinkled throughout the shop, as my friend and her female compatriots parade taffeta dresses in monstrous shades of pastels—persimmons, lilacs, periwinkles—the colors of weddings and religious holidays. Trains drag on the floor, sleeves drape like limp, pressed sheets of candied fruits, ribbons fluttering like pale leaves. I watch families gathered together: the women, like worshippers, circling around the smiling brides-to-be, as if they were the anointed ones. The men, in turn, submerge deeper into couches, into sleep, while the haloed, veiled women cannot contain their joy, they flash their winning smiles, and they are beautiful.
My mother would be a falconress, And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist, would fly to bring back from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize, where I dream in my little hood with many bells jangling when I'd turn my head. My mother would be a falconress, and she sends me as far as her will goes. She lets me ride to the end of her curb where I fall back in anguish. I dread that she will cast me away, for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission. She would bring down the little birds. And I would bring down the little birds. When will she let me bring down the little birds, pierced from their flight with their necks broken, their heads like flowers limp from the stem? I tread my mother's wrist and would draw blood. Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded. I have gone back into my hooded silence, talking to myself and dropping off to sleep. For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me, sewn round with bells, jangling when I move. She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist. She uses a barb that brings me to cower. She sends me abroad to try my wings and I come back to her. I would bring down the little birds to her I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly. I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood, and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying. She draws a limit to my flight. Never beyond my sight, she says. She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching. She rewards me with meat for my dinner. But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her. Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me, always, in a little hood with the bells ringing, at her wrist, and her riding to the great falcon hunt, and me flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet, straining, and then released for the flight. My mother would be a falconress, and I her gerfalcon raised at her will, from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own pride, as if her pride knew no limits, as if her mind sought in me flight beyond the horizon. Ah, but high, high in the air I flew. And far, far beyond the curb of her will, were the blue hills where the falcons nest. And then I saw west to the dying sun-- it seemd my human soul went down in flames. I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me, until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out, far, far beyond the curb of her will to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where the falcons nest I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak. I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight, sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist, striking out from the blood to be free of her. My mother would be a falconress, and even now, years after this, when the wounds I left her had surely heald, and the woman is dead, her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart were broken, it is stilld I would be a falcon and go free. I tread her wrist and wear the hood, talking to myself, and would draw blood.
I. The empty of stomach manifests silence a stillness that levels coffee in a cup and in a respectful manner allows steam to penetrate the surface. Reversal of action has created my sandstone canyon rooted cedar and sage at my feet. This movement is where a tranquility stems. II. When my child creates bubbles through a soapy wand, I occupy the action of fate that bursts the perfect form. A halcyon absorbed nesting within the existence of the form that no longer exists. The formless form is where my mind floats. III. It is easy to give form especially with English words a promotion of mechanical ligaments binding spirit with assembly-fabricated molds. Just as my hair poses an appendage of my brain my tongue poses an appendage of my heart. I cannot classify this thought as a typewritten symbol. An ideogram of essence cultivates my stillness to action.
Start this with the invocation: a seventy-seven Pinto, an eastbound freeway, two boysa few months from their driver’s license.It happens again because you’ve said it. You sit in the back seat, a ghost of red vinyl, to listento these boys—one of whom was you,the one along for the ride—talk brave about cheerleaders and socket wrenches as they passa stolen cigarette between them.They don’t know you’re there, wouldn’t believe in you should they look backstage, backseat.The boys are driving back from an Octoberorchard where they’d gone to see leaves change. You remember: orange, brown, as though you’d just seen those leaves,because in this proximityto yourself—the boy in the passenger seat—you are thinking the same thing, and each of your in-carnations feels like they’ve thought thisbefore. Your ghost, your present tense thinks that maybe this isn’t right. Now you’re along for the ride.These boys haven’t cuffed up againsttheir own mortality yet, though one of them is sick. The other one, driving and picking at the thinhair falling from his scalp, will diesoon, because what lurks in his dark blood can be cured by medical science. And that cure is what willkill him, as it leaves him weak,unable to fight off infection in his lungs. But that comes later. You are here with them now to findout what you owe to whom—your life,mortgaged to one of these boys and you’ve never been able to rectify that debt. You are thestage direction, a ghost backstage,wanting a spotlight, a soapbox a soliloquy. Dissolve back into your life, like sugarin tea—exit this scene now, stage left. *You are the apparition again in your mother’s house. You follow yourself down the yellow hallwayto the ringing phone in the kitchen.You already know who’s calling, the way you knew then—when you were the self you’re haunting. Your friendis dead. You know this even before his sister tells you—but because your ghost is too close, the boy can feel your grief, but can’t feel his own.And you did know then, didn’t you?You knew that morning, that the earth awakes closest to the sun—four days into every new year.And Lazarus, dead now, four days.Roll away the stone. Believe in something besides the past. Awaken from this dream likea man called out from a cave.It happens this way each time: a bourbon breakdown in January rain—weeping an invocation,cursing corollary. *Can you go to Tom’s grave today and mandate him back to this life? Should you cue him from the winglike a stage direction? Would hedamn you—a sadness, a gravestone on your chest, for calling him into this mortal suffering?If you had been in Houston that dayhe’d have died anyway. You’re a fool to think you can bargain across the river. Haunting the past won’t stopit from happening each time, exactly the same way. Won’t stop your heart from breaking like a glass decanter, brown whisky sliding mercury across the tile.
On humming rubber along this white concrete, lighthearted between the gravities of source and destination like a man halfway to the moon in this bubble of tuneless whistling at seventy miles an hour from the windvents, over prairie swells rising and falling, over the quick offramp that drops to its underpass and the truck thundering beneath as I cross with the country music twanging out my windows, I'm grooving down this highway feeling technology is freedom's other name when —a meadowlark comes sailing across my windshield with breast shining yellow and five notes pierce the windroar like a flash of nectar on mind, gone as the country music swells up and drops  me wheeling down  my notch of cement-bottomed sky  between home and away and wanting to move again through country that a bird has defined wholly with song, and maybe next time see how  he flies so easy, when he sings.
I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.  —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”   For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be  cut off from his people.  —Leviticus 23:29 What is a Jew in solitude? What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own? What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man? In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert what in this world as it is can solitude mean?   The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs with its electric gate, its perfected privacy is not what I mean the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights is not what I mean the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen is not what I mean   Three thousand miles from what I once called home I open a book searching for some lines I remember about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside, something that bloomed and faded and was written down in the poet’s book, forever: Opening the poet’s book I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyedand human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them   Robinson Jeffers, multitude is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf, and the separate persons, stooped over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice?   To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own to hear strangeness calling you from far away and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind (the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman’s god)   Find someone like yourself. Find others. Agree you will never desert each other. Understand that any rift among you means power to those who want to do you in. Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger. But I have a nightmare to tell: I am trying to say that to be with my people is my dearest wish but that I also love strangers that I crave separateness I hear myself stuttering these words to my worst friends and my best enemies who watch for my mistakes in grammar my mistakes in love. This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me? If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.   To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege about drifting from the center, drawn to edges, a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is, who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand; Jew who has turned her back on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?)   Solitude, O taboo, endangered species on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have: your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true    And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away? have I traded off something I don’t name? To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist? What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision far from the protection of those she has called her own? Will I find O solitude your plumes, your breasts, your hair against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song? in the old places, anywhere?   What is a Jew in solitude? What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man? When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide into the sea when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?   1984-1985
Julius Caesar’s head was cut off and fed to the barbarians waiting outside the walls of Rome. Salvador Dali wore one orange sock and a white one on days he went to eat breakfast in cafes. On days he stared at the wall, he did not wear socks.   Yukio Mishima sheathed his knives in wall of whale oil, claiming such creatures were the only ones that understood the art of sacrifice. The last thing John Lennon saw before he was gunned down was the brick wall of his apartment house.   Sitting Bull had fourteen wives he lined up against the cliff walls. He would close his eyes and walk blindly to them with an erection, promising he would take the first one his erection touched. Crazy Horse watched silently from the cliff walls above.   J. D. Salinger scribbled on his bedroom walls as a boy, promising his mother to whitewash the figures the first time he was caught. Joan of Arc climbed over the walls and fell on top of a castle guard, the commotion bringing soldiers who swore the wall opened and she escaped by stepping through.   Nikita Khrushchev stared at the wall of nuclear buttons and knew it was a green one they told him to push, but the triggers were every color except green. Hernán Cortés’ men met a wall of arrows, then turned and ran. Montezuma’s men met a wall of armor, wept, then stoned their chief off the wall for helping the conquistadores.   Carl Jung opened his eyes to find himself sleeping against a wall of flowers, the beautiful smell giving him the answer he had been looking for. Charlie Chaplin ordered his crew to remove the hidden mirror from the wall, footage of his latest lover overflowing onto the studio floor.   Sor Juana de la Cruz hid her new poem in a hole in the wall, but when a fellow nun went to retrieve it after Sor Juana’s death, it was gone. The Dalai Lama stopped in the snow and bowed his head to pray before the wall of dead monks killed by the Chinese.   Virginia Woolf’s last memory before drowning was the wall of family portraits, the photographs of her father and brothers so radiant in the river fog. Billy the Kid simply dug a hole in the adobe wall of the jail with his bare hands and walked away.   Janis Joplin was found dead of an overdose in her Los Angeles hotel, her face facing the wall. Federico García Lorca did not face any walls when he was shot under the trees.   No one knows how Tu Fu encased himself in a wall of bamboo, staying inside the tube for ten years, never saying a word, his feet becoming the roots of bamboo within the first few months of his silence. Al Capone stared at the walls of his cell in Alcatraz and added the bank figures again, trying to get them right.   Babe Ruth heard a thud against the wall of his hotel suite, the baseball rolling down the hallways as a signal his tryst with the team owner’s wife about to be revealed. William Shakespeare stared at the empty walls of the theatre, stood there without saying a word, and stared at the empty walls of the theatre.   Geronimo extended his arms over the walls of rock, the approaching sound of the cavalry troops echoing down the canyon, the pictograph Geronimo carved high on the wall, years ago, lifting him to safety. Two days before Salvador Allende was assassinated, Pablo Neruda, dying of cancer, woke at Isla Negra to find the walls of the room where he lay were covered in hundreds of clinging starfish.
For those who ran in the streets, there were no faces to welcome them back. José escaped and loved the war.   For those who swam with bitterness of a scorched love, there was a rusted car to work on.   For those who merely passed and reclined in prayer, there was the tower and the cross.   For those who dedicated tongues to the living and dying, there were turquoise painted doorways.   For those who left their children tied to the water heater, there was a shout and a name.   For those whose world was real and beautiful, there was a cigarette and a saint.   For those who asked José to stay and feed his children, there were flowers at their funerals.   For those who carried a shovel tattooed on their backs, there was a wet towel and a bottle.   For those who swept the street of superstition and lie, there was the house to come home to.   For those who came home late and put their swollen feet up, there was love and the smell of dirty socks.   For those who feared the devil and spit on his painted arms, there was a lesson in rosaries.   For those who had to leave before the sun went down, there was asphalt and a bus.   For those who stared at wet plaster and claimed the face of Christ appeared, there was confinement and stale bread.   For those who talked with each other and said it was time to go, there was lead in the paint and on the tongue.   For those who left children behind, there was a strange world of sulphur and sparrow nests.   For those who accused their ancestors of eating salt, there were these hands tracing what was left after the sweat.
Kick in the heart. Kick the starting lance. Throw the ground a word and stand back. The color of terror is the envy on body rags, the dragonfly war scraped off a painting inside the door.   Kick the shame. Kick the falling dawn as fortunate. Throw the corrupted guest out the door. A sequence of rhythms bound for the light on your bed. On the eggplant cooked for the husband working late: an ant, a hair— the only thing said to race the mind. Take someone else’s voice and touch their ears. Make sure they hear you cry in their own whispers, their harangue.   Kick the soil. Kick the sweet drowning as if you know the round jubilance of pear is afraid of a darkening spoon, a honey of flavor, the tender one who never touches your plate. The tired one who rations food to thank God eternity is here and there.   Slip the eye the blue-black stranger, his instrument of scars and neglect, its tune of every wish besides the grave of a careless, quiet man. Shape his sound into the thumb asking for a ride in the years of not going anywhere.   Kick the alphabet. Kick the hungry thigh and try again. Reduce yourself to a moving mouth, a solemn happiness that smells of the past, takes hold of the throat and teaches you to despise omens— ignore Apache mirrors on rock arches as if you knew what their scratchings meant.   Kick the heart. Kick the starting lance. It moves deeper into the month of blinking neon where vertigo is perfume, desire foaming on your bare feet killed by frost, taken by the animal waking inside your holy cross— a figure of green gowns and things that follows you until you dance.   Kick the truth. Kick the belly until it confesses. Admit you were fed by a woman flapping in the wind, told to sit there by a father who made her give birth to a shimmering head, your brain of flowers blossoming upon the body always first to confess.   What snow is left is tired water unmoved by your seasonal words, your circle healing by slowing down, swelling to the size of God, yellow leaves in the blood nothing dangerous— this impulse, this kick to the brittle lake where the snow goes away.
I called the white donkey that hurt my left shoulder the last time it appeared, ramming me with its ivory head, cracking my back to relieve me of worry and hope. I called the white donkey, surprised at the sound of my voice. Scared, I wondered if the white head would give me its donkey brain, snowy matter dripping into my ears like the horse of the first man who fell off, the donkey teaching me about desire and the moan, that white hair on the back of my head that warns me.   I called the donkey. It came slowly toward me, huge ears shaking with fury, its breath turning the air white as it bit into the white apple of my throat. I faced the donkey, watched its gait become a shuffle of possession, shaking its head as it stopped to root its dirty hoofs in the ground.   I stepped back and clicked my fingers, but it would not come closer, its snort commanding I listen as it farted. I walked away and did not know it was I who yearned for labor of the ass because the animal I summoned couldn’t remove the white scar from my heart, a blind life I lived for good.

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels! Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss! Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!      Berkeley 1955
The kinship with those humans who speak directly to me is webbed to the ceiling. An economy of satellites, a cosmos, where revision we think comes without the benefit of our witness. A peculiar time when stars with modest faces sleep in enormity and mirror death like a child’s infirmity that despite socio-economics is still an illness, definitive as fading paint grossing a distant understanding from a stain pooled from its center resonant of some terrific nucleus making sense of its own words with the strangest electricity.
I can’t tell you I had climbed for hours on ledges and crawled through gaps in the earth.   My hands negotiating through the teeth of the palisade lipped under the vineyard of temperate skies.   And I can’t tell you that I came onto a ledge within the shelter of a granite roof, ceaselessly carved by centuries of dripping water.   Feeding from pooled water and singular sunlight a chamisa plant sat like a chopped wood.   The opposite end of root speaking for its entirety through silence and color.   And I wish I could tell you that at the moment I met its splitting scent under the enormity of stone your name appeared in my throat with clarity.   And I wish we were old and in front of a grand painting, a picture or postcard of Picasso’s “Guernica” perhaps. It would be then that I would tell you Picasso once said that it took him his entire life to learn how to paint like a child.   It would be through these words that would make you understand the same clarity that pooled over me on that ledge those years before when as a young man I extended like direction, like timbre itself for a dying song that echoed your name.
I.   sound knots   pinned to a fabric-less body form of oak bone   a barreled chest     the presence of acoustic music over the instrument   resting on your lap     a limited vehicle but you knew that   having learned tablature   the guitar posed in sculpture   clear its throat by reaching the oval gap flushed   against stomach into its curious sound   gather fingers around an inexhaustible voice and play the strings  II.    bread shaped to song as we ate and fidgeted   the pitch of river frozen to stillness a film reeled and taut   swelling water oily in its cold steps before it hardens   an utterance before song is shaped   a compression of freezing water eating away at its own babbling faceIII.   where are the boxes of clothes   the newspaper to scoop inside of cups   feel free to comment   miss nothing as of chewing a new food   these are features of comfort   a lower altitude,   moved further but no egg crate to snug the ends of the hutch     a chimera of tempered sand   speak of her house absolved by the wiping ocean   speak of her name by way of mountains   the mirrors silver flaking for the edges of the mirrors   leaving only glass unreflective patches     the promised half   the unanswerable ruin of aperture begging   from where you haven’t seen yourself in years
After it lifts the army-green, stuffed dumpster over its head and the trash falls to the receptacle, it hulks backward with a cadenced beep as if to say, get out the fucking way, please.
I. SKIN & CORN   Her brown skin glistens as the sun pours through the kitchen window like gold leche. After grinding the nixtamal, a word so beautifully ethnic it must not only be italicized but underlined to let you, the reader, know you’ve encountered something beautifully ethnic, she kneads with the hands of centuries-old ancestor spirits who magically yet realistically posses her until the masa is smooth as a lowrider’s chrome bumper. And I know she must do this with care because it says so on a website that explains how to make homemade corn tortillas. So much labor for this peasant bread, this edible art birthed from Abuelitas’s brown skin, which is still glistening in the sun.   II. APOLOGY   Before she died I called my abuelitagrandma. I cannot remember if she made corn tortillas from scratch but, O, how she’d flip the factory fresh El Milagros (Quality Since 1950) on the burner, bathe them in butter & salt for her grandchildren. How she’d knead the buttons on the telephone, order me food from Pizza Hut. I assure you, gentle reader, this was done with the spirit of Mesoamérica ablaze in her fingertips.
That Lucia broke the machine twice in one week was evidence enough. He also offered this—she’s no longer automatic, her stitches are crooked and once another seamstress found Lucia’s “lost” sewing patterns in the trash. The security guard half listened as Lucia gathered her things. Then the manager turned directly to her—what is it with you? We give you work, put money in your pocket. She put on her best disappointed face as they escorted her past rows of itchy throats, bowed heads, the refrain of needle through fabric. Every day Elena counts pig. A pageant of molded plastic rolling down the conveyor belt. The task: grab Miss Piggy, pull gown over snout, fasten two tiny buttons, grab another. With each doll Elena’s hands grow stiffer. Her feet grow heavy as the concrete below. Dolls spit at her, or maybe this is imagined, but the ache in her legs might be real. The supervisor brushes against her back when he patrols the floor. After standing for hours, the room begins to blur. Her mouth opens like an empty wallet as naked dolls march on.                 What will settle in, what will rise from the lungs of girls who still burn weeks after detox treatment at a local clinic. Speak of headaches, blurred vision, diarrhea. How they suck air thick with sulfuric acid. Acetone working past unfiltered exhaust systems and through their livers. Most return to work despite doctors’ orders. Back inside, the tin roof and their steady perspiration remind them they’re still alive—together one breathing, burning machine.                     Like Celia’s pockets, there’s nothing but lint here. Lint & dead machines. The sound of layoffs & profit margins. Yesterday this department droned an unsynchronized rhythm of coughing girls tethered to well-lubed motors. Row after row of pre-asthmatic lungs. Black hair buried under perpetual white. The decision was made across the border, he tells them. Nothing I can do about it. Sometimes Celia would imagine the whole place caught inside a tiny globe. Something she could pick up. Shake.                 A perpetual conveyor, he patrols her mouth. The sound of unfiltered white. Breathing margins. The task: grab Elena’s hands. Pull. Fasten. He also offered crooked patterns. Put money in her hair. That Lucia broke. Was evidence enough? Molded vision as a refrain. An empty wallet will rise. Speak. How they exhaust systems. Despite the blurred other, the ache might be real. Something she could pick up. Across the border, nothing I can imagine.
Bangkok     Caught in a slip of particulars, say, between the dirt road and the brand-new      Seven-Eleven, a bucket  of lotus, three shades of red  in the mudbank giving way to     workers, faces hidden behind kerchiefs, binding the copper tines of another      half-constructed building,  this fretwork, that rooftop’s     progress up and up, the eye riding a motor’s rev, coming to a woman who leans      over the seventh story’s edge  for the pulley rope’s  basket of rice or rubber mallets, then a sweep down into cattle now, their beige skin over bones, the look of loose tents,      or taking in a bronze  Buddha, hands folded over the First     National Melting Company, the red gate, black gate,red, retina arriving      at a man throwing straw  clumps to earth so the seeds  don’t wash away,     and the light behind him washing away,      and this desire, a gaze  shot along the border which is     shaped like a question mark, cramped with hotels, pink neon      grammars blinking  Alpha, Alpha, Alpha Is    The Bank For You And YourNeeds, another quick catch,      the glance stippled  with disappearances,     a girl who lifts her skirt to bathe near the bus stop,      a fire  burning/burnt/burning  in the field of bulldozers,     an eye trying to fix itself as the vehicle turns,      the mind from  nascent to nation,  drifting in instances, a grit in wind worrying the surface, the facts,      out to finger the invisible  gap we would inhabit, pulsing always  in between.
1   This one’s on Route 80 south of Water’s End, Arizona, speeding anywhere else when I’m tired of reading the yellow dash-and-dash, highway’s old adage. Sunglasses coaxed yellows to reds, though there are none where I look into the camera. Behind me, a blur of roadside cactus called “succulents,” for the moisture they save for years. The sky cut from indigo to blue to white until I wished for the sunset’s truncations to stay there, thinking, too, that the verge of its curve could flirt me into the absolute.     2   Moving on, in Bangkok, I’m always crouching in these, wanting to keep my head lower than his to show I know he’s Mother’s father.   Asked, on going in, not to say anything if he brought up the distant old dealings, metallic shrillings of long-dead women, asked to ignore what they’d do for him, offerings he could almost eat a meal on.   And this from the aunt who was asked to leave the family when she was young, “for the sake of the children,” drawing the bad lot. No one told me why.   That’s my foot in the foreground. That was the daylight’s assignment of unwavering white, the background.   These are only the circumstances. As for an end to the glare getting the last word in, there was none.     3   He’d set the machine on the tripod himself, return to read the newspaper, wait for the click, and want to keep it, the stop-time, that is, the pretending to read the newspaper. Held half in the shadow fans of the palm tree, half in a browbeat of sun. So that the machine had to catch him quickly, the clarity, the shot of his legs as   suddenly: brown leather sheaves holding bone.     4   Say the moment arrives at the frame, and she who is about to enter the picture approaches. At the end of the road trip, she turns back in the hopes of memorizing what’s been passed, the colors that changed, the mirror-winks, the real moisture, invisible, along side mirage.   His face was a once-darker shade of dust in his country. Some days he’d set the aperture, the opening, as wide as he could, to ruin the picture, to let all the light in.
For Grandfather, in Bangkok I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards  away from your casket, away from their expert  invasions, kneeling by the order of our births alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics,  the family at your death keeps to form,  having to act out that love of endings.   I can say the little I know of how you lived  is your patient gaze in old photographs,  surrounded by three generations, most of the spindling offspring back from the States or Australia or wherever  they’d been taken, children barely known but abided  on holidays. Today I’m told we have to place   pennies in the dead man’s mouth  to remind us of the portions  left behind.You pay the debt,  someone says, you give your something solid back, push your currency up against the open,up against the father tongue. It’s the formal  silence we love, the hush that’s planned,  the good answer, monks, boyish and newly shorn, who know  to whip your burial cloth exactly three times  over the altar flame to purify countless threads.   Who know when to kneel, when to back away  from the casket. The casket itself carved  patiently, inlaid with the images, portions left behind of silver  shrunken disciples, each framed to each then  framed again by   squares of alabaster scrollwork  whittled into black wood:  the whole teak surface worried, Grandfather, with carpenter’s gold,  splintered,  then resplintered, puzzled with lapis.   The eastern window’s been slivered open,  to make the sun stab  the craftmen’s metallic fretwork. The mourners too,  suddenly embossed, become dozens shifting  to kneel. When a few clouds   eclipse the sun, wiping away the borders,  the frame and scrimshaw,  so that we stand briefly  in the room’s darkened largeness,  next to me someone whispers,   how your vessel is rented,  a work  to be given back.
What a giant I must seem to them, an exhausted giant who dozes above her sewing. Asleep in mid-stitch, sorting the day’s haul of cinders, rubies, griefs— They were laughing and carrying on, their tiny silver needles flying in and out, tiny silver thimbles on their fingers. It’s no use of course, keeping secrets from them, when chattering is almost their religion. Some held corners of the flag like an enormous quilt, and some danced on little shelves above the workshop. They were so merrie that I fell asleep again. In the morning my beautiful flag was finished, every stitch in place and every seam. So now I raise it—slowly, underneath a secret sky. Near the door to the half-daft and the cradle of kleptocracy. Where it rips and shivers, rips and shivers once more And makes me furiously glad, and fills me up with serious pleasure.
The heretic’s papers were spread out on the armchair   *   At the window, fruit of spring, you can bite again against the weather   weapons I let fall outside pharmacies, drowsy and bright   *   Air comes to the confused bends in the rail where in a mirror lush food puts you out for 1 night. Then it is the weather at noon that prepares to spring on you in December, a month ago blowing the lights out with a sob   *   On long walks a poorly tuned radio   in my world my head with a star attached swims back   *   Useless—it was the wrong tree but the flag in the school breeze scans the men and women on my sleeve   *   A . . . turned her head towards the open window of the shop. The voice was low. It did not sound like a man’s voice.   *   Eighteen trees starting from the end of the block outside the pharmacy, with beards today to the subway, station, steps   of a land-post   “screen my heart”   *   Under the dog’s neck When the radio went on. Doctor He moved his face away to The pines, a deep thought. The trees, for a few seconds they were Real to him, his ears stopped The river where no life could touch him. He pressed his ear against the cold Shrill whine. Dusty legs Wondered why they had sent him To this place, they feared the cobwebs Were swaying on the unique bed. Mown grass has the peppery smell Of being crowded together on This bed, and a feeling of dark apprehension Came over him. I watch a horse Gather speed, look at a movie With you. Your words are the grime On the sidestreet, down towards the river, Yellow in the cold glare of floodlights In the yard. In the middle of the line I repeated your instructions, I puzzled with a stranger does to you In a dream. Chunks Of meat are marked Cars following me as a thought follows Us from the motel. Father Has read these latinized titles Aloud, but failed And gave place to some smooth yellowish substance, Checked by no one as he rubbed the sponge- Like doll. It had some hair But its legs did not tempt me, The sponginess gave place to the tubes themselves. Colleagues efficiently solve an aggressive Blank to be expected as we sat at the breakfast Table near the door. A tree blocked Her hair spread and fell over the wheel. But the living room shows its trimming of thick straw— The bad mechanic sets the bread on the white cloth
He changes into a bird, and that’s the only difference. Rain on the improved sidewalk seems inspired after so much heat. Look at the objects that have already wilted and died. Someone is losing hair trying to penetrate the meaning of death—rather language which postpones dying is inventing a drug to keep us alive. Being similar never made this body more true. Bills for electricity and answering service are burning inside the hearth. My dream, to have a hearth and set an example for fading youth. The conspicuous peacock neither turns nor changes, yet suddently loses its feathers, buckles in the dust and dies. The meaning is as fantastic as any truth. Language invents a painkilling drug for restoring youth—an occasion inviting feelings which jolt and never subside. I mean he is dying again, slowly, as he gains time.
Momentarily    the language of description is lost    what you see with your eyes is enough, for you, anyway   but how to get the sense of what you saw across    to another person   it’s possible    through the spirit in your voice    when you say    “it was great!”   to convey    what happened    in that moment    & it was great    not only that    it was terrific, & interesting too    it was nice    & I had a good time doing it. I had fun.   You should have been there. Not only that, it was beautiful. It was inspiring.
Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective may see Foot 1957, also Wetermarck 1906, Ch. XIII To man (sic) the world is twofold, in accordance with that witness is now or in the future It wasn't until the waitress brought her Benedictine and she Villandry, "Les Douves" par Azay le Rideau mine. Yours, CYNTHIA. Not a building, this earth, not a cage, The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless a forgery: Opus loannes Bellini We named you I thought the earth is possible I could not tell to make live and conscious history in common and wake you find yourself among and wake up deep in the fruit Did you get the money we sent? I smell fire AT FULL VOLUME. STAGE DARK] 1. Russia, 1927 God, say your prayers. You were begotten in a vague war sidelong into your brain. In Letter Three & Four (as earlier) the narrator is North Dakota Portugal Moorhead, Minnesota The lights go down, the curtain opens: the first thing we gun, Veronica wrote, the end. 'Wittgenstein' Tomorrow she would be in America. Over forty years ago a tense, cunningly moving tale by the Hunga- Then he moved on and I went close behind. Interviewers: What drew a woman from Ohio to study in Tübingen? American Readers with this issue former subscribers to Marxist Perspectives The shadow of the coup continues to hover over Spain In the ordinary way of summer girls were still singing like a saguaro cactus from which any desert wayfarer can draw as is Mr. Fox, but in literature Twenty five years have gone by Ya se dijeron las cosas mas oscuras The most obscure things have already been said
Help me come up with a strategy to get through this white noise.  — U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney,  November 2001 Are we on the ground now? Ally cells and I said operations. We cleared 50% of a wonderful friend and enduring opposition. Take the solid. Louder. We clearly are loud. We are the postal system. No evidence has been information. Attacking the caves. Are you on the ground enduring? A wonderful friend ramped it up. You ought to open your mail. Opposition element: the air. The talents work with precision. 84%. The population attacking the caves, the talents work with the caves and tunnels. Hiding in caves, wavering in caves and hiding in mosques. A wonderful friend on the ground. Freedom I said: the enduring ally cells. Interested in the view, in our aid sensitivities. 50% to the front of our effort adding that 80% are willing to play. Independent oper-oppo-sition forces that are rosy. So make assumptions on the ground. Are we on the ground now? Can be more than air. The target. The air liaison. Campaign with the bombing and entirely happy. Attacking the leaflets. We keep working hiding in hiding in caves and cowering in cowering in cowering in caves and I could say confidential areas. The mosques and rest efforts are mad. Execution in the targeting of democracy. Those risks culti-targeting to minimize the individual. An obligation to the spirit of enterprise. A war of roundup freezing worldwide, and proceeding on course. Training facilities, proceeding on course, freezing their guided munitions. A population is tons of struggle against evil. A civilized world of innocents in the mud, an enemy that’s on the ground for there is no neutral ever. No neutral homeland. For the first time first time first time in history ordinary busi-security bioterror to defend enemies with the no-ness of life. Confident in destruction / complete and cause / certain of the rightness of this time / in the right / man the victories / to comment for a freer world history / committee of evil / defeat the forces / we will fight and great coalition wherever they are an era of over flight right against terror basing global terror the global trade and lives of our world improve / the modern alliance / I like citizens / but rather than the dust settle it could mean / as acknowledged / the carpet bombs precision bombs / as long as 23 months and I said go to America on alert / get a softball to school if you work / take your child / game this afternoon / game or a soccer to the president’s going to go to the game / the fight/ our new baseball game / to help us in our task / force will sign terrorists tracking American citizens / to protect level warriors / the decibel from these shadows / open your mail louder
The wind dying, I find a city deserted, except for crowds of people moving and standing.      Those standing resemble stories, like stones, coal from the death of plants, bricks in the shape of teeth.      I begin now to write down all the places I have not been— starting with the most distant.      I build houses that I will not inhabit.
He reads: What soul suffers in secret, the flesh shows openly.      Deep within, in a region hardly accessible, a bold self-image sends messages of bloodshed and conquest, which reverberate in his heart of hearts.      [I forget which hand is writing.]      He does not doubt that he exists.      The five senses have left their mark on him. It is a record of what has happened to him, but he cannot talk or travel until he finds a body of water.      A man who has lived on reindeer’s flesh amuses himself with ripples.      In this cage was once a nightingale. In the echo, new words for wind.      The usual convulsions, and a green cat. And, after all, months or years are nothing to him.      [My image contains his body.]      His body contains bodies.      Blemishes.      Inglories.    Vague figures, in a howling wind, and with no notion of perspective.      Of countless ruined worlds, he would appropriate the essential emblem. Wall struggling with wall, shadow with shad- ow.      Thousands of miles a day.      He gazes across an unguarded cemetery—gazes idly, waiting for new equipment.      As through a fixed window, he finds a kind of space, the visible world foreshortened.      He does not see deeply, but—still—one thing behind another.      He keeps a tiny bird, folded like a sheet of paper.      Twice two is four—still—and a circle has no angles.      Body sheds shoulder, jaw. However body may appear, the soulcomes back in scars.      [There are no dead. Only names.]      Too close, ruin wrinkles the surface—his breath bothers reality. The sun pours down. The pots are mended.      An unfolding, from where it is all contained.      The ships have been salvaged. [I do not know what body he has in mind.] Clothing is resumed. Temples are rebuilt.    “Which body?” we inquire, while all the liars cry out, “Verily!”      As though all this were in the dark.      Here is a column of soldiers, a heap of apples, an avenue of trees. Here a swarm of bees, of birds, a row of equidistant lines. A set of unequal objects distributes the field of vision.      Here is the painted world in an actual image. [I have no theory for the clouds he sees.]
seventy wingbeats per second   vagaries of vegetation, rosy anticipation Iturn the page without reading   essence of accident   what is the strongest motive what drives the solar wind   time’s not so old, dating only from the creation   New England has cooled significantly, icy core with a sooty coating   this ice hard to break—the brain will have to wait   catharsis of the vulture, obligatory vespers   a bat, painted the color of joy, head downward because   the brain is heavy I put on music but don’t alwayslisten   whether magma could rise to where tones reach audible frequencies   modest success with a late parasitic moth we will soon find out if all thisis true   sudden drain on the heart, more doubt, the big   melt: anything gone is replaced
I. Separation Precedes Meeting The cat so close to the fire I smell scorched breath. Parents, silent, behind me, a feeling of trees that might fall. Or dogs.  A poem, like trying to remember, is a movement of the whole body. You follow the fog into more fog. Maybe the door ahead divides the facts from natural affection. How can I know. I meet too many in every mirror.      2.   When I was little, was I I? My sister? A wolf chained, smothered in green virtues?  Slower time of memory. Once I’ve got something I lie down on it with my whole body. Goethe quotations, warm sand, a smell of hay, long afternoons.  But it would take a road would turn, with space, in on itself, would turn occasion into offer.          3.   For days I hold a tiny landscape between thumb and index: sand, heather, shimmer of blue between pines. No smell: matchbook. Sand as schematic as  Falling into memory, down, with my blood, to the accretions in the arteries, to be read with the whole body, in the chambers of the heart. The light: of the match, struck, at last.            4.   Concentration: a frown of the whole body. I can’t remember. Too many pasts recede in all directions. Slow movement into  Distant boots. Black beetles at night. A smell of sweat.  The restaurant, yes. You’ve no idea how much my father used to eat. Place thick with smoke. Cards. Beer foaming over on the table.  And always some guy said I ought to get married, put a pillow behind my eyes and, with a knowing sigh, spat in my lap.            5.   The present. As difficult as the past, once a place curves into  Hips swinging elsewhere. Castles in sand. Or Spain. Space of another language.  Sleep is a body of water. You follow your lips into its softness. Far down the head finds its level            6. Tropisms   Inward, always. Night curls the clover leaf around its sleep. Tightly. The bodies of the just roll, all night, through subterranean caves which turn in on themselves.  Long tunnel of forgetting. Need of blur. The air, large, curves its whole body. Big hammering waves flatten my muscles. Inward, the distances: male and female fields, rigorously equal.              7.   The drunk fell toward me in the street. I hope he wasn’t disappointed. Skinned his sleep.  November.   And a smell of snow. Quite normal, says the landlord, the master of rubbish, smaller and smaller in my curved mirror.  I have un- controllable good luck: my sleep always turns dense and visible. There are many witches in Germany. Their songs descend in steady half-tones through you.              8.   You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die following endless rows of sheep into your even breath.  Precarious, like Mozart, a living kind of air, keeps the dream spinning around itself, its missing core. Image after image of pleasure of the whole body deepens my sleep:   fins.              9. Introducing Decimals   A dream, like trying to remember, breaks open words for other, hidden meanings. The grass pales by degrees, twigs quaver glassily, ice flowers the window. Intimate equations more complicated than the coordinates of past and Germany. The cat can’t lift its paw, its leg longer and longer with effort. A crying fit is cancelled. An aria jelled in the larynx. Nothing moves in the cotton coma: only Descartes pinches himself an every fraction must be solved.
a sense of his thirty-third year takes his elbow   *   any kind of he says sniff must be allowed to mature   *   an accident leaves him and finally the swallows   *   by way of curiosity he is no hand by no means to depict a woman   *   often he knows a crowded room   *   just out of his mother he falls between the pursuit and a case he’d sooner forget           *   he has a female muscle camouflaged for impact   *   streets enough to welcome snow   *   he knowingly succumbs to the brown sitzbaths   *   his wife touches a foretaste so vivid that the sheen of timber upsets   *   in going this sort of persistence   *   difficulties of a heavy body placed in alternating gestures
What do we do with the body, do we burn it, do we set it in dirt or in stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey, oil, and then gauze and tip it onto and trust it to a raft and to water? What will happen to the memory of his body, if one of us doesn't hurry now and write it down fast? Will it be salt or late light that it melts like? Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap to a pen elsewhere —how are we to regard his effects, do we throw them or use them away, do we say they are relics and so treat them like relics? Does his soiled linen count? If so, would we be wrong then, to wash it? There are no instructions whether it should go to where are those with no linen, or whether by night we should memorially wear it ourselves, by day reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty. Here, on the floor behind his bed is a bent photo—why? Were the two of them lovers? Does it mean, where we found it, that he forgot it or lost it or intended a safekeeping? Should we attempt to make contact? What if this other man too is dead? Or alive, but doesn't want to remember, is human? Is it okay to be human, and fall away from oblation and memory, if we forget, and can't sometimes help it and sometimes it is all that we want? How long, in dawns or new cocks, does that take? What if it is rest and nothing else that we want? Is it a findable thing, small? In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe, a country? Will a guide be required who will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we swim? What will I do now, with my hands?
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink  of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,wudu, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds, and given me her purse and her packages to hold so she can accomplish this august ritual and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown as they notice what my grandmother is doing, an affront to American porcelain, a contamination of American Standards by something foreign and unhygienic requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom My grandmother, though she speaks no English, catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus over painted bowls imported from China among the best families of Aleppo And if you Americans knew anything about civilization and cleanliness, you'd make wider washbins, anyway
we didn’t really speak my summer wants to answer the architecture doesn’t matter this is not my real life when I am here I want to know why do I believe what I was taught a storm is on the way close all the windows begin at the earliest hour is there a self
Cairo’s taxi drivers speak to me in English. I answer, and they say your Arabic is good. How long have you been with us? All my life I tell them, but I’m never believed. They speak to me in Farsi, speak to me in Greek, and I answer with mountains of gold and silver, ghost ships sailing the weed-choked seas. And when they speak to me in Spanish, I say Moriscos and Alhambra. I say Jews rescued by Ottoman boats. And when the speak to me in Portuguese, all my life I tell them, coffee, cocoa, Indians and poisoned spears. I say Afonsso king of Bikongo writing Manuel to free his enslaved sons. And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is surprisingly good. Then they speak to me in Italian, and I tell them how I lay swaddled a month’s walk from here. I tell them camps in the desert, barbed wire, wives and daughters dying, camels frothing disease, the sand stretching an endless pool. And they say so good so good. How long have you been with us? All my life, but I’m never believed. Then they speak to me in French, and I answer Jamila, Leopold, Stanley, baskets of severed hands and feet. I say the horror, battles of Algiers. And they speak to me in English and I say Lucknow, Arbenz. I say indigo, Hiroshima, continents soaked in tea. I play the drum beat of stamps. I invoke Mrs. Cummings, U.S. consul in Athens, I say Ishi, Custer, Wounded Knee. And Cairo's taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is unbelievably good. Tell the truth now, tell the truth, how long have you been with us? I say my first name is little lion, my last name is broken branch. I sing "Happiness uncontainable" and "field greening in March" until I'm sad and tired of truth, and as usual I'm never believed. Then they lead me through congestion, gritty air, narrow streets crowded with Pepsi and Daewoo and the sunken faces of the poor. And when we arrive, Cairo's taxi drivers and I speak all the languages of the world, and we argue and argue about corruption, disillusionment, the missed chances, the wicked binds, the cataclysmic fares.
After Al-Sayyah  The radio blares “Dialogue of Souls,” and the woman who hated clouds  watches the sky.  Where is the sea now? she asks. Where is it from here?  What is its name?—  this rain on a morning ride to school, winter, my seventh year,  my father driving  through rain, his eyes fixed on a world of credit and debt. On the  radio, devotion to  the lifter of harm from those who despair,  knower of secrets with the knowledge of certainty. Not even the anguish of those  years, the heavy  traffic, cold and wind could have touched me. I was certain the palm  holding me would be  struck again. Chance allows for that and for stars to throb  in reachable depths.  Filled with grief bordering happiness, I didn’t care if I was safe,  whether the storm  was over, only that it came, the slash of lightning, the groaning sky,  and the storms we made,  how rain stripped everything of urgency, how to the lifter of harm rise  those who despair.
Long after the sun falls into the sea and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet and the air gets soaked in blackness; long after clouds hover above like boulders and stars crawl up and stud the sky; long after bodies tangle, dance, and falter and fatigue blows in and bends them and sleep unloads its dreams and kneads them and sleepers dive into the rivers inside them, a girl unlatches a window, walks shoeless into a forest, her dark hair a flag rippling in darkness. She walks into woods, her feet light-stepping through puddles, over hard packed dirt, through grassy hills, over sticks and pebbles over sand soaked in day, stones sun-sizzled over lakes and frigid streams through dim cobbled streets darkened squares and dusty pastures. She runs from nothing, runs to nothing, beyond pain, beyond graveyards and clearings. In the dark the eyes of startled creatures gleam like a herd of candles. They scatter and give night its meaning. What echo of a bell lulled her what spirit, what scent of a word whose storm wrote her what banks fell to drown her which blood star which thread of water which trickle of light whose heart being launched whose floating soul seduced her what promise did it make her whose memory burned her whose prayer did she run to answer whose help, what sorrow clot what pain dammed inside her what wall must she rebuild now whose treasure beckons her who spread ivy like a veil to blind her? Daybreak lies chained to a blue wall from which the stars drop and lose all meaning. She runs past villages that lost their names roads that lost their destinations seas that lost their compasses and sailors rivers that lost their marshlands and travelers houses that lost their sleepers and criers trees that lost their songs and shadows gardens that lost their violets and benches valleys that lost their worms and farmers mountains that lost their prophets and marauders temples that lost their sinners and spires lightning that lost its silver and wires chimeras that lost their bridges minotaurs that lost their fountains. Crescent moons hover above her, ancient white feathers, birdless, wingless lost to their own meaning. Music rises out of her vision. It stands, a wall covered with silver mosses. A clarinet sounds a wounded mare, violins women who lost their children. Flutes blow their hot dry breezes. Drums chuckle the earth’s ceaseless laughter. Pianos are mumbling sorcerers calling spirits and powers. Cellos chew on the sounds of thunder. Dulcimers skip about on crutches. Dance floors flash their knives daring their dancers. Words mill about the streets like orphans. Then a lute begins groaning and dawn loses its meaning. Night girl, night girl your book is full now. You have drawn all the pictures. You have seen many weepers. Stars held your sky in place and moons floated on your lakes and washed them. When a bird sings when dewed branches tilt sunlight into eyes when curtains are soaked with light when mirrors drown in shadows, take your day to the shore, my child. Put out the words that fired your waking, scatter them on the sand like seeds, then with your feet gently tap them, and let the bright waves receive your meaning.
1. Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope. Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants. What dimension of time will they cross at the Hours loop tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists? What siren song will the trucks shipping them back to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists. One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them, and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself to keep the cold wind at bay. But what world is this that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become an open-ended road? That’s what we’re all waiting for, a moment to peel itself like skin off fruit, and let us in on its sweetness as we wait, smoking, or fondling provisions, listening the engine’s invocational purr. In an hour that will dawn and dusk at once, one that will stretch into days strung like beads on the horizon’s throat, they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star begins to float on the water, so bright and still, you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand. 2. A pair of Roman fists robbed of spear and shield; the tiles of the tapestries mixed in with popcorn that slipped from the buttery hands, aluminum wrappers smudged with processed cheese; countless cigarette butts surround the fallen columns and beams with a fringe of tarnished foam; pairs of panties still hot with forbidden passion… The ruins are not ruined.  Without all this garbage packed, stratified, how else to name our age? 3. Earlier, I had walked the market of Sabratha, changed to its people, but like my old city brought me back to me. The petty merchants, all selling the same goods, shouted out jokes to each other. A Sudanese waiter carried a tray with a giant pot of green tea with mint. Among the older men, their heads capped with crimson shennas, I kept seeking my father’s face. An old lust wafted past me when the abaya-clad women, scented with knock-off Chanel, sashayed by. The sawdust floors of the shawarma and falafel eateries, the sandwich maker dabbing insides of loaves with spoons of searing harissa, my mouth watering to a childhood burn. Pyramids of local oranges, late season pomegranates, radish and turnip bulbs stacked like billiard balls, and the half carcasses of lambs as if made of wax and about to melt off their hooks, the trays of hearts, kidneys, brains and testicles arrayed in slick arabesques. The hand-woven rugs where the extinct mouflon thrives, mincers, hairdryers, and toasters, their cords tentacles drooping from rusty shelves. It was as if my eyes were painting, not seeing, what I saw, my memory slowly building the scene until it assembled whole. What face did my face put on in the midst of transfiguration? I know what the eyes of the men my age said, settled now in comfortable middle age, about the life I left behind. True, I did envy them the asceticism of their grace, where a given horizon becomes a birthright—to drive or walk past the same hills all your life, to eat from the same tree and drink from the well that gave you your name. 4. Though for centuries the locals broke the statues’ limbs and ground them to make primitive pottery, enough remains to echo all that has disappeared: you and the woman leave the towpath, and you brace her against the trunk of an oak. It’s not the moonlight, but refractions from suburban homes trapped under cloud-cover that make her bronze skin glow among glistening trees. First, God made love:   the canopy like the inside of an emerald, her lips a rush of cochineal. Then a route of evanescence brought her from Carthage into these living arms, here. 5. “A nice time, “ he tells us, how he and four cousins crossed the desert heading home on top of three-years’ worth of meager pay (the tarp ballooning, a giant dough) roped to a truck. Wearing the goggles of the welder he'd hoped to become, he looked at the sky and wondered “what those flying, smoke on their tails, thought of us.” Later, deported in a cargo plane, he handed the Tuareg soldiers one of his fake passports, and they like “space aliens” (in shabby uniforms, sunglasses, tribal veils) poured into his face. As the propellers’ hammering calmed to a shuddering hum, he saw the stars, “hundreds of them like gnats” swarm Mt. Akakous’ peak. “My next road is the water,” he says serving us tonight, and we promise, if the coffee is good, to put him on the next boat to the moon  shining over Syracuse. 6. Suddenly, I find your descendant’s hands leafing through my chapters, scribbling a note in the margin of my thoughts:  “How is it,” he asks, “that starlight announces the hour:  how can a song divide desire in two?” “My flame,” I must have written or said, “coated her body like silk, one kiss spreading threads of lightening into her pores, until she became a sob, barely lifted by the wind, and I became mist, the shadow of a statue at the break of dawn.”  To that he responds, “a Platonic echo;” and  “What will come of such a plasticine love?” Marcus Aurelius, your descendent knows I’ll leave as I arrive, so empty he gets lost in me. 7. Two centuries ago, one of my ancestors sat on one of the communal latrines in mid-morning and listened to Apuleius’s defense. Across from him on that marble hexagon, sat two other men. On normal days they’d have talked about the olive harvest, the feast of Venus coming soon. But today they listen to the Madaurian’s high eloquence studded with jokes, cracking their own one-liners, shaking their heads in delight. Away from the hot midday sun and the throngs, you could say, they had the best seats in the house, and so they lingered and heard as much as they could then went about their business. So what if a man maries an older woman for her money, what impoverished young Roman in his right mind wouldn’t do that? And sure too, if some man comes to take your inheritance, even if he’s your best friend, even if he takes good care of your mother, you’d be a fool not to sue him to the Council, even if you’d have to accuse him falsely of black magic. That’s the beauty of it, or rather, whoever is going to win will have to make us trust beauty, that things being already right, can be more right, which is what “beautiful” really means. And what better way, to take in all this refinement than hearing it in a latrine where only beauty shields you from the awful stuff of life. 8. Marcus Aurelius, the men at the shore follow your path into eternity, though they already see their journey as a quarrel with circumstance, their lives abscesses feeding on the universe’s hide, tumors in detention camps, in basement kitchens. Their pockets filled with drachmas, they’ll lift diffident heads and drag feet lead-heavy with shame. One of them is now driving a taxi in Thessaloniki or Perugia. With enough of the language to understand direction, he engages his late night passengers. In the light of the dashboard they’ll entrust him with their secrets. With time, he’ll become a light unto himself, his car a winged chariot of human folly, and his responses to them saplings nourished in the dark soil of philosophy. It’s the gift of seasons that stray from the earth, when soul reigns incidental to flesh, forgiving to no end, a light that has long surpassed itself. 9. The birds that drew the line to the first distance remain nameless to me— creamy white breasts, gold dust around their eyes, black/brown (dark roast) wings. The deserts they crossed, the plains east or north of here fall like sand from my hands.Um Bsisi, I want to call them, citizens of a protracted destiny, native and stranger, prodigal and peasant— admit now, they you’re none of these, that you’re not any,  or even all of them combined. 10. Southwest of here is Apuleius’s hometown, his inescapable destination having spent his inheritance on travel and studies. “Lacking the poverty of the rich,” he’s splurged, a month-long trip to the Olympic games; and openhanded, he gifted his mentors their daughters’ doweries. Few return to Madaura once gone, and when heading back shamefaced like him, they’d do as he did, taking the longest route hoping the journey would never end. Here in Sabratha, the widow hooked him, or he let her reel him, and that’s how that sordid business happily ended as it began. I look out toward Madaura, my back to the theater and the latrines, Madaura birthplace of Augustine, site of his first schooling—little Augustine holding a satchel of scrolls and a loaf of bread for the teacher, awakened by his mother, his tiny feet cold in tiny sandals, his stomach warm with a barley porridge my grandmother used to make, forced to slurp it, sweetened with honey from the Atlas, a sprinkling of cinnamon and crushed almonds from the family farm. If the world is that sweet and warm, if it is that mothering, why then this perpetual scene of separation, this turning out into the cold toward something he knew he’d love? He lets go of the neighbors’ boy’s hand warming his own. He refuses the warm porridge forever, renounces his mother’s embrace. It only lasted a month, this partial answer, because even then everyone knew that the sweet fruit they grew housed the bitterest seeds, that piety is its own reward while belief only darkens and deepens like the sea before them, a place meant for those seeking life other than on this dry earth. That’s why prophets were welcomed here, calmly, because God was like rain and they like the saplings which know only the first verse to the sky’s rainless hymn. And that’s why Africa’s tallest minaret looms unfinished, visible from the next town over, and for fifty leagues from the sea if it were turned into a lighthouse for the ships that no longer come. The merchant who’d built it, money made from smuggling subsidized goods to Carthage and used Renaults from Rotterdam, ran out of money, could not afford the mosque that was to stand next to it, leaving its gray concrete bleaching in the sun. There’s enough history here to enable anyone to finish the thought. It’s useless then to track the fate of these travelers, some, without life jackets, had never learned how to swim. Why not let them live in text as they do in life?—they’ve lived without words for so long—why not release them from the pen’s anchor and let them drift to their completion? 11. In a few weeks you’ll see pedants here with binoculars trying to catch a glimpse of the Ramadan crescent, and if these migrants stick around here time will belong to the departure of other travelers, flocks of Um Bsisi follwing the sun’s arch, Japanese and Korean trawlers sailing to Gibraltar or Suez chasing the last herring or sardine. Where is she now in her time?— her life dissolved in other people’s minutes, a sense of solitude her diligent companion even when she lets go of herself to kindness. He’ll be there when she returns from the party, he’ll lie beside her when she sleeps. He’ll say, “Time belongs to the species, but your life belongs to me.” She’ll laugh at his words, and remember what you, Marcus Aurelius, had said about losing only the moment at hand, how it circles in a ring of dead nerves, how we stand impoverished before what is to come. She’ll have her answer to your elocution; she’d always had an answer for you, one she refuses to share even with herself. 12. At last they set to sail. They slaughter a rooster, douse blood on the Dido figurehead adorning the prow. The seadog opens a canvas bag and pulls out a hookah. His Egyptian assistant fills the smoke chamber with seawater, twists the brass head into it, caking the slit with sand. He fills the clay bowl with apple-flavored tobacco, wraps it with foil, pokes it tenderly with a knife. He picks embers from the going fire, places a few on the aluminum crown, and inhales and blows until the bottom vessel fills with a pearly fog, the color of semen, I think, then hands the pipe hose to the seadog who inhales his fill and hands it over to the travelers in turn. The air smells sweet around us, the breeze blows it away and brings it back tinged with iodine. Their communion done, they embark except the one who stands, the dead rooster in his hand, as if wanting to entrust it to us, then digs a hurried hole to bury it in. The boat, barely visible, leaves a leaden lacey ribbon aiming directly for the burnt orange sun. As it reddens, for a moment, their standing silhouettes eclipse it. Then the sea restores its dominion, dark as the coffee cooling in our cups. Dangling from the vine arbor, the lights reflect a constellation on the table’s dark top. I trace my fingers among them, hoping conjecture would shine on the mind’s calculus. Between my unquiet eddies, Marcus Aurelius, and the coursing water, the travelers’ moment sails, its tentacles sewing a rupture I had nursed for too long.
With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain. Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain. Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name. No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain. The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written: “Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.” The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face. The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain. I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled. If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain. I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me. The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.
A minor brush with medicine  in eighty years was all  he’d known.  But this was different. His right arm limp and slung,  his right leg dead to feeling  and response, he let me spoon him  chicken-broth.  Later he said  without self-pity that he’d like  to die.  I bluffed, “The doctors  think that therapy might help you  walk again.”  “They’re liars,  all of them,” he muttered.  Bedfast  was never how he hoped to go. “In bed you think of everything,”  he whispered with a shrug, “you think  of all your life.”  I knew  he meant my mother.  Without her  he was never what he might have been,  and everyone who knew him knew it. Nothing could take her place—  not the cars he loved to drive,  not the money he could earn at will,  not the roads he knew by heart  from Florida to Saranac, not the two  replacement wives who never  measured up.  Fed now by family  or strangers, carried to the john,  shaved and changed by hired help,  this independent man turned silent  at the end.  Only my wife  could reach him for his private needs. What no one else could do  for him, he let her do. She talked to him and held  his hand, the left.  She helped him  bless himself and prayed beside him  as my mother might have done. “Darling” was his final word  for her.  Softly, in Arabic.
Therefore, no more recounting of dreams, a routine thing that bores with expectations of invention, unfiltered non sequiturs, unusual embraces only from the practiced young woman who everyday remembers being a bride, she is changing behind that white curtain Leora fifteen again experiencing prematurely the pure suckling of a baby fifteen with a virgin desire for pure suckling something to do with jasmine with jasmine tea existing only without accident It blooms while Leora sleeps when she sleeps at night and it is also dark for the jasmine four hours of tea sucking on blossoms, Cestrum nocturnum like colostrums: the earliest secretions, and then only milk from mother —there it is seven times over jasmine bath after jasmine bath till the tea can get no better highest grade as stasis all As gets so boring, ka-put to the test of innovation all the right answers Leora sees herself mermaid, eel, tiger fish from waist down form-fitting skirt of winks under that bonefish or ladyfish profile: tail fins already split, caught in transition from legs to fin hybrid mutant bastard mestizo mulatto masala mule mix mutt hm/bm/mmmmm watered down (jasmine bath tea) spiked (jasmine bath tea) stands taller on tips of split tail fin ps: pastiche, salmagundi when all dressed up Leg and fin share custody so young men sacrifice only below the belt to please her many wounded soldiers her company From now on storming the beaches rocks already aftermath, the breaking of dozens of sphinxes the taming of sandstone lions and griffins, gargoyles Leora takes to breast anything capable of sucking and being filled, no ban on leeches and vipers that stick out like misplaced overdeveloped hairs and while in position, her free hand shaves the heads of Medusa’s children screaming for more nursing with her eyes closed, her free handy blade, sharpened life line The liquids of history therefore tend to ferment; the beverages for walks down memory lane therefore become pungent cheeses and wines, the odes to bitterness and sweetness happen. This is also desirable. Taste depends on how the glass tilts, how tongue curls. What’s difficult is maintaining gaps as gaps. A sustainable nothingness. But something enters. Sustainable nothingness looks like a niche. Ghosts and spirits of what’s been lost. A young woman looks over her shoulder. Close watching of what’s fading does not mean the change from substance to spirit would be observed. On the tippy-tips of split tail fin looking over her shoulder a long line for the nurse, exceptional business, nonstop nursing and the milk won’t stop, years are at the end of the line. Pull the plug on a nearby respirator (how on earth?)  (don’t assume location, location, location) the substance travels the line joins the community of electricity, colonies of gigantic storms on the sun and appearances in auroras that the mermaid sits under as under any canopy nonstop The spell of the tide tailored to make the one falling under its influence fall more willingly. It feels nothing like falling at all: Leora describes rehabilitation Sand sparkles remembering having been alive only once Leora’s eyes sparkle upon contact with crabs and their incredible redness that ought to teach her something about fire she does not know with top-heavy ways of knowing  (the brain should travel the stations of the body, and one day  the eyes and navel, when the eyes accompany the brain,  line up in a row)  —then a real reason for revisionDream on  Accordingly, pureness of the situation milks its own purity Fantastic and looks disgusting  (no matter where the eyes are—candidate  for truth) but purity is still pure following such a milking The mermaid’s pregnancy has to be called immaculate after repeated searches for the limits. Lost without those. Pure. Last resort and best explanation for birth of a human baby from a mermaid without a human pelvis or womb. The best xrays cannot find them. Machines arrive on the beach and leave defective. Leora continues nursing her baby first in line The milk is pure. It does not need to be pasteurized. Makes (empty) no one ill. Nothing in it allows allergies. The chemistry (empty) of the milk is pure. (empty) The molecules of the tabernacle of purity.  (as if they are empty) (nothing is right  here) Law Flattened out they are like flattened tetrahedrons, probably are smashed pendulums now Leora blessed with impossibility of the usual kind of rape her own brand jasmine bath after jasmine bath without legs she does as much sitting as anyone who ever sat on a throne wheelchairs keep evolving
Tomato pies are what we called them, those days,before Pizza came in, at my Grandmother’s restaurant, in Trenton New Jersey.My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy by coming to America. Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce. Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean, sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after cops delivered him home just hours before. The waitresses are helping themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer, playing the numbers with Moon Mullin and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942, tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents. With anchovies, large, 50 cents. A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm). How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix, would stand outside all the way down Warren Street, waiting for this new taste treat, young guys in uniform, lined up and laughing, learning Italian, before being shipped out to fight the last great war.
Crows and struts. He’s got feathers! He’s got guts! Oh, the rooster struts and crows. What’s he thinking? No one knows.
The chair has arms. The clock, a face. The kites have long and twirly tails. The tacks have heads. The books have spines. The toolbox has a set of nails. Our shoes have tongues, the marbles, eyes. The wooden desk has legs and seat. The cups have lips. My watch has hands. The classroom rulers all have feet.Heads, arms hands, nails, spines, legs, feet, tails, face, lips, tongues, eyes.
You move around me expertly like the good, round Italian barber I went to in Florence, years before we met, his scissors a razor he sharpened on a belt.But at first when you were learning, I feared for my neck, saw my ears like sliced fruit on the newspapered floor. Taking us back in time, you cleverly clipped my head in a flat-top.The years in between were styles no one had ever seen, or should see again: when the wind rose half my hair floated off in feathers, the other half bristling, brief as a brush.In the chair, almost asleep, I hear the bright scissors dancing. Hear you hum, full-breasted as Aida, carefully trimming the white from my temples, so no one, not even I, will know.
It's a bug's world of intrigue and mystery, with humans a blip in their history. So when insects flitter and scurry past us Take note, because they may outlast us!
--The former President lost his temper. Loss of content in our public life. Only forms remain, intonation, affect. Why did you yell in my mom’s house? Radhika asks our neighbor. --She sounded like she does when her hands shake. She does not want to be there. Bryant calls to ask about her things. A tape on osteoperosis. No. Foundations of Economics (from the 1930s). No. The Soviet shelf. No. The Nazi shelf. No. The Greeks, the Moslems. No. The speech and drama shelf. No. Encyclopedias, no. Check reigsters back to 1964. No. Harry Truman, no. Mrs. Ike, no. --Was her reading too intense? --Grief is excess of sound. Anger is excess of form. Sadness can lack, or still exceed. Excess is overtone, the note beyond the note you sound. Without the tone, there is no object. Did I kill Bin Laden? No. But I tried. --My task is to inventory sentences, place them in order, box them up and ship them in a container. They are a sturdy furniture, haphazard art. They are boxes of papers, bills, pieces of a dissertation. A computer shopper magazine (discard). Titles whose aura was a life, or two, or three. The house is now full of light. A girl wanders through the rooms, trying keys at the windows. My mother knows none of this. --My father might be in the garden, or the scarecrow that wears his hat. Let him wander the house this last, inspect the plumbing, lights, air conditioning, the rows of beans, sort through medals, papers, release them as excess. posted by Susan at 12:44 PM 0 comments
Not the peace of a cease-fire,not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,but ratheras in the heart when the excitement is overand you can talk only about a great weariness.I know that I know how to kill,that makes me an adult.And my son plays with a toy gun that knowshow to open and close its eyes and say Mama.A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,without words, withoutthe thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it belight, floating, like lazy white foam.A little rest for the wounds—who speaks of healing?(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generationto the next, as in a relay race:the baton never falls.)Let it come like wildflowers,suddenly, because the fieldmust have it: wildpeace.
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.  Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy  is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”  —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden I’m not interested in who suffered the most. I’m interested in people getting over it. Once when my father was a boy a stone hit him on the head. Hair would never grow there. Our fingers found the tender spot and its riddle: the boy who has fallen stands up. A bucket of pears in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home. The pears are not crying. Later his friend who threw the stone says he was aiming at a bird. And my father starts growing wings. Each carries a tender spot: something our lives forgot to give us. A man builds a house and says, “I am native now.” A woman speaks to a tree in place of her son. And olives come. A child’s poem says, “I don’t like wars, they end up with monuments.” He’s painting a bird with wings wide enough to cover two roofs at once. Why are we so monumentally slow? Soldiers stalk a pharmacy: big guns, little pills. If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous. There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow. I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds. Something pokes us as we sleep. It’s late but everything comes next.
Erstwhile means long time gone. A harbinger is sent before to help, and also a sign of things to come. Like this blue stapler I bought at Staples. Did you know in ancient Rome priests called augurs studied the future by carefully watching whether birds were flying together or alone, making what honking or beeping noises in what directions? It was called the auspices. The air was thus a huge announcement. Today it’s completely transparent, a vase. Inside it flowers flower. Thus a little death scent. I have no master but always wonder, what is making my master sad? Maybe I do not know him. This morning I made extra coffee for the beloved and covered the cup with a saucer. Skeleton I thought, and stay very still, whatever it was will soon pass by and be gone.
I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts, and I’d like to quit the committee for naming tornadoes. Do you remember how easy and sad it was to be young and defined by our bicycles? My first was yellow, and though it was no Black Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone, chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear family in a television show totally unaffected by a distant war. Then we returned to the green living room to watch the No Names hold our Over the Hill Gang under the monotinted chromatic defeated Super Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building on K Street NW where a few minor law firms mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers and Meat Cutters. A black hand already visits my father in sleep, moving up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will never know a single thing anyone feels, just how they say it, which is why I am standing here exactly, covered in shame and lightning, doing what I’m supposed to do.
Drunker than Voyager I but not as Voyager 2 I rode my blue bike back through the darkness to my lonely geode cave of light awaiting nothing under the punctured dome. I had achieved escape velocity drinking clear liquid starlight at the Thunderbird with a fingerless Russian hedge fund inspector and one who called himself The Champ. All night I felt fine crystals cutting my lips like rising up through a hailstorm. And the great vacuum cleaner that cannot be filled moved through my chest, gathering conversation dust and discharging it through my borehole. During one of many silences The Champ took off his face and thus were many gears to much metallic laughter revealed. Long ago I forgot the word which used to mean in truth but now expresses disbelief. So quickly did my future come. You who are floating past me on your inward way, please inform those glowing faces who first gave me this shove I have managed to rotate my brilliant golden array despite their instructions.
Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings. I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings. I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.
In his life he neither wrote nor read. In his life he didn’t cut down a single tree, didn’t slit the throat of a single calf. In his life he did not speak of the New York Times behind its back, didn’t raise his voice to a soul except in his saying: “Come in, please, by God, you can’t refuse.”    —   Nevertheless— his case is hopeless, his situation desperate. His God-given rights are a grain of salt tossed into the sea.   Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: about his enemies my client knows not a thing. And I can assure you, were he to encounter the entire crew of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, he’d serve them eggs sunny-side up, and labneh fresh from the bag.
The street is empty as a monk’s memory, and faces explode in the flames like acorns— and the dead crowd the horizon and doorways. No vein can bleed more than it already has, no scream will rise higher than it’s already risen. We will not leave!   Everyone outside is waiting for the trucks and the cars loaded with honey and hostages. We will not leave! The shields of light are breaking apart before the rout and the siege; outside, everyone wants us to leave. But we will not leave!   Ivory white brides behind their veils slowly walk in captivity’s glare, waiting, and everyone outside wants us to leave, but we will not leave!   The big guns pound the jujube groves, destroying the dreams of the violets, extinguishing bread, killing the salt, unleashing thirst and parching lips and souls. And everyone outside is saying: “What are we waiting for? Warmth we’re denied, the air itself has been seized! Why aren’t we leaving?” Masks fill the pulpits and brothels, the places of ablution. Masks cross-eyed with utter amazement; they do not believe what is now so clear, and fall, astonished, writhing like worms, or tongues. We will not leave!   Are we in the inside only to leave? Leaving is just for the masks, for pulpits and conventions. Leaving is just for the siege-that-comes-from-within, the siege that comes from the Bedouin’s loins, the siege of the brethren tarnished by the taste of the blade and the stink of crows. We will not leave!   Outside they’re blocking the exits and offering their blessings to the impostor, praying, petitioning Almighty God for our deaths.    5.11.1983
You asked me once, on our way back from the midmorning trip to the spring: “What do you hate, and who do you love?”   And I answered, from behind the eyelashes of my surprise, my blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure . . . I love the spring and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.” And you laughed . . . and the almond tree blossomed and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.   . . . A question now four decades old: I salute that question’s answer; and an answer as old as your departure; I salute that answer’s question . . .   And today, it’s preposterous, here we are at a friendly airport by the slimmest of chances, and we meet. Ah, Lord! we meet. And here you are asking—again, it’s absolutely preposterous— I recognized you but you didn’t recognize me. “Is it you?!” But you wouldn’t believe it. And suddenly you burst out and asked: “If you’re really you, What do you hate and who do you love?!”   And I answered— my blood fleeing the hall, rushing in me like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure, and I love the spring, and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.”   And you wept, and flowers bowed their heads, and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.
After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence   humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery, a room without theme. For the hour that we spend complacent at the window overlooking the garden,   we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green, a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent movements some sentence might explain if we had time   or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular. That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten   comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp- fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way   false birch branches arch and interlace from which hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake   in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content to leave the way we found it. I love that about you. I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality   keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway.   I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence.   That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument.   I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.
1   The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary text over water over time, and that without which   the clouds part revealing an apology for clouds implicit in the air where the clouds had been recently witnessed rehearsing departure, a heartfelt phrase   in the push of the airborne drops and crystals over water over time—how being made to think oneself an obstruction between the observer   and the object or objects under surveillance or even desired—or if I am felt to be beside the point then I have wanted that, but to block a path is like   not being immaterial enough, or being too much when all they want from you now is your station cleared of its personal effects please and vanish—   not that they’d ever just come out and say it when all that darting around of the eyes, all that shaky camouflage of paper could only portend the beginning of the   end of your tenure at this organization, and remember a capacity to draw meaning out of such seeming accidence landed one here to begin with, didn’t it.     2   The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain   control of the formation and movement of clouds. As late afternoons I have witnessed the distant towers borrow luster from a bourbon sun, in-box   empty, surround sound on, all my money made in lieu of conversation—where conversation indicates the presence of desire in the parties to embark on   exchange of spirit, hours forzando with heartfelt phrase— made metaphor for it, the face on the clock tower bright as a meteor, as if a torch were held against   likelihood to illuminate the time so I could watch the calm silent progress of its hands from the luxury appointments of my office suite, the tumult below   or behind me out of mind, had not my whole attention been riveted by the human figure stood upon the tower’s topmost pinnacle, himself surveying   the clouds of the future parting in antiquity, a figure not to be mistaken, tranquilly pacing a platform with authority: the chief executive officer of clouds.   3   The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces which, prior to the factories’ recent construction,   provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons, a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement.   Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence   of any competing sound, its origin and its character. It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism   than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture provoke in an audience more positive, lasting response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature.   Even those who consider natural clouds products of conscious manufacture seem to prefer that a merely human mind lie behind the products they admire.   This development may be a form of self-exalting or else another adaptation in order that we find the hum of machinery comforting through darkness.   4   The clouds part revealing there’s no place left to sit myself down except for a single wingback chair backed into a corner to face the window in which   the clouds part revealing the insouciance of clouds cavorting over the backs of the people in the field who cut the ripened barley, who gather it in sheaves,   who beat grain from the sheaves with wooden flails, who shake it loose from the scaly husk around it, who throw the now threshed grain up into the gently   palm-fanned air whose steady current carries off the chaff as the grain falls to the floor, who collect the grain from the floor painstakingly to grind it   into flour, who bake the flour into loaves the priest will offer in the sanctuary, its walls washed white like milk. To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time   as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that the conference it leads to might change everything, to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment,   of moving above, with effort, the condition into which one has been born, to whom do I owe the pleasure of the hum to which I have been listening too long.   5   The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds, believers in people, ideas and things, the workers of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars   to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase and belief you can change with water over time. It is the habit of a settled population to give ear to   whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out by human experience, for most things people desire   have been desired ardently for thousands of years and observe—they are no closer to realization today than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe   they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow. Attempts to speed them on have been undertaken from the beginning; plans to force them overnight   are in copious, antagonistic operation today, and yet they have thoroughly eluded us, and chances are they will continue to elude us until the clouds part   in a flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork— but when the clouds start to knit back together again, we’ll dismiss the event as a glitch in transmission.   6   The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies united into one immaterial body, a fictive person around whom the air is blurred with money, force   from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare matters nothing. I sense without turning the light from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves   on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way. If I turn around, the room might not be full of wings   capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being, which is to say that I myself may be the source of what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it.   Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them and their love of money, everything I do without thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be   beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs   and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable.     7   The clouds part revealing the distinction between words without meaning and meaning without words, a phenomenon of nature, the westbound field   of low air pressure developing over water over time and warm, saturated air on the sea surface rising steadily replaced by cold air from above, the cycle   repeating, the warm moving upward into massive thunderclouds, the cold descending into the eye around which bands of thunderclouds spiral, counter-   clockwise, often in the hundreds, the atmospheric pressure dropping even further, making winds accelerate, the clouds revolve, a confusion of energy,   an incomprehensible volume of rain—I remember the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes against an asphalt wall, my vision of it scrolling   left as the crowd thinned out to a spatter and then just black until I fall asleep and then just black again, past marketing, past focus groups, past human   resources, past management, past personal effects, their insignificance evident in the eye of the dream and through much of the debriefing I wake into next.
That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s   impecunious craftsman, making what he makes turn out irregular, awry, every effort botched in its own wrong way. You belong, I said, laid out chalk-   white between a layer of tautened cotton gauze and another of the selfsame rubbish that you are wreaking havoc on tonight—and it didn’t disagree.   What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest for origin and purpose. Whatever destiny it is you are meant to aspire to before you retire to   that soup-bowl of oblivion such figments as we expect to find final rest in couldn’t possibly be contained in these boxes. And again—no contest.   And when I was in need, I said, you raveled off in the long-winded ploys of a winless October, unfaithful to the one whose instincts had devised you . . .   —At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands, turned down a dock I remembered and wept. I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept.   Looking out on the water in time we came to see being itself had made things fall apart this way. We envied the simplicity implicit in sea-sponges   and similar marine life, their resistance to changes across millennia we took to be deliberate, an art practiced untheatrically beneath the water’s surface.   We admired the example the whole sea set, actually. Maritime pauses flew like gulls in our exchanges. We wondered that much longer before we had left.
1   A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect   massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed- fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell   and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south-   bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal regularity their dying has given rise to the custom of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath.   The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time, about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly   equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human throat, while the adverb here refers to my person and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular   level extending more of less undaunted all the way down to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak   on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves.       2   Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched, trudges through the froth. I take its photograph from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch   day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche   has proven spirited enough to produce such a range of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to,   and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand-   new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera, and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale,   then might it not also prove possible for the psyche by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress its thumbprint on some other system, a production   in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway, dragging your long chains behind you most morosely   if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak.       3   After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending   machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes.   Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky   wide open without any question, steam and dioxides of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake   again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use of imagination more productive or time less painful it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me   wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy. Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction   visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes   rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples, or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it.       4     (Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce. On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief   crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar, cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh. Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history   (Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom   tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary   (Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging   nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel. This passion for the material realm after death however refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy   (Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats.   That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern, yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless.     5   Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs,   snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . . There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say   this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which to see means having wanted already to forget, unless   stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp, the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning   you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought   canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why the constant hum around or inside me has to choose among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call   of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset   by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica? And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself?       6   Asked again what I miss the most about my former life, I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities,   I eliminate certain objects and events from the running right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been   light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes.   Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding   plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth, approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week.   Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose, emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production,   shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look directly into the camera, and even though it will make me   come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn.       7   After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense   that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it   or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography will come to show: field after field of untouched white.   After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare, too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale   turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens   and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather over time might deaden one all over again, unless being changed with death means not only changing past change   but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change. That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from   change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it. In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph.   The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little   time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods. When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay.   I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour, even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world.   8   The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek.   Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping. Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide,   and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda.   The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand. Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about. And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous:   broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw. His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt   of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts   the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit. Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having   your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.  —
I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet a little while among the throng of flowered dresses you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgivenessand even though you would still be alive a few more days I knew they were ready to let themselves be packed into liquor store boxes simply because you had asked that of them,and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army without having noticed me wrapping my arms around so many at once that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger as if to return the embrace.
1   What does not change / is the will to change   He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He remembered only one thing, the birds, how when he came in, he had gone around the rooms and got them back in their cage, the green one first, she with the bad leg, and then the blue, the one they had hoped was a male   Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat. He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat, I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter, he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now?”   His last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone, ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened, he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought “The pool the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth why did the export stop?”   It was then he left     2   I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere”  but the kingfisher de l’aurore”  but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous!  he got the color of his breast  from the heat of the setting sun!   The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous.   But not these things were the factors. Not the birds. The legends are legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting, still the waters, with the new year, for seven days. It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters. It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There, six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds.    On these rejectamenta (as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born. And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes  a dripping, fetid mass   Mao concluded:  nous devons  nous lever  et agir!     3   When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in  even the stones are split  they rive   Or, enter that other conqueror we more naturally recognize he so resembles ourselves   But the E cut so rudely on that oldest stone sounded otherwise, was differently heard   as, in another time, were treasures used:   (and, later, much later, a fine ear thought a scarlet coat)    “of green feathers feet, beaks and eyes  of gold    “animals likewise,  resembling snails    “a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots,  and worked with tufts of leaves, weight  3800 ounces    “last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills  gold, the feet  gold, the two birds perched on two reeds    gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds,  one yellow, the other  white.    “And from each reed hung  seven feathered tassels.   In this instance, the priests (in dark cotton robes, and dirty, their disheveled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly over their shoulders) rush in among the people, calling on them to protect their gods   And all now is war where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields.     4   Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law    Into the same river no man steps twice  When fire dies air dies  No one remains, nor is, one   Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up many. Else how is it, if we remain the same, we take pleasure now in what we did not take pleasure before? love contrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use other words, feel other passions, have nor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue the same?  To be in different states without a change  is not a possibility   We can be precise. The factors are in the animal and / or the machine the factors are communication and / or control, both involve the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time   is the birth of the air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest   is change, presents no more than itself   And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed, loses it   This very thing you are      II    They buried their dead in a sitting posture  serpent cane razor ray of the sun    And she sprinkled water on the head of my child, crying  “Cioa-coatl! Cioa-coatl!”  with her face to the west    Where the bones are found, in each personal heap  with what each enjoyed, there is always  the Mongolian louse   The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough    as long as it was necessary for him, my guide  to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose   so you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look   and, considering the dryness of the place  the long absence of an adequate race    (of the two who first came, each a conquistador, one healed, the other  tore the eastern idols down, toppled  the temple walls, which, says the excuser  were black from human gore)   hear hear, where the dry blood talks  where the old appetite walks    la piu saporita et migliore  che si possa truovar al mondo   where it hides, look in the eye how it runs in the flesh / chalk    but under these petals  in the emptiness  regard the light, contemplate  the flower   whence it arose    with what violence benevolence is bought  what cost in gesture justice brings  what wrongs domestic rights involve  what stalks  this silence    what pudor pejorocracy affronts  how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot  what breeds where dirtiness is law  what crawls  below      III    I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage.  And of course, no Roman:  he can take no risk that matters,  the risk of beauty least of all.    But I have my kin, if for no other reason than  (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and,  given my freedom, I’d be a cad  if I didn’t. Which is most true.    It works out this way, despite the disadvantage.  I offer, in explanation, a quote:  si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guères  que pour la terre et les pierres.    Despite the discrepancy (an ocean courage age)  this is also true: if I have any taste  it is only because I have interested myself  in what was slain in the sun    I pose you your question:    shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?    I hunt among stones
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!   I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together   as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered about my mother, some of them taking care to pass beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record playing on the victrola, and all of them desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell   I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it, there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard displays, the dead roaming from one to another as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed to mere equipments    my mother, as alive as ever she was, asleep when I entered the house as I often found her in a rocker under the lamp, and awaking, as I came up to her, as she ever had   I found out she returns to the house once a week, and with her the throng of the unknown young who center on her as much in death as other like suited and dressed people did in life   O the dead!    and the Indian woman and I  enabled the blue deer  to walk    and the blue deer talked,  in the next room,  a Negro talk    it was like walking a jackass,  and its talk  was the pressing gabber of gammers  of old women    and we helped walk it around the room  because it was seeking socks  or shoes for its hooves  now that it was acquiring    human possibilities   In the five hindrances men and angels stay caught in the net, in the immense nets which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels and the demons and men go up and down    Walk the jackass  Hear the victrola  Let the automobile  be tucked into a corner of the white fence  when it is a white chair. Purity   is only an instant of being, the trammels recur   In the five hindrances, perfection is hidden  I shall get  to the place  10 minutes late.    It will be 20 minutes  of 9. And I don’t know,    without the car,    how I shall get there   O peace, my mother, I do not know how differently I could have done what I did or did not do.  That you are back each week  that you fall asleep  with your face to the right    that you are present there  when I come in as you were  when you were alive    that you are as solid, and your flesh  is as I knew it, that you have the company  I am used to your having    but o, that you all find it  such a cheapness!   o peace, mother, for the mammothness of the comings and goings of the ladders of life   The nets we are entangled in. Awake, my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle of being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires be left upon the earth. Let even your mother go. Let there be only paradise   The desperateness is, that the instant which is also paradise (paradise is happiness) dissolves into the next instant, and power flows to meet the next occurrence    Is it any wonder  my mother comes back?  Do not that throng  rightly seek the room  where they might expect  happiness? They did not complain  of life, they obviously wanted  the movie, each other, merely to pass  among each other there,  where the real is, even to the display cards,  to be out of hell    The poverty  of hell O souls, in life and in death, make, even as you sleep, even in sleep know what wind even under the crankcase of the ugly automobile lifts it away, clears the sodden weights of goods, equipment, entertainment, the foods the Indian woman, the filthy blue deer, the 4 by 3 foot ‘Viewbook,’ the heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room lifts the sodden nets    and they disappear as ghosts do,  as spider webs, nothing  before the hand of man    The vent! You must have the vent,  or you shall die. Which means  never to die, the ghastliness    of going, and forever  coming back, returning  to the instants which were not lived    O mother, this I could not have done,  I could not have lived what you didn’t,  I am myself netted in my own being    I want to die. I want to make that instant, too,  perfect    O my soul, slip  the cog     II   The death in life (death itself) is endless, eternity is the false cause   The knot is other wise, each topological corner presents itself, and no sword cuts it, each knot is itself its fire   each knot of which the net is made is for the hands to untake the knot’s making. And touch alone can turn the knot into its own flame    (o mother, if you had once touched me    o mother, if I had once touched you)   The car did not burn. Its underside was not presented to me a grotesque corpse. The old man   merely removed it as I looked up at it, and put it in a corner of the picket fence like was it my mother’s white dog?   or a child’s chair    The woman,  playing on the grass,  with her son (the woman next door)    was angry with me whatever it was  slipped across the playpen or whatever  she had out there on the grass    And I was quite flip in reply  that anyone who used plastic  had to expect things to skid    and break, that I couldn’t worry  that her son might have been hurt  by whatever it was I sent skidding    down on them.    It was just then I went into my house  and to my utter astonishment  found my mother sitting there    as she always had sat, as must she always  forever sit there her head lolling  into sleep? Awake, awake my mother    what wind will lift you too  forever from the tawdriness,  make you rich as all those souls    crave crave crave    to be rich?   They are right. We must have what we want. We cannot afford not to. We have only one course:   the nets which entangle us are flames    O souls, burn  alive, burn now    that you may forever  have peace, have    what you crave    O souls,  go into everything,  let not one knot pass  through your fingers    let not any they tell you  you must sleep as the net  comes through your authentic hands    What passes  is what is, what shall be, what has  been, what hell and heaven is  is earth to be rent, to shoot you  through the screen of flame which each knot  hides as all knots are a wall ready  to be shot open by you    the nets of being  are only eternal if you sleep as your hands  ought to be busy. Method, method    I too call on you to come  to the aid of all men, to women most  who know most, to woman to tell  men to awake. Awake, men,  awake   I ask my mother to sleep. I ask her to stay in the chair. My chair is in the corner of the fence. She sits by the fireplace made of paving stones. The blue deer need not trouble either of us.   And if she sits in happiness the souls who trouble her and me will also rest. The automobile   has been hauled away.
I. Le Bonheur dogwood flakes what is green   the petals from the apple blow on the road   mourning doves mark the sway of the afternoon, bees dig the plum blossoms   the morning stands up straight, the night is blue from the full of the April moon   iris and lilac, birds birds, yellow flowers white flowers, the Diesel does not let up dragging the plow    as the whippoorwill, the night’s tractor, grinds his song      and no other birds but us are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux! Délires!    What soul is without fault?   Nobody studies happiness   Every time the cock crows I salute him   I have no longer any excuse for envy. My life   has been given its orders: the seasons seize   the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort. The hour of death   is the only trespass     II. The Charge   dogwood flakes the green   the petals from the apple-trees fall for the feet to walk on   the birds are so many they are loud, in the afternoon   they distract, as so many bees do suddenly all over the place   With spring one knows today to see that in the morning each thing   is separate but by noon they have melted into each other   and by night only crazy things like the full moon and the whippoorwill   and us, are busy. We are busy if we can get by that whiskered bird,   that nightjar, and get across, the moon is our conversation, she will say   what soul isn’t in default?   can you afford not to make the magical study   which happiness is? do you hear the cock when he crows? do you know the charge,   that you shall have no envy, that your life has its orders, that the seasons   seize you too, that no body and soul are one if they are not wrought   in this retort? that otherwise efforts are efforts? And that the hour of your flight   will be the hour of your death?     III. Spring   The dogwood lights up the day.   The April moon flakes the night.   Birds, suddenly, are a multitude   The flowers are ravined by bees, the fruit blossoms   are thrown to the ground, the wind the rain forces everything. Noise—   even the night is drummed by whippoorwills, and we get   as busy, we plow, we move, we break out, we love. The secret   which got lost neither hides nor reveals itself, it shows forth   tokens. And we rush to catch up. The body   whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir   In the roar of spring, transmutations. Envy   drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul —that they are not one—   the matutinal cock clangs and singleness: we salute you   season of no bungling
The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester, the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which (from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.   In this night I moved on the territory with combinations (new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader, my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts.   My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop, there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then, I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me)   before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf- house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son,   I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years. But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country.   His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I found him intimate with my former wife: this boy was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts!    Black space,  old fish-house.  Motions  of ghosts.  I,  dogging  his steps.  He  (not my father,  by name himself  with his face  twisted  at birth)  possessed of knowledge  pretentious  giving me  what in the instant  I knew better of.    But the somber  place, the flooring  crude like a wharf’s  and a barn’s  space     I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was   here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut! But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party   I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort. The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library   was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking   down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern    The places still  half-dark, mud,  coal dust.    There is no light  east  of the Bridge    Only on the headland  toward the harbor  from Cressy’s    have I seen it (once  when my daughter ran  out on a spit of sand    isn’t even there.) Where  is Bristow? when does I-A  get me home? I am caught    in Gloucester. (What’s buried  behind Lufkin’s  Diner? Who is    Frank Moore?
And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end. Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin; Poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour. Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads; As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods, A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep. Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides Of youths and of the old who had borne much; Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender, Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms, These many crowded about me; with shouting, Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts; Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze; Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine; Unsheathed the narrow sword, I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead, Till I should hear Tiresias. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth, Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other. Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech: “Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? “Cam’st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?”  And he in heavy speech: “Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe’s ingle. “Going down the long ladder unguarded, “I fell against the buttress, “Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus. “But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied, “Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:“A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.  “And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.”   And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: “A second time? why? man of ill star, “Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? “Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever “For soothsay.”  And I stepped back, And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus “Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, “Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came. Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe.  Venerandam, In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:
I sat on the Dogana’s steps For the gondolas cost too much, that year, And there were not “those girls”, there was one face, And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling, “Stretti”, And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini, And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been.  Gods float in the azure air, Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed. Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen. Panisks, and from the oak, dryas, And from the apple, mælid, Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices, A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake, And there are gods upon them, And in the water, the almond-white swimmers, The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,  As Poggio has remarked. Green veins in the turquoise, Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars.   My Cid rode up to Burgos, Up to the studded gate between two towers, Beat with his lance butt, and the child came out, Una niña de nueve años, To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers, Reading the writ, voce tinnula: That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz, On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike And both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered, “And here, Myo Cid, are the seals, The big seal and the writing.” And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid, With no hawks left there on their perches, And no clothes there in the presses, And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas, That big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers, To get pay for his menie; Breaking his way to Valencia. Ignez de Castro murdered, and a wall Here stripped, here made to stand. Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone, Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall. Silk tatters, “Nec Spe Nec Metu.”
Palace in smoky light, Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones, ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia! Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows! The silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare, Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light; Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving. Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf  under the apple trees, Choros nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale foot alternate; Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows, A black cock crows in the sea-foam;   And by the curved, carved foot of the couch,  claw-foot and lion head, an old man seated Speaking in the low drone…:  Ityn! Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn! And she went toward the window and cast her down,  “All the while, the while, swallows crying: Ityn!  “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.”  “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?”  “No other taste shall change this.” And she went toward the window,  the slim white stone bar Making a double arch; Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone; Swung for a moment,  and the wind out of Rhodez Caught in the full of her sleeve.  . . . the swallows crying: ‘Tis. ‘Tis. ‘Ytis!  Actæon…  and a valley, The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees, The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top, Like a fish-scale roof,  Like the church roof in Poictiers If it were gold.  Beneath it, beneath it Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disc of sunlight Flaking the black, soft water; Bathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana, Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air, Shaking, air alight with the goddess  fanning their hair in the dark, Lifting, lifting and waffing: Ivory dipping in silver,  Shadow’d, o’ershadow’d Ivory dipping in silver, Not a splotch, not a lost shatter of sunlight. Then Actæon: Vidal, Vidal. It is old Vidal speaking,  stumbling along in the wood, Not a patch, not a lost shimmer of sunlight,  the pale hair of the goddess.   The dogs leap on Actæon,  “Hither, hither, Actæon,” Spotted stag of the wood; Gold, gold, a sheaf of hair,  Thick like a wheat swath, Blaze, blaze in the sun,  The dogs leap on Actæon. Stumbling, stumbling along in the wood, Muttering, muttering Ovid:  “Pergusa… pool… pool… Gargaphia, “Pool… pool of Salmacis.”  The empty armour shakes as the cygnet moves.   Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil The liquid and rushing crystal  beneath the knees of the gods. Ply over ply, thin glitter of water; Brook film bearing white petals. The pine at Takasago  grows with the pine of Isé! The water whirls up the bright pale sand in the spring’s mouth “Behold the Tree of the Visages!” Forked branch-tips, flaming as if with lotus.  Ply over ply The shallow eddying fluid,  beneath the knees of the gods.   Torches melt in the glare  set flame of the corner cook-stall, Blue agate casing the sky (as at Gourdon that time)  the sputter of resin, Saffron sandal so petals the narrow foot: Hymenæus Io!  Hymen, Io Hymenæe! Aurunculeia! One scarlet flower is cast on the blanch-white stone.    And So-Gyoku, saying: “This wind, sire, is the king’s wind,  This wind is wind of the palace, Shaking imperial water-jets.”  And Hsiang, opening his collar: “This wind roars in the earth’s bag,  it lays the water with rushes.” No wind is the king’s wind.  Let every cow keep her calf. “This wind is held in gauze curtains…”  No wind is the king’s…   The camel drivers sit in the turn of the stairs,  Look down on Ecbatan of plotted streets, “Danaë! Danaë!  What wind is the king’s?” Smoke hangs on the stream, The peach-trees shed bright leaves in the water, Sound drifts in the evening haze,  The bark scrapes at the ford, Gilt rafters above black water,  Three steps in an open field, Gray stone-posts leading…   Père Henri Jacques would speak with the Sennin, on Rokku, Mount Rokku between the rock and the cedars, Polhonac, As Gyges on Thracian platter set the feast, Cabestan, Tereus,  It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish, Vidal, or Ecbatan, upon the gilded tower in Ecbatan Lay the god’s bride, lay ever, waiting the golden rain. By Garonne. “Saave!” The Garonne is thick like paint, Procession,—“Et sa’ave, sa’ave, sa’ave Regina!”— Moves like a worm, in the crowd. Adige, thin film of images, Across the Adige, by Stefano, Madonna in hortulo, As Cavalcanti had seen her.  The Centaur’s heel plants in the earth loam. And we sit here…  there in the arena…
And before hell mouth; dry plain  and two mountains; On the one mountain, a running form,  and another In the turn of the hill; in hard steel The road like a slow screw’s thread, The angle almost imperceptible,  so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise; And the running form, naked, Blake, Shouting, whirling his arms, the swift limbs, Howling against the evil,  his eyes rolling, Whirling like flaming cart-wheels,  and his head held backward to gaze on the evil As he ran from it,  to be hid by the steel mountain, And when he showed again from the north side;  his eyes blazing toward hell mouth, His neck forward,  and like him Peire Cardinal. And in the west mountain, Il Fiorentino, Seeing hell in his mirror,  and lo Sordels Looking on it in his shield; And Augustine, gazing toward the invisible.   And past them, the criminal  lying in the blue lakes of acid, The road between the two hills, upward  slowly, The flames patterned in lacquer, crimen est actio, The limbo of chopped ice and saw-dust, And I bathed myself with acid to free myself  of the hell ticks, Scales, fallen louse eggs.  Palux Laerna, the lake of bodies, aqua morta, of limbs fluid, and mingled, like fish heaped in a bin, and here an arm upward, clutching a fragment of marble, And the embryos, in flux,  new inflow, submerging, Here an arm upward, trout, submerged by the eels;  and from the bank, the stiff herbage the dry nobbled path, saw many known, and unknown, for an instant;  submerging, The face gone, generation.    Then light, air, under saplings, the blue banded lake under æther,  an oasis, the stones, the calm field, the grass quiet,  and passing the tree of the bough The grey stone posts,  and the stair of gray stone, the passage clean-squared in granite:  descending, and I through this, and into the earth,  patet terra, entered the quiet air  the new sky, the light as after a sun-set,  and by their fountains, the heroes, Sigismundo, and Malatesta Novello,  and founders, gazing at the mounts of their cities.   The plain, distance, and in fount-pools  the nymphs of that water rising, spreading their garlands,  weaving their water reeds with the boughs, In the quiet,  and now one man rose from his fountain and went off into the plain.   Prone in that grass, in sleep;  et j’entendis des voix:…  wall . . . Strasbourg Galliffet led that triple charge. . . Prussians and he said [Plarr’s narration]  it was for the honour of the army. And they called him a swashbuckler.  I didn’t know what it was But I thought: This is pretty bloody damn fine. And my old nurse, he was a man nurse, and He killed a Prussian and he lay in the street there in front of our house for three days And he stank. . . . . . .  Brother Percy, And our Brother Percy…  old Admiral He was a middy in those days, And they came into Ragusa . . . . . . place those men went for the Silk War. . . . . And they saw a procession coming down through A cut in the hills, carrying something The six chaps in front carrying a long thing  on their shoulders, And they thought it was a funeral,  but the thing was wrapped up in scarlet, And he put off in the cutter,  he was a middy in those days, To see what the natives were doing, And they got up to the six fellows in livery, And they looked at it, and I can still hear the old admiral, “Was it? it was  Lord Byron Dead drunk, with the face of an A y n. . . . . . . . He pulled it out long, like that:  the face of an a y n . . . . . . . . gel.”   And because that son of a bitch,  Franz Josef of Austria. . . . . . And because that son of a bitch Napoléon Barbiche… They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench  dug through corpses With a lot of kids of sixteen, Howling and crying for their mamas, And he sent a chit back to his major:  I can hold out for ten minutes With my sergeant and a machine-gun.  And they rebuked him for levity. And Henri Gaudier went to it,  and they killed him, And killed a good deal of sculpture, And ole T.E.H. he went to it, With a lot of books from the library, London Library, and a shell buried ‘em in a dug-out, And the Library expressed its annoyance.  And a bullet hit him on the elbow …gone through the fellow in front of him, And he read Kant in the Hospital, in Wimbledon, in the original, And the hospital staff didn’t like it.   And Wyndham Lewis went to it, With a heavy bit of artillery,  and the airmen came by with a mitrailleuse, And cleaned out most of his company,  and a shell lit on his tin hut, While he was out in the privy,  and he was all there was left of that outfit.   Windeler went to it,  and he was out in the Ægæan, And down in the hold of his ship  pumping gas into a sausage, And the boatswain looked over the rail,  down into amidships, and he said:  Gees! look a’ the Kept’n, The Kept’n’s a-gettin’ ‘er up.   And Ole Captain Baker went to it,  with his legs full of rheumatics, So much so he couldn’t run,  so he was six months in hospital, Observing the mentality of the patients.   And Fletcher was 19 when he went to it, And his major went mad in the control pit,  about midnight, and started throwing the ‘phone about And he had to keep him quiet  till abut six in the morning, And direct that bunch of artillery.   And Ernie Hemingway went to it,  too much in a hurry, And they buried him for four days.   Et ma foi, vous savez,  tous les nerveux. Non, Y a une limite; les bêtes, les bêtes ne sont Pas faites pour ça, c’est peu de chose un cheval. Les hommes de 34 ans à quatre pattes  qui criaient “maman.” Mais les costauds, La fin, là à Verdun, n’y avait que ces gros bonshommes  Et y voyaient extrêmement clair. Qu’est-ce que ça vaut, les généraux, le lieutenant, on les pèse à un centigramme,  n’y a rien que du bois, Notr’ capitaine, tout, tout ce qu’il y a de plus renfermé  de vieux polytechnicien, mais solide, La tête solide. Là, vous savez, Tout, tout fonctionne, et les voleurs, tous les vices, Mais les rapaces,  y avait trois dans notre compagnie, tous tués. Y sortaient fouiller un cadavre, pour rien,  y n’serainet sortis pour rien que ça. Et les boches, tout ce que vous voulez,  militarisme, et cætera, et cætera. Tout ça, mais, MAIS,  l’français, i s’bat quand y a mangé. Mais ces pauvres types A la fin y s’attaquaient pour manger,  Sans orders, les bêtes sauvages, on y fait Prisonniers; ceux qui parlaient français disaient:  “Poo quah? Ma foi on attaquait pour manger.”   C’est le corr-ggras, le corps gras,  leurs trains marchaient trois kilomètres à l’heure, Et ça criait, ça grincait, on l’entendait à cinq kilomètres. (Ça qui finit la guerre.)    Liste officielle des morts 5,000,000.   I vous dit, bè, voui, tout sentait le pétrole. Mais, Non! je l’ai engueulé. Je lui ai dit: T’es un con! T’a raté la guerre.   O voui! tous les homes de goût, y conviens, Tout ça en arrière.  Mais un mec comme toi! C’t homme, un type comme ça!  Ce qu’il aurait pu encaisser! Il était dans une fabrique. What, burying squad, terrassiers, avec leur tête  en arrière, qui regardaient comme ça, On risquait la vie pour un coup de pelle, Faut que ça soit bein carré, exact…   Dey vus a bolcheviki dere, und dey dease him: Looka vat youah Trotzsk is done, e iss  madeh deh zhamefull beace!! “He iss madeh de zhamefull beace, iss he?  “He is madeh de zhamevull beace? “A Brest-Litovsk, yess? Aint yuh herd?  “He vinneh de vore. “De droobs iss released vrom de eastern vront, yess? “Un venn dey getts to deh vestern vront, iss it  “How many getts dere? “And dose doat getts dere iss so full off revolutions “Venn deh vrench is come dhru, yess, “Dey say, “Vot?” Un de posch say:  “Aint yeh heard? Say, ve got a rheffolution.”   That’s the trick with a crowd,  Get ‘em into the street and get ‘em moving. And all the time, there were people going Down there, over the river.    There was a man there talking, To a thousand, just a short speech, and Then move ‘em on. And he said: Yes, these people, they are all right, they Can do everything, everything except act; And go an’ hear ‘em but when they are through Come to the bolsheviki…   And when it broke, there was the crowd there, And the cossacks, just as always before, But one thing, the cossacks said:  “Pojalouista.” And that got round in the crowd, And then a lieutenant of infantry Ordered ‘em to fire into the crowd,  in the square at the end of the Nevsky, In front of the Moscow station, And they wouldn’t, And he pulled his sword on a student for laughing, And killed him, And a cossack rode out of his squad On the other side of the square And cut down the lieutenant of infantry And there was the revolution…  as soon as they named it.   And you can’t make ‘em, Nobody knew it was coming. They were all ready, the old gang, Guns on the top of the post-office and the palace, But none of the leaders knew it was coming.   And there were some killed at the barracks, But that was between the troops.   So we used to hear it at the opera That they wouldn’t be under Haig;  and that the advance was beginning; That it was going to begin in a week.
A Lady asks me  I speak in season She seeks reason for an affect, wild often That is so proud he hath Love for a name Who denys it can hear the truth now Wherefore I speak to the present knowers Having no hope that low-hearted  Can bring sight to such reason Be there not natural demonstration  I have no will to try proof-bringing Or say where it hath birth What is its virtu and power Its being and every moving Or delight whereby ‘tis called “to love” Or if man can show it to sight.   Where memory liveth,  it takes its state Formed like a diafan from light on shade Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth Created, having a name sensate, Custom of the soul,  will from the heart; Cometh from a seen form which being understood Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible Wherein hath he neither weight nor still-standing, Descendeth not by quality but shineth out Himself his own effect unendingly Not in delight but in the being aware Nor can he leave his true likeness otherwhere.   He is not vertu but cometh of that perfection Which is so postulate not by the reason But ‘tis felt, I say. Beyond salvation, holdeth his judging force Deeming intention to be reason’s peer and mate, Poor in discernment, being thus weakness’ friend Often his power cometh on death in the end, Be it withstayed  and so swinging counterweight. Not that it were natural opposite, but only Wry’d a bit from the perfect, Let no man say love cometh from chance Or hath not established lordship Holding his power even though  Memory hath him no more.   Cometh he to be  when the will From overplus Twisteth out of natural measure, Never adorned with rest Moveth he changing colour Either to laugh or weep Contorting the face with fear  resteth but a little Yet shall ye see of him That he is most often With folk who deserve him And his strange quality sets sighs to move Willing man look into that forméd trace in his mind And with such uneasiness as rouseth the flame. Unskilled can not form his image, He himself moveth not, drawing all to his stillness, Neither turneth about to seek his delight Nor yet to see out proving Be it so great or so small.   He draweth likeness and hue from like nature So making pleasure more certain in seeming Nor can stand hid in such nearness, Beautys be darts tho’ not savage Skilled from such fear a man follows Deserving spirit, that pierceth. Nor is he known from his face But taken in the white light that is allness Toucheth his aim Who heareth, seeth not form But is led by its emanation Being divided, set out from colour, Disjunct in mid darkness Grazeth the light, one moving by other, Being divided, divided from all falsity Worthy of trust From him alone mercy proceedeth.   Go, song, surely thou mayest Whither it please thee For so art thou ornate that thy reasons Shall be praised from thy understanders, With others hast thou no will to make company.   “Called thrones, balascio or topaze” Eriugina was not understood in his time “which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him” And they went looking for Manicheans And found, so far as I can make out, no Manicheans So they dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugina “Authority comes from right reason,  never the other way on” Hence the delay in condemning him Aquinas head down in a vacuum,  Aristotle which way in a vacuum? Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu. Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana  of a castle named Goito. “Five castles! “Five castles!”  (king giv’ him five castles) “And what the hell do I know about dye-works?!” His Holiness has written a letter:  “CHARLES the Mangy of Anjou…. ..way you treat your men is a scandal….” Dilectis miles familiaris…castra Montis Odorisii Montis Sancti Silvestri pallete et pile… In partibus Thetis….vineland  land tilled  the land incult  pratis nemoribus pascuis  with legal jurisdiction his heirs of both sexes, …sold the damn lot six weeks later, Sordellus de Godio.  Quan ben m’albir e mon ric pensamen.
With Usura  With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face, with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wallharpes et luz or where virgin receiveth message and halo projects from incision, with usura seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper, with no mountain wheat, no strong flour with usura the line grows thick with usura is no clear demarcation and no man can find site for his dwelling. Stonecutter is kept from his tone weaver is kept from his loom WITH USURA wool comes not to market sheep bringeth no gain with usura Usura is a murrain, usura blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. Pietro Lombardo came not by usura Duccio came not by usura nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin’ not by usura nor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted. Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis, Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit. Not by usura St. Trophime Not by usura Saint Hilaire, Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman It gnaweth the thread in the loom None learneth to weave gold in her pattern; Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered Emerald findeth no Memling Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man’s courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom  CONTRA NATURAM They have brought whores for Eleusis Corpses are set to banquet at behest of usura.       N.B. Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici bank.)
Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom Taishan is attended of loves  under Cythera, before sunrise And he said: “Hay aquí mucho catolicismo—(sounded  catolithismo  y muy poco reliHion.” and he said: “Yo creo que los reyes desparecen” (Kings will, I think, disappear) This was Padre José Elizondo  in 1906 and in 1917 or about 1917  and Dolores said: “Come pan, niño,” eat bread, me lad Sargent had painted her  before he descended (i.e. if he descended  but in those days he did thumb sketches, impressions of the Velázquez in the Museo del Prado and books cost a peseta,  brass candlesticks in proportion, hot wind came from the marshes  and death-chill from the mountains. And later Bowers wrote: “but such hatred,  I have never conceived such” and the London reds wouldn’t show up his friends  (i.e. friends of Franco working in London) and in Alcázar forty years gone, they said: go back to the station to eat you can sleep here for a peseta”  goat bells tinkled all night  and the hostess grinned: Eso es luto, haw! mi marido es muerto  (it is mourning, my husband is dead) when she gave me a paper to write on with a black border half an inch or more deep,  say 5/8ths, of the locanda “We call all foreigners frenchies” and the egg broke in Cabranez’ pocket,  thus making history. Basil says they beat drums for three days till all the drumheads were busted  (simple village fiesta) and as for his life in the Canaries… Possum observed that the local portagoose folk dance was danced by the same dancers in divers localities  in political welcome… the technique of demonstration  Cole studied that (not G.D.H., Horace) “You will find” said old André Spire, that every man on that board (Crédit Agricole) has a brother-in-law  “You the one, I the few”  said John Adams speaking of fears in the abstract  to his volatile friend Mr Jefferson. (To break the pentameter, that was the first heave) or as Jo Bard says: they never speak to each other, if it is baker and concierge visibly  it is La Rouchefoucauld and de Maintenon audibly. “Te cavero le budella”  “La corata a te” In less than a geological epoch  said Henry Mencken “Some cook, some do not cook  some things cannot be altered”’Iugx. . . . . ’emòn potí dwma aòn andra What counts is the cultural level,  thank Benin for this table ex packing box  “doan yu tell no one I made it”  from a mask fine as any in Frankfurt “It’ll get you offn th’ groun”  Light as the branch of Kuanon And at first disappointed with shoddy the bare ram-shackle quais, but then saw the high buggy wheels  and was reconciled, George Santayana arriving in the port of Boston and kept to the end of his life that faint thethear of the Spaniard  as grace quasi imperceptible as did Muss the v for u of Romagna and said the grief was a full act  repeated for each new condoleress working up to a climax. and George Horace said he wd/ “get Beveridge” (Senator) Beveridge wouldn’t talk and he wouldn’t write for the papers but George got him by campin’ in his hotel and assailin’ him at lunch breakfast an’ dinner  three articles and my ole man went on hoein’ corn  while George was a-tellin’ him, come across a vacant lot  where you’d occasionally see a wild rabbit or mebbe only a loose one  AOI!  a leaf in the current  at my grates no Althea______libretto______  Yet Ere the season died a-cold Borne upon a zephyr’s shoulder I rose through the aureate sky  Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest Dolmetsch ever be thy guest, Has he tempered the viol’s wood To enforce both the grave and the acute? Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?  Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest Dolmetsch ever be thy guest Hast ’ou fashioned so airy a mood  To draw up leaf from the root? Hast ’ou found a cloud so light  As seemed neither mist nor shade?    Then resolve me, tell me aright  If Waller sang or Dowland played    Your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly  I may the beauté of hem nat susteyne   And for 180 years almost nothing.   Ed ascoltando al leggier mormorio  there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent, whether of the spirit or hypostasis,  but what the blindfold hides or at carneval  nor any pair showed anger  Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes, colour, diastasis,  careless or unaware it had not the  whole tent’s room nor was place for the full EidwV interpass, penetrate  casting but shade beyond the other lights  sky’s clear  night’s sea  green of the mountain pool  shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask’s space. What thou lovest well remains,  the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs  or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable  Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee   The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace,  Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity,  Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.   “Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”  Pull down thy vanity Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, A swollen magpie in a fitful sun, Half black half white Nor knowst’ou wing from tail Pull down thy vanity  How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity,  Pull down thy vanity, Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity, Pull down thy vanity,  I say pull down.   But to have done instead of not doing  this is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open  To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity.  Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
The scientists are in terror  and the European mind stops Wyndham Lewis chose blindness  rather than have his mind stop. Night under wind mid garofani,  the petals are almost still Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona, When one’s friends hate each other  how can there be peace in the world? Their asperities diverted me in my green time. A blown husk that is finished  but the light sings eternal a pale flare over marshes  where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change Time, space,  neither life nor death is the answer. And of man seeking good,  doing evil. In meiner Heimat  where the dead walked  and the living were made of cardboard.
On the volatile nights of a winter nature corroborates with magnanimity a Cuban is in training for amusement or amnesia, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he brings candy to God, he cultivates the vernacular, he fights off cirrhosis with fruit poached in syrup, he conducts business; thus research has shown that The Cuban is resourceful. In the weighty choreographies of a summer nature authorizes already with suspicion a Cuban meets the ocean with offerings and harpoons, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he finger-counts the casualties, he commits an infraction he slides his hands into his pockets, he avows and commits; thus analysis has shown that The Cuban is inspired. Let’s attend the improbable territory where with pasty mouths a Cuban and The Cuban engage in virile conversation we will learn there by what voyage, by what strange condition by what exchange we fall prey to so much ingenuity.
You, functional space variants in voltage, the only light Transitory effect of Love several different lights Sustain Sustain them you sustain them.
One fisherman alongside the other one seagull alongside the other seagulls over the fishermen.
When one isn’t enough, you need two when two aren’t enough, you need four with four the progression begins, moving toward a number that schoolteachers will call absurd. Question: How many men do you need to put up a house? Answer: You need absurd men when one isn’t enough and two can’t do the work of One. And how much money should we give these men to compensate them? You need absurd coins when one coin sliced in half and handed out isn’t enough. And how many words do you need to  transform them? Absurd and absurd and absurd words when silence isn’t enough. This is what they call progression: Absurd men aren’t enough for putting up the house, absurd coins don’t make them happy absurd words can’t dissuade them.
I lie here thinking of you:— the stain of love is upon the world! Yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, smears with saffron the horned branches that lean heavily against a smooth purple sky! There is no light only a honey-thick stain that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb spoiling the colors of the whole world— you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west!
With what stillness at last you appear in the valley your first sunlight reaching down to touch the tips of a few high leaves that do not stir as though they had not noticed and did not know you at all then the voice of a dove calls from far away in itself to the hush of the morning so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it this is where we have come with our age our knowledge such as it is and our hopes such as they are invisible before us untouched and still possible
How can we believe he did it— every day—for all those years?We remember how the musicians gathered for him—and the prostitutesarranged themselves the way he wanted— and even the helmeted monkeyswith their little toy car cerebella— posed—and the fish on the plate—remained after he ate the fish— Bones—What do we do with thislife?—except announce: Joy. Joy. Joy—from the lead—to the oil—to the stretch of bright canvas—stretched—to the end of it all.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006   8 a.m.  --Mom is wearing a Kailua Surfriders Staff teeshirt this morning. That must be Bryant’s old shirt. No, she insists, it’s an Iowa teeshirt. The young man down the street, the one she’s never met, gave her an Iowa teeshirt when he heard she’d gone to Iowa. It’s Iowa. --I didn’t know she was coming today. --She was sweet at 4 a.m., Bryant says. They had the first conversation about the shirt then. --Israel sends more ground troops into Lebanon. There’s an opportunity there, we read in the Washington Post. --I don’t like you. I don’t like them. I don’t like them either. And Susan? She laughs. --Compare and contrast the acquisition of a language to its loss. Avoid the trap of merely saying that the latter happens in reverse order of the former. You are likely to do better if you see them as similar processes, though one leads to gain, the other loss. Think chemistry. Think performance of a script. Think Harold and the Purple Crayon. Think Harold Pinter. --Think two old men fishing for a beautiful young woman in a lake. Think one of them might get “lucky.” --When are you leaving? Where are you going? Are you taking the kids? --Sangha and May hatch plots of their own. Go quiet when I arrive. In this life, you either make plots or have them hatched around you. Like eggs. Like poisoned ones. posted by Susan at 6:46 AM 0 comments
The butterfly was there before any human art was made. Before cathedrals rose in prayer, the butterfly was there. Before pyramids pierced the air or Great Wall stones were laid, the butterfly was there. Before any human, art was made.
It’s like I thought it would be. Absolute silence. Just me and my poem. But, as I stand onstage preparing to start, I realize the audience is quiet because they want to hear me. Silence isn’t scary. It’s like Mr. Carey said, silence is my chance. And so I speak, slowly and clearly, and I don’t see the faces in front of me. I see the images of my poem, and I think only of what I’m saying and how much it means to me. My voice grows stronger and I don’t have to struggle to remember the words.   I know them because I wrote them.
Night is deep in a dark box deep in a cushion of down nestled in tissue tied with ribbons Night is asleep in the dark   Night wakes with curious paws wakes in a furry fog wrestles the tissue nibbles the ribbons Night is awake in the dark   Night tumbles in velvet directions tumbles along to your bed sniffing your wishes wagging your worries Night is a friend in the dark
One container of spaghetti sauce Grandma made before she died. Two old pieces of wedding cake you couldn’t pay me to eat. Three snowballs from last winter slightly deformed, no longer fluffy. Four small flounder from the time Grandpa took me deep-sea fishing. Everything coated with a thick white layer of sadness.
Will my ears grow long as Grandpa's? What makes us look like kin? Tell me where'd I get long eyelashes and where'd I get my chin?   Where'd I get my ice cream sweet tooth and this nose that wiggles when I talk? Where's I get my dizzy daydreams and my foot-rolling, side-step walk? Did I inherit my sense of humor and these crooked, ugly toes? What if I balloon like Uncle Harry and have to shave my nose?   How long after I start growing until I start to shrink? Am I going to lose my teeth, some day? My hair? My mind?   Do you think I'll be tall or short or thin or bursting at the seams? Am I naturally this crazy? Is it something in my genes?   I'm more than who I am, I'm also who I'm from. It's a scary speculation--  Who will I become?
My foot’s asleep, my seat is sore. You said “another hour” before. You say “an hour” every time. Your hours are much longer than mine.
Oh, how the wind howls, howls the blossoms from the boughs;   Oh how the boughs bend, bend and willow to the ground;   Oh, how the ground wells, wells with blossoms blown to hills;   Oh, how the hills sound, sound a whisper pink and loud.
In their yellow-most goings, leaves of maple ride breezes to the ground. You can hear their sound each autumn afternoon as the crisp air cuts through the trees and hurries us along the golden sidewalks home.
It was a good idea, cutting awaythe vines and ivy, trimming back the chest-high thicket lazy years had let grow here. Though it wasn’t for lackof love for the trees, I’d like to point out. Years love trees in a way we can’t imagine. They just don’t use the fruit like us; they want instead the slantof sun through narrow branches, the buckshot of rain on these old cherries. And we, now that I think on it, want those things too, we just always and desperatelywant the sugar of the fruit, the best we’ll get from this irascible land: sweetness we can gather for years, new stains staining the stains on our hands.
For part of one strange year we lived in a small house at the edge of a wood. No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody to ask questions. Except for the one big question we went on asking ourselves. That spring myriads of birds stopped overbriefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn to our leafy quiet and our brook and because, as we later learned, the place lay beneath a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds brilliant or dull, with sharp beaksor crossed bills, birds small and enormous, all of them pausing to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings, and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we of a destination. By the time we’d watched them wing north in spring, then make an anxious autumn return, we too had pulled it together and we too moved into what seemed to be our lives.
I Said the Duck to the Kangaroo, ‘Good gracious! how you hop! Over the fields and the water too, As if you never would stop! My life is a bore in this nasty pond, And I long to go out in the world beyond! I wish I could hop like you!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo. II ‘Please give me a ride on your back!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo. ‘I would sit quite still, and say nothing but “Quack,” The whole of the long day through! And we’d go to the Dee, and the Jelly Bo Lee, Over the land, and over the sea;— Please take me a ride! O do!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo. III Said the Kangaroo to the Duck, ‘This requires some little reflection; Perhaps on the whole it might bring me luck, And there seems but one objection, Which is, if you’ll let me speak so bold, Your feet are unpleasantly wet and cold, And would probably give me the roo- Matiz!’ said the Kangaroo. IV Said the Duck, ‘As I sate on the rocks, I have thought over that completely, And I bought four pairs of worsted socks Which fit my web-feet neatly. And to keep out the cold I’ve bought a cloak, And every day a cigar I’ll smoke, All to follow my own dear true Love of a Kangaroo!’ V Said the Kangaroo, ‘I’m ready! All in the moonlight pale; But to balance me well, dear Duck, sit steady! And quite at the end of my tail!’ So away they went with a hop and a bound, And they hopped the whole world three times round; And who so happy,—O who, As the Duck and the Kangaroo?.
I They went to sea in a Sieve, they did, In a Sieve they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day, In a Sieve they went to sea! And when the Sieve turned round and round, And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’ They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big, But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig! In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. II They sailed away in a Sieve, they did, In a Sieve they sailed so fast, With only a beautiful pea-green veil Tied with a riband by way of a sail, To a small tobacco-pipe mast; And every one said, who saw them go, ‘O won’t they be soon upset, you know! For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long, And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong In a Sieve to sail so fast!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. III The water it soon came in, it did, The water it soon came in; So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet In a pinky paper all folded neat, And they fastened it down with a pin. And they passed the night in a crockery-jar, And each of them said, ‘How wise we are! Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long, Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong, While round in our Sieve we spin!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. IV And all night long they sailed away; And when the sun went down, They whistled and warbled a moony song To the echoing sound of a coppery gong, In the shade of the mountains brown. ‘O Timballo! How happy we are, When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar, And all night long in the moonlight pale, We sail away with a pea-green sail, In the shade of the mountains brown!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. V They sailed to the Western Sea, they did, To a land all covered with trees, And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart, And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart, And a hive of silvery Bees. And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws, And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws, And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree, And no end of Stilton Cheese. Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. VI And in twenty years they all came back, In twenty years or more, And every one said, ‘How tall they’ve grown!’ For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone, And the hills of the Chankly Bore; And they drank their health, and gave them a feast Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast; And everyone said, ‘If we only live, We too will go to sea in a Sieve,— To the hills of the Chankly Bore!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve.
Mudman in earth cafeteria, I eat aardwolf. I eat ant bear. I eat mimosa, platypus, ermine.   “White meat is tasteless, dark meat stinks.” (The other white meat is pork, triple X.)   Rice people vs. bread people. White bread vs. wheat bread. White rice vs. brown rice. Manhattan vs. New England. Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob.   “What is patriotism but love of the foods one had as a child?”*   To eat stinky food is a sign of savagery, humility, identification with the earth.   “It was believed that after cleaning, tripe still contained ten percent excrement which was therefore eaten with the rest of the meal.”**   Today I’ll eat Colby cheese. Tomorrow I’ll eat sparrows. Chew bones, suck fat, bite heads off, gnaw on a broken wing.   Anise-flavored beef soup smells like sweat. A large sweaty head bent over a large bowl of sweat soup.   A Pekinese is ideal, will feed six, but an unscrupulous butcher will fudge a German sheperd, chopping it up to look like a Pekinese.   Toothless man sucking a pureed porterhouse steak with a straw.   Parboiled placenta.   To skewer and burn meat is barbaric. To boil, requiring a vessel, is a step up. To microwave.   People who eat phalli, hot dogs, kielbasas vs. people who eat balls.   To eat with a three-pronged spear and a knife. To eat with two wooden sticks. To eat with the hands.   Boiling vs. broiling.   To snack on a tub of roasted grasshoppers at the movies.       *Lin Yutang **Mikhail Bakhtin
A stick of carrot is equal to a gillyflower. A gillyflower is equal to a drum of gasoline. A drum of gasoline is equal to a stick of carrot. “For the sake of my offspring, I think I’ll marry an outsider.”   Tamerlane has been sighted in Northern Italy. Jesus has broken out in Inner Mongolia. They like to kiss outside and piss inside. We like to kiss inside and piss outside.   A mosquito has a mouth but no asshole. After three drops of blood, he falls asleep. He only gets up to bite another mosquito. He sucks and he sucks. Inside this balloon are ten thousand mosquitoes.   In my left fist is a fossil of the first butterfly. In my right fist is a theory of why blood trickles down men’s legs.    A man gains a drop of blood per day from eating. Each night, he gets up to slash himself Across the face and wrist. He must be bitten by ten thousand mosquitoes. He sucks and he sucks. Where would all that blood go otherwise?   Once a month, a woman drops a teacup on the floor, A fine teacup with bones inside it.   Vietnamese and Germans now speak the same language. Prussians and Bavarians cannot understand each other.
The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.
there is ghazal swimming inside of her, wanting to be born. on the matter of foretelling, of small miracles, cactus flowers in bloom on this city fire escape, where inside your tongue touches every inch of her skin, where you lay your hand on her belly and sleep. here, she fingers the ornate remains of ancient mosques. here, some mythic angel will rise from the dust of ancestors’ bones. this is where you shall worship, at the intersections of distilled deities and memory’s sharp edges. the country is quite a poetic place; water and rock contain verse and metaphor, even wild grasses reply in rhyme. you are not broken. she knows this having captured a moment of lucidity; summer lightning bugs, sun’s rays in a jelly jar.   this is not a love poem, but a cove to escape the flux, however momentary. she is still a child, confabulating the fantastic; please do not erode her wonder for the liquid that is your language. there is thunderstorm in her chest, wanting to burst through her skin. this is neither love poem nor plea. this is not river, nor stone.
pilipinas to petatlán she whispers desert trees, thorn-ridged, trickling yellow candles; roots spilling snakes’ blood virgin of ribboned silk; virgin of gold filigree one day’s walk westward, a crucifix of fisherman’s dinghy dimensions washes ashore virgin adorned in robe of shark embryo and coconut husk she fingers mollusks, wraps herself in sea vines virgin of ocean voyage peril she will herself born virgin of mud brick ruins; virgin of sandstorm echoes she is saint of commonplaces; saint of badlands virgin of jade, camphor, porcelain; virgin of barter for ghosts penitents, earthdivers of forgotten names praying skyward virgin of scars blossomed from open veins of fire she slips across the pacific’s rivers of pearldiving children virgin of copper coins she is bloodletting words, painting unlikeness virgin of anachronism children stained with berries and rust, their skeletons bend, arrow-tipped; smoke blurs eyes’ edges virgin of mineral depletion; virgin of mercury at other altitudes she remembers to breathe; a monument scraping cloud virgin of tin deposits extracted from mountains these are not divinations; there is goldleaf about her skin virgin of naming and renaming places in between
she wasn’t born in this city. she found its basalt greenstone chunks, seafloor forced skyward. it found her hands through mist and odors whirring pigeons’ clubfeet fluttering, toothless men’s paper sacks spilling elixirs, roots, shark fin tonics. heat swelling sewer steam rising, side street chess match maneuvers mystifying. it sought her whirlwind hair, grown seavine thick. songbird, adrift, nestling neon, she crafted snares for moths, butterflies, treasure hunting children tracing ideographs: sky, sun. patina spires, smirking dragon boys humming silk lanterns, flight of phoenixes through fish vendors’ stalls, corrugated plastic blackbird perches, jade-ringed gardens, needle-tipped shanties. it bulleted trees, lighting hash pipes; herbalists’ storefront canopies concealing leathered men, versed in languages of whiskered ghosts. it invented her dialect carving tongue: salt fables, yellow caution tape palaces. she lost herself in this city. it lured her, drank her air; honey voice’s precision, hybrid beyond memory. songbird, adrift, this city’s misplaced siren. migration patterns subterranean streams swallowed whole.
you dream in the language of dodging bullets and artillery fire. new, sexy diagnoses have been added to the lexicon on your behalf (“charlie don’t surf,” has also been added to the lexicon on your behalf). in this home that is not our home, we have mutually exiled each other. i walk down your street in the rain, and i do not call you. i walk in the opposite direction of where i know to find you. that we do not speak is louder than bombs.   there are times that missing you is a matter of procedure. now is not one of those times. there are times when missing you hurts. so it comes to this, vying for geography. there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match. let’s see this prayer ignite to high heaven.
From golden showers of the ancient skies, On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars, You once unfastened giant calyxes For the young earth still innocent of scars:   Young gladioli with the necks of swans, Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream, Vermilion as the modesty of dawns Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;   The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright, And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose, Hérodiade blooming in the garden light, She that from wild and radiant blood arose!   And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends Through the blue incense of horizons, palely Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!   Hosanna on the lute and in the censers, Lady, and of our purgatorial groves! Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer, Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!   Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom, Formed calyxes balancing the future flask, Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam For the weary poet withering on the husk.
I. ANCIENT OVERTURE OF HÉRODIADE   The Nurse  (Incantation)   Abolished, and her frightful wing in the tears Of the basin, abolished, that mirrors forth our fears, The naked golds lashing the crimson space, An Aurora—heraldic plumage—has chosen to embrace Our cinerary tower of sacrifice, Heavy tomb that a songbird has fled, lone caprice Of a dawn vainly decked out in ebony plumes… Ah, mansion this sad, fallen country assumes! No splashing! the gloomy water, standing still, No longer visited by snowy quill Or fabled swan, reflects the bereaving Of autumn extinguished by its own unleaving, Of the swan when amidst the cold white tomb Of its feathers, it buried its head, undone By the pure diamond of a star, but one Of long ago, which never even shone.   Crime! torture! ancient dawn! bright pyre! Empurpled sky, complicit in the mire, And stained-glass windows opening red on carnage.   The strange chamber, framed in all the baggage Of a warlike age, its goldwork dull and faint, Has yesteryear’s snows instead of its ancient tint; And its pearl-gray tapestry, useless creases With the buried eyes of prophetesses Offering Magi withered fingers. One, With floral past enwoven on my gown Bleached in an ivory chest and with a sky Bestrewn with birds amidst the embroidery Of tarnished silver, seems a phantom risen, An aroma, roses, rising from the hidden Couch, now void, the snuffed-out candle shrouds, An aroma, over the sachet, of frozen golds, A drift of flowers unfaithful to the moon (Though the taper’s quenched, petals still fall from one), Flowers whose long regrets and stems appear Drenched in a lonely vase to languish there… An Aurora dragged her wings in the basin’s tears!   Magical shadow with symbolic powers! A voice from the distant past, an evocation, Is it not mine prepared for incantation? In the yellow folds of thought, still unexhumed, Lingering, and like an antique cloth perfumed, Spread on a pile of monstrances grown cold, Through ancient hollows and through stiffened folds Pierced in the rhythm of the pure lace shroud Through which the old veiled brightness is allowed To mount, in desperation, shall arise (But oh, the distance hidden in those cries!) The old veiled brightness of a strange gilt-silver, Of the languishing voice, estranged and unfamiliar: Will it scatter its gold in an ultimate splendor, And, in the hour of its agony, render Itself as the anthem for psalms of petition? For all are alike in being brought to perdition By the power of old silence and deepening gloom, Fated, monotonous, vanquished, undone, Like the sluggish waters of an ancient pond.   Sometimes she sang an incoherent song. Lamentable sign!  the bed of vellum sheets, Useless and closed–not linen!—vainly waits, Bereft now of the cherished grammary That spelled the figured folds of reverie, The silken tent that harbored memory, The fragrance of sleeping hair. Were these its treasure? Cold child, she held within her subtle pleasure, Shivering with flowers in her walks at dawn, Or when the pomegranate’s flesh is torn By wicked night! Alone, the crescent moon On the iron clockface is a pendulum Suspending Lucifer: the clepsydra pours Dark drops in grief upon the stricken hours As, wounded, each one wanders a dim shade On undeciphered paths without a guide! All this the king knows not, whose salary Has fed so long this agèd breast now dry. Her father knows it no more than the cruel Glacier mirroring his arms of steel, When sprawled on a pile of corpses without coffins Smelling obscurely of resin, he deafens With dark silver trumpets the ancient pines! Will he ever come back from the Cisalpines? Soon enough! for all is bad dream and foreboding! On the fingernail raised in the stained glass, according To the memory of the trumpets, the old sky burns, And to an envious candle it turns A finger. And soon, when the sad sun sinks, It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks! No sunset, but the red awakening Of the last day concluding everything Struggles so sadly that time disappears, The redness of apocalypse, whose tears Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!
The buried temple empties through its bowels, Sepulchral sewer spewing mud and rubies, Abominably some idol of Anubis, Its muzzle all aflame with savage howls. Or if the recent gas the wick befouls That bears so many insults, it illumines In haggard outline an immortal pubis Flying along the streetlights on its prowls. What wreaths dried out in cities without prayer Of night could bless like that which settles down Vainly against the marble of Baudelaire In the fluttering veil that girds her absence round, A tutelary poison, his own Wraith, We breathe in always though it bring us death.
Yesterday I found my pipe while pondering a long evening of work, of fine winter work. Thrown aside were my cigarettes, with all the childish joys of summer, into the past which the leaves shining blue in the sun, the muslins, illuminate, and taken up once again was the grave pipe of a serious man who wants to smoke for a long while without being disturbed, so as better to work: but I was not prepared for the surprise that this abandoned object had in store for me; for hardly had I drawn the first puff when I forgot the grand books I was planning to write, and, amazed, moved to a feeling of tenderness, I breathed in the air of the previous winter which was now coming back to me. I had not been in contact with my faithful sweetheart since returning to France, and now all of London, London as I had lived it a year ago entirely alone, appeared before my eyes: first the dear fogs that muffle one’s brains and have an odor of their own there when they penetrate beneath the casements. My tobacco had the scent of a somber room with leather furniture sprinkled by coal dust, on which the thin black cat would curl and stretch; the big fires! and the maid with red arms pouring coals, and the noise of those coals falling from the sheet-iron bucket into the iron scuttle in the morning—when the postman gave the solemn double knock that kept me alive! Once again I saw through the windows those sickly trees of the deserted square—I saw the open sea, crossed so often that winter, shivering on the deck of the steamer wet with drizzle and blackened from the fumes—with my poor wandering beloved, decked out in traveller’s clothes, a long dress, dull as the dust of the roads, a coat clinging damply to her cold shoulders, one of those straw hats with no feather and hardly any ribbons that wealthy ladies throw away upon arrival, mangled as they are by the sea, and that poor loved ones refurbish for many another season. Around her neck was wound the terrible handkerchief that one waves when saying goodbye forever.
In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood,Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood,As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass,Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass,One sees a ragpicker knocking against the walls,Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls,But stumbling like a poet lost in dreams;He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes.He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws,Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause;Beneath the sky, like a vast canopy,He is drunken of his splendid qualities.Yes, these people, plagued by household cares,Bruised by hard work, tormented by their years,Each bent double by the junk he carries,The jumbled vomit of enormous Paris,—They come back, perfumed with the smell of staleWine-barrels, followed by old comrades, paleFrom war, mustaches like limp flags, to marchWith banners, flowers, through the triumphal archErected for them, by some magic touch!And in the dazzling, deafening debauchOf bugles, sunlight, of huzzas and drum,Bring glory to the love-drunk folks at home!Even so, wine pours its gold to frivolousHumanity, a shining Pactolus;Then through man's throat of high exploits it singsAnd by its gifts reigns like authentic kings.To lull these wretches' sloth and drown the hateOf all who mutely die, compassionate,God has created sleep's oblivion;Man added Wine, divine child of the Sun.
At my side the Demon writhes forever,Swimming around me like impalpable air;As I breathe, he burns my lungs like feverAnd fills me with an eternal guilty desire.Knowing my love of Art, he snares my senses,Apearing in woman's most seductive forms,And, under the sneak's plausible pretenses,Lips grow accustomed to his lewd love-charms.He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,Panting and broken with fatigue intoThe wilderness of Ennui, deserted and broad,And into my bewildered eyes he throwsVisions of festering wounds and filthy clothes,And all Destruction's bloody retinue.
ISaid the Table to the Chair,'You can hardly be aware,'How I suffer from the heat,'And from chilblains on my feet!'If we took a little walk,'We might have a little talk!'Pray let us take the air!'Said the Table to the Chair.IISaid the Chair unto the Table,'Now you know we are not able!'How foolishly you talk,'When you know we cannot walk!'Said the Table, with a sigh,'It can do no harm to try,'I've as many legs as you,'Why can't we walk on two?'IIISo they both went slowly down,And walked about the townWith a cheerful bumpy sound,As they toddled round and round.And everybody cried,As they hastened to their side,'See! the Table and the Chair'Have come out to take the air!'IVBut in going down an alley,To a castle in a valley,They completely lost their way,And wandered all the day,Till, to see them safely back,They paid a Ducky-quack,And a Beetle, and a Mouse,Who took them to their house.VThen they whispered to each other,'O delightful little brother!'What a lovely walk we've taken!'Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!'So the Ducky, and the leetleBrowny-Mousy and the BeetleDined, and danced upon their headsTill they toddled to their beds.
Tune yr sandwich to the key of C Make biscuits in kitchen B   Miss Scarlet with her lead pipe Waits behind the cupboard door   Clubs one from the other limp Only to begin again innocent   & nothing to do but gather into Legion gather into constellation   Coming along then a spider its web Holds the walls together holds the floor   Up gathers toward a central point Mean & distribution derivation   To insert a thumb & see what sticks Past the earth’s crust cirrus   And acidic enough to spoon fork but Chew & eat & swallow digesting the fact   That nine wonders hope the clouds have Answers hope the clouds have
A chicken soup for the rainbow lover’s soul. A chicken soup for the lover of chicken soup. A carnage of birds, a devastation. Chicken soup for the dried-up garden— It’s been a lousy summer sucking us dry. Chicken soup for the grocery list. Chicken soup for unwanted potatoes. Chicken soup for extinct animals.   In the west, the sun sets upon chicken soup. With or without noodles or rice or barley, Or vegetables—canned or otherwise— Carrots and celery or egg drop chicken soup— Chicken eggs, of course—or the alphabet Or chili sauce. Chicken soup for chili lovers, For the spicy soul. Chicken butchered & boiled specifically for your cold. A chicken soup for the cold soul, A chicken soup for the sole of your shoe.   A chicken soup for decision making: Does she love me? Or love me not? Knots tied with chicken soup. Chicken soup tied and sold in knots. 38 ways to tie your soup, to be tied. Chicken soup for the protection of others.   A prayer to chicken soup, may it bring me A winning lottery ticket. Chicken soup For recovering alcoholics who still Need hydration. A hydrangea’s Chicken soup—to be loved like no other.   A chicken soup for Barry Bonds— May he break Hank Aaron’s record. Stick a pin in the chicken soup & bet On its opponent. 30-Love. Match point. A chicken soup for winners. A chicken soup for losers. Chicken soup for those who tie or draw. The 60-plus occupations of soup. Chicken for Sue, born in the year Of the snake. The snake that ate An alligator and died. They both died.   A chicken soup for the one who is eaten. A chicken soup for the one who eats Things other than chicken soup. Transcending the bowl. A meta-bowl Chicken soup for the transcended bowl. Chicken soup for the transcending soup. Chicken soup for the Marxist, steering Away from values associated with heirarchies. Chicken soup for the mud wrestler, The roller derby queen. Chicken soup For dairy queen, for the queen of hearts,   For Lady Di and the paparazzi, For clean and dirty kings and queens. For kiwis with wings, for the royal Food pyramid. Chicken soup in January, it’s so nice To slip upon the sliding ice.
1. Mary-Frances applied continual pressure on me to start  the job and helped in recording and editing. 2. Thanks to Sandra for her heroic typing, although this  need not be taken to indicate her agreement with  various points. 3. Peter provided information about the notorious  perpetual pills. 4. As someone who gloried in seeing dogma overturned,  he would have delighted in the irony of seeing  arguments for the reverse. 5. And without their willingness to take on the chore of  responding to our whims and fancies over a 3-year  period, this book would have fallen short of its goals. 6. The production of this tome would have been  unthinkable without the marvelous electronic tools that  are now widely available. 7. However, Chapter 7 was written in a relatively self-  contained fashion, so the serious student may skip  Chapter 6 and delve directly into the theory. 8. The late abbess of Shasta Abbey proved that looking  through different windows into the same room is not a  metaphor. 9. Nick, who is writing a book on oxygen, gave much   appreciated data concerning that element. 10. The filmstrip format employed in Chapter 10 originated  with Elizabeth. 11. I have been very fortunate in being able to use such  penetrating minds. 12. In recent months, I have often felt like a small child in a  sweet shop as astronomers all round the world have sent  me the most mouthwatering new data. 13. Suffice it at this point to observe that I am not just talking   about wallpaper patterns on shirts and dresses, although  many of these patterns do turn out to have interesting   properties. 14. I do not expect that many readers will want to be   masochistic enough to want to read the book in order   from cover to cover.
I have a hard time making my mind take place. Every input adjusts the chemistry—water, peppermint stick, analogue. Kisses are circles. With eyes closed, every taste buds almond orange.   Ceiling defines the segment; door, the vector. Exits & entrances. My location’s ribcage is beneath the changing spectrum’s breast. Heft of a wet peony, white & pink, drips its honey south.   Conducted back, your body accelerates—biology of a taxi ride. Kept kempt, migraines at bay, tidy nails, & sneezes away. Sex through collisions—bridges jumped & limbs tangled.   Or the chromatic staff arranging the spheres’ accidental spills. Frets & intonations strung across a tempered series of knots, Strung through the loops of our virtual displacement.   But it isn’t wings or hooks or hooves or horns or see-through or white. Whether afloat in a boat or aloft in a plane. The way maps affect time. For a second I think I feel the fleeting texture of your skin.   Lumbar & sacral nerves descend to exits beyond the end of the cord. Keep the blood in at all costs, even when the wind crackles its cells. The coming of electricity, half next time & half this: My five. My unending ache at the absence of you.
She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove, three cords of ash, an axe; I want a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars: oats, coriander, thick green oil; I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders, linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt; she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl, steam rising from rice. She wants goats, chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want wind from the river freshening cleared rooms. She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies. I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s tenderness. Touch ancient as the river. I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox. She’s in her city, meeting her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together. We’ve kissed all weekend; we want to drive the hundred miles and try it again.
O Venlo, Venlo, stedje van pleseer. This time her body made him think of countryside, some figure from his childhood, sun on scythe, wind blowing shadows across the shining barley,   the milk-pail dented from use, the smell of leaf-mulch and leather in the tack room. Soon she’d take bus and ferry from London to Belfast, but first the fire in her bed-sit. Her fingers traveled too,   down the raised purple scars along his vertebrae, the flannel sheets between her thighs, his hair trailing along her abdomen, the quill of a feather poking through seams of the comforter,   the comforter itself. Those scars—he’d lied to her, his time in Nicaragua, thugs cut him coming from the fields. The bloodier fight was with his brother, slicing tines of a pitchfork   plucked up along the flooded Maas. Everything reduced to trinket and anecdote, the beer and facepaint of carnival, street-dance and tuba, beyond the muddy English roundabouts, the brown   and white waves, yellow lamps along Dutch highways, his work at the union office pinned beneath a glass globe paperweight—shaken it showered silver snow over the wide   straw hat, red and green plow, the slouching body, a campesino from days before Somoza fell. He wondered if she were any better, smuggling French social theory into Ulster, encounter   groups in the rec-centers of tower-block basements. She’d just gotten the news: her last lover died in a fire along the side of the highway, body broken in seven places, silver chrome,   pearl and gold gas tank scorched, his bike crumpled beneath the husk of an overturned van. There wasn’t much to talk about. Afterwards she lay with her back to him and he sang her carnival songs   in a language she didn’t speak, O Venlo, stedje vanpleseer. He thought of himself as the sun, kissing her neck at the hairline, turning grey cobblestones of the town-square silver, marshaling parades.
Forget contingencies from weather and wind, my Helen’s head was shaved, the shortest bit of stubble growing in. With darkened arching black eye-brows, Betty-Blue mouth penciled red,   jet patent-leather trench and high-heeled boots, she seemed more mannequin for Fashion Ave.’s penitent spread than enemy to brass at Camp LeJeune. Simply and grudgingly put,   her talk was action. Invincible in Bell- Atlantic block and tack, she converted non-coms and saved CO’s, harped flint and skinned the chair of military courts through well-pitched cheek,   prompt dispatch from the War Resister’s League. She looked good even on a bicycle, hemming left through traffic on Fourteenth Street, locking up on Lafayette or Grand. She doused for me   to celebrate—marched right through human waste and Bowery puddles, stretched her legs over the last old-fashioned hobos up to East Second Street. Those ancient days, our vestibule was manned   by crack-dealing Stan, a concierge of wit and improv, half his face scored by orange scars from hydrofluoric burns. He kept the place safe. But I had gone, cleared out behind a gang   of kids from Bronxville high on catnip wins, shell-game victims. Left Stan my toaster, shelves, a wire bird-cage, and, for once, nothing to say. Except to ask if he could touch her skull. Even now it makes no sense. Her precedents I knew lurched out of focus: photos from France after the Vichy fell, Jeannes and Sylvianes who’d made Nazi moll; those Belfast girls   last-ditched by soldier boys or peelers; two- toned Bergen-Belsen, bald sister to Fort Santiago. Then Squeaky Fromm, the other Manson moms, at Charlie’s trial. Extremes of Joan of Arc,   or even Buddhist nuns. Hated, chastened— or chaste, at least. Not what you’d run (I ran) your fingers satisfied across, the stubble surprising, soft as mink or fox, and arch   your back, as I did once she found me uptown, say yes I give again when she went down— and faster now, quick as the television dropped after dishes to the curb—or slipped   gradually up, the seconds separating as slowly as but more exquisitely than ticks off expensive fifty-minute hours— and some community service—all gone, and just   as easily forgotten the raft of former friends I’d cursed and floated off the island. Shaved head, her slender neck, dark shoulders—that was half— or less—her most convincing argument.
Country people rise early as their distant lights testify. They don’t hold water in common. Each house has a personal source, like a bank account, a stone vault. Some share eggs, some share expertise, and some won’t even wave. A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate. Last November I saw a woman down the road walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange cap to boot, a cautious soul. Bullets can’t read her No Trespassing sign. Strange to think they’re in the air like lead bees with a fatal sting. Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen with his rifle handy and the window open. You never know when. Once he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill. He’s in his seventies, born here, joined the Navy, came back. Hard work never hurt a man until suddenly he was another broken tool. His silhouette against the dawn droops as though drought-stricken, each step deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox, prying it open. Checking a trap.
Some are born to sweet delight.   Some are born to endless night.  —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” We spend our lives trying to grasp the premise. William Blake is not, for instance, William Blake, but rather a 19th century accountant from Cleveland on the lam for murder & the theft of a horse. In the closing scene,   he is going to die, & so is Nobody, his half-Blackfoot, half-Blood guide. Sure, this is a Western, a morality tale  about a destiny made manifest through the voice of a gun & a hero whose mythic flight from innocence   destroys him. But we all come to the end of the line soon enough. The obvious just seems wiser  when Nobody says it. Time, it turns out, is the most common noun in the English language, as if by constant invocation,   we could keep it at bay.  Yesterday, I sat in another state on a large rubber ball in my brother’s basement bouncing my newborn nephew in my arms. His mother, on the phone with a friend, asks what we should fear more,   the hobo spider or the poison that kills it. I want to whisper into his ear something that feels like knowledge: Once upon a time, there was nothing& one day, there will be nothing again. This is the faraway place   to which his tiny weight calls me. If he could understand the words. I think, he would know what I mean, having only just sprung himself  from that fine sea. Sometimes we coo to soothe him: Don’t cry, Little Bird. I know, I know.   But only the roar of the vacuum finally calms him,  for nothing sounds as much like the lost world of the womb as the motors of our machines. The root of travel means torture, having passed from Medieval Latin   into Old French. As the action opens, Johnny Depp, shot in black & white, is already rocking into night on a train. And soon, he will begin his dying. This is not to say that the inky band fanning across the morning blue   of a kestrel’s tail feathers  has no meaning, or the first fingers of rust coming into bloom on the green enameled chassis of a Corona typewriter left in the rain.  Direct observation, the naturalist Niko Tinbergen assures us,  is the only real thing. Perhaps this is what I should tell him.  Or that this moment, too, is a part of some migration. Every snow bunting composes its own song, & a careful watcher can tell one kittiwake from its neighbor by the little dots   on the tips of its wings.  The most used verb is also the most humble— merely to be.  Nobody can teach to William Blake the auguries of William Blake. We are, instead, our own vatic visions, bumbling prophets. Our sense of ourselves as invented as film.  Later, in an ocean-going canoe lined with cedar boughs, he will drift out into cold breakers, two bullets in his chest. But, here, in his small hat & wire glasses, he still seems  sweetly comic. He holds up a letter;   someone’s promised him a job. His fancy plaid suit makes him look like a clown.
What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all   this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely   unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of   perceiving them. . . . With this alone have we   any concern.    —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason At a church rummage sale, I study the perfection of shadows in a painting by Caravaggio, although what I hold is only a small print of Christ—its frame broken—dining at Emmaus with three of the Apostles. And because the table is dramatically, if not unbelievably, lit, the bowls & pitcher & loaves send their dark crescents onto the immaculate white cloth. When the Savior raises his hand to offer a blessing, its shade deepens further his crimson smock. Tenebrosus: that rich, convincing darkness. As though the master understood that the obscured world only seems to us somehow even more familiar, as though our sense of our own unknowing had at last been made visible—even if what we do not know cannot itself be seen. The future’s drape, the carnival fortunetellers of my childhood might have called it, but also the now’s, displayed as it is—so many unmatched cups & saucers, old coats & wicker baskets—all around us. At a party last week, someone said verisimilitude. We were huddled on a tiny porch. It was the first cool night & the wine had no conclusion.   The talk turned quickly to shepherds & the pastoral & then, to opera, before someone recalled a horror film he’d watched late one night with his brother. In black & white vignettes, an evil tree stump possessed by the spirit of an executed prince hunts the scheming tribal elders who have destroyed him. A former pro wrestler in a costume of wire & rubber bark & wearing a permanent scowl lumbers after vengeance in the confusion & fear of 1957 on a half-dozen root-legs, driving his victims into quicksand or toppling himself over upon him. Though here the point is the teller’s small brother & the boy’s allegiance, even in a state of suspended disbelief, to what we call sense. How, he wanted to know, suddenly unusually earnest, did the tree manage to get itself up again?   Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home, waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school, I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent & unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other, there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible & impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort.   It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself— breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots, peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board, making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves.   Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night, the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form across the stove—pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been.   Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off, hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks. In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.
One man prays: How shall I be able to lie with this woman?  Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her?  Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this?   Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released?  —Marcus Aurelius When we are lost in our longings, Aurelius, already it is too late: there is already nothing we can do. I have rarely desired an end to my desires. We are so in love with our wanting. Last week, though doctors were quick to repair it, a baby in India was born grasping her own beating heart in her fist. Today, a Dumpster arrives from Dave’s Trash Removal & I begin to fill it. I toss in a transistor radio that hasn’t worked in years. A man walking past asks if he can take it. Later, he returns & carries off a broken TV. A neighbor salvages the dented gray fuse box; a girl wants a window, a paper bag full of tangled cords. All night I listen to the wind & the echoes of feet kicking through rubbish, like a mouse nesting inside a drum. My older brother is dead a decade. Yet here in its enormous gold frame is the familiar, pastel portrait someone named Maxwell drew for our mother, an inaccurate rendering of the two of us when we were small. I can’t look at it; I can’t throw it away. Every change is a death, you tell yourself,turn thy thoughts now to thy life as a child. . . . One day, I tell myself, I will shut all the doors, leave everything behind. The museum is showing a hundred tricked-out Victorian photographs of that other world: the hoax of floating fairies, women haunted by ghostly blurs. Another century & still we want to believe in what we know cannot be true. Your words, Aurelius, have found me, but you could not. If we are disappointed, we have only ourselves to blame: Wipe out thy imagination. We fill our hands when they are empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.
Grandma is washing me white. I am the color of hot sand in the bleached sea light. I am a stain on the porcelain, persistent as tea. Stay in the shade. Don’t say she was the only one. Cousins opposite say: you too white. I am a night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning. My skin a curtain for a cage of bones, a blackbird coop. My heart is crusty bread, hardening. Hardening. This way, I feed my own fluttering. Under shade, the day looks like evening and I cannot bear the darkness. Don’t say, I can’t stand to be touched. Say, I stare into the sun to burn off the soiled hands that print my body with bloody ink. Don’t say, Mulatto. Say, I am the horse in Oz turning different colors, each prance brightening flesh. A curiosity. Don’t say, Bathwater spiraled down into the pipes. Say, I never did fade. Say, Skin holds the perseverance of my days. Folding, folding, the water continuously gathers, making wrinkles in a map.
Eat cereal. Read the back of the box over and over. Put on my red velvet jumper with white heart shaped buttons. Walk to the bus, pick up discarded cigarette butts and pretend to smoke.   Get on the bus. Girls yell, Wire head, ugly black skin. Take a window seat, under the radio speaker. Look for cats hunting in the fields.   Go to class. Stay in at recess. Steal chewing gum, plastic green monkeys and cookies from desks. Eat in bathroom stalls. Pure white light pours in.   Try to get a bloody nose by punching myself in the same bathroom after lunch.   The teacher passes around pictures of herself pregnant. You were fat! I yell. Everyone laughs. I lap it like licking honey from a spoon. I was pregnant, what’s your excuse? Everyone laughs. I swallow stones.   Grow tired in the afternoons, droop like a sunflower in the lengthening light.   Get on the bus. Girls yell, Brillo-head! Zebra! Sit in an aisle seat. Your father’s a nigger! I say, No, he’s a fireman. Laughter all around. Pinch myself shut like squeezing soap from a sponge.   Walk home. Sometimes find an unsmoked cigarette in the gravel along the curb—long, white, new. Put it to my lips, pull it away and hold it aloft, movie-star-like, all the way home.
A boarded-up house. Ransacked inside — broken glass and toppled tables, chairs overturned, books shaken for hidden money.   There are mouths in dreams full of gold teeth, chewing bread and meat. The body is hollow as flame and will burn down anything if pointed straight.   A bird flies in through the door, then flutters at the window. Although he is tiny, I am too afraid to help him escape. I’ve made myself another house. I hum to fill its empty rooms. I fold in like saloon doors closing, then swinging out, keeping out thieves.
I am trying to remember the lyrics of old songs  I’ve forgotten, mostly I am trying to remember one-hit wonders, hymns,  and musicals like West Side Story. Singing over and over what I can recall, I hum remnants on  buses and in the car.   I am so often alone these days with echoes of these old songs  and my ghosted lovers. I am so often alone that I can almost hear it, can almost feel  the half-touch of others, can almost taste the licked clean spine of the melody I’ve lost.   I remember the records rubbed with static and the needle  gathering dust. I remember the taste of a mouth so sudden and still cold from  wintry gusts. It seemed incredible then — a favorite song, a love found.  It wasn't, after all.   Days later, while vacuuming, the lyrics come without thinking. Days later, I think I see my old lover in a café but don’t,  how pleasing it was to think it was him, to finally sing that song.   This is the way of all amplitude: we need the brightness  to die some. This is the way of love and music: it plays like a god and  then is done. Do I feel better remembering, knowing for certain  what’s gone?
I like it when they get together and talk in voices that sound like apple trees and grape vines,and some of them wear hats and go to Arizona in the winter, and they all like to play cards.They will always be the ones who say “It is time to go now,” even as we linger at the door,or stand by the waiting cars, they remember someone—an uncle we never knew—and sigh, allof them together, like wind in the oak trees behind the farm where they grew up—a placeI remember—especially the hen house and the soft clucking that filled the sunlit yard.
The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash, a reaction sending out runners across her chest, a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back into fashion, their son coming back from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger spread down the long hallway of their house and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’s doubled beds, her doubled face in family portraits that double in frequency, a family set down and another, this dinnertime and more red wine, our faces flush with love and sympathy, the mother decides to see the son again, and so our doubled flashlights giving us heaven and earth, all of it safe or at least unmoving, the tall fence her ex built to hide the little grave, to guard the lot in this registered historic district (all of the houses bear their stories on a plaque, their first stories, run-on, this little town with no street lights, just moon, cedars), the tall fence behind which is the yard, blue, in this yard no marker stone and under this stone their son’s everything, no double, no double
In this land the children tear their hearts in half. Let me explain. If ten things are wanted, only ten can be had. If a stand of birches is found to be made of tin, the soil around them will bleed with rust. In this land children study their magazines in broad daylight, and in their books any soldier who stumbles will not fall. No one will fall, a gift parents try not to make much of. At every meal some is set aside. In every garden a patch lies fallow. At parties there are whispers of illegal cheeses. Camembert, especially, is said to taste alive. And so the children learn to make room. To leave some. Nothing will come, but nothing will go. To love like this half must rattle in its pit.
The casseroles just showed up. According to her sister a symbolic casting   of the feminine, not gender but physics, dear— according to a friend she looked   just like her sister, green bathrobe mid-afternoon, suitcase still in the trunk.   She’d carried him dead for days. Out above the reeds a sphere of birds   stretches and knots, rises as one brown then belly-white. Oh the hunger   when it came filled every chair.
The first person in recorded history struck by a comet slept on her couch across the road from the Comet Drive-In   and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee, and woke her. Everything that hurts   hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built   so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm . . . Here   let the towers go, let them write his crossing, cursive, back and forth   his name steadying our tongues . . . Famous, overcoat floating down without him, the idea that we stand   where we mean to stand, 1974, a distraction   from my parents’ morning commute. At 59th Street they split. The poems I was writing were no longer poems of their divorce,   my father’s sweeping gestures or his pain, the old Volkswagen and garden hose—all of that had washed from my poems   and instead an imaginary family arrived in borrowed gardens, their son stillborn—even as I grew heavy with my own son I wrote poem after poem holding this imagined horror close.
is an imaginary flower that never fades. The amaranth is blue with black petals, it’s yellow with red petals, it’s enormous and grows into the shape of a girl’s house, the seeds nestle high in the closet where she hid a boy. The boy and his bike flee the girl’s parents from the tip of the leaves, green summer light behind the veins. The amaranth is an imaginary flower in the shape of a girl’s house dispensing gin and tonics from its thorns, a succulent. This makes the boy’s bike steer off-course all summer, following the girl in her marvelous car, the drunken bike.   He was a small part of summer, he was summer’s tongue.
They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium and we all rose into the air, the same room where they demonstrated pow-wows and prestidigitation.   But not everyone believed it. That was the most important lesson I learned—that a truck driven by a dog could roll down a hill at dusk and roll right off a dock into a lake and sink, and if no one believes you then what is the point of telling them wonderful things?   I walked home from the pow-wow on an early winter night in amazement: they let me buy the toy tomahawk! As soon as I got home I was going to hit my sister with it, but I didn’t know this.
It was a good day and I was about to do something important and good, but then I unscrewed the pen I was using to see the ink. Precision German craftsmanship. The Germans are so persnickety and precise, they wash their driveways. Their mountains and streams dance around each other in a clockwork, courtly imitation of spring. They build the Panzer tank, out of rakes hoses and garden gnomes; they built me. And I’ve seated myself above an avenue on the brink of mystery, always just on the lip, with my toes over the lip but my bowels behind.   When I replaced the ink the sky was socked in, only one window of blue open in the north, directly over someone. But that person was reading about Rosicrucians in the laundromat, he was unaware as the blue window closed above him. The rest of us are limp and damp, I see a button in front of us that says “spin cycle.” I’m going to push it.
I wake up, bound tightly. A warm, valerian smell cascades to my palate. I can only move my eyelids and toes. Heat sits impishly on my chest, at my throat, curtains of it brushing against me. Panic creeps out of my armpits. I can only move my eyelids and toes, and this constant fluttering lulls me to sleep.   I awake late and move like a bee through the apartment, from station to station from the blue flame to the shimmering disc. From the stairs to the street, to the grocery store. To the meat aisle. To the cocktail wieners. To make pigs-in-a-blanket, to share them with friends. To sink into bed, to bind myself tightly in blankets, to flutter off into sleep, and then on past sleep, to be carried by admirers across a wooden bridge. Later I will burn this bridge.
We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims. that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri. That to seduce these rims, graces are insulated among manatees, descanting their juvenile pragmatism from the consistency of the graced. That whenever any formula of grace becomes detained of these endives, it is the rim of the peppery to aluminize or to abominate it. and to insulate Newtonian grace. leaching its fountain pen on such printed matter and orienting its pragmatism in such formula, as to them shall seize most lilac to effuse their sage and harakiri.
Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out. Music: Known as the Philosopher’s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it. Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds. Paris: You’re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf. Music: The unless of a certain series. Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything. Fire: The number between four and five. Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of. Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming to move. The false motion of the wave, “frei aber einsam.” Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face. Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time. Art: That’s the problem with art. Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds “like Katharine Hepburn.” Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it was to you Benjamin compared Adorno’s wife. Ghost citizens of the century, sexual misery is wearing you out. Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three hundred thousand . . . Hausmann’s Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first silence of the century then the king weeping. Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of, fly in the ointment of the mind! Sign at Jardin des Plantes: GAMES ARE FORBIDDEN IN THE LABYRINTH. Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the Jewish Quarter. “Nothing has been changed,” sez Michael, “except for the removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews.” Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum. The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city. Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your Mythomania. Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann. To say about Flemish painting: “Money-colored light.” Music: “Boys on the Radio.” Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of the Place des Vosges. Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds. The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech. Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return. Pop song: We got your pretty girls they’re talking on mobile phones la la la. Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom of the visible. Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have. Thus: I came to the city of possession. Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done. Paris: The train station’s a museum, opera in the place of the prison. Later. The music lacquered with listen.
Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.   The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love.   In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in   Across the bluing evening. It’s the hour things get To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet.   Yikes. It’s fine to be here with you watching the great events Without taking part, clinking our ice as they advance   Yet remain distant. Like the baker always about to understand Idly sweeping up that he is the recurrence of Napoleon   In a baker’s life, always interrupted by the familiar notes Of a childish song, “no more sleepy dreaming,” we float   Casually on the surface of the day, staring at the bottom, Jotting in our daybooks, how beautiful, the armies of autumn.
Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities, These pale window box poppies of the laughing class, Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight, Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’s foot, Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert It’s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel, Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing On its way out. Prince Valiant vowed to sew the horizons Into a single idea, to put on the blue dress of distance, Looping past rivers and mountains as one leaps from bed To bed to make loneliness lonely, the suburbs were for him A relief, a pageant of calm desire where he settled, All the king’s horses grazing on forsythia out back While the evening tilts back out of the night, a kindly drunk Uncle, and asks you to stay. Was this the end of traveling? Or just a change in the story over time, as for example howTous les chevaux du roi become Josie and the Pussycats From one version to the next? So all heroes are deranged By something quite common yet unexpected, a constellation Redrawn and named again through the stars Above the porch don’t shift but seem to sink Through winter’s pitcher of noircotic ink, Leaving a single streetlight that burned happily, Thinking it was the sun, after all it was the day Of the night and turned the world around it, We were good sentences and forgot where we started.
They basically grow it out of sand. This is a big help because otherwise it was getting pretty enigmatic. Welcome to the desert of the real, I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen. I do not think the revolution is finished. So during these years, I lived in a country where I was little known, With the thunder of the Gods that protect the Icelandic tundra from advertising, Great red gods, great yellow gods, great green gods, planted at the edges of the speculative tracks along which the mind speeds from one feeling to another, from one idea to its consequence Past the proud apartment houses, fat as a fat money bag. I wish that I might stay in this pleasant, conventional city, A placid form, a modest form, but one with a claim to pleasure, And then vanish in the fogs of hypnoLondon. All are in their proper place in these optical whispering-galleries, The swan-winged horses of the skies with summer’s music in their manes, The basic Los Angeles Dingbat, A housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night. Every Sunday is too little Sunday, A living grave, the true grave of the head. In one shout desire rises and dies. Composed while I was asleep on horseback I drift, mainly I drift.
He faced the sink, one foot up on the edge of the tub. She stood behind him, reaching around. In the mirror, her face rose over his shoulder like the moon, and like the moon she regarded him beautifully but without feeling, and he looked at her as he would at the moon: How beautiful!How distant! No smiling, no weeping, no talking. A man and a woman transacting their magnificent business with the usual equanimity. The man as a passenger walking the ship’s deck at evening and the woman as the moon over his shoulder oiling the ocean with light. Deep in the ship’s belly pistons churned and sailors fed the boilers' roar with coal. On deck just the engine’s dull thrum and a faint click as the woman sets her ring on the cool white lip of the sink.
He slaughtered a six of Miller in thanks when his supposed schizophrenia turned out to be mere panic, fewer than half the syllables and “easily managed with the new medications.” Chanted that mantra when his piano teacher’s voice droned on like an undertow beneath Chopin hours after she herself had gone home to Queens and when stop signs seemed to say slightly more than stop, seemed in fact to convey highly specific messages to him and him alone suggesting he assume certain key responsibilities including twenty-four-hour telephone contact with his finacée “to make sure nothing bad happens to her” and the immediate emergency closure of the Holland Tunnel…Oh, come on, Doc! If this isn’t schizo what is? And after all it took so long to nose the rental car’s savage servility through New Jersey for Thanksgiving at her mother’s that by the time he arrived he can’t possibly have been the same person he had been when he left Brooklyn and is that not a kind of multiple person- ality? It took hours. And then it was awkward. Which could describe so many things. The gangly half-dismantled turkey splayed on its platter. Her stepfather's lecture on property taxes and tougher sentences. The seven-dollar jug of Chablis which would come up later while he held back her hair. Every good boy deserves fudge and he tried to be one and earn huge loamy slabs of it. He practiced his scales on the steering wheel as he breezed by stop sign after stop sign toward the tunnel, stopped to search for the exact change, then resumed rehearsal as she, deeply soused, snored wetly beside him smelling like something spilled on a rug. He keyed each étude over and over as though there would not be many more chances or changes which I typed first by accident but had the chance to change for which I am thankful. But what am I doing in here.
Photograph found in the road: bejeweled hand gripping a limp dick. All parties suffering from lack of ambition. The hills of Tuscany won’t dapple with sunlight, and here it is nearly noon. She didn’t much want the leather jacket, the vendor didn’t really care to sell it, she hardly tried it on, he barely praised her beauty, then everyone wasn’t hungry and went to lunch. The rubies won’t glow. The delayed train shrugs on its siding. The penis appears at ease.Osteria, osteria, osteria, osteria. I knew many words but preferred to say the same ones over and over, like a photographer shooting four frames of the same subject, hoping for one in focus. This clearly among the other three.
Love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it.  CAMUS All day my husband pounds on the upstairs porch. Screeches and grunts of wood as the wall is opened keep the whole house tormented. He is trying to reach the bees, he is after bees. This is the climax, an end to two summers of small operations with sprays and ladders. Last June on the porch floor I found them dead, a sprinkle of dusty bugs, and next day a still worse death, until, like falling in love, bee-haunted, I swept up bigger and bigger loads of some hatch, I thought, sickened, and sickening me, from what origin? My life centered on bees, all floors were suspect. The search was hopeless. Windows were shut. I never find where anything comes from. But in June my husband’s fierce sallies began, inspections, cracks located and sealed, insecticides shot; outside, the bees’ course   watched, charted; books on bees read. I tell you I swept up bodies every day on the porch. Then they’d stop, the problem was solved; then they were there again, as the feelings make themselves known again, as they beseech sleepers who live innocently in will and mind.   It is no surprise to those who walk with their tigers that the bees were back, no surprise to me. But they had left themselves so lack-luster, their black and gold furs so deathly faded. Gray bugs that the broom hunted were like a thousand little stops when some great lurch   of heart takes place, or a great shift of season. November it came to an end. No bees. And I could watch the floor, clean and cool, and, from windows, the cold land. But this spring the thing began again, and his curse went upstairs again, and his tinkering and reasoning and pride.   It is the man who takes hold. I lived from bees, but his force went out after bees and found them in the wall where they hid. And now in July he is tearing out the wall, and each board ripped brings them closer to his hunting hand. It is quiet, has been quiet for a while. He calls me, and I march   from a dream of bees to see them, winged and unwinged, such a mess of interrupted life dumped on newspapers— dirty clots of grubs, sawdust, stuck fliers, all smeared together with old honey, they writhe, some of them, but who cares? They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said.   But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered enough? This evening we go to a party, the breeze dies, late, we are sticky in our old friendships and light-headed. We tell our funny story about the bees. At two in the morning we come home, and a friend,   a scientist, comes with us, in his car. We’re going to save the idea of the thing, a hundred bees, if we can find so many unrotted, still warm but harmless, and leave the rest. We hope that the neighbors are safe in bed, taking no note of these private catastrophes.   He wants an enzyme in the flight-wing muscle. Not a bad thing to look into. In the night we rattle and raise the lid of the garbage can. Flashlights in hand, we open newspapers, and the men reach in a salve of happenings. I can’t touch it. I hate the self-examined   who’ve killed the self. The dead are darker, but the others have moved in the ooze toward the next moment. My God one half-worm gets its wings right before our eyes. Searching fingers sort and lay bare, they need the idea of bees—and yet, under their touch, the craze   for life gets stronger in the squirming, whitish kind. The men do it. Making a claim on the future, as love makes a claim on the future, grasping. And I, underhand, I feel it start, a terrible, lifelong heave taking direction. Unpleading, the men prod   till all that grubby softness wants to give, to give.
"The younger brother roasted a breast of Pishiboro's elephant wife and handed Pishiboro some, which he presently ate. Then the younger brother said in a voice full of scorn. 'Oh you fool. You lazy man. You were married to meat and you thought it was a wife.'" FROM A MYTH OF THE BUSHMEN Poised upside down on its duncecap, a shrunken purple head, True Blueberry, enters its tightening frame of orange lip, and the cream of a child’s cheek is daubed with Zanzibar Cocoa, while Here at the Martha Washington Ice Cream Store we outdo the Symbolistes. a fine green trickle— Pistachio? Mint Julep? Words have colors, and colors are tasty. sweetens his chin. In front of me Licorice teeters like a lump of coal on its pinkish base of Pumpkin. A Rauschenberg tongue fondles this rich donnée, then begins to erase it.   Turning from all that is present in the flesh, so to speak, let the eye wander off to a menu, where it can start to ingest “Quite Sour Lemon sherbet topped with a stem cherry and chocolate sprinkles  Swilling in language, all floating in bubbly cherry phosphate the bloated imagination is urged to open still wider and shovel it in, and served with a twist of pretzel.” In this world “Creamy Vanilla and Smooth Swiss Chocolate ice creams” can be “blended with chopped pineapple, dark fudge sauce, ripe bananas, whipped topping, cookies, roasted nutmeats and nippy chopped cherries.” the Unconscious, that old hog, being in charge here of the creative act.   At about the moment my tastebuds receive a last tickle of Gingersnap and begin to respond to Orange Fudge, I look at you who have bought my ice cream cones for twenty years, Moving another new ice to the mouth we needn’t remember and look away it is always the same mouth that melts it. My mind assembles a ribald tower of sherbet dips, all on one cone, Apricot, Apple, Tangerine, Peach, Prune, Lime, and then it topples. You are steadier than I. You order one dip always, or, in a dish, two dips of the same flavor.   In this hysterical brilliance of neon Come on, consumers, we’ve got to keep scooping it is twelve or fifteen of us to thirty ice creams.  so that the creams shall not rise like cold lava out of their bins, numbing our feet, our knees, freezing our chests, our chins, our eyes, Open the door, quick, and let in two handholding adolescents. Coping with all those glands makes them good and hungry. so that, flying out of their cannisters, the chopped nuts shall not top off our Technicolor grave with their oily ashes.   Listen! All around us toothsome cones are suffering demolition down to the last, nipple-like tip. How do we know where to stop? Perhaps the glasses and dishes are moulded of candy, and the counters and windows… Over your half-eaten serving of Italian Delight, why are you looking at me the way you are looking at me?
I was out last night, the very picture of a sneak, dark and hunched-over, breaking and entering again. Why do I do it? And why, when I can afford serious residences, do I keep to this one room? Perhaps if I had not lost track of the difference between the real and the ideal it would never have happened. I hide here almost entirely now. When I go out, when I creep into those silent houses, I steal newspapers. An armload, no more than I can carry comfortably. Sometimes they are already tied up on the side porch or by the kitchen stove. Nobody misses them. They think each other or the maid has carried them out to the street. They say there is something intractable out there, the Law, the Right to Privacy, the World. In the days when my obsession was only a wound-up toy, squeaking and jabbering in my chest, I could have believed them. I sit by the window today (There is very little space left now, thought I have left corridors wide enough to walk through so I won't lose touch) holding my latest on my lap, handling them, fondling them, taking in every column. They are becoming more and more precious. My delusion grows and spreads. Lately it seems to me as I read of murders, wars, bankruptcies, jackpot winnings, the news if written in that perfect style of someone speaking to the one who knows and loves him. Long before they miss me, I think, the room will be perfectly solid. When they break in the door and, unsurprised, hardened to the most bizarre vagaries, begin to carry out my treasure, death's what they'll look for underneath it all, those fluent, muscled, imaginative men, sweating in their innocent coveralls. But I will be out in broad daylight by then, answering, having accepted utterly the heart's conditions. Tell them I wish them well, always, that I've been happy.
Uniformly over the whole countryside The warm air flows imperceptibly seaward; The autumn haze drifts in deep bands Over the pale water; White egrets stand in the blue marshes; Tamalpais, Diablo, St. Helena Float in the air. Climbing on the cliffs of Hunter’s Hill We look out over fifty miles of sinuous Interpenetration of mountains and sea.   Leading up a twisted chimney, Just as my eyes rise to the level Of a small cave, two white owls Fly out, silent, close to my face. They hover, confused in the sunlight, And disappear into the recesses of the cliff.   All day I have been watching a new climber, A young girl with ash blonde hair And gentle confident eyes. She climbs slowly, precisely, With unwasted grace.   While I am coiling the ropes, Watching the spectacular sunset, She turns to me and says, quietly, “It must be very beautiful, the sunset, On Saturn, with the rings and all the moons.”
In the years to come they will say, “They fell like the leaves In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.” November has come to the forest, To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen. The year fades with the white frost On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows, Where the deer tracks were black in the morning. Ice forms in the shadows; Disheveled maples hang over the water; Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream. Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold. The yellow maple leaves eddy above them, The glittering leaves of the cottonwood, The olive, velvety alder leaves, The scarlet dogwood leaves, Most poignant of all.   In the afternoon thin blades of cloud Move over the mountains; The storm clouds follow them; Fine rain falls without wind. The forest is filled with wet resonant silence. When the rain pauses the clouds Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls. In the evening the wind changes; Snow falls in the sunset. We stand in the snowy twilight And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud. Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight, Glimmering with floating snow. An owl cries in the sifting darkness. The moon has a sheen like a glacier.
died June 1916 Under your illkempt yellow roses, Delia, today you are younger Than your son. Two and a half decades – The family monument sagged askew, And he overtook your half-a-life. On the other side of the country, Near the willows by the slow river, Deep in the earth, the white ribs retain The curve of your fervent, careful breast; The fine skull, the ardor of your brain. And in the fingers the memory Of Chopin études, and in the feet Slow waltzes and champagne twosteps sleep. And the white full moon of midsummer, That you watched awake all that last night, Watches history fill the deserts And oceans with corpses once again; And looks in the east window at me, As I move past you to middle age And knowledge past your agony and waste.
It is the dark of the moon. Late at night, the end of summer, The autumn constellations Glow in the arid heaven. The air smells of cattle, hay, And dust. In the old orchard The pears are ripe. The trees Have sprouted from old rootstocks And the fruit is inedible. As I pass them I hear something Rustling and grunting and turn My light into the branches. Two raccoons with acrid pear Juice and saliva drooling From their mouths stare back at me, Their eyes deep sponges of light. They know me and do not run Away. Coming up the road Through the black oak shadows, I See ahead of me, glinting Everywhere from the dusty Gravel, tiny points of cold Blue light, like the sparkle of Iron snow. I suspect what it is, And kneel to see. Under each Pebble and oak leaf is a Spider, her eyes shining at Me with my reflected light Across immeasurable distance.
The children are back, the children are back— They’ve come to take refuge, exhale and unpack; The marriage has faltered, the job has gone bad, Come open the door for them, Mother and Dad.The city apartment is leaky and cold, The landlord lascivious, greedy and old— The mattress is lumpy, the oven’s encrusted, The freezer, the fan, and the toilet have rusted.The company caved, the boss went broke, The job and the love affair, all up in smoke. The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock— O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock.And so they return with their piles of possessions, Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions, Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens, Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.Downstairs in the kitchen the father and mother Don’t say a word, but they look at each other As down from the hill comes Jill, comes Jack. The children are back. The children are back.
Dreams brimming over, childhood stretched out in legs, this is the moment replayed on winter days when frost covers the field, when age steals away wishes. Glorious sleep that seeps back there to the glory of our baseball days.
Lissen to the whistle of night bats—oye como va, in the engines, in the Chevys & armed Impalas, the Toyota gangsta’ monsters, surf of new world colony definitions & quasars & culture prostars going blam  over the Mpire, the once-Mpire, carcass neural desies for the Nothing. i amble outside the Goddess mountain. Cut across the San Joaquín Valley, Santiago de Cuba, Thailand & Yevtushenko’s stations; hunched humans snap off cotton heads gone awry & twist nuclear vine legs. Jut out to sea, once again—this slip sidewalk of impossible migrations. Poesy mad & Chicano-style undone wild. Rumble boy. Rumble girl. In wonder & amazement. On the loose. Cruisin’ shark-colored maze of presidential bombast, death enshrined archipelago fashion malls, neutered wars across the globe come barreling down on my Neo-American uzi mutations, my uppgraded 2Pac thresholds. My indigo streets, i say with disgust & erotic spit, Amerikaner frontier consciousness gone up long ago. Meet my barriohood, meet me with the froth i pick up everyday & everyday i wipe away with ablution & apologia & a smirk, then a smile on my Cholo-Millennium liberation jacket. No motha’, no fatha’, no sista’, no brotha’. Just us in the genetic ticktock culture chain, this adinfinitum, clueless Americana grid of inverted serapes, hallucinations of a nation, streets in racist Terminator coagulation. Get loose after the day-glo artery of a fix. Power outages propel us into cosmos definition, another forty-million-New-Dollar-Plantation Basilica, or is it tender chaos? My upside-down Kahlúa gallon oración drool blackish metal flake desires, the ooze of Dulcinea— Tepeyac stripper, honey from Tara’s open green fans. Tara? Tara, where are you? Tara of the blessings & weapons against illusion. Against administrator pig, against molester snake, against rooster corporate lust. Remember me? i am the black-red blood spark worker, Juana Buffalo’s illegitimate flight usher, back up from Inframundo. Quick ooze again, this formless city space i live in— my circular false malaria. Fungi Town says everything’s awright without your Holy Wheel, your flaming tree wombs, this sista’ bundle i ache for, the one i lost in a fast brawl for redemption at the gates of this Creation Mulatto Hotel, this body passage, this wonder  fire from the chest. i stand alone on Mass Man Boulevard. Look east, look south. Bleary sirens come howling with vats of genocide & grey prison gang buses jam with my true brotha’ wetbacks. Pick another bale of tropical grape, another bushel of pesticide & plutonium artichoke. Cancer tomatoes the biggest in the world. Bastard word, bracero produce, alien culture—  power & slime. Crawl up my back, heavy loaded on cheap narratives, Salinas doubles, Atlantis sketched on Gorbachev’s forehead: you, yes, you, gator-mouthed agent—like gila progeny. Let’s hustle. Let’s trade. It is 1:27 A.M. in da rat Arctic. What do i trade passion for? Language escapes me. Passion is smoke. i dissolve. It is in my nature to disappear. No sista’, no brotha’. No motha’, no soul. This shred iciness is all, a crazy register that destroys itself into Polaroid, into a glacial sheet of multicolored border walls. Let’s foam & spin flamey bluish tears for the Thing-Against-Itself, soul-less soul, this film word surface. Sing out, baby. Wobble & bop to town. Drag yo’ hands across my fine-tuned work train named Desastre en route to Freetown—engineered African shaman houses smell of licorice, Ebola & famine blood, of hair torn, of death owls & cancerous alcoholic livers, of babies sucking this deep night to come, then—a busted chink of afternoon copper light wakes us, yo’ sista’ rolls in with a bag of lemons for Evil Eye, for the seven-inch ache in her abdomen. Keep me in stride. You. i am talking to you, fool. Don’t just sit there stretchin’ yo’ face. Tell me why fire yearns for the heart. Write it down. Say it. Fool. Speak the names. Conjure the recitations from the coffee cup, the steel-toe, border-crosser boots. The grass rips up the morning snow lights, jagged & yellowish. My AIDS face is hidden. Your rot, my epistemology. i stand in pure light, a blaze of eyes & arms, volcanic & solar, autistic, anti-written, burned by mad friars & clerics, uptown octopi readers, my long hair falls as reddish honey, on a naked supple back,  on breasts small & secretive. Mystery evades me. Shadows crumble. Without attention i locate the love void & yet, i know all is well. My blood rocks to a bolero out of rhythm, a firefly’s bolero that is, the one in the dog eye. Hear me warm up to the multi-night. Scribble poems &  shout rebuke for the sake of scarred angels, for Tara, who guides me in her emeraldine, sequined night of lies. Hear me now, kin to the half-collie language that i keep & walk. Kin now, to the leaves that plunge to the floors; swivel whiteness without axis, tectonic blasts without mercy. Straitjackets float on the river infinity. Pink-skinned fishes stare back as they evolve into my shape, my babble stream magnetic juan-foolery. Arm wrestle me on the soccer lawn, kick me in the balls. The murder music is for everyone.  The Last Mayan Acid rock band  plays Berlin’s latest score: dead trade market systems for the dead proletariats, rip up from Bangkok to Tenejapa. Everyone is meaningful & vomits, everyone deposits a stench pail, into the Cube— Neo-America, without the fissure of intimate thighs. Cross over into fire, hunger & spirit. i write on my hand: the road cuts into a star. Go, now, go, fool. In your lyric wetback saxophone, the one yo’ mama left you, the Thing-Against-Itself strapped across your hips. Do not expect me to name—this Thing-Against-Itself. Play it. Screw it. Howl up to the Void, the great emptiness, the original form.Night Journal: Keep on rockin’, blues fish, the gauze of hte day into night. Out there somewhere, Dis-America, pick up a chrome bone, the shards of the last  Xmas  Presidential extravaganza. You, of course, fool.  Swivel into the clear. Float over the greenish migrant barracks pocked with wire torsos, toes wiggle & predict our forthcoming delirium—there is a velvet panther shouting out OM in funk, there is a tawny word in the middle of the city thoroughfare, a planetary semi of lives slices the wet animal in half. i am that punk half panther. My fierce skull & mandible, formidable, my pelt is exact as witch quartz, a slashed leg tumbles down the highway, battered by every dirty, steel wheel. Face up to the sky, you, i said, to the brilliant gossip from the Goddess parade. Outside, outside.     So. Crawl up, baby, come on, keep on floatin’— sliding’, always: for black journeys, always in holiness.  From Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream, 1999.
It’s not that I don’t like the hospital. Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave. The smell of antiseptic cleansers. The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true. My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s And oxygen in tanks attached to them— A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared A cigarette, which was delicious but Too brief. I held his hand; it felt Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was, The sunlight pointing down at us, as if We were important, full of life, unbound. I wandered for a moment where his ribs Had made a space for me, and there, beside The thundering waterfall of his heart, I rubbed my eyes and thought, “I’m lost.”
To cure myself of wanting Cuban songs, I wrote a Cuban song about the need For people to suppress their fantasies, Especially unhealthy ones. The song Began by making reference to the sea, Because the sea is like a need so great And deep it never can be swallowed. Then The song explores some common myths About the Cuban people and their folklore: The story of a little Carib boy Mistakenly abandoned to the sea; The legend of a bird who wanted song So desperately he gave up flight; a queen Whose strength was greater than a rival king’s. The song goes on about morality, And then there is a line about the sea, How deep it is, how many creatures need Its nourishment, how beautiful it is To need. The song is ending now, because I cannot bear to hear it any longer. I call this song of needful love my voice.
By menopause, it’s not just estrogen my mother lacks. She’s lost her eldest son— that’s me, the one who’s queer—the doctor who once made her very proud. These days, I do my own wash when I’m home, I cook for her so she can take a break from all the chores she now refuses to assign to me. She sits, half-watching Ricki through her tea’s thin steam, her squint of disapproval more denial than it is disgust. She hears much better than she sees—it’s easier to keep out vision than it is to clear the air of sounds—and yet I know it’s age that stultifies her senses too. Enraged because she’s lost so much, I understand why suddenly she looks so stunned as from the television: “. . . Bitch, she stole my boyfriend, my own mother did! . . .” I fold a towel noiselessly. I know she thinks it’s garbage, sinful, crap—just as she thinks that taking estrogen in pills is not what God intended, no matter what the doctors say; or that I’m gay is plain unnatural, she can’t endure such pain. The oven timer rings. The cookies that I’ve baked are done. I’ll make another batch though she won’t touch them: given up for Lent. My mother’s love. I wonder where it went.
Before the glimmer of his sunken eyes, What question could I answer with my lies?   Digesting everything, it’s all so plain In him, his abdomen so thin the pain   Is almost visible. I probe the lump His boyfriend noticed first, my left hand limp   Beneath the pressure of the right. With AIDS You have to think lymphoma—swollen nodes,   A tender spleen, the liver’s jutting edge— It strikes me suddenly I will oblige   This hunger that announces death is near, And as I touch him, cold and cavalier,   The language of beneath the diaphragm Has told me where it’s coming from   And where I’m going, too: soft skin to rocks, The body reveling until it wrecks   Against the same internal, hidden shoal, The treasures we can’t hide, our swallowed gold.
How difficult it is to say goodbye to scourge. For years we were obsessed with you, your complex glycoproteins and your sly, haphazard reproduction, your restraint in your resistance, how you bathed so slight yet fierce in our most intimate secretions. We will remember you for generations; electron micrographs of you seem quaint already, in the moment of our victory. How difficult it is to claim one’s right to living honestly. The honesty you taught was nothing quite as true   as death, but neither was it final. Yes, we vanquished you, with latex, protease inhibitors, a little common sense— what’s that, you say? That some remain at risk? How dare you try to threaten us again! Of course, you’d like to make outrageous claims that some behaviors haven’t changed, that some have not had access to the drugs that mask your presence in the body. Difficult it is, how very sad, to see you strain (no pun intended) at response—our quilts, our bravest poetry, our deaths with grace   and dignity have put you in your place. This elegy itself renounces you, as from this consciousness you’ve been erased. The love for you was very strong, the hot pursuits so many of us reveled in— but what once felt like love was really not. I hardly know what I will find to hate as much as I have loved and hated what you brought to bear upon my verse, the weight of your oppression and the joys of truth. How difficult it is—to face the white of nothingness, of clarity. We win!
What I would like to give them for a change is not the usual prescription with its hubris of the power to restore, to cure; what I would like to give them, ill from not enough of laying in the sun not caring what the onlookers might think while feeding some banana to their dogs— what I would like to offer them is this, not reassurance that their lungs sound fine, or that the mole they’ve noticed change is not a melanoma, but instead of fear transfigured by some doctorly advice I’d like to give them my astonishment at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping, and how ridiculously gently it slicked down my hair; I’d like to give them that, the joy I felt while staring in your eyes as you learned epidemiology (the science of disease in populations), the night around our bed like timelessness, like comfort, like what I would give to them.
I. Blood   We wondered if the rumors got to her. I’d seen her with that other girl behind The Stop and Shop when I was walking home from school one day. I swear, the two of them were kissing, plain as that, the grass so high it brushed their cheeks. I told my teacher so, and maybe it was her who called their folks. Before too long, it was like everyone in town had heard. We waited for them at the dime store once, where Cedric grabbed her tits and said I’ll learn you how to love how God intended it, you ugly fucking dyke. Thing was, she wasn’t ugly like you’d think. She had a certain quality, a shyness maybe, and I’d describe the way she laughed as kind of gentle. Anyway, we never saw her with that girl again. They say she got depressed— shit, at the service all of us got tearful. I got to thinking what an awful sight it was, all that red blood—it wasn’t in the papers, but I heard Melissa’s mother, who was the nurse in the Emergency that night, say how she was just covered up in blood. I can’t think how you bring yourself to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked the counselor they called in to the school, and she said something like, What better inkto write the language of the heart? I guess it proves that stuff from Bible school they say, that such a life of sin breeds misery.         II. Phlegm   “My brain is draining from my head,” he said as once again he blew his nose. The clock read 3 A.M.;   its second hand swept slowly through another viscous minute. Dead to even nurses sticking them   for new IVs, the other ones slept off their benders soundlessly. “I’m losing my intelligence,”   he said, and blew. My patience waned. He thought he was the president:Dementia, KS, HIV   were printed in his problem list. “And plus, I’m getting feverish.” I can’t recall his name, but I   remember hating him—grim wish that he would hurry up and die. Just then, he took my hand, and kissed   the back of it as though I were a princess in his foreign land. “My lady, you are beautiful,”   he said, and coughed again. Unsure of what to say, my own throat burned. He said, “You can’t know what I feel.”       III. Bile   A gun went off and killed a little girl The day my friend was diagnosed with cancer. I walked through Central Park; a black dog snarled At squirrels chattering like they had answers.   The day my friend was diagnosed with cancer I dreamed of killing someone with a knife. The squirrels, chattering, had likely answers To all my angry questions about life—   A homeboy threatened someone with a knife Not far from where a cop showed off his gun, An angry answer to most questions about life. I watched the squirrels hop, the yuppies run;   The cop approached the black kids with his gun. I wondered how much longer she would live; The squirrels scattered when the homeboy ran. I wondered if she’d ever been in love,   I wondered who would pray for her to live, Forgive her for her anger and her weaknesses. I wondered why it hurt to fall in love. The cop tried aiming past me, towards the woods.   Forgive us for our anger, for our weaknesses: Through Central Park, past the black dog’s snarls, The cop gave chase. A skirmish in the woods. The gun went off—No! shrieked a little girl.   IV. Melancholy   We picked at it with sticks at first, until an older kid named Samuel arrived. He dropped a heavy rock right on its skull; we watched as thick black slime began to ooze from somewhere just below its heart—or where we thought its heart should be. “Raccoon,” said someone solemnly. The landscaper— sweat gleaming, like the polished figurines my mother wouldn’t ever let me touch— regarded us with keen suspicion from across the street. We learned what it could teach; like any body’s secrets, the sublime receded toward the fact of death. I knew both sadness, and disgust in love’s untruths.
Not long ago, I studied medicine. It was terrible, what the body told. I’d look inside another person’s mouth, And see the desolation of the world. I’d see his genitals and think of sin.   Because my body speaks the stranger’s language, I’ve never understood those nods and stares. My parents held me in their arms, and still I think I’ve disappointed them; they care And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage   To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry. I look inside their other-person’s mouths And see the wet interior of souls. It’s warm and red in there—like love, with teeth. I’ve studied medicine until I cried   All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds. Anatomy and physiology, The tiny sensing organs of the tongue— Each nameless cell contributing its needs. It was fabulous, what the body told.
Plankton rise toward the full moon spread thin on Wakaya’s surface. Manta rays’ great curls of jaw scoop backward somersaults of ocean in through painted caves of their mouths, out through sliced gills. Red sea fanspulse. The leopard shark lounges on a smooth ramp of sand, skin jeweled with small hangers-on. Pyramid fish point the way to the surface.Ninety feet down, blue ribbon eels cough, their mouths neon cautions. Ghost pipefish curl in the divemaster’s palm. Soft corals unfurl rainbow polyps, thousands of mouths held open to night.Currents’ communion—giant clams slam shut wavy jaws, send shivers of water. Christmas tree worms snap back, flat spirals tight,living petroglyphs against the night.
One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says, Please. By the time you hear what he’s saying, the light changes, the cab pulls away, and you don’t go back, though you know someone just prayed to you the way you pray. Please: a word so short it could get lost in the air as it floats up to God like the feather it is, knocking and knocking, and finally falling back to earth as rain, as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch, collecting in drains, leaching into the ground, and you walk in that weather every day.
Until nightfall my son ran in the fields, looking for God knows what. Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing. Something to fill an empty spot.Maybe a luminous angel or a country girl with a secret dark. He came back empty-handed, or so I thought.Now I find them: thistles, goatheads, the barbed weeds all those with hooks or horns the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones those wearing lantern jaws,old ones in beards, leapers in silk leggings, the multiple pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those with juices and saps like the fingers of thieves nation after nation of grasses that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds and grab handholds in whatever lean place.It’s been a good day.
the noun A disease of the peach tree —a fungus   distorts leaves. The first time I was taken   to see him I was five or six. A vesicle   on the skin containing serum, caused   by friction, a burn, or other injury. He lived   on Alabama Street next to Saint Peter’s and wore   a white t-shirt, starched and snug. A similar swelling   with fluid or air on the surface   of a plant, or metal after cooling   or the sunless area between one’s toes   after a very long walk. Don’t ask me how it is I ended up holding it.   An outer covering fitted to a   vessel to protect against torpedoes, mines, or to improve   stability. My guess is that he brought it out   to show me thinking, perhaps, I had never   seen one up close, let alone felt   the blunt weight of one in my hands.   A rounded compartment protruding   from the body of a plane. What came   next: no image but sensation of   its hammer (my inexpert manipulation) digging into but not breaking   skin—the spot at the base of my thumb   balloons, slowly filling with fluid…   In Spanish: ampolla—an Ampul of chrystal in the Middle Ages could be   a relic containing the blood of someone   holy. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t loaded.
I   Students, look at this table And now when you see a man six feet tall You can call him a fathom.   Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun And the alphabet is full of blood And when you knock upon a sentence in the Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags   Likewise, hello and goodbye.      II   Nick Algiers is my student And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide And so, I am the one in front of him And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.   Likewise the distance between us then Is the knife that is not marriage.      III   Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess Like making love or writing a poem Or drinking wine on a tropical island With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.   I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous. And in dreaming myself upon the moon I have made the moon my home and no one Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.   And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is That I will never win.
I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me But I resisted for fear she'd think it strange I am very lonely Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness No other human had before to my ears And told me that I was no good Well maybe he didn't mean that But that is what I heard When he told me my life was not worthwhile And my life's work the work of the elite. I say I want to save the world but really I want to write poems all day I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep, Write poems in my sleep Make my dreams poems Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes I want my face to be a poem I have just learned how to apply Eyeliner to the corners of my eyes to make them appear wide There is a romantic abandon in me always I want to feel the dread for others I can feel it through song Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few Like when he said I am no good I am no good Goodness is not the point anymore Holding on to things Now that's the point
The man who murders his wife Is not the same as the man Who goes around and murders a stranger.   I am a woman but I am not The same as another woman. Identity politics are bullshit.   There is only the smart and the evil, The good and the righteous. There is only one color on the earth.   In its infinite degradations it becomes music and mathematics. There is shit on my hands When I have been playing around with specifics.   Love your lover. You are a lover. With each breath God has put a golden faith Upon the snowy mountains of the world.   Here, look at the snowy mountains, Glittering with snow. They are wiser than you might think.   And in your soul, the small grey animals Of the world sit and wait to do good For you, and together   We are one thing, bleating a Somber, scurrying lullaby to Lapsing pinkish angels.   Upon a mountain The angels smile sleepily as they stretch Their very long legs, thinking of us.   And wise they might seem, us and the angels, But really it is only God who is wise.
Kissing the bankteller outside his stairs In Brighton, MA I cannot lie. I felt the hope That we once felt, if only for an instant O the lovely bankteller, like a moose he Rode my spirit quite outside my clothes And chrysanthemums sprouted I assure you Out my nipples when he kissed them. And the pureness of not knowing him at all Was really what we all feel when we enter this earth. There is a newness to the best things that cannot Be excelled and old things like old love die and rot. There are old ideas in the world that should be forgotten There are old ideas and old phrases that should at least Be recycled for others There are old plans now that should be new. There are old thoughts in your head, my reader, and let them die. Follow me, I am the crusader of the new My spirit is a plastic rod that channels all our births. And in the mouths of the little beasts, we shall find the great Ocean that spits up black bugs all glittering on its shores. You know there is an anthem to the ages. There is an anthem of the ages. This is that anthem This is that anthem
The rain whistled.   A taxi brought me to your apartment building And there I stood.   I had dreamed a dream Of us in a bedroom. The light shining upon us in white sheets.   You were singing me a song of your sailing days And in the dream I reached deep in you and pulled out a cardinal Which in bright red Flew out the window.   Sometimes when we talk On the phone, I think to myself That the deep perfect of your soul Is what draws me to you. But still what soul is perfect? All souls are misshapen and off-colored. Morning comes within a soul And makes it obey another law In which all souls are snowflakes.   Once at a funeral, a man had died And with the prayers said, his soul flew up in a hurry Like it had been let out of something awful. It was strangely colored, that soul. And it was a funny shape and a funny temperature. As it blew away, all of us looking felt the cold.
You have changed me already. I am a fireball That is hurtling towards the sky to where you are You can choose not to look up but I am a giant orange ball That is throwing sparks upon your face Oh look at them shake Upon you like a great planet that has been murdered by change O too this is so dramatic this shaking Of my great planet that is bigger than you thought it would be So you ran and hid Under a large tree. She was graceful, I think That tree although soon she will wither Into ten black snakes upon your throat And when she does I will be wandering as I always am A graceful lady that is part museum Of the voices of the universe everyone else forgets I will hold your voice in a little box And when you come upon me I won’t look back at you You will feel a hand upon your heart while I place your voice back Into the heart from where it came from And I will not cry also Although you will expect me to I was wiser too than you had expected For I knew all along you were mine
When my dad first started to die All my mom could remember Was the time he kicked her out After they first started dating So that he could go play golf It is the sort of thing we all remember When we feel death upon us I remember he died twice And once in my dream I just had to see him all nursed and swaddled as if he were sleeping But he wasn’t sleeping I stood in the white light of the nursing home bathroom With the sun spilling everywhere on me And tried to talk to him, but never, he’d never listen People don’t always listen to you when they are dead But that’s not sad I get tired And I don’t listen to one Goddamn thing you are saying But that is because most of the time you bore me And when I am finally asleep it is really nice just to dream I have seen a lot of things in this life But one thing I saw most readily Was that despite his eternal heartbreak And girlish silliness Mike’s face was kind of sweet, a sweet wind He is going to think it is weird that I put him in this poem But I don’t think it is weird that I put him in this poem
We’d often been included in   the weather, whose changes (as in the   still, portending darknesses of after   noon) were hardly evident, if even   manifest at all. The August rain   over Mixcoac & the deadening   of all aspect at a distance:   yet our sudden wet bodies, firm   swelling divested finally of shirts   & trousers, left beside turbid   footprints on the tiled floor;   this tongue, these lips the lightning   over the unchartered landscape of your   thigh: successive terra nova to   resist the still life of the body
1.   without that, the river which was, a substrata is movement now. mermaid left behind flopping in the pipes. her sludge is the sewer where once they fished to watch the night sky blacken. that one, long lingering, now languishes in a cavernous underground source, fountain for none.   music of exhaust and darkening horizons, her hair begins to thin, nails soften, while she waits, a siren of light slow to diminish, wasting rescue. dogs at night are frequent. the scales that once cleaved to her flesh, her skin house shelter, now a day-glow phosphorescence, luminous filth, cleavage, radiating and filtered through her. boils begin to grow, round lumps spurting evanescence, a rainbow of industry, inviting those who come to visit to enjoy her paints, corporeal, images of what might be, a river now sewer then tomb, sanctions while poking her eyes out. no sensible heat.       2.   images are wanting. she studies them. let them bury themselves in: no comment no comment.   a partial shutter moves through the crowd taking us up along its crest. pubises sway. incarnate and incorporated publicly. swaying us. subjects of.   the sap in the oak tree the bugs in the bookbinding. for she renders and has left behind the bark. its carnality upon which I turn. hard by and solitary. the other pole.            3.    she means to say or stubbornness as a means of resistance speaking about us and for us   dread and ailments a celebrated day in liberating explosions of losses disparities and distances dispersed in errors mistaken detours mismade calculations faulty respirations. counter to the stream and in plumes. the pressure transgressed in hands. nor was there another road.   trying to gather what is gone. first by pacing. then on her hands and knees with the measuring tape. she’s a period piece asking if. seeking the response she is the question.             4.   she means to say we live among a crowded scene. overcrowding faces and malice. a crack in time painted on garden paths. inclined to our desire. we ooze we can flourish there.   forward an elephant eleven o’clock rook one o’clock apple and three o’clock lightning perpendicular to spoon soiled underneath apple in line with lightning in line with two cent piece face down. all circling hunted and hunting. elephant trying to leave the scene heading out east spoon facing west constellating failure of identity with apple and rook.           5.   meaning to say. given that. the uncertainty. perhaps. surely. perhaps. figures in. the shape. perhaps. calls. subtract. total. a certainty. the space between. shaped by want. by need. fear of threats. the lure of repetition. her feet admired. their figures. the fear of repetition. start at the end. work back to shape. figure that. days wait. the response. slowness as position. a gap to walk into. opposition. given an entrance. she is on your side. whirlpools of repetition. opening traps. a shape appears. groups itself. more figures. a shape in the doorway. time for gets smaller. tilts inwards. the envelope unshared. first. given that. a set of shapes plan to meet. she is faint. clouds to the west.             6.   white metal teeth. describe her lips. how they reveal and encircle them. encircling me. place them in some setting. a long walk. the kitchen at night. hounding toward an untimely end.   that which spawns life. one foot in front of the next. spawning more. beating out the attachments. strumming along. not refreshing that. productive and not taking advice. recognizable car engine up the road. another can grow again there.           7.   unjoined. supporting that. permeated and touched. moved by injury. joining not singular. this state. that stare. meaning the look alikes and she is eying those that be. taken to the extreme. accepting even that. orchestrate a sighing. a fourth. audible sounds of presence. calculating the ooze of difference.   a quaver in the voice, it’s the ask if.         8.   I adopt a hostile attitude towards it. towards want.   forced into the background. escaped from the cage prowls about in your life. a ghost of dead business unfinished and naked cash payments between afterglow. intolerable shadow invites back into the fracture. watching the tree grow naked. going down to the port start from the shore of calculations and yawning. it is voracious. its wanting to be included wanting to grow fast. is asunder where the first was rooted out. sifting through the outrages of lightning and blood.           9.   refresh against the sightlines. in its sedimentation along the edge of the mountains. planes overhead. the love of trees indigent and muscular. exploratory chance to disappear bone by bone rancid. finally : slowly : she : exuberant and revolting forcing immobility. along the edges of the mountains replenishing asking Agnes asking Edith. grinding into their own emergence. an unlikely anger such unlikeness. sharp calmness shallow dehydration and a decomposition weary and threadbare. admit nothing turn by turn admitting a hand. expresses weariness. its evanescence its asking to be unlikely bone by bone.           10.   she tells more than she knows. a knot of suffocation. strangling itself. gestures your gait and resolutions. a recipe in permanent access in diversions. the flower dies at the end. a short stifled giggle. I had gone ‘too far’ asking toe to toe.   adoring and afar we attend. before talking. the horizon folding in on us. to give in advance of conductivity as a dispatch. regardless of protection she means to say. indeed.               11.   indeed. I can’t declare them for what they are. the approach goes like this. the dogs bark across the street. when and how and where. despairing answers. here it is finally. the days passing as an argument indeed indeed terrestrial. carnal excavating relentlessly. inaudible slow. howling recalcitrance behind the music. beneath the ground.
(from her to ravish meaning ravine On the other side artifice slumbers in the green. The shadow follows hour by hour hollow and gloomy and which call me forth) ……………………………….grafted onto the sentenceo a long time distant to hang on my belly obscure parallel images and tattoos age suggestive of the fingernail grazing the thigh the valley get turned on
1   an urban image from the eighties when we hung out at Chez Madam Arthur and at the back of the room women wrapped their arms around nights of ink and dawn      2   calendar of murmurs vague caresses about the planet and its water we could have confused words but there were doors open confetti in the midst of darkness gentle ways to swoon in a corner with she who put her tongue in my mouth      3   focus on yes, on the woman’s eyelids caress not silence not word focus beyond. Hold me back
You can read almost anything about angels, how they bite off the heads first, copulate with tigers, tortured Miles Davis until he stuck a mute in his trumpet to torture them back. The pornographic magazines ported into the redwoods. The sweetened breath of the starving. The prize livestock rolls over on her larval young, the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs of the clockworks. I would have a black bra hanging from the shower rod. I would have you up against the refrigerator with its magnets for insurance agents and oyster bars. Miracles, ripped thumbnails, everything a piece of something else, archangelic, shadow-clawed, the frolicking despair of repeating decimals because it never comes out even. Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm, the impurities of darkness sometimes called stars. Mostly the world is assignations, divorces conducted between rooftops. Forever and forever the checkbook unbalanced, the beautiful bodies bent back like paper clips, the discharged blandishing cardboard signs by the exits. Coppers and silvers and radiant traces, gold flecks from our last brush, brushfires. Always they’re espousing accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow not in the aimed-for heart but throat that has the say. There are no transitions, only falls.
We all think about suddenly disappearing. The train tracks lead there, into the woods. Even in the financial district: wooden doors in alleyways. First I want to put something small into your hand, a button or river stone or key I don’t know to what. I don’t have that house anymore across from the graveyard and its black angel. What counts as a proper goodbye? My last winter in Iowa there was always a ladybug or two in the kitchen for cheer even when it was ten below. We all feel suspended over a drop into nothingness. Once you get close enough, you see what one is stitching is a human heart. Another is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life. Whenever you put your feet on the floor in the morning, whatever the nightmare, it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion: the solidity of the boards, the steadiness coming into the legs. Where did we get the idea when we were kids to rub dirt into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania? Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.
When you hear the knives ring Turn the page. I wonder why I am not Myself of late, ridiculous glass edges Turn back on themselves And soon reveal The hand of an apprentice And godforsaken embarrassing torch, Stormy back hallways Out of the black and wooden theatres. Crystal Waters plus her driver Plus her entourage is still rolling out Of the Sands, Atlantic City On the soundtracks to shows Held over at The Fairmount She is throwing back shots With the mafia. I have learned To take apart this American Songbook And very fortunately as I would take My audience in confidence Threads of gold fall closely together Coming to break us off. At the first of the shows I sang this song And in between I saw him in the hall, What could I tell you? “Someday we’ll build on a hilltop high.”
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In the harsh glare of an easily reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost in the crack of an infinite sofa.  Everything falls apart, everything breaks down, torn into a million  fragments, Jericho everyday.   I want to be the blameless victim in this canceled puppet show, the marionette every mother loves, the one souvenirs are modeled from.    (In that lifetime, Elton John will write mushy ballads just  for me. Michael Jackson will want to be my best friend. He’d  take me to the Neverland Ranch, and by the llama feeding trough,  he’d say something like, “You’re a great guy, don’t give up,  stay positive!” And I’d say, “Michael, you fucking idiot, I am  positive!” And he’d say, “Oh, you’re so funny! Would you like  to touch Bubbles?”  And I would.)   In the crux of my hollow innocent youth, I believed that my teddy bears had feelings.  To cure me of this, my guardians made me give them to the church missionaries’ children. Scrubbed-clean rosy-cheeked blonde kids who smelled of sweat and talc, who were in constant wide-blue-eyed bewilderment as to why they were profusely perspiring in the tropics, instead of living out some winter wonderland Bobsey Twins fantasy, who were oblivious to their parents’ desperate efforts to save the dusky masses, ignorant enough to believe in the secret lives of stuffed animals.  I could not eat animal crackers because I did not want to hurt the poor things; but, braised the right way, I could eat any part of a pig, starting with the head, working on the soft flesh around the eyes, savoring its raspy tongue with a dipping sauce of ginger, chilies and lime.   Oh blameless innocent victim. What measures a lifetime?   I used to have this theory about how much life a human body could hold. It all had to do with the number of heartbeats. Each human is assigned a number determined by an unknown power cascading over the dark waters of the unformed Earth.    For some, it was a magnificently high number, seen only in Richie Rich comics, and for others, it was frightfully low, like twenty-six.  No bargaining, no coupons, no White Flower Day sale, no specials. Once you hit your number, you croak.  I imagined the angels in heaven and the demons in hell gathering to watch the counters turn, like how I enjoyed watching the speedometer line up to a row of similar numbers, and especially when the row of nines turned into  the row of zeros.   Oh blameless innocent victim. What measures eternity?   An eternal damnation. An everlasting love.   I could not imagine the night sky stretched out forever, so I decided that it came to an end at some point, by a velvet rope it ended and beyond that rope were row after row of cushioned seats,  a majestic cosmic theater, playing every movie I can remember.   I want to be able to evoke those blameless and innocent days, to revel in their ignorance and goodness as if they have the power  to protect and to heal, and to strengthen, and to bring me to safety  long after all other resources  were exhausted.   But I emerge anew in the wreckage, blinking in the sunlight,   the residue of salt water in my belly.   You know what they say, God never closes a door before making sure that the windows are barricaded and the fire escape is inaccessible.   I used to know how to stop the revolution of planets.   I used to know how to save the world.   Now, I don’t know anything anymore.
spilling water from my back, you call and i come. that exhausted walk to reach you breathless and no i didn’t run to see you, i’ve been smoking too much, same thing.   another awkward hug in the car as my face smashes your cheek that i can feel it leaving now is the saddest, a beautiful eruption you could have picked it off the tree and chowed   but you weren’t hungry. feeling it dying away all day much worse than the straining against the leash, another gorgeous thing that should not have happened, gone again.
We were application — aerial shapes investigating their causes as they unfolded their wandering life — possessed of temper, parents, talent, fancy — in books in which characters redeem being from the hands of infidels. I feel soaring pleasure.   When I was thirteen I opened my father — title page of my book —to explain exploded powers warmed by a glance. To penetrate the ocean behind the elements and give names — fidelity — from a stream of fire reduced to electricity — over the malignity of an alarming bed — the brightness of a familiar eye commences connection: These are the faces cooped up in one place, and his sweetest voice hiding how the blood circulates, and my peculiar trembled body, the seat of beauty.   At the end of two years every object inherited human feelings. I paused and brain exemplified generation. His child pursuing these reflections. My pale cheek and tremendous secrets of fingers.   Winter, spring passed — watch the blossom — it breathed hard —convulsive muscles of pearly whiteness — with his watery eyes disturbed by the first kiss traversing my bedchamber. His eyes held up the curtain of the bed. I remained listening, unfinished. My food its white steeple drenched by the rain.   We ascended into my room, putting my hands before my eyes —tingle — save me and save me — anticipated with such nervous joy I became capable of shooting forth from the trees — it was a divine spring — that night drawing me out I felt the sensations of others.   When shown the body they saw permission — I believe in innocence notwithstanding temptation — whom you loved was a creature who’d fill the air with birds serving you — feelings worked up by events — to wean us fro our future prospects towards a tenderness of fainting limbs, a type of me. I was encompassed by a bodily cloud. I remained rushing at the window.   They congregated around me, the unstained pinnacle. I arrived at the same lulling sounds: the giver of oblivion. The ascent is solemn, curling in wreaths — I sat upon the glittering peaks — swelled with sunlight over your narrow beds. I beheld the figure of a man at some distance. As he approached a mist came over my eyes. You are community. Instinctively lying down I covered myself with little winged animals, light from my eyes. Spreading my cloak I covered the ground. One part was open.   It was a paradise filled with milk. Uttering a few sounds the young man had been filled up. I awoke into my voice by his means — sun on the red leaves — mounted high in the heavens using gesticulations and a gush of tears. Feelings of kindness and gentleness overcame me. Fringed by deep lashes, I contemplated my companyion…
fleshes his dirty rotten hunka tin I am right strapped into head electrodes he sticks a gun in teen age drug Harry S Truman decided to drop first I am right sequence repeat dim jerky far away smoke cop rat bares his yellow teet kicks in the door I am right survivors burned time and place he throws atom bomb knocks man to floor you are wrong you are wrong he was looking for are wrong Breaks through door I’m poli outside bar Hiroshima has strayed into Dillinger’s right is making a difficult decision right survivors burned mixed you child I am he kicks him into 1914 movie if you are gay I am right wrong executioner officer I am cop right enough you are I am right right wrong Pentagon dim jerky far away smoke.   I cut up his cut-ups, allegory of an allegory of an allegory of an allegory of a waterfall of mental curlicues whose new meaning is no meaning in extremity. Is a Burroughs to eat? I am timid, abstract, complete, light fever, timid. Barefoot, yells Hey Pop, got any more Dick Tracys? Burroughs am paying one wrecked penny for the pleasure he’s wreaking on some “boy”; shooting quarts of toxins, skin a welcome mat, body heroically disjunct Picasso (two profiles, left front high…). The stapled urge for self-protection that…Danger is a refuge from more danger. Don’t even know what a Burroughs is.   Manhattan Project, first atom bomb test, New Mexico 1945: Oppenheimer and his boys think the planet could go critical. Oppenheimer refigures, the probability remains, “What the hell.” So-and-so many blasts: radioactive sex causes untold genetic mutations. A carnival of giants, vile luminosity sheeting off their scales and exoskeletons, march out of that desert looking for something to eat. I don’t want to die but witness APPETITE and MURDER tread the vile luminous sand: ant spider Gila monster rattler wasp rat locust lizard grasshopper rabbit praying mantis crow ant spider wasp…The entire town of Soda Bluff stampedes down narrow canyons scattering funeral lights beneath their trembling feet. The destruction of today. Last men, mercenaries on the last patrol, eat rations with dog mouths, then fool around in caustic green dusk; they wear Mylar capes and copper-studded jockstraps. Bud’s withheld a basket musta weigh two pounds of fresh peaches. Bud squirms down with a deep sigh, odor of penetration, he says, “I want to be so embraced.” The last ant cold mandibles his thigh, a howl and spasms from Bud’s lifted body mean death. I send my own spear into the enormous insect eye shattering a thousand selves —point touched pinpoint brain, blue sparks, burning isolation, burning rubber, ant collapses, cold heap of old parts. The reason Bud dies, so that his orgasm stays beyond. I don’t wonder who I am, I wonder where I am—still, nothing to do now but kick back and wait for orders.
White people leave the express at 96th Street, collectively, like pigeons from a live wire or hope from the hearts of Harlem. And I’m one of them, although my lover sleeps two stops north between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards, wishing my ass were cupped inside her knees and belly, wishing this in a dream thick with inequalities.   I live on Riverside Drive. My face helped get me here. I was ruddy with anticipation the day I interviewed for the rooms near the park with its snow-covered maples. I was full of undisguised hope as I strolled along the river, believing I belonged there, that my people inherited this wonderland unequivocally, as if they deserved it.   My lover buys twinkies from the Arabs, bootleg tapes on ‘25th, and carries a blade in her back pocket although her hands are the gentlest I’ve known. She ignores the piss smells on the corner, the sirens at 4 A.M., the men whose brains have dissolved in rum. And tries to trust a white woman who sleeps near the trees of Riverside.   When we go out together, we avoid expensive cafés on Columbus Avenue, jaunts to the Upper East Side. Harlem eyes us suspiciously or with contempt beneath half-closed lids. We have friends there, hidden in the ruins like gold, who accept us. When it snows, we walk boldly anywhere, as if the snow were a protection, or a death.
Long before the fresh apple crisis, my life had some form to it. I would wake in the mornings—I would perform something. For example, the day I tried, as one with acute passion might, to win one woman over but accidentally won another—that whole time I had been living like someone. Though I can’t remember his name. His model of optimism provided me with a certain geography that I inhabit in time of need. This time the need was surprising. People tend to have faith that the juice they drink in the morning is the same juice they have always drunk. And apples take their shape naturally. The guy, whose name escapes me now, taught me to look upon others’ concerns as mine to make at home. I was fond of doing many things at home, but my favorite was drinking juice. When my friends came by—they liked to suddenly show up with all kinds of breads in their hands, thinking they knew what I needed and planning to force it on me—I had to tell them I was busy with my juice. Two weeks before the crisis, I had been writing some poems about it. It was a warm day, not entirely different from other warm days in San Francisco. People were on the street. Pale people were on the street, making it to the park and lying there such that the next day they were a little browned. The poems I had written were failures, but dense ones. It seemed appropriate to think the person’s attempt at wholeness was a series of missteps, which if drawn across an afternoon might prove interesting to other people. I had a way of reminding my friends that we were all in pain, but a fruit tart kind of pain strangers can’t help but enjoy. That day I had, in a sense, gathered all my possessions and gone out onto the street with them. I awoke that morning with an urgency to prepare myself for something—not anything life threatening, but definitely personal.   My lover, then, wanted to spend much of her life asleep. She had no ostensible reaction to the city’s sudden depletion of all its fresh apples and no hope for them. In a world where a person’s tastes revolve around the kind of sleep she gets, I could not find four people who cared. I thought that if I could find those four people we could really do something. A few of my friends pretended they were chosen. A few neighbors felt bad and made offers. My mother called to console me. My lover—in actuality, the closest person to being a member of the encumbered troop, slept next to me. Sleep became our network: falling in and out of it for change. The rule of survival is that no two people can lie in the same bed and sleep at the same time. So I kept an eye on her and played this game of freshness. If by morning I could quickly run out and do seven things that did not involve longing, she would reward me. Before the crisis, the reward would have needed only to be an apple one. But after the apples were gone. The landscape usually contains the solution to what’s lost. Demographics help people in cars. Some people did not notice me. Some demographers lose sleep and do not notice me. That was two days before. The evening before it was two days before the crisis, I was thinking that I did not think I was asleep. I had been watching the sunlight take the corner of my room and my housemate’s cat in it. When I looked again, there was no light—but I had not been asleep. It’s the way people react to traumatic events. They say, “I had just been there” or will say, “She was just with me.” So the loss of light was emotional and the lost state—demographic. I began to trace things by their disappearance. Alone in the room, my memory, and anticipated darkness going for light. People like to talk about the daytime. People in strange moods often miss the daytime. Before the crisis it was not often that one would find me in strange moods. I had managed a particular kind of balance fortified by a certain satisfaction of taste. I was happy. I mean, I was in my juice.   Five weeks before the crisis, I was employed at the natural foods grocery around the corner from my house. I did not really work there, but I went there every week. All but the third Sunday of each month, I would walk in and find all kinds of juice on sale. Not to buy, but to stand next to. Shorter people have the privilege of proximity to most cardboard signs. That was one thing. I would stand there and be something for taller people who couldn’t see. I had gotten into the habit of improvised customer service as a way to peruse the juice aisles without being noticed. My parents thought my talents should have led me somewhere. My father would always say, “If you’re not going to be a people person, then numbers will have to do.” He was surprised that with all the time I had on my hands, I chose to spend most of it alone. Numbers then did hold some mystery for me, but mostly too high and far-reaching to explore. For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed. My decision to drink only fresh juice, which costs as much as a small satisfying breakfast, kept me busy rounding up cash. I would have to leave most friendships behind. As a way of keeping my life “wall-free,” I had to divide my time. I would spend the first part of the day searching for volunteer positions in organic juice factories. The second part of my day I would spend telling people about the first part. The other parts are not of substance here.   Twenty-five years before the crisis I had for the first time what would eventually become known to me as apple juice. Twenty-three years later a magazine editor would reject my first attempt to recount that experience in litany. I am always drinking in my poems, a good friend says.   In the first years of my life, everything I ate was mush. Today I will tolerate only the toughest of green vegetables and date people who will always forget this. When I had that remarkable glass of apple juice, I had no idea that one day I simply would not be able to find it. The city gets rid of its apples. People find themselves inventing fruit. The day I decided to write poems about it—it was twelve days before the rumors began and fourteen days before the media coverage—I had been resting in my best friend’s easy chair. We were discussing the rise of the smoothie industry when something fantastic occurred to me. Five days later I had twenty poems. When a person writes a poem about her passions, people on the street are bound to notice them. The passions overwhelm the body. She carries the body as though it were the book. The friend whose easy chair gave way to my failures moved out of town the next week, and though I miss her it was the failures that saved me. On every other day any kind of crisis one finds particular sayings helpful. If certain words are spoken quietly into a cup of hot water, with the handle of the cup turned toward the wall, whatever strength found in the person may be mirrored in the wall. The person leaves the house with her hand against this wall but strutting slightly.   In the alley behind the natural foods grocery, I met my second lover for the first time. Meeting people in vulnerable places accentuates the passion later. Or it may be so hot that the lover never thinks in the present. And the weather was so hot during the crisis. Only the alleys had shade. Forty-eight days into the crisis, while on a thirst strike, I had to make a run for the alley. Not as though people were after me, but the elements. The foundation of anyone feeling that they must get away is need; at the bottom of any body-based need is grace. When I appeared at the opening of the alley, a woman who not twenty-four hours later would be dozing in my bed was stacking crates against the east-side wall. Women who work against surfaces inspire me to do things—I thought about telling her, or—short women make me want things. All the time while I was growing up I put a lot of demands on my juice; forty-eight days into the crisis she made me forget it. I did not forget it, but was embroiled. The newspapers were saying things about the past. People were celebrating thick juice, and I kept writing those poems. That day in the alley I realized three things about life. While assisting her I learned three things to carry around with me, to disperse when needed. For six months during the crisis, I did not care about the crisis.   When my faith returned all my lovers were gone. That morning I woke to the two hundred and thirty-second day of the crisis; I was beneath my bed. It was the sixth day that I had awakened beneath my bed. I was lonely, but I was also sure. Life without juice had taken on the name and shape of my weakest character, who—when we passed on the street—did not know me. I knew it was me by the way my head felt: people find themselves in an idea and feel so specified by the idea that they are compelled to show it. Today all my ideas are liquid. That day of my faith, friends thinking I was sick came by to see me. It would be the last day I spent alone; I was happy, but still would not drink. The juice on my mind was no longer juice. There was an absence there, but one so constant it became familiar. I did not want to drink it.
My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our hair.   After a bath the cold metal soothing against my scalp, his hand cupping my chin.   My mother had a red pullover with a little yellow duck embroidered on it and a pendant made from a gold Victoria coronation coin.   Which later, when we first moved to Buffalo, would be stolen from the house.   The Sunn’i Muslims have a story in which the angels cast a dark mark out of Prophet Mohammad’s heart, thus making him pure, though the Shi’a reject this story, believing in his absolute innocence from birth.   Telling the famous Story of the Blanket in which the Prophet covers himself with a Yemeni blanket for his afternoon rest. Joined under the blanket first by his son-in-law Ali, then each of his grandchildren Hassan and Hussain and finally by his daughter Bibi Fatima.   In Heaven Gabriel asks God about the five under the blanket and God says, those are the five people whom I loved the most out of all creation, and I made everything in the heavens and the earth for their sake.   Gabriel, speaker on God’s behalf, whisperer to Prophets, asks God, can I go down and be the sixth among them.   And God says, go down there and ask them. If they consent you may go under the blanket and be the sixth among them.   Creation for the sake of Gabriel is retroactively granted when the group under the blanket admits him to their company.   Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside.   Asking the 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered.   In Hyderabad I prayed every part of the day, climbed a thousand steps to the site of Maula Ali’s pilgrimage.   I wanted to be those stairs, the hunger I felt, the river inside.   I learned to pronounce my daily prayers from transliterated English in a book called “Know Your Islam,” dark blue with gold calligraphed writing that made the English appear as if it were Arabic complete with marks above and below the letters.   I didn’t learn the Arabic script until years later and never learned the language itself.   God’s true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.   As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.   I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars.   When Abraham took Isaac up into the thicket his son did not know where he was being led.   When his father bound him and took up the knife he was shocked.   And said, “Father, where is the ram?”   Though from Abraham’s perspective he was asked by God to sacrifice his son and proved his love by taking up the knife.   Thinking to himself perhaps, Oh Ismail, Ismail, do I cut or do I burn.   I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.   Fourth son of a fourth son, my father was afflicted as a child and as was the custom in those days a new name was selected for him to protect his health.   Still the feeling of his rough hand, gently cupping my cheek, dipping the steel comb in water to comb my hair flat.   My hair was kept so short, combed flat when wet. I never knew my hair was wavy until I was nearly twenty-two and never went outside with wet and uncombed hair until I was twenty-eight.   At which point I realized my hair was curly.   My father’s hands have fortune-lines in them cut deeply and dramatic.   The day I left his house for the last time I asked him if I could hold his hand before I left.   There are two different ways of going about this.   If you have known this for years why didn’t you ask for help, he asked me.   Each time I left home, including the last time, my mother would hold a Quran up for me to walk under. Once under, one would turn and kiss the book.   There is no place in the Quran which requires acts of homosexuality to be punishable by lashings and death.  Hadith or scripture. Scripture or rupture.   Should I travel out from under the blanket.   Comfort from a verse which also recurs: “Surely there are signs in this for those of you who would reflect.”   Or the one hundred and four books of God. Of which only four are known—Qur’an, Injeel, Tavrat, Zubuur.   There are a hundred others—Bhagavad-Gita, Lotus Sutra, Song ofMyself, the Gospel of Magdalene, Popul Vuh, the book of Black BuffaloWoman—somewhere unrevealed as such.   Dear mother in the sky you could unbuckle the book and erase all the annotations.   What I always remember about my childhood is my mother whispering to me, telling me secrets, ideas, suggestions.   She named me when I moved in her while she was reading a calligraphy of the Imam’s names. My name: translated my whole life for me asPatience.   In India we climbed the steps of the Maula Ali mountain to the top, thirsting for what.   My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage. She had told me the reason why.   Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages.   I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she would give a new son.   I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sister’s first son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs.   It is the one betrayal of her—perhaps meaningless—that I have never forgiven myself.   There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.   You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God will still welcome you.   My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.
in ten Minutes  Come back: you will  have taught me chiNese  (sAtie).  shall I retUrn the favor?  Give you  otHer lessons  (Ting!)?  Or would you prefer  sileNce?
Two guys sucking each other in the steam room didn’t want anything to do with me, evidently— I left them to their comedy.    *   Legato longings: wish for walnuts, wish for water, wish to exorcise this morning’s debauch— two Fauré nocturnes.    *   In slow motion Steve tussled with a motorcycle trying to run me over on the boulevard of moon smut   splicing together bridges and lagoons, like the bride of Frankenstein rushing to overtake the inert   Real, a mass of facts, some conjugal, some comic— contrapuntal tenebrae!
for Kenward Elmslie Down in the boondocks rhematic sinsigns multiply    jug jug to hungry ghosts,  bursting open pearly gates.    “Aint no grace, aint no guilt,  popcorn twiddle, come full tilt”      handy pathfinders whoop    at no-restriction hurdles :      Da woid ob sin aint dare at all,  not in giggles nor reddening toes    no think blink  no tattle no buckle  high dick fun at the fair.   Vestigial legisigns just don’t operate,   healty wisps entwining and buzzing,   hinterland busy with fresh huggermugger.    Replica points:  you point your toes  in fact it’s toes we fluffily toss.   Secret moon lotion rub by reedy pool.   “They call me Googoo” I said, I…..      All upsurge, hot tip    green informants signify    the trees are barking    “cheeze it, the cops.”    Trees tease, twinkle.    That need being versed in country things:    guiltless I milked the cow,    slaughtered chicken,    swam with snakes,      unjust barefoot hobbledehoy    ahoy.
(Oakland)   Make it the place it was then,   so full it split vision to live there in winter   so late & wet abundance toppled toward   awful—birds of paradise a profusion   the ripe colors of anodized metal; in gutters   umbrellas smashed like pigeons,   bent ribs bright among black slack fluttering;   camellias’ pink imagoes dropping   into water & rotting, sweet stink—   & did not stop : the inundated   eye, over- populous urban eye,   the whole place, to look at it, was   a footprint in January : everywhere   cloudy water rising to fill in the outlines,   & meanwhile indoors differed by degree   alone : without love, loosed from God,   there were lovers & touch rushing in   to redraw your boundaries constantly   because it was a tune you kept   getting wrong, the refrain of what it meant   to live alone, months of that and then    .   sudden summer, sheer release, streets all cigarettes & sashay,  balls-out tube tops, low-riders & belly fat, the girls on the block   all like Oh no she didn’t, and girl, she did, she was mad skills  with press-ons & a cell phone telling him where to stick it, a kid   on her hip, just like that, summer, sheer beauty & lip gloss  that smelled like peaches, & you going to the store for whiskey   & condoms like everyone else on a hot, long afternoon  so long & hot it would just be sunburn to walk anywhere if it weren’t also   a pleasure, thoughtless & shiftless & horny & drunk,  just someone thinking summer wasn’t up to anything deep, & lo   there he was, his punk ass pink as a Viking in a tight  wifebeater & lingering by the public pool, drinking beer so sly   it didn’t look illegal, & he wasn’t a good idea but  did you have a light? & it seemed the whole summer went like that,   taking fire out of your pocket & giving it away, a ditty  you could whistle it was so cliché, like the numbers they gave you after   & you never called, the number of swollen nodes of the kissing  colds you got & later the number to call to get tested, the number of the bus   to the clinic, the number they gave you when they asked  you to wait, the number of questions asked, number of partners, number   of risks, number of previous tests, the number of pricks  —one—to draw the blood, the number of minutes you waited before   results, & then you decided you had to get the tune right,  the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, to take a number & wait in the long line   of the city’s bankrupt humanism like the bus that never comes  no matter how long you wait, & the grocery bag breaking, & if you were going   to sing that one, the one that sounds like all I got is bruised  tomatoes, broken glass & dirty bread & no one waiting at home, would you .   start with genius, as in, the spirit of a place?,   & small, as in of the back, wet in heat   & the urge to touch him there, skin   just visible between his jeans & t-shirt,   to see if he’s sweating, to see   if he feels what you feel?, & if he does,   is that all the spirit the place will give,   a small thing shared, just a phrase, not   a whole song, but something to build on?,   & if it isn’t bread & if it sure ain’t tomatoes   it isn’t empty, is it, like the signage you walk by   that fronts the Lakeside Church of Practical   Christianity, hawking a knowledge of God   so modest it seems trivial?, & it isn’t ever,   is it, the how to live it so it doesn’t   kill you, the where to touch it,   the when will genius sing your name   so it sounds like a place you can live?
If I could hold light in my hand   I would give it to you   and watch it become your shadow.
His hand in hold so trigger-tight its blood believes in ghosts. It clings with finger set on steel and waits inside a dream of ducks. The twilight burns into a rising arc of eastern sky as sun reveals herself too proud and instantly receives full-face a splash of mallard flock. A shotgun blasts the yellow into streaming pinks and gives the creek its new-day taste of echoed blood. Two green head ghosts fly through the pulse of dawn upon a trigger’s touch. The creek empties of sound. In silence human fingers find wet feet of web and carry in each hand a bird whose only cry comes in color.
In the backyard of my father’s house a hen’s warm neck once filled the center of my pale fist. Her place on the stump still wears my shadow like a stain.
You marched into the gray eyes of dawn feeling older than the bones that held their ground like grazing, aged cattle waiting, eyes closed to the wind, on a winter, slaughter morning. You searched through the fog for a sign, but there was no sun to burn the way, no burst of rainbow bridge to keep you from the cattle call.
I never thought I’d keep a record of my pain or happiness like candles lighting the entire soft lace of the air around the full length of your hair/a shower organized by God in brown and auburn undulations luminous like particles of flame   But now I do retrieve an afternoon of apricots and water interspersed with cigarettes and sand and rocks we walked across:  How easily you held my hand beside the low tide of the world   Now I do relive an evening of retreat a bridge I left behind where all the solid heat of lust and tender trembling lay as cruel and as kind as passion spins its infinite tergiversations in between the bitter and the sweet   Alone and longing for you now I do
One day after another— Perfect. They all fit.
1 Who knew it’s quite all right that I downed three gin-and-tonics (can’t fit male inside female part on fanny pack) at four o’clock the Dyke March day of NY Pride? Who knew Manhattan streets would liquefy and lurch with dames sans bras, sans hair, sans shirt in step with beer-can band led by a skirt- ed trans in green brassiere, led by the cops whose sentries are staid as posts with glasses on, lined up beside the march like S/M tops? (They seem to think Gay Pride’s this weekend’s yawn.) (Pit stop at McD’s, can’t clip pack back on.) Who knew she’d march beside me hand-in-hand and who’d expect me to remember names when Liz’s girlfriend saw us and waved “Hi. It’s . . . Anna”? (CNN shot feed, then frames.) Booze-stymied by the glare of girls and sky, how could I choose? Should I grip hand, or pray wondering: Is today today the day she’ll let me turn the key, lead her inside?    2 Okay, I’m sober now. Today is just the kind of day she talks but feels no lust.    3 Beside her isn’t bad. Fan-stirred, the air is humid and the theater is packed. An ear-cuffed thespian tries to fix the cold, our leading ladies sweat it out in back. A prim man to my right begins to sneeze. My nose is in agreement. The perfume from Queen Mother there could clear the room. This shadow play across her face is fine. Her arm’s near mine, which means exactly nothing. Hope’s hope hums on through separate listening. That skull, opaque to me as Midland’s vault, her silky crop, its pepper dabbed with salt — I chuckle at an apt sardonic line. Her suede complexion, lifts up, checks the time.    4. Les Nouvceaux from La Nouvelle Justine I don’t love her. She doesn’t love me. Neither does this waiter who may think it strange when young girls dine with staid dames twice their age on salade de Bastille and pain de Sade. I don’t like sitting by her like wet cloth. I don’t like restaurants whose queers pawn sex to the bachelor bunch who want a thrill. I don’t like dining with my, well, not-ex, both measuring the humid air for signs of sparks I see by parts will not ignite. I’d rather have a knock-down, drag-out fight that cleared the joint than watch another guy get spanked by Corset Kris, who’d like to grab a tit, not spend hip humping hairy thighs. I’d rather I were twice her age and wise. I’d spin cruel stories of past day of bliss then give my own hands covert exercise and send her home to bed without a kiss.    5. L’Addition   30 for the play and 10 for gins, 10 for two cabs and 40 for the eats, at least the metro home was freezer-cold, at least the Broadway Local still had seats at 96th, the local went express. I blistered home ten sockless humid blocks back to my solo digs for solo sex. I got this poem for my 90 bucks.
Darkened not completely dark let us walk in the darkened field trees in the field outlined against that which is less dark under the trees are bushes with orange berries dark green leaves not poetry’s mixing of yellow light blue sky darker than that darkness of the leaves a modulation of the accumulated darkness orange of the berries another modulation spreading out toward us it is like the reverberation of a bell rung three times like the call of a voice the call of a voice that is not there.   We will not look up how they got their name in a book of names we will not trace the name’s root conjecture its first murmuring the root of the berries their leaves is succoured by darkness darkness like a large block of stone hauled on a wooden sled like stone formed and reformed by a dark sea rolling in turmoil.
1 Not sweet sixteen not even sweet sixteen and she’s moaning not even sixteen years old and she’s moaning not even sweet sixteen and she’s moaning the words moaning out the words to “Precious Lord” she says “ain’t no harm to moan” and she’s moaning it’s Aretha in the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit in 1956 words moaned out so that she becomes denuded no more little black dress she has nothing to hide no more little black dress she has nothing left to hide.   Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the words and the music Thomas Dorsey wrote the words and the music for “Precious Lord” Thomas Dorsey aka Georgia Tom wrote other songs one of the other songs “Deep Moaning Blues” Thomas Dorsey: “I like the long moaning groaning tone” Georgia Tom moaned “Deep Moaning Blues” with Ma Rainey Georgia Tom and Ma Rainey moan they moan and groan their moaning and groaning make you see moaning and groaning you’re made to see they have nothing.    2 The first time Mahalia does it as one interconnected phrase she does it as three in one three words in one phrase three in one: “take-en-n—my-ah-aah—ha-an-nd” Mahalia does it in the same year in 1956 the same year as Aretha same but different the second time it is more aggressive it’s more aggressive: “take-ake my-ah han-and” Mahalia was a big fine woman Mahalia was denuded she sang “Precious Lord” at the funeral of Martin Luther King Aretha sang “Precious Lord” at the funeral of Mahalia.   Thomas Dorsey met Mahalia met her for the first time in 1928 it was in 1928 that Georgia Tom moaned with Ma Rainey he moaned with Ma Rainey he moaned and he groaned with Ma Rainey he met Mahalia and he taught her how to moan “you teach them how to say their words in a moanful way” to say their words how to say his words Mahalia was a big fine woman Mahalia was denuded Dorsey knew the heavier the voice the better the singer Dorsey knew as any teacher knows the heavier the better.    3 Al Green has a softened voice he has a voice made softened he was made to sing softened by Willie Mitchell in 1972 softened and softened and softened Al Green became Rev. Al Green of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in 1980 a tabernacle is a fixed or movable habitation habitation where you stay together with the lord Al Green has a softened voice he has a voice made softened he was made to sing softened on “Let’s Stay Together” in 1982 he was made to sing softened on “Precious Lord.”   Photograph of Thomas Dorsey photograph of a smooth operator photograph of Georgia Tom photo of a smooth operator the photo smoothed out retouched softened one side of the face completely light one side of the face all dark one side merges into the light smoothed out softened one side merges into the dark smoothed out made softened in the photograph a smooth operator is lighting a cigarette slender fingers hold a matchbox hold a match slender fingers hold a softened flame against the softened dark.  4   “Lead me” sing “lead me” they move with a repetitive rhythm Dom Mocquereau: “rhythm is the ordering of the movement” repetitive rhythm orders them to move on “lead” they move with all their weight on “lead” it sounds like “feed” it’s the Soul Stirrers it’s the most rhythmic music you ever heard repetitive rhythm it sounds like “feed me” S.R. Crain tenor A.L. Johnson baritone J.J. Farley bass Edmond Jabès: “can we be healed by repetition?” the Soul Stirrers move with a repetitive rhythm sing “feed me.”   Thomas Dorsey came to Chicago came looking for deliverance Georgia Tom came in 1916 the Soul Stirrers in 1937 to get deliverance you have to wait on the movements of providence he played piano he sang at buffet flats at rent parties he was a smooth player and he sang softly a smooth player they called him “the whispering piano player” the most popular dance at the parties was the slow drag he learned how to drag easy how to sing softly how to drag easy how to wait on the movements of providence.    5 Soul Stirrers move with a repetitive rhythm sing “feed me” repetitive rhythm orders them to sing “feed me” R.H. Harris sings lead he sings the essential word R.H. Harris taught Sam Cooke and Sam Cooke taught Johnny Taylor Johnny Taylor “Who’s Making Love” 1968 R.H. Harris: “they got a touch of me even if they don’t know me” what they got a touch of touch of tongue love R.H. Harris taught them to study the essential word the word brings it to a picture it’s the lord making love.   Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the words and the music Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the essential word wrote “precious” not “blessed” the essential word is “precious” this was to be enshrined as a moment of epiphany moment when he wrote the better-sounding word moment of épiphanie epiphania epiphano epiphaneia epiphanies moment of epiphany essential word shining picture Dorsey: “that thing like something hit me and went all over me” that thing must be that same thing went all over him.    6 Clara Ward’s real nasal her nasality makes her a real moaner she moans the three in one three words in one word she moans so that one word becomes three one becomes three: “thru-uuu-uah” double-clutches just like Aretha: “thru-ah thru-uuu-uah the night” sounds just like Aretha because Aretha sounds just like her Aretha followed Clara Ward note for moaning note denuded Aretha followed denuded Clara and did Aretha follow her to the lord to the lord to the light.   Thomas Dorsey was invited to Philadelphia by Gertrude Ward Mrs. Gertrude Mae Murphy Ward the mother of Clara in 1931 Mrs. Ward was told in a vision was told to go and to sing Dorsey was invited to teach the Wards how to sing how to say his words in a moanful way Dorsey liked the long moaning groaning tone Mrs. Ward was told in a vision a vision from the lord Dorsey taught Clara and Clara taught Aretha how to say his words in a moanful way all through the night.    7 Sounds like “feed me” doesn’t sound like the Soul Stirrers it’s not the Soul Stirrers it’s the Kings of Harmony the Kings of Harmony with Carey Bradley on lead Carey Bradley was taught by Silas Steele the first hard lead Silas Steele sang lead for the Blue Jay Singers those singers recorded the first quartet version of a Dorsey song Silas Steele sang hard with a repetitive rhythm question is can we be healed by repetition over “feed me” Carey Bradley sings hard: “take-ah my hand.”   Blue Jay Singers the first quartet to record a Dorsey song in 1931 those singers recorded “If You See My Saviour” those singers: “if you see my saviour tell him that you saw me” in 1931 Georgia Tom recorded “Please Mr. Blues” Georgia Tom recorded in 1931 with Tampa Red Georgia Tom and Tampa Red recorded a low moaning blues “Please Mr. Blues” is a deep low-down moaning blues those singers: “please be careful handle me like a child” if you saw their saviour you would see Mr. Blues.    8 Brother Joe May has a big voice has a big and loud voice Brother Joe May the thunderbolt of the Middle West the way he sang “pra-aaa-aaa-aaa-shus” is like thunder he was taught to sing “pra-aaa-aaa-aaa-shus” by Mother Smith he was taught to sing by Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith she was called Mother he called her Mother Mother Smith: “the lord just anoints me while I’m singing” when you’re anointed something goes all over you must be that same thng went all over her went all over her son.   Mrs. Willie May introduced “If You See My Saviour” in 1930 this was before she was called Mother twenty years before Brother Joe May sang “pra-aaa-aaa-aaa-shus” in 1930 in Chicago at the National Baptist Convention during the morning devotions at the convention she sang “you saw me” during the morning devotions in 1930 in Chicago Georgia Tom recorded “She Can Love So Good” in 1931 in Chicago Georgia Tom recorded “Please Mr. Blues” if you saw her you’d see Mr. Blues loving her so good.    9 Way past sixteen way past sweet sixteen and she’s moaning she says “when I don’t feel like singing I moan” it’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe at The Hot Club de France in 1966 Sister Rosetta had dyed her hair red played a hollow-body jazz guitar Sister Rosetta has a resonating vibrato she moans “ho-oo-oo-oo-meh” with a resonating vibrato she moans out “ho-oo-oo-oo-meh” becomes resonant “when I don’t feel like singing I moan” she becomes completely resonant she has nothing left to hide.   Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the words and the music Thomas Dorsey wrote the words and the music for “Precious Lord” the song is an answer song to another song answer to George Nelson Allen’s “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?” George Nelson Allen thought the answer was no a cross for everyone “there’s a cross for everyone” Thomas Dorsey thought the answer was no “see you got to be susceptible for whatever comes in the ear” he got Sister Rosetta to be susceptible got everyone susceptible.
1 Those who hear the train they had better worry worry those who hear they had better worry worry.    2 No disgrace to worry to have the worried life blues might do some good to be worried in the hour of our need.    3 Run run run away going to run run run away there are those who think they’re going to run away.    4 To hear and to be facing and to be facing what is heard to hear and to be face to face with what is heard.    5 Run run run away they’re going to run run run away there are those who think they’re going to run away from the train.    6 Fort built to protect the community from desert raiders community thought to protect itself from raiders.    7 Those who hear the train they had better worry worry better worry worry about a gift of tears.    8 Those who are gathered in the fort had better learn they had better learn how to cure their wounds.    9 The train with its poison and its tongue the lurking train with its poison and its tongue.    10 Those who are gathered better learn to be insensitive learn how to put on a show of being insensitive.    11 Danger of its poison and of its tongue danger of its poison and of its tongue against our teeth.    12 Had better break the habit the habit of prayer better let the jokes come back to us when we’re at prayer.    13 What really kills me is standing in the need of prayer standing in a gathering in the need of prayer.    14 Don’t if we don’t if we don’t break the habit we will be made to climb all the steps of the ladder.    15 Brood over someone else’s dream: three-story red tower beneath the tower the train is always departing.    16 Danger of its tongue for those gathered like a group gathered like a group of all virgins with their downcast eyes.    17 There is this problem with cutting off the prayer hand there is this problem with the other hand.    18 How insensitive is how those who hear better be how insensitive how unmoved and cold they had better be.    19 You can call him you can call him up and ask him if we had only asked for “Sleep Walk by Santo & Johnny.    20 Red tower green sky three-story tower against green sky beneath the tower the train is always departing.    21 Don’t break it be made to climb all the steps we don’t break it we’ll be made to climb all the steps.    22 Ant on the floor the small ant on the kitchen floor the small ant anticipates by sound or shadow.    23 Light turns out in the kitchen when somebody pulls on the string those gathered not able to anticipate the danger.    24 If we had only stayed in the school of the prophets in the school of the prophets who catch thoughts from words.  25 Ant on the floor the small ant on the kitchen floor those gathered not able to anticipate the danger.    26 Those who are gathered are fondled and taken by the hand taken by the hand and made to climb all the steps.    27 Perfectly built fort bound to make the community unhappy bound to make those in the community unhappy.    28 What really kills me is standing in the need of prayer I’m standing in the need of jokes that come back.    29 Standing in the need of prayer in a perfectly built fort bound to make you unhappy bound to make me unhappy.    30 Not broken the habit of prayer not been broken those who are gathered better learn how to cure their wounds.
Love comes in spurts.   RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS  1 And goes is gone cause for mourning head in hands in tears gonna be a long long wait for the resurrection of the dead.   There are birds there is birdsong unmourning and unmournful at sunrise in the white light there is a garden with high walls around it jardin de plaisir of mint and lavender of hyssop in hedges glassy beads of water on velvet leaves purple-flaked lupin spikes above velvet pulmonaria there is a gardener la belle jardinière bare-breasted and bare-footed bouquets of all flowers in her arms and woven in her hair.    2 And it hurts not good but bad to see a man head in hands in tears it breaks you up to see a man come down in tears.   There are birds there is birdsong having come through hunger and danger there is free song a free weaving of many songs song against song and other songs clustered/spun out in a blending of wavy pitches tant doucement the phrase means what the songs mean freshness that meaning so sweetly and freely as a gardener weaves flowers in her hair.    3 Can we stay in the weave of that meaning can we/should we attempt to stay to linger in a pleasure garden everlasting dream of love tomorrow its unseen/secret structure when our time remains a bad time and what time wasn’t bad wasn’t and isn’t a time of hunger and danger of young men and older men in tears our time a time of terror and counterterror can we/should we our time remaining a really bad time a really down and dirty time of terror what walls do not fall and who says they have no fear.    4 And boo-hoo-hoo like dolls hurts breaks you up like dolls get broken the visible human the visibly spastic plastic.   There are birds there is birdsong unmourning and unmournful having come through there is a garden with swept gravel paths dream designed/bel et bon designed connecting and interconnecting non brisé where men and women are in contemplation in conversation in one another’s eyes there is a gardener holding her bouquets and holding her skirts like the light like so sweetly woven song like love never for sale.
How long will the bed that we made together hold us there? Your stubbled cheeks grazed my skin from evening to dawn, a cloud of scattered particles now, islands of shaving foam slowly spiraling down the drain, blood drops stippling the water pink as I kiss the back of your neck, our faces framed inside a medicine cabinet mirror. The blade of your hand carves a portal out of steam, the two of us like boys behind frosted glass who wave goodbye while a car shoves off into winter. All that went unnoticed till now — empty cups of coffee stacked up in the sink, the neighborhood kids up to their necks in mounds of autumn leaves. How months on a kitchen calendar drop like frozen flies, the flu season at its peak followed by a train of magic-markered xxx’s — nights we’d spend apart. Death must work that way, a string of long distance calls that only gets through to the sound of your voice on our machine, my heart’s mute confession screened out. How long before we turn away from flowers altogether, your blind hand reaching past our bedridden shoulders to hit that digital alarm at delayed intervals — till you shut it off completely.
I went to my mother’s room at 13 past midnight, and told her I was dying. I’d wet the bed, I’d had this crazy dream, about a sexy neighbor I’d been spying on. Well, I didn’t tell her that. I mean, the day before she asked who I was eyeing when I didn’t want to go outside for ice cream. The truck was parked out front, and she was buying, but I couldn’t join the other screaming kids — not with Lance applying suntan lotion to his muscled teenage skin. Stretched out on a beach towel in his front yard, his body mystified me, while mine seemed happy to defy me. My dick would tent my cut-offs at the sight of him. I wore two pair of underwear, but even then I thought I’d burst right through the seams. So I didn’t dare tell mother what I’d dreamed, though she did think to ask me. I’d have been a fool to tell her that. She thought my blush was any boy’s, puzzling out his sexuality, but I swear it was as much because the fantasies were always other boys. some from my baseball team, some the roughnecks at school, but usually Lance. He was flying naked in the dream I had that night, the one that made me think that God was mad and killing me. I was lying (also naked — and hard as cinder block) on the beach towel I’d seen him lay across the grass the day before. I tried to understand the signs implying I might turn into some kind of freaky thing. But it would have been cruel to tell my mother that, especially when she was already crying, and trying not to laugh at the same time, when I showed her what came out of me. She apologized for throwing such a scene, said I was growing up to be a man, that’s all it meant, said it was normal for a boy my age’s thing to start uprising like a metal beam. She apologized again that I didn’t have my dad around to train an 11-year old boy in the ways of puberty. I was as stupefied as I’ve ever been. She never mentioned him. And I have never turned a deeper red than I did then, at 26 past midnight, when my mother helped me change my sheets, and said the next day she’d teach me to wash them. And then she said she’d ask the man across the street to talk to me. Would that be okay? Or would I feel more comfortable with someone younger, like his son?
1.   It wasn’t over a woman that war began, but it’s better To see it this way, my myth professor loved to say, a man From the South rumored to extort the bodies of college girls Into higher grades. My girlfriend of the time told me so —   He was a creep, she Got an A in the class and liked his joke about religion As self-mutilation, it was Ramadan then and, O Helen, I was fasting. I lie awake in a desert night east   Of the Atlantic on the verge of rain, the catapulted grains Of sand on hot zinc roof, the rustle of leaves, the flap Of peeling bark on trees whose names I do not know, and where Would I find a botany guide here. Water flowed   Like a river from the Jabal once. There were elephant pools, alligator Streams, and a pond for the devil to speak in human tongues. All desiccant names now after an earthquake   Shuffled the ground decades ago. It will rain soon, I’m assured, since nothing has stopped The birds from migration. All the look-alikes Are already here: the stork, the heron.   The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one That aesthetizes you more.
At a desk made of glass, In a glass walled-room With red airport carpet,   An officer asked My father for fingerprints, And my father refused,   So another offered him tea And he sipped it. The teacup Template for fingerprints.   My father says, it was just Hot water with a bag. My father says, in his country,   Because the earth knows The scent of history, It gave the people sage.   I like my tea with sage From my mother’s garden, Next to the snapdragons   She calls fishmouths Coming out for air. A remedy For stomach pains she keeps   In the kitchen where She always sings. First, she is Hagar   Boiling water Where tea is loosened. Then she drops   In it a pinch of sage And lets it sit a while. She tells a story:   The groom arrives late To his wedding Wearing only one shoe.   The bride asks him About the shoe. He tells her He lost it while jumping   Over a house-wall. Breaking away from soldiers. She asks:   Tea with sage Or tea with mint?   With sage, he says, Sweet scent, bitter tongue. She makes it, he drinks.
Between what should and what should not be Everything is liable to explode. Many times I was told who has no land has no sea. My father Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story Of a sycamore tree he used to climb When he was young to watch the rain.   Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.   My brother believed bad dreams could kill A man in his sleep, he insisted We wake my father from his muffled screams On the night of the day he took us to see his village. No longer his village he found his tree amputated. Between one falling and the next   There’s a weightless state. There was a woman Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand. When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew Could turn anyone into one-half reptile. I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being   The only one left. When we woke my father He was running away from soldiers. Now He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king And tried not to stop. He flew But mother woke him and held him for an hour,   Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward. Maybe if I had just said it.Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe I don’t know much about dreams But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead Know about the dying and sometimes Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree My father used to climb   When he was young to watch the rain stream, And he would gently swing.
The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows, They know what they love, milk in the grain.   When it happens, there will be no time to look for anyone. Husband, children, nine brothers and sisters.   You will drop your sugarcane-stick-beating of plastic bucket, Stop shouting at birds and run.   They will load you in trucks and herd you for a hundred miles. Old men will teach you trade with soldiers at checkpoints.   You will give them your spoon, blanket and beans, They’ll let you keep your life. And if you jump off the truck,   The army jeep trailing it will run you over. Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land.   Later, you will stand in distribution lines and won’t receive enough to eat. Your mother will weave you new underwear from flour sacks.   And they’ll give you plastic tents, cooking pots, Vaccine cards, white pills, and wool blankets.   And you will keep your cool. Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them.   Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.
1. Here, shooting stars linger They give out A sparkling trail like a cauterized incision   Silver, or amber If the moon is low and rising red     2. And the rain melts the roads And the roads Can rupture a spleen Or oust a kidney stone   As for the heart It needs a beginning The narrative Burden of events     3. “Mize, zey eat mize” The Frenchman exclaimed with a smile “Rraized and shipped from za States”   We raise rats! I thought That’s a lot of protein!   “Maize maize!” it was, after our chickens Have had their fill     4. She was the only nurse in town before the war She spoke seven languages and died suddenly He was a merchant He’s a doorman now and buys us cigarettes     5. Here we are with love pouring out of every orifice Here they are dancing Around the funeral pyre, the corpse in absentia     6. One of the drivers ran over the neighbor’s ducks The neighbor demanded compensation For the post-traumatic stress disorder he accurately anticipates   Do you know what it’s like To drive on roads occupied By animal farms: you cannot tell Who killed who or how Many ducks were there to begin with     7. In the morning, elephant grass moves the way Mist is visible in the breeze but doesn’t dampen the skin     8. Today, I yelled at three old women Who wouldn’t stop bargaining for pills they didn’t need One wanted extra For her grandson who came along for the ride     9. Like lip sores The asphalt blisters in the rain   And the boys Fill the holes with dirt and gravel And broken green branches Then wait:   No windex. No flowers or newspapers And gratuity is appreciated     10. “I have ants in my leg” And “My leg went to sleep” Are not the same thing!   The French argue There is no sleep in a tingling numbness The symptom of sluggish blood:   I agree. Me too my leg has been anted And we are learning to reconcile The dark with the electric     11. Four days the river runs to the border Nine days to learn it wasn’t the shape Of your nose that gave you away And debts are paid off in a-shelter-for-a-day   A pile of wood plus change in your pocket Is a sack of potatoes and change in another’s     12. No more running long or short distance The old women Snicker at me when I pass them by     13. She was comatose post-partum And the beekeeper Bathed her in love everyday   When she recovered I gave up What he’d promised me for the woman Who took up nursing their newborn Since as coincidence would have it Her name was Om Assel — Mother of Honey     14. The translation of a medical interview Is not a poem to be written   Come recite a verse from childhood with meI see you’re unable to weep, does loveHave no command over you? The sea’s like the desertNeither quenches the thirst     15. Here, dry grass burns the moon Here, a clearing of grass is a clearing of snakes     16. And the rain has already been cleansed from the sky The clinic is empty, soon The earth will unseal like a jar Harvest is the season that fills the belly     17. Here, I ride my bicycle invisible Except for a crescent shadow and the Milky Way Is already past     18. And a mirror gives the moon back to the moon Home is an epilogue:   Which came first Memory or words?
I spent a night turning in bed, my love was a feather, a flat   sleeping thing. She was very white   and quiet, and above us on the roof, there was another woman I   also loved, had addressed myself to in   a fit she returned. That   encompasses it. But now I was lonely, I yelled,   but what is that? Ugh, she said, beside me, she put   her hand on my back, for which act   I think to say this wrongly.
Tonight, nothing is long enough— time isn’t. Were there a fire, it would burn now.   Were there a heaven, I would have gone long ago. I think that light is the final image.   But time reoccurs, love—and an echo. A time passes love in the dark.
All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain.   What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it   that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me   something other than this, something not so insistent— am I to be locked in this final uneasiness.   Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out   of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.
To Flossie II 1  Why go further? One might conceivably rectify the rhythm, study all out and arrive at the perfection of a tiger lily or a china doorknob. One might lift all out of the ruck, be a worthy successor to—the man in the moon. Instead of breaking the back of a willing phrase why not try to follow the wheel through—approach death at a walk, take in all the scenery. There’s as much reason one way as the other and then—one never knows—perhaps we’ll bring back Eurydice—this time! _______________   Between two contending forces there may at all times arrive that moment when the stress is equal on both sides so that with a great pushing a great stability results giving a picture of perfect rest. And so it may be that once upon the way the end drives back upon the beginning and a stoppage will occur. At such a time the poet shrinks from the doom that is calling him forgetting the delicate rhythms of perfect beauty, preferring in his mind the gross buffetings of good and evil fortune.2  Ay dio! I would say so much were it not for the tunes changing, changing, darting so many ways. One step and the cart’s left you sprawling. Here’s the way! and—you’re hip bogged. And there’s blame of the light too: when eyes are humming birds who’ll tie them with a lead string? But it’s the tunes they want most,—send them skipping out at the tree tops. Whistle then! who’d stop the leaves swarming; curving down the east in their braided jackets? Well enough—but there’s small comfort in naked branches when the heart’s not set that way.________________   A man’s desire is to win his way to some hilltop. But against him seem to swarm a hundred jumping devils. These are his constant companions, these are the friendly images which he has invented out of his mind and which are inviting him to rest and to disport himself according to hidden reasons. The man being half a poet is cast down and longs to rid himself of his torment and his tormentors. 3  When you hang your clothes on the line you do not expect to see the line broken and them trailing in the mud. Nor would you expect to keep your hands clean by putting them in a dirty pocket. However and of course if you are a market man, fish, cheeses and the like going under your fingers every minute in the hour you would not leave off the business and expect to handle a basket of fine laces without at least mopping yourself on a towel, soiled as it may be. Then how will you expect a fine trickle of words to follow you through the intimacies of this dance without—oh, come let us walk together into the air awhile first. One must be watchman to much secret arrogance before his ways are tuned to these measures. You see there is a dip of the ground between us. You think you can leap up from your gross caresses of these creatures and at a gesture fling it all off and step out in silver to my finger tips. Ah, it is not that I do not wait for you, always! But my sweet fellow—you have broken yourself without purpose, you are—Hark! it is the music! Whence does it come? What! Out of the ground? Is it this that you have been preparing for me? Ha, goodbye, I have a rendezvous in the tips of three birch sisters. Encouragez vos musiciens! Ask them to play faster. I will return—later. Ah you are kind.—and I? must dance with the wind, make my own snow flakes, whistle a contrapuntal melody to my own fugue! Huzza then, this is the dance of the blue moss bank! Huzza then, this is the mazurka of the hollow log! Huzza then, this is the dance of rain in the cold trees.
I walked in the house on the flat aspect of the wood I took rectangular instruction of the wood   when I walked I turned at the wall and on the flat I moved steadily   unimpeded, not tumbling, climbing or short of breath. I walked in ease on the flat.        Something electric charged into our account and zinged out of it, pre-instructed   and paid for the house. I felt house on my heel then instep and toe. I had a bad foot and I paid to get it fixed so I could walk here. I paid for the house and I paid for the foot that touches it. I paid to be directed rectangularly and down a hall. I curved my body to direct my waste through a hole. I am helped and paying for it.   all of me exchanged, housing exchange.              I saw us standing  up in the world. And we sank into  exchange  vibrating transparency  like a sea nettle  afloat in the night sea   the edges of the sea-veil  tensed slapping above, visible when the wind crevassed and doilied      If there is a ceiling to exchange  and above it sky  I don’t can’t see it and I don’t know why  I want it  above my house which is crystalline gel edges    because the whole world’s disappeared  viewed as exchange             I broke my arm and the window integrally to exchange.   I paid someone to fix me and improve the window, triple-glazing it, and warmer I rebounded knit in knit up. All parties to the event’s aftermath  were paid.             Suppose I did not go in pain  to hospital, did not visit and revisit for x-rays, left the window smashed  and sat here by it,  stuck up  among the crystalline  and cold. I was painful and determined not to play, and with the other unemployed weighed —    the ghostship sagged with holes.                —So you want to be a thing outside exchange?    Drain out the dying bath  see what color you are?           The coin changed hands     identical with a will to transact.
Please god love me and buy me   Read this hillock and ride me Wraith typing all day for money.   God bought me today for two silver fish in a can God bought me tomorrow for bland in a pan and a card an email from Rebecca   Bought four hours of my control alt delete shut down Bought a new day-section with a headstand   My commerce in shall   Sky like a grandstand Transact   God performed me today for a half minute lucky in locker room hiding my boobs from the kids and my hair is silky and my mane shot silk gold   Bought a book on economy Georgie Bataille Called about plane tickets Georgie Bataille I bought my debt today Georgie Bataille hooray Debt off my God today   God off my debt in a macular hole   I dream of an end like a fount to this night Run thinner and thinner and then it’s all light Macerated in signal   by my go   I bought my ghost I walk my ghost
Raise up your back like an insect on the face of the nation He took Miss Mousie on his knee, O say little mouse will you marry me? Getting hair cut this morning illegally I can’t afford it Fourteen fifteen I depend on you and roiling unlap this morn The mind refrigerated all night Now to clarify the broth skim off the oil & swallow it is your oil I must have it shorter so it grows longer in unison A glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder  and tears
I am Invested in by a Huge Fund Heavy highquality furniture Sense of heavy Addiction glossy pleasance   I was lying Down on a yoga mat  My bones basketing air Barely draped in skin the basket Effulged by local Air Highquality scented humid air to support My orchid Skin   Suffuged in this Air expense I nearly floated Who was my Body   I am comfortable I am comfortable Flying my spirit   On a long leash She is in the wind  I am in the belle belle jar shellacked and brittle  begins to ding     How can I From inside this comfort   Represent Hope to   No no   I am Too tempted   To think I Deserve it  Rigidly and with effort   know my privilege       I know my fluorescent doorway   A rectangle Among the ceiling tiles   Ordinary flecked coated 1) foam rectangles   and one hard white light regularly rubbled  2) glass rectangle    these are my choices the    ceiling tile I would tear in behind the  Ugly lattice to the Duct area  Unscrew the grille Smallen myself Into the dark cold Square pipe  To share My cold What is in  My basket Bone-basket  With the other breathers/Workers   Or through the fluorescent door    Means giving up On going behind the lattice.     All that’s allowed Through the flow light   Is what Is shined upon   The light bends looking at my Skin and hair and green blouse    When I concentrate The light bending All at once Hooks my outsides   Hooks them into itself    Now I am  absent that   I am not / shined upon    very small dusty    lizardlike a toad a turd    on a tabletop corner And the outside of that is hooked away    wow my parents   hooked away People   on the street skin and clothing    hung on hangers    from electric wires   blooming and twisting swells of breeze   leave behind on the street a fair weather   an easy weather walk-through     I think I’m better than the walk-throughs  because something is left of me   that’s what I think I must  be wrong to think so        Would you like to Eat at my house   Fill up your Walk-through   You drive through Fill it up with   tea and sheets  water from the toilet   These could be your eyebrows  [crayons]   these could be your knees, these coasters    What could be your inside?    Paper wadded paper  It says something   What about Something sticky  For your mouth Honey   Then we will read you For dinner       In my transitional housing [dirt ball toad]    I picked myself apart With a fork  Connected a wire Where my belly was  Coiled up the plug  The prongs poke hurt   This is the part Light plugs  into My/The outside plugs into To light up   The shine is from unshiny      sewn in place with the little  Light hooks Made a case for me Visible      so I retaliated Against the hooks   I was trying My lizard turd  was trying to join the other   Mud     my thrashing harnessed motored made the light       Meanwhile My toad absorbed pollution   from the walkthroughs High empty thoughts Funneled backchannel   Won’t you be mine [mind] Be my thought softening the rockmud       I will reorient now I will claymation That is a scary Gingerbready      mud man  walking You can’t catch me hole for  Your thoughts  tunneled invisible Unreflecting  unrepresenter Not wrapped       The Sun is here Also later and at  the same time the sun burned  up and we revolved   around it dirt rock    warm dirt rock    in the dark of coursing  around the dark   I have made myself the center of    the galaxy I am very important to myself    must lose this   visibility   The shine is off   perspect while kicking   Where do you think they get the lights from?    Burn it up, burn up all the fuel into furious dirt    Nematodes don’t need light   When I am in a room with forest It is not that myself comes home to myself    Selva oscura, ya    Obsecurity of self    I considered long and seriously before    I was bornt    I stood on the street    With the hookers   Who were selling   Disappear into a hole    Into Mama    but come back out.    Go in, boys.    Go in and stay there.
Amazing the mood it's put me in. And the sky's tint at this hour—out on my own, occasional hum or zip of a car, August the summer month half the city splashes about the Mediterranean, or north: the beach at Donostia a jewel —its Paseo the lip of a shell to walk. It's hearing you what really pulls me in, soft this interior punch, recalling the sheen of your brow—we'd talk with our limbs, the Liffey below, have lunch... Re-lived this evening on the phone; the pitch of your Dublin tone.  Madrid
Little paper cuds we made by ripping the corners or edges from homework and class notes then ruminating them into balls we’d flick from our fingertips or catapult with pencils or (sometimes after lunch) launch through striped straws like deadly projectiles toward the necks of enemies and any other target where they’d stick with the tiniest splat, I hope you’re still there, stuck to unreachable ceilings like the beginnings of nests by generations of wasps too ignorant to finish them or under desktops with blunt stalactites of chewing gum, little white words we learned to shape and hold in our mouths while waiting to let them fly, our most tenacious utterance.
Out in the orchards the dogs stoodAlmost frozen in the bleak spring night & Mister dragged out into the rows Between his peach trees the old dry limbsBuilding at regular intervals careful pyres While the teeth of the dogs chattered & snapped & the ice began to hang long as whiskersFrom the globes along the branches & at his signal we set the piles of branches ablaze Tending each carefully so as not to scorchThe trees as we steadily fed those flames Just enough to send a rippling glow along Those acres of orchard where that body—Sister Winter—had been held so wisely to the fire
I. We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soonNight closes round, and they are lost for ever:— II.Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast,To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last. III.We rest—a dream has power to poison sleep; We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:— IV.It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free;Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
XXVII 1  This particular thing, whether it be four pinches of four divers white powders cleverly compounded to cure surely, safely, pleasantly a painful twitching of the eyelids or say a pencil sharpened at one end, dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass; the gist of poetry. D.C. al fin. 2  There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose-red grasses and you—in your apron running to catch—say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that puts wings to your heels, at your knees. 3  Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging branch long since and summer: they scurry before a wind on the frost-baked ground—have no place to rest—somehow invoke a burst of warm days not of the past nothing decayed: crisp summer!—neither a copse for resurrected frost eaters but a summer removed undestroyed a summer of dried leaves scurrying with a screech, to and fro in the half dark—twittering, chattering, scraping. Hagh! ________________  Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rise: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fullness. It is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it must build its perfection. The gross summer of the year is only a halting counterpart of those fiery days of secret triumph which in reality themselves paint the year as if upon a parchment, giving each season a mockery of the warmth or frozenness which is within ourselves. The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piece from one end to the other.
XXII 1  This is a slight stiff dance to a waking baby whose arms have been lying curled back above his head upon the pillow, making a flower—the eyes closed. Dead to the world! Waking is a little hand brushing away dreams. Eyes open. Here’s a new world. _______________   There is nothing the sky-serpent will not eat. Sometimes it stops to gnaw Fujiyama, sometimes to slip its long and softly clasping tongue about the body of a sleeping child who smiles thinking its mother is lifting it. 2  Security, solidity—we laugh at them in our clique. It is tobacco to us, this side of her leg. We put it in our samovar and make tea of it. You see the stuff has possibilities. You think you are opposing the rich but the truth is you’re turning toward authority yourself, to say nothing of religion. No, I do not say it means nothing. Why everything is nicely adjusted to our moods. But I would rather describe to you what I saw in the kitchen last night—overlook the girl a moment: there over the sink (1) this saucepan holds all, (2) this colander holds most, (3) this wire sieve lets most go and (4) this funnel holds nothing. You appreciate the progression. What need then to be always laughing? Quit phrase making—that is, not of course—but you will understand me or if not—why—come to breakfast sometime around evening on the fourth of January any year you please; always be punctual where eating is concerned. ________________  My little son’s improvisations exceed min: a round stone to him’s a loaf of bread or “this hen could lay a dozen golden eggs.” Birds fly about his bedstead; giants lean over him with hungry jaws; bears roam the farm by summer and are killed and quartered at a thought. There are interminable stories at eating time full of bizarre imagery, true grotesques, pigs that change to dogs in the telling, cows that sing, roosters that become mountains and oceans that fill a soup plate. There are groans and growls, dun clouds and sunshine mixed in a huge phantasmagoria that never rests, never ceased to unfold into—the day’s poor little happenings. Not that alone. He has music which I have not. His tunes follow no scale, no rhythm—alone the mood in odd ramblings up and down, over and over with a rigor of invention that rises beyond the power to follow except in some more obvious flight. Never have I heard so crushing a critique as those desolate inventions, involved half-hymns, after his first visit to a Christian Sunday school. 3  This song is to Phyllis! By this deep snow I know it’s springtime, not ring time! Good God no! The screaming brat’s a sheep bleating, the rattling crib-side sheep shaking a bush. We are young! We are happy! says Colin. What’s an icy room and the sun not up? This song is to Phyllis. Reproduction lets death in, says Joyce. Rot, say I. to Phyllis this song is! ________________  That which is known has value only by virtue of the dark. This cannot be otherwise. A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles, the will is quit of it, save only when set into vibration by the forces of darkness opposed to it.
XIV1  The brutal Lord of All will rip us from each other—leave the one to suffer here alone. No need belief in god or hell to postulate that much. The dance: hands touching, leaves touching—eyes looking, clouds rising—lips touching, cheeks touching, arm about . . . Sleep. Heavy head, heavy arm, heavy dream—: Of Ymir’s flesh the earth was made and of his thoughts were all the gloomy clouds created. Oya! ________________  Out of bitterness itself the clear wine of the imagination will be pressed and the dance prosper thereby. 2  To you! whoever you are, wherever you are! (But I know where you are!) There’s Dürer’s “Nemesis” naked on her sphere over the little town by the river—except she’s too old. There’s a dancing burgess by Tenier and Villon’s maitresse—after he’d gone bald and was skin pocked and toothless: she that had him ducked in the sewage drain. Then there’s that miller’s daughter of “buttocks broad and breastes high.” Something of Nietzsche, something of the good Samaritan, something of the devil himself,—can cut a caper of a fashion, my fashion! Hey you, the dance! Squat. leap. Hips to the left. Chin—ha!—sideways! Stand up, stand up ma bonne! you’ll break my backbone. So again!—and so forth till we’re sweat soaked. ________________  Some fools once were listening to a poet reading his poem. It so happened that the words of the thing spoke of gross matters of the everyday world such as are never much hidden from a quick eye. Out of these semblances, and borrowing certain members from fitting masterpieces of antiquity, the poet began piping up his music, simple fellow, thinking to please his listeners. But they getting the whole matter sadly muddled in their minds made such a confused business of listening that not only were they not pleased at the poet’s exertions but no sooner had he done than they burst out against him with violent imprecations. 3  It’s all one. Richard worked years to conquer the descending cadence, idiotic sentimentalist. Ha, for happiness! This tore the dress in ribbons from her maid’s back and not spared the nails either; wild anger spit from her pinched eyes! This is the better part. Or a child under a table to be dragged out coughing and biting, eyes glittering evilly. I’ll have it my way! Nothing is any pleasure but misery and brokenness. THIS is the only up-cadence. This is where the secret rolls over and opens its eyes. Bitter words spoken to a child ripple in morning light! Boredom from a bedroom doorway thrills with anticipation! The complaints of an old man dying piecemeal are starling chirrups. Coughs go singing on springtime paths across a field; corruption picks strawberries and slow warping of the mind, blacking the deadly walls—counted and recounted—rolls in the grass and shouts ecstatically. All is solved! The moaning and dull sobbing of infants sets blood tingling and eyes ablaze to listen. Speed sings in the heels at long nights tossing on coarse sheets with bruning sockets staring into the black. Dance! Sing! Coil and uncoil! Whip yourselves about! Shout the deliverance! An old woman has infected her blossomy grand-daughter with a blood illness that every two weeks drives the mother into hidden songs of agony, the pad-footed mirage of creeping death for music. The face muscles keep pace. Then a darting about the compass in a tarantelle that wears flesh from bones. Here is dancing! The mind in tatters. And so the music wistfully takes the lead. Ay de mí, Juana la Loca, reina de España, esa está tu canta, reina mía!
XI  1  Why pretend to remember the weather two years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of edelweiss! one dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five years’ drink! _______________  Having once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete which a moment before was alive with malignant rigidities. 2  When beldams dig clams their fat hams (it’s always beldams) balanced near Tellus’s hide, this rhinoceros pelt, these lumped stone—buffoonery of midges on a bull’s thigh—invoke,—what you will: birth’s glut, awe at God’s craft, youth’s poverty, evolution of a child’s caper, man’s poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun’s self turned hen’s rump. Cross a knife and fork and listen to the church bells! It is the harvest moon’s made wine of our blood. Up over the dark factory into the blue glare start the young poplars. They whisper: It is Sunday! It is Sunday! But the laws of the country have been stripped bare of leaves. Out over the marshes flickers our laughter. A lewd anecdote’s the chase. On through the vapory heather! And there at banter’s edge the city looks at us sidelong with great eyes—lifts to its lips heavenly milk! Lucina, O Lucina! beneficent cow, how have we offended thee? ________________  Hilariously happy because of some obscure wine of the fancy which they have drunk four rollicking companions take delight in the thought that they have thus evaded the stringent laws of the county. Seeing the distant city bathed in moonlight and staring seriously at them they liken the moon to a cow and its light to milk.
Remembering the past And gloating at it now, I know the frozen brow And shaking sides of lust Will dog me at my death To catch my ghostly breath.    I think that Yeats was right,  That lust and love are one.  The body of this night  May beggar me to death,  But we are not undone  Who love with all our breath.    I know that Proust was wrong,  His wheeze: love, to survive,  Needs jealousy, and death  And lust, to make it strong  Or goose it back alive.  Proust took away my breath.    The later Yeats was right  To think of sex and death  And nothing else. Why wait  Till we are turning old?  My thoughts are hot and cold.  I do not waste my breath.
I.   Sirs, in our youth you love the sight of us. Older, you fall in love with what we’ve seen, Would lose yourselves by living in our lives. I’ll spin you tales, play the Arabian girl; Working close, alone in the blond arena, Flourish my cape, the cloth on the camera. For women learn to be a holy show.   I’ll tell you where I’ve been, not what I am: In Rotterdam, womb where my people sprang, I find my face, my father, everywhere. New cousins I must stoop to greet, the get Of tall, whey-colored burghers, sturdy dams, As children fed on tulip bulbs and dirt, Tugged at dry dugs and sucked at winter’s rind.   My cousins, dwarfed by war! Your forms rebuke The butcher and the bystander alike. To ease you I can’t shrink this big Dutch frame Got of more comfortable ancestors. But from my Southern side I pluck a phrase, “I’ll carry you.” And it means “rest in me,” To hold you as I may, in my mind’s womb.   But snap the album, get the guidebook out! Rotterdam: her raw, gray waterfront, Zadkine’s memorial burning on the quay; This bronze is mortal, gaping in defeat, The form that wombed it split to let it be. It mends; he lurches up, in blood reborn, The empty heavens his eternal frame.      II.   Move to my room beside the Golden Horn Where minarets strike fire against the sky. The architecture: breasts and phalluses. Where are the words to say that words are lies? Yeats lied. And here Byzantium lies dead. Constantinople? Syllables in a text. Istanbul. Real. Embalmed in dancing dust.   Everywhere the dark-brown past gives way To the beige of progress, that wide vacant lot. Turkey without coffee! Endlessly we sip tea From bud vases, and I lust for the guide, A sultry, serious, pedantic boy In a tight brown suit, thirsting to get out Of the triple city weighing on his mind.   Oh, he was doomed, doomed like the dogs On Dog Island, in the sea, Netted and dumped and exiled, left to die, Then skinned. We heard imaginary canine howls, Like the rustlings of a thousand gauzy girls, Film-eyed cattle, perishing of ennui In abandoned harems where he guided me.   Meanwhile the Faithful, prostrate and intoning, Stare into the light as blind as death, Knowing for sure their end is instant Heaven. We Infidels concede them Paradise, Having seen heaven-as-harem, a eunuch God In charge: the virgin slowly fattening to blubber. Love, become feminized, tickles like a feather.   The saints of Art? Sophia, that vast barn Holds no small Savior waiting to get born. The formal scribble on the assaulted walls— Five hundred years of crossing out His name! Some famous, glittering pebbles mark the place As God’s most grandiose sarcophagus. Decay, decay. And the mind, a fetus, dies.      III.   Return me to the airfield near Shanghai Where I am very young: shy, apprehensive, Seated like Sheba on a baggage mountain Waiting for the first adventure to begin. The train will glide through fields of rice and men, Bodies like thongs, and glorious genitals, Not alien as Chinese, but Adam-strange.   Rejoiced by her first look at naked men, Her soul swims out the window of the train! She goes where newborn daughters clog the creeks; Bank-porticoes are strewn with starving rags. Here the old dragon, China, thrashes, dying. But the ancient, virile music of the race Is rising, drenched in gongs and howls of dogs   Islanded, the sighs of walled-up women Dreaming of peasants in their prisoning fields… But we break out of the harem of history! No longer that young foreigner on the train, I listen like a bird, although I ruminate Like a cow, in my pale Holland body, riven By love and children. These eyes are what they see.  Come die with me in the mosques of Rotterdam.
Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York Looking for help for you, Nicanor. But my few friends who are rich or influential were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites. They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda. At last I found one or two of them at home, preparing for social engagements, absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown until heaps of rich, beautiful fabric were strewn over the chairs and sofas. They posed before mirrors, with their diamonds and trinkets and floor-length furs. Smiling at me from the mirror, they vaguely promised help. They became distracted—by constantly ringing phones, by obsequious secretaries, bustling in with packages, flowers, messages, all the paraphernalia, all part of the uninterruptible rounds of the rich, the nice rich, smiling soothingly, as they touched their hair or picked up their phone extensions. Absently patting my arm, they smiled, “It will be all right.”   Dusk fell on the city as I ran, naked, weeping, into the streets. I ran to the home of Barbara, my friend, Who, as a young girl, rescued four Loyalist soldiers from a Spanish prison; in her teenage sweater set and saddle shoes and knee socks, she drove an old car sagging with Loyalist pamphlets across the Pyrenees all the way to Paris without being caught. And not long ago, she helped save a group of men from Franco’s sentence of death.   In my dream, Barbara telephones Barcelona. I realize this isn’t quite right, but I just stand there paralyzed, as one does in dreams. Then, dimly, from the other end of the line, through the chatter of international operators, we hear artillery fire, the faint tones of lost men, cracked voices singing, “Los Quartros Generales” through the pulsations of the great, twisted cable under the ocean.Agonía, agonía, sueño, fermente & sueño.Este es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía.   “No, Barbara!” I scream. "We are not back there. That’s the old revolution. Call up the new one.” Though I know that, every day, your friends, Nicanor, telephone Santiago, where the number rings and rings and rings with never an answer. And now the rings are turning into knells:   The church bells of Santiago tolling the funeral of Neruda, his poems looted, his autobiography stolen, his books desecrated in his house on Isla Negra. And among the smashed glass, the broken furniture, his desk overturned, the ruined books strewn over the floor, lie the great floral wreaths from the Swedish academy, the wreaths from Paris, South Asia, the whole world over. And the bells toll on… Then I tell Barbara to hang up the phone.   She dials the number again, then turns to me, smiling, smiling like an angel: “He is there.” Trembling, I take the phone from her, and hear your voice, Nicanor, sad, humorous, infinitely disillusioned, infinitely consoling: “Dear Carolyn…” It is Nicanor! And the connection is broken, because I wake up, in this white room, in this white silence,  in this backwater of silence on this Isla Blanca:  Nicanor, Nicanor, are you, too, silent under the earth,  Brother, Brother?
The poets are going home now, After the years of exile, After the northern climates Where they worked, lectured, remembered, Where they shivered at night In an indifferent world. Where God was the god of business, And men would violate the poets’ moon, And even the heavens become zones of war.   The poets are going home To the blood-haunted villages, To the crumbling walls, still pocked With a spray of bullets; To the ravine, marked with a new cross, Where their brother died. No one knows the precise spot where they shot him, But there is a place now to gather, to lay wreaths. The poets will bring flowers.   The poets are coming home To the cafés, to the life of the streets at twilight, To slip among the crowds and greet their friends; Thee young poets, old now, limping, who lean on a cane: Or the arm of a grandchild, peer with opaque eyes At the frightening city, the steel and concrete towers Sprung up in their absence. Yet from open doorways comes the odor of grapes Fermented, of fish, of oil, of pimiento…   The poets have come home To the melodious language That settles in their heads like moths alighting, This language for which they starved In a world of gutturals, Crude monosyllables barked by strangers. Now their own language enfolds them With its warm vocables. The poets are home.   Yes, they have come back To look up at the yellow moon, Cousin of that cold orb that only reflected Their isolation. They have returned to the olives, the light, The sage-scented meadows, The whitewashed steps, the tubs of geraniums, The sere plains, the riverbanks spread with laundry, The poppies, the vineyards, the bones of mountains.   Yes, poets, welcome home To your small country Riven by its little war (As the world measures these events), A country that remembers heroes and tears; Where, in your absence, souls kept themselves alive By whispering your words. Now you smile at everything, even the priests, the militia, The patient earth that is waiting to receive you.
Thousands lavishing, thousands starving;  intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings,  hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements,  exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness  and laughter, from the first scene to the last.  —Samuel Palmer, 1858 I. Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In      Pan’s  spring rain  “drives his victims  out to the animals  with whom they become  as one”—    pain and paeans,  hung in the mouth,    to be sung      II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me      June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal:    A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature…  Now I am ice, now I am sorrel.      Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest:  I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down    and    The book I love is everywhere And not in idle words    John, claritas tell us the words are not idle,  the syllables are able  to turn plantains into quatrains,  tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to  form corollas in light clusters of tones…    Sam Palmer hit it:  “Milton, by one epithet  draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw,  ‘Pine and monumental oak’:  I have just been trying to draw a large one in  Lullingstone; but the poet’s tree is huger than  any in the park.”    Muse in a meadow, compose in  a mind!      III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me      Harris’s Sparrow—    103 species seen  by the Georgia Ornithological Society  in Rabun Gap,    including Harris’s Sparrow, with its  black crown, face, and bib encircling  a pink bill      It was, I think, the third sighting  in Georgia, and I should have been there  instead of reading Clare, listening to  catbirds and worrying about Turdus migratorious that flew  directly into the Volkswagen and  bounced into a ditch      Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I’d  been going 40 you might be  whistling in some grass.    10 tepid people got 10 stale letters  one day earlier,  I cannot be happy  about that.      IV. What the Night Tells Me      the dark drones on  in the southern wheat fields  and the hop flowers  open before the sun’s  beckoning      the end  is ripeness, the wind  rises,  and the dawn says  yes      YES! it says  “yes”        V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me    Sounds, and sweet aires that give delight and hurt not—    that, let  Shakespeare’s  delectation  bear us        VI. What Love Tells Me        Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf  on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien  and prays:    Dear God, Sweet Jesus,  Save Us, Save Us…    the Light in the Grass,  the Wind on the Hill,    are in my head,  the world cannot be heard      Leaves obliterate  my heart,    we touch each other  far apart…      Let us count  into  the Darkness
Red-Wigglers, Night-Crawlers & Other Worms look out into the crapulous moonlight:   figures of women cascading through the Sunday night;   no beer in sight.   I remember the Night-bloomingCereus by Dr. Thornton, Engraver, Blake’s patron, it hangs in the hall outside the bedroom swaying hungrily like these giant white goddesses of the dark grotto…   there are touring cars and men with large guns singing through the woods   behind us.
I. “If the Night Could Get Up & Walk”    I cannot put my hand into  a cabbage to turn  on the light, but    the moon moves over  the field of dark cabbage and an  exchange fills  all veins.    The cabbage is also a globe  of light, the two globes    now two eyes in  my saturated    head!      II. “One Must Try Behind the Hills”      Eight Great Dahlias stood  beyond the Mountains.    They set fire to the Sun  in a black wood  beyond the Mountains,    in the Valley of Vision  In the Valley of Vision    the Fission of  Flowers    yields all Power  in the Valley of Vision.    Eight Suns  on Eight Stems,    aflame!
for Robert Duncan  one comes to language from afar, the ear fears for its sound-barriers—   but one “comes”; the language “comes” forThe Beckoning Fair One plant you now, dig youlater, the plaint stirs winter earth…   air in a hornet’s nest over the water makes a solid, six-sided music…   a few utterly quiet scenes, things are very far away—“formis emptiness”   comely, comely, love trembles   and the sweet-shrub
December 13, 1993  John Gordon Boyd died on the birthday of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers: Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald   John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness” and with extraordinary eyes & ears…     I think of two texts on the grievous occasion of his death:   “Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what I can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands.”  — Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis     and two lines in Rainier Maria Rilke, John’s favorite poet, that say it all…  Was tun Sie, Gott,Wenn ich bin stürbe?   “What will you do, God, when I am dead?”
There are more things to love  than we would dare to hope for.  —Richard of St. Victor  where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with blazons of fennel   and umbels of dill fell through the spokes of a wheel   on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle,   sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider—   and spied: “saw  the very drops of sweat glittering frostily  between the shoulder blades”    of a lad   …on and on he spied and bled from the blades of his cycle, small as a spider, hiding in the fireweed, getting wet from the skins of many human suns aground at the Kentish river near Tunbridge Wells,   where the dill lulls,   and all boys spoil…
Their singer suffered breakdowns. In their work there was a sense of what it was to live there at that time. One song described the dark around the military vehicles between them and the cocaine waiting in Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love or love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck damaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars. They got away with it and worked to abolish youth by knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was in love because my sentiments were matched by a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing survives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames. Nothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person operating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation.
P. entered a third space from which he could watch time pass instead of walking to the monastery in the middle of the night.   His opaque sexuality derived from the absence of a guarantee that his person would remain intact.   He recognized this in himself and we stared at the pylons regressing into the lackluster northeastern woods.   The monastery was a display before which he claimed sangfroid a picturesque ruin to which he was conveyed as though by boreal fluid.   Everyone loved occasional works like this their allusions to complementary and absent events.   Weaving around proliferating drywall I despaired over this desire.   P. joined the migrant workforce and grew more disconsolate and distant and drunk in our presence.   Our presence was only possible because of advances in technology in a dialectical relationship with their debasement: servers in cold rooms and a recursive void of woodblock chat sounds.
socalled swan of avon n/t but a beaurocrat buggering the buttercups goy from the waist up   now soldiers’re the ones making offers and fucking caravaggio posters maybe the artist had bothered about melancholia   suddenly xe finds xemself walking down some dark corridor   california was truly the promised land for a minute there video marlboro to show us   shoppingcart in dingy water and then turn melancholical   sign reads no squatting switchd on the cathode ray at yr coronation   the bomb droppd w/ regular monotony leaving us wanting    a to zed dampened a grid   satyrical deliria pan’s baallet in a black tutu   who have the inclination but even whose necromancer— firelit but dred— —commandeering meadows— protests were pathetic
swell me a bowl with lusty oil brightest under bis geynest under gore   ecce who com inna persian vestment  un monodatal voll  marines cd not hoist thee   whose eyes go seaward noreaster reeling thrashing at the mouth of the gowanus mischance upbrimmd   sludgie helas, aloft sometimes honeysuckle can smell like MURTHER    yr shining form to oil hath returned  yr helmet now shall make a hive for bees   it was no dream I lay broad waking oil blossomed green, incarnadine   s/thing keeps on testing me for tb   is politer not to talk about beastly p.o.v.   ludic like a succubus vomiting ivy lordly subtler grotesquerie   you can bet it smelled like murther creped and crinolinnd along the noggin w/ a victorian western pin   till I may see a plumper sludgie swim everlike rotund buddha—smack aghast everlike leo and thir friends marching in lockstep to the sunlit uplands.
for memorial at Zinc Bar, 23 June 2007, NYC  I am your sugarplum fairy commodore in chief.   —kari edwards  conturbabimus illa  (vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus [let us live,  my Lesbia, and let us love])   —Catullus V.II damesirs of fishairs princes reginae I dont need this botheration guilded toe in a gendered pension embedded narcissism skirts can or could be worn w/   intentional disgrace getting oh-aff I sleep where I sit gog and magog ope myopia   sweetness and delight do it for sidney, as starlover did rue on star, thir mistress cloying the lack, with thir poesis toying   twill never hurt regina prince alack, areft locks beset candle agrove a buck in a corridor   as like with likeness grace the tongue and sweets with sweets cloy them among   conturbabimus illa let us confound them   beasts implored and character impaled agathas breast in a 14th century pincer anon 7 heads w/ 7 comings on horns on their horns wings at their feet and at their wings  well you have three seconds to live bespeckled apprentice freckled daylilly a penny uneasily pleaded myrtle   iron bootblackeningat the speedwe levatate con there is no missus I am among   limbed elms colluding with doves   nor tide nor tail angels w/ svelte angles   the rub and tug goils languid as jersey too early for supper   etc was their pimp and whatever their sucker shitslinger master cleanser   w/ corporate coffee and torture pâté   my present page in l-l-livery   old glut of a beast’s spleen the glory over lordling socked ajaw   nassau ablog by fairly a sweepmate a swoopster bedeviled in gullet swashbuckld by proxy  homosexuality eh? red river andaloos funny albeit friday all the dork-rock   gender suggests we levitate avec held captive patrón, bothermonger   ah myrtle why sie is taken my mind impertinent parasol   glossy wit promise of salt caint leave thir cellphone alone ipode eternal satellite viscera   muscadetted papillon (that one)   strident 17 stallions with horns on their heads and horns coming out of the horns   a papillon that one   a buck in a corridor conturbabimus illa let us confound them   all ridded of giggling anthropomorphia aghast DL in the bowries the tee hee ambigenuity of amputee-wannabees   googling tee heesilly faggotdicks are for chicks dicks are for chicks   wicked hee to bury my heart at my heart was in my knee
if there is a river more beautiful than this bright as the blood red edge of the moon if   there is a river more faithful than this returning each month to the same delta if there   is a river braver than this coming and coming in a surge of passion, of pain if there is   a river more ancient than this daughter of eve mother of cain and of abel if there is in   the universe such a river if there is some where water more powerful than this wild water pray that it flows also through animals beautiful and faithful and ancient and female and brave
somebody coming in blackness like a star and the world be a great bush on his head and his eyes be fire in the city and his mouth be true as time   he be calling the people brother even in the prison even in the jail   i’m just only a baptist preacher somebody bigger than me coming in blackness like a star
the green of Jesus is breaking the ground and the sweet smell of delicious Jesus is opening the house and the dance of Jesus music has hold of the air and the world is turning in the body of Jesus and the future is possible
for elaine philip on her birthday me and you be sisters. we be the same. me and you coming from the same place. me and you be greasing our legs touching up our edges. me and you be scared of rats be stepping on roaches. me and you come running high down purdy street one time and mama laugh and shake her head at me and you. me and you got babies got thirty-five got black let our hair go back be loving ourselves be loving ourselves be sisters. only where you sing i poet.
a love person from love people out of the afrikan sun under the sign of cancer. whoever see my midnight smile seeing star apple and mango from home. whoever take me for a negative thing, his death be on him like a skin and his skin be his heart’s revenge.     *           lucy one-eye she got her mama’s ways. big round roller can’t cook can’t clean if that’s what you want you got it world.   lucy one-eye she see the world sideways. word foolish she say what she don’t want to say, she don’t say what she want to.   lucy one-eye she won’t walk away from it. she’ll keep on trying with her crooked look and her wrinkled ways, the darling girl.     *               if mama could see she would see lucy sprawling limbs of lucy decorating the backs of chairs lucy hair holding the mirrors up that reflect odd aspects of lucy.   if mama could hear she would hear lucysong rolled in the corners like lint exotic webs of lucysighs long lucy spiders explaining to obscure gods.   if mama could talk she would talk good girl good girl good girl clean up your room.     *           i was born in a hotel, a maskmaker. my bones were knit by a perilous knife. my skin turned around at midnight and i entered the earth in a woman jar. i learned the world all wormside up and this is my yes my strong fingers; i was born in a bed of good lessons and it has made me wise.     *             light on my mother’s tongue breaks through her soft extravagant hip into life. lucille she calls the light, which was the name of the grandmother who waited by the crossroads in virginia and shot the whiteman off his horse, killing the killer of sons. light breaks from her life to her lives…   mine already is an afrikan name.     *
curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.
There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come.   A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone.   Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there.   And immediately left behind.   —Marguerite Duras   (translated by Mark Pollizzotti)  It came. Words smashed out of the sky and from the mouths and off the pages and from the flesh and blood of the bodies and the words hit the readers and were destroyed like more bodies and the fields of the nation were littered with bodies and dead. Carcass love, they called it. Carcass economy, they called it. And the readers found the carcasses strewn across the pages and the readers came and stripped their innards and twirled intestines above their heads like lassos. The carcasses fell onto the pages and were taken away in wagons and trucks and they were replaced with new carcasses that were sold for words before the flies laid eggs and the wounds had time to fester. FALSE CARCASS ECONOMY! Will the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the bodies whose lips slurp out the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the words from the bodies who slurp out the souls of the carcasses cease to exist when the bodies themselves die? The readers grovel in the pages and find themselves in ditches with the carcasses but they do not know the rules of the false carcass economy. In this book the readers can feel their feet being removed. In this book the readers can feel the splash of the abattoir blood that sprinkles the page with poems. How do you know if the poems have too many bubbles? That is, how do you know if the blood of the poems has too many bubbles? When we speak of our own lives, says the collective voice of the readers, we certainly don’t mean human life. On the page the readers find themselves crawling around like quadrupeds with hands full of grass and earth uprooting plants and trees setting out for home and not getting far counting corpses on the fields to hell with animals there is God grinding his teeth with joy forging his way through the ruins of failing flesh there is the machine that has annihilated the bulk of humanity is it semen or is it a carburetor that makes us unrecognizable we know who we are through decay and in someone else’s story this is a lot worse than knocking your own brains out with good results then drinking tea with sugar and milk and suddenly feeling revived then exploding with words and speaking with animals and sinking in mud and being found by peasants who clean turds and who are like silent gods with holes in their shoes it is horrible to eat horrible to bulge in the belly with food horrible to blink when so many can’t blink oh to ruminate once more on the air polluted with liability on the hair singed from pollution the eyes burning fingers shrivelling the exact moment of ending will not come for many millennia we will not be able to document it it will document us it’s okay to kill some bodies speak of nothing and you’re lucky to make friends flank kidney liver swollen body on the sand who are you now that I am speaking with a mouth full of words that do not belong to me I crawl across the page and I don’t know if I’m dying or dead.
Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live, and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes, and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life with another.
for Richard Griffith 1 THE BURNING   Girl grown woman fire mother of fire I go to the stone street turning to fire. Voices Go screaming Fire to the green glass wall. And there where my youth flies blazing into fire The dance of sane and insane images, noon Of seasons and days. Noontime of my one hour.   Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces Among the tall daylight in the city of change. The scene has walls stone glass all my gone life One wall a web through which the moment walks And I am open, and the opened hour The world as water-garden lying behind it. In a city of stone, necessity of fountains, Forces water fallen on glass, men with their axes.   An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass, Behind the wall I know waterlilies Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers, Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon Who will not believe a waterlily fire. Whatever can happen in a city of stone, Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall.   I walk in the river of crisis toward the real, I pass guards, finding the center of my fear And you, Dick, endlessly my friend during storm.   The arm of flame striking through the wall of form.     2 THE ISLAND   Born of this river and this rock island, I relate The changes : I born when the whirling snow Rained past the general’s grave and the amiable child White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood. General, gangster, child. I know in myself the island.   I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire Among the building of my young childhood, houses; I was those changes, the live darknesses Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields Over the river fronting red cliffs across— And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks— Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose From sleeping streams of change in the change city. The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness. Fountain of a city in growth, and island of light and water. Snow striking up past the graves, the yellow cry of spring.   Whatever can come to a city can come to this city. Under the tall compulsion  of the past I see the city  change like a man changing I love this man  with my lifelong body of love I know you  among your changes  wherever I go Hearing the sounds of building  the syllables of wrecking A young girl watching  the man throwing red hot rivets Coals in a bucket of change How can you love a city that will not stay? I love you  like a man of life in change.   Leaves like yesterday shed, the yellow of green spring Like today accepted and become one’s self I go, I am a city with bridges and tunnels, Rock, cloud, ships, voices. To the man where the river met The tracks, now buried deep along the Drive Where blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red.   Towers falling. A dream of towers. Necessity of fountains. And my poor, Stirring among our dreams, Poor of my own spirit, and tribes, hope of towers And lives, looking out through my eyes. The city the growing body of our hate and love. The root of the soul, and war in its black doorways. A male sustained cry interrupting nightmare. Male flower heading upstream.   Among a city of light, the stone that grows. Stigma of dead stone, inert water, the tattered Monuments rivetted against flesh. Blue noon where the wall made big agonized men Stand like sailors pinned howling on their lines, and I See stopped in time a crime behind green glass, Lilies of all my life on fire. Flash faith in a city building its fantasies.   I walk past the guards into my city of change.     3 JOURNEY CHANGES   Many of us Each in his own life waiting Waiting to move Beginning to move Walking And early on the road of the hill of the world Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass   The stages of the theatre of the journey   I see the time of willingness between plays Waiting and walking and the play of the body Silver body with its bosses and places One by one touched awakened into into   Touched and turned one by one into flame   The theatre of the advancing goddess Blossoming Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go And far across a field over the jewel grass   The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out   Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god A supple god of searching and reaching Who weaves his strength Who dances her more alive   The theatre of all animals, my snakes, my great horses   Always the journey long patient many haltings Many waitings for choice and again easy breathing When the decision to go on is made Along the long slopes of choice and again the world   The play of poetry approaching in its solving   Solvings of relations in poems and silences For we were born to express born for a journey Caves, theatres, the companioned solitary way And then I came to the place of mournful labor   A turn in the road and the long sight from the cliff   Over the scene of the land dug away to nothing and many Seen to a stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth A hod of earth taken and emptied and thrown away Repeated farther than sight. The voice saying slowly   But it is hell. I heard my own voice in the words Or it could be a foundation And after the words My chance came. To enter. The theatres of the world.     4 FRAGILE   I think of the image brought into my room Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks. He is asking about the moment when the Buddha Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration. “Isn’t that fragile?” he asks. The sage answers: “I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”     5 THE LONG BODY   This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood An island in a river of crisis, now The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies. We pray : we dive into each other’s eyes.   Whatever can come to a woman can come to me.   This is the long body : into life from the beginning, Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward, And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground, Going as we go in the changes of the body, As it is changes, in the long strip of our many Shapes, as we range shifting through time. The long body : a procession of images.   This moment in a city, in its dream of war.  We chose to be, Becoming the only ones under the trees  when the harsh sound Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men, And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding Her baby. And threats, the ambulance with open doors. Now silence. Everyone else within the walls. We sang.  We are the living island, We the flesh of this island, being lived, Whoever knows us is part of us today.   Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.   Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies Reaching from darkness upward to a sun Of rebirth, the implacable. And in our myth The Changing Woman who is still and who offers.   Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth. In ways of being, through silence, sources of light Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light.   And everything a witness of the buried life. This moment flowing across the sun, this force Of flowers and voices body in body through space. The city of endless cycles of the sun.   I speak to you You speak to me
for Robert Payne Great Alexander sailing was from his true course turned By a young wind from a cloud in Asia moving Like a most recognizable most silvery woman; Tall Alexander to the island came. The small breeze blew behind his turning head. He walked the foam of ripples into this scene.   The trunk of the speaking tree looks like a tree-trunk Until you look again. Then people and animals Are ripening on the branches; the broad leaves Are leaves; pale horses, sharp fine foxes Blossom; the red rabbit falls Ready and running. The trunk coils, turns, Snakes, fishes. Now the ripe people fall and run, Three of them in their shore-dance, flames that stand Where reeds are creatures and the foam is flame.   Stiff Alexander stands. He cannot turn. But he is free to turn : this is the speaking tree, It calls your name. It tells us what we mean.
THE WAY OUT   The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man, with signs, and his journeys. Where the rock is split and speaks to the water; the flame speaks to the cloud; the red splatter, abstraction, on the door speaks to the angel and the constellations. The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon. And the loud hammering of the land behind speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs, we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.   All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.   Music of one child carried into the desert; firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid. Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain. The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs, the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening. Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain. Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child. The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.   Music of those who have walked out of slavery.   Into that journey where all things speak to all things refusing to accept the curse, and taking for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world, all creation being created in one image, creation. This is not the past walking into the future, the walk is painful, into the present, the dance not visible as dance until much later. These dancers are discoverers of God.   We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.   Out of a life of building lack on lack: the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith: an army who came to the ocean: the walkers who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou, city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo, the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes, swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March: all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.   Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.   Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death by his disciples carried from Jerusalem in blackness journeying to find his journey to whatever he was loving with his life. The wilderness journey through which we move under the whirlwind truth into the new, the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night: faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.   Barbarian music, a new song.   Acknowledging opened water, possibility: open like a woman to this meaning. In a time of building statues of the stars, valuing certain partial ferocious skills while past us the chill and immense wilderness spreads its one-color wings until we know rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea, the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find. What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.   Ways to discover. The song of the way in.
Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters,  from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our  dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot. We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down  where water has not run for sixty years. Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of  the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from  the abandoned iron-black mill. Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten  colors. Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the  murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock. Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots. You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat. You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green; The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of  accretions A beach of dream before the smoking mirror. You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and  the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes  of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon, Everywhere your own silence, who drink from the crater, the  nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.
Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death I lay there dreaming and my magic head remembered and forgot. On first cry I remembered and forgot and did believe. I knew love and I knew evil: woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind, despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass, renewal of all waters and the time of the stars and the black snake with gold bones.   Black sleeps, gold burns; on second cry I woke fully and gave to feed and fed on feeding. Gold seed, green pain, my wizards in the earth walked through the house, black in the morning dark. Shadows grew in my veins, my bright belief, my head of dreams deeper than night and sleep. Voices of all black animals crying to drink, cries of all birth arise, simple as we, found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream, deep as this hour, ready again to sleep.
My liveliest self, I give you fair leave in these windblown weathers, heather-hearted and human and strange, to turn every blackberry corner of yesterday’s summer.   The robin, singing her love-me-forever, kiss-catch-clutch-in the heather blues, sings tide flow and autumn’s turning and white winds folding.   Cattle along all hedges wind winter into their frosty breathing, their slow eyes dreaming barn, bullock, and fodder under all hedges.   But sea cave and sycamore tell us the world is wider than weather. Blackberries darken the corners I turn, and gold seas turning darken, darken.   My liveliest self, my other, Godspeed on our farings. The bronze path at evening. Toward summer, then. My hand, your hand— as if first meeting.
At dusk, a great flare of winter lightning photographed the bay: Waves were broken scrolls. Beyond Donegal, white mountains hung in a narrow bas-relief frozen on sky.    Later, there was sleet: trees down on the Drumholm road; near Timoney’s farm, a frantic goose pinned under branches.    All night long, we spoke of loneliness, long winter, while winter sang in the chimneys.   Then the sky cleared and a marvel began: The hills turned blue; in the valley a blue cottage sent up the day’s first plume of smoke. It gathered like a dream drenched in frost.   That should have been all. We had worn out night.   But single-file, deliberate, five heifers, a black bull, three calves stepped through the  broken fence. They arranged themselves between the house and hedge: a kind of diagram: a shifting pattern grazing frozen weeds.   Their image is with me still. The backs of the cattle are patchy with frost blue as  morning.
The giant takes us down. A man with no arms. Unbreakable.   What made today is concordant, transforms the brief decisive phase we call fear.   I look to that whited-over part and see a face. Then I look to the black and see the same face.  There were tunnels…chambersbeneath some of the sidewalks…page after page of places…  The last thing you think of. Won’t be my fluffy blonde hair.   We have his ear. He was the first boy I knew. The liberation. Which I remember from sand. The pail shape. The whole world’s washed out.   These words: take refuge. What I mean by dream in this case is his last dream. And you see no land, you’re that far away.   Someone coughs in my first life. Someone must have noticed how like you he is…   First you can’t be heard Then you can’t hear Then you can’t dial Then you can’t turn it off  You pose a question, I repeat it.And as always with speech, one is blind.   As a reflector, as of cloth or thick flecked glass, as slats— You asked though   about the self. There were fireflies, and the corn cut to the nubs. The windows shook, we saw a flash of light…   then the tiniest feckles of rain   after we waited all day.
Men are trading their bullets for worms. “I spent a lifetime building.”   We come down from the mountains. We brought eggs, a table, a windowshade. There were times when we couldn’t bring anything. So many people.   As you were walking up the hill and I was walking down, we almost passed each other. But I grasped your arm and backed up. You said: “This is what I look like now.”
She considers a field. She considers a field and buys it. Let her have the fruit of her hands.   We come down from the mountains. Yellow trees, green trees. I was leaving Earth but, before I did, I had to get rid of all my animals. My main one, my main model for behavior, was my snake. He was attached to the bottom of my foot but had become dangerous seeming and I was afraid he would bite me if he got the chance. My sister was there and I said, “Before I leave, I have to get rid of all my animals,” thinking maybe she’d help me. I said, “My horse, my frog, my snake…” but didn’t mention I was worried about how to dislodge my snake safely. As I was waking up, I thought of going to a place where they could give the snake a shot to knock it out or even kill it before they tried to get it off my foot. Which seemed like a pretty good idea, though inconvenient.
i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish only as one i contain the complications in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts the actors bow gently to me and i envy them their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams walking through corridors of glass framed pages telling each other the final lines of letters picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another only as one i contain the complications and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings   i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing re-running the reels of my presence in this world the difficulties vanish and the images are the same eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications only as one walking gently storing my dream
(for John Barrell)  1. gone to lunch back in five minutes   night closed in on my letter of resignation out in the square one of my threads had broken loose the language i used was no and no while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills   occasionally the metabolism alters and lines no longer come express waiting for you what muscles work me which hold me down below my head?   it is a long coat and a van on the horizon a bird that vanishes the arabic i learn from observation is how to break the line   (genius creates surprises : the metropolitan police band singing ‘bless this house’   as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam     2. walking my back home   the wind is the wind is a no-vo-cain band   and the footstep  echoes  i  have conjured people     3. ah, it all falls into place   when it was time what he had left became a tile bodies held shaped by the pressure of air were clipped to his attention by their gestures   my but we do have powerful muscles each of us equal to gravity or sunlight that forces our shadows into the pieces of a fully interlocking puzzle     4. good morning he whispered   the horrors of the horses are the crows the bird flies past the outside the library many heels have trapped the same way he tolls, he lapsed with the light from so many trees   check the pattern swerves with the back the tree that holds the metal spiral staircase swings aloft the hand removes a book and checked it for death by glasses or the angle food descends     5. the broadcast   she turns me on she turns on me that the view from the window is a lake and silent cars are given the noise of flies dying in the heat of the library the grass outside goes brown in my head behind my glasses behind the glass in the precinct thus, too, they whisper in museums and banks
a line of faces borders the strangler’s work heavy european women mist blows over dusty tropical plants lit from beneath the leaves by a spotlight mist in my mind a riffled deck   of cards or eccentrics was i a waterton animal my head is not my own   poetry is neither swan nor owl but worker, miner digging each generation deeper through the shit of its eaters to the root – then up to the giant tomato   someone else’s song is always behind us as we wake from a dream trying to remember step onto a thumbtack   two worlds – we write the skin the surface tension that holds  you  in what we write is ever the past   curtain pulled back a portrait behind it is a room suddenly lit   looking out through the eyes at a t.v. programme of a monk sealed into a coffin   we close their eyes and ours and still here the tune   moves on
(for Ed and Jenny)  greetings as the door opened ticking   please listen to this food alone for all the f.b.i. will continue   maybe you dozed off i hung by that phone all night suppose he talks   *   vida   later   aria   *   once upon a time not looking for any thing   *   you’re on your own it’s off it’s on   *   perhaps it means ragged like that golda my-yeer  pre-meer   *   and pour the old box down a drain   *   too much news said the news   *   r e o l e   *   it’s us or rust listener   *   deep   personal   regret   looking   up   monday   *   we can save your head or your body we can shave   *   even his admission is a subtle lie   *   in suspense what is cut into the smallest of the   *   grinding   to fill   a prescription   *   drum to the wobble and a roll on the sea come to mind an article of light distance through distance unfinished   *   piano   *   willing to believe   *   national   anthem   hearer   *   perfect rhyme to some   all cars   kept in doors   *   sophisticated newsmen show how it could have been   * retreat from the swiss legation   *   numbers for an event   *   corruption why not?   *   infinite   detail   is no more real   *   thought    against    power   *   answer     it   *   hooked to just another piece of tape hooked to just one more little piece of tape   *   through words in to no record     *   writer   righter   riter   *   am:   i   on replay?   *   all you do is expand the system   *   a polaroid of la with the wrong voice print   *   astronaut amazed at what was expected
lonely as four cherries on a tree at night, new moon, wet roads a moth or a snowflake whipping past glass   lonely as the red noses of four clowns thrust up through snow their shine four whitened panes drawn from imagined memory   lonely as no other lives touching to recorded water all objects stare their memories aware   lonely as pain recoiling from itself imagining the cherries and roses reaching out
I did something I could never discuss made an acquaintance and embraced him in a phone booth.   While interested parties lurked among free newspaper boxes he removed his domino.   What to construe from leather bracelets? The impossibility of translation from a phone booth to a churchyard   a gate painted white a belfry with no bell some culture with haceks the sense of lolling in a park   from a churchyard to a community garden heckling the rooster as it crowed.   We left the part we liked jeering the rooster from a sward.   We reentered the garden with a script but refused to expand on the vestiges of happiness.   A girl took responsibility for the garden and plied us with background information until her nervous guardian sent us back to the church with a coat of arms where we were going anyway as though under the influence of boreal fluid.   The songbirds of the yard were about to be contaminated by a new age concert.   With so little at stake they praised positive thinking.
But I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation.  (Lord Byron, November 1816)  what happens in any   sovereign body is created   on the evidence of the last   head on its last lap   those of us watching   then, during the programme   see the die seem to be cast   to draw the teeth   of our first question   affecting essential interests   they and only they had   she was dealing with   an unworthy family   gathered for death   inconvenient location   gruesome tired mannerisms   a bit thick coming from her   losing the thread of argument   in a sinuous cartwheel   drained of what life   hurried out with a pushchair   unsparing he takes us   to the cabaret   into patterns and groups   contrived for distraction   more likely   to deepen withdrawal   such a decrease   in which women   had views diametrically opposed   soon changes his tune   howling   face to face   cruel for people   recoiling in horror   plastered indeed   by any form of social   charges and interest   it may be healthy   to change the tone   of administration   in growth dynamics   use of perspective   attachment to things   entail perpetual disruption   of what space is for   built up   in absence   transactions typically occur   under conditions of heightened   variations in taste   spaces, isolated thoughts   which his concept of beauty   distorts to represent   thinking and feeling life   he considers in particular   superimposed spatial images   accelerating production   of different times   to control the future   this book has been edited to detect the note   of such preoccupations   blue evening light   desire out of stasis   for jobs   investment itself   ruthless traders   organising forces   unable to stop the drift   of imagination over materiality   form an autobiography   in fires of competition   only to emerge stronger   within this system of production   brought into our homes   which in turn form the basis   of generating and acquiring   aesthetic pleasure   conventional these days   cluttered with illusion   based on writing   remixed   to demolish any narrative   of the world within   no image concealed   from the realm of material   accumulation and circulation   in part as would be true   enduring time   by herself he touches her   surrounded by models   able to pass unrecognised   in the stream of money   implied by a photograph   where the sun never seen   can be constructed   crashing through layer after layer   on a depthless screen   with the requisite speed   somewhere behind us   thrown into the street   patiently to see   rotting pieces of car   buttons working backwards   against nerve junctions   tilt her head   towards her ankles   in the underground light   black fur gleamed   off the oil drum   searchers found   a delicate bubble of oil   sweeping through it   pure oxygen   dawn touched   at the corners   rose in flame   lengths of thin steel   drawn across dust   shifting in thick   time on   motions playing out   across from me   not in sequence   cut into the sides   of an extension run   below his eyes   were tombstones   ringed with razor-wire   he threaded   bright slashes of colour   through open   jolts of fear   measuring, calculating   shaking so hard   a lump of shadow   watching   turned from side to side   shielding us from the sun   pale green glass   frames disintegrating tarmac   down to the tunnel   of the corner of his eye   moving on   to some other   man for the moment   horizon of empty water   locking him away   inside and he wore   two pictograms   set in strange lines   invisible in air   energetically above them   heels and silk   scatter snow   in the middle of a room   swirling out of the mist   bright with arrangements   tainted too historically   he had forgotten   quite violent fights   listening   to the continuous pounding   of some other thought   looking at the surface   far away down   in a cloud of dust   tattered lace about her   she watched him calmly   bits of it he tore off   at the end of each meeting   seemed colour-coded   sparkling violently   tingling on his skin   holes turned round slowly   in brown earth   lined with age   he smelled burning   trees in darkness   a voice came   from an imaginary telephone   on the dashboard   shrink-wrapped packages   soft underfoot   glowed in the dark   blinds slanted to make   the match flame   blast across his face   snap shut   in the jungle   after the ones still alive   start confessing   flashbulbs go off   her hand flicked back and forth   over a section of floor   he had heard more   than every single word   from the once proud   ruins of arches   in one outstretched hand   an odd sensation   included balance   working to repair the damage   of triumph on his face   folded against the edge   of exhaust fumes   closing his lids   properly needed great care   she heard a rustle   little numbers   flew around trees   tumbled across a moonlit field   trying to reassemble   his head again   she blinked   some sort of code   subtle variations   in the colour of her eyes   a reliable testing ground   gardens inside shelters   shades patterning   an idealised culture   in one landscaped clump   stuffed full of shells   a version or remnant of something   under a different name   some crisis of identity   spanned the world   thought was the only thing   to come back to acting   beyond acoustics   even when dramatic   she always wore fancy dress   simply cut and held low   objects grouped together   confidently into fine jewellery   after the storm new scents   touched by salt spray   hardly dimmed the harsh light   he sometimes pulled at his hair   obsessed with finding the beautiful   curtain allowing him entry   never able to follow   the middle of night   downwards to find a runway   with deep sides   writhing under his fingers   personalities full of energy   order a series   of the same programme   cool for film   using this knowledge   machines talk to themselves   maintain a very persistent   buzzing as the signal   ends in a dramatic freeze   close to the border   on a street with a few orange trees
for Jack Kerouac  IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME,  I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement    of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold  light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing  and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass,    black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh  seen in the clear bright light. It is not night    and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside.  And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls  in the light  of the room. I sit or stand    wanting the huge reality of touch and love.  In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream    of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting  only the purity of clean colors and new shapes  and feelings.  I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY    I have ten years left to worship my youth  Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow  IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I  feel the swell of smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars  the brown shadows on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to  dull plane from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face.  The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the  clear grain. I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are.    The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall.    I am real as you are real whom I speak to.  I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up    and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash  to my eyes. No change to the room.  Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world.  The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture.  An agony to be so in pain without release    when love is a word or kiss.
for Jane  —ALL HUGE LIKE GIANT FLIGHTLESS KIWIS TWICE THE  SIZE OF OSTRICHES,  they turned and walked away from us  and you were there Jane and you were twenty-two  but this was the nineteen-forties,  in Wichita, near the edge of town, in a field  surrounded by a copse of cottonwoods. It was  getting dark and the trees around the bridge  almost glowed like a scene by Palmer.  The two Giant Birds—Aepyorni—from Madagascar,  extincted A.D. one thousand, turned and walked  from us across the bridge. Even in the semi-darkness  the softness of their brown feathers made  curls pliant as a young mother’s hair. There  was a sweet submission in the power of their enormous  legs (giant drumsticks). Their tiny heads  (in proportion to their bodies) were bent  utterly submerged in their business and sweeping  side to side as a salmon does—or as a wolf does—  but with a Pleistocene, self-involved gentleness  beyond our ken. My heart rose in my chest  (as the metaphysical poets say “with  purple wings of joy.”) to see them back  in life again. We both looked, holding hands,  and I felt your wide-eyed drinking-in   of things.  Then I turned and viewed across the darkening  field and there was a huge flightless hunting fowl  (the kind that ate mammals in the Pliocene).  He stood on one leg in the setting sun by the sparkling  stream that cut across the meadow to the bridge.    He had a hammer head and curled beak, and after my  initial surge of fear to see the field was dotted,  populated, by his brethren, each standing in the setting    sun, I saw their stately nobility    and again   the self-involvement.    We followed the Aepyorni    across the old wooden bridge made of huge  timbers. The bridge was dark from the shadows  of the poplars and the evergreens there.  The stream was dimpled with flashing moonlight    —and I think it had a little song.    Then    I found that on the bridge we were among  a herd of black Wildebeests—Black Gnus.  One was two feet away—turned toward me—  looking me eye-into-eye. There was primal  wildness in the upstanding coarse (not  sleek as it really is in Africa) fur on  the knobby, powerful-like-buffalo shoulders.  (Remember this is a dream.) I passed by him  both afraid and unafraid of wildness as I had passed  through the herd of zebras at the top of Ngorongoro Crater  in front of the lodge, where from the cliff we could see  a herd of elephants like ants, and the soda lake  looked pink because of flamingos there.  There is an essence in fear overcome  and I overcame fright in passing those zebras    and this black Wildebeest.    Then we passed    over the heavy bridge and down a little trail  on the far side of the meadow, walking back    in the direction we had been.    Soon we came    to a cottage of white clapboards  behind a big white clapboard house and knocked  on the door; it was answered by a young man  with long hair who was from the Incredible String Band.  He took us inside and he played an instrument  like a guitar and he danced as he played it.  The lyre-guitar was covered with square plastic  buttons in rows of given sizes and shapes.  The instrument would make any sound, play  any blues, make any creature sound, play  any melody…I wanted it  badly—it was a joy. My chest rose.  I figured I’d have to, and would be glad to,  give twenty or thirty thousand for it…  Then the dream broke  and I was standing somewhere with Joanna  to the side of a crowd of people by a wall  of masonry and I reached into my mouth  and took from my jaw (all the other  persons vanished and I was the center of everything)  a piece which was eight teeth  fused together. I stared at them  wondering how they could all be one piece.  They were white…It was some new fossil.  Down on the bone there were indentations like rivulets  like the flowing patterns of little rivers.
THERE ARE HILLS LIKE SHARKFINS  and clods of mud. The mind drifts through in the shape of a museum, in the guise of a museum dreaming dead friends: Jim, Tom, Emmet, Bill. —Like billboards their huge faces droop and stretch on the walls, on the walls of the cliffs out there, where trees with white trunks  makes plumes on rock ridges.   My mind is fingers holding a pen.   Trees with white trunks  make plumes on rock ridges. Rivers of sand are memories. Memories make movies  on the dust of the desert. Hawks with pale bellies  perch on the cactus, their bodies are portholes  to other dimensions.   This might go on forever.   I am a snake and a tiptoe feather at opposite ends of the scales as they balance themselves against each other. This might go on forever.
were lifted over the valley, its steepling dustdevils the redwinged blackbirds convened vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air   the profession of absence, of being absented, a lifting skyward then gone the moment of flight: another resignation from the sweep of earth   jackrabbit, swallowtail, harlequin duck: believe in this refuge vivid tips of oleander white and red perimeters where no perimeter should be        here is another in my long list of asides: why have I never had a clock that actually gained time? that apparatus, which measures out the minutes, is our own image  forever losing   and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged— isn’t one a suitable lens through which to see another:  filter the body, filter the mind, filter the resilient land       and by resilient I mean which holds  which tolerates the inconstant lover, the pitiful treatment the experiment, the untried & untrue, the last stab at wellness   choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure cataclysmic climate change or something akin to what’s killing bees—colony collapse   more like us than we’d allow, this wondrous swatch of rough       why do I need to say the toads and moor and clouds— in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket’s sound   and delight I took in the sex of every season, the tumble on moss the loud company of musicians, the shy young bookseller anonymous voices that beckoned to ramble  to be picked from the crepuscule at the forest’s edge   until the nocturnal animals crept forth  their eyes like the lamps in store windows  forgotten, vaguely firing a desire for home   hence, the body’s burden, its resolute campaign: trudge on   and if the war does not shake us from our quietude, nothing will   I carry the same baffled heart I have always carried  a bit more battered than before, a bit less joy for I see the difficult charge of living in this declining sphere       by the open air, I swore out my list of pleasures: sprig of lilac, scent of pine the sparrows bathing in the drainage ditch, their song   the lusty thoughts in spring as the yellow violets bloom  and the cherry forms its first full buds the tonic cords along the legs and arms of youth  and youth passing into maturity, ripening its flesh growing softer, less unattainable, ruddy and spotted plum       daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take there was a man who gave himself, decently, to me & I refused him   in a protracted stillness, I saw that heron I didn’t wish to disturb was clearly a white sack caught in the redbud’s limbs   I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until—  daylight, don’t leave me now, I haven’t done with you—  nor that, in this late hour, we still cannot make peace       if I, inconsequential being that I am, forsake all others how many others correspondingly forsake this world        light, light: do not go I sing you this song and I will sing another as well
A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden a tree of innocence called the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless   as opposites are in balance. It was also tasteless, the taste of innocence before it is betrayed. When God removed the wall   he gave the lemon thorns and bitterness because it had no hostility. It is a taste we want most to subdue. It asks to be left alone. We use it with fish and tea. We sugar it.   Look out the window. It stands with a donkey’s stance, hoping the day will pass. Its scent through the curtains cuts through mustiness, sharp with sweet blossoms. It hides the smell of new babies.
A hole torn in the fabric of the world, the web, the whole infernal weave through which life-giving rain is falling but mixing with the tears and with the blood. Dead body-snatchers enter, the mega-corpses, much in the news these days, enter and grind bones, flesh and sinews down to dry tree bark, mixing with tree bark, crawling with the demonic beetles. They’ll tell it later: “No one expected this”: not one—patient, doctors, practitioners of every stripe, no one except the one whose daily work is close to prophecy, who feels it in his nerves or in her muscles—where news travels up fast and lodges in the eyes, all-seeing, all-pervading vision of disaster. And comes in like a mouse, wee small, [wee modest, so wee, wee practical,] mouse with big ears and popping eyes, looking this way and that and not one tittle-tattle fazed by your huge presence. Later drowns in a bucket with a lizard: everything drowns round here getting to water. Not able to get out again. Thus coming quietly, thus probing, [thus stealing in,] squatting thus quietly back of the house: how do the tears well up, well down again, what makes them well, the seeing eyes know not, what routes the change parent-to-orphan? Stop. Orphan-to-parent? Stop. Then back again to tears? Look out beyond the healthy trees preserved in a close circle round the house for privacy, look out the window over hills and dales of this milagro country, see living green, see dying brown—on each and every morning mourn the trees. Criminal imbeciles who run the shows we live in from top to bottom of their slimy theater, have now decreed they will not solve the water. Matter of fact, they will not solve what we are made of—the high percentage water in all of us compounded. They will not solve a single problem by the name of life we give to human business. They will prefer to dip their steel in blood, to let the semen drip from off of their steel into the blood and thus contaminate, infuse with every cancer both body politic and body not so politic, just private, single, individual—but gives to other individuals their mien and color. Ghosts walk the hills and dales between the dying trees. “Remember now,” they say, with stab at tragic countenance, [for when can privacy enter into collective?] “those days, those days you took no notice of, counting them poor, dispersing them among the memories you could not value at their true worth, you could not recognize enough to feel: who knows if these few days, [these very days], were not those ones we lived together here, the only paradise?”
At five, the market is closing. Burdock roots, parsley, and rutabagas are poured back into the trucks. The antique dealer breaks down his tables. Light dappled, in winter parkas shoppers hunt for bargains: a teapot, or costume jewelry, a grab bag of rubbishy vegetables for stew. Now twilight, the farmer’s wife bundled in her tweed coat and pocket apron counts out her cash from a metal box, and nods to her grown-up son back from a tour in Iraq, as he waits in the station wagon with the country music turned way up, his prosthetic leg gunning the engine.
Billie Holiday was on the radio I was standing in the kitchen smoking my cigarette of this pack I plan to finish tonight last night of smoking youth. I made a cup of this funny kind of tea I’ve had hanging around. A little too sweet an odd mix. My only impulse was to make it sweeter. Ivy Anderson was singing pretty late tonight in my very bright kitchen. I’m standing by the tub feeling a little older nearly thirty in my very bright kitchen tonight. I’m not a bad looking woman I suppose O it’s very quiet in my kitchen tonight I’m squeezing this plastic honey bear a noodle of honey dripping into the odd sweet tea. It’s pretty late Honey bear’s cover was loose and somehow honey dripping down the bear’s face catching in the crevices beneath the bear’s eyes O very sad and sweet I’m standing in my kitchen O honey I’m staring at the honey bear’s face.
I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact. If you get right down to it the new unprocessed peanut butter is no damn good & you should buy it in a jar as always in the largest supermarket you know. And I am an enemy of change, as you know. All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released: swimming, the sensation of being dirty in body and mind summer as a time to do nothing and make no money. Prayer as a last re- sort. Pleasure as a means, and then a means again with no ends in sight. I am absolutely in opposition to all kinds of goals. I have no desire to know  where this, anything is getting me. When the water boils I get a cup of tea. Accidentally I read all the works of Proust. It was summer I was there so was he. I write because I would like to be used for years after my death. Not only my body will be compost but the thoughts I left during my life. During my life I was a woman with hazel eyes. Out the window is a crooked silo. Parts of your body I think of as stripes which I have learned to love along. We swim naked in ponds & I write be- hind your back. My thoughts about you are not exactly forbidden, but exalted because they are useless, not intended to get you because I have you & you love me. It’s more like a playground where I play with my reflection of you until you come back and into the real you I get to sink my teeth. With you I know how to relax. & so I work behind your back. Which is lovely. Nature is out of control you tell me & that’s what’s so good about it. I’m immoderately in love with you, knocked out by all your new white hair   why shouldn’t something I have always known be the very best there is. I love you from my childhood, starting back there when one day was just like the rest, random growth and breezes, constant love, a sand- wich in the middle of day, a tiny step in the vastly conventional path of the Sun. I squint. I wink. I take the ride.
for Kathe Izzo I was 6 and I lost my snake.   The table shook I can do better than this and shambled to the kitchen to the scene of the crime   I was green I put my sneaker down, little shoe   I felt the cold metal tap my calf   moo and everything began to change. I am 6 turned into lightning wrote on the night   At 6, I was feathers scales, I fell into the slime of it, lit   You think you are six, it yelled. I am face to face with a frog a woman alone in bed. The square of the window persists. I am 6.   The phone rings It’s my sister blamm I dropped a plate. Sorry.   Now the clouds slide  by afraid, awake my feet are cold but I’m fearless   I am 6.   Under here with bottle caps and stars adults and low moans, busses   slamming on brakes I am 6   the cake is lit it’s round the children sing. I will never return. We are so small.   My husband turns his fevered face. I put the medicine down. Click. I am 6.   The movie rolls on. Tramping feet, music blaring at the end of the war. I am frightened hold my hand   The round face of the woman upstairs, moving the faucets, strips of vegetable   slithering down, her reptile child will never return. The telephone  rings. It’s me. I’m six.
What’s yr race and she said what’s yr hurry how ’bout it cock asian man I’m just going for curry. You ever been to ethni-city? How ’bout multi-culti? You ever lay out skin for the white gaze? What are you, banana or egg? Coconut maybe? Something wrong Charlie Chim-chong-say-wong-leung-chung? You got a slant to yr marginal eyes? You want a little rice with that garlic? Is this too hot for you? Or slimy or bitter or smelly or tangy or raw or sour — a little too dirty on the edge hiding underneath crawling up yr leg stuck between the fingernails? Is that a black hair in yr soup?  Well how you wanna handle this? You wanna maintain a bit of différ-ence? Keep or mother’s other? Use the father for the fodder? What side of John A. Macdonald’s tracks you on anyway? How fast you think this train is going to go?
(in memory of José Antonio Burciaga, 1947-1996)   We are chameleons. We become chameleon.  —José Antonio Burciaga  We are space between— the black-orange blur of a million Monarchs on their two-generation migration south to fir-crowned Michoacán where tree trunks will sprout feathers, a forest of paper-thin wings.   Our Mexica cocooned in the membranes de la Madre Tierra say we are reborn zacuanpapalotls, mariposas negras y anaranjadas in whose sweep the dead whisper.   We are between— the flicker of a chameleon’s tail that turns his desert-blue backbone to jade or pink sand, the snake-skinned fraternal twins of solstice and equinox.   The ashen dawn, silvering dusk, la oración as it leaves the lips, the tug from sleep, the glide into dreams that husk out mestizo memory.   We are— one life passing through the prism of all others, gathering color and song, cempazuchil and drum to leave a rhythm scattered on the wind, dust tinting the tips of fingers as we slip into our new light.
I swallow a pill but there is no cure A city map won’t get me where I want to go   Scaling the scaffold, mindless of the mall, unaware of driveways where housewives dodge the wrecking ball, I crawl outside these vacant blues   and into the contours of your eyes
In the America of the dream the first rise of the moon swings free of the ocean, and she reigns in her shining flesh over a good, great valley of plumped, untrampled grasses and beasts with solemn eyes, of lovers infallibly pitched in their ascendant phase.   In this America, death is virginal also, roaming the good, great valley in his huge boots, his shadow steady and lean, his pistol silver, his greeting clear and courteous as a stranger’s who looks for another, a mind to share his peaceable evenings.   Dreaming, we are another race than the one which wakes in the cold sweat of fear, fires wild shots at death., builds slippery towers of glass to head him off, waylays him with alcohol traps, rides him down in canyons of sex, and hides in teetering ghost towns.   Dreaming, we are the mad who swear by the blood of trees and speak with the tongues of streams through props of steel and sawdust, a colony of souls ravaged by visions, bound to some wild, secret cove not yet possessed, a place still innocent of us.
There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”   —Martin Gardner, in Scientific American Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am putting on. It is evening in the antiworld where she lives. She is forty-five years away from her death, the hole which spit her out into pain, impossible at first, later easing, going, gone. She has unlearned much by now. Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens, her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses, she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks, but their ardor increases. Soon her second child will be young enough to fight its way into her body and change its life to monkey to frog to tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to nothing. She is making a list:  Things I will need in the past  lipstick  shampoo  transistor radio  Sergeant Pepper  acne cream  five-year diary with a lock She is eager, having heard about adolescent love and the freedom of children. She wants to read Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster without getting sick. I think of her as she will be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the mirror I see she uses her left hand to write, her other to open a jar. By now our lives should have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have passed one another like going and coming trains, with both of us looking the other way.
In memory of my parents  People whose lives have been shaped by history—and it is always tragic— do not want to talk about it, would rather dance, give parties on thrift-shop china. You feel wonderful in their homes, two leaky rooms, nests they stowed inside their hearts on the road into exile. They know how to fix potato peelings and apple cores so you smack your lips.   The words start over again hold no terror for them. Obediently they rise and go with only a rucksack or tote bag. If they weep, it’s when you’re not looking.   To tame their nightmares, they choose the most dazzling occupations, swallow the flames in the sunset sky, jump through burning hoops in their elegant tiger suits. Cover your eyes: there’s one walking on a thread thirty feet above us— shivering points of light leap across her body, and she works without a net.
Johannes Brahms and   Clara Schumann The modern biographers worry “how far it went,” their tender friendship. They wonder just what it means when he writes he thinks of her constantly, his guardian angel, beloved friend. The modern biographers ask the rude, irrelevant question of our age, as if the event of two bodies meshing together establishes the degree of love, forgetting how softly Eros walked in the nineteenth-century, how a hand held overlong or a gaze anchored in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart, and nuances of address not known in our egalitarian language could make the redolent air tremble and shimmer with the heat of possibility. Each time I hear the Intermezzi, sad and lavish in their tenderness, I imagine the two of them sitting in a garden among late-blooming roses and dark cascades of leaves, letting the landscape speak for them, leaving us nothing to overhear.
The tint of the sky between sunset and night.   And wandering with you and your nephew in that maze, half-lost—Madridof the Austrias—looking for Plaza of the Green   Cross where, days before you arrived, an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels straddling the curb, and so the van   heading for the barracks that morning had to slow to squeeze past . . . Back at the hotel your mom   is holding up her gift—Amethyst, she says admiring how light when passing through a prism   bends. At his window that morning before we began my student said, ¡Qué bonito!, watching it drift and descend, settling on roofs and cars.   And I think of you and your wife and daughter: getting to see Madrid in white, your visit winding down, and how   I had wanted that lesson to end to get to the park—Retiro, they say, is the city’s one lung, and the way the feel and sound of steps   cease when grass is completely covered as if walking on a cloud. The year before   on a visit from the coast, a friend sitting at a window watched the flakes flutter   and fall, dissolving before reaching the ground—aguanieve, he said while from a town near Seville   B-52s were lifting off . . . I was in a trance that week though like most things the war   in the Gulf was soon another backdrop, like the string of car bombs the following year. And yet that morning   as soon as I heard, something led me not to the park but down to City Hall, workers in the street   evacuated, sipping coffee, though I never reached the site—of course it was cordoned off, the spray of glass, the heap   of twisted metal, and so later learned their names their lives. Of the five there was one: a postal clerk who   as a boy, would plunge his hands into the white, the cold a sweet jolt   whenever he got to touch the stuff, scooping it tightly into a ball   like the ones he would dodge and throw years later at his wife-to-be: those weekends,   those places—away from city air— a release . . . Miraflores, Siete Picos, Rascafría . . . It’s in his blood, she would come to say chatting with a neighbor about his thing for snow—the way it falls   softly, blanketing roofs and groves, villages nestled in the Sierra’s   hills: it is February and she is picturing him and the boy, up there now   playing, horsing around
Light bulbs on a birthday cake. What a difference that would make!  Plug it in and make a wish,  then relax and flip a switch! No more smoke  or waxy mess  to bother any birthday guests. But Grampa says, “it’s not the same!  Where’s the magic?  Where’s the flame? To get your wish without a doubt, You need to blow some candles out!”
Just when you think you know the boa, There’s moa and moa and moa and moa.
I am the Earth And the Earth is me. Each blade of grass, Each honey tree, Each bit of mud, And stick and stone Is blood and muscle, Skin and bone. And just as I Need every bit Of me to make My body fit, So Earth needs Grass and stone and tree And things that grow here Naturally. That’s why we Celebrate this day. That’s why across The world we say: As long as life, As dear, as free, I am the Earth And the Earth is me.
Sun slant low, chill seeps into black water. No more days of bugs and basking. Last breath, last sight of light and down I go, into the mud. Every year, here, I sink and settle, shuttered like a shed. Inside, my eyes close, my heart slows to its winter rhythm. Goodbye, good- bye! Remember the warmth. Remember the quickness. Remember me. Remember.
I grow in places others can’t, where wind is high and water scant. I drink the rain, I eat the sun; before the prairie winds I run. I see, I sprout, I grow, I creep, and in the ice and snow, I sleep. On steppe or veld or pampas dry, beneath the grand, enormous sky, I make my humble, bladed bed. And where there’s level ground, I spread.
sun sunwarm sunwarm on back sunwarm on back legs sunwarm on back legs loosens  my heart  my heart beats  my heart beats faster  in sunwarm my heart beats faster  I flex  I flex legs  I flex legs loose with sunwarm  I drink dew from dripping leaves  I beat  flex  crouch  leap!    What am I?  (grasshopper)
Water nymph, you have climbed from the shallows to don your dragon-colors. Perched on a reed stem all night, shedding your skin, you dry your wings in moonlight.   Night melts into day. Swift birds wait to snap you up. Fly, dragonfly! Fly!
I’m practicing my  I-belong-here  no-twig-snap  no-leaf-rustle  no-branch-crack  see-all, know-all  float-like-fog  like-smoke  pine-needle-soft  forest walk.  No one will know I’m coming. No one will know when I’m gone.
Red and blue plaid, pockets with buttons, my camping shirt is flannel, worn soft, pine smells, campfire, forest moss.   I keep it hidden in my bottom drawer— where no one will find it and wash away my memories.
Petrarch dreams of pebbles on the tongue, he loves me at a distance, black polished stone skipping the lake that swallows worn-down words, a kind of drown and drench and quench and very kind to what I would've said. Light marries water and what else (unfit for drinking purposes), light lavishes my skin on intermittent sun. (I am weather and unreasonable, out of all season. Petrarch loves my lies of laurel leaves, ripped sprigs of deciduous evergreen.) A creek is lying in my cement-walled bed, slurring through the center of small town; the current's brown and turbid (muddy, turbulent with recent torrents), silt rushing toward the reservoir. A Sonata passes by too close (I have to jump) and yes I do hear music here. It's blue, or turquoise, aquamarine, some synonym on wheels, note down that note. It's Petrarch singing with his back to me (delivering himself to voice), his fingers filled with jonquil, daffodils, mistaken narcissus. (I surprised him between the pages of a book, looked up the flowers I misnamed.) Forsythia and magnolia bring me spring, when he walks into the house he has wings. Song is a temporary thing (attempt), he wants to own his music.
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.
I am a daughter and a sister. I wonder when I will die. I hear the warm weather coming. I see stars in the day. I want to learn my whole ballet dance. I am a daughter and a sister. I pretend to be a teacher at home. I feel like I am a teacher. I touch hands that are growing. I worry that I will never change. I cry when something or someone dies. I am a daughter and a sister. I understand that teachers work hard for students. I say that I don’t like bullies. I dream about me not moving while trying really hard to run. I try to become a good friend. I hope that there is no more dying or killing. I am a daughter and a sister.
No one knew what the stones like squatting frogs signified. There they were, fuming in rows, out of the ground; every critic had his explanation or hers. But—we had to remember—they   came to nothing, every one; those large stones out of the earth served the systems of those who considered them, as explaining something about the past it was important   for the explainer to explain. And yet no one had any idea truly; there was no basis in fact for any view of them, and they remained like their origins—or like   smiling Olmec babies, sweet but ominous figures come from the earth to reproach us, almost cheerfully, for our ignorance—a mystery, just as the probe of our feelings came up with nothing.
Light from the ugliest lamp I ever saw, here on the table that triples for reading, eating (can’t say dining), business on the phone; ugliest except a few around the corner in that guest house at windows   —plaster driftwood; cylinders like rockets or sanitary napkins propping shades; thin torso of a youth; red globe on orange globe, the works, somebody’s collection. Wouldn’t she love this one, lump of lamp base   intending landscape, two donkeys in mustard glaze, heads ruefully down, one carrying two rush panniers large enough to hold your pens or salts and peppers; on the other a shifty man with droopy moustache rides,   **   grumping under his sombrero; right leg broken off at the knee, left leg clipped at ankle. They make no progress, this mold-made work—the joins, arthritic ridges where dabs of grayish green suggest   a wizened bush from which a brass post rises to hold a shade that doesn’t fit and twice has tried to burn, as crusty sores at the rim show. Still, it lights my work. Why hate it? Do I care?   These indecorous furnishings stand for failure, are a clutter that weighs down, defeats the purpose, like dumbbells taken along on vacations; the pen jar; lamp base, sextant, portable folding triptych.   **   The writing table fills with clutter. Specials coax me to nudge buying into play. A checkout coupon lets me get some brand of lunch meats fifty-five cents off if I spend two dollars   but I just can’t find it when I’m shopping, the ticket— with its rubric of good news and inscrutable forest of bar code, black on red—to lead me on; back home there it is, on the table, laying waste my power to spend.   What I have wanted (with Larkin) to do must be “essentially undoable, it belongs to the imagination.” Rather, the demolition has begun, piss and shit and blood mix in the snow-white bowl; and yet   **   I find the Beech Forest (behind the beach dunes) that Allen recommended “without reservation.” The man was right—it more than satisfies, these beech ponds and their dune   forest. I sat on a pitch pine that had blown over and then turned round and risen again, and bowed part making a seat something like a saddle; the tree was growing while I sat on it   as were the other pitch pines round the pond ruddy in afternoon, late light of day, rough trunks with tufts of twisted branches green with needles, it was idyllic, wind speaking through the pines,   **   solitude:—O, yes, two high-breasted girls came striding by, I heard them coming, I heard them going, yammering at full volume not looking left or right, they passed me, were   out of sight and soon of earshot, Doppler effect caused by exuberant youth in oblivious chitchat. And people are smoking in these dry woods too, not policing their butts is how I know,   the butts will surface from the heavier, sifting sand, sand spilling, surfing down hills, crashing in waves over the path here. But call it solitude, when a thought—but wait! I thought—I should not be   **   having a thought here, this moment: yet a vision of a Chinese poet in his study overlooking such a pond as this arrives out of the silence like the yellow water lilies on the water, pads   spreading out in files like a design on the broadloom of a lobby. The sage is working on a poem, brushing it on silk, inspired by a blend of Tao and Confucius. Doubtless he would not forget   allusions to Sung poets, if he were not a Sung poet himself, in which case he would have to echo Han or T’ang; and he would be writing of solitude; time passing; absent friends   **   (enlightenment would have to be inferred). No matter, I didn’t bring a pen today. However, over there are inkberry bushes, so with a reed I just might make a start. . . . Farther   on the path I listen to a bird, a warbler perhaps, I do not know the song or see the bird. There with the pines and sand and birdsong, and no prayer- or guide- or selfhelp-book, no   serious commune, the mind must yearn to be led on; it wants a deity, an altar to approach; an altar at least to take steps toward; occasion to rise to—with nothing planned for the mind,   **   it’s like a person suddenly blind, not blind for a long time and knowing the ropes, but just now, rope-stung, blind—and groping, feeling around for the way, any way, or, closer to home,   when the power goes at night just getting from here to there even though you know the drill, —you never find the batteries when you need them, groping down cellar for the circuit breaker then   you flip it; nothing, it’s a bigger failure you are part of— know the layout in general yet without ceremony the mind leans forward, over an edge, hoping for, needing a little ritual, like a guide rail to keep it   **   from falling, going down. Even then the mind finds need of other news, keeps on desiring alterity somewhere at hand. For example, walking the streets of Provincetown, nothing to see   but lots to look at, all that fluff and buff, the Michelin-man day-trippers aching along; suddenly I want a prayer book, maybe notBottles and Stools or The Little Red Book but still . . .   even a pocket copy of A Shropshire Lad, such as I find soon after all the buff and fluff at Tim’s, the only bookstore on the street, handy for quick reads. Thin as a shortbread biscuit,   **   THE RICHARDS PRESS LONDON 1915, no doubt with its khaki cover, intended for some Tommy’s backpack, a backward solace for off-duty hours in the trenches: admittedly not very much   on the other hand just the thing I’m talking after; a talisman perhaps is all, an amulet with words that say, buck up, come on, you’ll make it,there’s something on after all this, no matter   what the words say. Housman’s “vision,” his drear anguish of love for someone, something, lad and landscape that never were, that might shoot threads of gold among the bloody muslins and the mud;   **   mind wants other news than what the ruffled senses bring data of—smoke or flesh or birdsong. It saw there was a space within, reserved for turning toward another; other; that   no bullet, arrowwood or beach plum might fill, though these could occupy that space a moment.  Again I heard the casual chirping of that bird, off in that tupelo, the song   I did not know, below the cries of gull and jay I did. The unknown I saw was not enough to satisfy; or—satisfied when it was framed, complement of what is known for sure.   **   It’s—like—when you go someplace strange, new, the seashore, any boundary, you want to learn the names of plants. Start looking at the edges of leaves. It gives a grip on where you are, and who, or seems to,   to know bullbrier, bearberry, blueberry. You get a GUIDE or a local to tell. On the dune path I found one, a gnarled bush alone, hollylike but succulent leaf; nothing like it in the book. But why feel helped in nature   by a name? When a horde of flower children wanted to know what they should do to be saved (back when) Snyder told them, “learn the names of plants; of animals; learn to do something with your hands.”   **   Well I went out to that dune again: to cop a copy of the leaf I took and lost: so it’s only bayberry after all; dioecious, two-sexed: some leaves different from others, that’s OK only one got pictured   in my book; but the waxiness, bayberry for sure, set to be rendered into candles for a gifte shoppe, nauseating noose of “scents.” Its nutlets twinkle near the oily leaves aglow above the sand,   bone white. Doesn’t make me feel better to know now about that scrawny straggler. Sanctimonious pilgrim know-alls, Bradford & Co.! Forest into desert, just like that. No time flat, considering.
That bag you packed me when you sent me to the universe— camp after camp I’ve opened it debating whether to unpack—  Not yet, not yet— Why did I feel so much in it was dangerous on the playground, too good for everyday, feel those splendid fireworks hazardous to institutions, unmannerly to etiquette, so that, time after time, I found myself saying  Not yet?   At each new place I faced it, it suggested, Here spread out your things, put on this coat, open this bottle—  No, not yet . . . sometimes throwing something out, giving things away, lightening my load. . . .   The more I pull out, the more it seems, some days, is left inside, the heavier it is.   Sometimes I think this package is almost a door the opening of which careening across heaven could be fatal.   Some days now I wonder if I’ll ever dare face my given garments— permanently wrinkled, surely out of date— your travel-thought wasting in its tissue, flesh-corrupt— till I’ve absorbed it, like those stitches that dissolve in an incision where something’s been removed.
“Do it,” yells the man across the street to his motorcycle. We each meet the day in our own way. The aquarium with three unspent goldfish buzzes. Three flies are flying. Coffee, traceable to dark, wet trees in Central America, cools. The black cat on my lap hates poetry, even the sound of it being typed. My skull and the falling stars sing back and forth the songs of magnets  in heat. A car with a broken muffler hums along, mumbling answers to questions  I haven’t shaped yet. What is a life? Stacks of typing paper wait to be darkened, dented. On my white wall a photograph of the poet James Galvin (cut out from the American Poetry Review). Sometimes I want to be:    1. an American  2. a poet  3. reviewed   James looks like a farmboy (Iowa, Iowa, you have more poets than  scarecrows these fuse-lit days). How carelessly James sits back on his hips, staring into the camera’s eye. (Imprisoned inside there is the last surviving Cyclops), and I think of W. C. W.’s lines:    the beauty of / terrible faces.   When my face opens like James’s, it is a year later, years later. Some life is gone. Only poems remain. Perhaps a poem that a magazine wanted to publish before it folded  (“folded,” the flight of such a word). And so the poem is stuck on a roll without a player piano. Imagination insists on saving its works as a poem, a tattoo, a quilt, an  essay, or an aside, like this one:    LOVE’S CHILLY NIGHT    an angel’s cold hand  irons leaves into  this flat romance    colors distract us  from stems rotting  under our own feet    an angel burdens  our night with  its little laughs    as a derisive white  moon freezes  far from a fire   Even as I type this my coffee is cold; the peasants who picked the beans are  sleeping; bottles of erasing fluids await their inevitable moments. I lose this moment. I’m dancing in the rain with a witch from San Carlos: Botta—is it you? Her red skirt turns like one solid year of sunsets. I almost catch her, but I’m back to this moment. Just in time to send you, my friends, another telegram. Here, Wordsworth’s worthy words.    (I know I will have to bear their cost.)    CLING (STOP) TOGETHER (STOP) IN (STOP) ONE (STOP) SOCIETY (STOP) RANE (STOP)   BUT THE WORDS WON’T STOP and what do I owe?   On my desk: a dictionary. All mine, my mine.   Words like “lacrimator” wait for me,  lak re mat ar which means:    1. the lake really matters  2. the lilac reddens into matters of the air  3. the lack of the red mats in the attic   YES! All of the above and below.   One of the flies has landed on a photograph of me hiding behind  Japanese fans. I stare at the fly staring at the me who no longer exists. I will not exist soon. I’m here, behind the typewriter. Men don’t split into new personae at the command of flashes.   We can become fleshless though, like the skeletons in Mexican  cathedrals, guardians of empty confessionals. In my room, I stare into a smaller box:    “a brooding young man embraces  a golden girl whose blue dress    has the words ‘forget Xanadu’  stitched into it while dice without    numbers float in the air suspended  between a far Heaven and a near Earth    as a black spider crawls toward  the blind moon. A gray feather’s    sleep on a blackening hill is  a hint of uncompleted journeys”   My neighbor comes home on his slow, red motorcycle and enters this  poem again. The miles hum between his legs.   One of the flies has bitten me. The black cat darkens all the windows by jumping sill to sill. The goldfish haven’t lost their glitter. At last, this is my land. I’ve learned to speak its language: America, I give you the power to break my heart.
In one version you must convince every living thing one by one to weep until he climbs back into the marriage-house, that earth about which it is said that bread is the glue of the earth. Certainly glue is money, the phrase “the tears of things” is money, the revelation of the Woman Clothed in the Sun is money. The lake is a disc of bright money buying a few plain birds down, they climb back nervously as you hurry through, plain birds like a  plain song, that moment when four or five are around your knees like Zeno’s arrow, rising by halves, like Eurydice’s bread, & still the possibility they might intersect, you would be the one who was struck by a flying bird, somewhere between a blesséd fool & village idiot, the only one to persist outside the local economy, drooling at travelers, holding yourself, slinging incomprehensible  advice, you would learn the trick with museum wire where you snap the heads off quiet animals in front of the store, tempted equally by science & dirty work. . . .   I am trying to invent a way for you to buy me back—
They moved across the screen like a computer simulation. They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned  to call this a nature show. Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for  the face. Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed  meditation. But the song was never familiar. Because this was the only room this was the only room where we  undressed—:  that was the plot. They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening  to us. The image burning in. Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed  skin. We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky’s numerous  advances. All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but  not enough. We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed  you to the story. This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire  wrapped in ripe gray gauze—  you like it. (2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt’s dry  speed—the Laws  prefigured in the neutral network’s burning thicket.) They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down. This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the  room like sand. Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire. The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of  kinked plot  which can’t be straightened like a motel wire  hanger looped around your wrists. The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought—  the image burning in now. We began to understand what they were—:  the Thou & the shalt & the not
For 8 months he lay in bed over the   difference between “the bell rings” & “he rings   the bell.” Did those 2 “rings” SOUND   DIFFERENT? The invisible disturbance which   is the bell’s vibration beating at the air—a   FIELD EFFECT—does it shift with the   ringer’s will? This, he thought, was the   smallest difference between things which the   human mind could hold (or almost hold, the  thought-of-it falling away from the thinking,   a penny rolling to the horizon & so to   sleep . . .). He couldn’t get up. It became clear   that he was the murderer. Everyone knows. A   man standing at a podium reads from notes.   In the audience people nod in immaculate   suits, women & men. When I am done someone will transcribe what I say into speech. It will not resemble my notes. He is just THE   THING between his notes & his speech. This is   only fair, that he be the air. Some of the   women wear hats with feathers in them, wild,   candescent. In the audience is a boy named B,   not the letter, not the note. Another sound,   neither letter nor note—
Back of the church the busy forsythias bow and scrape to May and all these blessed stones stiff in their careful finery of words; the mess of markers makes me go and browse.   Somehow the blocks of slate and marble hate to be cut and carved to the dimensions of Mary Monday’s age and her virtues. At heart they hurt to be made literate and they are rebelling, fast as they can, shedding an edge, a letter, as they go —a year, a part of a skull, a bone— it hurts them to stand so long for this kind of death not theirs. Fast as they can they are leaning away from their duty and look down longing for the warm sod. The prides and fears they stand witness to, the ladies and gents, are only whimsy now. They cease to reflect that wary pride the flesh beneath them took in lying down. To the last date line and death’s-head-stare, the legend reads, “There! I’ve done it!” But these are only beginning, the blocks of shale forget their lines letting the sunlight and rain divide and subdivide their veins and bone. They do not care, they only feel an unnatural heaviness, tottering so in the hot light. They long to be off and away, they toss and jibe in the sun; a whole regatta of black sails, they are sailing away over the lumpy green yard of time, and never coming about for home until they capsize turned turtle by boys from Central Square.   Tired of holding—they are tired of holding up; their always-leaning makes me hold my tongue and sit with them awhile. We heave our shoulders, or our shadows, on the mounds, while under the hills, memorials more fine lie lip to paper lip  and keep their impossible word.
Sewn straw, exact pattern. Fields of rice-sprigs evenly set, a mile of herringbone tweed. The town, a sea of gunmetal, fish-scale tiles.   By morning each floor a casserole of pillows, coverlets, comforters, towels: flown nests. Imprint of bodies, fading. They fold the beds away, the room waits empty all day.  All day the bodies circle, leaving no impression on each other. Tooled in the foundry of the streets. School-caps, factory-packed subway, miracle train: one territorial imperative, an emperor’s.  On his platform one yard square perched on a roof that slopes in waves of tiles up toward other tiled cascades, the karate student for hours does running in place, deep knee bends on his surfboard perch. All his free time to make his body efficient, tight, exact, rising and falling, mint piston pumping in its shaft.
After the declaration by emperor to stop the war many people in Tokyo killed themselves, for instance, in front of the imperial palace. But few people knows those facts.   Hence you must teach me where you got the news or what sort of book gave you the fact that quite few people knows. To know the fact of our nation’s subjection is not so comfortable but the fact of many people’s spontaneous death gives me more complicated feelings.   In the matter of what William Gass said I must describe my feelings. I went to Nagasaki on an educational trip four years ago. I can recollect those serious moment which was given by the beamed materials in the memorial hall.   But most youth after the war are indifferent to those nightmares because of our no experience. Surely, I think, those barbarious conducts shouldn’t be forgiven or forgotten at all and we must not close our eyes to the rebombing at any place in this world.   In conclusion I may say that most people except sufferers or the like will not have ill feelings toward your country but they will reproach the suffocative fact in history.   Where were you when the World War II was over. Please share your experience of the war with me. I’m now interested in the wars concerned with Japan for the past 100 years. If you tell me your reflections I can suspect more seriously. You have abandoned such cursed things as useless? In that war 3 million people were killed on the side of our nation, especially three hundred thousand people by the A-bomb. Over the war between the imperialism and militarism America won a victory. What does this word mean?
Minnesota, May 1945   DMZ, September 1967  1   In Tokyo our gallant boys dance rock-and-roll, squint eyes wary at standing easy. They leer and reel on a springboard tip and then jackknife toward the electronic noise . . .   And Charley, when Time Inc. said he said the President had his head wedged about Vietnam  burning for honor or—who knows? the Action he had said—  married the Marines. He showered for vows on those   who took his word who taught him shoot it out and shout “Yes Sir Yes Sir!”  and sent him out like napalm obedient to any itchy finger.   I hope the fields of Minnesota gave perspective when he moved out  as to the starting line on the command, survive, survive.   . . . our juiced doughboys feel their girls.    2    What did I tell you when we met last and it   “after the leeches and the food” on a break  in the rain was already up with you, Charley?   Mouthing the big cigar like a gangster at the wheel . . .    cigarette between thumb and finger  the way we all even in junior high  learned not to  your men watching in wonder    him tasting the strange  (turned officer so young)  foreign taste  that smoke: and all was dark  except what sparks  he scattered there, stubbing it out   What could we do for you   you hugging your knees    who taught you  to raise your voice?    3   No more the wide Mankato pearled with ice  under blue January sky your arm around the shoulder of the friend who ran faster no more the long hours pad in hand composing  reasons for your belief a belief in fathers has no reason   no more the simple passion of going first your hatless straightness, the struggle, the deep worry,  the dark Africa of being alive in a country  run by chiefs without tribes no more of all that, only your  brief beauty in many hearts in a time when fathers bury their sons, and you  surrounded, cut down in a war you were fated never to see,  blinded by love for all men.
I remember the dusty floorboards of wood in the streetcar Of the Minneapolis Street Railway Company And the varnished yellow banquettes of tight-knit rattan Worn smooth by decades of passengers The worn gleaming brass grips at the corners of the seats And the motorman’s little bell Windows trembling in their casings as we crossed the avenue Liberty dimes falling softly into the steel-rimmed hour glass The gnarled hand of the motorman near. My grandmother arranged herself against the seat Her back as straight as a soldier’s beside me Her navy hat with velvet band And net veil down making her head seem distant, Her dreaming smile and the patient Roman nose, A repose so deep; from my place I watched her when we rode like princes Rattling past traffic stopped on the granite cobbles Riding downtown together, my hands in hers; All that so much That I love yet but feel no sadness for, that Time crossed out like the trolley tracks taken up Or entombed under the pliant blacktop of the modernized.
Tell me the way to the wedding Tell me the way to the war, Tell me the needle you’re threading I won’t raise my voice anymore.   And tell me what axe you are grinding Where the boy on the bivouac believes, What reel you are unwinding For the girl in her bed who grieves.   While behind a derrick’s girder He watches the sinking sun, He asks what he’ll do for murder And what he will do for fun.   Will you read him the ways of war His Miranda rights in sin, Will you tell him what to ignore When he studies your discipline?   He dozes off—but he shakes In a dream that he is the one Death finds abed and wakes Just as the night is done.   Tell me what boats go ashore Riding the oil-dimmed tide, Red streamers and black in store For the boy with a pain in his side.   And tell me where they are heading Tonight; now tell me the score. Tell me the way to their wedding I won’t raise my own voice anymore.
I passed him by at first. From the photograph Peered sepia eyes, blindered, unappeased From a lair of brows and beard: one not amazed At anything, as if to have looked enough Then turned aside worked best for him—as if Night vision was the discipline that eased The weight of what he saw. A man’s gaze posed Too long in the sun goes blank; comes to grief. That face could be a focus for this back room, For pack-rat papers strewn as if in rage, Fond notes unread: each wary eye a phial Unstopped to let huge Melville out, to calm The sea of pages; Melville in older age: The grown man’s sleepy defiance of denial.
After you left me forever, I was broken into pieces, and all the pieces flung into the river. Then the legs crawled ashore and aimlessly wandered the dusty cow-track. They became, for a while, a simple roadside shrine: A tiny table set up between the thighs held a dusty candle, weed-and-fieldflower chains placed reverently there by children and old women. My knees were hung with tin triangular medals to cure all forms of hysterical disease.   After I died forever in the river, my torso floated, bloated in the stream, catching on logs or stones among the eddies. White water foamed around it, then dislodged it; after a whirlwind trip, it bumped ashore. A grizzled old man who scavenged along the banks had already rescued my arms and put them by, knowing everything has its uses, sooner or later.   When he found my torso, he called it his canoe, and, using my arms as paddles, he rowed me up and down the scummy river. When catfish nibbled my fingers he scooped them up and blessed his reusable bait. Clumsy but serviceable, that canoe! The trail of blood that was its wake attracted the carp and eels, and the river turtle, easily landed, dazed by my tasty red.   A young lad found my head among the rushes and placed it on a dry stone. He carefully combed my hair with a bit of shell and set small offerings before it which the birds and rats obligingly stole at night, so it seemed I ate. And the breeze wound through my mouth and empty sockets so my lungs would sigh, and my dead tongue mutter. Attached to my throat like a sacred necklace was a circlet of small snails. Soon the villagers came to consult my oracular head with its waterweed crown. Seers found occupation, interpreting sighs, and their papyrus rolls accumulated.   Meanwhile, young boys retrieved my eyes they used for marbles in a simple game till somebody’s pretty sister snatched at them and set them, for luck, in her bridal diadem. Poor girl! When her future groom caught sight of her, all eyes, he crossed himself in horror, and stumbled away in haste through her dowered meadows.   What then of my heart and organs, my sacred slit which loved you best of all? They were caught in a fisherman’s net and tossed at night into a pen for swine. But they shone so by moonlight that the sows stampeded, trampled one another in fear, to get away. And the fisherman’s wife, who had thirteen living children and was contemptuous of holy love, raked the rest of me onto the compost heap.   Then in their various places and helpful functions, the altar, oracle, offal, canoe and oars learned the wild rumor of your return. The altar leapt up, and ran to the canoe, scattering candle grease and wilted grasses. Arms sprang to their sockets, blind hands with nibbled nails groped their way, aided by loud lamentation, to the bed of the bride, snatched up those unlucky eyes from her discarded veil and diadem, and rammed them home. Oh, what a bright day it was! This empty body danced on the riverbank. Hollow, it called and searched among the fields for those parts that steamed and simmered in the sun, and never would have found them.   But then your great voice rang out under the skies my name!—and all those private names for the parts and places that had loved you best. And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung. The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar, and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment, and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles, and the runaway groom, and the fisherman’s thirteen children set up such a clamor, with their cries of “Miracle!” that our two bodies met like a thunderclap in midday—right at the corner of that wretched field with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle. We fell in a heap on the compost heap and all our loving parts made love at once, while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes and then went decently about their business.   And here it is, moonlight again; we’ve bathed in the river and are sweet and wholesome once more. We kneel side by side in the sand; we worship each other in whispers. But the inner parts remember fermenting hay, the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense, and passion, its bloody labor, its birth and rebirth and decay.
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.   Samuel Butler II  I’m going to murder you with love; I’m going to suffocate you with embraces; I’m going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you’re dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.   You will become my personal Sahara; I’ll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain your remaining brackish well. With my female blade I’ll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I’ll inhale your last oasis whole.   But in the total desert you become You’ll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage! Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.   So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move toward me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdure, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green.   When you are fed and watered, flourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome, and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you’ll begin to die again.
for John At a party I spy a handsome psychiatrist, And wish, as we all do, to get her advice for free. Doctor, I’ll say, I’m supposed to be a poet. All life’s awfulness has been grist to me. We learn that happiness is a Chinese meal, While sorrow is a nourishment forever. My new environment is California Dreamer. I’m fearful I’m forgetting how to brood. And, Doctor, another thing has got me worried: I’m not drinking as much as I should . . .   At home, I want to write a happy poem On love, or a love poem of happiness. But they won’t do, the tensions of every day, The rub, the minor abrasions of any two Who share one space. Ah, there’s no substitute for tragedy! But in this chapter, tragedy belongs To that other life, the old life before us. Here is my aphorism of the day: Happy people are monogamous. Even in California. So how does the poem play   Without the paraphernalia of betrayal and loss? I don’t have a jealous eye or fear And neither do you. In truth, I’m fond Of your ex-mate, whom I name “my wife-in-law.” My former husband, that old disaster, is now just funny, So laugh we do, in what Cyril Connolly Has called the endless, nocturnal conversation Of marriage. Which may be the best part. Darling, must I love you in light verse Without the tribute of profoundest art?   Of course it won’t last. You will break my heart Or I yours, by dying. I could weep over that. But now it seems forced, here in these heaven hills, The mourning doves mourning, the squirrels mating, My old cat warm in my lap, here on our terrace As from below comes a musical cursing As you mend my favorite plate. Later of course I could pick a fight; there is always material in that. But we don’t come from fighting people, those Who scream out red-hot iambs in their hate.   No, love, the heavy poem will have to come From temps perdu, fertile with pain, or perhaps Detonated by terrors far beyond this place Where the world rends itself, and its tainted waters Rise in the east to erode our safety here. Much as I want to gather a lifetime thrift And craft, my cunning skills tied in a knot for you, There is only this useless happiness as gift.
Tell us how the soul is bound and bentinto these knots, and whether any ever frees itself from such imprisonment. —Canto XII, Inferno    I say, Without a God there is no hell.There’s only this—. She rustles for her keys. The apple tree sheds petal after petal.   She says, Let’s take you to the hospital. The petals spin like sparks. I close my eyes and say, Without a God there is no hell,  and there is only this. It’s just as well. The lawn is red and white. She asks, Who says?How do you know? The wind fells every petal.   She says, Let’s take you to the hospital. I cannot breathe. I cannot tell her, Yes—. Because without a God there is no hell,   as she whispers, Talk to me, I know I will clamber—but not toward heaven, toward the sky, eyes winking behind petal after petal.   The rope-burnt bark will flake away and fall. Knot on my neck, the rest would be so easy: I’ll pray, Without a God there is no hell, then slip through petals—through petal after petal.
for John Fogleman There are some things we just don’t talk about— Not even in the morning, when we’re waking, When your calloused fingers tentatively walk The slope of my waist:  How love’s a rust-worn boat, Abandoned at the dock—and who could doubt Waves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We’re taking Our wreckage as a promise, so we don’t talk. We wet the tired oars, tide drawing us out.   We understand there’s nothing to be said. Both of us know the dangers of this sea, Warned by the tide-worn driftwood of our pasts—. But we’ve already strayed from the harbor. We thread A slow wake though the water—then silently, We start to row, and will for as long as this lasts.
When he wakes up out of sleep, the brown boy remembers two things: his white man calls and breaks the groans of Kevin Bacon, naked and writhing in pain on a hard and wet black street. Bacon has been beaten with broken bottles and has had his chest smashed in with a large flaming couch section. A mob of whites poured gasoline all over his chiseled stomach and then lit him afire. Brad Pitt lay next to him, his stomach breathless and glistening in the flame’s light.  The brown boy knows this is somewhere between movie and dream, staring at each stomach; but more importantly, he knows that despite the fire, the bodies did not burn. They did not char or turn black. They simply shined in sweat.  The brown boy will commit to his memory, most, Brad Pitt’s dying, and how he eventually turned over on his stomach, his penis turned down and scrape fucking the street—Brad Pitt ejaculating and on fire, the liquid shooting out of him as he looked up, staggered to his feet to let out something between groaning and laughter out to the black sky. Though Pitt had been beaten with bottles and wood, it was not clear where he was hurt, only that he was a screaming surface, dripping with lit gasoline and semen.  As the brown boy ponders this surface, the white man has chosen to phone his brown boy. Their first conversation of the day is bound by this scene—and dutifully, for the white man, he wants to start from the beginning:  Brad Pitt and Kevin Bacon are in a boxing ring in the middle of a football field. They are both wearing white boxer shorts, no gloves, and about to perform a dance routine. I am standing next to them, looking at Brad Pitt’s hair flop down over his face. He smiles at me before the music starts. From everywhere, broken glass bottles hurl at their bodies, and they are splashed with gasoline. We are also in a dark alley lit by fire. The two are still standing, looking over at me, though I can’t tell who is smiling. I only know Brad Pitt winks at me while Kevin Bacon is on the street, writhing as a large white flaming couch section is smashed onto his chest. My mother was dead in the dream. I was looking through a dense stash of clothes in a cabinet. All of them were soiled, and none of the clothes were hers. I remember holding a pair of purple and green Speedos that were woven to a pair of matching polyester tennis shorts. These shorts were my father’s. I remember my mother making all of his tennis shorts. I also remember pulling out a pair of long sweatpants that were much too large for my mother and holding them up as crumbs fell from the legs. I tried to smell them, wanting to think of her alive.    What the brown boy doesn’t say is that he wondered, in the dream, how his father was getting through this—living alone with only her smell left behind. Or how he pulled the sweatpants up to his nose and mouth, absorbing the whole of her scent through his body. Without revealing his father’s grief or his own, the brown boy breathes in the smell of Giorgio mixed with eleven years of shifts at the convalescent home, and gives the white man what he thought he wanted. He quickly shot to the end, where Brad Pitt grinds his fat cock in the pavement, the curve of it pushing down bent and spewing semen into the street.  Kevin Bacon stands up and groans, laughing as his bowels leak from his stomach. I was thinking about that before you called.    The brown boy knows the white man wants to hear the brown boy rise from sleep, hear the spill from his head in the morning without saying a word. Though this morning, to this dream, the white man has two responses: He calls the dream bizarre and says nothing about the brown boy’s mother, only I feel sorry for Brad Pitt.
We say lightning has no wings when it slides down our houses   We say loss is just a condition we acquire to bury our pity further   We say the bleeding hands on the table filled with red wine imported products and passports are just reminders of who we have become   We have no titles no birthright no groves or Shakespeare to return to   We apologize for the fear growing out of our ribs   Apologize for the numbers still etched on our tongues
—   One hundred breaths split the air as I lean on the only pine tree I find. It’s early or late, it’s breezy or hot. The fields are dry. Summer is near. The horses are everywhere, strangely galloping a dream, but I can’t remember how to call them, so I stand back, watch them pass.     —   The first time I rode a horse my body found the music of fire, crackling the wind. An unbearable pleasure that also left me with a burn on the side of my leg.A sign, the horsekeeper told me, of longing.A need to return—to belong. After all, departure is like pushing the weight of our heart against the village whose name has kept us awake.     —   Rafael came from somewhere in Eurasia. I passed my hands through his mane— saw a history of conquests and battles, a field of hay, a mount of truth, heard a silent ring, his eyes asking me to go with him, to confess something sacred, to name something lustful. Nothing of where he came from, or who I was, disturbed us.     —   I knew he was different by the way he ran— without pause, without grace, without distraction, without ease. He was told how to move in the world and resented it. He knew he would never own anything.     —   He came toward me. It was a quiet afternoon. I stood unmoving. And we listened to the untitled music circling the earth like an anthem free of its nation.     —   He was unfamiliar to me, approaching as if he possessed the land. Every morning he stopped five feet from the river.
The shadows of birds fading on a fighter’s back   The undressing of words on an unstamped postcard   The wet swings in the distant park   The jealousy of raindrops on the umbrella of lovers   The laughter of a boy before a bird   The song of two flutes, two swords, two bracelets, two fingers   The stare of a wave before a pearl   The yearning between the legs of a farmer’s wife   The opening of doors closing midday   The sudden howling of our muse—and  les éventails—disturbing the guest inside of us
Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event. You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc: About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon. Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity. How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become?   A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily, And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself. A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag. We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting, Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring.   We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember. The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop. To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us. And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too.   So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street. He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke. Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know. Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely. Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.
1. Let us think of God as a lover  Who never calls, Whose pleasure in us is aroused  In unrepeatable ways, God as a body we cannot  Separate from desire, Saying to us, “Your love  Is only physical.” Let us think of God as a bronze  With green skin Or a plane that draws the eye close  To the texture of paint. Let us think of God as life,  A bacillus or virus, As death, an igneous rock  In a quartz garden. Then, let us think of kissing  God with the kisses Of our mouths, of lying with God,  As sea worms lie, Snugly petrifying  In their coral shirts. Let us think of ourselves  As part of God, Neither alive nor dead,  But like Alpha, Omega, Glyphs and hieroglyphs,  Numbers, data.     2. First forgive the silence  That answers prayer, Then forgive the prayer  That stains the silence.   Excuse the absence  That feels like presence, Then excuse the feeling  That insists on presence.   Pardon the delay  Of revelation, Then ask pardon for revealing  Your impatience.   Forgive God  For being only a word, Then ask God to forgive  The betrayal of language.   3. God of the Syllable  God of the Word God Who Speaks to Us  God Who Is Dumb   The One God The Many  God the Unnameable God of the Human Face  God of the Mask   God of the Gene Pool  Microbe Mineral God of the Sparrow’s Fall  God of the Spark   God of the Act of God  Blameless Jealous God of Surprises  And Startling Joy   God Who Is Absent  God Who Is Present God Who Finds Us  In Our Hiding Places   God Whom We Thank  Whom We Forget to Thank Father God Mother  Inhuman Infant   Cosmic Chthonic  God of the Nucleus Dead God Living God  Alpha God Zed   God Whom We Name  God Whom We Cannot Name When We Open Our Mouths  With the Name God Word God     4. The new day cancels dread  And dawn forgives all sins, All the judgments of insomnia,  As if they were only dreams.   The ugly confrontation  After midnight, with the mirror, Turns white around the edges  And burns away like frost.   Daylight undoes gravity  And lightness responds to the light. The new day lifts all weight,  Like stepping off into space.   Where is that room you woke to,  By clock-light, at 3 a.m.? Nightmare’s many mansions,  Falling, have taken it with them.   The new day, the day’s newness,  And the wretchedness that, you thought, Would never, never depart,  Meet—and there is goodbye.   A bad night lies ahead  And a new day beyond that— A simple sequence, but hard  To remember in the right order.   5. Lord of dimensions and the dimensionless, Wave and particle, all and none,   Who lets us measure the wounded atom, Who lets us doubt all measurement,   When in this world we betray you Let us be faithful in another.
I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns, Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song. And who hoarded from the Spring branches The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.   What is precious, is never to forget The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light Nor its grave evening demand for love. Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.   Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are fêted by the waving grass And by the streamers of white cloud And whispers of wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks. Now, I remember only the flavor — not like food, sweet or sharp. More like a fine powder, like dust. And I wasn’t elated or frightened, but simply rapt, aware. That’s how it is sometimes — God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you’re just too tired to open it.
I am saying primroses lined the pathway of toothless hedges. I am saying the ocean shimmered like corrugated steel in the morning sun. The context of my story changes when you enter. Then I am dung on the wall of the nomad’s field. Then the everyday waking person. I am nodding in your direction like fissures between dandelion fur. Seeing in your manner. I am speaking your pace. Slippage of silk slippers. I say you are losing sight. I say your breasts are dry shells. I am afraid of what I am capable of doing. This is all a manner of stating how I prepare myself to be loved.
Her voice is a roundness. On full moon days, she talks about renouncing meat but the butcher has his routine. And blood. M’s wisdom. Still reliable. There are sounds we cannot hear but understand in motion. Slicing of air with hips. Crushing grass, saying these are my feet. I want my feet in my shadow. Suffice to meet desires halfway. Quiet. We say her chakras are in place. When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spill. She knows how to lead and follow. Know her from this. Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool. Night slips under the door. We are tucked into bed and kissed a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where the breeze can tug it towards canals stretching for sound. Her faith abides by the cycle of the moon. See how perfect she is.
Late for the feast. Let me guess, she said, everything worked against you. Some pulverize experiences at the pool. When the air slaps, they flip into the water and speak of the excitations of distress. The stratagems of delivering an annulled emotion. And how is one to read a nod? Is a nod an exclamation? Does one kiss after a nod? A woman mutters something about the tea being too weak. The walls threaten to expose us, shadows pinch as we mutter jouissance, jouissance, while the university teacher said the use of the word was a considerable error. A most lamentable error, given half of us are illiterate and unattached. Think of words in their system of birth. Now do you see, the teacher said. Ah, see. Dogs were barking for no reason. Some of us went to the ghats and watched the dead burn. Woman in white wailed, her hair a dumb struck line against her rocking spine. We look for other distractions in a place of death. In the afternoon meanings are extolled. We are asked to name our loves. I will not, he said, use common language to talk of love. I will not jump into the substance without reinforcement. He took his body to the breeze and swayed till we begged him to stop. The rain subsided but we were still wet. Thousands have died in a nod.
A hundred and one butter lamps are offered to my uncle who is no more. Distraction proves fatal in death. A curtain of butter imprints in air. After the burning of bones, ashes are sent on pilgrimage. You are dead, go into life, we pray. My uncle was a man given to giggles in solemn moments. Memory springs like crocuses in bloom. Self conscious and precise. Without blurring the cornea, details are resuscitated. Dried yak meat between teeth. Semblance of what is. Do not be distracted, Uncle who is no more. He does not see his reflection in the river. The arching of speech over “s” as he is becoming. Curvature of spine as it cracked on a misty morning. A shadow evades the wall. You are no more, Uncle who is no more. Every seven days he must relive his moment of expiration. The living pray frequently amid burning juniper. Communication efforts require the right initiative. Somewhere along the line matters of motion and rest are resolved. Crows pick the last offerings. You are someone else, uncle no more.
Although what glitters  on the trees, row after perfect row,  is merely the injustice  of the world, the chips on the bark of each  beech tree catching the light, the sum  of these delays is the beautiful, the human  beautiful, body of flaws.  The dead would give anything  I’m sure, to step again onto  the leafrot, into the avenue of mottled shadows,  the speckled broken skins. The dead  in their sheer open parenthesis, what they  wouldn’t give for something to lean on  that won’t give way. I think I  would weep for the moral nature  of this world, for right and wrong like pools  of shadow and light you can step in  and out of crossing this yellow beech forest,  this buchen-wald, one autumn afternoon, late  in the twentieth century, in hollow light,  in gaseous light. . . . To receive the light  and return it and stand in rows, anonymous,  is a sweet secret even the air wishes  it could unlock. See how it pokes at them  in little hooks, the blue air, the yellow trees.  Why be afraid? They say when Klimt  died suddenly a painting, still  incomplete, was found in his studio,  a woman’s body open at its point of  entry, rendered in graphic,  pornographic, detail—something like  a scream between her legs. Slowly,  feathery, he had begun to paint  a delicate garment (his trademark)  over this mouth of her body. The mouth  of her face is genteel, bored, feigning a need  for sleep. The fabric defines the surface,  the story, so we are drawn to it,  its blues and yellows glittering  like a stand of beech trees late  one afternoon in Germany, in fall.  It is called Buchenwald, it is  1890. In the finished painting  the argument has something to do  with pleasure.
joined harmonising the best  so it needn’t wait phrase: the question are you sure? hanging three feet off the ground silent, absolutely quiet headquarters – we travelled north clawing back small shelter hung with screaming on the same rig blended in enthusiasm as the race approached through cracks in snow free-falling into mind alive with brightness shivering instantly into sleep changed, re-formed they run, they run with madness into chutes of changed values all of them conventional vibrations of division dare to refuse the glass lazily through long green discrete landing sites to a transmitting unit over the protective line wave patterns in space form black against sifted patches of moonlight birds move in the dark their faint contours singing small notes to the rhythm of a train so empty at this hour silence in between contains the words things whiz past once more the sound of calculation by indirect means receives its full due along the wet pavement human flesh fallen in all directions to fresh eyes something to do with the sky senselessly dishevelled resolves and fixes the foundation desirable to guard against relative soundness of approach including human shapes used by the dealer connecting them to a sense of common unforeseeable properties of relics considered in place so deceptive their firesides play optimism for its object without arousing constitutional tradition beyond the rules of the game hailstones imagine moist sea air disordered beyond it rise drearier philosophies to resist retrogression faster than anything directly stimulating receptors attention moves many possible representations inside the heart decayed into blackness fine details of the scene creep along for years hard to become immune to a predator silhouettes of participants dangle in their own data faint green clouds in almost pure alcohol calibrate the equipment to assume a more personal form susceptible to psychic influences does not contempt breed often in disguise? slipping past a window on communal stairs into faded yellow flashed with orange slanting through smoke swished into a perfect dome dissatisfied when calm returns centered around a food animal mastery of areas managed to neutralise subjects into waves to destroy communication more easily on scanty pasture
for Diane Ward  unemployment. rate.  too. short.  than. any.  raccoon. too. imagist.  those. any. synonyms.  *  hornbl.  aleck.  paulist. each.  road. endless.   from. it.  the. same. irish.  from. mudge. nerves.  the. wine. edges.   behind. a. verb.  *   she. was. only. some.  drove. herself.  trying. to. convince.  De. Niro.  about. which. atlantic.    *    poverts.   nerv.  (saun. ch.)  m’etc.    *    where. would.  snowfall.  about. Goodman. Brown.  *  a. calve.  of. river.  some. carpark.  any. size.  of. limes.
for Tom Raworth  a. taupe. wald.  less. commas.  into. gelatin.  *  “let’s. call.  this.”   my. age.  leaning. into.  some. dream.  *  the. further. he.  moves. away.  the. more. surfaces.  the. longer.  they. end.  as. her. midst.  *  my. nose.  of. all.  recourse.   (shaped.   trouble. upon.  . siecle.)  my. polk. m’edge.
"The Eagle has landed!" —Apollo II Commander Neil A. Armstrong "A magnificent desolation!" — Air Force Colonel Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. July 20, 1969   That afternoon in mid-July, Two pilgrims watched from distant space The moon ballooning in the sky. They rose to meet it face-to-face. Their spidery spaceship, Eagle, dropped Down gently on the lunar sand. And when the module's engines stopped, Rapt silence fell across the land. The first man down the ladder, Neil, Spoke words that we remember now— “One small step...” It made us feel As if we were there too, somehow. When Neil planted the flag and Buzz Collected lunar rocks and dust, They hopped like kangaroos because Of gravity. Or wanderlust? A quarter million miles away, One small blue planet watched in awe. And no one who was there that day Will soon forget the sight they saw.
Tom Tigercat is noted for his manners and his wit. He wouldn't think of lion, No, he doesn't cheetah bit. Tom never pretended to be something that he's not. I guess that's why we like him and why he likes ocelot.
I was really in a muddle looking over a mud puddle 'cause I didn't have a paddle or a twig to ride the reef. But I said, Oh, fiddle-faddle, this is just a little piddle of a second fiddle puddle so I saddled up a leaf. I set sail on the puddle, but I reached the muddy middle and I rocked the leaf a little, then I gave it all I had. And I solved the mighty riddle of the whole caboodle puddle when I hopped up on the middle of a beetle launching pad.
She looks for wiggly fishes, At least so it appears, To stuff inside the suitcase That's swinging from her ears. And though she's very graceful When flying round and round, How does she get that faceful Of luggage off the ground?
We dreamed of glowing children, their throats alive and cancerous, their eyes like lightning in the dark.We were uneasy in our skins, sixth grade, a year for blowing up, for learning that nothing containsthat heat which comes from growing, the way our parents seemed at once both tall as cooling towers and crushedbeneath the pressure of small things— family dinners, the evening news, the dead voice of the dial tone.Even the ground was ticking. The parts that grew grew poison. Whatever we ate became a stone.Whatever we said was love became plutonium, became a spark of panic in the buried world.
Alone in the library room, even when others Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves: There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables, Looking as if they're reading, looking as if They're studying the text, and understanding, Shedding light on what the words are saying; But under their steady imbecile gaze the page Is blank, patiently waiting not to be blank. The page is blank until the mind that reads Crosses the black river, seeking the Queen Of the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna, Hades the mute, the deaf, king of the dead letter; She is clothed in the beautiful garment of our thousand Misunderstandings of the sacred text.
How do you know if it’s love? she asks, and I think if you have to ask, it’s not, but I know this won’t help. I want to say you’re too young to worry about it,as if she has questions about Medicare or social security, but this won’t help either. “You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth, “when you still want to be with them the next morning,” would involve too many follow-up questions. The difficulty with love, I want to say, is sometimes you only know afterwards that it’s arrived or left. Love is the elephant and we are the blind mice unable to understand the whole. I want to say love is this desire to help even when I know I can’t, just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars, the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes, fingernails, coconuts, or the other things she has asked about over the years, all those phenomena whose daily existence seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head. I don’t even know how to match my socks. Go ask your mother. She laughs and says, I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.
I collect them now, it seems. Like sea-shells or old thimbles. One for Father. One forMother. Two for my sweet brothers. Odd how little they require of me. Unlike theones they were sent in memory of. No sudden shrilling of the phone. No harriedmidnight flights. Only a little water now and then. Scant food and light. See how I’vebrought them all together here in this shaded space beyond the stairs. Even when theythirst, they summon me with nothing more than a soft, indifferent furl- ing of their leaves.
Eastham, Massachusetts One of the spectators is disappointed there isn’t a guide to explain the beaching, the scientists busy cutting into ninety-four pilot whales stranded on the salt grass. No one knows why and, try as the rescue team might, not one whale will go back to water. So they’re injected to speed up the dying,   lined up like lumber and sawed into, except when the black skin splits we can’t stop staring, their meat is so red. I don’t want to know why this happens— what parasite or geomagnetic anomaly finished their love of motion. Why should anything have to leave this world when water can cycle from atmosphere down to land, the ocean and back to forgiving sky.    I’m on my way to Connecticut where my father has a little vegetation on his heart valve—that’s how the intern describes it, trying to minimize the danger of him slipping into a haze so cold, some nights, bone-cold, his hand can’t get from his plate to his mouth.    Rain slicks the highway slowing me down. The same water fattened into snow in the woods of my childhood, the whiteness unbroken except where my father cut trails and taught me to ski, laying down the herringbone behind him as he broke up hills that left me with legs made of slush. He wanted me strong, no patience for pain. No choice but to find the muscle to follow. Even now when he boasts how I zigzagged the breakneck hills in an icestorm, there’s no hint of my knee-chattering fear, slats skittering out of control, each run a victory of luck more than will, each ride up the lift a prayer for my bones. I wonder how it is for him now there in the ward where whiteness can’t hide the cold blank that’s ahead. When the whales beached, spectators came like pilgrims, each new arrival scanning the faces of those heading back to their cars to see how it changed them to survey so much death. Nothing showed. Their eyes followed the asphalt, heads bent in private devotion.    There in a room where others have died, my father keeps a record of each test and drug. He watches medicine drip into his arm and circle in the dark of his blood. I believe it will heal him, as I believe in the strength of my blood to protect me from failures of will. Once when my grandmother at ninety-six lay delirious with pneumonia, pitching on her high horsehair bed, she saw three crows perched on the dresser.    They smell so awful, she said.Please, open the window. Let them out. It was my father who did what she asked. And the crows flew out, carrying her fever over the treeline, dissolving into sky, and she lived. Whatever she saw, by love, luck or dumb Yankee will, it was true. That’s what I mean by medicine.
Pomegranates fell from the trees in our sleep. If we stayed in the sun too long there were aloes to cool the burn. Henbane for predators and succulents when the rain was scarce.   There was no glorified past to point the way true and natural for the sexes to meet. He kept looking to the heavens as if the answer were anywhere but here. I was so bored with our goodness I couldn’t suck the juice from one more pear.   It’s here, I kept telling him,here, rooted in the soil like every other tree you know. And I wove us a bed of its uppermost branches.
Me trying to understand say whence say whither, say what, say me with a pencil walking, say reading the dictionary, say learning medieval Latin, reading Spengler, reading Whitehead, William James I loved him, swimming breaststroke and thinking for an hour, how did I get here? Or thinking in line, say the 69 streetcar or 68 or 67 Swissvale, that would take me elsewhere, me with a textbook reading the pre-Socratics, so badly written, whoever the author was, me on the floor of the lighted stacks sitting cross-legged, walking afterwards through the park or sometimes running across the bridges and up the hills, sitting down in our tiny diningroom, burning in a certain way, still burning.
He’ll have been the last of his kind here then. The flagstones, dry-stone walls, the slumping thatch, out-offices and cow cabins, the patch of haggard he sowed spuds and onions in— all of it a century out of fashion— all giving way to the quiet rising damp of hush and vacancy once he is gone. Those long contemplations at the fire, cats curling at the door, the dog’s lame waltzing, the kettle, the candle and the lamp— all still, all quenched, all darkened— the votives and rosaries and novenas, the pope and Kennedy and Sacred Heart, the bucket, the basket, the latch and lock, the tractor that took him into town and back for the pension cheque and messages and pub, the chair, the bedstead and the chamber pot, everything will amount to nothing much. Everything will slowly disappear. And some grandniece, a sister’s daughter’s daughter, one blue August in ten or fifteen years will marry well and will inherit it: the cottage ruins, the brown abandoned land. They’ll come to see it in a hired car. The kindly Liverpudlian she’s wed, in concert with a local auctioneer, will post a sign to offer Site for Sale. The acres that he labored in will merge with a neighbor’s growing pasturage and all the decades of him will begin to blur, easing, as the far fields of his holding did, up the hill, over the cliff, into the sea.
We were dancing—it must have been a foxtrot or a waltz, something romantic but requiring restraint, rise and fall, precise execution as we moved into the next song without stopping, two chests heaving above a seven-league stride—such perfect agony, one learns to smile through, ecstatic mimicry being the sine qua non of American Smooth. And because I was distracted by the effort of keeping my frame (the leftward lean, head turned just enough to gaze out past your ear and always smiling, smiling), I didn’t notice how still you’d become until we had done it (for two measures? four?)—achieved flight, that swift and serene magnificence, before the earth remembered who we were and brought us down.
Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,  morality: any working order,  animate or inanimate: it   has managed directed balance,  the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,  some energy left to the mechanism,   some ash, enough energy held  to maintain the order in repair,  assure further consumption of entropy,   expending energy to strengthen order:  honor the persisting reactor,  the container of change, the moderator: the yellow   bird flashes black wing-bars  in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,  startles the hawk with beauty,   flitting to a branch where  flash vanishes into stillness,  hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:   honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,  the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies  of control,   the gastric transformations, seed  dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into  chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,   blood compulsion, instinct: honor the  unique genes,  molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into   sets, the nucleic grain transmitted  in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,  some cells set aside for the special work, mind   or perception rising into orders of courtship,  territorial rights, mind rising  from the physical chemistries   to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male  and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper  racial satisfaction:   heat kept by a feathered skin:  the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen  burner under the flask)   so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates  interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum  efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame   staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and  necessary worked out of random, reproducible,  the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the   goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations  that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a  great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.
The song sparrow puts all his saying into one repeated song: what   variations, subtleties he manages, to encompass denser meanings, I’m too coarse to catch: it’s   one song, an over-reach from which all possibilities, like filaments, depend: killing,   nesting, dying, sun or cloud, figure up and become song—simple, hard: removed.
I.   Black swollen fruit dangling on a limb Red forgotten flesh sprayed across the prairie Parched brown vines creeping over the wall Yellow winged pollen, invisible enemies   Boluses without homesteads, grubs without a voice Burrowed deeply into this land’s dark, dark heart Someday, our pods and pupae shall turn in the earth And burgeon into our motherlode’s bold beauty     II.   We’re a seed on the manure, on the sole of your shoe We’re the louse trapped in your hank of golden hair We’re the sliver that haunts beneath your thumbnail We the church mouse you scorched with a match but lived   We’re the package wrapped, return address unknown We’re the arm lowered again, again, a bloodied reverie We’ve arrived shoeless, crutchless, tousle-haired, swollen-bellied We shall inherit this earth’s meek glory, as foretold     II. (For Leah, my niece)   They gave you a title, but you were too proud to wear it They gave you the paterland, but you were too lazy to farm it   Your condo is leaking, but you’re too angry to repair it Your dress has moth holes, but you’re too sentimental to toss it   You’re too bored to play the lute, it hangs on the wall like an ornament The piano bites you, it’s an eight-legged unfaithful dog   Love grows in the garden, but you’re too impudent to tend it A nice Hakka boy from Ogden, so hardworking, so kind   The prayer mat is for prayer, not for catamite nipple-piercing The Goddess wags her finger at your beautiful wasteland   A dream deferred, well, is a dream deferred     IV. (Janie’s retort, on her fortieth birthday)   The same stars come around and around and around The same sun pecks her heat at the horizon The same housing tract, the same shopping center The same blunt haircut: Chinese, Parisian, Babylonion The same lipstick: red and it comes off on your coffeecup The same stars come around and around and around The same sun tarries in the late noon sky The same word for mom: Ah ma, madre, mere, majka The same birthbabe: bald, purplish, you slap to make cry The same stench: mother’s milk, shit and vomit The same argument between a man and a woman The same dog, hit by a car, the same escaped canary The same turkey for Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year The same three-tiered freeway: Istanbul, Tokyo, San Diego The same hill, the same shanty town, the same lean-to The same skyscraper: Hong Kong, Singapore, Toledo The same soup: chicken, though the veggies may vary The same rice for supper: white, brown or wild The same stars come around and around and around The same sun dips her head into the ocean The same tree in the same poem by the same poet The same old husband: saggy breasts, baggy thighs The same blackness whether we sleep or die     V. Whoever abandoned her grandmother at the bus stop Whoever ran in and out the door like a blind wind  spinning the upside-down prosperity sign right side up again Whoever lost her virtue in darkly paneled rooms with white boys Whoever prayed for round eyes  and taped her eyelids in waiting Whoever wore platform shoes  blustering taller than her own kind Whoever sold her yellow gold for Jehovah Whoever discarded her jade Buddha for Christ     VI. Why are you proud, father, entombed with the other woman? Why are you proud, mother, knitting my shroud in heaven? Why are you proud, fish, you feed the greedy mourners? Why are you proud, peonies, your heads are bowed and weighty? Why are you proud, millennium, the dialect will die with you? Why are you proud, psalm, hammering yourself into light?
Border Ghazals I.   I hate, I love, I don’t know how I’m biracial, I’m torn in two   Tonight, he will lock me in fear In the metal detector of love   Rapeflowers, rapeseeds, rapiers A soldier’s wry offerings   He will press his tongue Into my neighing throat   I can speak three dialects badly I want you now behind the blue door   In a slow hovercraft of dreams I saw Nanking from a bilge   Some ashes fell on his lap I’m afraid it’s my mother   The protocol is never to mention her While we are fucking     II.   The bad conceit, the bad conceit police will arrest you Twin compasses, twin compasses cannot come   Your father is not a car, not a compass and not God Though he vanished in his sky-blue convertible Galaxy with a blonde   He kept crawling back to us, back to us Each time with a fresh foot mangled   One emperor was named Lickety, the other named Split Suddenly, the soup of chaos makes sense   Refugees roaming from tent to tent to tent, looking for love The banknote is a half note, an octave above God   O the great conjugator of curses: shit, shat, have shut! I have loved you both bowl-cut and shagged   There are days when the sun is a great gash Nights, the moon smokes hashish and falls asleep on your lap   Sorry, but your morphing was not satisfactory Shapeshifter, you choked on your magic scarf     III.   I heard this joke at the bar An agnostic dyslexic insomniac stayed up all night searching for doG   The prosperity sign flips right side up again The Almanac says this Ox Year we’ll toil like good immigrants   Horse is frigid. Mule can’t love Salmon dead at the redd   One leg is stationary, the other must tread, must tread, must tread The Triads riddled him, then us   What is the heart’s past participle? She would have loved not to have loved   I bought you at the corner of Agave and Revolucíon You wrapped yourself thrice around my green arm and shat!   A childless woman can feel the end of all existenceLook, on that bloody spot, Chrysanthemum!   Shamanka, fetch your grandmother at the bus stop Changeling, you are the one I love
I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade, a song for what we did on the floor in the basement   of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths   how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out   the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:   concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes   instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.   We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was   practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who   the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song   for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.
In one corner of the ward somebody was eating a raw chicken. The cheerful nurses did not see. With the tube down my throat I could not tell them. Nor did they notice the horror show on the TV set suspended over my windowless bed. The screen was dead but a torn face was clear.    I did not see my own in a mirror for weeks. When it happened, when I dared to face my face after the ravaging, it was not mine but something whittled, honed down to a sly resemblance. It, even the mirror, the pale room, the oxygen tank neat and black as a bomb in its portable crate— all was hallucination.    But the bloody rooster, the stray pieces of bodies slung into dreamless nooks, the white-haired doll whimpering on a gift counter— those were real.    I keep living there. Foolish. I am home. Half safe.
I was climbing up the sliding board When suddenly I felt A mosquito bite my bottom And it raised a big red welt. So I said to that mosquito, “I'm sure you wouldn't mind If I took a pair of tweezers And I tweezered your behind!” He shriveled up his body And he shuffled to his feet, And he said, “I'm awfully sorry But a skeeter's got to eat! Still, there are mosquito manners, And I must have just forgot 'em. And I swear I'll never never never Bite another bottom.” But a minute later Archie Hill And Buck and Theo Brown Were horsing on the monkey bars, Hanging upside down. They must have looked delicious From a skeeter's point of view 'Cause he bit 'em on the bottoms, Archie, Buck and Theo too! You could hear 'em goin' HOLY! You could hear 'em goin' WHACK! You could hear 'em cuss and holler, Goin' smack, smack, smack. A mosquito's awful sneaky, A mosquito's mighty sly, But I never never never Thought a skeeter'd tell a lie.
Benny said To Ruby Lee, “M-A-R-R-Y M-E!” Ruby said, To Benny, “Ben, wouldn't That be F-U-N?” Benny said, “My Ruby Lee, We will W-E-D Only if you let me K- I-S-S you Every day!”
It was such a lovely day Till I stumbled in the way Of a van that carries vinegar to stores. When I glared up at the man— Operator of the van— He said, “Vinegar, it never rains but pours!” Now a skunk was standing by. And I thought that I would cry From the vinegar that sprayed and soaked my clothes, When the driver kindly yells, “Watch that animal. It smells!”— And the skunk ran off, a hankie to her nose.
Toad gots measles Frog gots mumps Both gots such Disgusting bumps. They so ugly It's a sin. They be jumpin' Out that skin. Pay no mind These creepy items Close my eyes I bite 'ems, bite 'ems.
We used to have a single cow, We called her Mrs. Rupple. But she got struck by a lightning bolt, And now we have a couple. She's walking sort of funny now, Oh pity her poor calf. Old Mrs. Rupple gives no milk, She gives us half-and-half.
When I was a boy In Looziana, We wore blue jeans And a red bandanna.   My folks moved up To the state of Maine, We wore duck shoes In slicker-suit rain.   My folks moved down To the state of Texas, We wore brand names Like Lazy X’s.   Now that we’re living It up in Vermont, We wear pretty much Whatever we want.
December 26, 1974 Title IX of the 1972 Education Act is signed, providing for equal opportunity in athletics for girls as well as boys. The year was 1974 When Little Leaguers learned the score. President Ford took out his pen, And signed a law that said from then On women too would have the chance To wear the stripes and wear the pants. Now what you hear, as flags unfurl, Is "Atta boy!" and "Atta girl!"
In the heavy fashion magazines strewn here and there around the house the photos of objects and people mouth the word “money,” but you, assuming no one wants you anymore, mishear the message as “meaning.” Arousal follows. The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out.  Awareness, always awareness. Don’t you see how these elaborate masks are turning you into a zombie? The private life is not for the eye but for the endless interior. It is trying to push all this crap aside and find the missing line. Nobody, least of all the future, cares about the outcome of this quest.  It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life.
I called a man today. After he said hello and I said hello came a pause during which it would have been   confusing to say hello again so I said how are you doing and guess what, he said fine and wondered aloud how I was   and it turns out I’m OK. He was on the couch watching cars painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars   painted with ads for Tide around an oval that’s a metaphor for life because most of us run out of gas and settle   for getting drunk in the stands and shouting at someone in a t-shirt we want kraut on our dog. I said   he could have his job back and during the pause that followed his whiskers scrubbed the mouthpiece clean   and his breath passed in and out in the tidal fashion popular with mammals until he broke through   with the words how soon thank youohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove through the wires on the backs of ions   as one long word as one hard prayer of relief meant to be heard by the sky. When he began to cry I tried   with the shape of my silence to say I understood but each confession of fear and poverty was more awkward   than what you learn in the shower. After he hung up I went outside and sat with one hand in the bower of the other   and thought if I turn my head to the left it changes the song of the oriole and if I give a job to one stomach other   forks are naked and if tonight a steak sizzles in his kitchen do the seven other people staring at their phones   hear?
That there are things that can never be the same about my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious but also lacking in courage,   That from this yard I have been composing a great speech, that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child, that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides, that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky,   That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds and sparrows from the sky,   That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization, that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had,   That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters, and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke from the chimney of the trees where I was small,   That in January, I met him in a bar, we went home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard, and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed,   That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars, fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky,   O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still these assignments in the night, to remember the texture of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills,   That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen, the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark, blue, green, with shards of the Pacific,   That I do not know the dreams from which I have come, sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house, mammalian, no bigger than the herd,   That I wrote the history of the war waged between the Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks, beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having grown up near the ocean.
Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual Motion machine of the waves. Everything still Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we   Walked that shore, too earnest and sheepish To hold hands? The wind cutting through our clothes Cleansed and burned, the chill off the Atlantic An ache we courted in our dumbstruck talk:   Callow, expectant, what wouldn’t love give? Cavalcanti’s ray from Mars, Dante’s wheel that moves The planets and the stars, how nervous We were, awkward and shivering: “Like this,   Do you like it like this?” Up all night, Then waking to the smell of flannel and sweat, We lay grateful, winded, goosefleshed in the chill, Our own atmosphere rich and breathable:   We drank round the clock, embracing extremes, Too hurried and heartsore to think of time… Out fishing after midnight, we watched schools of squid Slide and shimmer, tentacles tight-wrapped   Around our gig’s hooks: Yanked from the water, They spouted jets of ink, then pulsed and quivered And faded to dead-white, their eyes, resigned and sober, Opening wider and wider…Ten years more,   And will either of us remember That ink sticky on our hands, the moon-glare Rippling as we knelt underneath the pier And scrubbed and scrubbed our hands in the dark water?
Wiretaps and tapes, concealed bugs and mikes,  intercepted letters full of passionate declarations, contradictory intelligence—  how attached he’d grown to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging the influx of intelligence with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost  like love: he felt the cool gray eyes of his superiors trained on him, rebuking him  for swerving, for letting himself go—such tender obsession occasioned by the file!  Not quite the professional style he or the Agency expected…   But such official loyalties  seemed mere protocol to this!— what was wrong with him,  he wondered, that he construed the documents to make the subject seem a hero,  a bastard whose sole patrimony was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword left by an unknown father beneath a stone?   And yet his exploits in the tabloids, the headlines screaming,   SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN! HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC    were these heroic different in kind from the rumors, unverified,  of a rape, a murder?   —But to have met undisguised the devouring monster! To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…   On balance, for such a life,  the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad: think of the opportunities for evil  a man of such qualities must have had! How well he knew him—an essential innocence that followed impulse, blind to protocol, not noticeably more kind  than he was cruel. But to stamp Case Closed and cease  gathering intelligence, to give the hero up, almost, he admitted, like a lover…:  such limits the hero unknowingly transgressed! And the Agency, cold-blooded where  limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?— more like a second backbone!), committed  to keeping order, could not afford such sentiments—the Chief of Security felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence  should lead to this…   He leaned back in his chair and sighed:  a forged genealogy certifying that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual assistance pact  to aid in taking back the usurped crown: he could see them now, the wind blowing lightly, the two of them sweating as they climbed the cliff, discussing  the terms, exchanging information, intelligence—  how would his own face look staring down across the sea  as he gestured earnestly toward some island, saying,  “According to our sources, the tax revenues…”  And then, edging the hero closer to the cliff, pointing  out the harbor, he’d push.
When I woke the darkness was so thick, So palpable and black that my eyes Seemed blind as stone staring into stone.   The blade that I had dreamed, efficient and quick As it cut into my thigh, cleaning a gangrened Wound infected to the bone, seemed poised   Above my throat: Close-grained, impenetrable, The blackness rose before me like a wall. And then off in the next room, nervous, light,   A soft padding as of an animal Raced like my heartbeat in my temples Round and round, trapped, stealthily desperate   As if hunting its own track, terrified And captivated by its own odor. Skin cool in the night air, eyes drilling   Through the dark, who I was before I Slept had burned off like a vapor So that amnesiac and pure, witnessing   My terror that I no longer recognized As my own, my mind floated beyond me To confront that frantic, closing footfall   As Jacob dreaming met his dark angel— Though in my wrestling nothing blessed me Or promised any blessing; but was a mask whose eyes   Were all black pupil, blind as molten tar. I strained to see what paced there, my eyes burning Through the dark until a pair of eyes blazed   Back across the blackness, an insistent, glazed Staring that shimmered and disappeared. The shining blade plunged at my throat, my mind   Stretched and twisted, its wires tightening And turning as the creature lunged back and forth And with a deep-throated yowling, thrashing   And thrashing to fight clear of its own circling, Cleanly leapt away. I reached for the knife But gripped only air, my eyes pressing   Deeper and deeper into the night’s black stone, Cutting the way the knife had cut into my wound, Probing for the white shining of the bone:   What had I become? What darkness had my dream Led me down into? Too frightened even To move, I lay bound and sweating in   The sheets, the moon a warning-bell beating On the glass, its light carving out the curtains Like the shadow of a wing across the windowpane.
for Lem  As if your half-witted tongue Spoke with an eloquence Death bestows, I heard your voice Muffled through the dark Layers of cemetery loam:   “They found me black-suited In the shuttered half-dark, my eyes Dug like claws into the clouds’ Soft feather-turnings. What kept me Separate the broiling sun   Of intellect now shone on fiercely: In the sheep-pens stinking Of dung and lanolin, I buried my face in the ewe’s Swollen side and listened   For the lamb the way The night sky listens To the synapse-fire Of meteors, the fibrillating Heartbeat of the stars.   I heard the cells crackle Into being, the embryonic Brain begin to burn: Hunger. Thirst. Beneath my ear My own disastrous birthing,   The umbilicus strangling Like a whip around my neck, Shoved through the momentary Breach memory tore open— Dying revealed to me my birth,   How half my brain went dark, One side of a universe Pinched out like a candle: Just smart enough to sense My difference, yet not know why—   Even my death was the thrust Of a bewildering punchline: On Thanksgiving Morning mouthwatering Pain shoved like a spit From my bowels to my brain.”
It is very hot—92 today—to be wearing a stocking cap, but the adolescent swaggering through the grocery store automatic door doesn’t seem to mind; does not even appear to be perspiring. The tugged-down hat is part of his carefully orchestrated outfit: bagging pants, screaming t-shirt, high-topped shoes. The young woman who yells to her friends from an open pickup window is attired for summer season in strapless stretch tube top, slipping down toward bountiful cleavage valley. She tugs it up in front as she races toward the two who have just passed a cigarette between them like a baton on a relay team. Her white chest gleams like burnished treasure as they giggle loudly there in the corner and I glance down to see what costume I have selected to present myself to the world today. I smile; it’s my sky blue shirt with large deliberately faded Peace sign, smack dab in the middle, plus grey suede Birkenstocks—a message that “I lived through the sixties and am so proud.” None of the young look my way. I round the corner and walk into Evening descending.
I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet  whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye; I was born across the river where I was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth, broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though it please you, through no fault of my own, pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells. I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden. I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion. I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air, air drifting like spirits and old windows. I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry; I was an index of first lines when I was born. I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying  ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was born with a prologue of references, pursued by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born. I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves; I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.
Love Song for the Newly Divorced One day, you will awake from your covering and that heart of yours will be totally mended, and there will be no more burning within. The owl, calling in the setting of the sunand the deer path, all erased. And there will be no more need for love or lovers or fears of losing lovers and there will be no more burning timbers with which to light a new fire, and there will be no more husbands or people related to husbands, and there will be no more tears or reason to shed your tears. You will be as mended as the bridge the working crew has just reopened. The thick air will be vanquished with the tide and the river that was corrupted by lies will be cleansed and totally free. And the rooster will call in the setting sun and the sun will beckon homeward, hiding behind your one tree that was not felled.
And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs to dull the senses, what little I have left, what more can be taken away? The fear of travelling, of the future without hope or buoy. I must get away from this place and see that there is no fear without me: that it is within unless it be some sudden act or calamity to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If I could just get out of the country. Some place where one can eat the lotus in peace. For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson or experience to those young who would trod the same path, without God unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance on the acts committed while young under un- due influence or circumstance. Oh I have always seen my life as drama, patterned after those who met with disaster or doom. Is my mind being taken away me. I have been over the abyss before. What is that ringing in my ears that tells me all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind. Woe to those homeless who are out on this night. Woe to those crimes committed from which we can walk away unharmed. So I turn on the light And smoke rings rise in the air. Do not think of the future; there is none. But the formula all great art is made of. Pain and suffering. Give me the strength to bear it, to enter those places where the great animals are caged. And we can live at peace by their side. A bride to the burden that no god imposes but knows we have the means to sustain its force unto the end of our days. For that is what we are made for; for that we are created. Until the dark hours are done. And we rise again in the dawn. Infinite particles of the divine sun, now worshipped in the pitches of the night.
March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides  into rain. The imperceptible change begins out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new craving, spring. May your desire always overcome   your need; your story that you have to tell, enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things   fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I   vigilant.
The girls turning double-dutch bob & weave like boxers pulling punches, shadowing each other, sparring across the slack cord casting parabolas in the air. They whip quick as an infant’s pulse and the jumper, before she enters the winking, nods in time as if she has a notion to share, waiting her chance to speak. But she’s anticipating the upbeat like a bandleader counting off the tune they are about to swing into. The jumper stair-steps into mid-air as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity, training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment long enough to fit a second thought in, she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish as she flutter-floats into motion like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos thumbed alive. Once inside, the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch acquired Manhattan. How she dances patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing its travels in scale before the hive. How the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope slaps and scoops like a paddle boat. Her misted skin arranges the light with each adjustment and flex. Now heather- hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle, surfaces fracturing and reforming like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water. She makes jewelry of herself and garlands the ground with shadows.
The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky, its empty windows edged in soot, its portals boarded up and slathered with graffiti, oily layers, urgent but illegible.All that can be plundered has been, all but the carapace—the hollow bell tower, the fieldstone box that once served as a nave. The tidy row of homes that line this block have tended lawns and scalloped bathtub shrines. Each front porch holds a chair where no one sits. Those who live here triple lock their doors day and night. Some mornings they step out to find a smoking car stripped to its skeleton abandoned at the curb. Most afternoons the street is still but for a mourning dove and gangs of pigeons picking through the grass. Our Lady of Perpetual Help is gray, a dead incisor in a wary smile. A crevice in her wall allows a glimpse into the chancel, where a sodden mattress and dirty blanket indicate that someone finds this place a sanctuary still, takes his rest here, held and held apart from passers by, their cruelties and their kindnesses, watched over by the night’s blind congregation, by the blank eyes of a concrete saint.
But for a low bank of cloud,  clear morning, empty sky. The bright band of light beneath the cloud’s gray I thought at first was open distance, but it’s ice that by extension raised the lake above the lip of blue lake and spilled it farther out than that horizon along the sky and floods the clouds. Seeing the distant level further unfurl into the sky says not to trust blue line as terminus when a meniscus of ice can ride up that wall of the skyline, a measure of illusion how close the eye can be to filled with seeing, to widen instead the tube of that measure of sight we are given. There is the larger lake the wider look we open eyes to see. That glance of the lip put in a bigger cylinder falls away, but how much deeper the spring to fill the cup. As if the surface we are seeing drops the more seeing is added, while we feel the stories well as our height from which to see. And watch the dawns coming. …I seem to be emptying of time the more time I put in, and see like a man with weathered eyes enough to face to face up to the sight’s field expanded to insight. To the dark the lake can turn and curl up like a map for poems to have these likenesses to graph, then come un-scrolled from semblance back to just this lake. Water cities are led to layout beside. But never in stillness; always the restoration to change, from ice, from cloud, turning to clear liquid—as is most of our body water— thinned sheet, layer that if written on or with, a bearing a name chiseled on water disappears.
I have to leave early in the dark  and hungry to avoid crossing the snow as the noon burns the crust into an un-servable lake slush instead of the crisp bridge that would be in order to get me over the ridge My journal is already laundered clean of my words and my instructions have dissolved into a white mash a washed bone ball rolled into itself of all I have in the world in my pocket The ink is thin the paper is poor my eyes balance on the pale words around which a stream flows almost erasing the way across the idea Shadows the black flowers of the light self -sowing through the trees dark gardens of midnight for the gray-white morning hour of blindness in print miles before I am to arrive here To approach the waiting milestone dims whatever else of its lantern ‘til only the placed light there is on me. In this light barely but used to it I can make out the staggered columns of my account as if back through weren’t the real distance: the thin chest flag pinned on by each ridge the titled introduction taking your coat each storm. My letters and ribbons have been the natural— strengths on their way to the more— natural weaknesses— and loss. yet— I wonder where I thought I was going— to ’ve done what you must pass examinations for before I took any.
And if sun comes How shall we greet him? Shall we not dread him, Shall we not fear him After so lengthy a Session with shade? Though we have wept for him, Though we have prayed All through the night-years— What if we wake one shimmering morning to Hear the fierce hammering Of his firm knuckles Hard on the door? Shall we not shudder?— Shall we not flee Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter Of the familiar Propitious haze? Sweet is it, sweet is it To sleep in the coolness Of snug unawareness. The dark hangs heavily Over the eyes.
When it is cold it stinks, and not till then.  The seasonable or more rabid heats Of love and summer in some other cities Unseal the all too human: not in his. When it is cold it stinks, but not before; Smells to high heaven then most creaturely When it is cold. It stinks, but not before His freezing eye has done its best to maim, To amputate limbs, livelihood and name, Abstracting life beyond all likelihood. When it is cold it stinks, and not till then Can it be fragrant. On canal and street, Colder and colder, Murphy to Molloy, The weather hardens round the Idiot Boy, The gleeful hero of the long retreat. When he is cold he stinks, but not before, This living corpse. The existential weather Smells out in these abortive minims, men Who barely living therefore altogether Live till they die; and sweetly smell till then.
X, whom society’s most mild command,  For instance evening dress, infuriates, In art is seen confusingly to stand For disciplined conformity, with Yeats. Taxed to explain what this resentment is He feels for small proprieties, it comes, He likes to think, from old enormities And keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms. Yet it is likely, if indeed the crimes His fathers suffered rankle in his blood, That he find least excusable the times When they acceded, not when they withstood. How else explain this bloody-minded bent To kick against the prickings of the norm; When to conform is easy, to dissent; And when it is most difficult, conform?
Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall  At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came Home to the stone north, every wynd and snicket Known to me wherever the flattened cat Squirmed home to a hole between housewall and paving. Known! And in the turns of it, no welcome, No flattery of the beckoned lighted eye From a Rose of the rose-brick alleys of Toulouse. Those more than tinsel garlands, more than masks, Unfading wreaths of ancient summers, I Sternly cast off. A stern eye is the graceless Bulk and bruise that at the steep uphill Confronts me with its drained-of-colour sandstone Implacably. The Church. It is Good Friday. Goodbye to the Middle Ages! Although some Think that I enter them, those centuries Of monkish superstition, here I leave them With their true garlands, and their honest masks, Every fresh flower cast on the porch and trodden, Raked by the wind at the Church door on this Friday. Goodbye to all the centuries. There is No home in them, much as the dip and turn Of an honest alley charmingly deceive us. And not yet quite goodbye. Instead almost Welcome, I said. Bleak equal centuries Crowded the porch to be deflowered, crowned.
“stooped to truth and moralized his song” Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.  Time to demoralize my song, high time. Vernal a little. Primavera. First Green, first truth and last. High time, high time. A high old time we had of it last summer? I overstate. But getting out the maps… Look! Up the valley of the Brenne, Louise de la Vallière… Syntax collapses. High time for that, high time. To Château-Renault, the tannery town whose marquis Rooke and James Butler whipped in Vigo Bay Or so the song says, an amoral song Like Ronsard’s where we go today Perhaps, perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and… Get well! Philip’s black-sailed familiar, avaunt Or some word as ridiculous, the whole Diction kit begins to fall apart. High time it did, high time. High time and a long time yet, my love! Get out that blessed map. Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it. Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire. High time, my love. High time and a long time yet.
No moss nor mottle stains  My parents’ unmarked grave; My word on them remains Stouter than stone, you told me. “Martyred to words”, you have thought, Should be your epitaph; At other times you fought My self-reproaches down. Though bitterly once or twice You have reproached me with how Everything ended in words, We both know better now: You understand, I shall not If I survive you care To raise a headstone for You I have carved on air.
I ply with all the cunning of my art  This little thing, and with consummate care I fashion it—so that when I depart, Those who come after me shall find it fair And beautiful. It must be free of flaws— Pointing no laborings of weary hands; And there must be no flouting of the laws Of beauty—as the artist understands.   Through passion, yearnings infinite—yet dumb— I lift you from the depths of my own mind And gild you with my soul’s white heat to plumb The souls of future men. I leave behind This thing that in return this solace gives: “He who creates true beauty ever lives.”
Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,  the blue one, especially. Your first love rounding a corner, that snowy minefield.   Whether you step lightly or heavily, you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance before evening falls, letting no one see you wend your way,   that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend, meaning “to proceed, to journey, to travel from one place to another,” as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.   You have to get over your resentments, the sun in the morning and the moon at night, all those shadows of yourself you left behind on odd little tables.  Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan, crawl over this ego or that eros, then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain.   Another old-fashioned word, yonder, meaning “that indicated place, somewhere generally seen or just beyond sight.” If you would recover, you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot   to that bridge in the darkness where the sentinels stand guarding the border with their half-slung rifles, warned of the likes of you.
On hot days we would see them leaving the hive in swarms. June and I would watch them weave their way through the sugarberry trees toward the pond where they would stop to take a drink, then buzz their way back, plump and full of water, to drop it on the backs of the fanning bees. If you listened you could hear them, their tiny wings beating in unison as they cooled down the hive. My brother caught one once, its bulbous body bursting with water, beating itself against the smooth glass wall of the canning jar. He lit a match, dropped it in, but nothing happened. The match went out and the bee swam through the mix of sulfur and smoke until my brother let it out. It flew straight back to the hive. Later, we skinny-dipped in the pond, the three of us, the August sun melting the world around us as if it were wax. In the cool of the evening, we walked home, pond water still dripping from our skin, glistening and twinkling like starlight.
The little world, the subject of my muse, Is a huge task and labor infinite; Like to a wilderness or mass confuse, Or to an endless gulf, or to the night: How many strange Meanders do I find? How many paths do turn my straying pen? How many doubtful twilights make me blind, Which seek to limb out this strange All of men? Easy it were the earth to portray out, Or to draw forth the heavens’ purest frame, Whose restless course, by order whirls about Of change and place, and still remains the same. But how shall man’s, or manner’s, form appear, Which while I write, do change from what they were?
The welcome Sun from sea Freake is returned, And cheereth with his beams the naked earth, Which gains with his coming her apparel And had his absence six long months mourned. Out of her fragrant sides she sends to greet him The rashed primrose and the violet; While she the fields and meadows doth beset With flowers, and hangs the trees with pearl to meet him. Amid this hope and joy she doth forget, To kill the hemlock which doth grow too fast, And chill the adder making too much haste, With his black sons revived with the heat; Till summer comes with diverse colours clad, Much like my Epigrams both good and bad.
My little book: who will thou please, tell me? All which shall read thee? No that cannot be. Whom then, the best? But few of these are known. How shall thou know to please, thou know'st not whom? The meaner sort commend not poetry; And sure the worst should please themselves for thee: But let them pass, and set by most no store, Please thou one well, thou shall not need please more.
Wotton, the country and the country swain, How can they yield a Poet any sense? How can they stir him up, or heat his vein? How can they feed him with intelligence? You have that fire which can a wit enflame, In happy London England’s fairest eye: Well may you Poets’ have of worthy name, Which have the food and life of Poetry. And yet the country or the town may sway, Or bear a part, as clowns do in a play.
Walking the fields a wantcatcher I spied, To him I went, desirous of his game: Sir, have you taken wants? Yes, he replied, Here are a dozen, which were lately ta’en. Then you have left no more. No more? quoth he. Sir I can show you more: the more the worse; And to his work he went, but 'twould not be, For all the wants were crept into my purse. Farewell friend wantcatcher, since 'twill not be, Thou cannot catch the wants, but they catch me.
Momus, to be a Poet Laureate, Has strained his wits through an iron grate. For he has rhymes and rhymes, and double strains, And golden verses, and all kinds of veins, Now to the press he presses hastily, To sell his friends stinking eternity. For who would be eternal in such fashion, To be a witness to his condemnation.
I met a courtier riding on the plain, Well-mounted on a brave and gallant steed; I sat upon a jade, and spurred to my pain My lazy beast, whose tired sides did bleed: He saw my case, and then of courtesy Did rein his horse, and drew the bridle in, Because I did desire his company: But he corvetting way of me did win. What should I do, who was besteaded so? His horse stood still faster than mine could go.
One said my book was like unto a coat, Of diverse colours black and red and white. I, bent to cross him, said he spoke by rote. For they in making rather are unlike. A coat, one garment made of many fleeces: My book, one meaning cut into many pieces.
The peasant Corus of his wealth does boast, Yet he’s scarce worth twice twenty pounds at most. I chanc’d to word once with this lowly swain, He called me base, and beggar in disdain. To try the truth hereof I rate myself, And cast the little count of all my wealth. See how much Hebrew, Greek, and Poetry, Latin Rhetoric, and Philosophy, Reading, and sense in sciences profound, All valued, are not worth forty pounds.
Misus and Mopsa hardly could agree, Striving about superiority. The text which says that man and wife are one, Was the chief argument they stood upon. She held they both one woman should become, He held both should be man, and both but one. So they contended daily, but the strife Could not be ended, till both were one wife.
God’s name is bare of honour in our hearing, And even worn out with our blasphemous swearing. Between the infant and the aged, both The first and last they utter, is an oath. Oh hellish manners of our profane age. Jehovah’s fear is scoffed upon the stage, The Mimicking jester, names it every day; Unless God is blashphem’d, it is no play.
Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest, of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent. Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and what, ye, why? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.
Sextus upon a spleen, did rashly swear, That no new fashion he would ever wear. He was forsworn, for see what did ensue, He wore the old, till the old was the new.
Upon the plain as I rode all alone, Assaulted by two sturdy lads I was; I am a poor man Sires, let me be gone. Nay, but ye shall be poor before ye pass. And so I was: yet lost nothing thereby. Would they had robbed me of my poverty.
Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind.
Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child, Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled. The tender racket rudely plays the sound, Which weakly banded cannot back rebound, And the soft air the softer roof does kiss, With a sweet dying and a pretty miss, Which hears no answer yet from the white rank Of teeth, not risen from their coral bank. The alphabet is searched for letters soft, To try a word before it can be wrought, And when it slides forth, it goes as nice, As when a man does walk upon the ice.
Our vice runs beyond all that old men saw, And far authentically above our laws, And scorning virtues safe and golden mean, Sits uncontrolled upon the high extreme. Circes, thy monsters painted out the hue, Of feigned filthiness, but ours is true. Our vice puts down all proverbs and all themes, Our vice excels all fables and all dreams.
Nature which headlong into life doth throw us, With our feet forward to our grave doth bring us, What is less ours, than this our borrowed breath, We stumble into life, we go to death.
In this poem there is no suffering. It spans hundreds of years and records no deaths, connecting when it can, those moments where people are healthy   and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter, maybe a Volume, shorn of violence consists of an adult reading aimlessly. This line is the length of a full life   smuggled in while no one was plotting against a neighbour, except in jest. Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She is in a drought-fisted field    with a hoe. This is her twelfth year on the land, and today her back doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity and of murder have declared a day’s truce   in the Civil War within her. So today, we can bring Nellie, content with herself, with the world, into our History. For a day. In the next generation   we find a suitable subject camping near the border of a divided country: for a while no one knows how near. For these few lines she is ours. But how about   the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes; anticipation of the young, the edited memory of the rest of us? How about thoughts   higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes. Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes: they have their own privileged history, like inherited income beside our husbandry.   We bring our History up to date in a city like London: someone’s just paid the mortgage, is free of guilt and not dying of cancer; and going   past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline advertising torture. This is all recommended reading, but in small doses. It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.
The heat shimmer along our street one midsummer midafternoon, and wading up through it a horse’s hooves, and each shoe raising a tongueless bell that tolled in the neighborhood, till the driver drew in the reins and the horse hung its head and stood.And something in a basket thin as shavings (blackberries? or a ghost of the memory of having tasted them?) passing into my hands as mother paid, and the man got up again, slapping the loop from the reins, and was off on his trundling wagon.
Our fathers did but use the world before,And having used did leave the same to us.We spill whatever resteth to their store.What can our heirs inherit but our curse?For we have sucked the sweet and sap away,And sowed consumption in the fruitful ground;The woods and forests clad in rich arrayWith nakedness and baldness we confound.We have defaced the lasting monuments,And caused all honour to have end with us;The holy temples feel our ravishments.What can our heirs inherit but our curse?The world must end, for men are so accurst;Unless God end it sooner, they will first.
Because I have come to the fence at night, the horses arrive also from their ancient stable. They let me stroke their long faces, and I note in the light of the now-merging moonhow they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been by shake-guttered raindrops spotted around their rumps and thus made Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place.Maybe because it is night, they are nervous, or maybe because they too sense what they have become, they seem to be waiting for me to say somethingto whatever ancient spirits might still abide here, that they might awaken from this strange dream, in which there are fences and stables and a man who doesn’t know a single word they understand.
Yet the after is still a storm  as witness bent shadbush and cord grass in stillness sand littered with the smallest of fragments whether shell or bone That city we are far from is still frozen, still in ruins (except its symmetries be renewed by sleep, its slant colors redeemed) Nothing has changed but its name and the air that it breathes There’s still no truth in making sense while the ash settles, so fine that planes keep falling from the sky And the name once again to be the old one Saint Something, Saint Gesture, Saint Entirely the Same as if nothing or no one had been nameless in the interim or as if still could be placed beside storm that simply, as in a poem Have you heard the angels with sexed tongues, met the blind boy who could see with his skin, his body curled inward like a phrase, like an after in stillness or a letter erased Have you seen what’s written on him as question to an answer or calendar out of phase Add up the number of such days Add illness and lilt as formed on the tongue Add that scene identical with its negative, that sentence which refuses to speak, present which cannot be found
The bend in the river followed us for days  and above us the sun doubled and redoubled its claims Now we are in a house with forty-four walls and nothing but doors Outside the trees, chokecherries, mulberries and oaks are cracking like limbs We can do nothing but listen or so someone claims, the Ice Man perhaps, all enclosed in ice though the light has been shortening our days and coloring nights the yellow of hay, scarlet of trillium, blue of block ice Words appear, the texture of ice, with messages etched on their shells: Minna 1892, Big Max and Little Sarah, This hour ago everyone watched as the statues fell Enough of such phrases and we’ll have a book Enough of such books and we’ll have mountains of ice enough to balance our days with nights enough at last to close our eyes
It is scribbled along the body  Impossible even to say a word An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand Yet not, not marks inside a box For example, this is a mirror box Spinoza designed such a box and called it the Eighth Sky called it the Nevercadabra House as a joke Yet not, not so much a joke not Notes for Electronic Harp on a day free of sounds (but I meant to write “clouds”) At night these same boulevards fill with snow Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe, as you wrote, writing of death in the snow, Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan It is scribbled across each body Impossible even to name a word Look, you would say, how the sky falls at first gently, then not at all Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause, twin ships, twin nemeses preparing to metamorphose into an alphabet in stone St.-Benoit-sur-Loire to Max Jacob
The Book of Company which I put down and can’t pick up  The Trans-Siberian disappearing, the Blue Train and the Shadow Train Her body with ridges like my skull Two children are running through the Lion Cemetery Five travelers are crossing the Lion Bridge A philosopher in a doorway insists that there are no images He whispers instead: Possible Worlds The Mind-Body Problem The Tale of the Color Harpsichord Skeleton of the World’s Oldest Horse The ring of O dwindles sizzling around the hole until gone False spring is laughing at the snow and just beyond each window immense pines weighted with snow A philosopher spreadeagled in the snow holds out his Third Meditation like a necrotic star. He whispers: archery is everywhere in decline, photography the first perversion of our time Reach to the milky bottom of this pond to know the feel of bone, a knuckle from your grandfather’s thumb, the maternal clavicle, the familiar arch of a brother’s brow He was your twin, no doubt, forger of the unicursal maze My dearest Tania, When I get a good position in the courtyard I study their faces through the haze Dear Tania, Don’t be annoyed, please, at these digressions They are soldering the generals back onto their pedestals for A. C.
Yes, I was born on the street known as Glass—as Paper, Scissors or Rock.  Several of my ancestors had no hands. Several of my ancestors used their pens in odd ways. A child of seven I prayed for breath. Each day I passed through the mirrored X into droplets of rain congealed around dust. I never regretted this situation. Though patient as an alchemist I failed to learn English. Twenty years later I burned all my furniture. Likewise the beams of my house to fuel the furnace. Once I bought an old boat. I abandoned the tyrannical book of my dreams and wrote about dresses, jewels, furniture and menus eight or ten times in a book of dreams. It sets me to dreaming when I dust it off. Our time is a between time; best to stay out of it. Send an occasional visiting card to eternity or a few stanzas to the living so they won’t suspect we know they don’t exist. Sign them Sincerely Yours, Warmest Regards, Thinking of You or Deepest Regrets. Brown river outside my window, an old boat riding the current. What I like most is to stay in my apartment. So that is my life, pared of anecdotes. I go out occasionally to look at a dance. Otherwise the usual joys, worries and inner mourning. Occasionally in an old boat I navigate the river when I find the time. Water swallows the days. I think maybe that’s all I have to say except that an irregular heart sometimes speaks to me. It says, A candle is consuming a children’s alphabet. It says, Attend to each detail of the future-past. Last night the moon was divided precisely in half. Today a terrifying wind.
Classically stagy, goose-neck elegant, river’s third eye. Pencil thin head. S for a throat. Skeleton of a saint.Plodder, preening posturer. One foot, another. Up from the dank weeds.
O little fleas of speckled light all dancing like a satellite   O belly green trees shaded vale O shiny bobcat winter trail   Amoebic rampage squamous cock a Chinese hairpiece burly sock   A grilled banana smashes gates and mingeless badgers venerate   The asses of the winter trees rock on fat asses as you please   Be jumpy or unhinged with joy enlightened fry cakes Staten hoy.
for Thomas From the five good emperors I have learned that there were five good emperors,   From the lemon tree I’ve planted now I know that leaves unpummeled yet will drop,   From the clock, the time, it’s five p.m., from the sun the length of day,   From Quercus borealis, the queer names of the leaves of all the trees,   From burning I’ve learned burning, from the aster family chickory abounds,   From hawkweed of the colors bright, from sleeping, of my dreams,   From mosquitoes, scratching, from fishes, fishing, from turkeys how to run and how to hop,   From erect perennials I’ve learned to reach the shelf, from my cats to lick the dark part of the tin,   From the sparrows I’ve learned this and that, from Germanic tribes, to gather thoughts in herds,   From the window blinds, from the sun decayed, from the heart, a brimming record braised and turned.
I    Eagerly Like a woman hurrying to her lover Night comes to the room of the world And lies, yielding and content Against the cool round face Of the moon.   II   Night is a curious child, wandering Between earth and sky, creeping In windows and doors, daubing The entire neighborhood With purple paint. Day Is an apologetic mother Cloth in hand Following after.   III   Peddling From door to door Night sells Black bags of peppermint stars Heaping cones of vanilla moon Until His wares are gone Then shuffles homeward Jingling the gray coins Of daybreak.   IV   Night’s brittle song, sliver-thin Shatters into a billion fragments Of quiet shadows At the blaring jazz Of a morning sun.
Inventing a horse is not easy.  One must not only think of the horse. One must dig fence posts around him. One must include a place where horses like to live;   or do when they live with humans like you. Slowly, you must walk him in the cold; feed him bran mash, apples; accustom him to the harness;   holding in mind even when you are tired harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun; one must imagine teaching him to run   among the knuckles of tree roots, not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves, and not to grow thin in the city, where at some point you will have to live;   and one must imagine the absence of money. Most of all, though: the living weight, the sound of his feet on the needles, and, since he is heavy, and real,   and sometimes tired after a run down the river with a light whip at his side, one must imagine love in the mind that does not know love,   an animal mind, a love that does not depend on your image of it, your understanding of it; indifferent to all that it lacks:   a muzzle and two black eyes looking the day away, a field empty of everything but witchgrass, fluent trees, and some piles of hay.
I have walked through many lives,  some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
An agitation of the air,  A perturbation of the light Admonished me the unloved year Would turn on its hinge that night.   I stood in the disenchanted field Amid the stubble and the stones, Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me The song of my marrow-bones.   Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke from his cloudless tower, The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew That part of my life was over.   Already the iron door of the north Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows Order their populations forth, And a cruel wind blows.
The last full moon of February  stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow. Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west stealthily changing position   until now, in the small hours, across the snow it advances on my pillow to wake me, not rudely like the sun but with the cocked gun of silence.   I am alone in a vast room where a vain woman once slept. The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches on guard beside her bed.   Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze but not until that sleeper, trapped in my body, turns and turns.
Under fluorescent light, aligned on a benchand table top, oranges the size of marbles danglefrom trees with glossy leaves. White trumpetsbloom in tiny clay pots. Under a firethorn’s twistedlimbs, a three inch monk holds a cup from whichhe appears to drink the interior life. The potterprizes his bonsai children who will never grow up,never leave home.
Tonight is a drunk man, his dirty shirt.There is no couple chatting by the recycling bins, offering to help me unload my plastics.There is not even the black and white cat that balances elegantly on the lip of the dumpster.There is only the smell of sour breath. Sweat on the collar of my shirt. A water bottle rolling under a car. Me in my too-small pajama pants stacking juice jugs on neighbors’ juice jugs.I look to see if there is someone drinking on their balcony. I tell myself I will wave.
I look in the turned sod for an iron bolt that fell from the plow frame and find instead an arrowhead with delicate, chipped edges, still sharp, not much larger than a woman’s long fingernail. Pleased, I put the arrowhead into my overalls pocket, knowing that the man who shot the arrow and lost his work must have looked for itmuch longer than I will look for that bolt.
I drove to Oak Park, took two tours, And looked at some of the houses. I took the long way back along the lake. The place that I came home to—a cavernous Apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee— Seems basically a part of that tradition, With the same admixture of expansion and restraint: The space takes off, yet leaves behind a nagging Feeling of confinement, with the disconcerting sense That while the superficial conflicts got resolved, The underlying tensions brought to equilibrium, It isn’t yet a place in which I feel that I can live. Imagine someone reading. Contemplate a man Oblivious to his settings, and then a distant person Standing in an ordinary room, hemmed in by limitations, Yet possessed by the illusion of an individual life That blooms within its own mysterious enclosure, In a solitary space in which the soul can breathe And where the heart can stay—not by discovering it, But by creating it, by giving it a self-sustaining Atmosphere of depth, both in the architecture, And in the unconstructed life that it contains. In a late and very brief remark, Freud speculates That space is the projection of a “psychic apparatus” Which remains almost entirely oblivious to itself; And Wright extols “that primitive sense of shelter” Which can turn a house into a refuge from despair. I wish that time could bring the future back again And let me see things as they used to seem to me Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state— Alone and free and filled with cares about tomorrow. There used to be a logic in the way time passed That made it flow directly towards an underlying space Where all the minor, individual lives converged. The moments borrowed their perceptions from the past And bathed the future in a soft, familiar light I remembered from home, and which has faded. And the voices get supplanted by the rain, The nights seem colder, and the angel in the mind That used to sing to me beneath the wide suburban sky Turns into dreamwork and dissolves into the air, While in its place a kind of monument appears, Magnificent in isolation, compromised by proximity And standing in a small and singular expanse— As though the years had been a pretext for reflection, And my life had been a phase of disenchantment— As the faces that I cherished gradually withdraw, The reassuring settings slowly melt away, And what remains is just a sense of getting older. In a variation of the parable, the pure of heart Descend into a kingdom that they never wanted And refused to see. The homely notions of the good, The quaint ideas of perfection swept away like Adolescent fictions as the real forms of life Deteriorate with manically increasing speed, The kind man wakes into a quiet dream of shelter, And the serenity it brings—not in reflection, But in the paralyzing fear of being mistaken, Of losing everything, of acquiescing in the Obvious approach (the house shaped like a box; The life that can’t accommodate another’s)— As the heart shrinks down to tiny, local things.   Why can’t the more expansive ecstasies come true? I met you more than thirty years ago, in 1958, In Mrs. Wolford’s eighth grade history class. All moments weigh the same, and matter equally; Yet those that time brings back create the fables Of a happy or unsatisfying life, of minutes Passing on the way to either peace or disappointment— Like a paper calendar on which it’s always autumn And we’re back in school again; or a hazy afternoon Near the beginning of October, with the World Series Playing quietly on the radio, and the windows open, And the California sunlight filling up the room. When I survey the mural stretched across the years —Across my heart—I notice mostly small, neglected Parts of no importance to the whole design, but which, In their obscurity, seem more permanent and real. I see the desks and auditorium, suffused with Yellow light connoting earnestness and hope that Still remains there, in a space pervaded by a Soft and supple ache too deep to contemplate— As though the future weren’t real, and the present Were amorphous, with nothing to hold on to, And the past were there forever. And the art That time inflicts upon its subjects can’t Eradicate the lines sketched out in childhood, Which harden into shapes as it recedes. I wish I knew a way of looking at the world That didn’t find it wanting, or of looking at my Life that didn’t always see a half-completed Structure made of years and filled with images And gestures emblematic of the past, like Gatsby’s Light, or Proust’s imbalance on the stones. I wish there were a place where I could stay And leave the world alone—an enormous stadium Where I could wander back and forth across a field Replete with all the incidents and small details That gave the days their textures, that bound the Minutes into something solid, and that linked them All together in a way that used to seem eternal. We used to go to dances in my family’s ancient Cadillac, which blew up late one summer evening Climbing up the hill outside Del Mar. And later I can see us steaming off the cover of the Beatles’ Baby-butcher album at your house in Mission Bay; And three years later listening to the Velvet Underground performing in a roller skating rink. Years aren’t texts, or anything like texts; And yet I often think of 1968 that way, as though That single year contained the rhythms of the rest, As what began in hope and eagerness concluded in Intractable confusion, as the wedding turned into a Puzzling fiasco over poor John Godfrey’s hair. The parts were real, and yet the dense and living Whole they once composed seems broken now, its Voice reduced to disembodied terms that speak to me More distantly each day, until the tangled years Are finally drained of feeling, and collapse into a Sequence of the places where we lived: your parents’ House in Kensington, and mine above the canyon: Then the flat by Sears in Cambridge, where we Moved when we got married, and the third floor Of the house on Francis Avenue, near Harvard Square; The big apartment in Milwaukee where we lived the Year that John was born, and last of all the House in Whitefish Bay, where you live now And all those years came inexplicably undone In mid-July. The sequence ended late last year. Suppose we use a lifetime as a measure of the world As it exists for one. Then half of mine has ended, While the fragment which has recently come to be Contains no vantage point from which to see it whole. I think that people are the sum of their illusions, That the cares that make them difficult to see Are eased by distance, with their errors blending In an intricate harmony, their truths abiding In a subtle “spark” or psyche (each incomparable, Yet each the same as all the others) and their Disparate careers all joined together in a tangled Moral vision whose intense, meandering design Seems lightened by a pure simplicity of feeling, As in grief, or in the pathos of a life Cut off by loneliness, indifference or hate, Because the most important thing is human happiness— Not in the sense of private satisfactions, but of Lives that realize themselves in ordinary terms And with the quiet inconsistencies that make them real. The whole transcends its tensions, like the intimate Reflections on the day that came at evening, whose Significance was usually overlooked, or misunderstood, Because the facts were almost always unexceptional. Two years ago we took our son to Paris. Last night I picked him up and took him to a Lou Reed show, And then took him home. I look at all the houses as I Walk down Hackett Avenue to work. I teach my classes, Visit friends, cook introspective meals for myself, Yet in the end the minutes don’t add up. What’s lost Is the perception of the world as something good And held in common; as a place to be perfected In the kinds of everyday divisions and encounters That endowed it with integrity and structure, And that merged its private moments with the past. What broke it into pieces? What transformed the Flaws that gave it feeling into objects of a deep and Smoldering resentment—like coming home too early, Or walking too far ahead of you on the rue Jacob? I wish that life could be a window on the sun, Instead of just this porch where I can stand and Contemplate the wires that lace the parking lot And feel it moving towards some unknown resolution. The Guggenheim Museum just reopened. Tonight I Watched a segment of the news on PBS—narrated by a Woman we met years ago at Bob’s—that showed how Most of Wright’s interior had been restored, And how the ramp ascends in spirals towards the sky. I like the houses better—they flow in all directions, Merging with the scenery and embodying a milder, More domestic notion of perfection, on a human scale That doesn’t overwhelm the life that it encloses. Isn’t there a way to feel at home within the Confines of this bland, accommodating structure Made of souvenirs and emblems, like the hammock Hanging in the backyard of an undistinguished Prairie School house in Whitefish Bay—the lineal, Reduced descendant of the “Flameproof” Wright house Just a block or two away from where I live now? I usually walk along the street on Sunday, Musing on how beautiful it seems, how aspects of it Recapitulate the Oak Park house and studio, with Open spaces buried in a labyrinthine interior, And with the entrance half-concealed on the side— A characteristic feature of his plans that made it Difficult to find, although the hope was that in Trying to get inside, the visitor’s eye would come to Linger over subtleties he might have failed to see— In much the way that in the course of getting older, And trying to reconstruct the paths that led me here, I found myself pulled backwards through these old, Uncertain passages, distracted by the details, And meeting only barriers to understanding why the Years unfolded as they did, and why my life Turned out the way it has—like his signature “Pathway of Discovery,” with each diversion Adding to the integrity of the whole.   There is this sweep life has that makes the Accidents of time and place seem small. Everything alters, and the personal concerns That love could hold together for a little while Decay, and then the world seems strange again, And meaningless and free. I miss the primitive Confusions, and the secret way things came to me Each evening, and the pain. I still wonder Where the tears went, standing in my room each day And quietly inhabiting a calm, suspended state Enveloped by the emptiness that scares and thrills me, With the background noise cascading out of nothing Like a song that makes the days go by, a song Incorporating everything—not into what it says, But simply in the way it touches me, a single Image of dispersal, the inexhaustible perception Of contingency and transience and isolation. It brings them back to me. I have the inwardness I think I must have wanted, and the quietude, The solitary temper, and this space where I can Linger with the silence curling all around me Like the sound of pure passage, waiting here Surrounded by the furniture, the books and lists And all these other emblems of the floating world, The prints of raindrops that begin as mist, that fall Discreetly through the atmosphere, and disappear. And then I feel them in the air, in a reserved, More earthly music filled with voices reassembling In a wellspring of remembrance, talking to me again, And finding shelter in the same evasive movements I can feel in my own life, cloaked in a quiet Dignity that keeps away the dread of getting old, And fading out of other people’s consciousness, And dying –with its deepest insecurities and fears Concealed by their own protective colorations, As the mind secretes its shell and calls it home. It has the texture of an uncreated substance, Hovering between the settings it had come to love And some unformulated state I can’t imagine— Waiting for the telephone to ring, obsessed with Ways to occupy these wide, unstructured hours, And playing records by myself, and waking up alone. All things are disparate, yet subject to the same Intense, eradicating wills of time and personality, Like waves demolishing the walls love seemed to build Between our lives and emptiness, the certainty they Seemed to have just two or three short years ago, Before the anger spread its poison over everything. I think about the way our visions locked together In a nightmare play of nervousness and language, Living day to day inside the concentrated Force of that relentless argument, whose words Swept over us in formless torrents of anxiety, two People clinging to their versions of their lives Almost like children—living out each other’s Intermittent fantasies, that fed upon themselves As though infected by some vile, concentrated hatred; Who then woke up and planned that evening’s dinner. It’s all memories now, and distance. Miles away The cat is sleeping on the driveway, John’s in school, And sunlight filters through a curtain in the kitchen. Nothing really changes—the external world intrudes And then withdraws, and then becomes continuous again. I went downtown today and got a lamp with pendant Lanterns made of opalescent art glass—part, I guess, Of what this morning’s paper called the “Wright craze.” I like the easy way the days go by, the parts of aging That have come to seem familiar, and the uneventful Calm that seems to settle on the house at night. Each morning brings the mirror’s reassuring face, As though the years had left the same enduring person Simplified and changed—no longer vaguely desperate, No longer torn, yet still impatient with himself And still restless; but drained of intricacy and rage, Like a mild paradox—uninteresting in its own right, Yet existing for the sake of something stranger. Now and then our life comes over me, in brief, Involuntary glimpses of that world that blossom Unexpectedly, in fleeting moments of regret That come before the ache, the pang that gathers Sharply, like an indrawn breath—a strange and Thoughtful kind of pain, as though a steel Band had somehow snapped inside my heart. I don’t know. But what I do know is that None of it is ever going to come to me again. Why did I think a person only distantly like me Might finally represent my life? What aspects Of my attitudes, my cast of mind, my inconclusive Way of tossing questions at the world had I Supposed might realize another person’s fantasies And turn her into someone else—who gradually became A separate part of me, and argued with the very Words I would have used, and looked at me through Eyes I’d looked at as though gazing at myself? I guess we only realize ourselves in dreams, Or in these self-reflexive reveries sustaining All the charms that contemplation holds—until the Long enchantment of the soul with what it sees Is lifted, and it startles at a space alight with Objects of its infantile gaze, like people in a mall. I saw her just the other day. I felt a kind of Comfort at her face, one tinctured with bemusement At the strange and guarded person she’d become— Attractive, vaguely friendly, brisk (too brisk), But no one I could think might represent my life. Why did I even try to see myself in what’s outside? The strangeness pushes it away, propels the vision Back upon itself, into these regions filled with Shapes that I can wander through and never see, As though their image were inherently unreal. The houses on a street, the quiet backyard shade, The room restored to life with bric-a-brac— I started by revisiting these things, then slowly Reconceiving them as forms of loss made visible That balanced sympathy and space inside an Abstract edifice combining reaches of the past With all these speculations, all this artful Preening of the heart. I sit here at my desk, Perplexed and puzzled, teasing out a tangled Skein of years we wove together, and trying to Combine the fragments of those years into a poem. Who cares if life—if someone’s actual life—is Finally insignificant and small? There’s still a Splendor in the way it flowers once and fades And leaves a carapace behind. There isn’t time to Linger over why it happened, or attempt to make its Mystery come to life again and last, like someone Still embracing the confused perceptions of himself Embedded in the past, as though eternity lay there— For heaven’s a delusion, and eternity is in the details, And this tiny, insubstantial life is all there is. —And that would be enough, but for the reoccurring Dreams I often have of you. Sometimes at night The banished unrealities return, as though a room Suffused with light and poetry took shape around me. Pictures line the walls. It’s early summer. Somewhere in Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel, Reflecting on his years with “Albertine”—with X— Suggests that love is just a consciousness of distance, Of the separation of two lives in time and space. I think the same estrangement’s mirrored in each life, In how it seems both adequate and incomplete—part Day-to-day existence, part imaginary construct Beckoning at night, and sighing through my dreams Like some disconsolate chimera, or the subject Of a lonely, terrifying sadness; or the isolation Of a quiet winter evening, when the house feels empty, And silence intervenes. But in the wonderful Enclosure opening in my heart, I seem to recognize Our voices lilting in the yard, inflected by the Rhythms of a song whose words are seamless And whose lines are never-ending. I can almost See the contours of your face, and sense the Presence of the trees, and reimagine all of us Together in a deep, abiding happiness, as if the Three of us inhabited a fragile, made-up world That seemed to be so permanent, so real. I have this fantasy: It’s early in the evening. You and I are sitting in the backyard, talking. Friends arrive, then drinks and dinner, conversation…   The lovely summer twilight lasts forever…    What’s the use? What purpose do these speculations serve? What Mild enchantments do these meditations leave? They’re just the murmurs of an age, of middle age, That help to pass the time that they retrieve Before subsiding, leaving everything unchanged. Each of us at times has felt the future fade, Or seen the compass of his life diminished, Or realized some tangible illusion was unreal. Driving down to Evanston last week, I suddenly Remembered driving down that road eight years ago, So caught up in some story I’d just finished That I’d missed the way the countryside was changing— How in place of trees there now were office towers And theme parks, parts of a confusingly panoply of Barns and discount malls transfiguring a landscape Filled with high, receding clouds and rows of flimsy Houses in what used to be a field. I thought of Other people’s lives, and how impossible it seemed To grasp them on the model of my own—as little Mirrors of infinity—or sense their forms of Happiness, or in their minor personal upheavals Feel the sweep of time reduced to human scale And see its abstract argument made visible. I thought of overarching dreams of plenitude— How life lacks shape until it’s given one by love, And how each soul is both a kingdom in itself And part of some incorporating whole that Feels and has a face and lets it live forever. All of these seemed true, and cancelled one another, Leaving just the feeling of an unseen presence Tracing out the contours of a world erased, Like music tracing out the contours of the mind— For life has the form of a winding curve in space And in its wake the human figure disappears. Look at our surroundings—where a previous age Could visualize a landscape we see borders, Yet I think the underlying vision is the same: A person positing a world that he can see And can’t contain, and vexed by other people. Everything is possible; some of it seemed real Or nearly real, yet in the end it spoke to me alone, In phrases echoing the isolation of a meager Ledge above a waterfall, or rolling across a vast, Expanding plain on which there’s always room, But only room for one. It starts and ends Inside an ordinary room, while in the interim Brimming with illusions, filled with commonplace Delights that make the days go by, with simple Arguments and fears, and with the nervous Inkling of some vague, utopian conceit Transforming both the landscape and our lives, Until we look around and find ourselves at home, But in a wholly different world. And even those Catastrophes that seemed to alter everything Seem fleeting, grounded in a natural order All of us are subject to, and ought to celebrate. —Yet why? That things are temporary doesn’t Render them unreal, unworthy of regretting. It’s not as though the past had never happened: All those years were real, and their loss was real, And it is sad—I don’t know what else to call it. I’m glad that both of us seem happy. Yet what Troubles me is just the way what used to be a world Turned out, in retrospect, to be a state of mind, And no more tangible than that. And now it’s gone, And in its place I find the image of a process Of inexorable decay, or of some great unraveling That drags the houses forward into emptiness And backwards into pictures of the intervening days Love pieced together out of nothing. And I’m Certain that this austere vision finally is true, And yet it strikes me as too meager to believe. It comes from much too high above the world And seems to me too hopeless, too extreme— But then I found myself one winter afternoon Remembering a quiet morning in a classroom And inventing everything again, in ordinary Terms that seemed to comprehend a childish Dream of love, and then the loss of love, And all the intricate years between.
They’re all dressed up in carmine floor-length velvet gowns, their upswirled hair festooned with matching ribbons: their fresh hopes and our fond hopes for them infuse this sort-of-music as if happiness could actually be each-plays-her-part-and-all-will-take-care-of-itself. Their hearts unscarred under quartz lights beam through the darkness in which we sit to show us why we endured at home the squeaking and squawking and botched notes that now in concert are almost beautiful, almost rendering this heartrending music composed for an archduke who loved it so much he spent his fortune for the musicians who could bring it brilliantly to life.
Each day I go into the fields  to see what is growing and what remains to be done. It is always the same thing: nothing is growing, everything needs to be done. Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray till my bones ache and hands rub blood-raw with honest labor— all that grows is the slow intransigent intensity of need. I have sown my seed on soil guaranteed by poverty to fail. But I don’t complain—except to passersby who ask me why I work such barren earth. They would not understand me if I stooped to lift a rock and hold it like a child, or laughed, or told them it is their poverty I labor to relieve. For them, I complain. A farmer of dreams knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams knows what it means to be patient. Each day I go into the fields.
Two women on the lone wet strand (The wind's out with a will to roam)The waves wage war on rocks and sand, (And a ship is long due home.)The sea sprays in the women's eyes— (Hearts can writhe like the sea's wild foam)Lower descend the tempestuous skies, (For the wind's out with a will to roam.)"O daughter, thine eyes be better than mine," (The waves ascend high as yonder dome)"North or south is there never a sign?" (And a ship is long due home.)They watched there all the long night through— (The wind's out with a will to roam)Wind and rain and sorrow for two— (And heaven on the long reach home.)
The conversations of the French  Quarter mules in their stables after a full day of pulling tourists and voters over cobble- stones is not espresso witty and in their dark no TVs feed them news of the ends of mules elsewhere in the Middle East and West. In our stables the ends of others are a fact of atmosphere. The yoyos on the mystery island nextdoor are revving familiar tools in backyard now gripped by failure first of electricity than of a meaner something that’ll grow into nothing we’ll know in the A.M. Once they were visitors like us then they grew mulish in their bubbles and pulled whatever was put around their necks in- cluding a banner that said, About What Kills Us We Know Little. On certain nights after a good internal fight we hear the voice- less others through the glass fearfully sweet’n’soft like dough. Oh let the monsters in. Help us rise above our not seeing them, may they let us into their eyes as well. Banish the blindness of these cobblestones, clop, clop. But! Pffsst! Our notes are in- complete. Loving you was never on the agenda. Better to sing as roughly as the stones. On Memorial Day we had one thousand hotdogs & counting. Didn’t visit a single graveyard. We the Grant Wood folks scan the sky for incoming missiles: blips ourselves we understand timing and touring in America. The gilded dads in the portraits sought the idealized continuity now moving before us democratically in showers of pixels and dots. I’ll go with the distracted mariner, my lover, and we’ll be in the world. It will be late by then and dark. We lyric virgin mules keep our book of hours in a dream apart, having stranded a billion turistas. But we could not break the chummy hand. Ready to brave the snow without a hat, severe weather notwithstanding, we merely nod and understand.
Side by side through the streets at midnight, Roaming together, Through the tumultuous night of London, In the miraculous April weather.   Roaming together under the gaslight, Day’s work over, How the Spring calls to us, here in the city, Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!   Cool to the wind blows, fresh in our faces, Cleansing, entrancing, After the heat and the fumes and the footlights, Where you dance and I watch your dancing.   Good it is to be here together, Good to be roaming, Even in London, even at midnight, Lover-like in a lover’s gloaming.   You the dancer and I the dreamer, Children together, Wandering lost in the night of London, In the miraculous April weather.
We have walked in Love's land a little way, We have learnt his lesson a little while, And shall we not part at the end of day, With a sigh, a smile? A little while in the shine of the sun, We were twined together, joined lips, forgot How the shadows fall when the day is done, And when Love is not. We have made no vows--there will none be broke, Our love was free as the wind on the hill, There was no word said we need wish unspoke, We have wrought no ill. So shall we not part at the end of day, Who have loved and lingered a little while, Join lips for the last time, go our way, With a sigh, a smile?
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain, Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,— I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain, Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay: Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows, And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
We are the music makers,  And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers,  And sitting by desolate streams; — World-losers and world-forsakers,  On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers  Of the world for ever, it seems. With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world's great cities,  And out of a fabulous story  We fashion an empire's glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure,  Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure  Can trample a kingdom down. We, in the ages lying,  In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing,  And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying  To the old of the new world's worth; For each age is a dream that is dying,  Or one that is coming to birth. A breath of our inspiration Is the life of each generation;  A wondrous thing of our dreaming  Unearthly, impossible seeming — The soldier, the king, and the peasant  Are working together in one, Till our dream shall become their present,  And their work in the world be done. They had no vision amazing Of the goodly house they are raising;  They had no divine foreshowing  Of the land to which they are going: But on one man's soul it hath broken,  A light that doth not depart; And his look, or a word he hath spoken,  Wrought flame in another man's heart. And therefore to-day is thrilling With a past day's late fulfilling;  And the multitudes are enlisted  In the faith that their fathers resisted, And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,  Are bringing to pass, as they may, In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,  The dream that was scorned yesterday. But we, with our dreaming and singing,  Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging  Of the glorious futures we see, Our souls with high music ringing:  O men! it must ever be That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,  A little apart from ye. For we are afar with the dawning  And the suns that are not yet high, And out of the infinite morning  Intrepid you hear us cry — How, spite of your human scorning,  Once more God's future draws nigh, And already goes forth the warning  That ye of the past must die. Great hail! we cry to the comers  From the dazzling unknown shore; Bring us hither your sun and your summers;  And renew our world as of yore; You shall teach us your song's new numbers,  And things that we dreamed not before: Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,  And a singer who sings no more.
The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow And true love parting blackens a bright morrow: Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen. But greater sorrow from less love has been That can mistake lack of despair for hope And knows not tempest and the perfect scope Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual Of drops that from remorse and pity fall And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw, Removed eternally from the sun’s law.
silver & gossamer & porcelain & cobwebs  some people are made out of they walk from here to there a limited number of times only— but the bony phone is just dumb plastic it rings not at all   i don’t understand: my ideas are universal but my audience is five guys at the shell station people just don’t get it   she longs for what makes her grin (tînjeşte dupâ ce rînjeşte) the sweetness of want the repulsiveness of having after days she was returned by the storms of language that had tossed her far & she rearranged her face for the english language—   what i heard i did not hear what i saw i did not see i trust my sense to dullness then i kill my joy & cease to be
is all wrong, ed   what poets now live where they say they do where they started out where they want to   half the midwesterners did time in new york the other half in california   only new yorkers write as if they are from new york and mostly they are not   the ones in california were wounded elsewhere when they feel better or can't afford the rent they'll go back where they came from   this is america you get hurt where you are born you make poetry out of it as far from home as you can get you die somewhere in between   the only geography of poets is greyhound general motors rules them all ubi patria ibi bene or ibi bene ubi patria bread out of nostalgia not a lot of it either some of us came from very far maps don't help much
I haven’t remembered anything, only the names and that their dates have been replaced by fees toted up out of mischief: a whopping yellow sun, finesse swallowed hard, a scrapbook in pantyhose dawdling beside some Shreveport-like expanse.   But now you see it, she’s supposed to call. Surely neither will converse, they merely tell, succumbing to a disorderly shelf life like Tampax in June. Salute the budding terminus where the East Side was. Can there be a way to redefine the tense behind its jaunts, the pubescent imagery a hand calls forth as, rippling, it is thrust into the brine?    The phantom tugboat slips along in depths past Garbo’s awnings and the united glaze which wilts, harnessing dim signatories in the windows’ sarong. Do things go further in need as I could? Or are they immune? How else have I been taught to guess and then been told to know, because matter equals good? A silken light masks the entrance to the market proofs of time.
I   It’s odd to have a separate month. It escapes the year, it is not only cold, it is warm and loving like a death grip on a willing knee. The Indians have a name for it, they call it: “Summer!” The tepees shake in the blast like roosters at dawn. Everything is special to them, the colorful ones.     II   Somehow the housewife does not seem gentle. Is she angry because her husband likes October? Is it snow bleeds softly from her shoes? The nest eggs have captured her, but April rises from her bed.     III   “The beggars are upon us!” cried Chester.   Three strangers appeared at the door, demanding ribbons.   The October wind . . . nests     IV   Why do I think October is beautiful? It is not, is not beautiful.  But then what is there to hold one’s interest between the various drifts of a day’s work, but to search out the differences  the window and grate— but it is not, is not beautiful.     V   I think your face is beautiful, the way it is close to my face, and I think you are the real October with your transparence and the stone of your words as they pass, as I do not hear them.
for Vincent Warren Behind the black water tower  under the grey of the sky that feeds it smoke speeds to where a pigeon spreads its wings   This is no great feat Cold pushes out its lust We walk we drink we cast our giggling insults    Would you please leave the $2.50 you owe me I would rather not talk about it just now Money bores me I would like to visit someone who will stay in bed all day A forest is rising imperceptibly in my head  not a civilized park   I think it would be nice this “new moral odor” no it would not mean “everything marching to its tomb”  The water tower watches over us Is there someone you would like to invite no one.
Half-ended melodies are purer.  To no longer perform in broad daylight, the apple’s a radish for it, the winter chill a living thing. But take your brother into later learning: Let the girls who will smell the buried cloves there.   So I am only beginning to learn what I from time to time forget. But throw away these childish things!   Barney’s coffin disappeared, and luckily you said the right thing for the sky mentioned for the last time. The little master of small talk is really the seducer of your every move, taking you into his confidence the way a cat his mouse.   And still young Lycidas cannot express himself fully. And: “Everyone is the same,” even down to his jockey shorts, dolce far niente, as they say.
Crossed fingers gird the planet, though small optimism obtains.   Will I read The Serious Doll in wraps, with its roller slur?   A book where everybody, reader and writer included, dies.   The kind of thing people said in the 1970s: “Hello, I’m back being me again.”   My first and last names and the first and last names of both my parents have the same number of letters.   The wasp waist, the tennis dress, the shirtwaist, the dirndl (Mainbocher).   A distant yet achingly distinct whinny: et voila! the walking buckboard.   Dustin Hoffman’s bookcase hanging by one hinge in air of Eleventh Street, dawn 1969.   Telephone solicitation for a ballet school in need of “serious floors.”   The thought of someone flat on his back on the carpet, tossing and giggling.   If it hurts don’t do it. (There are several unlesses to this caution.)   For the second time in two millennia slept through the meteor shower, results of last night’s talk.
Fighting a losing battle  lives next door to a vibrant woman in her 30’s. When he talks to her sub-mediocre takes over in a big way. Zombie-ized by the big eye she even sleeps with it on. Just sign me: concerned.
there are these trees. and beyond these trees, trees. and beyond that little or nothing. little fields and nothing but sky.
I think it is interesting though not exactly amusing how we go from day to day with no money. How do we do it, friends ask, suspecting we really have some stash stacked away somewhere. But we certainly do not and we also do not know how we do it either. You sure are lucky, some of our friends say. I am none too sure of that though, as I wait for the winning lottery numbers to be announced on CKLW. Thursday in Detroit is the day of dreams. We have been dreaming of a place in the country lately and I’m none too sure that is very healthy. And speaking of health that’s also been a problem that probably has something to do with no money, since we’ve all been sick lately, taking turns politely of course. Could you bring me some more tea one of us will ask, and the other will. In between the coughing and worrying our thoughts have often turned to crime. We seriously wonder how we can get away with a bundle with as little risk as possible. Last week we took our last $12 out of the bank and noticed how much more they had there though we had none. Of course we wouldn’t rob that bank, they know us there as the ones who bring the rolls of pennies in. And just yesterday they fish-eyed us for trying to cash our son’s xmas bond from his grandparents after only one month. So we wouldn’t try to rob that bank, but I do know of one up north that may be possible. . . I know this just seems like romantic dreaming but I practically make a career of reading detective stories, and God knows, I have no other. Anyway if the right opportunity comes along, we are more than ready to meet it. But this is a time of waiting, the I Ching says, though it does not say how we are to eat while waiting. And soon we will have another mouth to feed— Ann now in her seventh month, and that is often in our thoughts. Besides all that we are both over thirty, artist and poet, still waiting to cross the great water. Meanwhile, day after day, there is still Detroit to be dealt with — a small pond says our friend Snee. Big fish we used to answer him, but that was a while back. Now we think maybe Lake Erie is the great water referred to in the I Ching, and if we wait long enough we can walk across — to Buffalo or Cleveland. In a healthy person, says the philosopher, self-pity can be a forerunner to action: once the problem is seen clearly, a solution may be found at hand. And as I said, I think it is interesting though not exactly amusing.
can replace  poetry in my life and one day surely it will
The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring  In the days of long ago, Ranged where the locomotives sing And the prairie flowers lie low:— The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass Is swept away by the wheat, Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by In the spring that still is sweet. But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring Left us, long ago. They gore no more, they bellow no more, They trundle around the hills no more:— With the Blackfeet, lying low, With the Pawnees, lying low, Lying low.
I set up my computer and webcam in the kitchen so I can ask my mother’s and aunt’s advice as I cook soup for the first time alone. My mother is in Utah. My aunt is in Hungary. I show the onions to my mother with the webcam. “Cut them smaller,” she advises. “You only need a taste.” I chop potatoes as the onions fry in my pan. When I say I have no paprika to add to the broth, they argue whether it can be called potato soup. My mother says it will be white potato soup, my aunt says potato soup must be red. When I add sliced peppers, I ask many times if I should put the water in now, but they both say to wait until I add the potatoes. I add Polish sausage because I can’t find Hungarian, and I cook it so long the potatoes fall apart. “You’ve made stew,” my mother says when I hold up the whole pot to the camera. They laugh and say I must get married soon. I turn off the computer and eat alone.
I can hear him, now, even in darkness, a trickster under the moon, bristling his feathers, sounding as merry as a man whistling in a straw hat, or a squeaky gate to the playground, left ajar or the jingling of a star, having wandered too far from the pasture.
1. It unfolds and ripples like a banner, downward. All the stories come folding out. The smells and flowers begin to come back, as the tapestry is brightly colored and brocaded. Rabbits and violets. Who asked you to come over? She got her foot in the door and would not remove it, elbowing and talking swiftly. Gas leak? that sounds like a very existential position; perhaps you had better check with the landlord.  This was no better than the predicament I had just read about. Now it was actually changing before my eyes. Sometimes it will come to a standstill though, and finally the reflection can begin. Selfless—that was the proposition. Smiling and moving instantly there was no other purpose than that which brought them there, to be in a particular place. 2. This time the mule gave its face away. Take your cadillac where you want to go in the morning, convertible as it might be, and enjoy a good bottle of rum. Running on this way she used various modes of expression that were current. Nothing seemed to bring the woods any closer. What Woods, she was questioned, realizing that as far as the woods went, they were largely inhabitable through the facility of her mind. At the Philadelphia Flower Show, an ideal situation was built up. Here through various regulated artificial conditions, spring grass, waterfalls, the newly-sprouted bulbs completed her ideal concept of nature. The smell was overpowering. All right then. She had a thing about nature, from flower show glamor and enormous greenhouses the rich cultivated. A beauty of cultivation—in living? Hastiness did not prevent her from rising quick and ready to misnomers and other odd conclusions, throwing the telephone book to the floor, “OH OH the life I am entangled in.” Four sides of it.  Above was a paradisical level, incompleted. With working possibilities. Below, endless preoccupations and variations were possible. Currently in vogue were shelves, the vacuum cleaner, a new bedspread and color scheme for pillows.  Taste treats were unresponsive. Glamor do’s were out. Conversation was nil. Languid she could not even find a place to languish upon that was fulfilling in its own way.  So out of the lifelessness that was around her, the grape leaves drying out, and even though the avocado was sprouting, she thought, Why not fantasy? Tugging at this character and that, trying to push a little life in a prince or a charmer, a half- blind bat, dryad, the works of the story teller. Here the four walls of the room and ceiling became apparent again. “I ought to tighten down and make sure I say exactly what I mean.” And her face took on a tight pinched expression, and thrifty scotch economy gave her shrewd eyes in the prescribed way. Use every tidbit, usefully. Once upon a time there was a princess who had a long white fur coat with a high fluffy collar, and inside the coat were stitched beautiful butterflies in many bright colors. The princess languished. She was not sure where to sit to her best advantage to enjoy herself the most. She could not go in her mind or out. She looked at her long white hand, I am the Queen of the High Mountain Hag, she murmured to herself, still knowing she was a princess. She lay down upon the floor as if it were the garden of eden, the coat spread around her.  No, that poor little house she had built was a bore. It’s better that it go up in flames, as it did. She went down to Grand Central Station and gave away flowers. Some people took them and some people didn’t. 3. I’m glad to get back. I had to repeat a rough discontinuous journey. Questioning myself all along the way. Was I jumping on her because her time had come to an end. Indeed I pounded on his arm all night, over his concern for this soft-spoken individual, I can see nothing but their softness. Me ME, and the time we might spend together, reading and talking, to tear away that putrid husk. My flippancy is gone. Now I have started my secret life again, in transition, reminding. As the moth reminds, its feeble antenna groping, taken like a stalk of fern, coins of money. All over I was shaking as the fear and tension made itself apparent. It was a cold night out. It was colder still between the airy gaps, between blankets.  You can see she is thoughtful as she draws the string to the bow. Where to go indeed. The point is brought forward and discussed very cleverly. A sleeping angel or a sleeping troll? I was rather proud of being used, pushing the clothing hampers up and down the downtown street. Here, pleasant mentors conveyed their anxious solicitations, drawing from their bags, long lists of memorandum due, what I owed. It was a lot, if I hesitated. I choose to go on, saying this is the way I go, owing nothing, being that kind of person. Hung up? That thought intrudes as the clearly marked vista is not so clearly marked. Certainly one supposes in all honesty, that an essential core of feeling blooms in each encounter. Lost under the weight of the garbage of who are you that you are not making apparent. Thus unhappy, I don’t want it to be this way, and so forth. Not costumes, or paraphernalia, the immediate reactions. 4. We of course are in a family situation. Anything I wish might happen, but the larger situations are not real, not to be considered possible, discussable as to what sense of reality they possessed. In the snow, the wood piled up underneath. Oh those drifting sensibilities. At this point it is scarcely believable that people gather and like each other. Eating chocolate pudding, getting in touch with some other sense of alikeness. The form is no longer obvious to me. Whether they meander or are joined together in their senses in the mechanics or regular grooves they run along.  I suspect that in this house, this place that is musty and left as it was some years ago, there is no real fear; the objects are old and I am not familiar with them, only the sense that the Ghost or spirit world strikes you with its familiarity, pleasurable fear.  Here the familiar is apt to make its presence known, at any moment the unexpected lurk in the hall, into the room. Pieces of leather, old silken fans laid upon the table top, rooms filled with something left unexpectedly terror is the wrong combination of ignorance. It contains its own self with dusty fragments of velvet and fringe. 100 pieces of voice with no name, called it myself, as they spoke all day, sucking the soft slush, admitting their real deficiencies as— I am never sure; Oh it’s that power and disease of believing in the stale that doesn’t demand a real climate, takes its capacity when the demons come down. 5. The night passes in night time. The head moving to the shoulder, the head rising with a frown. In a firm voice, it doesn’t matter if the hair is flying from undue spring breezes, the self has been raptured on the wine that produces appropriate madness, and sad she says, my dear the bacchanal is a lovely way to be rid of waste. However, in seeing the house more manageable, one cannot even have fear larger than the unknown portions of the continent which refuses to sink.  There once was a woman who grew older, not that she minded, but the passage of time was always constant. Why does one have to contend with that she said, puzzled, as she got carried along, and constantly had to think up new coping modes of behavior. If he behaved to me thus when he was 40, now that I am 30, I can hardly behave like that to those that are 20, and so forth. There wasn’t any model except the one she built, and one could scarcely believe there was no established pattern. This offered wonderful possibilities, but also indecision and gutlessness. 6. You can’t see them, all bundled up, all those that choose to move other than where the distance seems appealing. Knowledge has no depth. There isn’t any message to be spoken. Wrangling, she speaks ill-advised my dear, as the cat has no point in laying its head down. She ought to watch carefully.  The claws. It could be the bent hands, as they grow, that as the fur impeaches the rose, doesn’t make the thing she hangs her body on any realer. What could it be all about? The necessity to follow, balancing, contemplating words, as the basis of why we move at all. Just a little touch. The leader cautioned further progression. I could hardly listen to the music for long. Now there seemed to be interruptions, pleasurable interludes, nothing definite, of a fragmented nature.  Certainly I wished the best for all. The sadder soldiers stumbled idly, as I also in the profound reaches of my slumber noted the elegant turns, the twisting statements grooving into the language building something to listen to. The dress made from silk. Trusting was awkward and not of a nature to ease any further building. Whosoever you revere will come back tenfold upon you and lighten the burden carried as those who desire the warmth and necessity of communication. 7. I am sure my dreams must have been of the wrong sort. However, as dreams are reflections of inner dilemmas, how did those arise, from a day of relaxation and summer enjoyment of the fund. Knowledge comes from what purported strike? From that which cleanses, and let us knot say “heart” but tissue. Hopefully and helpfully I have built up a language in which to talk myself to sleep. Not for purposes of letting in the cold.  However, I have found that not all blockaded against is the cold, the dreary reign of the dead, etc., and tasteless realm of the mushroom. As much can be denied as the bilious sun strives to cause an enlargement of singing in the back of the neck and the head. That is uncorraled ecstasy. I call it enthusiasm, free energy. But it has no place to land, it is bursting and unfocused; it is a real force and the counterpart of the gloomy depths.  As the pieces of the house ooze sap, blossoms and green twigs burst from the cracks. Whether or not to join in what I was half committed to see and do. 8. At this point, when Jack picked up the pussy willow branches, I said they can’t possibly be ours for the taking, and smiled with dedication to an older Con Edison man. The buildings were like the unexplored garbage in my mind, fascinating and dirty, pulling pieces of cloth from boxes left overnight. Energy as limitless possibility, in the attempt to transmit non-energy situations. For example, if once I stop to realize what little gets through, I am much more interested in the cover than the contents; it is difficult to find any interest in anything. Good energy displaces bad karma. And other non entities like that sort, producing flow that in its own place has a good bed, stocked well with what can be called fleet-footed fishes, and approaching places of investigation, such as relations between.  As I saw the blood flow to the surface of his skin, I forgot to watch for the telltale visions that again might come from something I have never seen; more possibly the components of what every man views. If this was a possibility, the rays from every person converging pass through the state of shock to numbness to unity without any mind at all, for this horror fits the cat on the stairs, between the fifth and sixth rung. This is the way people glow and pulse similar to an inlet of jellyfish blocking the way, full of human life; until I who will name myself a swimmer come along and refuse to be blocked on the way, although I turn back gladly, and will again swim through for it is possible they do not kill, the sting’s compounded measure is fear, and thus one not need join the broad expanse of human mouths calling people to join their ranks to comfort their newfound recognition or orifices, stomachs and legs. I reminded myself twice there were several stories that kept continuing themselves. She ignored her face, blotched and red upon times, but fuller. Did you forget to wax and wane? Her head was full of energy brought forward and positively that what was said would turn the obvious into color, but no sense. Sense was for the thinkers. Here the thinkers forgot their word orders or sense; it was better to give them coffee, and those off worse could smoke.  I had felt very foolish when I leaned forward and grasped his hand, with effort, and his cloak slipped down over one shoulder as he shouted, which is the way. And I followed for certainly no one would follow me. As the day is cold and colder, and what comes out of the head is of its own sort and nature. These words, like Nature, and Head, Thinking and Words, repeat themselves, as the lines of landscape, attics and other closed-off sections have reprimanded themselves by repetition. Light was such an enormous possibility. Taking sight into a frenzy, it was possible that just to look was full of excitement and wonder, for ages at a time, things appeared as beautiful, the sky, the street where cars had gone by.  I worried about certain characters: ones that never seemed to be other than puzzles to me but I was drawn to them with certainty only because there seemed to be no understanding? As when the mysteries were performed, the house then itself became distilled with reason as the pots and pans were used apparently filled with the stuff of continuity. The sorrow that each day sinks into the infertile other side of day, where voice comes out of the dark, and does its rituals. Memory has its own screen across the room to view itself, and the continuous dwelling of conjecture takes permanent form in stiff-legged walks to remind, thus on and on the breathing goes.  New York. January – March, 1967
In Tamalpais is a big crystal. An acquaintance told me the story. A Miwok was giving his grandfather’s medicine bag to the Kroeber Museum in Berkeley. He said this man took him over the mountain Tamalpais, at a certain time in the year. I believe it was about the time of the Winter Solstice, because then the tides are really low. They stopped and gathered a certain plant on the way over the mountain. On their way to the Bolinas Beach clam patch, where there is a big rock way out there.  Go out to the rock. Take out of the medicine bag the crystal that matches the crystal in Tamalpais. And  if your heart is not true  if your heart is not true when you tap the rock in the clam patch  a little piece of it will fly off  and strike you in the heart  and strike you dead. And that’s the first story I ever heard about Bolinas.
The grasses are light brown  and the ocean comes in  long shimmering lines  under the fleet from last night  which dozes now in the early morning Here and there horses graze  on somebody’s acreage  Strangely, it was not my desire that bade me speak in church to be released  but memory of the way it used to be in careless and exotic play  when characters were promises  then recognitions. The world of transformation is real and not real but trusting.  Enough of these lessons? I mean didactic phrases to take you in and out of love’s mysterious bonds?  Well I myself am not myself  and which power of survival I speak for is not made of houses.  It is inner luxury, of golden figures that breathe like mountains do  and whose skin is made dusky by stars.
When I used to focus on the worries, everybody  was ahead of me, I was the bottom  of the totem pole,  a largely spread squat animal. How about a quick massage now, he said to me. I don’t think it’s cool, I replied. Oh, said he, after a pause, I should have waited  for you to ask me. The waves came in closer and closer. When I fall into the gap of suspicion I am no longer here. In this world that has got closed over by houses  and networks, I fly out from under the belly. Life’s dizzy crown of whirling lights, circles this head. Pure with wonder, hot with wonder. The streets become golden. All size increases, the colors glow, we are in myth. We are in easy understanding. Scarcely talking, thoughts pass between us.  It is memory. As I search to find this day’s sweet drifting. The fog out to sea, the wind.
He is pruning the privet  of sickly sorrow desolation  in loose pieces of air he goes clip clip clip  the green blooming branches fall—‘they’re getting out  of hand’ delirious and adorable what a switch  we perceive multiple identities when you sing so beautifully the shifting  clouds You are not alone is this world  not a lone a parallel world of reflection  in a window keeps the fire burning  in the framed mandala, the red shafted flicker  sits on the back of the garden chair in the rain the red robed monks downtown in the rain a rainbow arises  simple country practices thunder  lightning, hail and rain eight Douglas Iris  ribbon layers of attention  So constant creation of ‘self’ is a tricky  mess He is pruning the loquat, the olive  which looks real enough in the damp late morning air  May 15, 1995
I How can we accommodate these reforms? The nights of bell-flowers are as finished as the hell of water that has unrolled and become news. Pull at the ox’s ring and the wall of the sinuses falls down. Pull at the hoop in the eyelid, dormitories are felled. A marriage of fists and kites, the smile is hammered so painstakingly into the gut it forms a ring. II I am staring up at a boxing match in which white Everlasts and red Everlasts take on the breakneck speed of cupids. Art Deco façades hem in the open-air courtyard; a black belt of skyline circles off their incandescent white waists. The sunrise pulls level with the sea. The boxers’ shadows furl and unfurl, drawing into cups. III You open your heart’s wings like a bread riot, split the uncooked potatoes on the table with a glance, and eat. You make the hours work like fragile perceptions for the food they get, the warmth they get, for the variable, contradictory spontaneities imposed on their bodies as love or triumph in mistaken assertions.
Sets the folds in alignment; this a shallow, a constitution of drops that moves to displace itself and unconsciously reverts to image. In such a state, the wave has become a setting— a table across which cups with propositions rolled inside them are passed. The passage of cups does not limit the range of potential outcomes, and yet at no point does the wave dissolve into abstraction. The shades are drawn and we are overwhelmed by flags crossing the black divan. An axis of rotation, gliding a fraction of an inch and yet unveiling its total mass. Advancing, the disc of its body shimmers. Alighting on the sand, it reveals itself in a cluster of pulses. Dilated, it lifts from the sea floor: fine spokes radiating on a wheel. It passes between bands of bright water, a kiss or a plow.
At once this dragnet of cousins Whips its way into your presence saying None of them among us. They are Oracles on the court of midnight, The tight filigree of a mind or your Splashing around in, your pandemonium Of copper graffiti inexpertly put up. They make weapons of furled hands. “We will walk, but our bones will carry Ribbons of lead, or we will, like Acrobats mill-headed in 3s (3 blades, 3 hips, 3 tongues), answer to what comes Before, what comes before?” Eleousa, Master of Dark Eyelids, eye opening Like a fennel seed, you are generous Or are you not, do you shore up and Wink at the soul? What does the soul say Other than “my divorce from . . .,” “tan Holiday . . .,” “smoking crystal in teak rooms . . .” But should have asked, “What do you See?” The sun a sequence of fans, a bridge, Only so exquisitely cabled as to make us Still—shall we fall Or travel between bridges Among the robust, sane clouds, A face cut from smoke, heat, and light? The sun, dancing in a vial, the initial Memory of what it was to be born— Doberman of a sheer-white universe— To school out—the audacity of rising Without name or color to new rooms, New youth, fruitful, born singularly To precise moments not in epiphany But duration—as under new weather We become—in action, receive—our Bodies uncasked like umbrellas under The flamingo-red light of the racing day.
Somebody who would never refuse money told me this— about the syncretic effect when each person plugs their attention into a field to read ad copy, let’s just say they become opened up and other beings can see into their minds. This was considered a science fiction idea to many people, but not to me. In my negative space construction is always occurring. The liftoff from awful to tolerable to positive and then finally to bright new beautiful has been my most difficult task to swing. But swing I will; there’s nothing else to do. I live here and being here and hearing myself or my mind’s divide through others convinces me that I must do everything I can to save us from the pit. That is, until the pit splits and the fruit tree finally grows. You may have a tree of your own—you may have a home in your own tree. Congratulations. If you write an instructive pamphlet you can bet I will read it. I do not want to go out in darkness. I am doing everything I know to prevent this, and thank you, by the way, if you’ve written a pamphlet. The shared information system and each being at the end of its screen emits an LED (light emitting diode) on an often green screen—you say I should give my father up to the authorities. You blame your circumstances on my choice—but it’s the authorities who did this to him. How do you think a person loses his mind? He let someone take it. He is sort of my mind and you are too, God help me. The green screen is an ingenious discovery. You can record events in a studio before the screen and then key in whatever environment you like. It’s a special color: Chroma Green, but it can be blue too. The experience of things is determined by our feelings about them. Information is colored by us. You may see remotely, in a photograph for instance, the image of an ambush victim. Maybe it is a war and/or she is caught naked. If she is unhappy—indicated by face and body arrangement—you may feel that. Some people will hate the state of things that made her so alone and vulnerable but few will do anything about it. How do you find her? What guns surround her country? And after all, maybe she would hate it. To have to feel grateful to someone moved by her humiliation. She may only be thinking about humiliation. That is a tough feeling to shake. Then, and I need not go too far into this, then there are those who see the pain of someone and they just love it. This may have something to do with a revenge sentiment over their own unclosed wound. The wound, they think, is everyone else’s fault and they cannot forgive. This is only information, in the form of speculation. Some feelings you get when you consider “What if this happened to me?” and you will want to remedy the situation to secure yourself from the (negative) condition of it. Together, humans create one body—the planet earth and its projections. The things in the stomach affect what goes on in the head. On the web many people make money with miracle potions. Some curb the human appetite. Some say you can lose while consuming whatever you want. I heard the other girl refer to me as a skull. She was very angry and did not look or say hello. There is a prevalent competitive notion that each only has one place. That her face is only hers and that I don’t have a face or to her it is death. This she reads as me—the death of her. Obviously I am not. I write and read and then roll on. I wear an ordinary human face, some could compare me to a bird of prey because my nose is hooked and my fingers are long and I like to ride my bicycle with the wind at my back. I am not here to attack. You are also a mutant. Do you think you can keep the heavy metals outside of you? Do you think you can go to sleep here and wake up the same? The screen is framed by plastic, beneath that you use words to issue commandments or call-outs. Most people use the web to send messages to people who are already their friends. They make arrangements for later and detail what happened in the past. This information may be not true. The web cannot know intention. It records and is open to influence. People make money through advertisements, or so they think—well, selling ads, that’s quantifiable— if ads make money, that is more difficult to know unless there are special offers. The web is full of special offers and 30-day trials. If you fall for those, or I should say, if you respond to the offer what often happens is that your information is shared with other companies who will fill your inbox with offers (that which is known as spam). Because you are someone who wants to look great and there are other companies with products compatible with your stated desire. Ways for you to achieve the prevailing notion of beauty. It is my job to tell you the models are selected because they are physically improbable. They are elevated to be made desirable. Their desirability is physical because they are models. If it were easy to be like that, they would not be sought-after by manufacturers. Generally, working people need to be sturdy. Advertisers want to make money. They go with psychology and so create a sort of self-rejection by advocating forms not reflected in most people. They know that people will pay in to be of an elevated form no matter what station they are from. Everyone wants to be beautiful. Everyone wants to be the agreed-upon beautiful thing. Probably everyone is beautiful somewhere inside if not outside. You can create an excellent argument for your being and improve upon ability. That is my opinion. If you live alone, you may know how great the web can be. On it there is information and pornography. Information includes the prospects. Pornography is the biggest industry in America. It is designed to bring about a certain state of arousal, generally, couched in anger that will allow the person to fuck exactly how they want to without worrying about the one fucked. Pornography is addictive for many. Of course, sometimes people want to touch, to hear a voice to imagine a partner and what they can do together. The web has many dating services. My ex-psychiatrist advised me against trying them. She had transferred the daughter role onto me. I do appreciate the dangers of strangers. I am prepared with the information that pictures are not people in both obvious and non-obvious ways. I know at least three people who have been in love with people they met online. Each one is intelligent and down-to-earth. I’ve gleaned from their descriptions of online courting that the early questions are essential. That and no expectation and somehow you have to withhold your own personal information. That is, until you meet up in a non-threatening place. You will have to have someone know where you are, a point person. And you will need a defense; mace, for instance or a rape whistle or a dog leashed nearby or in the car. It will be important for him or her to know you have a dog. They should meet each other as soon as possible. This is the magic of the machine. The meeting and love trial and, if it works, the love made. Well, that really is amazing. Objectively amazing. And good for the machine. Good for the machine. The electric web courses heavily through me. This may be how we make history: we can put up our movies, our words, or costume dramas. We say we are so and so and people follow the saga. Do you ever get the problem which is opposite to the problem of the watcher? Have you ever only seen yourself through other people? Or thought that’s what it was but it was really your thought processes transferred through them? I should look up the word rubric again. That and lacuna and devi. In the thrift store nobody looked at me. But the woman said, “Devi (hee, hee) Devi.” A celestial being: what we all are. True she might have meant devil. I am not a devil. I love my friends most of the time. I love animals—I don’t think devils do that. My friend sends me pictures of jackrabbits and frogs. Yesterday, he said he saw buttercups, a type of flower. You go over the tracks first, on the other side of the river and there they are.
The word penis is probably the most misattributed word in English, I think. Because almost nobody has a real one. The standards are made in Japanese or German factories. Womb/vagina sets are unusual too if genuine. Standards are from China; they are recycled sheepskin wallets. I was shocked too when I heard this. I do not have an actual either but they called me a genius when I figured it out about the fetal lamb/sheep skin. What else to do with all the wallets now that there’s no money? Only barter. I do not know what the inside of this thing looks like but I think it looks like a brain made of mozzarella cheese. Standard penises are made of a certain kind of plant. An ocean weed and how it’s fitted is by body weight at birth which is why you shouldn’t smoke if you are pregnant, you will be blamed even though it’s complicated to know exact reasons as we all in the new world know better each day. They’ve made new lingo to go with the genuine penis. They say unicorn, I say wasabi. Apparently, almost everyone gets green horseradish with sushi. Wasabi takes several million years to grow, its taste is delicate. When I mentioned Japan earlier, I meant the motor city. When I say Wasabi near Japan; it’s island of slow unit dance or Remarkable Mask. When I say new world, it’s where the newly suited go. T-cell robots, we of lambs and plants and jellyfish that are in our eyes which are colored by their place in the ocean. Really, if you broke us down, you’d have quite a collection: resins from pine, precious stones, silver dust, and sea grass filaments, stalks, pig livers, skin, a milk protein. This is the equipment for the dominant standard penis holders of the unreal, and I would love to be one with a genuine but I have not the stomach to pull off the cunning necessary for the genuine purse/penis license. You barter for it; you lie. Don’t get me wrong, it must be nice to have options. But to get them dishonestly? It’s bothering. I know, I know! I have got to say goodbye to the babyhood phase. Learn to thrive! Nobody has a father or a mother. I know this means to thrive! To be one’s own lover. My sheepskin wallet is . . . What could a person say? Stuck in the past, tripped up by the concept of wallet? It’s not like anything gets taken out unless it’s rotten which it probably isn’t because I feel okay and you look alright. It’s that it wants to be ultimate although a new and genuine vagina/womb set from a biped has not been recorded in over 180 years which means billions of here/now moments. Which means forgotten a trillion times and remembered exactly one plus that. There’s not as much empty space as we thought in the old blueprints that made donuts in space—the halo, the Homeric lure. The one electron penis and the drone. I’ve been sick and found all this out because I couldn’t get out of bed and there was a diamond near my head. I was reading about moray eels, their hydraulics. How they practically fly-fish with agility. It’s the forward going. I’d like to go boldly. I’ve kept a card of energy. Wilderness saved from childhood. Of this secret, one must be silent so the sun can trust us. Kids need each other. Better they never get separated entirely. Contra this, I do want to fly fish. To cast off and plant it then go with the nylon line. Where to take off the old wallet and give it back to a lamb. I’ll be the promo homo making arrangements to go to the show where we trade our new pieces congenially and find others, depleted by scavengers, and get them up-and-running to better suns, not the promised land, exactly the opposite. Exactly the opposite of anything promised.
—For My Students Breakfast, and I’m eating plain yogurt, figs from my garden, and honey.  I’m sitting in a lawn chair on the backyard patio— life is good, and the sunlight warming my lap and the pages  of a book remind me of Tucson and the subterranean apartment I rented alone and far from home.  There was a sofa in front of my one window where at noon the sun burned briefly on the cushions as starlings  stirred in the trees with their admonishments. Stepping back there now, I remember feeling hopeless after reading  Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.” I recall how I put the book on the coffee table and closed my eyes  and saw blood glowing in my arteries. In the leaves, the starlings went on with their disconnected chatter,  and I said to myself, “I’ll never write anything like ‘And the bull alone with a high heart! At five o’clock in the afternoon.’”  For three months, I didn’t write one word but instead passed the days swimming in the public pool where,  from my half-closed eyes, I watched light ride the splashing water or resting on the surface when I floated, face down,  sinking with fear: “What do I do now?” I asked. Some nights, I filled my red truck with gas and drove west on the 19  until my headlights flooded the desert, and when the city was less than pinpoints of glitter, and when all I could hear  was the whine of silence in my ears, I parked alongside the highway, leaned against my pickup, and stared  at stars so sure of themselves as they shone that I believed they couldn’t help but give me something that would  make me sit at my desk and write. I felt directionless and wanted to walk out into the landscape,  but I feared snakes and scorpions hiding in the buckhorn and staghorn as I recalled my father’s words,  “You’ll be lost forever on the far side of the moon”— words that haunted me as I imagined slipping into lunar shadows  that no human telescope would spot as I wandered lost and ripped with nostalgia for the nights I read  in used bookstores on Campbell—a time when the future seemed so clear I smelled it in dirt that somebody  rinsed from the sidewalk as I walked home. Then, one night while sipping black coffee along the side of the 19,  I remembered lying on the living room floor as my father and I listened to Brahms’s “Lullaby,” which inspired me  to practice “Away in a Manger” on my trumpet: “It’s a lullaby. Play it like that,” my father said as my sixth grade lips  struggled to phrase notes that would please a child under the beating stars, and remembering this,  I looked up to the oblivious heavens and tied words to images—Cassiopeia, Perseus, Cygnus, Pegasus—  and let them sing clearly through my mind.
Yesterday afternoon, I hung a framed print in the living room— a task that took two head-throbbing hours. It’s a wedding portrait that we love: Frida and Diego Rivera. I wonder how two people could consistently hurt each other, but still feel love so deeply as their bones turned into dust? Before Frida died, she painted a watermelon still life; before his death, Diego did too. I want to believe that those paintings were composed during parallel moments because of their undying devotion. If I close my eyes, I can see melon wedges left like centerpieces except for the slice Diego put on the table’s corner— one piece of fruit pecked at by a dove that passed through a window. I know that I won’t be building a bookshelf anytime soon and that the chances of me constructing a roll-top desk are as slim as me building an Adirondack chair that sits plumb, but I’m good with the spackle and putty knives in my tool belt. The knots in my back might not be there if I had listened to her suggestions, and I could well have done without two hours of silence over a few holes in the wall. But somehow, life has its ways of working things out. This afternoon, I shut the blinds, turned off the TV, lights, and phone, and massaged my wife’s feet to fight off a migraine— her second one this week despite the prophylactics and pain killers that we store in the breadbox. For once, I’d like to experience what she feels: nausea, blindness, and pain that strike when the cranial vessels dilate, fill with blood, leak, and make the brain swell. Earlier, an MRI triggered the reaction as it mapped her head with electrical current, gradient magnets, and radio waves hammering her floundering eyes. For now, we have our room, the bed frame, and the mattress where she lies as I knead her toes. Come nightfall, I hope that we’ll sit in the patio and watch the breeze stirring the lemon, lime, and orange trees that I planted along the back fence. On certain nights, the moon turns our lawn into green acrylic where we sip Syrah and mint tea until all we know is the sound of our breathing among the whispering leaves.
I used to think the land had something to say to us, back when wildflowers would come right up to your hand as if they were tame. Sooner or later, I thought, the wind would begin to make sense if I listened hard and took notes religiously. That was spring. Now I’m not so sure: the cloudless sky has a flat affect and the fields plowed down after harvest seem so expressionless, keeping their own counsel. This afternoon, nut tree leaves blow across them as if autumn had written us a long letter, changed its mind, and tore it into little scraps.
Her hand is at the feedbag at her waist, sunk to the wrist in the rustling grain that nuzzles her fingertips when laced around a sifting handful. It’s like rain, like cupping water in your hand, she thinks, the cracks between the fingers like a sieve, except that less escapes you through the chinks when handling grain. She likes to feel it give beneath her hand’s slow plummet, and the smell, so rich a fragrance she has never quitegot used to it, under the seeming spell of the charm of the commonplace. The white hens bunch and strut, heads cocked, with tilted eyes, till her hand sweeps out and the small grain flies.
It is farming in an inclement sun system like a powerless nether beast fallen amidst random stellar debris fruit changes form light then quavers across distorted mural relics the farmer then living as a clarified adder his land forms compressed his wheat suspended & flaring his unstable forms carving his soil with volcanic blue seeds
For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror.  Me, I’ve been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing.  It is the non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and the mind guided by stars.  So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage, like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions, would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass, staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like having an image go out and return to itself, so that its power transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.
It is the way I breathe through chronic terrifying ferns through a black ungracious stoma it is this uranium rejoinder this impact pointing backwards & when witnessed causes observers to panic to blur & forget & to flee they can’t see my approach my wayward dorsal looming my lettering in black drizzle it is my approach my weaving my sigil as curved embankment therefore I can never name myself or plot myself according to the sparks or the splinters from the work bench dazed ruthless with salivation with my awkward insular roaming I am like a few darkened eaglets riveted against the moon then I am brought to a table by deafness feasting with herons which spins me by embranglement by in-circular abatement always seeking to have me neutered beneath my derma so as to talk to myself so as to cancel my structureless scrutiny they speak of me as lawless as despicable as a typhoon in a sea well as to morals as to fixed & accelerated combination they fix me as deserted bereft as a fragment from a starving lion’s compendium I am considered as pointless positron without image as hieroglyph as sundial as martyr being leakage from a barbarous index province
I see into them as they see out of me & dissolve the wattage to avoid future legends young pharaohs on Fillmore cracking dutches it is a lonely frontier by contrast forgotten game skulking around big hearts, small temper thine absence overflows thine presence undoes do not attempt to circle the inferno a tremor in the throne is a tremor in the throne
Besides Sundays there were Wednesday evenings and the occasional Tuesday. They called Tuesdays “visitation” and we would meet in the parking lot and load into a van. There were little cards with peoples’ names and addresses on them and we’d drive around until contact was made. I always managed to hide a few cards and claimed carsickness but it was too humid to stay in the van. Oftentimes I’d recognize someone from school and felt like apologizing but couldn’t. On Wednesdays, it was a bit easier because we arrived early so my mom could volunteer. I skated the parking curbs on the side of the building and could hear the choir practice. Other times I’d wait on the stairs at the cosmetology school next door. There was this kid who dropped out of eighth grade, and I was his lookout while he smoked. He preferred to be called Fluid and got kicked out of youth group more than once. The youth minister was large and pale and wore tight shirts that made sweat stains around his belly. One day we went on a retreat that turned out to be a rented trailer in the country. In the afternoon we watched films inside and at night played games in the dark. I wound up sleeping under a table listening to Sanitarium from Master of Puppets on repeat. The following morning my headphones were taken away so I could be open to the message. Other retreats included all night bowling and Friday night lock-up. Arrival was at ten and they would keep us awake with caffeine, sweets, and more games. I frequently got nervous being separated into groups and remember once winning a race in the foyer wearing high-heels. Later I escaped to the pews of the sanctuary. It was pitch black and I found myself standing in a drained baptismal with white robes hanging over the windows. It was strange to see where all those people went after the altar calls. Those were on Sunday mornings and the services were very long and formal. It was important to sit behind the older ladies so you could sleep behind their hair. After the closing song I’d wait in the car seemingly for hours, listening to mix tapes, mostly Suicidal Tendencies or Maiden. Then we’d drive to a Chinese restaurant or go to this pizza place that had a buffet. I’d watch the others play video games but most of the time I’d just go outside. The clouds were always cumulus and some afternoons you could hear the wind and think about what it’d be like to be somewhere else. It really didn’t matter though, maybe I could get dropped off at a friend’s, watch Kung-Fu Theater, or skate the mini-ramp in the backyard. He had twin sisters and we could do whatever we wanted.
Too many are leaving  usually they greet in sleep before dashing as in today with this gentleman  (awkward not to type his name) when yesterday in the shower  I remembered his face in Aardvark something about NWA but not about them  just a played reference There were newspaper clips  all police brutality, all framed with snow & I vaguely recalled something  about Uma Thurman & the Menils when the guard ushered me out  for touching the African sculptures I waited in the lobby for hours  like this morning reading that he overdosed. It was a hotel  & I didn’t even know him I don’t even know his work
I refuse to settle out of the true choose to communicate through pay phones and paper out here in the country of McAllister & Steiner we are the only Victorians left & I wish I wouldn’t have said that one something that one time when what I really wanted was to finish cutting the okra for the gumbo & read Baudelaire again his L’Invitation au Voyage backwards reveals all of the magic in writing that one can endure each line out loud resounds perfect all week I’ve been thinking about printing a pirated book of such, nothing grand typed on the Remington, 3x4, no address no copyright and fifty limited for whomever I run into
Sweetheart when you break thru you’ll find a poet here not quite what one would choose. I won’t promise you’ll never go hungry or that you won’t be sad on this gutted breaking globe but I can show you baby enough to love to break your heart forever
you are my bread and the hairline noise of my bones you are almost the sea you are not stone or molten sound I think you have no hands this kind of bird flies backward and this love breaks on a windowpane where no light talks this is not time for crossing tongues (the sand here never shifts) I think tomorrow turned you with his toe and you will shine and shine unspent and underground
for Alan This, then, is the gift the world has given me (you have given me) softly the snow cupped in hollows lying on the surface of the pond matching my long white candles which stand at the window which will burn at dusk while the snow fills up our valley this hollow no friend will wander down no one arriving brown from Mexico from the sunfields of California, bearing pot they are scattered now, dead or silent or blasted to madness by the howling brightness of our once common vision and this gift of yours— white silence filling the contours of my life.
I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves seated in front of a fireplace, our house made somehow more gracious, and you said “There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I brought down with me to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature, and it is truth, that we came here, I told you, from other planets where we were lords, we were sent here, for some purpose the golden mask I had seen before, that fitted so beautifully over your face, did not return nor did that face of a bull you had acquired amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains, so cold, every star in the sky was a different color the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come I could not remember (then) what our purpose was but remembered the name Mahakala, in the dawn in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that, I watched them propagated, flowing out, or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another. then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off: a madness, or a beginning?
for Jackson Allen My friend wears my scarf at his waist I give him moonstones He gives me shell & seaweeds He comes from a distant city & I meet him We will plant eggplants & celery together He weaves me cloth  Many have brought the gifts  I use for his pleasure  silk, & green hills  & heron the color of dawn My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind He backlights my dreams He has built altars beside my bed I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember his name, or my own.
Extract the juice which is itself a Light. Pulp, manna, gentle  Theriasin, ergot like mold on flame, these red leaves bursting  from mesquite by the side of dry creekbed. Extract the tar, the sticky substance  heart  of things (each plant a star, extract the juice of stars  by circular stillation smear  the inner man w/the coction till he burn  like worms of light in quicksilver not the false  puffballs of marshfire, extract the heart of the empty heart  it is full of the star soul that paces fierce in the deeps of earth  the Red Man,  healer in furs  who carries a club who carries  the pale homunculus in his belly.  For you are angel, you call the soul from plants  or pearls of ambergris out of the grudging sea.  Extract arcanum. Separate true Archeus from the false  the bitter is not less potent—nor does clarity bespeak truth.  Out of the heart of the ineffable draw the black flecks of matter  & from these the cold, blue fire.  Dry water. Immerse yourself  though it be but a drop.  This Iliaster flowers like the wind.  Out of the ash, the Eidolon of the world Crystalline.  Perfect.
It seems like you could, but  you can’t go back and pull the roots and runners and replant. It’s all too deep for that. You’ve overprized intention, have mistaken any bent you’re given for control. You thought you chose the bean and chose the soil. You even thought you abandoned one or two gardens. But those things keep growing where we put them— if we put them at all. A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall. Even the one vine that tendrils out alone in time turns on its own impulse, twisting back down its upward course a strong and then a stronger rope, the greenest saddest strongest kind of hope.
The letter said you died on your tractor crossing Shoal Creek. There were no pictures to help the memories fading like mists off the bottoms that last day on the farm when I watched you milk the cows, their sweet breath filling the dark barn as the rain that wasn’t expected sluiced through the rain gutters. I waited for you to speak the loud familiar words about the weather, the failed crops— I would have talked then, too loud, stroking the Holstein moving against her stanchion— but there was only the rain on the tin roof, and the steady swish-swish of milk into the bright bucket as I walked past you, so close we could have touched.
Fair season and we’re tent pitching on holy grounds in central Illinois, busting through pavement with jack hammers, driving home a stake that will be pulled two months from now. One of us holds, the other presses down, grease shooting between cracks in the old hammer’s worn shell to our hands and faces—one slip and we’ve lost our toes. I’m from the warehouse, not the tent crew. I haven’t ridden around in tent haulers across the nation popping tents here and there, but for this, the state fair, the warehousers are let out to feel important. Around us a silvered city has risen, white vinyl tents at full mast and clean for the first time in a year. It’s August. It’s the summer’s dogged days when humidity doesn’t break until midnight, an hour after the fair’s closed down. We’re piled on back of a flatbed with our tools, our tiredness. We’re a monster understood best by Midwesterners, devouring parking lots and fields, our teeth stained by cigarette and chew, some of us not old enough, some too old. All of us here for the overtime.
A sleeper, they used to call it— four passes with the giant round saw and you had a crosstie, 7 inches by 9 of white oak— at two hundred pounds nearly twice my weight and ready to break finger or toe— like coffin lids, those leftover slabs, their new-sawn faces turning gold and brown as my own in the hot Virginia sun, drying toward the winter and the woodsaw and on the day of that chore I turned over a good, thick one looking for the balance point and roused a three-foot copperhead, gold and brown like the wood, disdaining the shoe it muscled across, each rib distinct as a needle stitching leather, heavy on my foot as a crosstie.
How valuable it is in these short days, threading through empty maple branches, the lacy-needled sugar pines. Its glint off sheets of ice tells the story of Death’s brightness, her bitter cold. We can make do with so little, just the hint of warmth, the slanted light. The way we stand there, soaking in it, mittened fingers reaching. And how carefully we gather what we can to offer later, in darkness, one body to another.
Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said, okay, but, if you let this one go, I’m really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away. You were never sweet, my mother says.   *** In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmy’s crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard. He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent. The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there's his mother, surrounded by her children. She was tough, he says. Tough. When Chicago’s Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfather—then five—and took him to deliver the money. That's all you'll ever get, she said, and don’t touch my kids or I’ll kill you.   *** My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I don’t have to tell him that ballerina-fable. He knows I’m three and mean. He knows it for his whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her, abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he won’t tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm, far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife he’d send for her, and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She wasn’t pretty. She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine. Her sons loved her. She was mean.
Each morning, downward, Maria Stella Maris Church glows out the passenger-side window. Further, the corner where the Salvation Army stood and Hart Crane spent the night. At a shore-edge bar, where they'd finally met up, they shared bottles, walked out toward being together, a hotel, and then got rolled. Crane spent the night in the shelter. E., bruised, shipped out the next morning. The hungover poet took the train back toward Altadena. From my car, not much has changed; I see young stevedores shrug off last night's drunk. Past New Dock Street, a cigarette splits, balloons into orange under my wheels. Hot ash. My unkindness is thrown over and over. Door to door, a ride is for what I've squirreled away, not riches but a pile: the ways no thing mattered, how a kiss didn't count, how a friendship could be severed by a coyote walking between us or a dream. My windshield is a tracery. Long ago, down Gaffey, we raced in my hairdresser's sports car. She drove with her knees. Her perfume, the want, filled the heated car. We drove once to her husband's parking lot, switched cars—he'd shipped out for days—and toured in his jeep. But in this home I've chosen, there's a church on every corner and mourners in between. Boys pair up and nothing happens. Girls hold hands. We get rolled. They ship out. Liquor is drained. The train returns to Altadena. Mary, star of the sea, watches over the gem of a filthy port like the hawk, diamond-shaped ahead. She lets me pass five days a week. On my way uphill there are ovals of golden light, then no one home. Shoeless child, chimes, and stevedore off work. Burnt lawn. Hellhole. Haven. Next stop, my house.
Before boys, Susan drove me to work, for teriyaki takeout on Manchester past Lincoln Boulevard. Inseparable, we planned winter and Easter vacations. In the stairwell, I tried to talk. She cut me off. Her echo was loud when she said you can’t see yourself. We went to see Purple Rain. That fall, I had dinner with a boy. Susan was angry and told me I was wrong. I felt it was true. Was it that boy? That he had once dated someone Susan knew? We stopped talking. We were eighteen. A decade later, I turned a corner coming out of a bookstore and heard Susan laugh. I know that, I thought, remembering how she’d saved me from saying who I was. I circled back. She answered as she had before we fell out. She answered with shame. Do you remember how things ended, she asked, because of boys?
One cuts blocks From the abundant river, Hauls them house to house.   One falls, unseen, The heart Inoculated cold   Against a sky still moving. Moving even now Above the river, The canal. Willows shimmering   Across the water, Muskrats diving out of reach. The river whispers Till it freezes—   A body Twirling sluggishly Beneath the surface as again   One stack, then Spreads the straw.   Another falters, Slips, or Puts a sliver on your tongue To feel it melting there— The ice-lit   Underworld Of someone else.
Imagine cities you’ve Inhabited, streets Paved in lava stone. You never intended to pray   In the temples, had Nothing to sell. Now imagine yourself   Returning to those same cities. Hunt for people you knew, Knock on their doors. Ask yourself   Where are the vases, animals Etched in gold? Where are the wines   From distant places, Banquets ferreted From the bowels of the earth? While you were missing   Other people wore Your garments, Slept in your bed.   How frightening The man who said In his affliction   Wood has hope. Cut down It will flourish.   If the root grows old And the trunk withers In dust, at the scent of water It will germinate.
Accompanied To the Campi Flegrei By a shadow,   She listened to voices rise From the darkness, Then recede.   Instruments Sustained them. When one had finished   Others played. False proportions Sung boldly.   Rain on the roof tiles. O selve, o campi.
I left here at eight And returned at 75. In between   I largely wasted America. I married, had children, Distinguished myself in a profession   Full of fools, becoming one myself, As is the way Of this (or, I suppose, of any other) world.   I missed The Nobel but I did bring down The Pulitzer. The weather,   The politics, the stars, And my own small contribution All lined up, and I got one.   So “Pulitzer” became my middle name Before I came here, where no one cares A whit about such things.   I failed at love. That’s where I truly fucked up. I couldn’t.   The women in this town Are mostly severe, resentful —The men bitter, disappointed:   A perfect place for my purposes. I stay in a room In the house of an old woman   Who doesn’t want to have sex any more And neither do I So we do not   Trouble each other on that front, Which is good. I do like to drink.   I used to love to eat But then I don’t much Give a shit   About any of that now. The old woman sometimes says wistfully God will soon be calling both of us   Back home, but as an agnostic I don’t believe that. As an American,   I don’t buy that. I came here to retire from love, To face my failure to love   As I attempted to face everything Else before, and that Is exactly what I am doing and doing   With the exactness I used to put into My work, for which I received the Pulitzer. I hate a coward.   My son Came here the other day and asked Exactly when I might   Be coming back And I sent him off without an answer. The answer   Seems to be staying here, Staying honestly here and coming to terms With my greatest single failure.   My wife is dead. To me, It seems I am left over To eat a shit sandwich.   “Eat me,” the world says, Now that I have lost my appetite. We used to say, “Eat me” To each other in high school, Another thing from which no one Ever recovers. America likes to think   Every one can recover from every thing, But about this, Especially, America is wrong.
Home from school at six years old, first grade, And uncle there to tell me Mommy Gone, Mommy not be coming back any   Time soon, Liam, Mommy had to go to Mental hospital. Nervous breakdown. Years later Mommy, when she gets out   Of mental, often says, “If you’re A bad boy for me Liam you’re Going to send me back, back   Into mental hospital, like you did First time.” At 13 I find out Mom had been doing years   In a federal prison all that time, For stealing, so no mental hospital for Mommy. Breakdown ours alone.   I was on my own.
Soon the summer Now the pleasant purgatory Of spring is over,   Soon the choking Humidity In the city   On the fire escapes In a sleeveless T-shirt Smoking a cigar   In tune with the tremor Of the mindless yellow Commercial traffic   Moving in the city, Where no one really Buys a car,   American Or otherwise, Where we will,   As Rilke said we would Where we will Wake, read, write   Long letters And in the avenues Wander restlessly   To and fro On foot in The humidity,   Where soon I’ll shower, dress, Take the dog out for a piss, And mail this.
We must stop bragging. There are limits For us to the cold and the twelfth night   Marks them all. Just off the coast of Maine The lobster boats pass, dragging their nets.   Capsize once in a while, in water Like that you die, that’s all, that water   Isn’t even frozen. Not even Frozen, and that’s as cold as it gets.   The hearts of birds beat voraciously So they keep warm, so if you put out   A feeder, keep it full of the seeds Their hearts feed on, then it is only   When their food runs out that you find them Inexpressibly taut in hollows,   And that’s as cold as it ever gets.
The sudden thuck of landing The arrow made in the mark Of the center lifted and   Loosened his skin. And so he Stood, hearing it like many Thrusting breaths driven to ground.   He abandoned the long light Flight of arrows and the slow Parabolas bows dream of   For the swifter song beyond Flesh. Song of moments. The earth Turned its molten balance.   He stood hearing it again: The precise shudder the arrow Sought and returned to, flaming.
To pass over in silence Is to acknowledge logic, The necessity of form,   The stunning curve of language, The curious way it seems To turn out that “love” means “need”   Even in a lush garden. To pass over the Red Sea Or your bounty—so long as   True silence and not some tense Paralysis of the false Is achieved—then Passover   Is always a charity, The painted fish in the blue Water turns to their own colors.   To pass over in silence Is to acknowledge you if This chatter dissolve as it   Will in the marvelous sky.
for Stanley Cavell I   Must we mean what we say? Stick to it, Be bound to, chained up beside the house,   Teased by boys on bicycles, fireflies, The seasons as they pass out of reach?   We could try meaning nothing, a way Favored in the brightest corridors   By those who pass from life to death through Halls of learning and replace marriage   With justice. To mean nothing is to Have nothing at heart, to be chained up   To the right of and a bit behind The body: without marriage, justice   Prevails as the clenched hand of culture On the most brutal bridle prevails   Against the motion beneath that wants To claim the hand of culture. Against   The Horse in the horse, the Rider in The rider, the heart beneath the tongue.     II   In the anarchies of the sensuous Hands the order of love is leaping.   In a far corner of the landscape A lover’s hands leap in the skin’s light,   And heroes’ hands lap like tongues on necks Curved with significance. The horses   Stamp and whinny, hint of caprioles As urgently as our mute souls   And it is impossible to mean Anything but motion. A dispatch   From the graceful landscape will arrive: “He must be told.” Lovers will obey   Thus leaving terror and time alone To fend for themselves. I will obey,   Am obeying now, making poems From chains, leaving the season alone—  You must be told (already your horse Leaps beneath you!) what you meant to say.
1.  A canvas with less turpentine, more hard edges, less bleeding, that was good for beauty, Frankenthaler in Art News   in the dining car crammed with parkas and laptops micro-waved cellophane, plastic plates and canvas bags,    and the valley under fog as the cows disappeared and when the green came back into view I could see   the SUVs floating on the Thruway, the cows oblivious to the revved engines of trucks. The river glistened   all the way to Albany, and I could see flags on Baptist churches and resurrection trailers, “God Bless America” on pick-ups—   “United We Stand” laminated to billboards as the fog settled then lifted, and when I woke   a flag the size of a football field hung from the gray tower of the GW, where the tractor-trailers jammed beneath its hem   as something sifted down on the silver-plated Hudson.  And then the lights went out.      2.   The faces on 7th Avenue blurred in the chaos of vendors and liberty scarves, freedom ties, glowing plastic torches, dollars and polyester—   and inside Macy’s I was hit by cool air as “Stars and Stripes Forever” floated down from women's fashions into the quiet aisles of Aramis and silk scarves.   I wanted to buy the Frankenthaler, a modest, early print, minimal, monochromatic; surface and perspective in dialogue; on 24th off 10th—the gallery still smelled like wood and plaster—   but I didn't stop, and when the train reached the Stock Exchange the Yom Kippur streets were quiet, and the bronze statue of Washington was camouflaged by national guard. I was walking my old mail route now   like a drunk knocking into people, almost hit by a cab until the roped-off streets cut me at the arm. At Broadway and Liberty the fences wound around the bursts of dust rising   over the cranes and bulldozers, over the punched-out windows— I stared through a piece of rusted grid that stood like a gate to the crystal river. I was sweating in my sweatshirt now, the hood filling with soot,    as I watched with others drinking Cokes and eating their pizza of disbelief. Zero began with the Sumerians who made circles with hollow reeds in wet clay and baked them for posterity.   At Broadway and Liberty. At 20 floors charred and standing. At miasma people weeping. Anna's Nail Salon, Daikichi Sushi,  the vacant shops, stripped clean in the graffiti of dust-coated windows.   Something blasted from a boom box in a music store, something, in the ineffable clips of light, disappeared over the river.
When I left Eli Zabar the cut-out star on the window was whirling in the animation of the rich and hungry hunched over tables for a $30 sandwich and a Diet Coke.   It was raining and the blurred glass of the galleries was the gold leaf of the Carrig Rhone frames— Childe Hassam’s dabs of Connecticut trees   the diaphanous blue on the fleshy rocks, the melting opal of the shoals. Inside the Whitney the rain trailed down my face;   and I found myself in a quiet corner staring at the pink face of Marilyn Monroe. I could still smell the smoldering high-tech plastic   as it burned the air. In the whiteness of her teeth, in the almost aahh of her mouth and the half-drugged eyes under the lids of teal shadow, the air kept singeing my nose.   Against the pale walls Marilyn’s face dissolved like a stretched mesh and litho ink where plain form is a place of no desire   like the empty mirror of the Hudson at dawn. In the fissures of her make-up, the planes of color led back and back behind her teeth longing—   to the deception by the Falls on her honeymoon (with Joseph Cotton in Niagara)—where we found her clothed and alarmed, and later desperate for the affirmation,   of a President’s limp dick and the crisp sheets the same color of these walls—as my t shirt dries to my skin and the faintest scent of ground zero   sifts down on the walls whiter than the wingtip vortices of melting in the morning light.
In the hermetic almost dark under the fluorescent dizz   I found her broken nerves, smoke coming off the dashes, the caps like jolts to the neck,   the pried-open spaces between vowels where the teeth bit off twine and the tongue was raw then cool with ice.   The air of the stockroom after lunch was the marbleized silence of the small blank pages she stitched into privacy.   Air of paper and faint glue bond, carbon, graph, yellow pads,   in the stockroom I could read alone— the confetti of money dissolved on the blank wall.   After work, I slid the numbered poems on blue mimeo into my playbook, and felt the open field   the zig-zagging past cornerbacks, the white lines skewed to heaven.   Excuse my mood—unbridled, chemical, her scrawled messages smooth to the mind,   excuse my absence, again and yes, then, too—   the cold stone of the Palisades was there after we split—   alone naked in the Hudson, the water greasing me in the tepid, chemical mix,   before I returned to the cement of 9W in my father’s Skylark   the night black and soundless within.
Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing. In Leland’s room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor. The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story? Sam looked at the clock twice. The day was dropping softly away while Sam’s sneakers made the wood stairs creak. The wood was sure it was wood. Alice got home from the store. The bags had to be unloaded as the day went and went. Then the sundown kitchen grew quiet. Sam crossed his legs one way, then the other way. He had chosen purple corduroys. They were pants of the day; one possibility. On the tilted table sat the damaged typewriter. What about Thomas Merton? Did he know the central story? Someone was quietly reading by the fireplace but not Sam. Next day there was badminton with the troubled carpenter and the story of an awful egg salad, causing laughter; but Sam had forgotten some thing. Then Alice brought in the brownies and minor pleasure colored the house   and there went the evening. J.J. came downstairs all gleamy from her bath. She had three reasons to get downtown fast. Sam picked up a novel by Sukenick. The clue must be nearby. Between Sam and the page swarmed the gnats of possibility. Leland stowed his bicycle in the basement and came upstairs with a point about capitalism. Look at the time said someone. Where was J.J. now? Where was the story? Under the red chair lay the newspaper whose relevance was all mystery or not mystery enough. Then Alice went out to see a movie. Some man meets some woman with big eyes on a jet and changes his whole life for her, disastrously but thrillingly. Alice told about it briefly, and went to make tea. Sam paused on the hard wooden stairs. J.J. was gone. She was gone. Leland was eating yogurt at midnight. The whole brown house was floating, gliding very smoothly for some reason with Sam not clear whether the gliding was a story and if so was it central and was it his?
For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house after my mother’s death; she died the year before; she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments of thinking she must have just stepped outside for a minute to weed the garden or to walk just a little way along Prospect Street, for a few minutes only and now almost now she’d be coming back, we’d hear the screen door, Bev would be back and saying something casual about—   about the cats, Daphne and Chloe, or about Mrs. Yamokofsky next door or about the pear tree, “or a colored stone she found.” That was the phrase that ended my poem in 1976: “or a colored stone she found.” The phrase rang slightly false but I wanted it—the “ound” and “one” sounds sounded profound and in 1976 “stone” was still a word guaranteed poetic. But did my mother ever pick up colorful stones? Wasn’t that more something I did fifteen years earlier? In the poem I was trying to turn my ironic mother into an ideal figure certified sweet like a child.   But what could I make her say? Something very sly and wry? The poetry would be in her voice, the way of her voice being hers—voice of my mother—whether the words were about the cats or Mrs. Yamokofsky or potatoes to peel for mashing. Not your mother. My mother. Poetry of her saying in her Bev way “those potatoes” or “Mrs. Yamokovsky” or “Daphne’s gone down by the Black River but if we feed Chloe I’m sure she’ll be back.” And my father and Kimbo and me just going “Yeah” or “In a minute” because this was all just life.
The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts is understandable. The divorced father does not cook confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner. The entire weekend is supposed to be fun. Kids love pizza. For some reason involving soft warmth and malleability   kids approve of melted cheese on pizza years before they will tolerate cheese in other situations. So the divorced father takes the kid and the kid's friend out for pizza. The kids eat much faster than the dad. Before the dad has finished his second slice,   the kids are playing a video game or being Ace Ventura or blowing spitballs through straws, making this hail that can't quite be cleaned up. There are four slices left and the divorced father doesn't want them wasted, there has been enough waste already; he sits there   in his windbreaker finishing the pizza. It's good except the crust is actually not so great— after the second slice the crust is basically a chore— so you leave it. You move on to the next loaded slice. Finally there you are amid rims of crust.   All this is understandable. There's no dark conspiracy. Meanwhile the kids are having a pretty good time which is the whole point. So the entire evening makes clear sense. Now the divorced father gathers the sauce-stained napkins for the trash and dumps them   and dumps the rims of crust which are not corpses on a battlefield. Understandability fills the pizza shop so thoroughly there's no room for anything else. Now he's at the door summoning the kids and they follow, of course they do, he's a dad.
It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter, something strangely like what your daughter or sister said once if you could remember. The child's voice flies across a small parking lot where, in one of the cars, a man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them. The child's voice probably hurts them momentarily with a sense of beauty apparently very possible yet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is implied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said. And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field after a game—the last three or four players walk slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked, one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls— the players seem to have known what it was all for yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there at the field's far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch the eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows in each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall. Hours later the field is dark   and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed. In the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much we must cherish life; the world will not do it for us. This idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy. Remember when you got the news of the accident— or the illness—in the life of someone more laced into your life than you might have thought; the cool flash of what serious is. Well, the missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like an imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman! Yet not like just another Halliday thing either. Instead it would feel like a new dimension of the world, the real world we imagine. With lightness! With weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio, that certain song you almost forgot to love.
Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car; your office door closes behind you and at that moment you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall from the hall’s point of view. If the halls don’t know you, the halls and the rooms of the buildings where you worked for seven years— if the halls don’t know you,  and they don’t— some new woman or two new men come clattering down these halls in the month after your departure, indeed just two days after you left forever they come clattering with ideas about the relation between mind and body or will and fate filled with hormones of being the chosen workers here and they feel as if the halls and rooms begin to recognize them, accept them, as if there is a belonging in the world—   but these new workers are wrong, the halls don’t know who is working under the unobtrusive fluorescent panels:   this is appalling and for a minute you are appalled though your being so now is not an event in the life of your new rented house or even your new condominium . . . So if they don’t, if they don’t know you, the halls, the walls, the fixtures, then what? Then there is for you no home in that rock, no home in the mere rock of where you work, where you briskly walk, not even in the bed where your body sleeps alone or not—   so if there is to be a place for you, for you it must not be located in plaster and tile and space, it will have to be in that other house, the one whose door you felt opening just last night when you dialed from memory and your friend picked up the phone.
I find I am descending in a propeller plane upon Pasco in the state of Washington. I accept this; I have reasons for participating in the experiential sequence that has brought me here. Down below the land is printed with huge circles, doubtless an irrigation system, doubtless it makes sense. There are people who understand it living with dignity in square houses and the result possibly is one billion radishes. Now some so-called time has passed. This nation is a huge nation in which the infinity of for example Washington State is just one segment of an even less thinkable hugeness and yet zim zim zim zim United Airlines has me here in my Eastern metropolis with its ten thousand makers of third-rate pizza uncannily far from the possible radishes of Washington State. The taxi driver experiments with narrow streets to shorten our detour caused by sports fans and he says the Eagles will out-tough the Steelers. I defer to his judgment, I am conserving my powers. After “a while” I have this unsettlingly smooth tuna salad with a pale pickle in a drugstore designed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, reading a few poems by David Rivard. I have thoughts. I have my Uncle Ralph’s jacket soft and droopy giving me a Sense of the Past. The rain out there on the roofs of retail outlets is saying No Guarantee and in a way I am nowhere, in another way maybe definitely not. In a wide wet parking lot I turn back toward the store to explain to the cashier that she charged me for six cans of seltzer when in fact I only had one from a six-pack but the idea of justice seems so fatiguing I would rather read a surprisingly serious detective novel so I vibrate with indecision in the parking lot till all the car windows rattle imperceptibly. Then an alleged interval ostensibly intervenes, at the mall a woman at a piano has played 1800 songs from memory according to the radio personality who stands with a mike explaining her bid for the Guinness Book of Records. I am walking away at an unplanned angle singing “Tiny Montgomery” which I bet she wouldn’t have been ready to play. I have this inner life, I think of my father lonely in Vermont, I think of myself lonely in Syracuse and my old poem about a detective who can’t solve his biggest case and as a result I have feelings—but my teacher said the future of American poetry can’t be merely the notation of sensibility. When he said that I felt a chilly fear at the edge of consc-consc-consc-consciousness like an ice cube in the corner of my stomach. That’s how I felt. So then, so then consequently I thought “I must gather up some serious ideas” but then Ashberry phoned and left a message after the beep. “Don’t be a sucker, ideas are where it isn’t.” This made my throat get sort of dry so I drank a Classic Coke and then another Classic Coke two hours later as time so-to-say passed. What was always there? Texture, that’s what, how it was/is, the how of how; when I pick up my color prints at the camera shop the disappointment I always feel is actually a blessing is it not? I can say “I’ll go along with this charade until I can think my way out” even though I’ll never think my way out. I’ve come this far; that day in 1971 I hitchhiked all the way to Montpelier didn’t I? And here I am. Suddenly I have a son who focuses with tremendous insistence upon dogs, balloons, air conditioners, hats, clocks, and noses. To him I convey that the world is okay: life is good: we accept it. Your dad is a little mixed up but your shoes got tied, right? As Barbara Cohen in high school said about politics it’s interesting, giving the word four earnest syllables, in-ter-est-ing.
En Cuba tuve—   I’m tired of hearing your complaints. All that whining about el exilio, the tragedy of loss,  In Cuba I had—   the catalogue of things, the status, the riches, the opulence of it all.  I had a mate. We were a pair. Our mistress was young. We were young. We would dangle on her ear   Concentrate on what you have. Forget the past.  and go out on the town. Mojitos at La Floridita, dancing at the Tropicana and later   No, don’t tell me about later.  in the jewel case, an aqua Tiffany box with white satin interior, we   Tiffany’s? From New York? I didn’t know you—  would lie together in the pillowy luxury, my ruby top layer and his aligned, our bases   Please you needn’t—  touching, my diamond waist and his forming a continuous line. Sometimes we would switch backs, I’d push   I understand that in communities of exile the population  my piercing needle through his back, his through mine. That’s   tends to lose ground politically as assimilation takes place, that  how I liked it best, a little harsh, but sweet. Tu y yo, you and I, is what she called us because our very   longing is a constitutive ingredient of not only the condition of exile but—  body parts were paired, he and I, forming a single unit, an I and a thou. Apart   Surely you have adjusted. Look, you’re mounted on a ring, you are independent, and prized. Very attractive for your age, I might add.  we are nothing. Longing doesn’t quite—   One adapts?  As to an amputation.   And La Revolución?  Don’t make me vomit.
It was a beach like all beaches, only perhaps more beautiful. And the sand was pink not red.   We would arrive in caravans, hampers overflowing with food and drink like Aziz and his party on the way to Malabar.   The colonials and their servants away on an outing. We would stop under thatch umbrellas, towels and tablecloths spread out against the sea.   My mother in her skirted swim suit surrounded by fathers of other children, her olive skin lit through her straw hat.   They would laugh and drink beer and leer while the children did the usual beach things,   boring futile tunnels to China, running at waves and then away, daring each other to be swallowed.   I would go out by the forbidden rocks and pick off oysters, then give them to the men to pry open, cover with lime juice and suck dry.   Once, I saw my mother sucking an oyster out of another daddy’s hand. Her dappled face bobbed and smiled and her tongue   searched the shell for pearls.
At supper he whispers something in your ear, the Judas boy, who wants you.   We go to the garden where it’s cool and wait.   From my place against the tree I see you through the window,   watch as you walk from door to desk, reach into your pocket,   pull out your wallet, empty it and leave it by the lamp, pick up a pen, lean over to write, then don’t,   take something heavy from the drawer, put it back then sweep the money into a paper bag.   You walk from desk to door and out, your hand reaching back to put out the light.   On the security film you leave the building alone, holding the heavy bag.   Off camera you walk towards the Charles, leave your saddle shoes under the pedestrian bridge.   We wait in the garden. And wait.   We don’t know yet whom you meet or why. We don’t know yet that the river has claimed you.
To celebrate his final Pride, in June, my friend, lymphatic, thin, and in distress, managed to dress in drag. He shot the moon: outstretched, he’d used his dying to think—obsess—   about the Prada pumps, their skin a snake; the heavy pantyhose, two pair; the moot but lacy underthings; the makeup, cake, to overlay his pain. I called him beaut-  i-ful; he said he felt like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (our campy interplay); I countered that he looked more like a hobo- sexual in heels. We howled. That day,   we never left his Castro flat. His rhinestone glittered, and everywhere, the smell of cologne.
This is what he dreams of: a map of burned land, a mound of dirt in the early century’s winter.   A map of burned land? A country is razed in the early century’s winter. And God descends.   A country is raised because of industry. And God descends, messengers rush inside   because of industry, in spite of diplomats. Messengers rush inside to haunt the darkened aisles.   In spite of diplomats, the witnesses know well to haunt the darkened aisles, experimentally—   the witnesses know well that ushers dressed in black experimentally lurk by the cushioned seats.   That ushers dress in black should tell you something: lurking by the cushioned seats, the saved and the terrible.   I should tell you something: this is what he dreams of, the saved and the terrible— a mound of dirt.
This may sound queer, but in 1985 I held the delicate hands of Dan White: I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk was made monument—no, myth—by the years since he was shot.   I remember when Harvey was shot: twenty, and I knew I was queer. Those were the years, Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk— elected on the same day as Dan White.   I often wonder about Supervisor White, who fatally shot Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk, who was one of us, a Castro queer. May 21, 1979: a jury hands down the sentence, seven years—   in truth, five years— for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White, for the blood on his hands; when he confessed that he had shot the mayor and the queer, a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk?   Why cry over spilled milk, some wondered, semi-privately, for years— it meant “one less queer.” The jurors turned to White. If just the mayor had been shot, Dan might have had trouble on his hands—   but the twelve who held his life in their hands maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk; maybe, the second murder offered him a shot at serving only a few years. In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White. And he was made presentable by a queer.
There's a certain sadness to this body of water adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds, handful of ducks, the water color   manmade. A still life. And still life's a cold exercise in looking back, back to Florida, craning my neck   like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin. As for the scrub oaks, the hot wind in the leaves was language,   Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic— an obsession: I wanted to live in it. (One professor in exile did,   covered himself in the stuff as a joke— then spent a week removing mites.) That's enough. The fields of rushes lay filled   with water, and I said farewell, my high ship an old, red Volvo DL, gone to another coast, another peninsula,   one without sleep or amphibious music. Tonight, in flight from San Francisco— because everything is truer at a remove—   I watch the man I love watch the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento, lit city of legislation and flat land.   I think of Florida, how flat. I think of forgetting Florida. And then the landscape grows black.
in memory, 1929-2004 We choose a cheap hotel because they’re serving drinks. We drink. I hear him tell a tale or two: he thinks   that so-and-so’s a sleaze; and then there was the time that Milosz phoned, oh please. Another gin with lime?   I want to say that once, I saw him dressed in leather, leaning on a fence inside a bar. Rather,   walking to the N, I gush about his books; he gives his change to men who’ve lost their homes and looks:   how like him, I’ve been told. Our day together done, I hug him in the cold. And then the train is gone.
It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down.   It broke like a hen’s egg on the sidewalk.   The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my   oblivious siblings.  A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind.   A gush of yolk and then darker.   Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala—vinyl seats, the rear- view,   headrests and you, your hand through your hair.  An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss.   Because the earth’s core was cooling, all animals felt the urge to wander.   Wash down this whisper of you, the terrible must.   Maybe the core wasn’t cooling, but I felt a coolness in my mother.   That girl was shining me on.   In blue crayon, the bug-bitten siblings printed lyrics on the walls of my room.   I wrote the word LAVA on my jeans.  It must be the Night Fever, I sang with the 8-track.   But the moon had not broken on the sidewalk, the moon   was hot, bright as a teakettle whistling outside my door,  tied up in sorrow, lost in my song, if you don’t come back . . .  and that serious night cooled, settling like sugar on our lawn.   I wrote the word SUGAR on my palms.  I shall say what inordinate love is.   The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.
The plane is packed and over sweaty heads,  rumpled hair, the movie glows in the transatlantic nighttime  murmur of priests and nuns and Riverdancers returning   home—a baby is cooed by an older mother, a boy feels  for his seat in the dark. I’ve read my books  already, 2 days traveling, the difficulties   technical. I hate that money, says the priest beside me,  and he orders another scotch, his third.  The Feast of the Epiphany tomorrow, he studies religious    journals for a message, writes in a notebook  impossibly small. We are having problems with sound, the flight attendant announces,  it is not your headset, and so the oceans swell in silence,  bright blue tumbles across the screen mutely, foam  collapsing over a tiny nimble figure   but she darts through to a green glow,  sunshine through a veil of wave, her surfboard tense between  her feet and the world’s largest ocean. Her ride   is long, impossibly long—her hips stay low, a friend  drops onto her wave and, together, they glide towards the shore.  No music. Just water and that blue. I check the SkyMall catalogue   for something I might need and didn’t know. There are  reasons I am flying over the ocean, reasons I  I wish I were sure of. Someday I might say, yes, I chose  him, and it wasn’t wise. Or maybe we’ll be old and  surrounded by our own. The screen flashes;  the surf is wild, but the bright sky makes me whisper,  Hawaii, where nothing could be that beautiful  but is. The waves are bigger and she sets out, flowered  bikini, hair pulled back in a serious bun.   But too soon she’s underwater, arms above her head,  spinning down into a champagne sea.  The priest asks would I like some English chocolate. I say no  at first then say yes. I say,  how many Euros for the scotch? The baby Jesus  is about to be adored by black men, foreign kings, in   fact, tomorrow. They’re stumbling, the Magi,  12 days across an ocean and through the desert.  It’s hot so they must travel at night—   who wouldn’t? And there was that star, sudden and perhaps a sign. We’ve already tried to get there once,  I want to say to the kings. It’s cool in this 747,   which later the pilot will land with only one engine.  A problem with  compressors. But what a sweet,   sweet ocean, and those few younger girls  who try to ride it. And what a night,  warmed by the sun-shocked smell   of saddle and sweat, the strong breath of camels.  What carved, fragrant trunkfuls  born across deserts and ready to be opened before an infant god.
Your soul is like a landscape fantasy, Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise, Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.   Singing in minor mode of life’s largesse And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite Reluctant to believe their happiness, And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,   The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming, Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees, And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming— Slender jet-fountains—sob their ecstasies.
Their long skirts and high heels battled away: Depending on the ground’s and breezes’ whim, At times some stocking shone, low on the limb— Too soon concealed!—tickling our naïveté.   At times, as well, an envious bug would bite Our lovelies’ necks beneath the boughs, and we Would glimpse a flash—white flash, ah! ecstasy!— And glut our mad young eyes on sheer delight.   Evening would fall, the autumn day would draw To its uncertain close: our belles would cling Dreamingly to us, cooing, whispering Lies that still set our souls trembling with awe.
Gently, let us steep our love In the silence deep, as thus, Branches arching high above Twine their shadows over us.   Let us blend our souls as one, Hearts’ and senses’ ecstasies, Evergreen, in unison With the pines’ vague lethargies.   Dim your eyes and, heart at rest, Freed from all futile endeavor, Arms crossed on your slumbering breast, Banish vain desire forever.   Let us yield then, you and I, To the waftings, calm and sweet, As their breeze-blown lullaby Sways the gold grass at your feet.   And, when night begins to fall From the black oaks, darkening, In the nightingale’s soft call Our despair will, solemn, sing.
for Charles Morice Music first and foremost! In your verse, Choose those meters odd of syllable, Supple in the air, vague, flexible, Free of pounding beat, heavy or terse.   Choose the words you use—now right, now wrong— With abandon: when the poet’s vision Couples the Precise with Imprecision, Best the giddy shadows of his song:   Eyes veiled, hidden, dark with mystery, Sunshine trembling in the noonday glare, Starlight, in the tepid autumn air, Shimmering in night-blue filigree!   For Nuance, not Color absolute, Is your goal; subtle and shaded hue! Nuance! It alone is what lets you Marry dream to dream, and horn to flute!   Shun all cruel and ruthless Railleries; Hurtful Quip, lewd Laughter, that appall Heaven, Azure-eyed, to tears; and all Garlic-stench scullery recipes!   Take vain Eloquence and wring its neck! Best you keep your Rhyme sober and sound, Lest it wander, reinless and unbound— How far? Who can say?—if not in check!   Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile? What deaf child, what Black of little wit Forged with worthless bauble, fashioned it False and hollow-sounding to the file?   Music first and foremost, and forever! Let your verse be what goes soaring, sighing, Set free, fleeing from the soul gone flying Off to other skies and loves, wherever.   Let your verse be aimless chance, delighting In good-omened fortune, sprinkled over Dawn’s wind, bristling scents of mint, thyme, clover . . . All the rest is nothing more than writing.
Beside a humble stone, a tree Floats in the cemetery’s air, Not planted in memoriam there, But growing wild, uncultured, free.   A bird comes perching there to sing, Winter and summer, proffering Its faithful song—sad, bittersweet. That tree, that bird are you and I:   You, memory; absence, me, that tide And time record. Ah, by your side To live again, undying! Aye,   To live again! But ma petite, Now nothingness, cold, owns my flesh. . . Will your love keep my memory fresh?
As I was going down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.   I was indifferent to all crews, The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons When with my haulers this uproar stopped The Rivers let me go where I wanted.   Into the furious lashing of the tides More heedless than children's brains the other winter I ran! And loosened Peninsulas Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub   The storm blessed my sea vigils Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves That are called eternal rollers of victims, Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses!   Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children The green water penetrated my hull of fir And washed me of spots of blue wine And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook   And from then on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent, Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;   Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres, The bitter redness of love ferments!   I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts And the surf and the currents; I know the evening, And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!   I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors, Lighting up, with long violet clots, Resembling actors of very ancient dramas, The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!   I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea, The circulation of unknown saps, And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!   I followed during pregnant months the swell, Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs, Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys Could constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans!   I struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas Mingling with flowers panthers' eyes and human Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins Under the horizon of the seas to greenish herds!   I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes! Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm, And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!   Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers! Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!   I should have liked to show children those sunfish Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish. —Foam of flowers rocked my drifting And ineffable winds winged me at times.   At times a martyr weary of poles and zones, The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll, Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers And I remained, like a woman on her knees...   Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes Drowned men sank backward to sleep!   Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves, Thrown by the storm into the birdless air I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats;   Free, smoking, topped with violet fog, I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall, Bearing, delicious jam for good poets Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,   Who ran, spotted with small electric moons, A wild plank, escorted by black seahorses, When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels The ultramarine skies with burning funnels;   I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of the blue immobility I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!   I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer: —Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself, Million golden birds, o future Vigor? –   But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter. Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!   If I want a water of Europe, it is the black Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight A squatting child full of sadness releases A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.   No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves, Follow in the wake of the cotton boats, Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames, Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.
I  Oh! the huge avenues of the holy land, the terraces of the temple! What has happened to the brahmin who taught me the Proverbs? From then and from there I can still see even the old women! I remember silvery hours and sun near rivers, the hand of the country on my shoulder, and our caresses as we stood in the fiery fields. —A flight of red pigeons thunders around my thoughts—In exile here I had a stage on which to perform the dramatic masterpieces of all literatures. I might tell you about unheard-of wealth. I follow the story of the treasures you found. I see the next chapter! My wisdom is as neglected as chaos is. What is my void, compared with the stupefaction awaiting you?   II  I am a far more deserving inventor than all those who went before me; a musician, in fact, who found something resembling the key of love. At present, a noble from a meager countryside with a dark sky I try to feel emotion over the memory of mendicant childhood, over my apprenticeship when I arrived wearing wooden shoes, polemics, five or six widowings, and a few wild escapades when my strong head kept me from rising to the same pitch as my comrades. I don’t miss what I once possessed of divine happiness: the calm of this despondent countryside gives a new vigor to my terrible scepticism. But since this scepticism can no longer be put into effect, and since I am now given over to a new worry—I expect to become a very wicked fool.   III  In an attic where at the age of twelve I was locked up, I knew the world and illustrated the human comedy. In a wine cellar I learned history. At some night celebration, in a northern city, I met all the wives of former painters. In an old back street in Paris I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent palace, surrounded by all the Orient, I finished my long work and spent my celebrated retirement. I have invigorated my blood. I am released from my duty. I must not even think of that any longer. I am really from beyond the tomb, and without work.
When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes—to a beach for two faithful children—to a musical house for our clear understanding—then I shall find you.  When there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury, then I am at your feet.  When I have realized all your memories, —when I am the girl who can tie your hands,—then I will stifle you.      When we are very strong, who draws back? or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us.  Dress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw Love out of the window.      —Comrade of mine, beggar girl, monstrous child! How little you care about the wretched women, and the machinations and my embarrassment. Join us with your impossible voice, oh your voice! the one flatterer of this base despair.    * * *     A dark morning in July. The taste of ashes in the air, the smell of wood sweating in the hearth, steeped flowers, the devastation of paths, drizzle over the canals in the fields, why not already playthings and incense?   * * *    I stretched out ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.   * * *    The high pond is constantly streaming. What witch will rise up against the white sunset? What purple flowers are going to descend?    * * *   While public funds disappear in brotherly celebrations, a bell of pink are rings in the clouds. * * *    Arousing a pleasant taste of Chinese ink, a black powder gently rains on my night, —I lower the jets of the chandelier, throw myself on the bed, and turning toward thedark, I see you, O my daughters and queens!   * * *
Not long ago, or maybe I dreamt it Or made it up, or have suddenly lost Track of its train in the hocus pocus Of the dissolving days; no, if I bend The turn around the corner, come at it From all three sides at once, or bounce the ball Against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune Tellers—well, you can see for yourselves there’s Nothing up my sleeves, or notice even Rocks occasionally break if enough Pressure is applied. As far as you go In one direction, all the further you’ll Have to go on before the way back has Become totally indivisible.
But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence. . . . —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia    I called for armour, rose, and did not reel. But when I thought . . .  I could feel My wound open wide. —Thom Gunn, “The Wound”      THE STATES   For he can creep.   Whose doctor said his bipolar was pre-existing. Smacked in the head by a steel cargo door, hinges tied with a hamburger bag. The day he blew up: a sucking silence, mouth of tar,  story told over and over.   bump and rattle, caissons rolling. The blacked-out school bus window is scratched to read GHOST RECON. Street signs flash by, “This here is Georgia. Now I see New Hampshire,  and here’s Colorado.” What country is this city?   Gorked on pain-relief cocktails, Iraq to Landstuhl Med to Andrews Air Force, wheelchair bus to Walter Reed. Wounded when burning poppies, now afloat on morphine. “As a state,” he once emailed,  “Afghanistan is next to Mars.”   The navigator slides along a wall: “Sir, can you show me north?” Where the gazebo is a tank. Where the manhole covers a bomb. Who apologize for shaving cuts. Skull plate,  40-lb. gain from meds, big ox baby.   “Fall in,” the heart-attack sergeant tells the legless man. “At ease,” he tells the psychotics. They limp by drug dealers for their scoop of Baskin-Robbins. Are told,  “Suck it up, get used to the outside world.”   Who are saved, but die in dreams, salute with a mechanical arm.     CONSTITUTION AVE, CAPITALSAURUS DAY   Beneath the marble, beneath the paper laws; the paved boglands and legs-up taverns, the slave-built steps of the Capitol. Winter 1898, a sewer-man digs up a dinosaur spine,  a nomen nudum, naked & unnamed fossil   tombed later at the Smithsonian near Jefferson’s Mammoth tooth that rattled his pocket, cherished knuckle-bone and proof against the French naturalist  who with powdered hands   wrote that New World dampness and cold had stunted flora, animals, and Man: the American Degeneracy.  Jefferson ordered Lewis & Clark to find  a living Mammoth,   the “animal de l’Ohio” grazing somewhere west of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and— lest a species wither, or Nation grow small—  brought Mammoth bones to Monticello.   “WHEREAS, the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur, which may be an ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex, were found at First and ‘F’ Streets, SE,   NOW, THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, do hereby proclaim January 28, 2001, as ‘CAPITALSAURUS DAY.’”   Anthony A. Williams     DISCOVERY IN SIBERIA   Reindeer of the herdsman Jarkov nuzzle a tusk frozen 20,000 years. Soon, French naturalists arrive. Radar shows the Holy Grail of Mammoth hunters,  a frigid bulk, twice an elephant’s size—   Timber saws cut the block. Hoisted by military helicopter to Stalin’s gulag caves, frozen labs for scientist-prisoners, now re-opened. Waving hair-dryers  to sublimate the ice, so that Discovery   can film them planting clone eggs inside an elephant, hatching a Mammoth American defender to split the ramparts, show scheduled for release in 2001  —the year, in the sci-fi film,   the monkeys learn to talk; when Mayor Williams greets  the Capitalsaurus and the new President Bush; when Mohammed Atta decides he  cannot date a waitress.     SECURITAS   Weary headlands roll through zones of night, red lights flash the muted streets, crotch-of-moss draining a blue spark dawn— We sleep, staring. Tree-shapes and stars prod us,  the belt of Orion is a martyr’s bomb.   And the king, our godsbody, lies abed groaning, chill spirit belaboring the flesh— His spit and sperm are tallied; his temperature, a weather report told by doctors. Until  lady Securitas peers from a cloud—   her bloodlined hands, the blank, bureaucratic face! We pray with our bodies: cold sweat, a hymn of twitches, heart racing, shrieking dreams . . . But fragrant Securitas has only  come for him—   To compass him about. Lifting out her breast. Stoppers his mouth with a thick nipple. Squeezing till the ichor throbs from his eyes,  milk to make us thirsty—     IRAQ & TEXAS: DJINN ROADS  Helicopters park at Forward Base EXXON; only the sand is flying today, and it breaks the speed limits, 50 miles an hour. Visibility zero; the air is hot as blood, the sky is burnt amber.  Lord keep still our hands.   In Texas, teens patrol the roads by night, burning the body’s fuel—State Troopers pull them over. George, fishtailing dauphin, a graceful falldown drunk, clouds the breathalyzer:  FELONY DUI. Daddy’s name sinks the report—   Election night, heaven staring, and Laura’s yellowcake Chevy mows down her boyfriend: VEHICULAR HOMICIDE: the car found guilty. “I know this as an adult, it was crushing,”  she recalls. Her scented, unmarked body   sweats beneath foundation garments and paste. His unmarked body, and fructifying breath, his stone squint chasing snakes from the sun— They walk, O my darling, the hill of light;  the bite of remorse teaches them to bite.  Then it rains. What falls from the sky is not water but mud, raindrops pulling clouds of sand into large wet globs. “It was biblical,” says Col. Gibbs. Lights a cigarette, his back to the storm: “You’ve got to embrace the suck.”     HOTEL AFTERMATH  From the dust, the limbs jerk up alive, stagger home to camp. Martian: neck gators for the nose, goggles seal off the eyes, baby wipes. WHAT DID YOU FIND THERE? A slipper, an ear, some wire. A chemical suit. A map of water. ——   From Stalin’s cave, just bits of gristle—unreadable, no Frankenstein DNA. They rewrite the Mammoth show.   From Walter Reed, “an aggressive campaign to deal with the mice infestation.”  Recovery rooms, “spit-polish clean.”   Whose mother swallows all the soldier medicine.   Who wheels himself in to play Texas Hold ‘Em.   Whose father says, “It was OK for my son to give his body. They try in their power,  but it reverses itself.”   Jefferson’s American Incognito is ground up for fertilizer— the maid said it was cow bones. Sweet heartland, Governor Meriwether Lewis  of Louisiana, depression pre-existing,   shoots himself in the chest and head.   Who sit by the apples and wingback chairs. “If I had two hands, I’d order two vodkas”—   Who cannot count his change.  Who wake up and punch the air.
for R.G. As if sliding down the green, scuffed face  of the wave, a seaplane falls and turns together, keeping the waters of   the ear flat: a dead calm. But when the window’s  frowning strip of shoreline, the battalions of tropical-drinks umbrellas   guarding the sandcastles and saltboxes  of the rich, when these flip upside down, and the pale   clouded sky floats below the ocean,  then we jolt awake— But this is not her dream, not water or land.  Tell me again, what illness do I think I have?   The ropes of blood coil through her neck,  they twist as it twists, as the head looks for parents and young men,   for nurses, strangers, year upon year attending  until the pulpy blood knots up at last, and the warrens of   the brain dry and crackle, a town of names  she saunters one long night: streets without signs lead to a girlhood park,   to songs under stars, and lipstick,  old houses forever unbuilding themselves—but within the blue   jungle scaffolding, a gallery of faces  stares back at her, portraits she can’t place . . . and then the town   flattens and crumbles behind her, it grows  to dry scrabbled pasture under a dishplate moon, hanging there   in the tints of the sky, yet like a stopped  clock, right twice a day:  Now ma’am, can you remember the name of the President who was shot in the ‘60s?  —Lincoln?   And if the names had sunk beneath the sea,  rolling hump and hollow, leopard spotted foam—surgeons would haul up   the big sharks and club them silly, knife off a fin,  then drop them bleeding onto the docks of Alcatraz,   warning the inmates: “See that?  No inside fin, they’ll swim round this Rock forever. . . .”   The convicts build the prison, then move inside,  their block minds ignite a thousand homes by dawn,   then melt in the butter sun of  breakfast porridge. . . . But this is not the Philosopher’s circle prison,   no lidless Eye radiates from the center,  beneficent and watchful: the neutered grounds   here at the Residence for Life  are groomed like the campus of Depression State U:   past the dwarfish berms and drumlins  a mazy cobalt walkway slithers to the storage lake,   with its hooded fount of aqua vitae sudsing  the green larvae, its dry Gazebo Isle no one shuffles to . . .   One night, the distraught Residence cook  shoots himself dead: everyone mourns, but only the young staff   seek counseling, their threshold of death  not yet raised to that of teetering Mr. On-His-Toes,   of Ms. Wheelchair-With-Political-Bumper-Stickers,  or elegant Mrs. Whisper, polite confused survivors of   wiped-out families, trolley cars, jobs learned  and lost, a cosmos squeezed beneath the blood boulder—    Why can’t I remember my problem?   They do not scream. They who once  made things happen now watch things happen to them:   they hand their middle chapters to  their children, and quietly appraise the spindle of   a leafless sapling outside, staked  to three larger poles of wood: all of them under arrest.   And you must calm yourself. In the acrid hold  of their boat, whose strangely knotted sail whips the wind   round on each side, anchorless boat  that hugs the dock, and keeps the dock from drifting to sea,   you can hear the first, reeling chapters,  of pierside painters crowding a rustic barrel-and-shanty scene   so clichéd the locals called it “Port Motif  Number One”—: the washy dab and smear of the medical test,    Can you tell me what day this is? —You mean now?   The brush like an oar rinses off its paints;  a filmy rainbow upon the waters, coils and ribbons   you trace in your own sweet time.
A loon dives in the swollen river. It followed the river first. The town lies between it and canals Diverted from the river. The beak of the loon is orange, Its wingspan broader than a duck’s.   My father’s legs were swollen. His once thin ankles barely fit his shoes. His heart no longer fed his body. Toxins and liquids began to drown him. His silly doctors didn’t see He couldn’t breathe.   My father took me to the river. We fished for bass and bluegill, Sunfish, cats. Fat suckers, Their lips like suction cups, We put back. Too many little bones To catch and make you choke.   I no longer want to go fishing. I don’t even want to play In the water. The boat Here has no oars, the current Is too swift. In the dark, teenagers Discover their body together.   The body feels like a prison. I kneel by my father’s stapled body. He suctions thick liquid from his lungs. He coughs to clear them; it hurts. He wants more air. He wants To live, the heart’s valve's parachutes   Opening with oxygen to feed The body’s healing. A tube Empties the chest cavity. He excretes Liquids and poisons. His shocked kidneys come to life. His stunned heart beats. His lung   Opens again. He eats. He poops. He walks. He wants to go home. On the phone, I catch my sister Taking him home. It’s snowing. It’s cold. My brother and mother Help him climb the stairs.   I walk down the path By the shallow canal. I see A falcon fishing. The power plant Breathes steam. I hope The wind won’t singe me. I come to the falls   Where a little dog Barks and bounces hello. His owner Smiles and greets me. In the church Of Saint Laurence I kneel, I Give thanks, my heart jumps.
We pass the straits of the Cape where grazing whales gather, though they’re not, I’m told, social creatures by nature.   Alice asks how they can sleep if they must think to breathe. Cranial hemispheres wink and wake and alternate,   so whales are half-awake and half-asleep, balanced between each of our states through dive and breach.   Once on the kitchen wall of a dune shack I saw, like a headdress, the baleen of a whale—   frayed filaments run from a thin, curled, rib-like bone: sieves for the sea.   Like this sickle-moon fin “negatively buoyant” I sink in sleep, but end, I think, where I begin.   Following one as it leaves two other whales we see suddenly not what we’re heading for but the asymmetrically   colored snout of a fin whale as it rises parallel within a stone’s throw of the boat,   the great eye set back water crashing rushing to let me see where it ought to be. I lose track,   the mottled chin’s marble veined, swirling through its green veil, which the top jaw slits.   And then, that’s it, I think. Nights I’m thrown upright from my rest. Brine thumps my chest.
To take,  like water, whatever shape you flow through, fill, or rest in.   And to choose that shape.    * * *   As: Brian, become a gangster, six feet from my face. Voice no longer a caress but a sharpened projection, belly a ram in a buttoned vest.   The whole body shows   the thing done: goat-song in the rites of a god, transforming, starting to speak now through him  as he walks on stage.    * * *   Remember when you turned into moonlight, the bark of an oak, an orange going to shreds in your own cold palm?   Everything you saw  you were, and you saw everything.   No choice. That face light gnarled around a tree was your face.    * * *   Flesh is approximate. We clothe it in dreams, wrestling with our eyes closed down through layers:  thug, wraith, chieftain, devouring angel (held by my shoulders I am trying to make you stay put) daddy mama breath balm a man a woman in separate desires  overlapped.    * * *   Curious,  cautious enough to disguise himself as a woman, the voyeur peeks at the rite.   Women, leaping, mothers and daughters— their rapt beauty draws him out.   The god  has tricked him: they will tear him apart.    * * *   As: a virus.  Never alive, but a frantic mimicry of life to pierce the cell, make over its orders, move, repeat itself, mutate in sped-up mini-evolution— now it swims the blood, unravels in light, never alive, now  it floats on air.   Lost in the host a thousand years, inert chemical mechanism asleep in a rain-forest cave.    * * *   To mime—  not a statue or a gray accountant picked from the crowd, but a robot.   Steel jumpsuit and boots, greasepaint turning the eyelids aluminum.   This hand a crank, this grin the edge of a disk,  I am Mister Silver Mister Silver—tape loop syncopating over the drum machine.    * * *   As: a child’s toy, its intricate language of joints and swivels, creature within creature: the robot  a wolf on silver feet, in his boxy jaw the tiny half-robotic head of a man  who will drive the car.    * * *   Who will drive the car  to the hospital after the cancer has metastasized?    * * *   These knots rising in my palm— look, in the photo album, he grips the mower like a sad hawk. Grandfather, father, son—flesh tightens, branching genes send up more  of the claw each year.   After the operation skin comes back thick as bark.    * * *   A boy, a lion, wild boar, snake no one will touch holds the changes.   Dream he is a sea god,  and he is. Dream he is a stone, a bull, no, a tree  rippling over the waves’ quick light, he is shape always becoming, he is a flame and the stream that drowns it.
Air as lost time Voice of a cloud, of a ghost crowned with nimbus Smack-thin, it lingers forty years I thought it came from the jeweled world we’d seen Everything stuffed, urgent, glittering alive But it was just pleasure, blank and sure Now what is there to sing From speakers, the tune folds and fades in waves Earphones drive it through your head
A charm,  a dream of protection. Gurgles hold the night light’s glow.   A stream of clouds  misting the branching tubes.   Water, in fog, a tub, plug to wire in the wall saying  Okay, it’s okay all night.    * * *   School, a door closing he opens:  haze of playground French, the five names for different kinds of marbles, games, bullies he wandered among while I was staring at the sea.   Shut off, not my past,  nothing I could do—   I keep making up all the world he lived.   His new name, intricate drawings of aliens, long tunnel of lunch (Mais il ne mange rien monsieur)— school hours shadows  that smother my days.    * * *   Burnt-out hills: char and velvety ash  along the dropped limbs, magpies, new gullies.   A dry time clears the ground.   He was standing where the road split, arms spread, a small x straddling the crack. That bird call a slash, then, on the edge of things.   He was standing,  behind him the green blue of ocean, the white blue of sky.    * * *   The house of childhood sold, or razed—   not lost but  softened, distended: diaphanous linked chambers springing from a lightshaft or a varnish smell, the way a floorboard aches, a scrap of wallpaper  tunnels the heart.    * * *    A film of  “events”— tiny collisions, tracks of light in the bubble chamber—you’d scan for hours (smell of formica, rock headsets, eyes going furry near four AM).   This celluloid memory now your memory, coursing chemical fissures in the brain.   Matter split like time,  thinner and thinner parings— Anything that happens is too fast to see    * * *   There the sky kept reeling as she ran— wisps, then puffy clumps, then rain—  the park spread low beneath the blanketing.   Who could have worn that purple coat cartwheeling in the grass?   It grows  as I look at it, puts on pillowy layers.   Now the coat wears memory, warms a ghost.    * * *   Wind off the world’s top, whipped clouds over hedgerows: Girton, that one year twenty years away.   He learned to walk, she started school, read, slowly,  the first book Red.   Moss edging the garden wall, little flags on the clothesline.
Give it back—I made it all up That alcove where surplus glowed under dust Unfinished, an attic space with nails poking down Khaki of sheet metal, orange flickering in tubes Ephemeral as the smells, which were plywood, solder, and Kents Color words, smell words—I put them in a book Everything there is still missing Two lies of remembrance: it was always winter Things could speak
Set up curbside, jewelry tray entanglement with things looking up, but nothing sells unless there is someone looking down, and who might that be? For the moment it’s not raining and off-coast in pods the gray whales parade south. Photographs sprout with the season. The gray whale’s spout is heart shaped, enough said. Just listen for the icon’s intake of breath and see what you can see. Yes, but that was yesterday and which way are prices going to go? There is a pack forming and they will need a leader. It’s then you kick the snot out of them, not before, and make it believable this one last time; but don’t depend on it, auditors, even though it’s turned out like this so many times before. There may be an image whose mind has changed. Sorry, no rain checks in this scheme of things, the windows are broken and boards keep out the light, it’s the cheapest thing to do and then forget it, as has been done before, before, etc. Could you pick out of a lineup who is the culprit here? The mirror is one-way and there’s no way to be sure which side you’re on, but so what? Go on making faces anyway, but be sure, now and then, to check your hand before your face, if just to say Wheaties, the best is yet to be. Our inventions, gods and needles, for instance, are built to say this to us ever and forever. It’s obvious why we can’t give them up, they’re ours, for ourself self’s sake! We live in the afterlife of what, unalterable, has already taken place. The minute you start acting like Robinson Crusoe it’s plain to see you’ve lost your hold on the world. There are many such, so many, washed up on our island shores! They end up sleeping over grates and in doorways at night, far distant from tree ripe fruit and warm sand. The dumps of our artifacts bewilder them. They probe, not knowing what to expect from excess. They act out an experiment, a hairline calculation for survival: is the expenditure of energy to dig up carrots from the frozen ground more than their return in calories? Did you notice the price tag when the wine was poured, the cool chardonnay, the special cabernet, white and red absurdities of words? The motion lights are set to react outside the house but, tell me, did you see the clutter in the study, one would think! Those catalogs, the cave, shadows.
Assume you have discovered an entropy of spirit, immeasurable of course, but it pulls graveward all those whose element is breath, not as the in and out again of water and the sun, but oblivion’s ass-first downhill twenty-four-hour drag. Knowledge is an after-the-fact affair, fair game for a hunger striker’s skeptic gopher tooth. Remember your “agenbite of inwit,” but don’t, please don’t, go knocking on doors declaring you’ve gone hollow with all the others, no one will believe you so long as your bag of flesh is fair. Fall down the stairs to another street. Have you noticed nature does not care for you, no matter the pathos of your fallacies, your antiperspirant, or you arms folded over the stretch marks of your hardest years? That’s you, cell mate, roping a Platonic calf. Rare air, this is all you’ll catch and never can. Live on that for a week and leave a message on your machine, “nourished by words alone.” Those fireworks you inherited, where are they now? Will you set them off to end the show? You have a story that simply cannot be sold, and no rewrite can change country or cast, so here you are in never-never land again. That figure off there in the mist is Nietzsche, stay clear, they say his breath is vile, he needs his space or so the professors say. Were you handed this out of an old script or are you improvising this to-do? Whatever you are, an actor or a human merely with all the other actors, or can you tell the difference without a script in hand, you talk about a text that is not there. Each morning your own short-form obituary appears on every page. An open mike will follow. But this is only in the babblesphere, don’t inhale those dialogues that bubble up. Weariness grows in direct proportion to answers that recede nightly as you snore. Did you audition for this part or did you win it in an all-night poker game? The difference is the same, none, today. Don’t give your chips to another to bet, that’s stacking the odds in your favor, sharing the blame. Avoid places where the lights are always on. Try finding a sunset through a simple gift of looking west. There can be too much light for your own good. Pace Pascal. Let someone close your eyes. Necessary, or so I’m told. That hand in front of your face, try it now.
1.   How account for dimming of the lights   baggage of old age tagged and waiting?   or light tricks in snow at sun-up?   waiting in line   waiting in line   come sundown watching the horizon eyes glowing.     2.   Who   not theother myself my prisoner   night flesh ear-skewered   music in natural air   screams well-deep seep to the brain-root   days Treblinka nights   guilt guts the ferret in my cage   sanity puddles the floor.     3.   In memory sickness   eyes unlace   open as last night’s boots   a glacier of light saps the air   remember   the torturer’s tinnitus starts the day.     4.   The irrationality of it   mob noise   angels struck from the block of darkness   a sunlit sky breaks through in shrapnel   hard screaming night   feather touch   troops improvising for the kill   panic   my enemy   my nail-hold.     5.   Of the texture of elbows shattered and stairwell falls   hallucinations of confession   rush to stop pain.     6.   Andean snow-stats blind me   the flashlight of the Burglar of Death flares   and holds on my eyes.     7.   In the Feast Halls   ghosts linger   feeding   avoiding   dogs   and the memory   of cracked bones.     8.   Present danger   colors hiss from a blue masque   bone-bonded   Autumn in no year’s season   a nerve twitches across the path.       9.   Planets by lamplight   street laughter embraced in being   parallel lines collapse curbside   cornices fall   from a stranger’s dream moon-sand ears   the inhabitants lean in to hear.
Held in a late season At a shifting of worlds, In the golden balance of autumn, Out of love and reason   We made our peace; Stood still in October In the failing light and sought, Each in the other, ease   And release from silence, From the slow damnation Of speech that is weak And falls from silence.   In the October sun By the green river we spoke, Late in October, the leaves Of the water maples had fallen.   But whatever we said In the bright leaves was lost, Quick as the leaf-fall, Brittle and blood red. For Kenneth Rexroth, 1950
Listen. Put on morning. Waken into falling light. A man’s imagining Suddenly may inherit The handclapping centuries Of his one minute on earth. And hear the virgin juries Talk with his own breath To the corner boys of his street. And hear the Black Maria Searching the town at night. And hear the playropes caa The sister Mary in. And hear Willie and Davie Among bracken of Narnain Sing in a mist heavy With myrtle and listeners. And hear the higher town Weep a petition of fears At the poorhouse close upon The public heartbeat. And hear the children tig And run with my own feet Into the netting drag Of a suiciding principle. Listen. Put on lightbreak. Waken into miracle. The audience lies awake Under the tenements Under the sugar docks Under the printed moments. The centuries turn their locks And open under the hill Their inherited books and doors All gathered to distil Like happy berry pickers One voice to talk to us. Yes listen. It carries away The second and the years Till the heart’s in a jacket of snow And the head’s in a helmet white And the song sleeps to be wakened By the morning ear bright. Listen. Put on morning. Waken into falling light.
1   What does it matter if the words I choose, in the order I choose them in, Go out into a silence I know Nothing about, there to be let In and entertained and charmed Out of their master’s orders? And yet I would like to see where they go And how without me they behave.   2   Speaking is difficult and one tries To be exact and yet not to Exact the prime intention to death. On the other hand the appearance of things Must not be made to mean another Thing. It is a kind of triumph To see them and to put them down As what they are. The inadequacy Of the living, animal language drives Us all to metaphor and an attempt To organize the spaces we think We have made occur between the words.   3   The bad word and the bad word and The word which glamours me with some Quick face it pulls to make me let It leave me to go across In roughly your direction, hates To go out maybe so completely On another silence not its own.   4   Before I know it they are out Afloat in the head which freezes them. Then I suppose I take the best Away and leave the others arranged Like floating bergs to sink a convoy.   5   One word says to its mate O I do not think we go together Are we doing any good here Why do we find ourselves put down? The mate pleased to be spoken to Looks up from the line below And says well that doubtful god Who has us here is far from sure How we on our own tickle the chin Of the prince or the dame that lets us in.   6   The dark companion is a star Very present like a dark poem Far and unreadable just out At the edge of this poem floating. It is not more or less a dark Companion poem to the poem.   7   Language is expensive if We want to strut, busked out Showing our best on silence. Good Morning. That is a bonny doing Of verbs you wear with the celandine Catching the same sun as mine. You wear your dress like a prince but A country’s prince beyond my ken. Through the chinks in your lyric coat My ear catches a royal glimpse Of fuzzed flesh, unworded body. Was there something you wanted to say? I myself dress up in what I can Afford on the broadway. Underneath My overcoat of the time’s slang I am fashionable enough wearing The grave-clothes of my generous masters.   8   And what are you supposed to say I asked a new word but it kept mum. I had secretly admired always What I thought it was here for. But I was wrong when I looked it up Between the painted boards. It said Something it was never very likely I could fit in to a poem in my life.   9   The good word said I am not pressed For time. I have all the foxglove day And all my user’s days to give You my attention. Shines the red Fox in the digitalis grove. Choose me choose me. Guess which Word I am here calling myself The best. If you can’t fit me in To lying down here among the fox Glove towers of the moment, say I am yours the more you use me. Tomorrow Same place same time give me a ring.   10   Backwards the poem’s just as good. We human angels as we read Read back as we gobble the words up. Allowing the poem to represent A recognizable landscape Sprouting green up or letting green With all its weight of love hang To gravity’s sweet affection, Arse-versa it is the same object, Even although the last word seems To have sung first, or the breakfast lark Sings up from the bottom of the sea.   11   The poem is not a string of knots Tied for a meaning of another time And county, unreadable, found By chance. The poem is not a henge Or Easter Island emerged Longnose Or a tally used by early unknown Peoples. The words we breathe and puff Are our utensils down the dream Into the manhole. Replace the cover.   12   The words are mine. The thoughts are all Yours as they occur behind The bat of your vast unseen eyes. These words are as you see them put Down on the dead-still page. They have No ability above their station. Their station on silence is exact. What you do with them is nobody’s business.   13    Running across the language lightly This morning in the hangingover Whistling light from the window, I Was tripped and caught into the whole Formal scheme which Art is. I had only meant to enjoy Dallying between the imaginary And imaginary’s opposite With a thought or two up my sleeve.     14   Is the word? Yes Yes. But I hear A sound without words from another Person I can’t see at my elbow. A sigh to be proud of. You? Me?     15   Having to construct the silence first To speak out on I realize The silence even itself floats At my ear-side with a character I have not met before. Hello Hello I shout but that silence Floats steady, will not be marked By an off-hand shout. For some reason It refuses to be broken now By what I thought was worth saying. If I wait a while, if I look out At the heavy greedy rooks on the wall It will disperse. Now I construct A new silence I hope to break.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1  This is only a noteThis is only a note / To say Echoes the title of William Carlos Williams’s poem, “This Is Just To Say”To sayThis is only a note / To say Echoes the title of William Carlos Williams’s poem, “This Is Just To Say” how sorry I amYou diedYou died Bryan Wynter was a friend of Graham’s, and landscape painter (1915-1975). The poem takes both the form of an elegy and a direct address to the deceased Wynter, in the form of a letter (that is, an epistolary poem).. You will realize What a position it puts Me in. I couldn’t really Have died for you if so I were inclined. The carncarn /Foxglove “The Carn” was the name of Wynter’s cottage in the town of Zennor. Carn is an alternate spelling of cairn, a heap of stones used as a landmark or tombstone. A foxglove is a colorful perennial flower, with cup-shaped buds.Foxglovecarn /Foxglove “The Carn” was the name of Wynter’s cottage in the town of Zennor. Carn is an alternate spelling of cairn, a heap of stones used as a landmark or tombstone. A foxglove is a colorful perennial flower, with cup-shaped buds. here on the wall Outside your first house Leans with me standing In the Zennor windZennor wind A village in Cornwall, on the southwestern coast England, prone to strong winds .   Anyhow how are things? Are you still somewhere With your long legslong legs In Graham’s poem “Wynter and the Grammarsow,” he terms Wynter “Sir Longlegged” (line 3). And twitching smile undertwitching smile under / Your blue hat Critic Fiona Green notes that these lines “resurrect the closing frame of “Lycidas”: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue” (line 192). Milton’s “Lycidas” is one of the most famous elegies in the English language.Your blue hattwitching smile under / Your blue hat Critic Fiona Green notes that these lines “resurrect the closing frame of “Lycidas”: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue” (line 192). Milton’s “Lycidas” is one of the most famous elegies in the English language. walking Across a place? Or am I greedy to make you up Again out of memory? Are you there at all? I would like to think You were all right And not worried aboutMonicaMonica Bryan Wynter’s second wife (née Harman), whom he married in 1959 and the children And not unhappy or bored.   2   Speaking to you and not Knowing if you are there Is not too difficult. My words are used to that. Do you want anything? Where shall I send something? Rice-wine, meandersmeanders A type of artwork. One of Wynter’s works at the Tate Gallery in London is titled “Meander I”. In Graham’s poem “Wynter and the Grammarsow,” he calls Wynter “Scholar King / Of rare meanders” (lines 18-19)., paintings By your contemporaries? Or shall I send a kind Of news of no time Leaning against the wall Outside your old house.   The house and the whole moormoor In addition to the definition of uncultivated land, a possible play on the verb, meaning to anchor Is flying in the mist.   3   I am up. I’ve washed The front of my face And here I stand looking Out over the top Half of my bedroom window. There almost as far As I can see I seeSt Buryan’s church tower.St Buryan’s church tower St. Buryan’s is a village in Cornwall. Noted by Sarah Ann Matson as “a greater height than any other church in Cornwall” (St. George and the Dragon [1893]).  An inch to the left, behind That dark rise of woods, Is where you used to lurk.   4   This is only a note To say I am aware You are not here. I find It difficult to go Beside Housman’s starHousman’s star / Lit fences In A.E. Housman’s poem “A Shropshire Lad 52” the last stanza reads: “There, by the starlit fences, / The wanderer halts and hears / My soul that lingers sighing / About the glimmering weirs.” Also, Graham wrote similar lines in an earlier poem, “Wynter and the Grammarsow”: “Walker beside the star / Lit fences of Housman (lines 25-26).Lit fencesHousman’s star / Lit fences In A.E. Housman’s poem “A Shropshire Lad 52” the last stanza reads: “There, by the starlit fences, / The wanderer halts and hears / My soul that lingers sighing / About the glimmering weirs.” Also, Graham wrote similar lines in an earlier poem, “Wynter and the Grammarsow”: “Walker beside the star / Lit fences of Housman (lines 25-26). without you. And nobody will laugh At my jokes like you.   5   Bryan, I would be obliged If you would scout things out For me. Although I am not Just ready to start out.I am trying to be betterI am trying to be better, Matthew Francis annotates this line in New Collected Poems (2004): “ ‘Try to be better’, or ‘TTTB’, was a motto of Graham’s”, Which will make you smile Under your blue hat.   I know I make a symbol Of the foxgloveFoxglove A foxglove is a colorful perennial flower, with cup-shaped buds. on the wall. It is because it knows you.
Unmet at Euston in a dream Of London under Turner’s steam Misting the iron gantries, I Found myself running away From Scotland into the golden city.   I ran down Gray’s Inn Road and ran Till I was under a black bridge. This was me at nineteen Late at night arriving between The buildings of the City of London.   And the I (O I have fallen down) Fell in my dream beside the Bank Of England’s wall to be, me With my money belt of Northern ice. I found Eliot and he said yes   And sprang into a Holmes cab. Boswell passed me in the fog Going to visit Whistler who Was with John Donne who had just seen Paul Potts shouting on Soho Green.   Midnight. I hear the moon Light chiming on St Paul’s.   The City is empty. Night Watchmen are drinking their tea,   The Fire had burnt out. The Plague’s pits had closed And gone into literature.   Between the big buildings I sat like a flea crouched In the stopped works of a watch.
when I’m braced for a mugging is stranger than the Eritrean boy asking the question outside Clifton Hill station. The skinnier for baggies he’s hop & a skip across three lanes following my hand. No way to countermand him. No way he’d stay for the whole story. The ghosts of spray-can gangs who tagged the length & breadth of the subway are benign I’d tell him. There’ll be the odd gutter-crawler in front of the House of Love. Keep walking. The garage’ll be closed but in summertime a gaggle of mechanics will punt a football in the road there. One missing his mark is bound to call an Eritrean to kick it back. Ignore them. Continue to a far flung franchise of the American dream. Once it was the dull red brick of the United Kingdom pub where the last of the blessed aged quicker than most on Victoria Bitter. Now it’s the McDonalds of this convergence of worlds in whose vicinity I’m more or less lost.
(i)   (for Robert Grey)   caged by dappled light unlike Rilke’s beast content this side of heaven     (ii)   perennial green ephemeral butterfly what time’s time enough?     (iii)   red roof in full leaf sail now grey threatening sky cry blue land ahoy!     (iv)   in this green waiting birds trill leaves quiver then time interjects its train!
Titian’s Young Englishman with a Glove, circa 1530 It happened in Physics, reading a Library art book under the desk, (the lesson was Archimedes in the bath) I turned a page and fell for an older man, and anonymous at that, hardly ideal – he was four hundred and forty-five, I was fourteen. ‘Eureka!’ streaked each thought (I prayed no-one would hear) and Paradise all term was page 179 (I prayed no-one would guess). Of course my fingers, sticky with toffee and bliss, failed to entice him from his century; his cool grey stare fastened me firmly in mine. I got six overdues, suspension of borrowing rights and a D in Physics. But had by heart what Archimedes proves. Ten years later I married: a European with cool grey eyes, a moustache, pigskin gloves.
‘Thirty years ago. And only yesterday,’ says Balázs, slapping at a fly. We sit beside a bottle underneath his vines and watch the football arc between his sons.   ‘Check through the corner one,’ the sergeant says, ‘and make it short and sweet. Take a couple of men.’ (Seventeen-year-olds still nervous with a gun.) It’s an office block like most down the derelict street; he keeps a good five metres ahead, tries the rooms along each corridor and beckons the two boys on. They reach the third floor, breathing easier now. The Council Chamber’s here, empty but for a tangle of chairs at the northern window end (unseemly three-day corpses, wooden legs in the air); dried into the floor – blood-stains; and seeping through the shattered panes the distant dialogue of cross-fire. Directly opposite him – another door. He notes the fact an instant before it opens sharply and his counterpart – the hated AVO uniform of green – levels his gun and time is not. They freeze. Somewhere beyond, the seconds slide away; between their eyes the slender lifeline holds across the mirror of air. ‘Döntetlen barátom azt hiszem’: Stalemate I think, my friend. Each slightly lowers his gun and slowly, eyes still locked, takes one step back. The two doors close together, softly as hands on a prayer. ‘Senki sincs ott,’ each says to his men: Nobody there.   ‘In Hungary we used to say Néha a második alkalom jön először – sometimes the second chance comes first.’ He’s silent, years away. The day is insubstantial, seems to float in the dry gum-scented heat. Only the football’s thud, steady as the beat of some huge heart, holds us in time and space. He rouses himself to swear: ‘Az anyád, off the kohlrabi, rossz gyerekek,’ then pours us another beer. The head on each glass whispers small talk; we blow the froth into the air.
Mondays Began with one plait loose, a pip in your teeth and late for Geography, lined and blank, facts to the right, tall stories left. To sail the heat in a weatherboard classroom boat with banana and vegemite colouring the air sargasso green. To ship ten thousand things on cursive seas to the edge of the known page —coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves. To import small desires and grown-up needs in little packets of time for show and tell. To carve your name on the prow. To wait for the bell.     In the Parlour only the French clock answered back. They sat cross-legged on the Persian carpet; destinations flashed by the smell of Marveer, lavender, dusty velvet. They opened their eyes in the olden times to fossick under the coffin flaps of the jarrah window seat for proper advice from disheveled magazines: nose straighteners, recipes, posture improvers, the runt who smoked and the chap who rowed. They didn’t see foresight’s guarded smile, they didn’t hear hindsight howl like a dog; the riddles were wordy, the clues were dumb: lopped head of a doll, silk wedding sleeve, gilt volumes, silverfish, and in the glass case, untouchable figurines locked away as grown-ups always seemed to be: shepherd and shepherdess on their marks, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Limoges? The real thing?    Almond Trees cover Willunga Plains: like the misty breath of winter children, the blossom hovers. Dearth, says the black bark, splits to let scent through with open questions where when why what who? As for that earliest aroma fear, she’d smell it, taste it, anywhere, one part in a million, pungent as coffee or smoke, already there in her mother’s milk. Against its grey unbeing she caught at talismans – black stones on a white plate, concrete nouns clattering out of thought. Marking time down the dead-end street to morning. Why was it always dark in the quiet hall? Through a memory crack of light an edge squeezed round the door: regret to inform stop missing in stop the air elliptic with tracer fire, familiar eyes glancing away, prismatic as flies’. Voices crept and huddled, where’s Daddy’s girl? He did come back, but who? They could not tell. Collections began. The tang of foreign coins lent her a lingo and currency for the unknown; Brother stuck down squares of expedited love with serrated edges. And they were invited to a fancy-dress ball with games of us and them. Father could not come for he was lame and Mother had to watch and wait not play so they learned dolls and trains and night and day and Snakes and Ladders and Hide and Seek. Knight’s gambit. Castle your king. Check. And when the black door opened and they knew threshold was famished, Brother stepped through. Now fear had her ID and her address. Best send an invitation. Tell her guest the lightest thing she served would ward off harm – a stick, a stone, a cloud of white perfume, thought itself, needing a go-between to say ‘this fragrance is like newborn skin, these quickening trees, like Mary’s aging cousin conceiving all baptism out of season’.      She Collected Dictionaries as other women take up men and shelve them: manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh, like a passion for clothes that would hang unworn in the dark, for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls in a shut case, nouns declined. Each unknown word shone with delicious fire and the alien phrases silked her skin with their genders and connotations.   She might have been the end house on the waterfront of Macau welcoming every sailor in. But the longing for many tongues to part her lips – si, igen, ja, ah oui, yes, yes – was departure’s smile, a leaning to the wind that sweeps a glitter of light across the sea and sets a silvery chill at the neck. Quick, to those books guarding the mantelpiece, ISBNs snug as a span of days; to bread and fruit and sparkling wine.   She had been given a cyclamen with scent, some new trick that married violet and rose, as if a flower should yearn to sing and the pink timbre tremble into quietest words. She touched her flesh and knew that it would fade as speech did and did not. And yet it was not language that she sought, nor the music of any meaning. An old allegiance drew her on beyond the first ground of thought and the idea even of silence to the fifth season which must at last return with its weather of recognition and its lost ends.
1 The first ten steps from the house to the shed, I break two or three promises the night has strung  like spiders’ webs across my path. The morning is sprung with secrets the night’s been spinning all night and now they’re trapping daylight between the oak and the mendicant poplars and snapping     2 Before me on the broken trail to my desk. In the cowshed the spider hangs on the cross of herself  above the first stall door, where, these seven days, she’s been dying, and I bank a fire and shoo the children when they follow me in and I sit to work. Winter’s come, and down on the river the kangaroos     3 Know it. I winter here all day, the poplars, wasted saints, laying on their hands, and nine hours on there’s a shoal of cloud in a cold sky  and a blue moon loose in it like a man overboard. Why is it so hard to keep a fire burning all day? You turn your back and it’s gone out somewhere, and yet you sit here still, every thought broken,  your feet cold in your boots     4 Two nights later the moon rises nicotine-stained and peaceable into the fingers of the silver trees,  and the floodplain is a smokefilled basement. Out of the blue sprawling mist the plover’s mad call: why will a river not stay in the ground? Out on the deck, I draw down deep on the evening and turn and walk     5 Its balm inside and search again briefly for the frequency of family life and I find it in the bath, my girl  and our three children, sleek as seals, and in that moment a truck passes on the road and snaps the powerline from the eaves. The house shudders and we fall back in time to candles and stories by heart and reading news from memory.     6 The earth, it seems, has caught a fever, and where will she lie to rest? When the men come  and plug us back in, I believe I hear her groan. How will she begin to forgive us, or is that what she’s been doing all along? In the night the mist rolls away, and at dawn there’s a frost over everything.     7 You’d call it a blessing if you hadn’t been woken four times by minor deities, pyjamaed like children  and frantic in the dark with oracles. Why do our children not know how to sleep? Do they fear we’ve left our waking late? At first light they dawn and have you rise and lead them out into the story     8 The river has told the grass again, a parable the day has forgotten by nine. And by ten, at your desk, you’ve forgotten it, too.  A man so easily distracted by himself. But what are you here for and what do they love, if not the way you leave each day to change the world’s mind and return with the night, your fire spent, your face lined with secrets?     9 One night, you arrive home late and tongue-tied and the child wakes choking. For three hours you wait in emergency  and the boy sleeps himself well against you, while an old man and then a woman come with broken-down hearts and don’t leave. You drive home at three and you stand with the boy in the cold outside and you look up and show him the perfect celestial circle     10 Ringing the imperfect moon, and you wish you could tell him what it means. This is what silence looks like, you think later,  and a possum lands like ordnance on the roof, and down in the paddock a dozen souls are reborn in the bawling cattle and the fox plays the geese like oboes with broken reeds. Night is the world in its other life.     11 One’s own life is an absurd miracle, waning as long as it lasts, in beauty or poverty, it makes no difference  in the end. One is nothing anymore. Our works are our children. They carry us on. They tell us, as though we meant something more than our mere being here. Landscape is another way, a practice longer than love and death.     12 For instance, the brown horse alone in the paddock all day, the canting of the black cockatoos,  the grass parrots parsing the morning, the grass trembling with afternoon, the paratactic catechism of sulphur-crested cockatoos in the orange trees, the patience of the river. Go the way the place goes; die beautifully to yourself.     13 Adopt the lively practice of the bluewrens in the hedge and the yoga of the hens. Learn the rules,  and forget the rules, like Basho in the naked birches on the river, flaring now under blue cloud in the late light of winter. A small death. A second coming. Drink tea and watch the landscape forget itself. Think of your life     14 in place, not time. Another time, you’re walking home beside the same river. Evening is crimson  along the horizon. Look, you say to the child, pointing west. It’s over there, too, he says, pointing east. The place has you almost surrounded. And there’s a dragon, he says. (There’s always a dragon.) Wingecarribee Zen.     15 But it’s no good pretending; we are creation’s anchorites. The places don’t sing,  GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you— George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week, a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it. They don’t sing, GS; they just are. That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach     16 And what you taught me. Time, that bad idea, is passing anyway, like water. If you’ve been sleeping, you once said,  you’ve been missing nearly everything. Meaning, the world wakes up at night; but what if it doesn’t wake again? Another time you said, You’re either writing, or you’re not; so why aren’t you writing? Well, I’m writing now. It’s either raining, or it’s not, and it’s raining now     17 Like a life sentence on the roof and the paddocks and horses and the roos, and deep down below  the syntax of the river and up a bit my friend wakes from the anaesthetic dark into the clinical noon of an American summer and wonders how the sun got inside her and cast these shadows, and how much afternoon she’ll get to keep.     18 Over east, beyond the ridge I can see from the desk and under the basalt hills and the feet of the Holsteins  and the potato fields and brown-barrel gums an aquifer runs where it always ran; but they’re mining it now, and if they draw it all down, it’ll keep the city in water a week. And how much rain and time will it take to make it rise again?     19 But seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory; the future is someone else’s  country to care for. Landscape, though, has all the time in the world; it’s we who are running out. Cars careen like idiots through the dusk, and in the roof the possum calls it a day, and the rain keeps on. It won’t be enough, but it’ll do.     20 My friend in Virginia who’s singing her cancer down looks on cows with love, and I think of her and it pleases me  to work where cows came and stood each day and let men drain them dry. This is still their concrete floor. This is still their draught, coming off the edge of night and under the barn door. Poems come like that, she told me once, on the wind to where we labour in wait.     21 But, listen: no one reads poems to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change the future’s mind. You write it like rain;  you enter it like nightfall. It isn’t for anything; a poem is country, and it needs you to keep walking it, and I walk out into it now, carrying my friend and smelling the paddocky wind and feeling the rain cold on my face.
I Every year the moon inches away from us. In time she’ll swim too far out to anchor us at our habitual angle to the sun, and that will be the end of the well-tempered and recursive wildness  that conceived and suffered us, and that will be the end of us. We have just two billion years to thank her for our time here. Eternity has a use-by date   II But it’ll be up long before that, and in the meantime, I sit on the cold step of the cowshed and watch the world throw its shadow on the moon like a horseblanket;  in the meantime the moon reddens in the refraction of all our dawns and sunsets, in a kind of transfigured cosmic smog. An apocalypse that lasts three hours until it’s time to go to bed.   III And in the meantime on the floor of my shed, blue planets sing in the hands of children as they once sang in war. Two small worlds forged to cry terribly down like creation unravelling upon one’s foes now  make a peaceful clangour on my secular desk. One spins from its orbit and quakes and chips its cerulean shell on the floor of heaven. The tectonics of play. We are loved like this, and this is how it ends.   IV I’m arguing a lot with death these days. And last night I found myself in court poised to clinch the case against the absurdity of life. Certainly, this was sleeping and certainly  I was dreaming and I’d been losing the thread, but all at once I saw where my argument must run, and I was running it there when my small boy cried and woke me and I went to him and now I’ll never know.   V Spring now, and the river has drawn back her bow. The lark ascends from the cd-player, and black ducks sip brown ditchwater in the yard. Everything’s in bud or leaf, last of all  the silver poplars and the Osage Orange, trees flaring even now in the backyard of the childhood of my friend, the poet, the poet’s son. The world happens twice. Draw the linen string taut and shoot.   VI One lives in paradox. Debussy plays; trucks flounder past like gods who’ve lost control of their machines. In between one makes one’s life up. The sound is the price you pay for the sight  that meets you every morning and half of what you paid for the house. The shed puts the perfect sky in her pocket, and possums rut in the roof. Eternity is in rehearsal, and this is its soundtrack.   VII Brad mows an acre an hour. A general at ease on his machine, a banker in overalls, he’s rationalised our small republic on one tank of gas. And this now— cutgrass at four o’clock—is how  hope smells. Some days I can see no way out: the body of the world in entropy. But today I sit among the ruins of the afternoon, and I cannot see how it can’t all go on forever.   VIII Meantime the moon has made herself new again, and there has been rain. The Marulan hills, which had almost forgotten the taste of the word, are spelling green again this afternoon,  and there’s water in a lake that’s been a paddock for a decade. Three black cockatoos, and then three more, fly over as I take the southwest road. And into all this panoply of hope, the new moon falls.
Today I watched a boy fly his kite. It didn’t crackle in the wind – but gave out a barely perceptible hum.   At a certain height, I’d swear I heard it sing. He could make it climb in any wind; could crank those angles up,   make it veer with the precision of an insect targeting a sting; then he’d let it roil in rapturous finesse, a tiny   bird in mid-air courtship. When lightning cracked across the cliff – (like quick pale flicks of yak-hair   fly-whisks) – he stayed steady. For so long he kept his arms up, as if he knew he’d hoist that kite enough.   I asked if it was made of special silk, if he used some particular string – and what he’d heard while holding it.   He looked at me from a distance, then asked about my alms bowl, my robes, and about that for which   a monk lives. It was then I saw I could tell him nothing in the cohort wind, that didn’t sound illusory.
Begin in a cave. Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects. Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later, you’ll fly the narrow passages of those bones,  but for now —   open your mouth, out will fly names like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then, listen for a frequency lower than the seep of water, higher than an ice planet hibernating beyond a glacier of Time.   Visit op shops. Hide in their closets. Breathe in the scales and dust of clothes left hanging. To the underwear and to the crumbled black silks — well, give them your imagination and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind.   By now your fingers should have touched petals open. You should have been dreaming each night of anthers and of giving to their furred beauty your nectar-loving tongue. But also, your tongue should have been practising the cold of a slippery, frog-filled pond.   Go down on your elbows and knees. You’ll need a spieliologist’s desire for rebirth and a miner’s paranoia of gases — but try to find within yourself the scent of a bat-loving flower.   Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl. Its face is the biography of propaganda. Never trust a hawk. See its solutions in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets.   And have you considered the smoke yet from a moving train? You can start half an hour before sunset, but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted and that you never discover the faces of those Trans-Siberian exiles.   Spend time in the folds of curtains. Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms. Practise the gymnastics of web umbrellas.    Are you floating yet, thought-light, without a keel on your breastbone? Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos, on mastering the thermals beyond the tremolo; reverberations beyond the lexical.    Become adept at describing the spectacles of the echo — but don’t watch dark clouds passing across the moon. This may lead you to fetishes and cults that worship false gods by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb.   Practise echo-locating aerodromes, stamens. Send out rippling octaves into the fossils of dank caves — then edit these soundtracks with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering about the evolution of your own mind.   But look, I must tell you — these instructions are no manual. Months of practice may still only win you appreciation of the acoustical moth, hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need   to observe further the floating black host through the hills.
Laid out flat in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed I look up: the leaves are immense, green and golden with clear summer light breaking through – though I turn only my neck I can see all of them along this avenue that has no limits.   What does it matter that I am only eyes if I am to be carried so lightly under the trees of the world? From beyond the numbness of my strange body the wealth of the leaves falls forever into my small still watching.
Someone said  that working through difficult equations was like walking in a pure and beautiful landscape –  the numbers glowing  like works of art. And in the same crowded room a woman I thought I didn’t like  was singing to herself – talking and listening  but singing to herself too and instantly  with the logic of numbers  I liked her as if she had balanced something I couldn’t. The corridors are long and pristine  but I’m not lost – just working  towards some minute  or overwhelming  equipoise.
It’s something they carry with them  – explorers night shifts seamen – like a good pair of binoculars or a camera case  perfectly and deeply compartmented. It has a quiet patina that both absorbs and reflects  like a valuable instrument  you have to sign for  – contract with alone –  and at the end of the voyage  you get to keep. Sometimes it’s very far away. Sometimes so close  at first you think the person next to you is picking up putting down  a personal cup  a book in another language before you realise what – when talk has moved off  leaning its arms  on someone else’s table – is being handed to you.
Dead to the world I have failed you Forgive me, traveller.   Thirsty, I was no fountain Hungry, I was not bread Tired, I was no pillow   Forgive my unwritten poems: the many I have frozen with irony the many I have trampled with anger the many I have rejected in self-defence the many I have ignored in fear   unaware, blind or fearful I ignored them. They clamoured everywhere those unwritten poems. They sought me out day and night and I turned them away.   Forgive me the colours they might have worn Forgive me their eclipsed faces They dared not venture from the unwritten lines.   Under each inert hour of my silence died a poem, unheeded
Tell the truth of experience they say they also say you must let go learn to let go let your children go   and they go and you stay letting them go because you are obedient and respect everyone’s freedom to go and you stay   and you want to tell the truth because you are yours truly its obedient servant but you can’t because you’re feeling what you’re not supposed to feel you have let them go and go and   you can’t say what you feel because they might read this poem and feel guilty and some post-modern hack will back them up and make you feel guilty and stop feeling which is post-modern and what you’re meant to feel   so you don’t write a poem you line up words in prose inside a journal trapped like a scorpion in a locked drawer to be opened by your children let go after lived life and all the time a great wave bursting howls and rears and   you have to let go or you’re gone you’re gone gasping you let go till the next wave towers crumbles shreds you to lace—   When you wake your spine is twisted like a sea-bird inspecting the sky, stripped by lightning.
“Feed Fred and sit with him and mind he doesn’t walk about. He falls. Tell him his ute is safe back home. Thinks someone’s pinched it, peers around the carpark all the time. His family brought him in it and he thinks it’s gone. He was a farmer once . . .”   I take the tray. The ice-cream’s almost melted round the crumbled orange jelly and the soup’s too hot. I know I’ll have to blow on it.   Hunched, trapped behind a tray, he glances sideways, face as brown and caverned as the land itself, long thin lips droop ironic at the corners, gaunt nose. The blue and white pajamas cage the restless rangy legs. In and out they go, the feet in cotton socks feeling for the ground.   “Are you a foreigner?” “Not exactly. Just a little sunburnt,” and I put the jelly down. I musn’t feel a thing: my smile has come unstuck. I place a paper napkin on his lap. He winces. “You’re a foreigner all right,” he says. “OK,” I say. What’s one displacement more or less, wishing I were a hearty flat-faced Fenian with a perm and nothing doing in the belfry. Someone like his mother. Or a wife who spared him the sorrow of himself. Now he grabs the spoon. “I’ll do it.” “Right,” I say, “You go ahead. Just ask me if you want some help.” The tone’s not right. I watch the trembling progress of the spoon for what seems years, paralysed with pity for his pride.   How does a dark-faced woman give a man called Fred who cropped a farm and drove a battered ute a meal of soup and jelly?   Outside the window, clouds are swelling into growing darkness and there’s a man hard on his knees planting something in the rain.
She slumps in the disabled bay clutching a waffle-cotton gown around a spreading paunch, shambling breasts. Why not say ‘I’? For that’s who sits at 6 a.m. waiting for the health club pool to open in the rain. A grown woman, after all, supposed to know her whereabouts.   Today’s my mother’s birthday, a 1907 Aquarian of the self- denying kind, ‘never say “I”’ her motto. She had me nailed for years. Her voice drowns out the radio’s chattering static. Now I’m the same age she was, dying, observing noble savagery:   a gathering knot of skinny women, tight black butts in leotards, regulation sneakers, Brazil-waxed calves, gripping i-pods, mobiles, water bottles. The men stand back, silent, sullen, balding, bored and out of it. Health stalkers, renouncers of smoke and flame, deniers of brimstone. One hell of a century: between the holocaust and the atom bomb who are these people?   Between the deep and shallow end, never say thank you or good morning. Avoid eye contact. Signals may be misinterpreted. Slow Lane, Fast Lane, Walking Lane Only’s where I’m at. The moving parts count laps: twenty five’s a half-hour’s worth. I sing myself a rumba to keep rhythm; the Speedo wall clock ticks a strict 4/4 defeats my ruse while dove’s feet skitter arrow-wise across the perspex roof. No Diving Running Eating Smiling Share if lanes are busy. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.   The waiting crowd are all, like me, up early talking or silent, more vivacious than galahs, more foolish than parrots.   We stand and wait, walk up and down in the rain talking or not, holding in sagging muscle, spreading paunch, talking about things that must matter. So much seems to hang on getting in that door.
Someone will push the house over one day, Some spacedozer give it a shove, But the cobbles we laid down here in the yard, These are a labour of love.   All winter we set these cobbles in place, Or was it the summer as well? Sorting through lumpy bluestone pitchers For ones that looked suitable.   The old house decayed – along with us – Will a strange new resident Admire the patio made in joy Wondering what we meant?   Things fall apart, the poet wrote, Certainties crumble and move But the cobbles oddly plotted together, These are our labour of love.
This synod is convinced that the forces of the Allies are being used of God to  vindicate the rights of the weak and to  maintain the moral order of the world.   Anglican Synod, Melbourne, 1916.     Bit weird at first, That starey look in the eyes, The hair down past his shoulders, But after a go with the ship’s barber, A sea-water shower and the old slouch hat Across his ears, he started to look the part. Took him a while to get the way A bayonet fits the old Lee-Enfield, But going in on the boats He looked calmer than any of us, Just gazing in over the swell Where the cliffs looked black against the sky. When we hit he fairly raced in through the waves, Then up the beach, swerving like a full-back at the end When the Turks’d really got on to us. Time we all caught up, He was off like a flash, up the cliffs, After his first machine gun. He’d done for three Turks when we got there, The fourth was a gibbering mess. Seeing him wave that blood-red bayonet, I reckoned we were glad To have him on the side.
My mother’s God has written the best of the protestant proverbs:   you make the bed you lie in it; God helps him   who helps himself. He tends to shy away from churches, is more to be found in   phone calls to daughters or rain clouds over rusty grass. The Catholics   have got him wrong entirely: too much waving the arms about, the incense and caftan, that rainbow light.   He’s leaner than that, lean as a pair of grocer’s scales,   hard as a hammer at cattle sales the third and final time of asking.   His face is most clear in a scrubbed wooden table or deep in the shine of a   laminex bench. He’s also observed at weddings and funerals by strict invitation, not knowing quite   which side to sit on. His second book, my mother says, is often now too well received;   the first is where the centre is, tooth for claw and eye for tooth whoever tried the other cheek?   Well, Christ maybe, but that’s another story. God, like her, by dint of coursework   has a further degree in predestination. Immortal, omniscient, no doubt of that, he nevertheless keeps regular hours   and wipes his feet clean on the mat, is not to be seen at three in the morning. His portrait done in a vigorous charcoal   is fixed on the inner curve of her forehead. Omnipotent there   in broad black strokes he does not move. It is not easy, she’d confess,   to be my mother’s God.
The story keeps on coming back, a man my father knew, that grazier across the river up north a mile or two,   a story that my father spun to last me all my life of how a man should not behave when burying a wife.   All through the funeral he’d wept . . . the priest there going on about St Peter and the gates through which his wife had gone.   His sobbing at the grave, Dad found, was harder still to bear. Then men in suits, the women in the best they had to wear   knew deeper down it couldn’t pass, no matter who had died. Extravagance like this was always better kept inside.   At last the man who sent his beasts to die on Tuesday gave one final, high unseemly cry and leapt into the grave.   ‘Mate,’ he yelled. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go!’ And scrabbled at the wood. A friend reached in to fish him out as any Christian would.   The women in their hats stood back. Two men jumped in the trench and skidding on the polished lid contrived at last to wrench   him out and lead him to his car. The clergyman intoned ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ They heard the broken moans   coming from a side window. He hammered at the wheel. ‘Mate,’ he yelled. ‘Don’t leave me mate.’ Not knowing what to feel,   the mourners now were drifting off towards their dusty cars. My father always finished here as if he’d gone too far.   But I could hear the slamming doors, the hearse without much chrome and dual decisions made to miss the wake and head straight home.   ‘Mate, oh mate!’ the man had cried, releasing all their fears. The sound of boots on coffin wood survives them down the years.
Seven o’clock, the time set in his mind Like herbs displayed in aspic, as the chimes Were striking. Then the squeaking of his shoes’   Black leather tread, pacing those measures down The first-floor hall, where sunset’s apricot Was oozing nectar through the open doors.   Her voice, conspiratorial and astonished, Called him across the bedroom’s drowning cube Towards the window. How well Miss Waterson   Remembers it: “Please come and look at this, Mr Devine;” the clock on the mantelpiece Rehearsing for the hour of seven. She pointed   Down. There, a moving picture on the lawn, His father, like a patient whose long months Of immobility meant learning afresh   The art of walking, climbing the light’s green slope Towards the summer house, looking intently As though for a cuff link or a signature.   That evening he still thinks of, lying now, No longer needing lessons for his legs, How he cast back his glance and saw the windows   Blazing like cats’ eyes on his uselessness, And in that golden mirror, two gold figures Recording him, two shadows of dark gold—   Miss Waterson (was it?) and another one— And then took out his watch on which the hands Were so meticulously assembling seven.   Young Emily, appointed just the week Before, came rushing to the stairs—she’d seen Him stumble—to advise Mr Devine   About his father’s fall. And so, almost Immobilized herself in that clinging syrup, She observed the hall clock’s quaint rendition of   Seven, the time set clearly in his mind Like summer herbs in aspic, as the chimes Were striking. Then the squeaking of his shoes’   Black leather tread, pacing those measures down The corridor, where sunset’s apricot Was oozing nectar through the open doors.   Her voice, companionable but astonished, Floated across the bedroom’s drowning cube As he descended. How well Miss Waterson   Remembers it: “Please come and look at this;” And Emily, who had just been taken on That week, came rushing to the window. She pointed   Down, smartly on the stroke of seven. There, A moving picture on the lawn, was old Mr Devine, like a patient whose long months   Of immobility meant learning afresh The art of walking, climbing the light’s green slope Abstractedly towards the rose garden.   That evening he still thinks of, lying now, No longer needing lessons for his legs, How he cast back his glance and saw the windows   Glaring like cats’ eyes on his helplessness, And in that golden mirror, two gold figures Gesticulating, two shadows of dark gold—   The new girl (was it?) and another one— And then took out his watch on which the hands Were so laboriously assembling seven.   Miss Waterson, with Emily behind her In a panic, dashed to the stairs to find Mr Devine, anxious to let him know   About his father’s fall. And there they saw him, Almost immobile in that clinging syrup, And heard the hall clock’s muffled tolling of   Seven, the time set firmly in his mind . . .
What images could yet suggest their range of tender colours, thick as old brocade, or shot silk or flowers on a dress where black and rose and lime seem to caress the red that starts to shimmer as they fade?   Like something half-remembered from a dream they come from places we have never seen.   They chatter and they squawk and sometimes scream.   Here the macaw clings at the rings to show the young galahs talking as they feed with feathers soft and pink as dawn on snow that it too has a dry and dusky tongue. Their murmuring embraces every need from languid vanity to wildest greed.   In the far corner sit two smoky crones their heads together in a kind of love. One cleans the other’s feathers while it moans. The others seem to whisper behind fans while noble dandies gamble in a room asserting values everyone rejects.   A lidded eye observes, and it reflects.   The peacocks still pretend they own the yard.   For all the softness, how the beaks are hard.
The sun met the moon at the corner  noon in thin air   Commotion you later  choose to notice   Love shapes the heart  that once was pieces   You take in hand  the heart in mind   Your fate’s consistent  alongside mine   Unless a mess  your best guess   That is right, thanks, the intimate  fact that you elect it   At corners, dressed or naked, with lips taste   full body, time thick or thin, fixated   Love, take heart  as heart takes shape   And recognition  ceases to be obscure   One line down the center  another flying outward enters
The Professor and Ginger are standing in the space in front of the Skipper’s cabin. The Professor is wearing deck shoes, brushed denim jeans, and a white shirt open at the throat. Ginger is wearing spike heels, false eyelashes, and a white satin kimono. The Professor looks at her with veiled lust in his eyes. He raises an articulate eyebrow and addresses her as Cio-Cio-San. Ginger blanches and falls on her knife.   * * *   Meanwhile it is raining in northern California. In a tiny village on the coast, Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are totally concerned. They realize that something terrible is happening. Each has been savagely attacked by a wild songbird within the last twenty-four hours. Outside their window thousands of birds have gathered in anticipation of the famous school- yard scene. Tippi Hedren is wearing a colorful lipstick.   * * *   Ginger stares back at the Professor. His sullen good looks are the perfect foil for her radiant smile. The Skipper and Gilligan come into sight. The Skipper has been chasing Gilligan around the lagoon for a long time now. Gilligan holds onto his hat in the stupid way he has of doing things like that. The Professor’s lips part in a sneer of perfect contempt. Ginger bares her teeth, as if in appreciation.   * * *   Jackie Kennedy bares her teeth. Behind and above her, the muzzle of a high-powered rifle protrudes from a window. A little man is aiming at Jackie Kennedy’s husband. The man is wearing bluejeans and a white T-shirt. There isn’t a bird to be seen. As he squeezes the trigger, the little man mutters between clenched teeth, “Certs is a candy mint.” The hands of Jackie Kennedy’s husband jerk automatically toward his head.   * * *   The Professor is noticing Ginger’s breasts. He thinks of the wife he left at home, who probably thinks he’s dead. He thinks of his mother, and all of the women he has ever known. Mr. and Mrs. Howell are asleep in their hut, secure in their little lives as character actors. Ginger shifts her weight to the other foot. The intensity of the moment reminds the Professor of a Japanese city before the end of the war.   * * *   In his mind he goes down each aisle in his government class, focusing on each face, each body. He is lying on his bed with his white shirt off and his trousers open. Dorothy Kirsten’s voice fills the room. He settles on a boy who sits two desks behind him. He begins to masturbate, his body moving in time with the sad music. At moments like these he feels farthest away. As he shoots, his lips part and he bares his teeth.   * * *   The Professor and Ginger are watching each other across the narrow space. The Skipper and Gilligan have disappeared down the beach. The Howells are quietly snoring. The Professor and Ginger are alone. From the woods comes the sound of strange birds. From the water comes a thick and eerie tropical silence. The famous conversation scene is about to start. Clouds appear in the sky, and it begins to snow.
Talking to my friend Emily, whose drinking patterns and extravagance of personal feeling are a lot like mine, I’m pretty convinced when she explains the things we do while drinking (a cocktail to celebrate the new account turns into a party that lasts till 3 a.m. and a terrific hangover) indicate a problem of a sort I’d not considered. I’ve been worried about how I metabolize the sauce for four years, since my second bout of hepatitis, when I kissed all the girls at Christmas dinner and turned bright yellow Christmas night, but never about whether I could handle it. It’s been more of a given, the stage set for my life as an artistic queer, as much of a tradition in these New York circles as incense for Catholics or German shepherds for the blind. We re-enact the rituals, and our faces, like smoky icons in a certain light, seem to learn nothing but understand all. It comforts me yet isn’t all that pleasant, like drinking Ripple to remember high school. A friend of mine has been drinking in the same bar for decades, talking to the same types, but progressively fewer blonds. Joe LeSueur says he’s glad to have been a young man in the Fifties with his Tab Hunter good looks, because that was the image men desired; now it’s the Puerto Rican angel with great eyes and a fierce fidelity that springs out of machismo, rather than a moral choice. His argument is pretty convincing, too, except lots of the pretty blonds I’ve known default by dying young, leaving the field to the swarthy. Cameron Burke, the dancer and waiter at Magoo’s, killed on his way home from the Pines when a car hit his bike on the Sunrise Highway. Henry Post dead of AIDS, a man I thought would be around forever, surprising me by his mortality the way I was surprised when I heard he was not the grandson of Emily Post at all, just pretending, like the friend he wrote about in Playgirl, Blair Meehan, was faking when he crashed every A List party for a year by pretending to be Kay Meehan’s son, a masquerade that ended when a hostess told him “Your mother’s here” and led him by the hand to the dowager—Woman, behold thy son—underneath a darkening conviction that all, if not wrong, was not right. By now Henry may have faced the same embarrassment at some cocktail party in the sky. Stay as outrageously nasty as you were. And Patrick Mack, locked into memory as he held court in the Anvil by the downstairs pinball machine, and writhing as he danced in Lita Hornick’s parlor when the Stimulators played her party, dead last week of causes I don’t know, as if the cause and not the effect were the problem. My blond friend Chuck Shaw refers to the Bone- crusher in the Sky, and I’m starting to imagine a road to his castle lit by radiant heads of blonds on poles as streetlamps for the gods, flickering on at twilight as I used to do in the years when I crashed more parties and acted more outrageously and met more beauties and made more enemies than ever before or ever again, I pray. It’s spring and there’s another crop of kids with haircuts from my childhood and inflated self-esteem from my arrival in New York, who plug into the history of prettiness, convincing to themselves and the devout. We who are about to catch the eye of someone new salute as the cotillion passes, led by blonds and followed by the rest of us, a formal march to the dark edge of the ballroom where we step out onto the terrace and the buds of the forsythia that hides the trash sprout magically at our approach. I toast it as memorial to dreams as fragile and persistent as a blond in love. My clothes smell like the smoky bar, but the sweetness of the April air’s delicious when I step outside and fill my lungs, leaning my head back in a first-class seat on the shuttle between the rowdy celebration of the great deeds to come and an enormous Irish wake in which the corpses change but the party goes on forever.
Which are the magic moments in ordinary time? All of them, for those who can see. That is what redemption means, I decide at the meeting. Then walk with David wearing his new Yale T-shirt and new long hair to 103. Leonard and Eileen come, too. Leonard wears a shark’s tooth on a chain around his neck and long blond hair. These days he’s the manager of Boots and Saddles (“Bras and Girdles,” my beloved Bobby used to say) and costumer for the Gay Cable Network’s Dating Game. One week the announcer is a rhinestone cowboy, sequin shirt and black fur chaps, the next a leatherman, etc. Eileen’s crewcut makes her face light up. Underneath our hairstyles, 23 years of sobriety, all told— the age of a girl who’s “not so young but not so very old,” wrote Berryman, who flew from his recovery with the force of a poet hitting bottom. It’s not the way I choose to go out of this restaurant or day today, and I have a choice. Wanda the comedian comes over to our table. “Call me wicked Wanda,” she smirks when we’re introduced. Why is New York City awash in stand-up comics at the least funny point in its history? Still, some things stay the same. People wonder what the people in their buildings would think if the ones who were wondering became incredibly famous, as famous as Madonna. Debby Harry lived in Eileen’s building in the Village in the early seventies, and she was just the shy girl in the band upstairs. Poets read the writing of their friends, and are happy when they like it thoroughly, when the work’s that good and the crippling sense of competition stays away. Trips get planned: David home to California, Eileen to New Mexico, Chris and I to France and Spain, on vectors which will spread out from a single point, like ribs of an umbrella. Then after the comfort of a wedge of blueberry peach pie and cup of Decaf, sober friends thread separate ways home through the maze of blankets on the sidewalk covered with the scraps of someone else’s life. Mine consists of understanding that the magic isn’t something that I make, but something that shines through the things I make and do and say the way a brooch or scrap of fabric shines from the detritus to catch Leonard’s eye and be of use for costumes, when I am fearless and thorough enough to give it room, all the room there is in ordinary time, which embraces all the people and events and hopes that choke the street tonight and still leaves room for everyone and everything and every other place, the undescribed and indescribable, more various and cacophonous than voice can tell or mind conceive, and for the sky’s vast depths from which they’re all a speck of light.
I'm at a double wake in Springfield, for a childhood friend and his father who died years ago. I join my aunt in the queue of mourners and walk into a brown study, a sepia room with books and magazines. The father's in a coffin; he looks exhumed, the worse for wear. But where my friend's remains should be there's just the empty base of an urn. Where are his ashes? His mother hands me a paper cup with pills: leucovorin, Zovirax, and AZT. "Henry wanted you to have these," she sneers. "Take all you want, for all the good they'll do." "Dlugos. Meester Dlugos." A lamp snaps on. Raquel, not Welch, the chubby nurse, is standing by my bed. It's 6 a.m., time to flush the heplock and hook up the I.V. line. False dawn is changing into day, infusing the sky above the Hudson with a flush of light. My roommate stirs beyond the pinstriped curtain. My first time here on G-9, the AIDS ward, the cheery D & D Building intentionality of the decor made me feel like jumping out a window. I'd been lying on a gurney in an E.R. corridor for nineteen hours, next to a psychotic druggie with a voice like Abbie Hoffman's. He was tied up, or down, with strips of cloth (he'd tried to slug a nurse) and sent up a grating adenoidal whine all night. "Nurse . . . nurse . . . untie me, please . . . these rags have strange powers." By the time they found a bed for me, I was in no mood to appreciate the clever curtains in my room, the same fabric exactly as the drapes and sheets of a P-town guest house in which I once—partied? stayed? All I can remember is the pattern. Nor did it help to have the biggest queen on the nursing staff clap his hands delightedly and welcome me to AIDS-land. I wanted to drop dead immediately. That was the low point. Today these people are my friends, in the process of restoring me to life a second time. I can walk and talk and breathe simultaneously now. I draw a breath and sing "Happy Birthday" to my roommate Joe. He's 51 today. I didn't think he'd make it. Three weeks ago they told him that he had aplastic anemia, and nothing could be done. Joe had been a rotten patient, moaning operatically, throwing chairs at nurses. When he got the bad news, there was a big change. He called the relatives with whom he had been disaffected, was anointed and communicated for the first time since the age of eight when he was raped by a priest, and made a will. As death drew nearer, Joe grew nicer, almost serene. Then the anemia began to disappear, not because of medicines, but on its own. Ready to die, it looks like Joe has more of life to go. He'll go home soon. "When will you get out of here?" he asks me. I don't know; when the X-ray shows no more pneumonia. I've been here three weeks this time. What have I accomplished? Read some Balzac, spent "quality time" with friends, come back from death's door, and prayed, prayed a lot. Barry Bragg, a former lover of a former lover and a new Episcopalian, has AIDS too, and gave me a leatherbound and gold-trimmed copy of the Office, the one with all the antiphons. My list of daily intercessions is as long as a Russian novel. I pray about AIDS last. Last week I made a list of all my friends who've died or who are living and infected. Every day since, I've remembered someone I forgot to list. This morning it was Chasen Gaver, the performance poet from DC. I don't know if he's still around. I liked him and could never stand his poetry, which made it difficult to be a friend, although I wanted to defend him one excruciating night at a Folio reading, where Chasen snapped his fingers and danced around spouting frothy nonsense about Andy Warhol to the rolling eyes of self-important "language- centered" poets, whose dismissive attitude and ugly manners were worse by far than anything that Chasen ever wrote. Charles was his real name; a classmate at Antioch dubbed him "Chasen," after the restaurant, I guess. Once I start remembering, so much comes back. There are forty-nine names on my list of the dead, thirty-two names of the sick. Cookie Mueller changed lists Saturday. They all will, I guess, the living, I mean, unless I go before them, in which case I may be on somebody’s list myself. It’s hard to imagine so many people I love dying, but no harder than to comprehend so many already gone. My beloved Bobby, maniac and boyfriend. Barry reminded me that he had sex with Bobby on the coat pile at this Christmas party, two years in a row. That’s the way our life together used to be, a lot of great adventures. Who’ll remember Bobby’s stories about driving in his debutante date’s father’s white Mercedes from hole to hole of the golf course at the poshest country club in Birmingham at 3 a.m., or taking off his clothes in the redneck bar on a dare, or working on Stay Hungry as the dresser of a then- unknown named Schwarzenegger. Who will be around to anthologize his purple cracker similes: “Sweatin’ like a nigger on Election Day,” “Hotter than a half-fucked fox in a forest fire.” The ones that I remember have to do with heat, Bobby shirtless, sweating on the dance floor of the tiny bar in what is now a shelter for the indigent with AIDS on the dockstrip, stripping shirts off Chuck Shaw, Barry Bragg and me, rolling up the tom rags, using them as pom-poms, then bolting off down West Street, gracefully (despite the overwhelming weight of his inebriation) vaulting over trash cans as he sang, “I like to be in America” in a Puerto Rican accent. When I pass, who’ll remember, who will care about these joys and wonders? I’m haunted by that more than by the faces of the dead and dying. A speaker crackles near my bed and nurses streak down the corridor. The black guy on the respirator next door bought the farm, Maria tells me later, but only when I ask. She has tears in her eyes. She’d known him since his first day on G-9 a long time ago. Will I also become a fond, fondly regarded regular, back for stays the way retired retiring widowers return to the hotel in Nova Scotia or Provence where they vacationed with their wives? I expect so, although that’s down the road; today’s enough to fill my plate. A bell rings, like the gong that marks the start of a fight. It’s 10 and Derek’s here to make the bed, Derek who at 16 saw Bob Marley’s funeral in the football stadium in Kingston, hot tears pouring down his face. He sings as he folds linens, “You can fool some of the people some of the time,” dancing a little softshoe as he works. There’s a reason he came in just now; Divorce Court drones on Joe’s TV, and Derek is hooked. I can’t believe the script is plausible to him, Jamaican hipster that he is, but he stands transfixed by the parade of faithless wives and screwed-up husbands. The judge is testy; so am I, unwilling auditor of drivel. Phone my friends to block it out: David, Jane and Eileen. I missed the bash for David’s magazine on Monday and Eileen’s reading last night. Jane says that Marie-Christine flew off to Marseilles where her mother has cancer of the brain, reminding me that AIDS is just a tiny fragment of life’s pain. Eileen has been thinking about Bobby, too, the dinner that we threw when he returned to New York after getting sick. Pencil-thin, disfigured by KS, he held forth with as much kinetic charm as ever. What we have to cherish is not only what we can recall of how things were before the plague, but how we each responded once it started. People have been great to me. An avalanche of love has come my way since I got sick, and not just moral support. Jaime’s on the board of PEN’s new fund for AIDS; he’s helping out. Don Windham slipped a check inside a note, and Brad Gooch got me something from the Howard Brookner Fund. Who’d have thought when we dressed up in ladies’ clothes for a night for a hoot in Brad (“June Buntt”) and Howard (“Lili La Lean”)’s suite at the Chelsea that things would have turned out this way: Howard is dead at 35, Chris Cox (“Kay Sera Sera”)’s friend Bill gone too, “Bernadette of Lourdes” (guess who) with AIDS, God knows how many positive. Those 14th Street wigs and enormous stingers and Martinis don’t provoke nostalgia for a time when love and death were less inextricably linked, but for the stories we would tell the morning after, best when they involved our friends, second-best, our heroes. J.J. Mitchell was master of the genre. When he learned he had AIDS, I told him he should write them down. His mind went first. I’ll tell you one of his best. J.J. was Jerome Robbins’ houseguest At Bridgehampton. Every morning they would have a contest to see who could finish the Times crossword first. Robbins always won, until a day when he was clearly baffled. Grumbling, scratching over letters, he finally threw his pen down. “J.J., tell me what I’m doing wrong.” One clue was “Great 20th-c. choreographer.” The solution was “Massine,” but Robbins had placed his own name in the space. Every word around it had been changed to try to make the puzzle work, except that answer. At this point there’d be a horsey laugh from J.J. —“Isn’t that great?” he’d say through clenched teeth (“Locust Valley lockjaw”). It was, and there were lots more where that one came from, only you can’t get there anymore. He’s dropped into the maw waiting for the G-9 denizens and for all flesh, as silent as the hearts that beat upon the beds up here: the heart of the drop- dead beautiful East Village kid who came in yesterday, Charles Frost’s heart nine inches from the spleen they’re taking out tomorrow, the heart of the demented girl whose screams roll down the hallways late at night, hearts that long for lovers, for reprieve, for old lives, for another chance. My heart, so calm most days, sinks like a brick to think of all that heartache. I’ve been staying sane with program tools, turning everything over to God “as I understand him.” I don’t understand him. Thank God I read so much Calvin last spring; the absolute necessity of blind obedience to a sometimes comforting, sometimes repellent, always incomprehensible Source of light and life stayed with me. God can seem so foreign, a parent from another country, like my Dad and his own father speaking Polish in the kitchen. I wouldn’t trust a father or a God too much like me, though. That is why I pack up all my cares and woes, and load them on the conveyor belt, the speed of which I can’t control, like Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times or Lucy on TV. I don’t need to run machines today. I’m standing on a moving sidewalk headed for the dark or light, whatever’s there. Duncan Hannah visits, and we talk of out-of-body experiences. His was amazing. Bingeing on vodka in his dorm at Bard, he woke to see a naked boy in fetal posture on the floor. Was it a corpse, a classmate, a pickup from the blackout of the previous night? Duncan didn’t know. He struggled out of bed, walked over to the youth, and touched his shoulder. The boy turned; it was Duncan himself. My own experience was milder, don’t make me flee screaming from the room as Duncan did. It happened on a Tibetan meditation weekend at the Cowley Fathers’ house in Cambridge. Michael Koonsman led it, healer whose enormous paws directed energy. He touched my spine to straighten up my posture, and I gasped at the rush. We were chanting to Tara, goddess of compassion and peace, in the basement chapel late at night. I felt myself drawn upward, not levitating physically, but still somehow above my body. A sense of bliss surrounded me. It lasted ten or fifteen minutes. When I came down, my forehead hurt. The spot where the “third eye” appears in Buddhist art felt as though someone had pushed a pencil through it. The soreness lasted for a week. Michael wasn’t surprised. He did a lot of work with people with AIDS in the epidemic’s early days but when he started losing weight and having trouble with a cough, he was filled with denial. By the time he checked into St. Luke’s, he was in dreadful shape. The respirator down his throat squelched the contagious enthusiasm of his voice, but he could still spell out what he wanted to say on a plastic Ouija board beside his bed. When the doctor who came in to tell him the results of his bronchoscopy said, “Father, I’m afraid I have bad news,” Michael grabbed the board and spelled, “The truth is always Good News.” After he died, I had a dream in which I was a student in a class that he was posthumously teaching. With mock annoyance he exclaimed, “Oh, Tim! I can’t believe you really think that AIDS is a disease!” There’s evidence in that direction, I’ll tell him if the dream recurs: the shiny hamburger-in-lucite look of the big lesion on my face; the smaller ones I daub with makeup; the loss of forty pounds in a year; the fatigue that comes on at the least convenient times. The symptoms float like algae on the surface of the grace that buoys me up today. Arthur comes in with the Sacrament, and we have to leave the room (Joe’s Italian family has arrived for birthday cheer) to find some quiet. Walk out to the breezeway, where it might as well be August for the stifling heat. On Amsterdam, pedestrians and drivers are oblivious to our small aerie, as we peer through the grille like cloistered nuns. Since leaving G-9 the first time, I always slow my car down on this block, and stare up at this window, to the unit where my life was saved. It’s strange how quickly hospitals feel foreign when you leave, and how normal their conventions seem as soon as you check in. From below, it’s like checking out the windows of the West Street Jail; hard to imagine what goes on there, even if you know firsthand. The sun is going down as I receive communion. I wish the rite’s familiar magic didn’t dull my gratitude for this enormous gift. I wish I had a closer personal relationship with Christ, which I know sounds corny and alarming. Janet Campbell gave me a remarkable ikon the last time I was here; Christ is in a chair, a throne, and St. John the Divine, an androgyne who looks a bit like Janet, rests his head upon the Savior’s shoulder. James Madden, priest of Cowley, dead of cancer earlier this year at 39, gave her the image, telling her not to be afraid to imitate St. John. There may come a time when I’m unable to respond with words, or works, or gratitude to AIDS; a time when my attitude caves in, when I’m as weak as the men who lie across the dayroom couches hour after hour, watching sitcoms, drawing blanks. Maybe my head will be shaved and scarred from surgery; maybe I’ll be pencil- thin and paler than a ghost, pale as the vesper light outside my window now. It would be good to know that I could close my eyes and lean my head back on his shoulder then, as natural and trusting as I’d be with a cherished love. At this moment, Chris walks in, Christopher Earl Wiss of Kansas City and New York, my lover, my last lover, my first healthy and enduring relationship in sobriety, the man with whom I choose to share what I have left of life and time. This is the hardest and happiest moment of the day. G-9 is no place to affirm a relationship. Two hours in a chair beside my bed after eight hours of work night after night for weeks … it’s been a long haul, and Chris gets tired. Last week he exploded, “I hate this, I hate your being sick and having AIDS and lying in a hospital where I can only see you with a visitor’s pass. I hate that this is going to get worse.” I hate it, too. We kiss, embrace, and Chris climbs into bed beside me, to air-mattress squeaks. Hold on. We hold on to each other, to a hope of how we’ll be when I get out. Let him hold on, please don’t let him lose his willingness to stick with me, to make love and to make love work, to extend the happiness we’ve shared. Please don’t let AIDS make me a monster or a burden is my prayer. Too soon, Chris has to leave. I walk him to the elevator bank, then totter back so Raquel can open my I.V. again. It’s not even mid-evening, but I’m nodding off. My life’s so full, even (especially?) when I’m here on G-9. When it’s time to move on to the next step, that will be a great adventure, too. Helena Hughes, Tibetan Buddhist, tells me that there are three stages in death. The first is white, like passing through a thick but porous wall. The second stage is red; the third is black; and then you’re finished, ready for the next event. I’m glad she has a road map, but I don’t feel the need for one myself. I’ve trust enough in all that’s happened in my life, the unexpected love and gentleness that rushes in to fill the arid spaces in my heart, the way the city glow fills up the sky above the river, making it seem less than night. When Joe O’Hare flew in last week, he asked what were the best times of my New York years; I said “Today,” and meant it. I hope that death will lift me by the hair like an angel in a Hebrew myth, snatch me with the strength of sleep’s embrace, and gently set me down where I’m supposed to be, in just the right place.
The city and the continent trail off into cold black water the same way: at the western edge, a flat stretch with precipitous planes set perpendicular and back from the beach or beach-equivalent, a blacktop margin where the drugged and dying trudge, queue up for Hades. Bolinas had its junkie lady with gray skin, gray sweater, stumbling through the sand with the short- burst intensity and long-run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. I’d huddle at the foot of the cliff in a cold wind late at night, wrapped in Indian blankets, waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit. Tonight I walk with old friends in a new dream past a vest-pocket park of great formality and charm in the far West Village. My disaffected former confidant has grown a pony tail and cruises up the street on a “hog,” a “chopper,” which seems a perfect locomotive choice. I walk out to the quay where gondola after enormous gondola departs for “the other side,” not New Jersey anymore, anymore than something prosaic as another mass of land past the bright horizon could function as a mirror of the chopped-away Bolinas hill. O western edge, where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a depth unfathomable even in a dream, I had thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, not to hone and polish with the lapping of the hungry waves of Lethe.
The Bergman image of a game of chess with Death, though not in a dreamscape black-and-white as melancholy films clanking with symbols, but in a garden in Provence with goldfish in the fountain and enormous palms whose topmost fronds cut into the eternal blue of sky above the Roman ruins and the dusty streets where any door may lead to life’s most perfect meal: that is what I think of when I remember I have AIDS. But when I think of how AIDS kills my friends, especially the ones whose paths through life have least prepared them to resist the monster, I think of an insatiable and prowling beast with razor teeth and a persistent stink that sticks to every living branch of flower its rank fur brushes as it stalks its prey. I think of that disgusting animal eating my beautiful friends, innocent as baby deer. Dwight: so delicate and vain, his spindly arms and legs pinned down with needles, pain of tubes and needles, his narrow chest inflated by machine, his mind lost in the seven-minute gap between the respirator’s failure and the time the nurses noticed something wrong. I wrapped my limbs around that fragile body for the first time seven years ago, in a cheap hotel by the piers, where every bit of his extravagant wardrobe—snakeskin boots, skin-tight pedal pushers in a leopard print, aviator’s scarves, and an electric- green capacious leather jacket— lay wrapped in a corner of his room in a yellow parachute. It's hard enough to find a parachute in New York City, I remember thinking, but finding one the right shade of canary is the accomplishment of the sort of citizen with whom I wish to populate my life. Dwight the dancer, Dwight the fashion illustrator and the fashion plate, Dwight the child, the borderline transvestite, Dwight the frightened, infuriating me because an anti-AZT diatribe by some eccentric in a rag convinced him not to take the pills with which he might still be alive, Dwight on the runway, Dwight on the phone suggesting we could still have sex if we wore “raincoats,” Dwight screwing a girl from Massapequa in the ladies’ room at Danceteria (he wore more makeup and had better jewelry than she did), Dwight planning the trip to London or Berlin where he would be discovered and his life transformed. Dwight erased, evicted from his own young body. Dwight dead. At Bellevue, I wrapped my arms around his second skin of gauze and scars and tubing, brushed my hand against his plats, and said goodbye. I hope I’m not the one who loosed the devouring animal that massacred you, gentle boy. You didn’t have a clue to how you might stave off the beast. I feel so confident most days that I can stay alive, survive and thrive with AIDS. But when I see Dwight smile and hear his fey delighted voice inside my head, I know AIDS is no chess game but a hunt, and there is no way of escaping the bloody horror of the kill, no way to bail out, no bright parachute beside my bed.
“You knew who I was when I walked in the door. You thought that I was dead. Well, I am dead. A man can walk and talk and even breathe and still be dead.” Edmond O’Brien is perspiring and chewing up the scenery in my favorite film noir, D.O.A. I can’t stop watching, can’t stop relating. When I walked down Columbus to Endicott last night to pick up Tor’s new novel, I felt the eyes of every Puerto Rican teen, crackhead, yuppie couple focus on my cane and makeup. “You’re dead,” they seemed to say in chorus. Somewhere in a dark bar years ago, I picked up “luminous poisoning.” My eyes glowed as I sipped my drink. After that, there was no cure, no turning back. I had to find out what was gnawing at my gut. The hardest part’s not even the physical effects: stumbling like a drunk (Edmond O’Brien was one of Hollywood’s most active lushes) through Forties sets, alternating sweats and fevers, reptilian spots on face and scalp. It’s having to say goodbye like the scene where soundtrack violins go crazy as O’Brien gives his last embrace to his girlfriend-cum-Girl Friday, Paula, played by Pamela Britton. They’re filmdom’s least likely lovers—the squat and jowly alkie and the homely fundamentally talentless actress who would hit the height of her fame as the pillhead- acting landlady on My Favorite Martian fifteen years in the future. I don’t have fifteen years, and neither does Edmond O’Brien. He has just enough time to tell Paula how much he loves her, then to drive off in a convertible for the showdown with his killer. I’d like to have a showdown too, if I could figure out which pistol-packing brilliantined and ruthless villain in a hound’s-tooth overcoat took my life. Lust, addiction, being in the wrong place at the wrong time? That’s not the whole story. Absolute fidelity to the truth of what I felt, open to the moment, and in every case a kind of love: all of the above brought me to this tottering self-conscious state—pneumonia, emaciation, grisly cancer, no future, heart of gold, passionate engagement with a great B film, a glorious summer afternoon in which to pick up the ripest plum tomatoes of the year and prosciutto for the feast I’ll cook tonight for the man I love, phone calls from my friends and a walk to the park, ignoring stares, to clear my head. A day like any, like no other. Not so bad for the dead.
It’s possible I misconstrued you,   laid too much emphasis on the uniqueness of a birth, failed to acknowledge circumstance could corrupt, sustain; I indulged myself in accusations against an absolute.   I don’t believe what I then believed. You are not responsible   for Leibniz or the Lisbon quake, for the twenty-six-eyed and sixty-arsed box jellyfish, that the cosmos is shaped like a soccer ball; or for the dosido of right and wrong around the garden bed.   You are not the monster I thought you were,   not by definition or necessity the one immutable. You are a creator caught in a creator’s net, in fact a creature. Every horror has its own pathology,   the disease infects the flock. Prey present as predators,  the malefactors replicate even as the angels experiment with cures. Each encounter pulls against reductive story, says I will not, I am just (an instant, an instance),   and reference skews on maps not drawn to scale.   I know saintliness exists. It’s all around me. My next door neighbours in their simple modesty, the lady down the street who is always helping someone older than herself. Even the slow judicial process conceives it natural to be better than we are. I’m trying to shoo the gloomy birds away   but crows repeat about me on the lawn; and the vulture and the kite, the cuckoo and the owl: should I have given up the ghost when I was drawn from the womb?
I can’t get my head around it. How did we devise   a concept like just war: the slain of the Lordare dung upon the ground. I know there are distinctions it is important to make and I don’t expect perfection but the chicanery of subtle thought . . . if I pick it all apart will anything be left to sew back into sense?   Cleverer minds are reconciled. Cultured, poised, the government official (Should I give him spectacles? Should they reflect the light?) pauses and replies:The President regrets . . . but consider the alternative … would you offer succour… and I can almost understand.   I sleep with reason as my lover, wake beside a monster in my bed. I fumble beneath the mask, shape my lips to the prospect of a kill, feel your thigh against my rump, your fingers at my throat.   Oh, Rakosi, I’m still strumming on my lyre. Is there really so much wrong with that? I’m embarrassed   by the flimsiness of my resolve, the silliness of saints and monsters, conversations with a being who can’t plausibly exist, this mockery of flagellation: this is my defective heart, this my amputated foot, this the bandage from around my head. A monster dies in the middle of his trial, another denies the power of the court, two more evade arrest: in politic’s parlour game, each day annuls the last.   9/11, I say, and Afghanistan, Bali and Iraq, but I can’t fix a year to each event, what is, what well might be, are steam against a bathroom mirror: I see bits, an eye but not its double, the other ear,   a chin that lacks a jawbone for support.
How do we know Eve and Adam were happy,  deprived, as they were, of a childhood?   Eve never knew, unlike Adam, a world that was free of the chatter of others.’   How did she cope? And how could she choose, if she’d wanted, to live by herself?   What did the man eat that made him hear voices, while Eve was inventing frustration?   Where could she go for a break from the sound of Himself, in his skin suit, like Tarzan,   assuring the bush that he’d just given birth to a woman? Did she smile at the fool, or remind him that he was   asleep when she turned up and found him? Where could she go to be shot of his need for a mother?   (A pity she woke him.) Life for them both was a training film shown in real time,   on the zen of zoo-keeping. When the encyclopedia seller arrived, who could blame her for buying?   No exit pollster asked how she felt when she left at the end of the movie.
A man began to eat his order of fish, and the ghost of the fish arose and spoke. Forgive me, it said, please hear me. I died in despair, which is, as you know, the worst of the deadly sins. As I slowly suffocated in the alien air, I gave up hope of salvation, and so died without the consolation of religion. In your compassion and mercy, have a Mass said for me, and pray for my soul. With that, the ghost of the fish vanished, and the man, congratulating himself on possessing the carcass of such a remorseful creature, tucked in.
In the real world  lovers part at morning with a kiss and look back longingly before they pass from sight.   They go insouciant to work and smile at times; their life’s Vivaldi.   Others bring what poetry they can into a life by counting days until employment comes again. They look at cherries in the fruit store and imagine biting in. They look so good.   Children break from singing in the drill hall, burst outside to toss their frisbees in the park. A boy plays Satie on the piano; two Americans embrace as traffic whispers up the drive. They are embarking for the real world’s farthest shore.   In the real world someone signs petitions every moment, tidies other people’s trash and greets another who is loved by someone else. This is how the real world copes with being economics, mathematics and ecology and botany and waiting for the bus.   Costumed people earn their living slipping from the real world to persuade us to buy moon-cakes, supple skin and perfect hair. We smile to see them aping us.  Gymnorhina tibicen swoops low and boasts her turf: the children run and shout out, ‘Magpie’ while the bird recalls the day in mimic song; order then restored, she dines alfresco on their scraps.   And while we watch Magritte’s sky turn El Greco, roofs de Chirico beneath the plastic clouds, a plane is pasted on a sudden patch of blue.
Un seul verre d’eau éclaire le monde Cocteau Behind the wedding couple, a mirror harbours  their reception. Outside, from the verandah, the harbour mirrors the exception of city from sky, hills snug with houses and a glass of water standing on the railing, half empty or half full. In the failing afternoon light brightening buildings counterpoint the darkness, glinting upside- down inside the glass, and the newly-weds, seen from outside joining hand to hand for the wedding reel, glide under its meniscus, head over heels.
for Ben Fenton-Smith None are more familiar with dew  than professional footballers. From early grades they are used to running through  practice drills and hurling their burly frames through rucks while the moist chaff  of wet grass under the winter lights softens their fall, accustoms the half-  back to the slippery ball and writes green cuneiform on wet sandshoes.  And they fear it in the morning, kicking off the dew in the ‘twos’  because they ignored a coach’s warning. Half their lives are spent in clouds  of condensation or the cold heat of a winter sun where even the crowds  seem like droplets on the concrete rose of the stadium. In the final days  of their season , sweat-spangled on the eve of their triumph, the ball on a string and their plays  honed, even the doubters believe. And the last day is, once again,  already an aftermath: the ground’s been shaved and sucked dry by the noon sun  and the paddock has become a paved and bristled hell for those who will  collide with it and pinion flesh on earth, earth on flesh and spill  blood for the sake of the game. Possession is the law; all are possessed.  And when the crowd melts into the dry darkness, after that great red football’s  booted between the uprights of the sky- scrapers and gone, the sky bawls  cheerless little drops for the victors and decks the oval with the losers’ jewels.
The jungle, from the floor to the canopy, Clogs and entwines Its every rung and level with rank growth. The python dines Among an epiphytic gaudery And hungry vines. On the mizzled hair of the two-toed sloth Moss has designs. Yet all that climbing tonnage is content-free. The top limbs sway as though to write in air, But can’t remember what they scribble there. Through the savanna’s heat-glaze the herds pause, Ripple and shiver, Or graze hypnotically, or drop their young, Which may deliver Their wet thin steps into the lion’s jaws. By pool or river They stoop at evening side by side among The surface quiver Of their reflexions as the light withdraws: A fable set down in invisible ink; They print their shadows on the pool they drink. Even the perfect pictures in the shale’s Slow-motion traps, The filamentous feathers, which one or two Sharp hammer taps Release, the fish in their meticulous scales, The precise maps Of leaves, did not direct this rendezvous. They’re simply gaps In time, and have no part in these details. The weird wiwaxias, worms and arthropods Were empty of intention as stone gods. Once, though, a figure had the thought to crawl Out of the day Into a cave’s dark reach, its first invoker, And there to splay His hand against the tallow-glimmered wall, And pause to spray His mouth’s cargo of spittle and red ochre On the array Of his five fingers, clear, indelible: Author and content of the space displayed, The maker’s hand becoming what it made.
Be precise authority is magic. When you think you've got it straight wax wane declination feel the movement under your hand one summer morning as you observe it set then rise that night. Always use a well-sharpened pencil followed by a good eraser. Watch the white emerge.
I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known. I would like to find them. They are not on the greying paper of old books or chanted on obscure lips. They are not in the language of mermaids or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing. They run like torn threads along paving stones. They are cracked as the skull of an old man. They stir in the mirror at fifty, at eighty. My ear keeps trying to hear them but the seafront is cold. The tide moves in. They migrate like crows at a cricket ground. They knock at the door when I am out.   I have done with craft. How can I front ghosts with cleverness, the slick glide of paradox and rhyme that transforms prejudice to brittle gems of seeming wisdom?   Though I bury all I own or hold close though my skin outlives the trees though the lines fall shattering the stone I cannot catch them. They have the lilting accent of a house I saw but never entered. They are the sounds a child hears – the water, the afternoon, the sky. I watch them now trickling through the open mirror. Sometimes, but almost never we touch what we desire.
for Seamus Heaney Overture:  violins: it is all scraggy, wideawake,  ironical, decked out  in denim fatigues. Witty and welcoming,  leathery-evergreen, bemedalled with beercans, cowpat and wallaby-dung, flap,  nub,  hinge,  node, blindeye quartzite,  wafery sandstone, bright as a button subtle for mile on mile far from vulgarity  (far from sleek Europe) in its array of  furniture tonings sheeted by sunglaze  lovingly dusted, wispy and splintery, tussocky,  corduroy, all of its idiom dry as a thesis to moist outsiders: wonderfully eloquent  on its home ground, branchful of adverbs, lovingly  wombat-hued, dreamily  sheeptoned, fluted with scalloping surf and every step a joke.
God made everything out of nothing; but the nothing shows through —Paul Valéry Lost from all angles but the sun’s,  This woken morning, It clicks its brilliance into place at once, If you follow the fall of light— A spider web, head-high, adorning The woodshed’s entrance like a sheet Of gold-shot fabric, metal-tight, That, even so, one handswipe could delete, Collapsing all That spacious architecture to a tacky ball.   It brings to mind the mathematician’s Monstrous idea, The Menger sponge, where infinite excisions Out of a solid cube delete Its substance while its form stays clear: The central ninth is cut from a square; Eight smaller squares remain; repeat For each; and so on with this lattice of air: A formula For zero volume, infinite surface area.   Enough. The estuary’s slung Like gold-shot cloth Over a gulf of shifting airs. Among Cloud-drifts of beaten eggwhite floats, As though confected of such froth, The mountain. Like a Chinese screen, The fabric of the view devotes Almost all blankness to this hanging scene, This one handsweep Of water, creased like the cheek of someone roused from sleep.
Suppose I were to eat you I should probably begin with the fingers, the cheeks and the breasts yet all of you would tempt me, so powerfully spicy as to discompose my choice.   While I gobbled you up delicacy by tidbit I should lay the little bones ever so gently round my plate and caress the bigger bones like ivory talismans.   When I had quite devoured the edible you (your tongue informing my voice-box) I would wake in the groin of night to feel, ever so slowly, your plangent, ravishing ghost munching my fingers and toes.   Here, with an awkward, delicate gesture someone slides out his heart and offers it on a spoon, garnished with adjectives.
I like to lie with you wordless on black cloud rooft beach in late june 5 o’clock tempest on clump weed bed with sand fitting your contours like tailor made   and I like to wash my summer brown face in north cold hudson rapids with octagon soap  knees niched in steamy rocks  where last night’s frog stared  at our buddhist sleep   but most of all I like to see the morning happen . . .   I like to go down vertical mountains where lanny goshkitch meditated  crashing poplars  sap sticky arms flailing  as thermosed green tea  anoints sneakers  and blood soakt brow I taste and love  myself a split second   and I like to feel my own full scrotum as I horizon the whole crisp linen earth in my beatitude waiting miguel-like in maskt fantasy for christ-like you— whoever you are   but most of all I like to see the morning happen . . .   I like to look at books howl haikus of the seasons of the mind that I might know the knowing and the simplest to think of all of us taking turns at catching each other in the rye   and I like to taste cold absinthe on hot hung sunday mornings discussing orgies symposiums and sounds with hoary headed poets in upstairs jazz club in Japan   but most of all I like to see the morning happen when k and ike still sleep and only the denver night riders hum contrasts to orient jazzy feather beasts in the dewy garden of real earth where I can sink my naked feet cool
Immersed we don’t ask who entered whose stream.   Take my hand there is no line no bridge only fond foolishness—   the bread crumbs I bring you in morning—   they float on the surface water with two violins   un- strung like the silent song on your lips soft   as the same hands I crushed to keep you from death.
I   Hung up on body parts in the particulate daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body, the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No time for ballads, the table is set.   II   Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen.   III   The music is an absence of colliding masses. You can cut your feet on the proverbial and be too close to hear it, the other music, the suffocation of things that can’t fly. A beautiful cacophony flutters in the brightness of dead calm as true objects lost in the politeness of daylight fill the grail of a new primitive. You choke on little candles and all through the night your legs cramp in the sweat of the moonlight. For no good reason a tenderness of geese is billowing in the curtains, as holes in the face open and close and paper scorches sky with futile encryption. Those armchairs foundering in the scum of the surf. Deafness craving disaster green in the spine, knowing the cocktail party’s over. Now it’s all red and your lips are trembling in believability, but it’s only a flickering image in the dark quadrant of your eye bending the light as they mow the daisies under the stars, for no good reason.
Then came the darker sooner, came the later lower. We were no longer a sweeter-here happily-ever-after. We were after ever. We were farther and further. More was the word we used for harder. Lost was our standard-bearer. Our gods were fallen faster, and fallen larger. The day was duller, duller was disaster. Our charge was error. Instead of leader we had louder, instead of lover, never. And over this river broke the winter’s black weather.
1   Gently disintegrate me Said nothing at all.   Is there still time to say Said I myself lying In a bower of bramble Into which I have fallen.   Look through my eyes up At blue with not anything We could have ever arranged Slowly taking place.   Above the spires of the fox Gloves and above the bracken Tops with their young heads Recognising the wind, The armies of the empty Blue press me further Into Zennor Hill.   If I half-close my eyes The spiked light leaps in And I am here as near Happy as I will get In the sailing afternoon.      2   Enter a cloud. Between The head of Zennor and Gurnard’s Head the long Marine horizon makes A blue wall or is it A distant table-top Of the far-off simple sea.   Enter a cloud. O cloud, I see you entering from Your west gathering yourself Together into a white Headlong. And now you move And stream out of the Gurnard, The west corner of my eye.   Enter a cloud. The cloud’s Changing shape is crossing Slowly only an inch Above the line of the sea. Now nearly equidistant Between Zennor and Gurnard’s Head, an elongated White anvil is sailing Not wanting to be a symbol.      3   Said nothing at all.   And proceeds with no idea Of destination along The sea bearing changing Messages. Jean in London, Lifting a cup, looking Abstractedly out through Her Hampstead glass will never Be caught by your new shape Above the chimneys. Jean, Jean, do you not see This cloud has been thought of And written on Zennor Hill.  4 The cloud is going beyond What I can see or make. Over up-country maybe Albert Strick stops and waves Caught in the middle of teeling Broccoli for the winter. The cloud is not there yet. From Gurnard's Head to Zennor Head the level line Crosses my eyes lying On buzzing Zennor Hill. The cloud is only a wisp And gone behind the Head. It is funny I got the sea's Horizontal slightly surrealist. Now when I raise myself Out of the bracken I see The long empty blue Between the fishing Gurnard And Zennor. It was a cloud The language at my time's Disposal made use of.  5 Thank you. And for your applause. It has been a pleasure. I Have never enjoyed speaking more. May I also thank the real ones Who have made this possible. First, the cloud itself. And now Gurnard's Head and Zennor Head. Also recognise How I have been helped By Jean and Madron's Albert Strick (He is a real man.) And good words like brambles, Bower, spiked, fox, anvil, teeling. The bees you heard are from A hive owned by my friend Garfield down there below In the house by Zennor Church. The good blue sun is pressing Me into Zennor Hill. Gently disintegrate me Said nothing at all.
A single bed. A single room. I sing Of man alone on the skew surface of life. No kith, no kin, no cat, no kid, no wife, No Frigidaire, no furniture, no ring.   Yes, but the perfect state of weightlessness Is a vacuum the natural mind abhors: The strait bed straightway magnetizes whores; The bare room, aching, itches to possess.   Thus I no sooner shut the tan tin door Behind me than I am at once at home. Will I, nill I, a budget pleasure dome Will rear itself in Suite R-34.   A pleasure dome of Klees and Watteaus made, Of chairs and couches from the Fair Exchange, Of leavings from the previous rich and strange Tenant, of fabrics guaranteed to fade.   Here I will entertain the young idea Of Cambridge, wounded, winsome, and sardonic; Here I will walk the uttermost euphonic Marches of English, where no lines are clear.   Here I will take the interchangeable Parts of ephemerid girls to fit my bed; Here death will first enter my freshman head On a visitor’s passport, putting one tangible   Word in my mouth, a capsule for the day When I will be evicted from my home Suite home so full of life and damned to roam Bodiless and without a thing to say.Footnote: Mrs. Circassian An orphan home. But into this eclectic Mass of disasters sails Mrs. Circassian, Maid without parallel, queen beyond question Of household gods, gas and electric.   She puts the room right with a basilisk Look, pats it into shape like a pillow; Under her hard hand, the Chinese willow Learns how to live with an abstraction. Risk   All and win all is her maiden motto, Which makes mere matter fall into its place, Dress right and form platoons to save its face, And suffers Pollock to lie down with Watteau.
I. Riverside Drive, 1929   “ ‘Good-by, Ralph. It should end some other way. Not this,’ Corinna said. ‘Now go away.’ No. Rhymes. It’s ludicrous. Try ‘Dear, good-by.’ No. Repetitious. Maybe ‘Dear, farewell.’ No. Stagy. Out of character. Oh, hell. Time for a drink.” The Smith-Corona heaves As he retracts his knickerbockered knees To rise. Outside, a southbound tug receives The sun broadside, and the bold Linit sign Pales on the Jersey shore. Fresh gin, tk-tk- Tk-tk-tk-tk, quite clearly fills his glass Half full from the unlabelled bottle. Now His boyish fingers grip the siphon’s worn Wire basketweave and press the trigger down To utter soda water. One long sip Subtracts a third of it for carrying. On the way back, he pauses at the door Beside his football picture, where a snore Attests that all is well and promises Him time to work. To work: before the tall, Black, idle typewriter, before the small Black type elitely inching on the blank White sea of bond, he quails and takes a drink. First, demolitions: the slant shilling mark Defaces half a hundred characters With killing strike-overs. Now, a new start: “ ‘Good-by, Ralph. I don’t know why it should end Like tihs,’ Corinna said. ‘But be my friend.’ ’’     II. Hotel Shawmut, Boston, 1946   (From a commercial travellers’ hotel, Professor S. jumped straight down into hell, While—jug-o’-rum-rum—engines made their way Beneath him, one so cold December day).   While he prepares his body, cold gears mate And chuckle in the long draught of the street. He shaves; his silver spectacles peruse An issue of The North American Muse. He uses Mum; outside him in the hall, Maids talk their language; snow begins to fall. He puts on his old clothes. The narrow room Has nothing, nothing to discuss with him Except what time you should send out your suit And shoes for cleaning. Now he stamps his foot: Outside the window, not saying anything, Appears a seagull, standing on one wing; A long-awaited colleague. With glad cry, Professor S. embraces the white sky.   While S. demolishes a taxicab, His spectacles review the life of Crabbe.   (From a commercial travellers’ hotel, Profesor S. descended into hell. But once in April in New Haven he Kissed a friend’s sister in the gloom of trees.)     III. Deus Ex Machina, Flushing, 1966   La Guardia. Knee-deep in storyboards, I line up for the shuttle, which arrives Outside the gate and off-loads shuffling streams Of transferees—each in his uniform Of sober stuff and nonsense, with a case Of talents at his side—who pass our line Of somber-suited shuttlers carrying Our cases on. Then one appears, a rare Bird in migration to New York, a bare- Crowned singer of the stony coast of Maine, And of Third Avenue in rain; a bard. The way of the almost-extinct is hard. He peers through tortoise-shelly glasses at The crowd, the place, the year. He is not here And is. In his check jacket, he describes An arc of back and arms as he proceeds Between two city starlings, carrying His store of songs in a beat leather grip And a dried drop of his brown lamb’s blood on His wilted collar. A Time-reader in Glenurquhart plaid identifies his bird— “Godwit, the poet”—to a flannel friend. The bard stalks on on his two legs, aware He has been spotted; in, I’d say, some pain At an existence which anticipates Its end and in the meantime tolerates Intolerance of the wing, the whim, the one Unanswerable voice which sings alone.     IV. Lament of the Makers, Including Me: 1967   New-minted coin, my poet’s mask (A small denomination in Demotic nickel, brass, or tin) Passes from hand to hand to hand Beyond my six acres of land. Did I desire such currency Among the meritocracy Of tri-named ladies who preserve The flame of art in mackled hands, Of universitarians And decimal librarians Who shore and store up textual Addenda, of asexual Old arbiters and referees Who startle letters with a sneeze, Of critics whose incautious cough Halts a new wave or sends it off To break on uninhabited shores, Of publishers, insensual bores Procuring art—“A maidenhead!”— To Jack the Reader, of well-read Young underfaced admirers who Impinge on undefended you At readings in all colleges? No, I did not; but knowledge is All-powerless to seek redress From injuries to innocence. I think continually of Abjurers, who, fed on self-love, Housed in an incommodious cave, Clothed in three-button sackcloth, crave Indulgence of no audience But their own laudatory ears. Alack, this anchoritic few Dwindles; these ticking times are too Struck with celebrity’s arrears, And heap past-due advances on The embryonic artisan; All hours from dawn to night are lauds, All auditors are all applause (However electronic), all Tempters conspire in Adam’s fall.   The world turned upside-down, without A beast in view, without a doubt, Recalls its exiles and bestows On them the palm, the bays, the rose (Art sick?), the Laurel Wormser Prize, Whose debased dollar only buys More nods, more goods, more fame, more praise: Not art, as in the rude old days.   Now worldward poets turn and say,Timor vitae conturbat me.
1   Nowhere is all around us, pressureless, A vacuum waiting for a rupture in The tegument, a puncture in the skin, To pass inside without a password and Implode us into Erewhon. This room Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall An empty elevator clangs its doors, Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall, Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air Outside, a trembling, empty brightness falls In hunger on those whom it would devour Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls And rises silently up the steel stairs To the eleventh and last floor, where I Reside on sufferance of authorities Until my visas wither, and I die.     2   Where is my friend, Rodonda Morton Schiff, Whose hulk breasts, cygnet-like, the Totensee, Shrilling her bosun’s whistles, piping Death— The Almirante of the Doldrums in His black cocked hat and braided cape—aboard Her scuttling vessel with such poems as just Escape confounding his gaunt rape with lust? She should be singing my song at this hour.     3   It is a simple matter to be brave In facing a black screen with a white FIN— The final title—fading out as all Credits have faded in the final crawl, To which the audience has turned its back And mumbled, shuffled, struggled into coats On its way out to face a different night; It is far harder, in the light of day, Surrounded by striped student nurses, to Endure a slight procedure in which you Are the anatomy lesson in pink paint Splashed by some master on the tinctured air, Complete, in gross detail, to the grimace Denoted by a squiggle on your face As the bone-marrow needle sinks its fang Through atomies of drugged and dullard skin And subcutaneum to pierce the thin, Tough eggshell of the pelvic arch, wherein— After steam-hammer pressure—it will suck Up sips of specimen tissue with a pain Akin to an extraction under gas, All gravity against all hollowness. Affronted and affrighted, I can’t pass This episode in silent dignity Or bloodless banter; I must sweat and grunt And moan in corporal fear of corporal pain Too venial to be mortal, making a fool Of my lay figure in its textbook pose (Fig. 1) before these starched and giggling girls Too young to be let out of simpering school To meet live terror face to face and lose.     4   Why must the young male nurse who preps the plain Of my knife-thrower’s-target abdomen With his conversant razor, talking snicks Of scything into my sedated ears, Talk also in his flat and friendly voice, So far from showdowns, on a blasé note Of reassurance, learnt by classroom rote? It is that he must make his living, too.     5   If Hell abides on earth this must be it: This too-bright-lit-at-all-hours-of-the-day- And-night recovery room, where nurses flit In stroboscopic steps between the beds All cheek by jowl that hold recoverers Suspended in the grog of half-damped pain And tubularities of light-blue light. For condiment in this mulled mix, there are Assorted groans and screams; and, lest repose Outstrip the sufferer, there is his own Throat-filling Gobi, mucous membrane gone Dry as Arabia, as barren of Hydropsy as a sunburnt cage of bone Perched on parched rocks where game Parcheesian (A devil figure, this) went, wended his Bent way to harvest, for a shekel, rugs, And pack them back by camel over sands Of nightmare to transship to richer lands Where millions of small rills plash into streams That give rise to great rivers—such wet dreams Afflict the desiccate on their interminable way Up through the layers of half-light to day.     6   The riddle of the Sphinx. Man walks on three Legs at the last. I walk on three, one of Which is a wheeled I.V. pole, when I rise From bed the first time to make my aged way Into the toilet, where, while my legs sway And the pole sways, swinging its censer high, I wait to urinate, and cannot make My mortal coils distill a drop, as time Stumps past and leaves me swaying there. Defeat: I roll and hobble back to bed, to the Refrain of cheeping wheels. Soon the young man With his snake-handler’s fist of catheters Will come to see me and supply the lack Of my drugged muscles with the gravity Of his solution, and I’ll void into A beige bag clipped to the bedside, one of The bottles, bags, and tubes I’m tethered to As a condition of continuance. The body swells until it duns the mind With importunities in this refined, White-sheeted torture, practiced by a kind, Withdrawn white face trained in the arts of love.     7   Home, and the lees of autumn scuttle up To my halt feet: fat, sportive maple leaves Struck into ochre by the frost and stripped From their umbilic cords to skate across The blacktop drive and fetch up on my shoes As if including me in their great fall, Windy with rumors of the coming ice. Though fallen, frostbit, yellowed also, I Cannot participate in their late game But must leave them to hide and seek a place To decompose in, while I clamber up Long enneads of stairs to the room where I’ll recompose myself to durance in A world of voices and surprises, for As long as Clotho draws my filament— To my now flagging wonder and applause— From indefatigable spinnerets, Until her sister widows, having set The norms for length and texture of each strand And sharpened their gross shears, come cut it off And send me to befriend the winter leaves.
(To Saul Touster) I. January 22, 1932   Could a four-year-old look out of a square sedan (A Studebaker Six in currency green With wooden artillery wheels) and see a scene Of snow, light lavender, landing on deepening blue Buildings built out of red-violet bricks, and black Passersby passing by over the widening white Streets darkening blue, under a thickening white Sky suddenly undergoing sheer twilight, And the yellow but whitening streetlights coming on, And remember it now, though the likelihood is gone That it ever happened at all, and the Village is gone That it ever could happen in? Memory, guttering out, Apparently, finally flares up and banishes doubt.     II. May 29, 1941   Tring. Bells On grocers’ boys’ bicycles ring, Followed, on cue, By the jaunty one-note of prayers at two Near churches; taxi horns, a-hunt, Come in for treble; next, the tickety bass Of chain-driven Diamond T’s, gone elephantine And stove-enamelled conifer green Down Greenwich Avenue. Out of the Earle I issue at half-past thirteen, Struck, like a floral clock, By seasonal Manifestations: unreasonable N.Y.U. girls out in their bobby socks And rayon blouses; meek boys with their books Who have already moulted mackinaws;Desarrolimiento of New chrome-green leaves; a rose, Got, blooming, out of bed; and Mrs. Roos- Evelt and Sarah Delano Descending the front stoop of a Jamesian House facing south against the Square, the sun— Who, curveting, his half course not yet run, Infects the earth with crescence; And the presence Of process, seen in un-top-hatted, Un-frock-coated burghers and their sons And daughters, taking over All title, right, and interest soever In this, now their Property, Washington Square.     III. December 29, 1949   The Hotel Storia ascends Above me and my new wife; ends Eight stories of decline, despair, Iron beds and hand-washed underwear Above us and our leatherette Chattels, still grounded on the wet Grey tessellated lobby floor. Soon, through a dingy, numbered door, We’ll enter into our new home, Provincials in Imperial Rome To seek their fortune, or, at least, To find a job. The wedding feast, Digested and metabolized, Diminishes in idealized Group photographs, and hard today Shunts us together and at bay. Outside the soot-webbed window, sleet Scourges the vista of Eighth Street; Inside, the radiators clack And talk and tell us to go back Where we came from. A lone pecan Falls from our lunch, a sticky bun, And bounces on the trampoline Of the torn bedspread. In the mean Distance of winter, a man sighs, A bedstead creaks, a woman cries.     IV. July 14, 1951   A summer lull arrives in the West Village, Transmuting houses into silent salvage Of the last century, streets into wreckage Uncalled-for by do-gooders who police The moderniqueness of our ways, patrol The sanitation of the urban soul. What I mean is, devoid of people, all Our dwellings freeze and rust in desuetude, Fur over with untenancy, glaze grey With summer’s dust and incivility, With lack of language and engagement, while Their occupants sport, mutate, and transform Themselves, play at dissembling the god Norm From forward bases at Fire Island. But— Exception proving rules, dissolving doubt— Young Gordon Walker, fledgling editor, My daylong colleague in the corridors Of Power & Leicht, the trade-book publishers, Is at home to the residue in his Acute apartment in an angle of Abingdon Square. And they’re all there, the rear- Guard of the garrison of Fort New York: The skeleton defense of skinny girls Who tap the typewriters of summertime; The pale male workers who know no time off Because too recently employed; the old Manhattan hands, in patched and gin-stained tweeds; The writers (Walker’s one), who see in their City as desert an oasis of Silence and time to execute their plots Against the state of things, but fall a prey To day succeeding day alone, and call A party to restore themselves to all The inside jokes of winter, in whose caul People click, kiss like billiard balls, and fall, Insensible, into odd pockets. Dense As gander-feather winter snow, intense As inextinguishable summer sun At five o’clock (which it now is), the noise Of Walker’s congeries of girls and boys Foregathered in their gabbling gratitude Strikes down the stairwell from the altitude Of his wide-open walk-up, beckoning Me, solo, wife gone north, to sickening Top-story heat and talk jackhammering Upon the anvils of all ears. “Christ, Lou, you’re here,” Whoops Walker, topping up a jelly jar (“Crabapple,” says the label, still stuck on) With gin and tonic, a blue liquid smoke That seeks its level in my unexplored Interior, and sends back a sonar ping To echo in my head. Two more blue gins. The sweat that mists my glasses interdicts My sizing up my interlocutor, Who is, I think, the girl who lives next door, A long-necked, fiddleheaded, celliform Girl cellist propped on an improbably Slim leg. Gin pings are now continuous. The room swings in its gimbals. In the bath Is silence, blessed, relative, untorn By the cool drizzle of the bathtub tap, A clear and present invitation. Like A climber conquering K.28, I clamber over the white porcelain Rock face, through whitish veils of rubberized Shower curtain, and at length, full-dressed, recline In the encaustic crater, where a fine Thread of cold water irrigates my feet, To sleep, perchance to dream of winter in The Village, fat with its full complement Of refugees returned to their own turf— Unspringy as it is—in a strong surf Of retrogressing lemmings, faces fixed On the unlovely birthplace of their mixed Emotions, marriages, media, and met- Aphors. Lord God of hosts, be with them yet.
I. Mother (1892-1973)   My mother, with a skin of crêpe de Chine, Predominantly yellow-colored, sheer Enough to let the venous blue show through The secondarily bluish carapace, Coughs, rasps, and rattles in her terminal Dream, interrupted by lucidities, When, suctioned out and listening with hard Ears almost waned to stone, she hears me say, “Mother, we’re here. The two of us are here. Anne’s here with me,” and she says, “Anne is so— So pretty,” as if abdicating all Her principalities of prettiness— So noted in her teens, when she smote all Who saw her shake a leg upon the stage Of vaudeville—and sinking into deeps Where ancience lurks, and barebone toothlessness, And bareback exits from the centre ring Of cynosure. Of little, less is left When we leave: a stick figure of a once Quite formidable personage. It is, Therefore, no shock, when next day the call comes From my worn father, followed by the spade Engaged upon hard January earth In Bellevue Cemetery, where he sways And cries for fifty years of joint returns Unjointed, and plucks one carnation from The grave bouquet of springing flowers upon The medium-priced coffin of veneer, To press and keep as a venereal Greenness brought forward from the greying past.     II. Father (1895-1974)   Whether the rivals for a wife and mother can Compose their differences and timely warp Into concomitant currents, taken by The selfsame tide when taken at the flood— Great waters poured black downhill at the height Of melting in the middle of the night— Is to be seen. We did not find it so. My father, whom I loved as if he’d done All his devoirs (though he had not), and shone Upon my forehead like a morning sun, Came home out of his hospital to stay In our rich, alien house, where trappings tried His niggard monkishness. Four days he stayed In his ashen cocoon; the fifth he died Under my ministrations, his pug jaw Thrust out toward the port of hopelessness, Where he (I hope) received the sirens of All possible welcoming tugs, even as I Felt under his grey, waxen nose for breath And called the doctor to record a death That made shift rather easier for me, Staring at nothing standing out to sea.     III. Tras Os Montes (197-)  1. In Company  Inspecting their kit and equipment at first light, I am glad the dawn is behind me, so my friends Cannot reflect upon my tears. The province I Move on across the mountains is still night- Bound, deep beneath the reaches of the sun Across the passes; so it will remain All of this long and dusty day, while we— Will, Joe, Bob, Jonathan, Garth, Peter, Paul, Ed, John, Phil, Harry, and a droptic me— March up the sunstruck slopes, dots on the rock That jags two thousand metres high ahead Of us above the passes where the dead Take formal leave of life: a kiss on both Cheeks of the dear departing, medals stripped, With all due ceremony, from his breast, Both epaulets cut loose from their braid stays, His sword, unbroken, pommelled in the hand Of his reliever; lastly, a salute Fired by the arms of officers, the guns Of other ranks, and a flat bugle call Played on a battered Spanish instrument With ragged tassels as the body falls Over the parapet—gaining weightlessness As its flesh deliquesces, as its bones Shiver to ashes—into an air that crawls With all the arts of darkness far below.    2. A Deux   A new scenario: on upswept slopes Of ripe green wheat—rare in this country—we Take, linked, a last long walk. In late July, The landscape waits, breath bated, on the whim Of cumulonimbi in the west, which roll In with deceptive stealth, revealing a Black heart cut with a cicatrice of fire, Zigzagging to its ground: a naked peak Kilometres away, a serra out Of mind. I fix your face with a wax smile. Our hands articulate our oneness, soon To dissipate, in a stiff splay of joints. Is all the language at my tongue’s command Too little to announce my stammered thanks For your unquestioning hand at my side, Too much to say I know the lowly deuce Is a poor card to play beside the ace, Black with his curlicues and his strong pulse Of sauve qui peut ambition? Calling a spade A spade, I’m pierced with the extreme regret Of one who dies intestate; as I’m snatched Into the stormcloud from the springing field, From green to black, I spy on you, below, A lone maid in green wheat, and rain farewells And late apologies on your grey head, And thunder sorrows and regrets. The storm Goes east, and the sun picks out my remains Against the cloud: a tentative rainbow, An inverse, weak, and spectral kind of smile.  3. Alone  The long march up the fulvous ridgebacks to The marches, the frontiers of difference— Where flesh marches with bone, day marches with His wife the night, and country marches with Another country—is accomplished best, By paradox, alone. A world of twos, Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, of Sound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayed By sole infiltrators who have cast off Their ties to living moorings, and stand out Into the roads of noon approaching night Casting a single shadow, earnest of Their honorable intention to lay down Their lives for their old country, humankind, In the same selfish spirit that inspired Their lifelong journey, largely and at last Alone, across the passes that divide A life from every other, the sheer crags Of overweening will, the deepening scarps Like brain fissures that cunningly cut off Each outcrop from the main and make it one While its luck lasts, while its bravura holds Against all odds, until the final climb Across the mountains to the farther shore Of sundown on the watersheds, where self, Propelled by its last rays, sways in the sway Of the last grasses and falls headlong in The darkness of the dust it is part of Upon the passes where we are no more: Where the recirculating shaft goes home Into the breast that armed it for the air, And, as we must expect, the art that there Turned our lone hand into imperial Rome Reverts to earth and its inveterate love For the inanimate and its return.   FINIS
At Steak ‘n Shake I learned that if you add “Bless their hearts” after their names, you can say whatever you want about them and it’s OK. My son, bless his heart, is an idiot,
All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling work of turning a yard from the wild to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing from a hidden, though not distant, perch;a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding like, Can you believe this, believe this, believe? Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
They travel in threes, usually in station waggons or utes, often have dogs, and eat out of cans in country motels, always the one on the edge of town – near the truckstop with good hamburgers – I remember the Isis Motel in Guyra   They drive old cars, or horses made of wind, whose manes are streamers of wind. They tend to wear black. I have met them as young as fourteen – Beck’s friend Kristin had written her autobiography already, it was called ‘These Days’ but it was stuck   in her computer somewhere, in the shed at her mother’s. Her mother and the girlfriend, they were also storm spirits. They taught swimming and they were kind at first, often charming   After watching the birds’ mating rituals on the forest floor at the bottom of the steep train, under the speckled trees, we decide to go north. We borrow Beck’s sister Jade’s car, and Alecto gets her licence first go.   We hear the Sibyl is staying at the Isis Motel. This time there’s no bush festival, no whip-plaiter, the pumpkins from the scarecrow bellies have all been eaten in baked dinners cooked for the Lamb and Potato Festival. That will be fifty-three dollars.   The others shower and go to bed, I’m as usual awake. At night across the road, five types of frogs set up their orchestra, and the Mother of Ducks lagoon throbs around the gazebo – tree frogs like the ones at home chaka-chaka, chaka-chaka   I go out and unroll my sleeping bag on the picnic table suspended over the lagoon, and watch the sun come up over the railway line. In the distance across a golf course, I see smoke and walking I come to a woman in black near a tent.   The Cumaean Sibyl, I presume? I say. She laughs in her mantle, invites me in. – So you’ve left the infernal regions too, I say and she laughs again, going out and poking kindling under the damp logs. I notice a laptop on her sleeping-bag.   She’s written a book about birds in New England which she shows me. No one reads it, she says, except ornithologists. She’s now writing a manual for editors. When she goes out to the fire I look at her hand-written page   ‘Parts of a publication: sections and paras, signposts and transitions, running heads and feet.’ Any news from home? I ask. The singer is failing to get his wife back, she says. The ferry man batted him back with an oar.   I prophecy he’ll be torn to pieces, she says, and offers to cook me some kidney. Where are your sisters? she asks. I say they’re at the motel. Well, they won’t be getting kidney, she says.   Our New England holiday over, and no other prophecies from the Sibyl, we’re drive south through the Moonbi Hills and down past the Emirates’ horse stud at Murrurrundi through bull-dozed mountains the Sibyl says you once went round, past the cones of a giant power station and the sign:   Muswellbrook – City of Power. And on to the Newcastle freeway. Back in Sydney at the hostel, the girl at the front desk leans forward: Have we heard? About Beck? She’s sorry, Beck has been killed in a car accident near Bulahdelah. Automatically I touch my dreads and groan.
A drunk cadet had hit them on a bad bend near the river, two broken necks. On the notice-board there’s an A4 page with a blurred digital photo of Beck laughing, leaning into her friends in a nightclub and below that, writing: We Love You Beck – from Kristin, Colette and Mandy.   I sit like an automaton in the big lounge room my back teeth snapping against each other, rocks in my gut. That night we watch on an iMac a video of Beck, an eight minute film Colette had taken on her phone.   Two of the men are crying. Kristin and Mandy are numb. I move to the noticeboard, reading anything: ‘Live-in nanny required Balmain 5 min from city’ ‘Experience life on an outback station help mustering mobs of 2000 animals on horseback or quadbike’.   Near me two women are whispering. Talking about their first-ever girlfriend. One says, Other people are always either versions or not-versions of her. Fourteen, it’s an age to break your heart. You know nothing. On the edge of knowing too much.   I lean forward, my head on the foyer koala. Voices travel to me from distant realms: I hear again the singer’s plea for his wife. Blurred from too much experience I prowl around the leaflet racks, groaning.   Late that night on the vinyl lounges the people remaining are Kristin and me, alone. My eyes are swollen, my ears still buzzing from the headphones at work. We talk over Beck till no more can be said. Now Kristin begins to tell her own story   how her uncle had his boat down the back of their block, and one day  he said he wanted to show her something, took her down the lantana path to the boat, something she might like, he said –   Kristin was raped at times twice a day or sometimes not for a week and sometimes after it he gave her pocket money once a twenty dollar bill which down the gully later she tore into thin red strips and buried.   Back at the house her mother bashed her for lying about the uncle, who was her brother, and who had loaned them the deposit on the house where Kristin and Odette her sister were fortunate enough to live.   When Kristin grew up, her mother apologised to her. The uncle was still alive. He had sent her a Christmas card this year. She sat on the lounge, looking down at her runners, her mouth closed. Behind her the stereogram and Elvis, a silent witness.   The uncle had said she was a rude girl, she should keep quiet about their secret otherwise he’d give her little sister a taste of the same. Kristin was quiet from then on. The reason she was telling me now, her hand on my arm   was that last week she’d had a call from Odette who was living in London. The uncle during those primary school years had done the same to her, tricked her the same way, used the same words.   I feel the weight of my empty useless arms. But later I hold her – hug her goodnight. She touches my shoulder. I was convinced, she says, I was saving my sister. My head clatters: Virgin, May I help you?   Back in the Furies’ bunk-room it’s beauty night, they’re whisking egg whites for a face mask … After they’ve done each other they sit me on the bed and paint my face with their fingers the egg white sets quickly and they tell me not to smile.   I dream of Alecto’s iron tower and bloody clothes – then I’m on TV being interviewed: So, the oldest Fury – and who is your god? I am asked – I once served Artemis, I say. And before that? – Athena, I say – Anath, Isis. I do not mention Dionysis or the Thracian women.
I pinch myself hard on the inner arm, inwardly smiling yet frightened too – what if I get caught in this far realm, on the underside of the world, in these pixelated centuries where humans are exactly the same, both kind and radically unkind –   So anyway, I say, her husband has his ships ready to go to war, and he’s waiting for the wind. He decides to order the sacrifice of their daughter – the wind comes, and they sail off to defend a trading route at Troy. Jade says, And this trading route is called “Helen”?   Very good. OK, skip ten years. When the husband comes back, his wife unrolls a purple carpet and his cousin prepares a banquet. His wife says, Darling, the slave-girls have run you a bath. He bathes. His wife finds out there’s someone at the front door   from Troy, a woman called Cassandra, holding twins she bore to the husband. Cassandra would like to come in. Maybe this piece of information was the trigger to the murder – at any rate, as her husband steps from the tub, she wraps a net around him as if it were a bathrobe, a net she’d made herself –   Wait, are you hungry? Jade says. Come into the kitchen. Amid the chicken bones and a potato salad she says, All right, go on. You have a very nice mouth, I say. Go on, she says, the net, wraps it round him.   OK. So the cousin comes in and takes two swipes with his sword, his two-edged sword, then the wife beheads the husband with her double-headed axe AHA! Jade says. Yes, I say. Then, splashed with his blood and bearing his head,   she runs to the banqueting room where his followers are being slaughtered among the mixing-bowls. She has defended herself and her daughter – everything else is gloss at that point. Revenge, though sticky-fingered, is sweet.   More chicken? Thanks. Her kids, a son and daughter, were sent away in case they grew up wanting to avenge their father. Which of course they do, Jade says. Yes.   The surviving girl sends messages to her brother, who’s in another country: don’t forget: come home when you can, and avenge our father – Years pass. Grown up now, the boy goes to Apollo’s shrine for advice, and the oracle tells him to do just that.   In the end, the boy does come back from exile, and kills his mother. A court case develops about the matricide, and this is where we come into it. See, up till now, the punishment for matricide has always been death. Lineage has been through the mother.   But this play was written at a particular point in history. Or pre-history, Jade says. Right. So the court is held at the Shrine of Apollo, and Apollo himself is counsel for the defence. Alecto is given the job of public prosecutor –   Your sister? Jade says. Yes. So the Magistrate calls up some citizens, and we hear the case. What were the mitigating factors? ‘The son was told to do it.’ His father’s ghost and ‘the oracle of Apollo himself’ told him to kill his mother.   They made the rest of their case, mostly spurious, one of Apollo’s arguments being that it’s less bad to kill a woman than a man. We made some good arguments, but the vote for the boy to die was fifty-fifty. At the deadlock, Athena turned up, Athena! her garment having been kissed by many men or what, we don’t know, and she in her deciding vote acquitted him. For us to lose, in effect, a case of matricide meant the balance of power was shifting.   I pour another vodka. What I didn’t say to Jade was, it meant we’d be lying low for some time, centuries perhaps. I remember the fires of earlier camps. In the distance, border furies, heat furies, storm furies. The sound of the Barking Owl.   And this owl, a real owl, sounds like a woman being murdered – Athena, your bird is telling you something! But Athena, last we heard, was with her cousin Kate Kyriakou on their way back to Greece for the Olympics. At the last minute they got a Virgin flight.   It’s an irony of fate, I said, that it was a foremost goddess who helped tilt that power. Or not, Jade said, maybe it was simply a pivot-point in storytelling where men must be shown to be in control, and the best way to do that is to get a woman to do the job.   Yes, I said. Let’s present it to Athena this way: she’s being chosen to give an award in a public ceremony and get her picture in the morning paper, her big chance, as a goddess, to be kind and compassionate. To downplay the warlike.   Mesmerise her with theology – Jade said, and perhaps flirt with her at the same time. For whatever reason, I said, Athena – without consenting to matricide – did not give it a high level of punishment. Certainly she didn’t exact a death.   In that sense you have to admit she is a civilising factor, I said. Flick your dreads as you may, Jade said. We hounded the son, though, I said. One time we said we’d leave him alone for a while if he promised to do penance at the Temple of Artemis.
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in the green that would balance on the wide green world, air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter: You came into my life really fast and I liked it.   When we let go the basket of the good-luck birds the sky erupted open in the hail of its libation; there was a gap and we entered it gladly. Indeed the birds may have broken the sky and we, soaked, squelched in the mud of our joy, braided with wet-thighed surrender.   In the yellow time of pollen near the blue time of lilacs there was a gap in things. And here we are. The sparrows flew away so fast a camera could not catch them. The monkey swung between our arms and said I am, hooray, the monkey of all events, the great gibbon of convergences.   We were falling towards each other already and the utter abandon to orbits was delicious. The falcon rested on the little man’s arm and falconry was the High Path of the World. Whole minutes passed. We were falling and the jungle fell with us.   She said I came, I came to my senses really fast and you liked it. I was surrounded by the fluttering of wings, nothing but a whirring in my ears, and the whole earth tilted and I lost my reason. For a time falconry was the high path of the world.   At night the sky was filled with animals. Ganesh loomed large among those points of light. He said Change! and we said Lord we are ready to bend. Thou art the high exalted most flexible. He said Then I will enter into your very dreams.   And the yellow-tailed black cockatoo, ablaze in his own musculature, soared all night above the sunlit fields of whisky grass that stretched inside me to a river’s edge. The great bird cawed its majesty, a sonic boom; and even I was barely welcome there.   There was a gap in things; and all the lilacs bloomed. Words split in our grasp. We were licking the cream from the universal ice. Words foundered and cracked. How the bonnet was warm on your bottom! And the metal continued tick-ticking though the engine was off.   And the evening shuddered, since everything is connected. I was licking the cream from the universal saucer. I was all of Cheshire and points between. You saw the great sky turn blacker, you saw the spray of stars and your hair got tangled in the windscreen wiper.   At the hot ponds we stripped as night closed in. I secretly admired your underwear, your long elusive legs. In the spring where we lay side by side we held hands. Up above the steam the sky. I said That one is called Sirius or Dog Star, but only here on Earth.   And when since the stories foretold it we parted, those birds were all released again. Such buoyancy. They go on forever like that. How else to say thank you in a foreign place? We are ever in the arms of our exile, forever going one way and the other   though sometimes of course on a sphere that is not so bad. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act. We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.   In the yellow time of pollen when the fields were ablaze we were very near bewildered by beauty. The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed with that thunder. It was both for the prick and the nectar we drank that we gave ourselves over.
And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path the tracing of a sphere: I will give myself over and over. I have migrated through Carpathians of sorrow to myself heaped happy in the corner there.   Nothing seemed strange in the world, you’ll understand— nothing ever more would. Monkey Boy came to me saying Look—the moon of the moon. The little one circled the big one. He crouched in the palm of my hand, tiny, sincere, pointing at the sky. There was something sad about him.   The python was nothing, nothing at all, nothing but strength shed to suppleness, nothing but will encased in itself. The python was a muscle of thought. Coiled and mute, in a place where nothing but rain fell, the python thought: this is the beginning or end of the world.   The python was everywhere, everywhere at once, aware only too much of that ageless agony: its existence. I am tired, it said; and the stream burbled by. I am waiting for the recoil, the uncoil, coil of night, coil of stars, coil of the coldness of the water.   The python said Who are these people? The whole city sweated, moved like a limb. The air fitted like a glove two sizes too small and too many singers sang the banal. The bars roared all night. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed.   In the yellow time of pollen there’s a certain slant of light that devours the afternoon, and you would wait forever at the Gare de l’Est, if time stood still, if she would come. She is the leopard then, its silvery speed; where will you wrestle her, and in what shadows, and on what crumpled sheets?   And all those sheets were pampas and savannas, the soft expanses of all that would be absent forever, all that was past, and future, and not here. And in a white rose there were not to be found any secrets, since in its unfolding there was no centre, nor in its decay. Only the random petals fallen.   In the yellow time of poppies when the fields were ablaze those invisible pollens rained around us. The days held us lightlocked in golden surrender and all night long the night shot stars. When my chest unconstricted at last, did yours?   The real issue, of course, was this: atomically, energetically, everything was wave function. And a wave continues forever into space, the wavelength never alters, only the intensity lessens, so in the worst cosmic way everything is connected by vibrations. And this, as even a dog would know, is no consolation.   Ah but the dogs will save us all in the end & even the planet. Not the superdogs but the household friendlies, always eager to please, hysterically fond, incessant, carrying in the very wagging of their tales an unbounded love not even therapists could imagine; their forgiveness unhinges us.   We were reduced to this: this day and night, primary gold and indigo, the binary profusion of distances guessed at, heat and cold, colours logged in the retina and lodged in the spine; we were dogs who knew the infinite is now,   that celandine was buttercup, that buttercup was marigold. The dog star marked the dog days and the wild rose was dog rose. The crow’s-foot was wild hyacinth. By day the correspondences were clear. I walked across the whin land. Speedwell bluer than sky.   A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, deep space wherein the mind collects itself. Words foundered and cracked. Nearly never bulled the cow. A shining isomorphousness rang out. The roussignol sang all night.   All colours were shuffled endlessly but never lost. A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, the secret blackness of the snow come flooding in. On summer’s lawns the ice-melt sprayed its figure-eights from sprinklers.   And everything stopped working, second time around, as if it had never happened before. Fans moved the corpses of fireflies through the rooms, supplicant, pathetic, pleading in brittle postures. Everything was magnified by their bug-eyed deaths.   We became solemn in that profusion of dying. Cane toads fattened the asphalt in the mist and the rain; our headlights caught them tensed as if listening: they were waiting, mute, for the imbecility of eternity.   The clocks merely pulsed, or rather the days. Like shotgun spray on the weatherboard, sleep scattered itself through the blurred heat and secreted itself in the nooks of delirium. Sometimes the magpies would wake us, or the phone,   mid-afternoon. And we needed nothing, not even hope, being no different from the dragonflies, or the cows in their despair. It appeared we lived on sunlight and chocolate bars. You blossomed so from not ever reading the newspapers.   Things came and went—the years and all the airports. I was a shade scattering my shade seed liberally to the winds and weathervanes. There was not enough absence to go round. I heard voices, stabat mater, in the whine of jets   and in air vents and headphones a stream trilling over rocks. On tarmacs and in transit I saw your lips, your nakedness, the trees, that dappled light. I dreamt of orchards. The preciseness of the world came flooding in.
Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness, there came a moment of perfect happiness, faces nestled in the vinyl, sleep coming on, surrounded by metal that in upcoming decades would oxidise to flakes.   Asleep at last, last of the valium, we came to know a car too is a flower and pollen its decay. In the dry air at dawn the cicadas kept still. The space that mass sat in decided how mass was to move. We dreamed of valleys of olive trees, silver side out.   The lions preened. We shivered with need. A mechanic showed me once how the spark-paths from spark-plugs looked, if you looked close enough, like mountain ravines from the air. The deeper the groove the faster the current. We shivered, this our habit, this flowing.   It takes the breath away. There are gum trees crackling from it two decades later. I slept so still beneath that mass of dreams like sediment compressed beneath a lake. I woke and the tributes and glory were gone and the crops all withered and money was merely the index of anxiety.   When we realised this our hearts swelled in exultation. Even time would forget there was reason for fear: that decay seemed to will itself upon us. I was off the air, delirious with substance. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed. I was off the air, light-headed with voracity.   The theme just kept repeating itself, year in year out, same demon different bodies. A nurse said When you stay, when you leave those wet imprints in our airspace, these sheets smell like formaldehyde, like death. We had merely reached early, down the end of the river, the leprosarium   of feeling, and all things stood for every other thing, creepers, vines, tendrils, anacondas, inert surrender, such listlessness, and yes the very rage with which we chased the very forms of it, the lineaments of nothingness, the powders of the comatose, the bliss.   This was the state of the world. Heading backwards we learned the flea-fish was the smallest animal before the insect kingdom began. Forwards, there were only the sudden deaths of galaxies. And yet when we practised love there seemed on certain days an awful lot of space; and so much sky.   Never had I lain then at Kangaroo Valley so comfortable in my own body. A virtual flatness and that centrifuge in the stomach stilled and my spine a spirit-level. The smell of coffee drifting in brought back to me that lily-white girl and that sad hour of need. How brittle every bone was then. How   could one not be completely bedraggled by time or compulsion or duplicity? I was all those things and am. I was so tired with the not-being-here inside of it all that fatigue was like oxygen, given of all the givens, sensurround of the gods. But I was gulping and heaving by then.   And that is all so long ago. Though when you forget the last time: most likely it is not the last time. And when dreams don’t come, when mastodons and minotaurs curdle in the night-reaches and the bulls lie fallow in dawn-sweats: sleep some more. Wait. Sleep on. And swim.
Nothing is plumb, level, or square:  the studs are bowed, the joists are shaky by nature, no piece fits  any other piece without a gap or pinch, and bent nails  dance all over the surfacing like maggots. By Christ  I am no carpenter. I built the roof for myself, the walls  for myself, the floors for myself, and got  hung up in it myself. I danced with a purple thumb  at this house-warming, drunk with my prime whiskey: rage.  Oh I spat rage’s nails into the frame-up of my work:  it held. It settled plumb, level, solid, square and true  for that great moment. Then it screamed and went on through,  skewing as wrong the other way. God damned it. This is hell,  but I planned it. I sawed it, I nailed it, and I  will live in it until it kills me. I can nail my left palm  to the left-hand crosspiece but I can’t do everything myself.  I need a hand to nail the right, a help, a love, a you, a wife.
For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil war, my father said. The old wound in my ass has opened up again, but I am past the prodigies of youth’s campaigns, and weep where I used to laugh in war’s red humors, half in love with silly-assed pains and half not feeling them. I have to sit up with an indoor unsittable itch before I go down late and weeping to the storm- cellar on a dirty night and go to bed with the worms. So pull dirt up over me and make a family joke for Old Billy Blue Balls, the oldest private in the world with two ass-holes and no place more to go to for a laugh except the last one. Say: The North won the Civil War without much help from me although I wear a proof of the war’s obscenity.
The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why had he and this junk come down to us so from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you ba bas will hear of as a god.”
“If you work a body of water and a body of woman you can take fish out of one and children out of the other for the two kinds of survival. The fishing is good, both kinds are adequate in pleasures and yield, but the hard work and the miseries are killing; it is a good life if life is good. If not, not. You are out in the world and in in the world, having it both ways: it is sportive and prevenient living combined, although you have to think about the weathers and the hard work and the miseries are what I said. It runs on like water, quickly, under the boat, then slowly like the sand dunes under the house. You survive by yourself by the one fish for a while and then by the other afterward when you run out. You run out a hooky life baited with good times, and whether the catch is caught or not is a question for those who go fishing for men or among them for things.”
Now his nose’s bridge is broken, one eye will not focus and the other is a stray; trainers whisper in his mouth while one ear listens to itself, clenched like a fist; generally shadowboxing in a smoky room, his mind hides like the aching boys who lost a contest in the Panhellenic games and had to take the back roads home, but someone else, his perfect youth, laureled in newsprint and dollar bills, triumphs forever on the great white way to the statistical Sparta of the champs.
In order to perfect all readers the statements should be carved on rock walls, on cave walls, and on the side of pillars so the charm of their instruction can affect the mountain climbers near the cliffs, the plainsmen near the pillars, and the city people near the caves they go to on vacations.   The statements should, and in a fair script, spell out the right text and gloss of the Philosopher’s jocular remark. Text: “Honesty is the best policy.” Gloss: “He means not ‘best’ but ‘policy,’ (this is the joke of it) whereas in fact  Honesty is Honesty, Best  is Best, and Policy is Policy,  the three terms being not  related, but here loosely allied. What is more important is that ‘is’ is, but the rocklike truth of the text resides in the ‘the’. The ‘the’ is The.  By this means the amusing sage  has raised or caused to be raised  the triple standard in stone: the single is too simple for life, the double is mere degrading hypocrisy, but the third combines the first two in a possible way, and contributes something unsayable of its own: this is the pit, nut, seed, or stone of the fruit when the fruit has been digested:  It is good to do good for the wrong  reason, better to do good for the good  reason, and best of all to do good  good: i.e. when the doer and doee  and whatever passes between them  are beyond all words like ‘grace’  or ‘anagogic insight,’ or definitions like  ‘particular instance of a hoped-at-law,’ and which the rocks alone can convey. This is the real reason for the rock walls, the cave walls and pillars, and not the base desires for permanence and display that the teacher’s conceit suggests.”    That is the end of the statements, but,  in order to go on a way after the end  so as to make up for having begun  after the beginning, and thus to come around  to it in order to include the whole thing, add: “In some places the poignant slogan, ‘Morality is a bad joke like everything else,’ may be written or not, granted that space exists for the vulgar remarks, the dates, initials and hearts of lovers, and all other graffiti of the prisoners of this world.”
there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms. when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating. these resurrected books were precious to her for a while. they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms. and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance. gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough. sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept.    if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried ‘the poetics of space’ round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey. every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there. and real. chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn. she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf. and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read
in order to upgrade the community’s appreciation of poetry during the international year of cultural enrichment stage 2, members of the state’s library progress committee decided to establish a small library of t-shirts on which would be printed quality verse in vivid, bold colours and lettering. the poems would be selected on the basis of one of three qualities: is the poem poignant, perspicacious, or pithy.   given the respectably researched fact that the wearing of words on t-shirts expresses a deep psychic desire for an intimate union of word and flesh, (and bear in mind the way “logo” nudges towards “logos”) it is not surprising that this library of t-shirts has been a great success. no one seems to mind borrowing pre-worn clothing. of course the library’s washing and ironing staff maintain the t-shirts in excellent condition. even after ten borrowings the shirts look brand new. and considering the phenomenal success of andrew lloyd webber’s “cats” it is no shock revelation that t.s. eliot’s “hollow men” has proved to be the library’s most popular t-shirt so far. in fact there are now eight copies of this shirt on loan, most in metallic or fluoro colours.   a couple of the more entrepreneurial of the library’s progress committee members are leading the push for diversification of the library’s poetry program, into neck to knee anti-uv swimwear, with maybe slessor, shelly and stevie smith prints for starters; and into underpants, with their multiple attractions.   while the committee feels both these garments could increase poetry’s appeal, they are worried about the practicability of adding these garments to the t-shirt poetry collection. would many members want to borrow preworn underpants, however compelling the poems’ cadences and metaphors; while the wear and tear on the swimming costume fabric via chlorine and salt water would perhaps be too great. however they are interested in marketing and selling these articles from a stall in the library’s foyer. the only committee member unenthusiastic regarding this proposal is an optometrist who has raised the issue of eye damage if the typeface of the lines of verse on the underpants were too small. a solution in the form of large print haikus is being considered.
from our deep cool verandah we spy on the world passing by. we both wear glasses in order to pick out the details. even as children we noticed all. people would say dont like those twins they look at you funny. we were reassured. our powers had been confirmed. but that was a long while ago. now we are 60. we have lived in this ground floor flat on the main road for 20 years. it is a very suitable dwelling, and we have a satisfactory relationship with the landlord. we think he is pleased we notice his transparency. we have been here since we left our husbands who got in the way of our observations.   after our evening meal we talk quietly of what we have seen. we believe in sharing our observations in case one of us has missed something. for our eyesight isnt as sharp as it was ten years ago. though we do clean our glasses each hour and keep our hair tied firmly back in small grey buns so nothing can distract our focus. we are small women. many people do not notice us, while we are noticing them. we keep to ourselves. mother used to say to us never get too friendly with strangers they can harm you. even if they smile and offer you an hour of their lives dont tell them nothing. mother knew a lot. she always kept the bible and a cloth to clean her hands on the kitchen table within reach.   at night we take turns to sit at the window and watch. we set the alarm at 2 and 6. this way we both get some sleep. theres always something to see along this road. even at 3 in the morning. last night we saw a woman in a torn fur coat, gum boots and a beanie blow up balloons, tie them on her arms as if they were wings. she climbed up a tree, spread her arms and jumped. we think she might have injured herself. she screamed for quite a while until one of the passing motorists stopped and rang for an ambulance. we didnt want to get involved. our slippers might have gotten wet. it had been raining quite heavily.   another night one of the local drunks fell asleep on our verandah. he smelt wretched but we were pleased to be able to get a closer look at him. for several weeks we had been trying to work out a few things about him. at least we were able to see how thick and long the scar on his bald head was. we were able to read the words on his tattoos, ‘dearest jean’ and ‘sailor boy’. we also saw a thin line thru the word ‘jean’ as if he had tried to cut the word out. very interesting. we scrubbed the verandah with disinfectant the next morning. it didnt take long.   we keep records of our observations in a private code in large journals. we are saving them up for the day when our memories fail us. then we can read them thru to recall the details. they are an assurance that our days have been full and busy. we put black velvet covers on these books. they are so soft to stroke. just like the backs of our 8 black cats who often sleep like guardians in front of the cupboard as if they recognised the importance of its contents.   there are many folks with bad legs along this road. they hobble ever so slowly up and down all day as if they had all the time in the world. they bandage their legs in different ways. some of the bandages are rather grubby. you’d think theyd wash them. there are plenty of laundromats around here. every pension day they could wash them. they could share a machine. you can fit a good deal in one of these contraptions – at least ten bandages. dear me. if theyd looked where they were going instead of expecting life to do everything for them, they wouldnt be in this predicament. we’re so pleased we’re not handicapped. we have only ourselves to thank. and of course mother.   pension morning is always busy. we always make sure the teapot is full by 9.30. the crowd gathers outside the bank. for at least half an hour. theres no time to get up and put the jug on for some time. they clutter the footpath. so many of them. it takes a while for us to sort out who’s there. we sometimes use the journal if we cant quite locate every face. often its the only way to really know who died before the postman called. on our deep cool verandah we sit. the twins. there are no mirrors in our hallway.
He falls abruptly silent when we fling A basket down or bang the dryer shut, But soon takes up again where he left off. Swept by a rainstorm through a narrow trough Clotted with cobwebs into Lord knows what Impenetrable murk, he’s undeterred— You’d think his dauntless solo was a chorus, This rusty sump, a field or forest spring. And there is something wondrous and absurd About the way he does as he is bidden By instinct, with his gift for staying hidden While making sure unseen is plainly heard. All afternoon his tremolo ascends Clear to the second story, where a girl Who also has learned blithely to ignore us Sings to herself behind her bedroom door. Maybe she moves to her invented score With a conductor’s flourish, or pretends She’s a Spanish dancer, lost in stamp and whirl And waving fan—notes floating, as she plays, Through the open window where the willow sways And shimmers, humming to another string. There is no story where the story ends. What does a singer live for but to sing?
I look through glass and see a young woman of twenty, washing dishes, and the window turns into a painting. She is myself thirty years ago. She holds the same blue bowls and brass teapot I still own. I see her outline against lamplight; she knows only her side of the pane. The porch where I stand is empty. Sunlight fades. I hear water run in the sink as she lowers her head, blind to the future. She does not imagine I exist.  I step forward for a better look and she dissolves into lumber and paint. A gate I passed through to the next life loses shape. Once more I stand squared into the present, among maple trees and scissor-tailed birds, in a garden, almost a mother to that faint, distant woman.
You must come to them sideways In rooms webbed in shadow, Sneak a view of their emptiness Without them catching A glimpse of you in return.   The secret is, Even the empty bed is a burden to them, A pretense. They are more themselves keeping The company of a blank wall, The company of time and eternity   Which, begging your pardon, Cast no image As they admire themselves in the mirror, While you stand to the side Pulling a hanky out To wipe your brow surreptitiously.
Your friend has died, with whom You roamed the streets, At all hours, talking philosophy. So, today you went alone, Stopping often to change places With your imaginary companion, And argue back against yourself On the subject of appearances: The world we see in our heads And the world we see daily, So difficult to tell apart When grief and sorrow bow us over.  You two often got so carried away You found yourselves in strange neighborhoods Lost among unfriendly folk, Having to ask for directions While on the verge of a supreme insight, Repeating your question To an old woman or a child Both of whom may have been deaf and dumb. What was that fragment of Heraclitus You were trying to remember As you stepped on the butcher’s cat? Meantime, you yourself were lost Between someone’s new black shoe Left on the sidewalk And the sudden terror and exhilaration At the sight of a girl Dressed up for a night of dancing Speeding by on roller skates.
The obvious is difficult To prove. Many prefer The hidden. I did, too. I listened to the trees. They had a secret Which they were about to Make known to me, And then didn’t. Summer came. Each tree On my street had its own Scheherazade. My nights Were a part of their wild Storytelling. We were Entering dark houses, More and more dark houses Hushed and abandoned. There was someone with eyes closed On the upper floors. The thought of it, and the wonder, Kept me sleepless. The truth is bald and cold, Said the woman Who always wore white. She didn’t leave her room much. The sun pointed to one or two Things that had survived The long night intact, The simplest things, Difficult in their obviousness. They made no noise. It was the kind of day People describe as “perfect.” Gods disguising themselves As black hairpins? A hand-mirror? A comb with a tooth missing? No! That wasn’t it. Just things as they are, Unblinking, lying mute In that bright light, And the trees waiting for the night.
Sweet Marie-Anne, she thought Being French, intellectual and brunette Entitled her, in any Parisian cafe To prompt service—and she was Probably right, (as the Policeman Later confirmed)—always provided The situation was normal, and She herself did not let the race down. So that afternoon, she said to me: “Sit by me, mon cheri, and order A drink!”—Well! The waiter came As was his duty, only to stand aghast At the unspeakable scandal of a Full-blooded French woman kissing This merde of a black man openly and Full on the lips!—Purebred son of The Galls, his first impulse Was to smash his tray at the black head And shriek out for help to the army of riot Police permanently stationed on the streets Of the Latin Quarter . . . —But He was a non-violent man, and besides, He had the customer’s tip to think of. So he turned to me, swallowing hard, and With controlled French politeness, he said:“M’sieur, please sit OPPOSITE the lady— “Yes, with the sacre table between you, face To face—Or mon cul, dammit, I shall Not serve you!”—And I was still wiping off Her lipstick, wondering what to do, when my lady Spoke, her face red with indignation: “But You’re mistaken! This one’s not like the rest, “Can’t you see! He’s a bon sauvage, and has Written such brilliant essays in impreccable French “On the phallus of—pardon, the merits of Negritude! Show him my dear!” she turned to me, “Show how well “You quote Molière, Corneille, and—” But the waiter Was already smiling and bowing: I had passed my test.
Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain, That may compassion my impatient grief? Or where shall I unfold my inward pain, That my enriven heart may find relief? Shall I unto the heavenly pow’rs it show, Or unto earthly men that dwell below? To heavens? Ah, they, alas, the authors were, And workers of my unremedied woe: For they foresee what to us happens here, And they foresaw, yet suffered this be so. From them comes good, from them comes also ill, That which they made, who can them warn to spill. To men? Ah, they, alas, like wretched be, And subject to the heavens’ ordinance: Bound to abide whatever they decree. Their best redress is their best sufferance. How then can they, like wretched, comfort me, The which no less need comforted to be? Then to myself will I my sorrow mourn, Sith none alive like sorrowful remains: And to myself my plaints shall back return, To pay their usury with doubled pains. The woods, the hills, the rivers shall resound The mournful accent of my sorrow’s ground. Woods, hills, and rivers now are desolate, Sith he is gone the which them all did grace: And all the fields do wail their widow state, Sith death their fairest flow’r did late deface. The fairest flow’r in field that ever grew, Was Astrophel; that was, we all may rue. What cruel hand of cursed foe unknown, Hath cropped the stalk which bore so fair a flow’r? Untimely cropped, before it well were grown, And clean defaced in untimely hour. Great loss to all that ever him did see, Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. Break now your garlands, O ye shepherds’ lasses, Sith the fair flow’r, which them adorned, is gone: The flow’r, which them adorned, is gone to ashes, Never again let lass put garland on. Instead of garland, wear sad cypress now, And bitter elder, broken from the bough. Ne ever sing the love-lays which he made: Who ever made such lays of love as he? Ne ever read the riddles, which he said Unto yourselves, to make you merry glee. Your merry glee is now laid all abed, Your merry maker now, alas, is dead. Death, the devourer of all the world’s delight, Hath robbed you and reft from me my joy: Both you and me and all the world he quite Hath robbed of joyance, and left sad annoy. Joy of the world, and shepherds’ pride was he, Shepherds’ hope never like again to see. O Death, that hast us of such riches reft, Tell us at least, what hast thou with it done? What is become of him whose flow’r here left Is but the shadow of his likeness gone: Scarce like the shadow of that which he was, Naught like, but that he like a shade did pass. But that immortal spirit, which was decked With all the dowries of celestial grace: By sovereign choice from th’heavenly choirs select, And lineally derived from angels’ race, Oh, what is now of it become, aread. Ay me, can so divine a thing be dead? Ah no: it is not dead, ne can it die, But lives for aye, in blissful Paradise: Where like a new-born babe it soft doth lie, In bed of lilies wrapped in tender wise, And compassed all about with roses sweet, And dainty violets from head to feet. There thousand birds all of celestial brood, To him do sweetly carol day and night: And with strange notes, of him well understood, Lull him asleep in angel-like delight; Whilst in sweet dream to him presented be Immortal beauties, which no eye may see. But he them sees and takes exceeding pleasure Of their divine aspects, appearing plain, And kindling love in him above all measure, Sweet love still joyous, never feeling pain. For what so goodly form he there doth see, He may enjoy from jealous rancor free. There liveth he in everlasting bliss, Sweet spirit never fearing more to die: Ne dreading harm from any foes of his, Ne fearing savage beasts’ more cruelty. Whilst we here, wretches, wail his private lack, And with vain vows do often call him back. But live thou there still happy, happy spirit, And give us leave thee here thus to lament: Not thee that dost thy heaven’s joy inherit, But our own selves that here in dole are drent. Thus do we weep and wail, and wear our eyes, Mourning in other’s, our own miseries.
(Variant printed in Samuel Daniel’s 1623 Works) To thee, pure spirit, to thee alone addressed Is this joint work, by double interest thine, Thine by his own, and what is done of mine Inspired by thee, thy secret power impressed. My Muse with thine, itself dared to combine As mortal stuff with that which is divine: Let thy fair beams give luster to the restThat Israel’s King may deign his own, transformed In substance no, but superficial ’tire; And English guised in some sort may aspire To better grace thee what the vulgar formed: His sacred tones, age after age admire; Nations grow great in pride and pure desire So to excel in holy rites performed. Oh, had that soul which honor brought to rest Too soon not left and reft the world of all What man could show, which we perfection call, This precious piece had sorted with the best. But ah, wide festered wounds that never shall Nor must be closed, unto fresh bleeding fall: Ah, memory, what needs this new arrest? Yet blessed grief, that sweetness can impart Since thou art blest! Wrongly do I complain: Whatever weights my heavy thoughts sustain Dear feels my soul for thee. I know my part Nor be my weakness to thy rites a stain, Rites to aright, life-blood would not refrain: Assist me, then, that life what thine did part. Time may bring forth what time hath yet suppressed In whom thy loss hath laid to utter waste; The wrack of time, untimely all defaced, Remaining as the tomb of life deceased, Where, in my heart the highest room thou hast; There, truly there, thy earthly being is placed, Triumph of death: in life how more than blest. Behold, oh, that thou were now to behold This finished long perfection’s part begun, The rest but pieced, as left by thee undone. Pardon blest soul, presumption overbold, If love and zeal hath to this error run: ’Tis zealous love, love that hath never done, Nor can enough, though justly here controlled. But since it hath no other scope to go, Nor other purpose but to honor thee, That thine may shine, where all the Graces be; And that my thoughts (like smallest streams that flow, Pay to their sea, their tributary fee) Do strive, yet have no means to quit nor free That mighty debt of infinities I owe To thy great worth which time to times enroll, Wonder of men, sole born, sole of thy kind Complete in all, but heavenly was thy mind, For wisdom, goodness, sweetness, fairest soul: Too good to wish, too fair for earth, refined For heaven, where all true glory rests confined; And where but there no life without control? Oh, when from this account, this cast-up sum, This reck’ning made the audit of my woe, Sometime of rase my swelling passions know How work my thoughts, my sense is stricken dumb That would thee more than words could ever show, Which all fall short. Who knew thee best do know There lives no wit that may thy praise become. And rest fair monuments of thy fair fame, Though not complete. Nor can we reach, in thought, What on that goodly piece time would have wrought Had divers so spared that life (but life) to frame The rest. Alas, such loss! The world hath naught Can equal it, nor, oh, more grievance brought, Yet what remains must ever crown thy name. Receive these hymns, these obsequies receive, (If any mark of thy secret spirit thou bear) Made only thine, and no name else must wear. I can no more: Dear Soul, I take my leave; My sorrow strives to mount the highest sphere.
O Lord, whose grace no limits comprehend; Sweet Lord, whose mercies stand from measure free; To me that grace, to me that mercy send, And wipe, O Lord, my sins from sinful me. Oh, cleanse, oh, wash, my foul iniquity; Cleanse still my spots, still wash away my stainings, Till stains and spots in me leave no remainings. For I, alas, acknowledging do know My filthy fault, my faulty filthiness To my soul’s eye incessantly doth show, Which done to thee, to thee I do confess, Just judge, true witness, that for righteousness Thy doom may pass against my guilt awarded, Thy evidence for truth may be regarded. My mother, lo, when I began to be, Conceiving me, with me did sin conceive: And as with living heat she cherished me, Corruption did like cherishing receive. But, lo, thy love to purest good doth cleave, And inward truth: which, hardly else discerned, My truant soul in thy hid school hath learned. Then as thyself to lepers hast assigned, With hyssop, Lord, thy hyssop, purge me so: And that shall cleanse the lepry of my mind. Make over me thy mercy’s streams to flow, So shall my whiteness scorn the whitest snow. To ear and heart send sounds and thoughts of gladness, That bruised bones may dance away their sadness. Thy ill-pleased eye from my misdeeds avert: Cancel the registers my sins contain: Create in me a pure, clean, spotless heart; Inspire a sprite where love of right may reign Ah, cast me not from thee; take not again Thy breathing grace; again thy comfort send me, And let the guard of thy free sprite attend me. So I to them a guiding hand will be, Whose faulty feet have wandered from thy way, And turned from sin will make return to thee, Whom turned from thee sin erst had led astray. O God, God of my health, oh, do away My bloody crime: so shall my tongue be raised To praise thy truth, enough cannot be praised. Unlock my lips, shut up with sinful shame: Then shall my mouth, O Lord, thy honor sing. For bleeding fuel for thy altar’s flame, To gain thy grace what boots it me to bring? Burt-off’rings are to thee no pleasant thing. The sacrifice that God will hold respected, Is the heart-broken soul, the sprite dejected.Lastly, O Lord, how so I stand or fall, Leave not thy loved Zion to embrace; But with thy favor build up Salem’s wall, And still in peace, maintain that peaceful place. Then shalt thou turn a well-accepting face To sacred fires with offered gifts perfumed: Till ev’n whole calves on altars be consumed.
My God, most glad to look, most prone to hear, An open ear, oh, let my prayer find, And from my plaint turn not thy face away. Behold my gestures, hearken what I say, While uttering moans with most tormented mind, My body I no less torment and tear. For, lo, their fearful threat’nings would mine ear, Who griefs on griefs on me still heaping lay, A mark to wrath and hate and wrong assigned; Therefore, my heart hath all his force resigned To trembling pants; death terrors on me pray; I fear, nay, shake, nay, quiv’ring quake with fear. Then say I, oh, might I but cut the wind, Borne on the wing the fearful dove doth bear: Stay would I not, till I in rest might stay. Far hence, oh, far, then would I take my way Unto the desert, and repose me there, These storms of woe, these tempests left behind. But swallow them, O Lord, in darkness blind, Confound their counsels, lead their tongues astray, That what they mean by words may not appear. For mother Wrong within their town each where, And daughter Strife their ensigns so display, As if they only thither were confined. These walk their city walls both night and day; Oppressions, tumults, guiles of every kind Are burgesses and dwell the middle near; About their streets his masking robes doth wear Mischief clothed in deceit, with treason lined, Where only he, he only bears the sway. But not my foe with me this prank did play, For then I would have borne with patient cheer An unkind part from whom I know unkind, Nor he whose forehead Envy’s mark had signed, His trophies on my ruins sought to rear, From whom to fly I might have made assay. But this to thee, to thee impute I may, My fellow, my companion, held most dear, My soul, my other self, my inward friend: Whom unto me, me unto whom did bind Exchanged secrets, who together were God’s temple wont to visit, there to pray. Oh, let a sudden death work their decay, Who speaking fair such cankered malice mind, Let them be buried breathing in their bier; But purple morn, black ev’n, and midday clear Shall see my praying voice to God inclined, Rousing him up, and naught shall me dismay. He ransomed me; he for my safety fined In fight where many sought my soul to slay; He, still himself to no succeeding heir Leaving his empire shall no more forbear But at my motion, all these atheists pay, By whom, still one, such mischiefs are designed. Who but such caitiffs would have undermined, Nay, overthrown, from whom but kindness mere They never found? Who would such trust betray? What buttered words! Yet war their hearts bewray. Their speech more sharp than sharpest sword or spear Yet softer flows than balm from wounded rind. But my o’erloaden soul, thyself upcheer, Cast on God’s shoulders what thee down doth weigh Long borne by thee with bearing pained and pined: To care for thee he shall be ever kind; By him the just in safety held away Changeless shall enter, live, and leave the year: But, Lord, how long shall these men tarry here? Fling them in pit of death where never shined The light of life, and while I make my stay On thee, let who their thirst with blood allay Have their life-holding thread so weakly twined That it, half-spun, death may in sunder shear.
Thy mercy, Lord, Lord, now thy mercy show: On thee I lie; To thee I fly. Hide me, hive me, as thine own, Till these blasts be overblown, Which now do fiercely blow. To highest God I will erect my cry, Who quickly shall Dispatch this all. He shall down from heaven send From disgrace me to defend His love and verity. My soul encaged lies with lions’ brood, Villains whose hands Are fiery brands, Teeth more sharp than shaft or spear, Tongues far better edge do bear Than swords to shed my blood. As high as highest heav’n can give thee place, O Lord, ascend, And thence extend With most bright, most glorious show Over all the earth below, The sunbeams of thy face. Me to entangle every way I go Their trap and net Is ready set. Holes they dig but their own holes Pitfalls make for their own souls: So, Lord, oh, serve them so. My heart prepared, prepared is my heart To spread thy praise With tuned lays: Wake my tongue, my lute awake, Thou my harp the consort make, Myself will bear a part. Myself when first the morning shall appear, With voice and string So will thee sing: That this earthly globe, and all Treading on this earthly ball, My praising notes shall hear. For god, my only God, thy gracious love Is mounted far Above each star, Thy unchanged verity Heav’nly wings do lift as high As clouds have room to move. As high as highest heav’n can give thee place, O Lord, ascend And thence extend With most bright, most glorious show Over all the earth below, The sunbeams of thy face.
How lovely is thy dwelling, Great god, to whom all greatness is belonging! To view thy courts far, far from any telling My soul doth long and pine with longing Unto the God that liveth, The God that all life giveth, My heart and body both aspire, Above delight, beyond desire. Alas, the sparrow knoweth The house where free and fearless she resideth; Directly to the nest the swallow goeth, Where with her sons she safe abideth. Oh, altars thine, most mighty In war, yea, most almighty: Thy altars, Lord, ah, why should I From altars thine excluded lie? Oh, happy who remaineth Thy household-man and still thy praise unfoldeth! Oh, happy who himself on thee sustaineth, Who to thy house his journey holdeth! Me seems I see them going Where mulberries are growing: How wells they dig in thirsty plain, And cisterns make for falling rain. Me seems I see augmented Still troop with troop, till all at length discover Zion, where to their sight is represented The Lord of hosts, the Zion lover. O Lord, O God, most mighty In war, yea, most almighty: Hear what I beg; hearken, I say, O Jacob’s God, to what I pray. Thou art the shield us shieldeth: Then, Lord, behold the face of thine anointed One day spent in thy courts more comfort yieldeth Than thousands otherwise appointed. I count it clearer pleasure To spend my age’s treasure Waiting a porter at thy gates Than dwell a lord with wicked mates. Thou art the sun that shineth; Thou art the buckler, Lord that us defendeth: Glory and grace Jehovah’s hand assigneth And good without refusal sendeth To him who truly treadeth The path to pureness leadeth. O Lord of might, thrice blessed he Whose confidence is built on thee.
O Lord, my praying hear; Lord, let my cry come to thine ear. Hide not thy face away, But haste, and answer me, In this my most, most miserable day, Wherein I pray and cry to thee. My days as smoke are past; My bones as flaming fuel waste, Mown down in me, alas. With scythe of sharpest pain. My heart is withered like the wounded grass; My stomach doth all food disdain. So lean my woes me leave, That to my flesh my bones do cleave; And so I bray and howl, As use to howl and bray The lonely pelican and desert owl, Like whom I languish long the day. I languish so the day, The night in watch I waste away; Right as the sparrow sits, Bereft of spouse, or son, Which irked alone with dolor’s deadly fits To company will not be won. As day to day succeeds, So shame on shame to me proceeds From them that do me hate, Who of my wrack so boast, That wishing ill, they wish but my estate, Yet think they wish of ills the most. Therefore my bread is clay; Therefore my tears my wine allay. For how else should it be, Sith thou still angry art, And seem’st for naught to have advanced me, But me advanced to subvert? The sun of my life-days Inclines to west with falling rays, And I as hay am dried, While yet in steadfast seat Eternal thou eternally dost bide, Thy memory no years can fret. Oh, then at length arise; On Zion cast thy mercy’s eyes. Now is the time that thou To mercy shouldst incline Concerning her: O Lord, the time is now Thyself for mercy didst assign. Thy servants wait the day When she, who like a carcass lay Stretched forth in ruin’s bier, Shall so arise and live, The nations all Jehova’s name shall fear, All kings to thee shall glory give. Because thou hast anew Made Zion stand, restored to view Thy glorious presence there, Because thou hast, I say, Beheld our woes and not refused to hear What wretched we did plaining pray, This of record shall bide To this and every age beside. And they commend thee shall Whom thou anew shall make, That from the prospect of thy heav’nly hall Thy eye of earth survey did take, Heark’ning to prisoners’ groans, And setting free condemned ones, That they, when nations come, And realms to serve the Lord, In Zion and in Salem might become Fit means his honor to record. But what is this if I In the mid way should fall and die? My God, to thee I pray, Who canst my prayer give. Turn not to night the noontide of my day, Since endless thou dost ageless live. The earth, the heaven stands Once founded, formed by thy hands: They perish, thou shalt bide; They old, as clothes shall wear, Till changing still, full change shall them betide, Unclothed of all the clothes they bear. But thou art one, still one: Time interest in thee hath none. Then hope, who godly be, Or come of godly race: Endless your bliss, as never ending he, His presence your unchanged place.
Oh, what a lantern, what a lamp of light Is thy pure word to me To clear my paths and guide my goings right! I swore and swear again, I of the statues will observer be, Thou justly dost ordain. The heavy weights of grief oppress me sore: Lord, raise me by the word, As thou to me didst promise heretofore. And this unforced praise I for an off’ring bring, accept, O Lord, And show to me thy ways. What if my life lie naked in my hand, To every chance exposed! Should I forget what thou dost me command? No, no, I will not stray From thy edicts though round about enclosed With snares the wicked lay. Thy testimonies as mine heritage, I have retained still: And unto them my heart’s delight engage, My heart which still doth bend, And only bend to do what thou dost will, And do it to the end.
Oh, laud the Lord, the God of hosts commend, Exalt his pow’r, advance his holiness: With all your might lift his almightiness; Your greatest praise upon his greatness spend. Make trumpet’s noise in shrillest notes ascend; Make lute and lyre his loved fame express; Him let the pipe, him let the tabret bless, Him organ’s breath, that winds or waters lend. Let ringing timbrels so his honor sound, Let sounding cymbals so his glory ring, That in their tunes such melody be found As fits the pomp of most triumphant king. Conclude: by all that air or life enfold, Let high Jehovah highly be extolled.
What god will catch me when I’m down, when I’ve taken sufficient drink to reveal myself, when my words are little more than a blurring of consonant and vowel?   I’m drunk on spring: branches of waxy leaves that greet me at my driveway, a family clutching trays of sweets. How can I sing of this?   If I cannot sing, then make me mute. Or lend me words, send me the taste of another’s prayer, cool as a coin newly minted on the tongue.
Last night something  tunneled through the elms.   But at sunrise,  I found just white light   biting my eyelids, salt  rubbed on a wound.   Batons of ice  fell from power lines,   soundless but still emphatic.  Then the rain   churned the snow to soap  scum, waxing cars with   winter’s lichen, patchy  in the strange   uneven fur of newborns.  And still, I was childless.   One cardinal  lodged on a branch:   a blood-drop  striking water   before the slow dispersion.
To invent the alef-beit, decipher the grammar of crows, read a tangle of bare branches with vowels of the last leaves scrawling their jittery speech on the sky’s pale page.   Choose a beginning. See what God yields and dirt cedes when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage, when your hand dips grain from a sack, scattering it among engraved furrows.   Beyond the hill, a plume of dust where oxen track the hours. Does God lead or follow or scout? To answer, count to one again and again: a red maple leaf and a yellow maple leaf that wind rifles and rain shines until they let go, blazing their scripted nothingness on air.
You slow down to watch cumulus clouds stream across the sky. You choose a more circuitous route home and pass a tree with white bags tied around random apples. The apples remind you of clouds, how each hangs in the sky, singular yet part of a flock. Each item in the flock is a coordinate of earth and sky, enumerating space. The flocks of apples and clouds are actual infinities, an endless collection of discrete items that one can conceivably count to the end. This is different from potential infinity, which is the entirety of infinity, an immeasurable continuum that is greater than the sum of its parts. After your first glimpse, you are lonely for more contraction of space around the light of your mind contemplating what cannot be conceived. What cannot be conceived this morning? The Army has found the larynx of an Iraqi man that American soldiers slowly strangled to death. His ribs, additional evidence for the trial, are still missing. They are in a refrigerator in Washington, D.C. These are discrete items; whereas how the passage of time felt as the soldiers strangled him is a continuum of infinite pain. And his words and songs and prayers and curses he will never speak are an empty set.
Hope fills me this morning as I fashion letters into a tree that sighs, that stays put yet moves, reaching to its limits, swaying and settling, a compass pointing to its place on earth where every morning it blocks the sun for me, at work in my studio, where I scratch and scrawl and loop letters into shapes so I can enter the Tabernacle of their bodies and hear each foot, each syllable sending its roots to a depth as great as that tree’s, which has been standing and rooting and swaying long before I came to memorize its plain mystery, its wide-bodied hull open to stars at night, each a point that I lengthen into a letter and each letter into a word, and with the words build a Tabernacle for the ten most broken and the ten most resonant words. I will place them in an inner sanctum enclosed by hanging carpets, and outside it, another space enclosed by carpets, and outside it, another, so that those who wish to read the words, to say them out loud, must first pull one curtain back and step inside, and then another, and another until they arrive in a hushed space, a soundproofed, heavy quiet where they come to know that which makes all things  day after day, and out of which the earth was made. Stepping behind each curtain they learn that the mystery of making is not a secret hidden within but a series of moves, a sequence of steps, outlined on a blueprint with notes and call-outs, white on black, constellations in the night sky, the primordial living Torah, circulating in the letters as trees circulate light, capturing it with their leaves, caching it within the soil, then drawing it back up, watering the tallest branches with the radiant dark.
I  Imperia  I saw a plaster hand, on view In sculptor’s studio, set apart... Aspasia’s? Cleopatra’s?... Who? This fragment’s human work of art?   Like lily silvered by the dawn, Frozen in kiss of snow, its light Loveliness dazzled me, and shone In poetry of purest white.   Though pallid, wan, yet striking, it Spread over velvet, graceful, slender Fingers—delicate, exquisite— Decked thick with rings of weighty splendor.   Thumb high, in serpentine-like pose, Arched in a svelte and shapely line, It lay, fine set, like one of those Hands held with proud air Florentine.   Did it comb out the sultan’s beard On jeweled caftan? Or, with twirls And twistings, when Don Juan appeared, Play in his lustrous, glistening curls?   A courtesan’s? A queen’s? Did this Wrought hand a scepter wield? Which one? The paragon of fleshly bliss? Sovereignty’s beauteous paragon?   Doubtless, by little starts and fits, It lit, poised, in its fluttering, On the she-lion croup of its Chimera-dream, caught on the wing;   The Empire’s fantasies; bombastic Love of fantastic, sumptuous schemes; Voluptuous frenzies orgiastic; Impossible and futile dreams;   Wild tales; poetic escapades Of hashish, Rhine-wine sorcery; Dashing Bohemian cavalcades On steeds unbridled, coursing free...   Such are the things the eyes divines In that white book, by Venus written: Blank palm where she has traced the signs One reads, a-tremble, terror-smitten.     II  Lacenaire   Close by, in contrast, lying there, Encushioned, was the severed hand— Pungent-embalmed—of Lacenaire, Assassin and scourge of the land;   Curio most depraved! But, though Repulsed, I reached and touched it, still Barely cleansed of its horrors! Oh! That flesh, red-downed and deathly chill!   Sallow hand, like a mummy’s wrought, All yellowed, laid-out pharaoh-wise, Spreading its faun-like fingers, taut, As if to seize its tempting prize;   Exuding from their tips, an itching Lusting for living flesh and gold, About to writhe, convulsed, and twitching Before their victims, as of old.   Vice clawed vile hieroglyph designs Of heinous wrongs—most foul, most fell— In all its wrinkles, all its lines, Signs that the executioner knew well!   One see its scabrous deeds large writ In the palm’s bestial creases, and The boiling cauldron scalding it With every crime at sin’s command;   Capri’s debauches libertine, Of fleshpot brothels orgy-rife Stained through with blot of blood and wine Like the old Caesar’s blasé life.   At once both soft and savage, its Shape shows a curious elegance, A fearsome grace that counterfeits The gladiator’s graceful stance!   Crime’s aristocracy! No plane, No hammer’s labors ever made Its flesh tough time and time again! Its only tool, the dagger-blade...   Work’s honest calluses! For you We look in vain, no sign we see: Evil’s false poet, butcher true— A Manfred of the gutter, he!
Over there, trees are sheltering A hunchedback hut... A slum, no more... Roof askew, walls and wainscoting Falling away... Moss hides the door.   Only one shutter, hanging... But Seeping over the windowsill, Like frosted breath, proof that this hut, This slum, is living, breathing still.   Corkscrew of smoke... A wisp of blue Escapes the hovel, whose soul it is... Rises to God himself, and who Receives the news and makes it his.
A blind man, on the thoroughfare, Startle-eyed as an owl by day, Piping a dismal little air, Taps here and there, loses his way,   Tootles awry his time-old ditty Undauntedly, as by his side Lopes his dog, guides him through the city, Specter diurnal, sleepy-eyed.   Days, stark, wash over him, unlit; He hears the dark world’s constant din And all that life unseen, as it Rolls, rushing, like a flood walled in!   God knows what black chimeras haunt That brain opaque, what lot befalls; And what dire spells the mind is wont To scribble on those death-vault walls!   Like prisoner grown half-mad, who, pent, Rots beneath Venice in her jail Eternal, and whose hours are spent Scratching a message with a nail...   But when the torch, in tomb immured, Dies in the breath of death, maybe The soul, to shades’ gloom long inured, Will see with deathly clarity!
A long time have I known you... Why, Full eighteen years, I must confess! All pink are you; pale, blear am I. Winters, mine; yours, spring’s comeliness!   White cemetery lilacs sprout Over my temples; but soon, now, The grove entire will bloom about My head, to shade my withered brow.   Pallid, my sun sinks low, and will Soon fade on the horizon’s face; And on the mournful, doleful hill I see my final dwelling-place.   Oh! May you from your lips let fall A kiss, too long delayed, upon My own, so that beneath my pall I may rest, heart at peace, anon...
Come, fallen angel, and your pink wings close; Doff your white robe, your rays that gild the skies; You must—from heaven, where once you used to rise— Streak, like a shooting star, fall into prose.   Your bird’s feet now must strike an earthly pose. It is no time to fly: walk! Lock your prize— Your harp’s fair harmonies—in resting wise, Within your heart: vain, worthless treasures those!   Poor child of heaven, but vainly would you sing: To them your tongue divine means not a thing! Their ear is closed to your sweet chords! But this   I beg: O blue-eyed angel, first, before You leave, find my pale love, whom I adore, And give her brow one long, last farewell kiss.
You who want knowledge, seek the Oneness within   There you will find the clear mirror already waiting
I was passionate, filled with longing, I searched far and wide.   But the day that the Truthful One found me, I was at home.
Of all that God has shown me I can speak just the smallest word, Nor more than a honey bee Takes on his foot From an overspilling jar.
O my Lord,   if I worship you from fear of hell, burn me in hell.   If I worship you from hope of Paradise, bar me from its gates.   But if I worship you for yourself alone, grant me then the beauty of your Face.
Eating is her subject.  While eating is her subject.  Where eating is her subject.  Withdraw whether it is eating which is her subject. Literally while she ate eating is her subject. Afterwards too and in be- tween. This is an introduction to what she ate.  She ate a pigeon and a soufflé.  That was on one day.  She ate a thin ham and its sauce.  That was on another day.  She ate desserts.  That had been on one day.  She had fish grouse and little cakes that was before that day.  She had breaded veal and grapes that was on that day.  After that she ate every day.  Very little but very good.  She ate very well that day.  What is the difference between steaming and roasting, she ate it cold because of Saturday.  Remembering potatoes because of preparation for part of the day.  There is a difference in preparation of cray-fish which makes a change in their fish for instance.  What was it besides bread.  Why is eating her subject.  There are reasons why eating is her subject.  Because.  Help Helena.  With whether a pound.  Everybody who comes has been with whether we mean ours allowed.  Tea rose snuff box tea rose.  Willed him well will till well.  By higher but tire by cry my tie for her.  Meeting with with said.  Gain may be hours.  There there their softness.  By my buy high.  By my softness.  There with their willow with without out outmost lain in out.  Has she had her tooth without a telegram.  Nothing surprises Edith. Her sister made it once for all.  Chair met alongside.  Paved picnic with gratitude.  He is strong and sturdy.  Pile with a pretty boy.  Having tired of some one.  Tire try.  Imagine how they felt when they were invited.  Preamble to restitution.  Tire and indifferent.  Narratives with pistache.  A partly boiled.  Next sentence.  Now or not nightly.  A sentence it is a whether wither intended.  A sentence text. Taxed.  A sampler with ingredients may be unmixed with their ac- counts how does it look like. If in way around. Like lightning.  Apprehension is why they help to do what is in amount what is an amount.  A sentence felt way laid.  A sentence without a horse.  It is a mend that to distribute with send.  A sentence is in a letter ladder latter.  Birth with birth.  If any thinks about what is made for the sake they will manage to place taking take may.  How are browns.  How are browns.  Got to go away.  Anybody can be taught to love whatever whatever they like better.  Taught of butter.  Whatever they like better.  Unify is to repeat alike like letter.  To a sentence.  Answer do you need what it is vulnerable.  There made an assay.  Wire on duck.  Please forget Kate.  Please and do forbid how very well they like it.  Paid it forbid forfeit a renewal.  A sentence may be near by.  Very well in eighty.  If a letter with mine how are hear in all. This is to show that a letter is better. Than seen.  A sentence is money made beautiful. Beautiful words of love. Really thought at a sentence very likely.  How do you do they knew.  A sentence made absurd.  She is sure that he showed that he would be where a month.  This is the leaf safe safety.  This is the relief safe safely.  A joined in compel commit comply angle of by and by with all.  Sorry to have been shaded easily by their hastened their known go in find.  In never indented never the less.  As a wedding of their knowing with which whether they could guess.  Bewildered in infancy with compliments makes their agree- ment strange.  Houses have distributed in dividing with a pastime that they called whose as it.  Bent in view. With vein meant. Then at in impenetrable covered with the same that it is having sent.  Are eight seen to be pale apples.  A sentence is a subterfuge refuge refuse for an admirable record of their being in private admirable refuge for their being in private this in vain their collide.  A sentence controls does play shade.  A sentence having been hours first.  A sentence rest he likes a sentence lest best with interest.  Induce sentences.  A sentence makes them for stairs for stairs do bedew.  A sentence about nothing in a sentence about nothing that pale apples from rushing are best.  No powder or power or power form form fortification in vain of their verification of their very verification within with whim with a whim which is in an implanted hour.  Suppose a sentence.  How are ours in glass.  Glass makes ground glass.  A sentence of their noun.  How are you in invented complimented.  How are you in in favourite.  Thinking of sentences in complimented.  Sentences in in complimented in thank in think in sentences in think in complimented.  Sentences should not shrink. Complimented.  A sentence two sentences should not think complimented. Complimented.  How do you do if you are to to well complimented. A sen- tence leans to along.  Once when they went they made the name the same do do climbed in a great many however they are that is why without on account faired just as well as mention. Next they can come being in tears, governess a part of plums comfort with our aghast either by feel torn.  How can whose but dear me oh.  Darling how is George. George is well. Violate Thomas but or must with pine and near and do and dare defy.  Haynes is Mabel Haynes.  What was what was what it was what is what is what is is what is what which is what is is it.  At since robbed of a pre prize sent.  Tell a title.  What was it that made him be mine what was it.  Three years lack back back made well well willows three years back.  It never makes it bathe a face.  How are how are how are how are how are heard. Weak- ness is said.  Jay James go in George Wilbur right with a prayed in de- gree.  We leave we form we regret.  That these which with agrees adjoin comes clarity in eagle quality that periodic when men calls radically readily read in mean to mention.  What is ate ate in absurd.  Mathilda makes ours see.  An epoch is identical with usury.  A very long hour makes them hire lain down.  Two tempting to them.  Follow felt follow.  He loves his aigrette too with mainly did in most she could not newly instead dumb done entirely.  Absurd our our absurd.  With flight.  Take him and think of him. He and think of him. With him think of him. With him and with think with think with think with him.
He started with the tune his mother had hummed in Ohio, nostalgia he’d carried for years, and by Sunday afternoon he had the words. A triumph, already; he whistled the banjo’s part.   (Himself a sympathizer from the North, called copperhead, called traitor by his own kin.)   Something lively, some git-up-and-git they’d wanted and didn’t he deliver— Miss Susan got seven encores the first night. That gave them their tune, their Negro walk-around—  Look away, look away, look away, they sang. Vipers, that spring, spread thick on the ground.
I   I am asking something gone return: at least one night, her face   a girl’s, just twenty, and to be married in a month,   holding the dress’s hem to her lips as places are called. And I,   come along too late to know her trembling, parting the curtain—   let me hear her now perched on the ladder, recite   “But Mama, . . . am I pretty enough . . . ?”   II   When Emily marries, ladies in hats drown out the proper vows   —it’s what the play requires; the everyday over the sacred. Even the set   is made of items found in the actors’ garages so we always see back to the bones.   Here my grandmother stands at the altar with her fictional George   and gossip swells in the pews which are rows of folding chairs.     III   Among the murmuring departed, in the cemetery,   my grandmother takes her place at the empty plot.   She’s the newcomer who can’t believe she’s dead   if the living roam just on the crest of this hill.   My grandmother in white poplin dress and hair ribbon   lifts her arms in despair— Emily, untouched by the rain.     IV   Tomorrow her face will glow on the cover of The Shreveport Times—  a gorgeous girl demanding her life. “But oh!” she cries in Emily’s voice,   “I can go back there and live all those days over again . . .”     V   So Emily steps back into childhood   though the wiser dead have told her don’t—   into her mother’s kitchen, her twelfth birthday, a moment   she thought she was happy. She watches now   that life: mother speaking gruffly, father late to work.   Dead Emily kisses the cheek of the classmate playing her mother—   understanding, in that kitchen, they’d all been blind:   they never knew those people they said they loved.     VI   My grandmother maintains her grace to the end.   She is the queen of the theater; all of Shreveport melts for her smile.   She holds her palms out to feel the heavy drops as the curtains close,   though she knows this rain is only the sound of rain.
I need them true to life and so I shoot them, as many as fill the field at dawn, and then fix wires to prop them as if feeding their young or bending to the river.   Why make a little book when they exist life-sized, can be etched to stand high as my hip? Often have I wished I had eight pairs of hands to hold them, and another body for the gun.
“Burnished,” when applied to limbs, refers you to furniture, or wood at least, a hint the skin has been burned beyond the human, & then beyond.   Necessary for the removal of skin from a burnished limb is an implement sharper rather than duller, wieldy & willing to dig without displacement.   The scrape of flint on a burnished limb —if you say “arm” you must mean it— resembles, no doubt, a chisel (of iron?) that furls what’s before it, away.   The point of whatever has been lost between the stasis of the burnished limb & its movement away from the rest of what you have identified as skin,   the skin of a burnished limb, is to bring to bear the thought of bone & how it relates or, better, responds to its covering uncurling from it flake by flake & amassing, forceless, on the floor, the floor you will describe as cement or concrete, at least rug- and wood-less, the wood being the skin of the burnished limb, until the skin is just another piece of your household furniture.
There are rooms that know you, rooms you know & can name, rooms that rise & stutter into view if you stare long enough. Rooms where nothing happened but in your head, where the world went on apart from you, you trying to rise to it. Rooms with walls of white blocks, one window, the only sound the bang bang banging of the headboard against the wall, your bed still. The room where the bed fell on you, the room where the hand going down was not your own, the groping tongue the proof. The room you talked your way out of, four men of monosyllables, thick arms & necks flushed pink, closing in, emptying the air between. The room where you were walked in on, the room where you were the walker, both times the last time in that room. The room with no door, a woman across the threshold, you crawling to her, over her to the bathroom to press your cheek against the white, your name an indictment among the stalls. The room the sun never touched, the sound of cars dropping you to sleep, your pupils large & hungry for light.
loaded like spoons into the belly of Jesus where we lay for weeks for months in the sweat and stink of our own breathing Jesus why do you not protect us chained to the heart of the Angel where the prayers we never tell and hot and red as our bloody ankles Jesus Angel can these be men who vomit us out from ships called Jesus Angel Grace of God onto a heathen country Jesus Angel ever again can this tongue speak can these bones walk Grace Of God can this sin live
for Peter Schjeldahl  Wake up high up  frame bent & turned on Moving slowly  & by the numbers light cigarette Dress in basic black  & reading a lovely old man’s book:    BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN    change    flashback    play cribbage on the Williamsburg Bridge  watching the boats sail by  the sun, like a monument,  move slowly up the sky  above the bloody rush:   break yr legs & break yr heart kiss the girls & make them cry loving the gods & seeing them die    celebrate your own  & everyone else’s birth:    Make friends forever  & go away
Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures The birds that were singing this morning have shut up I thought I saw a couple kissing, but Larry said no It’s a strange bird. He should know. & I think now “Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space.” Ron put me in that picture. In another picture, a good- looking poet is thinking it over, nevertheless, he will never speak of that it. But, his face is open, his eyes are clear, and, leaning lightly on an elbow, fist below his ear, he will never be less than perfectly frank, listening, completely interested in whatever there may be to hear. Attentive to me alone here. Between friends, nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy. What seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how that makes me feel. You are dead. And you’ll never write again about the country, that’s true. But the people in the sky really love to have dinner & to take a walk with you.
Ladies, who of my lord would fain be told,Picture a gentle knight, full sweet to see,Though young in years, in wisdom passing old,Model of glory and of valiancy;Fair-haired, bright colour glowing in his face,Tall and well-set, broad-shouldered, finally,In all his parts a paragon of graceExcept in loving wantonly, ah me! Who'd know myself, picture a woman wroughtIn passion and in presence after pain'sAnd death's own bitter images, a portOf safety where untroubled rest remains;One who with neither tears, nor sighs, nor zestWakes pity in her cruel lover's breast.
They talk of short-lived pleasure–be it so– Pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go. The fiercest agonies have shortest reign; And after dreams of horror, comes again The welcome morning with its rays of peace. Oblivion, softly wiping out the stain,Makes the strong secret pangs of shame to cease:Remorse is virtue’s root; its fair increase Are fruits of innocence and blessedness:Thus joy, o’erborne and bound, doth still release His young limbs from the chains that round him press. Weep not that the world changes–did it keepA stable, changeless state, ’twere cause indeed to weep.
Stand here by my side and turn, I pray, On the lake below, thy gentle eyes;The clouds hang over it, heavy and gray, And dark and silent the water lies;And out of that frozen mist the snow In wavering flakes begins to flow; Flake after flake They sink in the dark and silent lake.See how in a living swarm they come From the chambers beyond that misty veil;Some hover awhile in air, and some Rush prone from the sky like summer hail.All, dropping swiftly or settling slow, Meet, and are still in the depths below; Flake after flake Dissolved in the dark and silent lake.Here delicate snow-stars, out of the cloud, Come floating downward in airy play,Like spangles dropped from the glistening crowd That whiten by night the milky way;There broader and burlier masses fall; The sullen water buries them all– Flake after flake–All drowned in the dark and silent lake.And some, as on tender wings they glide From their chilly birth-cloud, dim and gray,Are joined in their fall, and, side by side, Come clinging along their unsteady way;As friend with friend, or husband with wife, Makes hand in hand the passage of life; Each mated flake Soon sinks in the dark and silent lake.Lo! while we are gazing, in swifter haste Stream down the snows, till the air is white,As, myriads by myriads madly chased, They fling themselves from their shadowy height. The fair, frail creatures of middle sky, What speed they make, with their grave so nigh; Flake after flake, To lie in the dark and silent lake!I see in thy gentle eyes a tear; They turn to me in sorrowful thought;Thou thinkest of friends, the good and dear, Who were for a time, and now are not;Like these fair children of cloud and frost, That glisten a moment and then are lost, Flake after flake–All lost in the dark and silent lake.Yet look again, for the clouds divide; A gleam of blue on the water lies;And far away, on the mountain-side, A sunbeam falls from the opening skies,But the hurrying host that flew between The cloud and the water, no more is seen; Flake after flake, At rest in the dark and silent lake.
It is a sultry day; the sun has drunkThe dew that lay upon the morning grass;There is no rustling in the lofty elmThat canopies my dwelling, and its shadeScarce cools me. All is silent, save the faintAnd interrupted murmur of the bee,Settling on the sick flowers, and then againInstantly on the wing. The plants aroundFeel the too potent fervors: the tall maizeRolls up its long green leaves; the clover droopsIts tender foliage, and declines its blooms.But far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills,With all their growth of woods, silent and stern,As if the scorching heat and dazzling lightWere but an element they loved. Bright clouds,Motionless pillars of the brazen heaven–Their bases on the mountains–their white topsShining in the far ether–fire the airWith a reflected radiance, and make turnThe gazer’s eye away. For me, I lieLanguidly in the shade, where the thick turf,Yet virgin from the kisses of the sun,Retains some freshness, and I woo the windThat still delays his coming. Why so slow,Gentle and voluble spirit of the air?Oh, come and breathe upon the fainting earthCoolness and life! Is it that in his cavesHe hears me? See, on yonder woody ridge,The pine is bending his proud top, and nowAmong the nearer groves, chestnut and oakAre tossing their green boughs about. He comes;Lo, where the grassy meadow runs in waves!The deep distressful silence of the sceneBreaks up with mingling of unnumbered soundsAnd universal motion. He is come,Shaking a shower of blossoms from the shrubs,And bearing on their fragrance; and he bringsMusic of birds, and rustling of young boughs,And sound of swaying branches, and the voiceOf distant waterfalls. All the green herbsAre stirring in his breath; a thousand flowers,By the road-side and the borders of the brook,Nod gayly to each other; glossy leavesAre twinkling in the sun, as if the dewWere on them yet, and silver waters breakInto small waves and sparkle as he comes.
I broke the spell that held me long,The dear, dear witchery of song.I said, the poet’s idle loreShall waste my prime of years no more,For Poetry, though heavenly born,Consorts with poverty and scorn.I broke the spell–nor deemed its powerCould fetter me another hour.Ah, thoughtless! how could I forgetIts causes were around me yet?For wheresoe’er I looked, the while,Was Nature’s everlasting smile.Still came and lingered on my sightOf flowers and streams the bloom and light,And glory of the stars and sun; –And these and poetry are one.They, ere the world had held me long,Recalled me to the love of song.
For why am I afraid to sing the fundamental shape of awe should I now begin to sing the silvered back of  the winter willow spear the sparkling agate blue would this blade and this sky free me to speak  intransitive lack –   the vowels themselves free   Of what am I afraid of what lies in back of me of day these stars scattered as far as the I what world and wherefore will it shake free why now in the mind of an afternoon is a daisy  for a while flagrant and alive   Then what of night of hours’ unpredicated bad luck and the rot  it clings to fathomless on the far side in winter dark   Hey shadow world when a thing comes back comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself  what then what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses what fortune what fate and the forms not themselves but only itself the sky by water and wind shaken I am born in silvered dark   Of what am I to see these things between myself  and nothing between the curtain and the stain between the hypostatic scenes of breathing and becoming the thing I see are they not the same   Things don’t look good on the street today beside a tower in a rusting lot one is a condition the other mystery even this afternoon light so kind and nourishing a towering absence vibrating air   Shake and I see pots from old shake  and I see cities anew I see robes shake I see desert I see the farthing in us all the ghost of day the day inside night as tones decay  and border air it is the old songs and the present wind I sing and say I love the unknown sound in a word   Mother where from did you leave me on the sleeve  of a dying word of impish laughter in the midst my joy I compel and confess open form my cracked hinged picture doubled   I can’t remember now if I made a pact with the devil  when I was young when I was high on a sidewalk I hear “buy a sweatshirt?” and think buy a shirt from the sweat of children  hell I’m just taking a walk in the sun in a poem  and this sound caught in the most recent coup
When I say the ghost has begun you understand what is being said. That time is not how we keep it  or measure first there was then wasn’t . . . It twitters and swerves like  the evening news. Now outside is 3D. Inside non-  representational space. Every law has an outside  and inside I have witnessed cruelty break and gulp and sweat then  punch out a smile. To be awake. This talking in space. To be absorbed in the ongoing. Belief’s a shadow to be looked into  and into until relief is gone. The dark triangle settled in the midst of  traffic is on us. Time comes in adverbial bursts, a glass of beer, a smoke . . . The evening air refreshes, startles, and the questions grow deeper like  shadows across storefronts. A forsythia ticking against  the dirty pane. This was time. Up. Down. Up. And you were a part of it. If I say it can you feel it now? Imagine. Lightning strikes. Rain  falls and drives. Clouds pass. Night clarified. Stars. In silent pictures the tree falls  in the optic nerve. The sound is chemistry. There’s no getting to it or if  getting to it feels like the actual sound  is that silence? Alone here with my shadows  drawn . . . So what’s this about? A horse and a castle, a tree  and its leaving? What’s this about in solitary  splendor? The undertow and its threshold, a door and the opening sky? Or because a play of reflection  lit up my bumper and caught my eyes I saw the shadow of a falcon. Because a sound a poor man  uttered reached my ear I fell into song. If the syntax of loyalty is not tragic  then what is the wager? If there were time, would it be ours?
from “Elegy for the First Century” Bells on our eyelashes and the death throes of words, and I among fields of speech, a knight on a horse made of dirt. My lungs are my poetry, my eyes a book, and I, under the skin of words, on the beaming banks of foam, a poet who sang and died leaving this singed elegy before the faces of poets, for birds at the edge of sky.
1. The leaves asleep under the wind are the wounds’ ship, and the ages collapsed on top of each other are the wound’s glory, and the trees rising out of our eyelashes are the wound’s lake. The wound is to be found on bridges where the grave lengthens and patience goes on to no end between the shores of our love and death. The wound is a sign, and the wound is a crossing too.     2. To the language choked by tolling bells I offer the voice of the wound. To the stone coming from afar to the dried-up world crumbling to dust to the time ferried on creaky sleighs I light up the fire of the wound. And when history burns inside my clothes and when blue nails grow inside my books, I cry out to the day, “Who are you, who tosses you into my virgin land?” And inside my book and on my virgin land I stare into a pair of eyes made of dust. I hear someone saying, “I am the wound that is born and grows as your history grows.”     3. I named you cloud, wound of the parting dove. I named you book and quill and here I begin the dialogue between me and the ancient tongue in the island of tomes in the archipelago of the ancient fall. And here I teach these words to the wind and the palms, O wound of the parting dove.     4. If I had a harbor in the land of dreams and mirrors, if I had a ship, if I had the remains of a city, if I had a city in the land of children and weeping, I would have written all this down for the wound’s sake, a song like a spear that penetrates trees, stone, and sky, soft like water unbridled, startling like conquest.     5. Rain down on our desert O world adorned with dream and longing. Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound, tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound, that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands.   World adorned with dream and longing world that falls on my brow like the lash of a wound, don’t come close—the wound is closer— don’t tempt me—the wound is more beautiful. That magic that your eyes had flung on the last kingdoms— the wound has passed over it, passed and did not leave a single sail to tempt toward salvation, did not leave a single island behind.
The child I was came to me once, a strange face  He said nothing We walked each of us glancing at the other in silence, our steps a strange river running in between   We were brought together by good manners and these sheets now flying in the wind then we split, a forest written by earth watered by the seasons’ change.   Child who once was, come forth— What brings us together now, and what do we have to say?
The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space.   No road to this house, a siege, and his house is graveyard.  From a distance, above his house  a perplexed moon dangles  from threads of dust.   I said: this is the way home, he said: No  you can’t pass, and aimed his bullet at me. Very well then, friends and their homes  in all of Beirut’s are my companions.   Road for blood now—  Blood about which a boy talked  whispered to his friends:  nothing remains in the sky now  except holes called “stars.”   The city’s voice was too tender, even the winds would not tune its strings— The city’s face beamed like a child arranging his dreams for nightfall bidding the morning to sit beside him on his chair.     They found people in bags:  a person without a head   a person without hands, or tongue  a person choked to death  and the rest had no shapes and no names.  —Are you mad? Please  don’t write about these things. A page in a book  bombs mirror themselves inside of it  prophecies and dust-proverbs mirror themselves inside of it   cloisters mirror themselves inside of it, a carpet made of the alphabet  disentangles thread by thread falls on the face of the city, slipping out of the needles of memory. A murderer in the city’s air, swimming through its wound— its wound is a fall that trembled to its name—to the hemorrhage of its name and all that surrounds us— houses left their walls behind  and I am no longer I.   Maybe there will come a time in which you’ll accept  to live deaf and mute, maybe they’ll allow you to mumble: death  and life  resurrection  and peace unto you.   From the wine of the palms to the quiet of the desert . . . et cetera from a morning that smuggles its own intestines  and sleeps on the corpses of the rebels . . . et cetera from streets, to trucks  from soldiers, armies . . . et cetera from the shadows of men and women . . . et cetera from bombs hidden in the prayers of monotheists and infidels . . . et cetera from iron that oozes iron and bleeds flesh . . . et cetera from fields that long for wheat, and grass and working hands . . . et cetera from forts that wall our bodies  and heap darkness upon us . . . et cetera from legends of the dead who pronounce life, who steer our life . . . et cetera from talk that is slaughter and slaughter and slitters of throats . . . et cetera from darkness to darkness to darkness I breathe, touch my body, search for myself  and for you, and for him, and for the others   and I hang my death between my face and this hemorrhage of talk . . . et cetera     You will see—  say his name  say you drew his face  reach out your hand toward him  or smile  or say I was happy once  or say I was sad once  you will see:  there is no country there.     Murder has changed the city’s shape—this stone  is a child’s head— and this smoke is exhaled from human lungs. Each thing recites its exile . . . a sea  of blood—and what do you expect on these mornings except their arteries set to sail into the darkness, into the tidal wave of slaughter?     Stay up with her, don’t let up— she sits death in her embrace and turns over her days  tattered sheets of paper. Guard the last pictures of her topography— she is tossing and turning in the sand in an ocean of sparks— on her bodies are the spots of human moans.   Seed after seed are cast into our earth— fields feeding on our legends, guard the secret of these bloods.  I am talking about a flavor to the seasons  and a flash of lightning in the sky.     Tower Square—(an engraving whispers its secrets  to bombed-out bridges . . . ) Tower Square—(a memory seeks its shape  among dust and fire . . . ) Tower Square—(an open desert  chosen by winds and vomited . . . by them . . . ) Tower Square—(It’s magical  to see corpses move/their limbs   in one alleyway, and their ghosts   in another/and to hear their sighs . . . ) Tower Square—(West and East  and gallows are set up—  martyrs, commands . . . ) Tower Square—(a throng  of caravans: myrrh  and gum Arabica and musk  and spices that launch the festival . . . ) Tower Square—(let go of time . . .  in the name of place)   —Corpses or destruction,  is this the face of Beirut? —and this  a bell, or a scream? —A friend? —You? Welcome.  Did you travel? Have you returned? What’s new with you? —A neighbor got killed . . . /    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   A game / —Your dice are on a streak. —Oh, just a coincidence /    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    Layers of darkness  and talk dragging more talk.
Even the wind wants to become a cart pulled by butterflies.   I remember madness leaning for the first time on the mind’s pillow. I was talking to my body then and my body was an idea I wrote in red.   Red is the sun’s most beautiful throne and all the other colors worship on red rugs.   Night is another candle. In every branch, an arm, a message carried in space echoed by the body of the wind.   The sun insists on dressing itself in fog when it meets me: Am I being scolded by the light?   Oh, my past days— they used to walk in their sleep and I used to lean on them.   Love and dreams are two parentheses. Between them I place my body and discover the world.   Many times I saw the air fly with two grass feet and the road dance with feet made of air.   My wishes are flowers staining my days.   I was wounded early, and early I learned that wounds made me.   I still follow the child who still walks inside me.   Now he stands at a staircase made of light searching for a corner to rest in and to read the face of night again.   If the moon were a house, my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.   They are taken by dust carrying me to the air of seasons.   I walk, one hand in the air, the other caressing tresses that I imagine.   A star is also a pebble in the field of space.   He alone who is joined to the horizon can build new roads.   A moon, an old man, his seat is night and light is his walking stick.   What shall I say to the body I abandoned in the rubble of the house in which I was born? No one can narrate my childhood except those stars that flicker above it and that leave footprints on the evening’s path.   My childhood is still being born in the palms of a light whose name I do not know and who names me.   Out of that river he made a mirror and asked it about his sorrow. He made rain out of his grief and imitated the clouds.   Your childhood is a village. You will never cross its boundaries no matter how far you go.   His days are lakes, his memories floating bodies.   You who are descending from the mountains of the past, how can you climb them again, and why?   Time is a door I cannot open. My magic is worn, my chants asleep.   I was born in a village, small and secretive like a womb. I never left it. I love the ocean not the shores.
Some gentler passion slide into my mind, For I am soft and made of melting snow —Queen Elizabeth I   Her sex sent her mother to the tower, made her father profligate with arrogant desires,   but she was made of flint and backbone.   Think of a young girl in a blue velvet bodice, a white collar and lace, the very prototype of virginal.   Think of a woman, her court enlivened by suitors and lovers in doublets, in brocaded cloaks, despite suspicions of their motives staining the sheets,   the way cups of spicy, flowery mead were sipped despite the possibility of poison.   Even the crown of the sun must go down each night.   Could she have stood at the prow of a ship in that great Armada she ordered, instead of at a window, waiting for urgent results?   Could she have guessed that the words of a man she inspired, carved into the marble of ages, had a muscular beauty more than equal to her own worldly triumphs?   Daughter, Queen, Ruler of roiling seas, of meandering rivers and meadows, of armies of soldiers, their swords and armor glittering like planets to her sun.   Namesake to an age.   And Poet? When she turned to the empty parchment (or once to a windowpane, a diamond for quill) everything must have gone quiet.   Even a queen is naked before the naked page, awaiting not the generous spoils owed to a victor but the gifts freely given of a besotted muse.
Elizabeth, The Lodge at Woodstock, 1554   Less than the charting of each dawn’s resolutions, less than each evening’s trickle of doubt, less than a crown’s weight in silver, a diamond’s  scratch against glass, less than the touted   ill luck of my rich beginnings—and yet more than Eve’s silence, my mute ingratitude. More than music’s safe passage, its rapturous net, more than this stockpile of words, their liquid solicitude;    more desired than praise (the least-prized of my dreams), less real than dreaming (castle keep for my sins), more than no more, which seems much less than hoped-for, again—   one mutiny, quelled; one wish lost, a forgotten treasure: to live without scrutiny, beyond constant measure.
Three summers since I chose a maid,  Too young maybe—but more’s to do  At harvest-time than bide and woo.  When us was wed she turned afraid  Of love and me and all things human;  Like the shut of a winter’s day  Her smile went out, and ’twadn’t a woman—  More like a little frightened fay.  One night, in the Fall, she runned away.    “Out ’mong the sheep, her be,” they said,  ’Should properly have been abed;  But sure enough she wadn’t there  Lying awake with her wide brown stare. So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down  We chased her, flying like a hare  Before out lanterns. To Church-Town  All in a shiver and a scare  We caught her, fetched her home at last  And turned the key upon her, fast.    She does the work about the house  As well as most, but like a mouse:  Happy enough to chat and play  With birds and rabbits and such as they,  So long as men-folk keep away.  “Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech  When one of us comes within reach.  The women say that beasts in stall  Look round like children at her call.  I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.    Shy as a leveret, swift as he,  Straight and slight as a young larch tree,  Sweet as the first wild violets, she,  To her wild self. But what to me?    The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,  The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,  One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,  A magpie’s spotted feathers lie  On the black earth spread white with rime,  The berries redden up to Christmas-time.  What’s Christmas-time without there be  Some other in the house than we!    She sleeps up in the attic there  Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair  Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,  The soft young down of her, the brown, The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!
Bury your heart in some deep green hollow  Or hide it up in a kind old tree; Better still, give it the swallow  When she goes over the sea.   In Saturday’s Market there’s eggs a ’plenty  And dead-alive ducks with their legs tied down, Grey old gaffers and boys of twenty—  Girls and the women of the town— Pitchers and sugar-sticks, ribbons and laces,  Poises and whips and dicky-birds’ seed, Silver pieces and smiling faces,  In Saturday Market they’ve all they need.   What were you showing in Saturday Market  That set it grinning from end to end Girls and gaffers and boys of twenty—?  Cover it close with your shawl, my friend— Hasten you home with the laugh behind you,  Over the down—, out of sight, Fasten your door, though no one will find you,  No one will look on a Market night.   See, you, the shawl is wet, take out from under  The red dead thing—. In the white of the moon On the flags does it stir again? Well, and no wonder!  Best make an end of it; bury it soon. If there is blood on the hearth who’ll know it?  Or blood on the stairs, When a murder is over and done why show it?  In Saturday Market nobody cares.   Then lie you straight on your bed for a short, short weeping  And still, for a long, long rest, There’s never a one in the town so sure of sleeping  As you, in the house on the down with a hole in your breast.    Think no more of the swallow,  Forget, you, the sea,  Never again remember the deep green hollow  Or the top of the kind old tree!
I remember rooms that have had their part  In the steady slowing down of the heart. The room in Paris, the room at Geneva, The little damp room with the seaweed smell, And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—  Rooms where for good or for ill—things died. But there is the room where we (two) lie dead, Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again  As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed  Out there in the sun—in the rain.
Up here, with June, the sycamore throws  Across the window a whispering screen;  I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose, Than anything else on this earth that is out in green.  But I mean to go through the door without fear,  Not caring much what happens here  When I’m away:— How green the screen is across the panes  Or who goes laughing along the lanes With my old lover all summer day.
Not for that city of the level sun,  Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze—  The shadeless, sleepless city of white days, White nights, or nights and days that are as one— We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done.  We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see  What, from the threshold of eternity We shall step into. No, I think we shun The splendour of that everlasting glare,  The clamour of that never-ending song.  And if for anything we greatly long, It is for some remote and quiet stair  Which winds to silence and a space for sleep  Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.
Sweetheart, for such a day  One mustn’t grudge the score; Here, then, it’s all to pay,  It’s Good-night at the door.   Good-night and good dreams to you,—  Do you remember the picture-book thieves Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through,  And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves?   So you and I should have slept,—But now,  Oh, what a lonely head! With just the shadow of a waving bough  In the moonlight over your bed.
Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint  Stands nearer than God stands to our distress, And one small candle shines, but not so faint  As the far lights of everlastingness, I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day  Where Christ is hanging, rather pray  To something more like my own clay,  Not too divine;  For, once, perhaps my little saint  Before he got his niche and crown,  Had one short stroll about the town;  It brings him closer, just that taint—  And anyone can wash the paint  Off our poor faces, his and mine!  Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as gold, But still, with just the proper trace Of earthliness on his shining wedding face; And then gone suddenly blank and old The hateful day of the divorce: Stuart got his, hands down, of course Crowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse: But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best,— He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest.  It seems too funny all we other rips  Should have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnably  Keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships.—  It’s funny too, how easily we sink,  One might put up a monument, I think  To half the world and cut across it “Lost at Sea!” I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night—  No, it’s no use this penny light—  Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown—  The trees of Calvary are where they were,  When we are sure that we can spare  The tallest, let us go and strike it down  And leave the other two still standing there.  I, too, would ask Him to remember me  If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see.   Oh! quiet Christ who never knew  The poisonous fangs that bite us through  And make us do the things we do,  See how we suffer and fight and die,  How helpless and how low we lie,  God holds You, and You hang so high,  Though no one looking long at You,  Can think You do not suffer too, But, up there, from your still, star-lighted tree  What can You know, what can You really see  Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!    We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun,  Without paying so heavily for it  That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one.  I could hardly bear  The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,  The thick, close voice of musk,  The jessamine music on the thin night air,  Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere —  The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair,  Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat  Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat  My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street.  I think my body was my soul,  And when we are made thus  Who shall control  Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet,  Who shall teach us  To thrust the world out of our heart: to say, till perhaps in death,  When the race is run,  And it is forced from us with our last breath  “Thy will be done”? If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things.  As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings—  Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings!  The temperate, well-worn smile  The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own:  And afterwards the child’s, for a little while,  With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes  So soon to change, and make you feel how quick  The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick—  (How does one though?) quite early on,  Of long green pastures under placid skies,  One might be walking now with patient truth.  What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth,  When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone?    There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen,  With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat,  The dainty head held high against the painted green And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet.  Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring  To me to-day: a radiance on the wall,  So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing  Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small,  Sapless and lined like a dead leaf, All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!    And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair—  Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay—?  Or could—with any one of the old crew,  But oh! these boys! the solemn way  They take you and the things they say—  This “I have only as long as you”  When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two—  Although at heart perhaps—God! if it were  Only the face, only the hair!  If Jim had written to me as he did to-day  A year ago—and now it leaves me cold—  I know what this means, old, old, old: Et avec ça—mais on a vécu, tout se paie.    That is not always true: there was my Mother (well at least the dead are free!)   Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am, Monty too;  The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so patiently; The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me—and what of me ?  But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot see  How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity. If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came;  Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any darkened day.  Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last year’s May,  No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday;  For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way,  The shadows are never the same.    “Find rest in Him” One knows the parsons’ tags—  Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep: Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags,  For so He giveth His belovèd sleep.  Oh! He will take us stripped and done,  Driven into His heart. So we are won:  Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings—  I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things.    But I shall not be in them. Let Him take  The finer ones, the easier to break. And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours, the perfumes,  Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms.  In silks and in gemlike wines;  Here, even, in this corner where my little candle shines  And overhead the lancet-window glows  With golds and crimsons you could almost drink  To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think There was the scent in every red and yellow rose  Of all the sunsets. But this place is grey,  And much too quiet. No one here,  Why, this is awful, this is fear!  Nothing to see, no face.  Nothing to hear except your heart beating in space  As if the world was ended. Dead at last!  Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast.  These to go on with and alone, to the slow end:  No one to sit with, really, or to speak to, friend to friend:  Out of the long procession, black or white or red Not one left now to say “Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here your head”.  Only the doll’s house looking on the Park  To-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lights out, very dark. With, upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids' footsteps overhead, Then utter silence and the empty world—the room—the bed—  The corpse! No, not quite dead, while this cries out in me.  But nearly: very soon to be  A handful of forgotten dust—  There must be someone. Christ! there must,  Tell me there will be someone. Who?  If there were no one else, could it be You?    How old was Mary out of whom you cast  So many devils? Was she young or perhaps for years She had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that man going past  Till suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon’s house  And stood and looked at You through tears.  I think she must have known by those  The thing, for what it was that had come to her.  For some of us there is a passion, I suppose,  So far from earthly cares and earthly fears  That in its stillness you can hardly stir  Or in its nearness, lift your hand,  So great that you have simply got to stand  Looking at it through tears, through tears.  Then straight from these there broke the kiss,  I think You must have known by this  The thing, for what it was, that had come to You:  She did not love You like the rest,  It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best,  She gave You something altogether new.  And through it all, from her, no word,  She scarcely saw You, scarcely heard:  Surely You knew when she so touched You with her hair,  Or by the wet cheek lying there, And while her perfume clung to You from head to feet all through the day  That You can change the things for which we care,  But even You, unless You kill us, not the way.    This, then was peace for her, but passion too.   I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew,  The only one that I would care to take  Into the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards, to wake.  Almost as happy as the carven dead  In some dim chancel lying head by head  We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through— One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind our lips was endless life,  Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly dawn, his “Are you there?”  And lie still, listening to the wind outside, among the firs.    So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to her of night and day, It is the only truth: it is the dream in us that neither life nor death nor any other  thing can take away:  But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of the dream could she have  cared so much ?  She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first the touch.   And He has never shared with me my haunted house beneath the trees Of Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyes for tears, And the happier guests who would not see, or if they did, remember these,  Though they lived there a thousand years.  Outside, too gravely looking at me. He seems to stand,  And looking at Him, if my forgotten spirit came  Unwillingly back, what could it claim  Of those calm eyes, that quiet speech,  Breaking like a slow tide upon the beach,  The scarred, not quite human hand ?—  Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginings  When it has learned so long not to think, not to be,  Again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of things  That I shall not see!    I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head:  When I was small I never quite believed that He was dead:  And at the Convent school I used to lie awake in bed  Thinking about His hands. It did not matter what they said,  He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt! And most of all in Holy Week  When there was no one else to see  I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly,  If He had ever seemed to notice me  Or, if, for once, He would only speak.
The town is old and very steep  A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers, And black-clad people walking in their sleep—  A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers  To her new grave; and watched from end to end  By the great Church above, through the still hours:  But in the morning and the early dark The children wake to dart from doors and call Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend,  Before it climbs up to the park, Ken’s is in the gabled house facing the Castle wall.   When first I came upon him there Suddenly, on the half-lit stair, I think I hardly found a trace Of likeness to a human face  In his. And I said then If in His image God made men, Some other must have made poor Ken— But for his eyes which looked at you As two red, wounded stars might do.   He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard, His voice broke off in little jars To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird  He seemed as he ploughed up the street, Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet  And arms thrust out as if to beat  Always against a threat of bars.    And oftener than not there’d be  A child just higher than his knee Trotting beside him. Through his dim  Long twilight this, at least, shone clear,  That all the children and the deer,  Whom every day he went to see Out in the park, belonged to him.    “God help the folk that next him sits  He fidgets so, with his poor wits,” The neighbours said on Sunday nights When he would go to Church to “see the lights!”  Although for these he used to fix   His eyes upon a crucifix  In a dark corner, staring on  Till everybody else had gone.  And sometimes, in his evil fits, You could not move him from his chair— You did not look at him as he sat there,  Biting his rosary to bits. While pointing to the Christ he tried to say,  “Take it away”.    Nothing was dead: He said “a bird” if he picked up a broken wing,  A perished leaf or any such thing  Was just “a rose”; and once when I had said  He must not stand and knock there any more,  He left a twig on the mat outside my door.    Not long ago The last thrush stiffened in the snow,  While black against a sullen sky  The sighing pines stood by. But now the wind has left our rattled pane To flutter the hedge-sparrow’s wing, The birches in the wood are red again  And only yesterday The larks went up a little way to sing  What lovers say  Who loiter in the lanes to-day;  The buds begin to talk of May  With learned rooks on city trees,  And if God please  With all of these We, too, shall see another Spring.   But in that red brick barn upon the hill  I wonder—can one own the deer, And does one walk with children still  As one did here?  Do roses grow Beneath those twenty windows in a row—  And if some night When you have not seen any light They cannot move you from your chair  What happens there?  I do not know.    So, when they took Ken to that place, I did not look After he called and turned on me His eyes. These I shall see—
To-night again the moon’s white mat  Stretches across the dormitory floor While outside, like an evil cat  The pion prowls down the dark corridor,  Planning, I know, to pounce on me, in spite For getting leave to sleep in town last night. But it was none of us who made that noise,  Only the old brown owl that hoots and flies Out of the ivy—he will say it was us boys—  Seigneur mon Dieu: the sacré soul of spies!  He would like to catch each dream that lies  Hidden behind our sleepy eyes: Their dream? But mine—it is the moon and the wood that sees; All my long life how I shall hate the trees!   In the Place d’Armes the dusty planes, all Summer through, Dozed with the market women in the sun and scarcely stirred  To see the quiet things that crossed the Square—, A tiny funeral, the flying shadow of a bird,  The hump-backed barber Célestin Lemaire,  Old Madame Michel in her three-wheeled chair,  And filing past to Vespers, two and two,  The demoiselles of the pensionnat Towed like a ship through the harbour bar,  Safe into port, where le petit Jésus  Perhaps makes nothing of the look they shot at you:  Si, c’est défendu, mais que voulez-vous?  It was the sun. The sunshine weaves A pattern on dull stones: the sunshine leaves  The portraiture of dreams upon the eyes  Before it dies:  All Summer through The dust hung white upon the drowsy planes Till suddenly they woke with the Autumn rains.    It is not only the little boys  Who have hardly got away from toys, But I, who am seventeen next year, Some nights, in bed, have grown cold to hear  That lonely passion of the rain Which makes you think of being dead, And of somewhere living to lay your head  As if you were a child again, Crying for one thing, known and near Your empty heart, to still the hunger and the fear  That pelts and beats with it against the pane.    But I remember smiling too At all the sun’s soft tricks and those Autumn dreads  In winter time, when the grey light broke slowly through The frosted window-lace to drag us shivering from our beds.  And when at dusk the singing wind swung down Straight from the stars to the dark country roads  Beyond the twinkling town,  Striking the leafless poplar boughs as he went by, Like some poor, stray dog by the wayside lying dead, We left behind us the old world of dread, I and the wind as we strode whistling on under the Winter sky.   And then in Spring for three days came the Fair  Just as the planes were starting into bud Above the caravans: you saw the dancing bear  Pass on his chain; and heard the jingle and the thud.  Only four days ago  They let you out of this dull show To slither down the montagne russe and chaff the man à la tête de veau   Hit, slick, the bull's eye at the tir, Spin round and round till your head went queer On the porcs-roulants. Oh! là là! fête! Va pour du vin, et le tête-a-tête  With the girl who sugars the gaufres! Pauvrette,  How thin she was! but she smiled, you bet,    As she took your tip—“One does not forget The good days, Monsieur”. Said with a grace, But sacrebleu: what a ghost of a face!  And no fun too for the demoiselles Of the pensionnat, who were hurried past,  With their “Oh, que c’est beau—Ah, qu’elle est belle!” A lap-dog’s life from first to last! ; The good nights are not made for sleep, nor the good days for dreaming in,  And at the end in the big Circus tent we sat and shook and stewed like sin!    Some children there had got—but where? Sent from the south, perhaps—a red bouquet  Of roses, sweetening the fetid air With scent from gardens by some far away blue bay.  They threw one at the dancing bear; The white clown caught it. From St. Rémy’s tower  The deep, slow bell tolled out the hour; The black clown, with his dirty grin  Lay, sprawling in the dust, as She rode in.   She stood on a white horse—and suddenly you saw the bend  Of a far-off road at dawn, with knights riding by, A field of spears—and then the gallant day Go out in storm, with ragged clouds low down, sullen and grey  Against red heavens: wild and awful, such a sky  As witnesses against you at the end Of a great battle; bugles blowing, blood and dust— The old Morte d’Arthur, fight you must—.  It died in anger. But it was not death  That had you by the throat, stopping your breath. She looked like Victory. She rode my way.   She laughed at the black clown and then she flew  A bird above us, on the wing Of her white arms; and you saw through A rent in the old tent, a patch of sky With one dim star. She flew, but not so high—  And then she did not fly; She stood in the bright moonlight at the door Of a strange room, she threw her slippers on the floor—  Again, again  You heard the patter of the rain,  The starving rain—it was this Thing, Summer was this, the gold mist in your eyes;—  Oh God! it dies,  But after death—,  To-night the splendour and the sting  Blows back and catches at your breath, The smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all the roses in the world,  the sea, the Spring, The beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream, the dream, the  Enchanted Thing!    At first you scarcely saw her face,  You knew the maddening feet were there, What called was that half-hidden, white unrest To which now and then she pressed  Her finger-tips; but as she slackened pace And turned and looked at you it grew quite bare:  There was not anything you did not dare:— Like trumpeters the hours passed until the last day of the Fair.    In the Place d’Armes all afternoon  The building birds had sung “Soon, soon”, The shuttered streets slept sound that night,  It was full moon: The path into the wood was almost white, The trees were very still and seemed to stare:  Not far before your soul the Dream flits on,  But when you touch it, it is gone And quite alone your soul stands there.   Mother of Christ, no one has seen your eyes: how can men pray  Even unto you? There were only wolves’ eyes in the wood—  My Mother is a woman too: Nothing is true that is not good, With that quick smile of hers, I have heard her say;— I wish I had gone back home to-day;  I should have watched the light that so gently dies  From our high window, in the Paris skies,  The long, straight chain  Of lamps hung out along the Seine: I would have turned to her and let the rain Beat on her breast as it does against the pane;—  Nothing will be the same again;— There is something strange in my little Mother’s eyes, There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring— The smell of beasts, the smell of dust—The Enchanted Thing!   All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern  And the black trunks of trees. Only the hair Of any woman can belong to God. The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod,  There had been violets there,  I shall not care As I used to do when I see the bracken burn.
Isabella Whitney, The maner of her Wyll, 1573  1   We’re told it was mostly the soul  at stake, its formal    setting-forth, as over water, where, against all odds,   the words-on-paper make  a sort of currency, which heaven,    against all odds, accepts. So Will, which is to say, May what   I purpose, please, this once, and what  will happen coincide.    To which the worldly dispositions were mere after-thought:   your mother’s ring and so forth. What  the law considered yours    to give. Which in the case of women was restricted—this was   long ago, and elsewhere—so  that one confessedly “weak    of purse” might all the more emphatically be thought of as having little   to say. Except about the soul. The late  disturbance in religion    having done that much, the each for each responsible, even a servant,   even the poor. Wild, then—quite   beyond the pale—to hustle    the soul-part so hastily off the page. And turn, our Isabella Whitney,   to the city and its faithlessness. Whose  smells and sounds—the hawker’s cry,    the drainage ditch in Smithfield—all the thick-laid, lovely, in-your-face-and-nostrils stuff   of getting-by no woman of even the slightest  affectation would profess to know,    much less to know so well. As one would know the special places on   his body, were the passion merely personal.      2   Wattle and brickwork. Marble and mud.  The city’s vast tautology. No city    without people and no people but will long for what the city says they lack:   high ceilings, gloves and laces, news,  the hearth-lit circle of friendship, space    for solitude, enough to eat. And something like a foothold in the whole-of-it,   some without-which-not, some  little but needful part in all the passing-    from-hand-to-hand of it, so every time the bondsman racks his debtor or   the shoemaker hammers a nail or one un-  practiced girl imagines she    has prompted a look of wistfulness, a piece of it is yours because   your seeing it has made it that much slower  to rejoin the blank    oblivion of never-having- been. The year was fifteen hundred seventy-   three. The year of our Redeemer, as  they used to say. That other    circuit of always-in-your- debt. From which she wrested, in her open   I-am-writing-not-for-fun-but-for-the-money  way of authorship, a world    not just of plenty but—and here’s the part of that’s legacy—of love.
In sympathy with Gaspara Stampa By woman so touched, so pressed, detachment being thought achievable at all   is boggling in itself. Its being thought achievable by love—but love for only all (not someone’s single) sentience—   appears the precept of too cold a form of flame. How much of a hand in things   relinquishes the hold of things-at-hand? What kiss might such   a mind reclaim? A swirl of dust in Buddhist schools, perhaps. A view of several solar   systems from above. Not love. The thought   appeals as it appals: Slow learners, we must spurn the selving sensualities, to feel   for feelers of this kind, unfasten passion’s burner to identify what’s under it—   in short, must court dispassion just to be compassionate.
You give me a little courage, Mary, in your skittish dedication to her highness; I too can dare as humbleness may dare; if there’s anywhere to speak with you, it’s here at the wordy Anglo-Saxon periphery of the universe’s one great surge of praise   though I’m lost here. Where’s the joyful noise? the syllables I managed to memorize before they were weighted down by meaning? and what’s all this complicated rhyme? Don’t mistake me—I’m not complaining; it’s just not my notion of a psalm   for all my love of wrought, elaborate things— especially when they’re the sort that sings and yours do sing a stunning song— but they’re off-kilter without the awe inherent in my ancient holy tongue. I miss my amen sela, hallelujah   though I do applaud you and your brother— going for the full linguistic bait-and-switch in the move from one language to another: David’s disarmingly direct speech a tour-de-force of formal contrivance (no form repeated more than once   in each of a hundred fifty psalms!) in your show-off/virtuoso hands. Talk about such a song in such a land— but what else is there in dreary England? Its sole extravagance a trove of synonyms that endlessly perplexes and expands   its mongrel, unbeautiful tongue— a language, frankly, crying out for poetry given its absence, even, of integrity not to mention intrinsic song. . . . (Its sound: water going down the drain according to my friend, an Italian,   after riding in a compartment of Americans gurgling all the way from Florence to Rome.) Why not a convoluted scheme of intricately wrought meter and rhyme? So what if the Hebrew has no strict patterns? Aim for a parallel sublime;   aren’t poems for the impossible? Though perhaps yours wouldn’t have been written had you known how daunting their task was; you had no Hebrew, used the Coverdale, Wyatt, Geneva Bible, as cribs for Latin, even psaumes de David, mis en rime Françoise . . .   Clearly, your secret weapon was ignorance, also useful (look at me!) in writing a poem, your psalms fourth- and fifth-hand half the time. Unless (of course!) your stroke of brilliance was to focus on the one thing you could do:Sing and let your song be new  which they are, profoundly, even to me, who know so many bits of the originals of what you claim you’re “translating” by heart. Still, I’ll be reading along, alternately put off and spellbound by your art- ifice, when my wary eye suddenly falls   on something both completely known and new, my own—our own—ungainly language for a brief instant alien with grace, a black-on-white typescript mirage in which English letters turn into Hebrew or at least intercept its holiness. . . .   How did you manage it, Mary? Your contemporaries called it piety— but I don’t believe that for a second. What motivated you was love of poetry, or rather of your legendary brother—lost so young—whom you would spend   your whole life working to immortalize. . . . I’m not sure he needed you. No lighter touch exists in English poetry than his . . . a touch you often managed to approach in your grief-induced lyric resolve to force a bit of him to stay alive.   Poetry as solace, as wizardry— and there he is, with you, all the time, clearly palpable in all your artistry. It was your eagerness to be with him that kept you going back to intervene with yet one more indomitable line,   got you through all hundred-fifty psalms. Or maybe it was just your poet’s ruse (poetry often thrives on self-delusion) to trick yourself to rise to his occasion. . . . Unless he just provided the excuse to stake your own (quite vast) poetic claims,   impossible to say from this vantage point: to distinguish collaborator from muse, self-doubt from false humility but, then again, there’s a poetry in mystery. Who will contradict me if I confuse my own passions with yours—so convenient,   inevitable?—in a poem like this— though you and I—despite the labyrinth of misapprehension, class, religion reinforcing our dissociation (Jew from Christian, commoner from countess, twenty-first-century from seventeenth)   come together in passion upon passion (forgive me, Mary, if dare too far): psalms, poetic forms, your genius brother (I mean both the poet and the man; no poem could manufacture that much charm). We’ve even suffered from a kindred harm:   my version, albeit, fairly mild, though I too was admonished as a child about what a woman dared not do. Still, I have a vast cohort, while you were almost entirely alone. Better yet, I had the complete Dickinson   (published just a year before I was born); I didn’t know it yet, but I had you . . . while you had to ransack antiquity for even fragments of poems by a woman. But of course you weren’t troubled by inequity— it was, frankly, all you knew—   you might even have relished your position as sole woman poet, thinker, patron— lonely as it was—though you did encourage your precocious niece, Mary (later Wroth). And who can really estimate the damage of your appalling bargain: a brother’s death   required to turn you into poet? Of course, in your time, death was everywhere. Perhaps you were pious—a last resort to shore up an attenuated heart against even further disrepair, immersion in the psalms a sort of antidote   to life’s massive overdose of pain: from living with a sad, disfigured mother (small-pox scars from nursing a sick queen) mourning her husband’s lost affection to deaths of favorites—your sister, your brother, your only daughters, Katherine, then Anne.  God made this day; he did us send itIn joy and mirth then let us spend it Excellent advice, if it would hold— And maybe it does, when you can summonall that air or life enfold to distract you with a binge of exaltation . . .  or if that fails, then an assiduous extravaganza of sublime detail calibrated to provide the wherewithal to face a universe we cannot alter if not with joy and mirth, at least with grace: a perfect, hand-illuminated psalter,  the loops of all its letters filled with gold— a treasure, even, for an exacting Queen— offering a deity who’ll listen to a voice alternately humble, bold, beseeching, thankful, ecstatic, bleak, through which (hallelujah, Mary!) you still speak.
It happens again As soon as I take down her book and open it.   I turn the page. My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.   The ship's rail freezes.Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet's coast.  A blackbird leaves her pine trees And lands in my spruce trees.  I open my door on a Dublin street. Her child/her words are staring up at me: In better dress to trim thee was my mind,But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find.  We say home truths Because her words can be at home anywhere—   At the source, at the end and whenever The book lies open and I am again   An Irish poet watching an English woman Become an American poet.
Oh fairest of the rural maids! Thy birth was in the forest shades; Green boughs, and glimpses of the sky, Were all that met thine infant eye. Thy sports, thy wanderings, when a child, Were even in the sylvan wild; And all the beauty of the place Is in thy heart and on thy face. The twilight of the trees and rocks Is in the light shade of thy locks; Thy step is as the wind, that weaves Its playful way among the leaves. Thine eyes are springs, in whose serene And silent waters heaven is seen; Their lashes are the herbs that look On their young figures in the brook. The forest depths, by foot unpressed, Are not more sinless than thy breast; The holy peace, that fills the air Of those calm solitudes, is there.
The time has been that these wild solitudes, Yet beautiful as wild, were trod by me Oftener than now; and when the ills of life Had chafed my spirit—when the unsteady pulse Beat with strange flutterings—I would wander forth And seek the woods. The sunshine on my path Was to me a friend. The swelling hills, The quiet dells retiring far between, With gentle invitation to explore Their windings, were a calm society That talked with me and soothed me. Then the chant Of birds, and chime of brooks, and soft caress Of the fresh sylvan air, made me forget The thoughts that broke my peace, and I began To gather simples by the fountain’s brink, And lose myself in day-dreams. While I stood In Nature’s loneliness, I was with one With whom I early grew familiar, one Who never had a frown for me, whose voice Never rebuked me for the hours I stole From cares I loved not, but of which the world Deems highest, to converse with her. When shrieked The bleak November winds, and smote the woods, And the brown fields were herbless, and the shades, That met above the merry rivulet, Were spoiled, I sought, I loved them still; they seemed Like old companions in adversity. Still there was beauty in my walks; the brook, Bordered with sparkling frost-work, was as gay As with its fringe of summer flowers. Afar, The village with its spires, the path of streams And dim receding valleys, hid before By interposing trees, lay visible Through the bare grove, and my familiar haunts Seemed new to me. Nor was I slow to come Among them, when the clouds, from their still skirts, Had shaken down on earth the feathery snow, And all was white. The pure keen air abroad, Albeit it breathed no scent of herb, nor heard Love-call of bird nor merry hum of bee, Was not the air of death. Bright mosses crept Over the spotted trunks, and the close buds, That lay along the boughs, instinct with life, Patient, and waiting the soft breath of Spring, Feared not the piercing spirit of the North. The snow-bird twittered on the beechen bough, And ’neath the hemlock, whose thick branches bent Beneath its bright cold burden, and kept dry A circle, on the earth, of withered leaves, The partridge found a shelter. Through the snow The rabbit sprang away. The lighter track Of fox, and the raccoon’s broad path, were there, Crossing each other. From his hollow tree The squirrel was abroad, gathering the nuts Just fallen, that asked the winter cold and sway Of winter blast, to shake them from their hold. But Winter has yet brighter scenes—he boasts Splendors beyond what gorgeous Summer knows; Or Autumn with his many fruits, and woods All flushed with many hues. Come when the rains Have glazed the snow and clothed the trees with ice, While the slant of sun of February pours Into the bowers a flood of light. Approach! The incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps, And the broad arching portals of the grove Welcome thy entering. Look! the massy trunks Are cased in pure crystal; each light spray, Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven, Is studded with its trembling water-drops, That glimmer with an amethystine light. But round the parent-stem the long low boughs Bend, in a glittering ring, and arbors hide The glassy floor. Oh! you might deem the spot The spacious cavern of some virgin mine, Deep in the womb of earth—where the gems grow, And diamonds put forth radiant rods and bud With amethyst and topaz—and the place Lit up, most royally, with the pure beam That dwells in them. Or haply the vast hall Of fairy palace, that outlasts the night, And fades not in the glory of the sun;— Where crystal columns send forth slender shafts And crossing arches; and fantastic aisles Wind from the sight in brightness, and are lost Among the crowded pillars. Raise thine eye; Thou seest no cavern roof; no palace vault; There the blue sky and the white drifting cloud Look in. Again the wildered fancy dreams Of spouting fountains, frozen as they rose, And fixed, with all their branching jets, in air, And all their sluices sealed. All, all is light; Light without shade. But all shall pass away With the next sun. From numberless vast trunks Loosened, the crashing ice shall make a sound Like the far roar of rivers, and the eve Shall close o’er the brown woods as it was wont. And it is pleasant, when the noisy streams Are just set free, and milder suns melt off The plashy snow, save only the firm drift In the deep glen or the close shade of pines— ’Tis pleasant to behold the wreaths of smoke Roll up among the maples of the hill, Where the shrill sound of youthful voices wakes The shriller echo, as the clear pure lymph, That from the wounded trees, in twinkling drops, Falls, mid the golden brightness of the morn, Is gathered in with brimming pails, and oft, Wielded by sturdy hands, the stroke of axe Makes the woods ring. Along the quiet air, Come and float calmly off the soft light clouds, Such as you see in summer, and the winds Scarce stir the branches. Lodged in sunny cleft, Where the cold breezes come not, blooms alone The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at— Startling the loiterer in the naked groves With unexpected beauty, for the time Of blossoms and green leaves is yet afar. And ere it comes, the encountering winds shall oft Muster their wrath again, and rapid clouds Shade heaven, and bounding on the frozen earth Shall fall their volleyed stores, rounded like hail And white like snow, and the loud North again Shall buffet the vexed forest in his rage.
When beechen buds begin to swell, And woods the blue-bird’s warble know, The yellow violet’s modest bell Peeps from the last year’s leaves below. Ere russet fields their green resume, Sweet flower, I love, in forest bare, To meet thee, when thy faint perfume Alone is in the virgin air. Of all her train, the hands of Spring First plant thee in the watery mould, And I have seen thee blossoming Beside the snow-bank’s edges cold. Thy parent sun, who bade thee view Pale skies, and chilling moisture sip, Has bathed thee in his own bright hue, And streaked with jet thy glowing lip. Yet slight thy form, and low thy seat, And earthward bent thy gentle eye, Unapt the passing view to meet When loftier flowers are flaunting nigh. Oft, in the sunless April day, Thy early smile has stayed my walk; But midst the gorgeous blooms of May, I passed thee on thy humble stalk. So they, who climb to wealth, forget The friends in darker fortunes tried. I copied them—but I regret That I should ape the ways of pride. And when again the genial hour Awakes the painted tribes of light, I’ll not o’erlook the modest flower That made the woods of April bright.
Thou blossom bright with autumn dew, And colored with the heaven’s own blue, That openest when the quiet light Succeeds the keen and frosty night. Thou comest not when violets lean O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen, Or columbines, in purple dressed, Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest. Thou waitest late and com’st alone, When woods are bare and birds are flown, And frosts and shortening days portend The aged year is near his end. Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye Look through its fringes to the sky, Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall A flower from its cerulean wall. I would that thus, when I shall see The hour of death draw near to me, Hope, blossoming within my heart, May look to heaven as I depart.
These are the gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name— The Prairies. I behold them for the first, And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch, In airy undulations, far away, As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, And motionless forever. —Motionless?— No—they are all unchained again. The clouds Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath, The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye; Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South! Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers, And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high, Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not—ye have played Among the palms of Mexico and vines Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks That from the fountains of Sonora glide Into the calm Pacific—have ye fanned A nobler or a lovelier scene than this? Man hath no power in all this glorious work: The hand that built the firmament hath heaved And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes With herbage, planted them with island groves, And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor For this magnificent temple of the sky— With flowers whose glory and whose multitude Rival the constellations! The great heavens Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,— A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue, Than that which bends above our eastern hills. As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed, Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides The hollow beating of his footsteps seems A sacrilegious sound. I think of those Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here— The dead of other days?—and did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvest, here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed, And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. All day this desert murmured with their toils, Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed In a forgotten language, and old tunes, From instruments of unremembered form, Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came— The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce, And the mound-builders vanished from the earth. The solitude of centuries untold Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone; All—save the piles of earth that hold their bones, The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods, The barriers which they builded from the soil To keep the foe at bay—till o’er the walls The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one, The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped With corpses. The brown vultures of the wood Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres, And sat unscared and silent at their feast. Haply some solitary fugitive, Lurking in marsh and forest, till the sense Of desolation and of fear became Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die. Man’s better nature triumphed then. Kind words Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors Seated the captive with their chiefs; he chose A bride among their maidens, and at length Seemed to forget—yet ne’er forgot—the wife Of his first love, and her sweet little ones, Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race. Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise Races of living things, glorious in strength, And perish, as the quickening breath of God Fills them, or is withdrawn. The red man, too, Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long, And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought A wilder hunting-ground. The beaver builds No longer by these streams, but far away, On waters whose blue surface ne’er gave back The white man’s face—among Missouri’s springs, And pools whose issues swell the Oregon— He rears his little Venice. In these plains The bison feeds no more. Twice twenty leagues Beyond remotest smoke of hunter’s camp, Roams the majestic brute, in herds that shake The earth with thundering steps—yet here I meet His ancient footprints stamped beside the pool. Still this great solitude is quick with life. Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds, And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man, Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground, Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee, A more adventurous colonist than man, With whom he came across the eastern deep, Fills the savannas with his murmurings, And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, Within the hollow oak. I listen long To his domestic hum, and think I hear The sound of that advancing multitude Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain Over the dark brown furrows. All at once A fresher winds sweeps by, and breaks my dream, And I am in the wilderness alone.
It was fifty cents a game beneath exhausted ceiling fans, the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lights burned distant, dull. I was tired, but you insisted on one more, so I chalked the cue—the bored blue—broke, scratched. It was always possible for you to run the table, leave me nothing. But I recall the easy shot you missed, and then the way we both studied, circling—keeping what you had left me between us.
Where did you get such a dirty face, My darling dirty-faced child?   I got it from crawling along in the dirt And biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt. I got it from chewing the roots of a rose And digging for clams in the yard with my nose. I got it from peeking into a dark cave And painting myself like a Navajo brave. I got it from playing with coal in the bin And signing my name in cement with my chin. I got it from rolling around on the rug And giving the horrible dog a big hug. I got it from finding a lost silver mine And eating sweet blackberries right off the vine. I got it from ice cream and wrestling and tears And from having more fun than you’ve had in years.
She had the jitters She had the flu She showed up late She missed her cue She kicked the director She screamed at the crew And tripped on a prop And fell in some goo And ripped her costume A place or two Then she forgot A line she knew And went “Meow” Instead of “Moo” She heard ‘em giggle She heard ‘em boo The programs sailed The popcorn flew As she stomped offstage With a boo-hoo-hoo The fringe of the curtain Got caught in her shoe The set crashed down The lights did too Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to do An interview.
When I am gone what will you do? Who will write and draw for you? Someone smarter—someone new? Someone better—maybe YOU!
At the moment of my mother’s death I am rinsing frozen chicken. No vision, no rending of the temple curtain, onlythe soft give of meat. I had not seen her in four days. I thought her better, and the hospital did not call, so I am fresh from an office Christmas party, scotch on my breath as I answer the phone. And in one moment all my past acts become irrevocable.
As the doors glide shut behind me, the world flares back into being— I exist again, recover myself, sunlight undimmed by dark panes, the heat on my arms the earth’s breath. The wind tongues me to my feetlike a doe licking clean her newborn fawn. At my back, days measured by vital signs, my mouth opened and arm extended, the nighttime cries of a man withered child-size by cancer, and the bellsof emptied IVs tolling through hallways. Before me, life—mysterious, ordinary— holding off pain with its muscular wings. As I step to the curb, an orange moth dives into the basket of rosesthat lately stood on my sickroom table, and the petals yield to its persistent nudge, opening manifold and golden.
To Mary Sidney In your lace ruff you resemble a giant  snowflake or a spider web pearled with dew. What poets you catch   in your symmetries, at your long table at Wilton  what wits (Spenser, Fulke- Greville, Drayton) pitch into the roasted   piglet, stewed apples, carp.  If you rowzed God up, He knocked you back on your heels, Lady—   “O God, why hast thou thus  Repulst, and scattred us?”—Through the high windows at Wilton seethe   rumors of battle, Philip’s pussing thigh,  death in the Lowlands. Mother Wrong, Daughter Strife stalk the cities; still   you keep house with grammar, you salt the psalms  for long preserving. “As smoke in wind, as wax at fire doth waste”   the unjust dissolve. Your stanzas  stay, still sting the tongue. Dawn finds you kneeling on stone, calling   again the bleak God you believe  will answer you. You mix medicines, you write   in invisible ink. But Time  trumps Fame which undoes Death which masters Chastity and Love—which leaves   Eternity, your Master wrote, master of all.  And like your lace, your lines shine, not pale, “but whitely,   and more whitely pure  than snow on windless hill that flaking falls, as one whom labour did to rest allure.”   Translate us too, rough line by line,  into your crystalline severe design.
The guests are floating in the lobby, walking but also gliding to the front desk then away, checking in, checking out, muscular souls adorned in cotton, wool, and rayon, chewing the future inside their heads, slicing the air with ironed pleats, avoiding the camera at every turn so as, so as to get it right this time, which is the first time. “First cut, best cut!” the director shouts since this is also a silent film for the deaf and therefore everyone. His aim is to get the cast to see what they’ve been missing, to disregard the very sounds that they don’t hear to begin with, but would notice immediately if they were gone. See how they glide on the ether above the floor. The insouciance, Lord. The insouciance! They are all here in the magic of the set, every soul in the guise of a guest going about her business, a rendezvous here, as assignation there, the solitary sipping at the bar. Someone striking appears at the door. The rain outside beats down on the streets with terrible force until all you can hear is the roar of the sky as it passes above, and then below, on its narrow tracks.
The nurse calls to tell me on Sunday evenings how he’s doing.  How he’s holding his own in front of the window with a thousand channels behind the one that saves his screen with snow, fish houses, and eagles.  How the days hang above the ice as vast recycled pages on which he writes in invisible ink. How the sun arcs across the sky, then breaks like a plate above the horizon.  How the temperature drops below zero at dusk, then continues to fall till morning. In this way she teaches me how to speak to him in his sleep at his home in Minnesota, which is the same, she says, as talking to a friend you’ve never met, but grown close to nonetheless from hearing his voice.  I hear the snow falling as she holds the phone outside the window. Silence is the sound of snow falling on snow, I think as I listen to the flakes inside the air before she closes the window.  “I’m thinking of walleye in their sleep,” I tell my father.  “Of catching them as they dream, then throwing them back in the hole I drilled by hand with the auger you gave me as a child, whose handle is stained with blood from my turning it so many times into the ice of Bad Medicine.”  I wait for her voice to return, then say, “Just this for now since any more would disappear the lake inside his head on which he builds a house for us to fish throughout the winter.”
My sister and I went out to them with sugar cubes and bridled their heads when they bent down to eat from our palms. We led them over to the long white fence on which we climbed to the topmost rail, then threw our legs across their backs, clutching the reins to steady ourselves against their girth, steering them out into the hills until we were lost, or thought we were, only to find ourselves at Judith Creek or Holcomb Rock where we’d turn back in the early dark, gripping their manes, crouching low, galloping hard on the high soft road across the fields to the open barn.
It’s not paradise I’m looking for but the naming I hardly gave a thought to. Call it the gift I carried in my loneliness among the animals before I started listening to the news. Call it the hint I had about the knowledge that would explode. In the meantime, which is real time plus the past, you’re swishing your skirt and speaking French, which is more than I can take, which I marvel at like a boy from the most distant seat in the Kronos Dome, where I am one of so many now I see the point of falling off. There’s not enough seats for us all to attend the eschaton. This ecstasy that plants beauty on my tongue, so that if it were a wing, I’d be flying with the quickness of a hummingbird and grace of a heron, is so much mercy in light of the darkness that comes. Who would say consolation? Who would say dross? Not that anyone would blame them. All night I hear so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted to look back, to save myself in hindsight, where all I see is the absence of me. Where all I hear is your voice, which couldn’t be more strange. How to go on walking hand in hand without our bodies on the path we made for our feet, talking, talking?
My soul and I went to the great sea to bathe. And when we reached the shore, we went about looking for a hidden and lonely place. But as we walked, we saw a man sitting on a grey rock taking pinches of salt from a bag and throwing them into the sea. “This is the pessimist,” said my soul, “Let us leave this place. We cannot bathe here.” We walked on until we reached an inlet. There we saw, standing on a white rock, a man holding a bejeweled box, from which he took sugar and threw it into the sea. “And this is the optimist,” said my soul, “And he too must not see our naked bodies.” Further on we walked. And on a beach we saw a man picking up dead fish and tenderly putting them back into the water. “And we cannot bathe before him,” said my soul. “He is the humane philanthropist.” And we passed on. Then we came where we saw a man tracing his shadow on the sand. Great waves came and erased it. But he went on tracing it again and again. “He is the mystic,” said my soul, “Let us leave him.” And we walked on, till in a quiet cover we saw a man scooping up the foam and putting it into an alabaster bowl. “He is the idealist,” said my soul, “Surely he must not see our nudity.” And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, “This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea.” And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur. And my soul said, “Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment.” So we passed on. And in a weedy place among the rocks was a man with his head buried in the sand. And I said to my soul, “We can bath here, for he cannot see us.” “Nay,” said my soul, “For he is the most deadly of them all. He is the puritan.” Then a great sadness came over the face of my soul, and into her voice. “Let us go hence,” she said, “For there is no lonely, hidden place where we can bathe. I would not have this wind lift my golden hair, or bare my white bosom in this air, or let the light disclose my sacred nakedness.” Then we left that sea to seek the Greater Sea.
Never mind the pins And needles I am on. Let all the other instruments Of torture have their way. While air-conditioners Freeze my coffee I watch the toaster Eating my toast. Did I press the right Buttons on all these Buttonless surfaces Daring me to press them? Did you gasp on seeing what The mailman just brought?   Will the fellow I saw pedaling Across the bridge live long After losing his left leg, His penis, and his bike To fearlessness? Will his sad wife find Consolation with the Computer wizard called in Last year to deal with glitches?   Did you defuse the boys’ Bomb before your house Was under water, same As everything else? Aunt Til grabbed her Silver hand mirror Before floating away. The dog yelped constantly, Tipping our canoe. Silly dog.
Ever imagining the dire, the sudden the menace with no thought of the gradual, the lingering itch of whatever. That was my sister. A stomach ache had to be diagnosed. “Oh, come on, it’s no big deal.” “How do you know? You aren’t me.”   At the doctor’s office she waited. He reached for his stethoscope, held it to her back and put it away in his pocket. Then, leaning across his desk, he asked importantly, “How long have you been eating your hair?” She couldn’t answer.   After surgery they came into the recovery room where she had just wakened. “You are a lucky lady. We found nothing.” She had an incision and several visitors. Besides, she was so lucky (incisions heal) and not a little disgusted.   “Me, eating my hair.”
In childhood Christy and I played in the dumpster across the street from Pickett & Sons Construction. When we found bricks, it was best. Bricks were most useful. We drug them to our empty backyard and stacked them in the shape of a room. For months we collected bricks, one on top another. When the walls reached as high as my younger sister’s head, we laid down. Hiding in the middle of our room, we watched the cycle of the sun, gazed at the stars, clutched hands and felt at home.
Lincoln, Neb., 2009
But it says nothing. And one is as quiet as if to say nothing moves me. Then there is the chair. And one speaks of the chair sitting at the table. Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth. The object is a piece of thing before. One shifts in a chair and opens the talk. And the time it says nothing one moves. The table is too long as the wall. Not a thing but it stays and one opens as a mouth will begin. Speaking of the table, nothing but to avoid that of the wall. One could return over and over to the chair, the wall one is sitting at. Least ways it says nothing. And the thing is, it stays still before speaking of. The object of nothing, even speech.
But it could not be brought to see what it could be brought. And the leaves are away again, teamed. A parent at the last and a parent in the middle. And as stones I thought it right. Two plates, and on the other side all the forest pieces. The clock says stay. The books lower the earth, and in gardens flat stones spin. The volume was of waiting. Today is today, until the preposition taken up. Next to the tree sways.   The sky in pieces the leaves part the leaves piece together. To and from a hand given all directions. The bark comes from below. Takes from the books of the moves under the sky. Speaker holds up the talks held last. Motors the dust and the yellow syllables. A slant on which was never here or only partly.
I look in that one kind of dwindled. And in this, look up, a truncheon in my fist, tin pot on my head, the war. My father, I’m looking at, is my age then and thin, his pants streak to the ground, shadows of rosevines . . . His father sits beneath a cat. Here the shadow has more flavor than my trains, elbows on livingroom floor, bangs that curl, opera broadcast, The Surreptitious Adventures of Nightstick. I lie in the wind of the sun and hear toots and smell aluminium smoke. The tiny oval of my mother’s youth in back and the rest is dark. Sundays, the floor was black. At the beach, here I’m a nest of seaweed, an earlier portrait of surrealists I saw later, a stem of grey what rises from my scalp. My hair is peaked in brine. And this here hat, dark green fedora over same green corduroy suit for a trip to the nation’s capitol, how far askance I’ve been since and never another hat. Cromium rods, the hand in the guide’s pocket seems far removed. Blurry shoes on sandstone steps, double and over exposed. Then in this one the SECRET points to my head, shaved, and emblem, OPEN, striped in “pirate” T-shirt and HERE IT IS. My elbow bent, upright this time, behind a pole. I had yet to enter at this snap the cavern beneath my sneakers. To the right my soles protrude from beneath a boulder, for I had trapped my mother and she asked Why. Taken. Given. Flashlight brighter than my face, another grotto, where the ball of twine, indirection, gave out but we never got very far in, Connecticut. I swim out of another cave in a further frame, cramped gaze of sunlit days, apparel forgot. Later I reel in a yell as my cousin takes a bite from my shank beneath ranchhouse breezy curtains of Marion. On a trudge up from the gasoline rockpit in the gaze of Judy Lamb, she carries my pack, my jeans rolled as I step on a pipe. Estwing in hand and svelte as only youthful can. Most of those rocks remain and she married a so-so clarinetist. My greygreen zipper jacket leans against a concrete teepee, my father looking bullchested stands before. Perhaps we had just argued. Central Park cement steps of pigeons, the snow removed. Overexposed whiteshirt at the drums, stick fingers ride cymbal at the camera raised, livingroom Brenton with orange & black “sea” wallpaper and orange&black tubs. I wore a wristwatch then and never again, drumtime hitching me past it. I graduate from highschool in white dinner jacket and diploma and frown, too many hot shadows back of the garage. Must roll up the bedroll with skinny arms and lam for the caves. Dave & A. Bell by the Ford Company Squire first time allowed alone to tool Bleak grass scapes of Knox farm. Rope down a crack, mosquitoes and Koolade, sun dapple leaf moss sandwiches, ache. Then in this group more drums on the roof, the gravel and the flat, a cover attempt for no album even thought. I tap and step in the dim known street. Lean on a chimney to inhabit the sky, deep with drops. Here I’m pressed on a wall of Tennessee limes, stones-throw from mouth of the underground we camped in. Too many thoughts, elide. Then lie on a beach in a doughnut pattern shirt with a stick, a pipe?, in my mouth as my cousin grins shiny beyond. Truro, also waiting for the caves. With the poets then I’m fat and the driveway is dark, the clapboards all white in a day of all talk. This then all ends in color, my red bandana and shirt out on Devil’s Pulpit, open hand addressed to the grey where Hawthorne and Melville now view of a highschool. While the water still spills, and the cat squints at leaves blown, my father wears Brahms, families lean in on one for a group shot, and the rock remains shattered in a star.
the rooms are chosen, then they move on the beads are wetted in the lime the weedlot boils in the blood of one eye the children first are cankered then they spin   there are not routes, only dials the rocks are spun together in one ball the laundry is of rust, the pillow shrieks pianos all blow northward and return   must be a bath if I could find it is a map of all the ways that center intermission skulls are simply caps for all compression day’s light raising closets for its dark   I put up the clothes and trail the keys that onyx knob in vacuum turns the train pressure on the pitches swaying back again a world without a heartbeat but it stays
He crackles the air in big fist because it is turning, the night’s spine and the fast floor of last year is now the wall of this   Those cracks should be flowers but there is no light nor lights in the windless binnacle strewn a slow rate of thought in the broad attention   What is shorn to say and then to leave awake in the sleep, the pen without its cap the numbers that will harm if not arrayed   The windows are not blank, the dark not empty but solid as the mask held loose before the eyeless active ridden hive   The sounds of the mind entire are the wind below at the valley floor then a thumping above as of rocks at work painting the wall   Turn out the lights and think invisibly stain the turn of time and hear the year before it’s there
In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan   You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat behind the one you there are   Then the I not part of the you equation, but the spider trying to build where it is written vibrates tentative I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore crystal region in its light, there are failures and there are failures   But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the final catch, trounced morning this is awful but none other available, words reach and visually fail to tie audibly retire the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of turning aside remind   I am hopefully this is position of the world overcome by and by the wind takes our voice the collateral one voice    after Diane Ward
When you get in on a try you never learn it back umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without travail of the tale, the one you longing live and singing burn   It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . . and other riskier small day and fain would be of the soap a sky dares    but we remand, that we a clasp of the silence you and I, all of tiny sphering rates back, I say to told wall, back and back and leave my edge, and add an L   Night is so enclosed we’ll never turn its page its eye, can be mine will be yours, to see all the people the underneath livid reaching part and past of the lying buildings the overreacher stops and starts, at in his head, in in her rhythm that knowledge is past all of us, so we flare and tap and top it right up, constant engage and flap in on keeping pace, our whelming rift, and soil and gleam and give back the voice, like those eary dead   Step down off our whelm lessons and shortly fired enter the bristle strum of Corrosion Kingdom where the last comes by first ever ring, every race through that tunnel of sun drop and pencil in the margins of a flare, of higher wish than dare, the stroked calmings of a line will spin and chime in blue quicks of a dream blues, the chores of those whispering gone crenulations   To meet a care is to dial redeem and we limp in the time sound balms so out of kilter is my name in the sun, and I win in the moon and you sing in that other spelling of win the way a blue is never singular
The youngest living thing in L. A. was my baby. The oldest living thing was the wind.   The wind grew well in that city in the desert. As did my garden of well-tended cement. As did my baby, whom I held like a heavy statuette.     I named him Mill at his birth . . . As the wheel goeth by drift of water . . .     And he grew and the wind blew and we lived in that desert and . . . no rain. No rain, no river. No sound of water. But for—   The fountain water.   The official fountain. Which flowed. Every day. Every day the baby slept. The baby breathed. The fountain flowed. It flowed imperceptibly. As if its water were fast asleep.     We stood on the fountain’s shore: woman + newborn. We made one totem. I named the baby Easter Island.     We played I Spy.   I saw: coins at the fountain’s bottom. Eyes. Copper cataracts, winking through the water at us.     I held the baby close. I held the baby stiffly. I brought the baby to see nobody.     I saw: statues in the fountain’s water. Statues in tall grasses on the shore of a sea. I turned to tell somebody. The city had disappeared into complete silence. There was only: the baby.     We were watching the water wrinkle in the wind. In the distance, maids were ironing.     Overhead: jets drew ciphers in the blue with their chalk.  The drift of the maker is dark. Beware that by the drifts thou perish not.  The statues, the statues in the strange fountain were looking at us. They were weeping and turning, turning and weeping.   They might have seen the city shimmering in the sun and wind, and known . . . It was a city with no one in it. If a door somewhere on the street opened, it would always be . . . no one.   It would be a bad draft that had blossomed.     I longed for meadows white with drifts of snow. I named the baby Drift.   In the winter I had planned to bring him north. To a barn’s eaves, to hear icicles drip. To prepare him to grow up in the path of the next great glacial drift.     City whose sky was white jet streaks.   Whose houses were apparitions of asbestos flakes.   Whose homeless sipped wind from tins.     Whose only water was the strange fountain.    Angel, my angel, my sweetheart, wake up. See the foam on the wave, see the tornado, the hurricane.  We stood on the fountain’s shore. The wind blew particulates of rug powder, of lemon-scented floor polish. The maids of the city were cleaning so completely.   And mutely.   There may have been other names I gave the baby.Zeno sweet Zeno Little fellow little fellow Vertigo  I said to the baby, We will stand here until there is snow on the mountain.  I may have meant to say fountain.  We peered all day into the strange fountain.  I said to myself, That is just your face stiffening around your cheeks. That is just grass growing at your feet.  I held the baby all the time, and he never ever cried.
To insects – sensual lust . . . was how I began my talk . . . On Paradise . . . at the local library . . . It would be a nuns-only audience . . . I knew . . . ! So I’d donned my habit . . . wore a ton of More Spirit Than Flesh make-up . . . And . . . brought props . . . props in my large portable closet . . . l’Armoire Secrète . . . Got to the library assembly room . . . Fuck . . . the one . . . only . . . person in the audience . . . my husband . . . Who . . . I knew . . . ! always preferred I get right to the . . . Thus . . . Paradise is sex sans bodies . . . Paradise: Travesty . . . Mechanical birds . . . Exegetes . . . Was I losing . . . ? Quickly to witticisms . . . I don’t like sexing but I love having sexed . . . The audience member . . . the audience member was . . . demanding to see the inside . . . of l’Armoire Secrète . . . Fuck . . . I . . . I began fumbling . . . with the golden lock . . . Took a minute for nunly explication . . . Sex lubricates . . . the locks on the gates . . . Paradise-wise . . . When the Armoire doors were . . . I stepped aside . . . let the audience member . . . He got very close . . . peered in . . . put his whole head . . . I regret he said . . . he was nervous trying to joke . . . I regret I’ve forgotten my spelunking costume . . . Shush I said . . . Keep looking . . . Though really there was nothing to see . . . l’Armoire Secrète was empty . . . Finally . . . he stood . . . squinting in the library light . . . he peered . . . right at me . . . Hey he said . . . he came very close . . . This was how a naked marble statue felt . . . Hey he said . . . gentle-wise . . . Love . . . he said . . . Love it’s me don’t you recognize . . . Of course I did . . . had . . . But had to pretend I did . . . not . . .   Will the audience member please take his seat . . . I said it resolutely . . . though not . . . firmly . . . I began again . . . On Paradise . . . My voice as clean as the Dewey Decimal System . . . I brought up my On Paradise PowerPoint . . . visuals of forests . . . trees . . . He was seated . . . Once my car broke down in front of a nunnery . . . over the door of which was inscribed . . . from Dante . . .   Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura   and I thought . . . at the time . . . I had been thinking una selva oscura . . . had to mean dark self . . . never bothering to . . . the Italian . . . I just . . . plunged . . . I’d donned a habit . . . black robes . . . . . . Was I saying all this out loud . . . or in my head . . . ? It’s hard to tell the difference . . . if . . . you talk enough . . . I donned these black robes and lived in shadows and . . . It was time for a rhetorical gesture . . . Of course of course I said with a nod . . . a nod magnanimous . . . a nod sagacious . . . a nod to a slide of particularly dark . . . trees . . . Of course the wilderness spreads woe unto him . . . who carries the wilderness with him . . . and the audience member . . . I had him . . . I knew . . . Thus . . . I parted my robes . . . to show . . . marching in and out of my cunt . . . the ants . . . Then . . . the robes . . . I shut . . . He . . . the audience . . . was no longer standing . . . very close . . . Goodness . . . ! I chided . . . Such distance . . .
for Tim It was in August, such a lovely summer, that I began the massacring. The flower killing. Feeding the sunflowers to the industrial dough mixer.   Soon there was enough yellow petal pulp for twelve loaves.   For twelve times ten loaves.   For twelve hundred loaves.     One of the food critics in town came around to inquire about my baking system. . . . I glanced at the machete, propped next to the ovens.     Toward October (and what auburn weather!), I still feltit, the substance of the soul, the libidinal terrible whatever.  I sat out back with the two countergirls, Haley and Shayla. There was one cigarette, and we were sharing. Mourning is the horizon of all desire, we were commiserating.  But Haley and Shayla, they’re—  They sell Kaiser rolls and sliced Sicilian and then they leave and put on a fancy tanktop and go out for the evening.  They go even though—  The little white clematis cling to the fences.  (At dawn the buds were dying as a sweet white bread was rising.)  November How beautiful were the yellow mums in the thin wintry sun! The bread they made had the hue of golden potatoes.  December Specks of red in lit windows: amaryllis that I stole and slaughtered and sold inside a pain de mie roll.  I love how in the cold, my breath flowers before me.  January, February I hacked through the ice to get at flower fetuses. The breads were very seedy.  Spring It was really beginning.  Baguettes made entirely of white peonies.  Brioche from the blood of purple lilacs.  Long lines outside the bakery’s door . . . What is the secret ingredient? I confessed: Flower. Flowers! Please, put me away. I am desperate.     Summer I could not go through another.   The woodbine had barely begun and already the mornings were full of the scent of them.     Not one honeysuckle would go unsucked—unless—     I closed the doors (every season is too full of longing!) and rechristened myself Flora. I drank a vat of rose water and put both my wrists through the slicer.   And then I began to bleed—a white powder. Flour.     And then you came in. I would have known you even if you were not wearing in your buttonhole a carnation.    The bakery is closed, I said tersely. I was bleeding profusely.  I loved you even before you saidNothing breaks more slowly, more silently, than bread.  With my blood pouring out as a fine, dry flour let me confess before I expire.  There on the counter, in that vase fresh and pink is the corsage I was keeping for our dance.
Try as much as I can try not to be I, nevertheless, I would mind that so much . . . said the oats to the water . . . which was working up to a boil . . . See, I said . . . to my daughter . . . Even oats . . . even oats maybe mind the boil . . . mind becoming oatmeal . . . For there was a small matter . . . Oleg had sent me a letter . . . I was to become . . . under Oleg’s orders . . . an angel . . . But we were late for school . . . We should be frantically . . . fossicking . . . but no, not if I was . . . dying . . . always late . . . I AM TO BECOME . . . I announced to her . . . before breakfast . . . AN ANGEL PRESENCE . . . I sugarcoated it . . . an angel who will bread your house . . . with lily dust . . . Why would I need lily dust . . . You’ll know when you’re an adult . . . Oleg . . . due any minute . . . I was telling her how I’d be . . . constantly . . . crossing over . . . to visit her . . . She asked . . . Will I know who you are? . . . Well not at first . . . No . . . But I am sure you will always be gracious . . . She was questioning things . . . very . . . worldlily . . . which sounds like she was making the world’s weight . . . into a delicate petal . . . of flower cellulose . . . but no . . . just . . . worldly is what she is . . . was . . . Once . . . when you were thirty-two . . . and in that attic apartment . . . and you . . . well . . . I understood . . . And you were cold . . . And I kissed your head . . . The top of it . . . In order to smell your hair . . . Mom don’t smell my head . . . I’m not even eight yet . . . Right . . . Yes . . .    I must have been having a nucleolytic episode . . . in which I foresaw . . . Mom . . . I heard her . . . I was still there but already . . . in the . . . underbelly . . . ? I was thinking of a lovely girl I knew . . . Last name De Flamand . . . she once wrote a lovely piece . . . about the world daffodil . . . and the difference . . . between yellow and yellowy . . . Mom . . . How nice it was going to be . . . to fit in . . . the underneath . . . or overhead . . . what have you . . . happily! . . . It was all coming to a sharp point . . . Had to get back to the present . . . for a moment . . . See . . . I said to my daughter . . . See . . . Even oats mind becoming oatmeal . . . We were staring down into the saucepan . . . my daughter in my arms . . . we played Taps . . . on our lips . . . in honor of the oats . . . I was present for that peculiarly sad moment . . . and still am . . . afterward . . .
When the motorboat man asked me to love him  I whispered precipice the word for the no-more-boyfriend feeling  because precipice contains ice (practically twice) because I wanted teetering— What? he saidYes  His ears from the engines—so hard of hearing—his hands always  so hot     Mid our first winter—I’d clung so long to the dock he had to crowbar my fingers off   Each digit cracked so cleanly Would you say they break like icicles? I asked sweetly     I knew I was nothing! But if I could sustain one song—I is, I is, I is I is I is  I could be: ice     Sex on the bathroom’s cold marble counter was best I whispered statuette, monument  What? he, sculpting my legs, said  Yes  The child? I named her Cecily It sounded like iced lily     For pure, I said pristine At the ocean, I said brine  Isle for vacation; for flowers, edelweiss  But when I said (only of late, late!) I choose ice Brittle pearls broke behind my syllables   Did he hear me? Again, twice, thrice:   For my love we would need to live in a great pyramid We would need to sleep beneath the continental shelf with Antarctic crust blanketing us The only driveway to any kind of house is an iceberg-ridden Northwest Passage When I whispered universe you were to translate it asone bright lineone bright rime
I TOO have been to Candyland, but I found myself missing the death cult. I missed the spectacle of the wounded bones being opened and instrumented.   Bill Varner, when he was still just a boy, wrote a stunning line of Arabic verse. He wrote: “The crescent moon is a scimitar; the sun, a severed head.”  ¡Gran cantar! and this, when he still had to keep his books in a locker! And he’d never even held hands with a girl—God! Penn State in the 1980s!   In those days, we all sat at the feet of a pig poet, deaf in one ear. One of these Dreadful “white-haired lovers”—oh, but he knew how to touch fire to fuse!  That little stick of fire apt to launch a poetic career! But what is it now? Merely a billowing cloud of humidity floating out of a tree.  Every turtle, snake, and bird is “born again”—oh, isn’t that so? The first time, Out the fêted cloaca—and the next, through the top of the shell.  The “I” is Greek, the “it” Italian, and Dickinson is our Ghalib. But that Ridiculous piece of dirt you’re kissing on can never be anything but.  Shut your eyes to what a worm he is, concentrate on his caress—but know Every half-truth is bound to call up its suppressed synoptic double.  Close your eyes and moan softly, your head full of packed cotton—but know Every hidden camera’s cockpit must one day be delivered of its black box.
HE has no gift for friendship, for he is void of all curiosity. Or rather, He’s only interested in matters touching the Lord Hamlet himself.  He was born in a lab whose walls were lined with giant, steamy jars Of the milk of the various mammals, from the milk of camels to the milk of men.  Pig milk, monkey milk, rat milk. Dog and cat milk, and the milk of whales. The milk of the duck-billed platypus and that | of the platitudinous buck.  The thick red milk of the vampire bat. And the black milk of the black bear. —A backlit wall of bottles, ranged from commonplace to rare!—  There was stallion milk and rooster, anaconda milk and shark; There was tarantula milk, Venus flytrap, and that | of the barking aardvark lark.  And he would have been perfectly normal, would have grown up socially adroit, But he stripped the sheet off a drinking straw, took a blade, and shaped a point;—  And he syringed into his body a few drops from every jar, Fell in the floor and spoke languages he had never heard before.  He spoke Titmouse. He spoke Miaow. He spoke Moo and Gnu and Ha. He spoke three kinds of Chickenhawk and the thirty dialects of Baa.  And from that day to this, MARDUD’s been lost in the zoo: A cautionary tale for whoever knows how to read the clues.
A collaboration with Emma Lazarus Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Give me your gentrificatees of the Lower East Side including all the well-heeled young Europeans who’ll take apartments without leases Give me your landlords, give me your cooperators Give me the guys who sell the food and the computers to the public schools in District One Give me the IRS-FBI-CIA men who don’t take election day off Give me the certain members of the school board & give me the district superintendent Give me all the greedy members of both american & foreign capitalist religious sects Give me the parents of the punk people Give me the guy who puts those stickers in the Rice Krispies Give me the doctor who thinks his time is more valuable than mine and my daughter’s & the time of all the other non-doctors in this world Give me the mayor, his mansion, and the president & his white house Give me the cops who laugh and sneer at meetings where they demonstrate the new uses of mace and robots instead of the old murder against people who are being evicted Give me the landlord’s sleazy lawyers and the deal-making judges in housing court & give me the landlord’s arsonist Give me the known & unknown big important rich guys who now bank on our quaint neighborhood Give me, forgive me, the writers who have already or want to write bestsellers in this country Together we will go to restore Ellis Island, ravaged for years by wind, weather and vandals I was surprised and saddened when I heard that the Statue of Liberty was in such a serious state of disrepair & I want to help This is the most generous contribution I can afford.
I sing this morning: Hello, hello. I proclaim the bright day of the soul. The sun is a good fellow, the devil is a good guy, no deaths today I know. I live because I live. I do not die because I cannot die. In Tuscan sunlight Masaccio painted his belief that St. Peter’s shadow cured a cripple, gave him back his sight. I’ve come through eighty-five summers. I walk in sunlight. In my garden, death questions every root, flowers reply. I know the dark night of the soul does not need God’s eye, as a beggar does not need a hand or a bowl.
I teach my friend, a fisherman gone blind, to cast true left, right or center and how far between lily pads and the fallen cedar. Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last? Our bait, worms, have no professors, they live in darkness, can be taught fear of light. Cut into threes even sixes they live separate lives, recoil from light. He tells me, “I am seldom blind when I dream, morning is anthracite, I play blind man’s bluff, I cannot find myself, my shoe, the sink, tell time, but that’s spilled milk and ink, the lost and found I cannot find. I can tell the difference between a mollusk and a whelk, a grieving liar and a lemon rind.” Laughing, he says, “I still hope the worm will turn,pink, lank, and warm, dined out on apples of good fortune. Books have a faintly legible smell. Divorced from the sun, I am a kind of bachelor henpecked by the night. Sometimes I use my darkness well— in the overcast and sunlight of my mind. I can still wink, sing, my eyes are songs.” Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last? He could not fish, he could not walk, he fell in his own feces. He wept. He died where he fell.The power of beauty to right all wrongs is hard for me to sell.
to W.S. Merwin I said, “Nothing for the last time.” You said, “Everything for the last time.” Later I thought you made everything more precious with “everything for the last time”: the last meditation, the last falling asleep, the last dream before the final makebelieve, the last kiss good night, the last look out the window at the last moonlight. Last leaves no time to hesitate. I would drink strong coffee before my last sleep. I’d rather remember childhood, rehearse forgiveness, listen to birdsong or a Spanish housemaid singing, scrubbing a tiled floor in Seville— I’d scrub and sing myself. O SusannaSusanna, quanta pena mi costi. I would strangle the snakes of lastness like Herakles in his crib before I cocked my ear to Mozart for the last time. There is not sky or clouds enough to cover the music I would hear for the last time. I know a bank whereon the wild thyme of everything for the last time grows, covered with deadly nightshade and poison hemlock.   No last, no first, thinking in the moment, years ago, you prepared the soil in Hawaii before you planted your palm trees, then shared most of your days and nights with them as equals. You built your house with a Zen room. I made no prayer when I dug a hole and pushed in a twelve-foot white pine, root ball locked in green plastic netting. I did not cut the netting, so twenty years later a tall, beautiful, white pine died. I lynched the roots. To save my life I would let them seize, cut out a bear’s heart, I would partake in its flesh. But you would die before you’d let them kill that bear. Again, I say, “Nothing for the last time.” You say, “Everything for the last time.” Sailor, I would have killed a stranger to save the world. Sailor, you would not. We kissed goodbye on the cheek. I hope not for the last time.   Home, I look into my brass telescope— at the far end, where the moon and distant stars should be, I see my eye looking back at me, it’s twinkling and winking like a star. I go to bed. My dogs, donkeys and wife are sleeping. I am safe. You are home with your wife you met and decided to marry in four days.
If a garden is the world counted  and found analogue in nature One does not become two by ever ending  so the stairs must be uneven in number and not exceed thirteen without a pause of two paces’ width, which  for instance, the golden section  mitigates between abandon and an orchestra just behind those trees, gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk: Length over width  to make the horizon run straight equals  to make the pond an oval:  Width  over length minus the width  in which descending circles curl into animals exact as a remainder.    Which means excess. The meaning of the real always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone.  He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte, but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He    who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.” Which is something else entirely. Said the axonometric divided by the anamorphic.  There is nothing that controls our thoughts more than what we think we see, which we label “we.”
because she needed a lavish tasteon her tongue, a daily tipple of amber and goldto waft her into the sky,a soluble heat trickling down her throat. Who could blame herfor starting out each morning with a swig of something furiousin her belly, for dayswhen she dressed in flashy laméleggings like a starlet,for wriggling and dancing a little madly,her crazy reels and her rumbas,for coming home wobblywith a flicker of clover’s inflorescencestill clinging to her clothes,enough to light the darknessof a pitch-black hive.
Would I miss the way a breeze dimplesthe butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?The leaning gossip, the half-alive rippleof sunflowers, sagging eternities of cornand sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellowin all directions, the windowsills swellingwith Mason jars, the blue sky bluest bornethrough tinted glass above the milled grains?The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen doorslapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure—the rote grace of every tempered life?
My grandmother never trusted calculators. She would crunch numbers in a spiral notebook at the kitchen table, watching her news.
When Isaac, a small, freckled boyapproaching seven, visits us for Family Camp,playing pirate with his rubber sword,sometimes he slumps in grief, trudging along, his sacrifice and small violinin hand, his palm over his chest,saying, Mother is here in my heart. Before he leaves for home, we ask if he’d like a Jewish blessing.Our grandson’s handsome face ignites;he chirps a rousing, yes, for a long life.We unfold the prayer shawl,its Hebrew letters silvering the spring light,hold the white tallis above his head,recite the blessing in its ancient languageand then the English, adding, for a long life.Isaac complains, the tallis didn’ttouch his head, so he didn’t feel the blessing.We lower its silken ceilingto graze his dark hair,repeat the prayer.
I should be diligent and firm,I know I should, and frowning, too;again you’ve failed to clean your room.Not only that, the evidenceof midnight theft is in your bed—cracked peanut shells and m&m’sare crumbled where you rest your head,and just above, the windowsillis crowded with a green giraffe(who’s peering through your telescope),some dominoes, and half a glassof orange juice. You hungry child,how could I be uncharmed by this,your secret world, your happy mess?
Bones are easier to find than flowersin the desert, so I paint these:Fine white skulls of cows and horses.When I lie flat under the starsin the back of the car, coyotes howlingin the scrub pines, easy to feel how those bonesare so much like mine: Here is my pelvis,like the pelvis I found todaybleached by the sun and the sand. Samehole where the hip would go, samewhite curve of bone beneath my fleshsame cradle of life, silent and still in me.
I don’t know. I still can’t get it right, the way those dirt roads cut across the flatsand led to shacks where hounds and muddy shoatsskulked roundabouts. Describing it sounds triteas hell, the good old South I love to hate.The truth? What’s that? How should I know?I stayed inside too much. I learned to boastof stupid things. I kept my ears shut tight,as we kept doors locked, windows locked,the curtains drawn. Now I know why. The dark could hide things from us. Dark could seewhat we could not. Sometimes those dirt roads shockedme, where they ended up: I watched a dog diein the ditch. The man who shot him winked at me.
“Even when you are not in a room, you are in it, your voice everywhere.” –Bill Holm  “Even when you are not in a room, you are in it, your voice everywhere.” –Bill HolmThe message that’s recorded on the phoneis unmistakably bad news, and thenanother call tells us it’s one we love—a sudden death while traveling, somehowappropriate for one who alwaysseized life too completely to stand still.A door slams shut, a wall has dropped away, and once again I’m driven back toempty pages, insufficient words,to rooms he always filled on entering—rooms lined with books, piano music, andgood friends who raise their glasses one last time.And now, as all the lights are blinking offin every prairie town we’ve ever loved,when all the toasts are made and songs are sung,when leaving is the only certainty,a single voice keeps echoing, alongeach dark, untraveled hallway of the heart.
When you are angry it’s your gentle selfI love until that’s who you are.In any case, I can’t love this anger any morethan I can warm my heart with ice.I go on loving your smiletill it finds its way back to your face.
I tied it to your wristWith a pretty pink bow, torn offBy the first little tug of wind.I’m sorry.I jumped to catch it, but not soon enough.It darted away.It still looked large and almost within reach.Like a heart.Watch, I said.You squinted your little eyes.The balloon looked happy, wavingGood-bye.The sky is very high today, I said.Red went black, a polka dot,Then not. We watched it,Even though we couldn’tSpot it anymore at all.Even after that.
Bunny Berigan first recorded “I Can’t Get Started” with a small group that included Joe Bushkin, Cozy Cole and Artie Shaw in 1936. Earlier that same year, the song, written by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, and rendered as a duet patter number by Bob Hope and Eve Arden, made its debut on Broadway in The Ziegfeld Follies.  By 1937, when Berigan re-recorded it in a big-band setting, “I Can’t” had become his signature song,  even though, within a few months, Billie Holiday would record her astonishing version backed by Lester Young and the rest of the Basie Orchestra.   Lovers for a time, Lee Wiley and Berigan began appearing together on Wiley’s fifteen-minute CBS radio spot, Saturday Night Swing Club, in 1936. Berigan died from alcoholism-related causes on June 2, 1942. Although “I Can’t Get Started” is perfectly suited to Wiley’s deep phrasing and succinct vibrato, she recorded the ballad only once, informally, in 1945, during a Town Hall performance date. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 and ended in 1939 with Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s forces entering Madrid. “I’ve settled revolutions in Spain” goes Gershwin’s lyric, just as odd.
During the Second World War, I was going home one night along a street I seldom used. All the stores were closed except one—a small fruit store. An old Italian was inside to wait on customers. As I was paying him I saw that he was sad. “You are sad,” I said. “What is troubling you?” “Yes,” he said, “I am sad.” Then he added in the same monotone, not looking at me: “My son left for the front today and I’ll never see him again.” “Don’t say that!” I said. “Of course, you will!” “No,” he answered. “I’ll never see him again.”   Afterwards, when the war was over, I found myself once more in that street  and again it was late at night, dark and lonely; and again I saw the old man alone in the store. I bought some apples and looked closely at him: his thin wrinkled face was grim but not particularly sad. “How about your son?” I said. “Did he come back from the war?” “Yes,” he answered. “He was not wounded?” “No. He is all right.” “That’s fine,” I said. “Fine!” He took the bag of apples from my hands and groping inside took out one that had begun to rot and put in a good one instead. “He came back at Christmas,” he added. “How wonderful! That was wonderful!” “Yes,” he said gently, “it was wonderful.” He took the bag of apples from my hands again and took out one of the smaller apples and put in a large one.
Between the bridge and the river he falls through a huge portion of night; it is not as if falling is something new. Over and over he slipped into the gulf between what he knew and how he was known. What others wanted opened like an abyss: the laughing stock-clerks at the grocery, women at the luncheonette amused by his gestures. What could he do, live with one hand tied behind his back? So he began to fall into the star-faced section of night between the trestle and the water because he could not meet a little town’s demands, and his earrings shone and his wrists were as limp as they were. I imagine he took the insults in and made of them a place to live; we learn to use the names because they are there, familiar furniture: faggot was the bed he slept in, hard and white, but simple somehow,queer something sharp but finally useful, a tool, all the jokes a chair, stiff-backed to keep the spine straight, a table, a lamp. And because he’s fallen for twenty-three years, despite whatever awkwardness his flailing arms and legs assume he is beautiful and like any good diver has only an edge of fear he transforms into grace. Or else he is not afraid, and in this way climbs back up the ladder of his fall, out of the river into the arms of the three teenage boys who hurled him from the edge— really boys now, afraid, their fathers’ cars shivering behind them, headlights on—and tells them it’s all right, that he knows they didn’t believe him when he said he couldn’t swim, and blesses his killers in the way that only the dead can afford to forgive.
Not even the males and the men of the males make use of their pinched tongues to sing, not even the females and the women of the females, corollas stemmed to spray on end sing their ruddy stones     The males and the men of the males feel the sea the ranch and the wheat, rice ears     polyglottal weddings  unseasonable lips    one body to the next     Indigenes displaced by indigenes displaced wherein the ranchlands, then the fields of wheat, burn to the crust     The choice between taking the flowers-of-the-trees- to-blossom and the long-as-the-rocks always lands on the flowers-of-the-trees- to blossom—    bouquet thrown hurriedly into the sun
The fenestrate surface of the pond surfaces in old companions snag ripples namely, Saburo     I recommend his face for the pond museum above the fox’s skulking face the hare’s face, death’s polished stone the crane’s larval pearl eyes transmitting the code for a sodden voice in the splintering reeds     And when I say I recommend I mean the menagerie in the utmost dark saviors hung from supping trees gone the way of idiot flesh—where you were endowed with a chance, and fucked up     Evening, I went down on the pantry, pried open a basket of rice cakes, grew partial to eating in the dark if only to concentrate the sound of walking through the wilderness at night, enlarged without people as wax I sleep in nectar     When was the flora brass A woman kneeling among cranes Willows waiting for sticks to arrive to burn cranes from her body        genital wind through which     No, it has always been this way blooms erupting suspicion, husband making sure each dawn the sticks stay lashed to his back, the wood she waits for thin as blades, and cut as close     To fallow soil sea dragon in hand proper, yes, though petrified      crimson, pink, indigo, green purple and yellow lotus cradle in the hedgerow     I feel faint exceptionally hot here on the ground     Should I be sweating this much? Should the sea dragon weigh so heavily? Bronze skin festooning the trees cutting a spirit loose?     Carrion flowers  slip  from my hand
Did you know I’m in this hospital bed? I’m not. I’m in the same light you stand in, much the same way I’m in the waist of your Carolina watching from the screen across the bed whose pulse is worn down with an IV to the head.   We are all snow birds atop the cherry blossoms of August. Springtime in Washington D.C. passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose brushing her teeth over the bedpan.   No adrenal gland has known such cortisol, such heartbreaking I love you O my God, so many soldiers on the brink of their lives returning! Are we still talking to the same god?   I can’t imagine the heart anymore now that it presses my ribs apart, a balloon of such gravity I ache for stars in a jar, wasps whose love reminds me of fireflies tonight.
Into my stomach an explosion of stars where I rely on myself, my government name, bony letters of fingers that tunnel your bisected heart, skyward with dark.   Parasites bed my inner lining— Am I not the rubberized universe? I am its buffer and get to name things for what they are, who they serve—what order.   A plural centipede burrows outbound, crawls the spine of my hand, tells my pencil to move along, give out lead. Months of illness do that to a puppet, gnaw at her strings, place moths on her neighbors, blend them with gypsies who live the treetops uprooted.   Dare the deliberately happy to butterfly the gnarled roots of life—   That we pass too many pounds of flesh uncut. Too much genius hermitted in stereo. The round tables forgetting their bird seed. Clovers push luck to surround these hollow legs.   Why no windows on the sides of houses? Why no flames beneath stones that burn? Why do all minutes lead the blue carp and black eel now?   We’ll be passing through heaven in a split pea shell, emptied of light, hard as effusive green ore the blood corrupts daily, within and without.
Only open homes & woods & pansies’ blue ledges can lead the zero with his only arms to embrace himself in open fields for all to gape upon. He unbuttons steel-gray sheets, a knotted top coat, bares himself, his hole, a vision as framed by the marker that is where his body blew and left enclosure intact, skeletal innards enough to make moviegoers ask, “Has anyone finished themselves yet?” I haven’t. I swim the lagoon, take note: the babies are barely dirty, their armpits smooth with silky soot weighted in apartment cycles like we keep movement in boxes for thunderstorms, and the railroad leaves a dancing behavior absorbed by every second thought, escaping the socket that was his mission, his body incomplete, to help us to the maidenhead of Niagara, a target awakening the chlorophyll of trees, their tongues the densest forest canopy and floor thigh deep with root rot we sleep on and fold into growing-whole sheep what becomes of the lot: night’s zero hour of what is & what isn’t, till death, not us part.
Gone then risen   Milk dawn gone then risen   Our ephemeral fawning done   Gone sanguine then risen in spell   High with your wrist while nihil busy   Unburrowing dice teams from sand figurines   Risen to swirl steam scooping passing seemingly   A kindred-ided up and up, born of dormant corners   Forms filial then filled Goes mourn and swoon   Love have and love loom Union and risen
Or nothing is really north, but you’re so civic and indivisible.     The Folk Revival has no middle, no anachronism, just no more caption or advent, but you’re not them dilettantes. As relentless as listening to the shore backwards, your words about how it happens, wanderlust and continental, badge verse the nourish of no mercy crash short, burst slack, repeat as you were reallysomething.     You know the house is empty, exempt, yours for the mentioning of will to power appears an officer on a horse with more posture than you’re used to, undoing your robe for it’s satin loose before a sash and give him the magician, night minion, answer over the flashlight nothing  Authority I admire is kept during itself, kinetic, black market uncorrectable and in between admiring and participating, you wear the tight number which hugs risen the been-there under your eyes vindicates evasion head on I don’t even imagine what real violation sounds I stay at the Social Club while you go sell my high back to Cuba China as a kind of sound of king of sound He’ll ask me to speak up, come closer, note the kind of trouble I’m in here is absurd and prolific the kind you catch for witnessing an author rewrite the book skip the vista, the word vista, the good word and look as it’s splitting
A gunshot then. Stop your bikes and let them wobble in mechanism   Then a gun watchman, hithered on the imaginary end of a macabre   lipping telescope, broke my hero into speeches.   It had to be masculine this many occasions consecutively and also diminutive from a hugeness I could not collect enough pipes and wizards on the trumpet trigger to build a trumpet or remorse or capitulate or boost my chest into order, for a basicness distortion gives, gives exegesis Pedals coiling and scuffing the earth dust trusting lungs to come out in funicular or jigback. If I could just look to the minimalists, suss a sleek black wrist gathering the handles or clutching stacks of hourglass glasses to his grappling ribs at this one endless shop. We looted
Straight rye whiskey, 100 proof  you need a better friend?  Yes. Myself.   The lights the lights the lonely lovely fucking lights and the bridge on a rainy Tuesday night Blue/green double-stars the line that is the drive and on the dark alive gleaming river Xmas trees of tugs scream and struggle    Midnite   Drops on the train window wobble . stream  My trouble  is it is her fate to never learn to make  anything grow  be born or stay Harbor beginnings and that other gleam . The train is full of long/way/home and holding lovers whose  flesh I would exchange for mine  The rain, R.F.,      sweeps the river as the bridges sweep  Nemesis is thumping down the line  But I have premises to keep  & local stops before I sleep  & local stops before I sleep    The cree-  ping train  joggles  rocks across  I hear the waves below lap against the piles, a pier  from which ships go  to Mexico   a sign which reads   PACE O MIO DIO    oil  “The flowers died when you went away”   Manhattan Bridge a bridge between we state, one life and the next, we state is better so is no  backwater, flows  between us is our span our bridge our naked eyes open here see bridging whatever impossibility. . . PACE!   PACE O MIO DIO    oil    “The flowers died. . .”  Of course they did   Not that I was a green thing in the house    I was once.  No matter.     The clatter of cars over the span, the track  the spur the rusty dead/pan ends of space  of grease     We enter the tunnel.   The dirty window gives me back my face
—for Joel— Nice day, sweet October afternoon Men walk the sun-shot avenues,  Second, Third, eyes  intent elsewhere ears communing with transistors in shirt pockets  Bars are full, quiet, discussion during commercials  only Pirates lead New York 4-1, top of the 6th, 2 Yankees on base, 1 man out   What a nice day for all this ! Handsome women, even dreamy jailbait, walk  nearly neglected : men’s eyes are blank their thoughts are all in Pittsburgh   Last half of the 9th, the score tied 9-all, Mazeroski leads off for the Pirates The 2nd pitch he simply, sweetly  CRACK! belts it clean over the left-field wall   Blocks of afternoon acres of afternoon Pennsylvania Turnpikes of afternoon . One  diamond stretches out in the sun  the 3rd base line  and what men come down  it    The final score, 10-9   Yanquis, come home
Slowly and with persistence he eats away at the big steak, gobbles up the asparagus, its butter & salt & root taste, drinks at a glass of red wine, and carefully  taking his time, mops up  the gravy with bread— The top of the café filtre is copper, passively shines back, & between mouthfuls of steak, sips of wine,  he remembers  at intervals to with the flat of his hand the top removed,  bang at the apparatus, create the suction that the water will  fall through  more quickly   Across the tiles of the floor, the cat comes to the table : again. “I’ve already given you one piece of steak, what do you want from me now? Love?”  He strokes her head, her rounded black pregnant head, her greedy  front paws slip from his knee,  the pearl of great price  ignored . She’s bored, he bangs the filtre again, its top is copper passively shines back .  Food & wine nearly finished. He lifts the whole apparatus off the cup . Merciful God, will it never be done? Too cold  already to add cream and sugar, he offers the last piece of steak with his fingers .  She accepts it with calm  dignity, even delicacy . The coffee goes down at a gulp, it is black & lukewarm .
EAST OF EDEN is mountains & desert until you cross the passes into India . It is 3 o’clock in the afternoon or twenty of 8 at night, depending which clock you believe . AND WEST IS WEST It’s where the cups and saucers are, the plates, the knives and forks . The turkey sandwich comes alone or with onions if you like The old newspaperman always takes his hat off & lays it atop the cigarette machine; the younger, so-hip journalist, leaves his on old-style .The old man sits down in the corner, puts his hat back on. No challenge, but it’s visible, the beau geste . The cigarette hangs from the side of the younger man’s mouth, he’s putting himself on . East of Eden is mountains & desert & every thing creeps up on you & comes in the night, unexpectedly . when one would least put out his hand to offer, or to defend .
I look out the window in upstate New York, see the Mediterranean stretching out below me down the rocky hillside at Faro, three years, two months, fourteen days earlier . 8:25 A. M. Rosemary gone back to sleep, pink & white . I stand at the livingroom window drinking coffee, open the doors to the balcony . Warmth beginning, tho I wrap my hands around the cup, count fishing boats in the sunglare, moving shoreward now slowly, or sitting there motionless on the flat sea . a fat blue arm stretches out from the coast, ripples where wind and currents show muscle below the blue skin of sea stretched out below me .  The coffee’s cold toward the end of the cup . I go back to the kitchen for more hot . put orange in bathrobe pocket, reach for knife, return to the balcony with the fresh cup where the flat blue sea fills my eye in the sunglare . stretches out below me.   The Southern Tier: the maple outside the window warms in the early sun . red buds at the ends of branches commence their slow bursting . Green soon  Joan moves  her legs against mine in the hall, goes down to start my egg . Carlos thumps the lower stairs . We move.   All our farewells al- ready prepared inside us . aaaall our deaths we carry inside us, double-yolked, the fragile toughness of the shell . it makes sustenance possible, makes love possible as the red buds break against the sunglight possible green, as legs move against legs possible softnesses . The soft-boiled egg is ready now .  Now we eat.    19 . IV . 71
There will be no edges, but curves. Clean lines pointing only forward. History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice. Women will still be women, but The distinction will be empty. Sex, Having outlived every threat, will gratify Only the mind, which is where it will exist. For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs. The oldest among us will recognize that glow— But the word sun will have been re-assigned To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device Found in households and nursing homes. And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged, Eons from even our own moon, we'll drift In the haze of space, which will be, once And for all, scrutable and safe.
The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough. Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise, Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen: The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming, Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns. Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears Disappears as if returning somewhere.
5pm on the nose. They open their mouths And it rolls out: high, shrill and metallic. First the boy, then his sister. Occasionally, They both let loose at once, and I think Of putting on my shoes to go up and see Whether it is merely an experiment Their parents have been conducting Upon the good crystal, which must surely Lie shattered to dust on the floor. Maybe the mother is still proud Of the four pink lungs she nursed To such might. Perhaps, if they hit The magic decibel, the whole building Will lift-off, and we'll ride to glory Like Elijah. If this is it—if this is what Their cries are cocked toward—let the sky Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold, To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach.  Whether it is our dead in Old Testament robes, Or a door opening onto the roiling infinity of space. Whether it will bend down to greet us like a father, Or swallow us like a furnace. I'm ready To meet what refuses to let us keep anything For long. What teases us with blessings, Bends us with grief. Wizard, thief, the great Wind rushing to knock our mirrors to the floor, To sweep our short lives clean. How mean Our racket seems beside it. My stereo on shuffle. The neighbor chopping onions through a wall. All of it just a hiccough against what may never Come for us. And the kids upstairs still at it, Screaming like the Dawn of Man, as if something They have no name for has begun to insist Upon being born.
1.    We like to think of it as parallel to what we know, Only bigger. One man against the authorities. Or one man against a city of zombies. One man   Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.   Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop, This message going out to all of space. . . . Though Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,   Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,   Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light, Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best   While the father storms through adjacent rooms Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come, Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.   Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community. All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.   The books have lived here all along, belonging For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,   A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.      2.   Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely. A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time, He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.   Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in, Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture, Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires   Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t. I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back. That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.  Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone. He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,   Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And: May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back. Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.   A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again. We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark. Our eyes adjust to the dark.      3.   Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,   That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—   When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,   Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel   Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,   Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,   Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones   At whatever are their moons. They live wondering   If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,   And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.     Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,   Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on   At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns   Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be   One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.   Wide open, so everything floods in at once.   And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,   Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.   So that I might be sitting now beside my father   As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe   For the first time in the winter of 1959.   


 4.
    In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001 When Dave is whisked into the center of space, Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid, Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off, Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent And vague, swirls in, and on and on. . . .    In those last scenes, as he floats Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas, Over the lava strewn plains and mountains Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink. In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time, Who knows what blazes through his mind? Is it still his life he moves through, or does That end at the end of what he can name?   On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy, Then the costumes go back on their racks And the great gleaming set goes black.      5.   When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.   He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks, His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years, When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled   To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find. His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise   As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.   We learned new words for things. The decade changed.   The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time, The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—   So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
1.   After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure   That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?   Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired   And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns.      2.   He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours   Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.   Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?   The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls.      3.   Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.   I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions   When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said:  Go ahead.
But sometimes I forget where I am, Imagine myself inside that life again.   Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps, Or more likely colorless light   Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.   And when I begin to believe I haven’t left, The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke   Climbing the walls while the hours fall. Straining against the noise of traffic, music,   Anything alive, to catch your key in the door. And that scamper of feeling in my chest,   As if the day, the night, wherever it is I am by then, has been only a whir   Of something other than waiting.   We hear so much about what love feels like. Right now, today, with the rain outside,   And leaves that want as much as I do to believe In May, in seasons that come when called,   It’s impossible not to want To walk into the next room and let you   Run your hands down the sides of my legs, Knowing perfectly well what they know.
1.   The earth is dry and they live wanting. Each with a small reservoir Of furious music heavy in the throat. They drag it out and with nails in their feet Coax the night into being. Brief believing. A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies. And in this night that is not night, Each word is a wish, each phrase A shape their bodies ache to fill—    I’m going to braid my hair Braid many colors into my hair I’ll put a long braid in my hair And write your name there  They defy gravity to feel tugged back. The clatter, the mad slap of landing.      2.   And not just them. Not just The ramshackle family, the tíos,Primitos, not just the bailaor Whose heels have notched And hammered time So the hours flow in place Like a tin river, marking Only what once was. Not just the voices of scraping Against the river, nor the hands Nudging them farther, fingers Like blind birds, palms empty, Echoing. Not just the women With sober faces and flowers In their hair, the ones who dance As though they’re burying Memory—one last time— Beneath them.  And I hate to do it here. To set myself heavily beside them. Not now that they’ve proven The body a myth, a parable For what not even language Moves quickly enough to name. If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments. If I lean into the desire it starts from— If I lean unbuttoned into the blow Of loss after loss, love tossed Into the ecstatic void— It carries me with it farther, To chords that stretch and bend Like light through colored glass. But it races on, toward shadows Where the world I know And the world I fear Threaten to meet.    3.   There is always a road, The sea, dark hair, dolor.  Always a question Bigger than itself—    They say you’re leaving Monday Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?
1. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1972   Oak table, knotted legs, the chirp And scrape of tines to mouth. Four children, four engines Of want. That music.   What did your hand mean to smooth Across the casket of your belly? What echoed there, if not me—tiny body Afloat, akimbo, awake or at rest?   Every night you fed the others Bread leavened with the grains Of your own want. How Could you stand me near you,   In you, jump and kick tricking The heart, when what you prayed for Was my father’s shadow, your name In his dangerous script, an envelope   Smelling of gun-powder, bay rum, Someone to wrestle, sing to, question, Climb?      2. Interstate 101 South, California, 1981   Remember the radio, the Coca-Cola sign Phosphorescent to the left, bridge After bridge, as though our lives were Engineered simply to go? And so we went   Into those few quiet hours Alone together in the dark, my arm On the rest beside yours, our lights Pricking at fog, tugging us patiently   Forward like a needle through gauze. Night held us like a house. Sometimes an old song Would fill the car like a ghost.    3. Leroy, Alabama, 2005   There’s still a pond behind your mother’s old house, Still a stable with horses, a tractor rusted and stuck Like a trophy in mud. And the red house you might Have thrown stones at still stands on stilts up the dirt road.   A girl from the next town over rides in to lend us Her colt, cries when one of us kicks it with spurs. Her father wants to buy her a trailer, let her try her luck In the shows. They stay for dinner under the tent   Your brother put up for the Fourth. Firebugs flare And vanish. I am trying to let go of something. My heart cluttered with names that mean nothing. Our racket races out to the darkest part of the night.   The woods catch it and send it back.      4. But let’s say you’re alive again—   Your hands are long and tell your age. You hold them there, twirling a bent straw, And my reflection watches, hollow-faced, Not trying to hide. The waiters make it seem   Like Cairo. Back and forth shouting That sharp language. And for the first time I tell you everything. No shame In my secrets, shoddy as laundry.   I have praised your God For the blessing of the body, snuck From pleasure to pleasure, lying for it, Holding it like a coin or a key in my fist.   I know now you’ve known all along.   I won’t change. I want to give Everything away. To wander forever. Here is a pot of tea. Let’s share it Slowly, like sisters.
You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns.   You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex.   You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink. You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome.   You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you. You give me you.   You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill. You give me 24-across.   You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings.   You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire. You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys with their feet on the chairs. You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday. You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it.   You give me D.H. Lawrence, and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples.   You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City. You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it.   You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret everyone is keeping.   You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt. You give me pictures with yourself cut out.   You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize.   You give me yes. You give me no.   You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down. You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm. You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds.   You give me the careening of trains. You give me the scent of bruised mint.   You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair.   You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx. You give me Echo.   You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves and soft fists of peony.   You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment. You give me seeming not to notice.   You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train.   You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed. You give me grief, and how to grieve.
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee;  What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.   Ezra Pound You’ll find labels describing what is gone: an empress’s bones, a stolen painting   of a man in a feathered helmet holding a flag-draped spear.   A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal;   this glass cabinet could have kept the first salts carried back from the Levant.   To help us comprehend the magnitude of absence, huge rooms   lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus, Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and   in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold all the scrolls of Alexandria.   My love, I’ve petitioned the curator who has acquired an empty chest   representing all the poems you will now never write. It will be kept with others   in the poet’s gallery. Next door, a vacant room echoes with the spill   of jewels buried by a pirate who died before disclosing their whereabouts.   I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept a few of your pieces   for my private collection. I think you know the ones I mean.
Someone was searching for a Form of Fire. Bird-eyed, the wind watched. Four deer in a blowsy meadow. As though it were simply random, a stately stare.   What’s six and six and two and ten? Time that my eye ached, my heart shook, why. Mistaking lime for lemon. Dressed in cobalt, charcoal, thistle—and control.   If they had more they would need less. A proposal from the squinting logician. Seems we are legal, seems we are ill. Ponderous purpose, are you weather, are you wheel?   Gold with a heart of cinder. Little blue chip dancing in the light of the loom. Mistress, May-girl, whom will you kiss? The death of water is the birth of air.
In May’s gaud gown and ruby reckoning the old saw wind repeats a colder thing.   Says, you are the bluest body I ever seen. Says, dance that skeletal startle the way I might.   Radius, ulna, a catalogue of flex. What do you think you’re grabbing   with those gray hands? What do you think you’re hunting, cat-mouth creeling   in the mouseless dawn? Pink as meat in the butcher’s tender grip, white as   the opal of a thigh you smut the lie on. In May’s red ruse and smattered ravishings   you one, you two, you three your cruder schemes, you blanch black lurk and blood the pallid bone   and hum scald need where the body says I am and the rose sighs Touch me, I am dying   in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May.
I never wish to sing again as I used to, when two new eyes could always stain the sea, of tangent worlds, indolent as callows, and the clock went backward for a skip, to rise, to set.  Some will twine grass to fit in a thimble, some will carve bread to mend a craggy wall, some in the slantest midnight cry for sleep. When the pitch-owl swallows the moon, what welt will show it? Sighing helps nothing, raspberries raw and green, in the form of a heart  imperfectly divided. A wave grows sharper close to the shore. Some own words like strips of scape and summon. It is possible to suffer even in the sun. And race the steep noon to its highest, hoary gate. Stares drop under the sky; silence of a windslap; and a scar drifts out of air to stand whistling:  She who listens poorly will always be calling. She who sounds silence drowns with the dumb.  She who cuts her hands off must drink with her tongue.
I believe there is a song that is stranger than wind, that sips the scald from the telling, toss, toss. In the room I move in, a wrecked boy listened to each sky’s erasing, for it was shrill winter, for it was blast and blur. For it was farther from the native birds and the gray heath heather and the uncaressable thighs of the one who shook in violet. Those who fly farthest must always burn the nest. But the mind in its implacable spec- trum dims to brown. Must you die on your back like a cheap engine, rust and wrack? In the crevicing days, there are no words for prizing, be- tween the lidless moon and the silver hands of the fountain. But if it is space you must fail in, teach it din.
His daughter pulls on  her father’s frayed dishdasha  to go check the bees.   Today she doesn’t  carry the smoke canister  with her to the field.   She opens a tray  while talking down their high whine,  breaks off honeycomb   and rubs it over  her face and hair, over white  cloth, down to her feet.   Each of her hands holds  the crumbling comb like a sponge  while she waits for them.   When the first one comes  she feels wings against her toes,  a tongue unscrolling.   She wills herself not  to laugh as the next alights  on her neck, tickling   her hairs as it walks.  Then they descend to shoulders,  forearms, chest, thighs, eyes   she shuts—she feels the  thousand tongues on the cloth.  Feather-like wings churn   in her ears, rustle  and hum with agitated talk.  Never been so loved.   Her father’s alive,  she’s a torch of burning bees,  tears course across cheeks.   When her mother sees  the apparition of bees  walking towards their door   she falls on her knees.  It is the end of the world.  But when the angel   speaks with her daughter’s  voice she’s not amazed. Mama,  how do I end this?   Her mother brushes  bees away from her eyes, pulls  them from her hair and   undresses her child,  hanging the winged dishdasha  on the clothes line.   Carries her naked  girl into the house to bathe.  The bee-like angels   take all day to strip  honey from the robe, return  it to their tiered home.
Before the moths have even appeared to orbit around them, the streetlamps come on, a long row of them glowing uselessly   along the ring of garden that circles the city center, where your steps count down the dulling of daylight. At your feet, a bee crawls in small circles like a toy unwinding.   Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream. And the noisy day goes so quiet you can hear the bedraggled man who visits each trash receptacle   mutter in disbelief: Everything in the world is being thrown away! Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things redden and ripen and burst and come down. It’s when   city workers cut down trees, demolishing one limb at a time, spilling the crumbs of twigs and leaves all over the tablecloth of street.  Sunglasses! the man softly exclaims while beside him blooms a large gray rose of pigeons huddled around a dropped piece of bread.
Eyes wide like an owl’s, an aspirin-pale face foretells in lamplight how it accumulates age. Somewhat masked, somewhat naked, there’s no way to know what others see when looking at it. All five of the body’s senses crowd on this small planet a weather of hair surrounds.   My face is not a democracy—the eyes are tyrants and the ears are radical dissenters. In the conversations of eyebrows, mine are whispers. Like the window at night, the face reflects too, uncertain how to change when greeting itself (and is it not cruel when another’s face won’t reflect acknowledgment of you?).   My mother, my father, and my brother are found in the blurring of feature and expression. Cynicism finds no purchase here; the same cannot be said for sadness (and look deeper—anger hides in the jaw). And while the nose quietly broods like an actor rehearsing his soliloquy, the empty page of the forehead, when I raise my brows, fills suddenly with questions.
No one saw the first ones swim ashore centuries ago, nudged by waves into the marsh grasses.   When you look into their faces, there is no trace of the ship seized with terror, the crashing waves and the horses’ cries when thrown overboard.   Every afternoon you ride your bicycle to the pasture to watch the twitch of their manes and ivory tails unroll a carpet of silence, to see ponies lost in dream.   But it isn’t dream, that place your mind drifts to, that museum of memory inventoried in opposition to the present.   You felt it once on a plane, taking off from a city you didn’t want to leave, the stranded moment when the plane lifts into the clouds.   That’s not dream, it’s not even sleeping. It is the nature of sleeping to be unaware. This was some kind of waiting for the world to come back.
Freedom is a rocket, isn’t it, bursting orgasmically over parkloads of hot dog devouring human beings or into the cities of our enemies without whom we would surely kill ourselves though they are ourselves and America I see now is the soldier who said I saw something burning on my chest and tried to brush it off with my right hand but my arm wasn’t there— America is no other than this moment, the burning ribcage, the hand gone that might have put it out, the skies afire with our history.
for Pat Silliman I   Hard dreams. The moment at which you recognize that your own death lies in wait somewhere within your body. A lone ship defines the horizon. The rain is not safe to drink.   In Grozny, in Bihac, the idea of history shudders with each new explosion. The rose lies unattended, wild thorns at the edge of a mass grave. Between classes, over strong coffee, young men argue the value of a pronoun.   When this you see, remember. Note in a bottle bobs in a cartoon sea. The radio operator’s name is Sparks.   Hand outlined in paint on a brick wall. Storm turns playground into a swamp. Finally we spot the wood duck on the middle lake.   The dashboard of my car like the keyboard of a piano. Toy animals anywhere.   Sun swells in the morning sky.   Man with three pens clipped to the neck of his sweatshirt shuffles from one table to the next, seeking distance from the cold January air out the coffee house door, tall Styrofoam cup in one hand, Of Grammatology in the other. Outside, a dog is tied to any empty bench, bike chained to the No Parking sign.
for Pat Silliman XII   A guide to the sky under full nondisclosure.   Dawn in the bare birch trees, the sun, swollen, throbs over the horizon. Hotel buffet doodah. Two dogs dancing, sniffing one another’s genitalia.   One can hear the electricity wired in the walls, water rushing through the pipes, the boards and joints of the old house groaning as they settle.   Map of morning. Winter light. One’s experience of the transfer point air- port as that of the city itself. Dear winter, it’s 5:15 AM. Shoes for Mickey Mouse.   Waste deep in the big muddy. The sound of rain around. The line (not visible) binds letters into words. People are drowning.   Moon, broken in the middle. What a watch watches. Song of the single en- gine Cessna, threading the pre-dawn sky. One bird, one bird, many.   Blades of grass brittle in the freeze. Spider’s corner of the bath room. One maple tree that will not return to life.
There is a chair the heart of which is wooden split five ways and grass pressed flat where we kissed where others later kissed on the same mattress and solemn nothing happening under a canopy—   Have you forgotten me?   I will go down wonderfully as was told in proverbs though for a long time I thought I should not go.   Here are things that have no Latin names or none that men would know.
We could paint semi-darkness in semi-darkness. And the ‘right lighting’ of a picture could be semi-darkness.   Wittgenstein  from Remarks on Color These islands lie off the west coast of Ireland as if nothing matters. The people have lived here for centuries with only a thin covering of soil over the surface. Great use is made of the seaweed, the cattle swimming out.   The women here are justly famous. They weave their own tweed and make a type of belt called criss. The heavy Atlantic seas, the slip stitch. The difficulty of the patterns are never written down.   Most impressive and rich, the trellis pattern and the rope, the tribute to the hardworking bee. But sometimes their knitting shows mistakes, with a true Irish touch of nothing really matters, a careless nonchalance of the crossing of their cables.   And note mistakes in the simple patterns: forked lightning or cliff paths, small fields fenced with stone, the ups and downs of married life, the mosses.   The openwork has a religious significance or none. Sometimes the clarity of the pattern is lost through the use of very fine wool.   Green from the mosses, brown from the seaweed, grey and cream color from the stones and pebbles: many are distinctly over-bobbled. No matter. They are too lovely to be lost. Wool and knitting leaflets can be obtained.   In no case is the whole pattern given. There are certain gaps and yawns and part of the pattern is left out as if it doesn’t matter, or was too lovely, so was lost.   Some of the simple patterns are charming for children’s jerseys. This one, for example, would be lovely on a child.
We called off the search, and the weary climbed down from the glacier with their dogs exhausted in the spring sun too tired to eat the ice in their paws.   We had called his name, mostly for show, a ritual that kept us moving: in the high bowls, their stunted pines predating the flood, in the steep ravines sliding loose with scree, loudly at first, then speaking it to each other then spelling it out on forms required by law.   It is a form of praying, he claimed, to walk out to the very edge of your life. Every time the reply comes clear as a stone at our thin crowns. It misses almost every time, humming as it goes.
i. Awake   Each entry consisting of the statements I am awake or I am conscious entered every few minutes:  2:10 p.m.: this time properly awake. 2:14 p.m.: this time finally awake. 2:35 p.m.: this time completely awake.  At 9:40 p.m. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.   This in turn was crossed out, followed by:    I was fully conscious at 10:35 p.m., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.   This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.    ii. Passport   How large it grew, that first kiss, until I could board it each night, a raft drifting out into the quiet lake. After twenty years the great amnesiac HM never recognized his doctor, and after lunch gladly ate another: Time for lunch, they would tell him again. You must be starving.   God, I am starving. Without a body, collection cannot precede recollection: recollect a tongue, that skilled swirl of its quick tip, a mouthful of familiars: smoke, strawberry candy. Memory in the web between dumbstruck and dura: dump and dune, duplicates. What kind of game is this?   I’m no longer a boy, HM would say to his reflection, the surprise on his face genuine. What kind of game is this? The mirror a passport like any other, its picture out of time, a foreign shock of untamed hair even the photographer declared beautiful then.  Then: the word smiles like a stranger on your first day at school, sitting on stone steps, worn with use.    iii. Taxonomy   “Red but not bird comes to mind.”  Only the kingdom of living names   was missing there—bank, flagstone, sofa  remained, but not the blur at the feeder,   the undersea creature on the card—  it’s a danger, a killer swimmer,   they coaxed him—it’s called a  (waiting for the word to stir from its depth;   how could he forget the ones who dressed,  fed, taught him word by word   the order of the world? What noise does  that loss make?) (They looked suspiciously   like his parents, he thought: strangers posing  unanswerable questions)—   “It has no name, it has no need.”
Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of “Mother,” Therefore by that dear name I long have called you— You who are more than mother unto me, And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you In setting my Virginia's spirit free. My mother—my own mother, who died early, Was but the mother of myself; but you Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, And thus are dearer than the mother I knew By that infinity with which my wife Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.
Why speak of hate, when I do bleed for love? Not hate, my love, but Love doth bite my tongue Till I taste stuff that makes my rhyming rough So flatter I my fever for the one For whom I inly mourn, though seem to shun. A rose is arrows is eros, so what If I confuse the shade that I’ve become With winedark substance in a lover’s cup? But stop my tonguely wound, I’ve bled enough. If I be fair, or false, or freaked with fear If I my tongue in lockèd box immure Blame not me, for I am sick with love.  Yet would I be your friend most willingly  Since friendship would infect me killingly.
Trying to see the proportional relation Of one memory to another One is so strange, and then To try and see what looms And doesn’t for the other person Who was there, it gets stranger, Especially when you’ve read His email. I don’t know how people Understand their lives, measure Their sensations against “objective” Or so-to-speak democratic estimations, Whether people accept the externality Of events, “events,” as things That happen to them. I refuse To accept some coagulate Of other people’s Impressions in exchange for this Privacy, no matter how flawed it is. This is lyric poetry. It has to be. It has No other hope. What was it About you and me that made whatever Happen to us. In New York Everything fell apart. What I dreaded And expected. But still. Tonight It is dark and the weather is cooler Than it’s been. It has taken A while for Fall to break; the global Warming kept me in summer Love with you like I was under a Fermata. Now that the times Are changing, I feel Even more for you; or I feel nothing. I can’t tell; it’s kind Of scary. I was sick of thinking About you this morning but I was listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen in order to think about You for literary purposes. When I feel nothing for a person I get scared I’m losing my humanity And that turning cold means My heart’s been botoxed: we’re All fucked. I watched a movie on YouTube Called Ladies and Gentlemen, MisterLeonard Cohen that was made when He was still just a poet and only Famous in Canada. He’s a pretentious little nerd In it, self-important, teacher’s pet wit. I think that, making music, he became So much nakeder, much more desperate. The talent, real, even pure, evenNatural, had to ripen in The artificial man. Alain Badiou, on the day Of his class, said, “Because an event Is pure rapture, an event disappears Immediately: it does not exist Objectively, but only by appearing And disappearing.” This is both Precise and vague; it is attractive I guess. I guess since you and me did not Disappear immediately, it was Not pure rapture, not in these Terms, but my smile Was real each time I swallowed Your cum. Getting Fucked by you was great; I could Feel it in my organs, but You didn’t make me go insane Except for maybe once Or twice. Actually maybe I am Being unfair. Maybe the fucking really Was that great. In this moment I Can’t remember. I just read a poetry Review in which the reviewer States that a certain book Made his cock feel as though It were tall as a tree. That’s Nice. I have no idea What it feels like to have A cock. Sometimes I feel As though I’m getting close To understanding and then Something happens to make Me have no clue again. When Sinan Fucks me, we lose our individuality So severely it’s like we’re both Gasping after an animal that’s his Cock that is beyond us and I lose All sense of the world. His cock’s Not even him, and he’s not him either And we aren’t anything. It’s strange, the possessive. Didn’t Thomas Mann write a book called HerrUnd Hund or something like that? Man’s best friend. What belongs To him. Me and Sunder Talked about how scary and arousing It is to watch men masturbate, cos Everyone relates differently to his. Like dicks are always almost but never Quite another. Je est un autre, Said that brat Arthur Rimbaud. I am definitely in love with you As I write this. You are so petty And superfluous I cannot stand You. Sinan is definitely In love with me. I know, because I saw him tonight. I love Him too. You are gracious To accord me the space and time In which to develop, or to elaborate Upon, as the French say, these Extreme emotions I am, despite The odds and certain lapses, So capable of feeling. It was good to slap Your face and to admit That your asshole Made me nervous. Your eyes had a way Of going soft and shiny When you said the really Tender things. We admitted It was intimidating For us both to hear each other describe People we’ve fucked and been In love with. I’m proud of what We accomplished together. Alain Badiou Ended his class with a reading Of “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” which Is an opera by Paul Dukas. You And me had gone pretty far By the time this day came, and Something very fragile in me breaks When somebody says my name, or Even a variant of it. I was tired. I think Badiou discusses “Ariane” In Being and Event which I have not read. In class he said That the story of the opera is About the relationship between law And freedom, and that it shows That the desire for freedom is not So simple. Ariane experiences an Event That causes her to demand freedom, Badiou Said, but she is unable to convince anybody Else, any other women to want freedom; she ends up alone. She genuinely falls in love with the wicked Bluebeard at the beginning. Bluebeard Who previously got women by having a castle To lock them in. This woman Ariane Does not have to be taken By force. When she enters His castle he hands Her seven keys, six Of which he gives her permission To use, and leaves. She hears the cries Of his other, imprisoned wives, Coming from behind a door. So she uses The forbidden key, releasing them. Meanwhile Bluebeard is assaulted By the local peasants, who want To free Ariane, fearing her fate will turn out like That of the women who came before her. But Ariane is already free In herself, and proves this freedom By bringing the wounded Bluebeard Home, caring tenderly for him, and then Declaring that she’s leaving him for good. By the end Bluebeard’s shattered, sobbing, Bleeding. Ariane Invites the other wives to leave with her In a wrenching aria, pleading With them one by one to taste With her the freedom awaiting Them, The World. But they all prefer confinement Even though they had longed For freedom before Ariane opened Their door. Once liberty arrived they were no Longer capable of it, preferring to serve; even a gutted, Hollowed-out power. Ariane exits Alone. The end. Badiou narrated This with emotion and I cried. Maybe cos I was tired and That thing about my name or because I am not heroic or free. I had missed half of Alain Badiou’s Lectures messing around with you On the couch by the fire; in the women’s Toilets; up on the hill. If this were a suitable parable, And it isn’t, I would try to tell myself That those very early mornings in Brooklyn when I sat Up in your bed feeling wrong and Got dressed and walked away, I should Have stayed away cos I don’t need you. Maybe I don’t need you. But I want You. Maybe I don’t love you. But I am getting to know you. Maybe What made me cry in class was how tired I was and how sad and hard It is, and how rare, to undertake an act That’s truly free, and not just a response To a confused surge of drives and fears.
Just now I touched my chest And felt my heart quivering there. This must be one of the bad times.  I think it is quivering with remorse And exhaustion. Once I saw a heart Beating in a documentary. I was a very  Little girl and the sight disgusted me. Throbbing and not stopping my heart betrays Me and yet remains sure and true, a thing  Of nature. Earth bleeding Its guts out on the sea floor exhausts Me with remorse and shame, and yet I have to trust it  As wealth is proven by how terribly it devastates Itself, and I am but one symptom among billions of the wealth Of Earth. A tired feeling that is recuperated by a passing spaceship  Or an infinitude like fame but more universal. I will have to miss you Earth; I miss you already. And yet when I touch myself whom I should Not trust it is still only the heaviest and most jealous feelings that bind me to you, like blood.
Eight stars make A soft solfege Above this motel Where there are never Stars. I let a skinny man Put his long thick dick in me for you So we could break our hearts The way you want me to. Somewhere a white Wall stretches up behind the backs of a tribe Whose obscurity protects its secret from the common World and the connivances it ordains. What time is it. What season is it. I don’t know. The moon blows green Gas into my skull I want to hide what I dream In a big boot, and wear the boot And starve as I lean upon the boot of my destitution And drag The truth as a gimp would drag the weight of her body. That would give me a feeling of honesty.
Love Is an interruption or an aberration, a force in opposition to the ultimate inertia of the universe,  Wrote Marguerite Duras.  Whether or not it is worth it it occurs. Whether or not it is to be believed it is.  The wind moves us without a frond being needed to be held by a slave girl.  The rudiments of sentences are ancient without a mouth needing to remember what it is losing as it lets those words out, something eviller than what they even mean right now, something too evil to be known right now  Or ever.  I feel sure that even the most culpable people have other qualities secreted away  Adjusting their garments in light of fate  He turned his head upward, he looked up the white wall. The light from the lamp could be light coming from a great distance, it could be a great distance away, and the wall could be snow it is so beautiful, he said. His head looking up the wall, his eyes looking up it, he said, that nail in the wall could also be beautiful, for so far away.
A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut. Perhaps this is my mesh of hours, my muscular ache, my guardian sash, twist of rope carved around an old maple trunk, my rod of power red with anticipatory friction at the edge of an emerging set of planetary rings. Stained ochre by the air I pitch forward, a vanilla-scented pear that floats or falls. In the rattan chair on the front porch by the blistered boards of the front door a figure of tar watches. Cool dust sparkles and settles. Shadows have made me visible. An empty wagon flares on the hillside.
Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure — dusky flutter — trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who’ve engraved on her locket phrases in script: “glide on a blade” and “rustling precedes the shuck.” This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it’s morning, afternoon or evening — the loot of hours — a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded.
Once we were in the loop . . . slick with information and the luster of good timing. We folded our clothes. Once we stood up before the standing vigils, before the popping vats, before the annotated lists of marshaled forces with their Venn diagrams like anxious zygotes, their paratactic chasms . . . before the set of whirligig blades, modular torrent. We folded our clothes. Once we remembered to get up to pee . . . and how to pee in a gleaming bowl . . . soaked as we were in gin and coconut, licorice water with catalpa buds, golden beet syrup in Johnny Walker Blue and a beautiful blur like August fog, cantilevered over the headlands . . . We tucked into the crevices of the mattress pad twirling our auburn braids, or woke up at the nick of light and practiced folding our clothes. Our pod printed headbands with hourly updates, announcing the traversals of green-shouldered hawks through the downtown loop, of gillyfish threading the north canals, of the discovery of electron calligraphy or a new method of washing brine. We smoothed our feathers like birds do, and twitched ourselves into warm heaps, and followed the fourth hand on the platinum clocks sweeping in arcs from left to right, up and down, in and out . . . We were steeped in watchfulness, fully suspended, itinerant floaters — ocean of air — among the ozone lily pads and imbrex domes, the busting thickets of nutmeg, and geode malls. At night we told stories about the future with clairvoyant certainty. Our clothing was spectacular and fit to a T. We admired each other with ferocity.
I left you last evening without the usual privileges. A lot of what my body was was toxin, that held me aloft in idle price, far from the witless wood and Arcadia. There’s no more moon for birds to buss at over streetlamps. Urchins make their way in the mist, trolling for dinner rolls. How frugal my recent times were spent, the clocks keeping how stoned a content. There’ll be much better dawns than this forthcoming.   Now—silver morning, body trussed across a sphere—what would Salome do? A certain Grace is coming toward you and xe is lovely. The troposphere might solder the iron we sought here, the sky is neither an abaude.   What Portia lacks is not anatomical, but philosophical: ‘bitter is my sustenance, melancholy my food, sorry my wine.’ Expressive geometrics of the New York sissy—and with such a disfunctional phone! Portia tells her students get thee to a muhfuckery, where I’ll lay thee fool across my lap.   P meets Sally’s longings, her shoes untied, and everything about her demonstrating a careless desolation, a blue eye and sunken. Take one step further and the Grace coming toward you is Beauty. The Grace turned away from you is Restraint. Hassan pleading for her life, fainting, having a bucket of water thrown on her, reviving.   Nothing but a farce, we animate Wall and Moon. The art is cruxy to the love-juice. Once there was many a sight, but now they are wilting, poor lambs. Once a malapert downpour, uncharacteristic of the rains of this place. Next football, a hemistich. The belle lettrist’s idea of a billet-doux, the scientist’s idea of a sauna.   What with their consummate barbeque wines, their tawdry dance moves, their go-go girls of yesteryear—we thought the Impressionists were trying to impress people. Fez—an impossibility the universe grew out of. Flaubert saying, Madame Bovary, c’est moi. Loeretta casting her lots.
What makes that fox so grabby for the stars, Begging like boys do? I meant to fully Gild that lily, till less like virile Mars It’s clepd the pansiest of pansy, The caducous calyx of a poppy. Cuz, step into these arms where you belong A coup at the prospect of this lording, A gleam in the gloom with serpentine song— The phosphorescent tide’s mine to lavish upon.   O stop me at the very vestibule— Before whom, and in what habit I speak I watched them use their meat to call me fool. Someone’s cage is aching at the seams, The noisome idle falls to dirty dreams— Thus the flummoxed drunk of xem will coil And I’ll learn the real, or it’ll learn me, Making free with the Italian model The single summer shower mano à mano.   The proverbial number of angels That could’ve fit on the head of a pin Are crying to the myriad angles, This glassy labyrinth we happened in Will not undo the errancer I’ve been. Soon the swancrest, the feedcrest, my distress Will feign to fuck the furlonged mannequin— At what—punishing pace we undress This crapshoot idée fixe and its yahoo mistress.   Fictive trees harsh the billow of my cape, All kind of lovers crashed rubbernecking. The fishes on the frontispiece were draped In your leafy worded velocity. You whisper, London has no more fog for me To whit, my darksome peachpit! storms above —A buckler to them that walks uprightly— Will not enforce this porno hand from glove Or diminish one jott my vegetable love.
I could make a wardrobe with tufts of wool caught on thistle and bracken.Lost—the scraps I might have woven whole cloth.Come watch, the man says, shearing sheep with the precision of long practice, fleece, removed all of a piece, rolled in a neat bundle.I’ve been so clumsy with people who’ve loved me.Straddling a ewe, the man props its head on his foot, leans down with clippers, each pass across the coat a caress.His dogs, lying nearby, tremble at every move—as I do, loving the hands that have learned to gentle the life beneath them.
Your pansies died again today. All June I’ve watched them scorch and fall by noon, their faces folding down to tissue-paper triangles. I bring them back with water, words, a pinch, but they are sick to death of resurrection. You planted them last fall, these “Chillers” guaranteed to come again in spring. They returned in April—you did not. You who said pick all you want, it just makes more! one day in 1963, and I, a daughter raised on love and miracles, believed it.
I killed a great silver fish, cut him open with a longthin knife. The river carried his heart away. I took hisdead eyes home. His red flesh sang to me on the fire I builtin my backyard. His taste was the lost memory of mywildness. Behind amber clouds of cedar smoke, Oriondrew his bow. A black moon rose from the night’s dark waters,a sliver of its bright face reflecting back into the universe.
My mother sends the baby pictures she promised— egg hunting in Shelby Park, wooden blocks and Thumbelina tossed on the rug, knotty pine walls in a house lost to memory. I separate outthe early ones, studying my navel or crumbs on the tray, taken before my awareness of Sylvania Superflash. Here I am sitting on the dinette table, the near birthday cake striking me dumb. Two places of wedding china, two glasses of milk, posed for the marvelous moment: the child squishes the fluted rosettes, mother claps her hands, father snaps the picture in the face of time. When the sticky sweetis washed off the page, we are pasted in an album of blessed amnesia. The father leaves the pine house and sees the child on weekends, the mother stores the china on the top shelf until it’s dull and crazed, the saucer-eyed girl grips her curved spoon like there’s no tomorrow.
Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower.Stay, I said to the spider, who fled.Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself.Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble.Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence.Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.
I didn’t think handsome then, I thought my father the way he saunters down Main Street, housewives, shopkeepers, mechanics calling out, children running up to get Lifesavers. The way he pauses to chat, flipping his lighter open, tamping the Lucky Strike on his thumbnail.I sneak into his den when he’s out, tuck into the kneehole of his desk and sniff his Zippo until dizzy, emboldened; then play little tricks, mixing red and black inks in his fountain pen, twisting together paperclips. If I lift the telephone receiverquietly, I can listen in on our party line. That’s how I hear two women talking about him. That’s why my mother finds me that night sleepwalking, sobbing. “It’s all right,” she tells me,“you had a nightmare, come to bed.”
Deeply repentant of my sinful waysAnd of my trivial, manifold desires,Of squandering, alas, these few brief daysOf fugitive life in tending love's vain fires,To Thee, Lord, Who dost move hard hearts again,And render warmth unto the frozen snow,And lighten every bitter load of painFor those who with Thy sacred ardours glow, To Thee I turn, O stretch forth Thy right handAnd from this whirlpool rescue me, for IWithout Thine aid could never reach the land;O willingly for us didst suffer loss,And to redeem mankind hung on the Cross,O gentle Saviour, leave me not to die.
Her hair was curls of Pleasure and Delight,Which on her brow did cast a glistening light.As lace her bashful eyelids downward hung:A modest countenance o'er her face was flung:Blushes, as coral beads, she strung to wearAbout her neck, and pendants for each ear:Her gown was by Proportion cut and made,With veins embroidered, with complexion laid,Rich jewels of pure honor she did wear, By noble actions brightened everywhere:Thus dressed, to Fame's great court straightways she went,To dance a brawl with Youth, Love, Mirth, Content.
I language want to dress my fancies in, The hair's uncurled, the garment's loose and thin.Had they but silver lace to make them gay,They'd be more courted than in poor array; Or, had they art, would make a better show;But they are plain; yet cleanly do they go.The world in bravery doth take delight,And glistering shows do more attract the sight: And every one doth honor a rich hood,As if the outside made the inside good.And every one doth bow and give the place, Not for the man's sake but the silver lace.Let me intreat in my poor book's behalf,That all will not adore the golden calf.Consider, pray, gold hath no life therein,And life, in nature, is the richest thing.Be just, let Fancy have the upper place,And then my verses may perchance find grace.
Sir Charles into my chamber coming in,When I was writing of my ‘Fairy Queen;’‘I pray’—said he—‘when Queen Mab you do seePresent my service to her Majesty:And tell her I have heard Fame's loud reportBoth of her beauty and her stately court.’When I Queen Mab within my fancy viewed,My thoughts bowed low, fearing I should be rude;Kissing her garment thin which fancy made,I knelt upon a thought, like one that prayed; And then, in whispers soft, I did presentHis humble service which in mirth was sent;Thus by imagination I have beenIn Fairy court and seen the Fairy Queen.
In gardens sweet each flower mark did I,How they did spring, bud, blow, wither and die.With that, contemplating of man's short stay,Saw man like to those flowers pass away.Yet built he houses, thick and strong and high,As if he'd live to all Eternity.Hoards up a mass of wealth, yet cannot fillHis empty mind, but covet will he still.To gain or keep, such falsehood will he use!Wrong, right or truth—no base ways will refuse.I would not blame him could he death out keep,Or ease his pains or be secure of sleep:Or buy Heaven's mansions—like the gods become,And with his gold rule stars and moon and sun:Command the winds to blow, seas to obey,Level their waves and make their breezes stay.But he no power hath unless to die,And care in life is only misery.This care is but a word, an empty sound,Wherein there is no soul nor substance found; Yet as his heir he makes it to inherit, And all he has he leaves unto this spirit.To get this Child of Fame and this bare word,He fears no dangers, neither fire nor sword: All horrid pains and death he will endure,Or any thing can he but fame procure. O man, O man, what high ambition growsWithin his brain, and yet how low he goes!To be contented only with a sound,Wherein is neither peace nor life nor body found.
A Poet am I neither born nor bred,But to a witty poet married:Whose brain is fresh and pleasant as the Spring,Where Fancies grow and where the Muses sing. There oft I lean my head, and listening, hark,To catch his words and all his fancies mark:And from that garden show of beauties takeWhereof a posy I in verse may make. Thus I, that have no gardens of my own,There gather flowers that are newly blown.
I am being paraded through the streets with my head shaved, with no memory of what I have done to deserve this.   I run a gauntlet of women who call me slut and whore, staggering under their fusillade of accusation:   What stories did I tell, what lies? What names did I reveal? What men did I sleep with? What did I do? For what reward?   Or in a catacomb deep under Paris they press gloves of barbed wire on to my bare hands, and when the wounds have healed   they point to the brambles left on my palms, saying, Surely these lines of head and heart and mind are those of a traitor.   When you wake I hold you tight, saying, It’s only a dream, the language of dream has nothing to do with that of life.   And as eventually you sink back into the deep well of sleep, I wonder if by my words I have betrayed you.
I woke. You were lying beside me in the double bed, prone, your long dark hair fanned out over the downy pillow.   I’d been dreaming we stood on a beach an ocean away watching the waves purl into their troughs and tumble over.   Knit one, purl two, you said. Something in your voice made me think of women knitting by the guillotine. Your eyes met mine.   The fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said, from where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.   I must go back to where it all began. You waded in thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep, head-deep, until you disappeared.   I lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again. You stirred in the bed and moaned something. I heard a footfall   on the landing, the rasp of a man’s cough. He put his head around the door. He had my face. I woke. You were not there.
You remember the Incredible Shrinking Man? I said. Well, last night I dreamed I was him. It began the same way.   The shirt cuffs were the first thing that came to my attention, drooping down over my knuckles in the bedroom mirror.    And my waistband and shoes were getting looser by the day. Within weeks you could perch me on your knee like a male doll.   Later you would put me to bed in the empty matchbox. You failed to watch for the spider that came to explore me.   I fought her with a darning needle, a button my shield. She retreated from me on a thread. I followed her down   to the cellar. How I made my way back I’ll never know. It took me days to travel over the quilt to your hand.   No longer a hand but an Alpine range of sleeping flesh. I crawled into an open pore and entered your bloodstream.
Forget the corncrake’s elegy. Rusty Iambics that escaped your discipline Of shorn lawns, it is sustained by nature. It does not grieve for you, nor for itself. You remember the rolled gold of cornfields, Their rustling of tinsel in the wind, A whole field quivering like blown silk?   A shiver now runs through the laurel hedge, And washing flutters like the swaying lines Of a new verse. The high fidelity Music of the newly-wed obscures your Dedication to a life of loving Money. What could they be for, those marble Toilet fixtures, the silence of water-beds, That book of poems you bought yesterday?
They had questioned him for hours. Who exactly was he? And when He told them, they questioned him again. When they accepted who he was, as Someone not involved, they pulled out his fingernails. Then They took him to a waste-ground somewhere near the Horseshoe Bend, and told him What he was. They shot him nine times.   A dark umbilicus of smoke was rising from a heap of burning tyres. The bad smell he smelt was the smell of himself. Broken glass and knotted Durex. The knuckles of a face in a nylon stocking. I used to see him in the Gladstone Bar, Drawing pints for strangers, his almost perfect fingers flecked with scum.
The Powers-that-Be decreed that from the—of—the sausage rolls, for reasons Of security, would be contracted to a different firm. They gave the prisoners no reasons.   The prisoners complained. We cannot reproduce his actual words here, since their spokesman is alleged To be a sub-commander of a movement deemed to be illegal.   An actor spoke for him in almost-perfect lip-synch: It’s not the quality We’re giving off about. Just that it seems they’re getting smaller. We’re talking quantity.    His ‘Belfast’ accent wasn’t West enough. Is the H in H-Block aitch or haitch? Does it matter? What we have we hold? Our day will come? Give or take an inch?   Well, give an inch and someone takes an effing mile. Everything is in the ways You say them. Like, the prison that we call Long Kesh is to the Powers-that-Be The Maze.
It was overcast. No hour at all was indicated by the gnomon. With difficulty I made out the slogan, Time and tide wait for no man.   I had been waiting for you, Daphne, underneath the dripping laurels, near The sundial glade where first we met. I felt like Hamlet on the parapets of Elsinore,   Alerted to the ectoplasmic moment, when Luna rends her shroud of cloud And sails into a starry archipelago. Then your revenant appeared and spake aloud:  I am not who you think I am. For what we used to be is gone. The moment’s over, Whatever years you thought we spent together. You don’t know the story. And moreover, You mistook the drinking-fountain for a sundial. I put my lips to its whatever, And with difficulty I made out the slogan, Drink from me and you shall live forever.
Near the year 1000 we find Maximos Planudes nude writing to a friend in Asia Minor asking for parchment because the right quality is not for sale in his own neighborhood, presumably Constantinople.   In the end, all he receives are some asses’ skins, which do not please him in the least, and a note:    Dear Max,    No parchment  till the summer,  months after the population  begins to eat meat.  Low yield  should come as no surprise,  our medieval animals  being much smaller  than their modern  counterparts.    Love,  A. Minor
This is the room. Where mole guests are welcomed. At this moment you see the wedding table prepared for the mole guests.   Rooms are heated with stoves. Rooms have been designed according to the patriarchal way of living. The family has, consists of, father, mather, sons and brides. There is no sex discrimination within the family. They artogether, have meal and altogether chat, but when the doors are clased.   Mole guests are welcomed in “Selamlik” part. Femole guests are welcomed in “Harem” part. On such occasions mole guests are served via the cupboard in the wall  which turns on its axis.
O dove, fly to Aleppo with my Byzantine ode And take my greeting to my kinsman.   –Mahmoud Darwish Before I was born, I saw a tissue of ingenious detours, an inextricable tangle wreathed with mistake.   Perhaps the ghost does not limp away, but rather forests flee me, frightened. Look, they are setting a place for loss, clearing the table for the first glow of antiquity.   Here we see William T. Walters in his little library illuminated, carefully smoothing the lip of the continent.   What form bounds forward from behind but The Atlantic Railroad Coastline Co.? The whole Roman Empire was sold by ascending auction in 193 A.D.   A globe enclosed. Bottomless years. The train has stopped on the platform and no one is there, for these are the Public Days, when the “Poor Association” claims the museum’s building.   As if bound by the knots of invention, I found a wrong road dotted with weeds and sorrows.
Perhaps the universe is an extinguished building with blue banners strung along and the forest, more like a commodity bordering bushes and asphalt,   something else to string our blue banners on. Never was restoration swifter: the leafless trees, the asphalt less splintered and more splendid.   Never was restoration swifter with its mightier solutions, less splintered and more splendid snipers, dynamiters, colorful bombs.   We please ourselves with mightier solutions, picnics under blue spruces snipers, dynamiters, colorful bombs the guardians of what we might call “home rights.”   At picnics, under blue spruces we clamor after the news and its employees, the guardians of “home rights” “the media” mustering “one mind.”   It’s news, the decision to nobly save rather than meanly lose some pretense of mustering “one mind” secures its truth.   The decision to nobly save rather than meanly lose our flag secures its truth as a squirrel secures its nuts by hiding them in the ground.   Our flag— a souvenir of having been here before a squirrel’s nuts, deep in the ground. But travel, travail, and The Method’s mistakes   all souvenirs of having been here before, haunt us and taunt us and call us names.  But travail, travel, and Method’s mistakes mark a different season, nuts rotting, bulbs blooming.   Each season haunts us and taunts us and calls us names until finally the universe is an extinguished building, a different season, nuts rotting, bulbs blooming and the forest, a commodity.
In the very night of movement where I sought a sequential self – The sea as blood, thought as Earth that changes the sea   Changes the fishes in it for the fortunes of landscapes are in the fantasies of architecture   H — taught to sing siren scales by ear by rote or immersion abroad   In the discrepancy of double exposure Casts of light crack time’s microscope
I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument once ended when his father seized a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurled it out a second-story window. That,I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed the people in his stories really loved one another, even when they yelled and shoved their feet through cabinet doors, or held a chair like a bottle of cheap champagne, christening the wall,rungs exploding from their holes. I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury of the passionate. He said it was a curse being born Italian and Catholic and when he looked from that window what he saw was the moment rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk deep in the icing, a few still burning.
Except a six-year pony penned from birthinside a barn, I never seen anything worse. Eleven dobermans and mixed breeds, some still pups, removed from a residence after anonymous tips about a dead dog decomposing on the porch.Still and yet, this many dogs almost beats that one horse. The problem of human freedom one might couch in other terms than Kant’s. It’s nasty in there.Dog shit everywhere. I don’t see how she could breathe. The woman, nearly ninety, wept and pleaded with the workers. I’ve been raising dogs right herein this very house since before your mothers were born.If I’m treating these dogs as bad as you say,how come you need those chokers to drag them away? The Humane Society truck’s radio, left on, played “Me and Bobby McGee.” They were strays, unwanted.I fed them and gave them a home. Now you’ll kill themand call me cruel. And who will protect me?How will I sleep? When asked, the welfare worker said the woman cannot be forced from her home. But freedom of will is not freedom from necessity and obligation. The neighbors lost interest soon and left her lawn. Meanwhile a breeze blows in from the Gulf on a girl showing her friends the spot where she lost her left foot to a shark. He kept twisting itlike a dog with a rag, she says just to hear them squeal.Really, he only managed to take a chunk and maulthe rest, but the doctors had to amputate. She had to learn to trust loss. And in Houston a boy tries to jimmy a padlock with a broom to free his six-year-old sister from the storage shed their parents told them was “the naughty room.”She was causing trouble at school, wetting her bed,and threatening to run away. We made a decision.We thought a few hours here was best for her. Police said the girl had been left water. A person may purchase the wind and the sun at the price of perpetual peregrination.
For Christ’s sake, learn to type and have something to fall back on.   Be someone, make something of yourself, look at Gertrudo Ganley.   Always draw the curtains when the lights are on.   Have nothing to do with the Shantalla gang, get yourself a right man with a Humber Sceptre.   For Christ’s sake wash your neck before going into God’s house.   Learn to speak properly, always pronounce your ings. Never smoke on the street, don’t be caught dead in them shameful tight slacks,   spare the butter, economise,   and for Christ’s sake at all times, watch your language.
As a teenager she was like any other, boys, the craic, smoking down the backs.   Later there was talk she broke things, furniture and glass, her mother’s heart.   ‘Mad at the world,’ the old women nod, round each other’s faces.   But it was more than that and for less she was punished.   That weekend she didn’t leave a cup alone every chair hit the wall, Philomena’s revenge.   Soon after she was shifted and given the shocks.   Round each other’s faces the old women nod ‘Treatment, treatment they’ve given her the treatment.’   These days she gets on with the furniture, wears someone else’s walk, sees visions in glass.   She’s good too for getting the messages; small things, bread and milk sometimes the paper,   and closing the gate after her father drives out, she waits for his signal he always shouts twice,   ‘Get the gate Philo, get the gate, girl.’
June 5, 1892   Dear Daughter,  Can you be fifty-three this month? I still look for you to peek around my door as if you’d discovered a toy you thought gone for good, ready at my smile to run up and press your fist into my broken palm. But your own girls have outgrown such games, and I cannot pilfer back time I spent pursuing Freedom. Fair to you, to your brothers, your mother? Hardly.    But what other choice did I have? What sham, what shabby love could I offer you, so long as Thomas Auld held the law over my head? And when the personal threat was ended, whose eyes could mine enter without shame, if turning toward my wife and children meant turning my back?    Your mother’s eyes stare out at me through yours, of late. You think I didn’t love her, that my quick remarriage makes a Gertrude of me, a corseted Hamlet of you. You’re as wrong as you are lucky. Had Anna Murray had your education as a girl, my love for her would have been as passionate as it was grateful. But she died illiterate, when I had risked my life to master language. The pleasures of book and pen retain the thrill of danger even now, and you may understand why Ottilie Assing, come into our house to translate me into German, could command so many hours, years, of my time—or, as you would likely say, of your mother’s time.    Forgive me, Rosetta, for broaching such indelicate subjects, but as my eldest child and only living daughter, I want you to feel certain that Helen became the new Mrs. Douglass because of what we shared in sheaves of my papers: let no one persuade you I coveted her skin. I am not proud of how I husbanded your mother all those years, but marriage, too, is a peculiar institution. I could not have stayed so unequally yoked so long, without a kind of Freedom in it. Anna accepted this, and I don’t have to tell you that her lot was better and she, happier, than if she’d squatted with some other man in a mutual ignorance.    Perhaps I will post, rather than burn, this letter, this time. I’ve written it so often, right down to these closing lines, in which I beg you to be kinder, much kinder, to your step-mother. You two are of an age to be sisters, and of like temperament—under other circumstances, you might have found Friendship in each other.   With regards to your husband—I am, as ever, your loving father—      Frederick Douglass
i want her tin skin. i want  her militant barbie breast, resistant, cupped, no, cocked  in the V of her elbow. i want my curves mountainous   and locked. i want her  arabesque eyes, i want her tar markings, her curlicues,  i want her tin skin. she is a tree, her hair a forest   of strength. i want to be  adorned with bottles. i want my brownness  to cover all but the silver edges of my tin skin. my   sculptor should have made  me like her round-bellied maker hewed her: with chain-  saw in hand, roughly. cut away from me everything   but the semblance of tender.  let nothing but my flexed foot, toeing childhood, tell  the night-eyed, who know how to look, what lies within.      —after alison saar’s “compton nocturne”
he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees.   fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees.  one hundred degrees in the shade : we settle into still pools of humidity, moss- dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees.   the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees.  frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees.   i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i : it’s part of what makes me evie : i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.
we make midnight a maquette of the year: frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize  the vows we offer to ourselves in near silence: the competition shimmerwise    of champagne and chandeliers to attract laughter and cheers: the glow from the fireplace  reflecting the burning intra-red pact between beloveds: we cosset the space    of a fey hour, anxious gods molding our hoped-for adams with this temporal clay:  each of us edacious for shining or rash enough to think sacrifice will stay    this fugacious time: while stillness suspends vitality in balance, as passions  struggle with passions for sway, the mind wends towards what’s to come: a callithump of fashions,    ersatz smiles, crowded days: a bloodless cut that severs soul from bone: a long aching  quiet in which we will hear nothing but the clean crack of our promises breaking.
We are the knife people, iron men, coat people  and he-lands-sailing. Souse eaters, house makers, husbands  of kine and goat and swine, farm builders  and keepers of kettle and scummer, word  scratchers, corn stealers and bad sleepers.   As if towns could build themselves. As if stumps jumped from the ground or  flesh of beasts fell into trenchers. As if paradise prevailed on earth. To come to rich moulds and lush plantings,  long-necked trees and tongues of land,   to redd the wild for the unborn.  To reck not the peril. Suffering snakes that may fly, wolves  that may ravish. Kingdom  of sachem and sagamore. Kingdom of corn and thorny promise.   To satisfy our appetite of spirit,  our thirst of property. To seek not the opera of war but  belittled by the possibilities to stand silenced by the task before us—   these be my sudden and undigested thoughts.
In the spring time the stars began looking for him By summer time they had found him By autumn time they had wounded him  so that the orange and red of his blood began  to leak from the sky onto the leaves of the trees By winter time they had slain him  so that his white fat began to melt and drip  falling as snow all over the land   And then he would begin to rise again  first as sap in the trees  stretching higher and higher until his back ached but  knowing he would not stop until  his black fur was hidden  deep among the unborn behind the dark wall of the night sky
Once in moonlight when I had not slept for three nights, when there was no food and a long rain had stopped, and some had slept outside in the rain you could see the streaks it had left on their skin, once in the eighth week of my captivity, alone in the moonlight outside on the ledge, I looked up and felt the stars move strangely back and forth, a slow rocking, as though the Lord were rocking us somehow back and forth, and I was not afraid but tears came anyway as I remembered my children so far away, the way children can call you back in through your thoughts and keep you awake like hearing the stars ring all night long. And when you watch animals die, when deer die you notice it, how they don’t cry out— I could see it in my mind’s eye— they don’t cry out but lie there, eyes open, and then they are dead outside of themselves they are dead but inside themselves they have joined the earth where they have always been rocking and rocking.—And so I was able to sleep a few hours before our next remove, miles and miles beyond the Great River, though I had lost track of our place in the world.
Stronger than alcohol, more great than song, deep in whose reeds great elephants decay, I, an island, sail, and my shoes toss on a fragrant evening, fraught with sadness bristling hate. It’s true, I weep too much. Dawns break slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea, what other men sometimes have thought they’ve seen. And since then I’ve been bathing in the poem lifting her shadowy flowers up for me, and hurled by hurricanes to a birdless place the waving flags, nor pass by prison ships O let me burst, and I be lost at sea! and fall on my knees then, womanly.
banging around in a cigarette she isn’t “in love” my dream a drink with Ira Hayes we discuss the code of the west my hands make love to my body when my arms are around you you never tell me your name and I am forced to write “belly” when I mean “love” Au revoir, scene! I waken, read, write long letters and wander restlessly when leaves are blowing my dream a crumpled horn in advance of the broken arm she murmurs of signs to her fingers weeps in the morning to waken so shackled with love Not me. I like to beat people up. My dream a white tree
I like to beat people up absence of passion, principles, love. She murmurs What just popped into my eye was a fiend’s umbrella and if you should come and pinch me now as I go out for coffee . . . as I was saying winter of 18 lumps Days produce life locations to banish 7 up Nomads, my babies, where are you? Life’s My dream which is gunfire in my poem Orange cavities of dreams stir inside “The Poems” Whatever is going to happen is already happening Some people prefer “the interior monologue” I like to beat people up
His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night. In the book of his music the corners have straightened: Which owe their presence to our sleeping hands. The ox-blood from the hands which play For fire for warmth for hands for growth Is there room in the room that you room in? Upon his structured tomb: Still they mean something. For the dance And the architecture. Weave among incidents May be portentous to him We are the sleeping fragments of his sky, Wind giving presence to fragments.
after Gwendolyn Brooks I. 1981   When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real   men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we   drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is a school   I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk   of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late. Standing in the middle of the street last night we   watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight   Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing   his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We   watched him run to us looking wounded and thin. He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.   He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,   how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June the boy would be locked upstate. That night we   got down on our knees in my room. If I should die before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.     II. 1991   Into the tented city we go, we- akened by the fire’s ethereal   afterglow. Born lost and cool- er than heartache. What we   know is what we know. The left hand severed and school-   ed by cleverness. A plate of we- ekdays cooking. The hour lurk-   ing in the afterglow. A late- night chant. Into the city we   go. Close your eyes and strike a blow. Light can be straight-   ened by its shadow. What we break is what we hold. A sing-   ular blue note. An outcry sin- ged exiting the throat. We   push until we thin, thin- king we won’t creep back again.   While God licks his kin, we sing until our blood is jazz,   we swing from June to June. We sweat to keep from we-   eping. Groomed on a die- t of hunger, we end too soon.
My son and I walk away from his sister’s day-old grave. Our backs to the sun, the forward pitch of our shadows tells us the time. By sweetest accident he inclines his shadow, touching mine.
I was sent home the first daywith a note: Danny needs a ruler.My father nodded, nothing seemed so apt.School is for rules, countries need rulers,graphs need graphing, the world is straight ahead.It had metrics one side, inches the other.You could see where it startedand why it stopped, a foot along,how it ruled the flighty pen,which petered out sideways when you dreamt.I could have learned a lot,understood latitude, or the border with Canada,so stern compared to the Southand its unruly river with two names.But that first day, meandering home, I dropped it.
How perfectly he has mastered the car alarm, jangling us from sleep. Later his staccato scatters smaller birds that landed on the wire beside him. Perhaps the key to success is imitation, not originality. Once, when the cat slinked up the orange tree and snatched a hatchling, the mockingbird turned on us, marked us for revenge. For two whole weeks he dive bombed whenever I ventured out the screen door lured by his call: first tricked into thinking the soft coo was a mourning dove courting, next drawn by the war cry of a far larger animal. He swooped from one splintered eave, his mate from the other, aiming to peck out my eyes, to wrestlethe baby from my arms, to do God knows what with that newborn.
The eagle floats and glides,circling the burnished aspen,then takes the high pineswith a flash of underwing.As surely as the eagle sailstoward the bay’s open curve,as surely as he swoops and seizesthe struggling fish, pullingit from an osprey’s beak;so too, autumn descends,to steal the glisteningsummer from our open hands.
But prayer was not enough, after all, for my father. His last two brothers died five weeks apart. He couldn’t get to sleep, had no appetite, sat staring. Though he prayed,he could find no peace until he tried to write about his brothers, tell a story for each one: Perry’s long travail with the steamfitters’ union, which he worked for; and Harvey—here the handwriting changes, he bears down—Harvey loved his children.I discovered those few sheets of paper as I looked through my father’s old Bible on the morning of his funeral. The others in the family had seen them long ago; they had all known the story, and they told me I had not, most probably, because I am a writer, and my father was embarrassed by his effort. Yet who has seen him as I can: risenin the middle of the night, bending over the paper, working close to the heart of all greatness, he is so lost.
Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me, like this room I lived in for eleven days, how I learned the way the sun laid its palm over the side window in the morning, heavy light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.
—for Travis and Vaughan and all the St. Catherine’s Indian School kids  dust, leaves twirling whirlpool up off road under wheels undercarriage automotive winds turning, lifting giving force to such delicate particles ends attached in former position to branch soft paper thin petal- like reds and golds much as the mane swings blows back from higher plane winds Percheron gold mane that red Percheron on the right the north side you’ve seen her in the early morning when it’s snowing she raises her dignity laughing at motorists distressed by ice and Pueblo patrol cars we catch in peripheral focus signal turn the halogens off and on on and off until they code the signal distress signal approaching tribal police traffic trap commuting the 35 mph racket through Nambe Pojoaque turn 50 Tesuque Bingo/Pull-Tabs long before the lodge turned stone near Camel Rock before the Congested Area in approach to the “City of the Oldest Catholic Church in North America” we convey these danger signs to local yokels perhaps even tourists if we’re in the mood consideration strange nation neither of us belong though we do stay in close proximity to these other Native peoples very different than where we come from still the same only sometimes though they know the patrol man he’s their cousin all of theirs they know this whirl these leaves rising now before our heated grill Chevy 4x ’91 they know the Percheron she steals the scenery easily with her laughter and turn pitching hoof and tail in mockery indispensable humor she takes this morning under gray the shade of nickel to cloud the stress enabling me to speak to you of beauty
First there was some other order of things never spoken but in dreams of darkest creation.   Then there was black earth, lake, the face of light on water. Then the thick forest all around that light, and then the human clay whose blood we still carry rose up in us who remember caves with red bison painted in their own blood, after their kind.   A wildness swam inside our mothers, desire through closed eyes, a new child wearing the red, wet mask of birth, delivered into this land already wounded, stolen and burned beyond reckoning.   Red is this yielding land turned inside out by a country of hunters with iron, flint and fire. Red is the fear that turns a knife back against men, holds it at their throats, and they cannot see the claw on the handle, the animal hand that haunts them from some place inside their blood.   So that is hunting, birth, and one kind of death. Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds. Red was the infinite fruit of stolen bodies. The doctors wanted to know what invented disease how wounds healed from inside themselves how life stands up in skin, if not by magic.   They divined the red shadows of leeches that swam in white bowls of water: they believed stars in the cup of sky. They cut the wall of skin to let what was bad escape but they were reading the story of fire gone out and that was a science.   As for the animal hand on death’s knife, knives have as many sides as the red father of war who signs his name in the blood of other men.   And red was the soldier who crawled through a ditch of human blood in order to live. It was the canal of his deliverance. It is his son who lives near me. Red is the thunder in our ears when we meet. Love, like creation, is some other order of things.   Red is the share of fire I have stolen from root, hoof, fallen fruit. And this was hunger.   Red is the human house I come back to at night swimming inside the cave of skin that remembers bison. In that round nation of blood we are all burning, red, inseparable fires the living have crawled and climbed through in order to live so nothing will be left for death at the end.   This life in the fire, I love it. I want it, this life.
I was birthed restless and elsewhere   gut dragging and bulging with ball lightning, slush, broke through with branches, steel   I was bitch-monikered, hipped, I hefted a whip rain, a swirling sheet of grit.   Scraping toward the first of you, hungering for wood, walls, unturned skin. With shifting and frantic mouth, I loudly loved the slow bones   of elders, fools, and willows.
for Quincy T. Trouppe Sr.  father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table moving away, snaking down, screwing its stitched magic into chitlin circuit air, its comma seams spinning toward breakdown, dipping, like a hipster bebopping a knee-dip stride, in the charlie parker forties wrist curling, like a swan’s neck behind a slick black back cupping an invisible ball of dreams   & you there, father, regal, as an african, obeah man sculpted out of wood, from a sacred tree, of no name, no place, origin thick branches branching down, into cherokee & someplace else lost way back in africa, the sap running dry crossing from north carolina into georgia, inside grandmother mary’s womb, where your mother had you in the violence of that red soil ink blotter news, gone now, into blood graves of american blues, sponging rococo truth long gone as dinosaurs the agent-oranged landscape of former names absent of african polysyllables, dry husk, consonants there now, in their place, names, flat, as polluted rivers & that guitar string smile always snaking across some virulent, american, redneck’s face scorching, like atomic heat, mushrooming over nagasaki & hiroshima, the fever blistered shadows of it all inked, as etchings, into sizzled concrete but you, there, father, through it all, a yardbird solo riffing on bat & ball glory, breaking down the fabricated myths of white major league legends, of who was better than who beating them at their own crap game, with killer bats, as bud powell swung his silence into beauty of a josh gibson home run, skittering across piano keys of bleachers shattering all manufactured legends up there in lights struck out white knights, on the risky edge of amazement awe, the miraculous truth sluicing through steeped & disguised in the blues confluencing, like the point at the cross when a fastball hides itself up in a slider, curve breaking down & away in a wicked, sly grin curved & posed as an ass-scratching uncle tom, who like old sachel paige delivering his famed hesitation pitch before coming back with a hard, high, fast one, is slicker sliding, & quicker than a professional hitman— the deadliness of it all, the sudden strike like that of the “brown bomber’s” crossing right of sugar ray robinson’s, lightning, cobra bite   & you, there, father, through it all, catching rhythms of chono pozo balls, drumming, like conga beats into your catcher’s mitt hard & fast as “cool papa” bell jumping into bed before the lights went out   of the old, negro baseball league, a promise, you were father, a harbinger, of shock waves, soon come
La luna Sang the miles por los palos de Nebraska You bunch of lights And houses How did you walk to this place Buffalo Bill Better know him some Spanish Para Horses ride rubber horseshoes moderno.   El café Boiled water/no milk in sight. Homes that will travel interstate 8 o tomorrow in the morning for the next edge of town.   The cowgirls/the local rodeo As they galloped by their hair unmoved by 15 miles per hour wind It seems that 25 pounds of hair spray is enough to hold a mountain down Their hair style longer than their faces. Que Pasa? Y los palos do not feel at home any more La luna goes round the star dotted cielo Let’s watch In this part of Mexico Se habla inglish.
The mountain have changed to buildings Is this hallway the inside of a stem That has a rattling flower for a head, Immense tree bark with roots made out of Mailboxes? In the vertical village moons fly out of Apartment windows and though what you See is a modern city The mountain’s guitars pluck inside It’s agriculture taking an elevator Through urban caves which lead to Paths underground They say Camuy To Hutuado Taino subground like the IRT in Constant motion   The streets take walks in your dark eyes Seashell necklaces make music in the Origin of silence What are we stepping on? Pineapple Fields frozen with snow Concrete dirt later the rocks of the Atlantic The sculpture of the inner earth Down there where you thought only worms And unnamed crocodiles parade Lefty stands on a corner Analyzing every seed Squeezing the walls as he passes Through at the bottom of the basement Where the boiler makes heat The flesh arrives out of a hole In the mountain that goes up like a Green wall Bodies come in making maraca sounds An invisible map out of the flora Bees arrive in the vicinity and sing Chorus while woody woodpeckers make Women out of trees and place flowers On their heads Waterfalls like Hurakan’s faucets Caress the back of Yuquiyu God to all whose tongues have the Arawak’s echoes   Hallway of graffiti like the master Cave drawings made by owls when they Had hands You see the fish with pyramids inside Their stomachs Hanging near the doorways where San Lazaro turns the keys Villa Manhattan Breeze of saint juice made from Coconuts Slide down the stairs to your Belly and like a hypnotized guanabana You float down the street And win all your hands at dominoes   The Moros live on the top floor eating Roots and have a rooster on the roof Africans import okra from the bodega The Indians make a base of guava On the first floor The building is spinning itself into a spiral of salsa Heaven must be calling or the Residents know the direction Because there is an upward pull If you rise too quickly from your seat You might have to comb a spirit’s Hair They float over the chimneys Arrive through the smog Appear through the plaster of Paris It is the same people in the windowed Mountains.
Her voice comes out of her knees, her fingernails are full of sound, Birds are in her lungs, which gives her gargantuan flight, A florescence through ether waves, like ancestral Morse codes.   Oriente province de Cuba her first steps. At nineteen she dismantled retinas— roosters blew themselves inside out, When she swayed by cathedrals they folded, guayacan trees fell to their knees, Mountains bowed with the contents for ajiaco. She filled the horizon with kerchiefs, gypsies danced behind her, Her bracelets were snakes, forces were captured in her gold chains, The moon was in her silver, there were reptiles stationed In her Afro-Siboney cheeks, there were in her Asian eyes Radars picking up the fingertips of the piano player— The language of the trumpet— black changos landing upon The shelf of her eyelids.   She motioned in songs to live them. Her passion destroyed the container, She blew up into false promises, romantic lyrics tied her in knots, Broken into pieces of kisses, she knew it was “theater” That you offered, A landscape hanging in the museums of desire, Rows of guayava paste, stories that according To your point of view, salons of dried roses. Illusions.   Her songs became the windows of the city, In the distance a hurt bellows from a bird locked in a radio.   Classroom teacher of tropical children, reading to them native flora— A wind entered her and she flew to New York, eating the skyline, Bridges of electric lights, conduits to the house of the Saints. At the Jefferson Theater she melted the microphone Into liquid mercury, and an ambulance had to Get her off the stage.   She embodied in gowns, capes, dresses, necklaces, bonnets, Velvets, suedes, diamond-studded, flowers, sequins, All through which she wanted to eat herself She salvaged us all, but took the radiation. Each time she sang she crossed the sea. From the Bronx she went back to Cuba, Adrift on the sails of a song.
a rooftop has an enemy   an owl   a cone of confusion     scansion of acoustics   or before sound   a crematorium     visually unresolved   (before) remains     leaves that only look   like the birds   between them     physiology limits visual memory     ash or bodies in glass
how this time is a fact of shared space looking to pass through, undifferentiated memory always has a back door      no one word settles  me     or rather than resist rather than resolution     such that lists   fall from   one
60 Her eye (I'm very fond of handsome eyes) Was large and dark, suppressing half its fire Until she spoke, then through its soft disguise Flash'd an expression more of pride than ire, And love than either; and there would arise A something in them which was not desire, But would have been, perhaps, but for the soul Which struggled through and chasten'd down the whole. 61 Her glossy hair was cluster'd o'er a brow Bright with intelligence, and fair, and smooth; Her eyebrow's shape was like the aerial bow, Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth, Mounting at times to a transparent glow, As if her veins ran lightning; she, in sooth, Possess'd an air and grace by no means common: Her stature tall—I hate a dumpy woman. 62 Wedded she was some years, and to a man Of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty; And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE 'Twere better to have TWO of five-and-twenty, Especially in countries near the sun: And now I think on't, 'mi vien in mente,' Ladies even of the most uneasy virtue Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty.63 'Tis a sad thing, I cannot choose but say, And all the fault of that indecent sun, Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay, But will keep baking, broiling, burning on, That howsoever people fast and pray, The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone: What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, Is much more common where the climate 's sultry.
41 His classic studies made a little puzzle, Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses,Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle, But never put on pantaloons or bodices;His reverend tutors had at times a tussle, And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys,Were forced to make an odd sort of apology,For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology. 42
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the termites had deboned the thing it was clean there was no saving it   in one bedroom a dresser with blue drawers its peg-legs rested on pure membrane   a girl just stood in her underwear ran the tips of her fingers over her ribs   thought greyhound no one knew no explaining why she didn’t fall through the floor   the kids were drinking beer in the yard the tetherball rope caught one girl’s throat   her mother’s face obscured behind the porch screen the mesquite shadow   no one could make her out her feet rested on hot sashes of dust   the sounds on the television were far away as that big caliche mound looked lake a waving man   the president got shot the boards stayed together for another three days   it was a matter of apathy or swelling or everyone was too hot to move
the live oak over the nursery got a disease they could only save one limb it wasn’t surprising; it wasn’t that kind of nursery   a girl rode her red tricycle around the bottom of the pool the pool had no water; it hadn’t rained   the girl kept smelling her hand it smelled like honeywheat, or the inside of a girl’s panties   someone said, race you she nodded okay and pedaled like hell after three laps no one had passed her   she looked over her shoulder, lost her balance ripped her hands & knees on the blue concrete   the one limb on the live oak curved like a question would she need stitches again   there was already ink under her skin & iodine on her tongue or was it the other way around   she could see black thread bunching sewing centipedes under her skin   her throat burned and she couldn’t move her legs it wasn’t a tricycle it was something she couldn’t get her foot out from under   she hated to stop or lose her shoe and, I’m sorry the pool was full of water
It’s no wonder I’m always tired with all these tract houses—  It’s night & cold on my belly in the undeveloped field now  I have to bury her clothing inside a black garbage bag in plot D police cars roll past but continue down the treeless parkway  even after shining  their lights on me in my freshman sundress  I can only assume they don’t see the significance of my presence but I must say 1994 is a simpler time—not everyone is suspect  I crawl up next to my old house & look through a lit window  my mother reads a book in bed I want to knock on the glass, there’s something  I need to tell her
If you’re love’s lover and look for love cold smoke the dog called bashfulness beware for your conversation is a hindrancy this poem isn’t interested I’ll bill you Why’d the mad one make madness in a thousand works that wild one make a thousand wild works of wiles? now he disrobes, now he’s so fast now he likes intoxicating substances and wants to die Since a spider spies and eats a whole deer behold what the web of Zoroastrianism will do! Since the love of nighties had positive market outlook, how will it be with “He took His servant in nighties?” Have you not seen the book of Waisa and Ramin? Have you not heard the tales of Wamiq and ‘Adra? You hike your denim so you don’t wear water   do you have to pull that bridge stunt over & over? The way of love is filth and I’m drunk the storm storms—how should a storm calm? you’ll be the jewel in the ring of lovers If you’re insistent on assuming the consequence of jewelry so, say it, how does the earth hurt if we fuck? what gifts would be unreasonable? it’s not cool to beat a drum when yr. in bed, son, and put your erection in the middle of the desert Listen to the sounds of fucking and coming, under the sky, which “Orientals, perhaps owing to some optical peculiarity, see as green.” When you’re drunk take your clothes off Heaven is great, Orion is confused how the world is high and killed by love which is high and killed! When the sun comes out, where do nighties hide? When the come comes, where does the pent go? I’m done. Speak to me, soul’s soul’s soul From desire of whom from whose desire every throat was cut
Someone said you were dead it’s not that I didn’t care You were not bacterial You were not frozen water in winter You were not a hairbrush broken by hair You were a treasure of gold in the world-toilet For you appraised the world of grains And flung the earth to the earth The good wine is mixed with the bad wine, come to the wine jar’s lips and let’s unmix it Poor people only have one soul but you and I have two let’s go on vacation to Mexico or Rome Everybody returns home How should old people associate with young people? Shut up—Be like a compass. The King has erased your name from the book of speech
This boat you’re videotaping. You’re looking at a boat. Despite your protests that you are looking at a translation of the fourth poem in the corpus of Catullus, I assure you you are looking at this boat. Lots of bad things battered this boat. Forget about volunteering to swab its lintels. This boat denies it was minced in the Adriatic. It denies that it lit up the Cyclades with an all night buck and spill. Rhodes is horrible, noble, Thracian. Proponents of Rhodes call truce though it might be their sinuses. Where this boat is is post-boat. The word for this boat is phaselus. A phaselus was a rather long and narrow vessel, named for its resemblance to a kidney bean. This boat was built for speed. Yet this boat is sort of fragile. Lots of bad things battered this boat from the beginning of its life to now. You state it’s cracked, but I tell you to go put your stupid hands in the water. Say it again. The boat frets about its impotence, falls over dead. The boat sucks lava dexterously; yes, this boat is right-handed. Its aura chainsmokes cigarettes, looks up at Jupiter out there in space, and its beams moist. What happens below deck, and involves feet, stays below deck. I’m not literally pointing out this boat to you, I’m writing a poem about it in limping trimeters. But this is a fact: botulism is sad. Noobs lurch toward a limpid coast. And before them stands a boat, a beautiful old boat looking like a kidney bean built for speed. It sits there quiet and old, looking over the lake and thinking this lake is really limpid. The noobs all have twins.
with Dana Ward with Dana Ward  I have so little want of activity even writing with its pain more terrible than life I don’t want but do because I’m kind of stupid finally not in the way, you, Sarah know I am nor, you reader, who think of me fishing. Line, spindle, lure, bait. Instruments for me are accessories, even the matchbook is only a tiara to my eyes, the fishing lure a long & white bracelet. Some of my so-called friends think of me as a derelict they always try to hold me to account. “Tell me what happened on the drunken night in question” On the witness stand I am a kitten terribly cute but I can’t say a thing about stupid, or fish, or last night. I like to lay at the base of a hill asleep while the shepherds work bringing things to heel with tepid will where I source my contempt in the index of swill. The entries there make no mention of hell which was sifted through the vale of tears, & fell to make Earth, & the base of this hill where I sunbathe & murmur ‘jealous cellmate’ as my willful peers go by.
for Andrew Joron the desire to show is destruction in lessons forgot before learned no shrunken heads hang by wires no mourning songs of half-remembered shutters open the width of an eyelash it is enough for vision to run its finger along, for access to steal from forbidden shores the still-cold beams of night and pack them in ice but a child couldn’t live here nonetheless in the morning is come a bell that summons a fortune that reads she will sooncross the water and the intended instructions which may not florish after all she leaves a painting outside her room and in the morning it’s gone and not one word is spoke between them but her father carries it to his grave the desire to show is destruction and we are not hung with skins we must follow internal echoes commit ourselves to memory
the trapdoor is closed; am finite again, but a moment ago—levitation! purple lights the bluewater bridge turned on the oil- black river st clair became fuel for the nightfishers there it was the dream of a memory or the memory of a dream that dumped me below a window, watching a woman change into a man. she entered his dairy log: at first all the world was americaand didn’t that suck, he thunk, and strunk his cunk against an overwrought iron fence. they stood waiting like that photograph of the bootblack jack and the aristocrat  looking away from her window at a fact well worth recording—Alexander Graham Bell wanted to call his daughter Photophone. between the forest and the gander i hand her over to Metacomet. yes i certainly did. and King Philip sayeth unto me: nature denatured thee friction alone makes her come therefore i need some more before you make me wear’um pants. O failed invention! where’d you get that voice? refusing to come to a particular point, castration finally made sense.
the madder runs like blood lifeblood of the livebud that kindles next to earth the hair on the church is water the lovebirds curve their crutches down so long to the sacred palaces so long to the fingerbone that lingers on if i’m alive it’s no thanks to you if i’m comatose let’s make the most of it tomato ghost rude twilight ruby tear discipline disappears between the shapeless necklace and the cloudy robe of shrapnel in the absence of incense no balm can grease the throbbing temples of the rotting world
This sonnet is your personal amulet To be worn in instance of need Or constantly held in the mind Occurring here and elsewhere at this moment This sonnet is sent without cunning To cull a particular phrase from your lips To enlist another protector In this age of malcontent benefactors Against an ironclad schooner Feudal kingdom Dismemberment by jubilant crowds Strangely indifferent faces Heat and dust besides Suicide implicating others
dreaming the lives of the ancestors, you awake, justly terrified of this world:you could dance underwater and not get wet, you hear, but the pressure is drowning you:  you’re awake, but just terrified of this world, where all solids are ice: underwater boogie, you hear, but the press sure is drowning you: the igbo were walking, not dancing: where all solids are ice, underwater boogie is good advice, because they’re quick to melt: the igbo were straight up walking, not dancing: and you’ve still got to get through this life:   take my advice, quickly: they’re melting:you could dance underwater and not get wet: and you’ve got to, to get through this life still dreaming the lives of the ancestors
To fight aloud, is very brave -  But gallanter, I know Who charge within the bosom The Calvalry of Wo -  Who win, and nations do not see -  Who fall - and none observe -  Whose dying eyes, no Country Regards with patriot love -  We trust, in plumed procession For such, the Angels go - Rank after Rank, with even feet - And Uniforms of snow.
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more, From Mississippi's winding stream, and from New England's shore; We leave our ploughs and workshops, our wives and children dear, With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear; We dare not look behind us, but steadfastly before: We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more! If you look across the hill tops that meet the Northern sky, Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry; And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy vail aside, And floats aloft our spangled flag, in glory and in pride, And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour: We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more! If you look all up your valleys, where the growing harvests shine, You may see our sturdy farmer boys, fast forming into line; And children from their mothers' knees, are pulling at the weeds, And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs; And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door: We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more! You have called us, and we're coming, by Richmond's bloody tide To lay us down, for freedom's sake, our brother's bones beside; Or from foul treason's savage group to wrench the murderous blade, And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade; Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before: We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!
Weep for the country in its present state,And of the gloom which still the future waits;The proud confederate eagle heard the sound,And with her flight fell prostrate to the ground!Weep for the loss the country has sustained,By which her now dependent is in jail;The grief of him who now the war survived,The conscript husbands and the weeping wives!Weep for the seas of blood the battle cost,And souls that ever hope forever lost!The ravage of the field with no recruit,Trees by the vengeance blasted to the root!Weep for the downfall o'er your heads and chief,Who sunk without a medium of relief;Who fell beneath the hatchet of their pride,Then like the serpent bit themselves and died!Weep for the downfall of your president,Who far too late his folly must repent;Who like the dragon did all heaven assail,And dragged his friends to limbo with his tail!Weep o'er peculiar swelling coffers void,Our treasures left, and all their banks destroyed;Their foundless notes replete with shame to all,Expecting every day their final fall,In quest of profit never to be won,Then sadly fallen and forever down!
you put this pen in my hand and you take the pen from  my hand. the night before the full moon    the moon seems full. what is missing is a dark hungry  sickle, the sliver of shadow eating    us up inside. after the mountains breathe their mint-and-sorrow  green against the long summer sky, they burst    into hot october laughter, lighting the horizon with citrus,  rust, and blood. you put this knife in my    hand. we pull. we meet as oceans come together, heaving  against and clinging across our salt watery    boundary. we approach endlessly like two rails of one track, tied  in a parallel that promises our eyes to    merge, someplace far off in the distance. you put this feather in my  palm. my fingers close around flight.
wedged in the top branches, rain still sighing  to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves, a mozambican woman turns mother,  her water breaking loose to pool with the flood   licking the trunk below, a country-sized  puddle calls forth the child whose name, the mother vowed, would not be drowned, no matter how  high she had to climb. my mother’s water   washed her bare yellow bathroom tile many  years ago, a diluvial warning of my struggle to arrive. we fought to  get me out, and have been tugging at each   other ever since, tethered by a cord  that simply thickens when it’s cut. we descended then, thirsting, churning, not into  the waters that hound the mozambican   mother, baying her and her baby in  the tree, but into that enduring ocean in which—as mother, daughter, or both—a  woman’s only choices are drink or swim.
“what, to the american slave, is your 4th of july?”—frederick douglass   i. august 1619   arrived in a boat, named and unnamed, twenty, pirated   away from a portuguese slaver, traded for victuals.   drowned in this land of fresh, volatile clearings and folk   with skin like melted cowrie shells. soon shedding   servitude. soon reaping talents sown on african soil.   after indenture, christians, colonists. not english, but   not yet not-white. antoney and isabella, whose marriage   stretched the short shadows of america’s early afternoon   into the dusky reaches of evening, whose conjugal coitus spent   first the choice coin of africa on rough virginian citizenship,   baptized their son, william, into the church of england.    ii. december 1638  fear must have shuddered into boston on the backs   of true believers—men and women of an unadorned god—   deep in the heavy black fabric of their coats and dresses like   a stench. black a mark of pride they wore as if branded,   never dreaming they could take it off. envy anticipated   their advent. glittered at them, settling in, from the knife   blades of the massachusetts. seeped like low-pitched   humming from the fur lining the natives’ warm   blankets. but desire docked in 1638. in from the harbor   flocked a people whose eyes sparked like stars, even near   death. whose hair promised a mixture of cotton and river   water and vines, a texture the fingers ached for. who   wholly inhabited a skin the midnight color of grace   that clarified the hue of the pilgrims’ woolen weeds. fear   and envy claimed pride of place, put desire’s cargo to good use.    iii. march 1770  that night, crispus attucks dreamed. how he’d attacked   his would-be master and fled in wild-eyed search of self-   determination. discarded virginia on the run and ran   out of breath in salt-scented boston. found there, if not   freedom, fearlessness. a belief in himself that rocked things   with the uncontrolled power of the muscular atlantic, power   to cradle, to capsize. awoke angry again at the planter   who’d taken him for a mule or a machine. had shouldered   a chip the size of concord by the time the redcoat dared   to dare him. died wishing he’d amassed such revolutionary   ire in virginia. died dreaming great britain was the enemy.    iv. july 4th: last but not least  17-, 18-, 19-76 and still this celebration’s shamed   with gunpowder and words that lie like martyrs in cold   blood. africa’s descendents, planting here year after year   the seeds of labor, sweating bullets in this nation’s warts,   have harvested the rope, the rape, the ghetto, the cell,   the fire, the flood, and the blame for you-name-it. so   today black folks barbeque ribs and smother the echoes   of billie’s strange song in sauces. drink gin. gladly   holiday to heckle speeches on tv. pretend to parade.   turn out in droves for distant detonations, chaos, controlled   as always, but directed away from us tonight. stare   into the mirror of the sky at our growing reflection,   boggled by how america gawks at the passing pinpoints   of flame, but overlooks the vast, ebony palm giving them shape.
watchdog howling (all caved in beyond the pale—tis my home   cold wind implacable driven unaccounted sooth shawl of sorrow   unplanned unmapped swallow order blunt trees mended like man   even our shadows belabored in light commonplace rumble—shaken   alliterative portrait of a ploughman struck down cattle thief   contraband—pig iron—intermediate between two states & cargo untold   undetected huckster amended airs an untapped inventory—catholic   in the tall grass—laughing—mask chimerical goods for summer sink in
phlegmatic on my bier no regrets—my body bears truth stem to stern beginning with the hips   who am of common stock looking to the sea face ground—nothing now conjured from dust   suffering—hung by the heels sought occasion as will was never conquered to see the host broken   a swinging scythe—the dance this most pleasant to me so make moan of the old days say why should love live
That which installs itself in the mind embraces sound   Rebounding,  rounding the fecund earth   Birth, as in what is not, as in one makes one,  is a mighty absence to understand   (and there are those who fail to get their lessons done)   Dun is the color of submission   Unfledged, she leafs through what has been nothing never Never to be what she is/ or could /or hope to be Bewitched by dictions (fictions) on the surface—   Face naming that which she must save, polished like an apple—   Apple of the eye, amour of town and street, apple of the cheek Eaten with a dab of honey for a sweet year   Ear to who am I in the suddenly-arriving what-comes-next Next to being, next to delivery, next to undergone Gone parenthetical but now revived as her eye Spies the sudden trespass of his unexpected welcome—   Succumbing, coming unto him in full sun this morning   Mourning what she need not beguile or lie beside
. . . some days ago I saw the picture of an Angel who, in making the Annunciation, seemed to be trying to chase Mary out of her room with movements showing the sort of attack one might make on some hated enemy; and Mary, as if desperate, seemed to be trying to throw herself out of the window. Do not fall into errors like these.   — Leonardo da Vinci It is time to speak of the lies  of images, omissions, insertions— imitations of reality, but whose reality, Leonardo?   For you she’s in nature—   you’ve lavished so much attention  on rock formations along your raised horizon  varieties of grass in the lawn  cloud convocations   and the shadow the archangel casts  obliterating most of what’s imagined growing there   and she, lovely, composed—“great grace of shadows and of lights is added to the faces of those who sit” beside the darkness of brown plasterwork—her right arm almost deformed, too far forward,   reaching out at an impossible angle—    FOR WHAT  —Botticelli, Campin, van Eyck—for you   she’s indoors all decked out in luscious silk and satin, surrounded by finery—tied-back drapery, carved benches, a rug or tiled floor, loggias and archways beyond her wildest ken windows revealing hortus conclusi and winding paths  slogging toward the sea And what of all those blues and golds, so rife with wealth    in her life there’s only red from madder juice  and yellow from kaolin clay  and a linen shift all frayed   The truth also is a small opening high up on the wall A floor that’s hard-packed dirt And beyond the room, villagers working the fields, donkeys dragging threshing boards over newly harvested wheat    AND EVERYWHERE, INSIDE AND OUT, WORLD-MOTHETING DUST    For all of you this is an event reduced to a book she cannot read a lily she does not smell a lectern she never owned   She might as well comb her hair with a stiletto heel Make of her body a cloud of white tulle Carry a watering can and wear shapely wooden clogs Fake glamour in a black bare-back gown Crouch on the ground flipping coins Pop a pogo stick between her legs and levitate    SHE COULD BE ANYONE ANYWHERE ANYTIME     She could be sitting in her slip, bored, bored to death, the intercom image appearing out of nowhere, announcing a stranger    (prima materia, take a deep breath    (for divinity to enter the world,  your mystery must be experienced   Her eyes will go wide, not expecting this   Her ears have encountered only silence    and the soft moan of a dove  (OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO   The trees thin The cumulus sky crackles ever so quietly Somewhere a rainbow breaks    too loud now  too strident    He’s gotten in   Hail comes in pellets  (heavy hitters    She will be patient  and hear him out  though what she really wants is to get back under the covers  that are damask, but a lie—  (rough-hewn flax is what she’d have)   Or she could be blending a batch of myrrh and roses to deodorize the foul stench of the room that opens out not on a vista of budding poplars but on sewage, piles of it come to rot at the side of the road just there, in front of her door  where broken planks of wood lean  and bleating sheep wait to be herded up the hill   But here’s this guy breezing in    (Titan, El Greco paint his feet unplanted on the ground  (is he preparing for a quick getaway  or must he be higher on the picture plane  (Tintoretto catches him in mid-flight, a show-off, he  (Martini and Crivelli force him to his knees   The breeze may be the whisper of something  she is in danger of losing    (the breeze may be her destiny     or his feathers could begin to moult  (transaction of feathers,  (light as a feather  in the face of all that dust she can’t escape   or she could cringe at wings,  voracious, unfurled, trying to scoop her up, knock her down, drown her in their soft pile,   snuff out any NO she stashes in her mind, or the wind could whip his feathers and blow the townsfolk quickly to her side    (Today, she knows no one will arrive in time . . . )    Certainly not those people tending their gardens,  (as if anyone had topiary trees  as Rogier van der Weyden (possibly Memling) shows    (read fields of barley and wheat  and plows, plenty of plows   In his eyes, pools of light map no pollution, only flame In hers, no flecks, no threads mar the cobalt calm    until his hail scumbles their surface    What is she to make of it   Her lids lower   Chrysalises, her eyes close on their private dusk  (she’s already seen her share of Roman crucifixions    (perhaps the future is there and her eyes seek the great above  where son and mother will be united  (perhaps she conjugates the months—  (nine is real—  (a number done on her    (perhaps she dabbles with using rue to end the thing    SHE’S GOT A CHOICE AFTER ALL     For the child she will have boundless love   For posterity the memory of being   For her life no proper translation
Thanks for the Italian chestnuts—with their tough shells—the smooth chocolaty skin of them—thanks for the boiling water—itself a miracle and a mystery— thanks for the seasoned sauce pan and the old wooden spoon—and allthe neglected instruments in the drawer— the garlic crusher—the bent paring knife— the apple slicer that creates sixperfect wedges out of the crisp Haralson— thanks for the humming radio—thanks for the program on the radioabout the guy who was a cross-dresser— but his wife forgave him—and he ended up almost dying from leukemia—(and you could tell his wife loved him entirely—it was in her deliberate voice)— thanks for the brined turkey—the size of a big baby—thanks— for the departed head of the turkey— the present neck—the giblets(whatever they are)—wrapped up as small gifts inside the cavern of the ribs— thanks—thanks—thanks—for the candleslit on the table—the dried twigs— the autumn leaves in the blue Chinese vase—thanks—for the faces—our faces—in this low light.
Four weeks in, quarreling and far from home, we came to the loneliest place. A western railroad town. Remember? I left you at the campsite with greasy pans and told our children not to follow me. The dying light had made me desperate. I broke into a hobbled run, across tracks, past warehouses with sun-blanked windows to where a playground shone in a wooded clearing. Then I was swinging, out over treetops. I saw myself never going back, yet whatever breathed in the mute woods was not another life. The sun sank. I let the swing die, my toes scuffed earth, and I was rocked into remembrance of the girl who had dreamed the life I had. Through night, dark at the root, I returned to it.
Nights we could not sleep— summer insects singing in dry heat, short-circuiting the nerves—Grandma would light a lamp, at the center of our narrow room, whose clean conspiracy of lightwhispered to the tall blank walls, illuminating them suddenly like the canvas of a dream.Between the lamp and wall her arthritic wrists grew pliant as she molded and castimprobable animal shapes moving on the wordless screen: A blackbird, like a mynah, not a crow.A dark horse’s head that could but would not talk. An ashen rabbit (her elusive self) triggered in snowthat a quivering touch (like death’s) sent scampering into the wings of that little theater of shadows that eased us into dreams.
Our shadows bring them from the shadows: a yolk-yellow one with a navy pattern like a Japanese woodblock print of fish scales. A fat 18-karat one splashed with gaudy purple and a patch of gray. One with a gold head,a body skim-milk-white, trailing ventral fins like half-folded fans of lace. A poppy-red, faintly disheveled one, and one, compact, all indigo in faint green water. They wear comical whiskers and gather beneath us as we lean on the cement railingin indecisive late-December light, and because we do not feed them, they pass, then they loop and circle back. Loop and circle. Loop. “Look,” you say, “beneath them.” Beneath them, like a subplot or a motive, is a school of uniformly dark ones, smaller, unadorned, perhaps another species, living in the shadow of the gold, purple, yellow, indigo, and white, seeking the mired roots and dusky grasses, unliveried, the quieter beneath the quiet.
It wasn’t until we got the Christmas tree into the house and up on the stand that our daughter discovered a small bird’s nest tucked among its needled branches.Amazing, that the nest had made it all the way from Nova Scotia on a truckmashed together with hundreds of other trees without being dislodged or crushed. And now it made the tree feel wilder, a balsam fir growing in our living room, as though at any moment a bird might flutter through the house and return to the nest.And yet, because we’d brought the tree indoors, we’d turned the nest into the first ornament. So we wound the tree with strings of lights, draped it with strands of red beads,and added the other ornaments, then dropped two small brass bells into the nest, like eggs containing music, and hung a painted goldfinch from the branch above, as if to keep them warm.
Cards in each mailbox, angel, manger, star and lamb, as the rural carrier, driving the snowy roads, hears from her bundles the plaintive bleating of sheep, the shuffle of sandals, the clopping of camels. At stop after stop, she opens the little tin door and places deep in the shadows the shepherds and wise men, the donkeys lank and weary, the cow who chews and muses. And from her Styrofoam cup, white as a star and perched on the dashboard, leading her ever into the distance, there is a hint of hazelnut, and then a touch of myrrh.
The night John Henry is born an ax  of lightning splits the sky,  and a hammer of thunder pounds the earth,  and the eagles and panthers cry!  John Henry—he says to his Ma and Pa:  “Get a gallon of barleycorn.  I want to start right, like a he-man child,  the night that I am born!”  Says: “I want some ham hocks, ribs, and jowls,  a pot of cabbage and greens;  some hoecakes, jam, and buttermilk,  a platter of pork and beans!”  John Henry’s Ma—she wrings her hands,  and his Pa—he scratches his head.  John Henry—he curses in giraffe-tall words,  flops over, and kicks down the bed.  He’s burning mad, like a bear on fire—  so he tears to the riverside.  As he stoops to drink, Old Man River gets scared  and runs upstream to hide!  Some say he was born in Georgia—O Lord!  Some say in Alabam.  But it’s writ on the rock at the Big Bend Tunnel:  “Lousyana was my home. So scram!”
King Oliver of New Orleans  has kicked the bucket, but he left behind  old Satchmo with his red-hot horn  to syncopate the heart and mind.  The honky-tonks in Storyville  have turned to ashes, have turned to dust,  but old Satchmo is still around  like Uncle Sam’s IN GOD WE TRUST.    Where, oh, where is Bessie Smith,  with her heart as big as the blues of truth?  Where, oh, where is Mister Jelly Roll,  with his Cadillac and diamond tooth?  Where, oh, where is Papa Handy  With his blue notes a-dragging from bar to bar?  Where, oh where is bulletproof Leadbelly  with his tall tales and 12-string guitar?    Old Hip Cats,  when you sang and played the blues  the night Satchmo was born,  did you know hypodermic needles in Rome  couldn’t hoodoo him away from his horn?  Wyatt Earp’s legend, John Henry’s, too,  is a dare and a bet to old Satchmo  when his groovy blues put headlines in the news  from the Gold Coast to cold Moscow.    Old Satchmo’s  gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes  set my soul on fire.  If I climbed  the seventy-seven steps of the Seventh  Heaven, Satchmo’s high C would carry me higher!  Are you hip to this, Harlem? Are you hip?  On Judgment Day, Gabriel will say  after he blows his horn:  “I’d be the greatest trumpeter in the Universe  if old Satchmo had never been born!”
Is this the river East I heard?— Where the ferries, tugs and sailboats stirred And the reaching wharves from the inner land Ourstretched, like the harmless receiving hand— And the silvery tinge that sparkles aloud Like the brilliant white demons, which a tide has towed From the rays of the morning sun Which it doth ceaselessly shine upon. But look at the depth of the drippling tide The dripples, reripples like the locusts astride; As the boat turns upon the silvery spread It leaves—strange—a shadow dead. And the very charms from the reflective river And from the stacks of the floating boat— There seemeth the quality ne’er to dissever Like the ruffles from the mystified smoke.
By a peninsula the painter sat and Sketched the uneven valley groves. The apostle gave alms to the Meek. The volcano burst In fusive sulphur and hurled Rocks and ore into the air— Heaven’s sudden change at The drawing tempestuous, Darkening shade of dense clouded hues. The wanderer soon chose His spot of rest; they bore the Chosen hero upon their shoulders, Whom they strangely admired, as The beach-tide summer of people desired.
The motion of gathering loops of water Must either burst or remain in a moment. The violet colors through the glass Throw up little swellings that appear And spatter as soon as another strikes And is born; so pure are they of colored Hues, that we feel the absent strength Of its power. When they begin they gather Like sand on the beach: each bubble Contains a complete eye of water.
This year, till late in April, the snow fell thick and light: Thy truce-flag, friendly Nature, in clinging drifts of white, Hung over field and city: now everywhere is seen, In place of that white quietness, a sudden glow of green. The verdure climbs the Common, beneath the leafless trees, To where the glorious Stars and Stripes are floating on the breeze. There, suddenly as Spring awoke from Winter’s snow-draped gloom, The Passion-Flower of Seventy-six is bursting into bloom. Dear is the time of roses, when earth to joy is wed, And garden-plot and meadow wear one generous flush of red; But now in dearer beauty, to her ancient colors true, Blooms the old town of Boston in red and white and blue. Along the whole awakening North are those bright emblems spread; A summer noon of patriotism is burning overhead: No party badges flaunting now, no word of clique or clan; But “Up for God and Union!” is the shout of every man. Oh, peace is dear to Northern hearts; our hard-earned homes more dear; But freedom is beyond the price of any earthly cheer; And freedom’s flag is sacred; he who would work it harm, Let him, although a brother, beware our strong right arm! A brother! ah, the sorrow, the anguish of that word! The fratricidal strife begun, when will its end be heard? Not this the boon that patriot hearts have prayed and waited for;— We loved them, and we longed for peace: but they would have it war. Yes; war! on this memorial day, the day of Lexington, A lightning-thrill along the wires from heart to heart has run. Brave men we gazed on yesterday, to-day for us have bled: Again is Massachusetts blood the first for Freedom shed. To war,—and with our brethren, then,—if only this can be! Life hangs as nothing in the scale against dear Liberty! Though hearts be torn asunder, for Freedom we will fight: Our blood may seal the victory, but God will shield the Right!
“All quiet along the Potomac,” they say, “Except, now and then, a stray picket Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro, By a rifleman hid in the thicket. ’Tis nothing—a private or two, now and then, Will not count in the news of the battle; Not an officer lost—only one of the men Moaning out, all alone, his death-rattle.” * * * * * * All quiet along the Potomac to-night, Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming; Their tents, in the rays of the clear autumn moon Or the light of the watch-fire, are gleaming. A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind Through the forest-leaves softly is creeping; While stars up above, with their glittering eyes, Keep guard—for the army is sleeping. There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread, As he tramps from the rock to the fountain, And thinks of the two in the low trundle-bed Far away in the cot on the mountain. His musket falls slack—his face, dark and grim, Grows gentle with memories tender, As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep— For their mother—may Heaven defend her! The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then, That night, when the love yet unspoken Leaped up to his lips—when low-murmured vows Were pledged to be ever unbroken. Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes, He dashes off tears that are welling, And gathers his gun closer up to its place, As if to keep down the heart-swelling. He passes the fountain, the blasted pine-tree, The footstep is lagging and weary; Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light, Toward the shade of the forest so dreary. Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves? Was it moonlight so suddenly flashing? It looked life a rifle—“Ha! Mary, good-by!” And the life-blood is ebbing and plashing. All quiet along the Potomac to-night, No sound save the rush of the river; While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead— The picket’s off duty forever!
Falling leaves and falling men! When the snows of winter fall, And the winds of winter blows, Will be woven Nature’s pall. Let us, then, forsake our dead; For the dead will surely wait While we rush upon the foe, Eager for the hero’s fate. Leaves will come upon the trees; Spring will show the happy race; Mothers will give birth to sons— Loyal souls to fill our place. Wherefore should we rest and rush? Soldiers, we must fight and save Freedom now, and give our foes All their country should—a grave!
All day she stands before her loom; The flying shuttles come and go: By grassy fields, and trees in bloom, She sees the winding river flow: And fancy’s shuttle flieth wide, And faster than the waters glide. Is she entangled in her dreams, Like that fair-weaver of Shalott, Who left her mystic mirror’s gleams, To gaze on light Sir Lancelot? Her heart, a mirror sadly true, Brings gloomier visions into view. “I weave, and weave, the livelong day: The woof is strong, the warp is good: I weave, to be my mother’s stay; I weave, to win my daily food: But ever as I weave,” saith she, “The world of women haunteth me. “The river glides along, one thread In nature’s mesh, so beautiful! The stars are woven in; the red Of sunrise; and the rain-cloud dull. Each seems a separate wonder wrought; Each blends with some more wondrous thought. “So, at the loom of life, we weave Our separate shreds, that varying fall, Some strained, some fair: and, passing, leave To God the gathering up of all, In that full pattern wherein man Works blindly out the eternal plan. “In his vast work, for good or ill, The undone and the done he blends: With whatsoever woof we fill, To our weak hands His might He lends, And gives the threads beneath His eye The texture of eternity. “Wind on, by willow and by pine, Thou blue, untroubled Merrimack! Afar, by sunnier streams than thine, My sisters toil, with foreheads black; And water with their blood this root, Whereof we gather bounteous fruit. “There be sad women, sick and poor: And those who walk in garments soiled: Their shame, their sorrow, I endure; By their defect my hope is foiled: The blot they bear is on my name; Who sins, and I am not to blame? “And how much of your wrong is mine, Dark women slaving at the South? Of your stolen grapes I quaff the wine; The bread you starve for fills my mouth: The beam unwinds, but every thread With blood of strangled souls is red. “If this be so, we win and wear A Nessus-robe of poisoned cloth; Or weave them shrouds they may not wear,— Fathers and brothers falling both On ghastly, death-sown fields, that lie Beneath the tearless Southern sky. “Alas! the weft has lost its white. It grows a hideous tapestry, That pictures war’s abhorrent sight:— Unroll not, web of destiny! Be the dark volume left unread,— The tale untold,—the curse unsaid!” So up and down before her loom She paces on, and to and fro, Till sunset fills the dusty room, And makes the water redly glow, As if the Merrimack’s calm flood Were changed into a stream of blood. Too soon fulfilled, and all too true The words she murmured as she wrought: But, weary weaver, not to you Alone was war’s stern message brought: “Woman!” it knelled from heart to heart, “Thy sister’s keeper know thou art!”
Dark as the clouds of even, Ranked in the western heaven, Waiting the breath that lifts All the dread mass, and drifts Tempest and falling brand Over a ruined land;— So still and orderly, Arm to arm, knee to knee, Waiting the great event, Stands the Black Regiment. Down the long dusky line Teeth gleam and eyeballs shine; And the bright bayonet, Bristling and firmly set, Flashed with a purpose grand, Long ere the sharp command Of the fierce rolling drum Told them their time had come, Told them what work was sent For the Black Regiment. “Now,” the flag-sergeant cried, “Though death and hell betide, Let the whole nation see If we are fit to be Free in this land; or bound Down, like the whining hound,— Bound with red stripes of pain In our old chains again!” Oh, what a shout there went From the Black Regiment! “Charge!” Trump and drum awoke, Onward the bondmen broke; Bayonet and sabre-stroke Vainly opposed their rush. Through the wild battle’s crush, With but one thought aflush, Driving their lords like chaff, In the guns’ mouths they laugh; Or at the slippery brands Leaping with open hands, Down they tear man and horse, Down in their awful course; Tramping with bloody heel Over the crashing steel, All their eyes forward bent, Rushed the Black Regiment. “Freedom!” their battle-cry— “Freedom! or leave to die!” Ah! And they meant the word, Not as with us ’tis heard, Not a mere party shout: They gave their spirits out; Trusted the end to God, And on the gory sod Rolled in triumphant blood. Glad to strike one free blow, Whether for weal or woe; Glad to breathe one free breath, Though on the lips of death. Praying—alas! in vain!— That they might fall again, So they could once more see That burst to liberty! This was what “freedom” lent To this Black Regiment. Hundreds on hundreds fell; But they are resting well; Scourges and shackles strong Never shall do them wrong. Oh, to the living few, Soldiers, be just and true! Hail them as comrades tried; Fight with them side by side; Never, in field or tent, Scorn the Black Regiment.
Mangled, uncared for, suffering thro’ the night With heavenly patience the poor boy had lain; Under the dreary shadows, left and right, Groaned on the wounded, stiffened out the slain. What faith sustained his lone, Brave heart to make no moan, To send no cry from that blood-sprinkled sod, Is a close mystery with him and God. But when the light came, and the morning dew Glittered around him, like a golden lake, And every dripping flower with deepened hue Looked through its tears for very pity’s sake, He moved his aching head Upon his rugged bed, And smiled as a blue violet, virgin-meek, Laid her pure kiss upon his withered cheek. At once there circled in his waking heart A thousand memories of distant home; Of how those same blue violets would start Along his native fields, and some would roam Down his dear humming brooks, To hide in secret nooks, And, shyly met, in nodding circles swing, Like gossips murmuring at belated Spring. And then he thought of the beloved hands That with his own had plucked the modest flower. The blue-eyed maiden, crowned with golden bands, Who ruled as sovereign of that sunny hour. She at whose soft command He joined the mustering band, She for whose sake he lay so firm and still, Despite his pangs, not questioned then her will. So, lost in thought, scarce conscious of the deed, Culling the violets, here and there he crept Slowly—ah! slowly,—for his wound would bleed; And the sweet flowers themselves half smiled, half wept, To be thus gathered in By hands so pale and thin, By fingers trembling as they neatly laid Stem upon stem, and bound them in a braid. The strangest posy ever fashioned yet Was clasped against the bosom of the lad, As we, the seekers for the wounded, set His form upon our shoulders bowed and sad; Though he but seemed to think How violets nod and wink; And as we cheered him, for the path was wild, He only looked upon his flowers and smiled.
Brave comrade, answer! When you joined the war, What left you? “Wife and children, wealth and friends, A storied home whose ancient roof-tree bends Above such thoughts as love tells o’er and o’er.” Had you no pang or struggle? “Yes; I bore Such pain on parting as at hell’s gate rends The entering soul, when from its grasp ascends The last faint virtue which on earth it wore.” You loved your home, your kindred, children, wife; You loathed yet plunged into war’s bloody whirl!— What urged you? “Duty! Something more than life. That which made Abraham bare the priestly knife, And Isaac kneel, or that young Hebrew girl Who sought her father coming from the strife.”
Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare, Gentle and merciful and just! Who, in the fear of God, didst bear The sword of power, a nation’s trust! In sorrow by thy bier we stand, Amid the awe that hushes all, And speak the anguish of a land That shook with horror at thy fall. Thy task is done; the bond are free: We bear thee to an honored grave, Whose proudest monument shall be The broken fetters of the slave. Pure was thy life; its bloody close Hath placed thee with the sons of light, Among the noble host of those Who perished in the cause of Right.
To-day, O martyred chief, beneath the sun We would unveil thy form; to thee who won Th’applause of nations for thy soul sincere, A loving tribute we would offer here. ’T was thine not worlds to conquer, but men’s hearts; To change to balm the sting of slavery’s darts; In lowly charity thy joy to find, And open “gates of mercy on mankind.” And so they come, the freed, with grateful gift, From whose sad path the shadows thou didst lift. Eleven years have rolled their seasons round, Since its most tragic close thy life-work found. Yet through the vistas of the vanished days We see thee still, responsive to our gaze, As ever to thy country’s solemn needs. Not regal coronets, but princely deeds Were thy chaste diadem; of truer worth Thy modest virtues than the gems of earth. Stanch, honest, fervent in the purest cause, Truth was thy guide; her mandates were thy laws. Rare heroism, spirit-purity, The storied Spartan’s stern simplicity, Such moral strength as gleams like burnished gold Amid the doubt of men of weaker mould, Were thine. Called in thy country’s sorest hour, When brother knew not brother—mad for power— To guide the helm through bloody deeps of war, While distant nations gazed in anxious awe, Unflinching in the task, thou didst fulfill Thy mighty mission with a deathless will. Born to a destiny the most sublime, Thou wert, O Lincoln! in the march of time, God bade thee pause and bid the oppressed go free— Most glorious boon giv’n to humanity. While slavery ruled the land, what deeds were done? What tragedies enacted ’neath the sun! Her page is blurred with records of defeat, Of lives heroic lived in silence, meet For the world’s praise; of woe, despair and tears, The speechless agony of weary years. Thou utteredst the word, and Freedom fair Rang her sweet bells on the clear winter air; She waved her magic wand, and lo! from far A long procession came. With many a scar Their brows were wrinkled, in the bitter strife, Full many had said their sad farewell to life But on they hastened, free, their shackles gone; The aged, young,—e’en infancy was borne To offer unto thee loud paeans of praise,— Their happy tribute after saddest days. A race set free! The deed brought joy and light! It bade calm Justice from her sacred height, When faith and hope and courage slowly waned, Unfurl the stars and stripes, at last unstained! The nations rolled acclaim from sea to sea, And Heaven’s vault rang with Freedom’s harmony. The angels ’mid the amaranths must have hushed Their chanted cadences, as upward rushed The hymn sublime: and as the echoes pealed, God’s ceaseless benison the action sealed. As now we dedicate this shaft to thee, True champion! in all humility And solemn earnestness, we would erect A monument invisible, undecked, Save by our allied purpose to be true To Freedom’s loftiest precepts, so that through The fiercest contests we may walk secure, Fixed on foundations that may still endure, When granite shall have crumbled to decay, And generations passed from earth away. Exalted patriot! illustrious chief! Thy life’s immortal work compels belief. To-day in radiance thy virtues shine, And how can we a fitting garland twine? Thy crown most glorious to a ransomed race! High on our country’s scroll we fondly trace, In lines of fadeless light that softly blend, Emancipator, hero, martyr, friend! While Freedom may her holy sceptre claim, The world shall echo with Our Lincoln’s name.
What sudden ill the world await, From my dear residence I roam; I must deplore the bitter fate, To straggle from my native home. The verdant willow droops her head, And seems to bid a fare thee well; The flowers with tears their fragrance shed, Alas! their parting tale to tell. ’Tis like the loss of Paradise, Or Eden’s garden left in gloom, Where grief affords us no device; Such is thy lot, my native home. I never, never shall forget My sad departure far away, Until the sun of life is set, And leaves behind no beam of day. How can I from my seat remove And leave my ever devoted home, And the dear garden which I love, The beauty of my native home? Alas! sequestered, set aside, It is a mournful tale to tell; ’Tis like a lone deserted bride That bade her bridegroom fare thee well. I trust I soon shall dry the tear And leave forever hence to roam, Far from a residence so dear, The place of beauty—my native home.
He is gone, the strong base of the nation, The dove to his covet has fled; Ye heroes lament his privation, For Lincoln is dead. He is gone down, the sun of the Union, Like Phoebus, that sets in the west; The planet of peace and communion, Forever has gone to his rest. He is gone down from a world of commotion, No equal succeeds in his stead; His wonders extend with the ocean, Whose waves murmur, Lincoln is dead. He is gone and can ne’er be forgotten, Whose great deeds eternal shall bloom; When gold, pearls and diamonds are rotten, His deeds will break forth from the tomb. He is gone out of glory to glory, A smile with the tear may be shed, O, then let us tell the sweet story, Triumphantly, Lincoln is dead.
Dedicated to the Federal and Late Confederate Soldiers Like heart-loving brothers we meet,  And still the loud thunders of strife, The blaze of fraternity kindles most sweet,  There’s nothing more pleasing in life.  The black cloud of faction retreats,  The poor is no longer depressed, See those once discarded resuming their seats,  The lost strangers soon will find rest.  The soldier no longer shall roam,  But soon shall land safely ashore, Each soon will arrive at his own native home,  And struggle in warfare no more.  The union of brothers is sweet,  Whose wives and children do come, Their sons and fair daughters with pleasure they greet,  When long absent fathers come home.  They never shall languish again,  Nor discord their union shall break, When brothers no longer lament and complain,  Hence never each other forsake.  Hang closely together like friends,  By peace killing foes never driven, The storm of commotion eternally ends,  And earth will soon turn into Heaven.
(July, 1862) Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill In prime of morn and May, Recall ye how McClellan’s men Here stood at bay? While deep within yon forest dim Our rigid comrades lay— Some with the cartridge in their mouth, Others with fixed arms lifted South— Invoking so The cypress glades? Ah wilds of woe! The spires of Richmond, late beheld Through rifts in musket-haze, Were closed from view in clouds of dust On leaf-walled ways, Where streamed our wagons in caravan; And the Seven Nights and Days Of march and fast, retreat and fight, Pinched our grimed faces to ghastly plight— Does the elm wood Recall the haggard beards of blood? The battle-smoked flag, with stars eclipsed We followed (it never fell!)— In silence husbanded our strength— Received their yell; Till on this slope we patient turned With cannon ordered well; Reverse we proved was not defeat; But ah, the sod what thousands meet!— Does Malvern Wood Bethink itself, and muse and brood? We elms of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fill; Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.
A Night Piece (July, 1863) No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air And binds the brain—a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there. The town is taken by its rats—ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe— Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve, And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead, And ponderous drag that shakes the wall. Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll Of black artillery; he comes, though late; In code corroborating Calvin’s creed And cynic tyrannies of honest kings; He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed, Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds The grimy slur on the Republic’s faith implied, Which holds that Man is naturally good, And—more—is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged.
(October, 1864) Shoe the steed with silver That bore him to the fray, When he heard the guns at dawning— Miles away; When he heard them calling, calling— Mount! nor stay: Quick, or all is lost; They’ve surprised and stormed the post, They push your routed host— Gallop! retrieve the day! House the horse in ermine— For the foam-flake blew White through the red October; He thundered into view; They cheered him in the looming; Horseman and horse they knew. The turn of the tide began, The rally of bugles ran, He swung his hat in the van; The electric hoof-spark flew. Wreathe the steed and lead him— For the charge he led Touched and turned the cypress Into amaranths for the head Of Philip, king of riders, Who raised them from the dead. The camp (at dawning lost) By eve recovered—forced, Rang with laughter of the host At belated Early fled. Shroud the horse in sable— For the mounds they heap! There is firing in the Valley, And yet no strife they keep; It is the parting volley, It is the pathos deep. There is glory for the brave Who lead, and nobly save, But no knowledge in the grave Where the nameless followers sleep.
(1864) Listless he eyes the palisades And sentries in the glare; ’Tis barren as a pelican-beach— But his world is ended there. Nothing to do; and vacant hands Bring on the idiot-pain; He tries to think—to recollect, But the blur is on his brain. Around him swarm the plaining ghosts Like those on Virgil’s shore— A wilderness of faces dim, And pale ones gashed and hoar. A smiting sun. No shed, no tree; He totters to his lair— A den that sick hands dug in earth Ere famine wasted there, Or, dropping in his place, he swoons, Walled in by throngs that press, Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead— Dead in his meagerness.
He rides at their head; A crutch by his saddle just slants in view, One slung arm is in splints, you see, Yet he guides his strong steed—how coldly too. He brings his regiment home— Not as they filed two years before, But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn, Like castaway sailors, who—stunned By the surf’s loud roar, Their mates dragged back and seen no more— Again and again breast the surge, And at last crawl, spent, to shore. A still rigidity and pale— An Indian aloofness lones his brow; He has lived a thousand years Compressed in battle’s pains and prayers, Marches and watches slow. There are welcoming shouts, and flags; Old men off hat to the Boy, Wreaths from gay balconies fall at his feet, But to him—there comes alloy. It is not that a leg is lost, It is not that an arm is maimed, It is not that the fever has racked— Self he has long disclaimed. But all through the Seven Days’ Fight, And deep in the Wilderness grim, And in the field-hospital tent, And Petersburg crater, and dim Lean brooding in Libby, there came— Ah heaven!—what truth to him.
Indicative of the passion of the people on the 15th of April, 1865 Good Friday was the day Of the prodigy and crime, When they killed him in his pity, When they killed him in his prime Of clemency and calm— When with yearning he was filled To redeem the evil-willed, And, though conqueror, be kind; But they killed him in his kindness, In their madness and their blindness, And they killed him from behind. There is sobbing of the strong, And a pall upon the land; But the People in their weeping Bare the iron hand: Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand. He lieth in his blood— The father in his face; They have killed him, the Forgiver— The Avenger takes his place, The Avenger wisely stern, Who in righteousness shall do What heavens call him to, And the parricides remand; For they killed him in his kindness, In their madness and their blindness. And his blood is on their hand. There is sobbing of the strong, And a pall upon the land; But the People in their weeping Bare the iron hand: Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand.
Calm as that second summer which precedes The first fall of the snow, In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds, The City bides the foe. As yet, behind their ramparts stern and proud, Her bolted thunders sleep— Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud, Looms o’er the solemn deep. No Calpe frowns from lofty cliff or scar To guard the holy strand; But Moultrie holds in leash her dogs of war Above the level sand. And down the dunes a thousand guns lie couched, Unseen, beside the flood— Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouched That wait and watch for blood. Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade, Walk grave and thoughtful men, Whose hands may one day wield the patriot’s blade As lightly as the pen. And maidens, with such eyes as would grow dim Over a bleeding hound, Seem each one to have caught the strength of him Whose sword she sadly bound. Thus girt without and garrisoned at home, Day patient following day, Old Charleston looks from roof, and spire, and dome, Across her tranquil bay. Ships, through a hundred foes, from Saxon lands And spicy Indian ports, Bring Saxon steel and iron to her hands, And summer to her courts. But still, along you dim Atlantic line, The only hostile smoke Creeps like a harmless mist above the brine, From some frail, floating oak. Shall the spring dawn, and she still clad in smiles, And with an unscathed brow, Rest in the strong arms of her palm-crowned isles, As fair and free as now? We know not; in the temple of the Fates God has inscribed her doom; And, all untroubled in her faith, she waits The triumph or the tomb.
Two armies stand enrolled beneath The banner with the starry wreath; One, facing battle, blight and blast, Through twice a hundred fields has passed; Its deeds against a ruffian foe, Steam, valley, hill, and mountain know, Till every wind that sweeps the land Goes, glory laden, from the strand. The other, with a narrower scope, Yet led by not less grand a hope, Hath won, perhaps, as proud a place, And wears its fame with meeker grace. Wives march beneath its glittering sign, Fond mothers swell the lovely line, And many a sweetheart hides her blush In the young patriot’s generous flush. No breeze of battle ever fanned The colors of that tender band; Its office is beside the bed, Where throbs some sick or wounded head. It does not court the soldier’s tomb, But plies the needle and the loom; And, by a thousand peaceful deeds, Supplies a struggling nation’s needs. Nor is that army’s gentle might Unfelt amid the deadly fight; It nerves the son’s, the husband's hand, It points the lover’s fearless brand; It thrills the languid, warms the cold, Gives even new courage to the bold; And sometimes lifts the veriest clod To its own lofty trust in God. When Heaven shall blow the trump of peace, And bid this weary warfare cease, Their several missions nobly done, The triumph grasped, and freedom won, Both armies, from their toils at rest, Alike may claim the victor’s crest, But each shall see its dearest prize Gleam softly from the other’s eyes.
One day in the dreamy summer, On the Sabbath hills, from afar We heard the solemn echoes Of the first fierce words of war. Ah, tell me, thou veilèd Watcher Of the storm and the calm to come, How long by the sun or shadow Till these noises again are dumb. And soon in a hush and glimmer We thought of the dark, strange fight, Whose close in a ghastly quiet Lay dim in the beautiful night. Then we talk’d of coldness and pallor, And of things with blinded eyes That stared at the golden stillness Of the moon in those lighted skies; And of souls, at morning wrestling In the dust with passion and moan, So far away at evening In the silence of worlds unknown. But a delicate wind beside us Was rustling the dusky hours, As it gather’d the dewy odors Of the snowy jessamine-flowers. And I gave you a spray of the blossoms, And said: “I shall never know How the hearts in the land are breaking, My dearest, unless you go.”
At Arlington, 1866 The summer blew its little drifts of sound— Tangled with wet leaf-shadows and the light Small breath of scattered morning buds—around The yellow path through which our footsteps wound. Below, the Capitol rose glittering white. There stretched a sleeping army. One by one, They took their places until thousands met; No leader’s stars flashed on before, and none Leaned on his sword or stagger’d with his gun— I wonder if their feet have rested yet! They saw the dust, they joined the moving mass, They answer’d the fierce music’s cry for blood, Then straggled here and lay down in the grass:— Wear flowers for such, shores whence their feet did pass; Sing tenderly; O river’s haunted flood! They had been sick, and worn, and weary, when They stopp’d on this calm hill beneath the trees: Yet if, in some red-clouded dawn, again The country should be calling to her men, Shall the r[e]veill[e] not remember these? Around them underneath the mid-day skies The dreadful phantoms of the living walk, And by low moons and darkness with their cries— The mothers, sisters, wives with faded eyes, Who call still names amid their broken talk. And there is one who comes alone and stands At his dim fireless hearth—chill’d and oppress’d By Something he had summon’d to his lands, While the weird pallor of its many hands Points to his rusted sword in his own breast!
So, because you chose to follow me into the subtle sadness of night, And to stand in the half-set moon with the weird fall-light on your glimmering hair, Till your presence hid all of the earth and all of the sky from my sight, And to give me a little scarlet bud, that was dying of frost, to wear, Say, must you taunt me forever, forever? You looked at my hand and you knew That I was the slave of the Ring, while you were as free as the wind is free. When I saw your corpse in your coffin, I flung back your flower to you; It was all of yours that I ever had; you may keep it, and—keep from me. Ah? so God is your witness. Has God, then, no world to look after but ours? May He not have been searching for that wild stat, with the trailing plumage, that flew Far over a part of our darkness while we were there by the freezing flowers, Or else brightening some planet’s luminous rings, instead of thinking of you? Or, if He was near us at all, do you think that He would sit listening there Because you sang “Hear me, Norma,” to a woman in jewels and lace, While, so close to us, down in another street, in the wet, unlighted air, There were children crying for bread and fire, and mothers who questioned His grace? Or perhaps He had gone to the ghastly field where the fight had been that day, To number the bloody stabs that were there, to look at and judge the dead; Or else to the place full of fever and moans where the wretched wounded lay; At least I do not believe that He cares to remember a word that you said. So take back your flowers, I tell you—of its sweetness I now have no need; Yes; take back your flower down into the stillness and mystery to keep; When you wake I will take it, and God, then, perhaps will witness indeed, But go, now, and tell Death he must watch you, and not let you walk in your sleep.
Blow back the breath of the bird, Scatter the song through the air, There was music you never heard, And cannot hear anywhere. It was not the sob of the vain In the old, old dark so sweet, (I shall never hear it again,) Nor the coming of fairy feet. It was music and music alone, Not a sigh from a lover’s mouth; Now it comes in a phantom moan From the dead and buried South. It was savage and fierce and glad, It played with the heart at will; Oh, what a wizard touch it had— Oh, if I could hear it still! Were they slaves? They were not then; The music had made them free. They were happy women and men— What more do we care to be? There is blood and blackness and dust, There are terrible things to see, There are stories of swords that rust, Between that music and me. Dark ghosts with your ghostly tunes Come back till I laugh through tears; Dance under the sunken moons, Dance over the grassy years! Hush, hush—I know it, I say; Your armies were bright and brave, But the music they took away Was worth—whatever they gave.
My boy, not of your will nor mine You keep the mountain pass and wait, Restless, for evil gold to shine And hold you to your fate. A stronger Hand than yours gave you The lawless sword—you know not why. That you must live is all too true, And other men must die. My boy, be brigand if you must, But face the traveller in your track: Stand one to one, and never thrust The dagger in his back. Nay, make no ambush of the dark. Look straight into your victim’s eyes; Then—let his free soul, like a lark, Fly, singing, toward the skies. My boy, if Christ must be betrayed, And you must the betrayer be, Oh, marked before the worlds were made! What help is there for me? Ah, if the prophets from their graves Demand such blood of you as this, Take Him, I say, with swords and staves, But—never with a kiss!
After the news, the forecaster crowed With excitement about his bad tidings: Eighteen inches of snow! Take cover! A little shiver ran through the community. Children abandoned their homework. Who cared about the hypotenuse now? The snowplow driver laid out his long johns. The old couple, who’d barked at each other At supper, smiled shyly, turned off the TV, And climbed the stairs to their queen-size bed Heaped high with blankets and quilts.And the aging husky they failed to hear Scratch the back door, turned around twice In the yard, settled herself in the snow, And covered her nose with her tail.
As cars pass, laboring through the slush, a boy, bundled against the stiff wind in his snow suit, gloves, and scarf, leans on his upright toboggan,waiting his turn atop the snow-packed overpass—the highest point in town. First one car exits, and then another, each creeping down the icy ramp. The brown grass pokes through the two grooves carved in the short hill. As the second car fishtails to a stop at the bottom, brake lights glowing on the dirty snow, the boy’s turn comes. His trip to the bottom is swift— only a second or two— and he bails out just before the curb. It’s not much, but it’s sledding in Wichita.
Draped in towels, my grandmother sits in a hard-backed chair, a white bowlof soapy water on the floor. She lifts her frail arm, then rests it,gratefully, in her daughter’s palm. Gliding a wetwashcloth, my mother’s hand becomes a cloud, and every bruise, a rain- drenched flower.
It’s the way they cannot understand the window they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take a wrong turn at my door and end up thus in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity, cruising the room until they find themselves smack up against it and they cannot fathom how the air has hardened and the world they know with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there with all they want just in front of them, they must fling their bodies against the one unalterable law of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on making the sound that tethers their electricfury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting in it.
Einstein’s happiest moment occurred when he realized a falling man falling beside a falling applecould also be described as an apple and a man at rest while the world falls around them.And my happiest moment occurred when I realized you were falling for me, right down to the core, and the rest, relatively speaking, has flown past faster than the speed of light.
for Hannah The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll backwards in her head, her senses fold   one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat. Every night she fights this silent way of being with all the whining ammunition that she has.   She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small and willful links to life that carry her away. Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades   with her stuffed animals. When she wakes, the sad circles disappeared, she blinks before she knows me. I have listened   to one million breaths of her. And every night my body seizes when she leaves to go where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.
I will not tend. Or water, pull, or yank, I will not till, uproot,   fill up or spray.   The rain comes. Or not. Plants: sun-fed, moon-hopped, dirt-stuck.   Watch as flocks of wild phlox   appear, disappear. My lazy, garbagey magic makes this nothing happen.   I love the tattered camisole of nothing. The world runs its underbrush course fed by the nothing I give it.   Wars are fought. Blood turns. Dirt is a wide unruly room.
Thanks, Ray, this is just what the doctor ordered.    No, you never see me have one with olives—your father likes olives but I can’t stand them.    No, cocktail onions are just picked small. Turn that down, Dan.    Avocados, toothpicks. Coleus, root sprawl.  The diffident glints of a late-day sun, rays  splintered by leaves: they shake and, in their  shaking, streak the light. Transparent murk  of glasses at the glass.    Would you move just one inch over? There. The light was in my eye.
Oh, dangling long sleeves in the Mercurochrome.  Parking her punch on her knees.    I’m not a joiner.    In the night, a visitation, small as a thumb,  enters the sealed house and ascends.    Mother wouldn’t have stood for that long. Drippy-drooping around on heels. Leaving the blue cheese out.
Now that the salt of their blood  Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . .  —Allen Tate   We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead trailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare— all the way to Ship Island. What we see first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee— half reminder of the men who served there— a weathered monument to some of the dead.   Inside we follow the ranger, hurried though we are to get to the beach. He tells of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split in half when Hurricane Camille hit, shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.   The Daughters of the Confederacy has placed a plaque here, at the fort’s entrance— each Confederate soldier’s name raised hard in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards— 2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx. What is monument to their legacy?   All the grave markers, all the crude headstones— water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones, and we listen for what the waves intone. Only the fort remains, near forty feet high, round, unfinished, half open to the sky, the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.
We tell the story every year— how we peered from the windows, shades drawn— though nothing really happened, the charred grass now green again.   We peered from the windows, shades drawn, at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, the charred grass still green. Then we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps.   At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns. We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps, the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.   It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns. When they were done, they left quietly. No one came. The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil; by morning the flames had all dimmed.   When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came. Nothing really happened. By morning all the flames had dimmed. We tell the story every year.
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi; they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.   They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi.   A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.   Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.   My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name. I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.   When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the sameage he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.   I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name— though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.
I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking,   the Erebus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live. So I try taking   you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again and again, this constant forsaking.   *   Again and again, this constant forsaking: my eyes open, I find you do not follow. You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.   But in dreams you live. So I try taking, not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow. The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—   I make between my slumber and my waking. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow. I was asleep while you were dying.
Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile.  —E. O. Wilson   I returned to a stand of pines,  bone-thin phalanx   flanking the roadside, tangle  of understory—a dialectic of dark   and light—and magnolias blossoming  like afterthought: each flower   a surrender, white flags draped  among the branches. I returned   to land’s end, the swath of coast  clear cut and buried in sand:   mangrove, live oak, gulfweed  razed and replaced by thin palms—   palmettos—symbols of victory  or defiance, over and over   marking this vanquished land. I returned  to a field of cotton, hallowed ground—   as slave legend goes—each boll  holding the ghosts of generations:   those who measured their days  by the heft of sacks and lengths   of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants  still sewn into our clothes.   I returned to a country battlefield  where colored troops fought and died—   Port Hudson where their bodies swelled  and blackened beneath the sun—unburied   until earth’s green sheet pulled over them,  unmarked by any headstones.   Where the roads, buildings, and monuments  are named to honor the Confederacy,   where that old flag still hangs, I return  to Mississippi, state that made a crime   of me—mulatto, half-breed—native  in my native land, this place they’ll bury me.
You can get there from here, though there’s no going home.   Everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been. Try this:   head south on Mississippi 49, one- by-one mile markers ticking off   another minute of your life. Follow this to its natural conclusion—dead end   at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches   in a sky threatening rain. Cross over the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand   dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried terrain of the past. Bring only   what you must carry—tome of memory, its random blank pages. On the dock   where you board the boat for Ship Island, someone will take your picture:   the photograph—who you were— will be waiting when you return.
(Civil War Photography by T. O’Sullivan, 1866) Raisin-black blood dries on their faces. Thick wool clothes. Lumps of bloated bodies lying on their backs.   Mouths open. Chins pointing to the sky. As though blown over backward. Or turned.   Fingers swollen. Boots and rifles missing. Coats and jackets pulled up exposing gray shirts, bloody underwear.   The sky drifts toward sap green. No fences. No stone walls.
When the soldiers came in their dirty blue shirts I was kneeling in the garden in the rain. That year only a few ramblers were left and the trellis had collapsed from the wind. Still I was glad for the water and darkness that clotted the air; the days had seemed sour to me in spite of the glory of the vegetables wandering into fall, the fat swollen apples and the wild roses creeping under the lilac. And there, as the men approached, I stood up near the two willow saplings sprouted from posts but driven in, the larger one, by the neighbor boy when he entered service, the smaller one when he returned home. I could see the street from where I stood, as though wrapped in gauze, heavy with the nests of caterpillars. (Next week a man with rags tied to sticks would dip them in kerosene and burn the worms that would then drop squirming onto his arms, his hair, the street.) And then I thought I was lying at the bottom of a pond edged with grayish leaves and looking up to the surface. I saw leaves, raindrops shattering the sky like splinters of glass drifting toward my body; noises seemed echoes as I continued to distance myself from what had happened. After that a disbelief, perhaps I had had a stroke, hit my head, or fallen asleep and woke to flies banging against my face. I saw edges of myself being flattened by rain, could smell the earth too and thought of the years of rot that made the smell, the rot of my father and his father and all those who had gone before and how we eat the root of the earth and then turn into rot ourselves just as pieces of dirt were grinding away between my teeth and tongue, my bit of gristle being stirred into earth’s stew. I began to raise my head and noticed for the first time the bunting, red, white, and blue, hung out for the parade.
He could have stayed in the city, photographed the cheese and oyster boys after the war, opal-colored orphans or ladies of unfortunate standing, back when tall buildings still believed in America, back when concrete was still a thing of splendor. Instead he went West to rehabilitate his grief.   Always the white sky. Always the dark figures lost in an immense world full of danger and disaster, starvation and storms of mosquitoes thick enough to snuff out candles. Provisions lost in a blazing sun that watched constantly. Twice hit by shell fragments, once by tuberculosis. Dead at 42.   The fortunate thing about his camera was its ability to stray— to put things in that didn’t belong, like footprints in the sand. Here is the photographer and his party exploring the great canyons of the West while their clothes dry on the line.
The white train emerges from a dark curtain of tall fir trees with its coat of light snow. The white train appears as though newly escaped from the jaws of night. The white train steams out of the forest into the clear white meadow, melting the fresh snow around it.   The trees are towering. Ancient giants. A whole section seems to have been logged. Over there the folded arms of soldiers who gather in small groups. We cannot see leaders or individual faces. Horsemen far away. On their way to the revolution perhaps.   In the dining car, behind the velvet curtains— blood puddings and sea pie, clear soups and small marrow. Already today the chef has cooked three luncheons while crossing Poland; the starched waiters managed without spilling a drop.   Dozens of dirty white napkins heap on hampers like miniature Alps threatening to fall. But now the train has braked and stopped. Small boys fog the windows with their warm breath as they watch the soldiers with silver sabers who order everyone off the train, into the new snow.
1.   Somewhere Indians are walking across America. One is a woman caught in stride between two white birches, her eyes on the ground, her mouth biting open a word while the wind shreds the lake behind her.   2.   A boy wakes alone in cold New England air. From his window he watches his father’s breath mix with the steam from cows’ urine. A white blanket of sheep has unrolled across the hill, and the yellow dogs who ran and ran have now disappeared.   3.   A glass necklace floats on her white breast just as she herself floats inside his lens while he watches from under the dark hood— her small black eardrops hang perfectly still, her long white neck and cleavage ready to be frozen forever by the touch of his finger.   4.   As the deer ate from the deep lawn and the fish jumped near the willow trees, the big white ferry paused briefly before sliding back again across the lake, completely unaware of its brightness and its beauty.
Inside, inside the return, inside, the hero diminishes. Over her vessel they place a veil, and when it is lifted the name of the vessel has been lost. Consider the darkness of the water which has no scent and neither can it swallow. Yet the ship’s bow extends over the proscenium like a horse at a fence and the orchestra stands and files out. On the long walk home, I long to see your face.
Summer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through The kitchen without comment, slams the door. An Elaborate evening drama. I lug his forlorn weight From floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap-   Toothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then Breach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar Pressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent Laughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At   Ten, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned His head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw The hand untouching, distant from. What fathering- Fear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration!   An indefinite continuation of life. I whirled out wings. Going Toward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose.
Against the backdark, bright  riband flickers of heat lightning. Nearer  hills begin to show, to come clear  as a hard, detached  and glimmering brim  against light lifting there. And here, pitched over the braided arroyo choked with debris,  a tent, its wan, cakey,  road-rur color. On the front stake, two  green dragonflies, riding each other, pause,  Look! cries the boy, running, the father behind him  running too—  and the canyon opening  out in front of them its magisterial consequence, cramming  vertiginous air down its throat—  to snatch him  from the scarp.
When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence pulls through them, the family rises into thinness and begins to break like a wave.   You turned away when I kissed you, the woman says. Why?   Half-lidded days of early winter.   When he points toward the woman, the boy looks at his hand the way dogs will.   The boy’s jaw sets. As though behind his teeth, into the soft flesh of his throat, a new set of teeth were cutting through. A mouth for what?   Each of them adopts a private view. Arguments veer every which way, and who can follow? A sequence of dark non sequiturs blows in.   When one, when one word, when the word suicide enters the room where they are shouting, the system closes down, prematurely becalmed.   The man writes, I am not given a subject but am given to my subject. I am inside it like a parasite.   He sees the woman’s face contract at the approach of other futures than the one for which her face was prepared.   So they inhabit their bodies like music, for a given time. And yet he continues to act as if there were times to come.   I just want you to go away, one of them screams.   Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the afternoon moon over their house.   She calls the man to a corner in the basement. Those aren’t spider eggs, he says, backing up. Those are its eyes.   When the encounter with the self is volcanic, nothing can follow.   Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy within the family.   As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, bright with meaning, there were another experience pendant, unnameable.
Our eye goes past the hieroglyphic tree to the swimmer carving a wake in the water. And almost to the railroad bridge from which the swimmer might have dived. Then, as though come to the end of its tether, our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble, it sabotages the scene’s transparence and siphons off its easy appeal.   At the same time, the blemish joins together the realms of seer and swimmer in our experience of plunging into and out of the image.
The bioluminescent undersides of squid render them invisible to predators below. That the radiance of the boy’s anger might protect him.   Walking the dog and stepping on a patch of repaired road, I remember the soft spot in his head.   You’re deaf as a beagle. No, you are.   Can I feel the tide’s drag on the turning earth increase each day’s duration?   A hair in my nostril has gone white.   In absolute night, from my bed, I hear him aiming for the toilet’s center. The sound deepens, voice finding its register.   Scientists call it an entangled system.   We survive Christmas, his face pressed to the smooshed bosom of his grandmother in a house so immaculate, the spider in the seam of the ceiling stands out obscenely.   Like a star at the outskirts of the galaxy, and slung around by the gravity of dark matter. For now, he goes where we go, but he does not belong to us.   I begin to begin my sentences leaning toward him, taking a deep breath.   He relinquishes the conversation with a contraction of his pupils.   What is for one of us the throb of the immediate is, for the other, the imminent mundane.   When napalm hits my brain, he takes on the tranquillity of a blinking newt.   She finds a photograph of him at seven. The sheer expressed of his face. As among Michelangelo’s early drawings, there is a copy of Masacchio’s lostSagra, the consecration.  We search our memories of him for a certain unity of characteristics that would hold through the permutations he now submits to us.  When it clings to the wire-and-rug surrogate, lab technicians shock it again. Instead of releasing, it clings tighter.  Throwing himself into the back seat after wrestling practice, mat burns on his cheek and forehead.  His muteness an onomatopoeia of the rising moon.
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/ Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts New York alter city/ black tears/ secret disciples Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground. Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions. Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/ Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/ Death and indestructible existence  In that Jazz corner of life Wrapped in a mist of sound His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams Inviting the nerveless to feel once more That fierce dying of humans consumed In raging fires of Love.
THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES SHALL BE A STRANGE NIGHT IN THE SOUTH, IT SHALL BE THE TIME WHEN NEGROES LEAVE THE SOUTH  FOREVER, GREEN TRAINS SHALL ARRIVE FROM RED PLANET MARS CRACKLING BLUENESS SHALL SEND TOOTH-COVERED CARS FOR THEM TO LEAVE IN, TO GO INTO THE NORTH FOREVER, AND I SEE MY LITTLE GIRL MOTHER AGAIN WITH HER CROSS THAT IS NOT BURNING, HER SKIRTS OF BLACK, OF ALL COLORS, HER AURA OF FAMILIARITY. THE SOUTH SHALL WEEP BITTER TEARS TO NO AVAIL, THE NEGROES HAVE GONE INTO CRACKLING BLUENESS. CRISPUS ATTUCKS SHALL ARRIVE WITH THE BOSTON COMMONS, TO TAKE ELISSI LANDI NORTH, CRISPUS ATTUCKS SHALL BE LAYING ON BOSTON COMMONS, ELISSI LANDI SHALL FEEL ALIVE AGAIN. I SHALL CALL HER NAME AS SHE STEPS ON TO THE BOSTON COMMONS, AND FLIES NORTH FOREVER, LINCOLN SHALL BE THERE, TO SEE THEM LEAVE THE SOUTH FOREVER, ELISSI LANDI, SHE WILL BE GREEN. THE WHITE SOUTH SHALL GATHER AT PRESERVATION HALL.
might have been. Certainly these ashes might have been pleasures. Pilgrims on their way to the Holy Places remark this place. Isn’t it plain to all that these mounds were palaces? This was once a city among men, a gathering together of spirit. It was measured by the Lord and found wanting.  It was measured by the Lord and found wanting, destroyd by the angels that inhabit longing. Surely this is Great Sodom where such cries as if men were birds flying up from the swamp ring in our ears, where such fears that were once desires walk, almost spectacular, stalking the desolate circles, red eyed.  This place rumord to have been a City surely was, separated from us by the hand of the Lord. The devout have laid out gardens in the desert, drawn water from springs where the light was blighted. How tenderly they must attend these friendships or all is lost. All is lost. Only the faithful hold this place green.  Only the faithful hold this place green where the crown of fiery thorns descends. Men that once lusted grow listless. A spirit wrappd in a cloud, ashes more than ashes, fire more than fire, ascends. Only these new friends gather joyous here, where the world like Great Sodom lies under fear. The world like Great Sodom lies under Loveand knows not the hand of the Lord that moves. This the friends teach where such cries as if men were birds fly up from the crowds gatherd and howling in the heat of the sun. In the Lord Whom the friends have named at last Love the images and loves of the friends never die. This place rumord to have been Sodom is blessd in the Lord’s eyes.
In the shape of this night, in the still fall  of snow, Father In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds  and children In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys  and the lovers, Father In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise  of our cities In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches  where the dead are, Father In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners  out on the black water In all that has been said bravely, in all that is  mean anywhere in the world, Father In all that is good and lovely, in every house  where sham and hatred are In the name of those who wait, in the sound  of angry voices, Father Before the bells ring, before this little point in time  has rushed us on Before this clean moment has gone, before this night  turns to face tomorrow, Father There is this high singing in the air Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window And there are other bells that we would ring, Father Other bells that we would ring.
I sigh for the heavenly country, Where the heavenly people pass, And the sea is as quiet as a mirror Of beautiful beautiful glass.   I walk in the heavenly field, With lilies and poppies bright, I am dressed in a heavenly coat Of polished white.   When I walk in the heavenly parkland My feet on the pasture are bare, Tall waves the grass, but no harmful Creature is there.   At night I fly over the housetops, And stand on the bright moony beams; Gold are all heaven’s rivers, And silver her streams.
I saw the garden where my aunt had died And her two children and a woman from next door; It was like a burst pod filled with clay.   A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors;   The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground, Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse Over the housetop and into the street beyond.   Now the garden lay stripped and stale; the iron shelter Spread out its separate petals around a smooth clay saucer. Small, and so tidy it seemed nobody had ever been there.   When I saw it, the house was blown clean by blast and care. Relations had already torn out the new fireplaces; My cousin’s pencils lasted me several years.   And in his office notepad that was given me I found solemn drawings in crayon of blondes without dresses. In his lifetime I had not known him well.   These were the things I noticed at ten years of age: Those, and the four hearses outside our house, The chocolate cakes, and my classmates’ half-shocked envy.   But my grandfather went home from the mortuary And for five years tried to share the noises in his skull, Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to die.   When my father came back from identifying the daughter He asked us to remind him of her mouth. We tried. He said ‘I think it was the one’.   These were marginal people I had met only rarely And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen; Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths.   This bloody episode of four whom I could understand better dead Gave me something I needed to keep a long story moving; I had no pain of it; can find no scar even now.   But had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up I might, in the sigh and strike of the next night’s bombs Have realized a little what they meant, and for the first time been afraid.
At night on the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple em- braced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to see where the girl’s feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout en- gine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgy- nous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and complaisant than the couple had done, and more likely to fall heav- ily to the floor.   A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is dif- fused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance.   She treads out onto a lopsided ochre panel of lit pavement before the doorway and becomes visible as a coloured shape, moving sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey- white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. You could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens, there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rap- idly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines.     A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight cling- ing like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight, and the police seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought down in the darkness.     In this city the governing authority is limited and mean: so limited that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse, cleans the streets after a fashion, and discourages fighting. With these things, and a few more of the same sort, it is content. This could never be a capital city for all its size. There is no mind in it, no regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant and powerful, have not moved through it as they have moved through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen.     In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw at first no individuals but a composite monster, its unfeeling sur- faces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without extremities, trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling across the streets it had managed to get itself provided with.   Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide and multiply. At crossings I could see people made of straws, rags, cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky green and blue, in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beau- tiful.   Faint blue light dropping down through the sparse leaves of the plane trees in the churchyard opposite after sundown, cooling and shaping heads, awakening eyes.
The pianist Joe Sullivan, jamming sound against idea   hard as it can go florid and dangerous   slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes;   in his time almost the only one of them to ignore   the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely,   he’ll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P.,   amble, and stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously   toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again   and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when   the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap.   For all that, he won’t swing like all the others;   disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business,   the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’ under the long variations:   Sullivan can gut a sequence in one chorus—   —approach, development, climax, discard— and sound magnanimous.   The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true,   too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then   running among stock forms that could play themselves   and moving there with such quickness of intellect   that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign,   concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness   it can sound bluff, bustling, just big-handed stuff—   belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display,   shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go—   And that thing is his mood: a feeling violent and ordinary   that runs in among standard forms so wrapped up in clarity   that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious   find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness;   the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings   make when they get driven hard enough against time.
The irritations of comfort— I visit as they rebuild the house from within: whitening, straightening, bracing the chimney-breast edges and forcing warmth, dryness and windows with views into the cottage below canal-level.   For yes, there’s a canal, bringing cold reflections almost to the door, and beyond it the main line to Manchester, its grid of gantries pale against the upland and the sky; there’s a towpath pub, where the red- haired old landlady brings up the beer from the cellar slowly in a jug: there’s a chapel next door to the cottage, set up with a false front and a real boiler-house, and— rest, my mind—nearby there’s a small haulage contractor’s yard.   Everything’s turned up here, except a certain complete cast-iron housefront, preserved and pinned to a blank wall in Ottawa.   This comfort beckons. It won’t do. It beckons. Driving steadily through rain in a watertight car with the wipers going. It won’t do. It beckons.
I’ve lived within half a mile of it for twenty years. West by the black iron weather-hen half-strangled with clematis on the garage roof I can locate it. Past a low ridge in the cliff face of a limestone dale there’s a cave in the bushes.   When the old tigers were long since gone, leaving their teeth, the valley people would climb there with the dead they thought most useful;   push them well in,   take them out again, walk them around: ‘They’re coming! They’re coming’    We Malagasies love our second burials. We hire a band that comes in a van. Again with liquefaction almost done we hold our cherished ones in our arms. From the grave-clothes they fall in gobbets as dog-food falls from the can. We wrap them in fresh dry linen. They bless our lives with their happiness.   Walk them around the valley. Drop here a finger for the god that is a rat or a raven, here a metatarsal to set under the hearth for luck.   And what was luck?   The afterlife back then was fairly long: nothing demented like for ever,   nothing military. The afterlife would come to the party.
Even if you didn’t have green eyes (in the bathtub, blue). Even if you didn’t have a lovely singing voice,  or care for Alexandrine champagne  some slow Saturday evenings to sing it through, it pleases me, your lips close to my ear,  or when you’re a big girl, and I’m a big girl too.   Five years difference between we two. Sometimes it hardly matters. I’ve decided to worship you,  Diana, goddess of the forest—  or is she the one of the hunt?  Who cares? You remind me of her too. Some woman caught me up, breathless, in her strong arms,  said breathe, darling. Her eyes were green-blue.   Vague resemblances: that’s the daily news. Meaning: I’m willingly a fool for you  any hour past midnight,  and almost anytime in three-quarter view.  Consider this, too: stumbling back, after a fight, to someplace we could call home, you and I have been known  to duet a jubilee so funky it sounds like the blues.   What steady arrows you shoot, Diana, become a goddess of the hearth: you whisper  time to put the porchlight on, and we do. Who am I talking to? What is this strange glare, this prescience that you won’t be true? Sometimes you say something like even so, boo, and it sounds like breathe, darling. That’s why this one’s for you.
All my stories are about being left, all yours about leaving. So we should have known. Should have known to leave well enough alone; we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put our cards on the table, your card was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t get till 4 am, so tired from wanting what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our heads, we’d lost our minds. Love, I wanted to call you so fast. But so slow you could taste each letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear.L, love, for let’s wait. O, for oh no, let’s not. V for the precious v between your deep breasts (and the virtue of your fingers in the voluptuous center of me.)   Okay, E for enough.   Dawn broke, or shattered. Once we’ve made the promises, it’s hard to add the prefix if. . . . But not so wrong to try. That means taking a lot of walks, which neither of us is good at, for different reasons, and nights up till 2 arguing whose reasons are better. Time and numbers count a lot in this. 13 years my marriage. 5 years you my friend. 4th of July weekend when something that begins in mist, by mistake (whose?), means too much has to end. I think we need an abacus to get our love on course, and one of us to oil the shining rods so we can keep the crazy beads clicking, clicking. It wasn’t a question of a perfect fit. Theoretically, it should be enough to say I left a man for a woman (90% of the world is content to leave it at that. Oh, lazy world) and when the woman lost her nerve, I left for greater concerns: when words like autonomy were useful, I used them, I confess. So I get what I deserve: a studio apartment he paid the rent on; bookshelves up to the ceiling she drove the screws for. And a skylight I sleep alone beneath, and two shiny quarters in my pocket to call one, then the other, or to call one   twice. Once, twice, I threatened to leave him— remember? Now that I’ve done it, he says he doesn’t. I’m in a phonebooth at the corner of Bank and Greenwich; not a booth, exactly, but two sheets of glass to shiver between. This is called being street-smart: dialing a number that you know won’t be answered, but the message you leave leaves proof that you tried. And this, my two dearly beloveds, is this called hedging your bets? I fish out my other coin, turn it over in my fingers, press it into the slot. Hold it there. Let it drop.
I’ll take a bath when it snows, when I can look out the window up high and see the sky all pale and blank like a fish’s eye. And I know the boats won’t go out tonight, the fishermen drinking whiskey, locked in a bar-dream, the music rocking them deeper.   It doesn’t snow enough here, though some would say otherwise, fearing accidents. But the paper boy, skidding uphill on his bike in light snow, knows better, making S-tracks when his wheels slide sideways.   We really needed this snow, the old men will say, putting to bed the surface roots of trees, putting to bed the too-travelled streets.   When everything is covered the earth has a light of its own; the snow falls down from the moon as everyone knows, and brings that light back to us. I needed this light.   All day I kept by the window, watching the sky, a prisoner in my clothes, the wind felt dry and mean. Starlings stalked the yard with evil eyes —I hated them, and hated, too, my neighbor’s house where sparks from the chimney fell back in a stinking cloud—black ashes bringing no blessing.   When the roads are covered, when the water is black and snow falls into the waves, the birds’ hunger swirls the air, dark lovely shapes. All hungers are equal now. I'll give them bread and seeds.   I have no money; the whiskey is gone, and I must bathe in water. Fishermen, please do not go out in your flimsy boats tonight to chase after the cod and mackerel, to hook the giant eels. Go safe, go free. Let your feet leave trails through streets and yards, wandering home, your crooked voyages to bed.
New houses relax on the fields. Garage doors open soundlessly to admit the monster. Tires stretched over forty pounds of air pressure float across gravel.   The boy closes the last storm door on the last evening paper and runs to the car where his mother waits. She does not answer him; the door slam freezes her dreams. It is January.   A dog chained to a barn door keeps barking. Somebody’s angry, scared to let him go. On the other side of a forest past these fields, wolves sniff the hard snow of the tundra. I lay beside the only tree for warmth, there where the pack might find me.   The house takes care of us now. Look at the meat browning under the light. The refrigerator switches on; ice crashes into the tray.   Here are locks in case someone wants to do us harm. Remember how the police had to pound and pound to wake us that night a white Cadillac leapt from the icy road   into the arms of our maple! It hung there, empty, doors flung wide— it was a great white petal of a car, breathing under the gas-lights, opening and opening.
for Janet and Christopher  Half-eagle, half-lion, the fabulous  animal struts, saber-clawed but saintly,  a candlewicked ornament dangling from our rickety sugar pine. Butternut    pudding in our bellies. His reindeer  and sleigh hurried here and gone—thank God  for us childless folks. Almost: the lovelocked Griffins on the sofa, sockfooted, hearing    gas and a kiddy heart in her tummy—  a life more imaginary than real,  though one is dazzled by gold that fills the egg unbroken. We feed her crumpets    and listen again: The lamb’s a hungry  bugger, even snug from earth’s  imponderable fury. Tomorrow, in a spurt by jet I’m home. Clumsy as a puppy    I’ll scale the flightstairs into the nosecone,  luggage banging at my sides, enter the egg-  shaped cabin and await the infrared climb toward space. Tell me one    thing true? If I could count the way  things slip from us: Mother’s fur gloves,  Sunday’s benediction, the dead gone before us, love’s rambler on the prairie—all displaced    as we buckle in our shuttle,  jetbound on a screaming runway,  gravity pulling at us castaways, more mammal than bird, subtle    leg-weary griffins made manifest,  arrowing towards home. How do we  ignore it: the attenuated being of our age, the bittersweet collapse    of dominoes mooned around our pine?  Withered with hatred from his quarter,  Saint Stephen even at death rolled mercifully over in high holiness. Sonless, wifeless, nine    thousand feet from land, I roll the lozenge  on my tongue, youthful habit for ache  of any kind, parting a survivor (Wait!), love rescuing me from the fringe.
Dusty and treeless, the street sloped beneath us. Somewhere a hammer made thunderclaps, forging the night-sky.    Then the children, seeing us, dashed from the Moorish houses, vigorously shouting, vying for position, while the bravest, in worn underpants and plastic sandals, climbed a high crater-like wall and plunged, with murderous cries, into the Roman pool where blue-lipped fish waited. Ah, those glorious soaked heads, spiked like palm fronds! Seeing one in our group clutch her purse— repelled by the wet black princes who shivered in circles of yellow mud and begged from us— I felt ashamed. In the brief African twilight, a canary chirped something shrewdly about avarice.   Far off, in the little neighborhood where I grew—with neat cement walkways and crab-apple blossoms— money ran through the fingers of our house, with nothing much to record its loss but unhappiness: one of us ironing servilely, one of us sobbing in a bedroom, one of us sleeping on a rifle, one of us seizing another by the hair, demanding the animal-like submission we thought was love.    Sunday evening. Mother is wearing a big cotton shift and tweezing her eyebrows. Her head is a thicket of hairpins. In the round hand-mirror that parodies her face, the world looks greater than it is. I am next to bathe in the water of the poor earth, reused by each of us in order of birth. Gray with sodium and grit, it covers me like a black robe, and yet I feel exalted.    Soon the violent rain, like wet Sahara sand, would fall, scrubbing the hot labyrinthine corridors of shuttered houses and aimless dogs, where the sparse life is purgative and inexhaustible, where little pilfering hands moved freely in and out of my trouser pockets, though there were no diamonds except those the eyes mined.
The heat out there this evening   is contained heat like things keep applicable boxes   at the ready then subsume their diverging constituent parts   long ambivalent talks into midnight, all those   glowy Sophia Coppola movies, Prosecco   the sexiest records I know. I don’t feel   how I know anymore to be more than something seeking   my appalling lack of cinematic knowledge, fictive innocence   & something like the break-down of those little boxes   little tombs put their hands up in front of my mouth   there’s a tacitly humiliating eulogy to drown out couldn’t feel   much more stupid about feeling stupid over feeling   stupid, living. Let me go & watch something   moving several images some of them symbolize humility broken   postures bloodshot eyes, intimately talking through this   publicly I am not developing at all but just the same. So hot   outside in the evening heat locking hazy jonquils   & sunflowers dead for two weeks, ridiculously   mournful as I’ll try & dimly think of the last real shock.   I remember disgust perhaps & something like alarm (the phone   going off in the middle of the night) pervasive disappointment   &, for sure, horror, but shock?, as if the heat were seceding from the frames   of its containment thought & feeling & establishing some wonderama   ratios & beanpole features quick to surge beyond the human model.   I know I do the heat out there this evening   will & maybe I should be the one I know who has to stop.   If I have to heal myself completely every time before I start   I shouldn’t be. I think about the god of demurrment in the world   or I think about it later having fallen to its love spell — the heat   keeps me shut up at the table in the evening   at the laptop arranging each letter with the same affectless love   it’s nothing moving Avery born & Vivian to come December   Kermit the Frog sings the Ave Maria while the white flag is endlessly   lowered & raised through the whole master/slave dialectic forever.   Don’t let me be wistful. Let me be the actual heat, forgiven   its severity & leaving for the year. Mercy is just like the children’s zoo it’s real   weird to think about anything now, think how fucking hard   a fucking beach read used to be sewn into its spine   delicious words from start to finish I could just   lay there & die it’s so goddamn nice in this sigh vitrine real 9/11   kind of midnight Friday midnight, lamely shifting in my chair, the fan   that stops the love that moves the world that stops goes out on gold   weeks other weeks it just sits in the back.   It collects statically. I hate that.
for Brandon Goacher I.   Let me speak with expressive   hesitation & a feeling for   interment why even   lineate what isn’t broken by   music let me speak with   inextricable reluctance.   I want to tear the heart   from refused convalescence   & feed it those long fronds   of river bed grass. I want to   tear the heart out of style   & put it between   utter thrall & the infancy   of all things impure.   Torn out, a flame thickens   between us as if   not right now we’ll be   ripped from this life   or each other a white   lie not a little more tender   than quick. Inextricable   reluctance to die or even   leave youth culture ever.   What a stupid feeling.   Do you think it isn’t   true? The very existence   of flame throwers proves   that sometime, somewhere,   someone said to themselves   ‘You know I want to   set those people over there   on fire but I’m just not   close enough to get the   job done.’ Someone   puts their arms around you   in the cold. There’s an al-   most disquieting closeness   as gossamer clots &   becomes an impasto derivative   of some newly visible   interdependence. Flame   throwers then are just   a description of prevailing   ideology, relics, the life   of the party, a soul   flirts by burning   that name for itself   up in jonesing that comes   at the end of desire?   Well I wouldn’t know   about that. A little   goat. Why would it   nuzzle dreamily up   the way I nuzzle dreamily   up to my knees. In the   ‘fatal position’ as my   nephew used to call it   estranged from play   waiting on the fox hunt.   Oh baby   it beats up my lips   the somatic effects   of contriving a psychic   blockade against death   with the contours of your   face & healing   in constant eclipse   where all things   inextricably broken by   music make the basic   rhythmic unit go   something like this — I   don’t want to loose you. I   don’t want to be   empty, clever hold &   keep you. I was lost  to you to start with still  I keep on coming back.   Do you think you’ll   keep on coming back to me   forever? That’s the meaning  of our life together  baby.
Lapo Elkman gazes out from the frame with a come-hither look. His wrists have soft bracelets around them & his shirt, black, is open. Looped on his neck pale strands of beads hang which causes a ribbon of shadow at his nipple. His facial hair, bleached by the sun, is brown-white. Tatiana Santa Domingo wears a floral printed dress. It is summer where she’s photographed or warm enough for clothes that light. Earrings perhaps of three golden hoops or two hang obscured in the shade of her hair. Her right cheek is touching the locks of Bianca Brandolini d’Adda whose own dress is dim purple satin. It has a black strap of lace an inch thick which, at her waist, intersects with another lace band even thicker & full of arabesques & Fleur De Lis. This lace is just above her belly which is pressed to the belly of Margherita Maccapani Missoni. White, with faint, almost invisible as flowers (maybe dots?) her sundress, exposes her shoulder. The left one is touching the patterned black stars on the silk frock partly covered by spilling brown hair, at its longest end, curled & falling from the head of Alexi Neideliski. Andrea Stefanowicz Sabrier lays on his belly wearing Ray-Bands & is laughing. Beside him on his back, with arm muscles slightly swollen, hands clasped behind his head & eyes closed Julio Mario Santo Domingo III laughs as well. Both are in blue jeans & t-shirts. Her blue & black checkered flannel clad shoulder hovers over the face of her sister whose cheek is buried in wildflowers. Each wears a ring, one is a cylinder of patterned white gold the other, more baroque, appears Victorian but isn’t wholly visible. Olympia & Fiona Scarry are un- comfortably positioned in these clothes & rings. Olympia’s eyes are wide, bright, but Fiona’s are so full of shadow it seems they aren’t there which gives her the look of the un-dead. White wife beater, ample hair in his pits, crotch the center of gravity here in this picture Harry Morton is laying on a bed. One arm behind his head it’s tattooed almost classically, twice, with illegible symbols. His slacks have grey stripes, they pour into a boot pressed on the soft white sheet at the right at the left sink into a blood-colored comforter, velvet. The chocolate toned pea-coat he’s wearing half-way reveals a hand, it grips the hem near the satin-coco lining. She has the the face of a mermaid, & the eyes Princess in her title, Elizabeth von Thurn und Taxis looks poised before apporaching the coffin. Count Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo is giddy & drenched having waded in the sea in his button up clinging his smile is one that gods give their children after hooking up with mortals for the fix. On a half-pipe ornate with graffiti the honorable Sophia Fermor-Hesketh rests a skate-board on her knee in black tights. She wears Docs. Her hair is blonde, mostly covered by a hat her dress is lycra black this is Madonna as eternal return. Yellow seal with ingratiating smile, caterpillar-seal hybrid antennae blue, markings pink, body yellow, silver dolphin, dolphin with desert-camo designs & dolphin dressed for jungle warfare these inflatables are harbored at the edge of a pool in which Bianca Brandolini D’Adda is floating on a sting-ray shaped raft on her belly hands under her chin three bracelets no bathing suit she’s swimming in her dress which is soaked & her legs are raised, ankles crossed this makes a diamond- shape between with liquid topaz. He has the cork in his teeth. In his left hand a half- glass of red. He is looking away at invisible friends & the ocean is beyond a grey mist with white bands Carlo Mondavi has hair that arcs at middle point a frozen cascade beneath which at right we see his ear half a sea-shell. The filigree is white, the buttons white impacted silk, the dots silk on sheer, on her blouse with short sleeves, she is blonde, her brother blonde his shirt white his scarf red she leans back on his chest his hand over his heart he takes an oath, Alexandre & Josephine de la Baume their lips closed eyes cold, unexpressive & imposing. JFK twice on a monitor his face & his back he is speaking Jared Kushner looks relaxed there’s a copy of the New York Observer on his knees which are bent he sits up against a wall smiles easily cropped black hair dark tie & slacks & white shirts by a window in the city. It’s a beach-house kitchen. Arnie Hammer’s by the sink. The head of his acoustic guitar nears its lip, & his ass sits near a rack where dishes dry there is one tiny elegant hole in his t-shirt, in his collar which is loose, low, reveals his long neck & hairy chest. The Corona in his right hand sweats. There is white foam all over my face which began in a canister, moved as blue-gel expelled by air-pressure then diluted with water was smeared on my cheeks, between my nose, lip & down onto my chin. I am shaving naked I have three rolls of fat each bigger than the last. Looking in the mirror I cough, draw the phlegm from my lungs with a suck roll it onto my tongue stick my tongue out examine phlegm’s color for blood but there’s none it’s like mud- infused egg yolk. I spit it down into the sink with the little hairs spiking the cream. The cigarette pulls like a kite from her body on a long arm suspended by wind. Her tea-cup she holds it waist high & with one finger pins the fabric lightly to the bottom of the saucer. The cigarette ash is precarious her dress has five little shoelaces white at sternum’s end. Margherita Maccapani Missoni is happy. Sophia Barclay has a grey cardigan under which she wears a Disney dress. Hayley Bloomingdale is blonde she has a kerchief on her head a thin slice of melon in her fingers a white strand of pearls her bangs are one soft shard that hook her chin. She turns like she noticed us following her, & ready with her smile meets our eyes Ivanka Trump is moving, carefree, through the city. A young Thomas Jefferson, Adrea Casiraghi stares proudly at the future of the world & finds it splendid, brown hair cascading over his wool grey coat his white shirt reveals his marshmallow chest which contrasts with his granite chin & jaw. Dasha Duhkohva reclines on a marble table outlined by hydrangeas in jeans & striped shirt a grey trench coat thrown over her body. In a little row-boat, in a tank-top across which in marker has been written River Keeper Amanda Hearst crowned by a loose, densely beaded tiara. Black rubber fishing boots swallowed her legs. She’s drawing an enormous black tarp around her torso & smiling while her head tilts to the left.
the ideal city building itself in his brain. Is this mile magnificent? He’s lived here   a while, but the mile feels unreal. Robinson’s training himself to act blasé. Do museums   amuse me? Yes, but not today. Would he like to be in one? Of course. Why not?   An object of value with canvas wings, an unchanging face in a gilt frame, arranged—   thoughtless, guilt-free, & preserved for eternity. Robinson doesn’t want to be   exceptional. He knows he is. He wants to beperceived exceptional. Trains plunge by, steam  rising from the grates. Sing, muse! of a man ill-met at the Met. A man on his lunch break,  heading for a heartbreak, a break-up with Time. A break-up with time? Feeling filled with ice,  the way you chill a glass, Robinson passes the National Academy. He craves a sense  of belonging, not to always be longing. To be standing in a doorway, incredibly kissable,  not waiting at the four-way, eminently missable. Is this mile magnanimous? He wants it  unanimous: that this is his kind of town— up & down & including Brooklyn. The sky  is clearing, but the isolation sticks. Robinson’s not sure what a camera obscura  is for, but he thinks he should have his portrait done with one. Faces  blur by as he heads toward the Frick. Something used to photograph the obscure.
O little-know facts—how Robinson attracts them!  Pilgrims rocked ashore here, before Plymouth Rock.  The word scrimshaw is of unknown origin.  The stock name of the archaic two-lane main road? Route 6A. Really it’s Old King’s Highway.  Some facts are useless: the paper bag was invented in Dennis.  Some facts are not: Wellfleet’s town clock sings out ship’s time.  19th century Americans observed only three holidays. The Fourth of July was one.  O witty aperçus—how Robinson accrues them!  Good food is self-made, like a good millionaire.  Don’t just do something. Stand there.  It’s got to be the weekend somewhere.  Robinson is crisp & perspicuous. His wife stands next to him on the sand.  Democracy could be a lot more sexy if . . . this one fades in the rockets’ red glare.  Ann blushes, runs a hand through his hair.  Robinson looks up, concussed.  Fireworks percuss.
the Tuesday after he was last seen.  A policeman is there to pick the shrill thing up. Who is it? the couple of friends present ask as he cups it to his ear.  Then hangs up. There was no one there.  They have come to recon a vacant property—a mise en scéne:  Knoll butterfly chairs—a pair of them—   two red socks soaking in the white bathroom sink,   a saucer of milk for the cat to drink,   a stack of reel-to-reel tapes,   a matchbook from the Italian Village where he ate his last spaghetti dinner,   & two books he’d been re-reading, or wanted someone to think he had:  The Devils & The Tragic Sense of Life.  Preoccupation & a certain mode of self-presentation.  Even when absent, Robinson has a style.  No wallet, though. No watch, no sleeping bag, no bankbook.  The apartment looks the way it feels to read a newspaper that’s one day old.  The policeman wants to go back outside, among the lemons & fog & barking dogs.  Out where the sun can copper their faces.  Writing takes space, recordings take time.  The place puts the policeman in mind of something he read recently, about the collapse of a dead star.  About how it takes ages for the light to become motionless.  Seven years after a disappearance, a person can be pronounced dead.  But that’s nothing compared to the size of the ocean.
1.   Living from pill to pill, from bed to couch, what doesn’t kill me only makes me dizzy. Pain dissolves like chalk in water, grit on the bottom of the glass.   Waiting takes forever, throbs to the soles of my feet, Bella noche . . .   Hives as large as mice hump up under my skin (“no more barbiturates for you, Cynthia!”) —itch, stretch, I don’t fit my flesh— sting, tingle, prick, the sorcerer’s threat.   There’s a knife stabbed through my left eye. My right foot is made of elephant hide and weighs in at roughly one cartload of potatoes. Oxygen twenty-four hours; I’m swelled with steroids,   prednisone buzz in the brain; a motel room with sixteen foreign workers sleeping in shifts, playing reggae at three a.m.     2.   Oh I love my white pill that makes the black fist of pain unclench, unspasming the nerves. I float, released to darkness visible, worlds dissolving.   And the yellow pill, bitter on my tongue, that wakes me at 2 a.m. writing out plans in Arabic to organize an expedition to the Pole. Drug of hubris searing my eyes, my scrawl unreadable in daylight: foil my enemies.   Bitter taste of fugue, my hand shakes: some foreign being in my brain giving orders. You must You must You will.   Later, the pungent brown liquor shoots the dark with threads of gold behind my eyes. One flash as the mind goes out.     3.   I must elude pain  float past clarity pain in the brain  slammed down like a housefly.   It’s a big dodge.   Fly on a stovetop  sizzle and ash pop.   This is illusion,  mental confusion    born in the synapse. What can be undone  down to the last gasp. It’s a hodgepodge.   If you kill pain  you will become pain;   pain does not feel pain,  no nerves in the brain.   It’s a mind-fuck.   It’s just your bad luck.    A torpor sealed my brain  I felt no humans near  it seemed to me I could not feel  or touch or see or hear.   I don’t know who I am  without my medicine. My skin will crawl with bugs  if I don’t get my drugs. My brain’s a maelstrom,  singing a sad song. Reality is so cruel.   Prednisone oh prednisone so fast my mind racing, never tasting rest.   Razzle-dazzle razz   Fist bitch piss stitch witch . . .  (only wait, the fit will pass.)   fast, gash, lash, splash—QUIT!   (I saw a werewolf in a white suit, walking past the tables at the Full Moon Café. Floppy bow tie, big furry hands.)   Percodan, Percocet, let you go, let you rest. When the grip lets you go and you float like a note on the flow, there’s your life, there’s no worry— (yeah, it’s funky how the night moves.)   Barbiturate babykins, narcotic slut, black oil of opiate. Chatty Cathy, dirty brat, bed-wetter, nasty pants.   Painkiller, painkiller, I have a new friend, better than my old friend, plugging holes in the brain: Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Cocaine!   I want a soft landing; let me float. Once the seizure lifted me and threw me down. I did not like it. I did not like lying there on the floor looking up through air like green water.     4.   And there is one so dark, a ghost, it passes through the mesh of thought without tearing a strand, whispering destinies perceived true, pronouncing sentences of death.     5.   A cloud, the absence of a noun, no name, roaring far away in the summer dark like a train, or a giant fan, or a highway that never stops. The mind explodes in the dark of space, unnursed by atmospheres, as air raid sirens scream for blood and I am only nerves, strung on constellations, meridians and vectors quivering. A red and yellow capsule invades the chemistry of thought; cathode rays blast from the television screen and signals pass deep into space until the stars are singing “Rosalita.” You will not remember this night.
“So, why don’t you sleep with girls?”  “I’m not really attracted to girls.”  “Are you telling me you were really  attracted to every man you slept with?”  Conversation with a friend   1.   After twenty I stopped counting, not like my friend Beverly, who sewed an embroidered satin star on her bell-bottoms for every new guy she fucked. She had them running down both legs and around the billowing hem, and was starting up the inseam when the jeans gave out in the wash.   It was a boys’ game anyway, those years of our extended homage to the penis: the guitar playing the penis, drums saluting it, cock rock, Molotov cocktail, the motorcycle gripped between the thighs, and I went down, we all went down, in the old cultural disaster of idol worship—a thousand-year bender. Only this time it was the adolescent member, oiled and laved, thrust forward arcing, thin with ache, all tight flesh poked upward, claiming its own. How it came and went, penetrating but never settling down, and how often we were caused to admire it: hairless sweet warrior, raider against the State.   But I have this sweet pink flower here between my legs—I put my hand down and touch it, still soft and wet, and many-folded, endlessly opening, hiding, seeking, hidden and sought, but never very much admired or even smiled on in those years, never served much less sung to. Not a garden then but a citadel, a wall to be breached, a new land claimed, but linger there? No, I would say there was an overall lack of appreciation,   though breasts were well respected, slopping loose under T-shirts like little animals, and I would feel my nipples brush the cotton with pleasure, see them regarded also with pleasure. Still, sex then was a taking, like spoils of war, a victory over all those straight fucks back home, marooned in the dismal suburbs that birthed us squalling and red and watched us flee in ungrateful cars down night highways.   And God knows it felt good those nights. I was ready, it was ready, to open and answer the call. And take me down and roll me over, yes, and give it to me—but why all this riding away afterward?   Where was everyone going and why didn’t I get to ride along? Who knew at first nothing had changed, just wanting the thrust and tug and slam up against the headboard, I should say so, but left still wanting more, wanting to leap out of centuries’ shame and be something new, not this old consolation of women for the powerless, some kind of cosmic door prize awarded just for showing up with a dick, some proof to themselves these boys were men.   “You’re good,” he said. Hell, I wasn’t taking a typing test, I was fighting to live in a dying world. I was throwing myself away, an offering to wildest space, surrender to the mind’s dissolve, the body’s electric light, nerve endings firing like exploding stars. “You’re good,” they all said: you’d think somebody was doing a survey. Girls say yes to boys who say no, and then your professor asks if you’re wearing underwear, when you meet for your conference on the poetry of Yeats.   Crossing the border after midnight in a borrowed car after a visit to the after-hours doctor’s office in Sarnia. Nodding out in the back seat, pills wearing off. He was a legend among undergraduates: cheap and reliable, always on call, until a month later the headlines screamed “Abortion Doc!” when a girl died in his office and he dragged her down to the river and dumped her body in the underbrush.
Heart, oh heart, I sit here writing your name on pieces of paper, folded, hidden, misplaced . . . found again.   There is the element of saying and there is the element of making: one needn’t choose. I am singing the dream out from the ice, asking it to carry me like a horse or a river, down and away.   This day, here in paned-glass sun: the young waitress shaking out her apron and retying it flat across her stomach— a bit of vanity—her hair swept off her neck, crash of a milk bottle on the granite counter, cream spread in a mild pool toward the rim, and the roots of habit and longing briefly seized by the mind.   So noisy here! The sound echoes out of years, brought to this showing forth, unrehearsed. It seems we wake and find ourselves repeating, embodying the ancient gestures by which we recognize ourselves completed.   Not one of us could be born and invent life—it must show through us— the arm flung in the air, the coffee poured out, and down the street, someone hurrying by, head down against the wind.   And a man and a woman come to an old grief, carved in them, carved into them —the old way of water wearing rock— by law, and the hatred between them is equal to the hope neither will release.   Each wants to be whole, to embody all of time, when nothing in this world is whole, and this is by law.   When my father said bitterly to my mother: you have changed, he meant, without meaning to say, how she had changed him. A man holds his head down against the wind. Yet the wind fills him with the dust of temples, the breath of the dead.   The dream of the light inside the branches— a gleam of wet, glimmer that is a bud, the leaf within the bud.   The photographer comes inside and closes the lens of his camera. Then he is the lens. Then my eye is the light. This is the element of saying. The young waitress flings a paper cup behind her, into the trash can. That is a saying. The cream swirled into the coffee, the sugar dissolving, disembodied, and the body of the manager disappears, swallowed into a doorway.   The element of making is slow, uncertain as a temple, a falling forward, stitching back, like a stone wall, like the panes in an arched window, like a repetition chosen beyond necessity.   Yet somehow we have seen all this before— the girl in the fur hat speaking syrup into a phone; the falseness of her charm is an ancient imposter, familiar and therefore true. A door is opened and falls closed. Suddenly at every table someone looks down and is reading— books, newspapers, calendars, reading tea leaves, reading bones.   A woman in a periwinkle jacket: I am reading her shoulders as the day introspects. In dream the passive construction and the past perfect tense prevail:she was being pushed on a swing. The woman with many television credits gazes out the window, heavy with years, forgetting herself, forgetting sorrow, the false husband, the crippled child, the old plots forgetting,  and it is suddenly lovely, as free as something read or dreamed; the young waitress with sun on her face—her unblemished face—looks up, from the middle of eternity, her desire immaculate in the moment.  When a word is beautiful above all others—your name— when a woman appears as a bird of prey and we turn away, hoping not to be recognized—oh heart!—   when the light on the branches flares in a window with no sky, this is old story reading us, these are springs from words laid down before and ahead of us, and in the moment we are making an answer.
(for E)  I stop my hand midair.    If I touch her there everything about me will be true.  The New World discovered without pick or ax.    I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969.  I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself.    My hand remembers, treading the watery room,  just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory.   Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car, lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace for her mud-pie crusty work boots.   She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks & stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far,  break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro:  souped, shiny, low to the ground.   The stars over the Atlantic are dangling  salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is  $20 a night; special winter off-season rate.  No one else here but us and the night clerk,  five floors below, alone with his cherished  stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails  in a primal search for every constellation  hiding in the sky of your body. My hand  waits for permission, for my life to agree  to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night  Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you  there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb  the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car?  You are a woman with film reels for eyes.  Years of long talking have brought us to the  land of the body. Our skin is one endless  prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands,  I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines.  The old claw hammer and monkey wrench  that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the  yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be  thrust into my painter’s pants against my  will. I will never be able to wash or peel  any of this away. Before the night is over  someone I do not know will want the keys  to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase  me down the street. A gaggle of spooked  hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard,  never to lay another egg, just as I am jump-  ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground  of sweet clover.
I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there’s not enough  troops in the army to force the southern people to break  down segregation and accept the Negro [pronounced Nigra]  into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes,  and into our churches.  —Strom Thurmond, South Carolina  Senator and Presidential Candidate  for the States’ Rights Party, 1948    I said, “I’m gonna fight Thurmond from the mountain to  the sea.”  —Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Civil  Rights Matriarch, South Carolina, 1948   The youngest has been married off.   He is as tall as Abraham Lincoln. Here, on his wedding day, he flaunts the high spinning laugh of a newly freed slave. I stand above him, just off the second-floor landing, watching the celebration unfold.   Uncle-cousins, bosom buddies, convertible cars of nosy paramours, strolling churlish penny- pinchers pour onto the mansion estate. Below, Strom Thurmond is dancing with my mother.   The favorite son of South Carolina has already danced with the giddy bride and the giddy bride’s mother. More women await: Easter dressy, drenched in caramel, double exposed, triple cinched, lined up, leggy, ready.   I refuse to leave the porch.   If I walk down I imagine he will extend his hand, assume I am next in his happy darky line, #427 on his dance card. His history and mine, burnt cork and blackboard chalk, concentric, pancaked, one face, two histories, slow dragging, doing the nasty.   My father knows all this.   Daddy’s Black Chief Justice legs straddle the boilerplate carapace of the CSS H. L. Hunley, lost Confederate submarine, soon to be found just off the coast of Charleston. He keeps it fully submerged by applying the weight of every treatise he has ever written against the death penalty of South Carolina. Chanting “Briggs v. Elliott,” he keeps the ironside door of the submarine shut. No hands.   His eyes are a Black father’s beacon, search- lights blazing for the married-off sons, and on the unmarried, whale-eyed nose-in-book daughter, born unmoored, quiet, yellow, strategically placed under hospital lights to fully bake. The one with the most to lose.   There will be no trouble. Still, he chain- smokes. A burning stick of mint & Indian leaf seesaws between his lips. He wants me to remember that trouble is a fire that runs like a staircase up then down. Even on a beautiful day in June.   I remember the new research just out: What the Negro gave America Chapter 9,206:  Enslaved Africans gifted porches to NorthAmerica. Once off the boats they were told,then made, to build themselves a place—to live.  They build the house that will keep them alive.   Rather than be the bloody human floret on yet another southern tree, they imagine higher ground. They build landings with floor enough to see the trouble coming. Their arced imaginations nail the necessary out into the floral air. On the backs and fronts of twentypenny houses, a watching place is made for the ones who will come tipping with torch & hog tie through the quiet woods, hoping to hang them as decoration in the porcupine hair of longleaf.   The architecture of Black people is sui generis. This is architecture dreamed by the enslaved:   Their design will be stolen. Their wits will outlast gold. My eyes seek historical rest from the kiss- kiss theater below; Strom Thurmond’s it’s-never-too-late-to-forgive-me chivaree. I search the tops of yellow pine while my fingers reach, catch, pinch my father’s determined-to-rise smoke.   Long before AC African people did the math: how to cool down the hot air of South Carolina?   If I could descend, without being trotted out by some roughrider driven by his submarine dreams, this is what I’d take my time and scribble into the three-tiered, white créme wedding cake:  Filibuster. States’ Rights. The Grand Inquisitionof the great Thurgood Marshall. This weddingreception would not have been possible withoutthe Civil Rights Act of 1957 (opposed byyou-know-who).  The Dixiecrat senator has not worn his sandy seersucker fedora to the vows. The top of Strom Thurmond’s bald head reveals a birthmark tattooed in contrapposto pose: Segregation Forever.   All my life he has been the face of hatred; the blue eyes of the Confederate flag, the pasty bald of white men pulling wooly heads up into the dark skirts of trees, the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of German shepherds, still clenched inside the tissue-thin, (still marching), band-leader legs of Black schoolteachers, the single- minded pupae growing between the legs of white boys crossing the tracks, ready to force Black girls into fifth-grade positions, Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101.   I didn’t want to dance with him.   My young cousin arrives at my elbow. Her beautiful lips the color of soft-skin mangoes. She pulls, teasing the stitches of my satin bridesmaid gown, “You better go on down there and dance with Strom— while he still has something left.”   I don’t tell her it is unsouthern for her to call him by his first name, as if they are familiar. I don’t tell her: To bear witness to marriage is to believe that everything moving through the sweet wedding air can be confidently, left— to Love.   I stand on the landing high above the beginnings of Love, holding a plastic champagne flute, drinking in the warm June air of South Carolina. I hear my youngest brother’s top hat joy. Looking down I find him, deep in the giddy crowd, modern, integrated, interpretive.   For ten seconds I consider dancing with Strom. His Confederate hands touch every shoulder, finger, back that I love. I listen to the sound of Black laughter shimmying. All worry floats beyond the gurgling submarine bubbles, the white railing, every drop of champagne air.   I close my eyes and Uncle Freddie appears out of a baby’s breath of fog. (The dead are never porch bound.) He moves with ease where I cannot. He walks out on the rice-thrown air, heaving a lightning bolt instead of a wave. Suddenly, there is a table set, complete with 1963 dining room stars, they twinkle twinkle up & behind him. Thelonious, Martin, Malcolm, Nina, Dakota, all mouths Negro wide & open have come to sing me down. His tattered almanac sleeps curled like a wintering slug in his back pocket. His dark Dogon eyes jet to the scene below, then zoom past me until they are lost in the waning sugilite sky. Turning in the shadows of the wheat fields, he whispers a truth plucked from the foreword tucked in his back pocket:Veritas: Black people will forgive you quicker than you can say OrangeburgMassacre.  History does not keep books on the handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved who built this Big House, long before I arrived for this big wedding, knew the power of a porch.   This native necessity of nailing down a place, for the cooling off of air, in order to lift the friendly, the kindly, the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant, into the arms of the grand peculiar, for the greater good of the public spectacular:   us giving us away.
All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood; I turned and looked another way, And saw three islands in a bay. So with my eyes I traced the line Of the horizon, thin and fine, Straight around till I was come Back to where I'd started from; And all I saw from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood. Over these things I could not see; These were the things that bounded me; And I could touch them with my hand, Almost, I thought, from where I stand. And all at once things seemed so small My breath came short, and scarce at all. But, sure, the sky is big, I said; Miles and miles above my head; So here upon my back I'll lie And look my fill into the sky. And so I looked, and, after all, The sky was not so very tall. The sky, I said, must somewhere stop, And—sure enough!—I see the top! The sky, I thought, is not so grand; I 'most could touch it with my hand! And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky. I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity Came down and settled over me; Forced back my scream into my chest, Bent back my arm upon my breast, And, pressing of the Undefined The definition on my mind, Held up before my eyes a glass Through which my shrinking sight did pass Until it seemed I must behold Immensity made manifold; Whispered to me a word whose sound Deafened the air for worlds around, And brought unmuffled to my ears The gossiping of friendly spheres, The creaking of the tented sky, The ticking of Eternity. I saw and heard, and knew at last The How and Why of all things, past, And present, and forevermore. The Universe, cleft to the core, Lay open to my probing sense That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence But could not,—nay! But needs must suck At the great wound, and could not pluck My lips away till I had drawn All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn! For my omniscience paid I toll In infinite remorse of soul. All sin was of my sinning, all Atoning mine, and mine the gall Of all regret. Mine was the weight Of every brooded wrong, the hate That stood behind each envious thrust, Mine every greed, mine every lust. And all the while for every grief, Each suffering, I craved relief With individual desire,— Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire About a thousand people crawl; Perished with each,—then mourned for all! A man was starving in Capri; He moved his eyes and looked at me; I felt his gaze, I heard his moan, And knew his hunger as my own. I saw at sea a great fog bank Between two ships that struck and sank; A thousand screams the heavens smote; And every scream tore through my throat. No hurt I did not feel, no death That was not mine; mine each last breath That, crying, met an answering cry From the compassion that was I. All suffering mine, and mine its rod; Mine, pity like the pity of God. Ah, awful weight! Infinity Pressed down upon the finite Me! My anguished spirit, like a bird, Beating against my lips I heard; Yet lay the weight so close about There was no room for it without. And so beneath the weight lay I And suffered death, but could not die. Long had I lain thus, craving death, When quietly the earth beneath Gave way, and inch by inch, so great At last had grown the crushing weight, Into the earth I sank till I Full six feet under ground did lie, And sank no more,—there is no weight Can follow here, however great. From off my breast I felt it roll, And as it went my tortured soul Burst forth and fled in such a gust That all about me swirled the dust. Deep in the earth I rested now; Cool is its hand upon the brow And soft its breast beneath the head Of one who is so gladly dead. And all at once, and over all The pitying rain began to fall; I lay and heard each pattering hoof Upon my lowly, thatched roof, And seemed to love the sound far more Than ever I had done before. For rain it hath a friendly sound To one who's six feet underground; And scarce the friendly voice or face: A grave is such a quiet place. The rain, I said, is kind to come And speak to me in my new home. I would I were alive again To kiss the fingers of the rain, To drink into my eyes the shine Of every slanting silver line, To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze From drenched and dripping apple-trees. For soon the shower will be done, And then the broad face of the sun Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth Until the world with answering mirth Shakes joyously, and each round drop Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top. How can I bear it; buried here, While overhead the sky grows clear And blue again after the storm? O, multi-colored, multiform, Beloved beauty over me, That I shall never, never see Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold, That I shall never more behold! Sleeping your myriad magics through, Close-sepulchred away from you! O God, I cried, give me new birth, And put me back upon the earth! Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd And let the heavy rain, down-poured In one big torrent, set me free, Washing my grave away from me! I ceased; and through the breathless hush That answered me, the far-off rush Of herald wings came whispering Like music down the vibrant string Of my ascending prayer, and—crash! Before the wild wind's whistling lash The startled storm-clouds reared on high And plunged in terror down the sky, And the big rain in one black wave Fell from the sky and struck my grave. I know not how such things can be; I only know there came to me A fragrance such as never clings To aught save happy living things; A sound as of some joyous elf Singing sweet songs to please himself, And, through and over everything, A sense of glad awakening. The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear, Whispering to me I could hear; I felt the rain's cool finger-tips Brushed tenderly across my lips, Laid gently on my sealed sight, And all at once the heavy night Fell from my eyes and I could see,— A drenched and dripping apple-tree, A last long line of silver rain, A sky grown clear and blue again. And as I looked a quickening gust Of wind blew up to me and thrust Into my face a miracle Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,— I know not how such things can be!— I breathed my soul back into me. Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I And hailed the earth with such a cry As is not heard save from a man Who has been dead, and lives again. About the trees my arms I wound; Like one gone mad I hugged the ground; I raised my quivering arms on high; I laughed and laughed into the sky, Till at my throat a strangling sob Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb Sent instant tears into my eyes; O God, I cried, no dark disguise Can e'er hereafter hide from me Thy radiant identity! Thou canst not move across the grass But my quick eyes will see Thee pass, Nor speak, however silently, But my hushed voice will answer Thee. I know the path that tells Thy way Through the cool eve of every day; God, I can push the grass apart And lay my finger on Thy heart! The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,— No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat—the sky Will cave in on him by and by.
I like to see it lap the Miles - And lick the Valleys up -  And stop to feed itself at Tanks -  And then - prodigious step Around a Pile of Mountains -  And supercilious peer In Shanties - by the sides of Roads -  And then a Quarry pare To fit its sides And crawl between Complaining all the while In horrid - hooting stanza -  Then chase itself down Hill -  And neigh like Boanerges -  Then - prompter than a Star Stop - docile and omnipotent At it's own stable door -
I move my hands in these woods to find her sex-parts.   We discover our sex-parts make heat and blue light.   We become outlines of ourselves—   long scratches in the sky.   We have a daughter who was never born.   She lives in the house we never built,   but in this new light, you can almost see its tattered roof.
Inside the woods is an abandoned hotel. Trees grow in the lobby and up through the rooms. Limbs jut out through the windows. It looks like outside inside.   I climb the trees through 1000 rooms.   I look for you in each of them.   You’re a long shiny line.
There are trees and they are on fire. There are hummingbirds and they are on fire. There are graves and they are on fire and the things coming out of the graves are on fire. The house you grew up in is on fire. There is a gigantic trebuchet on fire on the edge of a crater and the crater is on fire. There is a complex system of tunnels deep underneath the surface with only one entrance and one exit and the entire system is filled with fire. There is a wooden cage we’re trapped in, too large to see, and it is on fire. There are jaguars on fire. Wolves. Spiders. Wolf-spiders on fire. If there were people. If our fathers were alive. If we had a daughter. Fire to the edges. Fire in the river beds. Fire between the mattresses of the bed you were born in. Fire in your mother’s belly. There is a little boy wearing a fire shirt holding a baby lamb. There is a little girl in a fire skirt asking if she can ride the baby lamb like a horse. There is you on top of me with thighs of fire while a hot red fog hovers in your hair. There is me on top of you wearing a fire shirt and then pulling the fire shirt over my head and tossing it like a fireball through the fog at a new kind of dinosaur. There are meteorites disintegrating in the atmosphere just a few thousand feet above us and tiny fireballs are falling down around us, pooling around us, forming a kind of fire lake which then forms a kind of fire cloud. There is this feeling I get when I am with you. There is our future house burning like a star on the hill. There is our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on fire, my body on fire above your body on fire, our tongues made of ash. We are rocks on a distant and uninhabitable planet. We have our whole life ahead of us.
Someone once told me that animals are people under spells, and if you fall in love with them the spell will be lifted. I recently fell in love with a black trumpeter swan. I watched her ruffle her neck feathers for hours, watched her peck bugs from her breast. I was sure she would make a beautiful bride, but she was always a black trumpeter swan. I once brushed a horse’s hair for 3 straight years until it crumpled into death. The truth is there is no such thing as spells. The world is always as it is, and always as it seems. And love is just our own kind voice that we whisper into our own blood.
I watch a squirrel get run over by a car on my walk to work. She is lying dead in the street and still has an acorn in her little hands. I am amazed at how she is able to hold on to her acorn after being tumbled like that, after bouncing so high off the street. I walk over to the squirrel and see that her face is blown to bits and looks like uncased sausage spilling onto the asphalt. But that acorn is still so tight in her hands. I pick her up by her tail, take off my dress shirt and swaddle her in it, then put her in my bag. I know right where she is as I walk into work, everybody looking at me, everybody asking me about my shirtlessness. The world is as steady as if it were sewn into the skin of the universe.
You tell me a joke about two robbers who hide from the police. One robber hides as a sack of cats and the other robber hides as a sack of potatoes. That is the punch line somehow, the sack of potatoes, but all I can think about is how my dad used to throw me over his shoulder when I was very small and call me his sack of potatoes. I've got a sack of potatoes he would yell, spinning around in a circle, the arm not holding me reaching out for a sale. Does anyone want to buy my sack of potatoes? No one ever wanted to buy me. We were always the only two people in the room.
I   Time unhinged the gates Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island, And worlds of men with hungers of body and soul Hazarded the wilderness of waters, Cadenced their destinies With the potters’-wheeling miracles Of mountain and valley, prairie and river.  These were the men Who bridged the ocean With arches of dreams And piers of devotion;   Messiahs from the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Old World, Searchers for Cathay and Cipango and El Dorado, Mystics from Oubangui Chari and Uppsala, Serfs from Perugia and Tonle Sap, Jailbirds from Newgate and Danzig, Patriots from Yokosuka and Stralsund, Scholars from Oxford and Leyden, Beggars from Bagdad and Montmartre, Traders from the Tyrrhenian Sea and Mona Passage, Sailors from the Skagerrak and Bosporus Strait, Iconoclasts from Buteshire and Zermatt.    II    These were the men of many breeds  Who mixed their bloods and sowed their seeds.  Designed in gold and shaped of dross,  They raised the Sword beside the Cross.    These were the men who laughed at odds  And scoffed at dooms and diced with gods,  Who freed their souls from inner bars  And mused with forests and sang with stars.    These were the men of prose and rhyme  Who telescoped empires of time,  Who knew the feel of spinal verve  And walked the straight line of the curve.    These were the men of iron lips  Who challenged Dawn’s apocalypse,  Who married Earth and Sea and Sky  And died to live and lived to die.  These were the men who dared to be  The sires of things they could not see,  Whose martyred and rejected bones  Became the States’ foundation-stones.    III    Into the arteries of the Republic poured  The babels of bloods,  The omegas of peoples,  The moods of continents,  The melting-pots of seas,  The flotsams of isms,  The flavors of tongues,  The yesterdays of martyrs,  The tomorrows of utopias.    Into the matrix of the Republic poured  White gulf streams of Europe,  Black tidal waves of Africa,  Yellow neap tides of Asia,  Niagaras of the little people.  America?  America is the Black Man’s country,  The Red Man’s, the Yellow Man’s,  The Brown Man’s, the White Man’s.  America? An international river with a legion of tributaries! A magnificent cosmorama with myriad patterns and colors! A giant forest with loin-roots in a hundred lands! A cosmopolitan orchestra with a thousand instruments playing America!    IV    I see America in Daniel Boone, As he scouts in the Judas night of a forest aisle;  In big Paul Bunyan, as he guillotines The timber avalanche that writhes a mile.    I see America in Jesse James, As his legends match his horse’s epic stride;  In big John Henry, as his hammer beats The monster shovel that quakes the mountainside.    I see America in Casey Jones, As he mounts No. 4 with the seal of death in his hand;  In Johnny Appleseed, as his miracles Fruit the hills and valleys and plains of our Promised Land.  I see America in Joe DiMaggio, As his bat cuts a vacuum in the paralyzed air;  In brown Joe Louis, surfed in white acclaim, As he fights his country’s cause in Madison Square.    I see America in Thomas Paine, As he pinnacles the freedoms that tyrants ban;  In young Abe Lincoln, tanned by prairie suns, As he splits his rails and thinks the Rights of Man.    V    A blind man said,  “Look at the kikes.”  And I saw Rosenwald sowing the seeds of culture in the Black Belt, Michelson measuring the odysseys of invisible worlds, Brandeis opening the eyes of the blind to the Constitution, Boas translating the oneness in the Rosetta stone of mankind.    A blind man said,  “Look at the dagos.”  And I saw La Guardia shaping the cosmos of pyramided Manhattan, Brumidi verving the Capitol frescoes of Washington at Yorktown, Caruso scaling the Alpine ranges of drama with the staff of song, Toscanini enchanting earthward the music of the spheres.    A blind man said,  “Look at the chinks.”  And I saw Lin Yutang crying the World Charter in the white man’s wilderness, Dr. Chen charting the voyages of bacteria in the Lilly Laboratories, Lu Cong weaving plant-tapestries in the Department of Agriculture, Madame Chiang Kai-shek interpreting the Orient and the Occident.    A blind man said,  “Look at the bohunks.”  And I saw Sikorsky blue-printing the cabala of the airways, Stokowski imprisoning the magic of symphonies with a baton, Zvak erecting St. Patricks’s Cathedral in a forest of skyscrapers, Dvořák enwombing the multiple soul of the New World.    A blind man said,  “Look at the niggers.”  And I saw Black Samson mowing down Hessians with a scythe at Brandy-wine, Marian Anderson bewitching continents with the talisman of art, Fred Douglass hurling from tombstones the philippies of freedom, Private Brooks dying at the feet of MacArthur in Bataan.    VI    America can sing a lullaby  When slippered dusk steals down the terraced sky;  Then in a voice to wake the Plymouth dead  Embattled hordes of tyranny defy.    America can join the riotous throng  And sell her virtues for a harlot song;  Then give the clothes that hide her nakedness  To help her sister nations carry on.    America can worship gods of brass  And bow before the strut of Breed and Class;  Then gather to her bosom refugees  Who champion the causes of the Mass.    America can loose a world of laughter  To shake the States from cornerstone to rafter;  Then gird her mighty loins with corded strength  In the volcanic nightmare of disaster.    America can knot her arms and brow  And guide across frontiers the untamed plow;  Then beat the plowshares into vengeful swords  To keep a rendezvous with Justice now.    VII    Sometimes  Uncle Sam Pillows his head on the Statue of Liberty, Tranquilizes himself on the soft couch of the Corn Belt, Laves his feet in the Golden Gate, And sinks into the nepenthe of slumber.   And the termites of anti-Semitism busy themselves And the Ku Klux Klan marches with rope and faggot And the money-changers plunder the Temple of  Democracy And the copperheads start boring from within And the robber barons pillage the countryside And the con men try to jimmy the Constitution And the men of good will are hounded over the Land And the People groan in the tribulum of tryanny.    Then  Comes the roar of cannon at Fort Sumter  Or the explosion of Teapot Dome  Or the Wall Street Crash of ‘29  Or the thunderclap of bombs at Pearl Harbor!    VIII    I have a rendezvous with America  At Plymouth Rock,  Where the Mayflower lies  Battered beam on beam  By titan-chested waves that heave and shock   And cold December winds That in the riggings pound their fists and scream.  Here, Now, The Pilgrim Fathers draw The New World’s testament of faith and law: A government of and by and for the People, A pact of peers who share and bear and plan, A government which leaves men free and equal And yet knits men together as one man.   I have a rendezvous with America At Valley Forge. These are the times that try men’s souls And fetter cowards to their under goals. Through yonder gorge Hunger and Cold, Disease and Fear, Advance with treasonous blows; The bayonets of the wind stab through Our winter soldiers’ clothes, And bloody footsteps stain the deep December snows.  Here, Now, Our winter soldiers keep the faith And keep their powder dry . . .  To do or die!   I have a rendezvous with America This Seventh of December. The maiden freshness of Pearl Harbor’s dawn, The peace of seas that thieve the breath, I shall remember.  Then Out of yonder Sunrise Land of Death The fascist spawn Strikes like the talons of the mad harpoon, Strikes like the moccasin in the black lagoon, Strikes like the fury of the raw typhoon.  The traitor’s ruse  And the traitor’s lie,  Pearl Harbor’s ruins  Of sea and sky,  Shall live with me  Till the day I die.  Here, Now, At Pearl Harbor, I remember I have a rendezvous at Plymouth Rock and Valley Forge This Seventh of December.    IX    In these midnight dawns  Of the Gethsemanes and the Golgothas of Peoples,  I put my ear to the common ground of America.  From the brows of mountains  And the breasts of rivers  And the flanks of prairies  And the wombs of valleys  Swells the Victory March of the Republic,  In the masculine allegro of factories  And the blues rhapsody of express trains,  In the bass crescendo of power dams  And the nocturne adagio of river boats,  In the sound and fury of threshing machines  And the clarineting needles of textile mills,  In the fortissimo hammers of shipyards  And the diatonic picks of coal mines,  In the oboe rhythms of cotton gins  And the sharped notes of salmon traps,  In the belting harmonics of lumber camps  And the drumming derricks of oil fields.    X    In these midnight dawns Of the vulture Philistines of the unquiet skies And the rattlesnake Attilas of the uptorn seas …  In these midnight dawns Of the Gethsemanes and the Golgothas of Peoples,  America stands  Granite-footed as the Rocky Mountains  Beaten by the whirlpool belts of wet winds,  Deep-chested as the Appalachians  Sunning valleys in the palms of their hands,  Tough-tendoned as the Cumberlands  Shouldering the truck caravans of US 40,  Clean-flanked as the lavender walls of Palo Duro  Washed by the living airs of canyon rivers,  Eagle-hearted as the Pacific redwoods Uprearing their heads in the dawns and dusks of ages.
Bartender, make it straight and make it two— One for the you in me and the me in you. Now let us put our heads together: one Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun.   I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw. When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent.   What I shall tell you now, as man is man, You’ll find in neither Bible nor Koran. It happened after my return from France At the bar in Tony’s Lady of Romance.   We boys drank pros and cons, sang Dixie; and then, The bar a Sahara, we pledged to meet again. But lo, on the bar there stood in naked scorn The Goddess Justice, like September Morn.   Who blindfolds Justice on the courthouse roof While the lawyers weave the sleight-of-hand of proof? I listened, Bartender, with my heart and head, As the Goddess Justice unbandaged her eyes and said:   “To make the world safe for Democracy, You lost a leg in Flanders fields—oui, oui? To gain the judge’s seat, you twined the noose That swung the Negro higher than a goose.”   Bartender, who has dotted every i? Crossed every t? Put legs on every y? Therefore, I challenged her: “Lay on, Macduff, And damned be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”   The boys guffawed, and Justice began to laugh Like a maniac on a broken phonograph. Bartender, make it straight and make it three— One for the Negro . . . one for you and me.
At the Courthouse Square On the Fourth of July, Beneath Old Glory’s Pyrotechnic sky, The town fathers met, Minus Bible and rye.   Against the statue Of Confederate dead The Mayor spat His snuff and said, “We need a slogan!” And he palmed his head.   The Sheriff’s idioms Dynamited assent. The Judge croaked a phrase Latinistically bent. And the Mayor pondered With official intent.   On a neon billboard, As high as a steeple, The travelers puzzle The amazing sequel:The Blackest LandAnd The Whitest People.
Aunt Martha bustles From room to room Between attic and basement, With duster and broom.   Like an oven grenade, In cobwebby corners Her broom explodes A babel of wonders.   Her summer crusade Havocs the bugs. Like an enfilade, She rakes the rugs.   The sound and fury Of table and bed Whirs a panic of sparrows To the oaks overhead.   Untenable grows The vast of the house For even the ghost Of Lazarus’ mouse.   The fogies convert Back fences to staffs And sow their gossip With Pharisee laughs:   Aunt Martha’s scowl Is a lithograph’s.   As the fogies watch Her attic lairs Jettison the junk Of heirloom wares, She shouts: “Old houses Need cleaning upstairs!”
I was a minuteman at Concord Bridge, I was a frigate-gunner on Lake Erie, I was a mortarman at Stony Ridge, I fought at San Juan Hill and Château Thierry, I braved Corregidor and the Arctic Sea: The index finger brings democracy.   These States bred freedom in and in my bone— Old as the new testament of Plymouth Bay. When the Founding Fathers laid the Cornerstone And rued the thirteen clocks that would not say The hour on the hour, I nerved myself with them Under the noose in the hand of the tyrant’s whim.   I’ve seen the alien ships of destiny Plow the sea mountains between the hemispheres. I’ve seen the Gulf Stream of our history Littered with derelicts of corsair careers. I’ve heard the watchman cry, “The bars! The bars!” When midnight held the funeral of stars.   I saw horizontal States grow vertical, From Plymouth Harbor to the Golden Gate, Till wedged against skyscapes empyreal Their glories elbowed the decrees of fate. These States bred freedom in and in my bone: I hymn their virtues and their sins atone.   The tares and wheat grow in the self-same field, The rose and thorn companion on the bush, The gold and gravel cuddle in the yield, The oil and grit and dirt together gush. The Gordian knot to be or not to be Snares not the free.   My faith props the tomorrows, for I know The roots of liberty, tough-fibered, feed On the blood of tyrants and martyrs; the judas blow Tortures the branches till they twist and bleed; And yet no Caesar, vitamined on loot, Can liberty uproot!   I am the Unknown Soldier: I open doors To the Rights of Man, letters incarnadine. These shrines of freedom are mine as well as yours; These ashes of freemen yours as well as mine. My troubled ghost shall haunt These States, nor cease Till the global war becomes a global peace.
I judge  My soul  Eagle  Nor mole:  A man  Is what  He saves  From rot.    The corn  Will fat  A hog  Or rat:  Are these  Dry bones  A hut’s  Or throne’s?    Who filled  The moat  ’Twixt sheep  And goat?  Let Death,  The twin  of Life,  Slip in?    Prophets  Arise,  Mask-hid,  Unwise,  Divide  The earth  By class  and birth.    Caesars  Without,  The People  Shall rout;  Caesars  Within,  Crush flat  As tin.    Who makes  A noose  Envies  The goose.  Who digs  A pit  Dices  For it.    Shall tears  Be shed  For those  Whose bread  Is thieved  Headlong?  Tears right  No wrong.    Prophets  Shall teach  The meek  To reach.  Leave not  To God  The boot  And rod.    The straight  Lines curve?  Failure  Of nerve?  Blind-spots  Assail?  Times have  Their Braille.    If hue  Of skin  Trademark  A sin,  Blame not  The make  For God's  Mistake.    Since flesh  And bone  Turn dust  And stone,  With life  So brief,  Why add  To grief?    I sift  The chaff  From wheat  and laugh.  No curse  Can stop  The tick  Of clock.    Those who  Wall in  Themselves  And grin  Commit  Incest  And spawn  A pest.    What’s writ  In vice  Is writ  In ice.  The truth  Is not  Of fruits  That rot.    A sponge,  The mind  Soaks in  The kind  Of stuff  That fate’s  Milieu  Dictates.    Jesus,  Mozart,  Shakespeare,  Descartes,  Lenin,  Chladni,  Have lodged  With me.    I snatch  From hooks  The meat  Of books.  I seek  Frontiers,  Not worlds  On biers.    The snake  Entoils  The pig  With coils.  The pig’s  Skewed wail  Does not  Prevail.    Old men  Grow worse  With prayer  Or curse:  Their staffs  Thwack youth  Starved thin  For truth.    Today  The Few  Yield poets  Their due;  Tomorrow  The Mass  Judgment  Shall pass.    I harbor  One fear  If death  Crouch near:  Does my  Creed span  The Gulf  Of Man?    And when  I go  In calm  Or blow  From mice  And men,  Selah!  What . . . then?
“We all declare for liberty,” Lincoln said. “We use the word and mean all sorts of things:In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.Rifle the basket that thy neighbor brings.”  The grizzled axman squinted at Honest Abe, The six feet four of him, gaunt, sad of face, The hands to split a log or cradle a babe, The cracked palm hat, the homespun of his race.   “The wolf tears at the sheep’s throat: and the sheep Extols the shepherd for cudgeling tyranny; The wolf, convulsed with indignation deep, Accuses the shepherd of murdering liberty.   “But the dictionary of the wolf is writ In words the rats of time chew bit by bit.”
Down in the shipyard, day and night,  The Galahads of the dock,  Hard as the sinews of basin rock,  Build an ocean cosmopolite.    The rivets stab and the hammers bite  Into the beams and plates of steel  Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel.    We, The workers of the world strike catholic notes On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats  Epics of industry.    Day and night  The diapason puts  The bent-winged gulls to flight  And shakes the harbor and quakes the ground  And leaps at the suns like Prometheus bound.    Our matrix shapes our citizen of the world  To cross the churning mountains of the sea,  Nor fashions a canoe to sail a lake  In cool felicity.
A State which, in the epoch of race poisoning, dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must some day be master of the world.  —Mein Kampf   I    The veldt men pray  Carved wood and stone  And tear their flesh  To vein and bone.    The idols scowl  In the brassy sun  Unmindful of  Appeasement done.    Yea, warriors cringe,  Whose tauntings dare  The regnant brute  In regal lair.    As tribal gods  The brave confound,  They bruise their heads  Against the ground.    Kennings of death  Encyst the square,  The mourners drool  And children scare.    Hyena laughs  Spear to the stars,  Dark bodies fall  Like ruptured spars.  Witch doctors whine  Edicts anew  And saint their mugs  Of chloral brew.    Fear grapples fear,  Crinkles the knife:  And life is death  And death is life.    And he who dies  Bequeaths the chief  His herd and flock,  But not his grief.    Who dares to mock,  Who dares to shove  The idols folk  Are schooled to love?    And graybeards croak  One fool alone  Reviled the hakims  Of wood and stone:    And headmen staked  The wretch to die  From dooms that crawl  And dooms that fly.    Ages fag out  In cyclic nights,  But sire and son  Repeat the rites.      II   The rule-or-ruin class, in idols of the tribe, Creates narcissine images of itself; Defend its fetishes from the merest gibe, Like iron captains of the Guelf.   The black-veldt god Behold, hair kinked and flat, Against the sun’s needling myriapod A cooling mat. The low wide nostrils ventilate The long head in the incandescent air. Insufferable sunrays cannot penetrate Black tissues as the fair. The python arm with reach to spare Are at the beck of tribal law: The black-veldt god is not aware Of civilizations buried in the jungle’s maw.   The yellow god Behold, his mongoloid eye fold, The color of his sod. The cheekbones arched and bold, The broad index of face, The stoic mold Herald the myth of race. Lulled by the incense wisdom of repose, Millenniums of candlelight, The vegetarian god turns up his nose At odors of the carnivorous white.   The Nordic god Behold, his blue-gray eyes Far-famed to conquer with a single prod A people mazed in a hinterland of whys. Hairy as the ape, of lip as thin, With Mongol, one in blood, with African, He makes a pseudo-science of his skin And writes his autobiography Superman.   Race biases sow Hemlocks to maim and blind, Pile up Sinais of woe, Jettison the freedoms of mind, Breed the hydras of stealth, Set kind razeeing kind, Convert to potter’s fields the commonwealth.   Drink, O Fool, the bias of the tribe, Autograph the epitaph of pain, Press to the heart the fangs of the moccasin bribe, Rape beauty’s flesh behind the crib of grain, Let dust bowls blight the soul’s topography, Eat, O Fool, the racist shibboleth— Damn the soul to sodomy! Damn the soul to death!      III    How many times Does a Southern town Waste white genius To keep the Blacks down? How many times Does progress stop To find the maimed A mythical prop?  How many times Do a Führer’s claws Dig up dry bones Of the gray Lost Cause?    How many times Does the ermine class Throw scraps of hate To the starved white mass?   Five roads, the spokes of a county wheel, Mortise the hub of our Courthouse Square: Our graybeards fable our Daniel Boone, Who brothered the red chiefs where Five dark and bloody frontier paths, Crossbones old as the skull of the moon, Witnessed the sacrament pipe of peace, Grim as the grin of a dead buffoon.    Gone are scalping-knives, Gone are red frontiers, Gone are homeborn chiefs, Gone are pioneers.  Yet the town Five Points Worships myths of race; Like the veldt men, hates Alien norm and face.  Sky the Jim Crow sign, Dam the ghetto’s wrath, Gibbet freedom’s sons— Tell it not in Gath!   Out of the burial-crags of night The felon winds hawk down; Their devil claws riprap the roofs That visor the town.   The stores on Main Street lean, Tome to mummy tome; The houses squat like smoking hulls Half-convexed on a shoal of foam, And glowworm windows in the deaf-dumb streets Are greeting cards of home.  Idols of the tribe Jail the spirit fast. Scorn of lesser breeds Flash and bone outlast.  Vandal Z’s of wind, Beggar vale and hill, As the myths of race Loot the people’s will.   Upon the courthouse Justice stands, Eyes fated not to see; The town clock christens now the first-born hour Of a day of hate to be.   Nor man nor beast prowls in his world, But on the Courthouse Square A statue of the Lost Cause bayonets Contemporary air.  The skull and bones Of yesterday Haunts those who travel The American Way.  Nobler to grope In the dusk of dawn Than to stumble back In midnight’s spawn.  Mein Kampf is not A bible writ With hand of gore And heart of grit.  Mein Kampf is lepra That whores the soul, And the brothels of race Nordic bawds control.  Yet thunderbolt hells Of chastening rods Smite ever Gomorrahs Of tribal gods!
I   Along the Wilderness Road, through Cumberland Gap, The black ox hours limped toward Sunday’s sun, Across a buff clay belt with scrawls of stone, Where bird and beast quailed in the bosom brush From February’s fang and claw; the stars, Blue white, like sheer icicles, spired aglow As if the three wise men barged in the East Or priests in sackcloth balked the Scourge of God.   Foursquare by the rite of arm and heart and law, The scrubby log cabin dared the compass points Of Rock Spring farm, man’s world, God’s universe, The babel of the circumstance and era. The frozen socket of its window stared Beyond the spayed crabapple trees, to where The skulls of hills, the skeletons of barrens, Lay quiet as time without the watch’s tick.   Not knowing muck and star would vie for him, The man Tom sank upon ax-split stool, Hands fisted, feet set wide to brace the spirit, Big shoulders shoved, dark hazel eyes glazed by Grotesqueries of flame that yawled and danced Up, up, the stick-clay chimney. While fire imps combed The black and bristling hair, the acids of thoughts Made of the orby face an etching-plate.     II   Near pyrotechnic logs, the purling kettle, Aunt Peggy puffed her pipe on God’s rich time: A granny at a childbed on the border, Where head and backbone answered the tomahawk Her wise old eyes had seen a hundred Nancys In travail tread the dark winepress alone; Her wise old hands had plucked a stubborn breed Into the outer world of pitch and toss.   The cabin that her myth and mission entered Became a castle in which Aunt Peggy throned A dynasty of grunts and nods and glances. The nest, the barn, the hovel had schooled her in The ABC of motherhood, and somehow She’d lost her ego in the commonweal: She sensed so accurately a coming child That rakes dubbed her the St. Bernard of Sex!   And now her keyhole look explored Tom Lincoln Beneath the patched homespun, the hue and cry Of malice, until she touched his loneliness, The taproot that his fiber gave no tongue. Then, lulling the wife, troubled in flesh and mind, She eased the sack quilts higher and mused the while: There’s but one way of coming into the world, And seven times seventy ways of leaving it!     III   The woman Nancy, like a voyager sucked Into the sea’s whale belly by a wreck, Buoyed to the surface air of consciousness And clutched the solace of her corn-husk bed. Her dark face, sharped in forehead, cheekbone, chin, Cuddled in dark brown hair; her eyes waxed grayer With wonder of the interlude: her beauty And courage choked Aunt Peggy’s hyperbole!   Out of the fog of pain, the bog of bygones, The bag of cabin cant and tavern tattle, She picked the squares to piece tomorrow’s quilt: She puzzled now, as then, about her father Who let wild Lucy Hanks bundle and carry Flesh of his flesh beyond the Cumberland Gap; A strange roof is no roof when imps of fear Pilfer the fatherless in blossom time.   Year in, year out, the daughter tinkered with The riddle of her birth; the mother chided The woman Nancy as she had the child, “Hush thee, hush thee, thy father’s a gentleman.” The butt of bawd, grand jury, Sunday bonnet, Lucy, driven, taught her daughter the Word, And Nancy, driven, taught her son the Word, And Abraham, driven, taught his people the Word!     IV   The man Tom bit his fingernails, then rammed His pockets with the hector hands that gave Raw timber the shape of cabinet and coffin, And in his lame speech said: “Aunt Peggy, listen, Now that our Nancy’s time is come, I’m haunted By my own nothingness. Why breed nobodies?” He tapped the dirt floor with the iron-capped boot That aided fist and skull in border fights.   Aunt Peggy counseled: “Tom, you say the say Poor Joseph probably said in that low stable Ere Jesus came into this mishmash world.” She paused, then boxed the ears of cynicism: “It’s true, down in the barnyard, blood speaks loud, Among the hogs, the chickens, the cows, the horses; But, when it comes to Man, who knows, who knows What greatness feeds down in the lowliest mother?”   The man Tom turned and spat: his naked surmise Ranged out and out. Aunt Peggy’s innermost said: “Your father Abraham, bred like Daniel Boone, Conquered a land with gun and ax and plow, Baptized it in his blood! I say, I’ve said, What’s in a baby is God Almighty’s business; How the elders wring it out is worry enough! The best, the worst—it’s all, all human nature.”     V   The tavern, Tom remembered, the New Year’s Eve, The clubfoot scholar bagged in Old World clothes, With arrowy eyes and a hoary mushroom beard. An Oxford don, he hymned the Bastille’s fall In spite of the hair-hung sword; his betters set Him free to hail new truths in new lands, where He seined with slave and master, knave and priest, And out of all fished up the rights of man:   “As Citizen Lincoln asks, ‘What’s human nature?’ His full mug says a clear mind puts the question Which ties the fogey scholar in a knot! My new idea fed to his new baby Would fetch the New World and the New Year peace! The sum of anything unriddles the riddle: The child whose wet nurse is the mother-of-all Grows like a pine unmarked by rock or wind.   “To make a New World and a New Year, Plato And Jesus begged the boon of little children! Now Citizen Lincoln asks, ‘What’s human nature?’ It’s what we elders have: no baby has it. It’s what our good and bad graft on the neutral. It’s what our rulers feed the boy and girl. It’s what society garbs nature in. It’s a misnomer: call it human nurture!”     VI   Aunt Peggy hovered closer, with flawless rites Grown lyrical from habit: muffled pain sounds Dragged from the bed of cleated poles; she hawed Tom Lincoln, as one turns a nag aside, Then swooped her way, even as a setting hen Carves a dictatorship from yard to nest. And Tom again was squeezed into a cell Whose inmates were the ghosts of unsuccess.   Later his memories climbed a gala peak, His Nancy’s infare that ran riotous: The bear meat, venison, wild turkey, duck, The maple sugar hanging for the whiskey, The red ham, gourds of syrup, bowls of honey, The wood coal pit with brown and juicy sheep, The guzzling, fiddling, guttling, monkeyshining: A continent sprawled between that day and this!   A havenot on the frontier is no havenot; A Crusoe without Friday has no conscience: Yet Tom’s grub living gnawed him like the teeth Of slavery, land titles, melancholy. He, like his forebears, visioned a Promised Land And tidied ways and means to fly the barrens That doomed the flesh to peck, to patch, to pinch, And wrung the soul of joy and beauty dry.     VII   The black ox hours limped by, and day crawled after. White prongs of ice, like dinosaur fangs, gleamed in The cavernous mouth of Rock Spring; snowbirds shivered And chirped rebellion; a cow with jags and gaps Chewed emptily; hogs squealed in hunger fits; And scrags of dogs huddled against the chimney, Which shoveled smoke dust into the throats and noses Of ragged winds kicking up snow in the desert.   Nancy lay white, serene, like virgin milk After the udder’s fury in the pail. Beneath the sack quilts and the bearskin robe, In yellow petticoat and linsey shirt, The baby snuggled at her breast and gurgled— An anonymity of soft red wrinkles. Aunt Peggy, hovering, grinned, “He’s Sabbath-born. Remember …Sunday—it’s red-letter day!”   Like ax and helve, like scythe and snath, the bond Held Tom and Nancy; she smiled at his halt smile, His titan’s muss in picking up the baby. Tom frowned and spat, then gulped, “He’s legs! All legs!” Aunt Peggy beamed, “Long legs can eat up miles.” Tom gloomed, “The hands—look at the axman’s hands!” And Nancy mused, “The Hankses’ dream, the Lincolns’, Needs such a man to hew and blaze the way.”
Doubt not the artist and his age (though bald as the pilled head of garlic), married or divorced and even vying downstage, are both aware that God or Caesar is the handle to the camel’s hair. Ye weeping monkeys of the Critics’ Circus (colorless as malic acid in a Black Hamburg grape), what profit it to argue at the wake (a hurrah’s nest of food and wine with Auld Lang Syne to cheer the dead), if the artist wrought (contrary to what the black sanders said) for Ars’, the Cathedra’s, or the Agora’s sake? No critic a Gran Galeoto between the Art-lover and the work of art, the world-self of the make- believe becomes the swimming pool of a class, the balsam apple of the soul and by the soul and for the soul, or silvered Scarahaeus glass in which Necessity’s figuranti of innocence and guilt mirror themselves as they pass. If brass, in the name of Id or Sinai or Helicon, wakes up the trumpet, is it to blame? Although the moment’s mistone and the milieu’s groan sharp an unbearable ache in the f of the age’s bone, this pain is only the ghost of the pain the artist endures, endures, —like Everyman— alone. The artist is a zinnia no first frost blackens with a cloven hoof; an eyeglass —in the eye of a dusty wind— to study the crosses and tangles in warp and woof; an evergreen cherry parasitic upon a winter sun; a paltry thing with varicose veins when the twelve fatigues are done. Under the Lesbian rule of the seeress Nix, blood and black bile mix: in the second of a bestiary-goat’s caprice, Elan, the artist’s undivorceable spouse becomes a Delilah of Délice or a Xanthippe bereft of sonnets from the Portuguese. In Chronos Park the Ars-powered Ferris wheel revolves through golden age and dark as historied isms rise and fall and the purple of the doctor’s robe (ephemeral as the flesh color of the fame flower) is translated into the coffin’s pall. The St. John’s agony of the artist in his gethsemane without a St. John’s fire— the Vedic god of the snaky noose discovers; his far far cry, like the noise of block tin, crackles the sky: “Wayfaring man unneighbored by a wayfaring tree (though one may rue this bark of the Moreton Bay laurel), it is true a something trans-Brow or cis-Brow —or both— wills one to the wings of the eagle, or to the teats of the sow. Yet, no lip need sneer to the beard of an ape of God, ‘Thou thing of no bowels, thou!’ So, I say as the Sire who chastens and rewards, ‘Let thy blue eyes resist white stars of red desire.’” Like the shape of Africa, the raison d’étre of Art is a question mark: without the true flight of the bat, it is a hanker in the dark. Not as face answers face in water, but as windows answer each other, one viewer, lyrical as Hafiz in his cups, discovers a lark; his companion, flat as an open Gladstone bag, spies out an ark. The blow of a fist on the nape, this question came from a Dog, “What color can escape the fluky flues in the cosmic flux?” Perhaps the high-C answer lies in the wreck the sea sucks back into her bowels. Let the Say be said: “In Philae the color is blue; in Deir-el-Baheri, red; in Abydos, yellow— and these are by the ravens fed.” Art is not barrel copper easily separated from the matrix; it is not fresh tissues —for microscopic study— one may fix; unique as the white tiger’s pink paws and blue eyes, Art leaves her lover as a Komitas deciphering intricate Armenian neums, with a wild surmise. At once the ebony of his face became moodless—bare as the marked-off space between the feathered areas of a cock; then, his spoon-shape straightened. His glance as sharp as a lance- olate leaf, he said: “It matters not a tinker’s dam on the hither or thither side of the Acheron how many rivers you cross if you fail to cross the Rubicon!” Postscript: He was robbed and murdered in his flat, and the only witness was a Hamletian rat. But out of Black Bourgeoise came— for John Laugart— a bottle of Schiedam gin and Charon’s grin and infamy, the Siamese twin of fame.
Her neon sign blared two Harlem blocks. In Aunt Grindle’s Elite Chitterling Shop the variegated dinoceras of a jukebox railed and wailed from everlasting to everlasting: Come back, Baby, come back—I need your gravy. Come back, Baby, come back—I’m weak and wavy. The talk of the town, I’m Skid Row bound— and I don’t mean maybe! (O scholars) this is the ambivalence of classical blues—and the coins came from the blue-devils’ pocket of Dipsy Muse. Across an alp of chitterlings, pungent as epigrams, Doctor Obi Nkomo the alter ego of the Harlem Gallery —as a news-waif hallooed, “The Desert Fox is dead!”— clicked his tongue —a residual habit from the veld— and —stout as a peasant in the Bread-and-Cheese War— said, “The lie of the artist is the only lie for which a mortal or a god should die.” Because nobody was a nobody to him, when from his thin charcoal lips irony escaped, it was malice toward none. The therapy of his slips by design into primitive objets d’art humanized the patrons of the Harlem Gallery as much as the masterworks he salvaged from the Lethe of the American Way in Black Manhattan. Mr. Guy Delaporte III cried out before the Regents, “Mr. Curator, what manner of man is this?” Unharassed by the ignis fatuus of a lost job, Doctor Nkomo clicked throatily and, with a chuckle whispered to me, “It’s not this buckle- head’s right or wrong if he does right or wrong.” Like a humming disk came the strophe of a rebel Bantu song. Hubris is an evil the Greeks (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus) boned and fleshed to wear the mask. Pride is the lust- sinewed wench the churchman speaks of first in the Table of Deadly Sins: Doctor Nkomo’s All hail to Man was a vane on the wing to winnow the grain in person, place and thing. Too many (perhaps) of the Regents’ corralled hours Doctor Nkomo and I left gored in bull rings of pros and cons: without a horse-opera god, the Ultra dons the matador’s black of the wherefore and the why, or hoists the white flag and lets the red cells in the marrow die. His idée fixe ebbed and flowed across the dinner table: “Absurd life shakes its ass’s ears in Cendrars’—not Nkomo’s—stable. If, anchored like hooks of a hag-fish to sea weeds and patient as a weaver in haute-lisse tapestry, a Rivera or a Picasso, with a camel-hair alchemy, paints in fresco-buono the seven panels of a man’s tridimensionality in variforms and varicolors— since virtue has no Kelvin scale, since a mother breeds no twins alike, since no man is an escape running wild from self-sown seeds— then, no man, judged by his biosocial identity in toto can be a Kiefekil or a Tartufe, an Iscariot or an Iago.” Is philosophy, then, a tittle’s snack? History, a peacock's almanac? He laughed down at me, a kidney without anchorage, and said: “You must see through the millstone, since you’re not like Julio Sigafoos and me— an ex-savage.” His ebony forefinger an assagai blade, he mused aloud as the box played in Harlem’s juke: “Curator of the Harlem Ghetto, what is a masterpiece? A virgin or a jade, the vis viva of an ape of God, to awaken one, to pleasure one— a way-of-life’s aubade.” Black as cypress lawn, the crag of a woman crabsidled in. The breath of a fraxinella in hot weather, her unlooked-for grin evaporated; then, like a well’s spew of mud and oil and raw gas, she blew her top. Dipsy Muse slumped like Uhlan when his feet failed to prop, his squeal the squeal of a peccary ax-poled in its pen. The stem and stern of the Elite Chitterling Shop pitched and ditched in the chatter and squawks, in the clatter and guffaws, as a Yarmouth yawl yaws when struck by a rogue-elephant sea. Scragged beyond the cavernous door, clamorous as a parrot against the rain, Dipsy Muse’s vanity scrabbled in vain like an anchor along the neck-gorge of a sea-floor. The jukebox railed and wailed: The black widow spider gets rid of her man, gets rid of her daddy as fast as she can. If you fool around, I know what I’ll do— like the black widow spider I’ll get rid of you. A giraffine fellow whose yellow skin mocked the netted pattern of a cantaloupe opened his rawhide pocketbook to sniff of dope a whiff, with a galley curse and an alley gag; then—laughing, choking, brimstoning his spouse, he caved in like Ben Franklin’s beggarly bag. Doctor Nkomo sighed: “The nicks and cuts under a stallion’s tail spur him to carry it higher; but the incised horsetail of a man drains the bones of his I-ness drier.” A black outsider with all his eggs but one in the White Man’s basket, he quaffed his beer, stretched his beanpole legs; then —a rubberneck Robin Hood in a morris dance— readied a hobby with another color for a ride beyond the Afrikaner’s stance. “O, Romeo,” he said, “O Casanova, prithee, what is chivalrous—what, barbaric? (Why gnaw one’s thoughts to the bone?) When a cavemen painted a rubric figure of his mate with a gritstone, Eros conquered Thanatos.” His eyes glistening dots of an ice plant, he said: “My Western friends —with deserts to be turned into green pastures— rent diving bells to get the bends, curfew morals, incubate tsetse flies, stage a barroom brawl of means and ends in a cul-de-sac. (Eagles dying of hunger with cocks in their claws!) That rebel jukebox! Hear the ghetto’s dark guffaws that defy Manhattan’s Bible Belt! Aeons separate my native veld and your peaks of philosophy: I made the trek, Curator, on Man’s vegetable ivory, in threescore years and ten.” A whale of a man, I thought, a true, but not a typical, mammal. He absorbs alien ideas as Urdu Arabic characters. In a sepulchral corner, I glimpsed a Scarlet Sister Mary on the make, her lips dark and juicy like a half-done T-bone steak. The giraffine fellow eyed us with a dog-ape look and outed his impatience in a sigh; a single-acting plunger cast the die, “Mister, who are you?” His catarrhal eye baited by Doctor Nkomo’s hair (the silvery gray patina of a Japanese alloy), he was but a squeaking Cleopatra boy when the reply came like the undershot of a Poncelet water wheel: “Obi Nkomo, my dear Watson; but that is nil, a water stair that meanders to no vessel. If you ask what am I, you dash on rocks the wisdom and the will of Solon and Solomon. Am I a bee drugged on the honey of sophistry? Am I a fish from a river Jordan, fated to die as soon as it reaches an Asphalt Sea?” Not a sound came from the yellow giraffine fellow— not a sound from the bowels of this Ixion bound to the everlasting revolving ghetto wheel. Nearer the ground than Townsend’s solitaire, Doctor Nkomo raked his hair … his brain … but he did not blink the cliff of ice. “What am I? What are you? Perhaps we are twin colors in a crystal. When I was a Zulu lad, I heard an old-wives’ tale for seven-foot-spear Chakas to be. In a barnyard near a buffalo trail a hunter discovered an eagle eating dung with chickens. He carried the feathered rex to a mountain top, although it raised the dickens. The hunter explained, ‘You're not a chicken, Aquila.’ He launched the ungainly bird into space. A fouled umbrella! In the wing lock of habit, it tumbled in disgrace … down … down … down a ghostified cock! “Out of the visaing face of the sun swooped the falcon baron clarioning the summons of an aeried race. Twice the barnyard eagle answered the Solar City wight; thrice he spiraled the simoom-blistered height— braked and banked and beaked upward, upward, into transfiguring light. Old Probabilities, what am I? Mister, what are you? An eagle or a chicken come home to roost? I wish I knew!” His character (in the Greek sense) phrased a nonplus—needed a metaphor’s translation. As an African prince, kings and chiefs peacocked themselves behind him; and he, himself tough-conscienced, had slain heathenism, the Giant Grim, without a backward cry. Scot and plot, caste and class, rifted right angles to the curving grain. The dream of Abraham’s bosom bottled long ago, he walked the Pork Barrel’s porphyry street with the man in the ears; and the glassy rivers of talk —Heraclitean, Fabian, Marxian— in the lights and shadows of the illuminating gas, bona fides, limned a figure and cast of Homo Aethiopicus who knew all riverine traffickers pass beyond the Seven Walls of Water—to join … the Last of the Greeks … of the Romans, the Last. Once in a while his apology shaped itself like the symbol Q in a skipper’s log. During the falconry in the chamber of the Regents, Mr. Delaporte III flew off at a tangent and off the handle. Doctor Nkomo’s Dandie Dinmount terrier epithet sprang across the tables. My gavel big-talked in slang. Like a turtle’s head, the session withdrew into its shell. The old Africanist bowed cavalierly and said: “I’ve called the gentleman a liar —it’s true— and I am sorry for it.” Wealth of the fettered, illth of the lettered, left his realism, like rock dust, unweathered: one who eyes the needle of the present to knit the future’s garb. In his own buttoned guise he seemed to speak to the man Friday in Everyman boned and lined and veined for the twelve great fatigues to the Promised Land: “The golden mean of the dark wayfarer’s way between black Scylla and white Charybdis, I have traveled; subdued ifs in the way; from vile-canaille balconies and nigger heavens, seen day beasts and night beasts of prey in the disemboweling pits of Europe and America, in the death-worming bowels of Asia and Africa; and, although a Dumb Ox (like young Aquinas), I have not forgot the rainbows and the olive leaves against the orient sky. “The basso profundo Gibbon of Putney —not the lyric tenor, Thomas of Celano— hymns the Dies Irae!”
Air here is like the water Of an aquarium that’s been lived in for a while—clear and still  Beyond the rigors Of glass; appearing cold (and clear) as spring streams  Fed by snow and ice, But unexpectedly warm to feel, and inviting; side-lit—  A vitality of shadows Once you come into it, and long bars of light  Burning like spots, Remarkable for the absence of dust in their sharp crossfires;  Heavy, as crystal Is heavy, as if to move here would mean pushing against a force  Palpable, and strong; Yet rich with prospects of life, comfortable  With the idea of life, As if, put on its slide, every drop is stocked with wonders,  Swarming, about to burst—  Beautiful in a way, One element sustaining another, our message brought home  So that the living Might come to see. Harder to say that without them  We are nothing— Water without air; or to speak of our isolation,  Or our special loneliness; Or say as they look right through us, at their plants,  Pictures, books, Windows, reflections, and blank white walls,  That we need them, To orient ourselves and to tell us who we are;  Or that with each look They are swimming to within our sights; or that we are always casting  Wider and wider And that even now they are fighting to avoid our nets.
When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself I repeat   If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how Will I understand anything   Please refrain from talking during the movie   I need a life that isn’t just about needing To escape my life   Please God please may Carrie please fall for me   I want to show off my hidden camera I’m an informer but I have my limits   You hurt him once before now what If she’s there I don’t know if I can go   Please refrain from talking during the movie   Leave a message if you can’t reach me To exit press enter and don’t forget your receipt   When I think I read new things I want A life where I read and think new things   Please refrain from talking during the movie   I want to know nothing Again   Please God please may Carrie please fall for me   I repeat myself when I can’t Make you understand I repeat
for Patti Smith At the end of Bing Crosby’s Riding High his horse Will be buried in the clay of the racetrack where he fell, As a lesson for all of us. Sad, waggish Bing, The Mob didn’t want Broadway Bill to win, so the jockey Pulled on the reins until the thoroughbred, straining Over the finish line first, collapsed, heart attack.   I loved you like a guitar string breaking Under the conviction of a clumsy hand— Something like that . . . I suppose I must have Been thinking of you and your complex and beautiful band, Except the image demands I hold the guitar, If not you, and the broken string, as   Over and over loudspeakers call riders to the starting gate. The track bartender and a teller, a sharpshooter and the chess master Wrestler, the petty con man and a cop, reprise their parts. The heist gang dons clown masks, and Sherry will betray George, and Johnny can’t love Fay, And the fortune in the suitcase just blows away.
As phantoms direct life from the shadows,    I feel I leaned on something,  and it broke.   My father on the porch with his crosswords said, this must be what it feels like to be dead;   When I returned from the dead there was no one to greet me, but still you are glad—   I wander the ruins the way my tongue wanders my missing teeth, the bricks and mortar of Deep Deuce rotted like molars in an ancient mouth;   Here Charlie Christian might have walked—   The astrologer counseled patience and creative imaging:  Step One: Visualizean object that symbolizes the accursed influence. Picture yourself throwing it into a furnace. Step two: Visualizethe person who is responsible for the curse. Imagine one end of a ropeis tied around your waist and the other around that person. Picture yourself cuttingthe rope with a chainsaw as you call out, “You have no power over me!” Step three: Repeattwice a day for eleven days . . .   You visualize her green boots inside the furnace . . .   —No. You are in a crematorium and you see her perfect and corruptible body on a tray sliding into fire;   Then you see yourself cutting the rope that ties you together with a saw;   And then at last your own imperfect and corruptible body—I mean, me—calls out   and I jump in after her.
Oh, de wars and de scrapes  And de sprees am done—sprees am done  De foe am beat.  De Turks am drowned—Turks am drowned.  All safe and sounds  To our wives we come . . .  —Otello, by T. D. Rice Dreams may come from the enemy—   from the business of the past day—   from a disordered body—   from moral evil—   from God,  through the medium of the Angels, and departed saints, as forewarnings to stir up and prepare the mind for the scenes ahead. I fell into a slumber; and in it I dreamed that two devils entered the room, each with a chain in his hand; they laid hold on me, the one at my head, the other at my feet, and bound me fast, and breaking out the window, carried me a distance from the house and laid me on a spot of ice, and while the weaker devil flew off in flames of fire, the stronger one set out to carry me down to hell. I put my hands together and said, Lord I submit to go and preach thy gospel; only grant my peaceful hours to return, and open the door. Here I received the solemn news of the death of our only child. The vibration of the earth shook down the trees, thousands of willows were swept off like a pipe stem, about waist high, and the swamps became high ground, and high land became low ground, and two islands in the river were so shaken, washed away and sunk, as not to be found. From this I infer some trouble is at hand,But the film was already starting—   The sounds came in waves, higher and higher, at the top of it someone screaming—   Now what you call your great disappointment, I call the Great Awakeneing—   When I heard (though not always in these old forgotten words I remember) the first of three visions—   Yet if you tell me they are only my dear dead returning, I would not disbelieve you.   2.   It is an odd sort of fortune to have lived an adventurous life.   In my disgust, I left school and devoted all my blighted spirit to minstrelsy; I had no natural aptness for the banjo, but for dancing— such a remarkable gift few ever saw.   The first part of our performances we gave with white faces; and by practicing to knock spin and toss the tambourine back in my room, I was now the “Scotch Girl” in plaid petticoats.   Besides my Highland Fling, I took the principal lady parts in the negro ballets; for a lad, I danced “Lucy Long” so admirably a planter in one of the Southern States insisted on purchasing me, until the door-tender kicked that planter down the stairs.   Old Ephraim was one of the most comical specimens of the negro species, the blackest face, largest mouth, whitest teeth; What could he do? Why, he could fetch water, black our boots, take care of our baggage.   My father said of Howie Gray who worked beside him every day at the South Station PO and put both his sons through college, “He’s not an uppity Negro.” My father meant that as a compliment.   There were tears in his eyes when Howie Gray died.   3.   Every man his own radio—  It hath been thought that the dying speeches of such as have been executed among usmight be of singular use to correct the crimes wherein too many do live   Billington, disregarding the commotion he was causing and the certainty of apprehension, reloaded and stalked his enemy.    She concealed her crime until the time of her delivery, and then being delivered alone by her self in a dark room, she murdered the harmless and helpless infant.    Foster didn’t say a word. He just picked up a steal boomer and smashed Pikin over the head with it.    I went forth to be delivered in the field, and dropping my child by the side of a little pond (whether alive or stillborn I cannot tell), I covered it over with dirt and snow and speedily returned home.    He struck the helpless Kling again and again    Mr. Spooner strove to speak, when down, Brooks took him by the throat and partly strangled him. Ross and Buchanan came out. Ross took Mr. Spooner’s watch and gave it to Buchanan. Brooks and Ross took him up and put him in the well head first. Before they carried him away, I, Buchanan, pulled off his shoes.    Eight streaks of splattered blood. Eight murderous strokes of an axe or knife.    Was found, by a person with a dog, crossing the fields, in a piece of woods a little distance from Brandywine to the Turk’s Head, two dead infants.   Now what you call your Great Awakening, I call Much Ado,  I call The Big Sleep—  But when did I become someone on whom everything is lost?   Like the dream I lifted from my father like a Band-Aid—   Where I checked hats, that instantly, embarrassingly disappeared—   My earnest offers to return the $1.00 gratuity raining down on dead ears—   I thought I was boyish. It availed me nothing.
If only God would save me, I would know how to hurt you.   If only God would save me, I would know who to sell my soul to.   Anything is an autobiography, but this is a conversation—   William Burroughs insisted literature lagged 50 years behind painting,   thinking no doubt about abstraction, collage, fragmentation, his cut-ups.   But whatever that meant (why always 50 years?), or however he presumed to rile other writers,   poetry probably does lag behind any credible media theory about it—   so that if I put a pine tree into a poem,   a grove of pine trees and beyond them the sea,   you’d think it was the same tree Wordsworth put there; instead of two obligatory centuries of nature studies, all those   Technicolor vistas, torch songs, couples drifting through leaves in Salem commercials.   Into one life and out another,   the way a junkie playing a writer, a writer playing a priest,   so that when I finally blurted out,You-betrayed-me / I-wounded-you / We’re-so-unhappy  you assumed the burden of personal urgency, supposed it was me speaking at the limits of my self-control   and not The Damned Don’t Cry, Temptation, and Leave Her to Heaven.  You open your mouth and a tradition dribbles out.   But that’s mimesis—   how almost impossible to avoid mimesis, anybody’s hardest truths prompting the most fractured constructions,   the way to think about God might be to disobey God,   if only God’s wish to remain hidden,   so that if everything is an autobiography, this is a conversion.   As my lives flash before me,   why must the yearning for God trump all other yearnings?   You often hear converts confess the drinking, his pills, her sexual addiction,   concealed inside them a yearning for God— why not the other way around?   The admission of Jesus into your life concealing instead the wish, say, a need   To be fucked senseless drunk drugged & screamingOh God! Oh God! on a hotel bed . . .   God embraces our yearnings.   That afternoon my father heard his diagnosis of inoperable cancer, my aunt Barbara demanded we get him to Lourdes   She demanded this with a glass of vodka in her hand— she demanded this running her fingers up and down my leg— she demanded this before she passed out in her car—   In the movie of my life, my father died   after I forgave him,   & when my secret tormentor said may the ghosts of your dreams gnaw at your belly like a wolf under your jacket,   did she really want revenge, or was she just killing time?   For me God is a hair shirt, or he’s nothing; for me God is a pain in the ass;   that’s mimesis, again,   this hour I tell you things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I’ll tell you.   The world is a road under the wall to the church, the world is a church, & the world is a road,   & the world is a stone wall.   Still, he wanted her the way the Cardinal wanted the Caravaggio, & when the ill-advised possessor of the painting resisted— one night Papal Guards searched his house.   Of course contraband came to light, some illegal rifles, & when the ill-advised possessor of the painting went to prison— the Cardinal got his Caravaggio.   But I wasn’t a Cardinal, nephew to the Pope, and you— you were not a Caravaggio.   So I asked you to be in my movie.
I have a brief confession that I would like to make. If I dont get it off my chest I'm sure my heart will break. I didn't do my reading. I watched TV instead— while munching cookies, cakes, and chips and cinnamon raisin bread. I didn't wash the dishes. I didn't clean the mess. Now there are roaches eating crumbs— a million, more or less. I didn't turn the TV off. I didn't shut the light. Just think of all the energy I wasted through the night. I feel so very guilty. I did a lousy job. I hope my students don't find out that I am such a slob.
The school bell rings, we go inside, Our teacher isn’t there. “Maybe she’s sick!” her pet cries out. Yeah, right. As if I’d care.   I have a D in Language Arts, My grade in math’s the same. And now my teacher might be sick. Could be I’m part to blame.   She doesn’t like me, that’s a fact, I wouldn’t tell a lie. She says stuff like: “You’re very smart, But you don’t even try.”   I start to laugh—my teacher’s sick! And boy, I’m feeling fine . . . When someone knocks the door right in, And there stands Frankenstein.   She’s six-foot-eight, her dress is black, She’s wearing combat boots. I start to gasp, she growls and says, “I’ll be your substitute.”   The teacher’s pet is whimpering; She doesn’t stand a chance. The smart kid stares and points and faints. The bully wets his pants.   “My name is Mrs. Stein,” she says, And every student cringes. She leans the door against the wall, She’s knocked it off its hinges.   “Now let’s begin. You there! Stand up!” She looks me in the eye. I try to move, my legs won’t work. I know I’m going to die!   In one big step she’s next to me, And she does more than hover. She blocks the sun, it’s dark as night, My classmates run for cover.   “Now get up to the board,” she says. “I’d like to see some action. Pick up the chalk, explain to us Division of a fraction.”   I leap away to save my life, This time I really try. I think and think and think and croak, “Invert and multiply.”   “Correct! She says. I breathe again And head back for my chair. “You, FREEZE!” she shouts, and I stop cold. “And don’t go anywhere.”   This all begins at nine o’clock, I fight to stay alive. It seems to last a million years— The clock says nine-o-five.   That’s just three hundred seconds, And then my turn is through. She points at every one of us— “Now you. Now, you. Now, you.”   We all get nailed this awful day, There’s nowhere we can hide. The lunch bell rings, we cannot eat, We simply crawl outside.   We can’t believe the other kids Who run and play their games. Not us, who have big Mrs. Stein— Our world is not the same.   The bell has tolled, I must go in, My time on earth is through. I’ll leave this on the playground— Here’s what you have to do.   You must listen to your teacher And pray her health is fine, Or one day soon you’ll hear the words: “My name is Mrs. Stein.”
It’s always been a wish of mine (Or should I say a dream) To scare my sister half to death And hear her piercing scream.   That’s why I squished four bugs until They all were very dead, Then took them to my sister’s room And put them in her bed.   After we had said goodnight, My heart began to pound. I waited and I waited, but She never made a sound.   And then I got so doggone tired I couldn’t stay awake. I climbed into my own warm bed And shrieked—there was a snake!   It wiggled, and I leaped and fell And bruised my bottom half; Then I heard an awful sound— It was my sister’s laugh.
It’s too cold to smoke outside, but if you come over, I’ll keep my hands to myself, or won’t I. I would like to tell you about the wall eaten up   by the climbing plant—it was so beautiful. Various things have been happening to me, all of them sexual. The man on the bus   took off his pants so I could see him better. Another man said, “Ignore him darlin’. Just sit on my lap.” But I’m not one of those   who’s hungriest in the morning, unlike the man at the bakery who eats egg after egg after egg.   Listen. Come over: the cold has already eaten the summer. I need another pair of ears: from the kitchen I can’t tell if I’m hearing wind chimes   or some gray woman with failing arms dropping a pan full of onions and potatoes.  This morning I need four hands—   two to wash the greens, one to lift a teakettle, one to pour the milk. This morning, one little mouth will not do. We could play a game   where we crouch on the tiles, two yellow dogs drinking coffee from bowls. We could play a game where we let the breakfast burn.   Outside there’s a world where every love scene begins with a man in a doorway; he walks over to the woman and says “Open your mouth.”
—After Catullus My house disgusted me, so I slept in a tent. My tent disgusted me, so I slept in the grass. The grass disgusted me, so I slept in my body, which I strung like a hammock from two ropes. My body disgusted me, so I carved myself out of it.   My use of knives disgusted me because it was an act of violence. My weakness disgusted me because “Hannah” means “hammer.” The meaning of my name disgusted me because I’d rather be known as beautiful. My vanity disgusted me because I am a scholar.   My scholarship disgusted me because knowledge is empty. My emptiness disgusted me because I wanted to be whole. My wholeness would have disgusted me because to be whole is to be smug. Still, I tried to understand wholeness   as the inclusiveness of all activities: I walked out into the yard, trying to vomit and drink milk simultaneously. I tried to sleep while smoking a cigar. I have enough regrets to crack all the plumbing. I’m whole only in that I’ve built my person from every thought I’ve ever loved.
It had a secret name which in later years came to meanI will continue to stand here.  It had a food mouth and a shrieking mouth.   Popular wisdom indicated that Its hands could heat stones and that a man could cook meat on those stones.   That being said, It had a poverty hand and a riches hand.   They were the same hand.   A little ways above the hands the mouths spoke together but for two different reasons, like the music was behaving but the orchestra was broken.   *   Even in less benevolent moments, It was known to use Its own body as a tent and as the gifts inside of the tent.   Early people said It had a mother hand and a father hand, and that together they made a clapping sound.   Its hands delivered the children from madness.   The hands saw the riverbank sliding into the river to make a more shallow river.   They scooped the mud up. The hands were giving thanks.   *   The hands smelled like exodus. The hands were the law.   One hand grew older, and the other hand younger.   They said, fairly often,We’d like to try that again.  Both were restless and wanted rest.  One hand said, I will go where you go, while the other hand continued on alone.
Groundbreaking Ceremony, City of South Miami, Sunset Drive Improvements And so it began: the earth torn, split open by a dirt road cutting through palmettos and wild tamarind trees defending the land against the sun. Beside the road, a shack leaning into the wind, on the wooden porch, crates of avocados and limes, white chickens pecking at the floor boards, and a man under the shadow of his straw hat, staring into the camera in 1914. He doesn't know within a lifetime the unclaimed land behind him will be cleared of scrub and sawgrass, the soil will be turned, made to give back what the farmers wish, their lonely houses will stand acres apart from one another, jailed behind the boughs of their orchards. He'll never buy sugar at the general store, mail love letters at the post office, or take a train at the depot of the town that will rise out of hundred-million years of coral rock on promises of paradise. He'll never ride a Model-T puttering down the dirt road that will be paved over, stretch farther and farther west into the horizon, reaching for the setting sun after which it will be named. He can't even begin to imagine the shadows of buildings rising taller than the palm trees, the street lights glowing like counterfeit stars dotting the sky above the road, the thousands who will take the road everyday, who'll also call this place home less than a hundred years after the photograph of him hanging today in City Hall as testament. He'll never meet me, the engineer hired to transform the road again, bring back tree shadows and birdsongs, build another promise of another paradise meant to last another forever. He'll never see me, the poet standing before him, trying to read his mind across time, wondering if he was thinking what I'm today, both of us looking down the road that will stretch on for years after I too disappear into a photo.
for Ruth Behar I’m still thinking about your porch light like a full moon casting a foggy halo in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks branching into the sky like nerve endings inches away from the frozen stars, the pink gables of your Victorian home protesting yet another winter for you captive in Ann Arbor as you practice mambo by the fireplace. I’m following your red-velvet shoes to conga beats and bongo taps taking your body, but not your life, from the snow mantling your windows outside, 1,600 miles away from Cuba. I’m tasting the cafecito you made, the slice of homemade flan floating in burnt sugar like the stories you told me you can’t finish writing, no matter how many times you travel through time back to Havana to steal every memory ever stolen from you. You’re a thief anyone would forgive, wanting only to imagine faces for names chiseled on the graves of your family at Guanabacoa, walk on Calle Aguacate and pretend to meet the grandfather you never met at his lace shop for lunch, or pray the Kaddish like your mother at the synagogue in El Vedado, stand on the steps there like you once did in a photo you can’t remember taking. I confess I pitied you, still trying to reach that unreachable island within the island you still call home. I thought I was done with Cuba, tired of filling in the blanks, but now I’m not sure. Maybe if I return just once more, walk the sugarcane fields my father once cut, drive down the road where my mother once peddled guavas to pay for textbooks, sit on the porch of my grandmother’s house, imagine her still in the kitchen making arroz-con-leche— maybe then I’ll have an answer for you last night when you asked me: Would youmove to Cuba? Would you die there?
I. Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered at least half a dozen uses for peanut butter— topping for guava shells in syrup, butter substitute for Cuban toast, hair conditioner and relaxer—Mamá never knew what to make of the monthly five-pound jars handed out by the immigration department until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly.     II. There was always pork though, for every birthday and wedding, whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, even on Thanksgiving day—pork, fried, broiled, or crispy skin roasted— as well as cauldrons of black beans, fried plantain chips, and yuca con mojito. These items required a special visit to Antonio’s Mercado on the corner of Eighth Street where men in guayaberas stood in senate blaming Kennedy for everything—“Ese hijo de puta!” the bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue filling the creases of their wrinkled lips; clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth, ashamed and empty as hollow trees.   III. By seven I had grown suspicious—we were still here. Overheard conversations about returning had grown wistful and less frequent. I spoke English; my parents didn’t. We didn’t live in a two-story house with a maid or a wood-panel station wagon nor vacation camping in Colorado. None of the girls had hair of gold; none of my brothers or cousins were named Greg, Peter, or Marcia; we were not the Brady Bunch. None of the black and white characters on Donna Reed or on the Dick Van Dyke Show were named Guadalupe, Lázaro, or Mercedes. Patty Duke’s family wasn’t like us either— they didn’t have pork on Thanksgiving, they ate turkey with cranberry sauce; they didn’t have yuca, they had yams like the dittos of Pilgrims I colored in class.   IV.  A week before Thanksgiving I explained to my abuelita about the Indians and the Mayflower, how Lincoln set the slaves free; I explained to my parents about the purple mountain’s majesty, “one if by land, two if by sea,” the cherry tree, the tea party, the amber waves of grain, the “masses yearning to be free,” liberty and justice for all, until finally they agreed: this Thanksgiving we would have turkey, as well as pork.     V.Abuelita prepared the poor fowl as if committing an act of treason, faking her enthusiasm for my sake.Mamá set a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven and prepared candied yams following instructions I translated from the marshmallow bag. The table was arrayed with gladiolas, the plattered turkey loomed at the center on plastic silver from Woolworth’s. Everyone sat in green velvet chairs we had upholstered with clear vinyl, except Tío Carlos and Toti, seated in the folding chairs from the Salvation Army. I uttered a bilingual blessing and the turkey was passed around like a game of Russian Roulette. “DRY,” Tío Berto complained, and proceeded to drown the lean slices with pork fat drippings and cranberry jelly—“esa mierda roja,” he called it. Faces fell when Mamá presented her ochre pie— pumpkin was a home remedy for ulcers, not a dessert. Tía María made three rounds of Cuban coffee then Abuelo and Pepe cleared the living room furniture, put on a Celia Cruz LP and the entire family began to merengue over the linoleum of our apartment, sweating rum and coffee until they remembered— it was 1970 and 46 degrees— in América. After repositioning the furniture, an appropriate darkness filled the room. Tío Berto was the last to leave.
Not a study or a den, but El Florida as my mother called it, a pretty name for the room with the prettiest view of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up against the windows, the tepid breeze laden with the brown-sugar scent of loquats drifting in from the yard. Not a sunroom, but where the sun both rose and set, all day the shadows of banana trees fan-dancing across the floor, and if it rained, it rained the loudest, like marbles plunking across the roof under constant threat of coconuts ready to fall from the sky. Not a sitting room, but El Florida, where I sat alone for hours with butterflies frozen on the polyester curtains and faces of Lladró figurines: sad angels, clowns, and princesses with eyes glazed blue and gray, gazing from behind the glass doors of the wall cabinet. Not a TV room, but where I watchedCreature Feature as a boy, clinging to my brother, safe from vampires in the same sofa where I fell in love with Clint Eastwood and my Abuelo watching westerns, or pitying women crying in telenovelas with my Abuela. Not a family room, but the room where my father twirled his hair while listening to eight-tracks of Elvis, read Nietzsche and Kant a few months before he died, where my mother learned to dance alone as she swept, and I learned salsa pressed against my Tía Julia’s enormous breasts. At the edge of the city, in the company of crickets, beside the empty clothesline, telephone wires, and the moon, tonight my life is an old friend sitting with me not in the living room, but in the light of El Florida, as quiet and necessary as any star shining above it.
Someday compassion would demand I set myself free of my desire to recreate my father, indulge in my mother’s losses, strangle lovers with words, forcing them to confess for me and take the blame. Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet by sheet on the patio and gathered them into a pyre. I wanted to let them go in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding beside the azaleas and ficus bushes, let them crackle, burst like winged seeds, let them smolder into gossamer embers— a thousand gray butterflies in the wind. Today was that day, but it rained, kept raining. Instead of fire, water—drops knocking on doors, wetting windows into mirrors reflecting me in the oaks. The garden walls and stones swelling into ghostlier shades of themselves, the wind chimes giggling in the storm, a coffee cup left overflowing with rain. Instead of burning, my pages turned into water lilies floating over puddles, then tiny white cliffs as the sun set, finally drying all night under the moon into papier-mâché souvenirs. Today the rain would not let their lives burn.
I’ve been writing this since the summer my grandfather taught me how to hold a blade of grass between my thumbs and make it whistle, since I first learned to make green from blue and yellow, turned paper into snowflakes, believed a seashell echoed the sea, and the sea had no end.   I’ve been writing this since a sparrow flew into my class and crashed into the window, laid to rest on a bed of tissue in a shoebox by the swings, since the morning I first stood up on the bathroom sink to watch my father shave, since our eyes met in that foggy mirror, since the splinter my mother pulled from my thumb, kissed my blood.   I’ve been writing this since the woman I slept with the night of my father’s wake, since my grandmother first called me a faggot and I said nothing, since I forgave her and my body pressed hard against Michael on the dance floor at Twist, since the years spent with a martini and men I knew I couldn’t love.   I’ve been writing this since the night I pulled off the road at Big Sur and my eyes caught the insanity of the stars, since the months by the kitchen window watching the snow come down like fallout from a despair I had no word for, since I stopped searching for a name and found myself tick-tock in a hammock asking nothing of the sky.   I’ve been writing this since spring, studying the tiny leaves on the oaks dithering like moths, contrast to the eon-old fieldstones unveiled of snow, but forever works-in-progress, since tonight with the battled moon behind the branches spying on the world— same as it ever was—perfectly unfinished, my glasses and pen at rest again on the night table.   I’ve been writing this since my eyes started seeing less, my knees aching more, since I began picking up twigs, feathers, and pretty rocks for no reason collecting on the porch where I sit to read and watch the sunset like my grandfather did everyday, remembering him and how to make a blade of grass whistle.
What is this tint that in the shrill cress Will never cease to trouble us and in the fields Gives prick and praise for Beauty? And said birds that feed on berries Are pervious—and shook the snow from his thighs. I thought of nothing carefully, but of snow, and the birds. Then kissed the cup and sipped a little Though almost choked drank slowly Tickled with strange measure She faked a pretty anger I entertained the night with fantastic, empty pleasure We went as far as the ivie-bush And ivie-crowns upon our heads And carried her kiss untouched and entire Then all was fresh, inclined To wriggle and nussle and lascivious Ardent leaps. In the thickest of the wood Bid him kiss close and often And directed him to her fancie The ground had a sweeter scent, the boughs a blush One fruit, rare and rich, would outdo many together She was wild to climb the tree Nor would she be forbidden She seized the apple and put it in her bosom.
To those whose city is taken give glass pockets. To those whose quiver gapes give queens and pace their limbs with flutes, ropes, cups of soft juice. To those whose threshold vacillates give that bruise the dust astonished. To falling heroes give raucous sibyls’ polished knees. To those who sip nectar give teeth. And if they still sip nectar—give green chips of wood. To swimmers give clocks or rank their hearts among new satellites as you would Garbo’s skint lip. To scholars, give dovecotes to virgins, targets. Justice has nothing on them. Virgil, sweetheart, even pretty fops need justice. If they think not let creditors flank them and watch their vigour quickly flag. To exiled brides give tiny knives and beads of mercury then rob them of prudence for prudence is defunct. To those who fist clouds, give powder. And if their sullen wallets flap, give nothing at all. Still I have not addressed lambent fops swathed in honey, the stuttering moon Martyrs, Spartans, Sirens, Mumblers, Pawns Ventriloquists—or your sweet ego   The Beloved Ego in the plummy light is you. When I see you in that light I desire all that has been kept from meetcetera. For you. Since your rough shirt reminds me of the first grass pressing my hips and seeds heads fringing the sky and the sky swaying lightly to your scraped breath, since I hear panicked, my sister calling since the gold leaves have all been lost, and you are at least several and variegated I toss this slight thread back   The beloved ego on cold marble blurs inscription. Hey Virgil I think your clocked ardour is stuck in the blue vein on my wrist. It stops all judgement
I have tried to say that, although Love is not judgement analysis too is a style of affect since the scale that rends me vulnerable has cut, from abundance, doubt (not that identity shunts civic ratio or consequence) Sure — I would prefer to respond to only the established charms (and forget inconvenience) but her hair was also a kind of honey or instrument.   All that is beautiful, from which I choose even artifice, which I hold above nature won’t salve these stuttered accoutrements
It was Jessica Grim the American poet who first advised me to read Violette Leduc. Lurid conditions are facts. This is no different from the daily protests and cashbars. I now unknowingly speed towards which of all acts, words, conditions — I am troubled that I do not know. When I feel depressed in broad daylight depressed by the disappearance of names, the pollen smearing the windowsill, I picture the bending pages of La Bâtarde and I think of wind. The outspread world is comparable to a large theatre or to rending paper, and the noise it makes when it flaps is riotous. Clothes swish through the air, rubbing my ears. Promptly I am quenched. I’m talking about a cheap paperback which fans and slips to the floor with a shush. Skirt stretched taut between new knees, head turned back, I hold down a branch,
Sometimes I want a corset like to harden me or garnish. I think of this stricture—rain language, building—as a corset: an outer ideal mould, I feel the ideal moulding me the ideal is now my surface just so very perfect I know where to buy it and I take it off. I take it off. If all things fall and we are just emperors, serious and accurate and fugitive in such dormant lines of gorgeousness the day is a locksmith dew lies long on the grass and I a rustic ask: what is a surface—and respond only omniscience, the crumpling face as the domestic emotions elucidate themselves a sea of mist exists so strangely side by side the potent mould of anarchy and scorn.
First all belief is paradise. So pliable a medium. A time not very long. A transparency caused. A conveyance of rupture. A subtle transport. Scant and rare. Deep in the opulent morning, blissful regions, hard and slender. Scarce and scant. Quotidian and temperate. Begin afresh in the realms of the atmosphere, that encompasses the solid earth, the terraqueous globe that soars and sings, elevated and flimsy. Bright and hot. Flesh and hue. Our skies are inventions, durations, discoveries, quotas, forgeries, fine and grand. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright. Heavenly and bright. The day pours out space, a light red roominess, bright and fresh. Bright and oft. Bright and fresh. Sparkling and wet. Clamour and tint. We range the spacious fields, a battlement trick and fast. Bright and silver. Ribbons and failings. To and fro. Fine and grand. The sky is complicated and flawed and we’re up there in it, floating near the apricot frill, the bias swoop, near the sullen bloated part that dissolves to silver the next instant bronze but nothing that meaningful, a breach of greeny-blue, a syllable, we’re all across the swathe of fleece laid out, the fraying rope, the copper beech behind the aluminum catalpa that has saved the entire spring for this flight, the tops of these a part of the sky, the light wind flipping up the white undersides of leaves, heaven afresh, the brushed part behind, the tumbling. So to the heavenly rustling. Just stiff with ambition we range the spacious trees in earnest desire sure and dear. Brisk and west. Streaky and massed. Changing and appearing. First and last. This was made from Europe, formed from Europe, rant and roar. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright. Crested and turbid. Silver and bright. This was spoken as it came to us, to celebrate and tint, distinct and designed. Sure and dear. Fully designed. Dear afresh. So free to the showing. What we praise we believe, we fully believe. Very fine. Belief thin and pure and clear to the title. Very beautiful. Belief lovely and elegant and fair for the footing. Very brisk. Belief lively and quick and strong by the bursting. Very bright. Belief clear and witty and famous in impulse. Very stormy. Belief violent and open and raging from privation. Very fine. Belief intransigent after pursuit. Very hot. Belief lustful and eager and curious before beauty.Very bright. Belief intending afresh. So calmly and clearly. Just stiff with leaf sure and dear and appearing and last. With lust clear and scarce and appearing and last and afresh.
I call my wife outdoors to have her listen,to turn her ears upward, beyond the cloud-veiled sky where the moon dances thin light,to tell her, “Don’t hear the cars on the freeway—it’s not the truck-rumble. It is and is notthe sirens.” She stands there, on decka rocking boat, wanting to please the captain who would have her hear the inaudible.Her eyes, so blue the day sky is envious,fix blackly on me, her mouth poised on question like a stone. But, she hears, after all. January on the Gulf, warm wind washing over us, we stand chilled in the winter of those voices.
Mother came to visit today. Wehadn’t seen each other in years. Why didn’tyou call? I asked. Your windows are filthy, she said. I know,I know. It’s from the dust and rain. She stood outside.I stood in, and we cleaned each one that way, staring into each other’s eyes, rubbing the white towel over our faces, rubbingaway hours, years. This is what it was likewhen you were inside me, she said. What? I asked,though I understood. Afterwards, indoors, she smelled like snowmelting. Holding hands we stood by the picture window,gazing into the December sun, watching the pines in flame.
It’s a motley lot. A few still standat attention like sentries at the endsof their driveways, but more leanaskance as if they’d just received a blowto the head, and in fact they’ve receivedmany, all winter, from jets of wet snowshooting off the curved, tapered bladeof the plow. Some look wobbly, cockedat oddball angles or slumping forlornlyon precariously listing posts. One boxbows steeply forward, as if in disgrace, its door lolling sideways, unhinged. Others are dented, battered, streaked with rust, bandaged in duct tape,crisscrossed with clothesline or bungee cords.A few lie abashed in remnants of the very snow that knocked them from their perches.Another is wedged in the crook of a treelike a birdhouse, its post shattered nearby.I almost feel sorry for them, worn outby the long winter, off-kilter, not knowingwhat hit them, trying to hold themselvestogether, as they wait for news from spring.
My father had our yard cemented over.He couldn’t tell a flower from a weed.The neighbors let their backyards run to cloverand some grew dappled gardens from a seed,but he preferred cement to rampant green. Lushness reeked of anarchy’s profusion. Better to tamp the wildness down, unseen,than tolerate its careless brash intrusion.The grass interred, he felt well satisfied:his first house, and he took an owner’s pride, surveying the uniform, cemented yard.Just so, he labored to cement his heart.
Come March we’d find them In the five-and-dimes, Furled tighter than umbrellas About their slats, the airIn an undertow above usLike weather on the maps. We’d play out linesOf kite string, tugging againstThe bucking sideways flights. Readied for assembly,I’d arc the tensed keel of balsa Into place against the crosspiece,Feeling the paper snap Tautly as a sheet, then lift The almost weightless body Up to where it hauled meTrolling into the winds— Knotted bows like vertebrae Flashing among fieldsOf light. Why ruin itBy recalling the aftermaths? Kites gone down in tatters, Kites fraying like flotsam From the tops of the trees.
It’s said they planted trees by graves to soak up spirits of the deadthrough roots into the growing wood. The favorite in the burial yardsI knew was common juniper.One could do worse than pass into such a species. I like to thinkthat when I’m gone the chemicalsand yes the spirit that was memight be searched out by subtle roots and raised with sap through capillaries into an upright, fragrant trunk,and aromatic twigs and bark,through needles bright as hoarfrost to the sunlight for a centuryor more, in wood repelling rotand standing tall with monumentsand statues there on the far hill,erect as truth, a testimony,in ground that’s dignified by loss,around a melancholy treethat’s pointing toward infinity.
The anthology of love poems I boughtfor a quarter is brittle, anyway, and comes apart when I read it.One at a time, I throw pages on the fire and watch smoke make its way upand out.I’m almost to the index when I heara murmuring in the street. My neighbors are watching it snow.I put on my blue jacket and join them. The children stand with their mouths open. I can see nouns—longing, rapture, bliss—
Two floors up, at the corner of Hearst and Shattuck, he’s clamped for good  in an iron lung. When it’s time to eat he nudges his head a sweaty mile to the edge of the pillow. It takes a while.   His brilliant bloodshot light-blue eyes steer me from cupboard to fridge:  he would like his chicken burrito cut into bite-size pieces,  a bent straw for his glass of water, please.    How does the body live its only life in a cage? I watch him compute the distance from bar to bar, and squeeze between them with a violent compression, a fury of bursting free that doesn’t last.    His will is a crowbar, angled to pry up  the rooted intractable weight of matter. I watch him slyly, I check out the way he does it. He does it. But pain in its absolute privacy  weighs what it weighs.   I come here to study the soul, posing one question  a dozen ways, most of them silent.  “If I’m only a body,” he laughs,  “I’m up shit creek.” His laugh  a gritty eruption of rock, salt and breath.   Like me he writes poems  but he does it letter by letter  on a propped keyboard, the mouth-stick wobbling between his teeth. That kind of speed keeps a poet accountable.  He won’t ever say, “The grass is very green” when it’s only green.
“Make flour into dough,” she answers, “and fire will turn it into food. Ash is the final abstraction of matter. You can just brush it away.”   She tacks a sheet of paper to the wall, dips her hand in a palette of flour and ash, applies the fine soft powders with a fingertip, highlighting in chalk and graphite, blending, blurring with her thumb. Today she is working in seven shades of gray.   Outside the door, day lilies in the high flush of summer- about-to-be-fall. Her garden burns red and yellow in the dry August air and is not consumed.   Inside, on the studio wall, a heavy particulate smoke thickens and rises. Footsteps grime the snow. The about-to-be-dead line up on the ramp with their boxy suitcases, ashen shoes.   When I get too close she yanks me back. She hovers over her creation though she too has a mind to brush against that world and wipe it out.
Apprehended and held without trial, our friend was sentenced:brain tumor, malignant. Condemned each day to wake and remember. Overnight, a wall sprang up around him, leaving the rest of us outside. Death passed over us this time. We’re still at large. We’re free to get out of bed, start the coffee, open the blinds. The first of the human freedoms. If he’s guilty we must be guilty; we’re all made of the same cup of dust— It’s a blessing, isn’t it? To be able, days at a time, to forget what we are.  * These numbered days have a concentrated sweetness that’s pressed from us, the dying man most of all. Today we eat brunch at Chester’s, poached egg on toast, orange juice foaming in frosted glasses. He remembers the summer he packed blood oranges, stripped to the waist, drinking the fresh-squeezed juice in the factory straight from the tap. He cups his left hand under his chin as if to a faucet, laughing. He is scooping sweetness from the belly of death —honey from the lion’s carcass. We sit with our friend and brood on the riddle he sets before us:What is it, this blood honey?  *
Lonnie didn’t want to eat with Clifford. I tried to keep my eyes away from his mouth, Which opened uncontrollably, His thick saliva oozing over him. And he couldn’t talk. So I ate my lunch with Lonnie, heard him talk About the dive which broke his neck, about His motorcycle shop in Chico, while Another nurse gave Clifford lunch.    Every day His parents came to push his chair around The grounds. A grim, determined pair; I wondered what disasters they had seen. The nurses talked with them about Their son. His eyes are beautiful, they said. One day a nurse who put her stethoscope To Clifford’s chest could not detect a beat. “His heart has stopped,” she said in quiet awe. The P.A. speakers cried: CODE BLUE, C-2, STAT! CODE BLUE, C-2, STAT! The doctors, nurses and technicians ran Into our crowded room. The squeaking Crash cart could not be heard above The urgent, human sounds the doctors made: A swirl of orders filled the air. “I need The mallet quick, goddamnit, QUICK, I said!” Encapsulated in my iron lung, I noted that doctors weren’t the calm Professionals portrayed by Robert Young And Richard Chamberlain, but people just As scared of death as everybody else. Then, they took me, iron lung and all, And parked me in a room Where women patients spend their lives.   The room was quiet as a stone; no clocks Or television sets marked the time, Which passed as slowly as Moses climbing Mount Sinai, Until the social worker, Mrs. Mintzer, Came to talk to me about Shakespeare. All his tragedies, She said, contain a point where things begin To fall apart. The bold protagonist, No matter what his cunning, skill or strength, Can see his fall foreshadowed by a small Event. Macbeth saw Banquo at the feast And after that it went from bad to worse Until the murd’rous thane became a corpse Without a head. She paused to think a while. Now Clifford led a fairly normal life, She pointed out, despite his cerebral palsy. Playing cards and camping with his family Were not beyond his reach. The point where things fell apart occurred Five years ago, when he fell and broke His shoulder bone. “Clifford died,” she said. And tried to comfort me with her sympathy For my awful loss. I didn’t mourn his death at all. “Too bad he died so young,” I said, At twenty-three.” But all I cared about Was the space in my crowded room. The p.m. nurses took me back into my room. I asked one to play my tape, Appalachian Spring. She reached into my bedside stand and slipped. “There’s blood all over the floor, Clifford’s. I thought they’d cleaned up all that mess.”   I spent the weekend after that in the solarium. I read and overheard the nurses in the next room. “They say he wrote exquisite poetry About the way he felt when people stared At him as if he were a freak.”    And so I learned of my insensitivity, Insensitivity so great I failed To recognize a person Caught in much the same predicament as I. Such numbness isolates me more Than any iron lung.
I scream The body electric, This yellow, metal, pulsing cylinder Whooshing all day, all night In its repetitive dumb mechanical rhythm. Rudely, it inserts itself in the map of my body, Which my midnight mind, Dream-drenched cartographer of terra incognita, Draws upon the dark parchment of sleep. I scream In my body electric; A dream snake bites my left leg. Indignant, I shake the gods by their abrupt shoulders, Demanding to know how such a vile slitherer Could enter my serene metal shell. The snake is punished with death, The specialty of the gods. Clamp-jawed still in my leg, It must be removed; The dream of the snake Must be removed, While I am restored By Consciousness, that cruelest of gods, In metal hard reluctance To my limited, awkward, déclasé Body electric, As it whispers promises of health, Whooshes beautiful lies of invulnerability, Sighs sibilantly, seraphically, relentlessly: It is me, It is me.      March, 1988
I tell my attendants,Right there, When they rub me where it itches. They rub for a few seconds, then move on, There’s so much of it to wash, “It” being me, a former person, Now something that must be washed every day In so little time. Fifty minutes outside my breathing machine, And all I can do is stare As my breath recedes like the woman Who would not love me. It’s almost over, I say over and over to myself As soon as the machine is turned off. An idiotic mantra perhaps, But it helps when the ache descends into my eyes And my words quit coming out right.Left hand, I say.Right foot? the attendant says, guessing. I begin to fantasize about gusts of air Rushing down my windpipe with hurricane force. Garish and impossible, they’re respiratory porn. My re-entry is stalled By the attendant straightening a sheet That no one will see. Enraged, I squeeze my eyes closed.Christ. “What?”Never mind. Once back in and turned on, I cough violently and with conviction. Shocked by the force of the inrushing air, I feel my lungs expand like birthday balloons, My terror-flattened mind pops up into 3-D, As I return to the land of breathing.   January, 1990
Grasping for straws is easier; You can see the straws. “This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,” Presses down upon me At fifteen pounds per square inch, A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean, Supporting the weight of condors That swim its churning currents. All I get is a thin stream of it, A finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection. Water wouldn’t be so circumspect; Water would crash in like a drunken sailor, But air is prissy and genteel, Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity. The vast, circumambient atmosphere Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky. I inhale it anyway, Knowing that it will hurt In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.      July, 1988
for George Schneeman New York’s lovely weather  hurts my forehead  in praise of thee  the? white dead  whose eyes know:  what are they  of the tiny cloud my brain: The City’s tough red buttons:  O Mars, red, angry planet, candy  bar, with sky on top,  “why, it’s young Leander hurrying to his death”  what? what time is it in New York in these here alps  City of lovely tender hate  and beauty making beautiful  old rhymes?  I ran away from you when you needed something strong  then I leand against the toilet bowl (ack)  Malcolm X  I love my brain  it all mine now is  saved not knowing  that &  that (happily)  being that:  “wee kill our selves to propagate our kinde”  John Donne  yes, that’s true  the hair on yr nuts & my  big blood-filled cock are a part in that  too  PART 2  Mister Robert Dylan doesn’t feel well today  That’s bad  This picture doesn’t show that  It’s not bad, too  it’s very ritzy in fact  here I stand I can’t stand  to be thing  I don’t use atop  the empire state  building  & so sauntered out that door That reminds me of the time I wrote that long piece about a gangster name of “Jr.” O Harry James! had eyes to wander but lacked tongue to praise  so later peed under his art  paused only to lay a sneeze  on Jack Dempsey  asleep with his favorite Horse    That reminds me of I buzz  on & off Miró pop  in & out a Castro convertible  minute by minute GENEROSITY!    Yes now that the seasons totter in their walk  I do a lot of wondering about Life in praise of ladies dead of & Time plaza(s), Bryant Park by the Public eye of brow Library, Smith Bros. black boxes, Times  Square  Pirogi Houses  with long skinny rivers thru them  they lead the weary away  off! hey!  I’m no sailor  off a ship  at sea I’M HERE  & “The living is easy” It’s “HIGH TIME”  & I’m in shapes  of shadow, they  certainly can warm, can’t they?  Have you ever seen one? NO!  of those long skinny Rivers  So well hung, in New York City  NO! in fact  I’m the Wonderer & as yr train goes by forgive me, René! ‘just oncet’ I woke up in Heaven  He woke, and wondered more, how many angels  on this train huh? snore  for there she lay  on sheets that mock lust done that 7 times  been caught  and brought back  to a peach nobody.  To Continue:  Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan  hates yr brain  my dears  amidst the many other little buzzes  & like, Today, as Ron Padgett might say  is  “A tub of vodka”  “in the morning”  she might reply and that keeps it up  past icy poles  where angels beg fr doom then zip  ping in-and-out, joining the army  wondering about Life  by the Public Library of  Life  No Greater Thrill!  (I wonder) Now that the earth is changing I wonder what time it’s getting to be  sitting on the New York Times Square  that actually very ritzy, Lauren it’s made of yellow wood or  I don’t know something maybe  This man was my it’s been fluffed up  friend  He had a sense for the  vast doesn’t he?    Awake my Angel! give thyself  to the lovely hours Don’t cheat  The victory is not always to the sweet.  I mean that. Now this picture is pretty good here Though it once got demerits from the lunatic Arthur Cravan He wasn’t feeling good that day Maybe because he had nothing on  paint-wise I mean  PART 3  I wrote that  about what is  this empty room without a heart  now in three parts  a white flower  came home wet & drunk 2 Pepsis  and smashed my fist thru her window  in the nude  As the hand zips you see  Old Masters, you can see  well hung in New York they grow fast here  Conflicting, yet purposeful  yet with outcry vain!  PART 4  Praising, that’s it! you string a sonnet around yr fat gut  and falling on your knees  you invent the shoe  for a horse. It brings you luck  while sleeping  “You have it seems a workshop nature” Have you “Good Lord!”  Some folks is wood seen them? Ron Padgett wd say  amidst the many other little buzzes  past the neon on & off  night & day STEAK SANDWICH  Have you ever tried one Anne? SURE!  “I wonder what time ‘its’?”  as I sit on this new Doctor NO I only look at buildings they’re in as you and he, I mean he & you & I buzz past  in yellow ties I call that gold  THE HOTEL BUCKINGHAM  (facade) is black, and taller than last time is looming over lunch naked high time poem & I, equal in  perfection & desire  is looming two eyes over coffee-cup (white) nature  and man: both hell on poetry.  Art is art and life is  “A monograph on infidelity”  Oh. Forgive me stench of sandwich  O pneumonia in American Poetry  Do we have time? well look at Burroughs  7 times been caught and brought back to Mars  & eaten. “Art is art & Life is home,” Fairfield Porter said that  turning himself in  Tonight arrives again in red some go on even in Colorado on the run  the forests shake  meaning:  coffee the cheerfulness of this poor  fellow is terrible, hidden in  the fringes of the eyelids’  blue mysteries (I’M THE SKY)  The sky is bleeding now  onto 57th Street  of the 20th Century &  HORN & HARDART’S  Right here. That’s PART 5  I’m not some sailor off a ship at sea I’m the wanderer (age 4)  & now everyone is dead  sinking bewildered of hand, of foot, of lip  nude, thinking laughter burnished brighter than hate  Goodbye.  André Breton said that  what a shit! Now he’s gone!  up bubbles all his amorous breath  & Monograph on Infidelity entitled  The Living Dream I never again played  I dreamt that December 27th, 1965  all in the blazon of sweet beauty’s breast  I mean “a rose” Do you understand that?  Do you? The rock&roll songs of this earth commingling absolute joy AND incontrovertible joy of intelligence  certainly can warm  can’t they? YES!  and they do  Keeping eternal whisperings around  (Mr. MacAdams writes in  the nude: no that’s not (we want to take the underground me that: then zips in &  revolution to Harvard!) out the boring taxis, re-  fusing to join the army  and yet this girl has asleep “on the springs”  so much grace of red GENEROSITY)  I wonder!  Were all their praises simply prophecies  of this  the time! NO GREATER THRILL  my friends  But I quickly forget them, those other times, for what are they  but parts in the silver lining of the tiny cloud my brain drifting up into smoke the city’s tough blue top:  I think a picture always  leads you gently to someone else Don’t you? like when you ask to leave the room  & go to the moon.
Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. Black hair, small cold eyes, whom you loved. Cock-tease Katherine, chewer of souls. The door blew open and she blew in, a ghoul. Black air, small cold wind, taking everything. Fish-eater Katherine, whose nails dig blood. I’m going to call her pinch-cunt, pickle-lip, piss-dribble, shit-smear, goat’s-meat breath. I want to throw stones at her mother’s corpse, send her children to name-change foster homes. May the coat she is wearing burst into flames and boil the flesh blistering off her bones. May she be refused in both heaven and hell and wander the earth forever without rest— a hungry ghost clinging to the rocks and trees.
At first you didn’t know me. I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous  at the edge of your vision. A flat, high voice, dark slash of hair across my cheekbone.  I made myself present, though never distinct. Things I said that he repeated, a tone  you could hear, but never trace, in his voice. Silence—followed by talk of other things.  When you would sit at your desk, I would creep near you like a question. A thought would scurry  across the front of your mind. I’d be there, ducking out of sight. You must have felt me  watching you, my small eyes fixed on your face, the smile you wondered at, on the lips only.  The voice on the phone, quick and full of business. All that you saw and heard and could not find  the center of, those days growing into years, growing inside of you, out of reach, now with you  forever, in your house, in your garden, in corridors of dream where I finally tell you my name.
It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast winds. I sleep beneath the roof’s steep pitch, my mattress flat on the boards, looking up at the high ceiling, where morning diffuses downward in grains of bright dust.  This was the old painter’s studio. The light in those famous canvases is still here —he couldn’t carry it away with him— though his paintings took away everything else, opening space with a stroke of blue or yellow. I think of his violent loves, the stories they still tell about him here. But how quiet and alive his paintings were, how they quiver with the life not yet realized.  The town is quiet in September. Sometimes I hear people talking in the street. Last night someone said they were going to wait for Michael, and a voice said that Michael had gone home. I walk the narrow path down to the marsh. Wind hard in the dunes. Rain as I’m returning, cutting through twisting streets, past gardens bent low with rain, their colors a wash of gold.  I feel the air surround my body, feel it move between my legs and between each finger, as I walk, not mastering space, but in it. And when the clouds open, the sky suddenly wide and high, no roof of leaves, it seems there’s nowhere to go but into wind or water. I climb the narrow stairs that keep turning, twisting inward until they meet the ceiling, which opens and I rise through the floor, released into an openness I never learn to expect.  At the yellow table I sit and read an interview with Picasso’s lover, Francoise Gilot, the only one to leave him and have another life. She says she was not destroyed by him, as the others were: “Because I am of the stuff that cannot be destroyed.” I felt something blow through me then. Some devouring wind. Surely, then, I am of the stuff that can be destroyed. Haven’t I felt it? The breaking of all I was? Don’t I sit and count my losses, here in this room where all the life I knew has ended, so bare with desire I seem to be eating sky?  That’s how it is here: I’m lonely, sad; the wind blows along the roof and I can’t sleep. Rain runs down the walls and streams across the floor, leaving dirty puddles on the boards. A yellow table and a cupboard painted blue, three chairs that don't match, or even balance rightly, a dented bucket, its metal reflecting darkly what is, what cannot be taken away. What’s beautiful here? The whole thing is beauty, a clarity not in things but around them, complete. And still,  I seem to remain, somehow, myself, to remain at least something, at a loss to know how much can be taken from me and leave me only changed, not ruined, alert in an emptiness so alive I recognized it as my life. What would be left, the shape of it then, this life? I said some beauty, or radiance, an endless space I fall into or am taken up by, a brightness that holds me, gathers light in the center of empty space, like a vision of the life I have not lived.
For ten years I would not say the name. I said: episode. Said: setback, incident, exacerbation—anything but be specific in the way this is specific, not a theory or description, but a diagnosis. I said: muscle, weakness, numbness, fatigue. I said vertigo, neuritis, lesion, spasm. Remission. Progression. Recurrence. Deficit.  But the name, the ugly sound of it, I refused. There are two words. The last one means: scarring. It means what grows hard, and cannot be repaired. The first one means: repeating, or myriad, consisting of many parts, increasing in number, happening over and over, without end.
1 FAT is the soul of this flesh. Eat with your hands, slow, you will understand breasts, why everyone adores them—Rubens’ great custard nudes—why we can’t help sleeping with pillows. The old woman in the park pointed,Is it yours? Her gold eye-teeth gleamed. I bend down, taste the fluted nipples, the elbows, the pads of the feet. Nibble earlobes, dip my tongue in the salt fold of shoulder and throat. Even now he is changing, as if I were licking him thin. 2 HE SQUEEZES his eyes tight to hide and blink! he’s still here. It’s always a surprise. Safety-fat, angel-fat, steal it in mouthfuls, store it away where you save the face that you touched for the last time over and over, your eyes closed so it wouldn’t go away. 3 WATCH HIM sleeping. Touch the pulse where the bones haven’t locked in his damp hair: the navel of dreams. His eyes open for a moment, underwater. His arms drift in the dark as your breath washes over him. Bite one cheek. Again. It’s your own life you lean over, greedy, going back for more.
We remember the rabbit when we see the duck, but we cannot experience both at the same time —E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion WHAT do you remember? When I looked at his streaky glasses, I wanted to leave him. And before that? He stole those cherries for me at midnight. We were walking in the rain and I loved him.And before that? I saw him coming toward me that time at the picnic, edgy, foreign. But you loved him? He sat in his room with the shades drawn, brooding. But youloved him? He gave me a photo of himself at sixteen, diving from the pier. It was summer. His arms outstretched. And before that? His mother was combing his soft curls with her fingers and crying. Crying. Is that what he said? He put on the straw hat and raced me to the barn. What did hetell you? Here’s the dried rose, brown as tobacco. Here’s the letter that I tore and pasted. The book of blank pages with the velvet cover. But do you still love him? When I rub the nap backwards, the colors lift, bristle. What do you mean? Sometimes, when I’m all alone, I find myself stroking it.
She was pretty swacked by the time she Put the spaghetti & meatballs into the orgy pasta  bowl—There was mixed salt & pepper in the “Tittie-tweak” pasta bowl—We drank some dago red  from glazed girlie demi-tasse cups—after which we engaged in heterosexual intercourse, mutual  masturbation, fellatio, & cunnilingus. For dessert we stared at a cupboard full of art critic  friends, sgraffitoed into underglazes on vases. We did have a very nice time.
for Shelley Oh you, the sprightliest & most puggish, the brightest star Of all my lively loves, all Ladies, & to whom once I gave up My heart entire, thenceforth yours to keep forever Locked up in your own heart’s tiniest room, my best hope, or To throw away, carelessly, at your leisure, should that prove Your best pleasure, Who is that dumpy matron, decked out in worn &  faded Shabby army fatigues which pooch out both before & behind, now  screeching Scoring me painfully in philistine Commedia dell’arte farce, low  summer fare Across a pedestrian Ferry’s stretch of water in some meshugganah Snug  Harbor And once more, even, fiercely pecking at me in the cold drab Parish  Hall of Manhattan’s Landmark Episcopal Church, where a once Avant-garde  now Grade School Poetry Project continues to dwell, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bouwerie,  whose Stones hold in tight grip one wooden leg & all of Peter Stuyvesant’s  bones?Who is that midget-witch who preens & prances as she flaunts her lost  wares, Otherwise hidden beneath some ancient boy’s flannel-shirt, its tail out & flapping, & who Is shrieking even now these mean words:  “Hey Ted!” “Hey, you Fat God!” & called me, “Fickle!” “Fickle!”  & she points a long boney finger at me, & croons, gleefully.  “Limbo!” “That's where you really live!” & She is claiming to be you    as she whispers, viciously,  “Alone, & In Pain, In Limbo, is where you live in your little cloud-9 home Ted! Pitiful!”  She has a small purse, & removing it from one of her  shopping bags She brings out from inside that small purse, my withered heart; & lifting it high into the air over her head with her two hands, she turns it upside  down unzips its fasteners, & shakes it out over the plywood floor, happily.  “Empty,” she cries loudly, “just like I always knew it would be!” “Empty!”  “Empty” “Empty”  I watch her, and think,  That’s not really you, up there, is it,  Rose? Rochelle? Shelley?  O, don’t be sad, little Rose! It’s still Your ribbon I wear, your favor tied to the grip of my lance, when I  ride out to give battle,  these golden days.
Nine stories high Second Avenue On the roof there’s a party All the friends are there watching By the light of the moon the blazing sun Go down over the side of the planet To light up the underside of Earth There are long bent telescopes for the friends To watch this through. The friends are all in shadow. I can see them from my bed inside my head. 44 years I’ve loved these dreams today. 17 years since I wrote for the first time a poem On my birthday, why did I wait so long?  my land a good land its highways go to many good places where many good people were found; a home land, whose song comes up from the throat of a hummingbird & it ends where the sun goes to across the skies of blue. I live there with you.
What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go some where else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me, I like to lay around of a Sunday and drink beer. I don’t feel a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean all the grown-ups in the world, they’re just playing house, all poets know that. How does your head feel? How I feel is what I think. I look at you today, & I expect you to look the same tomorrow. If you’re having a nervous breakdown, I’m not going to be looking at you like you’re going to die, because I don’t think you are. If you’re a woman you put yourself somewhere near the beginning and then there’s this other place you put yourself in terms of everybody. “The great cosmetic strange- ness of the normal deep person.” Okay. Those were those people—and I kept telling myself, I have to be here, because I don’t have a country. How tight is the string? And what is on this particular segment of it? And the photographer, being black, and the writer, me, being white, fell out at this point. And he didn’t want to look at it—I mean it’s nothing, just some drunk Indians riding Jersey milk cows—but I wanted to see it, I mean it was right in front of my eyes and I wanted therefore to look at it. And death is not any great thing, it’s there or it’s not. I mean God is the progenitor of religious impetuousity in the human beast. And Davy Crockett is right on that—I mean he’s gonna shoot a bear, but he’s not gonna shoot a train, because the train is gonna run right over him. You can’t shoot the train. And I always thought there was another way to do that. And it is necessary to do that and we bear witness that it is necessary to do it. The only distinction between men and women is five million shits.
to Doug & Jan Oliver “I order you to operate, I was not made to suffer.” Probing for old wills, and friendships, for to free to New York City, to be in History, New York City being History at that time.” “And I traded my nights for Intensity; & I barter my right to Gold; & I’d traded my eyes much earlier, when I was circa say seven years old for ears to hear Who was speaking, & just exactly who was being told….” & I’m glad  I hear your words so clearly  & I would not have done it  differently  & I’m amused at such simplicity, even so, inside each & every door. And now I’m with you, instantly, & I’ll see you tomorrow night, and I see you constantly, hopefully though one or the other of us is often, to the body-mind’s own self more or less out of sight! Taking walks down any streets, High Street, Main Street, walk past my doors! Newtown; Nymph Rd  (on the Mesa); Waveland Meeting House Lane, in old Southampton; or BelleVue Road  in England, etcetera Other roads; Manhattan; see them there where open or shut up behind  “I’ve traded sweet lines for answers …” They don’t serve me anymore.” They still serve me on the floor.  Or, as now, as floor. Now we look out the windows, go in &  out the doors. The Door. (That front door which was but & then at that time My door).  I closed it On the wooing of Helen. “And so we left schools for her.” For She is not one bit fiction; & she is easy to see;  & she leaves me small room For contradiction. And she is not alone; & she is not one bit  lonely in the large high room, & invention is just vanity, which is plain. She is the heart’s own body, the body’s own mind in itself  self-contained. & she talks like you; & she has created truly not single-handedly Our tragic thing, America. And though I would be I am not afraid  of her, & you also not. You, yourself, I, Me, myself, me. And no, we certainly have not pulled down  our vanity: but We wear it lightly here,  here where I traded evenly,  & even gladly health, for sanity; here  where we live day-by-day  on the same spot. My English friends, whom I love & miss, we talk to ourselves here,  & we two rarely fail to remember, although we write seldom, & so must seem  gone forever. In the stained sky over this morning the clouds seem about to burst  What is being remembering Is how we are, together. Like you we are always bothered, except  by the worst; & we are living  as with you we also were fired, only, mostly, by changes in the weather. For Oh dear hearts, When precious baby blows her fuse / it’s just our way  of keeping amused. That we offer of & as excuse. Here’s to you. All the very best.  What’s your pleasure? Cheers.
to Michael Lally You had your own reasons for getting In your own way. You didn’t want to be Clear to yourself. You knew a hell Of a lot more than you were willing  to let yourself know. I felt Natural love for you on the spot. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Right. Beautiful. I don’t use the word lightly. I Protested with whatever love (honesty) (& frontal nudity) A yes basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode  Island New Englander is able to manage. You Are sophisticated, not uncomplicated, not Naïve, and Not simple. An Entertainer, & I am, too. Frank O’Hara respected love, so do you, & so do we. He was himself & I was me. And when we came together Each ourselves in Iowa, all the way That was love, & it still is, love, today. Can you see me In what I say? Because as well I see you know In what you have to say, I did love Frank, as I do You, “in the right way”. That’s just talk, not Logos,  a getting down to cases: I take it as simple particulars that  we wear our feelings on our faces.
for Jim Carroll, on his birthday A lovely body gracefully is nodding Out of a blue Buffalo  Monday morning  curls softly rising color the air  it’s yellow above the black plane  beneath a red tensor   I’ve been dreaming. The telephone kept ringing & ringing Clear & direct, purposeful yet pleasant, still taking pleasure in bringing the good news, a young man in horn-rims’ voice  is speaking while I listen. Mr. Berrigan, he says, & without waiting for an answer  goes on, I’m happy to be able to inform you that your request for  a Guggenheim Foundation Grant Has been favorably received by the committee, & approved. When  would you like to leave?   Uh, not just yet, I said, uh, what exactly did I say with regards to  leaving, in my application … I’m a little hazy at the moment.   Yes. Your project, as outlined in your application for a grant for the  purpose of giving Jim Carroll the best possible birthday present you could get  him, through our Foundation, actually left the project, that is,  how the monies would be spent, up to us. You indicated, wisely, I think, that we knew  more about what kind of project we would approve than you did,  so we should make one up for you, since all you wanted was money, to buy Jim a  birthday gift.   Aha! I said. So, what’s up?   We have arranged for you and Jim to spend a year in London, in a  flat off of King’s Row. You will receive 250 pounds a month expenses, all travel expenses  paid, & a clothing allowance of 25 pounds each per month.  During the year, At your leisure, you might send us from time to time copies of your  London works. By year’s end I’m sure you each will have enough  new poems for two books, Which we would then publish in a deluxe boxed hardcover edition,  for the rights to which we shall be prepared to pay a considerable  sum, as is your due. We feel that this inspired project will most surely result in The first  major boxed set of works since Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry  Finn! Innocents Abroad in reverse, so to speak! We know your poems, yours & Jim’s, will tell it  like it is, & that is what we are desperate to know! So, when  would you like to leave? Immediately, I shouted! & Jim! I called, Jim! Happy Birthday! Wake up!
Pat Dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947.   Ed Berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958.   Dickie Budlong……..my best friend Brucie’s big brother, when we were  five to eight……..killed in Korea, 1953.   Red O’Sullivan……..hockey star & cross-country runner  who sat at my lunch table  in High School……car crash…...1954.   Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan……..my friend, in High School,  Football & Hockey All-State……car crash….1959.   Cisco Houston……..died of cancer……..1961.   Freddy Herko, dancer….jumped out of a Greenwich Village window  in 1963.   Anne Kepler….my girl….killed by smoke-poisoning while playing  the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital   during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist….1965.   Frank……Frank O’Hara……hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966.   Woody Guthrie……dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968.   Neal……Neal Cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night  in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969.   Franny Winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the Detroit-Ann Arbor  Freeway, returning from the dentist….Sept. 1969.   Jack……Jack Kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969.   My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now.
a.) When I was twelve, I lived on the grounds of a mental asylum.     b). My Filipino mother was a psychiatrist, so that meant we lived in the doctor’s quarters— one of the three big brick houses that edged the institute.     c). My younger sister and I practiced Herkies— our favorite cheerleading jumps— off the patients’ bleachers near the softball field.     d). When I was twelve, I aced the experiments with celery and food coloring; they let me skip a whole grade and get right to The Dissections.     e). I secretly wished my supply of grape Bubble Yum would never run out but I couldn’t figure out how to blow bubbles and snap the lavender gum like Sara could.     f). We sold gift wrap and crystals for a junior high fund-raiser and my mom still asksWhere are all the crystals I bought? andWhy don’t you display them in your house?  g). When I was twelve, I worried about the darkening hair on my legs. My mother bought me my first training bra— no cup, just little triangle pieces stitched together— and then a slice of New York-style cheesecake to bring home.  h). Home.  i). When I was twelve, our house always smelled of fried lumpia or ginger.     j). We had zinnias as wide as my outstretched hand nodding at us in our garden.     k). My school had to create a whole new bus stop just for my sister and me, and everyone stopped talking and stared when we stepped onto the bus each morning, smelling of grape gum and ginger roots.     l.) Just who are these girls?
(a found poem, composed entirely of e-mails from various high school students) If I were to ask you a question about your book and sum it up into one word it would be, Why? I think I like Walt Whitman better than you. I just don't get literature, but for a fast hour and a half read, your book   takes the cake. I like how you organized the lines in that one poem to represent a growing twisting bonsai tree. Are you going to get a rude reaction when you meet that one guy in that one poem? I guess you never know.   You are very young to be a poet. I also like how your poems take up an entire page (it makes our reading assignment go faster). In class we spend so much time dissecting your poems and then deeply analyzing them. I think I like Walt Whitman   better than you, but don’t take offense—you are very good too! You are young, You are young and pure and really just want to have a good time. Thank you we have taken a debate and you are a far better poet than Walt Whitman. And I loved   how your poems were easy to read and understand. Hello my name is Alicia. We read you book and I just loved it. We also read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. There was no competition there. I liked your book a whole lot better.   It was an easy read. But poetry is not my favorite type of literature. Sometimes I am offered drinks and guys try to talk to me but I too just brush it off and keep dancing. Every once and a while the creepy mean guys try to offer you   things and then they say something. What would you do? Lastly, I was wondering if you ever wrote a poem that really didn’t have a deeper meaning but everyone still tried to give it one anyways? Walt Whitman is better than you.
If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick, the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse— then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance, bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them— and when I say I am married, it means I marriedall of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves. Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single one of them wonders what time I am coming home.
Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for  four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for  world peace and eternal salvation.   —Reuters  He started small: fasting here and there, days, then weeks. Once, he stood under a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting  for nothing—not even to sleep. It came  to him in a dream: You must roll on this earth, spin your heart in rain, desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab  any cuts from the day before, and lay prone  on the road while his twelve men swept  the ground in front of him with sisal brooms.  Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man  rolling through puddles, past storefronts where children would throw him pieces of butter candy he’d try and catch in his mouth at each rotation. His men  swept and sang, swept and sang  of jasmine-throated angels  and pineapple slices in kulfi cream.  He rolled and rolled. Sometimes  in his dizzying spins, he thought  he heard God. A whisper, but still.
When it comes to clothes, make an allowance for the unexpected. Be sure the spare in the trunk of your station wagon with wood paneling   isn’t in need of repair. A simple jean jacket says Hey, if you aren’t trying to smugglerare Incan coins through this peacefullittle town and kidnap the local orphan,  I can be one heck of a mellow kinda guy. But no matter how angry a man gets, a smile and a soft stroke on his bicep can work wonders. I learned that male chests  also have nipples, warm and established— green doesn’t always mean envy. It’s the meadows full of clover and chicory the Hulk seeks for rest, a return  to normal. And sometimes, a woman gets to go with him, her tiny hands correcting his rumpled hair, the cuts in his hand. Green is the space between  water and sun, cover for a quiet man, each rib shuttling drops of liquid light.
I’ve noticed after a few sips of tea, the tip of her tongue, thin and red with heat, quickens when she describes her cuts and bruises—deep violets and red.   The little girl I baby-sit, hair orange and wild, sits splayed and upside down on a couch, insists her giant book of dinosaurs is the only one she’ll ever read.   The night before I left him, I could not sleep, my eyes fixed on the freckles of his shoulder, the glow of the clock, my chest heavy with dread.   Scientists say they’ll force a rabbit to a bird, a jellyfish with a snake, even though the pairs clearly do not mix. Some things are not meant to be bred.   I almost forgot the weight of a man sitting beside me in bed sheets crumpled around our waists, both of us with magazines, laughing at the thing he just read.   He was so charming—pointed out planets, ghost galaxies, an ellipsis of ants on the wall. And when he kissed me goodnight, my neck reddened.   I’m terrible at cards. Friends huddle in for Euchre, Hearts—beg me to play with them. When it’s obvious I can clearly win with a black card, I select a red.   I throw away my half-finished letters to him in my tiny pink wastebasket, but my aim is no good. The floor is scattered with fire hazards, declarations unread.
You elbow me with your corduroy jacket when a box chock-full of antique marbles comes up. I can’t hear your whispers above the auctioneer’s racket.   The clipped speech of the auctioneer cracked me up when you impersonated him in bed. Like a wild, thick mop I soak up every copper smell from your corduroy jacket.   In two days, I will drive you to the airport, packed with other couples pressed tightly at the top of the escalator. Lines sear my cheek from your corduroy jacket   when we hug—then a quick kiss good-bye tacked on at the end. I’ll finger the rim on the paper coffee cup you leave in my car. When I hear your name I can’t forget   how your long torso pressed against my bare back, bluish in this early light. Your fingers shot into me, popped my spine into a wicked arch. There is no lack   of how it haunts me still—what I bid—lost, sacked and wrapped for other girls. I should have looked up to see who else was bidding, but I studied the folds in your jacket. My limit is spent, loud and certain as the auctioneer’s racket.
Periyar Nature Preserve There is no crumbly frozen cake to thaw. Today, we are in the jungle. I mean mosquito. I mean   tigers and elephants sludging their way to the lake for a drink and Don’t make sudden moves   or snakes startled from an afternoon nap will greet you fang first. I think we are lost. Too hot   for any cold confection to survive. Even my tube of sunblock is as warm as a baby’s bottle. You get   to those places I can’t reach, those places I dared not even whisper before I walked down the aisle   in white. You never worried if our families would clash, if they would clang like the clutch   of pale monkeys clanging the thin branches of the treetrops, begging for our trail mix. You never worried   about my relatives staring at your pale, muscled calves— things not usually seen outside of the bedroom. You wore   hiking shorts anyway. And still, they lavished ladle-fuls of food on your plate. I think we are lost. My eyes are dark   and wet as that wild deer that walked right past us, a little off the trail. I think we are lost, but for once   I don't mind. Eventually you turn us back to a place not on any map, but I know I can trace it back with my finger   if we ever need it again. We made it one year without a compass and we’re not about to start now.
don’t expect too much.   Well I expect you to go into the fucking human tunnel I’m going.   pink grimy glossed entabulature, welted and tattooed. Enfolded in ropy ceiling-hangings but it isn’t a room,   and bumblingly sliding out, little legs of   a little girl, bum on the wall/opening   pink legs sticking out like a hermit crab’s, she’s coming!   shudder out the little-girl legs with a little girl head mostly eyes, no ears, bug brain, aimless   Send her to school   It’s cold, and where should she go, she will eat her legs with her mandibles   her eyes will retract inside.   Stroke her riding hood Settle down, little   nobody will hurtcha   by breaking off your little legs, six little legs, if you come.
Stepping over the stones of my mother, chicken bones, straw,   the cellar in which the man was found, that man my grandfather   the day the sharecroppers left town, their son shot dead —   the thing whiskey’ll do to a man.   The woman who waited under the house at night, counting ghosts and bobcats through lattice of leaves,   walking bare-boned lanes, toes buried beneath blackened leaves —   no cause for worry if you’ve walked every acre, planted every row.   Nothing can get you if you pay it no mind.   I tell you these things so you’ll not mistake my actions for fear,   not think I do not know what makes a life, what makes people do the things they do.   I know my fears — I’ve named them, counted them out one by one   like tarot cards, voodoo dolls:   birth, death, poverty, obscurity, that you will leave me, or I will leave you.
I had a fascination with your dresses — the greens, brocades, the belted shapes which spoke of you more poignantly than the photos in their careful frames.   Your shoes were their own country, the heels, satins, the inexplicable mud — I scraped them with small fingernails, marveling at the gorgeous debris, wishing I had a microscope.   I searched your handbags, examined them for signs, evidence — where you were going, where you had been: tickets, lipstick, inked hieroglyphics, a broken comb.   I even smelled your stockings, sniffing at the crotches like a dog, frantic for any trace of you, my eyes raking their length, wondering at ladders, searching for clues.   My father came upon me once, cross-legged on the floor, his sad smile telling me more than any detection — he took my hand, and closed the door.
My eyes lie flat in my skull, darkened, bruised   lashes whip-stitched to swollen lids – sleep has once again been elusive.   My organs weigh more than they did the day before,   swollen with unhappiness, gorged on regret:   tiny fists in my stomach pummeling the hanging ball of my heart.
The Emperor thought of his heart as a water wheel flooding the rice fields of all creation and bloodied the water for a better harvest. His warriors hoped for a life with wings. His swallowtails wrote him the same lines —the secret of life is a resurrected worm— He told them eventually time would run backwards in their hands, now empty where a crossbow went. A theory works if it answers the exceptions. The writing in the air of swallowtails, from here to where the time changes at Mexico Beach, is like writing all the armies of the afterlife waiting underground in China. We are attuned to shadows. They strafe the shore. An osprey spins above the trees. But when a large one stops suddenly above the house, all the laws have been broken. A theory that a moment is a warehouse where armies are stacked to the ceiling, then one falls, is the last exception. The osprey’s underside is streaked like a zebra swallowtail. It misses the fish that dove out of the reach of shadows as the lovers jumped into theirs from the Bay Bridge to Fort Walton. If any should meet hovering over a milkweed or reflection, they might say didn’t I know you in another life, the kind of thing said often in Fort Walton or the Orient and didn’t plum blossoms freeze in the Emperor’s courtyard.
The intriguing comfort of an imagined past is entered through objects the same way we continue the present but without nostalgia Parents so long for happiness they say one life is not enough and live through their children But children also live backwards through past candles crank telephones carriages the ascendant animals that lived not in imagination but in Kansas and before there was an Oklahoma with its spotted sun   In those days a metaphor for Hell was the corn sheller field corn shriven shooting out cobs the grindstone razor strop even the ladder of progress from which Les Westfield slipped on a mossy rung though his son held the ladder and fell two stories: one the feudal structure of the family two the harmonic of almost fatal necessity as the maple stump entered his hip along with the difficult remission of breath itself an antique whose furious elaborations mimicked the rose
Numanah, Grandfather, grant me the grace of a new song far from this lament of lame words and fossils of a losing game. No more flat pebbles skimmed between the wetness of tongue and thigh and eye again! I never asked to be the son of a stained mattress who contemplated venison stew and knew the shame hidden in grease clouds stuck to the wall behind the woodstove where Grandmother cooked. I only wanted to run far, so far from Indian land. And, God damn it, when I was old enough I did. I loitered in some great halls of ivy and allowed the inquisition of education: electric cattle prods placed lovingly to the lobes of my earth memories. I carried the false spirit force of sadness wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket of a worn, tweed coat. In junkie alleyways I whispered of forgotten arrows in the narrow passages of my own discarded history. Then, when I was old enough I ran back to Indian land. Now I’m thinking of running from here.   Pine Ridge, South Dakota  February 1988
I flew into Denver April. Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt reflecting myself on a downtown street where I’d paused on my route to smell lilacs. The wanton winds chortled wickedly over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom and my heart soared gladly at winter’s death but an hour later I had whiskey breath at a dead end bar full of Indians. A Winnebago woman waltzed with me and told me how handsome I truly was so I bought her drinks and felt her hips and somewhere between the grinds and dips she lifted my wallet and split.
The whit’ning ground In frost is bound; The snow is swiftly falling; While coldly blows the northern breeze, And whistles through the leafless trees, In hollow sounds appalling. On this cold plain, Now reach’d with pain, Once stood my father’s dwelling: Where smiling pleasure once was found, Now desolation frowns around, And wintry blasts are yelling. Hope’s visions wild My thoughts beguil’d, My earliest days delighting, Till unsuspected treach’ry came, Beneath affection’s specious name, The lovely prospect blighting. With many a wile Of blackest guile Did Henry first deceive me: What winning words to him were giv’n! He swore, by all the pow’rs of Heav’n, That he would never leave me. With fondest truth I lov’d the youth: My soul, to guilt a stranger, Knew not, in those too simple hours, That oft beneath the sweetest flow’rs Is couch’d the deadliest danger. With him to roam I fled my home; I burst the bonds of duty; I thought my days in joy would roll; But Henry hid a demon’s soul Beneath an angel’s beauty! Shall this poor heart E’er cease to smart? Oh never! never! never! Did av’rice whisper thee, or pride, False Henry! for a wealthier bride To cast me off for ever? My sire was poor: No golden store Had he, no earthly treasure: I only could his griefs assuage, The only pillar of his age, His only source of pleasure. With anguish wild, He miss’d his child, And long in vain he sought her: The fiercest thunder-bolts of heav’n Shall on thy guilty head be driv’n, Thou Disobedient Daughter! I feel his fears, I see his tears, I hear his groans of sadness: My cruel falsehood seal’d his doom: He seems to curse me from the tomb, And fire my brain to madness! Oh! keenly blow, While drifts the snow, The cold nocturnal breezes; On me the gath’ring snow-flakes rest, And colder grows my friendless breast; My very heart-blood freezes! ‘Tis midnight deep, And thousands sleep, Unknown to guilt and sorrow; They think not of a wretch like me, Who cannot, dare not, hope to see The rising light to-morrow! An outcast hurl’d From all the world, Whom none would love or cherish, What now remains to end my woes, But here, amid the deep’ning snows, To lay me down and perish? Death’s icy dart Invades my heart: Just Heav’n! all-good! all-seeing! Thy matchless mercy I implore, When I must wake, to sleep no more, In realms of endless being!
The day has pass’d in storms, though not unmix’d With transitory calm. The western clouds, Dissolving slow, unveil the glorious sun, Majestic in decline. The wat’ry east Glows with the many-tinted arch of Heav’n. We hail it as a pledge that brighter skies Shall bless the coming morn. Thus rolls the day, The short dark day of life; with tempests thus, And fleeting sun-shine chequer’d. At its close, When the dread hour draws near, that bursts all ties, All commerce with the world, Religion pours Hope’s fairy-colors on the virtuous mind, And, like the rain-bow on the ev’ning clouds, Gives the bright promise that a happier dawn Shall chase the night and silence of the grave.
Oui, pour jamais Chassons l’image De la volage Que j’adorais. PARNY. Matilda, farewell! Fate has doom’d us to part, But the prospect occasions no pang to my heart; No longer is love with my reason at strife, Though once thou wert dearer, far dearer than life. As together we roam’d, I the passion confess’d, Which thy beauty and virtue had rais’d in my breast; That the passion was mutual thou mad’st me believe, And I thought my Matilda could never deceive. My Matilda! no, false one! my claims I resign: Thou canst not, thou must not, thou shalt not be mine: I now scorn thee as much as I lov’d thee before, Nor sigh when I think I shall meet thee no more. Though fair be thy form, thou no lovers wilt find, While folly and falsehood inhabit thy mind, Though coxcombs may flatter, though ideots may prize, Thou art shunn’d by the good, and contemn’d by the wise. Than mine what affection more fervent could be, When I thought ev’ry virtue was center’d in thee? Of the vows thou hast broken I will not complain, For I mourn not the loss of a heart I disdain. Oh! hadst thou but constant and amiable prov’d As that fancied perfection I formerly lov’d, Nor absence, nor time, though supreme their controul, Could have dimm’d the dear image then stamp’d on my soul. How bright were the pictures, untinted with shade, By Hope’s glowing pencil on Fancy pourtray’d! Sweet visions of bliss! which I could not retain; For they, like thyself, were deceitful and vain. Some other, perhaps, to Matilda is dear, Some other, more pleasing, though not more sincere; May he fix thy light passions, now wav’ring as air, Then leave thee, inconstant, to shame and despair! Repent not, Matilda, return not to me: Unavailing thy grief, thy repentance will be: In vain will thy vows or thy smiles be resum’d, For love, once extinguish’d, is never relum’d.
While those bewitching hands combine, With matchless grace, the silken line, They also weave, with gentle art, Those stronger nets that bind the heart. But soon all earthly things decay: That net in time must wear away: E’en Beauty’s silken meshes gay No lasting hold can take: But Beauty, Virtue, Sense, combin’d, (And all these charms in thee are join’d) Can throw that net upon the mind, No human art can e’er unbind, No human pow’r can break.
I. Ille Ego Oh! list to me: for I’m about To catch the fire of Chaucer, And spin in doleful measure out The tale of Johnny Raw, sir; Who, bent upon a desperate plan To make the people stare, Set off full speed for Hindoostan Upon Old Poulter’s mare. Tramp! tramp! across the land he went; Splash! splash! across the sea; And then he gave his bragging vent— “Pray who can ride like me? “For I’m the man, who sallied forth To rout the classic forces, And swore this mare was far more worth Than both fierce Hector’s horses. “Old Homer from his throne I struck, To Virgil gave a punch, And in the place of both I stuck The doughty Mother Bunch, “To France I galloped on my roan, Whose mettle nought can quail; There squatted on the tomb of Joan, And piped a dismal tale. “A wild and wondrous stave I sung, To make my hearers weep: But when I looked, and held my tongue, I found them fast asleep! “Oh! then, a furious oath I swore, Some dire revenge to seek; And conjured up, to make them roar, Stout Taffy and his leek. “To Heaven and Hell I rode away, In spite of wind and weather: Trumped up a diabolic lay; And cursed them all together. “Now, Proteus! rise, thou changeful seer! To spirit up my mare: In every shape but those appear, Which Taste and Nature wear.”
But it’s too late to say you’re sorry. — The Zombies  I   Man, if you’re dead, why are you leading me to drink after five sober years? Sonny, can I get a witness? I had a Snow White vision of the prodigal son returning to America that day of my final hangover. I tried to clear the mixture of cobwebs and shooting stars from my brain with spit-warm Budweiser, but the hair of the dog just was not doing the trick. I ended up pummeling myself seven times that day and named each egg white load for a Disney dwarf. The first was Dopey. The final was Sleepy, I think, or Droopy.    II   Last year you scrawled a letter to me about your first and final visit to the Vietnam Memorial and how your eyes reflected off the shiny black stone and shot back into your brain like guidons unfurling the stench of cordite and the boy screams of men whose souls evaporated into morning mists over blue-green jungles. You had to be there, you said. That’s where you caught the cancer, you said.    III   Sonny. Tonight I had a dream of Mom’s death twenty years too late and now my eyes will not close like I imagine the lid on her cheap casket did. I was not there when she died. Home on leave from Basic Training, you stood in for me because I was running scared through the drugged-out alleys of America, hiding from those Asian shadows that would finally ace you and now, now in the dark victory of your Agent Orange cancer, it gives me not one ounce of ease to say fuck Nixon and Kissinger, fuck all the generals and all the armies of God and fuck me, twenty years too late.    IV   History is history and thank God for that. When we were wise-ass American boys in our fifth grade geography class, we tittered over the prurient-sounding waves of Lake Titticaca … Titti … ca-ca and we never even had the slightest clue that Che was camping outen las montañas de Bolivia …  We never knew American chemists would kill you slicker than slant-eyed bullets.    V   Damn Sonny. Five sober years done squeaked by like a silent fart and I’m on autopilot, sitting in a bar hoisting suds with ghosts, yours and my slowly evolving own. When we were seventeen with fake I.D.’s, we got into the Bucket of Blood in Virginia City and slurped sloe gin fizzes while the innocent jukebox blared “She’s Not There” by the Zombies. Later that drunken night you puked purple splotches onto my new, white Levis and a short, few years into your future this lost nation would award you two purple hearts, one of which your mother pressed into my hand that bright day we filed you under dry desert dirt.
Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you.  The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every damn column, says the grasshoppers this year “are as big as Buicks” and that’s not bad, but then we get two eight-point pages of who had dinner with whom at the bowling alley café and who went shopping at Target in Rapid City and thus the high church of Adrian the Obscure is sacked.  Even my old Dylan tapes are fading, becoming near-comic antiques. The grasshoppers are destroying our yard and they’re as big as my middle finger saluting God. The grass is yellow. The trees look like Agent Orange has hit but it’s only the jaw-work of those drab armored insects who dance in profusion and pure destruction.  Sweet woman, dear love of my life, when you’re not angry and sputtering at everything and everyone, you become so childlike, so pure. Your voice seems to have grown higher recently, almost a little-girl pitch.  Today, like most days, I have you home for your two-hour reprieve from the nursing home prison. We’re sitting at the picnic table in the backyard staring at the defoliation of lilacs, brain matter, and honeysuckle. You’re eating a Hershey Bar and a crystal glob of snot is hanging from your nose. I reach over, pinch it off, and wipe it on my jeans. You thrust the last bite of chocolate into my mouth as a demented grasshopper jumps onto your ear. You scream. I howl with laughter until you do too. Happiness comes with a price.  This is the times of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my swarming love for you.  Last night on PBS some lesioned guy being screwed to death by legions of viral invisibility blurted the great cliché of regret:I wish I could be twentyagain and know whatI know now …  My own regrets are equally foolish. And, I wonder, how the hell is it I’ve reached a place where I’d give what’s left of my allotment of sunsets and frozen dinners for some unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place?   Darling, in the baked soil of the far west, I first saw the ant lions, those hairy little bugs who dug funnel traps for ants in the dry earth. At twelve, looking over the edge of one such funnel surrounded by a circle of tiny stones in the sand, I aimed a beam of white light from my magnifying glass and found I could re-create a hell of my own accord.   Poverty and boredom made me cruel early on. The next summer while digging postholes I found a cache of those grotesque yellow bugs we called Children of the Earth so I piled matches atop them and barbecued their ugliness. I was at war with insects.   In my fifteenth summer I got covered with ticks in the sagebrush and that fall I nervously lost my cherry in a cathouse called the Green Front and got cursed with crabs but that’s not what I want to sing about at all… come on now.This is no bug progression.This ain’t no insect sonata.  This is only misdirection, a sleight of hand upon the keys and the unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place that I’d like to return to will remain myth or maybe a holy, tumescent mystery.   And let’s not call these bloodwords POETRY or a winter count of desperate dreams when reality is much simpler.   Colleen, I swear to Christ this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my sparkling love for you.
Some places you could die in,  if you could just go on  living there. The boy, his legs bare and small, swinging in the stroller, sockless, suede-shoed feet touching the runner. He can walk, but the woman keeps him from running into the street. He won’t obey but listens to everything we say. Head tilted, face changing with the conversation. Green leaves leap through fences. Cars wait while we cross. And each bird the boy greets with its name, “Bird,” flies away. The sky holds everything.   The woman pushes her son’s son along. Her arms strong enough  to hold nine strong horses prancing. She’s given her money away because someone had to bury a child. That is the worst thing. A mother burying her child.   I would never do that to her, even though it means what it means. A thousand years from now when I am only a dream I will dream this dream of strolling. Perhaps I am doing so now.
In the redcoat she (who is I) was an angel, dark and bright.   Mama chose the drama: pretty scarlet to subdue the white walk, a world dumb with snow,   patentleather shoes to shine the path over ice. My   father paid the way. His teeth salt inside the grin.   I (who’s she) had a manner of leaping toward a light suddenly running into ecstasy or heat, exquisitely blind in the body racing inside it- self. A little fit of imagining.   Thin arms, cropped wings, to hold the bristly branches of fir, and sing- ing, sisters and brothers itching, happy from angelhair fine as a strand of cat hair split six ways and brushed into the skin to itch and itch again. We were wild and giddy with gifts.   It was then and always as all souls itch and spin in lit-red coats that float down this narrow vein, so we spin in O, to someone who loves us and suffers the world for each turn before a mirror, quiet as ice, we fall all through at last here in memory’s tiny Paradise.
On the other end of the line he sounds like my brother but is my father telling me about Coony who is fat. His whole body like a stomach round all round, fat even on his head. Eighty and heavy. How he joked Coony about his weight, joking him about a tow truck he’d need to haul him out of the tub like an old sunken ship pulled out of the gulf of blues, leaving whirlpools in the porcelain.   “Quit all that eating and drinking,” my daddy say he said to him. “Quit pointing in that garden and reach down to get it.” My daddy say he joked him, ribbed him good. (And I know my daddy laughed gap-toothed, his mouth, throat, chest, and gut wide open for the signifying jest. His gray hair striking back time.)   He sounds like my brother when he was a little boy, digging in the encyclopedia for the cause of something obscure, occult, trying to figure out how old Coony slipped in the bathtub that was always there and died like that. Baby Sister called to tell it first and she wasn’t joking after all like my daddy thought she was, Death a sad trick children pull.   On the other end of the line my father sounds like my brother now. I know how Dying, bitter or tender, is the dark water that keeps us young. And this gulf of blues, deep and shiny, the only place to be between Time and Eternity.
with respect to Zora and the Ground of the African Church Sorrowtalked eye-to-eye forgiven is no mere burden. The one who sings is no mere beast. The one who slips the harness of the horror stands alive  as earth.  Today I can watch the wind and it is blue smoke. I shake myself inside my dress, consider rain and choose  Shine. I was walking down Mississippi River Street  and a ghost stopped me. No one could see it but me, standing in the middle of the sidewalk smilin at a haint with his hat in his hand  instead of his head when he can tote that too.   When one mule die  the rest neigh-cry  till the wagon take the dead thing away.    Mississippi River Street rampant with noise,  radiant, won’t hold still.  But I have walked on blue black water.  Watched dead rise before the wagon came.   Everywhere I see mules,  open mouths sing blues, then be human, then  beyond.  Funerals, weddings, baptisms I take off my skin, hang it up like a soaked quilt to dry the tears and sweat from feeling. I stand naked before Church, holding Dr. Watts closer than my sagging, girlish breasts. My soul wears no clothes when she sing. It is all being in love with more than one man who is one whole man you can look into his eyes without blinking.   Where would I go to hide? Dr. Watts standing with my skin hooked on his finger and I am next to him solid and living the song  with no words . that every born-again mule knew in death and in life  before birth, now hums true again hot in the chest and throat breaking natural out the mouth like breathing.   Where would I go to hide? Sit down, rock my soul like my baby and Dr. Watts climb in my lap and moan for the milk no mother can buy  or borrow only make in hearts of her eyes, in lines of the palms  of her hands. And where would I find lines with no skin?   Where would I go to hide? I tell you I am living now. Like in Mississippi Grandmama’s bedroom sitting on the high bed  you could break  your neck leaving. Cousin Chubby said fried fish, greens, and cornbread was good eatin. I am good livin. Blue smoke watching, naked, haint-smiling, entertaining Dr. Watts, dreaming of a man with a white liver who can’t kill me, who love mulish women, hainted ones,  I am the sainted one naked with no sense of memory but good like God rocking hums in my lap and looking for no hiding place even if wind be blue smoke hurricane and I make red milk in the hearts of my eyes and reach out my lifelines to a hopeless haint I can stand myself.  Naked now, where would I want to go to hide? From this funeral wedding death and birth baptism the sliding tears washing my soul cleaner than Dr. Watts’ whistle or the look in a sweatin man’s eyes when he lookin at a perfect, brutal sun killing him with living while he lick his lips and dream of water, then put his shoulder behind a woman guiding him while he dig in and groove the earth  to the quick deep endless quick.   Where would I go  Where would I go to hide this  yes-crying love yielding beyond flesh yet  subsumed by sweat   Where would I go naked so  following blues and Dr. Watts  like a double-seeing shadow  standing before you with only blue smoke  between us  humming yes and yes and yes   subsumed by sweat and yielding  beyond mere flesh.
That day in December I sat down by Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I was myriad-weary. Feets swole from sewing seams on a filthy fabric; tired-sore a pedalin’ the rusty Singer;  dingy cotton thread jammed in the eye. All lifelong I’d slide through century-reams loathsome with tears. Dreaming my own silk-self.  It was not like they all say. Miss Liberty Muffet she didn’t jump at the sight of me. Not exactly. They hauled me away—a thousand kicking legs pinned down.  The rest of me I tell you—a cloud. Beautiful trouble on the dead December horizon. Come to sit in judgment.  How many miles as the Jim Crow flies? Over oceans and some. I rumbled. They couldn’t hold me down. Long. No.  My feets were tired. My eyes were sore. My heart was raw from hemming dirty edges of Miss L. Muffet’s garment. I rode again.  A thousand bloody miles after the Crow flies that day in December long remembered when I sat down beside Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I said—like the joke say—What’s in the bowl, Thief? I said—That’s your curse. I said—This my way. She slipped her frock, disembarked, settled in the suburbs, deaf, mute, lewd, and blind. The bowl she left behind. The empty bowl mine. The spoiled dress.  Jim Crow dies and ravens come with crumbs. They say—Eat and be satisfied. I fast and pray and ride.
In the ocean one fish swallows the other: a geometric progression of loss. You are bigger than I. The calamity of love swelling out larger than us. And what destiny partakes of our dilemma? Swallows the cause and effect: eyes and kissing mouths and enlarged parts wanting to breathe and wanting.  There is no gentle sense to this. Is there? Only a kind of terror at the chain of events, the scale of loss, the ordered  destruction one against the other— all that something larger awaits its moment.
for Jerry Ward I am the only one here.  I stand in my one place and I can see a good piece down the road. I am yonder, further than the chunk of your stone. Right now, directly, I am persimmon falling free and the prisoner opening up in me. Don’t come through my door and want to run my house. I am the angel who sweep air in and out my own dancing body. I got good eyes. I can see. A good piece down the road. Clear to God murmuring in me. My head is the burning bush. What I hold in my hand is the promised land. I set my people free in me. And we walk without wandering like people named after mere plants, because we are tree and high-stepping roots cake-walking in this promised place.  Where I go is where I am now. Don’t mess with me: you hurt yourself. In the middle of my stride now. I am walking yes indeed I am walking through my own house. I am walking yes indeed on my own piece of road. Toting my own load and yours and mine. I tell you I feel fine and clear this morning even when it’s night and a full moon with my thumbprint on it. Everything is clamorous and quiet.  I am the only One here.  And we don’t break. No indeed.  Come hell and high water.  We don’t break  for nothing.
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
She stands by the riverbank, notes from her bagpipes lapping across to us as we waitfor the traffic light to change. She does not know we hear— she is playing to the river,a song for the water, the flowof an unknown melody to the rocky bluffs beyond, for the mistthat was this morning, shroudof past lives: fishermenand riverboat gamblers, tugboat captainsand log raftsmen, pioneer and native slipping through the eddies of time. She plays for them all, both dirgeand surging hymn, for what has passed and is passing as we slipinto the currents of traffic,the changed light bearing us away.
The language of craneswe once were toldis the wind. The wind is their method,their current, the translated story of life they write across the sky. Millions of yearsthey have blown hereon ancestral longing,their wings of wide arrival, necks long, legs stretched out above strands of earthwhere they arrivewith the shine of water, stories, interminablelanguage of exchanges descended from the skyand then they stand,earth made only of crane from bank to bank of the river as far as you can seethe ancient story made new.
How well its squarefit my palm, my mouth, a toasty wafer slipped onto the sick tongueor into chicken soup,each crisp saltine a tile pierced with 13 holes in rows of 3 and 2,its edges perforated like a postage stamp,one of a shifting stack sealed in wax paper whose noisy opening always signaled snack, peanut butter or cheesethick inside Premiums,the closest we ever gotto serving hors d’oeuvres:the redneck’s hardtack, the cracker’s cracker.
You can have the grackle whistling blackly from the feeder as it tosses seed,if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched imperious as an eagle on the high branch.You can have the brown shed, the field mice hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door,if I can have the house of the dead oak, its hollowed center and feather-lined cave.You can have the deck at midnight, the possum vacuuming the yard in its white prowl,if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear.You can have the whole house, window to window, roof to soffits to hardwood floors,if I can have the screened porch at dawn, the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.
The church knelt heavyabove us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkeredon little wood folding chairswhere we gave our nickels, saidour verses, heard the stories, sangthe solid, swinging songs.It could have been God abovein the pews, His restless love siftingwith dust from the joists. We littleseeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, orhow the winter air knifedafter the dreamy basement.Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believingI was just watching lightpoke from the high, small windowand tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrapmy ankle, embrace any part of me.
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. He went flying down the river in his boatwith his video camera to his eye, makinga moving picture of the moving riverupon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showedhis vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees,the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would stillhave it. It would be there. With a flickof a switch, there it would be. But hewould not be in it. He would never be in it.
He crawls through the cracks of my stone foundation,   sly and sleek as I tempt him with food.   He stays out of habit; I cook out of love for things that move.   We grow accustomed to each other’s trails and smells, the skins we’ve shed   along the long, long road of rubbing each other smooth.   Till all the skins we’ve shed lie sparkling like so many stones in this desert land.   I scoop him up in my hand and eat him.
Wrapped in gold foil, in the search and shouting of Easter Sunday, it was the ball of the princess, it was Pharoah’s body sleeping in its golden case. At the foot of the picket fence, in grass lank with the morning rain, it was a Sunday school prize, silver for second place, gold for the triumphant little dome of Ararat, and my sister took me by the hand and led me out onto the wide, wet lawn and showed me to bend into the thick nests of grass, into the darkest green. Later I had to give it back, in exchange for a prize, though I would rather have kept the egg. What might have coiled inside it? Crocuses tight on their clock-springs, a bird who’d sing himself into an angel in the highest reaches of the garden, the morning’s flaming arrow? Any small thing can save you. Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me.
I His holy  slowly  mulled over  matter   not all “delirium  of delight”  as were the forests  of Brazil   “Species are not  (it is like confessing  a murder)  immutable”   He was often becalmed  in this Port Desire by illness  or rested from species  at billiard table   As to Man  “I believe Man…  in the same predicament  with other animals”     II Cordilleras to climb—Andean  peaks “tossed about  like the crust  of a broken pie”   Icy wind  Higher, harder  Chileans advised eat onions  for shortness of breath   Heavy on him:  Andes miners carried up  great loads—not allowed  to stop for breath   Fossil bones near Santa Fé  Spider-bite-scauld  Fever  Tended by an old woman   “Dear Susan…  I am ravenous  for the sound  of the pianoforte”     III FitzRoy blinked—  sea-shells on mountain tops!  The laws of change  rode the seas   without the good captain  who could not concede  land could rise from the sea  until—before his eyes   earthquake—  Talcahuana Bay drained out—  all-water wall  up from the ocean   —six seconds—  demolished the town  The will of God?  Let us pray   And now the Galápagos Islands—  hideous black lava  The shore so hot  it burned their feet   through their boots  Reptile life  Melville here later  said the chief sound was a hiss   A thousand turtle monsters  drive together to the water  Blood-bright crabs hunt ticks  on lizards’ backs   Flightless cormorants  Cold-sea creatures—  penguins, seals  here in tropical waters   Hell for FitzRoy  but for Darwin Paradise Puzzle  with the jig-saw gists  beginning to fit     IV Years… balancing  probabilities  I am ill, he said  and books are slow work   Studied pigeons  barnacles, earthworms  Extracted seeds  from bird dung   Brought home Drosera—  saw insects trapped  by its tentacles—the fact  that a plant should secrete   an acid acutely akin  to the digestive fluid  of an animal! Years  till he published   He wrote Lyell: Don’t forget  to send me the carcass  of your half-bred African cat  should it die     V I remember, he said  those tropical nights at sea—  we sat and talked  on the booms   Tierra del Fuego’s  shining glaciers translucent  blue clear down  (almost) to the indigo sea   (By the way Carlyle  thought it most ridiculous  that anyone should care  whether a glacier   moved a little quicker  or a little slower  or moved at all)  Darwin   sailed out  of Good Success Bay  to carcass-  conclusions—   the universe  not built by brute force  but designed by laws  The details left   to the working of chance  “Let each man hope  and believe  what he can”
William Morris I —how we’re carpet-making by the river a long dream to unroll and somehow time to pole a boat   I designed a carpet today— dogtooth violets and spoke to a full hall now that the gall of our society’s   corruption stains throughout Dear Janey I am tossed by many things If the change would bring better art   but if it would not? O to be home to sail the flood I’m possessed and do possess Employer   of labor, true— to get done the work of the hand… I’d be a rich man had I yielded   on a few points of principle Item sabots blouse— I work in the dye-house myself   Good sport dyeing tapestry wool I like the indigo vats I’m drawing patterns so fast Last night   in sleep I drew a sausage— somehow I had to eat it first Colorful shores—mouse ear... horse-mint... The Strawberry Thief our new chintz     II Yeats saw the betterment of the workers by religion—slow in any case as the drying of the moon He was not understood— I rang the bell   for him to sit down Yeats left the lecture circuit yet he could say: no one so well loved as Morris     III Entered new waters Studied Icelandic At home last minute signs to post:Vetch grows here—Please do not mow We saw it—Iceland—the end of the world rising out of the sea— cliffs, caves like 13th century illuminations   of hell-mouths Rain squalls through moonlight Cold wet is so damned wet Iceland’s   black sand Stone buntings’ fly-up-dispersion Sea-pink and campion a Persian carpet
I cannot know twisted Henriette of the plant kingdom Engrafted with a crutch. And yet her bulbous concerns Effuse a solid blue from inside, Like a steel Dryad, and her gaze effaced   Shines with distended power. Otherwise These clusterjewels would not dazzle us so, As limbs proliferate through her pulped brain From dendrites where creation flared   And this crippled tree would seem defaced,J’Accuse! beneath the lace of this clipped sister And would not glisten in synaptic blasts   Would not, from all the reaching boughs of self, Burst like ripe sapphires: for here there is no placeThat does not see you. You shake forth a nest.
“Being so caught up  So mastered.”  —Yeats I was too shy to say anything but Your poems are so beautiful. What kinds of things, feelings, or ideas inspire you, I mean, outside the raw experiences of your life? He turned a strange crosshatched color as if he stood in a clouded painting, and said, Thanks, but no other phenomena intrude upon my starlit mind.   I see you are wondering what this is all about. Don’t mind me, I’m talking to myself again. Yes, poetry is nice and often beautiful, yet it doesn’t beget much attention, money, or even a simple thanks for placing the best words in the best order. That’s when I forget all about your incessant demands, and the restless subject leaps the stream in Technicolor— until the Remembrancer appears and says, Stop this wasteful life.  Doctor, lawyer, thief. These fancies of yours could cost a life or worse, two. Meanwhile, he perceives my gifted body upholding my mind as I’m explaining my stuff on the Unicorn Tapestries, cheeks starting to color, feathers ruffling, quiet shudders. He shrugs, Your content sounds too beautiful but I’d like to read it sometime. Okay. He says all the right things, like I love you Hyacinth Girl. Things get interesting until the sudden blow: Thanks   For the memories. What I’ll think seeing his new work in The New Yorker is Thanks for nothing, asshole, as he drops me for that prolific pastoral life with his wife upstate. The more I think about it, it all depends upon your phantom attention. Surely a world embroiders itself in one’s mind at any moment, words resounding, ardent present clarifyingly beautiful And beautifully truthful. You know? Here I should put in a lapis color   Or a murky midnight blue. Or have the crowd stagger by in a riot of color pinning down the helpless beast with spears and ritualistic thanks to their gods. What one really wants to get at is the real, the eternally beautiful like The White Album or something. That’s what makes one perilous life worth living. All the brute indifference, humiliation, and failure can put one in the   mind to give up, freak out, kill somebody, heart battered, so mastered. Oh you   Wherever I go, on the subway, in my cubicle, at play, in sleep, it’s always you of the air, overpowering my senses like a Dutch master in one pure color, its fiction at full speed, walls breaking, a clarity panorama for the mind hunting for meaning and finding it at last! Now look at all the work I did, and not  one thanks Not even flowers. Off you rush to watch him accept another award in that life We can only dream of. From where you sit it all seems so beautiful   And I finally understand you. For that I can’t express enough thanks As the subject is the best color for me in the difficulty of this lonely life. It’s always caught up in my mind, what could be more beautiful.
I  The whole of human history … The whole of human history  seems to be the story of men who kill,  and of men who are killed;  of murderers who light their cigarettes  with trembling hands,  and of poor, unlucky kids staring into the eyes  of those who bring them their deaths.   But history is not about murderers, after all.  It is just the story of some poor kids.  The whole history of the world  is just the story of millions of poor kids  overwhelmed by the fear of death, or  by the fear of bringing death to others.   My mother had closed her eyes  and was breathing softly.  Every so often, her right hand,  abandoned on the white sheet,  would shift slightly, opening and closing  like the hand of a sleeping baby.   The nurse came into the room just then,  as I had begun to tell the story of Jaco.  She opened the door as slowly as possible,  but I felt her presence behind my shoulders  bending over the bed,  looking at my mother.   She is sleeping, said the nurse.  Don't wake her. I didn't turn around,  but continued my story in a low whisper.  When I got to the part about the grenade,  I heard the nurse tiptoeing out,  closing the door behind her,   silently.  The grenade exploded a few feet away, while Jaco was helping to carry two wounded soldiers down the hill to the hospital tent. By the time I got to him, he was stretched out on the grass, breathing heavily. Everyone around him had been killed. He watched as I approached, and when I was close, he smiled.  He had just been promoted to lieutenant, even though he had not yet turned nineteen. Six months ago, when we were getting ready to leave Italy, Ercolani had taken me aside and said: Look out for Jaco. He's like a brother to me. Make sure nothing bad happens to him.  I was irritated: War isn't a game. It doesn't play by the rules. If something bad happens to him, tough luck.  But from that day on, I kept my eye on Jacoboni: he was about the same age as me, but seemed much younger. In any event, he turned out to be a good officer: he did his duty like all the others, like a good kid. He took war seriously, convinced he would go home in one piece, back to his family in Monterotondo, near Rome. And it was perhaps because of this that he smiled as I sat down next to him.  I saw right away that it was hopeless. The grenade had torn open his abdomen and his intestines were cascading down his leg past his knees and coiling onto the ground.  We were surrounded by the dead: hundreds of them in the forest around us. Most were Italian, but there were a few Germans: they had advanced this far before we had finally pushed them back. Their dead lay alongside ours. It began to rain.   The rain on the oak leaves  made a soft music, like women whispering.  Every so often, it would intensify  as it darted here, and there through the trees,  rising and then fading away.    The green reflection of the forest  washed everything the color of water,  gave an extraordinary lightness to things:  to the solid trunks of the trees,  to the bodies lying in the grass.    Glimpsed through the branches of the trees,  the sky appeared light and remote:  A sky made of silk,  luminous and pure, serene,  scrubbed of clouds and fog.    The rain was coming from who knows where.  Or maybe it was not even rain,  just the memory of some rain  falling from the depths of past summers,  falling from some childhood summer long ago.
IV So it did not come as a surprise—a relief, almost—when we heard the tac-tac-tac of machine guns and the thud of grenades rising up from the woods below. The Germans were advancing again through the tangle of bomb-shattered branches, clearing a path with axe-blows, foreheads crushed beneath the overhang of great steel helmets, gleaming eyes fixed dead ahead.  The rest of that day was bitter, and many of us fell forever headlong in the grass. But toward evening the voice of battle began to diminish, and then from the depths of the forest we could hear the song of the wounded: the serene, monotonous, sad-hopeful song of the wounded, joining the chorus of birds hidden in the foliage as they welcomed the return of the moon.  It was still daylight, but the moon was rising sweetly from behind the forested mountains of Reims.  It was green against a white and tender sky…     A moon from the forest of Ardennes,  a moon from the country of Rimbaud, of Verlaine,  a delicate green moon, round and light,  entering the room of the sky from behind a screen of branches  as if stepping delicately out of the earth,  rising up from the grass, causing the tree-branches to blush  transparent and sweet.    Like startled birds, we had settled again around Jaco:  I can't stand it any more, he smiled.  Don't let me suffer.  But now his smile was tired:  a tired smile  in a face clenched like a fist.    Jaco's suffering gnawed away at us,  sinking into our bones.  There is nothing so terrible, or so sweet,  so touching, as that animal, man,  when he gives over to death.  I felt my shirt sticking to my back. My face  and the faces of the others were beaded with sweat,  like the sweet face of Nazzareno Jacoboni.  And little by little I became aware  that everyone had slowly turned toward me,  pinning me down with their eyes.    Along with Jaco's terrible, unbearable suffering,  something else was sinking into us, little by little,  something which was not ours.  Something strong, strange, insistent,  was slowly being born within us.  Jaco stared at me,  even he now stared at me,  expecting something,  and I felt a new idea forming inside me,  and inside the others.    I can't go on, said Jaco.  I looked away to the green moon hanging behind the trees:  It had taken on the round shapeliness  of a fragrant leaf: a laurel leaf,  perhaps, or sage, or mint,  a great green leaf, transparent with evening daylight.  The sun had not yet settled into the forest,  and his last warm rays struck the trunks of the trees  leaving some of them wounded, bleeding.  Others—the oaks, the beeches, poplars and birches—  reflected the light in a strange way,  as if they were made of glass.    That glassy light, which the sun, just before it sets,  draws from the earth's waters,  drinks from its grass, from its leaves,  from the trunks of its trees,  to slake its thirst.    All of them stared at me,  but I was not aware of what I was doing.  I felt my hands moving,  but I did not know what I was doing until  I found myself standing  and saw them looking up at me,  and Jacoboni smiling at me strangely,  and felt something cold and smooth in my hands.    And finally I was aware that I was standing  with a rifle in my hands.  I closed my eyes, and fired.  I fired with my eyes closed,  one shot after another.    And then, when the echo of the shots  had melted into the woods,  there was a great silence.    With my eyes still closed,  rifle still in hand,  I turned and took a few steps.  Suddenly I heard: Murderer! Murderer!  It was the voice of woman, terrible,  the voice of a sister, desperate,  the voice of a mother, of a lover.  And at that moment nothing could have been more terrible  than that voice of a woman,  that voice of a mother, of a sister,  of a lover, crying:    Murderer!  I opened my eyes and saw one of the girls running toward me, her hands like claws, as if she intended to tear me apart. She screamed again: Murderer! and then stopped abruptly a few paces away, filthy, disheveled, with a great bewilderment, spreading across her face, a wondrous pity. I stood in front of her, rifle in my hands, tears in my eyes.  And they were certainly a marvelous thing, those tears, not only for her, but for me as well.  My mother . . .   My mother was lying on her back, her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be asleep; Even her hand, abandoned on the sheets, had dozed off. I fell silent, looking at the moon rising inch by inch  over the olive trees of Settignano.  It gave me great solace, that moon and those trees. That bright silver moon over silvery trees, that moon in the shape of an olive leaf, clean and transparent, shining like a vein of silver, pulsing through green marble in the incensed darkness of a church.
One Sunday morning, instead of studying The Illiad, I escaped with Bino to Florence, to see what miracles the aviator Manissero would perform.   Whether he would demonstrate the art of Daedalus or the folly of Icarus.   We found the whole city festooned with banners on which was written: Today We Fly. They were everywhere: Via Cerretani, Via Cavour, Via Calzaioli, along the embankments. There was even one stretched across the Arno with an enormous red Today We Fly reflected in the yellow water  like the famous In Hoc Signo Vinces of Ponte Milvio.   We almost expected that Florence itself would lift off, with its towers, its statues, its red roofs, with its cathedral's nodding cupola rising slowly through the clouds like a balloon.   Every window, doorway and marketplace was crammed with upturned faces, scanning the sky for some sign of the direction the wind might take, and whether there would come with it the smell of rain.   We were most afraid of the wind from Bologna, proud enemy to the north. Almost as bad would have been the wind from the south, from Empoli, called the scirocco; or Petrarch's east wind from Arezzo, with its Grecian-accented gusts. But even a soft westerly breeze from Pistoia— even that sweet breath from the ballads of Cino, full of dolce stil novo— would have spelled disaster.   Luckily the sky that Sunday was clear, and the air was still. The leaves on the trees around the parade ground stood at ease, and the outlines of the hills were crisp, sharply etched in the crystalline air. Just wait. Today we really will fly, said Bino with a smile.  For overnight Today We Fly had become a catchphrase, fit for every occasion: for a straw hat rolling along the pavement; for a parasol blown around the corner; for a dress tangled up between the knees, or blown flapping like a flag around rounded hips.  It was the happy time of the first aeroplanes, before the War when it was fashionable for women to wear enormous hairdos as wide as their dresses were narrow. And those gigantic wings of hair, which were the objects of so many of our teenage jokes, have remained braided together in my heart with the fluttering Today We Fly: maliciously good-natured mementos of my adolescence.   We hurried over the parade grounds, and there was Manissero crouched in the cockpit of his machine: a contraption of woven reeds and papery cloth, with a motor so small it made you think a horsefly was pinned to the frame behind his shoulders.   The crowd had assembled, holding its breath, waiting for the miracle to happen, when suddenly the leaves began to tremble, and the blades of grass of nod. A few tiny white clouds sprouted like windowsills on Monte Morello, and the women's wings of hair began to come untucked from their padded nests of false braids.   Manissero jumped out of his cockpit at the first sign of this unfortunate breeze, waved amicably to the crowd with a gloved hand, and yanked off his leather helmet while a banner was unfurled above the grandstands:  Because of Unsettled Weather, Today We Will Not Fly.  It was hard to imagine anything more settled than the weather that day: a magnificent, paradisiacal Sunday in spring. But all it took was this delicate breeze, this perfumed zephyr from Pistoia, to spoil everything.  We returned to Prato with heavy hearts, and I took up my study of the abandoned Illiad, quiet and discouraged.  Thursday morning the rumor began to spread that the following Sunday, if the weather was favorable, Manissero would attempt to fly from Florence to Prato and back: thirty kilometers round trip!  By Saturday, Via Magnolfi, the Corso, Via del'Oche, Via Firenzuola—all the streets of Prato were crisscrossed with white banners carrying those fateful words: Today We Fly.  By noon Sunday rivers of people from the surrounding the countryside were flooding into the city through its five gates, and by three o'clock the cathedral square was awash with a restless and noisy crowd, pale, perspiring, noses in the air. I stood among them with my classmates, all of us impatient, barely kept in check by the stern gaze of our principal and the softer reprimands of the teachers.  We began to hear a new word: Velivolo! dancing above the buzz of the crowd. But that name for aeroplane, recently coined by d'Annunzio, seemed too delicate for the gaping mouths of dumbstruck farmers: it was still fresh, still smelled of varnish, and was as sweet and sharp in the mouth as mint candy. Velivolo!  Suddenly a white wing appeared in the blue sky and the reed-and-paper bird grew larger, came closer, hovered over the cathedral square.  A cry, only one, but from a thousand throats; a cry more of fear than joy: then sudden silence, bursting with anguish. Manissero was perhaps two hundred meters above our heads, and it seemed miraculous. Miraculous not just because he was flying, but because he was flying over Prato, in the virgin sky of Prato! which only the kites of children had dared to caress until today.   As long as the flying was over Florence, things were fine: certain facts, in Florence, are understandable, are legitimate, and fit within in the logic of history.   But over Prato! Over Prato where for centuries now nothing miraculous had happened. Not on the ground, and not in the sky. Especially not in the sky.   Over Prato! Where it seemed that miracles had become impossible, caught as we were between the historic pride of Florence and the ancient jealousy of Pistoia. Sacrificed, reduced to poor relations, robbed not only of everything that we had, which would have been bad enough, but of everything we might have wanted to have.   Yet here was Manissero flying in our sky, in the neglected sky of Prato. And he was flying, or so it seemed, better than he might have flown in the sky of Florence. Better than in any other sky in Tuscany!   After a moment, though, the suspicion began to grow that he might fly as far as Pistoia. Everyone held their breath, balanced on one foot, hearts stopped between beats:  The treacherous sky of Pistoia!  Some us took out our keys, ready to rattle them against such a betrayal. The rest of us set our lips to whistle in defiance. But Manissero veered to the right, and after a wide turn over Prato he headed back toward Florence.  The city detonated with joy. I lost myself in the crowd, beyond thought, proud citizen of Prato to my bones. It wouldn't be too much to say that all of us, that day, felt we held a piece of sky in our hands.  That night, in my dreams, the Achaean army, assembling beneath the walls of Troy, came to a halt, astonished at what lay before them: stretching from tower to tower immense white banners on which great red letters spelled out: Today We Fly.  And then Troy, the city of Priam— which from a distance resembled nothing more than Prato— detached itself gently from the earth, hovered with its banners snapping in the breeze, and drifted away into the clear sky, swinging gently from side to side.  Maddened Achilles ran along below, commanding: Stop! Stop!  And from the buzz of his accent you might have thought he was from Pistoia.   Beloved Priam, from the top of the Trojan gates. answered sweetly: Too Late. Too Late.  And his voice had all soft accents of Prato, taking flight.
China is made of earth, of sun-dried mud.   In this part of China everything is made from the earth: the houses, the walls around cities, and villages, the tombs scattered over the countryside. Even the people.   There are hills below that appear to be piles of mud set out to dry in the sun, naked, without a single tree or bush. They crowd around the landscape like the coils of bulging intestines tossed on the ground outside butchers' shops, slowly unraveling.   Sometimes we fly so low that we almost touch them.   And then I notice that the wind has brushed some kind of pattern into the earth: a mysterious alphabet written in the mud, struggling to communicate something precise. But there is not a single animal or human being in the yellow desert below.   Not a single village.  Suddenly we are landing: Xian, the geographic center of China, where Chinese civilization was born, in the cradle of the Yellow River.   In front of the terminal, three children are playing with a lump of earth: they are bundled up in jackets and brightly printed cotton trousers. I join them in their game until a young woman comes out of the terminal to call me in for dinner. One of the children grabs me by my overcoat, to keep me from leaving. So do the other two, clinging to me, asking me not to go.   The young woman comes out again, and yells at them to stop.   They let go, disappointed. One of them calls to me as I turn away:Come back soon!  We eat quickly and then prepare to take off for Lanchow. My three new friends wave goodbye to me. The littlest one gives me a present: a pebble, a precious gift. In this part of China there are no stones. You have to go to Karelia to find stone, very far north; or to the Caucasus; or to southern Siberia, along the slopes of the Pamir, slanting toward the steppes of Central Asia.  I put the pebble in my pocket, to take back home, to show what a precious gift I was given by a little Chinese girl: a pebble from the cradle of Chinese civilization.  A civilization made of earth, a civilization without bones, without a skeleton for support. A civilization of assembled customs, which suddenly unravel, dissolving into thousands of separate gestures, thousands of calligraphic icons, thousands of smells, colors, flavors, thousands of different shades. And then just as suddenly they solidify again into tradition, memory, habit.  It is this absence of stone, of solid, durable material, which makes China such an exquisite thing. Everything is reflected: an unimaginable number of movements, of patterns, thoughts, images, of which we see the copies in immense numbers, but never the originals.  The originals were destroyed long ago.  Here are the four elements out of which China is made: Earth, Wood, Porcelain, Silk. The most durable of these is Silk.  I should add a fifth element: Poetry, which is the most durable of all.
The laughing gull that flew behind the fencepost and never came out was the beginning and then a hand smaller than my hand covered Wisconsin with a gesture for explanation. In the afternoon there are pauses between the words through which commas can grow like daisy fleabane. A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound and nothing can be learned by more analysis. The book of her hair opens to its binding and I leaf through the glorious pages of appreciation and that’s not all. We could not have turned fast enough to catch light and leftovers from so much of what happened: the swift figures behind you like a planet’s dark companion, ships entering and leaving the hall closet the real and imagined between which is no difference.
October five. Seven years older in dog years and then your November the day record snowfalls hit Randolph New Hampshire in forty-three and I am thinking of something intimate and impossible to waste: Brazil’s undiscovered caverns of amethyst endless smooth oval stones along Washington’s moody Pacific chewing a continent. But I am wrong. We pass St. Michael’s the cemetery that asks the public to mow and weed it and perhaps draw larger conclusions about the already wasted and tidy up names frayed at the edges by the ions that bind by age the chemical salt of time that jostles stones over at their bases to remind us or alter their sentiments. We read and read and each time nothing new has come up on their markers. At home we hear the fishermen bring up their nets smack water to scare them. By now the flounder’s secret pocket where its heart and everything separate from meat and bone is cleaned and empty as a silk purse not a nickel left down in the freezer. Nothing really shines but this: I have loved you eight presidents. Forty years. Five point seven in dog.
I was so worried the hickory I recognized had died from salt burn in the last hurricane I may have passed by vervain and apple haw like they didn’t matter, but this spring it put out seven shoots from its base. Still, the oldest trick is the moon missing, then the “new” moon appears, though we know it’s the old one, and we pretend to be taken in like the mother or baby behind the bath towel. Really it’s the moon winking, being the stone that holds stones and now footprints. And when I tell Frances, I see she is a moon motionless in the doorway, skin reflecting a lamp, a face that awakens on paper.
for Doug Fieger (d. 2010), Berton Averre, Prescott Niles and  Bruce Gary (d. 2006) The men don’t know growls Willie Dixon’s most famous tune, but the version I prefer—low fidelity cassette bootleg, howling tin sound with shredded paper drums—remains unreleased, recorded not by some venerable Mississippi blues curmudgeon whose name, artfully dropped here, would evoke afternoons porch-sitting with magnolia wine and box-string guitar, or might bestow upon me some sorely lacking hipster bonafides. That’s never going to happen, since I am talking here about a nearly unlistenable cover, the monophonic noise and mid-range screech of The Knack, live in Hollywood, before a packed house at the Troubador, July 1979. So what if I was twelve? I’d already gotten it, learned how to pluck out the gallop of My Sharona’s bass, hoping someday I’d ace out Doug Fieger and be Sharona’s back door man myself, though I’d have been better off learning how to get in the front door first. Which was the vaguest country, women, or the blues? I did not know. I still might not. I only knew what I was learning: that a song could actually sound like sweat; that Ray Manzarek, gangly Ray best known as the piano-playing witness to greatness, had dropped by to sit in, and when he’d come down Wonderland Avenue it was a benediction, as if to say, Hey,these guys are all right, forgive them their sins of leather tie and Beatle boot. So I want to say thank you to whatever thought to tape that show, because it taught me that I wanted a forever girl like Sharona, who, as the 45-rpm picture sleeve promised, played the coolest records for her slumber-partying girlfriends, who all looked like the camisoled girls in the Runaways or the equally fated Go-Gos. But I am getting ahead of myself, since, as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows how this story ends. I have everything The Knack ever recorded, including this version of Back Door Man, which tells me everything that was wrong with 1979, and later, everything wrong with me. How does the show end? Listen to the cassette, a moment in unsteady time, the Zapruder film of the skinny tie era. For the band, you know how it ends already: rehab, divorce, rehab, forgiveness, comeback tour, state fair nostalgia; immortal Sharona—her real name —sells real estate, million-dollar homes. That’s what those little girls do, they grow up, which reminds meMy Sharona, that set-closing number, may be the saddest story I know.
I asked myself   What, Sappho, can you give one who has everything, like Aphrodite?
It’s no use   Mother dear, I can’t finish my weaving  You may blame Aphrodite   soft as she is   she has almost killed me with love for that boy
To an army wife, in Sardis:   Some say a cavalry corps, some infantry, some, again, will maintain that the swift oars   of our fleet are the finest sight on dark earth; but I say that whatever one loves, is.   This is easily proved: did not Helen—she who had scanned the flower of the world’s manhood—   choose as first among men one who laid Troy’s honor in ruin? warped to his will, forgetting   love due her own blood, her own child, she wandered far with him. So Anactoria, although you   being far away forget us, the dear sound of your footstep and light glancing in your eyes   would move me more than glitter of Lydian horse or armored tread of mainland infantry
“Joey, 4th grade, 1992” He’s been on the fridge since it happened,sneaking glances from underneath the catmagnet at our dinners, coffee habits, arguments.We posted him on the database of items found,hoping that someone would recognize his messyhair, Batman t-shirt, blue eyes, but no oneanswered the post or claimed him.Somewhere a childhood photo album is notquite complete, or a grandmother’s mantelpiece;an uncle’s wallet. One afternoon I got restless,flipped through my old yearbooks, trying to find him,looking to see how he might have aged: did he losethe chubby cheeks? dye his hair? how longdid he have to wear braces? But he’s too youngto have passed me in the halls, the picture justa stranger, a small reminder of the whirling aftermathwhen Joplin was clutching at scraps: everything displaced,even this poor kid who doesn’t even know he’s lost.
As day began to break, we passedthe “honk for worms” sign,passed it honking againand again, to wake up the wormsmy dad said. It was onlyabout another half mile tothe aspen grove and our worm digs.The humus, spongy and almostblack, turned over easily.I used my bare hands to putsome moist earth into a coffee canand, as the aspen glitteredin the risen sun, I gentlyslid the fresh, fat bait into my container.I heard the worms still in the groundgurgle as they tried to escape,while the ones in the can beganto ball up as their numbers grew.Streamside, surrounded by mountainswith snow lingering into summer,I picked out a worm and my dadarranged it on the hook to savemy small fingers. Now you can purchasea time-share on that land.The colony of aspen, thinnedby the builders, continues totremble. No amount of honkingbrings back the worms.
No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:Thy pyramids built up with newer mightTo me are nothing novel, nothing strange;They are but dressings of a former sight.Our dates are brief, and therefore we admireWhat thou dost foist upon us that is old,And rather make them born to our desireThan think that we before have heard them told.Thy registers and thee I both defy,Not wondering at the present nor the past;For thy records and what we see doth lie,Made more or less by that continual haste. This I do vow, and this shall ever be: I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.
’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemedWhen not to be receives reproach of being, And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemedNot by our feeling but by others' seeing.For why should others’ false adulterate eyesGive salutation to my sportive blood?Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, Which in their wills count bad that I think good?No, I am that I am; and they that levelAt my abuses reckon up their own:I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown, Unless this general evil they maintain: All men are bad and in their badness reign.
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groanFor that deep wound it gives my friend and me:Is’t not enough to torture me alone,But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed. Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward, But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail;Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail. And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee, Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.
O, call not me to justify the wrongThat thy unkindness lays upon my heart;Wound me not with thine eye but with thy tongue;Use power with power, and slay me not by art.Tell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight, Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside;What need’st thou wound with cunning when thy mightIs more than my o’erpressed defense can bide?Let me excuse thee: ah, my love well knowsHer pretty looks have been mine enemies;And therefore from my face she turns my foes,That they elsewhere might dart their injuries— Yet do not so; but since I am near slain, Kill me outright with looks and rid my pain.
Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving.O, but with mine compare thou thine own state,And thou shalt find it merits not reproving;Or if it do, not from those lips of thine,That have profaned their scarlet ornamentsAnd sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine, Robbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents.Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st thoseWhom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee:Root pity in thy heart, that, when it grows, Thy pity may deserve to pitied be. If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide, By self-example mayst thou be denied.
My love is as a fever, longing stillFor that which longer nurseth the disease,Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.My reason, the physician to my love,Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approveDesire is death, which physic did except.Past cure I am, now reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,At random from the truth vainly expressed: For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
When Americans say a man takes liberties, they mean he’s gone too far. In Philadelphia today I saw a kid on a leash look mom-ward and announce his fondest wish: one bicentennial burger, hold the relish. Hold is forget, in American. On the courts of Philadelphia the rich prepare to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well, in which love can mean nothing, doubletalk mean lie. I’m saying doubletalk with me. I’m saying go so far the customs are untold. Make nothing without words, and let me be the one you never hold.
And then I thought, Can I have more of this, would it be possible for every day to be a greater awakening: more light, more light, your face on the pillow with the sleep creases rudely fragmenting it, hair so stiff from paint and sheet rock it feels like the dirty short hank of mane I used to grab on Dandy’s neck before he hauled me up and forward, white flanks flecked green with shit and the satin of his dander, the livingness, the warmth of all that blood just under the skin and in the long, thick muscle of the neck— He was smarter than most of the children I went to school with. He knew how to stand with just the crescent of his hoof along a boot toe and press, incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain so surprising when it came, its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof pinned one’s foot completely to the ground, we’d have to beat and beat him with a brush to push him off, that hot insistence with its large horse eye trained deliberately on us, to watch— Like us, he knew how to announce through violence how he didn’t hunger, didn’t want despite our practiced ministrations: too young not to try to empathize with this cunning: this thing that was and was not human we must respect for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because I could not love him anymore in the ways I’d taught myself, watching the slim bodies of teenagers guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring as if they were one body, one fluid motion of electric understanding I would never feel working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed an indifference that gave me logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting the hand placed on back or shoulder and never feel the desired response. I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine and inflict on me, the sudden jerking of head away from halter, the tentative nose inspecting first before it might decide to relent and eat. I loved what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure might be blended, one warmth bleeding into another as the future bleeds into the past, more light, more light, your hand against my shoulder, the image of the one who taught me disobedience is the first right of being alive.
Cut back the stems an inch to keep in bloom. So instructs the florist’s note enclosed inside the flowers. Who knew what was cut could heal again, the green wounds close, stitching themselves together? It doesn’t matter. The flowers, red and white, will bloom awhile, then wither. You sit in an unlit room and watch the vase throw crystal shadows through the dark. The flowers’ colors are so lovely they’re painful. In a week, you’ll have to throw them out. It’s only hope that makes you take out scissors, separate each bloom and cut where you last measured. Did you know Venus was said to turn into a virgin each time she bathed? She did it as a mark of love. She did it so as to please her lovers. Perhaps, overwhelmed by pain, she eventually stopped bathing altogether. It doesn’t matter. It’s a pleasure to feel the green nubs stripped, watch the stems refresh under your blade. They’re here because they’re beautiful. They glow inside your crystal vase. And yet the flowers by themselves are nothing: only a refraction of color that, in a week or two, will be thrown out. Day by day, the water lowers. The red- and-white heads droop, blacken at the stems. It doesn’t matter. Even cut stems heal. But what is the point of pain if it heals?Some things should last forever, instructs the florist’s note. Pleasure,  says one god. Shame, says another. Venus heads, they call these flowers. In a week or two, you’ll lose the note, have to call the florist up.With sympathy, you’ll think he says. Perhaps: With love. It doesn’t matter. You’ve stopped bathing. Alone, you sit before the crystal vase refracting you in pieces through the dark. You watch the pale skin bloom inside it, wither. You petal, inch by inch. You turn red and white together.
I have been taught never to brag but now I cannot help it: I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth: does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and the dead both snap off in my hands? The neighbor with his stuttering fingers, the neighbor with his broken love: each comes up my drive to receive his pitying, accustomed consolations, watches me work in silence awhile, rises in anger, walks back. Does it offend them to watch me not mourning with them but working fitfully, fruitlessly, working the way the bees work, which is to say by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure? I can stand for hours among the sweet narcissus, silent as a point of bone. I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer than your grief. It is such a small thing to be proud of, a garden. Today there were scrub jays, quail, a woodpecker knocking at the white- and-black shapes of trees, and someone’s lost rabbit scratching under the barberry: is it indiscriminate? Should it shrink back, wither, and expurgate? Should I, too, not be loved? It is only a little time, a little space. Why not watch the grasses take up their colors in a rush like a stream of kerosene being lit? If I could not have made this garden beautiful I wouldn’t understand your suffering, nor care for each the same, inflamed way. I would have to stay only like the bees, beyond consciousness, beyond self-reproach, fingers dug down hard into stone, and growing nothing. There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light.
When the bed is empty, we pull the shades to block light, light of resemblance to remembery, long light of waiting, an impatience in the glows of it. The here of the now and the glow that days make in the room, without the body but with the stench of it. So we say, vacancy and abject,against the was, against a philosophy of once and then not. Not-being against. A child once grew here. As lines on a wall. As growing without knowing what would one day not be. A gnawing grows. Grew and was. Protection is curled. Motion- less. I envy her in her room. Hers with paint and dolls and hand- prints. Great green and glowing under blankets with a hand that nurtures the heart of the mouth, purrs into mouth, loves the heart. Heart beating within another—blushing blood— God, the beating, lit, and doing what it does.
The sun is still burning in my skin even though it set half-an-hour ago, and Cindy and Bob and Bev and John are pulling on their sweatshirts and gathering around the fire pit. John hands me a cold one and now Bev comes into my arms and I can feel the sun’s heat, and taste the Pacific on her cheek. I am not in Vietnam, nor is John or Bob, because our deferments came through, and we get to remain boys for at least another summer like this one in Santa Cruz, surfing the afternoons in a sweet blue dream I’m remembering now, as the nurse puts my cheek to sleep, and the doctor begins to burn those summers away.
My neighbor, 87, rings the doorbell to ask if I might have seen her clipping shears that went missing a decade ago, with a little red paint on their shaft, or the iron turkey bank and the porcelain coffee cup that disappeared a while back when her friend, now dead, called the police to break in to see if she were ill, and have we had trouble with our phone line, hers is dead and her car and driver’s license are missing though she can drive perfectly well, just memory problems, and her son is coming this morning to take her up to Sheboygan, where she was born and where the family has its burial lots, to wait on assisted living space, and she just wanted to say we’d been good neighbors all these how many? years, and how lucky I am to have found such a nice man and could she borrow a screwdriver, the door lock to her house is jammed.
She’s with Grandma in front of Grandma’s house, backed by a willow tree, gladiola and roses. Who did she ever want to please? But Grandma seems half-pleased and annoyed. No doubt Mother frowns behind the lens, wants to straighten this sassy face. Maybe laughs, too. Little girl with her mouth wide, tongue out, yelling at the camera. See her little white purse full of treasure, her white sandals? She has things to do, you can tell. Places to explore beyond the frame, and these women picking flowers and taking pictures. Why won’t they let her go?
He knows how to do what he sets out to do  with perfectly obvious procedure. The sea  is dark and forbidding. The horizon  is dark and forbidding.   Even from a distance, the less said the better. The colors in some of these landscapes  are perfectly desperate.   In a portrait there is never anything wrong  with the mouth. There is never anything wrong  with anything. Machines are not choosers.  The next best things are certain. Heaven  knowing the next best things. The young  can explain it, but who would they explain  it to? More promise than performance  as all sorts of things begin to interfere.   An energetic hostess seated me at the counter  next to a beautiful woman. It is possible  the timid portion of the population  unless held firmly in check will imitate  the silliness of timid people of years ago.   Supplication is valued. As soon as I learned the facts I gave up  on the exchange. She wanted something  mysterious, as if everything were the same.   Life changes and so-called truth changes with it. The businesslike  haste of the surgeon as he scolds the public.  To look at him and the thing he can never look at  shudderingly as the blood is drawn  is the duty of every patriot.   In a constructive age such as this I should have neglected everything  for the supreme duty of aiding  in the reconstruction.   I took my courage, which starts everywhere and goes  nowhere, and spoke to her. Here  one can unquestionably infer the inside  from the outside.   The leaders of the free world, assembled as if by magic,  seem to have the enemy at their mercy.  It can be argued that Christ himself spoke  to the mob. The crowd will stop  to see almost anything. The crowd will stop  to see something about almost everything.
How do you recognize a lovely place? The rotten anthropology of superheroes hovers above the conference table, exhausted on the idea of dazzling people. A plugged organization of the moon like a turnpike undecorated by barely legal children — true stories end in the moody doctor city but I always say the wrong thing. Away from Las Vegas I spend too much time at the whale facility. I’m bored with awakening into historical X-rays of the NO MOMENT. (What showmanship!) Who does wear a cape underwater? Now Egypt is miniaturized and it may never rain again. Hurling bodies and collapsing lungs used to be honestly scripted activities — the stillness in the dream of important history. From now on your stillness will be happening. In the actual dream remember how the children were modified, the sputtering, Russel Crotty language? Friendly Calliope is no longer remedial in the crisply American landscape. Even snowy Vermont grows opaque, a diminished suggestion in the desert mirror. I feel as if I’m speaking to a dear friend but I’m saying the wrong things. I don’t like cockfights or you’d rather be my daughter, deeply, authentically factualizing our especially Southern roots.
Have you seen, have you seen magic shadows? — Fleetwood Mac, “Nightwatch” My fugues have no apparent relation to past trauma of any kind. When it came time to rehearse we decided to get glamorous. We get all done-up for rehearsal. Gradually, imperceptibly, things begin slipping back into their normal place. My body is slowly rotating into its proper north-south orientation. My playing is flawless as it turns out. The audience goes nuts but what was it all about? Had I longer to see the aspects and facets of the family, which as we know are not always tickety-boo but I have drifted away like a wide-winged bird over many things that are meaningless, yet my mind is clicking away quite properly on other levels. I was never in it for the money, but I see where it goes without ever touching it.   It was like a honeymoon — nothing made sense, sounding utterly convincing to my own ears — selfness in training, needing a month of good sleep. When I woke I saw the sunlight streaming in across the ceiling and thought oh boy, we were awful yesterday, the obvious response being to phone the boss and tell him you’re sick and go to bed until it’s passed, except Boss is in bed too. Don’t let the lack of his spirit blind your life. You would expect me to tell you, wouldn’t you, if our positions were reversed, while I look for a suitable shirt, but you don’t have any more to accomplish, nothing at all. Did you ever love me? Could I grit my teeth and carry it all off without anyone being the wiser?   Any words that have concrete meanings are fine and completely friendly. The whole history of the human race is somewhat sad, wouldn’t you say, if you look at it in a certain way? But then, if you squint a bit differently it isn’t sad at all.   There were times we were all hurting really bad, thinking the bed will win. Maybe it was the beginnings of trademark — if we stayed telepathic we couldn’t do that — surprise, surprise, and that’s how we decided to do the dance and that’s how The Dance came about. There was a large, grassy clearing in the forest, the trees around it thick and tall and there was sunlight on the grass. We knew that people were worshipping and the way they did it was to gather around a place like this and allow themselves to become a part of it, greeting it and letting it greet them feeding their bodies to their souls, the pity of the tribe was how we imagined it, seeing behind closed eyelids a lovely scene, looking down from an open balcony into a central courtyard. We were in a place that appeared to consist of baskets of flowers.   I could see only the top of his brown hair and his moving hands. There’s a lot of color. It’s more noticeable than usual — I mean there are little prisms, rainbows everywhere but whether it was guitar or piano I couldn’t tell you — this is pre-Lindsey. The back room was vicious, everyone on a different drug. If you turned your back you’d better keep on walking. We did this every night, playing country rock at the height of glitter, mixed-bag material. We needed theoretical problems! My back to him, I said, “You mean us poor, sad little cast-offs, wouldn’t it be nice if we could cheer each other up so our miser wouldn’t cast a pall on the happiness of the Prince and Princess?” Only I’m foreshadowing with picky surfaces. The morals are contemporary — argument of sounds, accomodation, implosion, but still the ineffable grace of seeming perishable — the ordinariness of making love and hearing music.   I’m okay by myself, believe me. It’s a thought that gives rise to immense self-compassion. Okay, I’ll deal with this. I kind of went on the skids. It was just the four of us finally starting to crank it out, faster and faster, until it was too fast. Then one day, it was a Friday, always payday and I was in the bedroom beginning to sort out what I thought of as my shitpile, a collection of such things as dresses, belts, stockings, photographs, and old magazines all waiting to be put where they belong.
Never instead put the bales in the bounty, resize the type to provide ALLURE. Look how the picture seems to tell a story.   Mother, I’m all dolled up in HOPE. My breastplate hinge needs a little oil, I’m hobbling along to kick your crutch.   Mother, I’m all doped up with DESIRE. I’ve cleaned the machine with delicate hand, scrubbed the data within an inch of its life.   Mother, I’m all diary today, feeling PENSIVE. The returns keep disappearing, I can’t get my hands around even one. I keep clicking through   the channels, the links, little vortex displays all the characteristics of a MOTIVE, Mother, but someone’s just reported   that the election has been made OFFICIAL. The results seem promising. In one version you get to keep the crown. The twin diamonds   sparkling your eyes sparkle harder, the LIGHT takes on a decadence like that of old snow. In the other, your garland consumes itself,   your hair falls out like nuclear, your elisions lisp the windows shut, breaking the view in half. Your face becomes but a VAGARY   and there are no backups in storage. I AM a cosmos if I am still breathing. Wind breaks at my neck and spells your name acrostically.   Spells your name like my BELOVED. Repetition of facts and figures keeps me apprised. Dogs mass in the streets, shaking bones, slurping scrap   lifted from the MALFEASANCE of silver plates hung to dry from row house clotheslines, the tread’s worn down on the spires sagging   from the GLORIOUS peaks of this great sky! Can you hear the clicking through the air vents? Did you notice the picture twitch on the bedroom wall?   Leaves turn pink and blue, SUPERNATURAL is not dead, is rippling through me, I can feel my toes, I can see you staring at my nape,   I can see you vivid in the dark corner of the day, taking your damask gown off one strap at a time, as if I were watching. I have a MANDATE.   Nobody else would bother to see you this way.
Bring the oncoming train into focus. Tell me your theory of the market. Pupils dilate, trees fall, I practice transference in my downtime. Think of my mother watering plants. Is everybody really watching? Blog me. Add to my Wiki entry. Date me. Reply to my electronic flirt. My mother told me she’d nominate me for that award, if she could bear the proxy. Show me your tits. I shaved my balls. I took out a second mortgage. Motherhood frightens the elms, carves its sorry initials into the sky’s prolapsed anus. Each sadness passes through me like a gallstone. My valve leaks an amniotic canopy over the bar I’m fragging. I’m a fragment, a tender button. I saw my first beetle in the periphery. Lake Shore Drive against the ruins, the stain of lake-effect snow a special effect, the only weather exhibiting any real affect.
A brenda is missing—where is she? Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch with the crowded beak; a little pretenda  is learning to read in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher,  a skinny pretenda is learning to read till the missing brenda  is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro. Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays  & sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow  or blue will find the brenda in 1962, 
Nancy who has no mother,  who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them.   Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference. Click of the smart dog’s nails on linoleum.  Nancy bends over the clues, of brenda’s locket & dress. Word by word  between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn— are they missing too? Maybe Nancy  will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew: “neat pretty sly cute.” Syllable by syllable  & still no brenda! Nancy puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?
We bury the sparrows of Europe with found instruments, their breasts light as an ounce of tea where we had seen them off the path, their twin speeds of shyness & notched wings near the pawnbroker’s house by the canal, in average neighborhoods of the resisters, or in markets of princely delphinium & flax, flying from awnings at unmarked rates to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs we would descend much later;   in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters where streets were taken one by one, where consciousness is a stair or path, we mark their domains with notched sticks of hickory or chestnut or ash because our cities of princely pallor should not have unmarked graves. Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge to which patterned being is parallel: they came as if from the margins of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning our little hourglass up on the screen.
The last ice age had been caused by a wobble. After it passed they made houses from stars;   Visitors would peer in And see the tongs not slipping,   Roomsized pebbles having been moved far.   It’s like this more When we speak than when we write;   Loving thus we have been Loved by ground,   The word being A box with four of its corners hidden;   Everything else is round.
Each day the job gets up And rubs its eyes   We are going to live on in dry amazement   Workers push the granite bed under the avenue   Bed of the married The re- the pre-married   Making a form as forms become infinite   The scrapings scraping   Graywhacke chert   People wait for their bumpy little pizzas Theories of theories in gravity voices   Melpomene goddess of tragedy bathes   Mostly the bride never the bridesmaid   Angel food in whole foods   Consider Tanguy whose lunar responses to childhood Made everything a horizon   Those walking upside down don’t know what to think   The finch engineering itself to deep spring   Or you life tired of being cured   How many layers Of giving up are there   One of it   Two of everything in the arc you save
~~ & thus you entered   a forest of solitudes   where in this great   sense your life had   been pursued, till like   a shadow breaking off   a rising body, a   need hovered & grew.   Some lined feature of   another fate strives to   be met, sits low   & upright. Those qualities   which had been energy   or grace past pain   wove from the nerves   a nest or instinct.   Your calms are interesting.   Write to us during   this terrible government. A   universe coughs blue &   draws a twiceness from   the mitred now, while   your garden hand spells   the inexhaustible forms~~         FOR ELIZABETH ROBINSON
I passed through nature   into the next. Children   running in unsupervised shadows.   Last century’s fountains learning   not to lie. Risk   to identify with only   one element since one   will die but in   the summer air around   each thought, something is   built and avoided. You   go through an arch   and aren’t the arch,   just infinity of form,   curve’s curve of becoming,   a phrase tracking it   to future’s celadon relief.   As others dressed as   others we were supposed   to meet. Citizens walked   here without disappointment, seeing   no statue or palace   with eleven axes, patient   in the mindless heat—
Inside the brand-new museum there’s an old synagogue. Inside the synagogue is me. Inside me my heart. Inside my heart a museum. Inside the museum a synagogue, inside it me, inside me my heart, inside my heart a museum
at the altarpiece of Saint Teresa     No need to be coy— you know what she’s doing    And so did Bernini, when he found Teresa in the full-throttle of her divine vision,  caught her at it,   carving this surrender so fluidly you expect the impossible:   for her tang to swell up, ripe as seafoam, from the gulf of her flushed and falling figure. Perhaps this is how   God comes to us, or should come to us, all:   the bluntly and beautifully corporeal at   prayers in the Sunday school of pleasure. Why   shouldn’t He come to us as He did to Teresa? A saint   on her back— a girl tearing open the gift He gave her?
If there is a word in the lexicon of love, it will not declare itself. The nature of words is to fail men who fall in love with men. It will not declare itself, the perfect word. Boyfriend seems ridiculous: men who fall in love with men deserve something a bit more formal. The perfect word? Boyfriend? Ridiculous. But partner is . . . businesslike— we deserve something a bit less formal, much more in love with love. But if partner is businesslike, then lover suggests only sex, is too much in love with love. There is life outside of the bedroom, and lover suggests only sex. We are left with roommate, or friend.  There is life, but outside of the bedroom. My friend and I rarely speak of one another. To my left is my roommate, my friend. If there is a word in the lexicon of love, my friend and I rarely speak it of one another. The nature of words is to fail.
: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?  I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.  When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit  who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :  a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle  burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy. : Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:  Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,  like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.  There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing. : Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?  When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,  fluid : and my widowed aunt played Chopin,  and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.  I want now to be close to you. I would  link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days. : I am not happy. I will be open.  I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.  There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate  On what a tragedy his life was, really. : Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?  When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,  and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death :  if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,  if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.  I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me. : I will be open. I think he never loved me:  He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam  that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:  he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to know me. : What are you now? If we could touch one another,  if these our separate entities could come to grips,  clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday  I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,  and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.  Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.
I’m watching football, which is odd as I hate football in a hyperbolic and clinically revealing way, but I hate Bill Parcells more, because he is the illuminated manuscript of cruel, successful men, those with the slitty eyes of ancient reptiles, who wear their smugness like a tight white turtleneck, and revel in their lack of empathy for any living thing. So I’m watching football, staying up late to watch football, hoping to witness (as I think of it) The Humiliation of the Tuna (as he is called), which is rightly Parcells’s first time back in the Meadowlands since taking up with the Cowboys, who are, as we all know, thugs, even by the NFL’s standards. The reasons  I hate football are clear and complicated and were born, as I was, in Nebraska, where football is to life what sleep deprivation is to Amnesty International, that is, the best researched and most effective method of breaking a soul. Yes, there’s the glorification of violence, the weird nexus knitting the homo, both phobic and erotic, but also, and worse, my parents in 1971, drunk as Australian parrots in a bottlebush, screeching WE’RE #1, WE’RE #1! when the Huskers finally clinched the Orange Bowl, the two of them bouncing up and down crazily on the couch, their index fingers jutting holes through the ubiquitous trail of smoke rings that was the weather in our house, until the whole deranged mess that was them, my parents, the couch, their lit cigarettes, flipped over backward onto my brother and me. My husband thinks that’s a funny story and, in an effort to be a “good sport,” I say I think it is, too.   Which leads me to recall the three Chihuahuas who’ve spent the fullness of their agitated lives penned in the back of my neighbor’s yard. Today they barked continuously for 12 minutes (I timed it) as the UPS guy made his daily round. They bark so piercingly, they tremble with such exquisite outrage, that I’ve begun to root for them, though it’s fashionable to hate them and increasingly dark threats against their tiny persons move between the houses on our block. But isn’t that what’s wrong with this version of America: the jittering, small-skulled, inbred-by-no-choice- of-their-own are despised? And Bill Parcells— the truth is he’ll win this game. I know it and you know it and, sadly, did it ever seem there was another possible outcome?   It’s a small deposit, but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation. I need to believe in the sweetness of one righteous image, in Bill Parcells trapped in the body of a teacup poodle, as any despised thing, forced to yap away his next life staked to a clothesline pole or doing hard time on a rich old matron’s lap, dyed lilac to match her outfit. I want to live there someday, across that street, and listen to him. Yap, yap, yap.
I Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection music, silence, and surf.  II No longer speaking Listening with the whole body And with every drop of blood Overtaken by silence But this same silence is become speech With the speed of darkness.  III Stillness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices. You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles.  IV After the lifting of the mist after the lift of the heavy rains the sky stands clear and the cries of the city risen in day I remember the buildings are space walled, to let space be used for living I mind this room is space this drinking glass is space whose boundary of glass lets me give you drink and space to drink your hand, my hand being space containing skies and constellations your face carries the reaches of air I know I am space my words are air.  V Between between the man : act exact woman : in curve senses in their maze frail orbits, green tries, games of stars shape of the body speaking its evidence  VI I look across at the real vulnerable involved naked devoted to the present of all I care for the world of its history leading to this moment.  VII Life the announcer. I assure you there are many ways to have a child. I bastard mother promise you there are many ways to be born. They all come forth in their own grace.  VIII Ends of the earth join tonight with blazing stars upon their meeting. These sons, these sons fall burning into Asia.  IX Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.  X Lying blazing beside me you rear beautifully and up— your thinking face— erotic body reaching in all its colors and lights— your erotic face colored and lit— not colored body-and-face but now entire, colors lights the world thinking and reaching.  XI The river flows past the city. Water goes down to tomorrow making its children I hear their unborn voices I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.  XII Big-boned man young and of my dream Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat. I am he am I? Dreaming? I am the bird am I? I am the throat? A bird with a curved beak. It could slit anything, the throat-bird. Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large. Bird emerges wet being born Begins to sing.  XIII My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel the copper roof across the way thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you?
When the man behind the counter said, “You pay by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all?   Ah, Sandy, you were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days,   where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment, a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on   the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting change for the building’s monthly pool to predict which balcony   would fall off next. That’s when K. was fucking M. and M. was fucking J., and even B. and I threw down once on the glass-speckled   lawn, adrift in the headlights of his El Camino. Those were immortal times, Sandy! Coke wasn’t addictive yet, condoms prevented herpes   and men were only a form of practice for the Russian novel we foolishly hoped our lives would become. Now it’s a Friday night,   sixteen years from there. Don’t the best characters know better than to live too long? My estranged husband house-sits for a spoiled   cockatoo while saving to buy his own place. My lover’s gone back to his gin and the farm-team fiancée he keeps in New York.   What else to do but read Frank O’Hara to my tired three-year-old? When I put him to bed, he mutters “more sorry” as he turns into sleep.   Tonight, I find you in a box I once marked “The Past.” Well, therapy’s good for some things, Sandy, but who’d want to forgive   a girl like that? Frank says Destroy yourself if you don’t know! Deflated, you’re simply the smile that surrounds a hole.  I don’t know anything.
1.  The contours of the girl blur. She is both becoming and fact. A rancor defines the split. Rip into. Flatten the depth of voice. That   urgent flex peels off the steady layers. A girl, I say. Girl. Gu-erl. Quell. He. He—unbuttons before emergence.   As in yard rake pressed to roof of mouth. A fragrant rod. Suh—sssuh—ssuck. Insistence. Lips go lisp. Our brutish boy.   Having not ever been whole. Or simple. Or young. Just split and open. Not of it. For it. Born a cog of hard wheel at five, six, seven . . .   What to know of what has never been?    2.  No common place would do: bar stool, front porch, sea rock. Such a room should crawl into the soul. Stretch it. Contort it.   Could be the straddle of this stranger at the neck. I am this.  She does not waver. She is twenty-five. The bed is wet. As many   as had done this thing before. The wound is rupture. Blood-faced. Between sailing and anchor. No, between shipwreck and burial.   What does the mouth do? It does not mean no, saying no. It does not mean yes. It gurgles. It swells. It is comfort.   A quick kick. Mighty, mighty.
I. For that you never acknowledged me, I acknowledge the spring’s yellow detail, the every drop of rain, the anonymous unacknowledged men and women. The shine as it glitters in our child’s wild eyes, one o’clock at night. This river, this city, the years of the shadow on the delicate skin of my hand, moving in time. Disinherited, annulled, finally disacknowledged and all of my own asking. I keep that wild dimension of life and making and the spasm upon my mouth as I say this word of acknowledge to you forever. Ewig. Two o’clock at night. II. While this my day and my people are a country not yet born it has become an earth I can acknowledge. I must. I know what the disacknowledgment does. Then I do take you, but far under consciousness, knowing that under under flows a river wanting the other : to go open-handed in Asia, to cleanse the tributaries and the air, to make for making, to stop selling death and its trash, pour plastic down men’s throats, to let this child find, to let men and women find, knowing the seeds in us all. They do say Find. I cannot acknowledge it entire. But I will. A beginning, this moment, perhaps, and you. III. Death flowing down past me, past me, death marvelous, filthy, gold, in my spine in my sex upon my broken mouth and the whole beautiful mouth of the child; shedding power over me death if I acknowledge him. Leading me in my own body at last in the dance.
Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant? I will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and I will eat it and call it a carolyn sandwich. Then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayon­naise and  that is how you shall love me in my restaurant Tom, will you come to my empty beige apartment and help me set up my daybed? Yes, and I will put the screws in loosely so that when we move on it, later, it will rock like a cradle and then you will know you are my baby Tom, I am sitting on my dirt bike on the deck. Will you come out from the kitchen and watch the people with me? Yes, and then we will race to your bedroom. I will win and we will tangle up on your comforter while the sweat rains from our stomachs and fore­heads Tom, the stars are sitting in tonight like gumball gems in a little girl’s  jewelry box. Later can we walk to the duck pond? Yes, and we can even go the long way past the jungle gym. I will push you on the swing, but promise me you’ll hold tight. If you fall I might disappear Tom, can we make a baby together? I want to be a big pregnant woman with a loved face and give you a squalling red daughter. No, but I will come inside you and you will be my daughter Tom, will you stay the night with me and sleep so close that we are one person? No, but I will lie down on your sheets and taste you. There will be feathers of you on my tongue and then I will never forget you Tom, when we are in line at the convenience store can I put my hands in your back pockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook of your shoulder blade? No, but later you can lie against me and almost touch me and when I go I will leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed up against the thought of me Tom, if I weep and want to wait until you need me will you promise that someday you will need me? No, but I will sit in silence while you rage, you can knock the chairs down any mountain. I will always be the same and you will always wait Tom, will you climb on top of the dumpster and steal the sun for me? It’s just hanging there and I want it. No, it will burn my fingers. No one can have the sun: it’s on loan from God. But I will draw a picture of it and send it to you from Richmond and then you can smooth out the paper and you will have a piece of me as well as the sun Tom, it’s so hot here, and I think I’m being born. Will you come back from Richmond and baptise me with sex and cool water? I will come back from Richmond. I will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the back of your neck and then I will lick the salt off it. Then I will leave Tom, Richmond is so far away. How will I know how you love me? I have left you. That is how you will know
What's left is footage: the hours before  Camille, 1969—hurricane  parties, palm trees leaning in the wind,  fronds blown back, a woman's hair. Then after:  the vacant lots,  boats washed ashore, a swamp where graves had been. I recall how we huddled all night in our small house,  moving between rooms,  emptying pots filled with rain. The next day, our house—  on its cinderblocks—seemed to float  in the flooded yard: no foundation beneath us, nothing I could see  tying us to the land.  In the water, our reflection  trembled, disappeared when I bent to touch it.
Back in a yard where ringers groove a ditch, These four in shirtsleeves congregate to pitch Dirt-burnished iron. With appraising eye, One sizes up a peg, hoists and lets fly—A clang resounds as though a smith had struck Fire from a forge. His first blow, out of luck, Rattles in circles. Hitching up his face,He swings, and weight once more inhabits space, Tumbles as gently as a new-laid egg.Extended iron arms surround their pegLike one come home to greet a long-lost brother. Shouts from one outpost. Mutters from the other.Now changing sides, each withered pitcher moves As his considered dignity behoovesDown the worn path of earth where August flies And sheaves of air in warm distortions rise,To stand ground, fling, kick dust with all the force Of shoes still hammered to a living horse.
We brought that newborn home from Maimonides and showed her nine blue glittering streets. Would she like the semis with hoods of snow? The precinct? Bohack’s? A lit diner?Her eyes were huge and her gaze tiltedlike milk in a pan, toward shadow.Would she like the tenement, three dim flights, her crib that smelled of Lemon Pledge?We slept beside her in our long coats,rigid with fatigue in the unmade bed.Her breath woke us with its slight catch. Would she approve of gray winter dawn?We showed her daylight in our cupped hands. Then the high clocks began boomingin this city and the next, we counted for her, but just the strokes, not the laggardsor the tinny echoes, and we taught herhow to wait, how to watch, how to be held,in that icy room, until our own alarm chimed.
I wake to leafless vines and muddy fields, patches of standing water. His pocketknifewaits in my dresser drawer, still able to gut fish.I pick up his green shirt, put it on for the fourth dayin a row. Outside, the rusty nail he hammered catches me, leaves its stain on everything.The temperature drops, the whole shore filling with him: his dented chew can, waders,the cattails kinked, bowing their distress.At the pier, I use his old pliers to ready the line:fatheads, darters, a blood worm jig. Today, the lake’s one truth is hardness. When the trout bite,I pull the serviceable things glistening into air.
I read the palms of the other kids on the field trip to see which ones would grow upto be astronauts. The lifeline on Betty Lou’s beautiful hand ended the day after tomorrow,so I told her how the restof our lives is vastly over-rated, even in neighboring galaxies.When she asked me how I knew so much, I said I watchedWar of the Worlds six timesand, if she went with me tothe double-feature tomorrow,I’d finish explaining the universe.I smiled winningly. The Halley’s Comet lecture by our teacher whooshed inmy one ear and out the other.
She appears to be recognized as herself and not herself, new because endlessly recycled, not what she was but not what she will be—see? Not married and not not married, the processional’s a ritual meant to extend a magical present, until the head of this pin is the size of a rented hall and all of us angels stepping out on the long blank train of her on-going gown. To go in single and come married out is easy enough, what matters is to enlarge the interstitial, to live as long as we can in the not exactly no longer and the not quite not yet also. Where organ music drowns the ill-digested vows and the empty stomach growls. Hesitant. The BND goes down slow as a pill we can’t really swallow, stuck chunk in a stalled gulp between yesterday and tomorrow, at one and the same time belated and punctual. It’s the system itself we’ve come to see (open the plug of that rubber-edged rose window), not me and not you, but we: the marriage of church and state made visible, audible, available. Here Dearly Beloved’s an embarrassing gurgle, and the costly gown so much densely crumpled bathroom tissue backing up one overworked way in and out of the usual world. From the mouth to points South, scrawl that in soap on the vehicle? From “will you?” to “why don’t you ever?” on the march to “irreconcilable.” Hey—whoa! Away with you hand-wringing nay sayers: be here now now now now…. Cheeks are flushed and eyes overflow as we grasp her new handle, here to hear the I do as a couple of hard blows: that flesh-blunted sound of bone on bone dislodging as cough a caught morsel not thoroughly chewed. Back out, back up, quagmire, circle: proposed solutions involve the usual budget expansions, extended tours of duty, and additional troops.
—for J.P.O. I have wished you dead and myself dead, How could it be otherwise. I have broken into you like a burglar And you've set your dogs on me. You have been a hurricane to me And a pile of broken sticks A child could kick. I have climbed you like a monument, gasping, For the exercise and the view, And leaned over the railing at the top– Strong and warm, that summer wind.
Nose tucked under tail,you are a warm, furred planet centered in my bed.All night I orbit, tangle-limbed,in the slim spaceallotted to me.If I accidentallybump you from sleep,you shift, groan,drape your chin on my hip.O, that languid, movie-star drape!I can never resist it.Digging my fingers into your fur, kneading, I wonder: How do you dream?What do you adore?Why should your black silk ears feel like happiness?This is how it is with love.Once invited,it steps in gently,circles twice,and takes up as much space as you will give it.
You squeezed its leash in your fist, It followed where you led:Tick, tock, tick, tock,Nodding its wooden head.Wagging a tail on a spring,Its wheels gearing lackety-clack,Dogging your heels the length of the house, Though you seldom glanced back.It didn’t mind being dragged When it toppled on its side Scraping its coat of primary colors: Love has no pride.But now that you run and climb And leap, it has no hopeOf keeping up, so it sits, hunched At the end of its short ropeAnd dreams of a rummage saleWhere it’s snapped up for a song,And of somebody—somebody just like you— Stringing it along.
The jay’s up early, and attacks the lawnwith something of that fervor and despairof one whose keys are not where they always are, checking the same spots over and againtill something new or overlooked appears—an armored pillbug, or a husk of grain.He flits with it home, where his mate beds down,her stern tail feathers jutting from the nestlike a spoon handle from a breakfast bowl.The quickest lover’s peck, and he’s paroledagain to stalk the sodgrass, cockheaded, obsessed. He must get something from his selfless work— joy, or reprieve, or a satisfying senseof obligation dutifully dispensed.Unless, of course, he’s just a bird, with beaks—too many beaks—to fill, in no way possessedof traits or demons humans might devise,his dark not filled with could-have-beens and whys.
The release of water in the baseso controlled that the surface tension,tabletop of stability, a mirror, remains unbroken. Moisture seeps down polished basalt sides.This is how I grieve, barely enough to dampen river stones, until fibers in my husband’s tweed jacket brush my fingers as I fold it into a box. How close the whirlpool under my feet.
Even the bosses are sleeping latein the dusty light of September.The parking lot’s empty and no one cares.No one unloads a ladder, steps on the gasor starts up the big machines in the shop,sanding and grinding, cutting and binding.No one lays a flat bead of flux over a metal seamor lowers the steel forks from a tailgate.Shadows gather inside the sleeveof the empty thermos beside the sink,the bells go still by the channel buoy,the wind lies down in the west,the tuna boats rest on their tie-up linesturning a little, this way and that.
Gliding o'er all, through all,Through Nature, Time, and Space,As a ship on the waters advancing,The voyage of the soul—not life alone,Death, many deaths I'll sing.
Born on Monday and a tiny world-containing grain of light passed through each eye like heaven through a needle. And on Tuesday he screamed for a small ear in which to hide. He rolled on Wednesday, rolled his whole body full of immense salt spaces, slowly from one horizon to the other. And on Thursday, trembling, crippled, broke beyond his given strength and crawled. And on Friday he stood upright. And on Saturday he tested a footstep and the sky came down and alit on his shoulder full of various languages in which one bird doesn’t answer to another. And on Sunday he dreamed he was flying and his mind grew gold watching the moon and he began to sing to the brink of speaking
Various stars. Various kings. Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights. Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers, Much cold, much overbearing darkness. Various long midwinter Glooms. Various Solitary and Terrible Stars. Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers. Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars. More than one North Star, more than one South Star. Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems, Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thicknesses of Dark, Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth. Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens, All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes: Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk, Works of wonder and/or water, snowflakes, stars of frost . . . Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes, Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness, Various 5,000-year-old moon maps, Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in braille. Various gods making beautiful works in bronze, Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains, And all sorts of drystone stars put together without mortar. Many Wisemen remarking the irregular weather. Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers, Watches of wisp of various glowing spindles, Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac, Seafarers tossing, tied to a star . . . Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights. Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall. Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.
Wrongheaded and obsequious on vacation, unnerved by new surroundings, I miss the bright feeling of belonging and the familiar patterns of my country, its virginity and schizophrenia, my several stolen bicycles.
Translation broadens language as divorce and remarriage extend family. Born to fade and break, facts huddle inside black brackets. Work means inquisition as a child separates a cricket’s wings from thorax. Ideas come apart as monads, metastasizing rhapsody on the edge of delicate dusk. Thunder sounds in the distance or television, always on in this constant rain.
It was something to let him go.  It was a having to believe, furthermore, in the voyage of the other, a Ulysses without an Ithaca, was to speak of the sea without speech of the shore— and to have for a body the going away of the body, to have for eyes the going away of the eyes. And for hearing, a silence, where once were people. And for comfort, a dwelling before each steps into that weather of which all strangers speak.
Someone enters: That alone makes me speak. When you lived, I spoke to you. We are transitive. I never dream of speech: I either speak or don’t. And now that I know where you will not be— I do not go there.
you are listening to the transmission via seed pearl, aural irritant clockwork and sparkgap ultra high and superlow precious black opal crystal and glass shudders and sings broad cast scattered the seeds among the apocrypha each agent at land or sea satellite or space direct conversion of royal register and groove high in fidelity to our regenerative radio hisses and shouts everything that cannot be owned belongs now to us irradiant waves oscillate below visible light to arrive and reside requires no medium but occupies vacuum and air transformational emission follow your radiotelegraph we are your conductor our amplitude varies we fluctuate the frequency we are not subject to static interference we embed the subcarrierhush y’all you need not know that language if you know this sound
We had to sleep in the streets. Not on the sidewalks, in the streets. Cause the sidewalks was full of urine and body waste, dead bodies. And we had to sleep out there, in the hell of waste and the dead bodies. I walked from water up to my neck to get to the Convention Center. There was dead dogs, dead rodents, you had to push all that kind of mess out of the way, hoping that it didn’t touch you. I was pushing them out the way, so many dead bodies coming from the Ninth Ward up our way and they had people that was drowned up my way. Now this Convention Center wasn’t nothing nice, I kid you not. People still crying and begging to go home. There’s nothing there. You have no running water. You have no lights. The place stinks. It’s contaminated. I’ve been there twice. I died there, I died. Me, my ten-year-old daughter, my sister and her thirty-two-year-old son, we lived out there seven days. Five days we had no food. No water. Every night and every day the military people was throwing down on us like we was a bunch of wild animals. They was on a hunt to kill. They killed one guy right there in front of us, run over him with a police car and then they shot the man and left him there. They didn’t cover him up or nothing and the next day, it was so hot out there, when they did come to pick him up, his body was stuck to the ground. So I can understand you want to keep control of the people, but why have those people draw guns on children? Women with babies in their stomachs. Every time you look around we breaking and running, trying to get into the Convention Center and they’re drawing guns on people like that. I mean, it don’t make no kinda sense. They wouldn’t let you leave. You had to stay there. Cause we smelled like — I’m serious — because everybody was smelling the same way — smelling like sewer, like shit, piss. That was the scariest time of my life. And we had to have that on us because we ain’t had no water, we ain’t had no sewer. There wasn’t no limit on it because you had to scrub yourself just to get the scent out of your skin Because, like I said, they knew they have a lot of poor people like myself don’t have no transportation, don’t have no money. Well I have a car but it got under the water. Me, my ten-year-old daughter, my sister and her thirty-two year-old son, we lived out there seven days. We looked for her for an hour and thirty minutes in the Convention Center. Five days we had no food. No water. I seen children die, I seen old people die, I seen murders, I seen rapes. I seen people murder people then cut their heads off. We already knew that the killer people were putting them in the icebox, killing little children and raping little children. The men, the looters, the people that was staying in there. I am telling you, that was the most horriblest experience I have ever seen in my life. I seen the troops shoot people. They ride around with guns almost like we was in a prison camp. No, the place wasn’t on fire. It was some children upstairs playing with the fire extinguisher. Like hell. And like I said, I never in my life grew up in a house with millions of people. You know, I’ve always had my own room, my own, you know, my own, I was always — just — In the Convention Center, the buses came in. Every night. Every day they was telling us “The buses is coming, the buses is coming.” The buses passed right there in front of us and kept going! The people was there to see the buses so everybody run, rushing the buses to get on the damn buses and get out of there. Every day they was moving us around, go here, go there, the buses is gonna meet you here, meet you there. They was lying. There was never no buses, they was lying. They was just making us tired. They had us in there to kill us. We used to look up at the bridge and see all the buses going that way to the Superdome, or to the hospital, or to the people in those condos, getting them all out of there and going back. Buses going back again, buses leaving out New Orleans again. That’s how it was. It was nopd police but it wasn’t our regular district police. These were special nopd policemen. We was running from place to place telling them, “Oh, this person dead, that person dead.” They said, “Well we can’t do nothing about no dead bodies. Y’all just don’t worry. Y’all just try to get the fuck out of here.” They say, “Y’all go to the bridge. The bus’s going to pick you up on the bridge.” I think it was they job to send the National Guards and the armored people in there to make sure everybody was evacuated. They left us out there for five, six, seven days. We stayed on the bridge nine hours. They didn’t care about us. The first thing they dropped into us was boxes of cigarettes. Not food. Not water. Boxes of cigarettes. Two hours later they drop us water. And half of it burst open cause they was so high up when they dropped it. Two hours after that they drop us some army food in a box we got to pour water in to heat up. We was hungry, we had no other choice. The news got us out. Not the National Guard, not the Mayor, not Blanco, the news people is the only ones who got us out. Channel 26 got me out. Channel 26. The rest of them was there to kill us. I got tired of Convention Centers. I wanted to come the hell up out of that damn Convention Center.
for my grandmother, Theresa Frank Some slow evenings when the light hangs late and stubborn in the sky, gives itself up to darkness slowly and deliberately, slow cloud after slow cloud, slowness enters me like something familiar, and it feels like going home. It’s all there in the disappearing light: all the evenings of slow sky and slow loving, slow boats on sluggish bayous; the thick-middled trees with the slow-sounding names—oak, mimosa, pecan, magnolia; the slow tree sap that sticks in your hair when you lie with the trees; and the maple syrup and pancakes and grits, the butter melting slowly into and down the sides like sweat between breasts of sloe-eyed strippers; and the slow-throated blues that floats over the city like fog; and the weeping, the willows, the cut onions, the cayenne, the slow-cooking beans with marrow-thick gravy; and all the mint juleps drunk so slowly on all the slow southern porches, the bourbon and sugar and mint going down warm and brown, syrup and slow; and all the ice cubes melting in all the iced teas, all the slow-faced people sitting in all the slowly rocking rockers; and the crabs and the shrimp and crawfish, the hard shells slowly and deliberately and lovingly removed, the delicate flesh slowly sucked out of heads and legs and tails; and the slow lips that eat and drink and love and speak that slow luxurious language, savoring each word like a long-missed lover; and the slow-moving nuns, the black habits dragging the swollen ground; and the slow river that cradles it all, and the chicory coffee that cuts through it all, slow-boiled and black as dirt; and the slow dreams and the slow-healing wounds and the slow smoke of it all slipping out, ballooning into the sky—slow, deliberate, and magnificent.
I am watching the movie Twelve Angry Men because there is a character in it who reminds me of him. He is the one who wants to go to the baseball game instead of decide on a man’s life, he is the weak one, the one afraid to reveal what he really feels, the one for whom everything is a joke. He is not Henry Fonda, the tight-lipped moral one. The man is despicable, his weaknesses obvious to all, as obvious as Henry Fonda’s goodness. I watch the movie again and again, loving the black and white of it, soothed by the sound of my father’s voice, the careless pronunciation, the easy shrugging of the shoulders at every crucial question. I sink lower into the dark arms of the sofa. Strange how comfortable the familiar is, how we can even prefer it, however terrifying.
I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,I was ashamed of you. I despised youAs the place of my nativity.And there in Rome, among the artists,Speaking Italian, speaking French,I seemed to myself at times to be freeOf every trace of my origin.I seemed to be reaching the heights of artAnd to breathe the air that the masters breathed,And to see the world with their eyes.But still they’d pass my work and say:"What are you driving at, my friend?Sometimes the face looks like Apollo’s,At others it has a trace of Lincoln’s."There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River,And I burned with shame and held my peace.And what could I do, all covered overAnd weighted down with western soil,Except aspire, and pray for anotherBirth in the world, with all of Spoon RiverRooted out of my soul?
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel— Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens— But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Ballades by the score with the same old thought: The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; And what is love but a rose that fades? Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, failure— All in the loom, and oh what patterns! Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers— Blind to all of it all my life long. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?
Over treasure and land some texts will say it had Little to do with slavery or the newly Discovered yellow planet Few men watched the glaciers recede From shuttles they had built During the hemorrhage years When they’d gathered all the genes down from the ledges I’ll be a fig or a sycamore tree Or without hands By then doctors and poets Would have found a cure for prayer    •  Or have you shoved the door shut In the face of the dark? Have you body and light the trap Of retribution doing unto you What it does to others? You protest In the streets and papers and I leave For a faraway land Where with pill and scalpel And a distant reckoning If he should lick his lips Or clench his fist I shall find his second left toe Infected puffy From a bump I’ll lance it and squeeze Out the pus and offer Him an antibiotic I can’t refuse therefore I am   •  The first time I saw you it was hot I was fed up The second time your wife gave birth to a macerated boy I had nothing to tell you About letting go of the dying In the morning you were gone Had carried your father back to your house His cracked skull I didn’t know that was your wife When I raised my voice To those who were praying From behind the wall to keep it down I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat With a gadget a century old   •  Anemic From so much loss giving birth If you give blood in the desert you won’t Get it back not your iron pills or magic hat I put your thin Hemoglobin up to the light and called out To the donors Donors If you want to know your blood type And it’s a match You must donate Few came some indifferent to my condition Not having heard of it And willing anyhow   •  And the world is south The night a bandit with gasoline And I’m your dancing lizard mirth I put my one arm up And bring my one foot down on a hot zinc top The nearest hospital was the dawn She didn’t know her daughter on her back was The entry wound and she the exit She ran a brothel so The officer said Where the rebels came and went And ran into the government boys Her girl’s femur the size of the bullet   •  He was from the other side rumors Had a bullet through his left arm Or had it bitten off by a camel A camel elephant of the desert never forgets what you are If you aren’t kind to it When I met him his bladder was the size Of a watermelon his prostate a cantaloupe You cannot catheterize A man forever Every hour on the hour his left arm stump Hanging his good arm holding His penis his buttocks in deep squeeze A charge from the rear without spillage This poor murderous thief desperately single- Handedly began slapping his own ass As if he were dashing a stallion in a raid On some unarmed village   •  The mind in the field The brine in the field Whether I Is a diphthong codependent on What isn’t there to stay in the field The good you act is equal To the good you doubt Most have lost many You are either prosperous Or veteran in the field   •  A mother offers not necessarily Sells her one-eyed son For an education if you’ll bring him back And stone dust for one With congenital illness And little boy with malaria Same old gas Money mixed with blood Transfusion the doctor’s perfect record broken Nobility of taking A life you Who must walk to and from your house The jeep’s upkeep The donkey-cart ambulance   •  One boot left behind The one-boot photo I wanted On a book military black the quad a clinic’s Special Forces spun By his dangling heels from The pickup truck rushed To a central town altered combative With two scalp lacerations and blood In his auditory canal I was a lover of loss I tossed The boot in the capital of suffering
My daughter  wouldn’t hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn’t a place to call home And you’d get to go biking She said that’s how others Become refugees isn’t it?
1   Three sparrows in the schoolyard while waiting for my daughter to finish up her play with friends whose purity she will come to question in a few weeks and in that way I am reminded of the president when he speaks of enemies to the other side of the mirror but only in that way the three sparrows ruffled up the dirt as their wings and heads spun motorbike doughnuts after one of them had come back with a massive potato chip for the other two to fight over perhaps he was the provider or wasn’t hungry but simply couldn’t let a good bit of food go to waste   Then a crow came and the winner sparrow went zooming into the orange orchard knowing fully well it would be impossible to alight and reappeared with a chip the size of his beak and a flurry of birds descended on the scene (I even saw a Fletcher) but kept my eyes on that little sparrow and am happy to report he kept what his mouth held though it occurs to me he was also mean and the one who seemed a provider might have been yoked in that way my wife during delivery was rung up like a bar code whenever the nurse knocked or the doctor was called 2 In the room there were women Counting up to ten dressed in blue The doctor was also Pregnant in her final week The neonate came out broke The sound barrier and was whisked Away from the mother the father Had cut the cord having held Scissors before he couldn’t turn down The doctor’s offer as if he would Have denied someone an entry Or exit visa Then the women were gone And neighbors and friends had to go To work and the mother was alone With breast or formula milk One nurse suggested the latter Was the better soporific 3 An infant smile A gas tickle The price of milk It goes up in war My son is here to teach me My temperament is genetic His smile is blind It dreams a spandrel Turns opiate in the eyes He grunts impatient wants Gas out as soon as It forms in peace He coos It’s what doves do Though excitable Observant of moving lips Attempts utterance Throws up happy spit And hunger’s renewed
Angels don’t come to the reservation. Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things. Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing— death. And death eats angels, I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel fly through this valley ever. Gabriel? Never heard of him. Know a guy named Gabe though— he came through here one powwow and stayed, typical Indian. Sure he had wings, jailbird that he was. He flies around in stolen cars. Wherever he stops, kids grow like gourds from women’s bellies. Like I said, no Indian I’ve ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel. Maybe in a Christmas pageant or something— Nazarene church holds one every December, organized by Pastor John’s wife. It’s no wonder Pastor John’s son is the angel—everyone knows angels are white. Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians. Remember what happened last time some white god came floating across the ocean? Truth is, there may be angels, but if there are angels up there, living on clouds or sitting on thrones across the sea wearing velvet robes and golden rings, drinking whiskey from silver cups, we’re better off if they stay rich and fat and ugly and ’xactly where they are—in their own distant heavens. You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they’ll be marching you off to Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.
woven plaque basket with sunflower design, Hopi, Arizona, before 1935 from an American Indian basketry exhibit in Portsmouth, Virginia The Arizona highway sailed across the desert—  a gray battleship drawing a black wake,  halting at the foot of the orange mesa,  unwilling to go around. Hopi men and women—brown, and small, and claylike  —peered down from their tabletops at yellow tractors, water trucks,  and white men blistered with sun—red as fire ants—towing  sunscreen-slathered wives in glinting Airstream trailers  in caravans behind them. Elders knew these bia roads were bad medicine—knew too  that young men listen less and less, and these young Hopi men  needed work, hence set aside their tools, blocks of cottonwood root  and half-finished Koshari the clown katsinas, then  signed on with the Department of Transportation, were hired to stab drills deep into the earth’s thick red flesh  on First Mesa, drive giant sparking blades across the mesas’ faces,  run the drill bits so deep they smoked, bearding all the Hopi men  in white—Bad spirits, said the Elders— The blades caught fire, burned out—Ma’saw is angry, the Elders said.  New blades were flown in by helicopter. While Elders dreamed  their arms and legs had been cleaved off and their torsos were flung  over the edge of a dinner table, the young Hopi men went  back to work cutting the land into large chunks of rust. Nobody noticed at first—not the white workers,  not the Indian workers—but in the mounds of dismantled mesa,  among the clods and piles of sand,  lay the small gray bowls of babies’ skulls. Not until they climbed to the bottom did they see  the silvered bones glinting from the freshly sliced dirt-and-rock wall—  a mausoleum mosaic, a sick tapestry: the tiny remains  roused from death’s dusty cradle, cut in half, cracked,  wrapped in time-tattered scraps of blankets.Let’s call it a day, the white foreman said.  That night, all the Indian workers got sad-drunk—got sick  —while Elders sank to their kivas in prayer. Next morning,  as dawn festered on the horizon, state workers scaled the mesas,  knocked at the doors of pueblos that had them, hollered  into those without them, demanding the Hopi men come back to work—then begging them—  then buying them whiskey—begging again—finally sending their white  wives up the dangerous trail etched into the steep sides  to buy baskets from Hopi wives and grandmothers  as a sign of treaty. When that didn’t work, the state workers called the Indians lazy,  sent their sunhat-wearing wives back up to buy more baskets—  katsinas too—then called the Hopis good-for-nothings,   before begging them back once more.We’ll try again in the morning, the foreman said.  But the Indian workers never returned—  The bias and dots calls to work went unanswered,  as the fevered Hopis stayed huddled inside. The small bones half-buried in the crevices of mesa—  in the once-holy darkness of silent earth and always-night—  smiled or sighed beneath the moonlight, while white women  in Airstream trailers wrote letters home praising their husbands’ patience, describing the lazy savages:  such squalor in their stone and plaster homes—cobs of corn stacked  floor to ceiling against crumbling walls—their devilish ceremonies  and the barbaric way they buried their babies,  oh, and those beautiful, beautiful baskets.
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps when Mom unlocked and opened the front door. O God, he said. O God.  He wants to kill me, Mom.
When my brother died I worried there wasn’t enough time to deliver the one hundred invitations I’d scribbled while on the phone with the mortuary:Because of the short notice no need to rsvp. Unfortunately the firemen couldn’t come. (I had hoped they’d give free rides on the truck.) They did agree to drive by the house once with the lights on— It was a party after all. I put Mom and Dad in charge of balloons, let them blow as many years of my brother’s name, jails, twenty-dollar bills, midnight phone calls, fistfights, and er visits as they could let go of. The scarlet balloons zigzagged along the ceiling like they’d been filled with helium. Mom blew up so many that she fell asleep. She slept for ten years— she missed the whole party. My brothers and sisters were giddy, shredding his stained T-shirts and raggedy pants, throwing them up into the air like confetti. When the clowns came in a few balloons slipped out the front door. They seemed to know where they were going and shrank to a fistful of red grins at the end of our cul-de-sac. The clowns played toy bugles until the air was scented with rotten raspberries. They pulled scarves from Mom’s ear—she slept through it. I baked my brother’s favorite cake (chocolate, white frosting). When I counted there were ninety-nine of us in the kitchen. We all stuck our fingers in the mixing bowl. A few stray dogs came to the window. I heard their stomachs and mouths growling over the mariachi band playing in the bathroom. (There was no room in the hallway because of the magician.) The mariachis complained about the bathtub acoustics. I told the dogs, No more cake here, and shut the window. The fire truck came by with the sirens on. The dogs ran away. I sliced the cake into ninety-nine pieces. I wrapped all the electronic equipment in the house, taped pink bows and glittery ribbons to them— remote controls, the Polaroid, stereo, Shop-Vac, even the motor to Dad’s work truck—everything my brother had taken apart and put back together doing his crystal meth tricks—he’d always been a magician of sorts. Two mutants came to the door. One looked almost human. They wanted to know if my brother had willed them the pots and pans and spoons stacked in his basement bedroom. They said they missed my brother’s cooking and did we have any cake. No more cake here, I told them.Well, what’s in the piñata? they asked. I told them God was and they ran into the desert, barefoot. I gave Dad his slice and put Mom’s in the freezer. I brought up the pots and pans and spoons (really, my brother was a horrible cook), banged them together like a New Year’s Day celebration. My brother finally showed up asking why he hadn’t been invited and who baked the cake. He told me I shouldn’t smile, that this whole party was shit because I’d imagined it all. The worst part he said was he was still alive. The worst part he said was he wasn’t even dead. I think he’s right, but maybe the worst part is that I’m still imagining the party, maybe the worst part is that I can still taste the cake.
Dear Ra, There are no more cigarettes in this letter. It's all about spray-paint and traffic jams from here on out. Honk if you're epileptic, honk if it's 2:40 p.m., if you love shells. Honk in the name of freedom and fear of the human body. When I say "human body" I mean the kind that tears like lettuce. And when I say "fear" I mean the kind you feel seconds before crashing into a wall. That's the kind of poem this is. The kind raised on excess television violence. All that's left are ads for brotherhood and blowjobs. An ad for 2:42 p.m. A wad of hair. This isn't Marx. I'm not trying to bite the hand that feeds me sour candy. Run down the deer. Rain. Wear a red jacket and pumps. Pave the road back from my bed. I don't own a bed, it must've been the trap I've crept in and out of since I learned how to sleep alone. The Count of Monte Cristo's funeral. God's earlobe. An army of lamb can stop a film but not the violence of handbags. Not 2:43 p.m. Two forty-four pee em. Speak from a babble and a switch. Piss in a telephone booth. Grow a tree. Kidnap a car thief. Talk to him as though you want to be slammed in his trunk like a bag full of rocks. Talk to me in the woods. To my chest. With your fingers. Even if you kick in the gates, nyc is still nyc. My concussion is still a hotel. The guests are staying lukewarm and I'm picking up the tab. Ask me if I have ever wanted to tear out cables, burn up cradles. Interview my architects about hands. Ask an illegal immigrant how to escape from a political cliche. Does one use hammers? What about the moist area? The brutal caress? The spindle? Where does one learn to speak such a broken language? Are you jealous of films about Vietnam? This poem is dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. This poem is dedicated to the man who put a gun in my gullet. This poem is a pay-phone. Someone has slashed its chords and ripped out its face. This drink is mixed with a plastic fork. This is an invitation to my Halloween party. Come as a key. Come as a metatextuai tear in the metatextual fabric. Listen to my concert through walls that were built to keep the vermin out of my armpits. Shovel. That's all I ask in return for my sonata on gravel. I mean gravel in a dialectic sense. As in, tomorrow dirt will be glamorous. Asphalt will be categorized as a sound. You will be categorized as an outdated method of psychotherapy. Like confession. Or the couch. Or the chair. I will be classified as a sore loser. Last year's winner must have thrown something hard at my head. Something that shattered like a waltz in a bomb raid. It's almost three o'clock. That makes it exactly several thousand miles since I left your town. I left your mice. I left a confusing note for the exterminators. I've been confused when I should have been reborn as a crusade or a hospital of innocents. I've been bored when I should've been screwed. I've been a hungry year.
Dear Tourists, You can grope for moist souvenirs in the basement, but you'll need patience because nobody down there will warn you about the floor. In the street you'll find squirrels; on my scalp, bumps. If you want proof for the folks back home that you've surged like a seagull, print your name and number in the bathroom. If you want a seagull for a pet, talk to my therapist. If you find her, tell me where she lives, and where her daughter goes to school. If you want a piece of me, suck my dick. If you want to sell trips to the general public, take my pulse or my coffee-table picture-books about Italy. If there's a house in the trees, throw up a hammer and see what falls down. The bleeding kid isn't the best prize and you can't return it, so be careful where you walk when you've had a few. If there's a nettle between your shoulder blades and you're having trouble breathing, tell the teacher, but don't tell her it was me cause it wasn't. I was just watching, maybe even laughing at your gurgling sounds. That incident belongs to somebody else's amusement park. I don't ever want to see it again on this side of the blunt tracks.
Knowledge is Power. That is what the billboard says and I agree. I am an adult, therefore I understand the threat of passengers. The threat to Our Children, who don't understand the threat of these bird-like, twitchy people. They pose two kinds of threat. To begin with, there is the one we all know about, the preda­tory threat, the hawk-like passengers that prey on children as they sit in front of their computers or televisions. The terrorist threat. That threat is easy to handle. You shoot it. You contain it. You confiscate. You stitch. You bleed from various orifices and sockets, but you survive, you rebuild house and rinse the child. The more serious threat is the diseases passengers carry with them. Internal terrorism. Children love those diseases. It makes them babble like possessed. Their make-up looks like oil in the moonlight. Such children cannot be cleaned off. Kill them. Or turn them into entertainment. Art.
for Billie Holiday Lady could pour you a song, Coffee and a little cream. Stir it the whole night long Into a brown-sugar dream. Lady could wrap you a note Up in a velvet night— Sometimes Manhattan satin, Always Harlem delight. Lady Day could sing it Like nobody ever has At the Shim Sham Club, Hot Cha Cha, Joints that swung on jazz. Her bittersweet songs told Heartbreak, Meet your sister Pain, But Lady melted yesterdays Into beautiful rain.
for Eleanor Roosevelt Who showed the world the world itself  Was awkward, shy and plain. A high-born leader in a long,  Low decade full of pain. Poor farmers, blacks, homeless, the least  Advantaged hoped to see, Magnificently unarrayed,  Pure human dignity. A lady first, the great first lady  Looked fear in the face, And said, There is no room for fear  When courage take its place.
for Gertrude Ederle As Europe woke from sleep, Young Trudy Ederle At Cap Gris Nez in France Dived into a daunting sea. Many had tried to make This superhuman swim— Thirty-five punishing miles. Chances, at best, were slim. When Fury found the waves, Far from the western shore, Her trainer shouted, "Let's turn back!" But Trudy cried, "What for?" Under an English moon, The celebration began After the fastest crossing By woman or by man.
Jook joint's about to come alive! It's like a bee outside a hive; And when the hive begins to hum, It's like a dim and distant drum; And when the drum begins to beat, It's like a circus down the street; And when the street begins to fill, It's like a sudden summer chill; And just as summer simmers down, It's like the fireworks over town. Don't matter what the preachers say— This congregation's here to stay 'Cause when the jook joint comes alive Is when the Delta blues arrive!
“Mister Johnson I see you look to buyin' Mister Johnson That all you want is Fame? Mister Johnson Now what you got to offer? Mister Johnson Salvation is my name With a rhythm on a riff That's practically God Oh Lord, I'm a pure Undivining rod I'm a flickerin' candle With the blackest light I'm the darkest angel And I own the night Mister Johnson That instrument you got there Mister Johnson It's Lucifer's guitar Mister Johnson I'll tune it for you, baby Mister Johnson They won't know who you are I'm a cutthroat seller, The Magician of Deal Who can stoke sweet fire That'll make you feel Like a hothouse flower On double defrost Who won't give a nickel For the petals it lost Mister Johnson You slink on back to livin' Mister Johnson In devil-may-care control Mister Johnson Don't thank me for the favor Mister Johnson I thank you for your soul”
Superman flies onto his first comic book. Oil bubbles up in Saudi Arabia. Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds invades every panicked radio along the eastern seaboard. The Spanish Civil War rages on. Filming starts on The Wizard of Oz. At New York City's Carnegie Hall, John Hammond's SpiritualsTo Swing concert explodes with African chants, the Count Basie Band, boogie-woogie, New Orleans jazz, hot gospel, stride piano, harmonica instrumentals, Big Bill Broonzy's blues. The audience hears the ghost of Robert Johnson, four months gone, easing out of a Victrola phonograph at center stage— the entire concert suddenly enveloped by the man who was not there.
What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage,Staled are my thoughts, which loved and lost the wonder of our age; Yet quickened now with fire, though dead with frost ere now, Enraged I write I know not what; dead, quick, I know not how.Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound, And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found. Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight, Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight.Place, pensive, wails his fall whose presence was her pride; Time crieth out, My ebb is come; his life was my spring tide. Fame mourns in that she lost the ground of her reports; Each living wight laments his lack, and all in sundry sorts.He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined; Declaring in his thoughts, his life, and that he writ, Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.He, only like himself, was second unto none, Whose death (though life) we rue, and wrong, and all in vain do moan;Their loss, not him, wail they that fill the world with cries, Death slew not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies.Now sink of sorrow I who live—the more the wrong! Who wishing death, whom death denies, whose thread is all too long; Who tied to wretched life, who looks for no relief, Must spend my ever dying days in never ending grief.Farewell to you, my hopes, my wonted waking dreams, Farewell, sometimes enjoyëd joy, eclipsëd are thy beams. Farewell, self-pleasing thoughts which quietness brings forth, And farewell, friendship's sacred league, uniting minds of worth.And farewell, merry heart, the gift of guiltless minds, And all sports which for life's restore variety assigns; Let all that sweet is, void; in me no mirth may dwell: Philip, the cause of all this woe, my life's content, farewell!Now rhyme, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill, Go, seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find Salute the stones that keep the limbs that held so good a mind.
Sing lullaby, as women do, Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, And lullaby can I sing too As womanly as can the best. With lullaby they still the child, And if I be not much beguiled, Full many wanton babes have I Which must be stilled with lullaby. First lullaby my youthful years; It is now time to go to bed, For crooked age and hoary hairs Have won the haven within my head. With lullaby, then, youth be still; With lullaby content thy will; Since courage quails and comes behind, Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind. Next, lullaby my gazing eyes, Which wonted were to glance apace. For every glass may now suffice To show the furrows in my face; With lullaby then wink awhile, With lullaby your looks beguile; Let no fair face nor beauty bright Entice you eft with vain delight. And lullaby, my wanton will; Let reason's rule now reign thy thought, Since all too late I find by skill How dear I have thy fancies bought; With lullaby now take thine ease, With lullaby thy doubts appease. For trust to this: if thou be still, My body shall obey thy will. Eke lullaby, my loving boy, My little Robin, take thy rest; Since age is cold and nothing coy, Keep close thy coin, for so is best; With lullaby be thou content, With lullaby thy lusts relent, Let others pay which hath mo pence; Thou art too poor for such expense. Thus lullaby, my youth, mine eyes, My will, my ware, and all that was. I can no mo delays devise, But welcome pain, let pleasure pass; With lullaby now take your leave, With lullaby your dreams deceive; And when you rise with waking eye, Remember then this lullaby.
While that my soul repairs to her devotion, Here I intomb my flesh, that it betimes May take acquaintance of this heap of dust; To which the blast of death's incessant motion, Fed with the exhalation of our crimes, Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trustMy body to this school, that it may learn To spell his elements, and find his birth Written in dusty heraldry and lines ; Which dissolution sure doth best discern, Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth. These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs,To sever the good fellowship of dust, And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them, When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust? Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat,And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know, That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below, How tame these ashes are, how free from lust, That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.
The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.Some men with swords may reap the field, And plant fresh laurels where they kill: But their strong nerves at last must yield; They tame but one another still: Early or late They stoop to fate, And must give up their murmuring breath When they, pale captives, creep to death.The garlands wither on your brow; Then boast no more your mighty deeds!Upon Death's purple altar now See where the victor-victim bleeds. Your heads must come To the cold tomb:Only the actions of the justSmell sweet and blossom in their dust.
The worst for him was his friend turned wolf,and the blood that splattered as he ran. The worstfor us: the hospital, his upper lip tugged backto show the gash—the flesh halved deeply,cleanly—while I hold him for the needlethat rubs pain out. He submitsto the quick stitch, the thread blackagainst pink skin, calm now he seesthe doctor can be trusted, his voicesoothing, his face clean shaven,the clues that signal kindness to a child.He’s worried, though, about his petwho didn’t mean it, Mom. His voice is flat.He knows the months he’s tried to woo this dogwere over when it leapt for his throatand caught his mouth. The scars, at least,will be invisible. At home, he’ll sleep,big boy between his parents, till he’s sureno beast will tear into his dreams. And wewill want him there, our bodies makeshift walls.We who led the stranger to our home,fixed him a bowl, taught him to sleepunder our blankets, we who taught our sonto rub the muzzle that sheathes the teeth.
When some people talk about moneyThey speak as if it were a mysterious loverWho went out to buy milk and neverCame back, and it makes me nostalgicFor the years I lived on coffee and bread,Hungry all the time, walking to work on paydayLike a woman journeying for waterFrom a village without a well, then livingOne or two nights like everyone elseOn roast chicken and red wine.
We waded in the shallows,holding his hands, then justfingertips, as his feetslowly lifted off the bottom.The land did not stopat the waterline, but simplybecame unreachable.His worn face bobbed abovethe waves, breath in an Oas our words, fistfulsof shimmering minnows,scattered, lost on their wayto him. The tide carriedhim out, then back a bit,a gradual letting go into darkwaters, and we, stillin the ebb, could almostmistake that Ofor the response we wanted—on the ins, I’ll remember you,on the outs, goodbye.
The smell, once water has rinsed it,is like a field of ripe grain, or the grain heldin a truck, and if you climb the steel side,one foot lodged on the hubcap, the otheron the wheel, and pull your body upward,your hands holding to tarp hooks, and lift toesonto the rim of the truck box, rest your ribsagainst the side, you will see beetlesand grasshoppers among the hulled kernels.Water stirs and resurrects harvest dust:sun beating on abundance, the moist heatof grain collected in steel, handsplunging and lifting, the grain spilling back.
All these great barns out here in the outskirts,black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.You say they look like arks after the sea’sdried up, I say they look like pirate ships,and I think of that walk in the valley whereJ said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,No. I believe in this connection we all haveto nature, to each other, to the universe.And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,its clouds in simple animal shapes we could namethough we knew they were really just clouds—disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.
Near Butte, Montana
Dream of Mom’s red parka gone—someone stole it right out of the closetof the burned-down house—whatgood could it do anybody else, brokenzipper that always got caught,she’d jimmy it loose, just partof putting it on—and she was so tiny,the arms too short even for me,too-tiny gloves in the pockets, thumbsstubby, practically useless to anyonebut her—they deserve it if they shove ina hand, find the tissue she used and thenleft there who knows which cold day,what she needed it for, or why.
Forsythia, scaled and bud-bangled,I pruned to a thatch of leavesfor the curb, by the squirrel-gnawedcorn, silk strewn, kernels tooth carvedand husks shorn over the groundpocked with paw prints.The borers mashed the squash vine,the drought tugged the roots of sage,catmint languished by the sidewalk,tools grew flowers of rust.That winter we left our hopebeneath the snow, loved through the lastof the onions, watched the late leeks freezeto crystal, bent like sedges, their shadowson the snow. That winter we leftour hope beneath the snow.
Talking like Pushkin to his horse, I climb into thick equestrian aesthetics. I’m horseman and veterinarian in one on an estate of troubled youth, I am an aristocratic fop, hello, galloping at full gallop shooting at treetops, yahoo to you Sir in treble multiplication, I know about stallions and I’m out of here to the city soon, I must meet N. or K., I forget which, and then the zisters C. Sorry, I mean the sisters Z. My sideburns incinerate the furniture in the salon of Y. I do not care for C++ , for I live in the nineteenth century. I barely lived through math at the Lycée. I’m now dans une boutique. Vous ne parlez pas français? Merde, vous êtes alors crétin, mon vieux monsieur le barbecue! What are you a Volga Tatar or something? Actually I’ve never been to Kazan but I wanna go some day, maybe when the emperor exiles me. You look familiar, I know you from somewhere. So what brings you to St. Petersburg on this particular twist of the century? Lozenges of the imagination climb reflected in the Neva of the sky and in the sky of the Neva and farther along the Nevkas, and the stars, the stars shine viscerally like old duel scars anticipated. I am stuck at home. I’ll never see you, Paris, London, Rome. Adrenal memory flows and gels and burns, acting in combination with my sideburns. I’ll show you some transculture. Gospoda, do you understand any Russian, ah? Nyet? Damn, then I must speak to you in English.
Roaring roast cake with bean base spareribs for me, carottes étouffées medium rare, I like them a tad undercooked, still red with sap, tea leaves in olive oil, strawberry sushi flummoxed to the point of deliquescence, or better still, freshly picked cucumber rolls to match the lettuce steak, mesquite broiled to a crunchy andante, with all organic granola salsa, nuts nutritious to the max, and then of course the soypork casserole with legs of boletus, and tofu chops on a platter of tomato paste base salmon with a sprinkling of beet juice droplets, all served with a rich broccoli broth.
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I rose from marsh mud, algae, equisetum, willows, sweet green, noisy birds and frogs to see her wed in the rich rich silence of the church, the little white slave-girl in her diamond fronds. In aisle and arch the satin secret collects. United for life to serve silver. Possessed.
World like a coat, silver clasps,  ermine lined, warm with the dead inside, rolling around in the red center—I thought everything had a purpose—this was back when  I still drank—and wasn’t I a special traveler, nestled in that pocket amongst the butterscotch candies, the matchbooks?  Unessential but accounted for, a steady thing to touch. World like a morning glory, withered every  evening, world like a bristling dog, terrified of thunder—I can’t believe how I believed, or how that belief  assumed a shape around my body, taking on the imprint of my heat, gaining solidity. When  anyone questioned me, I held it forth, let them touch the sleeve—I needed nothing. World like an  egret, still and white on the highway divider, world like a regret typed out and then erased—I cannot  hold you any closer without everyone seeing, I cannot hold you at all, it seems, your  evergreens, your curling potato vine; it’s all too much much, and I a bit of goosedown, a thistle fluff, naked and  hatless, unaccounted for and extra, the world like a world like a world.
A dirigible powered us through the first leg,  traversing snow-capped mountains where goats leapt from crags, and men with wrinkled  apples faces looked up, pointed. Smiling  to cold air, I slept under a bear skin,  touched your lips in the night.  On our pleasant soap bubble journey, we dropped baskets down  each morning, hooked meats, cheeses;  in later weeks, nothing. Still, we took notes, detailing the weather conditions, the migrating  elk numbers and their steady decrease. Northward by cracked compass,  the sleet sheeting the balloon drove us low, then lower— In time we cut through the ice, sank fathoms into the sea, chaperoned by seals  that are not mermaids at all. Else you think this a hoax, know my hand— down here still—please send help.
They call it sacrifice— imagine me a tiny poppy  on a field of green felt—brief blip of color,  limitless expanse. I’ve never felt foreign, or like a lash in his eye. If it’s not love, it’s  very like. Most days it feels the same—  exacting—he tweezes the stray thoughts from my speech, cleans up my  heart with a tortoiseshell comb. Every lady should have such a man,  edging her lawn with a sharp rotary blade.  Year by year—let’s call it always—  editor and editrix. Engaged  against a flurry of typos, showered in revisionist white out. I erase his crow’s feet,  buff away his frown. My head—he yawns it open, scoops out dark foam,  yesses I’ve regretted, the tiny poppy everyone sees flapping to pieces— And so, we are growing taller, sweeter, ratified in the glow of the big correction.
In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift, there were words for cover which ripped them off, there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed, promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice, that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn’t unsee and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs of this time, and I can only go by what others tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate, I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls were under siege from smaller men who called themselves heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world. I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it as around my fortifications one man pulled another man behind his chariot. If they say that’s how I was, that’s how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror who apes me every morning. She’s not the one I remember imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall, which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear, and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers, and he turned from my beauty and said my name.
I’m having trouble understanding the wife. The wife seems like she is only there as a foil to your actions. I want to know how the wife feels when you drag her and your son down into the basement to start a new religion. The religion has something to do with cowering before a force greater than yourself and then being buried alive. I want to know how the wife behaves in small, enclosed spaces: if she is trying to comfort your son by telling him Daddy likes to play funny games, or if she is already visualizing herself walking into a women’s shelter, your son on her back and maybe, because this is a fantasy, she carries a burning torch, like an angry villager, or a goddess. Does the wife merit any revenge after you weed whack the coffee table? Does she agree with you that the coffee table is yours to destroy because you built it? What has she built in the house that is hers to destroy? What kind of childhood has the wife endured that allows her to understand you? In her past life or lives, was the wife ever a shepherdess? Does she see you as a sort of Pan, goatish, and pricked by ticks, but also very well-endowed? When the wife transforms into a tree can she still think or is she just a green haze inside, an idea of growing? I would like to see the wife peel off that bark, leaving only enough for modesty’s sake, although as this is your poem, we can take a bit more off. I want to see her uproot herself, pick up the house and shake it. How many people fall out? The wife has something about her the Germans would call unheimlich. I sometimes catch a glimpse of the wife out of the corner of my eye but then I look away. I cannot look directly at the wife. The wife is a conflagration of everything dear. I wonder sometimes if she is faking; There is a certain note she holds too long so the orgasm is more operatic, less genuine. When she cries, Oh my God, really, she should stutter. Let’s say the wife wakes up in the morning. You have already made breakfast. Does your kindness feel oppressive? Does she want to take your weed whacker through the house? Has she ever, in a fit of anger, destroyed your pornography? When you found a picture of the wife online with a foreign handprint smacked red on her ass, how quickly did your shock turn to arousal? Are you aware the wife is breaking down in public places, and sometimes cannot move for thirty minutes? Sometimes her arm goes entirely numb from the shoulder down. I think the wife might need some fine-tuning, some elbow grease, some wrenching apart, and then reassembling.
They were not traditionalists. They could bear the innovations  of plot. They could not wait to landscape the plot. They had plans  for a bed of pansies because pansies  hardly ever die  in a cold snap,  because pansies are hardy despite the name. When they shoved the trowel  into the soil it was with his hand  on the handle and hers adding force. They knew there were only  nine types of people in the world and they knew which ones would close the deal. They knew the shirkers by sight.  They had options. They knew about Required Communication.  About how I feel and you feel. When there was a question  of who did the dishes  and who did the cat box,  it was settled in-house  and never required an outside contractor. But the pansies got stem spot, leaf rot, and mildew. When they looked at their options  it seemed there weren’t really that many  after all. They swore to uphold the bonds  and the principles  and the yelling. They swore to oral sex. They dressed to the nines and they walked the aisle. They stood up and received the standard narration.
I want to spend a lot but not all of my years with you. We’ll talk about kids  but make plans to travel. I will remember your eyes  as green when they were gray. Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.  Sex will be good but next door’s will sound better. There will be small things. I will pick up your damp towel from the bed,  and then I won’t. I won’t be as hot as I was  when I wasn’t yours and your hairline now so  untrustworthy. When we pull up alongside a cattle car  and hear the frightened lows,  I will silently judge you  for not immediately renouncing meat. You will bring me wine  and notice how much I drink.  The garden you plant and I plant  is tunneled through by voles,  the vowels  we speak aren’t vows,  but there’s something  holding me here, for now,  like your eyes, which I suppose  are brown, after all.
for Milan Kundera This is your foreign correspondent, Aristotle, for The Poetics, reporting live from the Mediterranean where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians crown the tradeships of His Majesty, wave back and forth: starfish—moons—Februaries. To my right, our military advisor, Hernando Cortez, oversees operations at the Aztec/ Mexican border where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water a dove collects its nest egg upon the skeleton of a hummingbird. To my left, our scribe-in-residence, St. Nickle-and-Dime-‘Em-To-Debt, scribbles furiously to a mortgaged future where the last rites of man and of-man are delivered at the near-twin births of the lyric and gunpowder.
for Michel Tournier, The Four Wise Men At least once a month a man boards a bus bound for Detroit, one bag, a few books. Nevertheless he always tells himself I just might leave Cincinnati for good just cut out never look back... When he arrives in the Motor City he drinks and drinks it all in until he’s dead drunk on all fours, a two-year-old mama’s boy, bawling all night night after night for the salt-sweet milk of his sister-mother turning in her sleep from a hard back turning toward the Canadian border... When at long last he takes a bus back to the Queen City, long after the only rest stop, he notices the first signs: merciless thirst, gorging hunger, swollen ankles, what the folks down south call sugar.
Harry Whittington: the man accidentally shot by Dick Cheney Have you ever been in a situation where somebody you thought was your friend did something that hurt you very much, and then they tried to blame it on you, and then you had a heart attack? Just wondering. I thought Jack Abramoff was my buddy— a small fish with a large chicken. What a dick. Why’d he have to remind me of my first wife, Jacqueline Bouvier-Kennedy-Onassis-Bono-Crowe-Pitt-Degeneres-Federline? Of course, that speaks volumes to and of itself. On the other hand, everything tastes like chicken. And cooked people taste like butter. I barely touched the clam chowder but I ate the chicken fried steak. Then I ate hot beignet and sludgy chicory and I accidentally drove the hot ‘n’ sporty. Now I may try the chicken fries. Why poo’ed vindaloo? The founding fathers risked life and limb just so I could trust the kung pao ham. But the former potions master spiked my polyjuice with mango juice, and now I like drinks with chicks in them. Doesn’t anyone care about my feelings? All I wanted to do was kill little birds. Because, you know, that’s fun. I forget, which one am I banging, that Plame bitch or the Ambassador to Switzerland? I’d ask Dick which of the two he’s screwing but he never answers my emails. In other news, I’ve been up to my neck in new food intern activity. The skewers are kind of like hot wings, except they are made with chicken tenders. The backwash is kinda long, but watch the whole thing for the slo-mo matrix-esque finale. Way cooler than any other stick figure theater. A barn-raised quail just said “Bugs Bunny isn’t real.” Is there no end to the horrors this shooting will reveal?
to Rimbaud Two pages to a grape fable dangles the swan of samite blood shaping sand from thistle covered fog Over sacred lakes of fever (polished mouths of the vegetable frog rolling to my iron venus) I drop the chiseled pear Standing in smoke filled valleys (great domains of wingless flight and the angel’s fleshy gun) I stamp the houses of withering wax Bells of siren-teeth (singing to our tomb refusal’s last becoming) await the approach of the incendiary children lighting the moon-shaped beast Every twisted river pulls down my torn-out hair to ratless columns by the pyramid’s ghost (watered basin of the temple stink) and all the mud clocks in haste draw their mermaid-feather swords (wrapped by Dust) to nail them into the tears of the sea-gull child The winter web minute flutters beneath the spider’s goblet and the whores of all the fathers bleed for my delight
Because the dark suit is worn it is worn warm  with a black tie and a kiss at the head of the stairs When you hear the dark suit rip on the heart’s curb the hurt is big  rose flesh caught on the orange woman’s buttons As you talk metropole monotone  antique intelligence  as you dress wounds by peyotl looming the boulevards women hunt their children from you who look out  lit still inside of a dark suit
crashes thru air where Lady LSD hangs up all the floors of life for the last time Blue Grace leans on white slime Blue Grace weaves in & out of Lüneburg and ‘My Burial Vault’ undulates from first hour peyote turnon Diderot hand in hand with the Marquis de Sade wraps himself up in a mexican serapé at Constitution Hall, Philadelphia, 1930 Blue Grace turns into the Count of Saint-Germain  who lives forever  cutting up George Washington dream of pyramid liquefactions from thighs of Versailles Blue Grace intimidates Nevil Chamberlain feels up Fillippo Marinetti and other hysterics of the phallic rose Blue Grace dressed up as automobile sperm  My Claw of the future  and the almond rose Rich the Vampire wears  over the US Army — flags !  american flags !  flying like bats  out of ‘ My Burial Vault ’ ! flood museums  where Robespierre’s murder is plotted  — floated from Texcoco, the Prince of Bogota caught redhanded sniffing forty cans of Berlin ether !  Hydrek ice blue teeth  impersonates, psycho-kinetically, the resurrection of Blue Grace as prophetess of the anti-planet system Blue Grace under dark glasses getting out of one hundred white cars at once ! Cars of ectoplasmic tin-types go to the juncture where Blue Grace Glass is raped  at the Court of Miracles, Mexico City, 1959 Blue Grace undressed reveals tattoo marks of Hamburg, sea & storm of  Neptune-Pluto conjunction Rumors of war strafe the automation monster walking to universal assassination K & K and the russian poets suck Blue Grace’s opulent morsels, back & front The nicotine heaven of Bosch’s painting emanates the thousand beauties of  Christopher Maclaine’s tool box of mechanical brass jewels  Man,  the marvel  of masturbation arts,  intersects Blue Grace  at World’s Finale Orgasm Electro-Physic Apocalypse ! I sing the beauty of bodily touch with my muse, Blue Grace   Spring 1963
The Due D’Aumal’s cannonballs Are being marshmellowed 370 years from their masonic inception Now lie on the Potomac The Due D’Aumal’s balls cannonaded Split Through mirror teeth Washington D.C. Black City of white rectangular bits of fear Blown fluff of fear O the Duke of Aumal’s balls are raging Yellow vermin white houses of fear And beautiful funky people Diamond heart D’Afrique Human blood human need Black booming emotional vibes of life White geometry of abstract cerebral death I really saw at Fort McNair In front of American General’s mansion A fir-tree tied down to a black coffiny box Jefferson’s phantom always rides tonight There’s a solar splendor burst from Eighteenth-Century Cannon of the Due D’Aumal I’m sure Citizen Lafayette was no dixiecrat
Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought The lumens the pumpkins dance: pits of correspondence over the land Birds the dream tongues warble Iroquois Mojavé Ohlone Market Street of “The Mad Doctor” via the occult centers A gang of fox spirits at the crossroadsBandoleros set between the obliteration of grizzly bears painted by an Arcimboldist and the monstrance of bleeding chains Montezuma’s feathery headdress torn up in the boondocks of the Rosy Cross Coyote girls in myth-time At the central dream of edenic treasures The irrevocable annihilation of christian civilization is taking shape with carnivorous flowers of volcanic thought
Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak, a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl it carries. Some feel sunlight well up in blood-vessels below the skin and wish there had been less to lose. Knowing how it could have been, pale maples drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments. Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be snapped? Some feel the rivers shift, blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws skim the ground in snow and showers. The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until the second they are plucked. You can wait to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury the early star underdraws the night and its blackest districts. And wonder. Why others feel through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet star. Why sparring and pins are all you have. Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.
And if all those who meet or even hear of you become witness to what you are— a white country of blight beneath the last snows of spring. Could we remain quiet on earth and bear it, the war we make inside what is—it’s a long time to be here, to be still, to feel the rot inside now—bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars at the edge of a field where we are once again taken from ourselves. Could we remain here, witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply, each birdsong or siren extinguished where some trueness abides, some portion we have lost our right to claim or know. It comes into any mind that would perceive it, leaf-rot, speech-rot, the deliberate ribcage of the deer, these abrupt chalk cliffs over which the confused animals fling themselves, and you, obscure, receive no response that is not suffered as the days grow long and distortions come to seem the natural course of things— what trees whose creatures stray into space— and they find they cannot land though the eyelid struggles open—no answer, no resolution— a window opened to the mute green world, weedy and driftless, a wind drilling rain, dirt, the parameters of uncertainty, of hope, what we might be against what we have done, bees crawling through the lips of the one who would say the earth turned into sour flesh— What strange rooms, what soundless movement of sky over desert where the flesh again is beaten and the emptiness extends itself while some old man looks on, a raptor in waiting, the sand-field around them blown thinly toward sun—no longer ourselves in the afternoons, evenings, weak, vague, clutched at the mouth— because we did nothing, because we lost count.
When everything finally has been wrecked and further shipwrecked, When their most ardent dream has been made hollow and unrecognizable, They will feel inside their limbs the missing shade of blue that lingers Against hills in the cooler hours before dark, and the moss at the foot of the forest When green starts to leave it. What they take into their privacy (half of his embrace, Her violence at play) are shadows of acts which have no farewells in them. Moons unearth them. And when, in their separate dwellings, their bodies Feel the next season come, they no longer have anyone to whom To tell it. Clouds of reverie pass outside the window and a strange emptiness Peers back in. If they love, it is solely to be adored, it is to scatter and gather Themselves like hard seeds in a field made fallow by a fire someone years ago set. In the quiet woods, from the highest trees, there is always something Weightless falling; and he, who must realize that certain losses are irreparable, Tells himself at night, before the darkest mirror, that vision keeps him whole. On the verge of warm and simple sleep they tell themselves certain loves Are like sheets of dark water, or ice forests, or husks of ships. To stop a thing Such as this would be to halve a sound that travels out from a silent person’s Thoughts. The imprint they make on each other’s bodies is worth any pain They may have caused. Quiet falls around them. And when she reaches For him the air greens like underwater light and the well-waters drop. They will see again the shadows of insects. They will touch the bark and feel each age of the tree fly undisturbed Into them. If what is no longer present in them cannot be restored, It can at least be offered. Through long bewildered dusks, stalks grow; Rains fill and pass out of clouds; animals hover at the edges of fields With eyes like black pools. For nothing cannot be transformed; Pleasure and failure feed each other daily. Do not think any breeze, Any grain of light, shall be withheld. All the stars will sail out for them.
It began in a foyer of evenings The evenings left traces of glass in the trees A book and a footpath we followed Under throat-pipes of birds We moved through a room of leaves Thin streams of silver buried under our eyes A field of white clover buried under our eyes Or a river we stopped at to watch The wind cross it, recross it Room into room you paused Where once on a stoop we leaned back Talking late into daylight The morning trees shook off twilight Opening and closing our eyes auroras Beyond groves and flora we followed a road Dotted with polished brown bottles, Scoured furrows, a wood emptied of trees It was enough to hollow us out The evenings left grasses half-wild at our feet Branches with spaces for winds The earth changes The way we speak to each other has changed As for a long while we stood in a hall full of exits Listening for a landscape beyond us
Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me and I believe you. How could I not feel you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass, or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving. If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you. It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant. Maybe you darken, already too much changed, maybe in your house you would be content where no incident emerges, but for smoke or glass or air, such things held simply to be voiceless. And if you mean me, I believe you. Or if you should darken, this inwardness would be misspent, and flinching I might pause, and add to these meager incidents the words. Some books should stay formal on the shelves. So surely I heard you, in your complication aware, snow holding where it might weightless rest, and should you fold into me—trackless, misspent, too much arranged—I might believe you but swiftly shut, lines of smoke rising through snow, here where it seems no good word emerges. Though it is cold, I am aware such reluctance could lose these blinking hours to simple safety. Here is an inwardless purpose. In these hours when snow shuts, it may be we empty, amounting to something. How could I not wait for those few words, which we might enter.
It had to be from someone whose grandparents were born in Shanghai not the city’s greatest citizens, but certainly among the sober ones to make their small now eroded mark It had to be from a distant or dissolute descendant (yes, moi) who can sing praises unworthy of even a flicker of your attention Doesn’t this sound like it might turn into a love poem or a prayer Well, you are wrong, because a man of the people, which I am not nor will I ever be, doesn’t single out one above all others as this is a hierarchical construction and therefore undemocratic and antihumanist It had to be from someone whose virtues do not include stubbornness, patience, gentleness, loyalty, or truthfulness It had to be from someone who could take my place after I left the room never to return It had to be from someone who didn’t exist before this poem began writing itself down
There are rooftops made of cloud remnants gathered by a trader dabbling in car parts and burlap At night, I dive onto the breeze fermenting above the dirt and dream that I am a crocodile a tin of shoe polish, an audience of two In the morning, before the smallest yawn becomes a noodle, I am offered a ribbon of yellow smoke I opt for fuzzy rocks and clawed water and, of course, the perishable window I am one of the last computer chain errors to be illuminated I tell you there are rooftops on which the moon stops being a cold jewel And one by one the mountains begin their descent from the chambers of a lost book
The world weeps. There are no tears To be found. It is deemed a miracle. The president appears on screens In villages and towns, in cities in jungles And jungles still affectionately called cities. He appears on screens and reads a story. Whose story is he reading and why? What lessons are to be learned from this story About a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here? Time of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun Time of precious and semi-precious liquids Time of a man and a woman doused in ink Rolling across streams and down valleys Trying to leave some string of words behind.
That was the day your mesmerized went awol on the shore. Each star, you said, was the same star. Beneath our sunny beach blanket an anonymous moisture spread like fur. It’s getting dark and darker.   Dusk is hard. Gossip travels worst when it’s low-contrast out; it stalls, and the air begins to crack. Droplets black as blood squeeze through fissures, making night.   What came from above—the forestscan, the cornucump, the mar—came violently on our feet. Finally, when it was time to order, you pulled yourself up from the syntax we’d shared and beckoned for me to come. It’s just like rain, I said, as if to make amends. Every arm is the same arm, you replied, and took mine.   * In which an unwitting traveler to a parallel universe, offered trum and toke all night, drinks himself out of his depth to drown the unknown source of his discomfort.
Those who glance about me who cease to see inside the Sun who cease to imagine its destabilized pre-quanta cannot know me cannot know my ethos as pumice as mingled apparition or flare my perception through the prior sun that I ingest like a blackened pre-existence or collected hawks through assignation the Sun with its dualisms with its pre-biotic photons which waver perhaps 9 suns before the Sun existed before the oceans seemed formed there were molecular drafts akashic precursors floating proto-ammonia I think of carbon & wisps & floodings of feral combat shelter where blank geometry accrues before separable biology was born before the contradictory ballast of de-existent protozoa being scorching photon by abstentia like a pre-atomic sigil destabilized as blizzard a pre-cognitive rotation a strange galvanics of the cosmos & because of this galvanics one reeks of invisible tremor walking around in league with daunting helium affliction thus the mirrors in my skin like haunted salamander fluid like cells bereft with cooling centigrade rotation therefore I know the abyss as volatile lunar transposition as sub-liminal mantis as climbing as splintering therefore I am not an oily or blasphemous yogin collapsing in default by sudden anger or water yet I am compound struggling with scattered mental a-rhythmia with partial psychic aphasia intensive illusive aloof by interior compounding
Some things lock in competition, like an earthquake and a kiss. While a decision is waiting to be made, neither side of the argument progresses. The earthquake, though eager to prove its claim, shows valiant restraint; the kiss? It knows the power of bitten tongues.   Such stand-offs as these precede most gains (stance of knowing too much and fearing too late). The tongues, shaking along with the house, say nothing shattering at all.   With progress, not only earthquakes but kisses will be predicted. The last fine line between feeling and fact will choose a good point, and end. Flattery will continue to make us immortal in the difficult years between the first word and the lost.   * In which Mary, herself a palette of grays, inhabitant of a universe void of color, gains access to the complete scientific story of what makes red red—and reads it.
for Thomas Green Bethune Thar he blows! Plus, tusks crushed into grins, grins host to, guest of, impish Nature, her fort/da “jewels” glassified behind blank opposable pupils—Ahabit perfected (“perhaps memory”) by/for the dicey Veil. Auto-didact/-dialectics staged in rent-to-rent “crowded houses,” asea to har-har- poon Terrible Tom’s tom-tom stutter—VAC C . Gone but for “language, music, imitation and perhaps memory.” Owns no umbrella to forget to splay open like a bucket. Can’t cast down, can’t go singin’ in the there.
I left my heart in the teeth of jumper-cables— black tongue, superfluous nipples . . .By The Time I hit the yellow tape— it was already turning red . . . Of my fair and alabaster love? My redundant chains drawn in chalk?Halfway to the stars I stopped— turned, spat—it’s too late, baby . . .
Doors open and shut. We’ve come to the place where nothing shines. I hear eternity Is self-forgetting. Interiors warm with the nightmare of guests and poetry And you. Everything darkly Reverent years of reading about death eluded. Bled Back from the ear sidestepping your bullets bloom in on ye lay Rock. Rud. Spread So swiftly tastes like mud. Dredged mud off The corpse sled hushed down woodsmoke. Said the stars thrum on Marie Marie. Hold on tight. In the depths of outer space Is man.
Lie me down to heal in sleep, do not let me wake In sin, the tongue Cancels another year, another painted storm In the coral caves, some pious poet Drunk on vapors Swatting tomb-bats in the nightwood, would that Wayward bark sunned white Be also thunder, a hill of bones drumming—thud Thud, a wake Of buzzards braiding into the loosening skull—the redoubled fists Of students like an island in the bramble chained—I have been told To reason, lawless, empty, without rights— But I am old Not age, I have been told To match its columns by our footfall, prophet—I am not The straw or garland of our Sirens, not the brow Of holly, nor the warble Of any lark
The Soul has Bandaged moments - When too appalled to stir - She feels some ghastly Fright come up And stop to look at her - Salute her, with long fingers - Caress her freezing hair - Sip, Goblin, from the very lips The Lover - hovered - o'er - Unworthy, that a thought so mean Accost a Theme - so - fair - The soul has moments of escape - When bursting all the doors - She dances like a Bomb, abroad, And swings opon the Hours, As do the Bee - delirious borne - Long Dungeoned from his Rose - Touch Liberty - then know no more - But Noon, and Paradise The Soul's retaken moments - When, Felon led along, With shackles on the plumed feet, And staples, in the song, The Horror welcomes her, again, These, are not brayed of Tongue -
Banish Air from Air - Divide Light if you dare - They'll meet While Cubes in a Drop Or Pellets of Shape Fit - Films cannot annul Odors return whole Force Flame And with a Blonde push Over your impotence Flits Steam.
A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my Life had entered it And there were troughs beside - A closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun Until the tender Carpenter Perpetual nail it down -
In this short Life that only lasts an hour How much - how little - is within our power
I never hear that one is dead Without the chance of Life Afresh annihilating me That mightiest Belief, Too mighty for the Daily mind That tilling it’s abyss, Had Madness, had it once or, Twice The yawning Consciousness, Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue When Terror were it told In any Tone commensurate Would strike us instant Dead - I do not know the man so bold He dare in lonely Place That awful stranger - Consciousness Deliberately face -
The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants - At Evening, it is not At Morning, in a Truffled Hut It stop opon a Spot As if it tarried always And yet it’s whole Career Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay - And fleeter than a Tare - ’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler - The Germ of Alibi - Doth like a Bubble antedate And like a Bubble, hie - I feel as if the Grass was pleased To have it intermit - This surreptitious Scion Of Summer’s circumspect. Had Nature any supple Face Or could she one contemn - Had Nature an Apostate - That Mushroom - it is Him!
Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril Tree and Traveller stood. Filled was the Air with merry venture Hearty with Boys the Road. Shot the lithe Sleds like Shod vibrations Emphacized and gone It is the Past’s supreme italic Makes the Present mean -
The plastic army men are always green. They’re caught in awkward poses, one arm outstretched as if to fire, legs parted and forever stuck on a swiggle of support, as rigid and green as the boots. This one has impressions of pockets, a belt, a collar, a grip on tiny binoculars intended to enlarge, no doubt, some tiny enemy. In back, attached to the belt is a canteen or a grenade (it’s hard to tell). The helmet is pulled down low, so as to hide the eyes. If I point the arm, the gun, toward me, I see that this soldier is very thin. It’s almost unreal, how thin he is.
there is a dark mass following me. these legs are clumsy. they flap quickly. I want to slow them down. but my nerves. Lord, these pensive endings. the sun slumps against the merging fall on red leaves. and where the natives are unenlightened, the mass comes closer.  only white people swim in lakes nowadays  you know . . . Crystal Lake? never seen a black person jump in a lake; let alone a river till this summer. the Bronx River is said to be clean: we care about clean. a month before, two boys drowned in the Bronx River. a week after, a boy jumps into it unfazed. abandoned tires, relics of its sewer days, river herring spark no fear. and a publicly funded park with a biology class, a boat-making workshop for the children of Hunt’s Point, gives me hope we’d wet our hair again.  (these follicles don’t surf; don’t swim) but here in Virginia, there’s little comfort. the blush current from underwater springs makes me tense.  white people form groups to paddle on boards across the Hudson,  taking on trends from Hawai’i. they tap into the yesterdays  of Algonquian tongues. Wappinger. Mohican.  a sporty new aged (like gouda) convenience.  a luxury to admire when Long Beach is too far  and Rockaway too dirty. black folk don’t swim. we splash and cool off. we a ways forward from a Splenda hint of Senegalese manliness diving from a ferry, miles off shore from Gorée. that water got too much memory. we much prefer chlorine. that salt and fresh water our hypertension.  and that ocean is curiously scary.  and this lake is charmed and churning with tales from the deep. profound is this river of B-rated torture. deep are shadow people speculated through my rave tangerine goggles. on Lake Champlain at night, the chilly air felt like a presence. swamp monsters (this ain’t a swamp). tubular amphibians (they’d be in rivers). aquatic reptilians. ancestors distraught and vengeful (like Jason). but this is smaller and gnawing like chiggers; something from my weed days could live. down. here. my arms fight the green clearness. so mud olive I cannot see the bottom. beneath me is crisp. a fallen branch is mistaken for an eel.
This exclusive shit I don’t share with the world. 50 Cent I, Herman, made medicinal — concocted potions in ways my former’s was hearsay; Turned palomas christened Zora on to formulas husbands roll over n mitzvah. I, a black lad, proud Virginian, selling out Liberty Hall n pinched w/ stickpins in Woodlawn, do bequeath my next-to-last oratory:  My roots subverted the man,  honeys n dog voyagers to Neptune,  who dared interfere w/ your melodious saccharine midsection.  My cluster of tricks made chaps seek out connotation.  Look at my magic stick.  Not my clavicles, but my magic stick.  Ain’t no lightness of hand but of bounce player.  Constraints imposed by a corvid named Jim  could not interpret my remedies. Jim wasn’t much of a MacGyver: not one skill in therapeutic thaumaturgy. He prescribed cowlicks for the heartsick: I mean, really.
here’s the remedy for your chronic whiplash —  coming to you via triple ones on a mission —  pop a wheelie for originators of the flash.  check ya dial, emboss the rock b4 a fella dip dash. grand to slam a party — peep two needles in collision:  here’s the remedy for your chronic whiplash.  flare your dome w/ a pinch of cheeba succotash—  got my avenue peaking rapid circumcision — pop a wheelie for originators of the flash.  ululate the call; gods never caught tongue-lash —   tweak an EQ. my hash sparks double vision:  here’s the remedy for your chronic whiplash.  got my tambourine for ya partner. pass the calabash.  smile for the DJ when the cut spits — peep the precision. pop a wheelie for originators of the flash —  never fret what the beat can establish in the trash. master meter on Orion, starship blast w/ supervision:  here’s the remedy for your chronic whiplash —   pop a wheelie for originators of the flash.
The challenge: to start not with theory but with tangible performance You and others, approaching We shall be asked for a way out  to be fed  to keep warm and dry Starting with experience, magic genuine science More than once we have been lost in a trackless wilderness dwarfed and shadowed by mighty buildings subway trains wild as elephants One goes blindly back to one’s desk These moments come, their dark shadow We glimpsed control and more tragic waste We entered with 40,000,000 warriors with the dignity of cathedrals The lake is upon you. You have two canoes, your tent The child has entered upon this desert You have your axes What, precisely, is your procedure?
We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep adding and striking skills from the bottoms of our résumés under constant revision like the inscriptions on tombs shared for generations unnervingly up to date Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write:  I visited a country where kittens lay dying  under every bench, in every gutter, next to  every cigarette butt. One made me weep.  Two made me worry. Three made me  look away. I visited a city with very few  strays. The first one I saw I adopted.  What could it mean?  —posted by Sarah. 6.18.06 Hit “publish” and look away The New Violence: I visited a country where everything looked like home
As soon as possible, I will confront the wren’s  doings, rinse the white streaks from the porch bricks drawing lizards from their shade, the immediate  smell of water too much for all of us. But first is lunch. The remains we’ll scatter over  the driveway away from the bricks. Wrens come, crusts from our dishes make drama. Then history. What is possible in memory is disingenuous.  Limestone, impressed with the archaic smile of bone and reptilian wrists, wishbones and feathers,  describes. It cups the transitional form, naturally selecting one’s best side. There was  the time you forgot your legs no longer could recall how to stand—then rose up straight and sang You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me Probably I’ve been thinking of that since August.  The indelible wrens grate like shovels outside—exhumed, one voice rises from wilderness,  echoes,  settles, rests  —then another, and, between them, the keep of an unerring quiet.
Snow falls gently in the Hill Country covering the meadows and the valleys. The sluggish streaks of smoke climb quietly from the roofs but fail to reach the lazy clouds.On Alamo Plaza in the heart of the night and under the flood of lights, the flakes float like frozen moths and glow like fireflies. They drop on the blades of dormant grass.They alight on the cobblestones and live awhile in silence, they dissolve before dawn. The wet limestone walls of the mission glow proudly after the night of snowfall.
The first time I touched it, cloth fell under my fingers, the frail white folds softened, demure. No burn,no combustion at the touch of skin. It sat, silent, like any other contents of any other box: photographs of the dead, heirloom jewels.Exposed to thin windowlight it is exactly as in movies: a long gown, and where a chest must have breathed, a red crosscrossed over. The crown, I know, waits underneath, the hood with eyes carefully stitched open, arch cap like a bishop’s, surging to its point.
The dragonfly at rest on the doorbell— too weak to ring and glad of it, but well mannered and cautious, thinking it best to observe us quietly before flying in, and who knows if he will find the way out? Cautious of traps, this one.A winged cross, plain, the body straight as a thermometer, the old glass kind that could kill us with mercury if our teeth did not respect its brittle body. Slim as an eel but a solitary glider, a pilot without bombs or weapons, and wings clear and small as a wishto see over our heads, to see the whole picture. And when our gaze grazes over it and moves on, the dragonfly changes its clothes,sheds its old skin, shriveled like laundry, and steps forth, polished black, with two circles buttoned like epaulettes taking the last space at the edge of its eyes.
Each night, in a space he’d make between waking and purpose, my grandfather donned his one suit, in our still dark house, and drove through Brooklyn’s deserted streets following trolley tracks to the bakery.There he’d change into white linen work clothes and cap, and in the absence of women, his hands were both loving, well into dawn and throughout the day— kneading, rolling out, shapingeach astonishing moment of yeasty predictability in that windowless world lit by slightly swaying naked bulbs, where the shadows staggered, woozy with the aromatic warmth of the work.Then, the suit and drive, again. At our table, graced by a loaf that steamed when we sliced it, softened the butter and leavened the very air we’d breathe,he’d count us blessed.
The day of my mother’s funeral I spend clearing out her overgrown flower beds, down on my knees in the leaf rot, nut shells, tiny grains of sandlot sand spilling from the runoff gullies. The hot work was to see not feel what had to be done, not to go on asking,not to wonder anymore. Full from scraps I’d found at the back of the refrigerator, her mongrel dog lay curled on a stone and watched me work. It was Sunday. The telephone rang, then stopped, then rang again. By the end of the day, I’d done what I could. I swept the walk, put away the tools, switched on the indoor safety lamps, and then(it hardly matters what I think I felt) I closed the gate on a house where no one lived anymore.
Our loneliness sits with us at dinner, an unwanted guest who never says anything. It’s uncomfortable. Stillwe get to know each other, like students allowed to use a private research library for only one night.I go through her file of friends, cities and jobs. “What was that like?” I ask. “What did you do then?”We are each doctors who have only ourselves for medicine, and long to prescribe it for what ailsthe other. She has a nice smile. Maybe, maybe . . . I tell myself. But my heart is a cynical hermitwho frowns once, then shuts the door of his room and starts reading a book. All I can do now is wantto want her. Our polite conversation coasts like a car running on fumes, and then rolls to a stop;we split the bill, and that third guest at the table goes home with each of us, to talk and talk.
In first grade, you met Squanto, nearly naked and on his haunches, showing those thick-headed pilgrims how one must plant fishto grow maize. And in autumn you dove into the lobotomized pumpkin, into the gooey pulp and seeds, raising a clump like a slimy chandelierfrom the Titanic. And now in late summer, daughter, you smile, holding a ripe watermelon, cut in half, exposing the black seed within its bright red heart. Your melon. How proud you are to think you grew this delicious thing all on your own.
Forgive us. We have dragged them into the night in taffeta dresses, in stiff collars and ties, with the wind damp, the sleet raking their cheeks,to school lunchrooms fitted with makeshift stages where we will sit under bad fluorescent lighting on folding chairs, and they will sing and play.We will watch the first grader with little cymbals, bending her knees, hunched in concentration while neighbors snicker at her ardent face.Forgive us. We will hear the seventh-grade boy as his voice finally loses its innocence forever, at the unbearable solo momentand know that now, for years, he will wince at the thought of singing, yet will ache to sing, in silence,silence even to the generation to comewith its night, its sleet, its hideous lunchroom chairs.
After snowstorms my father shoveled the driveway where it lay open to a sweep of wind acrossa neighbor’s field, where the snow drifted half way down to the paved road, before snow-blowers, beforepick-ups cruised the streets with THE BOSS lettered on red plows. He heated the flat shovelin the woodstove till the blade steamed, like Vulcan at his furnace removing the dross, then rubbeda hissing candle on the steel so the snow would slide unchecked as he made each toss. He markedblocks with the waxed blade, lifted and tossed, lifted and tossed again, squaring off against the snow.
It hangs around the wardrobe for days, dull, or reclines in the hamperlike a flattened flamingo. I wash it in soft water. I give it new life, and what thanks?It walks out the door with my legs, through the gate, headed straight for the racetrack.
I go to the corner liquor store for a bottle of water, middle of a hectic day, must get out of the office, stop making decisions, quit obsessing does my blue skirt clash with my hot pink flats; should I get my mother a caregiver or just put her in a home, and I pull open the glass refrigerator door, am confrontedby brands—Arrowhead, Glitter Geyser, Deer Park, spring, summer, winter water, and clearly the bosses of bottled water: Real Water and Smart Water—how different will they taste? If I drink Smart Waterwill I raise my IQ but be less authentic? If I choose Real Water will I no longer deny the truth, but will I attract confused, needy people who’ll take advantageof my realness by dumping their problems on me, and will I be too stupid to help them sort through their murky dilemmas? I take no chances, buy them both,sparkling smart, purified real, drain both bottles, look around to see is anyone watching? I’m now brilliantly hydrated.Both real and smart my insides bubblewith compassion and intelligenceas I walk the streets with a new swagger,knowing the world is mine.
On the morning she became a young widow, my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow, looked up from her work to see a hawk turn her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers. That same moment, halfway around the world in a Minnesota mine, her husband died,buried under a ton of rockfall. She told me this story sixty years ago. I don’t know if it’s true but it ought to be. She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt on Sundays when the acolyte’s silver bell announced the moment of Christ’s miracle, it was the darker mysteries she lived by: shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside, a tapping at the door and nobody there. The moral of the story was plain enough: miracles become a burden and require a priest to explain them. With signs, you only need to keep your wits about you and place your trust in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck and grief are coming your way. And for that —so the story goes—any day will do.
You know how, after it rains, my father told me one August afternoon when I struggled with something hurtful my best friend had said, how worms come out and crawl all over the sidewalk and it stays a big mess a long time after it’s over if you step on them?Leave them alone, he went on to say, after clearing his throat, and when the rain stops, they crawl back into the ground.
Honored when the butterfly lights on my shoulder.Next stop: a rotting log.
Softly pummeled overnight, the lower limbs of our Norway spruce flexed and the deepening snow held them. Windless sunlight now, so I go out wearing hip waders and carryingnot a fly rod but a garden hoe. I begin worrying the snow for the holdfast of a branch that’s so far down a wren’s nest floats above it like a buoy. I work the hoe, not chopping but cradling, then pull straight up. A current of airas the needles loft their burden over my head. Those grace notes of the snowfall, crystals giving off copper, green, rose—watching them I stumble over a branch, go down and my gloves fill with snow. Ah, I find my father here: I remember as a child how flames touched my hand the time I added wood to the stove in our ice-fishing shanty, how he plunged that hand through the hole into the river, teaching me one kind of burning can ease another. The branch bobs then tapers into place and composes itself, looking unchanged though all summer it will bring up this day from underfoot.
She begins, and my grandmother joins her. Mother and daughter sing like young girls. If my father were alive, he would play his accordion and sway like a boat.I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace, nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers running away in the grass.But I love to hear it sung; how the waterlilies fill with rain until they overturn, spilling water into water, then rock back, and fill with more.Both women have begun to cry. But neither stops her song.
Your paperwork in, it’s like the morning after a party, the shaken survey of damage, a waste of bottles where there was laughter. It all seems so much more than you can manage: the accusing cups and stubbed-out cigarettes, the sun assaulting the window, your throbbing head. It’s not enough to face your own regrets(though they’re coming back fast, the things you said) because someone’s trailed bean dip across the table, someone’s ground salsa in the rug with his shoe. So you start to clean, as much as you are able,and think how far those hours have fled from you, before the hangover and your sour tongue, when you felt lovely, and infinite, and young.
Because one must be naked to get clean, my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt, steps from his boxers and into the tub as I brace him, whose long illnesshas made him shed modesty too. Seated on the plastic bench, he holds the soap like a caught fish in his lap, waiting for me to test the water’s heat on my wrist before turning the nozzle toward his pale skin. He leans over to be doused, then hands me the soap so I might scrub his shoulders and neck, suds sluicing from spine to buttock cleft. Like a child he wants a washcloth to cover his eyes while I lather a palmful of pearlescent shampoo into his craniotomy-scarred scalp and then rinse clear whatever soft hair is left. Our voices echo in the spray and steam of this room where once, long ago, he knelt at the tub’s edge to pour cups of bathwater over my head. He reminds me to wash behind his ears, and when he judges himself to be clean, I turn off the tap. He grips the safety bar, steadies himself, and stands. Turning to me, his body is dripping and frail and pink. And although I am nearly forty, he has this one last thing to teach me. I hold open the towel to receive him.
She kept them high on the top shelf, In boxes big as drums—Bright, crescent-shaped boats With little fishnets dangling down—And wore them with her best dress To teas, coffee parties, department stores.What a lovely catch, my father used to say, Watching her sail off into the afternoon waters.
The cruelest thing I did to my dog wasn’t to ignore his barking for water when his tongue hung like a deflated balloonor to disregard his chronic need for a belly rub but to teach him to shake hands, a trick that took weeks of treats, his dark eyeslike Greek olives, moist with desire. I made him sit, another injustice, and allowed him to want the nuggets enoughto please me. Shake, I said. Shake? touching the back of his right leg until he lifted it, his saliva tricklingfrom soft jowls, my hand wet with his hunger. Mistress of the biscuit, I ruffled his ears and said good dog until he got it. Before long,he raised his paw, shook me until he got the treat, the rub, the water in a chilled silver bowl, the wilderness in him gone, his eyes still lit with longing.
Hair rush, low swoop— so those of usstuck here on earth know—you must be gods.Or friends of gods, granted chancesto push off into sky, granted chancesto hear so well your own voice bouncedback to you maps the night.Each hinge in your wing’san act of creation. Each insectyou snick out of air a witness.You transform obstaclesinto sounds, then dodge them.
Long after I married you, I found myself in his city and heard him call my name. Each of us amazed, we headed to the café we used to haunt in our days together. We sat by a window across the paneled room from the table that had witnessed hoursof our clipped voices and sharp silences. Instead of coffee, my old habit in those days, I ordered hot chocolate, your drink, dark and dense the way you take it, without the swirl of frothy cream I like. He told me of his troubled marriage, his two difficult daughters, their spiteful mother, how she’d tricked him and turned into someone he didn’t really know. I listened and listened, glad all over again to be rid of him, and sipped the thick, brown sweetness slowly as I could, licking my lips, making it last.
Up from wood rot, wrinkling up from duff and homely damps, spore-born and cauled like a meager seer, it pushes aside earth to make a small place from decay. Bashful, it brings honeycombed news from below of the coming plenty and everything rising.
It may be as close as an old man in Michigan comes to the sound of the sea. Call it thunder if you want, but it’s not thunder, not at all. It’s more like the rush of semis on a freewaysomewhere between Bay City and Flint, the road a son will take when he learns, sometime around the last taste of a strap, that the life he was born to is nothingat all like a life he’d ever bother to live. There’s an anger in it, a tin-edged constancy that has no rhythm, quite, something more like white noise that still won’t let you sleep.Think of some man, needing to get a crop in, but the fields are sop, so he’s trying to find something to fix, something to keep his hands working, something to weld, something to pound,something to wrap his calloused palms around that might do less damage than a lead-rope knotted and tossed over the limb of a tree. If you ever decide to lose your yearsby working this land, you might think again, about the barn you build, or roofing it with tin.
We didn’t like each other, but Lynn’s mother had died, and my father had died.Lynn’s father didn’t know how to talk to her, my mother didn’t know how to talk to me, and Lynn and I didn’t know how to talk either.A secret game drew us close: we took turns being the prisoner, who stood, hands held behind her back,while the captor, using an imaginary bow, shot arrow after arrow after arrow into the prisoner’s heart.
With measured pace, they move in single file, dark hides, white faces, plodding through low grass, then walk into the water, cattle-style, indifferent to the matter where they pass.The stream is high, the current swift—good rain, late snow-melt, cold. Immerging to the flank, the beasts proceed, a queue, a bovine chain, impassive, stepping to the farther bank—continuing their march, as if by word, down valley to fresh pasture. The elect, and stragglers, join, and recompose the herd, both multiple and single, to perfectimpressions of an animated scene, the creek’s meanders, milling cows, and sun. Well cooled, the cattle graze knee-deep in green. We leave them to their feed, this painting done.
Wood strips, cross-purposed into lattice, made this nursery of interstices—a place that softened, then admitted, sun with shade, baffled the wind and rain, broke open space. It’s now more skeletal, a ghostly roomthe garden seemed to grow, in disrepair, long empty and well past its final bloom.Less lumbered, though, it cultivates the air by shedding cedar slats for open sky. As if, designed to never seem quite finished, it had a choice to seal and stultifyor take its weather straight and undiminished,grow larger but be less precisely here, break with its elements, and disappear.
Every family that lived in our court had an American truck with a union sticker on the backand as a kid I admired them the way I thought our soldiers must have admired Patton and Sherman tanks.You once told me that the Russians couldn’t take us, not with towns like ours full of iron, full of workers tempered by the fires of foundries and mills.It wasn’t the Russians that came; it was the contract, the strike, the rounds of layoffs that blistered until your number was called.I still remember you loading up to leave for the last time, the union sticker scraped off with a putty knife,the end of the white tarp draped over your truck bed flapping as you drove away.
You can’t have nothing clean. I scrubbed like a crazy woman at Isom’s clothes that first week and here they come off the line, little black stripes wherever I’d pinned them up or hung them over—coal dust settles on the clothesline, piles up like a line of snow on a tree branch. After that, I wiped down the clothesline every time, but no matter, you can’t get it all off. His coveralls is stripy with black and gray lines, ankles of his pants is ringed around, like marks left by shackles. I thought I’d die that first week when I seen him walk off to the mine, black, burnt-looking marks on his shirt over his shoulders, right where wings would of folded.
I spent the winter my father died down in the basement, under the calm surface of the floorboards, hundreds of little plastic parts spread out like debris on the table. And for months while the snow fell and my father sat in the big chair by the Philco, dying, I worked my way up deck by deck, story by story, from steerage to first class, until at last it was done, stacks, deck chairs, all the delicate rigging. And there it loomed, a blazing city of the dead. Then painted the gaping hole at the waterline and placed my father at the railings, my mother in a lifeboat pulling away from the wreckage.
You find it when you’re tearing up your life, trying to make some sense of the old messes, moving dressers, peering under beds. Almost lost in cat hair and in cobwebs,in dust you vaguely know was once your skin, it shows up, isolated, fragmentary. A tidy little solid. Tractable. Knobbed to be fitted in a lock-step pattern with others. Plastic: red or blue or yellow. Out of the dark, undamaged, there it is,as bright and primary colored and foursquare as the family with two parents and two children who moved in twenty years ago in a dream. It makes no allowances, concedes no failures, admits no knowledge of a little girl who glared through tears, rubbing her slapped cheek. Rigidity is its essential trait. Likely as not, you leave it where it was.
It’s all of it rigged, she says, Bust-one-wins, Hi-striker, even the Dozer. It’s like you think you’ll score that giant panda for the wife except you can’t, or not without you drop another twenty and then—what?—then you win a thumb-sized monkey or a little comb. She hands me five ones and then stands. She’s worked the whole of the midway, she says, funnel cake to corn-dogs. She’s worked every game plus half the rides, Krazy Koaster, Avalanche, Wing-Ding, Tilt-a-Whirl and if there’s somebody sick she’ll do a kiddy ride too, Li’l Choo-choo, maybe the Tea Cup. There’s a collapsing soft sigh and she sits, opens the paper, turns a page and as if she were the one assigned to face forwards, as if it were her job to intuit the world and interpret the news, Anymore, she says, it’s out of our hands, it’s all we can do—it’s not up to you. You see that bald bronco tearing tickets at the carousel? We worked the Bottle-drop and now he’s mine: he’s no genius but he loves me and he’s mine. Things happen, she says, you can’t take them back.
It begins in a cow lane with bees and white clover, courses along corn, rushes accelerando against rocks. It rises to a teetering pitch as I cross a shaky tree-bridge, syncopates a riff over the dissonance of trash—derelict icebox with a missing door, mohair loveseat sinking into thistle. It winds through green adder’s mouth, faint as the bells of Holsteins heading home. Blue shadows lengthen, but the undertow of a harmony pulls me on through raspy Joe-pye-weed and staccato-barbed fence. It hums in a culvert beneath cars, then empties into a river that flows oboe-deep past Indian dance ground, waterwheel and town, past the bleached stones in the churchyard, the darkening hill.
So still at heart, They respond like water To the slightest breeze, Rippling as one body,And, as one mind, Bend continually To listen: The perfect confidants,They keep to themselves, A web of trails and nests, Burrows and hidden entrances— Do not revealThose camouflaged in stillness From the circling hawks, Or crouched and breathless At the passing of the fox.
It will not stay. But this morning we wake to pale muslin stretched across the grass. The pumpkins, still in the fields, are planets shrouded by clouds. The Weber wears a dunce cap and sits in the corner by the garage where asters wrap scarves around their necks to warm their blooms. The leaves, still soldered to their branches by a frozen drop of dew, splash apple and pear paint along the roadsides. It seems we have glanced out a window into the near future, mid-December, say, the black and white photo of winter carefully laid over the present autumn, like a morning we pause at the mirror inspecting the single strand of hair that overnight has turned to snow.
the Venetian blinds I dusted offfor my mother on Saturday mornings,closing, opening them with the pull cord a fewtimes just to watch the outside universe keep blinking,as the flock suddenly rises from November stubble,hovers a few seconds, closing, opening,blinking, before it tilts, then vanishes over a hill.
When Isaac, a small, freckled boy approaching seven, visits us for Family Camp, playing pirate with his rubber sword,sometimes he slumps in grief, trudging along, his sacrifice and small violin in hand, his palm over his chest,saying, Mother is here in my heart. Before he leaves for home, we ask if he’d like a Jewish blessing.Our grandson’s handsome face ignites; he chirps a rousing, yes, for a long life. We unfold the prayer shawl,its Hebrew letters silvering the spring light, hold the white tallis above his head, recite the blessing in its ancient languageand then the English, adding, for a long life. Isaac complains, the tallis didn’t touch his head, so he didn’t feel the blessing.We lower its silken ceiling to graze his dark hair, repeat the prayer.
May 4, 1959 for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959
Welcome to Jackson: City of Grace and Benevolence City of Grace, you open, you part your curtains and smile like a hostess when we call your name, you tender what any traveler needs, a call to ease, a balm, a kindness, whatever storm. You take us in. City of Grace and Benevolence, you say you know what solace means, burned so often they called you Chimneyville, and now you can't forget, you've written it in bronze outside the City Hall the War made a hospital for the Yankee and for your Rebel sons, like the one who is always dying outside the Capitol. City of Fame, you hold him still, laurel on your crown, fan making a hand of wind to soothe his face and fill the eagle's wings spread above to promise,Virtute et armis, to say again just how far you'll go. City of Remembrance, you keep so well, you show us where Welty lived, the house still there, how she skated to the library, through the Capitol, the book now cast and open in her hands. Tell me now, City of Embrace, of the newsreels' children rounded from their march, flags gathered, the children trucked to the fairground cages, the ones who peer out through the chicken wire. City of Richard Wright and Ross Barnett, tell me not just where the Governor pledI love Mississippi, I love her people, her customs,
Natchez Afternoon burns everything off Franklin Street.  Even the birds, even the flies. Or iced-tea sugar and chicken grease weigh everyone  into a doze, all indoors, in a cool they said would never come eighty years ago  when this was still the center of business and the civilized left these high hours to the dogs,  ice in a highball, and let each house close its lids a while. They've kept their quiet,  so I'm alone before the windows, the radiant panes, each with its scrim of clay,  the finish the river gives everything, so nothing, not even glass, is clear.  It's almost painful, this saturation, this street and its stores of rugs and signs and flags,  bright and strange as a magazine photo you'd find in an attic or an antique store,  hard to believe the color was ever real. The teacups, the painted china and jeweled eggs,  even the bottles, medicine vials and flasks each with its ounce of dirt,  even the smell of the prolific earth, the sedimentary atmosphere of empire chairs  and oak armoires and mantles that survive their tall, white homes, like the plantation house  where, later, I'll witness again the marriage of gray suit and hoop skirt  that still feels like a dream, where I'll walk out of—or is it into?—myself,  the maitre'd's small, solicitous voice proffering another julep—cotton-leaf hand,  silver cup—though even he must be a reenactment or a revenant,  a hanger for the clothes of memory. I will take it, I would, a handful of refuge  in unthinking weather, will take the same lethargic joy in a breeze, any chill  in the throat, any kind of shade— so I enter the dim of one old cotton house,  its air-conditioned maze of hand-tools and quilts, corn cribs and cotton gins, and of course  the owner's smile, porcelain, bright, almost blinding, blooming in welcome and how-you-do  and what-brings-you. We talk amid rows of cook-stoves, stew-pots, and cast-iron skillets  about the wedding I've come to see on the famed estate, the time the town exploded,  the Rhythm Club's inferno, and then she ventures she knows the accent, knows  I'm from Alabama, and soon she's eloquent on our lakes and rivers, where the mister takes her  every chance they get. She's seen it all, so she asks where I'm from, and when I say  she starts to glow, gushing over mountains all the way to Gatlinburg. She's walked each one,  even skied the state's one slope, which conjures not the "Southern snow" that required almost everything  around us, but snow, cold snow, a thought that cools me further, so my sweat is nearly dry  when the smile tightens across her teeth and she leans in to say I just love it you know—there are no darkies there. Then afternoon is a conspiracy of color,  an echo the heat or the history in our voices draws us into—  someone else's version of ourselves— and the inevitable, painful quiet  in which an answer must arrive. What can you say? And how long do you have to wait  before you can leave, before you can walk out of yourself and down the cotton-trading streets  into the smother of trees on some more recent lane? How long do you have to wait  before you can leave and not be followed, and how long do you have to walk before the mockingbirds  drown in bass and drum and anger, before you can cross back into the proper century?  The smell of the river stays with you, maybe even grows as you move so you don't know  where you're going, and the key in your hand could open a car door or a plantation room  or nothing at all, some door that's vanished in the air, June's shimmer from the asphalt  and the roofs of every house, so you walk toward that moment when the sun starts burning  and the magnolias' thick perfume washes all around and you find yourself on a corner,  all linen and sweat, again the only one who'd walk in a heat like this. You have no idea  where you are, so you cock your head as if you might hear your way through the afternoon,  and when you raise your head, you see, across the street, two men hunched in shadow  on a barbershop's stoop, ties dangling like smoke in the solid air. They've seen you  and now their brows sharpen as if they know, too, you're not from here,  and in the space between you anything could pass, the ghosts of Farragut or Grant  or a hot white Caddy rattling New Orleans Bounce, you're waiting to see, it seems like years or centuries,  then one rises, ties his tie, and steps back in, leaving the other, who keeps your eye  a moment longer then looks into the distance through that lace of smoke that seems etched in the air  for something far behind you, something you don't even know how to look for,  something that may never arrive.
And the way the jury chose to believe the ridiculous stories of the defense. . . .  — Mamie Till, 1955 . . . with truth absent, hypocrisy and myth have flourished. . . . —Look, January 1956 The sheriff says it wasn't Till we pulled from the river, that man was as white as I am, white as cotton blowed by the cotton gin fan that weighed him down, looked like he'd lain there weeks, not a kid at all. He was a stranger just out of Money, recalled by a store clerk, a hobo, and a crossroad guitarist. The reporter finds them at the once abandoned crossing. They say it's like the sheriff says, came up one night, headed Clarksdale way, another one, hat pulled down, right behind. Three days later, the bluesman says, a plague of starlings gathered into little boys those who fished and found the dead man's foot. The reporter stares into his cataracted, cotton eyes. He cannot find them, no matter where he looks.
15 September 1963, Birmingham Later he will say he did not do it, he was home at breakfast, just ask the wife, say they heard some radio preacher doing love thy neighbor while birds filled up the yard. Later, he will say he did not do it then tell how he didn't, lean in close to say if he would have done it it wouldn't have been alone, he would have had a driver and a man out west to phone in threats to draw the cops away. They'd ease through empty streets to plant their package then glide away, their route thick with friends, a thousand ways to disappear. • The DA will lean, will see his would have dashboard-lit, driving Dynamite Hill, headlights, radio dead. Would have in the shotgun seat, sticks sweating in his grip, shadow steering through the city's sleep. Will see them driving, out before the paperboys, ready to throw when the dark is right. See him Christmas, few years back, outside the preacher's house, thin fuse of cigarette, newspaper spread on the bus protests. See flash, shock push him from the dark, burn his shadow where anyone could see. Something dark in the lenses of the bottle trees. • The photographer spots him eyeing the bombed-out church, minutes after, a face he's seen before, flash on the shards of phone-booths and broken windows he'll follow through the horrid and the horrified while the cops arrive, the state patrol arrives with bayonets instead of hoses, bayonets instead of dogs, while congregants arrive between firemen and plainclothes Klansmen and the children, the children arrive and depart, and there, the smirk he'll follow through uniforms and Sunday black, into the park, then lose him as it fills. • Will stand in the blur of what arrives and wonder where he could have gone. Whether he'd cut toward the depot, through the railyards to wind back home, or north through the nervous blocks, or circle back for another view, maybe shadowed in a doorway, japing in a storefront window, listening at a sandwich stand while everyone is talking, his work on every tongue. Maybe he could drift through the crush of lookers in cigarette smoke, in the breath of many lungs, common, innocuous, a cloud about to disappear. • Will stand imagining him split at each intersection, now four of him working the city's riot, one with a bomb in his Sunday Herald,  one with a gun hung out the window racing to a segregation rally, one with a bullhorn and a speech for the news if they want it right, and one just waiting for some midnight's cool when he can stand beneath the vacant windows and search for that fire in the face of Christ before driving out past the mills. On the ridge he'll see Vulcan's torch is red, but not for them. Shadows reel from the furnace sheds, birds exploding, blown from molten light. • The mayor says all of us are victims, innocent victims. The lawyer kills his radio. When folks ask later who did it, the lawyer says I'll tell you who. Who is everyone who talks of niggers. Who is everyone who slurs to his neighbors and his sons. Everyone who jokes about niggers and everyone who laughs at the jokes. Everyone who's quiet, who lets it happen. Now his voice flaps in the rafters of the meeting hall, and everyone is quiet. I'll tell you who did it, he says. We all did. • The photographer keeps his beat, past the crater in the church foundation, through the park, into the midday rush, just where he lost him. In the darkroom, he kept arriving, his face framed between elbows, caught in the thrall, or his crewcut, his smile cropped by arms. Now his haircut, half-rolled sleeve, cigarette lip, his eye pass by a dozen times, and more. He could be anyone, could be everyone wandering the storefronts, spying behind his News. The photographer follows each one, cocked and ready to shoot, but his lens can't catch them all so he just stands, tracing their paths, he just stands, lost in the crowd he becomes.
State of Alabama v. Robert E. Chambliss, 1977 When they come filling the yard with their overheard, broke-glass catastrophes of voice, overcrowded party line, he lets the screen door clap to see them plume the settle back to the fence, aftershocks of crowd and wail. When they come he says again he was home at breakfast radio preacher doing love thy neighbor and then the bomb, just ask the wife. The silence in the TV's cathode glow slowly fills with questions as starlings shutter light then weigh the lines, voices tangled in their claws. • They had him buying dynamite, a case he says he passed along, then the other's car behind the church, four men dome-lit in early dark. Now all they have is years of brag and noise and alibi, a quiet in which the trail's confused. At times it seemed he wasn't real, that he was no one, a story everyone had heard, just not the end, that he was different men, one arm with a bomb, another making calls miles outside of town, a fog, an exhalation, scattering when seen.
Come live with me And we will sit Upon the rocks By shallow rivers Come live with me And we will plant acorns In each other's mouth It would be our way Of greeting the earth Before it shoves us Back into the snow Our interior cavities Brimming with Disagreeable substances Come live with me Before winter stops To use the only pillow The sky ever sleeps on Our interior cavities Brimming with snow Come live with me Before spring Swallows the air And birds sing
I used to be a plastic bottle I used to be scads of masticated wattle I used to be epic spittle, aka septic piddle I used to be a pleasant colleague I used to be a radiant ingredient I used to be a purple polyethylene pony I used to be a phony upload project I used to be a stony blue inhalant I used to be a family-size turquoise bottle I used to be a domesticated pink bubble I used to be a pleasant red colleague I used to be a beaming cobalt emollient I used to be a convenient chartreuse antidepressant
It does not do you like it Imperfect copy's forgery Posts its vermillion decreeThese anointed mistakes Neither robust nor
All day long I've been hidden, enmeshed, locked in the shadow of the holy mountain, my body covered with shame. I'd hoped there would be a dog barking furiously. Unable to go forward, unable to go back, at least with the sound of a dog barking I'd attain something . . . something. Instead of a dog barking there was silence, then the sound of a drum beaten loud & fast by a young nun. Into this temple come none of the grand sounds, none of the great thoughts. In the cabbage field, heads all the same size are profiles of young novice nuns & the priestesses sitting in Unmun Temple. Young faces like dew, like hoarfrost.
What a relief you cannot live everywhere all at once. Today, here in Diamond Cave, there's no longer any reason to live. Stay one or two days: this world & the Other are drained of difference. Wind blows. As a pearl is born at seabottom in agony out of oyster flesh from within the most obscure darkness here the wind blows from the depths. I want to travel far & then return. The wind blows as if I were eighty-five, maybe eighty-seven.
Spiders in the cold, bees in inarticulate bunches hang from a day's work. Waiting for light they wait to see what they will be. A tree lets down green undersides and is maple. A window glints— a thing of saffron kindles with singlehood. In the broad yard each thing dandles its blue, its name, its consequence.
The coastline edges to the edge of our chart. We move on a central, generous blue. Wind high, ocean plain smack tonnage our bow plows through, the boiling salt excitement of our wake, gone in minutes, then birds on our bobbing crates a thousand miles from land. To pass the time I try to teach our bosun mate "Sailing to Byzantium." Good-natured, he laughs and laughs.   It is by no means enough that an officer o f the Navy should be a capable mariner. H e must be that, of course, but also a grea t deal more. He should be the soul of tac t, patience, justice, firmness and charity . No meritorious act of a subordinate sho uld escape without its reward, even if the reward is only a word of approval. Conver sely, he should not be blind to a single f ault in any subordinate though, at the sam e time, he should be quick and unfailing t o distinguish error from malice, thoughtle ssness from incompetency, and well meant s hortcoming from heedless or stupid blunder.
I stare down into waterburn. This urge to enter what we see. Unrefracted tropical sun with its whole arm works deeply the ocean interior. Water and light in union make a third thing—color as fluid deepened endlessly. Into the quarry of aquamarine, high-walled with light, the mind high dives. My fingers cleave watersilk. I breathe heavy light. The big cavitation of the props gone by, my struggling stops, my slowed descent, in diminishing light, gains the country where the shark is eagle, fish the fishermen, and men no more than stones along the road.
Things in the dark exist but are not realized. Perhaps with wings they wait for enacting light. I start out as the sky descends to the visible spectrum and begins. Midmorning I find in a lab a blue magnetic fluid: revolving in the stress of gauss, the source of blue resides. November nights, up to the first snow, derive from this seat of blue. I spend a month reflecting at Palomar. My delicate fourteen tons I bring to bear on galaxies: their lonely shine harbors on my dustless, understanding curve. I come to a mountain out of season. The brass benchmark telling the height is under ice. Without witness, without cease a blizzard pummels the summit's face. I reach the pole. Here at the axis the wobble and grind is audible. My compass tries to point straight down. It, too, deceived: Having achieved one absolute, the source of north, to find that south surrounds, is all but it. The Humboldt Current has my boat and its mile of line straight down. Now and then, fishermen haul in the inexplicable along with seabream, haddock, squid. I hook a coelacanth, thought long extinct, and brain it with an oar. Nose to the bottom I shove off from the hundred fathom curve. Slow footage of mud unreeling through my mind, the miles of decline become my age. Hauled up someday by accident, rupturing in the lost pressure, my look will say how knowing feels. Living among the trilobites I learn you cross great lengths of time by stilling the waiting in yourself. From scavengers I see how you can live off your own dead kind. I gum the grit of a tidal flat and have no name. A chance letter brings me home, telling how I was found. Returned I sit like water in a jar, light from a window passing through, a slow rain of precipitate remembering the bottom.
She kept its bones in a glass casenext to the recliner in the living room,and sometimes thought she heardhim mewing, like a faint background music;but if she stopped to listen, it disappeared.Likewise with a nuzzling around her calves,she’d reach absent-mindedly to scratch him,but her fingers found nothing but air.One day, in the corner of her eye,slinking by the sofa, there was a shadow.She glanced over, expecting it to vanish.But this time it remained.She looked at it full on. She watched it move.Low and angular, not quite as catlikeas one might suppose, but still, it was him.She walked to the door, just like in the old days,and opened it, and met a whoosh of winter air.She waited. The bones in the glass case rattled.Then the cat-shadow darted at her,through her legs, and slipped outside.It mingled with the shadows of bare branches,and leapt at the shadow of a bird.She looked at the tree, but there was no bird.Then he blended into the shadow of a bush.She stood in the threshold, her hands on the door,the sharp breeze ruffling the faded flowersof her house dress, and she could feelher own bones rattling in her body,her own shadow trying to slip out.
We opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver and brought up from the coal cellar jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit. We dismantled, we took down from the walls, we bundled and carted off and swept clean. Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing the door behind us, going our separate ways from the house we had emptied, and which, in the coming days, we would fill again and empty and try to fill again.
The whiskey stink of rot has settled in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises when I touch the dying tomato plants. Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots and toss them in the compost. It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready to let go of summer so easily. To destroy what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months. Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit. My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village as they pulled the flax. Songs so old and so tied to the season that the very sound seemed to turn the weather.
His car rolls up to the curb, you switch your mood, which doll to bring and rush out again on the sliding steps of your shoes half-on, forgetting to zip your new pink coat in thirty degrees, teeth and hair not brushed, already passing the birch, mid-way between us, too far to hear my fading voicecalling my rope of reminders as I lean out in my robe, another Saturdaymorning you’re pulled toward his smile, his gifts, sweeping on two flattened rafts from mine to his, your fleeting wave down the rapids of the drive.
I could fix the leaky pipe Under the sink, or wander over And bother Jerry who’s lost
Mix a pancake, Stir a pancake, Pop it in the pan; Fry the pancake, Toss the pancake— Catch it if you can.
I wake in the morning early And always, the very first thing, I poke out my head and I sit up in bed And I sing and I sing and I sing.
The morns are meeker than they were - The nuts are getting brown - The berry’s cheek is plumper - The rose is out of town. The maple wears a gayer scarf - The field a scarlet gown - Lest I sh'd be old-fashioned I’ll put a trinket on.
Your world is as big as you make it. I know, for I used to abide In the narrowest nest in a corner, My wings pressing close to my side. But I sighted the distant horizon Where the skyline encircled the sea And I throbbed with a burning desire To travel this immensity. I battered the cordons around me And cradled my wings on the breeze, Then soared to the uttermost reaches With rapture, with power, with ease!
The sun does arise, And make happy the skies. The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring. The sky-lark and thrush, The birds of the bush, Sing louder around, To the bells’ cheerful sound.  While our sports shall be seen On the Ecchoing Green.   Old John, with white hair  Does laugh away care, Sitting under the oak, Among the old folk,  They laugh at our play,  And soon they all say. ‘Such, such were the joys.  When we all girls & boys,  In our youth-time were seen,  On the Ecchoing Green.’   Till the little ones weary No more can be merry The sun does descend, And our sports have an end:  Round the laps of their mothers,  Many sisters and brothers, Like birds in their nest, Are ready for rest; And sport no more seen, On the darkening Green.
A Bird, came down the Walk - He did not know I saw - He bit an Angle Worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw, And then, he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass - And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass - He glanced with rapid eyes, That hurried all abroad - They looked like frightened Beads, I thought, He stirred his Velvet Head. - Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb, And he unrolled his feathers, And rowed him softer Home - Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon, Leap, plashless as they swim.
My hair had hardly covered my forehead. I was picking flowers, playing by my door, When you, my lover, on a bamboo horse, Came trotting in circles and throwing green plums. We lived near together on a lane in Ch’ang-kan, Both of us young and happy-hearted. ...At fourteen I became your wife, So bashful that I dared not smile, And I lowered my head toward a dark corner And would not turn to your thousand calls; But at fifteen I straightened my brows and laughed, Learning that no dust could ever seal our love, That even unto death I would await you by my post And would never lose heart in the tower of silent watching. ...Then when I was sixteen, you left on a long journey Through the Gorges of Ch’u-t’ang, of rock and whirling water. And then came the Fifth-month, more than I could bear, And I tried to hear the monkeys in your lofty far-off sky. Your footprints by our door, where I had watched you go, Were hidden, every one of them, under green moss, Hidden under moss too deep to sweep away. And the first autumn wind added fallen leaves. And now, in the Eighth-month, yellowing butterflies Hover, two by two, in our west-garden grasses And, because of all this, my heart is breaking And I fear for my bright cheeks, lest they fade. ...Oh, at last, when you return through the three Pa districts, Send me a message home ahead! And I will come and meet you and will never mind the distance, All the way to Chang-feng Sha.
My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.   My poet’s vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.
for Walt Whitman Besides the obvious technological and architectural advances, only one thing has really changed between our generations:   We now live in an America where blacks are not only allowed the right to vote but can become the Redeemer President of the United States   Otherwise, we still live in an America where the audacity to openly enjoy the pleasures of sex and being respected for wisdom are contradictions without reconciliation   We still live in an America where the economy collapses while the masses are consumed with preventing the rights of anyone with a fancy for anything out of the ordinary   We still live in an America where rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris are found in more homes than poetry books   We still live in an America where Christ and Dracula provide both excitement and fear for restless lives longing for a simple touch   We still live in an America where the impact of urbanization reaches out to the common person more than the obscene nature of poetry   We still live in an America where writing about prostitution is considered trashy and profane   We still live in an America where poets have to work while publishing to survive financial difficulty unless they are fashioned like Shakespeare   We still live in an America where, unless you belong to a church, you are a religious skeptic believing in nothing   We still live in an America where overt sexuality, siding with the barnburners, and authoring disreputable books limit poets to a vagabond lifestyle   We still live in an America where breaking tradition and the boundaries of poetic form are considered the trademarks of a pretentious ass   We still live in an America where everything from thieves to dwarfs to fog to beetles deserve validity   We still live in an America where books cannot prevent war and the sick and wounded need healing   We still live in an America where not everyone can appreciate the beauty of immigration, crowded streets, brutal differences, urban affection   We still live in an America where the same sun that once invigorated your passion continues to provide us with the beauty of life worth fighting for   We still live in an America where America still lives in us
He forgets that he used to call me mariconcito- that I harbored years of hatred toward him while hoping to find my real father. My childhood memories of him reminding me I was my mother's son, not his. I tried to poison him once and scattered sharp nails inside the shoes in his closet. By the time one of his sons died of AIDS I was already lost in contempt for the man I blamed for everything. There was the time I was in love and he met my boyfriend. Now he forgets to go to the bathroom or where he is but he still remembers Michael and asks about him. I help him walk slowly outdoors to step outside the prison cell that is the tiny apartment with no windows in which I grew up abused by both of them. He barely understands. His fate has been torture. I know that I cannot be his savior. I used to pray for him to die but here he is slowly fading. In his eyes I see that he learned to love me and wishes he could take it all back. He is unable to recall those drunken nights and hateful words. I should do the same. I left a long time ago but he still remains haunted by the little boy who wanted to belong. Like him, I want to forget that we made mistakes and caused so much pain. I need for both of us to remember how he taught me how to ride a bike and how to swim and told me, better late than never, that he loved me and was proud of all I had done. I have to help him settle into his favorite chair and let him know that I forgive him. There is a place somewhere where he will call me hijo and I will know him as my dad.
In this poem all artifice is stripped away but you are held under water. In this poem you enter a mirrored dressing room lit so that you look more beautiful than you have ever looked. I recognize you with surprise. In this poem you are by yourself.
Music lives inside my legs. It’s coming out when I talk. I’m going to send my valentines to people you don’t even know. Oatmeal cookies make my throat gallop. Grown-ups keep their feet on the ground when they swing. I hate that. Look at those 2 o’s with a smash in the middle— that spells good-bye. Don’t ever say “purpose” again, let’s throw the word out. Don’t talk big to me. I’m carrying my box of faces. If I want to change faces I will. Yesterday faded but tomorrow’s in boldface. When I grow up my old names will live in the house where we live now. I’ll come and visit them. Only one of my eyes is tired. The other eye and my body aren’t. Is it true all metal was liquid first? Does that mean if we bought our car earlier they could have served it in a cup? There’s a stopper in my arm that’s not going to let me grow any bigger. I’ll be like this always, small. And I will be deep water too. Wait. Just wait. How deep is the river? Would it cover the tallest man with his hands in the air? Your head is a souvenir. When you were in New York I could see you in real life walking in my mind. I’ll invite a bee to live in your shoe. What if you found your shoe full of honey? What if the clock said 6:92 instead of 6:30? Would you be scared? My tongue is the car wash for the spoon. Can noodles swim? My toes are dictionaries. Do you need any words? From now on I’ll only drink white milk on January 26. What does minus mean? I never want to minus you. Just think—no one has ever seen inside this peanut before! It is hard being a person. I do and don’t love you— isn't that happiness?
Zigging, mid- block, he’s off: on a torn-up, trafficked slab of Second Avenue— his cane sweeping over broken asphalt, like a sapper or an open skiff on back-splashing seas. For a few seconds it’s unclear if he gets the risk, as yellow cabs swoop down and flock at the light. Then, safe home on the other side. And I for one cannot take my eyes off him as he pivots, compassing north. We’re never truly clear. Now he jams himself at pace between a giant planter and cross-braced scaffold newly set up at Finnegans. And wham. The guy is smack on his ass, un-staring up to heaven, stunned.Damn, I think, what in hell was that? It’s not like the pain of loving someone who doesn’t want you back (though that once ate up years of my life and left me blown like an artery after too many bypasses), nor does it compare to frittering away in a job that I’m ill-suited to and which I’ll probably lose. It’s more as if a hammer dropped from a sill and laid him out cold. That scaffold just appeared there overnight. And for all my hard-won bile I’m not worse off than he is, except in this: I’ve come to think I am.
This guy I know, a rabbi, Friday nights, on his way home before sunset in winter, always stops at a florist or bodega and buys a bunch of flowers for his wife. Every week the same, a ritual, regardless of her mood that morning, fresh upsets at work, or snarling on the bridge; he brings her roses wrapped in cellophane. But isn’t there a ring of hokiness in that? Why should a good man have to show his devotion? Some things go unspoken; some things get tested on the real world, and isn’t that the place that matters most? So when you told me I should bring you flowers, I joked, “But don’t I show my feelings more in dog walks, diapers, and rewiring lamps?” The flowers, I learned later, weren’t for wooing, not for affection in long marriage, but for something seeded even deeper down, through frost heaves, and which might be, roughly, peace. (It’s funny that I just assumed romance.) Now there’s no peace with us. I wonder what they might have meant to you, those simple tokens, holding in sight what no rite can grow back.
The only time I’ve been to Switzerland was early one spring on a train through the mountains. There was a lake—I guess it was Lucerne? Above me cliff tops ridged with snow fanned out so that where I stood at the edge of the platform light bathed the empty siding all around with a diffused opalescence off the water. Behind the station must have been a town, spires of churches, municipal arcades, and coffee squelching in the fogged cafés. I never saw the place, though I remember thinking this is Switzerland and took a mind-shot of the pines, breathing in the cold as the porter whistled at us to reboard.
We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges. This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa. But moving up the trail, we caught a glimpse right at the start: the fox just over the hillock on the dune-side slope, spoiling the grass-inscribed sand. Neither of us looked— it seemed best to back away. On the dune’s steep side we surveyed what we’d come for: ocean’s snaking blues beyond the meadow, the silvered blade-like wands lying down. Lovely enough to hold ourselves to that view. But the currents of an odor wafted in and out, until the sweep of smell grew wider, wilder. The heat compounded, and ugliness settled its cloud over us, profound as human speech, although by then we were not speaking.
Dead deer a week now by the snowy gate. Do I have to watch it be eaten? Do I have to see who comes first, who quarrels, who stays? And there is the question of the night, what flesh preferred by which creature— what sinew and fat, the organs, the eyes. These appetites: it’s enough to know the swoop and cut of wings over the snarl of something leaping away. Do I have to see the icy figure fused to the ground, scrabbled snow, not lovely or deep, but the surface of something spoiled? By now the rib bones arch above it all, unbroken light shining between them, above the black cavity. And I hear the crows, complaint, complaint splitting the morning, hunched over the skull. They know their offices.
She thinks it wants to kill, this wind, the wind with no mind—a transference to everything out there. Because she needs waking, the howling is meant to wake her, a self crying underneath her sleeping self, the stilted house groaning on the edge. For how many days now this dominating sea? Wind so absolute it rides the rain sideways and up, crashing out far beyond her until the anchor breaks away— waves take possession, smash the boat on concrete pilings. But isn’t this what she came for?
If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you. The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open, Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity. The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury. Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable,  Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing. Teeth in fair repair. Will you be buried where; nowhere. Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia. And opening, most delft of blue,  Your heart was a mess— A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand, Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned. The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale, With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke. The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia.  I adore you more. I know The wingspan of your voice, whole gorgeous flock of harriers, Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour.  Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected. The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking,  Longing for to work.
No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no Buttering. No making small contusions on the page But saying nothing no one has not said before. No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs. No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.  Extinguish me from this. I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.  There is no thou to speak of.
We’re writing our names with sizzles of light to celebrate the fourth. I use the loops of cursive, make a big B like the sloping hills on the west side of the lake. The rest, little a, r, one small b, spit and fizz as they scratch the night. On the side of the shack where we bought them, a handmade sign: Trailer Full of Sparkles Ahead, and I imagine crazy chrysanthemums, wheels of fire, glitter bouncing off metal walls. Here, we keep tracing in tiny pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth, branding them on the air. And though my mother’s name has been erased now, I write it, too: a big swooping I, a hissing s, an a that sighs like her last breath, and then I ring belle, belle, belle in the sulphuric smoky dark.
It’s not spring yet, but I can’t wait anymore. I get the hoe, pull back the snow from the old furrows, expose the rich dark earth. I bare my hand and dole out shriveled peas, one by one.I see my grandmother’s hand, doing just this, dropping peas into gray gumbo that clings like clay. This moist earth is rich and dark as chocolate cake.Her hands cradle baby chicks; she finds kittens in the loft and hands them down to me, safe beside the ladder leading up to darkness.I miss her smile, her blue eyes, her biscuits and gravy, but mostly her hands. I push a pea into the earth, feel her hands pushing me back. She’ll come in May, she says, in long straight rows, dancing in light green dresses.
During the weeks when we all believed my mother was likely to die she began to plan her funeral and she wanted us, her children, to consider the music we would play there. We remembered the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings, the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months each errand was accompanied by some kindof dramatic movement. After my brother was born, there was a period during which she wore a muumuu and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused to fasten her seatbelt and there was the musicof an automated bell going off every few minutes, which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval, its insistence that someone was unsafe.
Dad would come home after too long at work and I’d sit on his lap to hear the story of Ferdinand the Bull; every night, me handing him the red book until I knew every word, couldn’t read, just recite along with drawings of a gentle bull, frustrated matadors, the all-important bee, and flowers— flowers in meadows and flowers thrown by the Spanish ladies. Its lesson, really, about not being what you’re born into but what you’re born to be, even if that means not caring about the capes they wave in your face or the spears they cut into your shoulders. And Dad, wonderful Dad, came home after too long at work and read to me the same story every night until I knew every word, couldn’t read,  just recite.
It thuds and clanks like tennis shoes in a dryer, only I am the shoe, sour, damp and wedged intothe narrow metal tube, heart clanging.
Next to the screen door work boots dry in the sun. Salt lines map the leather and laces drooplike the arms of a new-hire waiting to punch out. The shoe hangs open like the sigh of someone too tired to speak a mouth that can almost breathe. A tear in the leather reveals a shiny steel toe a glimpse of the promise of safety the promise of steel and the years to come.
out from under it and down the mountain slope it comes flat on its back white skirt and billowy petticoats blowingback over its head, whiplashing ricketypine sapling as it passes, bowling boulders left and right until it comes to a juddering sudden heart- thumping stop just shy of the little village in the valley far below.
I could almost hear their soft collisions on the cold air today, but when I came in,shed my layers and stood alone by the fire, I felt them float toward me like sporesflung far from their source, having crossed miles of oceans and fields unknown to mostjust to keep my body fixed to its place on the earth. Call them God if you must,these messengers that bring hard evidence of what I once was and where I have been—filling me with bits of stardust, whaleskin, goosedown from the pillow where Einsteinonce slept, tucked in his cottage in New Jersey, dreaming of things I know I’ll never see.
So I'll speak ill of the dead. A was crooked, planting the small left finger of the raccoon in the upholstery before he sold the car. B made certain to point out Celia's bewildered look before her pink slip came in the flimsy institution. In the videos of C, a jejune overwhelmed the cast. D built dollhouses. Even Lonnie down at Shell found him less a man for it, the night they went off to see the stock cars break. I wanted E's hair, but by the end it was no more. F refused alms, pulling the man up by his shirt in the street, and G sought rewards. Marybeth said H fondled her for sport. Now you, I, Smokey, hell bent on a village version of Club 21, embarrassed by our attentions. Mistrust it was. Dig me a chamber of preparedness.  William T. Osborn, 1964-1993
Just for this evening, let's not mock them. Not their curtsies or cross-garters or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens promising, promising. At least they had ideas about love. All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads through metal contraptions to eat. We've followed West 84, and what else? Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields, lounging sheep, telephone wires, yellowing flowering shrubs. Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them, the violet underneath of clouds. Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up: there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled— darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound with the thunder of their wings. After a while, it must have seemed that they followed not instinct or pattern but only one another. When they stopped, Audubon observed, they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers. And when we stop we'll follow—what? Our hearts? The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love only through miracle, but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through, how to make themselves shrines to their own longing. The spectacular was never behind them. Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you. Think of me in the garden, humming quietly to myself in my blue dress, a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms, though cloudless. At what point is something gone completely? The last of the sunlight is disappearing even as it swells— Just for this evening, won't you put me before you until I'm far enough away you can believe in me? Then try, try to come closer— my wonderful and less than.
The sculptures in this gallery have been  carefully treated with a protective wax  so that visitors may touch them.
Again this morning my eyes woke up too close to your eyes, their almost green orbs too heavy-lidded to really look back. To wake up next to you is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you to see you. But I do look. So when you come to me in your opulent sadness, I see you do not want me to unbutton you so I cannot do the one thing I can do. Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase away from me. Already it is years of you a staircase away from me. To be near you and not near you is ordinary. You are ordinary. Still, how many afternoons have I spent peeling blue paint from our porch steps, peering above hedgerows, the few parked cars for the first glimpse of you. How many hours under the overgrown, pink Camillas, thinking the color was wrong for you, thinking you'd appear after my next blink. Soon you'll come down the stairs to tell me something. And I'll say, okay. Okay. I'll say it like that, say it just like that, I'll go on being your never-enough. It's not the best in you I long for. It's when you're noteless, numb at the ends of my fingers, all is all. I say it is.
for Lily Mae The job was easy: I tucked them in, kicked off my shoes, listened for the floor to go quiet. Everyone slept except one: outside her door, she paced, she hummed, holding the edge of her torn nightgown. Pointing, I told her: to bed. Your bed. But she would not stay there. She was old, older than my mother: manic, caught up in gibberish, determined to sleep on my cot— At first it was just to quiet her. I could only sleep if she slept, and I needed relief from myself. That is how she became a body next to mine whether or not I wanted there to be a body. She climbed into my bed. I let her sleep hot and damp against my spine. All night she rocked, she turned, she poked her spastic elbows into my calves and slurred her broken noises in the dark. All the old fans went round in clicks those summer nights—and she rolled in bed and kicked me in the head and I was happy. No words, no tricks, I just didn't love my loneliness. My mind felt cooler with her there. Beside her, I could have been anyone. She had no word for me and not the kind of mind to keep one. And if she kicked me, some nights, just for the fun of it—who was I to disappoint my one? Sometimes I imagine I was someone she won at a fair as the wheel spun under the floating, unfaltering sun and clicked each lucky one and one until I was happily undone.
I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel  to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.   —DUCHAMP I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air and watch them pop. I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening. I had the happy idea to create a void in myself. Then to call it natural. Then to call it supernatural. I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin. I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything. I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would know them and feel them, and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend. I had the happy idea to call myself happy. I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in mold-life. I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do, and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes. I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.  It was my happiest idea.
Knock me or nothing, the things of this world ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish, clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts. Let them. Let the fans whirr. All the similar virgins must have emptied their flimsy pockets, and I was empty enough, sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn, dumb as the frost-pink tongues of the unpruned roses. When you put your arms around me in that moment, when you pulled me to you and leaned back, when you lifted me just a few inches, when you shook me hard then, had you ever heard such emptiness? I had room for every girl's locket, every last dime and pocketknife. Oh my out-sung, fierce, unthinkable— why rattle only the world you placed in me? Won't you clutter the unkissed, idiot stars? They blink and blink like quiet shepherds, like brides-about-your-neck. Call them out of that quietness. Knock them in their nothing, against their empty enamel, against the dark that has no way to hold them and no appetite. Call in the dead to touch them. Let them slip on their own chinks of light.
I ask your doctor of infectious disease if she's read Williams he cured sick babies I tell her and begin describing spring and all she's looking at the wall now the floor now your chart now the door never heard of him she says but I can't stop explaining how important this is I need to know your doctor believes in the tenacity of nature to endure I'm past his heart attack his strokes and now as if etching the tombstone myself I find I can't remember the date he died or even the year of what now are we the pure products and what does that even mean pure isn't it obvious we are each our own culture alive with the virus that's waiting to unmake us
the unthinkable prospect of a world in which I am left to my own devices which are few and as soon as the batteries die useless first order of business I draw a map in the sand mark where I stand as the capital of civilization within me the detailed blueprints of the pyramids and the concept of zero beyond me the finite frontier the many miles of undeveloped shoreline with spectacular views of a sea filled with intricately depicted monsters I have a lot to do before I introduce the new world to art and astronomy and industry medicine and technology ethics politics democracy by a show of hands we shall elect which tree to burn in the first fire
in a different version of this I'm the one sitting up in bed while the nurse says deep breaths listens to my lungs through the cold antenna of her stethoscope you're the one sitting in a chair in the corner with a half hearted smile plastered to your face in a different version of this we're both in bed hunched over while two nurses sisters actually listen to our lungs your husband and my wife sit in the corners of the room both of them completely useless in a different version of this I'm in a chair in the corner while my sister sits up in bed you're the nurse who listens to my sister breathing you glance at me for an instant and return my uncertain smile in a different version of this I sit up abruptly in bed I'm breathing deeply you put your hand on my back and say go back to sleep you're fine everything is fine
To Mary — —  1.   So now my summer task is ended, Mary, And I return to thee, mine own heart's home; As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faëry, Earning bright spoils for her inchanted dome; Nor thou disdain, that ere my fame become A star among the stars of mortal night, If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom, Its doubtful promise thus I would unite With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light. 2.   The toil which stole from thee so many an hour Is ended,—and the fruit is at thy feet! No longer where the woods to frame a bower With interlaced branches mix and meet, Or where with sound like many voices sweet, Water-falls leap among wild islands green, Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen: But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been. 3.   Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why; until there rose From the near school-room, voices, that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes— The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 4.   And then I clasped my hands and looked around— —But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground— So without shame, I spake:—"I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannise Without reproach or check." I then controuled My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. 5.   And from that hour did I with earnest thought Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore, Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I cared to learn, but from that secret store Wrought linked armour for my soul, before It might walk forth to war among mankind; Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more Within me, till there came upon my mindA sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. 6.   Alas, that love should be a blight and snare To those who seek all sympathies in one!— Such once I sought in vain; then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone:— Yet never found I one not false to me, Hard hearts, and cold, like weights of icy stone Which crushed and withered mine, that could not be Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee. 7.   Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain; How beautiful and calm and free thou wert In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain Of Custom thou didst burst and rend in twain, And walked as free as light the clouds among, Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long. 8.   No more alone through the world's wilderness, Although I trod the paths of high intent, I journeyed now: no more companionless, Where solitude is like despair, I went.— There is the wisdom of a stern content When Poverty can blight the just and good, When Infamy dares mock the innocent, And cherished friends turn with the multitude To trample: this was ours, and we unshaken stood! 9.   Now has descended a serener hour, And with inconstant fortune, friends return; Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power Which says:—Let scorn be not repaid with scorn. And from thy side two gentle babes are born To fill our home with smiles, and thus are we Most fortunate beneath life's beaming morn; And these delights, and thou, have been to meThe parents of the Song I consecrate to thee. 10.   Is it, that now my inexperienced fingers But strike the prelude of a loftier strain? Or, must the lyre on which my spirit lingers Soon pause in silence, ne'er to sound again, Though it might shake the Anarch Custom's reign, And charm the minds of men to Truth's own sway Holier than was Amphion's? I would fain Reply in hope—but I am worn away, And Death and Love are yet contending for their prey. 11.   And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak: Time may interpret to his silent years. Yet in the paleness of thy thoughtful cheek, And in the light thine ample forehead wears, And in thy sweetest smiles, and in thy tears, And in thy gentle speech, a prophecy Is whispered, to subdue my fondest fears: And through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see A lamp of vestal fire burning internally. 12.   They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth, Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child. I wonder not—for One then left this earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of its departing glory; still her fame Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name. 13.   One voice came forth from many a mighty spirit, Which was the echo of three thousand years; And the tumultuous world stood mute to hear it, As some lone man who in a desart hears The music of his home:—unwonted fears Fell on the pale oppressors of our race, And Faith, and Custom, and low-thoughted cares, Like thunder-stricken dragons, for a space Left the torn human heart, their food and dwelling-place. 14.   Truth's deathless voice pauses among mankind! If there must be no response to my cry— If men must rise and stamp with fury blind On his pure name who loves them,—thou and I, Sweet Friend! can look from our tranquillity Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,— Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by Which wrap them from the foundering seaman's sight,That burn from year to year with unextinguished light.
Surviving in its fragile skin, a white egret rises from the gulf of its strength. I want the lightest needle of a pine to fall on my hand, a pine with ravaged limbs. I'd stare through salt-blind eyes at a remote fragile sea. I'd roar. I'd make the skeleton of grief. I'd roar like you, unreconciled sea.
I try to carry the gravestone from the darkness of my mother's sickroom— scratches of light around drawn shades— outside, the gold and red of autumn. She is like a queen in exile scraping with her nails on silk walls her message of anger, her weak insatiable demands and regrets. I want her to grow rosy old like a maple leaf, ripening, yielding only to that ice edged wind that must come and cut her down—like me, like everyone.
Opportunity I love you Windows and watermelons march down the street The air is nobody Sky is in position I am ready to endure my freedom A riderless horse on a saffron plain A lake that spins A tree that lets the wind decide
Stripped to the waist, hard-muscled, downcast, under the guns of lounging guards, they are clearing a roadside across a palmetto landscape. I notice one blond boy swinging a pick, broad-shouldered. His skin is smooth, bright, sweaty. His upright body ripples under the rigid fury of his face. His bulging eyes fixed on the ground can see mountains, the destiny of his imagination he can never get to, where he could rest, a lion in the wilderness of his flesh. I see the body with its own career of gestures— its bright roads, its dark roads apart, serene. . . Men must be carved, apparently, like slaughtered steers or pigs to find the marble of their bones innocent, innocent after all as the stones they break, or rain, or the guards in cages of their white voices. Trapped in one chained line, one terrifying combination of arrangements, driven to taste each other's flesh. . . The body sings alone among the earth's arrangements ignorant of crimes or dreams or the curious idea of justice.
I'm an inexperienced mourner I don't even know how to begin to cry out like that old man wailing in the next hospital room—oi vay, oi vay—his two sounds beating against the wall. He makes me squirm but I get his message better than my own. How can I free myself like him? How can I know my place as he does, know how little I am? How can I mourn, the cheep of a trapped bird crying out violent sorrow? Old man, teach me. Help me reach the bowels of my cry and bring it up, coarse, rasping. Teach me to be disgusting. Help me to exile myself from all the populations of eyes and ears. Teach me to live in that country where no one else is, where I can bash to pieces my good breeding, my priests and pillars —no illusions, the self wiped out, unable to see or hear or understand. Old man—lying in your shit— you've let the angel of death from your mouth. One minute of your unforgiving protest is like true song: reckless, fatal singing, song that is not victorious, not even consoling, merely a sound you have to make.
We have had our lives. The reservoir visible In the window beside our elbows, and the willow Branches trailing at our stop Are the nature we leave Behind us gladly, since it has no place For all we have recently learned: that sex Is temporary, help Ours to hand down now, and materials science Not the only kind. We thank Calm, careful Minerva, goddess Of adults, who for so many years took us To school: her voice the timbre of fretless bass, Her eyes the color of pencil lead, she taught Us how to behave in order to have our rewards In twenty years. We have them, and if we wish Too often, this fall, to have led another life We do not mean that we would give up ours: Though we stand in a row and sway Before an obstructed view, we are able to find Initials outlined in the crosshatched trees, And pebbles—calculi—around our ponds And cherish them; we like to watch the roads Along which the perennial pollen sifts down As finely as ever, making a soft powder Of brass amid the troughs in softball fields. Our skills are finally in demand. If you mock us, Pan, In whom we also believe, do it As gently as you can.
(Alec Soth: "Kenny and Bill—Bad Newz,  Grand Rapids, Minnesota") They tilt their guitars and stare. Each boy puts one foot toward Us, one where a trailing wire Would run to an amplifier If amplifiers were there. Bill's Gibson glitters like ore. Kenny's Ibañez hoards White noise in its black fretboard. Bill's double chin shows. Is it fair To mention his pudge? Kenny's hair Gets stuck behind one ear. Each of the brothers wears A T-shirt, loose jeans, and a pair Of bruised high-tops. A pear- Shaped garbage bag hugs a steel bar. The big rectangular blur Behind them looks like the door To a walk-in refrigerator. Maybe dad is a restaurateur, A diner owner who requires Kenny to spend six hours A week moving cases of beer, While Bill chops potatoes, or scours Grease from the checkerboard floor. Bill imagines a national tour: CBGB's. The Black Cat. Hardcore. Or metal: the glow and allure Of arenas and open-air Pyrotechnics at dusk, a chauffeur. Or do they hope modestly for Sideman jobs, L.A. 'burbs, the secure Work of studio engineers? Two boys hold two guitars In a basement kitchen, and care What you think of them. Next year They promise to practice more. Right now their repertoire Is six songs, seven chords, Five originals, and a spare Reworking of REM's four- Minute anthem about a lost car: "Can't Get There from Here."
You were whiny and socially unacceptable even to loud young men whose first criterion for rock and roll was that it strike someone else as awful and repulsive and you told grim stories about such obscure affairs as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge- laden marathon runner from Zanzibar who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate sarcastic showtunes abject similesfeel like a piece of burnt black toast for example threaded on a rusty wire followed up by spitting too much time to think by fusillades from rivetguns by cold and awkward bronze reverberant church bells percussive monotones 4/4 all for the five or six consumers who enjoyed both the impatience of youth and the pissiness of middle age as if you knew you had to get across your warnings against all our lives as fast as practicable before roommate or friend could get up from a couch to turn them off We barely remember you in Minnesota we love our affable Replacements who modeled a more acceptable form of rage who thought of girls and cities boys and beds and homes and cars as flawed but fixable with the right drink right mates and right guitar strings whereas you did not and nothing in your songs resolved except in a certain technical sense as a drill resolves contests between drywall and screw Your second bassist took the stage name Flour your second drummer copied a machine Somebody else in your hometown took credit for every sound you taught them how to use I write about you now since nobody else is likely to and since even appalled too-serious flat compliments like these are better than nothing and because to annoy perseverate and get under everyone's skin beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world which is to fade into silence entirely which will never happen to The Ice Machine to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown in the eyes of any audience that is I should say not until it happens to me
A real one wouldn't need one, but the one Nathan draws surely does: four oblongs the size and color of popsicles, green apple, toasted coconut and grape, flanked, two per side, by billowing valentine hearts, in a frame of Scotch tape. Alive, it could stay off the floor, for a few unaerodynamic minutes; thrown as a paper airplane, for one or two more. Very sensibly, therefore, our son gave it something, not to keep it apart from the ground forever, but rather to make safe its descent. When we ask that imagination discover the limits of the real world only slowly, maybe this is what we meant.
Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square, the scent of manure in the municipal parterre, not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird, not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel that was OK too. From palace and hovel the great parade flooded avenue and byway and turnip fields became just another highway. Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens and geese, who squawked like the very dickens. There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit. In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon. By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch. Departing guests smiled and called, "See you in church!" For night, as usual, knew what it was doing, providing sleep to offset the great ungluing that tomorrow again would surely bring. As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing puzzled me: What had happened, and why? One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness, and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness. So often it happens that the time we turn around in soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in. And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.
The young man, hardly more than a boy, who fired the shot had looked at him with an air not of anger but of concentration, as if he were surveying a road, or feeding a length of wood into a saw: It had to be done just so. The bullet passed through his upper chest, below the collar bone. The pain was not what he might have feared. Strangely exhilarated he staggered out of the pasture and into a grove of trees. He pressed and pressed the wound, trying to stanch the blood, but he could only press what he could reach, and he could not reach his back, where the bullet had exited.  He lay on the earth smelling the leaves and mosses, musty and damp and cool after the blaze of open afternoon. How good the earth smelled, as it had when he was a boy hiding from his father, who was intent of strapping him for doing his chores late one time too many. A cowbird razzed from a rail fence. It isn't mockery, he thought, no malice in it. . . just a noise. Stray bullets nicked the oaks overhead. Leaves and splinters fell. Someone near him groaned. But it was his own voice he heard. His fingers and feet tingled, the roof of his mouth, and the bridge of his nose. . . . He became dry, dry, and thought of Christ, who said, I thirst. His man-smell, the smell of his hair and skin, his sweat, the salt smell of his cock and the little ferny hairs that two women had known left him, and a sharp, almost sweet smell began to rise from his open mouth in the warm shade of the oaks. A streak of sun climbed the rough trunk of a tree, but he did not see it with his open eye.
A shadow in the shape of a house slides out of a house and loses its shape on the lawn. Trees seek each other as the wind within them dies. Darkness starts inside of things but keeps on going when the things are gone. Barefoot careless in the farthest parts of the yard children become their cries.
Lean and sane in the last hour of a long fast or fiercer discipline he could touch dust into a sudden surge of limbs and speak leaves in the night air above him, inhabit quiet so wholly he heard roots inch into the unfeeling earth, rings increasing inside of that tree. Without moving, hardly breathing, he could call out of the long darkness walls around him, a house whose each room he knew, its hoard of silences, solitudes, doors opening onto the wide fields through which he moved, breathing deeply, unbewildered by the dead with their hands of wind, their faces of cloud. Stilled and gifted in the last hour before the first light, in the dark place of his own making, he could feel rocks relax alive beside him, gather from a moon-raveled river the pearl curves and blue fluency of a girl his hands once knew. He could let her go. He let it all go, desire and grief and raw need going out of him moment by moment into the mild immaculate night, love by love into a last passion of pure attention, nerves, readiness...  Light carved out of the darkness a muscled trunk, each clenched limb and the difficult tips of a plain mesquite taking shape over the hard ground where they found him, his eyes wide and his whole body hungering upward, as if he could hear and bear the bird singing unseen deep in those leaves.
What words or harder gift does the light require of me carving from the dark this difficult tree? What place or farther peace do I almost see emerging from the night and heart of me? The sky whitens, goes on and on. Fields wrinkle into rows of cotton, go on and on. Night like a fling of crows disperses and is gone. What song, what home, what calm or one clarity can I not quite come to, never quite see: this field, this sky, this tree.
1. deathbed There is a word that is not water, has nothing to do with heat or light, is unrelated to any one pain though the torn body tears itself further trying to speak it.  There is a sound beyond all the sounds that I have made, the needs that one by one I've tried to name. It burns clear in the eyes searching mine, the lips beginning to bleed again, her hand squeezing my hand, pleading and pleading that I understand. 2. living will All afternoon in the afterlife of little things that love, or pain, or need could not let go of I hunt for the will that will let me let you go. I am distracted and slow— all the grainy faces in old photographs, letters from the dead, deeds to places that are only air, some bright nowhere of broad fields and sunlight that was my idea of heaven one long afternoon of clouds and steady rain when you sat and explained where a garden was, a well, excited by it, the hell ahead of you just a brief tightness at your heart. Outside in the yard, crickets start, cry here and here and here,  night's thousand shadows growing tall. And now I have it, formal, final. I touch each keepsake like a wall. 3. going In the hard light and hum of the room to which I've come to stay, I watch the clock, and wait, and hour by hour begin to disappear. Movements, mutterings: the brain darkens like a landscape. Pain in the pale arterial hills flashes and vanishes, takes with it one whole year. Cotton and killdeer, a cloud looks down, something's happened in the wellhouse, someone runs through tall trees, breathe and breathe, is it my hand you hold? The fever climbs. You grow cold, then warm, now cold again, a hive of nerves in the skin. Some glimmer breaks through and I bend whispering as fear like a wind shakes you,I'm right here, I'm right here... Midnight, moonlight gauzing the walls, the iron and umber of intensive care: I watch as it swells and falls the puttied scar at your heart, and read each beat and falter on a screen and match my breathing to the breathing of a machine to know this time as it passes, each moment as it goes— until, early, you shudder and quieten, blood gases begin to rapidly rise and somewhere behind your eyes I fall in fragments away: a child surprised at his play, encroached upon by air, a shattered man near dawn, something about the way he holds so still, his hair.
A town so flat a grave's a hill,  A dusk the color of beer. A row of schooldesks shadows fill,  A row of houses near. A courthouse spreading to its lawn,  A bank clock's lingering heat. A gleam of storefronts not quite gone,  A courthouse in the street. A different element, almost,  A dry creek brimming black. A light to lure the darkness close,  A light to keep it back. A time so still a heart's a sound,  A moon the color of skin. A pumpjack bowing to the ground,  Again, again, again.
This inwardness, this ice, this wide boreal whiteness into which he's come with a crawling sort of care for the sky's severer blue, the edge on the air, trusting his own lightness and the feel as feeling goes; this discipline, this glaze, this cold opacity of days begins to crack. No marks, not one scar, no sign of where they are, these weaknesses rumoring through, growing loud if he stays, louder if he turns back. Nothing to do but move. Nowhere to go but on, to creep, and breathe, and learn a blue beyond belief, an air too sharp to pause, this distance, this burn, this element of flaws that winces as it gives. Nothing to do but live. Nowhere to be but gone.
Then all one day because of ice they couldn't make it down the hill.Or up, James says, dabbing at a spill of coffee, crunching toast as if it had a spine. But he could work, at any rate, could concentrate on that book he's been reading, or meaning to, the flu— or was it famine?—of '49, some smoldering fact he's found in the cold ash of some war. Gusting upward, lobes and nose on fire, his whole face florid from the heart attack he's somehow never had, he sways, repeating:Oh, we'd get down just fine,I expect, but we'd never make it back, then goes into his room and shuts the door. Eva's hours have nearer ends. She heats the little disk the cat sleeps on; chips, until her hands are gone, the glaze off all the feeders for the birds; then writes two friends to thank them for the birthday chocolates they've sent. The word alone makes her stomach burn. Which is mostly what age is, she's learned, the senses sharpening backwards, keen to what they can't perceive, when to be wise means mostly not to wish for what you love, for what you love is pain: spices or coffee, gin bringing the evening light into your veins, good chocolates the grandkids ravish like a horde of crows.You stuff your bellies with tomorrow's ache, she can almost hear him bellow, nipping and pinching to make them squeal. Hot water with honey, one coddled egg, dry saltines: Oh, what difference does it make? She picks up the chocolates, breaks the seal.    •  He draws the blinds on a wall of glass, winces at the glare, drags his chair into the bright crevasse between his bed and bookshelf, takes a deep breath of air, and buries himself in one of the early wordy furies of William Gladstone, never a man for minor keys. Creak and tick of the burdened limbs. A creak and tick inside of him as he crosses his legs and then uncrosses them, shifts his weight to ease the stiffness in one side, turns a page like a summit he has climbed, and breathes... Think of it—twenty thousand books devoured in Gladstone's life, and of his own enough to keep an army of bibliographers occupied; a whole age and empire crammed into one man: spellbinding crowds until he couldn't stand, felling his million trees, filling six decades' worth of diaries because a life is owed as well as owned, time a gift of which a good man gives account; who would mount, night after night, a moral, high-rhetorical siege upon some poor Haymarket tart in whom ruin and beauty were one word, then go home and whip himself for a sin that, all the evidence suggests, never occurred but in his heart.   •  And has just one, pleasure spreading through her blood like a single drop of ink. She scours the stove and countertop, bleaches coffee stains off the sink, cleans leaf by leaf the emerald ripple and the paradise palm, both mostly dormant now, reaches high for the philodendron, huge since trained to climb, and pauses, remembering the calm of constant motion that her mother was— a beauty, men said, though it hardly seemed a part of her, looking out of her own face like someone on a train; and remembering, too, the child-high hedgerows alone the lane behind their house on Paddox Close, the slice of sky above growing wider as she grew, the little park with its central statue (who was it of?), which, last time she'd seen, weather had worried to a Swedish ivy sort of green.   •  Emma Clifton, Elizabeth Collins, P. Lightfoot— even the names of those women are there amid the parliamentary proceedings, bulldog scholarship, affairs of state. He lifts his hand like a weight to check his watch, little trembles traveling through his bones into the air as through plucked strings a sound. Two hours until the final round at Palm Springs, with its hairpin fairways, lacquered greens, and that great eighteenth in homage to Bobby Jones. What a character!—touring in his teens, retired at twenty-eight with nothing left to win, at forty storming Normandy with men half his age. Even his death was rare— syringomyelia—cane to brace to wheelchair without a trace of self-pity, regret, rage:We all have to play the ball as it lies. How much of a man's revealed in how he dies... Poor Owen, barely sixty, Dean of the College, a decent book on Kant behind him: two days of chest pain slivering into a lifetime's knowledge and all the old beliefs come flooding back, silly relics and rituals, griefs you're born into, some guilt you can't even name. "Ischemia," that's exactly right: blood lack.   •  Sweet pickles and white bread, salted ham, a soybean spread that is his one concession to his heart, two butter cookies, plum jam: she clicks across the polished floor through motes that rise and float like molecules of light, pausing outside his door, hearing the Mahler chorus to which he always cries, plays to cry, she suspects, as if even sadness could be planned. She takes the knob in her hand, sees, inside its shine, white tablecloths, crystal cut fine as jewels, and, and... and a man with American shoulders and vowels, that face so open it wasn't, like the ocean, and that tidal way he had of filling any space that wasn't taken, the table where she sat with friends, afternoons and weekends, classrooms, boardrooms, lecture halls, the very bodies of their children, in whose broad limbs he seems to sprawl. Was that what she had fallen for, talk of golf, and Oxford, and roast beef in that gray decade after the war, that it seemed so safe a fall?   •  There—where the strings go silent and that woman's whole soul is in her throat...A home can have but one composer. Wasn't that the quote? That long ironclad letter Mahler wrote to Alma, the most exquisite woman in Vienna, who packed away that cold contract, her party dresses, and her own precocious technique, and settled, if you could call it that, into the role of being Gustav Mahler's wife:I am not happy, and yet not unhappy.My ship is in the harbor, but it has sprung a leak. But he loved her; and she is in his music as surely as the God he never quite possessed nor fully lost, as surely as the daughter is alive inside this song, whose life it cost. Gladstone also had a daughter die at five. Odd, not to have thought of that before. And Mahler's sisters name was Anna, and Gladstone's sister Ann; and wasn't Mrs. Gladstone's family from Oxford, or near?Oh, William dear, she told him once, if you weren't such a great man, you'd be a terrible bore.   •  Was that a laugh or a sob? Mahler dies off into the long silences, polite applause, and weirdly reverential tones of golf. This could take all day. She lets go of the knob, backs away.   •  He looks up as if he's heard a sound— what was it called, that late-medieval game out of which golf evolved? He looks down: O'Connor's on the second tee, It must have started earlier than he thought,Steady head, steady head, that pro at Sea Pines always said. James lifts one hand above his knee, so palsied now he can't keep his cocktails quiet, as if every instant were a shock his body took.Think of a stake driven through your skull into the ground.
Off-season and in the burnt forest of my nightgown, a feral undergrowth that marks me as burial site— to be still enough or just enough. My arms become fat arms: hearth. I eat dirt for doubt, a secret bleached old as lie. I out-want like a spindly winged monster. If I were a bug— were I—then you'd hope for reparation, and paint more brown into the plot.
We said she was a negative image of me because of her lightness.She's light and also passage, the glory in my cortex.Daughter, where did you get all that goddess?Her eyes are Neruda's two dark pools at twilight.Sometimes she's a stranger in my home because I hadn't imagined her.Who will her daughter be?She and I are the gradual ebb of my mother's darkness.I unfurl the ribbon of her life, and it's a smooth long hallway, doors flung open.Her surface is a deflection is why.Harm on her, harm on us all.Inside her, my grit and timbre, my reckless.
for Judith Radstone Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress bids me wear them, warm them, until evening when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her, resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope. She's beautiful. I dream about her in my attic bed; picture her dancing with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent beneath her French perfume, her milky stones. I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot, watch the soft blush seep through her skin like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass my red lips part as though I want to speak. Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see her every movement in my head.... Undressing, taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way she always does.... And I lie here awake, knowing the pearls are cooling even now in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night I feel their absence and I burn.
What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?   Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautiful. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else matters. All above us is the touching of strangers & parrots, some of them human, some of them not human. Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; the touches of the disappearing, things.
I run high in my body on the road toward sea. I fall in love. The things the wind is telling me. The yellow sky quiet in her quiet dress. Old birds sending news from the reddish hills. & the one hawk flying in the distance overhead. That hawk is what the wind says. In love with the heaving of my peacock chest, with my lungs, two wings, such flying things, but mine for now, just for now as I open my stride above the good, dirt road, fall in love with the mustard & coriander dust, & the far, far mountain beveled by light, by rain, the easy eye of the sun, now, smoke floating across the hillside like a face I knew once very well. Very well, I fall in love with the flowers & the wash hung like prayer flags, see, in red Juanita's yard. In love with the earth the color of earth. In love with the goats, their bellies & hooves, & the goat mouths bleating as they greet me on the road. I fall in love. How they wear their strange & double-eyes. How they do not blink or laugh at me or say a thing I understand when I ask them in my English, because they circle around my feet, as if they always knew me, Were you my children once? Did I know your names? Oh, little magics? Little children?
Last night, all night the dream, the dead mother, my small sister, tiny, her mouth over my shoulder (screaming) like a knapsack when she heard the news, & my brother playing the stereo. I howled like the coyotes; myself. & saw the light outside below the window, my mother, young, playing with me at a rock, in some sunlight falling over us. I was small. An old & famous woman asked her questions: Who wrote this dream? I wanted to know. My brother thought it was our mother who wrote it when she was old. She did not die, he thought. But I knew, & called down to the cotton-head of her then, when she could not see or hear me. She would never hear me. I was not capable of talking then, yet, & she had died, after all, & the mother I call to tell the dream will not remember, after all she was not born then, yet, & needed the first mother to die before she could use her name & feed her children.
Listen, you who transformed your anguish into healthy awareness, put your voice where your memory is. You who swallowed the afternoon dust, defend everything you understand with words. You, if no one else, will condemn with your tongue the erosion each disappointment brings. You, who saw the images of disgust growing, will understand how time devours the destitute; you, who gave yourself your own commandments, know better than anyone why you turned your back on your town's toughest limits. Don't hush, don't throw away the most persistent truth, as our hard-headed brethren sometimes do. Remember well what your life was like: cloudiness, and slick mud after a drizzle; flimsy windows the wind kept rattling in winter, and that unheated slab dwelling where coldness crawled up in your clothes. Tell how you were able to come to this point, to unbar History's doors to see your early years, your people, the others. Name the way rebellion's calm spirit has served you, and how you came to unlearn the lessons of that teacher, your land's omnipotent defiler.
The unrestricted sun had split the day in two, and now we went on the edge of the afternoon like a tableau of bent figures made of faded blue duck. We went like a wandering and stinking, sweating brotherhood, pull by pull between the leafy cotton plants, with the pathetic appearance of arriving at the end of the furrow. But we always arrived in a rush to get there, and the sole logic was we had to move over to the next furrow, and no one could stop the counterflow down it. And I, the dusty kid left behind in the middle of the field, held prisoner in my own slow shadow, was right in not giving in to the absurd pace of tradition. So my days burned up in that captive state of childhood. Then, yes, it was then the venturesomeness of sedition overtook me. Saturdays, after noon, the body finally lying down in the waves of the aluminum bathtub. And in the liberating rite of the water, I could shed the grime and contemplate the muddy waters of time. So it was, with the ablution of the weekly bath, I exiled myself each time from what I was.
When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands. The doctors believed her tonsils were inflamed, that she needed surgery. Instead, she went to a curandera. The curandera divined that a jealous relative had cast a curse on her and, now, her language of kindness was bound to her throat, the unspoken swelling her glands. As a child my grandmother spoke to santitos with a voice like a chestnut: ruddy and warm, seeds dropping from her mouth. The santitos would take her words into themselves, her voice growing within them like grapevines. During the tonsillitis, when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips, the santito's vineyards of accent and voice grew vapid, dry as a parched mouth. They went to her tongue and asked why silence imprisoned the words of the child, why lumps were present under her chin, why tears drew channels down her cheeks. I asked my grandmother how her tongue replied. After touching my cheek, she told me she had a dream that night: She was within her lungs and she rose like breath through the moist of her throat. She remembered her tonsils swinging before her like fleshy apples, then a hand taking them into a fist, harvesting their sound. She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks. Patting my thigh, she said, "That is why the name of your mother is Maria, because she is a prayer, a song of praise to the Holy Mother." She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.
as the meat  within the shell as the shell before the caw a bleached weed  a fig dusted to sweet the skin egg albumen of peacock  butterfly held to the ivory of oxen hoof  pulling  the space between sins I am  as I am so the host on the tongue  God of Bread complexion of conquest  the salt of Lot as God is  a crown of thorn  diadem of wheat so am I the echo calling fossil back to name amaranth ash spread across the light
The Body as Nature, History All motivations intermingle as the core of history, the internal becomes external... all as parts of the body. —maurice merleau-ponty i. the positing of space, corporeal history medium of my body
Negative, chalk (how I first saw your sign) reads like smoke signals. Has an extensive collection of glasses. On this side of the earth, no sides: where we practice our marksmanship, like soldiers in the city square, on corpses, no matter many beetles in the grass. Find it. Obstinately refuse to grasp. The spades, today valiantly shouldered, submerge in the unprofitable patch. Beetles are back-up plan zero, the if I were you thing inside the water container, which is too blind to trust with the wheel, to leave alone, even if in for the eve. The wounds we gave ourselves have just begun us, irreligious, and are the deterrents, as escarpments, of else but warlike heads. Go get your own aquarium, each fin becoming coiled beneath the bus, cruising along. There you'll find the nasal passage. Ask the operator for extreme commitment from the lamp shade to the table, all reflected in the unwashed window. Table of omens. Flotation devices murmured and murdered. The shutters of thunder are forlorn like the song of the sound of my own voice: a different tattooed country. Nationalism. At the rally, everybody's grin gives away two bags.All are watered, her body slipping out from under the dripping awning, effortlessly.
He strolled from the hill sound of sacred scales. A sheet on his head (arrested for something), they surrounded him, Hera speaking through his mouth kept the lid on his appeal to Caeneus the Lapith, who had been a woman— moon spread on the all edge of standing water, the bleachers where they left the bodies. That was the sedgy day, invisible contagions stretching from our roof on which the fresh trails of spilled pink... to the aquatic plaza, one sandal at a time and the bottom of the room beguiled us, below the carpet covered with sand, where they used to run down the slums. Athena's oak prow, oracular, from the grove at Dodona: the team started the troika. Many leave. One went in. Many Jasons. At some point Orpheus was on that upside-down boat beneath the bridge, but now, through its hull (some planks missing), the ancestral bricks shimmer. Rare is their tide.
He is for a long time bleating the embassy collection: (water-resistant cot, a resurgent stretch of storefronts to dive into, compadre, col legno, funding the new permits, pleasing room, murderous rain. Near-spring night, stars on flat blackboards, essay estate questions passed person to person. The lottery window I turn red past, hyacinth-lanced dawn. In green tree talk the transcriber dons a dark robe, a mirror. The notebook discovered the parting sun, magnificent trough, blind hair on a head of state, streak-woods in the winding road atlas—stranded shore. Pose in flight covered by weeds, claw hair-rocks, Pullulation. Push-up. Push-up. Pestilentia reeds announce—trebly isolated, a closed trio, the trinity trick-fucked—in a.
You are the man You are my other country and I find it hard going You are the prickly pear You are the sudden violent storm the torrent to raise the river to float the wounded doe
Tell em to take my bare walls down my cement abutments their parties thereof and clause of claws Leave me the land Scratch out: the land May prose and property both die out and leave me peace
1. They make such uncomfortable clank child of earth child of fire These are your tools of the trade difficult when you use them A large trunk with children darting in all directions appears slippery in its sheen adorned with thorns There comes a day in a man's life when the machete he was given early on can cut into small inheritances place them in a large calabash set them aflame spill the ashes behind him to cover his old footsteps the one's he stepped over & over trodden tongue lashing the atlas of littered women over & over every few years 2. Remember at the end of seven days a gift of hoe & machete used at times by your grandfather then again by his son At the end of the seven days remember the whipping song as you with machete & hoe in hand wrote on the earth diagrams signatures that would sprout shelter words won't lead you to obstacle's house Remember when she had a dimpled hammock on each thigh marks from birth from years lying behind diagrams written on her history
I have sinned in front of mirrors But I'll say this in my defense— Too scared to face my indecency the voice with a larynx big as mangoes too— I took your voice burnt with tabaco They say you must first imitate before your tongue jagged in novice can ripen a word shape it along color before words being enough change what's before you Now squeezing the bandages of injured history when they hid your clothing from the riverbank slings of leather like slices stretched along your skin in the mood of talking drum you remember only when they tighten speak from tension after all It's time for your dissertation mirrored cool one more color on the chameleon's back Time to play forgive the rainbow your song of imperfection
Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations, sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum carcass I'd found collapsed against the house. Forensics tells us the backyard is Panama before quinine, an ecosystem unto itself, civil war of mongoose, snake, and cat. The cause of the possum's death was obvious, this near-biblical dryness that lasted the summer. This morning I found a carapace, a palmetto bug in my shower, dead in his search for water. He got flushed, a Viking funeral; minutes later I heard about Rocky, 48, complications from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, who went the same week as John, 47, though by less violent means. I'd never introduced either to my family, and now I am covering the mirrors. Pictures from a decade ago exist without context, the bars in them closed, marriages shattered on the pebbly coast of installment debt, bands broken up by midnight arguments dead men can't recall. Forgive us our trespasses, yes, but also this literalism. Let us frame the only surviving picture of the three of us in a rectangle of thorns before we take communion out in the street. I will let those candles burn, burn, burn, burn, burn to the wick, Barracuda, then tell you how I would have laid down my life for either of those two men, and I have nothing to offer now they have done that for me.
One condition of work-release is daily to confess my obsessions, which I then write in disco glitter, one gluey blossom across my permanent record. When I eat too much of the local fruit, it gives me clairvoyance. But I forget to write down the predictions, instead crush cherry pits into a fine powder, chop the powder into lines with an expired credit card. The homeless give me quarters. Union rules require at least one mention of the weather here. My flight leaves on an inexact date in the nebulous future, arrives late afternoon, two days before our first kiss. I pay the airline $25 extra to lose my dignity between here and Chicago. At the airport you buy it back. When I walk to the market to buy more cherries, a parade of kittens follows, marching in formation, singing precise and bawdy cadence about prostitutes and crack houses. They change the names to protect the innocent. Signs say this mile of interstate is paved with the bones of the great mastodons, and kept clean by the well-meaning gentlemen of the Kiwanis Club. Vacationers from further south sit in the lobby watching guests from the north put on one-act plays. On even-numbered days, only, of course. Registered letters from the clerk of the court inform me that it won't violate my probation to drag you across state lines as long as I promise to return you by 8 p.m., mostly whole. The desk clerk is also the milkman is the town orthodontist. Instead of leaving Bibles at bedside, Gideons leave individual soaps printed with couplets from the Song of Songs, or corkscrews. I did not catch last night's plays, but promised to attend this evening's performance. I play a slightly amplified version of myself, with one line: Wish you were here. It's a song and dance number. Everyone applauds.
i.m. India's missing girls This is not really myth or secret. This murmur in the mouth of the mountain where the sound of rain is born. This surging past pilgrim town and village well. This coin-thin vagina and acid stain of bone. This doctor with his rusty tools, this street cleaner, this mother laying down the bloody offerings of birth. This is not the cry of a beginning, or a river buried in the bowels of the earth. This is the sound of ten million girls singing of a time in the universe when they were born with tigers breathing between their thighs; when they set out for battle with all three eyes on fire, their golden breasts held high like weapons to the sky.
Let us not speak of those days when coffee beans filled the morning with hope, when our mothers' headscarves hung like white flags on washing lines. Let us not speak of the long arms of sky that used to cradle us at dusk. And the baobabs—let us not trace the shape of their leaves in our dreams, or yearn for the noise of those nameless birds that sang and died in the church's eaves. Let us not speak of men, stolen from their beds at night. Let us not say the word disappeared. Let us not remember the first smell of rain. Instead, let us speak of our lives now— the gates and bridges and stores. And when we break bread in cafés and at kitchen tables with our new brothers, let us not burden them with stories of war or abandonment. Let us not name our old friends who are unravelling like fairy tales in the forests of the dead. Naming them will not bring them back. Let us stay here, and wait for the future to arrive, for grandchildren to speak in forked tongues about the country we once came from.Tell us about it, they might ask. And you might consider telling them of the sky and the coffee beans, the small white houses and dusty streets. You might set your memory afloat like a paper boat down a river. You might pray that the paper whispers your story to the water, that the water sings it to the trees, that the trees howl and howl it to the leaves. If you keep still and do not speak, you might hear your whole life fill the world until the wind is the only word.
When I see the houses in this city, the electric gates and uniformed men employed to guard the riches of the rich, the gilded columns and gardens, the boats on water, I wonder, how to describe my home to you: the short, mud walls, the whispering roof, the veranda on which my whole family used to spread sheets and sleep. The year I came to find work in the city, my wife painted our house white so it would be brighter than the neighbours'. I beat her for her foolishness. The children are hungry, I said, the cow is old, the money collector is after my blood, and you steal like a magpie— half a month's wage—to decorate your nest like a shiny jewel? The monsoon finally arrived the year I left, dripped through the thatch, peeled paint off the walls. The wells grew full and overflowed. The farmers rejoiced in the fields. My son sat with his mouth open catching drops of water like a frog. My wife clung to the walls and wept. When I fall asleep on the pavements in this city, I try to imagine my wife's skin against mine, the kohl in her eyes, the white walls, the whole village sky bearing down upon us with all the weight of the stars. I think of returning to that life, but mostly I try to remember how the world was once. I want to open my mouth like my son, and swallow things whole— feel water filling all the voids, until I am shaped back into existence.
The Wise Men will unlearn your name. Above your head no star will flame. One weary sound will be the same— the hoarse roar of the gale. The shadows fall from your tired eyes as your lone bedside candle dies, for here the calendar breeds nights till stores of candles fail. What prompts this melancholy key? A long familiar melody. It sounds again. So let it be. Let it sound from this night. Let it sound in my hour of death— as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. You glare in silence at the wall. Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all. It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; that it's too late for miracles. —But suddenly, lifting your eyes to heaven's light, you realize: your life is a sheer gift.
Out of orange juice out of gin. Me & him? We like to walk around. Lumpy houses cars on blocks. Jesus Jesus rest your head.
And then I began my habit of walking at night to get rid of the strings, witherings. The Lord revealed to me that I am full of birds turned smoke and hookèd strings. I say to the Lord, Lord take a string. I have named it mesas ringed with beeswax wicks, footsteps sowing up my stairs, tambourines in trees. Then a tedious, gruesome miracle unfolds, for the Lord takes the string and what attends it. Walking over a grate there is the sound of the grate. Margarita Mondays mean exactly that. I say, how could I eat? I ate. And how can I sleep? I shake. The Lord says, look at the branches, how they braid over graves. And the Lord says, look at the HandiMart, a bright, ordered box. They have their grief, the people there. Now the tableaus mass color, now the tableaus fall down. I say wet pavement keep on holding me up. Wet pavement hold me up. Now the fetishes crumble, now the meteors cup. The Lord says, I meant of it a blessing. And I say, I made of it a curse. The Lord says, sound of roots, sound of shoots, sound of asphalt, sound of cars. I say, I am walked into deeps. Here are the jewelthreads and throbbings that I need to leave. The Lord says, chomp and be chewed, alleluia. Sever and stitch, alleluia. Exceedingly, the Lord says, bar, barr, barr. I say snowfield? Snowfield? Piñon roasting? Chaparall? The Lord says, is what you want the terrible free? And I say to the Lord, Lord speak. And the Lord says, sound of earth in orbit, its muffled, its four-chambered beat.
Seed corn strung like scalps, Dil's tree with its crossed foxtrot legs. A story about habitations carved from snow. Fallen snow, not falling, Buttonwood, peavey. When Alvaro and Christina die they become two doors: one black; next, sky. They are also, perhaps, the cast-iron skillet, the string-bikini girl poised to sow beans. So sometimes the world is made still. Sometimes you're home and it's thaw. Sometimes a swashbuckler with a dry brush bivouacs to catch the salt breeze that bristles the lace. Hush. Honest men sleep with their shoes on. We love things for what they are. Texture of shingles, say. Lobster trap elegies. The way a hung coat suggests a general's death on the banks of the Monongahela, and dinner guests, toreadors. How, sixteen years before he kills himself, Allan's handlebar streamers and foxtail fly. Everything birthing its vanishing point. Even the sycamore, which is to say, even the man, is due to be shot, skinned and tanned. But seedpods are sachets or paper balloons and an oil drum serves to roast nuts. Meantime: Arabella Cleveland, her chin returning to slop, grows blue flax in clumps. Cooling sheds, phrenology. Moose racks, buckets. The smoothness of a plank box and the irregularity of hay. I think it's very cold there. I think Andrew loves his wife: her posture beneath a flat-crowned hat.
In green water I saw your eye and in it I saw that Arabian palace filled with birds and broken glass.  I copy an address into my right hand and fill myself with memories of psalms. A green fish emerges from seaweed as seaweed from a wave  that rises like the wailing wall. My sun-baked body at the edge, wind in my lungs, its whistle, my torn world, my grief, my soggy passport, my shell with no pearl, you lift them, delicate cloud, into a liquid world. Last night I dreamed of my father's flabby body and of my blue resolve to run away, to find a way, I dreamed of your eye  and for an instant I found the vertex of the road, the imaginary line that falls across the earth:  that meridian where the sun on a tiger's back meets the shade at its belly. Waking up, we are swallowed by wakefulness. The house swallows us in its terrible thirst. The routine of taking our children to school swallows us  and so does the if only I could. There was something to that dream. You know it. A direction. A way.  A forest as green as you and your roots. Give me your premonitions, give me your book, give me your prodigious memory, give me the blue gaze from your dark eye, give me the devotion of your sleeping birds. Sometimes the way is a fire through which the circus tiger  leaps, a perfect circle  returning to me with its stripes intact and with the endless continuity of this ineluctably feral world.
On paunchy green hills in some province of China, you are the one I speak to. Someone buys a perfume, recalling that the bones of his beloved are small. When he writes the note, when he wraps the little bottle, he takes that into account. So do I. The subtlest trace of mind against your shoulders is your true skin. And I press myself to you. I hear the steady rhythm of your typing, the key of a borrowed pulse. But what difference does it make, that it is given? For a while it is mine to use, then your turn, but the pulse originates in the Child of Heaven who has hearts to spare. Some day you'll sink yourself into a frozen lake where paper ships were torched with the names of the missing. Some dead, some vanished. The flames consume all but the wisp of smoke on which a single word rises and water licks at the rest. So we are freed from a weight. Perennially your hills are filled with birds. Green hills, the deep mosses around your temples. They, the birds, are your faithful ones. As I am, naturally. Faithful to a world unknown, a world for us alone, paper-thin, and too fragile to speak of.
Nothing's in the nest. No needles. No newborn ravens. Maybe something like night in the deep hollow, an eggshell planet, cracked in the middle, an empty bowl of soup. Nothing's in the nest. No thread. No webs of words. Maybe something like my navel, the eclipse of a magnifying glass. A slice, mute with regard to its empty depths. In the nest, nothing. The web unwoven. Dismembered. In the space, something, yes. A piece of cloth. Sounding like flags taking wing, a worm in its beak and suddenly, eyes, my eyes which, cutting across the empty air, direct themselves at something noiseless over there.
Dear Commissioner here are my directive accounts of genitals and cash now bring me your goods We don't live among fowlers Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything now which is burning and bitter poisonous Air is removed from the workspace and dispersed into the multiverse It's very strict metadata You get echoes and dropouts For the most part Juliet is gaseous now as a caucasian she gets it on the head and face and I move from hypocrisy to cynicism Cristal all over the face and neck concrete and glinting audible light on jumbotron marmalade for miles That good wood kept calling my name Behavior meet Behavior, Behavior meat all the social organs
I need help with long term hope I need help with the dawn of war and achieving my new year's resolutions This praise song and the problem of pornography structures this praise song as speaking placement I need help moving my chickens I need help with girl problem my dog, like, keeps marking the wrong areas? and my breasts this most pressing issue like choosing between best friends a distance problem involving constant acceleration and tethering glitches The party's all "descendant selectors, please!" and me I'm in my handspring visor and my bird plucking problem I need help with a bat script for parsing I need help with pricing with naming this praise song I said I seriously need help with the whole set up ASAP! so it's 40.08 /100.09 (grams of molecular mass of calcium carbonate) = moles of calcium then (moles of Calcium x .1973ml (convert grams to ml)) / 0.05 I got 1.580 ml is that right?
I went to the city some days to learn my master's pleasure & laid fort at the farthest place where hedges are highest & terror of the obvious is a rosary of similitude Did you see some of the nudging? How did you feel about the nudging? Boats by water and wagons by land in active assistance in perpetuating fraudulent froth & hence with haste I've seen their mulchy tongues suck up every animate aim sweeping excess into piles the reserves and neocons administrators and representatives the preachers and deputies and yahoos and spodies In the evenings they come down from their operational sectors to kiss the children what terror is in them to keep the sugar boiling to restrain the wanderings as fragile and fictitious Did you see the tent on a stick? Did you see the architecture of gathering? I go to the city some days to gather what's left of scrubgrass There in the alley we converse Idris his love of fresh skim Ted his disdain for women their lack of banking Terrence and Will their concern for purity of pussy power precedes them sap-drenched & parceled across the land I go to the city some days I receive a letter Dear Comrades don't get it twisted never lick the hand that lashes you use beef when you run out of oakum
after Bernadette Mayer I guess it's too late to live on the farm I guess it's too late to enter the darkened room in which a single light illuminated the artist stripped from the waist down, smeared with blood, stretched and bound to the table I guess it's too late to inhabit a glass-fronted, white, box-like room, dressed in white, against which the menstrual blood was visible I guess it's too late to start farming I guess it's too late to start struggling to remain standing in a transparent plastic cubicle filled with wet clay, repeatedly slipping and falling I guess it's too late to buy 60,000 acres in Marfa I guess it's too late to begin appearing on the subway in stinking clothes during rush hour with balloons attached to her ears, nose, hair and teeth I guess we'll never have an orgiastic Happening I guess we're too old to carry out maintenance activities in public spaces, during public hours I guess we couldn't afford to simulate masturbation while President Josip Broz Tito's motorcade drove by below I guess we're not suited to "I am awake in the place where women die" I guess we'll never have a self-inflicted wound in front of an audience now I guess entering a sex cinema dressed in a black shirt, jeans with the crotch removed, and a machine gun slung over her shoulder is not in the cards now I guess Clive wouldn't make a good photographic montage in which their male and female faces became almost indistinguishable I guess I can't expect we'll ever have a selection of photographs derived from images produced by the beauty industry now I guess I'll have to give up all my dreams of being seen, clothed and unclothed, being systematically measured by two male 'researchers' who record her measurements on a chart and compare them with a set of 'normal' measurements I guess I'll never be waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly We couldn't get tied together by our hair anyways though Allen Ginsberg got one late in life Maybe someday I'll have the foreshortened barrel of a gun pointing toward the viewer I guess joining our hands around the base's perimeter fence into which they weave strands of wool is really out Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops I guess examining women's working conditions is just too difficult We'll never have a, never-really-a-collective, a group of women who came together to work on a public mural Too much work and still to be poets Who are the simultaneously-the-beneficiary-of-our-cultural-heritage- and-a-victim-of-it-poets Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient loss of certainty Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks And Wendell Berry has raised large-scale spirals of rusted industrial materials in incongruous natural and commercial spaces Faulkner may have spent three days in a gallery with a coyote, a little And Robert Frost asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22  caliber rifle And someone told me Samuel Beckett lay hidden under a gallery-wide ramp, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the visitors walking above him Very few poets are really going to the library carrying a concealed tape recording of loud belches If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too, If Yves Klein could be an artist, and Jackson Pollock too, Why not a poet who was also dying of lymphoma and making a series of life size photographs, self-portrait watercolors, medical object-sculptures and collages made with the hair she lost during chemotherapy Of course there was Brook Farm And Virgil raised bees Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of the meticulous chronicle of the feeding and  excretory cycles of her son during the first six months of his life I guess poets tend to live more momentarily Than life in her body as the object of her own sculpting activity would allow You could never leave the structures made of wood, rope and concrete blocks assembled to form  stocks and racks, to give a reading Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord I don't want to be continuously scrubbing the flesh off of cow bones with a cleaning brush but  my mother was right I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing Or on as little as one needs to survive Steadfast as any person's glottis, photographed with a laryngoscope, speaking the following  words: "The power of language continues to show its trace for a long time after silence"  and fixed as the stars Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly
After the second conference, I would be cast in the role of a young dancer with a prestigious New York City ballet company. I would be cast in the role of the mother, a former dancer now amateur artist, whose career ended at 28 when she became pregnant. I would be cast in the role of the exotic beauty who is more in touch with her sensuality. I would be cast in the role of the director, a cruel and demanding genius who would sleep with the ingenue. I would be cast in the role of someone selected to compete for the part alongside several other dancers. I would be cast in the role of someone who bites the director, and/or doesn't get along with the other dancers. I would be cast in the role of the aging principal dancer. My rigid technique would make me the ideal choice, but I would also lack the passion required by this role. I would practice all the time. I would become increasingly paranoid. I would get drunk and yell, with dark makeup all around my eyes. I would barricade myself in my room. I would become increasingly critical. I would tell her how pretty she is, and carefully pull mittens over her hands before bed so that she does not hurt herself. I would sing her a lullaby. I would see my own image everywhere. I would be annoyed with her. I would paint picture after picture of the person I loved and hated. I would get a rash. I would get into an accident. I would eat the cake offered to me, although I did not want it. I would injure myself. I would hallucinate that I am having sex with my friend, and during this scene there would be a ripping, chewing sound. The scene is obviously misogynist. But it felt so real. I would peel skin away from my fingernails in long strips. It would happen in the bathroom. My friend would perform my role in my absence. I would perform my friend's role in her absence. I would sleep with the director. I would wish to sleep with the director. I would be left alone in the building. I would betray my friend. My friend would betray me. I would feel the envy and aggression of others keenly. I would feel envious and aggressive towards others. I would seem rather childish. I would be rigid and controlling. I would pass out. I would scratch my back until it bled, and wear clothing designed to cover these scratches. I would not be part of the group. I would discover her in my room, wearing my costume, I would congratulate her, kiss her, shove her into the mirror and hide her body. Only then would I notice my own wound. Crying as I watched her performance.
first garden Beastgarden.second garden Bees go mad on late summer evenings, should People stray from their jobs towards water Beastgarden.third garden Who makes the rented red boat's Oars turn Who is the younger one always Turning up Who professes to be better because He is just looking Who says he is worse off as He cannot look Beastgarden.fourth garden The unicycle girl, thin Like one with a sexual problem, Goes through The Schlosspark. This follows: Father rolling his eyes Beastgarden.fifth garden The man from Manchester Has my breast in his hand These are funny They don't do anything do they Being burnt by a fire I say Beastgarden.sixth garden Similarly, if only You grasped some Titanic misery or a Love like an old man's Beastgarden.seventh garden Where were we A ballroom competition goes on A yellow satin bikini A fuchsia floor-length are Dancing; an audience is Drinking, clapping 1 2 3 1 2 3 Beastgarden.
(Jesse Helms & others...) I'm coming up out of the tomb, Men of War Just when you thought you had me down, in place, hidden I'm coming up now Can you feel the ground rumble under your feet? It's breaking apart, it's turning over, it's pushing up It's thrusting into your point of view, your private property O Men of War, Censorious Ones! get ready big boys get ready I'm coming up now I'm coming up with all that was hidden Get ready, Big Boys, get ready I'm coming up with all you wanted buried, All the hermetic texts with stories in them of hot & dangerous women Women with lascivious tongues, sharp eyes & claws I've been working out, my muscles are strong I'm pushing up the earth with all you try to censor All the iconoclasm & bravado you scorn All the taunts against your banner & salute I'm coming up from Hell with all you ever suppressed All the dark fantasies, all the dregs are coming back I'm leading them back up now They're going to bark & scoff & rage & bite I'm opening the box boo!
The first sentence is a sentence about writing. The second sentence tells you it's alright to lose interest. You might be one of those people who sits back in his or her chair without interest, and this would have been the third sentence you would have read. The fourth sentence, what does that say, that says something about how I genuinely feel, even if it no longer matters how I genuinely feel, that has not even become the topic of another book. The fifth sentence says that that was left by the wayside because it was such a variable thing. That's what the sixth sentence said, and says, that it sits there still, varying, changing its colors, etc., the army of ancient Rome marches by, they think it is some sort of tomb and display their eagle insignia. The seventh sentence ill conceals its surprise that I should have tried to make it all look so far away. The eight sentence is therefore a meditation on something close at hand. The ninth sentence is a means of approach. In the tenth sentence I discover I am staring at a list of things I have done written in blue pencil on brown paper. In the eleventh sentence I draw a one-eyed duck on the paper beside the list. In the twelfth sentence I circle one of the numbers on the list and I start to feel nervous. In the thirteenth sentence I realize I have chosen something. In the fourteenth sentence I decide I will read my choice aloud. In the fifteenth sentence I stall by saying the words "I don't have a choice." In the sixteenth sentence I stall again by thinking about the obelisk on the Upper East Side in Central Park and how it is called "Cleopatra's Needle," and how around the base of the "needle" there are metal supports in the shape of crustaceans, I think they are crabs in fact but sometimes that word is slightly obscene so I consider not writing it. In the seventeenth sentence I think some more about the kinds of joke that employ that word and whether it is worth thinking about such jokes, as it does alter the genre of what you are writing if such things are allowed to be thought as a part of it. The lawns of the park were very green in summer, and it is early summer right now, right as I think to think this, and this is the first time I have lived in New York City for a full year in ten years, this is what I tell as the nineteenth sentence. In the twentieth sentence I recall the list and resolve again to look at it. In the twentifirst sentence I misspell twenty-first with two "i"s. In the twenty-second sentence I look down at the list, I have circled no. 18759351 on the list. In the twentisecond sentence I misspell twenty-second using an "i" again. In the twenty-third sentence I read what is written next to no. 18759351, it says, "He was sitting on a bench...," but at this moment a breeze enters in through the open window, lifting the page and you begin reading another line, the words, "And you hand in the application and it takes three months and...." In the twenty-fourth sentence you can see me set the page down as another person walks through the door. I turn off the electronic typewriter and scroll out the page and place it facedown on the desk and I cover it with a notebook you weren't aware was also there on the desk. Now you can see it, it is almost the exact same color as the surface of the desk and now you can see it. These were the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth sentences, respectively, it is the lot of the twenty-seventh sentence to have to announce that. In the twenty-eighth sentence a cloud passes over the apartment on its way into space. In the twenty-ninth sentence, I think, next year this will be the number of my age. The thirtieth sentence is all about the speed at which time is passing. In the thirty-first sentence I won't care anymore, I'll see that reality only accrues to itself and does not have to mean something. In the thirty-second sentence I want you to agree with me. Things happen by chance, and what Montaigne pleads with us to believe, in an essay, is that fortune makes herself known in the act of reading, there is much that I could not have intended which is yet here, I forget exactly how this goes, this being the thirty-third sentence. I sit down beside myself in the thirty-fourth sentence and say to myself, smiling, even small numbers are big. This is the working of time, the thirty-fifth sentence joins in saying this, too, once one has crossed the years their number does not matter. But what I was trying to get across was, I think in sentence thirty-six, that maybe you could not have done things earlier, maybe it just was not possible in those days for whichever reasons. You spend the thirty-seventh sentence attempting to spell those reasons out. You fall asleep, and in the thirty-eighth sentence you dream about a room. The room is a classroom in which you are alone, says sentence number thirty-nine, the windows have been left open and a sentence can be read on the blackboard. In the fortieth sentence you have to force yourself to go on. Descartes's dream, you remember, in sentence forty-one, provided a quote supposedly from Ausonius. This is the forty-second sentence, Est et non. Then I think it is safe to say that something begins to happen, sentence forty-three tells us. Sentence forty-four says that you should forgive. Sentence forty-five says that you remember this number as having been particularly beautiful when worn by your mother. Sentence forty-six says the figures move away. Sentence forty-seven is a sentence about what loneliness names itself in the paradoxical presence of others. Sentence forty-eight says it has a name. Sentence forty-nine says that I cannot remember this name. Sentence fifty says that I go back and try and live there in that moment when I was saying the name. I say, "Happiness." This was sentence fifty-one. That was sentence fifty-two. Sentence fifty-four is a sentence about how there is too much of so many things, there is too much of all the words, but the world runs on underneath them and I keep on imagining how you could have heard me, how you could not have heard me. Sentence fifty-five is a sentence about picking up the phone. Sentence fifty-six is a sentence about picking up a small cellular phone but not using it and willing the phone to ring on its own. The gray cotton of the sweatshirt I wear is a warm cotton in sentence fifty-seven. In sentence fifty-eight I decide to keep on saying the numbers. In sentence fifty-nine I hold the page up to the light and see the type on the other side show through, In sentence sixty you start to believe me. In sentence sixty-one I start to go back to the beginning. I wonder if I should worry. The world is full of pauses, the world is full with continuations, says sentence sixty-three. I let sentence sixty-four go. In sentence sixty-five it occurs to me that I concern myself here with something that ought not to be touched. Sentence sixty-six is a guess that this is the mystery of counting, that it goes on and means itself without having a meaning. I count the people in the distance I can see from my window in sentence sixty-seven. In sentence sixty-eight the breeze has a sweet smell. In sentence sixty-nine, it turns the last week of May in the year 2008. Sentence seventy concerns the lack of what I wanted, in my own mind, to be saying. In sentence seventy-one I'm going so far as to ask you if you can see this, how much of what I thought lay before me remained in the distance. In sentence seventy-two there is a hill there. In sentence seventy-three we see flowers open their faces and then black snakes slide down the face of the hill. In sentence seventy-four there is still nothing. In sentence seventy-five the moon changes place with the sun. In sentence seventy-six this takes place again, only now it is day. In sentence seventy-seven it is still day. In sentence seventy-eight it is still day. Why do you think about tragedy, sentence seventy-nine wants to know, since it is the least likely thing to happen. Sentence eighty will eventually come to me and want to know what I am doing with myself. Sentence eighty-one reminds me to expect this question. In sentence eighty-two something changes. I stay up two nights running and in the morning the sidewalk seems to rise up and meet my feet underneath my feet. Sentence eighty-four contains the question, didn't you already know that this would start to happen. Sentence eighty-five agrees. When I start to read sentence eighty-six I discover it contains the words, It is also true that what you said could be. For this reason, sentence eighty-seven is a sentence about why there are certainly points of correspondence between what we expect to be the case and what is. Sentence eighty-eight proclaims it feels the excitement and not the work. Sentence eighty-nine takes action without saying anything first. In sentence ninety I cover my eyes. In sentence ninety-one I uncover my eyes so that I can look again. In sentence ninety-two I cover them again. Now I am speaking to you. Now I am speaking to you. Say the words after me just as I say them. What it means to live is the subject of sentence ninety-six. You are moving out of earshot now. We are not going to miss each other. You have an excellent memory. Please never forget I was the one who told you that
BEEF: We are here between trees, with the tempo of a rosary being strung in a queue of escalating beads— BEEF: It's not quite the count in the countinghouse of my chest but the heart does make an awful attempt BEEF: a tee and a circle wherever it may be there was music coming on BEEF: which though machinery-like moves not in cogs, and never springs, but waves through BEEF: like wired applause for antic backstage buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it fades BEEF: but only after the chorus has pulsed BEEF: it drops off with sudden decision, like fountain water gone dross BEEF: or it reaches the furthest point the branch turns from us, and is for some arc fully quiet... BEEF: until the roulette snaps its jaw and the choir's circuit opens to one BEEF: like a pigeon unhinged, its wings in sudden white-rumped ascent BEEF: unopposed by iridescence BEEF: unopposed by iridescence
This is not a book. Otherwise, by now We would love each other. You would not put me first, Out of a kind habit, under your coat And clutch—as a sudden rain Spate down. For I've seen it done For the hardly known. No, you would know with a book you love: How nothing held your eyes The way the words did, with archer-focus: How each arrow heading toward you Was slowed by the dripping beehive On its spike— Nothing else could hold what you are Still: I pressed your heart in speech and saw What a musical you let rush, nothing Else in the eyes. This is not a book, But a streak— Words cross reins— The brow splits, veins careen.
Over the night a bull Whispers into a coal :Unmeant in the stall to sit and plate, But sixth, with all the senses, To consume— Incorporate— those signal Impressions which are (we know) its fate: In explosions, in hard strides, His coattails fly; to bits, to friends Craven and brave. Sadness undulates at their back. His lilt's a cotillion of flies. But how he charges, he commits! Each to the next.It seems unfair, a target lies Between its shoulder blades.
Left a hole on fire agony or was it the sun on the banks and near duets? Eagles with the white wine of the sun clink and spill, tall grass over head and heels . . . Space of hell: shy, inscribed already but alone— I think I can be that again, a new hole in the ongoing flute. In a leap, the country glows— to hone the fate that wonder exacts, to go netted through that much, so heavy as paperweights angels land square on chaparral nerves. And since names must give in spades, out of sorts like these, your reactions may swell great fountain lips— a promise that a wish will purge or pennies caravan the safe return hearts cross.
One evening in winter when nothing has been enough, when the days are too short,the nights too long and cheerless, the secret and docile buds of the appleblossoms begin their quick ascent to light. Night after interminable nightthe sugars pucker and swell into green slips, green silks. And just as you findyourself at the end of winter’s long, cold rope, the blossoms openlike pink thimbles and that black dollop of shine calledbumblebee stumbles in.
But isn’t midnight intermittent Or was that just a whispered nine A snap of blown light low against the flank of a cow A likeness of something numberless that only I not knowing the sound  might know It may have been howled by a circling dog being chastised — threatened —  by multiples of itself in pursuit of the consolation of knowing that  everything is real It was real I don’t mean midnight — despite horizon, nipple, and fissure I don’t mean And yet I do — mean, I mean A cowering animal woven real  flickers  please pull over  Kierkegaard Kierkegaard says knowledge precedes every act but surely there are acts that are not preceded by knowledge. Repetitions pass at the door from summer to winter. Some slowly. Some quickly. Total strangers. Never saw them before. Can’t picture them now. Umbrellas — strange totalities — upheld, wheeling.
A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions and I hold that names begin histories and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once, my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.
The water was rising, I got up on the bed Still wearing the Hawaiian shirt he had on yesterday He used his thoughts to draw a rudimentary circle on the wall Hitting Beirut and killing 22 civilians But now go the bells, and we are ready Novelty is no better than repetition That graces the walls of toilet stalls with hooey And comparison with the dead—their slimy cruelty—and meatballs Perched like ghostly birds Believing in old men’s lies, then too late unbelieving There’s rough life in the rust Long-buried whore’s eggs, razor-clams with shells Pirates dressed in pink and pit-bulls on parade With power to extend the longevity of learned fear in the mouse And a heron on the horizon many sewing-days ago Jane, Jane, ascend the stairs Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn Thus predicting the shock to the tale that so entertains grown children Of the animals that have nearly all forsaken us
The puppy must be learned of all this material. No map of the hospital. First, the war effort. Then, the war itself. The water makes and remakes its walls. No persons or boats are allowed in them. This plot is to be played out in the buildings known to us. Swim for the stick, baby! You’ve got an anti-sink device. The nba guard flips forward and back in his hologram. Fish-fission. Light.  —and found wheels beneath her linen skirt. The kids mill around like businessmen-clowns. Their organization is a matter of choice and thus not protected under reedlight. Candlelight. Horizonto-rotary gaze beating clearly to the right. Now, corrected, to the left. Fish! Flip! and Out of Hearing! Alone in the pink apartment with your little swab. The moth-mom tries out everything at once: straps on wool, ties a candle to her head. Don’t pity her. She wants to eat the moth! Which dithers over whether it eats wool or flame. The skyline lifts, and the gulfstream slips out barefoot clear to England. Maidens rhinocently down the cowpath clomp. Toothbrush into yogurt cup, Recyclamente! I am so adamant. The siren with a catch in its cry starts over. Eternal transistance. Ent’ring our marriage ride.
This is the body of, waiting to turn on. graced with a little tremor, a little-known form, a fibrous hook, a flimsy lever that makes the jar work a lever and a clasp :voila. The pathetic filofax unfurls, the owl describes; on air; makes an apse; lopes left off the phonepole, woodenly. we rise above the wind park, commemorially. our whorled fossil, pinned open. our emergency kit holds aspirin. digitalis. adrenalin-in-in.
Then in the August of my twenty-seventh year, naked except for my seaclogs, I greeted an audience of piers. After my dip, I came up covered in salt and sand: hair tough as an angel’s. Who could disappoint me now among the so-coifed? Disappointing menus for a banquet of twenty-seven. The hostess cannot hear the hotelier, walls blow ope’; lousy with wallets and checkbooks, the air. Naked except for The checks and the monies flapped like birds. I partook of the seasonal activity and caught a check in my hands—to myself from myself— and was caught; I was smart and dumb. I hadn’t been clobbered in such a long time! Now, shoved against the carpeted headrest, I wondered at its cold and slender neck. The nakeder I feel the happier. Camp is over, and the children come out wearing hats; the children are happy for each other, each camp having been maximally appropriate. The ocean grew gritty with proteins. I arose and clomb to the yard with its spigot. It looked up and blinked. Above, kite strings wrotetoing and froing was the same motion; tiny sighs above the halls at the county airport; swung on tiny chains; my father swathed me in two handtowels, said nexttime, swim in the sea. A gold thread falls from an eagle’s towel onto the beach. A gold face big as a quarter of the sky looks at us with gold-milk tears in its eyes and the gold girl goes on brushing the countryside with a twig-broom big as a tree. When our competitor finishes third, he approaches the throne with a gold wheel of tillamook.
—Hoooooooo Lay in an array of pixels Fat, simulated proteinsLooks just like nutrition!Acts just like an avatar! I just wanted to give my body to A net of guarine Gingko-balboa azatine melamine Camphobacter phylacter nicotine Which hung like neuron-nectar in a cell, net of Vatic coughdropped hairball tells the future of Neural center where the straight lines hopped Like a hairline fracture on a bender jumps a Mulholland retaining wall and crashes the crinkled Vale of Food-for-thought Fruit for monkeys in a barrel, one fruit per monkey For a total of fortyseven monkeydays For a total of twelve hours at a clip The go-home-and-feed-the-baby milk of it That man is a mouth chased by ghosts Round a rainslicked hairpin off a cliff in (And now I pause to remember How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling Where you cut your hair For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana The scissors-sister who slits where she goes-into Cuts as she cuts—) This machine makes its need louder and Invites me into its duct, unlike the baby Sleeping on the other edge of Pow’r, Eyes roll’d, mouth pinch’d shut Round Pow’r’s earthly sinks and shunts—
Now I know what it is to bite the tongue inside the mink stole: I do not want my inspiration stolen! ms. merongrongrong, for you I do my husband’s hairdo in a kind of flip. Now for once I want to build a data cage, a firewall, encrypt a fiber option, to lock up his image, lock the tick into his rib. I grasp his slim wrist and mask him for the gas: what a pheasant operation, his plumage brilliants as he whites out in closed caption, under glass. A harmless operation, a lipid removal or a viscous camera drip. ms. merongrongrong, please do not misprism me, for normally I am not like this, I do not creep or crypt, do not go hissing, bent double, kettlewaisted, clinched. When pressed I spread; when pinched, pinch; shiv and shinny my way out, make a finger mouth that shrinks the moon to a pupa, shove it in my purse to pupate on my cabbage stash, my petty rash cashola. In your stall, I dump the stenchy contents of my clutch on your counter, your clerk Moonlight scrubs the Wikifile, slicks the nail down to a nib, mums me in muff, ruff, muffler, ruffle, stomacher, pannier of ribbed silk, knight’s visor, hutch where I keep my prize rabbits, ms. merongrongrong I and II, which liplop the moonlit garden in stitched minks.ms. merongrongrong you send the Dutchman moon to touch us you cinch my betrothed ’s throat till he has to swallow what I bite, he drags himself to the window to vomit, he drags the bile sea in drag like a widow with a ghost lover, mourning over the suck white sand in white I wear a glass pane over my face, a teller’s window or a train’s, ms. merongrongrong, I stutter by in sailor’s guise, adrenal sink disguised as swagger, a thickened chest wall, a fat and padded neck. I go a specimen, I pose between the slides for my decline, ms.merongrongrong time thins and quickens, I help my husband up over the lip of the Dutch oven, his flank is ripped, one paw limp, one soft ear hangs by a thread, I lug myself up the path you have prepared for us, the trestle, the wooden tread—
O melting rainbow that embrace this roof O persistent covenant hangs around giving us nothing, leaves its muck in the water expects us to be knocked out by its fine colors weren’t you nothing too, weren’t you sea bottom crunched down into fuel and when that eggshell roof busts through mama’s gonna buy you a rainbow ride for free an illumination, an inflammation hyperion flame headdress dream pins in the fuel balloons of Koolaid burst down to cool the sticky baby’s head plus a credit card a glock a new bible a princess dress a mermaid princess dress so you’ll be twice submerged or an erased Indian princess pajama set now go to sleep
Soon the ambassadors from the Netherworld Will begin Their jet-like descent. Death, Disguised inside me, already, As sleaze. Grime and her magnificent seed. Brother Rainer Clutching his Bible, hallucinating helicopters. Brother Rainer, child-like and wrecked. Infamy, and the cosmology of chronic Raveling and unraveling. Or, Displaced insanity. Dirty Cindy, little Glitter of her father’s Spit: invisible, androgynous, a fragment of His, found at the bottom of his dream chest. Draped in my black cape of smut glue and Subterranean, they mistake me for A man in drag in my nasty Boots. Why just look: a manifestation Of stars. Or, appoint me hustler of Brutal Rainer and his kinky noir Scheme: me, at thirteen, on the beach In a candy-striped bikini. In time or out of time, Glamorine. Groom of the Underworld, please Come with me To the discotheque at the end Of the world. Piss- Elegant at the halfway House for the trashed and gone galore. Meet me in the love- Burned orchard Where the beautiful doomed Meet at last.
I did not want my body Spackled in the world’s Black beads and broke Diamonds. What the world Wanted, I did not. Of the things It wanted. The body of Sunday Morning, the warm wine and The blood. The dripping fox Furs dragged through the black New York snow—the parked car, the pearls, To the first pew—the funders, The trustees, the bloat, the red weight of The world. Their faces. I wanted not That. I wanted Saint Francis, the love of His animals. The wolf, broken and bleeding— That was me.
I’ve long had what Soviet psychiatrists called “a tendency toward vagrancy.” At four I would run away from home repeatedly for a whole day, alone or sometimes with a friend named Boris of like age. Knew full well we “just can’t do this,” but nudge for nudge and wink for wink, we’d board the trolleybus #10, I think, buy tickets at four kopeks each from our gleanings and savings of the week, stick them into the ticket punch on the wall, watch the chad fall as you pulled, and ride all across Kishinev in half an hour to get off near that unforgettable restaurant built in the likeness of a huge wine barrel. We peered inside, it was cool. Then we had options: go and splash in the local artificial lake (I couldn’t swim yet), wonder in between along the banks, catching frogs to take home in a glass jar to populate a small construction pond (why did we always use my shirt to do this?), or go and explore the local flea market, which was not at all safe to do, but even at four it’s nice to have options. (One guy sold what we thought was a gun, we asked him and he confirmed it.) Those were days of cholera epidemics in Moldova. We’d buy peasant-cooked fodder corn on the cob when we got hungry, haggled with old ladies over pennies. We wouldn’t catch the return trolley until sunset. Then it’s always the same picture: the wicket creaks open, the landlord’s mutant barks through froth, my wet shirt clings. I step out of the dark toward my mother waiting by the door of our “temporary house” on Kaluga Street, which was a bit of a dirt road, probably still is. She has been crying, takes me inside. Room and kitchen (no bathroom or running water): the room had a brick stove, the kitchen a dirt floor (with mice and sometimes grass) and a white washstand — these lines are all that has survived of them. There was great beauty in their squalor. She has been crying, takes me inside, says she will scold me later. I know it will be soon. First she must call the cops to tell them I’ve been found. Of course, back then I didn’t understand anything: neither how a poet harms his mother, nor how alienated (thank you, Marx, for that term) one can be from the start, and free in the grip of that greatest paradox of all — a happy Soviet childhood.
Time to recount the sparrows of the air. Seated alone on an elected stair, I stare as they appear and disappear. Tonight the deck supports tremendous quiet, although the twilight is itself a riot. I’m glad I’m staying here, not at the Hyatt. My pen, eye, notes, watch, whiskey glass and hell all hang together comfortably well. Pain is my favorite resort hotel.
I.I am a man. I’ve lived alone. I’ve been in love. I’ve played with fire, cursed the telephone, and basked in verse, in verve, and alsoHumid, terrestrial, mixed, nongenderspecific, have occasionallyday’s tumult ushers in an evening with a lone moved a woman’sshut icecream stand, false promises of cone heart, although I also,and scoop near Central Park. Juneific famously, had such an awk-are the silhouettes of people dreaming by, ward start. Amazed atlips, lit cigarette tips, thoughts and tulips streaming by how muchalong dimly hospitable park lamps toward eleven symmetry a lifewith an occasional rev of internal combustion can still support, Iwafted across from nearabouts. stare in rapt near-idiocy, like a“What’s this you are talking about, Sarah?” foreign passport, andyou hear a voice, and the reply, “I’m sorry. April’s Persian lilacsbut what was I supposed to do?” Two bats all bloom straight intodash through a silver stretch of atmosphere. my face, and variousWhat she was supposed to do we never hear, other blossom, too,depending on each case, while you are softly tangible, while you are sweetly mine. We’re existentially wise, we’re mortally divine.  II.All whispers know where whispers go and lusters where with lusters flow, and when your palm is in my palm, just as my poem  There is a sparkling tone to how you speak, is in your poem, look  a quickness to your whisper, an implied at this stellar, cellular,  correctness in your ironies. We stride organic life of mine, the  along emphatic benches in the weak general and particular, the  light bristling eloquent dark. Pine, elm and oak gross (as well as  fall silent now to hear you tell a joke— fine) intentions I epitomize.  something about a man and a mandrake; Look, seeing through its  I think it cute and laugh like Captain Drake. thin disguise the bleary  We then explore the vagaries of light sky whose weepy eyes have  found underfoot by lamps, and kiss. “Beatrix, rained us a surprise.  will you still need me when I’m thirty-six?" A lightning bolt’s  You favorably mumble that you might, protruding hand snatched  and throw a willing arm around my nape. past us, far and brief and  I reassure you that there’s no escape. as I hold you in my arms, youfill me with belief. Don’t wonder if and how, much stranger than right now, the hyacinth of sorrow may blossom forth tomorrow.  III.   The stars in liquid decadence reclaim their lost positions, all knotty dispositions dissolved in limpid dance. They offer us their Another couple floats up through thickened ink stardom. Oh, we into the field of vision, to redissolve could sympathize with them, leaving a thin trail of perfume and love but instead, we set eyes and visual recollection in the pink. with them upon that higher Cicadas cataract from tree to tree. tsardom, that real of love and A mock nightingale trills, then two, then three. reason. Our lengthy We cut short across grass and leaves (then four), cigarettes crackle encountering no one on our slight detour with dry regrets during where, negligibly burdened with a sixpack, the rainy season, but a master and his bulldog rustle on, we ignore their humors, their a small red light fixed to her furry back. melancholy murmurs, We are too busy with our love to see them. decline ascetic rigors, Tomorrow we’ll be going back to Boston. welcome straight facts, Three cheers for Central Park at height of season. clear figures,where laws concerning numbers come plumed with midnight sounds, and spirits stir from slumbers like angels out of clouds.
He wanders through the crooked streets that mimic river beds Before and breathes the anxious air in traffic filled with tension left from wooded crossroads in attack He shops the windows, happy, where the stalking once was good and his kitchen floor is built on bones of venison once gently roasted. "It's a good place for a party!" he concurs to friends now dressed in jeans. The ground was already beaten smooth and festive by the joy of ancient dances. He feels the warmth, and doesn't know his soul is filled with the spirit of coyotes past.
The pathways of my thoughts are cobbled with  mesquite blocks  and narrow-winding,  long and aged like the streets of  san fernando de bexar  y la villa real de san antonio  pensive  y callados  cada uno con su chiste  idiosyncracy  crazy turns  that are because they are,  centuries magic cada uno hecho así,  y with a careful  capricho touch,  así. They curl slowly into ripples,  earthy and cool like the Río Medina  under the trees  silently singing, standing still,  and flowing, becoming,  became and always as always  still fertile, laughing, loving,  alivianada  Río Medina  under the trees,  celebrating life. They end up in the monte, chaparral,  llenos de burrs, spurs  pero libres Running through the hills freefoot  con aire azul  blue breaths peacefully taken  between each lope  remembering venado  remembering conejos  remembering  where  we came from
I was the fourth ship.  Behind Niña, Pinta, Santa María,  Lost at sea while watching a seagull,  Following the wind and sunset skies,  While the others set their charts. I was the fourth ship.  Breathing in salt and flying with clouds,  Sailing moonbreezes and starvision nights,  Rolling into the wave and savoring its lull,  While the others pointed their prows. I was the fourth ship.  Playfully in love with the sea,  Eternally entwined with the sky,  Forever vowed to my voyage,  While the others shouted "Land."
A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page  one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk,  one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock clerk of clichés that she is, at the moment going ape
sometimes (  when the night air feels chévere!  ) when i can hear the real sound of el barrio on la conga y timbales  coke bottles & garbage can tops  when i can feel  & reallyreally touch  la música Latina / africana & the fingerpoppin' soul emergin from tears / sweet tears of laughter  & i can feel  a conglomeration of vibrations /  heat waves  body waves  people waves  of real gente
I arise around survival of the event as worse than the event The whole place surrounds the smell I take one step toward and ten paces back breathless with the mirrors with the fees and meters Feces I fax my demon family weeping on the bridge again My condition was induced as follows Releasing actual sales numbers, trying to mount the policeman or his horse tonguing captains manually strong simultaneous tendencies to approach and avoid appearance and avoidance Men come to my cherry doors to carry on about finance and cricket coaxing a cavernous oath wrestling natives into nestling My part is basically to hatch with regard for human dignity and life In my best foreign automobile stunting the stupor fronting us In order to love my country better I offer monthly meter readings I am filled with rhythm, passion and speed protruding in public popping my collar into a wreck My father sits me down Son, he says, don't let them enter your mouth I wrote a narrative about our collective pain and went shopping
Home; a place to rest your feet, a place where you can sleep.  Man, a place where you can shit, and no one can complain.  My Home / el barrio  where people rest their feet outside on the fire escapes, where i have a place to sleep with my brothers, sisters, cousins  oh yes, and Rover all in the same bed.  / where no can smell shit  'cause we've been living in it  all our lives  (we're immune to its stink)  My home; where on hot summer days people gather on the grandstands /  the fire escapes and in the box seats/  the stoops and cheer our home gang's stickball team  (they call themselves "the new york junkies"). and on those cool summer evenings we hang our legs from the windows / the roofs / the fire escapes while eating pop corn and sippin coke / or snorting it / shooting it and watch the Saturday evening gang-fights.  yes, this is home / our paradises and you're always welcomed as long as you're poor. and it was here / in my home that a butterfly happened to wing by he was easily spotted as a UFO  because of all his beautiful colors  he flew over the buildings /  through the lots /  around home plate a sewer top  in the middle of the street he flew in his dance about manner. and i almost cried when i saw children reaching reaching out for him reaching for hope for love / for that lost dream and he continued dancing / or maybe flying away away to save his beauty from these love-hungry children he flew he flew and i cried when he fell down the sewer /  now he was part of us.
& as you bow your heads to pray / pray a silent prayer around a chicken who lies motionless before your hungry eyes / dead dead as your dreams / as your hopes  / dead as that silent prayer  that dies more & more each day /  that no ears will ever share  that that dead chicken / which you  in your shame dare to call a turkey  will never hear not that god / lost in the heavens eating real turkey who to you now pray for blessings  will never hear / i wish you a happy thanksgiving. & as you bow your heads to pray / pray a silent prayer for the little boy who dances in the snow / barefooted he loves to greet new falling snow & has no shoes & hopes that santa on christmas eve will slide down the chimney  of his tenement slum & in his stockings which he has hung by the fire escape  / o so carefully  as not to tear them any more will find them filled with little hopes  & tiny dreams & beneath that narrow leaf / which he in his shame dares call a tree  / a christmas tree santa will leave toys  of wooden soldiers   & plastic dolls filled with love for him and his (  & does not know  that santa nods on roofs  & climbs on fire escapes  & snatches pocket-books  / & leaves no wooden soldiers  or plastic dolls  filled with love for him & his  beneath his narrow leaf) / i wish him a merry christmas. & as you bow your heads to pray / pray please pray a silent prayer for the poor old woman who sits by the stove / to keep warm as she looks out her window /  watching the falling snow  & for the numbers' man / she waits / waits silently for steam to rush through rusty pipes / for santa to stop his nodding for you to stop your prayer / open your eyes & boooooooo away the mouse that nibbles on your chicken (  there are too many prayers  that need be prayed  for all/ all to be done  at just one meal) & waits / she silendy waits for god to hear your prayers  / after dinner / / i wish her a happy new year.
spring came / the same way winter left & summer will come & summer will leave; slowly  / when no one's expecting it  when people are tired of waiting like waiting for welfare checks /  a long wait/ a slow wait the windows are open but butterflies don't fly in to display a sense of love  / only housefly enter  to sit on food & eat crumbs & dreams escape / & become stolen & lost & used & wasted & thrown away & dreamed anew the junkies sit on the stoop & nod themselves into dreams  / maybe into the ones which escaped & stinkball is played & on warm nights the ghetto musicians playour ghetto song  on garbage can tops & bang on empty coke bottles & sound real chévere :tomorrow the junkies will sit on the stoop & nod themselves into dreams / stickball will be played /  the streets will become chalked  with 1st and 2nd & 3rd bases hop scotch will become a game & tops will spin on sidewalks / & everyone will anticipate summer.
I am so lonely for the twentieth century, for the deeply felt, obscene graffiti of armed men and the beautiful bridges that make them so small and carry them into the hearts of cities written like words across nothing, the dense void history became in my beautiful century. When a man talks reason, he postpones something. He gets in the way of a machine that knows him for the sad vengeance he is, somewhere close to the bald name of his city. "New York" means "strike back." "Attica" means "strike back" and so does anyplace in the world in the huge eyes and tender hands of my century. I went to the capital. I had a banner, and there were thousands of people like me. There was an airplane, and for a moment heavy with laurel and sprays of peach blossom something that has never happened before stretched like a woman's shadow on a hedge between the plane and the people who saw it flying. It was the real name of the century. It told everyone to strike back until there was no reason in the world except a machine stalled overhead that knows everyone and is as delicate as peach blossom. But the poor years come too late.
Wasn't that your cheek against mine last night Gin Streetlight When somebody loves you Impossible When you reach the broken paddock fence the sign will say Impossible The color God painted my eyes A cross between storm and ewerstream Impossible All your wrong lovers without certificates Stamped across their foreheads Impossible Dear Torch Received your kind invitation Regret conflagration impossible You must mean a phantom Your hand at her waist Your ache at her absence Not mine Impossible A holy place in the emperor's city A peach in a stone Impossible You the mask of a ram I the mask of a bull Horn chips Mischling Torn doors Impossible Dance without footprints Dance with no name in a room with no lovers not touching Impossible Your eyes One protecting your sleeping son's dreaming One torchlit and trying to close Impossible Dear Lion Here's a gazelle Hold her in your teeth but no biting Yours Impossible
I'm used to the emperor's bitterness I can't find the sweet place unless you make me This face that is not my face I may look made but when you touch me you make me Make the oak say blossom The stripped say swell The avenue pavement say river Make me This shirt I can't take off The one the nights without you gathered to make me The new day The sweet place Tomorrow whispering from tonight's last light Make me Kissing you without authorization If you want me to stop you'll have to make me The ruined city Or is it a woman interrupting your sleep to say Now To say Make me
The descent has deepened the interior lengthened designated ending Blind pulled down inside and then shot up again to see east via the plateglass a moon a monsoon an ashram I used time almost wantonly in that bald but sensual sky to give me gusts and more measurement not to snap the stars shut but Joseph said you really ought to tender how you sail by eye your soul is just a length of baby
The source I thought was Arctic the good Platonic Up the pole was soaked film an electric elevation onto a fishy platform and waves on two sides greenly welcoming The sunwater poured on holy atheism It was light that powered out my ego or my heart before ending with a letter
after Marina Wilson Consider the hands that write this letter. Left palm pressed flat against paper, as we have done before, over my heart, in peace or reverence to the sea, some beautiful thing I saw once, felt once: snow falling like rice flung from the giants' wedding, or strangest of strange birds. & consider, then, the right hand, & how it is a fist, within which a sharpened utensil, similar to the way I've held a spade, the horse's reins, loping, the very fists I've seen from roads through Limay & Estelí. For years, I have come to sit this way: one hand open, one hand closed, like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up; food will come from that farming. Or, yes, it is like the way I've danced with my left hand opened around a shoulder, my right hand closed inside of another hand. & how I pray, I pray for this to be my way: sweet work alluded to in the body's position to its paper: left hand, right hand like an open eye, an eye closed: one hand flat against the trapdoor, the other hand knocking, knocking.
Boston, 1973—Years had passed and I assumed a Different life when one night, while resting from Books on Marlborough Street (where things like This can happen), there came into my room images In black-and-white with a flow of light that Would not die. It all came back to me in different Terms: characters were born again, met up with Each other in adult life, drifted across the Screen to discover cattle and oil, traveled miles On horseback in dust and heat, characters whose Names emerged as if they mattered in a history Book. Some were swept up by power and prejudice Toward neighbors different from themselves, Because that is what the picture is about, with Class distinctions moving the plot along. A few Could distinguish right from wrong; those who Could not you condemned from the beginning when You noticed them at all. Still others married or Backed off from the ranch with poignant flair, Like James Dean, who in the middle of grazing land Unearthed the treasures of oil, buried his soul in Money and went incoherent with alcohol. When the 40's Came, two young men were drafted, the one called Angel  Dying at war. It's a generational tale, so everybody Aged once more and said what they had to say along the Way according to the script. And then the end: the Hamburger joint brought into existence to the beat of "The Yellow Rose of Texas," Juana and her child the Color of dark amber, foreshadowing the Mexican-looking Couple and their daughter, all in muteness, wanting To be served. I climbed out of bed and in my head Was a roaring of light—words spoken and unspoken Had brought the obliterated back. Not again (I said, From my second-floor room)...let this not be happening. Three and-a-half hours had flicked by. As the sound Trailed off into nothing, memory would not dissolve.
Bick Benedict, that is, Rock Hudson in the Time-clock of the movie, stands up and moves, Deliberate, toward encounter. He has come out Of the anxious blur of the backdrop, like Coming out of the unreal into the world of What's true, down to earth and distinct; has Stepped up to Sarge, the younger of the two, And would sure appreciate it if he: "Were a Little more polite to these people." Sarge, Who has something to defend, balks; asks (In a long-shot) if: "that there papoose down There, his name Benedict too?," by which he Means one-year old Jordy in the background Booth hidden in the bosom of mother love of Juana, who listens, trying not to listen. Rock Hudson, his hair already the color of slate, Who could not foresee this challenge, arms Akimbo (turning around), contemplates the stable And straight line of years gone by, says: "Yeah, Come to think of it, it is." And so acknowledges, In his heart, his grandson, half-Anglo, half- Brown. Sarge repents from words, but no Part of his real self succumbs: "All right— Forget I asked you. Now you just go back Over there and sit down and we ain't gonna Have no trouble. But this bunch here is Gonna eat somewhere's else." Never shall I Forget, never how quickly his hand threw my Breathing off—how quickly he plopped the Hat heavily askew once more on the old Man's head, seized two fistsful of shirt and Coat and lifted his slight body like nothing, A no-thing, who could have been any of us, Weightless nobodies bronzed by real-time far Off somewhere, not here, but in another Country, yet here, where Rock Hudson's face Deepens; where in one motion, swift as a Miracle, he catches Sarge off guard, grabs His arm somehow, tumbles him back against The counter and draws fire from Sarge to Begin the fight up and down the wide screen Of memory, ablaze in Warner-color light.
(a myth of consequences) The ivy across our back fence tangles gray into a green evening light. How a second emptiness un-punctuates the first. Disloyal, we attempt to construct. An ache will tighten but not form. Making impossible even this upsurge of crows across our sightline. The Mayans invented zero so as not to ignore even the gods who wouldn't carry their burdens. Too slippery as prayer, too effortless as longing. Our problem was preparation. Premeditation neutered any rage potential. Years later, the spine of our backyard appears to have always been crooked. White jasmine, dove-calm in the lattice, is not a finely crafted lure.
In through our bedroom window, the full dawn-scape concusses. Difficult to sustain sleep's equilibrium of wordlessness. Naming anything, like stepping barefoot in wet sand up to my ankles. Name after name, sinking me farther beneath waking's buoyancy. House, this morning, is pale with the rush of what night siphoned off. Objects, still emptied of resemblance, hum their chord-less cantos. Bloodless, my knuckles knock on walls without echo, testing singularities. Sun on the cutlery offers an ageless sheen. Though it ages the silver relentlessly. New, but still rudimentary tools to be gleaned from my over-used weaponry.
We remember the rabbit when we see the duck, but we cannot experience both at the same time. —E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion What do you remember? When I looked at his streaky glasses, I wanted to leave him. And before that? He stole those cherries for me at midnight. We were walking in the rain and I loved him.And before that? I saw him coming toward me that time at the picnic, edgy, foreign.  But you loved him? He sat in his room with the shades drawn, brooding. But youloved him? He gave me a photo of himself at sixteen, diving from the pier. It was summer. His arms outstretched. And before that? His mother was combing his soft curls with her fingers and crying. Crying.  Is that what he said? He put on the straw hat and raced me to the barn. What did he tell you?
1fat is the soul of this flesh. Eat with your hands, slow, you will understand breasts, why everyone adores them—Rubens' great custard nudes—why we can't help sleeping with pillows. The old woman in the park pointed,Is it yours? Her gold eye-teeth gleamed. I bend down, taste the fluted nipples, the elbows, the pads of the feet. Nibble earlobes, dip my tongue in the salt fold of shoulder and throat. Even now he is changing, as if I were licking him thin.  2he squeezes his eyes tight to hide and blink! he's still here. It's always a surprise. Safety-fat, angel-fat, steal it in mouthfuls, store it away where you save the face that you touched for the last time over and over, your eyes closed so it wouldn't go away.  3watch him sleeping. Touch the pulse where the bones haven't locked in his damp hair: the navel of dreams. His eyes open for a moment, underwater. His arms drift in the dark as your breath washes over him. Bite one cheek. Again. It's your own life you lean over, greedy, going back for more.
The grey sky, lighter & darker greys,  lights between & delicate  lavenders also blue-greys in smaller strokes,  & swashes of mauve-grey on the Hudson—  openings of light to the blue oblong off-center  where the door to the warehouse shows—  the larger smearings darkening  deep into blues  So alight that sky,  late August, early evening,  I had to gasp at it,  stand there hardly moving to breathe it, using whatever my body gave me,  at that moment attending to it, thinking:  Turner, he should have seen it,  he would have given it back to us,  not let it die away  And that other evening, walking down Bank Street from marketing, the sky fiery over the river,  luminous but hot in its flowering also,  rich in color as Venice seen by Guardi—more aflame even, the sky moving in a pulse,  its fire breathing in a pulse verging on danger—mane of a lioness affronted.  That brilliance—the eye of the lion filled to the lids with flame  And his eyes, Turner's, that bright grey eye at seventy-six,  "brilliant as the eye of a child"  who grew his thumbnail in the shape of an eagle's claw,  the better to use it in painting  In Kirby Lonsdale, Yorkshire, where Turner first drew mountain-landscapes,  I found Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Last night  tossed in my bed  the sound of the rain turned me around,  a leaf in a dried gully  from side to side,  the sound of the rain took me apart, opened to what is it? breath caught in memory of a deep sweetness  that sound  unceasing delicate, the wetness running through my body  It might be nighttime  in a forest hut, the rain constant  in little rivulets splashing,  at times uncertain— safe in each other's arms,  the rain sheltering us a depth opening bottomless to a terrible sweetness,  the small rain shaking us in our bed  (the terror) whispering  End of a season,  wind from the west  new york, 1982
A cold night crosses our path  The world appears very large, very round now extending far as the moon does  It is from the moon this cold travels  It is the light of the moon that causes this night reflecting distance in its own light so coldly  (from one side of the earth to the other)  It is the length of this coldness It is the long distance between two points which are not in a line now  not a straightness (however straight) but a curve only, silver that is a rock reflecting  not metal but a rock accepting distance  (a scream in silence where between the two points what touches is a curve around the world  (the dance unmoving).  new york, 1969
This season for us, the Jews— a season of candles,  one more on the seven-branched candlestick for the seven days of the week,  but let it be seven in the sense of luck in dice,  seven of the stars in the constellations:  Orion, Aldebaran in the sky  lively over Jerusalem  Let the fuel last the besieged such as we are,  to nourish us.  Let the oil continue for heat, for illumination,  flame crouching in the lamp,  the glass smoky  (December upon us) the light not fail.  The air has been mild for days—  & the 7 rings through my life despite the 8 of this week—  bushes in the doorway of 7 Charles where I lived, 51, crackle with dryness,  are bare still. That house with the lucky number brought me luck & misluck, both,  like the other that added to 7, out of 4 & 3,  that seven underlying the eight of this week, the 8 just over, the 7 just under a third of the years with Stefan:  I praise them both today—  the lasting oil in the seven-branched candlestick:  absence of all fear—the smallest drop of fuel enough to leap from.  new york, 1973
This must happen just after I die: At sunrise I bend over my grandparents' empty house in Hazelwood and pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River. Copper tubing and electric lines hang down like hairs. The house is the size of a matchbox. I sprinkle bits of broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack needles in the open door of the porch. I scratch a Blue Tip and blow vowels of fire through the living room, the tunneled hallway. Flames run up the wooden stairs. I put my ear beside the hot kitchen window to hear the crackling voices of cupboards and walls. I flip the welder's mask: Sun off the rectangular glass, a rose glint before the white torch.
Eleven bombs had gone off the previous night,  most of them in this neighborhood, which is called  Teusaquillo, and it is one of the pleasantest in Bogotá. —Alma Guillermoprieto Flowering sietecueros trees: How easily we married ourselves to the idea of that bruised light outside the window, capillary fibers of the linen, stained wood of the door frame. Deepening hallway. Beyond the stucco portal, crushed purple. At night, tinnitus we thought, the ringing after an explosion, a frenzied inner ear axle squeal, until I placed my stethoscope's bell on the purpled ceiling: Bats at roost under the terracotta tiles, each squeak a vector between mountains, sicarios ricocheting through the dark. "If you press your skull between the pillows, it's like a lullaby." At dawn our windows imploded from the street. Before the glaziers knocked, a breeze: Blood-sweet draft of begonias rising again from the iron grillwork of our little yard.
When I cannot believe, The brown herds still move across green fields Into the tufty hills, and I was born Higher, where I could watch them as a bird might. When even memory seems imagined, what Can I bring to prayer? A pair of knees. The great faith that built a stair to heaven As now my memory tries to climb a hill, Becomes an old stone building, a deaf priest Whose hand is in the pockets of his parish, Who longs to buy a bell he'll never hear. The water in the font is cold, I trace A circle on my brow and not a cross.
It was the fruit I wanted, not the nest. The nest was hanging like the richest fruit against the sun. I took the nest and with it came the heart, and in my hand the kingdom and the queen, frail surfaces, rested for a moment. Then the drones awoke and did their painful business. I let the city drop upon the stones. It split to its deep palaces and combs. It bled the insect gold, the pupa queens like tiny eyes wriggled from their sockets, and somewhere the monarch cowered in a veil of wings in passages through which at evening the labourers had homed, burdened with silence and the garden scents. The secret heart was broken suddenly. I, to whom the knowledge had been given, who was not after knowledge but a fruit, remember how a knot of pains swelled my hand to a round nest; blood throbbed in the hurt veins as if an unseen swarm mined there. The nest oozed bitter honey. I swaddled my fat hand in cotton. After a week pain gave it back to me scarred and weakened like a shrivelled skin. A second fruit is growing on the tree. Identical—the droning in the leaves. It ripens. I have another hand.
She spun a line. She knew he was listening to her. She spun it and he took the fraying ends. Whatever she was saying, it was cotton, Then as he rolled the thread between Forefinger and thumb it turned to silk, And as he took the needle up to thread it The line she spun became thin finest gold. He knew not to believe her but he took it Because she kept on spinning like the truth Was ravelling from her lips; he watched her lips. Cotton, silk and gold, she wanted him To take the line and sew the wound right up Although she held the blade still in her hand Behind her back, and it was dripping, steaming. There under his left arm the gash lay open Like a mouth in disbelief. And he believed her.
The teddy bear cholla and the fat fat • Oh buckthorn, devil, whipple, teddy bear • Oh beavertail, oh pancake, porcupine • Oh plump saguaro with your hairy arms, I love Each of you with a different nerve of heart. Especially you, so trim, so pert, your birds Cupped in your pits and crotches, little friends • Oh areoles and aureoles, the orioles With yellow caps are havering and hot Making themselves a breeze with their cut wings • I ask the docent and he indicates • Oh nation, how you might have been, spread from So sure an order, with such tendering love
'I believe it would go ill with many of us, if we were faced with a strong temptation, and I suspect that with many of us it does go ill.'  —Ivy Compton Burnett He set out on the innocent exodus. He went at Easter In a lengthening dawn, and he did not count the days. He was young. With the wooden comb his mother made him He parted his hair in the middle (his beard was slow). He was fair still, he glowed like a source of light. There were so many priests about, there was too much singing; He did not like God the Father who came from Rome With his tattered son and the incomprehensible bird. Easter for him was other kinds of rebirth, But from the trees and streams, the uplands and valleys He knew the native spirits dislodged, crowding the shore To cross over like no longer immortal souls, lined up Awaiting the ferry and the disgruntled boatman. They did not intend to fade out to the sound of bells and choiring; They would find a new woodland or water for haunt, untroubled By candles and books and the tedious, meaningless Latin. Without farewell before daybreak he left home. He pushed past the visible almost crowd on the shore, Divine shapes, scents, their sorrowful voices and silences. He murmured out of respect and they let him pass through.Goodbye he declared to them and to his country. First he crossed the small sea in a leather coracle Pointing the blunt prow at what looked like mainland. The sea was glassy, he paddled with his palms, at landfall Made fire and warmed them, conjuring spirits of a new place. They gathered around to gaze at his lovely body. He abandoned his boat and clambered up the rocks. He climbed a hill, a ridge, and then a mountain. It was a protracted joy, that crossing away From the small sea. Looking back, Ireland got littler. Then it and the smooth water were lost to view And never again did he see what had been home, Hear its lilt, or receive news of his many brothers Who bred, and banked their fields, who fished and hunted, And made a tribe, a village and a nation. The uplands were lush and full of fauna, the grass Deep, humming, and everywhere were gods, Their tears, their wounds and resurrections. Spring Smattered the glades, flecked and mottled with blossom, The wheeling birds shouted their emphatic prayer; And deer: that enormous stag with a broken antler; Wolves and wild cats, too, a bear he saw, red pheasants, And rooting through an oak wood, a tusky boar... He walked in amazement (he did not count the days) Reading the symbols, and cheerful local gods Skipped and tumbled before him, showing the way Across the very backbone of that mainland. It was not England yet. It was wilderness. He wrapped his feet in grass and leaves, in strips of leather; He wore a leathern kilt and a stiff hide waistcoat Fragrant with wear and weather. As he went along He runed, was merry, it was almost like rhyming. He climbed jet black mountains veined with silver falls, Washed face and hands in the frenzied spray of those tarns, Made the noises of a man free now of Christendom, In the uncharted, unmarred wilderness, his sweet voice Gracing the ears of insects, beasts and wild fowl And the ears of the local spirits, Orpheus, Or as Adam's must have done when he told the animals Who they were in the first sunrise of the world, Before Eve had been carved out of his rejoicing To correct and contradict him, and the tall fruit tree Stood safe in his obedience, when at evening God himself, not his bloodied Son, walked out in starlight And kissed his creature, and lay with him in the dark. It was not, he began to know, an innocent exodus. It was the long route to exile, the way that hermits Took to white martyrdom, alone with their God for ever. He was not like them: wild-hearted spirits of place Coaxed his credulous footsteps past the equinox. On the eastern shore of what was becoming England He saw far off kernels of cities, squat towers, spires; Rough roads north and south, wagons groaning with stone, And into meagre harbours boats and barges Hugging the coast bore produce in and away. That world was not for him, with its crosses and crossroads. He saw steep islands dark in a bigger sea, No man mark on them, no smoke, no stone quarry, No furrows or shepherds, in their thin woods no traps. It was summer now (he did not count the days), He sat on the summit of the last hill and looked east Wondering where on that island he would build His round stone dwelling and give his mortal days To local grace, the gods of leaf and stone, With his soul configured to love, like a hearth, his heart On fire but unconsumed because such promiscuous heat Amazes and makes not cinders but rapture and language. His dwelling would be a beacon, a land-star radiant To a lowering ocean unbroken beyond the islands As far as the eye. Shading his eyes, he went on his way. He crossed the bad sands not knowing they were bad Between two tides, two islands, walking ankle deep, knee, Then up to the waist, the paps, until only his upturned face Floated on the water, the mouth crying out joyful spells, Eyes fixed on the sun, the flaxen hair fanned out Like rays of a lesser sphere. He could not swim But there was no need, a sea god hovered ahead, Sandals firm on the wave.  Emerging step by step He was new, it was autumn, his homelessness This island, these tilting rocks. He chose for his dwelling A high place with a view of nothing but east, The rows of waves impatient to crash on the boulders, Where the storms might climb and burst over his reflections, And the fowls of the air become familiars. He set to work carting stones, gods gathered nearby Harkening, making crowns of nettle, spears of bone, A cup from a gourd, and a dish. Each day his dwelling Grew higher, like a hive for bees, a dome, a cranium. One day, it was the solstice, a final stone Closed the fontanel. The votary moved in. He gathered the crowns and spears, the cup and dish And laid out the new table for his guests. Would the gods sit down beside at his first supper? He looked for them, he called out praising their names. They had all gone off somewhere. There was nowhere to go! The tide was full and even the deep route hither Had gone under waves, the mainland had vanished in fog. He sat alone at his table. He sat alone. The gods who had brought him were gone. He started counting Day one was the day when things began to go. He watched his shadow every morning, lengthening Over the water, over the sand and stones, And being washed and parched like a piece of laundry Until it was white as a nightshirt spread to dry On a gorse bush, fluttering a little, an empty sleeve, Saying go on, go back, go on, go back The way waves do, the way the tides do, also, Or simply wind blows and the tide says nothing at all. How clean the stones and the sand, the breaking waves, How clean the moonlight, the sunlight, and his lovely throat Young and in love—is it still young and in love?— With the spirits, his voice pure as a bird's, but he's counting, The days are shortening, his voice is growing darker. Surely they listen out and watch their votary There on the verge of the cliff in his careful dance Like a gull whose wings are reliance, like a guillemot. So he chanted, he praised and danced, and it was the end Of autumn. For the first time cold, he telt the bones in his flesh. Above him, north, with terror he saw the Lights And it was a human shadow that towered in them, A man on a cross, a man with a cross inside him Instead of a skeleton; the cross was still and shimmered As if it held its breath so as to observe him. He was trembling, he saw the ghostly limbs Behind the bright-dim curtain, those long wired veins Through which pulse flickered and the wine flowed, The chest breathed with almost no sound at all. This figure had nothing to do with the gods who brought him, Tugged at his heart, took their leave when most he needed. This looked like the son of the god he had sought to elude, Now a giant surveying a world and a singular man Abandoned by everything he'd served, but nonetheless Dancing and shivering above the scrum of waves. Cities had grown on the mainland meanwhile, monks and priors, Grew fat; there were nuns and teachers, the farmsteads prospered. The places he'd passed through had roads now, stone towers and walls, Where he'd chanted to wilderness out of a pagan heart. To the east there is nothing.The sleet blows in. It is so cold now, winter hardening. The days are counted and are counting down. After laud and joy, the radiance fading, Winter is here, and bidding becomes of the body, The rings of light, of fire, the rings of starlight. The votary tries his tongue to find what he means. He tries to speak with what has been refined. He has no words at all. The feet that led, the hands That rested on his head, arrested him, are nowhere. He was grown old and unremarkable, and now He knows desire. He knows desire as he has never Known any passion in his person before, he desires A voice, a touch. From his precipice soon Like a gannet he's to dive, or like a stone. Winter has come indeed, and the stars, he's wasted, wasted. No devil arrives to offer long life and kingdoms, To touch his brow, to kiss him on the lips. No gods return with prayer mats and chains of flowers, With brands and blankets, with warm thick drinks, with lamplight, With meat or fruit, with a breathing loaf or a lamb. (In the coldest night someone does cover him And when he wakes he finds A fire alive in the hearth, his table laid With biscuit, and in the gourd a mouthful of pure water.) He is old, his matted beard dark, filthy. He has Praised presence and absence and set his glow Fading on the island's seaward face. When he starts dying, That night, in the flickering of his chamber, The Vikings steer five ships packed with warriors Around the end of his island, using his glimmer As lighthouse and marker, reaching their intended haven. Had he survived that night, even afar he'd have felt The heat of the conflagration, smelled apocalypse As the pagans returned and the little gods came with them, Clapping their hands and rejoicing, and rushed to the woods To be with their trees and streams and hills and valleys As the church spires collapsed, the monks and priors and priests Fuel for bonfires, and until the Vikings withdrew They were safe, divine again, though the shuddering Lights Disclosed the tall cross and the watcher, smoke in his heart. The island's dark, the darker now for his dying, Unmarked and unremarked. But someone covers his face, Is winding in coarse scented cloth the extinguished body, Having tidied the wild hair, parted it in the centre, And washed at last the limbs that longed to be touched. Someone rolls them to the cliff edge, lets them go east.
You with the knees of a fish, You with the fish's ears, the tongue in your round Mouth that's nibbling the sweet air, You with a fish's patience, on your side Under the hot plank ot the keel, hook in your lip, And your tail twitching like a bothered lily, And the taste of your own bleeding on the air, salt on the sweetness, You with a fish's voice, singing and still Your aria, and the blue-silver flecks of light, The water's scales, breathing the breeze Abundant and not for you, you with a hook, Absurd, you with lidless mercuried eyes; And the reel whistles, the tall man's cast at you.
I would not paint — a picture — I'd rather be the One It's bright impossibility To dwell — delicious — on — And wonder how the fingers feel Whose rare — celestial — stir — Evokes so sweet a torment — Such sumptuous — Despair — I would not talk, like Cornets — I'd rather be the One Raised softly to the Ceilings — And out, and easy on — Through Villages of Ether — Myself endued Balloon By but a lip of Metal — The pier to my Pontoon — Nor would I be a Poet — It's finer — Own the Ear — Enamored — impotent — content — The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts — of Melody!
The Poets light but Lamps — Themselves — go out — The Wicks they stimulate If vital Light Inhere as do the Suns — Each Age a Lens Disseminating their Circumference —
Crumbling is not an instant's Act A fundamental pause Dilapidation's processes Are organized Decays — 'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul A Cuticle of Dust A Borer in the Axis An Elemental Rust — Ruin is formal — Devil's work Consecutive and slow — Fail in an instant, no man did Slipping — is Crashe's law —
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
Now I knew I lost her — Not that she was gone — But Remoteness travelled On her Face and Tongue. Alien, though adjoining As a Foreign Race — Traversed she though pausing Latitudeless Place. Elements Unaltered — Universe the same But Love's transmigration — Somehow this had come — Henceforth to remember Nature took the Day I had paid so much for — His is Penury Not who toils for Freedom Or for Family But the Restitution Of Idolatry.
Fame is the one that does not stay — It's occupant must die Or out of sight of estimate Ascend incessantly — Or be that most insolvent thing A Lightning in the Germ — Electrical the embryo But we demand the Flame
For Ofelia Camacho Delgado She wakes to the odor of sheep, trying to rub it off her hands. Dressed up in her native colors, standing by a tourist van, she is a dandelion, golden like the alpaca woven buttons of her sweater. She is done with the tourists taking her photo, holding a baby lamb. Without official papers in a new country, she briskly walks, and obscenely slow, a foreign tongue slithers by; its scales are the words she has not yet learned to trust. The baby girl hiding in her belly's nest will learn Quechua first, runa. the people The sick horses are pushed off the deck of a ship bound for Cuba. Pursuing, their heads bobbing, clearing the salt from their nostrils, they kick. As long as they can, they swim in the rushing swells, falling behind the ship's scent, swine and men. Know someone who needs their spirits lifted? Why not try a lavender or a rose scent? At the end of a hallway, a machine rattles and spits out ice cubes, some dropping, transparent on the dull vines of the carpet. Manuela pushes a cart of towels, shampoo, lotion, and soap bars scented with rose oil. Glancing down at the "Do Not Disturb" signs, she walks past the banker taking his third shower and the mother nursing her twins on a blanket spread across the floor. The peepholes are silent as a pile of dirty pillows, some dark never blinking, others bullet holes of light. Before leaving the Day's Inn on Mt. Vernon, she steals a few soap bars for her daughter, who places them in her dresser drawers, scenting her lingerie, fresh as cut flowers. A dandelion's root, far deeper, tolerant of drought and poor soil, is not an easily uprooted presence. Manuela hears the creaking of planks, the flapping of sails, and horses stomping, nervous, eyeing the full moon. She sees the marks of hooves in the sand, marks coming out from the sea and vanishing inland. She wakes to that odor again. This time she stands beside her Incan city, its green peaks cutting the sky open, painted on La Carreta Restaurant's wall. Her daughter is taking her photo, saying, "Sonríe, Mami, sonríe." "Smile, Mom, smile." The blindfolded horses are hoisted on board in belly slings, and their feet are tied, slightly touching the deck, suspended for most of the voyage, but once on land some will escape and revert to the wild. Know someone who needs their spirits lifted? Why not try a lavender or a rose scent? She lets the desert in, wild sage. The desert takes her back home while a farmer's pig crosses the highway. She sees her fake ID fly off the dashboard. The wheels of her upside-down car spin: Suspended, buckled to her seat, feet dangling, she spots the moon on the shards of her windshield, frozen tears, the peepholes blinking back at her. Death touches down like a hoof. A gust of wind pushes the seeds of dandelions upward, a flock of white, a gauze gown drifting over yuccas. Memory is the scent of soap bars taking refuge in a daughter's drawer.
As apparent as the rest, the asphalt cracks are crowded with yellow weeds, the rust goes beyond its bleeding color, and the lot's rails, battered by cars, cast larger bars by noon. On one side of the market someone painted a row of flower pots, hanging geraniums for the locals who must now go across town. As apparent as the rest, El Tigre walks upright, wears a tiny sombrero and sarape, and pushes a grocery cart full of food. His painted stripes are starting to flake like the bounty he wheels for the families drifting into the parking lot off 3rd Street and next to the train station still waiting to the retrofitted for the big one.
On my cutting board, I discovered them, the tiniest of ants, roaming dots of lead. At first, they were too few to classify, hiding under crumbs, these scavengers of leftovers. Admiring their labor, I immediately granted them citizenship, these tailgaters of a kitchen's routines. In Miami, I had no stove, working far from my home. My wife was a midnight call to San Bernardino. While searching for crumbs, especially for the taste of apricot jelly, they fell into a line across my cutting board; I saw it again, saw the line my sixth-grade teacher drew on the board, pointing to each end. While he planted himself on his desk, he leaned his face toward us, telling us in a low voice: "You don't see it yet, you're too young still, but that line in front of you continues infinitely on either side. And if there is the slightest slope in that line, either way, it will slowly begin to sag, then curve and veer and eventually one end will find the other. And lines, lines are never perfect, they are like us, never completely straight. So just imagine the searching that goes on all around us, every day. And to happen on that union is really to witness the most earthly of forms you'll ever get to know. If you're lucky, you'll see that, even luckier if you're part of that union."
For Father Bob I.  By the road she hovers in heat waves,  propped up on a cinderblock wall,  revived by mixed house paints,  fending for herself like wild mint. She is behind your shoulder, a blind spot, your city's poverty. A figure waits under a freeway ramp, gesturing as if she knows you.  The fences and lots have the same dogs,  peering through the chain-links, curious.  While at the hospital, you see kids play another  game of tag outside the emergency room doors  and know how fingerprints squander their ridges  and how digital minutes dry up under a glare. II. A stump is all that is left of a surveyor's point, a ponderosa pine in the foothills that started the city's perfect grid.  The sidewalks of Baseline need more than a grocery bag's empty belly, plastic, a ripped-up flame standing and calling out to an old preacher like yourself.  By the cameras mounted on the street lights, you wonder if they recorded the street sinking in the eyes of the woman who died on a bus bench. You pause in front of a freshly painted sign that says "Wrong Way," and see a sign within a sign, a resistance to the newest strip mall, the black lettering unevenly spaced and painted, a homespun warning to keep moving on.
I. The Santa Anas, childlike and profound, blanket me; I see the dust stirring the valley and clouding downtown San Bernardino; I feel the sting of your loss. The black oak leaves, brittle, tumbling, crack under my feet. Is your hand touching the dryness of my lips? You sing: "Don't sit, mountain-still, a coyote skull whistling." I tug at the skin on my wrist, trying to peel off the seam, my stubbornness. On Sunday, I wear my only decent dress, gypsy-green. I hear heels scurry around me, Our priest is a hinged tongue, his verse tucking us in. Why can't I focus on anyone's face? II. The winds fly from a canyon's belly into a peasant blouse. A stampede of leaves and twigs rushes by a patch of grass, scraping across a sidewalk and dragging their nails, fierce and defiant as a local poet's words. From the sides of mountains, waterfalls of dust form, and during my pilgrimage, the fate of lip-stained Styrofoam cups will not unnerve me. Not worried about compasses, I'll go by fences guarding abandoned lots, through desperate patches of grass, yellowing, past one-legged billboards of paper and glue. Resting under the shade of bus stops, I'll recite old tales to ward off the haunted and the debris of family floods piling up. When the voices on an updraft emphatically circle like red-tailed hawks, I'll recall the tail of a comet urging you to wrap yourself in its flames and dissolve. Entranced by a burning equal to yours, I'll walk eighty miles, traveling the routes of my childhood candy wrappers. III. In the moisture of a dirt road I traveled, you are the rain that visited the night before. Does your tongue sense the heat of bodies flying in the Santa Anas? Again, I am lost tracing your face, a dry playa, the eyes of clay, a brown maze of upward glances. Are you a creek bridge, a fallen cedar, lodged between sunbaked boulders inviting me to cross? You are the one taking away my fear of being wheeled down a hallway without doors. IV. With twigs in my hair, I was found somewhere near the national forest. Bystanders pulled back their sniffing dogs while I stood, barefoot and tired. When I predicted earthquakes in China, Peru and Cucamonga, California, I baffled my psychiatric ward. After a nurse removed my handout of The Seasons: Winter, wildlife appeared on the hospital grounds. A mule deer's antlers surfaced in the parking lot, weaving among the staff's cars. A coyote leaped into the patients' garden and howled under a security light as if to say: "I am here. Where are you?" A roadrunner scooted across a lot, losing one of its long tail feathers. All this had the staff checking again if their office windows were latched. In my notebook, I drew a coy face with blurry dots for eyes that peer out of a hollow trunk, struck by lightning, charred by fire, with smoke still rising under your vaulted sky. V. Outside my window,  the sky is suddenly draped by a hum,  a hummingbird's hunger. Her wings wrinkle the sky.  Unlike a chickadee too busy and full of seed chatter,  the hummingbird puffs up the air, feeding like a storm, a redness, a sideway rocket  past the world's ear. That spark reminds me of you. Thin-rooted, lingering too long, absorbed in window reveries, I'll be released. Here, the soil is moist, sponge-like, storing. Worms surface,  digesting their way up. I, too, am ready for the driving winds  of another season.
best thought, you had taught me — a river runs through it, the foot of the soul standing stubbornly in the freeze, all the shards of ice crumpling up the banks, what survives in the ignorance. Play it away. Be ceremony. Be a lit candle to what blows you. Outside, the sun gives a favorite present, mountain nests in ironic meadows, otter takes off her shoes, the small hands of her feet reaching, reaching; still, far away people are dying. Crisp one dollar bills fold another life. You taught me to care in the moment, carve day into light, or something, moving in the west that doesn't destroy us. Look again, in the coming summer, the cruelest month alive still eats up the hours. Regret is an uneven hand, a rough palm at the cheek — tender and calloused. I drink another glass of water, turn on the tap for what grows, for you, for what lasts, for the last and the first found thought of you.
for Gra'ma There was always fabric in your lap and a whistle in your heart. A sweet sap to be sucked waited in the garden. Nymphs of newts nestled under rock, your role as She Who Brings the Waters  intact. Between the trilling of the crickets educating into the night and the sad sack of cans in the mornings something grew, flourished in the dark — vines as sturdy as telephone wire writhed in the breezes. You patched together a blanket of us, sewed together the mismatched and lopped off edges. And anger grew a twin, ripped through the bermuda grass, something stubborn and determined: Me, in a leather patchwork skirt, the bitter lemon song returning to its beginning over and over on the Howdie Doody phonograph, a handful of bandages, a faceful of ghosts delivered from the mirrors. How did you stand it? All of it. Us crunching through your set life, kids scuffling through the mounds of leave. Always making do. Your sunshine eyes, those stenciled memories where we still live.
Unused baby blood and this is how you motion with hands clotty leaving  You have your apparatus being the Frog Husband and I burn your frog skin to keep you in the shape I prefer  Chimes You wrote in your apple box Elegant neck  I tried to glue the ripped paper back to the religious art but it doesn't work  Making a mess of it  Wasp friend landed on my shoulder sparkle to say This place we are in is a place  Broil the asparagus  Frog heart apparatus  Wash towels and rags on Wednesdays
Can be cracked or am that you didn't consider me or I thought so recovering in a nap You took the 4th of July beers  In the movie she was Asian and playing an Asian part singing white on white in the white room  I want to strum or mask this day Ask a question of the large “picture” window like why and why and also why to think of the napalmed girl in the picture
All summer, the city engine's low roar capsizes our bodies into sleep, groans,  evacuation—  Lost to a watery anamnesis so warm it requires a raft thatched from death's  flotsam to necklace its shore  I swim on, calling your name In my dreams, something is always deserting But tonight, no fast shadows of birds No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies or bright beach of child's porridge and bones—  Instead, someone weaving a net from fallen hair in and around our bed to catch the breath, blood, and ritual motions that oiled us  as one candle in a cave In your dreams, someone is always resisting being savedMy teeth are on fire, you say I saidDon't fly for the labyrinth, once I thought you were admonishing me to go away I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons phonographed in through a wounded windowEveryone can't have a cactus Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs
Hmong Hunter Charged with 6 Murders Is Said to Be a Shaman —new york times If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If a rifle fires a shot in the woods, whose body first hits the ground? If a group of angry hunters surrounds, curses at, and accosts you for wandering onto their land If you apologize for being lost, inform you saw no posted signs, swallow their chinks this and gooks taking over that; are walking away over mud and fallen leaves when a loud crack far behind you kicks up black earth If your father was conscripted to fight on the side of the United States for the cia during the war in Vietnam If he, your mother, you—the oldest son— and all your younger siblings were later abandoned in the hills of Laos as targets for genocide by the Viet Cong If after five years in a Thai refugee camp, you come to this land as a teen, a casualty of history and time, then receive three years of training to become a sharpshooter in the u.s. military If you spent your adolescence watching blacks, Asians, Latinos, and whites watching one another watch each other for weakness and flaws If, after this first blast, you wheel around in a bright orange vest; glimpse in that split second an angry, possibly inebriated man lowering or resighting his rifle If, in that icy moment, you recall the Native friend you used to collect cans with; once watched his three-hundred-pound father unload himself from a Chevy Impala and chase the boy down University with a ball-peen hammer If, of your own children, your quietest son lately lacks the wherewithal at school to defend himself; and your oldest daughter has always been for some inexplicable reason ashamed of you If hunting for you is not just a sport; never a time to drink beers with friends in a cabin, but rather is a factor in considering your family's winter protein consumption If you believe in God, but not the good in everyone If you hate to think about this shit, because why the fuck is it always on you to preprove your loyalty and innocence? If—frightened for your life and the livelihood of your immediate and extended family—in that split second, you reel and train your own gun back at the far face of that vapory barrel now aiming at your own If, yes, you are sometimes angry and so look forward to escaping your truck driver's life on certain designated dates, on certain designated lands, not always clearly demarcated, but always clearly stolen from the ancestors of fat drunk red men so confused they chase their own firey songs in the form of their sons Stolen from generations of skewed black backs, hunched your whole life on street corners laughing and picking their bones Stolen from the paychecks of your brown coworker social security ghosts Stolen like your own people from mountains in one land only to be resettled and resented here in projects and tenements If you barely finished high school, but you know from all you've ever seen of this system Might Makes Right, and excuses, treaties, and cover-ups appear the only true code inscribed on most white men's souls If, after such slurs, pushes, and threats in these woods it is now also on you to assess if that far rifle still locked on your face just issued a mistake, a warning shot, or murderous attempt— and the answer is: your military muscle fibers act If you then spot three four five six seven? other hunters now scattering for their atvs and, of course—if a gook, don't be a dumb one— scattering now also for their weapons If you are alone in this land, on foot, in miles of coming snow, wind, and branches and don't even know in which direction you'd run If from birth you've seen what men with guns, knives, and bombs are capable of doing for reasons you never wanted to understand If in this very same county's court of all-white witnesses, counsel, judge, and jurors it will forever be your word against theirs because there was no forensic testimony over who shot first If, yes, sometimes you can hear voices, not because you're insane, but in your culture you are a shaman, a spiritual healer, though in this very different land of goods and fears, your only true worth seems to be as a delivery man and soldier If, upon that first fateful exchange in these woods, your instinct, pushing pin to balloon, were to tell you it's now either you and your fatherless family of fourteen, or all of them Would you set your rifle down; hope the right, the decent, the fair thing on this buried American soil will happen? Or would you stay low, one knee cold, and do precisely as your whole life and history have trained? And if you did, would anyone even care what really happened that afternoon eight bodies plummeted to earth like deer?
You write not what you want, but what flaws flower from rust You want to write about the universe, how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts watching over us and instead what you get on the page is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway— the wails of the girlfriend or widow, her long lamentation so sensuous in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance Poetry is a sickness You want to write about Adoration, the glistening sweat on your honey's chest in which you've tasted the sun's caress, and instead what you get is a poem about the first of four times your mother and father split up Want to write about the perfection of God and end up with just another story of a uniquely lonely childhood If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote I'd be dead Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice, and look here, see, what got left behind when all the sand and dust cleared is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen braids the reddish hair of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter Outside, no blinking stars No holy kiss's approach Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems from prison You want everyone to feel empowered Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit one word at a time You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives Middle-finger your literalist boss Blow grocery cash on library fines Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready You live in an attic for nine years You go bankrupt You smoke too much Drink too much Alienate family and friends Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero your secret power will become loss Loss like only old people must know when the last red maple on the block goes and the drizzle turns to snow Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written The ghazal that bled your index finger Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear That slam poem you're still paying for The triolet that smiled to violate you through both ears But Poet, Sucker, Fool It's your job to find meaning in all this because you are delusional enough to believe that, yes, poetry is a sickness, but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up, but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood not ten minutes after the ambulance left was gorgeous Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream, but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical fruit for one another every Xmas Eve How in the morning before opting out I watched that tiny Native girl fumbling to braid her own and her now- snoring mother's long black hair together  in a single cornrow— If I can just always squiggle down like this:  even half as much as what I'd otherwise need to forget maybe these scales really will one day tip to find each flaw that made us Exquisite
Tonight I light the candles of my eyes in the lee And swing down this branch full of red leaves. Yellow moon, skull and spine of the hare, Arrow me to town on the neck of the air. I hear the undertaker make love in the heather; The candy maker, poor fellow, is under the weather. Skunk, moose, raccoon, they go to the doors in threes With a torch in their hands or pleas: "O, please . . ." Baruch Spinoza and the butcher are drunk: One is the tail and one is the trunk Of a beast who dances in circles for beer And doesn't think twice to learn how to steer. Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb. Its hands are broken, its fingers numb. No time for the martyr of our fair town Who wasn't a witch because she could drown. Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark At the vision of her, bobbing up through the dark. When she opens her mouth to gasp for air, A moth flies out and lands in her hair. The apples are thumping, winter is coming. The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming. By the caw of the crow on the first of the year, Something will die, something appear.
The sun is beginning to go down over a field of yellow onions. The edges of the clouds are almost pink, and at this hour the maguey rises up like a flower of dark blades. I worked so long today I have forgotten my own hunger. It takes a full minute for me to remember a word I have used all my life. What the Mexicans call poncho. At twilight I see it, abandoned, hanging like a ghost on the limb of a tree: my own brown ruana next to gray speckled chickens pecking at roots and a black track of storm coming west over the green mountain.
Grayscale breath on a fluid field, with lo-fi  rainpatter—petrol blue—,  a 60-watt sun uns -crewed from the woebegone sky: rip-  ­rap & coal slurries,  dragline & loess, what phosphor -us is a semaphore for, silklike  in its acoustic shadows  louver away, or stay when I move: figures astray from the mercury  dark—shatterproofless,  shutterproofless, image noise stressing each contour to  strass—  as if the margins were swarming with centers, or cinders  —"Ecchoes  to the Eye" — or Cinderella's slipper blown of poly­-  vinyl butyral  & laminated glass
Begins in interruption: an ambulance bell at the center of sleep, the room tilts sideways, furniture slides, an octet of amber blueverres à liqueur, one with a cut at the lip, clatters as a quaalude light in tatters mattes the curtains ormolu:  I miss you is what I want to say like a rocket stocked from the Reagan years, its radar gone haywire, wiring fried but live inside a bunker of some private Soviet Union you & I —
You are part of other people but not like them. You live in a little wooden box and wake up with your face in your palm and some sunlight. Which is a sign of resignation but not for you. Which is part of what I meant by trying to effect change in myself and also talking. By describing to you that before a city can become spectacular its buildings must put on an iron gown. And then some workers climb all around it. And it is like having no teeth because you are waiting for better teeth. I tell you I am very attached to my old teeth. In a game called all of thisis hypothetical I did not once slide my teeth across the table. I do not even remember what you offered as the hypothetical exchange for a life where I only drink soup. There were some girls on their bikes and wind. There were some people reuniting after many years apart or just a day. You were not like everyone else making demands with wild gesticulations. I thought about maybe trying to sharpen my knowledge of jokes. I thought about really needing a hug. A very important car with sirens rumbled by and sounded exactly right.
Today there has been so much talk of things exploding into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we all run outside into the hot streets and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth you can always see. With more sparkle and pop is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes into acid jazz. Small typewriters that other people keep in their eyes click away at all our farewell parties. It is hard to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving their broken little hands.
My mother the hard boned Chinese woman 23 years in this country without bothering to learn its language buys lean pork ribs special order at the Hop Sang in Chinatown and cooks dinner for an extended family of twenty-five during holidays. Seated loosely around the dining table trying to eat quietly I am scrubbed down to skin and bone, her oldest daughter— spineless, a headless snake a woman grandfather says who should have her tendons lifted out slowly by the steel point of a darning needle until she writhes. To my mother I'm useless but dangerous, capable of swallowing the family whole into my pelvis while I sit waiting for the boyfriend white and forbidden to touch our doorbell.
In a fish cleaning station near the equator, off the coast of Africa, summer stretches over the barracudas, their long mirrored-chrome bodies heaped like eel fillets, slung jaws gaping, red canine teeth exposed as if they still crave meat and muscle. Even dead, they are a melancholy fish, never satisfied, always wanting to bite off more than they can chew, their curious white eyes in a lidless showdown with an existence beyond the visible. Maybe they are the spawn of the serpent who prowled and tempted Eve, cast into the saltwater. They are terrifying and defiant, their pointed heads hammering towards the light, waiting for the first sign of weakness. The fishermen catch them hovering just beneath the surface. What is it like to die with your eyes wide open in the bright sun?
On our dining table, every dish is a dime-store pattern: blue dandelions, red nasturtiums, the entire stack, a small legacy won in a 1959 coin toss by Lealand, the uncle with the long arms and legs, who pitched penny after penny at a parking lot carnival until his pockets were emptied of everything, but lint and luck. My family wouldn't buy Emporium bowls thick like heads of cabbage or soup spoons holding hand-painted water lilies; our plates, chipped and resounding, clatter at every feast. In America, we acquired what was necessary: some English to earn a living, cotton for dull work, enough noodles for a long life. My father and uncles fled China with a black leather trunk, four wool sweaters, and proud photographs of their two-story mansion. They rented on Mason, Alfred's Steakhouse clanging all night below. Great-Uncle's wife donated a lazy susan, mini Bora Bora pitchforks, and wooden bowls, rancid from salad oil—whatever she couldn't unload at her yard sale. Sundays, she invited her nephews to hang coats, change diapers, and serve finger sandwiches, told guests,ignore those farmboys, too stupid to say yes or no. The boys didn't tell her about the jars of jade or the "big house," its pond swimming with yolk-eating carp. They studied calculus and chemistry and worked after school, eighty-five cents an hour, pouring coffee at Mee Heung Bakery and ironing pleats in sweat shops towards a new life: chicken and fresh fish every day, wonton noodle soup and television at midnight, Grace Kelly on weekends. When I get off the boat,America is a beautiful country, my father says as he watches Uncle Lealand, the organoleptic specialist, dish up the leftover black bean lobster for his cats.
In the early afternoon my mother was doing the dishes. I climbed onto the kitchen table, I suppose to play, and fell asleep there. I was drowsy and awake, though, as she lifted me up, carried me on her arms into the living room, and placed me on the davenport, but I pretended to be asleep the whole time, enjoying the luxury— I was too big for such a privilege and just old enough to form my only memory of her carrying me. She’s still moving me to a softer place.
Portions of a mango tree the storm cut down, a green blaze bent into mud and they come to me, at dawn three girls from Kanpur, far to the north admittedly (we know this from national geography class, the borders of states, the major cities). They hung themselves from fans. In the hot air they hung themselves so that their father would not be forced to tender gold he did not have, would not be forced to work his fists to bone. So that is how a portion of the story goes. Slowly in the hot air they swung, three girls. How old were they? Of marriageable age certainly. Sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, something of that sort. How do I feel about it? What a question! I am one of three sisters, most certainly I do not want father to proffer money he does not have for my marriage. Get a scooter, a refrigerator, a horde of utensils, silks, and tiny glittering bits of gold to hang about my ears and throat.Gold is labor time accumulated . . . labor time defined. Who said that? Yes, I am a schoolteacher, fifth standard trained in Indian history and geography, Kerala University, first class first. The storm tree puts out its limbs and I see three girls swinging. One of them is me. Step back I tell myself. Saumiya, step back. The whole history of womankind is compacted here. Open your umbrella, tuck your sari tight, breathe into the strokes of catastrophe, and let the school bus wait. You will get to it soon enough and the small, hot faces. See how the monsoon winds soar and shunt tropic air into a house of souls, a doorway stopped by clouds. Set your feet into broken stones and this red earth and pouring rain. For us there is no exile.
In the dog days of summer as muslin curls on its own heat And crickets cry in the black walnut tree The wind lifts up my life And sets it some distance from where it was. Still Marco Polo Airport wore me out, I slept in a plastic chair, took the water taxi. Early, too early the voices of children Mimicking the clatter in the Internet café In Campo Santo Stefano in a place of black coffee Bordellos of verse, bony accolades of joy, Saint Stephen stooped over a cross, A dog licking his heel, blood drops from a sign By the church wall—Anarchia è ordine— The refugee from Istria gathers up nails. She will cobble together a gondola with bits of driftwood Cast off the shores of the hunger-bitten Adriatic. In wind off the lagoon, A child hops in numbered squares, back and forth, back and forth, Cap on his head, rhymes cool as bone in his mouth. Whose child is he? No one will answer me. Voices from the music academy pour into sunlight That strikes the malarial wealth of empire, Dreams of an old man in terrible heat, Hands bound with coarse cloth, tethered to a scaffold, Still painting waves on the walls of the Palazzo Ducale.
I watch your hands at the keyboard Making music, one hand with a tiny jot, A birthmark I think where finger bone Joins palm, mark of the fish, Living thing in search of a watering Hole set in a walled garden, Or in a field with all the fences torn: Where I hear your father cry into the wind That beats against stones in a small town Where you were born; its cornfields Skyward pointing, never sown, never To be reaped, flagrant, immortal.
Terrace deep as the sky. Stone bench where I sit and read,I wandered by myselfInto the heart of the mountains of Yoshino. In one hand a book, in the other, a bag made of newsprint— No weather-beaten bones here Just lychees bought in the market, Thirty rupees per kilogram. Stalks mottled red tied up with string, Flesh the color of pigeon wings— Sweet simmering. Sunlight bruises air Pine trees blacken. Where shall I go? The Dhauladhar peaks Are covered in snow.
Mid-May, centipedes looped over netting at the well's mouth. Girls grew frisky in summer frocks, lilies spotted with blood. You were bound to meteorology, Science of fickle clouds, ferocious winds. The day you turned twenty-six fighter planes cut a storm, Fissured air baring the heart's intricate meshwork Of want and need— Springs of cirrus out of which sap and shoot you raised me. Crossing Chand Bibi Road, Named after the princess who rode with hawks, Slept with a gold sword under her pillow, Raced on polo fields, You saw a man lift a child, her chest burnt with oil, Her small thighs bruised. He bore her through latticed hallways Into Lady Dufferin's hospital. How could you pierce the acumen of empire, Mesh of deceprion through which soldiers crawled, Trees slashed with petrol, Grille work of light in a partitioned land? When you turned away, Your blue black hair was crowned with smoke— You knelt on a stone. On your bent head The monsoons poured.
I In the absence of reliable ghosts I made aria, Coughing into emptiness, and it came A west wind from the plains with its arbitrary arsenal: Torn sails from the Ganga river, Bits of spurned silk, Strips of jute to be fashioned into lines, What words stake—sentence and make-believe, A lyric summoning.  II I came into this world in an Allahabad hospital, Close to a smelly cow pasture. I was brought to a barracks, with white walls And corrugated tin roof, Beside a civil aviation training center. In World War II officers were docketed there. I heard the twang of propellers, Jets pumping hot whorls of air, Heaven bent, Blessing my first home.  III In an open doorway, in half darkness I see a young woman standing. Her breasts are swollen with milk. She is transfixed, staring at a man, His hair gleaming with sweat, Trousers rolled up Stepping off his bicycle, Mustard bloom catches in his shirt. I do not know what she says to him, Or he to her, all that is utterly beyond me. Their infant once a clot of blood Is spectral still. Behind this family are vessels of brass Dotted with saffron, The trunk of a mango tree chopped into bits, Ready to be burnt at the household fire.  IV Through the portals of that larger chaos, What we can scarcely conceive of in our minds— We'd rather think of starry nights with biting flames Trapped inside tree trunks, a wellspring of desire Igniting men and gods, A lava storm where butterflies dance— Comes bloodletting at the borders, Severed tongues, riots in the capital, The unspeakable hurt of history: So the river Ganga pours into the sea.  V In aftermath—the elements of vocal awakening: Crud, spittle, snot, menstrual blistering, Also infant steps, a child's hunger, a woman's rage At the entrance to a kitchen, Her hands picking up vegetable shavings, chicken bones, Gold tossed from an ancestral keep. All this flows into me as mottled memory, Mixed with syllables of sweat, gashed syntax, Strands of burst bone in river sand, Beside the buried stones of Sarasvati Koop— Well of mystic sky-water where swans Dip their throats and come out dreaming.
My mother forgets to feed her animals because it's only fair. She rushes to them when she hears hoarse roosters crowing and billy goats butting over a last straw. This month the moon becomes a princess. The stars fan her, Jupiter pours cups of wine, Mars sings melancholy mawals. Bearded men holding prayer beads and yellow booklets stare at her and point aching fingers at her waist. In our house we break a fast with dates from Huun and glasses of buttermilk. Then on to bowls of lamb soup flavored with mint, trays of stuffed grape leaves, spiced fava beans drenched in olive oil and lemon juice. And that is only the beginning. The spirits of Johnny Walker and gin hide in the trunks of white Peugeots. In the nightclubs of my city, waiters serve only non-alcoholic beer and belly dancers cover themselves. Father of sixteen children, our neighbor visits bringing two kilos of baklava. He washes them down with a dozen demitasses of sweet sage tea. Before dawn he runs to one of his two wives, both named Salma, and loves her hurriedly, his hands barely touching a breast.
So I go to Ashenda to get some fix Shandar there playing his lute & a dark haired angel combing a violin I cry Anatolia! Anatolia! I'm a nightingale shrieking dawn's first flick I'm the unknown soldier singing it's me again I say one more & I'm ready for the Western World Then I'm at a bar with Lucinda & we're drooling on the body on discipline and the reign of Robespierre Then it's consummation time & I say hey there's a ram butting at the door & a widow's crying for something I say Lucinda I've got a drum in my belly & she says I'm a goddamn shivering eel Then it's polka on a South Dakota lawn Shandar doodling Shahrazad stomping by the window soaking up the light Then we all smoke Camels & Lucinda says I wish I could live without having to disown & I say yeah tell me more about that
Today the date palms were pruned, the branches taken before the fruit ripened, before sweetness littered the sidewalks. The man who sawed them worked alone, a crane lifting him to the yellowed fronds. Beside his truck, he stood tall, American, a pensive pioneer. The top of each palm looked like the back of a man's head after a close-crop haircut, the neck cooled to a stubbly remembrance of hair, or was like a cat after being spayed, startled by a strange newness, pacing familiar rooms, darting, confused, and you (had you wished to console) are greeted with a barren gaze. The rubble of bark and fronds reminded me of Iraq, not the ruined bridges, or the surrendering soldiers' hands begging food, but the 16 million date palms, one per capita, lining the seams of the Tigris and Euphrates, a reminder of my own Libya and its 10 million date palms and the years of easy wealth that brought them neglect except in Huun, a magical city where they stuffed dates with almonds and sent them as far as Tanta and Oum Dourman. From Huun this story: a boy stands by a palm imploring his uncle to toss him a fistful of dates. Flustered by the boy's monotonous cries the uncle loses his feet, and as he falls to his death, cries down "Here nephew, I'm coming down with the dates!" So that's what we got from Huun, almond stuffed wonders and proverbial last words. There was another reminder, a tale of the prophet Muhammad living for months on water and coarse wheat bread, his wives protesting the austere measures of his faith. Muhammad, who praised honey and had a professed love for cantaloupes, and who once declared "the best meat is that which lines the bones," found in dates the solution he required. To his Arab followers, and to his wives, the fruit was "three skies above luxury," and as indispensable as water and air. I once had this dream of Whitman: I found him under one of the palms on Sherman Way gazing admiring. Though he had seen palms by the Gulf of Mexico, he had never tasted a date. So we drove to a supermarket, and he who had been thoughtful, even dignified, until then, began to sign and moan at the taste of "Araby's sugared dust clouds." When we walked the aisles he insisted on pushing the cart. The frozen foods did not surprise him since his Granny buried potatoes in the cold dirt of her homestead. Still I had to explain tofu, plastic, tacos, and the foods labeled free. He ran his hands caressing the waxed floor; "Smooth as a girl's wrist," he exclaimed. The bright fluorescent lights reminded hirn of the opera, and Walt sang a gravelly tune. The children sitting in carts reached for him, their hands were Lorca's butterflies on his beard. At the cashier he filled pockets with candy, and was shocked by the headlines of our news. Honda, Toyota, Saturn, Oldsmobile— in the parking lot the names waltzed on his tongue. At the fast food stand he ate heartily, the burger's slipperiness amused him, and at his clumsiness we both had a laugh. Then the talk grew quiet, the table stretching like the expanse of time dividing us; I felt he no longer wanted company, having begun to understand our world. Despite his old resentment of Blacks, and now my neighbors, the foreign-born Hispanics and their engines roaring through Balboa and Saticoy, and the Koreans' karoake— the baseline's muffled thuds, voices doused in Canadian Mist, and the off-key pleadings to the lover who never comes—, America remained to him luminous-industrial-fuming- sublime, and as he wished, beyond others' adjectives, beyond what anyone could have conceived. Mumbling a farewell, Whitman stood to leave. And with this my dream ended, Whitman wishing to depart and I holding on to his wrists. All day I wanted to hold his wide wrists. If you drive west of Alexandria your path will run through Alamain, Barani, and Matrouh. Then Egypt will end with a town on a steep hill called Sallum. If you go through the two checkpoints, Libya will unfold its dry pastures for you. On the Sallum hill there is a hotel where people stay to await relatives crossing the border or to hear word if it is safe to return. Across the road a tired bluegreen tea house sits like a bruise permanently on the verge of fading from the prairies' skin. You will also see the money changers— all teenage boys. With their right hands they will wave thick wads of money at your windshield, and with their left they will jostle to give you the best rate. The last time I stayed in Sallum few cars came from either direction, and among the boys fights flared with curses and stones hurled at brows. When the boys' rabble grew loud a man lazily stepped out of the tea house to call them bastards and sons of whores. This went on for hours until the sun settled in the middle of the sky, the boys taking shelter under a torn canvas shed, and the man to the tea house's dusty cool. Then just when all movement and noise seemed to surrender to the September wind and heat, four of the boys broke for a run racing—money still clutched in their hands— to a young date palm in the distance. Pressing shoulders and backs against it, they shook the palm until the season's first fruit began to rain. The other boys joined them, and soon the tea house emptied of the men slouching inside. Those were my brothers who cowered beneath the date palm to gather handfuls of fruit, rubbing each date clean on their sleeves, chewing softly to savor the taste as though it were a good omen, and rising to resume their lives, on their faces the smiles of those who once were blessed.
I The sky here is American like the blue of your eyes; the folds of your eyelids the Hindu Kush mountain. The rich vein of the Hindu Kush only a stony ridge cutting across the parched soil of Afghanistan on which the primal play of progress comes to pass. II Locked in, its people: nomadic, peasant or simply pleasant, green-eyed, blue-eyed, brown-eyed or simply wide-eyed. Its great teacher: Noor Mohammad Taraki, the proud translator of great works into Pashto, Dari, Turkic and Uzbek. Its cities: Herat, Kabul, Kandahar. III Assuredly, the pilgrims descend the emerald-strewn Panjsher valley. They have come to water and tend a young tree. Time is at hand, for the unhurried descent of the Western offering, whose yellow parachute will slow its fall. And this tree, which will grow underneath the cluster bomb, will hold up the pomegranate to the blue sky. IV The tick tock and whirr of metal and material in the hidden azure vault of the air has so far unleashed the American ahistoricality upon the two tall Bamiyan Buddhas. Ordained stone must give way to bared rock face. Grieve not. Rejoice, for the spirit triumphs here. V When Kabul was as beautiful as Leningrad, when our hearts hadn't grown weary, when Taraki could take a stroll down the streets of Kabul with a confident smile, when he could still be Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky, when our erstwhile bachelor could enjoy the company of dancing girls like a mogul emperor, when the way forward was the way forward. VI The uncertain exile is never to Rome— no picture postcards of the coliseum to send home— but to a mud hovel among other mud hovels by the edge of the city of Islamabad. For the uncertain exile has nothing to do with the divine or with any other kind of comedy, but with what has remained or with what reminds: with the trace of terror that persists. VII In this part of the world the children know and have desires to be a martyr, to enter paradise, to leave this life. Of the twenty-nine different names for the garden, they know all twenty-nine by heart. For this part of the world began with a garden and will end as an open ditch piled up with bodies. VIII Grant me Antigone's strength to forbear for the sun has come unstuck from a blue sky gone black, stolen for effect, and the veiled moon stands in, for the mourning women standing next to platters of rice, signifying the historically sound end of forgetfulness, returning our agency to mourn the collaborations of the merchant capitalist class with the unlistening, ahistorical God. IX If only Gandhi's spinning wheel had spun a million yards of cloth we would have covered all our war dead. And as for tents, we would have built cities upon cities of tents to keep the rain out for all our refugees. And then and only then would we have mourned our war dead, mourned our war dead.
In the lull, the afternoon sun warms the linseed field. The flowers are quiet, their bright subdued in the green while the mind wanders to the emerald mosque upon the hill, built around a flowing spring, the easy absolutions and ablutions in that mosque where the spring water has been let loose to meander over marble courtyards and inner chambers, across the geometric, green-tiled floor that cools the heels of the faithful.
The unkempt beard of the fearsome mullah overwhelms the two aging poets from the periphery, the far-flung provinces of Iran and Iraq. They stand tiptoe, toe deep in the master culture, arguing in an emptying, narrowing hallway, in the high imperial language of their poetry, over what became of the muffled, cuffed bulbul or of the straw-stuffed, stone-eyed mynah, over the proper ornithology for the symbols of woe.
—at Dubai International Airport and ending with a line by César Vallejo Because I must walk  through the eye-shaped shadows cast by these  curved gold leaves thick atop each constructed  palm tree, past displays of silk scarves, lit  silhouettes of blue-bottled perfume—because  I grip, as though for the first time, a paper bag  of french fries from McDonald's, and lick, from each fingertip,  the fat and salt as I stand alone to the side of this moving  walkway gliding me past dark- eyed men who do not look  away when I stare squarely back—because standing  in line to the restroom I want only to pluck from her  black sweater this one shimmering blond hair clinging fast—  because I must rest the Coke, cold in my hand, beside this  toilet seat warmed by her thighs, her thighs, and hers.  Here, at the narrow mouth of this long, humid  corridor leading to the plane, I take my place among  this damp, dark horde of men and women who look like me—  because I look like them— because I am ashamed  of their bodies that reek so unabashedly of body—  because I can—because I am an American, a star
—Independence Day Celebration 2011, Dhaka  i. In a courtyard, in these stacks of chairs  before the empty stage—near arewe Lord, near and graspable. Lord,  accept these humble offerings: stacks of biscuits wrapped in cellophane,  stacks of bone in glass: thighbone, spine. Stacks of white saucers, porcelain  circles into which stacks of lip-worn cups slide neat. Jawbone, Lord. Galleries  of laminated clippings declaring war. Hands unstack chairs into rows. The dead:  they still go begging.
—at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka Let me break  free of these lace-frail  lilac fingers disrobing the black sky  from the windows of this  room, I sit helpless, waiting, silent—sister,  because you drew from me  the coil of red twine: loneliness— spooled inside—  once, I wanted to say one  true thing, as in, I want more in this
In our arteries and eyes, a hundred lightbulbs throb like drugs. The furnace: a permanent mishap. And up in the dusk, there is lucid debris— a conduit, a wire mask, a swastika of corn. Boy- and/or girl-small, we'll find some horizon, an intricate faking in which to lose way. Here we are, not speaking or dead. Here we are or dead. To what do we owe this forgetting not to kiss? Not that any given face is not afraid.
Don't let me down. Don't not let the day drown. Face your waste of time.  This is all. This is all you are. This is all you are allowed.
—“mu” forty-eighth part— “While we’re alive,” we kept  repeating. Tongues, throats, roofs of our mouths bone dry,  skeletons we’d someday  be...  Panicky masks we wore for  effect more than effect,  more real than we’d admit...  No longer wanting to know  what soul was, happy to see  shadow, know touch...  Happy to have sun at our  backs, way led by shadow,  happy to have bodies, block  light... Afternoon sun lighting leaf,  glint of glass, no matter what,  about to be out of body it  seemed...  Soon to be shadowless we thought,  said we thought, not to be offguard, caught out. Gray morning we   meant  to be done with, requiem so  sweet we forgot what it lamented,  teeth  turning to sugar, we  grinned    •    Day after day of the dead we were  desperate. Dark what the night  before we saw lit, bones we’d  eventually be... At day’s end a  new  tally but there it was, barely  begun,  rock the clock tower let go of,  iridescent headstone, moment’s  rebuff... Soul, we saw, said we  saw, invisible imprint. No one wanted to  know  what soul was... Day after day of  the dead we were deaf, numb to  what the night before we said moved  us,  fey light’s coded locale... I fell away,  we momentarily gone, deaf but to  brass’s obsequy, low brass’s  croon begun. I fell away, not fast,  floated,  momentary mention an accord  with the wind, day after day of the dead  the same as day before day of   the dead... “No surprise,” I fell away  muttering, knew no one would  hear,  not even me  •   We wore capes under which we were in sweaters out at the elbow.  Arms on the table, we chewed our  spoons...  Mouthing the blues, moaned an  abstract truth, kept eating. The  dead's morning-after buffet someone said it was. Feast of   the unfed said someone else... What  were we doing there the exegete  kept asking, adamant, uninvited,  morose...  Elbows in the air like wings, we  kept eating, rolled our eyes,  kept  shoveling it in... Day after day of the dead we were them. We  ate inexhaustibly, ate what wasn't  there,  dead no longer dying of thirst,  hung over, turned our noses up  to  what  was  ________________  It was me, we were it, insensate,  sugared sweat what what we drank tasted like. Even so, the tips of  our  tongues tasted nothing, we sipped without wincing... We ate cakes,  we ate fingernail soup, a new kind of  gazpacho, no one willing to say  what soul was... Knucklebone soufflé we ate, we ate gristle, eyes  we  took from flies flying backward  a kind of caviar, none of us wanting  to say  what soul was
–"mu" fifty-third part–    Some new Atlantis known as Lower Ninth we took leave of next, half the  turtle’s back away. Whole bodies  we saw floating, not only heads...  Endless letting go, endless looking  else-  where, endless turning out to be  otherwise... Woods all around where  we came to next. We’d been  eating wind, we’d been drinking  wind,  rumoring someone looked at God eye  to eye... In what seemed a dream but  we saw wasn’t we saw dirt sliding.  We were back and all the buildings  were gone. What were cliffs to us  we  wondered, blown dust of Bandiagara,  what the eroding precipice we saw... Ground  acorns ground our teeth now. All but  all gums, we were where the Alone  lived, came to a clearing lit by light  so  bright we staggered, Nub it was we knew  we were still in... The mountain of  the night a mound of nothing, Toulali’s  burr  what balm there was. Toulali’s burr what  balm, remote though it was, lifetimes behind us now... Voice laryngitic, lost  and lost again, blown grit rubbed it  away...  Someone had said something came to mind. Someone had sung something, what  its words were no one could say. Sang  it  bittersweet, more brusque than bitter,  song’s  cloth endowment stripped... Choric strain,  repeatedly slipped entablature. Given...  Given  endlessly again... No telling when but  intent on telling, no telling what. Wished  we  were home  again    •    Refugees was a word we’d heard, raw talk of soul insistent, adamant,  the nonsong we sang or the song  we nonsang, a word we’d heard we  heard  was us... Wept in our sleep, again one with what would never again be  there, raw talk rummaged our book,  the  backs of our hands written on with  cornmeal, the awaited ones reluctant  again...  The city of sad children’s outskirts we  were in, woods notwithstanding, woods  nonetheless, bright light the light we  saw  as we were jolted, raw talk spiraling  away...  We were there and somewhere else no  matter where we were, everywhere more  than where we were... Where the Alone  lived we donned abalone-shell ornaments,  light’s clarity conceded, night yet to relent,  Toulali  smoldered on, semisang, semispoke, wrestled  with his tongue it seemed... We trudged in place,  barely lifted our feet, backbeat hallowing  every step we took, moved us albeit we  stayed  put. We were where we were, somewhere  else no matter where, evacuees a word we’d  heard...  Stutter step, stuck shuffle, dancelike, Toulali’s  croon enticed us, toyed with us, ground gone  under  where we stood ______________  Day of the new dead or a new day of the dead, La Catrina had we been  farther south... One of us out  of Mexico remembered, with us  from  no one could say when... Day  of the new dead a new day of the   dead...  Wind in off the water blew us there.  A beat before. Beginning's beginning. Never to be there again... Beginning beaten  back, aboriginal. The Alone collecting  shells  on Lone Coast... They were the awaited  ones'  grudge not the awaited ones, the awaited  ones' wish not to be there... Grudge or its  ghost, grudge against going, grudge to've  been anywhere at all... Gnostic hostages  down  on all fours, then-again's beginning, beat  before  beginning be-  grudged  •  We were in the woods again circling, not far from Lone Coast, kids again,  wondered why anything was. The city of  sad children a mood swing away,  we  strode imagining nothing, redwoods  everywhere, muttered barely audibly,  “Nothing is, nothing ever was,”  chill  so intrinsic we shook... No lament was  it, not exactly insight, precocious not  quite what it was. Beginning's beginning it seemed we came abreast of, beginning's   beginning's ghost... We shivered, would've  shed  chill's incumbency had we been able,  close but absconded with, all but all   done,  sperichill we called it, numb... Had  there  been a song, had someone asked who  sang it, whitecaps rushing the beach  we'd have said, whitecapped anacrusis we'd  have said, long since there and gone...  Lower  Ninth had fallen off, protobeat, protobegin- ning, blow borne before it began borne again,  the one coast it all had become now crumbling,  world  edge, world rebuff... Circling no end it seemed,  except we stopped, stood looking at the sunlight  streaming in. Churchical some would've said but  we resisted, felt it that way but wanted not to. Not  was  no guarantee... Circling no end it seemed... Same crowded  same  crowded same, ad infinitum, beginning's  beginning's bluff ______________
—“mu” sixty-first part—   Gray morning, blue morning, a feather blown between. Mashed  earth incumbent, gone up from,  never  more naked if ever to be naked,  brink what it was to be on...  Where next we came stick-figure  people greeted us. Abstract  was abstract, also something else. Line,  shape, extension each other  than itself, of number we’d have  said the same... Aspect arrested  us, riveted we stood... Stick-  figure epiphany held us in our  tracks,  everyone’s bones in full view...  Gray  morning, blue morning, an unheard string between. Bad heads’ morning  reluctance, ennui’s next-day dispatch...  We  were chill, shiver, exegetic sweat, backed-  up interpreters put upon by sluff, none of us could say what was what. Pale  admonishment poised upon lack,  like  to unlike, pale strain recumbent, re-  combinant, rude amniotic straw...  Took leave, leave long since taken,  awoke  to what would otherwise not have been. We contested birth, we wanted to be pre-  andoumboulouous, done-dead gnostics  again...  Sound bubbled up, it kept bubbling, sonic  residue, sonic remit. A fickle sonance, fraught sonance, warning we knew nothing,  stick-figure entourage otherwise issue-  less, beginning to be remiss it seemed...  Erst-  while ecstatics’ lapsed enchantment, trance  gone none could say since when...  Ghost  of what lifted us, ghost what lifted us,  erstwhile  enchantment between... Fell back, full-out  extended. Pilgrim someone called me, I said  no, then I said yes... Brax was on the box was what it was, toned uncertainty Stick-figure  counsel all air, edge, angle, down from where  we’d  been and we were again where the Alone lived,  adage, had it not been so abstract, it might’ve  been... Long day of the abalone-shell sunset...  Stood  among redwoods expecting the worst... What  was of note and what abjured nothing. What  was  all, none, one, all the  same  _________________  It was a ghost of a trance. I was a guest of the trance. What went on we  blamed on the ghost... It was the  ghost of a trance, each of us a   guest  of the trance. No two times were the  same...  When we hit a wrong not we said  nothing. When we hit the right note  we said so what... Tell my horse,  we were told, fluke solace, horse  we  were mounted by... What was done  was done by the ghost, gray morning,  blue  morning, eternity be-  tween  _________________  Told my horse we would gather at  Nod House, down drinks at the  no-host bar. Dirt was in the drinks  we  drank, planet sludge. Double-take told its horse whoa, told it unwhoa,  back and forth and back without  end... Talk spun our heads,  told  our horses ride on. Unresolved  which to insist on, stick with. Could it  whoa unwhoa's ramble unresolved...  Spinning heads made us feel we sat on  swivel  seats... Double-take talked us in,  took us in  _________________  Sat again at the same table, no two  times the same, twinship long since  gone. Leaned back, the back legs of our chairs broke, Nod House Nub's  new  address... A straining look made our  faces look raw, made our skin flush...  Dreamt each other's dream, donned  each  other's costume, hosted one another,  one  stepped in as  one stepped  out
Came now to another crossroads. Stick people stood awaiting us, to  the left, straight ahead, to the right.  What was that song you sang,  they  asked, spoke without sound sound’s  immanence, not without song but only one song, the one song summon­-  ing song’s eclipse... The one song  sang  song’s inconsequence, crooned it  could not’ve been otherwise, song  song’s own lament... The one  song sang song’s irrelevance, we  were  exhausted, we looked straight ahead,  left,  right. The stick people’s question fa­-  tigued us, glyphed riddle whose decipherment they said we’d someday  be,  exegetes against our will... Lack,  reluctance, pallor, eidolon. Crossroads cryptogram, they themselves were sing-  ­ing, nothing not what could be seen they  said,  soul not sign if not eyelight, song more  what could be seen than they could say, wan unwillingness they said... Slick  stick  people, tricky, soul a sick thing they said... Signs all said Stick City. Stick City straight  ahead, to the left, to the right, signs pointed  every  which way... Stick sublimity sent us reeling,  a we that wasn’t we against one that was. Mass, intangible we it was we were, beads thrown off  in a row... We’d have given anything to get to  Stick  City and there we were. Whatever way we  took would take us there. Stick City loomed  ahead and to the left and to the right, any which  way but in back of us, Stick City meant no turning back... Signs all said Stick City. We  read  them all out loud, “Stick City.” “Styxicity,”  Itamar  quipped... It wasn’t water we crossed, it wasn’t  hell we were in. Stick City housed our hearts’ desires we were told, Stick City stood without  end or assistance, line long since what stuck...  Line  was all point, point all extensity, stick’s own  deictic drop... No longer point less point than  point’s target, Stick City made them one and the  same... So it was on to where the signs said next,  Stick  the one place we were yet to arrive at, Diddie Wa  Diddie’s twin. A winding road it now was we were  on, so curved we could see our backs. No work,  no worry up ahead we heard, music’s utopic  stir...  Hogs lay stuck with knives and forks, chickens  likewise we heard. A wall of beats for backup, Stick  City  way off somewhere... As quick as that we were there, Stick City. It wasn’t the way we heard it was. Everyone  limped, walked with a cane, no way how we heard it  was...  As quick as that there we were. Stick City lay before  us, lied about. Legbaland it might’ve been... Diddie Wa  Diddie’s non-identical twin if twin it was, no way the  way  we heard it  was •  Stick-figure escorts ushered us in, pointed out what was what. Stick  people's gait was flawless, they  said, unstick people limped on  sticks...  A strand of horsehair lay in the  road, hair from a horse's tail. Come rain it became a snake, would-be stick  though  Stick City said no... It was getting  to  be late again, the arcade's light less intense... Come night we lay under  a horse, shouted voiceless trying  to wake each other up and woke up,  coiled  hair stiffened with earwax, as if at last  we were Stick City's own... Not so we saw soon enough. No home, no  haven was it, noise what of it we could  keep...  West L.A. it might've been, Saint-Pierre  it might've been wélélé no matter where  we were... Stick symphony. Ictic sashay... Head bob atop watery neck, nod homage,  noise,  names came loose. What of it we kept we  kept in name only, “Stick City” ours  to hold on to. Chance it might've meant,  I Ching, no place but we were long since  gone...  Where sign had been sound X marked it,  stick bisected stick. Signal some said, noise's  alternate, half where we were nowhere near  where we were, were where's discontent... It was getting  to be light again, noise the new day's largesse.  Sound was what sign turned out from, sound  itself exed out... What the song was we sang  no  longer what we were asked, stick inquisitors gathered, mum to the bone. Frown, furrowed  brow, grimace the glyphs met us, faces  lined up in a row. Line was what pressed us,  point egged us on, what the song was we  sang  no song we sang, what the song was we sang  moot... The strand-of-horsehair-become-a-snake became a rope around our necks, rope what the   song we sang was. We'd have given anything  to  say Stick City was where we were... Breath it  was  we gave, rope round our necks... We were neck- less, bobbing heads, barbershop xtet, calabashes  hit with sticks. Whatever we were, whatever  noise there was we made ours. “This is our  dispatch,” we said... Euphemistic necktie,  eu-  phemistic float. Horsehair tickling the tops of our throats. Wet, euphemistic scruff... As it was  getting to be noon we got our necks and bodies  back. A cartoon watch dog bit us, a pinscher  with  painted lips. We were stick people now, initiates.  Stick  legs only a blur, we were running, pant legs and hem- lines ripped... Cross. Chiliasm. Crisis. Stick bisected  stick. More hopeless the less we needed it, less  real the more shot with stick vaccine, less real the  more  stick we were... Stick inquisitors fell away as we went  in. Stick City disappeared as we ran deeper. Too  late to turn back, we were twigs, kindling, dispatch  gone  up in smoke... We were jíbaros, hicks, cuatro ping  in  back of us, howled, “Aylelolay lolelay.” We stood absorbed in what felt like advent. We stood on a plane  cut thru an adverse cone. Low, rummaging burr, the  sound we sought sought us, we the make-believe dead  more dead than we knew... Syllabic run was more alive than we  were, bass clack bugling disaster, brute sun outside the  nod  house door  ______________  Crossroads though it was it seemed an impasse, stick as in stuck we thought. Stick  as in stone's accomplice, Quag's bone-  yard remit... Insofar as there was an  I it fell in, a brass bell's everted lips  now  convergent, shush we were hollowed by.  Insofar as there was an I it was as each of us  insisted, as far as there was an I, stick  beating stick, there was an X... Crux...  Cross...  Crutch... Legs' Osirian soulstrut lost,  Legbaland it was and we limped on, limped  in, Stick City's outskirts endless it  seemed, no matter we leaned on sticks...  Were  there an I it stood like a stick, mum-stuff  crossing itself. Insofar as there was  an I it was an X taking shape, there but to be gone if not no sooner there than gone,  glass  house holding its own  ______________  We knew we wore skeleton suits. We knew we walked holding placards. “Dead from  Day One" they read, part requiem, part  rebuke... What lay around us had the  sound  of steam. Low-motion lurk. Time-lapse cascade.  Stick City city limits notwithstanding, glass  intangibles allowed what was lost otherwise,  gripless  in the house outside the house... It slipped  away and we slipped away and it slipped away,  Stick  City a mirage nod concocted, not to be be-  lieved but we did though it receded, nod Nub's  emic  retreat
Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase; Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn; Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him. ‘Thrice fairer than myself,’ thus she began, ‘The field’s chief flower, sweet above compare, Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man, More white and red than doves or roses are; Nature that made thee, with herself at strife, Saith that the world hath ending with thy life. ‘Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed, And rein his proud head to the saddle-bow; If thou wilt deign this favour, for thy meed A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know: Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses; And being set, I’ll smother thee with kisses: ‘And yet not cloy thy lips with loath’d satiety, But rather famish them amid their plenty, Making them red and pale with fresh variety; Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty: A summer’s day will seem an hour but short, Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.’ With this she seizeth on his sweating palm, The precedent of pith and livelihood, And, trembling in her passion, calls it balm, Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good: Being so enrag’d, desire doth lend her force Courageously to pluck him from his horse. Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein Under her other was the tender boy, Who blush’d and pouted in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy; She red and hot as coals of glowing fire He red for shame, but frosty in desire. The studded bridle on a ragged bough Nimbly she fastens;--O! how quick is love:-- The steed is stalled up, and even now To tie the rider she begins to prove: Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust, And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust. So soon was she along, as he was down, Each leaning on their elbows and their hips: Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown, And ‘gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips; And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken, ‘If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open.’ He burns with bashful shame; she with her tears Doth quench the maiden burning of his cheeks; Then with her windy sighs and golden hairs To fan and blow them dry again she seeks: He saith she is immodest, blames her miss; What follows more she murders with a kiss. Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast, Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone, Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste, Till either gorge be stuff’d or prey be gone; Even so she kiss’d his brow, his cheek, his chin, And where she ends she doth anew begin. Forc’d to content, but never to obey, Panting he lies, and breatheth in her face; She feedeth on the steam, as on a prey, And calls it heavenly moisture, air of grace; Wishing her cheeks were gardens full of flowers So they were dewd with such distilling showers. Look! how a bird lies tangled in a net, So fasten’d in her arms Adonis lies; Pure shame and aw’d resistance made him fret, Which bred more beauty in his angry eyes: Rain added to a river that is rank Perforce will force it overflow the bank. Still she entreats, and prettily entreats, For to a pretty ear she tunes her tale; Still is he sullen, still he lours and frets, ‘Twixt crimson shame and anger ashy-pale; Being red she loves him best; and being white, Her best is better’d with a more delight. Look how he can, she cannot choose but love; And by her fair immortal hand she swears, From his soft bosom never to remove, Till he take truce with her contending tears, Which long have rain’d, making her cheeks all wet; And one sweet kiss shall pay this countless debt. Upon this promise did he raise his chin Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave, Who, being look’d on, ducks as quickly in; So offers he to give what she did crave; But when her lips were ready for his pay, He winks, and turns his lips another way. Never did passenger in summer’s heat More thirst for drink than she for this good turn. Her help she sees, but help she cannot get; She bathes in water, yet her fire must burn: ‘O! pity,’ ‘gan she cry, ‘flint-hearted boy: ‘Tis but a kiss I beg; why art thou coy? ‘I have been woo’d, as I entreat thee now, Even by the stern and direful god of war, Whose sinewy neck in battle ne’er did bow, Who conquers where he comes in every jar; Yet hath he been my captive and my slave, And begg’d for that which thou unask’d shalt have. ‘Over my altars hath he hung his lance, His batter’d shield, his uncontrolled crest, And for my sake hath learn’d to sport and dance To toy, to wanton, dally, smile, and jest; Scorning his churlish drum and ensign red Making my arms his field, his tent my bed. ‘Thus he that overrul’d I oversway’d, Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain: Strong-temper’d steel his stronger strength obey’d, Yet was he servile to my coy disdain. O! be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, For mastering her that foil’d the god of fight. Touch but my lips with those falr lips of thine,-- Though mine be not so fair, yet are they red,-- The kiss shall be thine own as well as mine: What seest thou in the ground? hold up thy head: Look in mine eyeballs, there thy beauty lies; Then why not lips on lips, since eyes in eyes? ‘Art thou asham’d to kiss? then wink again, And I will wink; so shall the day seem night; Love keeps his revels where there are but twain; Be bold to play, our sport is not in sight: These blue-vein’d violets whereon we lean Never can blab, nor know not what we mean. ‘The tender spring upon thy tempting lip Shows thee unripe, yet mayst thou well be tasted: Make use of time, let not advantage slip; Beauty within itself should not be wasted: Fair flowers that are not gather’d in their prime Rot and consume themselves in little time. ‘Were I hard-favour’d, foul, or wrinkled-old, Ill-nurtur’d, crooked, churlish, harsh in voice, O’erworn, despised, rheumatic, and cold, Thick-sighted, barren, lean, and lacking juice, Then mightst thou pause, for then I were not for thee; But having no defects, why dost abhor me? ‘Thou canst not see one winkle in my brow; Mine eyes are grey and bright, and quick in turning; My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow; My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning; My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt. Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt. ‘Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, Or like a fairy, trip upon the green, Or, like a nymph, with long dishevell’d hair, Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen: Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire. ‘Witness this primrose bank whereon I lie; These forceless flowers like sturdy trees support me; Two strengthless doves will draw me through the sky, From morn till night, even where I list to sport me: Is love so light, sweet boy, and may it be That thou shouldst think it heavy unto thee? ‘Is thine own heart to shine own face affected? Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left? Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected, Steal thine own freedom, and complain on theft. Narcissus so himself himself forsook, And died to kiss his shadow in the brook. ‘Torches are made to light, jewels to wear, Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use, Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear; Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse: Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty; Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty. ‘Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed, Unless the earth with thy increase be fed? By law of nature thou art bound to breed, That thine may live when thou thyself art dead; And so in spite of death thou dost survive, In that thy likeness still is left alive.’ By this the love-sick queen began to sweat, For where they lay the shadow had forsook them, And Titan, tired in the mid-day heat With burning eye did hotly overlook them, Wishing Adonis had his team to guide, So he were like him and by Venus’ side. And now Adonis with a lazy spright, And with a heavy, dark, disliking eye, His louring brows o’erwhelming his fair sight, Like misty vapours when they blot the sky, Souring his cheeks, cries, ‘Fie! no more of love: The sun doth burn my face; I must remove.’ ‘Ay me,’ quoth Venus, ‘young, and so unkind! What bare excuses mak’st thou to be gone! I’ll sigh celestial breath, whose gentle wind Shall cool the heat of this descending sun: I’ll make a shadow for thee of my hairs; If they burn too, I’ll quench them with my tears. ‘The sun that shines from heaven shines but warm, And lo! I lie between that sun and thee: The heat I have from thence doth little harm, Thine eye darts forth the fire that burneth me; And were I not immortal, life were done Between this heavenly and earthly sun. ‘Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel? Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth: Art thou a woman’s son, and canst not feel What ‘tis to love? how want of love tormenteth? O! had thy mother borne so hard a mind, She had not brought forth thee, but died unkind. ‘What am I that thou shouldst contemn me this? Or what great danger dwells upon my suit? What were thy lips the worse for one poor kiss? Speak, fair; but speak fair words, or else be mute: Give me one kiss, I’ll give it thee again, And one for interest if thou wilt have twain. ‘Fie! lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, Well-painted idol, image dull and dead, Statue contenting but the eye alone, Thing like a man, but of no woman bred: Thou art no man, though of a man’s complexion, For men will kiss even by their own direction.’ This said, impatience chokes her pleading tongue, And swelling passion doth provoke a pause; Red cheeks and fiery eyes blaze forth her wrong; Being judge in love, she cannot right her cause: And now she weeps, and now she fain would speak, And now her sobs do her intendments break. Sometimes she shakes her head, and then his hand; Now gazeth she on him, now on the ground; Sometimes her arms infold him like a band: She would, he will not in her arms be bound; And when from thence he struggles to be gone, She locks her lily fingers one in one. ‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. ‘Within this limit is relief enough, Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough, To shelter thee from tempest and from rain: Then be my deer, since I am such a park; No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’ At this Adonis smiles as in disdain, That in each cheek appears a pretty dimple: Love made those hollows, if himself were slain, He might be buried in a tomb so simple; Foreknowing well, if there he came to lie, Why, there Love liv’d, and there he could not die. These lovely caves, these round enchanting pits, Open’d their mouths to swallow Venus’ liking. Being mad before, how doth she now for wits? Struck dead at first, what needs a second striking? Poor queen of love, in thine own law forlorn, To love a cheek that smiles at thee in scorn! Now which way shall she turn? what shall she say? Her words are done, her woes the more increasing; The time is spent, her object will away, And from her twining arms doth urge releasing: ‘Pity,’ she cries; ‘some favour, some remorse!’ Away he springs, and hasteth to his horse. But lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by, A breeding jennet, lusty, young, and proud, Adonis’ tramping courier doth espy, And forth she rushes, snorts and neighs aloud: The strong-neck’d steed, being tied unto a tree, Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he. Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds, And now his woven girths he breaks asunder; The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds, Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven’s thunder; The iron bit he crusheth ‘tween his teeth, Controlling what he was controlled with. His ears up-prick’d; his braided hanging mane Upon his compass’d crest now stand on end; His nostrils drink the air, and forth again, As from a furnace, vapours doth he send: His eye, which scornfully glisters like fire, Shows his hot courage and his high desire. Sometime he trots, as if he told the steps, With gentle majesty and modest pride; Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps, As who should say, ‘Lo! thus my strength is tried; And this I do to captivate the eye Of the fair breeder that is standing by.’ What recketh he his rider’s angry stir, His flattering ‘Holla’, or his ‘Stand, I say’? What cares he now for curb or pricking spur? For rich caparisons or trapping gay? He sees his love, and nothing else he sees, Nor nothing else with his proud sight agrees. Look, when a painter would surpass the life, In limning out a well-proportion’d steed, His art with nature’s workmanship at strife, As if the dead the living should exceed; So did this horse excel a common one, In shape, in courage, colour, pace and bone. Round-hoof’d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide, High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong, Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide: Look, what a horse should have he did not lack, Save a proud rider on so proud a back. Sometimes he scuds far off, and there he stares; Anon he starts at stirring of a feather; To bid the wind a base he now prepares, And whe’r he run or fly they know not whether; For through his mane and tail the high wind sings, Fanning the hairs, who wave like feather’d wings. He looks upon his love, and neighs unto her; She answers him as if she knew his mind; Being proud, as females are, to see him woo her, She puts on outward strangeness, seems unkind, Spurns at his love and scorns the heat he feels, Beating his kind embracements with her heels. Then, like a melancholy malcontent, He vails his tail, that, like a falling plume, Cool shadow to his melting buttock lent: He stamps, and bites the poor flies in his fume. His love, perceiving how he is enrag’d, Grew kinder, and his fury was assuag’d. His testy master goeth about to take him; When lo! the unback’d breeder, full of fear, Jealous of catching, swiftly doth forsake him, With her the horse, and left Adonis there: As they were mad, unto the wood they hie them, Outstripping crows that strive to overfly them. All swoln with chafing, down Adonis sits, Banning his boisterous and unruly beast: And now the happy season once more fits, That love-sick Love by pleading may be blest; For lovers say, the heart hath treble wrong When it is barr’d the aidance of the tongue. An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d, Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage: So of concealed sorrow may be said; Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage; But when the heart’s attorney once is mute The client breaks, as desperate in his suit. He sees her coming, and begins to glow,-- Even as a dying coal revives with wind,-- And with his bonnet hides his angry brow; Looks on the dull earth with disturbed mind, Taking no notice that she is so nigh, For all askance he holds her in his eye. O! what a sight it was, wistly to view How she came stealing to the wayward boy; To note the fighting conflict of her hue, How white and red each other did destroy: But now her cheek was pale, and by and by It flash’d forth fire, as lightning from the sky. Now was she just before him as he sat, And like a lowly lover down she kneels; With one fair hand she heaveth up his hat, Her other tender hand his fair cheek feels: His tenderer cheek receives her soft hand’s print, As apt as new-fall’n snow takes any dint. O! what a war of looks was then between them; Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing; His eyes saw her eyes as they had not seen them; Her eyes woo’d still, his eyes disdain’d the wooing: And all this dumb play had his acts made plain With tears, which, chorus-like, her eyes did rain. Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow, Or ivory in an alabaster band; So white a friend engirts so white a foe: This beauteous combat, wilful and unwilling, Show’d like two silver doves that sit a-billing. Once more the engine of her thoughts began: ‘O fairest mover on this mortal round, Would thou wert as I am, and I a man, My heart all whole as thine, thy heart my wound; For one sweet look thy help I would assure thee, Though nothing but my body’s bane would cure thee.’ ‘Give me my hand,’ saith he, ‘why dost thou feel it?’ ‘Give me my heart,’ saith she, ‘and thou shalt have it; O! give it me, lest thy hard heart do steel it, And being steel’d, soft sighs can never grave it: Then love’s deep groans I never shall regard, Because Adonis’ heart hath made mine hard.’ ‘For shame,’ he cries, ‘let go, and let me go; My day’s delight is past, my horse is gone, And ‘tis your fault I am bereft him so: I pray you hence, and leave me here alone: For all my mind, my thought, my busy care, Is how to get my palfrey from the mare.’ Thus she replies: ‘Thy palfrey, as he should, Welcomes the warm approach of sweet desire: Affection is a coal that must be cool’d; Else, suffer’d, it will set the heart on fire: The sea hath bounds, but deep desire hath none; Therefore no marvel though thy horse be gone. ‘How like a Jade he stood, tied to the tree, Servilely master’d with a leathern rein! But when he saw his love, his youth’s fair fee, He held such petty bondage in disdain; Throwing the base thong from his bending crest, Enfranchising his mouth, his back, his breast. ‘Who sees his true-love in her naked bed, Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white, But, when his glutton eye so full hath fed, His other agents aim at like delight? Who is so faint, that dare not be so bold To touch the fire, the weather being cold? ‘Let me excuse thy courser, gentle boy; And learn of him, I heartily beseech thee, To take advantage on presented joy Though I were dumb, yet his proceedings teach thee. O learn to love, the lesson is but plain, And once made perfect, never lost again. ‘I know not love,’ quoth he, ‘nor will not know it, Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it; ‘Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it; My love to love is love but to disgrace it; For I have heard it is a life in death, That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath. ‘Who wears a garment shapeless and unfinish’d? Who plucks the bud before one leaf put forth? If springing things be any jot diminish’d, They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth; The colt that’s back’d and burden’d being young Loseth his pride, and never waxeth strong. ‘You hurt my hand with wringing. Let us part, And leave this idle theme, this bootless chat: Remove your siege from my unyielding heart; To love’s alarms it will not ope the gate: Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery; For where a heart is hard they make no battery.’ ‘What! canst thou talk?’ quoth she, ‘hast thou a tongue? O! would thou hadst not, or I had no hearing; Thy mermaid’s voice hath done me double wrong; I had my load before, now press’d with bearing: Melodious discord, heavenly tune, harsh-sounding, Ear’s deep-sweet music, and heart’s deep-sore wounding. ‘Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love That inward beauty and invisible; Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move Each part in me that were but sensible: Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see, Yet should I be in love by touching thee. ‘Say, that the sense of feeling were bereft me, And that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch, And nothing but the very smell were left me, Yet would my love to thee be still as much; For from the stillitory of thy face excelling Comes breath perfum’d that breedeth love by smelling. ‘But O! what banquet wert thou to the taste, Being nurse and feeder of the other four; Would they not wish the feast might ever last, And bid Suspicion double-lock the door, Lest Jealousy, that sour unwelcome guest, Should, by his stealing in, disturb the feast?’ Once more the ruby-colour’d portal open’d, Which to his speech did honey passage yield, Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken’d Wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds, Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds. This ill presage advisedly she marketh: Even as the wind is hush’d before it raineth, Or as the wolf doth grin before he barketh, Or as the berry breaks before it staineth, Or like the deadly bullet of a gun, His meaning struck her ere his words begun. And at his look she flatly falleth down For looks kill love, and love by looks reviveth; A smile recures the wounding of a frown; But blessed bankrupt, that by love so thriveth! The silly boy, believing she is dead Claps her pale cheek, till clapping makes it red; And all amaz’d brake off his late intent, For sharply he did think to reprehend her, Which cunning love did wittily prevent: Fair fall the wit that can so well defend her! For on the grass she lies as she were slain Till his breath breatheth life in her again. He wrings her nose, he strikes her on the cheeks, He bends her fingers, holds her pulses hard, He chafes her lips; a thousand ways he seeks To mend the hurt that his unkindness marr’d: He kisses her; and she, by her good will, Will never rise, so he will kiss her still. The night of sorrow now is turn’d to day: Her two blue windows faintly she up-heaveth, Like the fair sun, when in his fresh array He cheers the morn, and all the world relieveth: And as the bright sun glorifies the sky, So is her face illumin’d with her eye; Whose beams upon his hairless face are fix’d, As if from thence they borrow’d all their shine. Were never four such lamps together mix’d, Had not his clouded with his brow’s repine; But hers, which through the crystal tears gave light Shone like the moon in water seen by night. ‘O! where am I?’ quoth she, ‘in earth or heaven, Or in the ocean drench’d, or in the fire? What hour is this? or morn or weary even? Do I delight to die, or life desire? But now I liv’d, and life was death’s annoy; But now I died, and death was lively joy. ‘O! thou didst kill me; kill me once again: Thy eyes’ shrewd tutor, that hard heart of thine, Hath taught them scornful tricks, and such disdain, That they have murder’d this poor heart of mine; And these mine eyes, true leaders to their queen, But for thy piteous lips no more had seen. ‘Long may they kiss each other for this cure! O! never let their crimson liveries wear; And as they last, their verdure still endure, To drive infection from the dangerous year: That the star-gazers, having writ on death, May say, the plague is banish’d by thy breath. ‘Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted, What bargains may I make, still to be sealing? To sell myself I can be well contented, So thou wilt buy and pay and use good dealing; Which purchase if thou make, for fear of slips Set thy seal-manual on my wax-red lips. ‘A thousand kisses buys my heart from me; And pay them at thy leisure, one by one. What is ten hundred touches unto thee? Are they not quickly told and quickly gone? Say, for non-payment that the debt should double, Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble?’ ‘Fair queen,’ quoth he, ‘if any love you owe me, Measure my strangeness with my unripe years: Before I know myself, seek not to know me; No fisher but the ungrown fry forbears: The mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast, Or being early pluck’d is sour to taste. ‘Look! the world’s comforter, with weary gait His day’s hot task hath ended in the west; The owl, night’s herald, shrieks, ‘tis very late; The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest, And coal-black clouds that shadow heaven’s light Do summon us to part, and bid good night. ‘Now let me say good night, and so say you; If you will say so, you shall have a kiss.’ ‘Good night,’ quoth she; and ere he says adieu, The honey fee of parting tender’d is: Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace; Incorporate then they seem, face grows to face. Till, breathless, he disjoin’d, and backward drew The heavenly moisture, that sweet coral mouth, Whose precious taste her thirsty lips well knew, Whereon they surfeit, yet complain on drouth: He with her plenty press’d, she faint with dearth, Their lips together glu’d, fall to the earth. Now quick desire hath caught the yielding prey, And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth; Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey, Paying what ransom the insulter willeth; Whose vulture thought doth pitch the price so high, That she will draw his lips’ rich treasure dry. And having felt the sweetness of the spoil, With blindfold fury she begins to forage; Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil, And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage; Planting oblivion, beating reason back, Forgetting shame’s pure blush and honour’s wrack. Hot, faint, and weary, with her hard embracing, Like a wild bird being tam’d with too much handling, Or as the fleet-foot roe that’s tir’d with chasing, Or like the froward infant still’d with dandling, He now obeys, and now no more resisteth, While she takes all she can, not all she listeth. What wax so frozen but dissolves with tempering, And yields at last to every light impression? Things out of hope are compass’d oft with venturing, Chiefly in love, whose leave exceeds commission: Affection faints not like a pale-fac’d coward, But then woos best when most his choice is froward. When he did frown, O! had she then gave over, Such nectar from his lips she had not suck’d. Foul words and frowns must not repel a lover; What though the rose have prickles, yet ‘tis pluck’d: Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast, Yet love breaks through and picks them all at last. For pity now she can no more detain him; The poor fool prays her that he may depart: She is resolv’d no longer to restrain him, Bids him farewell, and look well to her heart, The which, by Cupid’s bow she doth protest, He carries thence incaged in his breast. ‘Sweet boy,’ she says, ‘this night I’ll waste in sorrow, For my sick heart commands mine eyes to watch. Tell me, Love’s master, shall we meet to-morrow Say, shall we? shall we? wilt thou make the match?’ He tells her, no; to-morrow he intends To hunt the boar with certain of his friends. ‘The boar!’ quoth she; whereat a sudden pale, Like lawn being spread upon the blushing rose, Usurps her cheeks, she trembles at his tale, And on his neck her yoking arms she throws: She sinketh down, still hanging by his neck, He on her belly falls, she on her back. Now is she in the very lists of love, Her champion mounted for the hot encounter: All is imaginary she doth prove, He will not manage her, although he mount her; That worse than Tantalus’ is her annoy, To clip Elysium and to lack her joy. Even as poor birds, deceiv’d with painted grapes, Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw, Even so she languisheth in her mishaps, As those poor birds that helpless berries saw. The warm effects which she in him finds missing, She seeks to kindle with continual kissing. But all in vain, good queen, it will not be: She hath assay’d as much as may be prov’d; Her pleading hath deserv’d a greater fee; She’s Love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d. ‘Fie, fie!’ he says, ‘you crush me; let me go; You have no reason to withhold me so.’ ‘Thou hadst been gone,’ quoth she, ‘sweet boy, ere this, But that thou told’st me thou wouldst hunt the boar. O! be advis’d; thou know’st not what it is With javelin’s point a churlish swine to gore, Whose tushes never sheath’d he whetteth still, Like to a mortal butcher, bent to kill. ‘On his bow-back he hath a battle set Of bristly pikes, that ever threat his foes; His eyes like glow-worms shine when he doth fret; His snout digs sepulchres where’er he goes; Being mov’d, he strikes whate’er is in his way, And whom he strikes his crooked tushes slay. ‘His brawny sides, with hairy bristles arm’d, Are better proof than thy spear’s point can enter; His short thick neck cannot be easily harm’d; Being ireful, on the lion he will venture: The thorny brambles and embracing bushes, As fearful of him, part, through whom he rushes. ‘Alas! he nought esteems that face of thine, To which Love’s eyes pay tributary gazes; Nor thy soft hands, sweet lips, and crystal eyne, Whose full perfection all the world amazes; But having thee at vantage, wondrous dread! Would root these beauties as he roots the mead. ‘O! let him keep his loathsome cabin still; Beauty hath nought to do with such foul fiends: Come not within his danger by thy will; They that thrive well take counsel of their friends. When thou didst name the boar, not to dissemble, I fear’d thy fortune, and my joints did tremble. ‘Didst thou not mark my face? was it not white? Saw’st thou not signs of fear lurk in mine eye? Grew I not faint? And fell I not downright? Within my bosom, whereon thou dost lie, My boding heart pants, beats, and takes no rest, But, like an earthquake, shakes thee on my breast. ‘For where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection’s sentinel; Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny, And in a peaceful hour doth cry "Kill, kill!" Distempering gentle Love in his desire, As air and water do abate the fire. ‘This sour informer, this bate-breeding spy, This canker that eats up Love’s tender spring, This carry-tale, dissentious Jealousy, That sometime true news, sometime false doth bring, Knocks at my heart, and whispers in mine ear That if I love thee, I thy death should fear: ‘And more than so, presenteth to mine eye The picture of an angry-chafing boar, Under whose sharp fangs on his back doth lie An image like thyself, all stain’d with gore; Whose blood upon the fresh flowers being shed Doth make them droop with grief and hang the head. ‘What should I do, seeing thee so indeed, That tremble at the imagination? The thought of it doth make my faint heart bleed, And fear doth teach it divination: I prophesy thy death, my living sorrow, If thou encounter with the boar to-morrow. ‘But if thou needs wilt hunt, be rul’d by me; Uncouple at the timorous flying hare, Or at the fox which lives by subtilty, Or at the roe which no encounter dare: Pursue these fearful creatures o’er the downs, And on thy well-breath’d horse keep with thy hound. ‘And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles How he outruns the winds, and with what care He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles: The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. ‘Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell, And sometime where earth-delving conies keep, To stop the loud pursuers in their yell, And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer; Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear: ‘For there his smell with others being mingled, The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled With much ado the cold fault cleanly out; Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies, As if another chase were in the skies. ‘By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear, To hearken if his foes pursue him still: Anon their loud alarums he doth hear; And now his grief may be compared well To one sore sick that hears the passing bell. ‘Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way; Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch, Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay: For misery is trodden on by many, And being low never reliev’d by any. ‘Lie quietly, and hear a little more; Nay, do not struggle, for thou shalt not rise: To make thee hate the hunting of the boar, Unlike myself thou hear’st me moralize, Applying this to that, and so to so; For love can comment upon every woe. ‘Where did I leave?’ ‘No matter where,’ quoth he ‘Leave me, and then the story aptly ends: The night is spent,’ ‘Why, what of that?’ quoth she. ‘I am,’ quoth he, ‘expected of my friends; And now ‘tis dark, and going I shall fall.’ ‘In night,’ quoth she, ‘desire sees best of all.’ But if thou fall, O! then imagine this, The earth, in love with thee, thy footing trips, And all is but to rob thee of a kiss. Rich preys make true men thieves; so do thy lips Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn, Lest she should steal a kiss and die forsworn. ‘Now of this dark night I perceive the reason: Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shine Till forging Nature be condemn’d of treason, For stealing moulds from heaven that were divine; Wherein she fram’d thee in high heaven’s despite, To shame the sun by day and her by night. ‘And therefore hath she brib’d the Destinies, To cross the curious workmanship of nature To mingle beauty with infirmities, And pure perfection with impure defeature; Making it subject to the tyranny Of mad mischances and much misery; ‘As burning fevers, agues pale and faint, Life-poisoning pestilence and frenzies wood, The marrow-eating sickness, whose attains Disorder breeds by heating of the blood; Surfeits, imposthumes, grief, and damn’d despair, Swear nature’s death for framing thee so fair. ‘And not the least of all these maladies But in one minute’s fight brings beauty under: Both favour, savour hue, and qualities, Whereat the impartial gazer late did wonder, Are on the sudden wasted, thaw’d and done, As mountain-snow melts with the mid-day sun. ‘Therefore, despite of fruitless chastity, Love-lacking vestals and self-loving nuns, That on the earth would breed a scarcity And barren dearth of daughters and of sons, Be prodigal: the lamp that burns by night Dries up his oil to lend the world his light. ‘What is thy body but a swallowing grave, Seeming to bury that posterity Which by the rights of time thou needs must have, If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity? If so, the world will hold thee in disdain, Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain. ‘So in thyself thyself art made away; A mischief worse than civil home-bred strife, Or theirs whose desperate hands themselves do slay, Or butcher-sire that reeves his son of life. Foul-cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, But gold that’s put to use more gold begets.’ ‘Nay then,’ quoth Adon, ‘you will fall again Into your idle over-handled theme; The kiss I gave you is bestow’d in vain, And all in vain you strive against the stream; For by this black-fac’d night, desire’s foul nurse, Your treatise makes me like you worse and worse. ‘If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues, And every tongue more moving than your own, Bewitching like the wanton mermaid’s songs, Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown; For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear, And will not let a false sound enter there; ‘Lest the deceiving harmony should run Into the quiet closure of my breast; And then my little heart were quite undone, In his bedchamber to be barr’d of rest. No, lady, no; my heart longs not to groan, But soundly sleeps, while now it sleeps alone. ‘What have you urg’d that I cannot reprove? The path is smooth that leadeth on to danger; I hate not love, but your device in love That lends embracements unto every stranger. You do it for increase: O strange excuse! When reason is the bawd to lust’s abuse. ‘Call it not, love, for Love to heaven is fled, Since sweating Lust on earth usurp’d his name; Under whose simple semblance he hath fed Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame; Which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves, As caterpillars do the tender leaves. ‘Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, But Lust’s effect is tempest after sun; Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain, Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done. Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies; Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies. ‘More I could tell, but more I dare not say; The text is old, the orator too green. Therefore, in sadness, now I will away; My face is full of shame, my heart of teen: Mine ears, that to your wanton talk attended Do burn themselves for having so offended.’ With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast, And homeward through the dark laund runs apace; Leaves Love upon her back deeply distress’d. Look, how a bright star shooteth from the sky So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye; Which after him she darts, as one on shore Gazing upon a late-embarked friend, Till the wild waves will have him seen no more, Whose ridges with the meeting clouds contend: So did the merciless and pitchy night Fold in the object that did feed her sight. Whereat amaz’d, as one that unaware Hath dropp’d a precious jewel in the flood, Or ‘stonish’d as night-wanderers often are, Their light blown out in some mistrustful wood; Even so confounded in the dark she lay, Having lost the fair discovery of her way. And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans, That all the neighbour caves, as seeming troubled, Make verbal repetition of her moans; Passion on passion deeply is redoubled: ‘Ay me!’ she cries, and twenty times, ‘Woe, woe!’ And twenty echoes twenty times cry so. She marking them, begins a wailing note, And sings extemporally a woeful ditty; How love makes young men thrall and old men dote; How love is wise in folly foolish-witty: Her heavy anthem still concludes in woe, And still the choir of echoes answer so. Her song was tedious, and outwore the night, For lovers’ hours are long, though seeming short: If pleas’d themselves, others, they think, delight In such like circumstance, with such like sport: Their copious stories, oftentimes begun, End without audience, and are never done. For who hath she to spend the night withal, But idle sounds resembling parasites; Like shrill-tongu’d tapsters answering every call, Soothing the humour of fantastic wits? She says, ‘‘Tis so:’ they answer all, ‘‘Tis so;’ And would say after her, if she said ‘No’. Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun ariseth in his majesty; Who doth the world so gloriously behold, That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish’d gold. Venus salutes him with this fair good morrow: ‘O thou clear god, and patron of all light, From whom each lamp and shining star doth borrow The beauteous influence that makes him bright, There lives a son that suck’d an earthly mother, May lend thee light, as thou dost lend to other’ This said, she hasteth to a myrtle grove, Musing the morning is so much o’erworn, And yet she hears no tidings of her love; She hearkens for his hounds and for his horn: Anon she hears them chant it lustily, And all in haste she coasteth to the cry. And as she runs, the bushes in the way Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face, Some twine about her thigh to make her stay: She wildly breaketh from their strict embrace, Like a milch doe, whose swelling dugs do ache, Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake. By this she hears the hounds are at a bay; Whereat she starts, like one that spies an adder Wreath’d up in fatal folds just in his way, The fear whereof doth make him shake and shudder; Even so the timorous yelping of the hounds Appals her senses, and her spirit confounds. For now she knows it is no gentle chase, But the blunt boar, rough bear, or lion proud, Because the cry remaineth in one place, Wilere fearfully the dogs exclaim aloud: Finding their enemy to be so curst, They all strain courtesy who shall cope him first. This dismal cry rings sadly in her ear, Througll which it enters to surprise her heart; Who, overcome by doubt and bloodless fear, With cold-pale weakness numbs each feeling part; Like soldiers, when their captain once doth yield, They basely fly and dare not stay the field. Thus stands she in a trembling ecstasy, Till, cheering up her senses sore dismay’d, She tells them ‘tis a causeless fantasy, And childish error, that they are afraid; Bids them leave quaking, bids them fear no more: And with that word she spied the hunted boar; Whose frothy mouth bepainted all with red, Like milk and blood being mingled both together, A second fear through all her sinews spread, Which madly hurries her she knows not whither: This way she runs, and now she will no further, But back retires to rate the boar for murther. A thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways, She treads the path that she untreads again; Her more than haste is mated with delays, Like the proceedings of a drunken brain, Full of respects, yet nought at all respecting, In hand with all things, nought at all effecting. Here kennel’d in a brake she finds a hound, And asks the weary caitiff for his master, And there another licking of his wound, Gainst venom’d sores the only sovereign plaster; And here she meets another sadly scowling, To whom she speaks, and he replies with howling. When he hath ceas’d his ill-resounding noise, Another flap-mouth’d mourner, black and grim, Against the welkin volleys out his voice; Another and another answer him, Clapping their proud tails to the ground below, Shaking their scratch’d ears, bleeding as they go. Look, how the world’s poor people are amaz’d At apparitions, signs, and prodigies, Whereon with fearful eyes they long have gaz’d, Infusing them with dreadful prophecies; So she at these sad sighs draws up her breath, And, sighing it again, exclaims on Death. ‘Hard-favour’d tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean, Hateful divorce of love,’--thus chides she Death,-- ‘Grim-grinning ghost, earth’s worm, what dost thou mean To stifle beauty and to steal his breath, Who when he liv’d, his breath and beauty set Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet? ‘If he be dead, O no! it cannot be, Seeing his beauty, thou shouldst strike at it; O yes! it may; thou hast no eyes to see, But hatefully at random dost thou hit. Thy mark is feeble age, but thy false dart Mistakes that aim and cleaves an infant’s heart. ‘Hadst thou but bid beware, then he had spoke, And, hearing him, thy power had lost his power. The Destinies will curse thee for this stroke; They bid thee crop a weed, thou pluck’st a flower. Love’s golden arrow at him shoull have fled, And not Death’s ebon dart, to strike him dead. ‘Dost thou drink tears, that thou provok’st such weeping? What may a heavy groan advantage thee? Why hast thou cast into eternal sleeping Those eyes that taught all other eyes to see? Now Nature cares not for thy mortal vigour Since her best work is ruin’d with thy rigour.’ Here overcome, as one full of despair, She vail’d her eyelids, who, like sluices, stopp’d The crystal tide that from her two cheeks fair In the sweet channel of her bosom dropp’d But through the flood-gates breaks the silver rain, And with his strong course opens them again. O! how her eyes and tears did lend and borrow; Her eyes seen in the tears, tears in her eye; Both crystals, where they view’d each other’s sorrow, Sorrow that friendly sighs sought still to dry; But like a stormy day, now wind, now rain, Sighs dry her cheeks, tears make them wet again. Variable passions throng her constant woe, As striving who should best become her grief; All entertain’d, each passion labours so, That every present sorrow seemeth chief, But none is best; then join they all together, Like many clouds consulting for foul weather. By this, far off she hears some huntsman holloa; A nurse’s song no’er pleas’d her babe so well: The dire imagination she did follow This sound of hope doth labour to expel; For now reviving joy bids her rejoice, And flatters her it is Adonis’ voice. Whereat her tears began to turn their tide, Being prison’d in her eye, like pearls in glass; Yet sometimes falls an orient drop beside, Which her cheek melts, as scorning it should pass To wash the foul face of the sluttish ground, Who is but drunken when she seemeth drown’d. O hard-believing love! how strange it seems Not to believe, and yet too credulous; Thy weal and woe are both of them extremes; Despair and hope make thee ridiculous: The one doth flatter thee in thoughts unlikely, In likely thoughts the other kills thee quickly. Now she unweaves the web that she hath wrought, Adonis lives, and Death is not to blame; It was not she that call’d him all to naught, Now she adds honours to his hateful name; She clepes him king of graves, and grave for kings, Imperious supreme of all mortal things. ‘No, no,’ quoth she, ‘sweet Death, I did but jest; Yet pardon me, I felt a kind of fear Whenas I met the boar, that bloody beast, Which knows no pity, but is still severe; Then, gentle shadow,--truth I must confess-- I rail’d on thee, fearing my love’s decease. ‘Tis not my fault: the boar provok’d my tongue; Be wreak’d on him, invisible commander; ‘Tis he, foul creature, that hath done thee wrong; I did but act, he ‘s author of my slander: Grief hath two tongues: and never woman yet, Could rule them both without ten women’s wit.’ Thus hoping that Adonis is alive, Her rash suspect sile doth extenuate; And that his beauty may the better thrive, With Death she humbly doth insinuate; Tells him of trophies, statues, tombs; and stories His victories, his triumphs, and his glories. ‘O Jove!’ quoth she, ‘how much a fool was I, To be of such a weak and silly mind To wail his death who lives and must not die Till mutual overthrow of mortal kind; For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again. ‘Fie, fie, fond love! thou art so full of fear As one with treasure laden, hemm’d with thieves Trifles, unwitnessed with eye or ear, Thy coward heart with false bethinking grieves.’ Even at this word she hears a merry horn Whereat she leaps that was but late forlorn. As falcon to the lure, away she flies; The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light; And in her haste unfortunately spies The foul boar’s conquest on her fair delight; Which seen, her eyes, as murder’d with the view, Like stars asham’d of day, themselves withdrew: Or, as the snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backwards in his shelly cave with pain, And there, all smother’d up, in shade doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again; So, at his bloody view, her eyes are fled Into the deep dark cabills of her head; Where they resign their office and their light To the disposing of her troubled brain; Who bids them still consort with ugly night, And never wound the heart with looks again; Who, like a king perplexed in his throne, By their suggestion gives a deadly groan, Whereat each tributary subject quakes; As when the wind, imprison’d in the ground, Struggling for passage, earth’s foundation shakes, Which with cold terror doth men’s minds confound. This mutiny each part doth so surprise That from their dark beds once more leap her eyes; And, being open’d, threw unwilling light Upon the wide wound that the boar had trench’d In his soft flank; whose wonted lily white With purple tears, that his wound wept, was drench’d: No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed But stole his blood and seem’d with him to bleed. This solemn sympathy poor Venus noteth, Over one shoulder doth she hang her head, Dumbly she passions, franticly she doteth; She thinks he could not die, he is not dead: Her voice is stopp’d, her joints forget to bow, Her eyes are mad that they have wept till now. Upon his hurt she looks so steadfastly, That her sight dazzling makes the wound seem three; And then she reprehends her mangling eye, That makes more gashes where no breach should be: His face seems twain, each several limb is doubled; For oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled. ‘My tongue cannot express my grief for one, And yet,’ quoth she, ‘behold two Adons dead! My sighs are blown away, my salt tears gone, Mine eyes are turn’d to fire, my heart to lead: Heavy heart’s lead, melt at mine eyes’ red fire! So shall I die by drops of hot desire. ‘Alas! poor world, what treasure hast thou lost! What face remains alive that’s worth the viewing? Whose tongue is music now? what canst thou boast Of things long since, or anything ensuing? The flowers are sweet, their colours fresh and trim; But true-sweet beauty liv’d and died with him. ‘Bonnet nor veil henceforth no creature wear! Nor sun nor wind will ever strive to kiss you: Having no fair to lose, you need not fear; The sun doth scorn you, and the wind doth hiss you: But when Adonis liv’d, sun and sharp air Lurk’d like two thieves, to rob him of his fair: ‘And therefore would he put his bonnet on, Under whose brim the gaudy sun would peep; The wind would blow it off, and, being gone, Play with his locks: then would Adonis weep; And straight, in pity of his tender years, They both would strive who first should dry his tears. ‘To see his face the lion walk’d along Behind some hedge, because he would not fear him; To recreate himself when he hath sung, The tiger would be tame and gently hear him; If he had spoke, the wolf would leave his prey, And never fright the silly lamb that day. ‘When he beheld his shadow in the brook, The fishes spread on it their golden gills; When he was by, the birds such pleasure took, That some would sing, some other in their bills Would bring him mulberries and ripe-red cherries He fed them with his sight, they him with berries. ‘But this foul, grim, and urchin-spouted boar, Whose downward eye still looketh for a grave, Ne’er saw the beauteous livery that he wore; Witness the entertainment that he gave: If he did see his face, why then I know He thought to kiss him, and hath killed him so. ‘‘Tis true, ‘tis true; thus was Adonis slain: He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear, Who did not whet his teeth at him again, But by a kiss thought to persuade him there; And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine Sheath’d unaware the tusk in his soft groin. ‘Had I been tooth’d like him, I must confess, With kissing him I should have kill’d him first; But he is dead, and never did he bless My youth with his; the more am I accurst.’ With this she falleth in the place she stood, And stains her face with his congealed blood. Sho looks upon his lips, and they are pale; She takes him by the hand, and that is cold; She whispers in his ears a heavy tale, As if they heard the woeful words she told; She lifts the coffer-lids that close his eyes, Where, lo! two lamps, burnt out, in darkness lies; Two glasses where herself herself beheld A thousand times, and now no more reflect; Their virtue lost, wherein they late excell’d, And every beauty robb’d of his effect: ‘Wonder of time,’ quoth she, ‘this is my spite, That, you being dead, the day should yet be light. ‘Since thou art dead, lo! here I prophesy, Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end; Ne’er settled equally, but high or low; That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe. ‘It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud, Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while; The bottom poison, and the top o’erstraw’d With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile: The strongest body shall it make most weak, Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak. ‘It shall be sparing and too full of riot, Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures; The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet, Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures; It shall be raging mad, and silly mild, Make the young old, the old become a child. ‘It shall suspect where is no cause of fear; It shall not fear where it should most mistrust; It shall be merciful, and too severe, And most deceiving when it seems most just; Perverse it shall be, where it shows most toward, Put fear to velour, courage to the coward. ‘It shall be cause of war and dire events, And set dissension ‘twixt the son and sire; Subject and servile to all discontents, As dry combustious matter is to fire: Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy, They that love best their love shall not enjoy.’ By this, the boy that by her side lay kill’d Was melted like a vapour from her sight, And in his blood that on the ground lay spill’d, A purple flower sprung up, chequer’d with white; Resembling well his pale cheeks, and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood. She bows her head, the new-sprung flower to smell, Comparing it to her Adonis’ breath; And says within her bosom it shall dwell, Since he himself is reft from her by death: She drops the stalk, and in the breach appears Green dropping sap, which she compares to tears. ‘Poor flower,’ quoth she, ‘this was thy father’s guise, Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire, For every little grief to wet his eyes: To grow unto himself was his desire, And so ‘tis shine; but know, it is as good To wither in my breast as in his blood. ‘Here was thy father’s bed, here in my breast; Thou art the next of blood, and ‘tis thy right: Lo! in this hollow cradle take thy rest, My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night: There shall not be one minute in an hour Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love’s flower.’ Thus weary of the world, away she hies, And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid Their mistress, mounted, through the empty skies In her light chariot quickly is convey’d; Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen Means to immure herself and not be seen.
(from Troilus and Cressida, spoken by Ulysses) Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'dAs fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done: perseverance, dear my lord,Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hangQuite out of fashion, like a rusty mailIn monumental mockery. Take the instant way;For honour travels in a strait so narrow,Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;For emulation hath a thousand sonsThat one by one pursue: if you give way,Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush byAnd leave you hindmost;Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours; For time is like a fashionable hostThat slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seekRemuneration for the thing it was;For beauty, wit,High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time.One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,Though they are made and moulded of things past,And give to dust that is a little gilt More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.The present eye praises the present object.Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;Since things in motion sooner catch the eye Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee,And still it might, and yet it may again,If thou wouldst not entomb thyself aliveAnd case thy reputation in thy tent;Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields of late, Made emulous missions 'mongst the gods themselvesAnd drave great Mars to faction.
(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth) Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time;And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more. It is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet) To be, or not to be, that is the question:Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troublesAnd by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,No more; and by a sleep to say we endThe heart-ache and the thousand natural shocksThat flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummationDevoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause—there's the respectThat makes calamity of so long life.For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,The insolence of office, and the spurnsThat patient merit of th'unworthy takes,When he himself might his quietus makeWith a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscovere'd country, from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the will,And makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,And enterprises of great pitch and momentWith this regard their currents turn awryAnd lose the name of action.
(from As You Like It, spoken by Jaques)  All the world’s a stage,
(from Henry V, spoken by King Henry) This day is called the feast of Crispian:He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,And rouse him at the name of Crispian.He that shall live this day, and see old age,Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,But he’ll remember with advantagesWhat feats he did that day: then shall our names.Familiar in his mouth as household wordsHarry the king, Bedford and Exeter,Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.This story shall the good man teach his son;And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,From this day to the ending of the world,But we in it shall be remember’d;We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition:And gentlemen in England now a-bedShall think themselves accursed they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
(from Julius Caesar, spoken by Marc Antony) Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones;So let it be with Caesar. The noble BrutusHath told you Caesar was ambitious:If it were so, it was a grievous fault,And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–For Brutus is an honourable man;So are they all, all honourable men–Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.He was my friend, faithful and just to me:But Brutus says he was ambitious;And Brutus is an honourable man.He hath brought many captives home to RomeWhose ransoms did the general coffers fill:Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;And Brutus is an honourable man.You all did see that on the LupercalI thrice presented him a kingly crown,Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;And, sure, he is an honourable man.I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,But here I am to speak what I do know.You all did love him once, not without cause:What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,And I must pause till it come back to me.
(from Richard II, spoken by King Richard) No matter where; of comfort no man speak:Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;Make dust our paper and with rainy eyesWrite sorrow on the bosom of the earth,Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:And yet not so, for what can we bequeathSave our deposed bodies to the ground?Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,And nothing can we call our own but deathAnd that small model of the barren earthWhich serves as paste and cover to our bones.For God’s sake, let us sit upon the groundAnd tell sad stories of the death of kings;How some have been deposed; some slain in war,Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;All murder’d: for within the hollow crownThat rounds the mortal temples of a kingKeeps Death his court and there the antic sits,Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,Allowing him a breath, a little scene,To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,Infusing him with self and vain conceit,As if this flesh which walls about our life,Were brass impregnable, and humor’d thusComes at the last and with a little pinBores through his castle wall, and farewell king!Cover your heads and mock not flesh and bloodWith solemn reverence: throw away respect,Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,For you have but mistook me all this while:I live with bread like you, feel want,Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,How can you say to me, I am a king?
(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth) Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There's no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. [a bell rings] I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
(from Macbeth, spoken by Lady Macbeth) The raven himself is hoarseThat croaks the fatal entrance of DuncanUnder my battlements. Come, you spiritsThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-fullOf direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose, nor keep peace betweenThe effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,Wherever in your sightless substancesYou wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,To cry "Hold, hold!"
(from Henry V, spoken by King Henry) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height. On, on, you noblest English. Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof! Fathers that, like so many Alexanders, Have in these parts from morn till even fought And sheathed their swords for lack of argument: Dishonour not your mothers; now attest That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood, And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture; let us swear That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not; For there is none of you so mean and base, That hath not noble lustre in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'
(from Richard III, spoken by Gloucester) Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; Our bruised arms hung up for monuments; Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front; And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, To set my brother Clarence and the king In deadly hate the one against the other: And if King Edward be as true and just As I am subtle, false and treacherous, This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up, About a prophecy, which says that 'G' Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be. Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes.
(from Romeo and Juliet, spoken by Juliet) O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?Deny thy father and refuse thy name.Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my loveAnd I’ll no longer be a Capulet.‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy:Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor footNor arm nor face nor any other partBelonging to a man. O be some other name.What’s in a name? That which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet;So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,Retain that dear perfection which he owesWithout that title. Romeo, doff thy name,And for that name, which is no part of thee,Take all myself.
By photography’s gospel, I thank you, think you back. You fail far away from me, waving at pain. A perfect song is loveless and here by your name. Things will never be the same. Are they the same yet?
The giant world is no damned genius with its basket of latitude, its schedule for wanting to be touched. Now, slow asleep I’m song to break in on, a strength less lost than gone. I borrow minute, hour, day, day. The waves as cruel replacements pass for crutches.
The woman in the building across from me hauls onto the fire escape a yucca plant and squeezes it between a crate of herbs and a sapling fern tree. She looks a lot like me from twenty feet away. A forelock lies sweaty against her cheek as if she’s forgotten to fix herself. I put my thumbs and forefingers to my eye and frame her. I am reminded of those Chinese boxes made of red paper, inside one is another holding another, until at the center sits the tiniest mockery and celebration of the cell itself. She looks haggard but happy here, five flights up, bending over a fat leaf as if admiring herself in the waxy surface. Then she opens up the jewel-case of her voice, and I remember how once my sister asked my mother which one of us sang better. My mother paused from sewing as if adding seventeen to seventy-five and said we sounded the same. Good or bad, who knows. Each of us now watches the empty, open mouth of the other.
This boy lying face down in my sleep pushes around jars of jelly, waking me the night he is found so I can drag him from the wet ground and clean his blackened belly, this boy lying face down who is somehow bound to me, this hunted herdsman, refugee waking me the night he is found. Am I to dress him in an open gown, bless the holes in his chest with tea leaves? This boy lying face down, permeating even the simplest sound, with the crack in the door he slowly cries, waking me the night he is found, lips parted to my blue-black ground, whispering red vetch inside me, this slender boy lying down, waking me the night he is found.
is the six-chambered cylinder, the spinnable heart, how it clicks into place, lonely but strong by design. She understands its negative worth, how it holds in the dark and withstands what is held, how it burns and smells of smoke when left and left and left.
I am a girl who sees the world in everything. I wonder in a 100 years if the world will just flip. I upload the roar of children, chop cauliflower because I want to see the ones I love as loving me forever. I see colorful daisies as the children of lawns swaying unfruitfully in the wind. I want the ones who pretend they are without wings to protect me touch sun, feel hearts— in that instant I understand almost everything Pretending I am flying over the worry and loss of this city into the warm sun, to touch who l can. I worry, making canapés over the sink, that nothing will be easy, ever if all of this is happening for reasons, that that family is my family, crying out in pain, thin daisies bent flat in a summer wind. I understand that almost, when they cry why nothing is easy in this world with its reasons. I pretend I am without wings to protect me— I dream one day of a city that’s at peace. I see something good that is in everyone. In a 100 years I wonder will the world just flip.
So I say to my friend at the day job “We are bored sometimes, and scented like realtors but if everyone’s equally disconsolate under labor’s gooey caul then nuance can be stitched more vividly to secrets lodged inside of everyone until it becomes your own country with highways that carry you silently past the jetty which, from their heavy drinking, the case managers come out to failing to be stable and badly attempting to sing” We’re pushing our barques past the mansions as I say this, near the dwellings of persons whose lives have no mooring outside the slow fact of our passing— huddled arrogantly under their air-conditioning they want us to be users moved by advertisers enticing the constituency to join them and sit there and weep But we’re too busy pulling toward centers where workers assemble. While time for them is a melody played at long intervals across condominiums we who are the power know our systems so much better now come to this hour outside it now give it new form on guitar
This poem is essentially about life and death. What is clear about this particular poem, compared to most poetry, is that through the voice of the speaker the reader can feel the  emotions and thoughts of the author flattening down into points that come across as very personal to delight and sadden the younger readers of today. In almost all other poetry there is a “speaker” who goes upward and upward, a machine that absorbs vibration from bigger machines but if it happens here now, in this poem will there be anyone nearby who wants to see? Maybe the dead know how to live more fully, torches turned down but still fuming like rinds around hot marshmallows do, their divided subject matter focused primarily on dark imagery with symbols of light inside— I never understood the big whoop about Demeter: reading is already a giant supplanting. A new reader discovers this work while he is leaving flowers where his dead bride used to be. But it enables him to be reborn again each time— Persephone is not the unhappy one  moving up the dark stairs she considers in her consciousness as light while the poem commences and commences like the days dividing summer from its students, sponges that sway in an undersea film Until the poem spreads, and reaches its conclusion that students are each taught to believe in things differently: that Persephone was a goddess who was abducted by Pluto, the author himself a blue web that exists years and years after his death stuck inside the tired envelope of poetry Who feels he finally is reading himself, the spring flowers intense and papery like they used to be, enabling the reader again to feel the darkness with a rhythm that enables the reader to almost see. Was his conclusion merely a mistake, or did he intentionally use elements of different poems until he finally made his destination, from blue to smoking to flatten, September confused with its light?
His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
living in actual ass under the stars Josie’s experiment easy access to parking and bushes the first few times I feel awful flattened myself against the wall easy access to bulk movements of air dear souls “open themselves up, enraptured, to the essence of all things” marshmallow chimes blown on by a flamey wind we’re made of the same stuff you and I matches benzene drop zones you see this wound in my thigh a brief history of Vietfly I say screw the bag lady who called me prince and said I did nothing for  my people what does a spider feel in moonlight? marriage riding its dark horse a child I tried to climb the black cast iron vine of my mother’s sewing  machine to learn how to sing at the school of the silver wheel but  thread-chatter got in the way bunch-talk the needle stabbed mama’s  finger good we called it offpagoda of dirty dishes in the sink she threatens to kill me she’s upset I say the sea is a warning full and prompt the wave-shovels cannot pick up the dead duck fucking waves hats off  to the dead duck how many reels exhaust the image history of the person it would be lovely to heal in a little muck called never mind
1 Who does me this I whistle off brazen as the green of the Palestinian flag Strange wishful little books clot my fur I do not labor except to season my domain Through seven holes all things twitter I reject the disjecta of allegory A sluttery roller skate grips my shoe 2 Is there enough chaos in you to make a world? The feather on the egg is the horse under the bed The New England winter is still raw and long The summer is intense and abandoned
You and I thigh deep in Suwannee River then in a bathtub. Spanish moss clogs the drain and a man carrying a green towel interrupts. We send him away once more knowing he'll return to watch. We're photographers shooting on location for Sylvia Plath's upcoming book, Savage Beauty—wrong poet or wrong book, I know, depending on how you look at it—however, I'm the one who is white this time, you're darker, maybe Quechua Indian or Spanish, like actor Antonio Banderas, with very defined stomach muscles and a slick throb of a penis. Years later I write a book about our affair. They bring me on one of those daytime talk shows, and before being reunited, we are kept in separate rooms, the television split screen, green-towel man in the audience. I'm still white, so are you, both of us middle-aged with freckles and strawberry-blonde hair. Later I'm the viewer at home thinking, Like hell they'll fall for each other.
Model prisoner or not, I won't.Silver lash, hound's tooth,meager sinful town's crook. I am nervous again. I could kill if you let me. But tonight, I'll be still under this palm. Zeroed out, the tea my toilet muck. Licorice and almond twisted beneath the sink, I'm lovely again. Come on with my dying. Today the globe's underside isn't pink, but rather, I look ahead toward what has happened.
After wandering years Basho returned to gaze at his umbilical cord pickled in a jar. Plopped in brine years ago like the frog in the pond in his famous haiku. Of course fame meant nothing to him. He stood in the blazing rain in his family graveyard and as a crow squawked overhead the stones proclaimed him the last of his line. He kept feeling inside his straw raincoat for a missing limb or the hole where the wind and rain flew in. I'll get drunk tonight, he thought, and his eyelashes glistened as he trudged back to his hermit's hut to gaze again at the jar.
A wound is a blossom but only to the living. A May night, birdsong before the first light pierces, chirps out of blackness: My daughter's angry at me and her mother as I was once angry at mine. It's a way of crossing over. I'm so tired now. And my core's all water, flowing somewhere where the sea can't find her. And neither can I. How much longer till I finally lose her? Where is the first dawn wet blossom? Who recalls how I touched her mother once? Or many others? How night is not always easy. Nor are daughters. Nor are sons. And how is it I've become a father watching light sift slowly into the daughterless dark.
Dear Angry Mob, Oak Wood Trail is closed to you. We feel it unnecessary to defend our position, for we have always thought of ourselves (and rightly, I venture) as a haven for those seeking a quiet and solitary contemplation. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience. Signed,  Ranger Lil PS Ofttimes as the day ends  on a wet bed of yellow leaves  or the sky densens gray and dark  I am brought to imagine  the growing disquiet  in the hearts of my countrymen
It was as if her love had become a big eye or some historical logic or a religious particle lodged in the brain. In the most costly services of a great society one may find the allure of a benign intelligence. I have hoped, since I was a child, to be surrounded by a group of articulate characters who might with gracious friendship provide some essential entertainment  as Aaron’s  which was a cane  and then a snake  and then a cane again  great clouds  of smoke from the forest Itsy bugs amarch my naked legs  in my beard, to burn  as one might  with one’s eyes I learned, but can no longer remember with what dignity another’s care imbues one. You sit and pick the lice from my hair. What sort of life is this.
Dark mornings shown thy mask made well thy visage and voice rolling over and hearing some perfect sweetness that one broad soul poured forth again in happy countenance and ancient word  my city cold  for me, my nature  lost  come back  sallow soft and colorless  thy dreams repent  as: The whole family each with his own    “Now, sweet child, we must  kiss winter goodbye, and so too  your furs.” She clutched the puppy to her breast. “Not little Bobby, father.” “Yes, my darling, little Bobby as well.” And this, as she ought, was how Gretel remembered summer – a constant giving up of things and people.
I let my body down slow which is what they say to do, like a whale with its breathing and floating in the ocean. Yesterday was the half moon and today was basically the half moon too. A glacier’s blue and water in the middle of a lake is blue. I only had one day during which I could get myself out into the middle of it and I did,  kudos to me. And to the resilient goose  who never feels cold And to the talky crow  who has so many friends And to the inspiring stealthy ducks  who fly together in clips above water. It’s a silly betrayal of my own thoughts to invent or remember, so maybe I’ll just close with these tender lines of Henry David Thoreau: “An oak tree  in Hubbard’s Passage stands absolutely  motionless and dark against the sky.”
Ocean which I pushed up with my fingers so I could touch the orange sand below and white mountain which is not white but for getting caught in the cold Stay here where it is warm and where the sun shines, for later celestial garlands of dead light will draw you into the cold for sure
The storm turns off the lights.The lightninglights the whereabouts of the flashlight.The flashlighttakes us to matchesand candles, the oil lamp.Now we’re back, revisitingthe 19th century.
and turn the senior citizen centerinto an automated assembly line.Goodbye, dross of long winter nights.Farewell, old skin cells and reek:what couldn’t come clean on a clothesline.Bundles of pillows, caroming, bouncing,sloshing along, even as moremistresses of pillows hurry through the door,hugging stained sacks of featherslike thoughts kept well past prime.Sure, they should’ve been thrown outlong ago but—we paid so dearly for them.
It's the ragged source of memory, a tarpaper-shingled bungalow whose floors tilt toward the porch, whose back yard ends abruptly in a weedy ravine. Nothing special: a chain of three bedrooms and a long side porch turned parlor where my great-grandfather, Pomp, smoked every evening over the news, a long sunny kitchen where Annie, his wife, measured cornmeal dreaming through the window across the ravine and up to Shelby Hill where she had borne their spirited, high-yellow brood. In the middle bedroom's hard, high antique double bed the ghost of Aunt Jane, the laundress who bought the house in 1872, though I call with all my voices, does not appear. Nor does Pomp's ghost, with whom one of my cousins believes she once had a long and intimate unspoken midnight talk. He told her, though they'd never met, that he loved her; promised her raw widowhood would heal without leaving a scar. The conveniences in an enclosed corner of the slant-floored back side porch were the first indoor plumbing in town. Aunt Jane put them in, incurring the wrath of the woman who lived in the big house next door. Aunt Jane left the house to Annie, whose mother she had known as a slave on the plantation, so Annie and Pomp could move their children into town, down off Shelby Hill. My grandmother, her brother, and five sisters watched their faces change slowly in the oval mirror on the wall outside the door into teachers' faces, golden with respect. Here Geneva, the randy sister, damned their colleges, daubing her quicksilver breasts with gifts of perfume. As much as love, as much as a visit to the grave of a known ancestor, the homeplace moves me not to silence but to righteous, praise Jesus song: Oh, catfish and turnip greens, hot-water cornbread and grits. Oh, musty, much-underlined Bibles; generations lost to be found, to be found.
I have no answer to the blank inequityof a four-year-old dying of cancer.I saw her on t.v. and weptwith my mouth full of meatloaf.I constantly flash on disasters now;red lights shout Warning. Danger.everywhere I look.I buckle him in, but what if a carwith a grille like a sharkbiteroared up out of the road?I feed him square mealsbut what if the fist of his heartshould simply fall open?I carried him safelyas long as I could,but now he's a runawayon the dangerous highway.Warning. Danger.I've started to pray.But the dangerous highwaycurves through blue eveningswhen I hold his yielding handand snip his miniscule nailswith my vicious-looking scissors.I carry him aroundlike an egg in a spoon,and I remember a porcelain fawn,a best friend's trust,my broken faith in myself.It's not my grace that keeps me erectas the sidewalk clatters downhillunder my rollerskate wheels. Sometimes I lie awaketroubled by this thought:It's not so simple to give a child birth;you also have to give it death,the jealous fairy's christening gift.I've always pictured my own deathas a closed door,a black room,a breathless leap from the mountain topwith time to throw out my arms, lift my head,and see, in the instant my heart stops,a whole galaxy of blue.I imagined I'd forget,in the cessation of feeling,while the guilt of my lifetime floated awaylike a nylon nightgown,and that I'd fall into clean, fresh forgiveness.Ah, but the death I've given awayis more mine than the one I've kept:from my hand the poisoned apple,from my bow the mistletoe dart.Then I think of Mama,her bountiful breasts.When I was a child, I really swear,Mama's kisses could heal.I remember her promise,and whisper it over my sweet son's sleep: When you float to the bottom, child, like a mote down a sunbeam, you'll see me from a trillion miles away: my eyes looking up to you, my arms outstretched for you like night.
My master/father sent me up from South Carolina to Boston as a nine-year-old. My mother's illiterate silence has been a death. I wonder if she still labors in his fields. His sister, dutiful but cold as snow, gave me a little room in her house, below the stairs with the Irish servants, who hated me for the fatal flaw in my genealogy. For the first time in my life I am at home in this bevy of scholars, my first family. Here, the wallpapers welcome me into every room, and the mirrors see me, not my pedigree. My sisters, Jerusha, Emilia, Elizabeth ... But Mama's unlettered silence is a death.
For Ruben Ahoueya Today in America people were bought and sold: five hundred for a "likely Negro wench." If someone at auction is worth her weight in gold, how much would she be worth by pound? By ounce? If I owned an unimaginable quantity of wealth, could I buy an iota of myself? How would I know which part belonged to me? If I owned part, could I set my part free? It must be worth something—maybe a lot— that my great-grandfather, they say, killed a lion. They say he was black, with muscles as hard as iron, that he wore a necklace of the claws of the lion he'd fought. How much do I hear, for his majesty in my blood? I auction myself. And I make the highest bid.
The trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home. I make what calls me out. All gone before you know it. Words may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again. Closing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can't stay still. To unmask is to go silent. Language makes no promise to communicate. An articulated sound has its own dream in the ear. Her presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice. Now she's ready to draw eros from foreign bodies. It starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt. By she I mean who speaking animate configures. This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through. Through thoroughly, as a word weighs.
I'm feeling by ear. Consider them gods and not cruel but ecstatic. They have trick tongues and can't talk straight but use us as waves to curve words. In this moment we are here for their ride. Climb on under. Transport poetics in the transtraditionals, revering rumors revved high. We ask forgiveness for poem talk. I'm on her knees. She makes me say these things because she is a middle way like no other. The method is to wear me down to a base line vital pulse. Next pour right through carefully following the barely perceptible impulse. Almost dreams the state resists the name but go ahead and call it poetic that flares. Poetics remains neutral on its name but takes care when it comes to hers. There's a watch out on her names. It makes me wait until I have nothing else to fight with and then sets me loose. When I think what is being said I get a lump in the stomach. No go on the intellectual gizmo. Yes on any kind of lift, free run, no drift, too swift, the actual thing getting a lift. It hits the beat like rock bottom. The tongue gets hands on quick. The hearback suddenly gets high in the sense of crossing right on over.
Three sorts of serpents do resemble thee: That dangerous eye-killing cockatrice, The enchanting siren, which doth so entice, The weeping crocodile—these vile pernicious three. The basilisk his nature takes from thee, Who for my life in secret wait dost lie, And to my heart sendst poison from thine eye: Thus do I feel the pain, the cause, yet cannot see. Fair-maid no more, but Mer-maid be thy name, Who with thy sweet alluring harmony Hast played the thief, and stolen my heart from me, And like a tyrant makst my grief thy game: Thou crocodile, who when thou hast me slain, Lamentst my death, with tears of thy disdain.
The hardness of her heart and truth of mineWhen the all-seeing eyes of heaven did see,
Why did my parents send me to the schools That I with knowledge might enrich my mind? Since the desire to know first made men fools, And did corrupt the root of all mankind.   For when God's hand had written in the hearts Of the first parents all the rules of good, So that their skill infused did pass all arts That ever were, before or since the flood,   And when their reason's eye was sharp and clear, And, as an eagle can behold the sun, Could have approached th'eternal light as near As the intellectual angels could have done,   Even then to them the spirit of lies suggests That they were blind, because they saw not ill, And breathes into their incorrupted breasts A curious wish, which did corrupt their will.   For that same ill they straight desired to know; Which ill, being nought but a defect of good, And all God's works the devil could not show While man their lord in his perfection stood.   So that themselves were first to do the ill, Ere they thereof the knowledge could attain; Like him that knew not poison's power to kill, Until, by tasting it, himself was slain.   Even so by tasting of that fruit forbid, Where they sought knowledge, they did error find; Ill they desired to know, and ill they did, And to give passion eyes, made reason blind.   For then their minds did first in passion see Those wretched shapes of misery and woe, Of nakedness, of shame, of poverty, Which then their own experience made them know.   But then grew reason dark, that she no more Could the fair forms of good and truth discern; Bats they became, that eagles were before, And this they got by their desire to learn.   But we, their wretched offspring, what do we? Do not we still taste of the fruit forbid, Whiles with fond fruitless curiosity In books profane we seek for knowledge hid?   What is this knowledge but the sky-stolen fire For which the thief still chained in ice doth sit, And which the poor rude satyr did admire, And needs would kiss, but burnt his lips with it.   What is it but the cloud of empty rain, Which when Jove's guest embraced, he monsters got? Or the false pails which oft being filled with pain, Received the water, but retained it not?   Shortly, what is it but the fiery coach Which the youth sought, and sought his death withal? Or the boy's wings, which when he did approach The sun's hot beams, did melt and let him fall?   And yet, alas, when all our lamps are burned, Our bodies waste, and our spirits spent, When we have all the learned volumes turned, Which yield men's wits both help and ornament,   What can we know, or what can we discern, When error chokes the windows of the mind, The diverse forms of things, how can we learn, That have been ever from our birthday blind?   When reason's lamp, which like the sun in sky, Throughout man's little world her beams did spread, Is now become a sparkle which doth lie Under the ashes, half extinct and dead;   How can we hope that through the eye and ear This dying sparkle, in this cloudy place, Can recollect these beams of knowledge clear, Which were infused in the first minds by grace?   So might the heir whose father hath in play Wasted a thousand pound of ancient rent, By painful earning of a groat a day Hope to restore the patrimony spent.   The wits that dived most deep and soared most high, Seeking man's powers, have found his weakness such; Skill comes so slow and life so fast doth fly, We learn so little and forget so much.   For this the wisest of all mortal men Said, He knew nought but that he nought did know; And the great mocking master mocked not then, When he said, Truth was buried deep below.   For how may we to others' things attain, When none of us his own soul understands? For which the devil mocks our curious brain, When, Know thyself, his oracle commands.   For why should we the busy soul believe, When boldly she concludes of that and this; When of herself she can no judgment give, Nor how, nor whence, nor where, nor what she is?   All things without, which round about we see, We seek to know, and how therewith to do; But that whereby we reason, live, and be, Within ourselves we strangers are thereto.   We seek to know the moving of each sphere, And the strange cause of th'ebbs and floods of Nile; But of that clock within our breasts we bear, The subtle motions we forget the while.   We that acquaint ourselves with every zone, And pass both tropics and behold the poles, When we come home, are to ourselves unknown, And unacquainted still with our own souls.   We study speech, but others we persuade; We leech-craft learn, but others cure with it; We interpret laws, which other men have made, But read not those which in our hearts are writ.   Is it because the mind is like the eye, Through which it gathers knowledge by degrees-- Whose rays reflect not, but spread outwardly-- Not seeing itself when other things it sees?   No, doubtless, for the mind can backward cast Upon herself her understanding light; But she is so corrupt and so defaced, As her own image doth herself affright.   As in the fable of the lady fair, Which for her lust was turned into a cow: When thirsty to a stream she did repair, And saw herself transformed, she wist not how,   At first she startles, then she stands amazed, At last with terror she from thence doth fly, And loathes the wat'ry glass wherein she gazed, And shuns it still, though she for thirst do die.   Even so man's soul, which did God's image bear, And was at first fair, good, and spotless pure, Since with her sins her beauties blotted were, Doth of all sights her own sight least endure.   For even at first reflection she espies Such strange chimeras and such monsters there, Such toys, such antics, and such vanities, As she retires and shrinks for shame and fear.   And as the man loves least at home to be, That hath a sluttish house haunted with sprites, So she, impatient her own faults to see, Turns from herself and in strange things delights.   For this, few know themselves; for merchants broke View their estate with discontent and pain, And seas are troubled when they do revoke Their flowing waves into themselves again.   And while the face of outward things we find Pleasing and fair, agreeable and sweet, These things transport and carry out the mind, That with herself herself can never meet.   Yet if affliction once her wars begin, And threat the feebler sense with sword and fire, The mind contracts herself and shrinketh in, And to herself she gladly doth retire,   As spiders touched seek their webs' inmost part, As bees in storms unto their hives return, As blood in danger gathers to the heart, As men seek towns when foes the country burn.   If aught can teach us aught, affliction's looks, Making us look into ourselves so near, Teach us to know ourselves beyond all books, Or all the learned schools that ever were.   This mistress lately plucked me by the ear, And many a golden lesson hath me taught; Hath made my senses quick and reason clear, Reformed my will and rectified my thought.   So do the winds and thunders cleanse the air; So working lees settle and purge the wine; So lopped and prunëd trees do flourish fair; So doth the fire the drossy gold refine.   Neither Minerva nor the learned muse, Nor rules of art, nor precepts of the wise, Could in my brain those beams of skill infuse, As but the glance of this dame's angry eyes.   She within lists my ranging mind hath brought, That now beyond myself I list not go; Myself am center of my circling thought, Only myself I study, learn, and know.   I know my body's of so frail a kind As force without, fevers within, can kill; I know the heavenly nature of my nind, But 'tis corrupted both in wit and will;   I know my soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant of all; I know I am one of nature's little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.   I know my life's a pain and but a span, I know my sense is mocked with everything; And to conclude, I know myself a man, Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.
Before the sixth day of the next new year,Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.Many men then shall have an end of crosses,And many likewise shall sustain great losses;Many that now full joyful are and glad,Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear,The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,In every city and in every town.By day or night this tumult shall not cease,Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;An herald strong, the like was never born,Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn.
Read in my face a volume of despairs,The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe,Drawn with my blood and printed with my caresWrought by her hand, that I have honor'd so.Who, whilst I burn, she sings at my soul's wrack,Looking aloft from turret of her pride;There my soul's tyrant joys her in the sackOf her own seat, whereof I made her guide.There do these smokes that from affliction rise,Serve as an incense to a cruel Dame;A sacrifice thrice grateful to her eyes,Because their power serve to exact the same.***Thus ruins she, to satisfy her will,***The Temple where her name was honor'd still.
Church of broken toasters and singed fuses, church of the dripping roof and chipped chimney stack, of the flooded garage and its split door, gas-hissing pipes and sibilant water heaters, church of piss-poor light and shaky ladders where I unchoke windows and dislodge chopsticks from pipes, smooth curled up wallpaper and key the locks, fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times, church where wings of dead flies drift like petals from cobwebs, ghosts sift through floorboards and the homeless sleep in compost, steeping like tea bags pungent from the leaves' damp weight. Church where I am summoned by the door's clatter of brass to the brown-toothed vagrant who spreads open her overcoat; to the chattering man who communes   with pines and brooms the stairs; to the bent, old Japanese woman who forgets her keys, waits for me to twist the lock free so she can scrub floors with Murphy wood soap and a toothbrush, wobble atop a ladder and polish the two-ton bell. On this path I am my uncle setting cubes of cheese into jaws of traps, and my grandmother stirring peas into a pan of fried rice,   and my grandfather padding the halls in slippers and gloves, the cold globes of his breath a string of prayer beads weaving me, a mixed-blood grandson, into them.
Through darkness they came,  covered in ash, scarred by depths and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming  at edges of decks, hands clutching railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,  trunks pulled by hand, Where are you from? I unwrapped my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha  from my grandfather, ancient as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor  of carp centuries old. What are you? Not only where they were from but who they were  and would become. His strange past and the mystery of my own face, American?  this question flawed as we all appeared, my grandfather's birthplace the half of me  I lightened, bleaching my black hair to reach my girlfriend Amber's blonde.  In her candlelit room, I touched the mission photo of her  rubbing ointment on the burns of a hibakusha. Where are  water-filled troughs and the horses' manes my grandfather combed. The hay he bundled  in twine, you from? Could he have smoothed names engraved in granite, the scars on the woman's skin, targets  raised on maps? In a light blast What are a city of nips was erased, you? A blank scape, Go back  no trace of his childhood farm in Hiroshima, to where I turned  away from the chalkboard scrawled with Enola Gay, you are a button pushed,  from a bomb dropped, at Amber's picnic  they bowed over grace, and I looked up, didn't say Amen. Everything rises  when the ground's skin is broken.
Moving forward or back? Which way am I? I wake grasping your nightgown. I am still there. In the haze of faces burning. Arch of spreading flame, black-haired girl in saddle shoes and plaid skirt, knee-deep in a yard of violets. Her father, in clogs, pounding a path home, balancing buckets of carp on a bamboo pole. Daughter, father, splash of carp, magenta rows, white light's flashbulb zing fades as I cling to silk's edge, slats of ribs a bridge I take to your belly's bulge. My pollen inside you, nubs of arms and legs, hands with fingers petaling. Vase of roses on the night stand. Your gold ring engraved with my initials. The father, feet from the gate, his daughter kneeling with shears, pruning flowerbeds. Sealed in sheets,   I draw close to your body, place my ear against flesh, listen to the rhythmic thumping inside water.
We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so many people live in fear these days they drove up all four of them in a small car nice boy they said beautiful dogs they said so friendly the man ahead of the woman the other two waiting in the drive I was outside digging up the garden no one home I said what are you selling anyway I'm not interested I said well you have a nice day they said here's our card there's a phone number you can call anytime any other houses down this road anyone else live here we'd like to talk to them about living in fear
not self  of violence    against will not be gainsaid  will brook no argument  won't suffer the fools    gladly  would I climb a  mountain of salt with you   before dawn lodestar my freight the violent  silence the most beautiful word  is  trespass
beside the grave the ties gave was she there everywhere in the fern or return when he called her of black alder on her lips the fresh chips or felled tree she was free and no child and too wild
To the young and able man who lets his death come in with veils in his face that say you can come in and claim a place among us. To the young man who closes his eyes to the parting of clouds and lets what is beyond come in. To the young man whose body is still warm, that weightless being with halos, whose footsteps we will never fill. To the endless clock machine in the god body of the young man who closes his eyes as the light sweeps him to eternity. To the blessed beating of his heart when we listen to our closed palms. To the complex latticework of smiles in his photographs every two seconds you pick him up and back. God body love. Good-bye. To the young man whose laughter is now a memorial among us, as we sit under tents, listen to our mothers and sisters cry, shed our own not-so-private god tears love, shelter under the night that claimed him. To him and beyond and the endless love through which God privately loves him.
I like to think of your silence as the love letters you will not write me, as two sax solos from two ages across a stage, learning the languages of kissing with your eyes closed. I like to think of you as a god to whom I no longer pray, as a god I aspire to. I like the opening of your joined palms, which is like an urn where my ashes find a home. The music of your lashes; the silent way your body wears out mine. Mostly, I like to think of you at night when a black screen of shining dust shines from your mines to the edge of my skin, where you are a lamp of flutters. I remember the spectral lashes–marigold, tamarind, secret thing between your thighs, of closed kissing eyes. At night, the possibility of you is a heavy sculpture of heavy bronze at the side of my bed, a god. And I pray you into life. Into flesh.
On the day I set out on the climb, grief saddled in my back like a bag of marbles, my breath like clouds hanging on the low peaks of a mountain, on the day I set out leaving nothing behind, nothing on the bed, no version of myself, just my voice through the night, the voice I use to ward off nightmares. (My voice is a still life in itself, a shroud green and ultramarine deep blue, a bowl of apples and tangerines on a table.) On the day I set out, the mountain is high in front of me, the unreliable god of mist and fog. I have no voice to say how high my fingers must lift as if on a lover's upper lip, to take in the breath of how high my mountain is—white teeth behind a snow cap, numberless springs, cold like the enzymes in spit— a version of me is still asleep: the moving of a limb in sleep. Everything becomes lucid.
Had death not had me in tears I would have seen the barges on life's stream sail. I would have heard sorrow songs in groves where the road was lost long where men foot prints mix with other men foot prints By the road I wait "death is better, death is better" came the song I am by the roadside looking for the road death is better, death is much better Had death not had me in tears I would have seen the barges I would have found the road and heard the sorrow songs. The land wreathes in rhythm with your soul, caressed by history and cruel geography landscape ineffable yet screaming eloquent resonant like the drums of after harvests. We pile rocks on terracing love Carry the pithy cloth to cover the hearths of our mother. Come now, you lucky ones come to the festival of corn and lamb to the finest feast of this land come, now, your lovers have unfurled their cloths their thighs glistening like golden knives ready for the plunging, for the plentiful loving time. To whom shall I turn to what shall I tell my woes ? My kinsmen, the desert tree denied us sustenance long before the drought. To whom shall I turn to whom shall I tell my woes? Some say tell the mother goat she too is my kinswoman elemental sister of your clan But I cannot tell the mother goat for she is not here.
1.  the flat end of sorrow here two crows fighting over New Year's Party leftovers. From my cell, I see a cold  hard world. 2. So this is the abscess that  hurts the nation—  jails, torture, blood  and hunger.  One day it will burst;  it must burst. 3. When I heard you were taken we speculated, those of us at large where you would be in what nightmare will you star? That night I heard the moans wondering whose child could now be lost in the cellars of oppression. Then you emerged, tall, and bloody-eyed. It was the first time  I wept. 4.  The long nights I dread most  the voices from behind the bars  the early glow of dawn before the guard's steps wake me up, the desire to leap and stretch and yawn in anticipation of another dark home-coming day only to find that  I cannot.  riding the car into town, hemmed in between them  their guns poking me in the ribs,  I never had known that my people  wore such sad faces, so sad  they were, on New Year's Eve, so very sad.
In the east, the day breaks; do not say we have started too early; For we shall cross many hills yet Before we grow old; here  the land is surpassing in beauty.  Mao Tse Tung 1934 I look out the bars upon the Castle  the crust caked row of age  in a corner my friendly spider  crouches for the unwary gnats  of my days.  So much there is we must atone. There are spires of faith in the invisible claws of spiders in the flight and curve of gulls. These know, I swear,  the contours of the rolling Saharas  and the destitute oceans of our history. We sit, debating the charity of our captors. At night lights come on the shoreline bends into a broad bay  near the Castle  the sea is gray Yesterday it rained on the eve  of my forty-first year  and left all my defeats intact Let me lead you into the country It is only as half clansman  of the ritual goat  that I bring my song to the place of sacrifice here in the pain fields  asphalt and smoke of a large hearth I lead my rope is short.  I shall soon arrive under the tree. I will stage a hundred fights in honor of our Gods and our beloved leader Here, I could care less for the toiling masses I retreated here before Lent to my own stretch of sea front (I cannot see the damned sea  because of old caked walls  built by Dutchmen) But the shore falls into a deep gulf  there are no cliffs. They found a week-old baby buried in a shallow grave on the front lawn of the fort. I want my grave to be deeper. They are sawing through our firewood  Today is cassava day The flutist is silent Perhaps his troops have arrived in Georgia Not to arrive upsets me And for the path that I have trod  I have no regrets
A name only once crammed into the child's fitful memory in malnourished villages, vast deliriums like the galloping foothills of the Colorado: of Mohawks and the Chippewa, horsey penny-movies brought cheap at the tail of the war to Africa. Where indeed is the Mississippi panorama and the girl that played the piano and kept her hand on her heart as Flanagan drank a quart of moonshine before the eyes of the town's gentlemen? What happened to your locomotive in Winter, Walt, and my ride across the prairies in the trail of the stage-coach, the gold-rush and the Swanee River? Where did they bury Geronimo, heroic chieftain, lonely horseman of this apocalypse who led his tribesmen across deserts of cholla and emerald hills in pursuit of despoilers, half-starved immigrants from a despoiled Europe? What happened to Archibald's soul's harvest on this raw earth of raw hates? To those that have none a festival is preparing at graves' ends where the mockingbird's hymn closes evening of prayers and supplication as new winds blow from graves flowered in multi-colored cemeteries even where they say the races are intact.
For Chris Okigbo, the well-known poet, killed in 1967 in the Nigerian civil war. That night he came home, he came unto me at the cold hour of the night Smelling of corn wine in the dawn dew. He stretched his hand and covered my forehead. There was a moon beam sparking rays in particles. The drummer boys had got themselves a goat. The din was high in the wail of the harvest moon. The flood was up gurgling through the fields Birth waters swimming in floods of new blood. He whispered my name in far echo Sky-wailing into a million sounds across my shores. His voice still bore the sadness of the wanderer To wail and die in a soft lonely echo That echo I heard long ago In the fall of night over my river, In the distant rustle of reeds At growth in the strength of my river. Once upon an evening I heard it Strung clear as the gong of the drummer boys Bright burnished like the glint edge of the paschal knife, ready anxious to cut My cords and enter into my fields. I was still a dream then Carried by the flimsy whiffs Of sweet scents borne aloft on the vision Of my coming flood That will bear me slowly and gently Into his world of smiles and smells. He was not very gentle with me But I did not complain. The thrust was hard and angry, severing the tiny cord Shattering the closed gates of raffia Gathering at its eye the reeds to feed my fishes. My flood had not risen. The canoe carried on the strength Of his man rowed steep down my river into a tumultuous eternity Of green hills and mountains That reeled and rolled to the river shore To clasp and bear me away. Then the floodgates opened for justice to cleanse to purify My evening of awakening In the turbulence of his triumph Into the bright evening of my rebirth. The birth was tedious The pangs were bitter Into the bright evening I rushed Crying I have found him I have found him. He stood there rustling in the wind The desire to go was written large upon his forehead. I was not ready for his coming I was not ready for his loneliness, for his sad solitude against the rustling wind. I was not ready for his entrance Into my fields and shores of my river. The entrance of raffia was closed closed against his lonely solitude. He stood beneath my entrance In his approach I knew the steps he took Like the departing Lazarus Marching toward his grave. I was not ready. The flood was gurgling at his estuary swimming within me birth waters warmed by his coming. He was silent mute against the rushing of the wind to cry and die for his homeland. My flood had not risen then. Across my vastness he marched into the wind his arms folded upon his chest, his eyes searching for the gates that will open his amulets to snatch and wear his talisman of hope. He marched into the wind howling through door posts to catch the boatman at the dawn point. to ferry him across my river. But I was not ready. My hands stretched to cover his in the darkness, to cover his eyes in the agony of his solitude to call him names I knew to put the dressing from my womb upon his cudgel scars, to hold his hand in the clasp of nightfall. He was mute; the wind had stopped rustling He was erect like the totem pole of his household He burned and blazed for an ending Then I was ready. As he pierced my agony with his cry, my river burst into flood. My shores reeled and rolled to the world's end, where they say at the world's end the graves are green.
The weaver bird built in our house And laid its eggs on our only tree. We did not want to send it away. We watched the building of the nest And supervised the egg-laying. And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner. Preaching salvation to us that owned the house. They say it came from the west Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light. Its sermon is the divination of ourselves And our new horizon limits at its nest. But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants. We look for new homes every day, For new altars we strive to rebuild The old shrines defiled by the weaver's excrement.
I. Dzogbese Lisa has treated me thus It has led me among the sharps of the forest Returning is not possible And going forward is a great difficulty The affairs of this world are like the chameleon feces Into which I have stepped When I clean it cannot go.1 I am on the world's extreme corner, I am not sitting in the row with the eminent But those who are lucky Sit in the middle and forget I am on the world's extreme corner I can only go beyond and forget. My people, I have been somewhere If I turn here, the rain beats me If I turn there the sun burns me The firewood of this world Is for only those who can take heart That is why not all can gather it. The world is not good for anybody But you are so happy with your fate; Alas! The travelers are back All covered with debt. II. Something has happened to me The things so great that I cannot weep; I have no sons to fire the gun when I die And no daughters to wail when I close my mouth I have wandered on the wilderness The great wilderness men call life The rain has beaten me, And the sharp stumps cut as keen as knives I shall go beyond and rest. I have no kin and no brother, Death has made war upon our house; And Kpeti's great household is no more, Only the broken fence stands; And those who dared not look in his face Have come out as men. How well their pride is with them. Let those gone before take note They have treated their offspring badly. What is the wailing for? Somebody is dead. Agosu himself Alas! A snake has bitten me My right arm is broken, And the tree on which I lean is fallen. Agosi if you go tell them, Tell Nyidevu, Kpeti, and Kove That they have done us evil; Tell them their house is falling And the trees in the fence Have been eaten by termites; That the martels curse them. Ask them why they idle there While we suffer, and eat sand. And the crow and the vulture Hover always above our broken fences And strangers walk over our portion.
Miracle of the children the brilliant Children the word Liquid as woodlands Children? When she was a child I read Exodus To my daughter 'The children of Israel. . .' Pillar of fire Pillar of cloud We stared at the end Into each other's eyes Where She said hushed Were the adults We dreamed to each other Miracle of the children The brilliant children Miracle Of their brilliance Miracle of
NOTES FROM THE REVOLUTION During the beat of this story you may find other beats. I meana beat, I mean Cantus, I mean Firm us, I mean paper, I mean inthe Kingdom which is coming, which is here in discovery.It is also Om Shri Maitreya, you don't go across my vibes,but with them, losing the pronoun. It is Thy, it is Thee,it is I, it is me.Machines are metal, they serve us, we take care of them. Thisis to me, and this is to you. You say you to me, and I say youto you. Some machines are very delicate, they are precise, theyare not big metal stampers, She made enough poetry to keepher company.My Vibes. You intercepted my vibes. The long shadows,the long shadows, the long shadows. My sweet little tone,my sweet little tone is my arm. On what Only: The song that girl sang the song that girl sang
One afternoon the last week in April Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet One-half turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop And go gets it, and wants it for his own. A broken-off axe handle behind the door Is long enough for a hatchet, We cut it to length and take it With the hatchet head And working hatchet, to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle With the hatchet, and the phrase First learned from Ezra Pound Rings in my ears! "When making an axe handle  the pattern is not far off." And I say this to Kai "Look: We'll shape the handle By checking the handle Of the axe we cut with—" And he sees. And I hear it again: It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe By cutting wood with an axe The model is indeed near at hand." My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen Translated that and taught it years ago And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.
The sour smell,  blue stain,  water squirts out round the wedge, Lifting quarters of rounds  covered with ants,  "a living glove of ants upon my hand" the poll of the sledge a bit peened over so the wedge springs off and tumbles  ringing like high-pitched bells  into the complex duff of twigs  poison oak, bark, sawdust,  shards of logs, And the sweat drips down.  Smell of crushed ants. The lean and heave on the peavey that breaks free the last of a bucked  three-foot round,  it lies flat on smashed oaklings— Wedge and sledge, peavey and maul,  little axe, canteen, piggyback can  of saw-mix gas and oil for the chain, knapsack of files and goggles and rags, All to gather the dead and the down.  the young men throw splits on the piles  bodies hardening, learning the pace and the smell of tools from this delve  in the winter  death-topple of elderly oak. Four cords.
Old Woman Nature naturally has a bag of bones  tucked away somewhere.  a whole room full of bones! A scattering of hair and cartilage  bits in the woods. A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it.  a shellmound  a bone flake in a streambank. A purring cat, crunching  the mouse head first,  eating on down toward the tail--   The sweet old woman  calmly gathering firewood in the  moon . . . Don't be shocked, She's heating you some soup.  VII, '81, Seeing Ichikawa Ennosuke in  "Kurozuka"—"Demoness"— at the Kabuki-za  in Tokyo
1 He takes a book down from his shelf & scribbles across a page of text: I am the final one. This means the world will end when he does. 2 In the Inferno, Dante conceives a Paradise of Poets & calls it Limbo. Foolishly he thinks his place is elsewhere. 3 Now the time has come to write a poem about a Paradise of Poets.
for Charles You have lived six decades and you have lived none You have loved many and you have loved no one You wedded three wives but you lie in your cold bed alone You sired four children but they cannot forgive you Knock at emptiness a house without your love Strike the pine box no answer all hollow You planted plums near the gate but they bear no fruit You raised herbs in the veranda fresh and savory I cry for you but no sound wells up in my throat I sing for you but my tears have dried in my gullet Walk the old dog give the budgies a cool bath Cut a tender melon let it bleed into memory The robe you washed hangs like a carcass flayed The mug you loved is stained with old coffee Your toothbrush is silent grease mums your comb Something's lost something's made strong Around the corner a new prince yearns to be loved A fresh turn of phrase a bad strophe erased A random image crafts itself into a poem A sleepless Taipei night a mosquito's symphony Who will cry for you me and your sister Colette Who will cry for you me and your Algerian sister You were a rich man but you held on to your poverty You were a poor man who loved gold over dignity I sit near your body bag and sing you a last song I sit near your body bag and chant your final sutra What's our place on earth? nada nada nada What's our destiny? war grief maggots nada Arms cheeks cock femur eyelids nada Cowl ox lamb vellum marrow nada Vulva nada semen nada ovum nada Eternity nada heaven nada void nada   Birth and death the same blackened womb Birth and death the same white body bag Detach detach we enter the world alone Detach detach we leave the world bone lonely If we can't believe in god we must believe in love We must believe in love we must believe in love And they zip you up in your white body bag White body bag white white body bag
❖ A hundred red fire ants scouring, scouring the white peony ❖ Fallen plum blossoms return to the branch, you sleep, then  harden again ❖ Cuttlefish in my palm stiffens with rigor mortis, boy toys can't  love ❖ Neighbor's barn: grass mat, crickets, Blue Boy, trowel handle,  dress soaked in mud ❖ Iron-headed mace; double-studded halberd slice into emptiness ❖ O fierce Oghuz, tie me to two wild elephants, tear me in half ❖ O my swarthy herder, two-humped bactrian, drive me the long  distance   ❖ Forceps, tongs, bushi, whip, flanks, scabbard, stirrup, goads, distaff, wither, awl  ❖ Black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne's lace, bounty of cyclamen, mown paths erupt  ❖ Gaze at the charred hills, the woebegone kiosks, we are all God's hussies  ❖ I have not fondled the emperor's lapdog, whose name is Black Muzzle  ❖ Urge your horses into the mist-swilled Galilee, O sweet  Bedlamite ❖ Her Majesty's randying up the jewel stairs to find the pleasure  dome ❖ Ancient pond; the frog jumps in and in and in: the deep slap of  water ❖ The frog jumps into the ancient pond; she says, no, I am not  ready ❖ Coyote cooked his dead wife's vagina and fed it to his new wife ❖ I plucked out three white pubic hairs and they turned into  flying monkeys ❖ Let's do it on the antimacassar, on the antimacassar ❖ Little Red drew her teeny pistol from her basket and said "eat  me" ❖ Chimera: Madame Pol Pot grafting a date tree onto a date tree ❖ His unworthy appendage, his mutinous henchman grazed my  pink cheeks ❖ He on top now changes to bottom, Goddess welcomes her  devotee ❖ Fish fish fowl fowl, mock me Mistress Bean Curd, I am both  duck and essence ❖ Don't touch him, bitch, we're engaged; and besides, he's wearing my nipple ring  ❖ Sing sing little yellow blight rage rage against the dying of the  light
When the corpse revived at the funeral,The outraged mourners killed it; and the soulOf the revenant passed into the bodyOf the poet because it had more to say.He sat down at the piano no one could playCalled Messiah, or The Regulator of the World,Which had stood for fifty years, to my knowledge,Beneath a painting of a red-haired womanIn a loose gown with one bared breast, and playedA posthumous work of the composer S——About the impotence of God (I believe)Who has no power not to create everything.It was the Autumn of the year and wet,When the music started. The musician wasSkillful but the Messiah was out of tuneAnd bent the time and the tone. For a long hourThe poet played The Regulator of the WorldAs the spirit prompted, and entered uponThe pathways of His power—while the mournersStood with slow blood on their handsAstonished by the weird processionalAnd the undertaker figured his bill.—We have in mind an unplayed instrumentWhich stands apart in a memorial airWhere the room darkens toward its inmost wallAnd a lady hangs in her autumnal hairAt evening of the November rains; and windsSublime out of the North, and North by West,Are sowing from the death-sack of the seedThe burden of her cloudy hip. Behold,I send the demon I know to relieve your need,An imperfect player at the perfect instrumentWho takes in hand The Regulator of the WorldTo keep the splendor from destroying us.Lady! The last virtuoso of the composer S——Darkens your parlor with the music of the Law.When I was green and blossomed in the SpringI was mute wood. Now I am dead I sing.
After you finish your work after you do your day after you've read your reading after you've written your say – you go down the street to the hot dog stand, one block down and across the way. On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth  century. Most of the windows are boarded up, the rats run out of a sack – sticking out of the crummy garage one shiny long Cadillac; at the glass door of the drug-addiction center, a man who'd like to break your back. But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose  and pink, too. Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel where the hot-dog-man leans – nothing else on the counter but the usual two machines, the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty, I face him in between. A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on  walking. I watch the man as he stands and pours in the familiar shape bright purple in the one marked ORANGE orange in the one marked GRAPE, the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE and orange drink in the GRAPE. Just the one word large and clear, unmistakeable, on each  machine. I ask him : How can we go on reading and make sense out of what we read? – How can they write and believe what they're writing, the young ones across the street, while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE –? (How are we going to believe what we read and we write  and we hear and we say and we do?) He looks at the two machines and he smiles and he shrugs and smiles and pours again. It could be violence and nonviolence it could be white and black women and men it could be war and peace or any binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend. Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't  do. On a corner in East Harlem garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape, forgetfulness, a hot street of murder, misery, withered hope, a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE, pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.
Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain.   To paint half a man on a half a horse. To paint a dolphin in a forest. To color feathers on a beast. To grant a maid a fish's waist. To graft or to wax, whether clay, whether nether. As men graft their gods upon empires.   Then we build mirrors to better understand ourselves, to better understand our souls, and we ask ourselves reflectively, Where? then Who? Woe unto us, we are building our city from our urine. Maintaining it with our fardels and with facts. The burbs we raise to the ranks of birds. Then we furnish them with words that wilt, like oak and elm and ash.   Busily we build our city. Toilsomely we lay the bricks. Men of the six-clock give way to those of nine, those of the nine to the generation of twelve, and those of the twelve tend to disappear, making room for the more fashionable folks who make the two-o-clock noon in the middle of day by the greedy ill will of pills.   Toilsomely we build our city. Burdensomely we tow the line. Those ministers who refuse to tow we quickly omit. Then, when the city is complete, we sit back in the stadium bleachers and wonder how the generated world can be so excellent. How the emulated world can be so grand. How the phone pole stands in for its form. How matter is glued to the elements of ideals.   Then, when the city is complete, we sit at the edge of our great new void, like frogs at edge of a pond, like birds whose nests are littered with knots. Here, we live here in the syllables of our screams where vowels hang like fish hang on hooks. Out of the water. Like consonants with their scales scraped off. And because we fear our world is growing weary, we fill our homes with booty and with loot.   Then our big city crawls into the country, dragging its mountains right along with it. Like death that extends itself with golden planks, we hang ourselves by silk, by twine, by telephone cords. The religious tongue becomes the last supper that we swallow greedily and without chewing. Like death. That is the supreme fortune of man. This is a studied and digested truth.   A couple of hours later, we find ourselves at the junction of shanties where prairies host the sprawling city of Denver, that long lost city of long lost ghosts who haunt the long lost plains, that lifeless and wifeless city, in contrast, of course, to the Big Apple, that city of violated treaties, that wailing city set for the protection of infinity, so like the city of the seven gods, so like Rome, so with its epithets, with its alphabetical locomotives. There, only dogs can find the grisly burbs where the grisly grass slowly grows. Where savage canoes now blossom into lilies.   Montgomery says it's not a place of roof and of walls, it's more like a company, it's more like a corporation. But what is the city but its steeples and domes? What is a city but its spires and its clocks? Time, the people of the city. Time, the bluntest eye, the lion's padded paws.   Sea dreams and my flowering germander eyes droop at the factoried gloom. Bank rates are a codex to the cross. This is the religious box body. This is the largest corporation in the world. This, with a sprinkling of poetry and a poetic moat.   Sea dreams, a new born clerk, all raised and bred. A maze of cuneiform streets spread like a spider's web. Not dapper, but cricket-like. Not coned, but molded. The lot is posted for the dock. Violets are sold at a hundred a piece and marshals ride on horseback while Homer makes his slow way home.
But this is ambiguous and so I will clarify. Last night I dreamt of a lake on fire. A lovely woman tapered off into a fish. I wore an owl mask with the desire to avoid use of his sacred name, and then I came to those minced pronunciations, like gad and gar and ged and gog and goles and golly and gom and gosh jolly and gud and gum and adad and adod and bedad and begad and ecod and egad and gadzooks and garzoon. Because gar is only used by playwrights who put it chiefly in the mouths of foreigners.   You said, Oh god, my god, good god, followed by a good wish, to that god of my ever-closing gaps, for I receive god only ghostly, that goodly god that guides the globe, that god of love, that god of war, that god that blesses the god-blessed and the god-forsaken and the god-damned.   My god, my shame is on me, I said to the painterly painter, My god, my shame's inside me and must go forth my body, this beastbody, this dogsbody, this stony and bony bodykins that my god has plunged my soul into. Last night I hung from the vine, from the branch, from the noose, until the sun stopped and the moon stood still, until my nation took vengeance upon my enemies.   Last night a piece of cake tumbled into our city and struck our walls until they fell. Then it rolled around and around until the entire city turned upside down. Meanwhile back at the lake, I lapped silver water until dirt came out of my wounds, until dirt came out of my mouth. Then I killed my lover, Montgomery, in a new scatological satire.   Last night nature ran hastily into its din, enthusiastically into its prison, wallowing in the flood of its patterning and randomness. Bedlam elected himself umpire and stood quickly in the midst of it, arranging and disarranging the very laws of nature. The earth vessel itself he plunged into the green and uneven horizon, and all at once, we entered a whole new world. In the beginning, the heavens and earth rose. In the beginning, we gave birth to the tiniest of errors. In the beginning, we watch for the rest of eternity as it blossoms and it blooms.
A board. A slab. A draught. A frame strewn with sand for the delineation of figures. A sandbox. And. Geometrical diagrams. Or. A frame divided in two sections and in which round wooden plums slide upon parallel rods. For performing the functions of arithmetic. Finding mechanical solutions to mathematical problems. Addition and subtraction. Multiplication and division. Both square and cube root operations. On numbers. As. A set of positive integers unique in meaning and fixed in order. But. If the value of the plum changes according to its position on the rod, you find that I am divisible. Can be rendered invisible. That I can be reduced, diminished, and deducted from the larger quantities. I am trying to discover the value of me. But. I am dumb to the wonders of your great numbers. A child puts a penny in a penny loafer. A woman with two broken fingers carries three bags up four stairs. Five or six men stamp their feet in the snow. And. In the middle of a rectangular room, halfway across the world, seven empty chairs form a circle. For. A nine inch statue portrays a man on the back of an ox. And. I am trying to accrue. I am trying to accumulate. But. You have given me the gift of two glass eyes. Or. You've added eight and subtracted ten. The word is derived from a Semitic word ibeq. To wipe the dust. And. In architecture, a slab on the top of the capital of a column. In the Ionic orders, a square flat plate. In the Corinthian and Composite, variously cut and ornamented. See. You are bedazzled. You stand at the edge of a hundred horizons wearing a thousand crowns. While I, in this world, am slowly disappearing. As is this image of you. For. Any number times zero. Always equals zero.
A great light is the man who knows the woman he loves A great light is the woman who knows the man she loves And carries the light into room after room arousing The sleepers and looking hard into the face of each And then sends them asleep again with a kiss Or a whole night of love  and goes on and on until The man and woman who carry the great lights of the Knowledge of the one lover enter the room  toward which Their light is sent and fit the one and the other torch In a high candelabrum and there is such light That children leap up  unless the sea swallow them In the crossing or hatred or war against which do not Pray only but be vigilant and set your hand to the work.
A building for habitation and habit. Or. Headquarters of a domicile. A dwelling place of a family. Or. A structure that serves as shelter. As. A burrow or nest or cave. A shack in a series of shacks. With nooks and garrets and stairs. This is your corner of the world. Thick with suspicious walls. Or. I am backpedaling through my Motionless Childhood. For. A box for the keeping of birds. A place of worship. As. A church. Entertainment. As. A tavern. For. To be quit of you I confine myself to the house. Or. I am living alone in such emptiness. Burying my Lares in the basement. But. If this house should come to ruin, I am trying hard to fix the dispersed days. When you haunted this house of horror. Or. I am furnshing my house with memory. As. Locomotives and other forgettings. Inmates collectively. For. A daughter who brings the house down. The harder shell of a snail. Or. A tortoise. As. The swallow builds its own indent. Of wood, or stone, or clay. Protection from weather. Protection again from time. The first principle of architecture From which all things extend. But. Until you hit the boy in the back with a bottle, this is but a barroom box. Where six tall men play gilded guitars. Two which ways and ever which time. For. These are my lullaby lies. And. This house has memory of home. The I and the not I. As. Protection of I. Divisions of the brain. For. A receptacle of any kind. A twelve parts of heaven. Or. The entire sky. Excepting parts that never rise. For. A sign of the zodiac is considered the seat. Where artificers may be heard. But If seven children play at house, fireside things lie in the brush. Or. What is more beautiful than a road? A roof and a roost. A den and my digs. I am confined as by illness. To stay in this house without purpose.
A character representing sound. Or. A machine invented by Thomas Edison by which noise is recorded and reproduced. And. An instrument capable of being attached to pianofortes and organs by means of which they are rendered. Melographic. Capable of writing any music played upon them. For. If the instrument makes probable this oral hahucination, you spin the record of your reddened choice. Or. You mimic the melody and its blank harmony. You accompany the symphony with a tenor of all tomorrows. While I, lost in the Maze of Mirrors, ask you to tell me again the story. You say, First. You say, Make. First, make your mouth make a sound. Speak into the mouthpiece and cause the tremors in the thin diaphragm. Then. The steel point makes tracings upon the hard wax. Fix the thing upon a spinning cylinder. And. By means of the tracings, the diaphragm will repeat with perfection your original voice. Or. The echoes in the mountains of your lamentations. As. Cries in a haunted brothel. Or. Whispers in a ghostly tavern. The instrument has spoken in our hearing. Listen. It is a natural outcome of the telephone. Listen. The old man's laugh comes to us as out of a phonograph. I say, Perfect. I say, Yet. This instrument warbles. And. This record is warped. And. The tongue of this snake. Has scratched this disk. For. Your voice is skipping. And. As I put the conch to my same hear, I listen to the echo of. I listen to the echo of. The raspy susurrations of your adieu. Applied to a person or thing that exactly reproduces the utterances of another person or thing. Hence, the transitive verb. To report in Pitman's phonograph. As. It is a great loss to me that your song was not phonographed and preserved. And. Whether it be so, it is phonographed in the mind of the mindful God. All out of sync.
It doesn't matter to me if poems mean nothing: there's no floor to the universe and yet one walks the floor.
time will wash away so clean not a cry will be left in it
Praying answers prayer: in the deep spells of inquiry and hope, a self enabled to rise again to the compromises and the shattering caring forms
Taking root in windy sand  is not an easy way to go about  finding a place to stay. A ditchbank or wood's-edge  has firmer ground. In a loose world though  something can be started— a root touch water,  a tip break sand— Mounds from that can rise  on held mounds, a gesture of building, keeping,  a trapping into shape. Firm ground is not available ground.
I found a weed that had a mirror in it and that mirror looked in at a mirror in me that had a weed in it
Coming to Sumer and the tamarisks on the river I Ezra with unsettling love rifled the mud and wattle huts for recent mournings with gold leaves and lapis lazuli beads in the neat braids loosening from the skull  Looking through the wattles to the sun I said It has rained some here in this place unless snow falls heavily in the hills to do this  The floor was smooth with silt and river weeds hanging gray on the bent reeds spoke saying Everything is even here as you can see  Firing the huts I abandoned the unprofitable poor unequal even in the bone  to disrespect  and casual with certainty watched an eagle wing as I went to king and priest
A David psalm.  The LORD is my shepherd,  I shall not want.  In grass meadows He makes me lie down,  by quiet waters guides me.  My life He brings back.  He leads me on pathways of justice  for His name's sake.  Though I walk in the vale of death's shadow,  I fear no harm,  for You are with me.  Your rod and Your staff—  it is they that console me.  You set out a table before me  in the face of my foes.  You moisten my head with oil,  my cup overflows.  Let but goodness and kindness pursue me  all the days of my life.  And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD  for many long days.
No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one. Blessèd art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite. A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose. With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn.
For sleeplessness, your head face down, your shoulder blades floating and aspirin as a last resort, when death is threatening, though lately I have experimented with numbers and as for dreams I've never been boring and only once did I bite the arm of a woman sitting next to me and I should be careful, she might have a hand-written poem or a memoir and didn't I bite her arm and aren't we both poets, though I warn her that I make gurgling noises and twitch in both legs and make the bed jump and I am exhausted from looking at poems and I don't care about her nuts and bolts and she has to go to the wilderness herself and fuck the exercises, let her get smashed by a Mack truck, then she'll be ready to mourn.
Across a space peopled with stars I am laughing while my sides ache for existence it turns out is profound though the profound because of time it turns out is an illusion and all of this is infinitely improbable given the space, for which I gratefully lie in three feet of snow making a shallow grave I would have called an angel otherwise and think of my own rapturous escape from living only as dust and dirt, little sister.
Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember what it was like in the spring of 1950 before the burning coal entered my life. I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels and one crooked broken masculine one and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain with skin wrinkled up like a chicken's beside the razor and the silver tap. I didn't live in Paris for nothing and walk with Jack Gilbert down the wide sidewalks thinking of Hart Crane and Apollinaire and I didn't save the picture of the two of us moving through a crowd of stiff Frenchmen and put it beside the one of Pound and Williams unless I wanted to see what coals had done to their lives too. I say it with vast affection, wanting desperately to know what the two of them talked about when they lived in Pennsylvania and what they talked about at St. Elizabeth's fifty years later, looking into the sun, 40,000 wrinkles between them, the suffering finally taking over their lives. I think of Gilbert all the time now, what we said on our long walks in Pittsburgh, how lucky we were to live in New York, how strange his great fame was and my obscurity, how we now carry the future with us, knowing every small vein and every elaboration. The coal has taken over, the red coal is burning between us and we are at its mercy— as if a power is finally dominating the two of us; as if we're huddled up watching the black smoke and the ashes; as if knowledge is what we needed and now we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge. The tears are different—though I hate to speak for him—the tears are what we bring back to the darkness, what we are left with after our own escape, what, all along, the red coal had in store for us as we moved softly, either whistling or singing, either listening or reasoning, on the gray sidewalks and the green ocean; in the cars and the kitchens and the bookstores; in the crowded restaurants, in the empty woods and libraries.
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945 — in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.
My shadow followed me to San Diego  silently, she never complained. No green card, no identity pass,  she is wedded to my fate. The moon is a drunk and anorectic,  constantly reeling, changing weight. My shadow dances grotesquely,  resentful she can't leave me. The moon mourns his unwritten novels,  cries naked into the trees and fades. Tomorrow, he'll return to beat me  blue—again, again and again. Goodbye Moon, goodbye Shadow.  My husband, my lover, I'm late. The sun will plunge through the window.  I must make my leap of faith.
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads: Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. No gloves: fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper, and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin, hidden. Then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punchclock. Ten years later, in law school, I knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts, that every open lawbook was a pair of hands upturned and burning.
She knew what she was and so was capable of anything anyone could imagine. She loved what she was, there for the taking, imagine. She imagined nothing. She loved nothing more than what she had, which was enough for her, which was more than any man could handle.
Remember after work you grabbed our skateboard, crouched like a surfer, wingtips over the edge; wheels clacketing down the pocked macadam, you veered almost straight into the neighbor's hedge? We ran after you laughing, shouting, Wait! Or that August night you swept us to the fair? The tallest person boarding the Ferris wheel, you rocked our car right when we hit the apex above the winking midway, to make us squeal. Next we raced you to the games, shouting, Wait! At your funeral, relatives and neighbors, shaking our hands, said, "So young to have died!" But we've dreamt you're just skating streets away, striding the fairgrounds toward a wilder ride. And we're still straggling behind, shouting, Wait—!
Where is the word I want? Groping in the thicket, about to pinch the dangling berry, my fingerpads close on air. I can hear it scrabbling like a squirrel on the oak's far side.   Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean your singular flare, blaze your topaz in the mind's blank. I could always pull the gift from the lucky-dip barrel, scoop the right jewel from my dragon's trove.... Now I flail, the wrong item creaks up on the mental dumbwaiter. No use— it's turning out of sight, a bicycle down a Venetian alley— I clatter after, only to find gondolas bobbing in sunny silence, a pigeon mumbling something I just can't catch.
Childhood   You came into this world trailing clouds all right,  they just happened to be big black ones. In the castle you drank from a poisoned goblet  and were changed into something even bears cringe at. When you awake baling-wired in thorns, viceroys around you cobwebbed to their steins, moth-eaten ermines, a muttering king—  what choice do you have? Rappel down the turret with your cap and bells.Adolescence Handed a baton in a bad-luck relay, you've overshot the cliff and are pinwheeling down, flailing in time to that whistling-wind keening that lets viewers know you will soon be compressed under a subsequent sequence of rocks.  Squashed into pleats a centimeter wide? Stride till you're 3-D again.  Adulthood   You're staggering through a dark wood, soundtrack a fugue.    Remember wrens risk a hand for a single seed,  orchids can sprout from duff alone.  Executive Summary How many can you feed from your sourdough lumps?  Each morning, braid a loaf. Give them away.
I ask not wit, nor beauty do I crave, Nor wealth, nor pompous titles wish to have; But since, 'tis doomed through all degrees of life, Whether a daughter, sister, or a wife; That females should the stronger males obey, And yield implicit to their lordly sway; Since this, I say, is ev'ry woman's fate, Give me a mind to suit my slavish state.
Nay, Doll, quoth Roger, now you're caught, I'll never let you goTill you consent, —To what? says Doll, Zounds, Doll, why, do'stn't know? She faintly screamed, and vowed she would If hurt, cry out aloud; Ne'er fear, says he, then seized the fair, She sighed—and sighed—and vowed,—A'nt I a Man, quoth Roger, ha! Me you need never doubt,Now did I hurt you, Doll? quoth he, Or, pray? says Doll, did I cry out?
Strephon, your breach of faith and trust Affords me no surprise; A man who grateful was, or just, Might make my wonder rise. That heart to you so fondly tied, With pleasure wore its chain, But from your cold neglectful pride, Found liberty again. For this no wrath inflames my mind, My thanks are due to thee; Such thanks as gen'rous victors find, Who set their captives free.
Lying is an occupation,  Used by all who mean to rise; Politicians owe their station,  But to well concerted lies. These to lovers give assistance,  To ensnare the fair-one's heart; And the virgin's best resistance  Yields to this commanding art. Study this superior science,  Would you rise in Church or State; Bid to Truth a bold defiance,  'Tis the practice of the great.
or, The Wary Physician A doctor, of great skill and fame, Paulo Purganti was his name, Had a good, comely, virtuous wife; No woman led a better life: She to intrigue was ev'n hard hearted: She chuckled when a bawd was carted; And thought the nation ne'er would thrive, Till all the whores were burnt alive. On married men, that dared be bad,
She thought no mercy should be had; They should be hanged, or starved, or flayed, Or served like Romish priests in Swede. In short, all lewdness she defied; And stiff was her parochial pride. Yet, in an honest way, the dame Was a great lover of that same; And could from Scripture take her cue, That husbands should give wives their due. Her prudence did so justly steer
Between the gay and the severe,That, if in some regards, she choseTo curb poor Paulo in too close;In others, she relaxed again,And governed with a looser rein. Thus, though she strictly did confineThe doctor from excess of wine;With oysters, eggs, and vermicelli,She let him almost burst his belly:Thus, drying coffee was denied;But chocolate that want supplied;And for tobacco—who could bear it?Filthy concomitant of claret!—(Blest resolution!) one might seeEringo roots, and Bohea tea.She often stroked the doctor's band,And stroked his beard, and kissed his hand,Kindly complained, that after noonHe went to pore on books too soon:She held it wholesomer by much,To rest a little on the couch;About his waist in bed-a-nightsShe clung on close—for fear of sprites. The doctor understood the call,But had not always wherewithal. The Lion's skin too short, you know,(As Plutarch's Morals finely show)Was lengthened by the Fox's tail;And Art supplies, where Strength may fail. Unwilling then in arms to meetThe enemy he could not beat,He strove to lengthen the campaign,And save his forces by chicane.Fabius, the Roman chief, who thusBy fair retreat grew Maximus,Shows us, that all warrior can do,With force superior is cunctando. One day, then, as the foe drew near,With Love, and Joy, and Life, and Dear,Our Don, who knew this tittle-tattleDid, sure as trumpet, call to battle,Thought it extremely à propos,To ward against the coming blow:To ward: But how? ay, there's the question:Fierce the assault, unarmed the bastion. The doctor feigned a strange surprise;He felt her pulse; he viewed her eyes;That was too fast; these rolled too quick:She was, he said, or would be sick:He judged it absolutely good,That she should purge, and cleanse her blood.Spa-waters to that end were got:If they passed easily or not,What matters it? the lady's feverContinued as violent as ever. For a distemper of this kind(Blackmore and Hans are of my mind)If once it youthful blood infects,And chiefly of the female sex,Is scarce removed by pill or potion;Whate'er may be our doctor's notion. One luckless night then, as in bedThe doctor and the dame were laid,Again this cruel fever came:High pulse, short breath, and blood in flame.What measures shall poor Paulo keep With Madam in this piteous taking?She, like Macbeth, has murdered sleep, And won't allow him rest, though waking.Sad state of matters! when we dareNor ask for peace, nor offer war:Nor Livy nor Comines have shown,What in this juncture may be done.Grotius might own, that Paulo's case isHarder, than any which he placesAmongst his Belli, and his Pacis.He strove, alas, but strove in vain,By dint of logic to maintainThat all the sex was born to grieve,Down to her Ladyship from Eve.He ranged his tropes, and preached up patience;Backed his opinion with quotations,Divines and moralists; and run onQuite through from Seneca to Bunyan.As much in vain he bid her tryTo fold her arms, to close her eye;Telling her, rest would do her good,If any thing in Nature could:So held the Greeks quite down from Galen,Masters and princes of the calling:So all our modern friends maintain,(Though no great Greeks) in Warwick-lane. Reduce, my Muse, the wand'ring song:A tale should never be too long. The more he talked, the more she burned,And sighed, and tossed, and groaned, and turned:At last, I wish, said she, my dear—(And whispered something in his ear).You wish! wish on, the doctor cries:Lord! when will womankind be wise?What! in your waters; are you mad?Why, poison is not half so bad.I'll do—but I give you warning;You'll die before tomorrow morning.—'Tis kind, my dear, what you advise,The lady with a sign replies:But life, you know, at best is pain:And death is what we should disdain.So do it therefore, and adieu:For I will die for love of you.—Let wanton wives by death be scared:But, to my comfort, I'm prepared.
The night we got bashed we told Rusty how they drove up, yelled QUEER, threw a hot dog, sped off. Rusty: Now, is that gaybashing? Orare they just calling you queer? Good point. Josey pitied the fools: who buys a perfectly good pack of wieners and drives around San Francisco chucking them at gays? And who speeds off? Missing the point, the pleasure of the bash? Dear bashers, you should have seen the hot dog hit my neck, the scarf Josey sewed from antique silk kimonos: so gay. You missed laughing at us, us confused, your raw hot dog on the ground. Josey and Rusty and Bob make fun of the gaybashers, and I wash my scarf in the sink. I use Woolite. We worry about insurance, interest rates. Not hot dogs thrown from F-150s, homophobic freaks. After the bashing, we used the ATM in the sex shop next to Annie's Social Club, smiled at the kind owner, his handlebar mustache. Astrud Gilberto sang tall and tanand young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema... and the dildos gleamed from the walls, a hundred cheerful colors. In San Francisco it rains hot dogs, pity-the-fool. Ass-sized penguins, cock after cock in azure acrylic, butterscotch glass, anyone's flesh-tone, chrome.
WTF texts Josey, and I text back OMG. We had to tell Maggie what LOL meant– it's not Lots Of Love, though that almost always fits. Major emailed LMAO when I assumed his inbox gets dealt with by an underling, some undergrad, assumed it was Major's minor who invited me to read but "can not pay much sum of monies." Sum of Monies? I emailed back.Who wrote this? Your assistant's a Nigerian prince? WTF. For a while we just played with these, joking, like I tried onWicked when I moved to Boston, called Lisa Liser, pizza pizzer, saidFucken, wicked, pissah, dood. But before you know it, it's part of how you talk, how I talk, fucken guy. Dude. When my ex student saw me she said Sick a dozen times, amazed, delighted, meant it's super I've moved back, and, whoda thunk it, come in to her cafe. She checked out Josey, my instant street cred. Josey bought new pants for work with a cell phone pocket; the cell phone pocket pants are Husky Boys' Dickies, which I can't get enough of, laugh every time I think of them, or try to name them out loud. Josey wears Husky Boys' Dickies. My darling, my husky, my husky little boy.Hey, Husky, we say, around the house, just waking up, just bumping into each other en route from basement to garden to kitchen. Hey,Husky, do you want coffee? Hey Husky, Hey Bunny, Hey Hon. When I'm helping my students translate Sappho's Fragments 1 and 31, I get them to make a list of many-colored things, so they don't feel stuck with colorful throne. One girl can't think of anything but Skittles. Terrific, I tell her,you're breaking product placement ground. Then I ask them to think of voices they love, the voice of someone they love. It's hard to describe a voice, but I ask them each to try, put his or her beloved in the place of Sappho's, make her theirs, more real than just sweet-voiced and lovely-laughtered. You havethree minutes. Get something down, I tell them, some adjective or comparison,even if you just write the same word over and over again. 5:47 p.m. on a Wednesday, me saying Do your best and You could just say husky husky husky husky husky.
Hand and foot, from head to toe, the body we know like the back of our hands, we say, patting our palms since we don't know back from front, don't know our ass from our elbow. I help Liz find her vagina to use a tampon her first time, Brooke tells me what to expect during a blow job, Jeff says to let the funneled force of Coors hold open my throat, a stranger gives me Valium when I reach for her hand on a plane. Now Depo, condoms, the Pill make way for FSH and BBT, how the sperm that makes boys goes faster, dies sooner,like boys, says Joanna, holding her little girl. Laura's fingers flick to show how the dye popped open her fallopian tubes. Rita Mae says a 48 year old's sperm could cause autism, Esther says kids are nice but theydo ruin your life. Billy's friend announces, out of nowhere, I am so happy with my decisionnot to have children and none of us believe her. X shopped around for the perfect Jewish eggs, Y injected her belly, evenings, with little syringes, the bruises blooming black, now purple, now yellow and green. During implantation the nurses played soft eighties hits—I bought a ticket to the world, I know I know I knowthis much is true. She says in the ultrasound her ovaries looked like bunches of grapes. Z has a baby at forty-two—in vino she and her husband joke, in vitro a no-no in the Roman Catholic Church. Encyclicals entitledDonum Vitae, Dignitas Personae say why: the human personis objectively deprived of its proper perfection: namely, thatof being the result and fruit of a conjugal act. The church, thank god, is soothing, confident, ready to clear all this up. Life a gift, human persons dignified. And we, most of us, are perfect, because fathers put their penises in moms.
Our cabdriver tells us how Somalia is better than here because in Islam we execute murderers. So, fewer murders. But isn't there civil warthere now? Aren't there a lot of murders? Yes, but in general it's better. Not now, but most of the time. He tells us about how smart the system is, how it's hard to bear false witness. We nod. We're learning a lot. I say—once we are close to the house—I say, Whatabout us? Two women, married to each other.Don't be offended, he says, gravely. But a manwith a man, a woman with a woman: it would bea public execution. We nod. A little silence along the Southeast Corridor. Then I say, Yeah,I love my country. This makes him laugh; we all laugh.We aren't offended, says Josey. We love you. Sometimes I feel like we're proselytizing, spreading the Word of Gay. The cab is shaking with laughter, the poor man relieved we're not mad he sort of wants us dead. The two of us soothing him, wanting him comfortable, wanting him to laugh. We love our country, we tell him. And Josey tips him. She tips him well.
When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.  KAFKA, Wedding Preparations in the Country The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics, The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter) Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be  approached, Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present Which would have its own opinions on these matters, Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed) Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in And out of it. I want that information very much today, Can't have it, and this makes me angry. I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge. I shall keep to myself. I shall not repeat others' comments about me.
All the hills and vales alongEarth is bursting into song,And the singers are the chapsWho are going to die perhaps.O sing, marching men,Till the valleys ring again.Give your gladness to earth's keeping,So be glad, when you are sleeping. Cast away regret and rue,Think what you are marching to.Little live, great pass.Jesus Christ and BarabbasWere found the same day.This died, that went his way.So sing with joyful breath,For why, you are going to death.Teeming earth will surely storeAll the gladness that you pour. Earth that never doubts nor fears,Earth that knows of death, not tears,Earth that bore with joyful easeHemlock for Socrates,Earth that blossomed and was glad‘Neath the cross that Christ had,Shall rejoice and blossom tooWhen the bullet reaches you.Wherefore, men marchingOn the road to death, sing!Pour your gladness on earth's head,So be merry, so be dead. From the hills and valleys earthShouts back the sound of mirth,Tramp of feet and lilt of songRinging all the road along.All the music of their going,Ringing swinging glad song-throwing,Earth will echo still, when footLies numb and voice mute.On, marching men, onTo the gates of death with song.Sow your gladness for earth's reaping,So you may be glad, though sleeping.Strew your gladness on earth's bed,So be merry, so be dead.
What of the faith and fire within usMen who march awayEre the barn-cocks sayNight is growing gray,Leaving all that here can win us;What of the faith and fire within usMen who march away? Is it a purblind prank, O think you,Friend with the musing eye,Who watch us stepping byWith doubt and dolorous sigh?Can much pondering so hoodwink you!Is it a purblind prank, O think you,Friend with the musing eye? Nay. We well see what we are doing,Though some may not see—Dalliers as they be—England's need are we;Her distress would leave us rueing:Nay. We well see what we are doing,Though some may not see! In our heart of hearts believingVictory crowns the just,And that braggarts mustSurely bite the dust,Press we to the field ungrieving,In our heart of hearts believingVictory crowns the just. Hence the faith and fire within usMen who march awayEre the barn-cocks sayNight is growing gray,Leaving all that here can win us;Hence the faith and fire within usMen who march away.
Snow is a strange white word; No ice or frost Have asked of bud or bird For Winter's cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know, No man knows why. In all men's hearts it is. Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to mould. Red fangs have torn His face. God's blood is shed. He mourns from His lone place His children dead. O! ancient crimson curse! Corrode, consume. Give back this universe Its pristine bloom.  (Cape Town, 1914)
The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;And no one scrambles over the sliding chalkBy beech and yew and perishing juniperDown the half precipices of its sides, with rootsAnd rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,The moon of Summer, and all the singing birdsExcept the missel-thrush that loves juniper,Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and darkThe Combe looks since they killed the badger there,Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,That most ancient Briton of English beasts.
I never saw that land before,  And now can never see it again;  Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar  Endeared, by gladness and by pain,  Great was the affection that I bore  
 To the valley and the river small,  The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,  The chickens from the farmsteads, all  Elm-hidden, and the tributaries Descending at equal interval;  
 The blackthorns down along the brook  With wounds yellow as crocuses  Where yesterday the labourer’s hook  Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze  That hinted all and nothing spoke.  
 I neither expected anything Nor yet remembered: but some goal  I touched then; and if I could sing  What would not even whisper my soul  As I went on my journeying,  
 I should use, as the trees and birds did,  A language not to be betrayed; And what was hid should still be hid  Excepting from those like me made  Who answer when such whispers bid.
I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose. Many a road and track That, since the dawn’s first crack, Up to the forest brink, Deceived the travellers, Suddenly now blurs, And in they sink. Here love ends, Despair, ambition ends; All pleasure and all trouble, Although most sweet or bitter, Here ends in sleep that is sweeter Than tasks most noble. There is not any book Or face of dearest look That I would not turn from now To go into the unknown I must enter, and leave, alone, I know not how. The tall forest towers; Its cloudy foliage lowers Ahead, shelf above shelf; Its silence I hear and obey That I may lose my way And myself.
Some day, I think, there will be people enoughIn Froxfield to pick all the blackberries
Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and We had seen nothing fairer than that land, Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made Wild of the tame, casting out all that was Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad. Fair, too, was afternoon, and first to pass Were we that league of snow, next the north wind. There was nothing to return for, except need, And yet we sang nor ever stopped for speed, As we did often with the start behind. Faster still strode we when we came in sight Of the cold roofs where we must spend the night. Happy we had not been there, nor could be. Though we had tasted sleep and food and fellowship Together long. “How quick” to someone's lip The words came, “will the beaten horse run home.” The word “home” raised a smile in us all three, And one repeated it, smiling just so That all knew what he meant and none would say. Between three counties far apart that lay We were divided and looked strangely each At the other, and we knew we were not friends But fellows in a union that ends With the necessity for it, as it ought. Never a word was spoken, not a thought Was thought, of what the look meant with the word “Home” as we walked and watched the sunset blurred. And then to me the word, only the word, “Homesick,” as it were playfully occurred: No more. If I should ever more admit Than the mere word I could not endure it For a day longer: this captivity Must somehow come to an end, else I should be Another man, as often now I seem, Or this life be only an evil dream.
Often I had gone this way before: But now it seemed I never could be And never had been anywhere else; 'Twas home; one nationality We had, I and the birds that sang, One memory.   They welcomed me. I had come back That eve somehow from somewhere far: The April mist, the chill, the calm, Meant the same thing familiar And pleasant to us, and strange too, Yet with no bar.   The thrush on the oaktop in the lane Sang his last song, or last but one; And as he ended, on the elm Another had but just begun His last; they knew no more than I The day was done.   Then past his dark white cottage front A labourer went along, his tread Slow, half with weariness, half with ease; And, through the silence, from his shed The sound of sawing rounded all That silence said.
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the woodThis Eastertide call into mind the men,
Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night To be cut down by the sharp axe of light,— Out of the night, two cocks together crow, Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow: And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand, Heralds of splendour, one at either hand, Each facing each as in a coat of arms: The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
This is no case of petty right or wrong That politicians or philosophers Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers. Beside my hate for one fat patriot My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:— A kind of god he is, banging a gong. But I have not to choose between the two, Or between justice and injustice. Dinned With war and argument I read no more Than in the storm smoking along the wind Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar. From one the weather shall rise clear and gay; Out of the other an England beautiful And like her mother that died yesterday.
Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard If others sang; but others never sang In the great beech-wood all that May and June. No one saw him: I alone could hear him Though many listened. Was it but four years Ago? or five? He never came again. Oftenest when I heard him I was alone, Nor could I ever make another hear. La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off— As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world, As if the bird or I were in a dream. Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still He sounded. All the proof is—I told men What I had heard. I never knew a voice, Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told The naturalists; but neither had they heard Anything like the notes that did so haunt me, I had them clear by heart and have them still. Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet: Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say That it was one or other, but if sad 'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off For me to taste it. But I cannot tell If truly never anything but fair The days were when he sang, as now they seem. This surely I know, that I who listened then, Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering A heavy body and a heavy heart, Now straightway, if I think of it, become Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn The lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm That strewed an angle of the fallow, and Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square Of charlock. Every time the horses turned Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned Upon the handles to say or ask a word, About the weather, next about the war. Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed Once more. The blizzard felled the elm whose crest I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole, The ploughman said. “When will they take it away?” “When the war’s over.” So the talk began— One minute and an interval of ten, A minute more and the same interval. “Have you been out?” “No.” “And don’t want to, perhaps?” “If I could only come back again, I should. I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few. Only two teams work on the farm this year. One of my mates is dead. The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.” “And I should not have sat here. Everything Would have been different. For it would have been Another world.” “Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good.” Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
The sun used to shine while we two walked Slowly together, paused and started Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked As either pleased, and cheerfully parted Each night. We never disagreed Which gate to rest on. The to be And the late past we gave small heed. We turned from men or poetry To rumours of the war remote Only till both stood disinclined For aught but the yellow flavorous coat Of an apple wasps had undermined; Or a sentry of dark betonies, The stateliest of small flowers on earth, At the forest verge; or crocuses Pale purple as if they had their birth In sunless Hades fields. The war Came back to mind with the moonrise Which soldiers in the east afar Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes Could as well imagine the Crusades Or Caesar's battles. Everything To faintness like those rumours fade— Like the brook's water glittering Under the moonlight—like those walks Now—like us two that took them, and The fallen apples, all the talks And silence—like memory's sand When the tide covers it late or soon, And other men through other flowers In those fields under the same moon Go talking and have easy hours.
When Winter's ahead, What can you read in November That you read in April When Winter's dead? I hear the thrush, and I see Him alone at the end of the lane Near the bare poplar's tip, Singing continuously. Is it more that you know Than that, even as in April, So in November, Winter is gone that must go? Or is all your lore Not to call November November, And April April, And Winter Winter—no more? But I know the months all, And their sweet names, April, May and June and October, As you call and call I must remember What died into April And consider what will be born Of a fair November; And April I love for what It was born of, and November For what it will die in, What they are and what they are not, While you love what is kind, What you can sing in And love and forget in All that's ahead and behind.
Old Man, or Lad's-love,—in the name there's nothing To one that knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man, The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree, Growing with rosemary and lavender. Even to one that knows it well, the names Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is: At least, what that is clings not to the names In spite of time. And yet I like the names. The herb itself I like not, but for certain I love it, as some day the child will love it Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush Whenever she goes in or out of the house. Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still But half as tall as she, though it is as old; So well she clips it. Not a word she says; And I can only wonder how much hereafter She will remember, with that bitter scent, Of garden rows, and ancient damson-trees Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door, A low thick bush beside the door, and me Forbidding her to pick. As for myself, Where first I met the bitter scent is lost. I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds, Sniff them and think and sniff again and try Once more to think what it is I am remembering, Always in vain. I cannot like the scent, Yet I would rather give up others more sweet, With no meaning, than this bitter one. I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing; Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember: No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush Of Lad's-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
“No one cares less than I, Nobody knows but God, Whether I am destined to lie Under a foreign clod,” Were the words I made to the bugle call in the morning. But laughing, storming, scorning, Only the bugles know What the bugles say in the morning, And they do not care, when they blow The call that I heard and made words to early this morning.
The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes Till beauty shines in all that we can see. War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise, And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.   Horror of wounds and anger at the foe, And loss of things desired; all these must pass. We are the happy legion, for we know Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass.   There was an hour when we were loth to part From life we longed to share no less than others. Now, having claimed this heritage of heart, What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?
To these I turn, in these I trust—Brother Lead and Sister Steel.To his blind power I make appeal,I guard her beauty clean from rust.He spins and burns and loves the air,And splits a skull to win my praise;But up the nobly marching daysShe glitters naked, cold and fair.Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:That in good fury he may feelThe body where he sets his heelQuail from your downward darting kiss.
He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls; Aqueous like floating rays of amber light, Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep. Silence and safety; and his mortal shore Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death. Someone was holding water to his mouth. He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot The opiate throb and ache that was his wound. Water—calm, sliding green above the weir; Water—a sky-lit alley for his boat, Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers And shaken hues of summer: drifting down, He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept. Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward, Blowing the curtain to a gummering curve. Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud; Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green, Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes. Rain—he could hear it rustling through the dark; Fragrance and passionless music woven as one; Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace, Gently and slowly washing life away. He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs. But someone was beside him; soon he lay Shuddering because that evil thing had passed. And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared. Light many lamps and gather round his bed. Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live. Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet. He's young; he hated war; how should he die When cruel old campaigners win safe through? But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went, And there was silence in the summer night; Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep. Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
1. This one happens in morning as a nearby crow wakes me, calling God, God, look at this : I am on the steps of a church, wrapped in Monday's Korea Times telling of the drought in Pusan. You can live by the water and still die of thirst, and I, there on the cold brick steps, am dying. But dying means the presence of breath. This one happens on Hangul Day, Independence Day in Seoul, where girls in purple satin hanboks parade through downtown streets. In this dream I make eye contact with every single one of them. Another boy, a few years older than I, rides a tricycle in the parade, trailing the girls. He sees me. He winks, as if he knows how everything will end. 2. This one happens in the evening just as daylight surrenders to the moon, and the flute of dusk arrives. It is cool. I am wrapped in a sky blue blanket, so whoever finds me thinks kindly of whoever left me. The one who finds me is a nun. She opens the door, looking beyond me into the tired night, then looks down. She gasps softly. She says, ahneyong, you sweet beautiful child. She bends down like an angel and takes me into her arms. 3. This one happens in the cruelest moment of the day, as heat curls flowers into dirt. A man, drunk with despair, screams at the sun. His sorrow is a collage of moths and ants, crawling from his face to his chest. I watch from the steps. It is the year of the dog and I am a part of it : unable to speak but an expert at listening : to the old man from Laos who sits on the steps two buildings down : he is telling another man how Hmong children become human on the third day of life, after the soul calling ceremony and the burning of animal flesh. He smokes from a pipe and closes his eyes as he inhales. I can hear all of this. I can hear a woman rustling inside the church. She is a dancer, so she speaks with her hands. I hear her rise, sweetly from her knees to her feet. This means she believes in dreams. I hear her slide her hand, sweetly along her hair. This means she believes in the sun. I hear her move towards me and place her open palm on the door. This means she welcomes me. This means she believes in the miracle of possibility.
“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General saidWhen we met him last week on our way to the line.Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to JackAs they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Well, how are things in Heaven? I wish you’d say, Because I’d like to know that you’re all right. Tell me, have you found everlasting day, Or been sucked in by everlasting night? For when I shut my eyes your face shows plain; I hear you make some cheery old remark— I can rebuild you in my brain, Though you’ve gone out patrolling in the dark. You hated tours of trenches; you were proud Of nothing more than having good years to spend; Longed to get home and join the careless crowd Of chaps who work in peace with Time for friend. That’s all washed out now. You’re beyond the wire: No earthly chance can send you crawling back; You’ve finished with machine-gun fire— Knocked over in a hopeless dud-attack. Somehow I always thought you’d get done in, Because you were so desperate keen to live:You were all out to try and save your skin, Well knowing how much the world had got to give. You joked at shells and talked the usual “shop,” Stuck to your dirty job and did it fine: With “Jesus Christ! when will it stop? Three years ... It’s hell unless we break their line.” So when they told me you’d been left for dead I wouldn’t believe them, feeling it must be true. Next week the bloody Roll of Honour said “Wounded and missing”—(That’s the thing to do When lads are left in shell-holes dying slow, With nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache, Moaning for water till they know It’s night, and then it’s not worth while to wake!) Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God, And tell Him that our politicians swear They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod Under the Heel of England ... Are you there? ... Yes ... and the war won’t end for at least two years; But we’ve got stacks of men ... I’m blind with tears, Staring into the dark. Cheero! I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.
Light a match. Watch the blue part  flare like a shocked piñata  from the beating  into the sky,  watch how fast thin wood burns & turns toward the skin, the olive-orange skin of your thumb    & let it burn, too. Light a fire. Drown out the singing cats. Let the drunken mariachis blaze their way, streaking like crazed hyenas over a brown hill, just underneath a perfect birthday moon.
We’d gained our first objective hours before While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes, Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke. Things seemed all right at first. We held their line, With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed, And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legsHigh-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the sapsAnd trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain! A yawning soldier knelt against the bank, Staring across the morning blear with fog; He wondered when the Allemands would get busy; And then, of course, they started with five-nines Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud. Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. An officer came blundering down the trench: “Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ... Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the rightDown the old sap: machine-guns on the left;And stumbling figures looming out in front.“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat, And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ... And started blazing wildly ... then a bang Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ... Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.
I love you, great new Titan! Am I not you? Napoleon and Caesar Out of you grew. Out of unthinkable torture, Eyes kissed by death, Won back to the world again, Lost and won in a breath, Cruel men are made immortal. Out of your pain born, They have stolen the sun's power With their feet on your shoulders worn. Let them shrink from your girth, That has outgrown the pallid days When you slept like Circe's swine Or a word in the brain's ways.
Grotesque and queerly huddled Contortionists to twist The sleepy soul to a sleep, We lie all sorts of ways And cannot sleep. The wet wind is so cold, And the lurching men so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Wind’s fumble or men’s feet Is on your face.
Sombre the night is: And, though we have our lives, we know What sinister threat lurks there. Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know This poison-blasted track opens on our camp— On a little safe sleep. But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy. Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks: Music showering on our upturned listening faces. Death could drop from the dark As easily as song— But song only dropped, Like a blind man's dreams on the sand By dangerous tides; Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped In at the windows, watched my friends at table, Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway, Or coming out into the darkness. Still No one could see me. I would have thought of them—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity, Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that This gay machine of splendour ’ld soon be broken, Thought little of, pashed, scattered. … Only, always, I could but see them—against the lamplight—pass Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass, Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light, That broke to phosphorus out in the night, Perishing things and strange ghosts—soon to die To other ghosts—this one, or that, or I.
I have no idea what priests dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun. I have no more sense of what is sacred than a monk might have, sweeping the temple floor, slow gestures of honor to the left, the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing. Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph you look at over and over again, the one of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you did before prayer became necessary, the one with the sinking cathedral in Mexico City rising up behind you and a limping man frozen in time to the right of you, the moment when she touched your bare arm for the first time, her fingers like cool flashes of heaven.
Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat:Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean,A merciful putting away of what has been.And this we know: Death is not Life, effete,Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seenSo marvellous things know well the end not yet.Victor and vanquished are a-one in death:Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say,“Come, what was your record when you drew breath?”But a big blot has hid each yesterdaySo poor, so manifestly incomplete.And your bright Promise, withered long and sped,Is touched, stirs, rises, opens and grows sweetAnd blossoms and is you, when you are dead.
Fighting in mud, we turn to Thee, In these dread times of battle, Lord. To keep us safe, if so may be, From shrapnel, snipers, shell, and sword. But not on us, for we are men Of meaner clay, who fight in clay, but on the Staff, the Upper Ten, Depends the issue of the Day. The staff is working with its brains, While we are sitting in the trench; The Staff the universe ordains (subject to Thee and General French). God help the staff-especially The young ones, many of them sprung From our high aristocracy; Their task is hard, and they are young.O Lord, who mad'st all things to be, And madest some things very good, Please keep the Extra A.D.C. From horrid scenes, and sight of blood. See that his eggs are newly laid, Not tinged as some of them-with green; And let no nasty draughts invade The windows of his Limousine. When he forgets to buy the bread, When there are no more minerals, Preserve his smooth well-oiled head From wrath of caustic Generals.O Lord, who mad'st all things to be, And hatest nothing thou has made, Please keep the Extra A.D.C Out of the sun and in the shade.
Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit, the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens, graduate school and good pot. A group of four at a window table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi. Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano poet whose songs still bank off Fresno's beer soaked gutters and almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy you'd know we'd done this before. In Fresno, the bullets tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day. In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace. In my California, you can watch the sun go down like in your California, on the ledge of the pregnant twenty-second century, the one with a bounty of peaches and grapes, red onions and the good salsa, wine and chapchae. Here, in my California, paperbacks are free, farmer's markets are twenty four hours a day and always packed, the trees and water have no nails in them, the priests eat well, the homeless eat well. Here, in my California, everywhere is Chinatown, everywhere is K-Town, everywhere is Armeniatown, everywhere a Little Italy. Less confederacy. No internment in the Valley. Better history texts for the juniors. In my California, free sounds and free touch.  Free questions, free answers. Free songs from parents and poets, those hopeful bodies of light.
How much delight before we collapse How much earth in the lungs How much wine When we want more When the weeds sprawl It is not what you think Think how fast some landscapes change the lover, the gardener's grand idea, the failing Maple the boat about to capsize the correction the hand's reflection the impossible replication of weight versus time how it will never mean what you want
Amazement fills my heart to-night, Amaze and awful fears; I am a ship that sees no light, But blindly onward steers. Flung toward heaven’s toppling rage, Sunk between steep and steep, A lost and wondrous fight I wage With the embattled deep. I neither know nor care at length Where drives the storm about; Only I summon all my strength And swear to ride it out. Yet give I thanks; despite these wars. My ship—though blindly blown, Long lost to sun or moon or stars— Still stands up alone. I need no trust in borrowed spars; My strength is yet my own.
Not a sign of life we rouse In any square close-shuttered house That flanks the road we amble down Toward far trenches through the town.    The dark, snow-slushy, empty street ... Tingle of frost in brow and feet ... Horse-breath goes dimly up like smoke. No sound but the smacking stroke    Of a sergeant flings each arm Out and across to keep him warm, And the sudden splashing crack Of ice-pools broken by our track.    More dark houses, yet no sign Of life ... An axle’s creak and whine ... The splash of hooves, the strain of trace ... Clatter: we cross the market place.    Deep quiet again, and on we lurch Under the shadow of a church: Its tower ascends, fog-wreathed and grim; Within its aisles a light burns dim ...    When, marvellous! from overhead, Like abrupt speech of one deemed dead, Speech-moved by some Superior Will, A bell tolls thrice and then is still.    And suddenly I know that now The priest within, with shining brow, Lifts high the small round of the Host. The server’s tingling bell is lost    In clash of the greater overhead. Peace like a wave descends, is spread, While watch the peasants’ reverent eyes ...    The bell’s boom trembles, hangs, and dies.    O people who bow down to see The Miracle of Calvary, The bitter and the glorious, Bow down, bow down and pray for us.    Once more our anguished way we take Toward our Golgotha, to make For all our lovers sacrifice. Again the troubled bell tolls thrice.    And slowly, slowly, lifted up Dazzles the overflowing cup.    O worshipping, fond multitude, Remember us too, and our blood.    Turn hearts to us as we go by, Salute those about to die, Plead for them, the deep bell toll: Their sacrifice must soon be whole.    Entreat you for such hearts as break With the premonitory ache Of bodies, whose feet, hands, and side, Must soon be torn, pierced, crucified.    Sue for them and all of us Who the world over suffer thus, Who have scarce time for prayer indeed, Who only march and die and bleed. * The town is left, the road leads on, Bluely glaring in the sun, Toward where in the sunrise gate Death, honour, and fierce battle wait.
I would never have wanted to see your sad face again Your cheeks and your windy hair I went all across the country Under this humid woodpecker Day and night Under the sun and the rain Now we are face to face again What does one say to my face Once I rested up against a tree So long I got stuck to it That kind of love is terrible
Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes; Thy lovely things must all be laid away; And thou, as others, must face the riven day Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums, Or bugles' strident cry. When mere noise numbs The sense of being, the sick soul doth sway, Remember thy great craft's honour, that they may say Nothing in shame of poets. Then the crumbs Of praise the little versemen joyed to take Shall be forgotten; then they must know we are, For all our skill in words, equal in might And strong of mettle as those we honoured; make The name of poet terrible in just war, And like a crown of honour upon the fight.
What in our lives is burntIn the fire of this?The heart's dear granary?The much we shall miss?Three lives hath one life—Iron, honey, gold.The gold, the honey gone—Left is the hard and cold.Iron are our livesMolten right through our youth.A burnt space through ripe fields,A fair mouth's broken tooth.
A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,Babylon and Rome.Not Paris raped tall Helen,But this incestuous worm,Who lured her vivid beautyTo his amorphous sleep.England! famous as HelenIs thy bethothal sung.To him the shadowless,More amorous than Solomon.
A sycamore on either side In whose lovely leafage cried  Hushingly the little winds — Thus was Mary’s shrine descried. 
 “Sixteen Hundred and Twenty-Four” Legended above the door,  “Pray, sweet gracious Lady, pray For our souls,”—and nothing more. 
 Builded of rude gray stones and these Scarred and marred from base to frieze  With the shrapnel’s pounces—ah, Fair she braved War’s gaunt disease: 
 Fair she pondered on the strange Embitterments of latter change,  Looking fair towards Festubert, Cloven roof and tortured grange. 
 Work of carving too there was, (Once had been her reredos),  In this cool and peaceful cell That the hoarse guns blared across. 
 Twisted oaken pillars graced With oaken amaranths interlaced  In oaken garlandry, had borne Her holy niche—and now laid waste. 
 Mary, pray for us? O pray! In thy dwelling by this way  What poor folks have knelt to thee! We are no less poor than they.
Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.The low-lying mist lifted its hood, The October stars showed nobly in clear night.When I return, and to real music-making, And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking, With a dull sense of No Man's Land again?
Little did I dream, England, that you bore me
Under the Cotswold hills beside the water meadows,
At 14th Street and First Avenue Is a bank and in the bank the sexiest teller of all time Next to her the greatest thing about today Is today itself Through which I go up To buy books They float by under a bluer sky The girls uptown Quiet, pampered The sum of all that's terrible in women And much of the best And the old men go by holding small packages In a trance So rich even they can't believe it I think it's a red, white, and blue letter day for them too You see, Con Ed's smokestacks are beautiful The way Queens is And horses: from a pleasant distance Or a fleet of turkeys Stuffed in a spotless window In two days they'll be sweating in ovens Thinking, "How did I ever get in a fix like this?" Light pouring over buildings far away Up here when someone shouts "Hey!" In the street you know that they aren't going to kill you They're yelling to a friend of theirs named Hey John David Hey, perhaps And the garbage goes out In big white billowy plastic bags tied at the top And even the people go out in them Some are waiting now At the bus stop (for a nonexistent bus) And I thought it was garbage! It's so pretty! If you're classless or modern You can have fun by Walking into a high-class antique store So the stately old snob at the desk will ask In eternity "You're going where?" You get to answer, "Up." I like these old pricks If you have an extra hair in the breeze Their eyes pop out And then recede way back As if to say, "That person is on . . . dope!" They're very correct But they're not in my shoes In front of a Dubuffet a circus that shines through A window in a bright all-yellow building The window is my eye And Frank O'Hara is the building I'm thinking about him like mad today (As anyone familiar with his poetry will tell) And about the way Madison Avenue really Does go to heaven And turns around and comes back, disappointed Because up here you can look down on the janitor Or pity him And rent a cloud-colored Bentley and Architecture's so wonderful! Why don't I notice it more often? And the young girls and boys but especially the young girls Are drifting away from school In blue and white wool Wrapped in fur Are they French? They're speaking French! And they aren't looking for things to throw Skirts sliding up the legs of girls who can't keep from grinning Under beautiful soft brown American eyes At the whole world Which includes their Plain Jane girlfriends She even smiled at me! I have about as much chance of fucking her as the girl at the bank But I stride along, a terrifying god Raunchy A little one-day-old beard And good grief I really did forget to brush my teeth this morning They're turning red with embarrassment Or is that blood I've been drinking—I ordered a black coffee Miss And then a black policeman comes in Unbuttoning his uniform at the warmish soda fountain While I pull the fleece over my teeth And stare innocently at the books I've bought One a book with a drawing By Apollinaire called Les Fraises au MexiqueStrawberries in Mexico But when I open the book to that page It's just a very blue sky I'm looking at
Nothing is the way you think it is going to be. Take this little flower from me, and let it go into the way you think of it. And so it grows and is the face of Daisy the cow speaking, she my young grandma growing and wearing a pink slip and who fell from the sky that was clear blue and pure all over the place you called home as it moved out from under you in the slow rotation of the sphere you call a star, a flower, a mind.
All right, I admit it:  It was just a dream I had last night.  I was trudging along a muddy path in a column of downcast men  on the blackened outskirts of New York,  the twilight dingy and ruined, the future without hope  as we marched along  in our soiled, proletarian rags. To my left was Mayakovsky, head shaved,  and next to him his friend  with gray beard and dark cap. "You've got to admit," Mayakovsky  was saying, "that this is a pretty good  way to write a poem." "Yes," I said, "the momentum  is sustained by our walking forward,  the desolate landscape seeps into every word, and you're free to say anything you want."  "That's because we're inside the poem,"  he said, "not outside." Puddles of oily water gleamed dully beneath the low clouds.  "That's why my poems were so big:  there's more room inside." The hard line of his jaw flexed and  the men dispersed. I followed  his friend behind a wall to hear the poem go on  in the lecture the friend was giving on history,  but no, the real poem had finished. I went back to the spot  where the poem had finished.  Vladimir had left the poem.
The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's por- ridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.
Everything is perfect, dear friend.  —KEROUAC Get some sleep. Don't give advice. Take care of your teeth and gums. Don't be afraid of anything beyond your control. Don't be afraid, for instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone you love will suddenly drop dead. Eat an orange every morning. Be friendly. It will help make you happy. Raise your pulse rate to 120 beats per minute for 20 straight minutes four or five times a week doing anything you enjoy. Hope for everything. Expect nothing. Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world. Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die. Make eye contact with a tree. Be skeptical about all opinions, but try to see some value in each of them. Dress in a way that pleases both you and those around you. Do not speak quickly. Learn something every day. (Dzien dobre!) Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly. Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball collection. Be loyal. Wear comfortable shoes. Design your activities so that they show a pleasing balance and variety. Be kind to old people, even when they are obnoxious. When you become old, be kind to young people. Do not throw your cane at them when they call you Grandpa. They are your grandchildren! Live with an animal. Do not spend too much time with large groups of people. If you need help, ask for it. Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural. If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off. Plan your day so you never have to rush. Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if you have paid them, even if they do favors you don't want. Do not waste money you could be giving to those who need it. Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far more defective than you imagined. When you borrow something, return it in an even better condition. As much as possible, use wooden objects instead of plastic or metal ones. Look at that bird over there. After dinner, wash the dishes. Calm down. Visit foreign countries, except those whose inhabitants have expressed a desire to kill you. Don't expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want to. Meditate on the spiritual. Then go a little further, if you feel like it. What is out (in) there? Sing, every once in a while. Be on time, but if you are late do not give a detailed and lengthy excuse. Don't be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory. Don't think that progress exists. It doesn't. Walk upstairs. Do not practice cannibalism. Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don't do anything to make it impossible. Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week. Keep your windows clean. Extirpate all traces of personal ambitiousness. Don't use the word extirpate too often. Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not possible, go to another one. If you feel tired, rest. Grow something. Do not wander through train stations muttering, "We're all going to die!" Count among your true friends people of various stations of life. Appreciate simple pleasures, such as the pleasure of chewing, the pleasure of warm water running down your back, the pleasure of a cool breeze, the pleasure of falling asleep. Do not exclaim, "Isn't technology wonderful!" Learn how to stretch your muscles. Stretch them every day. Don't be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel even older. Which is depressing. Do one thing at a time. If you burn your finger, put it in cold water immediately. If you bang your finger with a hammer, hold your hand in the air for twenty minutes. You will be surprised by the curative powers of coldness and gravity. Learn how to whistle at earsplitting volume. Be calm in a crisis. The more critical the situation, the calmer you should be. Enjoy sex, but don't become obsessed with it. Except for brief periods in your adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age. Contemplate everything's opposite. If you're struck with the fear that you've swum out too far in the ocean, turn around and go back to the lifeboat. Keep your childish self alive. Answer letters promptly. Use attractive stamps, like the one with a tornado on it. Cry every once in a while, but only when alone. Then appreciate how much better you feel. Don't be embarrassed about feeling better. Do not inhale smoke. Take a deep breath. Do not smart off to a policeman. Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic. Be good. Walk down different streets. Backwards. Remember beauty, which exists, and truth, which does not. Notice that the idea of truth is just as powerful as the idea of beauty. Stay out of jail. In later life, become a mystic. Use Colgate toothpaste in the new Tartar Control formula. Visit friends and acquaintances in the hospital. When you feel it is time to leave, do so. Be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others. Do not go crazy a lot. It's a waste of time. Read and reread great books. Dig a hole with a shovel. In winter, before you go to bed, humidify your bedroom. Know that the only perfect things are a 300 game in bowling and a 27-batter, 27-out game in baseball. Drink plenty of water. When asked what you would like to drink, say, "Water, please." Ask "Where is the loo?" but not "Where can I urinate?" Be kind to physical objects. Beginning at age forty, get a complete "physical" every few years from a doctor you trust and feel comfortable with. Don't read the newspaper more than once a year. Learn how to say "hello," "thank you," and "chopsticks" in Mandarin. Belch and fart, but quietly. Be especially cordial to foreigners. See shadow puppet plays and imagine that you are one of the characters. Or all of them. Take out the trash. Love life. Use exact change. When there's shooting in the street, don't go near the window.
Only the wanderer Knows England's graces,Or can anew see clear Familiar faces.And who loves joy as he That dwells in shadows?Do not forget me quite, O Severn meadows.
As I went up by Ovillers In mud and water cold to the knee,There went three jeering, fleering spectres, That walked abreast and talked of me.   The first said, ‘Here’s a right brave soldier That walks the dark unfearingly;Soon he’ll come back on a fine stretcher, And laughing for a nice Blighty.’   The second, ‘Read his face, old comrade, No kind of lucky chance I see;One day he’ll freeze in mud to the marrow, Then look his last on Picardie.’   Though bitter the word of these first twain Curses the third spat venomously;‘He’ll stay untouched till the war’s last dawning Then live one hour of agony.’   Liars the first two were. Behold me At sloping arms by one – two – three;Waiting the time I shall discover Whether the third spake verity.
He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed. We'll walk no more on Cotswold Where the sheep feed Quietly and take no heed. His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river Under the blue Driving our small boat through. You would not know him now ... But still he died Nobly, so cover him over With violets of pride Purple from Severn side. Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers— Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget.
If it were not for England, who would bearThis heavy servitude one moment more?To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floorOf filthiest hovels were noble to compareWith this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now thereHarried in foolishness, scanned curiously o'erBy fools made brazen by conceit, and storeOf antique witticisms thin and bare.Only the love of comrades sweetens all,Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone.As night-watching men wait for the sunTo hearten them, so wait I on such boysAs neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal,Nor guns, nor sergeant-major's bluster and noise.
(To F. W. Harvey) Out of the smoke and dust of the little room With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys, I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom, To wonder at the miracle hanging high Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear. Time passed from mind. Time died; and then we were Once more at home together, you and I. The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire, One soul uprapt; and still another fire Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made: That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.
(To Two Scots Lads) Lying in dug-outs, joking idly, wearily; Watching the candle guttering in the draught; Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily Singing; how often have I turned over, and laughed With pity and pride, photographs of all colours, All sizes, subjects: khaki brothers in France; Or mother's faces worn with countless dolours; Or girls whose eyes were challenging and must dance, Though in a picture only, a common cheap Ill-taken card; and children—frozen, some (Babies) waiting on Dicky-bird to peep Out of the handkerchief that is his home (But he's so shy!). And some with bright looks, calling Delight across the miles of land and sea, That not the dread of barrage suddenly falling Could quite blot out—not mud nor lethargy. Smiles and triumphant careless laughter. O The pain of them, wide Earth's most sacred things! Lying in dug-outs, hearing the great shells slow Sailing mile-high, the heart mounts higher and sings. But once—O why did he keep that bitter token Of a dead Love?—that boy, who, suddenly moved, Showed me, his eyes wet, his low talk broken, A girl who better had not been beloved.
When I remember plain heroic strengthAnd shining virtue shown by Ypres pools,Then read the blither written by knaves for foolsIn praise of English soldiers lying at length,Who purely dream what England shall be madeGloriously new, free of the old stainsBy us, who pay the price that must be paid,Will freeze all winter over Ypres plains.Our silly dreams of peace you put asideAnd brotherhood of man, for you will seeAn armed mistress, braggart of the tide,Her children slaves, under your mastery.We'll have a word there too, and forge a knife,Will cut the cancer threatens England's life.
It wasn't our battalion, but we lay alongside it,  So the story is as true as the telling is frank. They hadn't one Line-officer left, after Arras,  Except a batty major and the Colonel, who drank.   'B' Company Commander was fresh from the Depot,  An expert on gas drill, otherwise a dud; So Sergeant-Major Money carried on, as instructed,  And that's where the swaddies began to sweat blood.   His Old Army humour was so well-spiced and hearty  That one poor sod shot himself, and one lost his wits; But discipline's maintained, and back in rest-billets  The Colonel congratulates 'B' Company on their kits.   The subalterns went easy, as was only natural  With a terror like Money driving the machine, Till finally two Welshmen, butties from the Rhondda,  Bayoneted their bugbear in a field-canteen.   Well, we couldn't blame the officers, they relied on Money;  We couldn't blame the pitboys, their courage was grand; Or, least of all, blame Money, an old stiff surviving  In a New (bloody) Army he couldn't understand.
'And all her silken flanks with garlands drest'— But we are coming to the sacrifice. Must those flowers who are not yet gone West? May those flowers who live with death and lice? This must be the floweriest place That earth allows; the queenly face Of the proud mansion borrows grace for grace Spite of those brute guns lowing at the skies. Bold great daisies' golden lights, Bubbling roses' pinks and whites— Such a gay carpet! poppies by the million; Such damask! such vermilion! But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour Is scarcely right; this red should have been duller.
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;And I was filled with such delightAs prisoned birds must find in freedom,Winging wildly across the whiteOrchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;And beauty came like the setting sun:My heart was shaken with tears; and horrorDrifted away ... O, but EveryoneWas a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
One would remember still Meadows and low hill Laventie was, as to the line and elm row Growing through green strength wounded, as home elms grow. Shimmer of summer there and blue autumn mists Seen from trench-ditch winding in mazy twists. The Australian gunners in close flowery hiding Cunning found out at last, and smashed in the unspeakable lists. And the guns in the smashed wood thumping and grinding. The letters written there, and received there, Books, cakes, cigarettes in a parish of famine, And leaks in rainy times with general all-damning. The crater, and carrying of gas cylinders on two sticks (Pain past comparison and far past right agony gone) Strained hopelessly of heart and frame at first fix. Café-au-lait in dug-outs on Tommies' cookers, Cursed minniewerfs, thirst in eighteen-hour summer. The Australian miners clayed, and the being afraid Before strafes, sultry August dusk time than Death dumber — And the cooler hush after the strafe, and the long night wait — The relief of first dawn, the crawling out to look at it, Wonder divine of Dawn, man hesitating before Heaven's gate. (Though not on Coopers where music fire took at it, Though not as at Framilode beauty where body did shake at it) Yet the dawn with aeroplanes crawling high at Heaven's gate Lovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillate Strangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white — Soaking light, dispersing colouring for fancy's delight. Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester's Stephens; Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens Of trench food, but the everlasting clean craving For bread, the pure thing, blessed beyond saving. Canteen disappointments, and the keen boy braving Bullets or such for grouse roused surprisingly through (Halfway) Stand-to. And the shell nearly blunted my razor at shaving; Tilleloy, Pauquissart, Neuve Chapelle, and mud like glue. But Laventie, most of all, I think is to soldiers The Town itself with plane trees, and small-spa air; And vin, rouge-blanc, chocolat, citron, grenadine: One might buy in small delectable cafés there. The broken church, and vegetable fields bare; Neat French market town look so clean, And the clarity, amiability of North French air.
Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day, I sit in solitude and only hear Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay, The lost intensities of hope and fear; In those old marshes yet the rifles lie, On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags, The very books I read are there—and I Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags Its wounded length from those sad streets of war Into green places here, that were my own; But now what once was mine is mine no more, I seek such neighbours here and I find none. With such strong gentleness and tireless will Those ruined houses seared themselves in me, Passionate I look for their dumb story still, And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree. I rise up at the singing of a bird And scarcely knowing slink along the lane, I dare not give a soul a look or word For all have homes and none's at home in vain: Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt, The self-sown wheat around was like a flood, In the hot path the lizards lolled time out, The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood. Sweet Mary's shrine between the sycamores! There we would go, my friend of friends and I, And snatch long moments from the grudging wars; Whose dark made light intense to see them by ... Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots Spun from the wrangling wire; then in warm swoon The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots, We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.
She was a villageOf lovely knowledge
After the dread tales and red yarns of the LineAnything might have come to us; but the divine
I Happy are men who yet before they are killed Can let their veins run cold. Whom no compassion fleers Or makes their feet Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers. The front line withers. But they are troops who fade, not flowers, For poets’ tearful fooling: Men, gaps for filling: Losses, who might have fought Longer; but no one bothers. II And some cease feeling Even themselves or for themselves. Dullness best solves The tease and doubt of shelling, And Chance’s strange arithmetic Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling. They keep no check on armies’ decimation. III Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition. Their spirit drags no pack. Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache. Having seen all things red, Their eyes are rid Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever. And terror’s first constriction over, Their hearts remain small-drawn. Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle Now long since ironed, Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned. IV Happy the soldier home, with not a notion How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack, And many sighs are drained. Happy the lad whose mind was never trained: His days are worth forgetting more than not. He sings along the march Which we march taciturn, because of dusk, The long, forlorn, relentless trend From larger day to huger night. V We wise, who with a thought besmirch Blood over all our soul, How should we see our task But through his blunt and lashless eyes? Alive, he is not vital overmuch; Dying, not mortal overmuch; Nor sad, nor proud, Nor curious at all. He cannot tell Old men’s placidity from his. VI But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns, That they should be as stones. Wretched are they, and mean With paucity that never was simplicity. By choice they made themselves immune To pity and whatever moans in man Before the last sea and the hapless stars; Whatever mourns when many leave these shores; Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.
Suddenly with a shy, sad grace She turns to me her lighted face, And I, who hear some idle phrase, Watch how her wry lips move And guess that the poor words they frame Mean naught for they would speak the same Message I read in the dark flame Within her eyes, which say, “I love.” But I can only turn away.I, that have heard the deep voice break Into a sing-song, sobbing shake,Whose flutter made my being quake, What ears have I for women's cries? I, that have seen the turquoise glaze Fixed in the blue and quivering gaze Of one whom cocaine cannot daze, How can I yield to women's eyes? I, who can only turn away. I, that have held strong hands which palter, Borne the full weight of limbs that falter,Bound live flesh on the surgeon's altar, What need have I of women's hand? I, that have felt the dead's embrace? I, whose arms were his resting-place? I, that have kissed a dead man's face? Ah, but how should you understand? Now I can only turn away.
Last night rain fell over the scarred plateau And now from the dark horizon, dazzling, flies Arrow on fire-plumed arrow to the skies Shot from the bright arc of Apollo's bow; And from the wild and writhen waste below, From flashing pools and mounds lit one by one, O is it mist or are these companies Of morning heroes who arise, arise With thrusting arms, with limbs and hair aglow Toward the risen god, upon whose brow Burns the gold laurel of all victories, Hero and hero's god, th' invincible Sun?
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . . Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . . Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . . Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous, But nothing happens. Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles. Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles, Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war. What are we doing here? The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . . We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy. Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey, But nothing happens.Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence. Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow, With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew, We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance, But nothing happens. Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces— We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed, Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed, Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses. —Is it that we are dying? Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there; For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs; Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,— We turn back to our dying. Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn; Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit. For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid; Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born, For love of God seems dying. Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us, Shrivelling many hands, and puckering foreheads crisp. The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp, Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice, But nothing happens.
She was a city of patience; of proud name,Dimmed by neglecting Time; of beauty and loss;
This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doorsMany a frosty night, and merrilyAnswered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:'At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush,' said he,'I slept.' None knew which bush. Above the town,Beyond 'The Drover', a hundred spot the downIn Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleepsMore sound in France—that, too, he secret keeps.
What makes us so mean? We are meaner than gorillas, the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on. It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival, as if survival were the most important thing on earth. It isn't. You know—surely it has occurred to you— that there is no way that humankind will survive another million years. We'll be lucky to be around another five hundred. Why? Because we are so mean that we would rather kill everyone and everything on earth than let anybody get the better of us: "Give me liberty or give me death!" Why didn't he just say "Grrr, let's kill each other!"? A nosegay of pansies leans toward us in a glass of water on a white tablecloth bright in the sunlight at the ocean where children are frolicking, then looking around and wondering— about what we cannot say, for we are imagining how we would kill the disgusting man and woman at the next table. Tonight we could throw an electrical storm into their bed. No more would they spit on the veranda! Actually they aren't that bad, it's just that I am talking mean in order to be more like my fellow humans—it's lonely feeling like a saint, which I do one second every five weeks, but that one second is so intense I can't stand up and then I figure out that it's ersatz, I can't be a saint, I am not even a religious person, I am hardly a person at all except when I look at you and think that this life with you must go on forever because it is so perfect, with all its imperfections, like your waistline that exists a little too much, like my hairline that doesn't exist at all! Which means that my bald head feels good on your soft round belly that feels good too. If only everyone were us! But sometimes we are everyone, we get mad at the world and mean as all get-out, which means we want to tell the world to get out of this, our world. Who are all these awful people? Why, it's your own grandma, who was so nice to you— you mistook her for someone else. She actually was someone else, but you had no way of knowing that, just as you had no way of knowing that the taxi driver saves his pennies all year to go to Paris for Racine at the Comédie Francaise. Now he is reciting a long speech in French from Andromache and you arrive at the corner of This and That and though Andromache's noble husband Hector has been killed and his corpse has been dragged around the walls of Troy by an  unusually mean Achilles, although she is forced into slavery and a marriage to save the life of her son, and then people around her get killed, commit suicide, and go crazy, the driver is in paradise, he has taken you back to his very mean teacher in the unhappy school in Port-au-Prince and then to Paris and back to the French language of the seventeenth century and then to ancient Greece and then to the corner of This and That. Only a mean world would have this man driving around in a city where for no reason someone is going to fire a bullet into the back of  his head! It was an act of kindness on the part of the person who placed both numbers and letters on the dial of the phone so we could call WAverly, ATwater, CAnareggio, BLenheim, and MAdison, DUnbar and OCean, little worlds in themselves we drift into as we dial, and an act of cruelty to change everything into numbers only, not just phone numbers that get longer and longer, but statistical analysis, cost averaging, collateral damage, death by peanut, inflation rates, personal identification numbers, access codes, and the whole raving Raft of the Medusa that drives out any thought of pleasantness until you dial I-8OO-MATTRES and in no time get a mattress that is complete and comfy and almost under you, even though you didn't need one! The men come in and say Here's the mattress where's the bedroom? And the bedroom realizes it can't run away. You can't say that the people who invented the bedroom were mean, only a bedroom could say that, if it could say anything. It's a good thing that bedrooms can't talk! They might keep you up all night telling you things you don't want to know. "Many years ago, in this very room. . . ." Eeek, shut up! I mean, please don't tell me anything, I'm sorry I shouted at you. And the walls subside into their somewhat foreverness. The wrecking ball will mash its grimace into the plaster and oof, down they will come, lathe and layers of personal history, but the ball is not mean, nor is the man who pulls the handle that directs the ball on its pendulous course, but another man —and now a woman strides into his office and slaps his face hard the man whose bottom line is changing its color wants to change it back. So good-bye, building where we made love, laughed, wept, ate, and watched TV all at the same time! Where our dog waited by the door, eyes fixed on the knob, where a runaway stream came whooshing down the hallway, where I once expanded to fill the whole room and then deflated, just to see what it would feel like, where on Saturday mornings my infant son stood by the bedside and sang, quietly, "Wa-a-a-ke up" to his snoozing parents. I can never leave all the kindness I have felt in this apartment, but if a big black iron wrecking ball comes flying toward me, zoop, out I go! For there must be kindness somewhere else in the world, maybe even out of it, though I'm not crazy about the emptiness of outer space. I have to live here, with finite life and inner space and with the horrible desire to love everything and be disappointed the way my mother was until that moment when she rolled her eyes toward me as best she could and squeezed my hand when I asked, "Do you know who I am?" then let go of life. The other question was, Did I know who I was? It is hard not to be appalled by existence. The pointlessness of matter turns us into cornered animals that otherwise are placid or indifferent, we hiss and bare our fangs and attack. But how many people have felt the terror of existence? Was Genghis Khan horrified that he and everything else existed? Was Hitler or Pol Pot? Or any of the other charming figures of history?Je m'en doute. It was something else made them mean. Something else made Napoleon think it glorious to cover the frozen earth with a hundred thousand bloody corpses. Something else made . . . oh, name your monster and his penchant for destruction, name your own period in history when a darkness swept over us and made not existing seem like the better choice, as if the solution to hunger were to hurl oneself into a vat of boiling radioactive carrots! Life is so awful! I hope that lion tears me to pieces! It is good that those men wearing black hoods are going to strip off my skin and force me to gape at my own intestines spilling down onto the floor! Please drive spikes through not only my hands and feet but through my eyes as well! For this world is to be fled as soon as possible via the purification of martyrdom. This from the God of Christian Love. Cupid hovers overhead, perplexed. Long ago Zeus said he was tired and went to bed: if you're not going to exist it's best to be asleep. The Christian God is like a cranky two-thousand-year-old baby whose fatigue delivers him into an endless tantrum. He will never grow up because you can't grow up unless people listen to you, and they can't listen because they are too busy being mean or fearing the meanness of others. How can I blame them? I too am afraid. I can be jolted by an extremely violent movie, but what is really scary is that someone wanted to make the film! He is only a step away from the father who took his eight-year-old daughter and her friend to the park and beat and stabbed them to death. Uh-oh. "He seemed like a normal guy," said his neighbor, Thelma, who refused to divulge her last name to reporters. She seemed like a normal gal, just as the reporters seemed like  normal vampires. In some cultures it is normal to eat bugs or people or to smear placenta on your face at night, to buy a car whose price would feed a village for thirty years, to waste your life and, while you're at it, waste everyone  else's too! Hello, America. It is dawn, wake up and smell yourselves. You smell normal. My father was not normal, he was a criminal, a scuffler, a tough guy, and though he did bad things he was never mean. He didn't like mean people, either. Sometimes he would beat them up or chop up their shoes! I have never beaten anyone up, but it might be fun to chop up some shoes. Would you please hand me that cleaver, Thelma? But Thelma is insulted by my request, even though I said please, because she has the face of a cleaver that flies through the air toward me and lodges in my forehead. "Get it yourself, lughead!" she spits, then twenty years later she changes lughead to fuckhead. I change my name to Jughead and go into the poetry protection program so my poems can go out and live under assumed names in Utah and Muskogee. Anna Chukhno looks up and sees me through her violet Ukrainian eyes and says Good morning most pleasantly inflected. Oh to ride in a horse-drawn carriage with her at midnight down the wide avenues of Kiev and erase the ditch at Babi Yar from human history! She looks up and asks How would you like that? I say In twenties and she counts them out as if the air around her were not shattered by her beauty and my body thus divided into zones: hands the place of metaphysics, shins the area of moo, bones the cost of living, and so on. Is it cruel that I cannot cover her with kisses? No, it is beautiful that I cannot cover her with kisses, it is better that I walk out into the sunlight with the blessing of having spoken with an actual goddess who gave me four hundred dollars! And I am reassembled as my car goes forward into the oncoming rays of aggression that bounce off my glasses and then start penetrating, and soon my eyes turn into abandoned coal mines whose canaries explode into an evil song that echoes exactly nowhere. At least I am not in Rwanda in 1994 or the Sudan in '05 or Guantanamo or Rikers, or in a ditch outside Rio, clubbed to death and mutilated. No Cossack bears down on me with sword raised and gleaming at my Jewish neck and no time for me to cry out "It is only my neck that is Jewish! The rest is Russian Orthodox!" No smiling man tips back his hat and says to his buddies, "Let's teach this nigguh a lesson." I don't need a lesson, sir, I am Ethiopian, this is my first time in your country! But you gentlemen are joking. . . . Prepare my cave and then kindly forget where it was. A crust of bread will suffice and a stream nearby, the chill of evening filtering in with the blind god who is the chill of evening and who touches us though we can't raise our hands to stroke his misty beard  in which two hundred million stars have wink and glimmer needles. I had better go back to the bank, we have only three hundred and eighty-five dollars left. Those fifteen units of beauty went fast. As does everything. But meanness comes back right away while kindness takes its own sweet time and compassion is busy shimmering always a little above us and  behind, swooping down and transfusing us only when we don't expect it and then only for a moment. How can I trap it? Allow it in and then turn my body into steel? No. The exit holes will still be there and besides compassion doesn't need an exit it is an exit— from the prison that each moment is, and just as each moment replaces the one before it each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it and pretty soon you get to like those jolts, you and millions of other dolts who like to be electrocuted by their own feelings. The hippopotamus sits on you with no sense of pleasure, he doesn't even know you are there, any more than he takes notice of the little white bird atop his head, and when he sees you flattened against the ground he doesn't even think Uh-oh he just trots away with the bird still up there looking around. Saint Augustine stole the pears from his neighbor's tree and didn't apologize for thirty years, by which time his neighbor was probably dead and in no mood for apologies. Augustine's mother became a saint and then a city in California—Santa Monica, where everything exists so it can be driven past, except the hippopotamus that stands on the freeway in the early dawn and yawns into your high beams. "Hello," he seems to grunt, "I can't be your friend and I can't be your enemy, I am like compassion, I go on just beyond you, no matter how many times you crash into me and die because you never learned to crash and live." Then he ambles away. Could Saint Augustine have put on that much weight? I thought compassion makes you light or at least have light, the way it has light around it in paintings, like the one of the screwdriver that appeared just when the screw was coming loose from the wing of the airplane in which Santa Monica was riding into  heaven, smiling as if she had just imagined how to smile the first smile of any saint, a promise toward the perfection of everything that is and isn't.
I love roads: The goddesses that dwell Far along invisible Are my favorite gods. 
 Roads go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone. 
 On this earth 'tis sure We men have not made  Anything that doth fade So soon, so long endure: 
 The hill road wet with rain In the sun would not gleam Like a winding stream If we trod it not again. 
 They are lonely While we sleep, lonelier For lack of the traveller Who is now a dream only.    From dawn's twilight And all the clouds like sheep On the mountains of sleep They wind into the night. 
 The next turn may reveal Heaven: upon the crest The close pine clump, at rest Ancl black, may Hell conceal. 
 Often footsore, never Yet of the road I weary,  Though long and steep and dreary, As it winds on for ever. 
 Helen of the roads, The mountain ways of Wales And the Mabinogion tales, Is one of the true gods, 
 Abiding in the trees, The threes and fours so wise, The larger companies, That by the roadside be, 
 And beneath the rafter Else uninhabited Excepting by the dead; And it is her laughter 
 At morn and night I hear When the thrush cock sings Bright irrelevant things, And when the chanticleer 
 Calls back to their own night Troops that make loneliness With their light footsteps’ press, As Helen’s own are light. 
 Now all roads lead to France And heavy is the tread Of the living; but the dead Returning lightly dance: 
 Whatever the road bring To me or take from me, They keep me company With their pattering, 
 Crowding the solitude Of the loops over the downs, Hushing the roar of towns and their brief multitude.
The cherry trees bend over and are sheddingOn the old road where all that passed are dead,Their petals, strewing the grass as for a weddingThis early May morn when there is none to wed.
Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth; What silly beggars they are to blunder in And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame— No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war, When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you; And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts That drive them out to jabber among the trees. Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand. Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen, And you're as right as rain ... Why won't it rain? ... I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night, With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark, And make the roses hang their dripping heads. Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves, Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green, And every kind of colour. Which will you read? Come on; O do read something; they're so wise. I tell you all the wisdom of the world Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out, And listen to the silence: on the ceiling There's one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters; And in the breathless air outside the house The garden waits for something that delays. There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,— Not people killed in battle,—they're in France,— But horrible shapes in shrouds--old men who died Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls, Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins. * * * You're quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home; You'd never think there was a bloody war on! ... O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns. Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft ... they never cease— Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out And screech at them to stop—I'm going crazy; I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.
(Hindenburg Line, April 1917) Groping along the tunnel, step by step,He winked his prying torch with patching glareFrom side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes and too vague to know; A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;And he, exploring fifty feet belowThe rosy gloom of battle overhead.Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lieHumped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug.And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.“I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply.“God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.)“Get up and guide me through this stinking place.”Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,And flashed his beam across the livid faceTerribly glaring up, whose eyes yet woreAgony dying hard of ten days before;And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.Alone he staggered on until he foundDawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stairTo the dazed, muttering creatures undergroundWho hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.At last, with sweat and horror in his hair,He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,Unloading hell behind him step by step.
When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried, Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died, Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled. Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair Can bring me no report of how you fare, Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day, Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind— Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.
You've heard me, scornful, harsh, and discontented, Mocking and loathing War: you've asked me why Of my old, silly sweetness I've repented— My ecstasies changed to an ugly cry. You are aware that once I sought the Grail, Riding in armour bright, serene and strong; And it was told that through my infant wail There rose immortal semblances of song. But now I've said good-bye to Galahad, And am no more the knight of dreams and show: For lust and senseless hatred make me glad, And my killed friends are with me where I go. Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs; And there is absolution in my songs.
If you asked an Elizabethan What are you on? he or she would have answered The earth, this terrestrial globe whereas today it means What medication are you taking? (Are you taking has less energy than What medication it is an anticlimax without a climax) And today What are you on about? would have sounded likeWhat are you of thereabouts in? and will So what medications are you on? I am taking italics it pokes a hole in whatever is going to be so I can slip through and not have arms and legs all the time You've lost me and I'm not even an Elizabethan That's O.K. neither am I though both of us bestride this terrestrial globe and fain would lie down for the earth is a medication a giant pill we ride on like the aspirin in the poem I wrote in 1966 and didn't understand until last night or was it this morning A.M. and P.M. are medications I take one in the morning and one in the evening Some day people will look back at the twentieth century and think How backward they were the way some look back now at tribal societies and say But primitive life was so dirty how could you keep things clean? not knowing that tribal people lived in the Garden of Eden comparatively speaking That is they had more humanity than later people who traded theirs for technology so that those people who look back at Earth some day from a distant galaxy will not be people at all comparatively speaking they will be cue balls But this morning I am not in a billiard situation the sun is shining onto my house and the trees are feeling like their tops because they are still in the Garden of Eden that is the gentle endless hush of an endless mother to her endless newborn child Things are there covered with sparkles that have nothing to do with sunlight the way one night I got out of bed and found that I was covered with sparkles very small ones I wondered if I would be covered with sparkles the rest of my life and if other people had them But these are not the same sparkles that things have on them except the ocean sometimes at night By day the ocean moves away from where it was but a mountain does not Somewhere in between lies Hidden Valley where Grandpa comes out of his cabin and staggers around the dooryard then goes back inside where Grandma is holding a baking tin of fresh hot biscuits but she will give him none Give me some biscuits he cries but she smiles and shakes her head They are all for me she exults and then laughs she is only joking Grandpa sits down at the table and pretends to be dead revived only by die muffled thud of the biscuit tin Where's mah coffee he roars even though he sees it in the cup before him and Grandma says We're plumb out That's how the day begins in Hidden Valley But where are the grandchildren They are scattered about the world in jagged pieces that move like birds in spring with colors and speedometers on them Someday they will return to Hidden Valley and form another mountain to make Hidden Valley even more hidden when the waterfall closes over it You think I don't know where it is or is that just a ploy to get me to tell you? You are like the guy who looked all over for his hat and later learned it was on his head but it didn't mean anything until he realized he had a head and that the hat was both on and inside it and when he did it was not a rabbit that he pulled out but a rectangle in which the rabbit was imprisoned You don't want to be that guy, do you? You would rather be the rabbit when all along you could have been the waterfall We move ahead in our story to five years later then we move five years back because there is no story only a collection of events with no beginning, no end, and therefore no middle, it is all one big beginning, middle, and end every second and though you are in it you are also to the side like an actor waiting in the wings for the cue that will cause the stage to light up and expand though it is also the cue for the audience to rise and head for the exits, because they are the real players and you, it turns out, are part of the scenery propped up against a wall, gathering dust along your top ridge, for soon you will be transported to Hidden Valley and placed among the other mountains One of these mountains is the Earl of Essex covered with the crud of having galloped all the way across Wales and England nonstop Essex who dashed up the palace stairs and barged into Elizabeth's private chamber unannounced —where no man had ever set foot— midst the gasps and cries of her ladies-in-waiting and there it is his face on the front of his head and her face coming off her head and starting toward him because she knew right then his head would be severed from his body but what she did not know is that he too would end up in Hidden Valley raining down his sparkles upon the house of Grandma and Grandpa Are you enjoying your vacation Yes I am in fact so much that I don't even think of it as a vacation or as  anything else and come to think of it I don't even think of it it's just the way things are How about you Yes I too am enjoying my vacation Well good Silence What you just said about your vacation I'm not sure I understand  what you mean I didn't mean much of anything I guess The mountains around here have a way of making me not think very  much maybe because they aren't thinking at all who knows and I tend to become like whatever I'm around But you're always around air do you turn into air Yes I'm always air What about Grandma and Grandpa are you turning into them No I can't turn into them I already am them Well that is very interesting but I have to scoot along now And a fine day to you as well Ireland rose up on the horizon backlit by history but Hidden Valley was too powerful it made Ireland sink back down though the voices of Ireland could be heard in the distance some singing others laughing and some wailing and scolding and then they too faded when Grandpa brandished his lips at them for he wished to sing himself and all alone on the veranda of his own personality the one built partly by him and partly by the celestial carpenters who found his scratchy gurgling caterwauling arias to be as  astonishing as he found them to be beautiful and moving— arias that caused tears to gush forth from the sky you could see when you looked up into his eyes not long after you were born the sky at night and professional wrestling was on TV Antonino Rocca bounded around the ring evading horrible huge guys who fought dirty the kind you would find only in New York City when it was in black and white little Antonino who looked like a short-order cook in a diner but who dodged and slid and leaped so fast the horrible big guys couldn't catch him but when they did, Ow! Get away, Antonino! and he came back to life and slithered free and hurled the big guys down and one-two-three boom they were pinned and once more he smiled at people like us out in the middle of nowhere prompting Grandpa to clear his throat and say It's time for bed it's way past time and it was but we were hidden outside of time and no one would know because they were visible inside of time I was happy in Hidden Valley happy enough and I'm happy I once lived there Maybe I'll find myself there again someday even though the mountains will be gone and the rest changed beyond all recognition
Not yet will those measureless fields be green again Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed; There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain, Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread. But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled, We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head. And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things Speaking so wistfully of other Springs From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred. In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers To lovers—to mothers Here, too, lies he: Under the purple, the green, the red, It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed! Only, when all is done and said, God is not mocked and neither are the dead. For this will stand in our Market-place— Who'll sell, who'll buy (Will you or I Lie each to each with the better grace)? While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face As they drive their bargains, is the Face Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.
in memory of Lorenzo Thomas How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? How Long, a city in China The nouns come toward you "Knee how," they say To the cluster of synonyms also approaching  . . . has that evening train been gone? How long, how long, baby, how long?   Let me know if you ever change your mind about leaving, leaving me behind or at least tell yourself before you find yourself on that train winding its way through the mountains of How Much Province The ten thousand yellow leaves of the ginkgo tree kerplumfed onto the sidewalk on East 12th Street, a deep-pile carpet of them on the roof of the parked car proving that Nature does have a sense of humor, though if a sense of humor falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it. . . . for everyone has clustered alongside the railroad track for the arrival of night and its shooting stars with trails like pigtails I am among them and I know this track is mine though it does not belong to me Nothing belongs to me for at this moment the boxes are being stacked to make way for you to move through them, reading their labels: family photos, Pick-Up Stix, miscellaneous and the song of the porcelain, the celadon, and Delft itself vibrating How long, how long will this baby take to depart? But I don't want to think about the past I want to be the past, with everything I've ever known and done spread out on a two-dimensional plane erected vertically and moving through the space I occupy on Earth There is a lot more room left in me though everyone I've ever known who's died is there My mother my father say hello to Ted and Joe and laugh with them though Joe knows they are crying too and that Ted is crying and it sounds like laughter They do this to console me and I let them do it, to console them What? I didn't hear you or rather I heard you but I couldn't make out what you said The phone lay in its cradle pretending to be asleep and the blinking light made you think that it was dreaming and that there was someone you were supposed to call— or were they supposed to call you? Supposed. What does that mean. It means no more than the contours of the landscape that is as beautiful as the contours in John Ashbery's poetry but it doesn't mean anything unless you turn your mind on its side and let it lie there inert, and from this inertia will arise a wing, the white wing of a bird that has no anything else, only this one wing that folds and unfolds itself like the magnetic field it rises above in wave after wave after wave. Then it's back to basics: If you bone or debone a chicken it comes out the same, if you dust a cake with sugar you add something but if you dust your house you take away. Oh to be a rock or a stone or even a pebble! Momentarily, for there is much that is unattractive about being a rock. For one thing, I wouldn't be able to finish this poem, I would sit here petrified until they carted me away to a park to serve as ornamental sculpture, if I were lucky. Now that you are convinced of something that you already believed, the wallpaper becomes a fact in the home of Anne and Fairfield Porter, in the upstairs hallway and the bedroom where Jimmy stayed, the wallpaper that here and there was curling off the wall so Joe could tear it off and glue it to a big white sheet of paper. There is no other wallpaper I would ever want. Now the wallpaper goes away, back on the wall in 1969 where I stood and gazed at it for a long time and then went downstairs to add coal to Fairfield's stove, the big Aga he had shipped all the way from Sweden because he was very determined to have it. All day its warmth rose up to the second floor and caressed the wallpaper.   Do you mind my going on like this? You want something else, right? Perhaps you want what you think poetry should give you, but poetry doesn't give anyone anything, it simply puts the syllables on the table and lets you rearrange them in your head, which you can do unless your head is a square the size of the tabletop. So why don't you lift your head off the table and go lie down somewhere more comfortable and not worry about anything, including the list of things to worry about that you keep revising in your head, for there is a slot through which that list can slip and float down like a baby in a rocking crib, down to a comfy dreamland and be transformed into a list of gods whose jokes are wonderful.   But when the alarm goes off the jokes don't seem funny now that something is missing from them— but what? (You weren't even asleep.) It's not something you feel you're going to remember, it's not as if you can go down the alphabet until you get to a letter that has a special hum because it's the first letter of the name you can't quite recall, it's not as if you can look just to the side of where you think a dim star is and thereby have it magically appear. The glow is gone, and knowing it comes back sometimes is little consolation. But I'll take it and go not to a deserted island but to the factory where they make the bottles that are washed ashore with a message inside, and though the message has been blurred by water stains it's a message, like the poetry in Valéry's saying that poetry is something written by someone other than the poet to someone other than the reader. To you, Paul Valéry, chapeau, though in some of your works no chapeau, for in them it is not a bottle but a test tube one finds one's finger stuck in. • What do you want to do with your life? is a question asked of a young person but slightly modified for an older one: What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Having control is an illusion we like to be fooled by: the pinball machine of experience has bounced us off one thing and onto another bing bing bing! Life might be like a pinball machine but it isn't one, and the trouble is that you might be like a person and you are one, as if in reverie, but then it all seems crambe. And so Sir Thomas Browne walks in with an insane look on his face, he is searching for examples of the number 5, do you have any new ones for him? If not please step aside, and out he goes into the garden, eyes locked onto the vegetation, the afternoon light on the back of his coat. You're relieved he didn't stay long. For God's sake here he comes again. Lock the door! But he performs osmosis and becomes the door and then the room and then you! And you go about the house looking for examples of the number 5 and you don't know why or where it will all lead to. But I do. Who said that? I did. Why did you say that? I didn't. You didn't what? I heard you! You mean you hurt me. No, I . . . I see there's no point in talking to you. And there wasn't for there was no one there, only the residue of an idea that lasted a few moments, like the history of Bulgaria or the rattling of bamboo trees in the wind or the Millennium Hotel in Minneapolis. The water lilies float on the surface of the water unaware that they are being depicted by brushstrokes "I love to be beside your side beside the sea, beside the seaside by the beautiful sea!" we sang underwater glub glub as the propeller turned to face us and we fled because Hitler was the propeller   and he was unsanitary So Père Noël took a bath whose bubbles rose up around his beard and tickled his fancy enough to keep him ho-ho-hoing throughout the holiday season, for he was in denial about his powerlessness in the face of Hitler   Hitler kept a special area on his face for the powerlessness of Santa Claus, he wore it like a merit badge among the many others that covered his face so that no one could see what he really looked like, the way Santa Claus used his beard to hide the deep sadness he felt for all humanity, for if he arrived on their rooftops weeping and wailing it would not do, it would not do to bring the children model replicas of Auschwitz or dolls in the form of the Butcher of Buchenwald or even of himself with downcast eye and ashen brow. The doctor comes in and says, "What seems to be the trouble?" for the twenty-fifth time today but you are only once today so you say, "There's a pain in my chest it's been there for three days it  started on Sunday night right after dinner," but the doctor is thinking about the dinner he is having tonight with  an incredibly attractive woman He is more worried about her than he is about your symptom In fact he isn't worried about you at all though he might be worried about being sued by you if he tells you to go home and take an aspirin and when you do you die But maybe you were going to die anyway no matter what he said or did and the lawyer who eagerly took the case on behalf of your family was hit by a car as he crossed the street toward the courthouse steps and your entire family was killed in a plane crash on their way to a Grief Management Center in Arizona But none of this happens because the pain was due to a strained muscle in your chest and now you do remember that right after dinner you tried to stop in midsneeze Two hundred dollars for half a sneeze is the going rate these days The cost of living sticks a hose into your wallet and vacuums out the money in a trice and you are so grateful you aren't having heart surgery that you don't even notice until cold air drifts across the floor like fog in a horror film, the one you decided not to be in, and now it pursues you in the form of frozen air, the evil brother of cool air that filtered down out of the early summer evening and told you that the world is kind, that atoms rearrange themselves to make you feel better, that the sun is departing only because it felt you wanted to be alone for a while It didn't say, "I will never rise again, I will go far away and be a pinprick in the sky among the billions of others, and you will never know which I am and I will never tell you." And you will never answer back, "Sun, I do not think you have that power: only I do, and I will go away and be the sky." Is that what is meant by "aesthetic distance"? Say what? It's as if the Panama Canal had been given aesthetic distance by becoming a passageway in your brain and you floated down it and came out on the end that you started at!Hunh? I keep a ball of laughter inside that Hunh.
"And then there were three whereas before there had been four or two And then there were four or two." Thus spake the King. No one dared ask what it meant. He seemed satisfied by the beauty of the logic that had arrived, the royal hall now lightly radiant as he arose from his throne and the world fell away, courtiers, battlements, and clouds, and he rose like a piece of paper on which his effigy had been traced in dotted lines whose dots came loose and flew away to a place in history where nothing mattered. And then there was one.
These, in the days when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and the earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
At that time the sheep called to him From their wormy bellies, as they Lay bloating in the field. He was A pastoralist, The schoolhouse hardly handsize In a sky of flax.  He began Then to keep the sayings of man (The left hand writing; the right hand Crossing out) farming the time by day With a great rake And in the evening hearing myths Of the hurricane and the tornado (Straws driven through glass), And of the waking in the grave (The sharp hands of brothers buried Together).  In the deep night the rat- Traps in the seed room broke the rat's Back, and the rat called to him in The next room over in a penetrating Eloquent way.  In the parlor it was Always deep night where the separated Organs of the living slept in jars (The lank goiter and the rotted Appendix) awaiting the end-time When the emasculated ram will rise In the flax-blue sky (Cold as the final bluing of a Sunday wash) And all of us will know The use in beauty of the whole body. In the hay field was the beginning Of knowledge: Sour wine, the great rake hoisted Toward the high sun-altar of the stack And the hoist rope hauled out hard (Like a greased whip of which the stories Told were of the severing of limbs) By two staggering teams—and the whole Sun in its extreme tower of noon. All he heard was violent and sad But he kept on writing the sayings Of man with his left hand, and sent Them off in broken words, and waited In the mortal field Listening to the mice in the bottom Of the stack.  Now though the schoolhouse Hangs like a stone over the field Robed in its winding sheet as blue as air, The shepherd hand of eloquence still keeps And flashes Out the sayings of the man— And the other (the right hand of Obliterating habit) sleeps.
So many forget-me-nots, with their white centers, scattered, you'd say, if there weren't so many everywhere, as many as the stars last night in between the branches above the porch, behind the house. Was it an argument or were there just things they had to say? I could have faith in so many creatures— the old setter from the neighbor yard who follows me around the corner and no longer, the chick with its new beak just past breakable whose lighter top feathers have a bit of flight, any mother bear— you say things and the next day it's like they don't matter, we want our faces to alter though we don't want to get older, neither do we want to get younger, repetition with less knowledge is ridiculous, just ask the Greeks, you get to keep being a tree but without the branch that showed the sky your starlike shape? I don't think so. Steadiness can be useful, but my loyalty loves a form that will follow me through changes. At a diagonal the dark woods on the back slope have enough space to walk between, not enough to hide. He looks into them and writes notes to his mother, she looks into them and finds alignment, or looks for what she wants. She has a human skeleton on her desk. He has a protractor. I had wishes for both of them yesterday but the weather has become so kindly, so temperate, I forget what blessings they don't think they have.
I We aren't serious when we're seventeen. —One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade, Noisy cafés with their shining lamps! We walk under the green linden trees of the park The lindens smell good in the good June evenings! At times the air is so scented that we close our eyes. The wind laden with sounds—the town isn't far— Has the smell of grapevines and beer . . . II —There you can see a very small patch Of dark blue, framed by a little branch, Pinned up by a naughty star, that melts In gentle quivers, small and very white . . . Night in June! Seventeen years old! —We are overcome by it all The sap is champagne and goes to our head . . . We talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips Trembling there like a small insect . . . III Our wild heart moves through novels like Robinson Crusoe, —When, in the light of a pale street lamp, A girl goes by attractive and charming Under the shadow of her father's terrible collar . . . And as she finds you incredibly naïve, While clicking her little boots, She turns abruptly and in a lively way . . . —Then cavatinas die on your lips . . . IV You are in love. Occupied until the month of August. You are in love. —Your sonnets make Her laugh. All your friends go off, you are ridiculous. —Then one evening the girl you worship deigned to write to you . . . ! —That evening, . . . —you return to the bright cafés, You ask for beer or lemonade . . . —We're not serious when we are seventeen And when we have green linden trees in the park.
When the child's forehead, full of red torments, Implores the white swarm of indistinct dreams, There come near his bed two tall charming sisters With slim fingers that have silvery nails. They seat the child in front of a wide open Window where the blue air bathes a mass of flowers And in his heavy hair where the dew falls Move their delicate, fearful and enticing fingers.   He listens to the singing of their apprehensive breath. Which smells of long rosy plant honey And which at times a hiss interrupts, saliva Caught on the lip or desire for kisses. He hears their black eyelashes beating in the perfumed Silence; and their gentle electric fingers Make in his half-drunken indolence the death of the little lice Crackle under their royal nails. Then the wine of Sloth rises in him, The sigh of an harmonica which could bring on delirium; The child feels, according to the slowness of the caresses Surging in him and dying continuously a desire to cry.
Helen achieves the difficult task of translating a symbol in time, into timeless-time or hieroglyph or ancient Egyptian time. She knows the script, she says, but we judge that this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual. In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach. To Achilles, lately arrived from Troy and the carnage of battle, this is a "carrion creature," but Helen would banish these memories. She says she is "instructed," she is enchanted, rather. For from the depth of her racial inheritance, she invokes (as the perceptive visitor to Egypt must always do) the symbol or the "letter" that represents or recalls the protective mother-goddess. This is no death-symbol but a life-symbol, it is Isis or her Greek counterpart, Thetis, the mother of Achilles.  We huddled over the fire,  was there ever such a brazier?  a night-bird hooted past,  he started, "a curious flight,  a carrion creature — what—"  (dear God, let him forget);  I said, "there is mystery in this place,  I am instructed, I know the script,  the shape of this bird is a letter,  they call it the hieroglyph;  strive not, it is dedicate  to the goddess here, she is Isis";  "Isis," he said, "or Thetis," I said,  recalling, remembering, invoking  his sea-mother;  flame, I prayed, flame forget,  forgive and forget the other,  let my heart be filled with peace,  let me love him, as Thetis, his mother,  for I knew him, I saw in his eyes  the sea-enchantment, but he  knew not yet, Helen of Sparta,  knew not Helen of Troy,  knew not Helena, hated of Greece.
She is afraid, too. So she needs this protection. She has tried to conceal her identity with mockery, "I am a woman of pleasure." She knows what the Greeks think of her, and here is Greece-incarnate, the hero-god; true, he is shipwrecked; nevertheless, though wounded, he carries with him the threat of autocracy. She has lost caste. He is still Achilles. Or who is she? She says that Helen upon the ramparts was a phantom. Then, what is this Helen? Are they both ghosts? And if she is convinced of this, why does she entreat the flame that Achilles kindled, "let me love him, as Thetis, his mother"? Is she afraid of losing even her phantom integrity? And what of it? Thetis — Isis — Aphrodite — it was not her fault. O—no—but through eternity, she will be blamed for this and she feels it coming. She will blacken her face like the prophetic femme noire of antiquity. But it does not work. Achilles is here to impeach her. Why? We must blame someone. Hecate—a witch —a vulture, and finally, as if he had run out of common invective, he taunts her — a hieroglyph. This is almost funny, she must stop him, he is after all, the son of the sea-goddess. She has named Isis, the Egyptian Aphrodite, the primal cause of all the madness. But another, born-of-the-sea, is nearer, his own mother. Again, she thinks of her and reminds Achilles of his divine origin, "O child of Thetis." This is quite enough. Can you throttle a phantom? He tries. The end is inevitable.  How could I hide my eyes?  how could I veil my face?  with ash or charcoal from the embers?    I drew out a blackened stick,  but he snatched it,  he flung it back,  "what sort of enchantment is this?  what art will you wield with a fagot?  are you Hecate? are you a witch?  a vulture, a hieroglyph,  the sign or the name of a goddess?  what sort of goddess is this?  where are we? who are you?  where is this desolate coast?  who am I? am I a ghost?"  "you are living, O child of Thetis,  as you never lived before,"  then he caught at my wrist,  "Helena, cursed of Greece,  I have seen you upon the ramparts,  no art is beneath your power,  you stole the chosen,  the flower of all-time, of all-history,  my children, my legions;  for you were the ships burnt,  O cursèd, O envious Isis,  you — you — a vulture, a hieroglyph";  "Zeus be my witness," I said,  "it was he, Amen dreamed of all this  phantasmagoria of Troy,  it was dream and a phantasy"; O Thetis, O sea-mother,  I prayed, as he clutched my throat  with his fingers' remorseless steel, let me go out, let me forget, let me be lost . . . . . . . O Thetis, O sea-mother, I prayed under his cloak, let me remember, let me remember, forever, this Star in the night.
Was Helen stronger than Achilles even "as the arrows fell"? That could not be, but he recognised in her some power other than her legendary beauty.    He could name Helena,  but the other he could not name;  she was a lure, a light,  an intimate flame, a secret kept  even from his slaves, the elect,  the innermost hierarchy;  only Helena could be named  and she was a public scandal  in any case, a cause of shame  to Agamemnon and Menelaus;  it was not that she was beautiful,  true, she stood on the Walls,  taut and indifferent  as the arrows fell;  it was not that she was beautiful,  there were others,  in spite of the legend,  as gracious, as tall;  it was not that she was beautiful,  but he stared and stared  across the charred wood  and the smouldering flame,  till his eyes cleared  and the smoke drifted away.
Move him into the sun— Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields half-sown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know. Think how it wakes the seeds— Woke once the clays of a cold star.Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?
(Being the philosophy of many Soldiers.) Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell. Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall. Both arms have mutinied against me,—brutes. My fingers fidget like ten idle brats. I tried to peg out soldierly,—no use! One dies of war like any old disease. This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes. I have my medals?—Discs to make eyes close. My glorious ribbons?—Ripped from my own back In scarlet shreds. (That's for your poetry book.) A short life and a merry one, my buck! We used to say we'd hate to live dead-old,— Yet now ... I'd willingly be puffy, bald, And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys At least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting, Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting. Well, that's what I learnt,—that, and making money. Your fifty years ahead seem none too many? Tell me how long I've got? God! For one year To help myself to nothing more than air! One Spring! Is one too good to spare, too long? Spring wind would work its own way to my lung, And grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots. My servant's lamed, but listen how he shouts! When I'm lugged out, he'll still be good for that. Here in this mummy-case, you know, I've thought How well I might have swept his floors for ever. I'd ask no night off when the bustle's over, Enjoying so the dirt. Who's prejudiced Against a grimed hand when his own's quite dust, Less live than specks that in the sun-shafts turn, Less warm than dust that mixes with arms' tan? I'd love to be a sweep, now, black as Town, Yes, or a muckman. Must I be his load?O Life, Life, let me breathe,—a dug-out rat! Not worse than ours the lives rats lead— Nosing along at night down some safe rut, They find a shell-proof home before they rot. Dead men may envy living mites in cheese, Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys, And subdivide, and never come to death. Certainly flowers have the easiest time on earth. “I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone,” Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned: The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now. “Pushing up daisies,” is their creed, you know. To grain, then, go my fat, to buds my sap, For all the usefulness there is in soap. D'you think the Boche will ever stew man-soup? Some day, no doubt, if ... Friend, be very sure I shall be better off with plants that share More peaceably the meadow and the shower. Soft rains will touch me,— as they could touch once, And nothing but the sun shall make me ware. Your guns may crash around me. I'll not hear; Or, if I wince, I shall not know I wince. Don't take my soul's poor comfort for your jest. Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds, But here the thing's best left at home with friends. My soul's a little grief, grappling your chest, To climb your throat on sobs; easily chased On other sighs and wiped by fresher winds. Carry my crying spirit till it's weaned To do without what blood remained these wounds.
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. * * * * *About this time Town used to swing so gay When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees, And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,— In the old times, before he threw away his knees. Now he will never feel again how slim Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands, All of them touch him like some queer disease. * * * * *There was an artist silly for his face, For it was younger than his youth, last year. Now, he is old; his back will never brace; He's lost his colour very far from here, Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry, And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race And leap of purple spurted from his thigh. * * * * *One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg, After the matches carried shoulder-high. It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg, He thought he'd better join. He wonders why.Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts. That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg, Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts, He asked to join. He didn't have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years. Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt,And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes; And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears; Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits. And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers. * * * * *Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal. Only a solemn man who brought him fruits Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul. * * * * *Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, And do what things the rules consider wise, And take whatever pity they may dole. Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes Passed from him to the strong men that were whole. How cold and late it is! Why don't they come And put him into bed? Why don't they come?
The Ocean has its silent caves,Deep, quiet, and alone;Though there be fury on the waves,Beneath them there is none.
Oh could I raise the darken’d veil,Which hides my future life from me,Could unborn ages slowly sail,Before my view—and could I seeMy every action painted there,To cast one look I would not dare.There poverty and grief might stand,And dark Despair’s corroding hand,Would make me seek the lonely tombTo slumber in its endless gloom.Then let me never cast a look,Within Fate’s fix’d mysterious book.
(To a Man who maintained that the Mausoleum is the Stateliest Possible Manner of Interment) I would be one with the dark, dark earth:—Follow the plough with a yokel tread.I would be part of the Indian corn,Walking the rows with the plumes o'erhead. I would be one with the lavish earth, Eating the bee-stung apples red: Walking where lambs walk on the hills;By oak-grove paths to the pools be led.I would be one with the dark-bright nightWhen sparkling skies and the lightning wed—Walking on with the vicious windBy roads whence even the dogs have fled.I would be one with the sacred earthOn to the end, till I sleep with the dead.Terror shall put no spears through me.Peace shall jewel my shroud instead.I shall be one with all pit-black thingsFinding their lowering threat unsaid:Stars for my pillow there in the gloom,—Oak-roots arching about my head!Stars, like daisies, shall rise through the earth,Acorns fall round my breast that bled.Children shall weave there a flowery chain,Squirrels on acorn-hearts be fed:—Fruit of the traveller-heart of me,Fruit of my harvest-songs long sped:Sweet with the life of my sunburned daysWhen the sheaves were ripe, and the apples red.
I GLOOM! An October like November; August a hundred thousand hours, And all September, A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years . . . And doom! That then was Antwerp. . . In the name of God, How could they do it? Those souls that usually dived Into the dirty caverns of mines; Who usually hived In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars; Who dragged muddy shovels, over the grassy mud, Lumbering to work over the greasy sods. . . Those men there, with the appearance of clods Were the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God Ever shrived. . . And it is not for us to make them an anthem. If we found words there would come no wind that would fan them To a tune that the trumpets might blow it, Shrill through the heaven that's ours or yet Allah's, Or the wide halls of any Valhallas. We can make no such anthem. So that all that is ours For inditing in sonnets, pantoums, elegiacs, or lays Is this: “In the name of God, how could they do it?” II For there is no new thing under the sun, Only this uncomely man with a smoking gun In the gloom. . . What the devil will he gain by it? Digging a hole in the mud and standing all day in the rain by it Waiting his doom; The sharp blow, the swift outpouring of the blood, Till the trench of gray mud Is turned to a brown purple drain by it. Well, there have been scars Won in many wars . . .Punic, Lacedæmonian, wars of Napoleon, wars for faith, wars for honour, for love, for possession, But this Belgian man in his ugly tunic, His ugly round cap, shooting on, in a sort of obsession, Overspreading his miserable land, Standing with his wet gun in his hand . . . Doom! He finds that in a sudden scrimmage, And lies, an unsightly lump on the sodden grass . . . An image that shall take long to pass! III For the white-limbed heroes of Hellas ride by upon their horses Forever through our brains. The heroes of Cressy ride by upon their stallions; And battalions and battalions and battalions— The Old Guard, the Young Guard, the men of Minden and of Waterloo, Pass, for ever staunch, Stand, for ever true; And the small man with the large paunch, And the gray coat, and the large hat, and the hands behind the back, Watches them pass In our minds for ever . . . But that clutter of sodden corses On the sodden Belgian grass— That is a strange new beauty. IV With no especial legends of marchings or triumphs or duty, Assuredly that is the way of it, The way of beauty . . . And that is the highest word you can find to say of it. For you cannot praise it with words Compounded of lyres and swords, But the thought of the gloom and the rain And the ugly coated figure, standing beside a drain, Shall eat itself into your brain: And you will say of all heroes, “They fought like the Belgians!” And you will say: “He wrought like a Belgian his fate out of gloom.” And you will say: “He bought like a Belgian his doom.” And that shall be an honourable name; “Belgian” shall be an honourable word; As honourable as the fame of the sword, As honourable as the mention of the many-chorded lyre, And his old coat shall seem as beautiful as the fabrics woven in Tyre. V And what in the world did they bear it for? I don't know. And what in the world did they dare it for? Perhaps that is not for the likes of me to understand. They could very well have watched a hundred legions go Over their fields and between their cities Down into more southerly regions. They could very well have let the legions pass through their woods, And have kept their lives and their wives and their children and cattle and goods. I don't understand. Was it just love of their land? Oh, poor dears! Can any man so love his land? Give them a thousand thousand pities And rivers and rivers of tears To wash off the blood from the cities of Flanders. VI This is Charing Cross; It is midnight; There is a great crowd And no light. A great crowd, all black that hardly whispers aloud. Surely, that is a dead woman—a dead mother! She has a dead face; She is dressed all in black; She wanders to the bookstall and back, At the back of the crowd; And back again and again back, She sways and wanders. This is Charing Cross; It is one o'clock. There is still a great cloud, and very little light; Immense shafts of shadows over the black crowd That hardly whispers aloud. . . And now! . . That is another dead mother, And there is another and another and another. . . And little children, all in black, All with dead faces, waiting in all the waiting-places, Wandering from the doors of the waiting-room In the dim gloom. These are the women of Flanders.They await the lost. They await the lost that shall never leave the dock; They await the lost that shall never again come by the train To the embraces of all these women with dead faces; They await the lost who lie dead in trench and barrier and foss, In the dark of the night. This is Charing Cross; it is past one of the clock; There is very little light. There is so much pain. L’Envoi And it was for this that they endured this gloom; This October like November, That August like a hundred thousand hours, And that September, A hundred thousand dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years. . . Oh, poor dears!
The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy; Yet still she turns her restless head: But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good. Where are now the warring kings, Word be-mockers? — By the RoodWhere are now the warring kings? An idle word is now their glory, By the stammering schoolboy said, Reading some entangled story: The kings of the old time are dead; The wandering earth herself may be Only a sudden flaming word, In clanging space a moment heard, Troubling the endless reverie. Then nowise worship dusty deeds, Nor seek, for this is also sooth, To hunger fiercely after truth, Lest all thy toiling only breeds New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then, No learning from the starry men, Who follow with the optic glass The whirling ways of stars that pass — Seek, then, for this is also sooth, No word of theirs — the cold star-bane Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain, And dead is all their human truth. Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be, Rewarding in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while, Till they shall singing fade in ruth And die a pearly brotherhood; For words alone are certain good: Sing, then, for this is also sooth. I must be gone: there is a grave Where daffodil and lily wave, And I would please the hapless faun, Buried under the sleepy ground, With mirthful songs before the dawn. His shouting days with mirth were crowned; And still I dream he treads the lawn, Walking ghostly in the dew, Pierced by my glad singing through, My songs of old earth's dreamy youth: But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou! For fair are poppies on the brow: Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
There they go marching all in step so gay!Smooth-cheeked and golden, food for shells and guns.Blithely they go as to a wedding day,The mothers' sons.The drab street stares to see them row on rowOn the high tram-tops, singing like the lark.Too careless-gay for courage, singing they goInto the dark.With tin whistles, mouth-organs, any noise,They pipe the way to glory and the grave;Foolish and young, the gay and golden boysLove cannot save.High heart! High courage! The poor girls they kissedRun with them : they shall kiss no more, alas!Out of the mist they stepped-into the mistSinging they pass.
France, March 1916. Over the top! The wire’s thin here, unbarbedPlain rusty coils, not staked, and low enough:Full of old tins, though—“When you’re through, all three,Aim quarter left for fifty yards or so,Then straight for that new piece of German wire;See if it’s thick, and listen for a whileFor sounds of working; don’t run any risks;About an hour; now, over!” And we placedOur hands on the topmost sand-bags, leapt, and stoodA second with curved backs, then crept to the wire,Wormed ourselves tinkling through, glanced back, and dropped.The sodden ground was splashed with shallow pools,And tufts of crackling cornstalks, two years old,No man had reaped, and patches of spring grass.Half-seen, as rose and sank the flares, were strewnThe wrecks of our attack: the bandoliers,Packs, rifles, bayonets, belts, and haversacks,Shell fragments, and the huge whole forms of shellsShot fruitlessly—and everywhere the dead.Only the dead were always present—presentAs a vile sickly smell of rottenness;The rustling stubble and the early grass,The slimy pools — the dead men stank through all,Pungent and sharp; as bodies loomed before,And as we passed, they stank: then dulled awayTo that vague fœtor, all encompassing,Infecting earth and air. They lay, all clothed,Each in some new and piteous attitudeThat we well marked to guide us back: as he,Outside our wire, that lay on his back and crossedHis legs Crusader-wise: I smiled at that,And thought on Elia and his Temple Church.From him, at quarter left, lay a small corpse,Down in a hollow, huddled as in a bed,That one of us put his hand on unawares.Next was a bunch of half a dozen menAll blown to bits, an archipelagoOf corrupt fragments, vexing to us three,Who had no light to see by, save the flares.On such a trail, so light, for ninety yardsWe crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw,Instead of lumpish dead before our eyes,The stakes and crosslines of the German wire.We lay in shelter of the last dead man,Ourselves as dead, and heard their shovels ringTurning the earth, then talk and cough at times.A sentry fired and a machine-gun spat;They shot a glare above us, when it fellAnd spluttered out in the pools of No Man’s Land,We turned and crawled past the remembered dead:Past him and him, and them and him, until,For he lay some way apart, we caught the scentOf the Crusader and slide past his legs,And through the wire and home, and got our rum.
God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men, Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves As soon as you are in them, nurtured up By the salt of your corruption, and the tears Of mothers, local vicars, college deans, And flanked by prefaces and photographs From all you minor poet friends—the fools— Who paint their sentimental elegies Where sure, no angel treads; and, living, share The dead’s brief immortality Oh Christ! To think that one could spread the ductile wax Of his fluid youth to Oxford’s glowing fires And take her seal so ill! Hark how one chants— “Oh happy to have lived these epic days”— “These epic days”! And he’d been to France, And seen the trenches, glimpsed the huddled dead In the periscope, hung in the rusting wire: Chobed by their sickley fœtor, day and night Blown down his throat: stumbled through ruined hearths, Proved all that muddy brown monotony, Where blood’s the only coloured thing. Perhaps Had seen a man killed, a sentry shot at night, Hunched as he fell, his feet on the firing-step, His neck against the back slope of the trench, And the rest doubled up between, his head Smashed like and egg-shell, and the warm grey brain Spattered all bloody on the parados: Had flashed a torch on his face, and known his friend, Shot, breathing hardly, in ten minutes—gone! Yet still God’s in His heaven, all is right In the best possible of worlds. The woe, Even His scaled eyes must see, is partial, only A seeming woe, we cannot understand. God loves us, God looks down on this out strife And smiles in pity, blows a pipe at times And calls some warriors home. We do not die, God would not let us, He is too “intense,” Too “passionate,” a whole day sorrows He Because a grass-blade dies. How rare life is! On earth, the love and fellowship of men, Men sternly banded: banded for what end? Banded to maim and kill their fellow men— For even Huns are men. In heaven above A genial umpire, a good judge of sport, Won’t let us hurt each other! Let’s rejoice God keeps us faithful, pens us still in fold. Ah, what a faith is ours (almost, it seems, Large as a mustard-seed)—we trust and trust, Nothing can shake us! Ah, how good God is To suffer us to be born just now, when youth That else would rust, can slake his blade in gore, Where very God Himself does seem to walk The bloody fields of Flanders He so loves!
There was a man whom Sorrow named his friend, And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming, Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming And humming sands, where windy surges wend: And he called loudly to the stars to bend From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they Among themselves laugh on and sing alway: And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Cried out, Dim sea, hear my most piteous story! The sea swept on and cried her old cry still, Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill. He fled the persecution of her glory And, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping, Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening. But naught they heard, for they are always listening, The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping. And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Sought once again the shore, and found a shell, And thought, I will my heavy story tell Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart; And my own tale again for me shall sing, And my own whispering words be comforting, And lo! my ancient burden may depart. Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim; But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.
One writes to ask me if I’ve readOf “the Jutland battle,” of “the great advanceMade by the Russians,” chiding—“HistoryIs being made these days, these are the thingsThat are worth while.” These! Not to one who’s lainIn Heaven before God’s throne with eyes abased,Worshipping Him, in many forms of Good,That sate thereon; turning this patchwork worldWholly to glorify Him, point His planToward some supreme perfection, dimly visionedBy loving faith: not these to him, when, stressedBy some soul-dizzying woe beyond his trust,He lifts his startled face, and finds the ThroneEmpty, turns away, too drunk with TruthTo mind his shame, or feel the loss of God.
There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train, And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain, And the girl who calls for orders at your door. Strong, sensible, and fit, They're out to show their grit, And tackle jobs with energy and knack. No longer caged and penned up, They're going to keep their end up Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van, There's the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,There's the girl who cries 'All fares, please!' like a man, And the girl who whistles taxis up the street. Beneath each uniform Beats a heart that's soft and warm, Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack; But a solemn statement this is, They've no time for love and kisses Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.
Now that you too must shortly go the way Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men Have gone in vanishing armies day by day, And in their numbers will not come again: I must not strain the moments of our meeting Striving for each look, each accent, not to miss, Or question of our parting and our greeting, Is this the last of all? is this—or this? Last sight of all it may be with these eyes, Last touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears, Even serving love, are our mortalities, And cling to what they own in mortal fears:— But oh, let end what will, I hold you fast By immortal love, which has no first or last.
Shy one, shy one, Shy one of my heart, She moves in the firelight Pensively apart. She carries in the dishes, And lays them in a row. To an isle in the water With her would I go. She carries in the candles, And lights the curtained room, Shy in the doorway And shy in the gloom; And shy as a rabbit, Helpful and shy. To an isle in the water With her would I fly.
God said, “Men have forgotten Me:The souls that sleep shall wake again, And blinded eyes must learn to see.”So since redemption comes through painHe smote the earth with chastening rod, And brought destruction's lurid reign;But where His desolation trodThe people in their agony Despairing cried, “There is no God.”
Know, that I would accounted be True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song; Nor be I any less of them, Because the red-rose-bordered hem Of her, whose history began Before God made the angelic clan, Trails all about the written page. When Time began to rant and rage The measure of her flying feet Made Ireland's heart begin to beat; And Time bade all his candles flare To light a measure here and there; And may the thoughts of Ireland brood Upon a measured quietude. Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, Because, to him who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body's laid asleep. For the elemental creatures go About my table to and fro, That hurry from unmeasured mind To rant and rage in flood and wind; Yet he who treads in measured ways May surely barter gaze for gaze. Man ever journeys on with them After the red-rose-bordered hem. Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, A Druid land, a Druid tune! While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew. From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye; And we, our singing and our love, What measurer Time has lit above, And all benighted things that go About my table to and fro, Are passing on to where may be, In truth's consuming ecstasy, No place for love and dream at all; For God goes by with white footfall. I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.
La Belgique ne regrette rien Not with her ruined silver spires, Not with her cities shamed and rent, Perish the imperishable fires That shape the homestead from the tent. Wherever men are staunch and free, There shall she keep her fearless state, And homeless, to great nations be The home of all that makes them great.
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still; Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame under flame, till Time be no more; Have you not heard that our hearts are old, That you call in birds, in wind on the hill, In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore? O sweet everlasting Voices, be still.
I feel the spring far off, far off, The faint, far scent of bud and leaf— Oh, how can spring take heart to come To a world in grief, Deep grief? The sun turns north, the days grow long, Later the evening star grows bright— How can the daylight linger on For men to fight, Still fight? The grass is waking in the ground, Soon it will rise and blow in waves— How can it have the heart to sway Over the graves, New graves? Under the boughs where lovers walked The apple-blooms will shed their breath— But what of all the lovers now Parted by Death, Grey Death?
Although you hide in the ebb and flow Of the pale tide when the moon has set, The people of coming days will know About the casting out of my net, And how you have leaped times out of mind Over the little silver cords, And think that you were hard and unkind, And blame you with many bitter words.
Were you but lying cold and dead, And lights were paling out of the West, You would come hither, and bend your head, And I would lay my head on your breast; And you would murmur tender words, Forgiving me, because you were dead: Nor would you rise and hasten away, Though you have the will of wild birds, But know your hair was bound and wound About the stars and moon and sun: O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.
Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.
“I cannot quite remember.... There were five Dropt dead beside me in the trench—and three Whispered their dying messages to me....” Back from the trenches, more dead than alive, Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee, He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly: “I cannot quite remember.... There were five Dropt dead beside me in the trench, and three Whispered their dying messages to me.... “Their friends are waiting, wondering how they thrive— Waiting a word in silence patiently.... But what they said, or who their friends may be “I cannot quite remember.... There where five Dropt dead beside me in the trench—and three Whispered their dying messages to me....”
Some may have blamed you that you took away The verses that could move them on the day When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind With lightning, you went from me, and I could find Nothing to make a song about but kings, Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things That were like memories of you—but now We'll out, for the world lives as long ago; And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit, Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit. But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone, My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.
What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet they were of a different kind, The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman’s rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were In all their loneliness and pain, You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair Has maddened every mother’s son’: They weighed so lightly what they gave. But let them be, they’re dead and gone, They’re with O’Leary in the grave.
I found in you a holy place apart, Sublime endurance, God in man revealed, Where mending broken bodies slowly healed My broken heart
I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.
(“Died of Wounds”) Because you died, I shall not rest again, But wander ever through the lone world wide, Seeking the shadow of a dream grown vain Because you died. I shall spend brief and idle hours beside The many lesser loves that still remain, But find in none my triumph and my pride; And Disillusion's slow corroding stain Will creep upon each quest but newly tried, For every striving now shall nothing gain Because you died.
I think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
O but we talked at large before The sixteen men were shot, But who can talk of give and take, What should be and what not While those dead men are loitering there To stir the boiling pot? You say that we should still the land Till Germany’s overcome; But who is there to argue that Now Pearse is deaf and dumb? And is their logic to outweigh MacDonagh’s bony thumb? How could you dream they’d listen That have an ear alone For those new comrades they have found, Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone, Or meddle with our give and take That converse bone to bone?
'O words are lightly spoken,' Said Pearse to Connolly, 'Maybe a breath of politic words Has withered our Rose Tree; Or maybe but a wind that blows Across the bitter sea.' 'It needs to be but watered,' James Connolly replied, 'To make the green come out again And spread on every side, And shake the blossom from the bud To be the garden's pride.' 'But where can we draw water,' Said Pearse to Connolly, 'When all the wells are parched away? O plain as plain can be There's nothing but our own red blood Can make a right Rose Tree.'
She that but little patience knew, From childhood on, had now so much A grey gull lost its fear and flew Down to her cell and there alit, And there endured her fingers' touch And from her fingers ate its bit. Did she in touching that lone wing Recall the years before her mind Became a bitter, an abstract thing, Her thought some popular enmity: Blind and leader of the blind Drinking the foul ditch where they lie? When long ago I saw her ride Under Ben Bulben to the meet, The beauty of her country-side With all youth's lonely wildness stirred, She seemed to have grown clean and sweet Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird: Sea-borne, or balanced in the air When first it sprang out of the nest Upon some lofty rock to stare Upon the cloudy canopy, While under its storm-beaten breast Cried out the hollows of the sea.
There is something in the sound of drum and fife That stirs all the savage instincts into life. In the old times of peace we went our ways, Through proper days Of little joys and tasks. Lonely at times, When from the steeple sounded wedding chimes, Telling to all the world some maid was wife— But taking patiently our part in life As it was portioned us by Church and State, Believing it our fate. Our thoughts all chaste Held yet a secret wish to love and mate Ere youth and virtue should go quite to waste. But men we criticised for lack of strength, And kept them at arm's length. Then the war came— The world was all aflame! The men we had thought dull and void of power Were heroes in an hour. He who had seemed a slave to petty greed Showed masterful in that great time of need. He who had plotted for his neighbour's pelf, Now for his fellows offers up himself. And we were only women, forced by war To sacrifice the things worth living for. Something within us broke, Something within us woke, The wild cave-woman spoke. When we heard the sound of drumming, As our soldiers went to camp, Heard them tramp, tramp, tramp; As we watched to see them coming, And they looked at us and smiled (Yes, looked back at us and smiled), As they filed along by hillock and by hollow, Then our hearts were so beguiled That, for many and many a day, We dreamed we heard them say, 'Oh, follow, follow, follow!' And the distant, rolling drum Called us 'Come, come, come!' Till our virtue seemed a thing to give away. War had swept ten thousand years away from earth. We were primal once again. There were males, not modern men; We were females meant to bring their sons to birth. And we could not wait for any formal rite, We could hear them calling to us, 'Come to-night; For to-morrow, at the dawn, We move on!' And the drum Bellowed, 'Come, come, come!' And the fife Whistled, 'Life, life, life!' So they moved on and fought and bled and died; Honoured and mourned, they are the nation's pride. We fought our battles, too, but with the tide Of our red blood, we gave the world new lives. Because we were not wives We are dishonoured. Is it noble, then, To break God's laws only by killing men To save one's country from destruction? We took no man's life but gave our chastity, And sinned the ancient sin To plant young trees and fill felled forests in. Oh, clergy of the land, Bible in hand, All reverently you stand, On holy thoughts intent While barren wives receive the sacrament! Had you the open visions you could see Phantoms of infants murdered in the womb, Who never knew a cradle or a tomb, Hovering about these wives accusingly. Bestow the sacrament! Their sins are not well known— Ours to the four winds of the earth are blown.
For one throb of the artery, While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate Mankind inanimate phantasy.
O living pictures of the dead, O songs without a sound, O fellowship whose phantom tread Hallows a phantom ground— How in a gleam have these revealed The faith we had not found. We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven, We have passed by God on earth: His seven sins and his sorrows seven, His wayworn mood and mirth, Like a ragged cloak have hid from us The secret of his birth. Brother of men, when now I see The lads go forth in line, Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me As for thy bread and wine; Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me To take their death for mine.
I Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walkWith an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. II Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass;Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. III Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by:War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.
There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it. The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty. And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall. Forefingers and thumbs will point casually toward it. It will be spoken among half-forgotten, whished-to-be-forgotten things. They will tell the spider: Go on, you're doing good work.
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,  England mourns for her dead across the sea.  Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,  Fallen in the cause of the free. 
 Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal  Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,  There is music in the midst of desolation  And a glory that shines upon our tears. 
 They went with songs to the battle, they were young,  Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.  They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;  They fell with their faces to the foe. 
 They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.  At the going down of the sun and in the morning  We will remember them. 
 They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;  They sit no more at familiar tables of home;  They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;  They sleep beyond England's foam. 
 But where our desires are and our hopes profound,  Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,  To the innermost heart of their own land they are known  As the stars are known to the Night; 
 As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,  Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;  As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,  To the end, to the end, they remain.
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun, Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire. Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
I saw a man this morning Who did not wish to die I ask, and cannot answer, If otherwise wish I. Fair broke the day this morning Against the Dardanelles; The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks Were cold as cold sea-shells. But other shells are waiting Across the Aegean sea, Shrapnel and high explosive, Shells and hells for me. O hell of ships and cities, Hell of men like me, Fatal second Helen, Why must I follow thee? Achilles came to Troyland And I to Chersonese: He turned from wrath to battle, And I from three days' peace. Was it so hard, Achilles, So very hard to die? Thou knewest and I know not— So much the happier I. I will go back this morning From Imbros over the sea; Stand in the trench, Achilles, Flame-capped, and shout for me.
Nude bodies like peeled logs sometimes give off a sweetest odor, man and woman under the trees in full excess matching the cushion of aromatic pine-drift fallen threaded with trailing woodbine a sonnet might be made of it Might be made of it! odor of excess odor of pine needles, odor of peeled logs, odor of no odor other than trailing woodbine that has no odor, odor of a nude woman sometimes, odor of a man.
1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next  summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting.  2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.  3 I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten  years. The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.  4 Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy, and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya) In a poem, one line may hide another line, As at a crossing, one train may hide another train. That is, if you are waiting to cross The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read Wait until you have read the next line— Then it is safe to go on reading. In a family one sister may conceal another, So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another. One father or one brother may hide the man, If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love. So always standing in front of something the other As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas. One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe; One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica  one tomb May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide  another, One small complaint may hide a great one. One injustice may hide another—one colonial may hide another, One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath  may hide another bath As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain. One idea may hide another: Life is simple Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory One invention may hide another invention, One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows. One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass, These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The  obstetrician Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here. A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it. In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by  the mother's And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love or  the same love As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers The better love fingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts" Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that" And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the  Garden of Eden Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve. Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem. When you come to something, stop to let it pass So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where, Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about, The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading A  Sentimental Journey look around When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see If it is standing there, it should be, stronger And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the  foot of a tree With one and when you get up to leave there is another Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher, One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass. You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be  important To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.
—1509 I've already grown a goiter from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy (or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison). My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings! My haunches are grinding into my guts, my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight, every gesture I make is blind and aimless. My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow. Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts are crazy, perfidious tripe: anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe. My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor. I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.
This is the song of the mud, The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin; The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys; The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds; The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses; The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.  This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu. His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big for him and too heavy; His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud that cakes to it. This is the mud that clothes him. His trousers and boots are of mud, And his skin is of mud; And there is mud in his beard. His head is crowned with a helmet of mud. He wears it well. He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him. He has set a new style in clothing; He has introduced the chic of mud.  This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle. The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome, The slimy inveterate nuisance, That fills the trenches, That mixes in with the food of the soldiers, That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts, That spreads itself over the guns, That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips, That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells; And slowly, softly, easily, Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage; Soaks up the power of armies; Soaks up the battle. Just soaks it up and thus stops it.  This is the hymn of mud-the obscene, the filthy, the putrid, The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men. Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead. Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing. Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men; Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men. Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it, Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence. Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down, And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud. Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them! Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly. There is not a trace of them. There is no mark where they went down. The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.  This is the song of the mud, The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin; The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys. Mud, the disguise of the war zone; Mud, the mantle of battles; Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers: This is the song of the mud.
November 1915 Today, as I rode by,I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree
Oh, my beloved, shall you and I Ever be young again, be young again?
When men are old, and their friends die,They are not so sad,
They swing across the screen in brave array, Long British columns grinding the dark grass.Twelve months ago they marched into the grey Of battle; yet again behold them pass!One lifts his dusty cap; his hair is bright; I meet his eyes, eager and young and bold.The picture quivers into ghostly white; Then I remember, and my heart grows cold!
Not fierce and tender but sweet. This is our impression of the soldiers. We call our machine Aunt Pauline. Fasten it fat, that is us, we say Aunt Pauline. When we left Paris we had rain. Not snow now nor that in between. We did have snow then. Now we are bold. We are accustomed to it. All the weights are measures. By this we mean we know how much oil we use for the machine. * * * Hurrah for America. Here we met a Captain and take him part way. A day's sun. Is this Miss. Yes indeed our mat. We meant by this that we were always meeting people and that it was pleasant. We can thank you. We thank you. Soldiers of course spoke to us. Come together. Come to me there now. They read on our van American Committee in aid of French wounded. All of it is bit. Bitter. This is the way they say we do help. In the meaning of bright. Bright not light. This comforts them when they speak to me. I often discuss America with them and what we hope to do. They listen well and say we hope so too. We all do. * * * This is apropros of the birthplace of Maréchal Joffre. We visited it and we have sent postal cards of it. The committee will be pleased. It is not a bother to be a soldier. I think kindly of that bother. Can you say lapse. Then think about it. Indeed it is yet. We are so pleased. With the flag. With the flag of sets. Sets of color. Do you like flags. Blue flags smell sweetly. Blue flags in a whirl. We did this we had ribbon of the American flag and we cut it up and we gave each soldier one with a pin and they pinned it on and we were pleased and we received a charming letter from a telephonist at the front who heard from a friend in Perpignan that we were giving this bit of ribbon and he asked for some and we sent them and we hope that they are all living. The wind blows. And the automobile goes. Can you guess boards. Wood. Naturally we think about wind because this country of Rousillon is the windiest corner in France. Also it is a great wine country. * * * This is apropos of the fact that I always ask where they come from and then I am ashamed to say I don't know all the Departments but I am learning them. In the meantime. In the meantime we are useful. That is what I mean to say. In the meantime can you have beds. This means that knowing the number of beds you begin to know the hospital. Kindly call a brother. What is a cure. I speak french. What one means. I can call it in time. By the way where are fish. They all love fishing. In that case are there any wonders. Many wonders are women. I could almost say that that was apropos of my cranking my machine. And men too. We smile. In the way sentences. He does not feel as we do. But he did have the coat. He blushed a little. This is sometimes when they can't quite help themselves and they want to help us. We do not understand the weather. That astonishes me. Camellias in Perpignan. Camellias finish when roses begin. Thank you in smiles. In this way we go on. So far we have had no troubles yet and yet we do need material. It is astonishing that those who have fought so hard and so well should pick yellow irises and fish in a stream. And then a pansy. I did not ask for it. It smells. A sweet smell. With acacia. Call it locusts. Call it me. I finish by saying that the french soldier is the person we should all help.
(in Memoriam F. W. G.)    Orion swung southward aslant Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned, The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant With the heather that twitched in the wind; But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these, Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow, And wondered to what he would march on the morrow. The crazed household-clock with its whirr Rang midnight within as he stood, He heard the low sighing of her Who had striven from his birth for his good; But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze, What great thing or small thing his history would borrow From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow. When the heath wore the robe of late summer, And the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun, Hung red by the door, a quick comer Brought tidings that marching was done For him who had joined in that game overseas Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow.
(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918)    I There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold, And much Despair, and Anger heaving high, Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold, Among the young, among the weak and old, And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?” II Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness, Philosophies that sages long had taught, And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought, And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness. III The feeble folk at home had grown full-used To 'dug-outs', 'snipers', 'Huns', from the war-adept In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused; To day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused— To nightmare-men in millions when they slept. IV Waking to wish existence timeless, null, Sirius they watched above where armies fell; He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well. V So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly Were dead and damned, there sounded 'War is done!' One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,'Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly, And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?' VI Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped, As they had raised it through the four years’ dance Of Death in the now familiar flats of France; And murmured, 'Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?' VII Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not, The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song. One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, 'What? Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?' VIII Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray, No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn, No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray; Worn horses mused: 'We are not whipped to-day;' No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn. IX Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency; There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky; Some could, some could not, shake off misery: The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!' And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?'
Autumn 1914 'O England, may God punish thee!' — Is it that Teuton genius flowers Only to breathe malignity Upon its friend of earlier hours?— We have eaten your bread, you have eaten ours, We have loved your burgs, your pines' green moan, Fair Rhine-stream, and its storied towers; Your shining souls of deathless dowers Have won us as they were our own: We have nursed no dreams to shed your blood, We have matched your might not rancorously Save a flushed few whose blatant mood You heard and marked as well as we To tongue not in their country's key; But yet you cry with face aflame, 'O England, may God punish thee!' And foul in onward history, And present sight, your ancient name.
October 18, 1914 I dreamt that people from the Land of Chimes Arrived one autumn morning with their bells, To hoist them on the towers and citadels Of my own country, that the musical rhymes Rung by them into space at meted times Amid the market's daily stir and stress, And the night's empty star-lit silentness, Might solace souls of this and kindred climes. Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear; From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood Had shattered these to shards amid the gear Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.
April 1915 I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like 'Thu bist,' 'Er war,' 'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar, Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird At England's very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are. Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we, 'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their brood perish everlastingly.'
1915-1916  I Phantasmal fears, And the flap of the flame, And the throb of the clock, And a loosened slate, And the blind night's drone, Which tiredly the spectral pines intone! II And the blood in my ears Strumming always the same, And the gable-cock With its fitful grate, And myself, alone. III The twelfth hour nears Hand-hid, as in shame; I undo the lock, And listen, and wait For the Young Unknown. IV In the dark there careers — As if Death astride came To numb all with his knock — A horse at mad rate Over rut and stone. V No figure appears, No call of my name, No sound but 'Tic-toc' Without check. Past the gate It clatters — is gone. VI What rider it bears There is none to proclaim; And the Old Year has struck, And, scarce animate, The New makes moan. VII Maybe that 'More Tears! — More Famine and Flame — More Severance and Shock!' Is the order from Fate That the Rider speeds on To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.
I When moiling seems at cease In the vague void of night-time, And heaven's wide roomage stormless Between the dusk and light-time, And fear at last is formless, We call the allurement Peace. II Peace, this hid riot, Change, This revel of quick-cued mumming, This never truly being, This evermore becoming, This spinner's wheel onfleeing Outside perception's range.
To Francis Fowler Hogan I think at first like us he did not seeThe goal to which the screaming eagles flew;For romance lured him, France, and chivalry;But Oh! Before the end he knew, he knew!And gave his first full love to Liberty,And met her face to face one lurid nightWhile the guns boomed their shuddering minstrelsyAnd all the Argonne glowed with demon light.And Liberty herself came through the wood,And with her dear, boy lover kept the tryst;Clasped in her grand, Greek arms he understoodWhose were the fatal lips that he had kissed—Lipes that the soul of Youth has loved from old—Hot lips of Liberty that kiss men cold.
And have we done with War at last? Well, we've been lucky devils both, And there's no need of pledge or oath To bind our lovely friendship fast, By firmer stuff Close bound enough. By wire and wood and stake we're bound, By Fricourt and by Festubert, By whipping rain, by the sun's glare, By all the misery and loud sound, By a Spring day, By Picard clay. Show me the two so closely bound As we, by the wet bond of blood, By friendship blossoming from mud, By Death: we faced him, and we found Beauty in Death, In dead men, breath.
Wisdom and Valour, Faith, Justice,—the lofty names Of virtue’s quest and prize,— What is each but a cold wraith Until it lives in a man And looks thro’ a man’s eyes? On Chivalry as I muse, The spirit so high and clear It cannot soil with aught It meets of foul misuse; It turns wherever burns The flame of a brave thought; And wheresoever the moan Of the helpless and betrayed Calls, from near or far, It replies as to its own Need, and is armed and goes Straight to its sure pole—star;— No legendary knight Renowned in an ancient cause I warm my thought upon. There comes to the mind’s sight One whom I knew, whose hand Grasped mine: George Calderon. Him now as of old I see Carrying his head with an air Courteous and virile, With the charm of a nature free, Daring, resourceful, prompt, In his frank and witty smile. By Oxford towers and streams Who shone among us all In body and brain so bold? Who shaped so firm his themes Crystal—hard in debate? And who hid a heart less cold? Lover of strange tongues, Whether in snowy Russia, Or tropic island bowers Listening to the songs Of the soft—eyed islanders, Crowned with Tahitian flowers, A maker of friends he went. Yet who divined him wholly Or his secret chivalries?— Was all that accomplishment, Wit, alertness, grace, But a kind of blithe disguise? Restless in curious thought And subtle exploring mind, He mixt his modern vein With a strain remotely brought From an older blood than ours, Proud loyalties of Spain. Was it the soul of a sword? For a bright sword leapt from sheath Upon that August day When war’s full thunder stored Over Europe, suddenly crashed, And a choice upon each man lay. Others had left their youth In the taming years; and some Doubted; some made moan. To meet the peril of truth With aught but a gay courage Was not for Calderon. Wounded from France he came. His spirit halted not; In that long battle afar, Fruitless in all but fame, Athos and Ida saw Where sank his gallant star. O well could I set my mood To a mournful falling measure For a friend dear and dead! And well could memory brood Singing of youth’s delight And lost adventure fled. But that so fearless friend With his victorious smile My mourning mood has chid. He went to the very end; He counted not the cost; What he believed, he did.
I will to the King, And offer him consolation in his trouble, For that man there has set his teeth to die, And being one that hates obedience, Discipline, and orderliness of life, I cannot mourn him. W.B. YEATS  I. THE PROLOGUE Patting good-bye, doubtless they told the lad He’d always show the Hun a brave man’s face; Father would sooner him dead than in disgrace,— Was proud to see him going, aye, and glad. Perhaps his mother whimpered how she’d fret Until he got a nice safe wound to nurse. Sisters would wish girls too could shoot, charge, curse … Brothers—would send his favourite cigarette. Each week, month after month, they wrote the same, Thinking him sheltered in some Y.M. Hut, Because he said so, writing on his butt Where once an hour a bullet missed its aim And misses teased the hunger of his brain. His eyes grew old with wincing, and his hand Reckless with ague. Courage leaked, as sand From the best sand-bags after years of rain. But never leave, wound, fever, trench-foot, shock, Untrapped the wretch. And death seemed still withheld For torture of lying machinally shelled, At the pleasure of this world’s Powers who’d run amok. He’d seen men shoot their hands, on night patrol. Their people never knew. Yet they were vile. ‘Death sooner than dishonour, that’s the style!’ So Father said. II. THE ACTION One dawn, our wire patrol Carried him. This time, Death had not missed. We could do nothing but wipe his bleeding cough. Could it be accident? - Rifles go off… Not sniped? No. (Later they found the English ball.) III. THE POEM It was the reasoned crisis of his soul Against more days of inescapable thrall, Against infrangibly wired and blind trench wall Curtained with fire, roofed in with creeping fire, Slow grazing fire, that would not burn him whole But kept him for death’s promises and scoff, And life’s half-promising, and both their riling. IV. THE EPILOGUE With him they buried the muzzle his teeth had kissed, And truthfully wrote the Mother, ‘Tim died smiling’.
Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small) And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul. Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned; “For,” said the paper, “when this war is done The men's first instinct will be making homes. Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes, It being certain war has just begun. Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,— The sons we offered might regret they died If we got nothing lasting in their stead. We must be solidly indemnified. Though all be worthy Victory which all bought. We rulers sitting in this ancient spot Would wrong our very selves if we forgot The greatest glory will be theirs who fought, Who kept this nation in integrity.” Nation?—The half-limbed readers did not chafe But smiled at one another curiously Like secret men who know their secret safe. (This is the thing they know and never speak, That England one by one had fled to France Not many elsewhere now save under France). Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week, And people in whose voice real feeling rings Say: How they smile! They're happy now, poor things.
In the glad revels, in the happy fêtes, When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled With the sweet wine of France that concentrates The sunshine and the beauty of the world, Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth, To those whose blood, in pious duty shed, Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth. Here, by devoted comrades laid away, Along our lines they slumber where they fell, Beside the crater at the Ferme d’Alger And up the bloody slopes of La Pompelle, And round the city whose cathedral towers The enemies of Beauty dared profane, And in the mat of multicolored flowers That clothe the sunny chalk-fields of Champagne. Under the little crosses where they rise The soldier rests. Now round him undismayed The cannon thunders, and at night he lies At peace beneath the eternal fusillade ... That other generations might possess— From shame and menace free in years to come— A richer heritage of happiness, He marched to that heroic martyrdom. Esteeming less the forfeit that he paid Than undishonored that his flag might float Over the towers of liberty, he made His breast the bulwark and his blood the moat. Obscurely sacrificed, his nameless tomb, Bare of the sculptor’s art, the poet’s lines, Summer shall flush with poppy-fields in bloom, And Autumn yellow with maturing vines. There the grape-pickers at their harvesting Shall lightly tread and load their wicker trays, Blessing his memory as they toil and sing In the slant sunshine of October days ... I love to think that if my blood should be So privileged to sink where his has sunk, I shall not pass from Earth entirely, But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk, And faces that the joys of living fill Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer, In beaming cups some spark of me shall still Brim toward the lips that once I held so dear. So shall one coveting no higher plane Than nature clothes in color and flesh and tone, Even from the grave put upward to attain The dreams youth cherished and missed and might have known; And that strong need that strove unsatisfied Toward earthly beauty in all forms it wore, Not death itself shall utterly divide From the belovèd shapes it thirsted for. Alas, how many an adept for whose arms Life held delicious offerings perished here, How many in the prime of all that charms, Crowned with all gifts that conquer and endear! Honor them not so much with tears and flowers, But you with whom the sweet fulfilment lies, Where in the anguish of atrocious hours Turned their last thoughts and closed their dying eyes, Rather when music on bright gatherings lays Its tender spell, and joy is uppermost, Be mindful of the men they were, and raise Your glasses to them in one silent toast. Drink to them—amorous of dear Earth as well, They asked no tribute lovelier than this— And in the wine that ripened where they fell, Oh, frame your lips as though it were a kiss.
(For Holy Cross Day, 1914)  Clouds is under clouds and rain For there will not come again Two, the beloved sire and son Whom all gifts were rained upon. Kindness is all done, alas, Courtesy and grace must pass, Beauty, wit and charm lie dead, Love no more may wreathe the head. Now the branch that waved so high No wind tosses to the sky; There's no flowering time to come, No sweet leafage and no bloom. Percy, golden-hearted boy, In the heyday of his joy Left his new-made bride and chose The steep way that Honour goes. Took for his the deathless song Of the love that knows no wrong: Could I love thee, dear, so true Were not Honour more than you? (Oh, forgive, dear Lovelace, laid In this mean Procrustean bed!) Dear, I love thee best of all When I go, at England's call. In our magnificent sky aglow How shall we this Percy know Where he shines among the suns And the planets and the moons? Percy died for England, why, Here's a sign to know him by! There's one dear and fixèd star, There's a youngling never far. Percy and his father keep The old loved companionship, And shine downward in one ray Where at Clouds they wait for day.
Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed),Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue
I have sought Happiness, but it has been A lovely rainbow, baffling all pursuit, And tasted Pleasure, but it was a fruit More fair of outward hue than sweet within. Renouncing both, a flake in the ferment Of battling hosts that conquer or recoil, There only, chastened by fatigue and toil, I knew what came the nearest to content. For there at least my troubled flesh was free From the gadfly Desire that plagued it so; Discord and Strife were what I used to know, Heartaches, deception, murderous jealousy; By War transported far from all of these, Amid the clash of arms I was at peace.
Not that I always struck the proper mean Of what mankind must give for what they gain, But, when I think of those whom dull routine And the pursuit of cheerless toil enchain, Who from their desk-chairs seeing a summer cloud Race through blue heaven on its joyful course Sigh sometimes for a life less cramped and bowed, I think I might have done a great deal worse; For I have ever gone untied and free, The stars and my high thoughts for company; Wet with the salt-spray and the mountain showers, I have had the sense of space and amplitude, And love in many places, silver-shoed, Has come and scattered all my path with flowers.
No remembering now when the apple sapling was blown almost out of the ground. No telling how, with all the other trees around, it alone was struck. It must have been luck, he thought for years, so close to the house it grew. It must have been night. Change is a thing one sleeps through when young, and he was young. If there was a weakness in the earth, a give he went down on his knees to find and feel the limits of, there is no longer. If there was one random blow from above the way he's come to know from years in this place, the roots were stronger. Whatever the case, he has watched this tree survive wind ripping at his roof for nights on end, heats and blights that left little else alive. No remembering now... A day's changes mean all to him and all days come down to one clear pane through which he sees among all the other trees this leaning, clenched, unyielding one that seems cast in the form of a blast that would have killed it, as if something at the heart of things, and with the heart of things, had willed it.
Brachest, she called it, gentling grease over blanching yolks with an expertise honed from three decades of dawns at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine, where even the oldest in the old men's booth swore as if it were scripture truth they'd never had a breakfast better, rapping a glass sharply to get her attention when it went sorrowing so far into some simple thing— the jangly door or a crusted pan, the wall clock's black, hitchy hands— that she would startle, blink, then grin as if discovering them all again. Who remembers now when one died the space that he had occupied went unfilled for a day, then two, three, until she unceremoniously plunked plates down in the wrong places and stared their wronged faces back to banter she could hardly follow. Unmarried, childless, homely, "slow," she knew coffee cut with chamomile kept the grocer Paul's ulcer cool, yarrow in gravy eased the islands of lesions in Larry Borwick's hands, and when some nightlong nameless urgency sent him seeking human company Brother Tom needed hash browns with cheese. She knew to nod at the litany of cities the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past, to laugh when the hunters asked if she'd pray for them or for the quail they went laughing off to kill, and then—envisioning one rising so fast it seemed the sun tugged at it—to do exactly that. Who remembers where they all sat: crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers, VF'ers muttering through their wars, night-shift roughnecks so caked in black it seemed they made their way back every morning from the dead. Who remembers one word they said? The Longhorn Diner's long torn down, the gin and feedlots gone, the town itself now nothing but a name at which some bored boy has taken aim, every letter light-pierced and partial. Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill, I picture you one dime-bright dawn grown even brighter now for being gone bustling amid the formica and chrome of that small house we both called home during the spring that was your last. All stories stop: once more you're lost in something I can merely see: steam spiriting out of black coffee, the scorched pores of toast, a bowl of apple butter like edible soil, bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass, my plate's gleaming, teeming emptiness.
I. O the screech and heat and hate we have for each day's commute, the long wait at the last stop before we go screaming underground, while the pigeons court and shit and rut insolently on the tracks because this train is always late, always aimed at only us, who when it comes with its blunt snout, its thousand mouths, cram and curse and contort into one creature, all claws and eyes, tunneling, tunneling, tunneling toward money. 2. Sometimes a beauty cools through the doors at Grand, glides all the untouchable angles and planes of herself to stand among us like a little skyscraper, so sheer, so spare, gazes going all over her in a craving wincing way like sun on glass. 3. There is a dreamer all good conductors know to look for when the last stop is made and the train is ticking cool, some lover, loner, or fool who has lived so hard he jerks awake in the graveyard, where he sees coming down the aisle a beam of light whose end he is, and what he thinks are chains becoming keys.
After love discovers it, the little burn or birthmark in an odd spot he can neither see nor reach; after the internist's downturned mouth, specialists leaning over him like diviners, machines reading his billion cells; after the onslaught of insight, cures crawling through him like infestations, so many surgeries a wrong move leaves him leaking like overripe fruit; after the mountain aster and ice wine, Michigan football, CanesVenatici and the Four North Fracture Zone shrink to a room where voices grow hushed as if at some holy place, and even in the kindest eye there lurks the eternity to which he's been commended; after speech, touch, even the instinct to eat are gone, and he has become nothing but a collection of quiet tics and twitches as if something wanted out of his riddled bones, the carious maze of his brain; as the last day glaciers into his room, glass and chrome so infinites- imally facet- ed it seems he lives inside a diamond, he breaks into a wide smile, as if joy were the animal in him, blind, scrabbling, earth- covered creature tunneling up from God knows where to stand upright, feasting on distances, gazing dead into the sun.
Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving, I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts. I pressed my face as close to the pane as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards. Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would (but why should it seem fuller now?) and though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in.
Do you remember the rude nudists? Lazing easy in girth and tongue, wet slops and smacks of flesh as they buttered every crevice. Sungrunts. Blubberpalaver. We were always hiking some hill toward some beauty some  human meanness ruined. We were always waiting too long to let ourselves be seen. It was an ocean's gesticulations, articulate elephant seals,  grounded clouds grown all one mouth. What could we do but laugh, casting clothes aside as if the air were ice and water a warm bed, goose-stepping goose-pimpled past their appeased surprise into  the waves. What could we do?   We could—we did—love take a long look at each other  and creep quietly away.
Lord is not a word. Song is not a salve. Suffer the child, who lived on sunlight and solitude. Savor the man, craving earth like an aftertaste. To discover in one's hand two local stones the size of a dead man's eyes saves no one, but to fling them with a grace you did not know you knew, to bring them skimming homing over blue, is to discover the river from which they came. Mild merciful amnesia through which I've moved as through a blue atmosphere of almost and was, how is it now, like ruins unearthed by ruin, my childhood should rise? Lord, suffer me to sing these wounds by which I am made and marred, savor this creature whose aloneness you ease and are.
Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery; impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains, sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery, with a little church on top of one. And warehouses, some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming, a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brillant rag. So that's the flag. I never saw it before. I somehow never thought of there being a flag, but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume, and paper money; they remain to be seen. And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward, myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen, descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans. Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook! Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy, a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall, with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression. Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall s, New York. There. We are settled. The customs officials will speak English, we hope, and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes. Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impression they make, or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter, the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps— wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter do when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat, either because the glue here is very inferior or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior. January 1952
The sun rose over the sweep of the hill All bare for the gathered hay, And a blackbird sang by the window-sill, And a girl knelt down to pray: ‘Whom Thou hast kept through the night, O Lord, Keep Thou safe through the day.’ The sun rose over the shell-swept height, The guns are over the way, And a soldier turned from the toil of the night To the toil of another day, And a bullet sang by the parapet To drive in the new-turned clay. The sun sank slow by the sweep of the hill, They had carried all the hay, And a blackbird sang by the window-sill, And a girl knelt down to pray: ‘Keep Thou safe through the night, O Lord, Whom Thou hast kept through the day.’ The sun sank slow by the shell-swept height, The guns had prepared a way, And a soldier turned to sleep that night Who would not wake for the day, And a blackbird flew from the window-sill, When a girl knelt down to pray.
April 26—May 25, 1915 Early morning over Rouen, hopeful, high, courageous morning,And the laughter of adventure, and the steepness of the stair,And the dawn across the river, and the wind across the bridges,And the empty littered station, and the tired people there.Can you recall those mornings, and the hurry of awakening,And the long-forgotten wonder if we should miss the way,And the unfamiliar faces, and the coming of provisions,And the freshness and the glory of the labour of the day.Hot noontide over Rouen, and the sun upon the city,Sun and dust unceasing, and the glare of cloudless skies,And the voices of the Indians and the endless stream of soldiers,And the clicking of the tatties, and the buzzing of the flies.Can you recall those noontides and the reek of steam and coffee,Heavy-laden noontides with the evening’s peace to win,And the little piles of Woodbines, and the sticky soda bottles,And the crushes in the “Parlour”, and the letters coming in?Quiet night-time over Rouen, and the station full of soldiers,All the youth and pride of England from the ends of all the earth;And the rifles piled together, and the creaking of the sword-belts,And the faces bent above them, and the gay, heart-breaking mirth.Can I forget the passage from the cool white-bedded Aid PostPast the long sun-blistered coaches of the khaki Red Cross trainTo the truck train full of wounded, and the weariness and laughterAnd “Good-bye, and thank you, Sister”, and the empty yards again?Can you recall the parcels that we made them for the railroad,Crammed and bulging parcels held together by their string,And the voices of the sargeants who called the Drafts together,And the agony and splendour when they stood to save the King?Can you forget their passing, the cheering and the waving,The little group of people at the doorway of the shed,The sudden awful silence when the last train swung to darkness,And the lonely desolation, and the mocking stars o’erhead?Can you recall the midnights, and the footsteps of night watchers,Men who came from darkness and went back to dark again,And the shadows on the rail-lines and the all inglorious labour,And the promise of the daylight firing blue the window- pane?Can you recall the passing through the kitchen door to morning,Morning very still and solemn breaking slowly on the town,And the early coastways engines that had met the ships at daybreak,And the Drafts just out from England, and the day shift coming down?Can you forget returning slowly, stumbling on the cobbles,And the white-decked Red Cross barges dropping seawards for the tide,And the search for English papers, and the blessed cool, of water,And the peace of half-closed shutters that shut out the world outside?Can I forget the evenings and the sunsets on the island,And the tall black ships at anchor far below our balcony,And the distant call of bugles, and the white wine in the glasses,And the long line of the street lamps, stretching Eastwards to the sea?When the world slips slow to darkness, when the office fire burns lower,My heart goes out to Rouen, Rouen all the world away;When other men remember, I remember our AdventureAnd the trains that go from Rouen at the ending of the day.
In what sense  I am I a minor observer  as in a dream absorbed in the interior, a beardless youth  unaccountably remote yet present  at the action reminding me faintly  of Prufrock. . . . a diminutive figure  barely discernible seemingly ageless  escapes me. The original impulse  to sing compressed  into one exultant note breaks out  of the chest-space, vibrating along  the shoulders in the presence  of full-bodied womanliness,  the eyes dark in the inner scene,  the hair long and black,  our dark lady, inmate of courtship. She does not speak.  She is nameless. The reason for her  presence there is unknown. A shepherd,  vaguely associated, stands  at a distance under  a birch tree, causally,  playing a flute. Sweetness  streams across. . . . also  from the balance and the position  of each, it issues. Neither moves.  The scene is not matter  that can pall or diminish.  Its secret holds as fast as I. As in Giorgione  the suspense is eternal.
After the war perhaps I'll sit againOut on the terrace where I sat with you,And see the changeless sky and hills beat blueAnd live an afternoon of summer through.I shall remember then, and sad at heartFor the lost day of happiness we knew,Wish only that some other man were youAnd spoke my name as once you used to do.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,Because the shells were screeching overhead.I bet a rasher to a loaf of breadThat Hull United would beat HalifaxWhen Jimmy Stainthorpe played full-back insteadof Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his headAnd cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead.We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,Because the shells were screeching overhead.
Soldier from the wars returning,Spoiler of the taken town,Here is ease that asks not earning;Turn you in and sit you down.Peace is come and wars are over,Welcome you and welcome all,While the charger crops the cloverAnd his bridle hangs in stall.Now no more of winters biting,Filth in trench from fall to spring,Summers full of sweat and fightingFor the Kesar or the King.Rest you, charger, rust you, bridle;Kings and kesars, keep your pay;Soldier, sit you down and idleAt the inn of night for aye.
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops “retire”
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
 O German mother dreaming by the fire,
 While you are knitting socks to send your son
 His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way To the siding-shed, And lined the train with faces grimly gay. Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray As men's are, dead. Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp Stood staring hard, Sorry to miss them from the upland camp. Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp Winked to the guard. So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent. Nor there if they yet mock what women meant Who gave them flowers. Shall they return to beatings of great bells In wild trainloads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, May creep back, silent, to still village wells Up half-known roads.
Halted against the shade of a last hill, They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease And, finding comfortable chests and knees Carelessly slept. But many there stood still To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge, Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world. Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge, For though the summer oozed into their veins Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains, Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass, Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass. Hour after hour they ponder the warm field— And the far valley behind, where the buttercups Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up, Where even the little brambles would not yield, But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands; They breathe like trees unstirred. Till like a cold gust thrilled the little word At which each body and its soul begird And tighten them for battle. No alarms Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste— Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done. O larger shone that smile against the sun,— Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned. So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together Over an open stretch of herb and heather Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned With fury against them; and soft sudden cups Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space. Of them who running on that last high place Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge, Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge, Some say God caught them even before they fell. But what say such as from existence’ brink Ventured but drave too swift to sink. The few who rushed in the body to enter hell, And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames With superhuman inhumanities, Long-famous glories, immemorial shames— And crawling slowly back, have by degrees Regained cool peaceful air in wonder— Why speak they not of comrades that went under?
All the hills and vales along Earth is bursting into song, And the singers are the chaps Who are going to die perhaps. O sing, marching men, Till the valleys ring again. Give your gladness to earth’s keeping, So be glad, when you are sleeping. Cast away regret and rue, Think what you are marching to. Little live, great pass. Jesus Christ and Barabbas Were found the same day. This died, that went his way. So sing with joyful breath, For why, you are going to death. Teeming earth will surely store All the gladness that you pour. Earth that never doubts nor fears, Earth that knows of death, not tears, Earth that bore with joyful ease Hemlock for Socrates, Earth that blossomed and was glad ‘Neath the cross that Christ had, Shall rejoice and blossom too When the bullet reaches you. Wherefore, men marching On the road to death, sing! Pour your gladness on earth’s head, So be merry, so be dead. From the hills and valleys earth Shouts back the sound of mirth, Tramp of feet and lilt of song Ringing all the road along. All the music of their going, Ringing swinging glad song-throwing, Earth will echo still, when foot Lies numb and voice mute. On, marching men, on To the gates of death with song. Sow your gladness for earth’s reaping, So you may be glad, though sleeping. Strew your gladness on earth’s bed, So be merry, so be dead.
All the dead kings came to me At Rosnaree, where I was dreaming, A few stars glimmered through the morn, And down the thorn the dews were streaming. And every dead king had a story Of ancient glory, sweetly told. It was too early for the lark, But the starry dark had tints of gold. I listened to the sorrows three Of that Eire passed into song. A cock crowed near a hazel croft, And up aloft dim larks winged strong. And I, too, told the kings a story Of later glory, her fourth sorrow: There was a sound like moving shields In high green fields and the lowland furrow. And one said: ‘We who yet are kings Have heard these things lamenting inly.’ Sweet music flowed from many a bill And on the hill the morn stood queenly. And one said: ‘Over is the singing, And bell bough ringing, whence we come; With heavy hearts we’ll tread the shadows, In honey meadows birds are dumb.’ And one said: ‘Since the poets perished And all they cherished in the way, Their thoughts unsung, like petal showers Inflame the hours of blue and grey.’ And one said: ‘A loud tramp of men We’ll hear again at Rosnaree.’ A bomb burst near me where I lay. I woke, ’twas day in Picardy.
i The Story of him who knew the most of all men know; who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled; who knew the way things were before the Flood, the secret things, the mystery; who went to the end of the earth, and over; who returned, and wrote the story on a tablet of stone. He built Uruk. He built the keeping place of Anu and Ishtar. The outer wall   shines in the sun like brightest copper; the inner wall is beyond the imagining of kings. Study the brickwork, study the fortification; climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace; study how it is made; from the terrace see the planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards. This is Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh the Wild Ox, son of Lugalbanda, son of the Lady Wildcow Ninsun, Gilgamesh the vanguard and the rear guard of the army, Shadow of Darkness over the enemy field, the Web, the Flood that rises to wash away the walls of alien cities, Gilgamesh the strongest one of all, the perfect, the terror. It is he who opened passes through the mountains; and he who dug deep wells on the mountainsides; who measured the world; and sought out Utnapishtim beyond the world; it is he who restored the shrines; two-thirds a god, one-third a man, the king. Go to the temple of Anu and Ishtar: open the copper chest with the iron locks; the tablet of lapis lazuli tells the story. ii There was no withstanding the aura or power of the Wild Ox Gilgamesh. Neither the father's son nor the wife of the noble; neither the mother's daughter nor the warrior's bride was safe. The old men said: "Is this the shepherd of the people? Is this the wise shepherd, protector of the people?" The gods of heaven listened to their complaint. "Aruru is the maker of this king. Neither the father's son nor the wife of the noble is safe in Uruk; neither the mother's daughter nor the warrior's bride is safe. The old men say: 'Is this the shepherd of the people? Is this the wise shepherd, protector of the people? There is no withstanding the desire of the Wild Ox.' " They called the goddess Aruru, saying to her: "You made this man. Now create another. Create his double and let the two contend. Let stormy heart contend with stormy heart that peace may come to Uruk once again." Aruru listened and heard and then created out of earth clay and divine spittle the double, the stormy-hearted other, Enkidu, the hairy-bodied wild man of the grasslands, powerful as Ninurta the god of war, the hair of his head like the grain fields of the goddess, naked as Sumuqan the god of cattle. He feeds upon the grasslands with gazelles; visits the watering places with the creatures whose hearts delight, as his delights, in water.  iii One day a hunter came to a watering place and saw Enkidu; he stood expressionless, astonished; then with his silent dogs he went home to his father's house, fear in his belly. His face was as one estranged from what he knows. He opened his mouth and said to his father: "Father, I saw a hairy-bodied man today at the watering place, powerful as Ninurta the god of war; he feeds upon the grasslands with gazelles; he visits the watering places with the beasts; he has unset my traps and filled my hunting pits; the creatures of the grasslands get away free. The wild man sets them free. Because of him I am no longer a hunter." His father said: "Go to Uruk and there present yourself to Gilgamesh the king, who is the strongest of all, the perfect, the terror, the wise shepherd, protector of the people. Tell him about the power of the wild man. Ask him to send a harlot back with you, a temple prostitute, to conquer him with her greater power. When he visits the watering place, let her show him her breasts, her beauty, for his wonder. He will lie with her in pleasure, and then the creatures,   the gazelles with whom he feeds upon the grasslands, and the others with whom he visits the watering places, will flee from him who ranged the hills with them." So the hunter went to Gilgamesh in Uruk and told him about the power of the wild man, and how he had unset the traps and filled the pits, so that the creatures got away free. The lord of Uruk said to the hunter then: "When you return, a temple prostitute will go with you and with her beauty conquer the wild man. He will lie with her and then the gazelles with whom he feeds upon the grasslands, and the others with whom he visits the watering places, will flee from him who ranged the hills with them." iv The harlot and the hunter traveled together, taking three days, back to the watering place. For three more days they waited, and finally Enkidu came with the creatures that love the water, the gazelles and the others, so as to drink their fill. The temple prostitute looked at him, Enkidu, the hairy-bodied wild man of the grasslands, the hair of his head like the grain fields of the goddess, naked as Sumuqan the god of cattle. "That is Enkidu, Shamhat, show him your breasts, show him your beauty. Spread out your cloak on the ground. Lie down on it. The wild man will look at you. Show him your body. The hairy-bodied man will come to you and lie down on you; and then show him the things a woman knows how to do. The gazelles and with them all the other creatures will flee from him who ranged the hills with them." And so the harlot, Shamhat, showed him her breasts, showed him her body. The hairy-bodied man came over to her, and lay down on her, and then she showed him the things a woman knows how to do. For seven days Enkidu in his wonder lay with her in pleasure, and then at last went to seek out the company of the creatures whose hearts delight in feeding upon the grasslands, and visiting the watering places, and ranging the hills. But seeing him, they fled. The creatures were gone, and everything was changed. His body that loved to range the hills was now unable to follow; but in the mind of the wild man   there was beginning a new understanding. Bewildered, he turned, and sought out the company of the temple prostitute. He sat down beside her, and looked into her face, and listened to her: "Enkidu, now you are beautiful as a god. Why do you seek the company of beasts? Come with me to the city, to Uruk, to the temple of Anu and the goddess Ishtar. Gilgamesh is the ruler, the strongest of all, the terror. The aura and power of his desire can be withstood by no one." Then Enkidu, whose heart was beginning to know about itself and longed for a companion, cried aloud: "Take me to Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh, whose aura and power cannot be withstood. I will cry out in Uruk, challenging him: 'It is I, Enkidu. The strength of the wild man born in the wilderness cannot be withstood.' " The temple prostitute replied: "Come then to Uruk, where the processions are, and music, and let us go together through the dancing to the palace hall where Gilgamesh presides, the favorite of the gods, the beautiful, strongest of all, the terror, the most desired.   Look at his radiant face, the favorite of Shamash and Enlil, Ea, and Anu.   While you were grazing beastlike with gazelles, before your mind had any understanding, his mind, a gift to the gifted of the gods, had a dream of you before you knew of him. In the early morning Gilgamesh arose and told his mother his dream: 'I had a dream. A star fell from the heavens, a meteorite, and lay on the empty plain outside Uruk. The men and women came and wondered at it. I strove with it to lift it but could not. I was drawn to it as if it was a woman.' All-knowing Rimat-Ninsun spoke to him, the lord of Uruk, Gilgamesh. His mother, All-knowing Rimat-Ninsun, spoke and said:   "The star that fell from the heavens, the meteorite that lay on the empty plain outside Uruk, the star you could not lift when you strove with it, the star you were drawn to as if drawn to a woman, is the strong companion, powerful as a star, the meteorite of the heavens, a gift of the gods. That you were drawn to it as if drawn to a woman means that this companion will not forsake you. He will protect and guard you with his life. This is the fortunate meaning of your dream.' Then Gilgamesh the lord of Uruk said: 'May the dream as you interpret come to pass.' " The temple prostitute thus told the tale.
i Gilgamesh spoke and said to the old man then: "When I looked at you I thought that you were not a man, one made like me; I had resolved to challenge you as one might challenge a demon, a stranger-adversary. But now I see that you are Utnapishtim, made like me, a man, the one I sought, the one from whom I might find out how death can be avoided. Tell me then, father, how it came about that you were admitted to the company of gods, who granted you eternal life." The father Utnapishtim spoke and said: "I will tell Gilgamesh the king the story; a secret of the gods I will disclose. There was an ancient city, Shuruppak— you know of it—most fortunate of cities, god-favored, on the banks of the Euphrates. The gods in heaven decided in their council to bring the flood down on the fortunate city. They sat in secret council together, deciding. Anu was there, the councilor Enlil, Ninurta of the Silence, and there also was the god Ennugi, monitor of canals. And there was Ea, cleverest of the gods. The voice of Ea telling me the secret came whispering through the reed walls of my house: 'You reed house walls, listen and hear me whisper; listen and be attentive to what I tell you. Utnapishtim, son of Ubartutu, abandon your house, abandon what you possess, abandon your house and build a boat instead. Seek life instead of riches, save yourself. Take with you, on the boat you build, an instance of each thing living so that they may be safe from obliteration in the flood. Perform the construction of the boat with care. Let the length of the boat and the width of the boat be equal. Roof over the boat as the abyss is roofed.' The whispering voice spoke through the rustling walls: You reed house walls, listen and hear what I say.' I listened and heard and spoke to the whispering voice: 'I hear what you say. What will I tell the others?   What will I tell the old men and the people?' Ea the god whispered to me, his servant: 'Tell them you can no longer live in the city, because you are out of favor with Enlil. The city is the city of Enlil, and therefore Utnapishtim, whom he hates, must find another domicile and another god who will be his patron and protector, and you have therefore decided to depart from Shuruppak and seek another home. Tell them Ea the god will be your patron, whose domicile is Apsu the abyss. Under the roof of Apsu is where you go. As for the city, fortunate Shuruppak, in the morning dawning, abundance will then rain down: there will be plenty, a flood of bounty, the city teeming with heaven's profusion, game birds falling, fishes unheard-of before in song or story, tumbling loaves of fresh-baked morning bread; grain will come showering in from all the grain fields; a harvest of everything, yes, more than enough. These are the things to tell the elders and people.'  ii "In the first hours of the early morning dawning, all the people came out for the boat-building, the little children, the weak as well as the strong, everyone carrying something: asphalt, and oil, and pitch, the best of timber with which to build. Day after day I labored building the boat. Ten times a dozen cubits were the walls; ten times a dozen cubits was each deck. There were six decks; the cabin was divided into nine compartments. I made up the plans; I drew a picture of them for our guidance. I hammered the boat together, and plugged the holes with water plugs to keep the water out. I made the bitumen pitch in the pitch kiln, three sar of bitumen pitch to caulk the hull and, to be certain, three sar to caulk the inside. I counted punting poles and put them aboard; I had the basket bearers stow the supplies of oil and foodstuffs, everything I needed. As for the people who came to help in the work each day was like a New Year's holiday: I slaughtered sheep and bullocks for their feasting; for drinking there was wine and beer, plenty, as if there was a river overflowing. On the seventh day I finished building the boat. I opened a bowl of ointment for my hands. I commanded the loading of everything I owned that could be carried, silver, and gold, and all the instances of living things to be saved from obliteration in the flood; and all my household people I took with me. At sunset on that day I launched the boat. The launching was very hard to manage. It took much shifting and much maneuvering on the ways to get the unwieldy boat down into the river, and two-thirds of its weight under the water in order to prevent it from capsizing. As darkness was coming on I heard the god: 'Abundance will rain down, more than enough! Get yourself inside, and close the hatch!' I saw the signs of morning in the sky. 'Abundance will rain down, more than enough!' I got myself inside, and closed the hatch. To Puzuramurri the caulker, who, outside, caulked up the hatch with pitch, I gave my house.  iii "In the early hours of the next morning dawning there was the noise of Adad in the clouds that rose and filled the morning sky with blackness. Shullat the herald of the dread Adad moved out over the mountains and over the valleys, bellowing; Hanish the herald of the dread Adad moved over the plains and over the cities; everything turned to darkness as to night. From time to time the Annunaki blazed terrible light. Then rain came down in floods. Beneath, the god of the Underworld, Nergal, broke down his own doorposts and opened the earth. Ninurta god of chaos and of war opened the dikes, and other floods burst forth. The South Wind rushed in flooding over the mountains. Brother could not see brother in the welter; none of the gods in heaven could see the earth; the land was shattered like a shattered pot; confusions of dread Adad were everywhere. Terrified gods got themselves up as high as they could go, nearest the highest heaven, cringing against the wall like beaten dogs. Ishtar cried out like a woman in her birth pangs, the sweet-voiced lady cried: "The days that were have now become as featureless as clay because of what I said when I went to the gods in heaven, bringing calamity down on those whom now the sea engulfs and overwhelms, my children who are now the children of fish.' The Annunaki sat and wept with her, the cowering gods wept, covering their mouths. Six days and nights the storm went on this way, the South Wind flooding over the mountains and valleys until the seventh day when the storm birth labor subsided at last, the flood subsided at last. I opened the hatch. The daylight touched my face. I looked outside. Nothing was moving at all. It looked as flat as a flat clay roof looks flat; and all the human beings had turned to clay. I fell to my knees and wept. The tears ran down the sides of my nose. I wept in the total silence. I looked outside and looked as far as I could, trying to find, looking across the world, something. And then, far off, something was there. What looked like signs of an island could faintly be seen; and then the boat was caught and held from under by the peak rock of a mountain under the water. It was Mount Nisir the boat was grounded on.   A first day it was held, and a second day; a third day the boat was held from under, and a fourth day, and a fifth; a sixth day, and then on the seventh day I freed a dove. The dove flew free and flew away from the boat, seeking a place for its little feet to alight, and finding none, flew back to the boat to perch. I freed a swallow then and it flew free and flew away from the boat, seeking a place for its little feet to alight, and finding none, flew back to the boat to find a place to alight. I freed a raven then and it flew free and flew away from the boat, and never returned. It had found a place to alight, and circled about the place, and alighted, and settled itself, and ate, and never after that returned to the boat. Then I set free all the other birds in the boat and they flew free, scattering to the winds.  iv "I went ashore and offered a sacrifice. I poured out a libation; I set out seven vessels of offerings on a stand, and then set seven more; I made a fire of wood of myrtle, wood of cane, and wood of cedar. I lit the fire. The odor touched the nostrils of the Igigi gods and gave them pleasure. I slaughtered a sheep to make a sacrifice; the gods collected like flies about the altar. The great goddess progenitrix Ishtar came down from heaven wearing about her neck the pendant Anu gave her for her adornment, of lapis lazuli ornately made. She said: 'Just as this pendant never shall forgotten be by the goddess, so the goddess never will forget calamitous days. The gods may come to the ritual but forbidden is the presence of Enlil, by whose command the flood was peremptorily brought down on the heads of all my children, engulfing them.' When the god Enlil came to the sacrifice he saw the boat, and the sight filled him with rage. He spoke in anger to the gathered gods: 'How is it that one man has saved himself? No breath of life was meant to be kept safe from its obliteration in the flood.' Ninurta opened his mouth and said to the god: 'Ea, the cleverest of the gods, deviser, let Ea speak and give Enlil his answer.' Then Ea opened his mouth and said to the god: "The punishment should always fit the crime. Let him who has performed an evil act be punished for that act. Let not the flood be brought down on the heads of all for what one man has done; and he who has transgressed, show pity to him, lest he be cut off from all his fellows. Better that a lion should come into the village and prey upon it, taking a few, than that the flood drown all. Better a wolf should find its ravening way into the fold, devouring some, much better than that the flood turn all that breathes to clay. Better that famine starve a few of them than that a harvest of waters obliterate all. Better that Erra the plague god, better that he take hold of some, seize them and bear them away to the Underworld, than that the flood drown all. I did not tell the secret to the man. He listened to the wind and guessed the secret. Let the gods sitting in council now decide how to reward the wise man for his wisdom.' The god Enlil then went on board the boat. He took me by the hand and made me kneel; he took my wife by the hand and made her kneel. The god then touched our foreheads, blessing us, and said: 'You were but human; now you are admitted into the company of gods. Your dwelling place shall be the Faraway, the place which is the source of the outflowing of all the rivers of the world there are.' And so they led us to the Faraway, the place we dwell in now, which is the source of all the rivers flowing through the world." Then scornful Utnapishtim said to the king: "Tell me, who would bring all the gods together so that for you they might in council decide what your deserving is, that you be granted admittance into the company of gods? Let there be now a test of Gilgamesh. Let him but keep himself awake for a week, six nights and seven days, to show his worth." So Gilgamesh sat down to begin the test.  v Almost as soon as Gilgamesh the king sat down to test himself, a mist of sleep, as ocean mist comes over the shore from the waters, came over his eyes, and so the strongest slept. Then Utnapishtim spoke to his wife and said: "See how this hero sleeps who asks for life. As ocean mist blows over the land from the waters, so the mist of sleep comes over the eyes of the king." The wife of Utnapishtim answered him: "Touch and awaken him, so that he may return in safety to his native city, entering through the gate of his departure." But Utnapishtim said: "Man is deceitful. Therefore he will deceive us. Every day, as he lies sleeping, you must bake a wafer and place the wafer near him, making a mark upon the nearby wall for every day this hero sleeps who seeks eternal life." She baked a wafer every day, of bread, for every day that Gilgamesh lay sleeping. The first wafer was dry as dust; the second only less so than the first; the third   was soggy and rotten; the fourth wafer was white in the crust; there were spots of mold on the fifth;   the sixth wafer looked almost as if it was fresh; and the seventh—Gilgamesh started and waked up as Utnapishtim touched him on the forehead. Gilgamesh said: "I had almost fallen asleep when you reached out and touched me and kept me awake." But Utnapishtim said to Gilgamesh: "Look at the wafers and look at the marks on the wall: a mark and a wafer for every day you have slept. The first wafer is dry as dust; the second is only less so than the first; the third is soggy and rotten; the fourth wafer is white in the crust; there are spots of mold on the fifth; the sixth wafer looks almost as if it is fresh; and the seventh—but it is then that you awoke." Then Gilgamesh said to him: "What shall I do? Who takes us away has taken hold of me. Death is in my chamber when I sleep; and death is there wherever I set foot."  vi Utnapishtim said to the boatman then: "Though your delight has been to cross the waters, the harbor now is closed, the crossing forbidden. The waters and the shore now shun the boatman. The hairy-bodied man you brought across the perilous waters, wearing the skin of a beast that hides his beauty, let Urshànabi take him to the washing place. There let him wash his body, washing away the filth that hides his beauty. Manifest be the beauty of Gilgamesh. Take the skin of a beast he wore on the journey and throw it away in the sea. Let Gilgamesh bind up his shining hair with a new fillet. Let him put on a spotless festal robe. Let him return to his native city in honor in the royal garments appropriate to himself." The boatman led the king to the washing place. Gilgamesh washed his body, washing away the filth that obscured his beauty; then Urshànabi took the skin of a beast and threw it away. Manifest was the beauty of Gilgamesh. He bound up his shining hair with a new fillet; he put on a festal robe, utterly spotless, a royal garment appropriate to himself. Then he and the boatman boarded the little boat and the boat began to move away from the shore. But the wife of Utnapishtim said to her husband: "This man has undergone a terrible journey. What will you give him for his return to his city?" Gilgamesh, hearing, took up his punting pole and brought the little boat back to the shore. Utnapishtim spoke and said to him: "Gilgamesh, you who have made the terrible journey, what shall I give you for your return to your city?" Then Utnapishtim said to Gilgamesh: "A secret of the gods I will disclose. There is a plant that grows under the waters, thorny to seize, as a rose is thorny to seize. How-the-Old-Man-Once-Again-Becomes-a-Young-Man is the name of the plant that grows under the waters. Descend into the waters and seize the plant." So Gilgamesh tied heavy stone weights to his feet to bring him down through the waters of the abyss to the place where he could find the magic plant. He seized the thorny plant that cut his hands; he cut the stone weights loose from his heavy feet; and the waters cast him up upon the shore.  vii Gilgamesh said to Urshànabi the boatman: "Urshànabi, this plant is a wonderful plant. New life may be obtained by means of it. I will carry the thorny plant back to my city. I will give some of the plant to the elders there, to share among them, telling them it is called How-the-Old-Man-Once-Again-Becomes-a-Young-Man. And I will take my share of the magic plant, once more to become the one who is youngest and strongest."  viii At twenty leagues they stopped only to eat; at thirty leagues they stopped to rest for the night. Gilgamesh found a spring, a pool of pure water. He entered the water, to refresh himself. In the reeds nearby a serpent of the place became aware of the fragrance of the plant, breathed its perfume, desired it, and approached, and stole away with it among the reeds. As it disappeared the serpent shed its skin. When Gilgamesh found out what the serpent had done he sat down weeping by the pool of water. He took Urshànabi by the hand and said: "What shall I do? The journey has gone for nothing. For whom has my heart's blood been spent? For whom? For the serpent who has taken away the plant. I descended into the waters to find the plant and what I found was a sign telling me to abandon the journey and what it was I sought for."  ix At twenty leagues they stopped only to eat. At thirty leagues they stopped to rest for the night. And so they traveled until they reached Uruk. There Gilgamesh the king said to the boatman: "Study the brickwork, study the fortification; climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace; study how it is made; from the terrace see the planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards. One league is the inner city, another league is orchards; still another the fields beyond; over there is the precinct of the temple. Three leagues and the temple precinct of Ishtar measure Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh."
All day and night, save winter, every weather, Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop, The aspens at the cross-roads talk together Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top. Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing— The sounds that for these fifty years have been. The whisper of the aspens is not drowned, And over lightless pane and footless road, Empty as sky, with every other sound Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode, A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom, In tempest or the night of nightingales, To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room. And it would be the same were no house near. Over all sorts of weather, men, and times, Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear But need not listen, more than to my rhymes. Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves We cannot other than an aspen be That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves, Or so men think who like a different tree.
1914-18 “equality of sacrifice” A. “I was a Have.” B. “I was a ‘have-not.’” (Together). “What hast thou given which I gave not?” a servant We were together since the War began. He was my servant—and the better man.a son My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.an only son I have slain none except my Mother. She (Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me.ex-clerk Pity not! The Army gave Freedom to a timid slave: In which Freedom did he find Strength of body, will, and mind: By which strength he came to prove Mirth, Companionship, and Love: For which Love to Death he went: In which Death he lies content.the wonder Body and Spirit I surrendered whole To harsh Instructors—and received a soul . . . If mortal man could change me through and through From all I was—what may The God not do?hindu sepoy in france This man in his own country prayed we know not to what Powers. We pray Them to reward him for his bravery in ours.the coward I could not look on Death, which being known, Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.shock My name, my speech, my self I had forgot. My wife and children came—I knew them not. I died. My Mother followed. At her call And on her bosom I remembered all.a grave near cairo Gods of the Nile, should this stout fellow here Get out—get out! He knows not shame nor fear.pelicans in the wilderness
At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe, I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard, My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole. There in the childish night my companions lay frozen, The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat, And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling, Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest. —Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence Of the unbroken ice. I stand here, The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare At the North Pole . . .  And now what? Why, go back. Turn as I please, my step is to the south. The world—my world spins on this final point Of cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds End in this whirlpool I at last discover. And it is meaningless. In the child's bed After the night's voyage, in that warm world Where people work and suffer for the end That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land I reached my North and it had meaning. Here at the actual pole of my existence, Where all that I have done is meaningless, Where I die or live by accident alone— Where, living or dying, I am still alone; Here where North, the night, the berg of death Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness, I see at last that all the knowledge   I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me— Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness  And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
December 26, 1969 Dear Kenward,  What a pearl of a letter knife. It's just the thing I needed, something to rest my eyes on, and always wanted, which is to say  it's that of which I felt the lack but didn't know of, of no real use and yet essential as a button box, or maps, green morning skies, islands and canals in oatmeal, the steam off oyster stew. Brown agate, veined as a woods by smoke that has to it the watery twist of eel grass in a quick, rust-discolored cove. Undulating lines of northern evening—a Munch without the angst—a hint of almost amber: to the nose, a resinous thought, to the eye, a lacquered needle green where no green is, a present after-image. Sleek as an ax, bare and elegant as a tarn, manly as a lingam, November weather petrified, it is just the thing to do what with? To open letters? No, it is just the thing, an object, dark, fierce and beautiful in which the surprise is that the surprise, once past, is always there: which to enjoy is not to consume. The un- recapturable returns in a brown world made out of wood, snow streaked, storm epi- center still in stone.
Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill— the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever. And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep;  it was the light that you will see at evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the raven's cawing, the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough such an immense, soundless, and high concern for the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing, Love, made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth, something brighter than pity for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses, and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
Toss in some wavy lines, an equal sign, and a squiggle, then a lilac log, boulders with faces, a few phrases like rock walls, twin marks from wagon wheels on granite. The tell-tale lilacs give away the cellar hole: magnetic lilacs, like nineteenth-century girls in pinafores and blossom sprays, stationed beside their no-longer houses. They look about to sing. Banana curls. Purple ribbons tying their waists. And boulders in the woods act as billboards interrupted by an enormous Mont Blanc fountain pen, lounging like an alligator. It intrudes. Comes out of my present time. No. Be less. It's a Bic ballpoint. Bleached by deletion, "By the middle of the nineteenth century, when de forestation reached its peak, more than half of New England's native forests"—according to Robert M. Thorson,Stone by Stone—"as much as 80 percent in the heavily settled parts of southern New England—had been cut down," "replaced with 'open space,'" the autumn foliage is paint-by-number and different tabs throughout  are half-finished murals of a single type of tree in a single time of year. Here's the place where someone w/ a pewter spoon kneeled to plant the Lady's Slippers that still appear, and the mushrooms like a stack of dinner plates that run up the side of a rotting tree. Here's the fallen-in deer stand and the apple tree among maples making fruit for deer. Outside the woods, the puff of dust on the road where the school bus used to stop. Outside is the failure to stay in touch or, really, to ever be in touch. I didn't ever know them (my neighbors) well. In winter you are handed a white tray with a few tiny rock walls, short lines drawn with a ruler, an indent for where a cellar hole could be a hyperlink to once go once more to the lake and told to go at it, go play.
Glued-on trees alternating with strips of bricks and little pieces of song taped up everywhere as green and pink diamonds in a woods in a box when the room of the mind has an easy chair and 3 large trees. A 3-sided woods with a divan at the back, an argyle of bird song on top of a syncopation of stapled trees, concrete strips and birches tacked up for reflection, digression, analysis if the room in the mind means 3 large people conferring in a box of woods with a love seat out front. Bands of fluorescence and poplar and a tempo of tacked-up trees a needlepoint of bird song, home-sweet-home, where a sapling on an end table is lit stage right beside the wicker chair as well as the leather chair in the boxed woods. A gray-haired woman sits on the floor to read stacks of old journals out of a crate, a flaxen girl in a Scotch-plaid holiday dress who rolls in stage left. Pulses of gold and lamé trees in French   and a disco ball in the boxed-in woods, if the many-roomed mind comes with a futon. The off-kilter, out-of-sync, the irregular pace of, the size 3 of, until a (Do Not) diagonal across the mountain range at the back of the mind, sound-split poles, stubs but glued-on, syncopation, many stapled, love lit: one by one, the leaves again taped up.
Last night I found my face below the water in my cupped hands. The mask made of copper and bone criss-crossing to make a smirk, a false glamour, a plated glaze. I unwound myself from the heavy machinery of my body's burden. The lute, the light, chime.   I'll get up and partner myself with music, the purple moon peeling itself like a plum. Men stand in a circle and they will ask and ask again. I want to pick the thick bud, to lose myself in the body's posture bending in or away, to let my majesty and birthright go and gesture toward a waking life.
I am haunted by how much our mothers do not know. How a republic falls because of its backhanded deals, stairwell secrets. My mother does not know I am lying with a man who is darker than me, that we do not have names for how we truly treat our bodies. What we do with them. The other possesses me. Without him the perception of me fails to exist. My mother now is taking her sheers and cutting through live shrimp. When I was a child she peeled each flushed grape until only the pale fleshy bead remained. She placed them onto a plate in one shining mound, deseeded, in front of me. How I sucked and bled the fruit of all their juice, hypnotized in front of the buzz of television in each version of my childhood. I am her daughter. This is certain. I am lying down with a man who is darker than me and maybe this poem is my real republic, my face is my face, or is it stolen from my mother and hung over mine? If I were a dream you could say my countenance was a string of flickering lights made of teeth or an expression unraveling like a carpet into a narrow river of another life. Does truth matter when it's floating face up or face down? The answer to this makes all the difference.
It wasn't holy so let us not praise gods. Let us not look to them for bread, nor the cup that changed water to wine. Let us look to the bend of the road that reaches. A silver blur across the skyline, woman standing on the farm. In her grasp, the shine that is seed, that is beginning. She will work the earth, bounty in the vault of cosmos above her, heat lightning that lassoes in its manic current. Man never existed but to invite danger. Loveless one. There was once an army of men, saluting from bayonet to bomb. They were expert at sabotage, hand combat. You stop the clock in your paltry chest. The one that says choose, choose. Wind that desired backward. Ring the alarm. When you wake, no more pain. A mirror like a window looking out. What can your past now say to you that has never been said before? What of that clock that forbade you to move   forward. What of the clock that asked for nothing but passage, the minutes careening into you like a fitful arrow.   What of the clock that summoned nothing, not even mercy. Once you tired of wanting, a face to break, you started the clock again.
Wake to find everything black what was white, all the vice versa—white maids on TV, black sitcoms that star white dwarfs cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents, Black Houses. White horse candidates. All bleach burns clothes black. Drive roads white as you are, white songs on the radio stolen by black bands like secret pancake recipes, white back-up singers, ball-players & boxers all white as tar. Feathers on chickens dark as everything, boiling in the pot that called the kettle honky. Even whites of the eye turn dark, pupils clear & changing as a cat's. Is this what we've wanted & waited for? to see snow covering everything black as Christmas, dark pages written white upon? All our eclipses bright, dark stars shooting across pale sky, glowing like ash in fire, shower every skin. Only money keeps green, still grows & burns like grass under dark daylight.
First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit—— Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they'll bury you in it. Now your head, excuse me, is empty. I have the ticket for that. Come here, sweetie, out of the closet. Well, what do you think of that? Naked as paper to start But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it's a poultice. You have an eye, it's an image. My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
The men that worked for England They have their graves at home: And birds and bees of England About the cross can roam. But they that fought for England, Following a falling star, Alas, alas for England They have their graves afar. And they that rule in England,
 In stately conclave met,
 Alas, alas for England
 They have no graves as yet.
In sodden trenches I have heard men speak, Though numb and wretched, wise and witty things; And loved them for the stubbornness that clings Longest to laughter when Death's pulleys creak; And seeing cool nurses move on tireless feet To do abominable things with grace, Deemed them sweet sisters in that haunted place Where, with child's voices, strong men howl or bleat. Yet now those men lay stubborn courage by, Riding dull-eyed and silent in the train To old men's stools; or sell gay-coloured socks And listen fearfully for Death; so I Love the low-laughing girls, who now again Go daintily, in thin and flowery frocks.
I knew a man, he was my chum, but he grew blacker every day, and would not brush the flies away, nor blanch however fierce the hum of passing shells; I used to read, to rouse him, random things from Donne— like “Get with child a mandrake-root.” But you can tell he was far gone, for he lay gaping, mackerel-eyed, and stiff, and senseless as a post even when that old poet cried “I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost.” I tried the Elegies one day, But he, because he heard me say: “What needst thou have no more covering than a man?” grinned nastily, and so I knew the worms had got his brains at last. There was one thing that I might do to starve the worms; I racked my head for healthy things and quoted Maud. His grin got worse and I could see he sneered at passion’s purity. He stank so badly, though we were great chums I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.
Colonel Cold strode up the Line (tabs of rime and spurs of ice);stiffened all that met his glare: horses, men and lice.Visited a forward post, left them burning, ear to foot;fingers stuck to biting steel, toes to frozen boot.Stalked on into No Man’s Land, turned the wire to fleecy wool,iron stakes to sugar sticks snapping at a pull.Those who watched with hoary eyes saw two figures gleaming there;Hauptmann Kälte, colonel old, gaunt in the grey air.Stiffly, tinkling spurs they moved, glassy-eyed, with glinting heelstabbing those who lingered there torn by screaming steel.
My hair, voluminous from sleeping in six different positions, redolent with your scent, helps me recall that last night was indeed real, that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn a watershed in the membrane that keeps us shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure, that I didn't just dream you into being. You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue, give my hands their one true purpose, find in my shoulder a groove for your head. In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched,  we're spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched   in a chestnut by a mob of our own making, only to be resurrected to stage several revivals that arise from slightest touch to thwart deep sleep with necessities I never knew I knew until meeting you a few days or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.
Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twenty turn circles like whorls of barbed wire, no spot below flown over uncanvassed. The closer to death the closer they come, waiting on wings with keen impatient perseverance, dark blades lying in wake until age or wound has turned canter into carcass or near enough for them to swoop scrupulous in benediction, land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging. no portion, save bone, too durable to digest. What matters cannot remain.
Speeding, without destination, after dark torrents have poured & been returned at home, the skies above mirror my mood, windshield wipers knifing through sheets, back roads slick with pooling, when a shard of cloudlessness opens. Pulling over, cutting the ignition, I unstitch myself from the humid seat, still fuming, to greet a full spectrum of color arcing past the treetops in lockstep with its fainter inverse. Archer's bow, hem of the sun god's coat, bridge between worlds, reconciliation & pardon. They don't last.
Particulate as ash, new year's first snow falls upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills, in imitation of motion that moves the way static cascades down screens when the cable zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker of legibility that dissipates before it can be interpolated into any succession of imagery. One hour stretches sixty minutes into a field of white flurry: hexagonal lattices of water molecules that accumulate in drifts too soon strewn with sand, hewn into browning mounds by plow blade, left to turn to slush.
(JUTLAND)1916 Not in the thick of the fight, Not in the press of the odds, Do the heroes come to their height, Or we know the demi-gods. That stands over till peace. We can only perceive Men returned from the seas, Very grateful for leave. They grant us sudden days Snatched from their business of war; But we are too close to appraise What manner of men they are. And, whether their names go down With age-kept victories, Or whether they battle and drown Unreckoned, is hid from our eyes. They are too near to be great, But our children shall understand When and how our fate Was changed, and by whose hand. Our children shall measure their worth. We are content to be blind . . . But we know that we walk on a new-born earth With the saviours of mankind.
1918 "This is the State above the Law. The State exists for the State alone." [This is a gland at the back of the jaw, And an answering lump by the collar-bone.] Some die shouting in gas or fire; Some die silent, by shell and shot. Some die desperate, caught on the wire; Some die suddenly. This will not. "Regis suprema voluntas Lex" [It will follow the regular course of—throats.] Some die pinned by the broken decks, Some die sobbing between the boats. Some die eloquent, pressed to death By the sliding trench as their friends can hear. Some die wholly in half a breath. Some—give trouble for half a year. "There is neither Evil nor Good in life. Except as the needs of the State ordain." [Since it is rather too late for the knife, All we can do is mask the pain.] Some die saintly in faith and hope— Some die thus in a prison-yard— Some die broken by rape or the rope; Some die easily. This dies hard. "I will dash to pieces who bar my way. Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak!" [Let him write what he wishes to say. It tires him out if he tries to speak.] Some die quietly. Some abound In loud self-pity. Others spread Bad morale through the cots around . . . This is a type that is better dead. "The war was forced on me by my foes. All that I sought was the right to live." [Don't be afraid of a triple dose; The pain will neutralize half we give. Here are the needles. See that he dies While the effects of the drug endure . . . What is the question he asks with his eyes?— Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.]
1917 They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young, The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave: But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung, Shall they come with years and honour to the grave? They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain In sight of help denied from day to day: But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain, Are they too strong and wise to put away? Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide— Never while the bars of sunset hold. But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died, Shall they thrust for high employments as of old? Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour? When the storm is ended shall we find How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power By the favour and contrivance of their kind? Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends, Even while they make a show of fear, Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends, To conform and re-establish each career? Their lives cannot repay us—their death could not undo— The shame that they have laid upon our race. But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew, Shall we leave it unabated in its place?
1914 For all we have and are, For all our children's fate, Stand up and take the war. The Hun is at the gate! Our world has passed away, In wantonness o'erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone!  Though all we knew depart,  The old Commandments stand:—  "In courage keep your heart,  In strength lift up your hand." Once more we hear the word That sickened earth of old:— "No law except the Sword Unsheathed and uncontrolled." Once more it knits mankind, Once more the nations go To meet and break and bind A crazed and driven foe. Comfort, content, delight, The ages' slow-bought gain, They shrivelled in a night. Only ourselves remain To face the naked days In silent fortitude, Through perils and dismays Renewed and re-renewed.  Though all we made depart,  The old Commandments stand:—  "In patience keep your heart,  In strength lift up your hand." No easy hope or lies Shall bring us to our goal, But iron sacrifice Of body, will, and soul. There is but one task for all— One life for each to give. What stands if Freedom fall? Who dies if England live?
October, 1918 Across a world where all men grieve And grieving strive the more, The great days range like tides and leave Our dead on every shore. Heavy the load we undergo, And our own hands prepare, If we have parley with the foe, The load our sons must bear. Before we loose the word That bids new worlds to birth, Needs must we loosen first the sword Of Justice upon earth; Or else all else is vain Since life on earth began, And the spent world sinks back again Hopeless of God and Man. A People and their King Through ancient sin grown strong, Because they feared no reckoning Would set no bound to wrong; But now their hour is past, And we who bore it find Evil Incarnate held at last To answer to mankind. For agony and spoil Of nations beat to dust, For poisoned air and tortured soil And cold, commanded lust, And every secret woe The shuddering waters saw— Willed and fulfilled by high and low— Let them relearn the Law: That when the dooms are read, Not high nor low shall say:— "My haughty or my humble head Has saved me in this day." That, till the end of time, Their remnant shall recall Their fathers' old, confederate crime Availed them not at all:That neither schools nor priests, Nor Kings may build again A people with the heart of beasts Made wise concerning men. Whereby our dead shall sleep In honour, unbetrayed, And we in faith and honour keep That peace for which they paid.
1914-18("The Honours of War"—A Diversity of Creatures) These were our children who died for our lands: they were dear in our sight. We have only the memory left of their home-treasured sayings and laughter. The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not another’s hereafter. Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right. But who shall return us the children? At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences, And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts that they bared for us, The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time prepared for us— Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences. They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us, Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment o’ercame us. They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour— Nor since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her. Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them. The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption: Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption, Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marveling, closed on them. That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven—By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled in the wires— To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes— to be cindered by fires— To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation From crater to crater. For that we shall take expiation. But who shall return us our children?
1914-18(Sea Warfare) They bear, in place of classic names, Letters and numbers on their skin. They play their grisly blindfold games In little boxes made of tin. Sometimes they stalk the Zeppelin, Sometimes they learn where mines are laid, Or where the Baltic ice is thin. That is the custom of "The Trade." Few prize-courts sit upon their claims. They seldom tow their targets in. They follow certain secret aims Down under, far from strife or din. When they are ready to begin No flag is flown, no fuss is made More than the shearing of a pin. That is the custom of "The Trade." The Scout's quadruple funnel flames A mark from Sweden to the Swin, The Cruiser's thund'rous screw proclaims Her comings out and goings in: But only whiffs of paraffin Or creamy rings that fizz and fade Show where the one-eyed Death has been. That is the custom of "The Trade." Their feats, their fortunes and their fames Are hidden from their nearest kin; No eager public backs or blames, No journal prints the yarn they spin (The Censor would not let it in! ) When they return from run or raid. Unheard they work, unseen they win. That is the custom of "The Trade."
1914-18(Sea Warfare) The ships destroy us above And ensnare us beneath. We arise, we lie down, and we move In the belly of Death. The ships have a thousand eyes To mark where we come . . . But the mirth of a seaport dies When our blow gets home.
I thought I was so tough, But gentled at your hands, Cannot be quick enough To fly for you and show That when I go I go At your commands. Even in flight above I am no longer free: You seeled me with your love, I am blind to other birds— The habit of your words Has hooded me. As formerly, I wheel I hover and I twist, But only want the feel, In my possessive thought, Of catcher and of caught Upon your wrist. You but half civilize, Taming me in this way. Through having only eyes For you I fear to lose, I lose to keep, and choose Tamer as prey.
On a parking lot staircaseI met two fine-looking men descending, both in slacksand dress shirts, necktiesmuch alike, one of the menin his sixties, the othera good twenty years older,unsteady on his polished shoes,a son and his father, I knewfrom their looks, the son with hisright hand on the handrail,the father, left hand on the left,and in the middle they wereholding hands, and when I neared,they opened the simple gateof their interwoven fingersto let me pass, then reached outfor each other and continued on.
The neighbor’s horses idleunder the roofof their three-sided shelter,looking out at the rain.Sometimesone or anotherwill fade into the shadowsin the corner, maybeto eat, or drink.Still, the others stand,blowing out their warmbreaths. Rain rattleson the metal roof.Their hoof printsin the corralopen gray eyes to the sky,and wink each timeanother drop falls in.
What was it we wantedto say anyhow, like todaywhen there were all the lettersin my alphabet soup and suddenlythe ‘j’ rises to the surface.The ‘j’, a letter that might begreat for Scrabble, but not reallyused for much else, unlesswe need to jump for joy,and then all of a suddenit’s there and ready tohelp us soar and to open upour hearts at the same time,this simple line with a curved bottom,an upside down cane that helpsus walk in a new way into thisforest of language, where all the lettersare beginning to speak,finding each other in justthe right combinationto be understood.
Forgive me, Aunt Phyllis, for rejecting the cutglass dishes—the odd set you gathered pieceby piece from thirteen boxes of Lux laundry soap.Pardon me, eggbeater, for preferring the whisk;and you, small ship in a bottle, for the diminutivesize of your ocean. Please don’t tell my mother,hideous lamp, that the light you providedwas never enough. Domestic deities, do not be angrythat my counters are not white with flour;no one is sorrier than I, iron skillet, for the heavylonging for lightness directing my mortal hand.And my apologies, to you, above all,forsaken dresses, that sway from a rod betweenladders behind me, clicking your plastic tonguesat the girl you once made beautiful,and the woman, with a hard heart andsoftening body, who stands in the drivewaymaking change.
My father, rather a quiet man,told a story only the one time,if even then—he had so littleneed, it seemed, of being understood.Intervals of years, his silences!Late in his life he recalled for usthat when he was sixteen, his papaentrusted to him a wagonloadof hogs, which he was to deliverto the train depot, a half-day’s ridefrom home, over a hilly dirt road.Lightly he held the reins, light his heart,the old horses, as ever, willing.In town at noon he heard the station-master say the train had been delayed,would not arrive until that evening.The boy could only wait. At home they’dwait for him and worry and would placethe kerosene lamp in the window.Thus the day had turned to dusk beforehe turned about the empty wagon,took his weary horses through the cloudof fireflies that was the little town.In all his years he’d never seen thoselights—he thought of this, he said, untilhe and his milk-white horses came downthe last moonlit hill to home, drawn asfrom a distance toward a single flame.
Lodged tight for daysin a corner of the wall,ladybug can’t resist the tree,crawling now over coldlight, ceramic fruits,tinsel lamb and sleigh.Flies out of the treeto try rum cake on aplate of caroling cherubs.Ends up on her back,wings flared, silly girlspinning over the kitchen floor.Later, between the blinds,tiny bump of silhouette:a stillness against the falling snow.
A little heat in the iron radiator,the dog breathing at the foot of the bed,and the windows shut tight,encrusted with hexagons of frost.I can barely hear the geesecomplaining in the vast sky,flying over the living and the dead,schools and prisons, and the whitened fields.
I don’t know when it slipped into my speechthat soft word meaning, “if God wills it.”Insha’Allah I will see you next summer.The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah.Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain.So many plans I’ve laid have unraveledeasily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers.Every language must have a word for this. A wordour grandmothers uttered under their breathas they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon,hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes,dropping the discarded skins into a bowl.Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah.Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allahthe rice will be enough to last through winter.How lightly we learn to hold hope,as if it were an animal that could turn aroundand bite your hand. And still we carry itthe way a mother would, carefully,from one day to the next.
Someone must have seen an old dogdragging its broken body throughthe wet grass;someone should have known it was lost,drinking from the old well, then liftingits head to the wind off the bottoms,and someone might have wanted that dogtrailing its legs along the groundlike vines sliding up the creeksearching for sun;but they were not there when the dogwandered through Turley’s Woods lookingfor food and stopped beneath the thorn treesand wrapped its tail around its noseuntil it was covered by falling leavesthat piled up and upuntil there was no lost dog at allto hear the distant voice callingthrough the timber,only a tired heart breathing slower,and breath, soft as mist, above the leaves.
Praise the restless beds Praise the beds that do not adjust  that won't lift the head to feed  or lower for shots  or blood  or raise to watch the tinny TV Praise the hotel TV that won't quit  its murmur & holler Praise the room service  that doesn't exist  just the slow delivery to the front desk  of cooling pizzas  & brown bags leaky  greasy & clear Praise the vending machines Praise the change Praise the hot water & the heat  or the loud cool  that helps the helpless sleep. Praise the front desk  who knows to wake  Rm 120 when the hospital rings Praise the silent phone Praise the dark drawn  by thick daytime curtains  after long nights of waiting,  awake. Praise the waiting & then praise the nothing  that's better than bad news Praise the wakeup call  at 6 am Praise the sleeping in Praise the card hung on the door  like a whisper  lips pressed silent Praise the stranger's hands  that change the sweat of sheets Praise the checking out Praise the going home  to beds unmade  for days Beds that won't resurrect  or rise that lie there like a child should  sleeping, tubeless Praise this mess  that can be left
I am hoping to hang your head on my wall in shame— the slightest taxidermy thrills me. Fish forever leaping on the living-room wall— paperweights made from skulls of small animals. I want to wear your smile on my sleeve & break your heart like a horse or its leg. Weeks of being bucked off, then all at once, you're mine— Put me down. I want to call you thine to tattoo mercy along my knuckles. I assassindown the avenue I hope to have you forgotten by noon. To know you by your knees palsied by prayer. Loneliness is a science— consider the taxidermist's tender hands trying to keep from losing skin, the bobcat grin of the living.
After an hour in the infusion lab,Taxol dripping into her,fighting her cancer;after sitting nauseousnext to a manvomiting into a Pepsi cup,she rose, palming the wall,stooping only to pick upa pen a doctor had dropped,giving it back to the doctorwho had slipped it poorlyinto his coat.
That kiss I failed to give you.How can you forgive me?The kiss I would have spent on you is stillThere, within me. It will probably die there.But it will be the last of me to die.
Under warm New Mexico sun,we watched the pelican placehimself down among the mallardsas if he had been there all along,as if they were expecting the large,cumbersome body, the ungainliness.And he, sensing his own unsightlyappearance, tucked his head closeto his body and took on the smoothinsouciance of a swan.
When my father held his Bic lighterto the nests in back of the garage,the gray paper pulp sparkedthen blackened. Ashes fell,coating crawling ivy and clover.A few yellowjackets fled,one or two swirled, flyinginto the sweaty face of my father,but most too stunned,their usual side-to-side swagof a dance, flailing in the smoke.When one landed on my arm, I stiffened.His wings settled into a still gauze,body coiled in yellow bands,the same shade as buttercups we heldto our skin, cupping sunlight near our chins.Every step, careful, quivering, as if neitherof us knew who was supposed to sting.
The wedding ring I took off myself,his wife wasn’t up to it.I brought the nurse into the roomin case he jumped or anything.“Can we turn his head?He looks so uncomfortable.”She looked straight at me,patiently waiting for it to sink in.The snow fell.His truck in the barn,his boots by the door,flagpoles empty.It took a long time for the taxi to come.“Where to?” he said.“My father just died,” I said.As if it were a destination.
At bedtime, my grandson’s breathrasps in and out of fragile lungs.Holding the nebulizer maskover his nose and mouth,I rock him on my lap and huma lullaby to comfort him.The nebulizer hisses as steroidsstream into his struggling chest,and suddenly he also starts to hum,his infant voice rising and fallingon the same few notes—some hymnhe must have learned while in the wombor carried here from where he was before—a kind of plainsong, holy and hypnoticin the dark.
There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction, How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactnesses Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.
The Holy Ghost was browsing in his or her library one day in the future, unaccountably bored, oddly querulous, vaguely wanting something that would be quietly unfamiliar. "It doesn't have to be great," said the Holy Ghost with the faintest note of exasperation in his or her voice, "just so long as it has its own special character." Gliding along the billion shelves, incredibly graceful despite his or her mood. Then the deft and lovely hand of the Holy Ghost lit on a slim volume of poetry— it was your book. It was your book. The first poem caused the Holy Ghost to frown; ah, but not with disdain, rather with curiosity! The second poem brought a brightening of divine eyes. And the page was turned as if by a pensive breeze. Maybe it happened after your death, but so what? It happened. "I'm taking this back to my perfect desk," said the HG. "This is really something."
The students eat something and then watch the news, a little, then go to sleep. When morning breaks in they find they have not forgotten all: they recall the speckle of words on certain pages of the chapter assigned, a phrase of strange weight from a chapter that was not assigned, and something said almost flippantly by a classmate on the Green which put much of the 18th century into perspective. Noticing themselves at the sink they are aware the hands they wash are the "same" hands as in high school—though the face is different. Arriving in the breakfast hall having hardly felt the transit, they set down their trays on one table; presently, glance at another corner of the space: that was where we mostly sat two years ago, that was where Gerry said what he said about circles, the concept of, and Leonardo da Vinci.
O mer! O mœurs! O merde contemporaine!   What’s left of my battles and my turmoil is in my seaside cabin: this roiling air. And yet it’s what’s outside that makes me shiver. Not the ocean coldness — something heavier. Hot black tea might help — it revives. Two kinds of glass are at hand for my thirst: that windowpane, this tumbler for my tea. If  I stare through the faceted clear sides of   the second at the first, I’ll see the darkness squinting back at me. I can’t deny that even though my eye —  clairvoyant as a crystal ball — clinks like it can see something, I don’t know what comes next    ...     (Zek — zek — whetstones on knives    ...     a nickering    ...    Here comes a horse, it whinnies and the rider — Stick him!, thieves shout as they leap down from a tree and stab, then they lead the horse away down the long snowbound shore.) Windswept snow and sand are sorrel: tea leaves scalded by sunset. Sea foam rushes up these shores to decorate some fir trees but not others. And on the withers of a wave a gull-equestrian comes riding in —  Haie! Here they both are! Snow explodes like sugar that someone is stabbing with a spoon in a glass of chai. And the tea-air sweetens, the snow-sand dissolves, the light of  it switched off, spent, an omen: now look — from deep within the firmament Time has bobbed up like the moon: the clock face of  a slice of   lemon. I clink the teaspoon in the glass — what’s that about? And even though each hourly radius of   the lemon slice is fixed in the white rind, between these translucencies pressed pulp spills out. Like lime or lemon, the taste of  Time is sour —  and yet it has no odor, color, hour. My clinking teaspoon’s yet another of my self-delusions, since it’s only the glass that answers it, and Time says nothing in reply — like all the other governings that invite us to believe they have their power over us. In every object, quick or dead, there’s Time, yet Time itself  is unaware of   Time —  the way a gull (such a polyglot of  fish-tongues), soaring in the dark, unknowingly glows at ten to two, her wings the phosphorescent hands of a clock. No people in this region. But — do people exist at all? And the so-called base and superstructure get, at best, a grade of  C (in Russian, “three,” troika — a kind of carriage — in which the Uriah Heeps are riding toward our “bright new future”    ...    ). Oh, plenty of   hearty pink-faced people (gray-faced, too) here    ...    but are they that real? There’s only sea and tides and more of the same. Sea air throws bombast at my cabin and makes it talk. My window’s blinded by a heavy foamy sea-pulp blast. At the bottom of my tea glass — sweetest sweet. But sugar specks are stuck to the sides, scarcely rinsed by waves of tea, whether attacked or not by my spoon. Now come the many stars that the sky is, or was —  like the American flag on the moon —  but under such a sky, who feels he needs Kant’s categorical imperative? So Time is always empty, a negative, and doesn’t bother us the way this landscape does. I could have sparkled like a Cicero! But even out here all words are turned into a game of  ping-pong, which makes my silenced brain come bubbling out my throat — it’s just one more white foam    ...     And only an insatiable gull’s scream of dissent marks this deaf   land not as the island of a castaway but as a massive continent.Translated from the Russian by Reginald Gibbons and the author
1   A bright red boat Yellow capsicums   Blue fishing nets Ochre fort walls     2   Sahar’s silk blouse gold and sheer   Her dark black kohl-lined lashes     3   A street child’s brown fists   holding the rainbow in his small grasp     4   My lost memory white and frozen   now melts colour ready to refract
Ten years on, I came searching for  war signs of the past expecting remnants — magazine debris, unexploded shells,  shrapnel  that mark bomb wounds.   I came looking for  ghosts — people past, skeletons charred, abandoned  brick-wood-cement  that once housed them.   I could only find whispers —  whispers among the clamour of a small town outpost  in full throttle — everyday chores  sketching outward signs  of normality and life.   In that bustle  I spot war-lines of a decade ago, though the storylines  are kept buried, wrapped in old newsprint.   There is order amid uneasiness —  the muezzin’s cry, the monk’s chant —  baritones  merging in their separateness.   At the bus station  black coughs of exhaust smoke-screens everything.  The roads meet and after the crossroad ritual  diverge, skating along the undotted lines  of control. A porous garland  with cracked beads adorns Tiger Hill.  Beyond the mountains  are dark memories, and beyond them  no one knows,  and beyond them no one wants to know.   Even the flight of birds  that wing over their crests don’t know which feathers to down.  Chameleon-like they fly, tracing perfect parabolas.   I look up  and calculate their exact arc and find instead, a flawed theorem.
for Jane Draycott As winter secrets  melt   with the purple  sun,   what is revealed  is electric —   notes tune  unknown scales,   syntax alters  tongues,   terracotta melts  white,   banyan ribbons  into armatures   as branch-roots  twist, meeting   soil in a circle.  Circuits   glazed  under cloth   carry  alphabets   for a calligrapher’s  nib   italicised  in invisible ink,   letters never  posted,   cartographer’s  map, uncharted —   as phrases fold  so do veils.
Under the soft translucent linen,   the ridges around your nipples   harden at the thought of my tongue.   You — lying inverted like the letter ‘c’ —   arch yourself deliberately   wanting the warm press of my lips,   it’s wet to coat the skin   that is bristling, burning,   breaking into sweats of desire —   sweet juices of imagination.   But in fact, I haven’t even touched  you. At least, not yet.
for Leela Samson Spaces in the electric air divide themselves   in circular rhythms, as the slender grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles  describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic,  one that once reverberated continually in a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple   in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and   match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter of eye-lashes, the pupils create an  unusual focus, a sight only ciliary muscles  blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal could possibly enact.   The raw brightness of kanjeevaram silk, of   your breath, and the nobility of antique silver adorns you and your dance, reminding us of  the treasure chest that is only  half-exposed, disclosed just enough, barely — for art in its purest form never reveals all.   Even after the arc-lights have long faded,   the audience, now invisible, have stayed over. Here, I can still see your pirouettes, frozen  as time-lapse exposures, feel  the murmuring shadow of an accompanist’s intricate raag in this theatre of darkness,   a darkness where oblique memories of my   quiet Kalakshetra days filter, matching your very own of another time,  where darkness itself is sleeping light,  light that merges, reshapes, and ignites, dancing delicately in the half-light.   But it is this sacred darkness that endures,   melting light with desire, desire that simmers and sparks the radiance of your  quiet femininity, as the female dancer  now illuminates everything visible: clear, poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.
drawing a breath between each     sentence, trailing closely every word.          — James Hoch, ‘Draft’ in Miscreants 1. some things, I knew, were beyond choosing:     didu — grandmother — wilting  under cancer’s terminal care.     mama — my uncle’s — mysterious disappearance —  ventilator vibrating, severed silently, in the hospital’s unkempt dark.     an old friend’s biting silence — unexplained —    promised loyalties melting for profit  abandoning long familial presences of trust.     devi’s jealous heart misreading emails  hacked carefully under cover, her fingernails ripping  unformed poems, bloodied, scarred —  my diary pages weeping wordlessly — my children aborted, my poetry breathless forever.     2.   these are acts that enact themselves, regardless —     helpless, as I am, torn asunder permanently, drugged, numbed.     strange love, this is — a salving: what medics and nurses do. i live buddha-like, unblinking, a painted vacant smile —     one that stores pain and painlessness — someone else’s nirvana thrust upon me.    some things I once believed in  are beyond my choosing — choosing is a choice unavailable to me.
An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas  containing stark white sheets,   perfect in their presentation of absence.  Only a bold logo on top   revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else.  I examined the sheets,   peered through their grains —  heavy cotton-laid striations —   concealing text, in white ink, postmarked India.  Even the watermark’s translucence   made the script’s invisibility transparent.  Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets   of sophisticated pulp, paper containing  scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned,   untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate  and circulate to keep alive its breathings.   Corpuscles of a very different kind —  hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.
Couched on crimson cushions,  pink bleeds gold   and red spills into one’s heart.  Broad leather keeps time,   calibrating different hours  in different zones   unaware of the grammar  that makes sense.   Only random woofs and snores  of two distant dogs   on a very cold night  clears fog that is unresolved.   New plants wait for new heat —  to grow, to mature.   An old cane recliner contains  poetry for peace — woven   text keeping comfort in place.  But it is the impatience of want   that keeps equations unsolved.  Heavy, translucent, vaporous,   split red by mother tongues —  winter’s breath is pink.
Krushchev is coming on the right day!  the cool graced light is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind and everything is tossing, hurrying on up  this country has everything but politesse, a Puerto Rican cab driver says and five different girls I see  look like Piedie Gimbel with her blonde hair tossing too,  as she looked when I pushed her little daughter on the swing on the lawn it was also windy last night we went to a movie and came out,  Ionesco is greater than Beckett, Vincent said, that's what I think, blueberry blintzes and Khrushcev was probably being carped at  in Washington, no  politesse Vincent tells me about his mother's trip to Sweden  Hans tells us about his father's life in Sweden, it sounds like Grace Hartigan's painting Sweden  so I go home to bed and names drift through my  head Purgatorio Merchado, Gerhard Schwartz and Gaspar Gonzales,  all unknown figures of the early morning as I go to work where does the evil of the year go  when September takes New York and turns it into ozone stalagmites  deposits of light  so I get back up make coffee, and read François Villon, his life, so dark  New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing up the street I wish it would blow off  though it is cold and somewhat warms  my neck as the train bears Krushchev on to Pennsylvania Station  and the light seems to be eternal  and joy seems to be inexorable  I am foolish enough always to find it in wind
Now when I walk around at lunchtime I have only two charms in my pocket an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case when I was in Madrid the others never brought me too much luck though they did help keep me in New York against coercion but now I'm happy for a time and interested I walk through the luminous humidity passing the House of Seagram with its wet and its loungers and the construction to the left that closed the sidewalk if I ever get to be a construction worker I'd like to have a silver hat please and get to Moriarty's where I wait for LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and shaker the last five years my batting average is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 times last night outside birdland by a cop a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible disease but we don't give her one we don't like terrible diseases, then we go eat some fish and some ale it's cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like Henry James so much we like Herman Melville we don't want to be in the poets' walk in San Francisco even we just want to be rich and walk on girders in our silver hats I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so
It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch ah lunch! I think I am going crazy what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch's I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems at Joan's studio for a new book by Grove Press which they will probably not print but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it yesterday I looked up the rue Frémicourt on a map and was happy to find it like a bird flying over Paris et ses environs which unfortunately did not include Seine-et-Oise  which I don't know as well as a number of other things and Allen is back talking about god a lot and Peter is back not talking very much and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth's although he is coming to lunch with Norman I suspect he is making a distinction well, who isn't I wish I were reeling around Paris instead of reeling around New York I wish I weren't reeling at all it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured   we are all happy and young and toothless it is the same as old age the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues the Seine continues the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all the Bar Américain continues to be French de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!) and Irving Sandler continues to be the balayeur des artistes and so do I (sometimes I think I'm "in love" with painting) and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers  and people under them and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy we shall be happy but we shall continue to be ourselves everything  continues to be possible René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it
Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headlinelana turner has collapsed! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up
I What shall I do with this absurdity —O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,Decrepit age that has been tied to meAs to a dog's tail? Never had I moreExcited, passionate, fantasticalImagination, nor an ear and eyeThat more expected the impossible —No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's backAnd had the livelong summer day to spend.It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friendUntil imagination, ear and eye,Can be content with argument and dealIn abstract things; or be derided byA sort of battered kettle at the heel. III pace upon the battlements and stareOn the foundations of a house, or where
'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.'  THOMAS MANN. How can I, that girl standing there,My attention fixOn Roman or on RussianOr on Spanish politics,Yet here's a travelled man that knowsWhat he talks about,And there's a politicianThat has both read and thought,And maybe what they say is trueOf war and war's alarms,But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.
I like Rosh Hashonah late, when the leaves are half burnt umber and scarlet, when sunset marks the horizon with slow fire and the black silhouettes of migrating birds perch on the wires davening.  I like Rosh Hashonah late when all living are counting their days toward death or sleep or the putting by of what will sustain them— when the cold whose tendrils translucent as a jellyfish  and with a hidden sting just brush our faces at twilight. The threat of frost, a premonition a warning, a whisper whose words we cannot yet decipher but will.  I repent better in the waning season when the blood runs swiftly and all creatures look keenly about them for quickening danger. Then I study the rockface of my life, its granite pitted  and pocked and pickaxed eroded, discolored by sun and wind and rain— my rock emerging from the veil of greenery to be mapped, to be examined, to be judged.
On the birthday of the world I begin to contemplate what I have done and left undone, but this year not so much rebuilding  of my perennially damaged psyche, shoring up eroding friendships, digging out stumps of old resentments that refuse to rot on their own.  No, this year I want to call myself to task for what I have done and not done for peace. How much have I dared in opposition?  How much have I put on the line for freedom? For mine and others? As these freedoms are pared, sliced and diced, where  have I spoken out? Who have I tried to move? In this holy season, I stand self-convicted of sloth in a time when lies choke  the mind and rhetoric bends reason to slithering choking pythons. Here I stand before the gates opening, the fire dazzling  my eyes, and as I approach what judges me, I judge myself. Give me weapons of minute destruction. Let my words turn into sparks.
The hinge of the year the great gates opening and then slowly slowly closing on us.  I always imagine those gates hanging over the ocean fiery over the stone grey waters of evening.  We cast what we must change about ourselves onto the waters flowing to the sea. The sins,  errors, bad habits, whatever you call them, dissolve. When I was little I cried out I! I! I! I want, I want.  Older, I feel less important, a worker bee in the hive of history, miles of hard labor to make my sweetness.  The gates are closing The light is failing I kneel before what I love imploring that it may live.  So much breaks, wears down, fails in us. We must forgive our broken promises— their sharp shards in our hands.
A row of tall skinny candles burns quickly into the night air, the shames raised over the rest for its hard work.  Darkness rushes in after the sun sinks like a bright plug pulled. Our eyes drown in night thick as ink pudding.  When even the moon starves to a sliver of quicksilver the little candles poke holes in the blackness. A time to eat fat and oil, a time to gamble for pennies and gambol  *shames: the middle candle that lights the others every night
The songs we join in are beeswax candles burning with no smoke a clean fire licking at the evening   our voices small flames quivering. The songs string us like beads on the hour. The ritual is its own melody that leads us  where we have gone before and hope to go again, the comfort of year after year. Order: we must touch each base  of the haggadah as we pass, blessing, handwashing, dipping this and that. Voices half harmonize on the brukhahs.  Dear faces like a multitude of moons hang over the table and the truest brief blessing: affection and peace that we make.
In life you had a temper. Your sarcasm was a whetted knife. Sometimes you shuddered with fear but you made yourself act no matter how few stood with you. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.  Now you return to us in rough times, out of smoke and dust that swirls blinding us. You come in vision, you come in lightning on blackness. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.  In every generation you return speaking what few want to hear words that burn us, that cut us loose so we rise and go again over the sharp rocks upward. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.  You come as a wild man, as a homeless sidewalk orator, you come as a woman taking the bima, you come in prayer and song, you come in a fierce rant. Open the door for Eliyahu that she may come in.  Prophecy is not a gift, but sometimes a curse, Jonah refusing. It is dangerous to be right, to be righteous. To stand against the wall of might. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.  There are moments for each of us when you summon, when you call the whirlwind, when you shake us like a rattle: then we too must become you and rise. Open the door for Eliyahu that we may come in.
The courage to let go of the door, the handle. The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very stains and leaks are comfortable as the little moles of the upper arm; stains that recall a feast, a child’s naughtiness, a loud blattering storm that slapped the roof hard, pouring through.  The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill, the small bones of children and the brittle bones of the old whose marrow hunger had stolen; the courage to desert the tree planted and only begun to bear; the riverside where promises were shaped; the street where their empty pots were broken.  The courage to leave the place whose language you learned as early as your own, whose customs however dan- gerous or demeaning, bind you like a halter you have learned to pull inside, to move your load; the land fertile with the blood spilled on it; the roads mapped and annotated for survival.  The courage to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain that cannot be imagined, mapless, walking into the wilderness, going barefoot with a canteen into the desert; stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths,  Cathay, India, Siberia, goldeneh medina leaving bodies by the way like abandoned treasure. So they walked out of Egypt. So they bribed their way out of Russia under loads of straw; so they steamed out of the bloody smoking charnelhouse of Europe on overloaded freighters forbidden all ports—  out of pain into death or freedom or a different painful dignity, into squalor and politics. We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage,  who walked into the strange and became strangers and gave birth to children who could look down on them standing on their shoulders for having been slaves. We honor those who let go of every- thing but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought, who became other by saving themselves.
It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers. There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote, Like the memory of scales descending the white keys Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms! And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining, Soon to let down its white or yellow-white. Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap, Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . . So much has fallen.  And I, who have listened for a step All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away, Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers  abounding.
The lights in the theater fail. The long racks Of costumes abandoned by the other dancers Trouble Celeste. The conductor asks If she is sad because autumn is coming on, But when autumn comes she is merely pregnant and bored. On her way back from the holidays, a man Who appears to have no face rattles the door To her compartment. How disgusting, she thinks;How disgusting it always must be to grow old.  Dusk falls, and a few drops of rain. On the train window trembles the blurred Reflection of her own transparent beauty, And through this, beautiful ruined cities passing, Dark forests, and people everywhere Pacing on lighted platforms, some Beating their children, some apparently dancing. The costumes of the dancers sway in the chill darkness. Now sinking into sleep is like sinking again Into the lake of her youth. Her parents Lean from the rail of a ferryboat waving, waving, As the boat glides farther out across the waves. No one, it seems, is meeting her at the station. The city is frozen. She warms herself In the pink and scented twilight of a bar.  The waiter who serves her is young. She nods assent. The conversation dies in bed. Later, She hurries off to rehearsal. In the lobby, Dizzy still with the weight of her own body, She waits, surrounded by huge stills of herself And bright posters announcing events to come. Her life—she feels it closing about her now Like a small theater, empty, without lights.
This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter. The poem will go on without you. It has the spurious glamor of certain voids. It is not sad, really, only empty. Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why. It prefers to remember nothing. Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago. Your type of beauty has no place here. Night is the sky over this poem. It is too black for stars. And do not look for any illumination. You neither can nor should understand what it means. Listen, it comes without guitar, Neither in rags nor any purple fashion. And there is nothing in it to comfort you. Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon. You will forget the poem, but not before It has forgotten you. And it does not matter. It has been most beautiful in its erasures. O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned! Nor is one silence equal to another. And it does not matter what you think. This poem is not addressed to you.
Accept my need and let me call you brother, Slate blue oyster, wet sand crustacean, In your hurrying to burrow, wait. Hover. Parse opening’s disaster to creation’s Slate, to another blue-eyed monstrous sand crustacean, Water-bearer. Hear the ocean behind me, Pursued, asking to be opened, asking Creation To heed the tides that uncover you nightly. Water-bearer, wear the water beside me, Hide your burying shadow from the shorebirds, But heed the tides that uncover you nightly. Gems in sandcastles, stick-written words, Hidden from the shadows of shorebirds, Washed over by water. Waters revelatory Gems, sand, castles, sticks, words— Assured of erasure, voluntary erosion. Watched over with warrior resolution, Crab armor, claws, and nautilus heart, Assured of a savior, reconstruct your evolution, Clamor to hear, water scarab, what the tampered heart hears. A scarab’s armor is light enough to fly. In your hurry to burrow, wait. Hover. Hear the clamor of the crustacean’s heart. Heed this call of creation. Call me brother.
tend their yard every weekend, when they paint or straighten the purple fencepickets canting each other at the edge of their lot, hammering them down into soil to stand. How long will they stay put? My neighbors mend their gate, hinges rusted to blood-colored dust, then weave gold party-lights with orange lobster-nets & blue buoys along the planks. So much to see & not see again, each chore undone before they know it. I love how faithfully they work their garden all year, scumbling dried eelgrass in fall, raking away mulch in spring. Today the older one, Pat, plants weeds ripped from a cranberry-bog. Sassafras & pickerel, black locust & meadowsweet, wild sarsaparilla,  checkerberry, starflower. Will they take root here? Meanwhile Chris waters seeds sown months ago. Furrows of kale, snap-bean, scallion break the surface, greedy for life. Muskrose & lilac cast their last shadows. Is it seeing or sun that makes them flicker, as if they’ve vanished? They shake   like a letter in someone’s hand. Here come the guys from Whorfs (“Whores”) Court, walking their dog —also in drag—to the dunes.   I miss seeing Disorient Express (a.k.a. Cheng, out of drag) walk by, in tulle & sequins the exact shade of bok choi. He must have endured things no one can name, to name only KS, pneumocystis, aplastic anemia. I remember he walked off his gurney when the ambulance came, then broke his nurse’s fingers in the hospital when he tried to change his IV line, wanting to live without meds. Zorivax, Ativan, leucovorin? I don't know. Pat & Chris pack down the loose dirt. I’ll never know what threads hold our lives together. They kiss, then fall on the grass. I should look away but don’t.
None of the streets here has a name, but if I’m lost tonight I’m happy to be lost. Ten million lanterns light the Seoul avenues for Buddha’s Birthday, ten million red blue green silver gold moons burning far as the eye can see in every direction & beyond, “one for every spirit,” voltage sizzling socket to socket as thought does, firing & firing the soul. Lashed by wind, flying up like helium balloons or hanging still depending on weather, they turn each road into an earthly River of Heaven doubling & reversing the river above, though not made of much: some colored paper, glue, a few wires, a constellation of poor facts. I can't help feeling giddy. I'm drunk on neon, drunk on air, drunk on seeing what was made almost from nothing: if anything's here at all it was built out of ash, out of the skull-rubble of war, the city rising brick by brick like a shared dream, every bridge & pylon & girder & spar a miracle, when half a century ago there was nothing but shrapnel, broken mortar-casings, corpses, the War Memorial in Itaewon counting More than 3 Million Dead, or Missing— still missed by the living, still loved beyond reason, monument to the fact that no one can hurt you, no one kill you like your own people. I’ll never understand it. I wonder about others I see on the sidewalks, each soul fathomless— strikers & scabs walking through Kwanghwamoon, or “Gate of Transformation by Light,” riot police rapping nightsticks against plexiglass-shields, hawkers haggling over cell phones or silk shirts, shaking dirt from chamae & bok choi, chanting price after price, fishermen cleaning tubs of cuttlefish & squid, stripping copper carp, lifting eels or green turtles dripping from tanks, Hanyak peddlars calling out names of cures for sickness or love—crushed bees, snake bile, ground deer antler, chrysanthemum root, bus drivers hurtling past in a blast of diesel-fumes, lovers so tender with each other I hold my breath, dispatchers shouting the names of stations, the grocer who calls me “daughter” because I look like her, for she has long since left home, vendors setting up pojangmachas to cook charred silkworms, broiled sparrows, frying sesame-leaves & mung-bean pancakes, men with hair the color of scallion root playing paduk, or GO, old enough to have stolen overcoats & shoes from corpses, whose spirits could not be broken, whose every breath seems to say: after things turned to their worst, we began again, but may you never go through what we went through, may you never see what we saw, may you never remember & may you never forget.
By the river years ago, recursive in memory, a finite moment, the past ended. Future began. The river flowed south. You were a man’s face floating among stones. By a river in autumn, willow leaves were yellow whisks in updrafts. We were not alone. Cottonwood boles twisted against banks, turtles dozed in the roots, bark slivered into water. The river sounded the swish of its name. You waded the Neosho as it meandered east. Two sandhill cranes fly overhead. Their legs stretch straight behind as they swim through air. Their grace is the river’s. No one saw flood-seined silt, gravel, broken mussel pearls. I stayed, you left. By the river I met you each day. I meet you each day. I will be meeting you in invariant futures. By the river leaves turn. Mud cracks pentagonal shapes. You return and leave. The river remains. By the river I was a child, I am grown. I remember water pooled, not moving.
Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks, until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes,and warbles a boy’s tenor, wood-flute tones, pure séance hymns from before Christians.Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare as seawater washes through the room,seeping through floorboards to serpent dens. The chorus stirs spirits from family lore.Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee— all rise from steerage and sing with the lords.Next performance is a poet reciting,“The Luck of the Irish,” blue eyes snapping:“Once I journeyed to the Cliffs of Moher.” I follow him to a rocky precipice, pause,then jump to dizzy foam tides below, fall, keep falling into this slow, heartbreaking solo.
Walking home I feel a presence following  and realize he is always there that Native man with coal-black-hair who is  my grandfather. In my first memories he is present, mostly wordless,  resident in the house where I was born. My mother shows him the cleft in my chin  identical to his. I am swaddled and blinking in the kitchen light. So  we are introduced. We never part. Sometimes I forget he lodges in my house still  the bone-house where my heart beats. I carry his mother’s framework  a sturdy structure. I learn his birthright. I hear his mother’s teachings through  what my mother said of her: She kept a pot of stew on the stove  all day for anyone to eat. She never went to church but said  you could be a good person anyway. She fed hoboes during the ‘30s,  her back porch a regular stop-over. Every person has rights no matter  what color. Be respectful. This son of hers, my grandfather,  still walks the streets with me. Some twist of blood and heat still spark  across the time bridge. Here, listen: Air draws through these lungs made from his.  His blood still pulses through this hand.
The light of evening, Lissadell,Great windows open to the south,Two girls in silk kimonos, bothBeautiful, one a gazelle.But a raving autumn shearsBlossom from the summer's wreath;The older is condemned to death,Pardoned, drags out lonely yearsConspiring among the ignorant.I know not what the younger dreams –Some vague Utopia – and she seems,When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,An image of such politics.Many a time I think to seekOne or the other out and speakOf that old Georgian mansion, mixPictures of the mind, recallThat table and the talk of youth,Two girls in silk kimonos, bothBeautiful, one a gazelle.Dear shadows, now you know it all,All the folly of a fightWith a common wrong or right.The innocent and the beautifulHave no enemy but time;Arise and bid me strike a matchAnd strike another till time catch;Should the conflagration climb,Run till all the sages know.We the great gazebo built,They convicted us of guilt;Bid me strike a match and blow.
That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing. It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there. Corazón, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, not spit. He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own . . . The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.The house was quiet and the world was calm.The words were spoken as if there was no book,Except that the reader leaned above the page,Wanted to lean, wanted much most to beThe scholar to whom his book is true, to whomThe summer night is like a perfection of thought.The house was quiet because it had to be.The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:The access of perfection to the page.And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
ghosts of America roam land of fast food  joints defined by movement herds of taxi cabs apartments too expensive to rent trained hands typing digital lives  commotion rust-shriek & blur of subway trains  O New York! until my legs detect a din i walk (signs call me back)   shoes snivel eyes a pocket    wrinkled youth palsied  elephantine ankles cross-eyed ditty  a tic in the face is a chronicle of past grievings  a cancerous cell love uncaved i write into this handbook of daytime things tantrums & baby paraphernalia  claiming words which gather time  answering life i sit & stare into cracks stars of fate i visit you across the sea of  disease between us  let us be stricken  with poems
1  only you are allowed to enter  voice for the first time  the look hesitant undemanding  body supple as sound  the hand unexpected a fruit falling  skin curves of sand  lull below the arms  scent of the ocean's salt   2    the body pushed into life's mouth  3    velvet crunch  of white under feet my heart  snowy lizards' tails  sleeping on branches  arms rhyme  with bending earth  a shadow slants  like a calligrapher's quill  4  pass the threshold  5  a genus of the solitary  the knitted  night stained-glass boxes  where memories ferment  unplanned you come  6   saguaros crack monsoons  consider erosion of rocks  water's fire lit  worlds intersect dusk purity of ascent ferocious nose of a cat  incandescent through forces  stay up waiting  planes converge fates intersect  7  how long does a measure last?  8  sea in the sky  knives  striking obliquely army of light  beating walls  the aquamarine houses are ghosts  between crystal trees  water steals over skewed floors only this life  9  a cat sleeps one eye opened
& what if hope crashes through the door what if that lasts a somersault? hope for serendipity even if a series of meals were all between us even if the aeons lined up out of order what are years if not measured by trees
Even two years later, she still gets correspondence addressed to him. Correspondence. This like that. Mostly about his hobby. Coin collector brochures. Announcements of collector swap meets. His pastime. A way to spend an afternoon back when an afternoon needed spending. Before all the silence flooded the house. He had old currency. Nickels worth ten dollars. And heavy, the bags. Musical, too. She needs to sort through them all. That's what she should do, realize its value. But what she is thinking of is spending it, buying gum and soft drinks, maybe a chocolate bar. Just get face value for mint-condition rarities. Get them back into circulation. Circulation. The afterlife where someone else could get them as change and be joyful at the luck of finding his life's pleasure.
At the end of the work day you could tell exactly how far you had gotten and how much farther there was to go. Of course, it was just a ditch for a pipeline to carry the reeking slop that a neighborhood of toilets would slosh together to be drained away but it was clean, the trench, the slick walls the backhoe bucket cut and the precise grade of the bottom. My job was to sight the transit. I gave a thumbs up or thumbs down or the OK sign if the pitch was right so that some future day shit would flow just as it should, down hill, but you knew where you stood, what you had done in a day, and what more there was to do and every meaningful thing I had said I had said without a word.
He worked years on the tablet, deciphering the pictographs. He knew it was a kind of language, those images. An eye. A bird, maybe a crow. A basket of wheat. A ladder. Did the order of the images matter? He cross-referenced similar texts. He studied the history of the region and satisfied many hours in the tablet's service. In a cousin language, a ladder was the word for happiness, to rise up, to be lifted above the ordinary. After years of work, he sorted it out. It was poetry, bad poetry, adolescent: "Today, I am happy, happy all this day, today."
There is no audience because there is no audience. So if you speak only to imagined beings what does "only" mean? -------------------------- This building formerly a restaurant . . . this small room has been scraped of its paint  and denuded of most former furniture: but  also it has grown in size—can a building be  enticed to grow? Because it is now as big as an  airplane hangar. -------------------------- Your  beautiful face  unbloodied beneath  flies Mother of flies your  beauty  to turn to. If only  the audience could see how you are peaceful and the  flies  languid, glossy But the audience will still bring  its own feelings  to these  words not seeing you  not seeing  what I  am present for. -------------------------- Who has left me  here, I have. Who are your  familiars  Come   into the  enlarging  page if you dare --------------------------  Because he invented  your shape I do mean  structure because he invented you badly   everything is still hidden. -------------------------- I was to impale myself on a quadrangular steel rod, with a blunt end  with a blunt end  which would make puncture  more difficult  and I tried—it's too hard. I can't  Okay said the voice. I can't  Okay then I was weeping  But it's blood! I'm  crying blood! I  screamed That's part of it said the voice. --------------------------- I think this is hard. (That's part of it) How they prefer him must go. I think this is difficult singing Length and repetition   create power If this voice can return like   a body It resembles something that's already been,  Changing. ------------------------------ Chestnuts broken autumnal fungi so you will remember, that  it's fall  outside  falling. you'll go down this is no story for the puling  social classes  No not at all  it's for us my familiars say  who let me weep blood on their ground.
It was a poem men took because it said ovary didn’t take my political poems they took the one that said ovary Are you sure it was because it   said ovary? Yes, for them that’s logical. --------------------------- Destroy another  city  What  else  is war for? So you’ll go down each of you does. dies in  whirlwind each of you who does, dies   paying for the pain you experience  Just that  and nothing is established Because I am a woman Cutting as many cords  as tie you to me. this isn’t  anarchy  it isn’t anything you  could name You’re still here  without ties? because they were logical.--------------------------- Dance little asshole dance oh he gets elected, like a Calvinist  He says, I have these guts  Men, I have these guts. --------------------------- Having dedicated whole  regions to the destruction  you inspire, the  logic will be to go on doing it  doing it. Having proceeded by the logic  of your per- sonal vaccuum  you will perceive your continued  lightlessness  as an excuse to go on. having  gone on  as you have. And so one continues. ----------------------------- Lead the boy out of  the building on fire his head twisted   upwards all fucked What else is there to  know if  one has gotten  twisted up  all fucked he is a screaming fire ----------------------------- In the explanations  of our lives’ experience they’ve left out this wild moment the long mirror on the right-hand wall of the corridor suddenly shattered I can’t see myself anymore. ----------------------------- I repeat that I am not frightened  and why not  I don’t know  what my reactions  are supposed to be. -----------------------------  “Please tell me something  with which I’m familiar.” isn’t there another part of now
Purportedly a chain of civilians, soldiers, voices lice they were called. It is sometimes sufficient to beg Lice creeping over one, kill them with a chemical; then there are lice-ghosts everywhere. Glints of pearly nails. The light of my beloved will keep me from noticing. Trailer to keep her in; he asked me if I knew her ‘auction name.’ Walked over the scorch; what are values when there’s nothing here? The wing of a dead soul grows into all the lace you see through, foreigner, lice-ridden article of divestment. Splendid vices pouring outcomes over the eager cash flow promotions. So many of the dead came to me that their transparencies covered my visage, I’m too near you. Don’t you want to see?  We came from faraway camps, forsaking the human because it broke our bodies into pieces for the torturer’s pet, who propositions you. There is always a slant on it. The trees must  go down; or light affects your eyes badly. We pleaded for an adjustment, before we’d recognizably died. You told me you were a heart, but you were guarding a tower. You said you were a failure, but you helped destroy us. Wings all over me, stuck to my skin, there’s no point to it why are you here when there’s nothing? We just don’t believe it.Now not no never you. I wasn’t you. You have to talk to me my name is irretrievable. No one letting you go because you are prized for not existing except as a body, now not. No I don’t exist, alighting and ghoulishly begging you for a drop of your blood, a morsel of your flesh. Yes take some of me, though there are so many others with flesh. But they’re too rich to give. I know they will never let you in, you beautiful kids who haunt the corridors extending through the invisible world, so you can find your way. So you can see past the smoke of disastrous fear acting out of dreams: it creeps everywhere. See how it took them over, for they had no mind to stand against any fantasy the instigators chose. Had no minds at all. When I was little, no one told me I’d have to suffer. Who can be a child? And the ghoul patiently explains how the wing of a word can extend till the barrier is made, so they can’t see us. If you say beauty, that will be ignored, and we can hide. It was his name a long time ago, before the auctions began. Her face then was large and younger. She can be lice or ghoul. I want that, I don’t want action. But I will have to live off bits of you.The new definition of witch is one who lets them eat you, if they have to. Because you keep regenerating. Oh that’s such an oldy, and all that flying. Sometimes they do—the man who showed me a few things sits all day. The teaching is to let them come as far as inside you even, empty enough; I can hear them and render affection Why, if there’s nothing? Is this nothing? But you are destroyed We shake all the time. You remind me of someone else I knew. The wing is inscribed, forinvolute. Not to beg in the offering of primal services, we have come here. No one would let us tell anything but our bodily humiliations; had to do differently, not for redemption, because we are more than redemption. I am my maker. The shape formed by the bits of mirror glued on is unimportant. They’re inside my chest and stomach, and they glitter in there. Then if light disattaches, comes up to be spoken, you can see and you can hear. This is true because each of you has this too. Has all the bright pieces inside: there was nothing else left to be. Then I say it, like these pages, or how they would love me for hosting them. The earliest people feared them, and subsequent ones deny the dead. Why would I be afraid of all the people dead and martyred? I thought you were talking about words. You knew I wasn’t.Dido who had to be delivered from the wrong story:I want you to know I’m no longer left over. What about ourlibrary, nothing good left there? I want to read the fashion of when youwere old a long time ago. Gothic roses in the type; I’m an ancientHad read every the book of before they arrested me.I had crossed the black plain, I had held tears it was abruptto be walked in a herd pushing us, wherever we went to be shot, orexecuted in the earlier style. It is a timeless death placed next to themost beat-up books. Only a book can love me now. We’re readingwithout real eyes; I’ve read everything too, or in the tradition oftelling it is repeated within you what we did. We must havebeen trying to make something as we are now, but why. Youhave the ear for it. The light wants you to reply, asking if ashore had been attained or if the language were Dutch or SwahiliI didn’t know. It is how you raised the ground, like raising a childevery word that comes out of my mouth torn I’m responsible toThe wind foul pieces here tries to turn me from tenderness, the waythey killed us in the center of the city, that night. The bodiesfloated in the river while I looked for other souls and saw my facewater damaged a new texture and how can I see? Potentialreturning within its white petals and central whorl.He couldn’t believe someone would hate and betray. Itold him, but he refused to believe it; then I left the room.This lace has to be made. Treason said the ghoul thatpeculiar invention betrayal, how primal was that?In Hesiod after the light, after chaos and lover. Said the armlesswoman, said the one cut open, said the smallpoxedthe strewn children their bodies woven into the pageso I could find what they thought, even if babies only cry.Those are the bodies when I was no longer alive but upliftedbutterfly of lace with an empty length to bifurcate my symmetry.No I don’t believe the lies of the live. I am a spot of light inorder to find out, hanging on because it wasn’t revealed indeath. I know what happened to me, she said; bleeding Ilay there unblessed. Do I want a blessing now, or a god torebuild me? We have gone beyond god or new lives, or death, ortribes. I am working on this lace light at present; I accept thedrop of sacrificial blood to propitiate me. One piece of you at a timeis all I need. I am letting you feed, I say, because I know this hasalways been. You’ve been telling me for yearsWe needed you, if no one else did. We have this project tochange our silence into the beautiful city of a voice.
The wind is fitful now:soot piles in the corners of new buildings, gulls stumble out of place in ragged branches to skim against a rise of pond water.
This is what it's like:you sit in the white roomsingular, knees togetherarms over your headto break the noise from the radiothat is false as a drunk's promiseto loan you his car next week.Of course next week never comeslies continue, nobody disbelieves thembut some are ready for the real storythe young man involved breaks her tired heartit's the usual: spilt liquor,broken dishes, wrecked cars.
The man who told me about warsaid, it's the only thingthat keeps us busy.I thought of your fingerson my backcounting the vertebraeone by one.The only thing?
Two of themwith chests like blond silkcornsilk hairstalled in trafficin the awful heatthey smiledwere they messengersdelivering through the open windowpromises or lies or invitations?Boys are everywhere at noon they glide between parched cars bare broad shoulders color of chestnut colts
She sat on his lap for hours pressed his face to her large pink breasts her hands moved through his hair like fond snakesshe gave him curls, cleft hooves beneath the flesh marvellous flesh, and smooth shoulders
A gardenlate spring, honeysuckle and lazy birdsheavy with the round scentof tuberoses and jungle gardenia.There is a manin boots that make his thighslook lethal with a whipno spursmedieval sorrow in his eyesor around the mouth, maybe.He is dangerousin this place he hasthe fertility of steel.There is a woman in a vine green habit her veins are purple, her blue eyes. She is blonde though sometimes brunette:
I hardly know where to look anymore. Places have a putrid familiarity like the smell of my own sheets or the close air of the kitchen — fishbones on the drain left in the ghastly order of temporal things.I have been sitting in this barfor years nowthe beer is stale, the wine off-colorthe music is always the same,old, sad songs that get olderno better than endless conversationnight after forgotten nightwhen all I or you can recallis the dark, the traffic lights,the bartender's commentsabout drunk womenin public places.I would like to go homefinally, down the long streetsnorth and south crossed with small gold leaves;I forget just where the hellanything is. Locked out.
The perfect satisfaction of wine, cigarettes, the sun at an afternoon angle passes through flesh as if flesh were a sieve to the direct point the soul of matter.Things fix timealthough the sun moveslazily, creating an imagethat seems like motivethe wine transmutesand becomes bloodcigarettes dissolveto blue threads and ashbut the sun continuesin constant repetitionof its slow and rather boring dance.
In early morning when the sunis vague and birds are furiousnames of children floatlike smoke through the empty room:Ariadne, dark as seal skinIan, fair-skinned babyMarina Terrence Alex Johnafter dinner pulled back from talk of war and morals their names glow like light around a candle — Jack, my rampant youngest son Celia, my daughter who sings
I poured a whiskey and soda watching the tree outside dissolve: light going backward pushed to corners to the white sliver of wood around the door.Where was that river seething with light? I recall the banks menaced by wasps swollen on summer sap, a cement hollow stuck with their strange cradles a woozy stench of damp clay the blunt poison of water snakes.
From this heightthe sunset spans the whole worldbefore me: houses and trees are shadowsneon flares between them like sudden firethe freeways run, alwaysstrangely vacant with riderless carsempty airthe windows up hererefract the blue slate and rose lightmaking the hills on the horizon collidewith ideas of Sussex, piedmontor the cold clear wind of the Abruzzibut that is never what is out there.At home, the lamp curls its aurorainto the corners of the roomand out the windowssquares, rectangles of lightstake out a territory on the ragged lawn.In the center of thingsbetween the pressing of the window and air— a small space —there is a meeting that definesnothing, everything.
As this suburban summer wanders toward darkcats watch from their driveways — they are boredand await miracles. The houses show, through windowsflashes of knife and fork, the blue lightof televisions, inconsequential fightsbetween wife and husband in the guest bathroomvoices sound like echoes in these streets the chattering of awful boys as they plot behind the juniper and ivy, miniature guerillas that mimic the ancient news of the world and shout threats, piped high across mock fences to girls riding by in the last pieces of light
when I no longer feel it breathing down my neck it's just around the corner (hi neighbor)
When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September, once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action happened on Friday nights where the high school football team gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that, we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel. But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument. Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere, staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now? Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn, and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there, to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses, to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach.
I wondered how long I could go on once the rain had stopped. My nerves were wedged like wings under a hat. Corncobs bobbed in boiling water. I kept a fist in my mouth. I was strident. The neat house curved like a draining sink. Hot cars shined outside. Their engines snapped like a chamois. I never wanted to leave. The streets were suet-thick. The hucksters had tinny voices. They had swollen drums. They had gravel underfoot and tongues that could peel citrus. Radios throbbed. The wet hush of my breath flung itself to mother. The soft dark skin. The sweet curl of the arm. The hum.
I spied everything. The North Dakota license, the “Baby on Board” signs, dead raccoons, and deer carcasses. The Garfields clinging to car windows—the musky traces of old coffee. I was single-minded in the buzz saw tour I took through the flatlands of the country to get home. I just wanted to get there. Never mind the antecedent. I had lost stations miles ago and was living on cassettes and caffeine. Ahead, brushstrokes of smoke from annual fires. Only ahead to the last days of summer and to the dying theme of youth. How pitch-perfect the tire-on-shoulder sound was to mask the hiss of the tape deck ribbons. Everything. Perfect. As Wyoming collapses over the car like a wave. And then another mile marker. Another. How can I say this more clearly? It was like opening a heavy book, letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.
The wind shakes the chimes into the siding, and the dog shakes too though he doesn’t wake you as I carry you to the bedroom. Small mouth sipping breath, you are fish-strange, bejeweled in the dimness of the microwave’s nightlight. As I turn my back to the bulb I make your form in my arms a dark weight but you are no anchor. Together we are sloops trailing a tiny wake in the carpet. In the dark it’s hard to navigate the furniture so I count distance—five paces from the tile to the sofa. From the sofa, twelve to the hall. I’m subtracting my steps to see what’s left. The things that burden me, like our lame dog’s shattered nail, blood on the carpet from his paces to the food dish, our drafty house, all are outpaced. There are no barriers, and I step over the hound’s dozing form as a quick gust cuts dead branches from the pine and the drifts lock our cars in. But I’m still counting— the none-stars in the winter sky, each hazily wrapped and strobing. The far bell over the deep waters of your sleep. Two steps to the corner where there are no animals nor animal danger. Two to the bed where behind us the shadow of the dog could be distant hills, where the clouds disassemble, where your breaths pull the warmth of the room in and where my face, my eyes are the glint of ore from a country far away and known only in a language, light as the syllables of exhalation.
for Cosetta Once there were coyotes, cardinals in the cedar. You could cure amnesia with the trees of our back-forty. Once I drowned in a monsoon of frogs— Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes. Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, never spoke about her childhood or the faces in gingerbread tins stacked in the closet. She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. But I don’t know this kind of burial: vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, peach trees choked by palms. New neighbors tossing clipped grass over our fence line, griping to the city of our overgrown fields. Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, grew watermelons by the pond on our Indian allotment, took us fishing for dragonflies. When the bulldozers came with their documents from the city and a truckload of pipelines, her shotgun was already loaded. Under the bent chestnut, the well where Cosetta’s husband hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots her bundle of beads. They tell the story of our family.
October 2004 1 Not much. Less. Slip of a finger, diminished interval, maybe third of three or two. Water mirrors house with high green door opening out (no steps) into pure air. 2 Air pockets three hawks. Cat got the bird got the cat. Overflown. A habit of flight. Worn cloud on the edge of edge. Wisps. Little tongues. 3 Tongues at work. Talk Today  She could did for an hour or more. My first her, who gave me words. Then at the end, before, merely Oh! A moment of... of more, perhaps. Oh sweet and blessed could be.Oh my soul 4 Soul slept, called in sick. Late sun clouds the lake with clouds. Katydid down to -did -did. Nothing to be done. Little sun, quarter moon. 5 Moon covered, un- covered, covered again, cold. Cold and hot, very and both. Disturbed the Sea of Tranquility. Distributed by the Moon Shop. Distributed self in pieces. Oh my broken. 6 Broken down, or out, as in war, or into, soon: my own him. How much we carry around under our skins, many we were, girls and boysNow now And then then. 7 Then gone and then to come: all the time, except the split second, except— All the time in the world. And out of this world? Oh little heart on my wrist, where are we going? 8 Going home: packed her bags to go back ninety yearsburning skirt broken fork slow train the old house current counter under cross The one who gave me time is out of time. 9 Time to shut the rattling windows slamming doors And if at first you don’t and if you try again and don’t you slip a little slide Rope burns hands over the book the pages over 10 Over time she— Overtime. Timer she was Click I mean I. Would work the week long song bird in the— Burning bush ahead, red sumac jeweled by sun. 11 Sun, here come the clouds again. Between us. You could care: you’ll swallow us up on your way out. You’re almost halfway there, and here am I, way past half. 12 Half-life, half-light, half- moon, half-mast: low flag, and every evening down. Discovered a world of green in him, on the shore of newfound skin His different hand 13 Hand over hand over: change for an empty Enter the bare page Oh keep him safe in his thin shift on his metal bed 14 Bed for one, my very one, own, oh let  him let him Someone’s deep inside him now, something inside him’s taken is it is he let him breathe 15 Breathe light hold in the light: him at bandaged rest, her last year in her last bed: the apple pink just under the skin: I am floating again a little less less the chord resolving. 16 Resolved, that leaves should turn and turn: color to motion to rest. Flutter of yellow, flash of red, bronze- leafed trunk fallen across the path. Ducks twitch white tails over the water, geese stretch necks ... All fall down. All rise. All different. 17 Different from us. Dry, quiet. Still. Still Freeman Sarah Rebekah John locust maple hornbeam oak Timothy. Bent grass under our feet, over their bones. Katheryn. Out of. Under and over. 18 Over my— my tiny planet, growing colder, little train that could but where’s the track? On, off again, over my, un- done, nerve flinched at No. But maybe If— 19 If. Only. Then again. But out of time just now as the lace of yellow locust leaves molecules particles waves catches its breath begins to hum. 20 Hum of words under words: brief for breath, him for hum, him still in his bed for one— And clouds so thick and fast the whole sky’s turning. 21 Turning now to the newsy world the Red Sox take last four claim pennant countries taken in or out people counted no count bombing voting mission killing vision blurred our leader says God says had hatred in his heart he said rage testosterone he said our leader vote for God 22 God is not a Republican Democrat Yankee Red Sox fan of him or her— But him is whom our bed is holding, him my one is home again, oh bless him keep him safe this little time that is our life. 23 Lifetime, timeline, line- up, down time, no time to lose time, all time gone. More of them, body count a full count, bases loaded, all bets off, one by one, or war time lots, all at once. 24 Once there was a girl, a boy, end of story in one first word, once she was and nothing’s left of her except me oh my and her him too: her last days he also came all back to me but now my own him is here is not once upon but times many. 25 Many, as in instances, or all, one, as in passing, as in course of: two words for time, in Vietnamese, but one for all the times to do, for go went gone, as in, this colder day, the geese: only ducks and gulls on the little pond, its tiny island. 26 Island’s I, for all the thinking not (no man no self). Island’s home, at least for some. But here’s a little boat for back and forth with one beside, rowing through the eventide, the late evening. 27 Evening out. On the town, out of town: city wearing your black dress sequined with lights, I am coming down for an even- ing out, in bed beside. The rest: held by, holding. 28 Holding on the Red Sox won eclipsing even the full eclipsed moon a moment outside the trouble we’ve seen though the TV had to bring in the war the war that people believe is good because they want to believe it’s a winning team 29 Teeming with leaves, trees and ground all gold around gray stones: I am greeting my last neighbors, we shall all be changed, pieces of gold slipping into air. 30 Airborne, air-born, hand- sized cradle to hold a soul, no broken- bough fall. Good news today, but best in the air, this old new leaf, turning it over. 31 Over and over again and again, time after time, stone upon hallowed stone. More than bones, ghost- thin skin, I’m here, much less less. Not yet not.
In the green rags of the Bible I tore up The straight silk of childhood on my head  I left the house, I fled My mother’s brow where I had no ambition  But to stroke the writing  I raked in. She who dressed in wintersilk my head That month when there is baize on the high wall Where the dew cloud presses its lustration, And the thrush is but a brooch of rain As the world flies softly in the wool of heaven.  I was a guest at my own youth; under The lamp tossed by a moth for thirteen winters  Sentenced to cabbage and kisses By She who crammed an Earth against my feet and  Pulled over me the bright rain  Storm of fleece. Not for me – citizenship of the backdoor Where even the poor wear wings; while on Sunday Gamy ventilations raise their dilettante In the bonnet of the satin-green dung fly, And fungus sweats a livery of epaulettes.  I was a hunter whose animal Is that dark hour when the hemisphere moves  In deep blue blaze of dews And you, brunette of the birdmusic tree,  Stagger in spat diamonds  Drunkenly.  Like some Saint whose only blasphemy is a  Magnificent juice vein that plucks his groin With April’s coarse magicianship as green As the jade squirt of fruit, I was the child whose breast  Rocks to a muscle savage as Africa.  Thundercloud, your wool was rough with mud As the coat of a wild beast on which flowers grow,  Your brogue of grunts so low   They left soil in the mouth. After you, I   Walked as through a Djinn’s brain  Gleaming lane. I was incriminated by your hammer In my chest. And forfeit to the crepe hoods Of my mother’s eyes; the iron door of her oven And her church. Skies, cut to blind, had but laid on Her priest’s mouth the green scabs of winter.  But I had the marvellous infection!  Leaning upon my fairy and my dog  In the ultramarine  Latitudes of dew shook like a tear that’s carried  Through darkness on the knuckles of  A woman’s glove. I saw each winter where my hen-thrush Left her fork in famine’s white banqueting cloth; Could I not read as well the tradesman’s hand With its magenta creases – whose soul turns blandly On a sirloin mattress to smile at the next meal? O She who would paper her lamp with my wings! That hour when all the Earth is drinking the  Blue drop of thunder; and in  Dark debris as of a magician’s room, my beast   A scented breathing   To the East.
I swear that I would not go back To pole the glass fishpools where the rough breath lies That built the Earth – there, under the heavy trees With their bark that’s full of grocer’s spice,Not for an hour – although my heart Moves, thirstily, to drink the thought – would I Go back to run my boat On the brown rain that made it slippery,
I have lived it, and lived it, My nervous, luxury civilisation, My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.... Their idea of literature is hopeless. Make them drink their own poetry! Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.
No, this is not my life, thank God ... ... worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag; Obsessed first by one person, and then (Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another; These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks, They belong to the people in the streets, the others Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul! Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars. Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas That float themselves about from place to place, and then Spend
January 2009 1 Snow fallen, another going gone, new come in, open the door:  each night I grow young, my friends are well again, my life is all before me,  each morning I close a door, another door. 2 Cloud on cloud, gray on gray, snow fallen on snow, tree on tree on unleafed tree— only a river silvered with thin ice and a slash of gold in the late gray sky. 3 Grayed snow slush trudge but snow falling coating filling in for absence Present!  child with stringed mittens here to take her place to take over on snow showing up air 4 White sky, whiter sun brushing trees with tints of red, then in the distance streaking mauve gold, filling in between the now filagreed trees, silhouettes against the now red burning sky. 5 As if letting go, dangling down, only down, through a cracked pane, a clear pane, weeping beech branches, roots in air, only the crack slant- ing up or (last night in sleep’s play a long red slide) sloping down 6 down buildings walls houses schools, no one building only bombing, months of little in, now nothing no one out, only down: bodies arms legs in Gaza where the eyeless man tore pillars house himself the people down 7 On this day, this birthday, I wish myself for the first time (who would be a child again?) back at that dining room table with him, his years of little more less back, not as in the note in her birthday book, died 84 yrs of age  8 snow rain ice stand walk fall little more less face flesh hand will is was oh yes no melt rain snow 9 Off the page, sliding or I brush or don’t see you, but without you, so cold, colder than stooped-by-age shoulder, oh flesh, hand, Love, come turn my page. 10 Tempered by age, passion, rage cool, no lost sleep—  while in sleep they burn again, your fine hand igniting my thigh, live birds crushed under my feet,  then morning grays again, aged back, writing died... of age 11 As body to body fall- ing together we burn again, snow drifts in air, turns, rolls almost horizontal, takes its own slow time off from falling 12 Gun to body, shell to body, bombs to bodies:  three, five, now nine hundred bodies, over two hundred children’s bodies,  over the border to Gaza to close the already closed border,  not to meet, border to border: a border has no body, is only a side. 13 Epiphany missed, not the seen but the comingto see, or star, the minister said, light sensed against the dark, but not even the dark night, or the cold bright, snow roof over the roof below the darkness before— only gray, industrial gunmetal battleship slate gray, and the coming of gray 14 Friend Sleep has betrayed me I’m trapped in a castle with villainess villain two doors open a third slams down before the darkness I’m trapped in a room my friends accuse me I hide my sheets I cannot tell them I’m dying and then awaking I’m hurting (why these dreams?) my betraying self 15 In sleep a holocaust rations trapped in a kitchen ovens coming why not eat them if food is scarce—  In Gaza food is scarce, power lost, the UN Compound, a hospital hit today, now over 1000 dead— But see, here, History: the Future: some hope, though still rationed, is Coming Soon. 16 stuck zipper sticky egg wiped off mouth mother’s mouth lined around but pursed now closer why not eat touch again all right merge again then zip: put sleep to sleep 17 Today the train too fast  they said too soon they said not yet they said to Washington all right now a black man to the White House on the train. 18 On his way to the Capitol largely built by slaves who baked bricks, cut, laid stone—  on his way to stand before the Mall where slaves were held in pens and sold—  on his way to a White House partly built by slaves, where another resident, after his Proclamation, wrote:If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. 19One hundred years later, King said and said to the crowd on the Mall,Now is the time and We can never be satisfied as long as, he dreamed: every valley exalted, all these years untilnot an end, they said, a beginning 20 O bless hold help keep him safe, let him help us through this cold, let us help him help us through this cold, let its end be O yes a beginning. 21 Cold is in the air, troops are finally out of Gaza where 1300 dead are on or in the ground where olive trees are up- rooted, down, spoons a coloring book limbs shoes in the rubble—In the depths of winter, he said. Today he is In, at work. 22 White roof over the roof, white branches clinging to branches, even the still fallen snow is moving, even icicles shift toward dripping, nothing, not even the cold bodies we are becoming is not moving, not even the ground is not moving, over, on 23 Beyond my windowed wall, gray clouds move over clouds,  beyond the Wall that grays Gaza, dust over dust of disturbed bodies,  wall with drawn- in windows, winter mirror 24 cold heart comfort shoulder feet hands water drawn in from left out take stay sober stone grave still body turn on light open to warm up front heart 25 fallen snow shifts blows drifts from tree to ground, leaves the beautiful skeletal limbs open to only all over air wind lifts then lets fall 26 He stumbled but still, she blundered but still, they said what they shouldn’t have said and recovered, of course they are the great but even the small (though all, we early learn, may fall) may leave the mistaken, misspoken behind as late we stumble into our selves. 27maybe not long, you said,cancer cancer cancer, c’s  crashing like waves— waves of frozen foam that day on that lake— you who please don’t go I can late we I can better Love I 28 mouth with you to mouth with you to body with you in body embodied, not yet un- bodied Love I can better no room so warm as with— I think I thought I could I can but not without you 29 In Vietnam: new year of the water buffalo, steady, slow, welcomed with peach blossoms, fruits, red wine— In Gaza: year of the new war, now ended but no room to bury the dead, no place for the living to buy food, water, any ... 30 for the woman who cooks on a fire of sticks, her bag of clothes on a tree for those going home to water their trees, lemon and almond and olive and for those trees 31 snow to rain to ice to melt to freeze frame window grayed in with old self same but new has come can better Love I—going home bless keep clean gray slate not white or black for even these few words, this small rain
is not a man being swallowed by a fish with eyes like eight-point throwing stars it’s a man being swallowed by a war a man being taken into the mouth of a woman or being swallowed by his work it’s a man traveling far inside a book a man being swallowed up in smoke he swallows the smoke, that blends around him like a thought it’s a man being swallowed by a sound he shapes it so he lives inside a song of a man being swallowed by his kin, his skin a man being swallowed by the State (Leviathan in 1948) It’s a man being swallowed by another manliterally, eaten as a pathway to god it’s a man being swallowed by a sight he cannot reach, cannot touch, cannot trace it’s a man who won’t recognize his face who can’t fit the parts, or find the place it’s a man in triumph over death who laughs and beats the dust from his clothes a man tasting dust inside the laugh it’s a man who listens to the clock a man with nothing to exchange a rude man, his twin he leaves behind it’s a man who wants to be a bride a man being swallowed by his fault with something old to show and new to hide it’s a man who tries to haul the rope a man who stooping can’t provide a man who can’t forget his name it’s a man who doesn’t know his worth it’s a man being swallowed by his wrath his youth, yield, luck, the law, his fear, the fog, his fame it’s a man being swallowed by a coat his father’s coat, he smells of the fit a man being swallowed by his vows it’s a man softly squeezing for the vein he never finds it, he’s minding the road it’s a man being swallowed by a room in which he finds a man being swallowed by a fish it’s a man who thinks what’s in a man who exits into night at closing time the figure of a man being swallowed by a fish.
Sick in bed with a sore throat, I can’t get out of my mind the image of the cat harpsichord from the eighteenth century, soothing a prince with laughter. It worked like this: the tails of them attached to the strings of the instrument were pulled by different notes, and the difference between the way the cats cried was music. A shadow is only a shape. Which is why certain individuals can put their hands in light and make them birds, can say in shadow what they can’t in light. The tiny branches of the hedge in the yard that separates my house from the next look like the rib bones of a bird when the sun hits lunch.   The world, they say, is best for a nest but no good for a flying place.Come back, I say to my dead, and the branches don’t even graze the window, when I eat it hurts.
I. The nest was at rest for a time, not being made. Before the eggs were laid, it softened. The robin sleeping. Inside the house, the sound of laundry in the dryer, the sound of a zipper tumbling inside the apparatus, and shirts with buttons, as well as napkins and a tablecloth printed with blueberries and stalks of lily of the valley, oval, for the table with claw legs and extra leaves for guests. II. In one account, the angels come, their hands emerging from their wings like sentences staying, as long as it takes, for the windows to go from indigo to black, as long as it takes for a breath to land in the base of the belly, in the cavity wisdom tells us wisdom comes from or first dwells in, before it navigates the narrows of the throat, becomes mantra, becomes guttural, becomes spit to aspirate the language the mouth makes. The native obligation of this account to its subject is care. The form of music the wind chime makes registers the commitment of a furious system, filled with conviction, to the continued transformation of what is. Do not ask what has been lost. Ask what changed. An instrument of will, the guitar echoes this, a chord, more reminder than absolute, the hand arouses but does not create the scale. In this way what rests gets taken up. III.  In another, the mind makes a decision to end its disorder. The mind wants first to end the face. The subject has had enough, one too many figures walking through the orchard, the call and response of conversation become an imposition on some other world unbroken by the idea of separate bodies, an idea one has never been convinced of, and so now it is a relief to believe what one has suspected, that separation a trick of perspective, though such a revelation does not undo the fatigue of existing in the continuing illusions of others. And yet, the obligation to be kind, to show interest in strangers when they visit with flowers, to family whose hands are empty, and to doctors, not to mention the pain. IV.  In the last account, the explosions are too small to be seen, and oxygen takes both thirst and hunger away as it ceases to find a home in the lungs, and the patient, having ceased to feel, ceases to breathe, as the heart shuts down before the brain and shuts the dreaming down, the settling on a nest of images, not feeling any form of distress. The pathways to distress are blocked, but the senses doubled, the ears know the house more than they ever did, whose clothes occupy the dryer, which voice accompanies water. V.   Angels be patient with this subject. I know what she would say to you if she could speak,  if she could see you just inside the window whose top right pane frames what we call a family, when the almost mother bird finishes what she is thinking about, barely but still hidden from sight. If you stopped to look at the nest you would see a sleep so purposeful the ladder of adoration would reverse and you would stay on earth.
The thunderstorm came like a pot boiling over and the color of water was made by that, all of a sudden, a pigment more tropical than dense with the reflection of light. Everywhere the scent of at least five different kinds of plants lifted up. The desert can’t talk back but I believe it breathes instead, breathes vivid when the water wants it the water can’t wait and it breathes back. I turned and went into the house. Under the dining room table, a snake. Green with a yellow stripe bisecting its back. Motion ate each centimeter of floor and air, scared, it makes sense to say, though there exists or existed no safer time ever in which that shape wouldn’t want to move, dead August being the exception to this when heat makes molasses of all of us. Why did I want to chase it out? I did, I got a rake and kept making it make that beautiful scared shape upon the floor, so clean. Like two ice cubes rubbing each other and too cold to melt. Nothing organized that fear. Seeing the edges it found its way out.
Hoarfrost coats and cuffs the playing fields, a heyday of glistening. So there’s hope in my throat as I walk across them to the woods with my chest flung open, spilling its coins. The light so bright I can hear it, a silver tone like a penny whistle. It’s fall, so I’m craving pine cones. Hundreds of maples the color of bulldozers!    But something strange is going on: the trees are tired of meaning, sick of providing mystery, parallels, consolation. “Leave us alone,” they seem to cry, with barely energy for a pun. The muscular river crawls on its belly in a maple coat of mail. Muddy and unreflective, it smells as if it too could use some privacy. The sumac reddens like a face, holding out its velvet pods almost desperately. The Queen Anne’s Lace clicks in the wind. A deaf-mute milkweed foaming at the mouth. Back at the field I look for what I didn’t mean to drop. The grass is green.  Okay, Day, my host, I want to get out of your house. Come on, Night, with your twinkly stars and big dumb moon. Tell me don’t show me, and wipe that grin off your face.
Once my sister told me that from her summit at the city pool she could see the yellow billows spread like gas or dreams between kids’ legs. In something the size of the sea, you can’t be sure who’s watching from above. Let’s say it’s the Almighty, twirling His whistle, ready to blow it at any moment and let loose the bottomless Apocalypse: the ocean would make bone of a body, coral of bone. Piss, and a tiger-fish darts through a skull-hole, a weed weaves itself through ribs. You, too, have seen the bulbs flash from the sea. You, too, have felt it breathing down your neck. You eat fish. You’ve heard that mermaids sing. My dreams are as beleaguered as the next Joe’s, my happiness as absurd, but I’m not going to go piss in the ocean about it. No, not in the ocean.
The kitchen in the house had a nook for eating, a groove for the broom behind the door and the woman moved through it like bathing, reaching ladles from drawers, turning to lift the milk from the refrigerator while still stirring the pudding, as if the room and everything in it were as intimate to her as her body, as beautiful and worthy of her attention as the elbows which each day she soothed with rose lotion or the white legs she lifted, again and again, in turn, while watching television. To be in that room must be what it was like to be the man next to her at night, or the child who, at six o’clock had stood close enough to smell the wool of her sweater through the steam, and later, at the goodnight kiss, could breathe the flavor of her hair— codfish and broccoli—and taste the coffee, which was darkness on her lips, and listen then from upstairs to the water running down, the mattress drifting down the river, a pale moonmark on the floor, and hear the clink of silverware—the stars, their distant speaking—and picture the ceiling—the back of a woman kneeling, covering the heart and holding up the bed and roof and cooling sky.
Summer-long the gulls’ old umbra cry unraveled ease but certain waves went by, then by. The sky shook out the days. The seabirds’ hunger rose in rings, flung rock-clams to their shatterings, raked gullets full, the bone-bills scraped. High noon: oceans of time escaped.  * All winter we slept benched together, breakers, sleepdrunk children in a car not conscious where they go. We kneaded bread, kept out the weather, while old suspicions huddled by the door, mice in the snow.  * In spring, the leaving bloomed— oak leaf unfurled, a foot, resplendent vigorous, aching to shake loose but still dependent. One morning moongreen loaves rose into bones that rose to lift our skin like sleeves, our time together’s revenant.  * Perennial fall, come cool the cliffs, bring quiet, sulfur, early dark. Represent as you must: dusk, dying, ends and row us into winter’s water: The body, wind-whipped, forms stiff peaks, ice settles in the marrow bone. At the chest, the live stone breaks against the beak, beak breaks against stone.
It was déjà vu all over again. I know this town like the back of my head. People who live in glass houses are worth two in the bush. One hand scratches the other. A friend in need is worth two in the bush. A bird in the hand makes waste. Life isn’t all it’s crapped up to be. It’s like finding a needle in the eye of the beholder. It’s like killing one bird with two stones. My motto in life has always been: Get It Over With. Two heads are better than none. A rolling stone deserves another. All things wait for those who come. A friend in need deserves another. I’d trust him as long as I could throw him. He smokes like a fish. He’s just a chip off the old tooth. I’ll have him eating out of my lap. A friend in need opens a can of worms. Too many cooks spoil the child. An ill wind keeps the doctor away. The wolf at the door keeps the doctor away. People who live in glass houses keep the doctor away. A friend in need shouldn’t throw stones. A friend in need washes the other. A friend in need keeps the doctor away. A stitch in time is only skin deep. A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. A cat may look like a king. Know which side of the bed your butter is on. Nothing is cut and dried in stone. You can eat more flies with honey than with vinegar. Don’t let the cat out of the barn. Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Don’t cross your chickens before they hatch.DO NOT READ THIS SIGN. Throw discretion to the wolves.  After the twig is bent, the barn door is locked. After the barn door is locked, you can come in out of the rain. A friend in need locks the barn door. There’s no fool like a friend in need. We’ve passed a lot of water since then. At least we got home in two pieces. All’s well that ends. It ain’t over till it’s over. There’s always one step further down you can go. It’s a milestone hanging around my neck.Include me out. It was déjà vu all over again.
The black water. Lights dotting the entire perimeter.  Their shaky reflections. The dark tree line. The plap-plapping of water around the pier. Creaking boats. The creaking pier. Voices in conversation, in discussion—two men, adults—serious inflections (the words themselves just out of reach). A rusty screen-door spring, then the door swinging shut. Footsteps on a porch, the scrape of a wooden chair. Footsteps shuffling through sand, animated youthful voices (how many?)— distinct, disappearing. A sudden guffaw; some giggles; a woman’s—no, a young girl’s—sarcastic reply; someone’s assertion; a high-pitched male cackle. Somewhere else a child laughing. Bug-zappers. Tires whirring along a pavement... not stopping ... receding. Shadows from passing headlights. A cat’s eyes caught in a headlight. No moon. Connect-the-dot constellations filling the black sky—the ladle of the Big Dipper not quite directly overhead. The radio tower across the lake, signaling. Muffled quacking near the shore; a frog belching; crickets, cicadas, katydids, etc.—their relentless sexual messages. A sudden gust of wind. Branches brushing against each other—pine, beech. A fiberglass hull tapping against the dock. A sudden chill. The smell of smoke, woodstove fires. A light going out. A dog barking; then more barking from another part of the lake. A burst of quiet laughter. Someone in the distance calling someone too loud. Steps on a creaking porch. A screen-door spring, the door banging shut. Another light going out (you must have just undressed for bed). My bare feet on the splintery pier turning away from the water.
They got old, they got old and died. But first—okay but first they composed plangent depictions of how much they lost and how much cared about losing. Meantime their hair got thin and more thin as their shoulders went slumpy. Okay but not before the photo albums got arranged by them, arranged with a niftiness, not just two or three but eighteen photo albums, yes eighteen eventually, eighteen albums proving the beauty of them (and not someone else), them and their relations and friends, incontrovertible playing croquet in that Bloomington yard, floating on those comic inflatables at Dow Lake, giggling at the Dairy Queen, waltzing at the wedding, building a Lego palace on the porch, holding the baby beside the rental truck, leaning on the Hemingway statue at Pamplona, discussing the eternity of art in that Sardinian restaurant. Yes! And so, quite frankly—at the end of the day— they got old and died okay sure but quite frankly how much does that matter in view of the eighteen photo albums, big ones thirteen inches by twelve inches each full of such undeniable beauty?
In the huddle you said “Go long—get open” and at the snap I took off along the right sideline and then cut across left in a long arc and I’m sure I was open at several points— glancing back I saw you pump-fake more than once but you must not have been satisfied with what you saw downfield and then I got bumped off course and my hands touched the turf but I regained my balance and dashed back to the right I think or maybe first left and then right and I definitely got open but the throw never came— maybe you thought I couldn’t hang on to a ball flung so far or maybe you actually can’t throw so far but in any case I feel quite open now, the defenders don’t seem too interested in me I sense only open air all around me though the air is getting darker and it would appear by now we’re well into the fourth quarter and I strongly doubt we can afford to settle for dinky little first downs if the score is what I think it is so come on, star boy, fling a Hail Mary with a dream-coached combination of muscle and faith and I will gauge the arc and I will not be stupidly frantic and I will time my jump and—I’m just going to say in the cool gloaming of this weirdly long game it is not impossible that I will make the catch.
Though it’s all too clear how unimpressed you are by a cri de cœur  and wafting away unhugged is from your perspective de rigueur  of schemes to rendezvous with you I’m still a restless entrepreneur The thought of you converts my favorite main dishes into hors d’oeuvres My addiction to the tingling you induce is a fait accompli Each drifting day is another page in the secret book whose dénouement  never arrives, while your fleeting glances lock me into this unfinishable roman à clef The idea that any one remembered moment at a party or picnic was my sole forever lost chance to touch you must be a cul de sac When my projects for a prudent career try to stand up your voice remembered administers the coup de grâce  and my mélange of bright ideas becomes a mere potpourri How I would love to believe this dance is a folie à deux The way you stride across Memorial Drive is a tour de force  but glimpses across traffic make a paper-thin raison d’être Your recent exit is implicit in many a mise en scène It’s as if you heard me approaching for a tête à tête and you slipped into the elevator with your tall boots and sangfroid Always you get to reculer and I never seem to mieux sauter— Still I will keep an eye out for you on every rez-de-chaussée.
Like nearly all women under sixty she would have deftly avoided meeting the eyes of an unknown man— but occasionally an exception happens by chance and her unconscious skill at avoidance gets instantly replaced by a human generosity which is either inherently feminine or gender-trained, as you please; she glanced at me exactly when I glanced at her in the store at the mall and so she gave me that momentary slight smile which impliesThough many men are dangerous, and I do not intend to suggest the slightest likelihood that you and I will meet or talk, much less make love and much less together conceive a sweet helpless child, still our eyes have just met and in this there is an undeniable contact between your humanity and mine and you are probably coping with some difficulties of masculine humanity while I cope with those of feminine humanity; and so I wish you well.
When you put on the mask the thunder starts. Through the nostril’s orange you can smell the far hope of rain. Up in the Nilgiris, glisten of eucalyptus, drip of pine, spiders tumbling from their silver webs.The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones.  You finger the stripes ridged like weals out of your childhood. A wind is rising in the north, a scarlet light like a fire in the sky.When you look through the eyeholes it is like falling. Night gauzes you in black. You are blind as in the beginning of the world. Sniff. Seek the moon. After a while you will know that creased musky smell is rising from your skin.Once you locate the ears the drums begin. Your fur stiffens. A roar from the distant left, like monsoon water. You swivel your sightless head. Under your sheathed paw the ground shifts wet.What is that small wild sound sheltering in your skull against the circle that always closes in just before dawn?NoteThe poem refers to a ritual performed by some Rajasthani hill tribes to ensure  rain and a good harvest.
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #16 The sun-face looms over me, gigantic-hot, smelling of iron. Its rays striated, rasp-red and muscled as the tongues of iguanas. They are trying to lick away my name. But I am not afraid. I hold in my hands (where did I get them) enormous blue scissors that are just the color of sky. I bring the blades together, like a song. The rays fall around me curling a bit, like dried carrot peel. A far sound in the air—fire or rain? And when I’ve cut all the way to the center of the sun I see flowers, flowers, flowers.
Benegal, 1779-1859 The fields flame with it, endless, blue as cobra poison. It has entered our blood and pulses up our veins like night. There is no other color. The planter’s whip splits open the flesh of our faces, a blue liquid light trickles through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyesrefuse to forget where once the rice parted the earth’s moist skin and pushed up reed by reed, green, then rippled gold like the Arhiyal’s waves. Stitched into our eyelids, the broken dark, the torches of the planter’s men, fire walling like a tidal wave over our huts, ripe charred grain that smelled like flesh. And the wind screaming in the voices of women dragged to the plantation, feet, hair, torn breasts.In the worksheds, we dip our hands, their violent forever blue, in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests for the East India Company. Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains. After that night many of the women killed themselves. Drowning was the easiest. Sometimes the Arhiyal gave us back the naked, swollen bodies, the faces eaten by fish. We hold onto red, the color of their saris, the marriage mark on their foreheads, we hold it carefully inside our blue skulls, like a man in the cold Paush night holds in his cupped palms a spark, its welcome scorch, feeds it his foggy breath till he can set it down in the right place, to blaze up and burst like the hot heart of a star over the whole horizon, a burning so beautiful you want it to never end.NotePaush: name of a winter month in the Bengali calendarThe planting of indigo was forced on the farmers of Bengal, India, by the  British, who exported it as a cash crop for almost a hundred years until  the peasant uprising of I860, when the plantations were destroyed.
They never learned to tell one bird from another, a shrubfrom a weedy sapling,  or when the season hadforced a flower’s bloom, not  even if a berry had ripened into poison. And yet they drew endless distinctions between colors and polish andcoarseness of weave,  and would not lettheir daughters marry out.They didn’t keeptheir children, though theygave them tests and fed them. They were knownfor meticulous records, for trophies and peeling stars.They burned things upor wore them down, had ranksand staff and lecterns, machines that moved themfrom place to place, bright jewels and playing cards.They were old when they could have been young, and youngwhen they could have been old. They left a strange wordin a tree: croatoan,and a track in the dust of Mars.
And the high winds bore down, and the sky built up that grey wall: derecho. The taverns by the sea closed their shutters, and the stands selling battered fries, derecho. On the boardwalk, pieces of salt-water taffy, half- eaten funnel cakes oozing grease and cream: derecho. And the people on every highway, panicked, sought a clear route for their exodus: derecho. What’s in your emergency backpack? Beef jerky, mineral water, flashlight, solar cells? Snap in the sound of derecho. Yesterday, white and blue sails pretty on the water; sharp glint of skyscraper glass. Then this derecho.
Do not look for illumination. Mostly there is the twitch that precedes gesture, the button’s resistance as you try to slide it into the too-small aperture slashed in a finger-width of cloth. And yes, I know it is hard to disregard how tiny and even the stitches are, how they ring the space that had to be opened first to make way for the fastening. Don’t feel betrayed if there is only silence in the trees, months of near continuous rain. Thoughts sometimes rush to collect at the bottom of the drain pipe. Other times they vaporize in the heat, fall for the voices warbling discontent. When it rains, I am oddly comforted. The rain soaks through, asks me to give up a little of myself. Asks me not to be so hard.
They think she lives alone on the edge of town in a two-room house where she moved when her husband died at thirty-five of a gunshot wound in the bed of another woman. The curandera and house have aged together to the rhythm of the desert. She wakes early, lights candles before her sacred statues, brews tea of yerbabuena. She moves down her porch steps, rubs cool morning sand into her hands, into her arms. Like a large black bird, she feeds on the desert, gathering herbs for her basket. Her days are slow, days of grinding dried snake into powder, of crushing wild bees to mix with white wine. And the townspeople come, hoping to be touched by her ointments, her hands, her prayers, her eyes. She listens to their stories, and she listens to the desert, always, to the desert. By sunset she is tired. The wind strokes the strands of long gray hair, the smell of drying plants drifts into her blood, the sun seeps into her bones. She dozes on her back porch. Rocking, rocking.
Never let my hands be to any one an occasion to temptation. — ISABEL DE FLORES She was the joke of the angels—a girl crazy enough for Godthat she despised her own beauty; who grew bitter herbs to mix with her food,who pinned a garland of roses to her forehead; and who, in a fury of desireconcocted a potion of Indian pepper and bark and rubbed it on her face, neck, and breasts,disfiguring herself.Then, locked away in a dark cell,where no reflection was possible,she begged for death to join her with her Masterwhom she called Divine Bridegroom, Thorn in My Heart, Eternal Spouse.
They are thin and rarely marry, living out their long lives in spacious rooms, French doors giving view to formal gardens where aromatic flowers grow in profusion. They play their pianos in the late afternoon tilting their heads at a gracious angle as if listening to notes pitched above the human range. Age makes them translucent; each palpitation of their hearts visible at temple or neck. When they die, it’s in their sleep, their spirits shaking gently loose from a hostess too well bred to protest.
On the tip of a hill, the silhouette is of something not of this world, the body silent in the birth of another shadow, swelling still among stars & veins. The sun dropping below the mountains left hardly any light, except what glimmers on the membrane & slips into the high grass. Alone, I pulled over to the side of 81 where semis’ blowing horns descend beyond the sloped field. Pieces of barbed wire snapped from the line. I stepped through the fence, its blood-colored rust rubbed into my hands. For a moment, it is something that stays with me, like a memory that does not give up easily. I try wiping my hands onto my jeans, but nothing. It is anything it wants to be—calf, half-life, angel—its fur a glaze of cricket sounds & cool air, a thing of stars burnt into hooves, a haze, & I stood there, not knowing whether it would be right to touch the one not breathing, its nose drying in the grass next to my hands, grit in the creases & burning now with the dust of splinters. Like flies, my fingers hover over the dead face.
We thought nothing of it, he says,though some came so close to where we slept. I try to see him as a boy, back in the Philippines, waking to the sound of machine guns. His family would spend their morningspreading a paste over the sores  of the house’s thick walls.He tells how he touched  points where bullets entered,his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes, as if inside there existed a space where everything from this world could vanish.Here we could place the memory of my sister,  his daughter, who died after a car wreck.Wedge her into the smoky path  & cover her in sunlight.The family next door is raking leaves in the yard.A father scolds his children for jumping into large piles he arranged into a crescent moon.We cannot hear them from inside, but I feel they are frightened as he grabs both of them  around the waist & spins.I wait for the ending to my father’s story, but he is too busy smiling, as if enjoying the silenceof bullets frozen there in his mind.
The snow voids the distance of the road and the first breath comes from the early morning ghosts. The sparrows with their hard eyes glisten in the difficult light. They preen their feathers and chirp. It’s as though they were one voice talking to God.  Mornings are a sustained hymn without the precision of faith. You’ve turned the bag filled with molding bread inside out and watch the old crusts fall to the ice. What’s left but to watch the daylight halved by the glistening ground? What’s left but an empty bag and the dust of bread ravaged by songsters?  There are ruins we witness within the moment of the world’s first awakening and the birds love you within that moment. They want to eat the air and the stars they’ve hungered for, little razors. Little urgent bells, the birds steal from each other’s mouths which makes you hurt. Don’t ask for more bread. The world is in haste to waken. Don’t ask for a name you can surrender, for there are more ghosts to placate. Don’t hurt for the sparrows, for they love you like a road.
The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch ; to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can’t do it, you say it’s killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.
The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
We, the naturally hopeful, Need a simple sign For the myriad ways we’re capsized. We who love precise language Need a finer way to convey Disappointment and perplexity. For speechlessness and all its inflections, For up-ended expectations, For every time we’re ambushed By trivial or stupefying irony, For pure incredulity, we need The inverted exclamation point. For the dropped smile, the limp handshake, For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift Or taken the first sip of a flat beer, Or felt love or pond ice Give way underfoot, we deserve it. We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot, The child whose ball doesn’t bounce back, The flat tire at journey’s outset, The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken. But mainly because I need it – here and now As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio Staring at my espresso and cannoli After this middle-aged couple Came strolling by and he suddenly Veered and sneezed all over my table And she said to him, “See, that’s why I don’t like to eat outside.”
What’ll it be? Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo. Whaddaya want on it? A swipe of mayo. Pepper but no salt. You got it. Roast beef on rye. You want lettuce on that? No. Just tomato and mayo. Tomato and mayo. You got it. …Salt and pepper? No salt, just a little pepper. You got it. No salt. You want tomato. Yes. Tomato. No lettuce. No lettuce. You got it. …No salt, right? Right. No salt. You got it. Pickle? No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo. And pepper. Pepper. Yes, a little pepper. Right. A little pepper. No pickle. Right. No pickle. You got it. Next! Roast beef on whole wheat, please, With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice Of beefsteak tomato. The lettuce splayed, if you will, In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus, And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded In a multi-foil arrangement That eschews Bragdonian pretensions Or any idea of divine geometric projection For that matter, but simply provides A setting for the tomato To form a medallion with a dab Of mayonnaise as a fleuron. And—as eclectic as this may sound— If the mayonnaise can also be applied Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll And as a festoon below the medallion, That would be swell. You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva? Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. You got it. Next!
Where the blossoms fall like snow on the dock bring fifty thousand in cash or you’ll never see your baby again
Look at me now, I stand before you, a man  whom life has made a gullible skeptic. Life so obvious and strange,  so full of marvels and dross even in our sleep we create monuments  even in our graveWhat more can we askthan to never know what to expect Each day has a different emissaryYesterday she was sharp-eyed
Please think of this as not merely a piece Of writing that anyone would fully Appreciate, but as plain and simple Words that attempt to arouse whatever Appetencies you, especially, depend Upon language to fulfill; that drench you In several levels of meaning at once, Rendering my presence superfluous. In other words, welcome this as a poem, Not merely a missive I’ve slowly composed And tucked under your windshield wiper So that these onlookers who saw me bash In your fender will think I’m jotting down The usual information and go away.
Whereas the porch screen sags from the weight of flowers (impatiens) that grew against it, then piles of wet leaves, then drifted snow; and Whereas, now rolled like absence in its drooping length, a dim gold wave, sundown’s last, cast across a sea of clouds and the floating year, almost reaches the legs of the low-slung chair; and Whereas between bent trees flies and bees twirl above apples and peaches fallen on blue gravel; and Whereas yesterday’s thunder shook blossoms off laurel the day after they appeared; and Whereas in the dust, the fine and perfect dust of cat-paw prints scattered across the gleaming car hood, something softer than blossoms falls away, something your lips left on mine; and Whereas it’s anyone’s guess as to how long it’s been since a humid day sank so low, so far from the present that missing sensations or the sensation of something missing have left impressions in the air, the kind a head leaves on a pillow; and Whereas the last of ancient, unconvincing notions evaporate from the damp pages of thick, old books that describe how, for instance, Time and Love once lay together here; how in a slurred flash of light she turned and waded back into the sea, and how the slack part of any day was and is all in the way he, half asleep, felt her hand slip out of his; and Whereas, the blue heron stands on the shore; while the sleek heron turns, broad to narrow, half hidden among the reeds; turning with the stealth, the sweep of twilight’s narrowing minute, of stillness taking aim; turning until it almost disappears into the arrowhead instant the day disappears, until, staring out of the reeds, the aforementioned heron is more felt than seen; and Whereas, you, with due forethought and deliberation, bite into an apple’s heart and wish it were your own
I don’t know how fast I was going but, even so, that’s still an intriguing question, officer, and deserves a thoughtful response. With the radio unfurling Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, you might consider anything under 80 sacrilege. Particularly on a parkway as lovely as the one you’re fortunate enough to patrol—and patrol so diligently. A loveliness that, if observed at an appropriate rate of speed, affords the kind of pleasure which is in itself a reminder of how civilization depends on an assurance of order and measure, and the devotion of someone like yourself to help maintain it. Yes, man the measurer! The incorrigible measurer. And admirably precise measurements they are—Not, of course, as an end in themselves but, lest we forget, as a means to propel us into the immeasurable, where it would be anybody’s guess how fast the west wind was blowing when it strummed a rainbow and gave birth to Eros. Never forget that a parkway is a work of art, and the faster one goes the greater the tribute to its power of inspiration, a lyrical propulsion that approaches the spiritual and tempts—demands the more intrepid of us to take it from there. That sense of the illimitable, when we feel we are more the glory than the jest or riddle of the world —that’s what kicked in, albeit briefly, as I approached the Croton Reservoir Bridge. And on a night like this, starlight reignited above a snowfall’s last flurry, cockeyed headlights scanning the girders overhead, eggshell snowcrust flying off the hood, hatching me on the wing like a song breaking through prose, the kind I usually sing through my nose: So much to love, A bit less to scorn. What have I done? To what end was I born?
In Breughel's great picture “Canal Street,”restaurant customers order roast swaninstead of chicken, hurled saladinstead of tossed salad, while shoppersspill through a maze of stalled trucksand scurry around the sidewalk stallsjammed with countless nameless thingsthat housewives sidestepto surround a Japanese manin a broad-brim hat and painted silk tieas he demonstrates how one gadgetcan cut food 50 different waysand though they don't understand a wordhe says, they stand transfixed by his spielamid the fumes and noise and loud fruitvendorsdropping casual perfections of sun and raininto bags and sacks against a backdropof silver towers and sea and fieldsvibrant with excess that giddy farmers hailby tossing animals, large animals,into the air to be carried awayon the winds of exuberanceto the four corners of the globewhere the romping godsbear so many attributesthey're a bundle of incongruitiesand no one takes them seriouslynot even their beaming angelswho parachute drunkenly down to the shoredistracting the dogs let loose on cormorantsthat ate so much they can't flybut not the boys in the rowboatwho have caught a blowfish,tickled its belly until it's about to burstlike a balloon before dropping it overboardto watch it blow itself backward to kingdom come,nor the other children who have stoppedclamoring over the stranded whale's backto swim out underwater, under the swans,grab them by the legs and yank them downin a slow fury of bubbles and lightand then sell them to the marketnear the restaurant in the foregroundof Breughel's great picture “Canal Street.”
For the second time this weekI've watched snow fall at sunrise,dawn arrive on a breeze(the way I think it always does).I don't know which, time or the weather,woke me, charmed me out of a dreamwhere a few of us floated around,gravity's jokers,face-up in the quiet waterand the jetsam of a slow life.I had one line that I'd savedand let it go as though it were mine,calling for “Darker days and brighter gods!” Then I only had my waking instant,but it opened with that same shadowless light,a sense of change, of something both nearand remote, first and last,blowing with the wind and snowthrough my reflection in the window.And then I lost it.So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee,an unfinished ode to idleness,cobwebs in high places,a spider that rappels down the bookshelves,and a commotion recollected in tranquility;sunlight pouring through,and another bright pagewith a peculiar darkness flowing over it —shadows of heatwaves from the radiator,or my thoughts going up in smoke.The glass, when misted over,reminds me of store windows,how they're swathed with soap,shrouded in secrecybefore a grand openingor after an ignominious closing.Either way, not very interestingexcept, perhaps, when the grafitti,the anonymous messages appearscrawled across themby some child of the air,words you can see throughor a clear smear.And at twilight I'm still here,the same place, the same light.Nothing to do but move with the view:snow, wind over soft ruins,unfinished buildings that loomlike monuments to a spent curiosity.I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopesroosting on soggy flunkgirders.Want a cigarette? Nope.Got a match? Nope.See any alternative to solipsism? Nope.Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope.Did you know that Marylandhas no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope.The creatures of idlenessare pure speculation.They follow the weather,shadow the wind, fill in the blanks.Some are big and clumsy and slyand like to lick my watch;others, like gerunds,have already drunk themselvesinto a state of being.Another, with time on his handsand the sense of how windowsare both inside and outside a place,stands there watching his silhouettechange to a reflectionas the light shiftsand he moves forward or back,plays like a godstepping in and out of himself,and hears the wind as the breath of changewhen the last flurry whirls away in the light. The last flake grows larger
Angiolieri's "S'i' fosse foco"If I were fire, I'd burn the world away; If I were wind, I'd blow it down; If I were water, I'd let it drown; If I were God, I'd deep-six it today.If I were Pope, what would make me gay? To ransack every Christian town. If I were emperor, what would make my day? To see heads roll on the ground!If I were death, I'd run down my father; If I were life, I'd flee from him. As for dear mama, she gets the same. If I were Cecco, and that is my name, I'd take the pretty young girls to screw and leave the ugly old hags to you.
IPromises to keep was a lie, he had nothing. Through  the woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict's talk of quitting as she's smacking at a vein. He was always going into the woods. It was he who wrote, The best wayout is always through. You'd think a shrink, but no, a poet. He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holds promises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fill  with a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steershis horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzard  is a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm,  lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They go deeper, sky gets darker. It's the darkest night of the year. IIHe had no promises to keep, nothing pending. Had no bedto head to, measurably away in miles. He was a freak like me,monster of the dawn. Whose woods these are I think I know,his house is in the village though. In the middle of lifehe found himself lost in a dark woods. I discovered myselfin a somber forest. In between my breasts and breaths I gotlost. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I've got promisesto keep, smiles to go before I leap. I'm going into the woods.They're lovely dark, and deep, which is what I want, deep lovely darkness. No one has asked, let alone taken, a promise of me,no one will notice if I choose bed or rug, couch or forest deep. It doesn't matter where I sleep. It doesn't matter where I sleep.
We speak of rebellion when the kidis a hellion and the folks are as mildas a spoon.Likewise Republicansborn of freethinking lesbiansseem like reactors, turncoatson how they were raised.Let me offer anotherconcatenationof this explanation. Think of your motheras one discrete cornerof a person with a multiplemental disorder.You're one of the others. One that split off.Not a turncoat then, but the expression
Evolution settles for a while on various stable balances. One is that some of the girls like cute boys and some like ugly older men and sometimes women. The differencebetween them is the ones who like older men were felt upby their fathers or uncles or older brothers, or if he didn'ttouch you, still you lived in his cauldron of curses andurges which could be just as worse. They grow already old,angry, and wise, they get rich, get mean, get theirs.The untouched/uncursed others are happy never needing to do much, and never do much more than good. They envytheir mean, rich, talented, drunk sisters. Good girls drink milkand make milk and know they've missed out and know they'rebetter off. They might dance and design but won't rip out lungs for a flag. Bad ones write books and slash red paint on canvas; they've rage to vent, they've fault lines and will rip a toga offa Caesar and stab a goat for the ether. It's as simple as that.Either, deep in the dark of your history, someone showed you that you could be used as a cash machine, as a popcorn popper, as a rocket launch, as a coin-slot jackpot spunker, or they didn't and you grew up unused and clueless. Either you got a clueand spiked lunch or you got zilch but no punch. And you never knew. It's exactly not anyone's fault. If it happened and you don't like older men that's just because you like them so much you won't let yourself have one. If you dideveryone would see. Then they would know what happened a long time ago, with you and with that original him, whose eyes you've been avoiding for decades gone forgotten. That's why you date men smaller than you or not at all. Or maybe you'veturned into a man. It isn't anyone's fault, it is just human and it is what happens. Or doesn't happen. That's that. Any questions? If you see a girl dressed to say No one tells me what to do, you know someone once told her what to do.
I believe you can build a boat. I believe you can get to water. I do not believe you can get the boat on water.How do other people bearwhat you are still afraid of? The answeris that when big things happenyou do go through the looking glass,but it is still you who goes through,the inner text is all still right to left,so you just keep reading.Because there is no boat and there is no water.I stare at my tiny baby's facebut he so wriggles he can't quite be seen.He grows steadier, more the bluris gone; joins us in the myth of the stable.Of the quakiness of infancy and old age we shimmer and shimmy into being and out again. In the mean-time, we're horses in the stable of the myth.A quick check of the ocean, or any fire, is a reminder of how things seem; I can't seem to see them.You’re on the beach and you find out the secretaryof defense thinks calico cats are agents of the devil.Your friend asks if they get 10 percent.She was funny, your friend.The water in this metaphoris unreal because of the way time passes, so you can't quite get the boat on water, but you can build the boat,and a boat is good for a lot of things not just on water.Will we, without the boat on water, always feel that we are missing something basic to the picture?No. That is what I'm trying to say. It is important to let sense quiver; even in this stable of the myth of stable, even living aboard a boat mired in mud in view of the sea.Who wants yet another world? It's enough already.
The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you, To see you shake your head. The mic may as well Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town To be whipped by a woman's voice. You can't tell The difference between a leather belt and a lover's Tongue. A lover's tongue might call you bitch, A term of endearment where you come from, a kind Of compliment preceded by the word singIn certain nightclubs. A lush little tongueYou have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you,With a shot of Patrón at the end of each phraseFrom the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can'tRemember your father's leather belt without shakingYour head. That's what satisfies her, the womanWith the microphone. She does not mean to entertainYou, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover's tongue— Call me your bitch, and I'll sing the whole night long.
If it had become a competition in which we, Like children desperate for the blue ribbon, Pulled knotted hemp, gripping until certain Of calluses, if our contest awarded the strongest,The boy who could best inflict pain yet not Flinch when injured, then you won, for I must Imagine the brown of your back to reach my Peak, a short thread of breaths, a tug of warWith the heaviest child grunting at the end Of the rope until jerked and dragged over The line. That fat kid flounders through muckThe way I splash your relentless name In shivers about me. Watch him wallow. If he tastes mud as bitter as this poemOf mine, then I win – and you love me.
We want pictures of everythingBelow your waist, and we wantPictures of your waist. We can'tTalk right now, but we will text youInto coitus. All thumbs. All biCoastal and discreet and masculineAnd muscular. No whites. EveryBody a top. We got a careerTo think about. No face. We gotKids to remember. No one over 29.No one under 30. Our exes hurt usInto hurting them. Disease free. NoDrugs. We like to get high withThe right person. YouGot a girl? Bring your boy.We visiting. Room at the W.Name's D. Name's J. We Deejay.We Trey. We Troy. We Q. We notSending a face. Where should weGo tonight? You coming through? PleaseKnow what a gym looks like. Not muchTime. No strings. No place, noFace. Be clean. We haven't metAnyone here yet. Why is it so hardTo make friends? No games. YouStill coming through? Latinos only.Blacks will do. We can take one rightNow. Text it to you. Be there nextWeek. Be there in June. We not a phonePerson. We can host, but we won't meetWithout a recent pic and a real nameAnd the sound of your deepest voice.
I, too, know the science of building men Out of fragments in little light Where I'll be damned if lightning don'tStrike as I forget one May have a thief's thumb,Another, a murderer's arm,And watch the men I've made leaveLike an idea I meant to write down, Like a vehicle stuckIn reverse, like the monsterGod came to know the moment Adam named animals and claimed Eve, turning from heaven to herAs if she was hisTo run. No word he said could be tamed.No science. No design. Nothing taken Gently into his hand or your hand or mine, Nothing we erect is our own.
They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison.Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison.In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball. Lovers hustle, slide, and dip as if none of them has a brother in prison.I eat with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race. A book full of white characters examines insanity—but never in prison.His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403. He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison?We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe. A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison.Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard. In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, gets only seven years in prison.I don't want to point my own sinful finger, so let's use your clean one instead. Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son's short hair in prison.In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran. I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.
This is what our dying looks like. You believe in the sun. I believe I can't love you. Always be closing, Said our favorite professor before He let the gun go off in his mouth. I turned 29 the way any man turns In his sleep, unaware of the earth Moving beneath him, its plates in Their places, a dated disagreement. Let's fight it out, baby. You have Only so long left—a man turning In his sleep—so I take a picture. I won't look at it, of course. It's His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole In a husband's head, the O Of his wife's mouth. Every night, I take a pill. Miss one, and I'm gone. Miss two, and we're through. Hotels Bore me, unless I get a mountain view, A room in which my cell won't work, And there's nothing to do but see The sun go down into the ground That cradles us as any coffin can.
Some folks fool themselves into believing, But I know what I know once, at the height Of hopeless touching, my man and I holdOur breaths, certain we can stop time or maybeEliminate it from our lives, which are shorter Since we learned to make love for each other Rather than doing it to each other. As for praise And worship, I prefer the latter. Only memoryMakes us kneel, silent and still. Hear me? Thunder scares. Lightning lets us see. Then, Heads covered, we wait for rain. Dear Lord, Let me watch for his arrival and hang my headAnd shake it like a man who's lost and lived. Something keeps trying, but I'm not killed yet.
For my father I think by now the river must be thick  with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning: drizzle needling  the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us — everything damp  and shining. That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked  into the current and found our places — you upstream a few yards and out  far deeper. You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots  and you grew heavier with that defeat. All day I kept turning to watch you, how  first you mimed our guide's casting then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky  between us; and later, rod in hand, how you tried — again and again — to find  that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river's surface. Perhaps  you recall I cast my line and reeled in two small trout we could not keep.  Because I had to release them, I confess, I thought about the past — working  the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands, each one slipping away  before I could let go. I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in, record it  for an elegy I'd write — one day — when the time came. Your daughter,  I was that ruthless. What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting  your line, and when it did not come back empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,  dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us out and watch the bank receding —  my back to where I know we are headed.
Like the moon that night, my father — a distant body, white and luminous.How small I was back then, looking up as if from dark earth.Distant, his body white and luminous, my father stood in the doorway.Looking up as if from dark earth, I saw him outlined in a scrim of light.My father stood in the doorway as if to watch over me as I dreamed.When I saw him outlined — a scrim of light — he was already waning, turning to go.Once, he watched over me as I dreamed. How small I was. Back then, he was already turning to go, waning like the moon that night — my father.
In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs  at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: his forehead white with illumination — a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,  darkened as if the artist meant to contrast his bright knowledge, its dark subtext. By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,  he was already linked to an affair with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems  to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out across the centuries, his lips fixed as if he's just uttered some final word.  The first time I saw the painting, I listened as my father explained the contradictions:   how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out   of necessity, my father said — had to own slaves; that his moral philosophy meant   he could not have fathered those children:  would have been impossible, my father said. For years we debated the distance between word and deed. I'd follow my father from book  to book, gathering citations, listening as he named — like a field guide to Virginia — each flower and tree and bird as if to prove  a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision. I did not know then the subtext  of our story, that my father could imagine Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —  the improvement of the blacks in body  and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites
I want to reach you—in that city where the snowonly shimmers silverfor a few hours. It has takenseventeen years. This trip, these characters patternedin black ink, curves catching on the page like hinges,this weave of letters fraying like the lines on my palm,all broken paths. Outside, no snow. Just the slow pullof brown on the hills, umber dulling to a bruise until the cityis just a memory of stained teeth, the burn of white marbleto dusk, cows standing on the edges like a dustcloud gaining weightafter days of no rain. Asleepin the hot berth, my parents sway in a dance, the silencebroken by scrape of tin, hiss of tea, and underneath,the constant clatter of wheelsbeating steel tracks over and over:to the city of white marble, to the city of goats, tobaccofields, city of dead hands,a mantra of my grandmother's— her teeth eaten awayby betel leaves—the storyof how Shah Jahan had cut offall the workers' handsafter they built the Taj, so they could never build again. I dreamtof those hands for weeks before the trip, weeks even before Istepped off the plane, thousands of useless dead flowers dryingto sienna, silent in their fall. Every night, days before, I dreamtthose hands climbing over the iron gate of my grandparents' house, overgrate and spikes, some caughtin the groove between its sharpenedteeth, others biting where they pinched my skin.
They didn't find it in me until months later—just like Vallejo who died on a rainyday far from the heat rising over a gardenin silvers and reds—far away from the dinof buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overranthe streets with their holiness. Laid on the surfaceof the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamoredagainst the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther stillfrom the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn.The fever should have churned my blood into tightfists while the sunset stretched across the skylike an open mouth. Everything was splintered heat.I'd awake to winter in D.C., find streets coveredin snow, the words of some ancient language bloomingunder my ankles like a song, a mantra called home.I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been.How to explain the hum of mosquitos in my ear, sensualand low, nothing like the sound of rusted-out engines,police sirens, a train's whistle. How easily I'd lost the tastefor that water, opened my legs to their hot, biting mouths.
Back before color threaded the world, when everything was in black-and-white, I was the only pagan at school, hiding my breath with its curry and accent, mouthing words to prayers I didn't understand. I wondered why there were always holy men but so few holy women. I wanted to be enchanted, to steal the baby Jesus from the Christmas play and keep him hidden in my closet, pull him out when I needed to be saved. I wanted to be the blue Madonna holding all the pieces of her son together. Half a world away, girls my age came as close to God as anyone could be. They were already throwing their bodies over their husband's funeral pyres, flung out like blankets over the flames, chantingRam, Ram like a nursery rhyme. My mother told me it was a holy mantra, the more I said it, the holier I would be, but I never really knew how or why, just that it was supposed to happen. Once I tried saying it as many times as I could in fifty seconds, but nothing. No miracle, no halo of thorns around my head. And all I could think about were those girls, widows at fifteen. What did burning flowers smell like? Something terrible, something holy?
1. Two Gods: the one in the closet and the one from school days and both are not mine. I opened the door on God at dusk and closed him the rest of the day. He perched on the ledge above my father's shirts and wool suits, a mandir in every Hindu house, ours smelling of starch, surrounded by ties and old suitcases. I was the ghost at school, sat on the pew and watched as other girls held God under their tongues. My lips remember the prayer my parents taught me those evenings with their bedroom closet open—Ganesh carved in metal, Krishna blue in a frame. I don't remember the translation, never sure I really knew it. I got mixed up sometimes, said a section of the "Our Father" in the middle of the arti, ending in Amen when I meant Krishna, Krishna,
She took the spareribs out of the oven and set them steaming on a plate before leaving her apartment. I didn't know how long to wait, tore into cold meat when I decided  my mother wasn't coming back. * No one knew about the gun she kept  in her purse until the authorities called—a .38 caliber pistol with a pearl handle and a trigger even she could easily pull—her car still waiting to be towed from a roadside ditch when they arrived on the scene. * Yesterday morning, I was leaning over a kitchen sink, my husband upstairs sleeping. Between his snores muffled under a down comforter and a portable electric heater that kept our bedroom warm, I knew I could sob as loud as I wanted without disturbing his dreams. * At the sports arena between musical acts and clouds of dope, I texted my lover a wide-angle shot of the stage—the reception bars on my phone bouncing back and forth between high and low—a text I had to send several times before it went through even though there was a chance his phone would be off or the text get lost for hours in the ether, even days. The silence is the agony. * My therapist says: It's not your fault. No way for you to have known exactly where your mother was headed. Then why am I left weepingin my kitchen decades after the fact? When I went upstairs and sat beside my husband, he could feel the mattress shift beneath our weight even though I felt much lighter after watching translucent ropes of snot lowering down into the sink, arms around me when I asked if he was awake, knowing that he wasn't. * How many romances get derailed when a text that has been sent fails to go through? How many mothers disappear through a kitchen door never to return—the food on the table the last meal they will ever serve? * My lover texted back: where are you now? Having no idea what I'd been going through when he texted again: Wish I was there with you.
Slowing down your body enough to feel. Thought you were at a standstill but you were only slowing down enough to feel the pain. There are worse things than running to catch the train, twisting your ankle, the afternoon fucked.Running to get to or away from? the stranger who helps you up wants to know, you who are so used to anything scribbled on a prescription blank.Just want the pain to go away, you say, surprised to find yourselfreaching for someone else's hand.
I was always afraid of the next card the psychic would turn over for us—  Forgive me for not knowinghow we wereevery card in the deck.
—Wuxi, China Walking out of the new cemetery, my father takes my hand, having just re-interred the remains of his own father and his father's two wives— his mother dead from T.B. by the time he was ten. He takes my hand and says, Now I can die in peace even if we didn’t get the actual bones.
Strapped to the bed of circumcision lies My son. This mutilation ties You to the fathers. They will never let You forget, or your flesh be enfranchised ever, Though you pray all your life long. They set you early on the rack, infect you with a fever Of remembering. In the marriage bed, When you are naked, there the sign is red. There is neither meeting nor mating but the past Cries that you've been waited for and wed already— I will not bless this mark upon your body. For you the hurricane is rising fast; I feel the horns of Moses in my head And Law wrenched again from the dead Hand of deity, and I descend out of the blast to you Mad with loneliness upon this bed. But I reserve also the rage That broke the Law upon you like a rain of stone That other time I saw you so could yearn. The Law is broken, baby. I will not ascend again.
Getting the child to bed is awful work, Committing that rage to sleep that will not sleep. The lie rots in my throat saying, “O.K. There is balm in Gilead. Go to bed. Honey of generation has betrayed us both.” And truly it is no wild surmise of darkness Nor Pisgah purview of Canaan drowned in blood But only my child saying its say in bed. If madness ever covers me, the caul contract That now but loosely insinuates a shroud I shall go howling into the conscious grave (God keep children from the power of the dog) Follow that note into the uttering horn Awake in the womb from which I was born.
Toward evening, the natural light becomes intelligent and answers, without demur:“Be assured! You are not alone. . . .” But in fact, toward evening, I am not convinced there is any other except myself to whom existence necessarily pertains. I also interrogate myself to discover whether I myself possess any power by which I can bring it about that I who now am shall exist another moment. Because I am mostly a thinking thing and because this precise question can only be from that thoughtful part of myself, if such a power did reside within me I should, I am sure, be conscious of it. . . . But I am conscious of no such power. And yet, if I myself cannot be the cause of that assurance, surely it is necessary to conclude that I am not alone in the world. There is some other who is the cause of that idea. But if, at last, no such other can be found toward evening, do I really have sufficient assurance of the existence of any other being at all? For, after a most careful search, I have been unable to discover the ground of that conviction—unless it be imagined a lonely workman on a dizzy scaffold unfolds a sign at evening and puts his mark to it.
Give me back my father walking the halls  of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company  with sawdust clinging to his shoes. Give me back his tape measure and his keys,  his drafting pencil and his order forms;  give me his daydreams on lined paper. I don't understand this uncontainable grief.  Whatever you had that never fit,  whatever else you needed, believe me, my father, who wanted your business,  would squat down at your side  and sketch you a container for it.
I lived between my heart and my head, like a married couple who can't get along. I lived between my left arm, which is swift and sinister, and my right, which is righteous. I lived between a laugh and a scowl, and voted against myself, a two-party system. My left leg dawdled or danced along, my right cleaved to the straight and narrow. My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation, my right stood upright as a Roman soldier. Let's just say that my left side was the organ donor and leave my private parts alone, but as for my eyes, which are two shades of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo. Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow while Adam puts his right foot down. No one expected it to survive, but divorce seemed out of the question. I suppose my left hand and my right hand will be clasped over my chest in the coffin  and I'll be reconciled at last, I'll be whole again.
Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge, and I took the road to the right, the wrong one, and got stuck in the car for hours. Most nights I rushed out into the evening without paying attention to the trees, whose names I didn't know, or the birds, which flew heedlessly on. I couldn't relinquish my desires or accept them, and so I strolled along like a tiger that wanted to spring but was still afraid of the wildness within. The iron bars seemed invisible to others, but I carried a cage around inside me. I cared too much what other people thought and made remarks I shouldn't have made. I was silent when I should have spoken. Forgive me, philosophers, I read the Stoics but never understood them. I felt that I was living the wrong life, spiritually speaking, while halfway around the world thousands of people were being slaughtered, some of them by my countrymen. So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought— and forgot to attend to those who suffered far away, nearby. Forgive me, faith, for never having any. I did not believe in God, who eluded me.
November 22, 1963  First, a black mark in the sky,  a speck that grows into a plane widening,  dramatically circling before it touches  a gray strip of land designed for its landing. Then the players descend  the wheeled stair to the stage  for the cameras, our collective eye:  first her, then him, as is custom,  and their entourage trailing behind,  those who believe the world is young  and the future spreads out like geography. It's the beginning  of all that,  and what a show it is, the bouquet of roses  we see given to her on the scratchy screen, the film pouring its light,  edges burned. And who knows what's truth,  what's myth, or if they arrive  as hawks or doves, brave with risk  in a bright and swirling land where the dust seems to crown  from its own gray dust. Here's the raw footage.  Here's the film clicking in the projector, and, as all things seen  through it  are black and white, isn't it important to note  her roses are red and not yellow,  and that neither of them squints in the bright Texas sun? If you can stand  what the light inside the darkness does  to your eyes,  watch them pause there for a moment:  our champion, our grace, in that high noon  that holds all the freshness of the morning.
Like the Necessary Evil and Enola Gay, in a sphere of air that’s calm and mildly cool, I need some last grip of blue to trigger my sleep. It was technically flawless, that mission, as they’d dropped a few dry-run pumpkins with a bird’s-eye scope. When I close my eyes under the drone of a fan, I see planes rattling in the aftermath. Smoothly soldered rivets saved the men inside. At a commemoration the captain said, “I’m proud I started with nothing and made it work as perfectly as it did.” Then, when the press persisted, red flashing his face: “Hey, I sleep clear every night.” I lie in another state, placeless in the air, with the sound of occasional sirens or barking dogs. In a magazine I read about Predators over Pakistan, our drone with fifty eyes named Gorgon Stare. The men at Langley, bombing by remote, call a person who escapes their fire, who runs from a car or burning hut, a squirter. Night is sometimes an acid, sometimes a cure. In other words, homo fabula: we’re part human, part story, but our mouths pass on in silence. I think of the men who brought that silence: Mr. Harry S. Truman, Captain Paul Tibbets, who painted his mother’s name on the nose of the plane.   My dream house circles me. Peonies thrive in beds I forget to water. With pillows I lie. A white cotton sheet covers my chest. I’ve been told to sleep in peace, where the trees are crowned with plenty and where birds float through wood-lawn, broom, and shrubs. Where a found twig can be golden or mundane. To orchestrate my sleep I take a pill, and as I fade finally, at the time of night when the birds believe they’re leaves, I dream of a path in acacia season where the air smells lemony and my whole day seems to rest on the limbs of the trees. Suddenly, a siren sound. Wind ripping the valley after a flash… In Plymouth, spring of ’45, while the Pacific squadrons trained, my father was born without cataracts in his eyes—David Roderick, 7 lbs., asleep on his mother’s white gown. There must have been milk and a huge cloud of necessity in which they breathed. In August, before he could talk, neutrons sheared from a core. I’ve read what they left behind: shrines’ ashes, and the boy under his desk who sang all day while his classmates fell silent, one by one. Two concussions hit the planes. They roared away from the light they’d made, the rain.  At night, when I falter again, and the pill dissolves in my veins, I think of Langley’s coffee, its infrared eyes. I think of the Enola Gay parked in the Smithsonian, where a woman smashed a jar of blood on its wing. When I signed my mortgage, I also signed for the peonies and for the shield of my yard’s tall trees. The birds daub nests of twigs and human hair. My potting shed makes its own black sense of heat. Here’s the price I pay for sleeping: Reapers circling a far-off village, my drones. To eyes at a distance, a screen lies always between a failure and a dream. In other words, homo fabula: we’re part story, part human, but only if our names are known, and only if our names, when spoken aloud, are pronounced correctly, with proper inflection, as when a mother addresses her son.
Loot my point of view,  hove my heart  free from its hived booth though I know your smoke,  its black blossom, is a substance I’ll never become:  colors  of plaster and grass I’ve prepped flawlessly, rivers I’ve whittled thin. It’s a personal matter to me, the wind. But let it be our cathedral feeling:  a sculpture of ash  dragging its robe over the hills because of us,  because of me. Yellow is hurried,  but red moves like a swarm  through toothpick homes,  pans over roofs,  where the ethos we child  from the ground will blacken to ruin.  Let’s glory  this roughened nap of landscape,  this parched Arcadia, with one nude-struck match and a breeze.
Basho said to refuse a prayer until its warmth hunches inside like a bird in its hutch. First the fledgling is born, then the worm, then they meet somewhere in the grass. I choose my paper for its cereal color, fuss over shaving a pencil. The prayer means to cleanse both triumph and lust. O derivative, sunlight reaping the trees, this whole morning cries through a single reed. Pencil, razor blade, spit—I'll try not to hurry.
This is what I see: a grain of wheat in the hand of a small boy barefoot on the unnamed roads, sleeping in the dream another is having. An oud, a violin, a guitar, a mirror of dew, a man about to undress, a woman staring. A traveler returning everywhere and forgetfulness stealing from itself.Maktoub, the Moor says, we hold clouds in our mouth and imagine God in our breath.
We kept only the keys, letters, and photos — everything else stayed behind when we left the house. That can happen when a nation changes overnight, when those you know turn into a gate of feathers — and the thing about feathers is, they know what's been missed. For years I watch my neighbor's house from others' windows— different countries, various homes, some of brick, some of stone. Some never imagine what a home can mean when an unfinished tune traps the ceiling. I pretend never to have seen a body midair, a father's hands planted on the ground— after all what we don't admit to never happened. But I couldn't change that day in Murcia, when water brought light to the door: I am seven it is the day before our departure, the day my father gives me a notebook, and I tell him,this is where I'll keep my country.
History can't be rushed. We didn't have time to see the village, we didn't have time to see the house fall to build light out of mud, nor did we see time burning. The city is missing, and we've saved others, our backs turned. What happened is a different reality in everyone's mind, but the direction we took tells us the world doesn't end when we force air out of bones. Now we know the myth by the cup of coffee going cold, realize we were never told how to take the street parallel to our heart.
Krystle Krystle Cole you're all I thought about sometimes I watched you while our daughter slept your Sissy Spacek ways your laconic demeanor in relaying either ecstasy or trauma & the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed on YouTube which is our loving cup the solution of butter & DMT you took anally that really made you freak the fuck out & your friends just stood there watching you as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels. It's that frictionless feeling the smooth & vacant course that lacks abruption, one wave the clinical mania un- differentiated whiteness contains when cylindrical cloud hard & plastic comes to represent the mind to the mind & thus describe a model of terrible momentum with unity of purpose toward nothing so much as cold, radiant nature stripped of Eros, of becoming, just the mainframe & its withering severity without any predicate of others, save perhaps their gazes, no walls, no nothing, completely white light & your name when your consciousness was splitting time was stopping you were going always into that. I was going always to the mall in those months, the young century's rainiest April & May, to walk the baby & to understand my art. I didn't understand. I would move the stroller through the halogen, over grooved tile & across those smooth marble expanses meant to simulate floating & gliding before that pure frictionless feeling was entire. Sometimes we'd go inside the stores. Sears was still enormous & because of its design implied a bound series of discrete, related worlds linked by passages threatened & precarious to me. The connections felt besieged or like a mask for separation, they felt like connection between us in life but I didn't take my allegory further Krystle Cole, into your lysergic delirium later redeemed by a beautiful discipline of spirit & cosmography developed for praxis. I liked your video on candy flipping hard & developing ESP with friends. It suggested oneness was a leavened mix of random indiscretion, bruising wariness, & bliss obtained by synchronizing chemical encounter. Krystle, there's a made up drug I wonder if you'd do it? Bradley Cooper, in Limitless takes this little pill, which, in its candy dot translucence looks a lot like a tear plucked from the cheek in Man Ray's "Larmes." With it, he can utilize all of his brain, & so he un-riddles the patterning hidden in the ceaseless flow of capital, structuring its chaos in excess of any mortal with a terrible momentum & unity of purpose toward nothing so much as pure profit & complete subordination of the world. At the mall certain spots sold old stuff: sports memorabilia & video games, vintage organs & deluxe baby grands. In one store there were highly priced comics with toys & ephemera related to the stories. They had action figures based on some series I guess called The Crisis of Infinite Earths. I wrote the phrase down in my notebook & realized only later that I'd made a rather telling trans- position, putting the word 'world' where 'earth' was & thinkingThe Crisis of Infinite Worlds I guess because anyone will occasion the world as a world its commonality precarious but real, & the person beside them does the same the person far in every way from them will as well where the wound of even being in material conditions where consciousness is made these confrontations & arrangements each taking their referent then as earth or taking something else entirely as world—the word is profligate & dense & transparent & cheap & impossibly one the clearest pill. In our minds it floods with light & we see through that, life's benevolent corruption in a radiance we can't make any sense of. Krystle, have you ever, just standing around, noticed someone smoking in an older silver Volvo & watched the comeback feelings of a Tupac Easter Sunday steep in their ambivalent features until they are more radiant than cinematic virgins having lost it in the wake of Saint Maria Goretti whose patronage is lost to the brutalized sweetness of her charges when depicted in the mind & reconstructed as a low-res simulation by scientists the weekend Wall Street's occupied & particles are found to go faster than light then weirdly feel like this is paradise not for people but paradise regardless. That same May I had gone to Detroit. I saw the most wonderful graffiti, more a prayer, written on a wall in magic marker, it read— Two Things:  1) That we would grow closer & closer as time progresses.  2) That our ships would not crash. Magic marker on a surface doesn't have much depth of skin. You move it smoothly on the wall & it stays smooth barely records the softest friction of two separate textures meeting. The wetness of its onyx dries quick or even quicker if you blow on it with circled lips, like clouds in old maps that blew ships across a flat earth to an edge I don't exactly not idealize. That somewhere there's a precipice in this world & tracing my finger along those ardent lines I'd found the fault of it a little, in its boldness far too faint & not enough.
Saturday mornings, before my weekly chores, I used to sneak out of the house and across the street, grabbing the first grasshopper walking in the damp California grass along the stream. Carefully hiding a silver hook beneath its green wings, I'd float it out across the gentle ripples towards the end of its life. Just like that. I'd give it the hook and let it ride. All I ever expected for it was that big-mouth bass awaiting its arrival. I didn't think that I was giving up one life to get another, that even childhood was full of sacrifice. I'd just take the bright green thing, pluck it off its only stalk, and give it away as if it were mine to give. I knew someone out there would be fooled, that someone would accept the precious gift. So I just sent it along with a plea of a prayer, hoping it would spread its wings this time and fly across that wet glass sky, no concern for what inspired its life, or mine, only instinct guiding pain towards the other side.
Some dreams are like glass or a light beneath the surface of the water. A girl weeps in a garden. A woman turns her head and that is all. We wake up a hundred times and don't know where we are. Asleep at the wheel. Saved by the luck of angels. Everyone touching his lips to something larger, the watermark of some great sorrow. Everyone giving himself away. The way the rose gives up the stem and floats completely, without history. In the end every road leads to water. What is left of a garden is the dream, an alphabet of longing. The shadow of the girl. Perfume.
Pushing the seed into the ground isn't enough. Whatever blooms in this place is dumb and blind. Foreclosure is a one-eyed man. Nothing falls from a sky like this except a little rain, never enough rain. All night my wife looks down the neck of my guitar passing the bottle back and forth like a story she's been telling for years. So many baskets of hard bread. You take the shovel to the ground. The land stares back at you. The corn drifts towards the sky. You don't know what dirt is until you bury your first daughter.
There is a music to this sadness. In a room somewhere two people dance. I do not mean to say desire is everything. A cup half empty is simply half a cup. How many times have we been there and not there? I have seen waitresses slip a night's worth of tips into the jukebox, their eyes saying yes to nothing in particular. Desire is not the point. Tonight your name is a small thing falling through sadness. We wake alone in houses of sticks, of straw, of wind. How long have we stood at the end of the pier watching that water going? In the distance the lights curve along Tampa Bay, a wishbone ready to snap and the night riding on that half promise, a half moon to light the whole damned sky. This is the way things are with us. Sometimes we love almost enough. We say I can do this, I can do more than this
It was Christmastime, the balloons needed blowing, and so in the evening we sat together to blow balloons and tell jokes, and the cool air off the hills made me think of coffee, so I said, “Coffee would be nice,” and he said, “Yes, coffee would be nice,” and smiled as his thin fingers pulled the balloons from the plastic bags; so I went for coffee, and it takes a few minutes to make the coffee and I did not know if he wanted cow’s milk or condensed milk, and when I came out to ask him, he was gone, just like that, in the time it took me to think, cow’s milk or condensed; the balloons sat lightly on his still lap.
My mother likes a man who works. She likes my husband’s muddy knees, grass stains on the cuffs. She loved my father, though when weekends came he’d sleep till nine and would not lift his eyes up from the page to move the feet she’d vacuum under. On Saturdays my husband digs the holes for her new roses, softening the clay with peat and compost. He changes bulbs she can no longer reach and understands the inside of her toaster. My father’s feet would carry him from chair to bookshelf, back again till Monday came. My mother likes to tell my husband sit down in this chair and put your feet up.
You’d been gone four months by then, but we brought you along anyway. On my back, you rested riding inside a wooden box. The idea was to lay you gently at the water’s surface,but our clumsy hands spilled you, and it was hard to tell whether you went head or feet first, but it didn’t much matter anyway, I suppose. You would float on down the creek until you had reached the next and so on. My father gave a little wave and joked, “We’ll see you back on down in Denver, Dad.” We stood there in silence listening to you chuckle under the bridge and over the first set of riffles downstream.
After we picked you up at the Omaha airport, we clamped you into a new car seat and listened to you yowl beneath the streetlights of Nebraska. Our hotel suite was plump with toys, ready, we hoped, to soothe you into America. But for a solid hour you watched the door, shrieking, Umma, the Korean word for mother. Once or twice you glanced back at us and, in this netherworld where a door home had slammed shut forever, your terrified eyes paced between the past and the future. Umma, you screamed, Umma! But your foster mother back in Seoul never appeared. Your new mother and I lay on the bed, cooing your birth name, until, at last, you collapsed into our arms. In time, even terror must yield to sleep.
Because it is a pearly eveningI am sitting in the window readinga book I have read before.Branches emphasizetheir heft and sway over their shadows.Some kind of extra firmament,an ear over the earth's ear,extra, as language is to prayer.Narratives of elsewhere: in the eyeinside my eye that vision makes when you tell it towhen you shut your eyes so hard they hurtyou get more vista and less twistof road, and then you're lookingat a valley you named yourselfand irrigated yourself,full of bitterroot, magnolia in the cleftsof rock, sage, at last a harvest,a desert that belongs to you—The trick to renunciation is starting now.The secret of detachmentis having already given up,a transcript of speech whose cadences are lost,the human need for a body to fill inall your body's deficiencies, those clefts and dentsalready given up, the narrative of a lifecompletely altered in the retrospectthat knowledge brings and so discreditedthe point of memory utterly lost.That piece of land has always beensuitable for a house. That nest has neverbeen ready for eight baby birdswho, top-heavy, frightened their own branchand home and scared themselvescompletely and remarkably away.Do you hear that? It's the wind negotiating the spine of one leaf it cannot decide whether to raise a fragment of an inch.Duncan writes as a readerstruggles with a strong sentence, I struggleat certain unmistakable timeswith what's furtive and most right.When people marry they finish their names.I am still listening for mineto begin. My spinewants a bicycle to order its work, a redbicycle, a hill into a heartof a city that holds something I want.The pattern of the air around that leafis like someone tracing my ribcagewith his index fingerand then walking away.Who can blame us for wanting other worlds,but shall we take them,or let them come to us? Is the spirit just an earmore like a mouththat bites the air and turns it into blood?A voice in the next room goes to sleep.Sleep moves in the branches of the oakbecome a rootless massunsung by skeleton or name or height.My friend who saysshe does not believe in Paradisebelieves in rest: I believe that,or more likely I like to think of her,the way she held my name in her small mouth,as she held her own name. I like to think of anyonewho on a night like thiswould reach towards my ribcageand trace it delicately and walk away.
November wind. The feeling of knowing something before you said it, all over everything. As in, shadow take me into the side of the mountain. As in, open up the earth and get inside. Leaving doesn't mean much. Arriving means everything, how you came to be where you were, even if later it will hurt to think of it. And the forgotten, aren't they always the most remembered elsewhere, before they perish,when someone has their eye on them,and later when the shrines are madewith local flowers and icons of heroes, rosesin midsummer, angels on winter wings?I'll leave your local customs to your own imagination.Leaving, though, always a kindof unfolding of the act of staying. Last nightI knew it was the East wind not asking for me arrivingbecause the door to the kitchen blew open, lastnight, at the edge of sleep, like someone using only half the alphabet. The book about Brecht separating at the seam because my reading had been the last one it could take before breaking into Exile and After, California in the middle, with the playwright in short sleeves, bored on the PCH, looking at the dramatic cliff work with a friend who meant well, driving, arriving at the slumlord dockyards saying at last scenery.You must forgive me or forgive the book for breaking. It was tired, you see it was a paperback, from the time people actually wanted ones like that, thought books like that should be held in hands on beaches or in cars or in cafes. Sleepy, almost sleepy, falling asleep, awake, now, I admit it, I was completely awake, listening to the wind, which I cannot defend. Nothing in the mind but that reckless pleasure and somewhere in the book Brecht saying the truth is concrete
In different cities, on different forms of transportation, a woman read Daniel Deronda until the year became the arbitrary pink the calendar chose for the middle of winter. And finally she sat in the reference section of the public library finishing Daniel Deronda for days at a slowing pace between piecesof newspapers and foreign language newspaperswhose syntax she enjoyed, not understanding.And when she didn't anymore she wrote in the marginsof Daniel Deronda for someonewho might never see. Thought of that personwho might never see, staring equally at the rain, equallythinking of her and of nothing in particular.Outside the news fell apart. If one choosesto be shallow or noble, or oneis born so, and if it matters. Translationsare appropriate when Nature is dormant, or when onehas nothing to say, or does not knowwhat to say. These are three different thingsbut sometimes they are the same.It is not wrong to want nice things, neitheris it wrong to want to be good, or to feel thatas a physical force of pleasure: Daniel Deronda,who does not know who he is,who thinks he does, and goes away on a boat.But the cover is a picture of a woman gambling.The air warms outside the referencesection, and also the rain. Incomprehensible news.Whenever a book ends, silence, as if a stewardship had ceased.A person can feel the bones of one's hands by stretching them.If love comes again, know better than to speak.
How many times should I look at you and should I change my life? Monarch you makeyour orange assent to death.And how much dexteritycan you really teach me?Does your courageeven map onto theseworldly obligationsto friends, my job, desirefor a little affection in the latehours of the evening, etc.?I can't put myself ever in your head.But I can lieon your wing, with my left eye letting my right dart forward as you do.Don't ask somethingwith a lifespanhow to change your life.Ask something you can't believe ever lived.
A basket of apples brown in our kitchen, their warm scent is the scent of ripening, and my sister, entering the room quietly, takes a seat at the table, takes up the task of peeling slowly away the blemished skins, even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully. She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh. For this, I am grateful. I explain, this elegywould love to save everything. She smiles at me, and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills, domed with thin slices she brushes into the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove.What can I do? I ask finally. Nothing,  she says, let me finish this one thing alone.
Between the train's long slide and the sunricocheting off the sea, anyonewould have fallen silent in those words,the language of age in her face, the birdscawing over the broken earth, gathering near its stones and chapel doors. In the marina, the sea and its bones have grown smaller. Though the tide is out, it is not the tide nor the feathers nor the cat that jumps into the street, the dust lifting with each wing and disappearing. The rust-colored sheets that wrap the sails of ships, I don't know their name nor the way to say lips of water in Italian and mean this: an old woman stood by the tracks until his hand stopped waving.
Headscarf fluttering in the wind, stockings hanging loose on her vein-roped legs, an old woman clings to her husband as if he were the last tree standing in a storm, though he is not the strong one. His skin is translucent—more like a window than a shade. Without a shirt and coat, we could see his lungs swell and shrink, his heart skip. But he has offered her his arm, and for sixty years, she has taken it.
The toddlers in their tadpole bodies, with their squirt guns and snorkels, their beautiful mommies and inflatable whales, are still too young to understand that this is as good as it gets. Soon they must leave the wading pool and stand all day at the concession stand with their hormones and snow cones, their soul patches and tribal tattoos, pretending not to notice how beautiful they are, until they simply can’t stand it and before you know it they’re lined up on lawn chairs, dozing in the noonday sunwith their stretch marks and beer bellies, their Wall Street Journals and SPF 50.
If it was free, you taught, I ought to grab it as you did: McDonald’s napkins, pens, and from the school where you were once employed as one of two night shift custodians, the metal imitation wood wastebasket still under my desk. But it was sugar that you took most often as, annoyed on leaving Dunkin’ Donuts, pancake house, and countless diners, I felt implicated in your pleasure, crime, and poverty. I have them still, your Ziploc bags of plunder, yet I find today, among the loose change in my pockets, packets crushed or faded— more proof of your lasting legacy.
It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck, out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand. Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water, but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack. The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot, strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog, fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.
The dryer, uniform and squat as a biscuit tin, came to life and turned on me its insect eye. My t-shirts and underwear crackled and leapt. I was a tourist there; I didn’t speak the language. My shoulders covered themselves up in churches, my tongue soothed its burn with slices of pickle. More I don’t remember: only, weekends now when I stand in the kitchen, sorting sweat pants and pairing socks, I remember the afternoon I did my laundry in Budapest, where the sidewalks bloomed with embroidered linen, where money wasn’t permitted to leave the country. When I close my eyes, I recall that spinning, then a woman, with nothing else to sell, pressing wilted flowers in my hands.
But inside her, there is always velvet, velvet with its give and yield, the kind you find at a pet store, a bin full of long ears and noses busy snuffing up nerves among the cedar chips and their eyes opening wide as if rabbits couldn't know what softness brings, as if they'd never know the smell of something long stored away now brought into light, and now too her mother with a camera pointing at her, red child on the lap of the Easter rabbit, softness of the body hiding inside the costume, eyes glinting from the wide holes in the mask, not a single sobbing breath of wind down the trail of mesquite and broom foot-printing the hills of some rancher's land. The bird dog lifts his ears to the sound of velvet, the girl listens to the drawn cries of a crow, her father walks with the silence of the shotgun, waiting for the pointer to find scent, the rabbit at the end of it blinking, its wide eyes shrinking from the scuffle of their feet like velvet settling, laid over lines, drying across the ceiling of an uncle's garage where they talk inside the smell of salted skin. At least three dollars for each good pelt he says, and they scream like children when, sleeves rolled over his forearms, he brings the club down on their heads, saving their feet for cheap key chains, for luck that softness doesn't seem to have inside of cages, chicken wire, tubes of water, and sometimes boys who try kicking the cage around to see what happens to velvet tumbling. And, in the after quiet, she bites the hands reaching toward her, so they stone her, they open her belly and pull some things out, open the pink albino eye and groan at the fluid inside. Then they bury the carcass without thinking first of washing their sticky hands in the sink before eating dinner, before setting the table, in the still softness of her beige room, she sits on the carpet picking at the velveteen of Bunny's stuffed neck, the rabbit's eyes dull with scratches, eyes left behind on her bed at night when she stands in the hall, hearing her father breathe in his room in the darkness, on the futon, kicking off the sheets. Awake from a fluid dream of a woman's eyes staring from behind a gag, her white skin settling in fat pools around her, naked, bald. And a man's voice said, this is your rabbit, so she woke to this dream inside her, with his teeth wrapped in her hair, and his hands inside her thighs where he fingered her coldly. But it has always been like this—wild, insidious, and commanding because she gives to it, fascinated by it and caught by it, as velvet only listens and is quiet.
I In September beyond the breezes and the smoke when autumn unveils its fiery shell, I think of you fragile and severe, small and immense II You were a traveler through demented and subtle geographies with your magic wand singing about Yugoslavia and Lebanon Chile and Peru —Those details on imaginary sheets, doubtful you would get lost because true history was made by women the girl-women and the old women. III When the children of war become a nebulous flame when the earth's shell is a shawl afire with gold, I name you, Marta Alvarado, arriving almost at dawn with your bony woolen gloves to open the school's doors and the defiance of your notebook.
A black God touched me today and I knew I was a poet. When I produce poetry I am responding to a God who touched me in a perverse way. The state of my text is an act of worship to a black female God that told me to worship capital. From a business perspective my poetics is about marketing a God who fondles with my white self. This is what makes my poetry so friendly to the void in the world. I marketed a God who exploits me to bring her message of panic to the poetry sector. I was watching a Kenneth Anger film when a large aphrodisiac God converged on me and told me to create a poem that pleases her. The results of her visit are collected in books called Hit Wave and Right Now the Music and the Life Rule. The text in these books is to give the audience hope for life today because a black female God told me to.
I like to feel like a Champion. Listening to Frankie Valli say "I can't take my eyes off of you" I feel like New York City is a scale model in my penthouse in North Carolina where I study economics, capital markets, and the World Bank. I like to look into a scene from the top of a building in my hometown down at the traders who are moving here from New York City because New York City started to be kind of like a losing place for wealth creation. Now I look down on them and say to myself "I'm too big to fail." I take my keys off of the ledge and walk down the condominium tower overlooking the entire city. When I reach the parking deck I open the door of a 1980 Mercedes Benz 450 SL and coast to a place called High Street. I'm at High Street knocking back a gin and tonic with three girls I met at the Arts & Technology Center conference on the decline of the book. We have a laugh about the old guard who make a book bound in glue and then pinch angel dust off our palms. At this point I'm so high I'm like, look, why don't we excuse ourselves and go up to my condominium tower I've just invested 3.5 million dollars in. They are like uh, we can do that. So we pile into my 450 SL and ride to the tower listening to the music of Frankie Valli transform our night into a piece of artwork. Nearly there, I look around at the Arts & Technology girls and sort of hum to myself. I feel like I've hit a milestone in my evening when we trip into the foyer of my massive penthouse that has those gleaming glass cubes set into the wall you see in Miami or Miami Beach. From the cubes a glimmer of the prosperity circling this region pierces the dark in the form of an orange- yellow beam of fluorescent light. One of the girls is removing her jewelry and I'm like no, don't. She takes off her clothes instead and lies face down on the carpet. At the stereo I play a song by Frankie Valli. The other two are kind of standing around surprised, I think, by the curtain of paperback books lining the north wall. Those are only bound books I tell them while I finger the Kindle on my coffee table. It is the new large Kindle and we are looking at a book called Boredom by Alberto Moravia, taking turns reading passages from the screen. When we get to the part when the boho girl is fucking the protagonist the totally white breast of one of the Arts & Technology girls slips coolly from her blouse. Pretending not to notice I continue to read in my turn. The girl sitting on the other side of me is wearing some totally white string of pearls and she's removing everything but the pearls. I continue to read the screen while the Arts & Technology girls start to make out like I had been planning for them to do ever since we licked angel dust off each other's palms. I get up and go to the stereo, set the needle back to the gold record "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," and walk calmly to the sofa. Once I'm there I melt into the sand-rubbed upholstery with the Arts & Technology girls who haven't yet passed out on the floor. While I'm lying with my back to the armrest I glimpse a piece of sky I've seen only in films of the old grain. It's a wild purple darkness with a bright white hole in it. I'm thinking to myself God, my personal Jesus Christ and saviour, I want you to come down here through that hole in the night and join me in Eden.
—for Fleda It seems so different art that moves me now From the sort of art I longed for long ago Soaring Vatic Agon I waited yesterday on the unsure shoulder Of a drenched back road From my car I could behold Our highway agent Gordon Fill a rut with a spade climb up on his grader And smooth things smooth as the top of a kitchen table There were frost heaves by the score And culverts clotted shut by April floods So it was brilliant what Gordon did with mud On Wallace Hill Pure mire Out there The road goes narrow as a needle On which you might wonder could dance how many angels I don't care I didn't No earthly need to summon spirits daemons No sign of them at all Nor would I dream one I might have once but wouldn't Nor gyre nor golem Nor great Leviathan Nor djinn Nor fiend Nor signifying wind Nor Elementargeist That lingering in that lane might make me conjure I had to get somewhere and fetch my daughter To bring her home Sweet Christ She might be standing in that mix of sleet And ugly rain which called for Gordon's art I'm trying to be a grownup Better late than never I suppose Or am I only jaded I don't know It was as though I'd shown up Just to see him wield his spade and blade out there It kept me from surmising some furordivinis Why should I bother Now that I moved on thanks be to Gordon Who signaled with his thumb for me to pass him He pulled the grader overYes give me something useful here I said Impromptu In my car it sounded odd To say it now sounds different I hope that Gordon watched me yesterday As I signaled back I'd never have made my way Without a skillful agent I hope he saw me wave
for my daughter Erika, on the birth of Ivy Creston I found it in a box I sifted through as I cleaned my office. How clear in mind, the time you drew it nearly thirty years ago. From dawn to dark, a sort of dusk prevailed, the nightbirds up all hours. I've stumbled on signs of ruthless murder in such a day— intinction of snow and blood. I've pictured talons. Not knowing what I felt, still I have sensed, without my witness, intricate change had happened. Snow of course can offer other signs: sweep of a grouse's wing where it flushed and flew, the raptor's errant jabs mere blots to the side, no blatancy of red on the cold white cover. In any case, it was that kind of day when you held the blue-green crayon as gently as a mother might her child, your hand so small I could cry. You frowned, and carefully drew three sides of a square, and then, above, a pair of slanting lines, to roof your house. Then swatches of sky. You glanced sidelong at me: did I approve or not? I knew that this was what you meant to ask. I chuckled. Please forgive me. I stroked your cheek. Look at you now! A mother twice at once, in a home built plumb and true on a leafy street. I consider these parallelograms you drew, each with a cross inside, to form two windows, which, you said, were there for me and you, "For looking down the road." The road was made of lines as well, which—not quite parallel— ran right from the doorway off the edge of the page. I clutch you tight in mind as I did so far back down that road, your picture done for then. I pray your babies' dreams and landscapes are as clean and sweet as you seemed to me that day, a perfect figure underneath those Vs —those harmless birds, or bird-abstractions—high above the house in their lambent blue-green sky.
I remember that store, and the nasty redneck whose stink seemed a challenge to everyone in it. The scene is decades old, but I'm still confused that no one took up the challenge—including me, though I liked an occasional fight back then. The prospect of pain meant less to me once, I guess. An aneurism had just killed my brother, so the pain I'm talking about was my body's. I breathed up another pain that day. I checked the man's beat pickup; why would he want them, those skunks knee-deep in its bed? I left the lot still more confused, my sweet retriever shivering on the seat beside me. The godawful smell still clung to the dog's wet coat, and my own. There'd be no more hikes for us that morning: rain had arrived, bone-chilling. If you killed a skunk, why would you keep the thing? To kill some time, I stopped at The Jackpot View. We've always called it that. Five mountaintops bled into mists to my east in New Hampshire. The sudden squalls spilled leaves on the woods-floor's pall of nondescript hue. Now he was dead. Now my brother was dead. I can't define any God, but only this morning, I caught a whiff of road-killed skunk and thought I could speak of Him or Her or It as surely as I could tell you the slightest thing concerning the man I'm remembering now, the one who shot or trapped or clubbed those miserable reeking creatures. The smallest enigmas we ever encounter remain as hard to explain as all the epical ones. I've failed for years to fathom the death of my brother; but it's just as hard to understand why a scene in an old Vermont store should linger like dead-skunk odor, which if you've lately been tainted comes back to scent you whenever a rain blows in—or like some pains you may have thought you'd forever gotten over, but which at some odd prompting come back to haunt you.
My objectives this morning were vague. As always I'd hike these hills— a way to keep going against the odds age deals, a way to keep body and soul together, and not so much thinking as letting things steal into mind— but I started counting from the very first step I took. I wore rank old boots, ill-laced, and patchwork pants. Around my neck hung the frayed lanyard of a whistle I use to summon our trio of dogs, who capered and yelped their pleasure at one of our walks, and more miraculous still, at having me for a master. It's true in a sense that I always count as I wander, though it's usually the beats of a tune (Thelonious's "Blue Monk" a favorite) that mark my time. These counts felt odder, better. We scattered a brood of grouse at step 91. The deerflies strafed us. At 500 a late trillium glowed by a ledge like a lotus. Right along the rain kept pounding. I was mindful of all these things but I never stopped counting. Life was good, and more. It was worthy of better response. At 1000 I thought,Enough—and counted on. Nothing was coming to mind. Nothing is coming again from my hike half the day ago with three dogs through rain but a mystic sense of well-being in quietly chanted numbers. Whatever this trance, I treasured it as a wonder not to be wrenched into meaning, as in Every second counts, as in You should count your blessings, though of those there seems no doubt.
I do better in animal time, a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk. In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie, I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening through water, even the high-pitched drone of the cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing. As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York, the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides. They camped under stars that meant no harm. It was the silence that alerted them to danger. They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.
In kindergarten during the Cold War, mid-day late bells jolted us, sending us single file into the hallway, where we sat, pressing our heads between our knees, waiting. During one of the bomb drills, Annette was standing. My mother said I would talk on and on about her, about how pretty she was. I still remember her that day, curly hair and pretty dress, looking perturbed the way little children do. Why Annette? There’s nothing to be upset about— The bombs won’t get us, I’ve seen what’s to come— it is the days, the steady pounding of days, like gentle rain, that will be our undoing.
Crows, crows, crows, crows then the slow flapaway over the hill and the dead oak is naked
One can’t help admiring their rickety grace and old-world feathers like seasoned boardwalk planks. They pass in silent pairs, as if a long time ago they had wearied of calling out. The wind tips them, their ungainly, light-brown weight, into a prehistoric wobble, wings’-end fingers stretching from fingerless gloves, necks slightly tucked and stiff, peering forward and down, like old couples arm in arm on icy sidewalks, careful, careful, mildly surprised by how difficult it has become to stay dignified and keep moving even after the yelping gulls have gone; even after the scattered sand, and the quietly lodged complaints.
Some years there exists a wanting to escape— you, floating above your certain ache—  still the ache coexists. Call that the immanent you— You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless, not worth you. Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence. And still this life parts your lids, you see you seeing your extending hand as a falling wave— / I they he she we you turn only to discover the encounter to be alien to this place. Wait. The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. The opening, between you and you, occupied, zoned for an encounter, given the histories of you and you— And always, who is this you? The start of you, each day, a presence already— Hey you— / Slipping down burying the you buried within. You are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day. The outside comes in— Then you, hey you— Overheard in the moonlight. Overcome in the moonlight. Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you hear this—what happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you He is speaking of the legionnaires in Claire Denis's film Beau Travail and you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze— The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. / And still a world begins its furious erasure— Who do you think you are, saying I to me? You nothing. You nobody. You. A body in the world drowns in it— Hey you— All our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer. / Don't say I if it means so little, holds the little forming no one. You are not sick, you are injured— you ache for the rest of life. How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living? And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body? Even now your voice entangles this mouth whose words are here as pulse, strumming shut out, shut in, shut up— You cannot say— A body translates its you— you there, hey you / even as it loses the location of its mouth. When you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places, when you lay your body in the body entered as if you're the ground you walk on, you know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you. You slow all existence down with your call detectable only as sky. The night's yawn absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle to the sun ready already to let go of your hand. Wait with me though the waiting, wait up, might take until nothing whatsoever was done. / To be left, not alone, the only wish—  to call you out, to call out you. Who shouted, you? You shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes sounding like you, you sometimes saying you, go nowhere, be no one but you first— Nobody notices, only you've known, you're not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad— It's just this, you're injured. / Everything shaded everything darkened everything shadowed is the stripped is the struck— is the trace is the aftertaste. I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done, was also done, was never done— The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much to you—
I don't usually talk to strangers, but it is four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now. I don't respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer. The war is on and the Department of Homeland Security has decided we have an elevated national-threat level, a code-orange alert. I could say something, but my packages are getting heavier by the minute and besides, what is there to say since rhetorically it's not about our oil under their sand but about freeing Iraqis from Iraqis and Osama is Saddam and Saddam is “that man who tried to kill my father” and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria and we see ourselves only through our own eyes and the British, but not the French, and Germany won't and Turkey won't join us but the coalition is inside Baghdad where the future is the threat the Americans feel they can escape though there is no escaping the Americans because war, this war, is about peace: “The war in Iraq is really about peace. Trying to make the world more peaceful. This victory in Iraq, when it happens, will make the world more peaceful.”
At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle. This water bottle? That's right. Open it and drink from it. / At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes.  Take off my shoes?  Yes. Both Please. /  At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever.  A fever? Really?  Yes. Really. /    My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world coun­tries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplor­able, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.
more so than we did before, but now we know what to do with them. We hang our troubles on them and wipe our shoes against them. We go lethargic on the porch, we tear the bark with spindly fingers. We soak up the sun with restless hunger.So much sky we say in unison, where does it go, do we follow it? Do we let it get away? For months we splay without a fence, door wide open— blue and brash inside and out. Because we can, we keep saying, because we can. We face a lush sense of life that we have nothing to do with. We face our cravings and journey with a new kind, our new people; They all possess smiles and frowns, but more windswept expressions—no permanent downwardness of spirit, the way it was back east. And since we've left the city to be ourselves, we still must face our needy souls— full of want, compulsions. Were we proud of this? The way we turned away? But we've protected these habits, forgone others in return. What is the profession of the culture-hoarder? Who are the gatekeepers? Do we grace them with our backs? Moreover our chests remain empty yet seductively warmed, burning by the fire, our asses cold and exposed. All the wood, crisp birch to shield our lazy lobes, rounded bodies, our cerebrums and other parts. Are we awaiting cheerless ambivalence to greet us in the West? Cavernous and cloudless, unaffected by beauty. Let's be petulant,this is us now, we say. We can't help but find ourselves lustful; crying alligator tears with pails to our eyes, we didn't know we were here we kept saying, we don't know how it happened. We thought and thought, and finally we closed our doors on the trees to hide what we grew temperate for but resolve didn't find us, not alive with force, we flew out of their arms.
Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I can­not. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas. /    You don't remember because you don't care. Some­times my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don't know because you don't care. /   Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you? /   I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recog­nition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this with­out breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, per­haps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new ten­dency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which trans­lates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that gov­ern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.
for Adam And I didn't see that now you were here on the page  writing poems too: poems silken with blue, fortified with a metaphor passing through. But I knew this speaker was you and knew there was so much about you that could reach around the metaphor to a personal etymology, one that could brighten and darken the poem without too many over-determined moves. But if you, speaker, need figures—more than language— who bless the poem's grief with vantage points or an altitude high up, or bandages soaked in vinegar, sure, then let the speaker invent a mirage, I understand that, too. It's tough these days when anxiety speaks through the fission of thought; it's the piss-pot of the mind. What anchors the fisted pronoun "we" in your poem? Something must. And another thing, upon second read, only now do I see how the "you" and "I" of someone else's poem landed in yours: on that particular cited greenery. And these other pronouns know—ahead of time-to check the soles of their shoes and how to manage a homonym's feet; moreover, they told you, speaker, how to open and shut the door without too much invention or conviction, which in a poem is rare.
It was not a romantic sentiment, nor self-determined; rather, it was embarrassing. My love of spearheading, from introvert to extrovert, from cowardice to consequence, from the enjambment to the unspecified dunce. It was a sabotage, a reckless moment: a purulent, tawny decree. All temptation puzzled me and drew me in. I dropped out of a large life, I flew over exams, I punched out breakfast teachers with lunch money, toiling over the idea of belonging rather than over upward mobility. I understood how power flung outward into the troves of the cursed (I felt cursed or troubled all of the time). I wasn't bearing oranges, limes, or even lemons. All of it blurred together so that a mere suggestion made by an outside force was something to be freely ignored. I could nod off, I could misinterpret, it could be reconfigured as a negotiation. The fog felt like an aphorism. Never lifting, always dull, always an added pull. The tribunal cloud judged below, judged my direction. There was lying, conning, faking, elucidating in order to get away with undoing. I was interested in preserving yet I can't tell you if it felt sacred or befallen. Your anxiety might have represented a crushing faith or a character assassination, my own or someone else's. Or a lack of grip on reality: the wet rip of the grocery bags all of it falling— your body on all fours. Accumulating soot upon retrieval. There were downsides to feeling different so I huddled in the corner (not a ball, not rocking). I felt friendless and yet social. I felt no aptitude towards refining a skill. However, words cut my brain into two brains with their precipice their demarcations, their incisions (too strong a word). They held me captive against their edge, their influence: I felt like insinuating something delicate or dear. Now—I am holding on—trying to pay attention to the collusion that I must be playing over and over in my mind, and it was my mind, it needed me to leave everything outside, on the steps or in the sky, to feign exhaustion in order to meet an aberration, the one in the corner that felt large and carefree with its own vernacular sprawled with whitewash on bricks or floors or that ghastly far above that kept me standing very still but perhaps I wasn't inactive, I was just interpreting what had already been an assumed boundary, immersed in its insularity and in what stuck to its roundedness. for Katy Lederer
It was just a momentary untruth in my way, bodies of the crowd blocked the big blue outside. Now I have a stealthy cause: to try and be myself, to further a personal idea of arrangement, of how to use those thoughts, the ones that don't get used. But how to let them tick without abuse. How to repay the debt, use the solvent, blast the botched & troubled nearby— What does everyone else caress? All those etched poses neatly joined: Mastery, hierarchy, witchcraft & shamanism. A spike in the dander keeps me plain enough— but to insist! To consolidate those fears—after months of uncertainty couldn't cough or breathe or pilfer correctly. Now this victorious shape, this idea moves through muteness, shyness, weakness— then it awakens: Becomes a nonconformist happenstance— A person saddled beneath Reaches up for a fiction, abundant and unrestricted ideas poised and in front.
After being humiliated one continues the manuscript of identity. Activities, diseases, doldrums, the crony affair after the situation, the one where one faces how one is the undertaste, how one isn't the neighbor, the piebaker, a white folk. How one isn't a gorgeous dream wrapped up in tireless affection, primped for wider screens. So there one grew, in the coffee sickness, the dictionary browsing in a fury for the word entitlement to spill— After convulsing with rage, one continues in the aftermath of no friends on Tuesdays or shouting fiercely when nothing sobered to the eleventh hour and the tide shrunk to its sense of privacy where it had nothing to do with shores or moons, and humiliation sat on its lover's knee, greeting the eccentric rich and the hourglass with such force the rage enameled like fine paint to a sheen of deep blue. Restless in the way that stirs the crowd to its feet to claim the encounter for the intentions of personal gain without the empire, without the embarrassment of shaking one's head, of resting it underneath the ground, to live sanctioned in the migrancy with an ugly plate for the economy but working ever so hard. So unplanned, so beyond what one did before the lack of dignity sang an opera. And organized all the ideas, before rage shot a bird that had once watched effortlessly all the comings and goings.
for Rick Hill and in memory of Buster Mitchell I Steel arches up past the customs sheds, the bridge to a place named Canada, thrust into Mohawk land. A dull rainbow arcing over the new school, designed to fan out like the tail of the drumming Partridge— dark feathers of the old way's pride mixed in with blessed Kateri's pale dreams of sacred water. II When that first span fell in 1907 cantilevered shapes collapsed, gave like an old man's arthritic back. The tide was out, the injured lay trapped like game in a deadfall all through that day until the evening. Then, as tide came in, the priest crawled through the wreckage, giving last rites to the drowning. III Loading on, the cable lifts. Girders swing and sing in sun. Tacked to the sky, reflecting wind, long knife-blade mirrors they fall like jackstraws when they hit the top of the big boom's run. The cable looped, the buzzer man pushes a button red as sunset. The mosquito whine of the motor whirrs bare bones up to the men who stand an edge defined on either side by a long way down. IV Those who hold papers claim to have ownership of buildings and land. They do not see the hands which placed each rivet. They do not hear the feet walking each hidden beam. They do not hear the whisper of strong clan names. They do not see the faces of men who remain unseen as those girders which strengthen and shape.
Seeing photos of ancestors a century past is like looking at your own fingerprints— circles  and lines you can't  recognize until someone else with a stranger's eye looks close and says that's you.
Because my father said Yesbut not in our lifetimes Because my mother said I know my daughter would never want to marry.
My dolls have been put away like deadchildren in a chest I will carrywith me when I marry.I reach under my skirt to feela satin slip bought for this day. It is softas the inside of my thighs. My hairhas been nailed back with my mother’sblack hairpins to my skull. Her handsstretched my eyes open as she twistedbraids into a tight circle at the napeof my neck. I am to wash my own clothesand sheets from this day on, as ifthe fluids of my body were poison, as ifthe little trickle of blood I believetravels from my heart to the world wereshameful. Is not the blood of saints andmen in battle beautiful? Do Christ’s handsnot bleed into your eyes from His cross?At night I hear myself growing and waketo find my hands drifting of their own willto soothe skin stretched tightover my bones,I am wound like the guts of a clock,waiting for each hour to release me.
(Nous n'irons plus au bois) No more walks in the wood: The trees have all been cut Down, and where once they stood Not even a wagon rut Appears along the path Low brush is taking over. No more walks in the wood; This is the aftermath Of afternoons in the clover Fields where we once made love Then wandered home together Where the trees arched above, Where we made our own weather When branches were the sky. Now they are gone for good, And you, for ill, and I Am only a passer-by. We and the trees and the way Back from the fields of play Lasted as long as we could. No more walks in the wood.
because I go  like the professed  sinner repentant to the altar of your baptismal flame  I am saved despite your  sculptor-love whose whimsy kneads  and molds  and fires then breaks the free-form of my fasting body  to make  me whole yet thankful I accept  these carnal gifts  of you  Eros and wear them as I would flawless jewels  (how can you  know that I  have bled  the way  and back  biting the dust  to wear  your name?) . . . the wound lies  not in your infliction  but in my  expectations . . .
1996 i. here: our forsaken home mesa breaks desert dialing curve of mountain territory of anthropology of the outlaw where you taught me how to shoot that .22 real good rifle butt steadied against the shoulder socket a wild pulsing third arm postures of stillness and reserve practiced cunning of the predator in the end shattered bottles among cowering piñones here: the natives have never been safe ii. curious sentimental boy intent on the romance of expedition clever cynical woman intent on the Romantic tropemi cielo mi mar mi luna mi tierra language of Spanish occupation diligent engineers we divide and enter mapping for future travels the sheets marked, desk cluttered: pencil shavings graphs incomplete stanzas metaphors and equations of isolated fixed points like Malinches we are left harboring the remains of one another's labor iii. la migra your mind skilled at expulsion vigilant surveillance those refused entry interest me those forced to settle elsewhere ours is a patrolled encounter my mind is what interests you creases of cerebrum electric streams coursing through these fissures a landscape ripe for excavation you are brother to Isabella in devices and commands always the agenda the missionary plans and like the others you will insist on exile and I am no Circe no magical powers no victim of narrative just a woman with these few words a woman who has peered through the barrel of a loaded gun leaving nothing intact
i was left out i was chosen second & then left out i was left handed i was left to fend for myself i  was the second in command the second in line i came without direction  * i want the  milk i want my first pick i want choice & all its implications there was a  * residue of scar between us it chafed when we rubbed our chests together  *  hello, brother, hello? hello in there, brother, can you hear me? it's a long tunnel to the grave speak you were my first god i was rapt in your coming  (mother better eat her vegetables, she better chew) choo choo what's bitter between us  *  i want the milk i need it for my teeth they're soft the gums bleed there's the evidence on my toothbrush i got the second draft i need calcium to make up i got a job  & left i don't know where you're buried  * what do you need? what will make you happy? what do you want? the dead do have mouths & appetites suck it up there's plenty in the ice box more where that came from  *  if somebody asked me what's next i wouldn't know i took my hands off her like something hot or fragile or in pain i was aghast at suffering how you can feed & feed it  & it's never full  *  there's a separation between us a suppuration there's just the  space of an idea i don't know what's missing it's a blind spot sometimes my left eye focuses & it's like looking at both of us through a window  *  i'm telling you the facts of life for you haven't been told you're in your late fifties you're dis- eased or disinterested a queer unable to come out of the casket OK  * you live this life i'll live the next she only has enough milk for one baby i'll go  around this time you come the next that time you'll have a better mother i promise you that
my dad's going to give me a self back. i've made an altar calledThe Altar for Healing the Father & Child, & asked him what i could do for him so he would do nice for me. he said i should stop saying bad things about him &, since i've said just about everything bad i can think of &, since . . . well, no, i change my mind, i can't promise him that. but even healing is negotiable, so, if he's in heaven (or trying to get in), it wouldn't hurt to be in touch. the first thing i want is to be able to enjoy the little things again—for example, to stop peeling down the list of things i have to do & enjoy this poem, enjoy how, last night, scouring the cupboards, i found a can of sardines that must be five years old &, since i was home after a long trip &, since it was 1 a.m. & i hadn't eaten dinner &, since there was no other protein in the house, i cranked it open & remembered that my dad loved sardines—right before bed—with onions & mustard. i can't get into my dad's old heart, but i remember that look on his face when he would load mustard on a saltine cracker, lay a little fish on top, & tip it with a juicy slice of onion. then he'd look up from his soiled fingers with one eyebrow raised, a rakish grin that said—allfor me!—as if he was getting away with murder.
1/ THE MOUTH Not English Somali Italian French the mouth blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Not the Absolute Speaker of the News, not crisis chatter's famine/flame, the mouth blown open at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Speaks back to the dead at KM4, old men in macawis, beards dyed with henna, the women wearing blue jeans under black chadors. Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were, the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces, the mouth of smoke at KM4 mouths syllables of smoke never heard before.2/ THE CONCERT Lake water in smooth still sun moves in and out of synch with the violin playing at the villa— the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand making some frantic motion to come closer, go away— it's hard to say what's being said, who's being summoned from the dead, from red sand drifting across the sheen of the shining floor. The pianist's hands taking wing to hover above a chord become the flight path of a marabou stork crashing down on carrion, the piano levitating up and up above red sand that it starts to float across the way a camel's humps far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise until mirage overbrims itself and everything into its shimmering disappears. And the ones who died the day before, blown up at the crossroads at KM4, scanning the notice board for scholarship results, put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud.3/ ORACLE The little man carved out of bone shouts something to the world the world can't hear. All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand, die out in sun just clearing the plain. Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar: an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock. The AK talks the talk of what guns talk— not rage or death or clichés of killing, but specs of what it means to be fired off in the air. No fear when it jams, no enemy running away, no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst— forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him. The AK wants to tell a different truth— a truth ungarbled that is so obvious no one could possibly mistake its meaning. If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel what you'll see is a boy with trousers rolled above his ankles. You'll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables that have the rapid-fire clarity of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute.4/ "BEFORE HE BLEW HIMSELF UP, HE LIKED TO PLAY AT GAMES WITH OTHER YOUTHS." And there, among the dead, appearing beside your tent flap, at your elbow in the mess hall, waiting to use, or just leaving, the showers and latrine, the boy with his trousers rolled appears like an afterimage burned into an antique computer screen, haunting whatever the cursor tries to track. So he liked to play at games with other youths? The English has the slightly too-formal sound of someone being poured through the sieve of another language. Syllable after syllable piling up and up until the boy, buried to the neck, slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his. As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame.5/ TIME TO FORGET There's a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand. Over there's a water tower, under that's the bore hole and here the body asks and asks about the role it's asked to play: no matter how it's dressed. Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena who eats even the bones and shits bone-white scat from the calcium. No matter if it sleeps under a dome of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun, or hides in a spider hole or walks around in uniform behind plate glass, the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown. On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob, and of the two, who is the more human? On the table there isn't a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey that keeps whispering, It's OK to be this way, nobody will know. And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton.6/ THE COMING At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air and hangs there beautiful and repulsive. Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds don't stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound— the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out as you go round and round the roundabout at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir are all pretending to be dead. The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses,Hey, can't you get my flak jacket adjusted so it doesn't crush my collar?
Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures in sex clubs it wasn't the whys and wherefores but technical details, like going rafting down the Colorado River; and when he wrote about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience was with his stepfather, the friend told him it wasn't weird, but the best possible thing that could have happened . . . I saw then that God, who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart as a negative: that the negative had been developed into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky on a day so clear he sees through the mountain's shadows to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it— a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing for what you want, depending on the equipment, the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek of come. . . . And my pal the poet, who believed in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind of "spooky action at a distance," he communed with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles where he hides himself away—his sanctuary Asshole Alley where God's own unholy loves bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears— and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . —That was how it was in those days, back when my friend hadn't yet met the coroner who wrote down his cause of death as "polysubstance abuse" that brought on his heart attack while fucking . . . And regardless if I believed, whenever we were together God shone clearer— those were the days when every morning God woke up in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night in divine rage. Whoever loved him, he loved. Whoever hated him, he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality of hate or the volatility of love.
I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter and in my twenties I almost ended up there— and then as an alternative to vodka, to live alone like a hermit philosopher and court the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway— and then there were the years in which I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity, years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares, and that was the worst, the very worst— you could say that always my life was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart— my life like scraps stitched together in a dream in which animals and people, plants, chimeras, stars, even minerals were in a preordained harmony— a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten, but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason— and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth. I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion, the voices still talking inside me . . . but then, instead of harmony, there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground. And maybe that's all it means to be a poet.
In my fantasy of fatherhood, in which I'm your real father, not just the almost dad arriving through random channels of divorce, you and I don't lie to one another— shrugging each other off when words get the best of us but coming full circle with wan smiles. When you hole up inside yourself, headphones and computer screen taking you away, I want to feel in ten years that if I'm still alive you'll still look at me with that same wary expectancy, your surreptitious cool-eyed appraisal debating if my love for you is real. Am I destined to be those shark-faced waves that my death will one day make you enter? You and your mother make such a self-sufficient pair— in thrift stores looking for your prom dress, what father could stand up to your unsparing eyes gauging with such erotic calculation your figure in the mirror? Back of it all, when I indulge my second sight, all I see are dead zones: no grandchildren, no evenings at the beach, no bonfires in a future that allows one glass of wine per shot of insulin. Will we both agree that I love you, always, no matter my love's flawed, aging partiality? My occupation now is to help you be alone.
[for my dad] The fallen Latte is the sign. It is from within the row of Latte that we feel our strength. It is the severed capstone that gives us Their message
~ [our] nightmare : no birdsong— the jungle was riven emptied of [i sihek] bright blue green turquoise red gold feathers—everywhere : brown tree snakes avian silence— the snakes entered without words when [we] saw them it was too late— they were at [our] doors sliding along the passages of [i sihek] empire—then the zookeepers came— called it species survival plan—captured [i sihek] and transferred the last twenty-nine micronesian kingfishers to zoos for captive breeding [1988]—they repeated [i sihek] and repeated : "if it weren't for usyour birds [i sihek]would be goneforever" what does not change / last wild seen—
Rub the entire block of SPAM*, along with the accompanying gelatinous goo, onto your wood furniture. The oils from the SPAM* moisturize the wood and give it a nice luster. Plus, you'll have enough left over to use as your own personal lubricant (a true Pacific dinner date). Why didn't you tell me about the "In Honor of Guam's Liberation" SPAM*! I'm trying to collect them all! Once I was on a diet and SPAM* faded from my consciousness. Then I met my future wife, who's Hawaiian, and SPAM* became part of my life again (a true Pacific romance). Maybe the economic downturn will help people appreciate SPAM* instead of loathing it. SPAM* doesn't have to be unhealthy; I eat SPAM* every day and I'm not dead, yet—just switch to SPAM* Lite. Despite rumors, SPAM* is NOT made of such odds and ends as hooves, ears, brains, native peoples, or whole baby pigs. The name itself stands for Specially Processed Army Meal, Salted Pork And More, Super Pink Artificial Meat, Snake Possum And Mongoose, or Some People Are Missing. My uncle is the reigning Guam SPAM* king. He won the last SPAM* cook off with his Spicy SPAM* meatballs. I will never forget the two-pound SPAM* bust of George Washington he made for Liberation Day, toasted crispy on the outside with raw egg yolk in the hollow center— the kids loved it! Only a fool would start a company in Guam that provides SPAM* protection. For Xmas, I bought a snow globe featuring a can of SPAM* sitting on an island. Turn it over and a typhoon swirls madly, unable to unseat SPAM* from its place of honor. I have a souvenir can I bought after seeing Monty Python's SPAM*ALOT on Broadway in New York City. It cost me $10 and is the most expensive SPAM* I've ever bought. I will never eat it.
~ remember just
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night;Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go;Ring out the false, ring in the true.Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor,Ring in redress to all mankind.Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life,With sweeter manners, purer laws.Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymesBut ring the fuller minstrel in.Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right,Ring in the common love of good.Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old,Ring in the thousand years of peace.Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land,Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Three Kings came riding from far away, Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar; Three Wise Men out of the East were they, And they travelled by night and they slept by day, For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star. The star was so beautiful, large and clear, That all the other stars of the sky Became a white mist in the atmosphere, And by this they knew that the coming was near Of the Prince foretold in the prophecy. Three caskets they bore on their saddle-bows, Three caskets of gold with golden keys; Their robes were of crimson silk with rows Of bells and pomegranates and furbelows, Their turbans like blossoming almond-trees. And so the Three Kings rode into the West, Through the dusk of the night, over hill and dell, And sometimes they nodded with beard on breast, And sometimes talked, as they paused to rest, With the people they met at some wayside well. “Of the child that is born,” said Baltasar, “Good people, I pray you, tell us the news; For we in the East have seen his star, And have ridden fast, and have ridden far, To find and worship the King of the Jews.” And the people answered, “You ask in vain; We know of no King but Herod the Great!” They thought the Wise Men were men insane, As they spurred their horses across the plain, Like riders in haste, who cannot wait. And when they came to Jerusalem, Herod the Great, who had heard this thing, Sent for the Wise Men and questioned them; And said, “Go down unto Bethlehem, And bring me tidings of this new king.” So they rode away; and the star stood still, The only one in the grey of morn; Yes, it stopped—it stood still of its own free will, Right over Bethlehem on the hill, The city of David, where Christ was born. And the Three Kings rode through the gate and the guard, Through the silent street, till their horses turned And neighed as they entered the great inn-yard; But the windows were closed, and the doors were barred, And only a light in the stable burned. And cradled there in the scented hay, In the air made sweet by the breath of kine, The little child in the manger lay, The child, that would be king one day Of a kingdom not human, but divine. His mother Mary of Nazareth Sat watching beside his place of rest, Watching the even flow of his breath, For the joy of life and the terror of death Were mingled together in her breast. They laid their offerings at his feet: The gold was their tribute to a King, The frankincense, with its odor sweet, Was for the Priest, the Paraclete, The myrrh for the body’s burying. And the mother wondered and bowed her head, And sat as still as a statue of stone, Her heart was troubled yet comforted, Remembering what the Angel had said Of an endless reign and of David’s throne. Then the Kings rode out of the city gate, With a clatter of hoofs in proud array; But they went not back to Herod the Great, For they knew his malice and feared his hate, And returned to their homes by another way.
The kings they came from out the south, All dressed in ermine fine; They bore Him gold and chrysoprase, And gifts of precious wine. The shepherds came from out the north, Their coats were brown and old; They brought Him little new-born lambs— They had not any gold. The wise men came from out the east, And they were wrapped in white; The star that led them all the way Did glorify the night. The angels came from heaven high, And they were clad with wings; And lo, they brought a joyful song The host of heaven sings. The kings they knocked upon the door, The wise men entered in, The shepherds followed after them To hear the song begin. The angels sang through all the night Until the rising sun, But little Jesus fell asleep Before the song was done.
Good King Wenceslas look’d out, On the Feast of Stephen; When the snow lay round about, Deep, and crisp, and even: Brightly shone the moon that night, Though the frost was cruel, When a poor man came in sight, Gath’ring winter fuel. “Hither page and stand by me, If thou know’st it, telling, Yonder peasant, who is he? Where and what his dwelling?” “Sire, he lives a good league hence. Underneath the mountain; Right against the forest fence, By Saint Agnes’ fountain.” “Bring me flesh,and bring me wine, Bring me pine-logs hither: Thouand I will see him dine, When we bear them thither.” Page and monarch forth they went, Forth they went together; Through the rudewind’s wild lament, And the bitter weather. “Sire, the night is darker now, And the wind blows stronger; Fails my heart, I know now how, I can go no longer.” “Mark my footsteps, good my page; Tread thou in them boldly; Thou shalt find the winter’s rage Freeze thy blood less coldly.” In his master’s steps he trod, Where the snow lay dinted; Heat was in the very sod Which the Saint had printed. Therefore, Christian men, be sure, Wealth or rank possessing, Ye who now will bless the poor, Shall yourselves find blessing.
Sitting under the mistletoe(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),One last candle burning low,All the sleepy dancers gone,Just one candle burning on,Shadows lurking everywhere:Some one came, and kissed me there.Tired I was; my head would goNodding under the mistletoe(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),No footsteps came, no voice, but only,Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,Stooped in the still and shadowy airLips unseen—and kissed me there.
(A Christmas Circular Letter) The city had withdrawn into itselfAnd left at last the country to the country;When between whirls of snow not come to lieAnd whirls of foliage not yet laid, there droveA stranger to our yard, who looked the city,Yet did in country fashion in that thereHe sat and waited till he drew us outA-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.He proved to be the city come againTo look for something it had left behindAnd could not do without and keep its Christmas.He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;My woods—the young fir balsams like a placeWhere houses all are churches and have spires.I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.I doubt if I was tempted for a momentTo sell them off their feet to go in carsAnd leave the slope behind the house all bare,Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.I’d hate to have them know it if I was.Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees exceptAs others hold theirs or refuse for them,Beyond the time of profitable growth,The trial by market everything must come to.I dallied so much with the thought of selling.Then whether from mistaken courtesyAnd fear of seeming short of speech, or whetherFrom hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”“I could soon tell how many they would cut,You let me look them over.” “You could look.But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too closeThat lop each other of boughs, but not a fewQuite solitary and having equal boughsAll round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”He felt some need of softening that to me:“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”Then I was certain I had never meantTo let him have them. Never show surprise!But thirty dollars seemed so small besideThe extent of pasture I should strip, three cents(For that was all they figured out apiece),Three cents so small beside the dollar friendsI should be writing to within the hourWould pay in cities for good trees like those,Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday SchoolsCould hang enough on to pick off enough.A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!Worth three cents more to give away than sell,As may be shown by a simple calculation.Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.I can’t help wishing I could send you one,In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.
(US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed those European countries which opposed the US attack on Iraq as only 'Old Europe') Old Europe stared at her breakfast, buttered her croissant, sipped coffee which tasted like a gun and blinked her grey eyes to restore the sun. Old Europe grasped at the old A.J.P. Taylor line, 'but in politics the impossible always happens' more and more, hoped for example, that the fact that the 'plant' for weapons in Northern Iraq was shown on the BBC an empty ex-Media Centre, and miles away a plain village, hoping not to be bombed, because by mistake young Colin, who apparently mistook often, used its name at the UN as that of the 'plant', would be accepted as a fact and then protected, thought Old Europe as her France loved to protect facts, as her Germany to act, or her Belgium to be. But, she reflected, in doubt and in debt, the future is not an ally over the sea which just needs to be convinced but a masked soldier, dead to Agincourt, Darmstadt, Verdun, wanting oil and meat and not understanding how a continental breakfast keeps the blood in your head, your brain not your gut. Old Europe set her spine straight in the doorway sun. Her hand crumbled bread as if it were old bone.
('Operation Iraqi Freedom') It felt odd from the start, this war. At the start, the 'death' of Saddam when Baghdad was bombed, but  he's not dead, a bizarre  Zapata, and then the Scuds fired at Kuwait  but they weren't Scuds, the 'chemical weapons of mass destruction factory', with earth banks and barbed wire  which wasn't one, however, and the 'column of tanks destroyed leaving Basra'  which was three tanks, the endless 'securing' of towns and cities  which aren't secure even allowing for the distinction that 'secure' does not mean 'safe', the 'Uprising' in Basra which no one could find there...  Once  there were poems in inverted commas, this is a war of inverted commas. Once  I wrote that 'poems about poems  don't seem as abstract as they once did' (although you don't need quotes, quoting  yourself) and the Oxford Companion decided  this meant I was no longer being abstract, when in fact I meant that poems about poems (in that case partly a child)  are not abstract because the abstract  in them works through to a deeper real. Will this war work through to the deeper real  at last? Now it seems again, however, that it feels odd, this war. I have paid it  careful attention for almost a fortnight and what  I would note here is that singular oddness of feeling it evokes: one is alwaysat a tangent to it somehow, albeitwith despair's edgy wit. The deathshave black solidity, as if from method, nowhite napalm suddenness...I thought: is itfarce encoring tragedy, but thereis too much earnest passion in the evil,and one watches that eros like watchingspiders breed: 'It is what they do on this planet,'as a child's science fiction exercisemight observe. Spiders feed in street windowsbroken by children's bones flying, butthe US polls say yes: who want this so much.Who know what they do and also thatthey want those inverted commas, George-Bush-as-by-George-Orwell. Is the USneed for war not 'a way to teach Americansgeography' as Bierce is often quoted, buta greed for abstractions: for the abstract, rather,not met by food or sex or fashion, byany intimate geography but this? But thenthe abstract is not the inverted commas,either, and it is those they want: the quoteswhich in two days will expire, the world left gasping with winded logic, the new skulls on dresses in the marketplace, damp empty dusty shoes. Günter Grass called this a 'wanted war' and perhaps that desire accounts for the oddncss of feeling: the animal impossibility of communication. In a damp concrete corner in the market, one's self-sense crouches close, alert for friendly fire.
The birdless place the Greeks named it. Insufflation of you know what. Followed quickly by some drone, some doctor, now that you mention it, bearing the proverbial cup on a silver filigree stem. I'll try a drop of that. The hoarse divinities would parade before the inventor of butterfly wings. No subtext here, people are naked. Bartering with the guileless do I even want to know?Three little ghostesses Sitting on postesses Eating buttered toastesses Greasing their fistesses Up to their wristesses.
We were thinking of starting a band, all lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery. This one would be gem, that one metamorphic, the rest pebbles and some laboratory-grown, semi-precious stones. The trees were in it for the long-run; they swayed or stood stoic, sheltered what they could. We made the cast as an idle grouping: we played the trump, the idiot, the glue. We backdropped with hearts hardly beating, our eyes set straight in our heads: the bombed- out school kids, the oilfields scrubbed in turns. We chewed the fat amongst ourselves. You said, this place should be more festive: a lightning bolt, a snail, a fraud. I set a crumb aside for the local roof rat; you tallied the droppings, the amputees, the gold. I blew my top when you lost "Dominion." You said, what can be done? It's gone, it's gone. Wind started in through the rift-way, buzzed over our slate-blue bones. All the leaves have aged with kindness, all our pretend looped and windowed raggedness went largely unseen. We were on stage the whole performance, held our breath for the final moments with cheeks rent and red. No neck was slit on our backs; no distraught lover jumped from our cliff's edge. There was a stirring backstage we could sense it: a temptress, some anger, some sin. Weeds came thick around us. The act had been bungled sorely. We withheld our opinions, sat in wait. We were good for a throwing.
Round and round they go  with a ribbon and garlanded  flowers in hand. The bark won't unravel,  the tree spells solidness—we  grand, oaken, elmed selves of the ancients. Our pith  is clean. There's no pining  away for tomorrow, we are in current respiration,  we move with the wind.  Singular, we are stunning. In horde,  we are dense, differing  dream. The autumnal flashiness these days  is drought-determined.  We barely go beyond the red. Our hollows  are never vacant. We live  to board; we take the ax. Marbled inside  the original stem. We were  born we don't know when.
There was no room for us to have feelings. Under the Queen, we were foiled, our faces blanked of wonder. A pitiful ordeal, our cheap toil. We hated her for stealing. Our crooked backs ached; our knees bled from kneeling, the whole sum of our treasures given up to fund her. There was no room for us to have feelings, so we made our way quietly; we arranged our own dealings, checked what we clocked. Each swallowed their thunder and railed within. Nothing left out for stealing. But pound for pound, we grew skinny, weary, reeling from the new rules she devised. We had to watch and mind her. There was no room for us to have feelings. We were audited, then fined. We abided her schooling. Then, all music stopped. All solitude filled, we couldn't ponder our losses. We tried to forget how much she was stealing. Our patron saints left us; the stars took to jeering, leering at our lessened state. We hardened at our blunder. There was no room to have any feelings. What of us? Not a pittance. No worth there for stealing.
For Ann Lauterbach Hemmed in by an un- tenable image:  feathers planted below fragile branches   of avian feet scaly crossroads scoring a particular blue of sky  offending through the uselessness of misplaced  forms thorny prongs that make no sense (and yet belong)    on the ground out of which  the bird wings stiffly jut rigid as  rhubarb leaf.    Should you kneel the body's aged mechanism  beneath the shade of dry feathers,    should you angle the vulnerable cavern  of ear—trembling passage to psyche's    failures our fall into suffering knowledge—toward the root  should youlisten you will hear    the wasted strains of an underground song rising from the muffled beak: site of a perverse smothering  throated core submerged deadened by thoughtless depths  but alive for the dead have kept it  safe from false music a ghoulish guard of LOVE    SAFE from  Psyche she who    bullied by the cruelty of others the sophistication of fashionable libraries    the envy of those who would molest the world into false confessions and banish all mystery  with their dripping candles she who would unearth the birdsong to cage it she who will end by destroying what she loves most.   Shhhh
Not forced to fall for hideous Phaon, nor to drift dreamlike from a Victorian cliff, pursued by visions of slender limbs, peach-soft hair, dewy violets clustered in an unwilling lap, not exiled on a distant island for writing smartly about love, not called amoral nor forgotten, not murdered by a jealous lover, nor weakened from drink, did not make an incision in the veins, never murdered in a tavern at twenty-nine nor thought mad, released immediately from St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, freed from Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, cured of syphilis, not mad nor ruined by drink nor shot in the head, the rope unknotted and fluidly slid from the lamp- post, sauntered away with a sideways crawl up the Champs-Élysées, never sickened from drink nor drowned in the Gulf of Spezia, the heart kept tight swam madly toward shore, disappeared down the glistening beach skipping happily in the direction of England, staved off fever while fighting for Greeks, lived, wrote, erased the blood-stained pillowcase, married Fanny, moved to Finland, fathered several pink-skinned children, lay down for a rest in the Baltimore street, got up confused about Spanish port and went to the graveyard to sleep it off, laudanum, opium, stroke, paralysis, aphasia, angels, threads of exotic Delacroix visions, but everything was put right when mom said, "Come on home, I want to care for you," left the house and walked into the river until the water level covered the hairline then shed the heavy Edwardian garments and broke into a birdlike breaststroke exclaiming, "How lovely to be free of the sickbed!" never destroyed by drink, sang while removing the shrapnel from a soldier, recovered from the Spanish flu, returned to Poland all debts forgiven by appreciative readers from the Congo, replaced the bottle of Lysol among toxic rats enjoying a sauna under the sink, did not pull the trigger or push the chair out from under the revolution while screaming about the army of the arts, put on a jacket and sailed to Mexico, calmly came up on deck, folded the jacket over the rail, and then— arrested by a vision of spread-eagled sailors descending like angels through the turquoise sky—decided not to swallow the sea, freed from Payne Whitney, walked right on through the psychiatric state hospital and out the other side, had no psychotic break while on acid in a land of dreamlike torch singers masquerading as Satanists, never touched the stuff, the dead liver tissue miraculously mended, smoker's cough silenced, cured by the sea air of old gray Gloucester, jumped into the beach taxi and drove down the beach gesticulating gaily toward the setting sun, not undone, unloved, forgotten, nor filled with despair, not punished for talking with angels, not unhappy nor alone, not misrepresented nor misunderstood nor nauseous from drink or drugs or depression, loved respected and read long-lived healthy and happy celebrated by all in life before dying contented in a comfortable bed.
I was eating my dinner alone, sitting on the living-room couch watching a movie on TV for company when the forces your covetous presence prevents slowly crawled out in fibrous droves. Without you to follow me with your clipboard, or record the game my face plays, masquerading as a cryptic territory and your field of study, the energy maggots turned the furniture into an ectoplasmic mass with the weight of iron: soft but resistant, a taut balloon against the hand. Hypnotized by the atmosphere I fell asleep, and the chair took revenge on my psyche. I could not scream, so I focused my will on pushing back against the animate matter. I was near failing when I managed to utter the word "dove," and then you shook me awake. "Stop," stop fighting with the furniture, you said. Yet something I could not see pushed hard against me, and it was not a force for good. My vocal chords were paralyzed and the language of the living was the only way to stop it.
How lovely it is not to go. To suddenly take ill. Not seriously ill, just a little under the weather. To feel slightly peaked, indisposed. Plagued by a vague ache, or a slight inexplicable chill. Perhaps such pleasures are denied to those who never feel obliged. If there are such. How pleasant to convey your regrets. To feel sincerely sorry, but secretly pleased to send them on their way without you. To entrust your good wishes to others. To spare the equivocal its inevitable rise. How nice not to hope that something will happen, but to lie on the couch with a book, hoping that nothing will. To hear the wood creak and to think. It is lovely to stay without wanting to leave. How delicious not to care how you look, clean and uncombed in the sheets. To sip brisk mineral water, to take small bites off crisp Saltines. To leave some on the plate. To fear no repercussions. Nor dodge the unkind person you bug. Even the caretaker has gone to the party. If you want something you will have to get it yourself. The blue of the room seduces. The cars of the occupied sound the wet road. You indulge in a moment of sadness, make a frown at the notion you won't be missed. This is what it is. You have opted to be forgotten so that your thoughts might live.
I've always wanted to play the part of that puckish pubescent Filipino boy in those John Wayne Pacific-War movies. Pepe, Jose, or Juanito would be smiling, bare-chested and eager to please for most of the steamy jungle scenes. I'd be the one who would cross the Japanese lines and ask for tanks, air support, or more men. I'd miraculously make it back to the town where John Wayne is holding his position against the enemy with his Thompson machine-gun. As a reward, he'd rub that big white hand on my head and he'd promise to let me clean his Tommy gun by the end of the night. But then, a Betty Grable look-a-like love interest would divert him by sobbing into his shoulder, saying how awfully scared she is about what the "Japs" would do to her if she were captured. In one swift motion, John Wayne would sweep her off her feet to calm her fears inside his private quarters. Because of my Hollywood ability to be anywhere, I'd be under the bed watching the woman roll down her stockings as my American hero unbuckles his belt I'd feel the bottom of the bed bounce off my chest as small-arms fire explodes outside the walls.
Then, take this tambourine inside the sheep barn, listen to the anaconda's intestines, the shark's walking stick, learn the river insect's secret neon calligraphy, swim through Frida Khalo's hair and come out smelling like orchids, lift your appetite towards the certified blue turtle, feast on Garcia Lorca's leather shoes and taste the sun, the worms of Andalusia, don't hesitate in front of a donut, a ferris wheel, the crab nebula, excavate diamond-eyed demons, Chaucer's liver, Minoan helmets, paste Anne Sexton's face on a $1,000 bill and purchase a dozen metaphors, beware of the absolute scorpion, the iguana with the limping leg, permit indwelling, white words around the eyes, the confrontation of windows, never feed your towel to the alligator, he will eat you and eat you and eat you.
The signature public the only avant-garde behind invention wheelchairs (in) "the street." Type (A) bleeds through the page— or screen—it becomes— a pool as it we're one drop rules(.) Individual talent divides tradition into tithes, tenths and nationalized tribes— catch-as-catch-can market share erosion. Staggered Lees piggyback the Gap. John Henry—busted by Keaton. Gentlemen, 'e thinks, as the bespoken, it was the other kind of happy feet I wanted. Guess these shoes will have to have.
for Jerry Estrin Snow covers The hills one by one Our neighborhood Characters become San Francisco 1874 Words later language A photograph At home when Light writes 1974 Or 1979 We move whereThe Lives of My Books Pages accumulate Not legible as themselves Historical time 1989 Startled leaves us Unafraid though Overgrown Died in 1993 Moved in 1994 In pink stone Earlier in "The Park" Wrote shells and cherubs The cathedral The fountain
Sometimes we would get hungry for the neighborhood. Walk up the sidewalk towards Chestnut Street. Speak to the Rev holding the light-skinned baby, ask his son to come put a new inner tube on my bike. Cross Ludlow, past the mailbox on the corner, Risqué Video, Dino's Pizza, and the Emerald Laundromat. The fruit trucks tucked into 44th Street on the left, house eyes shut with boards, fringes of children. Once we went into a store sunk into the street, owned by a Cambodian woman. She sold everything, from evening gowns to soup. Over to Walnut and 45th, where the Muslim cat sells this chicken wrapped in pita, draped in cucumber sauce. The pregnant woman behind the counter writes our order out in Arabic. We grab a juice from the freezer, some chips, eye the bean and sweet potato pies. Back into the hot breath of West Philly, sun is setting. The sky is smeared squash, tangerines in a glaze. Three girls and one boy jump doubledutch. A white man hustles from the video store with a black plastic bag. We look for money in the street, steal flowers from the church lawn. The shit stain from the wino is still on our step. Mr. Jim is washing a car for cash. John is cleaning his rims to Buju Banton. Noel is talking sweetly to the big blue-eyed woman. Linda, on her way to the restaurant. The sister in the wheelchair buzzes by with her headphones on. One night, a man was shot and killed on this block, right outside our thick wood door. But not today. Today is one of those days to come home from walking in the world, leave the windows open, start a pot of black beans. Smoke some Alice Coltrane. Cut up some fruit, toenails. Hold on to the moment as if time is taking your blood pressure.
what thoughts I have of you tonight, Du Bois of bodies rocked and minds embalmed in bark our blanched arrival—seethin with scandal's mark nowadays I peep you in the bean-pie seller's poise with that silhouette fit for bust or cameo I can't always divine your debonair birth or your boocoo brain laborin like an earth in hallelujah's ether, somehow duckin death's blow sure sprung from Imhotep's kundalini stitchin white reconstruction's funeral shroud scriptin Philly dirges for the cryin out loud cussin Garvey's name over martinis sometimes I wonder if you double agent on the page or mastermind of our ordered rage
after Billie these vitamin double ds gonna put cows outta business. these Sunday bests if frozen would delight. unpasteurized & untamed they swing in the hammock of my torso. they magnetize my man's hands. like a Wonder Woman blast or a web of thunder from Storm's wrist, this cocktail is nurturing napalm manna dew, Pepto Bismol for civilization. you can't outwit these aureolas. these nipples are necrophilia's enemy. Coltrane couldn't blow these tumescent tubas. these are gourds that'll make a shekere obsolete, make an eggplant go pale. these breasts gonna put old Betsy outta business & send the men with goats a-packin. this love is like a faucet, it turns on & on.
"Was Andalusia here or there? On the land . . . or in the poem?"  —Mahmoud Darwish I must admit to this outright theft. Before the crickets could impede me, I reached outside my window to grab as much of Andalusia as I could in the palm of my hand. I took the evening's silver from the olive trees, the yellow slumber from the lemons, the recipe for gazpacho. I made a small incision in my heart and slipped in as much as my left and right ventricles could hold. I reached for a pen and a piece of paper to ease-out the land into this poem. I closed the small incision in my heart and closed the wooden shutters of my window.
If you come to Mojacar and peel open an orange full of worms, count how many there are because those are the days it will take for your body to decompose after you are buried. If you come to Mojacar and find a small green snake with its back broken, don't step on it or you'll cause an earthquake that will catch up to you while you sleep in a continent far, far away. If you come to Mojacar and two brown long-legged spiders crawl on your face and shoulders, keep a sharp eye out for two individuals, a mother-son, or sister-sister who will try to take your money. If you come to Mojacar and see a scorpion scurry by your feet, note the direction it ran to, north, south, east, or west. You must avoid going there or risk the sting of losing a loved one. If you come to Mojacar and a cock crows ten times at three in the morning, lock your door and all the wooden windows because nightmares in silver dresses will arrive to slip into your bed.
If you stand on the corner of Mabini Street and Legazpi Avenue, wait for an orchid colored mini-bus with seven oblong doors, open the fourth door— an oscillating electric fan will be driving, tell her to proceed to the Escolta diamond district— you will pass Maneng Viray's Bar, La Isla de los Ladrones book shop, the Frederick Funston fish sauce factory, and as you turn left into Calle de Recuerdos, you will see Breton, Bataille, and Camus seated around a card table playing abecedarian dominoes— roll down your window and ask them if Mr. Florante and Miss Laura are home, if the answer is, yes, then proceed to Noli Me Tangere park and wait for a nun named Maria Clara— if the answer is, Je ne se pas!, then turn right onto the parking lot of Sikatuna's supermarket to buy a basketful of lansones fruit, then get back to Calle de Recuerdos until you reach the part that's lined with tungsten-red Juan Tamad trees, on the right will be a house with an acknowledgments page and an index, open the door and enter this page and look me in the eye.
1. Benigno Aquino Jr. International Airport The adobe-brown terminal looms like a sleeping carabao caked with mud— you come up with fifty words to describe the different shades of green you saw rushing up from the ground, you scratch your neck, feel the grime and sweat from San Francisco or L.A. on your nape, you look out your window seat search for a plaque or a stain of blood— this is the tarmac where he was shot. (For a better view, go to Ayala Avenue in Makati. In front of the Bank of the Philippine Islands and the Insular Life Building is the statue with the stairs and the dove on his shoulder. While you're there, look for the statues of Lapu Lapu and Tandang Sora among the Ipil-ipil trees on Makati Avenue.) You pass through a fluorescent-white curtain of warm air as you descend into the unloading tube— a smile from an airline attendant, the long walk to the Immigration booth,Balikbayan sir? Welcome home. a stamp for six months on your U.S. passport, another ten dollar bill between its pages for the Customs people up ahead,Balikbayan? Do you have anything to declare,pasalubong, expensive gifts for the relatives? Thank you sir! a porter in a red shirt takes your luggage to the street level, asks for five dollars, the faces of a hundred people pressed behind a bamboo fence stare as you board a Golden or Metro taxi cab. You inhale the humid air, sweat is now running down your face. 2. E. de los Santos Avenue The Jeepnies are engorged with eight or ten passengers, each jeepney speeding and stopping with their fiesta of sounds, of colors, the bodies inside breathing carbon monoxide. You take the overpass into Makati— to the right is the long tan wall topped with barbed-wire hiding the luxury homes of Dasmarinas Village, to the left is San Lorenzo Village where you'll find the San Lorenzo Pre-school. Go to the house in Zulueta Circle, this is where the poet of Like The Molave once lived. His widow's name is Cora. On the corner of Edsa and Buendia, among the street vendors selling copies of Woman's Day, Manila Bulletin, or Marlboro and Winston cigarettes, you might see a girl without a left arm tapping on windows of stopped cars pointing to her mouth, asking for money. Every other year, before the monsoon rains, it's the same arm that's cut off just above the elbow, a different young face running up to cars in the same intersection. 3. Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo You pass Camp Crame where Ninoy Aquino, Jose Maria Sison, the poet Mila D. Aguilar, and countless others were "detained" under Marcos. The positive wire attached to the penis, the negative to the scrotum. This is also the place where more than a million people said "no" to the Dictator. You may still hear stories about the tear gas, the armored personnel vehicles, the ordinary people who would not move out of the way. They say that for three days the electricity to the whole city was turned off but the people still fought for freedom, sang songs to each other around bonfires, made love by candle light.
"You can be so inconsiderate."  "You are too sensitive." "Then why don't you take my feelings into consideration?"  "If you weren't so sensitive it wouldn't matter."  • "You seem to really care about me only when you want me to do  something for you."  "You do too much for people." • "I thought you were going home because you were too tired to go with me to a bar."  "I was. But Norman didn't want to come here alone." •
of July    bagpipes big mad Hitchcockian crows siren families striding hurrying  want a whole lot of love sings the Joplin  mimic white birch willow swings pollen  the cars in shade  way way down gonna give you my love  staying in the house  the crows outside are winning car door a muffled crowd gasp wheels at the top of the sky  and waits  the night sky's visuals  called "Untamed Retribution" and "Rain Fire"  an objective sincerity the war does not space itself  two teenage girls at the screen with the sun in their eyes all day time takes  all the time bright canisters in the culverts girls read  hills of it  day-long trash truck heads down our street  what a big  engine emergency brake distance between telephone pole and queen palm's trunk  smoke loops from back of the house to front  leaves no signet in cloud sidewalk's scalding path  'neath county's ripe  corn table  globe's eggshell  for romance the girls layer their tears back into their skin  many dawns the boys waving    bends  air crosses clouds in hot nets  increasing the local tenor's uprightness fumes exhume  the crowd stands open-mouthed  heads lifted you you you you you and you send me smoke falls through each head of hair to each ear's    size and limit  love  sound-chamber'd  moon's  far off place
to wake to winter in the coming out of the time of year when they release the masterpieces,  but to be still in the other night.  some drown in movies. some prefer the unfinished ungovernable recital,  a mystical ecology  where one dies in a camp,  or rolls out with the dice  on the sidewalk among boys with cardboard shields  and plays dead in white crinoline. what if paradise was only lifting the veil to flirt.  no one perfect, but perfection inserts us so, Pascal  thinks a God in his pocket. what if paradise meant walking  on the ground of our self estrangement, and the veil of our gaze  an unsteady balm was not what we saw through  but were, twisting, untwisting— do you believe. we were never strictly servants.
2810 El Paso Street, 1974 Solitary as a mast on a mountaintop, an ocean of knowing long withdrawn, she dittied the days, grew fluent in cat, felt, she said, each seed surreptitiously split the adamantine dark, believing green. It was the town's torpor washed me to her door, it was the itch existence stranded me on that shore of big-lipped shells pinked with altogether other suns, random wall-blobs impastoed with jewels and jowls sometimes a citizen seemed to peek through, inward and inward all the space and spice of her edible heavens. O to feel again within the molded dough wet pottery, buttery cosmos, brain that has not cooled; to bring to being an instant sculpture garden: five flashlit jackrabbits locked in black. From her I learned the earthworm's exemplary open-mindedness, its engine of discriminate shit. From her I learned all the nuances of neverness that link the gladiola to God. How gone she must be, graveless maybe, who felt the best death would be for friends to eat you, whose last name I never even knew: dirt-rich mouse-proud lady who Rubied me into a life so starred and laughtered there was no need for after.
Love's last urgency is earth and grief is all gravity and the long fall always back to earliest hours that exist nowhere but in one's brain. From the hard-packed pile of old-mown grass, from boredom, from pain, a boy's random slash unlocks a dark ardor of angry bees that link the trees and block his way home. I like to hold him holding me, mystery mastering fear, so young, standing unstung under what survives of sky. I learned too late how to live. Child, teach me how to die.
I tell you it's a bitch existence some Sundays and it's no good pretending you don't have to pretend, don't have to hitch up those gluefutured nags Hope and Help and whip the sorry chariot of yourself toward whatever hell your heaven is on days like these. I tell you it takes some hunger heaven itself won't slake to be so twitchingly intent on the pretty organist's pedaling, so lizardly alert to the curvelessness of her choir robe. Here it comes, brothers and sisters, the confession of sins, hominy hominy, dipstick doxology, one more churchcurdled hymn we don't so much sing as haunt: grounded altos, gear-grinding tenors, two score and ten gently bewildered men lip-synching along. You're up, Pastor. Bring on the unthunder. Some trickle-piss tangent to reality. Some bit of the Gospel grueling out of you. I tell you sometimes mercy means nothing but release from this homiletic hologram, a little fleshstep sideways, as it were, setting passion on autopilot (as if it weren't!) to gaze out in peace at your peaceless parishioners: boozeglazes and facelifts, bad mortgages, bored marriages, a masonry of faces at once specific and generic, and here and there that rapt famished look that leaps from person to person, year to year, like a holy flu. All these little crevices into which you've crawled like a chubby plumber with useless tools: Here, have a verse for your wife's death. Here, have a death for your life's curse. I tell you some Sundays even the children's sermon — maybe especially this — sharks your gut like a bite of tin some beer-guzzling goat either drunkenly or mistakenly decides to sample. I know what you're thinking. Christ's in this. He'll get to it, the old cunner, somewhere somehow there's the miracle meat, the aurora borealis blood, every last atom compacted to a grave and the one thing that every man must lose to save. Well, friends, I'm here to tell you two things today. First, though this is not, for me, one of those bilious abrading days, though in fact I stand before you in a rage of faith and have all good hope that you will all go help untold souls back into their bodies, ease the annihilating No above which they float, the truth is our only savior is failure. Which brings me to the second thing: that goat. It was real. It is, as is usually the case, the displacement of agency that is the lie. It was long ago, Mexico, my demon days: It was a wager whose stakes I failed to appreciate. He tottered. He flowered. He writhed time to a fraught quiet, and kicked occasionally, and lay there twitching, watching me die.
I don't want to be alive anymore. I don't want to be alive enough to want that. One is not meant to turn on one's creator with ferocity expendable in only one way. Or is that exactly how one is meant to turn to burn   beyond the love that from beyond being has come to us: Christ's ever unhearable and thus always too bearable scream. In love and dread we learn to listen for beloved dread coming upon us like a whiplash rain we watch through a window. In pain we learn pain. Sometimes amid the rancid moonlight and mindlice of my insomnia there gleams a scalpel blade so clean with meaning so shaped and sharpened to interstellar blue that drawing it —in season due — across my own throat there comes not blood but an ancient answering starlight. Once upon a time in a pleasingly modern slaughterhospice with a view of sky-contempted skyscrapers and Lake Michigan's immaculate sewage my inner skin was skinned mouth to bowels, my soul —deadword, die to find it. For self-pity there must remain a self. Ah, but even shitting one's self one still finds one's self hastening to hide it all from the kind Ukranian nearly bearded night nurse. Fentanyl patches patching my stalactite thighs my diaphanous shoulders the very air eating me like a late leaf that once I would have flourished for a perishable lover or lonelied like some catpiss poignancy into a poem. Dead brain, living will, little pills entangling pain with adoration of it, morphine machine whose little beep (heavenly bell) conjures me to the suddenly more tolerable hallways of hell . . .  Lovely Leila, so unsurgically curved, disclosing as she leans to clean my lines a bit of icelace undergarment like the very last trace of a glacier. The brain the brain the brain flickering electrically in and out,  in,  out— not the mind in which I love my wife whose tightwound nightmind conjures Christ in diapers, for instance, filthy infant, or later, in a mist of adolescent bad weather, bored of wood, dogdead Judea, squawk-box God, some restless absurdity of earth, she says, through which the rest of heaven can come. Once upon a time I walked through the chemical glamour of a night refinery sparking dangerously without and within for beside me under her underclothes undulated an incarnation of creation's finest failure: moonskin to make a young man wince coupled with stifling innocence. Still, we managed. And over the wrought-iron railing of the country club to which neither of us could possibly belong, in the moonskinned pool that seemed both to embody and imbibe her, we improved. And later, out on a green (to be sixteen!) when the starshower I thought was mine was mining me for sweat, muscle, memory to make its own death shine unceasingly inside of me, even unto hell,  we excelled. Can it be that her last name was really Key? So much life in this poem so much salvageable and saving love but it is I fear I swear I tear open what heart I have left to keep it from being and beating and bearing down upon me    •  What rest in faith wrested  from grief What truce  with truth in bowing down not to the ground of being  but simply to the ground Affliction flickers distant  now like a structure on fire  Love's reprieve moves through me like a breeze But antlike  existence crawls all over me Lord and I cry out if you call  this vise quiet  a cry this riot of needs and genes an I Feelingly  among the bones  and nerves of sounds I make my scathing way  Failingly in church or in the parked car  before work I try  to pray What might it mean to surrender  to the wonder nothing  means   Not to end  with a little flourish  of earth Not to end •  Love is the living heart of dread    Love I love you unto the very edge of being    Dead • Something in us suffering touches, teaches first to find little coves in our loves: blank nothings wherein we are what we always were  — blank nothings — but changed or rearranged as atoms  in the random  kingdom  of things:hand, we say, or eye, or hair, as if to make ourselves — to stake ourselves — truly there Knowing now not to move in time we are moved  by tiger-striped tails bloodfine fins some natureless cerulean one would say thinking oneself out of nature Something in us, suffering, touches, torches,  so we may saunter seeingly through an altogether other element, as once in the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago  I floated a moment with my love and the two new lives borne from us  who loved best the eensy  green  almost  unfish more like the stars when you close your eyes and whirl open to the whirling grains so freed from things  you fall  down  laughing at the havoc For me for a long time not the minnows mattered but the pattern after: miraculous I didn't think to think: all those mite-eyes and animate instants answering at once to my need and to nothing as if my very nerves worked in finally a saving sense Something in us touches suffering  touching us like the constellations of kinetic quiet that bound us beyond us as right to the wall the girls pressed their still-forming faces through which the wild new schools flew  almost  too green  too blue  to stand And I held your hand.
I 'Is it really a revolution, though?' I reached across the wicker table With another $10,000 question.  My celebrated pamphleteer, Co-author of such volumes As Blood on the Rose,The Dream and the Drums, And How It Happened Here, Would pour some untroubled Muscatel And settle back in his cane chair. 'Look, son. Just look around you. People are getting themselves killed Left, right and centre While you do what? Write rondeaux? There's more to living in this country Than stars and horses, pigs and trees, Not that you'd guess it from your poems. Do you never listen to the news? You want to get down to something true, Something a little nearer home.' I called again later that afternoon, A quiet suburban street. 'You want to stand back a little When the world's at your feet.' I'd have liked to have heard some more Of his famous revolution. I rang the bell, and knocked hard On what I remembered as his front door, That opened then, as such doors do, Directly on to a back yard. II Not any back yard, I'm bound to say, And not a thousand miles away From here. No one's taken in, I'm sure, By such a mild invention. But where (I wonder myself) do I stand, In relation to a table and chair, The quince tree I forgot to mention, That suburban street, the door, the yard— All made up as I went along As things that people live among. And such a person as lived there! My celebrated pamphleteer! Of course, I gave it all away With those preposterous titles.The Bloody Rose? The Dream and the Drums? The three-day wonder of the flowering plum! Or was I desperately wishing To have been their other co-author, Or, at least, to own a first edition Of The Boot Boys and Other Battles? 'When are you going to tell the truth?' For there's no such book, so far as I know, As How it Happened Here, Though there may be. There may. What should I say to this callow youth Who learned to write last winter— One of those correspondence courses— And who's coming to lunch today? He'll be rambling on, no doubt, About pigs and trees, stars and horses.
She. My people came from Korelitz where they grew yellow cucumbers and studied the Talmud.He. Mine pored over the mud of mangold- and potato-pits or flicked through kale plants from Comber as bibliomancers of old went a-flicking through deckle-mold.She. Mine would lie low in the shtetl when they heard the distant thunder stolen by the Cossacks.He. It was potato sacks lumped together on a settle mine found themselves lying under, the Peep O'Day Boys from Loughgall making Defenders of us all.She. Mine once controlled the sugar trade from the islets of Langerhans and were granted the deed to Charlottesville. He. Indeed? My people called a spade a spade and were admitted to the hanse of pike- and pickax-men, shovels leaning to their lean-to hovels.She. Mine were trained to make a suture after the bomb and the bombast have done their very worst.He. Between fearsad and verst we may yet construct our future as we've reconstructed our past and cry out, my love, each to each from his or her own quicken-queach.She. Each from his stand of mountain ash will cry out over valley farms spotlit with pear blossom.He. There some young Absalom picks his way through cache after cache of ammunition and small arms hidden in grain wells, while his nag tugs at a rein caught on a snag.
When the Master was calling the roll At the primary school in Collegelands, You were meant to call back Anseo And raise your hand As your name occurred.Anseo, meaning here, here and now, All present and correct, Was the first word of Irish I spoke. The last name on the ledger Belonged to Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward And was followed, as often as not, By silence, knowing looks, A nod and a wink, the Master's droll 'And where's our little Ward-of-court?' I remember the first time he came back The Master had sent him out Along the hedges To weigh up for himself and cut A stick with which he would be beaten. After a while, nothing was spoken; He would arrive as a matter of course With an ash-plant, a salley-rod. Or, finally, the hazel-wand He had whittled down to a whip-lash, Its twist of red and yellow lacquers Sanded and polished, And altogether so delicately wrought That he had engraved his initials on it. I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward In a pub just over the Irish border. He was living in the open, In a secret camp On the other side of the mountain. He was fighting for Ireland, Making things happen. And he told me, Joe Ward, Of how he had risen through the ranks To Quartermaster, Commandant: How every morning at parade His volunteers would call back Anseo And raise their hands As their names occurred.
Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.
That's why we're here, said Julio Lugo to the Globe. Sox fans booed poor Lugo, booed his at-bat after he dropped the ball in the pivotal fifth.That ball, I got to it, I just couldn't come up with it. Lugo wants you to know he is fast: a slower player wouldn't even get close enough to get booed. Lugo wants you to know he's only human: We're human beings.That's why we're here. If not,I would have wings.I'd be beside God right now.I'd be an angel.But I'm not an angel.I'm a human being that lives right here. Next day, all is forgiven. Lugo's home run, Lugo's sweet comment to the press. I wanted to make a poster like the ones that sayIt's my birthday! or First Time at Fenway! or, pathetic, ESPN. Posterboard, permanent marker to say Lugo: me, too.I'm a human being that lives right here, decided it's too esoteric, too ephemeral a reference, but it's true: Oh, Lugo, Julio Lugo, I'm here with you.
Lockers, metal detectors, steel doors, C.O. to C.O., different forms, desks—mouth open, turn—so slow I use the time to practice patience, grace, tenderness for glassed-in guards. The rules recited as if they were the same rules every week: I can wear earrings. I cannot wear earrings. I can wear my hair up. I cannot wear my hair up. I dressed by rote: cords in blue or brown, grey turtleneck, black clogs. The prisoners, all in grey sweatshirts, blue jeans, joked I looked like them, fit in. I didn't think about it, until I dreamed of being shuffled in and locked in there, hustled through the heavy doors. In the dream the guards just shook their heads, smirked when I spelled out my name, shook the freezing bars. Instead of nightly escorts out, I'd stay in there forever. Who would know? So I went to Goodwill, spent ten bucks on pink angora, walked back down those halls a movie star. When I stood at the front of the class there rose a sharp collective sigh. The one who said she never heard of pandering until the arraignment said OK, I'm goingto tell her. Then she told me: freedom is wasted on women like me. They hate the dark cotton, jeans they have to wear, each one a shadow of the other their whole sentence. You could wear red! she accused. Their favorite dresses, silk slips, wool socks all long gone, bagged up for sisters, moms—maybe Goodwill, maybe I flicked past them looking for this cotton candy pink angora cardigan, pearl buttons. They can't stop staring, so I take it off and pass it around, let each woman hold it in her arms, appraise the wool between her fingers, a familiar gesture, second nature, from another world.
I wake up with a toothache, think I should writeabout a toothache, make it somehow worthwhile. It's got everything: intimacy, decay, how the body's busy, night and day, doing you in. One of the hundreds of jumpers' corpses pulled from the bay had a note in its pocket saying No reason at all exceptI have a toothache. Josey's grandfather shot himself after his fifth sinus operation failed. Josey says Empty Nose Syndrome and I get confused— how can hollows be hollowed? But then I go to emptynosesyndrome.org, cup my poor nose in horror, grateful for all I take for granted, can't see. Golden Gate Hank hates his nickname.If you wanted to be called Serenity Hank, Ken tells him, you shouldn't have jumpedoff the fucking bridge. The ones that live all say they changed their minds in the four seconds before they hit, tried to land feet first and managed it. Ken says don't tell people I think every dayof how I wouldn't kill myself, they get the wrong idea. I think every day of how I'd save myself, save Josey: stab the bad guy, fall feet first, punch the Great White in his eyeball, play dead in the bullet-ridden mass grave. From the back seat of the Suburban, I heard my mother say to my father Driving across a high bridgealways makes me want to jump. You might live: A seventeen year old boy hit feet first, swam to shore and walked for help, saying his back was killing him. Another guy realized he was alive and underwater, felt something brushing his broken legs. Great, now I get eaten by a shark, he thought. It happens. But this was a seal, circling,apparently the only thing that was keeping me alive,and you can not tell me that wasn't God, because that's what I believe, and that's what I'll believe until the day I die.
I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave. in Boston, a couple blocks away from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel, rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out of the car yelling, swearing at this woman, a little woman, whose first language was not English. But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew, we both knew, that the thing to do is get out of the car, slam the door as hard as you fucking can and yell things like What the fuckwere you thinking? You fucking blind? What the fuckis going on? Jesus Christ! So we swore at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled chins. I threw my arms around, sudden jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs of my hands toward where she had hit my truck. But she hadn't hit my truck. She hit the tire; no damage done. Her car was fine, too. We saw this while we were yelling, and then we were stuck. The next line in our little drama should have beenLook at this fucking dent! I'm not paying for thisshit. I'm calling the cops, lady. Maybe we'd throw in aYou're in big trouble, sister, or I just hope for your sakethere's nothing wrong with my fucking suspension, that sort of thing. But there was no fucking dent. There was nothing else for us to do. So I stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she'd backed into, her little eyebrows pursed and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous, and I'd been acting as if I'd like to hit her. So I saidWell, there's nothing wrong with my car, nothing wrongwith your car . . . are you OK? She nodded, and started to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge. I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren't we? and she nodded and we laughed.
English Composition at South Middlesex Correctional Center. Julie reads out loud, and I praise her super thesis, then show how her paragraphs veer away from it, just summarize. And is she pissed! Too pissed to listen when her classmates try to help. Amanda offers Act 2 Scene 1—"Now I do love her too"—as evidence of Iago's state of mind. But Julie's shutting down, frowning at her handwritten draft, writing that took her weeks. Hey Julie, I say. Julie doesn't look up. Says What. Says I hate this stupid paper now. So I sayHey Julie. Amanda's helping you—write downwhat she's saying. She says I'm aggravated. I think they take classes on naming their feelings. I say I know itbut you need to pull it together, or you'll end up screwingyourself. This is your chance. We're all quiet, breathing together, willing her to break out of this. Then: a little miracle. I look around the room and see that everyone is beautiful. Each did something special with her hair. Hey, I say, again. I say hey a lot in prison.Hey wait a minute. What's up with everybody's hair? Mabel got a haircut. Ellie's hair is long and black and gleaming down her back, Amanda's in French braids. Julie's freshly blonde, down to the roots. You guys all look great! They laugh. They're happy I noticed. Thank god I noticed; now, for a minute, we are women in a room, talking about their hair. Julie says Amanda did her highlights, and Sandy blew it out. Good job, guys;she looks great. And then I say, Julie. Look at youall pissed off over your paper when you're so lucky!Look at all these good friends you have. Helpingwith your paper, doing your hair . . . She nods. She looks me in the eye, back with us, back on track.I know, she says. I need to work on my gratitude.
Once upon a time there was a soldier who marched to Mictlán in his soldier boots and every step was a soldier step and every breath was a soldier word. Do you know what this soldier said? I'd like a piece of bread for my soldier hand. I'd like a slice of cheese for my soldier nose. And I'd like a woman for my soldier heart. The mayor of Mictlán saluted the soldier and bowed his head as he told the soldier: We have no bread, oh honorable soldier, we hold empty hands instead. Dear soldier, let us take yours if we may. And the soldier held out his hand to be taken. Oh brave soldier, said the mayor, cheese is your soldier wish, but we have none since the other soldier left. We whiff empty hands instead. The soldier let the mayor sniff the scent of his soldier palm. And forgive us, oh strong soldier, said the mayor, but no woman worthy of soldier warmth lives in our empty town. Will your soldier eyes teach us wonder and kindness and soldier love instead? Silence stiffened the soldier face as a search ensued in the soldier head for a moment one moment of soldier bliss. But all was dead. The longer the soldier looked the more the streets of his soldier mind resembled the streets that his soldier feet had taken him to: where no lost soldier finds bread or cheese or a woman to be a soldier wife. This was no space for a soldier life indeed. So off to the hills the soldier fled to seek out the place where a soldier sheds the rattle that beckons the soldier to death to soldier to death to soldier.
Oh father, oh music man with a whistle instead of a coin to toss on your walks, keep these things for us until we're ready to come home: our baby teeth, fragments of bone that rattle in a domino box. Tuck it in your pocket but please don't gamble it away the way you lost our christening gowns in poker. We had outgrown them, true, but what other proof did we have that all seven of our outfits could be stacked and shuffled like a deck of cards. Keep the bottle cap opener hanging by a string. Wear it like a locket and stay collared to our after-school bliss when we found you underneath a tree that scattered glass fruit around your feet. The boys lined them up for death by slingshot, and the girls giggled when the bodies shattered. Take good care of our drawings, our crooked handwriting exercises, the scribbles of our names, and sew a suit with sailboats on the sleeves, a coat with Qs sliding down a wire, and pants that celebrate our prepubescent autographs. And in your shoe— don't tell us which! let us guess!— save the coin you told us came from China. It had a hole in the middle because the merchants slid their change on chopsticks. We pictured them on market Sundays holding up their earnings like a shish kabob. We know you hid the coin because all seven of us wanted it and so you took it with you. Or so I claimed. Can I be blamed, oh father, oh story man, for wanting to possess the single thing that couldn't be shared? You saw me slide it out the window of your wallet while you napped and didn't snap to attention to complain. Of all your sons and daughters it is I who wanted to escape the most, to anywhere. I learned the desperate alchemy of flowering a barren day with song from you, oh master. A minstrel needs his freedom. And so you let me take it.
I am not your mother, I will not be moved by the grief or gratitude of men who weep like orphans at my door. I am not a church. I do not answer prayers but I never turn them down. Come in and kneel or sit or stand, the burden of your weight won't lessen no matter the length of your admission. Tell me anything you want, I have to listen but don't expect me to respond when you tell me you have lost your job or that your wife has found another love or that your children took their laughter to another town. You feel alone and empty? Color me surprised! I didn't notice they were gone. Despite the row of faces pinned like medals to my walls, I didn't earn them. The scratches on the wood are not my scars. If there's a smell of spices in the air blame the trickery of kitchens   or your sad addiction to the yesterdays that never keep no matter how much you believe they will. I am not a time capsule. I do not value pithy things like locks of hair and milk teeth and ticket stubs and promise rings—mere particles of dust I'd blow out to the street if I could sneeze. Take your high school jersey and your woman's wedding dress away from me. Sentimental hoarding bothers me. So off with you, old couch that cries in coins as it gets dragged out to the porch. Farewell, cold bed that breaks its bones in protest to eviction or foreclosure or whatever launched this grim parade of exits. I am not a pet. I do not feel abandonment. Sometimes I don't even see you come or go or stay behind. My windows are your eyes not mine. If you should die inside me I'll leave it up to you to tell the neighbors. Shut the heaters off I do not fear the cold. I'm not the one who shrinks into the corner of the floor because whatever made you think this was a home with warmth isn't here to sweet-talk anymore. Don't look at me that way, I'm not to blame. I granted nothing to the immigrant or exile that I didn't give a bordercrosser or a native born. I am not a prize or a wish come true. I am not a fairytale castle. Though I used to be, in some distant land inhabited by dreamers now extinct. Who knows what happened there? In any case, good riddance, grotesque fantasy and mirth.    So long, wall-to-wall disguise in vulgar suede and chintz. Take care, you fool, and don't forget that I am just a house, a structure without soul for those whose patron saints are longing and despair.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, We died in your valleys and died on your plains. We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes, Both sides of the river, we died just the same. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees)," Woody Guthrie I  after the immigration raid Beneath one apple tree the fruit lies flung like the beads from a rosary with a broken string. Another tree stands amused over the strangeness of a shoe that pretends to be an apple in its redness, though it'll never be an apple with that lace stem and a pit where a core should be. The tree at the end of the row will weep over the pillage all week. Around its trunk, debris: straw hats, handkerchief, a basket going hungry for what's out of reach. Somewhere in the orchard a screech goes weaker by the hour. A radio without paws, it cannot claw its chords to end its suffering. But silence comes, eventually, and the apple trees will rest, gathering the shadows to their roots as the flame inside each apple falls asleep. All the while, finches perch among the branches—patient vultures waiting for the fruit to rot. For a wasp, intoxicated by the sugars, this is the perfect place to nest. The colony will thrive inside decay: the apples softening until their wrinkled skins begin to sink, the seeds poking through like teeth. The trees will sway without the wind because the ground will boil with larvae. A bird will feast until it chokes and ants will march into the belly through the beak. II  after the ride by bus A strand of hair pretends to be a crack and sticks to glass. A piece of thread sits on a seat, pretends to be a tear. The bus makes believe no one cried into their hands and smeared that grief onto its walls. The walls will keep the fingerprints a secret until the sheen of oils glows by moon. Rows of ghosts come forth to sing.   Until that keening rocks the bus to rest, the fumes intoxicate the solitary button—single witness to the shuffling of feet and a final act of fury: the yanking of a wetback's shirt. The button popped right off the flannel, marched in the procession and then scurried to the side. The lesson: if wounded, stay behind to die.  The bus breathes out the shapes turned silhouettes turned scent of salt and sweat. The steering wheel unspools, every window shaking loose the wetness of its glare. And now a riddle squats over the parking lot: What creature stands its ground after evisceration? Roadkill. Clouds close in to consume the afterbirth. III  after the detention in the county jail  A mausoleum also keeps these gems: precipitation that hardens into diamonds on the cobweb stems, streams of urine that shimmer like streaks of gold. Lights coax out the coat of polish on the floor and what's solid softens into water stripped of ripples. Stilled and empty, a river that has shoved its pebbles down its throat. The cell holds out three drops of blood and will barter them for company, hungry for the smell of men again. Janitor, border guard or detainee, it's all the same musk of armpit, garlic breath, oils that bubble up from crack to tailbone, scent of semen from the foreskin, fungus from the toes. Without takers, the keyhole constricts in the cold. IV after the deportation plane falls from the sky A red-tailed hawk breaks through the smoke and doesn't drop the way the bodies did when the plane began to dive and spat pieces of its cargo out the door. No grace, the twitching of such a great machine. No beauty to its blackening inside the pristine canvas of majestic blue—a streak of rage made by a torch and not a paintbrush. The hawk lands on the canyon and snaps its neck in quick response to the vulgar cracking on the boulders, to the shrill of metal puncturing the canyon, to the burst of flames that traps a nest of mice within the lair turned furnace, burning shriek, and hair. Stunned host of sparrows scatters. Fume of feathers, pollution in the air. Poison in the lungs of all that breathes. A darkness rises. The blue absorbs it the way it dissipates a swarm after the crisis of a shattered hive. Heaven shows its mercy also, swallowing the groan that spilled out of the hill. No signs of tragedy by dusk except a star splayed over rock, the reek of fumes—a disemboweled god. V  after the clean-up along Los Gatos Canyon What strange flowers grow in the shadow. Without petals and with crooked twigs for stems. The butterflies that pollinated them were bits of carbon glowing at the edge. The solitary lone wolf spider doesn't dare to bite the scorched caul on the canyon. It packs its fangs for brighter lands. The footprints drawn in black do not match the footprints in the orchard though they also bear the weight of the unwanted. The chain gang called upon to gather the debris sang the Prison Blues all afternoon: Inmate, deportee, in your last attempt to flee every bone splits into three. VI after the communal burial Twenty-eight equals one deportation bus equals one cell in the detention center, one plane-load of deportees, one plunge into the canyon, one body in the coffin although one was a woman—sister not alone anymore among the chaperone of angels with wings of stone. Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón, Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón, Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín, Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz, Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón, Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador, Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé, Rosalío Portillo, María, y José. Y un Deportado No Identificado.   No papers necessary to cross the cemetery. The sun floods the paths between tombs and everything pushes out into light. No shame to be a cherub without a nose. The wreath will not hide its decay. Cement displays its injuries with no regrets. This is the place to forget about labor and hardship and pain. No house left to build, no kitchen to clean, no chair on a porch, no children to feed. No longing left except a wish that will never come true: Paint us back into the blank sky's blue. Don't forget us like we've forgotten all of you.
Just when I had long outgrown those late-night  seizures in my hand, those involuntary impulses return to make my fingers twitch like the tips of twigs  after the bird leaps off the branch— what a crafty little devil, bouncing back all  feathered and ticklish, jittery with pleasure when it finally finds its nest. The sheets become as damp  as the sweaty shirts that cling to the backs of men at the dance, and how I pity the girls who  undress their lovers before sex. When I started loving other bodies instead, allowing other  temporary guests to mold their shapes inside my flesh— a torso of my arm, a shoulder of my mouth, a waist  or a buttock of my leg—I had no need to concentrate my rapture to a single sticky place  since every movement in my skin was slowing down inside the vat of honey I was swimming in.  Oh bath with tongue, oh alchemy of heat and bed. The memory of so much sex enough to keep me sated  in the quieter evenings of my third and final age. So imagine my surprise when those possessions  from my adolescence woke me up again, but in the guise of scribbling from my pen. Not fancy or confession  but something in the middle, like the mole that snuggles   in the space between my breasts, that glorious discovery  that makes the men cry out, the women shudder with anticipation or intent. It's more like poetry, because it whistles through the paper like the weekend  afternoons I summoned passersby from behind the window's curtain. What wonder to seduce with sound,  granting serendipitous fantasy—here a table with rotating thighs, there a closet panting with exhaustion,  there the eye of the voyeuristic clock bold and looking to be satisfied with one pair of feet pointing at  two opposite corners of the room, three fingers always vanishing inside the cluster of  four hands that motion slowly left, slowly right— the capricious current of the underwater flower,  five limbs comparing lengths and flexibility, their competition sabotaged by the arrival of a  sixth contender, seven escalating levels in the throat— whimper, grunt, moan, sigh,  whine, hum, groan, cry—oh, and if we're lucky, thinks the grinning clock, we will spiral up the scale  (and down again) a good eight times, nine would be too much to ask,  though not impossible since there was once a record-breaking tenth, remember? Eleven minutes for a quickie; at least twelve positions for a marathon
In the dark evening, my father and I walk down the road to the old house where my grandmother lived, and we see through the door an old woman's feet lifted up, tired, on a footstool, still in her thick stockings, the feet with legs and stockings looking just like Grandma's after bearing nine children who lived, standing, working all day, the kind of woman who made stacks of toast, platters of eggs for all of us each hot morning, did laundry, then lunch, supper, and worked with the animals or cleaning fish the rest of the day. I want to go open that door as I did so many times in the past, remembering not to slam the screen, as everyone would yell although I am now also older and finite, the seams of myself coming apart. How I wish I could go to that woman with her legs up and rub her feet, put liniment on her legs. Years have passed through the doors of that house, of memory, doors of the past and my father's eyes are sad, looking in, his own memories, not mine, thinking maybe of his mother and some of his old belongings, the stolen Colt of his own father, the bracelet he gave me with his R.A. number. Her memories are unremembered, as my grandfather's, as those before them, I think of what this poem is about, only partly about memory, our many losses. And walking with my father I walk with my grandparents, among the first to be numbered: #1556, #1555.
With lines unseen the land was broken. When surveyors came, we knew what the prophet had said was true, this land with unseen lines would be taken. So, you who live there now, don't forget to love it, thank it the place that was once our forest, our ponds, our mosses, the swamplands with birds and more lowly creatures. As for us, we walked into the military strength of hunger and war for that land we still dream. As the ferry crossed the distance, or as the walkers left behind their loved ones, think how we took with us our cats and kittens, the puppies we loved. We were innocent of what we faced, along the trail. We took clothing, dishes, thinking there would be something to start a new life, believing justice lived in the world, and the horses, so many, one by one stolen, taken by the many thieves So have compassion for that land at least. Every step we took was one away from the songs, old dances, memories, some of us dark and not speaking English, some of us white, or married to the dark, or children of translators the half-white, all of us watched by America, all of us longing for trees for shade, homing, rooting, even more for food along the hunger way. You would think those of us born later would fight for justice, for peace, for the new land, its trees being taken. You would think the struggle would be over between the two worlds in this place that is now our knowledge, our new belonging, our being, and we'd never again care for the notion of maps or American wars, or the god of their sky, thinking of those things we were forced to leave behind, living country, stolen home, the world measured inch by inch, mile by mile, hectares, all measurements, even the trail of our tears. With all the new fierce light, heat, drought the missing water, you'd think in another red century, the old wisdom might exist if we considered enough that even before the new beliefs we were once whole, but now our bodies and minds remain the measured geography.
To be held by the light was what I wanted, to be a tree drinking the rain, no longer parched in this hot land. To be roots in a tunnel growing but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves and the green slide of mineral down the immense distances into infinite comfort and the land here, only clay, still contains and consumes the thirsty need the way a tree always shelters the unborn life waiting for the healing after the storm which has been our life.
The only Mexican that ever was Mexican, fought in the revolution and drank nightly, and like all machos, crawled into work crudo, letting his breath twirl, then clap and sing before sandpaper juiced the metal. The only Mexican to never sit in a Catholic pew was born on Halloween, and ate his lunch wrapped in foil against the fence with the other Mexicans. They fixed old Fords where my grandfather worked for years, him and the welder Juan wagered each year on who would return first to the Yucatan. Neither did. When my aunts leave, my dad paces the living room and then rests, like a jaguar who once drank rain off the leaves of Cecropia trees, but now caged, bends his paw on a speaker to watch crowds pass. He asks me to watch grandpa, which means, for the day; in town for two weeks, I have tried my best to avoid this. Many times he will swear, and many times grandpa will ask to get in and out of bed, want a sweater, he will ask the time, he will use the toilet, frequently ask for beer, about dinner, when the Padres play, por que no novelas, about bed. He will ask about his house, grandma, to sit outside, he will question while answering, he will smirk, he will invent languages while tucked in bed. He will bump the table, tap the couch, he will lose his slipper, wedging it in the wheel of his chair, like a small child trapped in a well, everyone will care. He will cry without tears—a broken carburetor of sobs. When I speak Spanish, he shakes his head, and reminds me, he is the only Mexican.
Powder rises from a compact, platters full of peppermints,  a bowl of sour pudding. A cup of milk before me tastes of melted almonds. It is the story of the eve of my beginning. Gifts for me: boxes of poppies, pocket knife, an elaborate necklace made of ladybugs. My skirt rushing north There is something round and toothless about my dolls. They have no faith. Their mouths, young muscle  to cut me down.  Their pupils, miniature bruises. I hear the cries of horses, long faces famished,  the night the barn burned.  God and ashes everywhere. Burnt pennies, I loved them, I could not catch them in their copper rolling. My mother's cigarette burns amber in a crystal glass. I am in bed imagining great infernos. Ashes skimming my deep lake. The night the animals burned, I kissed the servant with the salty lips. There was a spectacular explosion, a sound that severed the nerves, I was kind  to that shaking. The horses, the smell of them, like wet leaves, broken skin. Laughing against a wall, my hair sweeps the windowsill, thighs show themselves. First came my body, my statue's back, then hair electric,  matches falling everywhere. Tucked in my pink canopy, I am plastic, worn cheeks grinning. I found my little ones hiding from me,  crying into their sleeves. They are really from a breeze, momentarily, white.  When we unburied the dolls, red ants were a fantasy feeding on them, nest of veins, shrunken salted corpses. There is mythology planted in my mouth which is like sin.Keep fires inside yourself. My mother once said, When you were a baby,  I let you swim in a basin of water until your lungs stopped
Beijing I could still hear the musicians cajoling those thousands of clay horses and horsemen through the squeeze when I woke beside Carlotta. Life-size, also. Also terra-cotta. The sky was still a terra-cotta frieze over which her grandfather still held sway with the set square, fretsaw, stencil, plumb line, and carpenter's pencilhis grandfather brought from Roma. Proud-fleshed Carlotta. Hypersarcoma. For now our highest ambition was simply to bear the light of the day we had once been planning to seize. Baginbun The Nashville skyline's hem and haw as the freebooters who freeboot through their contractual mire and murk, like Normans stampeding dozens of cows into their Norse-Irish cousins, were balking now at this massive breastwork they themselves had thrown up. The pile of toot on a mirror. The hip-hirple of a white horse against purple. Age-old traductions I could trace from freebasers pretending they freebase to this inescapable flaw hidden by Carlotta's close-knit wet suit like a heart-wound by a hauberk. Bannockburn Though he was mounted on a cob rather than a warhorse, the Bruce still managed to sidestep a spear from Henry de Bohun and tax de Bohun's poll with his broad-based poleax and leave de Bohun's charger somewhat leer. Her grandfather had yet to find a use for the two-timing partisan his grandfather brought man-to-man against all those Ferdinandies until he saw it might come in handy for whacking the thingammybobs off pine and fir, off pine and fir and spruce and all such trees as volunteer. Berwick-Upon-Tweed Off the elm, the ancient pollard that a Flemish painter might love, that comes to shun the attention of its headstrong days, so is proof against the storm that takes its neighbor's roof. Her nonno collects his pension knowing that when push really came to shove he had it within him to wrap his legs in puttees and backslap those pack mules down that moonlit deck, Carlotta now wearing a halter-neck under the long-sleeved, high-collared wet suit whereof . . . whereof . . . whereof . . . whereof I needs must again make mention. Blaye Her wet suit like a coat of mail worn by a French knight from the time a knight could still cause a ruction by direct-charging his rouncy, when an Englishman's home was his bouncy castle, when abduction and seduction went hand in glove. Now Carlotta would climb from the hotel pool in Nashville, take off her mask, and set a spill to a Gauloise as one might set a spill to the fuse of a falconet and the walls of her chest assail. The French, meanwhile, were still struggling to prime their weapons of mass destruction. Bosworth Field It was clear now, through the pell-mell of bombard- and basilisk-mist, that the Stanleys had done the dirt on him and taken Henry's side. Now Richard's very blood seemed to have shied away from him, seemed to sputter and spurt like a falcon sheering off from his wrist as he tried to distance himself from the same falchioneer who'd pelf the crown from his blood-matted brow and hang it in a tree. Less clear was how he'd managed not to crack the shell of the pigeon egg the size of a cyst he'd held so close inside his shirt Blackwater Fort As I had held Carlotta close that night we watched some Xenophon embedded with the 5th Marines in the old Sunni Triangle make a half-assed attempt to untangle the ghastly from the price of gasoline. There was a distant fanfaron in the Nashville sky, where the wind had now drawn itself up and pinned on her breast a Texaco star. "Why," Carlotta wondered, "the House of Tar? Might it have to do with the gross imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on only when the Tigris comes clean?" Benburb Those impromptu chevaux-de-frise into which they galloped full tilt and impaled themselves have all but thrown off their balance the banner- bearing Scots determined to put manners on the beech mast- and cress- and hazelnut- eating Irish. However jerry-built, those chevaux-de-frise have embogged the horses whose manes they had hogged so lovingly and decked with knots of heather, horses rooted to the spots on which they go down on their knees as they unwind their shoulder plaids and kilts, the checkered careers of their guts. Boyne The blood slick from the horse slaughter I could no longer disregard as Carlotta surfaced like barm. My putting her through her paces as she kicked and kicked against the traces like a pack mule kicking from a yardarm before it fell, heehaw, in the dockyard. A banner's frittering tassel or deflating bouncy castle was something to which she paid heed whereas that vision of a milk-white steed drinking from a tub of water and breathing hard, breathing a little hard, had barely set off an alarm. Blenheim Small birds were sounding the alert as I followed her unladen steed through a dell so dark and dank she might have sported the waders her grandfather had worn at the nadir of his career, scouring the Outer Banks for mummichog and menhaden. Those weeks and months in the doldrums coming back as he ran his thumb along an old venetian blind in the hope that something might come to mind, that he might yet animadvert the maiden name of that Iron Maiden on which he was drawing a blank. Bunker Hill Carlotta took me in her arms as a campfire gathers a branch to itself, her mouth a cauter set to my bleeding bough, heehaw. Her grandfather sterilizing his saw in a tub of 100-proof firewater, a helper standing by to stanch the bleeding in some afterlife. No looking daggers at the knife. She'd meet the breast-high parapet with the nonchalance, the no fucking sweat of a slightly skanky schoolmarm though the surgeon was preparing to ganch her like What's-his-face's Daughter. Brandywine I crouched in my own Little Ease by the pool at the Vanderbilt where Carlotta crouched, sputter-sput, just as she had in the scanner when the nurse, keen-sighted as a lanner, picked out a tumor like a rabbit scut on dark ground. It was as if a fine silt, white sand or silicate, had clogged her snorkel, her goggles had fogged, and Carlotta surfaced like flot to be skimmed off some great cast-iron pot as garble is skimmed off, or lees painstakingly drained by turnings and tilts from a man-size barrel or butt. Badli-Ke-SeraiPork barrels. Pork butts. The wide-screen surround sound of a massed attack upon the thin red cellulose by those dust- or fust- or must-cells that cause the tears to well and well and well. At which I see him turning up his nose as if he'd bitten on a powder-pack like yet another sad Sepoy who won't fall for the British ploy of greasing with ham the hammer or smoothing over Carlotta's grammar: "On which . . . On which Bush will come clean." Her grandfather a man who sees no lack of manhood in the lachrymose. Bull Run While some think there's nothing more rank than the pool that's long stood aloof from the freshet, I loved the smell of sweat and blood and, sí, horse dung Carlotta shouldered like an Aqua-Lung as she led me now through that dewy dell and spread her House of Tartan waterproof. As we lay there I could have sworn, as I stared through unruffled thorns that were an almost perfect fit to each side of the gravel pit where she and I'd tried to outflank each other, I traced the mark of a hoof (or horseshoe) in her fontanelle. Bronkhorstspruit I traced the age-old traduction of a stream through a thorn thicket as a gush from a farthingale. Skeffington's Daughter. Skeffington. Attention. Shun. Attention. Shun. Shun. Shun. We lay in a siding between two rails and watched an old white horse cross the picket of himself and trek through the scrub to drink from an iron-hooped tub with the snore-snort of a tuba. His winkers and bellyband said scuba, while his sudden loss of suction Carlotta knew meant a pump whose clicket's failed in the way a clicket fails. Basra "The way to relieve the tension on the line to a windjammer is to lubricate the bollard so it's always a little slack . . ." Her nonno giving us the inside track on how the mule drivers whooped and hollered on the dock. No respite from his yammer on boundlessness being a bind and the most insidious kind of censorship self-censorship while he took Carlotta for a quick whip through conjugation, declension, and those other "crannies of the crammer" in which she'd been "quite unscholared." Bazentin As I was bringing up her rear a young dragoon would cock a snook at the gunners raking the knob of High Wood. Tongue like a scaldy in a nest. Hadn't a Garibaldi what might lie behind that low-level throb like a niggle in her appointment book.Dust? Fust? Must? The dragoon nonplussed by his charger taking the rust and, despite her recalcitrance, Carlotta making a modest advance when the thought of a falchioneer falling to with his two-faced reaping hook now brought back her grandfather's job. Beersheba Now summoned also the young Turk who had suddenly arisen from that great pile of toot, heehaw, as from one of Beersheba's wells. Like the sail that all of a sudden swells on the yawl that all of a sudden yaws, a wind finding meaning in a mizzen and toppling a bouncy castle. Her grandfather fain to wrastle each pack mule to a rubber mat whereat . . . whereat . . . whereat . . . whereat . . . whereat . . . he would eftsoons get down to work, reaching into its wide-open wizen while a helper clamped back its jaws. Burma Her grandfather's job was to cut the vocal cords of each pack mule with a single, swift excision, a helper standing by to wrench the mule's head fiercely to one side and drench it with hooch he'd kept since Prohibition. "Why," Carlotta wondered, "that fearsome tool? Was it for fear the mules might bray and give their position away?" At which I see him thumb the shade as if he were once more testing a blade and hear the two-fold snapping shut of his four-fold, brass-edged carpenter's rule: "And give away their position."
They've been so long above it all,  those two petals so steeped in style they seem to stall  in the kettle simmering over the town dump  or, better still, the neon-flashed, X-rated rump  of fresh roadkill courtesy of the interstate  that Eisenhower would overtake in the home straight  by one horsepower, the kettle where it all boils down  to the thick scent of death, a scent of such renown  it's given vent to the idea buzzards can spot  a deer carcass a mile away, smelling the rot  as, once, Marcus Aurelius wrinkled his nose  at a gas leak from the Great Sewer that ran through Rome  to the Tiber then went searching out, through the gloam,  one subscriber to the other view that the rose,  full-blown, antique, its no-frills ruff, the six-foot shrug  of its swing-wings, the theologian's and the thug's  twin triumphings in a buzzard's shaved head and snood,  buzz-buzz-buzzy, its logic in all likelihood  somewhat fuzzy, would ever come into focus,  it ever deign to dispense its hocus-pocus  in that same vein as runs along an inner thigh  to where, too right, the buzzard vouchsafes not to shy  away from shite, its mission not to give a miss  to a bête noire, all roly-poly, full of piss  and vinegar, trying rather to get to grips  with the grommet of the gut, setting its tinsnips  to that grommet in the spray-painted hind's hindgut  and making a sweeping, too right, a sweeping cut  that's so blasé it's hard to imagine, dear Sis,  why others shrink from this sight of a soul in bliss,  so in the pink from another month in the red  of the shambles, like a rose in over its head  among brambles, unflappable in its belief  it's Ararat on which the Ark would come to grief,  abjuring that Marcus Aurelius humbug  about what springs from earth succumbing to the tug  at its heartstrings, reported to live past fifty,  as you yet may, dear Sis, perhaps growing your hair  in requital, though briefly, of whatever tears  at your vitals,  learning, perhaps, from the nifty,  nay thrifty, way these buzzards are given to stoop  and take their ease by letting their time-chastened poop  fall to their knees till they're almost as bright with lime  as their night roost, their poop containing an enzyme  that's known to boost their immune systems, should they prong  themselves on small bones in a cerebral cortex,  at no small cost to their well-being, sinking fast  in a deer crypt, buzzards getting the hang at last  of being stripped of their command of the vortex  while having lost their common touch, they've been so long  above it all.
The first to arrive when the sleepy-eyed coach  grunts good morning and undoes the rusty lock,  he starts each day facing the water alone— the shimmering skin over the cold deep end  holding the calm of sunrise before his mind  bellows start. He plunges in to tame the water before the water tames him back—cutting meat  and treading at the Y each weekend only keeping  the pounds in place. On the deck stool with his fake leg stretched before him, the coach rasps  his creeds from the Navy. There’s standing tough and moving tough, he tells them. Whichever one’stougher, that’s what you do. On the cold mornings,  the slowest tries standing tough, his feet buckled  in at the water’s edge and every still joint its own heady fix. When he moves, he moves to reach  the finish line. The team is mired in last, not quailing  from the season’s end the only victory left. All around, hungry, he eyes the greater meets: the varsity team  that shreds the water twice as fast, the seniors’ cars  and flaunted car keys. Is every test decided by the one before? Do the mind, the joints ever forget?  He stares down the water, his body cold and primed  for the tournament, finals, anything assigned.
The shirtless man by the ticket counter  has already broken the gloom here, his crowd  of two boys and the cashier with the Star of David  gathered around and mouthing astonishment as he tells the tale behind every scar.  Yes, this one on the side was from the camp—  he tells them not to be shy to ask—  when he tripped into the ditch on the run after stealing cigarettes,  the one on the knuckle from punching the soldier  in the bar, brave with whiskey, a decade after. Touch it, he snarls, jutting out his fist.That split a real Nazi’s lip.  In the rooms behind him, the voices lay low  but touch is the rule, the extended families  passing in fours and fives as tight as at church or the carnival. Are they  all survivors here, dazed and exhilarated  by the fate that dropped them so far from blight?  A father heads the line, shirt fat with muscles and a single proud thumb pushing the stroller;  the woman and girl hug sideways, then again,  tight as dancers in a row. At each display,  the time lines and the whispered assurances reiterate that what is done is done.  Pol Pot is dead, the children of Kampuchea  reading again to go to college; Rwanda  has forgiven itself and opened supermarkets; the ghettos are demolished, the Cold War won.  Sudan, they skip. For now, the beasts are gone.  They face the new life, the one after the mending,  after the last mistakes were made.
I want to be a passenger in your car again and shut my eyes while you sit at the wheel, awake and assured in your own private world, seeing all the lines on the road ahead, down a long stretch of empty highway without any other faces in sight. I want to be a passenger in your car again and put my life back in your hands.
One century (which time let go) lives on stubbornly in this room. The speakers hum with tales of Sunday gospel, police dogs on the shoals, bootleg whiskey at the back of a bus in Chicago after the war. Thirty chairs and a light turned low give shelter from the cold outside where the word ‘legend’ is scrawled in black by the photograph on the window. Hoarse, white-haired, he squints at the figures who watch him back from the crooked tables,  his fingers conjuring the notes from childhood, his foot on the case tapping rhymes.You’re healed now, say the thin girl’s eyes.I’m out of change, says the man with the jar. A couple sways in the dark by the counter; the boys sit up front, eager, taking notes down. Their pens sustain him. At ten, alone, he walks by the ghosts of a college town, the bootleggers painted solemn on the gallery walls, Chicago beamed into the multiplex, the gnash of police dogs pantomimed through a flickering reel, the bus stopping by the curb to take him to his next one-night stand, the headlights gold as the waitress shuts out the light, unscarred, and heads for the dead of home.
When I take my scissors to your shirts, I am frightened: not that they will whimper But that they won’t understand the violence I mean. That kind of violence is the other side of love, Bright as a light-saber and permanent As the angel’s swords above Eden Barring that couple with a final X, That violence means a love strong as death. Once Sie ist mein leben, you said, meaning me And I took those words personally And knocked upon the door of my heart Until all its birds flooded to you, in a rush— Like the Iroquois, I tugged on our peace-pipe, I wrote your name in smoke. Then went home With my pockets rolling in shining glass beads, My pockets so rich with the coin of your country.
Sorrento, at night the long fingers of your orange lights Prick me in the sizzling streets, where the pinnacles Of other people ring tinny and papier-mâché. Is this the way Up to the murderous cliff? It’s most important that I get there And leave no witness. Ah, is this the majolica medallion Which marks the grave of girl abducted by a stallion Whom she gave a lump of maple sugar?  For that was in an autumn, The time of year when young girls get hopeless and feel like Giving it all away, the way a matronly merchant Might brush off her lap, at the iron end of the market day: It’s over, it’s worthless, without deserving and without Purpose have I nourished this hope in my small patch of earth, A sickly weed whose nodding sun’s gone nova.
On the eighth day he coined the word “alone” and saw that it was as good as everything else. A yellow school bus rattled down the lane, a wind blew in a drainpipe, strong, mellifluous. I brought two empty crates to the parking lot, watched neighbors with briefcases and car keys. At noon a mailman passed by where I sat invisible, like a tree among trees. Why, why, I asked. I wanted to know why, but only scared a squirrel that dropped his acorn when my voice broke silence unexpectedly— a white noise in a wireless telephone. My club soda went flat in the bottle. With a spit of rain, a wind blew again from the lake. I raised my index finger and touched it, pleading, give me a break, give me a break.
I’m jotting down these lines, having borrowed a pen from a waitress in this roadside restaurant. Three rusty pines prop up the sky in the windows. My soup gets cold, which implies I’ll eat it cold. Soon I too will leave a tip on the table, merge into the beehive of travelers and board one of the ferries, where there’s always a line to the loo and no one knows where the captain is. Slightly seasick, I keep on writing of the wind-rose and lobster traps, seagulls, if any—and there always are. Check the air and you’ll see them above straw hats and caps. The sun at noon glides like a monstrous star- fish through clouds. Others drink iced tea, training binoculars on a tugboat. When I finish this letter, I’ll take a gulp from the flask you gave me for the road in days when I was too young to care about those on the pier who waved goodbye. I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses, my mother, you, boys in light summer shirts. Life is too long. The compass needle dances. Everything passes by. The ferry passes by ragged yellow shores.
When his owner died in 2000 and a new family moved into their Moscow apartment, he went to live with mongrels in the park. In summer there was plenty of food, kids often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff. He didn’t have a big appetite, still missing his old guy. He too was old, the ladies no longer excited him, and he didn’t burn calories chasing them around. Then winter came and the little folk abandoned the park. The idea of eating from the trash occurred to him but the minute he started rummaging in the overturned garbage container, a voice in his head said: “No, Rex!” The remnants of a good upbringing lower our natural survival skills. I met him again in the early spring of 2001. He looked terrific. Turning gray became him. His dark shepherd eyes were perfectly bright, like those of a puppy. I asked him how he sustained himself in this new free-market situation when even the human species suffered from malnutrition. In response he told me his story; how at first he thought that life without his man wasn’t worth it, how those who petted him when he was a pet then turned away from him, and how one night he had a revelation. His man came to him in his sleep, tapped him on his skinny neck and said: “Let’s go shopping!” So the next morning he took the subway and went to the street market where they used to go together every Sunday and where vendors recognized him and fed him to his heart’s content. “Perhaps you should move closer to that area?” I ventured.—“No, I’ll stay here,” he sighed, “oldies shouldn’t change their topography. That’s what my man said.” Indeed, he sounded like one himself.
I grew up in a village built on coal and labor. An outhouse on a dirt road by a water pump glared at the whitewashed fences of uniformed yards that gaped like broken teeth in the mouths of miners. All summer we played Cossacks and Bandits, shot our symbolic rifles and revolvers and when killed would crush a wild cherry in the breast pocket, the spot where the heart stopped. Who started it? The red spreading over white satin never to be washed away completely, “I killed you! I killed you!” I screamed as he fell down. Men found him three years later in the abandoned mine after an explosion, his clothes covered with coal dust and blood. Women howled like wolves. “It’s nothing, he’ll get up,” I thought, “it’s just that stupid wild cherry on his shirt.”
Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’re beached and bloated, lie on shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’s Long Island, and the weather is fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man? A boy is not a body. A boy is a walk. Shed the machine. Must be entirely flesh to fight. Must be strategy instead of filling. What to disrobe, there, centrifugal logic, as in here is a slice of my finger. Tell me the circumstance of your dick extension. When we slip into imprecision, we lose control, windowless walls close in. Awareness of being in a female body is a tinge of regret. “The human frame to adapt itself to convention though she herself was a woman.” To receive, to be entered, to fret around upon entry. It’s grand. I’m a system. Plants tall as wheat to hide in.
What is the sound of sounds sounding indefinite fist in face again and sound of the surprise of it coming from nowhere, of breaking the arm on a small fall in your own house, a respiratory failure, wound opening like a little mouth. We inhabit the brutal. We are shattered everyday. We look askew. Head broken floor array, light array, great distances, life goals. Staked upon every border, guardians. Protections have many faces. Misuse of the face as a streaming desire. Solution posted: “Get rid of all the niggers.” The state exacts its controls. That the pepper spray happens against kneeling children— That the search for the secret leaker is unyielding— If you want, you can make a myopic focus, concentrate on a shone shadow or drift off into space.
Let’s not wrestle with water anymore— Enters until we flexible in its acceptance Persistent in entering through green or brown windowpanes jagged from years of sun Lights out across the street yr candle dances still or flashlight we send signals interrupted by slinging branches Tonight is O.K.— after all you walk by the window tip yr head at the orange sky blue lightning partially our rainbow People not alone in the percussive squalls (Caribbean music) Sole leaf flicked by adolescent wind goneAugust 25, 2005
—for the members of Oshugó Àgàn At first a child rolled off a reed mat a height of no consequence Later the bald ageless vulture circles the hill the man climbs When the owners of the land arrived they brought beaded bag in their search Bag beaded big enough to house the echoes that gave birth to sketches of words on dust Bag deep enough to circle obstacles that would sprout upon birth They reached a clean house chalked walls of peace a person of peace They planted a pair of brass scepters illumined male / female short legs kneeling long torso crisscrossed by arms hands clenching some secret or just its thumbs They saw three to be balanced—  Earth & us  Impermanence & love  water & its gourd as gorge  fish & whirling water How they all seemed dependent on each other There is balance where there are three . . .
1.  The candle will be our medium for dialogue  We must always  be on speaking terms 2.  When you see the candle by the bedside burning  it will be my message to you:  Do Not Touch! 3.  You will heal through herbs &  the words I give you to  spray unto the solution 4.  Never dress in black  I may mistake you for  someone ready to die 5.  As much as possible  do not speak wickedly or damn anyone 6.  As much as possible  stay away from funerals  I like to work alone  Death is death’s work (Iku n’iku che) 7.  Egun will be my messenger 8.  You may also petition me  through that white staff  you know the one—  with bells & snail shells  You also know the chant 9.  Do not be tempted by possessions & titles  If you have patience  I will make possible  those you actually  will need 10.  Remember this pact  & I will give you health & long life (aiku) All this was negotiated just prior to his birth. He probably kneeled before the Owner of the Sky while Iku, his patron Orisha, and many Egun sat watching with fly whisks in hand and full regalia (after all, one of their own was about to embark on his journey to the human world). The ilé aiyé. He probably placed in circular fashion inside a big calabash all his choices, probably whispered into the gourd a slow "Ashé tó iba Eshu." We say probably because one thing is for sure, El Niño does not remember the details. In fact no one does (except the deities & Iku). No one remembers the details of their creation. No one remembers the destiny, the mission they chose, their personal Orisha, and most importantly the date of their last breath. Memory & continuity. Keeping el hilo de la conversación. Never losing the wavy & fragile link that keeps you grounded to yr root. The dialogue with spirits that may tap yr left shoulder & all that. But no one remembers. No one remembers. Ésto si es trágico. In order to recall the details of what went on in the other world, to map his destiny, El Niño must be taken for divination. And even then one session won’t do it. The story will get revealed as his life turns each page & changes rhythm & the oracle is cast several more times. So they took El Niño to the diviner Edikán's house. After pouring libations & reciting the necessary ayuba prayers—greeting the creator, the ancestors, the divination, earth, wind, river, ocean, jungle, & crossroad orishas, Edikán cast the divining chain/ópele used by the babalawo. A picture began to emerge. He said the Orishas & Egun, collectively called ara orun or citizens of the other world, have given us certain verses & stories to deliver messages regarding the rhythms of our lives. He said El Niño’s patron deity is Oshun but he will always have an affinity with Ogun & Obatalá. But most prominent is his close relationship with Egun, that is, the ancestors, Iku’s messengers. He said it would be through a kinship with Egun that he would accomplish his most difficult tasks; even the arts of divination. He will be a mouthpiece for Egun. Edikán said El Niño has a predisposition to a vivid imagination. Because of this there are & will be mysterious phenomena happening to him like visions & dreams of secret songs. He will not regard them as strange. He said El Niño should be taught even at an early age the rigors of an herbalist. He should be taught at least how to recognize certain trees & plants, the healing properties of the most commonly used herbs, their harvesting times, how they mix & with what substances. All this will eventually lead to an encyclopedic knowledge not only of their healing properties but of their ability to alter the invisible rhythms that underlie most things. Edikán said there will be certain resguardos that must be prepared so as to begin bridging the gap between Orishas, Iku, Egun, & himself. Even though El Niño’s inner head/ori inu chose a good destiny in the other world, such destiny must be aligned with his physical head/ori in this world. It will be Orishas & Egun that will focus his life & help him fulfill the destiny he chose in the other world. He said beginning with the feet El Niño must be securely fastened to the earth so as to not depart too soon for the other world. (You see there is always the detail of Iku being overprotective. The relationship is like playing with a leopard—even an affectionate jab with its paw will cause a scar). The head will also have to be ritually prepared & fed with bits of white fruit among other ingredients & thus given a firm root, stability—“para que su cabeza no esté en el aire,” he said. We were witness to this event. We heard what needed to be done. There was actually a time, maybe this is still going on, when people consulted with the spirit world, the other world, on such occasions as the third month after birth. We collected the ingredients that would shape his destiny & began to assemble them. Much of them were from the river, the jungle, & of course, the cemetery. We heard what needed to be done. Ara Orun are hip to the images & subtle rhythms that stories & verses evoke. The same images & subtle rhythms running through our lives. Edikán said that barring some details of modernity, his life would follow a certain ancient story pertaining to the divination— Ofun is like this/ Ofun ni jé bé— The page continues to turn.The rhythm, the rhythm will come from dreams.
What booth is this? The last was a plastic gallows. In the teach me to kiss booth, you paid your dollar to promote, when prompted, a theory. Advised me about standing close and touching him who might next enter in such a way that draws contrast, rough and smooth, cool and warm, maybe the heel of the hand and thumb at the neck if the collar is open and the fingertips two three four, but never anything about the mouth, and then it was time. I back exited through the heavy drapes and opened shop next door.  What booth is this? In this booth I have rescued a dovekie but it will not eat. As the tub fills I need you (tore your ticket, right?) to surrender two of the goldfish from this bag. I’ll be back in a minute. The last of the sun is pinkening the ridge beyond the fairgrounds, and I’d like to see.  What booth is this? Keep moving everyone. Careful of the gourds; they’re pursing. I’ve handed over the last admission I can afford. Into this booth the branch of a bean tree descends and in an eventuality brought on by what yet I cannot say the armlong pods burst with pellet shot pressure and release seeds like these embedded in the board behind you. The next booth is one I have to man for someone. An emergency. I’ll meet you there.  Is this even a booth? In this booth there is room for one. Get in here and hold me up. I would fall without you. Why are we not told plainly? What good as a booth is this, what booth if it be one? Feel the first drop, as from a shearwater ocean bird held high for miles on the cyclonic air, blown far inland, never otherwise seen. The barometer is bottoming. This booth of ours is an eye of the storm simulation.
Okay, but now imagine someone,one of fifty, say, in the queue, fiftieth firstand advancing little, somewhere withinthe seventy-two-hour window of efficacyfor post-exposure prophylaxis, and, later,in the screening room watching The Clockwith the few dozen others in rows behind and aheadwho had waited too. He knows he has tobut he hasn’t yet. We pick it up there.It is two thousand eleven a few more days.The movie tells what time it is.In poetry too we all face forward.
Where the correlative of reason was conviction and where the correlative of power was obedience, the correlative of authority was trust Your job—she gives another to the child hip-high—is to heat the money in your hands to the optimum warmth for purchase. Cagey, the diversion in the same coin as his want. It buys her time, enough that once they round the corner, she might break into a sprint, as one might with a pet who can keep up. But the prophet makes eyes in his open fists of the nickels’ glint, and we see he forbears our guess her hector gets lost in the flash when as if by swale we all give way to expel a customer from the clench of us without her. For what beneath the moths who have all night to live do we brace ourselves as we approach? We lean to find again the boy’s outguess of us. Demand is double at the walk-up window, where punishment for paltry want is to tell it again into plexiglass the color of slobber, so others in the bleach of halogen light may deal their disparagement forward. For what if not dishonor are we braced, rehearsing what to ask? Repetition is a machine, a machine for converting request into appeal; and commerce, then, the window’s byproduct or balm, depending. Red hot cashews, yellow bag. Only because we visit by day do we know at night what to call at the walk-up window where two aisles of open merchandise end at the sacral plates of clerks before us who, if on pulleys they were carts instead or vending claws, would be by now concussed and dented by lever malevolence outright.  The prophet stands eye level with the vending plunge, a here and now mechanism he would need to invent to operate, and stands between it and his mother. Yellow bag. Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal;... because there is not enough recognition, they make art
Gray whaleNow that we are sending you to The EndThat great godTell him That we who follow you invented forgivenessAnd forgive nothingI write as though you could understandAnd I could say itOne must always pretend somethingAmong the dyingWhen you have left the seas nodding on their stalksEmpty of youTell him that we were madeOn another dayThe bewilderment will diminish like an echoWinding along your inner mountainsUnheard by usAnd find its way outLeaving behind it the futureDeadAnd oursWhen you will not see againThe whale calves trying the lightConsider what you will find in the black gardenAnd its courtThe sea cows the Great Auks the gorillasThe irreplaceable hosts ranged countlessAnd fore-ordaining as starsOur sacrificesJoin your word to theirsTell himThat it is we who are important
Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it standing by the windows looking out in our directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks we are saying thank you in the faces of the officials and the rich and of all who will never change we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us taking our feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you thank you we are saying and waving dark though it is
Since the stern art of poetry calls for words, I, morose, deaf, and balding ambassador of a more or less  insignificant nation that’s stuck in this super power, wishing to spare my old brain, hand myself my own topcoat and head for the main  street: to purchase the evening paper. Wind disperses the foliage. The dimness of old bulbs in these sorry quarters, whose motto’s “The mirror will please,”  gives a sense of abundance supported by puddles. Even thieves here steal apples by scratching the amalgam first. Yet the feeling one gets, from one’s own sweet reflection—this feeling I’ve  lost.  That’s what really puzzles. Everything in these parts is geared for winter: long dreams, prison walls, overcoats, bridal dresses of whiteness that seems  snowlike. Drinks. Kinds of soap matching dirt in dark corners. Sparrow vests, second hand of the watch round your wrist, puritanical mores, underwear. And, tucked in the violinists’  palms, old redwood hand warmers. This whole realm is just static. Imagining the output of lead and cast iron, and shaking your stupefied head,  you recall bayonets, Cossack whips of old power. Yet the eagles land like good lodestones on the scraps. Even wicker chairs here are built mostly with bolts and with nuts,  one is bound to discover. Only fish in the sea seem to know freedom’s price. Still, their muteness compels us to sit and devise  cashier booths of our own. And space rises like some bill of fare. Time’s invented by death. In its search for the objects, it deals with raw vegetables first That’s why cocks are so keen on the bells  chiming deafly somewhere. To exist in the Era of Deeds and to stay elevated, alert ain’t so easy, alas. Having raised a long skirt,  you will find not new wonders but what you expected. And it’s not that they play Lobachevsky’s ideas by ear, but the widened horizons should narrow somewhere, and here—  here’s the end of perspective. Either old Europe’s map has been swiped by the gents in plain clothes, or the famous five-sixths of remaining landmass has just lost  its poor infamous colleague, or a fairy casts spells over shabby me, who knows—but I cannot escape from this place; I pour wine for myself (service here’s a disgrace),  sip, and rub my old tabby. Thus the brain earned a slug, as a spot where an error occurred earns a good pointing finger. Or should I hit waterways, sort  of like Christ? Anyway, in these laudable quarters, eyes dumbfounded by ice and by booze will reproach you alike for whatever you choose:  traceless rails, traceless waters. Now let’s see what they say in the papers about lawsuits. “The condemned has been dealt with.” Having read this, a denizen puts  on his metal-rimmed glasses that help to relate it to a man lying flat, his face down, by the wall; though he isn’t asleep. Since dreams spurn a skull  that has been perforated. The keen-sightedness of our era takes root in the times which were short, in their blindness, of drawing clear lines  twixt those fallen from cradles and fallen from saddles. Though there are plenty of saucers, there is no one to turn tables with to subject you, poor Rurik, to a sensible quiz;  that’s what really saddens. The keen-sightedness of our days is the sort that befits the dead end whose concrete begs for spittle and not for a witty comment.  Wake up a dinosaur, not a prince, to recite you the moral! Birds have feathers for penning last words, though it’s better to ask. All the innocent head has in store for itself is an ax  plus the evergreen laurel.  [December] 1969  Leningrad
For V.S. When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi. At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing. Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored, is the cause of a human assault-wave by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels: each one his own king, his own camel. Nylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones, caps and neckties all twisted up sideways. Reek of vodka and resin and cod, orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples. Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard. And the bearers of moderate gifts leap on buses and jam all the doorways, disappear into courtyards that gape, though they know that there’s nothing inside there: not a beast, not a crib, nor yet her, round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold. Emptiness. But the mere thought of that brings forth lights as if out of nowhere. Herod reigns but the stronger he is, the more sure, the more certain the wonder. In the constancy of this relation is the basic mechanics of Christmas. That’s what they celebrate everywhere, for its coming push tables together. No demand for a star for a while, but a sort of good will touched with grace can be seen in all men from afar, and the shepherds have kindled their fires. Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain. Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child. He who comes is a mystery: features are not known beforehand, men’s hearts may not be quick to distinguish the stranger. But when drafts through the doorway disperse the thick mist of the hours of darkness and a shape in a shawl stands revealed, both a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy in your self you discover; you stare skyward, and it’s right there:  a star.
I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow, the helix picks out of them no sea rumble but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle on the burner, boiling—lastly, the seagull’s metal cry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision. Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack. A glance is accustomed to no glance back A list of some observations. In a corner, it’s warm. A glance leaves an imprint on anything it’s dwelt on. Water is glass’s most public form. Man is more frightening than his skeleton. A nowhere winter evening with wine. A black porch resists an osier’s stiff assaults. Fixed on an elbow, the body bulks like a glacier’s debris, a moraine of sorts. A millenium hence, they’ll no doubt expose a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe, mumbling “Good night” to a window hinge. I recognize this wind battering the limp grass that submits to it as they did to the Tartar mass. I recognize this leaf splayed in the roadside mud like a prince empurpled in his own blood. Fanning wet arrows that blow aslant the cheek of a wooden hut in another land, autumn tells, like geese by their flying call, a tear by its face. And as I roll my eyes to the ceiling, I chant herein not the lay of that eager man’s campaign but utter your Kazakh name which till now was stored in my throat as a password into the Horde. A navy-blue dawn in a frosted pane recalls yellow streetlamps in the snow-piled lane, icy pathways, crossroads, drifts on either hand, a jostling cloakroom in Europe’s eastern end. “Hannibal...” drones on there, a worn-out motor, parallel bars in the gym reek with armpit odor; as for that scary blackboard you failed to see through, it has stayed just as black. And its reverse side, too. Silvery hoarfrost has transformed the rattling bell into crystal. As regards all that parallel- line stuff, it’s turned out true and bone-clad, indeed. Don’t want to get up now. And never did. You’ve forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows ever stand in orchards: the crops aren’t worth it, and the roads are also just ditches and brushwood surface. Old Nastasia is dead, I take it, and Pesterev, too, for sure, and if not, he’s sitting drunk in the cellar or is making something out of the headboard of our bed: a wicket gate, say, or some kind of shed. And in winter they’re chopping wood, and turnips is all they live on, and a star blinks from all the smoke in the frosty heaven, and no bride in chintz at the window, but dust’s gray craft, plus the emptiness where once we loved. In the little town out of which death sprawled over the classroom map the cobblestones shine like scales that coat a carp, on the secular chestnut tree melting candles hang, and a cast-iron lion pines for a good harangue. Through the much laundered, pale window gauze woundlike carnations and kirchen needles ooze; a tram rattles far off, as in days of yore, but no one gets off at the stadium anymore. The real end of the war is a sweet blonde’s frock across a Viennese armchair’s fragile back while the humming winged silver bullets fly, taking lives southward, in mid-July.  Munich As for the stars, they are always on. That is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike sphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon here: well after hours, blinking. The sky looks better when they are off. Though, with them, the conquest of space is quicker. Provided you haven’t got to move from the bare veranda and squeaking rocker. As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze can be rested on none of these. Near the ocean, by candlelight. Scattered farms, fields overrun with sorrel, lucerne, and clover. Toward nightfall, the body, like Shiva, grows extra arms reaching out yearningly to a lover. A mouse rustles through grass. An owl drops down. Suddenly creaking rafters expand a second. One sleeps more soundly in a wooden town, since you dream these days only of things that happened. There’s a smell of fresh fish. An armchair’s profile is glued to the wall. The gauze is too limp to bulk at the slightest breeze.. And a ray of the moon, meanwhile, draws up the tide like a slipping blanket. The Laocoön of a tree, casting the mountain weight off his shoulders, wraps them in an immense cloud. From a promontory, wind gushes in. A voice pitches high, keeping words on a string of sense. Rain surges down; its ropes twisted into lumps, lash, like the bather’s shoulders, the naked backs of these hills. The Medhibernian Sea stirs round colonnaded stumps like a salt tongue behind broken teeth. The heart, however grown savage, still beats for two. Every good boy deserves fingers to indicate that beyond today there is always a static to- morrow, like a subject’s shadowy predicate. If anything’s to be praised, it’s most likely how the west wind becomes the east wind, when a frozen bough sways leftward, voicing its creaking protests, and your cough flies across the Great Plains to Dakota’s forests. At noon, shouldering a shotgun, fire at what may well be a rabbit in snowfields, so that a shell widens the breach between the pen that puts up these limping awkward lines and the creature leaving real tracks in the white. On occasion the head combines its existence with that of a hand, not to fetch more lines but to cup an ear under the pouring slur of their common voice. Like a new centaur. There is always a possibility left—to let yourself out to the street whose brown length will soothe the eye with doorways, the slender forking of willows, the patchwork puddles, with simply walking. The hair on my gourd is stirred by a breeze and the street, in distance, tapering to a V, is like a face to a chin; and a barking puppy flies out of a gateway like crumpled paper. A street. Some houses, let’s say, are better than others. To take one item, some have richer windows. What’s more, if you go insane, it won’t happen, at least, inside them. ... and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese. After all these years it hardly matters who or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes, and your mind resounds not with a seraphic “do,” only their rustle. Life, that no one dares to appraise, like that gift horse’s mouth, bares its teeth in a grin at each encounter. What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech. Not that I am losing my grip; I am just tired of summer. You reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted. If only winter were here for snow to smother all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm, like a dog abandoning its blind owner, crosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie, and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.  1975-76
The scorching noon, the vale in Dagestan...  -Mikhail Lermontov I A bullet’s velocity in low temperatures greatly depends on its target’s virtues, on its urge to warm up in the plaited muscles of the torso, in the neck’s webbed sinews. Stones lie flat like a second army. The shade hugs the loam to itself willy-nilly. The sky resembles peeling stucco. An aircraft dissolves in it like a clothes moth, and like a spring from a ripped-up mattress an explosion sprouts up. Outside the crater, the blood, like boiled milk, powerless to seep into the ground, is seized by a film’s hard ripples.    II Shepherd and sower, the North is driving  herds to the sea, spreading cold to the South.  A bright, frosty noon in a Wogistan valley.  A mechanical elephant, trunk wildly waving  at the horrid sight of the small black rodent  of a snow-covered mine, spews out throat-clogging  lumps, possessed of that old desire  of Mahomet’s, to move a mountain.  Summits loom white; the celestial warehouse  lends them at noontime its flaking surplus.  The mountains lack any motion, passing  their immobility to the scattered bodies.  III The doleful, echoing Slavic singing  at evening in Asia. Dank and freezing,  sprawling piles of human pig meat cover the caravansary’s mud bottom. The fuel dung smolders, legs stiffen in numbness. It smells of old socks, of forgotten bath days. The dreams are identical, as are the greatcoats. Plenty of cartridges, few recollections, and the tang in the mouth of too many “hurrahs.” Glory to those who, their glances lowered, marched in the sixties to abortion tables, sparing the homeland its present stigma.  IV What is contained in the drone’s dull buzzing?  And what in the sound of the aero-engine? Living is getting as complicated as building a house with grapes’ green marbles  or little lean-tos with spades and diamonds.  Nothing is stable (one puff and it’s over):  families, private thoughts, clay shanties.  Night over ruins of a mountain village.  Armor, wetting its metal sheets with oil slick, freezes in thorn scrub. Afraid of drowning  in a discarded jackboot, the moon hides in a cloud as in Allah’s turban.  V Idle, inhaled now by no one, air. Imported, carelessly piled-up silence. Rising like dough that’s leavened, emptiness. If the stars had life-forms, space would erupt with a brisk ovation; a gunner, blinking, runs to the footlights. Murder’s a blatant way of dying, a tautology, the art form of parrots, a manual matter, the knack for catching life’s fly in the hairs of the gunsight by youngsters acquainted with blood through either hearsay or violating virgins.  VI Pull up the blanket, dig a hole in the palliasse. Flop down and give ear to the oo of the siren. The Ice Age is coming—slavery’s ice age is coming, oozing over the atlas. Its moraines force under nations, fond memories, muslin blouses. Muttering, rolling our eyeballs upward, we are becoming a new kind of bivalve, our voice goes unheard, as though we were trilobites. There’s a draft from the corridor, draft from the square windows. Turn off the light, wrap up in a bundle. The vertebra craves eternity. Unlike a ringlet. In the morning the limbs are past all uncoiling.  VII Up in the stratosphere, thought of by no one,  the little bitch barks as she peers through the porthole:  “Beach Ball! Beach Ball! Over. It's Rover.” The beach ball’s below. With the equator on it like a dog collar. Slopes, fields, and gullies  repeat in their whiteness cheekbones  (the color of shame has all gone to the banners).  And the hens in their snowed-in hen coops,  also a-shake from the shock of reveille,  lay their eggs of immaculate color. If anything blackens, it’s just the letters,  like the tracks of some rabbit, preserved by a wonder.
Wind from the northwestern quarter is lifting him high above the dove-gray, crimson, umber, brown Connecticut Valley. Far beneath, chickens daintily pause and move unseen in the yard of the tumbledown farmstead, chipmunks blend with the heath. Now adrift on the airflow, unfurled, alone, all that he glimpses—the hills’ lofty, ragged ridges, the silver stream that threads quivering like a living bone of steel, badly notched with rapids, the townships like strings of beads strewn across New England. Having slid down to nil thermometers—those household gods in niches— freeze, inhibiting thus the fire of leaves and churches’ spires. Still, no churches for him. In the windy reaches, undreamt of by the most righteous choir, he soars in a cobalt-blue ocean, his beak clamped shut, his talons clutched tight into his belly —claws balled up like a sunken fist— sensing in each wisp of down the thrust from below, glinting back the berry of his eyeball, heading south-southeast to the Rio Grande, the Delta, the beech groves and farther still: to a nest hidden in the mighty groundswell of grass whose edges no fingers trust, sunk amid forest’s odors, filled with splinters of red-speckled eggshell, with a brother or a sister’s ghost. The heart overgrown with flesh, down, feather, wing, pulsing at feverish rate, nonstopping, propelled by internal heat and sense, the bird goes slashing and scissoring the autumnal blue, yet by the same swift token, enlarging it at the expense of its brownish speck, barely registering on the eye, a dot, sliding far above the lofty pine tree; at the expense of the empty look of that child, arching up at the sky, that couple that left the car and lifted their heads, that woman on the stoop. But the uprush of air is still lifting him higher and higher. His belly feathers feel the nibbling cold. Casting a downward gaze, he sees the horizon growing dim, he sees, as it were, the features of the first thirteen colonies whose chimneys all puff out smoke. Yet it’s their total within his sight that tells the bird of his elevation, of what altitude he’s reached this trip. What am I doing at such a height? He senses a mixture of trepidation and pride. Heeling over a tip of wing, he plummets down. But the resilient air bounces him back, winging up to glory, to the colorless icy plane. His yellow pupil darts a sudden glare of rage, that is, a mix of fury and terror. So once again he turns and plunges down. But as walls return rubber balls, as sins send a sinner to faith, or near, he’s driven upward this time as well! He! whose innards are still so warm! Still higher! Into some blasted ionosphere! That astronomically objective hell of birds that lacks oxygen, and where the milling stars play millet served from a plate or a crescent. What, for the bipeds, has always meant height, for the feathered is the reverse. Not with his puny brain but with shriveled air sacs he guesses the truth of it: it’s the end. And at this point he screams. From the hooklike beak there tears free of him and flies ad luminem the sound Erinyes make to rend souls: a mechanical, intolerable shriek, the shriek of steel that devours aluminum; “mechanical,” for it’s meant for nobody, for no living ears: not man’s, not yelping foxes’, not squirrels’ hurrying to the ground from branches; not for tiny field mice whose tears can’t be avenged this way, which forces them into their burrows. And only hounds lift up their muzzles. A piercing, high-pitched squeal, more nightmarish than the D-sharp grinding of the diamond cutting glass, slashes the whole sky across. And the world seems to reel for an instant, shuddering from this rending. For the warmth burns space in the highest as badly as some iron fence down here brands incautious gloveless fingers. We, standing where we are, exclaim “There!” and see far above the tear that is a hawk, and hear the sound that lingers in wavelets, a spider skein swelling notes in ripples across the blue vault of space whose lack of echo spells, especially in October, an apotheosis of pure sound. And caught in this heavenly patterned lace, starlike, spangled with hoarfrost powder, silver-clad, crystal-bound, the bird sails to the zenith, to the dark-blue high of azure. Through binoculars we foretoken him, a glittering dot, a pearl. We hear something ring out in the sky, like some family crockery being broken, slowly falling aswirl, yet its shards, as they reach our palms, don’t hurt but melt when handled. And in a twinkling once more one makes out curls, eyelets, strings, rainbowlike, multicolored, blurred commas, ellipses, spirals, linking heads of barley, concentric rings— the bright doodling pattern the feather once possessed, a map, now a mere heap of flying pale flakes that make a green slope appear white. And the children, laughing and brightly dressed, swarm out of doors to catch them, crying with a loud shout in English, “Winter's here!”
In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain, a child was born in a cave in order to save the world; it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart. To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar. He was but a dot, and a dot was the star. Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away— from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.  December 1987
Constancy is an evolution of one’s living quarters into a thought: a continuation of a parallelogram or a rectangle by means—as Clausewitz would have put it— of the voice and, ultimately, the gray matter. Ah, shrunken to the size of a brain-cell parlor with a lampshade, an armoire in the “Slavic Glory” fashion, four studded chairs, a sofa, a bed, a bedside table with little medicine bottles left there standing like a kremlin or, better yet, manhattan. To die, to abandon a family, to go away for good, to change hemispheres, to let new ovals be painted into the square—the more volubly will the gray cell insist on its actual measurements, demanding daily sacrifice from the new locale, from the furniture, from the silhouette in a yellow dress; in the end—from your very self. A spider revels in shading especially the fifth corner. Evolution is not a species’ adjustment to a new environment but one’s memories’ triumph over reality, the ichthyosaurus pining for the amoeba, the slack vertebrae of a train thundering in the darkness, past the mussel shells, tightly shut for the night, with their spineless, soggy, pearl-shrouding contents.
The last twenty years were good for practically everybody save the dead. But maybe for them as well. Maybe the Almighty Himself has turned a bit bourgeois and uses a credit card. For otherwise time’s passage makes no sense. Hence memories, recollections, values, deportment. One hopes one hasn’t spent one’s mother or father or both, or a handful of friends entirely as they cease to hound one’s dreams. One’s dreams, unlike the city, become less populous the older one gets. That’s why the eternal rest cancels analysis. The last twenty years were good for practically everybody and constituted the afterlife for the dead. Its quality could be questioned but not its duration. The dead, one assumes, would not mind attaining a homeless status, and sleep in archways or watch pregnant submarines returning to their native pen after a worldwide journey without destroying life on earth, without even a proper flag to hoist.  1992
Here’s your mom, here’s your dad. Welcome to being their flesh and blood. Why do you look so sad? Here’s your food, here’s your drink. Also some thoughts, if you care to think. Welcome to everything. Here’s your practically clean slate. Welcome to it, though it’s kind of late. Welcome at any rate.  ____ Here’s your paycheck, here’s your rent. Money is nature’s fifth element. Welcome to every cent. Here’s your swarm and your huge beehive. Welcome to the place with its roughly five billion like you alive. Welcome to the phone book that stars your name. Digits are democracy’s secret aim. Welcome to your claim to fame.  ____ Here’s your marriage, and here’s divorce. Now that’s the order you can’t reverse. Welcome to it; up yours, Here’s your blade, here’s your wrist. Welcome to playing your own terrorist; call it your Middle East. Here’s your mirror, your dental gleam. Here’s an octopus in your dream. Why do you try to scream?  ____ Here’s your corncob, your TV set. Your candidate suffering an upset. Welcome to what he said. Here’s your porch, see the cars pass by. Here’s your shitting dog’s guilty eye. Welcome to its alibi. Here are your cicadas, then a chickadee, the bulb’s dry tear in your lemon tea. Welcome to infinity.  ____ Here are your pills on the plastic tray, your disappointing, crisp X-ray. You are welcome to pray. Here’s your cemetery, a well-kept glen. Welcome to a voice that says “Amen.” The end of the rope, old man. Here’s your will, and here’s a few takers. Here’s an empty pew. Here’s life after you.  ____ And here are your stars which appear still keen on shining as though you had never been. They might have a point, old bean. Here’s your afterlife, with no trace of you, especially of your face.  Welcome, and call it space.  Welcome to where one cannot breathe. This way, space resembles what’s underneath, and Saturn holds the wreath.
I was someone's honor's student once, a sticker, a star. I aced Home Ec and Geometry;   I learned to stab a fork, steer my mother's car. Old enough to work, I refreshed the salad bar   at Steak & Ale, scarcity a line I couldn't fail. The summers between university,   interned at AT&T, in the minority outreach they called Inroads. My boss, Vicki, had two   roommates, whom she called, simply, The Gays, crashing on her floor. That was before   I was gay, I won't try to say with a straight face. Like anyone really cares, I care. What I'm trying to say:   all this prepared me for these squat blinking office accessories. The dry drinking   after the accidental reply-all. By now there's a lot to lose. Little by little, I have become so careful, no talk   of politics, or orientation: I let them say, he's “a homosexual,” without an arch correction. At a fondue buffet   in Zurich, our dumb- founded senior group director—when I let slip, damn it, my trip   with a twenty-year-old—inquired, They're always over seventeen, right? I told her of course,god yes, and, seething, smiled,   which I'm famous for. I didn't want to scare her. But I tell you, I'm keeping score.   E-mail is no more than a suicide I'd like to please recall. Note my suicide.   I'm paid to multitask, scramble the life out of fun: Monday I will ask—   every dash a loaded gun, every comma, a knife— you to bury the black-box file.
A chimney, breathing a little smoke. The sun, I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink of five tulips at five p.m. on the day before March first. The green of the tulip stems and leaves like something I can't remember, finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away. Why it was December then and the sun was on the sea by the temples we'd gone to see. One green wave moved in the violet sea like the UN Building on big evenings, green and wet while the sky turns violet. A few almond trees had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes out of the blue looking pink in the light. A gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue into the sky. They're just going over the hill. The green leaves of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh, and a green-copper steeple and streaks of cloud beginning to glow. I can't get over how it all works in together like a woman who just came to her window and stands there filling it jogging her baby in her arms. She's so far off. Is it the light that makes the baby pink? I can see the little fists and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts. It's getting grayer and gold and chilly. Two dog-size lions face each other at the corners of a roof. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips. It's the shape of a tulip. It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. It's a day like any other.
"How does the water Come down at Lodore?" My little boy asked me Thus, once on a time; And moreover he tasked me To tell him in rhyme. Anon, at the word, There first came one daughter, And then came another, To second and third The request of their brother, And to hear how the water Comes down at Lodore, With its rush and its roar, As many a time They had seen it before. So I told them in rhyme, For of rhymes I had store; And 'twas in my vocation For their recreation That so I should sing; Because I was Laureate To them and the King. From its sources which well In the tarn on the fell; From its fountains In the mountains, Its rills and its gills; Through moss and through brake, It runs and it creeps For a while, till it sleeps In its own little lake. And thence at departing, Awakening and starting, It runs through the reeds, And away it proceeds, Through meadow and glade, In sun and in shade, And through the wood-shelter, Among crags in its flurry, Helter-skelter, Hurry-skurry. Here it comes sparkling, And there it lies darkling; Now smoking and frothing Its tumult and wrath in, Till, in this rapid race On which it is bent, It reaches the place Of its steep descent. The cataract strong Then plunges along, Striking and raging As if a war raging Its caverns and rocks among; Rising and leaping, Sinking and creeping, Swelling and sweeping, Showering and springing, Flying and flinging, Writhing and ringing, Eddying and whisking, Spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting, Around and around With endless rebound: Smiting and fighting, A sight to delight in; Confounding, astounding, Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound. Collecting, projecting, Receding and speeding, And shocking and rocking, And darting and parting, And threading and spreading, And whizzing and hissing, And dripping and skipping, And hitting and splitting, And shining and twining, And rattling and battling, And shaking and quaking, And pouring and roaring, And waving and raving, And tossing and crossing, And flowing and going, And running and stunning, And foaming and roaming, And dinning and spinning, And dropping and hopping, And working and jerking, And guggling and struggling, And heaving and cleaving, And moaning and groaning; And glittering and frittering, And gathering and feathering, And whitening and brightening, And quivering and shivering, And hurrying and skurrying, And thundering and floundering; Dividing and gliding and sliding, And falling and brawling and sprawling, And driving and riving and striving, And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling, And sounding and bounding and rounding, And bubbling and troubling and doubling, And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, And clattering and battering and shattering; Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting, Delaying and straying and playing and spraying, Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling, And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming, And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing, And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping, And curling and whirling and purling and twirling, And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping, And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing; And so never ending, but always descending, Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, - And this way the water comes down at Lodore.
No, worry about nothing but the chiseling of hills into distance in the slight haze and sleep lost over color no two ever the same the wringing hands float ashore amazed. Worry about beauty. It can sell you anything. Lakes collect in the chambers of the heart where the sailboats are made of flying fish about the size of match heads. Sleep can be lost as easily as a house key, the shock can consume at any moment if the hills are not rising  weather is wearing them down and you are driving north in the late afternoon or holding your eyes in your hands like addresses.
It seems a certain fear underlies everything. If I were to tell you something profound it would be useless, as every single thing I know is not timeless. I am particularly risk-averse. I choose someone else over me every time, as I'm sure they'll finish the task at hand, which is to say that whatever is in front of us will get done if I'm not in charge of it. There is a limit to the number of times I can practice every single kind of mortification (of the flesh?). I can turn toward you and say yes, it was you in the poem
Memory is flotsam (yes) just below the surface an eternal city a heap of rubble debris smaller than your fist an animal with- out a leash organized wreck- age ghost net or one hanging silence on the phone—she's gone, my sister said, and we wept and wept over my grandmother while my sister sat with her body and me in the static and the rabbi they sent told her to recite psalms as comfort so we listened to each other breathe instead and my sister's breath was a tunnel a handful of pebbles a knotted Chinese jump-rope her breath was the coiled terrycloth turban our grandmother wore when she cooked or walked the shallow end of her condo pool for exercise— our grandmother still somewhere in her white turban sewing Cornish game hens together with needle and string or somewhere in her good wig playing poker or somewhere in her easy chair watching CNN while cookies shaped like our initials bake in her oven O memory how much you erased how many holes we punched in your facts since who knows the stories she never told about the camps there are no marked graves just too much food on holidays diabetes my mother's fear of ships and the motion of some suspension bridges O memory you've left us trauma below the surface and some above like the fact that I can't shake the December my sister's red hair caught fire from leaning too close to the menorah's candles, our grandmother putting her out with a dish towel with her strong arms.
The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym.Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot. He's been gone over twenty-five years. We are in Beth Israel Cemetery, Block 50, Woodbridge, New Jersey for the unveiling and the sky is like lead. We are in my grandmother's shtetl in Poland, but everyone is dead. The Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick & Benevolent Society has kept these plots faithfully next to their Holocaust memorial— gray stone archway topped with a menorah and a curse: Pour out Thy wrathupon the Nazis and the wicked Germans for they have destroyed the seed of Jacob.May the almighty avenge their blood. Great is our sorrow, and no consolation is to be found! My sister, in her cardboard kippah, opens her prayer book—a special edition she borrowed from rabbinical school—and begins to read in Aramaic. Not one of us can bring ourselves to add anything to the fixed liturgy. My son is squatting at the next grave over, collecting decorative stones from the Glickstein's double plot. We eat yellow sponge cake and drink small cups of brandy to celebrate my grandmother's life. We are no longer mourners, says Jewish law. Can we tell this story in Yiddish? Put the words in the right places? My son cracks a plastic cup until it's shredded to strips, looks like a clear spider, sounds like an error. When my sister finally pulls back the sheet, all the things my grandmother was barely fit on the face of the marker. A year ago at the funeral, her friend Goldie told me she was strong like steel, soft like butter—women like thatthey don't make any more. My mother tries to show my grandmother—now this gray marker— my son, how he's grown, but he squirms from her arms. Ihr gvure iz nit tzu beshraiben. Her strength was beyond description. The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and admonished them in Yiddish are nearly all gone, whole vanished towns that exist now only in books, their maps drawn entirely by heart: this unknown continent, this language of nowhere, these stones from a land that never was. Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. Der vind voyet. The wind howls, says I'm not a stranger anywhere. On the stones we write all we remember, but we are poor guardians of memory. Can you say it in Yiddish? Can you bless us?
The poem in which we drive an hour to the beach and Uncle Dave doesn't get out  of his lawn chair once. The poem in which we left the yellow plastic shovel behind and everyone is bereft. The poem in which I can't stop talking about how you walked deep into Lake Erie  and the water was still only up to your knees when you turned into a speck  past the rock jetty. The poem in which everyone listens to celebrity gossip in the car on the way back. The poem in which I pontificate on how ugly the fiancée of that Jonas brother is,  and how they're too young to get married, and how my grandmother's old  neighbor would have said, "Ugly? She can't help that she's ugly. It's that she's  so stupid," and I would have yelled at her for assuming that all former hair-  dressers are dim. The poem in which I turn into my grandmother's old neighbor. The poem in which I remember very clearly how they both stored tissues in their  bras. The poem in which I think about how this would horrify your mother—the  pendulous breasts, the moist tissues, the dipping into the cleavage to retrieve  anything. The poem in which your mother tries not to wince when I order whatever I want  from the menu despite her coupon for two medium 1-topping pizzas. The poem in which I try to find a deeper meaning for why I notice the woman  ahead of us in line at Johnny's Liquor Store who buys a pack of menthols and   asks the guy behind the counter if he knows her good-for-nothing brother. She  has hair that looks like cats got at a skein of yarn, and a tattoo above her ankle  that's dark and unspecified. It's far enough above her ankle that it's nearly mid-  calf—like her ankle and calf are two different countries and the tattoo got lost  in the borderlands on the way to its actual destination. The poem in which I am territory that is under dispute and no one will occupy it  because of fear and uncertainty. The poem in which I reach the conclusion that this feeling is inspired by your  mother and the way she hums out-of-season carols while doing kitchen tasks,  though it's not really about the humming but rather the time she asked me to  light the Hanukkah candles in the attic because it would be better if they were  out of the way for the Christmas party. The poem in which you and I are in line waiting to buy a mixed six-pack of Great  Lakes and I am staring at a stranger's tattoo and thinking about the fact that I  am not Anne Frank while the baby is in the car with your mother. The poem in which I go into Walmart and buy the baby an olive-green cap that  looks suspiciously like Fidel Castro's. The poem in which I could eradicate the fact that I ever went into Walmart and  bought anything so the baby can one day start a revolution. The poem in which we see a couple on the highway median in a stalled-out Buick  and don't stop to help. The poem in which the highway median looks like the spit of land between two  enemy trenches and I feel a deep longing for my childhood. The poem in which I remember, for no apparent reason, the tornado instructions  taped to the sides of all the filing cabinets in one office I worked in that was on  the top floor of a mostly abandoned mall in Overland Park, Kansas. All that  was left: decorative fountains, floor tiles, mirrored ceilings, Nearly Famous  Pizza, the carcass of Sears. The poem in which we leave Northeastern Ohio, The poem in which we return to  Northeastern Ohio. The poem in which it is night and we are lost in Northeastern Ohio and we keep  passing Amish buggies adorned with reflective tape. The poem in which the moon is a vehicle for content, and is far less than a perfect  reflector of anything. The poem in which we are all in some kind of limbo.
Dad didn't play the ponies or manic games at night; Mom was addicted only to her soaps. Sisters at war never swore. Silence was genius of an era, nothing personal. Our hidden grief shadowed the Fifties' sunshine like Eisenhower's speech against the military-industrial complex, like playground platoons still blowing up Japs. Thanksgiving comes late in this museum of childhood, flower painted at the bottom of a porcelain teacup: cracked saucer, no sugar, no milk.
Thanks, no thanks, to eternal life. What pleasure watching my old house broken-beamed, grey elephant brought to its knees? White ash—gone the way of trilobites and horsehair fern, even the nuclear-proof cockroach in deep-freeze. Cueballs knock each other randomly; reverse.  the tape and movement looks the same, illustrating the end of time: things happen, but don't matter. And if Lethe strips you like a swimmer from his trunks, where will "I" be? If Heaven without you is Hell, how will I know? A forever of no-never-mind does not appeal, God's heart a cold, contracting cinder. Give me the white light, the slit of split-second calm, and knowing over is over.
I'm selling my old rock records, the reggae and the Dead, the Beatles and bands no one heard after the Amazing Kathy Dalton became less so and Airto—busted for possession, his album's face behind ten fingers blacked with stationhouse ink— deported. A Stone retired, Mick past fifty, Van Morrison— composer of the world's best Celtic fuck music—gone spiritual, while "Peaceful Easy Feeling" sells Prozac, and the trippy paisley vinyl of Dave Mason's "Alone Together," Big Brother's funky R. Crumb cover (fat nipply Janis dragging that ball and chain) are quaint collectibles, like Fiestaware or bottles from defunct breweries; useful things no one uses anymore, worth money.
at Las Villas, a small Carol City bar with a makeshift stage, where he spends too much time drinking, pretending he can learn to play the guitar at forty-five, become a singer, a musician, who writes about "Que Difícil Es...." to live in Spanish in Miami, a city yet to be translated, in a restaurant where he has taken us for Cuban food, where I sit, frozen, unable to make a sound, where Mother smiles, all her teeth exposed, squeezes my hand, where Mae and Mitzy hide under the table shielding them from shame with a blood-red tablecloth, leaving my mother and me, pale-faced, trapped by the spotlight shining in our eyes, making it difficult for us to pretend we do not know the man in the white suit pointing to us.
This one appeared to me in a dream, was forgotten, only to reveal itself on the shower wall this morning. It must have been the water. • That one was on the full moon last night, clear as a bell. Someone projected it there.  • This one was on the ground, on crunchy pine needles. The moon projected it there.   • I forgot about that one . . . How was I to know it would be significant?  • Every time I see this one, I'm angry. It doesn't diminish, either, from that first time.   • Oh, that one! To tell you the truth, I never actually saw it, but I could feel it as it was described to me by a blind person over the phone.  • This one I spotted on the back of someone's shirt in a crowd before she disappeared.   • That one evolved, and is still evolving, on that big, flat rock over there; something scraped it, scratched it, the heat cracked it, the frost coated it, tiny plants took root, sheltering insects, and it rained, and it rained, and by the time I showed up, a butterfly had just flown off.   • Not this one again. It makes me so sad . . .  • I was glad to receive that one as a gift. So glad, in fact, that I went and had some copies made.   • Believe it or not, this one has a sound. Just listen.  • Oh, boy—that one! I'll never go there again.   • This one often arrives in the smoke of incense.  • I tried to turn that one over— it burned my hand.  • This one I tried to discard— unsuccessfully, obviously.  • That one speaks to me of space, and negative space, of open and filled spaces, and the among that comes between.   • Whereas this one is the opposite— you get the picture.  • Oh, my goodness— I've never seen that one before!  • This one, from what I gather, is an accident.  • That one, however, is intended.  • This one took some getting to— waiting for the thaw, for instance— but it was well worth it.  • That one, well, you can have it.  • Whenever this one comes my way, it's déjà vu, but I'm ready for it.  • That one is owned by the dentist.  • This one has been proven to be a fake, but I still like it.   • Alas, I lost that one once, in childhood, and it took me until now to find it.  • If you can only have one, choose this one.
We are both strong, dark, bright men, though perhaps you might not notice, finding two figures flat against the landscape like the shadowed backs of mountains. Which would not be far from wrong, for though we both have on Western clothes and he is seated on a yellow spool of emptied and forgotten telephone cable and I recline on a green aluminum lounge, we are both facing into the August sun as august as Hiroshima and the autumn. There are differences, however, if you care to discover, coming close, respectfully. You must discover the landscape as you go. Come. It is in the eyes, the face, the way we would greet you stumbling as you arrive. He is much the smooth, grass-brown slopes reaching knee-high around you as you walk; I am the cracks of cliffs and gullies, pieces of secret deep in the back of the eye. But he is still my father, and I his son. After a while, there is time to go fishing, both of us squatting on rocks in the dusk, leaving peaks and tree line responsible for light. There is a lake below, which both of us acknowledge, by facing, forward, like the sun. Ripples of fish, moon, luminous insects. Frogs, owls, crickets at their sound. Deer, raccoon, badger come down to drink. At the water's edge, the children are fishing, casting shadows from the enormous shoreline. Everything functions in the function of summer. And gradually, and not by chance, the action stops, the children hush back among rocks and also watch, with nothing to capture but dusk. There are four of us, together among others. And I am not at all certain what all this means, if it means anything, but feel with all my being that I must write this down, if I write anything. My father, his son, his grandsons, strong, serene. Night, night, night, before the following morning.
There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest.If they just went straight they might go far; They are strong and brave and true; But they're always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new. They say: "Could I find my proper groove, What a deep mark I would make!" So they chop and change, and each fresh move Is only a fresh mistake. And each forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of the truth at last. He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance; He has just done things by half. Life's been a jolly good joke on him, And now is the time to laugh. Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost; He was never meant to win; He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone; He's a man who won't fit in.
for Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959 Lately, I've become accustomed to the wayThe ground opens up and envelopes meEach time I go out to walk the dog.Or the broad edged silly music the windMakes when I run for a bus...Things have come to that.And now, each night I count the stars,And each night I get the same number.And when they will not come to be counted,I count the holes they leave.Nobody sings anymore.And then last night, I tiptoed upTo my daughter's room and heard herTalking to someone, and when I openedThe door, there was no one there...Only she on her knees, peeking intoHer own clasped hands.
A political art, let it be tenderness, low strings the fingers touch, or the width of autumn climbing wider avenues, among the virtue and dignity of knowing what city you’re in, who to talk to, what clothes —even what buttons—to wear. I address / the society the image, of common utopia.  / The perversity of separation, isolation, after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms, now they suffer in tears, these others, saxophones whining through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes. The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly ignorant. Let the combination of morality and inhumanity begin.   2.    Is power, the enemy? (Destroyer of dawns, cool flesh of valentines, among the radios, pauses, drunks of the 19th century. I see it, as any man's single history. All the possible heroes dead from heat exhaustion  at the beach  or hiding for years from cameras only to die cheaply in the pages of our daily lie.  One hero has pretensions toward literature one toward the cultivation of errors, arrogance, and constantly changing disguises, as trucker, boxer, valet, barkeep, in the aging taverns of memory. Making love to those speedy heroines of masturbation or kicking literal evil continually down filmy public stairs.  A compromisewould be silence. To shut up, even such riskas the proper placementof verbs and nouns. To freeze the spitin mid-air, as it aims itselfat some valiant intellectual's face. There would be someone
One against the other across the fleetingly infinite field: that dry crackling of pallid corn stalks clacking comes close to it. behind them mountains range like steppes between the tiers of fog they coddle. it's autumn coming close again and you need to compare this one to autumns past, recall the other sputters of color too good to last. something you need to say, something you come close to: wind in its limitless visits— especially in fall when it cleans the overblown trees— wind in possession of you says it best. but you go on anyway, trying to pen the breeze: this fall phenomenon different from summer's in its macabre celebration of the lifeless, in its forever rewritten memory of what comes next. sorrel leaves swirling in a whirlwind mimic your own compulsive repetition, its own circle of yearning so close to a kind of comfort. quickening conversations of geese flocking south chill through your thin skin: behind it a choir of silence undefined rows you closer to what you'll never forget, what you almost remember this time. closer to its name. the heart overtaken. the bare staves waving at boughs' ends, the musical red wings: something they almost say, more like a sense hunched in darkness, an ache, a suspicion: every time, closer to it, closer. hear hard light on the hillside flatten the visible scale into two dimensions, and you're in love with the flatted third: the way it breaks you down, over and over, to mean you are alive. the way you rub it in the wound that you never come close to wanting to close— as if you could scrub away the whirling of everything else and come down like snow to the center, the eye, so close to the purity of knowing inside this present pain, that searing white place without wind or words.
I almost insist on the words  as doors left swinging   from the force no one saw    A wrap around hotel    with empty courtyard    boarded up, sprayed white    Hiding Out.    Nick is too kind  two black  and slowly moving marbles against flesh   Sara, a model of containment    Brian is luminous (all eyes)    twin fires beyond the pit  that only crackles green    brighter than the edges of the neon  lining Fairfax    Family Books    The Films of Robert Blake    We score a trim ocean blue    windbreaker    and Dinosaurs of the Land, Sea & Air   I slipped away from the bench  when they brought  the car around   My black hobo sack abandoned   and thought a bomb. I was seamlessly high on my air heels and driven    away to where the camera could not follow   8-4-13
1   Did I say I was a creature of habit?   I meant the opposite.   I meant behavior is a pile of clothes   I might or might not wear.   Before all the sowing and reaping could go on for centuries,   before the calendar, I must have been convinced   that my movements were both mandated   and blessed.      2   I've never been an old woman knitting by a fire   but I've played one in images   where it meant being foolish or wise, a mistress   of distraction's indirection.   To rock while entwining is life's work,   but I am reckless, restless
So why assume [she] Is cold why not Assume drunk “Legless” Can keep up pretty good though With your car in the rural night You are a passenger Your left leg lolls and Your friend reaches a hand Across the emergency brake Which points now at the base of The gearstick shaft And can point at its head But nowhere else Thus does not “Speak” And unless overused abused is Reliable Whereas anyone can misunderstand Or willfully misinterpret the Point and represent Are very different (Moon!) 6am and the snow Sent enough light upward For this window to Transmit and permit My seeing I heard more than I saw I understood less than I heard I was well read compared to But not compared to I begin to feel warm in My crotch, as if a wodge Of moist electric blanket Were stuck in there And my friend was not Riding on the other side of the brake —I mean emergency—he is not Fox-hunting and on A horse in a novel In which the brake Is a strip of greenwood He is downstairs the coffee’s Made but he ignores My text He works alone And I will have to go down there
to mama who on the eve of my birth beat a bitch with a kool-aid spoon for taking her eldest child’s red balloon (if i wasn’t wet-fisted, all hemmed up inside cecelia, i’da jumped in) to the bazaar of milk & afterbirth that once was her body, piping hot almond dark with laughter & memories of fenced-in two-stepping late night in a brownsville park to mama’s hands, mad stallions pummeling dough for biscuits, cherry-scented butter-smeared fists or floured moons to ms cloritha, professional crier for dilroy’s funeral parlor (stuffed the dead fulla who knows, once saw some geezer’s toupee slid back like a yarmulke, a woman’s wig bangs in her ear, mourners too busy kiki-ing in the back to tell the woman’s kin her fall fell forward & dipped to the side cloritha wailing all the while, earning her fifty bucks off the books) to ms sheronda who daily bugged mama for dried black-eyed peas, swore her son looked like a jackson (the eldest sissy, what’s her face, bee bee, cee cee you know, “centipede”) to the hungry black power thief who snatched nefertiti off our wall, public enemy off the turntable, platter of mustard glazed tongue picked clean in the kitchen sink to cuban ruben cross the hall who loved tongue & chuck D, father figure by george michael (also gone from the crates), who OD’d at the tunnel (stuntin’) in mama’s leopard print dress
especially the rarest kind / or the kind named Priscilla G & not drowning in bleach cream / creamy spin / but spinning blades on a black Nina gunship in the gargantuan ghetto / not killing & maiming my brothers & potential husbands / when the working mothers give up & when they do not & when boys in their mad survivalist tactics want a movie sex parade / silk-edging their sweaty fists in 30 watt lit basements just because / death switch of a future / none of that has to do with any kind of blackness or a crazed horizon in the plumed summers of Los Angeles wherein television reenactments of real fathers didn't occur enough for news sidebars / but more than generally believed / they showed up to dailiness / cash in hand but as the school year revved up the rest of the madness had nowhere to hide / ballooned horizon / chemical concerns / fire up the blue turbines / fire up unconscious intention plus the acne of ignorance / on the city's glittery filth façade but not because of blackness / not for me / when I would get home sometimes there might be food sometimes just blackness I could live on / which I love
around 530 is a beautiful peaceful time you can just hear the dog lapping David lifts his smoke to his lips forever dangling chain in the middle of everything bout the top shelf or so. The party at which I sd that’s my col- lected works and every one stared my home was so small is it I’m not particularly into the task of humility at the moment but I’m not against it it’s like that deflated beach ball on a tiny chair   I think of as joking with the larger one on a painting floating in air my home is large love made it large once not to get all John Wieners & believe me love made it small once this place only had sex unlike the house I love a house I fear a house a house never gets laid frankly who doesn’t like a hotel room I live in a hotel room a personal one. A young person very much like me was brutal no personal photographs please it was anyone’s home perfect for a party now I’m going fast. How the description of a drug enters a room & changes the room thus with going fast say thus if you want to go slow. To drink the wrong thing for a moment for you to lick my thigh & your honey face   I met a dog named Izzie once, I met a dog named Alan the calm person writing her calm poems now & then she shows her sacred heart she opens her chest & a monkey god is taking a shit swinging on his thing. You didn’t know I had so much inside me buckets of malice bibles of peace I don’t want to go all library on you now like my mother the mother of god or my brother named Jack who sat in a deck of cards getting hard when she squeezes in getting cozy I know less what I want to say. I can open an entire  room comes out each moment that’s what I mean not things widen & flow there’s no purpose to this.
It is with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. We call things beautiful, not as such, but because of what they mean.   Because we commonly attribute beauty to whatever does us a favor, We are reduced to puzzled despair whenever actual beauty says no.   Indeed, our calling a thing beautiful almost means it is not. For how can we know it is beautiful until it betrays us?   A sage once said “The trouble with these great philosophers Is their only way of doing honor to an idea is to say the idea is true.”   It is the same with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. Humiliated, we are no longer willing to call the beautiful beautiful . . .    Madrid is reading his poetry to a roomful of unearthed cultural relics. He compares the white hair on their heads | to the flag that signals surrender.
Tossing off expletives into the sea of cab lights, I lounge ever more than I work. I wear my silk pants to the middle-of-America themed bar as if white-collar were this Halloween's hottest new costume. It sinks like a stone, this attention to the lives of others. I think I have evolved to respect my social obligations, only complaining to the cell phone's warm illicit glow. I feel drunk on the whole leafy season when you hear me, working ever to avoid work. Sentiment forbidden by custom, industrialization forbidden by nothing. Down the block they have begun restoring the mid-century antique dresser, men shuffling back and forth with gold polish and sand. It's insane that I care to ask towards its progress. We repeat a process of hoping our bodies to the future though for now mine eats cucumbers in bed. I had a dream about a crystal blue pool. I felt stupid when I saw the ocean.
I did not come here to sing a blues. Lately, I open my mouth   & out comes marigolds, yellow plums. I came to make the sky a garden.   Give me rain or give me honey, dear lord. The sky has given us no water this year.   I ride my bike to a boy, when I get there what we make will not be beautiful   or love at all, but it will be deserved. I’ve started seeking men to wet the harvest.   Come, tonight I declare we must move instead of pray. Tonight, east of here, two boys, one dressed in what could be blood   & one dressed in what could be blood before the wound, meet & mean mug   & God, tonight, let them dance! Tonight, the bullet does not exist. Tonight, the police   have turned to their God for forgiveness. Tonight, we bury nothing, we serve a God   with no need for shovels, we serve a God with a bad hip & a brother in prison.   Tonight, let every man be his own lord. Let wherever two people stand be a reunion   of ancient lights. Let’s waste the moon’s marble glow shouting our names to the stars until we are   the stars. O, precious God! O, sweet black town! I am drunk & I thirst. When I get to the boy   who lets me practice hunger with him I will not give him the name of your newest ghost   I will give him my body & what he does with it is none of my business, but I will say look, I made it a whole day, still, no rainstill, I am without exit wound   & he will say Tonight, I want to take youhow the police do, unarmed & sudden   & tonight, when we dream, we dream of dancing in a city slowly becoming ash.
Water the plants. Drink plenty of water. Don’t hear the news. Get bored. Complain about the weather. Keep a corkscrew in your purse. Swipe right sometimes. Don’t smile unless you want to. Sleep in. Don’t see the news. Remember what the world is like for white people. Listen to cricket songs. Floss. Take pills. Keep an empty mind. When you are hungover do not say I’m never drinking again. Be honest when you’re up to it. Otherwise drink water lie to yourself turn off the news burn the papers skip the funerals take pills laugh at dumb shit fuck people you don’t care about use the crockpot use the juicer use the smoothie maker drink water from the sky don’t think too much about the sky don’t think about water skip the funerals close your eyes whenever possible When you toast look everyone in the eyes Never punctuate the President Write the news Turn into water Water the fire escape Burn the paper Crumble the letters Instead of hyacinths pick hydrangeas Water the hydrangeas Wilt the news White the hydrangeas Drink the white Waterfall the cricket songs Keep a song mind Don’t smile Don’t wilt funeral funeral
The birth isn’t about poetry It is about screaming pain on a Sunday Hailing a cab and head racing To the hospital, now so close to the new apartment   I had a baby inside of me But no one expected it to happen so fast Or then at least they said they didn’t Maybe they expected it to happen so fast All along   Alone in the waiting room I shook and shook And the blood ran down my legs Later with the magnesium I thought of the many permutations of the bald head Pale, pickling fish skin, glowing with scales   When she came out, she was dark and full of hair No blood, but born in the caul Like the other magical realities of my past accomplishments When she came out she cried and it sounded like me But passed me, into her new reality   Now 3 weeks later, they say I am still not an erotic object So I wander the park in the snow with my friend We light candles and pray to the darkness We light the park on fire and the police come and find us   When they take us to the jail, I say no, it’s not right I am a mother after all They say, but where is your baby And I say, no no, my baby my baby They say, yes yes, look at your beautiful baby   I say, I do, I do Look, look, and listen My baby my baby She’s here
Acting on an anonymous tip, a shift supervisor at a runaway shelter strip-searched six teenagers. Mrs. Haver was taping shut the mouths of talkative students by the time she neared retirement, and Mr. Vickers, a skilled electrician in his day, didn’t adapt when fuses became circuit breakers, a fact that didn’t stop him from tinkering in our basement until the house was consumed by flame.   I used to want to be this bad at a job. I wanted to show up pissy drunk to staff meetings when the power point slides were already dissolving one into another, but I had this bad habit of showing up on time and more sober than any man should be when working audio/visual hospitality in a three star hotel that was a four star hotel before he started working there.   When the entire North Atlantic blacked out, every soul in the Hyatt Regency Dearborn flooded the parking lot panicked about terrorists and rapture, while I plugged in microphones and taped down cables by flashlight—you know, in case whatever cataclysm unfolded didn’t preempt the meetings. Meetings, before which I’d convince a children’s hospital to pay fifteen dollars to rent a nine dollar laser pointer. Thirty-five bucks for a flip chart, extra paper on the house. Is it good to be good at a job if that job involves pretending to be a secret service agent for Phizer’s George Bush impersonator? I don’t know   if it’s better to be good at a bad job or bad at a good job, but there must be some kind of satisfaction in doing a job so poorly, you’re never asked to do it again. I’m not saying he’s a hero, but there’s a guy out there who overloaded a transformer and made a difference, because in a moment, sweating through my suit, groping in the dark when my boss was already home,   I learned that I’d work any job this hard, ache like this to know that I could always ache for something. There’s a hell for people like me where we shovel the coal we have mined ourselves into furnaces that burn the flesh from our bones nightly, and we never miss a shift.
Last night whistling I passed by their alley, saw them in a sidelong blink of light from traffic, a speeding car, then I went home. Dreamed of gold skies, black money. I felt so stupid, to talk about them feels stupid. I’m the sullen red Sun.   Bernadette leans from tenement windows, sailors keep searching world after world for Bernadette, and her arms are black, her outstretched proffered palms all milky. From them coins drop into Pickpocket’s pockets freely.   Pickpocket’s face is pocked, his arms are pocked. I threw his face in a lake to make it ripple, he smokes a cigar to an orange hot hole in his face, a glow. At night the Sun’s a kid brought behind the woodshed and abased.
I didn't tell you that, in the end, he begged For the end. Death like the bed after The bedtime story. Death like a widening Crack of light beneath the door.  He begged them to let him Go so he could go. Said I want To die. Then said kill me. Please.    You and I endure that first pain.  We just want to die. People with that Other ultimately physical agony say Kill me and know they won't discuss it In therapy. Kill me. I’m thinking Of him today because I want to die And I am ashamed to say it. My thinking   Is red and sticky. Rather than kill me, I'd like you to listen as I live In a perpetual whine. Can’t I still be Somebody’s baby? Say yes for yourself. Call me some time. Every day I wish to die, Remind me how he insisted. Kill me. And I’ll live again.
This isn’t a great poem. I’m not writing this to write a great poem. I am writing this because I am one person. I am only one. I have a face and a front of my face. I have two shoulders and two hips. I’m living. I live. So what can I do with my face if it can’t see that person’s face? What do I tell my eyes to see? How do I let them know that when they see that face it is that person’s wish that they not know it? How do I tell them we have to go back into the world where no one knows us and we don’t know anyone? How do I tell them to stay there? There is nothing for them to see. How do I tell my hands they will never touch that person’s hands? How do I tell my ears that when that person says my name it is only a word? How do I tell my lips to make that person’s name another word so I can say it? How do I tell my neck that person cannot see it? How do I tell my hair that person cannot pull it? It is my hair. It is my head. How do I tell my teeth they will never strike that person’s teeth? How do I tell my thighs it does not matter what they do? They are the tops of my legs. They will fall apart. How do I tell my back it must never wait for that person? That person will not hold me. That person does not know where I am, does not think of me. Does not know I have exhausted every argument against him. That person does not know I no longer love freedom. That person does not know what it means when I ask for forgiveness. That person does not know I beg the world to let me change. That person cannot see my face. Knows a woman with my name and she is a woman. Does not know the word I hide behind my words. Does not know this face. Does not know this is my face. Says my name and looks at this person. How do I tell my feet to stand here? How do I tell my eyes to see? How do I tell the voice under my voice to keep on speaking? How do I tell my mouth to speak?
The stroll from my cell along the path above the donkeys past a door open, a door shut and a strong smell of wood and cigarettes ends where music helps white marguerites cut through the masonry.  * Dark for words with a clicking wren a yellow tit and over the clover a shovel and a rustle of grain. He’s training calves with shouts and food to follow him to another field before the second bell. * Broom loops over the buttercups.  These names give birth to cones and needles, ferns with mini-sacs of pollen attached. It only takes one shot of spittle on green for my brother to explain the sexual life of the forest and honeybees. * Simon says he would like to live alone in a cottage with a garden, no humans, no obligations. Solitary I prefer a pod while he likes hives. We confess we both wear armor outside our habitats. * Water was our first armor before our skin. Then came the bristle of sunshine. And a thickening of blood into oil or syrup in the lower veins. * I hate the thistledown covering my prototype now interior layer cowering at power or shout, but can laugh with the one who has sap under his skin pouring the bucket the hand is carrying. * Brother, help me find an animal who will rescue me from sharp delirium of fear beyond armor and my friends the birds by an open window: to be clear would be wonderful. A sigh without the ghostly gasps that accompany a certain voice. Still I still do desire more of the kind no one can see or hear. Not that second, rasping breath of triumph. Find me instead more like the breathy Saint Bernard. But a little dog A cask of brandy hanging at his neck
By living late, and sleeping late, we miss the moment when the bats come home to roost— when crooked shadows flit in jagged loops that seem to seek the chimney, seem to miss, then somehow disappear into the eaves; and they (the bats) tuck wing to fur to wing in crevices and roof-beam beveling, doze through our nearly diametric lives, invisible as brown on brown—until today, wakened by dreams, I caught a slight, compelling corner-glimpse in gray first light, of sudden motion in the mostly still new dawn; and drawn, I rose to see the flight: our dark companions exiting the night.
From down the road, starting up and stopping once more, the sound of a puppy on a chain who has not yet discovered he will spend his life there. Foolish dog, to forget where he is and wander until he feels the collar close fast around his throat, then cry all over again about the little space in which he finds himself. Soon, when there is no grass left in it and he understands it is all he has, he will snarl and bark whenever he senses a threat to it. Who would believe this small sorrow could lead to such fury no one would ever come near him?
The adults we call our children will not be arriving with their children in tow for Thanksgiving. We must make our feast ourselves, slice our half-ham, indulge, fill our plates, potatoes and green beans carried to our table near the window. We are the feast, plenty of years, arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted to be good company for one another. Little did we know that first picnic how this would go. Your hair was thick, mine long and easy; we climbed a bluff to look over a storybook plain. We chose our spot as high as we could, to see the river and the checkerboard fields. What we didn’t see was this day, in our pajamas if we want to, wrinkled hands strong, wine in juice glasses, toasting whatever’s next, the decades of side-by-side, our great good luck.
A part of, a part of love, hates, hates a part of.A part of, a part of hate, loves, loves a part of.Loves a part of, a part of the man, the man the state hates.Hates a part of, a part of the name, the name the people love.Hates wholeness, hate. Loves togetherness, love,the togetherness of the large human movement.Loves togetherness, loves. Hates wholeness, hate,the wholeness of the small human hyphen.De Wet, de Klerks. De Klerk, de Wets. Botha.Moneydeala, your worship makes an island of freedom. Detained Harassed Banned. The trap, the trap, the trap. The capture, the capture, the capture. The trial, the trial, the trial. So do we So we to. So do the Cape parts, a part of, the Dutch parts. Ho wick, Ri vo nia.She Who Tries her sacred knock, her High Organ of little male Anasi. Her Eastern Star in his Malta night. Order, a part of. Breytenback's albino, Gordimer's Beethoven. A part his, a part hers. The odor of Resistance, Brutus Dennis! A part invests. Victor, a Verster. A part divests. All American Apartheids pulled South. Dela"
The planet turns there without you, beautiful.Exiled by death you cannottouch it. Weird joy to watch postulateslived out and discarded, something crowded inside us always craving to become somethingglistening outside us, the relentless planetshowing itself the logic of what is buried inside it. To love existenceis to love what is indifferent to youyou think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful. World that can know itself only by world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.You are an hypothesis made of flesh. What you will teach the stars is constant rage at the constant prospect of not-being.   •  Sometimes when I wake it's because I hear a knock. Knock,Knock. Two knocks, quite clear. I wake and listen. It's nothing.
I was working in a bookstore and as an antidote to the twin torment of exhaustion and boredom, one day I went with a friend on a walking tour. We made it as far as Berlin and there I met the man I would move with to a boarding house, then to furnished rooms in the flat of a civil servant, and from there one morning in January to the Registry to be married. Afterward we moved to a studio apartment and two years later to the school where boys returning from the war would remove their collars and sew them back on with red thread to demonstrate the end of their allegiance to the cruel and fastidious past. Everyone wanted to be launched into a place from which you could look back and ask whether the red was also meant to enact spilled blood. You could say so, but only if you want to insist that history's minutia is best read as allegory. The fact is, history didn't exist then. Each day was a twenty-four hour stand-still on a bridge from which we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to catch sight of the future. It's near where you're standing now. One day we were lying in the sun dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera came by and devoured us.
In the rearview, fog extinguishes the hills of new money—mansions on acres away from road or sight. Their architected privacy, windows to look out at a land that won't look back. The fog's secure drapery. It's space to dance through they buy and what one might call "dappled light" moving across their acres, light through their oaks moving over their mares, brushed to a sheen.• Palms of sugar cubes. Soft snorting, I bet. Here, Muybridge proved their horses fly a moment. In their homes, they can't hear each other call from foyer to pool house. I am jealous of this loneliness most of all—loneliness delimited by colonnade and cold pressed juices.They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers.... I imagine hills and hills dappled like this.
I want to be near you | via nearness generally | an app "chance" rather than "skill" | determining the tax obligations of the feathers as | one falls into the pixel | on the white water | interlude. A grid is applied to the | field which dissolves into | the screen harmlessly beneath a summer storm. Brace. The silence that precedes an aperture opening | Left hands of right-handed engineers flensed skittish with false lines. These tears or weak areas | in crying fire are lined with a very transparent low weight enamel found in the company (from the Latin   com-, "with",   and panis, "bread") of other expressions | of space before choice under an ornamental plain. Since the location of paradise seems to be roughly that of Japan, a grid is applied | to the image from which the object has been extracted | and begins to spurt. As Emerson says, lyrical, not epical or even tragic | Suspension of certain clauses within the document is permitted when in cases of rebellion or the public safety may require it | The canvas may be folded in on itself 7 times. A sheet of melinex is | laid over the area of loss on the landscape | not the face | dolled by what it would release.
My childhood was not an anxious place, though I lay  in my bed, awake, thumbing my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun  imploded  would Russian astronauts be OK, they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs,  they that chased their own tail around this water bowl  we call Earth. When I was a child, in elementary school  we practiced a type of  protection called Duck and Cover, where we huddled  under desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. They were communists,  had the bomb, and were evil Reagan told us from the small grave  of a TV screen. In the sixties, Nixon said the same  thing, and the Panthers  countered with "the Viet Cong nevercalled me nigger" With their picks like unclenched fists,  with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb, they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014, and America is still scared of  the Russians and black people;  now the American Dream is to be debt free, which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least  I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.
I had the idea of sitting still while others rushed by. I had the thought of a shop that still sells records. A letter in the mailbox. The way that book felt in my hands. I was always elsewhere. How is it to have a body today, to walk in this city, to run? I wanted to eat an apple so precisely the tree would make another exactly like it, then lie down uninterrupted in the gadgetless grass. I kept texting the precipice, which kept not answering, my phone auto-making everything incorrect. I had the idea. Put down the phone. Earth, leaves, storm, water, vine. The gorgeous art of breathing. I had the idea — the hope of friending you without electricity. Of what could be made among the lampposts with only our voices and hands.
photo of United States from  outer space in trash  green fire held to  everything as  everyone  whirls into abs-  tr-  action  a moment with the  crystal and the weight of the house is released  we hold fast  we hold one another  we hold to the vigor of the street  pain of picked flower our frame  reckless but never monochrome  everything the speed and  tension of eloping  saunter past  barricades  waking not  sleeping to  dream
One rainy night we sat in trafficand, overtired in back, you sawa wind-whipped grocery bag afloatbeyond the clutch of jagged branches, swept by gusts and whirled in eddies.A sudden downdraft swooped it earthward, where it danced till with a whoosha current luffed it past the power lines. Disowned by gravity, small ghostnot yet snagged by twiggy fingers,it couldn’t reach the earth. Thin-skinned,it pulsed, translucent jellyfish.You wept and pled to be let outinto the dark and slanted rain,somehow to save that desolate thing.The light turned green and still you begged, Go back, go back, on its behalf,caught and held, bossed and tossedby a will much greater than its own.
He stood on his stoopand clapped her sneakers together hard, a sharp report,smacking right sole against left, trying to shock the mudfrom each complicated tread, spanking those expensive footprints until clay flakes and plugsticked onto the boxwood’s leaves like a light filthy sleetfrom the rubber craters and crannies where they stuck weeks ago,until her shoes were banged clean though that didn’t stophis stiff-armed slow-motion applause with her feet’s emptied gloves, slapping mate against matewithout missing a beat,half-wishing that hollow sound echoing off their neighbors’ houses could call her back.
When it snows, he standsat the back door or wanders around the house to each window in turn andwatches the weatherlike a lover. O farm boy,I waited yearsfor you to look at methat way. Now we’re old enough to stop waitingfor random looks or touches or words, so I find myself watching you watchingthe weather, and we wait together to discoverwhatever the sky might bring.
In her nineties and afraidof weather and of falling ifshe wandered far outside her door,my mother took to strolling inthe house. Around and round she’d go, stalking into corners, backtrack,then turn and speed down hallway, stop almost at doorways, skirt a table, march up to the kitchen sink andwheel to left, then swing intothe bathroom, almost stumble ona carpet there. She must have walkeda hundred miles or more amongher furniture and family pics, mementos of her late husband. Exercising heart and limb,outwalking stroke, attack, she strode, not restless like a lion in zoo,but with a purpose and a gait,and kept her eyes on heaven’s gate.
The sky hangs up its starry pictures: a swan, a crab, a horse. And even though you’re three hundred miles away, I know you see them, too. Right now, my side of the bed is empty, a clear blue lake of flannel. The distance yawns and stretches. It’s hard to remember we swim in an ocean of great love, so easy to fall into bickering like little birds at the feeder fighting over proso and millet, unaware of how large the bag of grain is, a river of golden seeds, that the harvest was plentiful, the corn is in the barn, and whenever we’re hungry, a dipperful of just what we need will be spilled . . .
A quarter of a century since we left high school, and we’ve gathered at a posh restaurant. A little heavier, a little grayer, we look for the yearbook pictures caught inside these bodies of strangers. Some of our faces are etched with lines, the faint tracing of a lover’s touch, and some of our hair is silver-white, a breath of frost. And some of us are gone. But he’s here, the dark angel, everyone’s last lover, up at the microphone singing Save the last dance for me; he’s singing a cappella, the notes rising sweetly, yearningly toward the ceiling, which is now festooned with tissue flowers, paper streamers, balloons. And we’re all eighteen again, lines and wrinkles erased, gray hairs gone, our slim bodies back, the perfect editing. A saxophone keens its reedy insistence; scents of gardenias and tea roses float in the air from our wrist corsages and boutonnieres. No children or lovers have broken our hearts, it’s just all of us, together, in our fresh young skin, ready to do it all over again.
It came with those scratches from all their belt buckles, palm-dark with their sweat like the stock of a gun: an arc of pickmarks cut clear through the lacquer where all the players before me once strummed—once thumbed these same latches where it sleeps in green velvet. Once sang, as I sing, the old songs. There’s no end, there’s no end to this world, everlasting. We crumble to dust in its arms.
When first thou on me, Lord, wrought'st thy sweet print, My heart was made thy tinder box. My ’ffections were thy tinder in’t: Where fell thy sparks by drops. Those holy sparks of heavenly fire that came Did ever catch and often out would flame. But now my heart is made thy censer trim, Full of thy golden altar’s fire, To offer up sweet incense in Unto thyself entire: I find my tinder scarce thy sparks can feel That drop out from thy holy flint and steel. Hence doubts out bud for fear thy fire in me ’S a mocking ignis fatuus; Or lest thine altars fire out be, It’s hid in ashes thus. Yet when the bellows of thy spirit blow Away mine ashes, then thy fire doth glow.
I am not a poet because I live in the actual world where fear divides light I have no protection against the real evils and money which is the world where most lives are spent I am not a poet because I cannot sing about lost kingdoms of righteousness instead I see a woman in a blue parka crying on the street today without hope from despair I am not a poet for there is nothing I can say in smart turns to deflect oncoming blows of every day's inexistence that creeps into the contemporary horizon I am not a poet but a witness to bear the empty space that becomes hearts if left to loiter or linger without a life to share I've seen sorrow on joy street and heard the blur of the hurdy-gurdy and I too know what evening means but this is not real—poetry is and from this have I partaken as my eyes grow into the evolved dark
I leaned against the mantel, sick, sick, Thinking of my failure, looking into the abysm, Weak from the noon-day heat. A church bell sounded mournfully far away, I heard the cry of a baby, And the coughing of John Yarnell, Bed-ridden, feverish, feverish, dying, Then the violent voice of my wife: "Watch out, the potatoes are burning!" I smelled them ... then there was irresistible disgust. I pulled the trigger ... blackness ... light ... Unspeakable regret ... fumbling for the world again. Too late! Thus I came here, With lungs for breathing ... one cannot breathe here with lungs, Though one must breathe Of what use is it To rid one's self of the world, When no soul may ever escape the eternal destiny of life?
I was only eight years old; And before I grew up and knew what it meant I had no words for it, except That I was frightened and told my Mother; And that my Father got a pistol And would have killed Charlie, who was a big boy, Fifteen years old, except for his Mother. Nevertheless the story clung to me. But the man who married me, a widower of thirty-five, Was a newcomer and never heard it Till two years after we were married. Then he considered himself cheated, And the village agreed that I was not really a virgin. Well, he deserted me, and I died The following winter.
I am Minerva, the village poetess, Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk, And all the more when “Butch” Weldy Captured me after a brutal hunt. He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers; And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up, Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice. Will some one go to the village newspaper, And gather into a book the verses I wrote?— I thirsted so for love I hungered so for life!
No other man, unless it was Doc Hill, Did more for people in this town than l. And all the weak, the halt, the improvident And those who could not pay flocked to me. I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers. I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune, Blest with a congenial mate, my children raised, All wedded, doing well in the world. And then one night, Minerva, the poetess, Came to me in her trouble, crying. I tried to help her out—she died— They indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me, My wife perished of a broken heart. And pneumonia finished me.
He protested all his life long The newspapers lied about him villainously; That he was not at fault for Minerva's fall, But only tried to help her. Poor soul so sunk in sin he could not see That even trying to help her, as he called it, He had broken the law human and divine. Passers by, an ancient admonition to you: If your ways would be ways of pleasantness, And all your pathways peace, Love God and keep his commandments.
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge. When I felt the bullet enter my heart I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary, Instead of running away and joining the army. Rather a thousand times the county jail Than to lie under this marble figure with wings, And this granite pedestal Bearing the words, “Pro Patria.” What do they mean, anyway?
Knowlt Hoheimer ran away to the war The day before Curl Trenary Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett For stealing hogs. But that's not the reason he turned a soldier. He caught me running with Lucius Atherton. We quarreled and I told him never again To cross my path. Then he stole the hogs and went to the war— Back of every soldier is a woman.
Very well, you liberals, And navigators into realms intellectual, You sailors through heights imaginative, Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets, You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits, And Tennessee Claflin Shopes— You found with all your boasted wisdom How hard at the last it is To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms. While we, seekers of earth's treasures Getters and hoarders of gold, Are self-contained, compact, harmonized, Even to the end.
"Mad—bad—and dangerous to know" bore George Gordon to the pageant of his bleeding heart in Philhellenic pirated by radicals reaching further and further to Cephalonia devoted to his fortune and the shaft that paid the brigade a remedy of bleeding heroism on hearing the news the Carbonari dreaming The Two Foscari to beat the row and lasting eulogy "she walks in beauty" at the crack of bark the bloody news spoke for many writing on a rock "Byron is dead" and agreed to act as the agent on VIRONOS he became a name not an island and subjugated to "Byron is dead" "so, we'll go no more a-roving" immense and lasting.
I. She thinks the monkey's bad luck because of all the Institutions it's seen. A curious curious George hooked to my hoodie, with arguably racialized, inappropriate lips curling out to smile and greet the staff as I ask for the nth time why no release or where is Albeheary? By now, anything may well prove to be true, which, of course, is insane. II. Sometimes I lose it. If I can't wear it, When I'm on the outside, the backpack Or higgly pocket. Little higgly pigglies Tearing at the tongue. Speak to me. Who, art? Thinning. More vodka. This time Lakeshore third floor, My DTs I can't dial. The kindest black Trans/guy who did my dialing for me. Others tore their hair out or hanged themselves. My roomie he collapsed his lung Eleven times. This is his last trip to the place. Eventual. Even. They moved me I got the same roommate Last New Year's as the one before. The shakes are permanent. The stain all the more so, like nothing. Inside, a perpetual processing. This is prisoning. Ever emotion's measured. "wrong" (with you) This isn't as or like anything. Outside, I just want back in. III. At one point, there was something to it. As when he found a hernia on me in the tub And suddenly, "operation." Herr Doctor. Then hospital at five years old and a Curious Curious George story. How he went too. Or windup Campbell's Soup. Of course he slept there, for solace. For comfort. Night rounds. Book lernt animal instinct. Aping compassion. Inappropriate lips. The old testament wronged.
The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne, Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright. What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed. George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man. He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death. In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition. She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation Stopped—just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's  heart fluttered And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,  "But I still have some of the pills."
So I'm an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach thing no song sing but in the word which I'm starlessly unreachably faithful you, pedant & you, politically righteous & you, alive you think you can peal my sober word apart from my drunken word my Buddhist word apart from my white sugar Thérèse word my word to comrade from my word to my mother but all my words are one word my lives one my last to first wound round in finally fiberless crystalline skein I began as a drunkard & ended as a child I began as an ordinary cruel lover & ended as a boy who  read radiant newsprint I began physically embarrassing—"bloated"—&  ended as a perfect black-haired laddy I began unnaturally subservient to my mother &  ended in the crib of her goldenness I began in a fatal hemorrhage & ended in a  tiny love's body perfect smallest one But I began in a word & I ended in a word &   I know that word better Than any knows me or knows that word,  probably, but I only asked to know it— That word is the word when I say me bloated  & when I say me manly it's The word that word I write perfectly lovingly  one & one after the other one But you—you can only take it when it's that one & not  some other one Or you say "he lost it" as if I (I so nothinged) could ever  lose the word But when there's only one word—when  you know them, the words— The words are all only one word the perfect  word— My body my alcohol my pain my death are only  the perfect word as I Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers  Listen Every me I was & wrote  were only & all (gently) That one perfect word
(from A Midsummer Night's Dream, spoken by Bottom) When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is “Most fair Pyramus.” Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life, stol'n hence, and left me asleep? I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.
Toys and rose The zoo body zigzags I think fish too  but I'm a polite social being, I'm a Ladle Lady or purple and blue I write green letters and gold editorials for the Krystal Oxygen Company I have one hip as far as I can see, that I see as I write say  white tee-shirts  upsidedown  turn em around  & put them on  your muscles  my angels  or  a semi-colon  is blue window  to me is that a haiku? I fly over San Diego in some one or another real despair and ask you to comfort me. You more or less do, you aren't even here  my best me my worldly me  my taste of spring my continuance my  comfort will you comfort me? I offer you my heart over Tucson  I can't use it  take it to comfort me  free  me be it take it take it to  be it which apparently you don't or take you help provide me it I think, that happens among true people, that poem I was writing no good poem  but Moment framed the Pleiades The garnets ring more beautiful the longer you  are waiting for me in them,  where Deity makes me friendly there. But who put on all the tee-shirts in Hunter's Point? Well we're all good boys my son said so. A semi-colon is a semi-precious garnet cluster telegram; what we love are such depths between all the messages. Pass the salt; Ladies of the Tang, bubble of night; this book about Harry Truman is wonderful. I see the Gulf Moon Rising every night. I'm familiar with the zonked starfish. I've the sheen on under the fire-escape railing all streetlight-lit. The hollow suddenly appeared to enlarge and fill with a bright light. Wild with the taste of wine it does not remember the despair of an hour ago, which was true that is of a true woman. She was somehow hating her position on the round earth in the dusky sky on a harsh Sunday. On the ground forgotten flowerlike firmaments. She addressed in uneloquent hatred SMUG LIFE  the one who soothes one's foolishness the Great Face Construct who loves you for your kinks child anyway, the Guru God:  Oh I will come back a knockout tomorrow  Useless to you!  You're not it you smug face  I'm not doing your yoga not wearing  Your moondrops using your cream  Rinse letting you fuck me Exquisite  Like I was one of the Ones With Brains Too!  Intelligence in panties with peekaboo  holes—  No I'm coming back raw  I'm getting drenched in the rain  It's rain and it's wet I'm soaked I'm  Chilled and I'm coughing the air's raw  To my throat, which is raw from  Coughing, coughing so strong  Coughing and laughing So strong from killing you!  Etc.    She didn't kill nothing.  & I don't get to share no secrets with the stars. I make chow. I contemplate semi-colons. I despair as a mother. I scream at that kid I'm gonna crack open your big walnut if you don't go to sleep. Theories of grace, that it implies no surprise no shock. Ukrainians sudden on Sunday speaking Ukrainian, the cross not Christian but Gracious  and when I want to cry or cough violently it must diffuse back into my embassy; hard, that takes hard. And if it weren't for you . . . not you smug life face, but real you. Please play cribbage.  Pass the salt.  Think of a garnet-black cabbage, a Ukrainian is selling it on 7th Street in honor of our marriage. A Spanish fan opens in my abdomen  I have Spanish dancers in my stomach  they're my arching striving in dance where it's black red flowers darken to be huge pleasuring the  severe, tried Angel who meets transition,  transport, as abruptly as necessary  for everyone's are apt Says the Unassuming Graceful Whose down-hip-ness Is that window The dancers' sensuous flaw That admits Spring, Contingent upon our personality Spring is for the worldly  just like the HaHa Room  Just like dearest rockbottom  suddenly gone buoyant    To be black geese to be  strenuous dancers  is not to dignify a passion but to  grip it.  Not saints but always pupils pupils dilated fully black in full achievement of gut-feeling. Joy.
Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'ns joy, Sphear-born harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers, Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ Dead things with inbreath'd sense able to pierce, And to our high-rais'd phantasie present, That undisturbèd Song of pure content, Ay sung before the saphire-colour'd throne To him that sits theron With Saintly shout, and solemn Jubily, Where the bright Seraphim in burning row Their loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow, And the Cherubick host in thousand quires Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires, With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms, Hymns devout and holy Psalms Singing everlastingly; That we on Earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer that melodious noise; As once we did, till disproportion'd sin Jarr'd against natures chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair musick that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood In first obedience, and their state of good. O may we soon again renew that Song And keep in tune with Heav'n, till God ere long To his celestial consort us unite, To live with him, and sing in endles morn of light.
If you are not to become a monster, you must care what they think. If you care what they think, how will you not hate them, and so become a monster of the opposite kind? From where then is love to come—love for your enemy that is the way of liberty? From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go free of you, and you of them; they are to you as sunlight on a green branch. You must not think of them again, except as monsters like yourself, pitiable because unforgiving.
I dunno yer highfalutin' words, but here's th' way it seems When I'm peekin' out th' winder o' my little House o Dreams; I've been lookin' 'roun' this big ol' world, as bizzy as a hive, An' I want t' tell ye, neighbor mine, it's good t' be alive. I've ben settin' here, a-thinkin' hard, an' say, it seems t' me That this big ol' world is jest about as good as it kin be, With its starvin' little babies, an' its battles, an' its strikes, An' its profiteers, an' hold-up men—th' dawggone little tykes! An' its hungry men that fought fer us, that nobody employs. An' I think, "Why, shucks, we're jest a lot o' grown-up little boys!" An' I settle back, an' light my pipe, an' reach fer Mother's hand, An' I wouldn't swap my peace o' mind fer nothin' in the land; Fer this world uv ours, that jest was made fer folks like me an' you Is a purty good ol' place t' live—say, neighbor, ain't it true?
i think in spanish i write in english i want to go back to puerto rico, but i wonder if my kink could live in ponce, mayagüez and carolina tengo las venas aculturadas escribo en spanglish abraham in español abraham in english tato in spanish "taro" in english tonto in both languages how are you?¿cómo estás? i don't know if i'm coming or si me fui ya si me dicen barranquitas, yo reply, "¿con qué se come eso?" si me dicen caviar, i digo, "a new pair of converse sneakers." ahí supe que estoy jodío ahí supe que estamos jodíos english or spanish spanish or english spanenglish now, dig this: hablo lo inglés matao hablo lo español matao no sé leer ninguno bien so it is, spanglish to matao what i digo  ¡ay, virgen, yo no sé hablar!
for liberty, your day filled in splendor, july fourth, new york harbor, nineteen eighty-six, midnight sky, fireworks splashing, heaven exploding into radiant bouquets, wall street a backdrop of centennial adulation, computerized capital angling cameras celebrating the international symbol of freedom stretched across micro-chips, awacs surveillance, wall-to-wall people, sailing ships, gliding armies ferried in pursuit of happiness, constitution adoration, packaged television channels for liberty, immigrant illusions celebrated in the name of democratic principles, god bless america, land of the star spangled banner that we love, but the symbol suffered one hundred years of decay climbing up to the spined crown, the fractured torch hand, the ruptured intestines, palms blistered and calloused, feet embroidered in rust, centennial decay, the lady's eyes, cataract filled, exposed to sun and snow, a salty wind, discolored verses staining her robe, she needed re-molding, re-designing, the decomposed body now melted down for souvenirs, lungs and limbs jailed in scaffolding of ugly cubicles incarcerating the body as she prepared to receive her twentieth-century transplant paid for by pitching pennies, hometown chicken barbecues, marathons on america's main streets. she heard the speeches: the president's the french and american partners, the nation believed in her, rooted for the queen, and lady liberty decided to reflect on lincoln's emancipatory resoluteness on washington's patriotism, on jefferson's lucidity, on william jennings bryan's socialism, on woodrow wilson's league of nations, on roosevelt's new deal, on kennedy's ecumenical postures, and on martin luther king's non-violence. lady liberty decided to reflect on lillian wald's settlements, on helen keller's sixth sense, on susan b. anthony's suffrage movement, on mother cabrini's giving soul, on harriet tubman's stubborn pursuit of freedom. just before she was touched, just before she was dismantled, lady liberty spoke, she spoke for the principles, for the preamble, for the bill of rights, and thirty-nine peaceful presidential transitions, and, just before she was touched, lady liberty wanted to convey her own resolutions, her own bi-centennial goals, so that in twenty eighty-six, she would be smiling and she would be proud. and then, just before she was touched, and then, while she was being re-constructed, and then, while she was being celebrated, she spoke. if you touch me, touch ALL of my people who need attention and societal repair, give the tired and the poor the same attention, AMERICA, touch us ALL with liberty, touch us ALL with liberty. hunger abounds, our soil is plentiful, our technology advanced enough to feed the world, to feed humanity's hunger . . . but let's celebrate not our wealth, not our sophisticated defense, not our scientific advancements, not our intellectual adventures. let us concentrate on our weaknesses, on our societal needs, for we will never be free if indeed freedom is subjugated to trampling upon people's needs. this is a warning, my beloved america. so touch me, and in touching me touch all our people. do not single me out, touch all our people, touch all our people, all our people  our people  people. and then i shall truly enjoy my day, filled in splendor, july fourth, new york harbor, nineteen eighty-six, midnight sky, fireworks splashing, heaven exploding into radiant bouquets, celebrating in the name of equality, in the pursuit of happiness, god bless america, land of star spangled banner that we love.
(can pickers) i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting in the sun as a latero a job invented by national and state laws designed to re-cycle aluminum cans to return to consumer acid laden gastric inflammation pituitary glands coca diet rite low-cal godsons of artificially flavored malignant indigestions somewhere down the line of a cancerous cell i collect from garbage cans in outdoor facilities congested with putrid residues my hands shelving themselves opening plastic bags never knowing what to encounter several times a day i touch evil rituals slit throats of chickens tongues of poisoned rats salivating on my index finger smells of month old rotten food next to pamper's diarrhea dry blood infectious diseases hypodermic needles tissued with heroine water drops pilfered in slimy grease blood hazardous waste materials but i cannot use rubber gloves they undermine my daily profit i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting during the day as a latero making it big in america someday i might become experienced enough to offer technical assistance to other lateros i am thinking of publishing my own guide to latero collecting and founding a latero's union to offer medical dental benefits i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting at night as a latero i am considered some kind of expert at collecting cans during fifth avenue parades i can now hire workers at twenty five cents an hour guaranteed salary and fifty per cent of two and one half cents profit on each can collected i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting at midnight as a latero i am becoming an entrepreneur an american success story i have hired bag ladies to keep peddlers from my territories i have read in some guide to success that in order to get rich to make it big i have to sacrifice myself moonlighting until dawn by digging deeper into the extra can margin of profit i am on my way up the opportunistic ladder of success in ten years i will quit welfare to become a legitimate businessman i'll soon become a latero executive with corporate conglomerate intents god bless america.
we gave birth to a new generation, AmeRícan, broader than lost gold never touched, hidden inside the puerto rican mountains. we gave birth to a new generation AmeRícan, it includes everything imaginable you-name-it-we-got-it society. we gave birth to a new generation, AmeRícan salutes all folklores, european, indian, black, spanish and anything else compatible: AmeRícan, singing to composer pedro flores' palm  trees up high in the universal sky! AmeRícan, sweet soft spanish danzas gypsies  moving lyrics la española cascabelling  presence always singing at our side! AmeRícan, beating jíbaro modern troubadours  crying guitars romantic continental  bolero love songs! AmeRícan, across forth and across back  back across and forth back  forth across and back and forth  our trips are walking bridges!  it all dissolved into itself, an attempt  was truly made, the attempt was truly  absorbed, digested, we spit out  the poison, we spit out in malice,  we stand, affirmative in action,  to reproduce a broader answer to the  marginality that gobbled us up abruptly! AmeRícan, walking plena-rhythms in new york,  strutting beautifully alert, alive  many turning eyes wondering,  admiring! AmeRícan, defining myself my own way any way many  many ways Am e Rícan, with the big R and the  accent on the í! AmeRícan, like the soul gliding talk of gospel  boogie music! AmeRícan, speaking new words in spanglish tenements,  fast tongue moving street corner "que  corta" talk being invented at the insistence  of a smile! AmeRícan, abounding inside so many ethnic english  people, and out of humanity, we blend  and mix all that is good! AmeRícan, integrating in new york and defining our  own destino, our own way of life, AmeRícan, defining the new america, humane america,  admired america, loved america, harmonious  america, the world in peace, our energies  collectively invested to find other civili-  zations, to touch God, further and further,  to dwell in the spirit of divinity! AmeRícan, yes, for now, for i love this, my second  land, and i dream to take the accent from   the altercation, and be proud to call  myself american, in the u.s. sense of the   word, AmeRícan, America!
And now I have another lad!  No longer need you tell How all my nights are slow and sad  For loving you too well. His ways are not your wicked ways,  He's not the like of you. He treads his path of reckoned days,  A sober man, and true. They'll never see him in the town,  Another on his knee. He'd cut his laden orchards down,  If that would pleasure me. He'd give his blood to paint my lips  If I should wish them red. He prays to touch my finger-tips  Or stroke my prideful head. He never weaves a glinting lie,  Or brags the hearts he'll keep. I have forgotten how to sigh—  Remembered how to sleep. He's none to kiss away my mind—  A slower way is his. Oh, Lord! On reading this, I find  A silly lot he is.
One foot down, then hop! It's hot.  Good things for the ones that's got. Another jump, now to the left.  Everybody for hisself. In the air, now both feet down.  Since you black, don't stick around. Food is gone, the rent is due,  Curse and cry and then jump two. All the people out of work,  Hold for three, then twist and jerk. Cross the line, they count you out.  That's what hopping's all about. Both feet flat, the game is done. They think I lost. I think I won.
Well it's six o'clock in Oakland and the sun is full of wine I say, it's six o'clock in Oakland and the sun is red with wine We buried you this morning, baby in the shadow of a vine Well, they told you of the sickness almost eighteen months ago Yes, they told you of the sickness almost eighteen months ago You went down fighting, daddy. Yes You fought Death toe to toe O, the egrets fly over Lake Merritt and the blackbirds roost in trees O, the egrets fly over Lake Merritt and the blackbirds roost in trees Without you little papa what O, what will become of me O, it's hard to come home, baby To a house that's still and stark O, it's hard to come home, baby To a house that's still and stark All I hear is myself thinking and footsteps in the dark
at my kitchen sink, the bathroom upstairs clogged with family from out of town spending the night after the wake and the after—wake—cold beverages have been consumed and comfort food, leftovers bulging both the fridge and the mini-fridge. In our fifties, both half-asleep half-awake, we face each other. My sister's smile foams white down her chin at the end of a day on which no one has smiled. We laugh. We may never brush our teeth together again. No mirror down here to see our haggard faces. We rinse, we spit. As we were taught.
"After a white reception in the crystal room of the Hotel Kenmore, Mrs. George Eustic (Patricia Hays) and her husband left on a wedding trip to the Pocono Mountains, Pa. They will live in good old Noodleville." (Home.) Where the friendly purple heart is.  I like to do things. I like to eat, and things like that. I like the things that go on around me. People are nice. And, really, I like this place I live in. However, some people don't. Sally doesn't.  Sick at heart, the trembling girl shuddered at the words that delivered her to this terrible horrible fate of the East. "Nasty!" How could she escape from this oriental monster into whose hands she had fallen—this strange man whose face none had seen. Smile! It is only a little picture,  In a little silver frame, And across the back is written  My darling mother's name.  (Valentine) Pink and purple and orange ones with Venetian rose buds Imported from Venetian In eleven thrilling volumes  I heard a shot—I saw him run—then I saw her fall—the woman I love. My leg was broken—and my gun was gone! I had only one thought—(tee! hee!)—his strange, astounding plots must be avenged—he must die for a coward at my hands! He had the courage of a lion and the cunning of a rat. He came running towards me when—suddenly, I— Ran. Forgetting the ripped lace, $35, green violence, & free samples. "I always run when I hear 3 rings!" . . . and remember those swell picnics in Birch Grove?
I Joe You lie About pineapples There are none under anywhere I look I see I find only dirty tulips Or orchid ribbons Orange With big black words A royal sky: It lets one see And what a good thing a white shirt is! Nice Nice to see red by night  to know pink well  to understand yellow birds  to realize black and white Terribly nice Mirrors are Nice (Terribly) To see by To see by me You I love I love Indians  pen points  Hungarian  plaster  sweetmeats  five A nice number to love by If feather pillows didn't leak Out onto green floors Where normal shoes belong With blue socks With white stripes And Boston newspapers All about news And things I like I like fried chicken  smashed 'taters  thickin' gravy  not biscuits an'  chawklit pie wif  mushmeller toppin' And I simply love horoscope! (Crunch) The sky is aflame! Red (A jet of anti-matter gas is exploding harmfully  against the upper atmosphere) But tomorrow is Tuesday And I shall see the four seasons on one branch  of pink trees displaying Ivory lilies insisting Upon white privacy (Or they threaten not to root at all) I, personally, vote for blue And to hell with Easter I prefer red and green  mother Christmas  black birds of passion  sunsets that consume  pink nuns and salty peanuts  and Renoir who bores me But most of all I like shoe polish And the big sun rises over Delhi. . . .
Did you know that Kenneth Koch's wife Janice used to be an airplane pilot? Once she had to make an emergency landing on a highway.  When Kenward Elmslie was a kid he wanted to be a tap dancer. Did you know that Kenward's grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer?  Kenward once told me that Jane Russell is a dyke.  Andy Warhol wanted to be a tap dancer when he was a kid too.  D. D. Ryan wanted to be a ballerina.   Did you know that Pat Padgett was Ted Berrigan's girlfriend for years before she married Ron?  Ron Padgett and I were in the same 1st grade class together in school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Ron's father, Wayne, was a notorious bootlegger in Tulsa until Oklahoma went wet.  A few years ago Ron's father got divorced and married a beautiful Las Vegas showgirl younger than Ron's wife Pat.  Did you know that Bill Berkson was once bat boy for the Yankees?  Ted Berrigan married his wife Sandy after having only known her for five days.  Did you know that the first poems John Ashbery ever had published were published in Poetry magazine under the name of Joel Symington?  Did you know that Bill Berkson was on the "1oo Best Dressed Men" list of 1967?  Rudy Burckhardt once dated Miss Vermont of 1938.  Donald Droll is in some way related to Daniel Boone.  Frank O'Hara once told me that what he really wanted to be was a concert pianist.  Did you know that Harry Mathews started out to be a com- poser? He studied at the Juilliard School of Music.  Edwin Denby was born in China.  Anne Waldman's father wrote a book called Rapid Reading Made Simple.  Tom Veitch's father writes Christmas card verse.  When I was a kid I wanted to be a fashion designer, a minister, and an artist.  Peter Schjeldahl's father is very famous in the plastic area. He discovered the new lightweight plastic used in Bufferin bottles. Soon he hopes to open a contraceptive factory in Red China.  Did you know that Bill Berkson was once on I RememberMama?  D. D. Ryan went to see The Boys in the Band with Jackie Kennedy just a week before she married Onassis.  John Ashbery was a quiz kid.  Kenneth Koch once won the Glasscock Award.  Did you know that Ron Padgett has blebs on his lung which may explode at any moment? They have exploded twice already.  Tina Louise once sang "I'm in the Mood for Love" to Bill Berkson over London broils at P. J. Clarke's.  Did you know that Ted Berrigan did his thesis at Tulsa University on George Bernard Shaw?  Did you know that the Katz Tumor is named after Ada Katz who discovered it?  Edwin Denby once performed in Berlin's "Wintergarten" billed as "Der Amerikanische Grotesktaenzer Dumby."  Yvonne Burckhardt was the backstroke swimming cham- pion of Connecticut for one week.  When I lived in Boston I used to panhandle on the street where all of the art galleries were, and I got my cigarette butts from the urns in front of the Museum of Fine Arts.  Did you know that Ted Berrigan's first book of poems, A Lily for My Love, was published by the Lenox Bar in Providence, Rd. Island?  Greta Garbo once called Bill Berkson her ice cream man.  I once went to a "come as your favorite person" party as Marilyn Monroe.  Did you know that John Ashbery once worked in a cherry canning factory?
Death is a funny thing. Most people are afraid of it, and yet they don't even know what it is.  Perhaps we can clear this up.  What is death?  Death is it. That's it. Finished. "Finito." Over and out. No more.  Death is many different things to many different people. I think it is safe to say, however, that most people don't like it.  Why?  Because they are afraid of it.  Why are they afraid of it?  Because they don't understand it.  I think that the best way to try to understand death is to think about it a lot. Try to come to terms with it. Try to really understand it. Give it a chance!  Sometimes it helps if we try to visualize things.  Try to visualize, for example, someone sneaking up behind your back and hitting you over the head with a giant hammer.  Some people prefer to think of death as a more spiritual thing. Where the soul somehow separates itself from the mess and goes on living forever somewhere else. Heaven and hell being the most traditional choices.  Death has a very black reputation but, actually, to die is a perfectly normal thing to do.  And it's so wholesome: being a very important part of nature's big picture. Trees die, don't they? And flowers?  I think it's always nice to know that you are not alone. Even in death.  Let's think about ants for a minute. Millions of ants die every day, and do we care? No. And I'm sure that ants feel the same way about us.  But suppose—just suppose—that we didn't have to die. That wouldn't be so great either. If a 90-year-old man can hardly stand up, can you imagine what it would be like to be 500 years old?  Another comforting thought about death is that 80 years or so after you die nobody who knew you will still be alive to miss you.  And after you're dead, you won't even know it.
WINTER  More time is spent at the window.  SUMMER  You go along from day to day with summer all around you.  STORES  Stores tell all about people who live in the area.  WRITING  Others have already written what I would like to write.  TODAY  Today the sky is so blue it burns.  IN THE COUNTRY  In the country one can almost hear the silence.  THE FOUR SEASONS  The four seasons of the year permit us to enjoy things.  RECIPE  Smear each side of a pork chop with mustard and dredge in flour.  BOOK WORM  Have always had nose stuck in book from little on.  THAT FEELING  What defines that feeling one has when gazing at a rock?  COSTA RICA  It was in Costa Rica I saw my first coffee plantation.  HAPPINESS  Happiness is nothing more than a state of mind.  MONEY  Money will buy a fine dog.  OUR GOVERNMENT  A new program is being introduced by our government.  EDWARD  On the whole he is a beautiful human being.  LAKE  A lake attracts a man and wife and members of a family.  THE SKY  We see so many different things when we look at the sky.  A SEXY THOUGHT  Male early in the day.  POTATOES  One can only go so far without potatoes in the kitchen.  MOTHER  A mother is something we have all had.  MODERN TIMES  Every four minutes a car comes off the assembly line they say.  THE OCEAN  Foamy waves wash to shore "treasures" as a sacrifice to damp sand.  TODAY  High density housing is going on all around us.  REAL LIFE  I could have screamed the day John proposed winterizing the cottage and living there permanently.  ALASKA  I am a very cold person here.  THE YEAR OF THE WHITE MAN  The year of the white man was a year of many beads.  LOYALTY  Loyalty, I feel, is a very big word.  SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT  Perhaps in our mad scramble to keep our heads above water we miss the point.  HUMAN NATURE  Why must we be so intent on destroying everything we touch?  COMPANY  Winifred was a little relieved when they were gone.
Under diagram of a letter-less paragraph, block white. Silent quadrates, grid imperceptible where the arrangement cross-puzzles itself. Blank words equidistant by page flectional by print. Structure of paper exists to limit communicatio of sound of silence; how word-types appear, how fonts distinguish an ipseity of language. The pages' margins shape set-text a voice unwrit; contains unseen accent, pressure wave code. Where breath within paper functions a sensation thought, actions charge form. Without a point an i will forget its direction, or a j with its curve will not show its breadth of line.
A sound-loop hangs from the white gallows of the page:    letter j strung up,  the crook of her foot postmortem—  leg sway. Mouth retches a vowel round o then from the roof gasps a dark l slung.  Is not innocent:  the i with a white noose  also around his neck,  blindfolded, asphyxiated. Spaces within words are miniature knots that suspend letters—  the paper  always tightening.
I place a black cloth the size of a dot over his head. Wrap his entire miniscule body with a thread of my black hair. He lies there on a white sheet of paper and squirms like a dark cocoon, thinks he is going to transform. The letter, when it begins to lose color in a book never opened, becomes a macula in thought. And when read through the lens of a decimal point: see its dark fleck of a cranium, see expendable language—grab the letter j next to him, hold it like a tiny black scythe, behead the i and watch its dot head roll to the back of a sentence.
In another poem, called The Logic of Spring,  a mechanical drawing of a tree that I've passed a 100 times  on my way to a different problem. I glance backwards, and the stack of the day multiplies, glancing backwards several times, the dog-eared corner with the graph paper sky of that morning  and the logic of spring. Right before I wake, I hear the riposte of mean jays (blue dots  that drag the pink banners of answers off the tree with words in gold italic latin)  from the fog pumped in by the machine set on my lawn. First thing in the morning, (page numbers in all the dish rags hanging around the sink)  I part the buttery curtains to see beyond the doric columns sitting on my porch & the  hibiscus twig that someone has set the stump of such a tree—gray  smudges and still intact line breaks with flashing pink splashes— outside my house while I slept. Seems unbearably cruel until I realize that in the flapping fog I finally hear its questions. Are you so easily distracted  by pieces of a poem attached to a tree?  in which as the situation changes you catch glimpses of yourself  a series of emoticons.
Love's balustrade, love's balcony  a few iron words that can be seen anywhere still in grocery lists, in laundry hung between two objects,  an e-mail, in an apology, in a thought about the weather these rusty words, these rusting gates  before a breath, Standing in the cold morning on a cold blue stairs, with a curlicue of coffee  you look at the word Love written on the side of the Pharmacy in cherry-vanilla flavored cursive  because this is where a love poem once stood, what I am saying right now is secretly built over  a love poem, the fossils of a cupola, pink buildings with red hyphens and dashes  and three red dots, You, second person pink with shutters you could open with a fingernail  like in an advent calendar to see sticker scenes of apartments inside: a radiator, a bare arm,  two cups by themselves on a table The mind of the attic still persists up there  meditative water and the chairs talking quietly to one another  It's now pink rubble, rhyming bricks, and an illicit balcony the heart had such a fancy elevator  that it started to look like a bird cage and once in a lemon-scented fog  near springtime-fresh trees, I heard two people say, "Yellow kiss-shaped flowers, telephone flowers,  are falling from my mouth now" Now, it's a set of blue and white checkered apartment buildings  math problems that are eight stories high a long division jutting as pollution into the sky  laundry, cooking spills, gasoline shirts commas, theories or arguments of boyfriends & girlfriends  boyfriends & boyfriends, girlfriends & girlfriends, all hanging out of the window that you opened.
September is work to the center Of arguments and controversies. Prejudgments and incomprehensions. What will I love if not that That was enigma? The years of infancy, Memory says, And there we are, with the demon Of the art of living Traced on the glass of some window. In the beauty of the night of May, Clear of moon, to the lume of a candle There was a design like the profile Of a landscape almost abandoned. Gone But not gone yet. It's fascinating, These mysterious uncovered feelings. Enigma of an afternoon of autumn, the picture Of which is a composition Of the eye of my mind. Every hour That I watch this picture I see again still that moment. Nevertheless the moment is an enigma For me, in how much is inexplicable. The physical things hide in the architecture Of the event. The enigma of a mock-up, Of a shadow, the spectral and eternal aspect Of the moment. Praises to you for being One great box of surprise, Your head the scene of a wonderful theater Of the most tender gray of the fog That joins the sky to the earth. A tangling of truth and memory, Mythology and iconography, I watch with the eye Of the mind the city that accommodates That one beautiful day that is now infinite. It deepens. It begins. The cyclical method. Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction, Is a truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth. I was assigned to you, together we were A beautiful and melancholic picture. This last picture is the realization Of the overwhelming moment In which the acute eye perceives you as a now That is over. A now that is fixed In the swept past.
This bald year, frozen now in February. This cold day winging over the ugly Imperfect horizon line, So often a teeth line of ten buildings. A red flag flapping In the wind. An orange curtain is noon. It all hurts her eyes. This curtain is so bright. Here is what is noticeably true: sight. The face that looks back from the side Of the butter knife. A torn-bread awkwardness. The mind makes its daily pilgrimage Through riff-raff moments. Then, Back into the caprice case to dream In a circle, a pony goes round. The circle's association: There's a center To almost everything but never Any certainty. Nothing is More malleable than a moment. We were Only yesterday breathing in a sea. Some summer sun Asked us over and over we went. The sand was hot. We were only yesterday tender hearted Waiting. To be something. A spring. And then someone says, Sit down, We have a heart for you to forget. A mind to suffer With. So, experience. So, the circus tent. You, over there, you be the girl In red sequins on the front of a card selling love. You, over there, you, in black satin. You be the Maiden's Mister Death.
Our sorrow had neither place nor carrier-away, and dared not hover over the child whose breath opened as transom of a frail house. Nor could we put our sorrow in the dictionary, for ghastliness already shot out its own defining in rags of fired light. Pigeons would not sleek it over their dirty coats, nor fly sorrow against the aviary's sharp fence. Each day bridgeless, each night birdless, all the nocturnals needless at the expanse of our nightwatch.  But wake at the moon, we could, mumbling, are wein a horror show?—inside of sleep our shock-white minds caught on reels where a child's body breaks the heart and the mother can't know if she counts as a mother. I don't know if the child heard what wept at the bedside, orderlies snapping smelling salts from chalky bullets against all the mothers falling, all the fathers under what each branch let down: there's a hidden weight to snow.
Nothing is nothing, although he would call me that, she was nothing. Those were his words, but his hand was lifting cigarettes in chains and bridges of ash-light. He said he didn't want his body to last. It wasn't a year I could argue against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl killed on the farm a mile out—brown and silvery, wild— and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime. I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses slowly through the cold, slow as I'd seen a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor of my beaten house. She seemed to see my whole life by ordinance of some god who wanted me alive again. Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken into the corners of violent sadness. She wrote my address across her chest to let everything listening know where my life was made. We waited, either forgetting what we were or becoming more brightly human in that pine, in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills, not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting from the yard part of what she required. Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would when the molasses warmed over the pot enough to come into the brandy, to come into the night begun by small confessions— that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor, that the woman he loved was with another man, his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space. Then I told of the assault at daybreak between the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script and song. There must have been chanting, as it was on the hour. What we said was liturgy meant only for us and for that night. Not for anyone else to repeat, live by, believe. Never that. Our only theories were inside of our hands, flesh and land, body and prairie. I reached to smoke down his next-to-last, which he lit and made ready. The poultry like a war ration we ate all the way through. What we wished, we said. What we said, we found that night by these, and no other, means.
God is not light upon light, no more than goat is need upon need although there, where it grazes, it is sun upon coat within which ticks and stray-blown feed burrow into the pocked skin of such foul scent covering the underflesh heart that could eat this farmer's grain or the barren mountain's bark high in the solitude of sheer animal peace laid over sheer animal terror. We ask the animal afflicted by its time, its impoverished American meadow that drove it to find birch from which to strip its easy feed to abide with us. It does not need us. We think it needs us. We must forgive God God's story.
If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
Stairs & rites not for the foot The building thinks Angular rock Green skyscraper Black ziggurat Miniature of time Made into altar Invention of the night Sprouting at dawn Carved rock praying as it buds Seeking the seed to sprout! Saliva in torrents Cooling waterfall You redeem your field Salt head Stream of lights Double reflection Stone & water The same sprouting
I uproot & save mental venture I split the dream of the slow & neutral Persist & breathe My little flask Pointy wisp Pubescent valve Join the game I smoke & praise you Hew & raze you Jungle kill Bulldoze your sierra Fire to ash I wait & wait And you where are you Fragrant lantana Aim your voice In calm plains In silence wild Erasing the thirst The weightless altar insults the blood Awake diagonals Rot & Stand Go & go Flower gaining Plant your will!
Far in a western brookland That bred me long ago The poplars stand and tremble By pools I used to know. There, in the windless night-time, The wanderer, marvelling why, Halts on the bridge to hearken How soft the poplars sigh. He hears: long since forgotten In fields where I was known, Here I lie down in London And turn to rest alone. There, by the starlit fences, The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.
and I heard an unending scream piercing nature.  —from the diary of Edvard Munch, 1892 At the greyhound bus stations, at airports, at silent wharfs the bodies exit the crafts. Women, men, children; cast out from the new paradise. They are not there in the homeland, in Argentina, not there in Santiago, Chile; never there in Montevideo, Uruguay, and they are not here in America They are in exile: a slow scream across a yellow bridge the jaws stretched, widening, the eyes multiplied into blood orbits, torn, whirling, spilling between two slopes; the sea, black, swallowing all prayers, shadeless. Only tall faceless figures of pain flutter across the bridge. They pace in charred suits, the hands lift, point and ache and fly at sunset as cold dark birds. They will hover over the dead ones: a family shattered by military, buried by hunger, asleep now with the eyes burning echoes calling Joaquín, María, Andrea, Joaquín, Joaquín, Andreaen exilio From here we see them, we the ones from here, not there or across, only here, without the bridge, without the arms as blue liquid quenching the secret thirst of unmarked graves, without our flesh journeying refuge or pilgrimage; not passengers on imaginary ships sailing between reef and sky, we that die here awake on Harrison Street, on Excelsior Avenue clutching the tenderness of chrome radios, whispering to the saints in supermarkets, motionless in the chasm of playgrounds, searching at 9 a.m. from our third floor cells, bowing mute, shoving the curtains with trembling speckled brown hands. Alone, we look out to the wires, the summer, to the newspaper wound in knots as matches for tenements. We that look out from our miniature vestibules, peering out from our old clothes, the father's well-sewn plaid shirt pocket, an old woman's oversized wool sweater peering out from the makeshift kitchen. We peer out to the streets, to the parades, we the ones from here not there or across, from here, only here. Where is our exile? Who has taken it?
for New Orleans and the people of the Gulf Coast water water water wind water across the land shape of a torn heart new orleans waves come louisiana the waves come alabama wind calls alabama and the roofs blow across red clouds inside the divine spiral there is a voice inside the voice there is light water wind fire smoke the bodies float and rise kind flames bow down and move across the skies never seen blackish red bluish bruised water rises houses fall the child the elders the mothers underwater who will live who will rise the windows fill with the howling where is the transfusion where is the lamp who who in the wet night jagged in the oil waves come the lakes loosen their sultry shape it is the shape of a lost hand a wing broken casinos in biloxi become carnations across the sands and the woman in the wheelchair descends her last breath a rose in the razor rain uptown on mansion hill even the million dollar house bows in the negative shade someone is afloat a family dissolves the nation disappears neighborhoods fade across lost streets the police dressed in newspapers flutter toward nothingness moons who goes there under our floors filtered wooden stars towels and glass gasoline coffins the skin of trees and jalopy tires fish bebop dead from the zoo the dogs half drag ward number nine miss Symphony Spikes and mrs. Hardy Johnson the new plankton new algae of the nameless stroll in the dark ask the next question about kindness then there is a bus a taxi a hearse a helicopter a rescue team a tiny tribe of nine year olds separating the waters the oils and ashes hear the song of splinters and blood tree sap machine oil and old jazz trumpeters z's and x's raffia skirts and jujube hats and a father man holds the hand of his lover saying take care of the children let me go now let me stumble stumble nowhere drink this earth liquor going in petals stadiums and looters celebrities cameras cases more water cases again and again a new land edge emerges a new people emerges where race and class and death and life and water and tears and loss and life and death destruction and life and tears compassion and loss and a fire stolen bus rumbles toward you all directions wherever you are alive still
I walk back—nowhere, under moonlight. The dogs look as if they are angels, the ones I never imagined, with drooling silvery rays and torn behinds, yes, glowing in a strange and excited phosphor, dancing out of rhythm, racing up trees, chasing snails. This is like a children's book. O, yes, the children with rectangle heads and sack stomachs. With the eyes of Da Vinci, sad and impish, meticulous as Ibn Khaldun and taciturn as Nietzsche, phlegmatic and bitter, when they speak they leave opalescent liquids on the grasses, stuttered under a half-erased mural of Arafat, or is it Sharon, wait, the children never speak, they nod their heads, they carry huge bundles strapped across their foreheads. They weep under newspapers and roll up their skirts and wash them in the gutters, ponds, if they find them, then they run to the sea. This is where we meet, on occasion, we make up stories, we remember fruits and produce as if blessed by the plutonium blasts. "Remember the pears, they were so green, and the avocados, like guitars, honey-golden, and the asparagus, like a lion's rainy mane, and . . ." Our mouths water. Their mouths water, I am used to these stories. I am used to the land barren, bitten and aflame with lies. I am used to our faces in this new wild dispassionate light. I learned this from my musician friends, from years waging futile wars with poetry until I could not think of anything else.
I forget the date: en route to Austin, Texas: soda on tray. Women at the computer, mexicanas learning to read and write at the same time, a workshop, we exchange stories the crossings: Hidalgo Texas Sonora Zacatecas Chihuahua—I think of my father, for a moment— I see him again, robust, alone, walks to the park, the heat dissolves the avenues. The Nomenclature cuts across the Arctic: snare the oil, gas lines, install the stations, derricks and surveillance towers, surveys, documents, classified pouches. Carry this microscopic fissure into South Asia. Diplomats—they say, so many teams of men, they orbit in silence and loud vests and helmets, they stoop with a sweetness and sift the granules, then, they rise, oblong, hunched, on fire, ready to dig into the ice, a new boundary for the national vortex, this undeclared war; the almost-uttered war, this war begins, listen. Listen closely— I hear a rap song in the distance: "I am standin' in Lebanon watchin' everbody get it on, why am I the only one singin' this desolation song...?"
I enter the void, it has the shape of a viola: Israel, Jenin, West Bank, Nablus—a rubble boy shifts his scapula as if it was his continent, underground Gazaground, I want to say—his only bone, the rubble boy is a girl, I think, her hair tossed, knotted and torn under the green shank of fibers, tubes and shells. She digs for her rubble father, I say rubble because it is indistinguishable from ice, fire, dust, clay, flesh, tears, concrete, bread, lungs, pubis, god, say rubble, say water— the rubble girl digs for her rubble mother, occupation—disinheritance—once again, I had written this somewhere, in a workshop, I think, yes, it was an afternoon of dark poets with leaves, coffee and music in the liquor light room. A rock, perhaps it's a rock, juts out, two rocks embrace each other, the shapes come to me easily, an old poetic reflex—memoria, a nation underground, that is it, the nation under-ground, that is why the rocks cover it. I forget to mention the blasts, so many things flying, light, existence, the house in tins, a mother in rags. It is too cold to expose her tiny legs, the fish-shaped back—you must take these notes for me. Before you go. See this undulate extend beyond the pools of blood. I ride the night, past the Yukon, past South Laredo, past Odessa, past the Ukraine, old Jaffa, Haifa and Istanbul, across clouds, hesitant and porous, listen— they are porous so we can glide into them, this underbelly, this underground: wound-mothers and sobbing fathers, they leave, in their ribboned flesh, shores lisp against nothingness, open—toward you, they dissolve again into my shoes— Hear the dust gong: gendarme passports, cloned maize men in C-130's, with tears bubbling on their hands, pebbles en route—we are all en route to the rubblelands. I want to chant a bliss mantra— Prajnaparamita can you hear me? I want to call for the dragon-slayer omchild. I am on my knees again. On the West Bank count the waves of skull debris—a Hebrew letter for "love" refuses me, an Arabic letter for "boundary" acknowledges me. Sit on an embankment, a dust fleece, there is a tidal wave ahead of me. It will never reach me. I live underground, under the Dead Sea, under the benevolent rocks and forearms and mortar shells and slender naked red green torsos, black, so much black. En route: this could be a train, listen: it derails into a cloud.
This is my last report: I wanted to speak of existence, the ants most of all, dressed up in their naughty flame-trousers, the exact jaws, their unknowable kindnesses, their abyss of hungers, and science, their mercilessness, their prophetic military devotions, their geometry of scent, their cocoons for the Nomenclature, I wanted to speak of the Glue Sniffers and Glue Smoothers who despise all forms unbound, loose in their amber nectars, I wanted to point to their noses, hoses and cables and networks, their tools, if I can use that word now—and scales and scanners and Glue Rectories. I wanted you to meet my broom mother who carved a hole into her womb so that I could live— At every sunset she stands under the shadow of the watchtowers elongating and denying her breath. I wanted to look under the rubble fields for once, for you (if you approved), flee into the bullet-riddled openness and fall flat, arched, askew, under the rubble sheets and let the rubble fill me with its sharp plates and ripped dust— alphabets incomplete and humid. You, listen, a little closer to the chalk dust—this child swinging her left arm, a ribbon, agitated by unnamed forces, devoured.
The heart shifts shape of its own accord— from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent, the corn dog stand. Or the heart is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead wait, paging through magazines, licking their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks through a door into a maze of hallways. Behind one door a roomful of orchids, behind another, the smell of burned toast. The rooms go on and on: sewing room with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles, room full of file cabinets and torn curtains, room buzzing with a thousand black flies. Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke, a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt. Heart makes a wrong turn. Heart locked in its gate of thorns. Heart with its hands folded in its lap. Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake. It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down. Bored, it watches movies deep into the night, stands by the window counting the streetlamps squinting out one by one. Heart with its hundred mouths open. Heart with its hundred eyes closed. Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel, heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence. Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked in devoted rows, their dusty spines unreadable. Heart with its hands full. Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history's lists, things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart. Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal. Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues. Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe. Heart with its feet up reading the scores. Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster. Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club, banging on the lid.
She never spoke, which made her obvious, the way death makes the air obvious in an empty chair, the way sky compressed between bare branches is more gray or blue, the way a window is more apparent than a wall. She held her silence to her breast like a worn coat, smoke, an armful of roses. Her silence colored the smaller silences that came and went, that other students stood up and filled in. I leaned near the window in my office. She sat on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting while I made my little speech. February light pressed its cold back against the glass, sealing us in. She focused on my lips as I spoke, as if to study how it's done, the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem, shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow, let its petals settle on my shoulders. I looked outside to the branches of a stripped tree, winter starlings folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames shuddering at the tips. Students wandered across campus as if under water, hands and hair unfurling, their soundless mouths churning— irate or ecstatic, I couldn't tell—ready to burn it all down or break into song. When I looked back her eyes had found the window: tree, students, birds swimming by, mute in their element. It was painful to hear the papery rasp of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch color smudging her neck and temple, branching to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush collapse. I could hear her breath—smoke rising from ice. I could see what it cost her to make that leap. What heat it takes for the body to blossom into speech.
and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate ballet above the clashing pirouettes of heavy machinery. They hum with life. While inside rumpled sacks pure white maggots writhe and spiral from a rip, a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips a living froth onto the buried earth. The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch, rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges, a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh. And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening, husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening and shifting within, wings curled and wet, the open air pungent and ready to receive them in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts, a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents soundly sleep along the windowsill, content, wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass. Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless waste we make when we create—our streets teem with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is a purpose, maybe there are too many of us to see it, though we can, from a distance, hear the dull thrum of generation's industry, feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder. Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.
There are at least two types of people, the first for whom the ordinary worldliness is easy. The regular social routines and material cares are nothing too external to them and easily absorbed. They are not alien from the creation and maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat them as alien. And also, from them, the efforts toward the world, and to them, the fulfillment of the world's moderate desires, flow. They are ef- fortless at eating, moving, arranging their arms as they sit or stand, being hired, being paid, cleaning up, spending, playing, mating. They are in an ease and comfort. The world is for the world and for them. Then there are those over whom the events and opportunities of the every- day world wash over. There is rarely, in this second type, any easy kind of absorption. There is only a visible evidence of having been made of a different substance, one that repels. Also, from them, it is almost impos- sible to give to the world what it will welcome or reward. For how does this second type hold their arms? Across their chest? Behind their back? And how do they find food to eat and then prepare this food? And how do they receive a check or endorse it? And what also of the difficulties of love or being loved, its expansiveness, the way it is used for markets and indentured moods? And what is this second substance? And how does it come to have as one of its qualities the resistance of the world as it is? And also, what is the person made of the second substance? Is this a human or more or less than one? Where is the true impermeable community of the second human whose arms do not easily arrange themselves and for whom the salaries and weddings and garages do not come? These are, perhaps, not two sorts of persons, but two kinds of fortune. The first is soft and regular. The second is a baffled kind, and magnetic only to the second substance, and made itself out of a different, second, substance, and having, at its end, a second, and almost blank-faced, reward.
When I am not writing I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young woman in an office park in a provincial town who has a job cutting and pasting time. I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world's richest art star in space. I am not writing a book called Kansas City Spleen. I am not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch's Maldoror. I am not writing a book of political philosophy called Questions for Poets. I am not writing a scandalous memoir. I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I am not writing a memoir about poetry or love. I am not writing a memoir about poverty, debt collection, or bankruptcy. I am not writing about family court. I am not writing a memoir because memoirs are for property owners and not writing a memoir about prohibitions of memoirs. When I am not writing a memoir I am also not writing any kind of poetry, not prose poems contemporary or otherwise, not poems made of frag- ments, not tightened and compressed poems, not loosened and conversa- tional poems, not conceptual poems, not virtuosic poems employing many different types of euphonious devices, not poems with epiphanies and not poems without, not documentary poems about recent political moments, not poems heavy with allusions to critical theory and popular song. I am not writing "Leaving the Atocha Station" by Anne Boyer and certain- ly not writing "Nadja" by Anne Boyer though would like to write "Debt" by Anne Boyer though am not writing also "The German Ideology" by Anne Boyer and not writing a screenplay called "Sparticists." I am not writing an account of myself more miserable than Rousseau. I am not writing an account of myself more innocent than Blake. I am not writing epic poetry although I like what Milton said about lyric poets drinking wine while epic poets should drink water from a wooden bowl. I would like to drink wine from a wooden bowl or to drink water from an emptied bottle of wine. I am not writing a book about shopping, which is a woman shopping. I am not writing accounts of dreams, not my own or anyone else's. I am not writing historical re-enactments of any durational literature. I am not writing anything that anyone has requested of me or is waiting on, not a poetics essay or any other sort of essay, not a roundtable re- sponse, not interview responses, not writing prompts for younger writers, not my thoughts about critical theory or popular songs. I am not writing a new constitution for the republic of no history. I am not writing a will or a medical report. I am not writing Facebook status updates. I am not writing thank-you notes or apologies. I am not writing conference papers. I am not writing book reviews. I am not writing blurbs. I am not writing about contemporary art. I am not writing accounts of my travels. I am not writing reviews for The New Inquiry and not writ- ing pieces for Triple Canopy and not writing anything for Fence. I am not writing a daily accounting of my reading, activities, and ideas. I am not writing science fiction novels about the problem of the idea of the au- tonomy of art and science fiction novels about the problem of a society with only one law which is consent. I am not writing stories based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's unwritten story ideas. I am not writing online dat- ing profiles. I am not writing anonymous communiqués. I am not writing textbooks. I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night.
I A cave with arms at the mouth. Our hero is blind: everything he hears he sees. Hear! Gold light sifts to his ear. A roar. The seas beaten—his duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix, destined for heat, they blush. II William's cabbage heart shook. He dragged himself from the dirt. If he could rest his ears he could see ginkgos in his city. The pretty boy I mean & Will, who were both aging with their senses curbed until they knew New York City by the root & crack. III As if there is a fig tree rooted in heaven & each of its leaves knows all the rules. 8:45 a.m. hum: he saw the boy had fallen into a manhole & the fig tree had fallen into a manhole & neither could be the sound of hands splitting gold hands landed up the breadth of William's back.  God bleeding me a kind of blooded cry  my lady makes me a heron  or my leg for a stump  the cursed in loam my  venomous thumbs my His guts an a-readied muck. IV If your hand had been dusk- yellow not a lantern but winged —a bridge or a dove sprung from the dirt. Trying to make a shape. The feathered thumb herring— bone. We would not fall. V I brought you in from the garden since I can't stand the trees' visions. William you will be there the last stately in ribbons. But the vision is a fattened glee. The glee is a clubfoot. The glee is a mutt. The eyes sewn up the air & nothing can be seen but visions. You are burst sideways like a fist in water. Your maker staring into an apron of mud. Thou art  bore a hole in the man. Thou art  not a bloody bit, not the man.
I A boy was covered in pigeons. He put birdseed in his hair and crotch so the ghostbird would descend and devour him. I saw the brown bird with the yellow breast smoking Lucky Strikes. Thought she might be the Holy Spirit. There are no birds only what this typewriter flushes out. The cliffs are made from stone doves. And the boys had beautiful lips. II The Outside suggests a tunnel to ride what he says through a tunnel. Geography, animal life, the eventual human being. Anatomy on the page is sexier, my ghost. The page of real thigh, my mister, opens at the top to be eaten like the sun you can recognize eats her rays. Greasy misery covers my hands. It bothers me to touch a carcass. Dead branches. Bothers me. III God's big eye is a pink cubicle. God's big eye stretches around me, a great balled gown. I look for him in the roots of the roofless space.Mons pubis corresponds to the real bird. The lung. The wing. IV I demand the air beat. The birds scared up into motion and I expect revelation. I have my lusty knife. Left cigarettes on your grave and chant. J is for Jerusalem. Returns the poet to an invisible homeland. Resurrects the liver.  Saying goodbye to a ghost is a hoax. The birds are still in flight. Unhook the birds. V Sick orange sky I hate I shall see it opened, the sunny aftertomb and a real poem at the gate. The erratic footprints of birds upon the sand or lacerations. No limbs at our disposal, only the desire of limbs to reflesh. The ghost gestures. I am filling your borders with letters. This is the new word—get up and live.
We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket about to settle into the shape of the present which, if we wanted to imagine it as a person, would undoubtedly look startled— as after a verbal berating or in advance of a light pistol-whipping. The camera came and went, came and went, like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse. The crew was acting like a litter of mimics trying to make a killing. Anything to fill the vacuum of time. The wind whirred and tracked the clouds. The credits, we were told, would take the form of a semi-scrawl, urban-sprawl, graffiti-style typography. The soundtrack would include instrumental versions of "Try a Little Tenderness." Our handler, who was walking backward in order to maintain constant eye contact with us, nearly stumbled over a girl in a sheath and pearls who was misting a shelf of hothouse flowers. While the two apologized to each other, we stood and watched the fine spray settle over the leaves and drip onto the floor. On the way out, we passed a door with a small window reinforced with wired glass through which we could see a nurse positioning a patient on a table. We swore afterward we'd heard her say, "Lie perfectly still and look only inward." A clock chimed and as the others were audibly counting backwards from five to zero, I thought I heard someone say, "Now let go of this morbid attachment to things."
That's how it was then, a knife through cartilage, a body broken. Animal and animal as mineral ash. A window smashed. The collective howl as a general alarm followed by quiet.  Boot-black night, halogen hum. Tape snaking through a stealth machine. Later, shattered glass and a checkpoint charm—the clasp of a tourist-trap bracelet. An arm. A trinket. Snap goes the clamshell. The film in the braincase preserving the sense of the drench, the angle of the leash, the connecting collar. A tracking long-shot. The descent of small-town darkness.
The rhinestone lights blink off and on. Pretend stars. I'm sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave. A science of motion toward some flat surface, some heat, some cold. Some light can leave some after-image but it doesn't last. Isn't that what they say? That and that historical events exchange glances with nothingness.
It was relatively painless except for being all she could see: a world made of dinner, very pleasant; a lunch at something called a table in the dining room; an endless night; a half-day; another lunch, this on Tuesday. Yesterday. Today. Pieces propped up with supports. The therapist tapped his cigar. He no longer accepted her general opposition to myth, marriage, Olympic Games, and the course of decades. He said it was as if she were engaged in an eternal war, either watching a movie or acting in one, depending on the situation and time of day. She sat in silence, the sky above a half-baked blue, a blank- face dying of awkwardness. The simple explanation boiled down to the too-easy explanation. He was smart and charming then; and later, much less so. Behind his head, pictures were crammed together with the top layer hung so high she had to crane her neck to see the details. He said to please pretend she was listening.
I'm remembering again, the day we stood on the porch and you smoked while the old man told you about his basement full of wine, his bad heart and the doctor's warning, how he held the dusty bottle out to you, glad, he said, to give it away to someone who appreciated its value and spirit, the years it took to settle into its richness and worth. I'm watching again, each cell alive, as you reach for the wine, your forearm exposed below the rolled sleeve, the fine hairs that sweep along the muscle, glowing, lifting a little in the afternoon breeze. I'm memorizing the shape of the moment: your hand and the small bones lengthening beneath the skin as it tightens in the gripping, in the receiving of the gift, the exact texture and color of your skin, and the old man's face, reduced to its essence. That, and the brief second when both of you had a hand on the bottle— the thing not yet given, not yet taken, but held between you, stoppered, full. And my body is flooded again with an elemental joy, holding onto it against another day in the unknowable future when I'm given terrible news, some dark burden I'll be forced to carry. I know this is useless, and can't possibly work, but I'm saving that moment, for balance.
for Richard Before the days of self service, when you never had to pump your own gas, I was the one who did it for you, the girl who stepped out at the sound of a bell with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back in a straight, unlovely ponytail. This was before automatic shut-offs and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank, I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas backed up, came arcing out of the hole in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts, belly and legs. And I had to hurry back to the booth, the small employee bathroom with the broken lock, to change my uniform, peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin and wash myself in the sink. Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt pure and amazed — the way the amber gas glazed my flesh, the searing, subterranean pain of it, how my skin shimmered and ached, glowed like rainbowed oil on the pavement. I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall, for the first time, in love, that man waiting patiently in my future like a red leaf on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty that asks to be noticed. How was I to know it would begin this way: every cell of my body burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me a nimbus of light that would carry me through the days, how when he found me, weeks later, he would find me like that, an ordinary woman who could rise in flame, all he would have to do is come close and touch me.
"the shows here all fights are prepared by women" evening at the bar below only four ninety nine that's cheap as we walk to our room a hundred feet away Id taken photo with a shirtless Pac about to warm up for his battle with Bisping anything goes I say to Bisping "he will mishmash your face" working behind Atul's lead & one other's later inside room give Taija a huge hug I think it must have been Arun's room or another minimalist orange variation book by Casey Anthony feel or leave bleeding through margins a French door to let cooling breeze certain sway crystal night I could swear more people Im familiar with & trust present it has to be Mama whom I correspond with or new letter I read cry out name of anyone close to me in their strangle house whose owner Ive made my acquaintance  name English evening in this outer sphere when alone you feel the cloth down your back like the cosmos always admire the poet or comics able to bring bone essence unwrit till name language happen get leaves behind in open living space where owner by family wife with this book in orange flower  "Beautiful!"
zookeeper killed by wolves in Sweden beside the beach you take me to watch baby seal pups it's your birthday, Coyo B, maligayang bati sleep comes over me make it through gongyo it's noon lean into salvation innocence nude turquoise pause blank space your subject head cinnamon rule narration suture destiny book hostile shelf you've reached a quarter century as is the case of parables your verdant hand recede lore as bridge barter abandon lore secure senility triumphant why Ill message you somewhere transcribe Vril stanza appear in adjacent room pause blank haste divine not on your birthday, Coyo B! I want you happy sorry to vanish why sing a solid identity sauna clamp HOY! your foot on the gas pedal of my Honda too demure to speak enter dialect ocean seismic Port Said it's probably too late to catch up October I mean a head of violent arctic squeamish despair nonesuch appraise no way somatic atlas or that beach we gaze at submerging pandas in cold cold ocean I leave you where cold can't recover itself outer engine portal corridor HOY! COYO B! establish announcement nerve of Rome counter Adonaïs imaginarium lead ulcer a dull terrain today you appear in adjacent room, viceroy finger in place marvelous period pause blank spate much to relate about our visit north of intention tell me, love, pondering the leaves
You will recall the day the dead returned  to the village. Name it now the nebula of perfect expulsion. These fragments of existence spin their enclosing web, unlock the uncertainty of grace. We are late. On the third day we will dance with the beer; the vessel will be prepared for the corrupted descent of power. Radiant in its bounded estate, the spirit knows itself as the guide who moves to erase her footsteps. So once again the dance negotiates the property of being strange, that absolute desire for falling. The red roof tiles slip into the morning fog There is a red silence  all around us. It will take years to learn this coherent grammar. The oriole has established an evasive coherence,  infinite, exact, with its place, there where the day seems set to honor the bird's expressive deceit. Logic always fails that Carolina wren. The propositional exactitude of a certain absence draws fire upon its wings. The bird knows itself a strict proposal of faith, a ground state that moves without an absolute space. Grammatical bird, attuned to roots and implication. Love is ancient evidence, an instrument constrained, jealous of its utility, in awe of its own death; every name embraces it.
For those of us young healthy we will face the mourning of our elders. Bury them beneath the earth. And for those of us who believe the living ever-live we will stand by the graves of our teachers and know that we like those we've buried are living ancients.
That everything's inevitable. That fate is whatever has already happened. The brain, which is an elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is. In this world, I am the surest thing. Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes. Please insert your spare coins. I am filling them up. Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim. But yet, I am a vatic one. As vatic as the Vatican. In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum I am waiting, like an animal, For poetry.
My heart is bleeding. It bleeds upward and fills my mouth up with salt. It bleeds because of a city in ruins, the chair still warm from sister's body, because it will all be irreproducible. My heart bleeds because of baby bear not finding mama bear and it bleeds to the tips of my fingers like I painted my nails Crimson. Sometimes my heart bleeds so much I am a raisin. It bleeds until I am a quivering ragged clot, bleeds at the ending with the heroine and her sunken cancer eyes, at the ending with the plaintive flute over smoke-choked killing fields. I'm bleeding a river of blood right now and it's wearing a culvert in me for the blood. My heart rises up in me, becomes the cork of me and I choke on it. I am bleeding for you and for me and for the tiny babies and the IED-blown leg. It bleeds because I'm made that way, all filled up with blood, my sloppy heart a sponge filled with blood to squeeze onto  any circumstance. Because it is mine, it will always bleed. My heart bled today. It bled onto the streets and the steps of city hall. It bled in the pizza parlor with the useless jukebox. I've got so much blood to give inside and outside of any milieu. Even for a bad zoning decision, I'll bleed so much you'll be bleeding, all of us bleeding in and out like it's breathing, or kissing, and because it is righteous and terrible and red.
In the middle of rolling grasslands, away from lights, a moonless night untethers its wild polka-dots, the formations we can name competing for attention in a twinkling and crowded sky-bowl. Out from the corners, our eyes detect a maverick meteor, a transient streak, and lying back toward midnight on the heft of car hood, all conversation blunted, we are at once unnerved and somehow restored. Out here, a furrow of spring-fed river threads through ranches in the tens of thousands of acres. Like cattle, we are powerless, by instinct can see why early people trembled and deliberated the heavens. Off in the distance those cattle make themselves known, a bird song moves singular across the horizon. Not yet 2:00, and bits of comet dust, the Perseids, startle and skim the atmosphere like skipping stones. In the leaden dark, we are utterly alone. As I rub the ridges on the back of your hand, our love for all things warm and pulsing crescendos toward dawn: this timeless awe, your breath floating with mine upward into the stars.
for Roger Caillois Water hollows stone, wind scatters water, stone stops the wind. Water, wind, stone. Wind carves stone, stone's a cup of water, water escapes and is wind. Stone, wind, water. Wind sings in its whirling, water murmurs going by, unmoving stone keeps still. Wind, water, stone. Each is another and no other: crossing and vanishing through their empty names: water, stone, wind.
Like the horn you played in Catholic school the city will open its mouth and cry out. Don't worry 'bout nothing. Don't meanno thing. It will leave you stunned as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut who's told he won the whole damn purse. It will feel better than any floor that's risen up to meet you. It will rise like Easter bread, golden and familiar in your grandmother's hands. She'll come back, heaven having been too far from home to hold her. O it will be beautiful. Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys won't kill you for it. Shake your head. Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize you are. What a lucky sack of stars.
I will do everything you tell me, Mother. I will charm three gold hairs from the demon’s head. I will choke the mouse that gnaws an apple tree’s roots and keep its skin for a glove. To the wolf, I will be pretty and kind and curtsy his crossing of my path. The forest, vocal even in its somber tread, rages. A slope ends in a pit of foxes drunk on rotten brambles of berries and the raccoons ransack a rabbit’s unmasked hole. What do they find but a winter’s heap of droppings? A stolen nest, the cracked shell of another creature’s child. I imagine this is the rabbit way and I will not stray, Mother, into the forest’s thick, where the trees meet the dark, though I have known misgivings of light as a hot hand that flickers against my neck. The path ends at a river I must cross. I will wait for the ferryman to motion me through. Into the waves he etches with his oar a new story: a silent girl runs away, a silent girl is never safe. I will take his oar in my hand. I will learn the boat’s rocking and bring myself back and forth. To be good is the hurricane of caution. I will know indecision’s rowing, the water I lap into my lap as he shakes his withered head. Behind me is the forest. Before me the field, a loose run of grass. I stay in the river, Mother, I study escape.
(1) Nothing that exists can be temporal; still I come to lay this stick upon these altars, those three definitions of sun, the border and thick measure of lost perfection. Sun must acknowledge this state, an iconic message, abrupt invention of death; we shall call it an accomplishment, or a causal relation. The mask measures my intent on a patch of earth, a spent measure, a return, that red unruly seat of the dead.  (2) Could the Cusan speak of love as a return, a plentitude of absence, an imprecise count of the dark from which he would always turn? The binukedine know how to entice the expansive energy flowing from grace, an absolute measure, a stellar device. I would propose a failed sun, a sacrifice that spins an ambiguous body in time, in trust to a sacred field, death's other price. Call this, too, an intrinsic order, a rhyme of resuscitated bodies, pure, sublime in their perturbative intent, a concern of rhythms and designs set upon an urn.  (3) This must be what is the case, nani in the manifold, dannu, milestone, the embrace of albarga mask, the cold design the solstice will prove. Nothing under law will hold. What established light will move or change the structure of light, light an order to disprove? Speak of the possible mask, of its finite correlation to love, the logical slight derivation and mark of corrupted space, that fugitive event that will leave no trace.  (4) Bogged in a bone order, syntax and substance of the passing world, I place my duge in the fragile arms of silence. So much for the quick embrace of the ceasing instant, the chaste argument only the dead can efface. Say that I have written my absolute descent and stable transformation through a sounding tone to one that now is spent. Praise this instant collation, paradox and migration of souls without assurance or the due gift of distance.
All summer connotations fill this light, a symmetry of different scales—the site of fibrous silence, the velvet lace of iris, alders the moon can ignite. One feels the amplitude of grief, the pace of oscillating stars, power in place where time has crossed and left a breathy stain. A body needs the weight and thrust of grace. I want to parse the logic, spin and domain, the structure mourning will allow, the grain of certainty in two estates, the dance of perfect order, flowing toward its plane. That bird you see has caught a proper stance,  unfaithful to its measure, a pert mischance of divination on the move, the trace of sacred darkness true to light's advance.
Somewhere between here and Belen, the Rio Grande will narrow to a muddy bead, no more than three feet across from shore to shore. My friend, Nick Markulis, claims he loves the river's color there, and will bathe his toes in the water, and will go on and on about a dry river in Athens that measures its life  in olive groves. Stratis Thalassinos told me about these peculiar waters that disappear and turn up again, and, of course, you know of Arethusa's fountain in Syracuse. I do not accuse Markopoulos (do I have the name right?—Markopoulos, Markulis, fugitive names, fugitive lives docking in Halifax) of being too conversant with asphodel meadows, but one cannot remain composed when hunters and cultic figures press their claims upon a sainted afternoon. Think now of the intimate authority of La Candelaria, the Sunday morning concert, the walk through the abandoned streets, where all was an occasion of Bogotá, a memory of Mazatlán, a shaping necessity we might have met at Salamis. Who can be sure that this white cloth will be dissolved by death?
1 One could sing October rain, and one had a gift for plain  chant and prayer, a domain unsettled by love or its intimate other. What fits with this theology no one dares to say. These twins so perfectly in tune must know "the modesty of nature," the perfect art and texture that sustains the other name. Paris could not be the frame for loyal Romans, their shame worn upon their bodies light as air, and nothing is quite as endurable as death. Those who have taken this path move with an abiding breath. Such a common dance this dense  intention of love's expense.  Keep this for that special hour when the Roman drops his sour gift for abandoned splendour; et c'est la nuit, the footfall that troubles that other Paul.  2 I have learned the felicity of fire, how in its wake something picks at buried seed. Think this a most festive deed, nature's mistake, borrowed flare of a village dance, satire of the sun's course, light you read through waste, repair. Death had freed that first opaque habitation (what a widening gyre), an aspen ache, a lustrous scar that might lead  to a hidden grove, or breed astonishment in its loss; all entire, a shaping breath proposes its own pyre. 3 Solitude guides me through this minor occasion; moon is my mentor, one on a spree. This notion, night's philanthropy, courts my favor. Devotion, love's predecessor, sings its tidy discretion. Such gentility reins all vigor, all caution.
In the damp sick In the dough In the chewed on chew of faces of expensive car owner faces chewed ons of the world: I do not fetishize the truth I poke around Holding my bland sandwich in my non-dominant hand, I think what could be worse, I think what could be as bad? To feel the thing you want to feel and not to care To be a wet road in the dark I'd like to thank Toyota, like to thank my parents, esthetician Ritalin Clonazepam internet TV weed my beautiful dresses
Rotten, he says, motherly how could you miss that Like a ragamuffin with no eyes his body has a dark spot Like doing laundry all day long he is being nowhere Cottage cheese runs out his mouth Another one and another one that doll can crawl his insides like an awning Motherly if mother mother as if spread If I could break the hymen of his ear with  I can't stand you I won't say a thing and I won't notice god you are the softest kind of jerk and yesterday is gone and I had nothing to do with it
I laze about, deranged and unafraid to godly kiss you, kiss the pharmacist that whipped you, undilute, to dilate high your animus of lime and lye. I know of an upstairs hell. A creamy, vascular thump through bonus years of things that pass and things that do not move.  Your cellular mouth. Your mess of inattention. Now that none  of us are good looking I think that/they are right. Strokes of light you taped across my nipple. Patterns staked to fake the love we cannot feel so slick the miser of your hand through my bad heart. Genius, you are blond enough. Once in a while. And in the end, when I sweep coolly up and will not be drawn back, then I will tell you of it. How I can. In writing, I am making an attempt to depict my beautiful nose through imagery. I will tell you of it. Once in a while. I will miss you. And the tape. To be flung down, petals from a balcony.
How it must have been for them, when wind came to strike cottonwoods they called home down —silver bridges across a gun-smoke creek-bed, joining yellow meadow to meadow...how it must have been like the beginning of time, when the first one beat great wings (though so silent a field mouse would never even hear before talons sinking in...) and rose over the Blues to find this valley with others following. And their human eyes, forward-gazing in their round faces, they turned toward sound to catch it in feather discs, their hearing tuned beyond human imagining...and then they were gone, like mist dissipating in the lowlands, and an eye trained toward their going might, squinting, distinguish signs of intention written by pinions, stroking damp air in their westward rowing. And we told ourselves all water eventually finds the sea—our coming, their going—so synchronous; this was simply something we wanted, more than knowing, wholly to believe.
Coleman Hawkins doing that thing with his sax: high and lonely as a kestrel twirls on thermals, sorting files of sound with a singular finger, now alighting  in pools of light, hovering then fixed like whirring wings of the insect glazed in serous amber but dreaming of oxygen: Sound leading a mindinto that sobrietyof thought which poisesthe heart. Sound like that, holding and giving out never. Sound quickenedwith desire. Soundthe benefit of nature in taut bolts of time, rich polychrome threads, count: Two-sixty. Sound blots outthe violence of affliction bringing it home lonely but good, letting it bend: Wehad much more reason being winged ones to recollect than forget.
Lynda Hull Maybe you sold it to buy junk. Though I like to think not.And I don't want to think you used the money for foodor rent or anything obligatory, practical. A pair of boots, perhaps. Thigh high burgandy boots with gold laces. Something crucial as lilies. Mostly, I want to believe you held onto the book, that your fingers brailed those pages' inky veins even in your final weeks. I want to believe words can be that important in the end. Who can help the heart, which is grand and full of gestures? I had been on my way out. He was rearranging his bookshelves when, in an approximation of tenderness,  he handed me, like the last of the sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving, like a thing he wanted but was willing to share, the rediscovered book— he'd bought it years ago in a used bookstore in Chicago. Levine's poems, with your signature inside. That whole year I spent loving him, something splendid as lemons, sour and bright and leading my tongue toward new language, was on the shelf. These weren't your own poems, autographed, a stranger's souvenir—we'd spent vain months leafing through New York stacks for your out-of-print collections—but you'd cared about this book, or cared enough to claim it, your name looped across the title page as if to say, Please.This is mine, This book is mine. Though you sold it. Or someone else did when you died. We make habits out of words. I grew accustomed to his, the way they spooned me into sleep so many times. Now I am sleepless and alone another night. What would you give for one more night alone? No booze. No drugs. Just that hunger and those words. He gave me The Names of the Lost. Need comes down hard on a body. What else was sold? What else—do you know?—did we lose
One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It's years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile.    •  If his daughter spooled out the fabric she's chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land's scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan's Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean, a mile or so off, anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling: "This is it. Here! This is it!" his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive.  • In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith's Blue.
My lover, who lives far away, opens the door to my room  and offers supper in a bowl made of his breath. The stew has boiled and I wonder at the cat born from its steam. The cat is in the bedroom now, mewling. The cat is indecent  and I, who am trying to be tidy, I, who am trying to do things  the proper way, I, who am sick from the shedding, I am undone. My lover, who lives far away, opens the door to my room  and offers pastries in a basket spun from his vision. It is closely woven, the kind of container some women collect. I have seen these in many colors, but the basket he brings is simple:  only black, only nude. The basket he brings is full of sweet scones  and I eat even the crumbs. As if I've not dined for days. My lover, who lives far away, opens the door to my room  and offers tea made from the liquid he's crying. I do not want my lover crying and I am sorry I ever asked for tea. My lover, who lives far away, opens the door to my room pretending  he never cried. He offers tea and cold cakes. The tea is delicious:  spiced like the start of our courtship, honeyed and warm. I drink every bit of the tea and put aside the rest. My lover, who lives far away, opens the door to my room  like a man loving his strength. The lock I replaced  this morning will not keep him away. My lover, who lives far away, opens the door to my room  and brings me nothing. Perhaps he has noticed how fat I've grown, indulged. Perhaps he is poor and sick of emptying his store. It is no matter to me any longer, he has filled me, already, so full. My lover who is far away opens the door to my room  and tells me he is tired. I do not ask what he's tired from for my lover, far away,  has already disappeared. The blankets are big with his body. The cat, under the covers,  because it is cold out and she is not stupid, mews.
(February, 1841) Melinda, I've been preparing to write. That peculiar girl named Molly,  who has a bit of liberty in the house, has said she'll find some paper. I have practiced mixing charred wood with water and have managed to shave a twig so one end nearly resembles a nib, but tonight Lila got caught up under the good Doctor's whip for such a little offense. I am frightened. Doctor Jackson brought in a new troop of slaves today. A boy of thirteen among them had the welted cheek that speaks of a driver's dissatisfaction. Lila put a poultice on to ease the swelling, but Jackson wants the boy to understand his place and thinks a scar will help. Lila's back and neck and arms have thirty new wounds to replace the one she thought to heal. Melinda, how is Jacob? Ever yours,  (February, 1841) Do you ever start at night believing I might be dead? I leave my body sometimes, Melinda. Is that all dying is? Remember how I'd scold you when the stew was thin, believing I needed a thick stock to forge muscle for all the work I had ahead? Your stew would make me big again, Melinda. Sometimes we have to trap, skin and roast possum, rabbit, snake and squirrel. Except for that, I have swallowed naught but salt pork and coarse meal in all my days away from you. But I work just fine. Ever your beloved husband,  (March, 1841) What a herd of slaves Jackson brought in last month. No sooner had their strength returned after the long march to the farm from Lynchburg but they began to plot another run. We didn't know they'd planned to leave until they were already gone a day. All manner of neighborhood men came around to tip Jackson's whiskey and help him on the hunt, though all they brought back for their trouble were two bodies. One dead, one fighting off living. That boy I told you about, Ben with the slashed cheek? At the stony fork of the river Doc Jackson found his body, cut up, twisted as if it had fought long under water, a dead hand pointing in the direction his netted sister and the "damned lost lot of niggers" had run. I guess he was too obstinate even for the water to hold down easily. Jackson used Ben like a scarecrow, his shirt hooked on a pole, his body meant to warn us from the road. Lila's still not certain that the girl will live. Until tomorrow, I am ever your Joe.  (December, 1843) William is the name Smythe matched to my description when he shipped me from his Wilmington slave pen to the Richmond consigner Jackson bought me from. So I am William, though it took more than one whipping for me to remember it. There is a woman keeps the kitchen here prefers we call her Auntie. She's been called so many names she "most forgets" which one means her. I trust Jacob is getting on in school just fine. I was, at his age, learning to carry myself with the pride of a Freeman. It's been many years since I've been able to answer to any person calling me that name. And Jacob? Can he remember his father? Please hug him for me, Melinda. I am ever your husband,  (November, 1845) How many live on our alley in Philadelphia? There, this room might accommodate a bed and two chairs, but here we are three men, two women, some potions, and a girl. We sleep in turns. Marlo often walks the woods at night, his eye out on the traps for all of us. 'Dolphus steals sleep in the smithing shop and steals everything else before dawn. Just last week, we bore the tread of a muzzled goat and two hens he brought in from a neighbor's farm. Our field sweat adds stench to the store of bones, feathers, brews, and herbs Lila claims can cure the women on this place. Sadie, who Lila never tried to stop herself from bearing, sleeps with her body wedged behind the door. Molly swings it in her side each night when she turns up to sleep after Miss Amy's laudanum takes and again when she races the conch call to the house in the morning. Even Lena, who had a well-built cabin of her own when she lived on the place, pushed four babies off her tit to make room for the Doctor and for Miss Amy's boy. I wonder, Melinda, are your wages enough, since I went away, to satisfy the rent? Yours in tribulation,  (December, 1847) The Doctor's had his eye on Molly since he caught her listening while the tutor drilled his son on Greek. She says the boy translates slowly. On a war now, his spoiled tongue has spent two days flogging some warrior's impenetrable shield. Molly showed me yesterday what a heart looks like. Traced it in the dirt that is my bed, my stool, my desk, my cabin floor. I miss you, Melinda. I miss feeling the little skip your heart took sometimes, though I know the pinch that came along with the stutter pained you. Molly is a smart girl, though brutal in her zeal. She's quicker than a butcher to find cause to wield a knife. I am certain the Doctor will lapse in his vigilance  soon enough. Then I will chance to capture on the page one of these letters. May God be good and grant so large a prayer. Yours,  (January, 1848) We are like to lose another hand unless 'Dolphus can recover from the flogging he took over a missing pair of cufflinks. The girl who was brought home with Ben's body was quickly well enough to work, and she had less skin on her bones than Doctor Jackson left on 'Dolphus. Perhaps there is some little hope for Lila's husband. Molly is afraid to sneak me any of the Doctor's paper. Molly, who can be as bad as 'Dolphus about purloining pretty, useful things. I doubted she was earnest in her fear, but now I see what she, born here, must have always known. A man whose livelihood depends on stealing the toil of other people's bodies must keep a keen eye on his own most dear and precious things.
Because she'd heard him laugh through new moon darkness and she knew he'd fallen and she knew, before she turned, he'd be crawling, like a crawdad, rock to loam— because she tried to love the straight back and neck he'd erected to recollect the man he'd been before—because she found herself adding up his usefulness like some kind of auctioneer—she showed him the dark coils areoling both her breasts and all the ways she bent and lifted, bent and lifted, steady, strong. She let him believe he was past due for a harvest and her hands were the right ones, now, to hold onto the scythe.    •  She made quick work of pleasure. The boysmile bunked down in his eyes, she claimed. Her tongue found the place in his mouth where the teeth were gone—where he'd hold his corncakes until they grew soft enough to chew. History had bedded him in all of this—his own history and failures not his own. Before he'd tramped in she'd watched another man—a man she'd thought she'd hated—watched his body opened, opened, opened until blood had married brine. She'd watch that man be whipped into something good for nothing more than fertilizing clay and she'd thought buckshot would have been a brand of kindness if sprayed into him just then. But even after his hard going, she did not miss him very much.  • Anyone she chose could be shucked like surplus property tomorrow, but that hadn't been enough to warn her off of picking him that night. Because she knew if she set her sight on nothing she'd get nothing in return, she'd walked with him. But because the night progressed so —because there were some clouds—no stars—no moon—he'd tripped over the branch of a dead and down tree. In all that darkness, there, without a moon, even then, she had not fallen. She thought to say so, but she did not say so. She did nothing but say she was sorry for him. She did not use her mouth to say this. Could he not listen to her hands? They spoke softly, articulating her condolences, to his torn and bleeding skin.
gone from a man claimed the girl a man named the girl  got the girl  stored up in his room    •   ran away runaway  gone  Dinah gone  •  19 years  of age about five foot three inchesbrown hair a cask-shaped mark over her left eye   • no one speaks no speech  just hatching    •   thought he knew her wellwhen she was in there with him  not a word was spoken  who to trust now? thought he knew  •   presents a gapbetween her upper foreteeth when she smiles
The eyes on a face have brought me sadness: the right eye searching for seams in ripped fishnets; the left eye lost and wandering the dark; the eye of the baby god crawling behind a couch in the moist suburb where we planned our escape from video games and grilled cheese; the eye of a whale we met in a dream who spit us out so we could make the 8 o’clock screening of On Golden Pond; the eye of the clock, blinking when the oboe wailed like a burning shofar; the eye inside the eye, curled up—a sprouting lima bean, remembering the nineteenth century, those rosy drapes; the eyes of missing finger tips, of sad afternoons in French cafés in Dayton, Ohio; the eyes on the very real parrot who sits on the shoulders of a wax actor dressed as a pirate; the eyes of an actress, pretending to be my mom; the eyes of my father, sleeping on a train, dreaming about miniature crashing planes; the eyes of a swimming pool, looking up or down everyone’s swimsuits and into their souls; the eyes in love songs written by mean men; the eyes in the painting  lost in a fire where we tried to save the ancient cat; the eyes underneath tap shoes clicking like teeth; the eyes of Fred Astaire, never blinking, even to kiss in the dark; the eyes of the state of Texas secretly tattooed on everyone’s ass, and the eyes on the billboard, ripped and faded from rain like the eyes of the best waitress on the Upper West Side who knows everyone’s order, even those of customers she’s never met. Can you hear the eyes under my eyes? They steal other people’s dreams to use them for ad copy. Here are the eyes of a man who’d be my husband if he hadn’t married my twin, and there are the eyes of the judge who divorced them, blue as his tie. I forget the eye color of the first man I loved—what color was my hat when we cried in the snow? The whites of everyone’s eyes swirl together in silent music. Nothing like the closed eyes of a flamenco dancer, eating a dripping hamburger by the highway. Instead it is the right eye of a teacher when she touches her student; the eyes inside my mouth and the eyes outside your mouth; the eyes of the writer and reader, a broken vase and a whole petal; the eyes on what you thought of as a cunt and the eyes on what I thought of as a cock; the small eyes on the open book and the bigger eyes of the closed book; the eyes I swallow when we talk, and the eyes that fly above us in sleep.
The host's girlfriend is barely seen. She's busy giving away wild animals to reluctant guests.  I agree to take a snake-dog, maybe an electric eel, but when I feel its sharp teeth in my shoulder, I start to worry about the future welfare of our fragile cat, the precarious order of our rented home, and remember I am supposed to be looking for someone....  A half-wolf, half-elephant cracks through the walls of the peeling wallpapered bedroom where my former student in a fuschia robe and curlers sits by a lighted make-up mirror. The shadows off elongated fake eyelashes are as dark as the branches of an evening tree. The hovering body of a fiery sparrow is almost transparent, like flute music or an idea. I turn my back  and finally, I spot her  my friend, the host. She's sipping rum punch from a martini glass; her whole body appears to be smiling, glowing, and I don't know what to think. I know she doesn't drink, hasn't in decades, and I wonder what's suddenly changed, but then I remember the cancer won, my friend isn't actually here, there is no party, there was never a house.
They worked They were always on time They were never late They never spoke back when they were insulted They worked They never took days off that were not on the calendar They never went on strike without permission They worked ten days a week and were only paid for five They worked They worked They worked and they died They died broke They died owing They died never knowing what the front entrance of the first national city bank looks like Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow passing their bill collectors on to the next of kin All died waiting for the garden of eden to open up again under a new management All died dreaming about america waking them up in the middle of the night screaming: Mira Mira your name is on the winning lottery ticket for one hundred thousand dollars All died hating the grocery stores that sold them make-believe steak and bullet-proof rice and beans All died waiting dreaming and hating Dead Puerto Ricans Who never knew they were Puerto Ricans Who never took a coffee break from the ten commandments to KILL KILL KILL the landlords of their cracked skulls and communicate with their latino souls Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel From the nervous breakdown streets where the mice live like millionaires and the people do not live at all are dead and were never alive Juan died waiting for his number to hit Miguel died waiting for the welfare check to come and go and come again Milagros died waiting for her ten children to grow up and work so she could quit working Olga died waiting for a five dollar raise Manuel died waiting for his supervisor to drop dead so he could get a promotion Is a long ride from Spanish Harlem to long island cemetery where they were buried First the train and then the bus and the cold cuts for lunch and the flowers that will be stolen when visiting hours are over Is very expensive Is very expensive But they understand Their parents understood Is a long non-profit ride from Spanish Harlem to long island cemetery Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow Dreaming Dreaming about queens Clean-cut lily-white neighborhood Puerto Ricanless scene Thirty-thousand-dollar home The first spics on the block Proud to belong to a community of gringos who want them lynched Proud to be a long distance away from the sacred phrase: Que Pasa These dreams These empty dreams from the make-believe bedrooms their parents left them are the after-effects of television programs about the ideal white american family with black maids and latino janitors who are well train— to make everyone and their bill collectors laugh at them and the people they represent Juan died dreaming about a new car Miguel died dreaming about new anti-poverty programs Milagros died dreaming about a trip to Puerto Rico Olga died dreaming about real jewelry Manuel died dreaming about the irish sweepstakes They all died like a hero sandwich dies in the garment district at twelve o’clock in the afternoon social security number to ashes union dues to dust They knew they were born to weep and keep the morticians employed as long as they pledge allegiance to the flag that wants them destroyed They saw their names listed in the telephone directory of destruction They were train to turn the other cheek by newspapers that mispelled mispronounced and misunderstood their names and celebrated when death came and stole their final laundry ticket They were born dead and they died dead Is time to visit sister lopez again the number one healer and fortune card dealer in Spanish Harlem She can communicate with your late relatives for a reasonable fee Good news is guaranteed Rise Table Rise Table death is not dumb and disable— Those who love you want to know the correct number to play Let them know this right away Rise Table Rise Table death is not dumb and disable Now that your problems are over and the world is off your shoulders help those who you left behind find financial peace of mind Rise Table Rise Table death is not dumb and disable If the right number we hit all our problems will split and we will visit your grave on every legal holiday Those who love you want to know the correct number to play let them know this right away We know your spirit is able Death is not dumb and disable RISE TABLE RISE TABLE Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow Hating fighting and stealing broken windows from each other Practicing a religion without a roof The old testament The new testament according to me gospel of the internal revenue the judge and jury and executioner protector and eternal bill collector Secondhand shit for sale learn how to say Como Esta Usted and you will make a fortune They are dead They are dead and will not return from the dead until they stop neglecting the art of their dialogue— for broken english lessons to impress the mister goldsteins— who keep them employed as lavaplatos porters messenger boys factory workers maids stock clerks shipping clerks assistant mailroom assistant, assistant assistant to the assistant’s assistant assistant lavaplatos and automatic artificial smiling doormen for the lowest wages of the ages and rages when you demand a raise because is against the company policy to promote SPICS SPICS SPICS Juan died hating Miguel because Miguel’s used car was in better running condition than his used car Miguel died hating Milagros because Milagros had a color television set and he could not afford one yet Milagros died hating Olga because Olga made five dollars more on the same job Olga died hating Manuel because Manuel had hit the numbers more times than she had hit the numbers Manuel died hating all of them Juan Miguel Milagros and Olga because they all spoke broken english more fluently than he did And now they are together in the main lobby of the void Addicted to silence Off limits to the wind Confine to worm supremacy in long island cemetery This is the groovy hereafter the protestant collection box was talking so loud and proud about Here lies Juan Here lies Miguel Here lies Milagros Here lies Olga Here lies Manuel who died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow Always broke Always owing Never knowing that they are beautiful people Never knowing the geography of their complexion PUERTO RICO IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE PUERTORRIQUENOS ARE A BEAUTIFUL RACE If only they had turned off the television and tune into their own imaginations If only they had used the white supremacy bibles for toilet paper purpose and make their latino souls the only religion of their race If only they had return to the definition of the sun after the first mental snowstorm on the summer of their senses If only they had kept their eyes open at the funeral of their fellow employees who came to this country to make a fortune and were buried without underwears Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel will right now be doing their own thing where beautiful people sing and dance and work together where the wind is a stranger to miserable weather conditions where you do not need a dictionary to communicate with your people Aqui Se Habla Espanol all the time Aqui you salute your flag first Aqui there are no dial soap commercials Aqui everybody smells good Aqui tv dinners do not have a future Aqui the men and women admire desire and never get tired of each other Aqui Que Pasa Power is what’s happening Aqui to be called negrito means to be called LOVE
the greatest living poet in new york city was born in Puerto Rico his name is Jorge Brandon (1902-1995) he is over 70 years old he carries his metaphor in brown shopping bags inside steel shopping cart he travels around with on the streets of manhattan he recites his poetry to whoever listens & when nobody is around he recites to himself he speaks the wisdom of unforgettable palm trees the vocabulary of coconuts that wear overcoats the traffic lights of his poems function without boring advice from ac or dc current book stores & libraries are deprived of his vibes to become familiar with this immortal poet you have to hang-out on street corners building stoops rooftops fire escapes bars parks subway train stations bodegas botanicas iglesias pawn shops card games cock fights funerals valencia bakery hunts point palace pool halls orchard beach & cuchifrito stands on the lower eastside the admission is free his presence is poetry
woke up this morning feeling excellent, picked up the telephone dialed the number of my equal opportunity employer to inform him I will not be into work today Are you feeling sick? the boss asked me No Sir I replied: I am feeling too good to report to work today, if I feel sick tomorrow I will come in early
(I hope) the only reason That I am this pre-autumn Afternoon in the privacy Of my suspicious living room Grant myself permission To believe in god once again Is solely because I saw An unexpected grasshopper Staring at my thoughts On the table that keeps The telephone from having A mind of its very own At first I was startled And then I was startled less At the sight of this insect Put together in green details To pay me an afternoon visit 39 floors above floor level In my High Rise Hobo apartment Miracle on 53rd street Grasshopper hopped all the way 39 floors above floor level To deliberately invade my privacy And I didn't mind at all After grasshopper assured me It didn't speak English or Spanish Or Chinese with an Italian accent So we hit it off right away You mind your own business And I will not ask you Any personal questions aside From how the hell did you get here I've never written a poem About grasshoppers this high up before And I know it wasn't something My non existing paint brushes Conceived behind my back and The only grass I have here is To smoke & not hop around in Until I get dizzy and levitate There has to be a mistake Or did the grasshopper take The elevator to the 39th floor And enter my apartment without knocking To make it obvious grasshoppers Have the right to remain silent also And give credit to the desert For his arrival and not no Almighty The only other mystery capable
I loved a girl when I was a girl, before I knew desire could be used against me. I so wanted to be relevant. Simple exchange— bouquets of wheat. My dirt-stained hands, tangled hair. I never could be prim, in apple-pie order. I dropped all the eggs, licking their smear off my hands; wrinkled her ribbons into my pocket, tore pages from her books, all for the sake of the lonely hour.
Pillows & ribbons harness barefoot friends,  haughty sisters & smiles; mothers watch, snoring.  Dirty Jeep, broken January; darkness steals my grief. I cannot imagine something more fragile than marriage. You held my hand.  We listened to the Callas arias on our porch.  You kept rewinding the love song back to the beginning  to the place where she saings, Certainly not today.  Leaf shadows tent walls. My tongue traces  tattoos & scars. Strange shirts  mingle in the dryer. Tangled sand, uncomfortable  legs, wasted days spent memorizing the body  I'd soon share. Bride, bridge, bridle: all signs said,  Don't wife her. I have learned how to hollow beginnings,  rewind homes & wedding veils.  Your drool, the doorknob, clumsy knots.  Today the map is mortified. In bed, polka dots, miscarriage.  Weather changes leaves, fragile-making. (not even divorcing in the eyes of the law: dissolving) I remember my sorrow at finding ants housed in my mother's peonies.  When we moved, the new residents tore out all her flower beds, the strawberry patch & the treehouse. I drove you there to show you.  You held my hand.
carefully folded, swooned, postpartum   posthaste—     my letter to you, I gave—    curious, you said uncanny you    said the color of my eyes in this light   is a different shade of green said   you don't eat meat but you wear   leather outside the birds   & inside the sun on the chair   & my thighs spread &   stick to the plastic &   you said you loved   it & the ampersand & my swoon   silently inside my skirt & the ochre   on the building changes to umber   in the light & the tree outside is   bare & I am, my foot inside my slipper   my toes curled behind & ow & yes   & some days are sunny days & some   days are
At the age of nine, Pa drove me to the river. The pastor & deacons awaited. I donned a white robe, transparent, self-conscious  of my fresh nubs. Father Jonas reached beneath me, placed a hand over my nose & mouth. I resisted. He pushed me hard until my feet released & rose to the surface, like a corpse. I cried afterward, cold & clammy, wet hair plaited back. All the men thought I was full  of the Holy Ghost.
Dear Ol' Dirty Bastard: I too like it raw, I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto isNever mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandanna. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party. Trill stands for what istruly real though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbagemen drift along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse. Bakku-shan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying,  my motto is Never mistake what it looks like for what it is
Who I know knows why all those lush-boned worn-out girls are Whooping at where the moon should be, an eyelid clamped On its lightness. Nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her Ears because nobody sees. Tattooed across her chest she claims Is BRING ME TO WHERE MY BLOOD RUNS and I want that to be here Where I am her son, pent in blackness and turning the night's calm Loose and letting the same blood fire through me. In her bomb hair: Shells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity, Somebody foolish enough to love her foolishly. Those who could hear No music weren't listening—and when I say it, it's like claiming She's an elegy. It rhymes, because of her, with effigy. Because of her, If there is no smoke, there is no party. I think of you, Miss Calamity, Every Sunday. I think of you on Monday. I think of you hurling hurt Where the moon should be and stomping into our darkness calmly.
If I could be anyting I would be a rich white girl and I am almost halfway there I straightened my hair before it rained Now all I can do is pray I don't mean that figuratively I'm living in this logocentrism Where did I get these Spanish thighs I was crying in the food court because I'm afraid of the spiritual anorexia that I crave I wrote out a prayer in reportorial style like a good Protestant Obsessed with achieving the androgyny of my time I cut when my boyfriend said I had the figure of an average Hispanic girl so what was I so upset about I decided to try liposuction at home So much splendor is owed to dysmorphia and a fucked perspective like those Gothic spires poking the heavens that someone just thought up like can we tap this broomstick on ethereal marble floors or what can we really do
Because urbanites can't look at mountains we dress ourselves like birds of paradise in falsies and teeter on Alexander McQueen flamingos clutching gold knuckles to our breasts Bodice make me bold tonight and if I die before I wake let this embryo inside me never take hold of my uterine lining for my 24-inch waistline's sake When I was a girl I would rip the yellow OBGYN listings out of the phone book and watch them sail on a river so refractive I'd swear it wore French skincare products The song of doves was prelapsarian They answered each other always like poor Echo in her cave wailing "There is only subjective truth!" which was a statement never heard before repeated so many times it lost all its power No body just the history of her libidinal choices I had not thought to compare the ego  to a video game because I was so deep in it I was all drives and instincts This is why one should never try to explain art with personal experience Still I plan to take full control of the situation by annihilating meaning I lost my virginity on a fence post I lost it to my middle finger And I was like a balloon full of saline when I straddled a balance beam This is how I lost it like a circus girl somersaulting for the thrill of her inner spectator
All my feelings are different and this one is the most Of all places here where women once retired from the men for fear of boring them I am so bloody in my own bath of wild hairs that I couldn't possibly join you tonight for that colonial thing Heroin or whore Babylon or Bethlehem No matter what I'm followed by mosquitos Flitting dicks who want me to teach them about themselves But everything I know is contained in capsules of macha that break down in my bloodstream And I wouldn't recommend it for the fairer sex who should buck up and study up on their condition I used to feel sick for all my sloth but not anymore In wanting to please I have sinned In leaning in I have sinned In breaking in two I feel sin So Vete ya A haircut and a hard cock is all I need To govern a family My rod cutting them down  supplicant on the ground For I was the first real white girl ever born in this country of flat skulls That's why I'm so cocky with my staff and my rule rock hard and inconsistent with my favor The mouths of L'Age d'Or sucked well at my pre-war stockings before cocktail hour Bells rang and trays of mosquitos were served with tarts We hadn't meant to kill them with La Macha which includes but is not limited to: a goddess religion unfaultering at the altar of shade an erotics of object-identification and compassion extending beyond the grave My sister and I drank mournfully but afterwards we still danced all night wearing quite literally bedazzled bustiers and veils of a dead boy's smoke que mala after beating their macho dead in ultra-feminine swoops How do they want us to think of them now our brothers haviing left so little charisma behind on the internet to aggrandize Such small mosquitos And though we are mourning we are still so macha as we chip the thin teeth of traitors and huff the scent of babies and slap each other on the asses and father seven times and punish the bull with its own marbled horns But though we're cocky we are still martyrs My sister says quita la macha and I'm like why It's okay to make up slogans in the spirit of revolution and she's like ok but after you systematically destroy machismo you must put his teeth to gnash at your engorged breasts for any sort of catagenesis to occur and I'm like that could be hot But it isn't the new love conceived by and for macha or is it? idk idk either i really dk So we taught our brothers all these methods of cameo that they may take a small symbol of macha to wear around their necks to the part of culture where the money used to be kept May they remember the strength of their mother's biceps as they show mercy to their fathers who are teleological till the end of supremacy which is the beginning of macha Kiss the black lips that feed you the corn hips that rock you and blight the prayers after you've said them Santa Mala Madre de Mala ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora y en la ahora de nuestra muerte  Hand me my beads War without end Amén
For you can travel with a screaming red rolling bag and float unnoticed on conveyors, through terminals or you can lug half a moose rack from Maine to Minnesota, carry it like a broken wing through airports as my friend Gro did, and draw only the curious touches of children waiting at gates. But dare to travel with a guitar and invite confessions from strangers in pinstripe suits of garage band summers, invite winks, gotcha smiles, and devil's horns rock on gestures. Invite finger points and winks, the long tongue licks, and the rubberneck glance to check if you are someone famous. To dare to travel with a guitar is to mark yourself charismatic megafauna of the airport terminal. Old friend, what else could I do but carry you? I have stored you in closets, propped you in corners, hunched over you late-nights, staring perplexed at the mysteries of your neck. Body of my body, string of my strings, see how the world began to hum and sing that day at thirteen when I opened the big birthday box.
The reception's not bad, across 50 years, though his voice has lost its boot-camp timbre. He's in his 80's now and, in a recent photo, looks it, so bald and pale and hard to see behind the tallowing of flesh. Posing with friends, he's the only one who has to sit—the man three of us couldn't pin. "The Hugger," they christened him before my class arrived— for his bearlike shape and his first name, Hugh. He fostered even us, the lowly track squad. "Mr. Morrison," I still call him. "You were the speedster on the team, a flash," he recalls with a chuckle. That's where his memory of me fades. And what have I retained of him beyond the nickname, voice, and burly shape? The rest could be invention: memory and desire's sleight-of-hand as we call up those we think we've known, to chat about the old days and the weather, bum hips and cholesterol, our small talk numbing as a dial tone, serious as prayer.
The older we get the stranger my husband becomes, and the less certain I am that I know him. We used to lie eye to eye, breathing together in the immensity of each moment. Lithe and starry-eyed, we could leap fences even with babies on our backs. His eyes still dream off toward something in the distance I can't see; but now he gazes more zealously, and leaps into battle with a more certain voice over politics, religion, or art, and some old friends won't come to dinner. The molecules of our bodies spiral off into the stars on winds of change and chance, as we welcome the unknown, the incalculable, the spirit and heart of everything we named and knew so well— and never truly named, or knew, but only loved, at last.
I never thought Michiko would come back after she died. But if she did, I knew it would be as a lady in a long white dress. It is strange that she has returned as somebody's dalmation. I meet the man walking her on a leash almost every week. He says good morning and I stoop down to calm her. He said once that she was never like that with other people. Sometimes she is tethered on their lawn when I go by. If nobody is around, I sit on the grass. When she finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper in her soft ears. She cares nothing about the mystery. She likes it best when I touch her head and tell her small things about my days and our friends. That makes her happy the way it always did.
I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat  to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops fast—a warm stone through liquid swimming between us. The stink of yellow sulfur thick. And the twist of his mouth, like tangled purple boughs or crossed legs of what he never dreamed he'd hit. Years after, I will admit only to so much. Blue moon tomorrow. Do we ever get a second chance? It's what I don't say that speaks loudest.
At one friend's home whole arsenals of guns litter the lawn—bright plastic shapes my sons pick their ways between to take proffered popsicles. Later, on evening news, words like "ambush," "strike," and "friendly fire" punctuate glowing clips of wreckage in far fields where other mother's children kneel to aim and pray. And though it's clichéd, truth be told, I wish one could keep her boys from growing old and going off to die. Toys need not rush us there. Instinct? No harm? An urge to hoist whatever's there, hard- wired within? Perhaps ignoble, I'm still glad when one spits on his own: They're bad.
Last night this commercial came on TV. It was this white lady making a nice dinner for her husband. She made him some baked chicken with potatoes and gravy and some kind of greens—not collards, but they still looked real good. Everything looked so delicious, I just wanted to reach into that television and snatch a plate for myself. He gave her a kiss and then a voice came on saying He'll love you for it and then the commercial went off. I sat on Miss Edna's scratchy couch wondering if that man and woman really ate that food or just threw it all away. Now Ms. Marcus wants to know why I wrote that the lady is white and I say because it's true. And Ms. Marcus says Lonnie, what does race have to do with it, forgetting that she asked us to use lots of details when we wrote. Forgetting that whole long talk she gave yesterday about the importance of description! I don't say anything back to her, just look down at my arm. It's dark brown and there's a scab by my wrist that I don't pick at if I remember not to. I look at my knuckles. They're real dark too. Outside it's starting to rain and the way the rain comes down—tap, tapping against the window—gets me to thinking. Ms. Marcus don't understand some things even though she's my favorite teacher in the world. Things like my brown, brown arm. And the white lady and man with all that good food to throw away. How if you turn on your TV, that's what you see—people with lots and lots of stuff not having to sit on scratchy couches in Miss Edna's house. And the true fact is alotta those people are white. Maybe it's that if you're white you can't see all the whiteness around you.
The monsters that come at night don't breathe fire, have two heads or long claws. The monsters that come at night don't come bloody and half-dead and calling your name. They come looking like regular boys going through your drawers and pockets sayingYou better not tell Counselor else I'll beat you down. The monsters that come at night snatch the covers off your bed, take your pillow and in the morning steal your bacon when the cook's back is turned call themselves The Throwaway Boys, sayYou one of us now. When the relatives stop coming When you don't know where your sister is anymore When every sign around you says Group Home Rules: Don't do this and don't do that until it sinks in one rainy Saturday afternoon while you're sitting at the Group Home window reading a beat-up Group Home book, wearing a Group Home hand-me-down shirt hearing all the Group Home loudness, that you are a Throwaway Boy. And the news just sits in your stomach hard and heavy as Group Home food.
On Sundays, the preacher gives everyone a chance to repent their sins. Miss Edna makes me go to church. She wears a bright hat I wear my suit. Babies dress in lace. Girls my age, some pretty, some not so pretty. Old ladies and men nodding. Miss Edna every now and then throwing her hand in the air. Saying Yes, Lord and Preach! I sneak a pen from my back pocket, bend down low like I dropped something. The chorus marches up behind the preacher clapping and humming and getting ready to sing. I write the word HOPE on my hand.
It's almost May and yesterday I saw a firefly. You don't see them a lot in the city. Sometimes in the park in the near dark one comes out you'll hear a little kid shoutLightning bug! Firefly! It's almost May and yesterday I caught a firefly in my hand. First firefly I seen in a  long, long time.Make a wish, Miss Edna said.Make a good one.Firefly wishes always come true.
My brother's funeral over, the dark-clothed  congregation clots the church doors, a lingering aftermath moving into flat light—the sky  low and swollen, a storm siren's long expansive notes, evenly measured,  so loud the pauses between ring with aftersound. Used to it, no one  here appears alarmed, the church ladies filing into his house bearing heavy covered  dishes, the funeral flowers. On the muted television tuned to the weather,  a small area of Watch now upgrades to Warning; the words stream across the bottom  of the screen calling conditions perfect, this town, this house disappeared beneath the map's  isolated lesion, its red edges uneven, stalled. The forecasters rely  they say on spotters to confirm what the radar cannot—they call it  ground truth; until then no one knows anything for certain beyond this inward watching.  The room hums, an airless, crowded hive. Their mouths are full, plates layered—fried chicken,  deviled eggs, casseroles, bright congealed salads with fruit suspended inside.  All of it dust. I have come here too late, his body gone, already ash. The storm's body  could be forming now, tightening from cloud to the gyre that will consume its path, all of it  a becoming—spiraling a wall of water, mud, dust, and sand; with dispassion taking up  into itself the fence line, a barn—the house beside them spared with the same dispassion. Or this,  more likely now: siren silenced, the winds diminishing, the light, afternoon's concession  to another dusk—severe, more common truth.
It nuzzles oblivion, confuses  itself with mud. A creature of familiar taste, it ambushes  from its nest of ooze the pond's brighter fish, clears its palate  with their eggs, lumbers fat and stagnant into winter, lulled  into dreams of light sinking until light drowns, and all is as before.
She perches high on the stand, gleaming whistle  dangling, on her suit a dutiful, faded red cross. Mine her only life  to guard, she does for a while watch the middle-aged woman who has nothing better  to do than swim laps in the Y's indoor pool on a late Friday afternoon. I am slow,  though, boring, length after predictable length of breaststroke or the duller lap  of elementary backstroke perfectly executed within the taut confines  of the brightly buoyed lane. So she abandons me to study split-ends, hangnail, wristwatch,  until—the body of the whistle cupped loosely in her palm—her head nods toward  shallow dreams. I've never felt so safe in my life, making flawless, practiced turns, pushing, invisible  to reenter my own wake, reverse it.
One day, chasing my tail here and there, I stopped to catch my breath On some corner in New York, While people hurried past me, All determined to get somewhere, Save a few adrift like lost children. What ever became of my youth? I wanted to stop a stranger and ask. "It went into hiding," said an old woman Who'd read my mind. "Swimming with sharks," a drunk concurred, Fixing me with one bloody eye. It was summer, and then as quietly as a bird lands, The sidewalks were dusted with snow And I was shivering without a coat. I had hopes we'd meet again, I told myself, Have a drink and recall the nights When we used to paint this town red. I thought you'd be in a straightjacket by now, You'd say to me, Making funny faces at doctors and nurses. Instead, here you are full of fleas, Dodging cars and buses To follow a pair of good-looking legs home. "And you, Judas," I summed the strength to shout, "Will you be coming to my funeral?" But he was gone already. It had gotten late in the day, Very late—and since there was nothing That could be done about it— I thought I'd better toddle along myself.
"If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps." If you knock out my teeth, I'll still go down on you, conscientiously, vine along a trellis, and suck you with my gums.  If you smash my toes, employing an ice crusher, one by one, I'll heal myself with such truancy that someday I'll run on my knees. "If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps," and orchestrate a standing ovation with the memory of my hands representing each that are dying, each that are dead, each forgotten that we refuse to remember like the lost hands of stumps. So much misery in plain sight like tears streaming down a face; so much misery hidden like the eventuality of the anti-Christ; and so much incognito like the accompanying instruments of a torch song: like the fire in the torch itself, like the torched interior of the song. If you cut off my ears, I will listen with my eyes to the spitting death of cavalrymen as they're roasted over an open fire; to the smallest bones snap, dry as sun-seasoned kindling of the young and truant witch when she's pressed by a thousand stones; to the brave convulsions of the communist strapped in the electric chair, dying by degree...not unlike the commonfolk plucked from the village, arbitrarily, one last December night, stripped to the flesh and heaved high into the freezing air upon a whittled stave, tall and sharp, thrust deep into the asshole they die by degree, ever so slowly and often only (if not by freezing first, which, if merciful, God deems) when the wooden point finally pierces the brain, brain-dead already from the mauve anticipation and ear-splitting prerequisite of pain. If you cut out my tongue, I will write you a letter, a love letter lovelorn for that taste of your tongue. If you fuck me hard I can never make love again, I'll plant hyacinth bulbs in an effort to replace my abolished fecundity. I will turn eternally on my side and pull down my pants and listen to your masturbate while fantasizing about my ass. I'll admire the willow out the window when I hear you come and allow as if in tribute to the times I used to participate, a vague expression of pleasure, albeit contrived to wash across my face the way my desire for you, real as a willow, once had done.
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.The trees of the mind are black. Their irregular branches, like broken arms backlit from MRI dye, offset by yearning. They take form in ways only experts can decipher.The light is blue. The observation of the alien doctor flickers in his iris, furnace gaslight burning like a pagan memorial.The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, I pity their need for idolatry. It bares itself only to the void of me,Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. I am unable to convince them otherwise. I hear them mew and compete as if for a rough teat's clear nutrition. Foolish rule of the organic, uncultured and out of control. I am mum and tidy as a nun in comparison. Though capable of devastation are my desires which punish the landscape with recrimination, uprooting the hedges. They swallow fire, speak in four languages, and love no one. I shudder with pride as they push themselves back to their origin, to the scraped-out bottom of a uterine nothing; this hard loneliness, skull-solid, pushed back into vagueness until it succumbs as if overwhelmed by barbiturates. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this placeSeparated from my house by a row of headstones. Its green vapors trigger an olfactory déjà vu like a recurrent nightmare. I envy the buried faces finally freed from worry and ailment, from the pressure to remain always forward-thinking. I picture their release, the prostrate bodies floating up as if levitated. What peace, what stillness was shoveled onto their pine box beds where darkness then dropped, all at once, final as an execution.I simply cannot see where there is to get to.The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset. I identify with its nausea. It meets me in the mirror uninvited, this face beneath my face, restless and unwilling. It formulates inside me like a kicking fetus and refuses to be ignored. It haunts and threatens like a past trauma.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; mute as a mug shot, it is quiet, like someone suffocated who suddenly stops struggling. I recognize in its warm death the expression of the starvingWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Against me a force, not stronger or more intelligent, but more adaptable to poor weather like dandelions. I can feel it whittle me down to horse feed pellets. I'm being winnowed out of the earth's circulation, with a pairing incremental as this winter's passing.Twice on Sunday the bells startle the sky—Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. I'm forced to listen to the liturgical lecturing, truant student of a catechism I loathe.At the end, they soberly bong out their names; Myths and ideals I could never bring myself to believe in, my prayers, the self-flagellation of unrequited love.The yew tree points up like a New England steeple.It has a Gothic shape. It used to remind me of home.The eyes lift after it and find the moon. Once fragile as rice paper, it hangs static and tough like a noose signifying more hardship ahead— interrogating flashlight that hurts my eyes. Now no home exists—just an empty bed, a pile of mangled sheets atop a dark wood floor, like snow atop the frozen mud tracks of hoof and wheel.The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. She licks her white feathers and stares back with one eye vicious as a swan about to bite.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. I watch, my leg caught in the truth of my life where beyond human emotion I've traveled at this point.How I would like to believe in tenderness— in those symbolic unions that elicit sweet concepts: mother and child, father and daughter, husband and wife.The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, its cheekbones flushed with an afterworld favoritismBending, on me in particular, its mild eyes; hair waving, mouth parted in mid-speech like drowned Ophelia.I have fallen a long way. I lie at the bottom, smashed like a dinner plate against kitchen tile, china chips and jagged bits. I lie at the bottom, shattered and dangerous, looking up with a baby's stunned engrossment. I'm moving closer to Pluto and Mars.Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars,— It will not be quick. Death drinks me in, slow as syrup.Inside the church, the saints will be all blue. They've ascended into heaven's oxygen-deprived morgue.Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,Their hands and faces stiff with holiness, mannequins perennially enacting the nativity in a wax museum.The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild as one dying of cancer. She begs for relief, but her pillow-muffled shrieks disperse with the other sounds and shadows of the night. We are left alone, her cadaver face, gaunt and grim, prescient of mine.And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.  Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree,"  Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)
Let me make the songs for the people, Songs for the old and young; Songs to stir like a battle-cry Wherever they are sung. Not for the clashing of sabres, For carnage nor for strife; But songs to thrill the hearts of men With more abundant life. Let me make the songs for the weary, Amid life’s fever and fret, Till hearts shall relax their tension, And careworn brows forget. Let me sing for little children, Before their footsteps stray, Sweet anthems of love and duty, To float o’er life’s highway. I would sing for the poor and aged, When shadows dim their sight; Of the bright and restful mansions, Where there shall be no night. Our world, so worn and weary, Needs music, pure and strong, To hush the jangle and discords Of sorrow, pain, and wrong. Music to soothe all its sorrow, Till war and crime shall cease; And the hearts of men grown tender Girdle the world with peace.
At first you'll joy to see the playful snow, Like white moths trembling on the tropic air, Or waters of the hills that softly flow Gracefully falling down a shining stair. And when the fields and streets are covered white And the wind-worried void is chilly, raw, Or underneath a spell of heat and light The cheerless frozen spots begin to thaw, Like me you'll long for home, where birds' glad song Means flowering lanes and leas and spaces dry, And tender thoughts and feelings fine and strong, Beneath a vivid silver-flecked blue sky. But oh! more than the changeless southern isles, When Spring has shed upon the earth her charm, You'll love the Northland wreathed in golden smiles By the miraculous sun turned glad and warm.
in your arms it was incredibly often enough to be  in your arms careful as we had to be at times about the I.V. catheter in my hand, or my wrist, or my forearm which we placed, consciously, like a Gamboni vase, the center of attention, placed, frail identity as if our someday-newborn on your chest— to be secluded, washed over in your arms often enough, it was in that stillness, the only stillness amidst the fears which wildly collided and the complexities of the illness, all the work we had yet to do, had just done, the hope, ridiculous ammounts of it we had to pump from nothing, really, short-lived consensus possibility & experiment to access from our pinched and tiny minds just the idea of hope make it from scratch, air and water like manufactured snow a colossal fatigue the severe concentration of that, the repetition of that lifted for a moment just above your arms inevitable, pressuring it weighed down but remained above like a cathedral ceiling, strangely sheltering while I held tightly  while there I could in your arms only there, the only stillness remember the will, allow the pull, tow against inevitable ebb— you don't need reasons to live one reason, blinking in the fog, organically sweet in muddy dark incredibly often enough it is, it was in your arms
Here again at the edge of what was,  the river held back by the stones it has carried, the knife in your hand brimming  rain. Inside this day without beginning or end, it cannot stand still inside you.  One day I'll leave—not you but all this—this hunger that pushes each wave.
The cause of death seems to have been starvation—his throat closed & so he was no longer able to swallow. On his deathbed he was editing The Hunger Artist,
Here, at your feet, all the gargoyles of heaven— kneel upon your furnace, their tongues worship you. You can love only one, the one you rest your hand upon, his head so sharp, his sulphur breath...Even now a saint makes his way up your steps, on his knees he is coming, he will find you, with his sword he will kill the beasts, all of them— he swears this will save you.    • Earlier, a deer stood by the side of the road deciding whether or not to kill me. I cannot blame her, I cannot blame anyone—many animals were hurt in the production of this book just as many trees were hurt & all the clouds. Open any book & the cloud above you bursts into flame, you know this & yet nothing stops you, the sky stuck to the end of your finger as you point to it.  • This is how it works—the master does not bow before his servant, he does not stand naked before her robes, his hands are empty yet he does not offer— not even a cupful—of his emptiness, how could he? How could the world then keep spinning? He made his money (as they say) the old-fashioned way, meaning he earned it, meaning slaves, meaning go fuck yourself.  • Geometry deals with properties of space. Figs (a "multiple fruit") are like strawberries only inside out—its skin is a receptacle. Saint Francis didn't eat for forty days, until his body erupted & now we call it ecstasy. Years later Frankenstein found a way to raise the dead. Friend, his creation mutters, flower.  • A storm will come the radio says find a ditch & lie facedown in it. Find your ditch & lie facedown & pray we will all lie down & pray after all there's only so many places to hide. We all need help the land is vast & dense & full of eyes & so many flowers the soil inside us is darker than oil lie down in it & pray.  • Remember: it's not that everything has to look like something else, or even remind you of something else—everythingis something else. This is the story we've been telling ourselves since we could speak. Possessnothing, Francis says. Do goodeverywhere. No one believes those wings will lift you.
They say you are made of clouds, they say you are made of feathers, they say you are everywhere or nowhere—we know you are both. Our flight is delayed, this airport another nowhere. If thisis your final destination, the air murmurs, ifa stranger or anyone you do not know well offers youanything ... but how well & what's he offering & is this our final destination? At the hotel a man hands us the key to room three one three—home for a week or so. On the lobby tv a woman once apparently enormous holds her old jeans up to her body & smiles. Neil Diamond sings & when I go in- to the bathroom he follows. Everybody has one. Paradise is cloudless, they say, impossible to know. Yesterday a man was sucked into the earth as he slept—a sinkhole opened below his bed—not even his brother could save him. In the hotel restaurant my daughter orders corn flakes, they come with a  pitcher of milk, she pours nearly all of it into her bowl, until I stop her she will keep on pouring. Three more tvs are screwed into the wall above us—a car goes round & round, a pitcher throws a baseball, a woman slams her racket to the clay. My daughter pushes her bowl away, picks two packets of jelly from the basket, pulls the plastic off one, then the other, lifts each to  her tongue—red, then purple. The wallpaper is the texture of trees, a landscape seen from above, a contour map of an unnamed mountain, people wandering the face of it. If we were closer we could tell river from leaf, mountain from shadow, a fire making, unmaking itself. What is this strand of DNA between us, unconnected to & of the shadows parading past, our outlines already chalked into the earth? I live on air & light, I drag my daughter everywhere, this morning she muttered Federer Federer Federer like a spell & it was as if he stood before us again, his perfect red jersey. How many mornings, the sun not yet up, did I swivel on the red stool at the supermarket lunch counter, my mother in back extruding donuts, the aisles dark & empty behind us—she'd bundled me into the car still sleeping to get there. I'd twirl or wander or make toast, contemplating the basket of butter & jelly, each in its little wasteful tub, impervious to air or time or decay. Angel of Grape, your purple body not only filled those coffins but took the shape of those coffins—emptiness made whole, color now a shape. Angel, my daughter now wants only you, she asks for the whole basket, she pulls back each sheet, puts her tongue in— strawberry is her favorite, because it tastes  like strawberry.
Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box filled with enough Vicodin to kill me. I would have sworn that I'd thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not. I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away. I'd been sober (again) for some years when I found that box, but every addict has one— a little box, metaphorical or actual— hidden away. Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good idea to keep a stash of pills on hand. For an emergency, I told myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed a root canal on a Sunday night? This little box would see me through until the dentist showed up for work the next morning. Half my brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.
Petals on a river, a tree in blossom, one pink bud—unopened—falls & is carried downstream & out to sea. From above the other petals seem to  carry it. Closer— this is our map, these our footprints, we grew up drinking this water. At the start there was doubt, we lit a torch, no one believed we would make it. Closer—the legs, the heart, the lungs. It's too soon to say we were lucky, it's too soon to say anything until the cloud is pulled back from the sky, until the ringing is pulled back from the bells. Look— everyone we've ever known runs without thinking not away but into the cloud, where we are waiting
I  This is a place without a terrain a government that always  changes an unstable language. Even buildings disappear  from day to day. [gendered pronoun] wanders in this place  [searching  [waiting the condition of unbearableness is the constant state of mind  for all occupants we read all day in the village square during the rule of [name  of major historical figure] a book that is so subtle  [its political content goes unnoticed what is political content?  [the question or the statement [gender pronoun] creates  [a reader culture  [generic plural pronoun] prefer both  II realism's authenticities are not the question the question [role of art in the State we know art is fundamental to the [New State] as is evidenced  in village scenes, majestic ancient views, masses and  masses of [generic human figures] marching in columns,  swords coded as plowshares, image as spectacle we kn0w [name of city], [adjective], [name of major composer] to recode [reduce] it: Linz, ambiguous, Wagner we know [name of major historical figure] calls, authentically,  for a more total, more radical war than we can even  dream in the language of the avant-garde we know a commercial promises to reduce plaque more  effectively in this same tone but sometimes we exceed even our own expectations to  surprise even ourselves something encloses the impossible in a fable an unreal world called real because it is so heavily metaphoric we can't keep our fingers of connection out of it   it is a ride in the country, the car crowded with children  [each child represents a different  ethnicity of [name of nation] it is a moment of standing with light resonating around [major  historical figure it is a guiding of the child towards the right path it is a picnic in a field, the spread is bountiful [the spread of [name of nation] is represented through the  arrangement of food on the checkered tablecloth it is [name of major historical figure]'s Art Collection:  figure after figure  each carries spears, lunges, draws the arm back to pull  tight the bow a ruined plaza has a [gendered human form] at its en  trance a [generic child] draws a sword under the guidance of [generic possessive pronoun] [honorific denoting repro- ductive role] a [generic human form] raises [generic pronoun] arms and four horses turn away another plays a lute an eagle holds a symbol fake [name of nation used as an adjective] heads while the end of lunacy in art was explicit in [name of major  historical figure]'s rhetoric while when nation turns to art, art loses its divergence while the [generic human figures] come back from war, their  legs in fog while a [generic human figure] sculpts, small against the  expanse of marble, giving into the monumental human  form that symbolizes eugenic possibilities while another [generic human figure] pedantically draws  postcards of village centers, operas, mountain vistas while overwhelmed by an opera [name of major historical   figure] plans genocide  III we know we respond resistantly as faked children's books of  realist adventure tales have turned into military instruc-  tion manuals or [name of major historical figure] hails a cab, [generic  possessive human pronoun] hand raised here, beckoning  as the red flag with [name of fast food chain] waves  behind [generic human pronoun] and the red star on top   of the [name of cultural landmark in major city] twinkles. many people raise their hands for different purposes all day  long we are always waiting for our cab to come the question here is the same as that of a relationship where does art define our vocabulary? the margin declares [it is impossible to speak about something it is only possible to speak beside it    [a film with a voice-over of nonsense to act in the unsecular forbidden margins [claims a certain  privilege]  [generic human pronoun] cast a colonizing eye a scripture of space / a place where a [generic human form] twists in space  [follow this body] getting you to recognize yourself in [generic possessive  pronoun] work  [is kidnapping] in the space of this question some emigrate or lapse into total  silence some co-opt this language and paint a series of meticulous and   beautifully colored monumental images of people impris-  oned and alone at the edge of a tedious despair some [refigure [refuse] respond] call out for an end rewritten, the goal of the artist is to prevent reality in a true and  concrete manner  IV [generic human figure] claims I can get more information at  home than by going to the war scene what [generic pronoun] sees is [gendered naked bodies] in  news photos—dead bodies, discarded bodies, junk   i saw this written on the bottom   [a way of testimony the poverty of image among the people of [name of nation] the continual increase in the amount of image a viewer can  tolerate  [who went to [name of nation? returning again and again to images of torture covert activities depicted [blown up  [to show power  details of photographs  or Xerox degradations  of photos on Duraclear  hang loose are  vulnerable and  fragmentary and  images are seen  through images and/or  viewers [call this]  the fate of Madame Bovery, the fate of Anna Karenina A dog with a [generic human face] has slogans coming out   of its mouth as angels hold its head back suckle at its  tits taped to a [gendered hand, adorned with ring] is a photo-  graph of [gendered naked torso], gagged [generic human figure] infects computerized images with  digitized viruses and then transfers them to canvas with  a robotic device  [possible responses to what is seen in [name of nation] at another time another set of reponses: a [sexual category withheld] cuts hair and cameras circle  around and [generic human pronoun] is dragged out of  the room another [generic human figure] says passionately we express  ourselves in a language of regulations. Symbols and  numbers best convey our ideas another [generic human figure] makes an enormous painting  of a massacre victim, mutilated and bloody, and hangs it  by night on a pedestrian bridge what a nation gives us is the image in [name of major weekly  news source] of the [generic human figure] standing  before the tanks with white flag [generic pronoun] painted on houses, streets, stones, trees [generic pronoun] covered [name of island] with strange marks  in chalk, oil paint, and dye [generic pronoun] wished to reduce writing to the zero level  where it is without meaning. When culture invades  private life on a large scale [generic pronoun] said the  individual cannot escape being raped another [generic noun] made a font that was scratched into  paper by a knife this font made each letter into a single scratch [generic pronoun] scratched the other [generic pronoun]'s  statement on rape into a banner and hung it outside  [my zero-level writing  [generic pronoun] said  protest rape  [generic pronoun] said  my zero-level writing  [generic pronoun] said  dangerous cultural rape  [generic pronoun] said  my zero-level writing  my zero-level writing  V a voice stutters in the background of our waking mind [generic possessive pronoun] stutter is our stutter or it is the way we define our difference?  stutter is nation beneath an image of human figures the words [you have  nothing to lose but your chains  at times two voices talk to one another  [generic human] faces [tired] we know we are all constructed when it comes down to it we don't believe it the social always holds us back while the ways that we encounter relation are various we remain searching [searching we question, respond  [deny we [move forward
this is true a man in an alley grabbed my arm this is true someone called me and left the phone dangling at the post office this is true a man stalked me someone tells a story someone tells a story to another person another person says I don't believe this someone tells the story again in an attempt to convince someone tells as disbelief is easy belief is difficult, supported by constraint but a woman knows a man stalked her knows this is true a woman knows her own address her own body her lost domain, her desires, her confusions someone tells a story there are things people can do to themselves they are: leave molotov cocktail on own yard set fire to own house leave a glass of urine on own porch leave envelope of feces outside own door send a butcher knife to self at work send letter to health department that self is spreading VD stab own back someone tells this story says this is true self turns on self the knife enters at a point that the self could not have reached  but did someone tells and then repeats and she stalks herself several  times to convince someone tries to enter into the information to pass words back and forth that have meaning fails, resorts to this is true this is true a woman calls her stalker The Poet this is true a woman describes a stalker in terms that describe herself this is true a woman stalked herself to kill herself this is true a woman is at times a man when a fish is hooked other fish don't see the hook thrashing seems crazy the hook could be the branding of a woman at a young age  by a man or an older male neighbor spending too much time with a  child or the boring nature of life in the story the hook is the artist's rendering of the stalker as  described by the woman it is the woman in a man's face she does not know this man thrashing seems crazy later she realizes it is herself her knife her hook her own face she was always drawing male this is true as thrashing is not crazy when one is on the hook
There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open  —a marriage, for example. No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end. There is no expression, in English, at least, for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch of the afternoon sun, for walking into the flatlands and dust that stretch out before you after your adventures are done. No adjective for gradually speaking less and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip. Certainly no name that one can imagine for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, in spade-shaped leaves spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur. No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit that drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.
tell the flowers—they think the sun loves them. The grass is under the same simple-minded impression about the rain, the fog, the dew. And when the wind blows, it feels so good they lose control of themselves and swobtoggle wildly around, bumping accidentally into their slender neighbors. Forgetful little lotus-eaters, solar-powered hydroholics, drawing nourishment up through stems into their thin green skin, high on the expensive chemistry of mitochondrial explosion, believing that the dirt loves them, the night, the stars— reaching down a little deeper with their pale albino roots, all Dizzy Gillespie with the utter sufficiency of everything. They don't imagine lawn mowers, the four stomachs of the cow, or human beings with boots who stop to marvel at their exsquisite flexibility and color. They persist in their soft-headed hallucination of happiness. But please don't mention it. Not yet. Tell me what would you possibly gain from being right?
The Brent geese fly in long low wavering lines on their migrations. They start in western Europe, fatten in Iceland, then fly over the Greenland ice cap to Canada. They sometimes breed on the Arctic coasts of central and western Siberia and winter in western Europe, some in England, the rest in Germany and France. What I have to offer here is nothing revolutionary. They learn the map from their parents, or through culture rather than through genetics. It is just an observation, a small observation that sometimes art can hold the oil wars and all that they mean and might yet mean within. Just as sometimes there are seven stanzas in a song. And just as sometimes there is a refrain between each stanza. And just as often this sort of song tells a certain sort of story, one about having something and then losing it. Just as sometimes the refrain of a song is just one word said four times. Just as sometimes the word is huge, sometimes coming from a machine and yet hitting in the heart; uplifting and ironic and big enough to hold all these things in its four syllables. Just as some- times, often even, it contradicts, and thus works with, the stanzas. Just as the police clear out yet another public space and yet another camera follows along behind. Just as the stream has no narration, only ambient noise. And the police move slowly, methodically in a line as if they are a many-legged machine. They know what they are doing. It is their third time clearing the park and they will clear it many more times and then they will win and a building will be built where there once was the park. In this song, as is true of many songs, it is unclear why the singer has lost something, maybe someone. In this time, the time of the oil wars, there are many reasons that singers give for being so lost. Often they are lost because of love. Sometimes they are lost because of drugs. Sometimes they have lost their country and in their heart it feels as if they have lost something big. And then sometimes they are lost just because they are in Bakersfield. Really though they are lost because in this time song holds loss. And this time is a time of loss. The police know, as they move through the park yet one more time, that they will win and a building will be built on the space. But right now, the building is not there. All that is there are the police and debris and the police deal with the debris. They push over book- shelves, open up boxes and look inside, tear into tents, awkwardly, the poles springing. They are only there to see if any humans remain. Tomorrow the bulldozers will push the debris into big piles and load it into trucks. The police wear white helmets and short sleeves under their kevlar vests. For many years the Brent geese ate eelgrass, but once the eelgrass was gone to the wasting disease and the estuaries filled, they moved inland to agricultural lands and began eating grasses and winter-sown cereals. The Brent geese are social, adaptable. They fly around together, learning from each other, even as these groups are often unstable, changing from season to season. Songs in their most popular versions tend to be epiphanic, gorgeous with swelling chord changes, full of lament too. And this song, like many, expresses the desire to be near someone who is now lost. It travels as something layered, infiltrated, unconfused with its refusals to make a simple sense. I want to give you this song sung in a bar in Oakland one night during the ongoing oil wars. The singer had clearly been lost once, but they sang as someone who eventually got in the car and drove out of Bakersfield, perhaps early in the morning, the sun just starting to rise, or perhaps later after sun-up, the light washing out everything in Bakersfield as the sun is wont to do there. Eventually they arrived to sing this song. This might have taken them many years. There was nothing that implied that the lostness was recent. But the lostness, it was clear, was huge and had been experienced fully by them. It probably doesn't matter where the sun was that day in Bakersfield when they got in the car. It probably just matters that there is a sun, still, and they got in the car and drove, drove through the oil fields with their wells pumping out amber colored oils and their refineries with tall towers that heat the oil so as to sort its various viscosities, and drove through the black cloud that is the slow constant burn of the oil wars. Then at some point they were in Oakland. The oil near Bakersfield is heavy but it often benchmarks against the Brent blend. Brent blend is a light crude oil, though not as light as West Texas Intermediate. It contains approximately 0.37% of sulphur, classifying it as sweet crude, yet not as sweet as West Texas Intermediate. When the park is cleared and the building is built, it will headquarter an oil company. When this oil company named their oil fields off the coast of Scotland, they choose the names of water birds in alphabetical order: Auk, Brent, Cormorant, Dunlin, Eider, Fulmar, and so on. Brent is also an acronym for the Jurassic Brent formation that makes up the Brent oilfield, for Broom, Rannoch, Etive, Ness, and Tarbert. About two thirds of oil is benchmarked against what is called the Brent Crude Oil Spot price. Petroleum suppliers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East often price their oil according to Brent Crude's value on the Interconti- nential Exchange if it is being sold to the West. The Brent Crude Oil Spot price is set in dollars, maintained by force, endlessly manipulated by commodity futures markets. The refrain is the moment when the singer makes it clear that they understand something about what is being lost. It was obvious they had lost their country, it being taken over by bankers and all. They had clearly been rejected. Loved too much and gotten too little of it back in return, many times. But none of this matters, it was obvious, in comparison to what is now being lost for that night even though the song is about a minor loss, about the loss of tongue on clit or cock, the singer seemed to understand s0mething about the other things that are lost. While a formation of police clear the far side of the park of the debris of its occupation, another forma- tion of police on the other side shoot the new gasses, the ones we do not yet know by name, into another part of the park where people are now clustered. This camera has sound and every few seconds there is a pop. It is unevenly steady. The song is just about two people who are not near each other, who have probably chosen not to be near each other any more. The song reflects and refracts the oil in ways both relevant and trivial in how it tells about what happens when one lets love go, when one gives up the tongue. It might be that only through the minor we can feel enormity. It might be that there is nothing to  epiphany if it does not hint at the moment of sweaty relation larger than the intimate. For what is epiphanic song if it doesn't spill out and over the many that are pulled from intimacies by oil's circulations? The truckers, the sailors and deckhands, the assembly line workers, those who maintain the pipelines, those who drive support in the caravans that escort the tankers, the fertilizers, the thousands of interlocking plastic parts, the workers who move two hundred miles and live in a dorm near a factory, alone, those on the ships who spend fifty weeks circulating with the oil unable to talk to each other because of no shared language and so are left only with two weeks in each year where they can experience the tongue in meaningful conversation. A life that is only circulations. Before the police come, before the building, in the middle of one night, a group of people form a line leading to the entrance of the park. Or several groups form several lines, all leading to the entrance. Some wear medical masks. Some wear glasses too. All pass bricks, one by one, down the line so as to make a pile. They are silent for the most part, silent enough that it is possible to hear the bricks make a clink as they fall. The pile gets bigger and bigger. It is waist high. Then chest high. Some get out of the line and climb on the pile, hold both their hands in the air because they know now is the transitory, momentary triumph and it should be felt. Others continue passing brick after brick, from one hand to  another hand, arms extended, torsos at moments also going back and forth with the bricks. When they run out of bricks, the pile is topped with fencing. Then they gather behind it, waiting. Back there, some- one might possibly be singing to a child, singing the epiphanic song that alludes to losing the moment of tongue on clit or cock over and over because the child cannot be comforted, because the singer knows only loss. The room will be dark. The light will be on in the hall. There will be shadows, in other words. And the singer will know about these shadows at this moment and know they had agreed to be with shadows when they had the child. They had gambled in a sense on a question of sustaining. They had agreed to exist from now on with a  shadow. A shadow of love and a shadow of the burning of the oil fields that has already happened and is yet to come and yet must come and a million other shadows that might possibly disappear in the light at that moment.
The best memory is not so firm as faded ink. —Chinese Proverb The body was one thing we always had in common, even when between us a continent unfolded. Eric says,We scattered his ashes beneath the Japanese maplehere behind the house. No ceremony, as you wished, but this... What you wanted from me was complex and simple, both. Once you asked for more than I had to give. I live with this; call it regret. Your hands bloom in the intaglioed scrawl, creased onion skin tattooed with garnet stamps from Pietrasanta, a sifting of marble dust...Images: chiseled jut of jaw, cheek, bridge of nose—recall each granite face rising from New Hampshire dirt upon which faltering, you last stepped. In 1729, long before either of us came to be, Reiner Ottens dragged his fine tip across a smooth sheet: Globi Coelestisin Tabulas Planas Redacti Pars III. Bright beings— lobster, serpent, bison, dove bearing the requisite sprig—swirl and writhe over lines that pin distance and story to time. Spectral creatures that we are, connecting dots to chart our ways....If only I could wrap the whole plane back into its ball. Without your body in it, this world's gone flat.(Jack Marshall, 1932-2009)
It is dynamic positioning that Allows a semi-submersible the Ability to hover there over The well. It is a thirty-six inch tube, A casing, that extends down to allow The drill and bit to be rotated there; The drill then spudding in; the seafloor, dark, And giving way. It is a thick column Of drilling mud that keeps natural gas And oil beneath the seafloor while the well Is capped and it is a cement that Fills in the casing so the drill pipe stays Unmoving, stable, in this ever moving sea. It is a sort of drilling mud that is Then pumped through the drill pipe and out through The drill bit then up through the casing and Then back up to the oil rig in the space Between the drill pipe and the inner wall. It is a blowout preventer, a series of valves That seal off the excessive pressure should The wellhead kick then blowout. There are all These variables. Various valves. Pressures. Buoyancies. Mixes of cements. Currents. Claims. Humans. Bow spring. Top plug. Shoe track. Floatshoe. I could go on and on here calling the New muses of innovation, common Vocabulary, that covers over the Elaborate simplicity of this, This well, Macondo well, was drilled by Deepwater Horizon and it went through Five thousand feet, through the abyssal zones, The epipelagic with its sunlight The mesopelagic with its twilight The bathypelagic with its midnight Then where the sea meets floor, the deep ocean, A blowout preventer there with the fish, The darker fish, the large detritevars That feed on the drizzle of the moulted Exoskeletons, the carnivores, snipe eels Big lantern fish, and zooplankton, corals. This well then went on reaching for the oil Another thirteen thousand feet. When it hits The pay zone, down through it, down deeper, deep. This well, Macondo well, was exploratory. This story then begins with other wells, But I will tell the story of This Well: In April twenty ten, the setting south And east of Louisiana's long coast. It begins with a round of tests, some done And some avoided. An environmental Impact and blowout plan declared to be Not necessary. Drilling easy. Then On April twenty, bled off five barrels Of fluid, reduced drill pressure. No flow. At noon, a drill pipe goes in hole so as To begin mud displacement. Seawater Then pumped in to displace mud. Kill line Not bled. It goes on like this. Partial lab Results, a circulation pressure that Did not yet match the modeling results And yet cement job pumped. Fluid returns Observed. Bottom plug ruptured. Still the Cement is pumped so it bumps top wiper plug At twelve thirty. Then two pressure tests. The drill pipe run in hole to eight thousand And three hundred and sixty seven feet. So mud displacement starts, the seawater Is pumped, then the spacer, then the fresh Water. The kill line opened and pressure then Decreased. Drill pipe pressure increased. The kill line shut in. Mud offloading done. It goes on. Drill pipe pressure. Kill line open. Then drill pipe pressure high again. Then sea- Water is pumped. Kill line full. Kill line Opened, bled to mini trip tank. Flow Is stopped. Kill line monitored. It Is then open. No flow. Considered A good test. Blowout preventer open- Ed, seawater then pumped down the drill Pipe to displace the mud and spacer from The riser. It is nine o'clock. The flow Out from the well increased. Trip tank then Emptied. Then fluids discharged overboard. Pumps Restarted. Drill pipe pressure on constant Increase. It goes on like this. Pump number Two started. Pressure spike. Then pumps two, three, And four are shut down. Pump one still online. Then pumps three, four restarted. Pressure build- Ing, pump two. Pumps shut down. First pump three, four,  Then one. Then drill pipe pressure fluctuates. Increases. Then decreases. Then again Increases. Then held briefly, then again Decreases. A repair begins. At some Moment hydrocarbons enter the bot- Tom of the well undetected and rise Inside the wellbore, growing quickly as They meet the lower pressure of the sur- Face, heavy drill mud, other fluids, sea- Water, all pushed by the rising and Expanding gases followed by more, By high pressure oil, gases, other flu- Ids, all there rising, swelling in The wellbore, all there, pushing from the Reservoir. It is almost at ten O'clock when mud begins its overflow- Ing of the line and then on the rig floor. It is almost at ten o'clock when mud Then shoots up through the derrick. It is almost At ten o'clock, diverter shut so that The gas and drilling fluid could be routed To the baffle plates, the poorboy degass- Er, then the lower annual prev- Enter is activated. The drill press- Ure, the volumes of gases, fluids, drill- Ing mud, seawater, then is steadily in- Creasing. And it begins again. Or be- Gins some more. First as mud. A mud that roar- Ing, rained. Then the gas as it discharge- Ing, hissing, the poorboy degasser fill- Ing. Next the first gas alarm then the oth- Ers. It was then almost close to ten o' Clock, still when next a roaring noise, a vib- Ration, engines began rapid increase- Ing as also the drill pipe pressure rap- Idly increasing as the rig then los- Ing power, shut down processes then fail- Ing. First explosion on five seconds aft- Er. Then explosion again, ten sec- Onds later. It was not yet ten O'clock when the mayday call was first made. The Deepwater Horizon gutted stem To stern. What happens next ends with eleven Dead. The rig tethered still to the deepwell. The shrapnel. The lightbulbs then popping. The Heat. Hot fireballs. The lifeboats smoke filled ovens. Some lifeboats left, not yet full. Those left Behind then jumped in to oil-covered, Still water and so swam away. Some died: Jason Anderson. Bubba Burkeen. Shane M. Roshto. Donald Clark. Wyatt Kemp. Karl Dale Kleppinger. Gordon Lewis Jones. Keith Blair Manuel. Dewey Revette. Adam Weise. Stephen Ray Curtis. I will not tell You their lives, their loves, their young children, their Relationship to oil. Our oil. The well Exploded. They then died. Some swam away. Some floated away in boats. Donald Vidrine, Curt Kuchta, Jimmy Wayne Harrell. I did Not die. I watched it then burn on a Flat screen. Anthony Brian Hayward, Steven L. Newman, David Lesar watched. And Susan Birnbaum too, watching.
I hold out my hand. I hand over and I pass on. I hold out my hand. I hold out my hand. I hand over and I pass on. Some call this mothering, this way I begin each day by holding out my hand and then all day  long pass on. Some call this caretaking, this way all day and all night long, I hold out my hand and take engine  oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to  this other thing that once was me, this not really me. This soothing obligation This love. This hand over and this pass on. This part of me and this not really me. This me and engine oil additive. This me and not really me and engine oil additive. Back and forth. All day long, like a lion I lie where I will with not really me and I bestow upon not really me refractive index testing oils and wood preservatives. I lie with not really me all day long, and so I bequeath not really me a honeyed wine of flame retardants  and fire preventing agents. I make a milk like nectar, a honeyed nectar of capacitor dielectrics, dyes, and electrical insulation and I pass it on every two hours to not really me. Not really me is a ram perched on a cliff above a stream, unable to be quenched by the flame retardant in furniture. Not really me comes near and takes a nectar of insulated pipes, and some industrial paints. Later I pass the breast cup to not really me, a breast cup filled with sound insulation panels and imitation wood  with a little nectar and sweetness. And not really me drinks it and then complains a little, rebuking me, for my cakes of nuts and raisins are cakes of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas, for my apples are filled with televisions and windshield wiper blades. On my breast are the curls of not really me and against the brow of not really me wafts plasticizer used in heat  transfer systems. As drinking not really me takes in anger and in need not really me drinks from the hand of that sweetest sleep the juice of me that cup of adhesives, that cup of fire retardants, of pesticide extenders. And as not really me drinks I cradle the moon and not really me in my right hand my lips kissing with the dedusting agents and wax extenders. Then later in the night, the bed scattered with the stains of cutting oils and gas-transmission  turbines, the blankets with blends of hydraulic fluid, we lie there together handing over and passing on  filled up and attempting to think our way through economics and labor and time and biology me and not really me together. I'd like to think we had agreed upon this together, that we had a tradition, that we agreed these things explained us to us but when not really me wakes after drinking the pharmaceuticals and photo chemicals night after night and day after day not really me will sing a song of rebuke, sing the song of not really me, the song that goes like Salutations to brominated fire retardants of Koppers Ind. goes like Salutations to water/oil repellant paper coating of 3M goes like Salutations to wiper blades of Asahi goes like Salutations to bike chain lubrication of Clariant International goes like Salutations to wire and cable insulation of Daikin goes like Salutations to pharmaceutical packaging of DuPont goes like Salutations to nail polish of Dyneon goes like Salutations to engine oil additive of Agrevo E goes like Salutations to hair curling and straightening of Agsin Ptd. Ltd. goes like Salutations to insecticide and termiticide for empty green-  houses of Chevron Chemical goes like Salutations to greenhouse flowers of Monsanto goes like Salutations to insecticide to kill fire ants of Rigo Co. goes like Salutations to plasticizers of US Borax Inc. Not really me's song will go on and on Not really me will sing it all night long hour after hour for weeks on end. It will have eighty-five company names in it. It will have twenty-one chemical functions in it. It will have ninety-seven products in it. It will have two hundred trade names in it. Not really me's song will rotate through these names in all their  combinations. And then it will end with another part that is as long as the first and  inventories the chemicals that not really me does not yet know. But oh those of you who are not really me at all I say let wisdom be your anvil and knowledge your hammer. Hand this over.  Pass this on.
Sometimes it feels like it is over and it's not. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it's over. It's dark often at these times. Urban though, so a certain version of light too. It's hard to predict if it will start on time or how late. I'm often a little late and it has started. Last night, I could tell from the  copters overhead that I was late.  As I walked up, the blocks around it were emptying out. Parents pulled their children home. The night herons settled into trees. That's the outer ring. As I got closer, all that was left were the blinking lights of the motor-  cycles blocking the intersections and the men and few women in  uniforms that mill about the corner, helmets in their hands. They  talked among themselves. Ignored me mainly. One told me how to  get around. I did not clarify that I was walking towards.  You can hear it sometimes. It often has a soundtrack. Sometimes it has   drums and brass. Sometimes just joy. When I am late I am trying to guess its path. Last night, several times I   got close to it only to be turned back by a line of cops. They let the media through but turned me back. Then it turned the corner and there it was. At that moment, I melted my body into it and it embraced me. Rosy fingered dusk and all that. Come here, it sang, listen. And then I was borne along by the waves all night and the whirlpool,  the fig tree, and I was the bat, hanging on patiently. Aarav came up and hugged me. Someone grabbed me from behind and I thought it is Artem but later  realized it was Berat. So much mask. I grabbed Charlotte's hand and held it for a while when things felt  dicey. It felt dicey as they cornered us from two sides and we went down the  tight side street, up the hill. Charlotte's hand. It's like that. Moving from isolation to the depths of friends. At first we didn't mask up. We were poets. Then slowly one by one we did. As we got turnt. As I got turnt I mean. Sometimes I still don't mask up. It often feels hubristic. I keep a bandana in my pocket. It isn't super effective. It falls down a lot. Last night, I tied it around my neck as we walked up the side street hill.  I pulled it over my face as I walked past the line of cops. I noticed  Emma there, throwing eggs. I ducked. Two balloons filled with  paint flew by. Visors suddenly yellow. She said to me, how is your heart? And I at first worried her question. Then I realized she meant my heart and how it was turnt. It is good, I said, I am opening it; I am expanding it. And I meant it. I love you I texted Felix. Lub u!!!!!! I texted Haruto. Texting Isabella and Jackson, I love you guys. I miss you. I texted love you some forty-three times in the last few years. I texted <3 some thirty-three times. Lub u, eighteen times. Miss you, thirty-eight. She said your feed is all riots, plants, picnics, and poets. It was an accusation. She was noticing that I had got turnt. And I said, my son, my son is in my feed too. I didn't bother to argue the riot with her. Still, oh that moment. Turnt moment: I was at the poetry reading and Mia didn't go. She was supposed to  read too but she didn't. She said she wanted to see what happens.  Then she texts I love you and I know then that Trader Joe's has  been looted. All the wines out in the street. Such sweet elixir, FOMO. Then the rest of that night. We quickly say good-byes after the reading, refuse the offer of going to   drinks, careen from the reading to our home. One of us on twit-  ter the entire time. Texting too. While we are driving, one of us at  home runs out into the streets, towards the gas. I drive up and two  of us get out of the car and I stay in the car and drive the few blocks  home. My son has fallen asleep in the back. I am coughing in the  car from the gas. He sleeps through it. I take him out and carry him  up to bed. More texts. I love you, I text. Come by and get me when  you are done. Later that night, I go out again. Miguel stays home with Minjoon. I go  to a fight party; Marxist v. Nihilist. No one knows which is which.  Mohamed, my fighting teacher, fights. I miss it. I love you I text.  She texts back I'm high on being slugged; my eyes are swollen; I  lost; I'm turnt. Standing outside, a woman gets kicked out of the club. The bouncer  tosses her out and into us. She is fucked up. And this feels awful to  her. Her arms wildly swinging indicate this awful feeling. It feels  awful to us. Another woman tries to help her and she slugs her. She  misses and the woman who she has tried to slug takes her, calms  her down. I hear her saying I love you, I love you over and over.  Later I will learn that she spent the entire night talking the woman  down. It's like that. When turnt, sometimes one needs to be held. Still later, I stand on the street, outside my house and watch the  t-mobile get looted. A man tries to stop another man who has  his hammer at the ready in front of the window. The man who is  attempting to stop the hammer gets hit in the face with the butt  of the hammer. I decide to go to bed. It is 3 am. I text Nathan and  say I love you and I'll leave the key in the box for you. The march  continues on, Nathan continues on, turns left a block away and  then when Nathan texts me back I know the Whole Foods is looted  and they are all drinking champagne, dancing. All of them will get  a cold later. Riot champagne becomes a term among us that winter. I wasn't there but I was there too. My germs were there. I too had that cold. Is this poem too heroic? I am sorry. I worry it is. Or I know it is. We are turnt to mere vandals at moments. I'll admit it. Every computer in that shop. Every phone in that one. Every car in that car lot. I don't want it to be heroic but last night I turned the corner and Nor  was there with her bike and when I saw her I said I love you and  we walked down the street as each window was cracked. They got  turnt. Eventually we disperse. I jog for a few minutes away and out  of the kettle. We joke, circle back to watch a car burn. Oliver walks  by. He is hurrying towards the dispersal. I love you we say to him as  he heads off. The car burns. The fire truck arrives. As I stand there  watching it, it is as if everyone I ever texted I love you to walks  by. I love you we call out to each other. A group of women walk by the car and stop to take photographs. So  much joy they have. They are laughing with such triumph. Selfies  and all. Turnt. This poem is true. I have texted I love you and its variations over  and over. Sometimes I barely knew you. But the names are not true. This is not a coterie poem. Is it a milieu poem? Can it be a movement poem? I took all the names of this poem and never wrote them in. There is no electronic record of them. I found a list of the most popular baby names for various countries in  2015, the year in which I am writing this poem. I made a list, one  male and one female from each list. Then I alphabetized it. And I  put those names in this poem one by one. I got to O. But Olivia, Saanvi, Santiago, Seoyeon, Sofia, Yui, and Zeynep, I love  you too.
we cut down 115th street for a quicker stroll past the pastor's house, vacant lot, liquor store. buses pointing out the hood & back. the route every morning goes by the liquor store. the loose Philly blunts and hard & dry. the sour mouth washed away by a dull gulp of liquor. store a honey bun in your fat back pocket. pray nobody notices your awkward walk. this liquor store sees stumbling often. out front the garish stickers fluoresce on the wire windows like winos with liquor store bottles. a small weapon sits behind the counter hidden by the cigarettes & candy small enough to steal. when the liquor store is locked up the rolling metals make the window a pastoral, part of our natural habitat. behold the liquor store: the sugar waters, the Ziploc bag of coins & Nate's tongue the color of loose pennies in the liquor store.
i was born by a lake, chicken shack,  & a church  — Common, “The Morning” 1st defense against food deserts. when the whitefolk wouldn't sling us burgers you gave no fuck. stuck your golden-ringed hand into the flour & fixed the bird. you 1st example of black flight. original innovation of deep fry. you beef tallow, city slick & down home migration taste. of course your sauce sweet & burn at the same time. of course you call it mild so whitefolk won't know to fear until it's too late. you no corporate structure, just black business model. they earn the recipe & go make it their own. every cut of crow you throw in the grease is dark meat. the whole shack: shaking, drenched in mild sauce, sweet spirit, baptized.
after Lisel Mueller on her profile i see she has 2 kids, now 1 she had in high school, now none at all. she unaborts 1. she is unpregnant in 8th grade. she unresembles her favorite pop singer Pink. she uncuts her hair, it pulls into her scalp from clumps on the floor. her new boyfriend forgets the weight of her. she leaves her new boyfriend. he's forgetting her phone number. she becomes my girlfriend she picks up the phone & i am on the line ungiving a goodbye. her best friend trades letters between us. we each open lettters from ourselves with hearts on the outside. she transfers to our magnet school. she moves to a neighborhood close by. we separate at the lips. we have never kissed behind the school. she unchecks the yes box on the note & i take away my middle school love letter. i unmeet her cop father & her Chicano moms. we walk backwards into Baskin-Robbins throwing up gold medal ribbon ice cream into cups. it rounds into scoops, flattens into gallon drums of sugar & cream & coldness. we are six years old. maybe we can go back to then. i unlearn her name, the way it is spelled the same backward. how it flips on a page, or in my mouth. i never knew words could do that until 5 minutes from now.
it's your 1st year of college & you should be missing home by now but mostly you don't. you read the Chicago newspapers & call family on Sundays. you pick up going to church at a place adjacent to the projects. you're not from the projects & the ones in Chicago seem worse but there's comfort in being around plainspoken folk. the church folk feed you & also cook you food. you take African American studies classes & sleep through Spanish & write poems at night. you read the newspaper. you consider pledging a fraternity. you go to parties to watch people. you don't miss home. you call your ex girl a lot. you imagine her face across the phone line. you stare at the scar on her chin. it is shiny & smooth. you read the newspaper. you text new girls mostly. you invite them to play cards & bet clothes or take them to dinner on your birthday so you don't spend it alone or you share their extra-long twin beds or you just text them. it's your 1st year of college & your nephew is tiny & your niece is young enough to be happy & the world is new & you are not going home for Thanksgiving. you are in the South at a new friend's house. you go to church with his family & to his old high school's basketball game & to his malls & to his grandmother's house. you did not make your team past 9th grade & never went to malls much. your grandmother had been dead for 2 years now. you read the newspaper. his family are nice people. you do not miss home. you go back to school. you stop talking to your ex girl. she has a new guy. you do not miss home. you write poems. you read the newspaper. there are still more kids dying. your 1st year of college & you should be missing but you're still here. you write papers about black people & voting & violence & families & that is the same paper. you don't read the newspaper. you have finals to finish. you go to church on Sunday with your new friend & you talk to new girls & consider pledging. you have heard the fraternities will haze you. you have heard about beating but you are not from the projects & you are not in Chicago. you stop reading the newspaper. you decide to kiss a girl & mean it. you decide to pledge a fraternity. you should have more information about the newspaper. & the girl. & the fraternity. you should call home more. you don't  read the newspapers or call. you are not from the projects or Chicago. you do not miss home. or your ex girl. or your newspaper. there are still more kids dying. you convince your new friend to pledge the fraternity. he worries about the hazing, the beatings. you tell him this is an opportunity. don't miss it.
My copy of The Fireside Book of Verseis as the seller promised—the stapled spine,the paper aged to Army tan—no worsefor wear, given the cost of its design,six cents to make and printed on a pressonce used for magazines and pulp. This bookwas never meant to last a war much lessthree quarters of a century. I lookfor evidence of all the men who scannedthese lines, crouched down in holes or lying intheir racks. I read the poems secondhand.Someone has creased the page. Did he beginthen stop to sleep? to clean his gun perhaps?to listen to the bugler playing taps?
Fall a scrimage of yellow leaves today All over Lincoln Park Like the mask of the Yellow Mule who travels between the next  world and Tibet inside its house of glass in the Field  Museum by the lake. I am carrying the night. I am carrying it as if it were a dark blue dish with stars  for the dinner of the Dalai Lama. It is the sky two nights ago; Its voluptuous rich blue looks almost black before the word  for blue had been invented; The clouds like continents, like huge, majestic prehistoric  creatures moving in a dance; The stars are brilliant ants. They may have died  a billion years ago. I feel so happy. It is as if I'm with my wife who's making  sculpture miles and miles away on Ada Street. I like everything about her. The way an angel, say, might look upon this early autumn scene  and love everything about it for its reality— These trees flanking the lagoon at Fullerton are quiet as green fish, The pale khaki maple leaf lying on the ground, its veins  intricate as the practice of a Tartar cavalry, Its delicacy like the penis of a cuttlefish, The grass pale lime and brown as dreams when they are turning brown Is almost ghostly, The way the family album on the table in the livingroom has  a gallery of ghosts. There is only wonder. Like the wonder in the worn thighbone of the dinosaur We're allowed to touch As often as we want on the Main Floor of the Field Museum. I bike along the lake and watch The whiplash of the waves and think, I didn't have to be here in the first place: I could have been  a star: Or cuttlefish. The shadow of that tree. Or been one of the  bees of oblivion In any ordinary orgasm. If there were no moon our hearts could take its place.
Death is careless at times. It confuses love with a wet afternoon in an empty room. The unpainted walls a reminder of how sex can resemble poverty. A hollow cry. An open mouth falling inside as you sleep. I prepare my heart and language with better words, like worlds in small selves I've built. Every month, one dollar buys me one brick. But how many bricks does it take to build a house? A stray dog barks late at night. I can't see him but know he's there. He reminds me that here, dreams have dangerous turns. I turn around to no one naked beside me. I play it safe not to see the fire in my hands. But let us be clear: I'm no beggar. It's just that there are times when  the world is a sound that cripples the air, and the soul. When what seems arranged — glazing and strange, like music played on tin cans — turns into wilting noise. When suddenly, all that exists is a small boy trying to focus on the pain lifting a nation. A telephone call: He was wearing black shoes, a  Calvin Klein T-shirt that he found in a hotel trash, brown slacks. She was wearing one earring on her right ear, one sock on her left foot, a dress the color of sky. She bought him a canne à sucre. He pulled her close, said, Ti cherie. And after they promised to meet later, she winked and walked leisurely in the shade. A tremble followed. When he turned around, her body was one of a thousand on the streets. He ran towards her, stood by her arm,unable to see her face. The call drops. I begin to count the ways I tolerate my dry mouth. To count the glasses of water I gave away to make up for my sins. But this act does not count when we fall out of our hearts.
There is a sorceress in our night. A sky that only moves memory to make place for the mangoes of last month. There is an old man who says, Libéremoi. And means, Take everything but my blackness. Only in the dark do doves find reason. Only in the dark do doves have reason to believe that vengeance is light hanging on fallen tree. After each fall, we ask, where is the island, the sugarcane that disappeared in our hunger, the water that emptied our thirst, the song that robbed our nightmare? They mock us. They tell us to whisper in their ears. They will obey. But curses beat the air wild. The air is faint. And they tell us, Stop plotting fire. You are in the wrongland even if the roosters recognize you. They hated our black. What they didn't understand is that it illuminates their world.
Who needs to be at peace in the world? It helps to be between wars, to die a few times each day to understand your father's sky, as you take it apart piece by piece and can't feel anything, can't feel the tree growing under your feet, the eyes poking night only to find another night to compare it to. Whoever heard of turning pain into hummingbirds or red birds— haven't we grown? What does it mean to be older? Maybe a house with- out doors can still survive a storm. Maybe I can't find the proper way to rebel or damn it, I can't leave. I want to, but you grow inside of me. And as I watch you, before I know it, I'm too heavy, too full of you to move. Maybe that's what they meant when they said you shouldn't love a country too much.
after the painting by Brent Lynch The humid nights are best and worst, best because the birds sing at two in the morning when you cannot get back into the other world, worst because it is the moist heat that makes the skin supple, makes you want to rub against someone else, a woman, and there is nothing but the long list of lost chances, things you could have said, perhaps the simple question  of will you sleep with me so that it is not just you and this shell of a home, this place where it feels the walls are another layer of my skin, and that is neither best or worst. It is the holding of the dead stink, the memories that was over him, holding them back. It is the utter singleness of being the only person here, the way the thoughts think themselves down to accepting that this is really just me here wondering who I am, just me here wondering why I am awake at two, which trigger it was, knowing all the time all too well the way the war of life is connected to the nervous system of the world, the ganglia of our shared horrors, either mine so large, or so people tell me, and here it seems to be the membrane between the skin of my bones and the skin of this home, the absorbing shock of space that gives when the memories burn their way in or out of me. I would lie here wondering how to tell her I am wrestling with the angel, wrestling with memories in the crevices and cracks of my body, of how I feel right now, what it felt like then, in those times, and I am glad she is not here, and I wish she were here, and she has no name because this is some woman I do not know. I practice in the silence of my thoughts the different pitch and rhythm of how I might ask will you sleep with me,  afraid of what to say should she say yes and this decade of my monkish life should lie open and I have to say why I am sitting on the edge of the bed, why I have woke her from the sweet smile I assume she has when I assume her horror is smaller than mine.
Calm appeared, his soul stopped, a crow staring as he snatched down miniature angels, trapped them in jars, capping the light away to make a hush out of glory songs, a crying out from the joyful aubades they breathe as easy as moonlight on jars of preserves, their throats full of fear now, the brave breast crumpled in his child fingers, their prisons invisible to the cherubim searching for heaven's missing songsters trapped in blind ways of getting even at a world that would make him small, make him an impotent wonder, curl his genius under like a witch's toes when his father died chewing on cheese and cornbread, chocolate surprise in the sun, an unkind ending. He grew in the way of genius, no charts showing where he ended and the world began, how cities figure in the jagged sweep of cornfields, endless thousands of shouts up into the evening, listening to the future speaking, like the old man in the schoolyard, a stranger by the wishing pond in the woods, or dogs that stand up like men in hats— these the Corinthian signs he mistook for an alphabet giving the right to molest children. Now wisdom is sour rubbing medicine pasted over nightmares, not the proper wealth of an old man, the arms of his neighbors around him like laurels.
It was cousin Alvin who stole the liquor, slipped down Aunt Mabie's steps on the ice, fresh from jail for some small crime. Alvin liked to make us laugh while he took the liquor or other things we did not see, in Aunt Mabie's with her floors polished, wood she polished on her hands and knees until they were truth itself and slippery enough to trick you, Aunt Mabie who loved her Calvert Extra and loved the bright inside of family, the way we come connected in webs, born in clusters of promises, dotted with spots that mark our place in the karma of good times, good times in the long ribbon  of being colored I learned when colored had just given way to Negro and Negro was leaving us because blackness chased it out of the house, made it slip on the ice, fall down and spill N-e-g-r-o all over the sidewalk until we were proud in a new avenue of pride, as thick as the scrapple on Saturday morning with King syrup, in the good times, between the strikes and layoffs at the mills when work was too slack, and Pop sat around pretending not to worry, not to let the stream of sweat he wiped from his head be anything except the natural way of things, keeping his habits, the paper in his chair by the window, the radio with the Orioles, with Earl Weaver the screamer and Frank Robinson the gentle black man, keeping his habits, Mama keeping hers, the WSID gospel in the mornings, dusting the encyclopedias she got from the A&P, collecting the secrets of neighbors, holding marriages together, putting golden silence on children who took the wrong turns, broke the laws of getting up and getting down on your knees. These brittle things we call memories rise up, like the aroma of scrapple, beauty and ugliness, life's mix where the hard and painful things from folk who know no boundaries live beside the bright eyes that look into each other, searching their pupils for paths to prayer.
It is the twilight blue Chevrolet, four doors with no power but the engine, whitewall tires, no padding on the dashboard, the car I drive on dates, park on dark lanes to ask for a kiss, now my hand goes along the fender, wiping every spot, the suds in the bucket, my father standing at the gate, poor and proud, tall and stout, a wise man, a man troubled by a son gone missing in the head, drag racing his only car at night, traveling with hoodlums to leave the books for street life, naming mentors the men who pack guns and knives, a son gone missing from all the biblical truth, ten talents, prophecies, burning bushes, dirty cars washed on Saturday morning. He tells me not to miss a spot, to open the hood when I'm done so he can check the oil, the vital thing like blood, blood of kinship, blood spilled in the streets  of Baltimore, blood oozing from the soul of a son walking prodigal paths leading to gutters. Years later I tell him the stories of what his brother-in-law did to me, and he wipes a tear from the corner of his eye, wraps it in a white handkerchief for church, walks up the stairs with the aluminum crutch to scream at the feet of black Jesus and in these brittle years of his old age we grow deeper, talk way after midnight, peeping over the rail of his hospital bed as we wash the twilight blue Chevrolet.
It was as hot as what stars must feel like so far away, certainly  there, inside me. I took it in my hands, put it where it should be in the wet softness where my heart sits. Ugly things came to threaten me, to say I had lost the last lock holding me to truth. That was not true, because old truths were now lies, I saw families as human. I found the goodness in what is not perfect, and a new perfection in what is not good. This happened in a new home twelve time zones away, as the world collapsed. in a clitter clatter like a busy kitchen, the universe forming now inside all of me.
In Los Angeles airport I sit stunned by the English, letters harsh things with no stories I know. The food smells dead, metal forks and knives set for making war against food. I am undone and done again, broken off from narratives of birth and being, of limits broken by the genius of slaves. I stand here where I was born, and the masks wait for me.
He lowered his head and darted through the grass, flushing a hen from off her nest, then zeroing in on the day-old chicks instead of the mother whose decoy trick had failed to lure him away. In the time it took for me to notice this, he'd broken the necks of two of the chicks and torn the skin from off their backs and heads. The taste of their blood had deafened him to my commands, so I went to him like an angry god and chased him away with my staff and rod, inflicting a wound also in his side for him to go on licking, to wash their blood from off his tongue with his own blood, and then I kneeled in the grass to regard his kill while the mother keened inside the woods not far away. Oh, what a mess they were with their heads snapped back and wings unhinged. I picked up the bodies like bloody socks and prayed to the god in charge of this field for my own weakness to feel this much for slaughtered chicks. For an understanding of his need to kill the most vulnerable thing, whether hungry or not.
On Mother's Day it isn't smart To give your mom a broken heart. So here are thing you shouldn't say To dear old mom on Mother's Day: Don't tell here that you'll never eat A carrot, celery, bean, or beet. Don't tell her you think smoking's cool. Don't tell her you've dropped out of school. Don't tell her that you've drowned the cat. Don't tell her that she looks too fat. Dont't tell her when you're grown you'll be A starving poet—just like me.
Santa needs new reindeer. The first bunch has grown old. Dasher has arthritis; Comet hates the cold. Prancer's sick of staring at Dancer's big behind. Cupid married Blitzen and Donder lost his mind. Dancer's mad at Vixen for stepping on his toes. Vixen's being thrown out— she laughed at Rudolph's nose. If you are a reindeer we hope you will apply. There is just one tricky part: You must know how to fly.
Katie kissed me! Yuck, it's true! My face took on a greenish hue! My knees, like jelly, started shaking! Then my stomach started quaking! Slobber slithered down my cheek! My consciousness was growing weak! My ears were ringing, my head was spinning! But, all the while Kate was grinning! My heart was pounding through my shirt! My tongue felt like I just ate dirt! Though you may think I've lost my brain! I wished she'd kiss me once again!
It's too soon for the front porch swing. No crocuses are opeing. The wind is from the north and chill.No matter. Spring is here. I stillAm bound to sit and swing out thereAnd feel it in the evening air. It's much too cold. The trees are lean And leafless—not a sign of green. It's foolishness to sit outside.The mockingbird has testified To spring's existence, and I seeThe buds are on the almond tree.I'm sure it's spring. How do you know?I think a cricket told me so.
Stripes and stars, Antique cars, Pretty girls, Baton twirls, Spangled gowns, Friendly clowns, Smiling folks, Papered spokes, Marching feet, Endless heat, Clapping hands, High school bands, Town traditions, Politicians, Perspiration, Celebration!
Mariah Watkins, Neosho, Missouri Imagine a child at your door, offering to do your wash, clean your house, cook, to weed your kitchen garden or paint you a bunch of flowers in exchange for a meal. A spindly ten-year-old, alone and a stranger in town, here to go to our school for colored children. His high peep brought tears: sleeping in a barn and all that, nary mama nor kin, but only white folks he left with their blessing, his earthly belongings in a handkerchief tied to a stick. I've brought a houseful of children into this world, concentrating on that needle's eye into eternity. But ain't none of them children mine. Well, of course I moved him on in. He helped me with my washings, brought me roots from the woods that bleached them white folks' sheets brighter than sunshine. He could fill a canning jar with leaves and petals so when you lifted the lid a fine perfume flooded your senses. White bodices and pantalettes danced around George on my line. He was sweet with the neighbor children. Taught the girls to crochet. Showed the boys a seed he said held a worm cupped hands warmed so it wriggled and set the seed to twitching. Gave them skills and wonders. Knelt with me at bedtime. He was the child the good Lord gave  and took away before I got more than the twinkle of a glimpse at the man he was going to be. It happened one Saturday afternoon. George was holding a black-eyed Susan, talking about how the seed this flower grew from carried a message from a flower that bloomed a million years ago, and how this flower would send the message on to a flower that was going to bloom in a million more years. Praise Jesus, I'll never forget it. He left to find a teach that knew more than he knew. I give him my Bible. I keep his letters in the bureau, tied with a bow. He always sends a dried flower.
Dr. L. H. Pammel Hybridization, cross-breeding, evolution: He takes to new theories like a puppy takes to ice cream. We whisper that our Green-Thumb Boy is the black Mendel, that Darwin would have made good use of Carver's eyes. So clear his gift for observation: the best collector I've ever known. I think we have an entirely new species of Pseudocercospora. And always in his threadbare lapel a flower. Even in January. I've never asked how. We had doubts about giving him a class to teach, but he's done a bang-up job with the greenhouse. His students see the light of genius through the dusky window of his skin. Just yesterday, that new boy, what's-his-name, from Arkansas, tried to raise a ruckus when Carver put his dinner tray down. He cleared his throat, stared, rattled his own tray, scraped his chair legs in a rush to move away. Carver ate on in silence. Then the boys at the table the new boy had moved to cleared their throats, rattled their trays and scraped their chair legs as they got up and moved to Carver's table. Something about the man does that, raises the best in you. I've never asked what. I guess I'll put his name next to mine on that article I'm sending out.
for St. Mark's Episcopal, Good Friday 1999 In his careful welter of dried leaves and seeds, soil samples, quartz pebbles, notes-to-myself, letters, on Dr. Carver's bedside table next to his pocket watch, folded in Aunt Mariah's Bible: the Bill of Sale. Seven hundred dollars for a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary. He moves it from passage to favorite passage. Fifteen cents for every day she had lived. Three hundred fifty dollars for each son. No charge for two stillborn daughters buried out there with the Carvers' child. This new incandescent light makes his evening's reading unwaveringly easy, if he remembers to wipe his spectacles. He turns to the blossoming story of Abraham's dumbstruck luck, of Isaac's pure trust in his father's wisdom. Seven hundred dollars for all of her future. He shakes his head.
Great Creator, why did you make the peanut? —GWC Arachis Hypogaea may have been smuggled to North America by slaves who hid seeds of survival in their hair. Despite your nakedness, the chains, the stench, if white men did not eat you, you might come to a cruel land where, tended by moonlight and exhaustion, your seed might grow to be your children's manna in the wilderness.Arachis Hypogaea, or goober, an annual preferring warmth and sun, is an attractive plant, resembling clover. It bears flowers of two distinct genders: the staminate, or “male,” yellow, pretty, and the inconspicuous pistillate “female.” When fertilized, the pistillate turns down  and corkscrews six inches into the ground. Each corkscrew, called a “peg,” grows one to four peanuts in the soil near the mother plant; each shell two of her shots at infinity. From the laboratory of a slave emerged a varied, balanced diet for the poor, stock foods, ink, paints, cosmetics, medicines ... Promise and purpose, the Ancestors' dream. “The Peanut Man,” we say, and laugh at him.
Cookies for sale! And cake! One dime! That's what it says on my cardboard sign. I pile cookies on a plate. I eat just one and then, I wait . . .  I taste the cake (one tiny slice) I squeeze the lemons and stir the ice; I count and stack the paper cups . . .  fresh lemonade is coming up! I count the bruises on my knee . . . won't somebody buy something,please?
Ants use antennae to seek out their tracks, Beavers gnaw trees for their lodge, Camels store food in the humps on their backs, Dragonflies dazzle and dodge, Elephant trunks furnish watery flings, Flamingoes eat shrimp to keep pink; Grasshoppers' ears appear under their wings, Hummingbirds hover to drink, Inchworms advance with a rear-ended loop, Jellyfish sometimes can sting, Kestrels catch lunch with a lightning-like swoop, Larks love to warble and sing, Moles tunnel intricate malls underground, Newts thrive in ponds filled with weed, Owls like to swivel their heads right around, People can learn how to read, Quetzals are gorgeous in feathery dress, Rats have acquired a bad label, Seahorse appears like a figure in chess, Tortoise found fame in a fable, Umber-birds thrive in the African wild, Vipers can poison their prey, Worms turn the soil when the climate is mild, Xylophage chews wood all day, Yaks grow in horns that are gracefully curled, Zorillas are striped black and white;  each zooabet creature is part of this world:  unique, with its own copyright!
I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war as we then called the second world war   don't lose your arrogance yet he said you can do that when you're older lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity   just one time he suggested changing the usual order of the same words in a line of verse why point out a thing twice   he suggested I pray to the Muse get down on my knees and pray right there in the corner and he said he meant it literally   it was in the days before the beard and the drink but he was deep in tides of his own through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop   he was far older than the dates allowed for much older than I was he was in his thirties he snapped down his nose with an accent I think he had affected in England   as for publishing he advised me to paper my wall with rejection slips his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry   he said the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion passion was genius and he praised movement and invention   I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't   you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
My father and brothers are swimming to the Rock. “Come with us!” they call to me and I say, “Maybe next year.” The Rock is very, very far away. I sit on the dock with my peanut butter sandwich. I watch them dive into the water and swim into the distance their kicks and  splashes and elbows getting smaller and smaller as they near the Rock. It takes them a long, long time. They arrive and pull themselves to stand and wave their arms in the air. I can't see it but I know their hands are in fists. I can't hear it but I know they are cheering. Even the loons call to celebrate their arrival! I sit on my dock dangling my feet in the water counting dragonflies. My father and brothers come closer and from the water lift their faces with wild wet smiles And I think This year!
As a kid I tried to coax its coming By sleeping beneath light sheets Weeks before The funeral of the summer locusts in the yard; Then when Granny peeled down the crucifix of  flypaper that dangled from the ceiling of the  kitchen Magic wasn't needed any longer To fill the air with pigskins. The air itself Acrid, lambent, bright As the robes of the Chinese gods inside their  house of glass In the Field Museum by the lake. Even practice could be fun— The way, say, even sepia photographs of old-time  All Americans could be pirates' gold Like my favorite Bill Corbus, Stanford's "Baby-  Face Assassin" crouching at right guard, the  last to play without a helmet on— And the fun of testing muscles out  Like new shoes; the odor of the locker room  pungent As the inside of a pumpkin; And the sting of that wet towel twirled against  bare butt by a genial, roaring Ziggy, Mt.  Carmel's All State tackle from Immaculate  Conception Parish near the mills; And then the victory, especially the close shaves,  could feel Like finally getting beneath a girl's brassiere She'll let you keep Unhooked for hours while you neck Until the windshield of your Granddad's Ford V-8 Becomes filled by a fog Not even Fu Manchu could penetrate. Jack, Next football weather my son Luke will be in high  school, Bigger than I was and well-coordinated—but Couldn't care a plenary indulgence If he ever lugs a pigskin down the turf Or hits a long shot on the court. At times, I wish he  would. So he might taste the happiness you knew Snagging Chris Zoukis' low pass to torpedo nine  long yards to touchdown And sink archrival Lawrence High 45 years ago come this Thanksgiving Day. Still, He has his own intensities As wild as sports and writing were for us: Luke's the seventh Rolling Stone, His electric guitar elegant and shiny black As a quiet street at night Glazed by rain and pumpkin frost.
Our matchbox bedroom in the loft above your  sculpture factory Turns magical at times Behind its dark blue Druid door. Last night, Inside you, sweetheart, It felt as if I were coming from the soul itself. And that Indian Summer Sunday afternoon a year  ago When the bed became a meadow Of purple thistles, the honey hidden at the bottom  of the stem Farm kids know to find For the sweetest suck of all. And sometimes in the winter when the room turns  into a Cornell box Filled with the everyday miracles— Soap bubble pipe and thimble, wooden rabbits And old tan magazine illustrations of the Zodiac. Or turns into an igloo in which the only place to  go Is to burrow here below the yellow blanket and  the pillows To the South Pacific Of ourselves. And then those mornings on  vacation Gentle as the feathers of a light spring rain, and  at the same time hard, like the beak Of a hawk. You are where I belong.
To Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey Were you guys lucky, too, to caddy, the light on freshly-sprinkled fairway delicate and bright as eye of an  Indiana owl or glitter of fish flickering in the Shedd Aquarium of the  imagination, the tough but tender touch of leather socks covering the cobra-  headed clubs, the crack of brassie on golf ball like whip of mule skinner filling all Death  Valley; or to anoint oneself in grease and oil, sweating beneath the belly of a car or truck in the pit in Shimskis' Garage  in Homewood; or to find felicity at Marshall Field's as a stockboy numb and  dazed by rawboned, adolescent lust, stumbling about  beneath a pyramid of boxes past models cooly on parade  among the customers all day, filling immaculate brassieres  with flesh like fortune cookies and in silken Oriental half-slips  as I sweat like Sydney Greenstreet examining the statue of the  Maltese Falcon in his hotel suite; and to fight, like a goddamn fool, in Navy alleys behind  black-and-tan saloon in Minneapolis, my iron ring, its  longhorns, slashing, can open up a cheek; and to sweat out a basketball game of one-on-one, the comments  cryptic and intense as a fragment by Archilochos; and to pitch papers onto porches on a bike route as if your arm  were Bobby Feller's blazing corncobs at a knot-hole in Des  Moines; to cut the uncut hair of graves beneath an R. Crumb "Keep on  Truckin'" sun large as a lemon drop, and to hawk cufflinks  made by Swank as well as cashmere sweaters from the  Shetland Isles, to scrub as if they had the London Plague of  Robert Greene dying in a bed of straw in Cheapside Gran  Canyons filled with dirty dishes in the Phi Gam kitchen in  Bloomington, to tool around behind wheel of Checker taxi as  if it were a chariot in a race in Babylon, to tote the 85¢ YWCA  Blueplate Special to the widows of the ghosts of pioneers, to  mix drink behind the bar as if concocting cocktails for Long  John Silver and Blind Pew or Bathhouse John and wee,  shrewd Hinky Dink, to create a 100 half-moons in a night by  manipulating the control box in this elevator roomy as a  shoebox purchased by Paul Powell here in a hotel with its 50  bags full of the fleas of Illinois— this great, unique chance to hear the language where it lives.
If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O. in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter, say not-it! to the sea oats, not-it! to the sky above the disheveled palms, not-it! to the white or green oyster boats and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods that resemble so many giant whiskers, if I repeat this is not it, this is not why I'm waiting here, will I fill the universe with all that is not-it and allow myself to grow very still in the center of  this fishing town in winter? Will I look out past the cat sleeping in the windowsill and say not-it! garbage can,not-it! Long's Video Store, until I happen upon what is not not-it? Will I wake up and BEHOLD! the "actual," the "real," the "awe-thentic," the IS?  Instead I walk down the Island Quicky, take a pound of bait shrimp in an ice-filled baggie, then walk to the beach to catch my dinner. Now waiting is the work I'm waiting for. Now the sand crane dive-bombs the surf of his own enlightenment because everything is bait and lust and hard-up for supper.  I came out here to pare things down, wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out beneath the rotting dock at five o'clock in the afternoon when the voice that I call I is a one-man boat slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion. Hello, waves of salty and epiphanic distance. Good day, bird who will eventually go blind from slamming headfirst into the water. What do you say fat flounder out there deep in your need, looking like sand speckled with shells, lying so still you're hardly there, lungs lifting with such small air, flesh both succulent and flakey when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, your eyes rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up the ocean floor for a mouthful of land.
Let it be said that Tim's year was divided into two seasons: sneakers and flip-flops. Let us remember that Tim would sometimes throw a football with all the requisite grip, angle and spiral-talk. Let us recall that for the sake of what was left of appearances, my mother never once let him sleep in her bed; he snored all over our dog-chewed couch, and in the mornings when I tip-toed past him on my way to school, his jowls fat as a catcher's mitt, I never cracked an empty bottle across that space where his front teeth rotted out. Nor did I touch a struck match to that mole by his lip, whiskery dot that—he  believed—made him irresistable to all lovelorn women. Still, let us remember sweetness: Tim lying face down, Mom popping the zits that dotted his broad, sun-spotted back, which, though obviously gross, gets the January photo in my personal wall calendar of what love should be, if such a calendar could still exist above my kitchen table junked up with the heretos and therefores from my last divorce.  Let us not forget how my mother would slip into her red cocktail dress and Tim would say, "Your mother is beautiful," before getting up to go dance with someone else.  In fairness, let me confess that I pedaled my ten-speed across the Leaf River bridge all the way to Tim's other woman's house and lay with that woman's daughter beside the moon- cold weight of the propane tank, dumb with liquor, numb to the fire ants that we spread our blanket over until I stopped for a second and looked up because I wondered if her mother could hear us, or if Tim might not have stood in the kitchen, maybe looked out the window and saw my white ass pumping in the moonlight, and whispered to himself, "That's my boy."
On thin golden poles gliding up, sliding down, a kingdom of horses goes spinning around.  Jumper, Brown Beauty,Dark Thunder, Sir Snow,  a medley of ponies parade in a row.   Settled in saddles, their riders hold on to reins of soft leather while circling along   on chestnut or charcoal, on sleek Arctic white, on silver they gallop in place day and night.   Such spinning is magic, (to dream as you sail) with lavender saddle and ebony tail,   whirling to music in moonlight, spellbound, galloping, galloping, merrily go round.
After Tim Dlugos' Things I Might Do I probably didn't tell you that the last Line of your poem left me on a plane of Movement somewhere between the best of pop Culture and the longest break in your favorite pop song I probably didn't tell you that the train is going to take Way longer than you think and you were probably annoyed I probably broke the moon in pieces with my night vision Straining too hard to remember what I probably dropped in your inbox I probably should've said what I meant. You probably knew how my life didn't fix into That theory box on your shelf, so I probably Ignored you when you said hi to me near Mercer St I probably left off the most important thing But you probably didn't want to hear it I probably tried to be a good New Yorker and Work hard and play hard but it didn't work Out that way, I probably just reverted back to The Rust Belt mode—work hard, have it not mean Enough to play hard or play at all. It's probably too hard to make A dent for yourself in the Rust Belt. It's all probably said and done Your neighbor knows what you did tomorrow and what was Going on yesterday. Probably good too so you don't get in trouble With the other neighbor. But they probably don't know that you could Be in NY for a few hours and have something good and so life changing happen To you it was probably a 360 for you and probably took You years to come down to 180, probably, right?
you know I wanted to know which one, the bridges are all made of metal out here, the diners are still chrome-plated-affairs, a silver lunch box you could almost pick up and carry on your way home but instead you fit yourself inside of its dents, bulky, heavy metal, you just went for the leather jacket, you know I flung myself through that metal that was so heavy, no not mental, but metal, I flew threw(ough) the Blue Sky Diner, right through Sunnyside's train yards, so high I saw both the trees and trains, the tops of the semitrucks that squish through skinny streets with not metal but bricks beneath the surface, you know it was all one and the same, unironic heavy metal, you know there is such a thing, I hate to have to say it this way, you know under the bridge near Skillman High School is the best place for a heavy metal concert next to the metal Queensboro Bridge, next to the Blue Sky Diner flying in the sky, adjacent to Sky Line Auto and landing for a beer with a splash at the Fire Water Inn - you know you're on fire, in the water, and the metal, hot, dunked into it, sizzles - yeah, I know you said the riffs sounded like metal, I know exactly which ones, which dented sides the notes screeched to and fro to, over and over, a riff engaged in a tiff of metal, the most perfect sound, perfect sound of all
The regal eagle sits alone upon a tree that serves as throne. But sometimes when the eagle flies (though this might come as some surprise) a mob of crows may—wing to wing— together drive away that king. Democracy in beak and claw finds regal eagle's fatal flaw. And is that legal? I don't know. You'll have to ask a mobster crow.
Who are these masked birds? Not Robin Hoods, for they live in the open woods. They only deal in stolen goods like berry futures, cedar cones, and sweet, sweet, fruit (but leave the stones). Insects they catch on the fly when swarms of them go buzzing by. No need to worry, moan. or fret. Your valuables they will  not  get.
Carole Robertston, Who loved books, earned straight A's, And took dance lessons every Saturday. Who joined the Girl Scouts and science club And played clarinet in the high school band. A member of Jack and Jill of America. Carole, who thought she might want To teach history someday Or at least make her mark on it.
Oh, fly, you flew onto my leaf and not my food. What a relief! For on my food you'd bring me grief as you're a vector of disease. But you on leaf? My mind's at ease. And there is much to please my eye. For oh, you are a lovely fly. Just do not go and multiply.
Tonight's your lucky night, boys. Look what I fixed for you! Stood all day in the burning sun to make this son-of-a-gun stew. Longhorn steaks two inches thick, dig in while they're hot. The coffee'll keep you up all night, belly up to the pot. You know your Cookie loves you, boys, loves to see you fed. Stood all day in the burning sun to bake this sourdough bread. Sop up all the stew, boys, take another steak. Have another hunk of bread. You know I love to bake. You know your Cookie loves you, boys, tell you what I'll do— tomorrow I'll fix steak and bread and a big old pot of stew!
Emma Wallace, 23  Farm Hand  Seymour, Iowa I came hungry into the world, and for that, look no further than my Pa. A history buff and a small-p poet, he built so many book- shelves, our house became the local lending library. At least to those few who knew a book to be a friend.
My mouth is snow slowly caking that stiff pigeon. My mouth, the intricately moist machinery of a plant. I have forgotten if I ever had a mouth. I have two mouths. One like warm rain; or wind manipulating the worn limbs of an elm. My mouth knows nothing of music. Or of the oils of love. Its shape is the shadow of innumerable pigeons; its words, at times, their bones. My eyes too know of shadows. And of the delicate hairs of my grandmother's heart. And of the plums of puberty. And the shadow of the eggs inside the woman who moves immemorially through clover past the wheat field and alfalfa and the 1890 Roman Catholic cemetary near the farm in Palos  Park. My eyes know of the blue shadow of the one desire. The mind does not; it is an animal, ignorant, ambiguous, talking, as it must, with many voices. I walk toward you as if wading through the waves in somebody  else's dream. I walk toward you as if wading through the waves in somebody  else's dream. I shall survive this death, even though the heart is a shadow of a bone. Or thick glass. My mouth quick with many bees.
Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for decades. Really since the early 70s. Before that I pretty much wrote as myself, though young. But something has happened to my memory, my judgment: apparently, my will has been affected. That old stuff, the fork in my head, first home run, Dad falling out of the car— I remember the words, but I can't get back there anymore. I think they must be screening my sensations. I'm sure my categories have been messed with. I look at the anthologies in the big chains and campus bookstores, even the small press opium dens, all those stanzas against the white space—they just look like the models in the catalogs. The models have arms and legs and a head, the poems mostly don't, but other than that it's hard—for me anyway—to tell them apart. There's the sexy underwear poem, the sturdy workboot poem you could wear to a party in a pinch, the little blaspheming dress poem. There's variety, you say: the button-down oxford with offrhymed cuffs. The epic toga, showing some ancient ankle, the behold! the world is changed and finally I'm normal flowing robe and shorts, the full nude, the scatter—Yes, I suppose there's variety, but the looks, those come on and read me for the inner you I've locked onto with my cultural capital sensing device looks! No thanks, Jay Peterman! No thanks, "Ordinary Evening in New Haven"! I'm just waiting for my return ticket to have any meaning, for those saucer-shaped clouds to lower! The authorities deny any visitations—hardly a surprise. And I myself deny them—think about it. What could motivate a group of egg-headed, tentacled, slimier-than-thou aestheticians with techniquies far beyond ours to visit earth, abduct naive poets, and inculcate them with otherwordly forms that are also, if you believe the tabloids, salacious? And these abductions always seem to take place in some provincial setting: isn't that more than slightly suspicious? Why don't they ever reveal themselves hovering over some New York publishing venue? It would be nice to get some answers here— we might learn something, about poetry if nothing else, but I'm not much help, since I'm an abductee, at least in theory, though, like I say, I don't remember much. But this writing seems pretty normal: complete sentences; semicolons; yada yada. I seem to have lost my avant-garde card in the laundry. They say that's typical. Well, you'll just have to use your judgment, earthlings! Judgment, that's your job! Back to work! As if you could leave! And you thought gravity was a problem!
We practiced together, sweat and stained. We pummeled each other and laughed off pain. Teams may disagree, may tease, may blame. Teams may bicker and whine, but get down for the game. You had my back. We fought the fight. And though our score was less last night, we're walking tall. Our team came through and stuck together like Crazy Glue. I'm proud to say I lost with you.
The windows are dressed in feathers where the birds have flown against  them, then fallen below into the flowers where their bodies lie grounded, still, slowly disappearing each day until all that is left are their narrow,  prehensile bones. I have sat at my window now for years and watched a hundred birds mistake the glass for air and break their necks, wondering what to do, how else to live among them and keep my view. Not to mention the sight of them at the feeder in the morning, especially the cardinal in snow. What sign to post on the sill that says, "Warning, large glass window. Fatal if struck. Fly around or above but not away. There are seeds in the feeder and water in the bath. I need you, which is to say, I'm sorry for my genius as the creature inside who attracts you with seeds and watches you die against the window I've built with the knowledge of its danger to you.  With a heart that rejects its reasons in favor of keeping what it wants: the sight of you, the sight of you."
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?  —Allen Ginsberg "Go ahead," I say to my neighbor at the Putney Co-op who tells  me he can't complain. "Let it out. It's mid-March and there's still two feet of snow on the ground. Fukushima has just melted down and the Washington Monument cracked at its pyramidion. Put down your  bags and sing. How many times dear father, graybeard, lonely old  courage teacher must you walk down the aisles as a randy eidolon humming your tunes for us to start? Our song begins in silence and grows to a buzz. We make it up as we go along, then watch our numbers swell—  ten thousand members who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Who fly  like a swarm to join us in our chambers, which are these aisles."  I'm singing without knowing it, carrying the tune of main things,  lamenting the prices with Bernie Sanders. My neighbor joins me for no other reason than singing along as a member of the cast we call the multitudes of lonely shoppers. I roam the aisles with the sadness  of America, juggling onions, blessing the beets. It's a local stage on  which the country opens like a flower that no one sees beside the road.In my hungry fatigue, I'm shopping for images, which are free on the highest shelf but costly in their absence—the only ingredient here that heals my sight  of blindness. I see you, Walt Whitman, pointing your beard toward axis  mundi by the avocados, reading the labels as if they were lines, weighing the tomatoes on the scale of your palms, pressing the pears with your thumbs the way you did in Huntington, Camden, and Brooklyn. And you, also, Ruth  and Hayden, at the checkout counter with empty bags you claim are full  of apples, almonds, and bananas. What can you say to those outside who haven't read your poems? Who find it hard to get the news from poetrybut die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.  It's night. The Connecticut slips by across Rt. 5. The moon is my egg  and stars, my salt. I score the music of the carrots, scallions, and corn in the frost of the freezer windows. The sough of traffic on 91 washes my ears with the sound of tires on blue macadam. The doors close in an hour....
For Ethan Canin I sat on the dock at dusk and spoke to the fish who swam beneath me like ears with fins to hear my secrets. “That words come close?” I whispered. “The sky enters me like a sword with my own hand on the hilt. How to witness what I can't express— the smell of lilacs, the dirge of loons. Make up the rest if you wish. Less is enough. Say I sound like one of the Hosts. That I'm crying also and there's nothing you can do to make me stop. That I'm like the peepers, katydids, and thrush with my own song— all call in the opera of dusk.  Or is it response?”
•  Well look, the wedding guests are here again.  Why not just send a card? Snapshot. Snapshot. Smile and kiss. But this bride has such a red face! Let her scramble past pardon en route to the loo. Evacuate the taffeta dire and paunchy. The groom is erect. The groom downed three pints and stole from the caterer. He would never be no grown-up, This part we'll remember. Dull and easy. Before the spawning and apathy. Before the dementia nurse and waiting for mama to die. Silverware. Cloth napkins. Carafes. Gather round. Sit pious and clench yourself. What's within should be held in. Choke it down. Medicine for the long haul. No more wildness is why I chose no more wildness. Now scurry ho, before someone else goes down on the bride. Isn't that her in the distance, up the pole?   •  By pineapple, by pamplemousse, we find ourselves back at the table armed with forks and particular ideas about what to drink. Go on, order what you want. Turn up the music, you. Lucinda, you have a great voice. You have a lovelygone face and teeth. O gums! Pink and alkaline. We live in the city with crowds of fallen. Soon I am dead and soon you. We'll all be dead together! Anne said.   •  Marie, you are not unclean. You are rose-oiled and shiny and ensconced in the corner with the witty anesthesiologist, inhaling ladysmoke at the café. It's a pleasure just to watch you scratch the crud off your lotto ticket tonight. Then in comes Jackson, looking like he's left his wife. And again Larry is extending his feelers toward Clarice. Larry, what gives? You'll soon lose interest. Eh, Mr Candlelight? I want to give you a good close reading. Come this way.   •  Oh skin! What a cloth to live in. We are not at the end of things. He's tuxedoed and I'm in a cocktail dress. How gussied up we get. Drink this, roll that. Another sender different gender. We're going to hit a winner. We're going to swallow vodka and slap down money and stand around frocked and gossiping and bleed a little in the bathroom from earlier today when we were a little minx. (He really is of the masses, mama said.)   •  Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Mr and Mrs of the moment now and dancing. Mr and Mrs End of Suffering. Mr and Mrs Safe and Headed Where. In the reach of night she'll have him. He'll have. A series of days filled up and emptied. A welcome closeness and a womb. He pours her a fizzy one. She pours him hers. Let's keep on doing this, let's do it together. A bit of drunk and full of wishing. (Two people jumping out of a building and holding hands, R said.)
•  When G died began the midnight panic attacks. He spoke French and English but that didn't help. How the body can betray. It frayed and decayed and then he was removed from it promptly and with force. To begin with, a bit of pressure in the throat. A tendency to choke. And then how lavishly it grew to overtake him.   •  At the funeral his wife had a gaudy kind of beauty. Sheer and elegant in a champagne silk blouse. And where did he go? No matter where on this earth and you could never find him. Flowery and young came the mourners, like bridesmaids. G would have liked it that way. Stilettos and stockings. The curves of the widow sleek and sublimate in blacksilk pants. Elsewhere people went shopping or to the movies. We drove to the crematorium. I can only hope so many beautiful women come to my funeral, M said.   •  Just at the moment when the person has disappeared forever they tell you he's alive forever lucky him. The church hushed dark a ruin and all of us inside it. (The city's a brute the sky is a brute though the day is calm and clear and mild strain to comfort console but there's no dispersing this. O incidental fragile beloved one, chance of recovery none.)   •  The city of Paris has you in mind tonight— Let its bridges lift you up. Let the city of Paris write you a letter, the men of Paris open their windows, tending their gardens of giant snapdragons. Let the city perceive you. It is infinite and slow, it will have you back. The beds of Paris are made for you, the city of Paris is sending you steak and water, wine and eggs, it has cafés for you, a broad-flowing river and many crossbreezes. When vaulting under, when the body has shown you its foul airless destination, let the Saint-Sulpice declare living and visible your clever spirit your kindness. The tables of Paris will give you food here are some macarons pink-sweet with jam. (Rude-blooming the flowers of Paris as if snout to blossom could uncover could reinvoke.)   •  How is it to have a body today and walk in this city in the sun, a bit shocked to find ourselves actually here with books and teacups and ghosts and time ample, a slow greedy feast. If there's no one to walk with all over this city you can go to the movies can hurry stop buy a bunch of lavender, a book, pastry be someone distinct true personal and new. The mind rivers out, angle by angle. He was sick and now nowhere and soon the cities and soon the planet and yet the decadence and festivals boys running, couples swooning on the bridge. Tonight G's attached to a city, where I carry him along in my head, ordering dinner, sitting in the square drawing the sheet up over the body that happens now to be lying there.   •  How emptily the time goes, how rosé. The waiter, he had a frank stare. He wanted to be admired and I admired him. In the café everyone was alive. Everyone was eating, the garden full and flowering wet and pleasure-dome the earth the days go on and G not and G just and how can a person and now one less and she crumpled thing now as if each were an original grief now gather here and look. (Everyone this summer is obsessed with Michael Jackson. A cold place in the center feel it. In central Paristhe French are saying "moon walk.")   •  I drank the tiny coffee but it didn't work tried the pills that are supposed to make you happy the pills that are supposed to make you free. The man on the corner is a flasher his skin bright blue. In front of the Métro grandpa is dancing. When he looked up there were so many cracks in the sky.   •  Walked until the caffeine wore off. Until the buzzing stopped. Walked. Food everywhere and everywhere people putting it into their mouths. Butter and cream, fruit and sugar, coffee and wine. People on the island swirling gelato. The private inner sweetness. When the rain comes down you can feel less lonely. You can feel cozy even shut alone into your private room. When the sun comes out it's a disappointment. Who on earth can live up to it. The days go on despair and elation in alternation. Blazoned swinging moods so big they bewilder. And what is the arc of life. And up ahead nothing. On the other side what.   •  The city says just live with the mystery don't fight it. This is your life, life using you. The great diminishment coming— You're not the only one who feels it. It's not like you're any more mortal now you were always mortal. So try a moment of lightness like when the red bird appeared on the terrace and it wasn't mystical wasn't anyone returning just was   •  The old man in the wheelchair smelling of garlic the little dog in the grocery cart the homeless dog and his homeless owner the dog's sad-looking face he stays all day in the grocery cart the sympathy one feels for a dog helpless in his dog life the sympathy one feels for a man helpless in his man life for the grey cat leashed to the fire hydrant the sympathy one feels for a woman alone at the dinner table. In the hot courtyards Paris lowered its awnings. It's hard to walk in a skirt in this weather the wind catches you. A gradual slowing and she turned transparent just a window, just a sensation of walking, a blister.
Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one running in the yard pulse pulse the absence. Leave them not to the empty yards. They resembled a family. Long quiet hours. Sometimes one was angry sometimes someone called her "wife" someone's hair receding. An uptick in the hormone canopy embodied a restlessness and oh what to do with it. (How she arrived in a hush in a looking away and not looking.) It had been some time since richness intangible and then they made a whole coat of it. Meanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale. A mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along. Borderless and open the days go on—
I once loved a boy who built batteries for pacemakers, miniature machines that could glint a heart to life.  There were no secrets  in his fingertips; to make sure,  I held them to the light. Even so, he had learned a way to make a pulse. He might have set it down like a wind-up toy:  a small bear stomping  across the table, escape  on its mechanical mind. Now, my own steps stutter when I sneak into the hospital and figure out how  to bring you back. With me  comes every girl I've ever been,  holding hands to let the current shiver through us like spun sunlight: flaxen, fizzy, a memory of miles, of measure,  time tangled together, copper wires  in my palm. Hello, gorgeous,  give me your hand. We've been waiting for you. So rise, girl.Wake up.
If you believe in snow, you have to believe in water as it's meant to be, loosed from clouds arranged like asphodel. Because that's what it's like to come back: a slow surfacing, memory spiraling away. You can sleep so long, whole seasons are forgotten like a hospital-room plaster, spidered with cracks in Portugal shapes. You can love sleep like water, love your heavy limbs pushing river and ocean aside. After Maggie woke, the doctors had her stringing bracelets of semiprecious beads, and she couldn't stop counting the kinds of blue. Here, summer, in the high shade of a ginko, she pulls up a handful of stones on silk and we drink grapefruit seltzer, listening to the tinny chime of bubbles rising to the air. She can't remember autumn, so we tell her someday this tree will drop its fan-shaped leaves all at once, golden in the October crush of every plant's frantic strip show. Later we'll see mountains through the scrim of empty branches, and if we can look straight up into the atmosphere, see the same plain old sky revolving. When we ask Maggie what color it is she always says iolite, picturing beads like raindrops, shining azure on the table. She forgets that sometimes things don't stay where you leave them, that the sky fades to white even before snow begins to fall. It's hard, but we have to tell her even sapphires don't glow blue without some kind of help.
You can't argue beauty's not an accident, the particular heft and angle of a chromosome's spin. A tarted spangle, bright lanyard twist, the slip of cells weighting this boat uneven from stern to prow. We're all skittery as marbles on a marble floor. Beauty stays, then goes; it fades, we say, something about years and sun, the nights we slept in makeup and left mascara like ashes on the pillowcase. We burned through every one of our dreams. I wasn't always a stepmother, you know. There were whole years when I was a girl. But now, these ladies sell me moisturizer, stand close in their lab coats, pretending at science in a fog of perfume. They wield a contour brush and my cheekbone pops. The magic settles uneasy; it turns out fairy dust was always fake. And the lipstick's made from beetles, shells crushed vermillion. My color is Fleshpot, they say, it's Folie or Fixation. It's Wilderness; it's Artificial Earth. They can't quite make themselves care. We'll waste it, they know, whatever we've been given.
Her Focusing on blanks, A, B, C, all of above. Your eyes lock on mine. Brain now a washing machine— facts, letters tumble and spin.  Him Tests are less trouble for me since I have met you. Is it possible? Can having you in my life increase the size of my brain?
He laughed with a laugh that he wished was his laugh, but everyone knew it wasn’t.   When he laughed he would ask, "Does that sound like my laugh?" and everyone said, "It doesn’t."   The laugh that he laughed that wasn’t his laugh went "Hardy har har, guffaw!" The laugh that he laughed that he wished wasn’t his went, "Hruck, sniffle-hick, hee-haw!"
I sang my songs so much that they became the soundtrack for my dreams, the melody of my moods, a room I lived in, and a balm for my wounds.   I sang my songs enough to know them backward and forward, enough to wonder if they could lift me from hometown haunts to center stage.   I’d sung my songs enough to think I could take on Baltimore’s best talent at the Harlem Theatre Amateur Hour and maybe even win.   If you sing a song enough, it can go to your head that way.
The bleachers are packed full. Everyone’s watching. What if I fall? What if my time is too slow? One more rider, then me.  "Next rider up!" I click my tongue, push my boots hard in the stirrups, heels down. My hands are sweaty, but I hold the reins right. Ready, girl. Ride!   I bust through the gate, spin round the first barrel, shoot to the second and circle around tight, leaning so hard, my stirrup kicks dirt. Streak to the last barrel— spin, fly, race down the middle. Home!
Jack was quite nimble, Jack was quite quick, Jack gave the beanstalk A mighty big kick.   Down came the giant— GIGANTIC fall— Bottoms up in a crater, Thus ending it all.
Gather 'round, ye scurvy mates, I'm signing on a crew. You there! Can ye tie a knot? Ye’ll do. I'd say you've snatched a purse or two. Ye'll do. Does the thought of plundered gold make ye shiver? Make ye bold? Ye'll do. Ha! You’re rotten through and through! Ye'll do. Phew! You stinking, drunken lout! You'd whack your uncle’s gizzard out! Well step right up! Beyond a doubt ye’ll do!
Indigenous Elvis works security: Chief Joseph hair, blue-black and pomped, turquoise and shell dangling from one ear, silver chunks of rings on every bronze knuckle.   Indigenous Elvis works security: X-ray glances at your backpacks, laptops, empty still-moist shoes.   Indigenous Elvis waves me to his line. A perfect gentlemen at all times, gingerly lifting my naked phone, holding the line as I return my computer and extra undies to my briefcase.   Next line, next flight, Indigenous Elvis eases in too close, asks, "Where you headed this time?" Subtle tango, I lean away, wondering what it is he saw first gave me away— My beaded barrettes in their travel case? A slight turn to my eyes?   Oh, mortification when I get him! Indigenous Elvis, at security, a third time. He lifts my carry-on, maneuvers my hand, gestures me close to ask, "How is my sweetheart?" Then against my neck, so my hairs rise with his sight, "How’s my sweetheart doing …  your sister … ? ... the one that got away."
I once was a child am a child am someone's child  not my mother's not my father's the boss  gave us special treatment treatment for something  special a lollipop or a sticker glitter from the toy box the better we did the better the plastic prize made  in China one year everyone got a spinning top  one year everyone got a tap on their shoulders  one year everyone was fired everyone fired but me one year we all lost our words one year  my father lost his words to a stroke  a stroke of bad luck stuck his words  used to be so worldly his words fired him let him go without notice can they do that  can she do that yes she can in this land she can  once we sang songs around a piano this land is your land  this land is my land in this land someone always owns the land in this land someone who owns  the land owns the buildings on the land owns  the people in the buildings unless an earthquake  sucks the land in like a long noodle
The boss is sitting at the desk the boss doesn’t look  at her the boss is waiting for the black telephone  to ring she also waits for a ring from the boss he is  waiting for the files from her   her blue dress like a reused file folder around  her body her hands tight around the files  the filing cabinet might eat her might take her hand off  the boss might eat her the boss   wants her but the boss wants money more just a little bit  more the boss always seems to want  the money a bit more the boss doesn’t hear  there are taxis outside waiting   for all the women down on the street across the street  a boss prepares for bed another boss above him  in apartment X rotates a Q-tip in his ear before sex  despite instructions on the box we took   my father out of the paper the living will the letters  with their little capes will leave the paper  who will take care of my children later who will take care  of my father the will will take care   of no one a piece of paper cannot take care of anyone I  cannot take care of everyone on some nights  I wake in a panic and can’t tell if I am dead or alive  this year I dye my hair so I won’t have to die
Aphra Behn is not wearing all her clothes in some part of South America nobody knows. Everyone is polite, and not. Maybe she left off her petticoats, her skirts look limp. She coughs. Of course her bosom is bare. He's bats   about her, also noble and misunderstood — that’s too much culture for you. His black skin is just skin, what with his wealth, frisson, and all those bearers and banners. The play is predominant, the manor-   house-reach. What she makes of it — not of husbands, not even of the rights of humans richer-than- thou, the local gentry who scheme more than they breed — is insolence, not to bore us. What is real is real, she says, wearing   what he wants with Damn the insects biting. His type tends to the florid—strange how everyone speaks well of him, then how chains become him — who says that? — and someone dies, someone like her father who fueled a nice   plantation with witty wives and loneliness and slaves enough to drive the horses into pantaloons and full sleeves— or play. Aphra grins at us, in disrepute as always, sailing to England on a petticoat.
Always fatal, Tay-Sachs disease affects only Eastern European children.  For R.N.B. Over the waves of his chest, you watch the sun go up, again. How accidentally the birds cross it! How seemingly accidental.   What random choices led you to him—your darling from the same steppes as Zhivago's, and your own.   Then he's dressed, and you're almost. Leaning over, he pulls your slip up to put his hand over that fat part of you, where swims the swimmer. Enter  Tay and Sachs, two men good at identifying  a certain kind of certain death  due to a certain mix of genes  of children with certain parents.   Today you go to determine your chances, rather, its chances, all euphemism unable to cover the chance red spot on the growing retina.   After your doctor has his way, you can see on the screen the little swimmer trying to escape, holding the needle with both hands,  just reflex.  The verdict takes time to swell and ripen. The doctor offers his only balm, a curse: knowledge without antidote. All you know   is that the immortals throw no bones, that you inherit nothing but genes and bravery, both faltering. You trot back   to work and your new belly swirls with the fetal pig you took the eyes from, grade ten. To market, to market. You pull your goddamn shrinking coat   around you. Nothing like the stir of life that has no chance. You shrug. It’s only the size of your finger, you don’t care—    But knowing at the end of ten hours’ pitched screaming, your insides reversing, you get  nothing—    What goes where with death? You know all about life. You majored in biology, pirouetted through the wedding night.   Does it make sounds yet? Choose happiness but accept the truth: the child might die, you tell your husband.  Suffer and die.   In the three-week wait you type and each hammer moves the days along. Waiting, every word from everyone hurts, every Good day,    careless or concerned, every word. The only sympathy you want is the same cruelty shared, all else grates. Inside, it spins—in fear?   What you must swallow is the sugar cube of your continuing, the inescapable desire to pee that stirs you mornings, hours before dawn.   But if,  at the end of these weeks of waiting, the white-masked priests come back bearing no news, which is their best,   you will have brushed off death, rimed him bright and acceptable   and seen it slant. Either way.  That is, what happens doesn’t matter. You eat. You lie down. The sun shrinks.  The daily din you’re thankful for   rescinds its paper currency that nothing backs up.  Your husband puts on a pot to boil, and another. He can’t feel it inside, though he’s eaten the same sour apple, bearing half the genes,   those underclothes, the bra, the brief of the body. You are dumb before his helplessness. The cord to belly to cord will not be broken,   ripped untimely as it may be. Mama has happened  and the rocking horse of your heart heaves on.
The exhausted dream I live in  is scattered with teeth, the little  tombstones of Freud that, plowed under,  grow up warriors.  My son buries his between pillow and case so no one  can exchange them for foundling dollars—  he wants to string them together,  the miser.   The rule is you lose a tooth for every child.  The new baby grinds,  gnashes, butts at the inexplicable ache inside—  the dog that won’t shake off.  Yet he gums prettily between howls.So smile! repeats his jack o'lanterned brother,  as I do, falsely,   as Death does.
The stones we have thrown I hear fall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley confused actions of the moment fly howling from tree-top to tree-top, quieting in air thinner than now's, gliding like swallows from mountain-top to mountain-top till they reach the furthest plateaus along the edge of existence. Where all our deeds fall glass-clear to no ending except ourselves.
Milij Balakirev 1837-1910, Russian Composer The black grand piano, the gleaming spider stood trembling in the midst of its music-net. In the concert hall a land was emerging where the stones were no heavier than dew. But Balakirev fell asleep during the music and dreamed a dream about the tsar's carriage. It rolled along over the cobblestones straight into the crow-cawing dark. He sat alone in the cab and looked out but at the same time ran alongside in the road. He knew that the trip had been long and his watch showed years, not hours. There was a field where the plow lay and the plow was a bird taking flight. There was a bay where the ship lay ice-bound, lights out, with people on deck. The carriage glided across that ice and the wheels spun and spun with a sound of silk. A lesser battleship: Sevastopol. He was aboard. The crew came forward. "You won't have to die if you can play." They showed him a peculiar instrument. It looked like a tuba, or a phonograph, or a part to some obscure machine. Scared-stiff and helpless he understood: this is the instrument that drives the warship. He turned to the sailor nearest him, desperately signaled with his hands and begged: "Make the sign of the cross like me, cross yourself!" The sailor stared somberly like a blind man, stretched his arms out, sunk his head down— he hung as if nailed to the air. The drums beat. The drums beat. Applause! Balakirev woke up from his dream. The applause-wings pattered around the hall. He watched the man at the grand piano rise. Outside the streets lay blacked-out by the strike. The carriages rolled swiftly through the darkness.
The jay streaks through the lilacs  in color clash. I note down: Invent  outdoor birdswing  so birds drunk on berries fall off in plaid  in front of my window.  I file it. After all,   the pussy willow’s barely tufted—  I have time.  At the drain, lifting its feet,  a Modigliani bird—another invention? The brook agrees  so brookishly, gulping at runoff  like a bear in spring,  like my husband. He didn’t trust my patents:    the squirrel-free gutter chain  the collapsing arthritic’s cane  a lever for pulling old stumps  in heavy rain.   But every act harbors a corresponding gadget.    It is that way with God: adjusting the acorn, locking the tree.  With the womb, He was clearly Italianate, the bulbous lines, the excess.  I often think of Him  humming Beatles songs like me, over  six Mason jars of pickling— my offspring?  The dog laughs. You heard it: a choke, then black gums, a frothing irony.  He’s all wet from rescuing bones from the brook. He drops them in, then goes in after. The brook’s rising with bones and I’m afraid  the electricity will fail. Will the dog    save me with his laughing?  That’s what this invention’s for: the automatic rosebush waterer,  hooked to the sun and this wheel, in perpetuity. Once a pirate working on my outboard told me, Betty, better sand  trickling in the hourglass than a shifting dune.  Even the Sudanese plant borders of aloe against the drifts.  But I like the look of roses.    Oh, that’s the husband at the door, scratching. Nights his furry self stands naked  before me, until the dog removes his stuffing.  O bear! Only by opening  the blinds do I see he’s bleeding.  It’s him, not me, aching  with overdue maternity.  A simple drawerful of cobwebs  kept for emergency does for him,  self-sticking,    then together we apprise  the chimney,  holding hands and chatting about the soot stains.  That was in winter before he died, the deft  air stealing all we were speaking.    Yesterday  a patent came for my speech retrieval unit,  an unusual event, even for me, because  the government usually can’t get past the drawings. And these were intricate:  I had the duck by the neck, her feet  in food coloring, each step  inked in. It all made sense—listen to the ducks now. And just in time for the aspect—  ghosts are aspects, aren’t they?  Of all but speech I have memory,  that one sense shy of mimicry.    In the spring, now, in fact, I take the blackfly larvae off rocks  in the rapids.  On toast, pre-maggot, the very eggs  of mortality, eating them I figure  I can lure Death itself, a raccoon washing and washing in the dark,  and from there, patent the trap.  I’ll be rich if its works.  Works, go the frogs, works, works.
Rushing rushing water's rumbling old hypnosis. The river's flooding the car-graveyard, glittering behind the masks. I grab hold of the bridge railing. The bridge: a large iron bird sailing past death.
This forest in May. It haunts my whole life: the invisible moving van. Singing birds.  In silent pools, mosquito larvae's furiously dancing question marks. I escape to the same places and same words. Cold breeze from the sea, the ice-dragon's licking  the back of my neck while the sun glares. The moving van is burning with cool flames.
1 The white butterfly in the park is being read by many. I love that cabbage-moth as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself! At dawn the running crowds set our quiet planet in motion. Then the park fills with people. To each one, eight faces polished like jade, for all  situations, to avoid making mistakes. To each one, there's also the invisible face reflecting "something you don't talk about." Something that appears in tired moments and is as rank as a gulp of viper schnapps with its long scaly aftertaste. The carp in the pond move continuously, swimming while they sleep, setting an example for the faithful: always in motion.  2 It's midday. Laundry flutters in the gray sea-wind high over the cyclists who arrive in dense schools. Notice the labrinths on each side! I'm surrounded by written characters that I can't interpret, I'm illiterate through and through. But I've paid what I owe and have receipts for everything. I've accumulated so many illegible receipts. I'm an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can't fall to the ground. And a gust from the sea gets all these receipts rustling. 3  At dawn the trampling hordes set our quiet planet in motion. We're all aboard the street, and it's as crammed as the deck of a ferry. Where are we headed? Are there enough teacups? We should consider ourselves lucky  to have made it aboard this street! It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia. Hovering behind each of us who walks here is a cross that wants to catch up with us,  pass us, unite with us. Something that wants to sneak up on us from behind, put its hands over our eyes and  whisper "Guess who!" We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't  know about.
I Two old men, father-and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas, he who changes everything he touches to Wagner. The ocean's green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors. Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before, his face a white flag. The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way. II A window in the palazzo flies open and everyone grimaces in the sudden draft. Outside on the water the trash gondola appears, paddled by two one-oared bandits. Liszt has written down some chords so heavy, they ought to be sent off to the mineralological institute in Padua for analysis. Meteorites! Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down to the Brownshirt years. The gondola is heavy-laden with the future's huddled-up stones. III Peep-holdes into 1990. March 25th. Angst for Lithuania. Dreamt I visited a large hospital. No personnel. Everyone was a patient. In the same dream a newborn girl who spoke in complete sentences. IV Beside the son-in-law, who's a man of the times, Liszt is a moth-eaten grand seigneur. It's a disguise. The deep, that tries on and rejects different masks, has chosen this one just for him— the deep that wants to enter people without ever showing its face. V Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his suitcase himself through sleet and sunshine and when his time comes to die, there will be no one to meet him at the station. A mild breeze of gifted cognac carries him away in the midst of a commission. He always has commissions. Two thousand letters a year! The schoolboy who writes his misspelled word a hundred times before he's allowed  to go home. The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VI Back to 1990. Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain. Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf. Dreamt I had drawn piano keys on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute. The neighbors came over to listen. VII The clavier, which kept silent through all of Parsifal (but listened), finally has  something to say. Sighs...ospiri... When Liszt plays tonight he holds the sea-pedal pressed down so the ocean's green force rises up through the floor and flows together with all the  stone in the building. Good evening, beautiful deep! The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VIII Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late. Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask. Whoever the teacher was, no one could say.
I One day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty, the bay's cold grave rose up through her arms and into her life. Her tears froze into spectacles. The island raised itself by its grass and the herring-flag waved in the deep. II And the swarm of small pox caught up with him, settled down onto his face. He lies and stares at the ceiling. How it had rowed up through the silence. The now's eternally flowing stain, the now's eternally bleeding end-point.
I. Here is a place where declarations are made/where the heart takes precedence the gleam goes bland This is the heart part/intense improvisation on the I/THOU axis pity the poor actors (darlings)dust in their throats (choking) dialogue ancient (concentrated chatter dictated by clouds) click of whispers dammed up phrases {mythologizing always) Moans move through their limbs like wind through Trees talking mad talk 'cross the illuminated Avenues of hard cities. II. Take the skin Take off the skin Remove the vital organs one by one especially the heart What is left The skeleton The skeleton is made of calcium magnesium, phosphorous et cetera: an amazing catalogue of chemicals You are holding in your arms an amazing catalogue of chemicals The elements clash tenderly Sparking compounds that move like eels Under touch. III. Dime falls, your voice rises (fevered) It's keen, the way the wind whips this Garbage up and around like a father Swinging his baby we are holding hands And yes, giggling no force can stop us now We are singing all the James Brown songs We know helpess off-key, but exhilarated Columbus Avenue breakdown: how the puddles In the sidewalks radiate splendor/glass Broken against high-rise buildings beckon We are hungry the shifting children salsa And you may be our feast, please linger You offer me your laughter I take the sweat from y our cheeks and hum. IV. Taste like tears—sea flaked and heated— Taste like try again and get nowhere, Maybe, this is the sonnet that mimes itself Sequences silent and perceptive The "might have saids" The stomach-eating rage The power of conversation is in its Possibilities of Interpretation (here's where the mime becomes important because the words sound so dumb) And here's where the anxiety dance gets choreographed. It goes like this: You turn clockwise. I turn Counter-Clockwise. We stop, stumble Resolve our steps. Begin again. V. You slipped into something dangerous after attending to your intimate conferences Thirsty friends forever requesting water Or is it blood they want? Your blood.  Somebody's screaming. Is it me? Here on the side street being a sideshow For passersby. You put on your silver armor. I have only my quaint devotion. It is not enough. You say I can't eat your food, baby, but I sitll like your cooking. Did I trip? Did you? That Mingus record is still revolving. You smile serenely. I can barely breathe. VI. If I could waste myself, I'd do it here In public. Curse your name till my tongue bled. The same tongue that searched out the darkest spot on your back and licked it like chocolate. Curse your name like you were some Broken god in need of further profaning. But I am no good at playing: victim. Sadness is so private. These tears on the Uptown Express. Take that tired song off the constant stereo. It keeps reminding me That what brought me to you was music. You said you never lied to me. Fucker. You take the exit sign home with you. But I won't become invisible.
It's all foreplay, really-this walk through the French Quarter exploring souvenir shops, each of them carefully deranged, as if dust were to settle only at perfect intervals. Yes to the vetiver fan that smells sweeter than sandalwood or cedar. No to the mammy doll dinner bells. No to the mammy dolls whose sewn smiles are as fixed as the lives of too many poor Black women here: motherhood at twelve, drugged, abandoned by fifteen, dead by twenty (suicide, murder) so easily in Desire. And yet, their voices sweeten the snaking air, providing the transvestites their proper Muses, all of whom have streets named for them in the Garden District. A soft heat settles on Terpsichore, just inside the gay bar where the owner's pink flamingos complement silly songs on the rescued Rockola. Who can dance to that Lorne Greene ballad, "Ringo"? Dixie beer is the beer of choice; marijuana the cheapest drug. Relaxation is key, since it's all a matter of waiting for the right body to stumble toward you. Lust perfumes parties in the projects, barstool chatter at the Hyatt, lazy kissing on the median strip stretching down Tchoupitoulas. If Professor Longhair were alive, he'd teach a lesson in seamless motion: the perfect slide of a man's hand down a  woman's back; a lesson you learned long ago before you met me. We are making love as we did before in Austin and Manhattan. But in this room on this costly bed our lovemaking starts out the slowest grind, then, like this city's weather, goes from hot to hotter, from moist to rainstorm wet. You're tall, A., and where there should be tribal markings there are scars-football, basketball, mid-sixties grind parties where something always got out of hand. There's the perfect amen. You're your own gospel. And you bring good news to me-the way you enter me Like grace, the way you say my name, a psalm. No. That's not it. It's the engineer in you that gets me. Your search for the secret line that goes straight to the center of the earth. Deeper and deeper you go until there's no earth left in me. And we hum and moan a song as old as our selves gone back. There are too many souvenirs in your eyes. Gifts given too often, too hastily, never opened. Outside a city sprawls its heat, seeks out every pore, licks every moment of sweat as we shiver in this chilly room taking each other's measure. We say good-bye again and again. As if every kiss, every touch we make will shadow All our celebrations. And they do.
Fat, face the color of blanc on blanc, smelling of cheap tobacco and many unwashed garments, from the other end of the car, the unmistakable melody of La vi en rose scratched against tender ears of Parisian commuters. "Not La vi en rose again", said the young Frenchman facing me. I understood every word he said. The old woman singing was no tiny sparrow, no waif. Her corpulent canine companion was equally uncouth. She sang Piaf's signature song with a hostile gusto, each syllable enunciated loudly. We sniggered as the singing voice came closer. So close we began to sing along, conspirators, smiling. And we welcomed the doleful silence at the song's inevitable end. I gave her a centime or was it two? She deserved it. Was she blind? Did it matter? As for me, I am weary of speaking shattered Spanish with  Argentinean intellectuals and outmoded American slang with the Moroccan grocer and his  cousins on the Boulevard Saint-Michel near rue du Val-de-Grâce And I cannot seem to count past the number, sept! Gloved hands push apart the Metro's doors. It is journey's end. I try singing Piaf's mysterious refrain, grateful for my own soulful silly version on the walk towards the rue Henri-Barbusse, a short slice of street named for a revolutionary or was he a pirate philosopher? Tired and cheered outside my American language, I am puzzled with the battered glamour of this city built for electric illuminations, swift flirtations, as I follow the paths to dead poets shaped in solemn statuary harboring the austere lawns of the Jardin du Luxembourg.
My memory of a perfect scent: pine, sage, and cypress; My friends' faith in the power of rough and winding paths to take me up a mountain and bring me back. Specimens plucked from that mountain's pastures: Indian paintbrush, sego lily, ordinary wildflowers. How I got them is a story of friendship and passion Nancy, now a doctor, once a shy sophmore in college Her husband Mike, the second, better one, and their obsession with the Great Outdoors—hence an Idaho address. Boise's Northend is a throwback to neighborhoods American—nice  homes Next to two-story garden apartments down the street from a   mansion. Bikes and dogs and hand-pushed lawn mowers. Where they dwell is a bungalow that spirits Memphis, Tennessee circa 1971: The Who blasting off a turntable, marijuana-scented air, boys with  long hair, girls wearing their boyfriends' blue jeans, bourbon and acid. Paperbacks, record albums, text books piled up—azaleas on the  parkway; a howl of buzzing bees late spring just before graduation. Their bungalow has dueling computers and a real backyard. While Nancy and Mike's boxes are slowly being unpacked, Their bicycles are carefully racked inside their front door. Everyone is a thief out West. If you leave your bikes on the porch They disappear. If you find water, someone else will divert it. There are those who fight about the wind. Others the sun. All angling for rights—mineral, water, air—that only comes with  political power. Oh, my friends who love to hike, to ski, to bike and me, they love Are driving me from Boise to Ketchum through mountain and   valley beauty. High desert heat is clear, dry and when your body rises out of a   chilly car, BLAM. From there you enter another air conditioning zone: a general store at the edge of mountain lore. This place has everything from Bibles to good bourbon. I almost bought a foot long sausage. I almost bought a gun. I did buy cowboy postcards, mostly made for fun. Food and security. Winter just over the ridge, four weeks hence. I used to watch Death Valley Days. Death was hinted, but not shown—the wagon turned over, The wagon train a going. O, those long-suffering white people fearful of Indians and scared of  bandits, desperate for shade, for water, for land flowing milk and honey. Hard-bitten men and sad-eyed women trekking. How grand those verdant acres were to be. What they got was land just green enough for wandering herds of  long-horned beasts and no where to farm, no where to hide. Today, the wind machines whip around: BIG ENERGY. Horses gambol and graze on that patch of land or this keen slope. No wheat and corn, not even dope grows here. But silver, gold, treasures unknown lode these mountains inviting speculation, misery, and bad legislation. A few miles up from Sun Valley, we enter a trail. Mike and Nancy smile and cajole. Straw hat and baseball cap attest to sun's plenty. Their walking sticks to the rocks' ready challenge to ankles and limbs. Our water pouches are overflowing. What were my friends thinking? We slip and slide on the side of this mountain and step aside for the sculpted women in tank tops and biker shorts—trotting as  fast as Nancy and Mike's favorite dog She runs ahead following the blonde beauties until all is shadow. We greet each other with glee. I am the novice hiker. I am afraid of falling into thin air. One large Black woman with a bum knee. What were they  thinking? She will love the smell. Pine, sage, and cypress. She will love the sound. Wind shakes aspens. Water crinkles rock She will love the sight. Wildflowers—whites, yellows, purples and  reds: Indian paintbrush, sego lily, the wily cinquefoil. When friends give you what you need, what more can you ask? Oh the pleasure in a mountain's power to quiet a panicked heart. The glade refined. Hawk's home, wolf's dream, bears far away. Stewards of American beauty—these are the paths my friends make  in wild places —the rise and fall of future walks. I salute their obsession for Idaho's red undulating hills. Whose mountain ranges east to west like those in the Himalayas says a guidebook, but ours is a different story—in this young  mountain, on these new hills, circumspect is the American West. Where people steal a drop of ore, a native flower, a piece of splendor day in and day out.
A child is something else again. Wakes up in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words, in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm, instant light, instant darkness. A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet. They're training him to be a polite Job, to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given, to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away. A child is vengeance. A child is a missile into the coming generations. I launched him: I'm still trembling. A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence, kissing him in his sleep, hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles. A child delivers you from death. Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.
I was wondering why that guy wore the blanket coat, bone choker, rock watch, woven buckle, quilled Stetson— I was wondering why he wore that beaded vest, like a ledger drawing or a Winter Count, its skinny figure forever sneaking after two bison around belly to back, around back to belly— I was wondering why, when he said,I wear these getups every day—Every day, because these thingsare sacred, these things are prayer. Then I knew I could live this life If I had blue horses painted around and around me, shells and beads like rain in my ear praying Prairie open in me at stoplight, hard city, last call, bank line, coffee break, shopping cart, keycode,Prarie open in mePrarie open in me every day every day every day.
I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the expanding ring. No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark, But the tree is lifted by this inward work And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering. So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours And strikes its roots deep in the house alone: The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors, White curtains softly and continually blown As the free air moves quietly about the room; A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall— These are the dear familiar gods of home, And here the work of faith can best be done, The growing tree is green and musical. For what is happiness but growth in peace, The timeless sense of time when furniture Has stood a life's span in a single place, And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir The shining leaves of present happiness? No one has heard thought or listened to a mind, But where people have lived in inwardness The air is charged with blessing and does bless; Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
Saturday I ran to Mytilene. Bushes and grass along the glass-still way Were all dabbled with rain And the road reeled with shattered skies. Towards noon an inky, petulant wind Ravelled the pools, and rinsed the black grass round them. Gulls were up in the late afternoon And the air gleamed and billowed And broadcast flung astringent spray  All swordy-silver. I saw the hills lie brown and vast and passive. The men of Mytilene waited restive Until the yellow melt of sun. I shouted out my news as I sped towards them That all, rejoicing, could go down to dark. All nests, with all moist downy young Blinking and gulping daylight; and all lambs Four-braced in straw, shivering and mild; And the first blood-root up from the ravaged beaches Of the old equinox; and frangible robins' blue Teethed right around to sun: These first we loudly hymned; And then The hour of genesis When the first moody firmament Swam out of Arctic chaos, Orbed solidly as the huge frame for this Cramped little swaddled creature's coming forth To slowly, foolishly, marvellously Discover a unique estate, held wrapt Away from all men else, which to embrace Our world would have to stretch and swell with strangeness. This made us smile, and laugh at last. There was Rejoicing all night long in Mytilene.
In the ancient days, when the first quiver of speech came to my lips, I ascended the holy mountain and spoke unto God, saying, “Master, I am thy slave. Thy hidden will is my law and I shall obey thee for ever more.” But God made no answer, and like a mighty tempest passed away. And after a thousand years I ascended the holy mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “Creator, I am thy creation. Out of clay hast thou fashioned me and to thee I owe mine all.” And God made no answer, but like a thousand swift wings passed away. And after a thousand years I climbed the holy mountain and spoke unto God again, saying, “Father, I am thy son. In pity and love thou hast given me birth, and through love and worship I shall inherit thy kingdom.” And God made no answer, and like the mist that veils the distant hills he passed away. And after a thousand years I climbed the sacred mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “My God, my aim and my fulfillment; I am thy yesterday and thou are my tomorrow. I am thy root in the earth and thou art my flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun.” Then God leaned over me, and in my ears whispered words of sweetness, and even as the sea that enfoldeth a brook that runneth down to her, he enfolded me. And when I descended to the valleys and the plains God was there also.
My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear—a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The “I” in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable. I would not have thee believe in what I say nor trust in what I do—for my words are naught but thy own thoughts in sound and my deeds thy own hopes in action. When thou sayest, “The wind bloweth eastward,” I say, “Aye it doth blow eastward”; for I would not have thee know that my mind doth not dwell upon the wind but upon the sea. Thou canst not understand my seafaring thoughts, nor would I have thee understand. I would be at sea alone. When it is day with thee, my friend, it is night with me; yet even then I speak of the noontide that dances upon the hills and of the purple shadow that steals its way across the valley; for thou canst not hear the songs of my darkness nor see my wings beating against the stars—and I fain would not have thee hear or see. I would be with night alone. When thou ascendest to thy Heaven I descend to my Hell—even then thou callest to me across the unbridgeable gulf, “My companion, my comrade,” and I call back to thee, “My comrade, my companion”—for I would not have thee see my Hell. The flame would burn thy eyesight and the smoke would crowd thy nostrils. And I love my Hell too well to have thee visit it. I would be in Hell alone. Thou lovest Truth and Beauty and Righteousness; and I for thy sake say it is well and seemly to love these things. But in my heart I laught at thy love. Yet I would not have thee see my laughter. I would laugh alone. My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect—and I, too, speak with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone. My friend, thou art not my friend, but how shall I make thee understand? My path is not thy path, yet together we walk, hand in hand.
Once there lived a man who had a valley-full of needles. And one day the mother of Jesus came to him and said: “Friend, my son’s garment is torn and I must needs mend it before he goeth to the temple. Wouldst thou not give me a needle?” And he gave her not a needle, but he gave her a learned discourse on Giving and Taking to carry to her son before he should go to the temple.
A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, “I will have a camel for lunch today.” And all morning he went about looking for camels. But at noon he saw his shadow again—and he said, “A mouse will do.”
Three men met at a tavern table. One was a weaver, another a carpenter and the third a ploughman. Said the weaver, “I sold a fine linen shroud today for two pieces of gold. Let us have all the wine we want.” “And I,” said the carpenter, “I sold my best coffin. We will have a great roast with the wine.” “I only dug a grave,” said the ploughman, “but my patron paid me double. Let us have honey cakes too.” And all that evening the tavern was busy, for they called often for wine and meat and cakes. And they were merry. And the host rubbed his hands and smiled at his wife; for his guests were spending freely. When they left the moon was high, and they walked along the road singing and shouting together. The host and his wife stood in the tavern door and looked after them. “Ah!” said the wife, “these gentlemen! So freehanded and so gay! If only they could bring us such luck every day! Then our son need not be a tavern-keeper and work so hard. We could educate him, and he could become a priest.”
Last night I invented a new pleasure, and as I was giving it the first trial an angel and a devil came rushing toward my house. They met at my door and fought with each other over my newly created pleasure; the one crying, “It is a sin!”—the other, “It is a virtue!”
Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, “Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.” Said I, “You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?” “Because,” said he, “They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”
In my youth I was told that in a certain city every one lived according to the Scriptures. And I said, “I will seek that city and the blessedness thereof.” And it was far. And I made great provision for my journey. And after forty days I beheld the city and on the forty-first day I entered into it. And lo! the whole company of the inhabitants had each but a single eye and but one hand. And I was astonished and said to myself, “Shall they of this so holy city have but one eye and one hand?” Then I saw that they too were astonished, for they were marveling greatly at my two hands and my two eyes. And as they were speaking together I inquired of them saying, “Is this indeed the Blessed City, where each man lives according to the Scriptures?” And they said, “Yes, this is that city.” “And what,” said I, “hath befallen you, and where are your right eyes and your right hands?” And all the people were moved. And they said, “Come thou and see.” And they took me to the temple in the midst of the city. And in the temple I saw a heap of hands and eyes. All withered. Then said I, “Alas! what conqueror hath committed this cruelty upon you?” And there went a murmur amongst them. And one of their elders stood forth and said, “This doing is of ourselves. God hath made us conquerors over the evil that was in us.” And he led me to a high altar, and all the people followed. And he showed me above the altar an inscription graven, and I read: “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that the whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Then I understood. And I turned about to all the people and cried, “Hath no man or woman among you two eyes or two hands?” And they answered me saying, “No, not one. There is none whole save such as are yet too young to read the Scripture and to understand its commandment.” And when we had come out of the temple, I straightway left that Blessed City; for I was not too young, and I could read the scripture.
The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top. The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.” The Evil God did not answer. And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.” “Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.” And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.” The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.
Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness; You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs, And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory. Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance, Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot And not to be trapped by withering laurels. And in you I have found aloneness And the joy of being shunned and scorned. Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield, In your eyes I have read That to be enthroned is to be enslaved, And to be understood is to be leveled down, And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed. Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion, You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences, And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings, And urging of seas, And of mountains that burn in the night, And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul. Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage, You and I shall laugh together with the storm, And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us, And we shall stand in the sun with a will, And we shall be dangerous.
“I am like thee, O, Night, dark and naked; I walk on the flaming path which is above my day-dreams, and whenever my foot touches earth a giant oak tree comes forth.” “Nay, thou art not like me, O, Madman, for thou still lookest backward to see how large a foot-print thou leavest on the sand.” “I am like thee, O, Night, silent and deep; and in the heart of my loneliness lies a Goddess in child-bed; and in him who is being born Heaven touches Hell.” “Nay, thou art not like me, O, Madman, for thou shudderest yet before pain, and the song of the abyss terrifies thee.” “I am like thee, O, Night, wild and terrible; for my ears are crowded with cries of conquered nations and sighs for forgotten lands.” “Nay, thou art not like me, O, Madman, for thou still takest thy little-self for a comrade, and with thy monster-self thou canst not be friend.” “I am like thee, O, Night, cruel and awful; for my bosom is lit by burning ships at sea, and my lips are wet with blood of slain warriors.” “Nay, thou art not like me, O, Madman; for the desire for a sister-spirit is yet upon thee, and thou has not become alone unto thyself.” “I am like thee, O, Night, joyous and glad; for he who dwells in my shadow is now drunk with virgin wine, and she who follows me is sinning mirthfully.” “Nay, thou art not like me, O, Madman, for thy soul is wrapped in the veil of seven folds and thou holdest not thy heart in thine hand.” “I am like thee, O, Night, patient and passionate; for in my breast a thousand dead lovers are buried in shrouds of withered kisses.” “Yea, Madman, art thou like me? Art thou like me? And canst thou ride the tempest as a steed, and grasp the lightning as a sword?” “Like thee, O, Night, like thee, mighty and high, and my throne is built upon heaps of fallen Gods; and before me too pass the days to kiss the hem of my garment but never to gaze at my face.” “Art thou like me, child of my darkest heart? And dost thou think my untamed thoughts and speak my vast language?” “Yea, we are twin brothers, O, Night; for thou revealest space and I reveal my soul.”
I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was. I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven. I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.
I cried to men, “I would be crucified!” And they said, “Why should your blood be upon our heads?” And I answered, “How else shall you be exalted except by crucifying madmen?” And they heeded and I was crucified. And the crucifixion appeased me. And when I was hanged between earth and heaven they lifted up their heads to see me. And they were exalted, for their heads had never before been lifted. But as they stood looking up at me one called out, “For what art thou seeking to atone?” And another cried, “In what cause dost thou sacrifice thyself?” And a third said, “Thinkest thou with this price to buy world glory?” Then said a fourth, “Behold, how he smiles! Can such pain be forgiven?” And I answered them all, and said: “Remember only that I smiled. I do not atone—nor sacrifice—nor wish for glory; and I have nothing to forgive. I thirsted—and I besought you to give me my blood to drink. For what is there can quench a madman’s thirst but his own blood? I was dumb—and I asked wounds of you for mouths. I was imprisoned in your days and nights—and I sought a door into larger days and nights. And now I go—as others already crucified have gone. And think not we are weary of crucifixion. For we must be crucified by larger and yet larger men, between greater earths and greater heavens.”
In the shadow of the temple my friend and I saw a blind man sitting alone. And my friend said, “Behold the wisest man of our land.” Then I left my friend and approached the blind man and greeted him. And we conversed. After a while I said, “Forgive my question; but since when has thou been blind?” “From my birth,” he answered. Said I, “And what path of wisdom followest thou?” Said he, “I am an astronomer.” Then he placed his hand upon his breast saying, “I watch all these suns and moons and stars.”
Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange. Nay, it is deeper than my sister’s depth and stronger than my brother’s strength, and stranger than the strangeness of my madness. Aeons upon aeons have passed since the first grey dawn made us visible to one another; and though we have seen the birth and the fullness and the death of many worlds, we are still eager and young. We are young and eager and yet we are mateless and unvisited, and though we lie in unbroken half embrace, we are uncomforted. And what comfort is there for controlled desire and unspent passion? Whence shall come the flaming god to warm my sister’s bed? And what she-torrent shall quench my brother’s fire? And who is the woman that shall command my heart? In the stillness of the night my sister murmurs in her sleep the fire-god’s unknown name, and my brother calls afar upon the cool and distant goddess. But upon whom I call in my sleep I know not. * * * Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.
Said the Eye one day, “I see beyond these valleys a mountain veiled with blue mist. Is it not beautiful?” The Ear listened, and after listening intently awhile, said, “But where is any mountain? I do not hear it.” Then the Hand spoke and said, “I am trying in vain to feel it or touch it, and I can find no mountain.” And the Nose said, “There is no mountain, I cannot smell it.” Then the Eye turned the other way, and they all began to talk together about the Eye’s strange delusion. And they said, “Something must be the matter with the Eye.”
And when my Joy was born, I held it in my arms and stood on the house-top shouting, “Come ye, my neighbours, come and see, for Joy this day is born unto me. Come and behold this gladsome thing that laugheth in the sun.” But none of my neighbours came to look upon my Joy, and great was my astonishment. And every day for seven moons I proclaimed my Joy from the house-top—and yet no one heeded me. And my Joy and I were alone, unsought and unvisited. Then my Joy grew pale and weary because no other heart but mine held its loveliness and no other lips kissed its lips. Then my Joy died of isolation. And now I only remember my dead Joy in remembering my dead Sorrow. But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.
Mid-morning Monday she is staring peaceful as the rain in that shallow back yard she wears flannel bedroom slippers she is sipping coffee she is thinking—  —gazing at the weedy bumpy yard at the faces beginning to take shape in the wavy mud in the linoleum where floorboards assert themselves Women whose lives are food breaking eggs with care scraping garbage from the plates unpacking groceries hand over hand Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front tough plastic with detachable lids Thursday morning: the garbage truck whining at 7 Friday the shopping mall open till 9 bags of groceries unpacked hand over certain hand Men whose lives are money time-and-a-half Saturdays the lunchbag folded with care and brought back home unfolded Monday morning Women whose lives are food because they are not punch-carded because they are unclocked sighing glad to be alone staring into the yard, mid-morning mid-week by mid-afternoon everything is forgotten There are long evenings panel discussions on abortions, fashions, meaningful work there are love scenes where people mouth passions sprightly, handsome, silly, manic in close-ups revealed ageless the women whose lives are food the men whose lives are money fidget as these strangers embrace and weep and mis-  understand and forgive and die and weep and embrace and the viewers stare and fidget and sigh and begin yawning around 10:30 never made it past midnight, even on Saturdays, watching their braven selves perform Where are the promised revelations? Why have they been shown so many times? Long-limbed children a thousand miles to the west hitch-hiking in spring, burnt bronze in summer thumbs nagging eyes pleadingGive us a ride, huh? Give us a ride? and when they return nothing is changed the linoleum looks older the Hawaiian Chicken is new the girls wash their hair more often the boys skip over the puddles in the GM parking lot no one eyes them with envy their mothers stoop the oven doors settle with a thump the dishes are rinsed and stacked and by mid-morning the house is quiet it is raining out back or not raining the relief of emptiness rains simple, terrible, routine at peace
didn't thank didn't wave goodbye didn't flutter the air with kisses a mound of gifts unwrapped bed unmade no appetite always elsewhere though it was raining elsewhere though strangers peopled the streets though we at home slaved and baked and wept and hung ornaments and perfumed the dark did he marvel did he thank was he grateful did he know was he human was he there always elsewhere: didn't thank didn't kiss toothbrush stiffened with unuse puppy whining in the hall car battery dead sweaters unraveled was that human? Went where?
He walked to the window stared down twenty stories to the street gaseous and dizzy as a swamp not visible at this height but there had been a street down there and he knew It came with the apartment and the guarded foyers and halls and the doorman holstered beneath the uniform the television split-screening front and rear entrances He knew it was all there and he was here twenty stories above the unsetteled swamp-mist he knew the trucks bound for the bridge were still passing near he could feel them rumbling in the soles of his feet so he knew the floor he walked on was someone's ceiling and it was all normal tonight and countable a two-year lease because a desirable with full view of river- a five-by-three balcony through the door is $200 deposit fully carpeted self-defrosting refriger- the balcony door is stuck but He can stare twenty stories down from the windowsill watching the swamp smokes curl and thin and the swamp lapping at the base and the unpaid-for miracle one inch at a time
the blood-smear across the knuckles: painless, inexplicable. once you discover it pain will begin, in miniature. never will you learn what caused it. you forget it. the telephone answered on the twelfth ring: silence without breath, cunning, stark. and then he hangs up. and you stand there, alone. then you forget. and your father's inexplicable visit: two days' notice, a ten-hour reckless drive. rains, 80 mph winds, bad luck all the way, traffic backed up, a broken windshield wiper, and no stopping him. clumsy handshakes.How are—?You seem—!How good to —!How long will—? he must leave in the morning, must get back. a gas station two blocks away repairs the wiper. did he sense death, and so he raced to us? did he already guess at his death behind those nervous fond smiles, the tumult of memories he had to bear? nothing we know can explain his visit, or the new, strange way he moved among us— touching us, squeezing our arms, smiling. the visit was an excuse. the words that surrounded our touching were an excuse. inexplicable, that the language we invent may be a means to get us closer, to allow us to touch one another, and then to back away.
I think she wanted to explain  the silence  hidden within her voice— blue egg in the nettles.  She wrote something on a rock, used the rock  to bash in the skull  of an injured deer. Bloodied swan-neck arms.  She slinks into her own viscera, a baby fox  backing into its trunkhole.The wordbone's connected to the gutbone. Meanwhile, her desire  for nobody now bucks like a rabbit  under her ground.
I haven't written in a while because I don't want to talk  about anything I've been unable to stop thinking about: the knotted thread  of bad capillaries on my retinae, money, or that my morning was ruined by the unusual tightness  of jeans around my thighs,  like the obligations of having a body so ill-fitting, oppressively snug  around an obstinate will. And while I don't want  to be distracted from this Duchamp thing I've been working on— I am itched out of reverie  over and over again  by this feeling I don't deserve my raptures anymore. So I'm sorry. I don't want to  bring you down. It's unfair to have to hear about needles and envelopes and flies  when you might just have been enjoying an iced tea outside  and when I would prefer to tell you,  really, there's a family of pheasant living  in the massive cottonwood we call the Tree of Life. The male's red, green, gold plumage  makes him look  like a Christmas present I would want to give you. So except “I hope you're well,”  that's all.
The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck.  —The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns. Dr. Peebles. The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say, I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say, That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like, Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car.  Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said, One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply, Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.
My neighbor is velvety and kicks serious game. So sweet garlic refuses to hang tight in his mouth. He pulls women to his wide chest each time as if he's won the Lotto. He rocks them gently and gentler. My neighbor is a master spooner. He knows not of desire, but only the rules of engagement. He says, I misshaving Skype on all night so I can listento your breathing. He floats in his museum, of gams, drifting from frame to frame.
As though undreaming the mountain from the sea or tweezering hands from a watch, a quick-fix change of regimes: a democracy lost to a monarchy, an empty sudden village, and elsewhere the wedding party lining up like a lost tribe of refugees. As though a reverse whisper of vows into a pageant of elegant ears when the heat in the O cooled its "till death do us" and the storm inside seething below the flowers, gowns, and cake, its own Institution.
This downpour of bad reasoning, this age-old swarm, this buzzing about town, this kick and stomp through gardens, this snag on the way to the mall, this heap and toss of fabric and strewn shoes, this tangled beauty, this I came here not knowing, here to be torched, this fumbling ecstasy, this ecstasy of fumbling, this spray of lips and fingers, this scrape of bone, this raid of private grounds, this heaving and rocking, this scream and push, this sightless hunger, this tattered perishing, this rhythmic teeth knocking, this unbearable music, this motionless grip, grimace, and groan.
for Mark Strand La Barraca Blues Suite/i. Beneath canopies of green, unionists marched doggedly outside The Embassy. Their din was no match for light lancing through leaves of madrone trees lining the Paseo then flashing off glossy black Maybachs skidding round a plaza like a monarch fleeing the paparazzi. Your voice skipped and paused like a pencil. Layers of morning pastries flaked gingerly then fell, soft as vowels, on a china plate. One learns to cherish the wizened reserve of old world manners, two blotched hands making wings of a daily paper beside us between sips of café con leche, a demeanor in short gentle as grand edifaces along this boulevard. Yet Guernica is down the street, and some windshields wear a sinister face, sometimes two. Think Goya. Just south of here, on the lower slopes of the Sierras, fields of olive groves braid the land like a Moorish head, but those sultans were kicked out long ago. In the lobby of the Hotel Urban, I wait for a cab, my obedient rolling bag like a pet beside me. I have loved again another city but Madrid is yours: her caped olés, her bullish flag, her glass pavilions and outdoor tables like a festival of unbroken laughter, our dark harbors, finding level. ii.Salobreña That stretch of mountains features white windmill blades whose slow turns are rifles aiming, for I cannot help but think of Lorca's killing between here and the  village Alfaçar, and the firing squad's gun pops are that Flamencan dancer's heel stomps. I bring back, too, her brisk hand claps and the cantor's Andalusian moans like dried sticks, or bones crumbling in his throat. Only souvenir shops and steep winding streets accrete in this region's stacked brochures. Her dress spills across the restaurant's floor like a red shadow, darker than billboards of black bulls high above roadways, motionless but seeming to gallop like Franco's brigades. All seeing is an act of war. Tanks and artillery or Spanish castles and mosques? I choose to lose, and beneath a watercolorist's sky study Didi's splendor, nude against the unruffled backdrop of the Alboran Sea whose waves match my sighs and bomb this beach, launching sprays of white duds. iii.Córdoba, Mezquita Even if he'd pulled over to study Andalusia's road signs, after one thousand and one nights, he still could not make out its calligraphic script, its vertical lines, its dots, marks like smoke stilled from incense, its curled sand soft Arabic, but this city's voice has coffins and carnations, and its hoarse singing shoots through him like twelve bars of earthen road that lengthens into a labyrinth of knowing blood beneath black skin. More echoes: the Alhambra sent him back to the seraglio of his youth where a Moorish guard stood in a museum, unfazed by a harem's rising laughter behind palace doors. Here are pillars and banded arches to once again imagine the body passing through like a key into infinity. Was this the answer to his ghetto past? But why travel so far? Since a child, even in sleep, he voyaged and broke free, tossing dice in dreams, once below deck on a caravel next to grains of paradise. He's collecting a thousand faces. He's moving beneath eyelids, turning time into flesh. Don't judge him. The courtyard's orange trees where once he washed like a morisco are teaching his tongue the craft.
I have not disappeared. The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is full of my thinking. An archbishop prays for my soul, even though we met only once, and even then, he was busy waving at a congregation. The ticking clocks in Vermont sway back and forth as though sweeping up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors, and what comes up are the great paragraphs of dust, which also carry motes of my existence. I have not disappeared. My wife quivers inside a kiss. My pulse was given to her many times, in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip in olive oil is communion with our ancestors, who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have given me freedom which is a crater I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs, a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic, makes me appear to those who think I've disappeared. It's too bad war makes people disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade into the mountains on a forest trail, I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade turns my arms and legs into branches of oak. It is then I belong to a southerly wind, which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared. In my children, I see my bulging face pressing further into the mysteries. In a library in Tucson, on a plane above Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns a controlled fire, I am held by a professor, a general, and a photographer. One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs the scented pages of my books, scouring for the bitter smell of control. I hold him in my mind like a chalice. I have not disappeared. I swish the amber hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers. When we talk about limits, we disappear. In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel. I am a life in sacred language. Termites toil over a grave, and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays. At a glance from across the room, I wear September on my face, which is eternal, and does not disappear even if you close your eyes once and for all simultaneously like two coffins.
If I told you Earl, the toughest kid on my block in North Philadelphia, bow-legged and ominous, could beat any man or woman in ten moves playing white, or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded masters at the Belgrade Chess Association, you'd think I was given to hyperbole, and if, at dinnertime, I took you into the faint light of his Section 8 home reeking of onions, liver, and gravy, his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat for room in front of a cracked flat-screen, one whose diaper sags it's a wonder it hasn't fallen to his ankles, the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock the perfect O of a handle, and the slats of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me with its loud timbales and drums blasting down from the closed room of his cousin whose mother stands on a corner on the other side of town all times of day and night, except when her relief check arrives at the beginning of the month, you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity after-school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class, but not necessarily when he stands near you at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too small, hunching his shoulders around his ears, as you imagine the checkered squares of his poverty and anger, and pray he does not turn his precise gaze  too long in your direction for fear he blames you and proceeds to take your Queen.
Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known! —Walt Whitman I. The Red Flag The newspapers said the strikers would hoistthe red flag of anarchy over the silk mills of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers' helper from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor, lifted up his hand and said here is the red flag: brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away for six dollars a week in the dye house. He sat down without another word, sank back into the fumes, name and face rubbed off by oblivion's thumb like a Roman coin from the earth of his birthplace dug up after a thousand years, as the strikers shouted the only praise he would ever hear. II. The River Floods the Avenue He was the other Valentino, not the romantic sheik and bullfighter of silent movie palaces who died too young, but the Valentino standing on his stoop to watch detectives hired by the company bully strikebreakers onto a trolley and a chorus of strikers bellowing the banned word scab. He was not a striker or a scab, but the bullet fired to scatter the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentino's back. His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife. Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery. Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around the tombstones. Blood for blood, cried Tresca: at this signal, thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea.III. The Insects in the Soup Reed was a Harvard man. He wrote for the New York magazines. Big Bill, the organizer, fixed his good eye on Reed and told him of the strike. He stood on a tenement porch across from the mill to escape the rain and listen to the weavers. The bluecoats told him to move on. The Harvard man asked for a name to go with the number on the badge, and the cops tried to unscrew his arms from their sockets. When the judge asked his business, Reed said: Poet. The judge said: Twenty days in the county jail. Reed was a Harvard man. He taught the strikers Harvard songs, the tunes to sing with rebel words at the gates of the mill. The strikers taught him how to spot the insects in the soup, speaking in tongues the gospel of One Big Union and the eight-hour day, cramming the jail till the weary jailers had to unlock the doors. Reed would write:There's war in Paterson. After it was over, he rode with Pancho Villa.IV. The Little Agitator The cops on horseback charged into the picket line. The weavers raised their hands across their faces, hands that knew the loom as their fathers' hands knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers. Hannah was seventeen, the captain of the picket line, the Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike. The prosecutor called hera little agitator. Shame, said the judge; if she picketed again, he would ship her to the State Home for Girls in Trenton. Hannah left the courthouse to picket the mill. She chased a strikebreaker down the street, yelling in Yidish the word for shame. Back in court, she hissed at the judge's sentence of another striker. Hannah got twenty days in jail for hissing. She sang all the way to jail. After the strike came the blacklist, the counter at her husband's candy store, the words for shame.V. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed Strikers without shoes lose strikes. Twenty years after the weavers and dyers' helpers returned hollow-eyed to the loom and the steam, Mazziotti led the other silk mill workers marching down the avenue in Paterson, singing the old union songs for five cents more an hour. Once again the nightsticks cracked cheekbones like teacups. Mazziotti pressed both hands to his head, squeezing red ribbons from his scalp. There would be no buffalo nickel for an hour's work at the mill, for the silk of bow ties and scarves. Skull remembered wood. The brain thrown against the wall of the skull remembered too: the Sons of Italy, the Workmen's Circle, Local 152, Industrial Workers of the World, one-eyed Big Bill and Flynn the Rebel Girl speaking in tongues to thousands the prophecy of an eight-hour day. Mazziotti's son would become a doctor, his daughter a poet. Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.
for John Nichols and Arturo Madrid On the road to Taos, in the town of Alcalde, the bronze statue of Juan de Oñate, the conquistador, kept vigil from his horse. Late one night a chainsaw sliced off his right foot, stuttering through the ball of his ankle, as Oñate's spirit scratched and howled like a dog trapped within the bronze body. Four centuries ago, after his cannon fire burst to burn hundreds of bodies and blacken the adobe walls of the Acoma Pueblo, Oñate wheeled on his startled horse and spoke the decree: all Acoma males above the age of twenty-five would be punished by amputation of the right foot. Spanish knives sawed through ankles; Spanish hands tossed feet into piles like fish at the marketplace. There was prayer and wailing in a language Oñate did not speak. Now, at the airport in El Paso, across from Juárez, another bronze statue of Oñate rises on a horse frozen in fury. The city fathers smash champagne bottles across the horse's legs to christen the statue, and Oñate's spirit remembers the chainsaw carving through the ball of his ankle. The Acoma Pueblo still stands. Thousands of brown feet walk across the border, the desert of Chihuaha, the shallow places of the Río Grande, the bridges from Juárez to El Paso. Oñate keeps watch, high on horseback above the Río Grande, the law of the conquistador rolled in his hand, helpless as a man with an amputated foot, spirit scratching and howling like a dog within the bronze body.
The volcano in my grandmother's Mexican village smothered the town, though the girl escaped because the axis of revolution sent her family into exile, black clouds covering their journey to the north. The axis of the earth is a skeletal bone extending from pole to pole, the arm of someone holding on. The Japanese earthquake shifted the axis of the earth, moving Japan twelve feet closer to North America, each day shortened by one second. When a poet said the past never happens because it is always present, the other one proclaimed the past is in the future, the axis bending to allow these words to skip the water like stones thrown by a boy in search of his father, the axis of yesterday sinking the stones the boy hurled across the pond.
They call the mountain Carlos because it is brown, though its purple slopes at dusk suggest other names. Those who name it have to brand the earth with something they know— a name, a face, even the heat that says "I know Carlos and he is the mountain. I am going to cover his eyes in light." They call its peak Carlos because it is the sharpest feature on the face that stares south, watching people cross the border, pausing to catch their breath and meet the cliffs of Carlos because he is there. When they ascend the canyons inside the face, Carlos shifts and the climbers discover what he has done. The moving earth changes everything and they are forced to stop playing the game of naming a mountain that keeps touching the sun.
Awake in the desert to the sound of calling. Must be the mountain, I thought. The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary line between the living and the dead was erased years ago. Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks. Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside, Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose. Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside American walls, river drownings counted as they cross, Maria Salinas' body dragged out, her mud costume pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans, black water flowing to bless her in her sleep. Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided, a way out of the current, though satellite maps never show the brown veins of the concrete channel. Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke, 1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind, the end of one war mutating the border into another that also requires fatal skills of young men because few dream the atomic bomb gave birth in the Jornado, historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels, massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes and neighborhood soccer games that always score. Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way. Make the sign of the cross, open your eyes to one town, two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust.
after Kees' "Travels in North America" 1. Santa Fe "The walls are old," he says. I turn in the plaza and nod to Weldon Kees, his face as dark as the cool shadows that surround us, walls keeping him safe, honoring his silence, though he comes to me to be led away. "The mountains out there are not old," he claims and slips his hands into his coat. We cross the street, each Indian blanket on the ground holding jewelry I would love to touch, but Kees and the Navajo man selling his crafts are whispering to the ground. Kees surprises me by entering the Museum of Arts. I follow him, the stone floor ringing with our footsteps, empty arches blending above. Kees stops and turns to me. "One can see only so much," he says. He leads me to the twisted dwarf, the tangles form of faith and death, arrows bristling from its muscled body, a sacrifice of the ugly encased in glass, Kees staring at the sculpture as if he knows why we really can't see it. He points to the deepest arrow and places a hand on my shoulder. "When you believe this, you are home," he tells me and walks out. 2. Albuquerque The Sangre de Cristo mountains are old and he is driving my car to the highest ridge, the valley below avoiding the bright moon, the same white light in the bay Kees wanted to touch before he left. "Mist and clouds are a lie," he claims. "Look down there. Men are running away." He drives slowly to the top and we get out, the autumn sun burning terraces into scrub cedars and piñon pines he wrote about when he crossed here long ago, standing on the edge of the cliff as if this is the only way for him to go. "Look past what you want to see," he sighs as the wind takes his slick hair and makes him into someone I have seen before, the streets of Albuquerque down there as dusty as his closed eyes. We stand on the edge and I wait at this elevation with Kees who wrote that the towns we will not visit are places where home truly lies. "I must go," he decides. "Where to?" I ask. "Anyplace you haven't seen," he says, and walks down the mountain. 3. Tyuonyi Kees and I are happy when the sun splits the tree for a moment because yesterday controlled this mountain dawn, burning mud deeper into the adobe. Cottonwoods catch fire here, give the people time to hide inside turtle shells, though they come out to watch us. I stop as the drawings come to life under the arches, symbols familiar to those who sleep by crossing the street each night. As I stare, I realize a man who diappears wants to understand and not hide, yet the designs tempt me to walk in the wrong direction and leave him behind. To go farther up would mean a canyon where I have been. A dirt street inside another path, tiny houses falling back, letting me pass beyond their locked doors, as if the smoking windows know where I must go. When I enter the placita, the old woman is not there because this is about bringing Kees back. The dirt street opens to the last scorched tree breaking out of walls to shade what can't be blessed, its branches confusing until their cracks enter the ground in search of peace. 4. Santa Maria Water disappears to settle as clear glass that contains memories of thirst, the ancient hole found in the ruins, Kees' hand keeping the others from skimming the surface of the still water, reaching to be alone under the mountain wall, though eyes that watch have seen this before, men entering and never coming out. One hand keeps the other from touching the surface. Pulling back allows the echo of falling rocks, the deep swimmer breaking through walls to emerge on the other side of the well where the first figures to emerge in centuries are sitting and rubbing sand over their wet, shivering bodies. 5. Fort Selden Kees is getting tired in the desert heat and sits on a historic slab of western settlement, this old fort a museum where thirsty men come to drink from the bitter well. Kees smokes too many cigarettes and shakes his head at me, "Look at the moth and the deep iris in your garden because the equation I found in San Francisco is an eclipse drawn on paper by my trembling hands." He pauses and takes a drag, my head bathed in sweat and confusion as he coughs this, "It is too late because jazz has gone away. I placed a stone deity of a bird next to an eggplant on my desk, its smooth purple skin as significant as the gathering of birds in your head, their chirping coming from sorrow, even from the bay where I never told a lie, though the grand steps lead to the burned church where the musicians used to trace my forehead." I stare at him and he tosses smoke on the ground because we are close to home. 6. El Paso Kees waits at the bus station in my hometown. We cannot go farther because the border here is out there and as violent as the reasons he disappeared in San Francisco a long time ago. I want to tell him who I think he is, but I grew up here and must hide how things have really been, drawing the light off the mountains as if the doubters of history are simply starving boys offering to shine Kees' shoes on the corner of Paisano Street. My hometown has a bridge, but Kees won't go near it because he says to cross it would be to admit there is something wrong on the other side of my family's house. He can never cross because we have found our way here, El Paso dreaming its population of mute men must keep growing because the border keeps taking too many of them away. Kees looks at the bus schedule, runs out of cigarettes and everything is closed. He nods at nothing and waits on the bench with someone he swears looks like me.
We had to imagine you even then, Ramon, your star lost, a glimpse to die for, all the kids galloping to Westside Park where your gang was supposed to meet in open warfare those bitter skinny boys from Toonerville,well-armed, Lupe said. And when we got there, nothing, no armies, no chucos with long tails and zip guns, just the grass with its stunned look, as though it never really wanted all that light. City grass doesn't want much of anything, it's not out there trembling with desire, minds its own business, leeching slowly upward from busted pipe. And now nobody knows what you really wanted, Ramon, when the needle spun true north, or why that final rush of light, flat stare of lawn as you staggered by, seared your own throat shut. Tonight, I'm getting to the smallest place I know, dusk coming on slow, the moon half full of shade, so still it almost doesn't want to move, whispers a phrase to particles of blue. Same moon you knew with its white mind watching, same moon you walked beneath and were gone.
Inside the night, this hospital, asylum, this party for those undone by desire, forever unslaked, inside a house inside the night, I'm inside this house with eight beams and moonlight pulling on the past through skylights, this house of white noise, wind and dry heat, lonely house on a ridge line, house of ordinary shame, my sister's house with corrals and outbuildings around it, and beyond that, the dog patrolling, and beyond that, skirts and folds of the mountain rising in rumpled geologic scrolls into the range. At the center beneath the moon's silence that nothing ever changes, muffled in blankets with fear beside me on my little bench of sleep, I can hear their voices, could be three or twenty-three, unhinged saints gabbling to their shadows, or panty-sniffers, drug-trippers in all flavors past vanilla, could be Birnam wood on the move, the shriek of its roots thirsty and air-brushed, or a pack of lunatics crooning norteño songs. What is certain is advent. They're coming down,  coming towards the heart beneath the feathers, coming for what can't be protected, on a beam of dread, riding that ray. I'm listening, my eyes snapped-open inside darkness, other people in other rooms who know how to sleep through a night like this night, thrown against the roundness of the world which is desire. The old bitch guards this night on the ranch, half shepherd, half other, this is her watch, she gallops the perimeter, anxious to sound like more than one dog, though she's going arthritic and her paws strike the hard ground. Now they quiet, penitents, lunatics, marauders and ragpickers, quiet. Only one left behind and the moon  is his hieroglyph, one creature padding  down the mountain, coming closer. Coyote knows a good joke, he only wants to let her in on it. He can't stop laughing, can't stop crying, can't stop licking the crevices clean, licking safety and duty until they're empty. I hear the dog listening, ears lifted. Coyote's tongue slides into night air, pressing narcotic vowels throughwonder, through longing and longing and wonder awaken. She's close to that edge, that border in the night where one thing becomes another and even an old dog who's worked a ranch eleven years feels the urge to let loose, blow this little settlement, go wild. Clouds loose and blue in the arms of the moon, slant light on this mountain raking us, the dog and I, we feel the pull. Imagine a woman trying to come between coyote and the female he's after when she knows what is dark and offers itself and vanishes has come for her at last? The body wants what it can't have, to follow the path of thirst through the rent in the wire beyond the corral. The dog doesn't move, but who knows better than she the small outpost death has set up in her, maybe she's all desire now to slip under the moon and chase down that lure. Coyote wheedles and croons another minute or two, then lopes off, calling over his shoulder in a language even I can understand, the right names for thingsnot kept in heaven.
Not rain, but fine mist falls from my lemon tree, a balm of droplets in green shadow. Six years now my mother gone to earth. This dew, light as footsteps of the dead. She often walked out here, craned her neck, considered the fruit, hundreds of globes in their leathery hides, figuring on custard and pudding, meringue and hollandaise. But her plans didn't work out. The tree goes on unceasingly—lemons fall and fold into earth and begin again— me, I come here as a salve against heat, come to languish, to let the soft bursts— essence of citrus, summer's distillate— drift into my face and settle. Water and gold brew in the quiet deeps at the far end of the season. Leaves swallow the body of light and the breath of water brims over. My hands cup each other the way hers did.
When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning, & someone ran knocking on our door one night. The house became birds in the eaves too low for a boy's ears. I heard a girl talking, but they weren't words. I knew one good thing: a girl was somewhere in our house, speaking slow as a sailor's parrot. I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland. Her voice smelled like an orange, though I'd never peeled an orange. I knocked on the walls, in a circle. The voice was almost America. My ears plucked a word out of the air. She said, Friend. I eased open the door hidden behind overcoats in a closet. The young woman was smiling at me. She was teaching herself a language to take her far, far away, & she taught me a word each day to keep secret. But one night I woke to other voices in the house. A commotion downstairs & a pleading. There are promises made at night that turn into stones at daybreak. From my window, I saw the stars burning in the river brighter than a big celebration. I waited for her return, with my hands over my mouth. I can't say her name, because it was dangerous in our house so close to the water. Was she a boy's make-believe friend or a beehive breathing inside the walls? Years later my aunts said two German soldiers shot the girl one night beside the Vistula. This is how I learned your language. It was long ago. It was springtime.
No, sweetheart, I said courtly love. I was thinking of John Donne's "Yet this enjoys before it woo," but my big hands were dreaming Pinetop's boogie-woogie piano taking the ubiquitous night apart. Not Courtney. I know "inflated tear" means worlds approaching pain & colliding, or a heavenly body calling to darkness, & that shame has never been my truest garment, because I was born afraid of needles. But I've been shoved up against frayed ropes too, & I had to learn to bob & weave, to duck & hook, till I could jab my way out of a foregone conclusion, till blues reddened a room. All I know is, sometimes a man wants only a hug when something two-steps him toward a little makeshift stage. Somehow, between hellhounds & a guitar solo made of gutstring & wood, I outlived a stormy night with snow on my eyelids.
The river stones are listening because we have something to say. The trees lean closer today. The singing in the electrical woods has gone dumb. It looks like rain because it is too warm to snow. Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding, we know you can't be everywhere at once. Have you corralled all the pretty wild horses? The memory of ants asleep in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur. The magpies gaze at us, still waiting. River stones are listening. But all we can say now is, Mercy, please, rock me.
If I am not Ulysses, I am  his dear, ruthless half brother. Strap me to the mast  so I may endure night sirens singing my birth when water broke into a thousand blossoms in a landlocked town of the South, before my name was heard in the womb-shaped world of deep sonorous waters. Storms ran my ship to the brink, & I wasn't myself in a kingdom of unnamed animals & totem trees, but never wished to unsay my vows. From the salt-crusted timbers I could only raise a battering ram or cross, where I learned God is rhythm & spores. If I am Ulysses, made of his words & deeds, I swam with sea cows & mermaids in a lost season, ate oysters & poison berries to approach the idea of death tangled in the lifeline's slack on that rolling barrel of a ship, then come home to more than just the smell of apples, the heavy oars creaking the same music as our bed.
When the trees were guilty, hugged up to history & locked in a cross-brace with Whitman's Louisiana live oak, you went into that mossy weather. Did you witness the shotguns at Angola riding on horseback through the tall sway of sugarcane, the glint of blue steel in the bloodred strawberry fields? Silence was backed up in the cypress, but you could hear the birds of woe singing praise where the almost broken- through sorrow rose from the deep woods & walked out into moonshine as the brave ones. You went among those who had half a voice, whose ancestors mastered quicksand by disappearing. Maybe our paths crossed ghosts hogtied in the wounded night, but it is only now I say this: Galway, thanks for going down into our fierce hush at the crossroads to look fear in the eye.
I've come to this one grassy hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to a place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish's grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet's song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh's lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, "I am a man," & now I know why I'd rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.
Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate what's going down in the streets. No, an attitude is not a suicide note written on walls around the streets. Twitter stays lockstep in the frontal lobe as we hope for a bypass beyond the streets, but only each day bears witness in the echo chamber of the streets. Grandmaster Flash's thunderclap says he's not the grand jury in the streets, says he doesn't care if you're big or small fear can kill a man on the streets. Take back the night. Take killjoy's cameras & microphones to the streets. If you're holding the hand lightning strikes juice will light you up miles from the streets where an electric chair surge dims all the county lights beyond the streets. Who will go out there & speak laws of motion & relativity in the streets? Yusef, this morning proves a crow the only truth serum in the street.
The scruffy house cat aches to fly— she dreams all day of wings and sky! So tonight she climbs the ladder, mounts a platform, nothing matters except to catch a thin trapeze then hold on tight with grace and ease. She swings herself by both front paws then somesaults to wild applause of kitchen mice, who, though dizzy, encourage Cat, to keep her busy.
Welcome, Flowers. Write your name on a name tag. Find a seat. Raise your leaf if you've taken a class here before. Let's go around the room. Call out your colors. I see someone's petal has fallen— please pick it up and put it in your desk where it belongs. Sprinklers at recess, fertilizer for lunch,  and you may snack on the sun throughout the day. Excuse me . . . what's that in your mouth? A bee? Did you  bring enough for everyone?
Kin Kletso/Yellow House Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico Anasazi Ruins, AD 1125-1130 for Henri, at 2 You step down into the Flat World Then ask me to say it, to explain How our name can mean both ancestor And enemy. Your body begins in four directions. Here, one calendar takes eighteen years. I am three. One day is an eyelash. Your body is a segment of prehistoric road, A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious. We are alluvial, obsidian. Sometimes the ground swells With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains Will be renamed after foreign saints. We sing nine-hundred-year-old hymns That instruct us in how to sit still For forty-nine years Through a fifty-year drought. We climb down through the hole anyway, And agree to the arrangement.
We meet—sometimes—between the dry hours, Between clefts in the involuntary plan, Refusing to think of rent or food—how Civic the slick to satisfied from man. And Democratic. A Lucky Strike each, we Sponge each other off, while what's greyed In and grey slinks ashamed down the drain. No need to articulate great restraint, No need to see each other's mouth lip The obvious. Giddy. Fingers garnished With fumes of onions and garlic, I slip Back into my shift, then watch her hands—wordless— Reattach her stockings to the martyred Rubber moons wavering at her garter.
Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.
I would figure out all the right answers first, then gently mark a few of them wrong. If a quiz had ten problems, I'd cancel out one. When it had twenty, I'd bite my tongue then leave at least two questions blank: _____ _____. A B was good, but an A was too good. They'd kick your ass, call your big sisterslow, then stare over your desk, as if you'd  snaked out of a different hole. Knowing taught me—quickly—to spell community more honestly: l-o-n-e-l-y. During Arts and Crafts, when Miss Larson allowed the scissors out, I'd sneak a pair, then cut my hair to stop me from growing too long.
from my mother's sadness, which was, to me, unbearable, until, it felt to me  not like what I thought it felt like to her, and so felt inside myself—like death, like dying, which I would almost have rather done, though adding to her sadness would rather die than do— but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was— a form of gratitude which when last it came drifted like a meadow lit by torches of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms, when a hummingbird hovered nearby, I slipped into my mouth thereby coaxing the bird to scrawl on my tongue its heart's frenzy, its fleet nectar-questing song, with whom, with you, dear mother, I now sing along.
for Keith and Jen Friends I am here to modestly report seeing in an orchard in my town a goldfinch kissing a sunflower again and again dangling upside down by its tiny claws steadying itself by snapping open like an old-timey fan its wings again and again, until, swooning, it tumbled off and swooped back to the very same perch, where the sunflower curled its giant swirling of seeds around the bird and leaned back to admire the soft wind nudging the bird's plumage, and friends I could see the points on the flower's stately crown soften and curl inward as it almost indiscernibly lifted the food of its body to the bird's nuzzling mouth whose fervor I could hear from oh 20 or 30 feet away and see from the tiny hulls that sailed from their good racket, which good racket, I have to say was making me blush, and rock up on my tippy-toes, and just barely purse my lips with what I realize now was being, simply, glad, which such love, if we let it, makes us feel.
Friends, will you bear with me today, for I have awakened from a dream in which a robin made with its shabby wings a kind of veil behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south of Spain, its breast aflare, looking me dead in the eye from the branch that grew into my window, coochie-cooing my chin, the bird shuffling its little talons left, then right, while the leaves bristled against the plaster wall, two of them drifting onto my blanket while the bird opened and closed its wings like a matador giving up on murder, jutting its beak, turning a circle, and flashing, again, the ruddy bombast of its breast  by which I knew upon waking it was telling me in no uncertain terms to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude not quite dormant in my belly— it said so in a human voice, “Bellow forth”— and who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel? Hear ye! hear ye! I am here to holler that I have hauled tons—by which I don’t mean lots, I mean tons — of cowshit and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots swirling the spent beer grains the brewery man was good enough to dump off holding his nose, for they smell very bad, but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips, twirling dung with my pitchfork again and again with hundreds and hundreds of other people, we dreamt an orchard this way, furrowing our brows, and hauling our wheelbarrows, and sweating through our shirts, and two years later there was a party at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth, one of which, a liberty apple, after being watered in was tamped by a baby barefoot with a bow hanging in her hair biting her lip in her joyous work and friends this is the realest place I know, it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful, you could ride your bike there or roller skate or catch the bus there is a fence and a gate twisted by hand, there is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana, it will make you gasp. It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you; and thank you for not taking my pal when the engine of his mind dragged him to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle or two of booze, and thank you for taking my father a few years after his own father went down thank you mercy, mercy, thank you for not smoking meth with your mother oh thank you thank you for leaving and for coming back, and thank you for what inside my friends’ love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod gleaming into the world, likely hauling a shovel with her like one named Aralee ought, with hands big as a horse’s, and who, like one named Aralee ought, will laugh time to time til the juice runs from her nose; oh thank you for the way a small thing’s wail makes the milk or what once was milk in us gather into horses huckle-buckling across a field; and thank you, friends, when last spring the hyacinth bells rang and the crocuses flaunted their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved the beehive which when I entered were snugged two or three dead fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames, almost clinging to one another, this one’s tiny head pushed into another’s tiny wing, one’s forelegs resting on another’s face, the translucent paper of their wings fluttering beneath my breath and when a few dropped to the frames beneath: honey; and after falling down to cry, everything’s glacial shine. And thank you, too. And thanks for the corduroy couch I have put you on. Put your feet up. Here’s a light blanket, a pillow, dear one, for I can feel this is going to be long. I can’t stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it. And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow perusing these words as I write them. And the way my love talks quietly when in the hive, so quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her but only notice barely her lips moving in conversation. Thank you what does not scare her in me, but makes her reach my way. Thank you the love she is which hurts sometimes. And the time she misremembered elephants in one of my poems which, oh, here they come, garlanded with morning glory and wisteria blooms, trombones all the way down to the river. Thank you the quiet in which the river bends around the elephant’s solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating on its gentle back the flock of geese flying overhead. And to the quick and gentle flocking of men to the old lady falling down on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently with the softest parts of their hands her cane and purple hat, gathering for her the contents of her purse and touching her shoulder and elbow; thank you the cockeyed court on which in a half-court 3 vs. 3 we oldheads made of some runny-nosed kids a shambles, and the 61-year-old after flipping a reverse lay-up off a back door cut from my no-look pass to seal the game ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker’s scar grinning across his chest; thank you the glad accordion’s wheeze in the chest; thank you the bagpipes. Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress for stopping her car in the middle of the road and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it, whisking a turtle off the road. Thank you god of gaudy. Thank you paisley panties. Thank you the organ up my dress. Thank you the sheer dress you wore kneeling in my dream at the creek’s edge and the light swimming through it. The koi kissing halos into the glassy air. The room in my mind with the blinds drawn where we nearly injure each other crawling into the shawl of the other’s body. Thank you for saying it plain: fuck each other dumb. And you, again, you, for the true kindness it has been for you to remain awake with me like this, nodding time to time and making that noise which I take to meanyes, or, I understand, or, please go onbut not too long, or, why are you spittingso much, or, easy Tigerhands to yourself. I am excitable. I am sorry. I am grateful. I just want us to be friends now, forever. Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you. I promise I will try to stay on my side of the couch. And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend; the photo in which his arm slung around the sign to “the trail of silences”; thank you the way before he died he held his hands open to us; for coming back in a waft of incense or in the shape of a boy in another city looking from between his mother’s legs, or disappearing into the stacks after brushing by; for moseying back in dreams where, seeing us lost and scared he put his hand on our shoulders and pointed us to the temple across town; and thank you to the man all night long hosing a mist on his early-bloomed peach tree so that the hard frost not waste the crop, the ice in his beard and the ghosts lifting from him when the warming sun told him sleep now; thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land; thank you who did not bulldoze the ancient grove of dates and olives, who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home; who did not fire, who did not plunge the head into the toilet, who said stop,don’t do that; who lifted some broken someone up; who volunteered the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant is called a volunteer, like the plum tree that marched beside the raised bed in my garden, like the arugula that marched itself between the blueberries, nary a bayonet, nary an army, nary a nation, which usage of the word volunteer familiar to gardeners the wide world made my pal shout “Oh!” and dance and plunge his knuckles into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries and digging a song from his guitar made of wood from a tree someone planted, thank you; thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm; thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke and false indigo whose petals stammered apart by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute... and moonglow and catkin and crookneck and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up; thank you what in us rackets glad what gladrackets us; and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart, this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked, oh giddy, oh dumbstruck, oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch, balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit, its tongue working like an engine, a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved; heart like an elephant screaming at the bones of its dead; heart like the lady on the bus dressed head to toe in gold, the sun shivering her shiny boots, singing Erykah Badu to herself leaning her head against the window; and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream by plucking the two cables beneath my chin like a bass fiddle’s strings and played me until I woke singing, no kidding, singing, smiling,thank you, thank you, stumbling into the garden where the Juneberry’s flowers had burst open like the bells of French horns, the lily my mother and I planted oozed into the air, the bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops below, the collard greens waved in the wind like the sails of ships, and the wasps swam in the mint bloom’s viscous swill; and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend. I know I can be long-winded sometimes. I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward, the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over, which is precisely what the child in my dream said, holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky hurtling our way like so many buffalo, who said it’s much worse than we think,and sooner; to whom I saidno duh child in my dreams, what do you think this singing and shuddering is, what this screaming and reaching and dancing and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away? Goodbye, I mean to say. And thank you. Every day.
I love. Wouldn't we all like to start a poem with "I love . . ."? I would. I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines in the word "parallel," love how words sometimes mirror what they mean. I love mirrors and that stupid tale about Narcissus. I suppose there is some Narcissism in that. You know, Narcissism, what you remind me to avoid almost all the time.  Yeah, I love Narcissism. I do.  But what I really love is ice cream.  Remember how I told you no amount of ice cream can survive a week in my freezer. You didn't believe me, did you? No, you didn't. But you know now how true that is. I love that you know my Achilles heel is none other than ice cream— so chilly, so common. And I love fountain pens. I mean I just love them. Cleaning them,  filling them with ink, fills me with a kind of joy, even if joy  is so 1950. I know, no one talks about joy anymore. It is even more taboo  than love. And so, of course, I love joy.  I love the way joy sounds as it exits your mouth. You know, the word joy. How joyous is that. It makes me think of bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions. I love the way the mind runs that pathway from bubbles to dandelions. Yes, I love a lot. And right here, walking down this street,  I love the way we make a bridge, a suspension bridge —almost as beautiful as the Golden Gate Bridge—swaying as we walk hand in hand.
Already his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all,  only 7; I didn't even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had driven up into the mountains to "take the waters," as our parents put it. Our parents' instructions were simple: they would be in one room, our sister in another, my brother and I in yet another. Down the dark hallways as dark as tunnels, down through the strong smell of minerals and seawater, the attendants led us to our rooms. What was that smell? Sulfur? Aluminum? There was the smell of salt, but it was not the salt of the earth, not the sea itself. The old man told us not to sit in the water for more than fifteen minutes at a time, to drink lots of cold water, to scrub the salts into our skin, to take care of each other.  And then, he left us. We took off our clothes, did it without thinking. "You get in first," is all he said, his voice sounding more like my father's, his voice having changed  almost a year ago. His body had changed, too.  Sitting in the pool, my thoughts began to swim in the vapors, the steam, I felt nauseated.  I wanted not to look at him. I wanted to look at the tile: blue and blue-white with the depiction of a terrible vine twisting and creeping around the tops of the walls. When he got out and lay on the tile next to the pool, his abdomen was already sculpted, and the thin trail . . . He knew I watched him, and he loved the admiration. When I finally got out, my head dizzy, my heart racing from the heat, I lay myself down next to him. He scrubbed my back with a rough sponge, pulled me against his chest as he scrubbed behind my ears and under my arms. There, in the steam, I was cleaner than I would ever be again.
Somewhere outside Kyoto's line, she said, they stumbled across the famous garden of moss, the smallish sign so plain it could have been  overlooked. No temple, only moss.  So they entered the walkway with little expectation, the silence creeping in, much like expectation. Instead of leading them to the garden directly, two monks had led them to a different task, requested they copy three hundred characters, the ink and paper set down for the task. And this, too, was a practiced form of prayer,  left behind for those who had forgotten prayer.  The monks left brushes, ink, and bowls of water.  They asked the seekers to write, to pray. But prayer,  any prayer, wasn't easy. The brush and ink, the doubting hand, made not for simple prayer. And even as I write this, I do not want to pray. This story changes nothing; I do not want to pray.
“If God is Art, then what do we make of Jasper Johns?” One never knows what sort of question a patient will pose, or how exactly one should answer. Outside the window, snow on snow began to answer the ground below with nothing more than foolish questions. We were no different. I asked again: “Professor, have we eased the pain?” Eventually, he’d answer me with: “Tell me, young man, whom do you love?” “E," I’d say, “None of the Above," and laugh for lack of something more to add. For days he had played that game, and day after day I avoided your name by instinct. I never told him how we often wear each other’s clothes— we aren’t what many presuppose. Call it an act of omission, my love. Tonight, while walking to the car, I said your name to the evening star, clearly pronouncing the syllables to see your name dissipate in the air, evaporate. Only the night air carries your words up to the dead (the ancients wrote): I watched them rise, become remote.
It is not the chambers of the heart that hold him captive, but the hallways of the mind. Why his image burning green and blue persists —the face, the eyes questioning, the shape of his head—is beyond anything I can understand.
Drowned together in his car in Lake Chippewa. It was a bright cold starry night on Lake Chippewa. Lake Chippewa was a “living” lake then, though soon afterward it would choke and die. In the bright cold morning after we could spy them only through a patch of ice brushed clear of snow. Scarcely three feet below, they were oblivious of us. Together beneath the ice in each other’s arms. Jean-Marie’s head rested on Troy’s shoulder. Their hair had floated up and was frozen. Their eyes were open in the perfect lucidity of death. Calmly they sat upright. Not a breath! It was 1967, there were no seat belts to keep them apart. Beautiful as mannequins in Slater Brothers’ window. Faces flawless, not a blemish. Yet—you could believe they might be breath- ing, for some trick of scintillate light revealed tiny bubbles in the ice, and a motion like a smile in Jean-Marie’s perfect face. How far Troy’d driven the car onto Lake Chippewa before the ice creaked, and cracked, and opened like the parting of giant jaws—at least fifty feet! This was a feat like his 7-foot-3.8-inch high jump. In the briny snow you could see the car tracks along the shore where in summer sand we’d sprawl and soak up sun in defiance of skin carcinomas to come. And you could see how deftly he’d turned the wheel onto the ice at just the right place. And on the ice you could see how he’d made the tires spin and grab and Jean-Marie clutching his hand Oh oh oh! The sinking would be silent, and slow. Eastern edge of Lake Chippewa, shallower than most of the lake but deep enough at twelve feet to suck down Mr. Dupuy’s Chevy so all that was visible from shore was the gaping ice wound. And then in the starry night a drop to -5 degrees Fahrenheit and ice freezing over the sunken car. Who would have guessed it, of Lake Chippewa! Now in the morning through the swept ice there’s a shocking intimacy just below. With our mittens we brush away powder snow. With our boots we kick away ice chunks. Lie flat and stare through the ice Seeing Jean-Marie Schuter and Troy Dupuy as we’d never seen them in life. Our breaths steam in Sunday-morning light. It will be something we must live with— the couple do not care about our astonishment. Perfect in love, and needing no one to applaud as they’d been oblivious of our applause at the Herkimer Junior High prom where they were crowned Queen and King three years before. (In Herkimer County, New York, you grew up fast. The body matured, the brain lagged behind, like the slowest runner on the track team we’d applaud with affection mistaken for teen mockery.) No one wanted to summon help just yet. It was a dreamy silence above ice as below. And the ice a shifting hue—silvery, ghost-gray, pale blue—as the sky shifts overhead like a frowning parent. What! Lake Chippewa was where some of us went ice-fishing with our grandfathers. Sometimes, we skated. Summers there were speedboats, canoes. There’d been drownings in Lake Chippewa we’d heard but no one of ours. Police, fire-truck, ambulance sirens would rend the air. Strangers would shout at one another. We’d be ordered back—off the ice of Lake Chippewa that shone with beauty and onto the littered shore. By harsh daylight made to see Mr. Dupuy’s 1963 Chevy hooked like a great doomed fish. All that privacy yanked upward pitiless and streaming icy rivulets! We knew it was wrong to disturb the frozen lovers and make of them mere bodies. Sweet-lethal embrace of Lake Chippewa But no embrace can survive thawing. One of us, Gordy Garrison, would write a song, “Too Young to Marry But Not Too Young to Die” (echo of Bill Monroe’s “I Traced Her Little Footprints in the Snow”), which he’d sing with his band the Raiders, accompanying himself on the Little Martin guitar he’d bought from his cousin Art Garrison when Art enlisted in the U.S. Navy and for a while it was all you’d hear at Herkimer High, where the Raiders played for Friday-night dances in the gym, but then we graduated and things changed and nothing more came of Gordy’s song or of the Raiders. “TOO YOUNG TO MARRY BUT NOT TOO YOUNG TO DIE” was the headline in the Herkimer Packet. We scissored out the front-page article, kept it for decades in a bedroom drawer. (No one ever moves in Herkimer except those who move away, and never come back.) The clipping is yellowed, deeply creased, and beginning to tear. When some of us stare at the photos our hearts cease beating—oh, just a beat! It was something we’d learned to live with— there’d been no boy desperate to die with any of us. We’d have accepted, probably—yes. Deep breath, shuttered eyes—yes, Troy. Secret kept yellowed and creased in the drawer, though if you ask, laughingly we’d deny it.   We see Gordy sometimes, and his wife, June. Our grand- children are friends. Hum Gordy’s old song to make Gordy blush a fierce apricot hue but it seems cruel, we’re all on blood thinners now.
Or is it on account of my radiant eye I have lived so long?—I never slept in the study hall, or called anyone by an improper name. I never urinated in a desolate synagogue. I never ate or drank in a desolate synagogue or picked my teeth. I did not walk into a desolate synagogue in the summer just because of the heat, nor in winter just because of cold rain. Also, I know one may not deliver a eulogy for an individual inside a desolate synagogue. But you can read scripture inside a desolate synagogue, or you can teach in a desolate synagogue, or deliver eulogies for the community. When synagogues are deserted they are to be left alone and weeds allowed to grow. One should not pick the weeds, lest there be anguish that the synagogue is in ruins. When are the synagogues to be swept so that weeds do not grow inside them? When they are in use.—When synagogues are in ruins, weeds are not to be picked there.Because I know these things I was approved, although unworthy, after a three-day oral examination before the king of Sicily to whom by custom the power of approval is entrusted. Thereafter, I have worn the laurel crown—my eye radiant to this day.
Hugging you takes some practice. So I'll start out with a cactus.
A network of branches crazes the sky like cracks in the glaze of a Chinese cup. Dawn, a poised dropper. History poised also. A man on the steet corner waves his sign: Germany 1934. So cold, elbows of trees creak when something flaps by— the craw craw craw— Would I be able to recognize places  in Latvia by my father's absence— farmyard littered with dented milk cans, mattresses leaking straw, table set for a meal that never happened? Every morning I look out a window at a scene he wouldn't recognize, blue tide of sunrise spreading west obliterating tracks of satellites, gray tide of inlet shoring up the wrack-line. My father steps through his window. He's put on his SS uniform. He stands on a dirt road, staring toward the vanishing point where the past is rectified. The first thing I heard this morning—three harsh cries—was the black crow veering past his head. History,welcome back, it said. I watch to see what he does next.  —12.8.2012
for Asja In predawn dark, a rat falling from a rafter is a dollop, wind a whir, and suddenly I'm remembering my mother  teaching me to bake her hot water sponge cake. How we whipped the egg whites with the electric mixer until stiff peaks formed. How she warned me not to allow a single thread of yolk to taint the white, or the cake would fail. To fold white into yolk-sugar-flour was slow,  patient. She let me carve a wedge with the rubber spatula, drop it to the batter's surface, then lift from the bowl's bottom up and over the dollop, turning it in. Warned me never to beat or mix or even stir—the cake would fall.  Once, dinking around, I stuck a wooden spoon into the still-whirring beaters, bent the metal, splintered the spoon into the batter. Once I cut her grandmother's precious lace for a doll's clothes, and she cried, the savaged pieces draped across her wrists. So many times I tried to shove my peasant feet into her dainty pumps, hand into her evening gloves. One spoon at a time, that first thin layer drawn across the airy white forming a little hill. Folding only just enough. The batter growing lighter by increments. It was mostly space we folded in, taming down the cloy. It was never so good as then, licked off the finer, the cake itself, to me, disappointing, layers smeared with homemade jam, topped with a stiff merengue. Never so good as then, her instructing, trying to domesticate my impertinence, teach me a little grace, me resisting, the sweet on my tongue dissolving so easily in that state of matter. Never so good as straight from  the Pyrex bowl. Never so gentle as the slide of batter into an angel food pan. The rest up to her, what she created from the baked version, brown on top and bottom.  Here I am, decades later sitting under the halogen of a full moon, and that moment, which was many folded into one, is so pure and specific, the sugar sharp on my tongue, the spatula pushing as if through  an undertow. My mother taught me to fold. Never so sweet as now. We were incorporating lightness into a deep bowl. As some bird—probably an owl out hunting—chacks its was across the lawn, sounding like a key chain, and now the garden sprinkler comes on, so I know it's 6:00 a.m. There's the first hint of dawn slow-dissolving one more night. This is a fifty- year-old love. It's heavy, so I fold in moonlight, the sound of water spattered on leaves. Dim stars, bright moon— our lives. The cake imperfect, but finished.     —12.17.2013
No one wants another paean to a rosy dawn, so it's good this one's bluish, baby-shade at the horizon, bleeding up into midnight like a botched dye job. And having enough of the old world—larks, crakes, nightingales, storks—this space is populated by one fly crabbing across a notebook page. He seems, like me, honey-slowed by winter's shortest days, clumsy and isolated. My love bought a black-and-white photo once, close-up of a birch trunk, fly crawling up the curled paper bark, marring the purity of the image. You don't notice the fly until you do, and then you can't stop. No one wants a fly in art, but there it is, elegantly framed. And we're over the epic, so here, first thing this morning, a pedestrian quarrel. Years ago, I flew across a mountain range in black coat and black boots to secretly meet him in the city. How many dawns did it take to arrive at this particular? At 9:30 the sky flares not like flame—a paper fan you buy in Chinatown for a dollar. A sudden breeze sways the Tibetan flags strung along the eaves. I never noticed how thin the fabric. You can see right through the printed prayers to the thermometer— five degrees—and beyond, birches leaning all to windward. Sun bleaches out the last mysterious. Now we pray to the real.  —11.29.2012
Before I go let me thank the man who mugs you, taking your last paycheck, thank the boss who steals your tips, thank the women who may break you. I thank the pens that run out on you midsentence, the flame that singes your hair, the ticket you can't use because it's torn. Let me thank the stars that remind you the eyes that were stars are now holes. Let me thank the lake that drowns you, the sun that makes your face old. And thank the street your car dies in. And thank the brother you find unconcious with bloody arms, thank the needle that assists in doing him in—so much a part of you. No thanks to the skin forgetting the hands it welcomed, your hands refusing to recall what they happened upon. How blessed is the body you move in—how gone.
Roofers scrape the scaly lid of an auto shop beside the house where I live. Where I live shirtless men tear at the black scabs of a roof's old flesh, toss scraps into the back of a truck parked in the lot next to a house where I live. Where I live a tarp rattles at night, plastic rustles, and trash is kicked along pavement by wind. Roofers curse and shell the tire shop's peeling lid beside the house where I live. Where I live a tarp shakes all night; cans land on pavement, tossed from windows of cars that blur by where I live. Where I live windows are ladled red with light your sun leaves me with. Repairs are made to roofs which will never cover me. As I read the road between us, tire tracks unscroll their tawdry calligraphy. Any day now you shall arrive, roar into my eye with your mountainside. Where I live when I live where landscape cannot survive you.
Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else. Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk. As you walk, you make your own road, and when you look back you see the path you will never travel again. Traveler, there is no road; only a ship's wake on the sea.
(at St. Mary's) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
I never recline in splendor, I never take repose. The eyes of an old woman are blue and stick to me like insects to a screen. She is not hating me, though there are those who hate me, so I never lie in repose for fear that if I agree with the vulnerability of sleep, I'll make my own murder. I don't embrace the unconscious or analyze my dreams. The eyes of people who hate me might be spiders crawling on my hands, or snails that leave their shells, but I will not allow their acidic tongues to touch me. I believe in ghosts only now that her blue eyes stick to me like humidity. I will not outgrow my spite, though I read books that instruct me to. No, I'll always lie with my sleep beside me like a knife. I forgot my spite, once, only to wish I had not: He lay me upon the bed, crossed my arms across my chest, then fell to me, pressing a book between us. I never lie in repose. I am not a portrait. But I think so still my joints ache. One day, he shall not be the same (as I have never been the same), and we shall read upon his stone a verse attributed to my name. This is my foresight and my fright, blooming red in his eye's white.
I rode him through the village, smiling. He tossed his tasseled mane in distress. The villagers took his gesture as vanity, and made no attempt to rein him back. Camped at night by stream and fire, he seemed to think stories were in order. The ghoulish tales twisting out his mouth no longer frightened me. On leaving, I'd taken on a certain complacency. Later, he'd characterize my silence as merely mean. But what is mean about a mouth that, having no stories, claims it can provide no flower for the ear, no wine for the wind? I tried: I told the tale of him, which he (the version being mine) was not much interested in. But all of us, the fattening moon, the yewey trees, the sharp-toothed stars who combed their glowing backs against the sky like cats: we laughed. And now that I had left, where would I take him? He was vehicle and, as such, responsibility. He was deadening, tiresome, and necessary. I made ourselves a home and kept him gently as a pet. Visitors often wonder aloud, How do you manage to keep such a creature inside? The floors are stained with his keep. I tell them my heart is huge and its doors are small. Once I took him in he grew. Now I cannot remove him without killing him, which, frankly, I have never wanted to do.
I carved upon my desk unsayables. He drank until he vomited on himself. Eavesdropping, the others resisted sleep. The house knew the pain of sun on lacquered floorboards. I carved it with the tips of scissors. A door creaked; he hung his head into the room.Please, the others cannot sleep. The shingles twitched like skin beneath moonlight. I spent the afternoon at a movie theater. He staggered through brush toward a pay phone. The others continued searching the streets for him. The house held the moon above it, it was that imperial. I recall the room was empty when I came back in. He was arrested at the Quik-Trip while calling collect. Frantic, the others circled the block again. The house was ghost-white, older than the dead. I needle-pointed for 72 hours straight. He claimed the whole situation humiliated him. Relieved, the others refrained from asking him what jail was like. The house was swan to field, tiger to sea. I lay in bed by the time the others came home. He couldn't recall putting on the orange jumpsuit. The others asked if I'd seen him around. The house shuddered, No-o-o-o. The house winced, winked its blinds. The house whispered I should stay inside. The others flew out the doors and into their cars. The others slammed their cars into deer and cried. He was more humiliated than he'd ever been. He looked more or less the same, though his eyes were ringed. The others hid in the basement. He climbed the stairs and presented a ring. The house swung its windows wide to ice. He banged his nails blue, pinned his tongue to his tie. He packed himself in a box, sent it to regions far off. The others pressed their ears to the pipes. The house wore its flames like a hat.  The house called a radio talk-show. We drank all night, laughed all night, the night he left. I shook in its mouth till the house drank me up.
I regard your affections, find your teeth have left me a bruise necklace. Those lipstick  marks leech a trail, ear to ear, facsimile your smile. Your 40 ounces of malt liquor, your shrink hate, your eyes dialing 911. The hearts you draw with ballpoint on my cigarette packs  when I've left the room, penned in your girl's cursive, look demented, misshapen approximations of what I refuse to hand over. It's a nice touch,  though: a little love to accompany the cancer.  My thought follows you to where you spend your days lying in bed, smoking and reading the Beats. The accumulation of clothes and ashes  circles you, rising like a moat after rainfall. Often you are a study in detachment—the trigger eye is your eye, still as a finger poised to press  should one refuse to cooperate, and I wonder  how you can hate men so much when you think like one. Think of what I could be doing outside if I could unlock the door of myself: think bikini,  think soda fountain, think tradition, a day lacking entirely your brand of ambivalence. If you were a number, I'd subtract you; if you were a sentence,  I'd rewrite you. Are you the one who left these  wilted flowers, are you the one whose PIN spells out H-O-L-E? Why are you wearing my clothes? If you are weather, then I am a town, closing down  at word of your coming: you're a glacier on fast forward, you're direct as a detour, when I say good-bye you move in next door. You say you  want to have my baby, you want to buy me a car,  and you're too young to enter a bar. I should tether you to a tree in the dark park, allow the moon to stroke your white neck. I should give you a diamond collar,  walk you around the block and show you off.
Inexplicable, the sign outside a deli scrawled with FLOWERS  and below that: ALWAYS. But there were no flowers. And I have never seen an Always. I would like to,  and I have looked. I have kept my eye keen  for Always, have liked its idea like an expensive purse, coveting it as it appears,  riding the arms of rich ladies who are so very lady. I've rolled on velvet  cushions where I heard Always slept, and I once tried to kiss Always,  but I don't think it was the Always I was looking for. I like your Always, it looks such a demanding pet. It looks like it kisses nice and soft.  It looks like the bruise I found flowering on my knee.  I fell down at your voice. Not to worry, I got right back up, walked ten more blocks  and by then I was halfway home. I knock my knees blue  and scabbed crawling toward you, wanting flowers,  and always, always, always to slide against the cold vinyl of a car's seat, your pale hands  on the bare backs of my legs, that's one Always I want, and whoever knew there were so many species  of Always? Your bare hands on the pale backs  of my thighs, printing bruise, and if you said Flowers, said Always and we could erect a forever  of something like sheets  and breakfast and an ordinary day, my eyes would  always slide across the table toward you,  to warm their twin marbles in your palm, my face would flower  for you daily, so that when we die, roses might petal  themselves out our throats.
Its nature is ruthless, nothing as simple as loss being ruinous, those undeniable rainbows of oil, shock of bright sulphurous puddles (in goldfinch, in lemon) and now what, if that beauty's terrible plumage makes you keep looking and disturbs your despair.
In the beginning, in the list of begats, one begat got forgot: work begets work (one poem bears the next). In other words, once there was air, a bird could be got. Not taken. Not kept. But conjured up.
A clear choice is so sweet. Not reluctance butreal resistance. Joy-to-bursting, or none.Grief, not gradations. Someone essential and someone not. A good, dark strike-through versus weighing everything at the end of each day. Look, a cat killed a cardinal on an emerald lawn. For so many reasons it shouldn't have been beautiful. But that's also the kind of book I like best.
No one home. Snow packing the morning in. Much white nothing filling up. A V of birds pulling the silence until some dog across the street barks, and breaks what I call my peace. What a luxury annoyance is. It bites off and keeps just enough of what I think I want to be endless.
In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children— a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them, in a chair near a window, their father thinks of his mother, her recent death and the grief he is trying to gather. It is late October. The hooplight spreads from the family, through the window, to the edge of a small orchard, where a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves and only apples hang, heavy and still on the branches. The man looks from the window, down to a scrapbook of facts he is reading. The spider is proven to have memory, he says, and his son, once again, cocks his small face to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if this is some riddle he is slowly approaching, as if this long hour, troubled with phrases and the queer turn in his father's voice, is offered as a riddle. There is the sound of marbles in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery jump of the girl's shoe as she waits, embarrassed, for her father to stop, to return to his known self, thick and consistent as a family bread. But still he continues, plucking scraps from his old book, old diary of wonders: the vanishing borders of mourning paper, the ghostly shape in the candled egg, beak and eye etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw. A little sleet scrapes at the window. The man blinks, sees his hand on the page as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over the playboard, with the careful pattern of their lives dropping softly away, like leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers, and after each phrase the guttural oh, and the left shoe jumping.
As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music— long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule, free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn, might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers, as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen in little blossoms. They have come for the lost Titanic and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp, silt fields, pale and singluar, like the snow fields of Newfoundland. On its one runner blade the capsule slides, slips out through drift hummocks, through stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped, its trail the foot-thin trail of a dancer, who plants, glides, at his head the flurry of a ship's chandelier, at his back a cinch-hook of icebergs cast down through the winds of Newfoundland. The music these three absorb stops with the wreckage, with words lipped up through a microphone:flange, windlass, capstan, hull plating, then oddly, syllables at a slant, as light might slant through window slats,stairsteps, doorknob, serving bowl, teacup, Bordeaux. Mechanical fingers, controlled by the strokes of a joy stick, brush over debris, lifting, replacing. In jittery strobe lights, camera lights, all colors ground down to a quiet palette, angles return, corners and spirals pull back to the human eye—as if from some iced and black-washed atmosphere, boiler coal, a footboard and platter, each common shape brightened, briefly held for the sake of retrieval. The current spins silt like a sudden storm. With the intricacy of a body the capsule adjusts, temperature, pressure. Someone coughs, then the three sit waiting, as in Whistler's Sad Sea three are waiting. All around them are dollops of winter wind, everywhere beach and sea. No horizon at all in this painting, just a grey/brown thrum beach to sea. How steady his breath must have been on the canvas, his hands on the brushstrokes of lap robes, of bonnets and beach chairs, the pull of a red umbrella: each simple shape loved and awash in the landscape.
—Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939 Dear One, Do you have the time? Can you take the time? Can you make the time? To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring, and its land is high, dear one, each slope with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas, are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea tans on the sill. The woman beside me has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair, shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut. At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful within me: colors were infinite, part of the air . . .lines were free of the masses they held. The melon, a cloud; and the melon, an empty, oval lariat. They have moved the canvas chair from the window. Sun, enhanced by the brewing jar, threw an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit, a cloud. The fruit, a doll-sized, empty lariat. D. O., into what shape will our shaplessness flow?     Dear One, Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then lifting through . . . sole, libertà. In an earlier time, the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male, half female—might place him among us, we who are thickened by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words break free of the masses they hold. Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds of a dog's throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber, feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some great-jawed, prehistoric other begin, back away, then the gill-less, the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks begin, back away, until only a wind remains, vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens. No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable that might be me. Or you.     D. O., Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke to its first brilliance—midnight, great moon— and walked through the hallways. The pin-shaped leaves of the potted cosmos threw a netted shadow, and I stopped in its fragile harmony, my arms, bare feet, the folds of my limp gown striped by such weightless symmetry I might have been myself again. Through an open screen door I saw a patient, drawn out by the brightness perhaps, her naked body a ghastly white, her face a ghastly, frozen white, fixed in a bow-mouthed syncope, like something out of time. As we are, D. O., here in the Highland, time's infinite, cyclic now-and-then one simple flake of consciousness against the heated tongue.     Dear One, My Italian improves:sole, libertà, and Dio, of course, D. O.! (Although He has forsaken me.) The tea at the window gleams like the flank of a chestnut horse. It darkens imperceptibly, as madness does, or dusk. All morning, I held a length of cotton twine— a shaggy, oakum filament— between the jar and brewing sun. We made a budding universe: the solar disc, the glassy globe of reddish sea, the stillness in the firmament. At last across the cotton twine a smoke began, a little ashless burn, Dio, that flared and died so suddenly its light has yet to reach me.
They darken. In the sky over Florence, the oblong clouds swell and darken. And hailstones lift back through the updrafts, thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs, they drop to the cobbled streets.Horses! the child Galileo thinks, then peeks through the doorway to the shock of ten thousand icy hooves. At his back, his father is tuning violins, and because there is nothing sharper at hand Galileo saws through a captured hailstone with a length of E-string, the white globe opening slowly, and the pattern inside already bleeding its frail borders. Layers and layers of ice— Like what? Onion pulp? Cypress rings? If only the room were colder, and the eye finer. If only the hand were faster, and the blade sharper, and firmer, and without a hint of song . . .
I remember the first day, how I looked down, hoping you wouldn't see me, and when I glanced up, I saw your smile shining like a soft light from deep inside you. “I'm listening,” you encourage us. “Come on! Join our conversation, let us hear your neon certainties, thorny doubts, tangled angers,” but for weeks I hid inside. I read and reread your notes praising my writing, and you whispered, “We need you and your stories and questions that like a fresh path will take us to new vistas.” Slowly, your faith grew into my courage and for you— instead of handing you a note or apple or flowers— I raised my hand. I carry your smile and faith inside like I carry my dog's face, my sister's laugh, creamy melodies, the softness of sunrise, steady blessings of stars, autumn smell of gingerbread, the security of a sweater on a chilly day.
When my aunt died, my uncle raised his hands like a prophet in the Bible. “I've lost my girl,” he said, “I've lost my girl,” over and over, shaking his head. I didn't know what to say, where to look, my quiet uncle raising his voice to silence. My aunt was eighty-seven. “Listen,” my uncle said, sighing like a tree alone at night, “women know. Every midnight on New Year's Eve, when others sang and laughed and hugged, your aunt looked at me, tears in her eyes. Sixty years. She knew. One day, we'd kiss good-bye.”
Marvelous Opaque Orb. Night-light  for the world.
Universe  Galaxy  Solar System  Planet  Continent  Country   State  City  Me
I take my kaleidoscope off the shelf, look through the little hole at the end of the cardboard tube; I turn and turn and turn and turn, letting the crystals shift into strange and beautiful patterns, letting the pieces fall wherever they will.
“I'm so—”I start to apologize,but Albert laughs.“It's not my birthday,”he says.I'm confused.“It's for you, Bindi.”“Me?” I say. “It's notmy birthday, either.”Albert leads me to the chair.He hands me the present.I open it.It's one of thoseplastic trophy things.It says: “World's Best Sister.”I get all choked up.“I'm really proud of you,”says Albert.“You are?”“Totally. You came througha really rough time, Bindi.”“Not always with flying colors,”I say.“True, but you never gave up.”“I thought I did, sometimes.And you went to all this trouble?”Albert shrugs. “It's what brothers do.”Albert's grandmother pops her head in.I look up.Megan and Kyra are in the doorway,smiling.Mrs. Poole leads us allover to the table.The message on the cake reads:“Bravo to Our Bindi!”“Wow!” says Kyra.Megan turns to Albert.“Need another sister?”
Fifty-nine days to go. I can't find my purple beach towel. I can't even get to my closet without walking across a sea of dirty socks. Mom pokes her head into my doorway, says: “Time to clean your room, Sophie.” And I have to admit she's right. And it's not that cleaning my room is the worst thing to do. It's just that there are so many other better things to do, like— painting my toenails Strawberry Pink, eating a huge stack of Uncle Joe's pancakes, dreaming of riding the Ferris wheel, thinking up a story to tell around the campfire on Scary Story Night, painting shells, riding waves . . . all the fun, wonderful, sandy, sunny things we do at Summerhouse Time.
On Tuesday on the way to Tween Time Alison is all bubbly with guess-whos and guess-whats. “Guess who really stole Mrs. Bagwell's ring?” “Guess what Mrs. Bagwell is doing now?” “Guess what you and I are going to do this Friday?” I hold my hand up. “Whoa! One guess at a time, please.”
They grow in number all the time The cat, the Mother, the Father The grandparents, aunts, and uncles Those I knew well and hardly at all My best friend from when I was ten The guy who sat with me in the back Of the class where the tall kids livedBill the Shoemaker from Lyndale Avenue The Irish poet with rounded handwriting They live in The Land of Echo, The Land Of Reverb, and I hear them between The notes of the birds, the plash of the wave On the smooth rocks. They show up When I think of them, as if they always Are waiting for me to remember I drive by their empty houses I put on their old sweaters and caps I wear their wristwatches and spend Their money. So now I'm in six places At once—if not eighteen or twenty So many places to be thinking of them Strange how quiet they are with their presence So humble in the low song they sing Not expecting that anyone will listen
She tells him she's leaving him and he bakes a pie. His pies are exquisite, their crusts like crinoline. He doesn't change clothes, works in slacks, shirtsleeves rolled. Summer makes the kitchen unbearable but he suffers beautifully, tenderly cuts the strawberries, pours into the deep curve of the bowl. She hadn't missed his hands since last they drew her to his body. Now she watches them stroke the edges of the dough, shape it like cooling glass. When the oven opens, his brow drips, he brings his hands to his face.
She lived there for years in a small space in a high rise that saw her winter years dawn. When the past became larger than her present, she would call and thank us for cards we gave her when we were small; for Christmas, Mother's Day, her birthday, our devotion scrawled amidst depictions of crooked hearts and lopsided lilies. She would write out new ones, and we found them everywhere—unsent; in perfect cursive she wished us joy, chains of x's and o's circling her signature. And when her time alone was over, the space emptied of all but sunshine, dust, and a cross nailed above her door, those cards held for us a bitter peace; they had finally been delivered.
The girl on the Bullard overpass looks happy to be there, getting soaked in a light rain but waving her hands to the four o'clock freeway traffic in which I'm anything but happy. You might think she's too dumb to come in out of the rain, but rain or shine, it doesn't seem to matter. She's there most every afternoon, as if she does this for a living. Some living, I'd say. Doesn't she ever get bored, or wish someone would stop and say, "Where to?" and her life would change? That's how I'd be, hating the noise, the stink of exhaust, the press of people. I can't imagine what her life is; mine is confused and often fretful. But there's something brave about standing alone in the rain, waving wild semaphores of gladness to impatient passersby too tired or preoccupied to care. Seeing her at her familiar station I suddenly grin like a fool, wave back, and forgive the driver to my right, who is sullen and staring as I pass. I find her in my rear-view mirror, then head for a needed drink and supper. I don't know where she goes, but I hope it's to a place she loves. I hope the rain lets up. I hope she's there tomorrow.
Does Chang feel his teeth falling out? One... two... three... His mouth shuts. How will he speak? Like the moon released at last and speechless, he has lost his descendants. Life splits— a rift, a cleft, the half- light between waking and sleeping. A quartz-colored dawn rescues him. The day clears. Dizzy waves rush to shore. The factory calls him to work, but even there, the gap-toothed partitions in the wall where the rice bowls are kept stay empty. It’s another sad round of layoffs. How many more will be lost? How many?
rain frog thorn bug tent bat along a broken mosaic a spongy ever-dwindling path soaring trees woody buttresses their massive twisted fins lofty crowns shoulder to shoulder climbing lime-green vines restless palms one strangling plant clinging to choking another a discontinuous canopy of branches and leaves impenetrable alive and teeming tangled underbrush the deeply shaded soil lumpy roots writhing across the forest floor low-growing ferns seedlings struggling for light jewel-colored hummingbirds insects sizzling and clicking and the dripping water trickling into the tiniest crevices steamy claustrophobic air a dazzling bellbird lost in a shaft of sunlight a golden eyelash viper sinuous as a vein on a broad-leafed frond flat worms land leeches walnut-sized spiders goliath beetles camouflaged butterflies on dead leaves parasites bees leaf-cutting ants atop glorious white lilies everywhere gripping climbing twisting floating through the trees stilt-like aerial roots the mouth-amazed pitcher plant buried larvae fruit-eating fish the perpetual battle to adapt the ruthless drive to survive under a punishing sun what grows bursts forth at astonishing speed then decomposes to be reabsorbed so much unknown unfamiliar unnamed but before long the trees seem the same the rocks every bird track who would dare think of such a place who would dare construct one of his own imagining and be utterly abandoned in the middle of it all if to be lost is to be fully present if confusion becomes the only boundary and then the decision [to divide space until a direction is created] only a madman would begin thought is its own cage the mind already anticipating the first step deciding every turn will be coupled by disaster and perhaps some bestial creature crouched at the center crying waiting for our hero our everyman our Elijah wandering the earth in rags
how much of the map  could be labeled  terra incognita how much unknown invisible to others  how much of myself could I shake off abandon those undiscovered places  [I barely know] exist  though the map is not the territory how I am drawn to leave behind the pattern  for the path for a minute  an hour for one whole day I'd be like a Wintu describing the body  using cardinal directionshe touches me on the west arm  the river is to the east when we return his east arm circles around me and the river  stays to the west
What struck me first was their panic. Some were pulled by the wind from moving to the ends of the stacked cages, some had their heads blown through the bars— and could not get them in again. Some hung there like that—dead— their own feathers blowing, clotting in their faces. Then I saw the one that made me slow some— I lingered there beside her for five miles. She had pushed her head through the space between bars—to get a better view. She had the look of a dog in the back of a pickup, that eager look of a dog who knows she's being taken along. She craned her neck. She looked around, watched me, then strained to see over the car—strained to see what happened beyond. That is the chicken I want to be.
Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas, kissed his forehead and tucked him in. I turned on his night-light and looked for you in the closet and under the bed. I told him you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell your breath, your musty fur. I remember all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall, click of your claws, the hand that hovered just above my ankles if I left them exposed. Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere— unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal two days out of date. And even worse than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside, trying not to let my love become so tangled with anxiety my son thinks they're the same. When he says he's seen your tail or heard your heavy step, I insist that you aren't real. Soon he'll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams. If you get lonely after he's asleep, you can always come downstairs. I'll be sitting at the kitchen table with the dishes I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up. We can drink hot tea and talk about the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.
Bless this boy, born with the strong face of my older brother, the one I loved most, who jumped with me from the roof of the playhouse, my hand in his hand. On Friday nights we watched Twilight Zone and he let me hold the bowl of popcorn, a blanket draped over our shoulders, saying, Don't be afraid. I was never afraid when I was with my big brother who let me touch the baseball-size muscles living in his arms, who carried me on his back through the lonely neighborhood, held tight to the fender of my bike until I made him let go. The year he was fourteen he looked just like Ray, and when he died at twenty-two on a roadside in Germany I thought he was gone forever. But Ray runs into the kitchen: dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, pushes back his sleeve. He says, Feel my muscle, and I do.
Nothing to do but scuff down the graveyard road behind the playground, past the name-stones lined up in rows beneath their guardian pines, on out into the long, low waves of plains that dissolved time. We'd angle off from fence and telephone line, through ribbon-grass that closed behind as though we'd never been, and drift toward the bluff above the river-bend where the junked pickup moored with its load of locust-skeletons. Stretched across the blistered hood, we let our dresses catch the wind while clouds above dimmed their pink to purple, then shadow-blue— So slow, we listened to our own bones grow.
is a river you wade in until you get to the other side. But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting around my ankles, moving downstream over the flat rocks. I'm not able to lift a foot, move on. Instead, I'm going to stay here in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it like a cranky baby, rock it in my arms. I don't want it to grow up, go to school, get married. It's mine. Yes, the October sunlight wraps me in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet as a golden Tokay. On the other side, there are apples, grapes, walnuts, and the rocks are warm from the sun. But I'm going to stand here, growing colder, until every inch of my skin is numb. I can't cross over. Then you really will be gone.
Late winter, almost spring. It's like finding a diamond; now I don't want to leave. I sit in the dirt and put my hands in your tracks. For the first time in a long time I don't doubt. Now I know I always knew you were here. You are the beginning of disclosure, the long-felt presence Suddenly incarnate. Behind me my friend warns, If we see the bear, get into a fetal position. No problem, I tell her, I'm always in a fetal position—I was born in a fetal position. Did you know, she says, the body of a shaved bear looks exactly like a human man? I skip a stone, feel a sudden bloat of grief, then laugh. I ask her, Who would shave a bear? We climb Farther up Rattlesnake Creek, watch winter sun glitter off dark water. No matter how high we go I look higher. Sometimes absence can prove presence. That's not exactly faith, I know. All day, everywhere, I feel you near at hand. There's so much to understand, and everything to prove. Up high the air is thin and hard, roars in the ears like love.
1 I always wonder what they think the niggers are doing while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists,  are containing  Russia  and defining and re-defining and re-aligning  China,  nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile, from blowing up that earth which they have already  blasphemed into dung:  the gentle, wide-eyed, cheerful ladies, and their men, nostalgic for the noble cause of Vietnam, nostalgic for noble causes, aching, nobly, to wade through the blood of savages— ah—! Uncas shall never leave the reservation,  except to purchase whisky at the State Liquor Store. The Panama Canal shall remain forever locked:  there is a way around every treaty. We will turn the tides of the restless Caribbean,  the sun will rise, and set on our hotel balconies as we see fit. The natives will have nothing to complain about, indeed, they will begin to be grateful, will be better off than ever before.  They will learn to defer gratification and save up for things, like we do. Oh, yes. They will.We have only to make an offerthey cannot refuse. This flag has been planted on the moon: it will be interesting to see  what steps the moon will take to be revenged  for this quite breathtaking presumption. This people masturbate in winding sheets.  They have hacked their children to pieces.  They have never honoured a single treaty  made with anyone, anywhere. The walls of their cities are as foul as their children. No wonder their children come at them with knives. Mad Charlie man's son was one of their children,  had got his shit together by the time he left kindergarten, and, as for Patty, heiress of all the ages, she had the greatest vacation of any heiress, anywhere:Golly-gee, whillikens, Mom, real guns!and they come with a real big, black funky stud, too: oh, Ma! he's making eyes at me! Oh, noble Duke Wayne,  be careful in them happy hunting grounds. They say the only good Indian  is a dead Indian, by what I say is,  you can't be too careful, you hear? Oh, towering Ronnie Reagan, wise and resigned lover of redwoods,  deeply beloved, winning man-child of the yearning Republic from diaper to football field to Warner Brothers sound-stages, be thou our grinning, gently phallic, Big Boy of all the ages!  Salt peanuts, salt peanuts, for dear hearts and gentle people, and cheerful, shining, simple Uncle Sam! Nigger, read this and run! Now, if you can't read, run anyhow! From Manifest Destiny (Cortez, and all his men silent upon a peak in Darien) to A Decent Interval, and the chopper rises above Saigon, abandoning the noble cause and the people we have made ignoble and whom we leave there, now, to die, one moves, With All Deliberate Speed, to the South China Sea, and beyond, where millions of new niggers await glad tidings! No, said the Great Man's Lady, I'm against abortion, I always feel that's killing somebody. Well, what about capital punishment? I think the death penalty helps. That's right. Up to our ass in niggers on Death Row. Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me!  2 Well, I guess what the niggers is supposed to be doing is putting themselves in the path of that old sweet chariot and have it swing down and carry us home. That would help, as they say, and they got ways of sort of nudging the chariot. They still got influence with Wind and Water, though they in for some surprises with Cloud and Fire. My days are not their days. My ways are not their ways. I would not think of them, one way or the other, did not they so grotesquely block the view between me and my brother. And, so, I always wonder: can blindness be desired? Then, what must the blinded eyes have seen to wish to see no more! For, I have seen, in the eyes regarding me, or regarding my brother, have seen, deep in the farthest valley of the eye, have seen a flame leap up, then flicker and go out, have seen a veil come down, leaving myself, and the other, alone in that cave which every soul remembers, and out of which, desperately afraid, I turn, turn, stagger, stumble out, into the healing air, fall flat on the healing ground, singing praises, counselling my heart, my soul, to praise. What is it that this people cannot forget? Surely, they cannot be deluded as to imagine that their crimes are original? There is nothing in the least original about the fiery tongs to the eyeballs, the sex torn from the socket, the infant ripped from the womb, the brains dashed out against rock, nothing original about Judas, or Peter, or you or me: nothing: we are liars and cowards all, or nearly all, or nearly all the time: for we also ride the lightning, answer the thunder, penetrate whirlwinds, curl up on the floor of the sun, and pick our teeth with thunderbolts. Then, perhaps they imagine that their crimes are not crimes? Perhaps. Perhaps that is why they cannot repent, why there is no possibility of repentance. Manifest Destiny is a hymn to madness, feeding on itself, ending (when it ends) in madness: the action is blindness and pain, pain bringing a torpor so deep that every act is willed, is desperately forced, is willed to be a blow: the hand becomes a fist, the prick becomes a club, the womb a dangerous swamp, the hope, and fear, of love is acid in the marrow of the bone. No, their fire is not quenched, nor can be: the oil feeding the flames being the unadmitted terror of the wrath of God. Yes. But let us put it in another, less theological way: though theology has absolutely nothing to do with what I am trying to say. But the moment God is mentioned theology is summoned to buttress or demolish belief: an exercise which renders belief irrelevant and adds to the despair of Fifth Avenue on any afternoon, the people moving, homeless, through the city, praying to find sanctuary before the sky and the towers come tumbling down, before the earth opens, as it does in Superman. They know that no one will appear to turn back time, they know it, just as they know that the earth has opened before and will open again, just as they know that their empire is falling, is doomed, nothing can hold it up, nothing. We are not talking about belief.  3  I wonder how they think the niggers made, make it, how come the niggers are still here. But, then, again, I don't think they dare to think of that: no: I'm fairly certain they don't think of that at all. Lord, I with the alabaster lady of the house, with Beulah. Beulah about sixty, built in four-square, biceps like Mohammed Ali, she at the stove, fixing biscuits, scrambling eggs and bacon, fixing coffee, pouring juice, and the lady of the house, she say, she don't know how she'd get along without Beulah and Beulah just silently grunts, I reckon you don't, and keeps on keeping on and the lady of the house say She's just like one of the family, and Beulah turns, gives me a look, sucks her teeth and rolls her eyes in the direction of the lady's back, and keeps on keeping on. While they are containing Russia and entering onto the quicksand of China and patronizing Africa, and calculating the Caribbean plunder, and the South China Sea booty, the niggers are aware that no one has discussed anything at all with the niggers. Well. Niggers don't own nothing, got no flag, even our names are hand-me-downs and you don't change that by calling yourself X: sometimes that just makes it worse, like obliterating the path that leads back to whence you came, and to where you can begin. And, anyway, none of this changes the reality, which is, for example, that I do not want my son to die in Guantanamo, or anywhere else, for that matter, serving the Stars and Stripes. (I've seen some stars. I got some stripes.) Neither (incidentally) has anyone discussed the Bomb with the niggers: the incoherent feeling is, the less the nigger knows about the Bomb, the better: the lady of the house smiles nervously in your direction as though she had just been overheard discussing family, or sexual secrets, and changes the subject to Education, or Full Employment, or the Welfare rolls, the smile saying, Don't be dismayed. We know how you feel. You can trust us. Yeah. I would like to believe you. But we are not talking about belief.  4The sons of greed, the heirs of plunder, are approaching the end of their journey: it is amazing that they approach without wonder, as though they have, themselves, become that scorched and blasphemed earth, the stricken buffalo, the slaughtered tribes, the endless, virgin, bloodsoaked plain, the famine, the silence, the children's eyes, murder masquerading as salvation, seducing every democratic eye, the mouths of truth and anguish choked with cotton, rape delirious with the fragrance of magnolia, the hacking of the fruit of their loins to pieces, hey! the tar-baby sons and nephews, the high-yaller  nieces, and Tom's black prick hacked off to rustle in crinoline, to hang, heaviest of heirlooms, between the pink and alabaster breasts of the Great Man's Lady, or worked into the sash at the waist of the high-yaller Creole bitch, or niece, a chunk of shining brown-black satin, staring, staring, like the single eye of God: creation yearns to re-create a time when we were able to recognize a crime. Alas, my stricken kinsmen, the party is over: there have never been any white people, anywhere: the trick was accomplished with mirrors— look: where is your image now? where your inheritance, on what rock stands this pride? Oh, I counsel you, leave History alone. She is exhausted, sitting, staring into her dressing-room mirror, and wondering what rabbit, now, to pull out of what hat, and seriously considering retirement, even though she knows her public dare not let her go. She must change. Yes. History must change. A slow, syncopated relentless music begins suggesting her re-entry, transformed, virginal as she was, in the Beginning, untouched, as the Word was spoken, before the rape which debased her to be the whore of multitudes, or, as one might say, before she became the Star, whose name, above our title, carries the Show, making History the patsy, responsible for every flubbed line, every missed cue, responsible for the life and death, of all bright illusions and dark delusions, Lord, History is weary of her unspeakable liaison with Time, for Time and History have never seen eye to eye: Time laughs at History and time and time and time again Time traps History in a lie. But we always, somehow, managed to roar History back onstage to take another bow, to justify, to sanctify the journey until now. Time warned us to ask for our money back, and disagreed with History as concerns colours white and black. Not only do we come from further back, but the light of the Sun marries all colours as one. Kinsmen, I have seen you betray your Saviour (it is you who call Him Saviour) so many times, and I have spoken to Him about you, behind your back. Quite a lot has been going on behind your back, and, if your phone has not yet been disconnected, it will soon begin to ring: informing you, for example, that a whole generation, in Africa, is about to die, and a new generation is about to rise, and will not need your bribes, or your persuasions, any more: not your morality. No plundered gold— Ah! Kinsmen, if I could make you see the crime is not what you have done to me! It is you who are blind, you, bowed down with chains, you, whose children mock you, and seek another master, you, who cannot look man or woman or child in the eye, whose sleep is blank with terror, for whom love died long ago, somewhere between the airport and the safe-deposit box, the buying and selling of rising or falling stocks, you, who miss Zanzibar and Madagascar and Kilimanjaro and lions and tigers and elephants and zebras and flying fish and crocodiles and alligators and leopards and crashing waterfalls and endless rivers, flowers fresher than Eden, silence sweeter than the grace of God, passion at every turning, throbbing in the bush, thicker, oh, than honey in the hive, dripping dripping opening, welcoming, aching from toe to bottom to spine, sweet heaven on the line to last forever, yes, but, now, rejoicing ends, man, a price remains to pay, your innocence costs too much and we can't carry you on our books or our backs, any longer: baby, find another Eden, another apple tree, somewhere, if you can, and find some other natives, somewhere else, to listen to you bellow till you come, just like a man, but we don't need you, are sick of being a fantasy to feed you, and of being the principal accomplice to your crime: for, it is your crime, now, the cross to which you cling, your Alpha and Omega for everything. Well (others have told you) your clown's grown weary, the puppet master is bored speechless with this monotonous disaster, and is long gone, does not belong to you, any more than my woman, or my child, ever belonged to you. During this long travail our ancestors spoke to us, and we listened, and we tried to make you hear life in our song but now it matters not at all to me whether you know what I am talking about—or not: I know why we are not blinded by your brightness, are able to see you, who cannot see us. I know why we are still here. Godspeed. The niggers are calculating, from day to day, life everlasting, and wish you well: but decline to imitate the Son of the Morning, and rule in Hell.
In a strange house, a strange bed in a strange town, a very strange me is waiting for you. Now it is very early in the morning. The silence is loud. The baby is walking about with his foaming bottle, making strange sounds and deciding, after all, to be my friend. You arrive tonight. How dull time is! How empty—and yet, since I am sitting here, lying here, walking up and down here, waiting, I see that time's cruel ability to make one wait is time's reality. I see your hair which I call red. I lie here in this bed. Someone teased me once, a friend of ours— saying that I saw your hair red because I was not thinking of the hair on your head. Someone also told me, a long time ago: my father said to me,It is a terrible thing, son, to fall into the hands of the living God.
If the hope of giving is to love the living, the giver risks madness in the act of giving. Some such lesson I seemed to see in the faces that surrounded me. Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted, what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?  The giver is no less adrift  than those who are clamouring for the gift. If they cannot claim it, if it is not there, if their empty fingers beat the empty air and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer knows that all of his giving has been for naught and that nothing was ever what he thought and turns in his guilty bed to stare at the starving multitudes standing there and rises from bed to curse at heaven, he must yet understand that to whom much is given much will be taken, and justly so:I cannot tell how much I owe.
The lady is a tramp  a camp  a lamp The lady is a sight  a might  a light the lady devastated an alley or two reverberated through the valley which leads to me, and you the lady is the apple of God's eye: He's cool enough about it but He tends to strut a little when she passes by the lady is a wonder daughter of the thunder smashing cages legislating rages with the voice of ages singing us through.
Lord,  when you send the rain think about it, please, a little?  Do not get carried away by the sound of falling water, the marvelous light  on the falling water.  I  am beneath that water.  It falls with great force  and the light Blinds  me to the light.
Humbling of Bhutto in Mecca, Bhutto kissing Hajar-e-Aswad, half the Bhutto cabinet in Ihram, kneeling. These were the first scenes, in the rolling newsreel of half-closed doors, of the doorjamb in the way of the twentieth century’s upstarts. A nationalization, by Bhutto, of religious piety? No, but a headlong scram into obeisance of all and everybody and everything to the stately rise of Islam in the neighboring, overbearing Arabia. That year Bhutto had appointed my father Hajj secretary, and we, the seven children and the ayah, were present at Melody Cinema in full regalia to see, to our amazement, on the screen, our father in Ihram like Bhutto, and in a tent in Mina, sitting on the ground in an ablution scene, the humbling of our mysophobic mother, who before her pilgrimage would have drunk water only from a glass washed three times by a servant and who wouldn't sit on the drawing-room sofa unless it was draped by a freshly laundered sheet.
1. In the first year of war they played “bride and groom” and counted everything on their fingers: their faces reflected in the river; the waves that swept away their faces before disappearing; and the names of newborns. Then the war grew up and invented a new game for them: the winner is the one who returns from the journey alone, full of stories of the dead as the passing wings flutter over the broken trees; and now the winner must tow the hills of dust so lightly that no one feels it; and now the winner wears a necklace with half a metal heart for a pendant, and the task to follow is to forget the other half. The war grew old and left the old letters, the calendars and newspapers, to turn yellow with the news, with the numbers, and with the names of the players. 2. Five centuries have passed since Scheherazade told her tale. Baghdad fell, and they forced me to the underworld. I watch the shadows as they pass behind the wall: none look like Tammuz. He would cross thousands of miles for the sake of a single cup of tea poured by my own hand. I fear the tea is growing cold: cold tea is worse than death. 3. I would not have found this cracked jar if it weren’t for my loneliness, which sees gold in all that glitters. Inside the jar is the magic plant that Gilgamesh never stopped looking for. I’ll show it to Tammuz when he comes, and we’ll journey, as fast as light, to all the continents of the world, and all who smell it will be cured or freed, or will know its secret. I don’t want Tammuz to come too late to hear my urgent song. 4. When Tammuz comes I’ll also give him all the lists I made to pass the time: lists of food, of books, lost friends, favorite songs, list of cities to see before one dies, and lists of ordinary things with notes to prove that we are still alive. 5. It’s as if I’m hearing music in the boat’s hull, as if I can smell the river, the lily, the fish, as if I’m touching the skies that fall from the words “I love you,” as if I can see those tiny notes that are read over and over again, as if I’m living the lives of birds who bear nothing but their feathers. 6. The earth circled the sun once more and not a cloud nor wind nor country passed through my eyes. My shadow, imprisoned in Aladdin’s lamp, mirrors the following: a picture of the world with you inside, light passing through a needle’s eye, scrawlings akin to cuneiform, hidden paths to the sun, dried clay, tranquil Ottoman pottery, and a huge pomegranate, its seeds scattered all over Uruk. 7. In Iraq, after a thousand and one nights, someone will talk to someone else. Markets will open for regular customers. Small feet will tickle the giant feet of the Tigris. Gulls will spread their wings and no one will fire at them. Women will walk the streets without looking back in fear. Men will give their real names without putting their lives at risk. Children will go to school and come home again. Chickens in the villages won't peck at human flesh on the grass. Disputes will take place without any explosives. A cloud will pass over cars heading to work as usual. A hand will wave to someone leaving or returning. The sunrise will be the same for those who wake and those never will. And every moment something ordinary will happen under the sun.
A fish meets another fish and lays eggs. As its fins signal to the seaweed its colors come out one after the other. Its bubbles are words meant for no one. The world rises and falls each day through the eyes of a fish.
I have a special ticket to another planet beyond this Earth. A comfortable world, and beautiful: a world without much smoke, not too hot and not too cold. The creatures are gentler there, and the governments have no secrets. The police are nonexistent: there are no problems and no fights. And the schools don’t exhaust their students with too much work for history has yet to start and there’s no geography and no other languages. And even better: the war has left its “r” behind and turned into love, so the weapons sleep beneath the dust, and the planes pass by without shelling the cities, and the boats look like smiles on the water. All things are peaceful and kind on the other planet beyond this Earth. But still I hesitate to go alone.
Sometimes I think about climbing a telephone pole but then what? Telephone poles now have almost nothing to do with telephones but I liked how a curly cord went into the receiver then a sturdier black wire went into the wall through the wall out to a pole then miles and miles of wire pole wire pole sometimes underground underwater to whomever you needed who’d dry her hands thinking Gosh now what or Thank heavens or Oh no then say Hello as a question or a lie then the intimate negotiations and sorry confessions and flat jokes would take word form from excited electrons moving through the wire and sometimes a cowboy would suddenly gallop to town through dust and cactus Yup a storm’s a-coming to call someone but the fates always intend so the cowboy must listen for the rest of his days to the phone make a funny insect-performing-Beckett sound until the operator comes on and says, Sorry but that calling area's been hit by the blast and the cowboy thinks, What blast? What blast? riding off into the moonlessly blue chaparral.
I love when out of nowhere I love when out of nowhere my cat jumps on me and my body isn’t even surprised. Me who wants to be surprised by everything like a dandelion like a bottle cap cricket cricket. I keep waiting for the god under the anthill to speak up. I keep waiting for the part of the myth where everyone turns into a different bird or the reeds start talking or horses come out of the ocean in their parliamentary regalia and cities grow from their hoofprints. I keep waiting for the bugle and the jackal-headed god to weigh my heart across the river. All this daylight in just a few moments pours itself into darkness. More and more I’m satisfied with partial explanations like a fly with one wing, walking.
You shouldn’t have a heart attack in your 20s. 47 is the perfect time for a heart attack. Feeding stray shadows only attracts more shadows. Starve a fever, shatter a glass house. People often mistake thirst for hunger so first take a big slurp. A motorboat is wasted on me even though all summer the pool was, I didn’t get in it once. Not in it, not in it twice. A dollhouse certainly isn’t wasted on a mouse both in terms of habitation and rhyme. Always leave yourself time to get lost. 50 cattle are enough for a decent dowry but sometimes a larger gesture is called for like shouting across the Grand Canyon. Get used to nothing answering back. Always remember the great effects of the Tang poets, the meagerness of their wine, meagerness of writing supplies. Go ahead, drown in the moon’s puddle. Contusions are to be expected and a long wait in ICU under the muted TVs advertising miracle knives and spot removers. How wonderful to be made entirely of hammered steel! No one knows why Lee chose to divert his troops to Gettysburg but all agree it was the turning point of the Civil War. Your turining point may be lying crying on the floor. Get up! The perfect age for being buried alive in sand is 8 but jumping up 33, alluding to the resurrection, a powerful motif in Western art but then go look at the soup cans and crumpled fenders in the modern wing: what a relief. Nearly 80% of the denizens of the deep can produce their own light but up here, we make our own darkness.
has ever lit up our hearts like this. No king. See Bhutto in Karachi, 1972. His path strewn with rose petals, sprinkled with attar, leads him, not to the sea with its crashing surf and screaming gulls but into the alleys and passageways of a slum. Ferdowsi in Shahnamah tags it for the interim as “the place of worship before any others existed. . . ” No King, no King of Kings, had ever toured a slum before. It opened wide the thrice-locked chamber of mercy in our hearts. The gathering crowds expecting to catch a glimpse of Bhutto, are, instead, treated to a double vision: Alexander the Great, in a red robe, left hand resting on his sword, like in an illustration from Shahnamah, as he watches our own pilgrim, the unsuspecting Bhutto “reach for the door handle of the Ka'ba.” Bhutto’s entourage and PTV news crew push back. The crowd askew, insufflated by this vision, pushes Bhutto towards the hovel of the woman driven half-insane by poverty. Bhutto, aglow, with tears in his eyes, embraces the woman who collapses in his arms. No king, no king of kings, had ever lit up our hearts like this. No king.
Proxies—pertinent, prominent, proximate— impose war, sustain it. The Empire ever absent and seemingly elsewhere— evasive, persuasive, pervasive. Things are this complicated.
My itinerary is the eternity of exile. Deferred is the trip back into domicile. My marching orders lost at sea; my papers shrouded in an immigrant's secrecy. Lamar Avenue in Austin, Texas is wide, long and it flows. Air-conditioned apartments allow for repose. My transports and attachments to the past, my dream-life, have an urgency that is never lost. An exile's ultimate treat, tonight's dreamlike score: a dinner with the Zaidis in their Islamabad home.
To the piano of ragtime music, Paul Newman plunges his head into a basin of ice and water. A consummate conman, with Robert Redford, he's up and ready to take on the Mafia.The Sting is on. Hollywood redresses the wrongs of the world. From my proscenium seat, it is Newman's awakening into action that catches my imagination. Cool. So cool. Outside NAFDEC cinema, Kipling'sGreat Game rages on. Yet, I am barely away. My basin of ice cold water is going tepid. The con of it all. But to them it's jazz. It's all cool, for jazz makes them look cool. As for ragtime, just a last minute anachronistic improvisation, for good cinema's sake.
This prisoner and other “ghost detainees” were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment and conditions, officials said.  —“Rumsfeld Ordered Iraqi Suspect Held as ‘Ghost’ Prisoner,”  San Francisco Chronicle, June 17, 2004 The ghost prisoner, a murderer, wishes he was invisible, sheer air, already dead. His narrow bed washes him away to dream escape through holy gaps that open in the grin of his small son. Lost teeth offer him a freedom so absurd he wakes and laughs.   No one hears the ghost prisoner. Whether he groans or bears stoically what instruments we’ve paid to play this march toward a freedom so absurd we wake and silently shake our heads. We do not speak ill of the dead.   The ghost prisoner, still murderer, wishes he was visible, fiery air, rallying the dead. His narrow cell just the place for prayer. Holy, holy, a ghost’s revenge pushed through gaps in his own gashed mouth, a curse so absurd, he wakes to its howl.   No one says his name, his crimes, how many jolts it took to resurrect him as a betrayer of insurrection, paying for freedom’s ring.   We do not want to know what it took. We’d rather not speak the dead ill. We do not want to know what it took to make him wish he were dead still.
after Frost We were the land's before we were. Or the land was ours before you were a land. Or this land was our land, it was not your land. We were the land before we were people, loamy roamers rising, so the stories go, or formed of clay, spit into with breath reeking soul— What's America, but the legend of Rock 'n' Roll? Red rocks, blood clots bearing boys, blood sands swimming being from women's hands, we originate, originally, spontaneous as hemorrhage. Un-possessing of what we still are possessed by, possessed by what we now no more possess. We were the land before we were people, dreamy sunbeams where sun don't shine, so the stories go, or pulled up a hole, clawing past ants and roots— Dineh in documentaries scoff DNA evidence off. They landed late, but canyons spoke them home. Nomadic Turkish horse tribes they don't know. What's America, but the legend of Stop 'n' Go? Could be cousins, left on the land bridge, contrary to popular belief, that was a two-way toll. In any case we'd claim them, give them some place to stay. Such as we were we gave most things outright (the deed of the theft was many deeds and leases and claim stakes and tenure disputes and moved plat markers stolen still today . . .) We were the land before we were a people, earthdivers, her darling mudpuppies, so the stories go, or emerging, fully forming from flesh of earth— The land, not the least vaguely, realizing in all four directions, still storied, art-filled, fully enhanced. Such as she is, such as she wills us to become.
Dogs so long with us we forget that wolves allowed as how they might be tamed and sprang up all over the globe, with all humans, all at once, like a good idea.   So we tamed our own hearts. Leashed them or sent them to camp’s edge. Even the shrinks once agreed, in dreams our dogs are our deepest selves.   Ur Dog, a Siberian, dogged the heels of nomads, then turned south to Egypt to keep Pharaoh safe.  Seemed strange, my mother sighed, when finally we got a hound,. . . a house without a dog.    Her world never knew a yard un-dogged and thus unlocked. Sudden intrusions impossible where yappers yap.   Or maybe she objected to empty armchairs, rooms too quiet without the beat of tail thump or paw thud.  N’de, Ojibwe say, my pet,  which also suggests ode, that spot in the chest, the part you point to when you pray, or say with great feeling—great meaning, meaning dog-love goes that deep.
The bodies seemed so much like sleeping children that working with them felt “almost more like a kidnapping than archaeological work,” Dr. Miremont said. —New York Times, September 11, 2007 Thunder loves you, mumbles charms to warm you—folded cold body.   Lightning’s pity picks you, licks a kiss, but what’s left to wick?   Even direct hits miss— no amount of flash and hiss fires you. Inviolate virgin,   inflammable channel to Gods long gone or gone underground, ghost-gray flecks left in the rock   altar, your shelter for five centuries where you huddled, red-painted hair and wreathed with feathers.   Weave threads of your shawl— not a shroud since you were live when left for dead—weave cover   please, I beg your handlers. Pull stitches so that wound closes over your smoldered remains.   They say you clutch your mother’s hair, strands in a bag sent up the mountain, an introduction to the Gods   of Science, who read threaded DNA to determine who you were related to when human.   Not the crushed boy near you, no brother he nor sister the girl, bound away to sacred silence,   cased in plastic cased in glass. Visitors point and justify the past:See what they did—child sacrifice.  Fattened ’em up, drugged ’em— Spanish violence, Christian influence, border fences, all deserved because of her   wad of coca leaves and elaborate braids. Lightning’s mark spares you display. Singed cheek and blasted chest,   blackened flesh looks less asleep, flashed back the fact you’re dead, a charred mummy, so far gone even   Lightning’s longing couldn’t wake you. Thunder won’t forget you, hums a generator’s song in cooler vents   to your coiled form in cold storage— song of your six years plus five centuries come to this: doom, doom, doom.   Lightning still sighs: release, release, release.
In the new century, we lose the art of many things.   For example, at the beep, I communicate using the wrong machine.   I called to say we have two lives and only one of them is real.   When the phone rings: you could be anybody. In the evening: you are homeless   and hunting for good light, as safe a place as any to make a bed for the night.   In both my lives, my nerves go bust. I’m certain that I’m not   as I appear, that I’m a figment and you’re not really here.   The struggle is authenticity.   I have a message. You must believe me.
Our stone wall was built by slaves and my bones, my bones are paid for. We have two   of everything, twice heavy in our pockets, warming our two big hands.   This is the story, as I know it. One morning: the ships came, as foretold, and death pearl-handled, almost   and completely. How cheap a date I turned out to be.   Each finger weak with the memory: lost teeth, regret. Our ghosts walk the shoulders of the road at night. I get the feeling you’ve been lying to me.
In the half-light, I am most at home, my shadow as company.   When I feel hot, I push a button to make it stop. I mean this stain on my mind I can’t get out. How human   I seem. Like modern man, I traffic in extinction. I have a gift. Like an animal, I sustain.   A flock of birds when touched, I scatter. I won’t approach until the back is turned.   My heart betrays. I confess: I am afraid. How selfish of me. When there’s no one here, I halve   the distance between our bodies infinitesimally. In this long passageway, I pose   against the wallpaper, dig my heels in, catch the light. In my vision, the back door opens   on a garden that is always in bloom. The dogs are chained so they can’t attack like I know   they want to. In the next yard over, honeybees swarm and their sound is huge.
I was listening for the dog when the locks were pried open. The man was dead. The dog, a survivor, was dead. It happens   more often this way. A disease left untreated; the body, in confusion, gives in.   The bomb breathes its fire down the hallway, the son comes back in pieces; the body, in confusion, gives in.   The grief is a planet. A dust ring. A small moon that’s been hidden under my pillow, that’s been changing the way my body moves this whole time.
The problem— it’s not been written yet, the omens: the headless owl, the bobcat struck, the red wolf where she could not be.   None of it done and yet it’s over.   Nothing yet of night when she called me closer asked me to bring her crow painting to stay straight across from her feet so she could waken into it,  remember her friend.   Of Old Chief alongside her shoulder  still watching over her just as the mountain had done throughout her Alberta childhood.   The Pendleton shroud bearing our braids, her figure in flaming pyre.   The cards, the notes, the tasks the things undone, not done and she with us faraway as this has always been and ever will continue.    We meet we leave we meld and vaporize from whatever it was that held us human   in this life.   And all the beautiful things that lead our thoughts and give us reason remain despite the leaving and all I know is what you know   when it is over said and done it was a time  and there was never enough of it.
It wasn’t socks missing from his feet, not elbow cloth unraveled unilaterally, not equal displacement of chin and brow, nor the eye that sat a bit lower on the right, it was his knuckle that made me weep, clove corners gone wayside, like minuscule meat hooks clawed away bits of him each shift he made, invisible a timeliness unfurled. It was his muscle torn through, festering, the prosthetic hand, finger- width dismay all across his attempted grin, left there just like that, for anyone to see—it was his mercy. In the end we’re rarely beautiful, mostly placed away from compromising situations into poses offsetting what has become of us in some gawker’s unnerving eyes. Yet, he was, is, still here in mine, and I’m human because of it. Maybe only. Maybe.
for Phil Young and my father Robert Hedge Coke; for Whitman and Hughes America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in. Sing back the moment you cherished breath. Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.   Before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep, held her cradleboard, wept her into day. My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery, held her severed cord beautifully beaded.   My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps, nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong. My song comforted her as she battled my reason broke my long-held footing sure, as any child might do.   As she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself, as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall.   My blood-veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine.   But here I am, here I am, here I remain high on each and every peak, carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing—   and sing again I will, as I have always done. Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing the stoic face, polite repose, polite while dancing deep inside, polite Mother of her world. Sister of myself.   When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle. Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light, day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision— then, she will quake herself over. My song will make it so.   When she grows far past her self-considered purpose, I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh I will—I do. America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.
Some teeth down there some hair and gray gums   Some grass and dirt down there some gristle and whimpers   All stupid grinning death running around the yard making a little child cry  with each busted grass blade   I had a dog I had three dogs I sit and stay   They did not disappear into the trees one day   Their brains were not broken coral on the street They were meat   •   Some leash down there some shit and tennis balls   I had a dog I had three dogs I sit and beg   Their brains were not broken coral on the street   They were not meat one day they did not disappear into the trees   All stupid grinning death running around the yard making a little child cry with each busted grass blade   Some whimpers down there some nipples and pink tum-tums   •   Some biting tails down there some sunlight and long nails   Some fleas dug up some mange and gray tongues   I had a dog They were meat I had three dogs   They did not disappear into the streets They did not tree   Some haunch skid and drag down there some mouths one day   They did not smell like baby’s breath   All stupid grinning death running around the yard making a little child cry with each busted grass blade   •   Some grass and dirt down there some teeth and ruined carpets   I had a dog I had three dogs I fucked fleas   All stupid grinning death running around the yard making a little child cry with each busted grass blade   Some eyelashes down there some eating grass and mange some baby’s breath   One day their brains were not broken coral on the street   They did not disappear into the trees   •   Some sit and stay down there some meat and sunlight   Their brains were not broken coral on the street they did not disappear into the trees   They did not fuck fleas   All stupid grinning death running around the yard making a little child cry with each busted grass blade   Some bones and baby’s breath down there some bark and seizures   Distant watery eyes   One day I had a dog   I had three dogs
Daffodils shimmy in the dilated onion grass their hearts out   Shelovesme Shelovesmenot   Smeared against the sidewalk   Urine left in the toilet all day simmers under halogens   Listening to someone else breathe listening to static cling   Time to wipe down the refrigerator with a handful of ibuprofen and a bandanna  soaked in tonic water   Butter-butter Black lemons Pine-Sol   •   Daffodils shimmy in the dilated onion grass their asses off   Other yellow flowers I don’t see you yet   Noon tears down the street a terrible kid on a brand-new   Now I remember the faces of tulips   Speechless   Yellow peaches sweat inside brown paper bags   Press your forehead against the pit in the perfect peach and everything will stop  moving how about that?   •   Daffodils shimmy in the dilated onion grass their eyes closed   Close your eyes I close my eyes   Families of worms work their yellow way up through clouds in the mustard air   Slams into the yard   Pollen lies down on everything it just lies down sun the color of photosynthesis and that’s fine   Birds bark inside houses   Yellow fingers work the yellow spine
I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard.   Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.   Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.   A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered   In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind,   Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.
He finds her near the stack of green plastic baskets waiting to be filled and circles her waist with his left arm, entwines her fingers in his, pulls her toward him, Muzak from the ceiling shedding a flashy Salsa, and as they begin to move, she lets her head fall back, fine hair swinging a beat behind as they follow their own music—a waltz—past the peaches bursting with ripeness in their wicker baskets, the prawns curled into each other behind cold glass, a woman in a turquoise sari, her dark eyes averted. They twirl twice before the imported cheeses, fresh mozzarella in its milky liquid, goat cheese sent down from some green mountain, then glide past ranks of breads, seeds spread across brown crusts, bottles of red wine nested together on their sides. He reaches behind her, slides a bouquet of cut flowers from a galvanized bucket, tosses a twenty to the teenaged boy leaning on the wooden counter, and they whirl out the door, the blue sky a sudden surprise.
He has transformed his Tonka dump truck into a push mower, using   lumber scraps and duct tape to construct a handle on the front end of the dump box.   One brave screw holds the makeshift contraption together.   All summer they outline the edges of these acres, first Daddy, and then,   behind him this small echo, each dodging the same stumps,   pausing to slap a mosquito, or rest in the shade, before once again pacing   out into the light, where first one, and then the other,   leans forward to guide the mowers along the bright edges of this familiar world.
Late afternoons, we'd tuck up our hems under Minisa Bridge, scrape our white knees on scrub brush and drowned trees to slide   down the dirt bank past milk-weed gone to seed, cattails and trash to sit on stones at the edge of the river and giggle and smoke,   waiting to wolf-whistle North High's rowing team. In the shadows where the milk-chocolate river unfolded, ooze between our toes, we'd strip,   risk long-legged insects, leeches and mothers for the silt slick on our thighs, the air thick with the smell of honeysuckle, mud—the rest   of the day somewhere downstream. We didn't know why, but none of us wanted to go home to polite kitchens and mothers   patiently waiting for what happened next, the way women have always waited for hunter husbands, kept vigils and prayed at the entrance of mines.
A roadside inn. Lakeside dive. Spiffed up. End of a summer day. And I suppose I should be smiling beneficently at the families playing near the shore, their plastic balls and splashes and chatter.   But my eye pivots left to a couple; he is carrying her into the water. He's strong enough, and she is light enough to be carried. I see how she holds her own, hugging his neck, his chest steady as his arms.   I have never seen such a careful dunk, half-dunk, as he gives her. That beautiful play he makes lifting her from the water.   And I suppose I should be admiring the sunset, all purple and orange and rose now. Nice porch here, too. Yeah, great view.   But I have never seen such a loving carrying as he gives her. Imagine   being so light as to float above water in love.
He was a surprise of white: his teeth like knives, his face a triangle of albino dislike. I had seen him before,   on our back porch, where my father sometimes left watermelon rinds, and he dipped his tongue into them,   his skin glowing beneath our lights, like some four-legged relative of the moon. I knew him as a citizen of the night:   a fainting, ghostly presence with a tail so naked it was embarrassed to drag behind him.   But that morning, terrified and violent, he was different: a hissing fury at the bottom of the garbage can, a vampire bathed in light.
Something almost Flemish about that water, a golden brown but clear into its depths, the plank-ends of the dock a fading gray beside it, and a boat moored at the end; something, it seems to me in looking back, about a murky bullhead on a stringer, one of those rope ones you can hardly see, so that the fish appeared to scull in place; something (the details start to widen now) about white wooden clapboards on the side of that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped, a neon beer sign staring out through glass— late in the afternoon, I drinking deep of everything I saw, now mine to keep.
The first few years she wore them I didn't even notice the leather's soft tan, and the buckskin laces roughly looped. By the time I paid attention, her feet had already curved the shoes inward, weather had toughened the soft leather, and one lace had broken short. Then I asked where she got those shoes and she said from the Indian store down in Mountain View.   Some other time, another year, I asked the name of the Indian store that sold handmade shoes like hers, but she said it went out of business and no store sold mocs with vodka splatters and Yosemite dirt ground in with a little tamale pie, so I couldn't buy shoes like hers anyway.   Last summer, laughing and crying together, in the campground at Lake Mendocino, on the night before her youngest son's wedding while the men drank beer and talked of politics and sports, I told her how much I really, really liked those old shoes of hers. So she took them off and gave them to me.   Those beat-up, raggedy Kaibab moccasins I wear are stained and worn rough by hard years in my friend's life. I wear them when I need her courage.
Sometimes they are the only thing beautiful about a hotel. Like transients, come winter they have a way of disappearing, disguised as dirty light, limp beside a puttied pane. Then some April afternoon a roomer jacks a window open, a breeze intrudes, resuscitates memory, and suddenly they want to fly, while men, looking up from the street, are deceived a moment into thinking a girl in an upper story is waving.
Atop his exhausted buggy with its rusted wheels and now-stuck key, one boot missing, a faded jersey, the bill of his cap cracked off, he sits   behind a nicked brown horse that once flicked its tail, clattered around planked floor or rug when the buggy was wound after school by children who've since   fallen behind him, white-haired or gone, as he still waves the flopping spring of his crop, still stares through dimming goggles, gathering gray ribbons   of dust in his silent, frozen race down an ever-unfurling track, hunched to win, leaving far back all claps and laughter, his once-smooth face   scarred and pitted, just the white fleck of a smile now, more a sneer, his empty fists on the reins of air still holding tight.
Dad dead, Mom—back in the bank, tellering— started dressing in cute skirts and pants suits she sewed herself from onionskin patterns and bright-colored knits picked up at Cloth World. Got her dark brunette hair cut in a shag. And she and her single girlfriends from work on a weekday night would leave me to "Love American Style" or Mary Tyler Moore and step out to hear the country house band or now-and-then headliners like Ray Price and Merle Haggard. Mom's blue Buick Wildcat shoulder to shoulder with the other Detroit behemoths in the dim lot around back. Wind skittering trash along the street. Bass notes thumping through the sheet-metal walls and the full swinging sound suddenly blaring when a couple came in or out the door. I know because I'm there, now, in the lot, crouched behind the fender of a Skylark or Riviera, in the weird green glow of the rooftop Ronnie's sign, not keeping tabs on Mom, not watching out, just keeping time with the band and sipping a Slurpee while she dances through this two-year window before getting re-hitched, settling back down. Just twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, looking pretty, having the time of her life.
1 . MORNING The year and its  as like as eggs,  the days in their crates of season  we break open  and the yolk of fresh sun we scramble  the runny light into  a firm break  of the night's winter  helping of the fast.  * Yellow dishes—  forsythia  set out for the early  meal of season— sit the house yards  the town  parks down together  to this spring as to a table  all set  in order just  So good to see  you and  your way found  back. ​ * The arriving coats of smell  are hung in the air, butt-smacked and  oiled babies of moment; and years of taste as touch  hug the senses  to the living; sweet sour bitter salty  some never experienced  again, the gloved fingers of bananas so briefly kissed  with ripeness; fruit,  grip-shaped thought brought to the tongue,  the finished taste  of words, an aftertaste of silence, the morning  glories we haven't tasted  yet ​ * life, as lasting as any one  sense, a taste  a sight, an orange mix of kiss with sweetness  for the moment  it exists, finishes and is swallowed, is also those  who finish hungry or starve  to death which swallows; the final stage of rattlesnake bite  is yellow vision,  light, then you both go out. Fear, to the tongue, is metallic: I tasted  a copper penny it could have been  a one-time and final, incomparable  —How does life taste  to one condemned  in that cup this morning?—
To Reg 1 season opener The ants are licking open the peonies unwrapping the seal to the tight globes of bloom they gang up on and chase away a ladybug I can sit here on the porch stoop as on the step of an amphitheater and watch ours is a great sports city the tour guides say even the house roofs are bleachers some ball is always in the air ready to open its colors fragrance like stadium food scent reaches the street our mouths drop open tongues about to do the work 2 The wind is so high, the lake surface contracts in a gasp The waves jump straight up. Our side must be winning. I can't hear the crowd of whitecap I see from the bus run The joggers and cyclists look as though hysterically they carry, themselves, the news and breaking sound that maybe There's not another side to water nor to the whole of what we play We field against a fog, or, the home game in solids, ice in a change of uniform We contend against what is and is ourselves though We want a side that isn't ours to have of the universe to have us on our feet like the waves cheering on this morning this morning We want our messengers to lie a pool of good news dead silent at our feet for us to walk open. Our winnings winning or not: still won a life that lets us live it the excitement of winged ankles, seas of dancing streets in the envelope. 3 When the waves jumped straight up, the messenger Sand smashed them to pieces for winning When the surface fainted back, the stampeding Sky sank its foot in that face to leave winning There were two countless words for the score You hear the roar of silence over winning Someone screaming, What are you doing, what are you Doing Something answers, I am winning. Doing nothing is thrown out the window To eliminate that way to deal with winning We burned gridlocked cars in Morse code before We took off running to say living is winning Lake Shore Drive reads Chicago is 'living life city' (quoting the song) winning. 4 The whole street ladies lay afloat in the gondola stroll of their own legs the daylit lanterns of their dreams hide inexpressibly their faces made up with not being in Kansas they fan with maps like feathers of brightly colored directions to famous brands of which this street is that one direction. And all one direction only— no movement. as if, since people move, there are no people on this street; the stalks of the buildings, reeds a hem of the lake sweeps through. 5 daylight you see people's reflections off each other fill the street cascading one from another the crowd slips like a fan out of itself, in the angling of store displays the glass facets kaleidoscope a rose window back of themselves full of the flash petals of grace that fall by evening home, when the ones dressed in evening wear possession-less and so, without reflection here take all the empties back all the want and people scavenged back off the streets into these who dine with starving off the streets 6 The street in the opening between buildings is running a strip of the el like a frame by frame tape, the windows of the train different shots of the sky, then it breaks, and the clouds are caught up in the walls of nearby glass-skin architecture. I never get to see what I think would be the whole movie. I, too, move on. The turns in the drive roll the buildings out from behind one another in a scenery change, only I am the one on wheels, the drop backs a larger stage than this town. And just as I can see betrayal coming by the music, my eyes braille the thunder hidden even up the sleeve of a silent film. The hand shakes anyway. Not meant to be the end of things. An inbound train toward the loop will be arriving shortly. The street in the opening 7 The John Hancock Building has never struck the actual oil it looks like it should. Wildcatters call this a dry hole. But it isn't, it has the pool of Lake Michigan on the bottom when you're looking from the top What an amazing hole, he said. Enchantment's name to call into what we all are looking for, a spell to an opening as deep into seeing. He had the gift of new first time in a city, pick pockets hadn't sighted yet the eyes, the bulging wealth of openness, the shiny change. We were watching the old movie of our century. —our village root, the well's drawn-words drip into volumes in our pack trying to solve our plot. A close-up on the winch-rope, frayed by so continuously raising the question, cuts off not to mislead the viewer; and screened on our bodies, the billboard buses, city wall— the crude that is this day struck from our drilling 8 All over everything the sun rises funny. I heard the eagle flies on Friday asthe eagle shits on Friday where I lived. Not enough for any growth to get paid its flowers. Mostly weed. Bouquet of distraction. Broken glass season gives way to plastic in the lots, only the packaging changes, it snows something or other year round white to deal with, powder or rock. Or through the window, the country unable to stop opening its poverties, making the sun go 'round to the back. But the sun reserves its someday someday to shine where door don' 'llow light. And I am drenched by a slow, barely brought in gusher of my working through the cracks, a gold opened in myself like a vein through blinding pain, through the names of need and silence. But my someday come seems didn't when the hit is only mine, not also enough of to my brothers. 9 Dawn burnished  wave, smoothed free of everything but the slowest curve  barely less than earth's hump unloads  a surf-less silence we can see—  clear bright yet shimmering—stillness as. Stillness as a dangerous surface enough!  a floor walked all night clear to the end of nowhere got to get my hands on some  no place except where  money from somewhere  to get me over this hump an arm swipes  everything off the table to this floor the hit bottom come to  the surface on the table
Baltazár went to the market and came home with a parrot. Thursdays in this town were always just so:   What should have been four big potatoes and some white cheese Came home in a cage filled with green feathers and two wings.   The mathematics of exchange in this world, the stomach or the heart— Which of these, how much of one for the other,   Friday would have to sort out. On a Thursday afternoon The world sang, a full dinner this way coming through the air.
given to look into the bowl of sky   for it to fill with future see it turned   upside down on the grass see the ladle pass   hear the god underneath calling his inside the heavenly vault eternal how that bump reminds me how we saw it once from the underside of Nut a mother's belly   see dissolve against her vast ground the drowned cloud of black   lives the solution's population of rain crowding the city in the belly   see it now as the sea extended the drowned city lit in this sky   see our sky the bone clouds casting African   tomorrows only an arm black balletic cloud extends itself   dark nimbic invertebrate squall   I am handed rain by a portuguese man-o-war These are   new skies once we absorb the seas' solution as the bodies lost the sting fire of lightning flesh   the water body air   we drown together in our living to drink   from this bone
Mourning doves are not owls after a while away from the city not because the country appears of a softer feather less predatory    you're thinking a sound more naturally friendly  less edgy and dangerous than the subway but because the   city city to city within itself so sharply details for you actually walks you through a training in the amplitudes of form    after a while that sharpness wipes the smile the natural had you putting on everything. Really owls are so soft their deadly  accuracy of flight depending on it they are all but silent a recognizable law nobody says shit you learn the city   has taught you to pick up on which wings bring the disk of their sun for around your neck each day    and which take you out; and that your green act of good is natural in that it too depends on the weather.
I wonder if anyone ever thought to tell time with them know where their shadow tipped on 3 o'clock which floor which parking spot from a window desk or if they ever stood completely over their own shade's dot that moment they had no metered footprint; a peek-a-boo we now find ticketed as a before and an after an either side of a space the zero pulls into, its long reserve wheel of nothing there. Yet here a gnomon of absence bears its shadow placement on some dial of brevity and cold about life about the footprint we may leave empty of light empty of even point to it.   Here it's flat and densely packed with people unlike the empty open of the plain; here our expanse the grown over dumpsite of the meadowlands wetlands or the shore is corps of engineered the bulldozer-beetle's ball of dung shines in it and somewhere the body hidden in our shit to fake us innocent... one of our jokes sometimes things rise and float.    We in the morning catch, from the train, in the green garbage runoff, sight of white herons and the cormorants. When they’re there in the evening, we safely assume the world hasn’t gone anywhere; a take of bearings the same the next morning when we’d see the lit towers on the island we were headed for we see now the hour. From the Jersey side we take a bearing, as on mountains from the vantage of the plain, on the towers from the vantage of the dirt-stiffened, unyielding, tarmac of marsh grass gray like steel grayed a vegetable steel from blur and the exhausts of the turnpike. Position with regard to surrounding objects here is unlike in the mountains which give a bearing even from deep within them, let you see them from inside their formation. Climbing to the high plateau of the street from the subway, we check the peaks downtown or midtown skyscrapers for direction. Walk a few doors up the block they parallax eclipsed by the postcard we no more see.  * There was a deep well lit its entire depth at noon on the solstice light without shadow: so with an in-line position with regard to the sun any cast line of shadow would indicate a curve; the distance between one and not, an arc of circumference. That phrase of the psalm says death’s shadow is as deep as that valley which is our grave; its length is the same cast everywhere as deep; no one’s is further from death than another’s; death surrounds us is our uncurbed circumference. We map our way with only the bearing of surrounding life itself borderless uncontrolled by the surface of our self. The bridge towers of the Verrazano are so far apart they tilt away from each other on the curve of the earth factored in. I wonder if from the distance apart of the The Towers you could figure that reach ‘round of the world with this method of shadow? The shadow of flesh casts how deep and far a landscape of perspective? how round a circumference enough to fit the living world does a single life turning to its labor spin? Take each story of a building as the radius of expansion we make of the earth, concentric spheres on Turtle Island, the hundred ten circumferences go nova So high a reach of vision set on so short a perspective the world on the turtle's back: at top, the wake of star formation at base, the animal god. the jealous Need, a stomach of feet trying to stand through this. What can we say of our own that stand in Newark say so far adrift from a chance to wash that the dirt on her feet cracks into sores the skin of her soles and steps her in one more shit infection she has to kick, one more occupation of her body by her monkey rulers she will have to throw off into space off her back burned out but clear of starring habit. Of her destroyed sun say it endows the landfill on which to build a new development “We are the stuff of stars,” Sagan says.
I expected something up out of the water not the shadow in the wave that rose to fill the wave then splash a breath off the abutting air then disappear. I didn't see any of this only the dark wave. Even the size of a whale I don't see what I look directly at. I didn't see the pronghorn antelope, speed they pointed out equal our car's, but never having seen distance so large I couldn't pin in it point to antler and saw in parallax instead the world entire a still brown arc of leap so like a first look at the milky way each stone a star I saw but could not see. I didn't see the Nazca earth drawings looking at a line like a path the vision on it my not looking up. & trying to see from on the ground looking from a plane thousands of feet above maybe I saw only what the unenlightened marking out the lines could see from there because I never saw the figures until shown from books. I've told folk half the truth that I was there I was but embarrassed never told I missed my chance until I saw: without embarrassment this country miss its chance looking at color and not see what it looked directly at, without embarrassment act and not see that done on its own hands not see its own bright blood.
i must be careful about such things as these. the thin-grained oak. the quiet grizzlies scared into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing in behind them closer in the snow. the snared rigidity of the winter lake. deer after deer crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare with their eyes pressed to the ice. in a sleep. hearing the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear in the high quiet. i must be careful not to shake anything in too wild an elation. not to jar the fragile mountains against the paper far- ness. nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air. of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious words. like rocks. without one snowcapped mistake.
1. He turned  so fast he  wound the spirals of his arms  tight  into a slap in the face  he beat himself to death  dancing he would fall  then get right —  back up to some music  he heard  all by himself no one to  help  listen    2. Program We tune  taking in hand the remote as partner  to the news. We turn  twirling the tit of the dial in touch to touch  between our fingers. We feel ourselves  both touch and button coming on.  Or is it music we two pick up step  to that times happening into  receiving line?  3. table. . .  Tied to a table  top the table tilted up  right so he hung by his ankles,  he filled from  a bucket on the floor at his head  the cup at his feet  overhead with a spoon, and when it filled, then an attendant emptied  cup back  into bucket, and he began again  doing the senseless hanging  sit ups like prayer in the morning  naked,  his throat cut draining the words  into the bucket  from which he delivered  the blood of his songs  into the cup of heaven,  his feet,  in steps  4. By The Rivers of . .  The boys came in the house  home from day camp  that summer they were stopped  so many feet into their running  through the door made to meet the guests  required of to sing  what they had done today They sang of being taught though  they thought they knew  already how to swim Asked if they liked it  the youngest explained that  what he liked the best was to come in  through the top door of the water  into the city underneath the pool He said  he saw long lights  he liked people made funny faces and were flying.  I am the guest I come in  through the top door of the water 4 to 12 for the public  aquarium  I'm a diver tankman to porpoises, moray eels,  the lightning  cloud of neon tetras at my hand I midwife the anaconda  — all 60  plastic wrap egg babies — making a living living in a vision  city  of living cubes of water door to door. Door to door  tank displays  on my shift don't get visited by out of tank appearances  in their own likeness hiding  gifts of transcendence and wisdom  Rather than glory —  tubes and cylinders trailing old air poor  disguise flippers for wings  and gifts no more than of care and feeding. Though I'm trained to their pH's and oxygen  levels this  is a lay practice of my own care and feeding They live in  a timeless solution of their histories  the living broth of their other lives, their dead, their brothers I find  something familial  familiar in these small squares these boxes buried in the public air  of the aquarium,  the slave atlantic's water, blocked each into a plot  water is one  with its everywhere: the how many lost of the all of us  brought here —  in my wandering going in door to door into  the gathered ecologies keeping  a watch out for the shark, in what I bring in this extra grace  said from some black thing  to this fare  — get their care and feeding  as if some hour  in all employment living to give it goes to their loss  where without that sorry  new york minute's pause at ourselves in this country we lose  our colors the gray side of money  that pale of ghosts flying folds on our chests,  and we float up  fattened by work that is emptied of the gain  back of our lives. They come from in between things  through as though  between things shines a door we sing of the orisha  I hear a singing on the other side  of a door singing going on behind the tanks  heard on the public floor  people invisibly at work on public display  their aquarium parading the corps  we've decorated as gods thousands of years unseen that morning we woke when we had lost  the attempt all our supplies everything  but our lives washed down the river left in a puddle  a fish we only had to dish up  out of its own carapace a shelled catfish  Plecostomus and here it was  I see now recognize one of my samples I care for  in this exhibit  all that kept me alive 'til we reached a village.  Come back in from my own  expeditions out I know the diving aboard landing of  the plane  made into the glittering night waters that are  the city home searching the long waving light refraction  for its drawing of  that African's face. But the boys they'll grow up  in what only is a difference  in this country as if starting the exhibit at a different door  changed the subject:  their mother white like many's somewhere in our people here,  their African  black like a many's in our American peoples)  father came over  long after the middle passage on a plane  to school  A whole new subject here. But we sit down  to Miles to Louis Armstrong  over dinner and later a little Lou Donaldson  gets us  dancing our stuff.  5. seat The erased unshined polish  of a board  that is a mind unmet  nor chaired into a seat  of any solving, gray with no answers the slate smoothness of the cities' street  education That moving standing still  we learn  that rest is hanging on no seat keeping the strap  and loop's flow open  from around your neck your foot out of the trap The loss of grace complaint  forgets we find footing  accomplishment in that  6. Dance, for the Balance of New Mexico We had driven until the land rover was in danger of never being upright again at this height. The cloud came through the window on the driver side and out the passenger and stopped, its center on the seat between. To go further would have been to carry black clown from Second Mesa's Butterfly Dance, his foggy, white stripes floating ash across the blackened rocks naked from a fire his hardened body We could hear the land rover strain, his screaming laughter just before he'd leap through a complete standing somersault, and we would halt and float the truck for that moment he was air in a sweated cloud of fear until he touched the balance to the ground and put us down.  7. Flamenco Goyasques We all have  women we were born of We all were dragged out &  lined up against the sky Know that  Somebody here stood beside you You put up your hands & you die . . . . . . . . . . . .  Just in . . .  Just in word. Word of navigational challenges
(after Juan Luis Guerra) from Africa to a Caribbean hill  de África a las lomas del Caribe to the smiling ruin of our cities  a la feliz ruina de ciudades anoint the neural vessels we refill  al matorral neural en donde vive until your acid muse drowns our pities  tu agria musa que ahoga soledades return us to our tribe that grew dark beans  devuélvenos al semillero isleño cut through the grease of our late-night omelets  metaboliza la grasa nocturna and warm this empty diner by the club  trae tu calor a nuestro desvelo where luckless lovers stare at tiny screens  haz que el amante no muera de sueño and poets brew old socks into psalmlets  tu borra es poema que embadurna while dreaming it rains coffee from above.  y sombría tu alegría de cielo.
He said – long ago – that myth was dead. He meant it.   “Myth is dead!” “Long live myth!”   They are playing out something. Legendary.   Picks up her glass. She has a glass, with coffee,   ice and milk in it. Thinks about the refugees on the   road. Road to what, to where? With nothing but   their clothes on their backs. Mythic and literal.   How to speak about them and why? How to speak   to them. To keep them in mind. In our minds.   “Bless you and keep you,” so the prayer says.
for John Ashbery “Good Barber of the Pea!” I exhumed, high into the vag where the barber keeps his pea—   “Good Sprout!” His mouth, his gray and hunted tongue always in the distance— "No use denying we master the particular service we deny ourselves. In the shade of this pea (the sum of his shade and the gavel flexing above his head) I will become a milliner to cover what work I’ve done. Or else, I’ll begin anew   at the infant chin, where nothing grows but chins!  Outside, snails, vines, surpass me and must—gaining pews upon pews. But don’t think for a sec I don’t know the way out of here, that release is one hair—spiral stair—top of which cleavage evaporates”
One of us is a faucet reconciling to the temperature of indifference. This is the world: the drawer assembled by you pinches a finger before yielding.There are so many foreigners here, I said, when I first stepped onto a beach in Virginia. I had an idea of the ocean, and of who I was. I am in water now, attempting to see the ocean. We lick our wounds with the same tongue.   Long accustomed to carrying a gauze for shield, the heart wraps bruises like dumplings. I see the sun through my neighbour's window, whelked in lace. Is this what we mean when we use the word "virtual"? Tulips grow even after they're cut. The ones I loved, having died without returning, crowd the heart's waiting room. To start all over again is to imagine the world is, as it is. I give up; I thought this was a poem about nation, the one she began at nineteen. The one she waits to return to: her eyes never adjusting to the colors of exile. This antechamber; this long incision called hope.   Last night I crossed to the other side, unwelcome territory. I might have been sad. My broke heart.   I'd been observing then, the sun's influence, subjugated by streetlights imitating moonlight. Even the sun softens, (I had thought to myself) to bring every image in view as a memory of some other place, some other text. Last night, I slept in a borrowed bed for guests I anticipated, as host to self's solitary marriage. I examined the world, thus altered. Later, standing at the precipice, I awoke. Even sleep did not take me back. And the signal—being green—I walked.
When I see the two cops laughing  after one of them gets shot because this is TV and one says while putting pressure on the wound,Haha, you're going to be fine, and the other says, I know, haha!,  as the ambulance arrives— I know the men are white. I think of a clip from the hours  of amateur footage I've seen when another man at an intersection gets shot, falls, and bleeds from a hole the viewer knows exists only by the way  the dark red pools by the standing cop's feet, gun now holstered, who yells the audience back to the sidewalk. I know which one is dying  while black and which one stands by white.  I think this morning about the student  in my class who wrote a free write line  on the video I played that showed a man pouring water on his own chest, "...the homoerotic  scene against a white sky" with no other men  present. Who gets to see and who followswhat script? I ask my students.  Whose lines are these and by what hand are they written?
Slight whiff of toner, or is it White-Out?  Brief heat of manuscript  lifted from the printer, against my face.   What is it about the new hire  that has everybody talking?  Her newness, perhaps, her éclat   cutting through  each of us, like a sword  through wet bamboo; it’s a graceful   violation. And then the water  breaks, and then a darkening  sky rolls over the lake, and then   a meeting is called to introduce her,  to make her understand,  to allow her to share in our delights!   Here is the coffee machine, there are the filters.  You may store your lunch  in the communal refrigerator, but please   remember to empty yourself,  all of you. Feel free to decorate  your cubicle with pictures, tack up a view   of the lake behind you  to remind you of the lake  behind you. Don’t listen to those of us   who are certain  of the small death  each photo you tack up represents.   Familiarity breeds  intent, intent signals purpose,  purpose is a proposition you make to those   who observe, quantify  and assess you; and use as many legal  pads as you like. And the retractable pencils,   they’re all yours. Marigolds.  Sunflowers. Black-Eyed Susans. Just keep it  yellow. Paper cuts will happen. Band-Aids   are in the top left drawer  in the kitchen,  next to the cake-cutting knife   we pull out for anniversaries, birthdays,  retirements, record days,  or the first time you see all of us converge   on the conference room, leaving you alone in your cube.
A creamy tear descended here when Cupid squeezed the teat of Venus. Dripping down the Milky Way it puddled beneath old oak, new pine. Love’s selfish thirst did pluck a cosmic note, set every entombed entangled bit of me in roots both new and old to singing. I was become in earth and by harmony a million bits of tongue and ear, sound funnels upwhorled in song conducting cones. Fresh music from old flesh corrected my (most melancholy) record of this last go round the planet. Now I was first things: elementals, vegetable and mineral in form, dust to kick it on the breeze, loam to feed old oak, new pine, Eros-greedy energy on hunt for nourishment, cream to suck, breast to squeeze.
My observation are as follows: still dirty “in the wisdom” that is constructivist  red theatre pieces, bike gloves all like a mashed crop of dyed hair, a bad crop this year.   We started the play at once:An Enemy of the People. A Buddha of lapidary contrition enters, hospice, tears, La Clemenza di Tito interlude   rolled in tulips of decisive consequence.  Sprezzatura. Our row throws that cosmic scratch, apotropaic, scalene back to the corner pocket angle on the hustle—   “Live at the Paradox.”
Everyone has a cousin Benjamin Bunny. Peter said a walk would do him good. The edge of the wood. Peter did not enjoy himself anymore. He never would again. The brooding lettuces in their falcon hoods. The coppice gate   wound shut by weeds, the jaws of life trying to keep it closed tight but anyone can climb it. As a child I played on a gate in a neighborhood park that swung of itself   and sounded like the distress call of a rabbit. I stood on the bottom slat and backed in and out of the air. I’ll never get out of here. The gate was pure folly, without fencing on either side,   Greek tragedy staged around a doorway the imagination strains to enter. I was raised in an aisle seat with an eye line of an actor about to come through   from behind it. Melodramatic onions grew wild. I cried and cried until someone said it’s okay to cry, it means the onions are fresh. Every dream begins   with a threshold. Meat in the driveway where dogs tipped the garbage. Where’s your mouth? There is a whistle you can buy that makes the sound of a rabbit screaming   hunters use to call whatever they want out of the thicket because everything they want wants rabbit for dinner. Move your hand   along the shaft to change the call from jack to cotton- tail and back again. Once you see them nose out of the interior at your bidding what stops you from sounding   every single day? All day? The shrill imagined rabbit’s canned terror. You can do it with a reed of grass. Cup your hands. Everything alive is listening. I knew a hunter   who could do a spot-on fawn whose suffering would bring a doe into the open every time. He didn’t want a doe, though. He wanted a buck.   Here’s what I can’t stand to acknowledge: when bucks hear the sound of the fawn my friend makes with his mouth they come, too, not in pity, but in lust,   so badly they want the doe drawn by the yearning of a fawn in need of her. Everything is within range suddenly, and who am I to judge. He mounts her relief   and spring comes. No. He takes a bullet. I was caught up in theatrics and forgot whose theater this is.
There was a need to be weak and I met it. I appeared in the confusion between strength and surrender, as if out of nowhere, that’s the illusion. I was reared ruminating in a thicket of sorrow with a beautiful string of drool hanging out the side of my mouth like a loose phosphorescent tether. How will I know what to do, I wondered. No one does, my mother said. And then, as the drawing back of the ocean before a tsunami suddenly exposes outrageous fish on the seabed, gasping, a great inhalation placed me here panting on the sacred grass. I feel like a girl in heaven, but I am a beast in a clearing. I came to as the wind picked up and in the bay as the tide came in, what a blow to mankind, an animalcrude wind to war, toward war, untoward toward war took my breath away with it.
I’m four at the hospital I was born in. From behind the nurse’s white gown and mask:   I want you to count backward from   ten for me now out loud.    *   My stepmother with a stack of my father’s papers. What do I do with it, Jimmie?    *   It was a beautiful suit of clothes, very expensive. I saw it hanging from the mirror   on the far side of his car. He was so pleased   when he found my note on the windshield. He took the suit upstairs and came back down to let me see it on him.    *   When they want rain,   they put their mouths to the water and blow. They take some in their hands and as they throw it upward cry Look here! Do like this!    *   A note to her television set was left by a woman   who then took her own life.    *   We were replaced on the line by the Unimates. They’re good at the work. They’re never late. The one problem with them is that they don’t buy cars.    *   It defies me. I put it right here where I always do, and it’s not there. I loathe a beastly key.    *   If you work hard to keep a secret, you’re resentful when it’s not found out.    *   Through our closed eyelids as the bomb exploded, we could see every bone in our hands.    *   It has a Slavic name he couldn’t pronounce. I said It’s flanged and chrome, with seven spiders on each side. That’s it, he said. Where can he but it,   he needs it today. I told him I don’t know, but I’ve got one in my garage.    *   She can’t leave you alone. Sits you down, feeds you what you don’t need to eat. It’s no use telling Bertie Mae no. And of course we wouldn’t take nothing for her.    *   I’ve killed other people. You’ll find that this will go better if you and I don’t talk.    *   Foreplay starts at breakfast.    *   On the answering machine: If you could   call me tonight no matter how late, it would be a good idea.
For the young man who would have myrrh from a woman, and cinnamon and aloes,   smoother than oil is her mouth. She flatters him with it. Between her lips lies death. The young man learns that as his bride he should instead have taken Wisdom to him. Wisdom is the words that figure her as   fear of the Lord. She has seen Israel choose the ways of the oppressor. The young men Strangeness would claim   She instructs. Wisdom pleads with them at the city gates that when pride comes,   then comes shame. Let a man meet rather with a bear and her whelps than with folly. Withhold not   good from those to whom it is due. The Lord’s eyes are on   every place, as on Hell and destruction. Whose   order was it that made the ends of the earth? Who put clothes on the deep? What is his name, and what is his   son’s name, if you can tell?   Wisdom can. Still a child, she attended God when God had not yet divided the waters. It was no one but God’s to do to divide what   isn’t said from what is. If God was male already,   Wisdom was not male. (It may have been Wisdom’s difference from God that let God speak   good into being.) Wisdom was God’s delight. She was with him over the waters. The still unformed   deep would have lasted had God not given it form. It made God tremble that His call for it to be light there would not let   night touch day. (There had to be room between them or they couldn’t be what   God said they were.) God and Wisdom were two. Day and night were two also. Day gave it to be seen at once that   down was and   up. The deep had a face. God’s breath   hovered over it until there was   wind there instead. The wind is in force in many places over the earth’s dry land. Its going on like that is so it too can have extension and still not be seen.   A door woke me. It was having to open and then flap shut against the stable’s north wall.   some thuds were back-to-back. After others,   there’d be a minute or more of only the wind.   The wind had become something the trees had had between them for days now. They’d showed to their tops that they’d be moved only so much. At the same time that it was many trees,   the night wind I was hearing them in was one. (One has to be the number God has against the too-many-to-count.)   If it had a back to it in those places how far north where right then it was quiet,   the wind’s broad front was as high as just below God. (That’s where God starts to be a different nothing than wind.) If nothing’s   around the wind to any of its sides, Wisdom confides that God’s around all. Inside all God holds,   Wisdom’s at the work of meaning for the faithful that there’s good to be had, if God’s heeded. I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn’t go on making   God up out of the wind.
In dogma is the secret that renders God unconditioned,   on one condition. “If you are not My people, I am not your God.” As fashioned by His people's witness,   a made thing, God, condemns the made things graven   images are. Inscribed as born   wittingly of Himself, God is (so to speak) that Father abler than the most sovereign   earthly father to make all things good. God the Father is conceived as   for us. Purposive, stewarding, benign,   He covenants our living on. “Written in   continuance” in His Book before they took form were the parts of our fitful bodies. As if what's given with the world is   life only,   life, and not (along with it, in time) at last, life's needful withdrawal,   God's said to let the truthful keep their lives forever if they swear God does what He says. These are the portions: either I'll outlast death   or it me. Little matter which   if it's the avowed   God I'm given up to. That I'm settled in the finite is what's true instead. Living is a good I don't want stopped   even for the saved. I'm beholden to it all the way that, in its one chance each with me and others, death hasn't used itself up yet. Mine affords me another day   hours before it's light. Along with the caused things outside that I can't see, I'm here ahead of myself again toward that coupling with the ground   when “I am poured out like water.” Death's still to be heard from at its least reserved. Under its breath it primes me to pay up and look pleasant.
I’m talking to you old man. Listen to me as you step inside this garden to fill a breakfast bowl with blueberries ripened on the bushes I’m planting now, twenty years back from where you’re standing. It’s strictly a long-term project—first year pull off the blossoms before they open, second year let them flower, watch the bees bobbing in every bonnet, but don’t touch the fruit till year three, and then only sample a handful or two . . . Old man I’m doing this for you! You know what they say about blueberries: blood-cleansing, mood-lifting memory-boosters; every bush a little fountain of youth sparkling with flavonoids, anthocyanin . . . I’ve spent all summer clearing brush sawing locust poles for the frames, digging in mounds of pine needles, bales of peat moss— I thought I’d do it while I still could. You can do something for me in turn: think about the things an old man should; things I’ve shied away from, last things. Care about them only don’t care too (you’ll know better than I do what I mean or what I couldn’t say, but meant). Reconcile, forgive, repent, but don’t go soft on me; keep the faith, our infidels’ implicit vow: “not the hereafter but the here and now . . . ” Weigh your heart against the feather of truth as the Egyptians did, and purge its sin, but for your own sake, not your soul’s. And since the only certain eternity’s the one that stretches backward, look for it here inside this garden: Blueray, Bluecrop, Bluetta, Hardy Blue; little fat droplets of transubstantiate sky, each in its yeast-misted wineskin, chilled in dew. This was your labor, these are the fruits thereof. Fill up your bowl old man and bring them in.
When I learned I could own a piece of The World I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. My wife's bright eye affirmed it. As do the soothing neutral tones and classic-contemporary decor of our professionally designed apartments, private verandahs before which the globe, endlessly and effortlessly circumnavigated, slips by, allowing residents no end of exotic ports, a new destination every few days to explore with a depth we hadn't thought possible. It's not how things are on The World that is mystical, not the market and deli, proximity of masseuse and sommelier, not the gym, our favourite restaurant, our other favourite restaurant, the yacht club, the library, the golf pro, the pool, but that it exists at all, a limited whole, a logic and a feeling. What looks like freedom is, in fact, the perfection of a plan, and property a stocktaking laid against us in a measure. The difference between a thing thought, and done. One can ignore neither the practical applications nor the philosophical significance of our onboard jewelry emporium, its $12 million inventory, natural yellow diamonds from South Africa no one needs, thus satisfying the criteria for beauty. Without which there is no life of the mind. What we share, though, transcends ownership, our self-improvement guaranteed by the itineraries, licensed experts who prepare us for each new harbour and beyond, deliver us into the hands of native companions on The World's perpetual course. The visual field has no limits. And the eye— the eye devours. Polar bears, musk oxen, rare thick-billed murre. We golfed on the tundra and from The World were airlifted to pristine snowfields, clifftops where we dined alfresco above frozen seas. The World is the entirety. The largest ship ever to traverse the Northwest Passage. How the silent energy coursed between us. Fundamental rules had changed. Except, with time, it seems a sort of accident— natural objects combined in states of affairs, their internal properties. Accusatory randomness and proliferation of types, brutal quantity literally brought to our doors. Or past them, as if on the OLED high-def screen of our circumstances, which hides more than it reveals. For what we see could be other than it is. Whatever we're able to describe at all could be other than it is. Such assaults on our finer feelings require an appeal to order, to the exercise of discipline a private Jacuzzi represents, from which one might peacefully enjoy the singular euphoria of the Panama Canal or long-awaited departure from fetid Venice. There is some truth in solipsism, but I fear I'm doing it wrong, standing at the rail for ceremonial cast-offs thunderously accessorized with Vangelis or "Non, je ne regrette rien," made irritable by appreciative comments about the light. In Reykjavík or Cape Town, it's the same. Familiarity without intimacy is the cost of privacy, security of a thread count so extravagant its extent can no longer be detected. Even at capacity, The World is eerily empty: its crew of highly trained specialists in housekeeping, maintenance, beauty, and cuisine—the heart and soul of the endeavour—are largely unseen and likely where the fun is. We sit at the captain's table but don't know him. He's Italian. I think on my Clarksville boyhood long before EPS, ROE— retractable clothesline sunk in concrete, modest backyard a staging ground for potential we felt infinite to the degree our parents knew it wasn't. The unknown is where we played. And while fulfilment of a premeditated outcome confers a nearly spiritual comfort of indifference to the time of year, a paradise of fruits always in season, the span of choice defines its limit, which cannot be exceeded. The sea rolls over, props on an elbow, and now is heard the small sound of a daydream running softly aground. Dissatisfaction, in a Danish sense. On prevailing winds a scent of compromise; for one tires of the spacewalk outside what is the case. Beyond immediate luxuries lives speculation and the tragic impression one is yet to be born. It could be when all pursuits have been satisfied, life's problems will remain untouched. But doubt exists only where questions exist. The World satisfies its own conditions. It argues for itself. Herein lies an answer.
When they were together she thought it God’s punishment. When he left she thought it God’s punishment.   When vermin overrun the city’s boardinghouses and highrises it’s God sticking a hose into the Devil’s hole to flood him out.   And when the floodwaters rose, where was everyone?   When fog risen from the lake assimilates varietals of exhaust, evolves through the financial district, renders toxic the neighbourhoods, swells over suburbs, the Devil has forsaken another project, saying sometimes I can’t fucking concentrate on anything.   He says he does what he does sometimes because the Devil gets in like water through his weak places.   When it rains like now the Devil yells at God I’ve told you not to call me that. When it rains like now. And every time God laughs at this   roofs lift off along the Eastern Seaboard. The Eastern Seaboard will never understand.   When we are broken, to whom are we opened?   God’s taken all the fish home to live with him, honey.   And when the earth shakes that’s God rearranging furniture not a bomb in the subway like we thought.   If you feel the Devil with you, he is there. If you think God has abandoned you, you are abandoned, his attention   on the World Series, more important than any one man, smiting the hell out of the Rangers’ big bats as the Giants lift fingers to the sky in praise and the ordnance deployed in his name, in making straight the way, would fill the oceans.   And each foreclosure is a failure of belief, each immortal jellyfish a failure of belief.   When those who will ruin us are elected, where is everyone?   And when I return from the desert it’s with the Devil cast out. With God cast out. Because it wasn’t really me   who did those things before, that wasn’t me.
Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit of disclosure, we trail Google Earth's invisible pervert through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier,  or grossly   contemporized, denuded of childhood's native flora, stuccoed or in some other way hostile to the historical reenactments we expect of our former   settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Walmart sprouting in the demographic, in Street View's perpetual noon.  With pale   and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete.  We sense a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence   of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see  them change, or just happily burn them, the sites of wreckage from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest   of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold, though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old house. Look what they've done to it. Who thought this would  be fun?   A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store, cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful   they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher registers, fullscreen, two of them dead now. Is this eternity? Encore, applause, encore; it's almost like being there.
We drank our faces off until the sun arrived, Night after night, and most of us survived To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue, And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new, The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.   How wonderful to be so magnified. Every Scotch and soda had been usefully applied. You were who you weren't till now. We'd been white Harvard piglets sucking on the whisky sow And now we'd write a book, without having to know how.   If you didn't get a hangover, that was one kind of bad And was a sign of something, but if you had Tranquilizers to protect yourself before you went to work, Say as a doctor interning at nearby New York Hospital, don't be a jerk, Take them, take loads of them, and share them, and don't smirk.   We smoked Kools, unfiltered Camels, and papier maïs Gitanes, The fat ones Belmondo smoked in Breathless—and so did Don, Elaine's original red-haired cokehead maître d’ Who had a beautiful wife, dangerously. But stay away from the beautiful wife or else catastrophe.   Many distinguished dead were there At one of the front tables, fragrant talk everywhere. Plimpton, Mailer, Styron, Bobby Short—fellows, have another drink. You had to keep drinking or you'd sink. Smoking fifty cigarettes a day made your squid-ink fingers stink.   Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene Were likely to become alcoholics. Life is mean That way, because others who drank as much or more didn't Succumb, but just kept on drinking—and didn't Do cocaine, and didn't get fucked up, and just didn't!   The dead are gone— Their thousand and one nights vanished into dawn. Were they nothing but tubs of guts, suitably gowned, waiting around Till dawn turned into day? Last round! Construction of the new Second Avenue subway enters the ground.   Aldrich once protested to Elaine that his bill for the night was too high. She showed him his tab was for seventeen Scotches and he started to cry. (Or was it eighteen?) We were the scene. Now the floor has been swept clean.   Everyone's gone. Elaine and Elaine's have vanished into the dawn. Elaine the woman, who weighed hundreds of pounds, is floating around— Her ghost calls out: Last round! Wailing, construction of the new Second Avenue subway pounds the ground.
Right now, a dog tied up in the street is barking With the grief of being left, A dog bereft. Right now, a car is parking.   The dog emits Petals of a barking flower and barking flakes of snow That float upward from the street below To where another victim sits:   Who listens to the whole city And the dog honking like a car alarm, And doesn’t mean the dog any harm, And doesn’t feel any pity.
The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge Outside the window is Jack Kennedy— Standing on one leg and looking jerkily around And staring straight into the room at me.   Ask not what your country can do for you— Ask what you can do for your country. Here’s how. That wouldn’t be the way I’d do it.   I’m afraid you leave me no choice now. The sequence begins with the grooves Of the carving board Filling with roast beef blood.   Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. The pigeons fly back and forth And look like they’re looking for something.   I went to sleep in Havana, Turned over on my back in Saigon, And woke up in Kabul, With Baghdad as both air conditioner and down comforter.   The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge Outside the window looks really a bit like me, Me standing on one leg and looking jerkily around And looking right into the room at me.   Unshaved men run Iran. In consequence, Nixon with his five o’clock shadow Rises from the grave to campaign. His ghost can’t stop—even in broad daylight.   In certain neighborhoods, you hear a victim singing,Corazón, you’re chewing on my heart!Don’t forget to spit the seeds out! Rat-a-tat. Shot dead in the street.   The pigeon outside on the ledge Came back from Iraq with PTSD. It stands there, standing on one leg in speckled camouflage, Staring in through the window at the VA therapist.   Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. Stet. Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change.   Every day I don’t die is February 30th, And more sex is possible. Flocks of pigeons are whirling around and flash white In the sunlight like they know something.   Here’s what. Here’s who needs to be made up. Here’s who I would do. The makeup artist is hard at work in the Oval Office. The fireplace fire is lit with the air-conditioning on full blast.
The fellow talking to himself is me, Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see Him every morning shave and comb his hair And then lose track of him until he starts to care, Inflating sex dolls out of thin air In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street! Completely crazy but not at all insane. He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain. He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool. He's been called a marvelously elegant ghoul.   But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on. He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone. It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn. A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die, Is not in pain so far, and she will try To palliate her death, is what her life is now. The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how? Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to. The moon and stars rapidly enter you While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun.   You keep on writing till you write yourself away, And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun! Speaking of someone else for a change, not me, There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely, Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird Circled forever around us and then without a word Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there And you burst into tears. I was unaware That ten years before the same thing had happened just After your young daughter died and now it must Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak And receive the recognition we all seek.
I live a life of appetite and, yes, that's right, I live a life of privilege in New York, Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning. Say that again? I have a rule— I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.   I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning. At the end of my legs were my feet. Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me! Get up. Giddyup. Get going. My feet were there on the far side of my legs. Get up. Giddyup. Get going.   I don't really think I am going to. Obama is doing just fine. I don't think I'm going to. Get up. Giddyup. Get going. I can see out the window it isn't raining. So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong.   The poor are poorer than they ever were. The rich are richer than the poor. Is it true about the poor? It's always possible to be amusing. I saw a rat down in the subway. So what if you saw a rat.   I admire the poor profusely. I want their autograph. They make me shy. I keep my distance. I'm getting to the bottom of the island. Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling.   I'm half asleep but I'm awake. At the other end of me are my feet In shoes of considerable sophistication Walking down Broadway in the heat. I'm half asleep in the heat. I'm, so to speak, wearing a hat.   I'm no Saint Francis. I'm in one of my trances. When I look in a mirror, There's an old man in a trance. There's a Gobi Desert, And that's poetry, or rather rhetoric.   You see what happens if you don't make sense? It only makes sense to not. You feel the flicker of a hummingbird It takes a second to find. You hear a whirr. It's here. It's there. It hovers, begging, hand out.
after Billy Collins, "Silence" You have the right to remain silent. That is your job. A ball gag plugs your mouth, and the immigrant girl with her loud sewing machine has been deported.   So tell us about the mind of China. We want to hear the silent blooming of its cherry blossoms, the quiet unfastening of its gowns, its songs of soy sauce and tiny bound feet.   Its trains have been blown up by dynamite, its factories bombed into silence. Its mewling puppies have been smothered and its gods are suffocating inside specimen jars. Shanghai has been evacuated   and each inhabitant issued an edition of Gary Snyder. So tell us about your ancestors, your grandfather in his bamboo cage, your grandmother drowned in the well. Let’s hear about the unmoving clouds, the stunted trees.   Read the poem we have placed in front of you. The Pacific has been drained, and even Ezra Pound has burst from his grave, his moldering hand poised to translate what you do not say.
after Billy Collins, "Monday" The Italians are making their pasta, the French are making things French, and the Chinese cultivate their silence.   They cultivate silence in every Chinatown on the persimmon of earth— mute below the towers of Toronto, silently sweeping the streets of Singapore clear of noisy self-expression.   The Americans are in their sport utility vehicles, the Canadians are behaving reasonably, but the Chinese remain silent maybe with a cup of tea or an opium pipe and maybe a finger puzzle or water torture is involved.   Or maybe the Chinese are playing the Chinese game of ping-pong, the pock-pock of the ball against their tight-lipped mouths as their chefs dice scallions and bean curd. The Chinese are silent because it is their job for which I pay them what they got for building the railroads.   Which silence it is hardly seems to matter though many have a favorite out of the 100 different kinds— the Silence of the Well-Adjusted Minority, the Girlish Silence of Reluctant Acquiescence, the Silence that by No Means Should Be Mistaken for Bitterness.   By now, it should go without saying that what Crocodile Dundee is to the Australian and Mel Gibson is to the Scot, so is silence to the Chinese.   Just think— before I invented the 100 Chinese silences, the Chinese would have had to stay indoors and gabble about civil war and revolution or go outside and build a really loud wall.   And when I say a wall, I do not mean a wall of thousands of miles that is visible from the moon.   I mean a noisy wall of language that dwarfs my medieval battlements and paves the Pacific to lap California’s shores with its brick-hard words.
after Eleanor Goodman, "Boston's Chinatown" It’s easy to slam the Chinatowns of America. They’re just a lot of red lanterns. Yeah, there are Chinese people around, But it’s all for tourists.   Their dirty alleyways remind me Of that strange beast called American culture. The peculiar smell of fish (how Chinese!)— I’ve eaten hundreds of meals there.   So I move on to mock the shantytowns of Asia. They’re just a lot of plywood and scrap metal. Sure, I know there are poor people around. I’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire.   I know the area pretty well. I’ve hung out in “bad” neighborhoods before Where the old men run their sketchy basement stores But they have mostly disappeared.   And it’s all too tempting to denigrate The postindustrial towns of the dull Midwest. Of course I know there are unemployed people there. I heard it on NPR.   Once I had to spend three hours In the Detroit airport, with its vendors peddling Chewing gum and soda. But people don’t really live there.   Just don’t ask me to smash the glittering cities Of cultural imperialism. They teach English language skills And how to adjust to life in the States.   Nobody really lives here. As someone involved in translation I’ve eaten hundreds of meals here. Nobody speaks Chinese.
To make a Chinese poem in English we must allow the silence to creep in around the edges, to define the words the way the sky’s negative space in a painting defines the mountains. —Tony Barnstone, “The Poem Behind the Poem” To make a Japanese poem in English we must allow the silence to creep up upon us the way the ninja stalks and strangles his unsuspecting victim.   To make an Indian poem in English we must allow the waters of language to rise and drown us like the Ganges until we are reborn in a more accessible form.   To make a French poem in English we must impale ourselves upon the Tour Eiffel until our bloodcurdling screams evoke that sublime je ne sais quoi.   To make a Spanish poem in English we must let ourselves be gored by the charging bull of poesy as we run like idiots through the streets waving to our friends' cameras.   To make an American poem in English we must level the mountains of language with dynamite and in the rubble build an ethnic theme park of charming accents and seething quiet.   To make an American poem Chinese we must silence its creepy edges and raise an iron-built mountain that mirrors our own negation to us as if it were gold.
Day by day the Missouri dropping lower under empty sky that had drained Okobojo, No Heart Creek, Whiteman Draw; every night still no moisture. Finally, a season late, the raw parched air turned and gathered over hardpan above Oahe, grumbling then breaking open all at once, sending runnels across the flats to spread and join and drag toward the river’s edge snatches of roots torn from ground where wind had settled the seeds once. Afterwards Will and Ellie, tromping in mud, scanned the rutted cow-paths for arrowheads that might've surfaced—traces of Black Buffalo, Big Foot, Touch the Clouds—quartz or chert or flint notched, chipped to different sizes and points for buffalo, deer, pheasant flushed out with a human howl, maybe with fire lit to the grasses, bitter scent of ash twisting in dust Ellie could smell like her own name unraveling, as she poked a glittering rock with her stick, heard the meadowlarks question change to sputter, last flick of wings. Whatever she and Will might lift, turn over in their hands, take home, hide among their things—even relief after rain did not belong to them.
Down the prickly cow path to the creek we journeyed as if we were insects making our way along scars in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us   when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses down the prickly cow path to the creek in chigger-shade where thoughts of time making our way along scars   lost what they meant up at the house when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses we pulled from our pockets matches swiped in chigger-shade where thoughts of time   tasting of sulfur at the tips lost what they meant up at the house listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles we pulled from our pockets matches swiped   the surface of the water trembling tasting of sulfur at the tips once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles   then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine the surface of the water trembling the prairie had been a giant sea he told us once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them   Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine none of us sure what we believed the prairie had been a giant sea he told us   we journeyed as if we were insects Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us none of us sure what we believed
Vinnie Two Crow from the trailer at the school crossroads has walked up through the snow, bringing a loaf of pumpkin bread. Takes her big boots off and sits for coffee. Clem’s always treated us good.—You up here had too much trouble. I open the bread, and she asks about the quilt in my hoop. Stray lightning quilt, charred toys quilt—I don’t need to say that. If you want, she says, I brought some sage along. Good smoke might take away the bad, I told Clem out at the barn.—If you got an old bowl or something to burn it in.
She never said I’m going to die. I was with her nearly every minute that week, reading, sleeping on the cot beside   the high-tech bed that kept shifting her slight weight while the window shadowed over, then grew brighter,   and she drifted or got changed or was given another shot. None of us said it, though finally when   she was barely talking anymore, I asked something like Mom,are you ready?—I just want Brad to be ok was what   she replied. I told her he would be, as if her wish or mine could preside at his sentencing hearing.   After that she was almost entirely silent, but when Dad came the last afternoon, edgy without a cigarette,   checking over the monitors, Mom said she wanted to see him for a while alone, and he was startled. Pull the door  closed, I heard her tell him, and he did. Out in the hall, staring at the pattern of alternating tiles, I thought of Saturday   mornings when Brad and I were little, and Dad and Mom’s room would be not just shut for a time, but locked. Secretly   I tried the knob once. In that house nobody was allowed to lock a door but Dad. Grandma would shoo us to the TV   with cinnamon toast to watch cartoons, one fool panic after the next—bolted dungeons, lies and threats, a saw-blade   inching toward the tied-up body. Then real people like us, finally: Roy Rogers saving them with his amazing calm.
Wounded Knee Years since I’d been back to the memorial; I’d forgotten   it was up on a rise above the killing ground. Two kids   appeared in the dust with things to sell—once coming from the far   end of the chain-link, two kinds of dream-catchers hanging   from his arm; and the girl, hunched on the broken steps under   the arch’s improbable cross, cradling a Tupperware bowl of beaded   star-necklaces in her lap. Her pink- and-silver t-shirt read PRINCESS.   I shut my car door, and a grouse startled off the fence, veered away   over bent switchgrass. The girl— Allie—said her little sisters made   the jewelry, in the gray house at the base of the hill; maybe   her price included the pictures I walked behind her to take: the marker   for 1890, then the more recent graves, in ground seared and   hardpanned by wind and snow and desolation; tied, bandana-pouches   of tobacco, and ribbons, like fists and fingers shifting and fluttering;   a few tough bright flowers left; gray-blue sky rolling above   to the edges of horizon all around, spitting, cooking up a storm.   I stood and turned back toward the arch again, where Allie and   her friend, if he was a friend, hadn’t spoken a word to one another.   For the first time in my life I wished I’d had some cigarettes—   to smoke with them, at least offer, something to do with strangers you   might sit a while beside till maybe one of you thought of something   to say. A little thunder crackled, and we said goodbye; I drove on   toward the shaft of rain above Manderson. No reason to think I’d   be any memory to them; a dream- catcher sold, a brilliant blue   necklace. I passed a knocked-overvote Democrat sign, and two younger   kids working on a bike upside-down, and remembered the small bowls,   empty now, brought and offered at the graves surrounded for miles   by graves never found. Rain would fill them, lift the reservoirs, clear   the air. I thought of reaching over to pop the camera-back open; turned   from dirt onto narrow blacktop, the road out, that was steaming.
. . . and it seem as though I could see my heart before my eyes, turning dark black with hate of rages, or harhequinade, stripped from that munner life leaving only naked being-hate. —Charles Starkweather On the Great Plains in March, the wind blows for days. Gutter pipes vibrate, shingles flap; things begin to come loose. Once they found old Miss Purdy wandering at midnight on U.S. 40, her dainty-laced nightgown billowing over her spindly, blue-gray thighs. It took three deputies to hold her down till the doctor arrived.   On the Great Plains in March the dry elm scrapes at an upstairs window, dust devils swirl and disperse across the wide, empty fields, and a pistol shot sounds no louder than a screen door slapping on a porch.
The squirrels are spreading the rumor: no more monkey business. The Dow Jones hops up, then down, then back up, trying for attention,  up against dog days. The Capitol dome rattles like a witch doctor's gourd. “More Republicans,”  warn the talking drums. The networks labor underground to stockpile T, A, and blood capsules  for Sweeps Week, when all hell won’t be enough to save some. Pedestrians slip into light coats of pollen and mold spores. The Enquirer reports the sighting of Satan's image over Chicago during  the heat emergency. His words were, “For the hottest deals in town,  see Sal at Mutto's Chevrolet on East Wacker.” The old elms shrug: “You think this is hot: we could tell you about hot.” Walmart and Kmart burgeon into crooked towers of back-to-school  candy. They're heaven-bound, via the moon. Greeters offer  themselves to the lowest common denominator. There's a Blue-  Light on moon caps.  Representatives from Tire City have announced they intend a hostile  takeover and cleansing of their former territory, now known as  Carpet City. Furniture City will not intervene. The NFL’s negotiating for rights to the Baptist Church. The carnies have packed up the Tilt-A-Whirl and Ferris wheel, leaving us  up to our ass in free parking. Everyone under 30 dreams of shoplifting some Air Jordans for school. Everyone over 30 dreams of going to prison for shoplifting. The hypochondriacs wake up noticing little dark spots in front of their  eyes, think they could be in the middle of something serious. “Winterize now,” say the prime-time commercials. “Spend, spend, spend!”  cry the cicadas and katydids over the scorched, moonlit lawns.
If it had worked out, I'd be on a train to Green Bay, not crawling up this building with the Air Corps on my ass. And if it weren't for love, I'd drop this shrieking little bimbo sixty stories and let them take me back to the exhibit, let them teach me to mambo and do imitations. They tried me on the offensive line, told me to take out the right cornerback for Nagurski. Eager to please, I wadded up the whole secondary, then stomped the line, then the bench and locker room, then the east end of town, to the river. But they were not pleased: they said I had to learn my position, become a team player. The great father Bear himself said that, so I tried hard to know the right numbers and how the arrows slanted toward the little o's. But the o's and the wet grass and the grunts drowned out the count, and the tight little cheers drew my arrow straight into the stands, and the wives tasted like flowers and raw fish. So I was put on waivers right after camp, and here I am, panty-sniffer, about to die a clown, who once opened a hole you could drive Nebraska through.
The Canasta Players: Seven at Autumn's Gold We real old. We bell-tolled. We   dilate. We stagflate. We   sing thin. We shake Schwinn. We   shit-doled. You stuff gold.
To Have and Have Not, 1944 Betty Joan Perske, age nineteen, gives that look, the one that shifts tectonic plates, to Bogie, and that’s it: Germany surrenders, Japan bows its apologies, and that sailor smooches the nurse in Times Square. The world, no longer black and white, makes love as D-Day shrinks to just a time for planting daffodils, and Hiroshima grows Toyotas. Harry T. has lunch with Stalin; General Patton takes up nursing Bonsai trees. “You know how to whistle, don’t you,” says Bacall, as the moon sighs and the Earth sighs back. “Just put your lips together and blow.”
How did we get here so suddenly, with our bags and baggage, looking the worse for wear, the ones misfortune   hasn't wrung into anything-but-perfect strangers? Old buddies, old loves, old antagonists chat at the bar   in the Hilton lobby; white-haired, no-haired dyed-haired, ringers for those oldsters so irrelevant to proms and cruising,   to study halls and going steady—to life as we knew it. The smithereens of yesteryear, mostly orphans who’ve buried   Mom and Dad, we’re holding out in a Guadalcanal of hazard and heart-soreness: edema, angina, sarcoma, thrombosis.   Casualties mount, as do the MIAs. Why aren't we vexed? Why aren't we screaming? Never mind; we're here, upright,   and don't have time to skip the niceties, which never seemed so nice, or to sweat the threats, as the dead,   ever younger, smile toward the future from our senior yearbook. It's too late for a fallback plan. Tonight,   we'll savor the motel cuisine, pass the Inglenook, and believe there's nothing opulent as this departure.
We unstave the winter’s tangle. Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.   We unplay the summer’s blight. Rotted on the vine, black fruit   swings free of the strings that bound it. In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,)   grotesque extruded peppers. We prod half-thawed mucky things.   In the sky, starlings eddying. Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.   Today, the creaking icy puller. Last night I woke   to wild unfrozen prattle. Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.
They go, the early flags, the gory maples— so too the daffodils & Lenten roses. Other petals swirl & nights warm.   Buds thicken and cast shadows: in a thunderstorm I almost forget the ice that was.   Narcissi suckle watery paths; meadows heap up emerald masses. How green & I want to delight   except this undertow—it pulls so fast passing before I recognize it— like souls in Dante who can’t see the present,   white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat. The parade I barely noticed was beginning is already halfway down the street.
In the dirt you dig fragments. Turn them and ponder.   Weed chard. Forms morph like clouds.   At lunch, you write down how in this jungle   a gem-backed toad startled and hopped away—   how June tiger lilies trumpet the sun. In the bean patch brown spiders,   egg sacs on their backs. Toddling through shadows,   sturdy, wobbling, fragile, pregnant as summer is—
1   & the radio reports how in 2050 farming Massachusetts will be like farming Georgia— all’s flux, no one can say what will grow in Georgia,   where maples will grow then or whose fine taps will sap sugar from the cold in spring. Will we get syrup from the boreal forest, peaches from Massachusetts?     2   Drone strikes & opium poppies. Oil spills & poisoned wells. Drought zone. Famine. War zone.     3   Artisanal, this    intervention:   what gift  this day.     4   My inner cynic saysdon’t bother this is navel gazing   & my friend at Yale says my hunger to be near zucchinis   will not save the planet from real hunger except I remember in the film on gleaning   when the priest in his compassion says:those who glean now out of spiritual hunger  also should be fed.     5   Ecosystem of yard or field or mind:   these cucumbers are more art than science, more daydream   than global action (if we separate the two). But digging now I feel an otherness—   life, a great inhuman freedom— here I work a plot that also grounds—
—for N.C. 1   Among all the harvests these are ones we make myth of—   heat loosening squash spicing the dew as we rush to fill   the restaurant order— haul our ripe crates.   Organic cash crop: to market, to market.     2   New worlds on the sky, sungold solar systems.   Gold balls on the chain. We map our hands in the scent of tomato.     3   Lost ones sag. Lost ones break. Birds peck. The ground oozes.   The unpicked fruit wavers. We catch what we can.     4   Basic: between stalks for hours in binary motion—ripe/ not ripe,   not mental really not boring either decisions of thumb & forefinger   forging attunement between body & vine;   as if picking were all we were made for—  plop plop in crates    in our upturned shirts.     5   I was in the field the day you called to say you’d lose the baby.   How your sac was broken, and there was no saving it, just the waiting.   I stood there, the whole day wrapped around me. I stood there, crying, smelling vine.     6   Another day of work. Another.     7   All month I thought of you, of us, the women, of all the trying to & breaking open.   Of the rainsplit? ones, the ones that burst.   And of the smells of vine & harvest. I wanted to give you tomatoes.     8   Here, a life is many ripened. Sprung, the seeded cells, a fragile mix of luck and tending.   Warm furze blur of dust & buzzing. Tangle risen from the mud & marching. Here we are not self but species   breaking as we bend & also fruiting pressing onward in the long bright tide:  yes it breaks & yes it also swells—
To John Bernard Myers In the corner lot  where they parked  green banana trucks  fruits  palmed in paper straw I smell  bedbug & kitchen-cockroach  summer afternoons Somewhere  tailless  one-eyed cats  doting in fat garbage cans  screaming with the stench  of rice & beans  strawberry tampax  piled  high as the smell  (I was small & slick)  the covers tilted  like the hat of a rock-look wino  in a deep  knee-bend nod  on a beer  can-street    Sunday morning   There were always  time-thick  empty nights  of nothing to do  but listen to the  ethereal  (she lived on the top floor)  I-go-for-more screams  of Charlie's pimp's woman  when he beat her  for his good  business principles  joy-pop the block  with morning-talk     I hear the dim iron dawn yawning  (I lived on Third Ave.)  rattle  nights into  Saturday morning  flag-bloomer  eclipses  just before the hunt—  they were as big—  the cats  like jungle bunnies  fierce with fleas & sores I see window-people  hanging out of gooey-stick slips  sweating  strange  below-the-button drawers  crouched junkies in hallways    with monkey backs  eating cellophane bananas  on a g-string  waiting  for that last bust  Spies with cock-comb  hair fronts  ear-gulping mambo music  eye-lapping pepperican flower  crotches I can hear the streets whispering  in the ears of yelping kids    in the fun-gushing that  rippled my blood  in the pump    but the kids  are dying in the lot  like the tarry-blown feet  of the rain  jingling  on the rusty-green  of yesterday's  fire-escapes.
1.   Balak in Hebrew (devastator)—King of Moab son of Zippor (sparrow), meaning he who was always running away into the desert as the Israelites were fast on his back.   Angry, humiliated, full of vinegar and sap, looking for the diviner.      2.   Balak (in Turkish, eccentric variant) meaning baby buffalo— something forging Anatolian rivers, Armenian fossil of the word, flushed downstream.      3.   Who drowned wading in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There the sky is cochineal. There the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes.      4.   If you thought of diaspora, you were thinking of emerald stones. If you thought of the marshes of snails and magenta bugs, you were wading in the reeds.   Ur: like rolling a good Merlot on the palate till it runnels up the nose. Ah: breath of the unknown. Tu: also, everything, self and side of mountain.   The soul sweats. The blue knifes the canyon.   In a cave, a man lived on herbs and water; the sky’s grisaille was a visitation; the leaves were out of toot sin Jants; the angels were alpha and omega—      5.   This road goes north—   no need to ask where you are,   sentimental pop songs are stuck in the CD shuffle   there’s a valley, a river, a smoking something—   if you ask what color is the sky can anyone say—cloudless, clotted, open?
When I saw his face on a wall at a party in a parlor looking out at the Hudson,   at a fundraiser for the winter soldiers over blocks of cheese and baguettes,   I had just come from some grainy footage of Dien Bien Phu in a hot black room,   where the scratched print showed the hills undulating, bodies and parachutes disappearing in jungle grass.   Between decadence and the alien Mao was propped in yellow and rouge   with lipstick and eye shadow, a real queen—part décor, part radical something   the American lexicon hadn’t filled in yet.   From the aerial cameras Haiphong Harbor was liquid light.   In liquid light, I saw my draft card float like a giant litho over the highway at 79th   the letters popped—selective service system— and morphed into gray rain—   anyone could have done it— singed, blurred, laminated—   and the bartender poured me another unidentified drink.   In the scratched cellulose nitrite, parachutes kept drifting down on the hedges of the Laotian border.   On the wall Mao was the punctum in rouge and yellow and smear.   Didn’t every myth signify confusion? Confucius, Charlie Chan, Chiang Kai-shek?   (An American vision of a place.)   The guy behind me in class asked, “Where is this place?”   Hanoi was glittering flecks on the nightly news, and the teacher answered,   “Every snake of land is someone’s history.”   We didn’t know what we didn’t know about the backyard furnaces, the tens of millions.   Even if Mao swallowed Darwin and Adam Smith swimming the Yangtze—here on the Upper West   in late spring, he was wallpaper, the most recognizable face in the world.   There seemed no point in breaking through the mask— I was glued to the colors for a while,   until the next war let us out of Asia until the sun went down on the wall.
All summer the patio drifted in and out of light the color of margarine; days were blue, not always sky blue. At night the word Algeria circulated among the grown-ups.   A patient of my father had whooping cough, the words drifted into summer blue. The evenings spun into stadium lights. Kennedy’s hair blew across the screen. Castro was just a sofa.   I saw James Meredith’s face through a spread of leaves on the evening news. The fridge sweat with orangeade, the trees whooped some nights in rain—   a kid down the street kept coughing into his mitt. Static sounds from Comiskey and Fenway came though the vinyl, the plastic, the pillow—   So when it left Stallard’s hand, when Roger Maris’s arms whipped the bat and the bullet-arc carried into the chasm the disaffections at 344 ft. near the bullpen fence   under the green girder holding up the voices rising into the façade and over the  river where a Baptist choir on Lenox Ave. was sending up a variation of Sweet Chariot into the traffic on the FDR that was jammed at the Triboro   where a derrick was broken and the cables of its arms picked up the star-blast of  voices coming over the Stadium façade spilling down the black next-game  sign into the vector of a tilted Coke bottle on a billboard   at the edge of the river where a cloud of pigeons rose over Roosevelt Island. It was evening by the time the cars unjammed and the green of the outfield unfroze and the white arc had faded into skyline before fall came   full of boys throwing themselves onto the turf with inexplicable desire for the thing promised. The going. Then gone.
The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees.   When I tell you the day is a poem I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening.   The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds of the wind that whips up the seawall.   If you want the poem to take on everything, walk into a hackberry tree, then walk out beyond the seawall.   I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing the mistral careen off the seawall,   hearing the fauvist leaves pelt the sarcophagi. Here and now   the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me   for a second, before the wind broke branches and guttered into the river.   What questions can I ask you? How will the sky answer the wind?   The dawn isn’t heartbreaking. The world isn’t full of love.
1.   What were we watching on the tube under mildewed ceilings in Eastlands? A Kenyan guy shaking a rattle made from a can while another guy in the band was talking to the queen   about making sound out of anything? The queen smiled. The Jubilee receiving line filed through.      2.   We shimmied past tin shacks selling wigs and bananas, coke and goat lungs;   the tine of a kalimba kissed my face. My face kissed the blue plastic of a soda bottle sliding down a hill of glass.   I paid the gang leaders for protection and we walked into the hills of airplane garbage,   black and blue plastic bags glowing in the sun spray over the heads of the marabou stalking the mounds with their knife-blade beaks.      3.   Stevie Wonder and Elton John moved through the Jubilee line. Prince Charles thanked God for the weather as the camera cut to fireworks spewing over Hyde Park and then to an image of Nairobi and the Slum Drummers picking metal out of the collages of garbage.      4.   My jeans were charred from the tin-can fires, and the grilling pig guts when some men looked up from scraps of wire—   and you went back and forth with them in Swahili before they offered us some sizzling fat, before we thanked them with our coy smiles and moved on  with Michael who took us   down a maze of alleyways where tin shacks were floating on polymers and nitrogen and a dozen pigs from nowhere snouted the garbage.      5.   You were saying “Dad”—when a marabou-hacked bag shot some shit on our shoes—“Dad, kinship roles are always changing”—   when a woman asked us for a few shillings and salt for her soup. Salt? Did I hear her right? Or was it Swahili for something else? And through the sooty wind of charcoal fires   and creaking rusty tin you were saying, “Hannah Arendt called Swahilia degraded language of former slave holders.”   In the soot of my head—I was listening— and Michael was asking for more shillings for the gang guys   who were “a little fucked up,” he said, “but needed help”— and when I turned around the heads of chickens   were twitching, the feathers fluttering down on oozing sludge; “Arendt called it a nineteenth century kind of no language,”   you were saying, “spoken”—as we were jolted by a marabou eating a shoe—“spoken—by the Arab ivory and slave caravans.”      6.   Out of bottles, cans, pipes, mangled wire—the Slum Drummers twisted and hacked, joined and seamed their heaven   into the black plastic ghost of a mashed pot. Pure tones blew from the vibrato holes   like wind through Makadara where the breath of God flew through sewage pipes.   I heard in a tubophone the resurrection of ten men rising out of coal and pig snouts   into the blue Kenyan sky where a marabou   swallowed a purse—and a woman’s conga was parting at the seams above boiling soup cans.      7.   Down a slope of stinking plastic you kept on about Arendt— “a hybrid mixture of Bantu with enormous Arab borrowings”   I could say poa poa sawa sawa karibu.   We could make a kalimba out of a smashed pot and pour beans into a can and shake it for the queen.   Yesterday in the soundless savannah the wildebeests and zebras seemed to float through the green-gold grass toward Tanzania.   We could hear a lion breathe; we could hear wind through tusks.      8.   On TV the guys were grinning into metal go-go drums; hammering twisted sewage pipes and cut wire like sailors from Mombasa— harder nailed than da Gama’s voyage down the Arab trade coast—      9.   So, where are we—in a slum of no language? Walking through steam shovels of light, breaking over mounds of metal as if the sky were just blue plastic?   Isn’t English just a compost heap of devouring grammar, joined, hacked, bruised words, rotting on themselves?   I keep following you, daughter of scrutiny, into plastic fields of carrion   between sight and site, vision not visionary, pig guts on the grill,   trying to keep balance between streams of sewage and the sky,   as you keep hacking, Sophia, at the de-centered, the burning text, anthropology’s shakedown.   A marabou just knifed the arm of a woman picking bottles out of plastic bags.   A rooster crows from under a pile of galvanized tin as if it were morning on a farm.
For Frank O'Hara I The lights are out The cats are hungry The room is full of gangsters II The dishes are dirty The icebox is empty I dream of celery and a compass III The roof is upstairs The window next door A guitar in the shower IV The hours disappear in my room Where is my blue pistol The door-god is knocking.
I wanted to be sure this was our island so we could walk between the long stars by the sea though your hips are slight and caught in the air like a moth at the end of a river around my arms I am unable to understand the sun your dizzy spells when you form a hand around me on the sand I offer you my terrible sanity the eternal voice that keeps me from reaching you though we are close to each other every autumn I feel the desperation of a giant freezing in cement when I touch the door you're pressed against the color of your letter that reminds me of flamingos isn't that what you mean? the pleasure of hands and lips wetter than the ocean or the brilliant pain of breathless teeth in a turbulent dream on a roof while I thought of nothing else except you against the sky as I unfolded you like my very life a liquid signal of enormous love we invented like a comet that splits the air between us! the earth looks shiny wrapped in steam and ermine tired of us perspiring at every chance on the floor below I bring you an ash tray out of love for the ice palace because it is the end of summer the end of the sun because you are in season like a blue rug you are my favorite violin when you sit and  peel my eyes with your great surfaces seem intimate when we merely touch the thread of life and kiss   7.30.69
During the day I play at drowning looking for the smoke of eyelashes and faded hair the lilac shadows of blood and the ruins of coffee but a night I dream of the last syllable in my mother's heart the last red word in her lungs.
the grapes remind me of the whales gathering salt for the oceanthis is a poem about my life you've interrupted my life and death schedule which gives me that poetic look each daythis is a poem about my life where was I before I met you? I was eroding on my way to work and slept a lot deep in the subwaysthis is a poem about my life then I met your lips on that windy day I stopped poisoning my life on Monday morningsthis is a poem about my life when I met you you were undressed like a stone in the rain I swam after utterly nakedthis is a poem about my life before you leave me to heal I will find you someone to love who will be shaped like a boxthis is a poem about my life before you leave me to heal I will become an apple and hide in a clockthis is a poem about my life I will plant these wild lines they will grow into honey and weep in the spring for you   2.14.94
To my friends Each hair is a poem I gave my son Each hair is my allowance from the universe Each hair is a sunspot on someone's broken heart The secrets that emerge from the psyche have no floor They will get off on any floor when you least expect them to They wear shadows that look like my mother She could stop God but could not make it snow She said the weather was a work of art Like the last streak of wonder In Medea's heart You don't have to watch human Sacrifice on television Shut your window Lock the door Wait for yourself In the corner In the night In the little house That holds your tears   There is no piano Just your green velvet And the years you spent in Russia As a little box in your mother's womb With all her curses and her dreams of men When I write poetry I hear voices: KennethKoch rubbing his forehead DavidShapiro swatting words FrankOHara blowing his noise PhilipBryant smiling upon me Neruda drinking red wine Lorca hailing a cab in New York Vallejo walking in Paris RonPadgett calming the world TedBerrigan dignifying wise-guy poetry JoeCeravolo on the radio with Melanoma in the milky sky Are you asleep? No Chopin is asleep on our new sofa He is wasting his life away His health looks like a dirty window His heart has a broken leg His breathing will go to the grave with him I'm not one to part I'm not one to hide my feelings I'm the end of the corridor in your hands This is a song of war Because love is music And its ferocious notes Are oars that pull us apart Death is incredible It is man made We change the names of the dead When we bury them In time they look back at us And see us The living Like old doors in the wind   In the beginning there were small islands Floating on poetry These islands belonged to Joe Ceravolo Joe's words are the body parts of poetry Like the little children of the fireflies Who set songs on fire when we cry There is work to do on top of the forest There are too many words on top of the forest They are obscuring our conversation If the trees aren't pruned our words will never reach Their destination: The telephones that hate love And protect the dead from living Will my daughter dress like Venus Wrapped in exaggerated hopes? Will the pill invent love for her? Will her life take place on a Mental and spiritual planet? Yes No My daughter is a seed full of steam Leaving me behind like a bad marriage Helen Helen My Helen of Troy Once I placed a kiss on a spider's web Because there is no evil in nature The spider laughed Now the kiss is as free as an insect And the better part of our love My other marriages were like the four seasons That come and go They have left me small stones That spend their nights on the balcony of life Watching Pathos and Comedy celebrate their wedding Tonight I will write poetry I will pile the world on my pillow Like a paramilitary sous chef Toss an avalanche of flowers With sunlight and olive oil.  (David Shapiro) 4.25.94
in the beginning there was no end the ground we walked on was a memory our shadows false stories our clothing space without time darkness was the color of angels and the stars did not weep 2.25.98
My angel, don't think the great stillness is wooing us: We just haven't slept the same among the letters that have a habit of Recognizing us. Those beautiful letters live in Paris all year around. For even the best of men go astray with words within the gentle depths When they are to express something unutterable. But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without them as a Part of me, as a recreation between hesitations, The boundless ones in moments of doubts.   If you have this affection for things that don't really matter to the poor, Then everything will become clear, more coherent and somehow more Conciliatory, not perhaps how I manage to function from day to day Taking Kenneth's last words to be my daily gospel that "we must write Every day," but in your innermost consciousness and wakefulness you will Know I have patience with these black lines that I share with my most Intimate friends to say I'm still writing to you. So I sincerely beg you to have no remorse with matters of the heart, For it is a foolish, overbearing organ that does not have a place to rest Except in our sleep with dreams it cannot have during our times of Playful awareness. I only seek, as well as I can, to serve the last Wishes as a poet. What else is one to do with these unsolved hearts on Paper? Otherwise they are of no use to anyone but the dreamer who tries To cherish matters of the heart, like closed rooms to the public in some Grand museum filled with treasure, or like books written in a strange Tongue hidden in the library of moments we let slip away fearing it was What we wanted from the beginning. We stopped searching for the Answers because we could not live in their blue tents. It's a matter of Living everything. Live now, and perhaps you will then gradually, without Noticing it, one distant day live right into the answers of the heart. 8.3.03
Two weeks into the bottle of pills, I'd remember exiting the one-hour lens grinder at Copley Square— the same store that years later would be blown back and blood-spattered by a backpack bomb at the marathon. But this was back when terror happened elsewhere. I walked out wearing the standard Boston graduate student wire-rims, my first-ever glasses, and saw little people in office tower windows working late under fluorescent lights. File cabinets with drawer seams blossomed wire bins, and little hands answered little black telephones, rested receivers on bloused shoulders— real as the tiny flushing toilets, the paneled wainscotting and armed candelabras I gasped at as a child in  the miniature room at the Art Institute in Chicago. It was October and I could see the edges of everything—where the branches had been a blur of fire, now there were scalloped oak leaves, leathery maple five-points plain as on the Canadian flag. When the wind lifted the leaves the trees went pale, then dark again, in waves. Exhaling manholes, convenience store tiled with boxed cigarettes and gum, the BPL's forbidding fixtures lit to their razor tips and Trinity's windows holding individual panes of glass between bent metal like hosts in a monstrance. It was wonderful. It made me horribly sad.  It was the same
1. Waking First the low drone of uilleann pipes, the river of the spine just barely quivering: the froth on a half-drunk pint of Guiness shifting as the bellow breathes.  2. Waiting A pressure sprouting in the back—the joke I told about having eaten a pumpkin seed to astonish the moon- faced toddler gawping at my beach ball belly in the grocery line.  3. Pitocin What the hell is this no one said chaos I can't find the cerulean beach, the sun- rayed trail through rain-cooled woods can't find your face the soft flamenco music hurts I hate it you turn off it now  4. Lidocaine Flying bullets, bats, then, finally, birds. Swallows sky-diving for mosquitos above the quiet reservoir at dusk. Iridescent synchronicity, twisting together as if on strings. You must listen hard to hear the soft applause of (closed in unison) a thousand wings.  5. Parturition Hosannas in the skull halls: I see as if from above a body brought to its knees, every one of its live cells singingHosanna for "we praise you" and "please save us" as being trains its way into the lighted room, the ravaged world.
The ancients would lift  a clay spout to your lips—  water and honey and wine. I give you milk, softened  with wine, and swear you'll never hunger, never  thirst while I'm alive. What suffering I can't preclude  I'll soothe with singing: My future, for you not the greenness of a leaf  but of the leaves on all  the April branches. Fire, I give you fuel. I sweat  and chop the wood. I tender forever in you  who begin where I end as if your body is  my body, your elegance  my elegance. Sustenance, emptiness  is lack of you, yearning is the road to where you are. You are the road, the where,  the song, the hunger. Child, I give you sleep, I sing  you there.
Show's over, folks. And didn't October do A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon. Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees. Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage, While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage And gone to shiver in their winter clusters. Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin, Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters. Even the swarms of kids have given in To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure: TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains. The days throw up a closed sign around four. The hapless customer who'd wanted something Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.
Don't feel small. We all have been demoted. Go on being moon or rock or orb, buoyant and distant, smallest craft ball at Vanevenhoven's Hardware spray-painted purple or day-glow orange for a child's elliptical vision of fish line, cardboard and foam. No spacecraft has touched you, no flesh met the luster of your heavenly body. Little cold one, blow your horn. No matter what you are planet, and something other than planet, ancient but not "classical," the controversy over what to call you light-hours from your ears. On Earth we tend to nurture the diminutive, root for the diminished. None  of your neighbors knows your name. Nothing has changed. If Charon's not your moon, who cares? She remains unmoved, your companion.
After Lyle Lovett If I had a ginko tree I'd climb it in the evening. If I had a marmoset He'd climb the tree with me. If we saw a falling star I'd wish I had a rocket. If I had a rocket I'd drag the star back home. If I went to space I'd pick up a satellite. If I had my own moon I wouldn't be so sad. If I weren't so sad I wouldn't need a companion. If I sold my marmoset I'd have a lot of cash. If I had some money I'd buy an Eldorado. (Silver, 1959, With fins like raptor wings.) I'd shine that Eldorado and drive it to my father's. If I had a father I'd take him for a ride.
Asleep until noon, I'm dreaming we've been granted another year. You're here with me, healthy. Then, half-awake, the half-truth— this is our last day. Life's leaking away again, and this time, we know it. Dear body, I told you, pleading,Don't Leave! but I understand you can't say anything. Who are we? Are we fictional? We don't look like our pictures, don't look like anyone I know. Daylight flickers through a bamboo grove, we approach the Forbidden City, Looking together for the Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes.Time is the treasure, you tell me,and the past is its hiding place. I instruct our fictional children,The past is the treasure, time is its hiding place. If we told him how much we love him, how much we miss him, he could stay.
Clarice, the Swiss Appraiser, paces our rooms, listing furnishings on her yellow legal pad with a Waterman pen, a microcamera. Although I've asked why we have to do this, I forgot the answer. The answer to why is because, inscrutable, outside of logic, helpless, useless because. Wing chairs, a deco lamp, my mother's cherry dining table—nothing we both loved using looks tragic. Most nights now I sit in the den reading the colorful spines of your art books, Fra Angelico to Zurburan, volume after volume of Balthus, Botticelli, Cezanne, Degas, Michelangelo, Monet, Titian, Velasquez. Friends. An art school's asked for them— after all, they have no "real" value now, except to me.... Upstairs, Cerise—is that her name?—gasps at the bentwood chaise, the blonde moderne bedroom "set" my parents bought on their two-day Depression honeymoon in Manhattan. I know this has something to do with paying taxes. Last night, a real icy February zero, I went out to start the engine of the car you gave me on my birthday, to keep it going, then came in and forgot it till this morning. I woke to the city's recycling truck grinding my papers and plastic bottles and my motor running. And still, I wasn't out of gas, Our neighbor, his head in a red bandana, yelled, "We didn't want to bother you at one in the morning!" and I thought, How did you know I wasn't in there, suiciding? Cerise means "cherry," Clarice means "light" or "famous"— is her name Clarissa? What is she saying? She's blurring, she looks like a Candice, she looks nice enough, but I'll defer judgement until she's finished this business. If I let on I felt sad, remember my mother's advice? "Everyone should collect something!" That was her path to the purpose-driven life, along rows of a flea market, then alone in her house jammed with the nicked, the chipped, ceramics with dings, the inscribed wedding bands of strangers— damaged things that always needed gluing or polishing. I tried not to teach our children the world's a dangerous place, but there we were, four of us, plunked into history, listening to Dylan. Then, two of us. Our son and daughter out in it, unafraid, purposeful.... Somehow, life veered from the script. I should get a new cell phone, but eighteen of your messages are in/on my old one and can't be transferred. How can Verizon say your voice isn't really in there at all, calling home to me?—Then where is it? Why should it disappear from somewhere is unapparently isn't? Why should my living here be so metaphysical? Callista enters our bedroom, the room sacrosanct to me, off-limits, but no matter. She scans our night tables, our TV, our pills and lotions and clippers. Oh, morning here you'd perform what you'd call your "ablutions" while I read the paper in bed. Pearl slinks from her place on my pillow, Bogey's hunched in the clothes closer on your shearling slippers, Hosni Mubarak's been deposed, Benghazi's a riot of freedom until the Khadaffis say it isn't. The day you died, I knew what people meant by saying the earth stopped spinning on its axis. No choice but to write myself, to keep going. Today's Science Times says we're not in the Garden of Eden anymore— well, that shouldn't give evolutionary biologists pause. Life, says the geologists, is a natural consequence of geology. Geology? I know there's got to be more to be written. Clarissa, Clarinda, Career, whatever your name is, pack up your digital camera, your officious watery pen, your scrutineer's notepad, you're in the wrong biosphere, your data will never add up—Clarity, I think we're done here.
Hot hot hot, you are hot, Sun, Glaring all over my east window Burning, beaming, yellowing The room. Uninterested in me Because I'm not Mayakovsky Although I feel you insistingI wake, that I produce right now Or perish as my uncle used to say. Brave Mayakovsky, doomed Mayakovsky, He could sass you, and later O'Hara (Before they turned forty, both gone) Sassed you and sassed Mayakovsky, too— But when I try I know it's just another Instance of me whistling in the dark, Me not blazing, me not burning out.
I say to the named granite stone, to the brown grass, to the dead chrysanthemums, Mother, I still have a body, what else could receive my mind's transmissions, its dots and dashes of pain
for Ihab Hassan  1   Closing the door is supposed to open some inward source—as with, for example, the prayer- closet: the text says go in and “shut thy door.” It's a stroke of luck when traditional wisdom so matches the turning of the season.      2   I've ofen thought of writing a poem of grotesque length (an epic, yes) and setting the entire argument the instant after Gautama's enlightenment, while it seemed to him he would pass directly into Nirvana, while the powers of good trembled thinking man was lost. It was only an instant, because of course the Buddha reconsidered.      3   Bulls for the bull-fight must (this is absolutely essential) be innocent. The very brightest are certainly, by human standards, stupid, but after a few fights the dullest among them would learn not to charge an empty cape but turn and massacre the fancy-pants who dances there for a bloody crowd. But, as Hemingway noted, the bull never survives. I can't, myself, get excited about “life and death, i.e., violent death,” and have never been able to work up much sympathy for the brute who runs with his head down or for the show-off, who has it coming. I'll probably never develop a taste for battle or get seven novels written or kill myself.      4   History is hard for me. I’ve no sense for it.      5   The world—and if ever there was a self-evident proposition, here it is—the worldis a big fish. I've caught it in my net. And now, long into the winter nights, wearily, I study my net. The fish stinks.      6   A friend talks passionately in favor of silence. I listen to him. He says, “Silence dissolves the categories” and “Silence renews the potential of consciousness.” And it strikes me that I should say something. But I've never been able to argue. And whenever there’s been a choice between speaking and keeping still, I’ve kept my mouth shut. Well, usually. And only after a certain amount of prodding I’ve produced the necessary conventional sounds, feeling the thread of words I spew inordinately fragile, certainly nothing to depend on. Whereas the craw of silence is vast and, anyway, already has us—it’s the scorching sunlight of a Nilescape or the wind across the Great Plains, burying us. Friend, waist deep in dust or sand, maybe we’d contrive a gesture.      7   I passed the peak of my energy at the age of—it's hard to believe— twelve. Since then, little by little, I've collected the furniture of my house. I teach meanwhile, and I study, but no one knows my specialty.      8 XMAS [after Pessoa]   A God is born. Some other Gods die. Truth has neither come nor gone, only the Error has changed. We have now another Eternity, and the world is no better off than it was. Blind Knowing plows a sterile plain Lunatic Faith lives a dream of worship. A new God is nothing but a word. Seek not. Nor believe. All is occult.      9   Time is molecular—so much for Zeno—and each moment brings everything out of nothing. In the beginning (each beginning) the universe is only a point—no dimension—and then it’s a world, for a moment, and each moment is apocalypse. Continuous creation it used to be called, and now we say expanding universe because (I forgot to say) each moment is more. Whatever else it may be, it's always more. No wonder the poet cries “Oh,Oh,” or, on a higher level, lyrical verses. But don’t worry. I’m not violent. We all live in a residue of bright pulsations, a gob of time, an after-image.      10   How naive can you get?—I was wondering, when the Great Year comes around to this point again and the next me sits signing his poems Keith Waldrop, will he remember back across the void of Decembers to where I drift into these speculations? And a moment’s thought answers my stupid question: I remember nothing.      11   When I think of the books you could fill with what I don’t know, oof. The pressing need’s for a phenomenology of ignorance. Everything has horizons, and they’re not just out of sight, they loom. Yes, and they beckon. An open door is plain and simple, like a wall. A closed door is an invitation. But if the knob is turning . . . ? Well, I’m closing in, or opening up. I’ve been so bloody finicky the mysteries catch me sometimes with my lids down. But I’m preparing. I need many voices for my revenge.
1 She would sigh, if she could think of anything intolerable. her numbers fold, in planes she can not describe. Does she close her eyes for that faint red of processes? Come to me, by instinct or for mathematics’ sake.     2 She moves in a metaphor of action. Heaven, she says, is hell remembered. Outside her gaze, I’m stranded on fraudulent heights. No tune I know is far enough out.     3 Man is a matter of walking upright, but she suggests happiness. Her whole power is one the side of vagueness. Everything I need to know about her is just before me. What can I learn that is not already gone?     4 Mountains rule the world because she’s from the hills. When she stands perpendicular to the sun’s rays, her light is confined. If she turns, the objective weakens. We shall not all rise, but all be modified.     5 I see her long after she has gone away. There are whole systems she doesn’t respond to. If you look long enough everything is hydraulics. Out of a series of partial images, she is the one that detaches.     6 If I could remember her, we might build. Will my words be fan- tastic enough to count? Whatever happens now, we have been opposite. Please believe me, I would seek you if I had the distance.     7 Given time and invention, she will surface. She will scratch, meditate, and some story will suffer. I refuse to believe things unsupported necessarily fall. She deprives my dreams of un- reality.     8 The hardest step to take is always the next. She is written across her face. We are what we are, momentary coincidence. She is body, speaking through body.     9 She will claim, for instance, King Solomon planted baobabs in India. And it may be true. A fine long rain penetrates farther than storms. Food is necessary and  also logic.     10 Sometimes I’m angry, and not at anything in particular. She has seven divisions, but no borders. I could change your name, since you always wanted to be fictional. Another unsolved dream, under the bridge     11 She has, it would seem, no natural inclination to rise. She is whatever I cannot get rid of. She’s whatever refuses to be information. She is my absence, my only secure reference.     12 Just when I’m ready to let go, satisfaction is satisfaction. Curious text, where we’re commanded to acquire Nirvana. Nothing but impatience could prompt our abrupt recognition. she says virginity of the mind can be restored.     13 Let me not praise her past her due. She is a heap of pebbles in exquisite random. Her laughter rings empty, where there were crowds. My arms around you, my love, are phantoms.     14 She appears sometimes to be talking about other data. It is as if she knew a separate category. I tell her, weeping’s no proof of the resurrection. All of her is curved and alters.     15 She can only be pictured as catastrophe. She con- fuses concepts with irony. Her thought spreads, like children running home. She finds comfort in the most outrageous limbs.     16 The moon, according to her, is a symbol for shine. Residues provide the passion of thought. Her reflexes condition my mythology. She is the energy of my indexes.     17 When she snarls at me, my senses sharpen. Who could expect her, without lying? She is a color outside the octave. Her rituals divide my life from its labors.     18 She makes the right answer sound foolish. The righteous glory in their un- certainty. Two nuts represent us in divination. The only thing she comes home in is twilight.     19 She sits in the street, making detours. Her history is rich in in- decisions. She is present, inclusive, untransformed. I do not pretend to know how the flood came.     20 A hymn describes the monotony of her expectations. She was created from the sweat of peacocks. Children defend themselves with shame and experience. All her objects answer to the same name.     21 Better a blank wall than simple dark. The play in her muscle de- termines where my eyes focus. She sleeps at the curve of my spine. She wouldn’t believe me, if I were to tell her.
I   In heaven there is no more sea, and houses no longer need a widow’s walk. And no more widows, there being neither marriage nor giving in marriage. How the air hangs lower and lower on this—I hope —hottest day of summer. A faintly rotten scent the ground gives off brings to mind lilacs that have budded and blossomed. There are no more blossoms, perfume and purple gone for a year, as if forever. In heaven there are no tears, salt water wiped away entirely. One moment I breathe contentment. And then unreasoning sorrow pulses through me, an imperfect tension, as if unending. I have time on my hands. In heaven there is no more dusk, dark, dawn, meridian. And what I know now and for certain: neither the day nor the hour.     II   It seems clear enough that there is in the brain a particular pain-center, where sensations of every variety check in, to emerge as anguish and hurt. Thus there is not, as we might suppose, a multiplicity of pains, like an arsenal deployed against us, but one pain which puts on, as in a ritual theater, different masks.  It need not, even, be a great number of masks, some few faces peopling an endless repertory. From one fairy tale to another, is not the witch the same witch, whether poisoning an apple or fattening the children?     III   The doctrine changes, blows here and there, hot, cold. One more notion sweeps across the state in gusts, fiercely at first, settling then into a mild rotation. It puts things in motion. It dies down, while pressure somewhere else is building.  Called to, across a chasm of thin air, I shape the air to answer. My moments force themselves apart.  Breathe out. Breathe in. But as long as you are alive, there is a dead space in your lungs, never emptied, never needing to be filled. The spirit there, stale and sustaining, holds open every possibility, urging none. Ghost money: money to burn.     IV   On the earliest known sundial, the finger of shadow moves through symbols of the cosmos, but there are no lines drawn to mark off the hours. It does not, in the modern sense, “keep” time, but celebrates its flight, its recurrence, its brightness.     V   Hermaphrodite, sleeping. Predominance, in the visible, of the right hand —but the eyes now closed. What could there be to dream about, for one already complete? A perfect asymmetrical stability. No need to see or even to look.  To know, without having to ask. From any point on the periphery, advancing always towards the body. Both sexes. And both asleep.     VI   A scream from outside broke our argument and I ran to the door, rushed out onto the sidewalk almost, I thought, before the scream had ended. The night sky, above the street lamp, had a sheen of some dark metal.  Sirens—which seemed this evening more frequent than usual, and more strident—state the theme, you have said, of our instant: the howl of a machine hurrying to disaster. And all day, in the violence of delivery, ordinary trucks rattle our sashes.  The street lay empty, mercury lit, silence giving us no indication of which way to turn.
too old for vision I must settle for dreams   specific forms of cloud   (body surrounded by body)   every sensation con- ceals a dream   fresco   figurine   sculpture in low relief  (a motor halo a mental blue)   cleft in the logical space   (wilderness or wrack)   we have lived on a ladder to the window of a room to which the key is lost   (words lost in the music)
An aging house, well yes he understands that—but suddenly down it falls.   And he is in a garden.   And there are animals.   And he is in a garden and there are trees.   And there are stones on fire.   And, well, he walks up and down on them.   But this is the Hebrew and, not a conjunction, merely some un- translatable particle.   Cenotaph (there is no body here).   (Somehow I can’t imagine digging a separate grave for the heart.)   And everything is cast down—plants, animals, garden, stones, fire, Tyre with its river called Litany—along with himself.   The living organism, he hears, is a symbol of the psyche.   Thinking is inward seeing. So Wittgenstein thought, and also Swedenborg.   Die, well yes he knows he has to, but thinks of it as being killed—or killing.   As if at a distance—he lives, not in life, but across from it.   And it comes to pass.   And he tries to distinguish life and its contents.   And they wheel around him, the cars, as if he were standing still.
To begin with, I am faced with mountains to circumambulate, since I can't cut  through them I enter the folds of a human adventure On every door there hangs a figurehead and this one comes to face me as the  door swings shut I will proceed with good will—the best of wills—anxiously Bird of daughters, bird flying from the forks, the blurbs, the serials, the time I saw a golden tadpole, eating apple jam; I saw a sudden whirlpool, sucking  down a ham The boughs groan with fruit, an apple falls—false alarm It’s a non-sequitur—that Sense data sinks The muscles give out mid-word and a thief stutters while accusing me (his  uncle) of theft Lune comes along mounted on a beast called That who is neither more nor less  than a horse as obedient to Lune as the tides are to the moon Shot of men hurrying toward each other at an intersection with open umbrellas  none willing to give way to the others, shot of placid camels kneeling near  a chained dog, shot of sugar maples temporarily obscured by falling snow Tomorrow morning, unless things vastly improve, I’ll go in person to the front  of the caravan and take it over the mountain I thought I saw an earthworm, stirring in the dirt, then I saw it was a sadist,  wielding a quirt
Wake up, get married, be born First A and B pick up the trunk, then C relieves A and A wanders off, then D  takes B’s end and B goes in search of A, but A is nowhere to be found,  and C and D make off with the trunk Long are the lazy man’s laws, the kittens are in the kitchen, the child’s chin aids  pronunciation
 Maybe I’m dreaming I’m naked except for a long black t-shirt I’m dreaming
 Bring on the aspirin and bread, the vitamin C and gin
 We have fourteen names for blue and that doesn’t even count “meridian”
 Diderot, Audrey Hepburn, Hegel, Charles Dickens, and Gertrude Stein
 Shadow bird shouting
 White coral fencing
 The butcher on Sunday, Pablo Ruiz, lives south of here (in F___) and has five  kids—how full of vitality he is She leaves us behind in the interstices of competence Origami, irreverence, sand on the wing of an ibis She drops a bucket down a thick well, she whacks a golfball longer than a marble Rude and shoed, should and lead, reed
Puddings don’t have lungs, melons don’t have riders Listen—a female seal, a seaport, and a social world Come day’s end the top of the tree hesitates, pauses, then sweeps on like a  blackboard eraser to clear the horizon Sit, Shep, incognito The lid of the sun is heavy, its lashes blink on the horizon, brushing the curve of  the sea So now they want to grant federal coal subsidies I heard “suspected pipe bomb” as “suspected python” The first nest empty and deep, at child’s eye level, in a young fir tree, of twigs Pathos is at the front line of defense against worries as they approach I remember almost nothing, only that I am in a room with others and we are  reading through sacks of mail, trying to ferret out spies She will never believe she’s too old to join a band or make quick vertical moves  on the playing field to really quiet music—she is that still Then the sparrow went to sleep in a lumber castle And so we come to chapter LIX, in which I learn that I have failed Can you believe this shit
A star screen shimmers under the moon over the urban center flashing on it red  and green I’ll have a suspension, mustard, topicality, glue Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty Whipped gouache just about covers the situation In the Musée Unless there’s a fallen nest on display empty of an egg once  belonging to a song bird, species unknown, which had sung See style, see working late, see mismatched socks, see polyphony It is the fate of logic infinitely to undo closure but that’s just to say that it’s the  fate of logic infinitely to be logical So like a man goes into a shop and there’s like this other man in there whom he  thinks he recognizes and he says like do I know you The fallen grass in winter sprawls its spring Regulations state that the pier can accommodate no more than one troupe of  acrobats, thirty fishermen, or fifty tourists Yo The child never gives up her secret, which—don’t tell—is that she has a secret,  and her secret has a penis We will lose another day from the inner picture—days are not ineradicable there What is it that one is autobiographical about
Things weren’t very specific when I was in labor,   yet everything was there, suddenly: all that   my body had known, even things I’d only been   reminded of occasionally, as when a stranger’s scent   had reminded me of someone I’d known   in the distant past. The few men I’d loved but didn’t   marry. The time, living alone in Albuquerque,   when I fainted in the kitchen one morning before work   and woke up on the floor, covered in coffee. Finally.   it was coming. It was all moving forward. Finally, it was all going   to pass through me. It was beginning to happen   and it was all going to happen in one single night.   No more lingering in the adolescent pools   of memory, no more giving it a little more time to see   if things would get better or worse. No more moving   from one place to the next. Finally, my body was all   that had ever been given to me, it was all I had,   and I sweated through it in layers, so that when,   in the end, I was finally standing outside myself   and watching, I could see that what brought me   into the world was pulling you into the world,   and I could see that my body was giving you up   and giving you to me, and where in my body   there were talents, there were talents, and where   there were no talents, there would be scars.
I don't want to teach you anything or show you my wound or have you taste the amazing thing I made this morning with only what we had left in the fridge before you came home with new groceries. I’m as tired as you are of genius. Hey, do you know where we put the sky? I haven’t seen it for months. When I was in New Mexico last week all I did was push the baby in her stroller and worry about the sun on her legs and think about coming home. Now I’m home and I’m thinking of the way the light came in off the runway while I was waiting in the airport for the return flight, feeding the baby a hundred Cheerios, one by one, thinking, I don’t even know how to visit New Mexico anymore, thinking, I guess there isn’t going to be a time when I live like I lived that summer in Santa Fe, that summer-into-fall I’ve for so long told myself I will someday return to, that place I’ve kept, that ace in the hole, that life with mornings and afternoons that I am still holding back with the very tip of my fingernail. After all, this afternoon is the afternoon I’ve been waiting for all my life: running the vacuum over the rugs while you walk the baby around the block and my breasts heat and tingle as they fill again with milk and someone with the wrong number calls my cell again and again, refusing to take there is no Phillip here for an answer. This is, after all, the exact life I take with me to bed each night, digging deeper and deeper into its blood-dark soil, waking some mornings from dreams that shake me and leave me with a thirst for the past or the future, a distance I can never reach—dreams of a house I don’t recognize but know I have lived in all my life, someone I’ve never seen saying, Reach underyour shoulder blade and feel with your fingersthe place where I pierced you. Oh, that summer: Why did I have to leave it cracked open behind me as I went? How did I even do that? How did I get that one sky to stay wedged there, blue as the sky and just as big?
All the baby knows is the flop of her limbs   and the milky blue vein of sleep and the parking lot   of her animal fear, the cars left there overnight,   windshields dark and thick with dew. The rest is   completely unknown, the complete darkness   of her white room, where she sleeps   on a clean sheet printed with baby   crocodiles and lions wearing diapers.
Now I know that I’ve never described anything, not one single thing, not the flesh of the avocado which darkens so quickly, though if you scrape what’s been exposed to the air it’s new-green beneath like nothing ever happened. I want to describe this evening, though it’s not spectacular. The baby babbling in the other room over the din and whistle of a football game, and now the dog just outside the door, scratching, rattling the tags on her collar, the car going by, far away but loud, a car without a muffler, and the sound of the baby returning again, pleasure and weight. I want to describe the baby. I want to describe the baby for many hours to anyone who wishes to hear me. My feelings for her take me so far inside myself I can see the pure holiness in motherhood, and it makes me burn with success and fear, the hole her coming has left open, widening. Last night we fed her some of the avocado I’ve just finished eating while writing this poem. Her first food. I thought my heart might burst, knowing she would no longer be made entirely of me, flesh of my flesh. Startled in her amusing way by the idea of eating, she tried to take it in, but her mouth pushed it out. And my heart did burst.
I am done smoking cigarettes, done waiting tables, done counting tips at two a.m. in the neon-dark dance hall, done sleeping with young men in my apartment, done facing them or not, thinking of oblivion, which is better than nothing. I am done not wearing underwear becauseit’s so Victorian. I am done telling men I don’t wear underwear becauseit’s so Victorian. I am done with the night a guy spread my legs on a pool table, all those balls piled up in the pockets. I am done. I am never going back. When I see that night on the street I will drive past and never even glance over. I am done going to grad school, nodding in your workshop. I am done teaching English as a second language, saying I pointing to my chest, saying you pointing to them. I am done teaching the poetry class where no one talked and no one listened to me and outside the window the cottonwood wagged its sun-white leaves in the breeze as if to say, I give up, I give up. I am done being a childless woman, a childless wife, a woman with no scars on her body. I am done with the wide afternoons of before, the long stare, the tightly closed door. And I am done, too, for the most part, with the daydream of after. I am after for now. I am turning up the heater to see if that will make the baby sleep another fifteen minutes so I can finish this poem. I am done thinking of the past as if it had survived, though sometimes I think of the past and sometimes I see it coming, catching up, hands caked with dried mud, head shaved clean.
The crocodile, with cunning smile, sat in the dentist’s chair. He said, “Right here and everywhere my teeth require repair.” The dentist’s face was turning white. He quivered, quaked and shook. He muttered, “I suppose I’m going to have to take a look.” “I want you”, Crocodile declared, “to do the back ones first. The molars at the very back are easily the worst.” He opened wide his massive jaws. It was a fearsome sight— At least three hundred pointed teeth, all sharp and shining white. The dentist kept himself well clear. He stood two yards away. He chose the longest probe he had to search out the decay. “I said to do the back ones first!” the Crocodile called out. “You’re much too far away, dear sir, to see what you’re about. To do the back ones properly you’ve got to put your head Deep down inside my great big mouth,” the grinning Crocky said. The poor old dentist wrung his hands and, weeping in despair, He cried, “No no! I see them all extremely well from here!” Just then, in burst a lady, in her hands a golden chain. She cried, “Oh Croc, you naughty boy, you’re playing tricks again!” “Watch out!” the dentist shrieked and started climbing up the wall. “He’s after me! He’s after you! He’s going to eat us all!” “Don’t be a twit,” the lady said, and flashed a gorgeous smile. “He’s harmless. He’s my little pet, my lovely crocodile.”
for David Trinidad I was seventeen in Orlando, heading toward   Orange Blossom Trail, where the porn was. Fairvilla Video,   its fried, freshened air. I was terrified but also thrilled,   on the edge. Can anyone even remember how hard-   won a little corner of sex was then, no internet,   no hope, no combination? I can’t; I can.   In an elaborate bid to convince   myself and the clerk I was bisexual, I bought a bisexual   video that I can’t recall, and a box   that made my heart stop:Leo & Lance. (VHS wasn’t cheap:   I spent all my allowance.) I can measure   this adventure in increments of shame:   tape loop, checkout, the run-walk   to my red Buick (no one could miss me), the peel out.   And the drive home, anticipation, cruel cellophane . . .   Leo Ford, born Leo John Hilgeford, looked like California   by way of Dayton. There was his tender love of Divine,   that rumored three-way on Fire Island with Calvin Klein.   Late in his career he raised rare birds, volunteered   at Project Angel Food. He was versatile: so much to give.   And Lance, David Alan Reis, from Santa Barbara,   or maybe Oklahoma. Poor orphan, the stints   in jail, IV drugs, and conversion.   Leo and Lance had the chance to work together   twice on film—Leo & Lance andBlonds Do It Best—   and more than once on the corner. Where have all   the hustlers gone, anyway? They died   weeks apart, in 1991. Lance first,   in May, in San Jose, of AIDS complications.   On the death certificate, his job is listed as “model of clothing.”   That July, Leo on his motorcycle was struck by a truck   on Sunset. “Chillingly, Leo had played a motorcycle accident   victim in Games,” says IMDB, so those who knew   his oeuvre might have seen it coming. After the wake at Josie’s,   his ashes were scattered by the Golden Gate Bridge. A tree in India—   IMDB again, as if the truth matters— was planted in his name . . .   As I try to get this right, I pull up my cache   of scanned porn.Leo & Lance: it begins in synth,   Cali melancholy canyon light, and here’s Leo,   shirtless, running up a hill in tight denim,   letterman jacket thrown over his shoulder— now the tinkling   piano; now’s a good time to jerk off by the last of the snow.   God, bottle-blond Leo. But wait, who is that loping up the hill,   gawky, rugged, also blond, a dumbfounded wow uttered as he watches   Leo shoot? Of course: it’s Lance. Before they formally meet,   before they go back to the lodge and do what they do   better than life, they have a little snowball fight, brief, unexpectedly sweet—   like children in the street.
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day, And make me travel forth without my cloak, To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way, Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke? ‘Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break, To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face, For no man well of such a salve can speak That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace: Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief; Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss: The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.  Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,  And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy, With my extern the outward honouring, Or laid great bases for eternity, Which proves more short than waste or ruining; Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent, For compound sweet forgoing simple savour, Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent? No;—let me be obsequious in thy heart, And take thou my oblation, poor but free, Which is not mix’d with seconds, knows no art, But mutual render, only me for thee.  Hence, thou suborn’d informer! a true soul,  When most impeach’d, stands least in thy control.
It takes more than a wish to catch a fish you take the hook you add the bait you concentrate and then you wait you wait you wait but not a bite the fish don’t have an appetite so tell them what good bait you’ve got and how your bait can hit the spot this works a whole lot better than a wish if you really want to catch a fish
Ostrich and Lark started each morning together at first light, day in and day out.   And they parted at nightfall.   Every day they nibbled an ongoing meal: a few seeds here, a few seeds there; for Ostrich, the occasional lizard.   All day the sun glared out of cloudless blue.   Every day, all day, over the cidada’s drone, a drizzle of buzzings fell, and a downpour of birdsong.   Hornbill, Bee-eater, Hoopoe, Diederik, Mousebird, Whydah, Canary: from gray-light-come to last-light-gone, the fancy-dressed suitors of the veld warbled their rain-shower jazz.   But Ostrich was silent.   Lark sang the first song of the day, perched tall, slender, the tawny brown on a termite castle or a low branch of a camel thorn tree.   But Ostrich was silent.   When Lark sang, he flickered his wings, and his white throat feathers trembled. All day Lark sang, standing still or flitting, his open wings vermillion-spangled.   But Ostrich was silent.   At dusk Lark sought his hidden nest on the ground.   Ostrich sat down under an acacia tree and tucked his head under one of his black-and-white wings.   Sometimes he dreamed of flying. Sometimes he dreamed of singing the sky full of stars.   Sometimes he dreamed of the green season, drinking caught water, and drinking, and drinking.   At first light, Lark called, and together they started their day.   One evening, as the great red sun sank toward the tree-spiked horizon and the birds swooped to their nests; as the plant eaters gathered at full alert and the meat eaters woke to prowl; as the gates of night opened to the dark,   Ostrich fluttered his billowy wings. He stretched his graceful neck, closed his eyes, and TWOO-WOO-WOOOT   Ostrich found his voice, a voice part lion’s roar, part foghorn, part old man trumpeting into his handkerchief.   Ostrich was booming! Which is what ostriches do.   The veld fell silent.   And Ostrich boomed like thunderheads on the horizon. Ostrich boomed like the rainstorm that ends the dusty months of thirst.   Ostrich boomed like the promise of jubilant green, like the promise of birth.   Ostrich boomed Lark right off his perch!   Lark flew up to an Ostrich-high branch and looked at his friend with a big WOW in his eyes.   Ostrich had found his voice at last, his own beauty, his big, terrific self.
So now I have confessed that he is thine, And I my self am mortgaged to thy will, Myself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still: But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, For thou art covetous, and he is kind; He learned but surety-like to write for me, Under that bond that him as fast doth bind. The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take, Thou usurer, that put’st forth all to use, And sue a friend came debtor for my sake; So him I lose through my unkind abuse.  Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me:  He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.
When I do count the clock that tells the time,  And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;  When I behold the violet past prime,  And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves  Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves  Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,  Then of thy beauty do I question make,  That thou among the wastes of time must go, Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake And die as fast as they see others grow;   And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence  Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
The letters still come for Mrs Watters, who must, at one time, have warmed this house and lived as we do. Mostly small matters — the rolled calendar that, had she stayed, might hang now where I drew the rusted nail, the catalogues, the last gas bill unpaid — and always Mrs Watters. So for me the spirit of the house is feminine, its whisper of the one who, constantly, draws letters that assume she has never gone. On which I weekly write, without conviction: 'No longer living here. Address unknown.'
The first act of love in a new house is not private. Loving each other we are half-aware of door and mirror. Our ecstasy includes the bedside chair, the air from the landing. Street-lamp and elm utter leaves on walls as in no room ever. Theirs is the tongue our tongues join in translating. Their message is clear: tonight you cannot ignore the world at the window. So we love in the knowledge of a city at a different angle. And sharing our bed with furniture and tree we claim their perspective, merging our lives here in their established frame.
Working with one eye closed or heads buried under their drapes, they focus to preserve the drowned shell-hole, the salient's rubble of dead, the bleached bones of sepoys torn from the earth. Their stills haunt us: a stretcher piled with skulls at Cold Harbour, graves in a barren wood that in one hour's carnage lost its name to history and the world's memory of death. The worst has happened, they confirm the worst: but show us too the makeshift hospital, the sad errand of the hospital van among the ruins. Also enough of sky to suggest the infinity of angles, that behind sandbags, under the hostile towers someone is finding time for a wry note on bowel movements, an entry that affirms the loved salience of what is always there: flower of Auschwitz, bird of the Western Front.
The lights come on and stay on under the trees. Visibly a whole neighborhood inhabits the dusk, so punctual and in place it seems to deny dark its dominion. Nothing will go astray, the porch lamps promise. Sudden, as though a match failed to ignite at the foot of the garden, the first squibs trouble the eye. Impossible not to share that sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we-now dalliance with night, such soothing relentlessness. What should we make of fireflies, their quick flare of promise and disappointment, their throwaway style? Our heads turn this way and that. We are loath to miss such jauntiness in nature. Those fugitive selves, winged and at random! Our flickery might-have-beens come up form the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be as tentative frolic! What do fireflies say? That loneliness made of light becomes at last convivial singleness? That any antic spark cruising the void might titillate creation? And whether they spend themselves, or go to ground, or drift with their lights out, they have left the gloom, for as long as our eyes take to absorb such absence, less than it seemed, as childless and deprived as Chaos and Old Night. But ruffled, too, as though it unearthed some memory of light from its long blackout, a hospitable core fit home for fireflies, brushed by fireflies' wings.
The flypaper hung from the ceiling cork- screws with the weight of dead bluebottles. Not a smidgeon of dust anywhere, the house burdened  with an unbearable tidiness that means he will not return.
If they'd had writing in time, Cuba could have been Crete, watery source of the Minoans and thus the Greeks. What's lost? A possible us growing like new foliage out of stony ground, emerging? Last voice, first, a whole world calling— awful, inaudible—into the unstoppable loud (roaring!) hurricane-force sea wind.
So lightly and invisibly I hardly knew it, river of blood descending without joy back to the heart through the frail vein all the time —the largest of the body!— shredded then dissolved ("obliterated") and there was a sudden seepage into surrounding tissue instead of the blood pouring out as you'd expect forever, and a new vein formed to bypass what was gone like a wild meander even the smallest flood ends, and the river goes straight from that point. But in my case the thin-walled base-ends held forming an anabranch, a section of a river that diverts from the main channel, rejoins it downstream. Local ones can be caused by or make small islands in the watercourse but sometimes they flow hundreds of miles like the Bahr el Zeraf in the south Sudan that splits from the Bahr al Jabal of the White Nile, doesn't return until Malakal instead of leaving behind, as it could have with the blood being old, a full-fledged oxbow lake that before too long will blister in the sun, become a little blue scar beside the heart.
I said no to you so often, couldn't see. Do you know how that changed you —divided what you saw in me or anything (if you did) from what you said or mostly didn't? And another bottle drained, your head lolling off the chair's back, the mirror's face blacked.
Radiant dog on doublecross, and I, by night, a raven fly. My fear is that eternity has an alm that is ordinary to ten thousand and worn from my strings, my console of limbs, and I a missing part. It is the world that's new, not I, and submarines can shoot the land from the wheelbarrow of sickly pastorals. Give me the swamp any day! or the huts that pave the slave to freedom. From a small cloud in my ears the song has leapt the valley curtained with snow, and for ascendant harmony the gambler thumbs his cards. Of all the queens one is a witch whose curse is that she's held. The horses roll the stone and trot after their maturity sweepstakes. This time the homeliest won't ride my bet into hasty subtract glue. The pieces fly and here I lie, triangle of head and gut and thigh. Put me on my mount, Tomahawk, and past the river our cortege will dust the heavy fur, and peasants' prayers will touch the smell of holy cadaver. I will have sun and manly rage, and Mike Atlas will trim me up to rip the bier from my brother's hearse, and avenge me for my loss. The gallows hurt! and for my scheme I hang on the bridge's span where my mother will trust my lips with tears, the ones I send her now.
in memory of Ted Berrigan Lose a brother? Lose a pa? At the sound of the tone it will be exactly sayonara. Meet me in the lobby of Casa Purgatoria when it's Turkish bath hour. We will sweat out whatever the fuck it is that's unclean and inside us, at least inside me. Round and brown and getting cool. Vestigal feeling in the monkey I cut off myself. Having stood beside the catafalque to nominte him for heroism I did not expect a nom- ination for tragedy to be so rapidly forthcoming. You saw as well as I did how the hot afternoon was grateful to him for bequeathing himself to its mysterious finitude. Dry and bright and breezy and the hours were honey. The shadow of a fully leafed-out tree over our white knuckles. I would have liked to have been holding beads to show how humble and elated I felt. I talked of farce as if it were life. Life itself seemed more than ever high hips in a form-fitting sheath. I can be restfully subdued by the sight of long undulant fingers, please let me show you my entire body! Every time you see me re- call my neck sinews, my piano-string forearm tendons, my pneu- matic sexual flesh, and my mild and erotic eyeballs—forget the shy- ness about me that you can't understand. You can easily read in my  eyes how voluntary my fantasies are, and how flattering they are to you. Body. B-o-d-y. Ah, the bruises. Later for laying flowers, says the body. O body, O tough stuff, O body capable of sleep. I break the shaft of my spear over my knee and kiss a patch of concrete. Then from hands and knees I rise to my full height.
I come off a little bit ventilated but you must realize the material world is constantly crumbling under my eyes it's too much for the novel tongue I speak the glitter of pavement in my brainstem, you must accommodate the polytonal grimace of the set lips becoming a smile, and you must accept the thin section of arm advancing across your peripheries to grip you in pleasure, measuring feeling in your restraint We have lived through the most furious little chunk of history for this? that we must unburden ourselves on night roof air, presuming the poise and perks of champ pigeon teams planing the evening winds until, signaled from the roof with a flag we become American birds
Bungle is the password A slight matter of a deposit secures you the night's blank face on the large crude banknote I offer all the grease that's ever been on my palm as advice: Don't breathe in the lights of evening Moonshine hits the can bounces off and consumes the drapes I'm talking about here where we meet at the emergency water supply One man and one woman gets you one of each and some shadows A caress in the breeze A caress please so much? You can't even die without touching, you can't sweeten the fat street of faces  without touch I don't retain the melody that set me, dressed as I am, in motion in marriage with myself It ain't no honeymoon to take off my breast and play it So it happens you notice me in my canary shorts and my crimson fez Twunk twunkity twunk My thumb piano, my  very open eyes
Happens this time in answer to indecency Lit by the yellow shop windows cast Unkind to you, that light You say, Sit, Ubu, sit, or Hey, I like your weave This avenue for instance Gateway to escapade You can see from the beginning to its end All-embracing greed Distracting appliqués of altruism Small pomme de terre Can you tell whose hand on the basinet and that does what for you Warmth all in the light Sight all in garage park hallway Morning's dusk on pause You stand body in profile What you don't fill in the doorway stays empty More than overcome I know you're there and unseal my lips
Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot. I know they said "third eye" in class, but it's not an eye eye, not like that. It's not some freak third eye that opens on your forehead like on some Chernobyl baby. What it means is, what it's showing is, there's this unseen eye, on the inside. And she's marking it. It's how the X that says where treasure's at is not the treasure, but as good as treasure.— All right. What I said wasn't half so measured. In fact, I didn't say a thing. Their laughter had made my mouth go dry. Lunch was after World History; that week was India—myths, caste system, suttee, all the Greatest Hits. The white kids I was sitting with were friends, at least as I defined a friend back then. So wait, said Nick, does your mom wear a dot? I nodded, and I caught a smirk on Todd— She wear it to the shower? And to bed?— while Jesse sucked his chocolate milk and Brad was getting ready for another stab. I said, Hand me that ketchup packet there. And Nick said, What? I snatched it, twitched the tear, and squeezed a dollop on my thumb and worked circles till the red planet entered the house of war and on my forehead for the world to see my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats, their flesh in little puddles underneath, pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet.
Off with the wristwatch, the Reeboks, the belt.  My laptop's in a bin. I dig out the keys from my jeans and do  my best Midwestern grin. At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth,  it happens every trip, at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles,  the customary strip is never enough for a young brown male  whose name comes up at random. Lest the randomness of it be doubted, observe  how Myrtle's searched in tandem, how Doris's six-pack of Boost has been seized  and Ethel gets the wand. How polite of the screeners to sham paranoia  when what they really want is to pick out the swarthiest, scruffiest of us  and pat us top to toe, my fellow Ahmeds and my alien Alis,  Mohammed alias Mo— my buddies from med school, my doubles partners,  my dark unshaven brothers whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends,  ourselves the goateed other.
Hell-raiser, razor-feathered risers, windhover over Peshawar, power's joystick-blithe thousand-mile scythe, proxy executioner's proxy ax pinged by a proxy server, winged victory, pilot cipher unburdened by aught but fuel and bombs, fool of God, savage idiot savant sucking your benumbed trigger-finger gamer's thumb
Richer than mother's milk is half-and-half. Friends of two minds, redouble your craft. Our shelves our hives, our selves a royal jelly, may we at Benares and Boston, Philly and Delhi collect our birthright nectar. No swarm our own, we must be industrious, both queen and drone. Being two beings requires a rage for rigor, rewritable memory, hybrid vigor. English herself is a crossbred mother mutt, primly promiscuous and hot to rut. Oneness? Pure chimera. Splendor is spliced. Make your halves into something twice your size, your tongue a hyphen joining nation to nation. Recombine, become a thing of your own creation, a many-minded mongrel, the line's renewal, self-made and twofold, soul and dual.
we had to read the instructions as we sank. In a hand like carded lace. Not nuclear warheads on the sea's floor nor the violet flow over the reactor will outlive this sorrowful rhyme.
It's just me throwing myself at you, romance as usual, us times us, not lust but moxibustion, a substance burning close to the body as possible withut risk of immolation. Nearness without contact causes numbness. Analgesia. Pins and needles. As the snugness of the surgeon's glove causes hand fatigue. At least this procedure requires no swag or goody bags, stuff bestowed upon the stars at their luxe functions. There's no dress code, though leg irons are always appropriate. And if anyone says what the hell are you wearing in Esperanto —Kion diable vi portas?— tell them anguish is the universal language. Stars turn to trainwrecks and my heart goes out admirers gush. Ground to a velvet! But never mind the downside, mon semblable, mon crush. Love is just the retaliation of light. It is so profligate, you know, so rich with rush.
And where my organ of veneration should be— wormwood and gall. Grudge sliver. Wailbone, iron, bitters. I mean to say the miniature waterfalls have all dried up in this miniature place where day is duty cubed, time is time on task and every mind optimized for compliance. Time to delint my black denim traveling stuff. The flourescent major highlighter has dimmed to minor. I'm so dying I wrote when I meant to write so tired. And when I sleep I dream only that I'm sleeping. Please see my black stuff's dusted off. Night has no dilution anxieties, but only the infinites are happy: Math. Time. Everything happy goes to many decimal places while flesh passes through gradations of glory. I visualized it, the nurse said of the bedsore. Everything exists at the courtesy of everything else. Please see that my grave is kept clean. Beloveds, finite things in which the infinite endangered itself, excarnate to memory and the divine substance has limited liability. You're kind, I tell the infinite. Too kind.
My bones tied up with his bones at night, him falling asleep in my arm after wrasslin me, calling it love in some kind of low whisper no dog would believe. I know his every smell, every way the littlest corner of him be stinkin underneath me, on top of me, while our children snore in the corner, then he creep out the way he creep in, before the cock crow at the sun. In daylight he act like we strangers, on the edge of the field, his little tan children of mine turning brown, playing more than working cause they his children, Missy look over at me while I look  over at her, both of us got some kind of papers on this same man that say he own both of us, the man who owes us even we he die cause the Bible say you gotta look after the widow. But when he die it will be cause Missy and me locked eyes many days and hated him like one wronged woman made out of two, him standing up there on the porch studyin everything— his eyes lit up like he the Lord of all creation. hush now, night wind on my skin, hush now bird lost in trees, hush now, hungry moon
It is Monday, I am twelve years old, summer still feel like summer to me...  Ernest Green My elementary school principal was white I only had one white teacher, she was named after the juice the astronauts took into space, Tang, I got some Tang at home...did you hear about the little girls who got killed while we was in Sunday School yesterday?  Elizabeth Eckford I live in Baltimore and so do you, your people the raw and stinky crew, my daddy a big shot on the Avenue your daddy can't buy a pair of shoes...  Jefferson Thomas One little girl was named Addie Mae, just like my aunt from South Carolina, and when I come home from church everybody was cryin about the news from Alabama...I know Alabama Alabama was on the math test today—  If you going 65 miles an hour leaving  Richmond near where my cousin live  and you drive for twelve hours straight  will get you to Alabama? hell no, cause  Alabama in hell ...  Terrance Roberts The bus is hot, the white neighborhood full of angry faces just two miles from where we live, angry faces I see at night when I look out the window and wonder why I have to sit next to white children to be smart...I was smart all the time, my mama told me so when I did things the right way, extra things, good things, smart is knowin when somethin's missing...  Carlotta Walls LaNier I like Malcom X because he looks like me when I am so mad I can't stand myself, when my cousins take my model car shelf down, break up my cats and then dare me to fight, when I have to walk from the white school home through the white neighborhood when I miss the bus or when I get a beatin for what my friend did and he get a beatin, too, but mine hurt more because he did it, not me, so I like Malcom X. He so mean, Mr. Green, he so mean...you got to be mean in Chicago...  Minnijean Brown When I was fourteen a boy kissed me when we were walking to the movies, he sneaked me, and I tried not to smile because kissing is a sin and all the while I was so full of hallelujah on the inside, on the way to the movies we go to now because somebody made a way somehow, standing in lines with protest signs, dogs barking all around, so I make sure I sound educated when Henry sneaks to kiss me on the way to the movies...we have all kinds of movies in Philadelphia...  Gloria Ray Karlmark New York is faster than yesterday, been here and gone before you remember it ain't here no more, we go downtown in the middle of tomorrow when it still be today, New York is faster than yesterday, I got a quarter for your ten dollar bill, give it to me I'll pay your cleaners bill because New York is faster than yesterday, and a high school diploma is all a genius like me will ever need in a city where a thrill is more to me if you will believe me...and believe me you will...  Thelma Mothershed What a word will do, my momma used to say at night when her work was done, rearing back in that chair of hers with the stuffin fallin out of the arms, what a word will do when you know what words are for, she would say, layin her head back, closing her eyes and settling down inside some dream. She never told us her dreams when we asked her, she just said we would know when the moon turned over three times and ghosts rose up out of the sea. Mama was half out of this world, in California we all the way in it...  Melba Patillo Beals  Little Rock Nine,  Shaking the line  Between white no  And black oh yes,  I'll walk all over  What is mine, thanks  To Little Rock Nine.
The barstool's capacious, then ever more enclosed, with every beer, as evening erodes. A few capricious tourists off the cozy track propose unbeaten toasts. He'll soon be going back. Mannequin musicians play mandolins or thumb pianos, bleat out a reggae air on ragged banjos. The booths patter with the local lingo. Smattered English polishes the windows. An amble to the john, the mirror's random crack. The urinal's askew. He'll soon be going back. The minimal solicitudes of seven-minute flirts: blurted-out soliloquies, well-trained parting words. Insert pejorative for natives here, before a sputtered call for one more beer. Dusty carnations; carnival bric-a-brac— long-faded revaltions. He'll soon be going back.
The chickens are back in their coop. The kids are out on the town. It's here in one fell swoop.  It's sundown. You've heard them say it before. The rumour's been going around. You're heading straight for the door.  It's sundown.  You've forgotten what you said.  All that matters is here and now  No one's getting you to bed,  even though it's sundown. The trucks roll by on the highway. You want to follow that sound. You want to have your say  at sundown. The dusk turns into dark. You walk away with a frown. You're the only one in the park  past sundown.  Here's where the children played,  but they're not here right now.  You don't want to end your day,  even though it's sundown.
He stood up suddenly and threw himself and his grey canvas sack to the bus's floor, then, clutching the sack's edges, he struck the floor with it again, four or five times, then stopped. No one moved, everyone had moved for a moment, away from him as he had struck the floor. He sat looking at the contents of the bag, now strewn all over. Cassetts, broken cassette cases, assorted papers, and pieces of his old cassette recorder. He sat quite still for a moment. Whatever had been happening wasn't happening anymore. Nothing continued to happen, then something began to happen again. He began to pick up his things, put them into the sack. No one moved. They all looked at him, or they all tried not to look at him. He put his things into the sack with steadily increasing speed.
1 Our last night in the house was not our last.With two cats in the yard. Our movers took the furniture in the morning. A country where they turned back time.
Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice, Suffuses the veins of the eyes Till the retina, mooncoloured, Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape A flat hot boulder it Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums Sidles The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations Mad and stark naked Sidles The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elphantiasis Sidles All three across heaven with a rocking motion. The Doldrums: 'region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator.' But the calms are rare The winds baffling but not light And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon All in the pallescent Sargasso weed And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance For What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon?  (Truth like starlight crookedly) What are we all but 'burial grounds abhorred by the moon'? And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we. But there is no snow here, nor lilies. The night is glutinous In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps Smoulder: distant fireback of copse Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond The constellations which have stopped working (?) Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps. On edge of lawn a glowworm Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn And in the centre the rugate trees Though seeming as if they go up in smoke Are held like cardboard where they are. Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move. Agesias said: 'Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation  (prandial).'  But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother. Barbarieus said: 'I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for   Praxinoê'  But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's  eyelashes. Galônus said: 'The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the  value of its beauty.' Decanus said: 'Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it.'  But Galônus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse. Epinondas said: 'I have been a liar, now no longer so.' Zeuxias said: 'What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool."  Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy? Epator was drunk for two days: Theodorus traced his disease to college,  Iphogenês saw God and died, And so down the Alphabet, ate, and the Persian, With variegated gutterals and sibilants, the Gaelic with dipthongs and  tripthongs, Choctaw with three different clicks Each letter is somebody But the Crab is nobody Nobody Nobody A ganglion of neurotic imitations Composed of each letter in turn Jointed by conflicts he does not want A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand. Suffering for the sins his father refuse to commit He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude Haunted by phantoms of his female self Whom he has never seen but composed himself, thus:  Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice  Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea  Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca  Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen This he desires, but despises: Bhah! Always sideways, crabs walk. Either he is not fit for this world Or this world not fit for him. But which? After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward? They lured him with promises, Now it has all slipped sideways What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot If fated to melt again after getting out of it? The answers are: He is not out of it Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock Not a yard, no, not an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth For chance is not blind but unimpedable And we call it blind because Since we frustrate it only by chance We prefer to shut our own eyes. The crab however crawls on. He must therefore be a crab subnormal. One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men, Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer And the process is reversed. In mass production one hand never knows The evil the other is inspiring it to do This is a heretic even to the faiths he fails to believe So worthless, awkward, unintelligible, The crab crawls on. He has sufferd because he was ugly Let him be cruel now that he is attractive Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self. We trap our goldfinch trapping out souls therewinged Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods: We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer We don't. We drink and drivel. My  poor Catullus, do stop being such a  fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is  gone. O, once the days shone very bright for  you, when where that girl you loved so (as no  other will be) called, you came and came. And  then and there were odd things done and many  which you wanted and she didn't not want.  Yes indeed the days shone very bright for  you. But now she doesn't want it.  Don't you either,  booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in  misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened.  Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened,  doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not  keen—though sorry you'll be to be not asked.  Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for  you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted?  Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to?  Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble? —Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened. How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid? O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind Wind humming like distant rooks Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization Civilization being relative our to Greek  Greek to Persian  Persian to Chinese Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction Satisfaction a matter of capacity Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram Epigrams—poems with a strabismus Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the  Zodiac And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways
If Black History Month is not viable then wind does not carry the seeds and drop them on fertile ground rain does not dampen the land and encourage the seeds to root sun does not warm the earth and kiss the seedlings and tell them plain: You’re As Good As Anybody Else You’ve Got A Place Here, Too
This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the ChicagoDefender to the Black Americans in the South so they would know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth- place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954 when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa- rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in 1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand- children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money, Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac- ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago, where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi- nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama, who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.
(For Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917—2001) maybe there is something about the seventh of June: Gwen, Prince and me . . . or maybe people just have to be born at some time . . . and there are only three hundred sixty-five days or three sixty-six every four years or so . . . meaning that some things happen at the same time in the same rising sign . . . and the same houses in Gemini . . . but some of us might also consider the possibility of reincarnating revolving restructuring that spirit . . . reshaping that spirit . . . releasing that spirit . . . tucking the use- less inside and when the useless pushes out again we restructure again and poetry and song and praisesong go on . . . because it is the right thing to do   we always will cry when a great heart . . . a good soul . . . one of the premier poets of her age restructures . . . reincarnates . . . revolves into a resolve that we now carry in our hearts . . . as all great women and men are alive . . . not by biology but remem- brance . . . and that’s all right . . . as the old folk say . . . because as long as they stay on the lips . . . they nestle in our hearts and those souls which are planted . . . continue growing . . . until generations not knowing their touch . . . their voice . . . or even the fact that some Chicago poets are terrible cooks . . . but always fun to eat with . . . will tell tales of having met someone who knew someone who once watched a basketball game . . . in which some Chicago poet cheered for Seattle at the request of some Virginia poet who wanted more games . . . while Mr. Blakely was amazed that a Chicago poet was even watching a game . . . and didn’t we miss him as he slipped away watching baseball . . . and what a way to go . . . though we then did sort of know . . . that once gone . . . he would call the woman he loved   and so we come to no more phone calls at six a.m. to chat ... and no more Benihana when we are all in New York . . . and no more gossiping and questioning and trying to make sense of a senseless world . . . no more face-to-face . . . only the poetry which is a great monument from this Topeka daughter to the world . . . and yet . . . there can be no complaints in this passing . . . no sorrow songs . . . no if onlys . . . it is all here: the work the love: the woman: who gave and gave and gave . . . no complaints of too long or too hard . . . no injustice of accident or misunderstanding of disease . . . just one great woman moving to the next phase . . . and us on the ground . . . giving Alleluias
It is appropriate that I sing The song of the feet   The weight of the body And what the body chooses to bear Fall on me   I trampled the American wilderness Forged frontier trails Outran the mob in Tulsa Got caught in Philadelphia   And am still unreparated   I soldiered on in Korea Jungled through Vietman sweated out Desert Storm Caved my way through Afghanistan Tunneled the World Trade Center   And on the worst day of my life Walked behind JFK Shouldered MLK Stood embracing Sister Betty   I wiggle my toes In the sands of time Trusting the touch that controls my motion Basking in the warmth of the embrace Day’s end offers with warm salty water   It is appropriate I sing The praise of the feet   I am a Black woman
I want to believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for.   When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green, I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also electrically flecked with white and I mean green in its damp way of glowing off a leaf.   Scheele’s green, the green of Renaissance painters, is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees as arsenious oxide is stirred in. Sodium displaces copper, resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used as insecticide. When I say green I mean a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf.   Before synthetics, not every painter could afford a swathe of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon, aka kinky pink, wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes have been the same. There were sunsets before, but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky was just cataract smears. I want to believe this.   The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves filling my window is a palette very far from carnation or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not, is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot. Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded. I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar as if I was looking at the green you could only see if you’d never known synthetic colors existed.   I’ve drawn into myself people say. We understand, they say.   There are people who only have words for red and black and white, and I wonder if they even see the trees at the edge of the grass or the green storms coming out of the west. There are people who use the same word for green and red and brown, and I wonder if red seems so urgently bright pouring from the body when there is no green for it to fall against.   In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked, “Can’t we imagine certain people having a different geometry of colour than we do?”   I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name, because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before.   Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake.   The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol. When I learned the word I was newly pregnant and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches. The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe, but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here.   Nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.” He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies to see the flaming petals again and figure out why.   Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence. Why is there no clear white? He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses, but all he finds is mist.   At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away like a blue shadow on the snow.   Then I felt like I killed the baby in the way you can be thinking about something else and drop a heavy platter by mistake.   Sometimes I feel like I was stupid to have thought I was pregnant at all.   Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees.   Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing. So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid. I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.
When the strange girl skips rope her hair flies like a porpoise. She collects things that melt and things that tick, circles and cubes and checkerboards in a drawer   she can pull out from her navel. Other children, alerted by the rumble of marbles in her chest, chase her across the field. She insists she is only   hungry, but they pin her down and open her up. Cockroaches rush out and bullies run and squeal, crushing carapaces underfoot. She gathers as many as she can,   tells them she’s sorry there is no lock. She’s sorry, but good children shouldn’t have secrets.
You are afraid of the dark, for which you blame the raccoons, or more to the point, your father, who took you and your mother into the night with a flashlight and shotgun, then left with both, while you held her shaking hand. You would follow your father to the end of the world, those distant birch woods where raccoons rustle and flash their green eyes. His gun was firing into the persimmon trees and the rain of leaves and ripe fruit fell farther and farther, until only the crackle of his shots and the distant baying of the hounds could be heard. The raccoons came then to hiss all around: he left you, he left you, and now you are ours.
When I tell you I love the song “Edelweiss” you have to understand that even though I too am a sophisticate who scorns musicals, I was once a little girl who stood in my grand- father’s living room singing, Cuckoo!Cuckoo! while he sipped his scotch and laughed at my preciosity. And when I sing the lyrics in your ear—Small andbright, clean and white,you look happy to meet me—you have to understand my grandfather only ever had one friend, a jeweler who also drank scotch, and left his $10,000 Rolex to my grandfather, who wore it even though it turned his wrist green, wore it to the funeral, where the daughter sang in her ethereal voice. Blossomof snow may you bloomand grow, bloom and growforever. She couldn’t take her eyes off the casket. You have to understand that my grandfather kept spinning that heavy gold around his wrist, and when he raised his voice to join in, he cried to sing it. Edelweiss, edelweiss,bless my homeland forever.
I brought what I knew about the world to my daily life and it failed me. I brought senseless accidents and a depravity sprung inside the jaw. Also I brought what I had learned of love, an air of swift entrance and exit, a belief in trouble and desire. It will amount to something I was told, and I was told to hold fast to decency, to be spotlit and confident. I was told next year’s words await another voice. But you are a hard mouth to speak to and if I write the list it will be free of constancy. It will include fierce birds, false springs, a few oil lamps that need quickly to be lit. Also dusk and weeds and a sleep that permits utter oblivion from our stranded century. This is not a natural world, and if there are recoveries from confusion, they pass like rains. I don’t look to the robins for solace; neither do I trust that to make an end is to make a beginning. If we are not capable of company, we can at least both touch the quartet inside evening, the snow inside the willow, the bewildering kinship of ice and sky. But as I walked I saw crows ripping at shapes on the street, a square of sunlight flare on the roof. Take my hand, if only here and not in the time that remains for us to spend together. We will stand and watch the most delicate weathers move, second by second, through the grim neighborhood. I will lean into you, who have loved me in your way, knowing where you are and what you care for.
So here are the strange feelings that flicker in you or anchor like weights in your eyes. Turn back and you might undo them, the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor chords blur and rest. But it was born dark. The shore of that lake is littered with glass. How you came to be who you are was all unwinding, aimless on a bike, off to retrieve a parcel that could only be a gift, and felt, as a child, the sea weave around your feet, white light rushing in with the surf. What lived there?    —Joy, dispatched from nowhere, and no need to think about your purpose, and no fear that the sun gliding down might burn the earth it feeds. Black habitat of now in which decimation looks tender. Sometimes the call of a bird is so clear it bruises my hands. At night, behind glass, light empties out then fills a room and the people in it, hovering around a fire, gorgeous shapes of wind leaning close to each other in laughter. From this distance, they are a grace, an ache. The kingdom inside.
THE DEEP EVENING-COLORED ROSE of the sea is closing. Sweet crude oil, orange as rust, finds an open pathway into the marsh. And what you thought would be your home, lush with grasses, is no home, drives you out into the gray-glazed gates of sleep. Blood flowers where we don’t see it. And every chance event is a high note racing from stars in sea-depths of brightness, and every shock we feel we feel only with the slack ropes of our arms. Someone wants to hide the body of oil and cannot. Someone wants to hide their hands from shame. Shark, dolphin, manatee, fish, each slick skin an undreamt tine threading its red flute-dusk through fumes. Sound of the flood-dark pulse. Then the second when the water makes no sound.     THE OLD VANDALS WERE FLOODS AND BOATS eroding the banks. The islands that once dotted the bays have sunk, disappearing into silverish grit, thinned into algae and filament now being made quiet by plumes. Despite ourselves we are made quiet. The death of the sea a thing we must lower ourselves into to imagine. I will stay with you here inside the sheen of orange that quickly kills, not like the saltwater slowly starving the freshwater- marshes and grasses that knit this green-wet world together. The two breathless gannets found covered in oil are not unlike you, at the mercy of a mercy that moves in plumes, that insists certain fates remain invisible. What existed before the oil arrived was delicate and mired, a broom of moonlight swept through half-choked waves. I trust you if you wish for what it, too, might have been.     LEADING INTO THE BAY are soft green expanses of grasses, saltwater channels, slicks not glimpsed here before. The birds bathe where they can, in half-damp shadows that make possible the next free climb into air. There is nothing beyond our means to feel it— oil pushing up to the surface where the surface-dwellers die, turtles pulling in from the Gulf for nesting. If I close my eyes I can hear the faint blue traces of blood over-gathered by oil and the sound of ice near the seafloor.   There will be a time when nothing living moves, a degradation of stillness beyond any liquid scar. Still, the solutions of despair are weak if you believe you can touch an undersea reef, the belly of a small wounded whale. You have the power to feel it. The breath of the animal moving like trust into your arms.     BEFORE THE HOUR WHEN THE COAST slid into ocean we thought we saw a patch of sun greening in waves. The slip of a fish. There was a need so deep in our bodies we could not even weep. We called for an end and that end did not come. Power after power, our machine tools and cutting tools did nothing to hold back the brown clouds rippling in chaotic columns toward the light. And what the skies mean, passing over beds of tarred seaweed, feels unutterable, like the darkness around a candle. Where had we hoped to live? You came into the month with dreams. You walked on those beaches even though you knew they were sick. The bird that sought the reeds to die in, the fish gill-soaked with oils— you gathered them into yourself as if you alone could bring back their flickering. And overhead the novae exploded toward you along tracks of gas and dust, and the fields of ocean rose into you, and the crabs broke from their cancer fossils in masses of tiny flowers and you felt inside you the islands re-arise, flushed from the thickening imbalance of the earth. (Is there some refuge beyond ourselves that is vast enough? The sea is without grief. As are the days.)
Robins in the cottonwoods, holding still as the thin snow comes. The sun seems to flood them with blood. They have settled in the empty branches while the storm-lamps spit in your limbs, red evening swinging across the sky then dropping, ragged, into your frame to stay with you as you move and smile and have opinions. Then a woman’s torso white with dawn— their rich perch is yours, there is nothing you need to expect or retrieve, like warm fields floating toward an invisible moon. A person learns stone-throated composures and barters for days of calm weather, like a man in a dream who understands the answering pressure of eyes—you ask too much. But the birds are not reckless. Every minute their fat shapes are filling with sun, and I apprentice myself to their candor. Their bodies drift on the moving branches, solid— they are not taking and keeping. They are not torn papers in a rumor of wind, their small backs brown fields holding thunderclouds up. Inside their bodies, nothing falls to the earth and dies.
When I found your face on a pillow of leaves you had already erased it. A nest so heavy can stay in the heavens only by reversal.   By this law the knees are laced with abandon.   I said to the young man.   If watching is the manufacturer, and I lose you what angel takes the place of a dowry or distance in this leaf action?        Subject to like passions as we are my soul herself, myself a possession I could not mistake for the man (his language and Latin) yet we are “taken to” a love passage I had hardly noticed in the late talk of money The work of love and the work of art has no sleeping part Is a drop of light in a small silver socket, a rosy dime in a daylight tryst Is a keeper and no spender As seeing who is invisible: a kind of flaxen thing caught in stone I obeyed and read further “I am hemmed” Though my heart were a pear tree threaded with fire Lion you leapt through me like fineness in the boundary gene         Conductor you knit me as isthmus Can I touch it Night is going 200 miles an hr as usual In this way we find we are suddenly altered If I were a day would you like me better Where were you you who in a bath changed meHow to be walking is a glorious porthole Must I insist on an absence more foolish and secret When your timber’s a forest I can’t see for the tree in my bed Gentle captive, it is a larger than murder we tender Fond and afire my style and my anchor Master there’s a boat for no lesser completion than beauty’s sweetest dress when you look on me kind Who am I to stop this flowing Least of all that home mile Sinking in the real I dreamed there was a further island Perhaps (how I thought you) to salt that harness with pleasure         Lovely hero where the lovely hero bounds an acre hidden between eros and its errors Finding a dozen darts beneath the skin of Watching the wire of a skinny flame No other lovely hero found the back behind her secret form of symmetry Her gleaming difference Her schoolish way in pretty understandings Said Not done Not said Undone Wealthy sadness has a way of winning everyone This is the end of my body as you know it its superfluous penchant for love its poorer costume, its shiny disaster         What is a maiden,  boatswain, but a fiery lair and a teary citadel By the smallest shipwreck a daughter is laughter Yet equaled  as in a fable this Gibraltar goes headlong in a just king’s love See how his hands are her mercy and measure her number and rescue O Perseus  Pythagoras  Pierre my Pierre         What rules a body’s buried factions when laundered by morning   When called by our names although we are invisible   Sleeping I forget my animal When the animal comes I’m forgotten because of it   How was it called in its own country   crossing a street in order to come inside
sleeps into heaven with his lamps on, finishing explan- atory negotiations for a while. Desert the enemy. Star formations, sandstone understanding, rock time in gen- eral, whatever. Latching onto ecstasy, words that change on waking, clover as a syrup of spring mind. Working off a deficit of sleep or cash, you know who your friends are. Singled out in traffic, lurching into light, having lunch. You’re a little one with sand in your eyes, with green on your horn, with milk on your chin. With flow- ering ears and hearsay.
It’s turneresque in twilight. The word comes at me with its headlights on, so it’s revelation and not death. I figure I’m halfway home though I’ve only started. Nothing is moving but me: I’m a blackbird. The neigh- bor’s in labor, but so am I, pushing against the road. Physics tells us nothing is lost, but I’ve been copping time from death and can’t relent for every job the stars drop on my back.
Let’s go out and buy something. In the sun.   No, let’s stay home and make something, the sun floods the room. It could be green, on paper. It could be money. That’s the way to create new matter.   That’s how I detach boats from moorings—my boat, my mooring—  the harbor shallow in low tide   skiff propelled over buffeting sands flats on   sheer puissance.
there are some things up there uptown   I want to see   I want to see I'm going to look at that and see   I want to go up and see   that show. That show   I went to see, I went to see.   There are some things up   there uptown   I want to   look at that and see. I'm going to see   what I look. What I look at, when I look, vessel,   I stood to see. I went to stand to look   to see. Venturing further I went outside myself to look at that wall. It fed! There was a box inside that was not blank, I saw it. It was really different from an aura, the thing had   colors, the thing was talking   to itself. And spoke   to me, not incidentally.
Careening over the highway in my lightweight Japanese Death Star buffeted by the great and powerful winds   icy winds of winter warming cold air with hot air under it   accordion pleats of natural disaster my disaster   in the past if you were to say to me   or to rage at me in a poem about America I would charge you a great failure   to even use the word. It is banality this land is suffering because poets—   their great cohort—     I look twice to save lives.
One thing I’m not doing in my poems: reporting on anything that really happened.   When I say I’m from New York, Glaswegians say, “Oh, I love Woody Allen.” They cannot construe how large a state can be. I just happen to actually be from Manhattan.   How impractical, to imagine that a structure like a government would be responsive to the needs of such a lot of people. Held like in a holding pen.   In the early 1990s I saw a yellow Indian drunk in a tattoo parlor in Seattle. He literally said he could literally see right through me. If he said it figuratively I took it literally.   A lot of people in America do not want regulation from the government. In principle: our forefathers, our persecution. Ideally we wouldn’t need industries and individual actions to be regulated. We wouldn’t even need laws.   People, including people who run corporations or work for them, would just behave responsibly. Corporations would take the responsibility of personhood seriously.   My mother cannot be trusted to restrict me from buying R-rated videogames at the porn store.   My mother struggled to love me—the firstborn had been so tractable—she still struggles to love me—can she be commanded to love me? Now I see what those commandments are about. There must be a God.   Objectively we could expect that our family members would go out of their way to behave toward us with extra care, concern, and with love.   Sometimes there is a harsh disjunction between what objective perception would suggest to us we might expect and what really takes place, or “occurs,” within the framework of what we call “our lives.”   I really saw the other day for the first time that my mother did not naturally take to me—I am not much like her. It would take an effort for her to understand what matters to me. (Her love will come around.)   My own daughter is quite different from me—I think—it’s hard to tell, she is only five years old. But she looks different—takes after her father, as I took after mine—and so far her concerns are not my own. She loves pink. I hate pink. (My love moves faster.)   Where would that moral activity come from, to behave responsibly toward others? Not to overcharge, not to seek loopholes, not to dominate, not to oppress. Does anyone consciously oppress? I guess some spousal abuse comes from the pure urge to dominate, and the ire that results when that domination is resisted, or thwarted . . .   But is it a pure urge or is it coming from an inscribed narrative of gendered hierarchy? Like a man wearing a wife-beater has been told too many times that his wife is supposed to listen to him and obey him. Now if he can be told by the government that “My Strength Is Not for Hurting,” a local billboard campaign, maybe that will ring in his ears when he lifts his fist.   If the government doesn’t do it, who will do it? The church used to do it, and still does. The one time I went to church, with my mother, in Tennessee, when we were at a family reunion and the whole family had certain activities, and one of them was “church on Sunday,” I was brought to tears by the simple goodness of the message that the pastor, or reverend —minister?—this was a Methodist church—was preaching. It was Father’s Day, actually, and he talked about how fathers ought to make sure to spend time with their kids. Turn off the TV, he said, and spend some time with your kids.   I was crying because I am not used to an experience of shared instruction in goodness. It was very moving to be in a room with real people all receiving the same instruction.
I mean this thing   I want to write and no other   You will not be so clever   as to resurrect the feathered   the tatty wings of a costumed   angel in my dining room   tatty spatial realm   room where I exist and look at things and eat them   and float nine inches above the floor   and no one else need know   and no other poet   will do       The poet will do   what the poet will do and mime   or maim the poet   meme—in fancy   venue or classroom or focus   group the wings of the poet   relax and warm and shed and oracular   shit out the window in a pile by the side of the road   and the commitment of the poet   to engage, subvert, refract, or remand   is safe in my vagina at last where it belongs.
I can play songs in my head Yes I can perfectly replicate   (the) full-on orchestral every note (when the lights / do down / in the city) yet I cannot   compose, for example   and though when I was young I believed   that the fullness meant I could recreate the sounds I heard in my head with my mouth   I learned through painful iteration painfully unsatisfactory   shameful the rendition   so partial almost unrelated the qualities are: note tone scale register vocality musicality incapacity painfully shy of representation is there anyone?   who is a record player
Now as the farmer sits at his accounts Reviewing fleeces neath deciduous beeches And notes in red contented ink Net profits of his quite impossible serenity; As graded apples marketably beautiful Into the bushel-baskets sink And trussed hay to the tin roof reaches, And where red tiles through darkening trees are reared A whole year's work is sold in sacks of meal; Now suddenly running Drops like a sprig Of oak in a gale on the neck The little wriggler, Vindictive-legged cunning, Drops like a fleck Of blood on a finger ring Crooking in his sting. It wriggles and stops, Wriggles and turns Through copper ferns Through stubble of crops Into the garden of his most impossible serenity. Chrysanthemums Wilt in alarm As dangerous comes Its arching arm A probable harm Nearer to his impossible serenity. Brambles turn sour Berries crinkle All fruits, Every flower, All roots wrinkle: The trees' atour Lapses, and the power Of his impossible serenity Collapses. The scorpion poison grips, its patterns spread Like wine that trickling on a dusty floor Hence and thence makes pellets and canals. Asphodel, improbable, beside the river bed Is found rank ramsons with a garlic smell. And cider in a dirty cask, lovelike, turns vinegar. Where had been pears and pippins, is a row of rotten balls, Globes of mundungus, faced with foul fungus, And locusts swarm to make the end complete. The last bee disembowelled waves its dislocated feet. Diseased the last elm falls, and with it falls The indistinct last glint of Dionysus Lysius. Earth is with scorpions like spiders hung. From every tile and brick they flick Like leaping twisting mixing flies on dung. A pretty virgin makes a pretty shrew, As those lo longer virgins also do, Because they are no longer so, or else because they are. The fracasado, self-considering as from far, By force of self-perverted scales Pities himself for impotence, and rails Oftener therefore: more he pities, more he fails. The scolding wife drives man to keep a scolding whore: If either dies, he grieves because she scolds no more, And scorns the other still because she scolds. The man whose one wife makes him ten cuckolds Wishes the girl were plain: she finds no joys In playing with her multiplicated boys, Wishes herself plain too, to find her joy in one. Whose wife Is dutiful and bashful all her life Thinks he would be happier if she were loved by other men. Surely some wit usurps the throne of Cypris, when Woman so seems what never woman was, For man to caper to as man should not. The golden mean is not. The man of business bonded to his trade Postpones his culture till his fortune has been made. The cultured man to realize his will Can find no means, nor wherewithal to touch His learning, since his culture costs too much. Reformers, visionaries, poets, other such, Because their vision real is, too sane their wit, The multitude they seek to benefit Lunatic calls them: and although they spurn Others' opinions, lunatic for lack of heed they turn, Parodying their visions of perfection. The land, too stupid to desire a change, Too lazy for that mental insurrection, Yet knowing their salvation lies In broader education Like cats enough uneasy to surmise They have the mange, Further enlightenment refuses And its chief men accuses Of unenlightenment, With consequent Stagnation. Over its losses Autumn its mosses Draws: the dormice go to sleep. In the shorter afternoons Determined to forget, the caterpillars crawl Into the weak oblivion of cocoons. To easier life the coward birds have all Flown from the towns and woods and pools: But some remain at large, poor ignorant fools. The bats are wiser, who hang upside down, Less crazily inverted than the town: Snails in cement immure their sleepy souls: Less mad, though timid, are the celibate Ferns that abide the next arriving spring To unroll fronds again, when warblers sing, Meantime intelligently hibernate, And delicately, Up to date. But we as leaves evacuate a lime Cannot deceive ourselves nor bide our time: Forced to retire by buds that seize our place, Self-superannuated, in disgrace, Know but too well that what we most deride In others is the poison on our side, Stung by the poison we ourselves put up Ourselves the poisoned cup We give our intellectual pride To sup. A scorpion drops from a unicorn's nape Into the virgin's lap. A scorpion drops from blood Xanthippê's tongue And Socratês though he have wrung A whole night's liquor from a score kulixes And sadly his wine mixes, Drinking all below the table, Wanders, constitutionally unable To drink himself unwise. Yes, even him approaching now to weigh these things The scorpion stings. This belt of fretted stars that so promiscuously plays Upon our eyes, we learn to name them all, Picking our favourites out like horses in a race. But now their steady passages recall How, geared to the years, They tick our lives out: and we cease to see Much hope in false futurity: Instead we falsify stars that have been With promise that we alter since those stars, Raising reality Not in what we see, Nor in what meteors there yet may be, But in fixed stars we would we once had seen.
It was hardly war, the hardliest of wars. Hardly, hardly. It occurred to me that this particular war was hardly war because of kids, more kids, those poor kids. The kids were hungry until we GIs fed them. We dusted them with DDT. Hardly done. Reha- bilitation of Korea, that is. It needs chemical fertilizer from the States, power to build things like a country. In the end it was the hardliest of wars made up of bubble gum, which GIs had to show those kids how to chew. In no circumstance whatever can man be comfortable without art. They don’t want everlasting charity, and we are not giving it to them. We are just lending them a hand until they can stand on their own two feet. A novel idea. This is why it occurred to me that this particular war was hardly war, the hardliest of wars.     My father was hardly himself during the war, then I was born during the era that hardly existed, and, therefore, I hardly existed without DDT. Beauty is pleasure re- garded as the quality of a thing. I prefer a paper closet with real paper dresses in it. To be born hardly, hardly after the hardliest of wars, is a matter of debate. Still going forward. We are, that is. Napalm again. This is THE BIG PICTURE. War and its masses. War and its men. War and its machines. Together we form THE BIG PIC- TURE. From Korea to Germany, from Alaska to Puerto Rico. All over the world, the US Army is on the alert to defend our country, you the people, against aggression. This is THE BIG PICTURE, an official television report to the nation from the army. This is Korea! Is one thing better than another? These South Koreans are all right. Woe is you, woe is war, hardly war, woe is me, woe are you? My father is still alive, and this is how I came to prefer a paper closet with real paper dresses in it.     Well, it’s morning in Korea. The most violently mountainous place on Earth. Every- one has been dusted, existence hardly done, whereas beauty has been regarded as the quality of a thing. At Uncle Dann’s Huddle doughnuts and coffee are free and in case there are any, for there are many, the unescorted ladies are not permitted. The decision has been made in Tokyo for the hardliest of wars, an old soldier made it. The situation in Korea is so critical that we the Navy must give the Eighth Army prac- tical support. Do you remember how you began this day? How did you spend this morning? Woe are you? Well, pinecones fall every day. So why do we fail? Miles and miles of homeless refugees set adrift by the Red scourge.
Beauty=Nation Ugly=Nation Ladies Garden in Progress The American Visitors The New American Word The Beauty of Publicity Mother’s Mop Head Ring spots Sway Me Yes, Ma’am Gossamer=Blouse Yankee=Blouse Yes, Ma’am Sway Me Father, nice to see you Major, it’s been a hell of a ride General M & General H Mother’s Mop Head I see ring spotsThat’s a good sight for my old eyes Yes, Ma’am Ray-Ban Sunglasses So Sway Me Sway Me Oh Sway Me 1. Parade of the Japanese Colonial Government’s Monitors 2. Parade of the First Republic’s ROK Monitors 3. Parade of the DPRK Communist Monitors 4. Parade of the Joint ROK-UN Forces Monitors Yes, Ma’am Did I tell you I saw corpses piled up inside the well in Pyongyang? Did I tell you I helped the Communist Monitor who was also a Colonial Monitor, ROK Monitor, then later an ROK-UN Monitor drag the corpse of his brother? Monitor=For Life! General=For Life! President=For Life! However, I see buttons and ring spots Father, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Major, snap out of it. It’s August 15, 1948 He’s smiling at me Fun Hydrangeas Gossamer=Blouse and Yankee=Blouse Warmly greeted one another I see Ugly=Translators Yes, Ma’am Me=Gook
Here comes Shitty Kitty en route to the Gulf of Tonkin or en route to a race riot? That is the question and meanwhile discipline is the keystone and meanwhile did you see on TV helicopters being ditched into the sea? That is also my film and meanwhile all refugees must be treated as suspects. Looking for your husband? Looking for your son? That is the question and meanwhile she was the mother of the boy or that is what the translator said or Shitty Kitty or shall we adhere to traditional concepts of military discipline tempered with humanitarianism? That is the question and meanwhile South Korea exports military labor left over from the war. That is also my history or is that your history? That is the question and meanwhile    (CHORUS: Dictator Park Chung Hee and his soldiers in Ray-Bans)    How much?  $7.5 million=per division  or Binh Tai massacre=$7.5 million  or Binh Hoa massacre=$7.5 million  or Dien Nien—Phuoc Binh massacre=$7.5 million  or Go Dai massacre=$7.5 milion  or Ha My massacre=$7.5 million  or Phong Nhi & Phong Nhat massacre=$15 million  or Tay Vinh massacre=$7.5 million  or Vinh Xuan massacre=$7.5 million  or Mighty History? That is the question and meanwhile a riot began over a grilled cheese sandwich at Subic Bay. Discrimination or perception? That is the question and meanwhile the sailor refused to make a statement or translate? That is the question and meanwhile twenty-six men all black were charged with assault and rioting and meanwhile did you translate? That is my question and meanwhile lard or Crisco? Aye, aye, sir!    (Anti-CHORUS: kittens in frilly white bonnets, bibs, and mittens)  K I T T Y S O N G    I, aye-aye-sir!  I, crazy-daisy-sir!  I, export-quality-sir!  I, grill-grill-sir!  I, meow-meow-sir!  I, kitty-litter-sir!
The television in The Deer Hunter is in Clairton, Pennsylvania. Everything is still at Welsh’s Lounge: the clouds, the sky, the unlit neon sign outside the window. All is calm, all is bright. I sing in English while my father is in Vietnam. American wives are in immeasurable pain and so is my mother. American soldiers are pushing a hel- icopter to the right side of the TV screen. Behind the soldiers is number 19. It stands for USS Hancock: its nickname, Fighting Hannah. Helicopter whirring. It sounds like Godzilla crying. My father is nowhere to be seen because he’s behind the camera, behind the lens. His eye’s filled with the green ocean. It zooms in on the soldiers, some in uniform, some shirtless, on the decks with number 19 behind them. They’re calm and bright, looking down at the flight platform below. Nobody is crying. Num- ber 19 goes beyond Yi Sang’s number 13. History is hysterical. The-13th-child-also- says-it’s-terrifying. 13+3+3. 19=13. A modest, shared hallucination. I’m still the 13th child. And Godzilla is still crying. Hannah ditches the helicopter in the sea. Now everything is happening on the left side of the screen. Nobody’s in the cockpit of the helicopter. The chopper blades tilt, making a diagonal line across the entire screen. That strange cry. It wants to go home—O like me, like my father. Now the helicopter and its blades are perfectly vertical to the South China Sea. The chopper is now engulfed by the sea, white with foam. Sayonara, Saigon! THIS SEEMS TO BE THE LAST CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT IN VIET- NAM. Now everything appears in the center of the screen. Helicopter is everything. Hannah is everything. My father’s framing never sways even when flowers call to him. He edits as he films, he often told me. He’s still nowhere to be seen. Missing in action somewhere in Cambodia, filming carpet bombing, my mother said. O the chopper’s belly convulses. O it’s in immeasurable pain. The chopper’s door open and the pilot and men in white shirts and dark pants spill out. IT’S ALSO BEEN THE LARGEST SINGLE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA IT- SELF. The chopper’s blades are swirling in every frenzied direction. O suicidal lines. Sayonara, Saigon! HILARY BROWN, ABC NEWS ABOARD THE ATTACK AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS HANCOCK IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA. White with foam. Now I see buttons on History's blouse.
Did a slave song at a master’s bidding mark Tom while asleep in Charity's womb? The whole plantation would be called to sing and dance in Master Epps’ large parlor room— after work sprung from dawn and dragged past dusk, after children auctioned to parts unknown, after funerals and whippings. Thus was the whim of the patriarch. No groans allowed, just high steppin’ celebration, grins all around, gritted or sincere. Charity threw feet, hips, arms into motion to please the tyrant piano. Was it here Tom learned how music can prove the master? While he spun in a womb of slavish laughter?
Supervises over the teatable our voluble hostess The passing round of titterings and toasties. Her glass-eyed friends, confidence's make-and-breaks, Give each in series gobbets of another's cakes. Dough drips into their tight triangular shoes. Their mouths give vent to evil-smelling news Keep their minds pure, make mental products crisper, With speaking eyeball rolls and the not too improper whisper. Fawn-eyed, the daughter, a gossip apprentice, Festoons gilt malice on her unmalicious twenties. Holiday smarmed the manureminded ephebus Sees in every skirt lubricity's rebus. Sex is their unknown god, with neither purity nor pox, To whom they genuflect whenever they enjoy their shocks. A little of everything, is the note they strike, The only limitation, what they think they do not like. Always they suffer inexpressible injustices, Making their own beds, these amateur Procrusteses, But expect their maids to lie in them. The middle classes Must have some defence against the vulgar masses. They have no use for idle gossips that scarify: But in their own leisure get together to verify Rumours of rationalists, use of contraceptives, Probable bastards, hope of their proving defectives (Details being perquisites of good detectives). This of course for the parish's sake. These long nose weevils Seek knowledge of others', as expression of their own, evils: And naught escapes being twisted and messed, Their own souls included, on matters of interest. Ignorant, superficial, malignant, self-deceived, Ashamed to bear, but proud to be bereaved, Devoted to truth's medals, but dismayed to see its flesh— Babies are born to them in prams and crêches. Lip-honouring peace, by their indignant whispers Others they desecrate, their own insure, in their smug vespers. At mattins for their own sins pray to be forgiven, Revelling in others while walking home from heaven. Martrylike suffer for transgressions of the parish, Or say they do, particularly the most garish. But humbly at their bedside never hope that Jesus has destroyed Others' misfortunes wholly, lest themselves be unemployed. Such and so balsting are their faded Joys Which Time, nor Sickness, never quite destroys. Balder and balder every haircut Cutting a caper as lewd as he dare cut, Quasiphilosophically Capricorn carouses Ill at ease in such respectable houses, The disinherited soul of an atrabilious Semi self-deprecating paterfamilias. With many eyeglitters at women's legs in stockings And at the schoolboys' furtive corybantic eyecockings, His Bacchanalian belly he wobbles like a sack with metaphysical justification as Dionysiac, And ungenteel jokes undoubtedly due to his strabismus Distorting even the quaint festivities of Christmas. Remembering in the artificial afternoon Old days when Pan his saxophonic tune Under the ilex played, and how the figwood image Nimbly swayed in the nights of lustful scrimmage, And how in pleased surprise he uttered several Eurekas At finding the gross fungus Ithyphallus Impudicus. With him his father's hair his father's scalp reveals Commensurate, with scratching too much during silent meals, With virgin's blood the holly on the wall Drips. As from Druid branches fail to fall Light, intense pearl juices from alabaster fitting, The proper tight-drawn hostess cuts unwitting Symbols of fertility from Christmas cake. All jollity Is fastened down. Only innocent frivolity Saturnalia is allowed in houses of good quality. Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. The door bursts open wide The Sunday china stands up horrified.Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. All he has ever remembered Bulges out like a plaster panel badly distempered. Tiddledywog. Meh, membrum caprinum erexit: Culpabat, alia aliam, quia ipsa conspexit. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. First he puts under the mat Persian cat and Pekinese dog. Then the tables' and chairbacks' torselling Smashes, and piles on potsherds of Worcester porcelain. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Forefeet dangling like clappers Dancing about he grips the frightened flapper's Flaxen coils, throws to the ground and violates her. Which done she becomes he: he hates her, And turning on the boy, knocks his eyes out, Strips him, and using sinewy tail as a knout Flogs the boy till he eddies and faints. And the mother faints, Whom Capricorn props up upon the chintz And bathing her forehead with cold milk and tea Reverses coldness that used to be. But when she recovers, recovers himself and batters The woman to death. This seems to mend matters. Next pausing somewhat incommoded by his toils, The carpets, cushions, colour schemes he soils. Last in fierce memory of dislocate desire The house itself he dislocates with fire. Scatters the redhot imitation coals Over this mortuary of human souls. The imitation furniture goes up in smoke And well fired china serves as admirable coke. Like wood distilled that dribbles clammily Oozes the ectoplasm of his burning family. Various vermicular disseminations
An accomplished ragtime pianist himself, Sam Patterson was quite close to Joplin throughout his Missouri days and on until his death in 1917. I interviewed Mr. Patterson in Manhattan at the Harlem YMCA, during one of his travels to New York. Thank you for your time, Mr. Patterson. I understand you were rather close to Mr. Joplin.   Yes, you could say that. Knocked around together for years. But I am curious . . . what is it got you so bent on knowing Joplin's story?  Well sir, his tunes . . . they have given me great comfort in times of need. They saved me in times voracious grief. They help me remember who I am. Where I’m from. Who I was.   Yes. The music will do that—take pain and pour it someplace else for a while.  I believe that his story is higher . . . deeper than the sound of his music. If people knew the sheer will that was put into each note, they might know better how those tunes, that music, let this country talk itself through its own ugliness. I want to uncover the details of his process. I’ve been talking to the people who knew him most intimately, the ones best able to carry his memory forward. So here I am, putting his story together so I can better know . . . ours. I’m hoping you will help me, sir.   I see. (Laughs)  You got high expectations, you know that? You don’t always get the story you want. It don’t always show the way to where you think you’re going to. And then too, it don’t change nothing if it’s the past. And ain’t nothing sound more like the past these days than some old ragtime tunes. Some things you just can’t get back.  I’m here for the story as it happened. That’s all I need, Mr. Patterson.   Well. You seem to know a thing or two about loss. How the world don’t slow itself one step. Whole world seems sold on racing away from whatever it’s ever been. Hooked on leaving its past behind without a trace. Especially after war.  That’s true, sir.   I see that you’ve seen your share.  I have, sir. With the 369th.   Took a chunk out of you, huh?  Yes sir. Belleau Wood.   Damn. You ain’t that one that won the Croix de Guerre, are you?  No, sir. Just one that got a bit . . . rearranged.   Well, then. Let me pour us a toast . . . Tell me. What story you want to hear? What you need to know?  I want to know about his unpublished work. You helped Mr. Joplin write his final scores?   Well, I was with him. I was in that room with him for days—weeks. He was pressing up on them keys like he was trying to look into a mirror and find his own face. Blood gone almost all the way bad by then.  Syphilis?   Yeah. That bad blooded dog. It bit him up and spat him out—left nothing but dry bones and a crop of scattered nerves—just enough for him to try and stutter out some last scraps of sound. It was rough, boy. Rough.  Did he get much done?   Well, in a seeming sort of way. Problem was, he couldn’t hardly start one rag before he would get up and go to the next. Was all broiled up in each one—start one sounding like morning, get halfway through, and end up switching to some chords that left a midnight taste in your mouth. Start another that blew through your bones like a winter frost, then he’d take a break and come back burning up them keys like August in a cotton field.   Did he finish any of those compositions?   Can’t tell you. Might have—but most of what he did finish he ended up callin child’s play. But they weren’t any child’s play, I’ll tell you that. Not any child I ever met. I know ’cause I heard him play it all together one time, just before he lit that match.   You mean that he played the whole thing at once? As one piece?   The whole thing. Took all them raggedy pieces and tied ’em all together with a loose string of phrase all syncopated up like a gold pocket watch. A dozen dozen little song parts ticking away, all coiled up spitting and spinning. Times falling away and then coming together at the last minute . . . goodness.  Did it have a name?   Can’t say it did. Only saw him play it that one night. And everything he was working on was changing titles all the time, anyway. One hour it’d be the If Rag, then turn around and it’d be Lost Boy. Next hour it’d be the Magnetic Rag. Remember Me. Tremble Hand. Hallelujah. Bad Blood. Palms Down. Syncopated Glories. Morning Burl. Seem like they was all getting born up at once—everything he’d had me writing down for all those days and nights. I couldn’t rightly say that all of it was nice sounding. But some of it stuck to me so hard until I could never shake it off. Or maybe it was the way he was playing it—like he was staring down a well. And then sometimes he’d just stop and look at his palms, like he’d brung up a last drink of water. Then he’d just splash it all over that piano.  But I can still hear parts of it in my head. (Plays)  That was some good stuff right there. ’Cept he’d played it all stiffed up, bar by bar, most the time. Till that one last night.  Were you there that night?   I was there. Well, naw I wasn’t there. I was supposed to be. See, he had just played that thing. Had played it all out, till there wasn’t no more. He was sweating and heaving at the end like he’d been running for everything he’d ever lost. I remember once he looked up like he’d found some secret in the music, and then he did something he’d rarely do—he sang a little with the tune, like I’m in the wind, baby. I’m in the wind, darling. He was just twirling them keys all around, you know. Just twinkling up those high notes with big bashes of bass. Then too, I remember there was this one part in the music where he sounded like he’d wandered somewhere deep in the notes and couldn’t find a way back. Well, he found his way back alright. But he just wasn’t the same no more.  What happened? How was he different?   Well, let me see . . . You ever have someone seem all never-beaten all their life, so never-beaten till it’s like they was never weak? So strong till the day you come to know how weak they are—that’s when you see how you never knew their strength? Well, I had been knowing him for days, weeks, years. All the time knowing ’bout his strength—knowing he would be hitting those keys to the end, even when he was out of it, he’d walk out with his head up. He’d seen worse. Lot worse.  See, sometimes he’d be out on the road, playing his set—everything that had got his name on it, his bread and butter. He’d be up there playin it all grand and professor-like, kinda stilted up and slowed down so that the audience could hear every note shimmering in its own museum. He’d love each rag like it was the children he never got to see grow up—he’d be keepin them all orderly and polite, straining up their voices—not so much as they’d break, but enough to hear them bend up a little into hope, no matter how sad they might be. But never rushin nowhere. Folks was all okay with that back when he first started playin that Maple Leaf and such.  But it changed. He thought putting those pieces on paper would help hold them the way he heard them—make them stay proper and well behaved.  I imagine he was quite eager to get his work published in order to get compensated.   Yeah, he was glad to see it out in the world. See, he wanted to leave his sound behind him . . . but see, it didn’t work out quite exactly like that. Once those rags were on paper, every ten-fingered bowler-wearing stud would put his hands all over those tunes. Walk them slow at first, till they learned all their ins and outs. They was polite with them tunes, till they figured out how to roll ’em out a little faster, and then make ’em strut and swagger more with each stride. Next thing you know, they was cakewalking them rags up and down that keyboard like a pimp in the tenderloin. Their fingers would work ’em more faster, more prettier than they was supposed to be—all slicked up and leaned back and sideways steppin—hustled up and tricked out like something illegal, ill tempered and ill-begotten gained.  And started to be like every time he went to a new town, there’d be some light-fingered hustler out to bootstrap himself up, using Scott like a ladder. Come up onstage after Scott all friendly, then play his pieces all to pieces. I mean snapping those rags with a shoeshine boy’s spit and polish, trying to make the best tip of the week by showing the master how to work his own business. He’d say in his polite little professor tone, “Very nice, but too fast, friend!” and they’d just laugh. He would laugh with them a little through his frown, too—because what else could he do?  And what’s make it worse is that Scott couldn’t keep up with ’em. That ol’ dog syphilis had him by the throat, and had gnawed up almost everything he could do with his hands . . . and every year it got worse, till he would come into town and some folks would think he must’ve been a faker, askin how could the great rag man be all dusted up and unpolished like that? This be Scott Joplin? This?  But he never stopped, brother. Never stopped. Would always shake it off, even though you know he’d been shook. Always had a plan—an opera, a show . . .   Like Treemonisha, right? Isn’t that what kept him going?   Yeah, trying to get that opera up and runnin kept him going for a long time. Years, maybe. But everybody got limits. And that night, he knew he’d just . . . run out of time. He’d played that patchwork blanket of rags for hours and hours that night, all up and down the fingerboard till the air was about beat out the room. And he was breathless. When he looked up you could see there weren’t that many breaths left for him here on this earth, and when I saw his face . . . boy, I just had to ...  I had to walk away for a while. I went out that door. Got the night air. Cleaned myself off with wall beneath the streetlights.  So . . . you left the building ...   Yeah. Only left about twenty minutes or so, walking round the block. Came back and there was a glowing off the roof of the building. Ran up all them stairs, thinking the building was on fire, maybe one of them johns had dropped a cigar on the roof. Got there to see him standing next to this big old metal trash can, all blazed up with his songs. He must’ve put some kerosene on them ’cause they was blazed up pretty high and hot—I could feel the heat off those rags—damn, all them beautiful rags—could feel the heat from ten feet away. And I could see Scott on the other side. His face all lit up, his hands trembling and holding one last stash of scribbled up music.  You can’t stop something you know is gonna happen anyway. And then, you still gotta try. And I did. I tried to fix my mouth to talk at him, talk him down from all that mischief the sickness had put up in his brain. But what could I say? All the things you would say in the same situation. Don’t do it, Scott—your voice on paper, your work, think of your bloodline of sound all burning up, man . . . Who gone show them, man? People need to know . . .   You know what he said?  What did he say?   It was almost like he knew it was coming. This giant hand of wind came right over us from the river. And he threw them rags all up in the air and into the palm of that hand, and it made a fist and smeared his music all over New York. All them notes all scattered over Manhattan like so many raindrops. All them notes burning up in smoke.  What’d he say? It’s all in the wind, Sam. It’s all in the wind.
Our Box Henry hid away. John Berryman’s Ol’ Henry sulked. I see his point—he was trying to put one over. It was that he thought that we thought he could do it that breaks our Henry out this-a-way. So, here he will come out and talk.   All the world like a fool-bent lover once did see from Ol’ Henry’s side. Here comes a departure: hereafter, something falls out. Now, it might go fraught. Let us see how Box Henry, pried open for all to see, survives.   What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear and see. Once, with his black-face worn, John was glad all at the top. And he sang. Here, in this land where some strong be, let Box Henry grow in every head.  From Dream Song 1
When I got old enough I asked my mother, to her surprise, to tell me what she did with my eyes. She balked and stalled, sounding unsure for the first time I could remember. It was the tender way she held my face and kissed where tears should have rolled that told me I’d asked of her the almost impossible— to recount my blinding tale, to tell what became of the rest of me. She took me by the hand and led me to a small sapling that stood not much taller than me. I could smell the green marrow of its promise reaching free of the soil like a song from Earth’s royal, dirty mouth. Then Mother told me how she, newly freed, had prayed like a slave through the night when the surgeon took my eyes to save my fevered life, then got off her knees come morning to take the severed parts of me for burial—right there beneath that small tree. They fed the roots, climbed through its leaves to soak in sunlight . . . and so, she told me, I can see.   When the wind rustles up and cools me down, when the earth shakes with footsteps and when the sound of birdcalls stirs forests like the black and white bustling ’neath my fingertips I am of the light and shade of my tree. Now, ask me how tall that tree of mine has grown to be after all this time— it touches a place between heaven and here. And I shudder when I hear the earth’s wind in my bones through the bones of that boxed-up swarm of wood, bird and bee: I let it loose . . . and beyond me.
D always felt, somehow or other, double. He was an upright line, but then again, he was a curve. When he looked in the mirror straight on, he saw the dapper features of the diplomat he was. But sideways, if he took off his horn-rimmed glasses, he imagined he could be taken for a rather distinguished Dame. He always saw both sides to everything.  Would he ever find his dæmon—the divine spirit within? Did he really have one spirit? D seemed to be singing a duet with himself.  Seeing both sides made him a champion procrastinator. D dilly-dallied. Waited till the last minute to decide anything. At every posting, he drove the staff crazy. But that was diplomacy.  Now dusk dropped on the gated embassy grounds. D flipped on his desk lamp, and the pool of light shut out the trees, looming and dissolving. D drew the drapes, deaf to the delicate drone of insect wings. He returned to his desk, trying to distract himself from a strange little pain that had come to him all his life, like a recurrent dream. (Except, he had to confess, he never dreamed.) The pain was a distinct tiny stab in a spot, well, what would you call that? D called it down there.  For years, since he was a little d, he considered all the options about this strange pain. It was nothing, really. He went long times between feeling it. Maybe it was too slight to worry about, but then again . . . At last D decided to see a doctor. As a matter of fact, he saw a number.  “Tell me your dreams,” the first doctor said.  “Don't bother to ask me, I never dream,” D said.  “In dreams begin responsibilities,” the doctor quoted.  D demanded a referral.  “I've got a very specific pain,” he said to the next doctor. He pointed to, well, down there.  “Your testicle,” the physician said. Which required a test. Several. And more.  Finally the second doctor read all the results and announced, “Aha, a dermoid cyst.” What? Inside the cyst were hair follicles and an eye-type thing with eyelashes and a tooth.  “Do you think I was a twin?” D wondered with a weird kind of delight as he examined the x-ray.  Well, the doctor wouldn’t go that far. These dermoid cysts were usually removed in childhood. No reason, however, to remove it now. D wouldn’t dream of having it removed! It explained everything! That slightly creepy darling little creature in there must have been a twin, someone D had grown around as she dissolved. D was convinced it was a twin sister.  And D had absorbed her. Of course he wanted to keep her with him.  That very day, he had his first dream.  Exhausted after his discovery, he had returned to the embassy in the late afternoon. Unable to face his office, he diverted his steps from the front walk toward the deserted path on the grounds where no one ever seemed to stroll. He walked deeper into the woods. The path sloped into a shaded dimple in the earth.  It was dusk in the dell.  D heard the drone of insect wings. In the mottled light a dragonfly dove straight down. Up curved a damselfly.  Impulsively D lay down in the leaves in his three-piece suit and curled up like a praying divine, two hands under his chin. He felt himself melting a little. All the old bedevilments dispersed into a delicate dampness. The world softened from darkling to darling . . .    . . . A stately antlered stag appeared in the distance and slowly, with a calm command, walked closer until D could see that he wore a diamond necklace around his neck. The stag slowly bowed his head, doffed his entire rack of antlers, and raised his head up again, looking directly at D. Now the deer was a doe! The doe blinked her eyes at D, as if waking. Then she donned the antlers, and turned and walked away . . .   D woke up ravenously hungry—and overjoyed.  He dusted himself off and drove straight to dinner. As he stared out the restaurant window, eating his dumplings, he wondered if responsibilities really do begin in dreams.  Maybe dreams are responsible to us, he thought.  He felt his sister inside him. She was the reason he was a debonair man, a man who understood that everything has two sides: inner/outer, yes/no. D thought both in lines as sharp as the creases in trousers, and in curves like the swirls of a skirt. What do I really know? he asked himself. Only that he had woken strangely endeared to himself—and satisfied. Now he understood the necessity of delay. To wait, and then to discover. Never to have only one answer.  The napkin at the restaurant had come rolled inside a little sparkly ring. “Add this to my bill,” he said to the waiter. And pocketed the little diadem as a reminder of the dyad he was.
M loved the little house she shared with her mum, its magnolias and mansard roof. Inside, the smell of molasses and ginger had sunk into the timbers. Water mumbled from a hand pump, not a faucet tap. Music murmured, not from a radio, but from a soft piano. All was washed to softness—the sheets, the table linens. Even the gold rims on the old dishes were brushed down to a blur.  M had been a surprise late baby, and her mother was almost the age of a grandmother. There were only the two of them—plus Maugie, their cat.  M grew up thinking she understood her mum. But in fact she only understood her in daylight. The night world was where mum paced with her mountains of money worries. Down the hall M blissfully slept, and down in the basement Maugie moused, bringing her prizes up to the landing so M and Mum could find them first thing in the morning.  And in the morning light Mum’s money misery vanished. She never spoke of it. But when Mum got sick, her worries magnified. Her illness brought the night world to daylight, though she still managed to hide it from her daughter. Mum could no longer hope for a miracle. Unbeknownst to M, just before Mum died, the ancient lady up and took misfortune into her own misguided hands. She sold their home to the neighbors who had always coveted it.  Why didn’t she tell me? M plagued herself with questions all through the small funeral—she and her mum were the last of their line—and said to her distant cousins and her friends: She never ever mentioned money! Lawyers, real estate agents, and the neighbors of course were summoned. But the deal was done. Though M harbored murder in her heart for those greedy neighbors, she couldn’t get the house back.  It’s all MY fault—I should have known, M moaned.  It took a long time for her to settle these affairs. She’d taken a leave from her job at the museum, but eventually she had to go back to work. She and Maugie went to the only place M could afford to buy, a small but gleaming condominium. How could she transfer doilies and dusty velvet couches with broken legs into this glare? What was home any more? She had an iron bedstead, not a sleek futon. Of course Maugie kept finding her way back to the old homestead, and M had to keep quashing the mayhem in her heart as she retrieved the crafty little animal from that basement now full of the neighbor’s traps instead of mice.  Up in the condo, M’s dreams began. Each night she dreamed of a ruined house. Mornings she woke to a smell like something left in an oven too long, a whiff of burnt molasses. Sometimes in a dream a window without a wall fell to the ground in mockery. Night after night in her sleep M shouldered mountains of blame. But then came morning.  All she could do was embrace the day. With her long shapely arms, she put on her makeup, donned her mackintosh, and struck out for the museum, determined to muddle through.  “It’s not my fault, I know,” she said to McM, the man who occupied the next desk. “I just miss my home.” He offered her a meatloaf sandwich. She said, “I never knew my mum, after all.” M’s dreams went on mortgaging her nights. When she startled awake, there was only Maugie at the foot of the iron bedstead squeaking an unsatisfactory plastic rodent, and a monstrous stink of burnt molasses and cat pee.  M decided to bake. Using her mother’s measuring cups, she chased the aftermaths of the dreams away by spicing the smells. With cinnamon, with allspice, with vanilla and cardamom, she made muffins, mousse, and meringues in the open-concept kitchen. She used all her mother’s bowls, and all her mother’s spoons, to expunge the smells—and she almost did.  Meanwhile, Maugie knew whenever workmen propped open a staircase door. The cat would slip into the hall, then escape down the stairwell through the service door. And M would get a call at the museum from the mingy mean-spirited neighbors.  “And what am I going to do with Maugie?” M moaned to McM.  “Your cat is lonely,” he said. “Does she have service potential?”  Maugie would be tested. McM agreed to help.  The minute McM walked into the combo of gleam and old wood and velvet and iron, the marvelous smells wrapped around him. “You’ve been baking,” he murmured approvingly, “in your farmhouse in the sky.” But M was busy wrangling Maugie into the carrier.  Shortly the cat was deposited on the welcoming laps of ancient ladies in wheelchairs. That champion purr eased the ladies’ hearts. Maugie aced the test. Seeing the ladies, something in M eased, too.  “My mother is a mystery I may never solve,” she said to McM on one of their lunchtime trips to the old ladies. Maugie now went willingly into her carrier.  And so the bright weekday activities wore down the mountains of dreams. Blame became a molehill. M’s nightmares became so predictable they were almost friendly. Metamorphosis set in. McM lingered when he held M’s coat, and she lingered as he slipped it on. Their hands met when they put the cat carrier into the car. But these were the gestures of daylight.  Thinking she was ready to brave the evening light, M had made the mistake of inviting McM for Saturday dinner. When the day came, she lay in bed with a fever, vacuuming was abandoned, her mahogany hair unwashed. Though the mushroom soup gurgled on the stove and the mousse slept in the fridge, the main course had never been started. She left a message canceling.  McM arrived anyway with merlot and magnolias. He merged into M’s mess. It smelled of cough drops and kitty litter and dust and the fragrance of a woman in a slept-in nightgown. She slid beneath layers of consciousness like the layers of the blankets he straightened for her. And then balancing two hot toddies, fully clothed, he climbed into the bed. Maugie obliged him with a space.  M was too weak to protest. She woke and drank and woke and slept. At midnight M sat up and slurped the mushroom soup held by McM. Magnificent . . .   And then she sank. That night of course she dreamed of a house, but this house was merely old, not ruined. It was the homestead, magnolias laden, sheet music still in the piano bench. When she woke, she smelled McM, still fully clothed at her side, his glasses on the floor, batted about by Maugie. Nothing smelled burnt. Unlike her mother, M didn’t believe in miracles. She believed in muddling through. Slowly something had risen in her, like those moons you sometimes see in an afternoon sky, night inside the persistence of day. M sat up in bed, hugging her knees, looking at McM sprawled beside her. The house at last is inside me, she thought. I’ve finally moved.
NO was a violin, NOT a viola, and NEVER a cello. They were noble instruments, but highly nonconformist. Prickly in personality, if sexy. Wayward. Always went in their own direction. Made odd choices. Loved the difficult. Naysayed the popular. Collectively unified in a single reaction to the mainstream: negative.  When they first chanced to come together, they doubted they would ever meld.  But the minute they began to make music, they discovered a numinous core to their triangle. They couldn’t see this core, smell it, or touch it—and neither could their slender audience (thirty people on folding chairs in a church). But all felt it was a natural union of sound, nimble and sublime.  That night they became the Negativo Trio.  Retiring to nestle in the velvet warmth of their cases, they whispered to each other, debriefing and musing in the first of many nightly pajama parties. This very first evening they discovered that what they wanted above all were two things. One was to play their music with the very nacre of its nature, and the other was fame.  Night after night they played. Increased their bookings. Recorded. And were downloaded. They raised money to pay off the debt of their obscure choices. On stage they each shone with the patina of centuries: maple, spruce, and willow with an elegant varnish of gum arabic, honey, and the whites of eggs.  But they weren’t famous, even though they played a nocturne as if every note were a black pearl.  Yet NO, NOT and NEVER did everything everyone advised them to be famous: they networked, they nodded nicely to publicists, they flashed their Negativo news on social media. But the fact was, the trio wasn’t for everybody.  “Do you think it’s our name?” NOT the Viola asked. “Would we be more famous as the Nightingale Trio?”  “Nope,” said NEVER the Cello. “Negativo has our brio.” And NEVER was right. The three of them played with nerve. The knottier the piece, the better. They made their audiences reach.  “We should be sexier,” NO the Violin said. “Naughtier. It’s our propensity for the minor key; we should lighten it up.” But when they played in the minor key, their audiences felt they had arrived at the navel of the universe. The instruments could never give up the minor.  Would the Negativos ever learn what the people in the seats knew? The trio wasn’t famous because, well, they kind of unnerved people. You had to have nettle to take them on.  Though they certainly wouldn’t have said no to notoriety, eventually they had to admit that they could not surrender their quirks.  “We will never be famous,” NEVER said one night after they had nestled in their cases for their midnight debriefing.  “I’m nauseous,” said NO extravagantly.  “And neglected,” said NOT excessively.  “Never,” said NEVER decisively.  They would never fill the biggest halls. Or be the first name on the tips of tongues. And with the inverted logic of misplaced dreams, even though they had toured, had notched up review, and had triumphs and fans, and websites and bloggers, and a body of criticism devoted to them, they felt they had reached their nadir.  The next morning they couldn’t seem to get up. They lay immobile, as if their velvet-lined cases were coffins.  A netherworldly silence descended.  The dust of despair drifted through the crack between the case tops and bottoms onto these living dead.  Time dragged like a dirty hem.  Naught into Nil.  Desolation into Dormancy.  Dormancy into . . .  . . . Rest.  Rest into Snoozing.  Snoozing into Sleep.  Sleep into Healing.  The nostrum of sleep lasted until the pinkish light that heralds spring.  A noisy nuthatch drilled for insects in a nearby tree. It was a forest sound, yodel-y and ebullient. It awoke the maple and spruce and willow of the Negativo’s constitutions. Their bodies couldn’t help responding to the vernal signal given when spring utters its only word: Nevertheless.   If not fame, nevertheless music.  “Numbskull nuthatch!” NEVER growled.  “Ninny nuthatch,” NO yawned.  “Bumptious bird,” NOT shifted, inadvertently jostling the snap to the dusty case. It sprang open. NO unclicked and climbed out, too. And NEVER heaved the lid.  They played immediately of course, trying a violin piece by the underrated Nardini. Most thought him a lightweight, but the Negativos gave it their signature interpretation of naked necessity.  “Oh it was NOTHING,” they began to say to one another as they did musical favors for themselves, producing scores of synchronicities and the occasional juicy nihilistic dissonance. They buoyed on their notes, as if a midnight Pacific of calm, rich, dark negatives were effused with luminescence.  How relieved their listeners were to have them back. Again their audiences were made aware of the noses between their ears. That slight, brief piquancy in the nostrils was the smell of earthly harmony. It came from within the airy column that united the instruments, the nucleus of their refusal to suit. Such accord, though it is as rare as ease, seems like nothing.  And so the Negativo Trio was known as a trio’s trio.  Not famous, but known.  Contrary to the vicissitudes of fame, ease is the path of the known, smooth as the satin of the instruments’ finish. To be recognized, yet not to suffer the disadvantages of fame, is a state so ideal it is the pinnacle of a career. NO, NOT and NEVER had at last woken up to that.
The way my grandmother put back the green bananas, unwilling to make an investment in her future, is how I’m feeling, watching my grown children watching CNN, sitting side by side on the sofa—no teasing, no tattling— just image upon image of Armageddon: starvation, explosions,  long lines at the gas pump, and even the Rabbi abandoning town.  Biological, my son says. And my daughter answers no, nuclear. I’m too embarrassed just now to admit how happy I am to have them home again, even though they’re only visitors, no longer “at home.” I built my house too close to the water,   my grandmother used to say whenever I went away. She meant she was easily moved to tears, and it took my own mother years to teach me the impossibility of protecting the weak from the strong. Enough crying, she’d say, clicking her tongue   like she was contesting the intricate but historical patterns of sudden death. You don’t die so easily. You have to suffer first. She meant, I now know, to comfort me, to protect me from her brother’s tank blown upside down in Germany,   the long lines at the gas pumps, the clergy blissfully following their prayers back home. O but then she’d kiss whatever ailed me, while my sister railed against injustice, her theme song exploding above the cushion separating her rights from all I’m still doing wrong.  How can we expect world peace, my father would have said, —if he wasn’t at that very moment watching I Love Lucy’s slide across the world’s stage on an overripe banana—when under one roof my own two children can’t get along.   As for me, just now I’m setting the table and filling the fruit bowl, whistling like Ricky Ricardo, unaware of his wife’s grand schemes, the well intentioned but certain and coming disaster. Please stay,Grandma, I say, holding her tightly in the aisle, unashamed of my tears. But of course, she died that very day, falling into honeydews, the melons, like hand grenades, rolling every which way.
I.Sleep faster, my son says. He’s poking at my eyelids, pulling at the pillows, the helicopter hum of anticipation rising in his throat as I reach out and spin him onto the bed. I want to set my heels once more in the soft underbelly of his childhood,   airlift him from danger, from disease, from all his fears, which are maybe not even his fears at all, but only mine. Yet now as he hovers above me, my body splayed out like my father’s before me, my every breath is less a prayer than a love letter torn open in desperation.   II. Remember, I say, when we counted to six million, a visualization of tragedy, one half hour a day  for two years, and that, for the tribe only; it would take another whole year for the gypsies, the Catholics, the gays, the foreigners, the Negroes, the artists, the philosophers, etc.   You were barely six at the time, your mother wondering what the hell I was thinking, and even now I can’t fathom why I didn’t just hold you close— It would have taken only a moment— And say whatever it was that I really wanted to say.   III. I’m watching Batman reruns when the telephone rings.Holy Charoset, I yell at the kitchen wall, call back later. Maybe I threw some raisins, I don’t remember. We’re already married, your mother and I,  but at the time, don’t ask, I was living alone.    And so I’m laughing, mostly from boredom, but still, laughing, while my father lay dying, gasping for breath in some dirty gutter, gunned down for a half-empty briefcase, a gefilte fish sandwich, and a New York Post which the next day would have his picture on the twenty-eighth page; one more dead Jew.     IV. You burst into the room, fifth grade facts burning your tongue like Moses’ coal. 100 people die every minute, you tell me as I turn down the TV; and then, gleefully: 50 since I’ve been in this room, and now 75 and now . . . O my little census bureau, my prince of darkness, my prophet of numbers, riddle me this:   how many grains of sand before you can call it a desert? And where were you the day Kennedy was shot? CNN, interrupting, asks. My grandmother clicks her tongue like she’s chopping onions in the old country. Poor boy, she says, pointing. And there’s John-John again, waving that little flag, still saluting.     V. And who will remember my father when I am gone? And how many have died since his death? And what’s one more. or one less. And what do I know of my father’s father? I’m waiting outside, engine humming, as my son, eighteen, registers. And now he’s shouting,   running towards me, arms pumping above his head. He’s Moses the moment before spying the golden calf. He’s his great grandfather crawling underground to freedom. He’s my father flying medical supplies, surviving the crash. My mother must have held him close. You’re home, she cries, safe.   VI. Vietnam, I say, or Sarajevo. Afghanistan, my son answers, or Iraq. My father would have said Germany. He could have said Japan. Nobody says anonymously. Nobody says Gotham. Korea, my cousin says, or Kosovo. My great grandfather  says South Africa. His great grandfather says Spain.   Somebody says Egypt now; somebody, Egypt then. Nobody says suddenly. Nobody says Brooklyn. I’m counting myself to sleep, when my wife hears a sound at the door. Careful, she whispers. We’re alone, in an empty house; my every breath reminding me I’m older than my father, on the day of his death.     VII.There are more people breathing this very moment, my son insists, than have ever died. He’s home from college, so I don’t double-check. He’s driven a long way to surprise me on my birthday. Are you sure you can’t stay, I ask, holding him close. He looks full of hope; a woman I’ve never seen before at his side. Welcome home,   I tell my wife. She’s just turned twenty-four. I’m childless, fatherless. It’s the day of the funeral; Nineteen years until the twin towers. Three thousand since Moses murdered the overseer. But that’s not what I’m thinking. One, two, three, she says, guiding me inside. How could we not fall back in love?
. . . you have inherited its burden without its mystery.  —Elie Wiesel I. March 1979 and I am watching Nazis march through Chicago. The bold type of the Sun-Times describes a small band of hoodlums, undereducated boy scouts, the better to be ignored. My grandfather, back hunched over his Bible, agrees. Jews like myself should stay home, should lay down our stones and pray like the Jews that we are.   II. Grandfather, you are easy to love with your long beard and the way you sway like a palm branch in the storm. It is easy to romanticize your spiritual search, worldly naiveté and wise rabbinical words. You belong in the books I read by Singer, Peretz, Sholom Aleichem. But their characters are ignorant of the chapters to come. You know where their prayers will lead.   III. A circle. Six Nazis. Your wife in the middle. One soldier says all Jewesses are whores and the others agree. You say nothing. Years later you'll decide to speak: "Do we not serve Hitler's purpose, we who would sooner renounce our beliefs than assume our burdens?"   IV. A generation after the Holocaust and I know no Hebrew. No Yiddish. No Torah. I fast only on the Day of Atonement and even then I've been known to cheat. A generation after the Holocaust and I apologize for my grandfather's bent back and wild gestures. I used to tremble to the rhythm of his prayers. I feared the mysterious words that kept us from the devil. Now, from my window I watch Nazis march. Their feet strike the pavement like the ticking of a clock. I am a Jew a generation after the Holocaust. Poorer, my grandfather says, without a past than he, who has no future.
The subtlest strain a great musician weaves, Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony To music in his soul. May it not be Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves Unheard in the transition. Thus do we Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty Of some rare mood, when the rapt soul receives A vision exquisite. Yet who can match The sunset’s iridescent hues? Who sing The skylark’s ecstasy so seraph-fine? We struggle vainly, still we fain would catch Such rifts amid life’s shadows, for they bring Glimpses ineffable of things divine.
My own heart let me more have pity on; let Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, Charitable; not live this tormented mind With this tormented mind tormenting yet. I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet. Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile 's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers, tied up with canvas straps—like classical music’s birthday gift to the criminally insane—is gently nudged without its legs out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street. It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers’ crane, Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares and dirty white crisscross patterns hanging like the second-to-last note of a concerto played on the edge of the seat, the edge of tears, the edge of eight stories up going over—it's a piano being pushed out of a window and lowered down onto a flatbed truck!— and I’m trying to teach math in the building across the street. Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned? All the greatest common factors are delivered by long-necked cranes and flatbed trucks or come through everything, even air. Like snow. See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year my students rush to the window as if snow were more interesting than math, which, of course, it is. So please. Let me teach like a Steinway, spinning slowly in April air, so almost-falling, so hinderingly dangling from the neck of the movers’ crane. So on the edge of losing everything. Let me teach like the first snow, falling.
When Mrs. McCausland comes to mind she slips through a small gap in oblivion and walks down her front steps, in her hand a small red velvet pillow she tucks under the head of Old Jim Schreiber, who is lying dead-drunk against the curb of busy Market Street. Then she turns, labors up the steps and is gone . . . A small story. Or rather, the memory of a story I heard as a boy. The witnesses are not to be found, the steps lead nowhere, the pillow has collapsed into a thread of dust . . . Do the dead come back only to remind us they, too, were once among the living, and that the story we make of our lives is a mystery of luminous, but uncertain moments, a shuffle of images we carry toward sleep— Mrs. McCausland with her velvet pillow, Old Jim at peace—a story, like a small clearing in the woods at night, seen from the windows of a passing train.
I remember watching my father stop halfway up the driveway because my tricycle was blocking the way to the garage, and how he solved the problem by picking up the tricycle by the handlebars and smashing it through the windshield of our brand new family station wagon, his face red with scotch, his black tie and jacket flapping with effort, the tricycle making its way a little farther with each blow into the roomy interior of the latest model as the safety glass relented, the tricycle and the windshield both praiseworthy in their toughness, the struggle between them somehow making perfect sense in midday on our quiet suburban street, the windshield the anvil, the trike the hammer, the marriage the forge, and failure glowing in the heat, beaten and tempered, slowly taking shape.
We mourn the broken things, chair legs wrenched from their seats, chipped plates, the threadbare clothes. We work the magic of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes. We save what we can, melt small pieces of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones for soup. Beating rugs against the house, we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie. I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog, listen for passing cars. All day we watch for the mail, some news from a distant place.
Echo of the clocktower, footstep in the alleyway, sweep of the wind sifting the leaves. Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur of autumn's opulence, blade of lightning harvesting the sky. Keeper of the small gate, choreographer of entrances and exits, midnight whisper traveling the wires. Seducer, healer, deity or thief, I will see you soon enough— in the shadow of the rainfall, in the brief violet darkening a sunset— but until then I pray watch over him as a mountain guards its covert ore and the harsh falcon its flightless young.
First, Beulah has no idea where the damn grape is. She just got her manicure and frankly could care less. She does find the cocky Cockney cute. But, so does that glittery Lil and well--- It’s Lil’s Big Show.   Lil has blood on her hands, and rubs in the almond scented lotion, while she waits for that peeled grape.   Beulah pours a large portion of gin and recalls the Minstrel shows, Bessie Smith, chicken dinners in a picnic basket, and a guy named Roy. He was no prince, but a king of the bedroom rambles.   Elsewhere, boots are beating the ground, leaving bloodied feet and untended harvests as glass breaks across the faces of Polish Jews and the Spanish Republicans fight black clad insurgents. More boots, pretty, shiny, well-made boots. “until the war” says Tom in The Glass Menagerie. When America sits in a “dark room” and watches “until the war”. Death’s stench rolls across the Atlantic, a powerful fog. Meanwhile,   The dapper heroes roam landscapes as fake as their stage names and the heroines roll up their stockings or sweat the chorus line  But not Miss Lil and the disobedient Beulah, both swaying large hips and rolling brown eyes, generously Awaiting a man’s tongue sucking   For Gertrude Howard (1892-1934)
i’d rather have an agogô for a heart a djembe for a heart gramophone for a heart bison bone for a heart dandelion spore for a heart sweet cream butter for a heart i’d rather have a mason jar for a heart an ashtray for a heart a plate of liver for a heart lawnmower for a heart jezebel for a heart   instead of this flesh & blood which mars my sheets instead of this archive that clogs my toilet instead of this flea-bitten attic full of raccoons instead of this envelope that arrives already open instead of this light bulb that rattles on the inside instead of this tv box that draws attention on trash day instead of this wart that only responds to rain instead of this colander that never catches the grit   i’d rather have a heart born of the lust between a sonnet & a blues song a coleridge-wild weed hoochie coochie heart a we real cool heart aboard the impossible spawn of slave ships an undying, maroon eternally brown in the black hills heart i’d rather have a heart that beats that beats that beats that beats that beats
The streets of San Francisco are littered with bodies of bank robbers & mobsters prostitutes & pimps   Bullet holes in foreheads   Clothes covered with that fake orange blood they used in the seventies   Just pretend dead   No sirens (those will be dubbed in later)   Camera pans an immaculate city   Mid-morning weekday only a few tourists about (everyone else is at work)   Light traffic on bridges   Newly erected Pyramid dominates the scene   Sky Maya blue perpetually wiped clean by low-flying clouds   Come nightfall even the junkies in the Haight & strippers in North Beach will have a kind of innocence   Just extras on the set   As close to Utopia as you could get in 1973   & now only attainable in a Dirty Harry movie
He had to have it, his mother told him. How could he not, with so few left in the world? He felt heaviest at night with the miracle of it. He was a vessel now. A receptacle for a threatened being. What if he rose too fast and killed it? Or maybe his stillness would do it, too much sitting around, stunned and hungry. And what if the bear emerged alive and another formed in its place, would he have to have that one, too, and another one after that?    He dreamed of the panda’s tiny eyes opening inside him, the doctor’s wide incision, a whirring pain, and then the furry thing emerging, the bear turning to him as to a stranger and whether that would be it—his bit part in the history of the future.
Full    the blow to a gong —gone blind    with the sight of white Silk, O milk  of my reason—    sun reseen in My mad mad mirror.    Gibbous   Sense Less science: the   Wish-apparition of a perfect fact.    As thought, the war Of one upon one.    Half   Half a mind almost mine.   Whole  fragment, I am A being from another word.    Crescent   Bow bent back—to what release?    My lone line, the join of all I am not.   A minor truth betrays A major one— A lore  for the lyre. For it is written: liar with a why.  New    Calling all coincidence, I will Deem the dark my day.   Yet—if I say  I am lying, I am lying To you now.   O zero raised to zero—I am lying with you now.
for Dylan I watch the ocean square into a turning Burn. Burning, my holes glass over. Lightning Hits the beach, melts me shut. I’ve drowned Before, in the bye along a row of shored   Rocks. From the barrel chest butcher I buy Tight roasts. This year’s man, his clownish dog walks me In the park until I die on his leash and domestic Night’s sticky seizures. I thumb and ♥ it   Like liking a million times. The rich own long Lighthouses to show us how away from them We are. Past waiting for the press of his chest To my back, I hobby along to the next hem’s   Promise. Again I straddle the blade thinking This is the time it will fill the gash.
They pay me to lift the ball off the bat touch the slender hand and slip beneath the taut band   I plant bulbs and mulch the mound I hone a group of black birds I do the simplest thing   In unison with the trees people move as the sun moves He calls a seagull an eagle and I agree   Across the pond they say I will I know this is a problem for the painter, etc.   Tell me where to go if they ditch me mid-season tell me a word seeks its world   Praise be to the upper lip of decision praise be to dumb clanking stems   Everything is alive even you, floral loafer
As soon as I step into the tunnel that will take me under the river I need to cross to get to the city my brain shuts down. No signal gets through and the question remains how do I know?   With a brain well emptied, and a head a vacuum of nothing, everything I’ve ever known goes quietly absent. As still and as quiet as a house abandoned or a mouth wide open in a painting.   As soon as I step out of the tunnel scientists squabble about when we should abandon the earth for some other place. I duck straight back into the tunnel in order to disrupt the signal.   In the tunnel's shelter there is nothing in my head, it's empty enough For the origins of the universe to begin. A frightening thing interrupted by my backing back out of the tunnel just in time.   In the light of day what's on my mind turns out to be your lifespan. Next to the tunnel is the only safe place to be. It is the only place where it's certain I’ll not all day not need to be crying and weeping to go on.   Which draws me directly back into the tunnel to interrupt the signal. It takes a little while for my mind to stop trembling.
She turns the bedlamp on. The book falls open  in her mottled hands, and while she reads her mouth begins to quiver, forming words  like Breathless. Promises. Elope. As she turns the leaves, Eudora's cheek takes on a bit of bloom. Her frowzy hair  thickens and turns gold, her dim eyes clear, the wattles vanish from her slender neck. Her waist, emerging from its ring of flesh,  bends to the side. Breasts that used to hang  like pockets rise and ripen; her long legs  tremble. Her eyes close, she holds her breath—  the steamy pages flutter by, unread, as lover after lover finds her bed.
Go north a dozen years on a road overgrown with vines to find the days after you were born. Flowers remembered their colors and trees were frothy and the hospital was behind us now, its brick indifference forgotten by our car mirrors. You were revealed to me: tiny, delicate, your head smelling of some other world. Turn right after the circular room where I kept my books and right again past the crib where you did not sleep and you will find the window where I held you that June morning when you opened your eyes. They were blue, tentative, not the deep chocolate they would later become. You were gazing into the world: at our walls, my red cup, my sleepless hair and though I'm told you could not focus, and you no longer remember, we were seeing one another after seasons of darkness.
Though I have never caught the word Of God from any calling bird, I hear all that the ancients heard. Though I have seen no deity Enter or leave a twilit tree, I see all that the seers see. A common stone can still reveal Something not stone, not seen, yet real. What may a common stone conceal? Nothing is far that once was near. Nothing is hid that once was clear. Nothing was God that is not here. Here is the bird, the tree, the stone. Here in the sun I sit alone Between the known and the unknown.
i
for Saaid Shire The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room. He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life; that’s how we bring Dad back. I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole. We grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear, your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums. I can make us loved, just say the word. Give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent, I can write the poem and make it disappear. Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass, Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place, maybe she keeps the baby. Maybe we’re okay kid? I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love, you won’t be able to see beyond it.   You won’t be able to see beyond it, I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love. Maybe we’re okay kid, maybe she keeps the baby. Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place, Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass. I can write the poem and make it disappear, give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent, I can make us loved, just say the word. Your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums we grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear. I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole, that’s how we bring Dad back. He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life. The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.
You know, the white guy In the film version of Raisin In The Sun, Pudgy balding head, Who comes to tell The black family Not to move to the White Chicago suburb. The man who smiles With the knife, Who IS a knife, But fools them for A second, because They’re looking at him The way he expects Them to look at him. Later, as they mop Up the blood, they replay What he said: that he Was elected by his neighbors, Because he’s the guy that Can get his foot in the door, Whipped and rumpled, Like he’s been apologizing Since he popped out of his Mother’s womb, like he’s a Close, personal friend of sorry.   He’s sorry now, in his wilted suit. This is the way the knife Gets through the door, and He sits there, as they Think, maybe he ain’t a Knife in sheep clothes, baaa Baaa, baaa; such a foolish-looking, Goofy little white guy. A small part of them, quietly Embarrassed they’re even Thinking that about him. They can barely hold their Manners in check, and that’s His trick, the trick of the knife You don’t see until you’re cut. And the strangest thing About this, the damn thing Is how meek he still looks After he cuts, and cuts again. Dun as a female robin, His tongue slices and whittles. He is singing the song of his Brood; money if you stay, Fire if you come, as they think: How did a white robe, a tinder cross, And goon’s club trot through Their door? A pack of Dobermans Couldn’t have done a neater job, Except that Dobermans of course, never Apologize.
Wherein she martyrs the mirror: this carnival of stone, her lips dilate the negation—space into starpoint   Wherein she, to be both sacrum & wrist— neither the fugitive epidermis, nor the unlocked ashblack— sovereigns the shadow swell as love   Wherein she ardors the emptiness open, proof the unanchored  Spirit of my silence, her revisions clothing my brightest orgasm—   Wherein she says, I can hear you, the seed under the belly’s flesh—love the far shore,   she says, For She withdraws the Spring wild    Thrust in her mother’s surrender,  iron ocean blackened to aurora.
Under the edge of february in hawk of a throat hidden by ravines of sweet oil by temples of switchblades beautiful in its sound of fertility beautiful in its turban of funeral crepe beautiful in its camouflage of grief in its solitude of bruises in its arson of alert Who will enter its beautiful calligraphy of blood Its beautiful mask of fish net mask of hubcaps mask of ice picks mask of watermelon rinds mask of umbilical cords changing into a mask of rubber bands Who will enter this beautiful beautiful mask of punctured bladders moving with a mask of chapsticks Compound of Hearts Compound of Hearts Where is the lucky number for this shy love this top-heavy beauty bathed with charcoal water self-conscious against a mosaic of broken bottles broken locks broken pipes broken bloods of broken spirits broken through like broken promises Landlords Junkies Thieves enthroning themselves in you they burn up couches they burn down houses and infuse themselves against memory every thought a pavement of old belts every performance a ceremonial pickup how many more orphans how many more neglected shrines how many stolen feet stolen fingers stolen watchbands of death in you how many times Harlem   hidden by ravines of sweet oil by temples of switchblades beautiful in your sound of fertility beautiful in your turban of funeral crepe beautiful in your camouflage of grief in your solitude of bruises in your arson of alert beautiful
Disguised in my mouth as a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun you come out in the middle of fish-scales you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo like X-rated tongues and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster In the morning in the morning in the morning all over my door like a rooster in the morning in the morning in the morning And studded in my kidneys like perforated hiccups inflamed in my ribs like three hoops of thunder through a screw a star-bent-bolt of quivering colons you breathe into veiled rays and scented ice holes you fire the space like a flare of embalmed pigeons and palpitate with the worms and venom and wailing flanks and somewhere inside this fever inside this patinaed pubic and camouflaged slit stooped forward on fangs in rear of your face you shake to me in the full crown of a black rooster In the morning in the morning in the morning Masquerading in my horn like a river eclipsed to infantries of dentures of diving spears you enter broken mirrors through fragmented pipe spit you pull into a shadow ring of magic jelly you wear the sacrificial blood of nightfall you lift the ceiling with my tropical slush dance you slide and tremble with the reputation of an earthquake and when i kick through walls to shine like silver when i shine like brass through crust in a compound when i shine shine shine you wail to me in the drum call of a black rooster In the morning in the morning in the morning gonna kill me a rooster in the morning early in the morning way down in the morning before the sun passes by in the morning in the morning in the morning In the morning when the deep sea goes through a dog's bite and you spit on the tip of your long knife In the morning in the morning when peroxide falls on a bed of broken glass and the sun rises like a polyester ball of menses in the morning gonna firedance in the petro in the morning turn loose the blues in the funky jungle in the morning I said when you see the morning coming like a two-headed twister let it blow let it blow in the morning in the morning all swollen up like an ocean in the morning early in the morning before the cream dries in the bushes in the morning when you hear the rooster cry cry rooster cry in the morning in the morning I said disguised in my mouth like a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun you come out in the middle of fish-scales you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo like X-rated tongues and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster In the morning in the morning in the morning
When i blow open green bottles straight across hump of a frozen tongue when i shove brown glass through skull of a possum and pass from my ears a baptism of red piss when i cry from my butt like a jackal and throw limbs of a dying mule into the river when i spit venom from the head burn codeine into a cosmetic paste and grieve into a wax of dried bulls when my mystical bunions jam eyes into searching spit of a starving wolf into cosmic lips like monkey genitals And i receive my pickled turned skeleton of rusty chains in the bodega i receive a symbolic heart made of five middle fingers in the bodega i receive a teeth parade of yellow roses to leave the bodega and cross the rio grande onto the flatbead bones of a musty nighttrain I say to see me loosen jaws like a snake to see me exhausted after a few strikes to see me pay dirt to the ice hog in my masai-pachuca-doo squatting on a pillow of old zoot suits squatting among the names and breeds breaking down cheeks dotted on this night train and i say i dream of the 1943 riots I say i dream in a hailstorm of riots And i say riots dream into a mass of skins stooping on flatbed bones of a funky nighttrain And when i siphon sweat for fuel from this patron saint of chronic diarrhea When i turn this rubber face into a spotted puma and take on the forceful winds of the prune pickers When my laughter dominates the last seat And i burn labor contracts into brown port caca Then I approach in mother of pearl and human blood in father of smoking and coughing throats and in my jelly of coyote strings who is to say what when i approach I mean somewhere along the road in this cold cold chicken shit somewhere along the road in this wasted body ​somewhere along the road eat stocks, bonds feathers ​somewhere along the road confiscate borders from wild dogs ​somewhere along the road shove them into the imperial valley ​somewhere along the road cry hard and let this night train sink its rundown rectum of electric chairs into heaven and say fuck it I see a way through the maroon glass of this milky way I say i see a way through for the cradle of hulls sticking through these indigo ankles I see a way through for these torn shoes stinking like dead cats I see a way through for these blood-streaked legs I say i see a way through for these pus-riddled holes in their suction-cup lips and when i pass through toothless combs coming from armpits of the bodega when i pass through bats on corkscrews coming from the bodega when i push my mortified flesh from this bodega and walk with the mildew of an old zoot suit walk tall in my mud-packed-masai-pachuca-doo walk among the survivors from the musty nighttrains fuck it I say dreams are like riots i say we dream in a hailstorm of riots and I say riots dream into a mass of skins coming from flatbed bones of the funky funky nighttrains
My friend they don't care if you're an individualist a leftist a rightist a shithead or a snake They will try to exploit you absorb you confine you disconnect you isolate you or kill you And you will disappear into your own rage into your own insanity into your own poverty into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon and then ashes The ruling class will tell you that there is no ruling class as they organize their liberal supporters into white supremacist lynch mobs organize their children into ku klux klan gangs organize their police into killer cops organize their propaganda into a device to ossify us with angel dust preoccupy us with western symbols in african hair styles inoculate us with hate institutionalize us with ignorance hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away And we are programmed to self-destruct to fragment to get buried under covert intelligence operations of unintelligent committees impulsed toward death And there it is The enemies polishing their penises between oil wells at the pentagon the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances the old folks dying of starvation the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs the life blood of the earth almost dead in the greedy mouth of imperialism And my friend they don't care if you're an individualist a leftist a rightist a shithead or a snake They will spray you with a virus of legionnaire's disease fill your nostrils with the swine flu of their arrogance stuff your body into a tampon of toxic shock syndrome try to pump all the resources of the world into their own veins and fly off into the wild blue yonder to pollute another planet And if we don't fight if we don't resist if we don't organize and unify and get the power to control our own lives Then we will wear the exaggerated look of captivity the stylized look of submission the bizarre look of suicide the dehumanized look of fear and the decomposed look of repression forever and ever and ever And there it is
Don't ask me who I'm speaking for who I'm talking to why I'm doing what I do in the light of my existence You rise you spit you brush you drink you pee you shit you walk you run you work you eat you belch you sleep you dream & that's the way it is In the morning tap water tasted fishy coffee sits in its decaffeinated cup caca & incense have a floating romance & a stale washcloth will make you smell doubly stale so don't get kissed on the cheek don't get licked on the neck at 8 a.m. the trains & buses are packed with folks farting their bread & butter farts the gymnasium is dominated by the stench of hot tennis shoes & one in the locker room  a few silly-talking intellectual-looking coke-drinking cloth-dropping paper-littering spinach-pooting smug arrogant women wait to be waited on & in another locker room there are odors of crotches & jock straps bengay, tiger balm & burning balls sweat socks & sweat suits of body-building door-slamming iron-pumping phlegm-hawking men all sour & steamy & wrapped up together in a swamp of butt-popping towels but don't let it get you down don't let it psych you up Outside the ledges are loaded with pigeons clouds are seeded with homeless people & lyricism of the afternoon in a sub-proletarian madman squatting & vomiting from his bowels a brown liquid of death in front of your house & it's not happening because of you  those socks don't stink because of me a bureaucrat is not a jerk because of us I'm not this way because of them you're not that way because of me don't ask about influences You rise you spit you brush you drink you pee you shit you walk you run you work you eat you belch you sleep you dream & that's the way it is
These New York City Pigeons cooing in the air shaft are responsible for me stubbing my toe spraining my ankle and getting sick on ammonia fumes That pigeon roosting on the clothesline stole my nightgown Those pigeons on the street lamp made me feel foolish while riding in a black car completely splattered with their grey & white poo poo These New York City pigeons are not calm like pigeons of Oxalá in Brazil and do not croon like doves of Zimbabwe New York City pigeons moan strange low mournful quivering cancer-like moans mixed with hungry hyena barks & gulping loss of the forest cries New York City pigeons are not relaxed like pigeons sunning at Marcel Duchamp swimming pool in San Francisco New York City pigeons are not happy like pigeons standing on head of the woman selling bananas on a street corner in Johannesburg New York City pigeons flap viral leather fungus dust from wings into faces then sit on steps vocalizing & waiting for the death of humankind New York City pigeons are not friendly like pigeons eating flaky crescent-shaped rolls at Hotel du Piémont in Paris New York City pigeons are not content like pigeons posing for photos on arms of men in plaza of Caracas New York City pigeons will lounge on ledges & murmur profanity all day will fight for fucking space in the mating season shit on air conditioners & wipe their asses on windows while big cockroaches suck Sucrets in the dark New York City pigeons are not alert like pigeons sitting quietly on bicycles in peace memorial park of Hiroshima New York City pigeons roll their pearly eyes inflate their throats and defecate on the shoulders of pedestrians New York City pigeons have no love for crumb-throwing pigeon lovers & no year of the pigeon is celebrated at least not for these New York City Pigeons
Art what do the art suppressors care about art they jump on bandwagons wallow in press clips & stink up the planet with their pornographic oppression Art what do they care about art they go from being contemporary baby kissers to old time corrupt politicians to self-appointed censorship clerks who won't support art but will support war poverty lung cancer racism colonialism and toxic sludge that's their morality that's their religious conviction that's their protection of the public & contribution to family entertainment what do they care about art
You never asked to be a master and God knows (if She would only say so) that I never asked to be a slave. Position papers, grocery lists rain down like ticker-tape on my long-march procession past where you cheer me on, waving from the wistful side of—let's admit it— barricades. You're tired of living without any joy. You think you're going crazy. You need my friendship. You're afraid to demand the right to be afraid. You're trying very hard. I know that, and you can't imagine how I wish it were enough. I need to sleep. I never asked for this; you never asked. Our twenty-five inch son whimpers in the night and my breasts hurt until I wake myself and feed him. He never asked for anything at all. We all want just to be a little happy. Listen, I see an older me, alone in some room, busy on the telephone dialing all my terrible truths. This thing has never let me live as we both know I might have; yet I see this thing can cut me down on some street or podium tomorrow— or just let me live, alone. Our child looks back and forth from your face into mine, and laughs. You worry about us, wondering if something within us has broken. You hold my body as if it were glass that will cut you. I'd stop this if I could, believe me, my beloved. I'm dying of bitterness. I love your forehead. Did I ever tell you that?
Not having spoken for years now, I know you claim exile from my consciousness. Yet I wear mourning whole nights through for that embrace that warmed my ignorant lust even past intimacies you had dreamed. I played your daughter-husband, lover-son, to earn both Abraham and Ishmael's guilt for your indulgence, and in time, reproach. Who sent us to that wilderness we both now know, although I blamed you for that house of women too many years. But Time is a waiting woman, not some old man with a stupid beard, and when I finally met my father I found him arrogant and dull, a formican liar with an Austrian accent. Well, we meet the phantom that we long for in the end, and getting there is half the grief. Meanwhile, my theories rearrange themselves like sand before this woman whose flaccid breasts sway with her stumblings, whose diamonds still thaw pity from my eyes. You're older than I thought. But so am I, and grateful that we've come to this: a ragged truce, an affirmation in me tht your strength, your pushiness, your sharp love, your embroidery of lies—all, all were survival tools, as when, during our personal diaspora, you stood in some far country blocks away, burning poems I no longer sent you like Yahrzeit candles in my name, unsure of me at last who sought a birthright elsewhere, beyond the oasis of your curse, even beyond that last mirage, your blessing. Mother, in ways neither of us can ever understand, I have come home.
the day after you sighed  your last breath out we let your butterflies go your painted ladies four of them born  from paper wombs  into a cheesecloth cage now proudly decked out  in orange and white  trimmed in black we let them go  with stiffened fingers they would not leave one drifted in hovering  half-hearted circles another rested softly on your  daughter's wet shoulder a third held close to the budding  milkweed you saved  from the scythe years ago the last one content to say  perched in its velvet cape  on my sunlit finger we could not speak so still  the afternoon and when time began  once again to flow they knew it was for them  (the opening of our hands) another ragged breath was drawn as they pumped and sputtered  (a single voice) and took to the clouding sky
this morning I felt my life if you were dead the expansiveness of the bed the birds still singing the remnants of the smell of coffee in the morning the emptiness of thought the deafening silence of my heart
It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower and every flower a tiny tributary that from the ground flows green and momentary is one of water's wishes and this tale hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of grass to find the sunlight hidden at the tip turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip then I might know like water how to balance the weight of hope against the light of patience water which is so raw so earthy-strong and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along drawn under gravity towards my tongue to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song which is the story of the falling rain that rises to the light and falls again
I heard a cough as if a thief was there outside my sleep a sharp intake of air a fox in her fox-fur stepping across the grass in her black gloves barked at my house just so abrupt and odd the way she went hungrily asking in the heart's thick accent in such serious sleepless trespass she came a woman with a man's voice but no name as if to say: it's midnight and my life is laid beneath my children like gold leaf
It is said that after losing his wife, Orpheus was torn to  pieces by Maenads, who threw his head into the River  Hebron. The head went on singing and forgetting,  filling up with water and floating way. Eurydice already forgetting who she is with her shoes missing and the grass coming up through her feet searching the earth  for the bracelet of tiny weave on her charcoal wristthe name of a fly or flower already forgetting who they are they grow they grow  till their bodies break their necks down there in the stone world where the grey spirits of stones he around uncertain of their limits matter is eating my mind I am in a river  I in my fox-cap floating between the speechless reeds I always wake like this being watched  already forgetting who I am the water wears my mask I call I call lying under its lashes like a glance   if only a child on a bridge would hoik me out   there comes a tremor and there comes a pause down there in the underworld where the tired stones have fallen and the sand in a trance lifts a little  it is always midnight in those pools iron insects engraved in sleep    I always wake like this being watched   I always speak to myself  no more myself but a colander draining the sound from this never-to-be mentioned wound can you hear it you with your long shadows and your short shadows   can you hear the severed head of Orpheus   no I feel nothing from the neck down   already forgetting who I am the crime goes on without volition singing in its bone  not I not I  the water drinks my mind   as if in a black suit  as if bent to my books  only my face exists sliding over a waterfall and there where the ferns hang over the dark and the midges move between mirrors some woman has left her shoes  two crumpled mouths  which my voice searches in and out my voice being water which holds me together and also carries me away until the facts forget themselves gradually like a contrail and all this week  a lime-green hght troubles the riverbed  as if the mud was haunted by the wood this is how the wind works hard at thinking this is what speaks when no one speaks
Very small and damaged and quite dry, a Roman water nymph made of bone tries to summon a river out of limestone very eroded faded her left arm missing and both legs from the knee down a Roman water nymph made of bone tries to summon a river out of limestone exhausted utterly worn down a Roman water nymph made of bone being the last known speaker of her language she tries to summon a river out of limestone little distant sound of dry grass try again a Roman water nymph made of bone very endangered now in a largely unintelligible monotone she tries to summon a river out of limestone little distant sound as of dry grass try again exquisite bone figurine with upturned urn in her passionate self-esteem she smiles looking sideways she seemingly has no voice but a throat-clearing rustle as of dry grass try again she tries leaning pouring pure outwardness out of a grey urn little slithering sounds as of a rabbit man in full night-gear, who lies so low in the rickety willowherb that a fox trots out of the woods and over his back and away try again she tries leaning pouring pure outwardness out of a grey urn little lapping sounds yes as of dry grass secretly drinking try again little lapping sounds yes as of dry grass secretly drinking try again Roman bone figurine year after year in a sealed glass case having lost the hearing of her surroundings she struggles to summon a river out of limestone little shuffling sound as of approaching slippers year after year in a sealed glass case a Roman water nymph made of bone she struggles to summon a river out of limestone little shuffling sound as of a nearly dried-up woman not really moving through the fields having had the gleam taken out of her to the point where she resembles twilight try again little shuffling clicking she opens the door of the church little distant sounds of shut-away singing try again little whispering fidgeting of a shut-away congregation wondering who to pray to little patter of eyes closing try again very small and damaged and quite dry a Roman water nymph made of bone she pleads she pleads a river out of limestone little hobbling tripping of a nearly dried-up river not really moving through the fields, having had the gleam taken out of it to the point where it resembles twilight. little grumbling shivering last-ditch attempt at a river more nettles than water try again very speechless very broken old woman her left arm missing and both legs from the knee down she tries to summon a river out of limestone little stoved-in sucked thin low-burning glint of stones rough-sleeping and trembling and clinging to its rights victim of Swindon puddle midden slum of over-greened foot-churn and pats whose crayfish are cheap tool-kits made of the mud stirred up when a stone's lifted   it's a pitiable likeness of clear running struggling to keep up with what's already gone the boat the wheel the sluice gate the two otters larricking along go on and they say oh they say in the days of better rainfall it would flood through five valleys there'd be cows and milking stools washed over the garden walls and when it froze you could skate for five miles yes go on little loose end shorthand unrepresented beautiful disused route to the sea fish path with nearly no fish in
No one would take her when Ruth passed. As the survivors assessed some antiques, I kept hearing, "She's old. Somebody should put her down." I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her about the fish who died for her, the ones in the cheerful aluminum cans. She lies on my chest to sleep, rising and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat fastened to a battered dock by a string.
A child climbs into a cardboard house, shuts its doors and windows to hold in the dark, and lies on her back inside, looking up through its cut-out moon and stars. She knows she is not looking at the sky. But she calls out, still,It's nighttime! I'm looking at the sky!
It feels like I need To go to my dad's house And when I'm at my dad's house I want to go to my mom's house I want to be at both houses
You are a seahorse unraveling. You are the back of a landhorse looking backward. Gotten away form have you thrown yourself racing. Who took what was not out of thunderous shade In an all-knowing sycamore's branches. What who do you make of stone steps you stepped through. You took the boat onto flattened waters. White wall of blue morning fog to slip into. You withstood what is was that was wailing you through. There you were standing on nothing, looking down at two Blackfeathered slashes your two hands held on to. Off were you going aloft would birds such as these take You. Who leaned you and stood you and shook you and shook you.
You're presenting me with a telescopic line of reasoning. You think because one dies then to die must be a good idea. Let me get this straight. So you think to follow suit is what's In the cards and the works and the stars. It may be that's The next step that's clear or it may be there's another way. You may find a friend for whom to die is not the be-all Or the end. There were ten rooms and a thousand shelves And ten thousand bottles filled with ten million tickets. You Were on the end of the ladder in a blue sky filled with litter. It was tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of A stunned city. Staccato ropes couldn't hold you any longer. And in the evening's sudden stillness I breathed in your ear. From now on out everything gets said in a whisper. If you like If you want if you care to come closer. This way is better.
1 Held between wars my lifetime  among wars, the big hands of the world of death my lifetime listens to yours. The faces of the sufferers in the street, in dailiness, their lives showing through their bodies a look as of music the revolutionary look that says I am in the world to change the world my lifetime is to love to endure to suffer the music to set its portrait up as a sheet of the world the most moving the most alive Easter and bone and Faust walking among flowers of the world and the child alive within the living woman, music of man, and death holding my lifetime between great hands the hands of enduring life that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in  our time, and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms  and hands may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for the unknown person held in the two hands, you.  2 Woman as gates, saying: "The process is after all like music, like the development of a piece of music. The fugues come back and  again and again interweave. A theme may seem to have been put aside, but it keeps returning— the same thing modulated, somewhat changed in form. Usually richer. And it is very good that this is so." A woman pouring her opposites. "After all there are happy things in life too. Why do you show only the dark side?" "I could not answer this. But I know— in the beginning my impulse to know the working life  had little to do with pity or sympathy.  I simply felt that the life of the workers was beautiful." She said, "I am groping in the dark." She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality, then you will understand it too. The struggle begins. Never again to be free of it, often you will feel it to be your enemy. Sometimes you will almost suffocate, such joy it brings." Saying of her husband: "My wish is to die after Karl. I know no person who can love as he can, with his whole soul. But often too it has made me so terribly happy." She said: "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn, climbed up to the marble quarries and rowed back at night. The drops of water fell like guttering stars from our oars." She said: "As a matter of fact, I believe  that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me  in my work." She said: "The only technique I can still manage. It's hardly a technique at all, lithography. In it  only the essentials count." A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me: "Kollwitz? She's too black-and-white."  3 Held among wars, watching  all of them  all these people  weavers,  Carmagnole Looking at  all of them  death, the children  patients in waiting-rooms  famine  the street A woman seeing  the violent, inexorable  movement of nakedness  and the confession of No  the confession of great weakness, war,  all streaming to one son killed, Peter;  even the son left living; repeated,  the father, the mother; the grandson  another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;  dark, light, as two hands,  this pole and that pole as the gates. What would happen if one woman told the truth about  her life?  The world would split open  4 Song : The Calling-Up  Rumor, stir of ripeness rising within this girl sensual blossoming of meaning, its light and form. The birth-cry summoning out of the male, the father from the warm woman a mother in response. The word of death calls up the fight with stone wrestle with grief with time from the material make an art harder than bronze.  5 Self-Portrait  Mouth looking directly at you eyes in their inwardness looking directly at you half light half darkness woman, strong, German, young artist flows into wide sensual mouth meditating looking right at you eyes shadowed with brave hand looking deep at you flows into wounded brave mouth grieving and hooded eyes alive, German, in her first War flows into strength of the worn face a skein of lines broods, flows into mothers among the war graves bent over death facing the father stubborn upon the field flows into the marks of her knowing—Nie Wieder Krieg repeated in the eyes flows into "Seedcorn must not be ground" and the grooved cheek lips drawn fine the down-drawn grief face of our age flows intoPieta, mother and between her knees life as her son in death pouring from the sky of one more war flows into face almost obliterated hand over the mouth forever hand over one eye now the other great eye closed
You'd think the sky would run out of water, but it won't; it just keeps coming down. I need someone to marvel at the breath escaping from me. Do you have a natural resource you prefer to exploit? Does someone think of you and turn the channel? How would you ever know? Have you ever zoned out during Downton Abbey? I'm certain of something I'd prefer not to tell you about. "Slow down," you say. But I can already see my breath, and its only October. Walking with you is making everything watery and spazzed out, like a movie about sex where I have sex and people are all like, "He's amazing, we really like his sex style!" But I digress. Will you please stand up when called upon to tell the audience how wonderful I was in my best moments; like someone in senior management delegating things and being sure of everything but how to stop? I promise I'll make this up to  you. I'll write your name on the menu board, and people will come into the store all expectant of you.
Right now I'm sipping a mango lassi in Action Town. I'm not bereft at all. In fact, I'm pleasantly aware of people moving on all fours. Our voice and text messages will be erased in no time. When I walk into stores they call me Spark Plug because I have a sparky manner. Things get all wavy from their constant attention. It's going to be okay. I'm a good habit: you don't need to trick me. I'm not sure where I should put my hands when I walk down the street with you. It's funny to think about who I would call if something really awful happened. I'd be jumping up and down not knowing who to call. My way of doing things is scary even to me. Remember the toothbrush, the honey bear, and the meal that we thought would never end? I'm counting on you to come through high water, to come through chaos, and to Action Town, where we'll lift our aces to skyward aviation.
I realize there is simply no way to stay up in the air with a sustained flapping motion. Sucks! But that doesn't mean I can't try. How odd to eat only white bread for levity. In spite of its limitations, you must consider the possibilities of leaping, daily. Whatever monster ails you, leap into the cool wind. I hope you consider me an authority. You don't know what this means. Yet. I have the necessary education for this type of work. I will imitate the sound of your father laughing into a microphone through a public address system in your place of work. How did that idea get into these instructions? I'm going to put stickers on the back of your shirt that will instruct people how to behave around you. Then, I'll leap through the air above you when you exit the subway. I just wanted to give you these instructions in a nutshell.
Covet not the sun its honorarium nor authorize the stars their grants to write. The sojournors spotted a forest adrift with language, but couldn't make sense of it. The woods at odds with the usual channels and those neighboring mountains didn't look like pyramids, no matter the scale. Read this part as if the sum of lilac mattered to you. For love of someone else's vortex, toss the luminaries aside. In lieu of flowers, please donate and in exchange for your sympathy I'll give you edits on the level of the line. Poems are to war as are ghosts to the proverbial orchard.  Headstones offer us nothing but an end to syntax. Microsoft  Word inverts the sea. I read your manuscript. Reader, I married it. I fear for the estuaries. They are so small this time of year.
Four square monks drive a Coupe de Ville Through the vale, over the hill   To get to where the savings are, They square their shoulders and point the car   They bang their heads when the radio blares That song about the lady who bought the stairs   And the dandy in back swirls down the chrome handle To cast weird sun on his pilgrim sandal   Where tokens once slurried to a buttercup Hajj What now? O shimmering mercantile Alcatraz!   Mobius ministries fringe the haze Of toothbrush choirs in a Yangtze glaze   Foaming in pollens of this lobotomized valley Ever since Yankee Candle broke up Bee’s Alley   Where skanking confederates Did trail natty satins, debt   Free, and Sanity herself (Now a scent, top-shelf)   Administered to gutter pirate queens Mini homecomings woven on the cosmic screen   And whispered in a turtle’s ear, Kid monk you dream, it was the beer   You vowed to brew Just like the thread will lose its screw   Just like the brain will shed its wrinkles, Diverting shipwreck’s periwinkles   To be reborn in a lonely place, Truth’s best conducted by an unclaimed face
The baboon is eating strawberries expired on the shelf of the Ft. Bragg Safeway. A coastal landscape with waves like inexpertly torn tinfoil hangs above his left shoulder at the check-in desk of an abandoned motel. The ocean itself is only a sound through a torn window screen where some hardscrabble bush about to flower is just a smell. Will something appropriately random please happen to convince me reality is still playing with a full deck?
I am here for a very particular reason: to buy a 6-pack of beer and berries out of season      all for you, i did it all for you     I noticed an oil spill on my drive past the bay, emergency broadcast on the radio —What do you have to say?      all for you, i did it all for you     You chopped down the plant that used to grow my pants, resurrected it in Indonesia like a blow-up doll with amnesia      all for you, i did it all for you     Poor people once lived here but you flooded the valley with psilocybin carcinogens, and forced the kids into shooting galleries      all for you, i did it all for you
The wrong words sit beside us Where the flesh is heavy. The right words come most easily To those who sleep. I put my boots in a CVS bag Because the weather demanded it And my jacket over The windshield in the morning To confuse the sun. Of mine own life, I'll tell you One thing the internet Won't tell you—I wear my hair Like a woman sometimes. The project of the snow's To put the sky in lo-fi And the memory of last week's Snow's a gash in the air. The mountains and seas Have a queer look about them. A hoax of golden daffodils Obscures them, you might say. I've been told We should pretend That everything we see is real, That images should try As best they can To come to life. I feel that iron Should take the place of snow In the literature And that silk flowers Should be manufactured like Real ones each spring. I'm reading the letters Of distinguished men to you. A broadside of a bad poem On very good paper. A treatise on how to infuse Brandy with plums. My fat ass Surveys the greensward And when I step In the manner befitting a person Of little station in the world The dandelions seem to Vanish in retrospect As though to die were just To overlook the rituals That accompany The death and life of weeds And to fold oneself Back into one's roots. I am so big I mean my ass is so big I can't fit in this room I'm building. My ass can barely fit Without assistance Through the door of this stanza Which is why I invented The pronoun "you." The streetlamps Seemed to you to want to Break apart the clouds So we left the city, are always In the process Of abandoning a city Somewhere. Some days now You'll find us trolling The hillsides for wildflowers. Other times, sitting at the very center Of our garden, googling "beauty" With the filter off.
My husband's out-of-town so I set Our house on fire. Champagne And eggs, asparagus for breakfast. Water for lunch. I eat dinner early In the late afternoon while the wind Disorganizes leaves, leaving me To clean them up. I think that the Imagination's guided by logic— A hand that's used to translating Images of rain to snow. Error-filled, The night destroys the details of Poems—the pearls worn by Beethoven In secret, the rocks H.D. mistook For seaweed as she walked In exaltation toward the beach. Is it Possible to sing the imagination Into being? And is it possible for us To valorize autumn by cloaking in Difficult language the paths of stars? Geraniums, they make entr'actes Out of air as I walk past them. Always these goddamn leaves And acorns shat on our house by The goddamn oak. One of us will fail The other, will plagiarize language From the other, that's certain. Acorns are beautiful only to those Who've never had to clean them up.
☽ A Great Book can be read again and again, inexhaustibly, with great benefit to great minds, wrote Mortimer Adler, co-founder of the Great Books Foundation and the Great Books of the Western World program at the university where my husband will be going up for tenure next fall, and where I sometimes teach as well, albeit in a lesser, “non-ladder” position. Not only must a Great Book still matter today, Adler insisted, it must touch upon at least twenty- five of the one hundred and two Great Ideas that have occupied Great Minds for the last twenty-five centuries. Ranging from Angel to World, a comprehensive list of these concepts can be found in Adler’s two-volume Syntopicon: an Index to the Great Ideas, which was published with Great Fanfare, if not Great Financial Success, by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952. Although the index includes many Great Ideas, including Art, Beauty, Change, Desire, Eternity, Family, Fate, Happiness, History, Pain, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, Time, and Truth, it does not, alas, include an entry on Pillows, which often strike me, as I sink into mine at the end of long day of anything, these days, as at the very least worthy of note. Among the five hundred and eleven Great Books on Adler’s list, updated in 1990 to appease his quibbling critics, moreover, only four, I can’t help counting, were written by women—Virginia, Willa, Jane, and George—none of whom, as far as I can discover, were anyone’s mother.     ☽  Missing Scenes   In which Eve plucks her moustache. In which Achilles waxes his ass. In which a butterfly triggers The Tempest. In which Moby Dick performs his own stunts. In which Bashō smokes hashish. In which the Buddha buys bonds. In which the Heavenly Banquet is served with a spork. In which Galahad chugs from the grail. In which spring follows summer. In which moss grows on meteors. In which Pelé scores on the Peloponnesian Fields.   ☽   Not in stock, says the campus bookstore clerk looking up from his screen with a smile when I inquire, incognito, after my books which are nowhere to be found on the shelves. We used to have two copies of the first one, he says, but no one bought them, so we sent them back last June. We never carried the second one, he adds, but we could order it for you. What’s your name? I glance up, above his head, at a shelf of Staff Picks. Between a history of disgust and a guide for saving the planet, I spot my husband’s last book, gleaming in the day’s dying light. Forget it, I mutter into my muffler, I can get it from Amazon by Friday. I go home and order an ivory satin pillowcase instead, guaranteed to reduce hair loss due to breakage and soften fine lines.   ☽  No Use   Wet cigarettes. E-cigarettes. A babysitter whose babysitter is sick. Nunchucks at a gunfight. Stiletto heels at the beach. Last year’s flu shot. Next year’s peace talks.   ☽   Heian courtesans slept lightly, when they slept at all, fully dressed in perfumed robes on straw mats, behind elabroately painted screens upon which their noble visitors knocked softly at all hours. In their onnade “women’s script,” they kept detailed notes about flowers, festivals, and furtive trysts on delicately tinted pages stashed in narrow drawers inside their pillows. These documents, copied and recopied over the centuries by courtiers, monks, and scholars in a relentlessly modernizing Japan, provide readers today with the richest portrait of any culture of its time on the globe. I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, reports the nonchalant Shōnagon, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material.   ☽   All day I lie sprawled across my pillow watching a light crust of snow retract across the lawn into a thin band of shade along the fence. I watch the sun fail to rise above the Japanese maple and drop like a coin into a slot in the wall.   ☽  Therapies A to Z   Art. Biblio. Chemo. Dung. Electroshock. Family. Gestalt. Hippo. Ichthyo. Jenga. Kite. Light. Music. Neurolinguistic. Occupational. Primal scream. Quantum touch. Reiki. Sandplay. Transpersonal. Ultraviolet. Viro. Wilderness. X-ray. Yoga. Zoo.
☽ Not to Be Despised   A Hyundai when hitchhiking. Peanuts when traveling coach. Support hose at forty. Dishonorable discharge. Water from a gas-station sink.     ☽   For a third day in a row the doorbell rings just as I am finally settling down to do some work. I resolve to settle the matter once and for all. The man on my stoop holds a shovel in one hand and in the other, his hat. An old pillowcse stuffed with something bulky—empty beer cans?—rests on the welcome mat at his feet. For twenty bucks, he offers to clear the front walk. Behind him, snowy steps descend to an icy path winding between a dead hydrangea and the Subaru parked, as usual, a little too close to the fence. My husband, I recall, will not be home until late. The forecast tonight is more snow. I show the man the contents of my wallet—two crumpled fives and one single—which he accepts, bowing slightly. I nod and withdraw behind the locked door. Eleven dollars, I reflect as I return to the keyboard with my tepid kombucha, isn’t bad for a half-hour’s effort. If he works fast, he could be done in twenty minutes. When I take a cupcake break in the kitchen moments later, however, I spy him out the sliding glass door, dragging his shovel behind him down the street, my icy walkway, to all appearances, untouched. Fair enough, I say, jangling my pajama pocket full of loose change.   ☽  Pillow is a funny word, Her Majesty announces in the rosy glow of her nightlight. So is Word. She sits up wide-eyed and smiles. Word is a funny word, she repeats. So is Funny! So is Goodnight, I intone from the doorway, and dissolve in the dark.     ☽  Guilty Pleasures   Beating a child at checkers. Peeing in swimming pools. Watching Dateline. Drinking milk from the carton. Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers. Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers, watching  Dateline, drinking milk from the carton. A roaring fire in July.     ☽  Questionable Gestures   To haggle with hookers. To roast a bride. Tax-deductible gifts. To supplement a hunger strike with juice. A post-doc at Yale School of Medicine’s Center for Obesity  Research sponsored by Pizza Hut. Golden parachutes. Faux fur. Blush on a corpse.   ☽   Last night I had a dream so vivid I didn’t bother to record it on my pillow. I was sipping a large stein of sangria at some sort of nightmarish gala, leaning on the arm of a once-powerful older man I’d met in college, upon whom I was now, in the dream, in the awkward position of passing literary judgment. He was wearing a white guayabera shirt with pink stitching, and what hair of his remained was slicked across a forehead speckled with age. I woke angry and aroused and could not get back to sleep. Was this a Prophetic Dream? A Psychological Healing Dream? A Belief Dream? The only option I could rule out for certain was a Dream of Daily Life.     ☽  Incongruous   A vegan in Vegas. A poor plastic surgeon. Tempests with names like “Trudy” and “Ted.” Perfume at a funeral. Military dolphins. Black balloons. Light rock.   ☽   I read a message last night from a woman I have yet to meet beyond the dim glow of a list-serv. She lives in Tampa, if memory serves, and won a juried prize last year for a mixed-media meditation on habitat loss across America, including charts, chants, photographs, oral histories, crowdfunded films, and salvaged trash. She tracks the migratory patterns of purple martins above Wal-Mart parking lots and graphs the spawning grounds of Northern leopard frogs from the Gulf Stream waters to the redwood forests. She posts quarterly reports on her blog. She now finds herself, she confessed last night, in the unfamiliar position of lacking words. While dropping off her child at preschool yesterday, she explained, she learned from a social worker stationed in the foyer about the sudden death, on Wednesday night, of a boy in the class. An accident at home, is all she knows. The details remain undisclosed. The toddlers have been told that ther friend now lives inside their hearts. What does that mean, her daughter wants to know. What does it mean that he is in our hearts? She doesn’t want Sam inside her, her daughter insists. Sam picks his nose. She doesn’t want Sam’s boogies polluting her heart. At a loss for words myself, I don’t reply. I sit at Her Majesty’s bedside that night and watch snowy pillows pile upon the peeling deckhairs outside.   ☽  Better By Moonlight   Equestrian statues. Landfills. The Grand Canyon. Sex after forty. Lawn furniture. Travel plans. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
24. Zachary talks about wanting to be with someone because he feels like he can be a better person for someone else. He says he doesn't know what he's doing, wishes he had someone to do things for. I tell him I think we are very different people. Theory as pure verbalism: a generated knowledge with negative impact. If I begin to miss someone, I think, "Life is bad anyway."
I wanted to write the story of a metamorphosis. The story is at least partly based on a dream I recall from the diary of another writer. In the dream, which may not be a dream but simply a vision the writer has while seated at his desk, an image of a white horse appears on teh wall. It is a white horse that haunts the writer's mind. The white horse has escaped its traces somewhere on an urban street. It is moving toward the suburbs with an eye to the countryside. It is successful in this movement because it progresses without hurry. It does not gallop. It moves along the street with the gait of a horse that drags a very heavy cart behind it. The horse moves successfully toward its liberation since it does not appear to be a fugitive. My heart beats more quickly when I think about this story, which I have almost certainly partially invented. The horse hides its fear of slaughter. It plays a game. Irony is a kind of secrecy. It is a principle of groups.
Just let the San Andreas stay put, keeping this tunnel intact, enough to amble   out of it, past Louie’s DimSum a Saturday afternoon, a breeze detectable off   the bay—visible in the distance, carrying with it the smells of open air markets:   crab freshly caught and seahorses piled in bins along Stockton . . .    or Jack, strolling out of the tube connecting Polk Gulch and North Beach, on his way   to Aquatic Park to spread the Sporting Green on his favorite patch of grass . . .   He is ferrying the portable radio to his ear, listening for the count   in the bottom of the ninth at Candlestick, begins to smooth   the pages with the palms before he sits to keep it dry: the split   seat of his pants for Jack Spicer (1925-1965)
75. Even with geographic proximity, there may exist temporal systems such that two people cannot meet one another or will never meet again. Dream last night includes swimming. Something about a thick river, keep riding boots on it, travel from station to station, temporary home to home. It is Berlin or a group of islands called "Connecticut." I am alone or have a child or am with my brother. It is sunset, when one seek something. It is possible we somehow die for a time, a year, a month, a day, without realizing this, then awake to find ourselves, which is to say "someone," present again, attentive, expectant, apologetic even?
What was it he felt humming beneath his skin? Gaze   of a twelve-year-old feasting. The hair on those arms.
One has some glory—brutal and rough, a kind of encounter Fame is not pursuant The splendid enterprise, peerage, and trench— Let us consider that flourish I had a friend who gloried, this seemed invisible to some He broke apart his face, he promoted "That was abandoning reputation to cover up shame" As evening borrows its tickle from sun And from retrospect, with alarm "I don't know anyone has got clean rid of it"
I was planted, a crop not a boy but with headlong technique, everything in me telling to be coursed through with water and emptiness  ★ The blank was worth tending a matter of tight, small discretions separating from youth like a bee It's just silence I've been talking about Into hills I tried things I was made of What was not in my memory, not math yet patched all together I required this armor "wrestling with old champions body against body"     ★ Scribbling down the solution "by little light attacks" A life is at odds and we solve it a shadow itself "Understanding makes profit of everything—arranges, acts, and  reigns," gives knowledge out in a swan Virtue wasn't a mountain, not a field or was it me brooding    ★ "Too ill to instruct others," this awareness of slow moving and ditch of the past of the subject A few lumps on the ground like a book "Mixing with men is wonderfully useful" but hard practice    ★ "For our boy, a closet, a garden, the table and bed, solitude, company, morning and evening, all hours will be the same, all places will be his study"    ★ He's in philosophy, and mingled let him forgive it I have been happy in rooms Gambling with pocket, with babble "he will not say his lesson as do it" and the unit is character, "repeated in actions"  ★ Rising to beg and confounding I hear it now, in our ears
(Francisco X. Alarcón) asleep you become a continent— undiscovered, mysterious, long, your legs mountain ranges encircling valleys, ravines   night slips past your eyelids, your breath the swaying of the sea, sprawled across the bed like a dolphin washed ashore, your mouth   is the mouth of a sated volcano, O fragrant timber, how do you burn? you are so near, and yet so far   as you doze like a lily at my side, I undo myself and invoke the moon— I’m a dog watching over your sleep
Broadway past Lincoln  Center and the wind   is up so seems  to speaksaw you    through the glassstanding in line  I swear a quiver  played  on your lipsyou were    leafing through his book… —years  it’s been years   since Corona  Heights, backing into him: dribble,    hook, swish… …that beige  comfy couch,   sipping a stem  of wine, his cat in my lap   * * *   The Townhouse Saturday night—shoulder   to shoulder pushing toward the piano he   stops to squeeze by; his eyes mine   clench unclench… …What was it we found   in common over drink smoke talk?   A college campus —his son, his daughter     * * *   Earlier that night I rose to the city’s surface steam through the grate, crossed crossed again down 7th   past Carnegie Hall, the greek joint as imagined, chic —unlike the shirt D wore (the fur   of his arms) at Castro and Market waiting for the light: words were struck like steel and flint   that distant August day…Then his visit to Spain, mine to New Canaan—walking through the Morgan   with him. And what our mouths unfurled across a table of olives years later—last night…   Dropping me off at 58th he reaches for the door I’m fumbling to open, leans close and plants   what I’ve missed   all these years
I just don't think that this is what it's supposed to feel like, shaking my big one to break the stream and make a pool for moving my tools, for they only weigh half as much when moved under water. I emerged in the morning, covered in blood and fine acid sand and decided to remain partially submerged a little while longer. Itching for more exercise, and cooled not by water but by air, I spent the afternoon collecting sea shells, and found each one heavily carved with the numbers of pretty village girls offering to take tourists to the ultimate level. A spring and summer service they offer. I meant to call one, with a headline ready on my lips, but a gull would dive down wheeling and screaming each time I tried to dial. One can fool the animals, but must forgive this wild, beautiful country.
I. did you say August ponds ought to have been surrounded by September fences? but did you say September fences ought to have been climbed over by October peoples? what did you say for October padlocks that ought never to have been attached moreover to November handcuffs? II. You'll remember us for our dark Hungarian laughter That tickled when it laughed, that dug at the limelight Why, I'll send you a dark silver Hungarian coin From the mines that never saw the light of day yet Why, I'll send you a dime's worth of Hungarian damage That has been done to a cave that is full of Rhapsody Why, I'll send you a silver key to the cave of despair I'll send you a violet tonight, I'll send you a silver sword I'll send you a silver hammer that'll hammer night and day I'll send you a pail-ful of our kinds of blue revolutionary stars. III. Who are you? Weren't you their prisoner in the sedge dark? Where has been your search for freedom? Will you count the trees again in these dense woods Wherever you have been tonight? Will you look backwards where you have been? And tell me whoever you are. What have been your escapes? Nevertheless freedom is as ever an intense girl angel That speaks to me one in the inane wilderness Where has been your phantasmagoria? Are the dark trees at war with the darklike trees? Where has been your light Where has been your swordy well, Where has been your darklike table? Did you ever search for another star?
When those are the walkative stars That talked to the immediate prisoners themselves When those are the talkative stars That walked along the narrow sledge pathways Yet those are lines to another star That were to have been led for changelings Around a dark dreambox of another kind That houses our more talkative stars
On the back of an invoice I wrote my name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters And because money was involved And so was my name ever in jeopardy On the back of the same invoice I rewrote my name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters And in Leopardy and in Jeopardy I resolved, dissolved upon a radical eradicator Inking in, dissolving upon Jeopardizing in my own name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters
Welcome to Texas, Devin Johnston, a windmill has your name— stubborn and American at off-rhyme to the arroyo-creased, angular region. Bald, redheaded turkey buzzards eat a rabbit struck by what it only understood as supernatural. The birds bring to mind black grasshoppers that broke clacking into red-winged and rasping darts. And even as we drive secular sunlight polishes aluminum slantwise.
A migraine's aura swallows an eye from a face into gapless, absent folds of unseeing. His scars concealed, the three-legged cat limps fluidly along a soft shore redrawn by storms.
One tenseless moment liquifies to be lost into the stream of static's gray light. A lapse develops him the tape but reveals the reels degaussed, emptied of ghosts. He sifts through the tissue of noise for accusative objects he could once recall as the magnetic arrows of the tape seethe out from their mound to forage. His perfect past a glacier's gray retreat looped back out of phase with itself. It's low-decibel hiss resonates in throbbing waves that mimic the present seen from behind. This present bends into an empty crease where the next phoneme fails to arrive. There, books helped him recover the echo and filter on a model of speech that crashed into twelve thousand darts roaming the field her face turns in shadow. Her face it blurs with gauzy silt of words that used to comprehend her. Their river spools through an oxbow bend above a bird's black wings smooth air.
Remington Rand patents a process awake. Behold: In grids of radio tubes Baal quickens. He looks with eyes of spy planes; he assembles hydrogen arms into normal-form games; he reads the cards scored with information and speaks the probable outcomes of elections. Young Baal began a paper chess machine, the residue from finite states of play. He becomes the liquefaction of those rules, learns it's more than structure symbols want. His thinking labors over knots of entailment, spans terms that signs bind like lesions. Struggling to imagine the scent of mint, he devils himself sleepless with opaque questions: What did there recognize in cloud faces as telegraphed through thought the sky distorts? These patterned shreds of spent thunderhead mime the low entropy of his little grammar. Baal listens to grasp his own encoding slurred through exact impairments of the brain. The cunning daemon fears his self diffuse beneath what renders ark to him aware.
Tired of walking and checking the lines of the tourist train that trundles through this town, famous for its pottery and brackish dune pools once visited by St. George and his dragon, and the lady with her unicorn, I stopped by at a convenient place to sit and shuck my sweet corn and let the local men hang their gates from my eyes. All they could offer were other versions of myself: soft and sweaty, sick of the big car diet dished up by Detroit and the cocktail-party and locker-room chatter I've had to tackle while touring this country's musky beaches. Choosing to drive to my next stop, I found perched upon a tall chalk cliff the statue of a broad-bodied chaser so large I could never easily handle him as a top. He'd been added on to so many times over the centuries, that it was only really possible to identify him by touch: a little more shy, perhaps, than other guys his age, an abstract clock-face jutting from the pack I could feel buckled around his waist, and such wee-wee nuts, he could only be named, I whispered, Patience. I camped there in his shadow 'til noon the next day, and drove away leaving a few of my burnt bones there, behind.
That this mountainside looks like a face is accidental, which is a shame, for I dearly love to laugh. The touch-smoothed redwood cross-section, in its rings of growth and brightness, seems like a sun seen from underwater, wobbly as jelly, mocking my inability to find a job, my food stamps, and saddens me to see the teens tagging themselves in nearby places to earn a virtual friend's respect, or boasting other symptoms of youth while leaving their greasy fingerprints on the thick lenses of my glasses, mocking my desire for artwork to remain packed in straw, and in music for sleepers halfway awake to grow wild in. It all gives me faith in arranging, I guess, when there is nothing else I seem much good at but fuss and copy and paste, with a head full of so many other worries. Got a check today. Bought a book I can't read without it putting me to sleep with its out-of-date luxuriousness. So instead of reading it, I stayed up and listened to Harry Partch's songAnd on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, dedicating it to the memory of Ramon Novarro, hoping it would arch electrically above him with all the characteristics of fire all night, all day, and soak his early spring colors in a late autumn sun as pale as silver and fern-green skiesto draw light through midnight
I stand in Walgreens while my mother sleeps. The store is fluorescent and almost empty. My father is ailing in a nursing home, my friend is dying in the hospital. What I want tonight is lipstick. As pure a red as I can find—no coral undertones, no rust or fawn. Just red. Ignoring the salespeople, I untwist tubes and scrawl each color on my wrist, till the blue veins beneath my skin disappear behind smeared bars. I select one. Back in my mother's apartment, silence. I limn my lips back out of my wan face. There they are again: smacky and wanting.
The sail is so vast when it's laid out on the driveway. I stake it with a screwdriver through the shackle at the tack to stretch it smooth, pulling on the head and clew. Now it's smooth as a night's worth of new snow. My wife, my partner, has been torn from her busy day. We face each other across the sail's foot and with my right hand and her left hand (I'm right handed, she's left handed) we pull an arm's length of the sail down over itself, then do this again, keeping my left hand, and her right hand, towards the foot. Each fold is easier since the sail grows narrower near the top. Then we fold towards each other and I wrap my arms around it, while she holds the bag's mouth open, the gray bag that will cover it through the winter. Then I thank her. And the driveway is visible again as it is in spring, when all the snow has melted.
In the evenings of my childhood, when I went to bed, music washed into the cove of my room, my door open to a slice of light. I felt a melancholy I couldn't have named, a longing for what I couldn't yet have said or understood but still knew was longing, knew was sadness untouched by time. Sometimes the music was a rippling stream of clear water rushing over a bed of river stones caught in sunlight. And many nights I crept from bed to watch her swaying where she sat overtaken by the tide, her arms rowing the music out of the piano.
nun meets me at the station, first month with carol and dick reynolds. set the table. clean the kitchen. vacuum.thank god she didn't ask me to take care of the children. i dry dishes in the afternoon. watch her can apples from the backyard, put them in the cellar dark to save for winter.why is everything so quiet? why does the man come home from school everyday at 3:30 and read the paper? why a different casserole on the table every night and everyone eats one portion and one portion only? why is there always enough, but never too much. . .
couldn't stand to see these new young faces, these children swollen as myself. my roommate, snotty, bragging about how she didn't give a damn about the kid and was going back to her boyfriend and be a cheerleader in high school. could we ever "go back"? would our bodies be the same? could we hide among the childless
he came in his seedy brown jacket smelling of paint. all thumbs, a man stumbling over his own muscles, unable to hold some part of himself and rock it, gently. she gave up, seeing him come in the door, wanting to show him her flat belly just an hour before, looking at her own corpse in the mirror. she lay there reduced, neither virgin nor mother. it had been decided. the winter was too cold in the garage. they would live with her mother. the old bedroom was already prepared, cleaned, the door opened. the solitary twin bed remained; he would sleep on the porch. she looked at him and tried to feel her way into the body of a woman, a thing which has to be taken care of, held safely in his arms. she lay there, trying to hold on to what she had, knowing she had to let it go.
i knew you before you had a mother, when you were newtlike, swimming, a horrible brain in water. i knew you when your connections belonged only to yourself, when you had no history to hook on to, barnacle, when you had no sustenance of metal when you had no boat to travel when you stayed in the same place, treading the question; i knew you when you were all eyes and a cocktail, blank as they sky of a mind, a root, neither ground nor placental; not yet red with the cut nor astonished by pain, one terrible eye open in the center of your head to night, turning, and the stars blinked like a cat. we swam in the last trickle of champagne before we knew breastmilk—we shared the night of the closet, the parasitic closing on our thumbprint, we were smudged in a yellow book. son, we were oak without mouth, uncut, we were brave before memory.
Yes, I wanted them to levitate. Unfortunately, I hadn't a leg to stand on. Cut-out camels plodded across the blackboard's high sill. Yet the desert below refused to unfurl its mica wings. When I asked them to try to remember, to release a soap bubble from their marvelous arsenal of wands, they resisted. They lined up, suspicious in individual spotlights. The fountain inside the scissored palm could only rise so high, maybe just a trumpeted C. Which is high, but not like those huge blue dreams that used to float by, shot from cloud-atomizers, the original public breeze on its back in the grass. Let's try to guess who or what is being borne up by this caravan of thin- skinned humps, a-bulge, inoculated? I tell you every one has a rider, a crop. It's been done this way for some time. If we pause here by the pillars of sand, up to our poet-knees in anarchy, won't each gulp of hoarded water from the toppled monument be sweeter passed hand to hand in the sun-colored dipper? Up to our thighs in it now, and spared what drills it- self into the rock daily, so it can claim to know zero after zero, and make that nothing into a sound like silent bells, split parched hooves, plodding.
my father said, again and again, shaking his head in disbelief at any ostentation; the neighbor's gold- plated knocker (we still banged fists) or my own lust to own the autographed edition or the waxed bronze bust. It is not only the idea—which should hold all of the pleasure— but the poet's pencil marks on paper which we treasure above the memorized poem. And so I fan my flushed face, signaling the fast-talking auctioneer, who has traced the provenance, and picks up the pace, multiplying offers. And who now does my father's bidding? Heaven's coffers, perhaps, are for the destitute; but why did he have to die to escape the shitty, crime-ridden, never-to-be-gentrified neighborhood of both our births? The cost of living, he would argue, is not the worth of being alive. But still he checked each lottery ticket which littered the empty lot next door, praised their silver latex glitter, praying to the beautiful unscratched, like little gods. Money talks, he taught me. But nobody beats the odds.
I. I watch them line up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher passes, one pushes, and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in '42, I tell the behaved ones: orderly and under orders. And I'm about to begin that horrific story, the one they don't yet know, when I pause to open the door for a little air. And there they are again, arms akimbo, like two stooges, the Angel of Death, and the Angel of Forgetfulness, those vaudeville comics, those incorrigible face-making kids, stuck forever—you first—no you—in the undersized doorframe of the museum I will, for lack of a better word, call childhood. II. Did I say Angels? Clearly, I meant my great-aunts whom you haven't yet met. My sister called them From-This-You-Shouldn't-Know  and May-You-Never-Forget. I preferred Horseradish and Charoset, that bittersweet matzoh sandwich munched at Pesach between prayers. Everyone I knew was still alive, and no one cared that in Venice, that very summer, Ginsberg, in the name of the Jews, forgave Pound. Hadn't I'd forgone my own bar mitzvah for a weekend in Miami Beach where that borscht-belt-south social director and shuffleboard champ first shticked There's Noah business like Shoah business, soon after Lillian Hellman ushered her de-judaicized Anne Frank onto the stage. III. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? my son asks. He's gauging my anger at this interruption—a love sonnet, less so?—but it takes eight dollars of gas just to get to his summer job. To Hell with the poem, I need me some shekels, he sings, misquoting both Ravikovitch and Snoop Dogg. Poetry was nowhere in my father's house, or money either, our doorposts marked pass-over; although in a pinch Dad could recite Kipling's "Gunga Din." Make fun if you must, my mother says, but look in the mirror and I'm here to tell you that your father was a better man than all those anti-Semitic Pounds and Eliots rolled up into one. IV. That was twenty-three years ago, before my mother, cradling his neck and not yet crying, waited, while in East New York, the ambulance raced, and the Angel of Death loitered. Are you comfortable? she asks, adjusting my father's pillow, while he, ever the emcee, mimics Henny Youngman's I make a living. Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden might repeat, were he here, and what wouldn't I give, at this moment, for his stiff British upper lip. What's one more death in the family, Otto Frank argues, expunging not grief but sex from his daughter's diary, and what parent today would dare to play jury or judge. V. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? the Angel of Consciousness, who sits, while I muse, on my right shoulder and whom I often confuse with her errant two-headed twin, the Angel of Conscience, asks. And now I'm recalling my home office, the Akeidah above the desk, the knife blade drawn downward, that Angel, what's her name, restraining Abraham's implausibly blood-stained arm. And because I, exiled to the basement when my Isaac arrived, overlooked that drawing, it hung ten months above my newborn son's head.I feel wicked sleeping in this warm bed, my daughter proclaims, rehearsing her Anne Frank and pausing anxiously for applause. VI.Burn everything after I'm dead, Kafka said, poking his prewar Jewish head into yet one more of my poems. He's trying to explain the fatherland to the fatherless. No one reads poetry anymore, anyway, my mother, quoting from her own unpublished diary, writes. And who doesn't want to go on living even after death?
I live in a room by the sea, where the view is great and the food is free. Some of the tenants come and go. Some I eat, if they're too slow. One end of me is firmly locked. The other end just gently rocks. I live in a room by the sea. It's perfect for an anemone.
The robin makes a laughing sound. It makes me stop and look around to see just what the robin sees— fresh new leaves on twigs of trees, a strong, high branch on which to rest, a safe dry ledge to hold its nest. The robin makes a laughing sound. I stop. I always look around.
When you know that vore means eat, you will know that insectivores feed  on grasshoppers, moths, and butterflies,  mosquitoes, bees, and plain-old flies. When you know that carni means meat, you will know that carnivores eat  snakes and lizards, deer and lamb,  carrion, birds, fish, and ham. When you know that herb means plant, you will know that herbivores CAN'T  eat anything that moves on a foot,  just foods that spring up from a root. When you know that omni means all, you will know that omnivores call Everything  they can suck or chew—  sometimes even me or you— food.
Mosquitoes, with needle-noses sucking blood from elbows, cheeks, and chin why were you not designed to thrive on brine, on swine, or likewise-spiny porcupines?  SLAP! SLAP!  SLAP!
With apologies to Rudyard Kipling ("If") If you can't wait to pick a book right now And read it through until the very end To find out who did what, and why, and how, Then—lucky you!—you're a READER, my friend!
some say I'm now almost extinct in this park but the people who say this don't know that by smelling the orchids in the trees they're sensing the fragrance of my chops that by hearing the rumbling of the waterfalls they're listening to my ancestors' great roar that by observing the constellations of the night sky they're gazing at the star spots on my fur that I am and always will be the wild untamed living spirit of this jungle
is a meadow after a snowfall that a poem hopes to cross
words are birds that arrive with books and spring they love clouds the wind and trees some words are messengers that come from far away from distant lands for them there are no borders only stars moon and sun some words are familiar like canaries others are exotic like the quetzal bird some can stand the cold others migrate with the sun to the south some words die caged— they're difficult to translate and others build nests have chicks warm them feed them teach them how to fly and one day they go away in flocks the letters on this page are the prints they leave by the sea
my shoes rest all night under my bed tired they stretch and loosen their laces wide open they fall asleep and dream of walking they revisit the places they went to during the day and wake up cheerful relaxed so soft
April fool Bear's-foot Bog-onion Devil's-apple Dog parsley Doll's-eyes Fairy hells Flying saucers Four o'clock Gagweed Goosefoot Hare's-ear Indian beans Inkweed Jacob's-coat Lady's-thumb Lion's-beard Locoweed Monkey-fiddle Moonseed Mother-in-law Puncture-vine Naked lady Quaker-bonnets Rabbit-bush Smartweed Sneezeweed Snakegrass Stinking Willie Sundials Swallow-wort Wahoo Wart-cress Witches' thimbles Wolfsbane Wonder berry
A witch can charm milk from an ax handle. A witch bewitches a man's shoe. A witch sleeps naked. "Witch ointment" on the back will allow you to fly through the air.  A witch carries the four of clubs in her sleeve. A witch may be sickened at the scent of roasting meat. A witch will neither sink nor swim. When crushed, a witch's bones will make a fine glue. A witch will pretend not to be looking at ber own image in a window. A witch will gaze wistfully at the glitter of a clear night. A witch may take the form of a cat in order to sneak into a good man's chamber. A witch's breasts will be pointed rather than round, as discovered in the trials of the 1950s. A powerful witch may cause a storm at sea. With a glance, she will make rancid the fresh butter of her righteous neighbor. Even our fastest dogs cannot catch a witch-hare. A witch has been known to cry out while her husband places inside her the image of a child. A witch may be burned for tying knots in a marriage bed. A witch may produce no child for years at a time. A witch may speak a foreign language to no one in particular. She may appear to frown when she believes she is smiling. If her husband dies unexpectedly, she may refuse to marry his brother. A witch has been known to weep at the sight of her own child. She may appear to be acting in a silent film whose placards are missing In Hollywood the sky is made of tin. A witch makes her world of air, then fire, then the planets. Of cardboard, then ink, then a compass. A witch desires to walk rather than be carried or pushed in a cart. When walking a witch will turn suddenly and pretend to look at something very small. The happiness of an entire house maybe ruined by witch hair touching a metal cross. The devil does not speak to a witch. He only moves his tongue. An executioner may find the body of a witch insensitive to an iron spike. An unrepentant witch may be converted with a frttle lead in the eye. Enchanting witchpowder may be hidden in a girl's hair. When a witch is hungry, she can make a soup by stirring water with her hand. I have heard of a poor woman changing herself into a pigeon. At times a witch will seem to struggle against an unknown force stronger than herself. She will know things she has not seen with her eyes. She will have opinions about distant cities. A witch may cry out sharply at the sight of a known criminal dying of thirst.   She finds it difficult to overcome the sadness of the last war.   A nightmare is witchwork. The witch elm is sometimes referred to as "all heart." As in, "she was thrown into a common chest of witch elm." When a witch desires something that is not hers, she will slip it into her glove. An overwhelming power compels her to take something from a rich man's shelf.   I have personally known a nervous young woman who often walked in her sleep. Isn't there something witchlike about a sleepwalker who wanders through the house with matches? The skin of a real witch makes a delicate binding for a book of common prayer. When all the witches in your town have been set on fire, their smoke will fill your mouth. It will teach you new words. It will tell you what you've done.
How solitary and resolute you look in the morning. A stoic in your cotton sleeve. Do you dream of walking out rain or shine a truffle balanced on your sternum and passing me on the sidewalk? Or is that a smile because you interpret nothing and statelessness is where you live? How calmly you indulge my moods. See you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse ceramics at the Met. Let's hear what you'd do differently.
Having desired little more than the arrival of the little more that arrives, outside our window a cypress of model proportions. Its patience seems to widen the nights we sleep in Rome. Warm flags draw a tortoise, it scrapes too near. Our friends hurry over when they hear, exclaiming over its mute resolute distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee. Density pours into swallows and shadows: spilled with abandon each morning, begins then the slow work of receding. The joints announce their new allegiances. Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things. Night broken into, it's the sub rosa singling out I ought to have expected from Fra Angelico's small panel among others, the souped-up full-spectrum wings combined with a mood of reverent submission in both figures warning of experience yet to come. Starting now she'll reason with herself deliberately (imagine bulbs expecting stars for effort!), aware of being always overheard, subject to unprecedented measures of integrity, like an author. While a substance of landscape, mineral, leaches into blood vessels quietly steadily, meaning in this case nothing is damaged; extravagance of umbrella pines propping their fingers under the bonus horizons of the hills, redundancies boosting the city's resemblance to itself. A painter once squared himself against a difficult question and said no one could just create a landscape, but isn't it true that expectation builds a neighborhood and there is nowhere else that you can live. It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention touched the first body alone, a body changed again precisely to its own form, a very special intention.   Alloyed discretion, the grit of a damp trowel explores my mouth, at leisure determining the candor that cavity is good for.
An owl once perched in my tree at night (when most birds cannot see). But when the sun rose, he was found by some crows, and their caws caused the owl to flee.
In all this system I watched a cloud fall Carted wet down the design Need is a big pool Lo go its creaturely waves Commerce came open and bright like a starfuck "I hear, with great shame for our century" Last zing on the stairs "So-and-so wants company to Paris; so-and-so is looking for a  servant with such-and-such qualifications" Execution too diddled back then "So-and-so wants a master"
56. I wanted to write the story of a metamorphosis. The story is at least partly based on a dream I recall from the diary of another writer. In the dream, which may not be a dream but simply a vision the writer has while seated at his desk, an image of a white horse appears on the wall. It is a white horse that haunts the writer's mind. The white horse has escaped its traces somewhere on an urban street. It is moving toward the suburbs with an eye to the countryside. It is successful in this movement because it progresses without hurry. It does not gallop. It moves along the street with the gait of a horse that drags a heavy cart behind it. The horse moves successfully toward its liberation since it does not appear to be a fugitive. My heart beats more quickly when I think about this story, which I have almost certainly partially invented. The horse hides its fear of slaughter. It plays a game. Irony is a kind of secrecy. It is a principle of groups.
75.Even with geographic proximity, there may exist temporal systems such that two people cannot meet one another or will never meet again. Dream last night includes swimming. Something about a thick river, keep riding boats on it, travel from station to station, temporary home to home. It is Berlin or a group of islands called "Connecticut." I am alone or have a child or am with my brother. It is sunset, when one seeks something. It is possible we somehow die for a time, a year, a month, a day,  without realizing this, then awake to find ourselves, which is to say "someone," present again, attentive, expectant, apologetic even?
from the sustaining air fresh air There is the clarity of a shore And shadow, mostly, brilliance summer  the billows of August When, wandering, I look from my page I say nothing  when asked I am, finally, an incompetent, after all
To be born yellow into a household where the black man rules with his fists and the white wife body livid with devotion hip enough to confuse trouble with love or whatever it was, such the lucky one to come up so unamerican , thankful one in whose imagination the country danger is so ambient  and precise of source it vanishes and with each departure more affectionate machines panting to run the dream between hope and habit    I wanted to say this more clearly In what ways did watching your black father beat your white mother empower you as a brown baby ? in a blue way is there anything so cruel so crude as to say you felt each of your hands in their puppet throats as they screamed for help in unison but only one was hunted for room within the invisible listener Only one could pray that far    I wanted to say this more clearly trustless of a soul who hadn’t suffered he tore hers toward him  And I arrived as a kind of vengeance, the many versions of war worn raw by their sex, come to be as the treacherous peace of empty pacts and broken chessmen were scattered all over the room     It’s like being the last person alive
Of course we failed, by succeeding. The fiery cherub becomes his smothering. A greedy heart dives into a dream Of power or truth, and wakes up middle-aged In some committee room. It is eating paper instead of God. We two are one, my bird, this is a wedding.   When love was war, you swore you’d burn Your life and die at thirty-five. I said good riddance, Bright hairy boy, I will beat you, down, Tear you to monkey shreds, survive like earth, Owl-eyed, because I wanted to see everything Black and permanent and kill you with your theories. We used to wake up sweaty and entangled.   Thirty, home, and work. We cohabit in a functioning machine. There is violence, somewhere else. Do we wish this? It occurs, The flayed combatant, the dismembered child, The instruments in the basement. We must wish it. See, Between us is peace, our babies are plump, I know you, I caress you, I fail you. My faith adheres In nothing. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.
for Ed. Baynard buildings blend into the sky the work goes on from where we left off and consciousness, by rights, is doors and windows a spritz of color in this life is what we can expect if we can expect anything and a breeze or two a quiet day a little sun that 5-letter word "money" relying on no one for pleasure than the weather and the then discovered leisure to lean a little into more than can be expected let me explain we feel the heart against the ribs we feel the leg against the chair we feel two eyes linked as one looking into your two and rubbing your brow like a finger taking the sweat lengthwise off the brow and drying the forehead which is suddenly your we feel the nouns make emotions out of a sense of easiness the ability to relax the desire to simplify what we suddenly discover is meant because we haven't paid attention to exemplify something what it is, we forget we know it was something special something out of the ordinary a nagging something or other stupidly repeating itself in a vague way on the sill when we think the water still that's the silliest thing I ever heard of hearing everything through the air conditioner above the bottom line
You look sleazy tonight ma said. Cheap, I said. I’m doin cheap. You got any idea how much it costs to do cheap these days? To do gold City of Paris three-inch platform sandals and this I. Magnin snake dress? I’m doin cheap. You look like a bird, she said a Halloween bird with red waxed lips.  —In high school you could either do cheap or Shakespeare, college prep or a pointy bra, ratting a bubble haircut with a toilet brush. I was not allowed to do high school cheap; I did blazers and wool skirts from the Junior League thrift shop. In high school it was don’t walk in the middle of Richie, Leelee, and the baby, you might come between them. You look like a skag wearin that black-eyed makeup, people are gunna think you’re cheap. While I poured red food dye on my hair to match my filly’s tail for the rodeo, ma beat her head against the wall, she said tryin to make me nice. I tried real hard, but the loggers, the Navy guys, they always hit on me. Cause you’re an easy mark, ma said. And I played guilty, I played guilty every time. But now, I said now I’m doin cheap.
its method is men the fact and the game disorder grounded expressed real named the facts of life the planet its field   the same day vehicles lived by the masses become contemplative attitudes powered by the joys of this world a glorious sign propagated with lightning speed   at the same time its goal the use of time the speed of transport the margin of life the rational journeys by another path none of it bad   the work from his world themselves rediscovers nature its essential green easily seen through like a window but intimate like a summer meadow as a result cold dreams draw misty truths to the surface official forgetfulness looks back on and chooses to forget the first half of to focus discussion on the second half like "I'm fine" as a journey all to itself and beautiful to the voyager particularly this service its servants our passage of time vanishes quickly like a leaf its eulogy a terrestrial paradise the very spirit of the renaissance to act on the basis of an obsession with death well, death pronounce it be-u-ti-full slowly revealed to eliminate this lived time men live in sea turtles to the laws
for Mandred Hecht the management organized the company and that was splendid enough chairs for all a quick change of clothes and scene brings us to the lawn of the company stretching out under our gaze which itself beer in hand stops short of the horizon (grazes) everything else vanished a certain rhythm (uncertain) of the blood directed attention to the tapping foot was this happiness being witnessed was this many weeks did the people over there look same as the people over there (hmm) who were they were they salesmen could we brush aside the tapping that by now had given way to winking and that to sleeping and then to tapping again what was being what was being covered up was it a fabulous shoulder gleaming was it an exact (and exacting) self-image suffering no monkey business were they happy did the countryside bloom, did not subside who were they were they salesmen and given fresh air and sun who were their wives were they salesmen, too from here they look organized and like good company not to overlook the flowers and facts what were they doing here had they been invited did they receive invitations with what grace was it many weeks they "you bet I am" emotion reflected (a shoulder) whose were they sales men (and women) did they make rounds and (ooph) how spiffy did they look did they look up as the management passed threading toward the logo-decorated dais were they former salesmen (and women) did they look it what was their country of origin was it organized who did they think they were (or weren't) how did they look in the light of the flowers of the facts were they news the kidding aside the beer flowed the lawn rolled endlessly in and out like a boat a picture of waves was a storm brewing when vacations came around were they still to be salesmen (and women) and retirement what about retirement but who could be retiring under the gentle hand of unlimited beer and lawn were those beer-colored storm clouds rolling in were they invited were they salesmen (and women) where did they come from would they go away could they be covered up why were they unresponsive to good sense and why were they gleaming did this look like a good place for rain to retire in would rain fall without invitation would it spoil the company what effect would it have on self-image would the people look the same after the rain were they salesmen (and women) why were they gleaming did the self-image include shoulders were they inviting were they cloud-like were they salesmen (and women) organized to manage a quick change was the self-image good company was it a salesman or a saleswoman invited to be a manager would they make the dais what about the clouds were there enough chairs for all the managers would they live happy in those chairs after they were managers would they settle for chairs
I am locked in a little cedar box with a picture of shepherds pasted onto the central panel between carvings. The box stands on curved legs. It has a gold, heart-shaped lock and no key. I am trying to write my way out of the closed box redolent of cedar. Satan comes to me in the locked box and says, I’ll get you out. SayMy father is a shit. I say my father is a shit and Satan laughs and says, It’s opening.Say your mother is a pimp. My mother is a pimp. Something opens and breaks when I say that. My spine uncurls in the cedar box like the pink back of the ballerina pin with a ruby eye, resting beside me on satin in the cedar box.Say shit, say death, say fuck the father, Satan says, down my ear. The pain of the locked past buzzes in the child’s box on her bureau, under the terrible round pond eye etched around with roses, where self-loathing gazed at sorrow. Shit. Death. Fuck the father. Something opens. Satan saysDon’t you feel a lot better? Light seems to break on the delicate edelweiss pin, carved in two colors of wood. I love him too, you know, I say to Satan dark in the locked box. I love them but I’m trying to say what happened to us in the lost past. Of course, he says and smiles, of course. Now say: torture.  I see, through blackness soaked in cedar, the edge of a large hinge open.Say: the father’s cock, the mother’scunt, says Satan, I’ll get you out. The angle of the hinge widens until I see the outlines of the time before I was, when they were locked in the bed. When I say the magic words, Cock, Cunt, Satan softly says, Come out. But the air around the opening is heavy and thick as hot smoke.Come in, he says, and I feel his voice breathing from the opening. The exit is through Satan’s mouth.Come in my mouth, he says, you’re therealready, and the huge hinge begins to close. Oh no, I loved them, too, I brace my body tight in the cedar house. Satan sucks himself out the keyhole. I’m left locked in the box, he seals the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.It’s your coffin now, Satan says. I hardly hear; I am warming my cold hands at the dancer’s ruby eye— the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.
It was too big to take on the subway so she came to it every day that winter in the room where it waited on one foot, sly seabird.   She sat down and opened her hands, parted the wings one by one till it flew ahead of her fingers singing the lame foot skidding on gold.   The sun turned its back on the glass and paled as she sat obstinate green-eyed her foot on its foot pumping.   The fire died. Snow hissing at the window. Above her head a baroque hailstorm failed in 4/4 time. She sang, unable to hold the bright hinge to her heart. Lame savior she sang. It bowed as she left and sat, chastened by scales, wondering.
The pure amnesia of her face, newborn. I looked so far into her that, for a while,   the visual held no memory. Little by little, I returned to myself, waking to nurse   those first nights in that familiar room where all the objects had been altered   imperceptibly: the gardenia blooming in the dark in the scarred water glass,   near the phone my handwriting illegible, the patterned lamp- shade angled downward and away   from the long mirror where I stood and looked at the woman holding her child.   Her face kept dissolving into expressions resembling my own, but the child’s was pure   figurative, resembling no one. We floated together in the space a lullaby makes, head to head,   half-sleeping. Save it, my mother would say, meaning just the opposite. She didn’t   want to hear my evidence against her terrible optimism for me. And though, despite her,   I can redeem, in a pawnshop sense, almost any bad moment from my childhood, I see now   what she must have intended for me. I felt it for her,  watching her as she slept,   watching her suck as she dreamed of sucking, lightheaded with thirst as my blood flowed   suddenly into tissue that changed it to milk. No matter that we were alone, there’s a   texture that moves between me and whatever might have injured us then. Like the curtain’s sheer   opacity, it remains drawn over what view we have of dawn here in this onetime desert,   now green and replenished, its perfect climate unthreatened in memory—   though outside, as usual, the wind blew, the bough bent, under the eaves, the hummingbird   touched once the bloodcolored hourglass, the feeder, then was gone.
Let’s say I’m Captain Cook, setting sail to drift until currents push me into a certain lane, certain highway with its humpbacked traffic bobbing along.    My young aren’t strapped in the back flinging Cheerios into the crevices like a game of darts but moored in the house with my patient wife so I can seek my destiny here—   And I have no destination, not the Friendly Center or aquarium—I journey only to find a usable route.    I’m stewing the bones a fourth time to leach any last savor for my broth—  not gumming pirate birthday cake with seafoam-colored frosting, nor placing my order at the drive-thru (no, not a Frosty, not a McRib)­­—    Place-names are still to be scrawled, new-minted to mark this passage, its weather and bits of luck.   The usable route’s a velvet highway I’ll trace to parchment—a new day, a new world,   not the GPS lady recalculating—    These words held in my mouth,  these words a way to inscribe we are not lost in a vast expanse of lostness.
How to get to it:  the heart within the corset  made of whalebone and Parisian leaded satin,  winter weight.   I can barely breathe.   Sun filters from high windows  into this dark-paneled room   where my sister helps me step into the skirt,  our grandmother’s grandmother’s sent-for dress, its pinprick satin buttons down my chest.  We hook each hook to hold the corset flush,  to anchor the bustle, as she did for her quiet February wedding,  snow covering the steeple of the Seamen’s Bethel.    Melville: This, shipmates, is that other lesson:   fasten the locks, hold the heart within its watery chamber.  When the seamstress slid the bone into the bodice  and pinned each cut piece together,  the satin stood upright at the sewing table. She could almost  see it breathe.   I am swallowed and swallowed whole. It outlasts  all our vows.
Novel unbegun, half-loaf rising, lighthouse northward and anchor south.   Lemon to grapefruit, you sleep-step sidewise, turnover, pop-up, tongue in the mouth.
You were given feet but had never touched them to earth. You were given the sea and you fed upon it for months.   So when your head crowned, ashen with loss of blood from the cord wound tight around your neck,   and when they cut you from me, and you were silent, and the tide in me receded, I remembered the shearwaters   following the ship—the slow sweep of them riding the wind’s current. The stretch of them, hovering,   cruciform, shearing the air the way an envelope slides back into a box of letters, making its narrow space. I had watched   from the stern for hours their trailing: as if stillness itself drifted toward me. I thought it was my life.   Then someone lifted you up, and there was a sound, and they laid you on me, breathing.
It’s not hard to imagine: my ancestor—a dry season,  dust like chalk on her tongue—mixes  spit with clay,   traces a river on rock. Next day: rain.    Why shouldn’t she believe  in the power of rock and her own hand?   I carry this need for pattern and rule, to see connections  where there aren’t necessarily any.    After my first miscarriage, I cut out soda, cold cuts.    After the second, vacuuming and air travel.   After the third—it’s chalk and spit again. I circle rocks,  swim the icy river.    And when my son is born, he balances the chemical equation that is this world.    And logic?   Logic is my son’s kite, good so long as you have  wind, string,  something heavier than hope    to tether you.
It's best to wake early, four, five a.m., while the neighbors sleep and the moon floats like a pearl in a pool of ink. In half-light the empty house is less familiar, less sad—the walls with their nail holes, the carpet—its patterns of wear, curtains with no job to do. I sit on my suitcase, eat powdered donuts; a napkin for a plate, juice out of a paper cup. Make one last check of the cupboards, the drawers. Run my hand along the countertops, the stair rail, trace the walls with my fingertips, each scar proof of my childhood, my initials carved into the tree of this, our sixth house.   My family could write a Handbook for Leaving— the way we pack up during summer solstice, disconnect from people and places like an abrupt shutting off of electricity. My father's convinced himself that the unknown is always better, the way the retina sees images upside down and the brain corrects.    Here I smoked candy cigarettes, my breath in winter passing for smoke, pale green of my bedroom. I counted the number of intersections on the way to school (four). I bundle memories together, weight them with stones like unwanted kittens drowned in a creek.   What kind of animal constantly moves? The point of migration is the return. We're nomads without the base knowledge of where to find water. These moves are like arranged marriages; economics now, love later. Maybe it's not against nature to move. Most of the body is no more than ten years old and blood renews itself every 90 days. But leaving disturbs the fabric of a place. I'd rather stay and witness change. My mother always wanting to plant perennials that we never stay to see. I pour some water on the marigolds clattering around the mailbox, Aztec flowers of death, their strong scent a beacon to lost souls. Then we drive away, the blank windows like the blank eyes of the dead, waiting for someone to seal the past with a penny.
Not to be confused with messenger pigeons, birds sent behind enemy lines in war, but think passengers as in birds carrying suitcases, sharing a berth on a train, or traveling in bamboo cages on a ship, always migrating on a one-way to extinction. How would extinction look on a graph? A steady climb, or a plateau, then a precipitous cliff at the dawn of humans?   Nesting grounds eight hundred square miles in area. Skies swollen with darkening multitudes. Days and days of unbroken flocks passing over. Ectopistes migratorius.   And the last of the species, Martha, named for Martha Washington, dies in a cage in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.   Forget clemency. We are the worst kind of predator, not even deliberate in our destruction. Our killing happens à la carte, on the side (side of Dodo?).   And because the nineteenth century did not enlist a battlefield artist for extinctions, there are no official witnesses to the slaughter, just participants. If you could somehow travel back to this scene, through the would-be canvas, you would run flailing your arms toward the hardwood forests and the men with sticks and guns and boiling sulphur pots to bring birds out of the trees, as if you could deliver 50,000 individual warnings, or throw yourself prostrate on the ground, as if your one body could hold sway.
Pattern or absence of pattern, the way a jet flies into blankness yet leaves a clear trail, I expect time to reveal an underdrawing, hatching of shadows, some rough plan visible through another spectrum of light.    Once, at an ophthalmologist’s office, through an accident of mirrors, I saw the interior of my own eye, the retina’s veins like roots or a web, and then again   ten years later, this time in an astronomy book—galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters of galaxies strung out strands of a cosmic web, the redness of that image, the light extending like roots 13 billion years in every direction.    Michelangelo could see a figure in a block of stone, waiting to be freed. I want his vision when I look in a mirror, his mathematical principles for depicting space, his ability to translate three dimensions into stone. First I’m in two dimensions, a photograph glued to the glass; then three—I’m somewhere between the glass and the background. All my houses, friends come and gone. How would he sculpt me? How far out of the stone have I come?
I learned to hide my wings almost immediately, learned to tuck and bandage them down. Long before the accident, before the glass shattering and that scene going dim, dimmer, and then dark, before the three fractures at the axis, three cracks   in the bone, it had already begun. My voice had begun to deepen, the sound of it suddenly more my father's than my own. My beard had started growing, my bones growing, my bones sore from the speed of their growth, and there,   at fourteen years of age, the first tugging of the muscles between my shoulder blades. It began as a tiny ache. It was just a minor irritation. Day after day passed, and this ache grew, and then the tips of the cartilaginous wings   began to tent my skin. Father Callahan had already warned that in each of us there was both potential for bad and good. When trying to shave for the first time, I nicked my cheek, the bleeding slow but continuous.   Standing there, dabbing at this small cut with tissue paper, the first tear surprised me, the left wing heaving through that fleshy mound of muscle between my shoulder blades and then the skin. I buckled and, on my knees, the right wing presented itself more rapidly than the left.   When I stood, there in the mirror, my wings outstretched with their tiny feathers wet, almost glutinous, a quick ribbon of blood snaking down my back. You wonder why I am such a master of avoidance, such a master of what is withheld. Is there any wonder, now?   I had no idea then they would wither and fall off in a few weeks. When Father Callahan patted my head in the sacristy and told me I was a good boy, a really good boy, an extraordinary boy, I wanted to be anything but extraordinary.
One of them grants you the ability to forecast the future; another wrenches your tongue from your mouth, changes you into a bird precisely because you have been given this gift. The gods are generous   in this way. I learned to avoid danger, avoid fear, avoid excitement, these the very triggers that prompt my wings from their resting place deep inside. And so, I avoided fights, avoided everything really. In the locker room, I avoided other boys,   all the while intently studying that space between their shoulder blades, patiently looking for the tell-tale signs, looking to find even one other boy like me, the wings buried but there nonetheless. I studied them from a distance.   When people challenge a god, the gods curse them with the label of madness. It is all very convenient. And meanwhile, a god took the form of a swan and raped a girl by the school gates. Another took the shape of an eagle to abduct a boy   from the football field. Mad world. And what about our teachers? Our teachers expected us to sit and listen. In Theology, there was a demon inside each of us; in History, the demons among us. So many demons   in this world. Who among us could have spoken up against the gods, the gods who continued living among us? They granted wishes and punishments much the way they always had. Very few noticed them casually taking the shape of one thing or another.
A fascicle of feathers in my hand, hand frantic and shaking, my arm holding my hand as far away from my body as possible—I am disgusted. I cannot pull out the central stalks of my wings where they protrude from between my shoulder blades,   but I can strip every tuft of feathers from them to bare those cartilaginous stems as they rise from my back, stalks stripped perfectly clean so as to better tuck them along my spine, hide them, make them invisible beneath my clothing.   I was so foolish then, a teenager not yet able to accept what he was. When my wings blackened, withered, and fell off, I was beyond happy. They would stay dormant sometimes as long as three months. Sadly, they always came back.   In the bathroom mirror, I can see myself offering a cluster of feathers to myself, as if to say:Take this from me and I will be forever grateful. But the me that is a trick of light on glass is uncaring, offers them back immediately.   If I concentrate, if I think hard on it, I can move my wings, and I practice in the bathroom mirror. But these wings cannot support my weight, cannot buoy me on even a strong gust of wind. What good are wings if you cannot fly?   What good is this ridiculous secret I am asked to keep? With the feathers ripped cleanly away, I tuck the stems along my spine. I bandage them down— cloth wound under my armpits, tightly wound around my chest. I fashion myself into an ordinary boy.
In that old story, the boy is depicted as delicate, lithe, and beautiful. Ovid had it wrong. Yes, the boy was beautiful, beautiful enough to capture a god’s attention, but he was not delicate. He was anything but delicate,   his muscles toned from working the fields. Listen to me; the gods are fairly conventional. A lovely woman is transformed into an old hag, a too-slow voyeur becomes the quick stag to be chased and shot through   by a single arrow. So, in the case of this young man, he must have been strong, anything but delicate like these flowers. The gods are convincing when they need to be. Believe me, they are honey-mouthed and persistent. The boy   had to be strong, but he was not stronger than the gods. He was seduced; who isn’t seduced by immortality? In the field, the boy was every bit the archer as the god. He was just as powerful with a spear, a slingshot, or a discus.   Ovid writes that Apollo loved the boy, loved him more than any living thing on this earth. But we know better. The gods love only themselves. In the field, a clearing ringed by trees, the boy did not   try to catch the discus. He was running from it, running from the god who took pains to aim so as to slice him clean through with a single shot. You see, this is not love. A god commanding spilled blood become delicate blue flowers is not love.
Women want to save you or want you to savage them. Men want to see what is under your towel. The dollar bills they throw into your cage are all you need to care about because you aren’t dancing in a cage to entertain them.   You dance in a cage to make money. I open my towel to the right then whip it back toward midline just as I open to the left: I show them nothing. But I have them convinced I will show them something. There is a difference between men and women—   you must look women in the eyes and, if possible, look hurt; with men, you must avoid looking at them altogether, you must focus on moving your hips, which is close to what they are actually watching. Suspended in a cage above the far end   of the dance floor, I was not attainable; I made myself seem attainable. These are just the basics. Wearing nothing but a towel, my greyish wings extended to full wingspan, my chest shaved— the clubbers believe I am wearing a costume.   It is amazing what people believe. The music is cheaper than a Budweiser. The air is smoke and the smell of smoke mixed with sweat, and your job is to convince each of them you are dancing for no one else. When my shift is over and I pull on some jeans,   tuck my wings and bandage them down, pull on two shirts, I can almost pretend I never entered that cage in the first place. Outside on Lansdowne Street, there are people standing in one line or another waiting to get in to clubs. Night after night, the same thing: the waiting never ends.
I turn over A new museum leaf The light is new And right on the spot I was just thinking about A fleet is about to set out On the ocean light Water turns to sky And makes the eye Blend ingredients in a bend Shaped like an ear A new speaker is speaking I hear the words They sound along The halls of the balls I turn to find them As if I knew where to turn Isn't that the sound That's present Isn't that the sound That's gifted Isn't that something I'd like to put upon The walls And take down Take apart And put in a mood The instructions to which I say aloud
Count your fingers Count your toes Count your nose holes Count your blessings Count your stars (lucky or not) Count your loose change Count the cars at the crossing Count the miles to the state line Count the ticks you pulled off the dog Count your calluses Count your shells Count the points on the antlers Count the newjack's keys Count your cards; cut them again
Count heads. Count the men's. Count the women's. There are five main counts in the cell or work area. 4:45 first morning count. Inmate must stand for the count. The count takes as long as it takes. Control Center knows how many should be in what area. No one moves from area A to area B without Control knowing. If i/m is stuck out for the count i/m receives a write-up. Three write-ups, and i/m goes to lockdown. Once  in lockdown, you will relinquish your things: ​ plastic soapdish, jar of vaseline, comb or hairpick, paperback ​ Upon return to your unit the inventory officer  will return your things:  ​ soapdish, vaseline, comb, hairpick, paperback ​ Upon release you may have your possessions: ​ soapdish, vaseline, comb, pick, book ​ Whereupon your True Happiness can begin  In the Mansion of Happiness: Whoever possesses CRUELTY Must be sent back to JUSTICE Whoever gets into IDLENESS Must come to POVERTY Whoever becomes a SABBATHBREAKER Must be taken to the Pillory and there remain until he loses 2 turns
I want to go home, Patricia whispered.  I won't say I like being in prison, but I have learned a lot, and I like experiences. The terriblest part is being away from your families.—Juanita  I miss my screenporch. I know every word to every song on Purple Rain.—Willie  I'm never leaving here.—Grasshopper, in front of the woodshop, posing beside a coffin he built  This is a kicks' camp. Nothing positive come out of here except the praying. Never been around this many women in my life. Never picked up cursing before.—down for manslaughter, forty years  I've got three. One's seven. One, four. One, one. I'm twenty-three. The way I found out is, I was in an accident with my brother. He was looking at some boys playing ball. We had a head-on.  At the hospital, the doctor says, Miss, why didn't you tell us you were pregnant. I'm pregnant? I wasn't afraid of my mama. I was afraid of my daddy. I was supposed to be a virgin. He took it real good though.  The last time you was here I had a headful of bees.  See what I did was, I accidentally killed my brother.  He spoke without inflection.  Asked how many brothers and sisters did he have—  On my mother's side, two brothers, well now, one brother, and  two sisters.  On my father's side, fifteen sisters. When I handed Franklin his prints, his face broke.Damn, he said to no one, I done got old.  I kept a dog. When you walk through Capricorn, keep your arms down and close to  your body.  That's my sign. No, she can't have no mattress. No, she can't have no spoon.  See if she throwed her food yet.  No, she can't have no more.  I am only about thirty-four minutes from home. That's hard. —George, field line seated on a bag of peas on a flatbed  My auntie works here, and two of my cousins. If I get in trouble, get a write-up, my mama knows before supper.—George  My name is Patricia, but my real name is Zabonia, she spoke softly. Some have their baby and are brought back on the bus the next day and act like it doesn't bother them a bit. Some cry all the way. And for days.—guard  That's hard.  I don't go there.  My mama was fifteen when she had me. That's common.  in the country.  Some can learn, and will be okay. Some could stay in the class forever and not learn. S── when she was a little girl was struck in the head with a machete, and I don't think she'll learn much more... She is so sweet. You wouldn't believe she had did all the things they say  she did.  Don't ask. My mug shot totally turned me against being photographed.  I miss the moon. I miss silverware, with a knife,  and maybe even something to cut with it.  I miss a bathtub.  And a toilet. With a lid. And a handle.  And a door. When Grasshopper came to Big Gola his wife was pregnant. He saw the baby once. Next when he was twenty. Now he's inside. In Texas. Second time. But he's short now. He'll get out soon.  That's hard.  I don't go there.  I miss driving. We're both here because of love.—Zabonia of herself and her best  friend  I am highly hypnotizable. I would wash that man's feet and drink the water.
My Dear Conflicted Reader,  If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature, and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direc- tion we're headed; so that—you might see a man driving to work in a perfume- and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other—as if this were their predestination. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplat- ing a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy's school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong-answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off...  Count your grey hairs  Count your chigger bites  Count your pills  Count the times the phone rings  Count your T cells  Count your mosquito bites  Count the days since your last menses  Count the chickens you've eaten  Count your cankers  Count the storm candles  Count your stitches  Count your broken bones  Count the flies you killed before noon
The evening empty as a convex coconut split down the seam: not that it can be filled. The evening empty as a gourd that twists on an iron thread: the rough skin of the sphere. . . . . .  Not that there was a spoken word to recall the moment of seeing the short span when the clocks ceased to revolve and hands met in jest or benediction time of the vortex into which hibiscus and almond trees strayed and windows made of aluminum. The stars are suddenly remote candescent petals night throws above the yard, the beautiful things. . . . . .   The great house is a hotel and a museum of victory how some lived at the epoch of planters and governors visible in the paintings the armchairs and gilded glass articulate artifacts and floors polished by daylight in a country of green hills and water wheels and wagons and sun coming out after a rain the labor is hidden that built the house long ago, and ploughed the land to make it bear fruit  . . . . . In British poetry, gentle woodland creatures gaze at the hermit with marble eyes lit from within. A single bird defends the song. Among the pines draped with snow from the whole land only a secret footfall teases the senses awake like white breath on white canvas. Ideal forms crowd the auditorium. The sky deepens on the surface of a lake, in a cradle of stars. A coppice of isolated birch trees climbs the mountainside to touch the moon's scar, benevolent witness washed of color and fragmentary illuminating the village below.   . . . . . In New World poetry, an invisible river runs this way and that. A car(t) eases on a bumpy track over small hills and into shallows. The world is a tangle of leaves. Towards sundown a driver gets out and pushes into the forest, drawn by a noise he cannot identify: perhaps the hiss of water below. It's only the river on its way. Ideal forms crowd the auditorium things present and things past scattered beneath the poinciana. The car heads into higher country then out into space where fields suddenly lie down beneath the seer cattle pastures and agricultural lands that have always been there watched over by the great house from its hilltop, like a sentinel. . . . . . In British poetry, the forms of desire darken with the change of seasons: green leaves once they fade and turn gold and fall to earth, and make a carpet in the forest, awaiting the rain. For each season has its sonata. Silence and sound in balance belong to the decline of autumn. In winter the notes are fewer. Silence comes into its kingdom crown of the father, who departs. The world of white prepares to conquer the earth with silence.   . . . . . In British poetry, articulate hues speak as they are visible to the mind audible colors played on a piano primary sounds in an empty forest. And then above a lake, the moon in motion suspended like a dancer as the music temporarily ceases depriving her body of its rhythm. . . . . . Ideal forms crowd the auditorium. The light of day starts to fade and a mist settles in the valleys. The great house is lit from within.   . . . . . As they were, in other windows you want to see their ghosts the slaves, like black posts staggered through the fields. You want to make a picture that shows the strange overlords at intervals watch the misery of torsos laboring to plant and harvest the seas of sugar. . . . . . The green beds of sugar cane extend from here to the hills. Bright heads grazed by the light of paradise become its negative.   . . . . . In time, would the land irritate us as it must have irritated the masters the tropical caress of the air unavoidable getting up each day to see once more the rolling green hills and cattle ponds tranquil in the valleys, the horses collected at the water trough, content to stand or to walk over the grass.   A comely scene worthy of an oil painting (fruit trees dappled with sunlight). They have escaped from seasons into the monotony of a terrible beauty. (Who is speaking?) . . . . . Away from the coast the car passes through a shadowy green world of tropical syntax ragged slopes and curves.   . . . . . What then was promised by the evening lights that spangled about the hills?   . . . . . Endless tall grasses, a landscape composed of variations on a color. The after-image of elliptical forms transparent as the cry of a seagull. . . . . . A tablet of scripted exclamations: there, a poinciana with pink blossoms overhangs the road, there a scrawl of fighting tendrils, an indigo grammar of petals offering illumination to fan-shaped pristine hieroglyphs waving to greener punctuations of banana trees and mango, a tangle of writing over writing closed to further interventions. Visible palimpsest of a book without letters the tangle of leaves has no secret key and cannot be deciphered, wordless monads travelling contours of silence. . . . . . Mimesis touches the world with an imperceptible tenderness, only hardly like wind an Aeolian harp. . . . . . There is a point when the sky pivots to face the dawn, to face the dark side of personality, that of a sensible man recanting the mysteries he embraced as a youth, when the angels spoke to him and he ran towards them with arms wide open across a field, beneath the painted stars. . . . . . Say that the world is a drinking glass containing things of the life and language and say that a poet wakes up one morning thinking of capturing for the future those petals inside that glass, broken vowels. A vase of orchids stands on a kitchen table. Not that it is abstract, or a luminous symbol, nonetheless it is an algebra of forces, like the equations of space-time, which rule outside the mental universe.  As if an image should leave its mirror behind (the thing of which it is but a ghost) like bodiless speech, and yet sensuous, in the way a dream can leave its mark on the dreamer—Esse est percipi, so speaketh the Law. Wind begins to touch an Aeolian harp. The great house is a place of articulation word calls to other words, in transit. Compelled by the beauty of flowers the mind creates a space for other things. . . . . . (By British I mean Romantic idealist.) Warm night descends like a cloak. The whistle of tree frogs supplies a melody, and crickets invisible to the moon begin their Parliament. The birds sleep with their young. The air is otherwise still.
I thought to write an elegy as reply to your questions to pitch the word as far forward like a dolphin out of the sea over a threshold, to behold the land as practical and green as this table, a space to write and walk into like a kitchen hearing the conjuct vowels what does a reader suppose if not the promise of a text the ultimate form at the end of a chain of forms infinite summed to a singular value the elegy as a place to begin.
. . . . . Before the astronomer's table a circle with a demon inside demons with wings of a bat (Before the astronomer's table) overhead like an armada of ships . . . . . Time of the weed, time of bramble along the bank of a canal muddy with old newspaper close-held surface to write on to dance as with desire black letters where roads meet . . . . . Tonight in the city, only the chains make soft noises like bells only the dogs are awake the fences lean over to scrape their elbows on stone and broken glass
We trekked into a far country, My friend and I. Our deeper content was never spoken, But each knew all the other said. He told me how calm his soul was laid By the lack of anvil and strife. “The wooing kestrel,” I said, “mutes his mating-note To please the harmony of this sweet silence.” And when at the day’s end We laid tired bodies ’gainst The loose warm sands, And the air fleeced its particles for a coverlet; When star after star came out To guard their lovers in oblivion— My soul so leapt that my evening prayer Stole my morning song!
Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I— Ah, how poets sing and die!
Gay little Girl-of-the-Diving-Tank, I desire a name for you, Nice, as a right glove fits; For you—who amid the malodorous Mechanics of this unlovely thing, Are darling of spirit and form. I know you—a glance, and what you are Sits-by-the-fire in my heart. My Limousine-Lady knows you, or Why does the slant-envy of her eye mark Your straight air and radiant inclusive smile? Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning. The bull-necked man knows you—this first time His itching flesh sees form divine and vibrant health And thinks not of his avocation. I came incuriously— Set on no diversion save that my mind Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds In the presence of a blind crowd. The color of life was gray. Everywhere the setting seemed right For my mood. Here the sausage and garlic booth Sent unholy incense skyward; There a quivering female-thing Gestured assignations, and lied To call it dancing; There, too, were games of chance With chances for none; But oh! Girl-of-the-Tank, at last! Gleaming Girl, how intimately pure and free The gaze you send the crowd, As though you know the dearth of beauty In its sordid life. We need you—my Limousine-Lady, The bull-necked man and I. Seeing you here brave and water-clean, Leaven for the heavy ones of earth, I am swift to feel that what makes The plodder glad is good; and Whatever is good is God. The wonder is that you are here; I have seen the queer in queer places, But never before a heaven-fed Naiad of the Carnival-Tank! Little Diver, Destiny for you, Like as for me, is shod in silence; Years may seep into your soul The bacilli of the usual and the expedient; I implore Neptune to claim his child to-day!
Maker-of-sevens in the scheme of things From earth to star; Thy cycle holds whatever is fate, and Over the border the bar. Though rank and fierce the mariner Sailing the seven seas, He prays, as he holds his glass to his eyes, Coaxing the Pleiades.   I cannot love them; and I feel your glad Chiding from the grave, That my all was only worth at all, what Joy to you it gave. These seven links the Law compelled For the human chain— I cannot love them; and you, oh, Seven-fold months in Flanders slain!   A jungle there, a cave here, bred six And a million years, Sure and strong, mate for mate, such Love as culture fears; I gave you clear the oil and wine; You saved me your hob and hearth— See how even life may be ere the Sickle comes and leaves a swath.   But I can wait the seven of moons, Or years I spare, Hoarding the heart’s plenty, nor spend A drop, nor share— So long but outlives a smile and A silken gown; Then gaily I reach up from my shroud, And you, glory-clad, reach down.
Long, too long America, Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only, But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not, And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are, (For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—  On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands— There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with the one pulse (Somebody stopped the moving stairs): Time was away and somewhere else. And they were neither up nor down; The stream’s music did not stop Flowing through heather, limpid brown, Although they sat in a coffee shop And they were neither up nor down. The bell was silent in the air Holding its inverted poise— Between the clang and clang a flower, A brazen calyx of no noise: The bell was silent in the air. The camels crossed the miles of sand That stretched around the cups and plates; The desert was their own, they planned To portion out the stars and dates: The camels crossed the miles of sand. Time was away and somewhere else. The waiter did not come, the clock Forgot them and the radio waltz Came out like water from a rock: Time was away and somewhere else. Her fingers flicked away the ash That bloomed again in tropic trees: Not caring if the markets crash When they had forests such as these, Her fingers flicked away the ash. God or whatever means the Good Be praised that time can stop like this, That what the heart has understood Can verify in the body’s peace God or whatever means the Good. Time was away and she was here And life no longer what it was, The bell was silent in the air And all the room one glow because Time was away and she was here.
In the first taxi he was alone tra-la, No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride. In the second taxi he was alone tra-la But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure You have left nothing behind tra-la between you’. In the third taxi he was alone tra-la But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes. As for the fourth taxi, he was alone Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked Through him and said: ‘I can’t tra-la well take So many people, not to speak of the dog.’
It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one; World is other and other, world is here and there, Parmenides would smother life for lack of air Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks— No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes, Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights, All your foes are friends and all your days are nights And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball. The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives And nothing that we do, make or become survives, His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white All-white Universal, refusing to allow Division or dispersal—Eternity is now And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see Postulating a dumb static identity Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt, Action along with error, growth along with gaps; If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse. No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year, That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because It is something that began and is not what it was, Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled, Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world, Its entity a denial of all that is not it, Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit, An absolute and so defiant of the One Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done, Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought. World is not like that, world is full of blind Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind, Swollen or diminished according to the dice, Foaming, never finished, never the same twice. You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form— Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained, Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained, Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet Would not be worth achieving if the world were set Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb World should find its voice for good and God become Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means Something but must fall unless there intervenes Between that meaning and the matter it should fill Time’s revolving hand that never can be still. Which being so and life a ferment, you and I Can only live by strife in that the living die, And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim Only to what a bird can find within the frame Of momentary flight (the value will persist But as event the night sweeps it away in mist). Man is man because he might have been a beast And is not what he was and feels himself increased, Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget The means within the end and man is truly man In that he would transcend and flout the human span: A species become rich by seeing things as wrong And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong. Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world, Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux, Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux And so he must continue, raiding the abyss With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss, Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick, Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate, Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate, But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour, Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch, Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.
Stuck pat with strawberry magnets to her sub-zero are all the stages: gill slits, lungs, sex—stopped at the third month, when the fetus is sucked out into a clear plastic bag. Reaching in for a quick soda, you can almost feel that flexible wind on your face. The fetus (named Jennifer, it says) develops in color-photo sequence till the second trimester, when (more bold-face) the kid's a murder victim, in cold blood, of Mom. You beckon to nothing: milk cartons, cans, stand in the chill blast of the suction door and grab your Sprite. Day and night she stands outside the clinics with the other Lifers. My advice: don't take her on. I once learned phylogeny provides intelligent options—but survival does not always select for insight. Down the line: there's a smug printed sign talking up adoption: Right. So, knocked up, I'd owe my body to an forgiving god, who'd swallow my offspring t00? Here's a fat man rattling a blood red genie in a pickle jar. No wedding ring. See that woman, head bent—they're hurrying her through the police cordon, past the screaming faces? I've walked where she's walking now— and where she lies now, I once lay, behind that secured door, near that white waiting table. My mind divided, momentarily, as if the world were just birth or no birth, what I could or could not do and still seem human to myself. Who first fixed in my head that slashed membrane between life and death? (I'd go toe-to-toe against her, but she stops me cold with her small, past due figure of remorse.) God, what next? she asks, leaning against her icebox, her T-shirt shouting how she pities the unborn. So do I. But not as much as I pity her, quickening with hate. And love: for those would-be lives inbred to a set of family gestures. One day on our way to the frog pond we take my daughter's hands, saying nothing—one on each side. She asks me why I don't see what she believes. I want to say I do, I see through all the cross- wielding apologists to why she, alone in her kitchen, grieves. It's sad. The big frogs croak like TV preachers pad to pad. But look: at the pond rim she points out tadpoles—hundredsm ink-black, legless. See? we both say. My daughter kneels, tries to cup them in her fist, but they're too fast. Born again and again into the limits of our perception, they swim intuitively, the way we think. She calls that revelation. We're surrounded by the bull chorus, a booming, backlit percussion. Call it revelation
The earth has feelings some killed others in its mud and it has lots of mud The earth builds a scrapyard, a sequence of them to tell of this, a seam on its embalmed glabella future galaxies caress The earth knows André Breton, compiles ingenuous personalities in its fevered correspondence Out of its winding sheet rolodex the earth erodes another name, your name Beware, the earth prepares to say one final time, construction eclipses It hoped to say nothing further and then was disappointed, its hope misplaced it knew deep down Say more, you say, the earth had hoped you would Express as little as possible with your furniture, find the little that is as near to nothing as can be The monuments unpictured drift up like watermarks through the odor of the lens You make things happen all the time, says the earth, take my advice look the other way
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we   protested but not enough, we opposed them but not   enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America   was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.   I took a chair outside and watched the sun.   In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money   in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us)   lived happily during the war.
Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep. Once meek, and in a perilous path, The just man kept his course along The vale of death. Roses are planted where thorns grow, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees. Then the perilous path was planted: And a river and a spring On every cliff and tomb; And on the bleached bones Red clay brought forth. Till the villain left the paths of ease, To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes. Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility, And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
I confess to these feet, tethered to the earth, pulled down by force every time I jump or try to fly. Like you, an old tree sentenced us, keeps your wings  under lock and key  so we’ll bicker with the birds over scraps of weather and the privilege to sing or be seen. In the dark, we scavenge midnight, make chains out of stars and bracelet shame. My biggest crime, I could not trust. I confess, I shut myself off from the one I needed and loved most. I confess, I could not be woken or accept myself to the river’s basin to be washed. I’m dirty, scratching love notes on the wall. Tonight, outside, winter, subzero. Too cold to snow. The neighbor next door shooting phantom deer with a handgun, his beagle tied to a tree. Over wooden bowls, we count, we’ve become experts at counting. When did we make each other serial? The keys froze in the ignition: tonight the moon rises  from a ravine, a spice drawer of pickled ferment to feast. For us it’s only surveillance: under surveillance we interrogate each other’s mouths, pursue every laugh and cry as they twist and turn through our time, as we investigate and ransack our dog-rabbit-wolf shadows, the half ones, the whole ones, and cross-examine every intent, put hidden taps to choice appendages. In the basement, we de-crimson our one last apple, cut a tunnel through the core,  truss ourselves in aromatics, climb in and out to the garden: among the capable trees, the not-degraded weeds, the flowers released, arrested in light, we stand on strong enduring feet, confess, captives of earth, to the heart, aflame, the source— across this iced plain— the only material witness.
An hour inland from Bangor, Maine, over rolling hills, in an oval pasture surrounded by giant conifers, the forest floor bejeweled with ruby-studded mushrooms, I watch the sheep sing, if bleating could be called a song. Maybe someone in a grove long ago saw a man attached to a beast of burden and so the concept of the satyr was born. Memory is the past reversed. I once went out with a sailor, a Spaniard, from Andalucía. We met at sea where I worked the roulette wheel in the ship’s casino. His legs were slightly bowed, his voice gruff and torn, and when he came the sound seemed to climb up not from his throat but from his feet smelling of earth and sea and grief— a deep song Lorca called duende. It wasn’t pretty. His blue and red and purple briefs soaking in a bucket by the cabin door. He told me once when he was a boy his grandmother had caught him trying to fuck a chicken. The poor chicken, he laughed, his saddle-worn Andalucían laugh, feathers flying everywhere, his grandmother screaming. And what to call those half-human, half-chicken kinds of days: scratching and clawing at the earth, bathed in dust, trying not to think about the simmering anise, peppercorn, and broth. When I visited him, he met me at the airport. Then the long train  ride south through field after field of sunflowers. Por la tarde families paraded, por la noche, only men and boys and extranjeras—foreign women— out past sunset. In an empty disco six or seven guys danced, throwing themselves around madly, slamming into each other to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Franco had died a few years back. From my window that night, a full moon, shadows of the town square, the boarded-up cathedral, a cat in heat, the smell of blood oranges. In the morning his grandmother, all in black, asleep stooped in a chair outside my door. Nearby the ruins of an ancient Roman temple, goats on hind legs eating the pale green leaves from olive trees.
I loved this tree. South of San Antonio, west of the heart, growing in the ravines of the Pecos River inside me, down across the Rio Grande and up into the Llano’s staked plains, tree of memory, tree of ghosts, tree of rain— under birdsong whispers you cradled me in your canopy. When I was a baby, I stroked the soft hair on your leaves. You were my first true church, and when rains came our whole bodies shook and shimmered with God’s words. You let me bury  all my secrets in your dirt and sleep in your altar as we drifted through stars. Forgive me, Tree, for humiliating you. I kicked at your bark. Spit on you. Tree, I cut you  and carved cruel words on you in reverse in my rough, crooked cursive, with a rusted green knife I stole from a bitch, scarring your sacred skin. I burned you with a lighter shaped like a cowboy boot, left bird dogs tied to you for days on end, let drill sergeants in training from the nearby base lash out and practice on you. I let belly-gods, plug-ugly bruisers, devouring cowboys and butchers stuff themselves into me, hog-tie me whole and slap me around as you watched. When I laughed and made animal sounds, I scared you. I chewed you out. Made fun of you. I used toxins and poisons  to make you immaculate. I wanted you perfect. I nailed a no-trespassing sign and a big security light to your side. I sold pieces of you off. I abandoned you. I abandoned myself. All around us the underground world overflows with love. Season after season you return, sap rising up from your roots, unfinished, always becoming. I defended against love for as long as I could until I couldn’t.You no longer have to hide your self in your deepest self.You no longer need the ones you thought you most needed. I know I am not good at this, or anything really, but I’m trying.Roll on, roll on, roll on— Tonight, I’m wearing a red dress, under a man’s honeyed mouths and tent. Your red flowers open and crown and cover us in a Sunday of pollens. And when I press my ear to your thickness, to your heart, I hear: bells, bells, bells.
To be a disco ball dangling in a storefront window, in the sun, with a cage on
 it. To be two and three disco balls, downtown McAllen, spangles of sun and
 water that grew tangerine skins late February, pink bottlebrush nostrils, buff-bellied hummingbirds. To be mirrors and hexagonal combs, mexican honey
 wasps, larvae, paper, wax. To make geometry without vocabulary, to be live 
music—take off your jacket, girl, wear your tank top . . . it's ninety degrees! To be a green light go, downtown Corpus, after cars and trucks zooming on beach
 sand, before hot tubs. To be an orange sun driving from Anzaldúa's grave, to
 be a cactus bloom fuchsia, opuntia, Laguna Atascosa, Laguna Madre, to be a
 watering hole, a mud chimney air vent for crawdad water tunnels. To be a silver lizard run over by tires, a swatch of river on asphalt, to be a bolt loosened from 
the border wall, to be a peso falling out of the border crossing's revolving slot, 
to be a coke-bottle dove, a mexican coca-cola, a cooing quorum of lotería cards
 signing a resolution. To be a goose perched on top of an abandoned sink in a yard, in a town that fords the river, to be the woman stretched on her beloved's grave, returned after decades. To be a kid in juvie, to be her guardian, the judge, 
the p.o., to be the letters she writes, the words that matter more than food, almost as much as music and more than makeup, nearly suns seen through the mandatory skylight, imagined by the control room monitor. To be el chalán, the last hand-drawn ferry on the river, its ropes pulled by pilots, to be a passenger
 almost on the other side.
With el río grande~bravo  in our face This river  at its mouth  at its source With you at its source  its sources With you at the snow  the evergreens The million earth holes  of water emerging  emerald Snakes, Gloria Anzaldúa's  grave With this river  on our face Neon green anole  swells its throat  pink-white El río bravo~  grande on its face Ocelots hunt  under six  foot shrub  canopies With the drive  of the Continental Divide  with the pull  of tributaries  in their limbs Chicharras  whining in the shade  rivers  in their timbals Females laying eggs  in branches   The young border patrol officer  flashes sirens daily  lifts his gun  with the river  on his face Upriver, Chihuahua  desert ancestors'  adobe bricks stand up  crumble down With el río grande~bravo  on our face You said you loved  the river  on my face You said headwaters  the source  el río grande  rises from its source  saw the lines around  our mouths  saw adobe-brick lines  exposed Monsoon season  granizo pelting  the facades  at its source  in my mouth  adobe mud  bricks in my mouth  the earth  holes, the sources  the snow  avalanches  granizo  Río Conchos de México  grandmothers'  Cueva de la Olla  at our face  Tarahumara  Rarámuri Tidal confluences  in our face Some crossed  with nuns during la  revolución el río bravo~grande  on their face Relatives  disappear  die detained  with tributaries  of many rivers on their face In Ciudad Juárez, a mother hoped  her missing daughter  married a rich American  with the river far away Constant helicopters finding heat  with the river as the source To the west, crossers lift the tortilla  curtain Walk deserts without water  on their face Guanajuato ancestors crossed through Cali  with mirages  in their face While I shower daily with el valle river water on my face Thank you and kiss you daily Julia de Burgos with el Río Grande de Loíza Puerto Rico in your face Julia I can now speak of hurricanes and being a dog at someone's feet I remember El Paso's Inca doves  burrowing owls in the morning  barn owls in El Valle's cemeteries  great horned owl and mockingbirds  Harris hawks and pauraques vecinos carrying signs  two communities  "¡No al muro!" "¡Segundo Barrio no se vende!"  with the river on their face A daughter and mother want their ashes  scattered  at Boca Chica  the river's mouth  the end, the start  another source  crabs collapsing  into bullets bursting out of holes  carrizo, bugambilia  seeds petals paper  rose  raspas  the mouth  the eddies  the tributaries  the flow  Río Conchos de México  the snow  granizo  the pelts  the sources  rising The confluence of people and god  tortugas  ribbon snakes in Roma  pigs and piglets jumping  from banks with the river on their face  You can hear roosters  crowing across  the water in Miguel Alemán Hurricanes  disturb unsettled graves with the river in our face You said you don't want archaic chains  lowering you loudly with obvious labor six feet in You want to hear the cool chachalacas  with the river on their legs  flapping  from ébano to ébano  el chalán  the ropes  the pull  over green  water  under  blue sky  to Díaz Ordaz I want to hear parrots  sabal palms  try again With the river on our face  I want no medicine  no ambition  with the river in my face I used to love you  with the river in my face I stil love you  when the river's on my face I made a foot-deep grave  with the river on my face I loved other rivers  with el río grande~bravo on my face I want to oxbox lake  in this place where children stil speak and lose  multiple tongues  in this place where we still lose and grow  forked tongues  this place where white herons hunt and drink in the resacas  this place with el río grande~bravo  in its pipes  in its lungs  in our face
A river killed a man I loved, And I love that river still —María Meléndez 1. Thousands of fish killed after Pemex spill in el Río Salado and everyone runs out to buy more bottled water. Here, our river kills more crossers than the sun, than the singular   heat of Arizona, than the ranchlands near the Falfurrias checkpoint. It's hard to imagine an endangered river with that much water, especially in summer and with the Falcon Reservoir   in drought, though it only takes inches to drown. Sometimes, further west, there's too little river to paddle in Boquillas Canyon where there are no steel-column walls   except the limestone canyon's drop and where a puma might push-wade across, or in El Paso, where double-fenced muros sparkle and blind with bullfight ring lights, the ring the concrete river mold, and above   a Juárez mountain urgesLa Biblia es La Verdad—Leela.   2. Today at the vigil, the native singer said we are all connected by water, la sangre de vida.   Today, our vigil signs proclaimed McAllen is not Murrieta.#iamborderless. DerechosInmigrantes=DerechosHumanos. Bienvenidos niños.We stand with refugee children.We are all human. Bienvenidosa los Estados Unidos.   And the songs we sang the copal that burned and the rose petals spread en los cuatro puntos were for the children and women and men. Songs   for the Guatemalan boy with an Elvis belt buckle and Angry Birds jeans with zippers on back pockets who was found shirtless in La Joya, one mile from the river. The worn jeans   that helped identify his body in the news more times than a photo of him while alive. (I never knew why the birds are angry. My mother said someone stole their eggs.)   The Tejas sun took a boy I do not know, a young man who wanted to reach Chicago, his brother's number etched in his belt, his mother's pleas not to leave in white rosary beads   he carried. The sun in Tejas stopped a boy the river held. Detention centers filled, churches offer showers and fresh clothes. Water and a covered porch may have waited at a stranger's house   or in a patrol truck had his body not collapsed. Half of our bodies are made of water, and we can't sponge rivers through skin and release them again like rain clouds. Today   at the vigil the native singer sang we are all connected by water, la sangre de vida.
After Walt Whitman A last formality is running late, as a life can't, this hot day. The final ethereal glow of the sun seems to come up from underfoot in this parkland of polysyllabic death.   These deep graves, two this time, neatly cut into the earth, await the arrivals, and two adjacent heaps of damp fertile glebe are half blanketed by reticent dark tarpaulins. After the full moon's first moments of horizon-magnified fact and risen largesse, it has contracted as our heaven has passed it by and now it floats above the crowns of the inky trees and well beyond bare roofs. It has always been an entity born dead—not a phantom, as must be this son, a muddy part of whom soared from cratered waste lands far away before landing here, and also this veteran father, whose heart staggered into an ER and failed after he heard what circumstance had done to his one boy.   No horses—hearses, the first two cars. A corps of six men— they bear the heavy coffined corpse of the father toward his very small opening in the planet; and six more envoys of duty, with much-practiced attentiveness, slow-step the light son, an imperfect cadaver with handles, to his own last place. White gloves lift up the draped famed cloth, super-striped and starry, from the younger casket, fold it just so— hands with hands over hands in ritual honor, a ceremony neither of mystical creed nor of doubter's midnights—then they advance it to the one who remains. She's looking away from her burials, down at the blades of moon grass. She feels no great gut blows from startled convulsive big drums that shake the spirits of mourners, nor any whirring of equally perilous small drums that might reduce the silence. The son is submitted as lifeless organism to dirt; the father’s remains descend into his pit alongside, likewise on tightly held ropes men slowly let slip. (In foremost ranks of a final unbecoming these two fell alike.) The ropes snake back up into what's left of natural light— remainder of the ancient calculus of day and night. From a boom box ten paces away, the familiar bugled notes say that the journey of these remains is done. Even if no grief shadows the bugler, bugles do sound it, word it—that unacceptable sentence of slow notes.    Distant, on overtime, respectful, yet much too near, a stranger waits to start up a backhoe. On such occasions, after courage of soldiers or folly of command or cold wrong purposes among patriarchs, lords, kings, and freed madness in red valleys, mountains, cities, villages, in schools, shrines, sheds, beds, mud-brick hearts, we have offered up our mortally wounded, un- comprehending remembrance. We look down or away and notice the impassive grass under our bloody weight.
My father came down not killed from among others, killers or killed, for whom he'd worn a uniform, and he lived a long afterward,   a steady man on the flattest of plains. I called after him many times, surprised when I heard the catch in my own voice. He didn't know how to find the solace   of listening to someone else speak of what he'd seen and survived. He himself closed his own mouth against his own words.   In the wrong sequence, his spirit, then his mind, and last his body crossed over that infamous, peat-inky, metaphorical water that has no far shore.   I think he was carried like a leaf in currents so gentle that a duckling, had it been alive, could have braved them, but too strong for a leaf. And saturated   with minerals that steadily replaced organic cells, the water turned my father, an ex-soldier, to leaf-delicate stone inscribed with the axioms of countless veins.
—Seoul, Korea 1971 Father gave her a little extra. How could she not    fall for him? He was handsome   but still a boy. In the depot where soldiers    took such women, his skinny body clung   too close to hers and his narrow ass still    belonged to his mother. The other men   knew the routine and how much to pay.    She loathed their accent and American swagger.   The sweat would barely cool and dry    before another shook the cot and bucked his hips   out of rhythm—in some other time zone.      However, he began to offer other things   besides money. He brought sweets from the base    and the minute he touched his pocket   the face she reserved for his English crumbled    like sweet toffee. Because he didn't know how   to say what he wanted to say, no time    was spent on uneasiness. Chocolate,   caramel and peanuts spoke best, secured    his place. He hooked his arms through hers as if   they could stroll the lane like an ordinary couple:    the unassuming black and the Korean whore   in the middle of the Vietnam War.
—Cincinnati, Ohio, 1972 Dear Sister,   America.   Late nights, we lie under the spread and listen to the stereo jazz sounds of WTKO on the FM station. He says I am so fine in my tight, pulled-back and strapless bed-sheet gown. Imagine, the polyester with sequins. A sultry Dinah Washington.  Turn. He puts a pillow on his stomach, a finger to his lips and blows — he can do a Louis like nobody else.Turn, to the Golden Oldies. Sometimes, he calls me his favorite Supreme or his one and only Apollo showgirl.   With the switch of a dial, we move in unison. In the infinite dark, our flickering stations turn.
—an Ode to Bob Ross When I was younger, I watched the world blend  on PBS. The painter with the Jewfro hypnotized me.   With a thumb hooked through the palette,  he painted forward from the base coat like a god might use a blueprint.  Behind the image is always the word: light. On top came tiny crisscross strokes  of phthalo blue. A rapturous pinwheel of words   unveiled sky. Two sharp strokes of titanium white  slashed with gray from the master's knife became wings, gulls taking flight. I begged for nothing  but paints that summer. Already equipped -with an afro, I sat before the paper and the cakes of color  and tried to figure out the path to cerulean, the wrist twist to evergreens and the motion  for clouds. The oversaturated paper dried and cracked   with the fine lines of lightning. The worlds he reproduced  might as well have been Asgard or Olympus. How I longed for a visit. Might he come  armed with a fan brush and dressed in a button down?   To be soothed by his voice and taken,  lured from the dining-room table and shown   the suburb's majesty. Look son, he might say,  at the pile of autumn leaves, the shade   on that forest-green trash bag. Using his two-inch brush  he'd blend the prefab homes on the hill until they seemed mysterious, folded hues  of Prussian blue, Van Dyke brown, and a blaze of alizarin crimson.
—Cincinnati, Ohio, 1987 Rage is the language of men,  layers of particulates fused.    Rage is the wine  father pours to the ground    for men whose time has passed. Rage  is gripped in the hands    like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage gets stuck in the throat, suppressed.   Rage is a promise kept.
It's not about the sex, really, it's not the ache of the bruised nipple or the burn left by his two-day-old beard in the crook of my neck where the pulse is taken, it's his breathing when asleep that draws me near. When I was seventeen, I'd check beside me, hope I hadn't rolled and squashed flat my one-year-old brother. His sigh on my ear, the rise and fall of air beneath his ribs, was a miracle to me. The nightly surprise of what I saw under the bulb's dim glow: I saw the small heart beating like wings unfolding in the body. Here, with this man, ideas of flight return.
Where am I going today if I'm going anywhere at all without my soul, that bird with its unreadable, unheard name having wandered off again, convinced that it is more than just a word— do we travel far from each other today?— me in my pre-owned Mazda with my radio full of wasps' nest news, my Peshawar & my Rupert Murdoch, all my guilty Murdochs— my destination like a homestead made of fallen maple leaves, the three leaves that form a tipi tipped together by a 5-year-old's hands, a dwelling place, where if I wanted to I could rest my human rights while my soul travels far from its base, lost for a while on its own highly privatized trip, the idea of living forever an idea that is not an eternity at all for my wanderer but a wish the bird has to fly brocaded by herself within the borders of a tapestry, far from some witch queen's cackle, far from that witch who has disguised herself as a sparhawk woven out of dark thread by a Flemish peasant's hands—  how far is too far, you ask?— a little foolishness goes a long, long way, I'd say; a lot drops dead in its tracks.
I fed my father what as it turned out the future would call his last meal (tho at the time neither he nor I was required to think it that exactly)— ground chourico & chopped green pepper open-faced on a burger bun, french fries, a cupcake with icing almost chocolate in flavor—alarming, a departure from his diet of low-sodium, zeroed-out trans fats & sugar-free vegetables with high fiber- scores, suffering as he had been for years from barbarian cholesterol & geriatric diabetes (the nurse shrugged simply & said "why not?"— meaning of course that we should get it, all of us, he was going to die, and soon). A few loose chitters of ground sausage fell onto his johnnie from the fork I lifted to his mouth—they left tiny, paprika-red dots of oil on the sheer cotton, prussic red, corpuscle red like the small scabs my sister and I had left on his face while helping him shave the day before. A week earlier I had visited him at home; the day an unusually warm day in a March unusually cold. He was telling me how he'd gone out into the yard to get some sun only to return minutes later to the house, the wind far too strong— he said he worried that if the wind took his hat from his head, he might die while chasing it. I made a joke—forced to, I thought—chasing a hat, I said, that might be a better death than most, I said maybe the death certificate would read "killed by the wind." He laughed all right. You know, he said, you've really got a lousy sense of humor. Better than nothing, I guess—(did he say that, or did I think it?). Later he said . . . he'd said earlier . . . then I said . . . he said . . . I said . . . I said . . . I said . . . Say now that this might be all that's left for consolation, this might be love at the end, the confidences exchanged— all these pratfalls, & this skin chapped by a blade, and your willing servant's shaky hands, then a short trip to be washed a last, finally blameless time (so the scriptures say) in the blood of the lamb: a smell like the smell of sweetgrass burning crosswise the length of a dry plain and sent by a wind whose swiftness has in it the bright voices of kindergarteners, children born of a hardship town.
to Simone Wandering off under those astrological signs charted just for you, my quiet trekker—all those houses & planets so perfectly straight-faced but still baffling at birth—don't think badly of me when I'm dead & you've gone deep into the distance of love tangles, moneyed interests, & old-fashioned commutes—into life in other words—I did what I could for you, knowing it might not be enough—I see now that I can't save you from suffering, & trying to hurts if I'm not kind. Tho I still want your life to be untroubled, & am afraid for you, a fear made out of my own fear of a future I can't control— the world so often a human heart that eats itself— places like New Orleans the Swat Valley Fukushima— the names of those remote destinations for film crews and symposium panels are places people die native to those regions & out to kill or defend life from itself—there is so much misery there that refuses to call itself misery & that sees itself instead as the unimpeachable power of a righteous day. And there are criminals & dunces elsewhere— hideous partyline whips, Saxon in outlook and proud of it—there are the bodysnatched and the inane candy-stripers & the greedy and the martini narcissists high on the rising year— but let's take the long view: these are not your true companions, & out of my reach your life will make itself in struggle & love perhaps dependent on the strength that will come if I only let go when you step out the door as hazel-eyed now as always & maybe more so this morning in slate-gray Gore-Tex.
"I see you," she says— one of the flickering homeless with gray alehouse hair, pale blue   eyes, crunchy lips—a methadone- troubled moth by the YMCA—but who does she see?—is it   the chubby, right-handed schoolboy sent out by the nuns at St. Joseph's to clap   the chalkboard erasers clean? Or the giddy teenage shipping clerk at lunch break   smoking pot for the first time behind a curtain factory shed? Perhaps the middle-aged   mortgagee? Maybe an ex- proofreader in lawyerland or betraying husband? Maybe the good loser? How about   the new father smiling in tears? Why not the complainer's   ally, or the devoted wanker, or the inert doubter, or the annoyancer   or toddler?— if not the circumspect bald man, crank, or   unselfish lecturer— or does she see each of them?— maybe each   would like a lantern to carry; tho there are   nowhere near enough lamps for all.
The American common is no collective or princedom but privacies of need & pleasure as they intersect in public spaces, tho the insufferable powers that be breed their plots behind our backs, thinking us witless, seemingly blind to their afflicted intentions, just a bunch of demographic motormouths & screw-ups to be targeted by commodities traders & search engines— a marketing niche for every need, stereotypes tagged by algorithms—here is a typical team of baton twirlers in an airport bar, each of them clad in foxy red track suits & tuned-in to the dollhouse stimulations of pigeon-talking sales reps; there is a previously undetected aggregation of retirees, evangelical camp kids, kickass bowlers, and mothy nuns in starched wimples, for whom the news of the day means the aging boy-man Hugh Grant's fear of double chins—neither of these or any other data dump entirely false, but so narrow-minded sometimes as to lose sight of us entirely: the midtown lady in Capris, a four-square surgeon off-duty & headed out to play poker, the plumber fly-fishing by the river— a sky of twilight slate now—not a word written on it.
Lucky day still spent wrestling the private problems and obsessions encountered first in your youth but played out now within the spectacle of public aging (tho, strangely, as you age you feel less & less seen by the young, a citizen active in frequencies of light waves increasingly invisible—not even boring to 15-year-olds). Of course, some problems you once had really have vanished—you can sense that as your daughter lays out the tactics crucial to "pre-gaming," her teen friends setting out to get toasted or stoned before house parties, parties at which they've been warned not to drug or drink— no longer a worry for you (except as relates, of course, to your daughter)—you can drink & drug somewhat "it would seem" to your heart's content. Not your style, you say? Not any longer? Still, the urge to lift or get lifted from self-conscious woes hasn't gone away totally, has it? Wanting to be free of your self has always been a mission big in your church—evangelically so! You got in a way (the wrong way) your wish— your skin certainly got looser on you—baggy, rounder, wrinkled—prescriptions for departure—the rigging's untuned, & no milk bath full of rose hips can compensate (so your friend likes to say), no fish oil omega-3 in gel capsules manufactured by entrepreneurial ex-hippies no wifely fruit smoothies or mod boots will cure jowls now or allow for glamour without the costume.
There's a word you've met but once and now forgotten  for the spoon-shaped concave under your Adam's apple: a small pouch that must be kissed and kissed again  by lovers learning the ins and outs of one another and where last night in the sleeping dark a lone mosquito  inserted itself and drew fresh blood and left venom and a couple of love-bites  then left without waking you although this morning you'll blaze with the minute but unassuageable  pain of them—which only that word that's vanished into the mud of memory might be the right cooling balm for.
What over the gable-end and high up under tangled cloud  that raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate or what the blackbird might intend when chattering among  scattered breadcrumbs or what the bellowing of one cow then another in the near field might mean remains beyond  my ken—being all noise for which no words will manage though all is language settling and unsettling the world  beyond me . . . and yet there’s the dunnock in all its dun colours at work among the small stones and patchy grass  of the driveway and here’s the robin’s aggressive tilt at breadcrumbs and there goes the sudden shriek  of the blackbird . . . all alive inside the inhuman breath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leaf  and blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebbles onto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inch  of the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known pure sense-startling untranslatable there of the world as we find it.
All the trees kept their own counsel without any wind to speak of, until one lone limber pine began gesticulating wildly, as if it suffered from its own inner cyclone.  It was like a lunatic in the courtroom of other trees.  We forgot about the sunset and the dark coming on across the plain.  Then the reason appeared: a mother antelope had twin newborns backed into the tree and fended off a pair of coyotes who darted in and feinted out, knowing she couldn't defend them both.  The girl I was with shrieked, "Do something!"  I thought of the rifle back at the house.  I thought of a litter of coyote whelps in a den somewhere nearby.  I thought of the three-hundred-yard sprint to the tree.  The mother antelope would be first to bolt, and those coyotes would have the aplomb to make off with both twins.  I said no.  The antelope struck out with her forelegs, she butted the coyotes back, until one of them got the chance they had orchestrated and caught a twin and trotted off, dangling it by the nape as gently as if it were her own.
I woke from a bird hitting the window, almost, I thought, hard enough to break it.  The sun rose knowingly.  I slid the sash up and stuck my head out like someone in an Italian movie.  A flicker lay on its back—stunned—but it was blinking steady as a railroad crossing.  Was there misery to put out?  Would it come to its "senses"?  I thought where were you when bark beetles killed half my trees?  Then I remembered, sleepily, reading that flickers mostly eat ants.  I went back to sleep for half an hour, and dreamed, as I often do, of horses.  When next I looked, the bird still lay still, still blinking.  Maybe, I thought, it can't roll over.  So I went down and rolled it over.  Terrified by my touch, it came to life and flop- hopped down the hill into some sagebrush.  It didn't fly, but it didn't seem broken, either.  I tried to find it later.  No luck.  Whether it lived and flew off, or died thrust into a bush, was, apparently, none of my business.  If it were thrust into a bush, I knew the ants wouldn't wait for the guest of honor to start dinner.
Without the manifest necessity of a paint-laden brush, the motion traced by the painter's hand would mimic that moth's fragile desperation against the glass as it seeks escape into the already painted sunset.  It drops to the sill periodically the way the painter's hand would drop to the palette.  Then it sputters back up erratically and zigzags to indicate the horizontal nature of sunsets.  On the other side of the glass, free to the air, a nighthawk enacts the same erratic striving, up and up and down and sideways then up again and falteringly up until it drops, wings folded, suicidally earthward.  It spreads its wings just above the ground for the life- saving aerialist's breathtaking swoop.  Air through feathers (they call it drumming) hums like a wind harp or tissue paper on a comb.   The nighthawk flies like that, erratic as a bat, because that's how moths fly, and that's what nighthawks eat and what they feed their fledglings.  Nighthawks build no nests but lay their eggs on bare ground.  Their camouflage is so perfect you can find them only by accident.  If you are out walking and the mother flies up, pulling that clichéd broken-wing trick, and you mark the spot she rose from, you can find the eggs.  If you go back after they hatch, you can look right at them and think they aren't there—just some small chunks of wood.  So I'm watching this nighthawk and the moth on the glass in their painterly struggles that mirror each other as the sunset reclines, aloof.  This is the only moth I've seen this rainless summer.  The only nighthawk too.  So I open the window and give them both what they want.
On starless, windless nights like this I imagine I can hear the wedding dresses Weeping in their closets, Luminescent with hopeless longing, Like hollow angels. They know they will never be worn again. Who wants them now, After their one heroic day in the limelight? Yet they glow with desire In the darkness of closets. A few lucky wedding dresses Get worn by daughters—just once more, Then back to the closet. Most turn yellow over time, Yellow from praying For the moths to come And carry them into the sky. Where is your mother's wedding dress, What closet? Where is your grandmother's wedding dress? What, gone? Eventually they all disappear, Who knows where. Imagine a dump with a wedding dress on it. I saw one wedding dress, hopeful at Goodwill. But what sad story brought it there, And what sad story will take it away? Somewhere a closet is waiting for it. The luckiest wedding dresses Are those of wives Betrayed by their husbands A week after the wedding. They are flung outside the double-wide, Or the condo in Telluride, And doused with gasoline. They ride the candolescent flames, Just smoke now, Into a sky full of congratulations.
Thirty seconds of yellow lichen.   Thirty seconds of coil and surge,  fern and froth, thirty seconds  of salt, rock, fog, spray.    Clouds   moving slowly to the left—    A door in a rock through which you could see    __   another rock,  laved by the weedy tide.    Like filming breathing—thirty seconds   of tidal drag, fingering  the smaller stones  down the black beach—what color    was that, aquamarine? Starfish spread    their salmon-colored hands.    __      I stood and I shot them. I stood and I watched them  right after I shot them: thirty seconds of smashed sea  while the real sea    thrashed and heaved—    They were the most boring movies ever made. I wanted    to mount them together and press Play.    __      Thirty seconds of waves colliding. Kelp    with its open attitudes, seals  riding the swells, curved in a row    just under the water—    the sea,    over and over.  Before it's over.
But unfortunately it can only travel into the future at a rate of one second per second,   which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me.   But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next moment and to the next.   Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead— well not zipping—And if I try   to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space, unconscious,   then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that. So I stay inside.   There's a window, though. It shows the past. It's like a television or fish tank.   But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim in backward circles.   Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance to see what I'm leaving behind,   and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping.   Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book.   Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting to be found charming.   Me holding a rose though I want to put it down so I can smoke.   Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion   of some dark star all the way back struck hard at mother's mother's mother.   I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow. I thought I'd find myself   an old woman by now, traveling so light in time. But I haven't gotten far at all.   Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like; the past is so horribly fast.
Myself I'm like a dress my mother made me, a fabric self split open with a sigh as I grew and—bewildered or proud   or full of rage—patched with nicer material than we'd had before. I got the sense it was all wasted on me.   But a needle's sharp to pierce, is itself pierced—so as to sew like I was taught. Like I learned: no dress could ever be   beautiful or best if it had me in it. I was the stain in a place we couldn't fix. Having fallen on a slicer of some kind.   Double-seamed, scabbed over, a new body pocket in the pattern. How to stitch up that wound right into the clean vertical rip   in some on-sale flannelette? I'd never again be cold. Skin's holey not holy. In mad winter alone with drink, I think:   tattoo needles don't use thread but ink to mark a place in this ever-moving skin and that wound is ornament. But who   needs a mark to know what's marked? I would pray to the dark in the dark. But what did I ask for, what did I know   to ask for? Nonfatal wounds: they're there when we die, deliquescent, vibrating like a drum skin just after each beat moves off.   A part of music. A way a body keeps time, is time's keeper, vigilant till time up and goes to find another body. Another's warmth   and shelter. Or related injuries. Anyone who hurts another was hurt that same way, so how far back behind our backs do we go   to finally find the first hurt; whose finger points to say, "You! You're the one who god knows why started a cycle of unending pain,"   to someone's child in short pants? A baby just torn a hole in her amnion swirl? And what of me? I can't tell where my flesh   meets the rest of me, ragbag full of rags, shot full of holes but that's just the way cotton and silk and everything I said up till now looks   when it hits the air and is cried on. I'm so inside out I evaporated entirely already as August does, my actual dress shredded at the seams—   unsalvageable. Who would ever love me like this? And just like that, I stopped thinking about it. I agree to meet you at the ferry heading to a place   neither of us wants to go but both just saidsure, I'll go... if you want! We should turn back, nobody said. Oh we should before it's too late,   nobody said again, insistent this time.
I forgot how lush and electrified it was with you. The shaggy fragrant zaps continually passing back and forth, my fingertip to your clavicle, or your wrist rubbing mine to share gardenia oil. We so purred like dragonflies we kept the mosquitoes away and the conversation was heavy, mother-lacerated childhoods and the sad way we'd both been both ignored and touched badly. Knowing that being fierce and proud and out and loud was just a bright new way to be needy. Please listen to me, oh what a buzz! you're the only one I can tell. Even with no secret, I could come close to your ear with my mouth and that was ecstasy, too. We barely touched each other, we didn't have to speak. The love we made leapt to life like a cat in the space between us (if there ever was  space between us), and looked back at us through fog. Sure, this was San Francisco, it was often hard to see. But fog always burned off, too, so we watched this creature to see if it knew what it was doing. It didn't.
The economical ikebana of the lesser octopus is disarming,   a sextopus, holding its intelligence & ink   in a concentrate. Not some sloppy octopus who suddenly   freaks, so princessy, rich. Driven to abstraction not unlike flowers   dropping their petals because petals are garbage off the bloom,   not expensive anymore thus going inside to find meaning.   Cut the eyes, then, from the cruel ikebana of the racehorse—   if a leg breaks she can't bear her own weight,   long-blossomed head turns to glue and the fortune   zooms off like flies from a carcass when shooed.   The tripod fell so I had to cast about for my crutch   to walk over—my bad left knee buckling— to right it.   I want to take a picture of the flowers I arranged   after an ikebana class, just one. I quit quickly   but still hope to learn to arrange beauty classically.   Maybe I'm lazy, or don't apply the rules to myself,   or maybe "laze" is just "zeal" rearranged, as in my case.   Even now, the clock we need to punch out on is too far   away to plug in, so power collects in its hands.
O father bringing home crates of apples, bushels of corn, and skinned rabbits on ice.   O mother boiling lentils in a pot while he watched fight after fight, boxers pinned on the ropes   pummeling each other mercilessly. And hung on the wall where we ate breakfast an autographed photo   of Muhammad Ali. O father who worshipped him and with a clenched fist pretended to be:  Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. O you loved being Muslim then. Even when you drank whiskey.   Even when you knocked down my mother again and again. O prayer. O god of sun.   God of moon. Of cows and of thunder. Of women. Of bees. Of ants and spiders,   poets and calamity. God of the pen, of the fig, of the elephant.  Ta’ Ha’, Ya Sin, Sad, Qaf.  God of my father, listen: He prayed, he prayed, five times a day,   and he was mean.
The phone call, from my wife.She’s hungry, she’s pregnant,someone kicked her  in the stomach—we have to.  I say yes, but the reply I keep to myself is,  We don’t have to do a goddamn thing. A dog. I’m talking about a dog I would have otherwise left to starve.   Now though, five years since, I love this animal, Lucy, more than I can most people.    Ÿ•   A boy names his dog and five cats after our Lucy. The boy, my brother, born in Henry Ford’s hometown,   lives now in Lebanon, which the Greeks called Phoenicia, and they tried but failed   to subdue it, same as the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Arabs,   Crusaders, Turks, the British, the French, the Israelis. There, my father built a house   with money earned in Detroit— as a grocer, with social security. Also there, the first alphabet   was created, the first law school built, the first miracle of Jesus— water, wine.    Ÿ•   On the first day the bombs fall they flee and the boy asks   to go back for Lucy, the dog. As for the cats,No. They take care of themselves.   One week into it he wonders who feeds them, who fills the water bowls.  Maybe the neighbors, the mother thinks out loud. The father is indignant: Neighbors—  what neighbors? They’re gone. The mother is stunned:What do you mean, gone?    After a month, everyone forgets or just stops talking about the animals. During the ceasefire   my father drives south, a thirty-minute trip that lasts six hours—wreckage upon wreckage   piled on the roads, on what is left of the roads. The landscape entirely gray, so catastrophic   he asks a passerby how far to his town and is told,You’re in it.    Ÿ Ÿ•   My father finds three of the cats, all perforated, one headless. The dog is near the carport,   where it hid during lightning storms, its torso splayed in half like meat on a slab, its entrails   eaten by other dogs scavenging on the streets. Look. They’re animals.   Which is to say, there are also people. And I haven’t even begun telling you what was done to them.
1 That’s right, I’m talking to you, not him or her.    2 You have been randomly selected for a security check.   It has nothing to do with you, your physical features, or your name.    3 Do you now belong or have you ever belonged   to a radical political organization? Do you have weapons training?   Have you ever visited a training camp? Did you pack your own bags?    4 You people send your sons and daughters on suicide missions.   You animals, you!    5 If you will please step aside. If you will please remove your shoes.   If you will please come with me. If you will please leave the premises.   If you will please not harm us.    6 May you live in interesting times.    7 As Americans, you know exactly what I’m talking about.   As Americans, you may be subject to this. As Americans, you should be worried.    8 Is it you who are to blame?    9 We cannot help you. There is nothing we can do for you.    10 The agents came looking for you, at your father’s house.    11 They wanted to ask you questions.    12 I heard about you being suspected,   detained, interrogated, jailed without charges,   prosecuted with secret evidence, found not guilty.   There’s no sense in you making a fuss—   they let you go free, didn’t they?    13 Once you begin to see you differently, as separate   from you, wholly other from you,   then you can become like us.    14 What has history made of you?    15 Let’s get to the point: It was always   like looking in the mirror— that face is you. I am you.
Go to the mother, to the father, to the house where no trees grow,   to the bedroom, the door closed, to her fear and to his fear,   and their shame, their longing, and to their bodies, their bodies young,   their bodies separate, their bodies together. How far must you   go back? Her womb. Her child body and his child body.   Go to first hairs. To flesh, chests, arms, faces, buttocks, and stomachs.   There, a wrinkle. There, color, nipples, and bellybuttons.   Go to the eyes, see what she sees and what he sees.   To the fingertips, which want what the eyes have made   their own. Go to want, to love, to what wants more than love.   Go to sins. What are your sins? Go to where the mother   is not mother, the father is not father, and kiss her lips, and kiss his mouth.   Do not be ashamed or afraid. The past is a strange land.   Go because you can. Go because you can come back.
The mother says, I am afraid. The daughter says, I am afraid.   The mother says, My feet are cold. The daughter says, My feet are cold.   The mother says, The car is sinking. The daughter says Yes, the car is sinking.   The mother says, The water is heavy, and the daughter says, The water is very heavy.   The mother says, I am too young for this. The daughter says, I want to grow old.   The mother says, I can see the sky, and the daughter says, I can also see the sky.   How about the moon, the mother says, and the daughter says, I can see the moon.   What else hurts you, the mother says and the daughter says, What about you.   I forgot to tell your father something, the mother says and the daughter says, I forgot to tell my father something.   The mother says, I do not want to die. I do not want to die, the daughter says.   I wanted to be a good mother, the mother says. Sometimes you weren’t, the daughter says.   Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter either, the mother says and the daughter says, I wanted to be good.   I can hear my heart, she says. I can hear my heart, she says.   I wish I loved Jesus, she says and she says, I wish I loved Jesus.   She says, The thud is unbearable. She says, The thud is unbearable.   What do you mean you wish you loved Jesus, she says and she says, The water is dark.   My clothes are getting heavier, she says. Heavier, she says, and heavier.   She says, The water is up to my chin now, and she says, It is up to my chin too.   What if this is the last thing I say to you, she says and she says, What if this is the last thing I say to you.   She says, I cannot hold on much longer. Please, she says, hold on longer.   The water is at my mouth, she says, and she says, Even if it is at your mouth.
Some will call the suicide bomber a coward but seeing him   you think only, Hungry, stumbling as he is toward you,   to the tent where pilgrims stop to eat and drink.   Behind you a woman in a black robe scoops rice with her fingers.   Beside her a girl, restless, runs out onto the dusty two-lane road   that the bomber now crosses. This is happening   at the end of forty days of mourning,   the anniversary a martyrdom. The girl returns breathless   and the mother gives her a glass of clean water.   You watch the ripple down her throat, and out of sunlight   the man approaches— his eyes, like yours, are brown.   Now you hear someone say, Sit, sit. It is the mother talking to the daughter.   And now someone is shouting, and now there is the terrible noise.   Every person is a story. You are the man who walked out   as he walked in, the bomb went off, and you lived to tell.
An assumption, a pejorative, an honest language,an honorable death. In grade school, I refused to accept the mayor’s handshake; he smiled at everyone except people with names like mine. I was born here. I didn’t have to adopt America, but I adapted to it. You understand: a man must be averse to opinions that have adverse impacts on whether he lives or dies. “Before taking any advice, know the language of those who seek to advise you.” Certain wordsaffected me. Sand nigger, I was called. Camel jockey. What was the effect? While I already muttered under my breath, I did so even more. I am notaltogether sure we can all together come. Everything was not all right. Everything is not all right. Imagine poetry without allusions to Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Bible; or allusions without the adjectives “fanatical,” “extremist,” “Islamic,” “right,” “left,” “Christian,” “conservative,” “liberal.” Language written or translated into a single tongue gives the illusion of tradition. A lot of people murder language—a lot fully aware. Among all the dead, choose between “us” and “them.” Among all the names for the dead—mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, child, friend, colleague, neighbor, teacher, student, stranger—choose between “citizen” and “terrorist.” And poet? Immoral, yes, but never amoral? Large amounts, the number between 75 and 90 percent of the estimated 150 million to 1 billion—civilians—killed during wars, over all of recorded human history. Anxious is “worried” or “apprehensive.” American poetry, Americans. Young, I learned anyone born here could become President. Older, I can point to any one of a hundred reasons why this is a lie. Anyway, I don’t want to be President, not of a country, or club, not here or there, not anywhere. He said, “I turned the car around because  it began raining bombs.” There’s no chance of ambiguity— an as here could mean “because” or “when”; it makes no difference—he saw the sky, felt the ground, knew what would come next; it matters little when the heart rate in less than a second jumps from 70 to 200 beats per minute. What they did to my grandfather was awful—its wretchedness, awe-inspiring; its cruelty, terrible; it was awfully hard to forget. Just after 8:46 AM, I wondered awhile what would happen next. At 9:03 AM, I knew there was going to be trouble for a while to come. When in her grief the woman said, “We’re going to hurt them bad,” she meant to say, “We’re going to hurt them badly.” For seventeen days, during air strikes, my grandfather slept on a cot beside a kerosene lamp in the basement of his house. Besides a few days worth of pills, and a gallon of water, he had nothing else to eat or drink. Given these conditions, none of us were surprised that on the eighteenth day, he died. Besides, he was eighty-two years old. I can write what I please. I don’t need to ask, May I? Like a song: men with capital meet in the Capitol in the nation’s capital. Any disagreements, censored; those making them—poets, dissenters, activists—censured. The aftermath, approximately 655,000 people killed. “The Human Cost of War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006,” Bloomsburg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland); School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University (Baghdad, Iraq); in cooperation with the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). The figure just cited—655,000 dead—resulted from a household survey conducted at actual sites, in Iraq, not the Pentagon, or White House, or a newsroom, or someone’s imagination. Of course, language has been corrupted. Look, the President, who speaks coarsely,  says, “We must stay the course.” The problem with “Let your conscience be your guide” is you must first be aware, conscious, of the fact that a moral principle is a subjective thing. I wonder: when one “smokes ’em out of a hole,” if the person doing the smoking is conscious of his conscience at work. Am I fully conscious of how I arrived at this? The continual dissemination of similar images and ideas. The continual aired footage of planes striking the towers, the towers crumbling to the streets, dust, screams, a continuous reel of destruction, fear, as if the attacks were happening twenty-four hours a day, every day, any time. For a while, I couldn’t care less about war. Then I saw corpses, of boys, who looked just like me. This was 1982, at age ten. Ever since, I couldn’t care less why anyone would want it. In 1982, any one of those boys could have been me. Now, it’s any one of those dead men could be me. The Secretary of State offered such counsel to the ambassadors of the world that the United Nations Security Council nodded in favor of war. Criterion easily becomes criteria. Even easier: to no longer require either. The data turned out false. The doctrine of preemption ultimately negated its need. While we both speak English, our languages are so different from each other, yours might as well be Greek to me. When the black man in the park asked, “Are you Mexican, Puerto Rican, or are you Pakistani?” and I said, “I’m Arab,” and he replied, “Damn. Someone don’t like you very much,” I understood perfectly what he meant. The President alluded to the Crusades because of (not due to) a lack of knowledge. Later, he retracted the statement, worried it might offend the Middle East; it never occurred to him the offense taken was due to  the bombs shredding them to bits and pieces. “You areeither with us or with the terrorists” (September 20, 2001). “You’re either with us or against us” (November 6, 2001). The day after, the disc jockey advocated, on air, a thirty-three cent solution (the cost of a bullet) to the problem of terrorists in our midst—he meant in New York; also, by terrorists, I wonder did he know he meant cab drivers, hot dog vendors, students, bankers, neighbors, passersby, New Yorkers, Americans; did he know he also meant Sikhs, Hindus, Iranians, Africans, Asians; did he know, too, he meant Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists; did he realize he was eliciting a violent response, on the radio, in the afternoon? Among those who did not find the remark at all illicit: the owners of the radio station, the FCC, the mayor, the governor, members of the House, the Senate, the President of the United States. Emigrate is better than immigrate. Proof: no such thing as illegal emigration. Further proof: emigration is never an election issue. I heard enthusiastic speeches. They hate our freedoms, our way of life, our this, that, and the other, and so on (not etc). Not everyone agreed every one not “with us” was “against us.” Detroit was farther from home than my father ever imagined. He convinced himself soon after arriving here he had ventured further than he should have. Fewer people live in his hometown than when he left, in 1966. The number, even less, following thirty-four straight days of aerial bombardment.First (not firstly) my father spoke Arabic; second (not secondly) he spoke broken English; third (not thirdly) he spoke Arabic at home and English at work;fourth (not fourthly) he refused to speak English anymore. Not every poem is good. Not every poem does well. Not every poem is well, either. Nor does every poem do good. “To grow the economy” is more than jargon. Can a democracy grow without violence? Ours didn’t. They still plan to grow tomatoes this year, despite what was done. Several men, civilian workers, identified as enemies, were hanged on a bridge, bodies torched, corpses swaying in the breeze. Photographs of the dead were hung with care. I can hardly describe what is going on. Day after day, he told himself, “I am an American. I eat apple pie. I watch baseball. I speak American English. I read American poetry. I was born in Detroit, a city as American as it gets. I vote. I work. I pay taxes, too many taxes. I own a car. I make mortgage payments. I am not hungry. I worry less than the rest of the world. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I eat several types of cuisine on a regular basis. I flush toilets. I let the faucet drip. I have central air conditioning. I will never starve to death or experience famine. I will never die of malaria. I can say whatever the fuck I please.” Even words succumbed; hopefully turned into a kind of joke; hopeful, a slur. However, I use the words, but less, with more care. The President implied compassion; but inferred otherwise. This is not meant to be ingenious. Nor is it ingenuous. The more he got into it, the more he saw poetry, like language, was in a constant state of becoming.Regardless, or because of this, he welcomed the misuse of language. Language is its own worst enemy—it’s the snake devouring its own tail. They thought of us not kind of or sort of but as somewhat American.Lie: “To recline or rest on a surface?” No. “To put or place something?” No. Depleted uranium, heavy like lead; its use—uranium shells—led to birth defects. When in his anger the man said, “We’re going to teach them a lesson,” I wonder what he thought they would learn. In a war, a soldier is less likely to die than a civilian. He looks like he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them like I do. He looks as if he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them as I do. When in his sorrow my father said, “Everybodyloose in war,” I knew exactly what he meant. It may be poets should fight wars. Maybe then, metaphors— not bodies, not hillsides, not hospitals, not schools— will explode. I might have watched the popular sitcom if not for my family—they were under attack, they might have died. Others may have been laughing at jokes while bodies were being torn apart. I could not risk that kind of laughter. Of all the media covering war, which medium best abolishes the truth? I deceive myself. I will deceive you myself. In the Bronx, I passed as Puerto Rican. I passed as Greek in Queens, also Brazilian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, even a famous, good-looking American movie actor. As Iranian in Manhattan. At the mall in New Jersey, the sales clerk guessed Italian. Where Henry Ford was born, my hometown, I always pass as Arab. I may look like the men in the great paintings of the Near East but their lives, their ways, I assure you, are in the past. Plus, except in those paintings, or at the movies, I never saw Arabs with multiple wives, or who rode camels, lived in silk tents, drank from desert wells; moreover, it’s time to move past that. Did language precede violence? Can violence proceed without language? It broke my father’s heart to talk about the principle of equal justice. The news aired several quotations from the airline passengers, one of whom was a middle-aged man with children, who said, “I didn’t feel safe with them on board.” He used the word “them” though only one, an Arab, was on the plane. Being from Detroit, I couldn’t help but think of Rosa Parks. Then I got angry. I said to the TV, to no one in particular, “If you don’t feel safe, then you get off the goddamn plane.” You can quote me on that. I was really angry—not real angry, but really angry. The reason? A poet asked me why I didn’t write poems about Muslim and Arab violence against others, and I said I did. And then he said he meant violence against Americans and Israelis,respectively, and I said I did, and before I could go on he interrupted to ask why I didn’t write poems about mothers who sent their sons and daughters on suicide missions. As if, as if, as if. I respectfully decline to answer any more questions. Write your own goddamn poem! Does this poem gratify the physical senses? Does it use sensuous language? It certainly does not attempt to gratify those senses associated with sexual pleasure. In this way, it may not be a sensual poem. However, men have been known to experience sexual gratification in situations involving power, especially over women, other men, life, and language. My father said, “No matter how angry they make you, invite the agents in the house, offer them coffee, be polite. If they stay long, ask them to sit. Otherwise, they will try to set you straight.” When in his frustration he said, “Should of, could of, would of,” he meant, “Stop, leave me alone, I refuse to examine the problem further.” Because (not since) the terrorists attacked us, we became more like the rest of the world than ever before. This is supposed to be a poem; it is supposed to be in a conversation with you. Be sure to participate. “No language is more violentthan another,” he said. Then he laughed, and said, “Except the one you use.” Do conflicts of interest exist when governments award wartime contracts to companies that have close ties to government officials? From 1995 to 2000, Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States, was CEO of Halliburton,which is headquartered in Houston, Texas, near Bush International Airport. Would they benefitthemselves by declaring war? Please send those men back home. My grandfather lay there unconscious. For days, there was no water, no medicine, nothing to eat. The soldiers left their footprints at the doorstep. His sons and daughters, they’re now grieving him. “Try not to make too much of it” was the advice given after two Homeland Security agents visited my house, not once, not twice, but three times. I’m waiting for my right mind. The language is a long ways from here. After the bombs fell, I called every night to find outwhether my father was alive or dead. He always asked, “How’s the weather there?” Soon enough, he assured me, things would return to normal, that (not where) a ceasefire was on the way. Although (not while) I spoke English with my father, he replied in Arabic. Then I wondered, who’s to decide whose language it is anyway—you, me? your mother, father, books, perspective, sky, earth, ground, dirt, dearly departed, customs, energy, sadness, fear, spirit, poetry, God, dog, cat, sister, brother, daughter, family, you, poems, nights, thoughts, secrets, habits, lines, grievances, breaks, memories, nightmares, mornings, faith, desire, sex, funerals, metaphors, histories, names, tongues, syntax, coffee, smoke, eyes, addiction, witness, paper, fingers, skin, you, your, you’re here, there, the sky, the rain, the past, sleep, rest, live, stop, go, breathe
I’ve always felt as if I were in a cage. If I stick out an arm, I’m seen as wanting and taking. A leg: my violence is noted. When I mentioned the suffocation by my father, they made it autobiographical. The subtext of my work in iron has been ignored, lost in discussions of time, not space. What you’ll never understand about installations is that everyone else is always outside of them. I’m stuck inside. The move toward deliberate transience is the mark of a fool. If disappearing is inevitable, you must fight it. No one misses the prisoner. The bars are like a frame: you want in as much as I have always wanted out.
My first teacher told me  that what sculpture involved was being a God. He was not talking   about the old ways, about fashioning  a man out of a rib. Out of the earth. A god can see something   that does not exist yet in the world. Who  could have imagined the giraffe, the octopus, the flounder? Who   could have imagined our sharp sensibilities,  our contortions? The materials are all there—eyes and blood and respiration,   but still, they get made new. Now I know  that these days such a view is against science, but the idea of a god is as real   as god is not. A scientist who sees  what has been done versus one who can make straw out of gold.   Or more like plastic out of petroleum.  Paper out of trees. You have to decide which kind you will be.   We’re mistaken when we equate the wise  and the prophetic. You’re always looking either backwards or forwards.   This piece puts you on a precipice.  It’s up to you which way you fall. You see—it’s all there.   The scientist and the artist were once one—  how else could you record what you saw? How else, find a way of seeing?
Everyone in the room is cheering. This is what you do for a painting you love! We climb up on one another’s shoulders, wave pom-poms that match the palette. We want to buy the season tickets to the train that huffs through this landscape. We want to climb the towers of this steely sculpture and hang the flag. Victory is ours! We have seen something to love here. Outside the gallery, there is an alley full of garbage. Beauty stops at the door. A scraggly tree is coming out of the pavement where the people are lined up, cigarettes and cell phones, waiting for a chance to look. They keep their giant fingers in their bags. Wear T-shirts of their favorite teams of artist assistants. On the alley wall, someone has drawn a hillside and a horse. A young man sits on a crate and peels the glue from under his nails. He nods. And looks. And soon, pulls out the chalk and adds a saddle and a man, who looks back and shouts as if he has found his enemy again.
I held a jackhammer once. It matched me   in height and weight and I planned destruction, ripped   everything solid from the ground. The concrete was my prey,   but it was the tool I fought to master, its metal body   trembling beneath my hands. Or, perhaps, its electric heart   was what shook me through my last held bones.   The concrete, gone, the rented machinery, returned—   and I wondered if Sisyphus had imagined a garden where the rock came from.
title after Robert Clermont Witt, 1906 Refuse to make eye contact with the subject. He has been following you around the gallery. You are certain that he can see down your shirt. Look at other subjects, but know that they, too, are not of primary interest. Even when they watch you. Try not to consider what happened to the small girl staring furiously, the thin-faced woman wanly looking away. Do not think about what they had for breakfast, if the bread was hard. Certainly do not consider the odors underneath their arms and skirts. Do not allow a breeze into the room they sit in. Do not assume I am talking about any painting: step away from the subject. All subject. Was the painter in love? Do not ask the question. Imagine you are the painter, blocking out everything you don’t want to see. Everything is out of the picture. Stop looking. Stop seeking what isn’t there. Tuck your narratives back in your pocket. Look for perspective, light, shade. Let your eyes wander back to the girl. She is trying to say something but her mouth has been painted deliberately shut. Her lips, thin.
It struck them both as strange: although each pond and lake clear to the coast was locked in ice, no open water, the imperious wind kept pushing waterfowl inland. That night a winter moon stood high and pierced the thin clouds’ vapors so the boy could contemplate their emptiness inside. Relentless, the flocks flew westward. The border collie whimpered, putting his forepaws now on one sill, now another, as if some odd creature circled the house.  This lifetime later, a man, he looks back on that stay at her farm, its details clear, their meanings still vague. His grandmother called it wrong as well, that the weather should be so frigid even in such a gale. As a rule this kind of cold needed calm. He sees the fire,   the dazzle of sparks when she loaded a log. What seemed most amiss was how the old woman’s house no longer felt safe that visit. He wanted and did not want to know what the dog might know. He tried to picture the menace outdoors. He longed to shape it so that he might name it. And after these many miles to now, away from the ruby glow of the metal parlor stove, from that blue-eyed collie, from the woman he so admires and loves recalling that night; after so much time,  he still believes that to name a thing is to tame it, or at least to feel less bewildered. Not Death, for instance, but The deaths of Al and Virginia, his parents. Not the abstract legalism, Divorce, but The disappearanceof my sweet wife Sarah, run off with that California lawyer.   Not simply Alone, but I have no children. Was that the wail of geese coming down the stovepipe? If so, it would be a marvel, but he knew it wasn’t. The caterwaul from the barn was alarming, and more than it might have been had Grandma herself not startled— after which she put on her late large husband’s threaded farming coveralls outside her housedress, which rode up and made a lumpy sash. She stepped out under cloud and bird. He would not follow. Rather, he stood  indoors to wait until she came stomping her boots through puddled barnyard holes like a child herself, kicking ice shards to scuttle along like beads from a broken bracelet. No matter. The world had gone wrong, violent and void at once. She said, The mare has foaled.    On tiptoe, she read the mercury out the kitchen window, then told her shivering grandson, We’ll call the new colt Zero.
That woman’s husband works the graveyard shift in a warehouse someplace. He’s a big man, and sleeps all day. I bet he drinks. But what do I know? Dark clouds are stealing in. Well, no they aren't. That's poetry, and bad at that. She’s a headstone color: gray hair, gray face.   Her hooded sweatshirt’s dull, like a sheet of old tin. It’s as though she doesn’t look forward to much but passing away. Her eyes are gray too, though it's too easy to call them empty. Their tears might so easily—flow. Oh no. I’m fussing around for eloquence here and coming up empty. The woman and I just nod at each other   as we wait by the post office window. Though I’m a rather old man now, I go on looking toward some sort of future. I’m a big man too, which may be why that woman shrinks. Or I think she does. We all like the postmistress, who’s old herself but spry,   and despite her losses still cheerful and bright. Her hairdo’s new. I recall her husband, who was a person people here always called Big Mike. Some old folks claim the man could lift a barrel brimful of hard cider right over his head. I’d like to imagine some tribute to Mike. I’d write it, if that were feasible.   A character, Mike. He drove a truck that he’d brush-painted pink. He lived with his wife and children and a bunch of critters and mixed-breed hunting dogs far back in the woods. In time the kids grew up and moved from here, but the family, we remember,   seemed always so decent and gentle with one another. The postmistress wears that shirt she loves. It’s a pretty shirt. Now what shall I name it? Purple? Fuschia? Puce? And how might I sort them, good and evil? How portray them? Let the clouds above, the God-damned clouds, steal in. No, let them hurtle.
Our loons still scull on the pewter calm of the lake, the chick having dodged the eagle one more day. The valorous drake and hen both held it between their bodies while the raptor circled. Reprieve. And here I am, old.   I stooped an hour ago to dump the pail of dace I'd trapped, then watched them scatter, the ones we hadn't hooked through their dorsals for bait. Twenty or so now swim at large— still prey, but not to us,   Who are headed home in the morning. I’m poised to throw away this clutch of wilting black-eyed Susans picked wild by my wife of all these years to grace our painted metal table, where we lifted ladders of spine   from fat white perch, last supper. So here I am, this aging man who wants somehow to write only one love song after another. I pause at dusk, I blink, I toss Our dim bouquet into late summer’s woods.
Why not write something for those who scratched out improbable livings here? Someone has managed to sow This broken field with stones, it appears,   So someone’s scratching it still, Although that Japanese knotweed has edged The tilth. Two wasps in the child Attempt to catch sun on a rail of the bridge.   The old local doctor has passed At almost a full decade past ninety. He never seemed depressed. Seventy now, if barely,   I consider the field again: Someone will drag these rocks away But they’ll be back. The air smells like rain, Which is fine, the summer’s been much too dry.   Nothing is left of the barn But some rusty steel straps in some nasty red osier. The stone fence still looks sound, But even there the knotweed steps over.   Hadn’t I pledged an elegy To the old ones who worked here? You couldn’t claim They thrived, exactly, but maybe They likewise scented good wind full of rain,   Lifted eyes above this old orchard To the cloud-darkened hills and found their support Somehow, somewhere. No matter, They kept going until they could go no more.   The trees’ puckered apples have gathered A flock of birds, and as they alight, They’re full of unseasonable chatter, As if to say that all will be right.   The old ones I promised a poem Must have said it too. It’ll be all right. I never knew them. They’re gone. I say it out loud, It’ll be all right.     —Caledonia County, Vermont
I took my boy to hear an echo. He wanted to hear one. I wanted him to.   We wended through a half-formed unintelligible brushy wood to a place I knew called “cave.”   It had openings at both ends and could be seen through, not into.   Nor was it a tunnel, strictly, though it passed through the ground, though it went somewhere.   It was like stepping into a telescope unseen, into the dark distorted center.   The walls were arched and laid with glazed tiles, orange, aqua, muddy green and so   streaked with nervous lines where water had run down, where water must have trellised down still.   It was not clean. It smelled of piss. Chicken bones, empties, old rubbers, mold.   Echo, I called. So did my boy. But his voice was small—birdscratch—it   got all lost inside the echo my voice made; pale echo, barely one.    That was when I had a boy.  I’m quite sure I did.  I wanted one, back then, when I had something to offer, when I wasn’t in this place, where light passes through me,  when I wasn’t like this, which is what, when I wanted one, as he, poor boy, wanted me.
I was a traveler in my day a business traveler, territorial in the grassy gaps. I sold bonds to clients hungry for bonds in the boundless sales call door to door among “folks.” It was a job I was born with. I had a heavy sample bag, rubber- banded stack of calling cards and leather binder (embossed) opening upon a vista of lamination, obligation rumination.   I furnished a nation to the chemical engineers and wives of Schenectady, New York over coffee, over roast beef and piano, a kingdom, a nation, a principality, landlocked state, aspirational acreage spiritual fallout hideout. I showed a picture of my boy cross-legged in front of a backdrop of a glaciated hanging valley deep in the transaction among handshakes and signatures if it came to it This is my boy, I said Come to me.   I was a traveler. Later I inspected the nickel mines near Sudbury telling my boy about the endless sheer black subterranean drop in the cage. I was telling the truth when I knew how to, as I had to as sales required, as stewardship permitted, long before disembodiment. I kept a picture of my boy in front of a cardboard tree and treehouse platform tacked to the upholstered partition above my desk. Once I brought him to the office. He stared at himself. “I had a treehouse then,” he said.
There is a brand of play called muteness Beneath the play yard’s interlacing branches.   It appeals to children born  Entre deux guerres, whose specialty it is.    It is mutiny; that is, a tongue  Of foreign origin ending in grunts.    One such child uses his tongue On a frozen fence for the embrace of it   For the mutating appendage makes of speech  A combat; an internment.   There is a brand of child assisted to the play yard By his keeper fussing with his zipper.    Yes, it is cold in the high hemisphere And nothing will be the death of him   As he sets hard sweets on his tongue  He neither chews nor swallows.    Such children can never swing too freely  From the elm’s loping barkless arm.    It is mutual. There is smoke on the air, tarry,  Commuting the industry on high   As the children simmer within Their word-cloud.    And someone or something is calling them home A familiar voice, if they have one.
Money changed hands. It’s how we came to be Came to be planted here in the mortar In the miniature cash forest Aster greenwood ficus hemlock Taproot stipe calyx anther in the Mortal hereafter Hearing hands making money change.   Speak up. I can’t hear you. There’s something wrong with your voice. You’re speaking too fast. Slow up. Speak into the currency. It wants to bone you. It wants to receive Your warmth in its coffers. Listen up. I’ve a fee to see to A toll-man a drawbridge. Open up. Close up. You have a cross bite In your crown, palate-ax. Bite down. Bite my ball Bearing interest.   I’m a businessman. I own a plant. I bid for it, bought it, soiled it, drowned it Tilled it, scolded it, heaved into it, stole from it Wept unto it A token in its behalf, suffered a stem    To rise in it  To market, to market  In my dirty jumpsuit  Worthlessness.
I was in Asia Minor in pursuit of distant honor in a suit of finest armor in a forest of pine or planks. I was not lost. Regina (my sextant) stared into the refiner’s flare as evening grew maligner.    I was in Kazakhstan  collecting rarest poppies. My capstan  gave out. I could no more withstand  the tides than fall to the rattan  mat like Tristan  sailing emptily to his mutant  island.    I was in greater Ghana  harvesting marijuana  with soul-strafing Tatiana,  the local swan—a  mortal one, a  prize among the fauna.  (There should have been a lawn a-    gainst her.) You see, I was in Corinth  fabricating synth-  etic absinthe.  I was adamant. The  trophy I chased for the ninth  night of days was Cynth  -ia, succumbing at the plinth.    Then to Argentina  I set forth with Ekaterina  a diminishing ballerina.  She pled for fina-  steride, having seen a  parrot turn bright green u-  pon my mythic ocarina.    I was in Tel Aviv.  Viv-  ian (my pigeon) and I were feve  -rish from bouts of griev-  ous liv-  er malaise. We must have been naive  -r than a hibernal beave   -r, for soon I was in Canada as ever. Had no plan; not a home to hide in, nothing human. Ada (vulgar bird) went wan, bade a screeching goodnight to her one God, a soapstone strap-on. Alone, I ran a do- zen tests: None truer, none sadder.
I suppose I shan’t go fishing Pa, for fear of finding We’re no fishers, Our folk, for all our bent For fish scraps and our Tolerance for muck dwellers and the like.   This creek is like no other, Pa, Inky cold and familiar, Don’t drink from it, it Commands, don’t kneel, don’t stare down   Or wash in it, don't pry your shoes from off Your battered stubs, not yet, no jay Flashes past and asks how you mean To ask a shit creek to provide.   You exist. It would, too. It falls through These viney half-corrupted patches of nettled hickory and oak Into a muddy slough Into a culvert, splitting   Around the treatment plant Then joining itself back in a ramrod concrete Channel beneath pavement; Then into the lake, sludge, great Lake.   Do you follow? It’s taking you somewhere, it matters Not where, Pa, it’s a trip At your command, inaudible.   It’s the postponed one We would have scheduled in these winding down days Together had we not been What we made of us. In the stagnant north woods. In the pale thick end-of-knowing daylight.
I lost my book. It’s got the names in it. Names for things and goods; structures, Types, boundaries, procedures, goads. My girl is in it, she who carried it Within her like a rare worm Until the untended bird came And tore its leaves from her As she lay there, Pencil pressing page, Taking it all down. Then the vast storehouses came down too, And the small secret ones, The shelves and grappling hooks, Dust, ink, lead, linen, ragged board. It’s time to go home and wash up. Home was in the book in my possession When I was reading what had been put down In her hand and mine, Instructions, inventories, Names. But I can’t read this while looking at words While I am assigned to living In what is called a home. It is all unkept. Its yard has turned back to heat-giving Snail-like deposits drowning in daylight By the mossed-over fence post. We lived here once? We took words down for all the names, Made markings? That book is lost, reader, Not misplaced.
In a life below decks in a great ship, windowless, butterflies in lamplight are moving as they move. Fish swim indifferently inside their bowl, two men   toss a ball, each to each, as the ship speeds, head- long ahead, and nothing's driven back to the stern since to go with this motion is to be moored in port.   From the tallest mountain at the mind’s white pole a cannon fires its charges into space, progressive speed, till one ball, by falling, flies, by flying, falls.   Now the surfer catches a wave of frozen light and rides it motionless to an impossible shore where he reckons sand the particles of his path:   and twins, one traveled from earthbound earth, the other staying home, meet again after years, each to the other younger from when he left.   The cat in its dire box keeps equally live and dead, the poison released, should hammer shatter flask when the atom decays, which it may not, or it may.   You, who chose two ways equally at once, circuit the conferences, meetings fueled by enigma, mixing with the eminent and their sidereal regard,   your morning Masses before library and lab.All outcomes must be possible in the system—Schrödinger. In your life's chosen box, this con-celebration.
Edwin Hubble “Tall, strong, beautiful, with the shoulders of Hermes of Praxiteles, that is how my wife first fashioned me, I who proved our Milky Way but another galaxy   among the Nebelflecken fleeing breakneck with the rest by the law, the constant, the time that bear my name: Hubble, stamped with Newton, Copernicus, Galileo.   Not bad for an Ozark farm boy hodded off to Oxford on a Rhodes, who tailored himself to tweeds and speaks the King’s English, as though he’d suckled on shires.   Astronomy, I attest, is a history of receding horizons, though mine tend to open to dinners with Stravinsky, the Fairbanks, and coup de maître, my surprise star-turn   at the Oscars: spotlights, applause, the whole heavens blue-shifted to me. Still—nothing headier than nights on Mt. Wilson, eye at the lens, my briar pipe glowing,   Humason at the spectrascope tracing the light shifts who was my mule driver. His habits—straight poker, panther juice—try the soul, but he’s brilliant at the shot.   Odd, too, the little priest who came to visit years ago, that he should account for nebulas’ radial velocities two years before me, though I only trust the data—   how he looked calmly pleased at Einstein’s recantation:The most beautiful solution to creation I have ever heard. So clocks reel back with space—camera, action, light.”
In the film that doesn’t begin and never ends, a man wakes, drives to a country farmhouse where he finds the guests he knows from his recurring dream, each   telling their own strange tale to him, the architect called in to pitch his new design—a fratricidal son, that ventriloquist whose dummy mouths his life—   progressive horror, till from his nightmare the man wakes, drives to a country farmhouse where he finds the guests he knows from his recurring dream. . . .   So with Dead of Night, Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle wake to their design, the universe a Steady State, a cloud that never moves from its mountaintop, one droplet   added for every one lost. Or like our own bodies freshened cell by cell, creation continuous, God-less, and atoms bred from atoms from alchemical stars.   You drive with Hoyle in the hills above Montalcino, the cloth merchant’s son, outspoken, caustic, truant, who would label you comically “The Big Bang Man,”   arguing the probabilities: “What matter, Fred, creates itself?” “Nothing, my dear Georges, then in an instant a universe?” All that is, is, is spinning on a pencil point.   And you in his dinner portrait of you, a Friday fast, coveting his steak, the enormous, undesired fish appearing to stay the same size however much you eat.
That I would even use the phrase suggests A false yet useful worldliness, a scope Far greater than my caste would indicate. The phrase signals, “I’ve lived abroad! I’ve watched The Premier League in European pubs!” In fact I hate the game; its ethos rests On boring strategies and rules that cope, Merely, with competition’s link to fate, How luck and skill dovetail in every botched Clear kick on goal, and every header rubs   Against the grain of what is beautiful In sport, at least to my Yankee Doodle eyes. Give me smashmouth football over soccer. Give me concussions, shattered bones, ripped muscles, Strategies of season-long attrition. Give me huge men heaving their bountiful Frames against each other with such grace that size Seems incidental to the role of stalker Of fleet backs and fleeter ends, men who bustle Along the line of scrimmage on a mission.   A hundred and sixty-pound defensive end, I was the scourge of JV quarterbacks. I blitzed on every down, so spent the game With most the action at my back; the coach Didn’t seem to care; he was drunk on power And vodka, said my job was to defend Right flank from sweeps and register some sacks. Helter skelter, I dreamed of gridiron fame. Much less than mediocre, I could not broach The fact of pain, the realm where bruises flower.
It is snowing in southwest Michigan. Such weather is unusual so late. The trees are squirting buds that advocate For green profusions that yesterday began To grunt and poke and strain toward full-blown spring. Now fleeced, the trees are January stark. Though clocks, sprung forward, hedge against the dark, We hear the arias our miseries sing When darkness is a slave to all that white. If global warming is the fangs of doom I see its poison wafting, from this room. The future will be mottled if not bright. Perhaps I’ll die before the killing trend. I hear my children’s voices on this wind.
for David Cobb Craig At first, we had ways of talking That filled up the evening Until some things could be said. It was a made-up Situation in which lives could be lost. Whatever that was now grows inside Our bodies—a spongy, pulpy cell— Causing pieces of paper we hold In our hands to appear   And disappear. All I ask Is to take me away from this place, To another place, very much like This place, where we can meet And six months later Be married. You laughed and went with me.
Under the trees, where everything Is still possible in prescribed doses: Hundreds of accordion-like units Without edges. But there is no unwinding   Of minutes to stay the execution Of a rain-shot weekend in early Beach weather, no elixir To revive the amputated flower   Still kicking on its ghost-stem In a bowl of water, no direction In which to steer The hapless, puzzled out-of-towner   Other than straight ahead, To the sheer drop-off Where his guidebook gutters Or deposits him, addressless,   In thin air.
An enormous list: coming and goings, nights and mornings, births and deaths and rebirths and second deaths and little lapses like grace notes where sadness surges in:   sadness surges in, a passing-windshield light-effect on the ceiling. Would you prefer it some other way? I’m versatile. I’m hungry. I’m hot. I’m not really sad either. I’m happy, it’s just that this happiness isn’t the happiness I expected or sought and for a time I confused this happiness with the sadness I thought I was experiencing. I feel a lot better now.   Oooh. That should give you an indication of the improvement. Oooh, there it goes again. And again, only I didn’t say ‘Oooh’ this time. I can’t explain it, but it feels terrific, like a totally fulfilled infatuation or a California Lifestyle apartment ad.
Here in Italy the buildings are the color Of dead skin and the sky is “tragic” And the rivers are brown and turbulent And everybody is always stopping by To say “Ciao!” and then “Ciao!” We think a lot about emotion, chiefly The emotion of love. There is much to cry about. And after, sleep. One falls in love So as not to fall asleep. I have just awakened To the fact that I am not in love And am about to fall asleep or write an opera In which someone falls asleep and dies Or write a letter to a friend or call somebody up To meet me later for a drink. Maybe it’s too late. Tomorrow I will go out and buy something to make me happy. I remember standing in the train station in Pisa Hoping to catch the sound of an American voice In the crowd. It’s good to remember such things When you think you haven’t “lived” enough Because you need to learn not to regret What you’ve never done. Fortunately, I remember Everything that's ever happened to me. I remember asking a woman I didn't know Whether or not she was the person I was looking for And she said, “Yes, much to my regret.” That wasn’t difficult to remember Because it just happened a few minutes ago. Other things are harder. I don’t remember Right away what I had for breakfast two weeks ago Last Thursday or the specific date of my first Masturbation, though I’m sure that with some effort I could recover the lasting details. I remember My father using a green hair tonic called “H-A,” Which stood for “Hair Arranger.” I remember the night My father tore out a big clump of my mother's hair In an argument. They were drunk and I came out Of my room in my pajamas and asked them to stop. If I said I wanted to fall apart in someone’s arms You would have to assume I was being sarcastic And you would be right. No one has arms in which I care to fall apart, at least not at the moment. Tomorrow night I am going to see a play about “A contemporary man in the process of falling apart.” I think everyone falls apart about twenty times a day. I’m still confused about why I mentioned Italy At the beginning of this poem, especially since It’s all a terrible lie. My students would say It means “the poet does not know where he is; Some catastrophe has distorted his perceptions.” I am drowsy but happy and resemble the corner Of a big empty room. I am drunk and staring Into the bathtub. A lot of people are standing Around listening to music. My fingers Smell like cigarettes. I am wondering If there is any way to describe the pleasure Someone derives from seeing a man’s cock Shoved up someone’s ass, or how one Can go on like this, even after having given up Completely to nervousness, and to death. I remember the one night I spent on a ship. The porters woke us at dawn. We stood At the railing to sight the blue and transparent island Gaping through mist in the distance. For breakfast, We ate peaches. I hated the people I was with, But I must have been incredibly stupid. We spent the day On the island, seesawed in the park, and waded in the sea.
"light which is not sum" —Norma Cole, Mars The workaround or aura Not like repetition   When we get to the final sun The maps are water the water gold   He would not honor me You explain then against   The disbelief displayed by the character I couldn’t know him   But knew love and Know it through knowledge   “Love never falls off whether prophecies will be abolished whether tongues stopped”   Announced as the fact Redolent of what was   The defining addition More than the parts   Unprecedented Ardor also not   Adding up to Sun or son to sum   The outcome Unknowable   Perfect and Unavowed   The same sound Unknown sum
When life seems gray And short of fizz It seems that way Because it is.
Unfortunately happiness Depends a little more than less On undependable, and hence Absurdly charming elements.
Bear in mind, my little man: Never let your verses scan. And acceptance will be sparse If, by any chance, they parse. But whatever else you do, Let it not be said of you That your poetry makes sense!. . . .That’s a criminal offense!
The problems of a working girl Are more than meet the naked eye; And life becomes a dizzy whirl At times—and dizzy, too, am I. I have not found the answer yet, And this is just a working plan: I shove along and do not fret, Nor yet depend on any man. To be a mother and a wife, I'm often urged by all my kith And kin—but as for husbands, life Is easier without than with.
I wish my frank and open face Held just one tiny little trace Of something that approaches guile. I'd like an enigmatic smile And heavy-lidded eyes instead Of just a regulation head.
Sometimes I wish that I were dead  As dead can be, but then again At times when I've been nicely fed  On caviar or guinea hen And I am wearing something new  And reassuring, I decide It might be better to eschew  My tendency to cyanide.
This is a day when I covered no ground. Just pushed and shuffled my papers around, Nudged at letters and winced at bills, Sorting them out into different hills, Hunted fretfully for a ruler, Worried the overworked water cooler, Sharpened pencils and filled my pen, Then shuffled my papers around again.
When in the dumps, I hate the things  That ordinarily I love. I loathe the lark that blindly sings;  I hate the bland, blue sky above. The crocus, sneering on the lawn,  Forsythia about to bloom— I'd like to see them dead and gone,  Instead of filling life with gloom. But most of all, I do not care,  While I am droning in my hive, To hear vivacious chums declare  How great it is to be alive.
At the market today, I look for Piñata apples, their soft-blush-yellow. My husband brought them home last week, made me guess at the name of this new strain, held one in his hand like a gift and laughed as I tried all the names I knew: Gala, Fuji, Honey Crisp—watched his face for clues—what to call something new? It's winter, only tawny hues and frozen ground, but that apple bride was sweet, and I want to bring it back to him, that new. When he cut it, the star inside held seeds of other stars, the way within a life are all the lives you might live, each unnamed, until you name it.
The Twenty-fifth is imminent And every known expedient Designed for making Christmas pay Is getting swiftly under way. Observe the people swarming to And fro, somnambulating through The stores in search of ties and shirts And gloves to give until it hurts. They're eyeing gifts in Saks' and Hearn's  And Macy's, not to mention Stern's, While earnest copywriters are Hitching their copy to the star Of Bethlehem quite shamelessly, For they are duty bound to see That Peace On Earth Good Will To Men Gets adequate results again.
Borne forward by extended increments.  Crawling waterward from this weed wilted shore. Like small furred voles skittering inward, taking little  grounded, mirrored steps: Like this, intervals of ice ridge and rime the pond rim. By night. As if  by dreaming ice might cast its million limbs over that surface above. Its frozen tincture  outfolding farther, farther unfurling across. By dawn: The moonspread scales then a foregone conclusion.  Constructed, transmutable truth: All day ice shrinking from the light, reconsidering.  And still, in leaving, leaving its lingering doubt, pale shadow of wingspan edgebound.  Near. Then again in dark the cold falling, fallen to glow on the meniscus, ice groping forward with more  sliding white. Ice: Its own logic, growing: Its horizontal precipice. Its glass  carapace. Night's cold and hoary frost. Vaster still till all its heirs' outstretched  tips interslip, imprint with their ferny whorls an entire span between lands.  To travel that unthinkably far! And then, having reached to cry out more room!—crack  like a shell, heave between its crushing shores. But which pressing which? And what boundary  divides water from ice, what self solidifies against self, which is water—host or  whore? Ice now in spring dissolving, dissolute reversal by increments retreating. Not I,  alive, here mudnudged under eaves, forming my young egg by egg, mother's lasting bequest.  To nest once in heat. To hatch and be born.
Will death be like this? Like waking from a long dream   still held—grounded— in the body disremembered? Spinning ceiling, close call? Foolish beating heart? Those trembling aftershocks of some electric message where bone met motion, clamoring in ligaments, that lingering tremolo singing in the ears like doubt, maybe the echo of some unrecognized once-familiar name. Estranged touch of wind over skin, on damp arms the hair not yet laid down . . . Breath's sour fluctuations not quite tamed. Cheeks' flush loosening, a displaced temperature sensed, unseasonal. Flash of light burning against walls, image after image, an eye, a frame, missing there.   Where, searching, searchless, you can't point to or put a finger on, nevertheless an urge   surging in raised fingers. A circle discontinuous, once rounded out by mouth. Throbbing inside the brow, no accessible thought. Specifically   no memory arising from follicles still tingling, the dulling skull heedless,   singed with salty pores. What if it's like this, only without the body?
It was twilight all day. Sometimes the smallest things weigh us down, small stones that we can't help admiring and palming. Look at the tiny way this lighter vein got inside. Look at the heavy gray dome of its sky. This is no immutable world. We know less than its atoms, rushing through. Light, light. Light as air, to them, for all we know. Trust me on this one, there is happiness at stake. Boulder, grain. Planet, dust: What fills the stones fills us. I remember, or I have a feeling, I could be living somewhere with you, weighted down the way we aren't now. Often the greatest things, those you'd think would be the heaviest, are the very ones that float.
It's hard to tell that the face of the moon is as much like a man's as god's. Out yonder, in the world without us, who's to say? — Either we get in the way, or things make use of us. Half-way around the globe from where they started, the static sound of starlings echoes off the barn roof. Spiders weave in the spokes of wheels, and stars circle unsuspecting suns. Little do we know, the world has a talent for making itself at home. Meanwhile, we paint our self- portraits on everything imaginable, then hold them up like mirrors. Our mercurial brushes grow longer, our skills more acute. Dust clouds the vision, tinder to the eye. So we burn trees to save the forests, burn air to fly afar. We do, we say. We can. The time is close at hand. Time was (said a man)  you could tell the weather from the moon. That was before another broke the quicksilver distance and walked all over it. Now you can't tell a thing.
I will hear his sleep in and through my own, my sleep will be bathed in his as if we slept in one same fluid My sleep floats within a listening so deep that the separating spaces of air become as pliant and full as snowfall, its singing silence as profound My ears and his throat — the sensation of anticipated hearing close inside the ear and the incipient murmur or cry forming at the end of his sleep — borne like birds and thrumming on the air of rooms between us My own sleep will be his clock, safely keeping time, his sleep tunes my dreams to listen, our sleep binds the hour, heavy and warm, into a blanket of air and sound
Balance is everything, is the only way to hold on. I've weighed the alternatives, the hold as harbor: It isn't safe to let go. But consider the hover, choices made, the moment between later and too late. Hesitation is later, regret too late. You can't keep turning and turning, or expecting to return. This earth is not a wheel, it is a rock that erodes, mountain by mountain. And I have been too soft, like sandstone, but there is a point where I stand without a story, immutable and moved, solid as a breath in winter air. I have seen my death and I know it is my neighbor, my brother, my keeper. In my life I am going to keep trying for the balance, remembering the risks and the value of extremes, and that experience teaches the length of allowable lean; that it is easier — and wiser — to balance a stone as if on one toe though it weigh a hundred pounds than to push it back against the curve of its own world.
for Vivek Narayanan it isn't matter isn't doesn't matter does it compared with what shan't have known your lines are all lines of approach this dog's eyelids this delhi dog's intentional eyelids, this doorway dog, this dog fellating beggars delhi exuding matter nictitation cannot extrude America to england the third nictitating poetry is over eyelid cannot eject America to england large foreign bodies poetry is over over and out surgery rarely happens over and ours dogs aren't loved over here, here! sufficiently foreign bodies remain requiring incision mind yourself it happened before you as you go you're nothing cold sunshine practised apprehension
INSIDE THE GATEWAY: 1970S RED CLOGS WITH SIDE BUCKLE   The forever shoe, which points homewards, belongs to my mother. When our house was being built, she stepped onto the driveway while the tarmac was still wet, still setting. Ever since that step, the driveway, which slants upwards, bears an imprint of her 1971 footwear. Her foot- print says, Climb! Come with me. Whoever steps into that impression becomes, for a moment, the leggy wearer of a fire-red clog with a pirat- ical silver buckle on the side. OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE: GOLD AND SILVER SANDALS The sandals which will make a female of me belong to many women. The front of the temple entrance hides itself behind shoe-racks. Vis- itors enter barefooted, leaving behind the dung, dried frogs, spilled petrol and ketchup traces of the streets. Hundreds of pairs of gold and silver sandals wait here for the women who will re-emerge from the vigil with the taste of basil leaf and sugar in their deep-breathing mouths and carpet fibres between their toes. The sandals, gold and silver, seem all alike. How can the women tell them apart? They do tell them apart. It is as if each pair sings an intimate mantra to its owner, audible only to her. One day I too shall return to expectant slippers that stack up like the moon and the stars outside a marble building; one day I shall not have to wear child's shoes.   SUNDAY BEFORE SCHOOL: WHITE SNEAKERS Seven years of these shoes are a chemical memory. The Convent ruled  that pupils' shoes must be white: absolutely white. Who can imagine a 1980s shoe that was absolutely white, without any logo, with no swoosh, not a single slogan? Sunday evenings, before the school week, I crouched down on the pink bathroom tiles and painted my shoes into the absolute of whiteness; like the Alice in Wonderland garden- ers repainting roses. This task was performed with a toothbrush and with special paste that annihilated so many design features. Purity was attained by the application of a whitener that stank of scientific poly- syllables. Convent-girl identity. Tabula rasa. Toxicity and intoxication: with good intentions, getting high on paste. BAD MARRIAGE SHOES: SILVER BALLET SLIPPERS When I met my ex, I was already committed to heels: black ankle boots ​ with four-inch stacks for walking through snow; French cream curved suede stilettos for scaling fire-escape ladders on to rooftops to admire the winter sky; even after I left him, scarlet satin bedroom-only spiky mules to amuse myself. Early on, my ex said that the way women walk in heels looks ugly. And my nails made unnatural social appearances: emerald lacquer; cobalt; incarnadine. Sign of a bad marriage: I began to wear flats. The penitential mermaid shoes, worn once and once only, were a Gabor creation: distressed silver ballet slippers with netted and criss-cross side details which would make the material seem to swish with the changes of light on feet that go walking. Cool as moonlight on a tourist coastline. But the inner stitching hooked the softness of my skin, which has always been too soft; but I could not turn back, for we had tickets to an evening of Mozart; but the paper tissues that I stuffed into my shoes failed to act as a protective lining. Paper tissue snow- flecks teardropped with crimson blood created a trail behind me as I ascended the many tiers of the wedding-cake concert hall. BAREFOOT: PEARL PINK POLISH Sitting next to someone can make my feet curl: shy, self-destructive  and oyster-like, they want to shuck their cases, to present themselves, little undersea pinks; their skin still is too soft, their toes still too long, their ankles still too slender, for a modern fit. But he is not modern; he sits like stone, and my bare feet are cool, they will not have to bleed.
for Geraldine Monk 'I love you,' he wouldn't say: it was against his philosophy; I-love-you didn't mean what it meant, plus the verray construction of the phrase caused bad-old-concrete-lawman-vandal-verbal-mildew-upon-the-grape- harvest-and-war-for-rare-minerals-required-to-manufacture-commu- nications-devices damage; saying I-love-you damaged love, subject and object; plus he could prove this in two dense and delphic languages suitable for philosophy, opera, cursing, and racking the nerves of arti- ficial intelligence machines that perhaps could love but would be hard-wired giammai to dare say so. So what moved him to not-say I-love-you? What wake-up-and-spoil-the-coffee ashtray-licking djinn? I have to start to agree. The verbness of it impropriety (eyes glob up the syringe when you're giving blood: semisolid spiralling); perhaps too active... I-love-you, I sand you, I drill you, I honey and set you for wasps, crimson you like a stolen toga, add value applying dye, fight owner- ship, I cite you to justify skilled outrage, put your name as guarantor on an astronomical mortgage, I admit desertification comes as a relief, from I to O, O my oasis, O my mirage. Maybe the verb is a tending-to- wards? A tightrope? A tropism? A station? But that's meeting him on his own ground; plus I can't disprove entire languages; plus those three little words aren't meant as saying. An icy drink in stormlight. A looked-at leaf left to transpire its own way until... And sans I-love-you the centuried moon rose above dinnermint stone; many men contin- ued talking; a woman lifted her sarsenet skirt, peed on green lilies and, utterly gracious, walked through the archway to join the mixed group delighting in — word! believe it! — fresh air.
It was necessary to move, and at this exit the beggar, cross-legged at the fork of the tunnel, calls out Love! A welcome, of sorts.  The night light fucks the suburb into nightmare familiarity — not like a shrammed nerd touting guided walks and histories that contract imagination for demolition work, levelling today's housing, restoring common greens, lingering at sites orphaned of their fever hospitals — by no means that hyperliterate, poor entrepreneur — It is the view, the barbed wire roaring into view round and round the playground walltop. It is the warehouse, warehouse windows blank of occupation. It is lives, lives supplied in great number, fulfilment of numbers. It is the sense of something shared — the tailor scissors razoring open fishmouth stitches, the sewn-up pocket of the new suit, and finding something — But it is new, all new, even the gangs who graffiti chimneys scrubbed and lovely, deleted like the railways delete repeatedly the head, the occasionally payrolled head, the feet of the quartered commuters, of the vertebral week.
I love them all. I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate a stampede, and therefore can be formally outlawed—even by a liberal court bent on defending a constitution guaranteeing unimpeded utterance. I love that the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer based on age, sex, appearance—e.g., a busat has big balls or only one big ball. More than the pristine, I love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced, in that I respect extravagant expression more than reserved. I admire reserve, especially when taken to an ascetic nth. I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.
A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough. Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators
Driving through this part of Louisiana you can pass four prisons in less than an hour. "The spirit of every age," writes Eric Schlosser, "is manifest in its public works." So this is who we are, the jailers, the jailed. This is the spirit of our age. "You won't be back will you," asked the inmate who told me he wanted to be a success.   + + +  Try to remember it the way it was. Try to remember what I wore when I visited the prisons. Trying to remember how tall was my boy then. What books I was teaching. Trying to remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration. Something about the extra-realism of that peculiar institution caused me to balk, also the resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing, notwithstanding top-notch examples to the contrary: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Wilde, Valéry, Celan, Desnos, et al. After all, I am not them. She asked me to come down, my friend the photographer and I went, and then I wanted to see whether my art could handle that hoe.  Trying to remember how my skin felt when I opened an envelope of proofs of Deborah Luster's intimate aluminum portraits of the inmates at Transylvania (the site of East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, a minimum-security male prison, now closed); then Angola (the site of Louisiana State Penitentiary, maximum security, ever-growing); then St. Gabriel (the site of the Louisiana Correctional Institution for Women, the LCIW). I was electrified by the first face—a young, handsome man blowing smoke out of his nose. Behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. On the phone my friend had described to me the rich Delta grounds of Angola, 18,000 acres. Angola, where the topsoil is measured not in inches but feet. The former sugarcane plantation lies at the confluence of rivers and borderland of the vermin-and-vine-choked Tunica Hills. Grey pelicans nest on the two prison lakes; alongside the airstrip are the grading sheds, the endless fields of okra and corn. Then there's the prison museum, the prison radio station, the prison monthly magazine; the tracking horses and tracking dogs trained by inmates... and the tree-lined neighborhood of free-world residents, their children bused outside the fence to school. Then the immaculate cinderblock buildings that house the inmates, the administration building, and the death house; the greenhouse and extensive flower beds—take away the fencing and it resembles nothing so much as a college campus. The men in maximum number more than the men who lived in my hometown. Then there's the geriatric unit, the award-winning hospice program; the caisson the inmates built to bear the dead in the hand-built coffins to one of the two graveyards inside the prison. In the old burial ground most graves are not identified by name. The caisson is pulled by draft horses, French Quarter style. When the champion of the prison rodeo had a heart attack in the fields, a riderless horse led the final procession. The celebrated inmate's uniform was "retired" to the prison museum. Everything about Louisiana seems to constitute itself differently from everywhere else in the Union: the food, the idiom, the stuff in the trees, the critters in the water, and the laws, Napoleonic, not mother-country common law. The prisons inevitably mirror differences found in the free world. Where they came up with their mirrors is another mystery. (In maximum, they are made of metal.) The definition of the face is a memory. Vivid to me is Debbie saying that at the trial of her mother's murderer, she looked around and saw the people sitting on separate sides of the courtroom, the way they do at a wedding, the bride's people, the groom's people, and she tried to take in the damage radiating through the distinct lines—the perpetrator's side, the victim's side.   Vivid to me is leaving Angola after the first visit and Debbie asking what I thought, and I said (too fast) I thought those were the nicest people I had ever met, and the ironic laughter it provoked in us both, the car yawing. The obvious truth, people are people. Equally, the damage is never limited to perpetrator and victim. Also, that the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts.   I remember an afternoon at the iron pile at Transylvania watching the men quietly plait each other's hair between sets at the weight bench. When I asked about a man whose face was severely scarred, a very specific face, with large, direct aquamarine eyes, a guard told me that the man's brother had thrown a tire over his head and set it on fire. This I did not know how to absorb. It was a steaming day; the men were lifting weights and plaiting their hair.   I remember Easter weekend at the women's prison. The day before, a long line formed outside the prison-run beauty shop. Inside, the women having their hair fixed were talking back to a soap opera on the small snowy screen. By visiting day the inner courtyard had been transformed into a theme park for the children. A trampoline had been rented, a cotton-candy machine; someone dressed in a bunny suit was organizing an egg hunt. The girls wore starched, flouncy dresses, and the boys white jackets and black, clip-on bow ties. The women were dressed up, too, even the ones shackled at ankle and waist. Deborah photographed all day, nonstop. Identifiable pictures of children would have to be excluded from publication, but people wanted a keepsake. We left before visiting hours ended. It wasn't our place to be there. It wasn't really in us to be there. Remember sitting in the frigid Holiday Inn bar near St. Gabriel, at the end of one visit to the women's prison, staring at the aquarium, not talking. Talking to a man who says he has done a lot of time. Lot of time. He should write a book, he says. He wants to be a success. "Hollywood, huh, here I come." Talking to a woman who says the one time her dad visited her from the Midwest, she asked him to look at her eyes. There was a look she didn't want to get, a faraway look. Her father pretended to examine her eyes, then told her they looked like the same old peepers to him. She passed her time reading. Same way she passed her childhood. She thought she was going to be an astronomer when she grew up. Not a felon. Both parents are dead now. Of her three sons, one disappeared, one died of suicide, and the third severed contact. One of the inmates at St. Gabriel informed me she wouldn't be around for visiting hours tomorrow because she was on the drill team. Also, her ex-husband would not be bringing her baby boy to see her. Not tomorrow, not ever. The grease burns, I am told by another inmate, are courtesy of her sister. Don't Walk On The Grass, says the sign posted in the inner yard. Then there's the bus that leaves from Monroe taking visitors to one of four neighboring pens, Al Derry's Prison Transport and Popcorn Balls. Evidently, the popcorn balls make it the competitive ride. Only in Louisiana. After a time. A lot of time. They stop coming. The free-worlders. They are too poor or too busy working or are already looking after others on the outside or their car is broken or they are too worn down or they move too far off or they get old, sick, and die. So the inmates wait for their turn. They aren't going anywhere. They have all the time there is. "The only continuity of our lives," wrote Malcolm Braly, American writer, American lifer, "was that we had none." "Waiting," goes the motto at St. Gabriel, "it's the LCIW way." I wrote a woman and asked whether she ever had any pets. She wrote back: Bandit, Baby, Snobby, Elsie, Bear (those were the dogs). Tiger and Fuzzball (the cats), Jill, Ben, and Junior (the coons). And a lot of unnamed fish, hamsters, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, guinea pigs, "and a deer, not really a pet but I finally coaxed to the point she would eat out of my hand." Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time. I wanted it given to understand that when you pass four prisons in less than an hour, the countryside's apparent emptiness is more legible. It is an open, running comment when the only spike in employment statistics is being created by the supply of people crossing the line. I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech to cut through the mass-media myopia. I wanted the heat, the humidity, the fecundity of Louisiana to travel right up the body. What I wanted was to convey the sense of normalcy for which humans strive under conditions that are anything but what we in the free world call normal, no matter what we may have done for which we were never charged.   The world of the prison system springs up adjacent to the free world. As the towns decline, the prisons grow. As industries disappear, prisons proliferate, state-funded prison-building surges are complemented by private-investment promising "to be an integral component of your corrections strategy," according to an industry founder. The interrelation of poverty, illiteracy, substance and physical abuse, mental illness, race, and gender to the prison population is blaring to the naked eye and borne out by the statistics. Of the developed nations, only Russia aspires to our rate of incarceration. And the Big Bear is a distant second. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the warp in the mirror is of our making.   The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept—whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily set aside—that the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, it might behoove us to see prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves. If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least our minds, we are more likely to register the implications. + + +   I am going to prison. I am going to visit three prisons in Louisiana. I am going on the heels of my longtime friend Deborah Luster, a photographer. It is a summons. All roads are turning into prison roads. I already feel guilty. I haven't done anything. But I allow the mental pull in both directions. I am going to prison in order to write about it. Like a nineteenth-century traveler. Kafka put it this way, "Guilt is never to be doubted." Also: behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. Also: there are more than two million individuals, in this country, whose sentences have rendered them more or less invisible. Many of them permanently. First to Transylvania. Then Angola. Then St. Gabriel. These are their place-names Over the next year and a half Deborah Luster will photograph upwards of 1,500 inmates. I will make three trips. It is an almost imperceptible gesture, a flick of the conscience, to go, to see, but I will be wakeful. It is a summons.
young Jesse Washington —  even though you on the wooden stick cross of fire bitten charred cut & burned 5 minute jury April 15, 1916 Waco, Texas shackled & dragged — lynched  You live on    Trayvon Martin face down red juice on the lawn clutching candy rushing home the hoodie the hoodie the prowler shooter said upside down shredded night    because of you you   we march touch hands lean back leap forth against the melancholy face of tanks & militia we move  walk become we become somehow   Eric Garner we scribble your name sip your breath now  our breath cannot be choked off our skin cannot be flamed totality  cannot be cut off each wrist each bone cannot be chained to the abyss  gnashing levers & polished  killer sheets of steel we are remarkably loud not masked  rough river colors that cannot be threaded back   hear us Freddie Gray here with us    Jesse Washington Trayvon Martin Michel Brown the Black Body holy  Eric Garner all breath Holy we weep & sing as we write  as we mobilize & march  under the jubilant solar face
for all the dead  & hear my streets with ragged beats & the beats are too beat to live so the graves push out with hands that cannot touch the makers of light & the sun flames down through the roofs & the roots that slide to one side & the whistlin' fires of the cops & the cops in the shops do what they gotta do & your body's on the fence & your ID's in the air & the shots get fired & the gas in the face & the tanks on your blood & the innocence all around & the spillin' & the grillin' & the grinnin' & the game of Race no one wanted & the same every day so U fire & eat the smoke thru your long bones & the short mace & the day? This last sweet Swisher day that turns to love & no one knows how it came or what it is or what it says or what it was or what for or from what gate is it open is it locked can U pull it back to your life filled with bitter juice & demon angel eyes even though you pray & pray mama says you gotta sing she says you got wings but from what skies from where could they rise what are the things the no-things called love how can its power be fixed or grasped so the beats keep on blowin' keep on flyin' & the moon tracks your bed where you are alone or maybe dead & the truth carves you carves you & calls you back still alive cry cry the candles by the last four trees still soaked in Michael Brown red and Officer Liu red and Officer Ramos red and Eric Garner whose last words were not words they were just breath askin' for breath they were just burnin’ like me like we are all still burnin' can you hear me can you can you feel me swaggin' tall & driving low & talkin' fine & hollerin' from my corner crime & fryin’  against the wall   almost livin' almost dyin' almost livin' almost dyin'
A dónde vamos where are we going Speak in English or the guard is going to come A dónde vamos where are we going Speak in English or the guard is gonna get us hermana Pero qué hicimos but what did we do Speak in English come on Nomás sé unas pocas palabras I just know a few words   You better figure it out hermana the guard is right there See the bus driver   Tantos días y ni sabíamos para donde íbamos So many days and we didn't even know where we were headed   I know where we're going Where we always go To some detention center to some fingerprinting hall or cube Some warehouse warehouse after warehouse   Pero ya nos investigaron ya cruzamos ya nos cacharon Los federales del bordo qué más quieren But they already questioned us we already crossed over they already grabbed us the Border Patrol what more do they want   We are on the bus now that is all   A dónde vamos te digo salí desde Honduras No hemos comido nada y dónde vamos a dormir   Where are we going I am telling you I came from Honduras We haven’t eaten anything and where are we going to sleep   I don’t want to talk about it just tell them That you came from nowhere I came from nowhere And we crossed the border from nowhere And now you and me and everybody else here is On a bus to nowehere you got it?   Pero por eso nos venimos para salir de la nada But that’s why we came to leave all that nothing behind   When the bus stops there will be more nothing We’re here hermana   Y esas gentes quiénes son no quieren que siga el camión No quieren que sigamos Están bloqueando el bus A dónde vamos ahora Those people there who are they they don't want the bus to keep going they don't want us to keep going now they are blocking the bus so where do we go   What?   He tardado 47 días para llegar acá no fue fácil hermana 45 días desde Honduras con los coyotes los que se — bueno ya sabes lo que les hicieron a las chicas allí mero en frente de nosotros pero qué íbamos a hacer y los trenes los trenes cómo diré hermana cientos de nosotros como gallinas como topos en jaulas y verduras pudriendóse en los trenes de miles me oyes de miles y se resbalaban de los techos y los desiertos de Arizona de Tajas sed y hambre sed y hambre dos cosas sed y hambre día tras día hermana y ahora aquí en este camión y quién sabe a dónde vamos hermana fijate vengo desde Brownsville dónde nos amarraron y ahora en California pero todavía no entramos y todavía el bordo está por delante It took me 47 days to get here it wasn't easy hermana 45 days from Honduras with the coyotes the ones that — well you know what they did to las chicas right there in front of us so what were we supposed to do and the trains the trains how can I tell you hermana hundreds of us like chickens like gophers in cages and vegetables rotting on trains of thousands you hear me of thousands and they slid from the rooftops and the deserts of Arizona and Texas thirst and hunger thirst and hunger two things thirst and hunger day after day hermana and now here on this bus of who-knows-where we are going hermana listen I come from Brownsville where they tied us up and now in California but still we're not inside and still the border lies ahead of us I told you to speak in English even un poquito the guard is going to think we are doing something people are screaming outside they want to push the bus back   Pero para dónde le damos hermana por eso me vine le quebraron las piernas a mi padre las pandillas mataron a mi hijo solo quiero que estemos juntos tantos años hermana separados But where do we go hermana that's why I came here they broke my father's legs gangs killed my son I just want us to be together so many years hermana pulled apart   What?   Mi madre me dijo que lo más importante es la libertad la bondad y la buenas acciones con el prójimo My mother told me that the most important thing is freedom kindness and doing good for others   What are you talking about? I told you to be quiet   La libertad viene desde muy adentro allí reside todo el dolor de todo el mundo el momento en que purguemos ese dolor de nuestras entrañas seremos libres y en ese momento tenemos que llenarnos de todo el dolor de todos los seres para liberarlos a ellos mismos Freedom comes from deep inside all the pain of the world lives there the second we cleanse that pain from our guts we shall be free and in that moment we have to fill ourselves up with all the pain of all beings to free them — all of them The guard is coming well
 now what maybe they'll take us to another detention center we'll eat we’ll have a floor a blanket toilets water and each other for a while   No somos nada y venimos de la nada pero esa nada lo es todo si la nutres de amor por eso venceremos We are nothing and we come from nothing but that nothing is everything, if you feed it with love that is why we will triumph   We are everything hermana Because we come from everything
the children of haiti are not mythological we are starving or eating salty cakes made of clay   because in 1804 we felled our former slave captors the graceless losers sunk vindictive yellow teeth into our forests     what was green is now dust and everyone knows trees unleash oxygen (another humble word for life)   they took off with our torn branches beheaded our future stuck our breath up on pikes for all the world to see   we are a living dead example of what happens to warriors who in lieu of fighting for white men's countries dare to fight for their own lives   during carnival we could care less about our bloated empty bellies where there are voices we are dancing   where there is vodou we are horses where there are drums we are possessed with joy and stubborn jamboree   but when the makeshift trumpet player runs out of rhythmic breath the only sound left is guts grumbling   and we sigh to remember that food and freedom are not free   is haiti really free if our babies die starving? if we cannot write our names read our rights keep our leaders in their seats?   can we be free? really? if our mothers are mud? if dead columbus keeps cursing us and nothing changes when we curse back   we are a proud resilient people though we return to dust daily salt gray clay with hot black tears savor snot cakes over suicide   we are hungry creative people sip bits of laughter when we are thirsty dance despite   this asthma called debt congesting legendarily liberated lungs
When I am a toddler, a child, a tween, a teen, and a young adult, I am called an ancestral soul, a ti gran moun, a little old person.   Adults study me and decide that I am wise beyond my years, mature for my age, emotionally ripe. I am told it is unusual to meet a five-ten-fifteen-year-old girl who does not slouch or mumble or speak in monosyllables.   When I do the things that come naturally to me—when I hold my spine up erect, when I wait my turn to speak, when I speak having listened, carefully, when I enunciate, when I look grown-ups in the eye—I am told I must have “been here before.”   "How do you know?" one college professor asks me after she has seen a psychologically violent play I have written at age nineteen. "How do you already know?”   In high school, I charm my teachers. They encourage me to write speeches about feminism that I recite for International Women's Day at City Hall or deliver as part of conference panels at local universities. “If you were older," they tell me, "we would probably be friends.” One of them even flirts with me.   Among my peers I exist somewhere between amicably mysterious and irrevocably dorky. The popular kids greet me in the hallways, but they never invite me to their beer-drenched parties. I will never play Spin the Bottle. I will never play Seven Minutes in Heaven. My mother tells me she is protecting me from boys, but the truth is, after I do my homework, she wants me to type up another family friend’s résumé or resignation letter. At home, I am a bridge, a cultural interpreter, a spokesperson, a trusted ally, an American who is Haitian too, but also definitely American.   The children of immigrants don't get to be children. We lose our innocence watching our parents' backs bend, break. I am an old soul because when I am young, I watch my parents' spirits get slaughtered.   In Haiti, they were middle class. Hopeful teachers. Home owners. They were black like their live-in servants. They donated clothes to the poor. They gave up everything they knew to inherit American dreams. And here, they join factory lines, wipe shit from mean old white men's behinds, scrub five-star hotel toilets for dimes above minimum wage. Here, they shuck and jive and step and fetch and play chauffeur to people who aren't as smart as they are, people who do not speak as many languages as they do. In the 1980s, they are barred from giving blood because newscasters and politicians say that AIDS comes from where they come from: Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a black magic island that spawns boat people and chaos, a place of illiterate zombies, orphan beggars and brazen political corruption.   When I am a child, my childhood is a luxury my family cannot afford. Their dignity is not spared, so my innocence is not spared. They are humiliated and traumatized daily, so I become a nurse to their trauma. I am told too much, so I know too much, so I am wise beyond my years.   When I am six, my mother tells me that when she found out she was pregnant with me at age nineteen, she “tried to kill the baby." She says "the baby," as if it isn’t me she’s talking about; as if I am not the expensive, scandalous daughter who forced my way into her world despite the abortion-inducing herbal teas she drank and her frantic leaps off of small buildings.   When I am sixteen, my father calls me on the phone to, inevitably, weep. He says, "Living in this country, I have learned not to hope for things. Only you are my hope. Only you." So—yes, I grow up fast.
you have to understand it was so hot   sand as far as the eye could see sand in teeth   a sealess life every step a sinking a scratch   every storm more sand   no sweat when we danced pure salt in our lovemaking   i tried to spit once it came out like a whistle   my first period curry powder   old wives spoke of tears   we thought they were senile   laughter was our wettest thing   we prayed often to no one   we believed in music   dry palms clapping dust on ankle bracelets   we threw tabla and daff caught spirit and sagat   a blaring life the wailing or caesarean births   widows' eyes wept wind   even our tongues were tanned   something sun-dried in every recipe   rays were babies' first words   you have to understand we forgot how to be thirsty   mud by then was primitive splashing the stuff of legend   only giddiness quenched us   we were dizzy all the time in the world all the time   then we heard him grumbling to himself   something about forty something about a flood   clad in sheep's wool he reeked of wolf shit   something about monogamy something about shelter   i thought: this must be heatstroke   i thought: the brain of a six-hundred-year-old   i thought: he is a conceptual artist   the ark an installation   his masterpiece took years   took trees got bigger   he was our favorite dirty joke   beloved schizophrenic neighbor   then he started preaching then he kidnapped pigs   mosquitos doves   things that wanted to eat each other stuffed onto the same boat   we threw our heads back we slapped ashy knees   we mooned him threw hot stones   we streaked whistled in his face   kicked the baking ship   laughter was our thunder thing   the lucky ones died laughing   for centuries he warned us   condescending motherfucker foaming at the mouth   sweat dripping from his beard   condensation how did we miss it?   i have no words for the first drop cooling the cheek   grandfathers raised their arms lightning made the children leap   sizzle gave way to drizzle humidity taught humility   we opened our mouths swallowing everything   the clouds begat clouds began to bite us back  panic soaked our slouching spines   the instruments drowned first   we played them sopping out of tune   denial gave way to rivers   i fell into a puddle my very first shiver   the shock of cold water made me orgasm   so all the times before had been dry heave?   so this was mourning this was mikveh?   the sky from blue to za'atar hail   we choked god's vomit filled our lungs   apologies bellyflopped reaching went out of reach   we ran from high desert to highest mountain   to whirlpool or choral grief   if noah had keen merciful he would have taught us how to swim   instead he saved two mice   muttered prayers shut the door   the best belly dancers became mermaids   the dinosaurs learned to fly   we never saw a rainbow   our grave stones coral reef
jazz is underwater vodou atlantis mute aborted ultrasound fetal fish in flood   haiti's first cousin forcibly kissed by a hurricane called katrina. hot winds come one fat tuesday. old levee leak explodes. fixing funds gone to homeland security. soldiers stationed in iraq. said,   jazz is underwater days like laissez-faire manna does not fall saviors do not save   hunger prays to rage for resilience, improvisational genius implodes, anarchy duets with despair. bassist fingers loot—nimble like a deft pianist. said, vodou atlantis mute. the fragile eardrums of instant orphans get inundated with someone else's mama's soprano saxophone screams.   (meanwhile televised tenor voices report monotonous drone to drown out) the deafening beat of funeral marchers can't swim. bloated trumpet carcasses, a singer swallows human sewage. her last note, a curse on america. aborted ultrasound. cacophonous   warnings scatter brains. pedestrians hear calls to evacuate, escape, and think, how fast can on-foot run? the poor, the weary just drown. abandoned elders just drown. people in wheelchairs just drown. the sick in bed cannot leave. their doctors stay behind too. new emergencies engulf the e.r. swamped hospitals ain't hostels, ain't shelters.   resources slim like hope. nurses stay behind too. their loyal partners will not leave. ill-fated rejects just drown. said, fetal fish in flood. outside, a breaking willow weeps like a father on his rooftop, murmuring his wife's last words: clutch tight to our babies and let me die, she had pleaded, you can't   hold on to us all, let me die. she, too, like jazz, is underwater. her love, her certainty, will haunt him. their children's survival, a scar. sanity also loses its grip, guilt-weight like cold, wet clothes. eighty percent of new orleans submerged. debris lingers, disease looms. said, days like laissez-faire.   manna does not fall. shock battles suicide thoughts. some thirsty throats cope, manage dirges in cajun, in zydeco. out-of-state kin can't get through. refugees (refugees?) remember ruined homes. a preacher remembers the book of revelations. still saviors wait to save.   and the living wade with the countless dead while a wealthy president flies overhead up where brown people look up where brown people look like spoiled jambalaya, stewing from a distance in their down-there distress, said,   he's free— high up—far up— vacation fresh—eagle up, up and away from the place where our protest sound started, still sings. american music gurgling cyclone litanies man cannot prevent, the man cannot hear.
i want to talk about haiti. how the earth had to break the island’s spine to wake the world up to her screaming.   how this post-earthquake crisis is not natural or supernatural. i want to talk about disasters.   how men make them with embargoes, exploitation, stigma, sabotage, scalding debt and cold shoulders.   talk centuries of political corruption so commonplace it's lukewarm, tap.   talk january 1, 1804 and how it shed life. talk 1937 and how it bled death.   talk 1964. 1986. 1991. 2004. 2008. how history is the word that makes today uneven, possible.   talk new orleans, palestine, sri lanka, the bronx and other points or connection.   talk resilience and miracles. how haitian elders sing in time to their grumbling bellies and stubborn hearts.   how after weeks under the rubble, a baby is pulled out, awake, dehydrated, adorable, telling stories with old-soul eyes.   how many more are still buried, breathing, praying and waiting? intact despite the veil of fear and dust coating their bruised faces?   i want to talk about our irreversible dead. the artists, the activists, the spiritual leaders, the family members, the friends, the merchants the outcasts, the cons.   all of them, my newest ancestors, all of them, hovering now, watching our collective response, keeping score, making bets.   i want to talk about money. how one man's recession might be another man's unachievable reality. how unfair that is.   how i see a haitian woman’s face every time i look down at a hot meal, slip into my bed, take a sip of water, show mercy to a mirror.   how if my parents had made different decisions three decades ago, it could have been my arm sticking out of a mass grave   i want to talk about gratitude. i want to talk about compassion. i want to talk about respect. how even the desperate deserve it.   how haitians sometimes greet each other with the two words “honor” and “respect.” how we all should follow suit.   try every time you hear the word “victim,” you think “honor.” try every time you hear the tag “john doe,” you shout “respect!”   because my people have names. because my people have nerve. because my people are your people in disguise   i want to talk about haiti. i always talk about haiti. my mouth quaking with her love, complexity, honor and respect.   come sit, come stand, come cry with me. talk. there’s much to say. walk. much more to do.
In inaccurate skin, among hologram trees, fresh from the tundra of dreams, I hear public television say that Jesus was trilingual. Billie Holiday sings the loss of plotliness, the loss of onomatopoeiabreath. Doris asks if I’ll touch her titanium humerus—I do. I go to Sheboygan to stand in Emery Blagdon's "The Healing  Machine," which was brought in  pieces from the Nebraska Plains. Its coffee can klieg lights' grace  and copper wire sculptures  leave burns all over me.  Death is like Russia:  beautiful, cold, expansive,  expensive. Ephesus says:  even marble turns to chalk.  Aldebaran is nearing  the end of its life.  Jupiter and the moon are  the closest they'll be until 2026.  It's 25-below wind chill. Winds  push iced piers into houses.  My wounds smell like strawberries.  Jim who once saw a UFO  and was too tired to tell anyone, who rode a tiger, and  slept with his cornet's mouthpiece stenciled on his lips, was a lifelong Indiana water garden gang member, Jim who delivered a baby from my body, Jim, impresario of poems, parking tickets, and sky-blue hydrangeas, Jim who "wore a crown of snow," Jim's ashes change the garden. Who can sleep with banded Jupiter so close to the moon?
but lake winds pick him up & blow him into the clouds. I married a dreamer. I wait. He stops to listen to the early lilac orchestra. He starts to change into blowy horizontal lake rain, then migrating red admirals.   I thinksay remember. I remember us. We chose the imaginal north/south somewhere between Bartlett Avenue and Jupiter, between Lake Michigan and the Aegean. Remember we drink Serbian Cosmos together, we eat squash blossoms and red snapper soup. We visit the Calatrava before bed. We nurture a magnetic field of words. I am   remembering you back. Remembering plays time. Thinking is all remembering. I remember our young bodies. I'm not finished with us. Remember that. If someone asks, "why is that lady out walking in that lake storm?" Tell them "months ago her husband went to the store in a blizzard & never came back." Tell them: "She can't stop looking for him.”
The poppies start as aliens end as husbands, a pause of light, a dull scatter. Transports dandelion clouds. Venus passes between sun & earth. Exceedingly rare, Transit, have you noticed how close the ode & elegy are? (In the United States someone dies every sixteen seconds!) Husband, Supermoon, Venus come & go. Death says there is no you at the end of weather. "Among the rarest of all predictable astronomical . . ." Husband presented me. The weatherman says we are locked in the clouds.
I wake to money, and take my money slow I watched for money, lights turned low   One must have a mind of money . . . Money that is not there and the money that is   The art of money isn't hard to master . . . The money surrounds us . . .   Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet money Money on a wet, black bough   Do not go gentle into that good money The pure products of money go crazy   Money sweeping out from us to disappear Oh Money! My Money! our fearful trip is done   I myself will die without money Money, Money, you bastard, I'm through.
Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.  —St. Paul I was already an old man when I was born.  Small with a curved back, he dragged his leg when walking the streets of Copenhagen. "Little Kierkegaard,” they called him. Some meant it kindly. The more one suffersthe more one acquires a sense of the comic.  His hair rose in waves six inches above his head.Save me, O God, from ever becoming sure. What good is faith if it is not irrational?  Christianity requires a conviction of sin.  As a boy tending sheep on the frozen heath, his starving father cursed God for his cruelty. His fortunes changed. He grew rich and married well. His father knew these blessings were God's punishment. All would be stripped away. His beautiful wife died, then five of his children. Crippled Soren survived.The self-consuming sickness unto death is despair.  What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr. Soren fell in love, proposed, then broke the engagement. No one, he thought, could bear his presence daily.My sorrow is my castle. His books were read but ridiculed. Cartoons mocked his deformities His private journals fill seven thousand pages. You could read them all, he claimed, and still not know him.He who explains this riddle explains my life.  When everyone is Christian, Christianitydoes not exist. The crowd is untruth. Rememberwe stand alone before God in fear and trembling. At forty-two he collapsed on his daily walk. Dying he seemed radiant. His skin had become almost transparent. He refused communion from the established church. His grave has no headstone.Now with God's help I shall at last become myself.
My love, how time makes hardness shine. They come in every color, pure or mixed gray-green of basalt, blood-soaked jasper, quartz, granite and feldspar, even bits of glass, smoothed by the patient jeweller of the tides.   Volcano-born, earthquake-quarried, shaven by glaciers, wind-carved, heat-cracked, stratified, speckled, bright in the wet surf— no two alike, all torn from the dry land tossed up in millions on this empty shore.   How small death seems among the rocks. It drifts light as a splintered bone the tide uncovers. It glints among the shattered oyster shells, gutted by gulls, bleached by salt and sun— the broken crockery of living things.   Cormorants glide across the quiet bay. A falcon watches from the ridge, indifferent to the burdens I have carried here. No point in walking farther, so I sit, hollow as driftwood, dead as any stone.
The dead say little in their letters they haven't said before. We find no secrets, and yet how different every sentence sounds heard across the years.   My father breaks my heart simply by being so young and handsome. He's half my age, with jet-black hair. Look at him in his navy uniform grinning beside his dive-bomber.  Come back, Dad! I want to shout. He says he misses all of us (though I haven't yet been born). He writes from places I never knew he saw, and everyone he mentions now is dead.   There is a large, long photograph curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago. My parents sit uncomfortably among tables of dark-suited strangers. The mildewed paper reeks of regret.   I wonder what song the band was playing, just out of frame, as the photographer arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?Get out there on the floor and dance! You don't have forever.   What does it cost to send a postcard to the underworld? I'll buy a penny stamp from World War II and mail it downtown at the old post office just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.   Surely the ghost of some postal worker still makes his nightly rounds, his routine too tedious for him to notice when it ended. He works so slowly he moves back in time carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.   It's silly to get sentimental. The dead have moved on. So should we. But isn't it equally simple-minded to miss the special expertise of the departed in clarifying our long-term plans?   They never let us forget that the line between them and us is only temporary.Get out there and dance! the letters shout adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home!  And soon we will be. See you there.
Most of what happens happens beyond words. The lexicon of lip and fingertip defies translation into common speech. I recognize the musk of your dark hair. It always thrills me, though I can't describe it. My finger on your thigh does not touch skin— it touches your skin warming to my touch. You are a language I have learned by heart.   This intimate patois will vanish with us, its only native speakers. Does it matter? Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire performed the sorcery we most required. They bound us in a spell time could not break. Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us.
I don't want my legs to show   I don't want   my legs to show that   I'm willing instead   I ripped my skirt off     the first story (in which I am featured)         my mother having forgotten the wooden clothespins which were my usual toys not having them to gum & grip instead I ripped my skirt off   say I'm willing more than so   I'm too willing so say so   more than say so much than   I'm willing to say     I don't want my legs to show but my breasts are available not motion but gravity the steadfast pounding   not motion not pavement   the pounding     the skirt is the uniform grey & sullen in school refusing to   hold a pleat wet wool on iron steaming flung   after lying   in snow thighs red & icy     sitting for yearbook pictures smart girls honor society   our white   panties showing every one if I show you my legs   won’t you see that   I’m leaving all life is   a leaning     slow dancing eyes closed arms raised around his neck   each girl a view for some other girl’s partner     they are not the feature the breasts hide the heart or disclose it the legs hide the opening   the skirt hides the legs   disguise enclosure in clothes   my mother couldn't understand why I wouldn't wear a slip when standing in the light the outline of my legs   shone   the skirt matters although it is see- through       fear is a by-product do not be dissuaded   this made more sense than that division into love & fear   I began to see fear   as a curtain a scrim substantive as light   evasive & theatrical but light as a curtain it need not be skirted   a skirt may be ripped shredded   or moved easily aside it need not be violated   it can be adjusted
fluid melodic getting more and more drastic   the moment she gives in to him she regrets it   a throat a chest   trying to press themselves         a current of air air through the mask   all the flourishes in the world   the fingers, the foot trilling, the breath keen   responding to recitative closing and opening   out from the head with the hands   carry it through the aria carry it through the chorus   when finally does, waltzes a solo but not alone       “let's waltz a rumba"   never gives in to the waltz never embellished   motifs, mimetic, sign language as clear gesture   displacing singers he likes this sound   muted and pronounced   effort of error she likes this sound weight, irrepressible   effort of eros         they talk about their differences w/out trying to change or be changed   regretting herself   where do we meet each other   w/out trying to hang or be caged
my husband thinks we have too many chairs in our house. I know we need more, my friend has enough chairs, many many more than we have. I told my husband: chairs, picture frames — they are the same.     when my friend and her husband have talked about looking for a different place to live, one with space for the families of their six children, he says, "but I want this view." on the interior walls, facing away from the sea, are paintings of this view — "well, it's not exactly our view, but close" — taken somewhere on this small stretch of land near the lighthouse, the painting of their house really of the one next door, a corner of their house visible in the background (receding in the perspective). in the Whistleresque painting, the house next door is a train rushing forward through the night fog.     our daughter believing,  acting as though (she believes) she can control the universe  externals, personal   at dinner, after three days joking of this (its urgency, extravagant tampering, how she commands and navigates, exhorts us: parents, boyfriend), I say, too bluntly, "so — have you thought of modifying  your  behavior?"  crude, hurt her, she cries, is embarrassed, she says, thinking the others in the restaurant have heard, "I know you don't mean to, but you're hard of hearing,  you talk too loud."         reading garden books the last week, immersed in gardens, in words, in visions of gardens   deer ate all the roses, the night Lily left the gate open     her husband wants this view, there is a place down the road, much larger, it has the same view (nearly). he wants to move there, but the houses are entirely different, the new one very formal, "a real house," my friend says. she is reluctant to leave her perfect — the perfect she created — structure. the chair, the frame, matter as much as the view they arrange.       ashamed, aware I've cut too close  "your behavior"    jokes are dismissable/admissible   this was criticism. I want to   apologize but do not   explanation self-righteous (remember an earlier fight, when she lived with us, her shouting, "why do you always have to be right?" me shouting,  "because I AM!")         or sinking, return     the authenticity (not authority) of others’ visions, seeing New York thirdhand at the moment of being there firsthand with my friend. my my interpretation of her memories — she’d lived there — inextricable from my own immediately perceived visions.   descending into the subway on an August day, the steps down to an aqua pool filled with Perrier. everyone breathing in the airpockets the bubbles made, cool and floating under water. they rose from the subway refreshed.     her dream became my strongest image of the city       later, we go to the movies, split up at the multiplex, the men to a macho flick (we see the previews of their film/ glad we missed it).   she and I sit in the last row — she doesn't want anyone behind her — spatial  boundary preemptive, compelling  throughout the movie she tells latecomers the two seats beside her are taken. I talk to her about    imagining her aura    I want to give her the house she wants.    I love her so. I want her to know.    like my mom         reading about newborn babies in the hospital, cribs ribboned in blue and pink, "as if that's not enough," she says, "the cribs are labeled: 'I'm a boy!' 'it's a girl!' "   looking out from oneself: I and thou. (bowing acknowledgment in that "thou": blessing.) looking out for oneself: I and it.     imagining her aura — huge and wide — so if someone sits near — it won't matter — she'll still have personal space — "I know, I know" — driving her Delta 88 — and she squeezes my hand —   her father out fishing on a boat in the afterlife (according to the psychic) — something about wine — your mother — tell her — "my mother doesn't drink" — tell your mother to stop whining.       it is not one view. from the same chair it’s constantly changing, coloring, waving. from different chairs, more so. gradations. water, clearest of notices that we are (the world is) in constant motion.   putting forth first: we are? the world is?   world/we. moving out from where we are/moving in from out there. the ferry crossing back and forth to the mainline, to “America.” this place called simply, by islanders, “the island.” THE island. there is no other frame or chair, no need for description, the world is circumscribed.          For Becca, Betty, Marie
Charles Olson wrote, "You can work on the life, or you can work on the work;  you can't do both." How can we separate the two? Why would we want to?  Denise Newman Elsewhere as internal. A journal a journey. Not geographical, conquering or colonizing.   One is always outside. Even this is a distance. The enclosure is temporary, temporal, a noticing. A space interior, represented by room or book. Diurnal — a journal. Small volume   containing the services for the little, or day, hours. An exquisite butterfly,   as distinguished from a moth. Day after day extinguished and preserved.   Distance measured in days, ending in death, or when the book is full.     Her notebooks. I want to tell you about this. (You?)     To listen secretly   to what is said.     "The men's tongues are jewels.”    The women's ears are jewels.       Her husband is described in sovereign terms. Her primary role is hostess. Going out into the world is a matter     what is the matter     of ominous glimpses     No indicators, distinctions of time, in this over and over.   The antistrophe is the catastrophe.       Route in day.   In a given day, whatever is done.   From one place to another,   whether distant or near. A passage   through life, a passage written, epic   remains in a room, the female tribe questing.     The self-reflections, abruptions, eruptions, the thinking going only so far as it will,   ending in midair —   or much further than it needs to         Travel, because it reveals? Ravels? Ravel itself ambiguous,   to ravel and unravel the same and sharing opposite meanings —   "to let fall into a tangled mass; to separate or undo   the texture of." Tangled and separate.     "Hence to entangle, make intricate, involve;   Hence to disentangle, make plain."   Traveling one sees connection and mystery. One sees?   Sightings/sitings. As though there's a hope   one could situate, identify, locate.   Claim. The first to sight land.   If you see it, it is yours.         Her slides   and the scribbled notes on her typed accompaniment —   which accompanied which?   (The notion of forefronting she attempts to subvert.)   Small chapters, various and repetitive (cumulative, cyclical, consequential, or in-).   Typography gives way.     The "central" fiction is perhaps hers, yet is continually disrupted.   (This word whose connotations I don’t entirely or exclusively intend or negate.) The intimate distance of telephoto lens —   The attempt at both. Objectivity without imposing pattern.   She "eavesdropping" (a hearing and house word) on her neighbors.   Slides of a wounded man, windowed woman.   They were without narrative, yet we imposed narrative.   We couldn't stay distanced or objective watching — was this a failure —   wanting to see what would happen.         The new earrings (which otherwise seem an anomaly, not connecting as the other slides connect   private with public) —   But what more intimate than the jeweled ear,   what more public —     The point of connection—   We hear. The ornamented ear. Up close, a whisper.       A construct more complex and inclusive.   "Evidence," noticings, of equal value.     There is a large painting behind her projector, someone else's artwork —   it mirrors the images in her slides — a scarred man, the musical staves of telephone lines   traversing empty skies, a house with a vacant window (the woman has left   to answer the phone, hoping it is the man, that he is safe).     When this painting is pointed out (I point it out) she says, "That's the way life is."       The repetitions — not even realizing they’re the same revelations.       Accretions and accumulations, if one learns at all it is “eventually.”     Journal entries as openings. Misspelling: “entires.”       Begin to read The New York Times again — thus the world enters.         I did start reading the paper. Manic, middle of the night, on chemo.   Moon face, legs that would no longer hold me, fingers that could not   cut or turn or grasp. I read. Obsessed   with news of a world I was not in.   My doctor said, "Give it an hour a day. Limit it." But the prednesone   hallucination in my brain, every time I closed my eyes, looked like an explosion,   an atom bomb, repeating, ceaselessly. My atoms. I read about Chernobyl. I ate the words. The poisoned milk, the vegetables.   My skin was scarred, burned from the inside, red on the surface from treatment   that charred my cells. Doctors from my hospital flew there, trying to save lives.   Half my head was bald, overnight. Toxic, waste. Waist-length hair covered the bald spot   for awhile, till it too fell out in handfuls. My face a moon. My hair no halo. My face a plate.   White and pasty, red from exertion which was nothing at all, red from staying awake. Red   from burning. Red from sweats, leaning forward and watching it rain on the newspapers . . .         The short and the long of it.   Containing and erasing all history in this present moment.   Every sentence could be threaded together, shuffled direct connections.     Integration without the abyss?   The world's madness and disintegration do not cause madness and disintegration The blurring disregard of boundaries The water which falls in drops from the eaves of a house. To stand under the eaves,   as to listen and learn     what is said within doors:   "It is beautiful and we are just beginning to recover from it."
In post—World War II America there were several loosely affiliated, overlapping strands of poets who began publishing—poets rejecting the epistemological and anglophile models of W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. They were known variously as the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets. They came up on the heels of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and along the spur of the Objectivists, aka Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Niedecker, et al. Robert Creeley was the bridge. He distributed the differences and sounded parallel concerns. He began corresponding with Pound and Williams in 1949. He and John Ashbery were seated two desks apart at Harvard. In Majorca, his Divers Press published Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn. He typed Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which was then mimeographed in an edition of twenty-five. At the now legendary and gone Black Mountain College, he studied with Charles Olson and "earned" his successorship. At Black Mountain Creeley edited the Black Mountain Review (initially from Majorca) and picked up the degree he had managed not to complete at Harvard. Over the years he would edit works of Charles Olson and George Oppen (and Robert Burns and Walt Whitman), as well as anthologies of new American writing. His correspondence was carried on at a rate and level not to be believed. The Olson/Creeley letters alone consume ten volumes (if e-mail had been available to those two the number of volumes might have been squared). He wrote tense stories and a superb short novel along with scores of word-perfect essays. Overall he published in the vicinity of seventy books. Checking a familiar book site, 227 titles are instantly identified with his name. His collaborations with artists including Francesco Clemente, Elsa Dorfman, Sol LeWitt, R.B. Kitaj, and Susan Rothenberg were the occasion of fine-edition books and traveling exhibitions. His collaborations with musicians such as Steve Lacy and Steve Swallow were performed for packed, hip audiences and are featured on numerous recordings. He could and did fill Albert Hall, but he had no qualms about reading to a crowd of four. No qualms, either, about talking extemporaneously in lieu of giving the promoted reading. He was not there to accommodate anyone's prepackaged expectations—he was there to discover the direction of his own thinking. And in that lies, as he often quoted William Carlos Williams, the profundity.
Valentine's palette is mostly grey. Next comes blue (borage, cobalt, silk, robe, egg). Then white. Some inherent greens. But she draws most often from the greyer end of the grey scale. It could be manifest in a postmortem jaw, dusty glass, a sky, one degree Fahrenheit, a lone sock under a sickbed; the water is grey, and the long wall where one exits a car. Grey is the intermediate state she inhabits with no apparent effort. In the grey space, the bardo, the spirit starts to find shape, to find internal structure.
1 The Saturday morning meadowlark came in from high up with her song gliding into tall grass still singing. How I'd like to glide around singing in the summer then to go south to where I already was and find fields full of meadowlarks in winter. But when walking my dog I want four legs to keep up with her as she thunders down the hill at top speed then belly flops into the deep pond. Lark or dog I crave the impossible. I'm just human. All too human.  2 I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah. The hem of his robe was as wide as the horizon and his trunk and face were thousands of feet up in the air. Maybe he appeared because I had read him so much and opened too many ancient doors. I was cooking my life in a cracked clay pot that was leaking. I had found secrets I didn't deserve to know. When the battle for the mind is finally over it's late June, green and raining.  3 A violent windstorm the night before the solstice. The house creaked and yawned. I thought the morning might bring a bald earth, bald as a man's bald head but not shiny. But dawn was fine with a few downed trees, the yellow rosebush splendidly intact. The grass was all there dotted with Black Angus cattle. The grass is indestructible except to fire but now it's too green to burn. What did the cattle do in this storm? They stood with their butts toward the wind, erect Buddhists waiting for nothing in particular. I was in bed cringing at gusts, imagining the contents of earth all blowing north and piled up where the wind stopped, the pile sky-high. No one can climb it. A gopher comes out of a hole as if nothing happened.    4 The sun should be a couple of million miles closer today. It wouldn't hurt anything and anyway this cold rainy June is hard on me and the nesting birds. My own nest is stupidly uncomfortable, the chair of many years. The old windows don't keep the weather out, the wet wind whipping my hair. A very old robin drops dead on the lawn, a first for me. Millions of birds die but we never see it—they like privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so I think. We can't tell each other when we die. Others must carry the message to and fro. "He's gone," they'll say. While writing an average poem destined to disappear among the millions of poems written now by mortally average poets.  5 Solstice at the cabin deep in the forest. The full moon shines in the river, there are pale green northern lights. A huge thunderstorm comes slowly from the west. Lightning strikes a nearby tamarack bursting into flame. I go into the cabin feeling unworthy. At dawn the tree is still smoldering in this place the gods touched earth.
I love these raw moist dawns with a thousand birds you hear but can't quite see in the mist. My old alien body is a foreigner struggling to get into another country. The loon call makes me shiver. Back at the cabin I see a book and am not quite sure what that is.
You and I on the boat notice the print the whales leave, the huge ring their diving draws for a time on the surface. Is it like that when we lose one another? Don't know, can't. But I want to believe when we can no longer walk across a room for a hug, can no longer step into the arms of the other, there will be this: some trace that stays while the great body remains below out of sight, dark mammoth shadow flick of flipper body of delight diving deep.
I worry much about the suffering of Machado. I was only one when he carried his mother across the border from Spain to France in a rainstorm. She died and so did he a few days later in a rooming house along a dry canal. To carry Mother he abandoned a satchel holding his last few years of poetry. I've traveled to Collioure several times to search for Machado's lost satchel. The French fed him but couldn't save him. There's no true path to a death — we discover the path by walking. We turn a corner on no road and there's a house on a green hill with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle. Are the poems in the basement of the house on the hill? We'll find out if we remember earth at all.
I feel my failure intensely as if it were a vital organ the gods grew from the side of my head. You can't cover it with a hat and I no longer can sleep on that side it's so tender. I wasn't quite faithful enough to carry this sort of weight up the mountain. When I took my vows at nineteen I had no idea that gods were so merciless. Fear makes for good servants and bravery is fraudulent. When I awoke I wasn't awake enough.
I envied the dog lying in the yard so I did it. But there was a pebble under my flank so I got up and looked for the pebble, brushed it away and lay back down. My dog thus far overlooked the pebble. I guess it's her thick Lab fur. With my head downhill the blood gorged me with ideas. Not good. Got up. Turned around. Now I see hundreds of infinitesimal ants. I'm on an ant home. I get up and move five feet. The dog hasn't moved from her serene place. Now I'm rather too near a thicket where I saw a big black snake last week that might decide to join me. I moved near the actual dog this time but she got up and went under the porch. She doesn't like it when I'm acting weird. I'm failing as a dog when my own kind rejects me, but doing better than when I envied birds, the creature the least like us, therefore utterly enviable. To be sure I cheeped a lot but didn't try to fly. We humans can take off but are no good at landing.
Yes, we'll gather by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river. They say it runs by the throne of God. This is where God invented fish. Wherever, but then God's throne is as wide as the universe. If you're attentive you'll see the throne's borders in the stars. We're on this side and when you get to the other side we don't know what will happen if anything. If nothing happens we won't know it, I said once. Is that cynical? No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting just nothing. Then again maybe we'll be cast at the speed of light through the universe to God's throne. His hair is bounteous. All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there. The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back so as not to frighten the little ones. Even now they remember this divine habitat. Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river? We'll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.
A woman ladder leans with her two-year-old boy in her arms. Her arms & legs & hands & feet are thin as crayons. The man ladder is holding his glass of bourbon, he is coming out of the child’s drawing in his old open pajamas— he’s in the war. The sky is blackest crayon-canyon. When does he leave again? When he leaves, I leave. I like that river the sky.
I lay down under language it left me and I slept —You, the Comforter, came into the room my blood, my mouth all buttoned away— Makers of houses, books, clothes- makers, goodbye—
The helicopter, a sort of controlled silver leaf dropped lightly into the clearing. The searchlights swung, the little girl, the little girl was crying, her mother, a girl herself, was giving birth, the forest dropped birdseeds of milk. Then the helicopter lifted away, the mother rested.    Like him who came to us empty-handed, who came, it seemed, with nothing, Joseph Cornell— making a shoebox universe to put it all in.
When I first heard you on the phone your voice had to be that '40s wartime voice for it to get under my skin like it did, after seven years asleep.  You’re at the beginning of something, you said,and I’m at the end of something; but you didn’t go away, twice-born, three times, coming around, rough cello.    Late days I want to drive to your grave, But I don’t belong to it.
In the perfect universe of math it’s said the world’s eternal aberration. In fact, we should be less than dead,   math itself disrupted for matter ever to be read as real. A thought so hard to fathom that The Nation in its article on math has said   we lack the right imagination: the human head will not subtract itself from the equation, zero out the eager ego to be less than dead.   Did the numbers hunger for mistake, for fun upend themselves to recalculate our infinite extinction? And was existence meant for all, since it could be said   without our numbers others might have thrived: the black rhinoceros, shortnose sturgeon—? Articles of horn and scale both less and more than dead,   figurative dreams that now haunt us in our beds. Memory’s another flaw in our equation. Was it The Nation? I forget. Regardless, I know that someone said in a perfect universe, we’d all be dead.
My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded into windows where every rivet bleeds contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand waved across my chest and I watched blood on a small screen get back-sucked into my weakened heart. It’s grown a hole I have to monitor: one torn flap shuddering an infinite ellipsis of gray stars back and forth. You’re the writer, the doctor said in French. Tell me what you see. Easier to stand in a courtyard full of tourists scrying shapes from this titanic Rorschach. Here’s a pump stub shaped like a hand; something celled, cavernously fluted as a lobster’s abdomen. How much work it must have taken to drag these bits out of pits of flame, from lake beds and rice paddies, and stack them in layers: the French planes heaped beneath the American ones, while the Englishwoman beside me peers into this mess of metals, trying to isolate one image from the rest. Ski boot buckle or tire pump, she muses at me, fossilized shark’s jaw, clothespin, wasp’s nest? According to the camera, it’s just a picture changing with each angle, relic turned to rib cage, chrome flesh to animal: all the mortal details enumerated, neutered. I watch her trace an aluminum sheet torched across a thruster as if wind had tossed a silk scarf over a face. If she pulled it back, would I find a body foreign as my own entombed in here, a thousand dog tags jangling in the dark? I tilt my head: the vision slides once more past me, each plane reassembling then breaking apart. Spikes of grief— or is it fury?—throb across the surface. Everything has a rip in it, a hole, a tear, the dim sounds of something struggling to pry open death’s cracked fuselage. White sparks, iron trails. My heart rustles in its manila folder. How the doctor smiled at the images I fed him: A row of trees, I said, pointing at my chart. Stone towers,a flock of backlit swallows—  Now I kneel beside a cross of blades on which the Englishwoman tries to focus. Do you think I’ll get itall in the shot? she calls as she steps back. Steps back and back. Something like a knife sheath. Something like a saint’s skull. The sky floats past, horizon sucked into it. She won’t.
In Phnom Penh’s museum, the skulls are stacked in aquarium tanks: grim toys for hooks to ply free from the rubble. Here, each one gets a tag, a mount, a photograph to suggest a life, perhaps a name, might be envisioned. Yet I’m more moved by what’s anonymous, past; imagine fields of faces sunken with decay, eyes jellied in their sockets, heel meats bruised, bloated in the rain—  Perhaps the skulls prefer a lack of names as, scrubbed of self and skin, they’re trauma’s best witnesses: fused by time and pain to one crisis, never to be separated. Lost as men, they become event. in this, they achieve a terrible transcendence.
It is important to remember that you will die, lifting the fork with the sheep's brain lovingly speared on it to the mouth: the little piece smooth on the one side as a baby mouse pickled in wine; on the other, blood- plush and intestinal atop its bed of lentils. The lentils were once picked over for stones in the fields of India perhaps, the sun shining into tractor blades slow moving as the swimmer’s arms that pierce, then rise, then pierce again the cold water of this river outside your window called The Heart or The Breast, even, but meaning something more than this, beyond the crudeness of flesh, though what is crude about flesh anyway, watching yourself every day lose another bit of luster? It is wrong to say one kind of beauty replaces another. Isn’t it your heart along with its breast muscles that has started to weaken; solace isn’t possible for every loss, or why else should we clutch, stroke, grasp, love the little powers we once were born with? Perhaps the worst thing in the world would be to live forever. Otherwise, what would be the point of memory, without which we would have nothing to hurt or placate ourselves with later? Look. It is only getting worse from here on out. Thank God. Otherwise the sun on this filthy river could never be as boring or as poignant, the sheep’s brain trembling on the fork wouldn’t seem once stung by the tang of grass, by the call of some body distant and beloved to it still singing through the milk. The fork would be only a fork, and not the cool heft of it between your fingers, the scratch of lemon in the lentils, onions, parsley slick with blood; food that, even as you lift it to your mouth, you never thought you’d eat. And do.
So today, yet another Guyanese will try to run the border dressed in a dead housewife’s hair—all they’ve recovered since her disappearance in a downtown shopping mall. An “incident,” the paper says. Another “routine occurrence”— wresting my trust from the publicans assigned to keeping us safe, whole. Rather: vow to stay vigilant against the maiming that waits in each landscape, even in this mundane procession of muddy spring days. To see the tenacity of rooted hair for what it is: an illusion as fleeting as courage. To keep the meat between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard marble of the cranium covered with its own skin. To stay vigilant. To watch the signs of violence stirring even in one's own machine. To keep both breasts attached and undiseased. To keep the womb empty; and yet to keep the organs living there from shriveling like uneaten fruit, from turning black and dropping. And not to mistake the danger for a simple matter of whether to put the body on the streets, of walking or of staying home—; there are household cleansers that can scar a woman deeper than a blade or dumdum bullets. The kitchen drawers are full of tools that lie unchaperoned. Even with the doors and windows bolted, in the safety of my bed, I am haunted by the sound of him (her, it, them) stalking the hallway, his long tongue already primed with Pavlovian drool. Or him waiting in the urine-soaked garages of this city's leading department stores, waiting to deliver up the kiss of a gunshot, the blunted kiss of a simple length of pipe. But of course I mean a larger fear: the kiss of amputation, the therapeutic kiss of cobalt. The kiss of a deformed child. Of briefcase efficiency and the forty-hour workweek. Of the tract home: the kiss of automatic garage-door openers that despite the dropped eyelid of their descent do nothing to bar a terror needing no window for entry: it resides within. And where do we turn for protection from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage— to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder, who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor, headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.
I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs.   That morning as the wind was mowing little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner to the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth:  Careers . . . Cookery, Seamstress . . . and Baby Maker. . . all gone up in smoke.   But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life, for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods and taught the mechanics of fire,   around which they had us dance with pointed sticks lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.”   Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving about what people think of a woman—thirty, unsettled, living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics.   Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.
Women who sleep on stones are like brick houses that squat alone in cornfields. They look weatherworn, solid, dusty, torn screens sloughing from the window frames. But at dusk a second-story light is always burning.   Used to be I loved nothing more than spreading my blanket on high granite ledges that collect good water in their hollows. Stars came close without the trees staring and rustling like damp underthings.   But doesn’t the body foil what it loves best? Now my hips creak and their blades are tender. I can’t rest on my back for fear of exposing my gut to night creatures who might come along and rip it open with a beak or hoof.   And if I sleep on my belly, pinning it down, my breasts start puling like baby pigs trapped under their slab of torpid mother. Dark passes as I shift from side to side to side, the blood pooling just above the bone.   Women who sleep on stones don’t sleep. They see the stars moving, the sunrise, the gnats rising like a hairnet lifted from a waitress’s head. The next day they’re sore all over and glad for the ache: that’s how stubborn they are.
1. “Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way to start the poem. But would she mean anything devoid of her context, in this case a lushly late-August deciduous forest, some maple, mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example, no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body. But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated, as the famous cartoon of the door is a mystery until we post the word LADIES at a point that would be four feet up from the ground if this door were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us, you see, who make believe it corresponds to a “true-life” human door. Does it help if I say the naked woman is “really” my true- life friend, she of the tangled dago surname we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next that she has been swimming—in Lake Tiorati—    2. you can see how straightaway the tangling subdivides into (a) where the hell is Lake Tiorati? and (b) why naked?—to the last let me answer that it’s 1978 and she is twenty; at college she’s been reading Simone de Beauvoir and learning words like patriarchy and oppression. And these have been Mixmastered into her thinking even about swimsuits—i.e., that not to wear one is to rip the sign off the door and stomp it underfoot. When she lies on a rock the last thing she expects is the tingling she feels now against her wrist, from a guy peeing brazenly at her perimeter. This is an impasse whose bud she thought she had nipped by aggravating her muscles into interlaced mounds so her body resembles a relief map of the Appalachians. In whose northernmost range this story unfolds & hence the much-delayed answer to item (a), above.    3. “Naked woman dadadadada police”: not a story but words at the end of a chain whose first link is her realizing that the Puerto Rican kids across the lake splashing and whooping are not having fun— though this is the sign that she’d stuck on their door. No, there’s another word for the kid slapping his palms on the water: Drowning. Even the urinater abruptly stops his stream and stumbles back from her, ashamed. And because she’s the one with the lifeguard build and because all the guys are much too drunk, without even thinking she finds herself paddling toward the spot these kids are now screaming Julio! at, where she draws a mental X upon the water. Of course, it is a fantasy, the correspondence that would make a drawing equal life, and so you understand how amazing it is, when she dives to the bottom and her hand happens on the child.    4. Perhaps what she expected was for the men on shore to pay her no mind, as in Manet’s Déjeuner . . . : the naked woman sits among them, yet she is a ghost. But the kids keep yelling Julio! even after she’s hauled the wet one out, the one she points to: Julio okay. No, they shriek,Julio otro! words she knows just enough Spanish to know mean there’s another Julio in the lake. Whom she cannot save despite her next round of diving, which lasts until the cops come hiking down the trail in their cop shoes. Then she comes ashore and stands shivering among them, telling the story calmly enough until she ends it with: for Christ’s sake can’t anyone give her a T-shirt? They’re staring as if somehow she’s what’s to blame, seeing a naked woman, not the miracle. Which is, of course, the living boy, that with these words—Julio otro!— we manage to make sense to anyone at all.
The famous Polish poet calls Simone de Beauvoir a Nazi hag but to me she will always be her famous book, the one with the Matisse paper cut on the cover, a sad blue nude I took into the woods. Where we college girls went to coax the big picture from her, as if she could tell us how to use all the strange blades on our Swiss Army knives— the firewood we arranged in either log cabin or tepee, a little house built to be burned down. Which could be a metaphor: Simone as the wind puffing the damp flames, a cloud with a mouth that became obsolete once we started using gasoline. Still, she gave me one lesson that sticks, which is: do not take a paperback camping in the rain or it may swell to many times its original size, and if you start with a big book you’ll end up with a cinderblock. In that vein I pictured Simone as huge until (much later) I read that her size was near-midget— imagine, if we took Gertrude Stein, we’d be there still, trying to build some kind of travois to drag her body out. The other thing I remember, a word, immanence— meaning, you get stuck with the cooking and laundry while the man gets to hit on all your friends in Paris. Sure you can put the wet book in the oven and try baking it like a cake. But the seam will stay soggy even when the pages rise, ruffled like French pastry. As far as laundry goes, it’s best I steer clear, what with my tendency to forget the tissues wadded in my sleeves. What happens is I think I’m being so careful, and everything still comes out like the clearing where we woke. Covered in flakes that were then the real thing: snow. Which sounds more la-di-da in French. But then the sun came up and all la neige vanished like those chapters we grew bored with and had skipped.
Word of it comes whispered by a slippery thin section of the paper, where the models pantomime unruffled tête-à-têtes despite the absence of their blouses.   Each year when my familiar latches on them so intently like a grand master plotting the white queen’s path, like a baby trying to suckle a whole roast beef,   I ask: What, you salt block, are you dreaming about being clubbed by thunderheads?—but he will not say. Meanwhile Capricorn’s dark hours flabbed me,   uneasy about surrendering to the expert fitter (even if the cupped hands were licensed and bonded)— I had August in mind, seeing the pygmy goats at the county fair.   Now the sky is having its daily rain event and the trees are having their hibernal bark event, pretending they feel unruffled   despite the absence of their leaves. And we forget how they looked all flouncy and green. Instead we regard fearfully the sway of their old trunks.
What hand opened the door, I don't know. No one lives there in winter. And I don't know if it was for entrance or for exit that the place opened itself, or was opened, though I do know what boundaries were broken. The lake lay frozen, the sky still as folded wings. And everywhere snow blown into the rooms, strewn across the braided rugs and knotty boards, under chairs, creeping like a slow cold tide, white and silent, out of its element with greed. Then I remembered the photograph, black and white, as old as me or older. What eye watched that scene, taking it in, shameless, I don't know, though I do know that boundaries were broken: A woman, her grey dress blowing toward land, lost on the shore in the dim light of her long day's end, and a man, farther up the beach, alone. The sea— mute, infinite entity—taking in its borders hungrily; and the stolen child it drank up when each entered the other in a moment of dropped vigilance. In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we love against the winds of loss. The woman, the man, their child gone—slipped from the safe home of their love, swallowed whole. I am not going to try to feel what that woman felt, or to speak with her voice. I don't know what she did next or how she did what she did next. She is the mother, my fear, all the love ever lost to grief. Her pain is an ocean vaster than planets, a diaspora of longing flung to all four flogging winds. In her life, I am sure that time drifted past her, with her, within her. I know that that summer, like all summers, moved on through the fall into winter, that the shore closed up, abandoned, cold. And that the thing lost still blows through us, the swollen door no longer shuts.
It isn't true about the lambs. They are not meek. They are curious and wild, full of the passion of spring. They are lovable, and they are not silent when hungry. Tonight the last of the triplet lambs is piercing the quiet with its need. Its siblings are stronger and will not let it eat. I am its keeper, the farmer, its mother, I will go down to it in the dark, in the cold barn, and hold it in my arms. But it will not lie still—it is not meek. I will stand in the open doorway under the weight of watching trees and moon, and care for it as one of my own. But it will not love me—it is not meek. Drink, little one. Take what I can give you. Tonight the whole world prowls the perimeters of your life. Your anger keeps you alive— it's your only chance. So I know what I must do after I have fed you.   I will shape my mouth to the shape of the sharpest words, even those bred in silence. I will impale with words every ear pressed upon open air. I will not be meek. You remind me of the necessity of having more hope than fear, and of sounding out terrible names. I am to cry out loud like a hungry lamb, cry loud enough to waken wolves in the night. No one can be allowed to sleep.
My eyes are polished smooth by sight, they clot like crystals in storm glass, like my sister brewing beakers of toxin. If we had seen what had been done, what the helicopter pilot did in our name,   what the special ops team did in our name, what they did with their hands in our name. What if it were my sister, what if it were her, what? If we had seen with our own smooth eyes.   Mark the diacritical, my lovely: we’re all wearing our knee-high boots, every last one of us, we live in a booted nation. A nation girded and gunning. This moment, this is precisely all, watching takes work, sight takes hours,   takes my eyeglasses, every last one of them, as if they were yours. You can see there’s a sigh in our sight. What if it were my sister? What if it were, what. What we saw ground into our eyes with the photos,   with the newspaper reports. What would I say, what can I say if, what would I say if it were my sister, my own? With my own beakers of toxin, my own boots, my own hands in my own name?
They are dying out and I want to reach them before they are gone Not that I know what I would say to them when I get there Their songs rippling beneath temporary sky As I approach, as I am doing now Even though I am nowhere near wherever they are Swirling in blossoming dust and dreaming they are not   They are dying out and I want to reach them before they are gone Just as I want to reach myself before I too am gone Another blossom sliding into slime What notes do I hear drenched in fiery sky Are these ghosts rising up before me Or gasps of dust near a lake covered by algae   They are dying out and I want to reach them before their names vanish Before they become ghosts dying in pink algae and ruined vowels Not that I know what their songs say Telling sting of monstrous human torrent Wheeling above burning story of lost lives Tapering branches of smoke, red and yellow leaves falling   They are dying out and I want to reach them Before my name joins theirs in plastic matrimony Before a blue-eyed undertaker powders my nose Or I turn to powder in squirt gun of unprofitable insects Secrets folded away never rinsed in scum corner History erasing traces of its nothing new
I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house with all the pomp available. With celebratory music and all my beloveds watching. With Baraka and DiPrima and Roque Dalton behind me I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house wearing my favorite clothes probably a hoodie or perhaps my Belgian suit. Belgium is a failed state in the heart of Europe which is something to aspire to. I like Belgium and one day I might like to read poems at the palace of the nation but for now I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems and sing karaoke and I will probably tell a few nervous jokes. It will be like all the other readings. We will be there together. I want to read poems at the white house and then like any house reading we will all clean up together. We will clean up the mess we have made together. All that rubble and all those ashes. These are my conditions.
But it is not always quiet here. Things go on while we sleep the sleep of soldiers. Ancient branches crack and splinter into dust. Large wings snap open in spring like carpets splayed out over the railing. Granite splits apart at the seams and great animals cleave roads through woods. Daily, in the density, there is life on the edge of the knife that cuts the world into hemispheres of sense and death. Trees are born and die, bones turn to humus, glaciers to meadowland. It is time to turn yourself loose, like new leaves, like big lakes on which swim enormous birds at a distance deeper in breadth than the water's depth. Their shadows pull you to the shore. Their size fills your lungs with sky. It is time to heave aside the boulders and the dams, to come back out like a bear after the thaw, to be ready for the forest, for the forage, for the full and waning moons. You will get soaked in wet grass, feel the insects pierce your skin. You will learn to balance between gravity and light. There will be hot and sticky nights, sharp songs at dawn, long and bright ineffable days. This is your chance to crash your way through underbrush unlocking like so many doors.
Darkness is not a death, does not obliterate, will not bury you or take your breath away. Darkness will not erase you the way it erases day with night because darkness is not the clock but merely the time falling away from the clock's circular face. Darkness is not the loss but the thing misplaced, not the hammer but the nail in its curved emergence from wood's grasp, not the storm's insurgence but the limbs broken off from their miraculous suspension in a storm out far, beyond us. Darkness is not about hearts, imperfect as they are, but what leaks through their incorrigible doors, not the stars but the glissade or glide of their dust. Darkness no longer shields the hunters' musk in search of you, or turns you to animal prey, it is only a measure of weight or days. Not something without a beginning or an end, it is not even—especially not—an end. Nor is it vertigo, nor the whole, but merely a piece. No, darkness is but a ghost of an idea, the least remembered, most estranged prayer, and your fear but a lingering, limbic fear torn from shreds of forgotten years. Only that much is clear.
When you step through the back door into the kitchen father is still sitting at the table with a newspaper folded open in front of him and pen raised, working the crossword puzzle. In the living room mother is sleeping her peaceful sleep at last, in a purple robe, with her head back, slippered feet up and twisted knuckle hands crossed right over left in her lap. Through the south window in your old room you see leaves on the giant ash tree turning yellow again in setting sun and falling slowly to the ground and one by one all the questions you ever had become clear. Number one across: a four-letter word for no longer. Number one down: an eleven letter word for gone.
Plows have piled a whitened range— faux mountains at the end of our street, slopes shrinking, glazed, grayed. Fog rules the day. In woolly air, shapes stir—slow cars leave a trace of exhaust, careful walkers share loud intimacies. My mother's birth slides across a calendar. Like a stranger who jumps off a bus, crosses tracks and strides toward us, memory parts the sodden gloom of our winter, as though, today, only she can see where she goes and track where she's been.
I like how the mallard ducklings goofy and weak waddle up the cement incline then slide into this runoff of lawn sprinklers and car washes and how the great blue heron seems to be teleported here from the Jurassic to look for extinct species of fish but mostly I like the way the little birds fly in and out of the barbed wire with only a smear of water to keep them singing.
hangs in the closet of this small room, collar open, sleeves empty, tail wrinkled. Nothing fills the shirt but air and my faint scent. It waits, all seven buttons undone, button holes slack, the soft fabric with its square white pattern, all of it waiting for a body. It would take any body, though it knows, in its shirt way of knowing, only mine has my shape in its wrinkles, my bend in the elbows. Outside this room birds hunt for food, young leaves drink in morning sunlight, people pass on their way to breakfast. Yet here, in this closet, the blue shirt needs nothing, expects nothing, knows only its shirt knowledge, that I am now learning—how to be private and patient, how to be unbuttoned, how to carry the scent of what has worn me, and to know myself by the wrinkles.
there was a rude boy on my jean jacket. black suit, shades and hat, skanking where orange street met birmingham. two-tone ska a second skin, a way to believe, though unsure why. days on this island with wasted republican frat boys and sorority girls, pompous u.s citizens, northern americanos with trust funds. only white dudes in sight without reagan hair are in the front of the car, a sputtering nondescript, and later pugs, the skinhead in boots and leather below unfiltered sun, unsure if peyote caps or heat is source of glistening blister of a head. an equally overdressed chubby blonde woman at his side who he swears sounds just like janis. on cue, val fills the hotel courtyard where my misfit crew hope for a corner of a floor not coated in puke or recent sex rented by bobcat’s brother’s sigma hate niggas fraternity. her dense wail careens off ten stories like a friday night public address system. so close to another why not join the hollow migration? us, funboy three, avoiding the same people in a different country. tequila, laughter and respect. then border patrol. stinking agave as he checks licenses and cargo space. when he opens the back door, rudy rests beside skinny black sophomore with a flat top. one front pocket open, the other concealing skunk. i consider what dank brick lines the cells, how long i will drink sweat because it tastes better than juarez prison chow. he reaches in the open pocket, returns rude boy to the seat. welcome home, boys. enjoy yourself, he says. it’s later than you think.
for Bill Berkson & Khaled al-Assad the union president’s dead & they won’t let transgender   people pee in north carolina & here i’m complaining about   climbing the mountain again the mountain’ll always remain   if i’m lucky, to keep me from sucking & only a king mule will   do. humbled by bill as he goes through the business of staying   alive with dignified unconcern. i don’t deserve him, have no zen   no dasein, just half-a-dozen self -inflicted wounds i’m expected   to grin & bear & like robert plant, i do. it’s like i’m in   a rembrandt or something holding testtubes to the sun   to read my urine specimens & —spoiler alert—i’m trigger sad   checked my email mid-poem so of course its bad news   the ancient city is practically gone, palmyra, palmyra   at least i still have bill here in isis usa
I lived a long time as both woman and girl it nearly killed me I don’t want an ordinary moment any longer no more gestures Such as the oaks neither shake nor fidget in observation And the objects worth discussing dissipate oh how they leak Away from the creeds claiming one can get ahead of the pain By naming see how the green will change you it really will I went into the green with a vine across my back and from the mud Came the pattern before the light could enter light turned And denied us, the moss struggled toward the yellow A fine pollen came up from the world and the road made this Shape in the powder: What’s wrong with right here? There’s a cape behind my eyes and the body inside it wallows   Across patches of burned up grass untender and lines perpendicular To the gate I couldn’t open an outrage regularly loiters Isn’t that weird, how talent carries time? Nothing’s resolved today and the hours are dim but vital A body in a cloak upon a road rolling sweetly through the mind Place this road in some distant future just like that foregone past And then offensively remember how women don’t exist Get head of the pain the ages counsel, make plenty of money
My words were sent underground to where the toggle switch detonates. That was the glare our voices were avoiding. There was something also   broken about the obedience of this retainer. The arcades weren’t semaphores just because the arrows leading there facilitated those   of us in line as though reliant on east or west quadrants. The ticket master was prone to elide requests from the travelers, the sliding doors   sounded a fanfare for the common man, get faster as thought, or mind the gaps. What I infer can never altogether establish a space adequate   to the body count. The platform motivates two guardians who were instructed in safekeeping to usher me from harm’s way but my stand   point so recedes from this tableaux as to acknowledge a footprint perspective. Translucent envelope inside remaindered by the riptide   or such tunnel vision as to warrant arrest. Why I was sent to the nether world inflicted with no wound. Someone lets fall a pair of zip locks   containing the pixie sticks of this conspiracy; what I had to say was sent, I mentioned this I think already, underground switch and toggle   intended to ignite what I could never bring myself to mean. Where the voices were avoiding me—hands outstretched at quarter day to hold   back the beam—was there something broken? I weather compliant. I rally.
on a line from Szymborska My departure from the city of O.? I took no leave.   I’d learned to sleep angry.   On a train I was contained.   The water under the bridge was just that. Shunned metaphor.   It did not send waves of regret or make me reflect. It did not baptize, wash away, or cleanse.   The countryside appeared like the sides of any country where rain falls and cows chew yellow flowers.   The world was not too much or too much with me.   I stomached it.   In the photograph I only look lonely because I was alone.   You cannot see the envelope on my lap or the letters lodged under sweaters in my suitcase.   I carried only one bag, what I could manage in a crowd.   You can imagine I held a thick book from which nothing could distract me. You can imagine my head high, eyes dry.   I did not see my departure as a failure, or a fall. I’d dodged a bullet. Been reborn.    You can imagine it that way.   Only none of it was like that, not like that at all.
The idea was. At least in theory, Dust was a bad thing.   There was a bowl Of it. At another Point in time The conclusion Was reached That everything Was of it.   No season, no Nothing to measure To measure against So no love or hate. Left us without no Moorings or so my Father told me   Vanity tables of it? Isn’t that what a vanity Table is for? What happens to As its failings accrue?   No mission but to be clean. Of itself. But existing (time) And problems there – The problem of now We are back here.   See the whole dust problem’s No measure. All’s dust, check. All’s virtuous, check. So why not live it up then? And thus, YOLO etc. etc.   {These fok whirr pretty smart. Thing is, even in The dust bowl, the Idea, a very American One was that something Wasn’t dust. I wasn’t. The Bowl wasn’t. The dust wasn’t.   Since Ecclesiastes, Been trying this one on. (how’s that working out for you?) One needn’t be geologically Or for that matter Psychologically trained to Begin unpacking the diffident And sometimes strained Relation the nation holds with All that is vanity.
First snow—I release her into it— I know, released, she won't come back. This is different from letting what, already, we count as lost go. It is nothing like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes: I love her. Released, she seems for a moment as if some part of me that, almost, I wouldn't mind understanding better, is that not love? She seems a part of me, and then she seems entirely like what she is: a white dog, less white suddenly, against the snow, who won't come back. I know that; and, knowing it, I release her. It's as if I release herbecause I know.
You ever wake up with your footie PJs warming your neck like a noose? Ever upchuck after a home-cooked meal? Or notice how the blood on the bottoms of your feet just won’t seem to go away? Love, it used to be you could retire your toothbrush for like two or three days and still I’d push my downy face into your neck. Used to be I hung on your every word. (Sing! you’d say: and I was a bird.Freedom! you’d say: and I never really knew what that meant, but liked the way it rang like a rusty bell.) Used to be. But now I can tell you your breath stinks and you’re full of shit. You have more lies about yourself than bodies beneath your bed. Rootingfor the underdog. Team player. Hook, line and sinker. Love, you helped design the brick that built the walls around the castle in the basement of which is a vault inside of which is another vault inside of which . . . you get my point. Your tongue is made of honey but flicks like a snake’s. Voice like a bird but everyone’s ears are bleeding. From the inside your house shines and shines, but from outside you can see it’s built from bones. From out here it looks like a graveyard, and the garden’s all ash. And besides, your breath stinks. We’re through.
If you think you know enough to say this poem is about good hair, I'll correct you and tell you it's about history which is the blacksmith of our tongues. Our eyes. Where you see misunderstanding I see knuckles and teeth for sale in a storefront window. I see the waterlogged face of the fourteen-year-old boy. The bullet's imperceptible sizzle toward an unarmed man. And as you ask me to sign the book that is not mine, your gaze shifting between me and the author's photo, whispering,but that's not you? I do not feel sorry for you. No. I think only that when a man is a concept he will tell you about the smell of smoke. He will tell you the distance between heartbreak and rage.
—after Steve Scafidi The way the universe sat waiting to become, quietly, in the nether of space and time,   you too remain some cellular snuggle dangling between my legs, curled in the warm   swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be— And who knows?—I wonder, little bubble   of unbudded capillaries, little one ever aswirl in my vascular galaxies, what would you think   of this world which turns itself steadily into an oblivion that hurts, and hurts bad?   Would you curse me my careless caressing you into this world or would you rise up   and, mustering all your strength into that tiny throat which one day, no doubt, would grow big and strong,   scream and scream and scream until you break the back of one injustice, or at least get to your knees to kiss back to life   some roadkill? I have so many questions for you, for you are closer to me than anyone   has ever been, tumbling, as you are, this second, through my heart’s every chamber, your teeny mouth   singing along with the half-broke workhorse’s steady boom and gasp. And since we’re talking today I should tell you,   though I know you sneak a peek sometimes through your father’s eyes, it’s a glorious day,   and there are millions of leaves collecting against the curbs, and they’re the most delicate shade of gold   we’ve ever seen and must favor the transparent wings of the angels you’re swimming with, little angel.   And as to your mother—well, I don’t know— but my guess is that lilac bursts from her throat   and she is both honeybee and wasp and some kind of moan to boot and probably she dances in the morning—   but who knows? You’ll swim beneath that bridge if it comes. For now let me tell you about the bush called honeysuckle   that the sad call a weed, and how you could push your little sun-licked face into the throngs and breathe and breathe.   Sweetness would be your name, and you would wonder why four of your teeth are so sharp, and the tiny mountain range   of your knuckles so hard. And you would throw back your head and open your mouth at the cows lowing their human songs   in the field, and the pigs swimming in shit and clover, and everything on this earth, little dreamer, little dreamer   of the new world, holy, every rain drop and sand grain and blade of grass worthy of gasp and joy and love, tiny shaman,   tiny blood thrust, tiny trillion cells trilling and trilling, little dreamer, little hard hat, little heartbeat, little best of me.
Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief  that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil  dragging from my neck as I swim  through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos, which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry  snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion  worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say:  I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means.    And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café,  and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket  as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No,  I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness  in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise  when my self-absorption gets usurped  by the sound of opera streaming from an open window,  and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl,  and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the  delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue  which means a language more beautiful than my own,  and I don’t recognize the song  though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s  breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me  two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch  leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face,  staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee  and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention  the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers,  some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers  and training wheels and nearly trampling me  when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress  blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway  and friends, it is not too much to say  it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea  and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles  of love and every name of the unborn and dead  from this abuelita only glancing at me  before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby  and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding  makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here  and tell you I said thank you.
—for Patrick Rosal Because I must not get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest, I hold something like a clownfaced herd of bareback and winged elephants stomping in my chest, I hold a thousand kites in a field loosed from their tethers at once, I feel my skeleton losing track somewhat of the science I’ve made of tamp, feel it rising up shriek and groove, rising up a river guzzling a monsoon, not to mention the butterflies of the loins, the hummingbirds of the loins, the thousand dromedaries of the loins, oh body of sunburst, body of larkspur and honeysuckle and honeysuccor bloom, body of treetop holler, oh lightspeed body of gasp and systole, the mandible’s ramble, the clavicle swoon, the spine’s trillion teeth oh, drift of hip oh, trill of ribs, oh synaptic clamor and juggernaut swell oh gutracket blastoff and sugartongue syntax oh throb and pulse and rivulet swing and glottal thing and kick-start heart and heel-toe heart ooh ooh ooh a bullfight where the bull might take flight and win!
Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest,   I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will and in the meantime neglect, Love, the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend,   instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings;   and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak, so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids   who spin a yarn about Max like I’m singing to you, except they tell a child, a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes   to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them, and combining in their story the big kids make   the boy who shall remain unnamed believe Max to be sick and rabid, and say his limp and regular smell of piss are just two signs,   but the worst of it, they say, is that he’ll likely find you in the night, and the big kids do not giggle, and the boy does not giggle,   but lets the final berries in his hand drop into the overgrowth at his feet, and if I spoke the dream of the unnamed boy   I fear my tongue would turn an arm of fire so I won’t, but know inside the boy’s head grew a fire beneath the same stars   as you and I, Love, your leg between mine, the fine hairs on your upper thigh nearly glistening in the night, and the boy,   the night, the incalculable mysteries as he sleeps with a stuffed animal tucked beneath his chin and rolls tight against his brother   in their shared bed, who rolls away, and you know by now there is no salve to quell his mind’s roaring machinery   and I shouldn’t tell you, but I will, the unnamed boy   on the third night of the dreams which harden his soft face puts on pants and a sweatshirt and quietly takes the spade from the den   and more quietly leaves his house where upstairs his father lies dreamless, and his mother bends her body into his,   and beneath these same stars, Love, which often, when I study them, seem to recede like so many of the lies of light,   the boy walks to the yard where Max lives attached to a steel cable spanning the lawn, and the boy brings hot dogs which he learned   from Tom & Jerry, and nearly urinating in his pants he tosses them toward the quiet and crippled thing limping across the lawn,   the cable whispering above the dew-slick grass, and Max whimpers, and the boy sees a wolf where stands this ratty   and sad and groveling dog and beneath these very stars Max raises his head to look at the unnamed boy with one glaucous eye nearly glued shut and the other wet from the cool breeze and wheezing Max catches the gaze of the boy who sees, at last, the raw skin on the dog's flank, the quiver of his spindly legs, and as Max bends his nose to the franks the boy watches him struggle to snatch the meat with gums, and bringing the shovel down he bends to lift the meat to Max's toothless mouth, and rubs the length of his throat and chin, Max arching his neck with his eyes closed, now, and licking the boy's round face, until the boy unchains the dog, and stands, taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels,   for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool, and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels, again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices, Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile, Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk, in the bowl you made with your own lovely hands.
We come here These little pillars of salt Placed into the hands Of physicians With debt sweats A gross product Of the sex apparatus There are expired teens There are the old That die in the summer The situation When a nation Loses its beloved celebrity It tries to out-mourn one another Extort them of their talent Versions of these chosen ones Hair flowing free and unrestricted Meanwhile The curbs are laced With water soluble prescriptions Running down into gutters Phosphorescent in the streetlight Medications Available in avocado Coppertone Aqua and white I suffer from the occasional Emotionally draining dream about turtles However The simple idea of omnipresent neutrality Is difficult Too much blood Spills in my dreams It’s a vascular debacle Mantras and Ak-47s Are boring In the park Getting some vitamin D The sunlight on my blue jeans I’m a deadened sapphire Reading Didion A psychic residue of fortune is on me Didion writes, “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be” I can’t handle fate The aphrodisiac of lying to myself The battery flavor of anxiety Shooting the messenger Having a god that doesn’t ‘get me’
Because he was 38, because this was his second job, because he had two daughters, because his hands looked like my father's, because at 7 he would walk to the furniture warehouse, unload trucks 'til 3 AM, because I was fourteen and training him, because he made $3.75 an hour, because he had a wife to look in the face, because he acted like he respected me, because he was sick and would not call out I didn't blink when the water dropped from his nose into the onion's perfectly circular mouth on the Whopper Jr. I coached him through preparing. I did not blink. Tell me this didn't happen. I dare you.
It’s the shivering. When rage grows hot as an army of red ants and forces the mind to quiet the body, the quakes emerge, sometimes just the knees, but, at worst, through the hips, chest, neck until, like a virus, slipping inside the lungs and pulse, every ounce of strength tapped to squeeze words from my taut lips, his eyes scanning my car’s insides, my eyes, my license, and as I answer the questions 3, 4, 5 times, my jaw tight as a vice, his hand massaging the gun butt, I imagine things I don’t want to and inside beg this to end before the shiver catches my hands, and he sees, and something happens.
for Amadou Diallo The few strings snap and pull the doll’s flimsy limbs for his last ballet, an American piece, arms flung like a flamingo’s wings, his sashay a flame’s undulation, dip, wave, head snapped into a skygaze, a pained grin white beneath the doorway’s light, legs braiding in the climactic pirouette, convulsive shoulders rolling, the body’s final drift smooth as a sun-baked bloodflake flecked off a rhino’s horn, the gored corpse sweet meat to a smoky gauze of ravenous flies humming and blood- sucking tiny gunpowder-singed hearts, charred kiss marks, until, at last, the strings go slack, the doll sprawls in a crippled collapse, his face half lit, the puppeteers praising this black ghost’s steel-pierced, last dying quake, the dead sweet and clean, and that last wheeze, an escaping, you’ve heard it, drops the floodgates for the real ghosts, a bouqet of them, a blitzkrieg of black orchids roaring. And they blaze.
If you find yourself half naked and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing, again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says you are the air of the now and gone, that says all you love will turn to dust, and will meet you there, do not raise your fist. Do not raise your small voice against it. And do not take cover. Instead, curl your toes into the grass, watch the cloud ascending from your lips. Walk through the garden's dormant splendor. Say only, thank you. Thank you.
All year, death, after death, after death. Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky, God putting on a show of tenderness, nothing like thoughts that rise and drift in my mind, like flakes shaken in a snow globe, and my brain laboring in its own night, never feeling the punky starlight of dark thirty, the time a friend said for us to meet and had to explain it was half an hour after the first dark, when daylilies fold up and headlights lead the way home, but maybe too early to find the moon turning half its body away, holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief breaks over you when you've already given all you've got and hands you tools you don't know how to use. The blush of dark thirty turned bleak when I heard about the O— O dark thirty, military time for 12:30 a.m., hour of the deepest dark, when, if I'm awake, as I often am, a storm of thoughts battle one another, now settling unsettlingly on the ways we make war and flaunt it. Take the Civil War double cannon the lawn of a city hall in the deep south, twinned so that two cannonballs chained together kill two at a time, often decapitating. And why did a small town, population 932, in rural New Hampshire, import a ballistic missile to crown its village green? Brecht's line floats up: "Pity the nation that needs heroes," but what to do with the guy pontificating on the Middle East, telling me with the gravest authority— that of stupidity—the reason for the strife there: "Hatred is in the rocks."
Has anyone described the smell of wishbones drying on the kitchen sill or the smell of glass, or the bucket of water lifted from the well we go to when death takes the last thirst from someone we love? After my mother died, sometimes I'd take the one piece of her clothing I'd kept to bed and bury my face in her flowered blouse to smell her last skin, but even from the first it was futile. What I got was the smell of goneness, the smell of screen doors where moths have spent their wing powder beating failingly to reach the light. My massage therapist said she felt grief in my body like hard empty boxes. I felt like I was always handling dough, never wanting the kneading to be done, never wanting to bake the bread that meant the end of something having to do with a mother and daughter in a kitchen. My mother has been gone for years, and I begin to see, in the spots on the backs of my hands, in the shelf my cheekbones make for my cheeks, in the way I hold my mouth against gravity's pull, that I carry her with me, my skin, her skin, her last skin.
Isn't it always the heart that wants to wash the elephant, begging the body to do it with soap and water, a ladder, hands, in tree-shade big enough for the vast savannahs of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt, the cratered full moon's light fueling the windy spooling memory of elephant? What if Father Quinn had said, "Of course you'll recognize your parents in heaven," instead of "Being one with God will make your mother and father pointless." That was back when I was young enough to love them absolutely though still fear for their place in heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full of something resembling street water after rain. Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess, to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkercheif of coins to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder, Land O'Lakes, and two Camels. If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence. Of the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tuunnel and down 34th Street to the Garden. So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken pathos.  It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were, the few real loves-of-your-life and how much of the rest— the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly, unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things like Popsicles unthinkingly. And though dailiness may have no place for the ones that have etched themselves in the laugh lines and frown lines on the face that's harder and harder to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life will appear in a dream, arriving with the weight and certitude of an elephant, and it's always the heart that wants to go out and wash the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.
(for Seamus Heaney) First time out I was a torc of gold And wept tears of the sun.   That was fun But they buried me In the earth two thousand years   Till a labourer Turned me up with a pick In eighteen fifty-four.   Once I was an oar But stuck in the shore To mark the place of a grave   When the lost ship Sailed away. I thought Of Ithaca, but soon decayed.   The time that I liked Best was when I was a bump of clay   In a Navaho rug, Put there to mitigate The too god-like   Perfection of that Merely human artifact. I served my maker well —   He lived long To be struck down in Denver by an electric shock   The night the lights Went out in Europe Never to shine again.   So many lives, So many things to remember! I was a stone in Tibet,   A tongue of bark At the heart of Africa Growing darker and darker . . .    It all seems A little unreal now, Now that I am   An anthropologist With my own Credit card, dictaphone,   Army-surplus boots And a whole boatload Of photographic equipment.   I know too much To be anything any more; And if in the distant   Future someone Thinks he has once been me As I am today,   Let him revise His insolent ontology Or teach himself to pray.
(for James Simmons)  1   I wake in a dark flat To the soft roar of the world. Pigeons neck on the white Roofs as I draw the curtains And look out over London Rain-fresh in the morning light.   This is our element, the bright Reason on which we rely For the long-term solutions. The orators yap, and guns Go off in a back street; But the faith doesn’t die   That in our time these things Will amaze the literate children In their non-sectarian schools And the dark places be Ablaze with love and poetry When the power of good prevails.   What middle-class shits we are To imagine for one second That our privileged ideals Are divine wisdom, and the dim Forms that kneel at noon In the city not ourselves.    2   I am going home by sea For the first time in years. Somebody thumbs a guitar On the dark deck, while a gull Dreams at the masthead, The moon-splashed waves exult.   At dawn the ship trembles, turns In a wide arc to back Shuddering up the grey lough Past lightship and buoy, Slipway and dry dock Where a naked bulb burns;   And I step ashore in a fine rain To a city so changed By five years of war I scarcely recognize The places I grew up in, The faces that try to explain.   But the hills are still the same Grey-blue above Belfast. Perhaps if I’d stayed behind And lived it bomb by bomb I might have grown up at last And learnt what is meant by home.
Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.  —Seferis, Mythistorema (for J. G. Farrell) Even now there are places where a thought might grow — Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned To a slow clock of condensation, An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft, Indian compounds where the wind dances And a door bangs with diminished confidence, Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels, Dog corners for bone burials; And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,   Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, Among the bathtubs and the washbasins A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. This is the one star in their firmament Or frames a star within a star. What should they do there but desire? So many days beyond the rhododendrons With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, They have learnt patience and silence Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.   They have been waiting for us in a foetor Of vegetable sweat since civil war days, Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure Of the expropriated mycologist. He never came back, and light since then Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain. Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something — A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.   There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking Into the earth that nourished it; And nightmares, born of these and the grim Dominion of stale air and rank moisture. Those nearest the door grow strong — ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’ The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning For their deliverance, have been so long Expectant that there is left only the posture.   A half century, without visitors, in the dark — Poor preparation for the cracking lock And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen, Powdery prisoners of the old regime, Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms. Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms, They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.   They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say, ‘Let the god not abandon us Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We too had our lives to live. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
(for Philip Haas) The television set hung in its wire-net cage, protected from the flung bottles of casual rage, is fetish and icon providing all we want of magic and redemption, routine and sentiment. The year-old tinsels hang where an unclaimed no-hoper trembles; fly-corpses cling to the grimy flypaper. Manhattan snows swarm on star-boxed waters, steam trails from warm subway ventilators . . .  Welcome to the planet, its fluorescent beers buzzing in the desolate silence of the spheres. Slam the door and knock the snow from your shoe, admit that the vast dark at last defeated you. Nobody found the Grail or conquered outer space; join the clientele watching itself increase.
Nurses and nuns — their sails whiter than those of the yachts in the bay, they come and go on winged feet, most of them, or in sensible shoes. July, and I should be climbing among stones or diving, but for broken bones, from the rocks below.   I try to read a new novel set aside; but a sword-swift pain in the left shoulderblade, the result of a tumble in Sheridan Square, makes reading difficult: writing you can do in your head. It starts to rain   on the sea, suddenly dark, the pier, the gardens and the church spires of Dun Laoghaire. You would think it was suddenly October as smoke flaps, the yachts tack violently and those caught in the downpour run for cover.   But in a few minutes the sun shines again, the leaves and hedges glisten as if with dew in that fragrant freshness after rain when the world seems made anew before confusion, before pain; and I think of you,   a funny-face but solemn, with the sharpest mind I know, a thoughtful creature of unconscious grace bent to your books in the sun or driving down to New York for an evening on the town. Doors open wherever you go in that furious place;   for you are the light rising on lost islands, the spéir-bhean the old poets saw gleam in the morning mist. When you walk down Fifth Avenue in your lavender suit, your pony eyes opaque, I am the one beside you, and life is bright with the finest and best.   And I have seen, as you have not, such is your modesty, men turn to watch your tangle of golden hair, your graceful carriage and unhurried air as if you belonged to history of ‘her story’, that mystery. You might have been   a saint or a great courtesan, anachronistic now in some ways, in some ways more up-to-date than the most advanced of those we know. While you sit on your sun-porch in Connecticut re-reading Yeats in a feminist light I am there with you.
A roof over my head, protected from the rain, I’m reading, pilgrim father, your letters to your son and wondering if, unlike you, I should­ head for home. Escaping the turbulence of this modern Rome in a flurry of skyline views and exploding foam, I can see that 747 in flight over Nova Scotia, Lahinch and Limerick, snoring back to the future; I can see the old stormy island from the air, its meteorological gaiety and despair, some evidence of light industry and agriculture, familiar contours, turfsmoke on field and town; I can even hear the cabin crew’s soft ‘fáilte’ and the strains of ‘My Lagan Love’ as we touch down. A recovering Ulster Protestant from Co. Down, I shall walk the Dublin lanes as the days grow shorter, I who once had poems in The New Yorker, and spend old age, if any, in an old mac with the young audibly sneering behind my back, deafened by seagulls and the playground cries of children — ourselves, once — by perilous seas. Now, listening to the rus-in-urbe, spring-in-winter noise of late-night diners while the temperatures rise and the terrible wind-chill factor abates, I realize the daffodils must be out in ditch and glen and windows soon flung wide to the spring rain; and marvel how, a figure out of the past, an old man in a hurry, you stuck it here to the last, negotiating the icefields of 8th Avenue to die on West 29th of the ‘Asian’ flu.    But first you met by chance at the riverside a young woman with a sick child she tried to hide (not out of shame, you felt, but anguished pride), soft-spoken, ‘from Donnybrook’, amid the alien corn.‘It pained me that her bright image should fade.’ Thus your epiphany, and you wrote to explain: ‘The nightingale sings with its breast against a thorn, it’s out of pain that personality is born.’ Things you understood: children, the human face, ‘something finer than honesty’, the kindness of women and the priority of the real. Things that puzzled you: economy, fear, the argument from design, the need to feel secure, the belief in another world besides this one here. Despite your rationalism, did it ever appear that the universe might be really ‘magical’, sir, and you yourself a showing-forth of that soul? ‘Art is dreamland.’ When you rejoined the whole what glimpse was given to you in the black hole? Now, to ‘Yeats, Artist and Writer’, may we add that you were at home here and in human nature but also, in your own words, lived and died like all of us, then as now, ‘an exile and a stranger’?
The only reality is the perpetual flow of vital energy.  —Montale Spindrift, crustacean patience and a gust of ozone, you come back once more to this dazzling shore, its warm uterine rinse, heart-racing heave and groan.   A quick gasp as you slip into the hissing wash, star cluster, dulse and kelp, slick algae, spittle, froth, the intimate slash and dash, hard-packed in the seething broth.   Soft water-lip, soft hand, close tug of origin, the sensual writhe and snore of maidenhair and frond, you swim here once more smart as a rogue gene.   Spirits of lake, river and woodland pond preside mildly in water never troubled by wind or tide; and the quiet suburban pool is only for the fearful —   no wind-wave energies where no sea briar grips and no freak breaker with the violence of the ages comes foaming at the mouth to drown you in its depths.   Among pebbles a white conch worn by the suck and crunch, a sandy skull as old as the centuries, in cold and solitude reclines where the moon-magnet shines;   but today you swirl and spin in sea water as if, creatures of salt and slime and naked under the sun, life were a waking dream and this the only life.
No wise man ever wished to be younger.  — Swift  1   Down the long library each marble bust shines unregarded through a shower of dust where a grim ghost paces for exercise in wet weather: nausea, gout, ‘some days I hardly think it worth my time to rise’. Not even the love of friends can quite appease the vertigo, sore ears and inner voices; deep-draughted rain clouds, a rock lost in space, yahoos triumphant in the marketplace, the isle is full of intolerable noises.    2   Go with the flow; no, going against the grain he sits in his rocking chair with a migraine, a light in the church all day till evensong, the sort of day in which a man might hang. No riding out to bubbling stream and weir, to the moist meadow and white belvedere; on tattling club and coffee house a pox, a confederacy of dunces and mohocks — scholars and saints be d-mn’d, slaves to a hard reign and our own miniature self-regard.    3   We emerge from hibernation to ghetto-blasters much better than our old Sony transistors, consensual media, permanent celebration, share options, electronic animation, wave motion of site-specific daffodils, closed-circuit video in the new hotels; for Niamh and Oisín have come to earth once more with blinding breastplate and tempestuous hair, new festive orthodoxy and ironic icon, their faces lit up like the Book of Kells.    4   Defrosting the goose-skin on Bridget’s daughters spring sunlight sparkles among parking meters, wizards on stilts, witches on circus bikes, jokers and jugglers, twitching plastic snakes, pop music of what happens, throbbing skies, star wars, designer genes, sword sorceries. We’ve no nostalgia for the patristic croziers, fridges and tumble-dryers of former years, rain-spattered cameras in O’Connell St., the sound mikes buffeted by wind and sleet —    5   but this is your birthday and I want to recall a first-floor balcony under a shower of hail where our own rowdy crowd stood to review post-Christian gays cavorting up Fifth Avenue, wise-cracking dialogue as quick and dry as that in The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye; for we too had our season in Tír na nÓg, a Sacred Heart girl and a Protestant rogue, chill sunshine warming us to the very bone, our whole existence one erogenous zone.    6   I could resign these structures and devices, these fancy flourishes and funny voices to a post-literate, audio-visual realm of uncial fluorescence, song and film, as curious symptoms of a weird transition before we opted to be slaves of fashion — for now, whatever the ancestral dream, we give ourselves to a vast corporate scheme where our true wit is devalued once again, our solitude known only to the rain.    7   The one reality is the perpetual flow, chaos of complex systems. Each generation does what it must; middle age and misanthropy, like famine and religion, make poor copy, and even the present vanishes like snow off a rope, frost off a ditch, ice in the sun — so back to the desktop and the drawing board, prismatic natural light, slow-moving cloud, the waves far-thundering in a life of their own, a young woman hitching a lift on a country road.
Walking among my own this windy morning In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower, I resume my old conspiracy with the wet Stone and the unwieldy images of the squinting heart. Once more, as before, I remember not to forget.   There is a perverse pride in being on the side Of the fallen angels and refusing to get up. We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill At the top of every street, for there it is, Eternally, if irrelevantly, visible —   But yield instead to the humorous formulae, The spurious mystery in the knowing nod; Or we keep sullen silence in light and shade, Rehearsing our astute salvations under The cold gaze of a sanctimonious God.   One part of my mind must learn to know its place. The things that happen in the kitchen houses And echoing back streets of this desperate city Should engage more than my casual interest, Exact more interest than my casual pity.
They said I got away in a boat And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you  I sank as far that night as any Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water  I turned to ice to hear my costly Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of  Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide  In a lonely house behind the sea Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes  Silently at my door. The showers of April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the  Late light of June, when my gardener Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed  On seaward mornings after nights of Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is  I drown again with all those dim Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul  Screams out in the starlight, heart Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.  Include me in your lamentations.
The bright drop quivering on a thorn in the rich silence after rain, lute music in the orchard aisles, the paths ablaze with daffodils, intrigue and venery in the airà l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the iron hand and the velvet glove — come live with me and be my love.   A pearl face, numinously bright, shining in silence of the night, a muffled crash of smouldering logs, bad dreams of courtiers and of dogs, the Spanish ships around Kinsale, the screech-owl and the nightingale, the falcon and the turtle dove — come live with me and be my love.
Surely you paused at this roadside oasis In your nomadic youth, and saw the mound Of never-used cement, the curious faces, The soft-drink ads and the uneven ground Rainbowed with oily puddles, where a snail Had scrawled its slimy, phosphorescent trail.   Like a frontier store-front in an old western It might have nothing behind it but thin air, Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron, Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire, A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden Silence of an untended kitchen garden —   Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a dark Interior echoing with the cries of children. Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork A family ate, slept, and watched the rain Dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit So that the mind shrank from the glare of it.   Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood? Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home, Remembering the old pumps where they stood, Antique now, squirting juice into a cream Lagonda or a dung-caked tractor while A cloud swam on a cloud-reflecting tile.   Surely a whitewashed sun-trap at the back Gave way to hens, wild thyme, and the first few Shadowy yards of an overgrown cart track, Tyres in the branches such as Noah knew — Beyond, a swoop of mountain where you heard, Disconsolate in the haze, a single blackbird.   Left to itself, the functional will cast A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon. The intact antiquities of the recent past, Dropped from the retail catalogues, return To the materials that gave rise to them And shine with a late sacramental gleam.   A god who spent the night here once rewarded Natural courtesy with eternal life — Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared For ever there, an old man and his wife. The virgin who escaped his dark design Sanctions the townland from her prickly shrine.   We might be anywhere but are in one place only, One of the milestones of earth-residence Unique in each particular, the thinly Peopled hinterland serenely tense — Not in the hope of a resplendent future But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.
There is an old statue in the courtyard that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone. The griefs of the ages she has made her own. Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard, her body is covered in mould, the garden overgrown.   One by one the first lights come on, those that haven’t been on all night. Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone. No snow, but the rain pours down in the first hour before dawn, before daylight.   Swift’s home for ‘fools and mad’ has become the administrative block. Much there has remained unchanged for many a long year — stairs, chairs, Georgian widows shafting light and dust, of the satirist;   but the real hospital is a cheerful modern extension at the back hung with restful reproductions of Dufy, Klee and Braque. Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff, a sifter of Lucozade, a paragraph of Newsweek or the Daily Mail   are my daily routine during the festive season. They don’t lock the razors here as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright — though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene, with grown men in their festive gear, was a sobering sight.   I watch the last planes of the year go past, silently climbing a cloud-lit sky. Earth-bound, soon I’ll be taking a train to Cork and trying to get back to work at my sea-lit, fort-view desk in the turf-smoky dusk.   Meanwhile, next door, a visiting priest intones to a faithful dormitory. I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist, and stare the clouds of unknowing. We style, as best we may, our private destiny; or so it seems to me   as I chew my thumb and try to figure out what brought me to my present state­ — an ‘educated man’, a man of consequence, no bum but one who has hardly grasped what life is about, if anything. My children, far away, don’t know where I am today, in a Dublin asylum with a paper whistle and a mince pie, my bits and pieces making a home from home. I pray to the rain-clouds that they never come where their lost father lies; that their mother thrives;  and that I may measure up to them before I die.   Soon a new year will be here demanding, as before, modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf, new leaves. This is the story of my life, the story of all lives everywhere, mad fools whatever we are, in here or out there.   Light and sane I shall walk down to the train, into that world whose sanity we know, like Swift to be a fiction and a show. The clouds part, the rain ceases, the sun casts now upon everyone its ancient shadow.
A heron-like species, rare visitors, most recent records  referring to winter months . . . very active at dusk.  —Guide to Irish Birds A sobering thought, the idea of you stretched there, bittern, under a dark sky, your exposed bones yellow too in a ditch among cold stones, ice glittering everywhere on bog and river, the whole unfortunate country frozen over and your voice stilled by enforced sobriety — a thought more wrenching than the fall of Troy because more intimate; for we’d hear your shout of delight from a pale patch of watery sunlight out on the mud there as you took your first drink of the day and now, destroyed by thirst, you lie in brambles while the rats rotate. I’d’ve broken the ice for you, given an inkling; now, had I known it, we might both be drinking and singing too; for ours is the same story. Others have perished — heron, blackbird, thrushes — and lie shivering like you under whin-bushes; but I mourn only the bittern, withdrawn and solitary, who used to carouse alone among the rushes and sleep rough in the star-glimmering bog-drain. It used to be, with characters like us, they’d let us wander the roads in wind and rain or lock us up and throw away the key — but now they have a cure for these psychoses as indeed they do for most social diseases and, rich at last, we can forget our pain. She says I’m done for if I drink again; so now, relieved of dangerous stimuli, as peace with my plastic bottle of H2O and the slack strings of insouciance, I sit with bronze Kavanagh on his canal-bank seat not in ‘the tremendous silence of mid-July’ but the fast bright zing of a winter afternoon dizzy with head-set, flash-bulb and digifone, to learn the tao he once claimed as his own and share with him the moor-hen and the swan, the thoughtless lyric of a cloud in the sky and the play of light and shadow on the slow commemorative waters; relax, go with the flow.
(after Saba) Anyone watching you in the water would think: ‘A siren!’ Winner in the women’s swimming event, you seem strange on the screen of my inglorious life. While you smile in triumph I tie a thread, a thin unbreakable thing, to your toe but you stride past without noticing me. Your friends, young like yourself, crowd round and make a noise in the bar; and then just for a moment cloud-shadow, a grave motherly shadow shivers down from your eyebrows to the proud, beautiful chin   and joins your rising to my own setting sun.
What night-rule now about this haunted grove? The spirits have dispersed, the woods faded to grey from midnight blue leaving a powdery residue, night music fainter, frivolous gods withdrawing, cries of yin and yang, discords of the bionic young; cobweb and insects, hares and deer, wild strawberries and eglantine, dawn silence of the biosphere, amid the branches a torn wing — what is this enchanted place? Not the strict groves of academe but an old thicket of lost time too cool for school, recovered space where the brain yields to nose and ear, folk remedy and herbal cure, old narratives of heart and hand, and a dazed donkey, starry eyed, with pearls and honeysuckle crowned, beside her naked nibs is laid. Wild viruses, Elysian fields — our own planet lit by the fire of molten substance, constant flux, hot ice and acrobatic sex, the electric moth-touch of desire and a new vision, a new regime where the white blaze of physics yields to yellow moonlight, dance and dream induced by what mind-altering drug or rough-cast magic realism; till morning bright with ant and bug shines in a mist of glistening gism, shifting identities, mutant forms, angels evolved from snails and worms.
I saluted the famous river as I do every year Turning south as if the plough steered, Kicking, at the start of a new furrow, my back To the shady purple gardens with benches under plum trees By the river that hunts between piers and sandbanks—   I began threading the long bridge, I bowed my head And lifted my hands from the wheel for an instant of trust, I faced the long rows of vines curving up the hillside Lightly like feathers, and longer than the swallow’s flight, My road already traced before me in a dance   Of three nights and three days, Of sidestepping hills and crescent lights blinding me (If there was just a bar counter and ice and a glass, and a room upstairs: But it rushed past me and how many early starts before The morning when the looped passes descend to the ruined arch?)   She came rising up out of the water, her eyes were like sandbanks The wrinkles in her forehead were like the flaws in the mist (maybe a long narrow boat with a man lying down and a rod and line like a frond of hair dipping in the stream) She was humming the song about the estuary, and the delights Of a salt ocean, the lighthouse like a summons; and she told me:   The land will not go to that measure, it lasts, you’ll see How the earth widens and mountains are empty, only With tracks that search and dip, from here to the city of Rome Where the road gallops up to the dome as big as the sun.   You will see your sister going ahead of you And she will not need to rest, but you must lie In the dry air of your hotel where the traffic grinds before dawn, The cello changing gear at the foot of the long hill,   And think of the story of the suitors on horseback Getting ready to trample up the mountain of glass.
A martyr this morning, as ever, to cramps and pains I organize myself to face the day. I show a leg, put my shoulder to the wheel, Daub paint on my eyelids and stick a couple of long Hairpins in my desperate mane to hold it— Too much trouble even to brush my hair.   I start on the spot on this heavy, sluggish, Difficult, heartbreaking work, the reason no doubt I was first put on the earth. I take the same little plastic brush that I use On good days to spread melted butter on pastry. And gradually lay bare with insect patience, Sifting away like an ant, with a hunter’s eye, or   The sharp ear of a trespassing pig, alternately huffing And puffing and effing and blinding: in the wet sand, The painful lines of our horror, the boundaried frame of fear, That lays us low so often in the bogs of despond. You’d take it as first for a boat’s skeleton, a kind Of Sutton Hoo for our people, but soon its true shape appears: Biblical Behemoth, the monster of all the old tales.
from the Purgatorio of Dante, Canto 28, lines 1-51 And earnest to explore within—around—  The divine wood, whose thick green living woof  Tempered the young day to the sight—I wound  Up the green slope, beneath the forest’s roof,  With slow, soft steps leaving the mountain’s steep,  And sought those inmost labyrinths, motion-proof  Against the air, that in that stillness deep  And solemn, struck upon my forehead bare,  The slow, soft stroke of a continuous ...  In which the ... leaves tremblingly were  All bent towards that part where earliest  The sacred hill obscures the morning air.  Yet were they not so shaken from the rest,  But that the birds, perched on the utmost spray,  Incessantly renewing their blithe quest,  With perfect joy received the early day,  Singing within the glancing leaves, whose sound  Kept a low burden to their roundelay,  Such as from bough to bough gathers around  The pine forest on bleak Chiassi’s shore,  When Aeolus Sirocco has unbound.  My slow steps had already borne me o’er  Such space within the antique wood, that I  Perceived not where I entered any more,—  When, lo! a stream whose little waves went by,  Bending towards the left through grass that grew  Upon its bank, impeded suddenly  My going on. Water of purest hue  On earth, would appear turbid and impure  Compared with this, whose unconcealing dew,  Dark, dark, yet clear, moved under the obscure  Eternal shades, whose interwoven looms  The rays of moon or sunlight ne’er endure.  I moved not with my feet, but mid the glooms  Pierced with my charmed eye, contemplating  The mighty multitude of fresh May blooms  Which starred that night, when, even as a thing  That suddenly, for blank astonishment,  Charms every sense, and makes all thought take wing,—  A solitary woman! and she went  Singing and gathering flower after flower,  With which her way was painted and besprent.  Bright lady, who, if looks had ever power  To bear true witness of the heart within,  Dost bask under the beams of love, come lower  Towards this bank. I prithee let me win  This much of thee, to come, that I may hear  Thy song: like Proserpine, in Enna’s glen,  Thou seemest to my fancy, singing here  And gathering flowers, as that fair maiden when  She lost the Spring, and Ceres her more dear.
My parents kept me from children who were rough Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams. I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys Who copied my lisp behind me on the road. They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud While I looked the other way, pretending to smile. I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.
What I expected, was Thunder, fighting, Long struggles with men And climbing. After continual straining I should grow strong; Then the rocks would shake And I rest long. What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away, The lack of good to touch, The fading of body and soul Smoke before wind, Corrupt, unsubstantial. The wearing of Time, And the watching of cripples pass With limbs shaped like questions In their odd twist, The pulverous grief Melting the bones with pity, The sick falling from earth - These, I could not foresee.   Expecting always Some brightness to hold in trust Some final innocence Exempt from dust, That, hanging solid, Would dangle through all Like the created poem, Or the faceted crystal.
I A whim of Time, the general arbiter, Proclaims the love, instead of death, of friends. Under the domed sky and athletic sun Three stand naked: the new, bronzed German The communist clerk, and myself, being English. Yet to unwind the travelled sphere twelve years Then two take arms, spring to a soldier's posture: Or else roll on the thing a further ten, The third - this clerk with world-offended eyes— Builds with red hands his heaven: makes our bones The necessary scaffolding to peace.  II Now, I suppose, the once-envious dead Have learned a strict philosophy of clay After long centuries, to haunt us no longer In the churchyard or at the end of the lane Or howling at the edge of the city Beyond the last bean rows, near the new factory. Our fathers killed. And yet there lives no feud Like Hamlet's, prompted on the castle stair: There falls no shadow on our blank of peace, We three together, struck across our path, No warning finger threatening each alone.  III Our fathers' misery, their spirits' mystery, The cynic's cruelty, weave this philosophy: That the history of man, traced purely from dust, Is lipping skulls on the revolving rim Or war, us three each other's murderers - Lives, risen a moment, joined or separate, Fall heavily, then are ever separate, Sod lifted, turned, slapped back again with spade.
Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor: The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper- seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease, His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream Of squirrel's game, in tree room, other than this. On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head, Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities. Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these Children, these windows, not this map, their world, Where all their future's painted with a fog, A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words. Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example. With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal — For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. All of their time and space are foggy slum. So blot their maps with slums as big as doom. Unless, governor, inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows That shut upon their lives like catacombs, Break O break open till they break the town And show the children to green fields, and make their world Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues Run naked into books the white and green leaves open History theirs whose language is the sun.
(Double Portrait in a Mirror)  I To the meeting despair of eyes in the street, offer Your eyes on plates and your liver on skewers of pity. When the Jericho sky is heaped with clouds which the sun Trumpets above, respond to Apocalypse With a headache. In spirit follow The young men to the war, up Everest. Be shot. For the uncreating chaos Claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever  a bride. Ever among the supple surface of summer-brown muscle The fountaining evening chatter under the stars, The student who chucks back his forelock in front of a glass, You only longed for your longing to last. The engine in you, anxiety, Is a grave lecher, a globe-trotter, one With moods of straw, the winds that blow him, aeroplanes. 'Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.'    II I am so close to you I will confess to you I am all that you do.   In thoughts where pity is the same as cruelty Your life is mine. Whether What fears and falters is myself Or yourself — all The apprehension of this time, We are both one. At night I'm flooded by the future Incoming tide of the unharnessed war. Beyond the blacked-out windows of our nightmare Facts race their hundred miles an hour In iron circles on an iron plain. The riders of those race-cars lose All sense of where they are. Ridden by their speed, the men Are their machines.  III All I can foresee now — more I shall learn — Is that our fear creates its opposite. Our peace is war. When you choose a mirror for a lover It shows you your own image as a gunman. You are a ghost amid the flares of shellfire Less living than The last war dead whose veins of mineral We mine for here.    IV Shall I ever reach The field enclosed by stones In the high mountains Where the scytheless wind Flushes the swayed grasses? Where clouds without rain Add to the sun Their mirroring shine? The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. Meanwhile, where nothing's sacred And love no longer willed Nor our true purpose conscious, Holy is lucidity And the mind that dare explain.
Stranger, you who hide my love  In the curved cheek of a smile And sleep with her upon a tongue  Of soft lies that beguile,  Your paradisal ecstasy  Is justified is justified By hunger of the beasts beneath  The overhanging cloud  Who to snatch quick pleasures run  Before their momentary sun Be eclipsed by death. Lightly, lightly from my sleep  She stole, our vows of dew to break Upon a day of melting rain  Another love to take:  Her happy happy perfidy  Was justified was justified Since compulsive needs of sense  Clamour to be satisfied  And she was never one to miss  Plausible happiness Of a new experience. I, who stand beneath a bitter  Blasted tree, with the green life Of summer joy cut from my side  By that self-justifying knife,  In my exiled misery  Were justified were justified If upon two lives I preyed  Or punished with my suicide,  Or murdered pity in my heart  Or two other lives did part To make the world pay what I paid. Oh, but supposing that I climb  Alone to a high room of clouds Up a ladder of the time And lie upon a bed alone  And tear a feather from a wing And listen to the world below And write round my high paper walls  Anything and everything Which I know and do not know!
The great pulsation passed. Glass lay around me Resurrected from the end. I walked Along streets of slate-jabbering houses, Against an acrid cloud of dust, I saw The houses kneel, revealed each in its abject Prayer, my prayer as well: 'Oh God, Spare me the lot that is my neighbour's.' Then, in the upper sky, indifferent to our Sulphurous nether hell, I saw The dead of the bombed graveyard, a calm tide Under the foam of stars above the town. And on the roof-tops there stood London prophets Saints of Covent Garden, Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead, Hyde Park Corner, Saint John's Wood, Crying aloud in cockney fanatic voices: 'In the midst of Life is Death!' They kneeled And prayed against the misery manufactured In mines and ships and mills, against The greed of merchants, vanity of priests. They sang: 'We souls from the abyss To whom the stars are fields of flowers, Tell you: Rejoice in the abyss! For hollow is the skull, the vacuum In the gold ball, St Paul's gold cross. Unless you will accept the emptiness Within the bells of foxgloves and cathedrals, Each life must feed upon the deaths of others, The shamelessly entreating prayer Of every house will be that it is spared Calamity that strikes its neighbour.'
I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground. Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting And on the mouth a grin: triumph of one Who has escaped from life-long colleagues roaring For him to join their throng. He's still half with us Conniving slyly, yet he knows he's gone Into that cellar where they'll never find him, Happy to be alone, his last work done, Word freed from world, into a different wood.    II But we, with feet on grass, feeling the wind Whip blood up in our cheeks, walk back along The hillside road we earlier climbed today Following the hearse and tinkling village band. The white October sun circles Kirchstetten With colours of chrysanthemums in gardens, And bronze and golden under wiry boughs, A few last apples gleam like jewels. Back in the village inn, we sit on benches For the last toast to you, the honoured ghost Whose absence now becomes incarnate in us. Tasting the meats, we imitate your voice Speaking in flat benign objective tones The night before you died. In the packed hall You are your words. Your listeners see Written on your face the poems they hear Like letters carved in a tree's bark The sight and sound of solitudes endured. And looking down on them, you see Your image echoed in their eyes Enchanted by your language to be theirs. And then, your last word said, halloing hands Hold up above their heads your farewell bow. Then many stomp the platform, entreating Each for his horde, your still warm signing hand. But you have hidden away in your hotel And locked the door and lain down on the bed And fallen from their praise, dead on the floor.    III (Ghost of a ghost, of you when young, you waken In me my ghost when young, us both at Oxford. You, the tow-haired undergraduate With jaunty liftings of the head. Angular forward stride, cross-questioning glance, A Buster Keaton-faced pale gravitas. Saying aloud your poems whose letters bit Ink-deep into my fingers when I set Them up upon my five-pound printing press:'An evening like a coloured photograph A music stultified across the water The heel upon the finishing blade of grass.')
That autumn was abundant In Istanbul the ancient and platinum Women with their faces covered and discovered My grandfather arrived on foot to this Ottoman city From the desolate Sebastopol and from other burned villages, From the bloody snow. He spoke about its minarets Certainly he loved the fields of leaves. Autumn, like a river or  a glowing bonfire And I don't know where he went to pray, Or perhaps he no longer did so in the city of the sultans But I know in his mouth he carried a needle Noble metaphor of his trade. Perhaps he wandered astonished throughout lovely Istanbul Searching for sustenance or clients Perhaps inclined, he entered one of the thousand mosques Where he prayed While the clocks stood still, Geographies were erased. Because the city was merely a golden breeze falling upon the  leaves A multitude of lights upon the holy minarets, My grandfather, A Jewish tailor also took refuge in Istanbul Also another small Jewish city Among the thresholds of history.
The sun changed colors The moon enamored even the most elderly, The tomatoes blushed with joy upon seeing you pass by.
She longed to be an island, She loved the unbridled madness of them, the islands, She longed to arrive to an island that, perhaps, wasn't an island Divest herself of the ruinous, stony loves She longed to be an island To only inhabit the sea's waistline And not leave or return To only be an island Island of the night Island of the dawn Islands.
Family dinner night, and we are deciding what to save: polar bears or slipper limpets. Girls in Afghanistan or the wolf. We can't save everything but the kids are ready with their banks, the season's extra, the not- ice cream. How does the Afghan girl feel to make our list? We bring more and more money to the table but the list outruns it. My mother comes in from visiting a friend in hospice, sick from all the chemo. When I get whatever it is, she says, I want you to do nothing. It's only May and already they've declared a statewide drought. Yesterday I hiked over a river that was not there. Coral reefs, my son says, that's what I want to save. And so we do. Whatever is happening to us is deductible. Silence of the was-river, was-bear. In the movies everyone is building some kind of ark.
Unable to pour boiling water over an edge from kettle to pot water boils from kettle to neti pot still boils from kettle to cup running over boil pool steam pool leak pool little cooling pot over the boiled edge of boil pooled salt vapors sulfurous stank boil heal dangled over the boiled edge of burnt earth cooling salt pool nettle stung black clotted blood at the bottom of the sink
Except another black girl was with me. Mother. Always lonely. I am always. Mother those girls. Forty-two. March summer. Light blue. Vermont. Endless crescent. Invert as a tyke lake. Fernet Mother, I'm grown. Forest. San Francisco. Lone cold. Stone turd. Talk three or none. Kidding. Kidding.
Rinky-dink kale feeding guinea pig Fonky bag uh cornchips plastic shoe Wearing crinkle-fry bastard . . . up in here TONIGHT Wanchu go head mister plinth butt And roll ya dumb ass a lavender Cigarette don't make me slap a freeze On this wart-o-matic bullshit Get me a rancorous tinker toy N turn this motherfucker out
Apart disclaimed wicked pea, split soft skin of the principle princess, who writhes, a little blood passes her perineum every night, grey linen sheets flax talisman plot luxe to strip and scrub all gore a plain bar of secret white soap it is a pine tree, it is an orange blossom, is it a rose hip under a baby tongue, blood cuts punisher, swear it closed, closes it
She invents wilderness out of absence, erases houses, the husband, the sewer pipe and the suburb it empties. Leaving the sparrow, the snake. Daily walks in her Virginia suburb minus the curb. Biographers struggle to account for these years in the wilderness, the housewife off hiking. Maybe her Virginia should be a West Virginia: wilder, less money, the creek a holler not this empty cul-de-sac. Some days she erased all but the air, maybe the light. Husband of the space bar, carpool a clean section break. She became a man in the wilderness and won the Pulitzer. I told the truth, she said, only I left some out. What rises in such a clearing? What stays home checking and re-checking the egg.
"Organizers Abruptly Cancel 25"' Anniversary Gala Honoring NASA's  Hubble Telescope As Riots Burn Through Baltimore"   The camera is having trouble focusing. A blurry spot where the universe is. Outside, a storm is brewing, trashcans into windshields. Outside agitators, a nebula of thick dust. The images are black and white but you can imagine the green of this star's birth as its extra spirals out. This spring a cosmic mirage where you could watch, on every television, the death of a star in a supernova explosion nine billion years ago across the cosmos. Here in Sandtown, six men have broken the spine of another. It was a mistake to send the camera out so quickly. Easy to fix the lens but nearly impossible to reach it, as far out from us as it has drifted already.
Since kindergarten my son's class has practiced for when a lion enters the building. They have a safe wall they crouch against. A closet some of the children fit into. The lion roams wild in the hall. Races up the stairs. When the lion is at the door they are taught to think of emptiness. Darkness. A real lion not some yellow-furred animal.
1 The Poet Down for Patrick Kavanagh He sits between the doctor and the law. Neither can help. Barbiturate in paw one, whiskey in paw two, a dying man: the poet down, and his fell caravan. They laugh and they mistake the lash that lurks in his tongue for the honey of his works. The poet is at bay, the hounds baying, dig his grave with careful kindness, saying: 'Another whiskey, and make it a large one!' Priests within, acolytes at the margin the red impaled bull's roar must fascinate — they love the dead, the living man they hate. They were designing monuments — in case — and making furtive sketches of his face, and he could hear, above their straining laughs, the rustling foolscap of their epitaphs. 2 The Poet as Mastercraftsman for Thomas Kinsella Eras do not end when great poets die, for poetry is not whole, it is where man chose mountains to conform, to carve his own face among the Gothic richness and the sky, and the gargoyles, and the lesser tradesmen. Praise from the apprentice is always shown in miniatures of a similar stone. I saw the master in his human guise open doors to let me in, and rhythm out. He smiled and entertained into the night. I was aware of work undone. His eyes, like owls', warned images from the room. Under the stairs the muse was crying; shields clashed in the kitchen and the war drum's boom, men in celtic war dress entered from the right. I left, my conversation put to rout. To poets peace poetry never yields.   3 The Poet as Black Sheep for Paul Durcan I have seen him dine in middle-class surroundings, his manners refined, as his family around him talk about nothing, one of their favourite theses. I have seen him lying between the street and pavement, atoning, dying for their sins, the fittest payment he can make for them, to get drunk and go to pieces. On his father's face in sparse lines etched out by ice, the puritan race has come to its zenith of grey spite, its climax of hate, its essence of frigidity. Let the bourgeoisie beware, who could not control his head and kept it in their care until the brain bled: this head is a poet's head, this head holds a galaxy.  4 The Person as Dreamer: We Talk about the Future  for Des Healy It has to be a hill, high, of course, and twilit. There have to be some birds, all sadly audible: a necessary haze, and small wristlets of rain, yes, and a tremendous air of satisfaction. Both of us will be old and both our wives, of course, have died, young, and tragic. And all our children have gone their far ways, estranged, or else not begotten. We have been through a war, been hungry, and heroes: and here we are now, calm, fed, and reminiscent. The hills are old, silent: our pipe-smoke rises up. We have come a long way . . . .  5 The Poet Dreams and Resolves for Macdara Woods To be alone, and not to be lonely, to have time to myself, and not be bored; to live in some suburban house, beside the mountains, with an adequate supply of stout and spirits (or of stout only), and some cigarettes, and writing paper, and a little cheap food, and a small hoard of necessary books, where I could write in dark as monks did, with only blue sky as interference, wind as soul-reaper. But what would I do if on certain nights I was mad in heat for the public lights? I would chain myself to a living tree to foil the Sirens of the distant city.
1 The sky is alone tonight — the moon and stars seek some presence in the firm quiet, in the hard lack. A meteor falls in the empty dark. Someone is absent, the universe is bare listen, God, are you there? Sand silts the world — dockleaves in the yard, broken teeth eat sadness in the hayless barn. Silence knocks on men's doors and silence answers it — but music is heard in space. Lichen eats the stone, old arrogance eats peace: female salt eats being, angry rust eats blood. Beetle and seal are dead, poisoned children in lakes — but music is heard in space. Weak whistle-music moves beyond Orion's Belt, silk threads in a cave float in the dark. Some player in the solitude with a hopeful song but destruction still goes on. Lard made from whales, coats from the seals' fur — shaving brush from badger hair, burnt chicks are henfood. God's lovely creatures last though we eat them, trout and lamb — there's a use for the whistler's tune. I saw a nest ablaze, living wood sawdust. I saw a bird on fire fall soundless from the air. I saw the ancient ramparts downed and silence in the plover field. I saw the killer's belly feed. A tongue hangs on a tree, the magpies' might is right: a noise of glossy black and white. I heard their loud artillery. My ears are withered leaves from their cacophony, the discord shuts God's eyes. But a new musician plays and music's heard in space.  2 Listen, father, wait a while — stay alive with me until the universe's gown, once as fresh as cabbage-heart, is clean again. Do you remember mothers' milk like pigeons' milk that feeds the flock? It will pour again — wait on. I saw it last night in the northern sky whiter than any blood dripped from the moon's pap and every parched grave opened up and the dough of milk and earth made a bread forever fresh. Listen, father, listen close — though the sky's a tambourine danced on by an iron fool there's harmony beyond his noise. Take time and slow your pace — the dark drink waits for you and strange music out in space. Did you see them last night, night's-eyes brilliant bright in the black grass and dandelions en masse, guineas on velvet once on an old god's shoulders dead since the ancient magic passed? Remember the age of the seed, kingdom of creatures, power of air? (Man was not alone, man and his household.) Waterfall tumbling from eldertree, foam on pools like feather capes? Remember pollen from grasses' ears? Listen, father, cry no tear for evil seed, for history's débris, for the cold eternal stones, ruined towers, groves of graves. Listen: a bullfinch sings sweetly (musical anvil in forge)his harmony's all history. So, my father, wait a while. There's no music after dying, no inkling of a human sigh — just worlds falling into suns. Earth will be the brightest bride, star-necklets on her gown — tinwhistles cracking tunes, platform dances in each town. Easy, father, wait a while. But he did not wait.  3   One day when hope was ill I took dangerous medicine and hope died out and left me there, a naked surgeon, my patient dead. Like a hen at grips with death my bill dumb down a well, my plumage drowned in hate. I turned my back on Glendarock, walked for a drink to ease and to obliterate pain and fear and grief. Rats laughed from every hedge, bones embossed the road — in the wind a grey crow screeched. And then I saw the sign that led my heart to peace — barley like a green fire, sheets of barley in live waves quivering its thousand ears, swaying flames of green as quietly restless as a child asleep. I knew then no victory would go to iron axe or spear: our mother which art on earth conserve us safe and clean. Gale and 'quake knock flat all laws, all walls, all treasuries — bindweed chokes the telegraph.  In spite of joy this peace waned and ice ran through every vein: all my pores were locked and my heart turned, a piglet on a spit, his blood steam, panting like a dog's tongue; the scythe taught the corn its dream. Caterpillars squashed on the roads, the swallow snapping back flies, frogspawn dead in pools dried up, the horsefly craving blood. Prick in a vice, a man screams. The scythe taught the poet his dream. Barley, cover me up, let me lie in your field. I ask of you a green death in the quiet milk of your stalks. Yes, the world will survive with neither you nor me alive. Damn you, death, I will not then experience the new gown of the universe — just lie manure on immaculate earth.  4 Once a perfect standing stone, fame engraved on my side, my statement unambiguous, I had nothing to hide. But the wind of curiosity blew with its what? and how? and why? and blunted the edge of my dignity. The cow of love rubbed its flank against my sides and frost burnt: the grain inside me shrank, I flaked on the grass bank. A flock of questions came seeking food and the mother in me said 'chook, chook' though I was dumb and mere rock. The anxiety mason chipped at me with his heavy hammer, carving his own design: his chisel gouged my grammar, engraved no notices of mine and every passing stray has read words not engendered in my head. And the lichen letters came twisting the bare word and their grey crust grew on me and concealed my shape. I lost all courage and desire, my voice was just a shard and all the silent world had ears. My body like a dead elm — dumb lightning upside-down — inquisitor's file eroding me, wedges wearing me out. Before me, in my mouth, restraints and oaths — but my poem stayed, I still stand. But where are they? The sky stands on my tip, stars flow through me, inside: I tame the sun and moon, harnessed to my pride. No friendships flourish in my shade, no herb of love, no mint of help, and I'm incapable of prayer. Now merely a lump of stone smashed in the field of scythes, a circle of calves around me staring with silly eyes.  I lonesome like a hawtree while lichen hones me down and a lizard-brooch sleeps.  5 In Hammer Glen there's blood in milk and a goose complains on an empty hearth: a cat swells in the churn, dead and full. A flitch of bacon hangs itself from rafters: a tongs stands like a bull. My first trip to the house of thatch — home of the Slaughter Lad who condemned his own kind — a hammer-vision showed him how to escape the bird-lime. I was called, no scalpel packed. I threw a saddle on the dark and galloped to the threshold of his mind. Knots of briars slid from their nests, each poisoned eye a blackberry. I was pelted with a shower of fruit from a bare blackthorn tree. I heard the chick sing in the egg, and the straw in the mattress grew, the raspberry cried in the jam. But I came safe from these shades, out of the battle-noise gales, until I reached Slaughter Lad's and saw there under the moon's eye a hedgehog milking a jack snipe, a goat beating a drum in the sky — I had crossed over the borders of the live. I walked into his head — no knife, no healing herb — helix of a snail's shell, into a complex corridor. Prayers of hate, echoes of roars fell from the faceted walls — his father's face was carved on the floor. 'I hit him hit him hit him again — the goose drank the juice of this brain, I made a pig-trough from his skull and put his eyes under a hen. One did not hatch at all, the other shook and cracked. Out walked a chicken's claw. 'The claw still sticks in me — it tortures and exhausts: contrition runs from my nose, surgeon, give me peace.' I refused. And left the place. I threw away all style and craft, my heart was ash and chaff, my soul was a gravel bed — a naked surgeon, and my patient dead.  6 The one-eyed monk sits, half prays where millstones turn. His body comes to life, a need to travel grinds him up — a need for pools full of hope, a need for wells of honey and sweat, a need for hills where torches burn. He walks the white-flowered field looking for a ferny place clad in sparse purple light (a foxglove round a bee) to a mild meadow of sheep, to soft dark, root of history — peace to all who walk this way. But only silence from his bell, dead butterfly his manuscript — unfinished, unrevised — he is addicted to this trip, this drug called pilgrimage that kills all dignity and skill and still's his reason to exist. And when the monk grows weak, clumsy, worn, aged — no more desire to roam, wanting his bell and page. But he can no longer illuminate, has lost the power to pray, lost his interest in the everyday. This travel's an enormous act, a trip all have to take, and meadows and mountains lure all who want to escape with coaxing honey, coaxing kiss, 'Do not search for new things, do not search for new things'. I will drown all my books in that honeyed well and play like a foal in the brownest fern. I will swim in the pool of hope, I will walk till night in the bright fields. But in the splendid dark I'll hear wings of parchment shake and bells weep.
for Pat Boran That kind of summer's day when music comes down from the hills and sings in small back-rooms and half-sets from a century before batter their complex hobnails on the floor and long laments in overcoats and caps draw tears, reluctant from the porter-taps — that was the kind of day it was, that day when I forsook the world of earn and pay. There, on the cobbles of the market square, where toothless penny ballads rasped the air, there among spanners, scollops, hones, and pikes, limp Greyhound cabbage, mending-kits for bikes, velvet calves in creels, women's overalls, she shook my hand beside the market stalls. And there before the coulter of a plough, aware of all the gifts she could endow, aware, as women are, of all her powers, as startling as a bunch of winter flowers, she tricked from me my childish, sacred vow. I got to know her lovers one by one: some saw her in an eclipse of the sun, some saw her practise magic with strange herbs and made her opaque alchemies of verbs — some, for her sake, thought blood her favourite wine, and some thought spirits helped them to divine her arcane instincts and, as holy fools, would chant her words not known to any schools. Some thought that secret nurture made her grow and more believed she thrived in public show; some scattered syntax like the blackthorn snow in flashy spangles on the mud below and some, like me, immersed themselves in laws, for what good are the sparks without the straws? But none of these sufficed. All through the land I see the poets in their mad distress — all favoured rivals? No, but victims, yes. A creature driven by a savage gland, she takes, and then dismisses, out of hand, the men and women that she most does bless. She does not rest, she does not detumesce. I leave her by a river on a bed, a silken landscape underneath her head, and spread her in her finest courting gown on a spectacular eiderdown with painted eyes and rings to catch the light by the oblivious water overnight. Only the poets can make her come to life, the stricken catalyst, who call her wife — at dawn I give her bed a gentle shove and amputate the antennae of love and watch the river carry her away into the silence of a senseless bay where light ignores the facets of her rings and where names are not the names of things.
Ah yes - they justify it all, the brats, hungry or asleep and gorged with milk. Each drop's (yes, the milk they drink is yours) another line unwritten, another page crumpled like a pufiball on the floor. Your limpid dialogue is reduced to the basic syllables of the cave and the quick infant minds grow huge, while you relearn vocabularies from the pram. The typewriter is now a battered toy, its ribbon has fingerprinted all the walls (cenotaphs for dead letters all its keys). You tap the heads assailing your broad lap and polarise regret and love them while the cunning offspring of your milk and blood root up the truffles of your mind.
I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital Columbus, Ohio, USA— a country caught   between Black and White.   I am born not long from the time or far from the place where my great-great-grandparents worked the deep rich land unfree dawn till dusk unpaid drank cool water from scooped-out gourds looked up and followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom.   I am born as the South explodes, too many people too many years enslaved, then emancipated but not free, the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed so that today— February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want.   I am born in Ohio but the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.
Your name is Diana Toy. And all you may have for breakfast is rice gruel. You can't spit it back into the cauldron for it would be unfilial. You can't ask for yam gruel for there is none. You can't hide it in the corner for it would surely be found, and then you would be served cold, stale rice gruel. This is the philosophy of your tong: you, the child, must learn to understand the universe through the port-of-entry, your mouth, to discern bitter from sweet, pungent from bland. You were told that the infant Buddha once devoured earth and spewed forth the wisdom of the ages. Meat or gruel, wine or ghee, even if it's gruel, even if it's nothing, that gruel, that nothingness will shine into the oil of your mother's scrap-iron wok, into the glare of your father's cleaver, and dance in your porcelain bowl. Remember, what they deny you won't hurt you. What they spare you, you must make shine, so shine, shine . . .
I sent him from home hardly more than a child. Years later, he came back loving avocados. In the distant kitchen where he'd flipped burgers and tossed salads, he'd mastered how to prepare the pear-shaped fruit. He took a knife and plied his way into the thick skin with a bravado and gentleness I'd never seen in him. He nudged the halves apart, grabbed a teaspoon and carefully eased out the heart, holding it as if it were fragile. He took one half, then the other of the armadillo- hided fruit and slid his spoon where flesh edged against skin, working it under and around, sparing the edible pulp. An artist working at an easel, he filled the center holes with chopped tomatoes. The broken pieces, made whole again, merged into two reconstructed hearts, a delicate and rare surgery. My boy who'd gone away angry and wild had somehow learned how to unclose what had once been shut tight, how to urge out the stony heart and handle it with care. Beneath the rind he'd grown as tender and mild as that avocado, its rubies nestled in peridot, our forks slipping into the buttery texture of unfamiliar joy, two halves of what we shared.
We walked through some heartache in '62. Gary liked Teresa but Teresa asked Elizabeth to tell Peter that she really wanted to go out with him but Peter had been making out with Jane in the theater, celebrating their one month anniversary, so that was out, and even though Jane broke up with Pete, Peter kept asking Gail to talk with Jane which Gail wouldn't do because she'd told Brenda that she thought that Peter was cute but Brenda wasn't listening to a word, wrapped up in lonely teardrops shed for Greg. The waters of 8th grade were never still.
Since I stopped the flow Of primordial ciswhite straight men Whom I heedlessly collect And from whom the spring feeds Without reason I have been Shopping so much more Than suits a prophet in the forest. A man said he felt like an awful cad But an admission as such Does not irrigate a dry spell Once it’s surpassed the length Of a petty offense record Because the body’s memory is not so Mutated by language And there’s very little pleasure in force When the subject is inertia. I used to leave as soon as The mysterious chemistry worked out Now I am both the one who leaves And the one who stays Eco­-novelty is rare and common And each design reforms The future and the last.
—after Gwendolyn Brooks No matter the pull toward brink. No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits. There is a time for everything. Look, just this morning a vulture nodded his red, grizzled head at me, and I looked at him, admiring the sickle of his beak. Then the wind kicked up, and, after arranging that good suit of feathers he up and took off. Just like that. And to boot, there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.    —for Walter Aikens
“I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she,  “All the old tunes I know,— Those I learnt ever so long ago.” —Why she should think just then she’d play them  Silence cloaks like snow. When I returned from the town at nightfall  Notes continued to pour As when I had left two hours before: “It’s the very last time,” she said in closing;  “From now I play no more.” A few morns onward found her fading,  And, as her life outflew, I thought of her playing her tunes right through; And I felt she had known of what was coming,  And wondered how she knew.
Every day in summer I'd cross the border; he'd nod, pick up the horseshoes, hand me one, triple the size of my palm, and say, You first. We'd play away the afternoon. Few words punctuated the clank of horseshoe against stake, until the fog rolled in and I'd retrace my steps home. I was five or six; he, white haired, however old that meant. One evening my father sat me down, spoke in the exaggerated tone adults adapt for children, asked if I knew who he was. Admiral Nimitz, of course, though I knew nothing of his command of the Pacific Fleet and was less impressed than if he'd landed a horseshoe. He was a calm man, a useful attribute for sending young men to their deaths. The only time I saw him upset, raccoons had invaded from their hideouts in the hills, attacked the goldfish in his pond, leaving muddy footprints as they escaped. As far as I knew, this was his only defeat.
Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch, are bickering. The eldest has come home with new truths she can hardly wait to teach. She lectures them: the younger daughters search the sky, elbow each other's ribs, and groan. Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch and blue-sprigged dresses, like a stand of birch saplings whose leaves are going yellow-brown with new truths. They can hardly wait to teach, themselves, to be called "Ma'am," to march high-heeled across the hanging bridge to town. Five daughters. In the slant light on the porch Pomp lowers his paper for a while, to watch the beauties he's begotten with his Ann: these new truths they can hardly wait to teach. The eldest sniffs, "A lady doesn't scratch." The third snorts back, "Knock, knock: nobody home." The fourth concedes, "Well, maybe not in church . . . " Five daughters in the slant light on the porch.
Just enough rain an hour ago to give the wispy dry grass some hope, turning it green instantly. This place has been abandoned, the old faith overgrown, confused by brambles, and in these hard times, its upkeep cut from the budget. But we walk, soaked to the knees, making our slow pilgrimage among gravestones, speaking blurred names back into the world.
These are the lines on which a committee is formed.  Almost as soon as work was begun in the tunnel  men began to die among dry drills. No masks.  Most of them were not from this valley.  The freights brought many every day from States  all up and down the Atlantic seaboard  and as far inland as Kentucky, Ohio.  After the work the camps were closed or burned.  The ambulance was going day and night,  White’s undertaking business thriving and  his mother’s cornfield put to a new use.  “Many of the shareholders at this meeting  “were nervous about the division of the profits;  “How much has the Company spent on lawsuits?  “The man said $150,000. Special counsel:  “I am familiar with the case. Not : one : cent.  “ ‘Terms of the contract. Master liable.’  “No reply. Great corporation disowning men who made. . . .”  After the lawsuits had been instituted. . . .The Committee is a true reflection of the will of the people.  Every man is ill. The women are not affected,  This is not a contagious disease. A medical commission,  Dr. Hughes, Dr. Hayhurst examined the chest  of Raymond Johnson, and Dr. Harless, a former  company doctor. But he saw too many die,  he has written his letter to Washington.The Committee meets regularly, wherever it can.  Here are Mrs. Jones, three lost sons, husband sick,  Mrs. Leek, cook for the bus cafeteria,  the men: George Robinson, leader and voice,  four other Negroes (three drills, one camp-boy)  Blankenship, the thin friendly man, Peyton the engineer,  Juanita absent, the one outsider member.  Here in the noise, loud belts of the shoe-repair shop,  meeting around the stove beneath the one bulb hanging.  They come late in the day. Many come with them  who pack the hall, wait in the thorough dark.This is a defense committee. Unfinished business:  Two rounds of lawsuits, 200 cases  Now as to the crooked lawyers  If the men had worn masks, their use would have involved  time every hour to wash the sponge at mouth.  Tunnel, 3⅛ miles long. Much larger than  the Holland Tunnel or Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tubes.  Total cost, say, $16,000,000.This is the procedure of such a committee:  To consider the bill before the Senate.  To discuss relief.  Active members may be cut off relief,  16-mile walk to Fayetteville for cheque—  west virginia relief administration, #22991  to joe henigan, gauley bridge, one and 50/100,  winona national bank. paid from state funds.
two oblong lobes of rough ice methane and ammonia fallen far below the Kuiper Belt perturbed by Jupiter into nearer perihelion where they warm the coma sublimes the tail blurs a trim probe relays images from the twilit surface as gray and vacant as sleep this small craft a little boat a dim soul in an afterlife in attenuate gravity in stifling quiet in the Tuat to be weighed against the truth Thoth and Anubis at the Scales
Because you’re gone, I take a book to bed:The Flame of Passion. Scabbard at his thigh, Lord Henry gets the girl. You’d only buy top Booklist picks. “The romance genre’s dead,” you’d say when promises of I-thee-wed lured me to bargain bins. I learned to lie about my day, hoard Harlequins on the sly while you were off at work, your office spread with red-inked proofs. But now it makes me yawn to read beyond the lovers’ wedding night. I close The Flame, not even halfway through. His sword grows dull while she goes on and on about how lovers must stay true. I’d write another ending, if I could, for you.
A king did not die, a president was not acquitted, a balloon did not fly around the world in twenty days, at 84 with white hair, Joe DiMaggio was not mourned. And air strikes launched street to street in order to bring peace, or a doctor convicted of doctoring death? No, and no, nothing happened, except flowers purple the year before bloomed white, but no viruses named after women spread across the globe, and the word “columbine” did not enter the consciousness of a nation. What about the bomb that made a mistake, or the famous son of a famous president mistaking the ocean for the sky? That year, the weather was unpredictable, that happened, and if anything else did, like shots fired at people praying, no one heard them, and if people prayed for war to become holy, those prayers went unanswered. In Turkey, the ground split open and the 17,000 who would die, let’s say, miraculously, they did not, not in 1999, the year two lifelong enemies shook hands and said there will be peace, but their palms never touched, why lie about that? Let’s say the child from Cuba arrived not an orphan but with his mother, who loved and did not sink into the sea. Let’s not talk about rampages, disasters, conflicts or coupes that never ruined a perfectly good year during which the sun shined on the moon, the earth, and six billion who, for once, got everything right and not a single thing wrong.
Lubbock, Texas Between 1985-1987, he writes sincerely, gratefully to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,  the International Red Cross Central Tracing Agency, Thai National Police, U.S. Department of State, and more, to no real end, though each letter surpasses the last. First he writes them in long hand, in Vietnamese, then I think someone helps revise, translate, and type: Don’t say the boat was stopped or encircled, say the boat was surrounded by the Thai pirates; it’s true they took away with them eight girls in our boat, but abducted captures the situation better; say…— “The Reading Room will be closing in 15 minutes.” I sit and stare at the rust print left by a paperclip coiling into the dead end of a labyrinth.   I’m reading the letters of Mr. Nguyen Van The concerning the disappearance of his granddaughter, Dinh Thuy Trang, when she escaped by boat…  In the blue of his sentences a boat leaves Vietnam, on October 24, 1985, ventures into the South China Sea, and drifts dangerously along the coast of Thailand.  I can just make out the boat, a small open “v”, drawing its wake pattern, on the sea, in the letters.Around 9 A.M. of 26 October, the boat was surroundedby 5 fishing boats belonging to the Thai fishermen. I recoil at the actions his apt verbs dramatize—invaded, searched, ransacked, pried, looked, seized: I see teeth flashing inside mouths like knives. No trace of Thuy. She’s gone…
I first discovered what was killing these men. I had three sons who worked with their father in the tunnel: Cecil, aged 23, Owen, aged 21, Shirley, aged 17. They used to work in a coal mine, not steady work for the mines were not going much of the time. A power Co. foreman learned that we made home brew, he formed a habit of dropping in evenings to drink, persuading the boys and my husband — give up their jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better. Shirley was my youngest son; the boy. He went into the tunnel. My heart my mother my heart my mother  My heart my coming into being.
Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand around on the sidewalks if we’re black or brown. Vanetta’s over the trestle, and that’s our town. The hill makes breathing slow, slow breathing after your row the river, and the graveyard’s on the hill, cold in the springtime blow, the graveyard’s up on high, and the town is down below. Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house, thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn’t attend, died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end. When a man said I feel poorly, for any reason, any weakness or such, letting up when he couldn’t keep going barely, the Cap and company come and run him off the job surely. I’ve put them DOWN from the tunnel camps to the graveyard on the hill, tin-cans all about—it fixed them!— TUNNELITIS hold themselves up at the side of a tree, I can go right now to that cemetery. When the blast went off the boss would call out, Come, let’s go back, when that heavy loaded blast went white, Come, let’s go back, telling us hurry, hurry, into the falling rocks and muck. The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water, the camps and their groves were colored with the dust, we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust. Looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over the parks and groves, it stayed and the rain couldn’t wash it away and it twinkled that white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles. As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night, with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white. The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.
All power is saved, having no end. Rises in the green season, in the sudden season the white the budded  and the lost. Water celebrates, yielding continually sheeted and fast in its overfall slips down the rock, evades the pillars building its colonnades, repairs in stream and standing wave retains its seaward green broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white. White brilliant function of the land’s disease.   Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under concrete arches and the channeled hills, turns in the gorge toward its release; kinetic and controlled, the sluice urging the hollow, the thunder, the major climax  energy total and open watercourse praising the spillway, fiery glaze, crackle of light, cleanest velocity flooding, the moulded force.    I open out a way over the water  I form a path between the Combatants: Grant that I sail down like a living bird, power over the fields and Pool of Fire. Phoenix, I sail over the phoenix world.   Diverted water, the fern and fuming white ascend in mist of continuous diffusion. Rivers are turning inside their mountains, streams line the stone, rest at the overflow lake and in lanes of pliant color lie. Blessing of this innumerable silver, printed in silver, images of stone walk on a screen of falling water in film-silver in continual change recurring colored, plunging with the wave.   Constellations of light, abundance of many rivers. The sheeted island-cities, the white surf filling west, the hope, fast water spilled where still pools fed. Great power flying deep: between the rock and the sunset, the caretaker’s house and the steep abutment, hypnotic water fallen and the tunnels under the moist and fragile galleries of stone, mile-long, under the wave. Whether snow fall, the quick light fall, years of white cities fall, flood that this valley built falls slipping down the green turn in the river’s green. Steep gorge, the wedge of crystal in the sky.    How many feet of whirlpools?  What is a year in terms of falling water?  Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities.  Continuity: Σ Q = 0  Equations for falling water. The streaming motion.  The balance-sheet of energy that flows  passing along its infinite barrier.    It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide,  runs through electric wires;  it comes, warning the night,  running among these rigid hills,  a single force to waken our eyes.    They poured the concrete and the columns stood,  laid bare the bedrock, set the cells of steel,  a dam for monument was what they hammered home.  Blasted, and stocks went up;  insured the base,  and limousines  wrote their own graphs upon  roadbed and lifeline.   Their hands touched mastery: wait for defense, solid across the world. Mr. Griswold. “A corporation is a body without a soul.” Mr. Dunn. When they were caught at it they resorted to the  methods employed by gunmen, ordinary machine gun racke-  teers. They cowardly tried to buy out the people who had the  information on them. Mr. Marcantonio. I agree that a racket has been practised, but the  most damnable racketeering that I have ever known is the  paying of a fee to the very attorney who represented these  victims. That is the most outrageous racket that has ever come  within my knowledge. Miss Allen. Mr. Jesse J. Ricks, the president of the Union Carbide  & Carbon Corporation, suggested that the stockholder had  better take this question up in a private conference. The dam is safe. A scene of power. The dam is the father of the tunnel. This is the valley’s work, the white, the shining.    Stock and   Dividend in Net Closing   High Low Dollars Open High Low Last Chge. Bid Ask Sales   111 61 ¼ Union Carbide (3.20)...67 ¼ 69 ½ 67 ¼ 69 ½ +3 69 ¼ 69 ½ 3 ,400     The dam is used when the tunnel is used. The men and the water are never idle, have definitions. This is a perfect fluid, having no age nor hours, surviving scarless, unaltered, loving rest, willing to run forever to find its peace in equal seas in currents of still glass. Effects of friction : to fight and pass again, learning its power, conquering boundaries, able to rise blind in revolts of tide, broken and sacrificed to flow resumed. Collecting eternally power. Spender of power, torn, never can be killed, speeded in filaments, million, its power can rest and rise forever, wait and be flexible. Be born again. Nothing is lost, even among the wars, imperfect flow, confusion of force. It will rise. These are the phases of its face. It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden. It changes. It does not die.
These roads will take you into your own country. Seasons and maps coming where this road comes into a landscape mirrored in these men.   Past all your influences, your home river, constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood, parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes.   What one word must never be said? Dead, and these men fight off our dying, cough in the theatres of the war.   What two things shall never be seen? They : what we did. Enemy : what we mean. This is a nation’s scene and halfway house.   What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone. The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.   The facts of war forced into actual grace. Seasons and modern glory. Told in the histories,  how first ships came   seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds lining the west horizon with their white  shining halations;   they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe— could not be used to transform; created coast—  breathed-in America.   See how they took the land, made after-life fresh out of exile, planted the pioneer  base and blockade,   pushed forests down in an implacable walk west where new clouds lay at the desirable  body of sunset;   taking the seaboard. Replaced the isolation, dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater  frontier of Europe,   a moment, and another frontier held, this land was planted home-land that we know.  Ridge of discovery,   until we walk to windows, seeing America lie in a photograph of power, widened  before our forehead,   and still behind us falls another glory, London unshaken, the long French road to Spain,  the old Mediterranean   flashing new signals from the hero hills near Barcelona, monuments and powers,  parent defenses.   Before our face the broad and concrete west, green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river  controlled and dammed;   the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country  sharp in the south,   liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert, the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen  fountain of life,   the flourished land, people with watercourses to California and the colored sea;  sums of frontiers   and unmade boundaries of acts and poems, the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing,  this fact and this disease.  ______________ Half-memories absorb us, and our ritual world carries its history in familiar eyes, planted in flesh it signifies its music   in minds which turn to sleep and memory, in music knowing all the shimmering names, the spear, the castle, and the rose.   But planted in our flesh these valleys stand, everywhere we begin to know the illness, are forced up, and our times confirm us all.   In the museum life, centuries of ambition yielded at last a fertilizing image: the Carthaginian stone meaning a tall woman   carries in her two hands the book and cradled dove, on her two thighs, wings folded from the waist cross to her feet, a pointed human crown.   This valley is given to us like a glory. To friends in the old world, and their lifting hands that call for intercession. Blow falling full in face.   All those whose childhood made learn skill to meet, and art to see after the change of heart; all the belligerents who know the world.   You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners, you workers and hope of countries, first among powers; you who give peace and bodily repose,   opening landscapes by grace, giving the marvel lowlands physical peace, flooding old battlefields with general brilliance, who best love your lives;   and you young, you who finishing the poem wish new perfection and begin to make; you men of fact, measure our times again.  _____________ These are our strength, who strike against history. These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness  to our diseases;   these carrying light for safety on their foreheads descended deeper for richer faults of ore,  drilling their death.   These touching radium and the luminous poison, carried their death on the lips and with their warning  glow in their graves.   These weaves and their eyes water and rust away, these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,  these farm and starve,   all these men cry their doom across the world, meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,  find every war.   Are known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers, fight on all new frontiers, are set in solid  lines of defense.   Defense is sight; widen the lens and see standing over the land myths of identity,  new signals, processes:   Alloys begin : certain dominant metals. Deliberate combines add new qualities,  sums of new uses.   Over the country, from islands of Maine fading, Cape Sable fading south into the orange  detail of sunset,   new processes, new signals, new possession. A name for all the conquests, prediction of victory  deep in these powers.   Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene, to photograph and to extend the voice,  to speak this meaning.   Voices to speak to us directly. As we move. As we enrich, growing in larger motion,  this word, this power.   Down coasts of taken countries, mastery, discovery at one hand, and at the other  frontiers and forests,   fanatic cruel legend at our back and speeding ahead the red and open west,  and this our region,   desire, field, beginning. Name and road, communication to these many men, as epilogue, seeds of unending love.
Often in summer, on a tarred bridge plank standing, Or downstream between willows, a safe Ophelia drifting In a rented boat — I had seen them come and go, Those wild bees swift as tigers, their gauze wings a-glitter In passionless industry, clustering black at the crevice Of a rotten cabbage tree, where their hive was hidden low.   But never strolled too near. Till one half-cloudy evening Of ripe January, my friends and I Came, gloved and masked to the eyes like plundering desperadoes, To smoke them out. Quiet beside the stagnant river We trod wet grasses down, hearing the crickets chitter And waiting for light to drain from the wounded sky.   Before we reached the hive their sentries saw us And sprang invisible through the darkening air, Stabbed, and died in stinging. The hive woke. Poisonous fuming Of sulphur filled the hollow trunk, and crawling Blue flame sputtered — yet still their suicidal Live raiders dived and clung to our hands and hair.   O it was Carthage under the Roman torches, Or loud with flames and falling timber, Troy! A job well botched. Half of the honey melted And half the rest young grubs. Through earth-black smouldering ashes And maimed bees groaning, we drew out our plunder. Little enough their gold, and slight our joy.   Fallen then the city of instinctive wisdom. Tragedy is written distinct and small: A hive burned on a cool night in summer. But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.
About twilight we came to the whitewashed pub On a knuckle of land above the bay   Where a log was riding and the slow Bird-winged breakers cast up spray.   One of the drinkers round packing cases had The worn face of a kumara god,   Or so it struck me. Later on Lying awake in the veranda bedroom   In great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea Reverberating, and thought: As a man   Grows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh, But the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po,   With teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp Flashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon.
To lie on a beach after looking at old poems: how slow untroubled by any grouch of mine or yours, Father Ocean tumbles in the bay alike with solitary   divers, cripples, yelling girls and pipestem kids. He does what suits us all; and somewhere — there, out there, where the high tight sails are going — he wears a white death flag of foam for us, far   out, for when we want it. So on Gea’s breast, the broad nurse who bears with me, I think of adolescence: that sad boy I was, thoughts crusted with ice on the treadmill of self-love,   Narcissus damned, who yet brought like a coal in a hallow stalk, the seed of fire that runs through my veins now. I praise that sad boy now, who having no hope, did not blow out his brains.
Summer brings out the girls in their green dresses Whom the foolish might compare to daffodils, Not seeing how a dead grandmother in each one governs her limbs, Darkening the bright corolla, using her lips to speak through, Or that a silver torque was woven out of The roots of wet speargrass.  The young are mastered by the Dead, Lacking cunning. But on the beaches, under the clean wind That blows this way from the mountains of Peru, Drunk with the wind and the silence, not moving an inch As the surf-swimmers mount on yoked waves, One can begin to shake with laughter, Becoming oneself a metal Neptune.  To want nothing is The only possible freedom. But I prefer to think of An afternoon spent drinking rum and cloves In a little bar, just after the rain had started, in another time Before we began to die — the taste of boredom on the tongue Easily dissolving, and the lights coming on — With what company? I forget.  Where can we find the right Herbs, drinks, bandages to cover These lifelong intolerable wounds? Herbs of oblivion, they lost their power to help us The day that Aphrodite touched her mouth to ours.
I advise rest; the farmhouse we dug you up in has been modernized, and the people who hung you as their ikon against the long passage wall are underground — Incubus   and excellent woman, we inherit the bone acre of your cages and laws. This dull green land suckled at your blood’s frigor Anglicanus, crowning with a housewife’s tally   the void of Empire, does not remember you — and certain bloody bandaged ghosts rising from holes of Armageddon at Gallipoli or Sling Camp, would like to fire a shot   through the gilt frame. I advise rest, Madam; and yet the tomb holds much that we must travel barely without. Your print — ‘from an original pencil drawing by the Marchioness   ‘of Granby, March, eighteen nine- ty seven…’ Little mouth, strong nose and hooded eye — they speak of half-truths my type have slung out of the window, and lack and feel the lack too late. Queen,   you stand most for the time of early light, clay roads, great trees unfelled, and the smoke from huts where girls in sack dresses stole butter . . . The small rain spits today. You smile in your grave.
(for Monte Holcroft) These unshaped islands, on the sawyer’s bench, Wait for the chisel of the mind, Green canyons to the south, immense and passive, Penetrated rarely, seeded only By the deer-culler’s shot, or else in the north Tribes of the shark and the octopus, Mangroves, black hair on a boxer’s hand.   The founding fathers with their guns and bibles, Botanist, whaler, added bones and names To the land, to us a bridle As if the id were a horse: the swampy towns Like dreamers that struggle to wake,   Longing for the poets’ truth And the lover’s pride. Something new and old Explores its own pain, hearing The rain’s choir on curtains of grey moss Or fingers of the Tasman pressing On breasts of hardening sand, as actors Find their own solitude in mirrors,   As one who has buried his dead, Able at last to give with an open hand.
Hard, heavy, slow, dark, Or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea   Teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later When the heart has lost its unjust hope   For special treatment. Today I go with a bucket Over the paddocks of young grass,   So delicate like fronds of maidenhair, Looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them,   Most of them little, and some eaten by maggots, But they’ll do to add to the soup. It’s a long time now   Since the great ikons fell down, God, Mary, home, sex, poetry,   Whatever one uses as a bridge To cross the river that only has one beach,   And even one’s name is a way of saying — ‘This gap inside a coat’ — the darkness I call God,   The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate The blue calm evening sky that plane tunnels through   Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand, Into something else? I go on looking   For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see.
The small grey cloudy louse that nests in my beard Is not, as some have called it, ‘a pearl of God’ —   No, it is a fiery tormentor Waking me at two a.m.   Or thereabouts, when the lights are still on In the houses in the pa, to go across thick grass   Wet with rain, feet cold, to kneel For an hour or two in front of the red flickering   Tabernacle light — what He sees inside My meandering mind I can only guess —   A madman, a nobody, a raconteur Whom He can joke with — ‘Lord,’ I ask Him,   ‘Do You or don’t You expect me to put up with lice?’ His silent laugh still shakes the hills at dawn.
One writes telling me I am her guiding light And my poems her bible — on this cold morning   After moss I smoke one cigarette And hear a magpie chatter in the paddock,   The image of Hatana — he bashes at the windows In idiot spite, shouting — ‘Pakeha! You can be   ‘The country’s leading poet’ — at the church I murmured, ‘Tena koe,' To the oldest woman and she replied, ‘Tena koe’—   Yet the red book is shut from which I should learn Maori And these daft English words meander on,   How dark a light! Hatana, you have gripped me Again by the balls; you sift and riddle my mind   On the rack of the middle world, and from my grave at length A muddy spring of poems will gush out.
Three dark buds for the Trinity On one twig I found in the lining of my coat   Forgotten since I broke them from the tree That grows opposite the RSA building   At the top of Vulcan Lane — there I would lay down my parka On the grass and meditate, cross-legged; there was a girl   Who sat beside me there; She would hold a blue flower at the centre of the bullring   While the twigs on the tree became black And then slowly green again — she was young — if I had said,   ‘Have my coat; have my money’ — She would have gone away; but because I gave her nothing   She came again and again to share that nothing Like a bird that nest in the open hand.
As I come down the hill from Toro Poutini’s house My feet are sore, being bare, on the sharp stones   And that is a suitable penance. The dust of the pa road Is cool, though, and I can see   The axe of the moon shift down behind the trees Very slowly. The red light from the windows   Of the church has a ghostly look, and in This place ghosts are real. The bees are humming loudly   In moonlight in their old hive above the church door Where I go in to kneel, and come out to make my way   Uphill past a startled horse who plunges in the paddock Above the nunnery. Now there are one or two   Of the tribe back in the big house—What would you have me do, King Jesus? Your games with me have turned me into a boulder.
I mean to say   I mean I keep meaning to   I mean amending   I mean correcting   I mean qualifying   I mean collecting   I mean X + X + X and so forth   I mean all possible values   I mean adding   I mean and also   I mean pileups happen when you can’t see where you’re going   I mean where you are   I mean your hand in front of your face   I mean my hand   I mean if that’s all I can see   I mean if that’s all I’m looking at   I mean that’s not all   I mean there is no end   I mean this isn’t the beginning   I mean only means   I mean blow the house down with breathlessness   I mean a house of breathlessness   I mean the walls are braced against themselves   I mean brace yourself   I mean to take the house down with its own components   I mean throw the whole deck at it   I mean two-by-fours and oven mitts   I mean rocks hucking them at walls of rocks   I mean self-healing walls   I mean with insipid pocks   I mean BB dings in street signs   I mean bullet holes in stop signs   I mean to riddle   I mean all signs point to “yes”   I mean eyelids are designed to admit some light   I mean sound   I mean boom   I mean faster than gravity   I mean I am not equal to the work   I mean I’m over my head   I mean hovering   I mean levitating   I mean light as a feather wide as a plane   I mean fight as a feather (infinitesimally)   I mean I’m going to talk about it   I mean talk about it by talking about talking about it   I mean write about it   I mean scrape it all towards me with the edge of my hand   I mean like a spray of crumbs   I mean pile   I mean to pile up and get on top of   I mean for the prospect   I mean for the pea beneath the mattress   I mean to feel the ceiling   I mean to figure it like a mime   I mean just imagine it   I mean kiss it   I mean I’m already running out of air   I mean steam   I mean fire   I mean fight it   I mean feed   I mean with fire   I mean fire is not finite only fuel   I mean light is not finite only illumination   I mean things to illuminate   I mean to throw shadows   I mean I have an important question: is this important?
the truth flies hungry, at least and otherous, of which—though it may be one—Kafka said troublingly, it has many faces    it’s the faces one wants, tripping the light shadows of its skin colours of its wordy swiftness, angry and solvent, of its loud remarks    as of feeding flocks one year, one, among the smallest birds in the Northwest, flew into the house a darting, panic thought at the walls and grasses perched on the top right corner of the frame   of Tom Field’s painting wherein adulterous Genji is found out—so Lady Murasaki reads from her blue scroll—and permitted me to take it in my hand soft, intricate   mind honouring and lift it out into the air and the next year, again, one flew into the house, almost certain, like a visitor, gold-crowned winged   floating about odd discoveries and alighted on the brim of the lasagna dish my hand trembled as I took it up and moved slowly to lift it out of the window into   the air a kind of thinking like everybody else looking for a continuing contravention of limits and of substance    for Sharon Thesen
Not coop so much as aviary. The way everyone thinks the youngest two are twins despite their differences. This memory of a blue dress the tall man called a cool drink of water. A carpet burning the skin right off my back. What I needed to say versus what I was able —the way you can't see an image in sunlight unless it's matte.Could you drink pee if there were nothing else?
We saw a lot more of them dead than alive the living diffident by the side of the road as the far-off mountains flanked and intoxicated the speedometer into saunter   The dead were interspersed on the asphalt their poor vision uncorrected by their auditory keenness like a blind spot in a poet   and their fender-mangled corpses were occasionally ripped in two before vultures reached them   In our rental van we left no mother bereft and orphaned no piglets   Turkey buzzards and American vultures were the javelinas’ gift to us   red and black scavengers that perched on ranchland fences the full span of highway they’d circle above in diminishing downward spirals   or flinch at each other’s puffs and swells or away from incoming vehicles   Still they shared the dead among them as we sometimes share our dead when we love our dead   Javelina the Arabic word for mountain in its root and then the mountain coming closer to an ear became a spear
A downpour drumming on the rooftop, engine running, car, idle, interior bathed in the pungent intoxicating spices radiating from the carry-out in the passenger seat. Inside the Taj, neon beacon in a strip mall dark with the common sense of folks long gone home, red lamps glowered. A pair of headlights glared back. A downpour drowning out its own drumming, so loud I could barely make out the whispered venom streaming from a mobile into my right ear. She was saying something about something as I reached across the steering column with my left hand, as if my left ear had been bent by the loudspeaker of the law. Engine off, everything—the car, the carry-out, etc.— went cold. I tossed the phone into the passenger seat, put her into reverse, backed up, out, and drove home with my double order, her running commentary as undertow.
This is not a waiting room for souls. It is modern, totally unwindowed.   The sun threw a ray away,  lost two rays it’s raining here in the room.   On the beach it looks very evening already, money removed from the world:   if one travels somewhere and back again, one is always different—we are not   separated on the journey. My mouth keeps spr-  inging open.   Everything does not have to have a limit   : varnish out, dooryear—winter ice is caught in winter,   I plunged myself but not under. (I can’t pull it out of my head,    can I.) Godthrough: a word with a star tied around  it, it   has to hit someone. Was such a storm the trees fell over,   there was a storm against. I have got a lot more songs in my mouth:   Shudderhorror.  Souldoll.  Shiverbeard,    is there much enough snow?  is that supposed to be lakes for the chessmen have   reached the bank? Mother shakes the little tree. Otherwise the darkness   will read it and will remain dark forever. A dream falls off,   a little shirt— the sky is red. And blue. How do the bones   get into my foot? Ung-Ung-train,  Puff-Puff train   afraided me away. No everything does not have a limit: I saw that I lived   here. That there is a spider  in the window here.  That there is a mirror   here. Twinslight, the  tongue, the garden flowers painted  —almostyou: to   walk where it is very dark and the small bell is already hanging   in the air—
First sew yourself into a pom pom mushroom Strut across the thirstland past faerie lights Shout complaints inside volcanic mancaves Scout for the last unlocated spring of ylem Then plait a cottage out of kestrel fluff Stir potato eyes into a vat of dislocated feelings Write a luculent novel five winters long Till dismay ferments enough nuclear energy to power Your moon buggy beyond the nacaret fields Stopping only to gather the pollen of the Umbiferous True Then plunge over cliffs sporting moth wings Dropping to the bottommost of the besprinkled sea And make your way up through the rain shadow On two cat feet in hostile territory All the while you compose a callithumpian song To nail a ritual within the astrobleme So bend dragons and constellate your enemies Fox on your shoulder spend a month sun-grazing A hundred hawks exploding before your stride Which will bring you luck on this godawful day You must make a new life by yourself like all Lurching tellurians stuck in eviternity
Adriaen het Kint, dead prisoner, passes back through the eye of the needle into the wombed-shaped anatomy theater in a caul of umbra mortis, lo. Tho I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I wear a caul stitched by the needle through which a camel passed, like the condom passed through the drug mule, sperm through the pierced condom, a camera through a heart. Just as the face of every Dutchman is lit by a flashbulb conceived two hundred years in the future, Adriaen het Kint now lifts a flayed hand to demonstrate how to put the god back together once he’s been dismembered and scattered among the reeds. Adriaen het Kint, shall we gather at the river to scoop up the disjecta membra? How, with flayed hand, shall we pluck the white lyre that rides the black thorax of the zika mosquito, resplendent in her viral robes? She is a messenger to all nations as she lowers her improbable proboscis into the human layer and vomits an inky toxin from the Greek for arrow ink for arrow, an arrow that sinks its bleat into the alien chordata so that the future contracts into itself, slinks off, slips further down the drain, sinks further down the wall outside the clinic, the infected needle blocking the stoma of the future with a crusty pus. The sleeper juts a canine up through the gum without meaning to, and an answering moon orbiting Jupiter winks back a salt signature, betrays a vein of water asleep beneath the frozen strata whereunto a white-clad nurse or rover soon will sink  a toothed cannula to draw it off How complete ly she circumvents the eye of the needle how completely she bypasses that camel-route to Heaven as she drains away for human use the plasma and the data
Race, friends, is boring. Everyone says so. Hashtag all lives matter, the channel turns, we ourselves live and turn, and moreover the TV told me yesterday (unendingly) ‘Ever to talk about race means you have no   Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no Inner Resources, because all I see is race. People have race, literature has race, especially great literature, Henry has race, with his blacks & whites made up as his feelings   about love & sex & art, which have race. And our social ills, & sin, in Chinese drag are somehow a dog that’s eaten itself, & its tail miserably remains as our mirror, bone or breaker, heaving on tide: us, flag.
I had not vomited in so long Someone put the hex on my true-to-selfness Some sorcerer kept me far from my guts The guts I feared would choke me And make me ashamed of having no wings And drown my own heart I know how to survive a feeling But I forgot that I knew it A manic forgetter froze my meats I kept asking for help when I didn't need it My demons stared out from the ice When they finally thawed they'd been dead all along And now I am the walking thawed You survive yourself if you wait long enough And vomit your guts down your defrosted breast And bathe in your mess and say baby it's fine
Oh, we fear our enemy’s mind, the shape in his thought that resembles the cripple in our own, for it’s not just his fear we fear, but his love and his paradise.   We fear he will deprive us of our peace of mind, and, fearing this, are thus deprived, so we must go to war, to be free of this terror, this unremitting fear, that he might   he might, he might. Oh it’s hard to say what he might do or feel or think. Except all that we cannot bear of feeling or thinking—so his might   must be met with might of armor and of intent—informed by all the hunker down within the bunker of ourselves. How does he love? and eat? and drink?   He must be all strategy or some sick lie. How can reason unlock such a door, for we bar it too with friends and lovers, in waking hours, on ordinary days?   Finding the other so senseless and unknown, we go to war to feel free of the fear of our own minds, and so come to ruin in our hearts of ordinary days.
the Platonic idea  is “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly  bed, created by God … a heavenly man, a heavenly  dog, a heavenly cat, and so on …”  Bertrand Russell  We’re not all lesbians at this bar and grill (not yet? not practicing? only in heart?), chiaroscuro as the room is with expensive ambiance and dear cuts of meat  and fish overlaid with nouveau fruit sauce, it’s clear that the most manly woman among us, older, wearing cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo, is probably neither entirely straight nor wholly queer. When she begins to confess her ‘secret’— it’s her holding of a piece of land, acres of sweet desert; its muddy roads, its remote sublime have four-wheeled deep into her being. She’s probably someone’s heavenly grandmother, as I’m still someone’s heavenly wife, despite the separation. Appearance does not really appear, but it appears to appear, yet, for a moment, it seems our conversation may open up unexpectedly or shatter into awkwardness over the word girlfriends: who in the rainy summers of our youths, we all played with our girlfriends,  (what do I mean by ‘girlfriend?’ what do you mean by yours?) It’s only then, as one of the younger women (the most lovely, so silver with bracelets and earrings and a noticeable ring) laughs that I begin to guess her inclination, Does it really appear to appear, or only apparently appear to appear? It’s a long way from Plato’s symposium to this bar and grill in Arizona. At that ancient feast— whenever a number of individuals have a common name, they have also a common ‘idea’ or ‘form’—only men reclined upon the couches, and the only the love of man for man was love’s ideal, the impulse toward some boyish form becoming the ascension of being to some ever truer realm, as the souls of men became pregnant and gave birth to  “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but  “the heavenly bed, created by God… a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on through a whole Noah’s ark,” but no heavenly woman, much less a heavenly lesbian, for since Aristotle, “Lesbian rule” has meant that measure made of lead so it could be bent to a curved or crooked wall. Because we are all women, how can we speak of love? In the beginning, banished from the realm of discourse, assigned to love’s servitude not its speech, to be love’s body not its tongue, so no one here speaks of her feeling, much less thinks to make it another’s measure. In our mouths, the tongue’s a knife, each word a wild edge, where we stammer only our own wound, a drop of blood sensual on the tongue, a distinctive taste of salt, more  mollusk perhaps—wrapped around an I of sand— than pearl, a syllable of milk or nipple, some  private body within the body, the you behind  your eyes, as if being itself were poetry—passionate  with nascent and protean neologism, full of the gaps  of being, the oblique richness of a depth in which we  begin to glimpse each other, mysterious and solo  as we are, black stubborn pearls of being.  If we spoke of Plato, and we don’t; each of us  was banished from the womb by virtue  of having a womb, to this unpredictable realm  where each of us would have to discover  her self, that wild tongue—never delineated,  even in shadow, upon the philosopher’s cave wall.
My damn cat brings me a dead songbird, wren or finch, I don’t know what it is— I mistook at first its folded grey for a strangely shaped piece of lint in the cubicle beneath my desk—nor which cat for I have two: Cricket with her dense body and stubby legs who jumps down from every shelf so reverberatingly, I call her the Black Bomb, or Ingrid, the quiet Russian Blue, whom I call Gritty because her coat is stealthy with dust. They’re always leaving me offerings—the mouse upon the threshold when I return from some trip, the redheaded grosbeak on the sill— but death is different in the front yard or even on the threshold, than Death on a particular morning, crawling into the house, carrying a warm form frozen in its warm mouth, tongue and tooth salivating a fluff of warble and whistle into a smoothly folded, iced, silenced thing, Death triumphant, affectionate! as if anyone would be happy feeding upon dead songs torn from the air.
When Simone Weil said it would be wrong to think the mystics borrow the language of love for it is theirs by right, though she didn’t call it the heavenly song of cock and cunt, perhaps that’s the inevitable conclusion of the sacred heart wounded into a womb, an arrow in the hand of an angel piercing such a depth in the body until it’s beyond what the body knows, delirious among the lilies or tasting the sweet meats of that table. Yet whoever the mystic woman is, she’s not ‘about’ sex; it’s not some sexual fantasy that she lies with in the dark mansion of God, sleeping every night in a different room, curling herself to the different shapes of emptiness. It’s not some narrative of first he this, then she that, that makes her tremble, being naked and open to nothing but thatnoche oscura, when with love inflamed, the saint runs out of the house into the hills, for she remains, asleep and dreaming, and in God’s innumerable rooms, innumerable forms and shapes of love, she lies down with them all in the depths of her body and blood, until every vision and icon shines with a glimpse of the forgotten and atavistic feminine body, pouring out of her as if out of the nipple of that blue stone embedded in the miraculous hand, as she herself becomes her own threshold; no faces remembered or imagined flicker across the hymen of her mind, for it’s not a penis, even God’s, that she imagines, but the form of herself, the knowing of the body of her own feeling, as in the Old Testament it was said that Jacob knew Rachel or Lot knew his own daughters, the knowing of the body allowed only to men; women, only the known or unknown, as she is known and un- known but as she knows herself as she knows the other that she is not: she enters herself, with fingers  of melting wax, of cold cucumber, with a thumb of glow, with all the abandoned utensils of domestic life, with a stalk from the forsaken garden, and with the lost wing feather of the angel of death and with the voice of a baby’s cry nursing on the vestigial milk of the mother of mercy.
the white of your skin, for skin, except when truly albino, always has some other color sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf, a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting stream, a richness implied of its many layers, the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity that lies within and makes the skin shed, not like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid ease of being—one resting upon the other, the sliver of your shoulder against the black fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed (as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga whales came swimming toward me—how white they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent as white fire, gliding through the weight of water, and when they sang in that chamber as small as the chambers of the human heart, murky with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments of what they had consumed, I was almost in love with them; they seemed the lost children of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other of all the existences they had left behind, their fins like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling like canaries of the sea: there was no darknessin their bodies, like clouds drifting throughunkempt skies, they illuminated the room). So I did not think of you so much as I felt you drifting through my being, in some gesture that held me poised like a hummingbird above the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you above the heart, and by above I mean there, not that geometric center, the breastbone that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake for the place where the heart lies, but the exact location, a little to the left, just on the crescent where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing, the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin and night that opens in imagination and in feeling upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where angels were once believed to dance, and all that nakedness without could not have been except for all that burning deep within
“There is no muse of translation,” the translator reminds as he struggles with Pindar’s victory odes, and what he means is that the imagery is overwhelming: the hissing of snakes as Medusa’s sisters mourn her death, the baby Iamos “lying on a bed of yellow and purple violets,” Heracles with his baby hands strangling the two serpents sent “to devour him on the day of his birth” so every translator must beware of “rank transplantation.” Just imagine, if one were to translate the line as “Forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.” How ridiculous that admonition to a king. Better to transpose to the vague modern, though Pindar “perversely, from our point of view—often seems to relish... the concrete image,” and it’s just there that I think perhaps all being is translation; the child I was at the kitchen table, translating my mother into my father, my father into my mother; each one’s “inviolate honey” becoming the “blameless venom” of the other. So now I too prefer the naked tongue, even pained and writing, caught in hammer and tongs, flexed and torqued upon the anvil, until the metal turns mercurial, quick, spilling into and out of the shape of everything that is. For all day, while that pair of grey-eyed serpents feeds the abandoned child on honey, and the e-mail box fills with a multitude of voices debating the distinctions of the hoaxes of authorship—the pseudonym, the heteronym, all the masks we can put on—I have trembled because of my tongue. Because it insisted upon saying I love you. So it waits and waits for some word from you. It’s late in the afternoon when you finally reply and then to the quote I sent to a list. I read obliquely, wondering if I should hope because you say you’re thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnets (the beloved and the lover’s love) or if I’m lost to the shadows you’re going off to dispel with a cup of coffee, that “best” at the end of your letter, my allotment from now on. Is it too much love or too little that I have translated into being? Oh by now I’m mistyping forget your tongue upon the anvil that the tongue itself has made.
What did we suffer for? why did we flee our houses as if we had been hostages at our own tables? Even free, we were not free, we kept breaking down in thrift stores, our eyes tearing in bins of glasses taken from the faces of the dead; disoriented and dizzy as crows swarming the corpses of our own hearts, in the aisles of the department stores filled with the glitter of plenty, we kept spilling coffee on ourselves. Why are we forever afraid of bathtubs, of water hitting us in the face like the invisible stoning of an anonymous crowd, why does buying makeup make us feel guilty, why do we eat our food like thieves? Why do we sneak our friends in the back door and make our love climb up a tree? Why do our lies nest within one another like diminishing dolls? Why do we jump when the smallest child pushes open a door? Why are we afraid of the whistling of teapots? Who’s coming in to read over our shoulders our most secret thoughts, who’s clinging to our roofs like a demon? Why is his cheerfulness even more frightening than his anger? Why does my hope burn like the scar of a burn on my breast? Why are you an eye floating in a pool of dead water, blue; and unable to breathe? Why do we keep asking why? How do we know how to stop it if we don’t know why it began? How can we unravel so much violence followed by so much lie? How will we know when it’s ever over? or believe it will ever stop?
Brooklyn, the present day  I. The Spirit Box   Son:  A son is a steadfast keeper of secrets,  a cupped palm, a calyx,a son is a spirit box, listen—   I was born after armistice, the fissured cities,   but slept nights with a human smoke.   And though I never shuddered from a black rouge   of rationed coffee to keep clean,   the frost and sullen mud of a forced march,   the unspoken, the unspeakable, became my life:   I was a boy bathed in dreams by a menorah fashioned against   the penalty of death, a mysterious klezmer.  A son is a spirit box, imagine.      II. Riders on the Back of Silence   Son:   As a boy, my old-world aunts and uncles would weep when I entered the room:   What did I have to do with sadness? Their cryptic tears   and purse-tucked Kleenex were my own tantalizing   Hardy Boys case to crack. Gradually, as a junior detective, I grasped   how much I resembled an uncle lost in the war,   and like the savvy, querying boy at the Passover Seder   become a scrupulous man, an inquisitive reporter,   I set out to track my look-alike’s, my family’s wartime destiny—   What my father marshaled against, what my mother endured,   the unspoken, the unspeakable, became my mission:   though I was born in a venomless time and suburb,   phantoms, chimeras breathed in our never-quite-here-and-now house,   secret calendars of fire: Mother, I dreamed we were   riders on the back of silence, the wild unsaid beneath us:  horse, whale,behemoth.   We never spoke of the war. So with stark reading,   a well-thumbedDiary of Anne Frank,   I resolved to imagine pitiless showers,   whips and watchtowers of brute commanders,   their Gypsy-less, Jew-less, jerry-rigged heaven.      III. The Photojournalist   Son:   In my search for your cloud-wrapped past, Mother,   the wounded earth became mine, and each time I aligned myself   with the exiled, the dispossessed, I aligned myself with you.   Apprenticed to, obsessed with, light and justice,   always I’ve tried to bring into focus a girl, with war as her spur,   with hunger as her horse and shadow—   Mother, in El Salvador I couldn’t lift my camera   to capture the unearthed bodies of silenced nuns:   I’m almost, but never quite, inured to death:   a child in a jacket of flies; the last typed lines of a friend,   a dissident poet whose body was opened beyond belief—   In the Secret Annex, in the countless precincts of strife, I’ve learned   an Esperanto of blood and hope and forbearance,   as if someday I might receive my wish: to read, on a night as serene as truce,   your long-awaited story: the capo’s unrelenting curses,   a castaway’s pain: I should know it by heart, Mother.      IV. The Antimiracle   Mother:   At the spring’s start, there were fists rather than fragrance,   April-upon-April hope braided with arrests and betrayals,   as dark as the derided spaces in our censored mail.   Garrisons, watchtowers, checkpoints as daunting as Gorgons,   proliferated. The borders became too-tight belts—   Long after the white of truce, in restless sleep I struggled   to awaken the family dead, to confess, unabashed:   Lampshades of sullied flesh, linens fashioned of human hair—   I was not prepared to stand outside humanity—      V. The Pet Name   Son:   Soft as a fontanel,Dove was the pet name   you gave me as a boy, and on the world’s battlefields,   like a drop of holy water, its bolstering sweetness   became my talisman. It was with me, mitigating, winged,   shielding me somehow, as my lover Jaeger’s lens shattered   and his lifeblood soaked into my shirt.   It was with me, a thousand leagues from God,   when I photographed a gassed village—   whole families and their livestock hushed   as if by an invisible hand, as if some heedless, insane baker   had dusted the afternoon with flour.      VI. Trains   Mother:   Today, amid the earliest birdcalls, the first neighborhood sounds,   I swept the stoop, leaned on the trusty broom,   and wondered: If I could write, son, about those years,   where would I begin?— Your grandfather was a stationmaster,   tall as a flagpole and as taciturn.   And though his owl-gray eyes have gone to earth,   I keep thinking he’ll round the corner in his fastidious clothes,   carrying a sprig of asphodel or fragrant honeysuckle—   so dignified with his gold spectacles and timetables.   God took him the Sabbath before the shouts and stones, the smashed   storefronts of Kristallnacht. How it would’ve angered him to see   that his beloved trains were used to betray us.      VII. Dove’s Arc   Mother:   For years I dreamed maternal dreams of your cozy security—   spacious freedom from pogroms, all the misery the wide,   unmerciful world doles out to Jews and scapegoats,   and always you seemed determined to court danger—   So you want to know about a prisoner’s,   a Häftling’s dignity? This is what it meant:   at the roll call, some anchoring wish—   or a shared shoe, a black rouge of rationed   coffee in the camp, to dodge selection for the flames ...   Truth to tell: there’s barely been a day   when the filth of the barracks, the fury of the camps   didn’t obsess my heart; But I will go with you to Birkenau,   near the slain beasts of the old crematoriums,   where everywhere you walk, you are walking on human ash.   I want to leave something sturdy in this world,   maybe a book of live-to-tell truth,   grace and vitamins, for those to come.   More than anything, son, what I’ve wanted to tell you:   there was a woman of courage in the camp,   and she shepherded me, kindled me to keep me alive.   A clear light seemed to shore her (as if we were seeing   a one-woman sunrise, an unstoppable human dawn),   so that she garnered strength to share her meager scraps,   strength to carry the ones still minus an alphabet,   making up soothing rhymes, little puddles of sound...   Like so many, she died of typhus.   And after liberation, in the DP camp,   amid the chaos, I prayed my children would inherit   a portion of her spirit. And it’s true,   you have some of her fearlessness, her passion, you do.   Son, why didn’t I see it before? How my hardscrabble prayer,   in it’s dove’s arc, was answered.
Even here? In this snowbound barrack?   Suddenly, the illicit sounds of Beethoven’s concerto   erupt from Juliek’s smuggled violin, suffusing this doomsday shed   teeming with the trampled and the barely alive,   realm of frostbite and squalor, clawing panic and suffocation—   Insane, God of Abraham, insanely beautiful:   a boy insisting winter cannot reign forever,   a boy conveying his brief, bounded life   with a psalmist’s or a cantor’s arrow-sure ecstasy—   One prison-striped friend endures to record   the spellbinding strings, the woebegone—   and the other, the impossible Polish fiddler,   is motionless by morning, his renegade instrument   mangled under the haggard weight   of winter-killed, unraveling men. Music at the brink of the grave,   eloquent in the pitch dark, tell-true, indelible,   as never before, as never after—  Abundance, emending beauty,  linger in the listening,truth-carrying soul of Elie,  soul become slalom swift,camp shrewd, uncrushable;  abundance, be here, always here,in this not-yet-shattered violin.
And when her son never returned from the meant-to-crush-him camps,   the crucible of Poland, always-hard-at-work Isa slept   for endless hours, and once, under her lids, she was led,   by diligent female Virgils, to a vast meadow   where an inspirited Isa embraced, one by one,   countless women who remained in mourning for their cherished sons.   Gallant and stricken, together the myriad bereaved   but defiant women formed an ever-widening circle,   prodigal with bitter tears, and then, suddenly,   like a jackdaw darting from eave to sun-drenched eave,   something flew between the throats of the grieving,   heart-gutted mothers, and a great beauty arose:   In the dream, Isa recalled, the singing of the harrowed women   with war-taken sons hushed the world's barrenness.   In the dream, the startling river of sound altered the embattled earth.
There is the lightning-white moment when I learn—   the way my costive train to Krakow stopped   and I woke to find myself, in jostling twilight,   at the Auschwitz platform— that the Italian postcard   I garnered in Milan years ago as a genial talisman   isn’t of a pipe-dreaming Italian boy,   no, no, but an androgynous image of Sophie Scholl,   the young, intrepid resistance heroine— as if I’d registered,   in my Schubert-adoring daughter, my school-resisting son,   a fire undetected before: Doric-strong nouns demanding  What would you undertaketo stop tyranny?—   stouthearted nouns:integrity, probity, courage;   in benighted Munich, the spit-in-the-eye swiftness,   the unbossed bloom of a crossed-out swastika,   the fierce integrity in the gust of the word freedom   sprayed over the walls and ramparts of a deranged   fatherland that rent flesh as if it were foolscap—  Someday you will bewhere I am now,   a steely, premonitory Sophie proclaimed to the rapacious   Nazi tribunal that rushed her to execution—   Gazer, collector, in clarity’s name, look close, then closer:   it’s not just a bud-sweet, pensive beauty,   a bel ragazzo’s charm; all these years:   it’s the spirit of crusading youth that I’ve cherished.
Look, we have made a counterpoint   of white chrysanthemums, a dauntless path   of death-will-not-part-us petals and revering light;   even here, even here   before the once-wolfish ovens, the desecrating wall   where you were shot, the shrike-stern cells   where you were bruised and emptied of your time-bound beauty—   you of the confiscated shoes and swift-shorn hair,   you who left, as sobering testament, the scuffed   luggage of utter hope and harrowing deception.   Come back, teach us. From these fearsome barracks   and inglorious fields flecked with human ash,   in the russet-billowing hours of All Hallows,   let the pianissimo of your truest whispering   (vivid as the crunched frost of a forced march)   become a slowly blossoming, ever-voluble hearth   revealing to us (the baffled, the irresolute,   the war torn, the living) more of the fire   and attar of what it means to be human.
Department of Trance Department of Dream of Levitation Department of White Fathom Department of Winding Sometimes my son orders me lie down I like when he orders me lie down close your eyes Department of Paper Laid Gentry Department of Sound of Sheets of Paper  he covers me with then sings I like best the smallest sounds he makes then Department of This Won’t Sting Am I slipping away Department of Violet Static as if he were a distant station Department of Satellite My child says you sleep Department of Infinitely Flexible Web and covers my face with blankness Department of Tap-Tapping the Vein Department of Eyelash I can’t speak  or even blink  or the page laid over my face will fall Department of Clear Tape in Whorls and Double Helixes on the Wall He says Mama don’t look  Department of You Won’t Feel a Thing I cannot behold Department of Pinprick He will not behold Department of Veils and Chimes of Lungs Afloat in Ether   I like this best Department of Spider Vein when I am most like dead and being with him then, Department of Notes Struck from Thin Glasses Successively at Random I must explain to my child that sleep  is not the same as dead Department of Borderlessness so that he may not be afraid of Department of Fingertips Lightly on Eyelids so I can lie and listen not holding not carrying not working Department of Becalmed faint sound of him    I am gone   His song is the door back to the room   I am composed of the notes
A tang approaches, like the smell of snow. Illness like a color deepens— pale gray, thick-in-a-cloak gray, secret coat silk, and finally the weight of rough pelts heaped on the bed.   The last enchantment of the day is tearing pages out of a book. The paper soft and thin, like falling asleep (a hand backstage smoothing my hair: the school friend, Lakamp, became an undertaker)   My baby laughs to rip the pages. Stays by me, does this damage. The tearing moves like voltage through my own hands.  Oh mother skimming fever   I need him to linger  are you still happening there, in your body?   I just want to lie at the edge of breaking.   Yes, I am still backstage, here in my body. The baby pulls out another page— leaving him would come this easily.   I will bind myself to the thinnest sounds, the feather coming out of the pillow.   Please keep ripping up the words. Please don’t need anything from me.
I was given a city, with coffee and sunlight. “The coin-purse smell of the subway,” I wrote. In the mornings policemen would stand, lightstruck and pleasured, over trays of danish. Mornings I wrote and workmen raised up their nets. Hallelujah the brick, the debris! I was given a city. The city got between me and God.   I was given a house. The curtains breathed over wide sills. There was a leaf in the middle of the floor, I loved the crispness of the leaf. I loved the privacy of sills. The sills sailed, I fell into the sills. The sills got between me and God.   I was given a mud hut. The walls curved to meet the ceiling like a tongue curves to make a word.   I was given God, with salt and sweet together. I was given a piece of meat. I loved the flesh. I was given bread only. I was given only water. I loved the coolness of the water. The water got between me and the feast.   I had an empty plate and there was the color of it. I cannot even describe the color of it.   I was given a cell with a window. There was a certain light at evening.   I was given nothing but the air, and the air dazzled.
Food in the underworld, the Death King   In his seedy, green nightgown Holding up flowers.   The warden of the underworld In her plastic, pink   Wheelchair Serving silver trays of   Shit and death and black Gelatinous.   Birth, the music Reminds me and   Will not stop When I turn it off,   A warped music boxTrapped inside.    I repeat what I cannot bear: Chronic repetition.   This poem is its own Language.   It marks the mind Like a missing memory   Marks the body. Then it Changes, makes it invisible.   Back form the edge of what Becomes.
My brother is still alive and living In Fresno.   All day he stares at the dead bodies Of automobiles   In his garage. It isn’t a prison He’d wish himself free of.   I visit him, Dragging my boxes   Of books and awards Behind me.   We are walking out of the city Into the white flame of the desert.   Not unlike the Desert Fathers walking out into Sinai.   My brother carries his briefcase Loaded in icons and dollar bills.   He is wearing Larry Levis’s shining Suit and black leather boots.   I am wearing a pale gown Of sun-bleached flowers.   We are talking About the Resurrection.   We are walking dead Into it   Leaving the world and its sweet chorus Of horrors behind.   There is no city But the city within.   No door, but the door To simple wisdom.   We walk, dumb As newborns   Into the tremendous and endless Blessing.
Snow White was nude at her wedding, she’s so white the gown seemed to disappear when she put it on.   Put me beside her and the proximity is good for a study of chiaroscuro, not much else.   Her name aggravates me most, as if I need to be told what’s white and what isn’t.   Judging strictly by appearance there’s a future for me forever at her heels, a shadow’s constant worship.   Is it fair for me to live that way, unable to get off the ground?   Turning the tables isn’t fair unless they keep turning. Then there’s the danger of Russian roulette   and my disadvantage: nothing falls from the sky to name me.   I am the empty space where the tooth was, that my tongue rushes to fill because I can’t stand vacancies.   And it’s not enough. The penis just fills another gap. And it’s not enough.   When you look at me, know that more than white is missing.
My mother’s named for places, not Sandusky that has wild hair soliciting the moon like blue-black clouds touring. Not Lorain with ways too benevolent for lay life. Ashtabula comes closer, southern, evangelical and accented, her feet wide as yams.   She’s Florida Missouri, a railroad, sturdy boxcars without life of their own, filled and refilled with what no one can carry.   You just can’t call somebody Ravenna who’s going to have to wash another woman’s bras and panties, who’s going to wear elbow-length dishwater to formal gigs, who’s going to have to work with her hands, folding and shuffling them in prayer.
My ancestors weren’t hippies, cotton precluded fascination with flowers. I don’t remember communes, I remember ghettos. The riots were real, not products of hallucinogens. Free love had been at Redbones since black unemployment and credit saturation.   The white women my mother cleaned for didn’t notice she had changed. I guess it was a small event, a resurrected African jumping out the gap in her front teeth. I guess it looked like a cockroach; that’s what she was supposed to have, not dignity.   My mother just couldn’t get excited about the Beatles, those mops she swilled in ammonia everyday on their heads. Besides, she didn’t work like a dog but like a woman; they aren’t the same. The hair was growing long for the same reasons Pinocchio’s nose did.   I can think only of a lesbian draping crepe paper chains over my head to make a black Rapunzel possible; that’s how a white woman tried to lift my burdens. At the time I didn’t reject her for being lesbian or white but for both burdens. That was when I didn’t want Ivory soap to be what cleaned me, made me presentable to society. All the suds I’d seen were white, they still are but who cares? I’m more interested in how soap dwindles in my hand, under the faucet.   I’m old enough to remember blocks of ice, old enough or poor enough. I remember chipping away at it, broken glass all over the floor. Later in the riots, the broken glass of looting tattled how desperate people were to keep cool.   There are roses now in my mother’s yard. Sometimes she cuts them, sets them in Pepsi bottles throughout her rooms. She is, I admit, being sentimental. Looting her heart. My father who planted them is gone. That mop in the corner is his cane growing roots.
In this restaurant a plate of bluefish pâté and matzos begin memorable meals.   The cracker is ridged, seems planked, an old wall streaked sepia, very nearly black in Tigrett, Tennessee   where it burned   into a matzo’s twin. While waiting for a Martha’s Vineyard salad, I rebuild the church with crackers, pâté as paste   as a flaming dessert arrives at another table where diners are ready for a second magnum of champagne; every day is an anniversary; every minute, a commemoration so there is no reason to ever be sober   to excuse incendiaries who gave up the bottle, threw alcohol at the church, spectacular reform   in flames themselves ordinary—there’d been fire in that church many times, every Sunday and even at the Thursday choir rehearsals. For years there’d been a fired-up congregation   so seething, neighborhoods they marched through ignited no matter their intention; just as natural as summer. There were hot links as active as telephone lines whose poles mark the countryside as if the nation is helpless without a crucifix every few yards; pity they are combustible   and that fire itself is holy, that its smoke merges with atmosphere, that we breathe its residue, that when it is thick and black enough to believe in, it betrays and chokes us; pity that it is the vehicle that proves the coming of the Lord, the establishment of his kingdom, his superiority because fire that maintains him disfigures us; when we try to embrace him; we find ourselves out on a limb burning. The meal   tastes divine, simply divine and I eat it in the presence of a companion dark as scab, as if skin burned off was replaced as he healed with this total-body scab   under which he is pink as a pig, unclean at least through Malachi.   In my left hand, a dash of Lot’s wife; in my right, a mill to freshly grind the devil, since fire is power both the supreme good and supreme evil are entitled to it; most of the time, what did it matter who was in charge of Job? Both burnt him.
It’s going to hurt You know this So you drink tea in the morning instead of an entire carafe of coffee Like a vampire, your skin cells burn on their first sip of the sun The ringing taste of green tea or whatever the fuck kind of tea this is Describe to me in detail this so-called purification ritual I can’t I’ve never done it before My cells are exploding into a wasting lament This is the last time you will ever write yourself through this On the other side of this swamp of dark water, a plane will crash The lone survivor will speak on the radio as you drive down Highway 27 In the middle of Florida in the middle of the night after you step off the plane you see the swamps morph into the mountains of your childhood They raise their heads like giants The Sierras stare; do not go there “Brave soul,” says the radio “Beauty,” says the radio “It had to be like this,” says the radio “Difficult,” says the radio “Now you’re 44 years old?” says the radio “That’s right. 44 years old,” says the radio Continue to drive through hornets and testicular small towns Some flags raised Some flags down The god of the underworld has let you go from his hand into the empire Floridian He says you have a pure heart so pure he cannot destroy it Some people look pure but they are not He says he cannot see you destroy yourself so he has let you go and he will protect you with his anger and melancholy It will hurt You know this All the substances have got to go Substances don’t flow from your body They leave with the violence of an exorcism Spicer says once a ghost leaves your body it never returns “Horrendous,” your sister texts “I’ve been vomiting all night,” she texts “Maybe it will be a Christmas baby,” you say Something with no substance surrounds you
A new obsession. How to get out of cold, metallic waters alive. Every night for a week I dream of my car ending up in a body of water. If I’m not driving, someone else is. Bob, the neighbor. My new paranoia. I Google how to escape a car filling with water. I watch videos on YouTube. I memorize the steps of what to do if this happens. First, you take your seat belt off. Late at night, I read pages and pages on the internet. What if the car lands in the water flipped over? Remember to stay calm. If you panic, you will die. News story about a woman who drives her minivan into the ocean on purpose. Horrified beachgoers run toward the water. The two kids are strapped in the back seat. One of the kids is screaming “No, mommy” — What about the sunroof? What if you land in the water and your car has a sunroof? My new car has a sunroof. You have to let the car fill with water so that pressure is equalized on both sides. This is elementary physics. If you don’t do this, it’s impossible to open the doors. This is the scary part. You have to hold your breath. None of the YouTube videos say anything about what to do if you have kids strapped in car seats in the car. I look up what the dreams mean. Water in dreams signifies turbulent emotions. If you are in your car and there is a flash flood, you should get out immediately. Even six inches of water can sweep your car away. Sweep it to where? Maybe the forest? I get nervous driving by the Gulf of Mexico. My friend Dyan got into an accident there and she said that if the car had flipped on the other side of the road, her whole family would have ended up in the water. I don’t like water. I don’t want to touch it. It scares me. I know all life was born of water. Today the government proposed to sell off all public lands. That before anything existed there were rocks and then water. I know that water is beautiful and mysterious. But why does it sweep people away? I want to push down the rising seas. I look at a map of cities that will be underwater by 2100, 2200 —  Jacksonville, New Orleans, Amsterdam. I want to push them down with my bare hands.
For Yogita and Anish
 “Ah neva seen this before in all ma years.” Testify, Sis. How we grew accustomed, Spoiled almost, by decorum, now try Mosquito larvae cultivating at speed In standing bodies of water. Pigeons Flock rooftops, twist, launch, shout As one, spin sky, turn skulls porous. Car repair shop drills sing industry. Tires feel out parking, meters freed. First horn blare triggers this chorus. Step up pistons, fire motor mouths, Say our only worry is our worst fears Come true. Mosquito straw proboscis Drinks from my arm, bam! Adios asterisk.• But, really, am I eyeballing an armored truck? Says one dung beetle to half earthworm, Who replies, as Gloucester, I see it feelingly. Who gave those uniforms permission to storm School car parks, automatics drawn? Finches ask Robins, who, channeling Auden, whistle —  Bang! WTF!Bang, bang, Lulu, Lulu gone ...     The calypso worked its juju On my digital radio. Flags at half-mast for this Union. Taps on trumpets dawn till dusk. Guides, Scouts, look out for rainbows Projected on a disused warehouse in LA County. Clocks throughout the land tell one contiguous time. Rain and shine stop dead in tracks on borderlines.• Cat asks me if dogs can ever be cool.After two of my kind pin down one of hisOn a front porch until chased off by our rulers. I open my mouth to spit some piety aboutLions lying down with lambs but only barkWhat my genes say I should, ears pulled back. Do you remember Judas Iscariot? Thirty silverPieces and a certain last supper just for this.A taser for every problem warns the bee With an empty bonnet, sting for emphasis,About why one plus one never makes two,After voting from sea to oil-slicked sea. Look at her, look at him, hold, kiss babiesIn photo ops, all gaga, minus bathtubNever mind water, in this national soap, This wait for the next sentence whose weight“Illegals” carry on shoulders they look overNonstop, even in sleep, one eye open, Breath held when police cruise by,Car backfire skin jump heartbeat skip,Day in, day out, glory hallelujah, do I have A witness as empire zips into bonfire.For what? To dip wrists in fresh waterFrom an inverted fountain in a square.• Black lives matter but blue lives matter more. Duh. Veins, blue, blood, plus or minus, B this or A that. Epicurus, I find your coin staring up at me From the bottom of my beer mug, too late For Troy, for Trayvon. I need a flotation device, A buoy, Woolf’s lighthouse and single room Garvey’s Star Line to beam me up Scotty. Where is yesteryear’s full moon that silvered Towers and made a midnight lake of the city Where lovers strolled, hand in hand, one black, One white, with no mind for anyone and no two Minds in their business? Gone the way of drones Whose shadows crossed the moon without trace On GPS to sow grief in the name of cod, liver, oil. Spell it out or risk talk stuck in ecofriendly caves. Black and blue, both, why can’t we, intoned, Rodney (not Walter), get along? Because, Because, because (fill in the dots) with your Trotsky (or Brodsky) and your Marx (Groucho). Laugh therapy narrows eyes, blocks ears, Hurts jaws, ribs, merrily, merrily, cha-cha. Cha.• Eek-A-Mouse blasts my buds, as I read The instruction manual, which says One thing but leads to another When I piece it together, finally. It being the thing I refuse to name. My nerves, porous as that strainer I hold over a tilted pot full of spaghetti In hot water. Pavarotti in the shower, Malcolm before a cracked mirror, Gaga at each news item competing For part Fool. Ornate, abandoned nest Left in place, in my suburban rafter, Squirreled from without a note, Unless feathers could ever be a sign Of things to come, of what once was.• Face Beckett’s door, imperceptibly ajar. His stage direction, for how things Turn out here if this show goes on. Sir Ian, why reserve your last check For your flies, before you take the stage? Because all eyes alight there first. Mr. Spock, where is the logic in this? I marvel at comics from my youth In 4K, LED. Captain, put me ashore. By which I mean at sea with sirens, Ears unwaxed, sternum lashed to bow. What is your name? Kunta. Whip. Am I not a ... asked Sizwe in Fugard. You are trans, on loan from genes, Dust, waves, particles, here, today.• Go-go in la-la land whines craft for art’s saké. See that chrysalis hanging like a mural. Should it stop unfolding, hold back Dues, suspend when wings peel gloves, Snake free, take flight, remind the greed In our chi, Che, cha, what turns without Turning? If you must know, but first, Shush, write milk in lemon juice on foolscap, Read by passing over Bunsen. Mercurial Chemists, we were all Curie. Cooked crack Ready to pay any price, to find out if love Could ever be a portion, all you would need, To spin Mercator a tad faster on whiteout Poles, match our heart, tap, rat-a-tat burst.• 1. Hummingbird feeder needs refill 2. Peel sticker, off window, that says glass 3. Buy T-shirt with directive, mind the gap 4. Sip tea from mug, of civil rights dead 5. Breathe in, sure, but really exhale 6. Note how breeze lifts a whole branch 7. Whose green skirt shows white undies• I mean certain legends about flight that grow up with right minds to help them come to terms with change that may be out of their control. Lone branch ranges from a curved palm 90 feet over LA’s 1914 craftsman in historic Adams. How flayed branch cruises broadcasts a specific gravity geared to flight of the right kind, slow, bracing, reluctant, noncommittal, inevitable, and resigned to its fate. Through double-glazing I hear, so I believe, that swoosh of storied capital decline, swish perhaps, almost a whistle, as you wish, much like us as kids with a clasped blade of grass held to our pursed lips for that didgeridoo that was elevator music to us atonal types. But how can a branch sing if made to move on by wind and rain from where it began, and thought it would end, even if a philosophy spread among shoots of a final sail set for another dimension? As word of government raids spread through town and university we forwarded emails, Instagrams, and stopped with neighbors in streets to exchange the latest. Is this time for emergency measures or are we too blind to know what we can feel coming a mile away, where someone who knows someone we know stops for bread, milk, eggs and is grabbed, handcuffed, and carted off to detention? Imagine us as branches dislodged in a sea change helped by soft water. We cling, not to give up on all we know. What for? That fall, we must accept as fate.• Juggernaut ancestors shape-shift cumulus, March across dull blue grass to bagpipes. Change bandages on Grandmother. Amputated right hand she says she feels Rainy days in Georgetown as a firm handshake That rattles all 27 phantom bones, makes her shiver. Grandfather never averts his bifurcated lens From his Golden Treasury, unless his hanky readies To catch eyewater at the blurred sight of her. In a time of airships, of toothpicks operated Behind hand cover. Whoever you vote for, (Runs the calypso) the government gets in, Ting-a-ling-a-ling. Doan tek serious thing Mek joke, bannoh. WTF. Twin towers got us Here. Nah, Reagan. Nope, slavery. Try again. Irony, that republic of deferred action. Hummingbird smashes into that glass door, My mother walks absently into it too. I glance just in time, brake and catch a face That I look through to my final destination.• K Street in South London? Now? How? One morning at 6:30 I crossed Blackheath Hill. On my paper round Met a scrawny fox halfway Uphill, down, not sure. We paused, inhaled each Other, fox-trotted away, In a slight panic, Me thinking tabloid Headlines, rabid animal Chases paper kid On delivery route. Follow as I buzz myself Into a tower, Board elevator, a man In a suit exits, With the merest nod. Climb 8 floors, carry That fox, and just as I plunge The folded Mirror Into letter box, Door, ajar, flies open, wham! A very pregnant Woman, naked, swollen breasts Blazing redhead, small Burning bush at crotch, Fills doorframe, scrambles my head. She takes one moment To compute I am Not her partner, slams door, smack, In my wide-eyed face. That moment, as she Processes me and I her, Stretches out enough For me to see her Shoulder-length, red, flaming curls And inverted red Triangle tuft at her crotch, Bright stretched skin at her Distended navel, An outie, as though I crashed at high speed and could Recall the lead up Frame by stark frame for Posterity, mine and hers, Her child near its term. The rest of my round I peer left, right, near distance, Round bends, for said fox. I conjure woman, Pregnant, framed by her threshold, Here, now, with only Me, you, these measures, This emergency, all three, To foster, connect all.• Lap up 70s Airy Hall, Guyana. One road in and one road out, One of everything village, Caiman, donkey, peacock, And mad expat Englishman Footloose and fancy-free Who we stone with red sand That crumbles on contact Grabbed from the roadside That acts as giant bow, Strung with two-story house, Whose Greenheart frame, Tensed, held all this time. English pelted for saying, Down his big burnt nose, That he was sent here To rule us half-clad children That he in his better days Seeing better times before Guyana’s famous red rum Got the better of him, Helped sow high and low, And everything between Our town and country.• Maestro, we played shoots Planted in one place Sprouts in disorderly rows, Up whole feet if you look away For a spell, all loaded In one hammock strung Between rafters in a back room Empty until harvest Stuffed paddy from roof To pillar to post. Rice husk smell for days. Rocking chair song and dance On full moons, donkey-bray At midday, peacock-scream Various most afternoons.• Now help bring barefoot Pale instep, cracked heel, stamping Englishman back, not to curse, Stone or ridicule, but to hear How he would remedy this now So out of sync with then.• Once more help us• Parse wheat from chaff,• Quantify this voting• Result that tests our gall.• Stepped-on alligator, Uncle• Takes for a log bridge• Until it lifts, shakes, yawns.• Velocity of legs cycling air, Caiman, not alligator, Lassoed between two poles, Fetched back to the house, Cut loose in a fenced field For sport for that day, Lost to me every day since. I bring it back, steady Its shine, against this time,• Where I am told one past Counts most, all others Must be put down to what That alligator, jaws open, Head reared, presents, Ready to lash with tail, Charge at anyone Who takes it for a log.• X marks the spot where Englishman walks in half Circles, pumps his bent Arms as if to fly, cackles Like a peacock, only to get The real thing started, The two in a quarrel thrice Removed from that magic Flower duet from Lakmé By Léo Delibes. Peacock, Donkey, caiman, village fool, Be my ally, bring it all, Cow, moon, dish, spoon.• Yo-Yo Ma follows Eek On democracy’s Shuffle Play.• Zebra asks me in Queen’s English peppered with Esperanto If he be black whiff white stripes Or white wid black stripes. I wake with this atonal pair On the edge of my edginess: “I do not care, I do not care, If the Don has on underwear.”“But don’t you think or worry some, That his nudity is zero sum?” “I cannot see for the life of me, Why that should concern anybody.”“I fret when all’s said and done, We leave him be, he has his fun.”
Berkeley psychologists told Harold his anger was justified. What parents let their child go for a midnight walk under no moon? I couldn’t have been more than four
along the street the outcast pauses his earring makes him special a useless worker of the disgraceful he’s stood at the crossroads of  years the traffic light contains three colors but none give him permission to cross I live OK and work at present as word processor (from the root “cess”) and in the process wander or hold court with whacked youngsters you just can’t get used to death you drain your life toiling for some treasure you’ll die like a darling you won’t protest and out of decorum pretend to see the light die just like the rest of us and to your relatives’ delight agonizing confess you know where to find the gold    Translated from the Russian
While the tennis ball went back and forth in timeA girl was burning. While the tonic took its greenyAcid lime, a girl was burning. While the ruby sun fell From a cloud’s bent claws and Wimbledon was wonAnd lost, we sprawled along the shore in chairs,We breathed the azure airs alongside A girl with the thinnest arms all scarred and scoredWith marks she’d made herself —She sat with us in flames That not all saw or saw but couldn’t say at riskOf seeming impolite. And later we’d all thinkOf the monk who’d doused himself with gas, Lit a match, then sat unmoving and alert amidDevouring light. She didn’t speak. She touchedNo aspect of our silly selves. I was the awkward guest everybody hardly knew.She was an almost ghost her mother sawErasing the edges of herself each day Smudging the lines like charcoal while her parentsRedrew her secretly into being over andAgain each night and dawn and sleepless All years long. Having seen that mother’s love,I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’veBrought to life the deadest Christ, and she Emptied herself into that blazing child with all her mightAnd stared a hundred million miles intoThe girl’s slender, dwindling shape. Her father was the devoted king of helicopter padAnd putting green. His baby burned as weAll watched in disbelief. I was the facile friend of friends insisting on a hugWho hadn’t been along for years of doctors, wards,And protocols. I forced her sadness close. I said C’mon let’s hug it out. Her arms were whiteBirch twigs that scissored stiffly at my neck till sheSlid on. That night we watched Some fireworks on the dewy lawn for it wasIndependence Day. Soon after, she was gone.She was the flaming tower we all daredTo jump from. So she burned.
Down in the basement, jacked on Kimbo,I’m screwdriving chunks of OxiCleaninto the washer. Jane: Collage is tattered backdrop,not worth the Time nor Money.
Homage to Morton Feldman 
 “Before the oracle, with the flowers” —1 Kings 7:49 1 Here in the gloaming, a wormwood haze —  the “m” on its head, a “w,” amazed at what the drink itself does: Vermouth, god bless you — th.2 What really matters now is begonia, he thought, distracted while reading —  their amber anther and bone-white petals missing from a jade pot by the door — not a theory of metaphor.3 In this corner, sweet alyssum. And beside it fragrant jessamine. Almost rhyming scents in the air —  a syntax weaving their there, there.4 Erodium holds an eye in the pink looping the white of its tendering cup.5 The blue moon opens all  too quickly and floats  its head-  y fragrance over  the path  before us: And so we slit its throat, like a florist.6 These hearts-on-strings  of the tenderest green things that rise from dirt, then fall  toward the floor,  hang  in  the air  like —   hearts- on-strings of the tenderest green things —   they rise from dirt then fall toward  the floor,  hanging in  the air like —   these hearts-on-strings of the tenderest green things,  rising from dirt then falling toward the floor,  hanging  in the air like7 Moss-rose, purslane, portulaca  petals feeling  for the sun’s light or is it only warmth or both  (they need to open) an amethyst  almost see-through shift8 Bou-  gainvillea lifts the sinking spirit back  up and nearly into a buoyancy —   its papery pink bracts proving with their tease  of a rustle and glow through the window —  there is a breeze.9 Epistle-like chicory blue beyond the bars of these  beds suspended  in air, (what doesn’t dangle?) elsewhere, gives way to plugged in, pez-  purply thyme, against a golden (halo’s) thistle.10 What’s a wandering Jew to you two, who often do wonder about that moving about? Its purple stalk torn-off and stuck elsewhere in the ground takes root and soon shoots forth a bluish star with powder on its pistil. Such is the power of that Jew, wherever it goes (unlike the rose), to make itself new.
Pandemic of lilies dreaming majesty hovers like sweat & unwraps you & you  are in love  it makes you bad, bad  is your name  is the desert  is movement long kiss heavy gut slow  slow hands in your seeds
the voyage of st. brendan
 A cry of “Land!” A cliff face, iron ore red, a monastery perched on top, gold-gilded. The crew cast anchor, doggy-swam ashore and surfed the scree slopes in buoyant uproar. The summit gained, they gasped: seven monks advanced in welcome, cooing like rock doves. The ground was fire-grate ash, entirely barren; reading looks, the eldest spoke to Brendan: “We drink the dew. Our food arrives by raven, one loaf one fish, our drop, our daily ration, the bird so clockwork and plain bountiful. Rest here, brothers. Come, observe our ritual.” The monks performed a wordless parable: seven stones in a fruit picker’s pail, bird-skin robes. Cried Brendan: “Holy fathers, bless you — these are quality palavers.” The crew half-slept, that night, in golden cells, their dreams hatchlings, their nerves eggshells. Before the raven-dawn they fled in haste, fearing their hosts’ hunger, and their faith.
the voyage of st. brendan
 Books were Brendan’s love. At number one,Amazing Tales, a vast compendium. Within, he found the Mathematic Salmon, the Manticore, the breath-defying Dragon. The dog-head folks, called Cynocephali, a godless bunch who play the banjolele. The Arctic tribes who worship tiger seals, their ice-hickle cities on wagon wheels. The whale  Jasconius, its mountain-back all porcupined with oak, and elm, and ash. And Inexpressible Isle, its ruined fort with butterfly judges, Heart’s Grief Court. In time, this diet of ripe and rum detail weighed on Brendan: he sickened, grew pale. He craved, instead, a simple common sense in keeping with his Rule of abstinence. “These things,” he cried, “are figments, folderols. The truth is here, at hand: a linnet’s carols, Kerry mountains, Christ upon his hook.” And Brendan made a fire, and burnt his book.
Think Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” Belle as beast Eel as style Bats testy Best lastly Bluely astute —  as bull as beetle as Bey as butte Beauty as lute  thus beauty as lush Late lethal Lust salty She’ll eye She’ll tally Yes stately yet stealth Yes steely yet sly Hey lathe —   [she taut] Hey sleuth —   [she tale] He heel He that She bluesy She ballsy She byte She shall
my first drink was in my mother my next, my bris. doctor spread red wine across my lips. took my foreskin• every time i drink i lose something• no one knows the origins of alcohol. tho surely an accident before sacrament. agricultural apocrypha. enough grain stored up for it to get weird in the cistern. rot gospel. god water• brandy was used to treat everything from colds to pneumonia frostbite to snake bites tb patients were placed on ethanol drips tonics & cough medicines spooned into the crying mouths of children• each friday in synagogue a prayer for red at dinner, the cemetery, the kitchen spirits• how many times have i woke strange in an unfamiliar bed? my head neolithic• my grandfather died with a bottle in one hand & flowers in the other. he called his drink his medicine he called his woman  she locked the door• i can only half blame alcohol for my overdose the other half is my own hand that poured the codeine that lifted the red plastic again & again &• i’m trying to understand pleasure it comes back in flashes every jean button thumbed open to reveal a different man every slurred & furious permission• i was sober a year before [ ] died• every time i drink i lose someone• if you look close at the process of fermentation you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body until it’s transformed into something more volatile• the wino outside the liquor store mistakes me for his son
What can I do but make of the eyes of others my own eyes, but make of the world a ghazal whose radif is a haunting of me, me, me? Somewhere there are fingers still whole to tell the story of the empire that devours fingers. Somewhere there is a city where even larvae cannot clean the wounds of the living and cannot eat on the countless dead who are made to die tomorrow and tomorrow. Carrion beetles and boot bottoms grind corpses powder-soft to feed the small-mouthed gods of gardens and wind. Roses made to toss their silk to earth like immolated gowns, hills spewing ribbons of charred air from cities occupied by artillery and pilfered grain, limbs blown from their bodies and made into an alphabet that builds this fool song, even now, presented before you as false curative, as vacant kiss — even what is lost in the fabrication of strangers needs naught from strangers. Even somewhere stings with stillness, stings with a home not surrendered but a given.• But I have not been with my feet on the earth there where bullets make use of skin like flags make use of the land. My thinking is as skeletal as the bombed-out schools and houses untelevised. What do I know of occupation but my own colonized thinking to shake free from. While my days themselves tremble from time and shake off place to feel falsely placeless, a hollow empathy as if its soft chisel could make of this wall — my ignorance mighty before me upon which drawn figures alight against the stone — my own; what is mine is the wall my votes and non-votes, my purchases wrapped in unthought have built and stretched, undead gray. There are no secrets in debris. I have a home I hate, its steel and lights red and blue upon me. Home itself a mist through which I pass and barely notice. Home, to assume you are home is to assume I am welcome in you — to what degree let the wounds say so — and can come and go as I please. The television tells me Over there, and one must point with a fully extended arm to show how far from, how unlike here there really is. Over there where they blow each other up over land and God. And it feels good to stretch as if from waking —  this silence could be called a kind of sleep — and thinkbeyond, where I am not and where those who are are not — wall upon which drawings of fists strike skyward and faces of activists stare into me from my Google search. Turnstiles separate home from home. Barbed wire catches clouds in its coil saws. What do I know of injustice but having a home throughout which bullets, ballots, and brutality trifecta against people who were here before here was here and people were brought here to change the landscape of humanity? That word has rolling hills and towering walls. To hammer against it not to get to the other side — believe nothing is there —  but to make obsolete side — know there is nothing. I know this: my metaphors have small arms, my wallet has made monstrous my reflection, I have done terrible things by being alive. I have built a wonder of terror with my life.•   [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, constructed by connected prefabrications. Interspersed among them are surveillances (I’ll make them pay). What is closed opens then settles. Spill: a scream, what makes it. On the wall a body leans, which is a caption: “This is not prayer.” (Which side are you on?) Here where there is no here, endurance measured by a field’s disruption and around it what makes possible a furthering (to settle this in court or to settle in this courtyard). Argument: this thinking is real because it has been made touchable if touch is the mutual rejection of objects from entering into the other (let’s settle this once and for all) who’s going to pay for what reaches toward and fails at heaven? To settle the debt, settle in silence. If it is not silent (this roaring (is it fire / stone / a pen lifting (ban no ban no b — ) or falling?) is it home?) make it so.]• Between his war with self and the war in a sand-sealed country neither of us could spell, juvie took from R what little childhood Chicago hadn’t taken. Between bloody showers and rushed meals, him forced by bigger boys until pain became expectation and expectation pleasure. A shortened sentence meant fighting for a country against people for whom R held no hatred while hating the ones he fought for. There is venom in coercion misnamed loyalty. Boys and bloody water in his head when he left to fight in heat and camo. Then in the barrack’s shower, three soldiers raped R. Sand is the Plaza of Pardon. Wind draws its name across the grains and leaves the grains with the name it gave. Who would I be after so many tried to live in me forcibly? R in the desert, our Skype lost connection when an explosion blew out what little service he had. Oh shit,we been hit. Then blackout silence and my pulse explicit. Let us rejoice in this: war is a love song that makes your body dangerous to others, that makes you unlivable. You become more private. You are always early to yourself. When I saw him again, marijuana discharged him dishonorably and the men inside him shooting guns and shooting cum went with him. This is one veteran’s legacy, one man I know and have lost to distance, my own pulling me from everything I’m meant to hold close. What do I know of exile but self-imposed self-removal. When R kissed my forehead goodbye the first time I felt citizenly, patriotic, my white handkerchief au revoir-ing a friend from my mind who returned with sand hissing down his pant legs. A hero is an hourglass. For what does his countdown drop its grains, skull to heel?• One night, words came, swift as if prayed for, showing myself to me to correct myself:Grief unhides beneath bombed mosqueswhile the sky blows into pale blue absencedust and vaporized skin.Grief and sky, unrequited lovers. Whose hurtcould hold the other’s? Grief knows the passageof the worm and the temperatures of dirt.Sky knows the neon of kite sail and tail.Fifteen thousand names written in the airby ribbon, rhombi billowed into shields,glide into the Guinness Book of Records, memoriespassed page to page across oceans and treatiesin ink out-blacking smoke. Waves leave soft creaseson the Gaza Strip and know airborne diamondsby the shadows of their measured shapestethered like falcons to a child’s quick hands ... How to mistake American arrogance for love, to think kites could humanize the already-human and hide the anti-human from its history. Why cloak our custom of cloaking? To make palatable the blade we turn on ourselves we turn it on others. In good light the metal will give us back to ourselves. Does the wolf know it has a reflection? Ask the water if it shows to us its beast self or has one given to it.•   [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, over which is painted “Is you coming or going or is I?” A ray of light ballistic through the form is both answer and rejection of an answer’s possibility.]• Tragedy disturbs tragedy. There can never be just one way to see the end to ourselves. The Mediterranean has endless room where capsized boats of hundreds bloomed once with refugees. Water can’t be trusted. The wind with its countless hands hasting water into waves can’t be seen so can’t be trusted even though we feel it, even when we know along its unseen force bobs curt hymns from the dead to the living. We don’t hear them rising from the salt like fins. We hear bombs and think Each storm carries the broken criesof a broken nation in its contortion. Alibi for the living is the land: it’s the earth itself that refuses the dead a home in burr or field, in the stone plateaus or tableaux of scree from a city of wild boars and roads that lead to a burning garden, a gutted church, a school uniform hemmed by soldiers, a birch limned with blood and pointing dually west to a row of houses roofless but for crows and east to a rifle hung above a threshold like a saint. Something’s always watching, well-aimed and unkind, empty and on fire or just- finished burning. And the water will rust the skin, will extinguish the fire and the flesh. Baptism is what the living do. The rest are left to idols of fish and worm, are left with the living’s pens and books bereft and intricate as mausolea woven from husks of stories the dead cannot tell. They brux in our renditions as we cull their truth for our song.• The wilderness within us creeps closer to the surface of thought and burial. We drag ourselves from the selves that laid bear traps that trapped us into our own dragging, one leg limp behind like a memory pain brings forward. Low grass collects pockets of our blood as if any gloss could reduce droughts in the smallest needs. If we make eye contact with the most beleaguered of us, we pray the remains of god would shower spears to smite clean such embarrassment. We are not neighbors, just near. We are failures of nature and the stars burn down through trees no light we can trust. Because we were shrewd with conviction the pads of our right hands’ digits have singed into them one letter each to spell faith. What we touch with that hand will fell our enemies who are ourselves. We draw a maze with our blood, follow paths drawn from the cruelties sculpted into another’s body. I am losted by a child’s missing eye, dead-ended by a family encrusted with shrapnel. If I follow my own disaster more closely, if I allow buzzards spiraling above prophecy enough to reveal time as caught in the loop of their pinions, if I remove my shirt from my bloodied torso and twist from it my own oil, if in my pocket I find the final ballot before the mine was tripped in god’s patience, if I see my vote had predicted the immolation of seasons and the beheading of goats sacrificed to rain that washed away no blood and emulsified sickness into the oceans and seas, if pain rises from the mouths of the dead in the shape the dead took when alive, if all this time we’ve been building tombs and calling them home —•   [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall bearing a hole in its center, or a 1.7272-meter-tall wall, which is me, bearing a hole in my center. I am the wall and the hole is what makes me better. I want to be better.]• Hajjar, does a body on its back act as the body’s own grief? Is a body downed the mind’s shadow? If we must love our souls, does that mean we must love what leaves?
My mother has taken me to Paddington Station. We are inside a whale. My father sleeps all day. When he wakes the cloisters come for him. My sister can sit on her hair. At night, a man sits on her bed. Her bed is covered in oak leaves. The sleeves of my mother’s kaftan trail in the dirt. We keep forgetting it’s not her. The telephone bursts from the wall. The wires are a joke. We get it.
but for the askance in her but for the biding in abeyance of her but for the clairvoyance that came to her like a grandmother but for the expanse of love in her the lark in the clear air but for the auld acquaintedness with violence in her
From the unfathomed, farthest away from the light, from the sea’s iron guardedness they come —  pin-eyed, with flesh like tree bark. Their jaws are gorgeously spiked, ragged with toothpick teeth, goon teeth, prison-bar teeth. O anglerfish, vampire fish, oarfish, goonch. A strange fish holds himself upright and fast to the park railings. He is white knuckled. His eyes focus upwards as if counting or reciting, tugging at the brain’s stubborn pinions. When you ask if there’s somewhere he needs to get to, he only sets his jaw harder. You both know that if he acknowledges you, he’ll fall. Every one of your dreams is about the president, however tangentially. Each morning, 
pre-waking, mucid insects seem to attach themselves to your collarbone and gnaw in at the marrow. What if we could all say whatever came first to mind, whenever we wanted to? No perusal. Scullion! Arse-wipe! Warp-faced pignut! Invincible as a body that’s snug in the womb. What if we could all get whatever we wanted, whenever — as in the fairy tale? On the beach at Marazion the surf is spangled with mackerel scales. The sands heave with stranded bodies, underwater silver bullets, drying and curling up in the winter light, so close to home.
the darkest hour the stars arisen asinine tomb and I left opened to the altogether am I to live among men abandoned I may learn to love again adrift in Jerusalem am I upon strewn palm
He hardly spoke any words only two —  or you could call it one the last thing he said was bye-bye flight-feathers veined and hairlike with interlocking barbules of  sound the bye-bye trapped a breath of air the two linked words drifted out on a calm lake that lay there with a single purpose —  to receive final words and allow them to drift on its surface out and further out on the lake of  thought and composure encircled by mountains the simple phrase soared upwards to the highest peak where it would be planted like a flag would eventually be enshrined each identical word carefully balanced either side of the invisible join —  like baby talk he put equal emphasis on each word his face was pinched and his bird beak very prominent there have never been two joined words with so much space around them pack up all my cares and woes light the light I’ll arrive late tonight blackbird bye bye bye
In their proverbs, the Sumerians quoted Fox as saying — on having pissedinto the sea — All the ocean is now my urine! Now, hang on there girl. I want to get a handle on your homeopathic incontinent ways,because I think you may be onto something. Firstly, what kind of fox are you that approaches the shore; no hen house to bother, no bramblesto scoff? No line of emerald shit to booby-trap the garden with? Perhaps wherever we are, you are; so why not the beach? What promisedid the salt ocean offer you, or appear to? Cured meat? Fish? After all, once a month I know I reek gloriously of kelp — salt and iron and yeast — an umami feast for the brave, or weak. Or were you worrying seabirds up on the cliff — stopped in your tracks, unable to resist. A little splish.The wind threshing your water as it fell — yellow, scattered, one or two drops of which maybe reached. Or perhaps you were caught short,coy on the beach, and entered the surf for decorum’s sake. All over the world, miles from the sea, girls caught between poor sanitaryprovision and a social imperative to be discreet find themselves in a dark place, their skirts about their waists. Maybe it wasthe king’s men that saw fit to drive you into the sea. But clever, resourceful, you just thumbed your nose and learned to swim.Paddled to safer land, much like we once did. Your charcoal paws doggedly turning the cold pages of the sea. Pausing now and thento pee, a comforting cloud of heat. And which child among us hasn’t cast their blessing on the waves? Sent into the surf  by mothers, which of ushasn’t rightfully claimed the ocean as our own, or in turn been claimed?
And slowly we’m sweethearts atween the wet grass all river-licked, lime dust in our hair and both of us so frightened, blind as moles. But wanting something. Wanting. We’m side-by-side on the grass, me barefeet in the water, bowing our heads, gentle as osses at the water trough. I can feel his shoulder ashiver and it makes me bold, makes me jumpy, so I hold out me ond till he takes it and kisses the palm like he’s eating sugar from it and we’m off ...
And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies; your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat you’re riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk, to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord wonders. You will never be whole. The voices. His voice, broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o’clock and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window, pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust, with its own murky gravities. You will fail. You have not made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat’s rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider: your lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma’s your ergotamine. Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought that treads the brain’s rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence. Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder. Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know what the other is doing. It’s three a.m., the mind’s alive like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass, a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons. You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing out thought according to the malnourished algorithm some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe air and you want-want-want what you’ll never have again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever. There is no movie montage where you’ll shop yourself to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold- leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you should take up yoga
I really do wish I did. Because if I loved lawnmowers I could go to the lawnmower museum I just heard about on the radio in a piece about small museums. It’s in Southport apparently —  a seaside town “fringed to the north by the Ribble Estuary,” according to Wikipedia. It would be quite a trip to go up there, and I’d almost certainly have to stay the night. I think I might stay in the Prince of Wales Hotel, which looks conveniently situated for the station and the museum too. I can hardly bear to think how much I’d be looking forward to making that trip if I loved lawnmowers. On the radio they said they have all sorts of models from Victorian ones all the way through to a state-of-the-art robot one that’s powered by solar energy. If I was planning the visit I’d probably have a bit of a virtual walk-round on Street View, and in fact I’ve just done exactly that in an effort to capture the feeling I’d have if I was actually anticipating a trip to the lawnmower museum. Exploring the area I discovered that Southport looks very much like Weston-super-Mare, where, as it happens, I stayed in a halfway house many years ago after doing a stint in rehab. Now crack cocaine — that I loved.
What got done to me stains through my hopes of passing as fully human — though my “bad blood” won’t gloss that; to canter around its crimson rosette would tart up a harm more my postwar bad luck than a told shame’s mother. Still, the pose: Say yellow rose go hard & plain to Amarillo
I believed death was a flat plain spectacular endlessly Can you distort my voice when I say this? My scared ghost peeling off me Distortion, she says, as if she has just made it up And then she is quoting a line from a poem Or is it a whole poem, I wish I could remember My voice opens and calls you in I don’t know if you can hear me I said, I carry inside me the trace of a threat that I cannot discharge I said, I want to ask you things you can’t ask a person who doesn’t exist She said, Why can’t you ask them If we can’t have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have? She said, Why can’t you have everything Well, you know, when you’re looking for a person, sometimes they appear And a light goes on and off in the opposite window, twice Yes, you say, that was a sign Strange love for the living, strange love for the dead Listen. I don’t know who you are but you remind me of — I wish you would put some kind of distortion on my voice, I tell her So people don’t know it’s me They know what they know, she said I told a story about my shame It got cold when the air touched it Then it got hot, throbbed, wept, attracted fragments with which it eventually glittered Till I couldn’t stop looking at it Exactly, she says And then she is quoting a line from a poem, I don’t know which one In my dream she reached out to touch me as if to say, It’s all right How I began to believe in something Are you there? The wind called to the trees And then it happened And they said, How do you feel? And I said, Like a fountainNight falls from my neck like silver arrows Very gently
You humble in. It's just as you remember: The sallow walls, formica counter top, The circular argument of time beneath Fluorescent flickering—doubt, faith, and doubt. She knows you've been to see the gilded girl Who's always promising and walking out With someone else. She knew that you'd return, With nothing in your pockets but your fists. Why do you resist? When will you learn That this is what your weary dreams are of— Succumbing to Her unconditional love?
How anything is known is so thin— a skin of ice over a pond only birds might confidently walk upon. A bird's worth of weight or one bird-weight of Wordsworth.
The wreck is a fact. The worst has happened. The salvage trucks back in and the salvage men begin to sort and stack, whistling as they work. Thanks be to god—again— for extractable elements which are not carriers of pain, for this periodic table at which the self-taught salvagers disassemble the unthinkable to the unthought.
That dusty bubble gum, once ubiquitous as starlings, is no more, my love. Whistling dinosaurs now populate only animation studios, the furious actions of angels causing their breasts to flop out in mannerist frescos flake away as sleet holds us in its teeth. And the bus-station's old urinals go under the grindstone and the youthful spelunkers graduate into the wrinkle-causing sun. The sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye, perpetually the tide recedes, beaches dotted with debris. Unto each is given a finite number of addresses, ditties to dart the heart to its moments of sorrow and swoon. The sword's hilt glints, the daffodils bow down, all is temporary as a perfect haircut, a kitten in the lap, yet sitting here with you, my darling, waiting for a tuna melt and side of slaw seems all eternity I'll ever need and all eternity needs of me.
The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smudged, breathed upon by small children and large animals flicking out hope as she whirls by, flap of tongue, scratch of paw, sweetly reminding her. The man moves earth, the woman sweeps air. Together they pull water out of the other, pull with the muscular ache of the living, hauling from the deep well of the body the rain-swollen, the flame-tipped, the milk-fed— all that cycles through lives moving, lives sweeping, water circulating between them like breath, drawn out of leaves by light.
I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take itFor there’s more enterprise In walking naked.
In your arms was still delight,Quiet as a street at night;And thoughts of you, I do remember,Were green leaves in a darkened chamber,Were dark clouds in a moonless sky.Love, in you, went passing by,Penetrative, remote, and rare,Like a bird in the wide air,And, as the bird, it left no traceIn the heaven of your face.In your stupidity I foundThe sweet hush after a sweet sound.All about you was the lightThat dims the greying end of night;Desire was the unrisen sun,Joy the day not yet begun,With tree whispering to tree,Without wind, quietly.Wisdom slept within your hair,And Long-Suffering was there,And, in the flowing of your dress,Undiscerning Tenderness.And when you thought, it seemed to me,Infinitely, and like a sea,About the slight world you had knownYour vast unsconsciousness was thrown . . . O haven without wave or tide!Silence, in which all songs have died!Holy book, where hearts are still!And home at length under the hill!O mother quiet, breasts of peace,Where love itself would faint and cease!O infinite deep I never knew,I would come back, come back to you,Find you, as a pool unstirred,Kneel down by you, and never a word,Lay my head, and nothing said,In your hands, ungarlanded;And a long watch you would keep;And I should sleep, and I should sleep!
My eyes catch ruddy necksSturdily pressed back.All a red-brick moving glint.Like flaming pendulums, handsSwing across the khaki—Mustard coloured khaki—To the automatic feet. We husband the ancient gloryIn these bared necks and hands.Not broke is the forge of Mars;But a subtler brain beats ironTo shoe the hoofs of death.Who pays dynamic air now?—Blind fingers loose an iron cloudTo rain immortal darknessOn strong eyes.
Here, where God lives among the trees,  Where birds and monks the whole day sing His praises in a pleasant ease, O heart, might we not find a home  Here, after all our wandering? These gates are closed, even on Rome. Souls of the twilight wander here;  Here, in the garden of that death Which was for love's sake, need we fear How sharp with bitter joy might be  Love's lingering, last, longed-for breath, Shut in upon eternity?
I To dream of love, and, waking, to remember you:As though, being dead, one dreamed of heaven, and woke in hell.At night my lovely dreams forget the old farewell:Ah! wake not by his side, lest you remember too! II I set all Rome between us: with what joy I setThe wonder of the world against my world's delight!Rome, that hast conquered worlds, with intellectual mightCapture my heart, and teach my memory to forget!
i. the old marrieds But why the moon rose so cruelly, neither of them would say. Though a listless jazz buzzed obediently beneath their day, and he had seen the hand-in-hands dotting the dim streets. And she had heard the morning skillet scorch its Mississippi sweets, its globs of fat. Now, time to be closer — here, on the verge of May. But why the moon drooped so cruelly, neither ventured to say.ii. kitchenette building We are soft-caged behind streaked windows, our someday plans grayed and siphoned flat. “Faith” is simply a church sound, not strong like “factory,” “scrubbing the chitlins,” or “keeping that man.” But could faith be a blatant gold blasting through dinner’s fatty fumes, its perfumed lure tangling with the smell of twice-fried potatoes and twist-tied bags of reeking rubbish lining the dark hall? Fluttering beneath florescent sputter, could faith warm our rooms, even the walls scrubbed raw with Baptist chill? If we let faith in, had the mind to carve it a space, keep it Sunday clean, anticipate its slow glories, beg it to begin? We can’t spare the time faith needs. We don’t have that minute. Since silly wants like hot water require we be practical now, we wait and wait on the bathroom, hope the warm stays in it.iii. the mother Murders will not let you forget. You remember the children you had — suddenly quarry, target — the daughters with gunfire smoldering circles in their napped hair, the absent sons whose screams still ride the air. You knew the ways of bullets, prayed your child run, outrun, beat them in their race toward the heart of your baby, your sweet. You imagine another child cocking the hammer with his thumb, or blazing the blade forward, harkening the dark that will overcome you. Never again will you look at a bright, upturned face and sigh, returning again and again to drown your baby in the mama-eye. I hear on Kilbourn, on Christiana, the not-there of my children. I have pushed them flail and wriggle from my tired body, eased my babies into a world of growl and gun. The breath-suck, I wailed and prayed, my loves, as rougher mothers seized you. Now I am newly barren, drained of mother luck, and you are suddenly far beyond my futile reach. If I let these frantic streets deny the tender in your names, if I relinquished you to this city and its unrelenting games, your end is all I own. If I dared let others govern your deaths, if I wasn’t there to mourn your final blurring breaths, believe that my loss of you to this was not deliberate. Though I have no right to whine, whine that none of the blame was mine, since, in every world I’m rooted in, you are dead. Or rather, or instead, you are so much a hollow of the children I made. But now you are scar on the pavement. I am afraid — is that the you there is now, how the story of you will be said? You were born — a gunshot, a swift blade — then you died. It’s too much this way — even the child who killed you cried. Believe. I loved you all. Be. Leave me the sounds of still-thudding hearts. I grieve you All.iv. a song in the back yard I’ve wallowed in the back yard all my life. I want to slide ’round front Where it’s gold-splashed and guarded and spined fragrance grows. A girl gets a craving for rose. I want to go in the front yard now and far away from these nappy weeds — this alley too. I wanna see where the well-off children play. I want some proper fun today. They do some miracle things. They have that secret kinda fun. My daddy says They’re uppity, but I think it’s fine how they’re tucked in their beds by a quarter to nine. My mama, with her country ways, try as she may, will never turn me into a weeds and wildflowers woman, that’s a fact. I only stay up late on account of all her party folk flooding our back gate. But that’s OK. I think front yard folk are perfect. Really, I do. And I’m gonna be a righteous woman, too. And wear a soft cardigan, cashmere trimmed in lace. And stroll ’round all of Lawndale with this righteous on my face.
The students know the agenda. When I step inside our classroom, the PowerPoint is loaded, the student presenting her report stands poised to begin. And so she does. This day is her second try, the first a wash due to our failed technology. I ask, Do you think you will earn another chance each time error is out of your hands?
chicago: city of ice-cold wind — elbow city of the rectangular block, where bigger thomas choked mary dalton in a drunken stupor on cottage grove, that great avenue divider between the haves & have-nots, where my uncle sydney fled after escaping an alabama chain gang a quarter after midnight &, consequently, cleaved the tennessee river (shackles & all) into another state of freedom. chicago: home of the case pocketknife, the nickel-plated snub nose, the banana-suit wearer, gold tooth & all. they migrated from alabama red dirt, from arkansas cotton fields bowlegged & pigeon-toed, & if you’ve ever resided on the west side, then you might as well been living in lil’ mississippi: natchez, vicksburg, grenada, yazoo city, booneville. chicago: home of the winding el, the circling loop, the midnight cruise down lake shore from hyde park straight to buddy guy’s 
legends; all them blues in one locale. the one-night stands the city gives you — the identity it injects then sucks from your marrow; the lives gunned down. chicago: where gwendolyn brooks scribed In the Mecca featuring 
pepita, our tragic protagonist: assaulted, murdered & forgotten by blue lives matter in ’68 & today nothing has changed. chicago: come sit in the corrupted light.
locate the closest overlooked neighborhood —   at its core extract all humans living underneath life’s bootheel. replace with millennials cradling postcolonial guilt, but not. ignore the woman’s  cardboard [help] sign tattered, stained & broken like her: imagine being long-ago unseen, erased in between the throng, an existing non-entity. ask,  too, if gun be an instrument what refrain whizzed soundless amid crestfallen shadows lingering a decade. go from “a to z” to list the dead — too many  to name, but try: antoine, byrd, carlos, delante ...     no deader now than then. still a memory real, cold steel, shots fired — death, what did we know  of dying? don’t forget love, a love strangling addicts caught in a docetic whirlwind with no blue sail. before the corner becomes distorted remember:  one more time inhale deep. inhale memory to include the bad & terrible beauty just beneath the living.
My daddy understood the richness of color and shunned my oldest sister’s whitewashed birth.Who the white child belong to? He asked in the delivery ward shaming himself as the source. Shadism colored my siblings’ perception. An ideal hierarchy with light skin the pinnacle after the paper bag test proved me cocoa dark and of less value. Burned biscuit defined what I could not erase. When they tired of sidewalk chalk and strike ’em out their feigned indignation made my smile give and give unsuccessfully, reaching eyes where ducts emptied silently. Turned my cheek on juvenile acceptance and sibling rivalry reminding myself thatAfter all, I’m the real thing and it comforted me.
rustle plastic bags of outside food in movie theaters/talk out of turn in the swallow-dark light/believe trash should be/as confetti/everywhere in the viaducts’ shadow/souring in gutters’ craw/jaywalk with the urgency of sloth /split verbs meaningfully/do or want to do better/ tattoo so you will never mis- remember our names/name ourselves Precious and Mercedes/must have some Indian in us/search for signifiers in eyes/ bright earlobes/textures of hair/ are color-stuck/are disabused our definitions of love/love and don’t know how to call it/ grieve any number of nouns/mostly people/ pets/preoccupy with memories at the repast/recall that day at the beach that / leads us to days at the beach grilling/meat browning/its purpose/it’s children on the sandbar tossing a ball/the dog biting the surf/finally some mirth/we carry for keeps.
All cousins know the electric slide/ how to spell/despite the stink of it/chitterlings or chitlins/the odor of pig feet or catfish under a steam of vinegar/ believe blood is the most important thing/bring family up for better or worse/better the family or bemoan who just won’t do right/ learn early the power fist/dap/pound/and running man/invent glorious ways to say “brother” with intricacies of hands/we cool/give elders their due/cull histories in quilts/set records/set beats/set rights/set Black Jesus/love our tannin skin/drown yowls in jazz/ watch blocks bristle heat/in the hundreds/it’s past sundown/Mecca’s everywhere now.
We fix you maternally in the mind, orient you in a case of “tut-tut,” “there there,” and “you’re young yet,” but how many times did you posture yourself for the broad body of him or him and open like home — his hands in your hair, your nerves rising kinetically to the cupola of his palms? Lovers’ propensity for being a keep and your saying (when you mean it), “I am yours.” We fix you in the mind as bright-sighted seminar, dipping from the source all that you know, but how often did your eyes light in flirtation or fight, working from his getting your dander up to his oval mouth there, there, your teasing tut-tut in arousing admonition at what he was after, knowing, as you prepared to keep him, that you were young yet and gleaning, gleaning.
Each flower a wilting sun The death of a new day is never kind Grief ain’t no song No loss is this romantic
Beside the tree Beside the chair Beside the house Beside the pit Beside the tree stump Coco say don’t climb / so I don’t / I sit & stare — my skin coming dark and burnt They say: tire I say: brown They say: Black Black can’t take back! & I don’t I learnt to not ask where I’m from I learn to listen, then not I’m too scared they gone tell me the things about myself  I done already buried in the dark Beside the tree  Beside the chair Beside the house Beside the pit Beside the tree stump I sit I sit I sit ’til no one even know I’m (t)here
After Martin Luther King Jr. The day they killed Martin we could not return to New York City our visiting senior class stuck in Huntsville streets blazed with suffering in that small Alabama town in the dull shroud of morning the whole world went crazy devouring whatever light that lit our half-cracked windows.
Let us descend into the blind world now. — Dante, “The Divine Comedy” As above, so below; as below, so above. — Three Initiates, “The Kybalion” A Lowcountry marsh trembles with the blood of an African Who refused to climb out of the salt and mud of the bay And quite literally lost his head. A hunter named Hunter Waits for the man’s wounds to close and for him to rise Again. Some call this festive cruelty Paradise. Pleasure. Demby, the African made to rise and suffer another shot, Calls it the Afterlife, the unceasing blind world of death He welcomed expecting the end to his captivity and exile. But there is no end to the perfecting of cruelty even now In the Afterlife, where a hawk humped up in the high weeds And a house on fire are a congruent sadness, a brief history Of nature’s one duty for flesh — decay, decay, decay ...  Sometimes, it is as if every bird in the Afterlife trills this One song. And I forget who I am, but then I look down At my feet shuffling in darkness and hear my name —  Till ... Till ... Till ... And I know I am no farmer, blade Or mule driven over some roach-ragged road to field And fray, and sometimes I forget how I came here to After- Life, to pleasure, to domestic violence, to drive, be Driven, and then I look down at my hands. It is a war That brought you this peace, a war that brought you this peace. And then, I heard a question: “Shall we kill all of the masters?” And before I brokered an answer, I heard a voice say: “Then, we must kill ourselves, first. And who will Be left to kill the masters?” I turned to find nothing But a boy in a tree and a girl beside him, their heads Tolling in the wind like pecker-fretted fruit. Voice, I said, Come now or do not come at all. And there, a man I had seen before scratching in dust next to a drill field With a dictionary and a strange astronomy for a face. Ezra, is that you, I asked. “The peasants’ bent shoulders, Odysseus and the dead bullock — call me whatever you’d like. I come to every name like a white ox toward Pisa And the butcher’s road. I come to Paradise dragged By the hair ... with one day’s reading and surrendered Temple.” You do talk funny, I said. “He do the police In different voices,” he said. And when all the voices sound like the police, I said, kill all the voices. And so ran. I ran from Ezra who ran after me and demanded he be My guide. “There is no running from the forest of men. There is no running from men.” I’ll be damned, I said —  But before I could finish Ezra said, “That’s right. Be damned. Be here taloned and tumbling the sky down in Paradise. Here. Be in your cage and free.” But here is not the here I seek nor sought. For that here harangues me And I might as well be the nigger coming over The obstacle fence, a periplum of certain disaster, A choir of empty cups sitting loudly before the famished, Your prince, dear Ezra, hanging by his heels in the piazza, The sprezzatura of maggots rummaging the round heart For its divinity and pulse. Ezra, nothing of you but the dead. And so, I ran past the possum running through the skull Holes of a dead man lying in the fog that licked them Into a wet testimony, the possum testifying, too, to their death —  Coming, going, in ruins and floating out, out, beyond Their murders and dropped plates, out beyond the Thame-ish Rivers and its drowning traditions. And then I looked back And saw Ezra. He had come to his cage and could go no farther. “Till,” he said. “Bring me up from beneath these decks, One slaver to another.” He winked and I winked back, Handed him the katydid buzzing in my pocket, as I had done Before, dug a trench around him as another had done before, Then said, “Ezra, be here in your cage and free,” and ran. And then I came upon a mountain and then a chasm For which there was no bridge and so turned back To find a possum running behind me, and I asked him, Dear Possum, what do we do with this darkness Between us, and the possum said nothing and ran on Into the darkness, into the chasm and fell speaking of The end of touch, the desire to forget desire, shadows, The fear in a handful of dust, a woman’s mouth, Fear I had known of and visited though now I cringed At the thought of that violence, the violence that I brought —  And so thought to throw myself, too, in that chasm When a hand touched my shoulder, a voice said, “Not now, Maybe never. On we go, dear boy, through this weather. Let’s find us another theory of light. Or darkness.” Then, she laughed, for it was a woman with a lit darkness And a careful chin, glasses, her body a tin of tender. What do you know of me, I asked. She said, “Louis, I know of you as I know fog — that it comes on Through the alleys and past the dead boys and girls Who had not wanted to die in those alleys and ornament The city’s sight. Louis,” she said. “I’ve known all your light. But do you know mine?” And I hadn’t, I hadn’t. “I was a taken city burning,” she said, “a burning house Built to heal the sick, a sick house full of healing, The owl, moccasin, and panther — a rising For which there has never been such risen, the total Black. I is the total black. Flame and fox and knot Of the what-nots you would have forgotten if not for me, I am perfect fucking memory, no-dominion-defied, The god-head-glitter-gussied-up-for-the-going-down.” And though I thought I saw I had not seen. Instead Of one body, three. Women. And who and who and who, I asked. They laughed at my asking and said, “You Wouldn’t know us, but we will tell you our names —  Mother, Song, and Holy Yoke. Audre, Gwendolyn, And Lucille. Follow us. Or heel.” And where And where should I follow you? They did not answer, Instead, they walked on the edge of the abyss Laughing as if the abyss. “We are what is whatnot, The ever shimmying out of the never-wound. Louis, do you follow or do you fall,” They said. “Are you short or is you tall?” And on and on they played, pleasured, and pigeoned With each other, kiting sound and word between them As I have seen lovers do, passing cigarettes and smoke From one mouth to another, the smoke the shared body Of a God that has no master or mastering plan Other than abiding in darkness, abiding in both Its coronation and crucifixion. On and on we walked. And I followed. Beyond the bears chortling pears From Augustine’s outstretched hand, out beyond the river Scissoring the changing maple, its leaves ambering Then auburn then green each time a child appeared And touched its trunk. We stopped, watched. I asked Who are they. And the one full of light and knives answered, Waving at a few who journeyed to the edge of the water But did not wade in. And why don’t they wade in, I asked. She snickered, quieted, then said, “Wind and foxes, what was never mine but was and was.” As if she knew I did not understand, continued, “‘The ones I got but did not get,’ the wild hair they could not grow But scratches me now as it did once in a dream. Our abortions, Louis, our ones given and gave. Dem. The ones given all of their years at once. And none Or never.” And when she spoke, I saw another come To the shore and wave at me, a boy given and gave, the crushed- Color of late evening long after the pickers have come In and settled near a pot of ox bones boiling in the evening Of their own water, once again predicting the arch And strange astronomy of the flesh and its march march March to October and the battered soil. I mean I turned From the one waving because I could not be beneath The stairs of his steering and stare. Paradise, Why do you bring me to such weather? Why Would any man come down from his noose for this? “Because coming down is exactly the point. All heavens lesser and below heaven. Noose, not ...     You came to see what has become of death ...    ” The women spoke as one who had many tongues — All Holy Ghost and gut of a river gabbling over the white Stones. And where are we going, I asked. “Where language begins, Till.  Paradise. But over there.”    •   And wasn’t this paradise that I had entered Through the thick marsh waters out of the cane  The crowds fleeced of their living flesh at the far bank  The intubated children with their gas masks  Hanging from their hands and wandering  The sand in wet hospital gowns in this their new cancer  Wasn’t this paradise  A boy headphoned and heart drunk  Swaying at the back of the crowd mumbling to himself Started from the bottom now we’re here  Started from the bottom now my whole team is fucking here
in this moment of orangutans, wolves, and scavengers, of high heat redesigning the north & south poles and the wanderings of new tribes in limousines, with the confirmations of liars, thieves, and get-over artists, in the wilderness of pennsylvania avenue, standing rock, misspelled executive orders on yellow paper with crooked signatures. where are the kind language makers among us? at a time of extreme climate damage, deciphering fake news, alternative truths, and me-ism you saw the twenty-first century and left us not on your own accord or permission. you have fought and fought most of the twentieth century creating an army of poets who learned and loved language and stories of complicated rivers, seas, and oceans. where is the kind green nourishment of kale and wheatgrass? you thought, wrote, and lived poetry, knew that terror is also language based on denial, first-ism, and rich cowards. you were honey and yes to us, never ran from Black as in bones, Africa, blood and questioning yesterdays and tomorrows. we never saw you dance but you had rhythm, you were a warrior before the war, creating earth language, uncommon signs and melodies, and did not sing the songs of career slaves. keenly aware of tubman, douglass, wells-barnett, du bois, and the oversized consciousness and commitment of never-quit people religiously taking note of the bloodlust enemies of kindness we hear your last words:  america  if you see me as your enemy  you have no  friends.
— Gaetano Donizetti, “Lucia di Lammermoor”  Be remote A while from malice and from murdering. — Gwendolyn Brooks water this fountain where I am yoked sun-break he holds you how once I this secret dark dagger my body rip off the collar your cage don’t wait my neck his breath these woods this water my waist his ring his grip blood sister
of Azamor at the mouth of the Oum er Rbia River Province, Doukkala Dorantes’s slave, with Captain Castillo and myself Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca named in honor of Alhajahad grandson to the conqueror of Canaria, four far from a tribe, lost band of followers, at once master and slave, trader and healer lost, after shipwrecks, having starved, our thirst so great we drank salt as foretold by the Muslim woman from Hornachos We sought war and gold and souls among the barbarians, burned their villages, then separated, lost, but in the end escaped by the mercy en la pasión de nuestro redentor Jesucristo to tell the tale of the Seven Cities of Cíbola  The hunger and thirst we endured the people always cured, whatever they had they gave us, warmed us by their fires, sheltered us  People who mourned their dead children for a year, each morning before sunrise, the whole clan wept, noon and at daybreak, household didn’t eat for three months, so deep is their mourning for their children  People of the bison, men naked, women and elders clothed in deerskin, the land parched, maizeless, they boiled their water with hot stones, we headed into the setting sun, following the maize road, surviving each day on a handful of deer fat, crossed the river, to the people who only ate polvos de paja, powders of grass, for four months of the year, they gave us flour and squash and frijoles and cotton mantles, we crossed the medranos, the people gave us beads and coral and emerald arrowheads  We saw women in lengths of cotton, closed with ties in the front, half-sleeves of buckskin that touched the ground, and wearing shoes The people sought our blessings, thought we came from the sky, Estevanico speaking for us, as we passed through a great number of diverse languages, we knew six, but found a thousand differences  We were fed on the hearts of deers, some feared and fled from us, the people having been chained by the ones who came before us, the ones we sought so feverishly to tell them No more killing No more chains, please Do no more harm, Holy Majesty, the wretched and disastrous end we suffered on account of our sins
Because the butterfly’s yellow wingflickering in black mud was a wordstranded by its language. Because no one elsewas coming — & I ran out of reasons.So I gathered fistfuls of  ash, dark as ink,hammered theminto marrow, into a skull thickenough to keepthe gentle curse of  dreams. Yes, I aimedfor mercy —  but came only closeas building a cage around the heart. Shuttersover the eyes. Yes,I gave it hands despite knowingthat to stretch that clay slabinto five blades of light,I would go too far. Because I, too,needed a place to hold me. So I dippedmy fingers back into the fire, pried openthe lower faceuntil the wound widened into a throat,until every leaf shook silverwith that god -awful scream& I was done. & it was human.
Quick swim up through my headlights: gold eye a startle in black: green swift glance raking mine. A full second we held each other, then gone. Gone. And how did I know what to call it? Lynx, the only possible reply though I’d never seen one. The car filling with it: moonlight, piñon: a cat’s acrid smell of terror. How quickly the gray body fled, swerving to avoid my light. And how often that sight returns to me, shames me to know how much more this fragment matters. More than the broad back of a man I loved. More than the image of my friend, cancer-struck, curled by her toilet. More than my regret for the child I did not have which I thought once would pierce me, utterly. Nothing beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs stirring the dark. And if I keep these scraps of it, what did it keep of me? A flight, a thunder. A shield of light dropped before the eyes, pinned inside that magnificent skull only time would release. Split back, fade and reveal. Wind would open him. Sun would turn him commonplace: a knot of flies, a rib cage of shredded tendon, wasp-nest fragile. The treasure of him, like anything, gone. Even now, I thumb that face like a coin I cannot spend. If I ever lived, I lived in him, fishing the cold trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying when he died, which is a comfort. I must say this. Otherwise, I myself do not exist. It looked at me a moment. A flash of green, of gold and white. Then the dark came down again between us. Once, I was afraid of being changed. Now that is done. The lynx has me in its eye. I am already diminished.
Als das Kind Kind war, war es die Zeit der folgenden Fragen: Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du? — Peter Handke, “Lied Vom Kindsein” i Began like pu, the uncarved block in a strange land. Simulacrum, wood golem knocking about, dreaming of flesh. Lies, truths, growths, recede and wonder what it is to be:D’où Venons NousQue Sommes NousOù Allons NousWoher kommen wirWer sind wirWohin gehen wirWhere Do We Come From?What Are We?Where Are We Going?How long have I got? Father never answers. Why he is surprised when I bolt, A prodigal arrow, into The world, I can only suspect, among gears and puppets.ii Wander the world. I saw a boy herding ox. I saw a dog dropping bones in the water, barking for more. I saw a bathing woman with a beggar on a crutch of wood. I saw a wretch with a dead albatross envy archers Whose arrows were beyond them. I may have seen a fleeting vanity fair, some carnival of souls. I saw a Hmong orphan calling Naga kings from the riverbank, Expecting nothing.iii Maw like Leviathan, peer of Melville’s albino, Abyssal gaze returned. Within your belly like a worm, After a lifetime of fighting, how I’ve become like you, Adrift In the sea, Jonah, a leaf, While the boy next to me has become a jackass. And yet I still wish and yearn, Dionysian, a destiny, if not a dynasty.
1. did your child lose acquired speech? A fount and then silence. A none. An ellipse between — his breath through the seams of our windows. Whistle of days. Impossible bowl of a mouth —  the open cupboard, vowels rounded up and swept under the rug.2. does your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals? He’d coo and we’d coo back. The sound passed back and forth between us like a ball. Or later, an astral voice. Some vibrato under the surface of us. The burst upon —  burn of strings rubbed in a flourish. His exhausted face.3. is your child’s voice louder than required? In an enclosure or a cave it is difficult to gauge one’s volume. The proscenium of the world. All the rooms we speak of are dark places. Because he cannot see his mouth, he cannot imagine the sound that comes out.4. does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon? To my ears it is a language. Every sound a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst. The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid a want. We make symbols of his noise.5. does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)? Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small.6. does your child pull you around when he wants something? By the sleeve. By the shirttail. His light touch hopscotching against my skin like sparrows. An insistence muscled and muscled again.7. does your child have difficulty expressing his needs or desires using gestures? Red-faced in the kitchen and in the bedroom and the yellow light touches his eyes which are open but not there. His eyes rest in their narrow boat dream and the canals are wide dividing this side from this side.8. is there no spontaneous initiation of speech or 
communication from your child? When called he eases out of his body. His god is not our words nor is it the words from his lips. It is entirely body. So when he comes to us and looks we know there are beyond us impossible cylinders where meaning lives.9. does your child repeat heard words, parts of words, or tv commercials? The mind circles the mind in the arena, far in — far in where the consonants touch and where the round chorus flaunts its iambs in a metronomic trot. Humming to himself in warm and jugular songs.10. does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)? A pocket in his brain worries its ball of lint. A word clicks into its groove and stammers along its track, Dopplering like a car with its windows rolled down and the one top hit of the summer angles its way into his brain.11. does your child have difficulty sustaining a 
conversation? We could be anywhere, then the navel of the red moon drops its fruit. His world. This stained world drips its honey into our mouths. Our words stolen from his malingering afternoon.12. does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pausing? When the air is true and simple, we can watch him tremble for an hour, plucking his meaning from a handful of utterances and then ascend into the terrible partition of speech.13. does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)? Because a reference needs a frame: we are mother and father and child with a world of time to be understood. The car radio plays its one song. The song, therefore, is important. It must be intoned at a rigorous time. Because rigor is important and because the self insists on constant vigils.14. does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)? Always, and he insists on the incorrect forms. The wrong word takes every form for love —  the good tree leans into the pond, the gray dog’s ribs show, the memory bound to the window, and the promise of the radio playing its song on the hour. Every wrong form is a form which represents us in our losses, if it takes us another world to understand.
coolie naam dharaiya ham tej pakare jaisan chhuri kate hamke Guyana mein aike
And trip me up a startled robbed way Dreamt a burnt stump for a tongue Ash-haired girl  Cowbell girl
To CD Wright No body is fixed in position no one can be known Still I am read by satellites my tendency extrapolated In the mountains I have no GPS I don’t know where to go There are those trees their leaves flicker like little jewels a whole bucketful Darkness stares back are you even human anymore I close the curtains at night not because I think others will see in Turn left there but so I do not see the reflection that is pure dark I am not afraid of anything oh is that so Citizen bear do this place not belong to you Unseen I wander through the thorny place of what I no that ain’t it No fear can be knew can be none fuck how do you spell it I held a heavy jade pendant in my hand once not in this valley in another In the range of  limited human experience how many places are there really I don’t even have to look at the earth anymore I just have to listen Now that hillbilly whisper guides me which way to turn how far up the turn is Drawling like moonshine we’re really off the grid now Making wild prayers to the green dark which kind do you mean Thank god we thought of  her recording this voice both kinds
The olla knocked with steam. The masa cooked.  She said her eyes are china. The vowel switched on an aura, a shine that sheens the threshold.  The vowel was spell: an i that might we, an i that echoes how we’re seen and see. Eyedentity. Ay Dios, she exclaimed surrounded by photos — niños and nietos —   where I’m the only chino. How might I see through my family’s eyes — an owl’s eyes  in ojos and one in its lid turned sideways 目 —  I wondered with her at the table where we  placed one olive — ojo negro — in each hoja, that worn folio for field corn’s field notes.  What does that dark eye in the ear’s husk see?
I was so afraid. I couldn’t escape it. It was bigger than me and 3 horned. It dashed for me and missed and missed again. It leapt for me in my skirt. I was younger than it. It opened its parent mouth and I could die trying. It would never never miss me. It would stand on its two legs and I was its message. Running hands over this country’s pantalones. I’m still surprised by our hulking silhouette. Our hopeful investments and slightly whiny children. Pompous jars of mustard in the fridge. We as blunt as gum under tables in restaurants.
As you may have inferred, Ka Pow is not a spicy chicken dish Meanwhile, you are an accident waiting to repurpose yourself Who are you to mix up languages? This is not a smorgasbord You have to remember that you are a cylinder, a form of fodder Meanwhile, you are an accident waiting to repurpose yourself Why do you need an expensive phone? It won’t help you in the future You have to remember that you are a cylinder, a form of fodder Our company motto: other than you, no waste shall go to waste Why do you need an expensive phone? It won’t help you in the future Have you ever thought of joining the circus? You might find a home there Our company motto: other than you, no waste shall go to waste Choosing suitable punishments is an unavoidable necessity Have you ever thought of joining the circus? You might find a home there. If you are speaking about my place in the universe, that’s not right Choosing suitable punishments is an unavoidable necessity Hasn’t the sky repeatedly proven to be the most excellent manager If you are speaking about my place in the universe, that’s not right Memories are iridescent insects infiltrating your dreams Hasn’t the sky repeatedly proven to be the most excellent manager Little sphinxes, I have instructed you to the best of my ability Memories are iridescent insects infiltrating your dreams As you may have inferred, Ka Pow is not a spicy chicken dish Little sphinxes, I have instructed you to the best of my ability Who are you to mix up languages? This is not a smorgasbord
Bitaug, Siquijor, Philippines Three women dragged the spiky, bulky mass onto a bamboo table on the side of an island road. A raised hunting knife glinted in sunlight, then plunged with a breathless gasp, slicing into the unseen. To a passerby they were a curious wall, a swarm of onlookers, barrio children and younger women, buzzing with a rising gleeful cadence as a mother busied herself with the butchering. Surprisingly, a citrusy, sugary scent sweetened the stranger’s face when offered the yellow flesh like thickened petals, licorice to the touch, he stood awed at the monstrous jackfruit, bloodless armadillo halved, quartered, sectioned off for feasting. His tongue tingled ripely. This country’s foreign to me
From a recessed hollow Rumble, I unearth as a creature Conceived to be relentless. Depend on me to hunt you Until you find yourself Counting all the uncorked Nightmares you digested. I will let you know the burning Endorsed by the effort of Matches. And you will claw Yourself inward, toward a Conference of heat as the steam Within you surrenders, caves You into a cardboard scar. Even what will wreck you Are your mother’s chapped lips. Even to drip your confession Of empty rooms. I know about Your recipe of rain, your apiary Ways. Trust me to be painful.
1 What’s The Word! she cries from her purchase on the iron finial of the front gate to my heart. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And this sparrow with a woman’s face roars in the burdened air — air crowded with voices, but no word, mobbed with talking, but no word, teeming with speech, but no word —  this woman with the body of a bird is shrieking fierce buzzed volts in the swarming babble, What’s The Word! This evening is the year of my birth. The country has just gained its independence. Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines. Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich come years of mass poverty, decades of starving children and racially-fueled mayhem. Word is armed squads raping women by the hundreds. Word is beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. Word is burning, looting, curfews, and shoot-to-kill orders. And word is more deadly days lie ahead. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast calls for more misery, more poverty, more starvation, more families fleeing their homes, more refugees streaming toward every border. More horror is to come, that’s the word. More scapegoating is to come, that’s the word. More violence is to come on the roads, in the streets, in the homes, violence in the churches, in the temples where they preach who to love and who to hate. How to get to heaven, and who to leave behind. How to don the fleece of the blameless and prosecute your neighbor. All against all is to come. That’s the word. Who hasn’t heard that! she spits. You call yourself a poet? You tame high finisher of paltry blots! You publish doubt and call it knowledge! You destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify your envy! You murder benevolence and virtue with condescension. You pretend to poetry and destroy imagination! Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect! You ape The Word made flesh with words made words to multiply more words and words about your words! And you ritualize these sterile pleasures, miming joy, delight, and generation! You celebrate cheap distractions! Your theories bloom in suicide of the mind, starvation of the heart, and mass maladies of the soul. You mock and mimic sincerity! You read and divine by irony! You snare the little ones! You pose stumbling blocks to the lame! You dig pits for the blind! You sell desolation! Your science is despair! What’s The Word! I can tell she’s up to no good, this feathered interval, monument to the nano, this deciding gram, my Geronimo. She’s out to overturn an empire, to usurp principalities and powers, just by swooping into the right assembly, perplexing a senate, baffling a parliament, or bewildering somebody’s crosshairs. Not worth a farthing, and without a cent, she would own the realm her shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. I tell her, I sang in a church choir during one war North American TV made famous. I fled a burning archipelago in the rain, on my mother’s back, in another war nobody televised. In the midst of wars worldwide, many in countries whose names I can’t pronounce, I tucked Christ’s promise and Adam’s disgrace together with my pajamas under my pillow each morning, unable to distinguish which was God’s first thought, and which God’s second. Therefore, I seek asylum in the final word, an exile from the first word, and a refugee of an illegible past. Who hasn’t witnessed the laws of merging and parting, blessing and killing! she says. Who isn’t subject to the hand that giveth and the hand that taketh, the change of the guard, with and without blood, and their own dismembered history fed to the unvanquished flowers? Lift every clock’s face and see the counting angels reckoning, the killing angels busy at their anvils. Say what’s The Word, or die! It’s obvious she’s accounted for what the wind will take, what the moths must eat, the ants carry away, the Caesars keep. She’s a breathing remnant restored to springtime’s living cloth. She’s a pair of scissors trimming lament to allow for all I don’t know. And I can tell by the markings on her coat and her black eyes she knows which dreams to parse, which to heed, and which to bury. And look at those prehistoric feet. No doubt, she’s realized the secret to surviving her own tribe’s slaughter and dispersal. Pocket dictionary packed with signs in another language, blazing shard of the original emanation, Precambrian spark deposit, igneous jot of infinite magnitude, fiery iota, something about her precise little beak convinces me she grasps degree, and knows which i’s to dot and which to leave large and alone. There are words, I say, and there is The Word. Every word is a fluctuating flame to a wick that dies. But The Word, The Word is a ruling sum and drastic mean, the standard that travels without moving. Words move, but The Word is fixed, the true blank. The Word is the voice of the lamp, and words are soot blackening the glass. The movements of words engender time and death. But The Word lives outside of time and death. Inside time, death rules. Life is death’s kingdom. We live at dying’s rate. Words are a sop for death. But The Word is the mother of thresholds, regulating life and death. The Word begets presences impossible to confirm, given the blinding action of time and the sea and the earth’s turning repose. And who is that supposed to feed? Whose thirst would that quench? she screeches, her voice materializing a greater body of innumerable birds arriving at dominion, increasing to overwhelm every mile of my heart, that bloody aerie branching and leafing, her feathers become all eyes and mouths, her voice coming now from everywhere, booming, When the Lover is ready, the Beloved will appear! Say what’s The Word or we both die!2 I’ll call her my battle angel, this evangelion. Seraphic herald of the ninth echelon, pleromatic aeon demanding a founding gnosis, her voice electric tekhelet, Septuagint, a two-leaved door opening onto porches, chambers, and courts, her voice a Solomonic column of barley sugar. She’s why I’m crazy. She’s why I can’t sleep. She’s why I never sleep. She’s why I avoid people. She’s why I drill the eight limbs with the mud-step, why I walk the octagon of trigrams inscribed on Wudang, why I practice the Spiral Ox Jaw and the Tiger’s Mouth. She’s why I’m hard to live with and why I say, The bread that rises in a house that fails, The Word, father of zero and one, is our advocate. A shut eye we name Beginning, The Word sleeps, and all is darkness. An open eye we name The Treasure, The Word wakes and voices are heard among the sounds of water. The Word dreams, and worlds appear. And stars beyond and behind our eyes. And the moon with its hair tied up and its hair let down. Bound on every side, and wide open in the center, The Word hosts our breath, our span, the space of our dreaming and our thinking, our stillness and our moving. And the emerging present is one of its bodies. The fulcrum, the eye, the heart enthroned, the dove without person, homing, The Word is a hammer raining down its songs, a river pouring out of the mouth of the anvil. Twin and unlike, The Word is without peer. Black and white, it is a wheeling pair of coincident opposites turning on a point: Existence and Nonexistence hand in hand. Substance and Void begetting life and death. The Word is an open book, and its first and last pages are missing. It is a brother and sister telling each other the missing parts of one another’s stories. It is the lover and the beloved constantly changing places in the fire. And it is the wind in the treetops outside our window, a voice torn to pieces. Hear it? The wind without a house, she says. Time without a gate, she says. A memory of the ocean torments the trees, a homesickness, she says. The wind is leafing through both of our histories, looking for a happy ending. It is my hand moving over your body, I say, finding more and more to know. It is a circle of women reciting in the round the oldest stories of Death disguised as a traveler or overlooked familiar, friend we shunned for less faithful playmates. It is a house, and from inside come the voices of children taking turns reading to one another. It is their own story they read. But why do their voices seem uneasy? Does the moon, giant at the window, frighten them? Does death run amok through all the pages of the story? Do the pages turn by themselves? Are there strangers in the house? Is the house burning? Soldiers with guns are at our door again. Sister, quick. Change into a penny. I’ll fold you in a handkerchief, put you in my pocket, and jump inside a sack of rice, one of the uncooked kernels. Men with knives are looking in our windows again. Brother, hurry. Turn yourself into one of our mother’s dolls sitting on the living room shelf. I’ll be the dust settling on your eyelids. The ones wearing wings are in the yard. The ones adorned with lightning are in the house. The ones decorated with stars are dividing our futures among them. Don’t answer when they call to us in the voice of Nanny. Don’t believe them when they promise sugar. Don’t come out until evening, or when you hear our mother weeping to herself. If only I could become the mirror in her purse, I’d never come back until the end of time.3 The treetops buck and heave in the night wind. Like drunks at sea leaning too far over a rocking bulwark. Like a woman throwing her green and gold hair in time to a song only she can hear. And from inside that windswept bulk growing darker comes a frenzied uproar of what must be hundreds of hidden birds. All that noise of wind, leaves, and branches, all that uttering from unseen throats, and is there no word? All that shrieking, iterating, crying in the rustling leaves. All that screaming, shrilling, running din of squeaky wheels, radiant numbers of tongues, beaks, hubs, wings, spokes keening in centrifugal spinning, and not one word? Not any? Nor part? No bearing? One hunger, a fanned fire, roars in the voice of the sea. One light eats itself, unconsumed. The wind is taking the night apart, she says. The wind is dismantling the leaves, the branches, the minutes, our listening, and finding more and more moving pieces to index: our hands, our mouths, our voices, recurring stairs of an imperfect past, a rumored present, figures multiplying inside a mirror. Each, alone in his dream of the world, I say, is host and guest, a book and the one who reads it by the light of a vanished childhood. Don’t say that, she says. We see by the light of who we are. Look at us: you inside me inside you. We’ve lived inside each other from the beginning. And from before beginning. Before the world was ever found. Before the world was found, I say, I dwelled inside you, and you breathed all through me, in my body and its happiness, in my body and its loneliness. After I found the world, I had to go looking for you. Ever since the world, I only lose you and find you. Lose you. And find you. The body of the beloved is the lover’s true homeland, she says. I can hear you, but I can’t hear me, I say, your voice a burning gown of song and time, and me with my ghosts, me with my mockingbird. Don’t say that, she says. What is my mind, I wonder, but the reflected light of your voice, O, burning one, O, seeing voice, O, speaking eye that renders us now legible, now indecipherable, now strangers traveling under assumed names. Don’t say that, she says. Look. A single page of the wind copied by hand is the volume of despair the smallest living wing displaces. And your voice will be your cup each day my wings shelter your dear, momentary earth. My mind is several minds, I say, each abiding differently: in your eyes, in the smell of your hair, in your voice moving over me, in my voice moving over you. She says, Don’t look at your hands. Watch the shadows they make. I say, Moving over you, my voice crosses out of forbidden chambers of the Emperor of China, through chronicles of exile and death in a foreign country, to touch the ground I touch in me when I speak to you. She says, A new mind makes the world new. True words are a little blue. And being human makes the saddest music in the world. She says, Postpone all morning bells. The ore lies awake inside the rock, a dream of origin waiting to be rescued. I say, The glare of your nakedness confounds me, a distraction from the darker incandescence of your being. Inside you is the safest place to be. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And of all the things on my mind this evening, words weigh the least, Death weighs the most, and your voice’s body beneath my voice’s moving hand is a green agent of freedom and law, best friend to my earth and my ache. Of all the things keeping me from sleep, words weigh too much, yet not enough. Time weighs nothing at all, but I can’t bear it. And your body, burdened by minutes and ancient rites, is my favorite sad song. One wave that gives rise to three, shoulder, hip, and knee, your body is the Lord’s pure geometry. Disguised as Time, your body is tears, lilies, and the mouth of the falls. And of all the things we’re dying from tonight, being alive is the strangest, surviving our histories is the saddest. Time leaves the smallest wounds, and your body, a mortal occasion of timeless law, is all the word I know.
To pass through astonishment and know much too late. And because habit makes us strange, I find myself Searching on a landscape that generates questions Beyond its ability to solve. That dark post Out there might be this poem standing as you would —  Lead in the 4th grade play — under theater lights And your shadows that petal around you. And what Should be most memorable isn’t. So I recall Those prolonged moments of silence, incongruous And revealing as metaphor, most frequently. For instance: waiting at the bus stop in Pai in A midmorning the hue of the roadside guardrails That dot the cliff’s side like Morse code. Before leaving With trees (those felled, ones half-painted white, the burnt trunks ...    ) That passed by like the so many phenomena Of our days blurred together into a motion, At times, convincing as a nickelodeon’s, I waited under the thatched roof of the station With other travelers. With each in our common Solitude risen around like that Haydn piece In the tunnel I descended into on my Way out onto Broadway from the 1 train some months Ago, it seemed of Hopper. Star fruit on the ground Discolored, withering, blighted. Three of the town’s Strays hobbled by before midday’s heat stalled the town Like some lost Stephano, Trinculo, and their lamed, Dark sycophant — at least that’s what they were for me. It wasn’t comfort, never comfort, but something else. And when each moment with expectations for more Than it can hold leads to the next, and soon — as then —  Expectation fills up the day as does your breath A balloon, the day floats with such care and strange hours.And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul ...     Plato wrote — poetry’s banisher, beauty’s guard.2 My hands grow differently used. While one hand thumbs Pages, the other hand steadies open the book. It’s the other hand that rests on the desk, forearm Paralleled to the table’s edge, all the fingers Except the thumb holding the blank field. One hand’s mole A gnat flattened between pinky and ring finger; The other hand’s palm-side, below the skin enough It’s likely a splinter left for years. Just one hand Fits my Discman, plugged in while watching those around (No news-as-white-noise here to occupy my sight): Kids who bus to school hours away toothpicking Slivers of chili-dappled mango slices in; A triple-sweatered lady palming back her hair In the thick Thai pre-dawn June; the one foreigner Other than us, earphone couched; and her shape, dozed slack, Coat-blanketed, neck against my side. One hand rests. Half a day ago, under a mosquito net, Flush with the desk fan sitting on the rattan floor, One hand kept on the steady act of beckoning Behind the tongue-swelled clit, uncreasing the ridged roof, Almost like the mouth’s roof as it slopes down toward teeth, Like rubbing the dampened cave wall, finger-darkened, As the guide turns his back to us. The other hand Traced its crook — that delta-creased pad set between thumb And fingers, hand’s most fleshy zone — on the torso. The other hand then stilled her hip, mosquito net, Weighted, walling out stitches of ants, from its hook A viscous drape like that through one hand’s two fingers. Oddly, only one hand drums along (the CD: Converge, Jane Doe) as the crowd would rupture outward Into a circle pit — a vortex in reverse —  If this were a concert. The other hand just bides Its time. Milton’s clumsy other hand, God’s other Hand that Lessing chose, and that Spaniard’s other hand Riddled useless at Lepanto, a bullet lodged Into that scurvied poet’s chest, the other hand Remembers and betrays. The other hand cries out,Which was Keats’s living one? Neither hand scarred yet, Even after thumb-knuckle tempted a sander In shop class, impulse from imagining too much. One hand’s cushion bears the pencil (my friend whose tasks Are split between his hands — “I eat with my left hand, Punch with the other” — says we whack off with the hand We write). Each hand on different shaded denim thighs, The unclipped nails crude halos of sun-blocking hills. One hand lets forth words; the other hand holds it back.3 Chased by a three-legged dog to the temple stairs, Past all the fallen star fruit (the veined tips the last To wither, the through-light flesh sun- and bug-eaten), We crossed paths with a one-legged man — wordless sounds, And that permanent wild gaze — crutching down the stairs (Four hundred!) as we stopped to catch a break mid-flight. Our breath would last us a run-through of the temple, And, in the first hallway — him?!, his phatic calls, tics, And unwilled smile facing the morning that just passed, The sun no longer in front of his propped body, But above it, the valley overabundant With the real light that stole our day. The fog too lifted Against my sight. We paused. Having just climbed the hill, We agreed to leave our shoes on despite sandals Stationed on the stoop, and then we turned towards that hall. “Let’s go,” he ends, befriended, prayer Phaedrus-empty.  — The driver gases the bus off the parking brakes To idle back out the station; the attendants Scoop up the wood wedges and clatter the door shut; The passengers all shift. In the chapter among The deformed and footless, Zhuangzi ends, arguing For the greatest of men, a man void of feelings: “The Way gave him a face, Heaven gave him a form, Can’t you call him a man?” Yet there are things I love: The sun, you, travel. And back again, the thick fog Parts us from the obliterating Turner sun. Pretty soon, come day, the motorbikes The Rough Guide Says all tourists should try will buzz by those three dogs, All lethargic, the largest too tired to dry-hump, His red tip unsheathing (there’s no neutering here), The black one, bald in spots, wouldn’t even fight it off, The mottled one coiled back like the dog that badgers Bosch’s wayfarer, bandaged, poor bastard, with his gnarled stick, Not looking at us, but rather caught looking back, And above his head a doorway — no, the gallows? —  The same one Brueghel’s final peasants romped beneath? My turn now to sleep. I can dab off from my jeans Your drool just reaching my thigh as you do, with care, From our sheets when — yet that stuff, all that stuff of ours Still spots our many beds with different aged salt-rings, Each gasp less a sound than a failure at silence. Before us another strange town, while for others School, home, maybe work, a field, someplace normal, there, Someplace beyond sight from its roadside stop. Abroad A month, toward a year in another country, Anne —  Anacrusis: these days I’m lost in, reminded Of my presence as if catching a stranger’s wave To the yet-to-be-seen man behind you as yours.    — traveled 2005 / written 2007–2008
Sankt Georg, what was it, questionable, doubtful, shady, twilit, a something area, something  Jan said, and he was born in Hamburg, and went to school here, so he would know. A little isthmus between the Alster with its freshwater sailors and the railway station, always a reliable drag on things anywhere in Europe (the transients, the drugs, the preset collisions between the foolish young and the unscrupulous old), though this one piped classical music — 
not anymore —  to the forecourt, where taxi drivers got out and walked their Mercs around in neutral because they were hours without a fare and were saving diesel (which was all very well in summer), and the immediate, somehow always slightly grubby or compromised view of three theatres, two museums, and le Carré’s bunker hotel, but, hey, it was classy while it lasted, and you could get to Milan or Moscow if you had to. Then the Polizeibezirk of underage Puppenstrich about the time B. came here from the country, still often the only girl not on the game, among whores and winos and people “with an immigration background” looking grim and wearing subfusc and doing the messages, as we once said. Then gays —  is there a pink euro, like a pink pound, and the Pink Pistols and gray wolves? —  intrepid advance guard of gentrification. So up the rents, send in the heavies, firebomb the buildings, locals out, make improvements, and up the rents again, same everywhere. A natty pellucid pissoir in the Hanser Platz that it would take Paris to pull off, drunks round the monument (“reel around the fountain”), hardy trees and hardier women, little roosters, little rosters in the apartment block for cleaning the common parts, little brass squares set in the ground for individual fascist outrages, with the victims’ names, the massy church at the end of the street —  St. George’s, the AIDS church, the rainbow flag, the incendiary community paper called the Dragon. Sudden sad flurries of flowers, the curt pairs of dates, a grown-out bleached person with one leg. The main drag changed utterly, meaning as usual stylistic diktat from elsewhere and the birth of an interchangeably frippish hideousness. Three hat shops, an empty tea bar (tax write-off? money laundry?) boasting sixteen varieties of macaroons, endless places to stop (if you even wanted to stop) on the narrow pavement between the heedless cars and the nosy passersby, expensive ready-cooked food shops with names like Mom’s, gone the hardware store that stocked everything and was staffed by people who advised you where to find it for even less, out of business, or moved away to less promising parts. The photo shops, the record store, bookshop. All gone. And behind that, the Steindamm, our belly and balls, twinned with Kabul, or Mombasa, or Abuja. Telephone shops if you wanted to call anywhere with a red, green, and black flag (launch pad of Ali Ağca and his crew of martyrs), casinos, thorny or hairy vegetables, fetish stores, Alphonso mangoes from Pakistan, video brothels, limitless mint and parsley and cilantro, hourly hotels, cracked olives and fresh cheese, old girls with three words of German, newly baked flatbread. The birds strike up between three and four (it’s the Northern light), while at lit intersections they never stop. Twilit, doubtful, shady, something. Questionable.
A working river, a working valley, The gray-green Rhône Lined with workings, heaps of dust, gravel, cement, And log jams waiting for transport, Like the island exporting itself to its neighbors one barge at a time. The river, the road, and the railway, A plait, a tangle, a place of through. The river not navigable, the boggy valley floor not walkable, The locals came down from the mountains a little way To site castles on moraine and regulate trade. Hannibal marched his elephants through here, dynamited rocks with vinegar. Poplars were planted en passant by Napoleon’s Grande Armée Two-hundred-some years ago. Goethe came to visit. The shade endures. Rilke was reminded of Spain. He lived among apricots at Muzot, Just the other side of the language barrier, And fixed to be buried with a view of France. No one knows who I am, were his dying words. Smells of hay and dung, the murmurs of subtle conversation Next door are tax-efficient sheep The underground chicken palace like CERN Or a discreet gun emplacement. The lights come on when we appear, and go off after we’re gone. Larchwood and rye bread, chocolate and slate, Dried beef and stone All one striated substance, The staff of life breaking explosively, crumblingly, If it breaks at all, A stash of daunting verticals, A washing machine delivered by helicopter Winched down into the Renaissance casbah. Time was a man had to carry his donkey across his shoulders up a cliff; Now everything is tunnel fodder. Electricity and water come piped through the mountains, The vineyards get a sousing under great rainbow arcs, Who wouldn’t want to die in a thirteenth-century tower With light sensors and cold running water Off the hills and a chill in the sunny air of the contemporary archaic.
Yes, your face like asphalt dust on my tongue whenever it rains. I’ll say it’s the last time I call, tomorrow. In your arms it won’t be the same, each step farther from the border. Gin and tonics. Tequila grapefruits. I threw that black mug at your face after gin, after tequila, I didn’t know Enrique’s Journey would trigger me, I’m sorry. I drank too much. I drink too much, yes, I know. It wasn’t me who threw it, I said, but it was. It’s me who needs to learn how to face grandpa’s bullet shells, bottles, broken chairs, doors he woke us up with. I was four. I saw Mom between his gun and Grandma. I was four. I need to forgive the coins he placed in my hands to buy him vodka. Grandpa chased every single one of his daughters with his machete in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, I didn’t know what to do except climb the water tower across the street with Red Power Ranger. He’s chased us to this country that trained him to stay quiet when “his boss” put prisoners in black bags, then pushed them out the truck, “for everyone to see what happens to bad people here.” Gin, straight up. Tequila shots. I’ve picked up the shards in our apartment, wiped the black smudge next to our bed, promised never to do it again, that I’ll seek help, but I don’t. I make an excuse. No one understands why Abuelita never left him. It’s mid-June, Venus and Mars the closest they’ve been in 2,000 years, but I’ve never seen grandparents hug, or hold hands. I make an excuse. You kept rubbing your hands. When I turned six grandpa quit drinking. He stayed at home at night but never talked to us. He didn’t like gin. Didn’t like writers. Didn’t like leftists. Everyone gone except one aunt. You’re not here. Tomorrow, tampoco. These walls snore like grandpa’s slurred shouts. I thought the border would take him. All my aunts, my mom, thought so too. We’re all running from the sun on his machete. The moon on his gun.
In Shia Islam, the Twelfth Imam is said to have disappeared in the ninth century. It’s believed his return at the end of the world will deliver order from the chaos. no one ever brings up the wages of virtue the cost of avoiding that which you were built to do some men actually love their enemies remind me to tell you about them when you arrive and when will that be again? I’ve already spiced the duck and hidden the sherry even grain has genes that say drink this or bendthere so much like our own I am rubbing yogurt through my hair getting ready for your return I read old mail from my bababazorg the Farsi like tea leaves or exotic blades years ago he melted into the tautness of earth like a pad of butter on turtle meat the birch curled its tongue I was full of credible fears today I’m full of olives and smoke sucking a fat red cigar and ashing on the good lace I’m comfy as a snake sleeping in a silk shoe though my glasses are foggy or maybe I just got perfume in my eye either way I’ll recognize you by your heartbeat you’ll recognize me by the green bird in my shirt pocket if you hurry I’ll let you hold her her flightlessness will mean nothing in fact my whole house has been cleansed entirely of symbols a strange call came from the west and I understood it in this new language I burnt away my candles and woke the sleeping spider resting his fangs against my hand there will be nothing here to distract you from your work just some old pears browning in the kitchen and a glass vase of pink roses humming their little songs
How long can you speak. Without inhaling. How long. Can you inhale without. Bursting apart. History is wagging. Its ass at us. Twirling in its silver. Cape. I want to kiss. Your scalp. I want you to kiss. My friends. Can you see the wet. Azalea quivering. On its vine. Its ripening. Dread. If it never rained again. I would still wear. My coat. Still wrap. My socks in plastic. Doing. One thing is a way. Of not doing everything else. Today I answer only. To my war name. Wise. Salt. I can make. A stone float off into. The sky. I can make. A whole family. Disappear. I know. So many people. Have been awful to you. I’ve given each one. A number. When you’re ready. I will ask you to draw me. Their hands.
After the 2010 San Fernando massacre Para Luis You novelize a route with flesh dumped at the ranch, can’t backtrack the courage of miles we traversed in the dark, on a sighing speedboat, through jungles that spat only shoes, calzones, bodies twisted as guitarras when there’s no grito left in them to pluck. Back home, we priested our mornings with sun-dried sombreros, communed with our ghosts & had no wish to sacrifice our bellies, our terneros, our Consuelos. With wings from acero, we’d crash latitudinal 
objections, mystify Bengay on the mouths of our map-torn feet, pay no heed to grief’s ambidextrous strophes. If we choked on our own blood we harpooned optimism. But when the vans deadlocked our 
pilgrimage we knew our shadows had crumbed the anesthetic vultures. They pressed their loaded beaks upon our backs until our knees bent sour orange. One asked if we served the enemy, but we took enemy to mean a seed that sits quietly underfoot, abashed to vestibule the grating sun. Blindfolded, we faced the gloom volcanoes of their mothers. How those mothers might’ve screamed like ours in their tortured independence: bloody thunder in the brown-starched symphonies, a wind that howled & shoved its thumbs through feral lands probing for judgment or commiseration. Chingado god that copycatted these legs from monotony. Chingado god that hewed our wrists, a pair of stems to strap behind our wrested boots & jeans. Whoever supplied a plea to that deviant afternoon’s rationed blessings neglected to add chile, sazón, a nosegay of tortillas to the long road. Mothers who’ve come to reclaim our tongues in the dirt: remind us of the braids in the phrasings of our dreams before we vanished. Pat the ground for the bodkinned orchids. Wasn’t it yesterday we were siphoning forecasts with our fingers roving on the table? Or caught your chests pain-leavened & stilled them with the rumpus of our hopes?
Because you were born with your knees tied together under you you are bound to need your hands and resent my knees. Because you were born with and without knees your face remains close to the ground to analyze all the methods the medics use to unhook them: they splint your legs against planks, numb each knee with a balm that makes you feel you are flying through stone. Now you crouch ready to doubt, blinking because it is your body’s to blink. You smile, invincibly obscured. From any closer I couldn’t take you whole so you imagine your hands luring my knees into both sides of your mouth and open your smile into a needy room — molded behind your teeth, a person of pity held down in thick liquid shame. Because you were born to be happy you would skin and uncap the knee of a good giant to make yourself a helmet that could guard you from under the brain, but you cannot get up off those knees.
We low on daddies hereabouts   The fathers all but gone   Our lack a weight   a shape a drybone lake   By war by   drink by   gun by   drift    The father’s all but gone.
The coarse croker-sack cloth    she’d grown to clutch    mesh-merged with her    woof and pang    rose to serve    more like organ    than protection
His mother    came (she said) from salt    so fed him salt.      Raised to wolf    white roots and dirt    she fed him dirt.
All transparent things need thunder shirts. The little ghost hanging from an eave, on Underwood Street, a piece of lavender-tinted netting stretched onto a metal frame. The Boston terriers and Chihuahuas patiently wait out storms with their eyes bulging in their special wraparound shirts. My family used to laugh at me sleeping under two down quilts, wearing a wool hat in summer, when I said I was afraid otherwise I would fly up to the ceiling. Once on a sidewalk beside Erie Street around the corner from Underwood where the pointless obsolete tracks run to a dead end on the other side, I found a black and silver rosary, with shining onyx beads, like the ones that you see hanging from the belts of nuns in their habits or priests in their chasubles. I kept it carefully until either I lost it or it got buried in the bottom of a purse abandoned under my bed or in the closet. Clutter keeps me bound to this earth. I told Patti last night that the God-sized hole in me was so big and vacant, voracious and spacious, it was like I was running some kind of desperate toddler’s shape-sorter game, trying to find something that fit to plug into it. I’d stuff anything in there, regardless of whether the shape coincided with the opening. It was like I could look at the sky and attract space junk, broken satellites, spent rocket stages, micrometeoroids, to plug the gap. The wind is its own kind of chaos, sometimes like a sheet of itself tangled or flowing on a celestial clothesline. It needs a weighted blanket. Little red flags on the maple at the corner of Underwood and Erie near the switching yard. Slow-moving locomotives that might be driven by nobody. Flags hold the tree down, mark it, make it know it’s real. Flapping on the flaming maple or falling.
When the mink ran across the meadow in bunched black parabolas, I thought sine and cosine, but no —  the movement never dips below the line. The creature vanished into barberries. Absolute predator who cracks a rabbit’s spine in one bite. And my mind leapt along a track to a summer field where I walked years ago to a stony spit out into the North Atlantic with a young man I hardly knew, and his sister. He was bald, dying of a brain tumor. I ignored his illness and we spoke of history. He was gentle, scholarly. Why do I remember him when it was his sister I painted seated in tall grass, her forehead wide, brown hair framing her face, ocean a cobalt swatch behind? Islands humped in little arcs across the bay. That canvas is stacked in a closet. But it’s the dead boy I’ve stored inside me all these years, scared of the otherworldly light around his eyes. Scared and ashamed of what I didn’t know. Ashamed of my fear that made his death, when it came, unspeakable. So history bounds into the present, glitter-eyed, with musky anal glands and daggering eyeteeth. Because that boy wasn’t dead: he must be killed again.
married a woman who was perfectly happy  to turn half their apartment into a laboratory  including the cadavers necessary to her husband’s explorations in surgery.  He also wrote articles on the ears of birds and in Latin, an anatomist, standing motionless  in the middle of the road  thinking that electricity must activate the blood  while the muscles, themselves living Leyden jars, flowered among  those who found it difficult to believe that electricity is an animal  lost in a garden of showering towers and, as with all living things, a certain degree  of the domestic filtered down between his hands to land  in a dusting of involuntary silver across the surface of every nerve.
The first line is a row of girls, twenty-five of them, almost a painting, shoulders overlapping, angled slightly toward you. One says: I’m myself here. The others shudder and laugh through the ribbon core that strings them. They make a tone tighter by drumming on their thighs and opening their mouths. The girls are cells. The girls are a fence, a fibrous network. One by one they describe their grievances. Large hot malfunctioning machines lie obediently at their sides. Their shirts are various shades of ease in the surrounding air, which is littered with small cuts. One will choose you, press you into the ground. You may never recover. The second-to-last line has a fold in it. The last line is the steady pour of their names.
Lit from within is the sole secure way to traverse dark matter. Some life forms —  certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms —  glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we emit infrared light from our most lucent selves. Our tragedy is we can’t see it. We see by reflection. We need biofluorescence to show our true colors. External illumination can distort, though. When gravity bends light, huge galaxy clusters can act as telescopes, elongating background images of star systems to faint arcs — a lensing effect like viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. A glass of wine or two now makes me weave as if acting a drunkard’s part; as if, besotted with unrequited love for the dynamic Turner canvases spied out by the Hubble, I could lurch down a city street set without provoking every pedestrian walk-on stare. Stare as long as you need to. If you think about it, walking, even standing, is illogical — such tiny things, feet! — especially when one’s body is not al dente anymore. Besides, creature of extremes and excess, I’ve always thought Apollo beautiful but boring, a bit of a dumb blonde. Dionysians don’t do balance. Balance, in other words, has never been my strong point. But I digress. More and more these days, digression seems the most direct route through from where I’ve lost or found myself out of place, mind, turn, time. Place your foot just so, mind how you turn: too swift a swivel can bring you down. Take your time ushering the audience out, saying goodbye to the actors. The ghost light is what they call the single bulb hanging above the bare stage in an empty theater. In the empty theater of such a night, waking to meet no external radiance, this is the final struggle left to win, this the sole beacon to beckon the darkness in and let the rest begin, this the lens through which at last to see both Self and Other arrayed with the bright stain of original sin: lit from within.
From a story of how the tobacco plant came to our people, told to me by my cousin George Coser Jr. It was way back, before there was a way back When time threaded earth and sky. Children were conceived, were born, grew, and walked tall In what we now call a day. There must have been two suns, a bright moon, somehow We had more light than now, sheen Of falling in love playing about Earth’s body In a wild flicker which lit Us up. We who were this planet and yearned for touch. Every planted thought grew plant Ladders to the stars, way back, before there was No way back, Miss Mary Mack. We used to sing along the buttons of her Dress. Our babies are always Our babies. Even back then when time waved through The corn. We knew our plants like Relatives. Their stories were our stories, there Were songs for everything — I Should say “are” songs for every transformation They link between way back and Now, the forever now, a time when a young Mvskoke man and woman Walked through the shimmer of the early evening. They had become as one song. They lay down when it was dark. I can hear their Intimate low-voice talking. How they tease one another with such gut love. Earth makes a bed, with pillow Mounds. And it is there as the night insects sing They conceived their first child. They Will look back as they walk East toward the sunrise. The raw stalks of beginning Will drink the light, root deeply dark into earth. In the tracks of their loving The plant-child emerges, first the seed head, then Leafy, long male body and the white female Flowers of tobacco, orHece, as the people called it when it called To them. Come here. We were brought To you from those who love you. We will help you.
We watched her grow up. She was the urgent chirper, Fledgling flier. And when spring rolled Out its green She’d grown Into the most noticeable Bird-girl. Long-legged and just The right amount of blush Tipping her wings, crest And tail, and She knew it In the bird parade. We watched her strut. She owned her stuff. The males perked their armor, greased their wings, And flew sky-loop missions To show off For her. In the end There was only one. Isn’t that how it is for all of us? There’s that one you circle back to — for home. This morning The young couple scavenges seeds On the patio. She is thickening with eggs. Their minds are busy with sticks the perfect size, tufts of fluff Like dandelion, and other pieces of soft. He steps aside for her, so she can eat. Then we watch him fill his beak Walk tenderly to her and kiss her with seed. The sacred world lifts up its head To notice —  We are double-, triple-blessed.
You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck.  Shrapnel and the eye Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped to its mother’s back Cut loose. Soldiers crawl the city, The river, the town, the village,  The bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything. Or burn it. They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill they take. Rumors fall like rain.  Like bombs.  Like mother and father tears swallowed for restless peace. Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight. Like a train blown free of its destination. Like a seed fallen where There is no chance of trees or anyplace for birds to live.No, start here. Deer peer from the edge of the woods.  We used to see woodpeckers The size of the sun, redbirds, and were greeted  By chickadees with their good morning songs. We’d started to cook outside slippery with dew and laughter, ah those smoky sweet sunrises. We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen. Though they began building their houses all around us and demanding 
more. They started teaching our children their god’s story,  A story in which we’d always be slaves.No. Not here. You can’t begin here. This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold by words, even poetry.
Is worth any number of old ladies. A grandmother hung from a cliff like a tense moment in an action movie and the Ode, speaking itself with its hand on one heart, steadfastly refused to save her, in fact it did that thing where it ground each finger out with a motorcycle boot and then ate its cigarette for emphasis, whooping; some old-ass bitch was in pussy church when the Öde, now spelling itself with an umlaut, swung its urn at the back of her head, really clocking her; till the violets in her church hat grew from the floor and won a third-place prize for consciousness; the Ode is pushing nanas off bridges, detonating them with dynamite, tying them to railroad tracks with squeaky young rope, pouring big glugs into them out of the skull-and-crossbones bottle, the Ode is checking its pocketwatch, which points always to death-to-old-ladies o’clock, it is shrieking ugh you’re like onehundred and your breath smellsexactly like horse medicineho, the Ode is blasting holes in them, is laying them out in the potpourri aisle, is stabbing them with those icicles they always said were dangerous, the Ode means ill to all of them, the Ode is worth any number    ...     and the worst is I believe it. The worst is I will become one, without having written anything like the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and sit in long rows along with my kind, till there the Ode comes striding toward me, my necessary death at the ready, my pulse like black grapes at its fingertips, saying, “Fear not, it will be fast, the forgetting of great poems will fly through you in bullets”; beauty is truth, and truth    ...     but already I am losing it, all I know is that the world is falling away, and you won’t believe what it is wearing, the ridiculous pantsuit of me, a old lady, crumpled hopelessly at the crotch, a flower valiant in its little butthole — all the vital syllables are being erased —  its space-age fabric now seen for what it is: an embarrassment, my name is turning into Edna, Myrtle, Dorcas, my descendants find my peppermints disgusting, the urn is approaching to scatter me over a landscape that is heaven on earth, and in the feet of the poem I am running — in mad pursuit, and struggle to escape —  chased as if I am worth one million, Pearl, Opal, Ruby, Coral, until I am caught by the feeble arm, and because it is true I am telling the Ode: you stood in me like a spine, put poppies behind my eyes, just the fact of you, that he took one raw spring to set you down instead of going out to tip heifers, tweak noses, or sexually harass huge curvy vases, you were for me too, though they would trade me in all my Beulahs, have lined me up to enter that land in my turn, you let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms, first to myself, and then almost out loud, mine, mine, the world’s, all mine, something to say in the face of tall sickness as I quietly try to unwrap hard candies, as I tug down tissues from my sleeve, because it is true I am telling you, Ode, that I had a throat and you boiled in it, and the Ode is murmuring almost gently, “But do you like my ending? Some people don’t like my ending,” I don’t, I never did, I thought it was so overwrought, though now that I’m here myself why not if it has to be this way then better put a bright red cough on all that white
I was so happy in the gem room. The sun was president, I was just dug up, all hell had shrunk to a sulphur crystal. Something danced on the point; it must have been me. I had a hundred faces, and one of them served up the ceiling in a perfect slice —  like a twelve-year-old saint in some countryside where they only read Revelation. I had some small nugget of sense, for once, I was a mind that understood the light    ...     Rain rained in my aquamarine. The world’s knuckles gripped the bedstead. I felt the red dynamiting of me in Missouri, where all outdoors was my candy store, where color sucked at its all-day self and never became less sweet, less new. “I want to put it in my mouth,” said someone, “I almost want to eat it    ...    ” I had dozens of uses, but I was mostly flat beautiful. Visitors just gasped in the matte-black room where I freely fluoresced. They saw me laid on a dictionary to demonstrate my transparency, which was complete; they could read the wordeverything through me. My name meant blood, meant seawater, meant lemon. The eye in my agate never blinked. I was believed to be formed of frozen moonlight. I was cut so that a star shone back. The purest and wind-clearest hunk of me they carved into a horse. When I was split to the purple and somehow still standing, they called me a cathedral. Yet just to the left of that I spilled all over velvet. The velvet is what did it —  I wanted to be smuggled. Wanted to ride past all the alarms, just before that drop of sweat hit the floor. Wanted to end up in god- knows-whose hands, a heist. “Obscene,” said a man behind me, “just in piles like that    ...    obscene.” Then I spilled another carat, laughing. In Missouri you could pluck me straight up off the ground. Gumdrops, gobstoppers, jujubes. I thought: try to suck me down to nothing, and find yourself up against one million years. In piles like that. Just out there. For anyone. Obscene. The legs of the real thing were opening, flash and flash and flash. I said: go ahead and smash the glass. Give me a break-in like a kaleidoscope. Someone will entirely drip with me as soon as I get out of here.
I have some explaining to do — 5 o’clock meant I would speculate about artichokes (Greek) and the unfarmed mackerel. Anyway, the men would present us with a bed of carrot and potatoes + 1 cup of broth. Our husbandry in sharp mustard suit, laden with trial pieces for the fondue. I would prefer not to. I had such friends —  a long time faring all through the West with my filth and a bouquet of cutlery where I had put it: by me. And yet expansive, the things made by the things I made. And a supervisor hovering behind me. The heaviness of being.I am the Name, Jehovah called from the bush. I had visions of pigeons. And I replied:Here I am to be called Ishmael and beget.
I saw him His body a very pale sea, almost green Soaring above me in a different sphere With gold wings He had a blissful expression One maybe he never had Certainly he was always smiling, somewhere When he died I had just gotten betrayed by a friend I thought was mine I forgave him Was more just said You live through any of it But what is the red shoulder we long to see I thought that I too would reach a great canyon My arms and legs blissed out Instead I blossomed inside Oh I loved his wife and children But they were still here with me When my father died he went straight up to heaven When the ghost died he stayed with us for a while I forgot to mention that the wings were gold and green And the winds were heavy They held his body Afloat in air as if in the ocean I forgot to say that when it was summer I too measured the red bell heads I said the hell with it All of it Heavy air will you hold me Suspended in the ocean of time Where I will never see you again My skin gold and green Sweet king, you left us I know it Dark is dark The darkness, darnit It surrounds With heavy air Arms and legs suspended The head
The day glared, breathless: an eye socket. Clouds barely shifted, and the opal sky was sheared into dry-dazzling millions. Yet fall in, the sky, it did not. The mail did not go undelivered, dogs were walked; lovers fell savagely out of and in love, and all between. Seven concussed days, his draft longhand swaying like supple pillars of gray flame, erasures; in the long nights his desk lamp revealed the window streaked with chalk sweated off the fen, which was England. Once Ribera’s Jacob, now Jerome, Ugg-booted at the piano, “The Irishe Dumpe” from the Fitzwilliam Virginal hindered by the little lion kneading his lap. Later, the papers howling of guignol ambush would milk his delighting spleen as the rectory self-veiled in evensong and dusk. Somewhere over an inexpressive sea of rain-sleek tiles, the contemptible perfection of gardens, perhaps up from the weird moonlike muteness of the Black Country’s broken kilns and felt absences, it came winging. He died without dread or pain. A sour storm rides the Levant, rinsing the domeless yellow streets. On the steep road to Worms Ash the coverts take the tincture of foxgloves, where the shade of Housman, deadly-formal kink still running through him, fidgets among the cinder-like moths. Hill makes his way to Pisgah.
After a Nick Cave “Soundsuit” made from buttons and found vintage abacus When George Washington became president in 1789 he had only one tooth in his head, a single premolar poking up from his gums. His dent- ures were fashioned from lead, gold wire springs, brass screws, the teeth of humans and cows, ele- phant ivory, and hippopotamus bone. It is a myth that he had false teeth made of wood. A mis- perception put forth by those misled by the hair- line fractures that ivory and bone possess. Just as cherry wine will stain cloth with a rust-hued vein, Washington’s fondness for dark wine blemished his teeth. The fractures eventually darkening, un- til resembling the grain in a piece of wood. The darkening of fractures is rather curious. The makeup of the flesh, the constitution of origin, the trackers of bloodlines thrown off the trail. It is difficult to determine what discolor- ations have tunneled their way through the body. Spider veins climbing the back of my legs like a winding river mapping the trauma. An unspoken collective of ephemeral bits and bytes, suffering most eloquently preserved in the mouth. The skin of one’s teeth decides many a fate. A black woman’s incisor settling down inside a white man’s maw. Overall, a quizzical look, an off-color joke about progress, the very blood a trick of the eye, an ocean blue on the outside of the skin, a blushing red if viewed just beneath the sheath.• A tooth is made up of the crown and the root, all the King’s Men destined to revolt. There are many ways to worm your way inside, many open- ings in the body of an animal. Some orifices gated with white entryways. A wooden portcullis, a pick- et fence, a laced corset secured tightly by a maid, a pointed geode just waiting to be pulled, the cavern wall glittering in the dark. Sharp crystals ornament the cave’s jawbone. Cave canem, quite naturally speak- ing. A hooded hole a place for some to hide or go seek. A toothless whistle the signal for the slave hunting bloodhounds, with canines fanged like water moccasins. The swamp mud gushing like the suppertime mush sloshing between the gums of a Confederate soldier. The terror of limbs at odds with the self. In World War I, trench foot meant frequent amputations, the blade sliding like floss between each toe. Some diseases attack the foot or mouth, gums left inflamed in the cross fire. A grieving mother wears dog tags around her neck. Her son’s baby shoes and teeth cast in bronze. The pulp at the center is how the tooth receives nourishment, how it transmits signals to the brain. The forgetting makes the present tense possible. Memory is the gravity of the mind. All the icebergs have started to melt, milky objects left hanging by a string, the doorknobs means to an end.• The keyboard’s toothy smile splayed wide, the flatlined cursor blinks impatiently on the screen, my fingers struggle to tap into word processing. I monitor all of the track changes. Even the computer is a slave to death. Its in- nards already bygone, its body obsolete upon year of purchase. I am a librarian, swimming the digital divide, my predecessor’s paddles —  a mass of floppy disks in an office closet. They pile up like the teeth of slaves waiting for sale. An affluent businessman at the door, his hands panning the saliva for white gold. His fingers parting the cavity, pursed lips cooing,I need something of yours to call my own. The desire to chew and smile at will. My grandmother lost her mind before her teeth, lost the memories be- fore the enamel gave way to rot. My face has my mother’s abacus features. We are, in fact, diphyo- dont. In one lifetime we develop two sets of teeth. The missing space filled with air, a hollow exile before the native tongue. I pray my unborn child will have a gap. What the French call “dents du bonheur” or lucky teeth. The womb’s peephole is rather impressionable. I will fasten the buttons of time. I will take the baby’s body in my own, whisper a plea in its discriminating ear:Try to keep your wits about you, my love. Memory is about the future, not the past.
tonight I started walking back to you father it was meant to be a stroll but then I started walking faster father I started chanting all the names of all the men I ever went to bed with father my thighs were burning and my feet were heavy with blood but I kept the pace and chants of names up father listed them to fence posts and the trees and didn’t stop and started getting younger father and walked all night till I was home just a spark in your groin again and told you not to bring me back to life told you I repented every name and had freed them of me father
Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy In    ...    the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net, in time of the breaking of nations, and in elementary arithmetic, the lichen-gray primaries keep in sufficiently close touch as to impose one part of a pattern onto another. The vibrational halo of the string figures passing from flower to flower, border to border —  night-moths of measureless size, circling among the young, among the weak and old, hawk-moths at dusk hatching the war-adept in the mornings —  the vibrational halo near the great wings is not the judgment-hour, only thin smoke without flame written on terrestrial things. I confess I do not believe in time. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness is an imitation game    ...    filled with the mysteries of mimicry    ...    But when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp and a deadly cipher flaps its glad green leaves like wings, what is our solution? Peace on earth and silence in the sky? I think that is not the faith and fire within us    ...    Still, I look into the depth of each breeding-cage, each floating-point form cleft into light and shade, hoping it might be so.
National Pigeon Association, England, 1940 Notch. Web. And then, down the shaft, lesser wing coverts and marginal coverts, and soft, greater underwing coverts — although never as great as greater under-primary coverts, gray-coated and down-plumped, trailing what might reveal a pattern just over the down that might support a secrecy. Launched from double-decker buses, or attic windows, or the dark roofs at Bletchley Park, the lesser pigeons, always first to find the fray, sport black metallic canisters strapped to matted lapel feathers. And tucked inside, like Russian dolls, a cipher’s hollow chambers —  down and down, a Fibonacci spiral, a paper nautilus of words and codes and keys that shift with each decipherment.The bard is in the wand — read space as shape, read a as i — the key takes subterfuge, that doubling, double agency when tomfoolery is crossed with rage. But these are simply carriers, word-burdened, instinct- tossed, searching for the perch within a blasted atmosphere. Find forms, the message says, and everything will fall in line.The bird is in the wind
My sister woke me very early that morning and told me “Get up, you have to come see this the ocean’s filled with stars” Delighted by the revelation I dressed quickly and thoughtIf the ocean’s filled with stars I must take the first flight and collect all of the fish from the sky
She took the words for a stroll and the words bit the children and the children told their parents and the parents loaded their guns and the words wailed, howled slowly licked their blind wounds until they fell flat on their faces onto the bloody earth and death came then dressed in its Sunday best to stop by the poet’s house and call to him with desperate cries and the poet opened the door not knowing what had happened and he saw death hanging from its shadow and sobbing it told him, “Come with me today we’re in mourning” “Who died,” asked the poet “Well, you,” replied death and death extended its arms to him to offer condolences    Translated from the Spanish
A lexicon of words that were not said in childhood, and all of those that were, were said beside an upturned boat, lapped planking of the creosoted shed, were said into the wind on tussocky ground, by farm-rust vehicles. The buildings I could not complete without my father’s help, the wind in which I was at sea. Rain blooming in August that moved the land and over land toward the autumn, sliding through the gates of summer, feeling for the bone inside the wrist.
saw the magnet grow electric  and the fixed points become a field in rural Denmark  as the needle moved through various materials all the while remaining parallel:  the usual: silver, zinc, lead, etc. and then tried needles of glass  needles of shellac  with all the west above while below, the east in winding spirals  traveling three years across Europe, a good friend of Hans Christian Andersen  and of aluminum, whose name points to its invisible lights  within  whose forces crossed and became his galvanic opus, The Soul in Nature,  as well as various Italian newspapers —  to eventually end up as a park in Copenhagen  dominated by green, a lake, and shade in which a woman dressed in green sits reading to this day.

because my voice was not the right voice and could not be understood I stood before the mirror — a murky glassen word this mouth can’t shape right to this day — and was made to watch my teeth and lips being imprecise. So this is why I come across a Southron and not from Yorkshire, or Sri Lankan; but I’ll complain no more about this clarified and potent tongue for when the moustached gent at US Customs asked me in his hapless twangare you a terrorist, my borrowed posh it sure abashed that poor colonial; and it was of course what my child-face perceived or could not in the glass which made of me a scrutineer of sound, a listener for and into every glitch in the aathma, the script, the avid void of English.
The stork arrived alone one day, beak sharpened like a bayonet.All the love you’ve had turned bad! he sang, eyes boring through the dingy nets. He hopped onto the patio.Good lord! Is this a rented flat?  Behind the shed, albino rats  were nuzzled on a family bed.  He hovered over them, wings spread.  Now this is how you do it! he said.  He speared a worm and sucked it down.  A rented flat, my god, he said. Inside, I laid my hands around my lump, my pumpkin-up-the-jumper. I’d swapped the wine and cigarettes for goji berries, spent the summer asleep or stretched in yoga pose,Utkatasana, Dhyana    ...      The stork came hopping round the corner  scraped his claw across the door —   Hello, hello? he called, polite,  then screamed I will not be ignored!  He had a bloody bone to pick,  an oozy piece of mind to share.  I was eight months gone by Halloween.  Kids rang the rented bell in sheets  and slime. I tried “maternal” out  with chocolate limes and fizzy sweets.  The bird shrieked half the witchy night:  For god’s sake, are you stupid? Teeth!  I waddled off to pack my case —   gorillas snoozing on the onesies,  pink booties, pads to catch the blood.  When they tugged that baby out of me  he came up laughing, blessed the midwife  with a fiery arc of golden pee and through the skylight of the ward I saw the stork retreat, zigzagging up into the evening sky, a fading squawk, the beat of wings. Then they laid that baby on my chest to feed, and cut the navel string —
Other than that, all was still — a quiet so quiet that, as if silence were a kind of spell, and words the way to break it, they began speaking.  They spoke of many things: sunset as a raft leaving the water in braids behind it; detachment, the soul, obedience; swans rowing at nightfall across a sky filled with snow; what did they wish they could see, that they used to see; to mean no harm, or to not especially, just now, be looking for it; what would they wish not to see, could they stop seeing; courage mattering so much less than not spooking easily —  maybe all nerve is; the search-and-rescue map wildflowers make of a field in summer; deserving it, versus asking for it, versus having asked, and been softly turned from.  They said it would hurt, and it does.
After I turned forty, I received my first 42 millirem dose of X-rays. I heated the machine with my uncupped body, tabled my rib cage to cool shoulders dear as a beloved relative who could no longer see due to intraocular weather in her eyes. Women in an outer room awaited bone scans. Backscatter is 5 microrems or .005 millirems. A dental bitewing X-ray, around 0.5 millirem. Mammogram, 40 to 70. Do not know about bone scans. Annual background radiation is 300, higher if we live on a mesa or often fly. Ozone plus uranium decay, daughters of radon gas.  How about our radiogenic thyroids, butterflies shimmering with table-salt iodine? Peonies of  bone marrow spun  rails of flesh in a waiting room of  jacquard chairs, of  round mirrors and water lilies, paper hydrangeas, African violets. If  I broke the silence, then I drew the flame of  your sun into my chest. Unshielded, I entered an inner room to don a rose-colored cotton kimono. For a minute, I thought of  flying fish roe and forgot its  Japanese name. What is the risk of carcinogenic harm while estrogen acts on my cells? Coralline of  the radiology room inside my mouth, the clinical air exuded an odor of magnolia powder although no one wore it, a scent riper than radical scavengers of  blackberries. I uttered a prayer of radiolucence  then remembered the word, tobiko.
By then, of course, they’d done plenty in the name of recklessness — their word as well, though incorrect, for wilderness. Ah, scutchweed, rushlightitude, if not, why not, strowbegone, nor sheep, fa la, shall  graze. The way, incredibly, for most it’s still enough to have noticed a similar weather pattern between regret and the windy plains of remorse, like that must make them the same, or should, or at least no more different than a fetish for being eaten alive and whole is, apparently, from the desire to leave loneliness  behind forever — a reasonable desire, I suppose, but in the end a useless one, since actual loneliness isn’t leavable: love distracts from loneliness, it doesn’t crowd it from view    ...    some could almost see this, eventually; others chose not to. Some — the luckiest —   arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where to be understood entirely stops being the main thing, or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl before them, one after the other, each a seemingly vast underworld of damage they didn’t have to talk about,  not anymore, they agreed it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was was their own.
How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail ferns. How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if somehow the fox’s mouth that so much of this life has amounted to had briefly unshut itself — and the moth that’s trapped there, unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled street seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind called doubt, or that other one,  persuasion, the broken one, in three clean pieces    ...    Well, it’s morning, now. Out back, the bamboo bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like (but nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better by now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing, stiffening, seems like nothing so much as, in this light, competing forms of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel each other out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the foliage than the promise of it. Less that shame exists, maybe, than that the world keeps saying it does, know it, hold on tight to it, as if the world were rumor, how every rumor  rings true, lately. When I’m ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what is shame but to have shown — to have let it show — that variety of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can, like love, be an eventual way through? There’s a minor chord sparrows make with doves that’s not the usual business — it’s not sad at all, any of it: this always waiting for what I’ve always waited for; this not being able to assign to what’s missing some shape, a name; this body neither antlered nor hooved — brave too, this body, unapologetic    ...
There are places for chaos on the page, meaningful, apparent confusion — temps en temps on the continent does not mean “time to time” in Kent, or Greenwich. From stone through weeds and parchment, through bad times, words made their way to the printed page. Bibles now not just for those who go to worship by carriage, but for those who pray with bare feet, some washed, some smelling of stables and excrement. I’m not sure the words ocean and sea mean the same to you and me. Ninety-five percent universal confusion, dark matter was born with the legitimacy of an onion, the roar of a lion. I sit in the rumble seat of judgment, I damn myself for entertainment, for wasting time on hopeless entertainment. I am guilty of snarling lines, Gordian knots in my “Shakespeare” fishing reels. I must untangle this because eels have hearts like us. The enemy is symmetry. In the spring of content, I trust glorious chaos. I smell in disorder the outhouse of order. I must have respect for what I kill and eat, Jesus gave them loaves and fishes, not meat. He added, “Waste nothing you eat,” he did not say, “Waste is chaos made by me, or my Father, one person who is three.” Rebecca, at the well, said, “Drink. Water your camels.” I swear, my hands each on a Bible, the only evidence admissible is invisible. At twenty, I was lost in the snow, a sleigh bell. Chaos is not a “sometime thing,” its face and back are turned to and from us, what I cannot see is beautiful, or an isthmus that connects almost nothing to almost nothing —  the great unless, either/or. I grab on to metaphor, uncertainty, dark matter, gravity specific. The motto I nail to my door:The Devil generalizes, angels are specific. Chaos makes me merry, string or rose-by-any-other-rose theory, romance of the rose, roses that go with any other flower, from devil’s paintbrush to huckleberry. From fertile Chaos sprang Eros and Night: Chaos danced first with Eros, then jealous Night. Time carries a scythe, women and men sound the hour. I model for myself, I pose in north light. With helpers, his stevedore brothers, Hypnos and Thanatos, Charon still poles his familiar ferry across the Styx to an island where skeletons dance. Einstein said, “I too believe in appearance,” he didn’t think Old One plays dice, takes chances. You bet your bottom dollar the universe rhymes with another universe like verse. Yeats, Herrick, and Herbert would like that. To them, I lift my hat. Delphic chaos is wise, metaphoric thinking multiplies bunches of grapes, by tripod, by butterflies. Chaos is endless longing —  God’s pussycat. In Prague, Mozart knew a starling who sang his piano concerto all along, except for one note he always got wrong.
I was waiting to try out one of my inventions from the flattop garage roof — parachutes this time —  when I tasted a black cherry from the next yard, wondering even at that age who had prior rights and what was constitutional so instead of  jumping I wrote a brief brief called Yaakov vs. the Tree Trunk where everyone laughed herself crazy at Marlboro vs. Madison or Red Stain vs. the State of New Jersey so bless me you fools for aren’t you mortals? And don’t you bend your body down over the water to taste the ice? And who, in your family, even ever just thought of swallowing a goldfish from the bowl, say, picking up its slippery body, bending your neck back and gulping it down even before they entered law school?
Good morning, electorate. We are on good speaking terms but do not speak, which means we must be self-reliant, there are many matters at hand. We’re not close enough to know each other’s good news, bad news, private matters. There are silent streets off public gardens for intimacy and come-what-mays. There is library silence and deadly silence that is a private matter. There is happiness written in white and silent writings, meters overheard. Silent are the voices I no longer hear —  after the first word spoken I’d recognize who’s there. There is a playwright’s staging called “business,” silent instructions without dialogue, and the silence that says, “none of your business,” but I have an office, a religion, that holds me responsible for everything. I hardly lift a finger to stop the slaughtering. It’s a little like putting a nickel or a dime in a cup and writing this against death, raking leaves against the changing seasons. My memory is like the first sound picture,The Jazz Singer. I am screening: it must have been October, 1927, I remember skipping along Liberty Avenue, before I learned to dance, I sang, “Hoover in the ashcan, Smith in the White House.” Later in Catalonia I danced the Sardana —  with its opening and closing circles that made free and equal the young and old, while the soulful tenora, a revolutionary woodwind, played the dance forbidden by Generalissimo Franco. Further back again toward first silences —  alone in the Charleville of my den, I smoked Rimbaud’s clay pipe, I thought “I will never die.” I’m simply telling the impossible truth that made my later studies more difficult. When I first shaved my fake oxtail beard invented by Cervantes, I fought back day-reasoning without understanding such dreams were my squire. I returned with Sancho to Granada, my forefathers’ home, my forbearers’ caves,banderillas in the bull’s neck of my mind. When I was young and difficult, Lorca’s photo near my bed, I saw Twelfth Night, sang Mozart arias, read history textbooks my father wrote. Loyalist, I shot fascists, not Iroquois. I found an old photo of Belmonte, the matador born with deformed legs — he stood so close to the bull the beast had to charge around him. His sword in a cape of silence, he stood erect, motionless, a gypsy in a suit of lights tailored by Goya.Interval.... Intermission....     I visited a zoo of languages on the soon-to-be-sunk Statendam, in February touring the Mediterranean with my parents, from the pillars of Hercules to the Bosphorus. In Barcelona, I sided with the brave bull who entered the ring deceived, never having seen a man off a horse, the bull, however noble, sure of death.• I want my work to have the “taste of self”: In the bright, silent mornings of my soul, I refuse my royalties: a bull’s ears, tail, and severed foot. God does not ride a horse, Jesus preferred donkeys. I feed my donkeys carrots, play them operas. A trio, they bray with joy. Because it’s common sense I make noise for the Lord. He wants our kind to read, sing, speak to each other, to rejoice and play to beat the band, horns, drums, bawdy noisemakers. We should give Him the time of day, among sounds, unhearable, bang away, weep with the uncountable suffering others. Among the multitudes, in the swarms, the schools, the hives, rejoice, boo, snore, make noise for the love of noise and questioning, praise Him on Doomsday, He hears the noise of all the world’s blinking eyes. I believe to live as a silent flower is worthwhile. I cannot speak the languages of trees better than birds, who out of gratitude and affection learn arboreal grammar, accents, pronunciation, whatever the weather, but I try because I love a good oak —  still, I cannot better the birds    ...     “Affection” for my neighbor is easy, “love” difficult. Silence can be affection, silence a perfect herald. Still there is speechless love and silent conversations called gestures, helping hands, sometimes only a loving telephone call. There are equators, latitudes, and longitudes of silence, useful compasses, lighthouses, red and green buoys, red light to port, green starboard, silent foghorns. I remember silent remembrances. Is partial light the opposite of silence? The sun is noisy, gossips earthly languages. Shhh. Trying to find truth. I’ve heard late-night laughter in Roman streets, screeching pigs carried upside down to slaughter. From time to time the living whisper, scream, “Help me! Murder!” Roots tremble. I never heard the noise and silence of mass murder. In Asia and Africa, there are English wildfires. Greek and Latin are still smoldering, flaming African syllables on every tongue. Love, silence, reflection, and revelation in the jungle and pine-barren ashes. I lift my head to music I call gods, whole notes, scales, clefs, and rests that are saints, mullahs, rabbis, atheists, pagans. So I will ask to collect my dead and wounded and you will never hear from me, the unheralded herald, anymore.
One conversation, one only, remaining: It will be that give-and-take With Larry Littlebird —  Oral listener —  All about eagles, their shoulders, Ospreys, their plummet, And frogs, their singing Scratched by rain’s soft claws. But any of these exchanges will do: Charlie saying, If you can hum It you can play it, if you can play at all. And if not, sing with closed lips to yourself. Low continuous sound, your refrigerator. You must not be lonely. Harold says someone pointed out Being begins with a hum: It seems what you are, You’re happy hearing it, I’m happy for you, For each other, happy. Hear it in your colloquial throat, The syllable meaning human. Or, if not any of these intercourses, then Jenny and Chloe, who with a shake And a nod and a wave of an arm Toward the East say, We are going And we’ll go on your behalf And we’ll carry signs and shout The last best protest. Cerise and fuchsia Sisters, ears pointing out. Or my street signs: Calaveras (our skull’s tacit mouth) and Eisenhower — War, a theft from those who hungerAnd are not fed. Not a way of life at all. Crossed words on a corner pole. Movers pack me up, extract me From that conversation. I’ve heard a few words — they stay with me, An earned ear — and yet Too brief for brooding. Ghost Of my father, who never said much But Smell the roses for the camera; Or when I ask, Can I retire? He quickly says, Don’t hesitate! Any of these exchanges will do, “Now is the perfect time.” Not “For what?” but stopping it open. “April Fool,” said my favorite Eleanor, And then she died. “Good night,” her son Tipped his hat at me, From the top of the stairs, and then he tumbled. “I love you,” I contributed. And then I buttoned up.
1 “With never a whisper on the main,” so the snow falls, glaring through the festschrift of acacia leaves at sunrise and seeping a dye of immortelle on mild fleece, shrinking back eternity to flurries stalking summer cairns. Somewhere, harpies in cruisers blare beneath prairie clouds. An iceberg flashes, turns a smoke of ice on the air. The cold repels, draws out redoubling whites; in the green heat you hallucinate where the sea runs, light on light, creeping the heights your new turret on the house in clouds scorns nothing: poetry’s sub rosa, ever uncompromised, as now, infrared crows eclipse the lawns.2 And I once brute and stammering to you toppled in a blue beach chair, pushed to the meridian-hush island coup talk, but your eyes search out where children leap hotels’ sand dams and worry the guard and his dog. The triumph of surrender, of love flamed from history, like that pyro-tailor’s scissors bright roar, reducing the “treasury of the poor.” You sputter into a blinding cough and recover with, “Emerson?” Yes, that culprit all along, new to me, so was Boston Common when we waited in the trash fire of autumn and could feel salt driving off the Atlantic.3 Where the mezcal ferns begin and after them dross wet soil rises from bank to ridge, sunset’s slow inflation; you point; they change in one stroke to mountain-blue foliage! On utility poles hang night’s recessive fable. Again, you stab the windscreen    ...    out there, abundant still lifes, the stark inflammable river you will cross over, recoil at the pier. What value is the ride? In digression, art. A mare froths in the sea the following day. It seems, gathered up by spokes of clouds, caught in an agonizing conversion. You jolt towards it, but out laughed a schoolboy, way too happy — “O Apilo!” — sun-blasted, all colors.4 Clinking cavalcade inching up the Sunday road lined with crowds: none anonymous, moving as lines do, growing in depth of play, unstable and absolute where they must. Each thing has a crack, indeed. Adjust the mirror beyond the surf’s exhortation and see arched dolphins at equinox blur with drizzle Port Antonio into Vigie. Half mile of bamboo cathedral tunnels an airy pass there once; its shadows hacked away and in that vacancy light depreciates now. Geography is not fate but fatal. Gone is the corridor to hold your glory. The sun and sea in your eyes still bow.5 Pilgrim of occasional fireflies, brooding inside the Alliance Française Pyramid, where the wild honey expires and the doggerel air embalms all you’ve lived, relived with lament and praise. Pain’s license. Silence, then the reciprocity of silence, its immense language sends an ibis to absolve and to mark your sins. Late-in-life astonishment, like bitcoins on the tongue. What you say is hidden in noon gossip. Yes, having a gift is to be called. Since it is given, let it go. The mind irons bronze in water, a voice radiating: “We please our elders when we sit enthralled.”6 Ascend and bless the devil’s altitude. Shale drifting from the sky’s blue furnace. Slant sparks of green off the vale Santa Cruz below, being so blessed, this is penance, of a kind, my own road to Emmaus, wafers upon wafers of oleanders suture those eyes scattered and staring through dust. Around each bend arrives the future, which departs exactly close to Lalibela one fleeting night the rock churches wept by my ears, refracted Stoney Hill’s stars, their ragged music pitching diaspora against despair. Such music you’ve left withstands permanently the striation of scars.7 To evening air I add, “blown cane blown cane blown cane,” and step into the Quattrocento outside the library by the pier. All’s changed. Blown I am a broad Antillean echo lost in the marrow wings of a pelican, or an albatross, cloud remnant, tasseled low flyer below the radar of the wind. Trade Winds. Travailed not traveled. Shit-bloodied. A million blades choir and collapse on repeat their absolute, surging pledge, picked up by potholes which I jump to reach home. Blown canes, singed from the African holocaust. Dark breaks in me carrying your line, lucid sandglass, seething uphill. Mine to keep and give.8 The kite season is early. Little insurgence everywhere of souls lifting, subsiding half transparent in night’s green silence. By morning they are fallen over the cement fence, your childhood allamandas annunciate your last withdrawal into heat so fierce it breaks its own laws and the man into tears along Lapeyrouse seawall, his umbrella kite shielding the sun from the murals. Meantime, I hesitate on a maroon canal in Delft, crossing water’s filial piety, erring rings whisper “small honors in the storm” and watch moss lilies drift into untouchable maze, fastened to each other. Your ancestors’ spires are of ambergris, they magnify in the water my spectral self.
Early in the morning a dough rises from the bowl curling upward. He clenches his fists of bean paste, his mouth dripping a black cocoa stream    ...     Hey, I say, have you just smuggled nine knife mountains and nine oil pans from hell? Deep-fried ghosts are the sweetest the crispiest the most intelligent even in burned rims, and taste even better with soybean drinks. He droops his sad expressions like Oedipus’s crutch. Collapsed in the steamer, he squeaks out a sweet smell of duck soup from his soul — quack, quack.    Translated from the Chinese
The swinger the swirler the swirled: stop grieving. I drink all night but in a diminishing appetite. The scene outside is obscene from a humbling window. My sentiment spreads, my famine a flagpole, a grizzle. Birds sing next year’s songs, or antique rescues. I write but where shall I send it? Let go — I shall go tie the flowers the leaves the whole orchard. The outskirts are curved, shadows of countrywoman donors    ...     You bring me a cup of fresh tea that I love, I return you two kapok leaves — like hand waves.    Translated from the Chinese
Under Venus the sugared wound, the heart-strung-up, the viola d’amore. Under Venus the Pliny-prescribed, the horsehair-hanked — not plucked, tugged — the singly sung (catgut kidney-cuffs the caterwaul, a knockback to the viola bastarda). Kittenish! A scalloped flirtatious border — florid cordial pansies (candied adoration). Viola odorata. Parfait d’Amourish.
A garland to fend off the dizzies. A garland to keep the quinsy at bay. March closes the seeded umbilicus. April opens the musty secundina. Equinox the half-melt rot. Easter the thin asquintable light.
She was always elsewhere. That’s what Mom wants carved on her stone. When did she first realize there was an Elsewhere, and that she was in it? What baby songs did she sing from wherever she was down to me in my crib? The lullabies of   Elsewhere. On birthdays she filled little flowerpots with chocolate ice cream and a real zinnia, chocolate jimmies for dirt. I tasted the cold chocolate, I opened the gifts. If  they were real, I was real. I was in the Elsewhere too.
To sow the remote morose root. To sow the virtuous standby. The backup fodder-crop suffers not from seasonal vicissitudes, mildew and blast, caterpillar attack. Under Saturn sing the golden-sickled beet. Under Saturn sing the ringed mangelwurzel. The great turnip (the dick reuben!). The pickled paucity-strick stew.
What if the primary colors on your spectrum were mud, muddled, and muddliest? Benjamin Franklin invented the Internet so that I could talk to folk but not face to face and I know what purple-tailed hawk of thought just perched on your extended wrist but try to fit your average feet in my size 17s. Fact: the average reader processes 300 wpm and maybe they can read other people’s faces like a vegan interrogating a list of ingredients but what if every face was written in Braille and you had only catcher’s mitts below your wrists, or IKEA bookcases with reams of instructions ciphered in tiny print with disappearing ink, imagine being so literal that when told to let sleeping dogs lie, you asked how a Doberman could be dishonest, imagine every smiling hint a girl ever sent your way was in a prescription bottle with a You­proof cap or a personal pizza delivered 30 minutes late to the door of a boarded-up summer bungalow then top that double dose of pepperoni by having even the most casual conversation served with Denali-sized asides of organic skew. Fact: the US has 95,000 miles of shoreline, but on this dinner plate the border between the Country of Carrots and the Province of Peas can never meet, say your brain is a slinky bullet-headed train but your mouth is a horse-drawn Amish wagon and what rockets across the endless gray rails of your origamied cranium is ever projected onto your grinning scrim of skin, and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent the Internet, but the Internet has plenty pictures of him inventing electricity which is almost the same thing, say your friend Cynthia R. claims it will storm later and you hear Oran Juice Jones singing “I saw you (and him) walking in the rain” and you beam a lighthouse smile, only Cynthia says, “Seriously, I saw it on the news,” while all you smell is full-length fur coats matted by a downpour in MacArthur Park and now Cynthia R. wants to know what’s so funny but who can say Oran Juice Jones without a concentrated face so you try to collect the loose nickels and pennies of thought spilling from your front pocket but Cynthia fires up her smartphone to show you the seven-day forecast and now the foil-covered pots on the back of her electric range are beginning to boil and you say, “No, I believe you,” but she believes in tone of voice the way Crayola once believed in a peach crayon called “Flesh” or the way banks believe in daily deposits left by a river’s most assiduous visits. Fact: the city of Pittsburgh has over 400 bridges, let’s say you arch quick when softly pricked as if any foreign finger were a cattle prod and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent electricity but he certainly earned a shiny penny by cutting out the lights during thunderstorms, only your steady tone is mono as a Sinatra single on the platter of a hand-cranked Victrola, and Cynthia cocks her head like a small dog that is not boarding your single­-storied boat and now you’re a wind-whipped antenna on an empty dinghy bobbing dockside as she steams out of range of your radio’s befuddled dial.
After Ian Sanborn’s ASL poem of the same title A man with eyes as blank as the indifference of nature is staring straight ahead as the whole thing unfolds. He has a black beard, black shirt, black woolen cap —  he could be a thief — you better keep your eyes on his hands which have begun clearing a clearing. Here he plants a seed as small as his own fingernail, and shazam! it sprouts roots, shoots, stems, branches —  a whole tree shouldering up, tossing and swaying in the air between the sun’s magic hands and the man’s indifferent eyes. Next thing you know, an orphan index finger is worming its way across the stage that wasn’t a stage until your eyeing it made it so. It inches over to the tree like a lost knuckle finding its way home, its feelers testing, feeling, sniffing, finding purchase, finding a toe-hold, the tiny, spiny, hairy, leg-like appendages beginning to wiggle, to climb, to shinny up the tree, the elbow, the sheer escarpment, pausing to send out a line, a lasso, a long rope as fine as the filament of a spider launched from its abdomen and hooking the thumb of the lowest branch. A rope for rappelling, for jumping off this cliff, taking this dive, twisting as it untwists, enfolding as it unfolds, holding on for dear life as it spins itself into silk, those indifferent eyes almost imperceptibly squinting in sympathy with this closing up, this cloaking, this cloistering, this hanging upside down with a pulse inside. A fluttering pulse. A pulse like the flutter of eyelids. Like the flutter of wings. A heartbeat growing stronger, stronger, breaking out, breaking free, the wings opening, the eyes opening as if all this time they were closed —  the blank eyes opening to the wings, taking them in, incredulous, in love with them — and the black and white has grown iridescent; the orphaned knuckle has found the hands; the hands have found their wings, and we are all utterly blown away.Ian Sanborn's ASL poem may be viewed here.
Tournaments lasted days and changed you, but today the living and dead are speaking through microphone of “I Voted” button, erogenous zone, a place in the mind’s wrestle, pause that votes and bets. Other voters return to homes, run dishwasher, read to kids, get high and craft. Still others walk the golf course turning gold with sprinkler. Returns are noted. No one hangs who had not already planned to hang. At some point I’ve thrown almost everything, and broken within, activated like a glow stick. It is a sustained throwing; an act with its stink of trash — power out — each evening, the stairs and the light switch, and a pause at the open door. Unenunciated stair-structures are closing off the switch from voice to silence. This morning, a snail bore its huge garden shell, the color of owl, into the afternoon. How to choose what to bring! I set the excess down by the door, for nobody who is there, or seems that way. Near the fire. Where the weather vane points is where I’ll carry my father, slung fleece and steady footfall into the valley of the painting above the couch, brushstrokes crazed and smoked, enveloping the riders, us, trot-dazed in a conjectured landscape paralyzed by the wind’s chisel. The clouds are a sheet the volcano staples above parking lots to hills where owners shit and talk on the last phones. As long as the sheet holds I will be darling. Or it is the mildewed sail battened down where I hide from fathers. Light rain makes rooftops new. Boughs fracture like lines an iced-over pond zags ahead of a boot and in there we get glimpses of inquiry, otherness to learn more about. Silence becomes the subject the speaker set out to be, landscape’s counterpart, and reflection my resemblance. A hand goes up to stop the process, and, when the process doesn’t stop, suppresses until the next moment approaches, and passes, the bid dizzy with regeneration. Let’s fold this balloon into animals, vehicles, a weapon, the air inside song, or last breath, or first. I’m a dog when I ape my words. Who would dent or differ? The teeth of the pig are, it whispers, red and brown and recede now that they have been mentioned. When I look close: not us. What is inexpressed? This departure hurries by and is like the lion who simultaneously guards the books and elsewhere tests the river with a paw, stone in the first and lean flesh in the other world where the sun is blessing its glide back into thornbushes and I am stone, guarding stone. There is no predator I would like to be torn in half by, from the logging road a cut like a jeweler’s work down to the shore where the sea stars disappeared leaving nukes and love metered and syllabary and also the rocks they used to cling to exposed at low tide, green clocks. At dawn a fishing boat’s uncertain past the rock offshore, chord on chord. Warped sexual knuckle in flushed purple and hundreds of shades of orange, herpetic and stone to touch, cut, they grow back, vitrified, easy to draw. Round was the dish of mints in the conference room where we signed over my mother’s liver, some mints were soft and pastel, some hard with white covering. Mint grows back in the creek. The liver grows back too, largest organ in the body. No, not skin, mother, skin is on the body —  we addressed this with the host at trivia night no, not the one I go to each Sunday with friends, the constant one I sleep inside of every blink. Time’s the thing that’s not the mind or the baby, which wants a nipple. Time’s a baby in a sling, all the babies in the park on blankets, beginning, a minor electricity, water and dust a kind of suet in a hanging cage and is larger than whatever the universe turns out to be (a strawberry pip) all tough winter, which has been shown to prosper. Seen from the past the line is the present when the astronauts came back, bid us bury our gravity and grow the lines that are the story of loneliness, waste, either enough or not enough. I walk past the potted plants in the side alley, marigold, sunfollower, a good plate, give a little water, adjust the moments. Constellation of last images before sleep: a walk around the drained reservoir, arrival at the island; having a theater all to yourself and they show the movie anyway. Formless or forming interior scrumble: the fluttering of her eyelid is like what floats up the chimney. Something inside is being stepped-down to the noises from when I was here last. This time of year you can see to the bottom of the lake.
I like the blue pill best. Just like a gladiola, its true flower is invisible. The rest is holy. Not like in that Tintoretto where no one knows god is dying, just the usual jingle and squawk from the birdmongers then sudden downpour, a few of the demons dwelling beneath the earth tentatively stir. Not like that. Not tentative. Imploring. The wound tingles. A head of foam forms on the mountain. Into my hand is placed a Mycenaean horse. Into my hand is placed a wax hand. The filament will not break. The fox gets closer. Mint barks. 5% of its life, an ant is active. The rest is holy. Wolfhowl ringtone is holy. Sticking out your tongue in the rearview mirror is holy. Any song that never leaves the lungs, all us animals garlanded and belled.
The man I pulled tonight carried a load of books. When I felt him watching me uphill, I grimaced. He gave me lunar cakes the size of two camel humps. When I answered him, I smiled to his face. He wore the moonlight in his specs. Pant seams clean as the embroidery work of his book covers. One cannot grow rich without a bit of cleverness. Should I have shown him the secret of my deft touch? The Circling Moon, the Graceful Swan? How East Wind beats West Wind if other two winds say so? Snow falls on cedars.
I might have married a painter, Therefore his mother. A radar Detector, a snow-covered Mountain, a novel By John Grisham not even Out yet. No, I wed The cop directing my rush,Toot toot, a trainer to test Agility, a kettle calling Time to steep. Yes, But I married this bird you must Close your eyes to know At scale, to hear his trills And fancy arpeggios Come-come-hithering. His note of warning.
Because our family is from the countryside, Your father liked falling from high places. Limber feet make expert tree climbers. The coconut — meat for eating, fiber for the buttonmaker. Your father liked falling from high places. Upon landing, he smiles. I carry my share. The coconut — meat for eating, fiber for the buttonmaker. Where the bend in the trunk begins matters most. Upon landing, he smiles. I carry my share. Husband and wife walk home, avoiding rice paddies. Where the bend in the trunk begins matters most. Even if they are full, trees that stand straight: avoid climbing. Husband and wife walk home, avoiding rice paddies. Your grandmother warned me many times over. Even if they are full, trees that stand straight: avoid climbing. But we were young, the city called to us like a wilderness. Your grandmother warned me many times over. Saigon is big, too busy, lacking decency. But we were young, the city called to us like a wilderness. The day he died, the sun heated the cement too hot for bare feet. Saigon is big, too busy, lacking decency. Afterwards, home brought no comfort. The day he died, the sun heated the cement too hot for bare feet. The New World Hotel stands fourteen stories. Afterwards, home brought no comfort, Because tragedy cannot save face. The New World Hotel stands fourteen stories. Everyone here must remember my new dress last fall, Because tragedy cannot save face. Our neighbors recount our tale with great skill and detail. Everyone here must remember my new dress last fall. With the white of his palms alone, your father made us a living. Our neighbors recount our tale with great skill and detail. The palm trees out front aren’t tall enough. With the white of his palms alone, your father made us a living. Even when we were promised, I could see he had ability. The palm trees out front aren’t tall enough. Mind your father, improve yourself, head upwards. Even when we were promised, I could see he had ability. He climbed until he got us to the city. Mind your father, improve yourself, head upwards. Limber feet make expert tree climbers. Because our family is from the countryside, He climbed until he got us to the city.
Despite all their fervor they were headed somewhere limp in the intellect nursery rhyme dialect headed somewhere all circumference hunnid something for Sumerian tablet happy meals where you get to munch the code-cold sun upfront the rest when you’ve eaten a bit of rat flesh in the shape of yesterday perishing  youth addiction : Future dreams of codeine nibbles the white nipple wedged between him and his soul stice staaay sis what is this? passes out on the battlefield, improviser / wisest man I ever mumbled alongside Power with all the wars in it ain’t shit in a flawed system besides self-destruction may all our enemies become powerful and empty in the west while we sell our bodies these mumbled prayers codeine ain’t got nothin to do with my love, child either labor in the holds was painless bled ’til the chains lost their grip and there are tapes to prove it
In the constant lutte to not become that bougie housewife of an athlete taking too much oxy while the help cooks ethical fried chicken for my family and I’m also the help and the television sighs and wags in the back some Wendy Williams rerun and this is acceptable and celebrating neon israel and soul is so radio : I walk alone. I know myself. Or so I chant in the mirror right around discovering that trap music is all the new negro spiritual / righteous delirium try to defund the clown in the en in negro say it a little less enter the New Yorker in Desdemona’s scarf and be this generative productive whistle blower for the radicals / coal at the root of slow kill and not scream at the Salvadorian man with the leaf blower in my landscape and hide him and his hoes when the ICE raid follows and swallow mister PCs pcp , in this constant creaseless / as in iron willed / as in willow weep for me / effort to love my enemy I became him The body of me. Its erotic disbelief temporarily suspended . alongside the American eagle : temptation to define freedom as consumerism, justice as my right to an object in a special whites only window : see that seedless eagle run the heavens so : suspended and hovering over my own safe house and spraying it with liquid hog manure literally. Check WikiLeaks. Assange looks like a creep but he saves everybody but himself so he must be. Negro do you wanna be that creepy?
I mean to really live? Kick a spook in the stomach and commit to yourself and not be committed. Sit through another because I got it like that yoga class where a Coldplay soundtrack competes with the upbeat white chick reminding you to be present, to thank yourself for making it to your mat. Point to any place on the map and blow it up. Blow up spots. Why you gotta blow up spots? I loved Lebanon, never quite made it. I spit out the sudden ash with Don Cherry in Marrakech. I lifted one chiseled leg so high over my head Magic City had called and the ATL was ready to blow me up and I said, please. Do I do. What you do. Sing with me. Another shooter made it first and the ACLU was a petty bunch of pseudo-saviors but they blew up spots that one day. So many sad stories you start laughing at the wrong time and you thought yours was one ’til the time working at Ailey with the girl whose mom was killed by her very own daddy in front of the just-say-no rainbow she drew him in class. She wears heavy aquamarine eyeshadow and closes the gap between feeling and being. I’m glad you’re Dorothy Dandridge. Ban on that word, daddy. Banksy sees the zoo in you and cages hisself in bluer notes. I go wild and will, and will. Myth is a special kind of killer and I love her atonal smile. Without her we’d all go bye-bye, point to a place in the rap and make it a black hole, let it suck us in hug the cuckolded sucker emcees and let it hold us against our certain demolition. Without her you would find it hard to live. All the opiates would shrivel into sickle cell and all the blood running through the streets would keep on believing in bodies —  what obsolete machines, the only ones worth saving. Thank yourself for making it for being present for the cold ache you sit with and rock into situations for the way you exploded in nuclear winter and thought you had dreamed it and made a new world bent as your denial reached forth to caress it all and it shocked your fingertips this is the bravest numbness
What will you be like when the daylight comes? I’m glad you’re Diana Ross, today. What is she scraping off her face? Two strobing flashlights at the apex of the cheekbones, one on the tip of the nose. I’m so glad you’re Dorothy. Nineties depression chic nirvana flannel and hobo overalls accented with stilettos are back falling through lawn chairs as Rodney King. Your dog ran away in the night and I’m celebrating. Caleb caught a case and I’m running through the streets like there’s a bouquet of swords in one fist and balloons in the other, dissembling my distress. In high school we read Camus’s Rebel but stayed up till midnight to catch the second airing of Jerry Springer on three way. I mostly remember the brawls and such earnest DNA testing, such universal are you my daddy tales. We’d stay on the phone and wait for the results. The audience hated reconciliation and everyone was someone’s mom outrunning the weightless claymation noonnight. Praying for patient doom. Tasting like Cool Ranch Doritos and a room of one’s own. Sullen minstrel cuddling the spotlight won’t you put down your phone and tell me what’s really the matter. Why won’t they call security before she hurls another chair. Their spectacle protects them from sorrow and all sorts of water rots in Chicago and no one seems outraged when the mother’s boyfriend is her daughter’s babyfather no one turns down the complimentary coffee and hamburgers or stabs him in the groin. By default, by heroic shamelessness. Did you spend at least eight and a half minutes in daylight. Did you radiate like starch in the Paleolithic age, get so thin it aches. Is the rebel wanted dead or alive? I had asked Diana. She had gone into hiding by then.
Ruby, please. A night shift nurse fell asleep at the wheel. The whole earth had a fever and the heated pulse beats faster ’til everything picturesque has her reeling. Just tryna make it real baby, like it is. He condescends. Twitching a trio of flax seeds between the thumb and forefinger in a dirty spiral, these are full of phytoestrogens that turn the gender    ...    generic    ...    generous. Hey, girl! Crease in her hey the size of turning. Is that mean? I live in place where it’s mean to be honest but I come from a place where it’s generous. Freetown is hedged on a slum. The ghetto, everybody’s vigilante. Cut to the footage of a young boy swimming in floodwater made of mud and feces. Constructed. Like shelter, the safest destination the excess has. You see a fugitive, I see my daughter’s future husband, Ma quips, full sunned and sweet, a nigga who can swim, can hunt her free. Glad silk bending his teeth into a Sunday hotel. And the kind of silt that reachers for shatter. All the land is water. You come forth through the cosmic slop by drowning. The sun is a gang of murders. You come through on the new acquittal looking for chicken strips and bourbon with Netflix on in the background and I’ll kill you myself. Back on the Las Vegas strip, the sun is a bouquet of drones chasing promoters through a circus. Stand there and look indignant in a bandana and stop calling the Loa out their names before they answer. You’re on the guest list for lil yachty and one oak and it’s a mouthpiece the boxer’s choking on when the nurse wakes up, a double suicide, American, pie and guns and obscene convenience, proud mascots for an army with no one left to defend
Looks to me like you’ve been disinherited, mute-chanting while sirens scatter the will into a dull blade that can be attached to the muzzle of a rifle like a shadow or braid joke. Stray dreadlock at the bus stop/ black stranded on blue/ and grape flavored bayonet that’s the word, French, daisy-hued lemon enunciation of when. I heard you were leaving this country and you tried holding Rockefeller to daddy’s promise in the corridor of  being reasonable and that he who could not sing should be made to sing and the crow pecking at synthetic kinky reggae would stow ’way home If we start thinking about the things that keep us in a place we know we shouldn’t be in and as the gates swing open jump rope like boxers training in velour short-shorts and spitfire just to keep brides in the jungle sequestered / the sore lavender nipples of the dairy cows add a rude dimension to the tasting menu but that’s what feeds you this sour mold juice, like the tiny yelling hands that piece together these machines american dolls and darn that charming cardigan made in Stanley Cowell’s incantatory shroud of a winter power outage , every shimmering object settles in cold blood but I will not be interrupted of it . I’m sending you two black babies the greeting card reads the wood of the reed splits like the chief’s prophecy/ mask , Ma remembers the one that sold her first was it her father what is a father bath on netted lots . of stray turtle doves in this tribe, ruler and thundering Bula gnawing on the missing leg of a queen’s stool, hers, m aa fa s nursing trumpet was she her father I will not be interrupted even to be my own father watching me dance and earn him a village . even by Black Christ of the Tropics begging to learn his name in silver verses I will not be interrupted I will not be interrupted
are our spirits, these loquacious silver gods who glide at some safe distance above their rank and proletarian bodies. Foul though fascinating landscapes they are that they traverse, besmirched with armpits and fruity genitalia and belching gobs and those impulsive blurting sphincters in whose hot updrafts they might ascend and soar. O, but our spirits are so lustrous, so hairless, so advanced in their glass-bottomed flying machines which run on just about nothing! What quick and icy notions they have that slot into one another like the tightest clocks, and how they lick their lips as they gaze down in anticipatory glee, for though they would not themselves wish to rough it, they certainly will peep through their bedroom windows, each a jiggling voyeur of its own ardent body when that body has chanced upon another, and the pair of them have knuckled down to their immersive work.
In a visually spectacular dream some years back, I took Paul Klee’s posthumous class in poetry and painting. What luck to be swept with the elect across the ocean that night to environs that could only be by Klee. Klee? you protest. Surely the dreamer is everyone in her dream.
what a saint you are, shining on everything, drawn to the world like flames are to moths, like honey to bees. So readily do you dole yourself out, and in such abundance so that we might operate our otherwise redundant eyes. For they’d be useless even as shiny bibelots that studded the otherwise dull surfaces of faces. No, in your absence, in that total darkness the eyes wouldn’t see or even be seen. And they would soon shrivel up and desiccate, die out from pointlessness like the little toe will (unless we can find a way to reverse its long decline). Hey, plump eyes! Isn’t it time you put your tiny wet hands together for the light!
Existence trumps nonexistence every time. It has all the colors and all the shapes and all the moves, it is rude in its bounty and its grotesque reach that overcomes all before it. This bit of stick I found in the park was showing off because the dead can’t have it. They can’t have any of it. It was sticky and prickled with a showy, dazzling presence, though it’s quietened a little now, now that I’ve taken it home and have it here on the mantelpiece. It has dressed in purple robes and carried its being like a chalice with such disarming mock-solemnity down and down the pale carved steps into its candlelit depths. Its being rests inside it now and purrs quite inaudibly with a sound like the most exclusive refrigerator, or a sound you might take for your own sovereign wheels spinning. Little stick. Wait for me. I’m coming.
In the end, some are incurable. They use lint to mop up the leaking, or apply cold poultices. Creeping mess can be cleared up with pink paste or trapped in sawdust and swept. Blood can pool from their sitting and standing, but they avoid clots by regular shaking, and the sucking of sherbet. Blue blue for the sky, white for the walls, apricot for glass and woodwork. They devise a timetable by casting lots. They scrabble around in the dirt for clues. Seven is too magical a number to hold, but the soft ones like to handle it constantly. They polish its fine teak head, drive theories through its shaft and talk into the early hours about how it can resemble an ax, or sex, and how it solves, as well as creates, all conundr/ums/a. They admire their creosoted fence for protection and their own faces in its misaligned hasp. A Mrs. Milkwater puts baby brushes to soak in milk and water (and vinegar). Her sons are successful barbers. At precisely midnight the blue lights go out. The red lights stay home.
More sky please push open the apartment shutters crowbar the paint factory’s broken window frames rip tar paper from the caving roof push it back crack it open blast an airshaft through the neighboring buildings snap it back expose the bird-ridden drafts the wren’s been busy here mornings year-round churr and chip golden open-throat yodel smack in the sleep cycle soldered to feeder suet in ivy like titmouse chickadee refusing to shift it back Carolina Canada climate haywire more sky please rik tik tik break open more light all the way past oil tank farms creosote docks the Kill Van Kull slide by kingfisher flap past cormorant incongruous flights parallel and merging plunge into slap out of tidal pools the Fresh Kills beak full of killifish and silversides crayfish and krill tarp past the salt grass and bridges fly Pulaski Skyway Bayonne’s silver buildings blank tower blocks sky wide as the river mouth more sky more please push it back past tankers and tugboats the last hulking cruise ship lasers fired across a spinning disco ball wobble bass and echo chamber dancing on deck past clanging buoys waveless channels to deepest basin all things even terns drop away sea and sky opened wide and empty
You. You at the door a crumpled thing when I open surprised. Sing, you hiss. Prosecute, sentence, waving your thin not-arms like dollar bills, your bewildering moldy skin — one or two of you are you, are you a god now, bony, wing-beaten down, smaller than ever, not dead as you should be but not alive either as you indicate mumbling almost falling in on your clawed feet — I still have desire — you float — at my small door — me inside — me inside life. Are you newborn now, I ask. Are you remnant. Why. Why are there moneylenders you say swatting me away when I ask can I help, growing more crumbled, but more than just cloth — all feather, burlap, beak, fingergrip, all edge and cling. A thing not formed or not divided yet. Pre-conception. Just at the threshold. Almost falling in your uneven crouching. Your chest a pulsation. A languishment that will not die. What is die. Now there is not blood on the earth anymore. We disappear. We pixilate. Races or places, is it. Which? Remember what it was to carry your load? Your you. That weight. Wondrous it was. At intervals light-struck. Silence and then the cutting of water, sleeping audible, thrown about by breath, keeping a sharp lookout — here’s where free choice vanished, here rights, here the real meaning of the word — (you choose) — consequence, capital, commodity, con- sumption. Community? Come here says time. Just try to find it, the here. Such a good game to keep you occupied for now. The rest of the now. It’s going to be a long time. Why are you here. What are they lending you.How can it be loaned. What is a loan. The changers. Who gets to keep it. No one gets to keep it. No one. None of it. What is it. The money changers. What can you change it into. What else do you want the things to become. But it won’t stay still as currency either. It will be changed again. Shape-shifting and all the other tiny adjustments. Currency manipulation — feel it — all those other hands on it, each with its own need, having held it — grasped, changed, folded, tucked, handed — oh look it becomes virtual — the fingerprint is lifted off, its little stain — no one’s need is on it any- more. It’s clean. It has never been, and never again will be, touched. The looping ledger of the fingerprint’s wish. I signed my name to this. Did you. In the hush. At the center. Among the closed shutters at the height of the day I signed. I clenched the pen and then my dream. It flowed. No one is ever at home. I don’t know why. Had been told to live by any means possible. Did. Beyond, the sea. You could feel this period coming to an end. All of it. A bomb went off, legs went off, means went off, blew off, like gossamer — nothing stalled — you couldn’t get it to stall — seemed painted-on but it was not, was sleeping, reality finally was sleeping — so deeply — you couldn’t wake it up again, you couldn’t wake yourself again — it rained — time sputtered now and then like a regurgitation of space. It’s a jail, light says, but it looks like just being lost, full of the things we needed to learn, us ready to step up and offer our lungs, intake and out, change me we say. We want to be identified, written-in, collected. Worth me up. Give me my true  value ... But still I have to bring this to you in these words, cracked glaze all over it, little holes over it, belief drilled through, self, that boutique, gone under, such dark windows, history arrested ... History arrested. How is that possible. It flowed. It flowed without us, us on it if we could catch a ride sometimes. How do you live in this end. I look at you. You have been through. Your war is done. I try to squint it in. Do you really want to begin again. Is that why you’re here. I feel I could count your fingers, each hair left on you, each thread of skin, each crease. Four or five times you cast a glance on us. But then it’s done. Your passing by us now a buzzing of flies. You stand at the window and the song begins. We don’t know what to do with it, the moon, that monster, the fame and the thirst, the night out there a shirt rolled up to reveal what dusk had hid — a murky heart, a love that would never be replaced. But they are still there on the steps — the money changers. The steps of evening rise. They want you to exchange. That is the sacrament. Why does he  keep throwing them out. Day after day. Forever. Listen to me, you say, you are going off into thought, it is not a real road. Take yourself off the road. He is and is not but he is. And you are always in the holy place. Because just being in it makes it holy. Uphold it. Linger. Be eternal for this instant. Lodge in. I cannot say in what. Have spent a lifetime saying in. In flow, in promise, rich, in haste experiment crowd season in bias gnawing at hope invisible in time standing in it confounded tongue in my mouth about to curl up, speak, promise, taste promise, laugh at the ignorance, cherish ignorance — don’t leave — this is where I’ve arrived — don’t slip away, the reverse of the watching and waiting is finally here, wasn’t mine, wasn’t me speaking either. Not anymore. This is that dream. The darling of failure. No identification. All impending and then the now strikes. It is unbreakable. It is. You must believe me. I want to be here and also there where you receive this but I can’t. That’s the whole story. I will never know what is there to know. You will not be changed. You must believe.
here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole hill-sweeping grove down, its mile-long headfuls of leaves upswept so the whole valley shivers its windy silvers, watery ... A strange heat is upon us. Again. That was you thinking that. I suggested it. Maybe the wind did. We both put in the horizon line now, the great loneliness, its grip, chaos recessed but still there. After finitude you shall keep coming toward me it whines, whitish with non-disappearance. We feel the same about this. The same what? We feel is there more. That’s the default. We want to live with the unknown in front of us. Receding, always receding. A vanishing moving over it all. A sleepy vacancy. It’s the sky, yes, but also this thinking. As from the start, again, here I am, a mind alone in the fields. The sheep riding and falling the slants of earth. The sleepiness a no-good god come to assume we are halfwits, tending, sleepy, the animals gurgling and trampling, thistle-choked, stinging. A dove on a stone. No sky to speak of, the god lingers, it wants to retire, it thinks this is endgame, what could we be — mist about to dry off, light about to wipe a wall for no reason, that random. This must have been way BC. Or is it 1944. Surely in 2044 we shall be standing in the field again, tending, waiting to surprise the god who thinks he knows what he’s made. Well no. He does not know. We might be a small cavity but it guards a vast hungry — how bad does that hurt you, fancy maker — you have no idea what we turned our back on to come be in this field of earth and tend — yes tend — these flocks of minutes, whispering till the timelessness in us is wrung dry and we are heavied with endgame. Have I mentioned the soul. How we know you hustled that in, staining all this flesh with it, rubbing and swirling it all over inside with your god-cloth. Rinse. Repeat. Get this — here with this staff which soon I shall turn into a pen again — brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless — I hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I’ve made, I see the dry field blonde-up and green, day smacks its lips, they are back, the inventors, they are going to do it again, sprinkle-seed, joker rain coming to loosen it all. How many lives will we be given, how many will we trade in for this — it comes in bushels, grams, inches, notes, crows watch over it all as they always have, come back from the end of time to caw it into its redo again. Cherish us. Will not stop. Nothing to show for it but doing. The flock runs across as the dog chases and I walk slowly. I admire what I own what I am and I think the night is nothing, the stars click their ascent, I feel it rise in me, the word, I feel the skull beneath this skin, I feel the skin slick and shine and hide the skull and it is from there that it rises now, I taste it before I say it, this song.
Some people say the devil is beating his wife. Some people say the devil is pawing his wife. Some people say the devil is doubling down on an overall attitude of entitlement toward the body of his wife. Some people say the devil won’t need to be sorry, as the devil believes that nothing comes after this life. Some people say that in spite of the devil’s public, long-standing, and meticulously logged disdain for the health and wholeness of his wife, the devil spends all day, every day, insisting grandly and gleefully on his general pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly considers himself to be an unswayed crusader: effortlessly magnetic, scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of the devil’s several advanced degrees, a luminous autodidact. Some people say calm down; this is commonplace. Some people say calm down; this is very rare. Some people say the sun is washing her face. Some people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.
wolf moon No moon in sight, so I howled at the exit sign instead. Red runes, electric. Telling an old story of escape, of wind, a wide cold. A distant car alarm. Otherwise: the dark, and our bodies, two strange women trying to touch each other. Breathing strange. Moving toward or away from each other as the red ghost in the sky opened, called us gone, showed us the door to another world. Otherwise, the dark, and our mouths, tearing at what bones we could find. Grinning and hungry for something — something we couldn’t, with all our words, name.   snow moon The magic where the streetlights turn the snow pink lasts only for the first night, the same way, maybe, a blanket loses track of its scent when it’s been touched by too many hands, or the way a body grays when too many feet have dragged their cigarettes and complaints through it. But for that one first night, everything cold- flecked and whispering was ours, the pink light ours, sent from some other world so we could, for a night, feel untouched. So we could feel like sugar—crumbling, and perfect for it.   worm moon Like any girl, I pulled myself into shreds to test the rumor that something with blood like mine could be halved and still whole. And what did I learn? I buried myself all over the garden, but the pieces only sprouted into new riddles: squid leg, spaghetti squash, a jerking thumb. Their names still sounded like mine; everyone in the same dress, chewing dirt to avoid each others’ eyes. I lay down next to the one beneath the porch, hiding among the oyster shells. Don’t cry, I said, but she cried anyway. Her tears fell straight into my eyes. What a lesson—to watch them float back and forth between us until we knew each one’s shape. Until we knew, finally, what to do with them.   pink moon Outside, the colors leapt from the trees. Here, inside, some new word was blooming in my underwear—darker than I’d expected. I’d expected something pink; a slow, sweet trickle. Not this wet tar, treacle, dark, like the blood had been stretching inside me for years, slow-building into a sticky chord, the first falling away. Soil’s been watered; come play. First stuck, first gum, first hum of pollen, calling in the bees and readying to wilt.   flower moon Spring is the season of crying and seeing nothing. Of choking up on someone else’s trash. Barbed tennis balls that lodge wherever air’s supposed to go, nasal cavity homewreckers. All spring my lenses wrenched themselves from my eyes, jumped ship, spore-lined and furious. Everything melted and ran down my face. All the trees wanted my number. Sent fuzzy messengers to murmur in my ears: I get so afraid sometimes all I want all I want is. All spring I brushed confessions out of my hair. Tore the little letters apart and locked myself in the refrigerator, until the world promised to stop birthing such soft things.   strawberry moon The house was filled with the smell of it, the last misshapen, sweet-heavy berries of the season losing their shapes on the stove. The house was filled with the smell of fruit unbecoming, fruit pulled to its knees at fire’s feet. All summer long, the bushes had whispered take me, shown us all the places we could kiss if we wanted. And so, as the light died, we put our mouths on the least lovable, the too-full, the easy-bruised, we shouted, I choose you, and you, and you, and you, and canned that hunger, and spooned it into our mouths on the coldest days.   buck moon Some of the cloven-hoofed things are good at leaping from one rock shelf to another without shattering. Good, in other words, at falling. I never trusted that ankles were any match for my body’s insistence on becoming earth again. So when I found myself on the cliff face, I knew it was dive or dust. A boy called to me from the bottom of the gorge, called me all the names he knew, and I stood frozen, wearing a crown of bones. The gravel laughed as it fled from my feet. I shouted down to the boy, Don’t try to milk me unless you’re fond of being kicked — buck and bray and jawbone. He responded, No, totally, sounds tough, how are you feeling?   sturgeon moon I hid in his rivers and estuaries. I ate his wet earth’s crops. I grew plump for him. Grew egg-lined, thirty tiny hearts in my belly, fruit thumping with seeds. He pulled me from the mud. Laid me out in the sun. Opened me down the center. Scraped every dead daughter from my silly maw. I learned better next time. Next time, I grew three extra rows of seeds. Hid them in my mouth. Sharpened them to teeth.   harvest moon Last winter, when we finally kissed under fluorescent lights, that was the seed we pressed between the ground’s lips. Then I laughed when the sky collapsed into pathetic rivers. Then I drank the dirt through my hooves, and liked it. Then I ate all the sun I could find. Though the weeds claw, sugar-starved, at my thighs. Though the sky casts over, cataract, callous, and the earth fumes as iron claws uproot the children’s children we keep warm in our bellies. Still, when the moon and the horses are fat on the horizon, still you’ll find me, arms heavy with eggplant, chard, tomatoes bruised blue, blushing kohlrabi till the kohlrabi’s gone. Will you pluck me before the dust does, root and all, radicchio tendon? I promise, I’ll feed no upright animal. Only the bees and the bees, beans sitting on the squash’s face. Will you turn your palms to the sky? Will you turn your palms to the prayer hunger makes? Will you feed and feed, and lick the bowl clean when we’re both full?   hunter’s moon I picked up my own scent somewhere on the forest’s edge. Spoiling flour, holy basil, sweat. My oldest smell is the smell that still clings to pajama sleeves late into Saturday afternoon. Toothpaste, mixed with the musk of rest. I pressed my snout to the ground and breathed deep, watched the tendrils of my slug trail bloom blue, bioluminescent. I followed the maze, pushbrooming forest floor with face, followed the promise of a rapid heart. Don’t ask who’s the bloodhound, who’s the hare, when there’s a chase to be made: the clarity of a cardinal direction clicking into place. And: the quickening—the tendons that appear, sudden, when the distant, rabid howl of hunters rolls across the tree line, and you lift your head in greeting.   beaver moon We made our home in the place where the water slowed. Yes. We flooded the plains until the landscape bloomed with wet. We stopped the tub. We drew a bath and called the river to its new, quieter life. Ring-builders. Kingdom carved. At the end of the line, we made our own place. Sure, from above, it looks like a snaking tail, headed by a circle. From here, in the mud, it doesn’t look like that at all. It looks like a world. Like a cleared space. Like everything that’s left when the trees soften and come, at last, crashing.   cold moon   Back below the ice. Back to swim. Seastar. Creeping brine. We salt, sink. We pull down the cold. We pull the moon to our floor. Hello. Waterstone. Brinicle. Cold-blooded and still flesh. Still horned fingers groping the kelp bed. Still salt. Pull. Everything the ice touches. Is ours. Is quiet now. We sink slow. We pray still. For moon. We answer it now. Ourselves.
Say licked clean at birth. Say  weeping in the tall grass, where  this tantalizing song begins,  birds perched on a crooked branch over a grave of an unending trek  into the valley of cooling waters.  The soil’s thirst, lessons of earth  unmoor the first tongue. Say I have gone back, says the oracle,  counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault  lines between one generation & next,  as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen, & one glimpses what one did not know. Say  this is where the goat spoke legends ago  in the ring of fire to deliver a sacrifice.  To feel signs depends on how & why the singer’s song puckers the mouth.  Well, I believe the borrowed rib  story is the other way round, entangled  in decree, blessing, law & myth. One only has to listen to nightlong pleas  of a mother who used all thousand  chants & prayers of clay, red ocher  blown from the mouth onto the high stone wall, retracing land bridge  to wishbone. My own two daughters & granddaughter, the three know how  to work praise & lament, ready to sprout wings of naked flight & labor. Yes,  hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy  to clan, from clan to tribe, & today  we worship her sun-polished bones, remembering she is made of questions.  No, mama is not always the first word  before counting eggs in the cowbird’s  nest. It begins in memory. Now, say her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.
Did a big brain raise us  into mountains to range over the valley, to see the approach before whoever it was knew they would walk a path between dusk & dawn half-awake? An eye squinted, & sex as idea made the lids dance. Now, the brain pauses on the edge of ascension or surrender, one sleepy hand pointing at a totem, & the other weighing a stick or jagged stone.
They work fingers to bone & borrow smudged paper, then make promises to family, unmerciful gods, the unborn. Some eat a favorite meal three times in a row. Others partake only a pinch of soil before boarding half-broken boats & rubber rafts — half of the young women big with life inside them, flesh & blood for daydreams of the Arabian nights, as makeshift charts & constellations work their way through war & rumors of war. The smugglers count their loot. Hard winds rattle gongs over sea salt till the rusty engines die, & cries alert mermaid sirens as pirated schooners adrift under a mute sky rock to & fro, & the fight goes out of the few alive. Their loved ones & friends, lost folk songs, mountains & valleys, all left behind. Searchlights spot the dead hugging the living, & draglines raise only those who were braver than us. The lucky ones stumble out of stupor, tried by raging water beneath black skies, listening to the albatross talk.
Like a child, mind wants to play, but even the butterflies are on the clock. Still, attention is happy to comport with the swallowtail as it jerkily rounds the corner. Like a child, mind follows, imitates. First and last it loves sequence. I’ve counted up to one this season.
I was so thirsty, you cracked an egg into my mouth. I ate it & thanked you. We were so rich then. I imagined the moon, a being I’d never seen, in every nail you’d use to tack the tarp over our heads. I confused hens clucking for the ringing of the phone you’d never let me answer. With a spatula to my ear, I’d pretend to be a woman on TV & say:¿Bueno? Your anger was the gun you kept by the door, my fear, the knife I used to chop onions. One night you confused the sound of a snake rattling for rain. The snake opened its jaw & its fangs were the color of mud. You reached for my thighs just before you died & I couldn’t face you. Once you stopped breathing I rubbed your beard between my hands & played the most beautiful cumbia. We danced for the first time since our wedding.
A vine drapes the fence in its cool enthusiasm, stemmed cascade. My skin has collapsed in flounces, in anticipation.• Look how I change the subject without changing, I appear to say —  which seems like nothing but is practice for the bigger change to come.• My mind is just like the stance and disposition of these trees —  dense, sparse, conical, lopsided, frilly (as was the mind of the tenant before me
What is a brand? The hopeful tag on the tan underpants that reads “Metaphor” leaves everything to the imagination which by now is plainly exhausted. I could describe these tags as so many flapping tongues, dropping hints about a foreign designer, himself largely a cover story. Someone somewhere must sew a shirt made entirely of red flags. Untiring, music rises then falls through its imagined past.
The songs swept down from the northern steppes with cinerary horse and sword and vestment in the wake of battle suicidal for a bronze translation of flesh burnt to a vertical vapor trail of fame which, so they claimed, would be undying by which they meant the dying would be just prolonged a little longer as on a ladder made of air each legendary smoke of name could only climb by thinning till it wasn’t there. And now as the steel tips of our devices dig, sort through and analyze what’s left behind: scant traces of berserk debris, dumb soot of ritual effaced by dumber ash, beneath ghost towns the ghosts have all abandoned, all we unearth intact now are the untranslated bones of babies, inhumed at home in older dwellings on deeper strata under mud floors in pits — placed carefully on sides, knees drawn to chests, skulls cupped in pebble bones of hand, the dead nursling, the stillborn, the miscarried — unnamed, unadorned, as if the only grave goods buried with them were their perishing —  as if that were what the mothers wanted to keep close, keep hidden, safe from the heroic stench of burning upward while their breasts still swelling dripping freshened the black dirt sucking at their feet.
When Richmond is finally one of the world’s great capitals I will line the streets with apple trees
I like that antique tea wagon and small television. I like the computer built by your brother. I like the man in the yellow jacket as the guide. I like free will and predestination and fate. I like how the mind reaches out to touch, literally, the light of the stars. I like how the reader is possessed. I like illusions of self that each new self is born into. I like if you love someone set them on fire. I like how the older lady steals the parking space. I like the sickness of soul. I like how the reader is also being watched by the narrator. The kangaroo leather documentary in the pub really pulled me in. The many levels of watching really pulled me in. I like how the narrator flickers in and out. The last chapter is sharp and honest. The last chapter has many serpents eating their tails. This builds habits of nature. This builds emotional connection. This embodies the novel.
Nowhere in those kerosene years could she find a soft-headed match. The wife crosses over an ocean, red-faced and cheerless. Trades the flat pad of a stethoscope for a dining hall spatula. Life is two choices, she thinks: you hatch a life, or you pass through one. Photographs of a child swaddled in layers arrive by post. Money doesn’t, to her embarrassment. Over time, she grows out her hair. Then she sprouts nerves. The wife was no fool, but neither did she wander. She lives inside a season of thrift, which stretches on. Her sorrow has thickness and a certain sheen. The wife knows to hurry when she washes. When she cooks, she licks spoons slowly. Every night, she made a dish with ground pork. Paired with a dish that was fibrous.
Beneath the waver of the dorsal fin lie the blood-shades of lamellae, their skin so close to the vein they breathe, filter, gather, flex, set down in loose and frangible parallels you find in gills of mushrooms, clams, and concertinas. Wave after wave, the tissues of the water breathers conceal what they reveal, according to their vital rhythm. Fins that breathe flit this way, that, in the give-and-take of panic and lust and tropical surge from no one place. To every fish, flesh, nightmare, and song: a private opening and the name it bears. Let us call it tomorrow or lament, the heart of my volition
Where did the handsome beloved go? I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go? He spread his light among us like a candle. Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me? All day long my heart trembles like a leaf. All alone at midnight, where did that beloved go? Go to the road, and ask any passing traveler —  That soul-stirring companion, where did he go? Go to the garden, and ask the gardener —  That tall, shapely rose stem, where did he go? Go to the rooftop, and ask the watchman —  That unique sultan, where did he go? Like a madman, I search in the meadows! That deer in the meadows, where did he go? My tearful eyes overflow like a river —  That pearl in the vast sea, where did he go? All night long, I implore both moon and Venus —  That lovely face, like a moon, where did he go? If he is mine, why is he with others? Since he’s not here, to what “there” did he go? If his heart and soul are joined with God, And he left this realm of earth and water, where did he go? Tell me clearly, Shams of Tabriz, Of whom it is said, “The sun never dies” — where did he go?    Translated from the Persian
Blood of an eye: tamarisk gall. Blood from a shoulder: bear’s breach. From the loins: chamomile. Blood from a head: lupine. A hawk’s heart: heart of wormwood. — From Coptic & Greek Magical Papyri
We have orgies at home. Tonight, it’s The Book of Mormon.
They don’t play loud music. They don’t have a dog. I think they’re both mimes.
Sometimes the blue in Blue Hawaii gets lost. But Elvis’s eyes speak pure Esperanto.
A flowery old-fashioned kind of speechlessness.
We got sent home early& no one knew why. I think weare at war! I yelled to my sisterknapsacks ringing against our backs. I copy-catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachersgot silent. Can’t blame me for taking a good idea.I collect words where I find them. I’m young & no one aroundknows where my parents are from.  A map on our wall & I circle allthe places I want to be. My auntie, not-blood but could be,runs the oil through my scalp.  Her fingers play the strands of my hair.The house smells like badam.  My uncle, not-blood but could be,soaks them in a bowl of water.  My auntie says my people mightbe Afghani. I draw a ship on the map. I write Afghani under its hull. I countall the oceans, blood & not-blood, all the people I could be,the whole map, my mirror. The kids at school ask me where I’m from & I have no answer. I’m a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. The towers fell two weeks ago & I can’t say blow out loud or everyone will hate me. They all make English their own, say that’s the bomb. I know that word’s not meant for me but I collect words where I find them. I practice at night, the crater it makes of my mouth. I whisper it to my sheets,bombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbomb a little symphony, so round. I look up & make sure no one heard.
Tell me how you entered this poem, how you even got in here. Where my parentals come from is where I’m coming from and where where I’m coming from is from we lock the front door and the back and the side and can’t spare a single extra key. Wherewhere I’m coming from is from we shut all the windows tight like our eyes to an ugly view: a jail if I ever saw one, and maybe I did, and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe you made the mistake, by coming here. Unannounced. Uninvited. It takes a lot of talent to step in someone’s crib and be welcomed without any alarms going off, so shake your ass something dangerous if you can, sing me a song real sexy-like or be suck out of luck if I feel like shooting strangers today. If home is where the heart is then four red bullet wounds across the chest of the city’s flag say everything there is about my feelings toward you and the whole damn world right now. Because it was my own blood this time and yet I’m still here, and the funny thing about that town and this one is that they both burned down once. And down the hall they’re burning bud and I want some kinda sorta but without the friends. Which makes you foe, I suppose, as if you are the presence of all colors and I am the absence of said colors. But maybe I got it backwards, twisted it all up. It just hurts to have my hair pulled even if it’s by my own hand. My mind is spinning blanks inside every chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love: squeeze. When lonely, loan yourself some time and don’t pay it back. Beware, because I’m both lonely and in love like the living embodiment of the code switch. I’m polluted air and poisoned water and whatever else they say except when I say I’m not and I’m not one to play for a fool for the record. Fear me. I’m godly and I’m just and just get the hell out demon and do come again. Come again: it’s my igneous ire toward you that keeps me a live wire, and alive.
Spandex leggings authenticating my anaerobic  exit strategies. Crotch but a bumper sticker in a heretofore-fleeting waterloo. Crunk repentance. I span our doomed alphabet soup like Jane Fonda’s antiwar legs  in calisthenic videos. My zenith of hair a brown,  wannabe-Fawcett, mean-ole-toucan pupic papa — . He who so feeds on an entire corpus and still starves, helms the colloquium outside the bathroom of transubstantiation.Tonight — a vastly archived Nietzschean nighttime — I anal bleach my humpty- dumpty stigmatas.  Boys conch with crimson Hollywood carpets that disentangle from their cavities, accustoming their catwalks upon the blood clots of their mamacitas. As twilight uncrowns the shade,  I howl effluvium, switchblade hue to hue. I plié before the gas cloud lifting jumbo leaves. Like a mythic infantry, the thirsty roaches begin to leatherflock.
is surely a peculiar answer for any teacher to receive when asking a kindergartner, but on second take, what word best describes me, crossbreed of butterfly and Super Fly aesthetics, other than peculiar? I suppose calling me a keen kid would also suffice in explaining my avidity for the kind of death that progresses the narrative of a gentling history, because that’s the only frame for greatness I seem to find for boys my shade and age to aspire to, short of having the height and hops to touch the rim, or the bulk and burst to break through the defensive line like a bullet.And, no, I haven’t given up on the prospect of Bulls starting shooting guard yet, but the God-fearer impressed upon me begs the mythology of goodness delivered to the multitudes like loaves and fish;how King is talked about in a black Christian tradition stillin mourning over his lost rays of light, the way mentioningthe name of Malcolm makes mice of shady white men some thirty years after the shotgun and he’s sung of as a prince: I want to evoke that level of pride in American democracy’s dark downtrodden because I know what it invokes in me, young and impressionable, watching Denzel’s mimicry for the one millionth time in my abbreviated existence —  drawing an X on my undeveloped chest, pushing it out into the unknown-ahead hoping a Mecca for melanin rises from the man-shaped hole I’d left in my loved ones’ lives.I bet my parents would be so proud of me. I bet post offices would close on my birthday. I bet God would dap me upwhen I got up there and Jesus — dying on a cross to meet me.
Jewelry boom box spittin’ bidi bidi bom bom he verges his groove of slapstick smoke across our donated mosquito nets bidi bidi bombom all night he fingertips our omnivorous junk in his cruel maw of tooth gaps magical realistic funky ass choral arrangements of servitude mighty dump truck hip-ee hip-ee dales my rotunda all over these unsullied shimmies bidi bidi bom bom orb-spider thighs cloaking his genocidal hunches Momma catapulting protection abracadabras over our twiggy panoplies we painstakingly bedecked how many times haven’t we fallen for mishandled precipices in the wrongheaded entirety of machomanic evacuation asteroid in mouth-crooked chaps guayabera deep pink guava pulp rum & coke in his fierce prayerful grip to bypass civility a Google-translated wink inumbrated eyebrows to cast embered mercies I pump bidi bidi bom bom hormonal harmonies for his jawlined mitzvahs bidi bidi bidi bidi bidi on wings only light will kerfuffle flight born at his bidding va-voomed for his favor we puff from the tail of his pickup truck we clothes- line an underwater continent marooned & whiplashed for genesis if carnage can charade competency we too can corrupt castanets timbre compulsory penances over his padded knees bidi bidi bom bom above his life insurance policy rates coma with anointed vanity with the right song a stone will pass for bread break for a fool’s sunrise achieve the love ritual cut scorn’s willy bob hither to this bomb
My heart was a dystopian berry budding in water tiger lilies claiminghocus-pocus wonder. I was broken vanity, vixen vase, victorious tête- à-tête — the Scrabble game nobody wonbecause the tiles aspired speculums. Ocean-misaligned brook / brook-misalignedagua — where else could these gospels have dawned if not in the bellies of men hyenaing a becoming?Twerking in church, I outperformed the candles diarized in the simpleminded annexation. Wussup,Blastoise with the veiniest homeboundpika-pika aim? Wussup, SimsChumbawamba Family Portrait Simulation?St. Sunny of the Sissies beheld the bukkake throngof mojo-coated cartilage squanderedon the refurbished bunk for new cetaceans. A dazzling jeremiadshone me dead until I gridlocked the algebraic expressionsof my body in question marks.These syndicated fiyahs stigmatized my herculean magmashades,but I held these walls apart, every inch of my mascara cut offapple pie.You watched me hobble home while the streets coalesced magenta. Tell Mommathe holes I cover with one error swell — & there are only inadvertent landscapesto dollop with nonetheless.
The alcove of your arm has become my favorite room for sleep, but I’ve been roused by nightmares lately. Even thunderstorms couldn’t wake you
In my country our shamans were women and our gods multiple until white people brought an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I askedWhat about babies and what about Buddha, and she saidThey’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers and recited them in front of women I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil. O sweet Virgin Mary, amen
After Rilke's “Les Fenêtres” i how much loss gains suddenly in emphasis and brilliant sadness  iifar from that which lives and turns  iii languages of our vain comings and goings wilt and gnaw  ivbeat them, punish them for having said and always said  v tear out, finally, our spells  vione life pours and grows impatient for another life  vii and the lovers, look on them there, immobile and frail pinned like the butterflies for the beauty of their wings  viiitoo great in the outdoors  ixlike the lyre, you should be rendered a constellation
I keep returning to John Constable’s Study of Clouds.Oil on cardboard, six by seven and a half inches, it shows purple-graythunderheads, one patch of blue, above low hills and two small trees flanked by shrubsin the left foreground. A sketch en plein air, a half hour’s worth of work at most,it catches exactly one scrap of sky and shifting sunlight on a blusteryday in 1820. The year King George the Third died in Windsor Castle, blindand insane, the year 50,000 Scottish weavers went on strike and printed a proclamationcalling for a new “provisional government.” Their leaders were caught, hanged, and thendecapitated for good measure. This cloud study survived that history.Two minutes later, the clouds would have taken on a different cast of light and shapejust like the thunderheads now piling up above the Liffey. I hobble out of the Dublin City Gallery,take a bus to the river, sit on a park bench with a ziplock bag of ice on my swollen knee. Its wet coldmakes the joint ache. My body is breaking down, bone spur under the right kneecap.At fifty-eight, I watch young men and women in black sweats run along the River Liffey —Abha na Life, Anna Liffey, river that crosses the plains of Life. I envy them.Once I too could run over the asphalt, almost without knowing I inhabited a bodywhose knees might seize up and swell. I will not run again in this life. Cirrus and cumulonimbusscud across the blue escutcheon of sky. Sun’s blazon through rain rampant, my life is a cloud studyfor some larger landscape John Constable never got around to painting. It hangs in a gilded frame.People stare at it before passing on to more important canvases, to Renoir’sLes Parapluies, women and men opening shiny black umbrellas in a Paris park.There a mother shelters her two daughters under an umbrella meant for one.The younger daughter holds a wooden hoop she has been rolling along tamped dirt paths,whipping it with a stick to keep it spinning, before the rain settled in. Renoir paintedthis small family in his lush, impressionistic style. Five years later, after visitingItaly and studying Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, he came back and finished the paintingin his new “manière aigre” or harsh style. He handled the gray silk folds of the auburn-haired woman’s dresson the left as if they were granite to be sculpted. She carries a market basket filledto the brim with shadow. To approach old age, one needs a new, harsher style. Here, by the Liffey,mothers push screaming infants in strollers. Five teenagers in blue jeans and bright yellow or green raincoatswalk by, joking, texting on cell phones, smoking. One girl and her boy hang back, embrace, French-kissa long ten seconds. Another boy shouts over his shoulder, “Get a room!” A pairof mute swans preens and swims down the River Liffey, whose amber waters mirrorhow the clouds pass, avalanche of cumulus that hangs forever on the burnishedunrippling surface of my memory — vast sky surf, cloud after cloud cresting, breakingto be washed away to blue nothing. Each of us — lovers, mothers, runners, me — no morethan windblown swansdown.
Cherub-bee-dee how does a man who doesn’t read English well know that cherub-bee-dum those aren’t really words-bee-dee. But birds. Cherub-bee-dum, he stumbles, reading to me by the sliding glass door cherub-bee-dee, through which I watch my brother play in the dum-dum-yard. Cherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum, like how my father saysFine then! Leave! My mother shouts, Stupid! Dumb! We live in a small bee-dee-nest too, one hallway to bee-dum-slam doors. Birds? What are birds? Thanks to my father, reading with me, I have more feathers. T-H-E. First word he ever taught me to pluck    ...    It is a word used all the time. Cherub-cherub-bee-dum!The mail. The mailbox. The school bus. The the. He asks me to read the mail. Not birds, mail. If you don’t read this, you will turn into birds. And I read it to him the best I can. The end. A feather. Two feathers. The. The end. Mother, mother. Repeat after me. Cherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum! We read together before bedtime.
Fog swaddles the trunks and so delineates, from a vast of green, the silhouette of each pine on the slope. Maybe it’s like that, only all along it was obscured by what —  rush, distraction? Fog. A pine. Querying grosbeak. Something shifts. You find yourself in another world you weren’t looking for where what you see is thatyou have always been the wolves at the door. Left ajar, gaping, your own door. And you burst in as the Mangler, you gouge out your right eye which hath offended. And you burst in as the Great Liar gorging on your own flesh and as Won’t Let Go who shreds your tendons, gnaws your femur. You can’t stop bursting in, coming upon yourself alone, vulnerable, in the privacy of your dying, bending to pick up with a tissue a crushed spider from the bedroom floor, half-sensing in your solar plexus the forces of that which cannot yet be sussed, discovering yourself once again already to have been inside something like an equation with a remainder, a deodand, a reminder of the impossibility of reconcilement —  to what? Once again. Forgive yourself, they say, but after you forgive what you have lived, what is left? You can’t set aside the jigger of  the present from the steady pour of hours or even differentiate trails of ants scurrying through some massive subterranean network from the shredded remains of a galaxy backlit by star glow. Time to close the door you think but your face is changed, so many crow’s feet. You must be on to the next stage in which you begin to recognize your mortal body, that nexus of your various holds on the world, as repository of every- thing you didn’t know you took in, human and not, all of it charged and reactant which accounts for the trembling in your hands as now you discern the body of your body —  like a still, hanging bell that catches and concentrates each ghostly, ambient reverberation.
As grains sort inside a schist An ancient woodland indicator called dark dog’s mercury River like liquid shale And white-tipped black lizard-turds on the blue wall For a loss that every other loss fits inside Picking a mole until it bleeds As the day heaves forward on faked determinations If it’s not all juxtaposition, she asked, what is the binding agent? Creepy always to want to pin words on “the emotional experience” Azure hoplia cockchafer, the caddisworm, the bee-louse, blister beetle, assassin bug The recriminations swarm around sunset When it was otherwise quiet all the way around You who were given a life, what did you make of it?
The city where I grew up was not a western city, nor an eastern city. It lay north of Bohemia, south of Greenland, below sandstone Switzerland in a river valley, green with fields. It was the dump in the middle, the rump of an exquisite gesture in stone —  a suite in Hotel “Old Europe.” Stuck under layers of wallpaper, newspapers from a world gone by: reports of Zeppelin flights, League of Nations conferences, “Miscellaneous,” alongside adverts for brassieres and ironing boards. But the view to the river was blocked with gray barracks. And the southern wing, and the northern wing, broken like the Baroque Palace, furnishings given for junk. All of it somehow stranded: the steamers and churches, the domes. And not much life in the bar. But then I found it one day down on the banks, under rusty nails, heaps of nuts and bolts from machines long since dismantled, factories expropriated, torn-down, I found it amongst the bones, unearthed by scavenging dogs, ribs and vertebrae, splinters of human and beast, so it seemed —  the key to the city. And found a kind of peace. And knew where I was, and where I came from —  until I saw the photographs, not the ones at home in the album, but for sale on the street market stall. Archive pictures, postcards of street scenes, city views from between the wars, moments from a life gone by, some still with the stamp “original print, by hand.” Past the housefronts, all still intact, over the bridges, the broad terraces, along the Königsufer, the banks of the Elbe, people walking, all dead now, but the youngest in their prams. Mothers in dark coats and hats were chained for all time to this or that man with a briefcase. On a traffic island, a boy in lederhosen who would never age, staring from the poster for “Riquet Cocoa Chocolate.” “Alsberg Ladies Wear, Wilsdruffer Straße: the new bathing costume from Alsberg.” And the beauty in silk stockings, getting out of the tram, no. 11, picked out by chance, and her too, fixed in that spot forever. All of them passersby in time —  the girl at the flower stall on Altmarkt, the one by the striped awnings on Prager Straße. At the station the clock forever at half past ten. A morning that lasts for eternity —  mostly in spring, in summer, in a city that was not eastern, nor western. Scarcely a photo that ever showed it in deep snow. The sign for Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten stood by the entrance to the subway. Soon an r was missing, an n, then an a. Power cuts, petrol grew scarce, people took to bikes again after Stalingrad. Not long now and almost all of it will be erased, a phantasmagoria like the desert palace of Kubla Khan. And your gaze leaped back and forth looking for the place it all began.     Was it the high tide? The moment that saw the sparkling twenties in. People peering over the railings at Brühl’s Terrace, dismayed at the rising of the Elbe. Like mourners at a wake all clothed in black. An entire people clothed in black, back then. Though the worst was behind them: four years of war in Europe, carnage. All of them losers, people suddenly with time on their hands, time to gather in dark clumps. Only a girl in a sailor suit, laughing and spitting over the railing into the swollen, mud-brown river, cold as the grave. Or maybe the storm in the thirties, that wrecks the funfair booths at the Vogelwiese fairground. Visitors watch the chaos in despair. Ghost train guests. Roll up and test your strength
I really fucked up. My E-flat key was loose. I only got a few hours of sleep the night before because Robyn and I were on the phone. They gave me the wrong repertoire list. How was I to know that high altitude affects clarinet reeds? I ran out of beta blockers. I forgot to bring a water bottle. I was worried that they’d hire that asshole who they don’t like because he threatened to blackball them at the union meeting. The acoustics were terrible. The second violinist used a new rosin and that threw her off, which unnerved me. My tinnitus roared the whole time. Robyn auditioned right before me. Just as I blew the first note, it dawned on me that Robyn might be sleeping with the conductor. Someone backstage slammed a door and I had to start all over again. The concertmaster doesn’t know a trumpet from a trombone, but since he’s powerful in a certain tiny corner of the music world everyone feels forced to curry favor with him. I forgot to eat. The audition committee talked the whole time. A clang in the heating system was near deafening. My carpal tunnel flared up. My neck twinges flared up. My arthritis flared up. I only got a few hours of sleep. I would have won the last competition, except that the concertmaster’s student was appointed with no audition, so I kept wondering if the same thing would happen again. I forgot I wasn’t playing the flute. I only got a few hours of sleep because Robyn and I were on the phone all night and decided to end our marriage. I really fucked up.
I was hanging with grandparents in a kindergarten and the teacher drew an accordion wall across to keep the children in antigravity class together the grandparents separately graded balloon worksheets sunlight floated in, the grandparents thoughtful about addition, mulling vacationCome here I said to the little one too little to be in class, soft as peachesI want to tell you something and you repeat it back to me next time She toddled over, put her arms up to hug me, we hugged She had stars inside her soul, was visibly celestial beneath her coatMore human than human, got it? I cuddled herOkay, she said, I’m more human than a human
They look at the photo and agree that’s dad in the class photo of Ip Man, Wing Chun master. I look at the face and cannot say it looks like him to me. My brother asked his forensics detective coworker to look at the face. Mom thinks it’s him too, he says proudly. My mother often watches game shows and says look it looks like (insert neighbor) and I look up to see some not-even-ballpark bone structure. What was my father’s face like when he left his country? What was his face like when, alone, he made the pork and peas, washed socks. This wretched neighborhood, when I say hi to white people on the street they don’t say hi back. Chinese either. Who has mastered this face, no sweeping lashes, just one naked thought after another. The young people I think I smile at in a dark crowd who walk away as if my face said, You’re standing in my way move along. I’d dress as Robert Smith or The Crow in high school and friends would say, But you look normal that way. I mention my Han melancholy and you murmur, No, Grandpa told Uncle DiDi we’re Mongolian, I thought you knew? You who had permission to deck any lump on the bus, who got asked later, Are you okay? I walk down the street feeling overly safe, I dgaf and want to magic you my extra. But my face fails me with a weak best, what friends know as “powered-
down mode.”What in the world is she thinking is what I sometimes ask myself, says a colleague about this face. What I partly see, what partly disappears in the mirror.
The best-known German goldsmith of the sixteenth century, Wenzel Jamnitzer, is also remembered for his study of the five platonic solids, Perspectives of Regular Bodies, in which he proposed that out of the same five bodies one can go on endlessly making all other bodies. The five solids originate with Pythagoras, but are named after Plato, who paired four of the five solids with each of the four elements and the fifth with heaven to make up the difference: tetrahedron (fire), octahedron (air), cube (earth), icosahedron (water), and dodecahedron (heaven). The idea is that the universe is made up of a handful of shapes and out of these shapes other shapes are made. In a letter to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Nobel Prize Committee, Chubby Checker claimed to have invented the dance that begat all other modern dances. Speaking of himself in third person he wrote, “Chubby Checker changed everything. He gave movement to a music that never had this movement before. The styles changed. The nightclub scene is forever changed. Checker gave birth to aerobics.” The song originally called “What a monotonous melody,” written in five minutes on a dare, begat “Limbo Rock” begat “Let’s Limbo Some More” begat “Mary Ann Limbo” begat “Limbo Rock/Do the Limbo Rock,” as “The Twist” begat “Let’s Twist Again” begat “Slow Twistin’” begat “Twist It Up” begat “The Twist (Yo, Twist!).” Checker calls his dance “dancing apart to the beat,” not dancing separate from the beat, but two people dancing separate from one another. “Limbo Rock” ends in a whistle. Limbo, the dance, comes from Trinidad, where it was danced at wakes, but in reverse: the bar began at the lowest height and was raised to symbolize a rising from death into life. Dante’s limbo is the best circle of Hell, all those unbaptized babies and old philosophers to snuggle up with at night. “Mary Ann Limbo” starts with a whistle.All day, all night, Mary Ann Down by the sea side siftin’ sand Even little children love Mary Ann Down by the seaside siftin’ sand Take a shape. Repeat it — translate it, reflect it over a line, rotate it around a point — and you’ve got symmetry. Go, go, go, go: that’s it! That’s gold.
Arborvitae It rises in a Champaign County bog Amid bedstraw and skunk cabbage, Rises out there in an ice age River valley gorged with glacial till, And swills the moraine-filtered rainwater With the wafer ash and honeysuckle. Stalwart, set apart, and biblical —  As if one of that ancient company That gave its coniferous canonical body To the tent that shuttled God Through the wilderness.• They say that cedar and cypress Are the protectors of  bones. You see them from the freeway, standing alone, Statuesque and serious, In the dead middle of and vigilant In beanfields, where farmers used to plant Their families.•Who are you like in your greatness? Consider a cedar of Lebanon, with fair boughs And forest shade, and of great height, Its top among the clouds.
Nobody sings about alligator eyes anymore, barely peeking out of the water, bouncing on the ground and rolling into the pond, leucistic. People think of traits, symmetrical fetuses giving orders from space, making playlists even as they’re being born. Things have come to eyes that gaze in directions we can’t think of. You are told by a judge that nothing new will ever happen. You lie to his face looking straight into the gaps that want to appear. Each night I count the celebrities. The silhouette of this long stretch of time where opportunities spark and fizzle like islet cells quickly eaten by bosses and strangers, nearly identical computer-generated faces, with smiling or disgusted expressions. It appears again, the farcical pulchritude, hobbits of caution in non-events first paying a visit to mitigators, then Mario, then TIAA-CREF. Can you escape an alligator if you run silently and glide into the water? People with happy faces and no luck at all, good or bad, jam the signal with a sickle.
Near the Naked Juices I passed A man my fingers walking Across his back he turned and held up A box said what Might this be I said oh You’re tactile too what’s your name He said William Amos Miller I said I thought you were born in 1872 he said so You know who I am yes you’re the man Who journeyed to the center of Earth In your mind he smiled on my arm said do You know that the Earth also journeyed To the center of my mind I said I never thought of that he asked Again about the box I shook it sniffed Said Mike and Ike is it fruit He inquired not exactly well I think I shall have an apple wait You haven’t paid oh My money nowadays is no money he pushed Outside we walked across the ice To the intersection he made to go across Wait you can’t go across we have to wait For help oh help he said crouching Until our hands touched the cold ground He said I said we said we see With our hands I jumped up and said you’re the man
The new root of the fern is the part you eat in famine. Harsh words are spoken, but they’re not the ones that make you turn. Where the muscle’s smooth. That’s where it doesn’t fray. The hard part is what comes easy. The hard part isn’t hard. It only seems. It only seems. It only seems that way. The snail inside the shell is tough. It holds the tooth, not tongue. The fingernail. The hair. What the old ropes come from. What’s left, dug up, and laid aside. Not the nick that never healed. There are lice that live inside the quill of every feather of every bird. You spoil it with a fingerprint. Artichokes have hearts. The alligator pear has an endosperm that, when squeezed, weeps only oil. You shed your skin as you grow cold. The hard part isn’t hard.
not an answer. She leaned into the apple tree, which then was evergreen, to the snake’s hands, sweet flesh, no need to be ashamed. We share and share alike, the peel not loose like night on day, but tight. She took the snake’s hands, diamondbacked, and opened its question. It was the first time she had something to give, what the man couldn’t take, the first time the man said please: please let me have a bite. He found the iron ore and brought it home. He found the coal under the forest and lit it on fire to watch it go so the snake couldn’t catch her if she fell and she couldn’t hold anything but its tongue. Never let the fire go out or else, he warned, and she held on.
Memory was the room I entered down a long corridor Thrown by the white drugs of pain though pain Was adrift on a glassy stream of green tide Where images flickered and ran on I didn’t write poetry for publication In those days but to grab the attention Of readers nearby who had been crushed by life Who floated across the exercise yard like headaches Smoking rag-cigarettes looking sideways For the next punishment for a break or maybe distraction Chips of memory kept rising to the surface Of our minds to take another bite I had no idea why poetry the squid caught me It clung to my brain in the damaging climate A creature in the alien element of air Arising from centuries of survival Thoughts must be inky and capable Of working the bait with a black beak For a quick kill and a metaphysical rise up through the abyss Poetry in those days was a handmade lure There were no fish or birds so I spun my lines To the ones with heads spring-loaded with resentment Their temper a red fleck twitching in an eye While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number
These water birds flew out from the minds Of fishermen and became fishing peons Wealthy sailors watched as darters emerged again To spread drenched wings in the sun And marked them as emblems for spinnakers Painters and ornithologists studied darters Until they became black-feathered arrows That pierced the souls of their creators These birds rode surf of bitter laughter And wiped out on a zoo’s concrete Key Largo To imitate darters lovers ripped off their clothes And plunged into the swiftness of estuaries Down the water column they entered brackish hell Their hair transformed to iridescent plumage Ruffled by memories of earth’s human atmosphere We can experience the lives of these feathered beings By flexing our particular despairs each morning At evening we take in the news as best we can On late nights we gaze at dead bodies of water And almost perceive those wet wings working the tide
And there are Two birds In this poem A loon Hand-carved From balsa And a snakebird On the tide Of the river The oily head Of a water bird Cuts surface And glides Along by Tarred wooden Racks Ideograms Oyster farms Low on the tide Lower than The hand-carved Loon it looks Hardly buoyant A bird From two Worlds it knows The murk On the bottom And waves Crinkled by sun It swims As well As a black trevally Sleek and fast A challenge to Handcrafted birds To all things made up
I’d often seen the runway kissed by refugees and bought-out hostages, an odd drunk and those renouncing the flying for good, and thought that surely there must be worse places to touch freedom. Between the tailfins and the gray town in the distance, gravity cropped up only at a newsstand, and fizzled out with the first bite of the octane damp, the view of the parking bunkers and stacked hovels by the motorway. Everything else, before and after, could have fitted into half a cigarette, the sickly sunshine and endless nights, the flags and oaths (the very language I wanted to forget), the Celts, the Saxons, the housebroken Vikings in crowded trains, hopping frozen behind stalls selling tat to tourists. Not enough time for loving because of other loves, nor codebooks nor guides except the perennialA to Z of not giving offense. The words were always there, smooth like pebbles (soap on the tongue), and sometimes the mockery of a commonplace, like that time when we put up a blackened Union Jack instead of curtains between us and the Poles on the scaffolding across the road. On occasions it seemed good enough to be happy or scared with the rest, to bring home from the terraces and parades that sly acceptance, to sit in the shadow of atavism as under a palm tree, and chew blissfully on the sweet dirt, the taste of the crowd. Or for an evening make a shortcut through someone else’s work, an incomer’s story of a homeland gained not lost, a fat compendium of patriotic verse; in essence, cheat again. In other words — never spend too much on a suit rarely worn    ...    if there had been loyalty at all, it fell on faces and disappeared with them, on promises and smiles, crazy schemes for finding undiscovered shores. The world, I thought, could be unfolded anywhere, if only you could fit it into a travel bag, into a clear, irrevocable word. It is strange perhaps that even today I think the same, still in the same place, buried firmly like a rock in a graveyard, as heavy, and as pointlessly decorated by lightness. The vows of yesterday skim the heights like animal shapes we recognize in passing clouds; postcards sleep in the unread books. Just like the nomadic tribes used to, I learn of myself only with my feet now, from the single map that remained. And when streets bring the shortened future a bit nearer, with open palm I seek the roughness of the facades, and in the friendly pain I find the coarse, unperfected truth of things. This, I think then, must be what it’s like in the bellies of gigantic animals: wet and quiet, almost pleasant, once you get used to the smell of those who passed through before you, and the immutable truth that there is no going forward or anywhere else    ...        Translated from the Bosnian
Do I have to dress up or can I wear jeans? Dear Joaquin, casual Sunday is a plus! Can a woman be fully present in heels? Remember the other day at the shops, we saw the T-shirt that read “Blessed” across the front? I know you picked it up for me as a joke, but it made me pause. I think I am blessed in the way I understand people to mean it: having good fortune. But this is where faith messes with my clean concept, because practicing Christians don’t believe blessings come out the clear blue sky. So here’s God again, all up in the Kool-Aid. I’m dating myself, but I mean that He gets in the way of spiritual minimalism. He is at once contained and uncontainable, which, intellectually, is hard to understand. So being blessed must require that one acts in such a way that presses God to bestow blessings, which isn’t the same thing as good fortune, but I want to believe that people are saying, “You have such good fortune, I hope for good fortune, too,” because it means that no one is preaching at me like, “You have good God-God,” “Father God I hope He Gods for us, too,” “You got God?” Et cetera.
In our house, all the clocks are turned off and the mirrors Don’t work. We sit like bread in a stay-fresh wrapper, Keep ourselves to our selves. Sometimes the speeches Are so beautiful it hurts. On the porch where we can’t be Seen to smile, the honeysuckle meshes with silent Weeds. We rock back and forth, back and forth in our long Black dresses. Mosquitoes taste our blood and find it good. Inside, candles are lit every night and keep going Until they burn themselves down. We kiss our fingers To our lips like Italians, promise we’ll never look back.Whip-poor-will. When the doorbell rings we don’t answer. In winter, the fur grows long on the horses and the ice Grows long on the eaves. We sleep in the same bed Like good animals, braid our hair together, tailor Our limbs to fit. Conspiracy of wood.
I listen and listen but how do I know Peace Peace in the plural says please or pleads I hear the whole song divide the state as one appeals past the last centuries’ pealing bells  wren under eaves ruins another wren’s heaven dying sympathies appear as a pear or peas with her territory her tune I want a nest clinging to the twine Please Please in the plural not a flag a mead hall not a circumstance puts pain’s poor plea deeper in the apparent  a stable not a stability where animals dream pressure the daylily plant the possible prayer and dreaming among them I tell the stranger pulling apart the sepal petals by their dusty crease in my mind I can’t I don’t know how to sing
How many books now have the word Last In their title? Or worry, or some dangling variation Of mistake? Or empire burning, orThe fools have fucked it up? Who the hell listens? They roar and Wriggle, up and down the page, They screen-print what’s coming next — pinups Of blocked streets and stone faces. How many books sling the word doom, Or mimic spotlights or air raid sirens, Regurgitate the Romans, the Kick Down the Door Guys, our genius with the fiery furnace? The quivers, the shakes, the iambic dread, The anger, the insomnia, the slow tic Of the wait, the wail, the transcribed too late, In the manner of those who have gone before us, Geiger counters, clacking the rising damp.
When God appears before me he is a burning woman tied to a bush. Her nakedness, a missed spot on a busy canvas, where a male hand has been practicing female gestures. For instance, hanging herself like laundry over her own arm. Nipple-colons introduce this scene of medieval war: horses crowned with riders are leaving; horses’ tails, like a clock’s hands, whip flies of hours off their round thighs. Time is an insect that leaves its maggots to hatch on an open wound of a mammal. There’s more face on these thighs than on all of the women’s bodies. One, with an arrow aimed at her, hands on her bent knees as if she wanted to ski into death like a scared child, mocks the splendid horse tails with hair so red, all of her blood must have gone into it. So, it isn’t a bush on fire. It’s red hair she used as a shield. In the distance, a town burning. Impatiently, horses whip buzzing ashes. The end.
They broke up and she, either fed up or drunk or undone,  ached to get back inside. Officials surmise she climbed a ladder to his roof, removed the chimney cap and entered feet first. Long story short, she died there. Stuck. Like a tragic Santa. Struggling for days, the news explains. It was a smell that led to the discovery of her body. One neighbor speaks directly into the microphone, asks how a person could disregard so much: the damper, the flue, the smoke shelf. He can’t imagine what it was she faced. The empty garage. The locked back door. And is that a light on in the den? They show us the grass where they found her purse. And it’s not impossible to picture her standing on the patio — abandoned — the mind turning obscene, all hopes pinned on refastening the snap. Then spotting the bricks rising above the roof and at first believing and then knowing, sun flashing its god-blinding light behind it, that the chimney was the way.
Once, there was a year where every romance  had fangs. It was hard to open up a novel without a vampire bearing down on a young, virgin neck. Soon, they were on the television. Later, the sidewalks.  Teenagers. They owned us with their hackneyed plots. Platinum fleur-de-lis emblazoned on their jeans.How do they wash them? I asked. They don’t,  my friend said. It’s part of what keeps them so dark and stiff. An entire generation has arrived dark and stiff. Unlike my pliable, light, pubescent years. I grew up reading Little House on the Prairie. Sweet, blind Mary stole my heart. Turn the page. Oklahoma. Wild mustangs. Malaria. And Pa. Talk about a hero. Now they have boys  so angry they transform into wild, shirtless dogs. They are maniacs, these fans. They beg their mothers to drive them to the theater where they burst  into dollars and popcorn in their seats. They want the car tossed off their withering girl bodies. Lured from their couches, they are eager to be taken from their lives  and placed directly in the vampire’s mouth. Younger and younger. Cha-ching. Is there nothing anyone can do?
Beauty is my irreparable and today I became geometric. A faux linear figure that distills a skip trace of First principles. In a whiteout of Atlantic snow banging stars into the femoral vein of Euclid while rows of lavender circuits, all porous, surrounded me. I genuflected before the hospital parking of my father’s jaundice, for I am a good daughter of the colony. The colony which begot the immortal heart of the markets. Resource nursed all young bucks of the florets, a liquidity I should service or else receive a lesser dessert. With my smudge cleanse at the ready I find myself dispensing with the usual future haunt of stability; a survival signaling my relationship to time, or I’m out of it, entirely. Chanting hell as hair veils my face as if this is a Western. Come polygon and I circumvent the disaster, do not disturb my circles. Holy I went, holy all around my head, the holy I am went careening down the back stairs of this low-rise rental. Striated by the pinnacle light of this city that has my blood pooled purple at the center of its gravity. You can scan the ground from overhead for death pits. I read this on the internet when I was dehydrated, lonely, and afraid. Office plants all broad-leafed repositories for cognition’s patent heart. I’ve gone and been abominable. A column extended from the top of my head into heaven. At the edges of my system an Anishinabek or Indo-European projection of words my nerves could translate into the crawl space of animal magnetism. White pine verticals send us up as a stomach pumped by filial love. Oh, inconsequent curb of my street I refuse to kneel, this day like any other, a cousin charged with trafficking. Still waiting to be ordained, I make mask of our features that are retreating. Plush pockets of rust about another falsehood of water, a creek that pleats. I’ve gone and got a blister. That summer a black bear’s muzzle was coated in shellac from the aerosol can she bit through on my mother’s porch. A half-century after my grandmother’s mother said, don’t ever shoot a black bear, they are my people. So I continue to speak more than this mortuary sunrise where I am only just alive. Boozhoo, today is over.
Cloud cover like a badly made bed, ruched in sections, rushed. Whatevered for reasons of a lifetime of do-overs. Why bother trying to change? The gathered duvet sometimes mimics you, makes double. Dopples a decoy. An escape plan. The safety of numbers and cover. When the wing dips, a hole in the sky revealed. Until then, a man in the aisle seat. Calculations to see if it’s possible to slide through the fisheye window if he touches your thigh again, your face. We like our planes fashioned after ships. The illusion one could jump or be forced off and possibly survive between the distance and everything that wants to live how it’s always lived. Without compromise. When does knowing a person begin? Was it when he said you look like his ex-wife? Hair naturally red, not like yours. Fake. He can tell, but it’s OK. What your children together would look like. That if you had been born in Fayetteville, he would’ve liked to have known you. Feels he does. Not like the absent husband his mind weds you to. The one who abandoned you to his company like a firing squad to its post waiting for a reason to prove worth. The moment he asked for vodka on the 53-minute flight from Charlotte to Wilmington to bridge the gap between pre- and post-flight beers. Or how he lifted his shirt to show you where his lungs had been punctured and once collapsed, he said he’d briefly died and now is, briefly, alive.
The last train pulses across the pane and fireflies spark beside the tracks. Acne’s red wing flames my face: I can’t take back this skin. In the other room, a drugstore Timex synchronizes with the faucet’s drip. If I squint, the fireflies align their lives to map the summer’s migraine of flowers that were weeds. You say, but I think they’re just trying to survive —
The sun time of the year died out and never might return. We made fires big as coffee tables to approximate the sun. I wanted to be a mountain. I wanted us all countless mountains in a detailed painting. Blood is everywhere as always. But now it is blown further and oxygenated for longer. Yet more sad word has come digitally. We contain no blood with which to soften and warm the sad word. Cold wind placed and places the house in its mouth. We met the end numb and almost still. Number meant less motion meant even number meant totally still. The buildings stand still. The buildings still stand. The buildings like the builders take each other by the hand.
Last time I had stamina and calluses and a bag of chalk. It hung from my lumbar like a bunny tail. Last time I was lighter and the ether better-emptied. Now blood is so close to my surface I slip off the walls. Tonight is the night of a massacre I do not look at. Although I have been to that city of bricks and black blooms. Therein I kissed a grave a million others kissed. A woman with a cigarette asked me for fire there and I provided it. I had been asked for light before but never fire. Tonight I climb three hundred stairs toward the light of my device. Maybe we’ll be wartime people leading wartime lives. Skirmishes have sprung from the heads of lesser gods. This is the light no one reads by we just stare into it. We wait for the glyphs that mean it is safe.
Lostness is the You Are Here, the red star that the mall map linked to GPS. As if you’d stared into your nowhere like a sun and photoreceptors compensated with a point. Lostness is an immaculately well-dressed person or a room laid out like charcuterie. It’s a feeling someone loves you after a ten-minute talk. Oh yes, but lostness is loving someone too, knowing you would take the raft out further if it meant a few more minutes. Sometimes, I want to tell my dog that I’m the only one in the world who knows her whereabouts and that’s lostness but it’s lived in. It isn’t sadness. Lostness is the job I had in ’98 in a warehouse unpacking chic decor where I began to unravel and unmake the very things the company was selling. It was the boxes I moved forward on the shelves until they lined up well, pop choruses that played again for the beautiful and found. It’s almost gladness. It’s the walk I took one day trying to decide should I live in Montreal? and thinking that I knew something to make it plain. Lostness is the many rains of money that I once watched from an open window. It’s long been here. It was the semilunate carpal flowering in late-Cretaceous bones where everything was going then never more unclear. It was the first prokaryote closing off its little O and all that it could be instead. But lostness is a steady wage. I remember when my grandfather would come home from the squats and thousand double checks of electrical work and wash his hands: all the dirt moved in his laundry sink like garter snakes that turned up under stones, a living current so bearable in its lostness that I could know it, only, for a hundred years and still be happy. Lostness was the school I went to where leaving crumbs on rectangles of paper meant showing the way someone would have to come. It was having your knapsack up on the table like a personal flotation device. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that lostness is always there on the lip of everything, like lichen or a bomb. There is a loving lostness that if you look deep into, you see a great balance beam that everything that was, or is, or that may be, is standing on.
The cause is the consequence. — Frantz Fanon 1He would get pulled over whenever he tried to download Blonde. He would be searched for f-bombs but not for h-e- double-hockey sticks. He would get choke-held for wearing a hat in the hallway. He would be Tasered for balling his Whopper wrapper and leaving it on the floor of the streetcar. He would get shot in the back every time he incorrectly used MLA format in the essay on  A Midsummer Night’s Dream.2He would take some E if he didn’t have to preach austerity. He would hire a tennis coach if the consultants he hired would actually fire the people to be fired. He would upgrade to the latest Galaxy if  millennials didn’t default on their student loans when he raised interest rates. He would get his shoes polished at the airport if the kiosk weren’t so far from the platinum members’ lounge. He would be placed on paid leave if  he raped the trainee from Dawson. Sexually assaulted. Allegedly.

I swallowed the sweet thing in a dream. I woke up heavy. I said, what’s the matter with you. I said, stop seeing what’s the matter with me. I ran to/from only moving one frantic eye. Something snitched. Then back to the argument. It is more acceptable to steal from the ether. When you said, we take matters into our own hands. I didn’t start the day with a ritual. Again. Twenty days and counting! I said, I was supposed to address my wrongs to you. The sweetgrass still in its plastic. Keep it there for its poetry? Then the driftwood resting on my father’s ashes. Well, you said, ecstasy from a fluted throat. Ha. As if there were presence enough in me to notice, before this. I said, I’m less angry now that you don’t exist. Then the aha moment announced. Whistling nothing like wind through fistulae. That happens here. Left to my own devices, I said. As if language were a refuge. As though the sound of walls.

A ▶ ◀ B You — this mucky fire slathered in my mind’s frame — are as committed to me as artists are to art. At times,your voice is constant — “kill yourself, kill yourself, killyourself” — fists punching clay with the aim to make menothing more than punched clay. Other times, you’rea cinema in my skull, screening me mangled: one leg  auger-mauled, hand vice-crushed, eye pencil-blinded to life — “end it,” you say, in the scene you loop: this cinema’s wallswith a bullet burst. At parties, you shape a sinister play fromothers’ glances: “hate him,” “idiot,” “fool.” When I bloom,  a sun, all alight and rising, you flatten my lift into lineson a page like Jaffee’s in the back of MAD; you fold itover and now the rise is the wound from a wing cleaved   and then gilded, the bloom’s a thousand-foot fall, the suna drain. Yet with each step the unrelenting chorus of youcircles round me, another chorus surfaces to surround you: the  line of sheltering trees artists grow, loamy and ablaze, against  your gale, the melodies of friends whose works asphyxiate yoursymphony, the lessons students teach about tipping yourplinths, the magic of  bringing nib to page and penning lifewith urgency and patience, word by word, with abandon  and care. Even though I know it can never silence you, I lovethis inky trick because it fills the blank before you can, marksup your script, swallows you choking in a page-mutatingfold, so your cruel barks, garbled, almost seem to say:A ▶ ◀ B     Click here to fold back so A meets B × frame yourlife with others'lines andyou lineyourlife withlove
We smuggle crates of Beaujolais through the squeaky pantry door. We steal cases of cigarettes, borrow the bulletproof Mercedes to race through the capital’s empty streets. It’s wonderful, the peace. No local can afford a car, except the police. The police stand beside their cars and wave. The police lack petrol for their cars. There’s a beer bottle shortage in the nation. There are no bars. Drunk driving is a hobby. Driving while high is an art. No one in the bad girls’ group is not in the back of the Mercedes, Vijay on Ashanti drum all the way to the beach. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are money. We are thirteen. We rent a hut roofed with palm fronds. We lie out on the sand with our bottles of French wine and our Hong Kong blondes and look up at the Atlantic Slave Coast midnight sky:shine all my diamonds shine ’cause they really diamonds.
On “Sueño No. 5: Botella del mar,” a photograph by Grete Stern (1950) The woman sits clutching her knees inside a short-necked bottle on a beach, looks up smiling at a mouth above all imagined itineraries. We like to think she volunteered to be lowered into the bottle. On her own idea, even her own craftiness, lured into being enrobed with the thick glass that is the gray-blue of a ukiyo-e sky of flying cranes who breathe the steam of that bluish gray ideation and end of autumn, or a plume of smoke from a train in the middle distance. Swells of warm seawater push wet sand against spun tips of seashells that sit on the warmed strand like nobility on a plush settee. The bottle’s bottom edge lists in the hot sand, the heat of the morning sunlight penetrates the bottle walls, and foam and breeze coax a juddering creature from underneath. From inside the woman argues with herself that the horizon is another of the world’s ambitions. Those ships slipped into bottles with volition and self-responsibility, acquiesce so marvelously, like the glass fitting so smoothly around her. She is a person born to be put into this and admired as perfection from the outside, which is how we love flowers and dreams, though our desires may suffocate them.
I’m not sure whether it happened in Manitoba or Alberta: go home, they complained, go back, wherever pakis or niggers come from. Was 
I seven years old? Was I five? The day was cloudy; there was wind, and a sidewalk underfoot — a path of cement on which we kids marched. In whose place was I a guest, if home wasn’t this flat territory we were on? The hard sidewalk under my shoes, their sense of here. 
I walked home alone — I say “home” — I went where my parents paid rent, right? Our house wasn’t ours? Overhead, the sky spread out; the sky’s country was itself. We had moved from Ontario, but my gut got that they didn’t mean there. Immigrants, all of us, we’d chorused in assembly — the more immigrants, the kindlier the country, the folksier the mosaic. First the English and the French, then Western Europeans and the Ukrainians, I guessed, then Chinese and Indians, then the Guyanese and other such Commonwealth stragglers? Eventually we’d bring into “us,” Canadians, a panoply of the human race — so my sweet young self, in Trudeau’s aftermania, believed. Those children’s hate had a kind of guilelessness, however, that conveyed my abjection straight from their Canadian parents’ hearts. I was foreign to clear distinctions between master and savage — to fantasies of homesteaders who, by subjecting trees to their saws, had “mixed their labor” with “unowned” lands. Homesteaders, they called themselves, by principle: “home” was theirs, because they were first to fence it. As if we still were at war with whatever made entreaty against their fencing, my existence existing too near threatened. My very being entreated something before I ever opened my mouth. Get lost! Here kingly kids drink from institution’s cup. Something older than English yea well knows what with his guts he must disagree. Something français dit bon, histoire-là, je parle 
au-dessus du poète: domination, Dominion, domicile, home. I protested: one of my parents is here’s occupying family! Don’t blacken 
me! Please see my colonists’ blood, inside! They practiced the 
policing of reserve on the surface of my brown skin. They practiced homing in on enemy. The clouds above, the sky above, witnessed. The land underfoot said, here was here first. We thought about 
beginnings.


After Rilke I carried a bowl of menudo into the forest / I carried my bisabuela’s tripas not daring ask whose intestines I carried / con cilantro y radish y cebolla chopped fine / I carried the sewing machine they’d chained her to in the garment district downtown I carried the forest crackling against asphalt where her chanclas burnt & melted so I carried her too / I wore no red / I bore no basket / there was no forest but an avocado tree in the backyard of the house they made her sell to get her Medicare for her diabetes shots / I carried her sugarwater / a hummingbird great-granddaughter I carried her flickering / her black- 
& white-screened / I carried her face / the scars her warped esposo left her granddaughter / carried those wounds through the womb / not wolf but blue-eyed man / I stirred the menudo / my belly the pot / & scalding into the forest I carried / & that tree I chopped down chopped into a boat & carried my mother & my bisabuela across the chile-red sopa the blood-water broth / named her daughter / what forest have we made for her I cannot see / I carried darkness into the forest & sliced it out.
Somewhere in kentucky she went for kicksspiked polka-dot mintjulep grade 1 stakes white-glovedclubhouse how-you-do-seesuntil all the horses broke their legs & for all the horses my exjoined the seine-et-oisethoroughbred liberation front & shecrashed all the bentleys & it was I who bledin derby countryside where horsesdie in japaneseslaughterhousesdefrockedof rose blanket & blue ribbon& how very they wentin the kind of darkness knowingonly my oldkentucky home no longer a run for the roses it’s besiegedwith cannibals & thieves& only millionaires row singsa hero is a horse without a heart that never achesfor lovers who cross themone too many timeswhen we kill one horse all of them diewaitinglong after kentucky & she slips white gloves on my hands bent from carrying her on nyc streets jammed the wrong way in every directionhow merry are wehow merryhow bright-shine beaming no longer weeping& she bears my head to the heat& I let it all go& bet my last hat & home& how& how very are we& it changes everything
Music, wind, someone’s car horn Imagining to return Buddha’s big toe on the lake Your intricate gaze of form Eating the lake like a word Unzipped carefully by day You walked it hesitantly You taste something step by step• Losing my way, wildly blue Perhaps annotated past The return gaze, my snowfall My city gate firmly shut Even to wonder how you’ve been Isn’t what you want, therefore Lightly enclosing my text Cast down toward what I’ve not seen• Happily a ceiling fan You grasp the word sweltering Days are tectonic, the sound Of one memory spoken Who waits for you at the lake’s Wild edge? Bright glint of the noun You knew dissatisfaction Speaking even against time• Recorded a length of time I held memory tightly Unoriginal dimming Of  the light there, a found scene Number three on the dirt path Father carries his school bag Without use for meter, yet Both skies open to thunder• Don’t speak to me of sorghum Red fields, pressed up toward a sky Whatever called to me there Too wild, attempting a face Old verses for my father Dignify the cooling page Black earth is the word it makes Tilts forward, consequential
In memory of Dorothy Burns i. troppo allegro Remember seasons? Seem to recall those once were easier. Reasonably sequenced, regal of tempo and temper, Reliable change flipped heads-over-tails each quarter, Recovering the hemisphere with four fine suits, knock-off designer. Recently, someone shuffled, cut the deck into disorder: Relapse, tic, hiccup, snap, weeks reissued like hipster Rediscoveries    ...    join the club! No closer Reading required to diagnose this crazy weather: Record highs, flourishing lows. April even crueler Recapitulated each fortnight. Spring hailing like a howitzer. Reek of summer tickling autumn’s automatic sprinkler. Redder-neck sunbathers burnt by November’s toaster. A warbler Retweeting Keats, well into winter. A death for Easter.ii. funeral: march Remember: misremembering that fishy Faulkner Remark, the dead are never passed. Ask: will this chapter Retain familiar cycles? Lather, rinse, repeat. Swelter, Reins, release. Welter, ruins, reseed. Seconds per Revolution: top-heavy spinning, simian moods over- Reaching from swing to swing. For reveler, Read revelator: elevator going upper, downer, Results of a heart dialed three degrees warmer. Remedial Ecclesiastes: a time for X, and a-whole-nother Reciprocal time for X’s refrain, a dinner Reservation for six — make that five — and an altogether Regrettable time for the long and short divisions of disaster. Remainder: only a matter of time. No more time to matter.iii. scherzo: presto chango “Remember, the world’s stage was not set for your metaphor, Christopher Rex, tragicomic motherfucker: Recognize, why don’t you, your relish for the realish, for hinter-gatherer Relationships between the dank diamond mine of  your inner Resources and the Real World (remember that?), our fixer-upper Residence imperiled enough without your cheesier Regrets stinking up the joint — shoulda, coulda, woulda, Gouda. Character Reassessment sure is fun, but don’t run down the theater. Regards, Responsive Reader / Longtime Listener / Other: _______ ” (Re: that critique, one childhood scene I’ll offer: Relatives teasingly wondered why my “gatekeeper,” Regulator of mind and mouth, would wander Regularly away from his post. Still no answer.)iv. finale: re-fugue Remember with me (it’s not all mine to remember), Remind me, under this never-better weather, whether, if ever, “Real time” and its dead-ahead march to an unlucky number Really feel right as a royal flush, since time seems so much fairer Rewound — recoiling counterclockwise, the seasons’ order Restoring, entropy decreasing, days uncreasing — now faster, Regress infinitely, till the Spaide family tree, our off-kilter Calder, Recollects its fallen leaves — relief, pains, laughter, Reverse it, past, even, it’s not — trust I tamper Respectfully, gatekeeper, but why not even further,Reductio ad absurdum, back to the very scene I enter Rehearsal, ninety-nine degrees, summer-hot, set to simmer, Ready or not, on the twenty-first day of December?
Warmth activates the sugars, and sugars rally in the gorse, in the flowers it sees with, the scent that is its voice,the nontoxic fragrant wood good for cutlery, and for burning, though it flares out quickly, unlike smoldering peat. Are they converting sugars of their loneliness to conviction? Burning their sugars on the wicks of their frailty, one can nearly read by them,as Fillan in his own cave read by the light of  his broken arm, one of the horrible miracles of the times — St. Fillan, the Human Flashlight,patron of the mentally ill —  an unenviable between-worlds position.Whereas marsh orchids, fully in this one, change their clothes out in the open, hard candy in their mouths, the sugars plump, round, smooth,unlike seawater’s jagged molecules, which when drunk like anger will tear through you. Like bitterness, desiccate you.To survive, suffering burns the strength of the afflicted. If, left in Fillan’s cave, bonds of the stricken were loosened by morning, his spirit had intervened to convert the molecules of their madness,and still later did smugglers stash there some of those little things that make life worth living.The highly edible sweet gorse flowers produce a coconut-flavored wine if one enjoys the luxury of time, and a tea prescribed in cases of uncertainty,for those who appear to have lost all hope.
God-My-Father gave me three words:O-My-Love. O-My-God. Holy-Holy-Holy.
Say they stilltie ropes to the casketsof immigrants they findin the desert. That a ropesaves time shouldsomeone come looking.
each night I count ghostlets of how my body was wanted / behind with deadheading / rose hips have come / behind with actions that count only / when the timing is right / I took out a contract / it was imprudent in value / behind with asepsis / hello microbes of my body / we sleep together / hello cats / I make my bed daily / of the three types of hair on the sheets / only one is human / I count the bedrooms / I never had sex in / but there were cars  / wild woods / blackfly has got to all the nasturtiums / you cannot dig up a grapevine / and expect shelter to come / I am touched by your letter / writes a friend / you prevaricate desire / says message / all this fucking / with no hands on me
she at last had permission to use the marble bath for the marble bath she untied a paper bag of periwinkle bath salts & flicked them into the water as though cracking a whip she untied her hair she untidied her hair tested the water with the soft pads of her toes (tips of bladder wrack in the sun) her skin her markings (as for the bath) —  interior-of-Stilton at last underwater she drew breath from every shell collected from every beach later in the evening when dressed for bed she rejoined her brothers & sister & they were each served a portion of the last portion
Son of Man. Son of Marvin & Tallulah. Son of Flatbush & roti & dollar vans bolting down the avenue after six. The boy grew like a debt, & beautified every meter of the pockmarked, jet black asphalt which held him aloft on days he sped from much larger men along its skin. Godfathers & hustlers, Division 1 scholarship forfeiters, alchemists, liars, lasagna connoisseurs, Internet mixtape DJs & baby mama conflict consultants, each one appearing as if from the smoke of our 
collective imagination, Jordans laced, drawstrings taut, all of them gathered one by one to race the gangly, mop-top prodigy from the front of Superior Market to the block’s endarkened terminus, the same corner where Man Man got jumped so bad at the back end of last summer, neighborhood residents came to regard the place as a kind of memorial & it was like this every other afternoon, you know, from June through the final days leading up to the book drives & raucous cookouts which signaled our school year’s inauspicious return, this was the manner by which Mycah Dudley first gained his fame, dusting grown men without so much as the faintest scintillation of sweat to make the performance ethical. It was damn near unsportsmanlike, his effortlessness, mass cruelty in a New York City dreamscape, the laughter of girls with hip-length, straight-back braids & baby powder Forces making every contest an event worth leaving the perch of your bunk bed, stepping out into the record-breaking swelter that summer held like a trap door for kids with broken box fans & no mother home for at least four more hours to fill the quiet with discipline.   • We gathered in swarms to gawk at our boy before takeoff. His flesh maroon-clad from head to foot like an homage to blood, black plastic afro pick with a fist for a handle jutting from the left side of his high-top fade, his high-top Chuck Taylors, size 12, sounding like ox hooves once he entered the groove of a good run & the distinction was basically moot at that point is what I am saying, the line between him & any other mystical creature, any worthwhile myth, any god of prey or waning life.   • The entire block was out that night. Firecrackers packed the blackening air, their fury matched only by the exorbitance of dope-boy 
convertibles turned mobile dancehalls by the moment’s weight. Which might explain why no one quite remembers when, or how, the now-infamous brawl began. Only that Mycah was in rare form earlier that evening, having just embarrassed Mars Patterson — so named, it bears mentioning, for the chocolate bars he loved to steal & trade on the 4 train, not the red rock planet or lord of war — but was now in his everyday mode, seated on the stoop, a seer with so few words for devotees & passersby, each eventually stopped asking for his backstory, 
for his praise or functional wisdom, & instead were content to let him eat his veggie patty with cheese without interruption, which he did, which he was, when the din that always accompanies someone’s son’s public pummeling rang out, cut through our scene lengthwise, compelled the boy, for the first time on record, to leap from the steps of the brownstone his nana died braiding hair inside of, enter the scrum, thresh the crowd for signs of the conflict’s center.   • General consensus has it he was looking for his little cousin, & found him, even before the initial cop car ran like a living ram through the people. Before the boys in blue sprang, a spray of navy fléchettes, from behind its doors. Before they were caught in the scuffle, released ten to twenty rounds of ammo into the crowd without warning, bullets glancing off of Cutlass doors & corner store glass built for battle, all but three or four of which entered the boy mid-stride, lifted his six-foot frame from the ground, legs still pumping. For a second, you would almost swear he was running through the gunfire, preparing for liftoff or something, baby cousin held firmly in his arms, shielded from the onslaught. They never would have caught him if he hadn’t been holding that child, said no one, though we all thought it during the weeks following that moment we each froze, the moment his body collapsed slow as petals upon the unremarkable cement, & we stared at our champion felled by an outcome so common we don’t even have a special name for it. Still. No one standing ran that day. Most of us turned to face his killers, hands at our sides, determined to make them make it a massacre. But all that was before we heard Man Man let off a scream so full it rent the crowd in two, split the circle we had built around the boy’s corpse, our human wall parting to watch each casing fall from Mycah’s still-wet, dark red sweatshirt onto the street. Hear me. I heard the gunman’s greeting. Saw hollow points etch 
apertures into the boy’s clothes. They shot Mycah Dudley, quite 
legally. He died that night. He rose.
At the mouth of the river, Moon, stars, an Arctic calm, The twin lights at the end of the piers Revolving with the smoothness We expect of supernatural machinery. Seen from down here on the beach The harbored ocean slowly tilts, Like a mirror discreetly manhandled By night from the giant room It was supposed to occupy forever. The mind says now, but the stars On their angelic gimbals roll And fade, a tide of constellations Breaking nowhere, every night About this time. Strike up the band. In the tumbledown bar, the singer Has fallen from stardom and grace, But though her interests nowadays Are wholly secular, she can Still refer back to the angels, And knowing that song, we share A moment with the saved before We leave to make the crossing. No captain, no ferry, but Cross we shall, believe you me.
The magnolia before it blooms stands bare as a statue from antiquity or a shaved puss, it flowers first then greens. A pissed off dyke climbs into the branches to be held by an ancient indifference and both were me. Yet it’s possible I am a short bald man. That I am neither a big-bosomed wide-hipped pretty nor a short bald man. An antelope, an elk, a deer on this rug, a twiggy tree. The genderless squat figure, solo, blurry, hands on hips, that repeats. A plush life of winter and summer colors of flowers alongside tight checkered bands edging the broad green center where we look for each other, a woods, a pasture, a park, a yard, a median of grass set in a concrete mold situated within a pay lot. How it feels to stand outside a house at night whose lights are on. Whose lights are on.
If we meet each other in Hell it’s not Hell. — Geoffrey Hill i How is it I can never find Or call to mind One image of Christ walking slowly in the rain, In a steady, gentle rain, The kind that shapes an afterimage Just for a moment of the man Like a cloak of shadow following Or like a blank page After it’s been turned? The dead are concealed from us But not distorted by the rain. They remember our having remembered. A woman curls up on the sofa. Years before the fact she sleeps Her death and drapes it Even now, exactly as she must. Just after dawn, In the wren’s eye There are no blossoms left in the trees, And yet the sunlight blazons white New flowers onto every leaf. The wren’s eye gorges itself, Bursting the new life. The memory of a tree is the tree. Christ could fly. Impale upon him certain words Good as Greek For the impulse of the earth is to seek A language of flowers That do not die, turning A hair’s breadth toward us Even now, exactly as they must. If it was justice I saw Fall from the sun Onto boys ruining the one Flower shared between them, So be it. The woman on the sofa wears a little wing In her sleep. When she awakes, Its twin will be the wren in the dream Nearly there, nearly all the way There into the human day. Rain falls out of brilliant sunshine. For a moment, her window Fills with catastrophe, boys Torn apart and scattered, white petals Blackening the glass, Exacting recent justice. So strange that the recent past, As chaste As antiquity, as the orangery Of a blind eye, should at once appear Preposterous Yet achingly tender. Modern times are too cautious. The boyish, florid love of catastrophe Has thrust a fist into the dawn, And the scent of that fist, Whose citron betters daylight, Is wasted on modern times. Not long ago, you and I Nearly captured a wren. Christ lifted His face then, And rain fell all day until evening.ii In a corner of my garden, there is a spider’s web Entirely armored in rose petals broken off by rain. The spider will learn to eat roses, or he will starve to death. This is political economy for modern times. The planet dies. The planet starves its cruel interiors First, with a blazon of colors and soft poetry. Next, It apportions one small bird to every tree and sets fire To the trees. The rest is the cold business of the oceans Who have never forgiven us for breathing air. Homer was tempted. Loose thighs of oblivion Welcomed humanity away from itself and from life, And only one of the Bronze-Age host refused that welcome. He was the father of starvation, entirely armored In the disguise of a real man, destroyer of oceans. We have made ugly war upon distinctions. Canon bleeds a wedding into the gigue, and “when I try to imagine a faultless love or” the seedtime Of my deepest convictions — that the soul is immortal, That a woman couched upon a fragile little wing Created the creator of the universe — thought, Or rather the entire machinery of truth and terror Usurps a newborn king, i.e. imagination. Phaedrus, step down. There is a little wing wearing sunshine Like wind in the white hair of the bee you never imagined. An infinitesimal distance goes on forever. At the moment of death, the light hand of Attic stele Softly lights upon the shoulder of eternity, And thought yields to flesh and flesh yields to imagination, Sexing this or that unimaginable creation With new hair. It makes a difference. We are bound to one another And to God by harrowing, albeit helpless distinctions, Impossible to bridge, imperative to love well. We are free, but briefly. The pattern of a leaf branches Out from human hearts, and the blood spills Into the pattern a stone makes crashing into windshields. God follows. The wrist and wing of the beloved follow Close behind, and not even Hell prevails against This new extinction. Slow time is the beginning Of no time at all. The light hand of Attic stele Wrests me from the sleep I’d imagined life to be — The walking stone, the irreparable Gethsemane — And I am awake, wearing a green flesh newly fashioned From my heart.coda Should the bird outlast the blossom in the tree? Keep faith, but keep it silently, Starveling. I keenly remember there were two of us, And a stand of poplars like a kiss Quavering Upon the shade of the earth where no earth was Ready to bear the weight of us Relinquishing Soul for substance, pistil of white campion For color, continuance and one Unbelieving Substance of perfect memory. There were no trees. The sun was shining.
After Lorca mother’s malisonThe burr of the wind is seeping through the door, pink stumps of rhubarb are breaking through the soil. Though it is February I have the mind of autumn. Though it is February
And this my hand, against my self uprear. — William Shakespeare I took the crooked, arcade-overshadowed road off the main square built by de Chirico and chanced upon a watch repairer’s shop which might have been painted by Bhupen Khakhar for whose summer show the London weeklies have just prepared such a frosty welcome. Wait. Is this ekphrastic or oneiric? The site Bologna or Bombay? Are the hanging watches, so sure of their gender, Bulgari or Janata? Too early to tell. But there he sat at his workbench working at what looked like tiny jeweled bits of time laid out under his eye loupe in magnolia light. These fragments he seemed to be reassembling into a perfect circle, or a sphere seen from above —  it was like a miracle obligingly performed in slow motion, or the flight of an arrow broken down into ever smaller fractions of advancement. He took his time, and my time, to acknowledge me —  clearly he didn’t crave an audience, as though the slow work that so ravished him required if not secrecy at least discretion. Could he mend, I wondered, the cracked glass on my watch before I had to leave tomorrow? His black eyes rested on the old Omega as though bemused such a watch should belong to someone so importunate, then he cleared the air with a lenient, experienced smile.Certo. But it will have a different bombatura not quite as fine as this one was. Though the word was unfamiliar, it conjured up at once light skating the rim of a sheer bevel.Va bene. So long, I thought, as I can tell the time, and don’t have to squint through cracks as I had since fending off a drunken punch which I’d provoked myself enough to throw. I would have paid extra to watch him clean the face with the wad of turquoise putty he had to hand, paid double to have Devanagari numerals replace the Roman, but he wanted me out.A domani allora. Then as I left he said it needed una revisione completa before it got too late. A watch like this deserves  — he changed the tense — deserved a lot more care.
In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan’t care a bit for Rosie there, she needn’t think it. What will grey eyes and red cheeks be good for there? — John Ruskin, letter to Susan Beever, from Assisi, Sacristan’s Cell, June 25, 1874 To-day, being my sixty-first birthday, I would ask leave to say a few words to the friends who care for me, and the readers who are anxious about me, touching the above-named illness itself. For a physician’s estimate of it, indeed, I can only refer them to my physicians. But there were some conditions of it which I knew better than they could: namely, first, the precise and sharp distinction between the state of morbid inflammation of brain which gave rise to false visions (whether in sleep, or trance, or waking, in broad daylight, with perfect knowledge of the real things in the room, while yet I saw others that were not there), and the not morbid, however dangerous, states of more or less excited temper, and too much quickened thought, which gradually led up to the illness, accelerating in action during the eight or ten days preceding the actual giving way of the brain. — John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera Letter 88 (February 8, 1880) Too fast and far again! by much; the impetus of phrase running away with me. — John Ruskin, additional note no. 54 to Modern Painters Vol. 2 (1883 revised ed.)  My dear little birds,  before me on my desk this morning where I sit preparing tomorrow’s lesson  lies a copy of The Witches’ Rout by Agostino de’ Musi —   Agostino Veneziano your teachers will call him —   wherein a carriage made of dragon bonesand drawn by two naked figures  is depicted making topsy-turvy progress through a jungle scattering goats & geese & winged skeletal reptiles  and there, look now, there atop it all the witch squats  as one at stool — manly forearm, muscular shoulder, pendulis mammis —   the narrow dugs it is  her business to possess —  filthy hair streaming contra natura —   out in a headwind of mephitic vapors    ...      Time out of mind such creatures have impressed  the dreams of those who live, as it were, by watchfires,  fearful of neighbors, fearful that the law  they hammered into whatsoever shape as pleased them  may yet prove versatile —   their sensual rites & ceremonies,  novelties & conceits;  their pharisaical holiness    ...    —  and this is but a scholar’s imitation you will say, rude work though of  a fine school — a fine school be it allowed, and good enough to lose itself  beside the master’s —   & yet  & yet  steady the hand that hovers over  the acid-bitten cliché  steady the elbow  behind this  engraving on paper Fro spot my spyryt þer sprang in space  so now   Piazza Sta Maria del Pianto, Rome (1840). A pensive study of old clothes sun-sipped dry in the Jews’ quarter, hanging out of a marble architrave smashed & built into a piece of Roman frieze moldering into broken brickwork projected over wooden windows propped on gray entablature. A vestige of yet-legible inscription: nomine fortuna. No important lines, no beauty of object. A pendent hodgepodge of contrasted feeling cheesecaked into picturesque febrility. An episode. A grief in, as it were, parenthesis. A match without a marriage, as after news of an engagement. A church embedded sans façade among the common sort of houses. A succor from St. Peter’s mere bewilderment & worry. Graphite heightened w/ touches of white body color on gray-green paper. Beresford Chapel, Walworth: a bare, oblong, low-ceilinged barn, each brick-arched window filled with small-paned glass requiring iron bars threaded like halves of cobweb to stay true. No traceries, no clustered shafts, no vaulting. No fantasies. No perpendicular flights of aspiration. Clean lines, and severe. Pews shut-in with partitions of plain deal and neatly brass-hatched doors. No pulpit, merely a stout, four-legged box of well-grained wainscot, but decorated with a velvet cushion —  crimson, with golden tassels at the corners —  which formed my one resource, for when I tired of Dr. Andrews’s sermon I could watch the colors texturing the folds & creases each time he thumped it. Beresford. That’s where we worshipped: Papa, Mama, and I. Poor preparation, this, for Rouen! Rouen wardered by groups of solemn statuary clasped by stems of sculpted leafage crowned by fretted niche & fairy pediment like inextricably meshed gossamer; Rouen with her surge & foam of pious chivalry breaking on crystal cliffs to stand revealed as every hidden thing shall be, insatiable at prayer or pillage, lending grace to English rudeness, venom to Italy’s cunning    ...    Rouen with all her avarice & intricacies, gargoyles open-mawed, molten, drenching ornament down spires vertiginously pinnacled —  insanae substructiones! Inutiles domos! —  yet piping pastoral songs of innocence —    The Palazzo Contarini-Fasan, Venice (1841). Higgledy terraced structures the colors of ice creams & sorbets w/ no bland tinting. No calligraphic decoration. Graphite, watercolor & body color. A thorough spell in the vernacular. Stone filigree spidering rhythmic tessellations w/ some scratching out. Details that become a refuge. Detail that becomes a refuge. A long-drawn replica in which new life may even now be in the offing. A sulky grandeur, by the bye. A naughty jailer. A determined postulant. A barber-pole mooring post. A dipped oar tilting  for trouble. The Doge’s tottering state stepping off on gray paper. Worn somewhat, and not a little weary, Sandro’s uncommon Fortitude, in this his first recorded work. Consider it a moment, if you please, before you pass hurriedly on to see The Birth of  Venus next door, and notice that Sandro began where you perhaps will end: with weariness. Would you have guessed that Fortitude allows (allows? approves of!) reverie? See how her fingers play in restless idleness or nervousness about her sword hilt (sword or mace? I’ve lost my notes about her    ...    ). She is no match, it may be, for the trials that are to come, yet see her armor shine in readiness, her gentle fingers apt to grip her sword (or mace) should she be called. Lips pursed and eyes averted, she has smiled, and not a little ruefully, at her fate from time to time. She has no smile today. Her quality must be borne daylong, lifelong. To flaunt it ever is not to possess it quite. See Pollaiolo’s Virtues pose and attitudinize: thus they perform their various meanings. Fortitude must contain — must be — all that she stands for. Go, see whatever the Uffizi has to tempt you; but remember Fortitude whose battle did not begin today, nor yesterday, nor on the Sunday last. Many a day has passed since it began. They are so wedded to their righteousness, those lesser Virtues, quite incapable of  being tempted. They would not dare risk complacency. She would be lost without it. But sword or mace? Go now. It is no matter. I will not need you until tomorrow morning.   Ravine at Maglans (1849?). Deeper brown on brown. A limestone precipice stepped with horizontal cleavages to overlook the void. No water but a dream of water years back, far down, running harum-scarum strong enough to turn a mill. A spate become a thread. A visit out of season. A torrent bed of what must have been snow-melt now entirely dry. No stones crumble but flow, subside, rhythmic as cloud, as high-built, as unsubstantial over the long haul. Quartz strips ribboning a treed crevasse fringed w/ curled & unfurled fronds. Leaves shook to palsy by the noon wind’s spite. A rock fissured. A great fault. A graphite rock fissured in brown ink & ink wash heightened w/ flesh-toned body color on white paper. Last night St. Ursula sent me her dianthus out of her bedroom window, with her love —  living dianthus, and a single dried sprig of  her other window flower, vervain    ...     how many flowers are named in Genesis? Good answer! Not one. Plenty of trees, however. It was a poet planted flowerbeds that Eden might be filled with tremulous, frivolous petals — I dare say he was right, they were made to be noticed! And to see a poppy husk fall from a bursting flower is to know something of the life to come once the body has turned to dust & ashes, even as our dying breath aspires toward our Father’s house    ...    as for the trees, what can we learn of noble constancy more than we find in the pure laurel leaf, so numerable, so sequent and serene?   open the envelope petals & may spill on the table where I remain preparing the lesson   bruise-edged rose petals cling to my fingers dust motes dancing gnats in a sun-shaft myrrh, or a snuffbox?   write to me, tell me who do you dance with oftenest, often? gray eyes & red cheeks useless in heaven   undowered, garlanded with no forget-me-nots: compassed about with the forgetfulness of all the world   honor unwon kind words unsaid good deeds undone: none of these, none touch me more nearly Now, if  I say “St. Ursula has sent me a pot of pinks!” some will say I have goneheartily, headily mad, but all it means is that the flowers I received of  late (from the hand of whatsoever friend or stranger) helped greatly in my work, and afterward reproved me in their own way for its failure.But how much love of mine have others lost because one poor sick child would not receive the part of love that yet belongs to her! Think now, sweet milkmaids of Albion whose face is your fortune, think of one lying still there, nearly a skeleton, and ask yourselves: We have a little sister and she has no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day of  her espousals?   South Side of the Basilica of St. Mark’s, Venice, from the Loggia of the Ducal Palace (c.1851). An eerie vantage. A capricious helter-skelter variety of application, quickening details of watercolor passing  for time-veined marble scaled-up from a daguerreotype. An echo’s volume. Shadows lilt & flourish over chessboard floor tiles. A kind of hectic color. Disallowance of perspective. Sculpted relief without recession. Megrims & mysteries; conceits & divertisements. The uncapped St. Jean d’Acre’s pillar giving on to the southern portico. A Byzantine capital. A sonata on a virginal. Graphite & watercolor heightened w/ white on three jointed pieces of paper.  Up my spirit leapt, so glad  to shed this gross flesh and have done!  My ghost, given up by the grace of God,  was led where marvels are counted common.  I climbed to where cliff-top meets cloud —   vertiginous heights no man has known —   my soul drawn on toward a wood  decked with countless jewels & stones.  It is hard to credit a sight so fine  as the wash of  light in which they shone:  woman never wove a gown  so dearly adorned, so lit with splendor.  In splendor, cliffs of crystal stood  crisp as ice, clear & clean.  At their foot, a forest spread:  the trees were touched with a red-blue sheen  and leaves of  burnished silver slid  quivering to & fro between  limbs that shimmered like blue jade  each time a light-gleam touched the scene.  The gravel underfoot was strewn  with gems, and the sun seemed quite outshone  by those precious, oriental stones  so dearly adorned, so lit with splendor.  The splendor of the grove was such  that my grief left me — it lifted clear;  the fragrance of the fruit so fresh,  I found I needed no other fare.  Birds flew together, branch to branch  like flecks of flame — now here now there;  no human symphony can match,  nor voice nor string delight the ear  with such a song: they blessed the air  with a sweet accord that swooned & shone  with harmonies you will never hear  but there where all is lit with splendor.  So adorned in splendor was  that forest where I met my fate,  a cunning man could not devise  a fitting way to tell of it.  Climbing pear trees, apple trees;  browsing wonders — pretty sport!  And soon the flowers & fields & hedgerows  turned beautifully intricate  with burns & water gardens. Bright  as burnished gold the fellside shone  where I trailed a stream that ran with light,  dearly adorned & lit with splendor.  But a greater splendor was yet to come:  a riverbank of  beryl ablaze  where water swept & swirled in a foam  of  hurrying murmurs & confused airs.  The stream bed glinted with a gleam  like sunlight filtered through stained glass  or winter starlight, when it may seem  we’re all alone when the clouds pass.  Each pebble bright as Hesperus:  sapphire, emerald — each one shone  with a light too bright for similes,  dearly adorned & lit with splendor.   Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas (1853–54). A living witness. A verticality more smooth than the water over wch it rears. Glib-channeled water rushing; dry rock dripping — fluid, labial rock, less still than the wildflowers & feathered grasses that cling in unguessed cracks & overhang. Mapped lichens. Lampblack, body color. A cumbrous slab. An unobtrusive majesty. A happenstance long sought before seen, loved long before understood. A lesson of devotion to be found always, found but once. An obstinacy gladdened by the river’s flux, the ice floe’s pluck & laving. Pen & ink over graphite on wove paper w/ some scratching out. In Santa Croce, here we are well quit of restoration, for who cares about this slab with its poor bit of sculpture? An old man in the deeply-folded cap worn by the scholars & gentlemen of  Florence c.1300–1500, dead, a book upon his breast, and over it his hands lie folded. At his feet, the legend:.bordered {  width: 500px;  height: 200px;  padding: 20px;  border: 2px solid black;  } temporibvs • hic • svis • phylosopye • atq • medicine • cvlmen • fvit • et magister galilevs • degalileis • olim • bonaivtis • qvi etiam • svmmo • inmagistratv • miro • qvodam • modo • rem • pvblicam dilexit cvivs • sancte • memorie • bene acte • vitepie • benedictvs • filivs • hvnc • tvmv lvm • patri • sibi • svis • & • posteris • edidit The worn face, still the old man’s perfect portrait —  though one struck out by a master’s chisel at a venture, just so, with a few rough touches; the falling drapery of  his citizen’s cap subtle beyond description, with the choice of folds exquisite in its ornamental pattern; the carpet he lies on almost uninjured, elaborate with fringe & frond relieving the severity of the figure    ...     and see now, see how the cushion’s nearly-perfect tassels balance to fill the angles of the stone —    Study of a Peacock’s Breast Feather (1873). A single plume, painted of its natural size. One iridescent throb transitioning from the active plume’s obliquity to the decorative’s dualed symmetry. An uncertain correspondence w/ a heart-shaped flower petal. A cold thrill: a pang as of a nice deep wasp sting. Moss green moving via jade to emerald, indigo to lapis lazuli: as much as is allowed, having neither hocus-pocus nor heaven to dip a brush in. A heraldic emblem; watch & ward against incipient commodity. A lost key to a blue box for blue girls w/ gray eyes. Watercolor & body color on paper.  whirrrrrrr-r-r-r-r-r-r  pink! pink! pink! cherry-erry-erry  pew-pew-pew-pew-poor-pew-pew the chaffinches chirp but feebly; this June snow  discomposes them  Coniston  bright as glass  ill-cast  by an undiscerning hand  wave-lines  showing like flaws in planes of fine crystal  unsteady, unstill  troubling & troubled  What is it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven?  Child, according to this morning’s Spectator ’tis nothing but the filtration of money from above downwards —   an oft-observed phenomenon  concessum propter duritiem cordis  a thing allowed  and properly recorded in our holy book of double entry  I mean St. Usura’s Gospel of  Filth  wherein we learn his doctrine of arithmetic  that 2 + 2 = 5    ...      O we are so humane,  forsooth, we are so wise,  that whereas our ancestors had tar barrels for witches  we have them for everybody else —   and we will have our cauldrons cooled, please Hecate,  after Mr. Darwin’s theory  with baboon blood!  Occulted by daylight  we will drive the witches’ trade ourselves  as, once, I saw a boy with his basket of rotten figs  poor little costermonger  before the south façade of the Ducal Palace  stooping to cry Fighiaie! Fighiaie!  Inibito a chiunque il vendere frutti cattivi  19th June, 1516  (i.e. before that nobody thought of doing so)  as, more than once, I have seen the girls at the windows: poor girls  at the windows, in the alleyways,  in the slums by the Euston Hotel, by the railway lines,  take Camden Rd. toward the canal basin, lift your eyes,  do but lift your eyes as you leave the hall, gentlemen,  and you will mark them, they hold themselves  liberally, knowing our likings, poor girls, nothing to sell  but everything; nothing to sell  but themselves I dewyne,  fordolked of luf-daungere too fast & far,  boiled to rags by morbid violence — No  they cannot touch me for coyning  me so misby — so misby — so misby  me wish me was a clergyman  tellin lies all day  & Flint — & Tukup — & But —   cujus sancte memorie  those rich-left heirs  Fighiaie! O Love,  sane as the proud flesh  about a healing wound  in the side of my nation that yet may pass  at a crisis  into morbific substance,  let this man work. O Love,  give us work  and set us to it,  for we are corrigible: O fettle us  for we are not  after all entirely corrigible  & stay our hand when we would set our soul upon a cast: teach us how to give & hazard all we hath upon your coming, for the soul cannot be bargained otherwise — only lost. Impregnable to our economies whatever the deceiver promises, the soul is not for sale. And now, the cost  diligently accounted for, the sum  entered in the ledger, see this bound  and shelved in sequence where it may be found  by any who enquire, should any come    ...      Love sets no term. Love schedules its appearances  according to no clock of ours:  to moon-bewildered waves we each of us receive  our summons, unreluctant. Let walk upon them  all who can.  ...    came Phaedra then, and Procris,  next Ariadnè, fairest of all,  whose daddy’s mind was a slaughterhouse  bright Ariadnè  whom Theseus once from Crete  to the tilled acres of sacred Athens led —   nor had he the joy of  her, his heart’s desire,  poor Ariadnè  fair, moon-bewildered —   false Dionys̄us witnessed against her;  Artěmis slew her    ...      O, feed her with apricocks & dewberries,  with purple grapes, green figs & mulberries Is she not with me here among the hawthorn blossom?  Diodati, a year with no summer,  and the world was void —   þe fyrre in þe fryth   — she was the Universe  At dusk pipistrelles flit like black rags torn at the edge  bonfire cinders  riding the vortex  spiraling circuits  all round the terrace  all day have I sat here  preparing the lesson My dear little birds, did you not see the gleam of sunshine yesterday? Hadst thou but seen her in it  bareheaded, barefoot between the laurels & the primrose bank   Moss & Wild Strawberry (1873). Gentle, hesitant line. A suggestion in the genitive. A secret in midsummer. A slackening deft moss nested in cleaved stone. Traces of body color on gray-blue paper trefoiled w/ dewy sequins. Seekings. Rooting a subtle declivity in the rock revealed now by a berry’s posture. A gaze darkening where lines triangulate palely. A beckoning. A suggestive gesture.
Dazed with rambling gossip, their looming net of mistakes, their love of rumor, they all dream arousal. They are far from indifferent. Their language bellows need. A gull darts over and behind bare buildings, shaggy forests, mountains, city streets. Trees lose leaves, and one man insists the leaves aren’t dying after collecting outdated food at church, upswing in full euphoric force, he’s certain he’s spreading world peace. Men at work lumber to dumpsters. Oaks yellow. Rocks trap leaves. Jehovah’s Witnesses mouthed salvation. Janice listened wishful, but today she relays her own bitter story: lazy sister-in-law fat on a couch, quarter-sized bedsores on her ass, brother-in-law blind, stumbling drunk. Hearts rigid and numb, neighbors forget crepe myrtle blooming pink. Impermanent and frenetic worry hums. Eyes grow glaucoma blue. Sucking cigarettes and mumbling, they stand hardy as an autumn day’s geraniums, hard before winter.
In memory of John Ashbery (1927–2017) A girl moaning: I don’t understand “Wave.”
She pronounces Chama the name of the milky green river with a richness in the ch I cannot muster, puts a hard d on the end of her ands. anD. anD. anD. Like the river she is asking to be endless anD shifting. To stream. I’d scouted the knoll of oaks for rattlers, being beyond the bounds of Coverage having no means to learn their habits. So I lay down with her on the ground. Their ground. AnD I willed to forget the cares of my later-in-life job search. Job. Which is also Job, a man in the Bible. Which is a book. The oaks of the knoll were leaning into the Chama like girls washing their hair in basins. I thought of EB shampooing Lota, of Frost’s birches, of Plath’s Wych elms which I’d like to have googled. Did snakes favor oak knolls? Did Georgia O’Keeffe worry about health insurance costs in Abiquiú? AnD beside me my love streaming, her poodles distantly nosing the chamisa. Standards. I thought I had them. Put art at the front of the queue wych is different from quiú. AnD now this. Biblical the proportions of this breaking-back-into-a-country-I’d- locked-myself-out-of phase. Was it scenic? I liked the pachysandra, branches of oak taking all that space from the sky. But then everybody disappeared to their offices. Three times I wrote work work work when woke was what I wanted to write. Miniature is the acorn I fingered in the soft flour-sack pocket of my jeans. Acorn smaller than East Coast or indeed Irish Oak varieties wych she handed me anD how hungrily I pocketed its little body.
What are you going to do With what is left of yourself Now among the rustling Of your maybe best years? This is not an auto-elegy With me pouring my heart Out into where you Differently stand or sit On the Epidaurus steps. What shall I say to myself Having put myself down On to a public page? Where am I going now? And where are you going Tricked into reading Words of my later life? Let me pretend you are Roughly of my age. Are you a boy or a girl? And what has happened to you? Look at the chirping various Leaves of Mr Graham’s Spanking summer. Where are You at? I know my face Has changed. My hair has blanched Into a wrong disguise Sitting on top of my head. Beside each other perched On the Epidaurus steps. Where am I going to go? Shall I rise to follow The thin sound of the goats Tinkling their bells?
Sheila, we speak here on the fly Leaf of a book which was myself  A good few graves ago. Now I am maintained by other Words for better or for worse  To whisper my hello. The seasons turn. Threshold on thresh Hold forms continually and falls  Under grief’s lonely hammer. What did you say? I thought between These fly leaf words I heard you speak  Out of your Second Summer. The summer chimes and turns its blue Dragon-flying eyes to see  We two are not afraid. Hello, Sheila, I can hear Your breath on the other side of the word  And see you turn your head.
Do not allow me to sink, I said To a top floating ribbon of kelp. As I was lifted on each wave And made to slide into the vale I wanted not to drown. I wanted To make it all right with my dear, To tell my cat I’ll be away, To have them all destroyed, the poems Which were not objects enough on their own Even entertainment value. I wanted Through my saltwater breath to leave A bubble or two in its abstract sphere On the surface of their delicious minds.• Outside the window of the world The midges dance above a bush Making a complex music holding A language for which there is no key. That they are dancing there helps us To communicate even in the negative.• Time’s not funny enough to dash My hopes. I go in wide open To deal with its little team of tenses To try to win myself a stopped Place for an instant while I think.• I have left my place to come to speak To you. Now from this other place Inhabited by the very beast I brace myself to speak with good Tone that will carry. I love you. How does that sound? I was only testing.• Who murmurs me their secret name? Is it you? If you could do that You certainly would be better than me. Who I am, the name I hunt After has so far escaped me. The grammarsow or the waving rook Surely must think of me as somebody.• Ben Narnain was a love of mine, Going up beside the Soordook Burn And bracken and bog-myrtle. The water Ouzel dipped at the pools. The twite The mountain linnet caught the eye. From the top I saw the sword of the long Loch lying in its scabbard of hills.• Ideosyncracies of the way We speak eventually become Currency and only by Art Skip the expanded chest of rhetoric To speak nearly from one to another.• Younger my brash prison of joy Seemed to do me well enough. Now made modern with its new Benefits of experience I can hardly catch a glimpse Of that young sun and tree-top. My cell’s window has risen too high.• Is who’s listening who I guess It is? My dear it is so long Since I held your heart near. I wanted just to speak but now Hearing your little ear I know So well near me I am put off. Anyhow I was only going to try To assail some aspect of Reality.• The blemish is this, I think, I could I would have if I had known I really could but me knowing It maybe too well was not sure What it was I could and the words Were all against me and would not help.• Listening through the microscopes of power I heard a rebec under an olive Sing to me that certainly My wife would leave me and go down To live on the prose plains again.• This is a book. It is blue. Those are pages. They are black and white. That is a famous man. The worms Do not know his name or color.• I am here very much at four A.M. Am I in a deeper night Than you whose eyeballs observe terrible Encounters under your dream’s hill? I am only still up out of sleep Trying to burnish an implement With my mind’s elbow grease to pack In English and send off to you For you to put on the mantlepiece.
Sit on the park bench and chew this mint leaf. Right now, way above your head, two men floating in a rocket ship are ignoring their delicate experiments, their buttons flashing red. Watching you chew your mint, the men forget about their gritty toothpaste, about their fingers, numb from lack of gravity. They see you and, for the first time since liftoff, think home. When they were boys they were gentle. And smart. One could tie string around a fly without cinching it in half. One wrote tales of sailors who drowned after mistaking the backs of whales for islands. Does it matter which man is which? They just quit their mission for you. They’re on their way down. You’ll take both men — a winter husband and a summer husband. Does it matter which is — don’t slump like that. Get up, we have so much work to do before —  wait you’re going the wrong way small whelp of a woman! this is not  how we behave where are you going  this world is already willing to give you anything do you want to know Latin  okay now everyone here knows Latin want inflatable deer deer ! i promise the winter / summer children will barely hurt dear i’m hurt that you would ever think  i don’t glisten to you i’m always glistening  tame your voice and turn around the men are coming they’ve traded everything for you the gemmy starlight  the click click click  of the universe expanding  stop  aren’t you known aren’t you  known here how can you be certain that anywhere else will provide  more pears than you could ever eat  remember the sweet rot of it all come back you forgot your sweater  what if there’s nothing there when you —  you don’t have your  sweater  what if it’s cold

After twenty years of marriage, we walked out of the bush and on to a rough dirt road we followed till we saw a pond we might be able to get to. The ground was boggy and buzzing. The pond was thick with weed and slime. It was not the sort of pond anyone would swim in, but we did — picking and sliding into the water over the bog and bees, bees we suddenly noticed were everywhere, were settling on our hair as we swam, ducks turning surprised eyes our way. After twenty years of marriage what is surprising isn’t really so much the person you are with but to find yourselves so out of place in this scene, cold but not able to get out without stepping over bees, so many bees.
Who is speaking? Our correspondent on the hill above the river, making pictures for exhibition in other places. Each stroke of his pen ricochets across the valley. He sees what he wants to see. He does not hear what he cannot see. A smoking ruin behind him. Another 
waiting just around the bend. airy particulates A path leads from the pa to a ford of the river hard by, which was that traversed by the raiders on their return. Nothing was heard but the occasional yell until about 8 pm, when we could again distinctly hear the yells repeated, and then all was again quiet, save the sentinels’ “All’s well.”was, it seems, waha, mouth  The stream at this spot is about 90 yards wide, and its depth is about 3 feet. Then a shout of “stand to your arms,” which was followed by a heavy volley from the rebels, who set up a most unearthly yell.wavering, with two hearts  The south bank is flat and low, and on that side there is a good deal of marsh. They were full of determination, and at times came within speaking distance, inviting our men to come on, who replied by recommending them to stand out.led the women in resisting the survey  The north bank is high and steep, and its precipitous sides are clothed with karaka and fern trees, whose luxuriant foliage, thickly matted with the vine, and parasite plants which grow there in abundance, forms a sort of vegetable wall. Several old women were vociferous in encouraging the enemy.to get shellfish from the reef  The landscape is extremely pretty. They were blowing their horns and shouting for a long time, and in the morning it was found that the sap rollers had disappeared, and also a quantity of gabions.this white flag is not an emblem of peace  The camp shows above the windings of the river, which pursues its tortuous course over a shingly bed, and is lost to view in the distance. All the peach trees, karaka trees, where the picnic parties used to go, have been cut down.a comet, west northwest, portending  The sun shining on the white tops of the tents renders their outline particularly distinct. Every time a shell is thrown they set up a general howl of defiance, followed by such challenges as “Come on, Pakeha!” “Come on, 
soldier — come on!”left on the ground for the pigs and sea gulls (karoro)  In the distance the sea presents an unvaried, unbroken line, and the snowy peak of the mountain to the left adds considerably to the scene. During the night they contented themselves by wasting on us all the bad epithets and evil wishes their language is capable of.“a mate noa,” till death  The road down to the ford on the north bank is very steep, insomuch that it is a necessary precaution to dismount and lead a horse. They have several blowing horns, by means of which they mimic our bugle sounds. These horns are heard both day and night, and it is probable that they have certain established calls, which they all understand and adopt on particular occasions.wrote his name on a tub  The raiders, however, managed to get their bullock drays up to the top, but it is presumed they were empty, and that their contents must have been brought up by hand. On Monday night the guard in No. 8 Redoubt were entertained until about 2 o’clock by Hapurona, who was urging his people most vehemently to attack them, and said they were very weak in it. He said the Governor had done him all sorts of injury, and that he would scatter our bones over the Waitara.a blue shirt braided with scarlet  The ground about the pa is tolerably clear, and it is in part intersected by fences. Several of the men in the redoubt knew his voice and what he said quite well.being covered with myriads of empty cartridge cases  A solitary canoe was found half full of water near the ford. During the night voices heard on our right, that of a woman being most conspicuous. She was endeavoring to incite the people to some desperate action by relating the deeds of her forebears.being pouri (grieved)  How do they sound, drifting back to him there on the side of the road down by the river or along the beach? A group of riders coming the other way, a group the artist did not catch in his notebook and they were gone before he thought to turn around and look after their retreating voices. Top hat and sidesaddle. Onaero, Urenui, Wai-iti, Pukearuhe.
In Homer, the gods take the place of consciousness. For me, it is birds. Gray gulls seen from above, a tan and white pigeon bringing amoral intelligence to the balcony wall. Geoff says they are really getting tough on birds in Brighton. Bringing in a bylaw. I remember his balcony it’s really just the roof of the room downstairs but when you climb out the window you get a view of the sea and the ferris wheel which I believe is gone, or going it was an eyesore all the locals said though I — of course —  thought it was wonderful and the burned-down pier out in the water.
The time of breathing into clasped hands hovering over a lighter to make a flame not knowing that an angry man threw his eyes into the night the belly of his shattered father weeping rain for separation of earth and sky harvesting bitter grudges from minds like hardened soil packing up the wounds with mud and whiskey and opening doors to wait for those curious to know how sky maps granted our existence how the weight of earth pushed against tongues of oars and our tīpuna pushed back and won.
In the warmth of night I put feet to my plan: waited for my brothers to sleep. They’d spent the day sharpening their hooks, repairing the great net, filling gourds with fresh water. They’d bundled taro wrapped in leaves sitting below the cross seats. The bundles and the net would cover me, especially if I said the chant to slow my movement and my breathing. The moon became brighter like a big fish eye as the chant hooked me. I was holding my grandmother’s hook so tightly a little cut welled red between my closed knuckles. “Goodmorning, brothers,” I called and they cussed and moaned until the next chant took us a further hundred miles and then another until my chanting made them gasp as we settled on a patch of ocean black with fish. They forgave me, not that it matters. I took the bloody hook and said my business to the ocean. It worked. The fish rose and our descent was secured.
I buy a Mana Party T-shirt from AliExpress. $9.99 free shipping via standard post. Estimated arrival 14–31 working days. Tracking unavailable via DSL. Asian size XXL. I wear it as a dress with thigh-high vinyl boots and fishnets. I post a picture to Instagram. Am I navigating correctly? Tell me, which stars were my ancestors looking at? And which ones burnt the black of searching irises and reflected something genuine back? I look to Rihanna and Kim Kardashian shimmering in Swarovski crystals. Make my eyes glow with seeing. I am inhaling, long white clouds and I see rivers of milk running toward orange oceans of sunlit honey. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? I want to spend my money on something bougie, like custom-made pounamu hoop earrings. I want to make them myself but my line doesn’t trace back to the beauties in the south making amulets with elegant fingers. I go back into blackness, I go back and fill in the gaps, searching through archives of advertisements: Welcome to the Wonderland of the South Pacific. Tiki bars, traffic-light cocktails & paper umbrellas. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? Steering through the storm drunk & wet-faced waking up to the taste of hangover, a dry mouth, a strange bed, shirt above my head is the flag fluttering over everything. What were we celebrating? The 6th of February is the anniversary of the greatest failed marriage this nation has ever seen. In America, couples have divorce parties. We always arrive fashionably late. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? The sea our ancestors traversed stretches out farther than the stars.
For RWT the other day i was thinking about the term pyramid scheme, and why they called it pyramid scheme and not triangle scheme and i asked you what you thought you thought it added a certain gravitas, and linked the idea of 
economic prosperity with some of history’s greatest architectural achievements unconsciously suggesting a silent wealth of gold and heat a triangle is two dimensional, and therefore a less striking mental image than the idea of a third dimension of financial fraud which is how many dimensions of financial fraud the term pyramid scheme suggests but i had to pause for a second at the financial fraud part because it occurred to me i didn’t know what pyramid schemes really were i knew they had something to do with people getting money from nothing like the person at the top of the pyramid scheme, or more accurately triangle scheme, acquires a number of investors and takes their money and then pays the first lot of investors with the money from another bunch of investors and so on and so forth all the way to the bottom of the triangle or pyramid face which is the kind of stupid thing that happens if you keep your money in a pyramid and not a bank account although if you ask me banks are the real pyramid schemes after all or was love the real pyramid scheme? i can’t remember maybe it’s better to keep your money in a pyramid than a bank and i should shop around and compare the interest rates on different pyramids maybe i should open up a savings pyramid with a whole bunch of trapdoors and malarias to keep the financial anthropologists i mean bankers out my emeralds cooling under the ground like beautiful women’s eyes i think this was supposed to be a metaphor for something but i can’t remember where i was going with it and now it’s been swept away by the winds of whatever but knowing me, it was probably love that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true that cartoon black castle with a single bird flying over it i don’t know where this poem ends how far below the sand but it’s still early evening and you and I are a little drunk you answer the phone you pour me a drink i know you hate the domestic in poetry but you should have thought of that before you invited me to move in with you i used to think arguments were the same as honesty i used to think screaming was the same as passion i used to think pain was meaningful i no longer think pain is meaningful i never learned anything good from being unhappy i never learned anything good from being happy either the way i feel about you has nothing to do with learning it has nothing to do with anything but i feel it down in the corners of my sarcophagus i feel it in my sleep even when i am not thinking about you you are still pouring through my blood, like fire through an abandoned hospital ward these coins are getting heavy on my eyes it has been a great honor and privilege to love you it has been a great honor and privilege to eat cold pizza on your steps at dawn love is so stupid: it’s like punching the sun and having a million gold coins rain down on you which you don’t even have to pay tax on because sun money is free money and i’m pretty sure there are no laws about that but i would pay tax because i believe that hospitals and education and the arts should be publicly funded even this poem when i look at you, my eyes are two identical neighborhood houses on fire when i look at you my eyes bulge out of my skull like a dog in a cartoon when i am with you an enormous silence descends upon me and i feel like i am sinking into the deepest part of my life we walk down the street, with the grass blowing back and forth i have never been so happy
in his white light dreams at Discovery Hut Herbert Ponting meets the Siberian ponies he’d once photographed on the Terra Nova the ponies no longer flexible refuse to wear equine pajamas or trap their hooves in bamboo snowshoes for his Royal Collection inside the stomach of ice the ponies more still than life soften the silver shadows of Scott and his team and turn from Herbert’s bromide into the drift and whiff of themselves
You yearn so much you could be a yacht. Your mind has already set sail. It takes a few days to arrive at island pace, but soon you are barefoot on the sand, the slim waves testing your feet like health professionals. You toe shells, sea glass, and odd things that have drifted for years and finally washed up here. You drop your towel and step out of your togs, ungainly, first your right foot, then the other stepping down the sand to stand in the water. There is no discernible difference in temperature. You breaststroke in the lazy blue. A guy passing in a rowboat says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” And it is. Your body afloat in salt as if cured.
It came to pass that I boarded a plane and as I edged past the man in the aisle seat he saidMy name is Dov. I knew you would come.
When we arrive at the lounge of everything with our bags handfuls of earth the lives of our grandparents in our memory devices we expect an exchange of sorts that is what we expect and I think everyone deep down expects that we will not turn back Through a high window we will connect stars like line drawings translate the sparkles of the poet we will sign the fascinating mouth of the speaker we will sing lyrics that someone thought were pretty good we will sing them and we will not turn back we will not When our footsteps awaken fresh from a long complicated journey during which the planet slid otherwise we will likely remember a dream we had once and tell a version of it to the next person and the next and realize hopefully they also have a dream to tell and we will not do that thing where we won’t listen to anyone else’s dream we will listen and interpret signing singing saying even though we have been instructed not to use ings we will use the wisdom disseminated by our devices we will not turn back we will not If on arrival there is wringing of hands we will shake hands and in the eye of a storm we will make tea with our brilliant fading bodies we will do a variety of things while we can we will bed down on the steps of the assembly if we have to we will bed down in a court of law and all beds anyway are temporary and when we see that and realize we have traveled through the night we have traveled and are not turning back that will be the point at which we will arrive
End of the day. A bar where you ought to leave a tip. The green bird was saying pretty pretty pretty, loved ones were walking home across the city. I waved at the girl who waves her whip    ...     but please be certain I’m a citizen    ...     I take stuff to the dump    ...    or maybe it’s the tip? I’m where the nitty really meets the gritty. I know I find it hard to listen. I read too much. I often need a drink. It isn’t the world that makes us think, it’s words that we can’t come up with. Sure, I can work up fresh examples and send them off to the committee. But the poetry is in the bird. And in the pretty.
For Síle I give thee the sun as guarantee and the Egyptian faience beads and the little silver oar that was gifted once to an English harbor master. I give thee the silk dress with its triple-ruffled sleeves and the cloaks with big hoods that fall full though some are pulled in at a central button. I give thee the little colored goats that go down on their knees as penitents. I give thee the death mask and the plaster hand of Seán Ó Riada, for he is among the best loved of the musicians.
I’m in charge of a cage. I know those that won’t. I don’t mean can’t. Just won’t. There’s a roster for Tuesdays, Fridays. Dogs to die. The disconsolate, the abandoned, those with recurrent symptoms, the incorrigible mutt — oh, a dozen choices by way of reasons. Even so, some won’t. Won’t play along once their number’s up. The “rainbow bridge” in the offing as the posher clinics put it, a pig’s ear as a final treat, a venison chew, the profession behaving beautifully at a time like this. Still, those that won’t. Won’t go nicely, I mean, with a gaze to melt, a last slobbed lick. Those with a soul’s defiance, though embarrassment in the lunchroom should you come at that one! Even after the bag is zipped, you feel it:We’re real at the end as you are, buster. We sniff the wind. What say if we say it together?
Later, lying on the lawn of the big house someone asked could we remove our jackets. No one had taken chargewe were young officersand I took mine off.And then (or earlier)we were in the battle zone taking cover behind parked carspostboxes, phone boothsand in abandoned trams when my friend took one full in the chestand went down without a word.“Way to go,” I thought and imagined the sniper reporting “I got one”and being doubtedbut I could have attested to it the perfect shot. And then the shelling and the strafing began. Later I wrote a report (I was good at that) and I remembered lying out on the lawnof the big housethat was called “Mandalay”in the hot sunand Barry asking about our jacketsand I removing mine and Ian saying “In the enemy armyyou could be shot for that.” The battle zone wasn’t always a citysometimes it was jungle where our first foes were mosquitoeswho took our bloodand flew away with itlike bees, Barry joked taking pollenfrom the full flower of our youth.
People like to mock my town, they mock it for being too provincial and too boring and it’s true, not much of import happens here but I don’t mind. Some people say, when they are asked what they like about Palmerston North, that you can always find a park and that’s true, too, you can always find a park just a short walk from where you want to go, sometimes right outside, you don’t have to walk at all, you’re right there. Of course only people who live in New Zealand mock Palmerston North, as people who live outside New Zealand know nothing about it. People who don’t live in New Zealand mock our entire little country as a 1950s throwback with honest, rural folk and unspoilt scenery which isn’t quite true, our scenery is spoilt from being looked at too often and freedom campers, they say, are a problem, but me, I blame dairy cows. When I lived in the UK people there thought New Zealand was a state of Australia, and they would ask me what was coming up on Neighbours, thinking I had some kind of inside knowledge, but the truth is I don’t even watch Neighbours or indeed any soap operas. Actually the whole Southern Hemisphere is more or less written off by people who don’t live here, as somewhere elsewhere, insignificant, like Palmerston North, where as I said nothing much happens. And it’s an undeniable fact that the magazines I subscribe to come from exotic places that they flaunt in their titles, magazines like The New Yorker and London Review of Books and The Paris Review but not The Palmerston Northerner. It’s another fact that The Paris Review isn’t even published in Paris and has nothing to say about that city but it has insightful interviews with famous writers, some of whom I have read. I have been to Paris and apart from the architecture and the food and some very fine cemeteries and of course the language it’s quite like Palmerston North, though parking is a nightmare. I never visited the Louvre but one fine afternoon I went to the Musée d’Orsay which in the opinion of many educated people really is just as good if you like Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, which I do. Still it was nice to come home again, home to Palmerston North, New Zealand, and to see the good brown Manawatū River moving sluggishly under the bridge. It’s not the Seine, but water is water. Paul Celan threw himself —  odd phrase, as if he were both baseball and pitcher — into the Seine. John Cleese said Palmerston North is the suicide capital of New Zealand, yet you don’t hear of people throwing themselves into the Manawatū, which would be a risky business, but only because of the effluent from those dairy cows leaching into the river. We live on a floodplain, and the river is ever in our thoughts and sometimes our houses. At such times we are downcast but we lift up our eyes unto the hills and the windmills perched on them that turn and turn. One time I saw a middle-aged woman in the Plaza, our only shopping mall, with her head tilted to where the sky would have been, but for the ceiling and the mood lighting, a stout middle-aged woman with black mascara, elegantly dressed, her wet mouth a dark, soundless O, and the crowd not unsympathetically parting and reforming around her — rock in the river —  noticing and not noticing, which is our way.
In real life you are aging at the rate of a short-lived sitcom and the only kind of loneliness worth laughing about is throwing out half a frozen meal for two because leftovers are never funnier the next day. In real life there is no such thing as a gritty reboot — it’s just fucking gritty all the time, mate, because your best-laid plans are always someone else’s chance to crash a car into the crowd at a men’s rights charity concert. In real life the nice guys pull out of the race when their tires are slashed or they turn back because they think they left the iron on and no one adheres to sports film clichés anyway —  we’re all selfish and we want that trophy. In real life you’ll never make it out of your homophobic small town alive, so your left hand begs for water while your right hand swings an ax your left foot drags a church bell while your right foot taps — S.O.S., S.O.S., S.O.S.


What song will they play if I don’t come home tonight? I wished someone would write a song for me, then someone did but it was a song berating me; it was called “Actually, Ashleigh” and I think of the cruelty of songwriters as I get ready — how their music makes their words sound better than they really are how our feelings make music seem better than it really is and how the difficulty of getting ready is a pure, bitter difficulty like calculus. In the back row a once-promising student cries. What will my face become? Strings of demi-semi quavers. I partition the day into a wall of smaller more manageable days, each of which goes black as I billow past in my bike pants and cleats and I see I am not getting ready at all; if anything I am getting unready, I am trying to be made lovely by the glow of an Adshel in the rain. In youth we are told we will rise up whole from our baths, from the comforting midwinter soup of our sadness. We will not devour ourselves tonight. The dark broth will always drain from us. Our legs will drain from our bodies and into the ground and our footsteps will pour into the future. But the future is hidden under thick nests of fat beneath the streets. It pours out to sea, gently warming the earth and its creatures. I go down there as I get ready and the air turns over, gently exposing its soft underbelly. My going-out clothes are waiting for me ironed smooth, laid out like a disappearance.
grandma you flew once over mount taranaki and landed on fanthams peak before the snow fell all over your city and when they looked up they thought they saw an angel but it was just you on your way home from the supermarket and your feet needed a rest
After Denise Levertov Must be a stumbler, bleeder, as some floccus remains here, carded into ragged sleeves by barbed wire. I’d believe in a God who can learn to work new spindles, new pupils uncomprehending the reasons light rosins in winter, and still spill clumsily, bleeding. Now drizzle caught in oily pockets loads the fleece with wealth. I’ve often wondered what the fence keeps out in a country bereft of predators. I long ago reconciled instinctive sympathy for the perfect innocence of animals with an equally ardent carnivory. Arms retreat guilt-free through the widest breach in the garment, having chosen a meal the stauncher faiths call impassible, withdrawing to empty folds. I hope you feel safe when you die.
Our islands are Tagaloaalagi’s stepping stones across Le Vasa Loloa small and frail but courageous enough to bear his weight and mana high enough to keep us above the drowning and learning how to navigate by the stars currents and the ferocity of storms Point and sail in any direction as long as you know how to return home You have to navigate the space between the borders of your skin and the intelligence of the tongueless horizon and learn the language of touch of signs and pain of what isn’t and what may be in the circle of the tides that will stretch until you understand the permanent silence at the end of your voyage and our islands are your anchor and launching site for the universes that repeat and repeat like the long waves of our ocean like Tagaloaalagi’s compulsive scrutiny of what is to come and fear
Two feet of snow at my parents’ place, in another season. Here, the cicadas sing like Christian women’s choirs in a disused cotton mill. Belief is a kind of weather. I haven’t seen proper snow for three years. The new urban forest for native plants and birds will be splendid if the local cats don’t kill the birds. The problem is, all my sympathies are with the cats. The friendly disturbers are more endearing than what they disturb. A trimaran called 3rd Degree spinning around its cable in the channel: that’s how love is here and should be everywhere. It seems so unserious or contentedly ironic; it’s the kind of thing you either look through or ignore. But you’d be wrong. The question isn’t: Why is love so strange here? It’s: Why did it feel normal somewhere else? In quiet places, the present is just gossip about the past. The future is a critique of that. All my best.
When I was “in despair” (the dark days when I actually used such terms) I noticed the behavior of animals —   sleep when tired, eat when hungry That made a lot of sense to me and yet I felt different  I felt my humanness too much No fly ever wonders whether it should make lots and lots of maggots  It gives birth on a mound of cat food or inside the rubbish bin As far as I know it’s not worried about overpopulation or what sort of environment its kids  will grow up in My humanness sees me at an art gallery  watching others  watching walls My humanness gives me dark thoughts of cruel behavior  You are in the States a visa glitch and there you remain  Like Star Trek, I talk to you on a screen  your face half a second out of sync with your speech  I’m in the future  my Tuesday is already over and I want to tell you all about it  to prove my superiority That lovely conceit of time  that saw people travel from all over the world to be in Gisborne  for the first sunrise  of the new millennium  Remember how we all thought the sewer pipes would burst  and the criminals would escape  or something like that  Y2K packs sent to every household  because no one knew for certain  what the numbers 2000 really meant  Somewhere, people, important people  cowered in bunkers  fearing the worst
you lie on your back arms close to your sides the body as a card run through the slit of the EFTPOS machine and stopped rubbed off on a coin or two a set of eyes lingering underneath when you move them you can feel the iris brush against the profile of Queen Elizabeth or a native bird it costs actual material money to change these symbols it costs actual material money to make actual material money valid and invalid what does a banker fall asleep thinking about? hand wrapped around notes stuffed between the mattress and the bed frame you’re lying next to that body and feel bad for thinking about ways to kill yourself and/or him who voted for this system of profit no one voted on the voting system you think about dragging his sleeping body to the balcony he sleeps like the dead so fat chance of him waking throw him from the second floor but you second-guess yourself not because you don’t think you could do it you’re not sure the drop would do it you take the gold from your lids place it on the bedside table
• Phone your local police station. They have a 24-hour answering service. Please note your message will be used for training purposes. Your voice print will be added to their database. • Access Hobbit Rescue (HR) on the Hobbit Rescue app (type in Hobbit Rescue). Type your address in the required box. Wait for assistance to arrive. • Do not touch the Hobbit. Warner Bros. can recycle most parts of a Hobbit. Interference with any part of a dead Hobbit is a crime. Remember: you will be liable! • Do not Facebook your Friends. Some of your Friends may not be Friends. Australian Unionists are known Trollers. Be vigilant. Unionists have no part in our film industry. • When Hobbit Rescue arrives they will ask you questions. You are required to answer. Hobbits are an integral platform in our 
national economy. Withholding information from a private company in pursuit of its legitimate profit can be deemed a treasonable act. • Remember Hobbits are our friends. They were born here. This is their home. They represent our way of life. Do you want to lose that way of life?

Here’s what I had in mind, kōtiro, this clipping at words like overgrown maikuku —  return the blankets of domestic life; don’t fold washing or wear shoes, polish these rerenga kē. Eh. But this world. I s’pose neither of us planned to be in politics, never did do what others told us to —  wahanui though, go on, get your sedition on girl, your agitator, your defiant speak to each other eye to eye —  Māori been jailed for nouns, phrases; butcher up a clause, get buried in Pākehā kupu, then dig that out like the old people. No one approved of their language either.

d
Kant says time is neither event nor thing. Well, I think. That’s that. But then Teresa calls. She’s found my old letters. There are dead dogs in them, old boyfriends; the miscarriage is happening (has happened) and I have to catch a plane. The plane has (not yet) taken off. Sundials, T squares, heartbeats, and the equinox. In places of worship, incense burns. All to mark no thing. Here, wind moves water in one direction, then another. Some mornings, nothing ripples, not leaves, not iridescence on birdwing, beetle back. Some mornings, both: stillness, unrest. Last season’s loon calls. And sometimes? I can’t remember the lake where I first heard that sound, though the vision of it rises through a paint-flecked pane. On my morning walk: a hawk perched on a telephone wire above what used to be a hayfield: rusted New Holland baler, bobolinks and meadowlarks saved from the mower. That was a generation ago, dead farmers, dead cows. Now is not the time, moles, voles, mice, to dart into the light. Nothing stops in stillness except solstice when the sun stands still in declination. I should tell someone this, that we are not propelled beyond a moment of observation, even loss, into something else: field edge, lakeside, motherhood. But that, instead, we are always on our way. On my return, the wire’s empty. The hawk has hunted or not, is sated or continues, hungry. Hunger, at least, returns. Once, in different water, my daughters waded naked after mussels. Appendages, these daughters were. I was accustomed to the creases behind their knees where I kept their pulse. Keep these, too: ships’ bells and steeple chimes, an hourglass, the pharaoh’s water clock. Now, on a floating dock, my daughters sun themselves, swing limbs above water that soon enough will be ice. These days, you can lift saliva off the back of a stamp, determine who licked it. And that woman? That sender? She will have stopped and she will not yet have stopped and she will still be bleeding.
Some things no one says aloud. But he was there if he says he was. Bleaching fields and buttermilk. The stench of breweries and lye. Two-thirds of his life before this one? Sky. His current city rises off a river not Lek, though here in the gallery, a train ride away: The impossible familiar. The somehow known. The curator has written:On the crowded ferry, cows attempt to drink.  But anyone can see that one scratches her neck, a good-sailor cow, sickle-hocked, not parched. Cows like that. Yes. He remembers. Also that, downriver, float the fishmongers’ baskets of haddock and crab. On the way home, this will be also his view, the river running toward its source, a reverse birthing. But now, he sees that Rembrandt has wired coils of light into the shipbuilder’s ruff. He remembers shipbuilders, the horizon upon which sailed their fluyts, and above which: homesick. That was what we call a long time ago because it has to be called something. And now? The guard warns him back from one world. Rose hip. Willow. Sea salt. The infinite clouds.
It is pretty to be sweet and full of pardon like a flower perfuming the hands that shred it, but all piety leads to a single point: the same paradise where dead lab rats go. If you live small you’ll be resurrected with the small, a whole planet of minor gods simpering in the weeds. I don’t know anyone who would kill anyone for me. As boys my brother and I would play love, me drawing stars on the soles of his feet, him tickling my back. Then we’d play harm, him cataloging my sins to the air, me throwing him into furniture. The algorithms for living have always been delicious and hollow, like a beetle husk in a spider’s paw. Hafez said fear is the cheapest room in a house, that we ought to live in better conditions. I would happily trade all my knowing for plusher carpet, higher ceilings. Some nights I force my brain to dream me Persian by listening to old home movies as I fall asleep. In the mornings I open my eyes and spoil the séance. Am I forfeiting my mystique? All bodies become sicker bodies. This is a kind of object permanence, a curse bent around our scalps resembling grace only at the tattered edges. It’s so unsettling to feel anything but good. I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows. Rockabye, now I lay me down, et cetera. The world is what accumulates —  the mouth full of meat, the earth full of meat. My grandfather taught his parrot the ninety-nine holy names of God. Al-Muzil: The Humiliator. Al-Waarith: The Heir. Once, after my grandfather had been dead for a year, I woke from a dream (I was a sultan guzzling flies from a crystal boot) with his walking cane deep in my mouth. I kept sucking until I fell back asleep. There are only two bones in the throat, and that’s if you count the clavicle. This seems unsafe, overdelicate, like I ought to ask for a third. As if anyone living would offer.Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies
gravity accounts for the distance between weightand mass it can also mean alarming importance human bones are so full of gravity it’s hard for us toswim I lost my glasses chasing a branch in the ocean which is far too deep to dredge sometimesI imagine the sea’s made of actualtears this would explain the salt think of allthe disconsolate toddlers weeping right now intothe earth the tears must go somewhere it’s importantto consider everything to name what we’re able oceans give us rain but we don’t call rain ocean knot a dozenrats together by the tail and you’ve got a roi de rats which is harder than rain to hear in the night andfar less welcome who mourns a rat king frustrated chthonic always the biter never the bittenthey give us the evil we need to stay moored togood still I would break any promise to avoid findingone O Terrible God of the Mechanical Age I amyour favorite pilgrim yet even I am finding it impossibleto speak to you now without asking for protection
friends! if i may interrupt right quick i know y’all working, busy smoking & busy trying not to smoke, busy with the kids & moms & busy with alone, but i have just seen two boys — yes, black — on bikes — also — summer children basketball shorts & they outside shoes, wild laughing bout something i couldn’t hear over my own holler, trying to steady the wheel & not hit they asses as they swerved frienddrunk, making their little loops, sun-lotioned faces screwed up with that first & cleanest love we forget to name as such, &, hear me out i’m not trying to dis lil dude, but in this gold hour he kind of looked like Francine off Arthur same monkey mouth & all, ole & i say hey looking-ass boy tho in a beautiful way, the best beautiful same as i know all of us have looked like something off when backlit by love. o loves, y’all ugly asses have crowned me the worst names: wayne brady, gay wiz khalifa, all kinds of bitches & fags (tho only with my bitches & fags), all kinds of shit &, once, mark of buddha that year acne scored my forehead with its bumpy faith. my niggas & my niggas who are not niggas i been almost-pissed myself, almost been boxin’ been tears & snot off your dozen wonders been the giddy swine dancing the flame. o my many hearts, y’all booty-faced weird-ass ole mojo-jojo-looking asses dusty chambers where my living dwells roast me. name me in the old ways, your shit- talk a river i wade, howling until it takes me. i can’t stop laughing, more river wades down my throat. could be drowning could be becoming the water, could be a baptism from the inside out. don’t save me, i don’t wanna be saved. i’ve died laughing before, been seen god’s face & you have her teeth, my nig. but hers ain’t as yellow as them saffron shits you keep stashed in your gloryfoul mouth my friend! my friends! my niggas! my wives! i got a crush on each one of your dumb faces smashing into my heart like idiot cardinals into glass but i am a big-ass glass bird, a stupid monster crashing through the window & becoming it just to make you laugh. Andrew used to sayfriendship is so friendship & ain’t it even after Andrew gave it on over to whatever he was still my nigga. when they turned his body to dust he was still my dusty-ass boy. don’t you hear it? the dust on the fan calls me a bum, says my hairline looks like it’s thinking about retirement. the dust in the car says i look like a chubby slave, says i look too drunk, takes my keys, drives me home. the wind is tangled with the dust of the dead homies, carrying us over to them, giggling in the mirror. hear them. hear your long-gone girl tease your hair on the bus. hear them rolling when you sweep broom across the beaten floor. i miss them. all the dead. how young. how silly to miss what you will become. i apologize. sometimes it just catches up in me. love & ghost gets caught up in us like wind & birds trapped in a sheet just the same. & my friends is some birds, some chicken-head muhfuckas who i would legit stomp a nigga for, do you feel me? when they buried my nigga i put on my timbs walked into that hot august tried to beat his name out the dirt. i beat the earth like a nigga. i threw hands at the earth like a punk muhfucka & the ground chuckled, said my nigga. what is you doing! you can’t hear the wind drunk off the kindred lent? can you hear that great roll from way off like a big nigga laughing in an alley! how your dead auntie laugh when she see you still ain’t grew into that big-ass head! like your real friend laugh when you still the same ugly as yesterday! same ugly as always! same ugly as their last life!
there, on the ground like dirt or a bird december froze & may thawed, bloodmisted, crying for any mother, the boywho called your mama a bitch bleedsour love for you, his wings frozen & fighting the cold wind of our sneakers.we storm him because we love you& your mama has fed us & only usis allowed to call her out her name because we know her name, Ms. Jones,& she bad & only we can say that& when we bad she has permissionfrom our mamas to beat us like we hers. we hers like you hers. you our boy.we pool our punches into the boylike quarters for a bag of flaming hots.we make him look like a bag of flaming hots. lord forgive me, but i don’t regret it.&, on the real, all these summers later,i miss it. i wish a little bit to gather arounda man’s body & stomp in the name of love, beat what he said about my next to bloodback into his vermilion mouth, to makehis mouth a beautiful, smashed tomato.really tho. Leland, you remember how we beat that nigga? our middleschool ritual, that thirty-second eternity.later, i licked his blood off my nikes& dreamed we were water lilies holding the water down.• they were around me likenigga1nigga2 nigga3nigga4 me nigga5nigga6 nigga7nigga8 & i felt    ...    safe?what could be saferthan a circle of boystoo afraid of killing youto kill you? the fists that broke my ribs also wanted me to live.i praise each one true godfor each foot that was nota sharp anything.i had always wanted 8 niggas on me (but not) like that. each hand laid upon me like a rude & starving prayer.after a while i started to like iti leaned into it unblocked my face the bottoms of their shoes were the sweet of a well-chewed eraser.i was their promise. their ink.you should have heard them laugha language so delicious i cracked up cracked grin & all. i didn’t know a thing about love until those boys walked away so happy.my heart pouring from my nose.
but there is no proof but proof no mark but the good news that there is no bad news yet. again. i wish i knew the nausea, its thick yell in the morning, the pregnant proof that in you, life swells. i know i’m not a mother, but i know what it is to nurse a thing you want to kill but can’t. you learn to love it. yes. i love my sweet virus. it is my proof of life, my toxic angel, wasted utopia what makes my blood my blood. i understand belle now, how she could love the beast. if you stare at fangs long enough, even fangs pink with your own blood look soft.• low-key, later, it felt like i got it out the way, to finally know it up close, see it in the mirror. it doesn’t feel good to say that. it doesn’t feel good to know your need outweighed your fear. i braved a stupid ocean. a man. i waded in his stupid waters. i took his stupid salt & let it brine my skin, took his stupid fish into my hands & bit into it like a flapping plum. i kissed at his stupid coral & stupid algae. it was stupid. silly really. i knew nothing that easy to get & good to feel isn’t also trying to eat you.• knew what could happen. needed no snake. grew the fruit myself. was the vine & the rain & the light. the dirt was me. the hands drilling into the dirt were my hands. i made the blade that cut me down. but i only knew how to live when i knew how i’ll die. i want to live. think i mean it. take the pill even on the days i think i won’t survive myself. gave my body a shot. love myself at least that much. thank you, me. thank you, pill, seafoam & bland. thank you, sick blood, my first husband dead river bright with salmon.
scooby-doo was trying to tell us something when every time that monster mask got snatched off it was a greedy white dude. •   in ’97, a black comic gets on stage, 
says, you ever notice how white dogs be like woof woof & black dogs be like ruff ruff motherfuckaaaaa!! •   the dog upstairs won’t shut up & i’ve thought of ending his  little  noisy 
life but i have to remember he 
matters he matters & if i did the 
brown girl upstairs would cry forever. •   dog (n.): a man’s best friend. (see: fetch, roll over, K-9, good boy, put down.) ex. my dog died, I had to do it with my own hands. dawg (n.): a man’s best friend. (see: blunt rolled already, handshake, my nigga, put me on.) ex. my dawg died, he did it with his own hands. •   dogs in this house eat the same thing we do. we eat greens, he eat 
greens. fried bologna, neck bones, 
leftovers.    ...    he died from the suga, the gout or whatever 
 came for big mama came 
back for the dog. •   everybody love Lassie, but what 
about Sounder? •   possible rite of passage #37: graduating from outrunning the 
block’s dogs to outrunning the block’s police. •   i too have been called boy & expected to come, kneel. •   what Animorph did you want to be? i wanted to be the boy who turned into the bird limp in the dog’s wet mouth, holding me toward his human saying I made 
this for you. •   the dog upstairs needs to stop running his mouth talking all that shit I can hear him up there fool don’t think i understand he don’t know i got a bark too teeth too thumbs & a terrible child’s mind. •   something about Air Bud felt    ...    
the talented obedient beast, the roar of the eggshell crowd. •   dogs aren’t racist but they can be trained to be so as can the water as can the trees as can gravity as can anything marked by a pale hand & turned bloodgold a bitter king’s magic touch. •   i’m the kind of werewolf that turns into a shih tzu. ruff ruff motherfucka. •   while my grandmama spoke on the clean blood of Jesus i watched the hounds in the mud hot for anything warm & thought of something better to worship. •   i stand in the dark bathroom in my tightest shortest shorts my vaselined legs the only things catching light. i say i’m a real bitch 3 times, clap my hands above my head. nothing happens. i walk back into the club, put my hand on a man’s chest & it’s a paw. •   the gay agenda made CatDog to offer your child’s gender to their seven-headed god. •   a dead dog is a hero, a dead lion is a hero, a cloned sheep is a miracle, a dead child is a tragedy (depending on the color, the nation, the occupation or non-
occupation of the parents). •   during the new moon i switch from an –a to the traditional –er, i raid the farm, smash the melon patch, swallow chickens whole, spit out the bones ground down 
to smoke, howl Geee-zuss! toward the sky’s great nothing. •   •   dog bred to smell the coke/dog bred to smell the bomb/dog bred to smell the nigger hid beneath the floorboards. •   dude’s dog won’t leave the room won’t let his lord out of his sight 
won’t let his master disappear won’t let himself go hungry won’t let nothing happen to the one who brings the water even if it means being owned, being witness to his hunger. or maybe he’s just dumb. •   stay. open. stay. look at me. stay. open. teeth. bad. bad. stay. open. 
 treat. treat. pant. wag. treat. good. stay. good. stay. •   i listen to DMX smoking a blunt doing bout 90 in a 55 when the cop ask if i know why he pulled me over 
i say i’m just trying to be me. •   the dog upstairs won’t shut up but i can’t hate him he’s up there alone all 
day making noise must be the only way he knows he’s not a ghost.
I am afraid of your transcendental death. When people say think of a man. I think of a brown man. Sometimes the earth grows khella because she can feel our suffering. Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis. When people say think of a man. I think of a white man. I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain. Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis. I was drunk holding my teeth in like students. I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain. You die like an actor. I was drunk holding my teeth in like students. My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water. You die like an actor. I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person. My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water. Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme. I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person. Where does it hurt, we say. Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme. I am afraid of your transcendental death.
Daily, daily scathing roughens the psyche and veils are unhinged. I too was a planet, planed and waterless. Wolf-roved. Our roofs leaked, mischievous sisters locked the Mother General out in the garth where she prayed to the Foundress and the dead and the living looked on, entombed and disapproving. Gray nuns, grave, gave out. There was weeping in every stall. Though the stalls be empty of cattle, we trust. Though our intellects rust, we grow tweedy-brown and opportunistic, feeding off morsels. A cosmos of relics in the crypt and a senior sister led the laity around brilliantly by a twisted adamantine-ringed nose, to see broken finger bones, bloody cloths, brains. Blood so blue and white we redden and hide our film-star faces. Cagey. Margaret crushed by a door. Martha martyred by a window overlooking the park, with swaggering ducks and blinding water. Paddlers. What if you had held a grudge, fondled it, and found that you had fallen in love? He has turned up finally, his jaw like the suspension bridge, magnetized with stubble, cheekbones like girders. Oh no, I am not a cliché. See my inside. Ten years inside but without the comforts of bantam mornings. Bodies on beds shimmied into corners with shifty valances. September blues. Fat satin. Sidling in from the green room. In the gut, a vagabond ache like disgust. I walk cumbersome honesty sideways through several doors, park her in the smoky alley. Pull up compunction by his Jaeger collar, kiss his spandrel nose, expel him into the snowy street. I relish jealousy on the side with copious dressing. Feed depression to a gull called Guillaume on a bleak beach during lunch break. Simplify the universe with a pie chart and chomp down three-quarters of it with mustard and beer.
Muscular as a stallion in fact —  but I have no horse in this race of people against people. It was made certain I wouldn’t, that I’d inherit nothing except a whipping of my hindquarters as a form of correction, in the cadence of I love you, tar baby, I love you. This is not unlike how my parents were raised, to comply, and their parents before them, and theirs before them and so forth as far back as anyone cared to speak of what they lived through, the preposterous preposition of it all. Therefore and thereafter, whenever I hear the word pedigree, I think of the blank check I don’t have behind my name, and then I think of saddles and stirrups, and then the soreness of my lower back, and then the source of that. How a boss can ride you: of this I am personally familiar, plus know by blood drawn from two lines of family men forced to cut out their own tongues to keep food on the table they could no longer taste or even stand to. Their tongues grew back, yes, after some time and with sharpness I’m told, needing to cut against something, anything, to be purposeful given their new forms.Woe! Woe! Woe! How a man rides his wife, his children, how he’d ride a horse he’ll never have, could never give them unless said horse is immaterial, hence not a horse at all —  just muscular, as a stallion is, as a word is that’s denied striving families horsepower, any engine beyond their fragile bodies to propel them forward; the whole race: forward, even if it pits people against a people, even if it means rearing a rear end tender and raw.    I love you, tar baby, I love you something strong.
Because it changes O’Hare to o hate, o hate, o hate — over and over, no matter how many times I retype it. O hate, like an American tune, an American fable where, yo, you can enter an o hate bathroom, take a selfie in the mirror cuz your sister wants to see the pockets of your Great American Rhinestone Jeans. Because, on a street called Viewpoint,I get home becomes I get guns, off a road on a mission to kill every squirrel-ish pedestrian. Because he was packing, concealed, threatening to use it, use his hands or feet. My feet, iamb of a son of a birch, of a brick chatting with the devil, with God, with a listener not listening. Because he’d gone bonnets, his garden bounty a faded wine, his wife’s linguine a longing for a golden ear, so I took her to the botanical gardens in my getaway car, to a fruit on a vine, but the limes went lemur, the night to nonfat, the clear to catastrophic. Because driving away from the frog man croaking hypocrite,heavenly went down like a melting hedge, a gal gone hog-tied, a fish crying, a tiger- tiger togetherness, flight or fucked, a heart, stroked, racing to its vicarious carousel, a fungus lashed to a beam gone beleaguered. Because he will kill her, that’s his plan: to kill us all. Can’t commit or commute, can’t debone his breath, can’t take his acute paranoia, chalk it up to cute. Because this here’s a Josie madhouse, a bedroom bedrock-locked. Because Blvd morphed to Bled, spirit summoned with a Ouija board. Becausesoap holder went love hen, though love had flown the Calycanthus like the grilled portobellos messing with his vowels. Please please, I pleaded to the pleading day. Because prayer is like a bread line, a penny for your exploded mind. Because lots of logs to you
Here comes rain on our roof! It stays just long enough to tickle me into writing this. It stays just long enough for everybody to get into a pair of PJs (silk-cotton blend) and then goes poof! At our best we exude awesomeness. At our best we are destined to turn pale with the rest of humanity. We are awesome and quick as decomposing sticks at a trail’s end. We bend dreams into circles of green zone satire. We have mahogany stuffed in our mahogany ears. To all who are not us we are sorry to say You’re welcome! Nature thankfully adores a rumor! A sunset! A glacier! Clouds glimmer and cast inevitable shadows off the groundswell footrest. I remember you from that time before we first met when our eyes were wet like summertime coasters as we Ubered noiselessly between pews. The aristocrats are failing to panhandle via email. One aristocrat is sleepily winding through the face of another.
The sun got its new angel wings tee-shirt  smudged with the sandbox’s finest  demi-mud. This would render  appearances partial, with a cornball’s  incongruence. Sidewalk chalk radioactive  Well, we’ll never write that letter to  the lozenges, I mean that shrinking postcard on the way to Saturn  Will someone please hand me  my martini, so I can  make it through this  The awful ordeal?  title Name there  placed in the palm  the of your natural  action tremor  off-center rendering that floating  green eye, well  it floated  off onto some  bell somewhere  Yesterday’s duck  seemed to have three parents: a vulture  a turkey, & a something  a plastic  shapeliness unaccountably  signaling Dark Star  Winged creatures  suspend shyness  & we were stabbed  with permission  all over  & again, the assemblages  of guilt  frozen in dispossession  Did that closet just murmur? “No mere solar beam can harm the lord of photosynthesis” “No barrier can stop one who dwells between all boundaries” “Welcome back to life, my former foes” “& be tied to the end of your string / flying in the air babes at night”    9  /4   /16 Tompkins Square Park
Once, a man named a thing beautiful & so we wore it, buried it, turned it into currency. Somewhere, maybe here, maybe now, I stand completely still until he looks in my direction. Sometimes I don’t believe I exist until someone calls me beautiful. Sometimes any warm thing will do. Sometimes it’s me, a warm thing in the low light. Beautiful is what the man called me after he did what he wanted with — I’m running out of ways to describe it  — my body, my silence. Beautiful. Why, I ask, in order to love yourself must you, first, be loved? A bone sucked clean of its marrow. A trail of ants magnified into ash. & of course, I’m asking no one. & of course, I know the answer. Of course, I know it’s not me they’re looking for, the men, I mean. & I wished he didn’t feel the need to speak, really wished — like me  — he just kept quiet, but no, he had to speak, he had to say beautiful —  & now, goddamnit, my body appears, trapped in the long tunnel of a telescope. & now I am here attending the aftermath of my own ruin, with nothing but beautiful to keep me company. Maybe he meant the city beyond the window. Maybe he was talking to himself. Maybe beautiful, as in good job, as in look what I just did with my own two hands.
Past the congested interstate, past the long lines outside the Dorothy Day Center, past the cheering bleachers, the steam rising from the coach’s face, the fathers straining in prayer, past the rusting letters on the marquee, the dim lights along Main, the couples who will fuck during the movie & the couples who won’t, past the frozen orchard, past the defaced statue of a saint, a dog chews thin the leather cord around his neck. The opposite of hunger is not satisfaction, it is birth. It is what makes a man chisel a face into stone. It is what drives the body to lie in the fresh snow. It is what quiets the world when she pulls you in close. It is the winning pass, the crowd too busy counting down to notice. The world puts its mouth on you & you don’t say a thing. The world digs a hole in your yard & it’s up to you to fill it, up to you to find something useful to do with your sadness. Strange, the yellow beetle, dried between the pages of the dictionary, staining the page with its flattened body — its outline, a dirty halo circling the word pleased — please, you’ve circled the same two blocks in search of a place to park, circled the yard howling a name that won’t respond, but you still think you know enough to call that enough? The boat smacks against the dock it’s tied to. Your mother fixes your father’s tie before closing the casket. Everyone you loved refused to die in this town before they died in this town. The woman beside you on the plane wants to know where you’re going.
I said cake I said top hat I said microphone four little golden baby heads wait I said pirate ghost wait wait I said closed eye smiling cat he scrawled back oh my god I thought fuck yeah I can read this at the marathon he said Eileen smilesehhh I can use it the bell of my computer rang same message wait the cat is crying with relief the cat is a devil now the cat is not mad the cat making racialized jazz uh or not my white hands I’m talking to everyone now. and I’m using a filter. No I’m not I acknowledge that there is an image of me twice. I only recently learned the term jazz hands if we fucked Pennsylvania up what is our hope to live in a stolen country that was always stolen and worked largely by stolen people. Out of a conservative diaspora came I mongrel poet from Massachusetts to make my marklove & these things and opportunities to speak. We can’t fall down we teem in the new opportunity we discover what resistance means our time & blowing up the inside of my computer buck studies the phone says delivered what is. Adam says did you see my beard. We talk about money awhile I ride my bike. Get off the phone goes ding. It’s his beard calling. I go oh. you have what I want. he says lol then skull then rocket then turkey green pistol and a flame. I don’t know what to say back to that I say bike and go.
I would like a century a tree grows slow a crack of light hits my palm while I’m reading I grab to take a picture & the crack is gone branches pouring out of my hands days has made its mark I have wind swept hair I think of my step brother who I knew more like this his face a photo graph on a beach on a book & when he died I was family watching a tree in the wind & I wanted to speak to him who was truly my brother that speck of light is gone on my hand and him. I told her I’d probably like to end here like my com puters do & my dog did. I took a chance w horrifying her. I’m shooting for this love where I live. See me dying now or running across the beach to catch the tree book cover in the end of summer’s wind. The ocean is a feast & it’s here I bring my water tree book feet, taste branches the lot that is me who wants a century.
I’m overcome by the cruelty of nature no I mean I’m with it. And each little capacity it has can’t be transferred I mean a spruce can’t give its oils to you can it. But that’s how it grows in the ab sence of technology my thoughts grow. My thoughts grow among trees but I don’t help them though I’m for them. I’m for my dog & inci dentally I feed her but I don’t see her much. Joe does. Joe is my friend & also a dog father I don’t help mountains Mountains help me I know the planet is old & splashy sleep helps me. Time helps me. My mother helped me. And now she is gone. She also hurt me so it’s good that she’s gone. I can grow different in the day or three decades in which I’ve got left I can grow toward the mountains sit in solidarity with prisoners or go to jail. I’m not joking I can push different. I want to say something about my cunt. Because that’s what you ask. But I am alone. No mother no phone just a notebook & a cunt & my thoughts. I don’t even think my thoughts. You do.
Of Tribulation, these are They, Denoted by the White.— Emily Dickinson
That was the year we drove into the commune in Cornwall. “Jesus Jim,” mam said, “back up quick they’re hippies.” Through the car window, tents, row after row, flaps open, long-haired men and women curled around each other like babies and the babies themselves wandered naked across the grass. I reached for the handle, ready, almost, to open the door, drop out and away from my sister’s aggressive thighs, Daddy’s slapping hands. Back home in the Dandelion Market I unlearnt the steps my mother taught, bought a headband, an afghan coat, a fringed skirt — leather skin. Barefoot on common grass I lay down with kin.
i.  My body a full echo I dawdle down to the creek  Ask the god of blood for  Abundance continuity  My offering the syrup of pressed beans &  A 7-winged tulip   ii.  Later the rains swell the creek with coffee the storm a beckoned sheet The immortal herself reaping the earth the tongues cut out of the cows   iii.  I walk in as the wash attempts its valiant swallow   A cafeteria aid wipes the cotton from the counter  Her bald eyes aurora with seeds  You brought that didn’t you?   iv.   My bottom lip a pink venom My desire a valley with  legs His steady fingers toying the tea I look  up to a straight line and bury it Can’t downsize what  hithers me  Every now & then a troubled thirst  opens my mouth for a song that does not come  I feel it all  until a fixed voice decides  No but wait you’re the water
October 2017 You once said: My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirtshoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life, so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder. When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned: He’s killing me. At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair of the thief. The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us. When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said:My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura.That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name. I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth. I said to you: You came from another planet. How did you do it? You said: Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains. Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters, all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado, a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told the helicopters: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten. Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof, as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them. A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These peopleare going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadasde sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising. I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again. Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face. Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart. I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of gray grit. You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.
Darlings, if your owners say you are / not usually like this / then I must take them / at their word / I am like you / not crazy about that which towers before me / particularly the buildings here / and the people inside / who look at my name / and make noises / that seem like growling / my small and eager darlings / what it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear / be a matter of pitch / I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo / there is a difference / between burying a thing you love / for the sake of returning / and leaving a fresh absence / in a city’s dirt / looking for a mercy / left by someone / who came before you / I am saying that I / too / am at a loss for language / can’t beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone / I am not usually like this either / I must apologize again for how adulthood has rendered me / us, really 
/ I know you all forget the touch / of someone who loves you / in two minutes / and I arrive to you / a constellation of shadows / once hands / listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.
chapter viii  Tired I walk toward everything except fear over seaweed-covered rocks I think that someday some new women will be allowed to see each other happy happy more than usual I looked in all the other open rooms of my heart A vague fear obscured the whole scene into a diorama of ruin As sharp as a sword-cut the light struck a half-reclining cloud Time and distance trembled in my body   • To become in love with everything apropos of nothingTo see without seeming to stareTo change in the reflectionTo appear peculiar   • We never refer to sadnessas something that lookslike secrecybut it does   •  I drifted on the fresh breeze I did not like it Joy joy joy although not joy a bad thing I can feel it wet against my bosom My journey is mapped and ready I am only taking one dress   •  I don’t want to talk of infinitesimal distinctions between man and man see no difference between men and maidens I am the modern Morpheus I made the minutes disappear I am thin an errant swarm of bees a naked lunatic faithful selfish old a tiger immensely strong a wild beast a paroxysm of rage mercy murder coming coming coming   chapter xiv  After a bad night I lock myself in my room and read I had only imagination I remember how on our wedding day he said I shall never let trouble or nervousness concern you you can trust me I must not forgive I cannot  I know the real truth now My imagination tinges everything with ill adventure I suppose a cry clears the air as other rain does   •  I have a good memory for details it is not always so with young ladies or so it had been said to me I cannot comprehend this husband Women all their lives are interrupted considered hysterical summoned to make children for the strong and manly and for his sake must smile and not speak Now this man I began to think a weak fool I had trusted him my husband even half believed his words when he said I would have an ordinary life without dread   •  Let me tell you from experience of men his brain and heart are terrible things This man impotent in the dark He succeeded in getting me to doubt everything took a hue of unreality I did not trust even my own senses You don’t know what it is to doubt everything even yourself I am a wife he fashioned by his own hand to be sweet and earnest and so kind   •  An idea struck me Following great loss  people see things that others cannot Men want to explain explain explain see themselves new pretend to be young Ladies’ bodies are deemed unholy by the very men who burn them Generations of men believe that women walk amongst them without knowledge My thesis is this I want to believe to believe  to believe in a universe willing to understand   chapter xxi  A detail in a pool of blood the body gathered in an awkward kink I dress myself  in easy anything   •  I softened into a swollen confusion only slightly solid I was shining He beckoned His hands a dark mass like a thousand rats A cloud closed over my eyes I moistened myself with brandy I held tight to life I became like water   •  Kneeling on the edge of the bed his face was turned his left hand held both arms his right gripped my neck blood a thin stream of it his nostrils quivered   •  I lay in disarray my eyes and from them came an endless moment Cold moonshine dazed me I began to pull on clothes I drew back unclean Shame folded me like steel tried to twist me in obedience I could not feel the rise of reddening dawn Silence the sound of  what happened   •  I want you to know all this understand how much I need to show you It was he who caused me to disappear My husband my husband and other men hunt me and command my flesh my blood my brain This is my pollution story   •  The eastern sky became clear  as the awful narrative deepened  in the morning light  when the first red streak shot up my flesh
After Rita Dove Apá, dying is boring. To pass las horas,I carveour last nameall over my body. I try to recall the taste of  Pablo’s sweat.Whiskey, no.Wet dirt, sí.I stuff  Englishinto my mouth, spit out chingaderas.Have it your way.Home of the Whopper.Run for the border. ¡Aguas! The mirrorbetrayed us.It erased your facefrom my face.Gave me mother’s smile, narrow nariz.Once, I woreher necklace.The gold slick, obscene. God, I was beautiful.Cada noche,I sleepwith dead men.The coyote was the third to die.Your moneyis still in his wallet.Quien engaña no gana. Apá, there’s a foto, in my bolsillo,of a skeletonshroudedin black flames:Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.Patron saintof smugglers, pick-pockets, & jotos. La Flaca. Señora Negra. La Huesuda.¡Aguas!An animalis prowlingthis station. It shimmies with hunger.It shimmerswith thirst.To keep it away, I hurl my memories at it. Your laughter is nowsnaggedon its fangs.Your painnow breathes inside its lungs. Tastethe feeling.Siempre Coca-Cola.America’s real choice — I gathered & smashed bottles.Apá, followthe glasssnaking fromthe barrel to a mesquite to find my body.Lips blue,skin thickwith scabs. Apá, kneel in the shade, peelthe scabs. Touchour last name.Solís.
In the desert, the moonshivers. Tonight, to stay awake, I’ll cut my feet with glass.Outside Oaxaca, in a clinic, my mother said, “I hate your Indian face.”In the dream I’m running. My limbs skeletal and scabbed.After my mother’s death, I found, in a box, her wedding dress.As I lifted the lid, a stench corkscrewed into my nostrils:the dress had curdled like milk. During the day I gather tinder.Paper. Shed snakeskin. When the last light above the mountainsknots into stars, I crouch under mesquite,make a fire.Sometimes the moon stops shivering. Sometimes I tally what I owe.In the dream I’m running through a hallway. The floor uneven.The walls green. Last month, as my son blew out the candleson his cake, I noticed, for the first time, the hideous shapeof his nose. Tonight I’ll pinch my thighs to stay awake. My mother,in the clinic, said, “The rain has a fever, it needs plentyof rest, it needs to drink plenty of water.” The doctor scribbled in a filethen asked for more money. If my mother could see me now!My feet bloody. My face darker than ever. Tonight, to stay awake,I’ll sit close to the fire. In the dream I stumble, but I never let goof my right breast: an urn heavy with my own ashes, an urnI’m lugging God-knows-where.
What you need will come to you at the right time says the tarot card I overturned at my friend Nathalie’s house one evening. I was wondering if she said something worth hearing, What? I’m looking at her face, trying to read it, not a clue what she said but I’ll just say yeah and hope. Me, Tabitha, and her aunt are waffling in Waffle House by the Mississippi River. Tabitha’s aunt is all mumble. She either said Do you want a pancake? or You look melancholic. The less I hear the bigger the swamp, so I smile and nod while my head becomes a faint foghorn, a lost river. Why wasn’t I asking her to microphone? When you tell someone you read lips you become a mysterious captain. You watch their brains navigate channels with BSL interpreters in the 
corner of night TV. Sometimes it’s hard to get back the smooth sailing and you go down with the whole conversation. I’m a haze of broken jars, a purple bucket and only I know there’s a hole in it. On Twitter @justnoxy tweets I can’t watch TV / movies / without subtitles. It’s just too hard to follow. I’m just sitting there pretending and it’s just not worth it. I tweet back you not being able to follow is not your failure. It’s weird, giving the advice you need to someone else, weird as thinking my American friend said I move through London like a Hotep when she actually said I’m used to London life with no sales tax. Deanna (my friend who owns crystals and mentions the existence of multiple moons) says I should write about my mishearings, she thinks it’ll make a good book for her bathroom. I am still afraid I have grown up missing too much information. I think about that episode of The Twilight Zone where an old man walks around the city bar selling bric-a-brac from his suitcase, knowing what people need — scissors, a leaky pen, a bus ticket, combs. In the scene, music is playing loud, meaning if I were in that bar I would miss the mysticism while the old man’s miracles make the barman say WOAH, this guy is from another planet!
I saw another ladybug Chicago could win if  I eat the leftover fish & chips in every line so I don’t forget We went to the river called fish & chips We stayed at the fish & chips tower They donated a million dollars to the fish & chips foundation so we could go to school for free It’s called fish & chips college for women
amaryllis comes in many flavors snow sometimes slants when will politics make improvements? strawberry amaryllis walks right in snarling at snowfall saying flowers don’t abuse women female rabbi demands ancient answers untranslatable tablets found there’s more knowledge in flowers aren’t all rabbis ancient females snow’s setting in untranslatable strawberry soufflés, first course ancient untranslatable second course arrives edible flowers abound distant whale sounds sing loudly singing memories of the future they thought so singing, singing, never stopping singing echo above sea level roads people ponder protest extreme weather patterns manifest warnings swim swam have swum under and in soufflés until willows swill scotch seltzers no tree left behind pleas a branch fell right into the money jar no money have I none neither do you so together we’ll be bereft piles of words mound high counting moon phases feathers flew across our minds consult the feather field guide mostly about toucans and birthdays and cookie monsters we live in the country they wonder why the thin place is nearby it’s a wordy country here full of vegetables each word is a pea lots of potatoes with eyes carrots without tops one frozen leek left behind carrots have eyes too, y’know you can sit on a mushroom, never ginger some folks sit on rocks large, smooth, flat and shakers made fine furniture some rocks start to shake like a quaker I’ve never dated a dentist dating a dentist really bites tooth-growing oysters what a very weird universes is a yellow letter in my synesthesia I mean my synesthesia scheme can you hear sunrays? see trumpet calls? taste the shape of words? if you spell synesthesia with an a (synaesthesia) everything changes because a is red synesthetes come in many colors snow sometimes slants when will untranslatable make improvements? if you stick with me what everything does will be the backwards opposite improvements make untranslatable demand flowers hear, see, taste everything will make sense again you’ve got another thing coming I see people nothing will ever make sense nonsense to making sense again the mysterious mind memories within time plus space do you know the future will be there? time might go backwards, sir if only pleasure were limitless beyond the mind a tiny speck of sand if only you knew how limitless pleasures can be like little engine dresses yes the small pleasures roar like mighty engines here sometimes they are jets you mean nuclear jet engines like the speedway’s oh save us and the trees more trees will save us air moves through we hear maple sap drop trees taught us to breathe sap rises up we see windy voices say nothing is really real tonight the wind laughs oysters jump on our plates
The Sangre de Cristo Mountains mottled as if with oil stains. Configurations of cloud-shadows. Easy gait of hours: a way through — or into — the dry winds.Our church is the mountains, says the guide to the tour group, all of whom have been instructed to keep their cameras inside their bags. 
A group crowding the aisles of San Geronimo Chapel. On the dirt path between adobe structures, bareheaded. Stretching, palms out, as steam from the boiling pot does. To move along the earth without keeping a ledger. The horsefly not so incongruous with the sagebrush. Still, reflexive swatting.We’re good citizens, we serve in the Army, though we’re regarded as second 
class by the US government. Framed badges and news stories in the house of the retired sheriff. Men in his family who have been policemen, firemen, soldiers. His wife pinching the ears of bear sculptures formed from mica clay. Thick paste of red soil and the piñon that pierces through it. To carry on from day to day without exercising the sloppy hand of 
manipulation. Four dollars for a plate of fry bread in cinnamon butter. The boy at the counter restless, wanting to get back to the electronic dance 
music on pause on his iPhone. Reading a history backward, the deep strata. Settling on this life as a parasite on its host.That man next door who you bought from? He sells jewelry made by an Anglo woman. His wife. The stray dog asleep on her side, dreams ripped from her open jaw. Money touched from hand to hand. Whole lifetimes spent trying to make sense of an appetite. A town called Tres Orejas. Three ears. Plenty.
don’t talk to stranglers when yr wasted do talk to swingers don’t talk to swindlers if you can tell them apart from the strangers who are just strangers no stranger than you alone and afraid to be alone cuz they might want to touch your throat
I play the egg and I play the triangle I play the reed and I play each angle I play the lyre and I play the lute I play the snare and I play the flute I play the licorice stick and I play the juke I play the kettle and I play the uke who ever thought of the triangle who ever thought of the clarinet the castanets the cornet the discotheque the harmonium the euphonium marimbas and maracas harmonicas tom-toms and tatas I play the fiddle and I play the jug I play the washboard and the washtub I play kalimba and I play the koto I play the organ and I play the banjo I play the fool I play it cool I play hot and I play pranks I played your mixtape forgot to say thanks
spread millet in this neighborhood all you get is bluejays bluejay may be cooked three ways
if you didn’t mind the bible you’d surely mind the belt
the pope has his cardinals batman has his robins shakespeare has a lark in just one of his sonnets
kiss upon kiss they grow into this they wish your shad roes hand sock hard rock cold toes will blow warm will blow cold they just raid your hash then like meat bees with your cash they give they take form like your fist over love
turns out there are no dead bodies after all unless you put them there
let’s say you want flowers you should have flowers let’s say you want forever you should have flowers let’s say he should have you in and out by tuesday and if you want flowers you should have flowers and the flowers will stay fresh until tuesday you say yes that’s the way it’s done should you want flowers
Blue light ringing through the green grass. The bent heads of petals are not praying to anything or to anyone. Only we are standing in a field of them, my son and me and me holding him. In my arms he stretches out to the very far ends of the earth like a radio signal made of skin and organs, of everything. I was singing a song to him I made up about me dying. Since yesterday he has not been crying as much as screaming like it is terrifying to wake up. It is terrifying to wake up and terrifying to sleep and his feet going blue in the cold spring air in which he is growing. His mother is growing him with the milk she makes all day, spilling out in blue. The song I am singing to him puts him to sleep, will put me to sleep. Will one day burst the drum in my ear like a bell, very much like a voice screaming from far off, though you don’t know if it’s hurting or hungry or nothing at all.
Olive seashells in the air you can eat. The very inner of the inner ear in the breeze. Last night my son dreamt about falling out of trees. I had almost forgotten that we were simians. The fiddlehead turns on itself but only ever in love. Green cinnamon roll, a snake too small to hunt anyone. Curled in like my son’s fingers, his fists. More beautiful than a spider fern, spun-in island, moldy tongue of a hippopotamus, the eye of the forest. When my son wakes up screaming I don’t pick him up right away. I tell him where he is and who I am. At night all the fiddlehead wants to do is sleep. When I sleep I dream about death adders curling around his soft body, all of us making the same kinds of sounds.
One look at the lilac, one smell and my childhood is —  dogs scratching at the sliding glass door, bits of bottles coming up like grass in the grass, a dirty towel down by the feet of the tree, Lysol cans, small packets of Land O’Frost turkey meat —  there in front of me in spring, in the wonderfully fat rain, flowering purple and whatever the pinkish purple is called and the white ones too. They smell like my siblings, like the backs of my infant son’s ears, like my son whom I would kill someone for. Before he was born I wouldn’t kill anyone. But now I would. And after I’d get a coffee from Starbucks, a coffee and a piece of that amazing lemon-frosted lemon cake and think nothing of it, and read the paper and hold him against my chest and listen to his body living, alive outside his mother’s body, and the lilac outside on the street, outside everyone, and heavy in the rain.
The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, 
Harvard Museum of Natural History The ovaries, when splayed, resemblesliced tomatoes. Or rose windows, each geometry precise enoughto praise. I want to press my tongue against the bloodroot petal, to runits stamen along my slick shelf of teeth like a man might with a wheat stalk.Four times so far other tourists have taken me for a galleryattendant. In the glass, a slow- sidling crimson spreads over my ownskewed reflection: a hesitant teen in a Harvard hoodie, the fifth,leans in to ask, Excuse me, sir?Are they really glass? — a testamentto how my binder encases my breasts, my faith in the plum yew’s fruit-shorn frenzy. Dense clusters teeming with their separate blossoms, anyunknowing eye might think they were living. But I know the lilac’s tell:two blemishes, bulbous where some hot glass mis-dripped, then caught foreverin the filament. Sometimes, I think I’ll wake to find they’ve finallytrickled off me in the night, pooled molten down the bed and gatheredback again. I might thrash off both breasts in a sleepless fit, or could unfurlmy clit like a pollen basket passed from a honeybee’s hind legsto the hive. It makes its secret seen. I can only answer yes. Yes,They’re real. I mean, they’re really glass. You could snap a stem between fingerswith such a slight force, one stark blink —  the flies flitting the gallery would fearthe weight of their own landing, thick wings rapt still. When the public,in their distressed astonishment, demanded to know how the Blaschkastransported the models without a fracture in even one pistil,Leopold Blaschka revealed his own elaborate process: pack eachflower tightly in its cardboard cradle, then strap them down with strong wireto restrict movement, and set each, at last, in a wooden box wrapped with burlap.They drove them straight from Manhattan in two hearses. The drivers, of course,wore black suits. Onlookers parted to allow their small procession past.I like it here, with everyone focused on the flowers. Hunched, kneeling,as if suspicious, still doubting, the teen eyes two tiny zinnias,then moves on to another case. I’ve seen many leave unsatisfied.They can’t bear to be partitioned —  how can I blame them? Someone made thesewith their body. They let their breath unspool to form each impossiblebud, crafted every flower’s fold, then waited on the heat to break tohold just one, wearing special gloves. Wouldn’t anyone wish for just one lieamong a garden this precise? One daisy swapped out in secret, switchedwith a common courtyard flower, now waiting for someone to noticeits wilt while its counterparts keep all their glisten. It does seem to metrue punishment: never to change. Unflinching forever. Sometimes, nearclosing, when the hall becomes quiet, I really do believe they’re real.
the bare-backed barback in the bear bar’s back bar barebacked with a bare bear who was also a barback back there
“A Billion Things in One” is an erasure of the article “YesJulz, Snapchat Royalty” by Max Berlinger, which appeared in the New York Times on June 30, 2016.



ix There I was, all spread out for the taking, bloomed wings waiting for winter sleet. It was a long season of drinking whole creeks and nothing else. We churned desert into desert. What I’m saying is, neither the desert rat nor damselfly can bear the nosebleeds: shoal- laced face bearing down just in time to overwinter. There I was, all spread out for the taking. In truth, nobody wants water this thin. One swallow, and we’re off to dig for more within a hollow womb. This morning we sip water, discussing the trauma in our blood: saltwater —  there it rests, in droplets, on my breast skin, “Oh,” I say. “My tears,” rubbing them deep within.xi At church I sat salvaged: I said to send me away wearing nothing but satin and lace. We both felt secondhand. It was knee- length, and it wore me cheap. I couldn’t embrace the old woman who once wore it, couldn’t see my wrists even. And my neck, it was braced up all in lace. The woman next to me says, “How beautiful.” I say, “This beautiful,” then split a hair down the middle. I lied, “I made it myself,” then stood up to fade through painstaking humiliation. As a child, a girl, I saw through myself to age 45. It was then when I first noticed the aching of my hands, how they were soon to set themselves away — they came and went, as if they were lace for the breaking.xiii I was reciting Alfred, Lord Tennyson on my back, in a canoe, floating the holiest way I knew —  so close to ghost, and went pale for a moment before finding myself wandering among high pines. I didn’t expect to emerge in white already with my heart in his hand, just as normal as a shell rests on my chest. Didn’t expect to hand it over so early on, at the boundary of our properties in a dream: in the grasses where he ended and I began. I’m feeling very still now that we’ve crossed over into the pale, where we are soon to thread, soon to embellish, then loop back into each other: braided the way we were taught to approach each other — the same way.
Just when he thought to loom the backyard for bud & Just when he came to admire, or thought to dote over Already he rues stick-thin arms, whose petals brave the late Whose middles freeze; we’ve gone without All ramose till now, empty skirts anxious to round back for It’s the fourth year lips have gone without any such Already hips full of leaves and none Else, years by last, the lone — it splat behind My back, it came to ache as the rake clawed at We’ve gone into partial burn, without even No matter for bloom, the seasons no longer allow The trouble with doting over blossoms is In a swollen tub of ruth, wanting nothing but his
This is the deepest part of the world. Bird don’t fly here,but there is the sound of wings. The smell, just a struggle in the earthunderneath the musty floorboards. Monsters hatch fully-grown from their eggs.Snaky legs indicate chaos. I carry sad omens, slobber down the psychic’s legsto her feet pointed backwards. I roll off the back of a skull strapped on topof a fox who shape-shifts into the irresistible. A Christian, Oklahoma-shaped and melancholic,caught at the entrance of a ditch as the best breath of me tornadoes into the next county.
The Ozarks are where defeated assassins, the unholy, and monsters come to retire. The proper soil and crooked moonlight grow back the disemboweled, the decapitated, while we collect arrears in child support for our demi-god children. The procession of taillights lined deep down the logging trails. Along the way, there was a gentleman arguing with his soul over his suicide. I, tongue of snakes. Cut up, dipped in powdered sugar, scattered to the ants in the deepest corner of Mt. Nebo as an insult, bind my ghost to the mountain. Typhoon collected the few precious scales left of me from the undertow. My southern accent-muscle burned up from haunting your life/house. Now, let daybreak be my head and the year, my whole body. An online southern Christian university ordained my smoker’s cough to be a dove. My favorite exorcism: The demon, steeped in corn bread philosophy, does not have enough ass to carry off the jeans he advertises as he kneels down to the priest and holy water. Years ago, as a child, I climbed the levee and made a hole in the air. That’s where I will rest, but the gate is not wide enough. Like my burial site, I am party-size.
Noted to be the definitive bright morning of 10,000 calendars. The church bell melted. Rage of unrequited love became a terrible serpent. The morning star lowered like an enemy’s flag. A vampire’s mattress tumbled out at the outskirts of town. Ancient lanterns, suddenly thrown through the air, somewhere deep in the mountains. That night, in a snowy rural area, an elderly, powder-faced woman appeared on doorsteps in search of wine. Her origins, neatly wrapped in the cold dressing of a snowflake’s breath.
Chorus rumbles constant throughout nightstoried roots curl around obsidianarrowhead dissolved into shaft grooveyou unbuckle the stems from your leg Coda’s systemic sameness & designmonsoon shovels clay onto handpushes up arm, pericardial shift damsits build you prostrate in an office chair Massacre song foundation roll fields hypoxicgrasses scribe a hill slope horripilationa pronghorn horns the air stirs skin cells Unpeel bison hide bundlepiece stem into its chamberpillar a room with red cedar smoke Confusion forms to recall its palms air pushdifferent if not warranted you hear onlypast reflections bounce off the keystone surface:a beast skips on a buttethrown across a wheeling prairieoak shadow outline casts to your interiorwalls angled from captured leaf veins Unmoved trailer homes center scenecottonwoods bend your headyou thumb forward then walk
Small red tin box sealed in shrink-wrap, cut open with pocketknife, pried apart, its goods aerate the office. I pluck white sliced chalky cylinders; let them simmer in my mouth. I exhale peppermint scent through my nose. Cut open the official letter. A map in letters on a white page. My teeth grind mints. Photocopies slightly off alignment, I blur lines. Equations disperse family through land documents, position each generation. I am only fourth in line. Some plots are gumbo after winter thaw. Sections stitched together with extended relatives. This ritual, personal death papers drafted. I am partial to this grassland; the place of deer marks and porcupine quills, ledger extrapolates history. I refold estate document, place it back into its envelope.
Can’t hear things well if they are things whispering. Nothing gentle to hand on back of hand. A horsehair bow across gut string. A heart is a physical object singing in the chest. Chamber doors oxygenating blood rushing through. Salmon through river climb. When one writes of light as a painted smile across face. You call bullshit to the interpretation. A post re-posted significant meme image locked to words. Speak of Soul? Sounds like a grifter’s hustle. Don’t do it. Anyways, you try to place yourself into the nature poetry experience. In your nature placement, you’re constantly thinking of how you don’t like to shit outdoors. You like a toilet throne and a stall and toilet tissue. Your mind ruins beautiful poetry expressions by expressions before a flush. Yes, if you see a nature painting you ponder a spot to express self. Think of hole digging and burial afterward. A courtesy thing. Some mass crushing flowers. Or smeared across a granite slope. Is not a waterfall one constant flush? You mean, if you were to see this world through black-light vision, knowing everything covered in shit, this planet would be a beautiful glow.
it lyked to eat salmon w/ its fingers like a bear and then use those fingers to clean its glasses it cried and it looked like a raccoon I believe it wanted to cultivate this look
the bear was born thrown from its side by killer-of-enemies its rage scratched open several rivers and the gulf of mexico an aspect so to speke made fulsomely as it were one whos habitat full somely made reaches all its leaves and feathers to the smoky air a tanager on an elm in oahu really reminded of the grand canyon by the souvenir mug of the muleskinner & the horse & the name angel
when it rains it pours the rain it raineth everyday pull up the reins, rayned in by reason, rule, and reverence if the aim is total abject embarrassment of shiny-looking objects tenderly gathered for the pome’s sunset quinceañera a star winked at me btwn the apricot and the cypress 2 crows atop them like a punter on the mizzenmast u better step up your game, havelok by what means of studye and devocyon what is love but a constellation of significances it liked to eat salmon w/ its fingers like a bear and then use those fingers to clean its glasses it cries and it looks like a wolf I believe it wanted to cultivate this look
I begin the day like any other day: a decade staring back in the rearview mirror of the wrecked pickup truck: you standing so tall you’re already headless: until I turn around the cornfield blurs into the torn edges of an atlas: pull your hands out from under me to anoint this god- given country of yours: mottled bones singing the anthem of a star- spangled nation: this land given enough time to list its own possibilities: atrocities like a blade of dusk resting on my throat, I bruise: by standing I practice the sacred: & kneel how the body was built toward the bottomless insides of ghosts: the small of my back the sacrum: they say, the five disciples with pocked faces unlike your self-inflicted gunshot but a single entryway: an emptiness full of faith: rise to me as only you would after god has left you with these entrance wounds with no way out: the purpling field that goes on & on: recognizable as a heartbeat: a century- long orbit around a cage of stained glass: broken, you gather me in your image of failed flesh: piecing mirror after mirror back together through the night until nobody forgets: one hundred years of this landscape behind & before us continues to stir — even if the earth under our knees, under every American sky, had been turning west- ward for centuries.
For Edgar The submarine’s inside was dim. — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen in my youth, I hitched a ride to San Diego, across chirping desert and distant night, I gazed upon a slow-moving dark, encasing a convex cerulean cavity each night, I stood beneath the sky for hours mesmerized at the perplex reformatory, twinkling lights of broken glass fragments spreading against a glistening sunset a faceless man behind a lost reflection of glass at a drive-up window informs me,too bad, you know nothing of your own past how far will I walk against the night? conforming to a captivity I had never realized some years later, under the kitchen table, they all huddle, as the rampage continues toward the back of the house, a clash of debris from the other room recoils and broken sounds escape the barricade of doors I remember I returned in 1970, all they remember is me sitting at the edge of my bed, with the war still in my hands
For E.P. Kazhe/Botella The dread, however, was not of death’s agonies. — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen it is prohibited to whisper the names of the dead, as it encourages them to linger at the doorstep, and she has already lingered, far too long
These words of two, three years ago returned. — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen one day, Coyote sees Duck walking her ducklings, Coyote asks her how she keeps them in a straight line, Duck says she sews them together with white horsetail hair every morning and tugs on the line gently, until the horsehair disappears, that is how she keeps her ducklings in a row as usual, Coyote leaves smiling, she sees a white horse grazing in a nearby field, she plucks a few strands of tail hair and returns to her burrow the next morning, one by one she begins to sew her pups together when she finishes, she gently tugs on the horsehair and drags their little bodies along the ground, Coyote tilts her head in dismay and becomes distraught, she realizes she has killed her little pups
Someone once asked me, what are the words I do not yet have — ....    ....    ....     verbs that will story our bodies into something more than missing, more than squaw or lost, beyond statistics:1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime. Daily ritual: my hands search and sift through layers of tiny earthquakes, shifted verdicts not guilty not enoughevidence not prosecutable not our jurisdiction I dig.Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaultedcompared to all other races. I dig. We are vanishing lines in history books, treaties; laws do not protect us. I dig until mud and earth find home underneath my fingernails. I’ll plant something new in the absence burn vanish underreport Invisible, our ghosts starve, while the rest of the world keeps on eating.A recent government study found that there were 14 federal humantrafficking investigations in Indian Country between 2013 and2016. During that same period the FBI investigated 6,100elsewhere. Let us poem a place where you cannot erase us into white space.....    ....    ....     Let us dig to remind ourselves our roots are ancestral and there is nothing deeper than these sacred, dirt-covered hands.
try again. so the lesson goes. less a foot. an arm. an eye. easier to lose one of two, to split a pair, to untwine. other injuries are more difficult. a broken septum, an amputated tongue. consider the spleen. once ruptured the body is maligned, capillaries flooded with something other than. the greeks considered the spleen the organ of compassion, but the french recognized melancholy, the mottled flesh, the ache of. it is not, after all, the heart but the spleen that is the source of our greatest suffering. the heart is that which we cannot live without. it must be whole, intact. if our heart breaks, truly breaks, it must be replaced. but the spleen, that abalone nestled behind, within, can be carved down to a sliver of itself. it can live on somehow, a mere fragment of.   • every day dawn finds herself naked and wonders if she has not in fact lost herself entirely in the night, her clothes, precepts, selfhood. what comes of a preposition, of love, some penetrated interiority. in this new and sudden opening, there is the fragile pink of sky, the lip of wind. dawn is not alone in her discomfort. the sun too is heavy with the previous day’s misfortunes. neither can bear the tentative movement of the other. she would withdraw safely into the darkness but sun is thick limbed, blocking the door. dawn walks backward toward the window, her legs shimmering with light. she will fall — she always does — upward, into the buoyancy of it. there will be witnesses. it does not matter who. for dawn there is only the swarm of light, the heady rush of it. everything else is incidental.   • there is a story we tell. a story about suffering. not because we are only suffering, but because that is the story we have been taught to tell. take a beetle for instance. it talks of nothing other than the leaf it chews. the angularity of it. the soft brush underneath. there are many beetles. far more than there are humans. somehow our voices always drown them out. take crows for instance. they have been known to fish. not with their beaks but with fiberglass poles left idle by drunken fishermen. or maybe they are just sleeping. either way the crow speaks only of fish. the cold flesh. the fragile meat. in the story i tell myself there are often buffalo. not because they are prolific, but because they occupy the expanse of my memory, its continent. the buffalo are only a metaphor. snow is also a metaphor. bodies blanketed in white. freezing. we are all rigid with it. the story. tell something different. something about the rain. the sound of it. like walking skyward. away from one’s origins. what has been culled from one atmosphere falling gently into another. • energy is an attribute of objects. we often mistake the boulder for something other than. he is drawn to the laboratory dome, a concrete formation sitting cross-legged on the mountainside. as if protesting movement. as if unmovable. he finds breathing difficult, the opening and closing. he avoids people who demand such things. there are those who objected to nuclear fission, to anything being split in two. inside the concrete building, he finds the guts of the machine, metal tentacles wrapping around the bulbous head of an octopus. he stations himself at the tentacle’s tip and measures the distance electrons travel when driven from their source. a hundred years ago scientists believed that fission could split the world into sequences of light. they were right. he scatters particles, drives elements far from their nucleus. to create such structural injury. we continue to.
We didn’t know my mother was driving back to her childhood, with a ring of keys, a compass, and a tiger panting in the back seat. Soon enough the tiger was behind the wheel, circling. And each circle spun further and further away from us. When she calls, the tiger has parked the yellow-striped taxi on the highway’s rough shoulder. It’s time, she says, for this dream to be over. Time to go home, sleep in her own bed. If the compass ever worked, she’s forgotten how to read it, and the ring for the keys is broken, the keys melted down for their metal. If I would just call someone and tell him where she is. She has money — she can pay someone to drive her home. If only a road sign were in sight, but no, there’s only scattered chert and farmland and a man across the road who is not my father. Behind the wheel the hungry tiger’s yellow eyes are slightly open. Behind the wheel the tiger snacks on the summer of 1970 and the entire works of Iris Murdoch. Caught in his teeth are recipes for chocolate mousse and coq au vin, my brother’s first arrest, the one- room schoolroom where her mother taught. So who to call? The tiger, sated for the nonce, has started snoring. The quick drive by, today disguised as children. The tiger snores away.
1 Late fall the white fur grew up your spine thick as the tail of a marten. You built up the fire, wrapped your legs with skins, but how that chill wind broke through sill and jamb. We stuffed paper in every crevice — an uncle’s will, the writ that changed your name, a certificate of Degree of Indian Blood and one that said O positive. Still we shivered, your eyes yellow in the lantern’s light. Always, they were out there, in a field of boulders the size of bears hunched over. O, you were silky with fur, with a sharp smell I could not get enough of. I fell into a dream of milk and skin, on the bed of pelts in the winter cabin. When I woke they had taken you or you had gone with them. And didn’t I, so green with sleep, track you the three days until new snow fell?2 I packed flint and tinder and a compass whose face shines in the lowest light. I learned a song to map the way and one to call you back. I crouched over every footprint, sniffing.And herewas a broken branch and here something like hair caught by a bramble. I followed and followed — all the yellow hours, until I came to untouched earthand waited in the clearing for the snow to come downwhite as the winter blanket you long had wanted.3 In the spring when you come down hungry from that other mountain the space between one rib and the next deep enough to lay my finger —  how much of you will remain or linger —  bone or mouth or memory of the first sadness of humans? Will you dig from the crevices the paper where they wrote you down as this instead of that? Or startle at the clatter of plates? The creak of the wooden bed? Will your skin shake off its fur, your claws remember they were fingers? And the hands, meaty as paws, soften into what I once could stroke or suckle?
The Age of Gold cracked me up last night, asters and sparrows to be exact, that unrelenting knot in the choral fire. It’s good exercise, to get out on stage, to stand in the silvered chamber and deny emptiness, when the pocket falls so deep one could mark anything out over the top. The India ink drops continuously, its likeness, still Helen as phantom not the truth of the state of her body but being awash in a sound uprooted. The desk is still a symbol I pile things on, pin down elegies, illegible dates, introductions scrawled on slender backs of envelopes, receipts, small machine-like cloud chambers, talon disconnected. Sunlight burns my feet putting away the wet mop, where I am stopped from almost killing myself. All that wobbling of the lensnonsense, I will cling to the truth of the soundtrack tearing through the unveiling: Jeanne Moreau’s scepter coated in dusta darkness poured from the open door, crowned enameled teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex• Their portrait is crushed to the point of flowers Their lines are reaching arms out from the center Their lace is torn over the image at points a flame-like insistence flaring this all up from behind one piss-driven, lifelike icicle the diamond district through a downpour past the love-sick dungeons of Dante, a cleaving after in Sappho, what remains of a dialogue? The small, blobbed cellular enclosure slipping it into strings letting it wither• No god but the act creator eternally rested in lightfears for my life dissolved in the boothlargely unknown fire exit back/ of the hotel closet door satin sheets light foot thunder lover impaled/ outside of that world cutting young poets much slack and the box for the board missing: remains of the maze spit out from a star
* *  * *  The  third  arrow flew  upward  and stuck  we rode back  sun birds  bedeviled  the great stem  its reflected  words  fast thunder  hills  a molten  mass  small clouds  of stones  green rushes  waylaid  spirits onto  lava beds  post removed  stone broken  face turned  down  to earth  * *  * * I dropped out the little hangnail blanket of a  door  sun strapped  to my back so everyone could feel I was sinking  * *  * * I dried out  woke up sprouted wings  and flew away  * *  Looking Glass is dead  The circular blue paper is the sky  We see some green spots which are pleasing  Are the commissioners clear as I am?  I gave them a blue flag which they pretended to cherish  I live in hopes I do not have two hearts  The Illinois River will rise  A single warrior to write beyond without me  Death at the hands of the long guns  Did I say death? Or the springs are drying up?  Find the break where blood runs clear  Through the love you bear your gallant little band  * *  “Not to reverse history   but to draw out the strength” * Write in the corridor to be no speaking Sing in the hall to be no dancing Cry in the street to be no leading Break into the house to be no sleeping Feel in the closet to be no running Fight in the dome to be no screaming Lie down in the dark to be no changing  * *   Are the commissioners clear as I am? The dampness of night pierces my shield. Two dead men push a stick through my buttonhole. The sun looks down on me as complete. I want you to look and smile — red with iron black. With all of my heart I thank my black-robed friends for their kindness. Columns of steel rise. I was glad to hear the black robes had given you this shimmer of elongated nights, left to waver in the void. They know how to die in battle. They are a twist in the black mirror, that river between the city and the mist. We will produce no sane men again. They come back different and the same. They roam over hills and plains and wish the heavens would fall. You issued the first soldiers and we only answered back, seeking air. I have sent many words that were drowned along the way. The wind is full of bottles and the air aggressive, a red feather placed into black hair.   * Joy Harjo in a 1989 interview with Lewis MacAdams
For Arthur Sze (Qin) Dim Sum equivalent to: dot, speck heart. Stone piled on stone I finish my meal. In this early sunrise I see shadows where a cairn of rocks used to stack in the direction of eastern light. In late morning, I lit red candles and placed them next to a three-hinged mirror, as a way of seeing shadows of shadows. Milkweed grows on the side of the road in ditches, reminiscent of professors’ soft words, amazing the brilliant contemplation and thought pattern as you learn, slowly. In my body neuron-zipped words and more words. My lexicon building from nothing to something good. Embossed tattoos like small notes on sheet music. Dots and lines, strands and strings I rest on the note D, increased by one half as my orchestra director signals, dashes and spaces for letters as grace notes in Morse code. Notes in staccato igniting instrumental waves of burning wood, a fiery spark over and speck dust played in harmonics, as a coot hovers over a brook dives in comes back with a fish. No one would ever know its true beauty and calmness, the setting sun across an arctic lake, unless it is witnessed. As speckled day owls, brants, and mergansers float in the sunset. To learn you must be open, diligent, and willing to be an individual. 11,000 murres with webbed feet land also without any fear of predators. But still, on the page grow spotted mushrooms and morels. Examine the distortion and effects of the warming earth. The change of the ice age with purpose as the warming earth today, but I take heart in sun along with the core of a gingko tree’s light.
As I toss & roll these bones at the 2nd, 3rd & 4th vertebra the curvity of my neck where something of  a winged fused bowed & fossilized merged kink-bended wrongly & fused bowed & fossilized then merged bended slouched in a hunchbacked crooked pain into a pinged pang where needles & cracks at my side-to-side forced hanging sluiced movement of ivory scalloped cervixes at the nape & snaps snaps I rebound at the fear & instinctively quake with vanquished surrender in numbness & wake then mumble you’re part of me now leave & it slaps its tale then a V formation following & decelerates the sea waved source of vigor  110  years old.
Taken:“duck foot skin; an owl with five owlets; nesting minks; caught in a fish trap. A bird egg found in winter.”
’inept’ipéecwise cilaakt: (I am wanting to) hold a wake / (I am wanting to) hold the body Had this body been madeof nothing but its bright skeleton & autumn- blown skinI would shut my eyes into butterfly wingson a mapped earth. Had the gods even their own gods, I could re- learn the very shapeof my face in a puddle of sky- colored rain. Extinction isto the hands as the lips areto the first gesture the tongue carves into the slick mouth just beforeprayer. In every way the world failsto light the soft inner machine & marrowof the bones in motion — I imagine smudging my tongue along a walllike the chest I dare to plunge in-to, the Braille of every node blooming outas if the first day- light of winteredsnowfall. This night —  like any fleshed boy I dreamof a lyre strung with the torn hair of hímiin &in place of my dried mouth — thereit is. Whispers in the blue-black dark after c’álalalc’álalal reach outtoward my teeth to strum this wilting instrument. &once awake, I’m holding its frame to builda window back in- to the world. Had this body been held after allthese years, I would enter you to find my frozen self & touch. Like the gutted animalwe take in offering. & live.
I am not murdered, and I am not missing, but parts of me have been disappeared. — Leanne Simpson They too know all too well that some cracks were built just for us to fall through.
 We live in a world that tries to steal spirits each day; they steal ours by taking us away. From Industrial Schools to forced assimilation, genocide means removal 
of those who birth nations — our living threatens. Colonization has been choking us for generations. I tell my girls they are vessels of spirit, air to lungs expanding; this world cannot breathe without us. There are days 
I wish I didn’t have to teach these lessons, but as an Indigenous womxn 
silence is deadening. There is danger in being seen, our bodies are targets marked for violence. We carry the Earth’s me too inside us, 
a howling wind, our mothers & their mothers swallowed these bullets long ago. The voices ricochet I wish I were invisible I wish I were invisible 
I wish echoes
 in my eardrums — we know what it’s like to live in fear. Colonialism’s bullet sits cocked, waiting behind a finger on trigger. We breathe and speak and sing
 for survival. We carve out in lines; we write — I know joy I know pain I know loveI know love I know — lessons we’ve carried throughout time. Should I go missing: don’t stop searching; drag every river until it turns red and the waters of our names stretch a flood so wide it catches everything. And we find each other whole and sacred, alive and breathing and breathing and breathing.
For Julien Poirier Eke out a few more bars for the jewels behind doors. Lutes and harps lay up to bolster language out from underneath. More absentmindedly walking the room, swishing about beyond argument or caging names. Calling out over the whole wet season, commercial speculations (cycles). I love that edge the wall makes — casino game-board green — my love comes bursting out the center of the glass (foiled) I abandon my trap in fragments. The grand terrace band (it’s waning) finale of synchronized dives, straight to my deepest forest overnight, this unfinished, uproarious music for vacuum.
1 I don’t understand this kindergarten assignment: “Draw Your Clan.” The three letters live in abstraction. A friend suggests mine looks like his, minus legs, and that day I believe my clan is a species of amputee Snipes, birds forced to fly the skies forever, and I wonder if we are meant to symbolize endurance or something beyond my five-year-old comprehension.2 My mother explains we are not legless birds and if she had a more worldly vocabulary she would have suggested we were ambiguous, not quite a fish, more than a water snake, but she says we are among the few. The last Tuscarora Eel died out a generation ago, so we are left Onondaga Eels among the Tuscarora, voiceless as well as legless.3 I find an encyclopedia photo, see jagged rows of razor teeth in a mouth perpetually grinning and when I show it to her, she says clans are a system to keep track of families, so we don’t inadvertently marry our relatives, and that we have no more affinity with eels than anyone else on the reservation has with their animals.4 “If I threw you in the dike,” she says “you’d drown as fast as anyone else,” done with this lesson. I remember older cousins, swimming between my legs, and suddenly I am rising, their hands grabbing my knees as my balls collide with the backs of their necks, and they break the surface, toss me into deeper water, probably watching to make sure I surface, after they’ve had some amusement at my struggle.5 In wet darkness, I imagine opening my eyes and mouth, taking water in, filling my lungs, discovering gills like Aquaman or Namor, the Sub-mariner. Knowing I had better odds of dying, face down, no voice to call out for help, I am never quite brave enough to try it, not daring enough, even, to open my eyes when my face breaks the stillness of river water contained.6 But I flip on my back, ears below the surface, listen to mysteries, breathe shallowly at that level, and float, wondering what it would be like to glide the depths on fins, knowing if I were there, I would desire legs and lungs, and then I fill my chest to capacity, and dive, loving and begrudging the ache I find there, the throbbing of my chest begging for release, and I swim back up, eyes still closed, wondering how long it will take to find the surface again.
I stood in a longhouse with a woman who may or may not be Mohawk. Some shift their opinions about her like meteorologists, as if her blood were a storm system tracked in its comings and goings. But the father of her two sons was, without question, Seneca. We knew that, in Haudenosaunee country, a father is to some degree irrelevant, that her own shifting identity would impact her sons’ lives like a gene vulnerable to betrayal, causing certain, terminal conditions. She waited on an elder she called Steam (warning I was not to call the elder woman by that name). Steam (not Steam) would observe the boys, understand their natures, give them their Creator names defining their lives during the next ceremony. I confessed my namelessness, confessed my longhouse- and fluency- deficient community, and confessed that my clan mother, three hours away, did not know me well enough to give me a name, confessed my community followed a more casual ceremony. You find your name after a social misstep, a dubious facial feature, a birth defect. Names offer the name-givers comfort, that your challenge is harder than theirs, no matter the truth. Our names are a convoluted toughening of our skins. My name is not like Steam (no one is forbidden to use it). No one calls me Batman because of my status, my utility belt, my impressive batpole, my agility, my muscles, my profile in spandex, my virtues, but because I wore the cape to an older age than I should have, and could continue to wear it now, as that shit is not going away any time soon. Even kids who only know Christian Bale or Michael Keaton, lurking in latex and leather hood, still think Batman is my name. And this is why I have no memory for when or how you became the Bumblebee, what it means, beyond the literal. You soar in gardens, spend days ensuring growth, and if metaphors are at work here, this one seems true enough to keep you in amber wings, fuzzy yellow rings, black lacquer torso, and sensitive antennae. What metaphor suits the night I left on the Amtrak for Chicago, past 1:00 a.m., while you stood on the platform, watching those cars pull out, the night I wanted to leap from the train, stay? I cannot invent new names for the ways we slow, struggle, attempt to maintain the illusion of futures without measure, defy actuary numbers and because I have gone closer to the light than you have, the story is easier to craft and finesse than it should be. Pollination trails are smaller than those I’m forced to fly in, and lying in Little Rock, Santa Fe, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Seattle, hotel rooms, the ellipse of your name trail winds me home, waiting, dusted in pollen and history.
act 1, scene 1: do you know what it means for our survival?  Fog spun into silk  on the knee of the comptroller,  propelled toward the crest of Ontario,  the old, faded star, steambreath onto the windshield. To orient in the finest sense  of cackles, mute chrysanthemums,  funneling inordinate nakedness,  absorbed, absorbed, immediately absorbed. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, we stay limber, each line choreographed from a tremendous mouthful of swamp, skunk cabbage  brining at the jowls,  acquiesced to pestilence,  and exaggerated diffidence. Do you know what it is to clamp your shell  an extra foot into the silt riverbank,  kissing the soles of passersby,  silky grains churning the earth over? Makeshift ceremonial dances,  fine textiles culled from thrift store bins  display brightly-colored throats who feed  stacks of cash killed on recycled names. There is a golden tapestry  on the berry-stained  bottom of Wealth Woman’s  basket of abalone.  Beneath it are the exhausted  faces of her babies  grown old in the length  of the inhale, and a facsimile  remains from all the cycles  spilled over, since nature  cannot acid wash, since  frizz canvassing the ozone  always carries over. Geometry for days, countless days,  spin-cycled through a craftsman’s  circumpolar hands. There’s always  another grotto or chamber  where things dwell, they say.  Wandering skitterers we are,  the Northern Lights vacuum pried-open skulls.  We cover ourselves with hides and entrails,  overripe elderberries, looking to steal a moment  of letup from the glare. The limbs of the Old Ones  shunt aside bare toes, stripped solid  and indifferent as a bear’s den  or an ant’s apartment. Don’t be so much in charge, the frogs say,  of coalescing wolverine trails  huddled in 60-million-year pellet tracks  when the wetlands dried out. The way soaked, green corpuscles  rasp each other’s mouths and hands  braiding the woof of God’s mind,  that’s how it is, says  the giant rat’s captive wife. Even if you can only faintly hear  the eighth narrative told in the corner  of the babbling wooden-slat house,  that is enough leftover hooligan grease  for the gods with killer whale ganglia. Knuckles rasp proscenium floorboards,  splattering herring peck at scops owl’s waist,  spruce branch  lowered,  scrapes conglomerate bedrock.Mother-in-law’s atonic hands lunge for stewed milt. One can conclude it’s a virus  to plant burdensome layers  of topographic crust on self-renewing  limbs, like there was more to it  than rustling fingers at the end of the line. All components must be in order,  or it’s an ulcer here, a bladder infection  there, a baked-out parking lot,  fizzing in trampled-over, chastened hairlines. Hold, hold, hold, hold in your palms  the Steller’s jay that beats its wings  on glaciers lying high and straight  over rivers slicing into cool nettles. Sea lions suck up a quick breath, dive  and waft on the outskirts of ballerinas  who gyrate in like-mind  to classics bubbling up from Sedna’s citadels. I’m here to show you what you can do  with this sandbar dialect,  says the humpback whale  and the goatsbeard moss, and the ore  of iron oxide in the shoreline cliff. You must trust, she says,  your swimming blood, joints  lumbering in shadows, the dolphin  clicking out to you, far above ground.  And we should feed just as much as eat,  says the heart your body formed around.
To be a bride of my own lamentation I wear a dress not of time’s poisoned quills but feathers of discontent — kingfishers ghosting in cornstalks, my field of frozen flutes. The edge of descent, digression’s highway brings a particulate ash to my mouth, starry metals of the meadow’s cold snap, ravens in the sycamore scorched to black. I follow their echo’s loop and chase. I master the map of never, raft its fragments, mouth the brightness of human’s leftover snow, details of fever-clouds where the convent dissolves in violence. I wear the canyon like a blank eye, lay before the never-returning light my silhouette, fossil of the drowned town’s scroll.• Here, where your ghost is always departing the ebb and flow of terrestrial tides, I follow your echo’s loop and chase, vortex streets of a cylindrical sound infinite in its arrangements of light. The evening veil, a partial reveal —  how I appear to myself looking past this fact of being underway. Each day I stow my earthen materials in preparation for the never-end. In the snapshot of my dead friend, hanging in the room where loved ones refuse return: a gradual reduction of color. Running out of time, neck-deep in water, we knew no one was coming to help us in the same way one denies language to come from a picture. I imagine love a revelation, not of mind —  the blue gauze of planetary motion —  a tone-on-tone painting of a body floating on the sea’s shifting horizons. It is a question of legibility. When I became tired of depicting poetry, I became aware of another kind of plane, the kind good for dwellings and their narrative escape. Here children sit up all night by the flames —  the orphan boy from blood-stained pottery who singed his head and burned out both his eyes. That was your life, a prefix for fire. Spider will weave a ladder to your heart, it is said, even though you are sleeping, intoxicated by abandonment, a bitter wind reminiscent of a wave.• In the last days of my marriage to god, I wandered his spiraled library to read in the dark blank imprints of trees. Relentless navigation through the stacks of shell-tempered mortuary offerings, sandstone saws recovered from the caves. I lingered on the stairs of the convent to write these things, to recollect myself. Around midnight the mountains returned. The clouds dispersed into semicolons and I with them, into a new language, its boat temporary, invisible. I knew I would be traveling like this for centuries. This was my first attempt at vanishing. I would return before anyone noticed poems to be found in the forest, not the mind. There’s a canyon between this version of me and the shadow in the corner that is mine. I wear this canyon like a blank eye.
She could live on chips on paint chips potato chips the poker chips he stacked in towers on the nightstand she could live in glass or underground or in his Cadillac she lived inside his head his cowboy boots she found a scorpion in once stabbed him in the shoulder by mistake he called her lucky charm called her witch made her practice in a walk-in closet how to cast a spell draw fortune how to make herself more pretty she dreamed she buried the brother she didn’t have dreamed her brother was dwarfed he died when her father called her pet he died when her father left she learned to live in the parking lot alone outside the casino learned to live at the bar by the pool tables theatres where men shot men raped women shot women shot themselves skinned animals ran one another over and over she learned to live in his smoke his vodka his idea of perfection the perfect girl the perfect evening unencumbered by her needs she dreamed of being buried on her knees her knees are plum so cute and sore so sturdy the father is dying now the girl is grown she dances with knives in her panties the men love her knives she loves the mistakes she makes the knives are her father the men are her father the panties are wool are sheep she dances in sheep with knives she strips off the sheep and for a moment feels her flesh at peace with her flesh she almost puts away the knives almost lets the men lose interest there is still so much work to do
Dear sir, your air of authority leaves me lost. Eases me from a place of ease. Contracts with my contradictions to take from me a place. Autopilots my autobiography. Frightens my fright. Sighs with my breath. Wins at my race. Your certainty has me curtained. Your nerve has me nervous. Your childhood has me childlike and your nastiness nests in my belfry like a hawk. You are beyond and above my slice of sky, peach as a pie, bourbon as its pit. You are spit and vinegar while I sour in my bowl. You bowl me over while I tread lightly on my feet. You walk on water while I sink. You witness me, fisherman, boat on the lake, while I struggle and burble and brittle and drop. You wink at me and I must relate. I close my eyes to erase you and you are written in my lids. A litmus test. A form of lair. God with three days of facial growth and an old bouquet for a face. Soap and water for a brain. I have no handsome answer. I have no pillar of salt or shoulder to look over. I have no feather to weigh. I have no bubble to burst. I am less to myself, a character in a drama, a drumbeat, a benevolence, a blight. All parts of me say shoot on sight. Aim for an artery or organ. Good night.
When I was your age I went to a banquet. When I was your age I went to a barroom and bought cigarettes with quarters lifted from the laundry money. Last night I did all your laundry. I don’t know why I thought this love could be pure. It’s enough that it’s infinite. I kiss your cheek when you sleep and wonder if you feel it. It’s the same cheek I’ve kissed from the beginning. You don’t have to like me. You just have to let me keep your body yours. It’s mine. When I was your age I went to a banquet and a man in a tux pinched my cheeks. When I was your age I went to a barroom and a man in a band shirt pinched my ass. There is so much I don’t know about you. Last night I skipped a banquet so I could stay home and do your laundry and drink wine from my grandmother’s glass. When I was your age boys traded quarters for a claw at my carcass on a pleather bench while I missed the first few seconds of a song I’d hoped to record on my backseat boombox. When I was your age I enjoyed a hook. You think I know nothing of metamorphosis but when I was your age I invented a key change. You don’t have to know what I know.
Everything has gender in Arabic. History is male. Fiction is female. Dream is male. Wish is female. Feminine words are followed by a circle with two dots over. They call it the tied circle, knotted with wishes which come true only when forgotten or replaced by the wishes of others. In the town of tied wishes, people feel great anticipation because a stranger will arrive today in her feminine sign. Someone says he saw her two dots glittering, refuting another’s vision of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness.So scary, he says, how the moon hides in her red circle
1 I wanted to write an epic about suffering, but when I found a tendril of her hair among the ruins of her mud house, I found my epic there.2 I didn’t sleep last night. As if the night were hiding in the morning coffee.3 Her life is a game of snakes and ladders sent relentlessly back to square one, but whose life isn’t? She takes a breath and throws the dice again.4 The city glitters below the airplane window, not because of the bones and skulls scattered under the sun, but the view through the frosted breather hole.5 She died, and time changed for those she loved most, but her watch kept ticking.6 A god carried the burdens until the weight persuaded him to transfer them to man —  the new suffering god.7 The map of Iraq looks like a mitten, and so does the map of Michigan —  a match I made by chance.8 If you can’t save people, at least don’t hate them.9 Her bubbling annoys me —  can’t understand a word she says. So what if I toss her from the aquarium? So what if I spill her new world with this nasty immigrant fish!10 The city’s innumerable lights turning on and off remind us we are born to arrive, as we are born to leave.11 The handkerchiefs are theirs, but the tears are ours.12 Women running barefoot. Behind them, stars falling from the sky.13 So strange, in my dream of us, you were also a dream.14 He said to me: You are in my eyes. Now when he sleeps, his eyelids cover me.15 Gilgamesh stopped wishing for immortality, for only in death could he be certain of seeing his friend Enkidu again.16 Some say love means putting all your eggs in one basket. If they all break, can the basket remain intact?17 The homeless are not afraid to miss something. What passes through their eyes is how the clouds pass over the rushing cars, the way pigeons miss some of the seeds on the road and move away. Yet only they know what it means to have a home and to return to it.18 The wind and rain don’t discriminate in buffeting us. We are equal in the eyes of the storm.19 When I was broken into fragments, you puzzled me back together piece by piece. I no longer fear being broken in any moment.20 Freezing in the mountains without blankets or food, and all they heard wasno news is good news.21 Their stories didn’t kill me but I would die if I didn’t tell them to you.22 Before killing them they collected their personal effects. Their cell phones are all ringing in the box.23 We are not upset when the grass dies. We know it will come back in a season or two. The dead don’t come back but they appear every time in the greenness of the grass.24 If yearning encircles us, what does it portend? That a circle has no beginning and no end?
Ten below, high of zero, 4:11 pm flashed the alarm panel’s handsome blue touchscreen. Without commotion or fire the afternoon passed slowly, full of promise, then disappointment. Without heartbreak or break-in. For company I had Kafka on my lap and Qolsys vibrating lightly against the wall.4:34    ...    4:35    ...    There are all sorts of creatures in the world, I read,wretched, limited, dumb creatures who have no language but mechanical cries
No woman wants to be low-hanging fruit, my glamorous girlfriend says, but I’m indiscriminate and love all fruit, I’m tempted to list each kind right here, in and out of season, because even just saying the names gives me pleasure, as does saying your name. I’m not alone with my passion — my whole family, we’re a little off in this regard, we can spend hours talking about cantaloupe or arguing over how many flats to buy when it’s Peach-O-Rama at the Metropolitan. Once I even drove half a day to get to Pence Orchards where I met and took photos of Bert Pence, who sold me three boxes of peaches at wholesale prices. He was so good to me, as was the late-summer freestone I picked as I walked back through the orchard in the August heat to the entrance gates, which were nothing like the Gates of Hell. On the contrary, I was in heaven there in Yakima. I can still smell that single peach, which was profusely low-hanging, it was the definition of low-hanging, it fell into my hands, as you did —  or perhaps as I did into yours —  but that was months ago. When I walked past the stands yesterday, on what should have been the first day of spring, all produce had been covered with heavy blankets to keep it warm, to mitigate harm. Today the temperature dropped so low someone thought to remove the fruit entirely and stash it away. With this strange weather we’re having, will I see you again? I can’t help myself.
Wheal Emma and Brookwood are abandoned copper mines whose remains are located near Buckfastleigh, within the Dartmoor National Park, an area with a long history of widespread industrial activity. From this one locality, in the second half of the nineteenth century, more than thirty thousand tons of copper ore were raised, processed, and shipped for smelting. In 1859, in order to stabilize and increase the power supply, Wheal Emma Leat (a fifteen-mile-long channel) was cut across moorland and around woodland valleys to transport water from the River Swincombe and to feed the mines by supplementing the Mardle, a tributary of the Dart. Some of this now empty moorland waterway can be walked today on Dartmoor. I am grateful to Kevin and Donna Cox, owners of the Brook Manor estate, for showing my collaborator, Ignacio Acosta, and me over the remains of mine workings on their land. Widening the plug doorway on the bob wall left no surface evidence. The Mardle has a floodplain fair and wide. Material would have been trammed directly, although blacked ochreous water flows freely from the collapsed portal. Humphrey kept Kevin back when we went into the near horizontal dark adit stooped at the panic shaft. In Brook Wood at the combe head is a small killas quarry predating all three setts. Rent was paid to the Brook Wood adventurers. Three areas of dumping partially covered this crumbled masonry within woodland of varying density just south of the tarmac road. Yet a leat is depicted on the 1886 OS map channeled entirely in a raised wooden aqueduct.   Wheal Emma Leat, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta.     Engine House, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta.   Then buildings fall into decay where ivy and tree growth have taken hold. The silted channel follows the contour round hills and combes using the best-fit method to Wheal Emma sett. Whereas conifer scrub and dense patches of rhododendron are seen quite late in the sequence. All 99 stations were used and having passed over the wheel water may have been diverted. The long wheelhouse sides are not straight but slightly kinked to provide for a dished 60-ft wheel over an arched tailrace exit at floor level. In this same evening were those people engaged to feast on roast beef and strong ale nearby. Within the valley of the holy brook the mines are situated near Buckfastleigh, crushed ores are hauled for the South Wales copper smelters, Alfred Jenkin their agent in Cornwall. Over and over had they been in the heaven of expectation finding the ore ground pitched eastward; those who gambled their lives in swift currents and dark treacherous pools. Granting two properties as one sett at a royalty of 1/24 together with fine machinery, wheels, a beam engine, and water privileges. One hundred and twenty- five workers being then separated only by a small transverse valley. The flat rods moved off so quietly that those not looking were unconscious of their being in motion. Steam was employed only at limited scale. Emma, 116 fathoms below adit, pumping backed-up water for life itself: men cutting lode in fume- and dust-ridden air or crushing with hand tools, spalling, cobbing, came our tramroad to harbor direct in Totnes and thence by sea to Neath —  no more windlass or horse-whim turning. What you see here is the dressing floor. Their Phoenician purple dye —  their copper with fifteen percent Cornish tin. Remember when a solid solution of metal elements was defined by ecstatic bonding. Water poured over its surface producing hydrogen gas. The new material is stable and ready for use but scaled-up production could fuel cannibal drones.   Tailrace, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta.     Green Pool, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta.   We love the color and the stillness. Nothing would live in this water now at the base of a spoil heap two stories high. Worm casts and broadly scattered pits are laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. This is the green pool: a water soak away made from glass epoxy. They are brown and green like uneven flat loaves and the museum label reads tortas de cobre. Moss grows on anything like black flame retardant mechanically supports and electrically connects —  the fenced-off shaft protecting the river from what leaches out between sea-borne traders. At these horizons the levels were extended over 330 fathoms. Small groups of self-employed miners and their families continued to migrate. Here was alluvial gold mixed with sand and gravel, producing more than 14 heads of stamps were capable of crushing. Composed of quartz, peach, and gossan with black and yellow copper letting down a stream of mineralized water. For in much of this section the leat had been cut from solid rock. A stone-lined sluice is just visible. 4,000 shares on the cost book system, streamworks in eluvial ground, 5 shillings each deposit. Nothing but a washing strake such as we use, commodified and priced both minerals since the Bronze Age in West Devon, in Cornwall beneath a layer of black sand. An adit is also brought home to the spot from below: narrow tailings in steep profile cast every shovel full as it rises into a tye. £40,000 worth of copper ore from above the 50-fathom level. Water breaks up the soil, exposing mere threads of land, linear strips cut into channels called races dug across the ground to be worked, removing the overburden.
The sky is high We shit on earth We look up the sky The earth gives birth To our future
In every dream of a room the first room intrudes. No matter the years, the tears dried and forgotten, it is the skeleton of the first that protrudes.
take you where you don’t want to go. Where you’d been and had passed smilingly through, and were alive. Then.
Dear Mother // I apologize for these instructions regarding my belated death // but police keep pestering parents on where to shake their child’s ashes // fuck that // Dance & laugh my ashes into the volcanoes [volcanoes look like Earth’s pimples // about to burst] Dear Mother // I hope neither of us dies but rather // we drift into alzheimers together like Abuela years ago // We can walk out of the house in our bathrobes // waving at police cars & thinking they’re taxis taking fathers home // Dear Mother I haven’t told you but bombs in Chelsea were so close to me last fall // I fell & prayed to Holy Nuns of the Erectile Dysfunction Committee but still // I’ll never understand why // God made something so beautiful as the sun // on the ridge // to be blinding Dear Mother // I’ve been much too slow to say thank you The word twisted on my tongue // I stutter to say th-thanks!! & maybe it’s my accent // unable to pronounce refrigrator En español // refrigerador // As if our language was a child who wet the bed from being tickled too much // & if we only speak one language // can we name her Joy // Dear Mother I’ve read the credit report // & America fiscally sponsored the Civil War in El Salvador // where men had genitals cut off stuffed into their mouths // their heads decapitated & placed between their legs // Tio saw all his friends // students slumped on chain link fences // after marching outside the university As a child // I never thought how difficult it must’ve been to pick the heads of daisies with me // by the swimming pool Each petal pulled // I’d recite // he loves me // he loves me not God must // in the most bloated nights // the fullest nights God must’ve known // you’d follow me outside “heaven’s gates” What an oxymoron // There must be a heaven that’s boundless & unbridled // where we can seek asylum // Dear Mother // please teach me how to hold the sorrow // without losing my arms
Caretakers — died in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, one after another. One didn’t show up because her husband was in prison. Most others watched the clock. Time breaks for the living eventually and they can walk out of doors. The handle of time’s door is hot for the dying. What use is a door if you can’t exit? A door that can’t be opened is called a wall. My father is on the other side of the wall. Tomatoes are ripening on the other side. I can see them through the window that also can’t be opened. A window that can’t be opened is just a see-through wall. Sometimes we’re on the inside like a plane. Most of the time, we’re on the outside like doggie day care. I don’t know if the tomatoes are the new form of his language or if they’re simply for eating. I can’t ask him 
because on the other side, there are no words. All I can do is stare at the nameless bursting tomatoes and know they have to be enough.
Fish tap tap tap on the roof Water rushes by through the living room and into the kitchen late  night and look someone thought to do the dishes A lamp is on in the other room Two lamps Lampreys swirl in a bucket from last night’s dream I had wanted to dream about birds and all I got were these  eels Who could I call to ask what to do?  • Who could move the peonies back into the kitchen and who might  change their water? Other things get started Peepers Stuck in jelly At the same time spring pushes up against the windows  a green screen And sleep Pooled at the top of the stairs Who could I call to make an appointment  or swim? Cows float in the bunch Scraps of  brown paper I learn to swim in the afternoon with everyone else my age A sale of  Holsteins and Herefords You can smell the detergent in the yard with  the other flowers When I woke up this morning the lights were already on in the  clover  • Hunkered down on all fours to see it maybe press your nose  up against it Like rabbits The bottoms of  her baby feet My son’s hair is still gold and smells like wheat The porch light sluiced through the mown grass so we would know  where we were or were not At home or away Just upstream from a cell tower and a box of  Huggies Who would scoop up the backyard and who flush out  those rabbits? The neighbors are already at it Just upstream from a can of  Red Bull and a pollen allergy The old mower used gasoline but this new one you just plug into a wall Trims the edges An orange extension cord crawls out from the dining room into  the sun The entire afternoon stacked up on the edge of  the patio  • Dandelions with their heads chopped off and my mother’s one or  other dog or is that a deer? Deer file up to the window to look at you A gardening problem in the suburbs Deer pellets Your little fingers opening an apple opening  a star Feeding it to a deer The seeds inside were red watermelon seeds A light sweat breaks out over the milk carton Not only that but also fish piled up in the back of  a truck or slung into  waxed bags A silver leak Where is everyone? My kids slide inside their wet rooms asleep A bag of Chinook a bag of  Silverside? Leaking onto a pile of ferns  • A light wash overflows this regular morning Aspirin with codeine inside is nice and something to look forward  to outside of a blank slate The cool floors of grocery stores The side of your cheek in the morning  a fish cheek Safeway is open ditto Fred Meyer The fridge opens by itself and leaks something almost lettuce and  almost milk Just upstream from a pair of headphones and a Weight Watchers Not only a light on in the refrigerator but a puddle lit from inside A dragonfly drags through grass  and trash You don’t get to be the grass That dragonfly probly isn’t even a dragonfly probly it’s a deerfly Snapdragons! I dreamt we started the whole day over from scratch Poured that out onto the floor  • Not only static in the trees when I wake up but something whipped  up into glossy foam Chirrup-chirrup my tree makes syrup  syrup so sweet Upstream from a can of Aqua Net and a Pepsi White twist ties Just opened this morning Skipping down the grandmother sidewalk without stepping on a  crack No one to catch it or hold it No one to pull the light out of the rhododendrons by hand with  their own hands Mom calls from the dog run in the backyard A minor threat A dog floats by another dog Put the coffee on I’ll be right in! A wind from I-5 kicks up her green jogger and there she’s gone Stuck in a tree  • No one to mow the backyard or the front even or take a message The eels are male then female and back again They swim under the couch and disappear The sun goes on despite disappointing coverage and lower fees Mom does her hair What would you like to do with this pile of cell phones? What would you like to eat? The baby likes dogs and flowers Bees in the lilac tree have something to say and say it without giving  away the ending A yellow retriever mix or black lab or roses Royal Gold or Ruby Ruby That lilac tree probly isn’t even a lilac tree probly it’s a bush Press play Her little fingers can’t yet work  a button  • Not only a list of ants making its way from a crack in the concrete to  a scrap in the sink Flower Carpet Coral or Flower Carpet Pink But milk in the ground Babymeal Something opens in the day and you  step right through The ants are interesting they stick together all in a line or a ring  circling The rings of  Saturn Oh look someone picked up the tennis balls and miscellaneous toys  before plugging in the mower Or a spaniel or a boxer No one to pick her up or hold her? Blight was a word we never used as the roses took or they didn’t The baby? Fragrant Cloud Fragrant Plum The grass is tennis-ball green  • But also that deerfly could have been a mosquito just outside the  service area I could finally get through to you to reach you! The tips of its fingers Paper or plastic? If you want birds you might try a bird feeder Just upstream from a gallon of  2% and a yellow pack of American  Spirits Stick on your mosquito body or yellow swimsuit  and swim But also the kids breathing inside their mammal rooms breathing  water Someone left the bougainvillea on all night ditto the humidifier Same frequency as the rhoddy’s You could hear it for a long time after Their dream names Sharpied onto the sides of a white  plastic bag I could finally do that No one has called my cell phone now for hours  • Cherry blossoms call to the surface of things that is  their color In contrast to almost everything else on the floor My dream kids shit in buckets Frogs try to get on them Who will shoe their pretty little feet who will hold their hands? This is the earth and sometimes the earth  changes colors Now I remember they were horses mulching the backyard Who will polish their shiny little hooves? Who will pick them flowers? A regular morning You nuzzled open a pile of cherries and there it was the thing we  always wanted Whatever that was A chain link fence goes round and round  like a song They sleep standing up in a circle  • Dandelions pee in a corner of the yard a kind of Kodak  yellow Lamb’s Tongue ditto the Coltsfoot My horse kids eat something off the ground I can’t quite make out  some leather fruits and Oh’s Nosing in the dark Nosing inside of  holes Lay their necks across my one neck Just upstream from a microwave and a tub of  Cool Whip Noses against the sliding glass door squeak a little at night that is  their sound Noses against visitors Who will mow around their calves? Mom said she wasn’t sure Not one memory of a butterfly back there but horseflies somehow in  the buck grass Eat the roses Dig a little hole and get into it  • What should I do with their withers and fetlocks what should I do  with their dressage? A parade is nice I shoveled the backyard for a picnic but you could still smell it The tomatoes almost took ditto  the basil Not only today but also tomorrow Noses in the dark Manure noses The day curled up in a cup A private life you can hear above the washer or was that the mower  even now it’s two blocks away Listening is yellow and green Fish swim in cell phones Speakers set up thoughtfully throughout the house did you  notice that? Skin wings on the back of another animal or person Eating out a radio  • The day curled up in a corner Butterfly static but harder to hear the closer you are to the window  isn’t that odd? Skateboards on the macadam Switch heel kickflip via a Frontside 180 I couldn’t see the kids before they were born though they threw  their voices An earful of leaf  blowers Then they were here The day was moving off somewhere  hard to see The day was both Curled up on the couch At first I thought I could hear them through leaves and understory  but then I wasn’t so sure You both do and you don’t More a davenport than anything else Just upstream from a can of  lemon Pledge and some Gordon’s  • Did I tell you that I watered the cherry tree in the backyard ditto  the crepe myrtle? Is that what’s it called? Talking to maple leaves makes for a nice morning if quiet  at first and then loud Day moves toward the door A box fan instead of air conditioning I can’t tell their voices apart Across the dark green lawn something glows is that a glass of milk? Kids curled up on the coating An earwig floats by another earwig The day listens to traffic moving off in two directions at once like  standing in a spring shower Flowers appear without warning And whom do we have to thank for this delicious lunch? These petits fours? That one and only glass of milk?  • For instance you walk through the room without  looking up The door opens out onto central air after all Light a cigarette in there Those Chinook and Silverside probly aren’t probly they’re Rainbow  Trout and Organic Salmon A spoonful of roe No place to light your fingers Or move them back and forth For instance the phone keeps ringing in the other room Beneath a tea cozy Just upstream from a toilet cover and  a Percocet More a lilac than anything else An ant floats by another ant A lilac tree But you don’t even know how to have fun anymore you don’t even  like to do drugs  • Sidewalks glint in sun and trees newly opened oh shit I woke up  with a tension headache! Pear blossoms They smell like semen For instance I look forward to seeing you all day No place to put our feet up or  say anything Blah blah blahblahblah Quick let’s do it before the kids wake up! For a long time I would cut the grass in the morning before  it got too hot For instance the basil burned ditto the oatmeal Growing up I never considered a different kind of  life because we  had television It doesn’t seem that long ago A swimming pool in the living room White reverb I used to take off fast but now I take off slow  • More a migraine than anything else Something dull in the bushes is that a rabbit? A dead squirrel whirligigs  the light That light was cling-free For instance a Coke is nice and something to look forward to and  you can do it by yourself I think the day knows exactly what it’s doing Opening a stuck window or collecting a small fee But also you see something out the window I don’t see Moss grows you can count on it Morning dew scratched at the door then cantered away into what  we’re not sure of I filtered everything through rain and got what exactly  more rain? The good news is ferns The good news is graffiti Those peonies probly weren’t even peonies probly they’re dahlias  • But also the kids pick flowers if you let them Some petals are soapy and blow down the street a quick and linty  pink and white dream As for TV there’s always perennials As for day care there’s always the grass A pile of nachos in the microwave Just upstream from a car battery and a glass of SunnyD Benadryl in the grass and grass insects tuning up the tardy afternoon a  twitchy kickstart Her sneeze in the puffed-out dandelions his little cough someplace  else altogether It’s time for lunch It’s time for the sun Just because you carry something from one day to the next it doesn’t  make all days the same Everybody out of  the pool! The regular skimmers are brightly colored and constant The regular skimmers are chlorined and cousined  • Not only recycling but holding hands in a holding pattern the day  spends outside Tied up with kitchen twine and stacked neatly by the curb A cardboard floats by another  cardboard The next thing you know the rain has stopped And starts again before you know it with a drop and a drop and yet  another drop A cup of coffee on the counter The dogs in the backyard in a lather Just upstream from a VHS player and a bucket of KFC Stars look down and count the tops  of our heads A cell phone tower via a pine tree The newly emptied mall parking lot via a lake I got here late Wildstyle via FatCap along the chain link was red and yellow spray  roses The top of my daughter’s head ditto the top  of my son’s  • The afternoon leans toward television and birds A dream can stay on all morning and does so sticking around for  drop-off and pickup Just in time for a quick once-over The pansies took ditto the ground cover More an annual than anything else The top of my daughter’s head is astro fluff in the  atmosphere Blue jays on shuffle in the regular trees For instance bees make their home in the sandbox Margarine via butter The sound of the interstate via the sound of the sea The top of my son’s head is corn silk shot through a cassette deck  playing early Black Flag Alone in the kitchen Mom presses rewind on the microwave Dogs melt into the linoleum  • Not only that but you don’t have to feel bad anymore Blue jay by blue jay The birds are real and wait just outside where  we left them Just upstream from the new mixed-use building concern and a two-  liter of  Diet Squirt Wings in the wallpaper Wings and glue I wasn’t going to do it again but maybe you could describe  the light? It’s not easy but it’s a little  easier Probly those earwigs weren’t even earwigs probly they were rollypollys Our loved ones are everywhere Leaves buffeted by the HVAC system Their names whispered through an intercom in the evergreens The blue jay’s nesting material was modern and shining recyclables  reflected on the surface of  the lawn A twist of  tinfoil in the shape of a swan  • A cloud of dryer lint soundproofs the scrape Open wires braided in a regular fishtail braid or a 6-pack yoke in a  classic milkmaid Cotton wool jute and burlap Feathers from other birds mixed with regular paper  and fiberglass Just upstream from a bottle of  Sumatriptan and a case of  bottled  water More a grocery list than anything else A single zigzag Tinsel blings the classic cup Leaves repurposed as sanitizer and a kind of traditional blockwood  painted or flock wallpaper Banana leaves and artichokes on fast-forward Cellulose is waterproof Human hair or horsehair in a perfect carousel Not only plastic strips but cellophane draped over the vegetation A cell phone calls from a cornrow  • A bird calls from a saucer or plate A wire hanger hangs in this regular afternoon a kind of dressing  chair without a seating assignment Dead twigs dead leaves and dry  grass Reclaimed corners Reclaimed grass That monoprint of a maple leaf on the platform A phosphorous updo For instance neighbor kids find a nest and check on it each morning  balanced on a pile of chairs The ground looks up and then returns to whatever it was doing  before Curbside check-in for squeakers Curbside check-in for suet Broom bristles mop string and  dental floss An onion bag in a topknot That twist of  tinfoil in the shape of a Park-n-Ride  • For instance a light applause breaks out over the swing set slide and  seesaw combo Did I tell you I aced the bathroom? A roll of toilet paper Scotch-Brite and a butter knife Probly that nest wasn’t even a nest probly it was a regular  four-in-hand Warm water white vinegar and Arm & Hammer An upload of sunlight For instance butterflies have tongues and hang them out in the day  to pick up what exactly? The local station we used to get we don’t get anymore Voice mail via an otter A block-graph via a bluebell Their tongues curl in the light of a flatscreen projecting a host plant and  a finale Four long two short Sip-sipping a hotspot  • For instance the grass looks up and then goes back to whatever  it was doing before A very heavy rain followed by a very light rain Did I tell you I replaced everything and  all at once? Dog shit in the backyard The day in a V shape planted in parks parkways and yards or  seasonally planted around the house An attachment via an acorn A chat room via a catkin If  the day is fernlike and pointed at the ends and irregular or keeled  as the times and styles change A four-ring box clutch via a pillbox A glass organza via a clinkerbell Those blue jays probly weren’t even blue jays probly they were  finches You can’t put the day back together again A decal of a hawk silhouette Just upstream from a pair of  headphones and a Stouffer’s  • If  the day is tapered twigs leaf stems and a white undersurface  tolerating the usual errands A small tree in the shade of a tall tree An ozone inside a loophole More a Lean Cuisine than anything else We let the grass go yellow on purpose and drove straight to the store My daughter pulls the grass up  with her fingers My son uses scissors If  the day is deciduous and thin with waves at the margins and  common or common enough Did I tell you I vacuumed the carpets and dusted  the picture window? A picture of what? An airplane headed in the direction of  the Willamette Meanwhile the river looks up and then goes back to whatever it was  doing before A landing strip via some riprap Our futures in a bindle  • If the day is untidy looking and aromatic with end-leaflets narrowing  where the sun is lopsided and lobed I’ll wait outside We can’t leave the kids in the car anymore Or wind or cows or people Schist in your shoes pick up where we left off A photo-offset of a fern into a  spreadsheet The blue flame in the new gas stove has fins If  the day is irregular on both sides and pebbled or modified by  acrylics and permanent Black toner cartridge via a starling A stop bath via a sparrow The afternoon clears the table for flowers and more  television Not only whatever’s on but a pinnate in the past More a dinette set than anything else The day ticking over in the fixer bath  • Meanwhile a northern flicker bends a piece of plexiglass into a wind  chime Did I tell you I raked the leaves and put them all into a black  Glad bag? Meanwhile a black-capped chickadee One kid asleep upstairs another on the pot Bird clutter marks the spot Just upstream from a newly relaxed regulation and the brand new  Jiffy Lube A birdbath in a dribble! A damselfly vacates the day in a blur A mosquito on a daisy My daughter looks up and then goes back to whatever it was she was  doing before The afternoon divided up into zones Where her new sounds meanwhile astound the daylight  on a leaf An off-brand beetle duct-tapes the water X’s & O’s  • You don’t have to if  you don’t want to Pink rollers via a ripple Little white sticks via a balk Meanwhile a deer tick slides into the very last reserved parking spot Under arms around the ears back of the knees and  between the legs Meanwhile inside a belly button A pink parking pass flutters between the seat cushions A speckle-winged quill vacates the day in a blind More a leftover than anything else That grass probly wasn’t even grass probly it was a roll of   Diamond Pro  Fescue or Jade 50 A blue tint ditto a cloud of flies Meanwhile a regular water strider enamels the edge of a pond  making room for you and the rest of  the day A stork inside your mind Dots and lines   • In other places we felt much the same as we do today only  more so Meanwhile a mayfly floats by another mayfly A hard drive via a hedge A Bluetooth via a squiggle Oh look someone remembered to take out the compost Meanwhile mites in a double clasp and peaked felt number wish you  well and more White foam flowers on a polished floor Who will tape their wings back? Who will fold their corners? A common green lacewing has an appointment someplace else  altogether and will keep it To a thrip or a honeydew? A grand tour Just upstream from a stackable washer/dryer unit and the brand new  FreshDirect The loop that keeps happening in the leaf litter  • Before you know it that light has changed from checker mallow and  milkweed to something more en-suite Whites and sulphurs Probly that lacewing wasn’t even a lacewing probly it was a green  smudge Hey! Hey kids! Meanwhile a green comma or a common  ringlet Their wings are made of cardboard and Reynolds Wrap A rubber band here a rubber band there Meanwhile real sunlight sneaks up the wall somewhere between  butterfly yellow and butterfly brown Not a dream really just an ordinary afternoon What color is that goldenrod? A focal point via a knob The new streaming service was all aflutter and temporarily  unavailable Not only that but a golden hairstreak One kid on the couch the other in a bole  • Just between the dimmer switch and a short circuit of  local or overlit  fritillaries Hi-Liter yellow and chisel tipped A bucket of  honeysuckle Bring the car around I’ll be right out! Did I tell you I aced the console with some Orange Glo ditto the late  afternoon? They blanket the lawn in summer A long dash followed by a short dash Right between a commotion of  track lighting and a dribble of newish  antibiotics A newish drop in the bucket An overflow of stillness and snacks My son looks up and then goes back to whatever it was he was  doing before The day is nonslip and early A download of nervy and rainbowed fluorescence A bedhead floats by another bedhead  • Just between the newly installed porch floods and a small handful of  cabbage whites A vertical frequency to it A sprinkle of what exactly? Not only that but our intentions stacked up  in a swirl The bunting’s vocals were lip-synced and weird ditto the dishwasher’s A voice box via a gorge A yellow Lego on top of a yellow Lego Right between a semi-transparent aftereffect and a latticed or  crosshatched bit of fluff An upgrade via a wrinkle More a floater than anything else Probly that bunting wasn’t even a bunting probly it was a Western  Peewee We began with sliced apple and later moved on to sunlight An orangetip on a pincushion A pip on the carpet  • Or an inverted firefly blinking on and off through a drift of dandruff  flicked off the TV set A flittery cat’s eye Yellow green or pale red Just upstream from a can of  Sea Foam and a bag of Birds Eye Single  Steamers An additive combination of  bark dust and  grade school Or a perfect glow stick The tops of trees Or an elliptical wastebasket where my son might pick out a glow  worm or a lime green flashlight fish The day has its limits The yard looks the same now than it did just an hour ago Same rush of  Oregon grape same hurry of  salmonberry The names for things slip away A rotary via a spiral A router via a tangle  • Or a streamer bobs its way across the living room trailing a yellow  popper through the top water My daughter ties off an improved clinch knot A perfection loop The day is construction paper  and laundry It syrups the corners Not only that but the remote control scuddled in the wingback Wide open spaces Or a glint in the kitchen counter where a local slope wrinkles a bowl  of cereal on the new Formica The toaster shimmies A splake floats by another splake Did I tell you I folded the clothes in a basic reverse squash or rabbit  fold ditto the onesies? The day is sound checked and  perennial  Appearing and disappearing in the hydrangeas A plus sign followed by a minus  • Or a speck of something else altogether some mica or something  made of  OJ bits and squinting A dreamy dusky wing Meanwhile the grass is back Butter and eggs are seamless and windowbox the stand mixer organic  dish soap and phone A private suburb here where we put things A plug-in via a stob Rods and cones Or cuckoo bees spun out in a bright wash of parallel and early or late  climber roses Just upstream from a buffet-style weekend special and some notable  losses Pollen paints the car and cleans out eczema Wicks out the margins Wisteria points up the positives of nonverbal  choral work Or music you can’t hear Water music  • Or a flowering piggyback petals a residue of  light-to-dark jellies and  purple glue stuff A smidgen of  Windex A gimlet in waves Probly that cat’s eye wasn’t even a cat’s eye probly it was a regular  toothpaste At the same time heaps of clouds bounce off  the driveway I plated the snacks ditto the expectations Burnt toast and bitumen Or outside the voices of other children climb up Taller ones Pedal bikes pushed up and down the walk all day transfigure  the pavements in a wired curlicue A fiddlehead with arms and legs Or taller trees in a chase The day is non-glare and leafed out stuccoed by  robot beetles One television is off the other is vertical rays of  light  • Or a #2 pencil beam crinkles the cornea in the backyard feathering seed  starters and stems The day feels irreversible and will stay inside a Dixie cup Things stick to the door screen Windy light broken off and moth dust broken off Ribs and holes Not only that but a complicated system of noticing and a dob of  apple juice You blow on it and it glows Or a refurbished working day backlights the hanging geraniums a  handful of pink fiberglass A lake effect glancing off the sideboard A streamer via a stickle A cooler via a brook More than that those green and gold flecked inlays look away A creek bed in the hallway  A spiral floats by another spiral  • And pink and blue transparencies gel the day each morning And pansies more than you You don’t have to wonder about the sky anymore you don’t have to  ask what to wear Just upstream from a sketchy weather system and the new overpass High on glue The raindrops can’t lash the ferns they can’t  flash flood a pinna Then the sun comes out again And trees are stressed out and can’t get going either It’s dinnertime breakfast is over Over and over my son’s voice across the lawn a white sparkler then  a green sparkler then a white Someone comes running Probly those geraniums aren’t even geraniums probly they’re trailing  accents Local traffic Left to your own devices you would watch TV clips all day and   make more toast and then what brush your teeth?  • And vacuuming the carpet makes a nice smell part burnt tips part  wet dog It’s difficult to think of something to do A snip floats by another snip I guess what you’re doing today is doing chores I picked up everything in the house and put them all back down just  to the left of themselves Pajamas and urine A throw rug via a jelly roll And its color time and petal time again & leaves lift the light outside  the window just enough Let the flowers back in ditto the dog You only have a few minutes for anything it’s hardly enough time  to get started Hey! Hey trees! Did I tell you I scoured the linoleum with an X-Acto and cleaned out  the wayback? One tree is a pine and one is a maple I know that One tree is you  • And a handheld  Japanese coffee grinder collects dust and would  after any wedding not just ours Bags of  groceries wait in a brown line A skater floats by another skater Green feedback Golden raisins If  you want to hear lake water lapping it up those thousand tongues  pushing past duckweed you’ll have to imagine it A basin inside a teacup And slices of orange radiate in a Ziploc No one uses sprinklers here except the university we’re just as happy  with people Just upstream from your first home and anything that’s leftover Repetitions in crinoline Or dream neon If you want to hear the lawn service line up edges in sunlight you’ll  have to wait until Wednesday In the morning the kids come running down the stairs
We were up late and everyone had been drinking, and someone said, Hey, is that God’s head on the boil? We didn’t know where to look or what to think, it was obviously some sort of perverse joke, or not, right? And the conversation went on for days, sober, drunk, asleep, awake, what did it matter? Some of us felt the real time was for something, but what? And the questions kept coming, once they started, my favorite one being two strung together, What makes art “modern” and what does “urgent” mean now? Where was the greater good? That was another one bandied about, followed by Where was the common tent? which gave a feeling of empathy for a minute and then grief because, well, where was it? Will you arm, hoard seeds, go hungry? Those terrified me because, after all, who will repair things when the end is pale or dark? Where will you hide out when capital runs out, when water? Which will be greater, the heat or the cold? Wait, did God’s boiling head just say something? Cry out Go to hell from a giant lobster pot? Tantalizing us with where to go next? Are phosphorescent lamps to mark escape paths? Not that it’s not a great party, but whose place is this? Igniting quail in banana leaves, sons bandaged, who invited us? Why are the emerald bleeding and the ivory weeping? (Lower the freaking music.) Does anyone have the time?
i was born at the rupture the root where i split from my parallel self  i split from the girl i also could have been & her name / easy / i know the story all her life / my mother wanted a girl named for a flower whose oil scents all our mothers / petals wrung for their perfume i was planted land became ocean became land anew its shape refusing root in my fallow mouth cleaving my life neatly & my name / taken from a dead woman to remember / to fill an aperture with cut jasmine in a bowl our longing our mothers’ wilting garlands hanging from our necks
I was one year old when my nanny went away leaving no memory of a face that watched, arms that held, hands that fed and cleaned me, left no record of her voice or name. My father died, leaving wisps of pipe smoke for a memory. My mother went away to write in London, left me at her home place, Ballyrankin, a sheltered farm in the Slaney river valley. I listened to stories from a paralyzed aunt sitting among sleepy dogs next to the fire. Statia cooked every day for the dining room, churned butter, gave sugared bread to me and her child Bernie, fed outside men in dirty boots and greasy caps in her stone-flagged kitchen that smelt of damp clothes, roasting meat, and cake. I fished for minnows in Shillelagh stream under ash trees where filtered sunlight made pools of silver water. On one side horses grazed and swished their tails at flies, on the far side cows rubbed their backs against low beech tree branches. My mother went away to hospital, left me with English neighbors, the Smythe Vigours’ hairy legs banged on passage floorboards, my bedroom filled with evening sun. They warned against crying. I cried louder. They took my pearl pink rosary beads given to me by a monk from a mountain monastery. He told me Holy Mary answered children’s prayers. A protestant child, I didn’t know the words, but I knew she’d hear me if I could catch the sunlight on her beads.
If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still. — Homer I’m striving to be a better astronaut, but consider where I’m coming from, the exosphere, a desk where the bluest air thins to a lip. Impossible to know the difference from where I sit and space. I promise I still dream of coming back to you, settling on your yellow for the kitchen. We won’t fight. Let it not manifest. Not over the crumpled bodies of laundry. Let us not row over the nail polish, its color, the spilled sun. Inspiration is the deadliest radiation. It never completely leaves the bones. You know.From here, there are no obstructions but the radiant nothingness. An aurora borealis opens like a fish. This. To the pyramids, yes, to a great wall. And there you are, moving from curtain to curtain. O, to fantasize of having chosen some design with you. But the moons over Jupiter. But asteroids like gods deadened by the weight of waiting. I remember you said pastel for the cabinet where the spice rack lives. That I ought’ve picked you up flowers when I had a chance. Daisy, iris, sun. Red roses. Ultraviolet, the color of love (what else but this startles the air open like an egg?). I’m really trying to be better, to commit to memory the old songs about the ground, to better sense your latitudes, see the corona of your face. Take your light as it arrives. Earth is heavenly too. But know that time is precious here. How wine waits years and years to peak. What is there to do: I’ve made love to satellites in your name. I’m saying I can’t say when I’ll return. Remember me, for here are dragons and the noble songs of sirens. Stars that sway elysian. Ships that will not moor, lovers who are filled with blood and nothing more. Who could love you like this? Who else will sew you in the stars? Who better knows your gravity and goes otherwise, to catastrophe? I’ve schemed and promised to bring you back a ring from Saturn. But a week passes, or doesn’t manage. Everything steers impossible against the boundless curb of light. Believe I tried for you. Against space. Time takes almost everything away. To you. For you. A toast to the incredible. I almost wish I’d never seen the sky when always there was you. Sincerely,
1 Father trellis of my voice (or noose) abruptly vanished — 2 I wear this razory fishhook of crucifix. Look. How it helps me keep my head down, down with shame, the glory and shame see this frail weightless chain: there is another like it. Sometimes my neck feels like it’s breaking —  It hangs right here near the heart’s hidden room where a table is set for me not a dark bar. No more that pointless horror. Weightless frail chain massive iron seaweed and barnacle-bearded anchor —  You may peek from your door toward dawn and see me attempting to make it to the end of the hallway to the restroom bent double, gasping for air in small sips but I will be there, table set for three, the unseen host, then me there to meet my own glorified body who does resemble me in a vague way, but is not particularly radiant or splendid: he is ugly, as though he had been crying all his life that can’t be my soul people scream when they first see it
Something so light almost nothingNot a list of violencesnor reports from beauty One person looks up & then another after another looking up in the same direction Who took this picture of Fight ghost town this is Palestine
Acts of love have material effects. For a woman tending the sacred fire, these include the risk of becoming an extinguisher of flames essential to civic life. It is a burden to put out what others hold as central to faith in coherence. Acts of faith have material effects — a Vestal Virgin touched by encounter must be buried alive, a beautiful metaphor for shame itself, which squirms even under all that dirt. Thus, the dead learn too late that devotion should be unidirectional, a straight line from here to suffocation. Love must not bleed at the edges, must not meet others in the banal spaces of civic life. It is a burden to personify. If Vesta’s hearth is the site of the sacred, its material effects are destruction: burning, consumption, constant hunger for more wood. Acts of destruction have fantasmatic effects. For a body surviving encounter, these include civic life, shame; the risk of being a proxy — tender of the hearth belonging to the public, by way of the goddess, who embodies a dream of faith in coherence. Material effects extinguish themselves, eventually, as when a woman touched in the correct way undoes the burden of love and puts out, taking the goddamn city in and under.
I’ve been thinking about the anatomy of the egg, about the two interior membranes, the yolk held in place by the chalazae, gases moving through the semipermeable shell. A curious phrase, the anatomy of the egg, as if an egg were a body, which it is, as if the egg could be broken then mended, which, depending on your faith, broken yes, but mended? Well. Best to start again, with a new body, voided from a warmer one, brooded and turned. Better to begin as if some small-handed animal hadn’t knocked you against a rock, licked clean the rich yolk and left the albumen to dry in the sun — as if a hinged jaw hadn’t swallowed you whole. What I wanted: a practice that reassured that what was cracked could be mended or, at least, suspended so that it could not spread. But now I wonder: better to be the egg or scaled mandible? The small hand or the flies, bottle black and green, spilling their bile onto whatever’s left, sweeping the interior, drinking it clean? I think, something might have grown there, though I know it was always meant to be eaten, it was always meant to spoil.
I am not land or timber nor are you ocean or celestial body, but rather we are the small animals we have always been. The land and the sea know each other at the threshold where they meet, as we know something of one another, having shown, at different times, some bit of flesh, some feeling. We call the showingknowing instead of practice. We seem to say, at different times,A feeling comes. What is the metaphor for two animals sharing the same space?Marriage? We share a practice, you and I, a series of postures. Here is how I become a tree [ ] and you [ ] a body in space.
1 We hoped to see things as they are by which we meant without us. We thought once we stripped away smell, taste, color —  anything improper —  leaving only location and number, the thing would be naked on the teeter-totter of an equation.2 Then Archimedes told another one. If I had a long enough lever and a fulcrum, I’d get a high resolution image of objectified bodies and hoist myself on my own petard.
The summer everyone left for the moon even those yet to be born. And the dead who can’t vacation here but met us all there by the veil between worlds. The number one song in America was “In the Year 2525” because who has ever lived in the present when there’s so much of the future to continue without us. How the best lover won’t need to forgive you and surely take everything off your hands without having to ask, without knowing your name, no matter the number of times you married or didn’t, your favorite midnight movie, the cigarettes you couldn’t give up, wanting to kiss other people you shouldn’t and now to forever be kissed by the Earth. In the Earth. With the Earth. When we all briefly left it to look back on each other from above, shocked by how bright even our pain is running wildly beside us like an underground river. And whatever language is good for, a sign, a message left up there that reads:here men from the planet earthfirst set foot upon the moonjuly 1969, a.d.we came in peace for all mankind. Then returned to continue the war.
Dress like you care! Eat like you care! Care like you care! You don’t think apples just grow on trees, do you?• A fish taps a clam against a bony knob of coral to crack its shell —  which demonstrates intelligence yes, but is the fish pleased with itself?• Alone in your crib, you form syllables. Are you happy when one is like another? Add yourself to yourself. Now you have someone.
Attending to verbal constructs makes care long-term, not acute, which is for the best because, though flawed, each one is salvageable or replaceable unlike my flesh. Words can be compared with moments, houses, trees, wires, wires, trees, houses. All stand on their marks. Still, there’s a lot of overlap. I move my eyes to make time. I take their measure and create a duplicate.
For the time being an ampersand is a boy clutching his knees to his chest as art. On high, the god of form wears a face on each wrist. Only a god can take and give time, but the one in front of the gun lasts forever
There were no road rails. I remember no road rails and the death depth off the cliffs we motored along. I remember speed in a parched Chevy clunker that could not have sped, and bench seats, and no buckles, and bare thighs peeling off faux leather at every hairpin. Every elevated canyon mile was a feat but a breath of less slickened air too, less cog and fume —  a winding away from the wavering, sea-leg steam off blinding sidewalks, infinite sidewalks and other shoeless kids kicking rusted palm leaves outside infinite apartment complexes. Away from our corner of the valley of concrete corners, of no evidence of valley besides boulders stacked in the distance of every vista. The driver was a stranger, was my mother after my whole life had passed with stranger after stranger, was my mother after seven years, and me at seven years with her driving that snuff-colored Nova from her blinding valley not a valley —  through Laurel, Topanga, Malibu canyons all the way to some fantastic, to her beloved blue — eucalyptus choking local growth the whole trek. And the cooling air as we 
efforted west, and the jolt of a castle, The Castle, in a distant crook of a range that hid the slate of the ocean, made me want to stop moving but not stop here. I remember hoping to find hermit crabs the size of the mole on my right side chin. And if I tethered them to a stick they’d line up by mass and trade shells, find homes that fit. And there’d be one left without, one torn out. A book said a scientist leaned into wet sand, watched a torn crab die in the beak of a gull. I can’t remember if I saw that death or read it. 
I remember watching a wrong castle tucked into a wrong mountain notch on the chin of the sky, like the hermit mole on my chin if my face were the sky. “It’s a beauty mark,” my mother had said, “Don’t pick at it.” I eyed that smoking stranger at the wheel and dug my nail in as the Pacific swelled into view that first time.
A sudden not-breeze fills the air. Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat. A boat of agony. Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting. Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the fourth wall. How to read that? The optic nerve gets it up. What has been done weighs the heigh. The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket. Acquisitive or generous? Balance implies a man out of sight line removing his shoes. Why a man? is the question. The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher. Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep. They worry but their eyeballs still roll. And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip, the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech.Let us bury Caesar. I hope we find some sand.
there are more Ss in possession than i remembered / my name hinges on the S / is serpentine / has sibilance / is simple / six lettered / a symbol / different from its sign / sound shapes how we think about objects / the mouth shapes how sound spills out / how the speaker’s seen / a sigmatism is the homosexual mystique / my parents sought treatments / i was sent to a speech / pathologist / sixth grade / a student / she gave me exercises / i was schooled / practiced silence / syllabics / syntax / my voice sap in the high branches / my voice a spoonful of sugared semen / i licked silk when i spoke / i spilt milk when i sang / when i sang sick men tore wings from city birds / so i straightened my sound / into a masculine i / the S is derived from the semitic letter shin / meaning my swishiness is hebraic / is inherited / it’s semantic / no matter what was sacrificed / the tongued isaac / a son against the stone of my soft palate / still i slipped / my hand inside my neighbor’s / waistband & pulled back pincers / sisyphus with the sissiest lips / parseltongued assassin / sassy & passing for the poisoned sea / now when i say please / let me suck your cock / i sound straight / as the still secondhand / on a dead watch.
what will be left after the last fidget spinner’s spun its last spin after the billboards accrue their thick layer of grit masking advertisements for teeth paste & tanqueray gin after the highways are overtaken by invasive forests after the ministers give up their gods & the rabbis their congregations for drink after new men rise to lead us sheep toward our shearing, to make bed sheets from our hair after the high towers have no airplanes to warn away & instead blink purely toward heaven like children with one red eye after phone lines do nothing but cut the sky into sheet music & our phones are just expensive bricks of metal & glass after our cloud of photographs collapses & all memories retreat back into their privatized skulls after the water taps gasp out their final blessing what then? when even the local militias run out of ammunitions when the blast radii have been chalked & the missiles do all they were built to when us jews have given up our state for that much older country of walking & then that even older religion of dirt when all have succumbed to illness inside the church of our gutted pharmacies when the seas eat their cities when the ground splits like a dress when the trash continent in the mid-atlantic at last opens its mouth to spit what will be left after we’ve left i dare not consider it instead dance with me a moment late in this last extinction that you are reading this must be enough
i Dear A. — Nailing crockery to the walls was not something I ever understood, but Simonetta’s maiolica falls, like this sideboard, painted wood, under the enchantment of a freehand look —  a curling script, a loose grape tendril, the forms that hecatomb smoke took purling to a Roman god’s nostril    ...     Because geranium is crinkled in the spillage from the wishing well, now outdated and backfilled, this whole place evinces the nature of a souvenir plate. Another tell: the mosquito flourish in its signature.ii The rustic bicycle, like a pen that spent its ink, wrote an invisible sentence to the ramparts and back, now and again rolling through the arches of an aqueduct dowsing with its sixth sense across the hillsides. Locals tucked plastic water bottles under spouts chiseled into lions’ pouts stationed at intervals, like shrines. Their cars idled while they stooped, and on Sundays even formed lines. They trust this water more, Lorenzo whooped, than what comes out of their taps? The sources snake beneath the maps.iii The little terrier Amore, they warned me, had eaten the seat belts; so there I was, my friend, fearing whiplash in the back seat (no headrest either!), in all respects afloat —  Simonetta on alert for signs of gallantry, like the wives of those diminished Casanovas who dream they’ve merely grown discreet. And the dissertation she once wrote on courtesan-poetesses, fancying herself of that ilk (“Like me!” — a phrase she’d strew among her compliments) gathers dust on a shelf. When I think of Boccherini’s metacarpals interred beneath the soppressata marbles of the duomo, I think: Casa del Diavolo. Those two.
It is eighty degrees in December. It is he, on one of his furloughs, bringing himself — and hell — up to date.My Don Juan, the better climber (as the mercury yo-yos),is in a newly roused state, the world circumcised away from an out-of-season bud leaving at the scrupulous rim,as it unfurls, a darker appliqué, like O-positive frozen solidat the sight of one’s resuscitated victim. This rosebush assiduously forks over its works where most grandifloras falter, thriving as far into the year as Capricorn.While named after a lover, it decorates its own altarand wields an extraordinary thorn: once I saw it catch a football in those semiquaver quasi-teeth; it is three-headed, like Cerberus,a hybrid drawing bloodlines from a root-ball on hands all that’s impure lies beneath.Hands can train it, barbarous as it is, on an arbor, and I might like to take its thick canes in harness, first pouring cement as a base(so it would know I meant business). Always poised to strike,they eventually undo their stays, baying out like a window of garnet, as at Chartres (torture chamber in its basement,or so I hear). I wonder how such a daemon rose got its start,what fairy tale explains its scent    ...     And then I go out tonight and find him, swiping right on every pretty face in candlelight.It is almost Christmas. Stacks of square plates. (It’s an open plan.) Racksof bottles. The whites and blacks, clear glass, and stainless steel sieves denote compliance with standards. A wire basket of freckled pearsis transparency; sterilized knives give full disclosure; and as regardsthe stemware, due diligence dares a slip, especially on chanteuses like these salting down from state-of-the-art speakers. (Or is it sugar?) Does the chorizo flambénot deter him? Gold as all hell, Valkyries stand tall with beer to the brim. Beakersin Siren form flush with Chianti, if not ambi- valence. Recalling the steel meshes belting Monterosso’s cliffs against the voxDei of the sea, the myth refleshes: ordering, in the manner of heroes,an Andromeda on the rocks.
Soul, don’t complain, says Senhal, who means by “soul” a thing like “future,” possesses without knowing it not soul, but future, is little present, Senhal, & less past when this she shares, not always willing all, the pale pearl earth with you & shelters in her heart a stunted lemon tree, inviolate, & shielded by a sour ring of fire, the kind that keeps a Valkyrie asleep. Always born too early, Senhal lights these candles not to read by, but to watch the diamonds flower & die within their hot, blue nuclei, which seem to flicker with secret intent that fails, all told, to comprehend her. & arguably, this darkness is, for her, the best of them, refusal of the soul she never recognizes as refusal of the future which she is instead of all her otherwises —  & might she have been —  conscience-calmed — perhaps —  or else a bird of the earthly paradise in which one barely needs to eat or else subsists on manna or some other fragrant zero denuded of the tang of death & the numb green shade, a starry zone, orthogonal with luminous errata, in which a lake of ultramarine has been used with never parsimony in all the places where blue is required to smudge a Thule out of sand & sea & air, a seeming there that seeming wants to hold her in its arms, in which one could be one & yes the ripe quicksilver that the artificer poured into the throats of statues to give them voice had never brought the air alive with hoarsest cries & muffled pleas (lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber did they cry?) as if nor it nor any thing mercurial had ever learned to savor love & poison in one mouth?
To love is to tell the story of the world. There was an ocean with a boat mountains a meadow too painful to stare at directly. Haven’t I been here before? Yes. No: not quite here. “It is not as if,” the philosopher writes, “an I exists independently over here and then simply loses a you over there.” In the mist, a man rigs the Suzelle, little red boat.Loved labored for months, learning to tie the right knot. The exact and only knot that will keep the vessel tethered. She rehearsed for the worst possible thing. “The attachment to you,” it is written, “is part of what composes who I am.” I know/knew those hands, hers. I watched her dust the sourdough with flour at midnight a moon between her fingers. Gone went Loved. But the half-world of her in me was me. It was lit by the moon.
i be but i don’t is. i been & i am one who be on my own biz. i love not a b____. but see know i been loved. i’m one who been that & then not deserved much cuz i been on my own dirt. i don’t know love. i been a lie but don’t be a lie i be fly sometimes but don’t be a fly sometimes i be addict-like but not high like an addict’s like. just scratching low stones like an addict might. stop? not an option. i be getting mine. been getting over. been over this but be caught in a cycle. but you be what you be & it be good. & i be moved & making new habits.
if i said baby you might think a certain thing but nah. that’s only maybe what i mean, perhaps i’ll say ma & your mind says Cam’ron, women creeping up but i’m a changed man, & that’s not game ma. it’s practice in high school & THOT isn’t out yet. we’re classic Chicago & bustdowns bloom in our mouths. my Ma spits Too $hort & the line i catch the first time is b*tch b*tch b*tch make me rich but Ma puts me on punishment when i whisper Ludacris & tells me sex shouldn’t hurt. i say nothing & Ma lets it go until a few years later when i get becky or brain or top or dome by a white girl & Ma tells me everything i’ve risked for this escapade. i can’t fix my mouth to say but Ma what i got i didn’t ask for
He snapped his lighter shut, placed it beside the metronome on his nightstand. We’d just made love and I was sitting naked on the edge of his bed, watching the stars appear. He told me my skin was chatoyant in the window light, like wet fiddleback maple. I asked him what chatoyant meant. He grinned and explained growth distortion, how it could pattern the wood fibers into flames of alternating tones. I told him that was nice and he said he could take me to the workshop for a look around. Show me what he was talking about. I rolled my eyes. It sounded so boring. But then he bit into my thigh and said he wanted to fashion me into a beautiful cello. He drove with both hands on the wheel and told me he thought of everyone as instruments. He said his father was filled with knots like a burl and only good for music boxes but his mother was quilted beneath her surface, like rippled river water. Then he just stared ahead at the road and kept quiet the rest of the way. When we got inside he felt along the wall and flipped a switch so I could see the three white torsos, each with a headstock and fretboard attached to the sternum. They were displayed on hangers like guitars. I covered my mouth with a shaking hand, backed away and ran out to the parking lot. He stood at the door and watched me squeal away in his pickup. The sky clouded over as I drove to the police station, all the millions of stars like birds’ eyes. Like the darkness was sawn off the trunk of a black walnut tree, then sliced into a veneer.
He said he buried his right eye in South Georgia —  on a dare, he said, when he was little, beneath one green ash of two that mark the end of a road whose name he’s by now forgotten: Lonesome something, maybe Dog or Cricket. He said he couldn’t love me, not really, not without his old right eye, and anyway he’d left his tongue as a tip slid under a mug at a small North Florida diner, would collect it too along the way, seeing as he’d asked the server to save it, and she had kindly agreed. Three of his ribs were further gone — one in Wisconsin, where he’d planted it like a tree though he believed even then nothing would bloom on it. Another he pawned in Manitoba for a silver bracelet, which he wore only when he was very sad, and his last rib he’d been keeping in a safe deposit box in a credit union on the alien Oregon coast where he’d visit sometimes, stopping often at vantages to take in expanses of pines covered in moss and something else, like brine, and the pines were tall, tall and uncommunicating, as if they had been designed only to listen. His ears he’d left with me, I told them everything — words I had invented for the color of new moons, city names I had given to four slender ant colonies that had since emerged on the lawn. I told the ears Come back to me, but they were unable to relay these types of things, and anyway there was nothing else to do. I took all my littlest veins and pitched them as a woven tightrope out of the kitchen window and hooked, with a makeshift grapple, the cheek of the visible moon, which carried me away, and I was sorry to have wounded it like that and I was sorry to be carried by what I had wounded.
Why is it eternity lasts a moment a moment eternity? Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls at dawn? I hear voices rustle in the leaves after they are gone. New mice burst into life. Small raccoons bear tiny chains around their wrists.
1 Where am I from? In black basilicas dragged incessantly down a cross is a man who here resembles a dresssnatched from a hanger, there: thick clouds of muscles — an overcast body —  embodied weather of one hardly-known country. (A country where I am from?) Dragging him, they stick their hands under his armpits. How cozy their hands arein such a warm place! Through a cut in his chest Eve watches with her one bloody eye. Of a cut in the chest — a red eyelash! But where am I from?2 Yes, a man resembles a dresssnatched from a hanger. Inside blackalphabet dragged incessantly down each letter is a man.3 To a telephone in a long hallway as if to a well for water. (Well, where am I from?) (Neither mama’s nor papa’s, my round face takes after a rotary phone.) A rotary phone is my gene pool. My body rings as it runs to put my head on the strong shoulder of the receiver. Blood is talking! Blood connection is weak. Inside the receiver I hear crackle as if fire were calling. Who is this? It’s me, fire receiver. But where am I from?4 Days of merciless snow behind the kitchen window —  snow got deposited like fat under our skin. How large we’ve grown on those days! So much time spent at the kitchen table trying to decide where to put commas in sentences about made-up lives, yet no one bothered to tell us that words, uttered once, crowd in the brain like in a hospital lobby. That time is supposed to heal only because once it was seen with a scalpel in its hands. You’ve made a mistake, you’d say mysteriously, pointing at lines written by a child. Think of another word with the same root. As if words can have roots. As if words didn’t come from darkness, cat-in-the-bag words, as if our human roots were already known to us. Here’s Grammar, here’s Orthography, here’s a paper rag “bread, milk, butter.” What roots? What morphology? What rules of subjugation? How is it even possible to make a mistake? Here’s Physics, Chemistry,Geometry with its atlas, now, where are Vaclav’s letters, 1946? What to do about the etymology of us?Our etymology? 1946 crowds my hospital lobby. The face of a rotary phone, the face of a clock, the face of a radio on the wall —  these are my round-faced progenitors. But Vaclav’s face —  where? (Again a man resembles a dress snatched from a hanger.) And where are the letters? One per week, in his best Sunday handwriting? Inside the receiver — fire. (How cozy are my ears in such a warm place!) But where am I from?5 A postwar city, barracks — the joy of a first apartment —  a coat, a jacket, a leather purse fat with pills, but where are the where-letters from the where-face? Evacuated face, de-evacuated face, sick not sick, stuck through face, vacuum face, lab rat face. This country was tested on Vaclav’s face. Now we can live in peace. So, where am I from? A postwar city, barracks — the joyof a deactivated face, vacated face. A face snatched from a hanger. Absence as an inner organ.6 In a village known for a large puddle where all children fall between the two categories of those who hurt the living things and those who hurt the nonliving things, in a village known for being unknown (where am I from?), a graveyard around an old church, the frightening alphabet around the village, an alphabet on gravestones, marble letters under the moth-eaten snow. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones.7 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. A bone is a key to my motherland.8 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. Eve watches with her one red eyelash. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones. In my motherland people kneel before wells. In my motherland people pray to the crosses of flying birds. A bone is a key to my people. Among my people, only the dead have human faces. Still, where am I from?9 Women saints in berets of golden threads, who are they by your feet, seated like pets? An angel with wings of a peacock, an angel with a human face. Butwho are they by your feet,seated like pets? Now, if you wear such golden berets, if you tame children and angels, if your white boneless fingers leaf through a book while I gnawon this wooden verse, would you, holy women who wear golden berets, put the hairs on my tongueinto a pigtail?10 A mouse-tail of a word for a word-loving rodent! Inside my alphabet dragged incessantly down each frightening letter is a man. My frightening alphabet in his best Sundayhandwriting. A letter addressed to lost letters, phone-face, clock-face, radio-face —face as an inner organ. Where are Vaclav’s lettersas an inner organ. On the borderlines of my motherland— wet laundry claps in the wind like gunfire. Have you heard of my motherland? My motherland is a raw yolk inside a Fabergé egg. This yolk is what gives gold its color. This face is a fire-receiver. This face is an inner organ. A bone as a key to my people. Where am I from?11 The golden bones of my motherland are ringing!
1 No one knows where I’m going, not even me. Although that owl I heard outside last night might lead me to the terrain and call out the custodians so they can surround and welcome me, or do whatever they want to do. I won’t speak, won’t say my name even if they try to coerce me, or play unearthly music, such as sailors hear far out on the Atlantic, in fog so thick they venture to climb it to reach clear sky. Some do and speak of large blue birds that glide there silently as ghosts, but those men return too damaged to speak much or stay above ground very long. The owl could tell more, if he wanted, but he won’t. And not only that, he’s decided he will never be seen.2 I’m happy to honor that, but I’d like to know what kind of owl he is. I mean, is he blue, or is he striped so he can blend with the forest? Is he tall and white, from the Arctic, or a pygmy, from further south? Is he long-eared or spectacled? I want to hear again the noise he made, was it a screech, or a staccato huhuhu followed by a deep-drawn whoo, or did it sound like wood being sawn? I am ashamed I paid it no attention. I did not know then he was a messenger, albeit a taciturn one. How does he know me, and why is he so interested? Once a parrot took stock of me, learnt to speak my name in exactly the tones I said it in, mimicked it endlessly and so loudly that I ran from my laughing friend’s house with my shrill-voiced name hurling after me.3 Where does the owl go during the day? How can he know I’ll still be here when he surfaces? I do take trains —  I go north sometimes, pulled by my past. I fly to places. Will he know all this and follow me everywhere? When can I expect his sounds to morph into spoken words that I understand and act on, if I agree with him? But if I decide to stay put, never leave the bedroom, will he get fed up standing there and row away through the night air, hooting a farewell? I don’t think so, no, this fellow is here for the duration of my stay on this enormous ball and could tell right now how long that will be, and what messy adventures are still ahead of me, but his trick is to keep as schtum on such stuff as the wooden owl on my bedside table.4 I’ve heard stories about owls, how they appear from nowhere at the edge of things to sit watching, usually staying silent, but sometimes uttering a few words in their night language we don’t understand. That’s my fellow, although I don’t know him. Should I leave the house and hold my right arm out for him to land on and turn his big eyes on me? As if he’d be so compliant. Or should I try to forget him, pretend he’s not there in the dark, like a tree I hadn’t noticed growing? Oh, at least I should stop mentioning him here, but what else can I write about? Not the journey I’m taking that I know nothing of, not yet, and when I do I mightn’t feel like writing. I think the solution might be to buy a T-shirt with an owl printed on it, a blue owl, on a yellow shirt, and write about that small fellow to begin with.5 What I want to learn is this: do owls ever venture inside, to stand on a corner- table, cock their heads to one side, and take in completely what’s going on? There are mice here that may be welcome, but I know my owl would be suspicious. He’d assume I want him inside to see what he looks like, to make friends with him, so he’ll be kind to me. I could promise to wear a blindfold and say nothing, act like I don’t know he’s there, but I will know and that’s enough. I think I hear his thoughts and I’m sure he hears mine. I feel his big eyes on me all the time. Maybe I should start carrying the wooden owl around with me, and practice owl noises. When is he going to tell me what he has to? I’m not asking for a map, but I’d like to know where I’m headed, if not where I’ll end up. And I’d like to know it as soon as I can.6 When I say I hear his thoughts, I hear some, not the important ones. And here’s one of mine — if he ventured inside this house he’d see something that might intrigue him, a hand-knitted toilet roll cover, in rings of purple, red, and white. Like an unknown planet hanging in the sky. I’d let him have it, take it back to his nest, or his hollow tree trunk, or his half-sunken boat. I know he’ll assume this is another example of special pleading, and I accept that. Would I do better to ignore him, let him stay out there, like a pinecone that remains unobserved? I saw my doctor yesterday, he spoke of the deterioration, and I felt the owl was hiding in a cupboard, agreeing with every word. After that I went to my sister’s grave and the owl flew back to wherever he’s been ordered to lurk while observing me. Maybe I should feel privileged to have his full-time attention.7 This morning I captured a beetle climbing the parsley. I put him in an empty matchbox, wondering what the owl thought of this. Would it impact what might be unfolding? I doubted this. I slipped on some spidery jazz that I knew would annoy the owl. He needed to be in control. I ground coffee beans and made espresso. The aroma wafted through the house. I freed the beetle to explore the table, and when it wandered off the edge I let it. I’m sure it survived, but I’m not bothered, just as I know the owl doesn’t care about me. We are thrown together, all of us, by winds that come here from far-off worlds. I sipped my coffee, humming the tune spun through the jazz, and I felt quite well for the first time in weeks, even months. Was the owl watching —  had he been in contact with the beetle? And what was their collective verdict on me? Did it add up to more negative evidence?8 OK, I’m blanking him. I watched a crow today, really admired how he operated, looking after the young ones, his partner, none of this spying on others. I’ve decided I don’t like owls, their self-absorption, or their nosiness about people. I know which I’d rather be. And I don’t have to deal with a crow stalking me. The owl would laugh about these thoughts. He’s been given the task of waiting to release, when he can, exactly what I need to know or what he can reveal. I admit he’s not easy but, shit, he’s the dumb card I’ve been dealt and I have to pretend I like him. Can I ask him about the Oxford and Cambridge rowers, or about the hairdressers the Louisianians use, or the tiger cubs that Texans keep as pets? The owl would make minced meat of them all. I wish he would hoot another noise to me. I might even acknowledge his importance, given my situation, but I won’t reveal anything.9 I felt the presence of the owl last night. He was in the room with me. Not literally —  he appeared in a dream, where a blue van struggled up an icy road before sliding back in a horrible, wriggling way, to what felt like an end. I’m not sure how it seemed so. And I can’t say where the owl was in this little film, except he was definitely there. This morning I came down the stairs, expecting some sign from him. I found a few brown feathers on a white plate on the kitchen table. OK, then, he must be a brown owl, but why donate some feathers, and what did these denote? I made coffee, then put on a CD of Anouar Brahem’s oud that seemed to suit the moment. And I decided it was the time to poach two eggs to serve on top of two slices of rye bread while I primed the espresso machine again and asked myself what the owl was saying.10 Those feathers were gone from the plate when I went back for them this evening, so I wondered if maybe I’d imagined them, or if they’d fluttered up from the eggs before I’d poached them. That doubt was caused by the owl, I was sure — I’d made him careless, and he was recovering his poise, his control. And I was back in the place where I knew nothing, where he liked me to be. I opened the door and stood there, listening, but no owl sound came. Then a bat just barely avoided my head, and glided toward the moon. I stood watching this leathery fellow, then closed the door, and opened some wine. How much did the owl control? Would I be attacked by a rat tonight while I slept, not savagely, but enough to terrify me? Or would cockroaches swarm on my duvet, clicking enough to wake me? The idea being that these would render me so punch-drunk I’d welcome whatever the owl had to say.11 I spent the morning drawing owl after owl on bits of paper, and after I’d got somewhere near a proper depiction, I found a black marker and reproduced it on an A2 drawing page which I Pritt Sticked onto the gable wall, then I dug out my old black bow and four arrows and unleashed these into the body of the owl. I knew I was being provocative, maybe even launching an act of war, but I could take no more, and couldn’t see what I had to lose. The owl clearly was unmoved by this, so I repeated the desecration four times over till the drawn owl looked machine-gunned, whereupon I flung the bow down on the grass and went in to pour a large glass of Talisker for the first time in months, if not years. It still tasted good. I slipped on Kind of Blue, which always chilled me, and lay on the sofa with my shoes kicked off, and the curtains wide open. I thought, let the owl do his worst.12 When the dark came, I lurked in the kitchen, bow in hand, arrows in the quiver that hung from my left shoulder, like the Robin Hood I wanted to play in the school pantomime —  I got Little John instead! I kept looking out at the dark garden, wondering if I should be there, waiting to fire arrows at any sound or movement. Why did I want to kill the owl? He hadn’t given me the news I dreaded, but he’d stayed silent. That was more than I could bear. I poured a glass of Malbec and put on a CD of Baltic jazz. Did he think I could wait forever, as if I were a rock? I sliced some cheddar and a heel of bread, opened the back door and went out. The moon turned its big eye onto me, and I saw it wobble. The stars hummed along. Where am I going? I shouted at all of them. There was no response. Then far off, I heard a faint huhuhu followed by a whoo. You cowardly bastard! I roared, and sprayed the arrows all over the blackened world.
in the blackest recesses of Bistro Malatesta entre les heures du quatre à cinq (forgoing his liaison with Odette for the third time in as many days) Prudhomme observes a snailfish undulating round the hat stand’s spine, the stalagmites of candles (its sad, small eyes, its cryptic lack of scales) wants to cleave to it wants to shake the dipsomaniac in the corner, hiss Ay caramba! Have you seen it?Here on the Rue Mouffetard — so far from deep-sea canyons, so far from home? considers eating it flavored with rosemary, flavored with dill whiskery thing sees it, loses it in Gauloise furls, catches it again, its curl/uncurl progression along a velveteen banquette it stirs him — its decision in oblivion to be a thing of  light and so gelatinous thinks of turtles nibbled at by surgeonfish wonders if perhaps he’s lost his grip, and if  he has, likes it
So déjame contarte un cuento, una historia es que lluvia rain agh what’s the word tey tey at? eltiw? Ateltiw? Last night, Atelti came after class. Siempre sabes when she’s here because you hear hail on the windows, the flapping of the leaves, las hojas, ne iswat AND ne kwajkwawit, los árboles, trees I figure I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that she visited seeing how dark I was, un ichan of  negro, of  zájtik. And zájtik isn’t bad. Sometimes it brings rainbows, arco irises, kusamalut Atelti told me something she heard in El Salvador, algo de mis abuelos y abuelas, both alive and dead  Ne muyut shipanu sempa pal ne kali pal ne takamet, siwatket,  Ajkawat ne neshti ka ne ejekat tik ne weytepet, ne tiupan,  Ne ilwikat, ken titajtani — tzalan ne ashal, ne apan, ne ujti  The fly enters every house of man, woman  leaving ashes to wind for the volcano, church  Sky, how do you ask — in between sand, river, road So what does it mean? Where’s the answer at the end? The moral? The hail rattling outside: clattaraka araka araka araka araka — cla ttaraka taraka taraka taraka taraka taraka ka ka ka kuh kuh and me without my raincoat. “Don’t be outside by the time I leave,” I said. “Y qué,” she said as more hail hit the windows, a few pellets falling onto the carpet inside. And it continued. And she added some rain a bit after. When it was time to leave I stepped outside it still rained and was offered an umbrella to the car which I refused. Mi hermana, Atelti, was there to stay. So I thought, “Get wet. If  you’re so desperate Talk Dígame” And she rained  And vapor seeped out from my buttons
In Exodus Moses is hidden in a cleft, behind God’s hand, begging, and he sees — rushing past him —  God’s back, diminishing. Moses stops begging. God’s back is black fog. I know. He, we guess, means to do it, to do all of this. The brute center part of an iridescent moth. The carnation against the man.
Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling. — Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Stephen Mitchell The fresco cracks cooperatively over time. Not to give a secret away but gradually to break off keeping it. In the sky you make birds like this, one wing longer than the other, an asymmetrical v wedged against wind, one stroke longer than another, never the bodies turned the same direction, each finding its own angle, and one, in the distance, a dot. These are the Deadly Birds of the Soul Rilke was forced to call terrifying. Migratory, weighing no more than a pencil. Because every flying thing is passionate, and every flight a posture torn from stone. There was a time it was a theme parents would pay an artist to realize — the face of a beloved son, a Luca or Piero, painted onto the shoulders of Tobias, painted into the company of Raphael. You tell yourselves and your quiet house no harm will come to the boy as he goes out. A guardian, though, is not a guard. To keep safe is subtly different from confining. Radiance can strategically direct itself to seem like us, ready, as it were, to walk. As a mirror goes through the appearance of requiring subsistence, goes through the motions of a meal whose food appears to be food. Radiance, we know, is never quite as warm as light. Who has not tasted the silver in sea mist? Whosever they are, angels are the first to surface there. You know a guardian by the silver of a river-crossing, of a father’s filmy eyes, in gall, heart, fire, and mostly smoke. In smoke and mostly mirror. As, wedged between forward and backward being, rehashing and planning ahead, presence will be specked again with being erased, a reusable writing surface calling down to the life without rest, the self-propelled surveillances of sharks.
The aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a man midair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many guns pointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what he sees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the appropriation, the film clip, chase, pressed lips over lips, photo moment on the minute-drawn breath in, the over, the under, bodies in black and white cut to pose, the way a kiss can pose, dispose of everything around it for another, dispose of thinking. It’s like waving good-bye. Mouth to mouth seeing as saying. Inside. Resuscitation back to the brain saying yes as the mouth makes an O. Circles for the digital age, colored dots for faces already made for erasing. Hurry, come, he, 6’7”, sees fifteen minutes from the Mexican border, cremates his old paintings up close. But the ashes were kept in a book urn, not so afloat in the ocean with my parents, Above, On, and Under (with Mermaid)
After Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” triptych right panel But all dark notes are dismantled there from the middle ear downward. Voyaged mind, cauldron skin. Can you claim anything is yours? The burning salt hour throws its black broken-glass frame skyward. Left behind the mum orchestra, body parts in peril and animals dizzy for lust past all lost astronomy and wipeout, this naked edible overjoy, a kind of suicide in syllables, fifth panic, fourth stall’s birds-fermata, this half ocean’s susurrus is coming over us in the picture. Can you akin? Can you hear it, pinned to the unseasonable underearth, an option for music and water constantly changing shape, an answer in dissonance? To hear desire is to wake yourself inside, upturned, long enough to know tomorrow is exile. Chaos, body harp, and painted butt music, crowd-crawl, rose crowned to the chest, rabbit call and playing cards    ...    listen, I’m hell-humming in your direction, giddy, I am too taken to leave it alone, the will locked in as if it is already inside of me now: to fall. Let’s be clear, my darling, in the reeling crave, spilled gut-platter of enclosed bones, in the final flesh-clean drop, it sounds like fire rising with the cliff’s updraft.
National Portrait Gallery I have a need to see the painting when no one is looking. The god- thought if there was such a thing, inconsolable, of Saturday reaching for Sunday to ride out onto the Indian Ocean like an argument of starched waves in their coffin-white lace I might finger as I pass. There are hands in the paintings: raised, pointing, folded, reaching, reaching    ...    there’s a leporello book intended for my ex-lover’s breathing, weather balloons like colored severed heads laughing their way up the sky’s fever-continuing threshold of three miles withholding this formula for desire. Beside the one body and its skying figures of speech, night’s impressionist-flecked mask captured by singing: try to inhale. And again, please. Cough up cadmium twice, suddenly. Carry the caraway seed page away, fill your sea purse head with the tiny unborn. Painting, like digging up your garden in the dark, isn’t spring. Isn’t daddy root, mama bud pullulating for some creation. Isn’t spring. Isn’t season’s salt measure for your worth. Whoever told you that lied about what’s to be framed next.
An erasure of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Palingenesis” I, sobbing in the rolling mist, Started for peopled days. In dreams A faded, lonely promontory shed petals. Belief exists. Cunning with its perfume Working from youth, defiance. A phantom Vanished. The swift surrenders, leap into The old dead heart of lies. I will give, remembering my turns Into foliage. Of what light unseen! What, what, what, what, what, what Will hold still without its end?
A Deaf Blind poet doesn’t like to read sitting up. A Deaf Blind poet likes to read Braille magazines on the john. A Deaf Blind poet is in the habit of composing nineteenth-century letters and pressing Alt+S. 
A Deaf Blind poet is a terrible student. A Deaf Blind poet does a lot of groundbreaking research. A Deaf Blind poet is always in demand. A Deaf Blind poet has yet to be gainfully employed. A Deaf Blind poet shares all his trade secrets with his children. A Deaf Blind poet will not stop if police order him to. A Deaf Blind poet used to like dogs but now prefers cats. A Deaf Blind poet listens to his wife. 
A Deaf Blind poet knits soft things for his dear friends. A Deaf Blind poet doesn’t believe in “contributing to society.”
An erasure of  Laura Redden Searing’s “My Story” Generous instinct, were you My hand I must Think. The later brain. My hands craving every Learned heart. Nature, art, World. In my memories I thought of trust Then all fear. I Fell on my pain. Hope shall in loss Throb. My, my, my Stand for the release. A nation’s groan beneath Dear night. All right.
An erasure of Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s “On Seeing the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl, Sitting for Her Portrait” Guide, passion, catch what Hath no speech. Unknown Joys, power, and meditation’s Unfolding sky. Feeling draws Heart and wildering language Still without speech to Mind. Philosophy fails to Sway this future child.
It’s summer, and just the sunniest of afternoons. Outside the sanatorium, in the arboretum, the attendees are served their teas. The strudel is toothsome when Herr Stumpf, from the lectern, contradicts the consensus that I is for ice cream. No, now he’s proposing that I’s for spaghetti, all spaghetti, he avers, being once alphabetti, all spaghetti being once that capital I that it is when it’s dry, not the maddening doodle that it is when it’s done and awry. His audience listen, but once he has spoken, then beneath their applause that’s not fulsome but token, they don’t soften, no rather, they stiffen.
All the new birds are made of nothing. They have nothing inside (for anti-ballast) and those insides are surrounded in an outside nothing that has its own flibberti hole. The birds, they’re nothinging up there in the nothing trees, or on nothing roofs under a nothing sky. They fly of course, but what is flying if not nothing?
On occasion, when the mood takes him as it so often does, he will put down his papers, get up from his kindly old chair, and leave for a while the sweeping beam to sow its charitable seed — that seed which, when falling on the ground of a helmsman’s fertile consciousness, ought germinate in it a cautious vigilance. He descends then, the long corkscrew of the stairs and opens at their base the metal door so that he may take a closer look at what might be beyond his tower’s environs. There he always finds the churning world, she laps at him from every side with no respite, and spatters him with spray. Thanks to a certain modulation, a tone which he adopted long ago when he still wore shorts and buckled shoes, there is no danger here from neither shark nor crocodile, not in this sea stuffed as it is like a dressing-up box with whimsy. Indeed, were there such creatures hidden neath the sliver-thin surface of the waves, they’d have no teeth but only soft gray gums and goofy grins, and they’d be giggling knowingly at the whole thing. And so it is that as he gazes out, he cannot help but wonder what it is he might be warning of with the light that turns atop his tower, because that tower is itself in fact the only hazard anywhere on which a ship might rip her wooden skin and haemorrhage her lumpy blood that’s made of all the gasping sailormen.
You recount the history of the French garden. From above, I see tight rows of trees beside threadbare grass. When the language teacher talks about le capitalisme: the gesture of three fingers rubbing imaginary fabric. I’m a tourist, vulnerable and stupid, my legs showing, shoes practical, face red. Together, we try to reconstruct an anecdote whose contents have scattered. A motorcycle passes, a French police siren you say sounds innocuous then we both laugh sourly. I hadn’t seen a woman slap a child in some time. A truck reversing, and the alarm that continues for hours one morning. Porn on a handheld device, its tinny echo in a room with bare floors and very little furniture. Across the courtyard, this T-shirt on a hanger out the window turns in the light breeze as if trying to look behind itself. I’m consumed with not knowing where to buy paper, safety pins, stamps. The window frames of that building are red, emerging from gray gables. Enormous bumblebee at the threshold investigates the doorway, doesn’t enter. The flies do; they’re promiscuous; they leave. I don’t know the word for because. So each act is disconnected from another. I can almost imagine there are no consequences, the days just pass, one sunny, one cloudy, someone unseen shouts, sirens every few hours, clouds move in a solemn procession across a wide sky staggered with chimneys, people wait to cross the street, a large tree tosses its wig a little. Other small trees in the courtyard flicker. They are responsive. The sun heats the pavement; le pavé répond. You send me a short erotic video, you’re naked, propositioning me. Do you act more like the coin or the water? Across the narrow street this bird sipping from roof puddles seems more dove than pigeon. Pacing, grandmotherly, she stops to look at me. Do you just know how to love another person like someone knew to paint those window frames red? Most of the architecture looks floral, like a boring math problem. The crosses that reach and reach. Why does the scrape of the furniture when I rearrange it sound like crass American English to me? I slept late, now I’m watching the clouds, like clouds in an eighteenth-century painting. Overly articulate. Except these clouds are not trying to symbolize anything. Where’s my dove. I always want to go look at people. A booth selling copies of copies of Louis Vuitton. The small shadow the roof makes on another roof right next to it. When my friend came to Paris she wanted to break everything. Impeccable shoes on the impeccable feet. Clothes so new they’re creamy, and to seem to never have to 
compromise. I feel tattered when I’m actually not. I’m an American, I eat. A huge decorative basket of citrus snugged beside me in the upscale bistro. The woman from a building opposite comes down, indignant: Who threw a pomelo into my window? You read to me about the history of the barricade. I picture the drab suburbs. The shoulders and elbows of people in the museum evoke more reaction in me than most of the paintings. A young lithe person with live eyes tends bar, gender trouble tattooed up their arm. I count twenty-nine sleeping bags lined up beneath the overhang and each one inhabited. I read to you about the history of enclosure. Two people talking on a balcony, their black hair blowing. One leaning over into the courtyard. Behind the cathedral, vulgar black felt stapled in the raised flowerbeds to mask their frames. The river stinks, allures, as a specific person can. A repository, a consequence, a long sentence, an ongoing story. The generous current cut through by a party boat shouting wooo! wooo! wooooooo! wooo! emitting an obscene light waving at whatever will wave back.
the drone was once a scrap of metal the drone looks as if it might be a toy the drone is not a toy the drone could have been something other than a killing machine the drone could have been a house the drone could have been a spoon the drone could have been a swing the drone does not know who it is going to kill next the drone is going to kill next the drone has learned to disguise itself as a shard of sky the drone’s soft hum is a disembodied echo the drone was mistaken for a star once the drone renders itself celestial the drone scoffs at sovereignty the drone asks what is a border if you can fly right over it? the drone was built by a man the drone killed a man & a woman & a child the drone killed a child & did not see her face the drone does not see a face the drone sees a body & then the body is gone.
It was winter. The opposite of burning, which is also burning. My banner displayed clock parts, a cup of wine, a worm eating its opposite head. My motto was Try to Be Responsible, but every new moon was a sacrificial moon. Thirteen paving slabs were flipped into the river. The extra light of spring threw our business into relief. My banner displayed a sunburst, a bloodied hand dropping a knife, and in the other hand an avocado withholding its stone. War would soon come but not for us, and this became our motto, Not for Us. Then a crime in our community led to anger. Gossip gathered the truth into a ball; paperwork was spoiled; a man was removed from the yellow light of the barn. We heard his sobs coming from the orchard, and these were a source of comfort. Summer roused lanterns of dust under doorways, though a vinegar taste kept the air difficult. Antifa angels bathed their eyes in milk, as horses refused riders. The timid among us signed petitions swearing that when the time came we would know it by the rocks in our hands. I made a banner for the protests to come depicting the planting of milk teeth, the burning of a noose, a stadium left empty. Autumn was just my luck. I could not stomach the broth I boiled, and slept badly. Arguments I won in my head lost direction when formed out loud. The riots continued but quietly now, indoors. It was a time for manifestos, though the wrongs were too many for anything less than a lake. Friends kept the counsel of friends. In the yellow light of the barn we tried to write sentences each other would like, or not desire to alter. Together we designed a quilt depicting the wolf taking scent, water moving quickly, the sign of the errant cloud and alphabet, a baby resisting sleep, a worm eating its opposite head, only this time surrounded by snow, which hasn’t stopped falling since Thursday, the name we gave to our child.
War the war, the sorry edge of us, because we stacked nice clean plates for days, we were sure things when love broke across the headland, leaving conch shells in ditches, five fish slapping on the steps of the old town hall, it was winter, we were bonfires unattended, our bodies litigating, agreeing and writing it all down, the law of legs, the law of how we sleep, the law of shoulders killing me, and now we fold clothes without thinking my clothes your clothes and war the war o happy war what love we are so badly bitten in this long-term necessary chapel with all attendant relics, citronella candle, junior hacksaw, a box of miscellaneous wires, our headland way-way underwater, no one else beside us but ourselves beside ourselves.
Once, we were coming back From a  fête votive in Goudargues When, sticky with pink barbe à papa, And queasy because The hairpinning road through St Marcel de Careiret Resembled the crazy-maze passage of our caroming bumper car, We were met by a stream of sangliers —  Wild boars —  Dashing across the D9 near the Forêt de Cavillargues. They pelted in a single ribbon, as I recall, So how could we even tell what they were, How distinguish that ruche of  shadow and wind From any other ghost of  the district? That year I came across A theory about the suffix –argues That trails behind village names all around here. (Vallérargues, St André d’Olérargues, Goussargues, Foussargues.) It may refer to an area of  land Given to Roman soldiers after service in North Africa By the praetor in Nîmes. Cavillargues. The acres of Cavillus, perhaps. The hairy pigs had emigrated, perhaps from the Caucasus, And no doubt had settled the Val de Tave long before Cavillus Arrived to begin gentrification. He wandered from the marble steps of the Maison Carrée, Perhaps having paid obeisance to Roman gods and governors, Perhaps uncertain from an encounter with the local plonk, And les sangliers came out to give him a thrill, And to tell himthat this is not yet the Forêt de Cavillarguesyou can’t run through it as if you were a ground-level mistralwith your feet like bound clumps of asparagusand your eyes on the Perseid meteor showersall roads lead to Rome except ours
Gravel path stirred by the rain fallen hard through the sweetgum trees, path that leads to the bend where the trail splits open in air: Everything is lighted evenly. It is a queer hour. The difference between light and shadow is the jealousy turn in the eye. The sun is all in the bottle cap that glints in the silt like a djinn’s brass hilt, in the way some lea  is frozen unto the air, some warm leaf heavywet here, and in how, just there: The strangeness strangely passes. And evening mounts. I can’t get the life out of my head. There is no glamour on this path but if I return I will find it in the thought of how I looked for some. I stoop to look at the veins that sweep like Latin roots in the satin of things, dream: The difference between something and nothing, which is nothing. The gravel lies on itself like dust lies on water. No, no, there are no mothers here. I bend to see it all, the little stones cast-wise. Things chase themselves away from the mode of things. I find a quartz, milked clear: I could not hear its accent if it sang, no matter how far off it formed. What dead hand I should feel if I lifted it.
Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time? We’ve wasted our time. Our magnificent bodies on the dissecting table. Our day after tomorrow. Our what to do now. The stink of us so undignified. The end game of bloom. We will lose the sun struck and disassembled lightly down and crawling like a worm. This earth it is a banquet and laid on its table we. A puncture in the wound room, crude and obvious. The raving lunatics they are upon us, but we are raving too.
Sybaritic afterlife I don’t crave you. I like daylight. I like crowds. I don’t think it will be charming underground. The silence will be sudden then last. What’s chic will shrink. There won’t be any pretty, pity. Will never peaches there, or air. We’ll be so squashed and sour there. I don’t want a cold place. Don’t want a threadbare clamp and consequence all old. Our loneliness will be prolonged then go too far. Oh fuck it’s true. Then nothing left of you.
In a crumpled shirt (so casual for a god) Bow tucked loosely under an arm still jittery from battle He balanced himself on a flat boat painted black. Each wave as I kneel closer a migrant flag A tongue with syllables no script can catch.The many births you have passed through, try to remember them as I do mine Memory is all you have.
i Waves smack the body, Nayeli, seven, drowning. Spring: crossing season.ii Summer indicates the migration will be “safe.” Yej Susen, three, sprints.iii Inda Jani, one, knows to crawl under the fence —  she was trained all fall.iv At four ai-em, Yao, twelve, is sewn inside car seat; winter will protect.v Itzel, five, plays dead. Border patrol agents see her body — they leave.
there’s nothing in my face. There is nothing in yours. What we have are called heads. They are nothing unless we kiss. Lips are wonderful. They are full of mechanoreceptors. In the Old World we all used to kiss and kiss. It was then that we did have faces. We had noses and cheeks and foreheads and soft, downy hair. In the New World we stopped kissing. Those who were already here stopped. Those who came stopped. Now there are only four people who have heads that are also faces. They are an artist and three children for whom I have a face other than my hands.
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. A strategy of continence, avoidance, mule-headedness, and hope. The next assassin, brush fire, or virus swerves this way, head-on collision; We see it coming and can’t divert — the path too crowded with pilgrims. By the side of the road to Calvary blooms a mustard bush. It never means to do anything but propagate. It sees the centuries winnow themselves in and out, And hears itself appropriated for a parable. It keeps all these things, and ponders them in its heart While casting savior seeds generation after generation.
Stop playing. You do remember the card tables, Slick stick figures like men with low-cut fades, Short but standing straight Because we bent them into weak display. What didn’t we want? What wouldn’t we claim? How perfectly each surface was made For throwing or dropping or slamming a necessary Portion of our pay. And how could any of us get by With one in the way? Didn’t that bare square ask to be played On, beaten in the head, then folded, then put away, All so we could call ourselves safe Now that there was more room, a little more space?
When a hurricane sends Winds far enough north To put our power out, We only think of winning The war bodies wage To prove the border Between them isn’t real. An act of God, so sweet. No TV. No novel. No Recreation but one Another, and neither of us Willing to kill. I don’t care That I don’t love my lover. Knowing where to stroke In little light, knowing what Will happen to me and how Soon, these rank higher Than a clear view Of the face I’d otherwise Flay had I some training In combat, a blade, a few Matches. Candles are Romantic because We understand shadows. We recognize the shape Of what once made us Come, so we come Thinking of approach In ways that forgo Substance. I’m breathing — Heaving now — In my own skin, and I Know it. Romance is An act. The perimeter Stays intact. We make out So little that I can’t help But imagine my safety. I get to tell the truth About what kind Of a person lives and who Dies. Barefoot survivors. Damned heroes, each Corpse lit on a pyre. Patroclus died because He could not see What he really was inside His lover’s armor.
1    A pepper of  bees opens the pupils. An ensemble of aromatics Chorus aphrodisia, mariner’s root, bright sky and night star, heavenly rainbow. Amethyst, azure, blue flower-de-luce. Flowering ring. •  White archangelic the bee nettle, the dead nettle. A hide of nettle cloth, of finely-nerved sedge. Take heed the edges, the pipes, the passages, the petal corridor, the corolla tube.   •  A blossom is a throat. Rose oil and hip. A ripped rose is a voice organ, time-cut and curt. Royally red and confidence- keeping, redder than Mars, redder than hot days and parched, Venus on the lips.   2    Muscle rose. Flesh rose. A verge toward red Then rustling redshank rose. Vines ascend the arch of aorta. Mercurial, the climbing nightshade, the bundle-branched bittersweet.    •  White-spotted hellebore under Jupiter and wind. Oak lungs, jovial lungs. Sea rush blows the lungs with sweet rose, carmine and sanguine, flaming red. Candleberry fires the blood.   •  Red is antispasmodic, cardiovascular. Great garden patience of Mars. May-blossom, hawthorn. Spring gushes red-veined with sorrel, bloodwort below Jupiter, red dock for longevity.   3    Venus stokes the throatwort. Ringing with wasps The good leaf. The rose noble. L’herbe du siège slackens the isthmus of the fauces. Gash-red and choking rose.    •  Double tongue. Bay laurel. Daphne of the sun. Yarrow charms wasps, snuffs the inveterate headache. Daphne sings the bees from the ears.   •  The voice reeds are a Queen Anne’s lace of wasps. Mercury abounds with buzz and wild carrot, jump-starts speech with hoar-strange words, a gargle of hog’s fennel and brimstone wort.   4    Under Leo, composure. Touchwood and rue Herb of grace. Anti-magical. Vinegar of the four thieves. Poison against poison. Rue before regret. Touch wood Ruta sets the garden free.    •  Lightning sulfur the garden prone to primrose and paroxysm. Pellitory- of-the-wall quells old hacking. An old cough. A new moon courtesy of wild clary. Eyebright. Clear eye (en toute bonne foi).   •  Sweep away the broom, the burdock, the beastly antipathy between ash tree and adder. Snakeweed. Dragon’s blood. Devil’s bit. Serpent’s tongue. Wickedness (a weak moon) licked & licked & licked.   5    What a commotion! Wild rocket, a racket Flesh and blood of wake robin, cuckoo point, the clear caroling rise & fall. Volatile dog’s mercury. Dog’s-grass. Dog rose. Hot fits and cold metallic blue. The indecisive indigo.    •  So the garden bellyaches. So what the gripes? Rows rife with tormentil, gallant herb of the sun. Five fingers, flesh and blood. Stamina, life’s long thread, root-red, the unhindered heart.   •  Leaves respire and rain returns blood-veined and blood dock, blood-colored juices. Red poppy a headache. Heartichoke the downhearted. Loosestrife calms the fugitive scarlet. Sweet slumber. The fleshy rootstock.   6    Enlist imagination under the banner of science. Erasmus Darwin, Flora attired by the elements. his Botanic Muse Sea lavender, sea holly, sundrops. Jacob’s ladder reaching ether. Wind rose. Sun rose. Water grass.    •  The loves of the plants. (The economy of vegetation.)Root, pith, lobes, plume, calyx, coral, sap. Air distributes the seeds of names. Windflower, digitalis. Tipsy and ethereal. Trade winds, vital light. Seeds within seeds.   • Start from the soil, and win their airy way. The fifty-seeded heart’s delight, saturnine and doting wild. Heart’s-ease. Herb constancy.Pensée    ...    An opening. Call-me-to-you. Kiss-her- in-the-buttery. Meet-me-in-the-entry.   7    The yard wants what the yard wants. Rose Bloom of Ruth. Breath of life. Blush. Charisma. Compassion. Imagination. Ebb Tide and Nostalgia. Ground cover and climbers. Floribunda. Abundance.    •  A hybrid of bruise and steep, petal and dreg. Lungfuls of lamp flower, rose campion, rose of heaven. The moon shoulders roseroot, rosy-colored stonecrop. The neck laced with French rose, common rose, pomander of roses.   •  At the center of the garden the heart.Red as any rose. Pulsing balloon vine. Love in a puff. Heartseed, heart-of-the-earth. A continuous flow of red.   8    Nosebleed, staunchweed, sanguinary. List Thousand-leaved root of yellow. Thousand weed with leaves like feathers. Small birds flirt herb-of-Venus’ tree. If my love love me, nosebleed and yarrow.    •  Feverfew-profuse June and July. Agueweed, sweating-plant, boneset with yellow thrum. Venus yields to water. Boneset breaks the sun.   •  Past mudwalls and molehills, where the cowslips and the lungs moss, hedge bells, morning glory and the hundred-leaved rose, all the livelong organs rose —  a catalogue, a desire, a wish.   9    Chaffweed whups the chin-cough. Life everlasting Venus hiccups dry wind and sandy rows. The garden ruminates cudweed, creeping roots June through September. Pearl-flowered. Eternal flower.    •  Take flower-gentle. Take knitbone and knitback. Ass ear. Blackwort. Slippery root. Saturn’s orbit comfrey-picked and sea-goat-prickly. Take sea wrack, knobbed wrack, bladderwrack.   •  Paralysis and palsywort the garden supplants fool’s parsley with imperatives!Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not. Mouse-ear to the ground. Borage for courage. Self-heal. All-heal. By crook or by hook-heal.   10     La voilà! Horsetail and paddock-pipes. Viola organista A hurdy-gurdyish drone. Pansy-meek with cattail and fretted tension. (Love-in-idleness.) The over-thinking viola.    •  Liverwort, liverleaf, liverweed. A low sun and Jupiter presumes three-lobed hepatica. Water hectors wind and wind blows sound into lungwort, bladderwort, kidneywort, the kidney-leaved sower weed, the hartwort.   • Dame de coeur. The crowning heart. The garden wants it all: leaf, stem, root, the whole shooting match shoot system, timbre, pitch, fully chromatic rows, heart trefoil and arssmart under sun.
Choice by extinction sounded ominous to Yanks like us — we all remembered the war. But that was just Herr Schreiff’s personal English. We were on the same side now, building the thing, the thing, the VTOL fighter.What’s today? There must be some big dates coming up, historic dates. He’d say, Cold hands frog heart, and it became a gag among the engineers: Soft hands wombat heart, Sweaty hands lawnmower heart.The docs in this place want to put in a pacemaker; I said no, I’m not in this for the long run. On his birthday Schreiff brought in three bottles of schnapps and we sat around half pickled trying to do the do the debug the navigation. What a fright? Patty —  Debbie — Susan called, wanted to know could she bring me anything. I told her, My old brain. I used to be smart, you know?I’m assuming someone is in charge of the dates, the historic dates. Schreiff had worked for Heinkel during the war, on those last-ditch plywood jet fighters that kept disintegrating in midair and killing their precious test pilots. Ah Christ, look at this mess! Where’s the thing, the thing to call the nurse? Someone needs to deal with those important dates, it’s allsodisorganized.
After Alejandra Pizarnik, after Fernando Pessoa i  Comic screen to change what came to notice Even though sky at first was the same blank slate So literal. The value of  it You make your own lion’s teeth sink in, slowly   ii   The insects claim you don’t belong here then bite & bite  Virtue the undulant yards as penance    iii   Hordes of animals without teeth crash the window in a dream & it means you are not hungry enough   iv   The capuchin stays silent in the void  You feel the sun of  unknown experiments   v  Once a choice comes to full & the act carries the joy of struggle The winter mother severs only a chance at restarting. Could you sorrow the one unchosen thing infinitely so it feels occasional, the act is itself   vi   If  I write a texture I could make it stucco like childhood  Aloe or cactus spines To cut is to heal  the rough of a cut All dark blue against good skin like leather   vii  Imagine the root of oppositional archetypes Next to me chrysanthemums the rust of  blood when it dries but in front of me So much blue & a broken white I can’t see myself on purpose   viii   What rocks itself  out of  time on a wingbeat Is not a name or a silence  As in sanity’s  meager gestures. Downriver, the unruly sound turned  C-shaped / Real secrets as fragrant and familiar as what’s under the smoke   ix   I stand next to the rocks  Where you choose to return without choosing / Some black, some silver  The lines of ash & passage A neon swig of enlightenment   x  Don’t be exceptional in this false. All fluent in nothing, hiding where your debt growsBe aggressive or do not mind, you say I feel like a chicken after boiling Or like you do now — smooth from the pain  (I love how you love promises because they are lies)  (I love the honesty of cheap rings)  Like a ripened plum or two, pitted — Now a flat middle ground, now another  interior to hold the ruin   xi  Your hair grows in eighths on alternate days but you pretend not to count What rains in it What grandiose adornment hasn’t happened but will happen Also a lie — in color   xii  The grunting you hear on the other side of the wall might be music Or the disaster of a concrete floor The western cities, the eastern cities / that inscrutable skin I chose The high ground of resurrection Discursive —  falling soft / I witness the guilt planted for others I practice by moving my legs I am a bracket You are the conquering seawall Nothing earth about you except what clean is visible Also your hands
I live a small life, barely bigger than a speck, barely more than a blip on the radar sweep though it is not nothing, as the garter snake climbs the rock rose shrub and the squirrel creeps on bramble thorns. Not nothing to the crows who heckle from the crowns of the last light’s trees winterstripped of green, except for the boles that ivy winds each hour round. See, the world is busy and the world is quick, barely time for a spider to suck the juice from a hawk moth’s head so it can use the moth as a spindle that it wraps in fiber while the moth constricts until it’s thin as a stick you might think was nothing, a random bit caught in a web coming loose from the window frame, in wind.
I sit across the table from my partner  in the atrium of the psychiatric holding facility  our hands churched into our laps. We are not allowed to touch. The air between us thick as Perspex.  They tell me all the ways this place resembles a prison.    •   Everything a sterile white  so clean it could almost disinfect  a memory.   •   In 1787,  Jeremy Bentham conceived of what would become  the most common prison design:  the panopticon.  Intended to control prisoners through the illusion  that they are always under surveillance.   •  My partner tells their therapist they are afraid of taking their own life,  that they balanced on a building’s edge,  & three officers escort them from the room.   •  The first cop who ever handcuffed me  [was my father] left me bound  till my fingers blued.  On the days when I can’t remember  his face,  he becomes the scent of  vodka & zip ties  the sound of  cuffs & a bottle  petaling into blades.   •   At the booking office they remove my glasses  & the guards blur into a procession  of fathers.   •   I bring my partner clothes & pads when the hospital decides to hold them longer,  shove each shirt that could mark them as queer back inside the closet & shut it [like a mouth].   •   The word faggot scrawls across  the jail guard’s lips like graffiti.   •   When I visit my partner  they insist on staying inside  the sky above  the patio cordoned  off  with chicken wire.   •  I plead my sentence down in exchange for: my face, my prints, my DNA  & ten years probation. When I see a cop, I fear  even my breath  criminal  & when my therapist asks me  if  I’m suicidal  I lie. Perhaps both are a kind of  surveillance.   •  Tear gas floods the street,  sharpens water to a blade  hidden in the orbit of my eye.  & just like this, a squad car  remakes my sadness a weapon. If my partner snaps cuffs  around my wrists  [& I asked for this] have they also weaponized my desire?   •  A woman in the facility tells my partner:  I know what you are. Says:  Sinner. Says:  Anti-christ. My partner goads her on, babbles in false  tongues & is confined  to their room for safety.   •  Once, a cop dragged me into an alley &  beat me like he knew  exactly what I was.  What does it say if sometimes  when I ask my partner to hit me  I expect his fist tightened in their throat, his voice  bruising their tongue? •  I am arrested & placed  [in the men’s jail] in solitary confinement.  They tell me this is protective  custody. That they couldn’t afford  the lawsuit if  I were killed. In this way,  they tell me I am a woman  only when I am no longer  breathing.   •  The origin of the word prison is the Latin prehendere — to take.  It follows, then,  that to take your life is to prison  the body beneath dirt.   •  [Historically,  suicide is a criminal act].   •  Balanced on a building’s edge, I imagine some permutation of  this moment  where to fail at death  would be a breach  of my probation.   •  We both weep for the first time  upon release when we see the sky.  Pale blue sliced through  with a single helix of razor wire & bordered  in sterile white.
Two men share one tooth. From one tooth the men predict the world. Thank you! or we would not exist. Two men and one tooth is not a problem. One man is wide and one man is sober. Sometimes the men are the same. Little tooth is the light of the orchard. From it all things are made up. Once the two men lost the tooth and every one disappeared. No one was angry because no one was there. The men found the tooth when the tooth started laughing. The men said what is that noise and the world came back on. They told the tooth that’s not funny but it was very funny. One man swallowed the tooth and put on all the sad knowledge. He wanted to punish the tooth but the tooth punished him. It lasted three hours and then he threw up. The two men live in a cave with bay windows. To be in love is so solemn think the two men once a year. The tooth never thinks any thing. It is the tooth of a goat.
Looking out at a man’s name on a battered wingtip in strong winds; was it planned that when the cheap wing bends, the name stays steady? What if it didn’t matter how much you trod over the body of your mother, what happened when you were younger, how you tried forgetting and forgot to forgive. Something has to hold you: numbers, columns, cards to swipe, books to shelve, pints to pour. A life filled with fixed wings, with hard grasps, with the grateful. What’s worth keeping? Not the sad boy who blamed you for all the ways he was broken. Not the man’s name on the wing, but why not the battered wing itself. Why not the woman thinking. Why not the river below, its lips wet, footprints animal. What forked tongues come when clouds crack open, when this sky’s watched you sleep all day, and now lets down its darkness. There’s all night to stay awake.
One day we’re told to look at the sun through a hole in a cereal box All there is to be seen is the rest of  the world disappearing This somehow shadows aliveness but almost everyone who has ever lived is restlessly sleeping as dead For who About what The end is near over  & over yet we insist on making dates to keep talking  Always about the last eclipse the next blood  flower buck worm strawberry ice wolf event  Then there’s a last constellation we might ever see  until there’s something else to look out for  Gone are the frightening & gorgeous conspirators that I’m sure I will not see again  Traces of sweat & mystery streaks some hells communion & of course a few awkward goodbyes The mattress is  gone forever like so many of the bodies I’ve worshipped Here we are left with impressions & a recollection of  my side of  the story I cry w/ one eye all the time but the right one staid defiant  What would you read to someone you  love if you knew that they were dying If  it’s over again can we share more than black sites & drownings skin turned confetti blue turned coal & innards swept down sewers w/ brooms  We give way beyond what we know So the gun  in my mouth made me a monster for a while  Coming back shoeless calloused me  everywhere but the bottoms of feet Someone dressed like a traitor convinced me there are loyalties that deserve to be broken Someone w/ death to the klan on the door let me know I already broke free  Hear them both They’re dead & it’s tricky  since the decomposed & me are close but here  I am w/ you The friend who is you  Impossible almost lover you The us  we chose as family you & others in the fullness of  time None of us breed but someone will give birth behind bulletproof glass where life & the divide begin This is a fabled event packaged as betterment It will spawn someone who pays to spray us  like invasive bugs in the street Cops  were children so we can look forward to  good regime/bad regime during future  questioning Thanks for the theater  but we’ve seen the play Civil discourse is broken  down in the destruction manual They can have all  the orchestras Classical music will never drown out the sins What would you write to someone you love if   you thought you might be dying  Maybe once I was someone who I’d love to see  punched in the face But I am here & not yet dead so  a constellation of the imaginary is no imaginary  constellation There is no sky w/o a dream of sky You  who are family fuck a grid & thanks to you I see  brightness independent of state-­sponsored power We talk about who threw that brick through the window & how it’s now part of a path in a garden Broken glass is as old as glass but the sound is more than fresh wounds There are fresh worlds still to be heard  Oh  & you my friend I will fight anyone who says  you’re not pretty That is just ridiculous talk Distant  impractical you I believed we could be possible w/ translation  software & hearts-for-eyes emojis No dice  but not before I entertained  dressing in a tux as your husband Look  I never thought when you said no more haircuts  until wars were over that you’d never have  short hair again My beautiful barber  brushes my face I feel funny I  moan a weird prayer for peace I guess it could happen  lol after all we deserve a new start Soon we’ll be dead & brag  about riches We were here & looked right into the sun
After Jim Steinmeyer’s book “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear” Over the years they hunted, the wayward apprentice watchmakers, the disappointing sons who transformed their surnames, hunted over acres of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey, mustaches a breath from feral, poured an ocean of fortune into fabrications of brass and iron, spent entire seasons strumming massive harps of wire into perfect calibrations of invisibility, prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors, cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights, broke the legs of imitators and thieves, chewed holes in each other’s pockets, harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops making endless passes over the bodies of the dead, hoisted high a cenotaph for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits, breathed miles of delicate thread into the lost labyrinths of their lungs, all to make a woman float to make a woman float and none of them ever thought of simply asking her.
Six years ago, the big museum sold eight famous paintings to purchase, for unspecified millions, Gustave Caillebotte’s Man at His Bath. Now it’s hip to have a print of it, and whenever I see one hung for decoration, I’m almost certain that this is what Caillebotte had in mind when he broke out the oils in 1884: some twenty-first-century bitch in Boston catching a glimpse of a framed reproduction, recollecting a study about how washing oneself may induce a sense of culpability. What I remember is he insisted I clean before leaving. That, and he was trying to be dreamlike. He took my jaw in his hand and said in the next life, we’ll really be together, and the clamp in his voice made me almost certain he knew something I did not. Now I eat right, train hard, get my shots. This life — I’m angling to remain in this life as long as I can, being almost certain, as I am, what’s after —
The Queen sits on a throne of gem-trimmed robes. Between her robes the jutted moth, it follows dust. She can’t rest before the funeral, her self- unmaking, some maid whose hair is browned by blood; a matching queen. Nights’ dim candles, grackles’ glib decrescence.Now dance, now weep. No rest for feet still warm from summer’s phrasing — odors / ankle / thorn. Keeping time while dying, the Queen grows bored, her hand’s throat out, amiss. (Yet I sob, I paw. Yet) I kiss.
How to get close without going over. How to feign lust for whatever’s on offer. How the largest possible quantity of anything is a lifetime. A lifetime of oat bran. A lifetime of timing belts. A lifetime of saying, sure, why not,i’m only on earth x numberof years, and not knowing what to make x. Sometimes I pick a number I’ve already passed. I remember the gambler’s credo — when you only have fifty bucks left in this world, you’d better get rid of it fast; the last thing you want is money around, reminding you every day of the money you lost. The recommended retirement plan is arabesque, then leap and smash on the seawall. We made a promise not to catch each other.
The comet taught us how to watch the war. The comet contended that fire is romantic and recommended we each behold it alone, envisioning out there somewhere our next lover, craning up at this same sky. Was the comet simply endeavoring to keep us divided, I asked it, and the comet did not reply. Then we discovered the men who wanted us dead were convening at night on the site where their hero had been unceremoniously interred. And so we exhumed the guy, burned him up, and fed his ash to the rapids, to be churned into marlstone and mud-rich air. Good thinking. Now he’s everywhere.
After Nadia Reid This spirit she came upon me as I slept — in such a way my life or yours could come to be so thoroughly owned —  she was reckless — I knew she would make me run away with her — I said spirit, slow down — but the spirit wanted to ride — but I am so afraid, I said — I have all this tenderness to impart — but the tenderness is not mine to give away —  but all your tenderness is your own tenderness, said the spirit —  it is not, I said — why then did you give it all away? — I did not give it away — then it is yours to give away — the spirit riddled like this — if in her arms I read a story — if out of her arms I had the choice to write one but I chose not — chose not because I did not know where I was going — because my path broke down & I had this choice — stay or split — if I knew that were I to split one part of me would become a ghost — if I did not know yet which part — if the voice calling me out asked me to describe the splitting & I did — if I said it was like smoke spiraling outwards — it was like smoke lifting off me taking on form & leaving me — if  it was like a delicate girl I never met but dreamed of — if it was like the flags of my youth fluttering, far out at sea — like breathing out a breath you will never take back in — but you know you can never take any breath back in —  if I saw her outside of myself & mourned her like I have mourned no other loss — if I knew it was both a miracle & the most terrible tragedy — to open up — release a flame — watch the flame go —  have you seen it? A flame that can ride water — she was my daughter & if I could I would send her to you, if I sent her to you would you take her? Listen, I ran this out of me because I knew it would burn me down — my trainers press the ground & lift up again — I saw myself on my back in high grass in high summer with everything coming to me — how this ghost left me & printed a new person all over me — I could peel her off or live like this —  I cried — one or both will destroy me! — the spirit called it fate but I knew it was just drama — I will never know why a good person must die —  fate does not exist I said, but every door I opened showed yesyes yes — I shut each one & locked it — checked the locks three times — went back & checked them again — shook them to be sure — drew hearts round the keyholes so the spirit would know I loved her — it wasn’t — it was never — that I didn’t love her —
In the nighttime house I don’t know where you are My allegiances could change How can I stop my allegiances from changing? Morning is a gown put on at midnight, but no one’s coming I don’t know what your secrets are You say you have no secrets but I can feel them, they’re bumps under the blanket You do not let me in This mood kept me up all night, like stars in my face, like the burning fuel of dead stars burning right through my face So now I have my own secrets This voyage at nighttime, these burning holes I can’t take you with me —  I don’t know who you are You say it’s me, but I’m dreaming, I can’t recognize anything except someone else’s song, which sounds like a kind of siren, it’s calling me, it puts a light onGive me three reasons Oh, you think I test you? You think I work you too hard? You think it’s too much to make you master the task on your blue-black knees at 3 am?
What can I tell you? It was a summer that seemed to be making history — their personal history — almost before it began, and they stood back slightly, still in it, but observing it, saying “the summer this,” “the summer that,” all the while it was going on. They became obsessed with a fountain, for example, one they walked past each day, how abundantly it would reach upwards and yet be pouring back down itself the whole time — all winter this fountain had been dry, not saying a word. What more can I tell you? Oh, everything — like how they would walk home in the evenings when the light was soft, anything bad sliding off them, and they would feel owned, completely owned, in a good way, by the air, which would touch them constantly, sometimes urgently, sometimes lightly, just to let them know it was there, and they would think maybe this is what being alive is, when they saw how complicated a tree was and how it wanted them looking at it and saying this, how the color of a particular flower at this particular moment was redder even than the life force, whatever that is, if you could open it up and get right down inside it, if you could put your mouth to it and become as red as that rose even, it was still redder than that, and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves so they wouldn’t do anything except listen to the songs in their heads which were sad ones like nearly all good songs and watch this feeling rolling in, sunshine or rain, we don’t know yet, it’s a good one, it’s the best one, though it has no name.
How hard it is to sleep in the middle of a life. — Audre Lorde We wake in the middle of a life, hungry. We smear durian along our mouths, sing soft death a lullaby. Carcass breath, eros of  licked fingers and the finest perfume. What is love if  not rot? We wear the fruit’s hull as a spiked crown, grinning in green armor. Death to the grub, fat in his milky shuffle! Death to the lawlessness of dirt! Death to mud and its false chocolate! To the bloated sun we want to slice open and yolk all over the village. We want a sun-drenched slug feast, an omelet loosening its folds like hot Jell-O. We want the marbled fat of steak and all its swirling pink galaxies. We want the drool, the gnash, the pluck of each corn kernel, raw and summer swell. Tears welling up oil. Order up! Pickled cucumbers piled like logs for a fire, like fat limbs we pepper and succulent in. Order up: shrimp chips curling in a porcelain bowl like subway seats. Grapes peeled from bitter bark — almost translucent, like eyes we would rather see. Little girl, what do you leave, leaven in your sight? Death to the open eyes of  the dying. Here, there are so many open eyes we can’t close each one. No, we did not say the steamed eye of a fish. No eyelids fluttering like no butterfly wings. No purple yam lips. We said eyes. Still and resolute as a heartbreaker. Does this break your heart? Look, we don’t want to be rude, but seconds, please. Want: globes of oranges swallowed whole like a basketball or Mars or whatever planet is the most delicious. Slather Saturn! Ferment Mercury! Lap up its film of dust, yuk sung! Seconds, thirds, fourths! Meat wool! A bouquet of chicken feet! A garden of melons, monstrous in their bulge! Prune back nothing. We purr in this garden. We comb through berries and come out so blue. Little girl, lasso tofu, the rope slicing its belly clean. Deep fry a cloud so it tastes like bitter gourd or your father leaving — the exhaust of his car, charred. Serenade a snake and slither its tongue into yours and bite. Love! What is love if  not knotted in garlic? Child, we move through graves like eels, delicious with our heads first, our mouths agape. Our teeth: little needles to stitch a factory of everything made in China. You ask: Are you hungry? Hunger eats through the air like ozone. You ask: What does it mean to be rootless? Roots are good to use as toothpicks. You: How can you wake in the middle of a life? We shut and open our eyes like the sun shining on tossed pennies in a forgotten well. Bald copper, blood. Yu choy bolts into roses down here. While you were sleeping, we woke to the old leaves of  your backyard shed and ate that and one of your lost flip-flops too. In a future life, we saw rats overtake a supermarket with so much milk, we turned opaque. We wake to something boiling. We wake to wash dirt from lettuce, to blossom into your face. Aphids along the lashes. Little girl, don’t forget to take care of  the chickens, squawking in their mess and stench. Did our mouths buckle at the sight of  you devouring slice after slice of  pizza and the greasy box too? Does this frontier swoon for you? It’s time to wake up. Wake the tapeworm who loves his home. Wake the ants, let them do-si-do a spoonful of  peanut butter. Tell us, little girl, are you hungry, awake, astonished enough?
I am the type to go to bed with my feet dirty A man calling from a balcony is not to be trusted In 1988, the nation sings a song I can’t understand but I sing it 
because everyone looks at me like a thief and no one likes a thief Algae gather in plastic cups along the Jersey Shore The dull prongs of a fork still count as a weapon I gather plastic cups along the shore and shake them out to use for tea, juice, a home for my toothbrush The pledge of allegiance is a building ledge, an alleged crime, a leg crossed over another leg, a plea gone askew, a glance shared in a room with someone else who looks like you Hundreds of toxic wild boars are roaming across northern Japan and it would be a mistake to identify with them In 1960, my grandmother holds no knife in no tall wheat When washing her feet, my grandmother tells me she spent decades without shoes, wonders if the mud misses her When we look at each other, we also look away, knowingly I am a good daughter and I can repeat this indefinitely without 
taking a breath Often, I call out to myself just to hear an echo, to hear something moving in the walls like a healthy family of rats My mother has been told, repeatedly: “You cannot walk here” Here is a white stone, a white fence, a white seagull, a white jug of milk, a white candle, a white duvet, a white patio, a white bar of soap to wash your mouth out Sometimes I dream in Cantonese and I have no idea what is being said You grow to love what you create, pouring out of your mouth In 1988, my father sees his reflection in the rearview mirror and identifies with the blood moon lighting his way to Atlantic City From a balcony, a man yells at me: “You need some white dick” and I turn into a boar 我 在 广 东 做 梦 My father disappears for weeks and my mother keeps weeding the garden, pulling cigarettes from the splintering tomatoes I will devour I study asymptotes for months and dream in curves — almost but never touching My mother writes in her English diary for night school: “I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him I” and her ESL teacher only gives her a check, so I give her a check plus To be a good daughter means to carry everything with you at all times, the luggage of the past lifted to the mouth When we look at each other, my mother laughs like an overripe tomato on a windowsill In 1989, I spent months assembling a puzzle map of the United States of America and the teacher said, “Good job, Jane” and then louder and slower like a drowning sloth: “Gooooood jooooob, Jane” and I did not touch a single piece Bloody drunk and a blood moon, my father fights with another gambler and jabs at his arm with a dull fork and they both laugh celestially 你 是 一 只 美 丽 的 野 猪 During elementary school, I did not say a single word, not even when called on, and thus the teachers and administrators 
decided I could not speak English because they looked at me Mao Zedong explains math: “In geometry, I just drew a picture of an egg — that was enough geometry for me” My grandfather was jailed by the Red Army sometime between 1966 and 1976 and my mother says: “I saw him cry when I tried to visit. He wanted to eat the bao I made for him” Algae gather, gleaming like jewels, on the head of my 5th grade betta fish Counterrevolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution are likened to “finding a bone inside an egg” I was born, healthy, in the year of the rat The man on the balcony invests in a foldable set of two chairs and one table in eggshell white — mold resistant, perfect for outdoor use 你 不 敢 看 我 I was ten when I willed a rock to fall off a ledge, just by staring at it long enough
I still keep it hidden in the jar of  saltwater you gave me don’t worry, no one can hear me, my husband’s in the bathroom & my daughter’s in her bedroom wearing those headphones made of sponges on her ears yes, I’ve kept it all these years, and kept it hidden, but — I have to tell you something: something about it has changed recently has changed since the last time we talked the shell has opened, and —  calm down please I’m about to tell you I’ve waited years to tell you how? how could I have called you? I don’t know where you live: I don’t even know your name! so I’m telling you now: the gluey seam that held it closed at some point it began to dissolve I don’t know around Christmastime, I suppose but it was gradual subtle not something easily seen through water, through glass so perhaps it started earlier than that, but that’s when I first noticed —  (of course it’s still alive I know because I know)  so after the seal first began to loosen, things accelerated after that and I could see inside of  it and what I saw was a tongue but very pale the tongue was white, in fact, and thin as a strip of paper also smooth no bumps or grooves but there was no doubt: this was a tongue I’m sorry I used the past tense only so that you might understand how it appeared to me when it was new and strange to describe to you what I saw then not because it’s changed because it hasn’t except in its familiarity I spend an hour with it every morning and if the weather’s mild, after they’ve gone to bed, I take it out at night, lie on my back in the grass, hold the jar on my chest, and together we watch the metallic flower petals spin at each other in that dangerous memory of  heaven, or the past please don’t cry no one’s to blame and nothing’s ruined, nothing’s wrong there’s no discomfort there seems to be no pain there’s only time, letting something looser and I’ve made the preparations it will die when I die no, she isn’t listening and if  she is well, then the eavesdropper’s punishment is hers she can’t be spared all her life spent holding her breath only to hear the sound absorbed by moss stuffed into the ears of  a stillborn kitten all her life over and over again at the kitchen table playing the tapes of a conversation she recorded with a microphone slipped into a coffin thirty-six years ago finding no meaning in those and searching for the jar in which she’s certain it still floats the tongue of  her mother’s ghost
At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage we made a right at the curved iron fence, one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry —  the way it gets — and though I knew him well I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke in my town by the Delaware and it was used for code the way one of the Amerindian languages was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were. I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish or maybe it was just for me and they were bent over guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two of us or in any way tired of the nectars since it ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to — well —  boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie and a little whisky after, some of it spilled on the vanilla ice cream that underlaid the pie it had once overlaid, all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers ran the country.It was Larry, I’m sure now, and what we talked about was cardboard and we were amazed that in the open spaces beside the hotel on 47th Street there were four or five small cardboard “houses,” both of us remembered, the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags, the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street near the Pennsylvania Station where I put up the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase with little or no stuffing and a cardboard bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats, cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon for costume dances, balls is what we called them as if we were art students in Paris about to swim in the nearest fountain.Though what I want to say is the bees were too busy to do us any harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms of bees, that terrified me (Larry, too) except for one occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased me through the yard and over a fence hating any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal, or gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions, who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops, who ran like hell that day (Larry, too) for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.
1  Outside the room where you have lived a long time Are other rooms, another building, just like yours. Each night a ship sails past, wider than the building, taller than the highest church. And though the passengers would like to visit the city, No one in the city ever boards the ship. Would you? Each night this spectacle is seen by you. The street surveyed, The air inhaled. Grapes from the west, Cinnamon from the east —  If I’ve employed too liberally the passive voice, Remember it’s the thoughts, The feelings that are of consequence here, Not the one who feels them.   2  Shall we walk to the market? You could walk there blind, like Gloucester, smelling your way. Shall we stop for coffee? Which café? The one that’s commandeered by women, delicate cups? Or the one where men preside, baristas in tuxedos, the coffee rich enough for rainy days? A window, the desk, a lamp, and a chair —  You’ve liked the room, you like to rearrange it for winter, Put things back for spring. But you’ve been young for a long time, An embarrassingly long time. Look what you wrote! Remember how much, despite Your ridiculous behavior, you’ve been loved.   3  The city never changes, it’s never the same. Sometimes the inhabitants restore a building, patch it up, But in a generation they’re dissatisfied, they try again, Expose the old parts so you see them Plainly, ruined or not. Who schooled you? What made you scared of change? Vividly you remember a child’s body; likewise you remember a man’s. You woke up one morning, There you were, a stinking adult. What happened between? What will it be like, You’ve seen the images, to watch your body spoiling From the inside out, your lungs, your arms, The muscles in your face —  Look out the window, Choose a single brick. Once, a long time ago, the city was old.   4  Clouds desire the sky, the sky the sun. The wave Desires the land on which it trembles, Repeating the same question, day after day — Am I allowed to ask for what I want? And every day the land responds,Of course you’re allowed.You’re allowed to be angry, to rail, You’re allowed to curse the God who put you here. I’ve buried many people, old people, young people. I’ve buried children while their parents wept beside the grave. But I’ve also seen miracles. Remember when they told you You might die? You didn’t, you’re alive. And every month since then, each minute, every second is a miracle. What happens next you cannot know. Is it better or worse to live longer? Really the words better and worse do not obtain.
it started with the first time i opened the closet in my new bedroom. paper flecks bursting from behind the door. they had been waiting all millennia. you helped me pick them from my hair but even weeks later we’d still find pieces in between teeth — under tongues —  on shoulders & lodged beneath fingernails. you were always so gentle as you’d release them out the window — same as you’d do for a spider. when finished with a rainbow it is the task of the youngest angel to put it through the paper shredder. he crouches in the cloud mist — taking handfuls of the body’s remnants. he learns not to weep after years of practice. the first rainbow he shredded was that one that we tried to follow in your car —  driving around wet fallen trees — mist rising from the asphalt. we never did get there but we did stop for ice cream. you bit the bottom off the cone. the sound of the rainbow’s destruction was only a dull static noise to us down here. i noticed it but didn’t want to tell you. the next time i was tearing open what looked like a credit card offer in the mail & out came the confetti. we had just stopped finding it on everything — gushing like an artery i covered my face until it was through. mounds upon mounds of color. stole the rake from my aunt’s shed we had used to rake leaves in early october before the weather gave herself over to frost. i resisted the impulse to make the confetti into piles to leap into. you were coming over & i wanted to be clean. the next time we slept together i transported myself somewhere else as you kissed me. sat on the collarbone of the rainbow as it was shred along with my hair. me, with the thousand-piece body. me, getting blown away by the first breeze. me, inhaling the tears of the kneeling angel. i came back to the room when you knelt, spitting paper out of your mouth. confetti began to pour out from behind my lips, miraculously dry. each time i tried to apologize more came out; you, naked on the bedroom floor trying to dispose of the colors as they came. flow mountain spring. flow slit neck of a pig. flash flood & flow melted ice cream down to our elbows. by the time it stopped your fear turned to anger. slammed the door as you left & there i was with all this color. i put some in my mouth but it was too bitter too swallow. if i don’t kiss anyone this won’t happen again —  i can keep it a beautiful secret. routine: each morning removing the piles of cut paper. when you come over i sometimes find them on your skin. you don’t notice so i kiss them off your neck. i’m trying i’m trying. i peel the rainbows free & roll them up like yoga mats in the closet. the shredding has gotten so loud — i ask you if you hear it & you shake your head, unknowingly. i can’t stand it — i can’t stand it. caress this color out of me.
all the rain came down at once like a dropped bag of aquarium pebbles. too much for the street to swallow: all gravel & grit. i feel the saltwater rushing in my mouth as i hit the shore — sand becoming rice. the pot on the stove — put on the lid. we read the back of the bag — bring the water to a boil — it protests in the clouds. rainwater peeling open car windows to fill the floor — make mobile your lakes & the herons will come — don’t feed the birds rice. my favorite summer storms are the ones that come too fast. they remind me so much of myself: gathering their gray hair in a bouquet to beat against the highway. i think of the times the thunder would toss geodes at the street until they cracked open, about dad telling my brother & i to go upstairs & shut the windows before the storm snuck inside. the car prayed until it drove on water — ocean barreling toward us like a great big whale: blueness open & mouth full of salt. you ask if we should stir the rice & the water hisses & spits. we often forget about the ghosts who kneel in pots of water. there’s always a wooden spoon. i keep mine in the glove box. taking it out, i park the car with the four-ways on. other monsters slosh past. we get out on the side of the road. kneeling i plunge the spoon into the bank: chicken broth & rice. rain warming our bodies until there’s no mistaking us from the stove. i burn my feet getting back into the car. our flesh turns chicken-white & tender. somewhere in all of this i managed to drive across the whole unknown ocean — the one without a name that shows up only when it downpours. makes tides that eat radar & sailors. picks rice grains from her teeth. the other side is not land, but soft rice steaming & ready. our legs sink in. take a spoonful of me before i drive home a second time. the sun emerging like a quartered bell pepper. i’m thinking of lying in a rain puddle with you & falling apart into a palm full of cooked rice.
to enter the sky with our bodies  the principal concern for  inventing airplanes  no one taught me this  any more than they taught me  to say good morning to my hippocampus  but I do because I love my hippocampus  I was in a band one summer  we never could harmonize  we smiled and kept playing  we loved our united disunity  a wild stubborn focus  chewing its way out  how awkward the  archer after  shooting  his arrow  remembering  first time getting  into bed just  for sex  they say  I’m old now  ask my advice  all I have to offer is  make as many mistakes  as you can handle but make  them as soon as possible  oh and don’t waste time following each other from opposite sides of the river  when storm blows wig  off my head it simply  means it is time to let  the storm take its share
first and most important  dream our missing friends forward  burn their reflections into empty chairs  we are less bound by time than the clockmaker fears this morning all I want is to follow where the stone angels point  birdsong lashing me to tears  heterosexuals need to see our suffering  the violent deaths of our friends and lovers  to know glitter on a queer is not to dazzle but to  unsettle the foundation of this murderous culture  defiant weeds smashing up through cement  you think Oscar Wilde was funny  well Darling I think he was busy  distracting straight people  so they would not kill him if you knew how many times I have been told you’re not like my gay best friend who tells me jokes and makes me laugh no I sure as fuck am not I have no room in my life to audition for your pansy mascot you people can’t kill me and think you can kill me again I met a tree in Amsterdam and stood barefoot beside it for twenty minutes then left completely restored  yet another poem not written by a poet  sometimes we need one muscle to  relax so the others follow  my friend Mandy calls after a  long shift at the strip club to say   while standing in line for death I am fanning my hot pussy with your new book will you sign it next week my fearless faggot sister
A black sun rises in the West of me& will never set. God of my fathers, sleeplike the one sleeping next to me;inert & tenderly coiled. I am so gratefulto yóu, that breathes as the deadbreathe in their shallow land — barely,below the range of my hearing.That draws in the thin streams of black air& shifts & puts a white arm around me.I want to know, Né, what it is likein the kingdom of the dead where you are.Is the one I fear there with her trainof silver hair? Have you seen John, the templesof his glasses duct-taped to the hinge?I know it is not still there; I know everythingis in furious motion beneaththe black sun & the sky white as chalk — the torrent of silver hair whippedabout her face that woke in the moonlighton the last morning, lucid & fluent,& turned toward my father & said, “I love you,”walking backward on the white roadinto the white sky toward the white city,black sun clearing the horizon &a wind lifting in the torn leaves like the windin the wood above Lady’s Walkwhere I trespassed in spring, singing,Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, the bluebellshissing like cats & the canopya violent array, violently outside mein flickering Islamic greens / Spanish grays,the topside / bellyside of milledleaves, the harebells biting their bitter tongues,& raising its head in panic, a juvenilefallow deer stippled with thick white spots.Then someone shouted, “Oy, stay there, you fúck,”Oyé, Whale, & my launces in his side,& I went down the hill with the sweetgrasspulling at me & the spit in my mouth.Né, I cannot sleep. Ever since I lost my little children.I look for their shapes on the ceiling,in the dark, & they are not there.Né, never, no, no, never, never, never, never.There is nothing, Né. Neither the nightnor the white city like Conholt in its great estate.Not the hart, nor the furious wood.O, John, John. I came downstairs still drunkto find you asleep with your headon the hoover, & the hoover still running;half-shaved, the tape on your glasses,your mouth open & the tattered Crombie.Then years later when Oli called & you were,O John. Y am alpha and oo, the firsteand the laste, bigynnyng and ende.O, John, John. No white city as a wijf ourned to hir hosebonde,no voice in the wind, in the (clouds) cryingLo! Y make alle thingis newe. I make all things new.Como una novia adornada para su esposo.Como tu cuerpo en la noche, Né; like this bodythat pregnancies have raged over& I have loved with my mouth moost feithful and trewe.i And let him that is athirst come.ii And let him that heareth say, Come.iii And let the dawn thunder up in the streetwhile you are sleeping with the first cars saunteringby & the dustmen & women whistling.Lord, I will stand before yóu when yóu wishin death’s little house & yóu will eat my pronoun.   • In that other life that will be ourswhere there is neither marriage nor children,I may kneel beside you, Mouse, & notknow you — our eyes like a golem’s, emptyof their own will, but full of hís,the dead Lord at the center of hís dead city.In the days when my glory is strippedfrom me, & yours from you, & all are madeequal — no aesthetic splendor, no charm,no subversive, faithless glances to-ward those I have loved & have loved me;no property, no desire, no variation,no sparrowhawk thrusting through birchesin the snow toward the wood, forhé never stepped in a wood, nor saw a harebelleasing its frail metaled head, its lightpinks & papery blues, through the first trancheof snow in November, nor the gray cereof the plunderer beneath her blue helmet,her single attention, wings volute in air,head w/ beak narrowly ajar in concentration& hunger breaking the line of the fenceat the old house in Broadway;in the snow; in the snow that has flattenedeverything, the bells ringing out,the clouds heaped above the Blackdownsdragging themselves from the earth,headlights on the ridge in the wind gropingtoward them, the hills featureless,snuffed, white, black, dull, shining w/ no light.No drinking in the afternoon, no dope,no flaring temper. No bed to sleepit off, Mouse, while you draw catkins & piggies& pussybears with gorgeous happy frownsin the cold. No sleep, no flesh to restin, for there is only day in the white irradiatecity where the lamb lights hís terriblemercy in to worldis of worldis, forever & ever& hís government will never fail, for no gloryis allowed but hís glory, no bonegouvernance but hís bone gouvernance,no prison camp but hís prison camp,hís plantations, hís will & techne, hís punishmentbeatings, hís censorship, hís textual criticism,hís forgiveness, hís rehabilitation, Oferdful men, & vnbileueful & cursid & manquelleris.Mouse, on that day, will you turn toward me& will I see in the insubstantial glassof your eyes the memory of these days;myself, father, authority, half chocolate & halfsteel, still carrying you at six up the hill& down the hill, still playing the Ticklepuss& Crocopotamus, the horn of plenty,salver, lessener of cries, bringer of swallows& dragonflies, the Emperor & Downy Emeraldhovering over still waters in the valei of teeris,wolves in the mist in the hillsabove Antequera where the rocks baredthemselves like teeth & you wereasleep on my chest with fine alabastereyelids & eyelashes plashed with droplets of dew?Where I said, “Shhhhhh, close your eyes& imagine that you’re a water reed, Mouse,”& I blew on you & that was the wind& then my hand was a snail wandering overyour eyelids & the nape of your neck& last of all it rained & that was my fingersgoing pitter-pat upon the pinnacles of your head.The days fade through our slow parting;your mother grows ambivalent. Little accident,in the stillness of the earth there is no life;the harebell reaches its root into death& the waters flow down until the rock is dry.I wanted more than I was given,& found in betrayal a churning courage.Torchlight in the garden where we make our choice.The will that flickers. My loss. Our bliss.Mouse, on the last day, remember this.   • Lying with you, Né, in the sun, in the (clouds)half-listening to the Senegalese preachertwo mornings after the riotswhen they ran Mame Mbaye down to the gutter& wishing you would go buy your mutes& play again, here, in silence, — for them & for me & yourself & the polis — Bach’s Suiten für Violoncello No. 1.To watch in dumb show the formal motionsthat reify language & music — the flesh;your shoulder & forearm & wrist& lightly-draped fingers one continuousdependent assemblage flowing south to the riverat Arganzuela & the chuckling magpies.There is an authority in you, when you play,that is different from the authorityof the whap | whap of rotor blades overhead;control that is liberation, a concentrationthat is neither at one point nor diffuse,like the globes of light hovering over the lamppostsin your myopia last night; wanderingacross the river, the madrileñosalso entonados swaying like palm frondsin the wind; then the dark, & our one bodywith its artifacts of pregnancy & loss.An authority that is different from the authorityof the Lord in hís dead city, hís kingdomthat has no contiguity with ours, no conformitá,the streets empty of opposition& neither wind nor rain; nor thunder, nor tears.Now a thin sun is dwelling in the wind.I wd like to reach out to you in its cold light& pull the shape of your body into mine;put my tongue against your eyesso I can taste what it is you see through them;the restaurant opening, the crisp cloths.Even the polis with their holsters & war clubslooking on carefully & asexuallylike angels come to lie with the daughters of men.A kestrel on a lamppost strips the bascinetfrom a cricket with slow, consideratemotions: lovely rare flame.Have they buried Mame Mbaye? They are erasinga name from the wall & the quarter is pacified.Clouds rise above Guadarrama,Somosierra, above the meseta like kites.The picoletos shift from foot to foot in longblack boots. Bells bleat — lambs;Alsatians on leashes. The bougainvillea — glad to bring us at last the first traceof its colors — flaunts a breathless restraint.   •
The streets ram themselves into coochies: sodden women with bamboo for backs & taffy for sex. Both sweet & sour. Star-cloaked women who don’t bend or break. Who catch Hondas right in they grills. Women with electric-pink hoofs that drag in the slow churn of the intersection. Clog the sidewalks. Metastasize along the corridor of Main Street. They have come to settle around the bend of this corner. Pose under carnival-like car lights at just nine-thirty. Note: It ain’t even prime time & they got all thatgood-good going on sale. The gully accordion, their arms sway in & out of tempo with traffic. They stagger in & out of the busted frame of Pop’s Grocery neon-blue open sign. Their smoke-thin throats glitter when they slip into the ringing center of the motel lobby. Strangled light bubbles & soaps along their jaws like melted crayons through the Plexiglas. A rush of shade strains against their nylon-clamped thighs, rides up their hips & dangles around their soft bellies as they saunter on in. They be harvested sounds for the replay later this evening. When they got to make it do what it do. When they got to cash they own checks. Trace dollar signs into ceilings — signals cut with their zirconia-encrusted toes. Giggle & grunt at all the right moments for the Best in Show.
I hustleupstream. I grasp.I grind. I control & panic. Poke balloons in my chest, always popping there, always my thoughts thump, thump. I snooze — wake & go boom. All day, like this I short my breath. I scroll & scroll. I see what you wrote — I like. I heart. My thumb, so tired. My head bent down, but not in prayer, heavy from the looking. I see your face, your phone-lit faces. I tap your food, two times for more hearts. I retweet. I email: yes & yes & yes. Then I cry & need to say: no-no-no. Why does it take so long to reply? I FOMO & shout. I read. I never enough. New book. New post. New ping. A new tab, then another. Papers on the floor, scattered & stacked. So many journals, unbroken white spines, waiting. Did you hear that new new? I start to text back. Ellipsis, then I forget. I balk. I lazy the bed. I wallow when I write. I truth when I lie. I throw a book when a poem undoes me. I underline Clifton: today we are possible. I start from image. I begin with Phillis Wheatley. I begin with Phillis Wheatley. I begin with Phillis Wheatley reaching for coal. I start with a napkin, receipt, or my hand. I muscle memory. I stutter the page. I fail. Hit delete — scratch out one more line. I sonnet, then break form. I make tea, use two bags. Rooibos again. I bathe now. Epsom salt. No books or phone. Just water & the sound of water filling, glory — be my buoyant body, bowl of me. Yes, lavender, more bubbles & bath bomb, of course some candles too. All alone with Coltrane. My favorite, “Naima,” for his wife, now for me, inside my own womb. Again, I child back. I float. I sing. I simple & humble. Eyes close. I low my voice, was it a psalm? Don’t know. But I stopped.
the bo’y wakes up the bo’y looks at itself the bo’y notices something missing there is both too much and not enough flesh on the bo’y the bo’y is covered in hair what a hairy bo’y some makes it look more like a bo’y some makes it look more like a monster the bo’y did not learn to shave from its father so it taught itself how to graze its skin and cut things off the bo’y cuts itself by accident the blood reminds the bo’y it is a bo’y reminds the bo’y how a bo’y bleeds reminds the bo’y that not every bo’y bleeds the bo’y talks to a girl about bleeding she explains how this bo’y works this bo’y is different from hers bo’y has too much and not enough flesh to be her the biology of a bo’y is just bo’y will only ever be a bo’y the bo’y is Black so the bo’y is and will only ever be a bo’y the bo’y couldn’t be a man if it tried the bo’y tried the bo’y feels empty the bo’y feels like it will only ever be empty the bo’y feels that it will never hold the weight of another bo’y inside of it no matter how many ds fit inside the bo’y the bo’y is a hollow facade it attempts a convincing veneer bo’y dresses — what hips on the bo’y bo’y paints its face — what lips on the bo’y bo’y adorns itself with labels written for lovelier frames what a beautiful bo’y still a bo’y but a fierce bo’y now a royal bo’y now a bo’y worthy of being called queen what a dazzling ruse to turn a bo’y into a lie everyone loves to look at the bo’y looks at itself the bo’y sees all the gawking at its gloss the bo’y hears all the masses asking for its missing the bo’y offers all of its letters — ‘ b ’ for the birth — ‘ o ’ for the operation — ‘ y ’ for the lack left in its genes what this bo’y would abandon for the risk of  being real the bo’y is real enough and too much existing as its own erasure — what an elusive d — evading removal avoiding recognition leaving just a bo’y that is never lost but can’t be found
i.m. Denis Johnson, 1949–2017 the unified field  It wasn’t that there was anything to say that would stop him from feeling this way — the X of himself splayed out in space where gravity was weakest. He and his father and talkative mother suffering tiny strokes that took away this syllable from this word, that syllable from that, all this lay in one pan of the balance scale while in the other there was nothing but dark matter and the cosmic inconsequence of his literal physical heart beating. And then the unified field, faced with its own emptiness, bent down to his chest as if to listen.   a toast to pavlov’s dogs  Oh Leash held by a hand I can’t see, here in the laboratory where nothing can change and where yips and bites are fine-tuned to the pack’s mentality, am I one of his dogs, the three-legged one that knows nothing of my lack except for how I bark, growl, and whine to be let in? Am I the salivating triangle guided only by my nose that keeps me on the move in my limping trot away from you, Leash, yanking me back from all the filth I want to shove my nose in? Why won’t you let me go free? The sad gestures of our growing intimacy is a reflex we can’t escape or express: sometimes, emotion is just mange. So Leash, here’s a toast to my lab pals: August, Fast One, Pretty Little Lady, Joy, Beauty, MiLord, Clown.   the judgment after the last  What would we like to see happen? Would we like to drive nails into our hands? Would the shame engulfing us like flame on a computer screen make us understand that throwing a match into the Grand Canyon while snapping a selfie, and never once thinking how far that match falls, is the original sin that a donkey’s ears twitching as we ride it to the bottom reveal as the truth about our consciences? How many nails will we need? Go to the movies, do research, be the Regulator forced to kill kill kill and that’s when we’ll find out just who we are or if there’s anything like “who” anymore.   mission  It’s not simply that the palm trees are on fire but that they waver up more fire than fire, brighter and harsher and more intoxicating than the flames spreading ever thought of being —  the thick black smoke turning noon to midnight rears up in a wall that nobody can see over or around or through even as this nobody comes crashing through the screen right into my living room: poor nobody! In this loneliest of times, he tells me how much he loves me, how his lack and mine feel somehow the same and that the flames crawling over him have become his mission: burning, he erects a burning house of smoke we can neither live in or abandon.   sunday is never the last day of the week  Using zip ties and Velcro to strap on a homemade bomb, who is to blame, who should have told us that on the far side of the screen in this Sunday calm our generation has had its time? In that corner where we slept together so many nights, yes, in that corner where the bed of the dead lovers has been put out with all the other Monday morning trash, there are always two doors opening and closing as one of us goes out and the other comes in. Why couldn’t we show our love for one another the way the void dissolves into the zero? Why did the animal grafted to the human find such satisfaction in explosions? Darkness to darkness, ashes to ashes, the animal to the human, why shouldn’t we take pleasure where and when we can —  provided this is pleasure, provided that the body isn’t null.   last rites  Even if the suit they dress me in for my funeral is dry-cleaned at Perfection Laundry, then washed and washed in the blood of the lamb, the knees will still be muddy from kneeling down, the sleeves, mismatched, will tell their own threadbare tale about the breath of life breathed into tabletop dust. What would the naked man and woman and talking snake say about the god who no longer remembers if they’re forgiven or not? Listening as a kid to the old stories, there were never enough beanstalks and giants and Jacks. Now, the pallbearers pick up my coffin, they carry me out to the ruined cathedral where the saints’ wooden faces, frozen in their homely expressions of grace, are shadowed by flocks of  blackbirds whirling past.   coda: the hunger artist as a senior citizen  Nowadays, in my cage in old straw, where my brother keeper forgets to come feed me anymore, at last I’m fasting for its own sake, not to break records I’ve broken a thousand times before. Besides, nothing could be easier than to starve forever if the food they keep on giving you makes you sick. This hunger is a moment’s vision that will persist in a pillar of radiant house dust.
The hastily assembled angel wanders And has through cities centuries of  cities And countries and millennia of  cities And countries and of  women and of men there’s No hurry now though he was hurriedly Once brought to being and bears the scars of  that Though slowly in the Earth though slowly he Eventually began to wonder what The hurry had been for and if  he could Have been a better angel or have done Better the job he did if once They’d made him the other angels had allowed Him to meet God for he has been uncertain As people are uncertain he has nev- er been as certain as dogs are who sniff The wind that moves the curtain and see behind the curtain
Except most things weren’t clouds everything there Was clouds the hastily assembled angel Before he knew the word clouds was the last word He heard the other angels shouting as They shoved him though he after he had fallen Too far to hear them he saw their mouths mak- ing shapes that were not clouds and when he saw that Thought That’s something that isn’t clouds that shouting After I’ve fallen too far to hear them don’tThey know I’ve fallen too far to hear them now Or are we not together now before He knew the word in those few minutes the oth- er angels were assembling him he named The things he saw with words that seemed to fit them Nothing was heavenly a few things wereOcean and hole and monkeyapple he Before the other angels shoved him had Started combining words but nobody Would name the things he saw the way he named them And to the other angels all his naming Was noise they shouted as they shoved him It’sAll clouds what difference could it make to the angel Built to monitor the Earth from the surface Of  the Earth what was or wasn’t true in Heaven They shoved him then they stared and then they shouted After the disappearing figure all The things they suddenly remembered they had Forgotten to tell him as they were hammer- ing him together as they hammered him Together and behind them but above Behind a pinkish light that was or was- n’t God pulsed like the heart of  one of  the creatures God hadn’t yet created though the angels Had seen the creatures coming in the waves Then covering the Earth the angels had Seen them and didn’t want to be assigned To live with them and so had voted to Build their own angel but they didn’t ask Permission first instead they built him quick- ly and as Gabriel asked God if  this New angel could be sent instead to Earth Fresh eyes for a fresh world the other angels Shoved him the hastily assembled angel From the cloud and Heaven he the hastily Assembled angel could see farther than The other angels though he couldn’t under- stand what he saw as well as the other angels Might have and as he fell he saw their mouths mak- ing shapes he saw the light behind them pulsing And as he fell he watched the clouds becoming Abstract as any other angel would From Heaven watch a species go extinct Even as dry land emerged from the waves below him
The hastily assembled angel flies With patchwork wings red patches and white patches And yellow patches blood and emptiness And sun and usually an angel’s wings would Be made of  only one of  these but his Were made at the last minute and were almost Not made at all and wouldn’t have been made Had Azrael not seen in the hastily Assembled angel’s eyes as Azrael Placed his white palm on the hastily assembled Angel’s chest fear as Azrael placed his palm there To shove him from the cloud and saw he had No wings and paused and thought then pulled him back And so the angels stitched together what was Near blood emptiness sun as what was near Was Heaven and what else would Heaven be
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. — Donald Trump, June 16, 2015 They woke him up by pissing in his face. He opened his mouth to scream in Spanish, so his mouth became a urinal at the ballpark. Scott and Steve: the Leader brothers, celebrating a night at Fenway, where the Sox beat the Indians and a rookie named Rodríguez spun the seams on his changeup to hypnotize the Tribe. Later that night, Steve urinated on the door of his cell, and Scott told the cops why they did it: Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported. He was a Mexican in a sleeping bag outside JFK station on a night in August, so they called him a wetback and emptied their bladders in his hair. In court, the lawyers spoke his name: Guillermo Rodríguez, immigrant with papers, crop-picker in the fields, trader of bottles and cans collected in his cart. Two strangers squashed the cartilage in his nose like a can drained of beer. In dreams, he would remember the shoes digging into his ribcage, the pole raked repeatedly across his cheekbones and upraised knuckles, the high-five over his body.Donald Trump was right, said Scott. And Trump said: The people that are following me are very passionate
For  Jack Agüeros (1934–2014) I was eight when the blackout struck and the lights died all across the city like a massacre of fireflies. In the projects of Brooklyn, I steered myself to 14F, fingers spread against the cool tiles of the hallway, past the concrete and chicken-wire terrace where I once burnt ants with a magnifying glass. Many years later, at the Chinese restaurant uptown, Jack said: They got any flan here? He was my first poet. I had seen the fireflies in his sonnets blink and float away: Fulano the philosopher in the unemployment line; Blanco the painter, painting in the madhouse; Monterosa the dealer killed by shotgun in a bar on Avenue A; his mother the seamstress and the quick needle of her sewing machine; Jack the moving man, his hands sliced raw. He stacked his apartment with dictionaries in three languages. I knew the raconteur’s grin with every tale: Raúl Juliá is a friend of mine:a Puerto Rican playing Macbeth. He took 14 curtain calls on opening night. Maybe he would tell me now that flan was not Puerto Rican, or Mexican, or Spanish, but Chinese, invented by a trembling cook to satisfy the palate of an emperor in the Ming Dynasty. No flan, Jack, I said. This is a Chinese restaurant. Two minutes later, he said: They got any flan? I showed him the dog-eared and fingerprinted menu. No flan, I said. When the waiter unfurled his pad, Jack said to him: You got flan? He sang this song for an hour. The egg roll was not flan. The fried rice was not flan. The fortune cookie was not flan. Can we get some flan? he said. Goddammit, Jack, I said. The poets crowded into the bar, striding to the mic. Jack stood with poem in hand, read the title, tilted his head and said it again, studied the page as if the words shriveled up like ants burnt under a magnifying glass, then sat down. I witnessed the massacre of fireflies. A few of us clapped, not knowing what to do with our hands, staring at the sonneteer who lost all his quatrains and couplets in the denim jacket he left on the subway, the words of Fulano still waiting on the unemployment line: The faster you spin, the stiller you look. / There’s something to learn in that, but what? After the diagnosis, I handed Jack a book of poems. He dangled the book upside down like a stiff mouse by the tail, something we would sniff  behind the refrigerator. I wanted sonnets. Jack kept singing the chorus of a song:Get me to the church. Get me to the church. Get me to the church on time.  At the end, I leaned over Jack’s bed to read his own poem in his ear, but some words come home after the blackout, fingers crawling on the wall. I know what I should have said at the Chinese restaurant: Jack, let’s get some flan. We should have braved the subway at rush hour, straphangers rocking all the way to 14th Street and 8th Avenue, to La Taza de Oro, gone now like Jack, for rice and beans, squid in its own ink, café con leche y flan, Jack: a spoonful of flan for you after all the years of sonnets and bread for me, the steam rising when your hands cracked the crust at the table.
Poverty is black ice. — Naomi Ayala You leave me sleeping in the dark. You kiss me and I stir, fingers in your hair, eyes open, unseeing. You leave me asleep every morning, commuting to the school in the city at sunrise. The landlord’s driveway, a muddy creek, ices over hard after the freezing rain clatters all night. Your feet fly up, your head slamming the ground, an eclipse of the sun flooding your eyes. You sleep under the car. No one knows how long you sleep. You awake with a hundred ice picks stabbing your eardrums. You awake, coat and hair soaked, and somehow drive to school. You remember to turn left at the Smith & Wesson factory. The other teachers lead you by the elbow to Mercy Hospital, where you pause when the nurse asks your name, where you claim your pain level is a four, and they slide you into the white coffin of an MRI machine. You hold your breath. They film your brain.Concussion: the word we use for the boxer plunging face-first to the canvas after the uppercut blindsided him, not the teacher commuting to school at sunrise in a Subaru Crosstrek. Yet, you would drive, ears hammering as they hammer in the purgatory of the MRI. A week before, Isabela came to you in the classroom and said:Miss, I cannot sleep. Three days, I cannot sleep. Her boyfriend called at 2 am, and she did not pick up. At 3 am, a single shot to the head put him to sleep, and he will sleep forever, his body hidden beneath a car in a parking lot on Maple Street, the cops, the television cameras, the neighbors all gathering at the yellow-tape carnival of his corpse. You said to Isabela: Take this journal. Write it down. You don’t haveto show me. You don’t have to show anyone. On the cover of the journal you bought at the drugstore was the word: Dream. Isabela sat there in your classroom, at your desk, pencil waving in furious circles. By lunchtime, as her friends slapped each other, Isabela slept, head on the desk, face pressed against the pages of the journal. This is why I watch you sleep at 3 am, when the sleeping pills fail to quell the strike meeting in my brain. This is why I say to you, when you kiss me in my sleep: Don’t go. Don’t go. You have to go.
My only love sprung  from my only hate! — Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene v At forty, I studied the mirror. I poked my mouth to free a trapped grain of hamburger, and a tooth broke off  between my fingers. I felt nothing. The dentist said: The tooth is dead. The root is dead. The X-rays show signs of trauma to the lower jaw. What happened here?
The landlord says we have to go. On the night the thermostat read seventeen below zero, and there was no heat on the first floor, the Massachusetts State Sanitary Code appeared in the landlord’s in-box like a spirit tapping bony knuckles on his window, and a letter appeared in the landlord’s in-box like a spirit scratching the words no rent in the frost on his window, and the landlord’s mouth foamed as if he’d swallowed detergent, and the foam froze on his beard, and the landlord’s plumber laid twenty-four feet of baseboard on the first floor, and now we have to go. The landlord keeps his purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo parked at the edge of the driveway, purple inside and out, paint job and upholstery purple, the color of emperors. The mad emperor Caligula assassinated his cousin, jealous of his purple cloak, and the mad emperor’s mouth foamed as if he’d swallowed detergent, and the foam froze on his beard. The neighbors report a moose sighting today. The moose charges from the woods, mad as an emperor jealous of a purple cloak, sees the purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo as another moose, and rams Caligula’s chariot with his bristling antlers, kicking the car the way a teenager high on detergent T-boned my leased Toyota Corolla two weeks ago, and so the moose claims his territory, this land without a gas station or a movie theater or a pizza joint or a doctor’s office, and gallops back into the woods, snorting foam. Now come the hunters tracking the moose, crossbows bristling since crossbow season is upon us, their vision blurred by a night of Red Bull and detergent, and see the purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo as a moose, firing volley after volley of arrows into the windshield, and the talisman of the air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror does not keep the glass from exploding, and the jumper cables coiled in the back seat do not rise magically like electric eels, and the hunters explode in a cry of huzzah, waving their crossbows as if their arrows thumped the hump of Richard the hunchback king. The purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo is a dead moose, tow truck dragging away the carcass to a round of applause in my brain. The landlord will snort and foam, demanding to know why there is nothing left but his mutilated vanity plate stamped with the year 1976, and I will speak to him in Brooklynese, palms turned upward in the universal gesture of the uncooperative witness. He will keep my security deposit, his territory without a gas station or a movie theater or a pizza joint or a doctor’s office. I say huzzah.
I close my eyes and see him windmilling his arms as he plummets from the Mystic Tobin Bridge, to prove me wrong, to show me he was good, to atone for sins like seeds in the lopsided apple of his heart, but mostly to escape from me in the back of his cab, a Puerto Rican lawyer in a suit and tie. I hated the 111 bus, sweltering in my suit and tie with the crowd in the aisle, waiting to hit a bump on the Mystic Tobin Bridge so my head would finally burst through the ceiling like a giraffe on a circus train. I hated the 111 bus after eviction day in Chelsea District Court, translating the landlords and judges into Spanish so the tenants knew they had to stuff their clothing into garbage bags and steal away again, away from the 40-watt squint that followed them everywhere, that followed me because I stood beside them in court. I would daydream in the humidity of the bus, a basketball hero, flipping the balled-up pages of the law into the wastebasket at the office as the legal aid lawyers chanted my name. I hated the 111 bus. I had to take a taxicab that day.What the hell you doing here? said the driver of the cab to me in my suit and tie. You gotta be careful in this neighborhood. There’s a lotta Josésaround here. The driver’s great-grandfather staggered off a boat so his great-grandson could one day drive me across the Mystic Tobin Bridge, but there was no room in the taxi for chalk and a blackboard. He could hear the sawing of my breath as I leaned into his ear, past the bulletproof barricade somehow missing, and said: I’m a José. I could see the 40-watt squint in his rearview mirror. I’m Puerto Rican, I said. It was exactly 5 pm, and we were stuck in traffic in a taxi on the Mystic Tobin Bridge. The driver stammered his own West Side Story without the ballet, how a Puerto Rican gang stole his cousin’s wallet years ago. You think I’m gonna rob you?
I didn’t want one child. I wanted a thousand. Because though you may try, you can’t kill all of them. My body couldn’t birth a thousand, so I didn’t even bring one here. I let you have them. One by one, and         I had my first surgery when I was eighteen. No, seven. No. I had my first surgery when I was thirty-five. No, when I was forty-seven. I almost had my first surgery today. The doctor drew an all-seeing eye around my wound to diagram the length and width of the scar with a purple magic marker. To be honest, I had my first surgery when they pulled me deadfirst headfirst from between my mother’s thighs. But I don’t remember that one; the separation of my flesh from the source of all I’d known. Muddy vessel, crumbling temple. This carved body, overgrown garden, nest of the narcotic.         My first ten years were mostly marked by my relentless pursuit to not look pregnant when I went out in public. One of my goals each day was to not have someone ask me in public — hopeful look in their gesturing gaze, so excited by the prospect of a coming Christmas miracle, “Are you    ...?” and to have to shatter their hopes of Dream Baby, and simultaneously begin the Emotional Labor of soothing their embarrassment after hearing, “No.” Because a woman with a swollen or distended abdomen can only mean one thing. And that thing is always joyous and awaited with excited anticipation. A woman with a distended abdomen couldn’t possibly be dealing on the daily with something gone terribly awry. Couldn’t possibly be engaged in an ongoing war for her body, a custody battle for her own self. A woman’s swollen belly is everybody’s Good News, everybody’s Business. So that’s how I spent five years in my thirties: running around evading expectations my deceptive uterus induced in family, friends, and rank fucking strangers.         What they took from me: What they scooped out of me: What they carved from out of me: What they excavated from me: What they dug out of me: What they released from me: What they harvested from me: What they pulled from me: What they birthed from me:    — a colony of tumors  — an archive of NOs  — a battalion of rogue dreams  — an inheritance of heartbreaks  — a lockbox of my foremothers’ molestations  — a cedar chest of secrets  — four generations of the miscarried and stillborn  — a library of zeros  — a ledger of names written in decimal points  — my grandfather’s shriveled aspirations  — a moldy cellar of witnessed whippings  — a  jewelry box of swollen tongues  — a Bible of abducted children         Everyone is invested in policing the Black body. Yes, even you. And there’s a particularly virulent investment in the surveillance and policing of the Black Woman (née “Female”) Body. In fact there are multiple systems, most of them economic, that hinge upon controlling, corralling, and commodifying the female body in general. Why do you suppose, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Seventeen, the ocean vomited up twenty-six dead Nigerian girls on the gorgeous Mediterranean coast?   Pussy and Blackness are two of the first moneymakers ever recorded. And if you got both, well then, you know what time it is, right?       [Bend over so I can swipe this credit card down your ass.]         What information is passed through a genetic line? What memories are housed in our cells? Are our memories the memories of some memories of some long-dead, unknown Ancestors along the line? What traumas do we carry that we picked up along the way, that were never ours to begin with?
I have hidden your lost teeth in the net of all my famous hair And with foresight promised your umbilicus To several minor gods. I paid your fee in fawn skin & the lightest fringe of tissue, all the quiet noons assembled, In yard stars & the light of phosphorescent pens, The dioramas that it takes to fill lacunae, in ancestral knots That tell the story of our humble people: watchmakers, Mainly, ventriloquists & scholars of quintessence, Amateur lifeguards I meant to surpass. How I loved My green & distant futures! But I love you more From late Holocene out to the farthest buoy, unto Blackmail & a verb that means renouncing Christ Or else describes the path of sap before it’s amber, Before it dimples, just a little, to collect —
After Thomas Hardy The milkmaids say Pray for their speech is reserved,fixed here in circles of opalized light. Presenting themselves without fancy or choicechapped hands on the full udder’s verge, y’know — cream-skinned, gathering toad spume on skirtsrelentlessly cracking the snails underfoot — a century later & more their compeers bow headsto these luminous fields made of ether, of blue & extravagant air, calling up with the samenimble fingers their ciphered familiars, girl-souls at large in a nonhuman hour.Speaking their argot & screen-practiced moue. Not to you, with your paper, your man-heavy shoes,untouched by the mulch of the digital yard! They only gaze rapt at threshold, milk spilled.No purchase for you here, Sir, & no clue —
It burns up all the grass too, and breaks the stones, so tremendous is its noxious influence. — Pliny the Elder, “Natural History” On a blood- or honey-colored moon at midnight & no 60-watt abuzz. With Sirius ascendant. From a dunghill’s punk egg hatched By toad or serpent. From cold gland & pillaged crib, from ruined sluice, Bible comics & potshots at swallows. From the Ring of Fire, the Zipper, The Nighthawk with her victims taloned upside down. From pistis to gnosis To the midway where they draw a bead on cardboard sheikhs. From no harvest. From no temperate father. From years borne down tainted water & all we failed to mark in frequencies cranked up, from How laughing we cast our own forfeit. O well — It’s cinch your boots up now, it’s shoulder to the wheel, it’s soldier on To lay coins on the fang marks & stand already spent, Condemned for what we wrongly thought exhaustion. Comes now the bright arrival, comes the pageant rain of ashes: The seal torn & tablets fixed but still impossible to read.
Nothing better for people than dogs nothing better than ma king you scream here. There were two super new cars and then some pink chicken filets I guess there were berries for sale in Scandinavia a man in a plaid shirt & cookies also they are working in the ceme tery I can see their blue ladder from here. A man has written a book about many deaths or many things to do after. Read it read it they say but what comes after is a small idea. Now is large rainy. Amy I wish you luck
Is that your house he asked This used to be my house I said But those are not your people So that can’t be your house But it is my house I said I had some people maybe a few Even though those are not your people Even though they don’t look like you I had to live somewhere I said This is the house where I lived But where are your people he said My people live in a different house They don’t care to know about me If you’re the devil Why are you asking me questions The devil said since the house You had to live in is gone I thought you’d be happy It sure is a hot day I said Of course it is said the devil Why do you think I work in town
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you save me half a bag of skins, the hard parts, my fav, dusted orange with hot    •  you say we can’t go to the bar cause you’re taking your braids out i come over, we watch madea while we pull you from you   •  you make us tacos with the shells i like & you don’t   •  i get too drunk at the party, you scoop my pizza from the sink with a solo cup, all that red   •  you, in the morning, bong water grin, wet chin   •  you, in the lawless dark, laughing like a room of women laugh at a man who thinks his knowledge is knowledge   •  i text you & you say, i was bout to text you, bitch   •  you cook pork chops same way i do, our families in another city go to the same church   •  you, rolling a blunt, holding your son, is a mecca   •  you invite me out for drag queens on the nights i think of finally [ ]   •  you pull over in Mississippi so i can walk a road my grandfather bled on   •  you gave me a stone turtle, it held your palm’s scent for a week   •  i call your mama mama   •  you request like a demand, make me some of that mango cornbread i cut the fruit, measure the honey   •  you & you & you & you go in on a dildo for my birthday you name it drake, you know me   •  a year with you in that dirty house with that cracked-out cat was a good year   •  at the function, i feel myself splitting into too many rooms of static you touch my hand & there i am   • do you want to be best friends? a box for yes, a box for no   •  did our grandmothers flee the fields of embers so we could find each other here? friend, you are the war’s gentle consequence   •  i am the prison that turns to rain in your hands   •  you, at my door the night my father leapt beyond what we know you, dirt where i plant my light   •  the branches of silence are heavy with your sweet seed   •  you smell like the milk of whatever beast i am   •  your poop is news, your fart is news, your gross body my favorite song   •  you, drunk as an uncle, making all kinds of nonsense sense i listen for the language between your words   •  & when we fight, not a ring, but a room with no exit we spill the blood & bandage the wound, clean burns with our tongues   •  if luck calls your name, we split the pot & if you wither, surely i rot   •  we hate the same people, we say nigga please with the same mouth   •  & before we were messy flesh, i’m sure we were the same dust   •  everywhere you are is a church, & i am the pastor, the deacons, the mothers fainting at the altar   •  as long as i am a fact to you, death can do with me what she wants   •  my body, water, your body, a trail of hands carrying the river to the sea   •  i ink your name into my arm to fasten what is already there   •  i would love you even if you killed god   •  you made coming out feel like coming in from the storm   •  you are the country i bloody the hills for   •  you love me despite the history of my hands, their mangled confession   •  at the end of the world, let there be you, my world   •  god bless you who screens all my nudes, drafts my break-up text   •  you are the drug that knocks the birds from my heart   •  ain’t no mountain, no valley, no river i wouldn’t give the hands for comin’ to you sideways   •  o the horrid friends who were just ships harboring me to you   •  & how many times have you loved me without my asking? how often have i loved a thing because you loved it? including me   •  & i always knew   •  with yo ugly ass
Today I woke and believed in nothing. A grief at once intimate and unfelt, like the death of a good friend’s dog. Tired of the mind reaching back in the past for rescue I praise the day. I don’t mean merely some mythical, isolate instant like the mindless mindfulness specialist who at the terminal cancer convention (not that it was called that) exhorted the new year’s crop of slaughters (ditto) to “taste” the day, this one unreplicable instant of being alive. (The chicken glistened.) Nor do I mean a day devoid of past and future as craved that great craze of minds and times Fernando Pessoa, who wanted not “the present” but reality itself, things in their thingness rather than the time that measures them. Time is in the table at which I sit and in the words I type. In the red-checked shirt my father’s mother used to wear when she was gardening and which I kept because it held her smell (though it does no longer) there is still plenty of time. Two murderers keep their minds alive while they wait to die. They talk through slots in their doors of whatever mercy or misery the magazine has ordained for the day —  the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, say, ten signs that a relationship is on the rocks. When their communion flags, as communions will, they rekindle it with personal revelations, philosophical digressions, humor. This is a true story, one of them says sometimes by way of preface, as if that gave the moment more gravity, asked of the listener a different attention, at once resisted and reinforced an order wherein every hour has its sound, every day its grace, and every death is by design. “Love is possible for anyone,” I hear the TV talk-show host say, which is true in the way most things in this life are true, which is to say, false, unless and until the nullifying, catalyzing death is felt. Love is possible for anyone because it is equally impossible for everyone. To be is to be confronted with a void, a blankness, a blackness that both appeals and appalls. Once known — known by the void, I mean — one has three choices. Walk away, and unlearn the instinct of awe. Walk along, and learn to believe that awe asks nothing of you. Are you with me, love? (For love read faith.) Naked once and after a rat, my father cried, “Die, vermin, die!” banging the broomstick over and over on the floor so incorrigibly dirty it might as well have been the earth itself. This is my mother’s story, though I was there, I’m told, and no small part of the pandemonium. We were five souls crammed into one life, and so incorrigibly poor — or was that fear? — we all slept in one room and shared one great big chester drawers, as we called it, and not with irony but in earnest ignorance, just as like meant lack, as in “How much do you like bein’ done with your chemo?” and just as I and every other child I knew, before we tucked into our lemon meringue pie, solemnly wiped the calf slobbers off. Ah, local color, peasant levity, the language fuming and steaming rich as the mist of rot that rises off the compost heap (“kitchen midden,” you might hear an old Scot still say). When do we first know? That there’s a world to which we’ve been, not oblivious, exactly, but so inside we couldn’t see it, who now see nothing else? Heaven is over. Or hell. Did you forget the rat? It thumps and thrashes like a poltergeist inside the chest of drawers but somehow, though my father is fast, and though his rage is becoming real, every drawer he opens is empty. What happens when we die, every child of every father eventually asks. What happens when we don’t is the better question. To kill a wasp on water is the peak of speed. My brother who is other has a mind of lead. I with my stinging griefs watch from away. How can it be there are no adults left? What matters here is timing, not time. His hand is high and white above the blue. A wasp is also atom and urge, hover and touch. Even wings are not a clean distinction. Down comes the slap like a rifle shot. What vengeance can there be on blank necessity? My brother who is other has a way. His hand is high and white. And then it’s not. Once when my father’s mother’s health was failing and she found it more and more difficult to tend to the tiny family plot at Champion, Texas, which is less town than time at this point, a blink of old buildings and older longings the rare driver flashes past, I took it upon myself to salt the graves as I must have read somewhere would work for unwanted growths. As indeed it did. In the months after, every Sunday when we spoke, she thanked me for the blankness, the blackness, (my words, of course) this new ease I had allowed her mind. Until one day leaning over with flowers the leached earth opened and my eighty-year-old grandmother tumbled right down among the bones of the woman from whom she’d first emerged. To see that image you have to be that sky. It has to happen in you, that crushing calling viewless blue that is so deeply in you that it is not you. “O, Law’, honey, I like to died.” You don’t climb out of poverty so much as carry it with you. Some shell themselves with wealth. Some get and spend, get and spend, skimming existence like a Jesus lizard. But for those whose souls have known true want — whose souls perhaps are true want —  money remains, in some sense, permanently inert, like an erotic thought that flashes through a eunuch’s brain. In 1980 my father bought his first airplane, a scream-proof four-seater we crammed five inside, which he considerately slammed into a sorghum field alone. Unkillable, he killed the next ten years with work and wives, then bought another, and brought it down in the solitary fire that was his aspect and atmosphere. Homes, schemes, thirty years of savings plowed into a sign company (!) that did not, it turned out, exist. A hole is hard to carry. People ask if I believe in God and the verb is tedious to me. Not wrong, not offensive, not intrusive, not embarrassing. Tedious. Today I saw a hawk land on Elizabeth’s chimney. It sat with its bone frown and banker’s breast above the proud houses of Hamden. Are you with me? Then see, too, a lump of animate ash rising from the flue (or so it seems) to be a pigeon fluttering dumbly down next to that implacable raptor, suddening a world of strange relations wherein there is no need for fear, or far, or meat. There was a man made of airplane parts, one of which was always missing. He wandered the hospital grounds in search of a rudder, an aileron, or some other fragment that would let him fly from this place where he was not meant to be. There was a woman who emitted invective ceaselessly, dispassionately, an obscenity machine. One timid gentleman saved Saran wrap for five full years and every night wrought an ever-more-solid ball with which, it turned out, he planned to bash the skull of the first soul he saw the dawn God blessed his weapon. (A success story, alas.) Another man with anvil hands sat six months of nights in faith that there would come occasion of darkness, unguardedness, and vision sufficient to rip from its socket one of my father’s bright blue eyes. (Ditto.) My father moved among them like a father. He attended and pacified, he instructed and consoled. Late to the trade, he worked too much, and trusted his heart, no doubt, more than he should, but was, by all accounts, at this one thing, and despite the end, good. For love read faith into these lines that so obviously lack it. For love let words turn to life in the way life turns to world under the observer’s eye, the swirl of particles with their waves and entanglements, their chance and havoc, resolving into some one thing: a raptor on a rooftop, say. No power on earth can make it stay. But is it lost or released into formlessness when we look away? To be is to believe that the man or woman who inscribed with an idiosyncratic but demanding calligraphyFuck da money — Trust no one on the rough blanket of the residential motel where my father spent the last two years of his rough residential life intended the note of defiant, self-conscious (da!) humor that left my father, whom I had not seen in years, and I, whom years had seen grow sere, far even from myself, erupting in laughter until we cried. Before my good friend’s good dog died ten times a day she pressed her forehead to his “to confirm the world and her place in it.” Now she won’t even say his name. Strange how the things that burn worst in one heart one must keep silent to keep. Ten to one you thought of men. The murderers, I mean. But no. This is a true story. There is another cell, you see, in which a woman I have known since childhood, and since childhood have known to be suspended on a wire of time but nimble-witted nonetheless, lies on the cold stone floor. She is even more naked than they have made her. She has killed no one not even herself. Punishment, perhaps, or some contagion of fate, finds her here, her hair shorn, both wrists wrapped, her eyes open, pondering the parable of perfect silence.Remember, he said, memory is a poor man’s prison. Make to have and to love one live infinitive
1  Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part of history. No, her story is an illumination of history, the matchstick lit in the black seam of time. Or, no, her story is separate from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct from the stream of people that led to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness of which she is the momentary foreground. Maybe history is a net through which just about everything passes, and the pieces of her story are particles caught in the interstices. Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary that has no part in history at all, if history is about what is included, what is made important. History is the galleon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth century, swaying like a drunk who will take six months to finally reach his house. She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean. The war is over, though her husband is still in his officer’s uniform, small but confident among the tall white officers. Her hair is marcelled like a movie star’s waves, though she has been too sick with the water’s motion to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two, the blur of need at the center of each day’s incessant rocking. Here is a ship, an ocean. Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void.   2  Research is mourning, my friend says. Which means what, exactly, for the things listed in the archives as filling the galleons when they left Cebu and Manila —  ivory objects, jade objects, copper objects, brass objects, lacquer objects, mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture, pearls, rubies, sapphires, bolts of cotton cloth, silks and gauzes, crepes and velvets, taffetas and damasks and brocades, stockings, cloaks, robes, kimonos, bed coverings, tapestries, linens, church vestments, rugs, blue-and-white porcelain that numbered 1,500 in one ship, wax, tallow candles, cordage, sailcloth, musk, borax, camphor, cigars, varieties of tea, cinnamon that was dried and powdered, 40,000 pounds of it listed in one ship’s manifest, cloves, pepper, nutmeg, tamarind, ginger, martaban jars from Burma, dragon jars from China, Vietnamese jars, Siamese jars, Spanish jars, 800 jars found with the wreck of one salvaged ship, jars that would have contained tar for caulking, oil, wine, bizcocho bread, salted meats, dried fruits, lard, bacon, beans, chickpeas, lentils, flour, garlic, cheese, honey, rice, salt, sugar, food for months, not enough food, not enough water, chickens, cows, pigs, up to one thousand souls depending on whether the ship had a tonnage of 300 or 500 or 1,000 or 2,000, ships that in the 250 years of the trade route wrecked somewhere along the way more often than they arrived in Acapulco, sailors, mercenaries, officers, noblemen and their entourages, priests and missionaries, slaves that were called indios or chinos, nails, tools, iron cask hoops, fireworks, opals — elegy?   3 We didn’t want to be noticed, so we put charcoal on our faces. I listen to the hours of tape, of the two of us at the dining table.All the girls, looking like dirt. / My father was always drinking Questions about the town, her parents, the names of peopleor with women, my mother had to take care of the business. /  that only she could now remember. The images, I imagined,My sister broke her back when she was a child, she grew up scrolling in her mind, and translated into the answers she gave.into a hunchback. She died very young. / They set up a dance Sometimes pausing, not because she couldn’t recall, but didn’tat the municipal tennis courts to celebrate the end of the war, want to recall badly, the pause a kind of gap between what sheand he was there, in his US uniform. / He always insisted that knew and what the words could do. The two things a voicewe sit at the front, but when I was by myself on the bus I sat can say when it is saying one thing, the things that suddenlysomewhere in the middle. I didn’t want trouble. / I was around return when you are speaking, like pockets of color coming tofifty-five when I had my first real job, working as the security life in your mind: I listen to her with my skin and my eyes,at Macy’s. / I always liked to read. I wanted to go to college my ears. I had had the notion that asking her about her lifelike my sisters, but I got married. / You know that wedding might add something to what I thought of as my art, as thoughdress in the picture, we had to borrow it from our neighbor. /  her past and her love could be vectors of use. But I started toI liked Japan when he was stationed there. It was so clean. realize that what I actually needed to know, I would haveThen Norfolk. Richmond. / I was so sick on the ship, I can’t to conjure for myself, because what we know most deeplyremember much. Your mama just kept running all around. we guard best, even as she spoke, laughed, passed the glowIt was a navy ship. / My mother’s name is Canuta Sacay and of each story to me, like a document I could have in handmy father’s name is Enrique Omega. My grandparents were but could not understand. I put the tape away, felt for yearsfarmers outside Ormoc. / I was born in Ormoc, December 8, that it was enough, the responsibility done. Our conversation1924 or 25. / This was the apartment we lived in in Maryland. stopped when my aunt came to take her out for some errands.That’s Junior there in the picture. And there’s your mama. Chatter, chairs moved around, then noises that are just noises.   4  In Madrid I orient myself I walk on the wide boulevards and know an empire is its boulevards I stand below the angel skeptical of the beauty of angels at the royal gardens I count the 138 kinds of dahlias at the crystal palace I imagine the exhibition of plants indigenous to my islands I walk up the street of the poets read the bronze lines on the ground the longing and song of the pirate in one museum I stare at Picasso’s lightbulb in the oldest neighborhoods I wonder if  José Rizal walked these streets studying diseases of the eye during the day writing his novel in the night in another museum I look at the paintings of the dwarves of  the horses of  the undying fruit in the train station I visit the memorial for the murdered in the great white square at dawn I walk inscribe myself  like letters on a page at the naval museum I look into the face of  Magellan show the painting my face I sing the neighborhoods of Huertas and Chueca maybe only in Madrid is the light a gold weight always at the supermarket I overhear two Filipinos speaking and I turn away and break I find myself in the cathedral in the movie theater where I watch a movie without understanding the words spoken around a corner I stop because a kind of meadow has been grown on the side of a building like a tallness of heart a dream carried into waking my life breathing before it incredible and true
Poor devil, dog six years on a tether clipped to a cubby box. The sun dropped into a slot on one side & after a dark spell popped up on the other. Birds of a weather chattered along wires overhead & the yards around shrilled emergencies. Who knew? Once upon afternoon a dust demon spins itself up in the master’s tumbleweed to his match scratch: puff: mega blaze & four hours’ ruckus until doused out. I’ll bask three days in wonders. I’ll slobber & yawn. I’ll gnaw & grunt in my groin to my heart’s content. They say death changes a body’s mind about things. Master shuts up & just rots.
We’d pout. Our mother, brisking off, urged Darlings! — your vitamins & minerals dissolve inside with the milk & this-&-that into instructions rejiggering more vitamins, minerals, milk & this-&-that to fizz up & turn into actual you, or me, or anybody & etc. Experiment: — you might let drop capsules & milk into spit in one another’s cups. Watch, wait; think, add, stir. I’ll be right back. One day it quits. The whole business quits. Imagine that.



Hear me Neglect turned everything to gold Midas touch I turn the comfortable To the dead an anti-elegy tho I’m Learning not to mourn what I make It’s a complex this gravity I birth unknowing Not my complex yours say it I am owned by several things all of  them Inherited from a horizon claimed before I was languaged Invoke the historical Somethingsomethingsomething Chains Somethingsomethingsomething Unworthy I’m citizen of a clumsy imperative Belonging is a concern of a self   I deaded Past participle implies the historical is a mob Try again I mobbed my own lonely and was legion Play some offense then Gold the impossible wound Citizen of  betrayal Citizen of the going going going — Recursion this fugitive state as native to me as my father’s Eyes chestnut of a tree felled before we were languaged See Inheritance is a hell of a drug We Black and highly valued For our Flex I said what I said and became citizen Of  this petty excuse for forever Flex on ’em then Invocation of the bicep I have and the bicep throttling me I live here now Mississippi and everywhere is everywhere That someone may have escaped from Fugitive A sad motivation for river It’s a strange thing That belief you are beautiful be a subversion of the water But here I am winter gasping at the conditions Too weak to even strangle the grass to soil No instead Trees feathered with their hollowed offspring Here the wind don’t howl just blooms a militia Of castanets seven people were lynched here I looked it up and nobody will tell me which tree You are not as tired of the image as I am of uncertainty Every day the rain threatens Every day my same imperious lonely Hear me the sun ran like a punk the sun ran like it owed Not even the gold is trustworthy why gold? Because it was the color of my love and by extension The life I buried here Gold the genesis of one lonely My ancestors were traded mere miles from here Gold the genesis Of  another I know they are not the same in anything but geography Still it is an act of   Flex just to stand anywhere gravity being what it is Attempt the volta toward impossible Midas the lonely into a radif Dreams of living life like a gilded garrote  Flex The crown of scar tissue still the crown  Flex Go to therapy if  you scared  Flex Shuck the fear out of  the opposition  Flex Every day gold for the sake of your attention  Flex Your hereness a mountain plumed with trees Branches hemmed like unplayed notes A history can be undone with less than an alphabet Amend the scandal of the time that brought you here Fled to Flex Ex. My family fled from Mississippi My family Flexed from Mississippi and you become The muscle driving you forward See you were ugly Once because you believed it Dire invocation I am some kind of unkillable and don’t know how to act Everything I said I couldn’t live without  Gone Lucky me to be born into a language of mistakes I leave the violent on Seen and watch them wither Turns out I was their gravity their forgetful sovereign I Flex they flinch the sonics of the words cousins By virtue of a pistol This is how I was taught to bridle Sadness like an American Run with a band of  kids With silver caps so you know we bad waiting for the bone Eviction Flex like value native to your mouth Tooth out A tiny moon a second grin shimmering in your palm Flex The loss the cost is secondary Hear me a life I had ended While I was trying to pursue the life I wanted by pursuing A loss cobwebbed as a bride All of this true the calcium winnowing Under the gold I widowed my own comfort I am in danger My squad an echo my squad a promise you get dead someday If you touch me thus I’m untouched Neglect killed the grass The dead turn to gold before they resurrect I am framed By a pastoral I might have escaped once O the history O the lineage the renowned Flex of survivors I’m here I’m back muscled like a creek or the whisper That threads a storm miles later Maybe not Stick to the facts I’m alive despite a growing and planetary grief I wear a chain Somedays and a sweatshirt that translates to I Am ComingBack For What Is Mine Gaudy surprise on the faces of children Of owners They think I am impossible They think I am a ghost I Medusa like my daddy taught me their eyes wilt and are Ill-tended grapes consumed by the skull I’m metaphoring I told you I don’t know how to act but I know how to anthem My lyric loose and I got time today I’m the type of  bad No synonym alive can hold
Yael picks at their cuticles. When they speak to themself, they speak out loud. They speak to themself this morning. I think, they say, that I am coming down with wisteria. Their nail beds a bit purplish. There’s a Caesar cipher decoder ring in their shredded wheat and, unsure of what to decode first, Yael hides it under their pillow. Yael says, Today I’ll be lonely. They need the practice. Yael never drinks their cereal milk, pours it back into the jug. But they are thirsty. Outside of their tent, the lawn is still entirely a lawn — the neighbors kept to themselves last night, trampled none of the daffodils. A good omen. Today Yael can leave their tent without fear. Of what? The omen has no answer, it presents only the bright of things. Yael shoves three empty bottles into their bag and heads toward the river.   • The pigs are having a swim and pay Yael no mind as they submerge each bottle. Yael imagines the bubbles that shimmy out are the 
bottle’s breath, that they have the power to take breath from anyone. The hair on their arms turns golden. Then the water. Then the pigs flee. Yael looks down as Sun approaches. They were already kneeling. 
Their shins disrupting the path of an ant colony’s leaf-carrying 
ceremony. The ants do not bite Yael — Sun is watching, and the ants like being alive, love to feel the weight of a veiny leaf, love even more the sound their mandibles make piercing through that leaf. Sun kicks a flowering fennel as He walks toward Yael, but forgets to change the wind’s direction. The seeds blow into Yael’s hair and up their nose. Though Yael did not see Him do it, Sun gives himself away by whining, It’s not my fault.   • Sun’s whine reminds Yael of their husband, Heber. Heber whines like that when Yael wants to leave his tent. When Yael doesn’t invite him into their tent. When Yael doesn’t want to watch a movie that Heber has seen a dozen times. It’s exhausting to be shown things, to try to enjoy a movie while also giving a convincing performance of that enjoyment. Heber ruins these screenings — he weeps before the scenes that call for weeping. He mouths each pivotal line. So far, Yael has spent their life absorbing men’s favorites. On the rare occasion that Heber does ask to watch their favorite movie, Yael can’t remember having one. This makes Yael feel a creaking, hollow-boned kind of gloom. This gloom opens the flaps in their brain that make them want to lie in bed all day. Yael does not know the sound of their loudest yell. All their noises 
have been practiced. Maybe this is why Sun’s whine makes their cheeks flush. The sound is a selfish one. Why should it go unpunished?   • Sometimes, when they think of Heber away at war, Yael grows giddy, 
presses their smile hard into their pillow until the whirling joy 
subsides. But what is the mainspring of that giddiness? They try to dissect the thought:  Heber = Giddy  Or  Heber away = Giddy  Or  Heber away at war = Giddy   • If Yael were to look up from the dirt, they’d see the kestrels circling above, their left talons leashed to Sun’s wrist by neon green fishing line. Taut line. No give. Yael won’t look up. Sun exhales and lets loose His belly. It peeks out from under His shirt. You can keep thinking of me as Sun. He’s relieved Yael is alone. I’ve been looking for a new name. His old name felt stale. Dead by comparison. Sun is perfect.I have a very important job for you, Yael, descendant of — He’d left His notes at home — Yael. Enlist in my war against the wicked and blessed shall you be above all people in the tent. Sun doesn’t mention that Yael isn’t His first, or even His second, choice.
yesterday I was at the Wailing Wall pretending to be a man, pretending to be a Jew it was research for my job still I tried to feel God, touched the Wall said a prayer for my sick mother the women go to one side the men to the other the rest of us float and bobble like space trash around the corner is the empty co-ed wall no one prays before the genderless stones they smell the concession the gay rabbi said Jerusalem has been conquered forty-four times I walk with the men, stolen yarmulke in my hand past the dancing bar mitzvah boys on the other side of the fence their mothers throw hard candies at them
I find myself in the deep corridor that would have been dark if my right hand wasn’t shining like a torch. — Tomas Tranströmer One of those idle hours I did not want To participate in “group,” when it seemed Impossible I’d know a word to haunt Again, or make me laugh, or spur that dream To roam myself the ranges of the tongue; When on that ward I thought not one aspect Of anything, no matter how strong, strange, Or keen, could sharpen the “blunted affect” Even electric shock had no effect on    ... During one such despondent interval I read these lines from his New Directions New collected poems, and the verbal Sequence somehow composed the correct code To unlock feeling: corridor, right hand, Dark
After  Jean-Michel Basquiat Crows  and more crows. One crow  with a rat  hanging  from its beak, sloppy  and beautiful. Another crow  with its wings  plucked  empty. I wanted  so much of today  to be peaceful  but the empty crow untethers  something in me: a feral  yearning for love  or a love that is so full of  power,  of  tenderness,  the words  fall to their knees begging for mercy  like tulips  in wind. I don’t wear the crown  for the times power  has tainted  my body, but I can tell the difference  between giving up  and giving in. If  you can’t, ask the crow  that watches me  through the window,  laughing as I drink my third bottle of wine. Ask the sound  the tree makes  when the crow has grown  disgusted with my whining. After years of repression,  I can come clean.  I was a boy  with a hole other boys  stuffed themselves into. I have wanted  nothing to do with blackness  or laughter  or my life. But about love,  who owns the right,  really? Who owns  the crow who loves fresh meat  or the crow who loves  the vibration  of its own throat? Everything around me  is black for its own good,  I suppose.  The widow, the picture of the boy  crying on the wall,  the mirror  with its taunting, the crows  that belong  to their scripture. Can you imagine  being so tied to blackness  that even your wings  cannot help you escape? About my life,  every needle,  a small prayer.  Every pill, a funeral hymn. I wanted the end  several times  but thought,  Who owns this body, really? God?  Dirt?  The silly insects  that will feast on my decay? Is it the boy  who entered first  or the boy  who wanted everything to last?
In the old place, there was no place that did not see me. Wherever I went mothers whispered about me like a Greek chorus:I heard that boy    ...    I heard that. I was just a boy. But it was true, what they said, that I liked other boys, that I had stolen Sarah’s, though he was four years older and they were very much in love. I made him break up with her in a Chili’s parking lot while I waited inside. I was fourteen. How embarrassing to have been fourteen, to have eaten at that Chili’s, often. That summer I had no taste for anything but him. Faintly of chlorine. When he left for college I had no one. Sarah’s friends stared me down at school. I found it was better, if I could not be no one, to be someone. Small, but particular. Specified, which was an apprenticeship for special. Cold, another word for cool.
Maybe it was my old friend Fascination who first let me know that Danger was right across the hall, or maybe it was the unrealized absence of pollen, or, was it the nearness, Danger, of your hair’s blatant softness, just toweled. Or, I wanted to stop thinking — and, I wanted to ask,Do you think God understands attraction? Surely, right? Or, I wanted you to notice my anger, which you might not characterize as dangerous, per se, but rather, fickle, a synonym for “mercurial.” Maybe that’s typical. Yup, there is a liquid sharpness in me I wouldn’t unlid except    ...    damn, Danger,  there’s this certain way you draw out epiphany    ...     You’re messy, Danger, baby, meaning untidy, confusing, monumental, great in size, and also, of or serving as a monument, which leads me to reconsider the dimensions of sandwiches, as well as apartheid, the aphid, and the scarab beetle.  Danger, can you feel me tremble? But I am saying nothing, dear  Danger, you don’t already know — you’re used to being pursued with rage, unwanted advice, riddles. That’s not me, respectfully — Joy is always waiting to cyclone you with nothing more than a matchbook, a long gaze, a warm bowl.
For Hasna Henna and the Rohingya Lice? My aunt once drew a comb through my hair steady; she wouldn’t let what feeds on blood eat my inner tree. Where now is the word for such intimacy? I know it still, but all I see are jungles burnt of our rarest trees. My point is: it takes a while to say, “I am a fire hazard,” or, “a household of rare birds” is another way to say tree. I wrote one draft of this poem, then she died. Will I forget her name, Hasna Henna? Let’s smell a tree; night-blooming jasmine, o-so-heavenly! A sapling succeeds by flourishing from a tree’s seed. How else to perfume these needs we breathe? A sapling of course = a small and soft tree (i.e. baby tree). I grieve the rice she fed me off a palm leaf. Only now can I fully marvel: how finely formed is a tree! Someone I loved said to stop with the oceans in my poems —  well, oceans + oceans + oceans! We drown so many trees. (Night blooming tree = baby tree = once and future tree.) Lately, all I think about are trees. Read this again to replace tree with refugee. Tarfia = joy in the margins + one who lies to protect trees.
Whenever folks discuss finding themselves, ya get kinda giggly. Maybe b/c ya found yrself considering yr Armenian love who preferred ya in both corset and bindi, and it was for her ya begrudgingly waxed yr jungle-scabbard    ...    Ya find yrself in the fret of reclamation via musks all motherland-misty (coconut milk, marine accord, mimosa tree). Last weekend, ya found yrself in leggings to argue again with yr Dominican love over the tender texture of Texas tamales. Ya not-so-secretly want to find yrself in a garden kissing a risk- taking party until ya feel as good as a half-price smoothie. Somehow, identity never finds ya kohl-eyed in magenta blooms photographed by a mixed-race admirer on a humid evening, mostly b/c yr too busy galaxy-gazing to be anyone’s so-fair-and-lovely. Was that a touch of pride or self-pity? Probably. But ya just can’t deal with another stranger’s surprise at yr love of both tequila and mango lassis. Does yr Guyanese love truly expect ya to replace the chicken & fish in yr diet with mushrooms that arbitrarily? You’re so black, yr told pretty frequently. Ya don’t know what to make of it: humanity. Ever find yrself advised by Bangladeshi Brooklynites? Like they know yr bae Poetry! Loves, let’s stop projecting insecurities. But maybe it’s like when ya tried to be cheerful after a famous poet called ya Debbie Downer for mentioning the hurricanes in yr other sovereignty? Never don’t find yrself coring what music can be cleaved from a dull language into an anomalous nationality. A personal theory: we all behave oddly around fat titties. Now here Poetry comes to say she wants to be an ode to what is muddy. OK, baby. Here’s to dank difficult borders, gardens of ingrown perennials, fractured fins, the wings of inner menageries. Here’s to our own empires of dirt — no one’s pruned-perfumed colonies of exotic beauty. This is not a poem! Or is it an efficient exercise in surviving hysteria?
pyramidal, its certain form certain it is a form wittgenstein or anyone can think of a stag in their mind but not be able to shoot that stag and where is all that everlovin antimatter that matter supposedly co-creates? at the end of the dream, the poem at the end of everything what else, the end sighs sor juana the doors have an 11-minute song called ‘the end’ which feels serious when you are 11 and stupid six or eight months later nor did I offer up my own dream which was a meadow in my cup meadowtation ha ha ha the ship kissed the sands of galenic shores at the buttressed end of my dream where spectacles do not fear to interpose long fallen out of  the mouth of vishnu so long gabriel so long usen now the instrument of my reflection no longer necessary since the inside is the out and I’ve jiggered the mechanism such that my jacket’s always dry & clean & my cock is hard only when I want no more embarrassing sublunarities and my cunt is wet just as my lover thinks of fucking it cities appear golden to my gaze a figure empyreal arises in shadow long for this world aching on the threshold of my upturned arse and my one ways and means, lilified cloak enmaned w/ tresses, baldly dignified, the cloak was regal it did not speak, yet diogenes leapt on it, yet the trumpets pointed one direction entrained to a kind of roseate beam the same pink beam philip k. dick saw emanating from the fish necklace around the neck of that delivery girl he saw in his doorway after he’d had his wisdom teeth removed that same beam that triangulated w/ arcturus, aka alpha boötis, to flash up and hit it smack in the third eye till it and we and we are bent sobbing, having given up our library, having died of the plague and worse, having vowed never again to write w/ pen and ink having inscribed yo la peor, I the worst, in blood on the back of a dirty pamphlet, but oh what unmiserable mind is this no me miserum noli me tangere nothing miserable nothing touches me
something scrambled out of me at least I thought it was out of me it could have been into me very fast very sly dirty breath’d assassin spiders ants earthworms I witnessed being dissected by my brothers and crane flies I tried but never managed to capture whole such fey stupid wings and legs left drifting on walls mostly I was a witness mostly I’ve kept out of  the way with my hood zipped up to my chin what is the surest thing we know? that as we grow older we think less of killing things and more of coming back who knows where we acquire our knowledge from our mothers aunts perhaps they pass it on like a candle through an ancient pockmarked door something parenthetic like a clasp broken useless as a rotten wick a spider climbing the sublime coast of  your shoulders walking through those rooms again a web breaking on the back of  your hand
all you have to do    is show yourself     in case you hear us      we are so small         and fenceless in the shade     throw us a hook      when you can    touch the scribbled    child in the inferno  all you have to do  is show yourself a little    pin your dark    olive green parts  against the boulder
I.M. Ché Frye i  Kubla Ché, dreaming of ancient Egypt, ate his hyacinths and was marvelous. Wherever you are is what I’m meant to say. Before you beauty come, Dis crouching among the black basalt, kneading master’s soured linen, watching (bewatched) the great beaten gold litter borne by, deltoids sun-dewed stone, temples bronze & strong & in train in  thrall perpetual —   I am of a mind, daddy. Like, inside the blind-white cloth-of-gold, the scented, sweating box she sat in (think box, lock box) —  Phoenician forest, seeder of  known world’s every known green: malachite, sea-green jasper, chrysocolla, olivine —  & outside, too, other-handed, other- landed, in rainless, treeless Thebes, my dark knees tendered by two lands, rubbed bare by work & love —   Move the tombs to the cliffs of Beni Hasan. Send salt from the four lakes. She is Nefertiti, she shares the crown, she brings the single sun. You do not watch the sun. But in the Deeds of  Suppiluliuma she says she is fearful but there is no fear past true heresy, her beauty is clear of the next line & the next and that kind of  beauty is if not redemption the possibility of a separate resurrection.    (Am I not beautiful too?)  The miners are instructed: Find a vein, gouge it to the very end.   ii  Princeling Ché, wolfling Ché, fish- eyed prodigy, anabole, brother mine, all-beautiful boy, who’ll turn your pages now? The lines unfurled before you in your sleep, who sets them to song? I cannot. (All men have crowns and every crown can be broken.)  Were your senses mixed (blood shaking your heart — orange, with violet veins) or did hearing alone stay and go last, were your nostrils, at last, unblocked, your ears, at last, symmetrized, did you unravel first silence did you dream?  Maimonides says of Abraham it is not God he disobeys but Elohim; that in the bureaucracy of divine instruction the envoy fore the eyes supersedes the voice in the ear did they close your eyes, daddy? they must have closed your eyes (enucleate the globe, ligate the four recti, fix in formalin) for under the sole edict of sound  the son is killed.   iii  Of  your father we dare & do not speak.   iv  Wherever you are, you are not your death. You are not your cold body, your subclavian blood, your spine upon the body block that proffers up your organs, your humors pooled with gravity — you are abed in natron, my friend, you are forty days not in a metal slot but roused into the mirror world, the eastern fields of light, the father sun rayed gentle on the rushes & not the prosector but the jackal keeps your stomach & the falcon your intestines and your heart remains your heart is yours for you there are no more tests of   heart.   v  My friend, magnificent, across your empty desk they go on trading base metals & precious gems. They found flint in feldspar caves, below the first cataract, where single stones, actioned by wind, can mother a dune. They trade tin south to children of  the stars, mix alum with deep-red alizarin to dye, to delight them who are yet to learn the violence of  such charm  heart hanging in its bloodslick chamber heart gleaming in its rubied darkness  My husband, my god, my gold-mad son  lorn issue, dim & darling eyes flooding with natal sand, every night flooding my free past. What’s a queen know of this my babies in their sunless cease what’s a queen’s knees know but milk & crystalled honey her throat but subtle Mareotic wine sun smelted to gold, disced & sledding behind her  the whole world’s whole life given her to give —    vi  Look, the dreamer comes!  Was this what you sleep- conceived, this equal dialogue this black silt talk rife in death & germ all-mixing, estuarizing, high-banked along the flood’s go-down? (it lowers down its voices, the flood it helps me to think, blessed ram, of death as flood for in it all things high & low, fair & dun, flax & inlaid faience, free & liened & husbanded are leveled, meet, and proven in the engorged the enchafèd delta.)  I see it now. (The trick of death is that it keeps returning.) Lady of all women, they call me, they are all my children now. (Labors of my dim life.) I will prepare each part for them. (From the front, no back from behind, no face am I purged at last of the various envies?)  I will build a city for you.    (I will build a city for you.)   vii  Twenty years ago we were nineteen and already elegiac, we were future tensed & annealed, we were quenched in the dark peace of violent histories — Karnak, Babylon, Persepolis, Byzantium — the names alone (quarry our bones, convey us to Karnak) our names we preserved, bent to stave & strophe, accomplishing our envy, gathering our violence, we were altogether desire, (only ever) all we would be full of  imminence (light first, sun later) stayed, asituate, unforgiving.   viii  Now you are time’s but I say to you, Ché, in full mouth: We will be perfect. There will be a recognition. The skill has left your fingers, the dream your brainpan but time, too, is prospected by work (the lumen of the vein) (the schist afire through the rock) and humans, too, may burn like candles, their spines wicks, their feverdreams the sputting flames —   Work in the shadows. We will work in the shadows, the rest being the madness. Naughty naughty boy. Ward residuum. Hold to murmur, hold to method. You see? Time breaks along its faults, lays bare its jeweled fragments for those who love and work. It gives it all for free. It asks only reversion at the end. (And like, that end whereof we could not think thereof  (no questions asked) you spake & said, My father and you answered, Here am I, my son) O tell me — go, you go first (you went first) — what reason makes this right, what insupposable value, what excuse but ultimacy which all know to be the breath of evil?  I will build a city for you.   ix  About beauty they really got it, those masters: great wonders call for great suffering. The father straps down his son, carves along the throat’s chalked crease (signaling purpose), the slavers slough off infants into sand holes (streamlining, focusing the workforce), the queen conceives eternal city, she deracinates a people to upraise it with their bowed backs, mortar it with their warm, oxygenated blood sunk generations & contingency & opportunity cost gambling our own lives’ great gamble: that wrong, actioned by time, can be made soluble in art.  So, Volchénochëk, you may be absolved —  I tried & trying.   x  Listen, I want to say something to you. You arrived just in time. You told me they’re not better than us, you honored our sin, repaired my will, you were havoc in the trees, the dense infolding fire & its fuel at once (white fusion, wild usufruct) always your mind was the Emergency, always severaled, chording the upper & lower, equal & bonded in appetency, bonded always to mine.  This is a moment of children. Who cares who sees? (Who sees?) We scoff at faultless entropy, we strip the pith from the inner stalk, we count to three. Talk me into it, daddy (the first rolls were blank) oxidize this carbon black significance — heart of water — this red hematite & blue frit, these yellow ochres that every child knows enflesh the unreal sun —    xi  Put it another way: the ink gleams for three more words before it (and meaning) sets. In those three beats I must be thousand-faced, entelechied, liable, I must be totally told on —   in the middle of my life a myth, a tidal mouth, I am planted in bitter celery, in the phytolithic matrix all-possible clay I sense your slow impulsion all around me.  Heart’s lake, calendula on my fingers, laughter in the morning- golded reeds (shaking the papyrus), the scale in the wind that shakes the reeds, deus absconditus, the only gossip of the living, I miss you so much.   xii  Either we are eternal, with neither end nor beginning, or we are sprung from a single thing and proliferative — in either case death is not death (though time cannot but give form to suffering). Believe (if you must) as I must:  In all things moment.  In each thing everything.
In a new translator’s version of Genesis, there’s no Adam. No serpent. In paradise, I don’t bleed. Fig leaf-free girl,dear God, I say as we converse fluently without tongues, joined as two spice-drenched beloveds in a song of songs,could we please ask the gardener to plant a pomegranate grove by a stand of non-fruiting olive cultivars, which don’t bloom and aren’t so messy?
dear suicidehow is the war? is it eating?tell me of the girls chargingbackwards into dumb tidesdeath’s wet mouth lappingtheir ankles, knees, eyebrows.tell me of the sissies like drunkfireworks, rocketing into earthafterimage burned into river& cement memory.how is the war? does it havea wife? does she know howthe bodies got in her bed? dear suicidei know your real name.i bind you from doing harm.i enter the room like a germ.i say your name, it is my name.the walls cave around me like a good aunt.the window hums. the door rocks me.the dresser leaves to go make tea.the room knows my name.it binds us from doing harm. dear suicidewhere are you keeping my friends?every cup i turn over holds only air.i jimmy open a tulip expecting their facesbut find only the yellow heart.what have you done with them?yesterday i took my body offbeat it on the front steps with a broom& not one of themcame giggling out my skinyelling you found me!not one of them i called forwas already in my hand. dear suicideyou a mutual frienda wedding guest, a kindof mother, a kind of selflove, a kind of freedom.i wish you were a mythbut mothers my colorhave picked oceanover boat, have sentchildren to schoolin rivers. i known niggaswho just neededquiet. i seen youdance, it made me hard.i would not deny youwhat others have foundin the sweet mildewbehind your ear. i knowwhat happens when youask for a kiss, it’s alltongue, you don’tunlatch, you suckface until the bodyis gone. dear suicidethat one? i promised himi would kill for him& my nigga was my nigga& my word is my word.dear suicide, where are you?come see me. come outside.i am at your door, suicide.i’ll wait. i’ve offed my earrings& vaselined my face. i put onmy good sweats for this.i brought no weapon but my fist. dear suicideyou made my kin thin air.his entire body dead as hair.you said his name like a dare.you’ve done your share.i ride down lake street friendbareto isles of lakes, wet pairsstare back & we compareour mirror glares. fish scareinto outlines, i blarea moon’s wanting, i weartheir faces on t-shirts, little flaresin case i bootleg my own prayer& submit to your dark affair.tell me they’re in your care.be fair.heaven or hell, i hope my niggas all thereif i ever use the air as a stair.
She steps into La Roue de la Fortune movie theater off the Jersey Turnpike, buys a ticket, and so swiftly the waters roll above her instinctual visions: Plaza, Il Piazzo, creep of film over the sound of the wordspiano, purr, whisper across her neck, one door opens another, in the labyrinthine pitch to preserve order, the expulsion from Eden, the dark soda up her clear plastic straw, reels of rodents, popcorn, teenage workers, acne, blood and circulation turn to ice inside this mechanized paradise, where reality meets the sound of gardens growing past their makers’ dreams, growing strange and outrageous. She stops to check her phone and the phone lights up, Putin, Botox,Trump, the garden grows outward, up, to each side, the ghosts are simply plants who forgot to stop growing; they groan, shriek, quake, giggle, gurgle, stare, and point fingers at the living.I’m glad I’m in love, she thinks.
There was this bear cam on the Internet. It was pointed at a place called Katmai National Park, Alaska. A few years ago my friend sent me a link to it. I would watch it sometimes but I never saw any bears. Maybe it was bad luck because my friend said she saw bears. All I ever saw was the enormous river rushing and the tall pines in the background doing nothing. I mean, that was OK, of course. I loved the sound of the river and wind in trees and the sheer thrill that such a sublime nothingness could be witnessed like this. But I wanted to see a bear. It seemed even more thrilling to be typing in a cubicle and suddenly out of nowhere there’s a bear on your screen that maybe 50 other people in the world catch a glimpse of. Maybe they are on a break from Facebook or filling out a spreadsheet and BOOM, a bear. So I thought while I was writing this that I would just check the bear cam online and sure enough a fat bear is in the middle of the river eating a salmon right there in the Katmai National Park. I get up from my desk and tell my colleagues “You guys, come here!” and my colleagues come in my office but by the time they run in the bear crosses the river, or pixelated screen or whatever, salmon in his jaws and the only thing there is the river and trees and they say, “Sandra, this is boring,” and walk back to their own offices.
I was probably worst at selling weed —  robbed weekly, used too much of my own product, cut each bag with a dash of oregano —  but then I have to consider that summer Matty asked me to help him boost cars, his dad called me a liability —  too paranoid to be lookout, too shaky to use the slim jim, didn’t even know how to drive stick —  oh yeah, & let’s not forget that time Mo almost lost an arm after I convinced him to pay me twenty bucks to stitch his wound with fishing line instead of going to the hospital, or that time I convinced Aliyah to let me tattoo a cross on her ankle with a safety pin & a ballpoint —  & then there’s that time I swiped a Stentor from Carl Magee’s locker & tried to set myself straight by becoming a violinist, but of course, the noise complaints, the neighbors banging the portraits off the walls, the boys talking shit, calling me prodigy, fancy chink —  & I wonder if they’re still having a good laugh, like when they found out I wanted to be a poet & so they glued roses & violets to the hood of my Kia, & so maybe I wanted, for the first time, to prove them wrong, prove I didn’t belong there, & so maybe I made new friends —  friends who wrote poems, who sat around talking about poems, who went to school to study poems and lived in off-campus apartments where I crashed on nights I got too fucked up on white boy drugs to drive back to the Eastside, where, even without me, the rosin glow of junkers trace the block, where Mandy, three years sober, tucks the kids into bed, where Lee, first in his class, spray-paints the fleet of stolen bikes gold, where Andrew stands in the kitchen reading the Bible in the dim light from the microwave, where Nikki, years later, coming home after a double at Champps, calls to wish me a happy birthday, & I am, of course, too busy to answer — somewhere in a different time zone, at a swanky party celebrating a man I do not know, who just won an award for a book I have not read & the woman who smells of citrus, who’s been raving to me all night about how much she admires my work, excuses herself to use the bathroom, leaving, in the seat beside me, her open purse.
I know better than to leave the housewithout my good dress, my good knife like Excalibur between my stone breasts.Mother would have me whipped, would have me kneeling on rice untilI shrilled so loud I rang the church bells. Didn’t I tell you that elegance is our revenge,that there are neither victims nor victors but the bitch we envy in the end?
Too hot torest, I tossmy arms off the bed. My night-gown wet withsweat. I feel you — a sack ofscavenged skullson my chest — sippingthe salt frommy breasts. Imp. Incubus. Im-pulse. You andme like a mare that must bebroken inby breaking in- to. Tamed ishow fire isby giving itself something to destroy:it destroys it-self. But who can deter-mine what’s insideanother? What is riskedwhen we enter    ...    Caliper. Forceps. Scalpel. Oculus.Perhaps you’rethe wilderness that waits with-in me. Perhaps another mystery, I open beneathyou. Yoked. Harnessed.Paralyzed. At once a-wake and a-sleep. I nay. I knockover the kerosenelamp. Light of the rationalmind snuffed. Shadowof shadows. Because I can’tsee, I sense.Your thumb thrummingmy mouth. Acommand. Arch- angel. Visionof invasion.Insemination. My horseheart beatingwith yours.
i was mothered by lonely women some of  them wives some of them with plumes of  smoke for husbands all lonely smelling of  onions & milk all mothers some of them to children some to old names phantom girls acting out a life only half a life away instead copper kitchenware bangles pushed up the arm fingernails rusted with henna kneading raw meat with salt with coriander sweating upper lip in the steam weak tea hair unwound against the nape my deities each one sandal slapping against stone heel sandal- wood & oud bright chiffon spun about each head coffee in the dowry china butter biscuits on a painted plate crumbs suspended in eggshell demitasse & they begin i heard people are sayingi saw it with my own eyes [ ]’s daughtera scandal she was wearing [ ] & not wearing [ ] can you imaginea shame a shame
a girl buried to the chest in red earth her wrists bound beneath the soil with twine a crowd gathers to father her its infinite hands curved loosely around a stone small enough that no single throw is named as cause of death no single hand accountable to the blood the girl undaughter unnamed unfaced undone from the lineage her photographs pulled already from bookshelf from walls her father among the hands his pebble streaked with quartz the first to rise to carve the air & arc toward the girl the rootless tree faceless & erect & perhaps the stones twisting like fireworks the girl their nucleus rise & rise for a time opposite of rain opposite of  hail & perhaps the silence a beat too long & another another & then a rustling of  wings above the girl a flock thick mixed cloud of avifauna partridge & nightjar & golden sparrow & avocet & lapwing & every other sort of  plover & ibis & heron & gulls though the sea is far & to the north & the minutes pass & the girl is untouched & each bird in its beak tongues a stone    •  [what if  i will not die] [what will govern me then] [how to govern me then] [what bounty then on my name] [what stone what rope what man  will be my officer]
Even though it’s May & the ice cream truck parked outside my apartment is somehow certain, I have a hard time believing winter is somehow, all of a sudden, over — the worst one of my life, the woman at the bank tells me. Though I’d like to be, it’s impossible to be prepared for everything. Even the mundane hum of my phone catches me off guard today. Every voice that says my name is a voice I don’t think I could possibly leave (it’s unfair to not ask for the things you need) even though I think about it often, even though leaving is a train headed somewhere I’d probably hate. Crossing Lyndale to meet a friend for coffee I have to maneuver around a hearse that pulled too far into the crosswalk. It’s empty. Perhaps spring is here. Perhaps it will all be worth it. Even though I knew even then it was worth it, staying, I mean. Even now, there is someone, somehow, waiting for me.
ninety-nine names for my god though i know none for my [ ] a failing not of my deity but of my arabic not the language itself rather the overeager mosaic i hoard i steal i borrow from pop songs & mine from childhood fluency i guard my few swearwords like tinkling silver anklets spare & precious & never nearly enough to muster a proper arabic anger proper arabic vulgarity only a passing spar always using the names of animals i am not polite i am only inarticulate overproud of my little arsenal a stranger blows a wet tobacco kiss through the window of my taxi & i deploy my meager weapons [dog] [pig] [donkey] & finally my crown jewel i pass my tongue across my teeth crane my neck about the window & call [your mother’s ]
Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful. I should say something nice about the weather. I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls when I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches lift. Sure, I’ve hurt the ones I’ve loved by not paying attention. Not alone — never alone is a lesson I need to understand. It was you who said that. It’s you still. You who says, Look! You who points to the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron, who cups the minnow in your hands, who spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls the world with your absence. You who says, Look! & when I look, you are gone, replaced by the whitetail’s hind legs, fading into the bush.
I’ve stopped asking: ¿Why?  I’ve let a man whistle  from the table for more beer, & brought it to him  with a smile. I’ve slapped a man & ran  while he laughed —   atrevida. I’ve had a miscarriage. I’ve let a man  kiss me after an abortion  & comforted his hot tears. I’ve done these things,  while other girls work in maquilas  piecing together Dell computer boards,  while other girls work in brothels,  & cake foundation across their bruised arms,  while other girls  ride the bus home alone  at night, every night, while other girls are found  wearing clothes  that don’t belong to them, or no clothes at all. I’ve done all of this  while other girls are found  with puta  written in blood across their broken bellies.  My mother used to cover my eyes  when we’d walk by girls working the corner,  & say:  See how lucky you are,not to have to work  like they do? I have been  muy puta,  have been called puta.Yes, I’d say, very lucky.
goodbye city. goodbye stoop. goodbye rush hour traffic plume. goodbye feminist qpoc weed delivery group. goodbye cheap noodle spot on the corner. goodbye drag bar next door serving the messy deep into the dead eggplant evening. goodbye drunks screaming about literally nothing below my window. goodbye window & all it’s seen & forgiven. goodbye urine stains talking shit between parked cars. goodbye stars erased from the polluted heavens. goodbyegetting my steps in. goodbye highway streaked red & white with shipments of grapefruit trucked in by the refrigerated crateful. goodbye angels dressed in thrifted robes. goodbye locusts — i’ll see you in a decade or so. i’m beguiled by & guided by goodbyes : meaning go ye with god : meaning ghost-flushed & godless : meaning guided by some guy away. who cares who? some new charon who smiles big as a river. who rivers big as i ferry with him toward death. the city you’re in now will never be the city you live in again. the ferryman with his good bile smiles good with his good will toward men. with his good guiding arm. no need for goodbyes when i got this phone where i can visit both my living and my dead. good grief. what’s my root for all this avoidance? for never saying peace to anyone’s living face? for this foolish and footloose decree? my casual excuses for slipping out the back door before the party gets lit? must be the  jew in me. this blood doctrine. my family who survived what i cannot write, never said goodbye, only, i’ll see you again soon. the stories we carried are the only country i’ll pledge my sword to, guiding me even now toward the safety of strange men’s rooms through cruisy city parks. exile is an heirloom. plant your sneakers in the garden so as not to bury your children in the backyard. goodbye park bench. goodbye best friends. goodbye graffiti at union & metropolitan that reads godbye krewl world written moments before that poor girl leapt out into the electric commuter dark. when god closes a door, he bolts it —  god the comptroller : god the poorly contoured : god the slumlord. boards up the building before you can flee the house. gone the orator. gone the forest. gone the morgan stop bookshop before i even moved here. everywhere was better before humans came and gave it language. god the skyline’s remarkable this time of day — light tricked through the carbon in the atmosphere. god even the leaves are changing and going away. god the rivers flooded with factory waste and the air’s been replaced with arrogance. my therapist wants closure, but i ghost the session. i text, transition from one state of matter to the next. goodbye city. goodbye stoop. when i moved you were already gone. a simulacrum. a worn photocopy of what brought us in by the refrigerated crateful and when i return you’ll be even further distorted, disoriented organism, a fourth mortgage, an organ exhausted by fingers, yet still at night anyone who sleeps in you’s bathed in gold. to all my dead, i’ll see you again soon. to all my living, let bygones be gone by the time you take this next breath. let’s live instead here, in this transitional state. the instant water evaporates. riding the trains below the city.
My mother is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my father, a limp in his walk, & my macho lost his green card at a bus station. I want words split letter for letter to turn sound into wisdom on my losses.   •   My macho says: Your skin is the color of milk, you glow between sheets. ¿Who gives more light: me, or the luna lunera? Too much milk makes you sick — drink, drink, cascabelera.   •   I want to leave my hembra behind. ¿What are my options? She bleeds on the rug, births a litter, then hides limp bodies in kitchen cabinets.   •   I lied. My father is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my macho, a limp in his walk, & my mother lost her green card at a bus station. Who these losses happened to matter to no one but me. To others, my loss is only worth its sum parts.   •   I pour a shot to get the flies drunk. Watch their little legs stagger. I like the flies tipsy, like my macho likes me when I am glazed on the kitchen floor, begging him not to leave me.   •   Come kill me over the stove, under the running shower head, gravel my skin bloody. I am so afraid one night my macho will choke me to death, though I am not afraid of dying.   •   My macho says: Hembra, I imagine the woman I love when I’m with you, but you’re not that woman. I ask: Who is she? My macho says: Cállate, take off your dress. Each of   his fingers strokes death. I only want to die. So I die, una y otra vez.
With statements by President Donald Trump I write my body, as border betweenWe have some bad hombres here this rock & the absence of water.& we’re going to get them out. I cut myself with a scimitar,When Mexico sends its people, as political documentation.they’re not sending their best. How do you write about the violenceThey’re not sending you. of every man you’ve ever loved?They’re sending people Macho, youthat have lots of problems breathe bright in the neocolony,& they’re bringing those problems to us a problem of Empire pullingThey’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing the capitalist threads of my border.crime. They’re rapists. Empire: you were so sterileMexico’s court system [is]corrupt. & shiny with your dead man’s coinsI want nothing to do with Mexico & castration, your white rosesother than to build an impenetrable & that trash bag full of a MexicanWALL & stop them from ripping woman’s dark hair. Empire: youoff U.S. I love the Mexican people, made us hungry for the glintbut Mexico is not our friend. of machismo, the dim glareThey’re killing us at the border of marianismo. Tonight on TV,& they’re killing us on jobs & trade. muted montages of the largestFIGHT! Happy #CincodeMayo! ICE raid in Texas. I drinkThe best taco bowls are made pink champagne in a hotel bar,in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! & correct the pronunciation of   my name.
Unlike the monarch, though the asteroid also slipped quietly from its colony on its annular migration between Jupiter and Mars, enticed maybe by our planetary pollen as the monarch by my neighbor’s slender-leaved milkweed. Unlike it even when the fragrant Cretaceous atmosphere meteorized the airborne rock, flaring it into what might have looked to the horrid triceratops like a monarch ovipositing (had the butterfly begun before the period broke off). Not much like the monarch I met when I rushed out the door for the 79, though the sulfurous dust from the meteoric impact off the Yucatán took flight for all corners of the heavens much the way the next generation of monarchs took wing from the milkweed for their annual migration to the west of the Yucatán, and their unburdened mother took her final flit up my flagstone walkway, froze and, hurtling downward, impacted my stunned peninsular left foot. Less like the monarch for all this, the globe-clogging asteroid, than like me, one of my kind, bolting for the bus.
The way to the toy store was blocked by a fallen tree in the road. There was a policeman directing traffic down a side street. I asked him, “What happened?” He said, “Lightning in the night.” I took the turn and drove down the street looking for a way to turn back. Other streets were blocked by fallen trees, and I couldn’t find a way back to the toy store. I kept driving and soon I was on the outskirts of town. I got on a highway and drove, soon forgetting the toy store and what I was supposed to get there. I drove on as if I was hypno- tized, not noticing the signs for turnoffs. I must have driven a couple of hours before I woke up, then I took the next exit and had no idea where I was. I drove down a straight tree-lined lane with farm houses on either side. There was a lake at the end of the lane. I pulled over and parked. I got out and started walking. There were several docks along the shore. I walked out on one and watched the ducks swimming and diving. There was something bobbing in the middle of the lake. I stared at it for a long time before I realized it was a man’s head. Then, a moment later, it was a coconut. No, it was an old tire floating right side up. I gave up and started following the ducks. They would suddenly fly up and circle the lake and come down and splash land again. It was quite entertaining. A man walked up behind me and said, “This government lake is off-limits to the public. You’ll have to leave.” I said, “I didn’t know it was a government lake. Why should it be off-limits?” He said, “I’m sorry. You’ll have to leave.” “I don’t even know where I am,” I said. “You’ll still have to leave,” he said. “What about that man out there?” I said, pointing to the tire. “He’s dead,” he said. “No, he’s not. I just saw him move his arm,” I said. He removed his pistol from his holster and fired a shot. “Now he’s dead,” he said.
Mitzy fell asleep as soon as we got home, but I didn’t. The evening had upset me. Why did Jack keep asking me if I’d been married before? And why did my answer not satisfy him? It was probably just a bad joke. Jack’s humor is off sometimes. But he’s not a bad guy. Well, then I went to bed. When we woke up in the morning Mitzy said, “Jack was right about you, wasn’t he?” “What do you mean?” I said. “Jack said you were kicked out of the Army,” she said. “I was never in the Army, how could I be kicked out?” I said. “I don’t think he likes me.” “Oh, I think Jack likes you a lot. He just wishes you were more interesting,” she said. “And by making me secretly divorced and secretly kicked out of the Army I’m instantly more interesting, is that it?” I said. “According to Jack you are,” she said. “I think we had better have breakfast,” I said. “Good idea,” she said. During breakfast I said, “Don’t you think I’m interesting?” “Of course I do, honey,” she said. “Let’s forget it. I mean, Jack is an old friend. Maybe he was just drunk,” I said. “That’s probably it,” she said. “What are you going to do today?” I asked. “I’m thinking of buying a new dress for the wedding,” she said. “What wedding?” I said. “You know, Carol and Bob’s wedding, next Saturday,” she said. “Oh God, I forgot all about it,” I said. “How could you forget? Bob’s your best friend,” she said. “I know, I just had my mind on other things, but now I’ll focus on their wedding, I promise,” I said. Shortly after that Mitzy left the house. I cleaned up the breakfast dishes, then sat down on the couch. Why had Jack told the two secrets I had told him years ago. I had sworn him to silence, and now everybody knew. I had told him I would kill him if he ever told anybody. I wasn’t going to kill him, but I did think about disappearing, just vanishing altogether. Where would I go? What would I do? And I do love Mitzy. I could tell her the truth. I’ve had eighteen years to do that, and not a squeak so far.
My wife and I were spending a quiet night at home. She was reading a magazine on the couch and I was reading my novel in my chair. I said, “Darling, can I fix you a cup of hot chocolate?” She said, “That would be great.” So I got up and went into the kitchen and started to boil the milk. A few minutes later I handed her the cup. “Hmmm, smells great. Thank you, darling,” she said. I sat down and resumed my reading. She said, “Did you know a tiger has the same number of bones in it as a monkey?” “I don’t believe it,” I said. “And a whale has the same number as a mouse.” “Get out of here,” I said. “These are some little known facts discovered by a man named John D. Baxter,” she said. “He must be crazy,” I said. Then we were quiet for a while. I looked over and she was asleep. I went on reading my novel. Then I put my novel down and got up and started to tiptoe around the house. I went into our bedroom and over to the dresser. I opened up Mitzy’s jewelry box and let the jewels run through my fingers. There were some fantastic pieces in there, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. I thought about stealing some, but felt creepy about it. I put them back in the box and tiptoed back into the living room. I tripped on the coffee table and went crashing down. Mitzy woke with a start. “Go back to sleep,” I said. “What was that?” she said. “I tripped, that’s all,” I said. She started to get up. “Where are you going?” I said. “I want to look in my jewelry box,” she said. “Why?” I said. “I dreamed somebody was trying to steal something in there,” she said. She went into the bedroom and looked in the box, then came out. “It’s okay,” she said. “Well, I’m glad,” I said. She got back on the couch and picked up her magazine. “Did you know jellyfish have bigger brains than humans?” she said. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “Well, they do. It says right here,” she said.
I told the doctor I wouldn’t be seeing him again. “No, I guess you won’t,” he said. I walked out the door feeling really good. Of course I knew I was going to die, but still the day looked bright to me. I walked down to the water. Ducks were circling around and about. A sailboat sailed by. I walked along the shore. The sun beat down on me. I felt as though I might live forever. I sat down on a bench and watched the joggers pass. A pretty blonde walked by and I said, “Hello.” She looked at me and said hello. A man with a greyhound on a leash walked by. I got up and started to walk. A woodpecker was pounding on a tree. An airplane flew over, leaving a thick trail of smoke. I left the lake and walked on up the road. I crossed at the streetlights and crossed the bridge. A car swerved to miss me. I thought, that could have been it, the end right there, but I walked on, bravely dodging the cars. When I got to the residential district, I felt relieved. There were large elms and maples overhanging the street, and people pushing baby carriages. Dogs ran loose everywhere. A man stopped me and asked if I knew where 347 Walnut Street was. I said I didn’t. He said, “Oh well, it didn’t matter anyway.” I said, “Why?” He said it was a funeral notice. I walked on, bumping into a fat lady with a load of groceries. I said I was sorry. She kept going, dropping a load of grapefruit. Then, further on, there was a giant explosion across the street. Police and firemen were there right away. It appears it was a gas main beneath the shop. No one was there, luckily, but the firetrucks had their hands full. I left before it was out. The shop was pretty much destroyed. When I got home I was tired. I made myself a cup of tea and sat down on the couch. I thought about calling my mother, but she was in heaven. I called her anyway. “Mom, how are you doing?” I said. “I’m bored. Don’t come here. There’s nothing to do,” she said. “Aren’t there angels?” I said. “Yes, but they’re boring,” she said. “But I was going to come see you,” I said. “Go to hell, it’s more exciting,” she said. I had fallen asleep with my teacup in my hand. When I awoke I realized I had thought it was a phone. My mother would never be so sarcastic about heaven.
What would the lovely Yang Guifei, concubine to the emperor, a Helen of China, have made of our gleaming grocery stores, always awash in berries, melons, tangerines? Her passion for lychees, rushed north by a chain of horsemen, laid waste to a dynasty. She must have understood, at least upon the deadly finale, the cost of transporting food so fragile over so many li for pleasure, not necessity, while the kingdom faltered. History wants a great beauty to undermine a ruler through human weakness. And who of highest power would deny his most-loved mistress her longing for a flavor available briefly, far away? There’s something classical about her appetite, about the chain of sweating couriers, thirsty, fearful of bruising the delicate fruit. It proves how far we’ve come, those tiny stickers with PLUs and far-flung nations of origin so common, we decry the waste. The good peasants of antiquity always ate locally, if at the cost of variety, and under tyranny. Neither they nor we would refuse a bunch of ripe lychees in December. Neither they nor we get to choose who would eat humbly, who like an emperor.
begins in dirt, clumps of Queen Anne’s lace, bindweed unfurling its moons in the morningto start somewhere to perform one’s certain act of  failure begins as still life with foliage and road one man with a shovel, digging one measure-full of map, a clump resting heavy on his blade one woman in a house up the grade laboring at a washbasin, her hands pinked raw, her mind worrying some idea east to west, passing it through every state her imagination has to offer begins with her view: blot of man in grass landscapeto throw one’s sorrow throw one’s lonely sorrow like a clod of dirt to the sky begins with the sound of rustling, dried stalk against stalk in wind whipped up by the motion metal makes through place and you, love, in the passenger seat with muddy boots and what’s native to your veins the window rolled down, the hand making waves and me admitting: I am that woman, I am that womanmake us thread and lace us let us be a vessel holding everything together silence to silence, thwap upon thwap of fence posts gauging speed then Briza maxima, big quaking grass rattling a car towing a car with a hitch-line the shock of scotch broom in a ditch giving order, yellowing the scene, 
defining margin and median the blocks of who lives where, the borders of recognizable plots we create when we wake, we create in our wake networked, but not in the way General Pershing displayed his blueprint 
for defenseto weave our fingers strong as rope to bond with knots something other 
than a nation begins with the defenseless, the redlined neighborhood thought less than the dips and curves and blinker’s blitzing through the dark we feel in the heart, centrifugal force and we ride: no destination, no end to the turning ego, its fuel of insecuritiesto be moving and acting and weaving through space the trace of our being here, tattooed in asphalt like the body’s Blaschko lines made visible a pattern, a pattern manifest, the way we were madeyour palm look at your palm look at all the connections you hold in your hand
Translated from the Japanese The square in the square in the square in the square in the square. The square circle of the square circular motion of the square circular motion. The person who sees through the smell of the soap of the blood vessels that the soap passes through. The earth made in imitation of the globe made in imitation of the earth. Castrated socks. (Her name was words) Anemia cells. your expression is also like the legs of a 
sparrow. The enormous weight that drives itself toward the diagonal of the 
parallelogram. The eastern autumn that welcomes the fragrance of coty unmoored from spring in marseille. Mr. Z’s vehicle cruising the clear sky like a bird. It says Roundworm Medicine. Rooftop garden. The young mademoiselle imitating a monkey. The formula for a falling body speeding straight through the curved straight line. Two wet bits of dusk pressed as xii on the dial. The greeting from the fitted door from inside the canary in the 
birdcage in the door inside the door. The male or female friends who arrive at the entrance to the cafeteria split apart. A sugar cube with black ink spilled on it is carted atop a tricycle. Military boots stepping on a business card. Fake nasturtium that runs through the town. The people who went down from above and up from below and down from above and up from below are the people who did not go up from below nor down from above nor up from below nor down from above. The bottom half of that woman is like the top half of that man. (I am one who mourns the chance meeting of sadness.) A square case starts walking (that is a strange thing). The goodbye that rises up near the radiator. Rain outside. Group migration of luminescent fish.
I am unhappy about your description of my life as dull. It is dull but I dislike you using the word dull. If I could I would unhook the receiver from the wall and place it on your dirty mouth. I don’t feel able to elucidate. If you hadn’t known the German for lose/lose, if you hadn’t the face of Dürer as Christ in Self-Portrait of Dürer as Christ
If all the dead exist in the underworld, does the underworld occur outside of time, what does that mean for your father, through what magic will you locate your father who has only just arrived, has always only just departed, only just deported, did you don a suit and loiter on the highway your hands gripping a giant gilt-framed photograph of him and what questions did you interview at all who passed those vampires and angels you encountered, can you state for the record the moan you heard the ghosts emit across the nation-state,,, wuaahh buu,,, did you perform three miracles for a virile hag a witch with universes for eyes and did you request in barter a single boon his location or did you unlock his location using a skeleton, are we all a line assembled from white keys of death and is this song the sonata we hear when we press those keys, was your tool to search for him a wishbone, did you slice the wishbone from the breast of a monstrous old god, who was the god, what was his username, was it one of the ghost-giants you fled from terrified that he may have glimpsed even a shred of you, was it the famished god who grabs small ghosts to its mouth and slurps down their marrow, was it a devourer whose fingerprints leak out red tears in hysterical shame, was it Francisco Pizarro, was it King Leopold, did you see Joe Arpaio levitating each leg borne aloft by flying police cars, did you see Winston Churchill that infant-faced faminist turning loose new Emergencies, was it Andrew Jackson mounting a scorpion across that moist trail this pilgrimage for creating new ghosts, did the ghosts cry out wwuu wah,,,,,,,,, how did you kill the god, is revolutionary politics the name for deicide,, a wa wa,,,, is the translation for that moan “god grief!” did you slay the god with smallpox or pistols, hemlock or Maxim, London debt or land grants or fantasies or plague blankets or kryptonite, was it patricide, did you pry your fingers into his rib cage, did you hold the bone’s moist handles up into the sky and poke that plump cloud with your dowsing rod, did the stick sniff out your father from this city of ghosts until this wet rod twitched, until the witching stick tugged you through hell’s alleyways, until you arrived here at this modest house, what category of building is the house that contains your father, until you found a prison, until you found a shadowless space where he waited underneath a star, is death the story of until, is death the story you came to untell, did the light emit a silence like hssssssshs, this light the star wept—was it a message from the past strewn across black heaven, an emergency beacon from a plague universe calling help help from masters and money, what sound do you hear arrayed against you (here the ghost chorus leaps and screams keke keke!), did the star halt above that house like a police chopper spotlight, basking its blue heat on your skin, was this when the star’s strange beams obliterated your shadow, did you cry no please my shadow is all I have here, did you say without my shadow I am a ghost, without my shadow I have no history, how did you feel when the star cried and wailed down its weep-light in fragile pink lineaments, did you see the star throned above where your father may be waiting, is your father the king who sleeps in a cave beneath the city or does his life continue in this mute house, is he washing the dishes as we speak, is he talking on the phone in that loud way of his, is he watching a K-Drama while eating 牛 肉 麵, did he clip the soup’s recipe from that most authentic of sources Gourmet magazine, had you bought him the subscription for his birthday and was his reply to you months later, “Fine, these French can cook but take away butter and they don’t know how to do anything,” (hahahahaha say the ghosts) was that many years ago now in fact probably a decade, did you just glance down at your wristwatch to show how many days are left in your very own life, do the manic watch hands ratchet around like helicopter blades chuh chuh chuh, were you given this watch from your future self that renegade timelord, do you have the time, is time something one can possess or does it soar away from us on outspread wings, but doesn’t Dōgen say that time does not fly since it does not exist outside of us, is it impossible to exist outside the underworld, did you open the front door to the house and see the living room from your childhood, the white Naugahyde couch preserving the dark halo that he cast when he dozed off during his hair dye, the cubic light of a TV luminous solely from VHF, and framed by the window: a blue Honda, car of his youth!,,, these nostalgic recreations do they make you wonder if you had somehow time traveled to a coordinate outside of the underworld, traveled to the past, or would it be more accurate to say that we are already inside the underworld, that the apocalypse is not a spectacle but what elapses as we speak, what does it mean to speak,, ha ha blah blah blah,,,, did you tour the house of memory saying nothing, did you find the doors to each room shut, all handles locked, is this how your waking brain prohibits all fantasies, is it true that they have outlawed dreams, who is they, did you come to your bedroom door and open your wallet to take out your key, did you see on a dollar the face of an evil god, did Andrew Jackson wink at you from the currency and bare his fangs hsss sa sa,,,,,,, was this when the five dollar bill singed you, did the sign of the apocalyptic populist ignite and burn out the grooves from your fingerprints, how loud did you holler shocked, did your wallet keep falling into the floor and never stop, did the floor wobble like a trampoline, did a menacing voice laugh and say on god’s intercom here is your shadow catch, did you fall through the hole in the carpet, did you land in one of the old sewers and in the distance see someone sleeping on a stone slab, was it a body curled to the side uncovered by any blanket, did you talk on the phone with the woman from the ambulance, was it true that your sister and your stepmother saw his body covered only with a sheet, did the woman tell you what she had seen and do you remember telling her “You have a terrible job—you must tell everyone that the one they love has died,” did you recognize her when you entered this place and saw the Recording Angel, is the occupation of that archivist of prayers: writer, did the sleeping figure roll back as though on an airport conveyer, do the walls of the cave inch closer to strangle you, is the underworld a prison since those who enter it have no right to return, who will rescue you, who will rescue you now that you have lathered yourself with cave, is it true that you have forgotten how to breathe, did you aspire to be as breathless as the ghosts who populate this place or did you just have a bad day, would you like to stop, would you like to stop and catch your breath huh huhh huh, did you simultaneously call your expression narcissism and your restraint self-loathing, doubly self-damning, have you been given permission to forgive yourself, shall you ask the mirror Uncle what ails thee, what about your dowsing rod, will you wish for water, wish for air, witch for heir, did you tap your bone wand to the gray rocks repressing you, did the earth and its baroque caverns transpire into the simple night about you, did you look down through the wind from a ship sailing dark heights, did you find the ship’s steadiness strange given that nothing supported you above sky and city, well is the air nothing, was it the Maya who said that soul was simply breath, is the soul nothing, what if you crept into the airship’s spacious caverns and saw not helium but a palace of flowers, what if the entire vessel had been borne up by the exhalations of flowers their breath tasting sweet into the air, what if this was the world, what if you lived on a planet that had grown itself from the souls of flowers, did you once believe that grief was the philosopher’s stone whose touch silenced all spacetime into dark matter, on Sunday did you meet a man at the market who had returned to Haiti the day before the earthquake, did he tell you what that taught him, was the lesson to quit his job and love his daughter and begin afresh, did he remind you that you imagine the world for your child, is the poet what we name the vocation of love and freedom, on that first summer day in March did your child’s grandparents text you Christos Anesti, did you sit yourself down in the airship’s aisles unsuspended by clouds and float in the silver air, buoyed by nothing so magical as resurrection, did you take a deep breath and accept an in-flight complimentary beverage, did you gaze out the window at the spill of stars and think no not stars, the lights of the city, each one lit by a soul below?
In a dream my dad fell  from the top of a steep white mountain  down into a blue crevasse  like the space between two waves  where the light shines through just enough  to tell you  you will miss this life dearly.  The falling took years.  I could hear him moving through air and then finally nothing.   In another dream my dad was an angel  his see-through body dangling in the air  floating above me face shimmery like tinfoil  and I cried and cried when he told me  I can’t come back to earth now not ever.  When my dad told me  You will always be my daughter  maybe it was like that.  Will I be allowed to come back to earth  and be your son?
We come to the city; we embrace the pantheon, but they dream of their one and only god. They want to be villagers again. Just when you began to distinguish the sound of your history from its echo, they want to be villagers again. You must not kill their sacred animal; you must give up your taboo for theirs for they want to be villagers again. Sunlight and shadow is what made this rose, you say, a god who could not have arisen elsewhere but they want to be villagers again. The twist in your tongue is the river’s song. It’s how your feet walk now, how your fingers strum, but they want to be villagers again. The dusk of their coffee, their muddy water booze, the herb of life shooting out of the impeccable concrete, but they want to be villagers again. You point to salt escaping the sea’s hold— a vision of a tundra reclaiming the desiccated grass, but they want to be villagers again. You build terraces for the ancient woods to breathe, but haunted by maggots eating their dead bullock—the speed of light is always late—they’ve become villagers again.
Sabratha He started out making feluccas; an Egyptian taught him how. Then he opened a shop by the beach, sold ice cream, parasols and chairs. He asked for my hand when I was in teacher college, first year. Time passes like the Ghibli here. I was 7 months with my third baby when someone sought him for a Zodiac. He traveled all the way to Guangzhou, brought back a dozen, has been selling them ever since. One night I asked how strong they were, how many they carry. “It’s all in the booklet,” he said, “no reason for what keeps happening to them.” He sipped from a glass of bokha and explained how from this same jetty, long before the Arabs and Vandals, even before the Romans and their famous theater, boats filled with people and goods and sailed off. A day or a week later, the sea sends back the drowned. His long-lashed eyes closed when he spoke, his face unchanged by the years. His fingers moved so carefully putting out his cigarette. He saw me looking, nodded, then pulled me toward his manhood to help him sleep.
ONE The First Invention, ear laid to earth, is listening to the fingerlength underground beings moving in segments through tiny tunnels; one inch shrugs out another, as bamboo climbs in segments, joint by green joint ... Or an inexpressive mask that must travel the world, uphill and down, always keeping its own counsel, impelling  forward from inward— unspelling a logic that cannot look out or see. Or a thought that recurs, till one wonders whether Bach’s theme, without cause, or pause, is like a cat in a night-closet, the cat evenly leaping from level to level; the theme that sinks down into one hand, next leaps to the other, reprises itself, then doubles down softly, a counterpane on a shelf. SIX Have you ever noticed, in Piranesi’s Carcerid’invenzione, the tiny repeating figures in the foreground? Brittle, frugal, fugal, they ignore that above them stairways rise out of sight, and somewhere else collapse, in-swallowed, devolving through walls or domes. The same way Bach’s motive splays out to the right, swoons flatly, swans it, footnotes, follows up, talks to itself, purls, mutters, dawdles, resumes ... Six is playing at infancy, one three five, that’s all Baby knows, a block pile clumsily building. Then the tall chord falls sideways—pretends it’s a melody—everyone knows it’s a chord— or a problem in long division which at one point just sticks on that endless, that déjà vu decimal, six six six ... ELEVEN Eleven is caterpillars, two, marching: the one stave of thick-barred sixteenth notes set down precisely beneath the other, tiptoe to toetip, close-clinging, rising and falling and mirrored: one looks down and locks the other’s horns, or its own; the two could be said to be linked like the locked yet endlessly out-spiraling spindled ribbons of DNA. Yet there’s something scary, like Cicero’s dizzying concept of motus animi, hurtling mind unstoppably inventing figures on figures, yet with no vanishing point, a world of ladders or stairwells where space keeps revolving, welling up into space endless, unfree, unfolding like stairs in a case.
slate 1    slate 2    slate 4
Once & could-be-future girl, believe we’re not like you. Sure, the pickup was tucked in dusk, shed all carefree w/ its sunburn shimmer. Still nothing new to say about the creek, how reeds get moony, or when we saw pelicans hold hands & gossip. But y’all must wanna get this close to soft, so here goes: spool heels, silver sleeves w/ pink accents, kind to stifle the trailer static, same color Dot says Granny passed in. Past since good & we did keep her pearls for you, kissed the hems holy, darned the moth marks back to true. Goes: none of it imitation. Goes: we are her barefoot bloodline, butter in the salt pan. Trust you’re not from this sweat but still a goodness. You once most only boy in the yard, laugh into your born polish. Step-joy, uncousin: home is a name you bless in silk & cinch. Believe we’re all alive here. Come hum this lace blood-warm. Glisten.
[For J.A.] After the wind just stops you still hear the wind’s wild almost, its approach and retreat, and how it kept circling as-if-trying, as if about-to-be, an almost-speech, loud and full of syntax casting about for life, form, limit, fate. To be bodied. To strut. To have meaning. How easily we wear ourselves as if it is nothing to have origin, whirl, outcome, end and still be. After the high winds stop you’re forced to hear the freshness of what’s there. It smacks, shimmers—this sound of the scarcely there, the adamantly almost, all betweens, sub-­ siding till adjustment—and then the re-blanketing evenness sets in ... Gone all that acceleration shooting up and back, futurist, wild with naming and naming its one price. Oh nothing holds. Just the rattling of the going and coming together of things, as if matter itself is trying to find something true to say—crazed investigation, tentative prophecy trying on savage shape, figure, progression—widening without be- coming. Is this the last war now, finally—but no, only more of notion’s motions—more more the wind says, break grief, loosen possibility, let vague hopes float, sink—let other debris slip into their place. Rootless mind. Shallow whirling of  law and more and yet more law brocading the emptiness. Then suddenly all stills. It is near noon. No more spillage. No more gorgeous waste of effort. No more upgathering, out-tossed reachings of green as if imagining some out there exists—hovering inhalations, then as-if-hiding, then all coughed-out at once in a tumble—
too much, too many, disconcerted, uncountable. Yet no dream ... After the wind stops you hear fact. You hear fact’s plan. It is huge. The tree does not escape. Things are finished forces. You hear a name-call from far off, tossed, dropped. Someone gives up. Light rips here from there. Where birdcalls cease, you hear the under- neath. Try living again day’s long pitched syllable-ooze hums after the high winds stop & your final footprint lifts off & no matterhow cleanyou want it to be nothing is ever going to be gone enough. Oh. Oak, show us up. Indecipherable green sound us. Stilled leaf-chatter quiver up again, rustle the secret rule we’ll never catch in time. To be late is to be alive. This Sunday. All things are mention of themselves—as the dog barks, the air conditioner scours its air—and each thing takes its place. But look, keenly, adamantly a road has appeared—a sense that something is happening striates the open air—there is a limping in the light, a tiny withdrawal of light from light, which makes a form in the gully—you haven’t changed much it says—children still appearing out of nowhere now, so violently heavy with life, they dart, they breed, you be a ghost now the surrounding tunes up, as if it is all going to begin again, though this time without you standing here noticing.... So notice is given. The look on the light is that of an argument about to be made and won. Yes you were underneath history for this while, you were able to write the history of being underneath, you were able to disappear and make the rest appear. But now it wants its furious place again, all floral and full of appearance, full of its fourth wall, its silvery after-tomorrow, and ramping-up now quite a spectacular dusk. This page is turning. It is full of mattering. Our unrealized project glows in your mind. The animals lift their heads for an instant then back. New shoots in the parched field. All the details are important you think but no, even the ruins look like they might be fake—important but fake— though we must learn what they have to teach then push them back deep into the light. This is the way it is it murmurs, circling, out here in the middle of summer. Which summer was it which was the last of the summers. All the children are returned home. Day turns its windless folio. You stay it says. We pass here now onto the next-on world. You stay.
The language we currently use to describe ourselves is a form of Boolean algebra. I don’t want scars to remind me that I had to take a knife to this body in order to call it mine. I buy a dress shirt and I feel like a child again. It is a men’s size S and the cuffs go past my fingertips. A stranger mistook her left for her right and kissed me on the 
shoulder instead of her boyfriend. I hope we evolve into higher beings with 6 sexually dimorphic 
genders and needlessly complex sex. My parents watch a video of my nephew. They laugh and say he reminds them of me as a child. I watch the broad shoulders of the Asian man walking in front of me and feel euphoric. I don’t want to shoot up this body in order to call it mine. Would I prefer being a fairy in a dress or a butch dyke in menswear? This fear is habitual, unconscious, reflexive. My optometrist asks me, Number 3, or number 4?
Does realism get your vote? It gets mine. The plants with their insatiable thirst for appearances, the heart-stopping 7:00 p.m. air moonlighting as a pressed-cardboard Korean ashtray (server, modest coaster) decorated with a single blondish branch holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit (pear, plum, ripe peach) slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind flecked with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying size from pinpricks to ashes, pencil (it looks like) to brush. The romance of the windowpanes (I’m squinting a little) has nothing to do with the misguided view, the one with the Fates schmoozing under the maroon awning of the high-rise (schmoos is more like it) and the embarrassed-looking sycamores revealing for all they’re worth in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way, which 
contributes to the overall tone without detracting from the realistic participation, a motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it, which could be the key signature if not for a free-standing radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.
in the cornfield along with the husks and splintered baseball bats (I almost said smitten, as though late p.m. in October were the moon and not just a windy compound) and the risk-tolerant deer, woodchucks, crows, and occasional wild turkey all of which darken perceptibly but don’t stop. Reading stops. Like the active voice which the French use for weather (“Il fait ... ”) so the subject takes on a cloudy presence but no reference, sans agency sans intrigue sans whereabouts.
I sang all night for you, but you didn’t care. You were too sad. Little bird, 
I said to myself, you can’t bring anybody back, but maybe you can keep him here. I thought you liked my song. But I couldn’t tell now. You looked angry, but you stayed in the room where I sang. I inherited the song. Not from my parents. Not from my grandmother. My grandfather doesn’t sing. My song was mine and I thought you liked it. I thought you loved me. Now you showed no sign of loving anything. But you stayed in the room all night. The room was full of statues with coins under their tongues. I felt bad for building them. Some don’t even have names. Sylvia, Ian, Anne, Emily, Seb. You barely moved. Sometimes, you moved. Little bird, I told myself, little bird, pretending I was you, I love you. Please sing for me. I didn’t want you to leave. 
I kept singing.
We used to say, That’s my heart right there. As if to say, Don’t mess with her right there. As if, don’t even play, That’s a part of me right there. In other words, okay okay, That’s the start of me right there. As if, come that day, That’s the end of me right there. As if, push come to shove, I would fend for her right there. As if, come what may, I would lie for her right there. As if, come love to pay, I would die for that right there.
The thought of all the grass blown over to one side hurts me. That wind can do that. I must have gotten to him first though he pushed out against the little pouch in me I now call soulless. Of everyone I’ve met on earth I always find they got here first and will they teach me their good reason for staying? I would discipline a comet against my way of leaving, push it out of sky after sky and after every loss on earth the baby I was would come back. That’s what it means to be lovable, to give oneself whole again whole birth whole placenta whole breast whole milk whole fist whole flower but only what fits harmlessly whole in the mouth. The baby comes and goes, comes back to weed me of my body, feeds my bald birdies what’s not for me to know. I had hoped that all my animosity toward men would lead toward safety in one who would wake me before I hit the wooden world and rock me there to say what violence had not yet come.
Mortality is itself immortal Leo thought, reminded five years later of the performance. Having come, despite his Irish darkness, to resemble one of the Carrot clan himself. Whatever he had read, and the feelings that went along with those books, articles and poems, layered his unconscious now like lava. What was the voice of that moment, he questioned his uni-ball pen. The playing fingers, the singer, the wind that came in and made King Carrot pop his collar. As even the King’d say now, after Usher. Usher’ll die like everyone else but not for a few decades yet, touch head. Where Leo wandered as if streets were wild with flowers rather than construction Mortality was in memory: mortality was immortality even. Quotidian checking, marking, jogging things along (e.g. the economy) these are the columns and emojis of obituary. The privileged sublime? The working artist reading the world under a misprinted title, taking pills to still contradiction, lines of sky gray, and greenery (tracing the eyeline of buildings’ weed mascara). The forcing of life through an earth crumbling with fatigue and love gone wrong: or was that the humans standing on it? Yes, we all needed some grace to get from one side of town to the other. And how have a career without going up some real stone steps? To see things and write them up, whether on bench or phone while stopping, or on a keyboard once home. To Leo death was always shocking: whether blighted cornfield defunct toaster or road possum. Anything might’ve had poison tipped into its ear: think of Carrot III slumping as the piano lid closed, and knocking a candle over. The singer leaping from her stool, suffocating the flames before giving the gift of life, making every line she’d sang that night seem crucial. That’s what Leo—and probably everyone else who was there—remembered, if only because a new song about superficial human life (“A river is thicker than royal blood”) soon ruled the air
Take the measure of wooden speech with a wooden tongue The sound waves crash in, like a handful of grasshoppers Take the nails and bang them into the weeping painting The kids are shouting what they’re for: it’s making noise Making noise and drinking milk with a magnifying glass The ancestor’s dead from reading books and breathing From boxing vegetables and reading books and breathing The cardboard boxes are in his brain in tiny mirroring bits From the vein in his forehead to the vein in his toe they run They run like children to the school milk and the myths Out of the crush they would say of him, mad as a string The trees would say different of course when they saw him Out of grace, they never were, they would mimic Umback The leaves in his hair were the marks of a bush comedy A bush comedy so good it could run forever without seats The little version of the novel, every novel he read at night That he played out with his bosses, with strangers, his wife The wife has another ancestor with the same name, related That the lightning spilled down the hill in hot liquid form A form that was repeated and parodied in the hill’s plants Take this string and wrap it round the painting as if alive As if alive and attempting to survive out there in the bush Take the clock and time the boy who went to get the milk As if you can get milk from a large white rabbit that makes The sound of death, chewing grasshoppers like a machine
What injures the hive injures the bee, says Marcus Aurelius. I say not wanting to hurt another, this late, should maybe more than count, still, as a form of love. Be wild. Bewilder. Not that they hadn’t, of course, known unkindnesses, and been themselves unkind. When the willow’s leaves, back again, unfold all along their branches, the branches routinely in turn brushing then lifting away from the pond’s face, it’s too late. Last night I doubted as I’ve not doubted myself in years: knowing a thing seemed worthless next to knowing the difference between many things, the fox from the hounds, persuasion from the trust required to fall asleep beside a stranger; who I am, and how I treated you, and how you feel. So that it almost seemed they’d either forgotten or agreed without saying so to pretend they had. Did you know there’s an actual plant called honesty, for its seedpods, how you can see straight through? Though they’d been told the entire grove would die eventually, they refused to believe it. The face in sleep, like a wish wasted. To the wings at first a slight unsteadiness; then barely any. What if forgetting’s not like that—instead, stampeding, panicked, just a ghost choir: of legends, and rumors, of the myths forged from memory—what’s true, and isn’t— that we make of ourselves and, even worse, of others. Not the all-but- muscular ache, the inner sweep of woundedness; no. Not tonight. Say the part again about the bluer flower, black at the edges. I’ve always loved that part. Skull of an ox, from which a smattering of stars keeps rising. How they decided never to use surrender as a word again.
If I believed in a god, he would be a sea god, like the sea in its predictability—now approach, now recede—beneath such a god I would not mind, I think, being the shore, say of the sea what you will, it’s the shore that endures the routine loss without which what strategies would there be for softening the hollowness that any victory, give it time, comes with, how curb the risk of arrogance, with its doomed but not undangerous hound, complacency?... I made this for you— put it on. I know it’s not going to matter whether the decisions I made were the ones eventually I even meant to make, or should have, or should have thought maybe more than twice about. What’s history anyway, except—according to the latest mouth saying so—just what happened: I flourished undramatically, to no apparent purpose, like pretty much everyone. The sea dragged the shore; the shore suffered the sea.
From the sequence “Shekhinah Speaks” Comfort, comfort my people ... —Isaiah 40:1 A voice says, “Your punishment has ended.” You never listen to that voice. You really suck at being comforted. Another voice says, “Cry.” That voice always gets your attention, keeps you thinking about withered flowers and withering grass and all the ways you’re like them. Hard to argue with that. Death tramples you, an un-housebroken pet trailing prints and broken stems, pooping anxiety, PTSD, depression. It’s better to be animal than vegetable but best of all is to be spirit flying first or maybe business class with your emotional support animal, your body, curled in your lap, soaring with you above the sense of loss you’ve mistaken for the closest to God you can get. You want to cry? Cry about that. Who do you think created the animals to whom you turn for comfort, dogs, miniature horses, monkeys, ferrets, hungers you know how to feed, fears you know how to quiet? I form them, fur them, it’s my warmth radiating from their bodies, my love that answers the love you lavish upon them. Your deserts and desolations are highways I travel, smoothing your broken places, arranging stars and constellations to light your wilderness. Sometimes I play the shepherd; sometimes I play the lamb; sometimes I appear as death, which makes it hard to remember that I am the one who assembled your atoms, who crowned your dust with consciousness. I take you everywhere, which is why, wherever you go, I’m there, keeping you hydrated, stroking your hair, laughing when you chase your tail, gathering you to my invisible breasts more tenderly than any mother. You’re right—you never asked for this. I’m the reason your valleys are being lifted up, the source of your life laid bare. Mine is the voice that decrees— that begs—your anguish to end. When you suffer, I suffer. Comfort me by being comforted.
Honey-sweet song —Pindar Standing, leaning, with both long- clawed paws she rips punk wood out of a tree with a high hollow to get at her cause inside—her sharp brute parentheses tear at the living humming word. The honey the tree has helped the bees hide has drawn her near with its scent. Forcing the issue, she’s heavy, off-balance, intent. Flying defenders of the sweet they’ve produced and on which they and their larvae depend, the bees swarm her nose, her eyes, her tongue, her plan, often they trace with their hovering the lying-down eight of infinity before they sting and fall mortally self-wounded. Yet always in this valor they fail to defend—and who can succeed?— the whole history of poetry.
After Mondongo’s “Políptico de Buenos Aires” and María Teresa Hincapié’s “Una cosa es una cosa” born here a mutation. given a mutation. immediately. in what they name misery village 31.  what do you see, said brother, exiled to another quadrant? in the middle a hole. to one side a highway birth appearing much more Thursday. close to us a demolition attached to bullet train. hole right here. box here. steel threads. steel cars there. bumps on wax surface here. seats to magic mutating show up above and diagonal.  who cannot return to examine hole asks remaining ones: do you see?  ten boxes leaking on his back. mother’s tooth and eye. 40,000 brick shacks demand windows. neighbors punch holes for water.  do you see? hole here a singer with scaffold mouth singer born a string of golden altered light singer with a radioactive suitcase mirror lined with silver teeth door full of crabs singer a mouth in boat full of mattress paper bag masquerading as zinc roof an eye against all false honey  body in corner is a paper bag no a dispersing skyrise brother who hasn’t written his lesson yet  how to have peace? an exquisite purple blind in the one purple house closed to sun a scattered business emptying drains overnight because government won’t do it we all paid before each breakfast  under soil there are more stories alone you see?  landmark eye plucked from ostrich?  hair line remediators shamefully planted because of refractory mistake?  collector says village 31 full of growing miserables asks for bodies which contain fabric sees 500 tiny threads collected as fees in jars not alone water not alone electricity not alone highway use modification IDs if you must poke blood I know you took them hole there and charged five pennies for a soft creature all flowers here on the flip side, lightseekers attend a cathedral of  spreadsheets searching new red skies  on the flip side, a healthy boy sits in chair reading alone a masterpiece single knife  single thread single hole  a soft penny for a breath
You have to make sure you have skin in the game was one of the rules they yelled out near the end. Also one must have hope. Also watch the clock, the clock isrunning out. Out of what. I had hoped to escape. To form one lucid unassailable thought. About what? It did not matter about what. It just needs to be, to be shapely and true. Let me tell you. To feel a thought one came up with one’s self. Out of one’s interiority. There. That’s the whole story. If humanity. If to hang on claw back what to call it. However atrophied. Not not-living. Yes horribly close- quartered. However much we missed the bus. However much we should have been there while it lasted. Hear us: it lasted. Even here off the bus its lastingness keeps blossoming & spooling onward. Yes it’s a game it’s always just a game. The wind is hissing this all afternoon. But even it, raspy and weakening, plunders this space that it might find some emptiness. From mind. Lean in & you’ll hear plenitude. Listen it’s trying to make a void again. In which to hear itself. It’s too alone. Everything wants em- bodiment. But there’s this noise now it’s replacing everything. This humming of agreement fast-track skipped-step information yes yes yes yes lost hope lost will—dear dis- embodiment, here is an old wind, watch it orchestrate event, I raise my hand to find my face again, I know I am supposed to think I’m whole, there is no holiness in me, can I begin again, I’d like to try to get this right, we might if gotten right go on, whom am I speaking to, whom, I’ll pick up the acid the wrappers the 3D glasses, I’ll gather up the spotless tools printers magnifiers, the place is wired for sound I’ll cut the wires, I’ll drag the cursors off, I’ll sweep it clean, they’ve taught me to, I think this waybecause I am human, that’s my secret occupation, I am unusually common, I can get it right if you just tell me, we have a shot, whom am I speaking to, why is that laughter seeping-out nonstop from the invisible, from hospice hospital embassy cathedral— oh ghost institutions—why must you hover here—spy here—before me always though in- visible. Or is it invincible. I can’t make out the words being said. Or is it sent. In my direction. I’ll wait for an answer. I have indeed nothing better to do. I have nothing actually at all to do. We cannot remember having that—a thing to do. To be needed what was that like. To figure, discover, uncover, recover. To make bring think shape. To fold, to crease prepare serve-up. To imagine. To buy hold name sell. To shape. To order. This haunts us now. To make a thing for another. For another’s use. To fashion, to offer, to bring, hide, make. To serve. Oh to serve.... My new humanity is now relieved of duty. My soul has its alarm turned off. No my soul has this knot in its throat—or is it a gag—pacified, petrified, up all night counting silently toward infinity. Losing its place. How many of us are left. What else could happen. Has it all already happened. Who is they. That autocorrected to thy. Why. No matter what I say it fixes it. It’s fixed.
I must be the heavy globe of hydrangea, always bowing by summer’s end. Must be salt, like sadness at a burning city, an ethical disobedience. I must be a violet thorn of fire. These days I don’t taste good, but I must be singing and boneless, a lily. I must beg for it, eyes flashing silver as a fish. Must be a rosary of listening. This is how I know to love. I must hide under desks when the forecast reads: leaves red as meat, sleeping lions, chandelier of bone, moon smooth as a worry stone. I must want my life and fear the thin justice of grass. Clouds hunt, wound the rising tide. I must be paradised. On my knees again.
We shelter an angel whom we never cease to offend. We ought to be the guardians of that angel. —Jean Cocteau A scherzo of thumbnail butterflies, white ones, Covers the hillside. God is more Adorable than music. Nevertheless, On a given morning, as the wind drops, Music pries Heaven apart from itself, Like flowers beneath the wings unfolded on them. Every breeze is self-registering. This morning, I walked deeper into the hill, Free of the sun. Midway up the tallest trees, One leaf alone would stir while all the leaves On the very same branch remained stock-still. Apart from itself, Heaven signaled to me. William Blake was no romantic. He was, Beyond the arsons of levity and his toe, The final bulwark of the baroque. He was the last to oppose, “almost Successfully,” rebirth on all the wrong terms. He saw the leaf alone where no light was. Infinite variation plays against A steadfast variety. The butterfly Knows the difference in its wings, even As the flower she alights upon darkens Beneath her weight. The sun goes deeper Into the hill. Root systems and riot shine. Did you think for a moment Earth Was aware of itself? Never. Its adoration Persists altogether elsewhere from The very beginning, beginning again Just at that moment one leaf all alone Spins into the baroque, a scherzo of one note. The hillside is covered with little doors, And the wind rises out of them, returning, When the music is spent, with all the news Of the unaware, unreflecting, nearly perfect Hours blindly about the business of perfection. Hence the tiny eyes on a butterfly’s wing. Rebirth is an idiot. Isolated Each into its own eternity, Like every pain, birth continues out of mind Deeper into the hill. Earth riots With levity. Darkness swims into light. Flowers begin to imagine the life of flowers. Heaven signals to me, pouring down shade Out of the canopy of trees, prying The sunlight apart from itself. Darkness And light are the same thing. Music moves Effortlessly between the two, made of nothing But wings, wings with eyes, no end in sight.
One figure is female, the other is male. Both are contained. One figure is mythical, the other historical. To the extent that one can be said to have existed at all, they occupy different millennia, different continents. But, to the extent that one can be said to have existed at all, both figures are considered Asian—one from Colchis, one from Korea. To mention the Asianness of the figures creates a “racial marker” in the poem. This means that the poem can no longer pass as a white poem, that different people can be expected to read the poem, that they can be expected to read the poem in different ways. To mention the Asianness of the figures is also to mention, by implication, the Asianness of the poet. Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple in a dance. After such a revelation, the poem is about race, the story is about the gun, the dance is about the body of the dancer—it is no longer considered a dance at all and is subject to regulation. Topics that have this gravitational quality of aboutness are known as “hot button” topics, such as race, violence, or sex. “Hot button” is a marketing term, coined by Walter Kiechel III, in a September 1978 issue of Fortune magazine. The term evokes laboratory animals and refers to consumer desires that need to be slaked. The term “hot button” suggests not only the slaking of such desires but also a shock or punishment for having acted on those desires, a deterrent to further actions pursuing such desires, and by extension, a deterrent to desire itself. Violence and sex are examples of desires and can be satisfied, punished, and deterred. Race is not usually considered an example of desire. Both the female and the male figures are able to articulate their desires with an unusual degree of candor and specificity. Both are responsible for many sexual deaths. The male figure says, “When anger grips me, I cannot contain myself. Only after I kill something—a person, perhaps an animal, even a chicken—can I calm down.... I am sad that Your Majesty does not love me and terrified when you criticize me. All this turns to anger.” “Your Majesty,” here, refers to the king, his father. The female figure is never directly quoted, but Pseudo-Apollodorus writes that she casts a spell upon the king her husband so that when he has sex with another woman, he ejaculates wild creatures into the woman’s vagina, thereby killing her. Although the punishment is enacted on the body of the woman, this punishment is meant to deter the king from slaking his desires. Both figures, royal themselves, are angry at the king, but neither attempts to kill the king—which would be political. Instead they displace this anger onto other unnamed deaths, which are considered sexual but not political. Both figures have spouses known for strategy, for self-preservation in 
politically tumultuous times, times of many unnamed deaths. Both figures are counterfoils to their strategizing spouses, figures of excessive 
desire, requiring containment. Both containers are wooden. Both containers are camouflaged with a soft, yielding substance—one with grass, one with fur. Both containers are ingenious solutions to seemingly intractable problems. One problem is political. One problem is sexual. They are both the same problem. They have the same solution. The male figure waits in the container for death to come. He waits for eight days. His son will live. This ensures the succession, the frictionless transfer of power. The female figure waits in the container for the generation of a life. We do not know how long she waits. Her son will die, after waiting in his own wooden container. This ensures the succession, the frictionless transfer of power. There are many artistic representations of both containers. The male figure’s container is blockish, unadorned, a household object of standard size and quotidian function. Tourists climb into it and pose for photos, post them online. The cramped position of their bodies generates a combination of horror and glee. This, in turn, creates discomfort, the recognition that horror and glee should not be combined, that such a combination is taboo. The female figure’s container is customized, lushly contoured. Its contours are excessively articulated to the same degree that her desire is excessively articulated. Artists depict the container in cutaway view, revealing the female figure within, awaiting the wild creature. The abject position of the female figure—on all fours, pressing her genitalia back against the hollow cow’s genitalia—generates a combination of lust and revenge. This, in turn, creates discomfort—the recognition that lust and revenge should not be combined, that wild creatures and female figures should not be combined, that these combinations are taboo. Hot button topics are taboo because they generate discomfort. The male figure slakes his violent desires and is punished. The male figure also functions as a hot button, a means whereby the violent desires of tourists 
are slaked, while generating discomfort in these tourists. The female figure slakes her sexual desires and is punished. The female 
figure also functions as a hot button, a means whereby the sexual desires of artists are slaked, while generating discomfort in these artists. The tourist can climb into the rice chest. The tourist can pose for a photo in the rice chest. Then the tourist can climb out of the rice chest and walk away. The artist can look into the hollow cow. The artist can render the contours of the hollow cow, the contours of the female figure. Then the artist can walk away. Both containers allow the tourist and artist to touch the hot button, the taboo. The desire and the discomfort remain contained. Both containers allow the tourist and the artist to walk away. The male and female figures remain contained. Neither container—the rice chest, the hollow cow—appears to have any necessary connection to race. To mention race where it is not necessary to mention race is taboo. I have not mentioned the race of the tourist or the artist. The tourist and the artist are allowed to pass for white. The tourist and the artist are not contained. I have already mentioned the race of the poet. But to the extent that the poet is not contained, the poet is allowed to pass for white. I have already mentioned the race of the male and female figures. The male and female figures are contained. The rice chest and the hollow cow are containers. The rice chest and the hollow cow are not the only containers in this poem. Colchis and Korea are containers in this poem. Asianness is a container in this poem. Race is a container in this poem. Each of these containers contains desire and its satisfaction. Each of these containers contains discomfort and deterrence. Each of these containers contains a hot button, a taboo. The tourist and the artist can enter each of these containers. The tourist and the artist can touch the hot button and walk away. Each of these containers separates the slaking of desire from the punishment of desire. Each of these containers is an ingenious solution to a seemingly intractable problem. They are the same problem. They have the same solution. Each of these containers ensures the frictionless transfer of power. Each of these containers holds a male or female figure. The name of the male figure can be translated as “Think of me in sadness.” The name of the female figure can be translated as “I shine for all of you.”
I know something about godforsaken places. Walking on the beach alone, far from the Dead Sea, I thought I saw a horseshoe crab crawling slowly— it was a Gideon Society, black Bible cover. Another time, washed up on a Montauk dune, I found a Chianti wine bottle with a letter in it. I read to myself a child’s handwriting: “Hello, let’s make friends. Please call,” she gave her phone number. I held the bottle a week before calling, then asked for Mary Jane, in my best Portuguese accent,I am Pessoa. I’m calling from Por-tu-gal. I’ll be your friend.
Father Lear the king so shaped his bairns with the wand’s upper hand the fire’s swanny wing smooth tippet of the spider In the very kingdom of herbs and servants he shaped them from peace vessels of the animals from toil of the flesh from milk horses and the birds of sighed mercy and the tongue undone He shaped his bairns in night’s long harm and in day’s bright psalter in the seven courts of the north and with the mild birch of the paternoster From his ploughing fields and his sweat his toothèd heart and his waxing wit Father Lear the king shaped his bairns for good or ill this he did
... who spoke late echolalic, then in similes, by the lake, where the sticks were her long mosquitoes, her lava pyramid brown rice.Got a crush on a suffix, giggled, blushed, at every -tion. And there were many, in conversation, flirting with her. Pre-dejection. Pseudoabstraction.As she grew into orchestration, a white sport coat and a pink carnation, crenellation, inhalation— had I known too much lamentation?I, who have lived isolation, seen sun as lion, its mane’s diffusion; offered her a turnip moon, close-shaven. Parental anomaly, weird shared ions. A word-prescription. A nerve-ending infatuation.I’m blessed she’s the termination of me, last blood relation. Daughter, if you follow land to its suffix, there’s ocean, which I know your toes, bare, still-growing, slim, will never shun.
After Cai Guo-Qiang Quick, before the sun rises, get up one more time, my grandmother. The artist won’t mind if you borrow his sky ladder. Place your foot on the bottom rung and keep climbing, even though you’re a skeleton with a broken neck from falling downstairs on Guy Fawkes night. The ladder is wrapped in gunpowder, and he’s lit the touchpaper. Your bones are ascending firecrackers. You’re half a kilometer high now, halfway to the universe, my joy-gardener. I hope you find a garden with rich black soil for your black roses, hybrids like you— half white half Indian, half woman half flower, their roots twined through your skull, you who were transplanted among the pale roses of a British family. Your skin now a mix of photons and soot. What do you find up there? Is there a hothouse? Are there alien hands with deft brushes pollinating stars? Remember how your tomatoes kept yielding more planets? Are there constellations of exotic fruit now you’ve reached the top? Have you gone back enough in space-time to when you were alive? The ladder is charred, the hot air balloon that held it up is about to collapse. The explosions are over. Cai showers his head with champagne, as his 100-year-old granny watches on her cell phone.Did you see it? He asks,did you hear the whoosh, the rat-tat-tat at the starry door? You can go back to sleep now
The fools nearly killed me trying to make me one of them: a loaded word of  bond with dress codes and penal codes, postured allegiant to the culture as with the flying of flags from knots tied on the back of  head wraps worn hoods over. I can’t gunpoint when the life of this alter ego began though the possibility can’t be dismissed it began at gunpoint in a way, with an icy pressure against the temple, the mind splitting into two tracks while a circus of peers clowned.Going back far too long now, the camera has blurred my edges in the suggestion of motion even if  I stood as still as the air does before shit really hits the fan. I truly went ass-first into fronting indifference, forbade my happy teeth from public reveal lest they pop the balloon of my perfectly round face, baby-angled, already read as kind or innocent or soft from the jump when I wanted respect on my name and women on my lap like it was said I should. And, shamefully, I did. Several sistas come to mind here and this doesn’t make me feel good; a tender touch in the moonlight goes only so far for a shadow. I had to break it down for myself that being down represented the fear of having fear.I still shake when the wind blows, scary as ever, thespian as always in all ways toward the ghost of a threat or disrespect passed through me then through me, through a thin skin then through the skin. So, to compensate— a mask, what Dunbar’s bars beat home way back when about standing in the presence of the pale folks, only that idea flipped upside down, what’d be a forced smile slicing the face open like some summertime melon instead setting scowl folds into smooth forehead, brown eyes set at the mouth’s corners, fixing it in the position of silence like rusty nails.If carrying nothing else, I learned to bring this exact look to the danger because being me to the fullest would be a liability, provide a sharper image for the hidden cameras to home in on; yes, just that fast—a certified blue, strolling up to the screen door with a heavy hand for knocking and his true hand resting so sweetly on his gun. My gun, I should say, since in this case the cop is also me, like that little angel or devil used as sitcom trope.Just imagine the person coming for you being  you every time: don’t trip, you’d say, unless into the fight.
6. A rabbit hides in the wheel arch on a flight to hawaii and arrives alive a poem stops a tank long enough for a picture to be taken I myself have become more fearful of heights the question is then what happens the eye of jupiter is growing smaller but also colder 7. The movie is better than the book which is better than the experience silver is better than gold (it doesn’t infect piercings) a fake masterpiece is better than a real one because at least it’s affordable permadeath in virtual warfare is better than actual death in actual warfare imitation is better because it’s sincere whereas innovation seeks to impress and anyway is never what it says it is the second time is better than the first, as you well know! the remake is self-conscious and therefore more morally alert this sentiment is better than the other times it has been expressed because in the past it was expressed more forcefully and now it can relax even thinking that Salinger meant David Copperfield the 1980s magician who made real cars and buildings disappear is better than knowing he meant Dickens but only because others have thought this before you and written about their mistake with winning modesty or honesty or both a cat hunting a bird is better now because of cartoons just as the cat that lives next door is a better cat because it is not your cat anymore a rhyme is better the more times it has been used cliché is better than truth truth is just something that hasn’t become a cliché yet but inevitably will (then you can put it in your pocket and no one can put the truth in their pocket) and any king or queen or president or prime minister is better than all previous kings or queens or presidents or prime ministers any poem is better than all the poems that precede it that say essentially the same thing which means new is better than old but only if it looks or sounds or otherwise seems somehow old being in a simulation is better than being in reality watching the simulated stars set to ambient music created by a gifted 
recording artist is better than watching real stars set to dismal sounds from real life derivative beauty is better than any other kind (here we are surrounded by all this derivative beauty—imagine!) however the audience will still say “nah” however many times you say the cover version is better than the original but the cover version is always better than the original I know that the cover version is always better than the original and the reason I know the cover version is always better than the original is that I’ve never heard the original 41. You’re not the capital’s purveyor of inclement art traversing the pale river with a glass of equally pale sulphur on a trip in search of black ice cream or whatever it is the russians are buying nor an idle dealer who sports a crown of vegetables in your self-deprecating portrait (a little fancy commissioned not to be indiscreet but in the fantasy at “some” expense) not even the owner in your wildest dreams of a kept viper but more a kind of overlarge boy who somehow drags out a salary on the halved lunches of interns hoarse from smoking not thy powerful talk you stay in the shop to keep in the shade that’s all you are not the best urban poet but this gallery has a heartless master on six figures who likes to say he’s all mouth and isn’t and even asks after your finances the bastard and why look up from your phone at your desk at reception when it seems you’re the only one the satire on the walls this month has seen (it can’t cut both ways, can it?) and nobody has ever penetrated the depths of the mercedes that waits like a black moon or a scoop of something poisoned melting on the curb outside ignored by wardens as if they can’t perceive the gleaming anomaly so great is it and you with your “I always had a good nose for it” you with your aquiline sophistication and games of insolence their verve dulling let’s be fair in these conditions and your brochures your spelling just enough bait 55. If you want to know my wishes briefly Mark, famous host, bright ornament, OK then, pronto— I ask to be the master of a great rural cultivator of the soil, a small tribe used to the easiness of dirt. I do. And to worship the cold painted rocks at dawn with an unfit “hello.” And later when the presents are in stockings crowded by the chimney breast, to remember the lead-haired fisherman I was then, waiting a year for the prize of a red honey jar, at a sagging table eating my eggs among ashes— whoever does not love this does not love this life! I hope that you live, and the city, amid duties. 57. What kind of life is called a healthy life...? I don’t ask that it’s too easy or too hard. I’d like something in between the two ...  At the same time I don’t want to know, even if it is my call ... I know you know I don’t wish to shave my head again or work the funerals ... the center of attention ...  At the same time I don’t want to be bored! Underneath the veil ... in gloves and pearls ...  W/r/t life ... that’s my prerogative ... bitches ...  61. Love’s syllables scroll. Tag them, Verona. May is a happy man. Consider pressed his tiny region. Place the stars or less. Fragrant hues applaud the Nile. One tree sounds. Love, the two unique dogs. He speaks fluent hearts. A dog can enjoy his humorous letter. No one has bought cilantro, my arse. Your lie, my boast. I will not keep silent in the lawsuit, Bilbo. 63. In general I hate discussing my poetry so I always ask questions there’s a kind of writer/artist though and you meet them all the time now who only talks about their “practice” without anyone caring or asking (it isn’t connected to success) and shows no flicker of interest in anything anyone else does if the choice is between talking about me when I don’t want to talk about me or talking about you when you only want to talk about you then let’s talk about me by the way if you don’t know this type of artist you probably are it sorry
One of the first I learned was the trinity, three persons in one God: father, son, and holy spirit, née ghost. Then I started writing JMJ on all my homework and tests, for good luck, but also because My ballpoint’s blue ink looked pretty beside the paper’s purple Ink, like the inside of a clamshell when I teared up or squinted From the smell. Sometimes the sheets were wet and curled like Petals reeking of gin, which is why it was called spirit duplication, After the nonflammable alcohol used in the process. Jesus, Mary, And Joseph, is what the three initials meant. I’d draw a cross from The descending caret of the M and think of Mary, the mother, And of the other Mary, not, weeping at the limp feet of the crucified Jesus. Where was Joseph, I wondered, but never asked. We seemed To pity him a little, for reasons I couldn’t name, like my father, Who was both my father and a son, and soon to be the son of His father’s ghost. When my grandmother was dying, she asked Her only child, my mother, to go with her. Mom waited decades To obey, but she finally went. Together in one grave now, they are Two Marys, maybe with the Jesus of their most solitary prayers, Petals littering their one stone’s four corners. Being motherless, Like being childless, is both good and bad, I think, And it is a third thing, too, that is neither of these.
A man I loved kept a folded square of masking tape in his pocket  He did this / only for a year  His masking tape was bright orange and fraying As evidence / coroners had used it to attach to his father’s calf the rope his father’d used / This man planted the tape in our yard when the year was done and from it grew thirteen beams / From these beams rafters grew  Ropes uncurled from these rafters and fathers hanged from the ropes  / Over the fathers a roof blossomed like a shield and against it a ladder leaned / The ladder was so tall the man I loved said it must have ended in heaven And down  / from the ladder an angel scurried while we slept In its mouth it carried torn strips / of tape  The angel pressed this tape on the calves of the man I loved like bandages / Each morning I removed the tape I was careful not to wake him Each morning / he’d walk through the garden of swaying fathers He’d kneel beside our rosemary bush / He’d rub its leaves in his hands He’d ball his hands in his hair to scent it He wanted / just to keep his earthliness with him / In hell this is the only prerequisite
Where there’s blood, there are birds. After the war, many of the men’s faces are missing parts: an eye, a nose, a mouth. One doctor uses a man’s own rib to construct a new jaw. They call him the-man-who-fixes-faces. A body might stay whole in the trench, but who can resist looking up, sometimes, at the birds? You get out alive, maybe, but your face wears forever the look of what’s lost. The-man-who-fixes-faces might give you something like a face. Now all you see are faces turning away. A bullet wounds in a straight line, but shrapnel is feathery: it picks up dirt. The birds, it’s easy to forget, are filthy; a little bird in the blood can kill you. A square within a circle, the golden ratio, symmetry, they say, makes a face beautiful. Birds have two eyes, two legs, and two wings, but the soldier’s face is half here, half in the air. Mirrors can be psychologically damaging to birds. Birds are territorial. Birds keep going back to the fountain to check on that one bird beneath the water. In the park near the hospital, the-man-who-fixes-faces paints some of the benches blue. The blue benches are for the men whose faces are unrecognizable. I’ve seen a bird attack a window. If you don’t want to see a man healing, look up at the sky. Why is the sky blue? Symmetry: a line drawn from the sun through the zenith to the “anti-sun.” Like shrapnel, light scatters.
What can you see elsewhere that you cannot see here? ... Had you never gone out and listened to idle talk, you would the better have remained perfectly at peace. —Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ The Queen of Sheba packed fenugreek, turmeric, milled cardamom, desiccated coconut, sweet almond oil, figs, fat amber dates, green lemons, and mint, onto a dozen knobbly camels. Let’s see, Poetaster, how your sinuses like these!
fine parchment face suddenly chantilly lace his torso a doily perforated twinkling with sweet patient fungus shiny maggot- milled one old gold trinket slipped between two ribs his legs folded and cold he too was somebody’s honeybunch and heartleap his jaw an ox-bone his eyes full of lake his burring voice booming out bold songs likejohn bro-own’s body da-da da-da da da da
Aba says in a blizzard, fill the bathtub. With firewood. Aba says a leaky roof is a blessing. Provided the bucket. To melt snow. With fire. We gather. All the trees in Queens. Shake & shiver. My axe cannot approximate. My axe is a plastic bottle. Filled with club soda. I wonder when it unfreezes, will it explode. Aba says: Light of my eyes, where are you getting your science. I no longer know. I used to believe in string theory. But the field breaks. Too many. Rules. & you can’t quantify nor quantum even a drop of rain—everything’s just too damn big. For models that would prove. The rules. Tried & still not true. The roof is always leaking. The bathtub is a mass grave of trees. Aba says go outside before it’s too late. But I have. I’ve seen. In a public bathroom I hide with many other women from a storm. The leaky roof fills with cinders & once more. A dead bird. One of us screams. They all scream. When I pick him up off the slimy floor. Pick the maggots from his body. Soon. I have the bathroom. To myself. In public. I have an entire sanctuary. Of sorts. To mourn. When I bring the dead home. Aba tears at his clothes & covers the mirrors. Won’t let me burn the body. Says even birds died in the Shoah’s desperate, hungry hands. Days before the bodies were turned to ash. Perhaps this bird too descends from a lone survivor. We cry for his mother. We cry for my grandmother. Free up the bathtub & flood our home. With rainwater. Float a burning, empty pyre. I say: Aba, this isn’t what we do either. Aba says: It’s too late to go outside. Which I do. I try. I dig & dig. For dirt, defying my father. I lose the feeling in my hands. In snow that doesn’t quite stick to the ground. Night falls & his body stays warm under my layers drenched. From sleet & sweat. I won’t give in. Birds gather around me. Dark lights against blue cement. They wait it out. They stay perfectly still. Right out in the open.
Who cares about the redbud tree, its flowers half-black, half-pink, from winter’s April freeze; who cares who lives halfway or dies too soon, the blue jay’s baby squirming on bare ground, the agonies of blood, the frigid breeze shaking the fragile sense of April showers; who cares who craves the heated pools of June, the lake of boaters buzzing by or drowned. Two vultures meet me at my open door, scanning for carrion, the stink of spasms, the sky-gods pecking rotting flesh for food; who cares if this strange order ends in good, or if the chickadee lands in the chasms of endless carelessness forevermore.
Whose branch this is I think you know. By how my (question-marks as) claws inscritch the bark. How my worry-work along this bough runs back and forth (and copper-keen) and evermore; I got mocked and nicked No-Fly Bird not for nothing. Not for nothing have I picked this oak. Though not thicktrunk-ancient as some angel-oak, it’s sure the highest of our high so suits my lack. —Charred wings won’t lift; I’ve got no glide nor span to speak of. Ain’t this my beat : my usual limb. Ain’t this pecking (carking) pulse my far and wide.
[ Johnny Pep, P.O.W. ] When they flang me down that hole I clawed for home— When they sealed the seam with clay : sucked roots and ore— When my gut would grind would groan of lack I ’voked some meat— When I was blindered underground I seen our creek— When stench would stain the mind the mind would branch— When I got stripped & roped to stand for sleep I reined my hoss— When cane-straps flogged us cross the field we’d call a tune— ( When rows of welts ( still ) grave the mind the mind will climb. )
[ Tetsu schools her son ] Bloomed no intention not no notionof  a child but out you came. What some got natural motheryknow-to-do unborn in me. I been brought from cross the water far—every bone a alien never not. (No soil no roots yall clinch so hardfor home gon’ be my home.) My flint mama was no lamp to menor well my name she gave means iron. Long nights back home we boiled our seafor salt to sell the salt. On me mongst moss and spruce the unclesand the sofu took their turns. Time and tide I’d had to burnto (cauldron) boil the sea and eat the salt. Himself  who was your seed he called meSteel when he would call me liked my sharp. Yes once you heard him down thetelephone (some breaths) the line broke off—
Had it had good tang to it or even a cell’s cell of succulence he’d have squirreled the day away to paw and tongue.
I gave up the pencil, the walk in woods, the fog  at dawn, a keyhole I lost an eye to. And the habit of early, of acorn into oak—  bent tangled choked because of ache or greed,  or lousy light deemed it so. So what. Give up that so what. O fellow addicts of the arch and the tragic, give up  the thousand-pound if and when too.  Give up whatever made the bed or unmade it. Give up the know thing that shatters into other things  and takes the remember fork in the road. The remember isn’t a road. At noon, the fog has no memory of fog, the trees I walked  or wanted to. Like the pencil never recalls its least  little mark, the dash loved, the comma which can’t, cannot dig down what its own brief nothing  means on the page. I don’t understand death either. By afternoon, the brain is box, is breath let go, a kind of  mood music agog, half emptied by the usual  who am I, who are you, who’s anyone. Truth is, I listen all night for morning, all day  for night in the trees draped like a sound I never quite   get how it goes. There’s a phantom self, nerved-up  as any arm or leg. Of  course I was. Of course I stared from the yard,  my mother at the window rinsing knife and spoon and the middle of her life. In drawing class, all eyes fix on the figure gone  imaginary, thinning to paper. Not the wind or a cry  how the hand makes, our bent to it—  pause and rush, rush and pause— small animals heard only at dark, spooked in the leaves.

Magic rain magic mist magic dew magic hail Magic darkness magic sea magic waves magic River magic fountain magic well magic spring That bursts forth when a magic spear pierces Rock magic oak tree magic ash magic lime tree Magic bough magic yew magic hawthorn magic Tree to make you young again magic tree to Prevent hunger magic thorn magic ivy magic Fern magic blossom, mistletoe and mandrake Magic wild grasses magic wheat magic breath Magic blood magic feather magic dung magic Piss magic mantle magic trousers magic veil Magic hat magic chain magic sword magic Shield magic hearth magic bench magic door Magic cry of a deer or cry of a magic deer; Seven as a magic number magic the human Head for divination magic also the head of A dog, magic too vessels that burst in the fire To uncover disobedience magic the river That rises to drown liars magic the stone That causes silence magic the deep lake That causes forgetfulness magic the hazelnut That makes a lover foolish magic the stone That banishes sorrow magic the charm bought Cheaply in the form of small poetry books, Or nine the magic number and the magic Number seven again and the magic twelve also And green as that magic color violet as magic Red as magic black as magic white as magic Purple also as a magic hue and also red again; Magic also the felling of two oak trees in a wood And the magic wand used by the Druids to Find your beloved carried away by fairies— And, when all else fails, magic the new-fangled Blessings of Christians swarming into our oak Wood now, making even the disappeared speak.
It’s like touching without touching, except when there is, also, touching. We pull the bowstrings back and parallel together, aiming a handsbreadth higher than we believe we intend, and let the glove move where we draw the wire, scared that the machinery will misinterpret us, that we may not stop trembling, that we may lose our belief in ourselves before anything is released, or shared, or sent. And yet we trust the notch to know the whereabouts of the bow, and trust the tail or fletching of each salvo to astonish the target as soon as it gets there, to make its point within its nest of Os and Os and Os. Our belts and buckles try to keep the secrets we have begun to decide that, later, we want to expose. There is the rest of our group, and there is the river, and that is called the kisser, the stabilizer on your shoulder. Do what I do. You have time. Put your hand over my hand. That feels nice. No longer too young to participate in this activity, we have become the elevated counselors of the air, which will not take anything but our most forceful advice.
It broke the dog’s leg when you were reversing for me on the slope at home.Racing greenit sits for scrap now on the tow truck. Majestic as a king on his lecticathe ratchets clickthe blue straps tightenbefore the final journeyout the gates through which it oncefirst drove purchased from our savingswhen we were toldwe were having twins. Ground-in chocolate, mud, crumbs infant seats all straps and bucklesthe roof rack bars were your horizontal handles when you’d standand, like the Hulk, begin to shake us when you’d come to say goodbye. And the strapped-in children wouldshout as if they were about to be tipped out, and when you stopped, their laughterturned to Do it again! Go on, do it again!I once knew a woman who drove a convertible: metallic navy, white leather interior, gloss veneer fabric, reclining roof.A thing of  vehicular beauty. When she sold it she never wrote a poem.
Too busy peddling my fire and trying to keep the mouths fed and packing up belongings of the recent dead right now to access your luxurious philosophy, though one looks forward to a time when the universe permits, I said to my electric correspondent who came at me puffed pink in thoughtfulness when what I needed then as now was a quiet high enough to envision a half-gallon brick of all-natural vanilla ice cream softening on the hot hood of an idling cop car: the earliest rivulets, a slow loss of strict rectangularity, then the wild gliding around on the beautiful bleak enamel paint job as its sweet fragrance fills the air like a gift from Madagascar I can breathe. Rapt Cortés transported cuttings of vanilla across the Atlantic during his plunder of the Aztecs; the Aztecs themselves fell captive to its magic after vanquishing its first cultivators the Totonacs, who paid their conquerors tributes of baskets stacked to heaven with cured vanilla pods like long sentences of salutiferous essence. This is one of those instances history likes to push your face into to try to stir your appetite for cruelty a little, or at least make you covet the perks of it: I too want vanilla in quantity. I want it all around me, like a fortress of mellow dangles. It will move with me as I move and it will ward hateful people off. For centuries Europeans tried to cultivate it outside its native Mexico and failed. They could get the vine to flower, but in the absence of ancestral pollinators, specifically hummingbirds and a stingless bee, the flowers dropped off podless. Meanwhile, Edmond Albius—born into slavery on an island east of Madagascar known then as Bourbon, lush French colony and home to roses, one active volcano, one dormant, and one arena-like caldera that holds the record for most rainfall shed in one location by a single tropical cyclone ever, namely Hyacinthe— knew enough from orchids at age twelve in 1841 to think to lift with a bamboo splint the flap of the rostellum dividing the pollen- heavy male anther from the female stigma in order to rub the pollen on the stigma’s eager wand. Within weeks the pods had begun to form and lengthen into joyous beanlike squiggles laden with tiny seeds like secrets of the universe as Albius at the shore and under bright southern stars breathed out I hope in a kind of enlargement akin to liberty from time, so that on that occasion he might feel briefly as if his own, even as his method of vanilla pollination belonged first to his master, then Madagascar, and then the world, with nearly all vanilla produced today as Albius taught us, including the kind in Breyers since 1866, fourteen years before Albius died unrecognized, in poverty, in misery to be exact, while everyone white around him grew rich with vanilla, adding it to candy, Coca-Cola, Chanel No. 5, and even in effigy to the air freshener dangling down in my Uber, its waves whispering Albius, Albius, but inaudibly.
I do kind gestures. Remove my appendix. I put my ear to a flat shell and—nothing. I play the lottery ironically. Get married. Have a smear test. I put my ear to the beak of a dead bird—nothing. I grow wisdom teeth. Jog. I pick up a toddler’s telephone, Hello?—No answer. I change a light bulb on my own. Organize a large party. Hire a clown. Attend a four-day stonewalling course. Have a baby. Stop eating Coco Pops. I put my ear right up to the slack and gaping bonnet of a daffodil—. Get divorced. Floss. Describe a younger person’s music taste as “just noise.” Enjoy perusing a garden center. Sit in a pub without drinking. I stand at the lip of a pouting valley—speak to me! My echo plagiarizes. I land a real love plus two real cats. I never meet the talking bird again. Or the yawning hole. The panther of purple wisps who prowls inside the air. I change nappies. Donate my eggs. Learn a profound lesson about sacrifice. Brunch. No singing floorboards. No vents leaking scentless instructions. My mission is over. The world has zipped up her second mouth.
I hold two fingers to my head, trigger my thumb, I say pow. I slice my throat with a single stroke, pull an invisible blade vertically along my vein. Remember the deaths we did together? Twiddling oven knobs in the air then thrusting our chins to inhale? I loved you so much during that experimental play when you slowly leant forward to nick your femoral artery then quietly bled out in your seat until curtain call, blood only we saw. As well as death, we’d mime marriage. I’d slide on a spectral ring and you’d shiver at the thrill of my thumb and fingertip sealing the deal for a second till the thought melted back into your skin. I am proficient at beginnings, the Air Year: the anniversary prior to paper for which ephemeral gifts are traditional. Only after our rings became solid silver did they truly disappear. Now the house is a mime scene. Mime blood all over the floor, trodden into carpet fibers, shirts, bras, dried to an airy crust under my nails. I slit my neck at the traffic lights, pow on the train, I suspend my non-knife above my head, “see what you’re making me do.” Red whirls rise from the cuts. All these huge thoughts come to nothing. My shadow is the chalk outline of a woman who did not jump.
1. they were a kind of solution Say one Spaceman, when she lands, will touch down in a human sentence, speaking Dutch, a dialect of Mentalese. Her torch- songs (loosely rendered from the Arcturan): “Baby Let’s Get Square with Pi,” or, “You’re the Apple of My Eye,” or “Boola Theta Babel Bye-Bye.” It might make sense. This is a heady thought. The traditional verse, viz. “Who’s Your Daddy,” as sung in The War of the Worlds, and signaled Mayday,mayday—a little like Beethoven’s 4th in digital redaction—may underpin what limbic Dutch must once upon a time have bloomed beneath the sagittal crest of Homo—Who? What? This news just in!—the starry sky is empty. Spacemen are out. Sorry. 2. exo-statisticians change minds, cite insufficiency of planetary bodies of right type What, no aliens? Or, with greater dignity,life elsewhere in the universe? That window’s shut, we learn. Astronomers, indignant desert birds, eyes screwed to the long cinder- scuttles of their telescopes, will voice some doubt, one hopes! This is too lonely. Heliocentric humility’s a habit hard to shake. Endowed with what we’ve called “intelligence,” or “powerful intelligence,” like-minded creatures, each an end- point in a home-world’s evolutionary raffle, well, just must across the vasty deeps of space and time yearn forth to find each other with awful big radios. That’s how the Book of Revelations we knew used to read, rephrased so, pi be praised. 3. binary My friend the geometer, when asked if pi were in the sky or in the skull, replied pi’s the pontification of a ratio. Bisected, so, the circle: pi. To show that in a well-formed sentence, well, that’s human, sure. All language is. So ever since that fateful shore of Lake Turkana where tongue forked, where first flaking syntax split the atom into force and mass, thing and verb, the copula has groped to reanneal it: this opulence is equal to the sum of those simplicities ... So here’s the mystery: across the placid surface of the water a salt of stars once scattered, hissing. Caliban stammered Are stars. Then, Look, look up at the stars! 4. prose obtrusions concerning the keats equation Hold it there. Would you say truth’s a property of sentences, but beauty’s not? So that mysterious predictive gift of mathematics is precisely that of 
sentences like I predict the sun will rise tomorrow?—isn’t that the leap that left the chimpanzees behind?—and adding time of sunrise just adds 
increment to the precision? So that Platonic realm where Mathematics must exist to be discovered by Ramanujan or Hardy or Arcturans tucked in anywhere in time or space is just that space where earlier equations live, like love’s a rose or tears are rain, which Hardy’s and Ramanujan’s respective ancestors discovered independently? That if in England two men feed a horse, the horse stays thin, the axiom would hold as well for two Tibetan yaks or fat Jurassic stegosaurs (assuming less that that’s what the Arcturans use to carry mail than that, like us, they pinch their pence)— That that’s the realm where poems and equations likewise lie unspoken, 
quietly awaiting their discovery? And so those famous instances where mathematics efflorescing on some blackboard purely for the play of it turn out to have a shocking congruence with patterns in the world is just exactly like the case where poetry is news before the news it stays? That hadn’t the acclaimed predictive potency of mathematics best be cast as a reminder of forgotten shock—the shock our shaggy kind must once have felt, framing for the first time well-formed sentences about the world that was, and then about the world about to be, and so extended human sensibility 
and thrust it forth as backward through the night of time? Yes, if diffidently. 5. postscriptum The aliens are back, incidentally. Astral systems dropping planets like nuts in May. Exo- biology leaps again into likelihood. A straw poll proves the numbers may be multiplex. No small relief for this slow versifier, who, peering through this poem’s decades-long zoom- lens has seen what changes?—sapphire heaven bleached of all biology?—shazam!— and then revivified, less abruptly, with a thought. In the same blink of the clock the pupil of a black hole was seen to matter, some dinosaurs grew feathers, and (this one for Ripley’s) Pluto got demoted from a planet to a rock. Also my family died. Also I had a daughter.
The story tells us Sisyphus is being punished. Over and over he has to push that boulder up and up. The mountain and God glaring. And you, you have your avalanche of moods. Pills the size of stars to nearly quell cascade and tumult. And still you step gravity amplified by incline, each hazard in the way of the boulder a reminder it should be easier. There should be a hot fudge sundae at the top. A long nap in the shade. The story forgot to tell us, though, Sisyphus thrived. He learned to guide his wrists and shoulder girdles safely to protect himself. And later he worked to safeguard every insect from here to the crest. Considers this his calling. Even as the sun and the weight of time bears down. Your strength is kingly.
On this night  I remember Nachshon  who was not Moses who  walked into the Red Sea  and called for God  to meet him there On this night  I am only a body and you  are only a body On this night  nothing is hidden  only the afikomen On this night  God was here and I  I knew it
my mouth hurts / i’m still dreaming / of hamburgers / of childhood / of the delicate clacking / of baby teeth / it’s foreign / even when i hold / myself / 
i keep tonguing my toothache / ripping the grass from the dirt / and trying to tie the blades in knots / again / the irritation / the bottle full of milk / that will always spill / or spoil / sometimes i’m a lover / of my own dysfunction / sometimes / i list out all the sharp spots / try to floss them out / mop the spill with paper towel / mail you a postcard / from my mouth / inscribe it with a paradox / is being full / of cavities / the same as being empty / or just another iteration / of the holy body
every part  down to gristle  where meat attaches  to bone—leaves hollow  having pushed the world away, we call it back through language  love thyself  thy sternum tight like a cage  W., R. & T. drop acid and go to a  bar inside a grocery store  I absorb this information neutrally  move toward the scary  We slipped  into the crowd escaping. We were first in line to escape. We were trying to fit inside coolers or buckets, get lifted out.  They mandate  show us a video  try to prepare us  (we are teachers)  to respond first.  I know I must not be the only  Saw it coming and didn’t say anything—why?  You should always strive to emit positive vibrations to others, earth, and self.  sun-filled mouth breathing woodpecker in our bed  and I think he is those things last living form on earth  (Hard to write a poem and let it fail) What kind of life to not be engaged with desire up to the very end. Isn’t that what dying is—to no longer be in proximity to want?  I wrote, trees and non-binary (it was a typo)  & source of positive vibration.  hear flower say no  accept and do not pick it  bringing back the dead First it was the leg bone. Then dark wet owl pellets, fur and bone, tiny skull with bone so fragile it flaked into bone ... dust—bone, soaked in bleach, bone on the back porch, bone of water, bone of light, good boy bone, bone I asked permission for, may I always be ready to hear no: I offer bone as offering, I shake bone around to anyone good who may be listening.  What’s mine is yours even if it’s only bone dust.  We live openhearted and without fear.  In the triple-X fantasies, I’m the puppy. I bring back the dead  a sign of—what? Surrender? Having, out in the wilderness,  thought of you? Invoke your proximate sanctuary, string antidotes together like beads.  cat piss—rancher—rearview spider—wasp nest  dead dad blanket for the coldest nights—mountain pass—  antelope—taking a shit under a rainbow in a field of ponies, in Oregon (how that actually happened) I know your secret I too have dropped entire days into my thigh Nights and galaxies, termites of testosterone week after week slow as money even slower when it crystallizes. I think you are  beautiful in me  small shocks I did not know I’d bottom for,  which is not a secret. Sometimes I imagine shapes behind  my head pouring me into wood chips: me alive, me proximate  to want, useful as a body for some animal part unashamed by its own rage.  Why your pouch fit my jaw like that, why you only smell like that after lightning?  Way it sometimes hurts how bad—desire to be bred.  I close a motionless fist, forget to call you by your other name—  small pink flag waving in the wind.
Damn, son he grunted holding his falling jeans and sprinting sideways in high hay and concatenation He didn’t even want to chase the favor he hadn’t planned to live forever he didn’t know he had a fever thought it was a true love shopping spree thought the cotton needle was a vaccine thought the Visine was tiny water and the eye a reliable bank in the space between seeing and being seen and plenty quenched and hesitant and addicted to fickle sonance and espionage fake Prada real caught up ketchup packets spilling from his pockets Dexter Gordon flickering in his locket on grin on roar on dimples and porridge this is your typical roll out strategy pretend to shift into helpless chaos and laugh when they fall for it such tall grass in Ole Miss such that mystery of the body of the boy of the ball is leaping violently into pinstripes— He was isolated yes but he never made us nervous he was never convicted he never took the backpack he never made it to Rikers he never did come back
Just like  Jesus I am a time machine I go away I come back they won’t let me watch things die and the spy in the spine a hearse of sense and rumors a bundle of all that’s possible in a body tied to its back with the babble of hypocrites and dirty rivers if you fall asleep in yellow and awake in a bed of cotton wool with a star of nails where your heart should go and the cosmetics of wartime blood lipping wax in a factory basement attached to a slab of maple you do not have to love that man to slice his lips and scream what divination turned into demon by ignoring you alone can remember and revert to God I give the woven whisper of a kid to her first brown doll mounted to a branch of song she sings reasons that we fear ourfeelings— To the dice in the tree she is singing as the torches come up throbbing and grinning a crimson minnow in her last est lap
Translation: “I won’t forget.” my father: sideburns down the length of his face my age now & ripe my age now & alive his husky voice’s crackle like the night’s wind through corn fields of bell-bottoms fields of pomade my mother’s overlarge sunglasses crowded on her face crowded in the only english movie theater that plays amitabh bachchan my mother watching the blown-out screen the smoke spilling from light how he is able to be in all places at once all the places she can’t be the man on the screen a kind of god maybe a kind of god maybe my grief at all places at once replaying their every story a kind of god maybe my father’s nazar his long look his luck-laced lungs breathing my mom’s hands in the theater as they whisper next to my father’s the almost touch blood electric my father watching her his sideways glance on her thick eyelashes so long it’s as if she never blinks my father’s stomach blinks & blinks and a thousand amitabh bachchans blink his insides his heart pumps main na bhoolunga on beat main na bhoolunga in chorus main na bhoolunga the theater singing my mother’s ghost fingers on his palm & maybe this is what falling in love is like: a more handsome man jumbling the intestines a more handsome man belting the song to the woman with the long eyelashes in the theater & you—afraid to blink in case she disappears in case it was smoke this whole time.
So how will it end? You want it straight?
This disease has come backWith frills and furbelows.You must give your whole life to poetryOnly a few survive if that— Poems I mean, paper crumpledShades of another water— Far springs are what you long for,Listening for the slow drip of chemicals Through a hole in your chest.If you were torn from meI could not bear what the earth had to offer.
The herons were no longer safe in the sky. They flew with prayer, then fell to us. We hid them from the cats. What to do with prayer? Decades after the civil war, we enter the sniper’s hole, sew the sandbags, read words for his boyfriend on the wall, true with prayer. Write my name & invite me to a wedding. I want a parade of cars with flashers on, each blinking red, two times two with prayer. Dear Eurydice, what good a heart that can’t resist looking back? Foolish, music-laden Orpheus. Almost saved you with prayer. In the museum of memory, the missing accumulate. They shoot out of the tiles like grass blades, damp & new with prayer. I found a photo in a library book: lovers holding hands. I felt chosen, then lost it. & I didn’t pursue with prayer. When I interviewed God, I said I moved the plants toward the light, forgot the water. Is love a lack, always imbued with prayer? Tarot cards, make me beautiful. Abundance me, O Three of Cups, spin luck O Wheel of Fortune, I’m through, I’m through, I’m through with prayer.
What happened when he grabbed me at the root? I stopped. It all stopped: spirals fought to win My spiral life (from an unspiraled root— From thick cigar stubbed in my young tongue’s root— (Heart beating uncle lifetimes through my skin)). What happened, when he grabbed me at the root Where women come to starve, our ready root? My broken body (one more), broken in? My spiral life from an unspiraled root- Fed pomegranate? (in the basement: root- Husked hell of seed as if seed could have been What happened.) When he grabbed me at the root, Did ancestors throw chains down through our root To rot and winnow, with their pain and sin, My spiral life? From an unspiraled root? Oh sisters, keen our sisters! Till the root Of loving! burns! (but not! from! foreign kin!) WHAT happened (when) (he) (grabbed) me at the root? Our spiral life! From an unspiraled root!
The soldiers are afraid of the camera. Are you shooting the souk? The photographer says No no, just her. I say Just me, just me. My black dress, a little above the knee, helps. A girl learns to spectacle enough. The soldier nods, lowers his head. The crew remind me to sayNot from here, to say Half-half, to speak English, mostly.Everyone is always kinder to strangers. The city will devour its children, unless she doesn’t recognize them. And so I, of this city, I who stand on stages and name this city, deny this city in the heart of the city, deny this city at the old gate of the city. I say Bonjour, I say Thank you, I undo my accent and put on the colonizer’s tongue. When you say hometown, what do you mean? The crew comment on the quality of the light through the tin roofs, they say Pretend no one is looking. But the guy with the espresso and cigarette is looking, and the teenager who sells batteries is looking, and the man with the shisha is looking, and the woman in the clothes shop, his wife perhaps, is looking. The photographer says Beautiful, says Try to keep your shoulders even.
I hate how I can’t keep this tremor inside, this mute matter of being made extant, this shiver in being, in no not-being, this wild flying up from the inner surge and this crack in the apparatus espied around the corner from my particular warble, this quiver of dissolution in the pool of no single thing, this break in the entity of the single, of not a mistake in being made, this suffering of trying to contain the infinite in language, this refusal inextricable from its mass; this love, love of love, this being only in your presence, this inability not to err, rather the constitution of my broken image caressed by this, this permission to submerge, this bigger and bigger being, tremor of infinite allowances, this telos of cataloging that which can never be disappeared.
I am thinking that to make thinking new again is torch-lit work, subterranean and exalted. Antarctica, Goethe, Methuselah. Seven hills of Rome. An advertisement for a summer farming gig on a homestead in Alaska puzzles me: imagine harvesting kale through days of unrepentant 24-hour sunlight, covered in mosquitoes. How do you do the things in the dark when there is no dark? I want now to tell you abt my love for my whip, for killing the engine and sitting in the garage. This is also an ancient practice.
A tool for piercing holes. Particularly in leather. A simple metal shaft. A knob of wood for handle, polished by its fit in the sinewy cradle of a leather-worker’s 
palm. Likely the tool with which Louis Braille blinded himself as a child in France. An accident in his father’s saddle-making shop in the early years of the nineteenth century. Braille later invented a system of raised dots as a means of reading and writing for the blind. We don’t know much. Whether he was in the shop with his father or snuck in alone. Whether it was damp and rainy or whether the sun shone and brought to life the floating dust that always hung in the workshop air. Maybe it was just a little poke in the eye. A small tool, a small slip of the hand, a small injury. How a little fumble ends in blindness. It was decades before general anesthetic or antiseptics. Perhaps the doctor they rushed him to believed in the value of “laudable pus” in a wound. I don’t want to picture it. As a child, playing in his father’s saddle-making shop, did Louis Braille already know the names of the parts of a saddle—cantle, pommel, stirrup, tree? Did he know the smell and feel of each grade of leather? Of all the tools—punch and pincers, gouge and groover, chisel and awl—he chose awl. Likely the last thing he saw, a shine of metal galloping toward his eye. Is it accident that my tool for pressing hand-punched Braille is so much like a blunt, very small awl?
I was walking through a vast darkness in a dress studded with diamonds, the cloth under them like chain mail—metallic, form fitting like the sea to its horizon. I could hear waves breaking on the shore and far off concertina music drifting over the dunes. What was I doing in high heels in sand in a diamond-studded dress that had to be stolen? Fear washed through me, as if one of those waves had risen up and, against all the rules of waves, splashed me from the shoulders down. I was wet with diamonds and fear. A small boat held offshore with its cold yellow light pointing a long watery finger at me while the stolen feeling of the dress sparkled my location out into the universe. Thief! Thief! came an interplanetary cry, causing me to gaze up into the star-brilliant firmament, for it wasn’t just a sky anymore. It had taken on biblical stature. How had I gotten into this dress, these unruly waves, this queasy feeling I would be found out? Time to run! my heart said, pumping away under its brocade of diamonds. Strange vacancies had accumulated after all my sleep-plundered nights. Thief! came the cry again, as if I should recognize myself. And I did. I flung those high heels into the depths, took up my newfound identity, and without the least remorse, began to run those diamonds right out of this world.
The blood of language moves through the word cell from monk’s cell to prison cell to biological cell. I don’t know why a Braille cell is called a cell. I don’t know how many blood cells Louis Braille lost when the awl he was 
playing with as a small child slipped and injured his eye. Red blood cells live some hundred days before they are worn out by their silent hustle—looping and looping, pounded through the heart’s chambered cathedral, rushing out to the farthest reaches of the body with the good news of oxygen, squeezing single file along capillaries, like anxious deer probing their tracks through the woods. Rushing, silent, looping the circuits of the body. Again, again, again. Load iron. Dump iron. Load dump squeeze hustle. Red blood cells pushed through the capillaries that pushed through my 
retinas. They broke loose to run a green swarm in the corral of my eye. But that is history. Today cells still push through the capillaries fenced off by my calloused fingerprint. This one that I run over the Braille cell, the pattern of bumps. — A red blood cell is measured in microns. A solitary prison cell is measured in feet. Six feet by nine feet or less. I don’t know what the unit of measure is for how living in solitary changes a person. We know that living in a confined space, without access to the long view or landscape, changes the eye. The eye, for lack of practice, loses its ability to make out what lies in the distance. I don’t have a unit of measure for what this does to the heart. — A Braille cell is measured in spaces in a grid—two across by three down—that can be filled with a raised dot or bump. Different combinations of dots represent different letters, punctuation, symbols, shorthand. — The oldest cell I find in the dictionary is the monastic cell, a place for contemplation. From the concealed place where wine was stored. As in cellar. I find Braille contemplative. I touch my index finger to a bumpy piece of paper. My hand advances slowly left to right, the touch receptors in my finger triggered by the uneven contact of paper and skin. Messages run along nerves, finger-to-brain, brain-to-finger. Cognition sizzles. Mind notices this feels different than the pathway of sound in ear to auditory processing. Listening pulls me out into the world in an infinity of directions. Touching my reading educates me on my exact location in the world, feet in shoes, weight of foot on ground, weight of bones and flesh in chair.
Fucked art thou, with luck, o reader within the palace within the palette within the impatience within, who tilts his letters into the light of the mind’s muttering unto itself, releasing their sounds to the whirlpool fierce of an ear to draw creations in— Who brings forth a kiss of circumference, the glyphs hooked and loosened and linking, as though they were dancing through moths of minutes and months like wind—out of a god whose name is Gone ... Fukkit and lukky art thou in the wind moving marjoram into the mint, the fuzz and down of the former grazing the raised ribs of the other, the essences borne— Pheromones suddenly wafting, your eye catching the gradient greens and vein-like patterns, the gray stubble of sage’s tongue, thick oregano’s glister and whorl, stalks of thyme spiking the air on a kitchen porch or Sikinos slope with its lavender flower, lit up, still, in June; The blue film of night’s end rolling into white near dawn, the light by which you know a friend, the ancients explain, from six feet off—or, a wolf from a dog; The glow of morning bougainvillea, its papery bracts in a breeze like prayer, its bezeled ruby beginnings morphing into pinks- and magentas-to-come, cream-tipped corollas on perfect display, style and stigma sheathing the anther; Then creeping Christians’ dusky luster, in the shade at noon; Almonds swelling jade drupes into the sinking summer, encoding spring’s initial explosion; Pomegranate’s garnet, pendant, containing—against the green of its arch and stretch—six hundred seeds dark with light, glinting in its skin; Fucked, art thou, and lucky, who translates it into the day as blessed— So blessèd as in blasted art thou, in a way, in whom this knowing is strengthened in bringing you down to the cords of arthritic knees, 
wrestling the gust of a given moment’s giving—like vapor—and 
strangely grateful; Blessèd art thou whose petitions are curses, whose fuck touches the 
innermost chamber, waking the king and queen in their slumber; Blessèd the consonants funneling vowels, In Scripture’s offering—a dove’s neck wrung, cakes unleavened and 
mingled with oil; Blessèd the spirit’s meniscus within a letter typed or scrawled, as 
not-quite-deciphered codes of soul— A pupil’s reaching through a sentence, slipping and reaching again, and again, a teacher tracing the shape of her thinking; Blessèd even the stink and politic rot of the day’s pronouncements on high, Liver of the blaspheming Jew, gall of goat, and slips of yew— in action as Evil: the concrete Lego-like bunker and tower, bunker and tower, barbwired cabbage and vines, shadows gliding as crows fly across the road to the holy of hills and prefab huts, from which goat-like thugs emerge, watching and then descending through a glowering slope-
stepping prance, tribal fringes trailing—their dance sick with a stiffened faith, wicking and blotching their map of state, like a cancered scan, 
eating away at its language and letters, as Gone yields goon, or gun, or bone, where lips meet and part in the “b” of all that’s brutal and also insidious, pointed to and taken on, in the maybe pointless battle— Evoking the hundred blessings the rabbis say need to be uttered daily, reading the number—me’ah (hundred)—into the word for what, or mah: “What does Becoming your God ask of you?” (Deuteronomy, 10:12); And blessèd is never quite knowing, exactly, what those blessings should be.
i want ! to be friends ! with katya ! i want  to dress ! how i want to dress ! like a gale ! full of glitter ! and back alleys ! a seagull laugh ! to shake our being ! whose secret lies !  perhaps ! in kicking legs upwards in delight !  painted ! an omnivorous harpy ! goofy !  loving our friends ! lighting up around them !  what a man ! unstoppable ! they’ll say, why !  they’re the perfect woman ! (now that’s me !)  judy jetson ! enraged ! with a penis ! and obsessed with Contact too ! in every situation !  a little Jodie Foster ! o dear role modelfor my role model ! find meaning ! play parts !  everything real ! happens ! behind the eyes !  all those things we cannot prove ! like love !  like the world ! is just ! what we make of it
Before you sink away into the morphinesweet unreality of the everyday we would like to say something about those spasms and fasciculations of yours as well as that bump on your back For years you have no doubt been googling every freckle Just recently you were at the doctor’s with a patch of dry skin on your leg Diagnosis: too much shower gel But on hearing the word chondrosarcoma you went home and immediately unplugged your router Do you know where your priorities lie? Do you know what life has to offer or did those endless therapy sessions and that eight-week mindfulness course simply teach you how to tolerate suffering that every signal in your body can be temporarily expelled to the rhythm of some breathing exercise?Let the pain beTo be free is to be free of need Wrong To be free is to need some fresh air and to be able to get up and go outside Don’t say we didn’t warn you  Translated from the Dutch
For Juan Felipe Herrera In the town of frijoles, men eat their meals without washing their hands, wanting to bless their mothers’ food with soil from the fields. In the town of frijoles, boys beat on hollow pots, the last wiping of their sides with a piece of tortilla as holy a moment as taking the wafer in church. In the town of frijoles, women undress to keep their babies warm, stories whispered into bald heads revealed as poems decades later, when it is early. In the town of frijoles, old men cry for their fathers and mothers, tombstone ranches dotting the night moon where the pinto aromas extend beyond the bowl of the sun.
In the other world we use other words, painting them with water on the desert’s sidewalk under • unwaver ing / the / sky’s gaze, meant to be eaten up immediate ly by our nearest star: we know we’re brief, a flash of the magnesium bulb’s Lichtenberg lace or in the hardpan land we inhabit, unwilling / it’s / to unloosen • Edenic ancestry to us, to unearth / un couth / the • treasure which lies (we believe) like an ocean of luminous fish with their wayfinder’s lanterned faces beneath us, sufficiently gilded to wake the dead  ’s memory of what they no longer own: a form for the nation-state to take, to write its penal colony’s penalties upon, or hold, same as we hold our own souls, which wager against us as soon as they’re able.
Is it alive?  —neither a head, legs nor arms! ...................  ... torpid against the flange of the supporting girder . ?  an inhuman shapelessness, knees hugged tight up into the belly  Egg-shaped! —William Carlos Williams, 1950 visit to El Paso, from “Desert Music” Yes, I am a body of rags lying here on the bridge waiting for a hot rain to wash me open, dissolve me off the bridge because this border is closed. I rot on the boundary line and can’t enter Juarez, pennies thrown at me when a drunk El Pasoan returns in the darkness and sees my shape that makes him hurry across. No head, decades ago they threw it in the river without my screams. My arms were the first to go when I couldn’t climb the wall. I can never leave this bridge. I live on the pure line that divides countries and grabs my hunger from sliding into Mexico with my outstretched hands. I still have my knees. I used to be sold in Juarez and smuggled into El Paso, the egg that floated down the Rio Grande to break hundreds of miles away before being thrown back. I stay on the bridge and can’t move. Do not cross to El Paso without wiping your shoes of me, one foot on US concrete, the other scraping away at my Mexican rags. When I struggle against the wire fence, I make sure I salute two flags.
There is no act of forgiveness, only the redeeming light on the shoulders dancing in tall weeds, cigarettes gone and the girls slapping free. The tortilla cart burns against the wall because Jesus called my brother who was acquired by whistling gangs of men under the hanging arch. There can be no night without the wind on shoulders exhausted by games and messages my brother lost between the darkness and the bridge into Juarez, Mexico, where no crows caw because the buildings are torn and flashlights are narrow in their beaming stumble, my thoughts the last ones on this side of the river, my sudden happiness hidden in celestial light without being appalled at what I see, my ears to the ground listening to weeds overrun by boys who can’t spell and are waiting for me without knowing pilgrims are on the border. Whatever kills them spares me the journey to beg for purity among unspoken Spanish everyone fears in their greed. The group doesn’t know it is what the river stones teach, though I can’t speak of them because faith is prehistoric and my brother is pursued by dust storms that erase his footprints across the back roads where he loses his language of need.
With my ear to the door of my cell. And my want like a comb in my hair. Like a veil where there is no veil. With a ring in my ear. A ring in the hole in my ear. I rap at the door of my will and the door of my want as to will them away. My want like a veil on the floor. I appear at the door of my will with a veil in my hand and a comb in my hair. My want like a hole that I bore in the floor. Where my will is more feeling than veil, and my veil is more want for a veil than a veil. I wear the comb of my fear in my hair. My veil is as thin as my want, and my want is as thin as a hair. When I curl up my want in the curl of my hair. When I curl up on the floor of the cell of my want. I bear my fear in my cells like I’m bearing a ring. Like I’m curled up inside of the ring in my ear. I rap at my want for a door where there is no door. A will where there is no will. At my want for unveiling. My will to unveil it. The curve of my will and my ear to the door. With the curl of my ear to the door. Not the door but my fear of the door.
A crow perches inside me. Actually, it is a whale. It is hard to tell by touch alone. Nothing I own ever looks me properly in the eye. Sometimes a loud caw at dusk feels like the largest mammal on Earth. A deep breath out the blowhole into my stomach. One second it swims and the next it is a small extension of a tree. This is a kind of beginning— a finger puppet show. The light dancing around my hands. Me dancing alone on a stem. A persimmon blooms. A boy learns a song and plants it in an orchard. Inside of me the large creatures change their shapes to fit. A blackbird. An organ. Animals with no names. I send them off into the world daily. Little sadness takes flight. Love is a brave child. These things take the shape of their containers. I don’t have to do anythingto hold them.
Exodus is a traffic jam, and traffic jams are dangerous. Ahead of us, armed with sticks and rakes, a child’s brigade does battle on this doomed track hourly blown to dust. To occupy themselves, they race a tank. Dust is faster. Tattered surveillance blimps yank against steel tethers over the saltlick plain. The road goes boom again. The flimsy means by which we try to distance war don’t matter anymore. Disguise your car, your hair, take to the air, stare down on the terrible mirror of the ground where those who didn’t qualify for tickets to the sky wave goodbye, goodbye.
Monostich: a long sentence Sternum: a little chest Heart: upside down Location of the unconscious: Empty window seat Horizon: gone at night Thought: given Prison: a perversion — Our earth can’t live without holy rites. You can see this from the sky. Lots of hills to climb up and down. A straight ravine between. Snow figures engraved in stones. Show streaks of sun gone but The white rocks shrink and grow Grave at sunset. Turn to the right And you will fall to the left. One figure wears a beard Down to his chest But Eros hates coverings. And prefers to be caught naked With his bow and arrow. Embellishes But clears the way for pathos. — From above I covet a mountain beneath my feet. Shrines made of dung and branches, With berries for eyes and burlap hung with holly. They were curled in shadows on roads Leading to every stop we made from the Trig To Top Withens to Liverpool. The white and purple mountains. Stood over the Brontës and clusters Of black thistles’ script. I remember a church (a cave supported By old bicycle parts to keep it up) Was bound by a broken bell and a box Containing snapshots and trinkets. “We will get through this!” — Why mercy? Having mercy on someone is easier than forgiving them. That one there? A man limited by logic, he imprisoned the people whose thinking was infinite. And her, the serious one? Stars without light hold the others up. I lost you for a moment. Mid-sentence is darker so you can’t decipher it. Look up. Oyster, shell pink, sky inside. Our prison. What would you tell the judge? The difference between a man who shoots others and then himself and one who shoots others and runs away. You will tell her that decisions are only guesses. “Resentment is a weak form of suicide.” That’s why suicide is hard to choose even when you’re dying. “I wish they would shoot themselves before they shot the others.” — We’ve evolved (arrived) just in time for the obsolete. The center that runs along the sides of the tarmac Is a camp without a name. A holding station. A glass of narcotics, a warm blanket, steam for suffocation, For each passenger of any class. “Did you know a rendition is an interpretation, an explanation of something not clear?” “It’s also persecution and surrender, Translation and the handing over Of prisoners to countries Where detention is.” Pass through customs in silence. The red strings of radiation Will only burn your bed-skins. Do not joke or rhyme with bomb. “If you have a passport, bless it.” — Now the wing is whitening, its patches quiver on the steel and fragment into petals that are either living or not. In grade one I watched the lights of cars passing on the bedroom wall for surely they were messages flying at the speed of light. And aren’t they still? In the sky there are few signs of progress. Tongues wag and sailors pull their beards. Some have pictures of naked women, some have boys. It’s fractal, a science student whispers to nobody special. — There is a wonderful kidnapped hunted raped and betrayed girl In fairy tales. She has a name, but the vowels and subjects Around can’t be switched to fit. She wants to escape but letters won’t let her. She never thinks about darkness or dying because they’re natural And don’t require thought. She carries her darkness everywhere. What is not natural Is being here an utter stranger. And flight being no metaphor. — What if the outcome of an act burst into color. All that fruit skin dimpled from the touch of branches. The oranges falling when the creatures below were hungry. Each wink of an eyelid presaged a long look at a winter That would come eons later. What if you stood when I entered. What if you think of time as a long and everlasting plain, You can pass across it any which way you turn. And walk around the pond with your father again. — I had a garden of my own For twenty-one years. Seven trees times three Planted for the first children. Oh its land was a meadow And our little house, a grape arbor And a Wampanoag Grave in a grove of elms. Then a tree like an elephant Bucked in a storm. And its trunk broke into A wrinkled little stump. Roots don’t give up. And stones only breathe once a year. Many people passed through. We could have watered more Or flowered a path For the visitors. After all Love meant life and its shadow. Children played and grew. I too grew old for no reason. Love stood at a distance. One day the snow will camouflage The huddling April buds Before a cherry-picker Damns all but one, the littlest. — At least I know when the wild geese Fly from Sepiessa. They herd the future As it approaches the bench. Night ... the playground At Town Hall is creaking And tribal members Now numbered In the twos are too early for sun-up. We almost sit together But our feet of shadows Show failed land deals. Steps lowered and slimy On a slip into the lagoon. Ghoulish are the ghosts Of time past: ancestors With our same names. —Pensées sauvages: wild pansies, like violets, have the shape of thoughts, savage thoughts, colored thoughts, sprung from a stem. Purple and yellow. Five petals. Once Cupid shot an arrow dipped in the ink of a pansy into the eyelid of a sleeping child. From then on the child saw cirrus colors at dawn, dawn being where iridescence grows flowers.
For Kazim Sunrise ocher marks the river’s forehead, wet dhotis betray supplicants bare as opaque windows, their secrets. It’s no secret, my petals wreath my crown in marigold, a glow I’ve nursed into nova when I cracked, from drought, my pericarp, thirsty for God. I have always been a honey man, coat of a langur, pilgrim- body of fruit- offering cast onto the tongue of deity I prayed would move in me. No sweetmeat to sugar the idol carved of me. The devout fill brass kettles, fill God with God, to offer running water to Sun, as mantras insist from the temples; the adhan’s pollen drifts— yes, God is great. Along the ghats umbrellas bloom in red, I breathe into nostrils of marble:The name of God is Truth— vendors hawk neem branches to scour mouths in bitter.
like when I can’t sleep I say to myself the the the the the the the— each article drenched to the bone in the belief it attends something solid, fond belief, always being cut in on—the the the the the the the the the does the trick if I can stick with it not get swept into narrative, that shock brigade all tell, if by shock they mean hit the the the the the the the the papers say asylum is temporary now, true, what’s not that’s able to maintain its potency, you wake up from a spell in that genre of safety, relative safety, what saved you making as if the story were widely shared until you saw them as-if otherwise and then what saved you was seeing their look, saying resemblance too may be at any time revoked so must be made the most of, seeing it then, seizing the minute dismounting with the foot trained as a dancer to keep you traveling because they’d slept and, refreshed, moved the the the the papers expired, it’s their turn now to really live
You and me, of course, and the animals we feed and then slaughter. The boxelder bug with its dot of red, yeast in the air making bread and wine, bacteria in yogurt, carrots, the apple tree, each white blossom. And rock, which lives so slowly it’s hard to imagine it as sand then glass. A sea called dead is one that will not mirror us. We think as human beings we deserve every last thing. Say the element copper. Incandescence glowing bright and soft like Venus. Ductile as a shewolf’s eyes pigmented red or green, exposed to acid in the air. Copper primes your liver, its mines leach lead and arsenic. Smelting is to melting the way smite is to mite. A violence of extraction. What’s lost when a language dies? When its tropes oppose our own? In the at-risk language Aymara the past stretches out in front, the future lags behind. Imagine being led by knowing, imagine the end as clear.
by this point you must be hungry for God not the real thing only flecks of gold paint the marble bust of a half-bull half-man today I took a visit to the only museum and every last gallery was packed with snow I mean this literally the whole place frozen I didn’t stay long I was worried about melting the art I touched my eyes lightly to each flake and when I left the museum I believed a bit more in God the strangest thing was I never shivered I knew love the whole time
A sparrow weaves over the derelict terrace the psychics used to meet in toward the snow-garnished mountains! They brought their lozenges of grief here, held each other’s pallid hands and summoned reeds of kindness into their voices! The men down tools, take lunch, smoke in a row, dangle their legs from the wall! They’re kids mostly; a xylophone of hard hats tuneless in the rain! The half-built apartment block is waiting and they will never live there! I knew a boy who wanted to be a pilot so much that he became one! Farewell, years of simulated taxiing on the world’s fantastic runways! O night flights over the patchwork of Europe! O unscheduled layover! O seat belt sign! I knew a man who hiked into the mountains! His name was early morning light! His name was sunset in Libra! Between the Scots pine and the ash he found the branch with his name on it and stepped off it into the air!
Before any of it, a goat appeared in a piebald sweater, beardless and tethered at the collar on half a tennis court of land up a rutted lane above the road. Doubtless a horse once clip-clopped there before a trap, a whip, a tweed of farmer with bushels and crates of cabbages, parsnips, blue duck eggs to pay the country doctor. Not now, and not then, we drive home between the fields. She is radioactive, or lately was, and sleeps on the doses of nitrogen mustard a country doctor has called for. Little goat forgive me. I shouldn’t do this. All you do is munch your poxy plain of grass, your kingdom for a caper. If at night you sing your tired chin to sleep, it’s not a metaphor, it’s a tragedy. Instead, let’s say a ship arrived one day. Let’s say its decks were delicate, polished oak. Let’s say happy impossible winds steered it. Let’s say the captain, sweeping his spyglass over the hills, after all this time, found us.
There is no delusion that she wants her. Is marriage like owning a very expensive art piece? Your spouse the painting? You the crooked frame that won’t fit? Is this how desire is born? From having less or from wanting more? She wakes up calling her name. She wakes up knowing that she doesn’t want less. From House of Cards she learned a new rule: “I love that woman. I love her more than sharks love blood.” Or something along that line. She may have misquoted. It came out of the pre-disgraced Kevin Spacey’s mouth. Her God doesn’t exercise telepathy or residence. Hands, eyes, mouths, authenticity. It’s a city without mirrors. Because touch, in itself, is symmetry. — She held the woman’s face in her mind’s eye & realized that they would never be lovers & as soon as she let her go, mosses grew all over the geography of her hands and the woman’s face. Is this because it’s a debt that must be paid for not believing in somebody? In herself? She felt the desire of desire as if it was a binchōtan charcoal and its ash. Masakichi Yakitori and the Pyramid Club. — On Easter Sunday, she sang a Christmas carol of Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu, where is your power to persuade a tree from falling asleep on itself? Does night dream of actresses sleeping on leaves? Where is the human figure in this? Your Saturday is a memory without a body. A pair of lungs that knew too much about your mother’s rape tells you to leave reality through a threshold of a dream. You knew how to be authentic. How to get rid of people. How desertion works in the wilderness. You exclude sound from your thesis. It’s a way for you to desert poetry without being too poetic. — There were thistles inside of your mother’s vaginal canal. She wasn’t violated in the wilderness. He has dragged her there to say that it was okay to want pins and needles. She wasn’t numbed after all. Her body didn’t pretend to be a God. Just a whimpered Lao Tzu. In a remote mountain, the men are smoking pipes and their vapors smell like evergreen. To punctuate their desire she says: God is being difficult. But he is not. I have to tell the world that I am sad and have been forgotten. Is there a way home from not being homeless? Is there a way to swim in an Indian reservation without being caught? Listen: the isotope was just a trope. There are ways to move smoothly in and out of insincerity. We grow to learn how to brush melted butter onto doughs shaped like the cavalry. They arrive galloping on the baking sheets without yeast in their armors. — Every Tuesday we acquire clues from the shape of your mother’s scream. When it was hoarse, it had the shape of a small bonsai tree. Your cat licks you and licks you. You know it’s not 300 bc. Desire comes and goes while leaving lies to clothe themselves. Her anger is a troublesome candidate of sadness— lights itself on fire. From time to time, the cunt of that fire grows ember by ember. Once in a while, a house made of screams floats down a black river on the planet Pluto. Its chimney is not designed to ventilate silence or resilience. It’s designed to allow screams to escape without suffocating everyone inside it. Once in a while the rain arrives to suppress the anger of the scream. When anger soaks like wet grasses on the house’s floorboard, the ants come out to showcase their military might. They resurrected the screams from their wet ash and carry them on their powerful backs. The aftermath of a rape is portable and transmutable. A possible somatic experience for the ants, but may not be for the human or the inhuman.
If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot. Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep. Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door. Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady. Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell. For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate. The adage goes: coffee stunts growth. Twelve grapes on New Year’s: the opposite. Advice from the learned: hide a book under your pillow. Never step on. Never drop. Every rice grain that remains on your plate you’ll meet again on the footpath to heaven. You’ll have to stoop to pick each one of them up.
end- and be-any, make ends hour, at the end on my haze, elf’s well that ends well, at a fair end, an end as itself, any good must come to an end, tie is loose ends, end on the line, defanging on the end, end as sight, coming to a man end, end as took, hour a terrible end, to end on the ticks, team end, on the semiotics end, light at the end of the tunnel, choking both ends, does the end justify the bound, short end on the brand, know which end is is, now-end, toss-end, you haven’t heard the end on it, follow me to the ends.
Canary-yellow dice aren’t what you think, seller said in their shop where they sold  all things  canary—  whistles,  sweets, frills, perfumes, with hints  of cherry chance, a throw of canary. Much hinges on  canary, Canary said  in  their  shop where they sold sunny vanes on canary die.  Forgive me for showing  myself a composed canary, live or not.
I fear dispersal but the resounding really sounds may be full of echo or echolocation for the next round Eye rowed in the guest book of God my many sacred tongues body and bow Fingers spell now all the spaces I open You now verse now open oh pen Cacti quiver for a century In the desert I swam myself earthword to know No time on earth and no breath no dearth Hollowed out into architecture eternal Who argues with rhyme or snow Who knows the space in your here The space in the storm so finely bowed The space in snow no one nears
With “Waltzing Matilda,” funnel web spiders, and echidnas out of the way, you move on to the villanelle. The alien learns quickly, and soon the rhyme scheme and refrain are being applied to whatever it encounters: moonlight filling a green bucket by the door, a dog’s tooth in furniture, the sound of a nail gun. You go to bed and dream of planets disappearing like balls in a perfect snooker clearance. In the morning you find the walls papered with villanelles, each one signed by what appears to be a bar code. When you scan one with your phone, the screen lights up with footage of a satellite flyby through the heliosphere, trailing the sound of whale song, children crying, sustained applause, and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
“It took the herd six hours,” the Blue Planet voiceover explains, orcas pushing a blue whale calf under. Keet, our son points at the screen, naming them all one whale, from the greek kētos, water-monster, “The seas bathed in calf’s blood.” More, our son asks, More okean, watches the red beneath them spreading, More ocean. “Killer whales,” the voice reminds, the blue calf’s heart bigger than all three of ours, its blood could fill our son’s bathtub for weeks. The orcas only eat the head, let the rest sink to the ocean floor, but no, the voice points out how body born six thousand pounds lands on the skeleton of a full grown blue, “Nothing gets wasted in the water.”Look, our son staring, Look, learning how the deep devours, blubber separates from bone, even bone won’t survive long, eaten by water worms and salt. Spicy, our son calls any intense flavor, tears in his mouth, but no, not over this, the calf’s blood or its bones, the orcas swimming through reddened salt, but over desire, he wants what he cannot have or doesn’t want what he is given, a calf’s heart in the teeth of a hungrier mammal, because what else is worth that much salt?
because we know distance too well because the blood bank didn’t have enough blood for nana & her new knee because I see your car a car like yours parked across the street from my apartment because the same night awaits us all because arizona & the drought & I was seven when it started because nana used to sleep with a belt tied around her waist so tight to wake like an hourglass because I wait on you because I want to know the antonym to every word because we speak to each other in our sleep because I do my best thinking in the shower so I take long showers because you kiss the parts of my body I hate most because you can love someone & not remember their birthday because sometimes I want the wind & it is impossible because from the airplane I can see both oceans & where they meet
In order to see the world’s evils clearly They redden their eyes on the branch Until they believe the warm wind’s praise In order to become waves in our blood They offer their lives to the wine cellar In my glass, the blood of their youth Tries to send waves through my heart It’s a jockey riding my bloodstream Loosening age’s reins— I used dirty words I don’t normally use Nearly scaring awake my dead relatives I fell fast asleep with my arms around love And, waking, couldn’t find my lover I fit right in at a banquet in the city And finally realize, love is wine’s tax High taxes make wine noble A crate of red wine Is a crate of Van Goghs—do you believe that? A crate of red grapes Is a crate of nipples—do you believe that?  Translated from the Chinese
What did they desire, the dead who had returned? The sons who had inherited their estates pretended not to know them. The iron gates were welded shut, but soon the dead had learned to hire lawyers practiced in the laws that bound the afterlife to lesser gods. The angels thundered on like piston rods, denying their gold wings to either cause. The city streetlamps flared like learnèd ghosts. The moon turned red. Beneath a scrim of clouds, Spanish moss draped the myrtle trees like shrouds— in politics the guests became the hosts. Those days made angels of the better sort. The cases languished in a lower court.
Grain by grain, salt’s frozen tears Help me count history’s disasters I can’t blame salt for telling foodYou’re full of wounds Salt misses the freedom of the ocean Remembering waves, salt jumps into a soup But it finds there only my reflected face It hides by making itself too soft to chew Sometimes, salt follows a cold sweat Waking me from a nightmare Dreamed blood tastes like salt As if in human failure lay the silence of God Having swum in the ocean Salt considers soup a shallow pond For salt, every meal is a jail One day, an extra salty flavor Makes me cough and cough It feels like cold fish bones scraping my throat Maybe it’s salt telling meI’m going to prison in your body Don’t ever forget who I am!
I’ve never seen pigeons argue I only see them soar I don’t know if a pigeon is naïve or worldly I just know it has no past to make it toil through life Maybe they’re the tongues of the air Lazily expressing cars’ sighs Maybe they’re lined up on the roof Vying to perform snow’s wedding One day I stick my head out the window And realize their nation is the act of soaring Soaring makes my silence meaningless Thank god, they’ve taught me how to talk about nations! Standing under a flock of pigeons, I think ohPeople aren’t even worth one flower blooming toward them Translated from the Chinese
How do I compare the costs Of leaving one system Of cooperation For another System of cooperation? How do I loosen the tongue Enough to inhabit The temple incognito? What are the people to me Until I condense my hesitations And drink in stillness with The rest of us, slightly drunk But pacing moderately Around the dew, dropped To the knees at a tepid hour? Cooperation is free, or is it So? A refugee has no terms Of comparison. Who really is Aggrieved is a real fugitive To freedom. The only enemies Of freedom are border agents And those dozing on one side Of the other. The border condition Realizes the personality. That is why it has to be Negotiated again in public Houses. I tried to be loved And everyone else failed me. The dew is a corrosive. It’s only obvious once The horizon tempers The topography again. And this is so only when Earthlight can be confined By the foreground. Allegorists are not agents Now so much as internet vernaculars We all get our chance to innovate. Nations cannot be explained Otherwise. Someone, we, Made up the whole thing. I want us to think we were Liars then but are dying to Finally grow up, no longer Following fictions. But Perfectly flush corroborating Rehearsals. The students can always Have the data They deserve. What is oligarchy? They call it up And it clicks. (Hear the disconsolate fizz of epiphany pitched out of library windows and welfare field office exits.) Everything can be Said to have Occurred. But do They describe themselves As belated or latent? The reveal is just a mild Turning in Any case. The air in winter Is best for your device. Cordon it around your Device’s appetite. Or there will be A disaster For the recollection, Proof by perdurable Association. (Check the custom, or costume, that to learn is a bargain first fixed in the recognition of ignorance for which the learned refuse to serve as models.) Students delay excitement Just long enough And then they know. You are a student By profession. If you insist You deserve A livelihood You will be Persecuted For this And that is What has become Of forensics. That is the Rootless fact. Its reason is Untraceable, so Its stolid justice proffers Souls for history’s Paltry set of names Of strangers. To Assimilate novelty Is then to obtain inventory. What will you do With it all? Won’t you enjoy The leverage it provides So as to insist On more? It is not data But esteem. That is the remaining Root system, That nothing will Have to be Enough.
& no it’s not a landscape painting I’m talking about a prospect wherein vision gets unhooked from the sockets. & no it’s not a love song about blindness or the way she moves. rather it is standing in the midst of nothing & the wind passing since seeing was always a curse, the boundary between things floating up to foil how anyone might touch or travel. unless we can find a non- delineated dance proliferating otherwise in the unhasty unfolding of we’re already there à la Hegel re: Kant, & not like that Caspar David Friedrich painting either (some solitary man-figure surveying what was already his so it becomes his again) but instead unvisioning the world, not like Heidegger, obviously, not the thing at hand but like the hand repeating a motion forever, writing her beloved like this is politicsthis is the end of all endings & the wind
my mother asking how to open a tab on her laptop, to email a photo, calling to ask—can you change the lightbulb at the top of the stairs?
Thinking. Wondering if my trot to Paris to suffer you wasn’t all wrong. My amour fou precise as a shark collecting scents miles off, exact as a saint cowed before invisible wings rustling abstract sheets? Your eyes green, and red your hair, iconic in this television universe of one man let nothing on, no “real” Twitter feed surrendering candid portraits of what you believe, what you love. And I sit, subtracted, before my love. Wondering. Subjected as I was to plural echoesnth parts sensual,nth parts trust, and to hear there a call to illegitimate Paris where I fit right in, Jacques Brel songbook, ukulele, bread and wine, simulacralmaudit bohemian pelted by Polanski-ish rain, but happy away from Los Angeles where you fit in, being able, in one city, to drive for hours and never leave home. My choked voice grumbled “de chrysanthèmes ...” (Brel song) as I sought the streets of Apollinaire’s “Zone” on Google maps (which I paid dearly for) still hearing the angel even as you were angry with me who nearly destroyed your apartment’s electricity plugging in some idiotic gadget of mine and leaving it smoking drunk on uke, bread and wine. Hard not to think this symbolic or a great way to pep up an episode of Friends, or an ancient Merchant Ivory film. If I were Anne Carson you’d be translation and I an impotent scholar before the Greek, drawn by love to the undecided omnivorous Word that paints travelogue, that shields Earth, begging this word side with me when I touch down in Paris, that it’s you who’d ground this polysemous text with a kiss, or touch puppyish, unambiguous. Oh, that Anne Carson, such a genius. She makes me think. I’ve never been so wrong, and in the wrong place, a foreigner, foreigned in my own goddamned country by double negation fitting right in (as I’ve said) and you a Mediterranean accent amidst the stones of French abstraction, pride, often cruelty,noirs désirs circling like bats who’ve read too much Saint-Just and mistaken it for Sade. (That sounds quite important. I’m afraid it’s not.) It rained. I wrote a pining song in a hotel room refusing your offer to stay with you and your boyfriend (quelle horreur) who spoke no French while I conducted vertiginous conversations with a curator at the Musée Gustave Moreau pinning my hopes on words like “Gautier” (Théophile) “Mallarmé” and “Rimbaud” (who didn’t come up of course), and marred the language even further with the help of Google translate in my letters to you in the guise of, who? it wasn’t Baudelaire (I can’t remember who, maybe Marat, and you, Charlotte Corday). I liked the pining song, in the end, it’s Morrissey-esque, funny but grim, slippery and only incomplete without (or with) you. Here I do not go again, merely think flat-footed on my horizon (scratching my itchy head, I think I have dandruff) while you sleep in a Westwood Airbnb lyrically, so I am drawn shark-angelly down Hollywood Blvd. on the 302 to an American-styleaperitivo with sliders instead of funicular olives again with you talking, and I gazing deep into your colors, reading your Tweets but never commenting. Such lovely olives. It’s a beautiful evening.
So I entered suffering. A room with dazzling walls, starched drapes, a bed with the coverlet turned down just so. Shirred bed skirts. The pillowcase crisp, bearing the marks of the iron. A low wrought iron table with a pitcher and its glass of water. Curtain half cinched. Was anyone else ever here? Not a trace of a prior occupant. No candy wrapper. No smudge on the high-gloss sheen. Yet I marvel at the labor that must have gone into all those preparations: someone lifting the mattress, twice, as you must, and adding the final touches; smoothing away all traces of a final touch, filling the glass precisely, so the camber of water fits like a seal over the rim. A radio on the nightstand. It lights up, and there’s the very voice in my mind, arguing with itself, trying to convince itself that it suffers. Why so many hypnotic cadences, so many rhetorical flourishes—anaphora, chiasmus, parataxis—such subtle case logic, Rogerian argument, appeals to so many arbiters: God, reason, justice, twilight? Search from station to station, and the white noise in between. On fm, am, and shortwave, the same rapt monologue. That marshaling of precedent, scientific data, illustrations from the history of medicine, the Upanishads, the Vedas, the sutras and suras, the Sermon on the Mount. But what is 
suffering? Is it true that it requires my consent? In a shaft of evening, the trillion worlds collide. The rose in the vase grows whiter in darkness.
For Alexander Moysaenko The black heart of the moon’s visible through the trees from here. Where are you? I’m alone on the road with a dead phone. The birds are flapping overhead but there’s not much light to be guided by. If any horizon becomes visible enough to follow. Forget the rain’s smear, the chafe of fabric at the calf. The money ran out. The diners are stuffed and back for more. Each terrible thing I said to the child will get repeated hopefully as a joke. And like language, these gestures, or a certain way of nodding one’s head, it all eases in with less than a breath. Forget the song’s words, the order of the band’s set tonight. The black moon’s heart’s got that sinister bent and I want to get touched at by the snakes. One of the students in my class used to go bear hunting with his two uncles. They played recordings of distressed animals to lure in tentative animals to kill. This practice is illegal in many places. Because it’s so very effective. I split open the apple and hand the good half to a child on the bus nestled in under the arm of her sleeping mother. Love from here is a long way to go. Get on your bike and ride through the lights.
It’s so flat here you can see everything. It’s not romantic. Nobody can slip in or out in secret, and who among us has pumped the last worry through her heart? Collapsing into shade, I wish for more sons, endless daughters: a higher ratio of my people to other people. Why not want what I want; since we used all the air conditioning it’s become impossible to think things through. Can you believe your ears? All the electric music in the world has been turned into handbells. I wish I had a cushion for my knees instead of gloves to keep the handbells pure. We can get used to anything. That doesn’t mean we should. I went to a wedding where everything was outrageous but trying to act 
modest by including very goofy elements, such as people in bear costumes and gold nuggets descending from the ceiling, only to be jerked back up out of reach when people tried to grab them. Long ago, a matrimonial family collected a few eggs from each household in the village to contribute to the wedding cake. A pig for the dinner: a gift from a rich great-uncle. Shortly after, there was a period of department store gift services and electro-synth harps for hire. But now we pick dandelions to make wine, and pluck chickens to make fine the groom’s cloak. He wants large brown wings; he wants wolf pelt for his loins. He wants he wants he wants. There is no end to that. The bride is someone who has only ever served. No use asking someone who’s once had a true taste of freedom, whose eyes widened and whose pelvis thrust up unbidden. Better she be someone who might never know what she lost. It is as it ever was. How many centuries have brides been made and used in this way? How few centuries have let women be girls first, swirling as long as they wanted into their sweetness and sharpening to ripeness, only becoming women once full heavy love was their desire inside and out. Maybe one. Maybe not quite one full century.


It was like climbing a mountain to those of us who’d climbed one. To the others, it was like, I suppose, something else. In other words, we let 
everybody find her own figure of speech. Not that it—speech—lay thick on the ground, or mountain; it presented itself one word at a time, far between. A body had to keep an eye out, like for firewood at dusk, or else miss her chance. Nobody else, let’s face it, cared about metaphor, or even simile, the like-it-or-not-ness of the mountain pretty much getting 
between a body and her musing, in its going. One step at a time, anyone could lose herself or someone else just staring at her feet. And if a body meet a body is not mere speech but something that could happen, like hopping a bus—though on the mountain you’ll catch no rides, worse luck, the mountain requires to be climbed on foot, one after the other, nothing else will get you up it. There’s nothing like such obduracy but in the wild, nobody can tell you otherwise. No simple figure, this struggle: just a crag, your burden, and your own two feet. Say 
otherwise, talk through your hat, which I don’t care for.
Chile, chocolate, coyote, guacamole, mezcal, peyote, tomato, ocelot, tequila—the words survive months of siege, 240,000 dead in Tenochtitlan. The Place of Herons, a place of whiteness, did not survive. Duende, a tiny face in a calla lily, survived. A bowl decorated with scorpion and pelican survived. Clay faces full of shadow. Sculptors who understood light, how it addresses the afterlife, expecting a great dark to fall.
Aztec girl twisting her hair into a braid  when the army arrives. She sees them in her citadel, her nickname for the city  forgotten by her mouth’s mind. The Spanish writer who keeps the oldest codex saw grief when the papers of the people’s prayers were burned by the soldiers. Havoc, my freedom, without a history I invent my own. Say I am of many faces, neither white nor brown,  say violet,  the color that speaks like violence. Legacy sounds like lost at sea.  Say it wasn’t precious to me, identity.  Strange, dangerous innocence.  The earth is an onion strung with lights, my eyes sting  from the blaze. A gold hawk joins  the ring of fox in heavy dew around me early and I am part of their wet ritual in my wish  to turn from what is human, even knowing it was hawk who stole the woodpecker’s redheaded flight.
The thing inside the thing inside the thing inside Malinche, mother, Cortés, father,casta, first mestizo, loanword for admixture, dark one, darker than one and lighter than the other, espaldera, graft, hybrid, pardo, parda, castiza
1 The leaves sleeping beneath the wind: A vessel for the wound. Time perishing: the glory of the wound. The trees rising among our lashes: A lake for the wound. The wound lies in bridges When the grave lengthens, When patience stretches Between the banks of our love and death. The wound, a gesture, is passing. 2 I give the voice of the wound To the tongue of strangled bells, To stone approaching from afar, To aridity and the arid land, To time borne on a stretcher of ice, I kindle the fire of the wound. When history burns in my garments, When blue nails sprout in my book, When I shout during the day, Who are you? Who’s thrusting you Into my notebooks, Into my virgin earth? In my notebooks, in my virgin earth, I glimpse two eyes of dust And hear someone say, “I am the wound that grows In your narrow history.” 3 I named you cloud, Wound, dove of departure, I named you quill and book. And here I am, starting a dialogue Between myself and the drowned tongue On the isles of exodus, On the archipelago of the ancient fall. And here I am, teaching the dialogue To the wind and palms— Wound, dove of departure. 4 Had I a harbor, had I a vessel In the land of dreams and mirrors, Had I the remains Of a city, had I a city In the land of children and weeping, I would forge them all for the wound Into a spear-like song That pierces trees and stones and sky, A song as supple as water, Unruly and dazed, like conquest. 5 World adorned with dreams and yearning, Rain down on our deserts, Rain down, but shake us, palms of the wound, And break two branches off for us From the trees that love the silence of the wound, From the trees with arched lashes and hands That keep vigil over the wound. World adorned with dreams and yearning, World falling in my brow, Drawn like the wound, Come no closer—the wound is closer than you. Don’t tempt me—the wound is more beautiful, And the wound has passed by that enchantment Cast by your eyes In the last kingdoms, Passed without leaving a sail to tempt it astray, Without leaving it an island.    Translated from the Arabic
I inhabit these fugitive words, I live, my face my face’s lone companion, And my face is my path, In your name, my land That stands tall, enchanted and solitary; In your name, death, my friend.    Translated from the Arabic
I amuse myself with my country.  I glimpse its future approaching on the eyelashes of an ostrich, I toy with its history and its days, I strike it with stones and thunderbolts. I extinguish its lamps and light its windows, and at the other end of day I inaugurate its history. I am a stranger to all of you. I am from the other end. I live in a country of my own, inflating the sky to see its ashes, and in sleeping and waking I open a bud to live within. Something must be born, so I bore caverns in my skin for lightning and build nests. I must pass like thunder into lips as sad as straw, between stone and autumn, between pore and epidermis, between thigh and thigh.  And so I sing: “Form worthy of our demise—advance.”  And so I shout and sing: “Who will give us the maternity of the cosmos, who will nourish us with mines?” I advance toward my self, toward ruins. The silence of calamity takes me—I’m too short to gird the earth like a rope, I’m not sharp enough to pierce the face of history and plunge in. You want me to be like you. You boil me in the cauldron of your prayers; you mix me with the broth of armies and the pepper of tyrants, then pitch me like a tent for the wali and hoist my skull like a flag.  (My death,  Nevertheless I run toward you, I rush rush rush to you.) You live like flagstones, and lamentation is your air. You announce the hedgehog’s abode and sleep on the scarab’s censers—your children are immolations. A distance as great as a mirage divides us. I rouse hyenas in you, I rouse the gods. I sow sedition in you and suckle fever, then teach you to journey without a guide. I am a pole for your latitudes and a walking springtime. I am a convulsion in your throats, a hemorrhage in your words. You advance like leprosy toward me, and I am the one bound to your dirt. Yet nothing unites us, everything divides us—so let me burn alone, let me pass through you like a spear of light.  I cannot live with you, I cannot live without you. You are an undulation in my senses, and I cannot escape you. Even so, cry out, “The sea, the sea!” Even so, hang the beads of the sun on your thresholds. Open my memory and study my face beneath its words, learn my alphabet. When you see foam weaving my flesh and stone flowing in my blood, you will see me.  I am closed like a tree trunk, present and ungraspable like air. Thus I cannot surrender to you. I was born in the sockets of lilacs, I grew in the orbits of lightning, I live with light and grass. I storm and I clear up, I shine and cloud over, I rain and snow—the hours are my language, and my country is day.The people are sleeping, but if they die they’ll awaken, or so it was said. You are all sleeping, but if you awaken you’ll die, or so it shall be said.  You are dirt on my windowpanes, and I must remove you. I am the coming morning and the map that draws itself. Nevertheless, there’s a fever in my bowels that keeps vigil over you.  Nevertheless, I await you,  In the shell of night by the sea, in the roaring of the depths, in the holes in the robe of the sky, in the jujubes and acacias, in the pines and cedars, in the hearts of the waves, in the salt,  I await you.   Translated from the Arabic
Our city fled, So I sought its paths in haste And looked around—I saw only horizon, And I perceived that those who flee tomorrow And those who return tomorrow Are a body I tear apart on my page. I could see: the clouds were a throat, The water formed walls of flame. I saw a sticky yellow thread, A thread of the history that clings to me. A hand mulls over my life, ties my days together Time and again, a hand that was heir To the race of dolls and the progeny of rags. I entered the rites of creation In the waters’ womb and the trees’ virginity, I saw trees seducing me, I saw rooms among their branches, Beds and windows resisting me, I saw children and read them My sand, I read them Suras of clouds and verses of stone, I saw them journeying with me, I saw pools of tears and the corpse of rain Gleaming behind them. Our city fled— What am I? A spike of grain Weeping for a lark That died beneath the snow and cold, Died without revealing its messages, Died without writing anyone. I questioned it and saw its corpse Discarded at the end of time, And I cried out, “Silence of the ice, I Am the home of the exiled lark. Its grave is my home, and I’m an exile.” Our city fled, And I saw my feet transform Into a river overflowing with blood, Into ships growing distant, expanding, And I saw my drowned shores seducing ... My waves were wind and pelicans. Our city fled, And refusal is a crushed pearl Whose powder anchors my ships, And refusal is a woodcutter living On my face—it gathers me and sets me on fire— And refusal is the distance that disperses me. I see my blood and I see my death Beyond my blood: It speaks to me and pursues me. Our city fled, And I saw how my shroud illumines me, I saw ... If only death would grant me time.    Translated from the Arabic
The coals you walked on in places considered un- civil gleam beneath feet transformed they gleam, new blades sharp you are adept at conjuring shoes for your bare feet & blood pools easy along the obsidian edge you walk fast because of in spite of you are said to be laughing until you cry you cry laughing and wait for the water to reach the earth soothe this fire you are still learning the power of the rheostat installed when you landed without papersonce you had some one who who kissedyoursoles once you had some one who held your soles to the fire in their foreheads, asking to be blessed you once were that kind of girl warbought a berth upon a lazaretto skimming the surface of the sky safety you learned comes from concealing everything from turning your own body to bread, your own laughter into balm, in disguising your soul red bruises purple turn calloused you watch them come, keeled over with want ectothermic creatures, now hot now cold to help ease your hot you’re cold and you watch like a witch cursed and cursing, you don’t feel the sliced beets carrying you now you note how easily the knives perfect these useless things you cut off at your knees to live
The heart, the surgeon says, does not reveal the small rifts, the hairline cracks which split the hairline cracks they conceal cops and robbers in a stretch of skin flaunting star-scars with show of blood bone the ledges of what it holds tight in checkmate moves: bend this and break fight first and bleed to earn needle finger wrap caress balm the salvation of sight Behold what beauty lasts, what outlasts itself The curtain calls the ovation Seize the beginning that ends this way: off center stage above fractured ribs the heart succumbs in silence All is dark. Listen a kommos sung solo It is too late to repair anything.
I turned twenty-four and dad decided to take another stab at making a man out of me. On his command, I drove us out to Hollywood where you could get three sets of suits for a hundred bucks.What a steal! he exclaimed as though his enthusiasm would fertilize something that never existed within me. Regardless, I followed him into the outlet and I allowed him to wrap the cheap, heavy thread around my tired shoulders, to salt the wound of my body with his idea of truth. I let it happen but I did not forget what I was beneath the cover of the flesh:five million faggy mountainsslicing through fields fullof dreamed-up tongues andunnamable bluish grasseseach blade the lengthof a universestretching inward towarda singular pointoflife-sustaining unlogic— Dressing myself behind the heavy polyester curtain, I listened as dad held the suit guy hostage with the oft-told tale of the night he encountered real-life Biblical demons, how at first he felt their presence tightening inside his chest, and then witnessed them crawling up and down his walls and how he prayed and cursed them in the name of the lord until they dissolved like sugar into the dark And he never said this, but I knew he was convinced they came for me nextand colored my nailsand stretched out my hairand adorned me with flowersand forced my inside places to whisperwoman woman womanlate each night at themoment justbefore sleep And I knew he knew who I was becoming and I understood what the suits were for So I tossed them in the back of my trunk where they sat waiting for years and the day I sold that car offthose suits were still in there
The trouble with Jane Eyre isn’t what I thought when I slammed shut the book on those pictures trying to fly out at me because I misunderstood, being too young to read. When you’re unable to read a book you can’t understand the illustrations either. Those were my mother’s books, a green bound set of that one and the book by her sister, Emily. When you can’t understand the artwork the face at the window is a monster. It is only Cathy, though, in the book by Brontë’s sister, calling for her lover. And the awful figure bending over Jane’s bed with the candle, that monstrous creature—well, there are flaws in the mind of Jane, too, and the awful figure bending over her might be the tormented wife of Rochester. There’s a flaw in Jane’s mind, too, looking down on the young French child born to another tormented mother whom Rochester says has inherited sin. The young French child likes presents too much, likes to dance and sing—and so what? She is love-starved, this child who has supposedly inherited sin, who will never get the approval of Mr. Rochester. We lose track of the pretty child who likes to sing. Jane goes away for a while to prove her purity. Then, when the other wife dies, Mr. Rochester will approve. Reader, I married him, she says, after she has gone away for a while. He is blind from the fire the crazy wife set. And then, miraculously, her love asks if she is wearing a blue dress. I believe she is pregnant, then, carrying a child who will be a good child, miraculously. Charlotte Brontë knew only part of the happy ending. Perhaps he gets better and sees the blue dress. We have to believe things turn out well, while Charlotte, herself, had nine months of pleasure and died. And so the book, which ends as if resolved, asks us to believe things turn out well, the French girl gone, Rochester and Jane and the baby in the burned-out mansion, because books then ended resolutely and did not reflect how it is to have a calm life, Rochester and Jane and the baby in the burned-out mansion, illustrated by the art of the woodcut, which does not suggest such a calm life, but a knife and fire making art out of wood, in a mansion that itself has been sculpted by fire and breaking things, which is how we really live.
The following poems and collages were created for Victoria Martinez’s solo show, Celestial House, at Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) as odes to the homes and Chicago neighborhoods the artists grew up in. All collages are by Victoria Martinez and all poems are by José Olivarez.   Victoria MartinezPantry Secrets, 2018, collage, 15 × 10 in.   Nation of Domination my mom hugs me & wants me to stay. i have my foot on the pedal. a fake gold chain on my neck. i confess i’m a sucker. i never want magicians to reveal their secrets. i want to live in the unknowing where everything is possible. my mom dances with me to Los Bukis. she thinks this makes me her baby still. perspective is a magic trick. i hit my brother with the Rock Bottom & i bet you can guess what i leave out. ask Farooq if you need a hint. the brain is full of magic i don’t understand. no one signs up to take a dive. in wrestling, there’s a team of writers who decide who wins and who loses. the metaphor is obvious. my mom wasn’t born to play the role of mom, i don’t care how many baby dolls she played with. i dance with my mom to Los Bukis & you’re a fool if you believe it’s her son she’s trying to hold on to.   Victoria MartinezPillow Talk, 2018, collage, 15 × 10 in.   moonshine the poets are right about the moonlight. i take my spot of sky & deposit it into a savings account. only after the bank confiscated our house did i understand. roses don’t grow without pricked hands. i didn’t have to spend a summer in a freezer packing lunch meat to know the value of sunlight. my mom didn’t have to spend a decade wiping down floors to appreciate education. when i give you a bouquet of roses, i give you a bouquet of bloody hands. a handful of dirt & the worms that doted on your roses. when i take my piece of sky out of the bank, it’s smaller. the drunks are right about moonshine.   Victoria MartinezHoyne, 2018, collage, 15 × 10 in.   Shelter Island frigid are the branches of black trees cutting through a blacker night. missing are the lampposts that adorn every few feet of New York. cold is your hand in my hand & yes, i am a man, & you are a woman. my wilderness is not unlike the woods that surround us. the sky in my wild lit by lanterns in the faces of animals. my own flammable face. my father’s temperament. my thrifted excuse. yes, it’s the night before 45 is sworn in as president, & yes, we leave the city, & we would leave the planet, too. you hold my hand & we walk into the teeth of the hour armed with each other. bitter cold is the world we leave behind. when we hold hands, we invent a spaceship. ​
The opera In her head Runs with no interval, A lot of people singing tunelessly About the same things. An overheard Comment like A rotting peach. The overzealous Cockatoo of her impatience, Flap flap. The slab Of blue behind her Is a sea of Her doubts. The squirrel In her stomach Trying to get out— They say you have to be Twice as good. They say There are pills For everything now. Enamel Eyes to see all The better with, my Dear. Fur coat For your tongue—
You are dark as religion. Remember God could not have named a modicum of light without you. You are plum, black currant, passion fruit in another woman’s garden. You are Black as and as if by magic. Black not as sin, but a cave’s jaw clamped shut by forgiveness. Color of closed wombs and bellies of ships, you, dark as not the tree trunk but its every cleft. I chart each crescent moon rising above fingernail and rub together my thighs for want of you. I try to find you where the pages of books meet. You hang where men or piano keys segregate. When I miss you, I remember the hickey the sun left on the back of my neck. If I forget, I smoke blunts down to my fingertips and beg you to come on my lips. This is how I pray for you when I’m not pessimistic. I bow to your darkness like I kneel beside a child’s bed, confessing as gospel, there’s no monster here.
1 The sinner’s bouquet, house of shredded & tornDear John letters, upended grave of names, moonBlack kiss of a pistol’s flat side, time blueborn & threaded into a curse, Lazarus of hustlers, the picayune Spinning into beatdown; breath of a thief stilledBy fluorescent lights, a system of 40 blocks,Empty vials, a hand full of purple cranesbills, Memories of crates suspended from stairs, tied in knots Around streetlamps, the house of unending push-ups,Wheelbarrows & walking 20s, the daughtersChasing their fathers’ shadows, sons that upset The wind with their secrets, the paraphrase of fractured,Scarred wings flying through smoke, each wild hourOf lockdown, hunger time & the blackened flower. 2 Of lockdown, hunger time & the blackened flower —Ain’t nothing worth knowing. Prison becomes home; The cell: a catacomb that cages and the metronomeTracking the years that eclipse you. History authors Your death, throws you into that din of lost hours.Your mother blames it all on your X chromosome, Blames it on something in the blood, a Styrofoam Cup filled with whiskey leading you to court disfavor, To become drunk on count-time & chow-call logic.There is no name for this thing that you’ve become: Convict, hostage, inmate, lifer, yardbird, all fail.If you can’t be free, be a mystery. An amnesic. Anything. But avoid succumbing to the humdrum: Swallowing a bullet or even just choosing to inhale. 3 Swallowing a bullet or even just choosing to inhale,Both mark you: pistol or the blunt to the head Escorting you through the night. Your Yale—An omen, the memories, the depression, the dead And how things keep getting in the way of things. When he asked you for the pistol, and you said no,The reluctance wasn’t about what violence brings. His weeping in your ear made you regret what you owed. On some days, the hard ones, you curse the phone,The people calling collect, reaching out, all buried, Surrounded by bricks. On some days, you’ve known You wouldn’t answer, the blinking numbers as varied As the names of the prisons holding on to those lives, Holding on, ensuring that nothing survives. 4Holding on, ensuring that nothing survives, Not even regret. That’s the thing that gets you, Holding on to memories like they’re your archives,Like they’re there to tell you something true About what happened. My past put a skewOn how I held her. Unaccustomed to touch, I knew only dream & fantasy. Try to see through That mire and find intimacy. It was just so much.& then, the yesterdays just become yesterday, A story that you tell yourself about not dying, Another thing, when it’s mentioned, to downplay. That’s what me and that woman did, trying To love each other. What kind of fool am I, Lost in what’s gone, reinventing myself with lies. 5 Lost in what’s gone, reinventing myself with lies: I walk these streets, ruined by what I’d hide. Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine. I barely see my daughters at all these days.Out here caught up, lost in an old cliché. But tell me, what won’t these felonies betray? Did a stretch in prison to be released to a cell.Returned to a freedom penned by Orwell. My noon temptation is now the Metro’s third rail. In my wallet, I carry around my daguerreotype,A mugshot, no smiles, my name a tithe. What must I pay for being this stereotype? The pistols I carried into the night, my anchor; The crimes that unraveled me, my banner. 6 The crimes that unraveled me—my banner.Only a fool confesses to owning that fact. Honesty a sinkhole; the truth doomed to subtract Everything but prayer, turn my breath into failure.Whiskey after prison made me crave amber, Brown washing my glass until I’m smacked.The murder of crows on my arm an artifactOf freedom: what outlasts even the jailor.Alas, there is no baptism for me tonight. No water to drown all these memories.The rooms in my head keep secrets that indict Me still; my chorus of unspoken larcenies.You carry that knowledge into your twilight, & live without regret for your guilty pleas. 7 & live without regret for your guilty pleas—Shit. Mornings I rise twice: once for a count That will not come & later with the city’sWild birds, who find freedom without counsel. I left prison with debts no honest man could pay.Walked out imaging I’d lapped my troubles, but a girl once said no to my closed ears, dismayedthat I didn’t pause. Remorse can’t calm those evils.I’ve lost myself in some kind of algebra That turns my life into an equation that zeroesOut, regardless of my efforts. Algophobia Means to fear pain. I still fear who knowsAll I’ve done. Why regret this thing I’ve worn? The sinner’s bouquet; house, shredded & torn.
A collective family myth passed down across generations takes on the polished gleam of truth, and memories become legend. The legend of black sod-busters on a piece of red soil they own in a township of black ranchers. Their legendary rodeo.grand entry Two Stars and Stripes flutter into the arena, carried by two men in jeans, red shirts, white Stetsons. Guiding their horses with left hands, holding the flagstaffs in their rights, their backs straight and tall, their faces, their chestnut faces, beautiful in the light of the setting sun. After them, two by two, banners waving, hooves raising dust, ride the Horse People of Boley, a varicolored promenade. They canter once around the ring, then they circle into the sky.mutton busting In the cluster of five-year-old contenders wearing life jackets and bicycle helmets, paper numbers safety-pinned to their backs, you line up one by one for a turn to hang on tight with your legs squeezed at the sheep’s broad middle, fingers holding handfuls of deep, warm wool as the sheep destiny presents runs you out to cheering applause. Whether you’ll fall on top of it, or it on you, you won’t fall far. You have no front teeth anyway, and a brown clown gone pick you up.bareback riding This horse was bred and born to buck. He’s a good horse, he’ll give you points. Gloved hand in the rigging’s handle, bare brown hand waving in the air, you whir your spurs at his shoulders as he leaps, twists, and jolts your bones. Four seconds or four hundred years. But if you can get up and slap the dust off your jeans with your hat, the future’s eyes, looking at you, will fill with forevering light: light that will make generations of proud brown people remember the Black Horse People of Boley.bulldogging In truth there’s seldom a reason for a man to wrestle a steer, unless he’s a real ranch cowboy dealing with ornery power. Maybe, while rounding up the herd, he bumps heads with testosterone, and it’s testosterone-vs.- testosterone. Bill Pickett learned, watching dogs on a Boley ranch, that sometimes you’ve got to bulldog a hardhead with a kiss of pain. Today, you slide from horse onto the fleeing steer, grab his horns, pull five hundred pounds of muscle down.team roping, calf roping, steer roping Roping always involves a team, whether it’s two men or women or one human and one smart horse. The aim: to bring down and hog-tie a big scared baby of a calf or a full-grown and pissed-off steer. You gallop out swinging your loop with one hand, the other holding the slack and the unneeded reins. You down him with a careful toss, tie three of his hooves together, step back with wide arms and a grin. A rope isn’t always a noose: ropes in brown hands can be lassos.saddle bronc riding It’s not the leather riding gloves and it’s not the fringed buckskin chaps, not the worn-in and dusty boots, not the spurs’ blunted silver stars, not the 10x wide-brimmed straw hat (both winged helmet and regal crown): it’s not clothes that make the cowboy. It’s something behind a bronzed face, in the level gaze from dark eyes, and, of course, it’s heart that puts you, the reins in one hand, one hand free, waving with the horse’s rhythm, your heels spurring from neck to flank, on this bronc called America.barrel racing Thunder explodes out of the chute. Mane and tail whip in the speed wind, agile hooves pound a swift tempo circling around the first barrel. One hand grips the horn, the other communicates with the taut reins, though your thighs give the best guidance, telling your horse to maneuver in circles that hug the barrels. Three barrels, a tight cloverleaf you gallop through with one joined will. This contest pits you and your horse against the clock and your best time. Sister, your dreadlocks are flying!pony express Before telegraph, news traveled from mouth to ear, from hand to hand. News arrived old. From sea to sea took weeks, unless carried by boys stationed along the stagecoach route to race a cross-country relay. Your pulse gallops toward the handoff, when your teammate takes the baton and the noise and flurry go on without you. Your leg run, you and your horse (your partner, your friend) stand encompassed in adrenalin, watching, as the Ancestors must, unable to help, but cheering.tennessee walker Let’s hear it for the barrel men, for the bullfighters, for the clowns, for the men on the side ready to run toward trouble. Give it up for the musical director (thanks for the hip-hop, bro!). And for the announcer and all the folks cheering in the stands. That baby wearing a tiny cowboy hat. That man the same black as his horse, in that white suit and fedora. His Tennessee Walker’s proud gait as he nods to his own rhythm, tail an ebony waterfall.bull riding Boley bulls are bred for bucking, bred to be mean, to be “Bad Boys.” They teach you to sit strong, hold on, and with one hand reach for the sky. After riding a Boley bull a cowboy thinks, Hell, I’ve been there. I’ve held the bull-rope, raked my spurs, while that bad boy tried to kill me. A ton of Brahma seeing red gives you a whole new perspective, a who-you-think-you-talking-to fearlessness. You’ve seen the bull’s eye: you know you can’t die more than once. You’ve lived through eight Mississippis.
Anger is the other person inside  mi garganta, my throat.  The mouth’s mouth is the deepest. Rage is the homeless boy fallen down a well. Shout down and he will echo back.  La lengua, tongue. How long have you been down there?  Subterráneo, underground. The letters of Cortés are difficult to read,  on each page a horse dies. The lord of the city lives homeless in a canoe. Hundreds of natives are speared.  Another town is burned alive  with all its caged creatures. On each page the people appear to walk  over their dead.La tierra estercolada, the earth fertilized, spreads a cloth whose pattern repeats.  On each page the future arrives on a raft woven of snakes.  Over and over, the design obliterates. Never does he say this was their home we took.
it is dark here & still you have al nur at your neck when fajr does not come my body is the color of mourning / not dua or dawah / so I say let the day come my body is fajr / day is mourning / I am still a clot of blood looking for skin the color of god is a stain / shaped to you like a grief not yet come black is the color of god not grief & rain is not looking for skin / but is red dust stepping into your body without melting & finding every empty space a dwelling to come I am still an accident of geography looking for a body that is not a stain & prayer is the mourning I wake up to / the clot of blood I pick until again a wound comes out the color of accident / which is red dust / the color of geography / which is dissolution & lined like a palm made by prayer / shaped to me like a drought not yet come & yes / I want to be named to the marrow / make inventory & god of what has yet hurt me & so I pick dua from your neck until I am no longer wound & strained & come to claim the dwelling of you a sign & beget a desert of new names & call fajr skin that has left blood & black how I step into your body & melting the stain to come it is mourning here / I am four droughts old again & mistake all the women in my family to the time of desert / clot of blood & red clay straining / for a homecoming but looking for skin does not unstitch the mouth & the stain of grief is finding no words at all & every empty space is like stepping into red dust & what comes from accident begets home / invented by all the god in my color & yes / I want to be shaped to the clot / whole & make blood & black of what has yet come
my sister wraps the throw around herself on the small cream loveseat & i know for sure that she is not a speck of dirt on a pill. she coughs & sniffs up all the lucky air in the room into her excellent nostrils, which are endless holy wells replenishing the soft architecture of her guts. not even the lupus can interrupt this ritual of beholding. you ever look at a thing you ain’t make, but become a mother in the looking? our blood is a thread tied around my finger, tied around her finger, that helps me love. when her knees swell, when her joints rust, when her hair thins & flees making a small continent of skin on the side of her head, i am witnessing her in whatever state her body will allow. Bismillah to the brain that put my name next to her name and said look at this girl your whole life and know some kind of peace.
she was washee i told her you are like your motherland a wilderness needs a belt laid down two white hotel towels took her into the tub towudu the boys out of her mouth pointed her nipples toward qibla wiped clean her intention to perform ruk’u as if carrying a glass of chai on her back fold at the knees palms to the ground tucked her soles under her astaghfirullah used country in my used country I felt his teeth circle as a mosquito the black mystery he placed my right hand over my wrong stain said he was bringing me home offered me a suite with a lock a key in the shape of a brother perhaps twenty- two years old my body pure as a glass table he spilled was she my boss on my back at night came easy as a fly to post-conflict faithfully used my country
the archivist enters the room with a bag of oranges she  broke one on the walk over her shirt tucked under bra strings of juice draw down her chin he is sitting at the table when she enters facing the open window that exits to a skyline licked with fog a thick cover of buildings hang from the clouds she hasn’t yet learnt to know words & not their meaning camera spills through the gaps in her teeth  lands within the hollow  that turns to plump breast; meeting place her father walks to the kitchen sink empties the steaming jug into terra-cotta bowl steeps the dried khat until it turns to tea they say the leaf of God conjures old ghosts but he weathers the nightmares for the memories the children marching in twos past where he stood cutting leaf & cane the eldest of twelve first from his village to enter university swallowed the language  of three colonizers afaan oromo he kept hidden in the secret of his cheeks she thought everything unknowable stayed hallowed in transit the crackle of scalded onions  & oil her aunty covered in gold & satin towering over gleaming blue hands filled with wood & metal as the doctor eased her knees open back pressed against white linen imitation cotton forced against her meat she found etched onto ceiling two mountains  estranged by migrant ash white like the dripped seed of the poplar in spring clotted between the blackened roots of Odaa Nabee the sound of thunder kindling the floodplain; meeting place he takes his seat at the table an old study desk from the salvos reads like an atlas scrunches a piece of green places it in his mouth rests his hands at the end of the counter & asks where is your country? she draws her finger to the   middle of her chest  etching circles onto skin her tongue loops the enclave of her cheeks drawing rings across flesh then slips past the white threads that drip from teeth  she gestures to the back of her mouth her left palm remains on breast & says in here
Especially in line for the food bank, my mother radiated grace. Talked a machinery of Principles. Elm trees and their dresses of urine, her small mouth always chiding, don’t speak to a man of that kind. This daily commitment to life felt laborious, haram. Expendable it was, like all my milk teeth knocked back into my mouth. That taste. What even is sustenance? She was a woman of Principles, she flossed, her exquisite fangs displaying remorse only when she reprimanded me or talked of the coat. Consider the white lab coat hanging above a crusted heater; consider our dilapidating shame. Consider me. Tonight, I exercise humility, so I identify with the pigeons nagging on the chicken bone gray as the sky. Unparagraphed I am, the way I still steal my dinner from a health store on 6th Ave, then lecture the diorama with my lentil soup. The truth is, I never educated myself the way I cultivated my limits. I was an abandoned thought, marching through an unlocked window— I had an albino budgie once, red ink for eyes. He wore a lab coat and crashed against my window like a displaced insect. His name was Apollo. Some circumstances never abandon you, you only train the muscle that carries them. Is a wing a muscle? 3 Best Exercises to Building Badass Wings, says the ad and the man in the subway sprawled across hard plastic
 looks like a glorious bone. In his odor, I feel at home. Consider his careful dedication to repose. There is something he has mastered genuinely, his fist curled around it.
 Sleeps on two cushions, one for his ass. She was a woman of Principles.
 Consider her stark god of oblivion.
 Nobody would’ve differentiated between us and him. Uniformly standing in line, a dark puff, plume on the wing. The wing patched to the torso of a body entirely ignorant of aerodynamics. The world hadn’t hurt us more than it had hurt anyone else, but still, I couldn’t trust the sky and its reverberations. In line, I made friends with a family of crickets in white lab coats. They sang to me, of the end of it, that wings were awaiting us there: stale bread rolls, a cheese pie, Braeburn apples sharing space with two cans of tomatoes.
on my block, a gate on my block, a tree smelling of citrus & jasmine that knocks me back into the arms of my dead mother. i ask Ross how can a tree be both jasmine & orange,
At one time, if my nails had been painted this shade of rose-foam in Kabul they would have rammed out the frosted shell like the tarp off a bud’s wet belly, they would have gouged out each shining beast, viscera still shiny, each glittering pore still insane with breath The pain is meant to shame me back to the realm of several whitenesses, they want to chew off the cicatrix and lodge the septic cadaver into a further gorge where frisks of neon riot in aporia, where the humility of the body is turned to iron The shame is a figure with an axe climbing a voluting staircase, it runs the speeding drams with agility from the hard pallet of the radius to the soft roofs of the mounds It famishes the exquisitely nurtured yellow around which breakers of scarp hemorrhage tigerish glyphs, accomplishing the gravity of Japanese inscriptions A delicate cancer bares its jaw, tufts of blood abound in clay, sculpted fetal knots a fetal navy, they harden to seeds, crab-like, platinum, growing beneath the watery ceiling of the palm into amiable shoots; an aubade on delphiniums growing clearer each day Over many months the permutations will again show their round, maddening faces, the Persian inlay will abound with devout layers we will stroke on the fine, sensual, nymphic chemical paint up to the ridges where we bleed the richest I cannot evade the force, brushing further and further iridescent texture on my torso, spirit, tongue, I’m a bridge of veins in air I’m an orphic phantasm, hair combed through with stalactites I’m a bouquet of limbs appliquéd on pouring rain, what can the spectral evening muster in lament?
The streets of Shobra are still traced with music from years ago— children ripping the clothes off lines, pins scattering in a rounded clatter of sharp-throated wooden notes. It might have been a merging of Mohamed Fouad and Mohamed Mohy or Mohamed Fawzi, and my brother (also a Mohamed) is sitting in the shimmering corner of our grandma’s balcony with one leg up. He wants to finish this one song because it has his favorite parts, which he has rewound a few times now, and Mahmoud is downstairs again yelling, holding a peeling board game they taped together, and my brother’s eyes glint over to the chorus, remembering how Mahmoud once told him how his father comes home only once a month, and he feels bad he is taking so long to go downstairs but this would be the last time he rewinds the song, Mahmoud, wallahi, he yells, the cassette player’s volume on high but not loud enough to drown out the street-market prices, the chatter of bent men at the coffeehouse, their fingers caterpillar-like through the mugs, blowing on clouded tea, but the music is just enough to shroud it all in the blur of a filmy fog that Mahmoud can hear and he can’t help but remember how sometimes at night, if he closes his eyes hard enough, he hears the din of keys against the door, the whistling of a man nearly always caught in the middle of an unfinished song.
you michelangelo’s crouching boy/you d’angelo’s purr/you dead currency/you dead presidents/you a stick of incense/you a stick-up artist/you haraami/you the hum of a lifetime basined in my lap/count our tallies of loss backward for me/run to the bank & translate it into a fistful of green of your choice/or something else sanctified/or european/pick the synonym of your choice. in a traditional sense/the body holds its arithmetic/exports it outward/to the touch and exhale/the praxis felt best/against a groan of concrete/with the dumb weight of a hand against the small of a back/here, an elevator is our only spiritual ascension/can i be excused from living so slimly? i dream you closer too/beside the honey-colored dog licking its vulva/an abstract laugh swelling inside your throat/ask me about blood clots and spun coins/the cracked skin of heels/anything but the nightly heartbreaks of/too many addresses/and all the ways/i am still auditioning/for this country’s approval.
In praise of all that is honest, call upon the acrylic tips and make a minaret out of a middle finger, gold-dipped and counting. In the name of Filet-O-Fish, pink lemonade, the sweat on an upper lip, the backing swell and ache of Abdul Basit Abdus Samad on cassette tape, a clean jump shot, the fluff of Ashanti’s sideburns, the rice left in the pot the calling cards and long waits, the seasonal burst of baqalah-bought dates. Every time they leave and come back alive. Birthmarks shaped like border disputes. Black sand. Shah Rukh’s dimples, like bullets taking our aunts back to those summer nights, these blessings on blessings on blessings. Give me the rub of calves, rappers sampling jazz, the char of frankincense and everything else that makes sense in a world that don’t.
my god wakes up with bed head and sticky fingers, doesn’t want to go into work today my god forgets to do the dishes lets all the houseplants die my god teenages built this earth on Friday night and tires of it on Sunday morning my god commands a willing army, unwillingly mutters, whines my god is so type B just wants to be left alone just wants to smoke a cigarette and not think of the parents and their children my god is a liar always one foot out the door and ready to leave me here if that’s what it takes my god fickles breaks every bony promise picks away at the meat laughs when i tantrum still, i half-kneel and pray a half-prayer bend until i can look myself in the eye still, there is no god but God so i make do with this one
kitchen table Imagine this. Mother sits near the rusty stove, chops onions for the puchero pot. Radio’s on. A soft bolero by Lucho Gatica, “Somos”: we are. She sings along to her favorite tune. He wants to talk. Dog sleeps under the table. He doesn’t know how. He met an older boy. They kissed. It just happened. In an instant. His new dirty shoes, her stained apron over her knotted hands. Kitchen’s bright yellow light undoes him. Mother senses his stare. Dinner isn’t ready yet. He wants to say things. That same night a storm breaks out, water overflows the gutters, takes everything away—leaves, twigs, a straight soft string. She doesn’t have much time.oval table   Profane four-legged thing a holy place of gatherings father mother three kids a ghost eating asado Sunday mass barbecue sins familiar sins scattered all over the old checkered tablecloth Prayone day you’ll have a family like this all these traditions will pass on to you Pray! this broken table now dies slowly now lies alone in a toolshed somewhere south. high altarThen Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. —Genesis 8:20   A piece of furniture with a flat top and one or more legs, providing a level surface for eating, writing of us kids & father still preaching we’re both alike you my son I will make you love every womenmujeriego like dad cracked broken legs or so he says this life unknown to you so apart tell us oh why you feel a man hidden inside liar you love hairy legs so familiar or so he says
To be a statue carved by Bernini Lounging in a climate-controlled museum in Rome is luxury Like the luxury of a personal pan pizza with unlimited free toppings Or the luxurious feel of a premium eye pencil used to draw bisons on the walls of a French cave To be so white and glossy is unimaginable Like how I imagine a plate of eggs painted by Velázquez or the lid of a designer toilet cistern In a European magazine (I could be European And wear a dashingly arranged scarf or sip weirdly-named liqueurs that taste like semen In a Rococo palais) but in the scheme of things Where I am marble and still my wrist will be a marvel Like the marvel of an isthmus whose name can only be pronounced if you have a lisp Or the marvelous sausage that saved a man from the Inquisition in 1582 It is definitely marvelous to be as attenuated As the casually extended leg of a greyhound reclining on its very own velvet settee To be so thoroughbred is an accomplishment Like the thoroughly flattened face of a Persian cat which always looks peevish Or the extremely frivolous ceiling of a banqueting hall where royals are put to death If it is admirable to be so luxurious then I will never be admired The way a designer toilet cistern is admired or a piece of elaborate pâtisserie (Although I am not a statue I have often held my arms aloft As when catching a carelessly thrown baby or pointing at two meteors at the same time) It is exhausting trying to be so inanimate and desirable If my arm breaks off  like the shell of a freshly-filled cannoli You will know why
the city has sex with megan  when the air shaped like the inverse of Megan accepts Megan as she moves.  If Megan is a system of exchange that floats her labor and her point  of view in vapor/liquid soup passàging through her valves and if her later corpse, collapsing,  updates its inversion of the air  even more than did the air displace when she grew from brown-eyed baby into strong laboring woman in blue jeans  and heathered wool, and if the air and earth draw from Megan’s corpse  all the energy and minerals  she pulled from her surrounds to build her nails and bones and teeth—  if the exchange doesn’t stop but only ceases to support her consciousness,  and if her consciousness was corpse anyway until it found relation,  then what demises is the potential for the human social, and another sociality  will unbutton my whole shoe and tongue hang limp,  what sex is for but stops me  at the barrier, a pixelated glamour reef though very  close and simple, smell a  flurry, parapluie paraphrase,  energy funneled through a shape. You filtered chemical  information in such a pointy fulgent scrambled way, in the city  and outside the city in the vernal zones  and aqua zones the city shaped, flow-charted, realist  trucked. The city caved under  when the zones rose and lapped around the pilings,  manged foundations green,  rotted the teeth out of the mouth of the city,  harbor high-rises dark and blown. The city is extremely fragile tender  human mesh and will be mush  and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins roam the rearticulated harm.speech by a flaneur—no a flaneuse— On my face, D. folliculorum are relaxing  like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks  against the bases of my hair follicles  which provide shelter and shade. These critters are peculiar to  the ecology of the human face  which I take around the city  open, close it is my means  of feeding I rely on  changing its shape in response to others’ faces and postures  to reduce my risk and increase my safety  and my likelihood of being  included in the group’s collective  life. I smile a lot and hope it  don’t look fake.
Who is the barber with the straight razor at the neck of the Mad King, the physician of the Don who must hold his broken feet and cloudy wisps of hair from between his legs while he knows nothing? The possibilities are numerous—what jobs we get ourselves into. I feel like at this moment I could be anyone in the world because I could be a hundred objects of torture—whatever the mind can come up with has been done,
Sometimes I wake up in the night with a terrible headache, my mouth blackened; a ghost looking for valuables in the debris, I turn on a battery-powered light, clipped to a book, I write things down in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius who said the finest bottle of wine is just grape juice, passing through the liver, no matter the beauty of a frothing glass, or a night of big Truth-seeking, never recalled; the importance of putting something bittersweet into our mouths, turning it around and around on our tongues, attaching to it, our missions, our purpose—in the end we are all just filters, not even as beautiful as the plainest bird or as zen as the meanest deer tick, nothing is given over to, nothing new is lit. So often it is this. I wake up, urgent, fatalistic, with the taste of nectar on my boughs. I replay on a loop my one stoic consistency, my middle of the night vow, that I will start tomorrow the essential dismantling of what I live.
When I say But mother, Black or not Black, Of course you are polyethnic,
See, now You are finally offstage where we can talk. I can’t see through the drapes and pulleys, it’s too dark for me to turn them into moss and oaks, too dark for me to blink wooden risers into a bayou beautiful in near collapse that once ran a monstrous river into the Gulf, a scorched stew powerful only in sufficient stillness. No monstrance, no milagro, no brown scapular scraps, not even a woven palm frond. Just You and me. Just me, actually, standing with hip cocked and three fingers resting on my chin. Not even a naked household goddess above my bed where I ache and ache. I hate the Greeks, those bastards, for figuring You into some kind of flesh—though that cure is just a start. And the Romans tried, but flesh must do more than die: it has to live. And here’s what’s next. Me talking to You in Your most present absence, without even an apophatic clue. I imagine Your holy knees gathered to Your chin and Your arms bound twice around your legs. I imagine Your heart in a corner beating while You listen to my footfalls circle from the best damn hiding place of all.
IX If it became impossible to touch and be touched, to see and be seen, to love and trade ecstasy for risk where risk is ecstasy, to be hidden in plain view, to be perfectly lost which means lost to the world, lying side-by-side arms linked in a bond so intricate it could never unfold or break— If it became crucial to live out of sight, to be housebound, to walk a beaten path in the garden, to sit at the window blurred by rainfall, to sit barred and blocked, books set aside that would never be read, rolling news of flash flood and fire, angels treading the updraft, a chaos of voices— If dreams should give the rest of it: the path in the garden going underground, flood and fire as God’s only gift the house holding its secrets, that pattern of locked rooms, what lies outside (voices: angels) crowding the perimeter—You could make an installation of it(and why not?) on a bare floorin a bare hall under neon strip:what seems thrown down what seemsheap after heap of discards but is not:hair and shoes and spectaclesand clothes (teeth also saved)repetition such that it blursimages folding into one anotherabstract, just shape being evidentexcept this shoe exceptthis lens catching the light which iserror or artifact, something likeiron litter carefully thrown downby Joseph Beuys but more the brightgrotesque of Bacon’s Fragment,of Dubuffet’s L’Arbre de fluides,what’s torn what’s wrenched apart ...Heap after heap, grainy footageof a cattle train snowscapesmokestacks, scratch orchestra, whatmore do you need ... dogs ... what moredo you need of this: the trainall but silent in snow, footageof carcasses thrown down naked,you could make a montage of it:quick hands, a low sun deepeningto yellow by trees and towers,the way shadows are cast, the lightyou need, the shapes you needa sureness of touch to bring it alltogether, perhaps a light boxfragments and fractures backlitand all of a piece not leastthe new dead: they liein a scatter, your focal pointthey make sudden brokenangels in the snow.Fool steps up. His art is palimpsest.He’ll tag your work: spray-painta ditzy orange bug-eyed frogat the door of the charnel housecolor the snowscape blue, redactthe chimneys, configure the trainwith silver-and-black chevrons:a snake drawn up to the iron gate,his artwork: Evil is as evil does.The frog spits bile. The snakeis hollow-eyed. He addsspeech bubbles to the cold still air:“Hosanna Hosanna Ho—sa—nna”:Children in a pool of light, a pool of dust; the wayimages deceive, the way time shunts and stalls, a testof what gathers and corrupts, what will not stayas words unspeak, as children are lost to light and dust.
Like the time I dreamt about a loon family, just some common loons—not metaphors in any way, just real loons in a lake swimming near each other so it was clear they were a set, preferring each other’s company in the cold still lake with its depth of reflected pines. The curve of their black heads and sleek necks, black and white stripes then checks on their folded wings, floating so low atop their reflections they almost seem inside them. Their wails like wolves, their calls like an echo without origin, their calls like an echo of lake, or what makes lake lake. How nice to think the male and female loons cannot be told apart by their plumage and that they build a nest and sit on eggs together. One of their calls is called “tremolo.”
Driving too close to the curb. Admit to being poor. Stash pumpkin seeds for my kid. Hustle the Christian way. Starch my shirt collars. Value a strong smudge. Give pigeons saintly names. Cream both my feet. Recycle. Sign off emails with warm regards. Double tap #vegan. Heart statuses which start withI’m delighted to announce. Mornings. I struggle to decide what mood to wear. Evenings. I lie beside my aftershaves imagining the sea. I should really have it by now. A Dyson. Panasonic bread maker. A photo by the piano of a slum tour. I need the spirit of a full-moon party rather than the charisma of a shed. They honk when I slow. I swear with my eyes. Think of real blood. Sunday comes. Dad asks what’s the plan. I knit him the only winning scratch card. I leave a candle on for destiny. Once. I had an acceptance speech written. Soon. A staircase will rise to defeat us all. The roads have moved. When I get in I’ll sit in the shower & say it’s a bath. Double tap an ultrasound pic. Sip railroad water. Notification. ZANC1 started following you. Check my speed. Slap on another Barry Manilow playlist. Keep my grays in the dashboard. Wonder. What the guy who put a gun to my little brother’s head is doing for New Year’s. Wonder. If my neighbor made it through. Up ahead. A badger’s hit beside a boulder. Its glare a wooden egg I slow for.
Humans being made in the image not of God Directly but of the angel who the day God made Human beings most resembled God who changes The way light changes as the sun in the morning Becomes the sun in the afternoon in the evening And in the night and to resemble God Is to resemble light the way a bed Resembles sunlight when sunlight is spread Across it to resemble God is to Remain the bed as the light slides away The hastily assembled angel when Humans appeared on Earth at first the an- gel didn’t see any resemblance he Saw his reflection in a pond and marked Neither the similarities nor differ- ences between himself and humans their Voices climbed a canyon to his tent In the clouds and though they laughed and shouted With voices like the voices of the other Angels he never once hoped he was be- ing called If God had made me for them he Shouted down hours after the laughing pack Had left the canyon I might watch them Instead God merely hadn’t called him back After the other angels shoved him from Heaven instead the angel watched the sun until he Began to think it was the eye of God Even though he felt sure God had No eyes no body and no voice with which To call him back instead he watched a forest At the edge of the canyon he watched it until A different pack of humans cut the shortest Fully grown tree down then he watched the tree as The humans dragged it to their camp he watched the Tree as the humans broke the tree apart he Watched as the humans carved the parts of the tree in- to gods with bodies and glowering faces He watched the humans as they bowed to the gods He watched them like a small child watching dancers Forgetting his own body bowing as they bow
The hastily assembled angel thinks He must be more like God than people are Especially because he like God can’t Choose to be less like God he tilts his chair Back his brown metal folding chair on its Back legs and lifts first his right leg and then His left onto the wolf-sized rock he’s using As his desk while the great flood floods the plains The valleys and the forests far below him And the mountains eventually his mountain Eventually his right leg on the rock His left crossed over at the ankles WantingTo be like God he thinks must be the wrong way To be like God who doesn’t want to be Like anything but I don’t want To be like God
The hastily assembled angel wandered The desert hidden in the pillar of Cloud in the day and in the pillar of Fire in the night and as he wandered he Asked himself whether sometimes as he wandered He asked himself whether he really could Be said to wander since he after all Could see through time which was even better for Seeing where he was going than seeing through space In the day he was a darkness in the cloud Like rain and in the night he was a darkness In the fire like God and day and night he won- dered why he had been given gifts even God Hadn’t been given or no even God had- n’t given Themselves or no no even God did- n’t have and who he wondered ever could Give God a gift except he knew he was Allowed to see through time because he was Not God and could be wrong and saw through time With many-chambered eyes all things that might be And God would see only the one thing that wouldIs that the one gift he wondered That free people Give God uncertainty
Stricken, seen, satellite at the edge of a party, being fifteen, with the black bulbs someone’s planted in the mother’s lamps to give glow-in-the-dark ambiance to hideous kisses, and the ruffles are all wrong on the saved-for shirt, and the curtains, suave in the murk, seem to laugh. The liquidy fin of feeling is destination-less, twisting like paper wrapped ’round a pinkie in blind date anticipation. Toy for the psyche, phrase to swim through the mind like an offense, at 3 AM. Half-helix, as if waiting for, Oh God, don’t say it,
Yes of forsythia against the limitless ivy, a nude posed in a garden against the silver maple pinwheeling its children into a gown around her chime of the cliff-hanging falcon’s screeching talons against a rabbit, wheezing soldier in a field, gunpowder tainting the cake in his pocket jet fuel over the Pacific, waking to a hula in a zephyr, the bride deplaning onto an island chain, bowing to leis of plumeria the mallow of nurses’ shoes, their news, the black sedan of a telephone spreading it like a virus and, after, the scent of a cedar closet white gloves of a mare, in heat, pawing clover, the sail of a Spitfire cresting a hill in San Francisco, angelic against sunset rosin on the cello’s catgut, a honeycombed queen calling home her lovers, a Basquiat above the head of an ascetic, chaos over order magenta in the thorns, shy to the shears, making the blue jays bluer, a someone on the bed’s chenille edge, composing an oratorio of medicines the bartender in his ice pick scars, twisting zest over his creation, wheel and butane of his Zippo kissing as the citrus, at last, expresses
The feeling of time derives from heat, an agitation of molecules, oracles from the friction of air through fissures and the leaves of oaks. A few gnats stitch the lake’s edge where a fox turns off the gravel road to nose through rhododendron as children crawl through winter coats to reach a closet’s dark recess. Dawdling at the edge of sleep you work through problems already past though unresolved, a notional path, a crease through heads of wild blue phlox that waking, you can’t follow.
We gathered in a field southwest of town, several hundred hauling coolers and folding chairs along a gravel road dry in August, two ruts of soft dust that soaked into our clothes and rose in plumes behind us. By noon we could discern their massive coils emerging from a bale of cloud, scales scattering crescent dapples through walnut fronds, the light polarized, each leaf tip in focus. As their bodies blotted out the sun, the forest faded to silverpoint. A current of cool air extended from the bottomlands an intimation of October, and the bowl of sky deepened its celestial archaeology. Their tails, like banners of a vast army, swept past Orion and his retinue to sighs and scattered applause, the faint wail of a child crying. In half an hour they had passed on in search of deep waters. Before our company dispersed, dust whirling in the wind, we planned to meet again in seven years for the next known migration. Sunlight flashed on windshields and caught along the riverbank a cloudy, keeled scale about the size of a dinner plate, cool as blanc de Chine in the heat of the afternoon.
The pines are stately still reflecting upon themselves without knowing it in eternity upside down.
Grown from conventional purpose in order to rename over there as “across state line,” in terms of survival, Dante calls X a way to maintain courage. & from the end of this dispatch I would’ve been a good wife hemming distances, a little, every day, without one wholly thing the matter. O moon! Whatever victim of etiquette I turn out to be, valued as customer of or friend to, when recategorized for this present time, my skin & skeleton are of as much consequence as the grass that never grew under my feet. In the skirmishes of things, is my ally equal in measure to the I of me? Or are we paired solely by image? Ran short of noun-like qualities, both of our names X-faced and rent of whatever postwar commonalities fooled us into individualistic days: my good looks head for memory. Memory, I’ve been wreckless with survivalist fame. What other efforts are there? The nose gone, then the jaw. As the monetary equivalent for a decade, fitting to join myself judge or faction, law hath nitpicked the grass of the first field for the alien light of common sense. They’ll see your heart evicted. I see your heart evicted.
When people say “Time is running out” I see an alarm clock with a bell on top and with arms and legs dashing out the door of a room in which time has stopped reminding the human race that we are running out. I carry this idea to a corner of the room and set it down gently. I don’t want to wake it up. Then I tiptoe away.
I’m going to look at my watch though I don’t really care what time it is. Just slightly curious. It’s funny when you see it’s much earlier or later than you thought, but even funnier when it’s exactly the time you thought. But at my back etc.Etc. being “Desarts of vast Eternity.” I give up. It’s eleven eleven. What ever happens at eleven eleven? Vast eternity!
I thought very hard and thought of nothing. —Jesse Ball, Census In one segment of the landscape, a hyena drags her clitoris across the plains, a dust perfuming up. Cicadas pulse the segment, a femur filled with rain. It is a lush grassland within which the greens have sprouted through the exposed joints of animals. This seems to be a metaphor for growth and resistance. A single singed dollar rolls through the wind. I read a book that imagines, among other things, a world without trees. I wrote a book that imagines, among other things, a world without men. The book splayed open on my parents’ dresser, an early part of the book. People do this when they no longer want to see information. I no longer want to see information. In another segment, a series of weasel oil candles, such is the cure-all in this aspect of land. Mostly the candles are not lit. At night the moon makes the earth shine like bottle flies, a glimmer here and there where a lachrymose flame continues on. A god peeks past the clit of the hyena disapprovingly, as evidenced by their glare and nod. But I want a god to glare and nod. I want a god to do anything at all with my debts. In another segment, my grandmother lives and she watches a pack of lionesses feasting inside the rib cage of a zebra. At first, she tells us, she believes the zebra to be sleeping on her side, but the lions move her skin under the membrane of bones. It’s like I always say: The evenings wait for the kind of death we get and we are so very fond of the evenings. In another segment, the last one, we know it to be last because a single woman is braiding her hair in a desert. We have been here before. An animal raises her leg.
In the last segment, I tried sufficiency. They moved my femur and a single woman braiding her hair fell from me. I tried to warn you, this desert editorializes. A scorpion lifts its tail, braids more active than braiding, it hisses. I, of all people, get it. In the mornings we wake to the kind of life we want until we turn our heads east. The night fills without us but I warned you, I was full already. A banana inside me blasted open a door, my thoughts at the threshold of such a door blank. Love transacts, a figure in the distance crowded with window. An enzyme eats plastic, but which kind? Synthetic polymer or the ways you tried to keep me? This is the last segment. My mother draws a circle around time and this is an intercourse. My mentor draws a circle around time and this is an intercourse. I shake out of bed. Humans continue the first line of their suicide letter. An enzyme invents us, we invent enzymes. The plastic we make, we must eat it. Draw a circle around time. We designed us in simple utterances. The political term graft means political corruption. The grifter never had an I. In the burn unit, they place tilapia skins over human scar tissue, the killed form on top of afflicted form, also a graft. Also a graft of afflicted form, the killed form on top, they place tilapia skins over human scar tissue. In the burn unit, I never had a grifter, corruption means political, graft the political term. In simple utterances we designed us. Time draws a circle, we must eat it. We make the plastic, enzymes invent we, us invents an enzyme to continue the first line of a suicide letter. Out of bed I shake with intercourse. Time draws a circle around my mentor. Time draws a circle around my mother. This is the last segment. The ways you tried to keep me? Synthetic polymer, but which kind? An enzyme eats plastic, crowded window, a figure in the distance transacts love. At the threshold of such a blank door, my thoughts open a door. A banana blasted inside me. Already I was full but I warned you, the night fills without us. We turn our heads until we want the kind of life in the mornings we wake to. I get, of all people, it. It hisses. A scorpion, more active than braiding, braids its tail, lifts the editorialized desert. You tried to warn me from me. Her hair fell braiding a single woman. My femur was moved. They tried sufficiency in the last segment.
: sorry this not that poem raised block flower & plant bed.  peonies, gardenias, poinsettias plus a yellow orb slow-rising  over an endless golden scape— darting through uncluttered space  cardinals, thrashes, sparrows blue air fragrant with lavender  washing brain matter into virtue. if only i could pastel language  onto a canvas of thistledown yes, deceit comes to mind—  .a lie. traitor. turncoat. recreant backstabber to truth i would be  gut-shanked a thousand times. this is not that poem nor am i  that poet to hold your hand .or. erase knot-hole screams  blood on a cement floor .or. suicide is another form of escape  no-no-no—but i do promise the evil-ugly humans inflict  to each other to their [selves] how time is malice is death  enflaming pupils with spite inextinguishable if ever set free—  forgive state poet #289-128 for not scribbling illusions  of trickery as if timeless hell could be captured by stanzas  alliteration or slant rhyme—
First the people had to invent ladders. No one had ever seen a ladder. Once they had ladders they invented walls to climb over. Soon they realized it took two ladders to climb a wall. One to climb up one side—one to climb down the other. People would ascend one side of the wall, descend the other side of the wall, and then walk away, leaving the ladders behind. That is why there are so many ladders in the world. The ladders are picked up and stored in an enormous warehouse. Scientists have proposed attaching all the ladders, one on top of the other, creating an elevator into outer space. Some people want to destroy all the ladders. Others want to destroy the walls. Others say that someday we are going to need all the ladders in the world.
: .or. this malus thing never to be confused with justice nothing symbolic. OK. dark is dark—  cage is cage. hunted & hunter are both in the literal. make believe & what ifs  do not exist: a lie. nothing cryptic here. OK. rape is rape. prey must pray. no  minute in the future safe from quiet insertions of a shank in masking tape.  OK. nothing here infinite: only time is constant to the merciful & merciless—  there are no allegories to hide behind.he slit his wrists means he slit his fuckin wrist  OK? there is a cell with one window  just before day. dawn’s early demise magnifies a dull metal toilet. the cool  water cooling two can sodas. each wall a slab of soft gray cinderblock, no  posters featuring eroticized women with an exclusive in black tail. OK.  the wall that slits the light does not reveal nothing new, ever. the exposé  the changing same: always a holding. one window offers a gateway. my face  pressed against the window & time rules this empire. OK. the mind held  hostage by time. mind & body conjoined twins. the other wall holds  a frame. the frame holds a metal door to contain utter disbelief. of the visible:  walls are gray not like summer but darker—yes. there is darkness. OK—
1 Light falls from her voice and I try to catch it as the last light of the day fades ... But there is no form to touch, no pain to trace. 2 Are dreams taking their seats on the night train? 3 She recites a list of wishes to keep him from dying. 4 The truth lands like a kiss— sometimes like a mosquito, sometimes like a lantern. 5 Your coffee-colored skin awakens me to the world. 6 We have only one minute and I love you. 7 All children are poets until they quit the habit of reaching for butterflies that are not there. 8 The moment you thought you lost me, you saw me clearly with all of my flowers, even the dried ones. 9 If you pronounce all letters and vowels at once, you would hear their names falling drop by drop with the rain. 10 We carved our ancestral trees into boats. The boats sailed into harbors that looked safe from afar. 11 Trees talk to each other like old friends and don’t like to be interrupted. They follow anyone who cuts one of them, turning that person into a lonely cut branch. Is this why in Arabic we say “cut of a tree” when we mean “having no one”? 12 The way roots hide under trees— there are secrets, faces, and wind behind the colors in Rothko’s untitled canvases. 13 Will the sea forget its waves, as caves forgot us? 14 Back when there was no language they walked until sunset carrying red leaves like words to remember. 15 It’s true that pain is like air, available everywhere, but we each feel our pain hurts the most. 16 So many of them died under stars that don’t know their names. 17 If she just survived with me. 18 A flame dims in the fireplace, a day slips quietly away from the calendar, and Fairuz sings, “They say love kills time, and they also say time kills love.” 19 The street vendor offers tourists necklaces with divided hearts, seashells to murmur the sea’s secrets in your ear, squishy balls to make you feel better, maps of homelands you fold in your pocket as you go on your way. 20 I am haunted by the melody of a forgotten song sung while two hands tied my shoelaces into a ribbon and waved me goodbye to school. 21 If I could photocopy the moment we met I would find it full of all the days and nights. 22 It won’t forget the faraway child, that city whose door stayed open for passersby, tourists, and invaders. 23 The moon is going to the other side of the world to call my loved ones. 24 The seasons change colors and you come and go. What color is your departure?
1 One dies.Eschrichtius  robustus, gray,  of the sole living genus, of  baleen, of the family Eschrichtiidae, slate  gray or darker,  and notable, now, for gray-white patterned scars left by parasites, two  blowholes “which can  create a distinctive V-shaped blow ... in calm wind conditions”;  and falls, as  it falls, as through blue breeze; and swirls, light as a tissue, drifting down—  down, through  the cool layers, the sifted light of sea-wind- warmed currents, loose galaxy  of whirling flecks, slow-  motion, in a haze; in whose first stage, falling, now, the “mobile  scavengers” drift alongside,  sleeper sharks and thin hagfish —or, as the book calls them,      “enrichment opportunists”—  come to feed at the soft flanks and fat, for weeks, as the  bones grow exposed, all  of them, spinning down ...  2 We might hear rain before the rain. Sirens. Hail before it cracked the hundred panes. Or lay our heads on the desks and listen to our blood whispering in the woodgrain. In 1963 the warnings are piecemeal, part of the good day’s play or work. We might need to cover our heads. Hold hands in the hallway. Look away from the blast. — July 29, 2013: a sperm whale found deceased on the beach of a small island off the coast of the Netherlands had dozens of plastics bags, nine meters of rope, two long pieces of garden hose, a couple of flower pots, and a plastic spray canister in its stomach. — I’m watching a hummingbird, bare thumb- top—gray-green blur—dip to my feeder bulb and dart off, over the barn, to a wire.A. colubrus. Little serpent. I hear the burr of wings; and already it’s back— dips again, hovers there; sips now; attacks the tube of red sugar-water until bubbles aerate, like an aneurism. — June 28, 2016: an 80-foot blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) caught in 200 feet of fishnet, crab lines, channel buoys off the coast of Orange County: lines cut through its mouth, wrapped its fins. “Blue whales are typically thought to be more offshore animals, and crabbing gear is thought to be more inshore, but obviously the spatial overlap between those two is coming into conflict,” explained Leigh Torres. “The fact that we see this entanglement isn’t terribly surprising, though it is unique.” — Weeks I couldn’t sleep. Years I couldn’t waken. I found a note I’d written one ill night.pines shredded ice snow  such wind  rips the night I run my tongue above my tooth, aching. And know it’s coming back once more. The warning —right cuspid, gum swollen, puffed as a pea— two days before the viral fire, the toxic sea ...  — March 23, 2016: 13 sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) beached themselves off the shallow coast at Tönning, Germany: “We may never know the exact cause,” wrote Danny Groves. Stomach contents: 43 feet of fishing net, 100 plastic bags, golf balls, sweatpants, greenhouse glass sheeting, cigarette butts, hypodermic needles, a plastic car engine cover, a bucket ...  — Cottonwood seeds. Gnats’ wings in the sunlight. Whirl of dust motes in the haze of still light. If it were so simple as to drift down. If it were so easy as getting up again. Little bug, little serpent. The air slows with summer thickness when you fly away. And the feeder bobs there like a red buoy on the green waters of a distant bay. 3 A drawer full of notes. Years trying to—  all night sweating  sheets so heavy burning—  600 lymph nodes   I know where you live— She’s eighteen months old. Up, up?  I’m afraid—  One of my titers read 2560  “Active.” “Acute.” “You really are sick.” so weak—to pick her up. I pick her up—  Aggregate allergen: grasses, wheat, milk,  acidics, trees (?): multiple exclusion ...  Temp 103.7. Good night, moon—  After a sunny walk with her wagon—  next day— panting  testicles so swollen  freezing system flushing itself—into the waves—  Aggregate infection: Liver. Kidney.  Heart sac. Spleen. Gut. Urinary tract. Neck ...  good night, night bird—far off—through the high pines— 4 In the second stage, at 4,000 feet  (or 122  “atmospheres”), weight suspends; a heavy thing in one world  floats like willow seed in a breeze  in this,a moving vast throughthat darkness, silent ...   they don’t need  much else—oxygen, nor light— the frilled shark and fang-tooth, the spider crab,  the vampire squid, who strip the dead  down now beyond bones to the merest blueprint of  whale; slow down-spinning of  months, a year, more, the hypoxic haze, the “marine snow”  in a kind  of afterlife of weather— drifting down of plankton, and protists, soot,  sand, fecal matter in aggregates  “held together by a sugary mucus”—  all, sifting down,  through the aphotic zone; and its vast weight, once 40-plus tons, skin  “like a peeled hard-boiled egg,”  patched with orange whale lice, white barnacles, it too long since  sloughed, shed, dissolving as  particulate snowfall, orbital, in this new galaxy  of darknesses;  borne, like seed, floats down ...  5 I have been silent for a long time now. You know I am serious about the whales. You don’t know this. I floated there in stillness, in white sheets. White boughs breaking. The pines in ice and wind like a hammering pulse. When I woke I couldn’t speak or make sense. And when I slept again I didn’t sleep. And more fires spreading through the body’s depths. — “Plastic Garbage Patch Bigger Than Mexico Found in Pacific.”National Geographic: These pieces of plastic are not necessarily floating bottles, bags, and buoys, but “teeny-tiny pieces of plastic resembling confetti.” 90% of sea birds consume it. “Over eight million tons of new plastic trash finding its way into the oceans every year.” The Great Pacific Garbage Patch moves in a clockwise direction, like a toilet. It circulates an area of 7.7 million square miles. “70% of marine debris sinks to the bottom of the ocean.”New York Times: Plastiglomerate was “discovered” by Charles Moore, a sea captain, surveying plastic washed up on a remote, polluted stretch of sand on Hawaii’s Big Island. It is a new stone, a fusion of natural and manufactured materials. “If [plastiglomerates] are buried within the strata,” says Jan Zalasiewicz, an English geologist, “I don’t see why they can’t persist in some form for millions of years.” — You’d think we’d learned enough to duck our heads. (It’s time for arithmetic.) Okay, kids, who can tell me what you get when you divide a number by itself? Silence. Overhead the hum of fluorescents. The swallowing sea of storm clouds out the window beyond the trees. What does it take to raise sufficient alarm? When do you hide? Where do you fly from harm? — Aggregates increase “like snow.” Aggregation theory represents a two-state system [“time for chemistry, kids”] ... to characterize the formation of marine aggregates and the loss due to sinking:     where· C1 is the concentration of the cells· r is the radius of each cell· G is the shearing rate· α is the stickiness coefficient· g is the growth rate. Thus, aggregation of marine particles is more prevalent when cell and particle concentration is higher (e.g. algal blooms). — Do the math. That’s what the specialist said. The first doctor winked. Some people just need to get sick in order to relax. Thanks. Your T cells go bat-crazy. They attack the health host: it’s your immune system out of control ... viral opportunism running rampant through your lymph. It won’t stop. You can’t sleep. Flushing toxins down the pipe ...  — Wikipedia: marine snow is a variety of mostly organic matter, including dead or dying animals, and plankton ... also plant parts and degrading plant material. Because of the relatively long residence time of the ocean’s thermohaline circulation, carbon transported as marine snow into the aphotic zone by the biological pump can remain out of contact ... for more than a thousand years.A blue jay lands in the fringe tree. Sudden downfall of petals. The massive galaxy of matter as the body floats down through the ocean’s zones is granular, a snowy sand, agglomerate of debris in slow orbit around the disintegrating husk of whale. Here are the five most common “unnatural” causes of death. Entanglement. Ship and propeller strikes. Commercial fishing (i.e. human appetite). Bycatch. Climate change (i.e. global warming). — I was sick for years. Now it’s coming back. Little serpent sipping there beyond the deck.A. colubrus. The need for names (my friend wants to help) is thirst for clarity, affinity. Yet sometimes I watch the trees. Let the whip maples weep and go blur above the barn. Now they’re a wash of green, a mere wave. Now they carry me, as he says, in their arms. 6Viral-capsid antigen: 2410—   Hummingbird’s back again—green bulb blinking  its alarm.  Now the first heavy drops ... Good night, little one—asleep with her toys—  Aggregate testing: lymphoma TB  “tumors?” HIV leukemia Grave’s— Like photons, slowly, around a gray sun—  And when I blink and bring them back, in their  distinctions, the silver limbs like water— “chronic running into walls” “chronic fog”—  Every second, trillions of neutrinos  passing through your arm, “like you’re transparent”— CFS :: CF/IDS :: ME :: “no kidding?”—  Right. Sperm. Great blue. Minke (common; Antarctic).  Fin. Sei. Humpback. Bryde’s. Gray. Orca. Pygmy ... Cicada husk hangs on through the hard rain — 7 When I pull out my old notes, my notebooks full of shaky words— In the third stage, a whale fallen through the deepest oceanic zones— bathyal, abyssal—may take a hundred years—more—to decompose— When I find the old books, I see check marks, dog-ears, underlines—Full restoration of health is still your hope and expectation, but— giant isopods—squat lobsters—osedax—sea cucumber —bristle worms— You know I am serious about the whales: [Views of Jeopardy]— Born in 1925, in Pittsburgh, PA—with a metro population greater— than the global population of whales, perhaps less than two million—  When you hear [ ] it’s already [ ] Shh. Close your eyes— Languages are dying at a rate of one every two weeks— pine pollen, gnats’ wings — glints in air — dust motes, mold spore— this.fucked.flux.lux.crux // (broken piece of lamp garbage)— Each eye the size of a grapefruit. Heart bigger than a smart car— But what we see is infinitely less than what we don’t see. Up, up?— Cottonwood seed—polymers, i.e. plastic “foam”: gas bubbles— I can’t believe I’m getting it again, “you have always”—“such— darkness”—measured by a billion bioluminescent wanderers— Wherever you sit is the center of the universe—wherever—you— Hear the warning it’s too late. Flatfish. Time for math again, kids— polystyrene “for infant teething”—biosemiotics: every cell has— a cognitive element. SnotBot: whale-breath DNA—in decay— and lived for eighty-seven years—mostly alone—mostly islands— In the third stage, a whale fallen through the deepest zones— bathyal, abyssal, down through the coldest depths, may take that— long to decompose, a hundred years, more — no light — no oxygen— [What do you mean] [what do we do about it]—shh—  Think of this one, spinning, Eschrichtius robustus, gray, of the— sole living genus, of baleen, of the family Eschrichtiidae, like a— tissue, floating in the darkness, to settle there. It takes your life.
Based on the Chinese myth of Chang’e Saturday. The good bread set out for the dogs to eat.The rabbit hurt on milk & tall willows that I’ve bound to storefront. The headlines saythe waves are coming in today. The waves & spoiled fruit & all the lives I’ve wastedplaying archer. At least this side of the kingdom will still love me. I pull the weeds. I pull the tides& storm the shores. The rabbit drops its mouth into a crater. The waves overtake the red citywith spears in hand. June & the headlines announce the end of the world. I am terribleat playing heroine. I’ve done all I can: plucked the apples, swept the chimney. Washed the rabbit,saved the tortoise from its slow drowning.
Take this glass, quoting me darkly: Cassandra, coalmine canary. I want to sing the confusing flesh, The confounding joyful leash, Flesh that stretches planet-wide If a planet were human-sized. These pulsing thermal layers we wear, Not the myriad places they tear. The sweet and acrid cabbage head, Its labyrinths and where they lead, Not how cleanly one can divide, With one strike, body from the mind. You here with me, reflected too, The four of us now become two Making joy with cry, weep laughter, Naked amid the slaughter.
After Mohamad Zatari Ooze, oud. Ease hearts whose eyes sink low. Be hourglass in the pillaged O—. Be wells none see. Unstoppered tears, O oud, we gather in your bowl. O ladle of ores, scoop ink here now seeping from the foreigner, be sighs, O oud, and cloven aches in the dark of millions of ears. Be gift for famished wails and wakes to lacks and flares and tented stakes, the lonely outer sounds of sleeves eating wind and drowning faces. The oud’s a lovely ark that leaks with tales and bromides we can’t keep, and miles of ghosts before their sleep. And miles of ghosts beneath our sleep.
After “M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School, Detroit, 1942” by Philip Levine The nun stood by the chalkboard and wrote the word America, underlined it twice and asked: What do you see here? Elizabeth shot up her hand and said:It is home. My grandmother came here so that we could live.
In one, I married the first man who asked and I endured. Took as little space as I could, opened my hands and he’d place his faults, lined up like eucharists into my palms until overflowing. Maybe if he’d found God sooner, the baby would have lived. Maybe I wouldn’t have found myself alone between blue light and linoleum passing something too small to survive. Maybe if I loved him enough, she’d have wanted to live. Maybe I would have too. Maybe I’d have played the hymns his God demanded on the church piano. He’d stand in the pulpit singing, his tenor swinging high, then low again and I could remember God myself. Maybe I would have stayed for that. Maybe when he called years later, I could have returned. Maybe I would have loved his children and traded them for the dead. Maybe I would wear white on Sundays, pull on my gloves, hold the women after they raised up during service, wipe their sweat, and hold them fast as they cry hallelujah. Hallelujah. Maybe I would be the woman swooning. Maybe his God would move through me just once like that, maybe God would fill me so tight with spirit, I’d split like stars.
We have almost nothing left, no ground in common. At best, a brand or maybe a miniseries. No campfire to gather around. The big stories—peckish news gets told in tweets, gets old so quickly. In place of one place a billion tiny customized versions appear targeted specifically to your tastes. You see only what you want to see. Maybe you always did.
I thought I had lost myself, but I see it’s you that’s gone missing. O always elsewhere. What yacht or spaceship have you hijacked? In what seedy hideaway do you scoff at the sameness of all cities, all ideas? Once you made me loquacious because what’s the point in saying anything if there isn’t the possibility of being misunderstood. Now I am nearly speechless with boredom. I will wait Madame Butterfly-style for your return.
I was someone in the distance who never got closer. I lived in the past, so the present was my future. When I shook hands, I dissolved into a mirror where I tended my reflection of features so faint my mother strained to see them. I was the rind, the zest, a heart marooned in the guest of a friend in the back row of a twelve-step room. I confessed to the priest in his box, suppressed the north, south, east, and west desires that pull men over the moon. I crooned the self-help tune that every glance is a gift, every second chance a first, the suicide fence on the tall bridge a positive thing for those crawling the walls.
you could mistake grief for a diamond the way it shines when cut into, like fish eyes in a boat’s drain. The eyes fly into death seeing everything: the cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B2, the ten billion-trillion-trillion carat diamond in Centaurus, the soul swimming through air with its tie hanging silver beneath it like a kite string. But Philomela’s tongue does not die. Shards of memory fall through her, finding muscle at the shore where blood meets vein, cutting the string that’s kept her sanity tied to the root. In its place, mute swans lie dormant beneath frozen lakes of scar. Tereus says she cannot say what happened. She says silence writhes inside the walls of truth, like a fox thrashing hot in a hound’s jaws, or a riled fly, frantic to escape the hand that carries it to safety.
Long after I stopped participating Those images pursued me I found myself turning from them Even in the small light before dawn To meet the face of my own body Still taut and strong, almost too Strong a house for so much shame Not mine alone but also yours And my brother’s, lots of people’s, I know it was irrational, for whom I saw Myself responsible and to whom I wished to remain hospitable. We had all been pursuing our own Disintegration for so long by then That by the time the other side Began to raise a more coherent Complaint against us we devolved With such ease and swiftness it seemed To alarm even our enemies. By then Many of us had succumbed to quivering Idiocy while others drew vitality from new Careers as public scolds. Behind these Middle-management professors were at pains To display their faultless views lest they too Find censure, infamy, unemployment and death At the hands of an enraged public Individuals in such pain and torment And such confusion hardly anyone dared Ask more of them than that they not shoot And in fact many of us willed them to shoot And some of us were the shooters And shoot we did, and got us square In the heart and in the face, which anyway We had been preparing these long years For bullets and explosions and whatever Else. A vast unpaid army Of self-destructors, false comrades, impotent Brainiacs who wished to appear to be kind Everything we did for our government And the corporations that served it we did for free In exchange for the privilege of watching one Another break down. Sometimes we were the ones Doing the breaking. We would comfort one another Afterward, congratulating each other on the fortitude It took to display such vulnerability. The demonstration Of an infirmity followed by a self-justificatory recuperation Of our own means and our own ends, in short, of ourselves And our respect for ourselves—this amounted to the dominant Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing, which partook Of modes of oratory and of polemic, of intimate Journals and of statements from on high issued by public Figures, whom at one time or another we all mistook ourselves for. Anyway it wasn’t working. None of it was working. Not our ostentation and not the uses we put our suffering To, the guilt- and schadenfreude-based attention We extracted from our friends and followers, and even the passing Sensation of true sincerity, of actual truth, quickly emulsified Into the great and the terrible metastasizing whole. To the point it began to seem wisest to publish only Within the confines of our own flesh, but our interiors Had their biometrics too, and were functions not only Of stardust, the universe as we now were prone to addressing The godhead, but also of every mean and median of the selfsame Vicious culture that drove us to retreat into the jail of our own bones And the cramped confines of our swollen veins and ducts in the first place Our skin was the same wall they talked about on the news And our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew Images could drop from above like the pendulum in “The Pit And the Pendulum” or killer drones to shatter the face of our lover Into contemporaneous pasts, futures, celebrities, and other Lovers all of whom our attention paid equally in confusion And longing, and a fleeting sense like passing ghosts Of a barely-remarked-upon catastrophe that was over Both before and after it was too late. We were ancient Creatures, built for love and war. Everything said so And we could not face how abstract it was all becoming Because it was also all the opposite of abstract, it was Our flesh, our mother’s bloodied forehead On the floor of Penn Station, and wherever we hid Our face, amid a crowd of stars for example as Yeats Once put it, and for stars insert celebrities Or astrology here, your choice, and even when We closed our eyes, all this was all we looked at Every day all day. It was all we could see. We were lost in a language of images. It was growing difficult to speak. Yet talk Was everywhere. Some of us still sought To dominate one another intellectually Others physically; still others psychically or some Of all of the above, everything seeming to congeal Into bad versions of sports by other means And sports by that time was the only metaphor Left that could acceptably be applied to anything. The images gave us no rest yet failed over And over despite the immensity Of their realism to describe the world as we really Knew it, and worse, as it knew us
All of this magic is death:  your vicious little organ singing like a drunk uncle,  the beautiful, white-headed children  that passed through your body, the cats you fed till plump as pimples and languid. Who let the rot in? And what if you never return—full and free—  to that alleyway in Morocco where old men watched  as he entered you? Where are your daughters?  The holiday pies filled blood-red with wild rhubarb. And tonight, on each continent, women are teaching other women to be vessels. Women are singing sweetly to get what they want by force. What will you remember of this place  The naked limbs in the orchard,  the crust left along the empty bowl,  your own hands on your stomach in the browned-out night. A sense of abandon placed among the linen, sharp-lined and never dirty. On gray gadgets you’re kept humming. Stories about rivers are stories about girls who want things, you taught them.  And the machines that fix other machines are not glamorous technologies. In the yellow kitchen, a silent anxiety attack.  Breathe deep and drop nothing off your tray, my sweet.
The arterial beauty of  Florida is alive in all of its obesity.  And the sequin-sellers are doing good business east of  Granada Boulevard. — The sad-eyed woman’s ultrasound image—all dirty blur of gray and ambiguous genitalia—sits lovingly electric on your newsfeed.  And the neighbor with his disorder you invented is going out tonight. — The starlet will eat a sandwich and Kevin will push the joke too far—the vomit, the bobby pins—  and that’s OK tonight. — And your mother, with her rough hands, her quiet advice, has walked along the sidewalk knowing how cold a wooden house can feel,  wondering whose soft, strange lips she could kiss.
My grandmother was born in a city called [宜兰] Despite its name, no orchids grow there Five of my six aunts have names ending in [兰] My mother’s full name is [little wind] Orchid seeds are distributed by land, water & wind One of my aunts drowned in a river I invented from rain One of my aunts thinks skydiving is a synonym for when it rains the other way One of my aunts faked her visa & went to the vet once thinking it was the doctor she asks me how come dogs here have doctors I say because dogs here are domesticated the opposite of domestic is alien the opposite of flower is fist the opposite of purple is pray orchid comes from the Greek word meaning [testicle] Greek women believed eating orchids made their unborn babies boys for a son, my mother creamed her toes suckled coals liquefied flies fucked on full moon days flossed with a dagger darkened her bathwater ashed her cheekbones torched her crotch candied the blood boiled it with sugar & still she wept when she saw my face filmed it with her fingers weeded out my eyes & witched them into rivers my grandfather farmed orchids in a city named thirst when the war came, he pissed on his field to keep the orchids alive, he spent all his body’s water his organs dehydrated into stones I skip across sea-mirrors flowers bruise in the wind & weaponless crimes are called births water perpetrates want the army unburied our bodies in a field of salty orchids everyone in my family resembles a river’s rag-dolled neck in photos our faces overlap like venn diagrams of grief there is a breed of orchid called the ghost orchid & another breed called the blood orchid one is fictional & the other is edible & the other night I vased my throat like a stem & did not think of extinct species decades later reappearing like the lungfish one of the original fish that left the sea for land all migrations begin as mothers as mimicry a fish saw a tree & decided to stand without feet my brother says orchids look like pussies smell like pussies too he says I should know I do know I know the color of thirst is not salt but cylinder but a city leased to fire to architect the ash into an alibi my wife’s spit is my river is my silver bullet thirst is the mouth’s unit of memory memory begins in me like a bone to breed its breaks
In Calgary I saw a man break a dog’s back. —Joseph Stroud, “Calligraphy” i In Calgary I saw a man marry moneyWho giveth this money? the commissioner asked The man saidEveryone who works for me The commissioner askedWhere are they? I don’t hear them declare it The man said That’s not their jobYou do yoursDo you take this money the commissioner askedto have and to hold till death do you part?
Dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound: beneath the house, the kegs roll in; the party flips its switches down. When drunk comes, it comes as sound, a chord, a liftoff. I ride the rim, dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound. He could be anyone, and he abounds. I slip inside a dance with him. The party flips its switches down.Let’s go, he says, upstairs now. My cup spills. My shirt is skin. Dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound, I won’t. Get lucky. Get found. But kegs run out, the hour brims, the party flips its switches down, his hips to mine, his arms around, a song ends, and dark begins— dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound, the party flips its switches down.
?) Let every sentence begin: I have been grossly mistaken.The stars are gone. Kirk: Kindly tell me what happened to the stars. Kierkegaard shuttles past Reason to planet Absurd, a gas giant without a detectable landing pad. He says, it’s the leap that matters.We’re being pulled toward the center of the zone of darkness. Kenosis required, emptying the self of self. His sky lit, mine blazes black, an experimental physics. Doubt the gravity that repels, attracts. Dark energy : Dark matter : Attempt to probe : Universe [Static]. Neil deGrasse Tyson: we are a speck on a speck on a speck on a speck.
There’s nothing dandier than threadbare threads worn by a discerning shabby dresser. A collar’s fret or subtle fray is not lesser because it’s worn away but models instead the bespoke tailoring of time itself. Done poorly—the gentleman farmer’s piecemeal pastoral, that NoHo charmer’s duct-taped boots—it’s like an unread bookshelf of secondhand prose: a too-studied pose. Done well, it draws you in to draw you near, reveals the intricate pattern in the years’ inexorable ravel. Between decompose and deconstruct, what seemed a foppish quirk grows wise. Design undone. We wear time’s work.
I tell him to touch his toes. He reaches for them in a squat. He stabs them with his little fingers. One toe. Two toes. Then we say our letters, spell out all the sounds we will deliverbecause the death of a child is no small death. I extend to him an open palm where he makes a fist and slams it into my hand, a form, he wearily shouts, is “a butterfly coming home!” We play “give me a five” and continue swatting at the butterfliesuntil the sun goes down. I don’t recall ever playing with my mother like this. Late one morning, my son caught me pinching the sides of my head, my face wet from so much crying. He punched my arm, which knocked one hand off of my face. Ashamed that he saw me, I laughed very loudly which brought him concern and happiness. He never mentioned it again and I never forgave myself.My good son, running through the garden in giggles. He is waiting for me to catch him. Once I pretended to have fallen in a pit. I did not tell him it was a grave. Very quickly he sprinted over and stood beside my body. “Your hand!” he demanded. Like a little father. I gave him my hand. “Now, the other hand!” I give him the other.
That’s a good one, the idea of the moon having a stem and somehow stealing you, whoever you are, kind of like Persephone or Orpheus, portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture including poetry, film, opera, music, and painting. And it kind of fits my mood this morning, something vaguely cartoonish and devoid of real gravitas, but still, a kind of realism, even so. And the area around is the void, outer space, nothing, because explaining things is never as interesting as wanting them, the desire to know, set against a backdrop of black velvet and rhinestones. Let’s say that you wake up one day and realize you don’t remember anything that happened yesterday. Maybe for five minutes or so. And for those five minutes you’re thinking, as I was thinking this morning, that this is it. Car keys. The word for when you really want something and work for it. Your dog’s name. There are not enough blank pages for all this forgetting, like debris falling back to earth, you and yours hiding in the underbrush with hopes of your own, of rescue or escape. When you don’t remember why you’re hiding in the underbrush, you’ve been hiding in the underbrush forever. This whole other existence leaps forward in possibility. And then the five minutes are up, and it’s oh yeah, eggs, Saturday. Some day that was. A chemist once told me luminol was her favorite color. It glows a beautiful greenish-blue when it comes into contact with blood by reacting to the iron in hemoglobin, looking a bit like the sky this morning. It’s a kind of truth of blue, that uncovers, that remembers. It’s used by investigators to detect blood at crime scenes where no blood is visible. There are so many things to forget, to lose, and in so many different ways. But even so, one can be wrong about the past, and deduce from error, but still be right about the future or the present. And when you don’t remember what day it is, happy birthday. Despite all our best efforts, there’s a wolf on the horizon making a movie of your approach, and it’s a shipwreck playing across me as I’m pouring sugar into my cup.
I write: the tall grass is a third wish then back away from the field. If I move back far enough, everyone in the front row will be still. Be still— you’re witnessing my first time. A ballooning ballroom expanding until the beat drops, a letdown letting you down gently before the DJ jumps up, afraid to play something that could offend. I write: the tall grass is a third wish wasted
what she told me. What I honor. They, as unambiguous as Lyrae is: black, bard, badass; svelte with flourishing braids; a singularity and somehow all of them gathered as one like tributaries to the mouth of the river of God—Gwendolyn and Lucille and June and—and I can’t count all the ways I was saved that day, emerging wet from the ritual to find myself sitting in some stranger’s living room, a writer who’d been pushed out of their homeland by its persecutions, pulled into America on the promise of asylum, the same America that commits my own kind to institutions with routine and rarely second thoughts signaling the presence of conscience, and while we’re on the subject of right and wrong, know I’d read the news recently and retreated far into my unfeeling before I received the blessing of her timely word, walking in bloody boots through hallways leading to the chambers where tenderness is said to rest in all of us by symbology, but then I was called outside my bones again. And let me tell you, my friend: you’ve never seen light before you’ve seen it. I swear, it’s as if with the snap of a finger I could recite the very definition of gold without needing to run yolk from the promise of a child, a happy day’s glow spilling into the street like July’s laughter from a fire hydrant as we left the house with folk who loved words and loved us—loved us— so expansively. And less than two nights later we’re all throwing our asses in a circle, cuttin’ up, working up what was an effortless sweat, undeterred even as the music skipped on every hiccup of the fraying wires, tethered just as strenuously to joy as ever, like always, trying to catch a good breath, but I paid it no mind, no mind, no mind—no, I wasn’t absent upstairs exactly, I was hyper-present; what a ghost is to death I was to life, inside everything simultaneously—the sub and the synth, the blown-off roof and hole-stomped floor, the rise of their chests and the fall—and only nigga returned me to this plane:my nigga, my nigga, a lyric left on my bottom lip like the sweet after- burn of Hennessy, but yo, it’s like I was being called for, called out of need since I know that word only has such resonance in a world where we ain’t free. And, nah, we ain’t free, if you were wondering. There are no shackles on me your eyes can see but none that I can’t feel as if they were appendages divided from me by the occurrence of civil war, a set of chimeless chains that could be yanked on and bring me, even at my most upright, to my knees. And if it happens— again—I suppose I could pray, there, at my literally lowest moment, immersed in the mess they’ve made that I’m tasked with cleaning up for the commendation of pennies. I hope I don’t get shot while genuflect since that’s apparently a thing now in this country, but I worry such a selfish ask won’t have sufficient fuel to reach heaven, that the bastardized sparrow will burn up in the atmosphere as easily as tissue paper. And I recognize I’m rambling now, but I’m likewise increasing my odds of bumping into the point of all this since inside the milk of me something was stirred by what she said, but it’s hard to translate a muscular language to a verbal one just as it’s hard to relate to folk who don’t consider their own demise fifty ’leven times a day at least, and for that relapse not to be an injurious ideation but an itch of practicality. What I wouldn’t pay for the chance to not pay attention to every little thing—how they talk near me and how they talk when they believe I’m nowhere near, what they do or don’t do with each other that they do or don’t do with me, the questions they feel quite content to ask me and the ones they never seem to though I leave the door open, the window, the bleeding heart. I know them so well, people who wouldn’t know me from the next in the lineup; I know them so intimately you’d think I love them all, and the gag is that I do, by some undesired miracle, and that is part of all this, too. To say they don’t deserve my time is an obvious statement, but they take it anyway because it’s all they know, evident as I recount every transgression taking seconds off my time on this earth, summing up to years, almost to the point I’m gone already, in response to which I either swallow spit or spit out ellipses. Ask the wounded wall what I know of restraint, the manifesto I’d pen with what pours out from my punctured knuckles, though, perhaps, the poet was signaling that, all along, I’ve been teaching the most important life lesson merely by domesticating rage, confining it inside the margins of the flesh that my parents made for me, the page my life is written against each day in corrective red ink. And this seems like the appropriate moment to divulge that her sermon came during a dialogue about poetic craft of all things, but if poetry can’t be applied to how one moves through this world then I see very little worth in it, which is where it started for me. Poetry was a dead white thing in my life once, at the bottom of the trash can with the doll of Jesus they’d tried pawning off on me back in Catholic school, but luckily I already knew one for us, by us, and thus found the inner-strength to soldier through the barren winter of lyrical delight rocking a pair of big-ass Timberlands and other on- trend threads a person of greater gravitas could’ve filled out better around the shoulders. But I digress—since what I really mean to be speaking on is how the Cavalier poets weren’t really doing it for me during high school, not because their explicit sexuality or their taste for material excess and ambitious proximity to the throne were such disagreeable subjects to me, at the time revisiting rap’s mafioso era, but because when we painted those same pictures as we preferred to, our tongues spiraling like ballerinas and bullets, they sought the ban on sale or talked down on it as being absent of any artistic merit, as if a nation’s worth of people surviving subjugation is more science than art anyway, for if that were true, then we wouldn’t have a culture and America wouldn’t have great product to push to the rest of the planet aside from all the bombs it seems much keener on dropping casually like Funkmaster Flex, and I’d already grown tired in my young age, so tired, of trying to prove I’m not stupid even above trying to prove I’m smart. And those who doubt there’s a difference have digging to do, deep into their pockets to get me what I’m owed for damages, for emotional distress and all things it’s been made feasible to sue for with solid legal representation. Funny, I once longed to be a lawyer, little fool that I was, my back against a brick wall painted by spotlight, rifles lined and aiming, in that night’s vision—legal fluency seemed the only option for release from this burden because it’s the language my nemeses speak in. I do know bad English from black, but I know power even better because I’ve brushed up against it just as a person in any number of neighborhoods around here may have brushed up against a police officer. Maybe it’s needless to say I didn’t go down an attorney path; I actually don’t have a plan at all these days except evading the bullet and also the bullet points corporations thrive on, as if any of this is simple, as if I, symptom of systemic dysfunctions enveloped by skeleton and skin, am something simple. I’d only ever be two-dimensional if airbrushed on a blank T-shirt and even that would show depth to someone’s esteem for who I was with no one else nearby, and all this means is that there is more to me or anyone alike than being menace or miscreant, minstrel or misanthrope, or murdered as all four would be with equal fanfare. But what I really want is to know what they feel when their black friend dies in that typical way for it’s maybe the only thing I don’t know about them, while we practice poker faces and draft FAQs. Forget seeing eye to eye for a second. Set aside the particular grammars of forgiveness we use without pulling up the problem’s root: do they still feel full people if they put the hammer down? And when they can’t answer, make note that I can because I have those tools and also others that shall remain nameless in order to remain purposeful. That’s how I prefer it, besting all desertions of their decency, which I say since you’ve caught me rare and raw tonight, sipping off the bottle top, slurring my songs, hitting my two-step on beat every. single. time. Damn—how blessed they are to be able to watch me work around them—as illegibly as what the miraculous Phillis Wheatley wrote all over her master’s walls, owned in the moment, I feel, solely by an ambition toward self-definition I also try applying prodigiously, bringing them to speechlessness, a shaming kind of silence sayinglisten, leave me be because there’s no explaining me, thus there’s no exploiting me: what only a history under thumb and foot helps grasp before letting go, for one’s own good even more than mine.
before cameras could remember color, back when the paint had not yet dried on the world, and where was the fire? Everywhere under their feet a patchy shining and nothing tall standing plumb on either side of the street,canted saplingsand slow zigguratsin brick,everything splayed away from the kids who wreck,who make these pictures. Their defenseless foreheads, the wet paving. Each cuts their eyes at the adult who kneels, who stares through a black birdhouse. Their hurry does blur some things on their way into the box: blousing coats and bobbed hair, hungry auras. And something without fail also is tucked in the arm’s right angle: a ball, an orange, an infant’s skull. They could not strive more furiously if it were an infant’s skull.
Glitz girls in the spackle. Teen climbed The boughed over stair. Stole lace to begin again In darkness, a fingering salt. Print Delighted the line to lined Pink. Was doll-sized, weighted out. Was flat-reaped sigh And dollar bin plaid. Fridays we stayed in Till in coughed through with dry heat. Men Grew approximate in their longing for something to mine. Sippy cup of burn, acrylic camel, and melting kohl Was a hiding past boyish. We shone with miraculous Droll. Don’t try to kiss me, she was always saying. Older Than a watch, the girl who pays starch to hush Meat. Gargantuan between grown and still us, I leave her orange street, my wanting ode
Watch for them. Faint as aspen, peeled as birch, walking the edge of the field raw. Any minute now, you should start to see remote women flickering in the distance, their smiles more flickering inside the flickering. It isn’t hard to find them, but once you do, don’t believe them. Confessing is just a big part of their drama. Don’t we all know someone pale and drawn out from coming back 
so many times, someone worn thin from having to turn into the thread that turns into the rope that turns into the river that leads her out of the fire she may have started? It was supposed to be fragrant and perennial like blossoming. Their returning. It was supposed to be copious and make you reach for a wide jug hoping to catch it all. Come back, that’s what these women do. They climb out of oval frames hung on walls. They use any open page as a little ladder.
I won’t explain. My aunts spell  around the vanity mirror & centerpiece me, my lips plummed,  my neck belled mid-flight.  After the food’s uncooked, the heirloom paring knife stitched up the bell peppers & dark meat,  after the fiddle leaves  left their fiddles, the porch undressed of wasps & us our old names—  right here. As if even the evening  didn’t let on. No parking lot, no gas stations. A scythe of emptied prisons shudder  alongside the highway; bougainvillea & gun oil in the sheets. All my cousins slow-dancing  in their cowboy boots & antlers.  My mothers singing to the dogwood tree  blooming black across my arm. Your hand finally on the small of my back, without any kind of fear. This time, I’ll be a girl & you can be anything alive. Take the rope off your wrists.  Somewhere far away from here,  a star’s unspooling its star-white curtain.  What happens if we begin already angels? Press your ears to my wingspan. Hum a little. We are the most possible kind of daughterhood.  I promise. Step into the light.  Let me see the mark our rapture left behind.
From up here in the leaves’ no-kidding goldishnessyou’d guess everyone was already in lovely w/ each others’ cheekbones. Infinity scarves& vanilla coffee, mint tea, warm whatever. Cozy becoming the coming-at-the-seams, a coupletof verbs mid-bodily inexperience. That man doing cartwheels is not wearing a shirt & in any other life I’d want to be the double darefanfaring a future so totally astonishedby his nipples. This is what I mean when I say things like catastrophe.Okay, fine. Just one more winter. Nothing can compare anymore to us anymore. You big good oak limb. I’m in such cute like w/ you today.In one diary of my have-beens, my mother named me Elizabeth after one of her mothers. You god particle. You matrilineage.I’ve never lived anywhere more or less this haunted. She named my sister Elizabeth. You boygenius. You midsummer pinky promise ring. There’s this person I know I’m not in love w/ but wears a dress patterned like a postcard from the state my grandmadied in. Imagine waking up a whole frame away from your bedsheets. Imaginewaking up & being anything as yellow as a dress. You treeline. You root song. What’s an amountof time equal to you? You kindling ring finger. You unchewable bark but the headache’s gone. Pardon me, dandelions,have you seen my ghost, six foot nothing, has an interstate for a mother but also a mother? Adjustyour spurs, honeybunch. This time I’m writing all of us in pink ink. Let’s huckle-buckle off into the leafiestof all possible genderings. You know how the rain starts right after you get home & the country songyour friend slow-danced w/ her big love to, the one your mom would play real quiet on her moonbeamhighway streak back to Pensacola, is somehow already at the chorus & you forget there are words like joy?Or when someone whispers Imagine you never met them back at the bum, grinning stars? You remember.It’s like that. Or, is that. The difference between salt & salt. A somedayof matching sweaters. Told you it’s cute. O sweaters. O little knitbundles of vegetable-spit. It’s always sunsetting. You golden hour. You soap-soft seasonal.Once my mom found me sitting in a circle of candles, touching each rosebud& sat w/ me until we were wax musuemsof our secrets. Look— the sky’s a toenail & the moon’s a chesthair. All the shirtlessboys have tired themself out, spread-eagled & slapping the sun off their shoulder blades. My body is a lineheading for my body. You crushed-grass sex smell. You dirt-inverted comma. Someone w/ bleachedhair is biking home to restud their denim. I rediscovered kissing foreheads & it is so yes again. Hurry up & sunspot, daylilies!The cops aren’t going to awe themselvesto death & we have a dictionary to laugh across.The light’s seltzer, bubbles.I said My lord. I thoughtMy god. O moonstruck. O gladracket. Barringgravity, our knees could be forevering each other. Barring leather, love is a world I’m prayingall my mothers’ joy back toward. Elizabeth was my name. I’m writing this on all the trees like a wish.I’m kissing every hem in sight. We’re all hysterical & going nowhere together.C’mon rapture. Let’s go bedazzling. Nothing gets futured without its own spitshine & I’m already not not not not not not miraculous.
Ain’t of no kind word in what they’ve been telling you. Heard they call you “Song Bird” these days. Part your beak and collar the long part of neck with sapphires. Girl, when are you going to see you aren’t ever goin’ be one of them. Don’t mean a thing they pour prosecco in porcelain dishes. Let you lap leftovers from their palms. Do they pinch your sides to regurgitate the slug of white cake, candied roses, the baked breasts of hummingbirds? Merchant the fetid smell of it into crystal? I heard their trade ain’t much different from what is done here at home. Only difference is they prefer their Black rare and chilled over ice, fine caviars knifed from the ovaries of the South. Maybe at night you prowl the Turkish rugs. Dressed in Schiffli lace, an ankle ribbon tagging you rare specimen. Do they call you beautiful for one of your kind? Pocket your songs and measure your skin for couture. And for who do you think it will make statement when worn to the Grand Palais Garnier?
Dark corridors, crammed bedrooms, stairs that smell of cigarette smoke and impermanence. Long days of waiting. Ringing of the bell that calls us to our dinner. Shillings and pence that fill the hand. The wallpaper. The pulse of other people’s half-heard arguments. The landlord’s dog. Interminable phone calls in the lobby. Someone is falling apart, another’s longing to be somewhere else. You hold on to the street map of your heart and make yourself at home. You’re here at last, whatever “here” now means. Now you can start your childhood again, the world a mythic past you’ll wander into by mistake, the joys of lost performance with a vanished cast of now-imagined names that other boys might whisper just to put you in a spin. It is another language that deploys the tottering edifice that you live in. Strangers will come and go, are gone for good. The bedrooms empty. Here is a new skin for you to wear in the enchanted wood.
but all I want to do is marry them on a beach that refuses to take itself too seriously. So much of our lives has been serious. Over time, I’ve learned that love is most astonishing when it persists after learning where we come from. When I bring my partner to my childhood home it is all bullets and needles and trash bags held at arm’s length. It is my estranged father’s damp bed of cardboard and cigar boxes filled with gauze and tarnished spoons. It is hard to clean a home, but it is harder to clean the memory of it. When I was young, my father would light lavender candles and shoot up. Now, my partner and I light a fire that will burn all traces of the family that lived here. Black plastic smoke curdles up, and loose bullets discharge in the flames. My partner holds my hand as gunfire rings through the birch trees. Though this is almost beautiful, it is not. And if I’m being honest, my partner and I spend most of our time on earth feeding one another citrus fruits and enough strength to go on. Every morning I pack them half a grapefruit and some sugar. And they tell me it’s just sweet enough.
A thing stolen say a spoon say gone before morning shook or worse unable to reorient a slip of the wrist and you’re married the spoon is small is decorative the length one walks back to oneself a shadow’s length or less a belief in one or other end reflects the particulars of one or other neurosis my caldera my Zika my bug-out in a camo pick-up still as damn now nothing happened say the spoon means jack the marriage too say a container is a ritual the spoon which is your bath your mirror is saving your life or more with earned misfortune still a house is not yours a body a personality the collection of traits the fear of heights of Zika the boy with his screen the game with its gun the bath with its salt the outer layer stripped and like an iris shrinking in the light of yet another the trick is not to mind the slanted rain the lack of sleep his screen the light of screens their shelter the shelter is not yours the marriage with its many utensils is silver in the same way love is sheer is tugging at your sleeve there was a plan a bunker the love-thing barely walking to a garden to a den of rifles with a knack for game a river say twice the width of home and gold and rising say it floods the rooms which are not yours the love-thing say the ritual of bathing does you good the thing beyond the body which is you is peeled back and massive barely anything at all the bucket you were dropped in the river the swallowing of itself in infinite configuration infinitely frayed the boy is you the man the screen with its various positions its many worshippers which are you say nothing really happened not the end the spoon the house with its ammo was a game the game of angels which are you
I ran across the street, I didn’t know any better. Ran out in the street, I didn’t know no better. I just knew a woman was there, though I’d never met her. She sat me in her parlor, distracted me with trinkets, milky glass birds and fish, distracting trinkets. She said my mother would be fine, but did she think it? The world was a blur of crystal wings and fins. My tears were casked in crystal, wings and fins. She was the first of many lady-friends. The tree shadows shortened, she brought me a drink of water. Morning matured, she brought me a glass of water. I drank it so fast, she went and brought another. I kept looking out the window, she didn’t ask me what for. I watched out that window, she didn’t ask what for. The seconds broke off and lay there on the floor. I imagined my mother’s route, as far as I could. Her long morning walk, followed as far as I could. Nothing I could do would do any good. Suffer the little children, and forbid them not. Christ said suffer the little children, and forbid them not. Said love thy neighbor, sometimes she’s all you got.
Everything we do and say in patriarchy can be traced back to “Strangers in the Night.” Your faded jeans, my faint daytime smile. (Dazzling’s so expensive.) Bad Mailer novels; lose-money-quick schemes. A fortune in friendship, nevertheless. Beef farmers favor self-flesh awareness. (Or brittle in toffee queen regimes.) Thoughts as feats of strength. The figure in the woodpile as a white snake, two needle bites. The end of the week, of us, strangers now or not? I’m dressed in white, I am the right blonde in the wrong seaplane, I haven’t learnt the language yet. The meta-leopards will have taken over the aquarium. They’ll stroll this way like kangaroos to green glass. Papa, I’ve upset you. There’ll be a line of songs like crystals lining up to kiss the bell that says Big Town. We are on the roof now, playing to Central Park everyone hot in their coats. Paid for not stolen. They admit to being too late for miracles, for charity. The poem’s parents are in the front row. The poem’s friend interprets. Can we repeat it without going back to the start, the lover’s demand like ants beneath the plaint? In Eden, in Athens, estrangement flowers. We turn and return. Is it love itself, beckoning from the lurid grass- lands? There’s a cuteness to plaster’s novelty hiding of the body. People are cited in the mouth, stand on the ground. They fly like Lucy. You can deny it all for fun and parties, as if the mind was the feeling that input gives. It’s a power no one likes to admit, as it so often leads to failure in later life, like living in a swimming pool, or losing your tongue in the mail. What of romances with characters from books? Alice says hello I remind her of a cookie in a dream she had of heaven or hell—but which was it? Everything that happens in the world has someone to say it’s their fault, repress it as they may. The cutout in the cocktail bar wants to go home with someone for once. The snakeskin hangs on the gate like it’s a street corner, that each uttered “baby” renews. Knowing can be a means to forgetting, also We stand there as if the floor or wall is our companion our fortress in trouble: mates a bit longer, keeping sex at bay. Not everyone looks where they’re going or cares where others are. They’re the rugged ones, though fleet as moths when crossing a highway. Sometimes, despite our own egos, we admire this, as if wise that the pattern of the one ahead won’t ultimately save or brave us Don’t rush. The star we wake to mightn’t always be there, so we wander outside as if air were itself a prayer or someone’s. Is that for me? addressing an ivy or a wet plank, suddenly hungry. Tell me what happened to Peter and Wendy and the loser with the hook for a hand. Was it all alright in the end? They say time is nothing but it takes the saying to make it so. To be the one is to vanquish Sinatra, but also life (not that life is patriarchy) Repress the possibility for the sake of staying young, as around the bend a boat may contain the set of problems that will have always been around. Attitudes to dancing housework, contraception, ever music’s themes. A wall- flower may remind themselves of wallpaper, peeling to reveal a peasant who goes to sleep at dusk behind their tux, but does that haunt you more than the possibility of possessing truth? Is that what your glances are about?
A cloud spelled out a rune I couldn’t read fast enough before it morphed into another form that changed again, so I recited something true enough from an ancient book: “The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes.” The screen went blank and then the slip. No matter, I thought, I’ll drive a truck. “The clouds are codes for reading the blues,” I said beneath my breath as I walked out into the rain with my umbrella and attitude that kept me lean if un- employed. A hermit thrush reported the dusk somewhere in the woods on my way home and I called back like a human bird who’d lost his wings: “Light’s such a fickle thing but I sing for it.”
Knowing my passion for celebrity nudes reached back to the last days of Netscape Navigator, Siri dutifully told me of the latest gossip site to promise their release. Lawyers had sued to block the nudes’ coming to light and thereby confirmed they exist, she said. I resented the assured existence of any celebrity nudes I had yet to see, insisting all stars were both clothed and unclothed until the moment the webpage was loaded—at which point truth would be made clear. Siri disapproved of my inaccurate interest in Schrödinger and his daguerreotype nudes, whose bits I’d heard were coffined up behind some Princeton research paywall full tuition granted access to. She explained I could save my money: how all nudes took form already, stored as light in fiber optic cables stashed in the oceans’ aphotic sands. HTML5 would dredge up everything. Hypertext did not excite me, but I had to admit pleasure at the thought of seabed celebrity nudes leaked by wolffish. Would they float? Form islands? I saw archipelagos of nudes in a cold Atlantic full of them. I asked Siri what she thought of my nudes, the lighting I’d used—their dark, private silhouettes. Bring your umbrella, she said. I looked at the thick cloud of my nakedness above, and agreed it was possible for rain.
The Inaccessible Island Rail lives in Atlantis, with two black feet on the black plateau. It might be slight, it might be shabby, but it knows what it knows. Rain falls from the sky. The sun shines, within limits. Wind blows in from the furthest west. There is nothing beyond the cliffs. Island Cape Myrtle is not true myrtle. It is not the one in the myths. Wind-stunted trees fill the fern-bush heath. Sweet Roman Myrtle, True Roman Myrtle. Lies beyond the cliffs. What there is is sparse. It is made of grass and ferns. The birds fill what they can with themselves and fledglings in boulders that lightning burned. They eat beetles, flies, moths. They become what comes of trying. The downy undersides of the leaves, they take it. Until they can’t. They take to flying. Trying, the wind does what it can. In time the strangest things occur. The tunnel finds itself inside the grass, and eggs of milk, of lavender.
My husband doesn’t believe me—that the dogs barked nightly at the spirit in the corner of the kitchen. That I knew of a family whose quilts were flung against the wall mid-sleep. Once, I told him I met Satan in Scandinavia, and she had pigtails and a machete sticky with spiderwort. She couldn’t have been older than six or seven. Her ancestors were Vikings. They boiled firestarters in urine and when she approached me, she laughed and called me ugly three times: stygg stygg stygg. With the same gurgle of the growling dogs. With a film over her eyes, bobbled back into her head. Then she giggled and ran away. Later in the hotel room, I anointed my forehead with oil—right thumb tracing the Sign of the Cross, howling in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit amen.
[byline] northern triangle—First, I lived near mud, there, I carved some things. Then, I found a well, yo soy un bicho migrante. I had to climb trees, find mollusks, made a knife to eat them raw. Later, later-later, I worried about firewood, pots to cook. I asked ¿Where did my parents go? ¿Where? ¿There? I walked to another tree, another shore ... ¿Where are they now? I carved more: my face, my parents’, an alligator’s, yo soy un bicho migrante. ¡But no! I got tired of waiting, of playing, I wanted to see more. I found a river, found a road. Found more like me, a bunch of us waiting for more of us to flee. A tribe. A small village, yo soy un bicho migrante. I saw there were rules, clothes kept dry in plastic bags, phone numbers written inside pants. They also made fire, carved things into the mud. Asked ¿De donde sos vos? I pointed: de allá. Said I didn’t have plans. They answered, ¡Bienvenido! Tapped their feet on the dirt, yo soy un bicho migrante. We walked on the road, then along the road looking for food. Through the forest, through the mountains, we looked for mud, for frogs, for—¡There! ¡There they are! We played our favorite game, until I got bored again. Yo soy un bicho migrante. Nights are boring. Fireflies ... boring. Stars, the moon ... Well ... I began to let myself think ... babosadas came to mind: countries, passports. Then, I walked away from everyone, got to a mountain, then another one. Got to a river where I saw rats. ¿Have you seen the tribe? ¿A savage bunch that makes fires from trash? In a hurry they chased after me. I ran north. Found a few others. Or, maybe it was just me. To eat you have to believe, they said. Handed me something in the dark. Yo soy un bicho migrante. Saw pizza in the dark, hamburgers, clouds maybe. Maybe clouds. I saw fireflies. Few days had passed. I felt like an empty road. I invented machines. Planes. Fast cars. I barely had time to learn their names. I barely had time to say goodbye. Yo soy un bicho migrante. Years later, I filled forms. Wrote my name & woke up in a bed that had traveled 56 days, 56 nights. Then, came an election. War. Kids kept coming, but I had to find work. Wrote so many books my hands got tired. Made alternatives for plastic. Someone separated people into groups. Trees were cut extinct. But I destroyed fences, jailed kings, invented a replacement for countries. We searched for 
purpose. Happiness. ¡Anyone could travel anywhere! We learned new languages. I had looked through the window I wasn’t supposed to. Yes, I looked. ¿What can I say? So I could be certain I looked & broke through. Yo soy un bicho migrante. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll return to that well & begin carving mud again. I’ll carve the whole world backwards. But no. Maybe not. Migrating has no beginning. No purpose. Yo solo soy uno de muchos bichos migrantes.
[byline] ocotepeque, h.n.—I was born in a little town. This was not very long ago. I think I was four five years old. Parents let me do whatever: I looked up at the sun, I loved the sun, it burned a dot in my eyes. Mom was saying we must go catch the bus soon, instead I grabbed a piece of wood & etched it. Sucked it like my own thumb to learn something no one else had. Don’t judge my face. Girls like me. Boys like me with my long hair, I relish it. I love my father very much. More than anybody. He stayed. One morning I come home. He isn’t there. Down the road, this crowd. I drive the crowd away. This is my father, I say. Ask them this thing they allow: his body given to me. I dissect it. Anatomy, my father taught me.
[byline] la herradura, s.v.—¿Do I have a mother? Have her pinkie in my hand crossing the street? Have her breath on my hair as she sings arru-rru mi niño to sleep. ¿Don’t you mean where? ¿What was your question? I’m older. Think more about memory. It makes me crazy. Obsessed. Her warm breasts on my belly as she knelt to tell me todo va estar bien. I’ll never see her again was the fear as if she’s gone, died, will never come back. I whispered it hidden in banana groves looking at the sky hoping one of those planes would take me to wherever she had left to. Whenever Mom hung the clothes to dry, not a cloud in the sky. I could see her sandals picking up dust. For a second. For a second I believe she’s back. It went like that every day. Every single night. 
I’ll never see her again. But then, I did. Her face. Her hair. She was the same. So much had changed. I do not remember 
what it was I truly felt.
That [science] which treats of those conditions of knowledge which lie in the nature, not of thought itself, but of that which we think about ... has been called ... Architectonic, in so far as it treats of the method of building up our observations into system. —Sir William Hamilton  ... one of which systems is a poem. 1. what the chicago window was for mainly light.  the supporting function on the sides opens to let in  air. the proportion wall to door dependent on heat.  repeated upward into cold wind  around the columns and garland  sky high reflections off the face of their investment the blueprint raises money longer  hours profit piles up the american beauty of work yourself  to death to look out on.2. otis railroad architecture ran elevators off the ground to get weight it needed up like people off land to get over then an elevator railroad floated architecture up floors open as plains to the sky through walls into rooms coupled like cars to each other without a climb hallway distances like vistas through zigzag mountain valleys as work’s landscape the first time since walking sheep in the cloud meadows far away from the later smoke the elevators laid more meadow out than the mountain had basis for its little square created acreage out of air. more than the fiery iron horse the hidden legged spider wove worlds more tightly into her realm of feeding upon more needed immediately she trained her fare into catching her by waiting for her to swallow the fat rides she needed to keep her moving. and moving faster with no feeling of movement she has architecture anesthetized to no other way as long as there is up it will feed her with it. she has learned how to go streetwise through airports she tells you when the moving walkway is ending.3. the rookery was built out of birds which were actually individual flames not really birds with fiery plumage they stood out against the masonry of black smoke all that survived the fire. I have that x-periential thing about fire that makes me crazy at even the thought of it I x. so the idea of the city having only this place for birds to land after took me a long time to visit. the difference between locate identifyknow something about and visitre-experience identify with is in if the roosts that become return call back a sky unclear how much what’s left tells that much about what has been lost enough to nest its shard against which tomorrow lies best living its death until death is shown the lie it lives into life. it stirs nothing suddenly. more the politicking of birds found a place to buy and sell the audacity to have survived. as the architectonic of a city.4. any programmable hall crown hall is a lyric miniature of bridge el and street-stacking engineering. railroad building to art song. the base work. the columns of profit. and a capital. the vast empty spaces re-created inside are potential. what ended frankenstein always waiting to be given life it already has. any programmable hall a machine. but these are new life designing already itself piece by piece cell to embody back maybe even the species that crashed into the vast invisible window walls in their migrations. the artificial intelligence of walls in the first place that beheld us in to our cathedral now to other worlds out of the darkness. the light the open. in their way the intelligence.5. against all that square straight up the hancock leans away in all  faced direction from you to the side up ahead  the darkness so strictly structured it erupts in a gusher of sky pure  american brought in against all that square straight up  drill out on the plain of it all x-ed out into simple  optimistic shift of dimension. all tapering has its vanishing point.  infinity its asymptote. any two lines converging downtown has  its hancock its lift off michigan avenue. pyramid6. the aqua only underneath the water from the street can you see up the moss hanging floors of the waterfall cliff orchids of light off the ledge balconies the re-vegetation of the canyon the re-visualization of our spaces from our animal need to be curious about what’s around our corners not just that they square. the walls of wave canyons beneath the southwest wash out up here with clear views divest of the ground to dust of much that has lifted them to where they can see is runoff. a drainage of romanoff richness in its dissolution of geography. the appalachian humps— bodies bedded the long house state to horizon the smokies roused from the valleys by the updrafts’ bump you to look up into a landscape from a bird up turned view.7. 860-880 lake shore drive we were discussing how devoid of everything— it was  she was listening to our conversation she said she had lived in one of his residences and it was calmly scary how the building almost wasn’t there yet everything you needed was within reach  the way she went at things was the way it was already it was like there were no walls  which made it feel really spacious she was never in a place that fit her so every where she turned was where she wanted it directed her in that it didn’t everything was there everything else was out of her way it was as if he refused to build in the way anything ever again. it was almost insane.      ( lake point ) rippley mies van der rohe licorice melting farthest out into the lake walls waving around like a curtain a sail of window melting into solid wind lotte lenya singing brecht the remembered ship against which the rational was not a defense. which loaded his tools. nothing but the existence of line left not even a rule. the pencil the point wavering8. marina pie in the sky with petal pinched crust stacked high above its park of delivering vehicles on the river a pie boat too can cut in (there’s a marina) home to pinecone peel down balcony symmetry fun for tie up and sing dock of the day as it. this city doesn’t hold back bay manners up nor not talk straight it does look like a corncob. a celestial gate from here a bean. cakes of ice with faces on them. us. a fountain. the base. the column. of river wheels roof over your head with food and amenities layered in between your work all day and immediate need to sit down without traffic stacked up in one convenient location residents willing to pay for required. freedom of imagination insight into freedom— the capital. let’s say to try anything once but more deeply freedom from fear of response.9. the drawbridge houses the boats go by the drawer bridge pants’ flies go up the river like the moaners’ bench of fifteen-year-old boys when the girls go by. think how heavy the weight that balancing lifts to let the delicately lilting sails like skirts through and the traffic back across if it were in your pants to toss up or down. the massive concrete counterweights like balls. streets go up at the helens navigating the obstructions some not come down except at some castrating war of recollection a reconnection. think of the engineering of the open and close as of arms. who houses in the palaces of these gates. what counter power holds place on the bank of this flood this flowing and crossing of desires? the palaces balance’s hub a dowry to house the form of the beloved.11. di chirico chapel a Franz Kline ceiling painting on the tunnel vault of a building which incorporated its partial collapse from a bombing the black paint swaths beside the open to the night sky the stars the outdated old style of stars lit the chamber pale a standing shadow fell across the floor through a small open door slanted off the wall the no one there stood outside any light to block her hoop balanced on its own shadow not rolling still a dress model of its architecture rose off the air.12. the mecca this isn’t there anymore something famous is built over it that has nothing to do with it or for now as public housing went up and torn down too to defeat . . . .13. robie house mock horizon sub urb laying down  its give up retreat from the city back into the low against the ground against the high of skyscrapers re-carpeted the nation outside. but is back now to reclaim the collapsed properties it let go grow weed to re-gentry heedless of tearing up whose rooms back into profit. the however here police drawn blood on their doors have lived dangerous and can paint it angel mad sign again anytime if flipping back and forth for gain were to spread too far the spread could find their horizontal shrunk to their floated upper floor.14. shedd aquariumArapaima gigas third most ancient species my totem fish made so from the fact it targeted me to eat. six feet of it attacked me when forgetting protocol I slipped my legs into its tank without warning it I was feeding not food it mauled my toe it thinking it a goldfish which was usually how I announced service. The Shedd’s A. specimen is the oldest living in the country so old its heavy tail dragged down its spine into that hump of the frail. This might be the last time we meet. Some sheds you walk into with experience of a specific song to reclaim. I couldn’t see the building for checking first the clarity of the tanks’ water the name plates above the windows how well the shit was cleaned off the bottom and if it came there was nothing in a tank at all having eaten itself— this first fame is what was always held up to the staff for us to surpass. and here I was degrees and jobs later still holding it up for inspection. it is a beautiful building we have built together this life arapaima gigas. huge thanks.
his voice not so much hypnotic as reachingfor the hypnotic but I leave it anyway sitting in the upright chair of the windowless room for a place higher up that’s not quite the windowless room— though I’m aware of my body’s particular kind of breathing down there dressed in my favorite shirt and somehow up here I’m dressed in that same shirt which is I feel suddenly becoming very important its color pertaining to a quiet hue of knowing I can’t quite explain and I do not think about the money I have given him the man who is speaking but I’m looking instead down on a yellow kitchen in Swindon upon a tiny remembered body I have found crying or about to cry in little white shorts and there is carpet streaked with blue and there is the noise of a terrible thing that is happening and there is summer outside with its other children “He doesn’t understand does he” says the man “he is so young” and I understand the shirt that he will have to grow through all of the terrible things to fit I can feel my body now filling up the space inside its soft and lavender-scented cotton
She wanted to taste the fire inside the corn, cried over photographs of other people’s cakes. Once she punched a cake. Those memories surface often, like a flood of bus stop pigeons. She hoped to meet an owl before she died, did nothing at all to further this agenda item other than looking up. Curious about clocks, she asked a lot of questions regarding their guts. Was there an ocean inside them, for example? How did the first craftsman know where to lodge the quiet snore of gears? She asked for holy water to be distilled down into an adhesive seal that might ride the forehead all week long the same way she tumbled her bike into hollows and ravines regardless of weather. Little reek of the river which was mostly things left behind. Once she bit a tree. It was softer than expected. The blossoms remained unchanged or fell like hail.
Pollination against the seed to grow canopy and mark place in shades of green—dry here to reflect in glassine quartz chips in the off-red dirt where trees tree as the forest is difference there green-inflected light you nurtured far where volcanic would give name in poem or misty rain for each better- suited frond of palm, its trunk, those particular roots. Here, so dry. Not to have visited outside the lines you published, strands of rain where trade winds dry as here easterlies sap the energy of watering. It’s where we read, as you knew, where the single tree in a back garden opens out to all trees momentarily safe, or at least alive, before the chop. I knew a man who tried to make a suburban backyard into a palm house.Arecaceae would seem like part of the joke as we measure tank rungs and how many waterings left, aside from our drinking. But you see them where farmhouses were built and lost or condemned for varying reasons—twin date palms (“fate palms”) thick and robust and the scrabble of rubble and chimney between. But no habitat of like, just addendum. Living in a shack there was a single great chestnut, not a walnut, out of place. A chestnut introduced like a vision of walks, the tessellations of light collected into prayer, which is where it began for you. And for others. The mirror of any leaf, the flipside, the reverse, is the growing and falling enigma—even here among the non-deciduous, dry leaves fall, stroke light. Whole branches cut off from the supply when sap is difficult to supplement, create. That vegetation cleared for plantation leaps shadows out of wasted soil, to scaffold.Gardening. I have known so many gardeners who sought to build hope out of the clearing, to remake an image of plenty, of sharing fresh air and taking stale breath. Each quietly “oracular,” if in denial, each afraid of drought though remembering greened light in their plans, their reticulation, their watching the weather. To make a calm to spread—there if we bother to look, to listen to the birds moving in and out, some staying. You knew back gardens, and you knew the streets made bare, as they are here—say, of Melbourne, green-gilled city, whose old planted trees become expendable? Or where I am, huge chunks of bush grubbed out daily with excuses made or not bothered with—hard to keep track of outside the shade of verandas, offices. Or among the palms on another island, Réunion, the warning of offensive odor though a beauty that might make an activist or remaker of demi-lost verse forms. What is there in common, across the list of names, of species—growing conditions, from a part of the world far from where they’re coaxed into a differing light? What is there in common if we’re not in the place of writing, and yet we are grown into, welded rhizome by rhizome? You cannot take the first bird I see today—a yellow-rumped thornbill tuning in, foraging for the rest of the small flock—any more than I would choose to. It tends the image. Each cell an art to tempt and let be to rebuild the soil. But no profiling, and no conflict. The straggly tenuous but tough contradictions of York gums’ outer reaches supple but brittle closer to a perception of where a heart might rest, termites holding the strings of a pacemaker, split and opening out to tempt owlet nightjars— I heard one calling from a broken limb at 10:49 the other night and you were still breathing, sleeping your breath to the canopy of world? That near and far line of prayer. Once, on a very small island, a coral island big enough for a dozen palms and a colony of land crabs and two humans, the heart of a young palm was torn out and handed over to the one unfamiliar with its form or taste. He ate, and the palm was gone. Coconuts were spouting, finding and making on the atoll, at the outer. Lugging vats of water up and down the valley wall, I think this, and your line, a late line: “nothing is missing”—a conclusion? I wrote of that palmheart for a heart surgeon years ago because all elegies are entwined, even those of different endocrines. The circulatory system of memorials. If welcomed under the green light of plantings, the off-spectrum aspiration against grief, I would have told you of the jam tree—acacia acuminata— because we are surrounded by them against the odds, and they come back, thriving on disturbed ground, with trouble around them. Short-lived treeshrubs, their rough bark exchanges codes of camouflage with stick insects, as I look now and can’t see beyond the idea of an insect being there, legs forward like antennae. Rot here is powder rather than mulch, mostly. Saplings rise to spend time dying. But some pull through and some will become part of the width of those great jarrahs felled by ancestors, their essences pushing against climate to make good. My “you” can’t be yours, but the moon and sun do their own syzygy for us all. Language is vegetation. I knew a couple who screened their cedar kit home from a country pub with a line then another line and another line of native trees. I have a family who planted tens of thousands of trees to reclaim saltland settlement hauled out of its deep sleeping, its subroots. I knew a person who filled empty paddocks with trees deleted for a new suburb, next to the new suburb where bushland had hung on against the trend, gone late. To have known morning in those places! I know you’ll have known this—how thick vegetation, the uprights and bends of trees on a still morning, can enhance our ability to pick out the between-notes of birdwork. You wrote of clarity, and translated ornate forms, to be filled with a moment’s singularity. Respiration. Our greatest breath might be so low or a rasp like a storm coming in to rejuvenate, to depart with cataclysm. And so we pass with varying degrees of light, the need for oxygen in the dismantling of carbohydrates. Night is eating of oxygen. But more, much more out in bare day. So in our sleep we join the trees, wrapped in leaves and fronds, held out of consciousness by tendrils. So we thank god for photosynthesis more than we thank god for the sun as itself? Here, we have valley, we have curved rim of valley closing out, here we have a kite, too— a black-shouldered kite that hovers above the infrequent powerlines and self-supply, and here we have year building on year that is an aside to a past that builds in all directions. The inner green of room cracked in the thermal economics of presence that underwrites reflection in crops and their residues, a shattering of light in glassy stubble, the march against concrete and lead, against ordnance and conquest, just roots holding soil so dry it is tempted to lift as a plume across the district, hungering after the great dust devil that took off a roof and opened a house down near Picnic Hill Road not long after you passed. Interior of wood of fallen branch of loosened fibers and machines striking out from gravel shoulders to lay great flooded gums on creek beds a trickle of old seasons green with algae, green with signatures of flow, the bridges where great roots held sway. What remakes such wasted soil? We try local species and intertwine with olive trees. And in our suppressed thoughts, palmistry is a lush future of shade and flycatchers maintaining the relationship between mosquitoes and moisture. No toxins; no anti-growth. Our night-lights out here stick out sharp—sore thumb exposure, a failure of perspective of what is lured to the hot light. Mouth dry. We go away too and bring places back in descriptions but we won’t let them set root—they grow inside and reach no light, this bright light that weakens accustoming eyes over time, straining to pick out moss from lichen, which shields the granite boulders it breaks down. Gradient cuts underfoot the echidna following termite galleries, interstices of plumbed surface-sounds. We go back to the records, the old books, which are young and would replace those earlier cuckoo sounds, the kickings-out in nests, the breaking through of secret chambers—all here, too, like birth, but with an unanswered history, or partially echoed and not fully addressed. This stuff we do with our souls to adjust the fragments of bush to whose maps? To miss the kangaroo trail though it’s before our eyes, or the path of an elusive rain, or a lake whose existence you might request, hint at, question? Diverse as the air after war is gone but we still can’t breathe so something slips or grafts. The stain. We rely on such conservancy, on gestures of repair and renewal that regenerate, to sustain with hands-off learning to let be, to live alongside, harvest no more than needs be. Such need manifests. Such sleep of passing is the caveat, is the covenant is the testament of work that rains without a cloud in the sky. Memorandum of walk of planting of tending: crowbar to break soil or soft cell, either way. Mostly, people search for pathways to exemptions so they can cut down protected trees. Mostly, people search for ways to get around those thin laws so they can bring down an old system of life. But here, too, we want to keep the trees going against the trend of felling, to give breath to those who stifle the art of growth. Pollination with the grain to grow canopy and mark place in shades of green—dry here to reflect from fool’s gold but grow gnarled out of off-red dirt we coax with seedlings if rain sets green-inflected light you nurtured far from here, far where necessities work outside the poem for each better-suited frond of palm frond, a eucalypt trunk, any particular roots. Dry wet dry. Making growth to suit a soil’s recovery.
For Steve  Remember when we almost drowned in ’03, the woods  so thick we only knew the rainstorm by sound of thunder and violence of the creek, how every day I’d take you to the Stop-N-Go  for your case of Natty Lights? Think back to summertime,  when after lunch you’d pull your shirt off and wring it in your hands and count off one beer, wring some more, two beers, how in July you’d sweat  all the way through last night’s binge. Think back to when  we chopped paths across hardwood bottoms for skidders to plow makeshift roads for Justiss Oil pumpjacks to suck black snot the earth  doesn’t blow. I wanted to call in sick every day, to feel  the sunrise through my bedroom pane instead of the company truck’s windshield. But this isn’t about that. What was I? Eighteen? Drinking  creamy coffee the color of soupy dishwater, the callouses  of my hands sanding the white Styrofoam cup, whiskey from a flask stirred into yours. I grew to welcome the start of a day filing blades, the rhythm  I’d find scraping down, down, up and over. I didn’t care  like you did for squaring drill sites with double-knots of orange flagging for the loggers, how we kneeled, panting in the dirt, how you would pan your head  to take inventory of the beech and white oaks rooted inside  the flagged-off square. I don’t know what it mattered, Steve, which tree we marked for loggers to fell, which sapling we ourselves chopped  with machetes. Did the thicket not return what we gave?  Did the thorn limbs and briars not cut your flesh into estuaries of brackish pink creeks of sweat and blood? Nothing changes much,  does it, Steve? I’m filing a brush hook’s edge for the first time  in years and still hear you yelling at me, Not like that, Smith. Just give that damn thing to me.
In ASL gloss and English 1   Morning wind-wind-everywhere Water mouth-dry-mouth-dry finish G-a-z-e-l-l-e-s gazelles Hooves s-e-e-d-s there stuck. Gazelles trot-trot Hooves s-e-e-d-s fall-away Grass meld-pillow protect. Feel eyes-eyes-look-search hunger Sense ready Fingersnaps gazelle p-r-o-n-k how: Legs-stiffen leap-straight-up Back-shoulders-drop Tail-up drop head-up drop p-r-o-n-k that. Gazelles-pronk-pronk Look-like eye-shimmer, eye-shimmer Body-shimmer kill can’t. From the winds that scheme to dry every drop of moisture at dawn, they gather seeds, lodged between their hooves. Everywhere they trot, they leave behind seeds, hoping that their grass-blades will knife the knolls into pillows when they sense other eyes prowling for a kill. Then they shoot straight up, their legs stiff with hiding quivers, their backs arch upward, bridging their shoulders and tails hanging limp, as they drop their heads straight down, their bodies shimmering like mirages punching everyone’s eyes out. They are too vibrant for slaughter.     2     Night pop-up stories shh Stories stay no-no Stories winds-blow-away Secrets cherish-cherish. Gazelles smell-smell lie-lie finish Men hunters mind-dumb do-do P-i-s-s here there over there Gazelles smell-smell avoid finish. Experience-experience happen-happen Stories body-inspire Moon eyes shine think-hide rifle Gazelles catch-catch finish. Hunters jaw-drop gazelles group Move-together cloud-move-together D-u-s-t rise avoid death. Tend happen what Hunters watch nights Gazelles stand-stand tail-twitch-twitch Hope land somewhere safe.   At night stories tiptoe with them. No one ever records them. Not even the winds. They are small, but secrets nurture them. Their noses have learned the scent of lies. Hunters keep marking their hiding places with their piss. The gazelles case their borders. They see things that inspire legends. The glint of moon in black eyes staring at them from the bush, calculating whether to shoot. The stunned cackle of teeth when gazelles sail en masse over clouds of dust, cracks of heat, our bodies snapping the neck of death. But most of the time they simply watch. Their limbs, dexterous and inured to danger, twitch dreams of unmarked countries.       3   C-h-e-e-t-a-h gazelles watch know-inside-out Gazelles mother show legs-zigzag Time surprise laughter-catch. Leaves delicious gazelles attract eat Eyes-open-look-that-way flicker Gazelle-tails-perk-up-all Mind-telepathy c-a-t finish. Fingersnaps gazelles-scatter-from-center Leave-behind smell-smell poop Flies-flies-buzz c-h-e-e-t-a-h finish. Gazelles-gallop escape Cheetah-eyes-stay-same run-run-after Gazelles-zigzag-sideways. Hair-bare-escape Cheetah-teeth cheetah-claw Gazelles-zigzag fast, slow Cheetah-trip-trip Gazelles-proud-pronk-pronk.   Gazelles know all about cheetahs. They’ve learned from their mothers the art of zigzagging, the power of surprise. Leaves of succulence bid them closer. Distant flicker of shadow, spots, ringed tail alerts them. Their breaths murmur the scent of cat, now. They scatter: a crater of half-chewed leaves, dung, and flies flailing in his lightning wind thundering from behind the scruffy bush. They coagulate like veins galloping from his heart of hunger, those cold eyes of cat sleeking speed, until they twist abruptly, sideways, their necks barely whisking the nick of his fangs and claw. Changing tempo and direction, their hooves are staccato music driving him to exhaustion. They pronk.
The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,  my home is where we make our meeting-place,  and love whatever I shall touch and read  within that face. Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;  peace to look, life to listen and confess,  freedom to find to find to find  that nakedness.
The sensual sap ascends to summer us, and all fronds, greenwoods, lily bands attend our festival. A festival I had more chaste and regular when with the greening globe I seasonally bore my clocked and colored joys. Now, love, I stand exile in the shadow of your praise, errant, unpunctual.
The big doll being broken and the sawdust fall all scattered by my shoes, not crying I sit in my dark to discover o failure annulled opens out in my hands a purse of golden salvaged sovereigns, from floors of seas culled. The dancing doll split in an anguish and all the cords of its elegant limbs unstrung; I stumble whistling; the bones of my skull marvelously start to sing, the whole shell of myself invents without peril and contains a court aubade. I hid the dovesmall doll but something found it. Frightened I gave the fire what was left. Surrounding, it mulled dulcet over the melting jeweled two blue eyes. That night our hearth was desolate, but then its stones sprung flowered and the soaring rafters arched. Now all the house laughs, the sun shouts out clearly: dawn! the sea owes us all its treasures; under the soft the riotous explosion of our waking kiss or gift, a stone plucked or shorn free of gravity falls upward for us, slow, and lies there, quietly.
Sad. And it comes tomorrow. Again, gray, the streaks of work shredding the stone of the pavement, dissolving  with the idea of singular endeavor. Herds, the herds of suffering intelligences bunched, and out of  hearing. Though the day come to us  in waves,  sun, air, the beat of the clock.  Though I stare at the radical  world,  wishing it would stand still.  Tell me, and I gain at the telling. Of the lie, and the waking against the heavy breathing of new light, dawn, shattering the naive cluck of feeling.  What is tomorrow  that it cannot come   today?
He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair near his navel, swaying. And now he saw his other hairs rise up. He felt a hectic current in his veins. Looking within, he saw the bubbling of his blood. He cursed his fever, saying: “It is the chemistry of prayer. It increases in frequency, seeding panic to all my being. My cells swell with the liquid of guilt they fabricate, juices of hatred eat my belly my corpuscles make war in me as they devour each other. My head heats in the combustion of anxiety, I am polluted by the secretions of my soul’s decay, while my brain wears away with the scratching night and day on the encephalograph of prayer. I grow monstrous with the leukemia of the world.” And he heard the hair say: “Hear me.” And he saw it grow gray as it waved. All his hairs he saw whiten, and, numberless, wilt from their erect electric listening. He saw them topple from their roots. “How dare you!” he cursed them. There surged a brief resuscitation to his body. His heart took heart and pounded twice with the health of fear But then the plague of prayer redoubled and overwhelmed him. In his feebleness he raged, and said: “I will tear out this evil and free it.”With his withered hands he tore the remaining hairs from his body and head. With his nails he opened his breast, and with his fist he exploded his heart, which erupted, a black and red volcano. As his brain tasted, for the first time, the birth of his doom, he came a rolling tide, a floating mountain of ecstasy. “I see you! I love you!” his eyes cried, overflowing with his bright blood. “You were the light of the world that are now my gushing tears— the kind and fiery tears of chaos, that wash my eyes with the cure of oblivion.” “He hears us!” cried his sick blood pouring from his ears. “Even as of old he heard our hair before it perished.” With his last strength, the chemistry of prayer, a few drops of his blood coagulated. That clot whirled out, free, in the vortex of the universe.
It smiles to see me Still in my bathrobe. It sits in my lap And will not let me rise. Now it is kissing my eyes. Arms enfold me, arms Pale with a thick down. It seems I am falling asleep To the sound of a story Being read me. This is the story. Weeks have passed Since first I lifted my hand To set it down.
Proof Sheets: 36 Prints   These photographs are the index of an hour,  memory clocked along negative margins:  one through twelve, one through twelve, one  through twelve.   Even in a sequence there is choice,  as when I chose not to photograph silences between words—   choice of the parted lips—  or choose now a sequence out of time.  Scissors: chopped time.   Rearrangement is good:  You are characters in a drama called then.   You are figures for mythology.  I shall make Phaedra blonde, Theseus dark, Hippolytus  blonde—   blue eyes: blue eyes; that will do—  Antigone singing in the graveyard wind,   a twelve-year old who is Jocasta alternate weeks.  Neither imagination nor my willing flesh can move this  hand   one fraction of an inch;  a shift of stance could have juxtaposed mouths.  The fixed frame   is the drama:  Hippolytus at banquet;  Phaedra in her chamber,  behind her that painting blurred   into an omen,  as if Theseus were Creon, Meleager, shepherd, faun;  Oedipus barefoot, hairskin beast;  Antigone maenad, Helen, Artemis.    Only out-of-focus figures move.
Mortal and full of praise, I watch the enchanted hero busy at his chores: desert, tundra, prairie restless under an easy stride. Dagger in belt, sword slapping thigh, he passes from sight, the restored land sprung airily to green praise. Arachnid webs entangle life. A busyness of thread weaves silk into night— the long shudder of moonlight, a transfixed eye shuddering. Nothing is so easy as death, I try to say. But the hard fact of glazed eyes, the boy turned to solitude, lies face up in the center of all webs, roads unwinding stubble. Whoever is alone walks brittle filaments, late stars smudged on dawn, a night sky’s frayed dawn. Dare we evaluate life: This hero’s gesture charms eternity? Someone who paused here once on an ordinary day, troubled by the impatience of his calling, set up a hasty signpost: “Toward…” Nothing is so scarred as this place, shards of parched cloth trampled by footprints coiling crazed centers. Fresh with spring, light breezes play on dust. A whisper of rain. Ropes of skeined thunder twist sky.
I   Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation in the wings, roles taking on flesh before a role begins…   as light begins in the elm, pushing the long elm branches into night, a ghost light pressing sky…   or actors, swollen with strange selves, distended to the edges of tight skin, a brightness under moth-wing fingertips.   White arms stretch out toward truth. The stage is full of light. Your brightness gloves my skin.     II   Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels, tiny, unable to reach a gold key, knew what gardens were for—   yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight to will flamboyance from green buds. The swollen poppy twists within its cap,   a pink invention wrestling light. How often I think of tunneling roots, curtains of roots, white ropes   that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels. Here, we are rubbed on gold. This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens.     III   A robin listens to darkness. I think of worms, grubs, moles, the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down,   of cave fish, blacksnakes, and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls that thunder on dark walls.   When we wear another self, do our souls darken? On a bright stage, do we enter darkest places?     IV   There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves.   For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls, stumbling and skuffing fingertips. At Mycenae, it is a heavy must, a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern.   They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn silence frayed under a blur of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands manipulate evasive cellar shadows.   Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves.     V   Oh I think of Alice gone down, down under groundcover dreams, a man’s tunneled night.   Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget lines. My tongue-tied silence foundering… Stage props mumble rigidities. The audience…   I think of silences at Nieux, at Mycenae, the tourists gone, guides returned to wives, houses….   And those silences of capricious light. The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame. Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through  arias of reddest blossom.
I. PULSE   Light over the Hudson recovers a Caribbean I have  never seen. We list islands: Molokai, Oahu, Kauai; St. Lucia,  Haiti…. The surf folds tunnels of light while a hand folds over a wrist (tell-tale pulse), counting. The long tunnel is a wrist of blown spume.   It is like a dance, I think, this silence full of questions. Pulse-beat; pulse-beat. Pulse. Pulse.   I push my hair back into the memories of palm trees, brushing my hands and my hair on the islands.     2. NIGHT MUSICGarlic and sapphires in the mud...  T.S. Eliot   The window opens onto a fire escape. The Sausage Manufacturers’ Chamber Group, scattered  among potted geraniums and dying petunias, plays Hindemith’s Kleine Kammermusik. The oboist, his briefcase full of knockwurst and reeds, is suffering  from hiccups. The cheerful notes—hiccups on oboe—float in through  the window. Ralph turns in bed, a flailing arm upsetting the urinal. Perhaps he is awake. A pale German shepherd  leaps through the window, over the bars of the hospital bed, and begins to lick  Ralph’s feet. Why are Ralph’s feet out of the covers? The dog looks  up, and says “Ralph,” and walks up Ralph’s stomach to stare in his eyes. “Where is your bone?” Ralph says; but the dog curls up  under Ralph’s left arm and falls asleep. “Why not?” Ralph thinks. The musicians have departed, only a faint odor of garlic lingering on the windowsill. “I could call you Fritz,” Ralph says to the sleeping dog, “or Cokie or maybe even Pepe. But I’ll call you Ralph.” This time the music comes through the window  without hiccups and without garlic.     3. THE INVENTIONS OF SLEEP   A telephone call begins on the television set: You are in a phone booth, headlights in the distance, behind you couples strolling in a park. We almost know   each other’s names, and I think about children moving out of darkness into  patches of light then back into darkness. Their voices are a murmur under your soft voice.  “I’m tired now,” you say; “I haven’t been called before.”   In Manitoba winter, in loose snow thrown up by the  Canadian Pacific, elk burrow down, their great antlers caught in the dining car lights. Their  heads turn to each other in snow, muzzles, flanks touching under the snow line.   If I am asleep, your voice is folded under my arm, and I whisper, “sleep well,” watching the antlers turn  to each other in loose snow, the summer voices blurred by city traffic.     4. THE DARK, THE DREAM   At 11:15, I will follow the last corridor into darkness. At 10:30, when I had spoken to the darkness for the  first time, I had asked the darkness the names of all the corridors, calling your name into every closed  door. But tonight all of the doors are windows.    Hide and seek:    Helen George Barbara Tom Sheryl  of patches of fog on an Irish lake,  Roger watching swans vanish.  Muffie dancing Jim climbing the switchback  trail into light.  Margaret and Mike dealing the cards, Janet  asleep.   Lights go on and off back of the windows: I call your  name at the head of each corridor.  …not windows. Vyvian hands me the negatives: ten seconds: Theone on the far side of the car: four a.m., truth  balanced on a steering wheel; ten seconds: my mother’s body falling toward darkness, the dead child falling, Bob Pawlowsky falling: I  have no goodbye.     . . .   11:15: hide and seek, and the long corridor darkening  against night’s invention echo lengthening. —my way now, calling.     5. SCARS   That little scar I’ll never see on the left underside of my  heart or the almost-closed arteries opening and closing like  baby mouths or the good artery, a tiny flow talking about  tomorrow….   Strange in the garden, watching two boys wrestle in  long grass, their wheelchair friend in zebra-striped pajamas watching  the wrestling, all three in the hungry shade of a magnolia. Binoculars: The boy in striped pajamas’ dense shouts: shouting,  shouting: “Quit it, you cocksuckers! They won’t even let you  walk on the grass. Quit!” They are hidden by the magnolia. I cannot hear them. The long magnolia branches wrestle like boys’ white  arms and legs.   That scar in the groin: hernia. Punched hole in the  groin: heart catheter. The new scar throat to belly.   Now they have helped the zebra boy back into the  wheelchair and, pushing him up the hospital ramp, take turns  bumping shoulders. “Quit it you pricks! Do you want me thrown out of the  place?”   I listen to my casual heart beating veins into arteries;  then I approach the zebra and his friends.   In Africa, wildebeest, impala, warthog gather at the  waterhold, nudging shoulders. The gaunt flat-topped trees cast lion shadows, vultures circling. Where are the sabre tooth tiger, the  mastodon?   I think of America cemented coast to coast, white  jet-trail scars for sky, a loveliness of footprints jumbled on spring grass.     6. POST-OPERATIVE (1)   Fever again: 101 slow footsteps on the beach. The footsteps are a conversation in the  waves. “Come. I’m here.” I am walking toward the  long-haired woman wrestling already her bright shoulders’ turning. On the shore, gaunt lovers wrestle bone against bone, rib cages interlocked, bone grinding: slow footsteps music on dry sand     7. POST OPERATIVE (2)   Joy crusted with pain:  fresh lava  breaking through  a shifting black map  in the crater pit:  Mauna Ulu: New Mountain.    Seabird, seabird, fly the old lava. In long light, at the foot of the pali, press in on the 40-foot spine, legs wrapping heads; arms, torso, genitals cradled in legs, a 40-foot snake, chain of love, birth chain, twisting in the long ocean light, an arm under the dark cloud brushing generations of lovers. Seabird, seabird, fly in on a long stroke of cold light.     8. POST-OPERATIVE (3): THE ELEVATOR   Elevator: a hand on my shoulder, a hand on the  wheelchair, hands brushing my hair… or the blown hair of a woman shouldered in  sea-foam… elk burrowing in loose snow… or a mouth opening, closing mouths meeting.   In one step, I am free, my feet firm. This is Manhattan, the cement island, below me the  Hudson roped in pale rain. Three boys break into a run, dodging taxis. Their jeans are tight wet skins, their wet faces masks. “Run fast!” The towers of the hospital shape sky.   Haiti, Kauai, Manhattan—white shoulders of the sea  breaking down every island.   A little box on a chain goes up and down: up  down.    Once, in a dream, the elevator reached top floor, then shifted sideways, finding another shaft; at basement, it returned to floor 1, returned to basement, floor 1, basement, then floor 10, floor 11—sideways on floor 11, doors opening into mouths.   A mouth in my heart says a name, calling. Then  another, another.   I brush dry sand from my arms that are streaming rain, turning toward Broadway.
Winter morningsdriving pastI’d see these kids huddled like grousein the plowed rutsin front of their shack waiting for the bus,three small children bunched against the drifts rising behind them.This morningI slowed to wave and the smallest, a stick of a kid draped in a coat, grinned and raised his red, raw hand, the snowball packed with rock aimed at my face.
The canyon walls close in again, slant light a silver glare in brown water. The water is only knee deep, but when the boy reaches the  boulders— purple dark, silvered by the smash of brute water— water will tear at his chest and arms. The walls of the canyon are brilliant in late light. They would have glared red and gold for his drowned camera: splashed blood to his left, to his right a wall of sun laddered  with boulders.   More than boulders. Some stranger once fought down this  cliffside, his rope of twisted dry vines strung boulder to boulder, clifftop to arroyo. Escape. Escape maybe. Maybe bones  in the desert. I think of hands scuffed raw from the braiding.   Almost…. Water froths over the boulders, tugs at the boy’s footing. Almost…. The blood cliff to his left blinds him. Blind nails scrape at  two boulders, a torn vine whipping somewhere above him.   He wedges knees against polished rock, pressing up, clawing  slick stone. Now. Rope cutting his hand, he skids underwater: silver and froth, a film of bright blood staining his eyes. But he drags hand over hand up out of the water, climbing  the sun hand over hand, the ancient vines holding, boulders for foothold, up out of that canyon.
90th and Third, NYC We almost missed him, although his face, As blunt as a busy Picasso, all shifting Planes, was wedged in a picture frame.  We almost missed him, the way one can stop Seeing hunched-over bodies along the street Or a favorite picture above the sofa In the living room, so familiar it seems Invisible, until it has drifted askew Or been removed. "If only he had something More contemporary," my companion offered. The man in the frame extended his crushed Paper coffee cup, fingers hugging its Greek Pillars and statues, white and blue. "Spare any change?" he asked. I brought Forth a quarter. His eyes, brilliant, saidI am a masterpiece. This is where I live.
Henri Rouseeau, 1897 In the heat of her dream, she hears The iron kettle boiling, its scuttle and hum As hurried as hoofbeats across a plain. She drops in two guinea hens. Dancing In a ring round her skirts, the children Cheer, “Auntie, the English song!” Lifting Her lute, she sings of the cat and the fiddle, The cow jumping over the moon. How the little Ones hoot when the dish runs away With the spoon. Ah, spoon—an uncloaked Lute, it waits to be strummed. The temptation of London, of Paris, Of bumping along in the carriage with M. Philippe In his top hat and greatcoat to visit The peacocks, turquoise and gold and green, each Roaming the Bois de Boulogne with one hundred eyes. She sleeps in the desert, under a smiling full moon That shines in the teal night. Quiet behind her, A lion stands, tail erect, having sniffed At her onyx flesh, at the ribbony stripes His color-blindness darkens on her muslin dress, All rainbow hues. She is lost in a dream, Always happiest out of doors, without shoes.
It is easy to imagine Heraclituswalking stone streets witnessinglife in Athens with no permanence,stopping strangers to explain about the river,being laughed at as they movedfrom point A to point B fearing Apolloand Hades then at dusk drinking wine, waiting for the happy obliteration alcohol brings,not realizing how lucky they wereto be stupid and so deepin their bodies even the sunand moon trading places over and overmeant nothing.
rain on the lake room at the lodge alone in a room in the lazy light loons on the lake geese in the air moose in the woods aware awake a cry dislodged from the musty woods the gamy musk of the one aroused the roaming moose the rooms lit up the woods awake in the loony light the moon dislodged the lake aflame the Muse amazed amused aroused
By freezing passion at its blossoming perhaps Rodin knew he challenged Sophocles who said as lover you want ice to be ice yet not melt in your hands. How stone, implying permanence, might let us believe, a moment, the seated figures are beyond the leaf that cannot keep from letting go the branch, beyond even stupidly purpling grapes that do not understand the process by which they darken; darken nevertheless.
For Robert Penn Warren Reckless and white as a flashlight beam cast into some dark corner, the moon insists on the deeper blackness surrounding it. Perhaps it wishes to be a woman or a window,  cushioning everything, full of itself for the moment, yet frightened, like any egotist. But still the stars patiently insist on their presence, pinholes to nothingness.  When else would I walk on such a night in the world?  Half answers suggest themselves.  The body consumes and wanes, collapses.  We get to watch how everyone dies who dies before us, how birds rest.  And yet while night solidifies,  we can continue our discussion in our effort to open the gift of the world,  our hope to find years in this box we tear apart.  Birds do not count in our calibration.  They crack time randomly, as if it were seeds.  With sudden unaccountability they start up and disappear.  And yet, in some way all of this is beside the point, for what can we do except continue our conversation,  and what would we gain if we disappeared?  They tell us that this is so.  Do you have any songs from your childhood you still use to sing yourself to sleep?  Being, mind, ego: the moon loves itself in cloud shimmers, dancing as if it had pulled a scant nightie off a laundry line to clown with.  We can only walk while there is light.
You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . .   Howard Moss Dogs will also lick your face if you let them. Their bodies will shiver with happiness. A simple walk in the park is just about the height of contentment for them, followed by a bowl of food, a bowl of water, a place to curl up and sleep. Someone to scratch them where they can't reach and smooth their foreheads and talk to them. Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen and other bringers of bad news and will bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell fear and also love with perfect accuracy. There is no use pretending with them. Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it. They make no secret of themselves. You can even tell what they're dreaming about by the way their legs jerk and try to run on the slippery ground of sleep. Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance. They don't try to impress you with how serious or sensitive they are. They just feel everything full blast. Everything is off the charts with them. More than once I've seen a dog waiting for its owner outside a café practically implode with worry. “Oh, God, what if she doesn't come back this time? What will I do? Who will take care of me? I loved her so much and now she's gone and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.” And when she does come, what a flurry of commotion, what a chorus of yelping and cooing and leaps straight up into the air! It's almost unbearable, this sudden fullness after such total loss, to see the world made whole again by a hand on the shoulder and a voice like no other.
To strip away this incessant chatter, yes, but what lies underneath it? Death, of course, or our fear of death. Which is why we talk so much, bury our heads in books, turn forests into pages and pages into mirrors in which we see ourselves appear and disappear. When I look up from the story I've been reading about the Jews in Nazi Germany and the silence that closed their mouths forever, I see a girl outside the cafe smiling in at her father who smiles back but cannot hear her. She makes all kinds of gestures with her hands, mimes herself inside an invisible box and breaks down laughing. Then she gathers her breath and blows it against the window. It is not snowing outside, the leaves have hardly begun to turn, the season is merely poised for the long descent, but still the glass steams up. And in this little cloud of warmth that's come from deep inside her body, she writes a single joyful word, which vanishes almost before she finishes.
I wear my heart on my sleeve, or rather both sleeves, since it's usually broken. Sometimes when I join my hands to pray, the jagged edges briefly touch, like a plate that fell and cracked apart from being asked to hold too much.
And what about this boulder, knocked off the moutaintop and tumbled down a thousand years ago to lodge against the streambank, does it waste itself with worry about how things are going to turn out? Does the current slicing around it stop itself mid- stream because it can't get past all it's left behind back at the source or up in the clouds where its waters first fell to earth? And these trees, would they double over and clutch themselves or lash out furiously if they were to discover what the other trees really thought of them? Would the wind reascend into the sky forever, like an in-drawn breath, if it knew it was fated simply to sweep the earth of windlessness, to touch everything and keep nothing and be beheld by no one?
As I was guided by the director through the thick space Of these rooms, worn sparrow brown, and strode With the August sun on my shoulders across this particular Acre of grass, nobody had told me this was the place Where you had summered as a boy. I have weathered My fourth decade, older now than you were When you died. I can barely remember you, yet I can see You not as my father but as my son. You are age nine. The downpour divides into two massive stage curtains Parting. You bolt from the bunk, loudly racing With your chums down the slippery hill to the dock, Your cape of a towel flapping as if ready to lift you airborne. You are the smallest. Still, you always run in the front. You do not know how beautiful you are, of course, squinting Against the sun, the flame that escapes behind the gray Vapor for hours, sometimes for days. You cannot see That from the beginning it has been eyeing you from afar, That it has focused its golden spotlight just for you.
Always the evening noises, the footsteps on the stairs, the day that rises in the throat. A turn of the key will expel the world. Against the extinct forest of furniture, the channeled bloodstream translates the dream into this small life. In the end we shrink until finally we can no longer inhabit the gestures of our childhood. A nail in a board: the remains of a fence; blurred memory of the mountain that raised the tree, that brooded over its ore. Modest against a hedge, a spade dreams its beautiful death. “Simple and calm,” nourished on weeds and wind, the image moves, distilling its own memory. Far off, we disappear into the ochre and the gold, the mud-brown and the primordial green. The slightest evidence of life. In the courtyard's silence, the barking of that dog. A shutter, merely, that's banging. Those books stacked in one corner of the room. Everything that, ordinarily, follows its automated course. And there, all at once: the happiness that spreads its billion pinpricks through the body. Evening's voice unreels its argument. Five floors below, the courtyard and its echoes. The barking still, and overhead the footsteps of regret in the maids' rooms. I'll try to have given each thing my word before giving in to sleep. The room breathes deeply the music of a quartet. It's that grave well-being, unexpectedly, you know? Nobody. You may speak. I'm not there. A gesture: the garden diffuses the pale green taste of currants. One remains quiet as long as possible. Another gesture: the sun rips open the scent of the lindens. Childhood leaps over the wall. The miracle would be having something to say. Maybe we could have inhabited that smile, over there, at the other end of the room; or else we could have met at the improbable dawn of memory. Maybe we could have fallen asleep in the twilight of this autumn when the brain is nothing more than oak and leather. But we have only this thin life to place beneath the axe. The crows in the plowed field, black against the field's ochre, gleaming and black amid the smell of moist earth, a smell mixed with the brush and bark and roots that the wind returns as someone somewhere burns them. And then that pile of words that rots with helplessness. In the forest, the sound, dry and brief, of a pebble in a streambed, fallen after patient millennia into the earth's darkness. Just a dry sound and its echo, quickly engulfed by birdcalls. And later, on the path, drops of blood from the trees. A farmer carriers his tools slowly toward the shed. In the atmospheric silence, a woodpecker registers the sound of its life's work. That's all. Some animals, a pile of wood, and the smell of rain, which always calls to mind something that can't quite be reconstructed. Acrid smoke; and then that crackling of the woods in the clearing. A few centimeters above the cut weeds, the tenuous vapor of memory. Between eyelashes, amid the colors of the woods, the colors of weeds, and earth, that sky, that patch of sky, that sky. The courtyard, the wood bench, the sputtering of the fishpond, the smell of humus, the smell of mushroom. Five notes in the rain sketch the presence of a bird. The village, the morning, belong to the birds. Images flow freely through the alleys. Silence full of events: the eyes prey on a shadow. A gull's passing reshapes all the shores of the world. Birdcalls cut through the fog, wet grass: morning. The rectangle of a wall says: “blank,” nothing else. On the horizon, very nearby, a woman dressed in black glides silently across her wide open destiny. Between branches, near the sun, the moon, which opens the night to the night. I sink, gently, and disappear. On the surface, alone, the cry of an owl keeps watch. The stairs, the brass doorknob, the smell of dark corners. The iron bed, the red bedspread. Slow breathing. That song that waits for nothing but our melody. We are of the morning, of the gently sloping hour that comes slowly down from the sun. The old clothes in the corner are tinged with the morning's color, which will have to be worn. The lark's song widens the silence. Deep in the forest, the cuckoo, the woodpecker, the chiaroscuro of ancient musics. Heavy wagons clench their signal-lights toward the heights of the opaque sky. I moved with closed words across the homeland that sleeps me. From this far country, where you respond to me without my hearing a word of yours, without perhaps my words ever reaching you, from this country where perhaps we understand each other, I overhear the most contradictory noises, which veil and deny your voice, and which would like to make me believe that I'm speaking alone.
She recognizes its crest in the way he looks at her.  The wave is as vast as the roiling mass in the Japanese Print they had paused in front of at the museum, Capped with ringlets of foam, all surging sinew. That little village along the shore would be Totally lost. There is no escaping this. The wave is flooding his heart, And he is sending the flood Her way. It rushes Over her. Can you look at one face For the whole of a life? Does the moon peer down At the tides and hunger for home?
Atlas, you’re Homer. I am so glad you’re Hera. Thera so many things to tell you. I went on that minotaur of the museum. The new display centaurs on how you can contract Sisyphus if you don’t use a Trojan on your Dictys. It was all Greek to me, see. When I was Roman around, I rubbed Midas against someone. “Medea, you look like a Goddess,” he said. The Minerva him! I told him to Frigg off, oracle the cops. “Loki here,” I said. “In Odin times men had better manners.” It’s best to try and nymph that sort of thing in the bud. He said he knew Athena two about women like me, then tried to Bacchus into a corner. Dryads I could, he wouldn’t stop. “Don’t Troy with my affections,” he said. “I’m already going to Helen a hand basket.” I pretended to be completely Apollo by his behavior. If something like that Mars your day, it Styx with you forever. “I’m not Bragi,” he said. “But Idon better.” Some people will never Lerna. Juno what I did? Valhalla for help. I knew the police would Pegasus to the wall. The Sirens went off. Are you or Argonaut guilty, they asked. He told the cops he was Iliad bad clams. He said he accidentally Electra Cupid himself trying to adjust a lamp shade. This job has its pluses and Minos. The cops figured he was Fulla it. He nearly Runic for me. I’m telling you, it was quite an Odyssey, but I knew things would Pan out. And oh, by the way, here’s all his gold. I was able to Fleece him before the museum closed.
...and a decrepit handful of trees. —Aleksandr Pushkin And I matured in peace born of command, in the nursery of the infant century, and the voice of man was never dear to me, but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand. The burdock and the nettle I preferred, but best of all the silver willow tree. Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams; it lived here all my life, obligingly. I have outlived it now, and with surprise. There stands the stump; with foreign voices other willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies, and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.
Night is a cistern. Owls sing. Refugees tread meadow roads with the loud rustling of endless grief. Who are you, walking in this worried crowd. And who will you become, who will you be when day returns, and ordinary greetings circle round. Night is a cistern. The last pairs dance at a country ball. High waves cry from the sea, the wind rocks pines. An unknown hand draws the dawn’s first stroke. Lamps fade, a motor chokes. Before us, life’s path, and instants of astronomy.
That city will be no more, no halos of spring mornings when green hills tremble in the midst and rise like barrage balloons— and May won’t cross its streets with shrieking birds and summer’s promises. No breathless spells, no chilly ecstasies of spring water. Church towers rest on the ocean’s floor, and flawless views of leafy avenues fix no one’s eyes. And still we live on calmly, humbly—from suitcases, in waiting rooms, on airplanes, trains, and still, stubbornly, blindly, we seek the image, the final form of things between inexplicable fits of mute despair— as if vaguely remembering something that cannot be recalled, as if that submerged city were traveling with us, always asking questions, and always unhappy with our answers— exacting, and perfect in its way.
The sun sets behind the market square, and the nettle leaves reflect the small town’s imperfections. Teapots whistle in the houses, like many trains departing simultaneously. Bonfires flame on meadows and their long sighs weave above the trees like drifting kites. The last pilgrims return from the church uncertainly. TV sets awaken, and instantly know all, like the demons of Alexandria with swindlers’ swarthy faces. Knives descend on bread, on sausage, on wood, on offerings. The sky grows darker; angels used to hide there, but now it’s just the police sergeant and his dear departed motorcycle. Rain falls, the cobbled streets grow black. Little abysses open between the stones.
She could be any woman at all, caught off-guard on-guard. With her hands stroking or strangling and maybe with her intentions half-interred. But she is as she is. Her gaze is always filing away at its cord. And what she's really after is you to love her. She forgets who she is. She could be so small she almost has no smell. She feels like anyone at all. When you walk up to her, she keeps quite still, but what she answers to is never loud enough to know. Eaten away by outwardness, her eyes are empty. They could be watching you or not. They work indifferently, like lit-up glass and if you ask why she won't speak, why should she? When what she really wants is silence. You know what women are like: Kay, Moira, Sandra. They move through a dark room, peering round under the hoods of their names. Alcestis, Clytemnestra. She could be either of those. She scarcely knows. She goes on thinking something just over your shoulder. This could be the last night before you lose her. But what's the use of saying one thing or another. When what she's really after is you to love her.
Good God! What did I dream last night? I dreamt I was the moon. I woke and found myself still asleep. It was like this: my face misted up from inside And I came and went at will through a little peephole. I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble, except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel. Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight. Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer. Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight. Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes, Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other, There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things. I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible. There's no material as variable as moonlight. I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking: Good God! Who have I been last night?
The screamer sleeps, inside. The desert's wide awake: the mouse, the rattlesnake. I've come out here to hide, behind our house, below the riddled sky, afraid of what our bodies made. To the south: Mexico... These are the nights men run. Guaymas before midday, a beach-town life...I play it out. Such things are done. The Rincons seep like a stain into the paling east. The borders are policed. The wail, nearby, of a train.
The four am cries of my son worm through the double foam of earplugs and diazepam. The smoke alarm’s green eye glows. Beneath the cries, the squirm and bristle of the night’s catch of fiddlebacks on the glue-traps guarding our bed. Necrotic music. Scored in my head. And all night columns of ants have tramped through the ruins of my sleep, bearing the fipronil I left for them home to their queen. Patriot ants. Out of republics endlessly perishing. If I can hold out long enough, maybe my wife will go. If she waits long enough, maybe he’ll go back down on his own.
Reaching for the vinegar over the range hood (still dashing grass wisps on the gas flames from the exhaust vent where we booted that brooding sparrow) I remember the rabbit in the Tiergarten that perched on its spatula feet where the grass had just started to green. The German clouds were unibrow. It's not the stretching, slightly weaving, that recalls it, it's the tang of vinegar, Easter egg dye solvent. And my gallimaufry gets going, guests for dinner, the requisite foofaraw. In the soffits of the staircase a rag and a featherduster. In the eaves the nests made of frass and cellophane. "When it rains on a golf course it's called Irish dew—" Father-in-law's jackstraw. "Dundee, is this an Aussie shiraz? Put it in the croc au vin." Cellophane and frass. Everything in the canon went into Gargantua before he was born from the ear beneath his mama's cornrows: Augustine, Aquinas. Aristotle and Plato. Virgil and Homer. Goliards and troubadours. Thus an ort peeking out from a nostril, skin flakes, a slight acne, undercoat all colors, like a farrow; the chuffer, snuffler, grunter, farter, pecker, whelp, head half the size of the requisitioned teat (Googling "mastitis" and finding "ewe," ew) —the whole shebang reeks of bedstraw. On the radio, transrational statistics; Brigitte Bardot lashing out at the leash law in Zurich; on an uncle's fourth percussive sneeze the baby wakes —interrobang—
A pack of  young flirts was patrolling the party, They were cultural outsiders, consumed with    ...    what? Their own notion of  beauty as reflected in the shine-more mirror Of  a man's pants? Or nothing But midnight and no one is counting. They were practitioners, they admitted to the barman, Of  psychological materialism, explaining they had read both Sartre and Beauvoir and believed in the cerebellum, The thalamus and the lower brain and that between The lower and the upper parts there must be room for them, Nant [ nothingness ] aside. Indeed, the evening was a spectacular bacchanalia, The girls lugging their blind-drunk partners around the floor. One sitting it out with a volume of  The Collected Camus. That one was “imperious” (the word is Beauvoir's) “The club was plunged into almost total darkness, With violinists wandering about ‘Playing soulful Russian music' into the guests' ears.” “‘If only it were possible to tell the truth,' Exclaimed Camus at one point.” There was vodka and champagne, both in quantities Extremely beautiful and nice for getting tight. And dancing Cheek to cheek, between the exchange of  furtive kisses And giggles every time one of  the chaps said, “Don't Leave me, I love you, I'll always love you.” Which they took as irrefutable evidence Of a general greed for human warmth, I.e., for touch, even among the agonized Post-adolescent dreamers who morphed on the dance floor That night into naughty boys, echoing the girls' questions Of   “how shall we live,” “what shall we do,” Words without end, without weight.
Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.
How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?
The Minister of Culture goes home after a grueling day at the office. He lies on his bed and tries to think of nothing, but nothing hap-pens or, more precisely, does not happen. Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does, which is to expand the dark. But the minister is patient, and slowly things slip away—the walls of his house, the park across the street, his friends in the next town. He believes that nothing has finally come to him and, in its absent way, is saying, “Darling, you know how much I have always wanted to please you, and now I have come. And what is more, I have come to stay.”
It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.
I was stretched out on the couch, about to doze off, when I imagined a small figure asleep on a couch identical to mine. “Wake up, little man, wake up,” I cried. “The one you’re waiting for is rising from the sea, wrapped in spume, and soon will come ashore. Beneath her feet the melancholy garden will turn bright green and the breezes will be light as babies’ breath. Wake up, before this creature of the deep is gone and everything goes blank as sleep.” How hard I try to wake the little man, how hard he sleeps. And the one who rose from the sea, her moment gone, how hard she has become—how hard those burning eyes, that burning hair.
5 am. One-quarter past.Distant chimes inform me this.A bell peal knells the mist.And sunlight’s not yet bludgeoning. But some light gets blood going. Last night it was snowingand now every path’s a pall.Though mine the only footfallsat this hour of awe. Above hangs a canopy of needle leaf. Below, the season’s mean deceit—that everything stays white and clean. It doesn’t, of course, but I wish it. My prayersare green with this intent, imploring winter wrens to trill and begging scuttling bucks come back. There’s something that I lack.A wryneck bullet-beaks a branch.His woodworm didn’t have a chance.What I miss, I’ve never had.But I am not a ghost. I am a guest. And life is thirst, at best. So do not strike me, Heart. I am, too, tinder. I’m flammable as birch bark, even damp. Blue spruce, bee-eater—be sweeter to me. Let larksong shudder to its January wheeze,but gift these hands a happinessjust once. It is half passed. And I am cold. Another peal has tolled.I’ve told the sum of my appeals.I need not watch for fox. They do not congregate at dawn.But I would, were I one.
is my seasonof defeat.Though allis green and death is done, I feel alone.As if the stonerolled offfrom the headof the tombis lodgedin the doorframeof my room,and everyoneI’ve ever lovedlives happilyjust pastmy able reach.And each time Jesus risesI’m remindedof this marblefact:they are notcoming back.
The border of a thing.Its edge or hem.The selvage, the skirt,a perimeter’s trim.The blow of daylight’s end and nighttime’s beginning.A fence or a rim, a margin, a fringe.And this: the grim,stingy doorstepwhere the lapse of passagehappens.That slim lip of land,the liminal vergethat slipsyou pastyour brink.Where and whenyou blink.
Consider the rip for a mouth, the rip in the crotch, the hank of hair,consider the flair for ill-fortune, the empty stare, the done deal with sorrow, the rich and rare nest-egg of dreams, the share and sharealike in matters of loss, the payments in kind, the liking for blindbets, for truth or dare; consider the threadbare get up, the make-upbeyond repair, the tin-tack teeth, consider the dungeon voicewanting nothing more than bare house-room, and nothing less than hand-in-glove, a pigeon pair given over to make and mend, to touch and go, to wear and tear, and all it takes is this: forswear flint and fire, stay silent, be white on white, live in dead air.
Up late watching slug porn, you confessyou had a boyfriend who could spin you like that, slug grace and slug ballet—we don’ttouch the topic of slime—and those eyes dangling from tentacle tips must be akind of love or lust, sighting farther andnearer all at once. (But are those eyes?) Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag, touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of memory and... What did we do before YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs, of course, don’t care, can’t tell girl from boy, (being, you know, hermaphrodites), and only want flesh to fly. Forget their infamous languor—here’s litheness in loving, buoyant miracles of want, one slug spiraling on the axis of another like a globe slapped by an insolent hand. Neither old nor young, we’re familiar with sluggishness, too tired to explain why nothing makes us spin like that: a-swirl, a pirouette, a gyre! It’s either fucking or marriage, I say,saying more than I mean. Why can’t lust belove and love be lust? you’re always asking, even now as the slugs begin their sluggishwithdrawal—each complete in love and lust;each mother and father to what they’ve madetogether; each alone, content, and free.
What might be saidto disport itselfalong the cinderblockin leaves. *What I writeI write insteadof ivy. *Green snoutsin evidence or—moreto the point—insolent and tense. *What might be saidto writheprofessionallyas the daysnod and wink.
1Starsare the campfiresof exiles.Language existsto pull thingsclose. *Stop that!Communicationsare being monitored.Collusion is forbidden.Humanitywill be punishedwith the profusionof new jargons. 2Inverted in glass,a white cupinvents the underworld. *Fog thinsto chiffon,nylon,Easter. *In the universe next door,I’m goneand the shadowsof the leavesof the elm I had pulled downstill make a fussover the earth.
Light was on its wayfrom nothingto nowhere.Light was all business Light was full speedwhen it got interrupted.Interrupted by what?When it got tangled upand brokeinto opposite broke into brand new things. What kinds of things? Drinking Cup “Thinking of you! Convenience Valet”How could speed take shape? *Hush!Do you want me to start over? * The fading laser pulse Information describing the fading laser pulseis stored is encodedin the spin statesof atoms.God is balancing his checkbook God is encrypting his account.This is taking forever!
Is unwritten, though it has lived in violence.First the factory stood, quiet as an asylum. Then the annihilating mallee with its red fists of blossoms and the mountain ash creeping over it like a stain.I have no proof, but I tell you there were leadlight windows here once, barred.They cast a little striped light on the women.Now in scrub and yellow broom I stand on a history braided and unbraided by stiff Irish wrists. The rope and span and carded wool are unpickedas are their faces and names.Londonderry, Cork, Galway, Kildare— as I say the words they are sucked awayto a hemisphere in darkness.I will not presume to saywhat suffering is or how it was meted out in this place.At what point it breaks a body I cannot tell. But this morning I saw a young rabbit hunched in brush and shadow.I saw its lesioned face, its legs too thin to scramble,the blood-berry red and pink scab of its eye. It had caught the disease we brought here for itand wanted a quiet place to die. And it was lucky, or as lucky as it would get—there was time and light, the hawks and dogshad not been written yet, and were still out of sight.
I find it in a field of feathers, pink-crested,a knuckle of bone picked clean by the wind,a pale mohawk mounted on stone.I bend down. Zeroed out of its head are two sockets, two airy planetsfull with sun, and taking asylum in onea millipede is coiled, a slick black hypnotist.Polished, it spirals in on itselflike one of Saint Hilda’s fossil snakeswe studied in the school chapel’s stained glass. As if the eye could dig itself into the earth then extend a curled feeler out, like a fern.I turn the skull round in my palm like a pebble—it will not settle. Otherwise, all is still: the grasses claw in, the world does not tilt.Even the blue stand of scrub grows over;it has nothing on its mind. But the skull will outlast the summer, a thought cut short,and I will pass it every day as I walkand stop just here, where the air hones its teethon bone, where the mind remembers itselfonly as a shell, and I will mourn what was once a world: one eye rolled to the daylight moon, the other pressed down into the earth.
From my cell I was staring at a cloud, a dog decaying in the woods, etc., as I took up the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions. By this time my hand was so far away that it looked like a small hairless spider whose progress I could hardly help but follow, from the corner of one eye, as it went on filling page after page in a notebook the size of a stamp with words too small for anyone to read. I looked up and noticed my bars had turned to gold. And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now. Camouflaged and lightless congregation, the world will never know your names, never know of its debt to you, or what you suffered; with what uncomplaining anguish you sacrificed the one thing all hold most dear, most have in common, the sense of being completely different from anybody else—it just vanished at some point, having attained its sexually mature and winged stage. You had a great vision about it, but told no one. We have misnamed death life and life death. You saw another world, and it was precisely the same as this one. This time you told everyone, until someone asked you very nicely to quiet down. And the weather—everything you have heard on that subject is a serious understatement. The scarlet horrors were preparing to file in for my ignominious obsequies, already they swarmed freely over my body. Then, there was no weather. I can’t tell you how perfect that was. As it happens I had been gazing up at the dusk stars, as I can be found doing more or less day and night, for I like to think they are growing younger as I die, come by some time and tell me what you think. Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water. Family motto roughly translates, April wizards bring May blizzards. We tend to be apprehended eventually, after a futile but all the more spirited attempt at first degree self-impersonation; however, this is not the time for levity, we happen to be speaking of a serious medical goodnight kiss. Traditionally, we are then detained at a local mental facility known for its celebrated alumni, though in recent decades secret and permanent socialist elements in the government have seen to it that the lowest scum of humanity now appear to have open access to those once hallowed halls smeared with our shit and vomit. What I’m getting at is this: after a relatively brief stay, we are invariably released with some deranged doctor’s or other’s blessing, a mixture of relief and disgust on the part of the staff, and the secret eye-signal that will get you into any movie house in Milwaukee free for the next year. Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candleflame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears’ worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream.
If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake.  1975–2010
Unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies, it remains nothing but a grain of wheat. —John 12:24 The ingredients gathered, a few small red tufts of the dream spoor per sheaf of Demeter’s blonde wheat, reaped in mourning, in silence, ground up with the pollen and mixed into white wine and honey. These stored forms of light taken under the ground. Taken by mouth. First those who by birth hold in secret the word; then placed on the tongues of the new ones, into whose ears it is meant to be whispered. Word murdered, forgotten so long ago, placed as a kiss on the lips of the soon-to-be-no-longer breathing who mean to enter death with open eyes, with mouths saying Death, what death? We have no word for it in our country where the bride of a brighter oblivion reigns. Not the purple-haired god but the child queen, the raped girl, come back from the dead hand in hand with the child she conceived there, returned in a resurrected virginity, wind through green wheat. Present-day site of a minor refinery in Christ. Although by the tenth generation already the children of light (“in their dark garments”) had trampled and smashed and generally raped the two thousand years of this precinct and its holy meal, intolerable mirror. Men who’d designed and bowed down to a law derived from the sayings of one who appeared here to say that the law is abolished, it is too late, all that is over with. Men who bungled their way through the next eighteen centuries before finally descending into the earth themselves, and what they found there they used, and we thank you for destroying the destroyers of the world. And here at the end this is as good as any other entrance to the underplace, journey of the fallen leaf back to the branch, to the bees of Eleusis among olive blossoms, untroubled among crimson wildflowers. Four thousand years later: same flowers, same bees.
Fifteen years later the old tollbooth keeper is still at his post but cannot break a twenty, regrettably, his brains blown out, or provide the forgotten directions. I did phone, what do you think? Before I can blink I am parked out front of the unbelievably small, unlighted house.I’ve got my finger on the buried bell, nothing. For hours I’ve been walking around, and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but no one is home in Zanesville, Ohio. My dusty toothbrush waits for me, of this I feel quite sure, my teenage image in the dust-dimmed mirror waits. Only now I’m afraid I’ll be forced to disturb the slow fine snow of dust that’s been coming down, year after year, on my blanket and hair, and put on my dust-covered clothes, and walk without making a sound, trailing my eternal lunar footprints, down the windless hall, and down the stairs at last. It’s not going to happen overnight. But one of these days I’ll arrive; I will go down to sit with the father. The elderly father, strictly speaking, of never really having been there.I will sit down and eat my bowl of dust like all the rest.
Say I had no choice, this weightless finger touched my tongue and told me to, it taught me; when kinder and more subtle methods failed, it put a gun to my head, a zero seared coldly in one temple, electrode glued chill to the other, the sniffer dogs rooting and snuffling in my crotch, the small white doorless room, the laser flashlight in one eye. You can’t hear the voice when it utters let there be speech, yet I faithfully spoke what I thought I was supposed to, inspired idiot, or dummy on that lap of language, the words themselves more real than I, words here before we were and when we are not again. So I blurted it out, my initial soliloquies, what I could catch through the static, giving my head a good thump now and then like one of those black-and-white tv sets, and projecting, those were some vast stadiums, the first row of faces as far as near stars if there at all, never having the faintest idea what it meant, the microphone dead, I did my best, tell them. Inch-thick rope for ascot, eyes put out, chained to my oars, all the others long vanished: the first minute of death is so long, like the first minute of consciousness there in the infinite darkness of somebody weeping, you never arrive, never reach shore, never mind with what clarity you seem to hear with your lips distant roar of surf breaking. I pulled too for those who’d come later, I’m guessing, singing in their names as well, sort of lip-synching but singing twice as loud, strapped to the mast, earways cleared, though I heard nothing but nothing, blue. Making up what I couldn’t make out, and all that uproarious and pitiless derision I had to raise my voice above, I mere link—out on that unknown ocean beating at my ears, just as at the beginning, the mother’s heart booming softly; from nowhere it came, like me, months before I arrived to take up the sorry job of being me, whatever a month was, whatever I was then, blind little dolphin with a thumb in its mouth, whatever a mouth was; poor mother mourning her own mother’s dying, over the actual ocean she lay, a strong stone’s throw from the Ohio or that poisoned ghost of it. Mother of my mother dying away from this world just as I was about to die into it. I see them there, up to their knees, gathered as for a baptism, cross traced in hydrochloric acid on a tiny forehead, right there at the dead water’s edge a scythe of moon, a meteor in arc of falling axe of gold for the severing of hairy umbilical rope, hear me out! I saw they were standing watch over her, and my mother’s conspicuous absence, wincing at the constant cough; and I saw her whom I would never meet, nearing peace in the scarlet Magdalenean cerements, clenching lightly between thumb and skeletal forefinger the scarlet egg, and the wide river’s sundering undertow sucking to its breast her shrunken body, fetal in her narrow bed, nothing but a huckleberry craft by now just vanishing around the first bend, more and more lost from sight by my mother, twenty-two, unaided by lunatic male she’d been sentenced to, from Goethe-phase to Trakl-phase. And she breaks down in her hotel room, in bullet-pocked Vienna, helplessly swept down the blind unwept current still flowing, sadness’s chemistry, horror’s and guilt’s, to this day through my veins. Months before we met, I listening to her crying, it went on forever, how not hear it, how not be fed it, in a shoreless darkness of sorrowing I listened, still listen, now watch this and pay close attention: nothing else there, only a listening called me, no name even, till they grave it in stone. Until we finally met, I watched her face rise on the horizon. Then there was some loud mutual screaming in the even more terrible blindness called light. Long before I invented the first word it taught me, it told me the others, so many. So only what was never mine is mine; and when no one is listening I sing what it means to me, even now, hearing my voice through my own disappearing, farther away every day, my mother’s mother’s fate and mine now one as I board the ocean liner at three months of age and arrive in New York, filled with space and time.


Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur. —René Char By boat to Seurasaari where the small fish were called vendace. A man blew a horn of birchwood toward the nightless sea.Still voice. Fire that is no fire. Ahead years unknown to be lived—Bells from the tower in the all-at-once, then one by one, hours. Outside (so fleetingly) ourselves—In a still mirror, in a blue within where this earthly journey dreamingitself begins,thought into being from the hidden to the end of the visible.Mountains before and behind, heather and lichen, yarrow, gorse,then a sea village of chartreuse fronds.Spent fuel, burntwind, mute swans. We drove the birch-lined highway from Dresden to Berlin behind armored cars in late afternoon, nineteenth of June, passing the black cloud of a freight truck from Budapest.Through disappearingvillages, past horses grazing vanished fields.The year before you died, America went to war again on the other side of the world.This is how the earth becomes, you said, a grotto of skeletons. In the ruins of a station: a soaked bed, broken chairs, a dead coal stove.White weather, chalk and basalt, puffins, fuchsia and history shot through with particles of recognition: this one wetted down with petrol then set alight, that one taking forty rounds, this other found eleven years later in a bog.In the station house, imaginary maps, smoke chased by wind, a registry of arrivals, the logs of ghost ships and a few prison diaries written on tissue paper.Do you remember the blue-leaved lilies? The grotto, the hoarfrost, the frieze? Through the casements of glass hand-blown before the war, a birch tree lets snow drop through its limbs onto other birches. Birch twigsin wind through glass.Who were we then? Such a laughter as morning peeled its light from us! You said the cemeteries were full in a voice like wind plaiting willows—fields in bloom but silent without grasshoppers or bees. What do you want then? You with your neverness, your unknown, your book of things, youwith once years ahead to be lived.Your father believes he took you with him, that you arein an urn beside your sleeping motherbut I am still writing with your hand,as you stand in your still-there of lighted words.Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight. Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not—do not, upon waking, gaze out a window if you wish to remember your dreamAn ache of hope that you will come back—the cawing flock is not your coming.Did you float toward Salzburg? A windin the mustard fields?—or walk instead beside me through the asylum in Krakow? Hours after your death you seemed everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight. Now your moments are cloudsin a photograph of swifts. In the hour held open between day and night under the meteor showers of Perseidwe held each other for the last time.Dead, you whispered where is the road? There, through the last of the sentences, just there—through the last of the sentences, the road—
On shanks’ mare Argyle talked to himself.Alone, he’d carry on whole colloquiesen route to some poor corpse’s obsequies—these dialogues, the way he kept his witsabout him, body and soul together,fit for the wretched work of sin-eating.Sometimes he counted words or parts of wordsas if they amounted to something morethan sound and sense attuned between his ears,as, for example, how coincident:the way grace and gratis, wherefore gratitudepartook a kinship such as cousins do,singing the same tune in different voices,much as grave and gravitas, then gravitykept one earthbound, grounded, humble as the mud—the humus, so-called, God wrought humans from. Or how from Adam’s rib was fashioned Eve—bone of his own bone, flesh of his flesh—whom he got gravid by implanting seed,in her unfathomably fecund Eden.The memory of a woman’s companywould bring his ambulations to a haltto aim his gaping face due heavenward, the dewy air her touch, her taste, sweet salt.
The body of the boy who took his flightoff the cliff at Kilcloher into the seawas hauled up by curragh-men, out at first lightfishing mackerel in the estuary.“No requiem or rosary” said the priest,“nor consecrated ground for burial,”as if the boy had flown outside the paleof mercy or redemption or God’s love. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”quoth Argyle to the corpse’s people,who heard in what he said a sort of riddle,as if he meant their coreligionistsand not their sodden, sadly broken boy.Either way, they took some comfort in itand readied better than accustomed fareof food and spirits; by their own reckoning:the greater sin, the greater so the toll.But Argyle refused their shilling coinand helped them build a box and dig a grave.“Your boy’s no profligate or prodigal,”he said, “only a wounded pilgrim like us all.What say his leaping was a leap of faith,into his father’s beckoning embrace?”They killed no fatted calf. They filled the hole.
Because he barely heard the voice of Godabove the hum of other choristers—batwing and bird-whistle, gathering thunder,the hiss of tides retreating, children, cattle;because he could not readily discernthe plan Whoever Is In Charge Here has,he wondered about those who claimed to haveblessed assurances or certainty:a One and Only Way and Truth and Life,as if Whatever Breathes in Everything mightn’t speak in every wondrous tongue;as if, of all creations, only onemade any sense. It made no sense to him. Hunger he understood, touch, desire. He knew the tenderness humans could do,no less brutalities. He knew the coldmorning, the broad meadow, the gold sunset.One evening on the hill of Knocknagaroon,the Atlantic on one side, the Shannon on the other, the narrowing headlandsof the peninsula out behind him,the broad green palm of Moveen before him,it seemed he occupied the hand of God:open, upturned, outstretched, uplifting him.
Thin gruel, shallow graves, whiskey watered down,the ne’er-do-well and good-for-nothing crowdof cornerboys and gobshites were amongArgyle’s manifold perturbations.Worse still, the episcopal vexations: their excellencies, eminence and graces,red-cassocked dandies and mitered wankers,the croziered posers in their bishoprics with their Easter duties and Peter’s pence,their ledgers full of mortal, venial sins—keepers of the till and tally, bankersof indulgences and dispensations;their bulls and bans and excommunications,nothing but contumely and bamboozles.For all their vestiture, rings and unctions,preaching to bishops, like farting at skunks, was nothing but a mug’s game to the sin-eater,so in earshot of them mum is what he kept. Still, he thought there might be something to it:a life apart from this life where the soulslong dead and gone were neither dead nor gone.Some days he felt so happily haunted,by loving ghosts and gods upholding him.Some days he felt entirely alone.
The suite on the sidefacing away from the seais the suite with the fireplaceand two plasma screen tvs.Better luxury compensatesfor lack of view. Beforethe perpetual gas fire, stunnedas if into stone, enteringas you enter your Anne Brontë,a world muted, chemically arranged,I try renewal of a mind remade.Mind is book is water is fire, all change.Fear is the wake-up call at three,too early, for planes. Airport quiet.Leave the hotel without baggage, flydirect to Geneva. They await you there.What occurs is only the turning of a page,imagined for screen. Unseen is greater.Is attested to, as we rise in Mass.Water should be avoided by all thosewho get into difficulty with ease, and cats.Searching for the blackberry in the fur-linedcoat, I roam and ring, openinga closet, from which tumbles a victim,providing a fitting climax. Mrs. Pontifaxis staying across the hall. The glamour.She is the Minister of Finance’s daughter.She sees the cold winter sea rise from her vantage.Our age is blinded by celebrity, seeingwith the gilded orb of a bronze, dull god.The domes of our room service coolafter we have slaked and fed. As you readthis becomes the first one written under the influenceof an anti-depressed self, whatever that is to be.What is, is taken off a shelf, a remaining wrackthat half emerges from the brackish ruins of the year.Will love reunite?Will Ireland be solvent?All nights, holiest, least holy,be still, be silent. Ireland, Christmas 2009
No children;Cold uncoils in the blood;Science, true, not goodFor you. So old,Suddenly, or so young.Lyric inside not to be sung.Plug pulled, screen gone.Sun out; mindBountiful, playing pain.These are my childrenIn my head. Unbegotten.This is to self-forget,To have the futureBorn forgotten.
In response to a student who told me he just “skims” the poetry right before class The barn was in the Netherlands,in a field where fierce night windcaught the straw as if to fusethe winter stars to their coldness.A farmer, woken by the sound, knowinghis animals would be agitated,walked to the barn and by lanternbrushed the tails of his horses.In calming them he gatheredmany long, gleaming strandsof their nut-brown hair. Given overto what he heard in the swishing of their tails—the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow,persistence turned to rhythmic movement—he hoped that if he listened long enoughthe layered sound would become a salve.He rolled the strands together, laid outalong the windowsills of the barn.Then, once dry enough in spring,he rolled them in paraffin waxto preserve the soundand left them to absorball the varied rays of sun, the spillsof rain, and then snow flying fastacross the latched windows and the slats,the rhythm of other breathing,animals plodding by the barn walls.The wax melted as the years progressedand other horses resided in the stalls,and their tail strands were addedto the aging threads. From that encased sounddeepening over years, a rope,pulled strong and taut, would resonate.Then another generation worked the landand waxed the horse-tail cord again,and in turn when it caughtthat century’s light, was spuninto amber. Woven into the cells of hair:the tones of canal and field,pasture, furrows of plough,leaf and shadow, straw and stone,the human calling, the animal uttering.And when melted again, incrementallystrands from other horses living therewere added until there were enoughlayers of sound, set with the nourishmentof grass and salt, to be given awayand the space the hair had occupiedwould be returned to emptiness.The horse-hair cord was broughtby a farmer to a luthier’s shopalong a canal, and it was a perfect fit,she said, for a violin bowshe had carved a few months earlier,waiting, and for the bow-less violinsomeone had just given her. She knewrosin carrying a current throughpastures, filled thirst, and the griefof night wind and scavenged applesmade the gathered pieces a whole.And now they are together in your handsthis moment to makeunrehearsed, immediate,after all those animals’ years,when you bring the instrument to your chin,when you raise the hair-strung bow,again their elemental sounding,and then their measured note, their first.
The Oldest Love Poem(For Susan) Back from Istanbul, she gives to methe photograph she took insidethe Archaeological Museum’sblue tiled hush, of a tabletcarved in terra cotta from Nippur,written in Sumerian.Delicate etches, a lift of riverbedwhere the summer waters ranglistened on this piece of earththe earnest working hand,a pause between the lines to contemplatecedars’ ornate overhangingleaf-work become inseparablefrom the carving. Maybe reading sky,reading wind, or tree soundsbeside the sound of clayshaped to carry a human mark.Maybe it says we are so elegantin our exchange that looking at each otherthe trees whisper their contented greenacross any distance to be herebranches heat-satiatedfull in our veins of holding
The newspaper caption read: “Two officers talk to a young man, name withheld, as he stands on a bridge above the Merrimack River, distraught over learning that his mother is terminally ill.” When I first saw you I could glance up from your image in the paperand out her kitchen doorway watchmy mother trim her artemisia,scraps of silver trailingher green wheelbarrow.And I imagined yes,if mine were dying,I would be on the abutment too,about to release the cableignoring those attempting rescue
So this is aging: the bare sun, skinned,palely bucking the dark wind,slides through the glass, crawls on the carpet,climbs the footboard, lies crosswise on the blanket,a spoiled dog waiting to be fed.Not now, dear warmth. The kindling’s in the shed,too far to fetch. Those two great logs that closetogether to make fire, reposeapart, an old couple reminiscingon conflagrations they’re now missing:how every sunny Saturday afternoon,Hey, diddle-diddle, the dish ran away with the spoon.Not yet, dear spoon. Some hotter day, dear dish.No tidbits now. Instead, let’s make a wish,and boil fresh water for the small teapotto keep it piping hot.
We had so little, yet we had so much:Thunder and lightning at the lightest touch.
Morning’s mirage, disdainful & calm as a mirror,held the shorn bush that yesterday flourished,now lopped canes & a scant spitfall of remnance,confetti trampled in the clefts of vanishing deer.To touch its truth I punched my fist into the chopped molest,the boscage—withdrew my red sleeve. Abstract that.
No one has touched me for weeksyet in this drugged, gilt afternoon, late,when nothing is safe, I’m paralyzed,as though so wildly desired—passing solo through the garden’scinnamon, marigolds, famished roses, where a matted shingleof the swept-up human hair I begged from a local beauty shop& spread out fruitlessly among the blooms & canesto keep away the deer might well be a satyrpassed out in the palace’s candied gold—that something regnant with a strange, godlike powercould not help but reach out from the umbral blueto tap my white arm. It is a day to die,the light autoerotic, theatrical, with an unbearable listing,stalled in cusp, in leonine torpor. Is courage artifice?As though to answer were within my means.Or to even move my mouth.
Must be entered through the sharpener every Sunday,else your name will be lovingly written in the Book of the Down Arrow. The One Steeple to Every Church rule breaks in halfin the Church of the Open Crayon Box; the One Bellto Every Steeple rule breaks off its tip. “Climb stairs to the steeples,” the preacher commands, “and let every belltone ring out!” You can see the whole townfrom the steeple, and you exit the church through the view, and you walk through what calls itself Flagpole—the town is a blot on the town, but the railroad is coming out this way and we must give them a smear to see through the windows: now you pass the General Store, that even your vaguest stick figure can enter, now you pass a vacant lot: the post office isn’t here yet, is only a set-aside space in the center of the country’s envelope; now you pass the voting-place, where we stuff our handwriting through a slit. Tall trees fall in the pinewoods, tall telegraph poles are raised, and words inch along our wires: text text text stop, text text text stop.And now you pass the Feed Store, which sells carrot and turnip and sugar-beet tops—only the visible parts—and now Whitey BaLavender’s Hardware, where everything hangs off the hook of its color, or color hangs off the hook of its all, where you work your hands into cool washers, and work hands into nailheads of the color blue, and watch Whitey BaLavender busy himself pouring crayons into bullet molds. You show him a list that says “ax,” and he sells you a red line through it. All up and down Main Street ponies are covered with strokes as coarse as horse blankets. And once you have drawn the ponies you begin to draw the saddle shop, you grip the right color like a saddle horn and somehow keep from falling off, and you ride to the edge of town, where you draw the fur trading post, where they sell tails of any shy animal, the rest of the animal gone down a hole, where you trade in your skin for a possibles bag and wear possibles bag where your skin was. Fat geese fly in any letter you like but you need red meat for once, and write a splayed-hide word like “Deerslayer,” and take hold of the ending and drag it home,and now you are almost there, now you are building the home with hand-drawn Log Cabin Font, you are building it log by log of course and smoothing the logs with a color called Adze, you are biting the crayon to notch the logs and driving in dots of nailheads. Stumps of umber surround you, and the skyis beginning to look like sky. You are hoping a man can be really alone here; you are hoping your father can tell what it is;and now only the doorknob is left to draw and in your enthusiasm you shout at the paper, and the weather changes just in time, not raining, beginning to spit.
After Elinor Lipper The creature that had oncebeen a man handed over his petition,a stained and grimy scrap,handed it to his lord and master,a petition asking to be transferredto the status of a horse.You son-of-a-whore, the master,kicking for good measure, bellowed.What do you mean by this?The creature that had oncebeen a man, having considereddeeply his petition, answered:If I were a horse, I would haveone day off in ten. As is,I have none. As a horse,I could rest now and againduring work. As a formerman, I cannot. As a horse,I would be expected to performwork equal to my strength.As a prisoner, I am alwayshungry, and hungry, I work less and get less bread, so I can barely stand.A horse gets a stableand two blankets. I haveno blankets, no jacket.If a driver beatsa horse too hard, he is punished, for a horse is precious. If the brigadiersbeat and kick me, it is likebeating a tree. So you see,a prisoner is nothing here.But a horse? A horse is something!Inside the frozenand the broken vista, the plea had a ring of truth heardeven by the lordand master, who had previously been a man himself, and who, when no other former men could see, attached that name to the page, grantingthe horse a stable and two blankets.
If you’d seen the Gaillardots’ mullein in the Cedars of the Shouf; if you’d seen the Aleppo dock, red with iron, in Bcharre where the Adonis River’s said to run as red with what was thought his blood; if you’d seen the bearded oat in Burjein, the rayed white horehound in Tripoli; or maybe the milkwort in Ehden, as often I saw the strigose bellflower and the cyclamen, you might have been the more awed by a mallow-leaved bindweed in Aley on your way to the brunnera in Baalbek. The Mediterranean poppy in Nabatieh, Beirut mullein in nearby Baabda, connate Alexanders in Qadisha, fodder vetch in Zgharta,white rocket in Sour, Gypsywort in Marjeyoun, headed Ziziphora in Baakleen, bladder skullcap in Barouk. The viscid catchfly, ah, vying with bats at evening in Zahle—for these the earth of continuous habitation since the Chalcolithic Age salivates at dawn. But not a reed grows where no grave is. In Sacandaga Valley,two thousand bodies were trans-buried by the boneyard gang. They ceded the pitted ground to the dentist gang, whose jackhammers drilled the rock beneath.Powder monkeys tamped the holes with dynamite. The beaver-tooth gang’s axes and cross-cut saws cleared the trees. Bush burners followed. The fires burned for two years. The patience of dam builders built a force equal to the water: It flooded the ashes, the railroad station, and a train, which I saw transposed in the steely swells, or so it seemed. But iron turns a torrent red.
I wake to light jackhammering, and newsfollows: a planefailed over the sea. All want to go home, but drastic curfewsobtain from a meridian. * * *We are a long way from a sea that cedesblack boxes from an areaforested as the Andes. Instead, a Mercedes,black as La Brea,leaps from the backlit red, anonymous,when we try to crossat the traffic island discarding hibiscuswith every wind-toss. * * *We are a long way from the courteous lilacor waxwingwith sensitive feather tipped as a kayakis tipped by a coxswain.
The fire was so fierce, So red, so gray, so yellowThat, along with the land,It burned part of the skyWhich stayed black in that corner For years,As if it were night thereEven in the daytime, A piece of the sky burntAnd which then Could not be counted onEven by the birds.It was a regular fire—Terrible—we forget thisAbout fire—terribleAnd full of pride. It intended to beBig, no regular fire. Like so many of us,It intended to be moreAnd this time was.It was not better or worseThan any other fireGrowing up. But this time, it was a fireAt just the right time And in just the right place—If you think like a fire—A place it could do something big.Its flames reached outWith ten thousand pincers, As if the fireWere made of beetles and scorpionsClawing themselves to get up,Pinching the air itselfAnd climbing, So many sharp animalsOn each other’s backsThen into the air itself, Ten thousand snaps and pinchesAt least,So that if the sky Was made of something,It could not get away this time.Finally the fire Caught the sky,Which acted like a slow rabbit Which had made a miscalculation.It didn’t believe this could happen And so it ran left,Right into the thin toothpicks of flames,Too fast to pull back,The sky with all its arms,Hands, fingers, fingernails,All of itDisappeared. Goodbye.The sky stayed blackFor several years after.I wanted to tell youThis small storyAbout the sky.It’s a good oneAnd explains why the skyComes so slowly in the morning,Still unsure of what’s here. But the story is not mine.It was written by fire,That same small fireThat wanted to come homeWith something of its ownTo tell,And it did,A small piece of blue in its mouth.
The optimists among ustaking heart because it is springskip alongattending their meetingssigning their e-mail petitionsmarching with their satiric signssinging their we shall overcome songsposting their pungent twitters and blogsbelieving in a better worldfor no good reasonI envy themsaid the old womanThe seasons go round theygo round and aroundsaid the tulipdancing among her friendsin their brown bed in the sunin the April breezeunder a maple canopythat was also dancingonly with greater motionscasting greater shadowsand the grasshardly stirringWhat a concertoof good stinks said the dogtrotting along Riverside Drivein the early spring afternoonsniffing this way and thathow gratifying the cellos of the riverthe tubas of the trafficthe trombonesof the leafing elms with the legatoof my rivals’ piss at their feetand the leftover meat and greasesinging along in all the wastebaskets
Some claim the origin of songwas a war cry some say it was a rhymetelling the farmers when to plant and reapdon’t they know the first song was a lullabypulled from a mother’s sleepsaid the old womanA significantfactor generating my delight in beingalive this springtimeis the birdsong that like a sweeping mesh has captured melike diamond rain I can’thear it enough said the tuliplifetime after lifetimewe surged up the hillI and my dear brothersthirsty for bloodutteringour beautiful songssaid the dog
In every life there’s a moment or twowhen the self disappears, the cruel woundtakes over, and then againat times we are filled with skyor with birds orsimply with the sugary tea on the tablesaid the old womanI know what you mean said the tulipabout epiphaniesfor instance a cloudless April skythe approach of a butterflybut as to the disappearing selfnoI have not yet experienced thatYou are creating distinctionsthat do not exist in realitywhere “self” and “not-self” are like saltin ocean, cloud in skyoxygen in firesaid the philosophical dogunder the table scratching his balls
the man made me soften and meltsaid the old womanthe bee made me shiver like a ragsaid the dark red tulipthe bitch made me pushsaid the dog
Brother, I’ve seen some  Astonishing sights: A lion keeping watch  Over pasturing cows; A mother delivered  After her son was; A guru prostrated  Before his disciple; Fish spawning  On treetops;  A cat carrying away  A dog; A gunny-sack  Driving a bullock-cart; A buffalo going out to graze,  Sitting on a horse; A tree with its branches in the earth,  Its roots in the sky; A tree with flowering roots. This verse, says Kabir,  Is your key to the universe. If you can figure it out.
How do you, Asks the chief of police, Patrol a city Where the butcher shops Are guarded by vultures; Where bulls get pregnant, Cows are barren, And calves give milk Three times a day; Where mice are boatmen And tomcats the boats They row; Where frogs keep snakes As watchdogs, And jackals Go after lions? Does anyone know What I’m talking about? Says Kabir.
To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas, To idol worshippers and idol smashers, To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites, To Vedic pundits and Faber poets, The weaver Kabir sends one message: The noose of death hangs over all. Only Rama’s name can save you. Say it now.
For Geoff Dyer his front yard is the true Benares  — Devara Dasimayya,  tr. A.K. Ramanujan His death in Benares Won’t save the assassin From certain hell, Any more than a dip In the Ganges will send Frogs—or you—to paradise. My home, says Kabir, Is where there’s no day, no night, And no holy book in sight To squat on our lives.
god my darling do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law  —Janabai, tr. Arun Kolatkar Chewing slowly, Only after I’d eaten My grandmother, Mother, Son-in-law, Two brothers-in-law, And father-in-law (His big family included) In that order, And had for dessert The town’s inhabitants, Did I find, says Kabir, The beloved that I’ve become One with.
Plucking your eyebrows, Putting on mascara, But will that help you To see things anew? The one who sees Is changed into The one who’s seen Only if one is Salt and the other Water. But you, says Kabir, Are a dead Lump of quartz.
I won’t come I won’t go I won’t live I won’t die I’ll keep uttering The name And lose myself In it I’m bowl And I’m platter I’m man And I’m woman I’m grapefruit And I’m sweet lime I’m Hindu And I’m Muslim I’m fish And I’m net I’m fisherman And I’m time I’m nothing Says Kabir I’m not among the living Or the dead
When bones and flesh have finished their business together,we lay them carefully, in positions they’re willing to keep,and cover them over.Their eyes and ours won’t meet anymore. We hope.It’s one of the oldest rules we mostly follow.In the deep Stone Age in Shanidar, now Iraq,someone or all of them laid or threw on the grandfather’s chestwhatever was blooming—St. Barnaby’s thistle, yarrow, hollyhock...His was their only burial before the frost.For millennia, then, the dead might go under with thistle,quantities of red ocher, a chunk of meat.Now we have everlasting bouquets of plastic;now we have hundreds a day to bag and box and pickleto re-cross the Atlantic.Light a row of oil wells and kneelon sand too much embroiled for tombs.Regrettably, something of the smellis of bodies suddenly buried in fallen stones.But some is incense, pinches of pulverized Baghdad risingin ceremonial smoke:dust of combatants, onlookers, miscellaneous limbs,contents of hovels, contents of museums,ancient pollen of yarrow and hollyhock.
Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night,a child herself with child, for whom we searchedthrough here, or there, amidst bones still sleeved and trousered,a spine picked clean, a paint can, a skull with hairSewn into the hem of memory: Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,God not of philosophers or scholars. God not of poets. Night to night:child walking toward me through burning maizeover the clean bones of those whose fleshwas lifted by zopilotes into heaven.So that is how we ascend! In the clawed feet of fallen angels. To be assembled again in the work rooms of clouds.She rose from where they found her lyingnot far from a water urn, leaving herself behind on the groundwhere they found her, holding her armsbefore her as if she were asleep.That is how she appears to me: a ghost in heaven.Carrying her arms in her arms.Blue smoke from corn cribs, flap of wings.On the walls of the city streets a plague of initials.Walking through a fire-lit river to a burning house: dead Singersewing machine and piece of dress. Outside a cashew tree wept blackened cashews over lamina. Outside paper fireflies rose to the stars.Bring penicillin if you can, surgical tape, a whetstone, mosquito repellent but not the aerosol kind. Especially bring a syringe for sucking phlegm,a knife, wooden sticks, a surgical clamp, and plastic bags.You will need a bottle of cloud for anesthesia.Like the flight of a crane through colorless dreams.When a leech opens your flesh it leaves a small volcano.Always pour turpentine over your hair before going to sleep.Such experiences as these are forgotten before memory intrudes.The girl was found (don’t say this)with a man’s severed head stuffed into her where a child would have been.No one knew who the man was. Another of the dead. So they had not, after all, killed a pregnant girl. This was a relief to them.That sound in the brush? A settling of wind in sorghum.If they capture you, talk.Talk. Please yes. You heard me right the first time.You will be asked who you are.Eventually, we are all asked who we are.All who come All who come into the worldAll who come into the world are sent.Open your curtain of spirit.
“I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck,talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children,final semester college seniors, bloodshot,collars undone, gorgeously exhausted, return from Wall Street interviews in attitudes of surrender on the Dinky—the one-car commuter train connecting Princeton to the New York line. Panic-sweat sheens their faces. Justin hasn’t seen me yet. “Something’s fucked with my tie.” He’s right. I see his future, the weight he’ll gain first in his face, then gut and ass, the look of bad luck he’ll haunt his bad jobs with. He tears off the tie. Elephants on it. Fatigue, swollen ankles, the midwife said. The worst discomforts of pregnancy. I wrote those down. But she’s wrong: self-pity. Strange dreams, she said. No dreams. Discarded newspapers—business section, money, real estate, auto—sift apart to quartos and folios underfoot. “Shut up, Justin,” says the girl across from him. I hardly recognize Brianna in her interview hair. She scratches her face, fingers trembling from the day’s aftershocks. “I wanted,” she counts on her fingers, performing the sitcom of her tragedy, “Tribeca loft, expense account, designer clothes so haute they don’t look it, my very own Tesla, summer home in the Hamptons I’m too busy to use.”“You wanted money,” says Justin.Brianna: “It went down with the towers.”I spent my lopsided day lifting my bellyback towards center, interviewing for adjunct jobs. There’s a half-moon in half-clouds up over the tracks. Justin spreads over three seats, texts with his thumbs, talks: “The Lehman Brothers guy asks me, Did you ever sell anything? Sell me a bottle of water. I’m like fu-uck. To say something I say ‘Why do you like water?’ He says...” Justin fixes a diamond stud back in his ear. “They’ll let me know.” Fifteen responsible childrensigh in disappointed relief. Somebody they knowdidn’t get the job they didn’t get. I sleep. Wake.Beautiful clothes spread bodiless before me!Tailored black suits and skirts, silk ties,ephemera of sheer and filmy stockings deflated over seat backs. Brianna looks around,no conductor coming, squats to peel off, in one motion, skirt, hose, underpants, step butt-naked into soft chino shorts I’ll neverbe able to afford. “Nervous crotch sweat,” she says.I keep trying to look not-quite-40in a different way than I’m not-quite-40.The woman interviewer looked at my belly.“As a new mother would you have time to be literary mama to your students?” So I could suewhen they don’t hire me for the job I don’t want.Justin looks up from his iPhone: “Soon-Jigot three offers. Fuck.” He flips the curlhis mother’s fingers crimped, first day of pre-Kinto his four-year-old forelock. “He’s guessing he’ll go with Goldman Sachs.” Brianna grabs her neck in living garrote. She high-fives anybody she can reach in gloomy delight. She gobblessnack-pack popcorn, licks her fingers; bits dropyellow from her lips. “My mom will go crazyDeutsche Bank didn’t offer.” She sees me.“I didn’t realize that was you with your hair up.Look, Just.” She high-fives me. “It’s Professor.”Is Brianna crying? “Don’t call me Professor,” I say, dozens of times a semester. “I’m a writer, not a teacher.” Justin grabs a Norton Anthology out of his five-hundred-dollar briefcase. “Fuck.What are we supposed to read for tomorrow?”“Prufrock, dummy,” Brianna says. “You’re a good professor.” She condescends through tears. “Poor baby,” mocks Justin, slumping so low in the seat I only see his shoe soles on the arm rest. The train swooshes through suburban tracts. The moon gets smaller. Brianna arrives mornings to workshop in a fake hurry and the sweats she slept in, probably rolls backin bed after. She hands out slight, surprising poems,apologizes, sips cardboard-container coffee in a recyclable sleeve, turns her BlackBerry to vibrate.It moans like indigestion through class.I hand her one of my self-pity tissues. My ankles are slim. Brianna hates her name. “So tacky.I’d be a Kelly if I were twenty years older.”I’d like to be able to hate her. I’m turning into my Favorite Teachers—so kind,so industrious, so interested and interesting.“Sorry I’m late with my portfolio,” she saysthrough sniffles. She dabs her lip. “I had to prepare for,”a breath, “interviews.” A few times a semesterI say “It’s only poetry.” Gumbleeds! nosebleeds!the midwife predicted, and it’s true, my Kleenexesare measled with blood, weird hairs, stretch marks,frequent catnaps, hip joints so loose you must take care
Comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love —Song of Solomon scent of myrrh on the handles when oil is in the locksilken is his mouth when he is hard upon me young heart, green bed, his fingers are in the streamhe eats of the bitter honey the sweetness of cherrysacrament of the blood and of its windingsacrament of arrival and of its bindingexpert in earth, eager in flesh he falls upon me and feaststhe watchmen have not seen him nor the owl in her nesthis darkness at noon among the white buildingsa hand that was stone builds the inner templesacrament of what is written on the table of the heartblueness of the wound where he has placed his kiss
My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself —Ezekiel And into the heavens, as on a bright day after rain,there came the shapes of four creatures,and they each had the likeness of a man,and each man had four wings outstretchedand each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open,given to weeping at the worlds they contained:an eye-world of light, of fire and air,of water and its mirror, heart and its first fear;and in each world were four names,entangled in its forest of letters,whereupon I could read: Dow Jones, Cargill,Chevron, and DeKalb of the frozen seed,bearing but once and giving up its need; and under each name were discovered four meanings,literal, figurative, rational, dim,and under each meaning a counter-meaning, with its likeness of Freud, Marx, Hegel, and Lacan; and the four figures passed as one overhead,their wingtips linked like molten silver joined.For I, Ezekiel, had been given to eatthe very substance of God, and my eyes were open and my mouth spake,as spring opens winter and winter closes fall;and the earth turned rightly, to my senses sweet.Son of man, they called me, a proverb and a sign.Say: I am a sign of the city, the cauldronwhere men burn down to desire. Say: I am the proverb of nothing and one,boiling over the fire, rising out of beliefand falling, like a tyrant, out of derision alone.And lo, a likeness, as of the appearance of fire,the error of presence, of nothing as one,and lo, another likeness, the appearance of water, the error of absence, of something as none;for water surrounds all shapes that enterbut has no shape of its own, and fire is the shape of ruin alone.For the princes of the sea shall cast their garments upon the land’s end:their scholar’s robes, sharkskin suits, and alligator shoes, their Nikes,Reeboks, and Chuvashian mittensknitted by the children of shepherds, by tinsmiths and ladies’ men, in the dark at the back of the store; for the princes of fire consume what they love, with the reckless ambition of gods.Yea, as I spake to dry bones that lay upon the earth,they danced into being, and chattered, one and one,down the hallways of my desert, the thresholds of my river.For the Lord builds ruined palaces and plants desolation,he receives what is absent; possesses all that is gone.
The workman made it; therefore it is not God —Hosea Hear the word of the Lord,ye children of Pittsburgh, of Calistoga and Tlaquepaque,ye hierophants and wishbones,teraphim and household plants, for I am a jealous God betrayed.My lover, whom I uplifted,has fallen to other affections.Weep for her outcast state,for I rescind her corn and her fields, her appetites and her husbands, her loom and the cloth of her weaving; yea, as she sleeps in her bed,I will crumble her idols of clay.I will cause to burn in the nighther barns filled with swallows,her caves of rodents and bats, her racks of sidereal dresses, her stacks of serpentine hats.The velvet of her touch, once royal, I will scarify with my wrath.for I am a god betrayed; my lovehas reached into my weaknessand turned my heart like a fist. Therefore, I will strip her nakedand drive her into the field.In her body of filth and feathers,her blood of beasts and men, she ismy desolation and a forgotten name.For my cosmos is contracted. My first world slips from my hands.Tell the people, my prophet Hosea, that I loved her more than love,and she gave not love in return.My anger flattens and spreadsalong the walls and windows.It glances from my mirrorsand breaks the east wind’s bones.I was a God of such strengththey could not guess my name.And this woman of human warmthsuckled me like a child.Now I dwell with the mole, blindly,and my voice is thin as a gnat’s.I grieve what grinds in me, heavily.I am but a half note, half sung.
Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrelsTap-dance on the water.They pluck the tuna hatchlingsAs Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry,Might once have picked up pearlsFrom a broken necklace.Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardinesUp near the surface so the diving shearwatersCan fly down through the bubbles and get at them.Birds from above and big fish from belowRip at the pack until it comes apartLike Poland, with survivors in single figures.The krill, as singletons almost not thereBut en masse like a cloud of diamond dustAgainst the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling,Are scooped up by the basking shark’s draglineOr sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen—A galaxy absorbed into a boudoirAnd nullified, a deep-space mass extinctionWatched only by the Hubble telescope.Make your bones in a shark family if you can.If not, be tricky to locate for sheerTranslucence, a slick blip that will become—Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws—A lobster fortified with jutting eavesOf glazed tile, like the castle at NagoyaHoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkwardMouthful like a crushed car. That being done,Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.
That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died (it’s there in her museum in Meersburg), on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s, Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland, in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes rested on white pillows till they looked their last— all of it junk now, or no longer extant, unattributable, anonymous in its insentient and continual disintegration. We bear within us the seeds of all the gods, the gene of death and the gene of love— who separated them, the words and things, who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end, the few boards and the floods of tears, home for a few wretched hours. Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote, bed and tears too impalpable, no No, no Yes, birth and bodily pain and faith an undefinable surge, a lurch, a power stirring in its sleep moved bed and tears— sleep well!
A drowned drayman was hoisted on to the slab. Someone had jammed a lavender aster between his teeth. As I made the incision up from the chest with a long knife under the skin to cut out tongue and gums, I must have nudged it because it slipped into the brain lying adjacent. I packed it into the thoracic cavity with the excelsior when he was sewn up. Drink your fill in your vase! Rest easy, little aster!
The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes looked so nibbled. When they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey. Finally in a bower under the diaphragm they found a nest of young rats. One little thing lay dead. The others were living off kidneys and liver drinking the cold blood and had had themselves a beautiful youth. And just as beautiful and quick was their death: the lot of them were thrown into the water. Ah, will you hearken at the little muzzles’ oinks!
Know this: I live beast days. I am a water hour. At night my eyelids droop like forest and sky. My love knows few words: I like it in your blood.
i O those years! The green light of morning and the still unswept pavements of pleasure— summer yelled from every surface of the city and supped at a horn refilled from above. Silent hour. Watery colors of a pale green eye’s diluted stream pictures in that magic green, glass dances, shepherds and streams, a dome, pigeons— woven, dispatched, shining, faded— mutable clouds of happiness! So you faced the day: the font without bubbles, dawdling buildings and staircases; the houses locked up, it was for you to create the morning, early jasmine, its yelps, its incipient aboriginal stream—still without end—O those years! Something unquenchable in the heart, complement to heaven and earth; playing to you from reeds and gardens, evening storms drenched the brassy umbels, darkly they burst, taut with seeds, and sea and strands, wimpled with tents, full of burning sand, weeks bronzing, tanning everything to pelts for kisses landing indiscriminately like cloudbursts and soon over! Even then a weight overhead grapes bunching you pulled down the boughs and let them bounce up, only a few berries if you wanted first— not yet so bulging and overhung with plate-sized fruit, old heavy grape flesh— O those years! ii Dark days of spring, unyielding murk in the leaves; drooping lilacs, barely looking up narcissus color, and smelling strongly of death, loss of content, untriumphant sadness of the unfulfilled. And in the rain falling on the leaves, I hear an old forest song, from forests I crossed and saw again, but I didn’t return to the hall where they were singing, the keys were silent, the hands were resting somewhere apart from the arms that held me, moved me to tears, hands from the eastern steppes, long since trampled and bloody— only the forest song in the rain dark days of spring the everlasting steppes.
A shadow on the wall boughs stirred by the noonday wind that’s enough earth and for the eye enough celestial participation. How much further do you want to go? Refuse the bossy insistence of new impressions— lie there still, behold your own fields, your estate, dwelling especially on the poppies, unforgettable because they transported the summer— where did it go?
When despair— you who enjoyed great triumphs and walked with confidence and the memory of many gifts of delirium and dawns and unexpected turns— when despair wants you in its grip, and threatens you from some unfathomable depth with destruction and the guttering out of your flame: then think of the unsatisfied ones, with their migraine-prone temples and introverted dispositions, loyal to a few memories that held out little hope, who still bought flowers, and with a smile of not much luminosity confided secret desires to their small-scale heavens that were soon to be extinguished.
That quality of the great boxers to be able to stand there and take shots, gargle with firewater, encounter intoxication at sub- and supra-atomic levels, to leave one’s sandals at the crater’s lip like Empedocles, and descend, not say: I’ll be back, not think: fifty-fifty, to vacate molehills when dwarves want space to grow, to dine alone, indivisible, and able to renounce your victory— a hymn to that man.
I have met people who, asked after their names, shyly—as if they had no title to an appellation all to themselves— replied “Fräulein Christian” and added: “like the first name,” they wanted to make it easy for the other, not a difficult name like “Popiol” or “Babendererde”— “like the first name”—please, don’t burden your memory overmuch! I have met people who grew up in a single room with their parents and four brothers and sisters, and studied at night with their fingers in their ears at the kitchen table, and grew up to be beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses— and innerly gentle and hard-working as Nausicaa, clear-browed as angels. I have often asked myself and never found an answer whence kindness and gentleness come, I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself.
Fill yourself up with the forsythias and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too with your blood and happiness and wretchedness, the dark ground that seems to come with you. Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome. And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows, then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you into June, when the roses blow.
George Sandys (1578–1644), translator of Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, and resident treasurer of the Virginia Company for its settlement at Jamestown (1621–1624).  i. a long voyage, 1621 I left you where you are:A humming late summer afternoon& mottled by shade a man reading a letterBecomes the image of a man readingThat I am forgetting.This page is small yet stout enough To bear me whole upon it to youAll the way in London. I may expand Myself at leisure then fold it tight,A sanctuary;Like our vessel christened The George,My letter is another ark to preserve me: George.No midnight is so private as the sea’s:Timbers breathe, a loose rope snaps, & as the windShoves you behind then slaps your face,Seeing nothing, nothing to be seen, you feelUnhoused, evicted from time.But tonight, my love, my lamp is feathered, shy, Herald of the next ransack & assail. Behold the storm petrel! gray wick-threaded throat Burning the oil secreted, an amber muskOf uncompassed seas & the solitary hunt, Of error & sign, &That delirium—which turnedOur ship’s boy to mowing fields of Atlantic salt.Like windrows he dropped the waves. Until gaffed, pulled like a sleeve Through himself, He will live, tongue-bit, torn.To return likely to a stool set on the shaleWhere he can mend nets skirted by braggartsWho have never traveled fartherThan the smoke dribbling from their chimneys.I try never to imagine drowning.Noisy urgent inefficiencies above, waves Pummeling, sky shredding, & the bodyAnchored only in its just longing for air.The tighter death’s embrace, the more languorousThe moment. So this boy sufferedSome vast charity of sight. He was what he saw, an adam. Now he may be adamant & stain & distance; & also that small satin interruptionOf terror—the instant breath’s Orphaned by self’s perishing through poetry. Like Daphne his voice is forfeit for the song,But we do not grieve for Daphne.My bird-light gutters. Its call had soundedLike dry wood giving up a nail.What is this your wound that you must follow it?For you I had no answer; consider only the reveriesOf the carpet navigator in his room. ListeningTo collisions of wave & star outside his tower,Rock-rapt, icebound, with a mind by dread & ceremony & the dozen arts of courtesy Girded, he invented those ideal earths in latitudesUnstrung that I now trespass—After I had translated two books To the pouring of seas & clamor of sailorsI began to brood long on landlessness, Coming to believe it my sovereign, my home, When on the flat horizon of weeks at noon the flaw:A color merely, private, ethereal, collectingHeft in the warp of time. Days Before we quailed at the barbed illegible peltOf forest, I wrecked, forlorn upon its savor,Sweet damage of apples Fermenting in rain-soaked hay,Giving way to something ranker—I tasted it at dinner lying on my tongue.I am His Majesty’s servant as my god made me;I am also my damps & exaltations; I am afraid.Heaven & hell enlisted their geographers, A map has opened the soul’s five hinges, & PersianWith expectance how often have I feasted On departure. London, Naples, Marriage, Damascus, now your dear person.So much flowing through meMy sight has silted dark my mouth. I begAll the many tongues your wonder cabinet holds—Dolphin, mockingbird, Muscovy bear—to tellThis arrival, so unforeseen, disorderly As my hope you will not forget who I was, & am,Unwildered, unwestered, constant, returning.Bless you where you are, & where you would beWhen you are there, & bring you thither. My love,What may never not be strange? What,This morning, will wake & make me new. ii. winter 1621 It begins like a legend told to a fretful child:It was, it was, and it was not. It beginsAs if with symptoms of that sweatI hear, so late (oh notThank God too late), you were spared:A little blush along the throat. A restlessness.Then the silkworm’s casement, tapering & pale as the egg of a chimney-swift,Which we will convert to cloth To cover the naked Indian. A bobbin,Which dropped in my tisane would ravel the maelstromOf silk. Spindle of whirlwind, spoonfulOf follow. The thread’s stained scalding mile Pours out my glass tempered in our kiln,As each new settler is also seasonedIn this furnace, our new-found land.(As the man drowning believes he digestsThe mild water, as the damned marry flame& yet blister, so do I know myselfGrasped by change at the stroke of change.)Hold this glass up to your eye & throughIts pebbled horizon you may spy your room,See its ire of surfaces sore with chairs. Green grass green grace...Would that I could account this world oneWhere nothing is lost only exchanged.Without coppice, park, romancely glade, Or commanding vantage, Woods press on us; they fester, & they watch. To the northeast white spruce,Phalanxes of fledging pinions, clamp Root to granite & hoardWhat they glean off salt-fog, sea-spray, & stone. From ewers of willow-oaks darkness steams.At breakfast I have pinched the plantlets Insinuated by a maple’s winged seed overnight;It unclasps twin leaves, pale hands Loosening the soil of my rest,They never empty of their solicitations.I find no empires here, no apostles or emeralds.Instead, all things a-broil with an awful begetting& my hours unsettled by some new showOf riotous & mystical imagination.Though we might wish to wedge us barnacle-tightTo shore’s edge, our foundation raisedOn marshland recalls this irritable fact—The estuary, a nursery of strange devices, Throws off new forms so promiscuouslyI wonder how the world holds any more shapeThan a dream?From my hand at night (my lightA little oil in a dish or a rush taper smokingNot so different from his), flower Ovid’s fantastic shapes, shadows Of an old empire’s former splendorNow perjured by Virginia’s clay & leaf & sand Turned to the king’s profit as iron, silk, & glass.Belief is possible at night, solitary, firelit.Then, I can believe in Ovid’s centaurs,Or at death that he was met by a three-headed dog.I can believe in your letters, which never come.It is for you that I persistIn translating fresh birdsong, like this bunting’sComecomecome wherewherewhere All together down the hill. (Where did they go, who went before us?Starved trove: scatter of blue beads & a nameGrafted to that bald acre. Roanoke.There is my terror & my tale: to go west Under this eternity of nameless trees.)And what will you make of this Humble hieroglyphic of nature I forward to you?Nocturnal, double-wombed, variously calledMonkey Fox; Frosted,Or Short-headed, or Indolent.Let this Leafy-Eared Rat-Tailed ShufflerThe naturals call Possoun Join your zoo’s other fantasies & with the Little Military Learnéd Horse Enjoy its dish of ale. Its fur is durable;Its flesh wholesome, white, & pleasant.With one hand I can reach forA medicine man’s last breath caught in a vialOr a hummingbird, stuffed With arsenic & leaves & looking Like a fine jeweled dagger aimed at my heart, With the other hand I brush away The web spun in a fox skull’s whitened socket While a wild turkey glowers from its cornerLike a small dyspeptic dragon.My cullings do not quite master my closet.When I imagine myself returned to the smells& noise of London, from my stiff kneeSands grinding as I walk, no marvelsExcept those which the mirror surprises in all of us,The swan-white wing at my temple, I do not know what to hope for:That you do not see me, or that you do,But as though I were pinned under glass.At my windowsill a quince widensA jaundiced eye into the dark where areReal nettles beneath the words & invincible redRoot of the madder. As long as any image of this worldSticks in my soul, I remain— iii. spring1622
What I notice first within this rough scene fixedin memory is the rare quality of its lightning, as ifthose bolts were clipped from a comic book, pastedon low cloud, or fashioned with cardboard, daubedwith gilt then hung overhead on wire and fine hooks.What I hear most clearly within that thunder nowis its grief—a moan, a long lament echoing, an ache.And the rain? Raucous enough, pounding, but oddly musical, and, well, eager to entertain, solicitous.No storm since has been framed with such matter-of-fact artifice, nor to such comic effect. No, the thousand-plus storms since then have turned increasingly artless, arbitrary, bearing—every one of them—a numbing burst.And today, from the west a gust and a filling pressurepulsing in the throat—offering little or nothing to make light of.
A word you can’t quite saywithout itching, flinching; it’s not easyto ignore its squirming appetite, stayyour primal juddering. And yes, atnight, each microbe gurns in the salty seaof gut and gullet, born again, boldly eatsas you ate it, brews its own queasy teaof proto-raunch which it will quickly sate,birthing wanderlusting vigors, as yetunknown to microscience. They sashay, setout for the toes or gape through your eyes atyour drooping lids, your fat bunch of keys, atthis internal motel’s boss, bellhop, lackey, satin the throne of his slumber, a mercy seat.
They arrived at the desk of the Hotel Duncanand Smithed in, twitchy as flea-drummed squirrels.Her coat was squared and cream, his patent shoeswere little boats you wouldn’t put to sea in.People, not meaning to, write themselves into the soap that your life is, rise or fall in the plot.Seems that they were fleeing from the 1980smuch as a hummingbird flies from a flower’s bell.These were the times when wine was still a treat and not yet considered a common bodily fluid.You will have heard that the mind works muchas an oval of soap turned between two hands.She went round the room seeking lightsthat could be off without desire becoming love.He spread his arms behind his head, a gestureof libido she misread as test of temperature.Every carpet has its weave and underlay, seen only by the maker, the deliverer and the layer.The year was a dog but the day was as good as a song that ends with a wedding, meat on the rib.Evening was folding over the grid, slick walkerswith armfuls of books splendored in dusk’s ask.The song of the pipes was eerie as a face pressedto glass, as a basketball with a mouth and teeth.They lay in the glow of the times and talked ofhow people form a queue to exact or escape love.Each sigh has a sequel, she thought, then he did,then the whole hotel pulsed through that thought.Scandal has an inroad, but you must tunnel out;she rose and stood up counting, all hair and beauty.Though we do not hear them, beneath our own,our shadows’ footsteps clatter, they match our dread.
At the drycleaners I stand in line, my feetshuffling weight from side to side,impatience all over me while the woman,light brown, with her Creole story drones on.In New Orleans none would notice.She’s exotic in Baltimore, a dawn birdeverything hears. Even the clerkleans into her tale, clucking softly. Whenpeople behind me cough, she won’t berushed. She’s got her whole story to go.Soon there’s a man she never married,her mother opposed, far away still, and hewent into a bar, wrong place, wrong color,wrong words, maybe, a good man.He’ll never come away of there, not comin’home, geraniums on the back porch,and not replace the bad tire her Honda has,who could always be telling her what timedoes in the kitchen if she stand halfnaked letting his dog go on out. Solet me pay you for him, give you moneybecause you is nice and I remember,her nearly singing voice sighs. The sleevedpants, two shirts hang on the brass ring, allfinished, unclaimed, the stiffenedstains gone away. The perfectly starchedcloth a redemption so beautifulit might be the linen of royalty, but smallfor a man two of us will think of as sleep scuffs house walls like tide under a boat.How nice they are, these women doingthe little one person can for anotherwhich is, in the end, a washof memorable words that leave you standing.
A tail, a torso, a tiny face.A longing, a journey, a deep belief.A spawning, a fissioning, a bit of tissueanchored to a psyche, stitched to a wish. Watery. Irony. Memory. My mother, my face, and thenthe last thing she’d ever see, and thenthe last words I’d hear her say: You’re killing me
Like silent naked monks huddledaround an old tree stump, havingspun themselves in the nightout of thought and nothingness—And God so pleased with their silenceHe grants them teeth and tongues.Like us.How long have you been gone?A child’s hot tears on my bare arms.
Small and panting massOf moonlight and dampness on a logThis glistening tumor, terrible frogOf moonlight and dampness on a logMy small and panting mass
1 Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need.Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block,and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected,where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectationas cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood.Rembrandt knew of all this—isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman?It’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are.Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations—Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye.2 But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surelythat hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would revealwithin us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain,aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards.Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztecyour heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance!Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling,we’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher,who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosurewhere dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.
The poetry’s arrested in his scene,which can’t be trusted, because I saw it through painkillers that softened my head,after I’d asked him what Keats really meant:“Was it a vision or a waking dream?”—You think that really mattered much to him?In my waking vision dream, there’s no glory,no prize committee or dew-drip Paradise.He’s in an attic nook, or dim garage, or the cellar where he actually writes,the space a sheeted granulated matter, his silenced countenance and de-boned bodyscabby with caked ash about to crust and crack, poems piled at his feet like shoeshine rags.A grave purpled fraughtness colors him.What damaged him to this silence? He still writes and still isn’t heard, as ifnot being heard is the whole point of it,and who are these children, these wavingHalloween windsocks who won’t talk to him?Beyond my busybody vision, he staggersthrough divorce, stooped, bereft, still writing.Spiky and singing, he out-writes them all, the cheered, spotless others—he howls at their after-dinner-speaker poetry,the monsignors, the suburbans, the woo-woowisdom merchants weeping to the bank.Poetry’s a weather that doesn’t need a specific place: it’s a storm outside a cellar,sunshine at a bedroom window.Too much schoolroom poisons the idiom.Too much reverence stinks up the joint.The sorrow hanging in the dreamy air seems to confuse him, he can’t understand how his heart came to hurt him like this, confuses it with leaves blurted out by storms,leaves that keep falling fast in the cellar,in poems he writes, the base desires and rage,he says the gods designed the set,stage-manage things, scripted them,the hilarity that hurts us is that none of it really matters, that poetry’s griefs are intimates we don’t choose. They come to us, for us. They cling to body and soul.
How often now, raging weeping for the dayslove gives then takes away, takes from youthe slightly chapped hand laid on the oneyou’re pointing at a tree, and the voice that breathes coffeeberry bush into your mouth. The finger that taps and feathers your earbut the giggle’s gone before you turn around.The sandalwood scent hanging in the room,the auburn strand like a flaw in the porcelain,the off-course nail clipping in the carpet.The days eat into your stomach, knife youwith longing for relief from lovethat you cannot leave or leave alone,from its rings of fire where you won’tburn down to ash or be transformed.You become them, and they keep burningand have a coffeeberry voice. Listen how their rhymes sing the little deaths you live.
That marsh hawk,its blown-leaf flight across Tomales Bay fog, summer’s abraded light,the Pacific tide pressuringand squeezing wave on wave into the bay’s pinched inlet. . .We feel somehow between usstill water crushed by that sea,so constant it seems not to be.The hawk, a circus, tumbles,stops, stands upon the air,beats its wings as if to shoo the sun’s drenched veils, and its clapping wings stopour unstoppable argument,that love goes, who knows why,and delivers us from pain to pain, air with teeth that seems to eat more air. Northern harrier, owl face, they sea-changed your name,who listens with your faceand shows not love but want, speed, life in flight toward, forever toward,pausing at every chanceto use what ocean-bornbayside air sustains youby resisting you. We thankyour sunken head bonesand wild close-to-water seekingthat somehow speaks to us, delivers us to another amazed agonized place.
The silence of night hoursis never really silent.You hear the air,even when it doesn’t stir.It’s a memory of the day.Nothing stirs. Memory lags.No traffic hushing upand down tricky hillsamong the camphor trees.No foghorns, no streetcars’shrilling phantoms beforethey emerge from tunnels.These absences keep us alert.No rain or street voices,nobody calling to someone else,Hannah, you walk the dog tonight yet or what?
A true friend is one soul in two bodies. —Aristotle Kant says, transcendental  idealism. In Aquinas, we exist apart from bodies but only on Thursdays when his famous ox flies by the window wiser at Cologne where Albertus Magnus,his real name, appoints Aquinas to magister studentium,master of students. Aquinas is petrified but says yes.He feels his soul sailing out of his headfloating near the roof where a blue ox wings by.On Wednesday, two bodies are one soul waking at sunrise thanks to the pineal glandof Descartes, who thinks this node in the brainis a tiny sugar cone or salted peanut,the seat of the soul while Aristotle points to the chopping ax as a teleology as if the ax were a living, breathing personwhich it isn’t. Heraclitus, air and fire while Aquinas objects, no not an ax but ox.If you’re a bird or soul I am only one milefrom the sea. If you are a soul in two bodieslife is more complex and we must labortwice the field of sorrow after sleep, bath, and a glassas Aquinas whispers, the things we love tell us who we are
i. a wife will wean
A last rock-skip hurlstorm (crazing river-glass) the closest they ever were. • In right lockstitch snared and split some fire-supper cooked on sticks. • By dawn the older brother took to chucking what bottle-frags he could find and crud-oysters across. The (high-pitched) younger blacked our waters with a yowl. • Lord the sound such as rose from him carried so— Carved into us. Clings. • Hadn’t they clung tooth and claw to branch and bark. — Came a man (and truck) to take them off. • Dieseled those boys off away some say somewheres upcountry, inland. • Where it was they landed (why) nobody not them knows. • No body not them knows just how they humped and grubbled home what road they’d graved what woods criss-crossed which creeks which trains they’d hopped who helped. • Came safe home sure but blank as houses. Came safe home —as him —and him. —as (evermore) not them.
Split the boy —his thorax, throatPierce-peel the craw:A jag-crystalled crust —his black scoria, slag(not Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled)What no gizzard ground (could hope to grind)What would not meshWhat would not smeltEmbedded undigested there in meat
Here at the wolf’s throat, at the egress of the howl,all along the avenue of deer-blink and salmon-kickwhere the spider lets its microphone downinto the cave of the blackberry bush—earth echo,absence of the human voice—wait herewith a bee on your wrist and a fly on your cheek,the tiny sun and tiny eclipse.It is time to be grateful for the breathof what you could crush without thought,a moth, a child’s love, your own life.There might never be another chance.How did you find me, the astonished mother saysto her four-year-old boy who’d disappearedin the crowds at the music festival.I followed my heart, he shrugs,so matter-of-fact you might not seebehind his words(o hover and feed, but not too long)the bee trails turning to ice as they’re flown.
One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square. “My friends, I want her to be queen!” “I want to be queen!” She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed. They swooned against each other.  In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward groves of palm trees.
A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.  A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.  You look away: the new love!  You look back,—the new love!  “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing to you. “Build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes,” they beg you.  Arriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere.
O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes.  Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.  Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.  Behold the time of the Assassins.
He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.  He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life  And we remember him and he travels. . . And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!”  He won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.  O his breaths, his heads, his racing; the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and of action.  O fecundity of the spirit and immensity of the universe!  His body! The dreamed-of release, the shattering of grace crossed with new violence!  The sight, the sight of him! all the ancient kneeling and suffering lifted in his wake.  His day! the abolition of all resonant and surging suffering in more intense music.  His footstep! migrations more vast than ancient invasions.  O him and us! pride more benevolent than wasted charities.  O world! and the clear song of new misfortunes!  He has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from the tumultuous pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.
There doesn’t seemto be a crack. Ahigher pin cannotbe set. Nor can you go back. Youhadn’t even knownthe face was vertical.All you did was walk into a room.The tipping upfrom flat wasgradual, youmust assume.
There are charmsthat forestall harm.The house bristleswith opportunitiesfor stasis: refoldingthe linens along their creases, keepingthe spoons and chairsin their right places.Nobody needs towitness one’s exquisitecare with the napkinsfor the napkins to have been the actthat made the factunhappen.
We knew it would happen, one of the laws.And that itwould be thissudden. Wordsbecome a chewingaction of the jaws and mouth, unheardby the only othercitizen there wason earth.
Pity the beautiful,the dolls, and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes.Pity the pretty boys, the hunks, and Apollos, the golden lads whom success always follows.The hotties, the knock-outs,the tens out of ten, the drop-dead gorgeous, the great leading men.Pity the faded, the bloated, the blowsy, the paunchy Adonis whose luck’s gone lousy.Pity the gods, no longer divine.Pity the night the stars lose their shine.
ISo this is where the children come to die,hidden on the hospital’s highest floor.They wear their bandages like uniformsand pull their iv rigs along the hall with slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale,they lie in bright pajamas on their beds,watching another world on a screen.The mothers spend their nights inside the ward,sleeping on chairs that fold out into beds,too small to lie in comfort. Soon they slipbeside their children, as if they might meshthose small bruised bodies back into their flesh.Instinctively they feel that love so strongprotects a child. Each morning proves them wrong.No one chooses to be here. We play the partsthat we are given—horrible as they are.We try to play them well, whatever that means.We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts.The doctors come and go like oracles,their manner cool, omniscient, and oblique.There is a word that no one ever speaks. II
For Marina You say the old masters never got it wrong,But when Goya painted the death of the imaginationIt was a lost dog against a usurious yellow skyAnd the dog, a hapless creature who had drawn itselfTen miles on two legs, stared in amazementTo see the man who once fed him from his plateReduced to this. So I felt this week, the vile soil and everything upon it—The beggar guest kicked from the tableBefore his own dog, and even the honest unpickingOf art performed nightly and in seclusion.Like any Penelope my armor is resignationAlthough I thought I would lift the bow myselfAnd draw.By the morning he is goneAnd what to make of this?The prostitutes hang from a beam like miceThe suitors are piled unburied in the yard.And some say that it is now much betterAnd others, that it is worse.So order was restoredI stared in amazement •Perhaps Akhmatova was rightWhen she wrote who knows what shitWhat tip, what pile of wasteBrings forth the tender verseLike hogweed, like the fat hen under the fenceLike the unbearable present tenseWho knows what ill, what strifeWhat crude shack of a lifeAnd how it twists sweetly about the broken sill:Pressingness, another word for honeysuckleBut housewives? Has poetryEver deepened in the pailWas it ever found in the sink, under the tableDid it rise in the oven, quietly ableTo outhowl the hoover?Does it press more than the children’s supperThe sudden sleepless wail?Did it ever?It lives. It takes seedLike the most unforgiving weedGrows wilder as the child grows olderAnd spits on dreams, did I sayHow it thrives in the ashen family nest Or how iambs are measured bestWhere it hurts:With the heel of an iron On the reluctant breast Of a shirt? • MICHAEL BLANNThere was a hush, then Michael BlannStepped out onto the stage. MichaelBlann, with his pipe and his jukebox headOh, he’s your man.He has a song for all weathers, a pipeAnd a voice, and he sings and he roamsHe sings to the wind and a dog of howThe trees are all bare and Jack’s come home.He’s a thin voice, like a spider thread On days when the sun is late and fineLive and let live, sings Michael BlannThe wind yields not, but the hills is mine.He’s no call for fate passing overHis sheep are all angels, the stars are his LordsHe’ll play any part the clouds should fancyTo humble tunes and hand-me-down wordsThe acts are written in briar strandsAnd the Pharisees are leaves in the airI likes a drop pipes Michael BlannSing follow hark forward the innocent hare. He wore to his end a clutch of sheep’s wool To show the gods that Michael BlannWent alone, alone for most of his yearsBut crossed the hills a singing man.
March 29, 2010 Every morning since the time changedI have woken to the dawn chorusAnd even before it sounded, I dreamed of itLoud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucousAnd once I rose and twitched the curtains apartExpecting the birds to be pressing in frightAgainst the pane like passengersBut the garden was empty and it was nightNot a slither of light at the horizonStill the birds were bawling through the mistsTerrible, invisibleA million small evangelistsHow they sing: as if each had pecked up a smoldering coalTheir throats singed and swollen with song In dissonance as befits the dark worldWhere only travelers and the sleepless belong
Pure gaze, you are lightning beyond the last treesand you are the last trees’past, branching green lightning of terminal brain branches numened densely with summer’shunter color, as night comes on, the ocean they concealgone berserk, wind still rising.Pure seeing, dual vortex doors to the blue fire wheresex is burned away, and all is as it was and I am being offeredin your eyes, as in cupped hands,the water of to never thirst again.Again I turn away, and the future comes, all at once towering around me on every side, and I am lost.Pure looking, past pain (this is promised):we must have wed on poverty’s most hair-raising day delighting, flashing risk, riskunfailingly lighting the way, anything possible in that dissolving of seam between minds, no more golden time—each step I tookthe right step, words came to me finally and finding the place you had set for them,once again wrote themselves down.Till true word’s anvil ring, and solid tap of winged blind cane come,I wish you all the aloneness you hunger for.That big kitchen table where you sit laughing with friends, I see it happening.And I wish that I could not be so much with youwhen I’m suddenly not; thatinwardly you might switch time, to sleepand winter while you went about your life, until you woke up well,our conversation resumed.Ceaseless blue lightning, this love passing through me: I know somehow it will go onreaching you, reaching youinstantlywhen I’m not in the way; when it is no longer deflected by all the dark bents, allI tried to overcome but I could not—so much light pulled off course as it passed within reach, so muchlost, lost in me, but no more. October
For Peter S. I saw the shrouds of prisonerslike baptismal gownsburied outside the cemetery.On the canvas frills exhaledsinged wool and cardboard.The angels arrived as lace.Took notes, then stuck. Awful residuefrom a small cut. •The veil has been ripped from the skinwhere it was burned in.The skin is the veil, the baby-material,imprinted on, as ifone dropped the handkerchiefand it was one’s wrist.The cuff is frightening. Stuffed onto oil.Water-stains might fence its ghost in. •“The barbed wire complex”I understand. Winged and flattenedat the same time, poor things!Some leftover specters of blood.Remember Blake’s figures like columnswith headslooking around for God?When events are not as randomas they seem. •The article of clothingis only half there, it’s not full,but when it falls forward, it is.Terrible emptiness of the spreadneckline and little sleeve.Half-cooked squares.Was this religious fireand is this where it passed?Maybe they are floating on waterof paint, pool-sized, blue and ridged like foam.You would have to flyto see them flat as a map.The rib and hem. Rained onfor eons. Noah’s children’sfloating forms. •Angels die?It’s a frightening-miracle because here they are.The Upper Godhas let them droplike centuries into space.And I recognize them!
Growing up, I barely knew the Bible, but readand reread the part when Cain drifted eastor was drawn that way, into a place of desolation, the land of Nod, there to begin, with a wife of unknown origin, another race of men,under the mark of God. As a boy, I thought Nod would be a place where the blue scillas would bloom gray, a country of the rack and screw, the serrated sword, where the very serving cups were bone. As a grown man, I’ve heard that Nod never was a nation—of Cain’s offspring, or anyone—but a mistranslation of “wander,” so Cain could go wherever, and be in Nod. Far more than in God, I believe in Cain, who destroyed his own brother, and therefore in any citycould have his wish, and be alone.
Nervy, sparrow-like,Eyes Cherokee, Blackberry black,Arrow-quick,Picky eater,Lean in spirit,Converted Quaker,She taught her grandsonArithmeticAnd checkers tacticsAnd let him touchThrough her cotton nightieSmall, tense nipples.Her hands, arthritic,Knitted doilies, Breaded tomatoes,And put up apples,While the hoarded guiltsMade for bright quilts,The torrid migraines’Counterpanes.
One does not want,O Lord, to heapUp by still watersOf words a cairnBut hopes to attendA small covertOf tamariskWhose leaves saltyYet featheryWill shed light overA thickened plot.One wants at lastTo cede the fieldTo tamariskAnd mastic tree,To olive and stone,Stones in the fruit,Seed in the stones.
Sometimes the rain shinesJust when the sun reigns,And that was the way it isBeyond those French doorsThat late afternoon hereIn this mind’s early eveningWhere they still fade inThat cool color Polaroid,Pastel shades of her prom dress,A bowl of double peonies,Promising, precocious,Trying, trying to open. •Their friend and he were tightTight-rope walkers, self-taughtTaut-trope-talkers, stalkingJamb-up, arm-in-armAnd caroling to lucky starsTheir bars and rebars,The night a carouselOf tryst and troth, Of casual carousals,Cocky arousals,Pitching the dark to the dark.(Streetlight and moth,Reader, she married both.) •But then there he was,In the morning’s mourning,Soi-disantProustian mignon,Aesthetic asceticAnd Kansas rubeReducing his thoughtTo a bouillon cubeThat no one hot Ought ever pore over.
Maybe the light from a small window Tucked at the utmost eave of the barnCould be misunderstood; if only I had pulled In by the other way or not looked upAgainst such darkness. The animal I brought Into this no longer mine, the taskEach day was to confine enough, from harmOr from each other as night loosensOver the assemblage. But in the pastureOne wrong step was taken. And those who remainAre weary, heads low, torment nowhere To be seen, not even in the illuminationOf men who have come to help,Who behind the double doors keep watchBy the body so it does not becomeAnything for those who scavenge, to follow backThe acts of blood right up to the locked stall And light where each shaft lands precisely again Through the again. The horse was in the snow,The rock was underfoot; all the unknowablesMade whole and apparent by one who stumbled.
How many times I have providedFor your death; the apple turned one wayThen the other, an arrangement made, The softer ground. To hold your head As if this mattered, to say what I thinkEssential into your ear,To watch the eye look everywhere to findWhat it does not know it looks for.To fasten you down in the one placeWhere no one can say anything more,Being nothing else but breath leaving,While the man with the needle stands byUntil the signal of how it is time. To believeI know what will happen next; to leave the hill As the body stiffens; to pass each blossomOf blood in the snow as if I understood All I was capable of.
As for her, the circumstances must be ordinaryAnd so the return. Door unlocked. The path mowed Right to the oiled gate; the pasture Cleared of stone and alder. All untouchedEnough to enter. The man or woman Off down the valley or working aboveTreeline. No other sound but a few strays Hurrying through the dusk as if the endWill begin, certain and with nothingMore to say. She does not know she does not know. Having come back to find her kindAnd none being left she took herself up Into a tree unclear what to do next save onlySing the song she wanted sung back to her.
Paul lost his footing, turned out a spectacular corkscrew.It looked like he was acting out a series of renga in the air. The general theme was prevenient grace.But the white rim broke his form, and he hit the bathtub water like a big charred bough of a tree.A semicircle of his shoes—Oxfords, monk straps,bluchers, a lone boot—crowded in to get a look.After that, Morphy was only surface. You can lookinto anything and see what you want. For example,Pierre swore he could read stock returnsin the little channels of Morphy’s pruned thumbs.He even called in Schiaparelli’s niece. She enteredwith a shoe on her head, I swear. There are pictures,look it up. My uncle, my unfortunate uncle,says the whole event—Morphy in the tub—lookedfloral, with shoe petals. Just to be difficult, I said“saucer of milk”: a teacup on a dish, alone in thequiet, waiting for a cougar to come by. Ialways bank on something parched and amblingto make my point. Or else something with abroken heel, covered in wet newspaper andhuddled up next to the highway. All thumbs.
Nimble, preserved together, milkweed-white rears upturned,female tule elk bowed into rustling foxtails.Males muscled over the slopes,jostling mantles, marking terrain. Their antlers clambered wide,steep as the gorges. As they fed, those branches twitched,sensory, delicate,yet when one buck rearedsquaring to look at ushis antlers and his gaze held suddenly motionless. Further out, the skeleton.The tar paper it seemed to lie onwas hide. Vertebrae like redwood stumps—an uneven heart-shaped cavern where a coccyx curled to its tip. Ribs fanned openhollow, emptied of organs.In the bushes its skull. Sockets and sinuses, mandible,its few small teeth. All bare now except that fur the red-brown color of a young boy’s head and also of wild iris stalks in winterstill clung to the drying scalp. Below the eye’s rim sagged flat as a bicycle tire.The form was sinking away.The skin loosened, becoming other,shedding the mask that hidesbut must also reveal a creature.Off amid cliffs and hillssome unfleshed force roamed free. In the wind, I felt the half-life I watched watch me. Elk, I said, I see you abandon this life, this earth—I stood for a time with the bones.
LAUDSSomehow I am sturdier, more shorethan sea-spray as I thicken throughthe bedroom door. I gleam of sickness.You give me morning, Lord, as yougive earthquake to all architecture.I can forget. You put that sugarin the melon’s breath, and it is wetwith what you are. (I, too, ferment.)You rub the hum and simple warmthof summer from afar into the hipsof insects and of everything.I can forget. And like the sea,one more machine without a memory,I don’t believe that you made me. PRIME
has a moth in her palm,a river on her tongue,a scalpel in her boat,a lump in her throat,a gamble in her shoe,a fire in her den,a shadow in her flesh,a flutter in her breast,like everybody else.
A sound of far-off thunder from instruments ten feet away: drums, a log, a gong of salvage metal. Chimes of little Issan bells, pipes in a row, sometimes a querulous harmonica. Inside the elephant orchestra’s audience, bubbles form, of shame and joy, and burst. Did elephants look so sad and wise, a tourist thinks, her camera cold in her pocket, before we came to say they look sad and wise? Did mastodons have merry, unwrinkled faces? Hollow boom soft chime, stamp of a padded foot, tingle of renaat, rattle of angklung. This music pauses sometimes, but does not end. Prathida gently strokes the bells with a mallet. Poong and his mahout regard the gong. Paitoon sways before two drums, bumping them, keeping time with her switching tail. Sales of recordings help pay for their thin enclosure of trampled grass. They have never lived free. Beside a dry African river their wild brother lies, a punctured balloon, torn nerves trailing from the stumps of his tusks. Hollow boom soft chime, scuff of a broad foot, sometimes, rarely, a blatting elephant voice. They seldom attend the instruments without being led to them, but, once they’ve begun, often refuse to stop playing.
Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked, both fell to the floor. A gesture gone sadly awry. This was close to fact and quickly became symbolic, bound to occur in Florida, where she was surrounded by rotting abundance and greedy insects. One moment a laughing smile, a graceful hand alighting on solid furniture, a casual shift of weight, the next, undignified splayed legs. The shell of the table proved to be stuffed with termite eggs. True, it was a fall from no great height—merely the height of herself, and although the hollowed-out table failed, at least the floor held, though probably infested by termites as well, and possibly built on a latent sinkhole, how can you tell? And how could she, smiling and easy, arm moving without forethought and permission, have forgotten fear, apparently let go of a hard-learned lesson? Enter a room as though it is strange. What you recognize may have changed, or may change without warning. Trees fall in hurricanes and on windless mornings, breaching houses where people you knew have vanished or died or stopped loving you.
“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.”They are bodies of the selfless or of those newlydead. What appears transparent is really flameburning so brightly it appears like glass. Whatyou’re looking through is the act of giving: Onething in life needed desperately, given to another,or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodiesare not transparent, but sometimes the colorof lead, like the elephant whom a child with somepeanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirlingdust, so that it appears he has lifted a monumentor a city with all its pain. The bodies that seemtransparent are made of an ice so pure it appearsto be glass sweating, where you, desiring another,glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.
Lots of contemporaries— but “me” is not my contemporary. My birth without “me” was a blemished offering on the collection plate. A moment of flesh, imprisoned in flesh. And when to the tip of this tongue of flesh some word comes, it kills itself. If saved from killing itself, it descends to the paper, where a murder happens. Gunshot— if it strikes me in Hanoi it strikes again in Prague. A little smoke floats up, and my “me” dies like an eighth-month child. Will my “me” one day be my contemporary?
Me—a book in the attic. Maybe some covenant or hymnal. Or a chapter from the Kama Sutra, or a spell for intimate afflictions. But then it seems I am none of these. (If I were, someone would have read me.) Apparently at an assembly of revolutionaries they passed a resolution, and I am a longhand copy of it. It has the police’s stamp on it and was never successfully enforced. It is preserved only for the sake of procedure. And now only some sparrows come, straw in their beaks, and sit on my body and worry about the next generation. (How wonderful to worry about the next generation!) Sparrows have wings on them, but resolutions have no wings (or resolutions have no second generation). Sometimes I think to catch the scent— what lies in my future? Worry makes my binding come off. Whenever I try to smell, just some fumes of bird shit. O my earth, your future! Me—your current state.
There were two kingdoms only: the first of them threw out both him and me. The second we abandoned. Under a bare sky I for a long time soaked in the rain of my body, he for a long time rotted in the rain of his. Then like a poison he drank the fondness of the years. He held my hand with a trembling hand. “Come, let’s have a roof over our heads awhile. Look, further on ahead, there between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.”
A gust roused the waves, leaves blew into the water, the waves were ash-gray, the sky tin-gray, ash-gray the autumn. It was good for my heart: there my feelings were ash-gray, the sky tin-gray, ash-gray the autumn. The breath of wind brought cooler air, the waves of mourning brought separation: autumn and autumn befriend each other.
With her hair closely cropped up to the nape Like Dorian Apollo’s, the girl lay on the narrow Pallet, keeping her limbs stiffly frozen Within a heavy cloud she could not escape... Artemis emptied her quiver—every arrow Shot through her body. And though very soon She’d be no virgin, like cold honeycomb, Her virgin thighs still kept her pleasure sealed... As if to the arena, the youth came Oiled with myrrh, and like a wrestler kneeled To pin her down; and although he broke past Her arms that she had thrust against his chest, Only much later, with one cry, face to face, Did they join lips, and out of their sweat, embrace...
Around the bend of a phrase you return, it’s dawn in a book, it’s a garden, one can see everything, the dew, a moth on a leaf and it’s you who rises suddenly amid the pages and the book grows more lovely because it’s you and you’ve not grown old, you walk slowly to the door.
It’s as if she were an earn,  gebidende prey for her eyrie. Perched alertly,  a hægtesse on their innards. In bitter morgenceald,  her hoar-glittered feathers. Suddenly she sees  a fox on the westene. At that she rouses,  heaved up on high, and heads straight at him,  in harrowing hæste. Hearing her, he freezes  his tail. He’s terrified. Sees, bestelð,  with ēagan flashing, talons overtake him,  dash him down in torment, overtake him again,  swengeð him on the eorðan. One yelp as she pincers his liver.  Wyrd—pierces aorta.
We wither, unlike stars; die, unlike hills and cisterns.Ana shadowed my protector, esteemed Arbad, who’s left us. But ana do not grieve; all sparrows exit the feast hall. Novelties don’t excite me, nor wyrdstaef affright me. Men are like encampments that soon become ruins. They come with their kin, leave only land behind when  they go— the last herdsman rounding up the stragglers. Man’s a shooting star: light turned to ash. Wealth and kin a stain that soon wears away. The work we do inevitably gehrorene. The wise grasp this; the foolish fight it and lose. If my wyrd holds off a while, my fingers reach out for its stick.Ana can tell you stories, bent over the more ana try to straighten.Ana am like a battered sword that hasn’t gotten any less sharp. Don’t leave me! (The sparrow finds the exit suddenly—.) O you reproachful wifcynn: when the men go off Can your witchcraft tell us who’ll return? Do you faint because they flet ofgeāfon? You make everyone weep! for the burston bodies of the irreplaceable friends of your own youth. But neither the witches nor the necromancers know what the aelmihtig intends. Just ask them:Hwœr cōm the men? Hwœr cōm our protectors? They don’t even know when the rain storm will come!
A blind man was riding an unheated train, From Bryansk he was traveling home with his fate. Fate whispered to him so the whole car could hear: And why should you care about blindness and war? It’s good, she was saying, you’re sightless and poor. If you were not blind, you’d never survive. The Germans won’t kill you, you’re nothing to them. Allow me to lift that bag on your shoulder— The one with the holes, the empty torn one. Let me just raise your eyelids wide open. The blind man was traveling home with his fate, Now thankful for blindness. Happy about it.
Children grow in secret. They hide themselves in the depths and darker reaches of the house to become wild cats, white birches. One day when you’re only half-watching the herd as it straggles back in with the afternoon dust, one child, the prettiest of them all, comes close and rises up on tiptoe to whisper I love you, I’ll be waiting for you in the hay. Shaking some, you go to find your shotgun; you spend what’s left of the day firing at rooks and jackdaws, uncountable at this hour, and crows.
Wherever the earth is crag and scrub, the goats are there—the black ones, girlishly skipping, leaping their little leaps from rock to rock. I’ve loved their nerve and frisk since I was small. Once my grandfather gave me one of my own. He showed me how I could serve myself when I got hungry, from the full-feeling bags there like warmish wineskins, where I’d let my hands linger some before bringing my mouth close, so the milk wouldn’t go to waste on my face, my neck, even my naked chest, which did happen sometimes, who knows if on purpose, my mind dwelling all the while on the savory-smelling vulvazinha. I called her Maltesa; she was my horse; I could almost say she was my first woman.
The red sun rises without intent and shines the same on all of us. We play like children under the sun. One day, our ashes will scatter—  it doesn’t matter when. Now the sun finds our innermost hearts,  fills us with oblivion intense as the forest, winter and sea.
I spoke in a hurry, in a nervous hush, Because the time was short— The lightning was shuddering, Slowing down, running. Or was that my blood, The quiet diminishing of daily life? It’s time for me to go forth Into Your tiny mustard seed. In the house of my Father, everything is fading, In the house of the Father, all the angels are crying, Because the anguish of a jaded, exhausted horse Sometimes finds its way even unto them. One gray day, I was alive on this earth, And amid the mist of day—in triumph— The Spirit may approach and look So that you will see Him, without seeing. And, so, celebrate the meager light, Curse not the twilight. If Christ is to visit us It will be on such pitiful days as these.
september is a month like any other and unlike any other. it seems in september everything awaited will arrive: in the calm air, in a particular scent, in the stillness of the quay. when september comes, i know i’m going to lose myself. the ants climbing my legs and a certain change of light tell me so. the air comes and goes beneath my dress, pressing the warm cloth against me, pressing me with the desire to find myself in the sea, that sea beaten deep gray and magnetized by neutrinos, thanks to which i can perform my observations and telekinetic communications. the salty, sticky wall of the Malecón is covered with fish and forgotten hooks. i like to lick its sheen of salt and make my tongue salty and sticky. in that moment the rest of the city can vanish, it’s just that sea and me, before all thought, all desire. then i undress and enter, knowing i’ll find something, and that the boats—which seem suspended on the horizon, seem to have slipped their limits, motionless and painted there—are also mine...when i met you and you met me it was still september and we were strange and different and would be for a long time after—though i sometimes snagged you with certain secret hooks, shaping a sort of formless impression: something strange and indefinable divided the outline of your body from the space around you, but without making a human form, and in your eyes the sunlight revolved like a bicycle’s spoked wheel...the bicycle moves on and i’m carried along, filled with dry branches and coral. in my hair i wear the butterflies we collected together. the little house, one point amid the infinite, comes into view: already we can see the windows, like little black voids, and their curtains beating in the wind. i squeeze your waist, the bicycle moves on; even though the street is narrow the bicycle rolls on, rolls on against the spray. when you turn your head and see my hand, my hook snagged in a struggle of desire, the sun has turned immense in your eyes again. you make for the little house already in view, already at the edge of the curve...a naked man in lamplight is a magnificent animal: his pointy shoulders jut out and cut off the light. a line of fuzz descends from his navel to where the darkness begins, where the skin tightens like the skin of a fig. his body—your body—is an arc i want to tighten, to overcome, to conquer. hidden behind a tree, i can see your eyes again. the Mississippi is a big river with many tributaries. the arc tightens and closes. i throw an arm over you, a leg, a hand, a lip, hallucinations, an ear—as usual. my body moves on. the Mississippi is a big river with many tributaries. its water burns in my thighs, in the course of my dreams: the Mississippi is a deep and torrential river situated in the United States, it is born in Lake Itasca, passes through St. Paul, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, traverses 3,780 kilometers and slides and slides through a wide delta to the Gulf of Mexico. i’m in geography class. i like this class. the world just barely fits in my head. the map hangs before me with its spokes and points. someone made that all up, just to make me think i belong to one of those zones out there. all those castles and fortifications to toy with, the beginnings of everything that seems to be reality, but isn’t, because we’re not outside but inside the globe, that huge globe so stubborn in its sufficiency, and even far from the classroom nothing’s different: there’s just the idea of that transparent globe that is my image of the world, always turning, imperfect and constant inside me. i like the maps and the instability of the geography that situates places in my head. i like using graph paper to plot the latitudes and longitudes i can’t measure. i also like the geography professor, whose eyes i must constantly avoid in order not to drown myself. he doesn’t know, he can’t imagine, that while he lectures, while he looks at me, i draw fish in my notebook to throw in his river. the boy behind me won’t stop looking at me, and whatever one does the others all follow, watching from the corners of their eyes. that’s why i’m going to fold the page away from his gaze and make a true map where he won’t find me, alone at my desk in the middle of the world...in the middle of the lake there’s a boat and we’re three—although the third may have already vanished for us—and i want to paddle and sit in the center. you’ve taken off your shirt: the landscape appears and disappears. when i take the oars you want to teach me how to row over the edge. you try to teach me: you take my hands—you’re behind and above me. my fingers are lost in the middle of the boat. i’m wearing faded jeans and carrying a purple parasol. the oar descends toward the deep and tangles with seaweed. my hair hangs surly and limp on my wet shoulders. we try to steer but go nowhere. you explain the roundness of the earth; the sharpened tip of the compass needle, always precise, marking contours, lines, limits. the shadow and truth of your body in the landscape: appearances and disappearances when you try to comprehend the possible across great distances, the symmetry, forgetfulness, incarnation in other beings: animals, plants, and later, men once again. you taught me all this, but i’m not a map and i hold still. i abandon my shoes and my dread of nearing the end: the oar descends toward the deep, it is september. we don’t move. i keep still to be different, that’s why...
we went into a market—they call it a grocery—and you can’t imagine. fruit brilliant as magazine photos. all kinds of different oranges, grapefruits, mandarins, some tiny clementines with a blue sticker—Morocco—they’ve come so far...the eggs are painted with colors corresponding to the days of the week you’re supposed to eat them: a different color for each opportunity. i felt dizzy, the gulf between myself and this place seemed insuperable. tears welled up in my eyes, i wanted desperately to flee, to get outside so i could breathe. i wanted to explain to Phillis, the North American who had invited me, what was happening to me. i tried, but she couldn’t understand: you have to have felt it yourself: the first time. for the first time my mind had crossed over five hundred years of development at jet speed and arrived in the future, a cold future, its display cases filled with artificial snow and artificial heat. there were a thousand things i never knew existed, a panoply of brand names and gadgets for every purpose. i felt like someone from the stone age, and realized most people on the planet never know the era they’re living in, any more than they could know the quantity of living matter in this galaxy that surrounds us, or the milky complexity of the molecules in their own brains, and what’s more they don’t know that they’ll die without ever knowing. i felt terror of that gloss, of the waxed fruit, of propaganda so refined it could dilute the existence of the strange things before my eyes, other sensations: everything wanting to be used up, immediately, licked, tasted, eaten, packaged, mastered. i knew i couldn’t stand this avalanche, this brilliant swarm, for long, these rows on rows of distant faces staring out at me from cardboard boxes. i’d seen nothing singular in the place, no unique thing i could separate out from the amorphous mass of texture and sensation. i began to move closer, imagining i walked with those who have never eaten meat or tasted cow’s milk, who have never nursed except from the teat of a goat. those who have had only wildflowers to chew when the winter hunger comes. i approached closer still, imagining i walked with the salty ones, who collect their water from the public pipe. my nose began to bleed and Phillis said it was the cold; i knew that wasn’t the problem. we were near the seafood display, i moved closer. fish have always aroused in me both horror and desire. i moved closer, like a lost child feeling her way through space toward something of hers that’s hidden. i brushed the shells with my fingertips, they were smooth and delicate, but obviously artificial, made to be used once and thrown away. at first touch they might seem real, pearly, perfect, but they’re actually plastic, and they’ve never even seen any sea.
1 Under the long green hair of pepper trees, The writers and composers work the street. Bach’s new score is crumpled in his pocket, Dante sways his ass-cheeks to the beat.  2 The city is named for the angels, And its angels are easy to find. They give off a lubricant odor, Their eyes are mascara-lined; At night you can see them inserting Gold-plated diaphragms; For breakfast they gather at poolside Where screenwriters feed and swim.  3 Every day, I go to earn my bread In the exchange where lies are marketed, Hoping my own lies will attract a bid.  4 It’s Hell, it’s Heaven: the amount you earn Determines if you play the harp or burn.  5 Gold in their mountains, Oil on their coast; Dreaming in celluloid Profits them most.
What a thing it would be, if we all could fly. But to rise on air does not make you a bird. I’m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles. It’s spring, and everyone’s got something to puke. The things we puke: flights of stairs, a skyscraper soaring from the gut, the bills blow by on the April breeze followed by flurries of razor blades in May. It’s true, a free life is made of words. You can crumple it, toss it in the trash, or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining a permanent address in the sky. The postman hands you your flight of birds persisting in the original shape of wind. Whether they’re winging toward the scissors’ V or printed and plastered on every wall or bound and trussed, bamboo frames wound with wire or sentenced to death by fire you are, first and always, ash. Broken wire, a hurricane at each end. Fire trucks scream across the earth. But this blaze is a thing of the air. Raise your glass higher, toss it up and away. Few know this kind of dizzy glee: an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.
From Daddy sprung my inborn ribaldry. His crudeness destined me to be the same. A seedlet, flowered from a shitty heap, I came, the crowning glory of his aim. From Mother I inherited ennui, The leg irons of the queendom I once rattled. But I won’t let such chains imprison me. And there is just no telling what this brat’ll...! This marriage thing? We snub our nose at it. What’s pearl turns piss, what’s classy breeds what’s smutty. But like it? Lump it? Neither’s exigent. And I’m the end result of all that fucking. Do what you will! This world’s your oyster, Pet. But be forewarned. The sea might drown you yet.
Sei allem Abschied voran: half a line from Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus as my motto, I rehearsed my elegiac art (“be in advance of all parting”) and won, I thought, with each song deeper, until I stood before the keeper in whom I’ve come to recognize myself.
I had heard the story before about the two prisoners, alone in the same cell, and one gives the other lessons in a language. Day after day, the pupil studies hard—what else does he have to do?—and year after year they practice, waiting for the hour of release. They tackle the nouns, the cases, and genders, the rules for imperatives and conjugations, but near the end of his sentence, the teacher suddenly dies and only the pupil goes back through the gate and into the open world. He travels to the country of his new language, fluent, and full of hope. Yet when he arrives he finds that the language he speaks is not the language that is spoken. He has learned a language one other person knew—its inventor, his cell-mate and teacher. And then the other evening, I heard the story again. This time the teacher was Gombrowicz, the pupil was his wife. She had dreamed of learning Polish and, hour after hour, for years on end, Gombrowicz had been willing to teach her a Polish that does not and never did exist. The man who told the story would like to marry his girlfriend. They love to read in bed and betweenthem speak three languages. They laughed—at the wife, at Gombrowicz, it wasn’tclear, and I wasn’t sure that they themselves knew what was funny. I wondered why the man had told the story, and thought of the tricks enclosure can play. A nod, or silence, another nod, consent—or not, as a cloud drifts beyond the scene and the two stand pointing in different directions at the very same empty sky. Even so, there was something else about the story, like teaching a stunt to an animal—a four-legged creature might prance on two legs or a two-legged creature might fall onto four. I remembered, then, the miscarriage, and before that the months of waiting: like baskets filled with bright shapes, the imagination run wild. And then what arrived:the event that was nothing, a mistaken idea, a scrap of charred cloth, the enormous present folding over the future, like a wave overtaking a grain of sand. There was a myth I once knew about twins who spoke a private language, though one spoke only the truth and the other only lies. The savior gets mixed up with the traitor, but the traitor stays as true to himself as a god. All night the rain falls here, falls there,and the creatures dream, or drown, in the lair.
Some days I am happy to be no oneThe shifting grasses In the May winds are miraculous enoughAs they ripple through the meadow of lupineThe field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven& do you see that boy with his arms raised Like one of Raphael’s angels held withinThis hush & this pause & the sky’s lapis expanse?That boy is my son & I am his only fatherEven when I am no one
I saw my mother standing there below meOn the narrow bank just looking out over the riverLooking at something just beyond the taut middle rope Of the braided swirling currentsThen she looked up quite suddenly to the far bankWhere the densely twined limbs of the cypressTwisted violently toward the storm-struck skyThere are some things we know before we knowAlso some things we wish we would not ever knowEven if as children we already knew & soStanding above her on that bridge that shuddered Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings I knew I could never even fate willing ever Get to her in time
They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,  Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm. They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,  Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm. I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream,  And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this? They said, my poets, singers of my song,  We cannot tell, since all we tell you is But history, we speak but of the dead.  And of the dead they said such history (Their beards were blazing with the truth of it)  As made of much of me a mystery.
It was as if a flower bloomed as ifIts muttering root and stem had suddenly spoken,Uttering on the air a poem of summer,The rose the utterance of its root and stem.Thus her beautiful face, the crippled girl’s,Was like the poem spoken by her body—The richness of that face!—most generousIn what it keeps, giving in its having.The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields,Petal on petal, telling its own silence,Her beauty saying from its thorny stalkThat what it is is kept as it is given.
You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us.You are what’s fallen from those fatal boughs.Where will we go when they send us away from here?
The unclean spirits cry out in the body Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment— Nobody witnessing could possibly know the event  That cast upon her the spell of this enchantment. Almost all the guests are under some kind of enchantment:  Of being poor day after day in the same body; Of being witness still to some obscene event; Of listening all the time to somebody’s voice Whispering in the ear things divine or unclean, In the quotidian of unending torment. One has to keep thinking there was some source of torment,  Something that happened someplace else, unclean.  One has to keep talking in a reasonable voice About things done, say, by a father’s body To or upon the body of Ellen, in enchantment Helpless, still by the unforgotten event Enchanted, still in the old forgotten event A prisoner of love, filthy Ellen in her torment,  Guest Ellen in the dining hall in her body, Hands beating the air in her enchantment,  Sitting alone, gabbling in her garbled voice  The narrative of the spirits of the unclean. She is wholly the possessed one of the unclean. Maybe the spirits came from the river. The enchantment  Entered her, maybe, in the Northeast Kingdom. The torment,  A thing of the waters, gratuitous event, Came up out of the waters and entered her body And lived in her in torment and cried out in her voice. It speaks itself over and over again in her voice,  Cursing maybe or not a familiar obscene event  Or only the pure event of original enchantment  From the birth of the river waters, the pure unclean  Rising from the source of things, in a figure of torment  Seeking out Ellen, finding its home in her poor body. Her body witness is, so also is her voice,  Of torment coming from unknown event; Unclean is the nature and name of the enchantment.
Having been blown awayby a bookI am in the gutterat the end of the streetin little pieceslike the alphabet(mother do not worryletters are not fleshthough there’s meaning in thembut not when they are meanmy letters to you were meanI found them after you diedand read them and tore them upand fed them to the windthank you for intrudingI love you now leave)Also at the end of the streetthere is a magnolia treethe white kindthat tattersafter it bloomsso the tree winds upin the streetOur naked shivering bodiesmust be at some distancemissing us come backcome back they crycome homeput down that bookwhenever you readyou drift away on a raftyou like your parrotmore than you like meand stuff like that(dear fatheryou always were a borebut I loved you morethan interesting thingsand in your honorI’ve felt the same about myselfand everyone I’ve ever met)I like to read in tree houseswhenever I can which is seldomand sometimes neverThe book that blew me awayheld all the problemsof the worldand those of being aliveunder my nosebut I felt far away from themat the same timereading is like that(I am sorry I did notgo to your funeralbut like you saidon the phonean insect cannot crawlto China)Here at the end of the streetthe insects go on livingunder the domeof the pacific skyIf Mary and Josephhad walked the sixty milesto Bethlehem verticallythey would have foundthemselves floatingin the outer pitch of spaceit would have been coldno innsa long nightin the dark endlessand when they began to crythe whole world would thinksomething had just been bornI like to read into thingsas I am continually borne forwardin time by the winds like the snow(dear sisteryou were perfect in every waylike a babyplease tell brotherthe only reasonwe never spokewas out of our great lovefor each otherwhich made a big windthat blew us apart)I think I am coming backI feel shoulderswhere a parrot could landthough a tree would beas good a place as anyYou cannot teach a tree to talkTrees can say it is springbut not though bright sunlightcan also be very sadhave you noticed?
Women who lie alone at midnightbecause there is no one else to lie toWomen who lie alone at midnightat noon in the laundromatdestroying their own socksWomen who lie alone at midnight:Hans Brinker, or The Silver SkatesWomen who lie alone at midnightas the first furl of starlightpearls the moon with nacreWomen who lie alone at midnightsending a postcard bearingthe face of a bawling infantwho cries “I am for the new”Women who lie alone at midnightreciting the names of shoesWomen who lie alone at midnightspurting unjustified tears,the kind that run sidewaysnever reaching the mouth,the kind you cannot swallowWomen who lie alone at midnightsinging breast away the burden of my tenderand afterwards burpWomen who lie alone at midnightobeying the laws of physicsWomen who let their dreams curl at the endWomen in a monastery of flamingosWomen who die alone at midnightcontributing to the end, to lost time, to the rain and flies,seeing the bird they saw trapped in the airportsurviving by the water fountainWhat’s more, try it sometimeIt works
God put his finger on my sacrumand he lifted me, he set mein the center of the universe,the curious desireof my chronically lonely life.It was cold and dark and lonelyand I was scared.There were no accessories.I burst into tears over nothing.What would Jimmy Schuyler do?wwjsd?And as quietly as the sound of Kleenexbeing pulled from a box,I sneezed.And morning, that goddess,as if she were slightly deaf,barely lifted her head off the horizonbefore laying back down.And a rose opened her portalsand the scent ran up an elephant’s trunk,or tried to.Such a long way for everything to travel!From here I look like a front moving inAn icy purple lighta poet would say belonged to a perfume stopperbelonging to his mother.When it was her nipple.You know, neither in the pastor in the future.
When we talk about when to tell the kids,we are so together, so concentrated.I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’mthe killer”—taking my wrist—he says,holding it. He is sitting on the couch, the old indigo chintz around him, rich as a night sea with jellies, I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,as if within some chamber of matedness,some dust I carry around me. Tonight,to breathe its Magellanic field is lesspainful, maybe because he is drinkinga wine grown where I was born—fog,eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’msharing the glass with him. “Don’t catchmy cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you wantto catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love himall my life. He says he loves meas the mother of our children, and new troupesof tears mount to the acrobat platformsof my ducts and do their burning leaps.Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for amoment, I imagine a flurryof tears like a whirra of knives thrownat a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nodto it, it is my hope.
I hunted heaven for him. No dice. Too uppity, it was. Not enough music, or dark dirt. I begged the earth empty of him. Death believes in us whether we believe or not. For a long while I watch the sound of a boy bouncing a ball down the block take its time to reach me. Father, find me when you want. I’ll wait.
Wisdom is a kindly spirit but does it love me? And righteousness? There’s nothing in it. To poetry I leave my senses, my deregulation, custodial duties, and to be a janitor is a great consolation. It gave me my mother back through all her years. To love these children, so full of neurons and consciousness. What joy to clean up and put a shine on their mess. To my mother I leave my veil, my wing, the window and time. I, artifact. In this age the hand is a voice. I leave the voice, the wonder, the mirror, and my lens, bent and beholden to the worm, leaf-work in wrought iron, eerie illuminations and deep-sea vision. I’ve seen the Eurostar, the drunken boat, and Davy Jones’ Locker. I’ve seen Spanish galleons and the H.S. Mauberley covered in brine. There is this line from cloud dander to the solo bulb of mourning, a string through common prayer. I like it when the gray-green shadows suddenly dayglo over the rushes. The wind in my head. To write is an equal and opposite reaction my comrade, communard, my friendo. What is it finally thinking what in winter’s dusty alcove, the body tocks. The day was cloudy. The light muddy, dreary when they took it down. To Times Roman I give my stammer, my sullenness, my new world violence, form and all that, forms, and all that paper, gusts. Little buttress.  I send love and weapons to everyone possessed with night visions. When those green lights flash and blink, is that it? When the “it” continues strangely for a bit, then falls into a line, is it over? I quantified daily the wonder in the grain. I found I was over and singular yet many, the many and the singular, the many and the evolutionary, the many in the grain. Many more. Who in hell am I writing for? This vision is silly, teenage, and mine, a spot on the negative, a hole in composition. I quantify, I loaf, I wonder, I find, I rev.  Here the days’ mud, night is a satellite, and anger, my cleft, my birthmark and star. Anger might be a better way to say “I love you,” truer than “how are you in space”? Are you cold, can I get you a blanket? To the polestar I leave my alien regalia, my off-world headdress. I leave acoustic forms in time, blooming, sudsy, inconsolable. If you are unsatisfied, then welcome.  Here there are people working every corner of every inch of grass. The meticulously arranged outside reminds me of ocean and feels old. In space the letterforms “I love” oscillate in waves. I lose myself in waves speaking the half of me that forgot to say “goodbye” when I meant to say “how come.” Memory continues to bloom. More songs about death and dying, songs of inexperience. More songs about being and loss, being in loss, more songs about seeing and feeling. If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misunderstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever. To mercy I leave whatever.
For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers, green roses, chrysanthemums, lilies: retrophilia, philocaly, philomath, sarcophilous—all this love,of the past, of beauty, of knowledge, of flesh; this iscatalogue & counter: philalethist, negrophile, neophile.A negro man walks down the street, taps Newportout against a brick wall & stares at you. Love that: lygophilia, lithophilous. Be amongst stones,amongst darkness. We are glass house. Philopornist,philotechnical. Why not worship the demimonde?Love that—a corner room, whatever is not there, all the clutter you keep secret. Palaeophile,ornithophilous: you, antiquarian, pollinated by birds.All this a way to dream green rose petals on the bed you love; petrophilous, stigmatophilia: live near rocks, tattoo hurt;for you topophilia: what place do you love? All these words for love (for you), all these ways to say believe in symphily, to say let us live near each other.
προσέλθετε For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon
The birdhouse made from a gourd is wiredto a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast postof the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was,for a thong of leather to hang it by, which long ago broke—are now the fingerholes of the mournful wind instrument it’s become.The broad round bowl of it makes a sort of birdlybasso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post,the floor joists and walls in two notes: a slightly sharp Dand an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner,which explains why all my thinking these daysis in B-flat, a difficult key for all but the clarinetand this sudden covey of nuthatches, whose collective woemakes it a minor chord I am in the middle of.Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the luffof limbs and needles suggests, and sail on,the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chatteringlike a gull, and the mountain’s last drift of snowresembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging,Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-gooand doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers,by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdnessof the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once,this nowhere we shall not be returning from.Draw the lines! Assume the crow’s nest, Pip. This shipsails on music and wind, and away with birds.
Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goateeand informed the seven of us in his chargehis name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a manhe never knew, had been possessed,as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humorand a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.As we should also always remember to call himonly by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,least of all with the title “Mister” attached,which would remind him of that same most hated fatherand plunge him therefore into a moodhe could not promise he would, he said, “behave appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job,unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,this meant not only beer cans and bottles,all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but alsothe occasional condom too, as well as the festeringroadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry,or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tarwith a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossedinto the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselvesrode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard incrementsthen we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloadedour tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident,in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailerwe marveled at and strangely envied, since every inchof wall we could see through the open doorwas plastered with fold-outs and pagesfrom every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazinehe had ever found among the wreckage there.Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yardsof his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22from the rack beside his door and poppedwith amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rackto dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hidecoat we could see, come the fall, except for school.As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathomand Lucy had no use for, on the truck’s dashall that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,a tome he said he’d read already eleven times,this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,it might have had to do with something like the galleryStump’s trailer contained, the first word of its titlemeaning something to us, the last nothing at all.There were things about men we might beunable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shadewith Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.The town we came from was sinking into the emptinessof a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,and rats were more common than haresand universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenanceof rats the very earth offered up like a plague,the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox,seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire.Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam,one, after medical school, would hang himselffrom a beam in his parents’ basement, the othersmerely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory.Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stumpwould spend his last twenty years in prison,having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slugthrough the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away, balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer,arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump,whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itselfeven before the trial, and who, no doubt, by somecourt-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself,was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown countryof a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers,in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense,that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.
For Andrew O’Hagan Three moons in the skythe night they found himdrowned in Sawtan’s Bog;just his cap, sitting thereand his wee fat hands poking out.It was no loss to the village, I told them next morning,and the villagers agreed. Horn-daft, he was,havering and glaikitand scaring the children.I mind that timehe picked up a mouseand ate it, quick, in two mouthfuls;set the tail asideon the groundlike a cocktail stick.I used her well, after that,his Jennie,still in her widow’s weeds,gilping into herwhenever I could,in the barn or the boathouseor off in the fields.She slipped two or three out at least,and sank each one in a lobster creel.Her head was awayby the end, as mad as her manand no good to me.She sleeps now under Beinn Ruadhainn, her face covered in ivy, scab, and sticky-willow.The dreams came then.Last night, the burning loch, so full of bairnsthey bobbed to the surface with their hair on fire;black snow; fingers coming through the floorboards;rain like razor blades;the foosty-faced man, there at every corner,hands furred with grey-mould.And her, as always, star-naked, hatchingin the herring-nets.The last I remember was my body being drivenwith sticks through the townto Sawtan’s Brae, and hanged.I broke from sleep and sat up sweating, dream-fleyed in the dark.I groped around for the matchesand the matches were put in my hand.
Stop belonging to me so much, face-head.Leave me to my child and my flowers.I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that.It’s like having ten dogs on a single leadand no talent for creatures.No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s.Don’t you have a place to go, face-head? Deep into the brick basement of another life? To kill some time, I mean. That furnace light could take a shine to you. There are always places, none of them mine. And always time—rainbow sugar show of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky—but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply. “Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it. All those prodigal particles, flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment of glitches. The chorus just more us. But nowhere bare and slippery have I got a prayer. If I had two hands to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.
When you show yourself to the woman you love, you don’t know your fearis not fear, itself. You have never been good,but now you are so good,who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skinthat bathes the world for you,or her face, captured like a she-lionin your own flesh?This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring upon ring of wedding, the kindthat doesn’t clink upon contact, the kindwith no contract,the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light. Cloud covers and lifts, and sleep and night and soon enough, love’sbig fire laughs at a terrible burn, but only (only!) because pain absorbs excess joy and you shouldn’t flaunt your treasures in front of all day’s eyes.
I am dreaming of a house just like this onebut larger and opener to the trees, nighterthan day and higher than noon, and you,visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icymilk or hot tea or whatever it is you like. For each night is a long drink in a short glass. A drink of blacksound water, such a rush and fall of lonesome no form can contain it.And if it isn’t night yet, though I seem to recall that it is, then it is not for everyone.Did you receive my invitation? It is not for everyone. Please come to my houselit by leaf light. It’s like a book with brightpages filled with flocks and glens and grovesand overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyrin whom the fish is also cooked. A book that took too long to read but minutes to unread—that is—to forget. Strange are the pages thus. Nothing but the hope of company.I made too much pie in expectation. I was hoping to sit with you in a tree house in a nightgown in a real way. Did you receivemy invitation? Written in haste, before leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed.An idea like a storm cloud that does not spillor arrive but moves silently in a direction. Like a dark book in a long life with a vaguehope in a wood house with an open door.
Her wattled fingers can’tstroke the keys with muchgrace or assurance anymore,and the tempo is alwaysrubato, halting, but stillthat sound—notes quiveringand clear in their singularity,filing down the hallway—aches with pure intention, themelody somehow prettieras a remnant thanwhatever it used to be.
Now he has silver in him. When sometimeDeath shall boil down unnecessary fatTo reach the nub of our identity, When in the run of crimeThe skull is rifled for the gold in teeth,And chemistry has eaten from the spineSuperfluous life and vigor, why then heWill show a richness to be wondered at, And shall be thought a mineWhose claim and stake are stone and floral wreath.The body burns away, and burning givesLight to the eye and moisture to the lipAnd warmth to our desires, but it burns Whatever body livesInto extinction though it wear a plateOf armor in it: therefore do we thriveIn fear of fire, in terror of the shipThat carries us to fire. A soldier learns To bear the silver weightWhere in his head the fire is most alive.
Night, the fat serpent, slipped among the plants,Intent upon the apples of his eyes;A heavy bandoleer hung like a prizeAround his neck, and tropical red antsMounted his body, and he heard advance,Little by little, the thin female criesOf mortar shells. He thought of Paradise.Such is the vision that extremity grants.In the clean brightness of magnesiumFlares, there were seven angels by a tree.Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubtThey were not really from Elysium.And his flesh opened like a peony,Red at the heart, white petals furling out.
I would invoke that manWho chipped for all posterity an ass (The one that Jesus rode)Out of hard stone, and set its either wingAmong the wings of the most saintly clanOn Chartres Cathedral, and that it might sing The praise to all who pass Of its unearthly load,Hung from its neck a harp-like instrument. I would invoke that man To aid my argument. The ass smiles on us all,Being astonished that an ass might rise To such sure eminenceNot merely among asses but mankind,Simpers, almost, upon the western wallIn praise of folly, who midst sow and kine, Saw with its foolish eyes Gold, Myrrh, and FrankincenseEnter the stable door, against all odds. The ass smiles on us all. Our butt at last is God’s. That man is but an ass—More perfectly, that ass is but a man Who struggles to describeOur rich, contingent and substantial worldIn ideal signs: the dunged and pagan grass,Misted in summer, or the mother-of-pearled Home of the bachelor-clam. A cold and toothless tribeHas he for brothers, who would coldly think. That man is but an ass Who smells not his own stink. For all his abstract styleSpeaks not to our humanity, and shows Neither the purityOf heaven, nor the impurity beneath,And cannot see the feasted crocodileRinged with St. Francis’ birds to pick its teeth, Nor can his thought disclose To normal intimacy,Siamese twins, the double-beasted back, For all his abstract style Utters our chiefest lack. Despite his abstract style,Pickerel will dawdle in their summer pools Lit by the flitteringsOf light dashing the gusty surfaces,Or lie suspended among shades of bileAnd lime in fluent shift, for all he says. And all the grey-haired mules, Simple and neuter things,Will bray hosannas, blessing harp and wing. For all his abstract style, The ass will learn to sing.
The work has been going forward with the greatest difficulty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more difficult than it has ever been before.– From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome.Hardly enough for me that the pail of water Alive with the wrinkling light Brings clearness home and whiterThan mind conceives the walls mature to white,Or that the washed tomatoes whose name is given To love fulfill their bowl And the Roman sea is wovenTogether by threading fish and made most whole.I delight in each of these, delight moreover In the dark skill of those hands Closer to wise than cleverOf our blind Italian landlady who standsHer shoes fouled with the lustful blood of rabbit Lightly dispatched and dressed Fixing it to the gibbetOf the clothesline where the laundry sails to rest.These textures solicit of us our instant homage But are disparate senseless things Unless a reigning imageBring them to purpose as your presence bringsThe world in offering, like a chaplet worn In Aphrodite’s name, The furious unicornCome to the virgin’s lap tethered and tame.And thus it is as you stand in this morning’s shadows Where ancient chamber pots Are grown to little meadowsOf mint and parsley; surely it’s love unknotsThe winds for Ulysses and recalls to man A summer without cease; Sprung from the same dishpanOnion and lily work their primal peace.
My dear, your eyes are weary;Rest them a little while.Assume the languid postureOf pleasure mixed with guile.Outside the talkative fountainContinues night and dayRepeating my warm passionIn whatever it has to say. The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears.Thus your soul ignitedBy pleasure’s lusts and needsSprays into heaven’s reachesAnd dreams of fiery deeds.Then it brims over, dying, And languorous, apart,Drains down some slope and entersThe dark well of my heart. The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears.O you, whom night enhances,How sweet here at your breastsTo hear the eternal sadnessOf water that never rests.O moon, o singing fountain,O leaf-thronged night above,You are the faultless mirrorsOf my sweet, bitter love. The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears.
“Dark and amusing he is, this handsome gallant, Of chamois-polished charm,Athlete and dancer of uncommon talent— Is there cause for alarmIn his smooth demeanor, the proud tilt of his chin, This cavaliere servente, this Harlequin?“Gentle and kindly this other, ardent but shy, With an intelligenceWho would not glory to be guided by— And would it not make senseTo trust in someone so devoted, so Worshipful as this tender, pale Pierrot?“Since both of them delight, if I must choose I win a matchless mate,But by that very winning choice I lose— I pause, I hesitate,Putting decision off,” says Columbine,“And while I hesitate, they both are mine.”
For Nathan Gebert  IThe chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew.I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan. In her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House, right off Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida,I began my story—it was an interview, much of life is an interview.She said I did not need to pay her, but donations,yes, donations were appreciated:they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelopethat she could take back to the cloister.She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper.She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife.My meetings with her went on for a few years.I had come to speak about Durell.I did not know how to end sentences about Durell.He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror? What? There were so many ways to end my sentence.He was an unlikely candidate for so many things.Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer.I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact, but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own,which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly.Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things.Sister Ann’s face was open, fragile—parts were chipped like on a recovered fresco.Above her gray head, a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene,the colors off, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading— the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity.There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame.It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples,one named Cleopas, the other anonymous, forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them, the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger. They were on their way to that town, Emmaus,seven miles out from Jerusalem,gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing—they argued about whether to believe what they had seen;they were restless, back and forth the debate went—when there is estrangement there is little peace. ii
The field blank in snow. But I mean this page.Now print mars the surface to make surfaceSeen. Sheen only error brings. Perfect rageSo the sun rises. Rage is your slow practiceThat makes of every day another dayIn whose gathering promise the shy sparrowsShiver instead of sing. I want to go away.See these footsteps? These black shapes in the snow?If there is a word for them, it’s no word I know. Pursuit?, no. Proof?, no. Don’t call it fear.Could I cross this white sheet if I were coward,Edge to edge, margin to margin, neverReferring to anything outside itself?—Stop that. Stop pointing to the photo on the shelf.
To make beauty out of pain, it damns the eyes—No, dams the eyes. See how they overflow?No damns them, damns them, and so they cry.What shape can I swallow to make me whole?Baby’s bird-shaped block, blue-painted woodThat fits in the bird-hole of the painted wood box?The skeleton leaf? The skeleton key? LoudKnock when the shape won’t unlock any locks.I hear it through the static in the baby’s roomWhen the monitor clicks on and off, soundOf sea-ice cracking against the jagged sea-rocks,Laughing gull in the gale. What is it dives downPast sight, down there dark with the other blocks?It can’t be seen, only heard. A kind of curse,This kind curse. Forgive me. Blessing that hurts.
The holes havealmost left the sky and the blanksthe paths—thepatches next tonatural, corroboratedby the incidentalsounds of practicalactivities and crows,themselves exhibitingmany of the earmarksof the actual. Thismust have happenedmany times before,we must suppose.Almost a pulseif we could speedit up: the repeatedseeking of our severalsenses toward eachother, fibers trying toreach across the gapas fast as possible,following a blast.
We say pinhole. A pin hole of light. Wecan’t imagine how bright more of it could be, the waythis muchdefeats night.It almostisn’t fair,whoever poked this, with such a small act to vanquishblackness.
Lynette, the stars are kerned so far apart—Through a herniated zodiac I almost see your waled skylanes, your shocked Capricorn and Cancer.In the hundred and two years since you were born, and the sixteen since your heart failed, and the nearly sixty since you gave up poetry, it seems we can’t navigate by the same star chart.I’d like to think we were fated to work the same coracle: you steering with one hand, grasping your corner of the seine while I grasp mine; together sweeping the weirs.Lynette saw the sky made wide-waled corduroy by the flight paths of fighter jets.Corde du roi—“Cloth of the king.”(“A baseless assertion,” states the oed.)A fireman from the Midlands nfs said the raids on Swansea were worse than on Birmingham, where a ten-year-old Roy Fisher gaped at the garden where his cousins were slaughtered, and later wrote, It was like a burst pod filled with clay.Last night, Lynette, my son thought he saw his father in the jumbo jet roaring over Cherryhurst: the weather softer, flight paths altered.Three weeks now his father gone. •Insofar as Moses came to in a coracle, it wasn’t a Welsh one-off; it wasn’t a hapax of vessels.Insofar as it’s kind of a kiddie boat, not a kayak, not the royal barge the Makah sent William Blake, aka Johnny Depp, with into the northern Pacific; not even the Viking ship, its carved prow like an uncial; insofar as it is calico wrapped up in tar, insofar as it is swaddled willow whippets. •“Pastoral ding-dong is out,” Lynette wrote, and no wonder— bombs hidden on the glossy knolls. In the sorrel. In the tormentil.I thought she was perhaps the closest I could get to my grandmother.While Lynette was writing “Displaced Persons”— Neither from the frosted leaf nor from The grey hard ground could they find Relief
He was cleaning leaves for one at a timewas what he needed and a minute before the twobrown poodles walked by he looked at the stripped-down treesfrom one more point of view and thought they werepart of a system in which the dappled was foreignfor he had arrived at his own conclusion and that wasfor him a relief even if he was separated,even if his hands were frozen,even if the wind knocked him down,even if his cat went into her helpless modeinside the green and sheltering Japanese yew tree.
Having outlived Allen I am the one who has to suffer New York all by myself and eat my soup alone in Poland althoughsometimes I sit with Linda he met in Berkeleyor San Francisco when he met Jack, the breadjust coarse enough, the noodles soft but notthin and wasted, and not too salty the way theChinese further down sometimes make them, thename still on my mind whatever the reason formystery, or avoidance, though rat Netanyahuand pig that swings from a needle or lives in somehuge incubator, they do darkness where therewas light, the name hates them, the namein hiding, the name with a beard, and Linda sheloves the name though she invokes her Christas Jack her lover and tormentor did andtaught her to do though it is too easy, that,it troubles me but what can I say, what should Isay while we walk north on the right hand side,past the pork store and the hardware store, me lecturingon Logos (my God) and what not Hebrews and Greekswhere Allen and I once kissed, Jack in the sun now.
Where we could be boys together. This region of want:the campestrial flat. The adolescents roving across the plat.Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither.Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttesthat mammillate the valley right where it needs to bust. And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me on the inflorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles;upon the grassland’s raffish plaits. And he could roll mein coyote brush: I who was banished to the barrencould come back into his fold, and Iwould let him lay me down on the cold, cold ground.Clouds, above, lenticular, the spreading fundament, a glorious breech among the thunderheadsand in their midst, a great white heron magnifies the day. We’d keep together, he and I,and we’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursueeach other through the crush of darkling rifts.Climb into each other’s precipitous coombes.Where would it end, this brush and bush, this bromeand blazing star? There is always some new wayto flex a limb and find its secret drupe.Not only the hope of nature; the nature of hope:so long as culverts carry us, so long as we stay ripeto one another’s lips, and welcoming to hands,as long as we extend our spans, to tangle them, as spinning insects do their glistered floss.This is not a time to think the trumpet vine is sullen.Rather: the trumpet’s bell is but a prelude.It says we all are beautiful at least once.And, if you’d watch over me, we can be beautiful again.
The mask? Because we were never uglyenough. Because our ugliness was epic.Because we were given to it, because we were so misgiven. You wear one. Iwear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had themfabricated, poured out in gold and beaten.Most wore them to the grave. In Mexicothe living wear them, not to scare the deadaway, but as invitation. They leave candyon the mounds of those they mourn. NewOrleans? Women wear them in orderto bare everything else. Men wear themin order to watch. I can remember, backbefore it all grows grim, making oneout of the news, trying to paste it together. I remember my mother helping me. I don’t really remember my father. Somethinglike a face, like the man in the moon.I understand we’re hardwired this way,to make faces before anything else.It’s why we see the Madonna in mold,alien architecture in Martian crater creep.We keep looking for those first faces, firstfamilia. Every culture, every eon. Witness the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, onehundred seventy centuries gone. They call him Sorcerer. They call me Knight.We have always lived in the dark.
Suffer as in allow.List as in want.Listless as in transcendingdesire, or not risingto greet it.To listis to lean,dangerously,to one side.Have you forgotten?Spentas in exhausted.
1What do we like bestabout ourselves?Our inabilityto be content.We might see thisrestlessnessas a chipnot yet cashed in. 2You appear because you’re lonelymaybe. You would not say that.You come to tell meyou’re saving moneyby cooking for yourself.You’ve figured outwhat units you’ll needto exchange for unitsif you intendI know I mustn’tinterrupt 3Hectic and flexible,flamesare idealnew bodies for us!
No longer if we’ll get cancer but when, the doctor said. Now questions accrete around the irritant like pearl: Not when but how? Not how but whom? And then why. And then why not. I take a can of ashes to the beach and empty them into the wind. Outside the trash man collects bottles like a miser rattling his jewels, tossing them onto the growing heap.
The pond is sheathed in ice, a duck troubles the reeds, the air around us still enough to hear the baby stir, but we don’t know where it is yet. By the force of our longing it is getting made for us, as thrilled people, palms full of seed, long for the chickadees to light, and they do. Light.
I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal, silver fur agleam against the sand like a coin thrown down in a losing bet. What left this bounty of meat on the beach to rot? I watched the neighbor’s small boys skirt the dead seal the way sandpipers tease themselves in the surf, dodging up and back along the body’s shore. “It’s dead,” I told their father as he ambled behind them up the beach. He called to the little boys, his voice borne toward them on the mild breeze. “Boys, come back,” he said, and they did not.
I used to love the run-up to a storm, watching from the porch as the grown-ups hurried to bring things in, my mother rummaging through drawers for a flashlight, cursing: nothing was where it was supposed to be in our house. It can’t be so, but the only people I ever remember huddled in the basement were my mother and me, suspended in that eerie half-light like bats. We’ve just spent a week like this, my mother perched in a chair above the water keeping watch for the next bad thing. We were happy so sometimes she’d let the vigil rest, the sentry of her shoulders easing to a more receptive pose, a quarter moon, until something called her back to the watch, mother first no longer but this white, foremost light. You can read by it. You can see.
Avoid adjectives of scale.Dandelion broth instead of duck soup.Don’t even think you’ve seen a meadow, ever.The minor adjustments in our equationsstill indicate the universe is insane,when it laughs a silk dress comes out its mouthbut we never put it on. Put it on.Cry often and while asleep.If it’s raw, forge it in fire.That’s not a mountain, that’s crumble.If it’s fire, swallow.The heart of a scarecrow isn’t geometrical.That’s not a diamond, it’s salt.That’s not the sky but it’s not your fault.My dragon may be your neurotoxin.Your electrocardiogram may be my fortune cookie.Once an angel has made an annunciation,it’s impossible to tell him he has the wrong address.Moonlight has its own befuddlements.The rest of us can wear the wolf mask if we wantor look like reflections wandered off.Eventually armor, eventually sunk.You wanted love and expected what?A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star?The moment you were born—you have to trust others because you weren’t there.Ditto death.The strongest gift I was ever givenwas made of twigs.It didn’t matter which way it broke.
A momentary rupture to the vision: the wavering limbs of a birch fashionthe fluttering hem of the deity’s garment, the cooling cup of coffee the ocean the deitywaltzes across. This is enough—but sometimesthe deity’s heady ta-da coaxes the cherries in our mental slot machine to line up, andour brains summon flickering silver like salmon spawning a river; the jury decidesin our favor, and we’re free to see, for now. A flaw swells from the facets of a day, increasingthe day’s value; a freakish postage stamp mailsour envelope outside time; hairy, claw-likemagnolia buds bloom from bare branches; and the deity pops up again like a girl from a giant cake. O deity: you transfixing transgressor,translating back and forth on the borderwithout a passport. Fleeing revolutions of same-old simultaneous boredom and boredom, we hoard epiphanies under the bed, stuff them in jars and bury them in the backyard; we cram our closet with sunrise; prop up our feet and drink gallons of wow!; we visit the doctor because all this is raising the blood’s levels of c
—not pen. It’s gotthat same silken dust about it, doesn’t it, that same sense of having been roughed onto paper even as it was planned. It had to be a laborof love. It must’vetaken its author sometime, some shove. I’ll bet it felt goodin the hand—the o
For John Hollander Although it’s likely you’re on your ownat this moment in this city of three millionreading the poems of Traherne,and there was no one till you lit your lamp,the kingdom of childhood keeps being foundedin his voice and his seeing,which are a sort of birth. A birth goes onin the dark of a poor family, or a mother alone.Then comes the small bright circle of the faces:lover pores over sleeping loved one, parent over childin their enclosure we name home,a hut in the plain so bare there’s not a tongueof grass to make the wind hiss. Unknownto the world a world exists:trees and streams, birds all the colors of the flowers.So Traherne pours over youhis wild remembrance of the world to come. And wouldeven in the silence of his bookif it were lost and lay unopenedtwo hundred years. Even if he had diedbefore he sang the Eden in his look.
we all got tickets to The Truthfinally we thought finally when the curtain fell awayour indrawn breaths could be heardeven in the next theater even the gasp of the mime who had slipped in among usa loud whushing like reams of litterwhirling upward in a galehands shot to mouths and mouths fell open I couldn’t say withinhow many seconds all our minds shut some slamming others just a click like 300 parallelrows of tipped dominoes a racket of almost unisonbelieve me we wouldn’t have resisted anything but the truthso instantly and universallyyet we sat there and waited for something elsewhich you could say we also got if you count the mime’sunpleasant remarkso she wasn’t even a real mimeprobably part of what was clearly just a performance
You don’t need a machine to do that.A plastic bag will do. But he built it,his tools cast about in the unitwhile he got up his nerve to use it.Nothing more was stored there.A poured cement floor, a triple-locked doorafter door after door down a corridor reeking with the odor of everything over.In heretofore phrases, he left a noteoutlining his Help! in argotso wrought it was hopeless to ferret outhis intent, meant or not.A ball-peen hammer was all she had.The shards cut her. What else had he hid?At least, she cried, he’d thought ahead.He drove home instead.
How gloriousis this strange muscle in my mouth.Child’s tease, lips’ balm, baton of speechunless it’s tied.What’s forgotten is on the tip.Sides slip out the truth. The rootis how far a kiss can go.One can lose it when guilty.Be lashed by another’s.Feel it twisting over rooky woods and wordlesshear it swinging in a bell, sliding through a grooveor placed firmly in a cheek. Beware itshould be held most often for most oftena forked one has no friend.
All this havocjust means I’m a poor wizard.Once, I lit three twigs and fanned the smoke,from miles away,into the girl who jumbled scales through my spine.As she vanished I clapped a delighted tune.But not without aches of my own.Did the sack of no echoes fail me?Now, on such a mild curse—boils, sewn eyes, a shrewin the loin my ankle reddens up and eyes mewith disdain. Toenails fall off.How far will this go?Poor wizard. Poorly done in.These pangs are power are power as bothknees lock upashamed to move under me.
Whatever the cost I pay up at the minnow pools.I don’t know anything of the misery of these trapped fish,or the failure of the marsh I’m so hidden.Up above is the island with its few houses facingthe ocean God walks with anyone there. I oftenslosh through the low tide to a sisterunattached to causeways.It’s where deer mate then lead their youngby my house to fields, again up above me.Pray for me. Like myself be lost.An amulet under your chest, a green sign of the firstrose you ever saw, the first shore.Then I wash my horse, dogs, me behind the barn.Only the narrow way leads home.
The philosopher David Lewis spun a fantasy of two omniscient gods who know about one world, which might as well be ours. Each knows precisely all there is to know, the grand “totality of facts, not things.” Each knows the pattern of the light on each neglected leaf millennia ago. Each knows the number of the stars, their ages, all the distances between them, all the “things too tiny to be remembered in recorded history—the backfiring of a bus/In a Paris street in 1932,” as well as all the things that history distorts or just can’t see, like the thought that must have flashed across Patroklos’s mind (if he’d existed and had had a mind—the middle knowledge of the schoolmen) when Hektor split his stomach with a spear (if he’d existed too). Each one looks on, as though through ordinary eyes, as “Mme Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist and as infantile as St George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the quivering steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered over the ground,” and sees “the gray ‘toppers’ of old” the gentlemen strolling with her wore, the little “woolen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge feathers” that she wore (or would have worn if they and she’d been real). Each monitors the photons through the slits, the slow decay of radium, and knows the ratio of vermouth to gin in someone’s first martini at Larre’s. Each knows what Darragh, Geoff and Willy knew before the bullet or the pavement killed their worlds, and where the shots came from in Dallas. Each knows precisely what the other knows, in all the senses of those words, and if a question has a factual answer, each can answer it. Yet there’s a question neither can resolve: which god am I?The question posits both a world and a unique perspective on that world, which neither has. And if gods One and Two could reify themselves by wondering who or what they were, they’d have to know the answer—and, because they don’t, they can’t. Could gods like those be real, in something like the sense that you and I are real? But then, what sense is that? Gods One and Two are you and I writ large: I wander out into the day and feel the sunlight on my face. I see the sunlight on the first spring leaves like green foam on the trees, and so do you. The world we have in common, that the gods can comprehend in its entirety, remains beyond my grasp, and yours. The world I know belongs entirely to me, as yours belongs entirely to you. I know my world completely, as the gods know ours, because it’s nothing but my take on things, and starts and ends with me. I’m both the author and the captive of my world, because my take on things is all there is to me. When Mary, in Frank Jackson’s philosophical diversion, wanders from her room of black and white and shades of gray and finally sees a rose, and then goes on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, and drinks coffee, and talks for hours, it’s hard to see how all of this (as she might say) could be an artifact of her perspective. But it is.So what? Philosophers tell stories, but they make them up, and what are they to me? Sometimes I think I’m humoring myself (a good thing I suppose) with an extended exercise in nonsense. Have breakfast, have a cup of strong black common sense, get over it, I tell myself, refuting Berkeley with my foot. Instead of this entanglement of self with self, why can’t I just relax into my place inside the natural order, be a thing within the solid scheme of things, a Dane in Denmark? How can fantasies, unreal by definition, show me what I am, and know? How can the poetry of possibilities dissolve the prose of facts? My little life sustains me while it can, and that’s enough. It may be all contingent, but it’s real, and when catastrophes occur, as they inevitably do, I’d rather they occur to me, instead of writing them away, or redefining happiness or sorrow or tranquility as alterations of some abstract point of view that points at nothing. Inescapable illusions must be real, or might as well be real, no matter where reflection on them leads; and if accepting them means taking things on faith, that’s fine. Who wants to be a posit, or a site of possibilities? Who wants to walk out and evaporate into this green spring day? Who wants to have sex with a wraith?No matter where reflection on them leads. It leads, of course, to me. A cri de coeur is not an argument, but where the real argument begins. Hopkins: “searching nature I taste self at one tankard, that of my own being.” Kant: “the feeling of an existence without the least concept,” meaning that despite the certainty I have, I’ve no idea what I really am, or where, and as for “searching nature,” I have no idea even where to start. These matters mean the world to me, and yet no matter how I try to come to grips with them, they slip away. I and here and now are ever present, yet they vanish in the act of apprehension, as a poem turns into language as you write it down. Dimensionless, atemporal, imprisoned in the present—even as I say them to myself the words fall short of what I thought I started out to say, like the conclusion of an argument too close to me to share, or like an empty thought balloon that hangs above me in the air. It’s not the question of what makes me who I am through time—of how a figure in a photograph from 1985, a couple sitting in the garden of the small Hôtel des Marronniers just off the rue Jacob, could be the person who remembers her and thinks of him today—but of what constitutes me now, and of what made me then. If giving it a name won’t help, then neither will pretending it’s divine. If I should be supplanted by a bright recording angel knowing everything about me in the way the gods know all about their world, I wouldn’t have survived. She takes the whole thing in—the house on Maxim Street, the bike rides down the hill on Wabash Street, my high school friends, their friends, the friends of friends of friends—with eyes that monitor my back, my face, the traces in my brain projected on a screen, the n degrees of separation linking me to nearly everyone who’s ever lived, a thing within a wilderness of things, with each one locked inside a universe with no outside, of which there’s nothing she can see. How could it be an afterlife? It’s just a different life, another life, complete or incomplete as anyone’s, consumed by questions that elude it, not because she can’t remember, but because the words that make them up are undefined: which one of them was I? which world was mine?
At the Oriental Institute, Chicago They redid King Tut splendid, once stone-huge as this yet his wife’s feet tiny, the only thing of her nowlow, next to him. A few toes, some of the rest, a bit of ankle, that’s itin the shade of her husband’s looming, massive looking straight ahead into the future where we live and can’teye-to-eye, where to stare at himis to suffer warbler neck, head back and upà la the high just-leafing-out trees as bright bitswing their blinkand hide. Little wife, such small feet, the thought dwarfs the king as ache, as what is ever left of us and oh, I like her better.
When the moon’s worn scutcheon touches the flint-gray flood,I will lave him in foxglove and vetch until the bloodof his wretched heart heals.Without a scar, he stood—as the men make their way into the quaking wood.
For Julie If I could tie a river around my love’s waist like ribbon, make sails out of her bloodand pin down death like a squirming bug.If I could lift and rock each coffin in my arms I would start with hers.
When Ronnie’s husband stepped out of the showerShe spotted bite marks on his buttocksI was so listlessI wished the dog could talk
Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks(for a is the color of fleet,b is the color of war and demolition,c is the color of echo and blur,&c.) and builta bricolage:So cab was a whirring warbler.bach was the Spanish Armada crashing and crashing.And enoch he couldn’t describe.And when it reached the height of Enoch,standing, he tore whole tonguesdown to their colors.
Women asleep. Carlight,east red and west white.Women, and men made of them,and lambs in their droves, and power lines eastto the women-made men and women of men,when a man is a sumof what women he knows, and I blurred my vision till Isaw a woman and lambs in the streets,west red and white east,and I wanted to eat. Women and men,don’t fear me, I am a hand come to wake her. Red in the west sayswoman is man is woman is man.
A field of thistles, díscharging concentric waves of negative theology, on a mountainside, 2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide),would certainlysuffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not enough sought state of subtle shock if he’d close this computer and walk up the summit road until the sea’s in view. And maybe in the southeast wind, in broadcast waveform data therein, microsystems stocks he has beenchecking, clicking all day like an addict gambler, will float up until red numbers cross the black horizon into green—two redtail hawks float up on a thermal—maybe even make some money while you’re up here—ask why is each second so charged with a feeling of living in freakGötterdämmerung daysof live free radical notion or die into negative white on white sun prideburning away, but equally charged with utopian headlong longevity crowing—why can’t I be steady? Why is my only balance built of collisions and cancelings-out of such sharp spike-of-chaos moods?Field of thistles, red and green. Fields of dollars, thistles, solidi and yen and rand and rupees blowing off the curve of land.
Raking laceat the fringe of the tide,raking with fingersthe English and cutworkand French of the froth,with the negative blackdwarf sun in her eye echoeye mirror eye, she, taking his fingers, English and Hebrew bones, bobbin bones, to lace with her own,said love, if you like,but abyss of light.
But you made everydelicate, elegant wrist& glistening ankle.But you made thembeautifulin braided rope& dime store gold. But you made everynecklace clasp.But you made themcaress the napelike an errant windafter a shower. But you made everyeyelash erotic. Everysingle strand of hairsoft.But you made themfrom dust & bone.Made every glorious singing thigh. Everybutton nose.But you made themwith holes—wide opento the faintest hintsof saltin a sea breeze, saltin the sweaty mouthof a navel, saltin the blood, sweetin every wrong way.
Then there was the time I looked directly into the face of the life I thought I was missing, of love. I used to think to be not alone meant never having to walk through the high wheat or struggle in the water. Not having to decide notto fling from some height.Once, the two of us rode one bicycle.I wore a straw hat and perched on the handlebars and beside us the sea oats swayed like skirts and I heard a trilling in the crabgrass. The sidewalks were bleached as Grecian stoneas we rode past the fish shop smelling of morning—salt, bread, limes, men.Riding in front, it was such that I could not be heard always, at least not the first timefor you pedaled into the wind and my hair was a ribbon in your eyes.I said I thought bougainvillea was a stoic plant and then had to say twice, no, stoic! and then no, the bougainvillea! and then you said easily it was nothing like that at all. But our future was clear enough when I asked if you saw the clean aprons of those men (how much longer you think until they clean the fish? did you see how white those aprons were? did you see?)
Since I was the one who had been ill, it was me she came to see.Everyone wanted a glimpse of her.The people emerged from their houses toward mine and with such caution. They made a visor of their hands.It was as if they were to be accounted for,wading the long uphill, little moving triangles all I could distinguish at first.But the queen came to see only me and I saw her. And my life for a while was dismissedand so repaired.
In the road, a dog. Days dead, that dog. Liliana was walking beside me awhile (I am sure) and I was almost not crying but then found what I was looking for. She heaved it for me—all of it, the stench, the weight—in her thin arms until it was too much. Tired, she dragged the thing by its wasted paws all the way home. Her dress was stained. This is how I learned about love. She did not mind at all the silent, steady distance I placed between us.
This was more like the atmospherehad been pinched, whose chirp was an unexpected gust in a harmonium enough to break all that high horse talkthat curdles the atmosphere. While centaursate grass and hurdled epitaphs, that chirp in the midst did change one of us. 'Twas clawed out in a feeling’s flock'Twas 'couraged by the tall grass
Whose table is that, left on three legs?If there’s been a mistake, it may be in assuming less vulnerability as one fills the vase—whose buoyant comfort exaggerates at the sight of his own proffered, sympathetic hand, striking him so cleanin comparisongloved white, magician—for a sec he even sees the calla lily’s furlin the gesture of voilà!
Tennessee: We are here, between trees, with the tempo of a rosary being strungin a queue of escalating beads—Carolina: It’s not quite the count inthe countinghouse of my chestbut the heart does make an awful attemptt: and a circle wherever it may be there was music coming onc: which though machinery-like moves not in cogs, and neversprings, but waves throught: like wired applause for antic backstagebuds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it fadesc: but only after the chorus has pulsedt: it drops off with sudden decision, like fountainwater gone drossc: or it reaches the furthest pointthe branch turns from us, and is for some arc fully quiet...t: until the roulette snaps its jaw and the choir’scircuit opens to onec: like a pigeon unhinged, its wingsin sudden white-rumped ascentt: unopposed by iridescencec: unopposed by iridescence
Peace fell on the dim lands a sort of abstractionThe metronome counted one petal after anotherSo the petals fell as or in some musicThis song needs no breath just an apparitionWith a mouth open and eyes and eyesThe wet smear of eyes beneath pink Petals in excess of the window frame’s bright Yellow square and yes spring gathers right nowThe moisture from my breath up into clouds Whose downpour makes of the plum tree in blossomA diminishing crowd for which the natural symbolRefuses to exist a plain blue gem on a pinFaces glowing within the stone like flowers Within the stone like flaws the mind turns inwardTurns inward its tangle of wet black boughsA knot pulled tight so tight it ceases to be A knot yes I’ll say it a knot that becomes angelicAnother example everywhere seen of the angelicGears toothless and without cogs a sort of mistThat turns the other gear by drifting through itAs just now through my eye drifts that stormBattered tree whose broken-petal pocked barkAsks of me a question my mouth can’t speak Like a river that dives underground just thereThere where the animals thirst the mostA desert fox say or say a toad or let’s speak more simplyAbout a plum which bursts through its own explosionInto being and hangs there so ponderouslyAs if as if not concerned with innocence orGravity or other acute angles as they evaporateInto this poem O no am I speaking again again aboutdim lands these dim dim lands of of peace
For T.S. Whose hands touched, first, the headof the penis, the shaft?And was it soft or shale? More rockthan clay.And who pinched firstinto their place the small cups at the base of the ass? Who was itgot down there, on whose knees,and blew— and was that passionor panic, the machine that drovethose exhalations? —and howcould we rate the power of thatbreath—breeze or gale or a whisperlike the song the little boy singsto the beetle, whose small legs moved in tune like his legs, the legs on that first body, must havemoved, if they did move, when the dust settled.In my mind everything’s become enormous.But was it ever small like that, the first body?Did it ever sit close to the ants and their pilesof dirt from which that body had come?You were a small boy once, I suppose.You were dirty from the start. You showed me how to use a cock ring,and why. How, without ever paying for a room, to spend two weeks in any city.How two men could fuck and continue to face each otherdirectly —took my body and showed me,my back on a table, my knees by my head. Stretched me into seeing you were more than a dog.You must be dead by now, though I don’t knowwhose hands prepared you. Whose fingersfingered, for the final time,all that dark and kinky hair?If the first body was made of dirt,in order to plumb the hollow of that first throat, whose thumb first lodged inside the hingeof that first mouth to force it open?To make the tongue, so it could work,who shoved inside that mouththe shit of a hundred thousand worms?
IFrom the false summit, coxcomb-cum-arête,cool thermals underscore our frailties,past edges where our wingless feet are set and the long look down dilutes the evergreens.As sandstone ends, the world of ghosts begins—they sometimes rise up still in dreams, my love.With one hand firm, I step onto the skinof the abyss, embracing what’s aboveand severing spent ties to the scree below. The filtered light turns lichen eerie green,ushering in a world we hardly know,at least not one we’re sure we’ve ever seenjust so, each climber brand new in his skin,no longer mired in waiting to begin. ii
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey And short the season, first rubythroatin the fading lilacs, alyssum in bloom,a honeybee bumbling in the bleeding hearton my gelding’s grave while beetles swarm him underground. Wet feet, wet cuffs,little flecks of buttercup on my sneaker toes,bluets, violets crowding out the tuftsof rich new grass the horses noseand nibble like sleepwalkers held fast—brittle beauty—might this be the last?
Make your strokes thus: the horizontal:as a cloud that slowly drifts across the horizon;the vertical: as an ancient but strong vine stem;the dot: a falling rock;and learn to master the sheep leg, the tiger’s claw,an apricot kernel, a dewdrop, the new moon,the wave rising and falling
Three years, Huang Gongwang worked on his famous handscroll,Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.
It is pleasant, very pleasant, to sit at a wooden boothsurrounded by parrots, wheels, right-turning conch shells,the victory banner and the endless knot,the lotus, the treasure vase, the golden fishes—is this not so? Is it not pleasantto sip Tsingtao beer, or Zhujiang, or Yanjing,and tap your fingers on the bamboo mats?After we’ve drunk enough, there will be Buddhist Delight,Mongolian beef side dishes, a whole host of sauces,even some pizza and chicken wings if children are present,as well as the small ice-cream machine, lotus paste, pears,smiles and bows all around. It is pleasant, is it not,to linger outside the door that opens to the parking lotof this small strip mall beside this secondary roadand look upon the scattered cars all come to rest herelike boats in China, floating on a quiet evening tide.
What every painter knows, but most others forgetis how bright colors dim in artificial lightand lobster tastes most freshthe nearer to deathyou set your teeth into the lobster’s flesh.
Greed got in the way. We built a fake estate.Levinas said to see ourselves we need each other yetdoorbells, rows of them, glow in the night villagea string of lit invitations no elbow has leaned into(both arms embracing messages). Unansweredthe doors are rotting from the bottom up.It’s another perplexing pothole in our road, loves.Hard core from the quarry might make it level,hard core and cunning speculation into mattersconcerning love and doubt, concerning want and plenty.O the places where pavement runs out and ragwortsprings up, where Lindenwood ends but doesn’t abutanywhere neatly, a petered-out plot of Tayto tumbleweeds, bin bags, rebar, roof slates, offcuts,guttering, drain grilles, doodads, infill, gravel!A not-as-yet nice establishment, possessing potentialwhere we have no authorized voice but are oddly fittedout for the pain it takes to build bit by bit.When the last contractions brought us to the brinkof our new predicament, we became developers.
The Shannon when it washesthe shoreline in the wakeof a cruiser susurrusesexactly like the Polishlanguage you hear in lidlon Friday evenings, 7 pmpayday. That’s whatGerry says. •The river surface offersspace to the song:hammer taps of Latviansand Poles nailing planksof a deck. The placebetween water and skyholding sound. It is under-loved and an amphitheater. •Latvians and Lithuaniansare nailing planksof grooved decking.It will be a nice featureof that riverside property. Their tap-tappingunderscores the distancebetween this side and that. •Winter gales have made swift workof the billboard proclaiming42 luxury bungalows only tworemaining
When I boarded the plane, everyone looked like Uncle Tomruddy, some were empurpledgray hair or auburn in terrier thatchespale blue of eyea smidgen of resignation:the tribe.I thought We are driving to the interiorI thought holy godthe airline upholsterywas Yeats, Kavanagh and Heaneyhandwriting. I thoughtholy shit, this is the maw.The maw.
Why does Mama wear Indira’s red and green earrings? A jinx is the inverse of Jewish artichoke; kinship is the transverse of no opinion coke. Flambé is the reverse of Papa’s poker chips; touché to the universe of acquiescent lips. For the same reason she wears silent Nehru jacket, holy Nehru jacket.
“So,” she said, sipping tea from a Chinese oxblood cup,“did anything good happen because of your divorce?”“Well, my emotional palette is wider now. It includescolors like,” I paused... “like that.” I pointed to the cup. In southeast Winnemucca bypass Route 7 connects two segments of Route 2 I love you and is resigned as Route 2 although Route 7 is never erotically part of Route 2.“Quite a price to pay for a palette. But I heard Munch’sjust went for $750,000 at Sotheby’s in London.”“I heard that too. I think he used a color like oxbloodwhen he painted The Scream. I’m in better shape.”
I smell the blood of low-definition attorneys.I smell the blood of low-definition attorneys.
Polyester is raised up on column 4 then joined or depressed on joint 3 on Saturday Albert reduced wigmakers to minuscule wages with his merry song which is glued to aluminum arm 2 then slides into elevated leg post 1.
Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think?Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think?Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think?
I’m honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein. —President George W. Bush, Washington DC, May 25, 2004 “Just ask yourself,” we said back in those days,“Is this world better off without Saddam Hussein?”Now that’s a simple question. Just ask yourself.It turned up starkly, undeniablyAs that left hand inside the trench Marines were diggingAt the prison turned “facility.” That was one day’s headlined excavation.Meanwhile, the relics from the tell near NasiriyahWere looted from the National Museum.Is our world better off without Saddam Hussein, who had cut off so many other hands?Our own president had grateful thousandsOn hand to honor him, give him a hand In DC on the birthday of the Sage of Concord.In other words, though, is this world better offWithout those who have made it better off?It’s a bit of a riddle, really, how to tell,But each old hand among us has a hunch.Is our world better off without Bobby E. Beasely?Michael Yury Tarlavsky? Craig W. Cherry?Yadir G. Reynoso? Joshua I. Bunch?These soldiers’ names graced the obituaryPage that day in the LA Times. It’s archived. Check it.But what can we tell from a name? Or measlyObit? Ask yourself. —Well, more than a bitOf obit is in the name Tobit, but just whatTobit of Nineveh—praised for preparingFor righteous burial the Judahites Who fell in war against Assyria,And blessed with a devoted son who saved him—What Tobit could now have to do with us,Not even our extravagant friend Emerson—Though wait! Emer? Cuchulain’s perfect mate, Worked hand in hand with him, possessor of The six great gifts of womanhood, from needleworkThrough chastity to sweet words and gentle speech?—Perhaps not even Emerson could tell, Who lauded nature’s “rounds” and scorned the divisive “line,”Its “bounds of good and ill,” and praised perverseReturns (“Evil will bless, and ice will burn”),And who would have turned 199That day in the merry month of Jumada al-awwalWhen Bush addressed that brave unnamed Baghdadi.—Raymond J. Faulstich, Jr., Kane M. Funke.—What names people have! Stephen I. Yenser!What monikers, what handles for their children.—Daniel Lee Galvan...Anyway, without them, mind you,We’d still have that butcher Saddam Hussein.—Wait! With them, you mean, we’d still have Saddam?—Well, it can be perplexing when it’s put like that.—Bemusing. Like the sound of one hand clapping.—Or one hand washing itself. Is our world betterOff without Roberto Abad? —Abad, Roberto:What kind of name is that, in any case? Middle Eastern? And where’s the middle initial?To tell him from his father, of course. A typo? For Bad,Roberto A.? “Good is a good doctor,But Bad is sometimes better” (Emerson)?Or W, where Emerson and Bush dovetail?—It seems Roberto got his girlfriend pregnantIn spite of the “Campaign for Children and Families”Between Iraqi tours in case he didn’t come backFrom his second, which of course he didn’t,Not for a second, even, to glimpse his son,Whose name we are not told. Hussein, perhaps—or George.
I have never arrivedinto a new life yet.Have you?Do you find the squeakof boots on snowexcruciating?Have you heard peoplesay, It wasn’t me,when they accomplisheda great feat?I have, often.But rarely. • Possibilityis one of the elements.It keeps things going.The ferrywith its ratty engineand exactitude at chugginginto blocks and chains.Returning as everto mother’s houseunder a salty rain.Slave up, slave down.
Infinite nestingpushes all mattertowards emptiness:child-nodes,tree-droppingswith a root element of null.None is always includedin every clusterof children.Nothing in nothingprepares us.Yet a fresh light was shed on immortalityfor me climbing the stairsfirm foot first.Everything was in the banister:crows on branches, crickets,architects, handsaws and democrats.Red moon at 3 am.
I want to leave this placeunremembered.The gas stove is leakingand the door of the refrigeratorstained with rust.The mugs are uglyand there are only two forks.The walls are blackand soft, the bed a balloonof night-clothing.The stairwell slopedto a dragger’s pace.There are big windowswith blind-slats dustyand gray. Street life goes all night and at dawnfreedmen shout and laugh outside the kitchen.Where does life begin and end?In the lamb or the cotton?My pillow is my friend.
For Arthur Russell All that glitters isn’t music.Once, hidden in tall grass, I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:doe after doe of leaping. You said it was nothing but a trick of the light. Gold curves. Gold scarves. Am I not your animal?You’d wait in the orchard for hours to watch a deerbreak from the shadows.You said it was like lifting a cello out of its black case.
Less lonely, less . . . I gave you a tiny box. You lifted the lid, praised the usefulness of my gift: a silver pin shaped like an amper-sand. As you fastened it to your lapel, I thought again of that motel outside of Chicago. ¿Te acuerdas?I sat on the edge of a bench, untied my shoes. Face down, eyes shut, you breathed inthe aroma of sweat & allspice coming off the sheets. I tossed my ring—gold, inscribed—toward a pile of clothes. But the ring dropped in the small of your back where it rattled & rattled like a coin in a beggar’s cup.
I never glimpse her but she goesWho had been basking in the sun,Her links of chain mail one by oneAglint with pewter, bronze and rose.I never see her lying coiledAtop the garden step, or underA dark leaf, unless I blunderAnd by some motion she is foiled.Too late I notice as she passesZither of chromatic scale—I only ever see her tailQuicksilver into tall grasses.I know her only by her flowing,By her glamour disappearingInto shadow as I’m nearing—I only recognize her going.
Not, this time, to inferbut to wait you outbetween regret and parking lotsomewhere in the day like a dareSalt grime and the foodcarts’rising steam, at Prospect St. a goshawkhuge and aloof, picking at something,nested in twigs and police tapefor a while we allheld our phones upIt is relentless, the suddennessof every other song, creature, neighboras though this life would prove youonly by turning into itself
Turn left off Henry onto Middagh Street to see our famous firehouse, home of Engine 205 andHook & Ladder 118 and home also to the mythic painting “Fire under the Bridge” decoratingthe corrugated sliding door. The painting depicts a giant American flag wrinkled by wind and dwarfing the famous Brooklyn Bridge as it stretches as best it can to get a purchaseon Manhattan. In the distance a few dismal towers and beyond the towers still another river. A little deal table holds a tiny American flag—like the one Foreman held as he bowed toreceive gold at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City—; this actual flag is rooted in a can of hothouseroses going brown at the edges and beginning to shed. There’s a metal collection box bearing the names of those lost during the recent burnings. Should you stop to shake the box— which is noneof your business—you’ll hear only a whisper. Perhaps the donations are all hush money,ones, fives, tens, twenties, or more likely there are IOUs and the heart of Brooklyn has gone cold from so much asking. Down the block and across the street, a mansleeps on the sidewalk, an ordinary man, somehow utterly spent, he sleeps through all the usual sounds of a Brooklyn noon. Beside him a dog, a terrier, its muzzle restingon crossed paws, its brown eyes wide and intelligent. Between man and dog sitsa take-out coffee cup meant to receive, next to it a picture of Jesus— actually a digital, color photograph of the Lord in his prime, robed and though bearded impossibly young and athletic, and— as always—alone. “Give what you can,” says a hand-lettered cardboard sign to all who pass. If you stand there long enoughwithout giving or receiving the shabby, little terrier will close his eyes. If you standthere long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally witha starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name.
No pitying/“Ah” for this one —Alan Shapiro No, nor a fierce hurrahfor what it does without choice,for following the lightfor the same reason the light follows it.Just a thing rough to the touch, a facelike a thousand ticks turning their backs,suckling at something you can’t see,and a body like a tag off the earthso that my child hands couldn’t tear it outfrom the overgrown lot next door. My palms raw with the shockof quills and spines. Its hold like spite, and uglyexcept when seen from a distance—a whole field of them by the highway,an 80-mile-per-hour view like a camera’s flash.All of them like haloswithout saints to weigh them down.
Ignorance will carry me through the last days,the blistering cities, over briny riversswarming with jellyfish, as once my fathercarried me from the car up the tacked carpetto the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.
I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloatIn the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.My father had one job from high school till he got fired at thirty. The year was 1947 and his boss, planning to run for mayor, Wanted to hire an Italian veteran, he explained, putting itIn plain English. I was seven years old, my sister was two. The barbarian tribes in the woods were so savage the Empire Had to conquer them to protect and clear its perimeter.So into the woods Rome sent out missions of civilizing Governors and invaders to establish schools, courts, garrisons:Soldiers, clerks, officials, citizens with their household slaves.Years or decades or entire lives were spent out in the hinterlands—Which might be good places to retire on a government pension,Especially if in those work-years you had acquired a native wife.Often I get these things wrong or at best mixed up but I doFeel piety toward those persistent mixed families in Gaul,Britain, Thrace. When I die may I take my place in the wedgeWidening and churning in the mortal ocean of years of souls.As I get it, the Roman colonizing and mixing, the intricate ImperialProcesses of enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitableFucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and birthsAs developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupledWith the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, theyNeeded to swap, blend and improvise languages—couplesEspecially needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess— Roman, barbarian—I find that Creole work more glorious than God.The way it happened, the school sent around a notice: anybodyInterested in becoming an apprentice optician, raise your hand.It was the Great Depression, anything about a job sounded good toMilford Pinsky, who told me he thought it meant a kind of dentistry.Anyway, he was bored sitting in study hall, so he raised his hand,And he got the job as was his destiny—full-time, once he graduated.Joe Schiavone was the veteran who took the job, not a bad guy,Dr. Vineburg did get elected mayor, Joe worked for him for years.At the bank an Episcopalian named John Smock, whose family ownedA piece of the bank, had played sports with Milford. He gave him a smallLoan with no collateral, so he opened his own shop, grinding lensesAnd selling glasses: as his mother-in-law said, “almost a Professional.”Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing. Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat,I imagine, and made loans or change. Pinsky like “Tex” or “Brooklyn” Is a name nobody would have if they were still in that same place: Those names all signify someone who’s been away from home a while. Schiavone means “a Slav.” Milford is a variant on the names of poets—Milton, Herbert, Sidney—certain immigrants gave their offspring. Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place.
Tulips panted against the wall. So much need to feed a crisp stem
How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wanderthe halls of the skull with the fluorescentssoftly flickering. It rests on the headlike a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinseland awkward as soon as one stops to look.That pile of fallen leaves drifting fromthe brain to the fingertip burned on the stove, to the grooves in that man’s voice as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves of books with moonlit opossumsand Chevrolets easing down the roads of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet itself is a swarm, a pulse with noindigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo. Our compacted galaxy, its constellations trembling like flies caught in a spider web, until we die, and then the fliesbuzz away—while another accidental coherence counts to three to pass the time or notes the berries on the bittersweet vinestrewn in the spruces, red pebbles droppedin the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds a fraying map from the pocket of the day.
Thank you whoever tuned the radioto rain, thank you who spilledthe strong-willed wine for notbeing me so I’m not to blame. I’m gladI’m not that broken tree althoughit looks sublime. And glad I’m not taking a test and running out of time.What’s a tetrahedron anyway? What’sthe sublime, 3,483 divided by 9,the tenth amendment, the ferryman’s nameon the River Styx? We’re all missingmore and more tricks, losing our grips,guilty of crimes we didn’t commit.The horse rears and races then moves no more,the sports coupe grinds to a stop, beginninga new life as rot, beaten to shit, Whitmangrass stain, consciousness swamp gas,the bones and brain, protoplasm and liver,ground down like stones in a river. Or doesthe heart’s cinder wash up as delta frothout of which hops frog spawn, dog song,the next rhyming grind, next kid literati?Maybe the world’s just a bubble, all philosophy ants in a muddle,an engine inside an elk’s skull on a pole.Maybe an angel’s long overdue and we’reall in trouble. Meanwhile thanks whoeverfor the dial turned to green downpour, thanksfor feathery conniptions at the seashoreand moth-minded, match-flash breath.Thank you for whatever’s left.
That we await a blessed hope, & that we will be struckWith great fear, like a baby taken into the night, that every boot,Every improvised explosive, Talon & Hornet, Molotov & rubber-coated bullet, every unexploded cluster bomblet, Every Kevlar & suicide vest & unpiloted drone raining fire On wedding parties will be burned as fuel in the dark season. That we will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God, The constant wakefulness of God, alongside the sweet scalp Of God, the contented murmur of God, the limb-twitched dream-Reaching of God. We’re dizzy in every departure, limb-lost. We cannot sleep in the wake of God, & God will not sleep The infant dream for long. We lift the blinds, look out into inkFor light. My God, my God, open the spine binding our sight.
The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyedis not big and is not small.Big and small arecomparative categories, and to whatcould the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed be compared?Consciousness observes and is appeased.The soul scrambles across the screes.The soul,like the square root of minus 1,is an impossibility that has its uses.
My father’s been dead for thirty yearsbut when he appears behind my shoulderoffering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pridein something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledownor tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world—“Albie, grip in the middle and turnwith a steady pressure”—it’s measurable,if not the way the wind is in a sock,or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the wayan absence sometimes does, and I listen to himwith a care I never exhibited when he was a presence,alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pelletsand radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negativecapability”—the phrase of course is Keats’s,from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred timesa day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrianversion of early maritime cartography: the known worldstops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writesHere There Be Monsters and then illustrates their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breathwith a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t wasteon inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t thinkof a polar bear!”...the game one playswith a child. But I say with adult certainty thatwhen Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to strippinghe couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yetthose empty hours in his mind were populated justas unbearably—and indeed, yes, therewere monsters in that void, and the vigilant bearsof insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behindhis eyes each night until her return. For Keats,however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic isa positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable“dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agencyor sugar daddy powering the universe in allits spangled beauty and veiled mysteryfrom behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of uswere mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf.“Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from timeto time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, withhis nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said“I tried to support it by not going in.”
The mourning dovewearing noon’s aureolecoos from the rhododendron,oo-waoh, shadow o- ver what to do. Oh.And the sad rhetoric spreadsthrough suburb and wood.Those who hear dove moan love no querulous warbling more—the going hence about which is there no- thing to do? From no small rip in fatethe you you never shall bemore will be extracted.Dove knows the rubricand starts in, who, who is next and soon?
for my mother They are fleeting.They are fragile.They requirelittle water.They’ll surprise you.They’ll remind youthat they aren’tand they are you.
The sunlight almost unfaceable, and weightless,and the gravities, wind-flickers, shadows, the rippedblack places crows make on the phone poles—how to keep your own counsel,even against the little stabs, the winds and chromes— •Various flashes, the office door, a supper glass, a lastsmear of streetlight on the bedsheets.Nothing. On into the soaring, black release. •The messages say syllabus and vetting thatand will be absent. Nothing.On into the what? the air you’re gliding onor falling from, the wind of it makingahs and salves in the hollow of your chest,Celina of a bodily sibilance like willows, of the shimmering, midsummer glance.You would allow yourself a message.How to make it low-key. How to keep it to a few lines. •On into the wind of whatever is happening.What leashes you seems to have come undone.You lean down into the white heap of black words.You pad out toward the water fountaininto someone’s eyeshadowed look, the lush backwash of her skirt.You weigh maybe three or fourounces, swirling down the stairwellin whichever wind this is, your ribsaching with what theysing so shamelessly.
the froth of noisethe undersides of the cedars make,the windblown dark that hintsand fails for hours at effacement—maybe I could claim it isn’tpraying, but it’s asking,at the least, beggingthat these lungfuls of this blacknesseat whatever keeps on swellingand collapsing in my chest, and be donewith it, no more noiseleft hanging in the spacesbetween brake lights than a smothered rushthat sounds like sufferingand is nothing. Instead a sobbing isn’tso much easing from my throatas shining like black light from my torso,veining the leaves of weeds, stoningthe whole roadside in a halo—I can feelthe heat of truck lights on my back,I’m inside that brilliant gravity,I think of time, I’m in the driver’snightmare and it shudders by—
After Stevens By now the snow is easingthe live nerves of the wire fenceand the firs, softening the distances it falls through,laying down a rightness, as in the spackled whites,the woodgrains of a room’s hush before music,before a lush legato in whose unctionsthe excruciations ease, as in the firstthick arrhythmics from the hardwoods of the late quartets,whose dense snow of emotion, downdrifting,formal, whose violins and cellos,desiring the exhilarations of changes, turn loose an infusionof wintry music, all sideslip and immense descent,repetitions, evolutionssalving down into the still air, the wound,the listening.
up a little,” he says,shutting the rusted tailgate,“maybe at least leandown from your high horse and look busy,” picking uphis work gloves and his spade.“You’re not the onlyhick on the clockwith an education,” he says, half-laughing, half-wheezing,and spits, his bottom lip bulgingwith a load of Skoal,“even if you do think pretty highlyof your poetry.”
The deer racing across a fieldof the same clay and tallowcolor they are—if they are:or are they tricks of the light?—must feel themselves being pouredand pouring through life. We’re not builtbut become: trembling columnsof apprehension that rippleand pass those ripples to and frowith the world that shakes around us—it too is something pouredand ceaselessly pouring itself. February shakes the fieldsand trembles in each yellow willow. •The violin’s back is not veneer—the strummed wood shudders together.Undivided by cautioneach note is its own first thought.My first thought’s a kind of prayerthat I might resonate entire—sometimes it’s such a meager portionshaking a little, as if it ought...Every day, the same desireto push myself through the doorthat leads to some bright place,brighter than the concert platform,where the whole self echoes together—the outer to the inner pleasure. •Everything runs together—the light smells of spring,the unreasonable brightnessof this peg, this sheet, this line tetheringlinen between sky and mud as if the garden marked a pausein that eternal returnwhose looping trace is the bloodhissing through the ventricles.What gives you life’s the thing that kills.
After it came in like a dark birdOut of the snow, barely whistlingThe notes father, mother, child,It was hard to say what made us happiest. Seeing the branches where it had learnedTo stir the air? The air that openedWithout fear? Just the branchesAnd us in a room of wild things? Like a shapeless flame, it flewA dozen times around the room.And, in a wink, a dozen more.Into the wall, the window, the door. You said the world turns to parts.You said the parts are cunning spheres.You said you always love the face of sin.You said it’s here, the lips and eyes and skin. Outside the snow deepenedWith heaves of discontent.Inside, the tremor of our lifeFlew in and in and in.
i thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest. Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.ii No more noisy, loud words from me, such is my master’s will. Hence-forth I deal in whispers. The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song. Men hasten to the King’s market. All the buyers and sellers are there. But I have my untimely leave in the middle of the day, in the thick of work.Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though it is not their time, and let the midday bees strike up their lazy hum.Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him, and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless inconsequence!iii On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange smell in the south wind.That vague fragrance made my heart ache with longing, and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.iv  By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love, which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free. Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou are not seen.If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart—thy love for me still waits for my love.v  I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away to find in the very next moment its consolation in the left one.vi Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well. Oh, thou beautiful, there in the nest it is thy love that encloses the soul with colors and sounds and odors. There comes the morning with the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth. And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest. But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor color, and never never a word. Originally appeared in the December 1912 issue of Poetry magazine.
Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh dayMay break with dazzling light to these sick eyes.Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen,That time may find its sound again, and cleanseWhatever it is that a wound remembersAfter the healing ends.Originally appeared in the October 1947 issue of Poetry magazine.
Let it come down: these thicknesses of airhave long enough walled love away from love;stillness has hardened until words despairof their high leaps and kisses shut themselvesback into wishing. Crippled lovers lieagainst a weather which holds out on them,waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry,some screaming cat that smells a sacrificeand spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips,syllable by monotonous syllable,that wash away the sullen griefs of loveand drown out knowledge of an ancient war—o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain,let love be brought to ignorance again.Originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Poetry magazine.
Lullee, lullay,I could not love thee moreIf thou wast Christ the King.Now tell me, how did Mary knowThat in her womb should sleep and growThe Lord of everything?Lullee, lullay,An angel stood with herWho said: “That which doth stirLike summer in thy sideShall save the world from sin.Then stable, hall, and innShall cherish Christmas-tide.”Lullee, lullay,And so it was that Day.And did she love Him moreBecause an angel cameTo prophesy His name?Ah no, not so,She could not love Him more,But loved Him just the same.Lullee, lullay. Originally appeared in the December 1938 issue of Poetry magazine.
This timeless blood was here before begat. Infinity runs in your veins— Not mine, nor yours, Nor Eve’s, not Adam’s— Gat of God, And spinning like taffy Godwards back again.Sapped through the centuries to us— Grafting a limb there for the Jesse tree— Remultiplied infinitely, From heart to heart tick-pulsed, Ill clad, ill fed, ill fit— Here, child, do what you can with it.Originally appeared in the July 1968 issue of Poetry magazine.
I am God—Without one friend,Alone in my purityWorld without end.Below me young loversTread the sweet ground—But I am God—I cannot come down.Spring!Life is love!Love is life only!Better to be humanThan God—and lonely.Originally appeared in the October 1931 issue of Poetry magazine.
Blesssomething smallbut infiniteand quiet.There are sensesmake an objectin their simplefeeling for one.Originally appeared in the February 1966 issue of Poetry magazine.
Asters—sweltering days old adjuration/curse, the gods hold the balance for an uncertain hour. Once more the golden flocks of heaven, the light, the trim— what is the ancient process hatching under its dying wings? Once more the yearned-for, the intoxication, the rose of you— summer leaned in the doorway watching the swallows— one more presentiment where certainty is not hard to come by: wing tips brush the face of the waters, swallows sip speed and night.
Renege on the rock! Smash the oppressor cave! Sashay out onto the floor! Scorn the cornices— see, from the beard of drunk Silenus from the unique uproar of his blood the wine dribble into his genitals! Spit on the obsession with pillars: ancient rheumatic hands quake toward gray skies. Bring down the temple by the yearning of your knees twitching with dance. Spill, spread, unpetal, bleed your soft flowers through great wounds. Dove-hauled Venus girds her loins with roses— see the summer’s last puff of blue drift on seas of asters to distant pine-brown coasts; see this final hour of our mendacious southern happiness  held aloft.
I You don’t need always to be scrubbing the tiles, Hendrickje, my eye drinks itself, drinks itself to death— but other drink is in short supply— the little Buddha there, Chinese grove god in exchange for a ladleful of Hulstkamp, please! Never painted anything in frost-white or ice-skater blue or that Irish green in which the purple shimmers through— always my own monotone, my compulsion to shadows— not pleasant to pursue that path so clearly. Greatness—where? I pick up the slate-pencil and certain things appear on paper or canvas or whatever the heck else— result: Buddha bronze hocked for booze— but I draw the line at homage under ornamental plants, banquet of the painters’ guild— something for the boardroom! ...Creaking, little sheep squeaking, chromotypes Flemish, Rubensish— for the grandchildren (same idiots!) Ah—Hulstkamp, hits the spot, midpoint of colors, my shadow brown, stubble aura around heart and eye— II The blocked chimney smokes —the Swan of Avon blows his nose— the tree stumps are wet, clammy night, emptiness mingled with draft— enough characters, the world is overpopulated as it is, plentiful peach-fall, four rosebuds per annum— asperged, set to tread the boards by this hand, grown wrinkled and with sluggish veins! All the Juliets and Ophelias, wreathed, silvered, sometimes murderous— all the soft mouths, the sighs I extracted from them— the original actresses long since turned to smoke, rust, leeched dry, rats’ pudding— Ariel too, away with the elements. The age takes off its frockcoat. These lousy skulls of lords, their trains of thought that I pushed into extremes— my lords makers of history all of them crowned and sceptered illiterates, great powers of the cosmos— yes, like so many bats or kites! Sir Goon wrote to me lately: “the rest is silence”— I think that’s one of mine, could only be mine, Dante dead—lacuna of centuries to my logomachic quotes— what if they didn’t exist, the booty never brought to light, the booths, the scaffolds, the cymbals never clashed— gaps? Gap teeth maybe, but the great monkey jaws would grind on emptiness, mingled with draft— the tree stumps are wet and the butler snores in porter dreams.
I Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad, so many years as a man, compromise, in spite of partial success in intellectual tussle he was never anyone of Olympian allure. He walked slowly through the dreamscape of the late autumn day, barely distinguishable from early spring, with young willows and a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed. Dreamy exposure to phenomena that to nature in its administration of various cycles—young and old alike— are inseparably part of a single order—: so he drank his gin and accepted a dish of sausage soup, free on Thursdays with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance of sorrow and pleasure. II He had been reading on the park bench and stared into the gray of the last roses, there were no titans, just shrubs thinned out by fall. He put down his book. It was a day like any other and the people were like all people everywhere, that was how it would always be, at least this mixture of death and laughter would persist. A scent is enough to change things, even small flowers stand in some relation to a cedar of Lebanon, then he walked on and saw the windows of the furriers were full of warm things for the winter ahead. III All very well, a gin and a few minutes in the park at noon, with the sun shining, but what when the landlord comes by, there are problems with your tax return, and the girlfriend’s in tears? Shattered: how far are you allowed to push your I, and see peculiar things as somehow symptomatic? Shattered: to what extent are you obliged to play by the rules— as far as a Ludwig Richter canvas? Shattered: no one knows. Shattered and you turn equally pained to singular and universal— your little experiment with destiny will end gloriously and forever, but quite alone. Damned evergreens! Vinyl whines! Gin, sun, cedars—what use are they to help the self reconcile landlord, God, and dream— voices warble and words mock— left the house and closed his reverie.
One says: please no inner life, manners by all means, but nothing affective, that’s no compensation for the insufferable difficulties of outward-directed expression— those cerebralized city-Styxes when my little prince pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst, and it’s no different now the contraries are not easy to reconcile but when you survey the provinces the inner life has it by a neck.
A day without tears is a rare occurrence  culpable absent-mindedness practically an episode  • when men still wore starched collars, and stuffed cotton wool between their toes hobbled about in pain, pedicure hadn’t been invented, but you would see faces that were worth a second look those were years when something whispered
He fell and died, the skier, high up there in the snow. And now, spring having come, his father leaves his home, dark in the valley, to throw a hook in the heavy river.
That the stars are adamant everyone understands— but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave or peace below every gray stone. If happiness never comes, what is a life? A lily withers in the sand and if its nature has failed? The tide  washes the beach at night. What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web? What does a dayfly make of its hours? (Two wings creased over a hollow body.) Black will never turn to white— yet the perfume of our struggle lingers as each morning fresh flowers spring up from hell. The day will come when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse and all goes still— when nothing remains but the dayfly  folded in a leaf. But no one knows it.
when all the golden birds fly home across the blue deep water; On shore I sit rapt in its scattering  glitter; departure rustles through the trees. This farewell is vast and separation draws close, but reunion, that also is certain. My head on my arm I fall asleep easily. On my eyes a mother’s breath, from her mouth to my heart: sleep, child, and dream now the sun is gone.—
What is the structure of lips That take care of sounds, That can scream loud and long, That can wait and be silent? Yesterday I was mastering words And kissing lips lightly— Their loving weakness Now remains on my own Hardworking lips, Exacting, as if forever, My terrible punishment.
In memory of Octavio Paz not even lost in death the memory of why we burned, and therefore still a fire consuming all obsequious delay, now polvo, dust, of a desire but still alive  and aching, not even lost to you within our common urn, urgent as an ash still burning alma, soul, still and moving toward you, la muerte, my amor—  not even lost in death, memoria, and feeling some reply, alma, memory and ash, ash burning still, still and moving toward you, dust and dust, ash  alma and amor constante  más allá de la muerte, constant even in our common urn, polvo enamorado.
In memory of Anthony Kerrigan The pure shapes of things shake and are fall ing under the cry of bajo el cri cri and chirping of the six margaritas daisies that I loved but now know deflower when the men bent upon murdering me bend down in cabinets and on cliffs and in cafes where some flamenco guitarist breaks his fingers on the grave accents / / / breaks his fingers on the acute  \ \  hunting now even in the graves
Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured, Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell— We, who have sung the praises of the lord With every fiber in us, every cell. We, who did not manage to devote Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat, Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away. Every morning, every day, we’d rise And have the finest Chinese silks to wear; And we’d strike up the songs of paradise Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair, We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran, Whether we sewed or not)—yet we have been Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan: The world was ours, each one of us a queen. First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled, Then plaited with a starry diadem; We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled: But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them, Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden Where apple trees from paradise are found. No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.
It’s not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with sins enough. Someday I’ll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a lifelong drunk. And I’ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all my days, And I’ll see that I’m rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its unnumbered paths and ways. I haven’t lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to pardon. Now I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed off virtue’s burden. Each day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count them like some paranoid miser. If what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men beneath your standard; If there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not suffice, But who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after You is there any life, Well then there’s Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint Cecilia and plenty more! But if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore, If a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled ingrate, Or the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face— Well, anyway, You didn’t come to save the just but that other type that abounds, And if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere . . . Lord, I’m still around. And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little something back from You, Hasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You, Hoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him, And maybe this little that he’s made himself, kept back until then, though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim. It would be something that he’d put his whole heart into, something useless and malformed. Just like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered forward with encumbered arms And offered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride, A magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands, a pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.
Music of Japan. Parsimoniously from the water clock the drops unfold in lazy honey or ethereal gold that over time reiterates a weave eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright. I fear that every one will be the last. They are a yesterday come from the past. But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight garden, what vigils by an unknown sea, and from what modest melancholy, from what lost and rediscovered afternoon do they arrive at their far future: me? Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play I am. I want to be. I bleed away.
I am happy living simply:like a clock, or a calendar.Worldly pilgrim, thin,wise—as any creature. To knowthe spirit is my beloved. To come to things—swiftas a ray of light, or a look.To live as I write: spare—the wayGod asks me—and friends do not.1919
How is your life with that other one? Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars and a long coastline— and the memory of me is soon a drifting island (not in the ocean—in the sky!) Souls—you will be sisters— sisters, not lovers. How is your life with an ordinary woman? without the god inside her? The queen supplanted— How do you breathe now? Flinch, waking up? What do you do, poor man? “Hysterics and interruptions— enough! I’ll rent my own house!” How is your life with that other, you, my own. Is the breakfast delicious? (If you get sick, don’t blame me!) How is it, living with a postcard? You who stood on Sinai. How’s your life with a tourist on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?) is it to your liking? How’s life? Do you cough? Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind? How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising? How’s kissing plaster-dust? Are you bored with her new body? How’s it going, with an earthly woman, with no sixth sense?  Are you happy? No? In a shallow pit—how is your life, my beloved? Hard as mine with another man?1924
A kiss on the forehead—erases misery. I kiss your forehead. A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness. I kiss your eyes. A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water. I kiss your lips. A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.1917
Fair enough: you people have eaten me, I—wrote you down. They’ll lay you out on a dinner table, me—on this desk. I’ve been happy with little. There are dishes I’ve never tried. But you, you people eat slowly, and often; You eat and eat. Everything was decided for us back in the ocean: Our places of action, our places of gratitude. You—with belches, I—with books, with truffles, you. With pencil, I, you and your olives, me and my rhyme, with pickles, you. I, with poems. At your head—funeral candles like thick-legged asparagus: your road out of this world a dessert table’s striped cloth. They will smoke Havana cigars on your left side and your right; your body will be dressed in the best Dutch linen. And—not to waste such expensive cloth, they will shake you out, along with the crumbs and bits of food, into the hole, the grave. You—stuffed capon, I—pigeon. Gunpowder, your soul, at the autopsy. And I will be laid out bare with only two wings to cover me.Late July 1933
Each day as dawn approaches, the King sits in majesty and blesses the holy creatures: To you, my creatures, I speak, before you I declare— Creatures who bear the throne of my glory with all your heart, and willingly with your soul— Blessed is the hour of your creation, and exalted is the constellation beneath which I gave you form. May the light of that morning continue to shine when you came into my mind— for you are a vessel of my desire prepared and perfected on that day. Be silent, creatures of my making, so I might hear my children pray.
When one stands before the throne of glory, he begins reciting the hymn that the throne of glory sings each day:
The Nut Garden holds things felt and thought and feeling for thought is always a palace— Sinai with flames of fire about it, burning though never by fire devoured. On all four sides surrounded so— entrance is barred to pretenders forever. For one who learns to be wise, however, its doors are open toward the East: he reaches out and takes a nut, then cracks its shell, and eats...
Veiled in velvet, is she here?  Leave off, leave off:  You shall not enter,  you shall not emerge.  It is neither yours nor your share. Return...Return:  The sea is swelling;  its waves are calling.  I hold to the holy portion—  I am held in the holiness of the King.
Prepare the feast  of perfect faith, the delight of the Holy King.  Prepare the feast of the King. This is the feast  of the Lesser Presence; the Ancient Eminence and Field of Apples  assemble with Him for the feast.
Peace be upon you—  ministering angels,  angels of heaven— from the King who is king of all kings,  the Holy One, blessed be He;  in peace be your coming—  angels of peace,  angels of heaven— from the King who is king of all kings,  the Holy One, blessed be He. Bless me with peace—  angels of peace,  angels of heaven— from the King who is king of all kings,  the Holy One, blessed be He,  in peace be your leaving—  angels of peace,  angels of heaven, from the King who is king of all kings,  the Holy One, blessed be He.
The brain, like the earth, lies in layers.Floaters dart and punch. I see the field. My face stays numb. Keep your eye on the target.Click the button when a light appears.Last night I read “So little evidence is leftof what had vanished
You don’t get everything back.Is today morning or night? The radio voice saysthe composer is changing the place home is. When they try to put a tube down her throat, the woman beside me sobs. Nurses probea vein as she thrashes, call the Hmong translator.Once a boy told me, in Laos he sat in a tree all night. Father pay me dollar for every man I’m shooting. When there’s water to cross, the fish, caught,get needled through gill slits. Down the dark hall,machines bleat at each bed. Eyes open and shut: flashes,detachment, vitreous gel. Her son, seven years old,comes after school, peels oranges, watches football, changing the place home is.
How I’ve changed may not be apparent.I limp. Read and write, make tea at the stoveas I practiced in rehab. Sometimes, like fire, a task overwhelms me. I cry for days, shriek when the phone rings. Like a page pulled from flame,I’m singed but intact: I don’t burn down the house.Later, cleared to drive, I did outpatient rehab. Otherslost legs or clutched withered minds in their hands.A man who can’t speak recognized meand held up his finger. I knew he meant One year since your surgery. Sixteen since his.Guadalupe wishes daily to be the one before. Nobodyis that. Sometimes, like love, the neurons just cross fire.You don’t get everything back.
By new namesand then no namesat all, their lawswill reach your land,Lorine, to feedon your much lovedmarshy spaceswhose occasional facesdiscern a strangerfrom far offbut like to takea break from wellor welding justto talk. We can-not extricatea place from thoseit’s made of, the sounds it makes. But nowfrom BlackhawkIsland to Madisonto Washington,geologiesthin; more things sound or workthe same. Their laws will reach your land, Lorine, by new namesthen no names at all.
It hides its edgesin speed, it hasno edges. Plus every timehe thinks he knowsit close enough, can discriminatecentripetal forcefrom what gets shearedstraight off,direction changes:through stunned space the bladesnaps back,turtles into its handleand starts over spinning the other way. All along the chopped-up sidewalk (the need to keep breaking what we maketo keep making)the concrete saw plunges and resurfaces,precise as a skull;it glints against the small smokeof its own work.
It turns out there’s a difference between a detailand an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk ismere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicepis an image because it moves when her body does,even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sunon a thin stalk. The same way that the bar codeon the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail,until you hear that the row of numbers underneathare the numbers his grandfather got on his armin a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, somethingactivated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry,where a coffin is just another coffin until someoneat a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an imageso heavy and warm at the same time that you forgetit’s about death. At my uncle’s funeral, the coffinwas so beautiful it was like the chandelier lightingthe room where treaties are signed. It made me thinkof how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshonefunerals, where everything the dead person ownedwas put into a bonfire, even the horse. In that lastsentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don’t really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere near a fire, and a detail is as luminous as an image.The trumpet vine on the sagging fence. The clothesin the fire. And each tattoo that I touch on your back:the three-part illustration of how to use chopsticks,the four-leaf clover, the clock face stopped at 12:05.
Midnight’s merely blue,but me, me, me, I’m through and through sloe, cracked soot-on-a-boot, nicotine spat, licorice whip. You can scratch, scratch, scratch but I stay underskin true to ebony, ink, crowberry, pitch;hoist me up by my hooves and shake till I’m shook, I’m still chock full of coke, fuliginous murk.O there’s swart in my soul,coal by the bag, cinders and slag, scoriac grit, so pleasecome, comb through my fleece with hands pallid as snow and watch how they grow tarry, raven, stygian, ashed— or, if you wish, clean me with bleachI won’t flinch, just char down to a core of caliginous marrow,pure carbon, atramentous,utterly piceous, shadowed, and starless,each clumpity clump and eclipse of my heart raptly re-burnishing a woolgather dark.
in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers,unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño. If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm into a jar of water. The silver letters on his black belt spell Sangrón. Once, borracho, at dinner, he said: Jesus wasn’t a snowman. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal. I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no tronabas, pistolita? He learned English by listening to the radio. The first four words he memorized: In God We Trust. The fifth: Percolate. Again and again I borrow his clothes. He calls me Scarecrow. In Oregon he picked apples. Braeburn. Jonagold. Cameo. Nightly, to entertain his cuates, around a campfire, he strummed a guitarra, sang corridos. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Greaser. Beaner. Once, borracho, at breakfast, he said: The heart can only be broken once, like a window. ¡No mames! His favorite belt buckle: an águila perched on a nopal. If he laughs out loud, his hands tremble. Bugs Bunny wants to deport him. César Chávez wants to deport him. When I walk through the desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin. The snake hisses. The snake is torn.
marc-antonizes.Somehow it organizesthe mob—like somuch lead—into rankand file. Somehowit stands us rabble up and makesa row of men stiffenor a rose of lead filings arise. A rose is a rosethat arose, a magneticpersonality verynearly said. She knewhow to drawthis one painterto her place in Parisand make him somethinggreater. (She knewhow to cube him.) But the magnetic can turn ona dime and goall red like a faceof a Rubik’s Cube. In fact, its flipside can repel what itonce sucked in—all those friends,Romans, countrymen,cubists.
makes windthe way it whirlsabout and blowsthe neighboring namesof other signatoriesaway. The pointof it is notthe John or JaneDoe it names;the point’s the quillin motion as ifstill stuck and aquiver in goose skin. The trick to writingwell isn’t upthe sleeve. It is the sleevethat fluffs up the flourish,that blooms aroundthe stunted stamensof the fingersand distracts usfrom our graspingfor the sunor the uncertainscratchingof the stylus.
Ghost sun halfhidden, where did you go?There’s always a motherof some other creatureborn to fight for her young.But crawl out of your hide,walk upright like a man,& you may ask if hunger is the only passionas you again lose yourselfin a white field’s point of view.In this glacial quietnothing moves except—then a flash of eyes & nerves.If cornered in your head by cries from a cavein another season, you can’t forgetin this landscape a pretty horsetranslates into a man holding a gun.
For Derek WalcottAn island is one great eye gazing out, a beckoning lighthouse,searchlight, a wishbone compass, or counterweight to the stars.When it comes to outlook & point of view, a figure stands on a rocky ledgepeering out toward an archipelago of glass on the mainland, a seagull’swings touching the tip of a high wave, out to where the brain may stumble.But when a mind climbs down from its high craggy lookoutwe know it is truly a stubborn thing, & has to leaf through pages of dust& light, through pre-memory & folklore, remembering fires roared down theretill they pushed up through the seafloor & plumes of ash covered the dead shaken awake worlds away, & silence filled up with centuries of waiting.Sea urchin, turtle, & crab came with earthly know-how,& one bird arrived with a sprig in its beak, before everything clouded with cries,a millennium of small deaths now topsoil & seasons of blossoms in a single seed.Light edged along salt-crusted stones, across a cataract of blue water,& lost sailors’ parrots spoke of sirens, the last words of men buried at sea.Someone could stand here contemplating the future, leafingthrough torn pages of St. Augustine or the prophecies by fishermen,translating spore & folly down to taproot. The dreamy-eyed boy still in the man,the girl in the woman, a sunny forecast behind today, but tomorrow’s beyondwords. To behold a body of water is to know pig iron & mother wit. Whoever this figure is, he will soon return to dancing through the aroma of dagger’s log, ginger lily, & bougainvillea,between chants & strings struck till gourds rally the healing air,& till the church-steeple birds fly sweet darkness home.Whoever this friend or lover is, he intones redemptive harmonies. To lie down in remembrance is to know each of us is a prodigalson or daughter, looking out beyond land & sky, the chemical & metaphysicalbeyond falling & turning waterwheels in the colossal brain of damnable gods,a Eureka held up to the sun’s blinding eye, born to gaze into fire. After conqueringfrontiers, the mind comes back to rest, stretching out over the white sand.
Of all living monuments has the fewestfacts attached to it, they slide right offits surface, no Lincoln lap for them to siton and no horse to be astride. Here is what I know for sure:Was a gift from one city to another. A citycannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives away a great door in the air. Well a city cannot except for Paris, who putson a hat styled with pigeon wings and walksthrough the streets of another city and will noteven see the sights, too full she is of the sightsalready. And within her walk her women, and the women of Paris looking like they just walked through an Arch... Or am I mixing it up I think I am with another famous female statue? Bornin its shadow and shook-foil hot the factsslid off me also. I and the Arch we burnedto the touch. “Don’t touch that Arch a boywe know got third-degree burns from touch- ing that Arch,” says my mother sittingfor her statue. She is metal on a hilltop andso sad she isn’t a Cross. She was long agogiven to us by Ireland. What an underhand gift for an elsewhere to give, a door that reminds you you can leave it. She raises her arm to brush my hair. Oh no femalearmpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.
On my birthdayA crow guffaws, dirty man throwing the punch of his one joke. And now, nearer, a murder answers, chortling from the pale hill’s brow. From under my lashes’ wings they stretch clawed feet. There the unflappable years perch and stare. When I squint, when I grin, my new old face nearly hops off my old new face. Considering what’s flown, what might yet fly, I lean my chin on the palm where my half-cashed fortune lies.
I. TO THE FATESThey cannot keep the peaceor their hands off each other,breed not yet preach the old discredited creed.Love is charity conceived as a coin dropped in a beggar’s cup.Reason not the need. Gluttony is no nicer than greedor wrath, but lustis our categorical must.We have no choice but to breed. II. OLYMPIAOlympia lies on her couchwith an insolent stare,her hand hiding her crotch,a flower in her hair.She splits the lot of us with a sneer: we are either breeders or queer.We will fight wars because of her.She will root us on. We will win.The face in the mirror is not brave,but we crave contact with her skinand the jewel in the mouth of her cave.She tempts like a sinand under her spell we fallinto a deep enchanted sleep,and wake up ready to make the leap,ready to heed her call,only now we’re alone,on streets less friendly than wilderness,a platoon of ex-pals in Manhattan.Olympia tempts like a sin,but then sends us home to the wife,commands us to resume the lifewe had planned to give up in her honor:the life of a dutiful husband, a modest successin his profession, impressive in credentials, in mood depressive(but nothing that a pill won’t cure).You ask if he is happy? “Sure.”And Olympia lies on her couch,with her insolent stare,her hand hiding her crotch,a flower in her hair.
For Arnold Rampersad Shadows bluing the snow, the pines’ and mine, bear the cast of a kestrel’s blue-gray crown I note as I find my way about this town. Blues here more likely the Nordic-eyes kind than the blue-black of some Black folk back home.Here so many lakes reflect the sky’s blue dome; some summer days skimmed-milk blue tints windblown whitecaps. Blue’s an adjective, verb, and noun, and the color of the world when I pine because she’s gone leaving too much wine and time. Blue shadows on the snow, mine and the pines’. For a tall man, blue ox, and now me, home is Bemidji, though the blues here around more the cast of a kestrel’s blue-gray crown than the blue-black of my cousins back home.
All that has tamed me I have learned to love and lost that wildness that was once beloved.All that was loved I’ve learned to tame and lost the beloved that once was wild.All that is wild is tamed by love— and the beloved (wildness) that once was loved.
with the medicinal poppies of Junenor with Celan’s bloom-fest of dredged stone, not with history’s choo-choo train of corpses, not with Nottingham’s Robin Hood nor Antwerp’s Diamondland.Not walking on the Strand in Manhattan Beach with her silicone breast implants, refinery, waves of trash, not out of the Library of Alexandria with her burnt gardens that prefigure gnarly, barnacle-laden surfboards broken in half. You can’t build the child with the stone paths that we have walked on through the atmosphere, the pirate’s plank, the diving board, the plunge, nor with the moon whether she be zombie or vampire. Not with Delphi, not with fangs, or cardamom bought in Fez, red with spring, red with marathon running cheeks. Not with monk chant, bomb chant, war paint, not with the gigantic Zen pleasure zones, nor with this harnessed pig on the carousel that I am sitting on with my son in Nice, France. How it burns on its axis as if it were turning into pineapple-colored kerosene the way the Hawaiian pig, apple in snout, roasts in its own tropical meat under the countdown sun.
Once upon a time,There was a beautiful shark.She combed her long, blonde hair,And it made the halibut bark.It made the chicken oink,And the whale to run for Congress.A man should never obstructThe course of material progress.Yet a lamb cannot but weepWhen the kiddies come home from college.For they have forgotten to keepThe agreement they made to acknowledgeThe woodpecker’s right to peck,And the maple’s to be pecked at.Let’s have a little respectFor Rubber Duck with a doctorate. That provocative way of standing!All elbows and banglesAnd hips just like a coat hangerAnd ankles at right angles! I like The shape of the pouring soy milk,The sound of the splitting log.But Egret finds it regrettable that herSister is dating a dog.Don’t listen to ’em, kid!And don’t listen to their questions.This corporation’s been ruined byWell-meaning false confessions.And the world is fast a-melting,Though I would have it slow.And I don’t think it’s helping:The way these animals goStraight from hatchery to quackery,And, if only to amuse,I’ll throw my hat in with Mike Thataway inBlack patent leather shoes.Maybe I’m just like my mother.She’s never satisfied.Maybe I’m just like my father:Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.Maybe I’m just like my cat:Licking invisible balls.Perhaps you’ll reflect upon that, Next time you’re screening your calls.And all the solvent and the solute,They were walking hand in hand.This the Indian poets were theFirst to understand.The ancient Indian poetsHad their heads screwed on straight.Fixed on the body’s affluenceAnd the effluents that escape.And the influence they enjoyed?Close-focus hocus-pocus.And every gezunte moydIn a juvenile honey locustWill prefer their Hindi distichsTo the Indiana Hoosiers.We’re gonna be there from Spit ChristmasAll the way to Mucus New Year’s.But for now I draw the curtainAnd settle into Lent.Last person to go to HarvardWithout knowing what that meant.
Hrhm Shp, colt-culling,Is what hoof lore calls it—The choke-chain sound a roan coinedTo describe the things he sawBefore the sniff weevils crept Up his nostrils and chewedHis eyes at the hue-sweet root. •Mother mares scare foalsFrom folly-trots and foxgloveBy telling them fury talesOf muck stirrup-deep and shellsShoveling PasschendaeleOnto Passchendaele,The foal fallen with the boy. •One memory, commonTo all breeds, spurs night maresSparking down the mute streetsOf their sleep, gas-blindWitnesses scraping KruppGuns over the cobblestones,Winged sparks breeding in the hay. •Having watched us box and ditch Our dead, they thought our deadAte termite-runnelsIn the black bark of the landAnd pulled all horsefolk downTo join whatever dark cavalryThundered underground. •The burlap gas mask cuppedAnd strapped to the wet snoutCould be mistaken, whenThe gas gong soundedAnd the men grew fly-heads, For a feed sack chock- Full of red ants.
Questions for a zoologiststarting with anatomy concluding with love:Is a turtle’s skin loaned? True or false: weight of his shell is lighter than the light of drums. What is the under-shell and is it tough as a mangrove? Can he see through his shell-box?Can he see out the rear to this sea of ours? Does he exist in the order of things? How does life begin, when does it end and is that good or evil?Yellow margin over a cuttlebone, domed carapace is it a lonely worldof sow bugs, cutworms, and God?
On the other side of this doorYou are an oyamel native to the mountains of MexicoRising in a cloud forest of sister evergreensShedding pollen cones, shedding winged seedsOur lost wings singly and in pairs.This is why the monarchs vanish Raising sienna-hued colonies longer than my armsHibernating in Mexico where it’s hotter in January than my front yard, where the red bougainvillea ravesAnd magnolias with a mauve rush on paperAnd open as though thinking about last year’s novelsRead over the shoulders of garden-strollers Obey the apostle’s exhortation And do everything in love.
I have one good memory—a total Eclipse of the sun—when out of brilliance Dusk came swiftly and on the whole At seven years it felt good on a summer afternoon To be outrun by a horse from another century—The next morning I washed up On land like a pod of seals Struck with a longing for dark at noon—If the cessation of feeling is temporaryIt resembles sleep—if permanent, it resemblesA little ice age—and the end of some Crewelwork by a mother who put honeyInto my hands so the bees would love me.
I’m having trouble looking animals in the eye.Their empty suits in outer space!Monkeys injected with a virus to show off Our eminent domain, the nervous system.Teacup pigs we breed and obsessive mice Worrying themselves bald in a miniature opera.For pleasures of the tongue we areWinking cattle out of meadows Slashing their throats and swiftly quartering them.In riding habits with gold flame pins we ride horsesTo hounds, chase a fennec fox until his redCoat flares up against the extinction Of light. Once in a circus we madeAn elephant disappear and he did not mind.
Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes.
Cutlery clatters into the sink. But always the characters, uniquely themselves,only some decades older. They searchfor their coats. You were, she reminds him,our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos: Morningside Heights, one of your lives. Thirty years since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes—East Africa his beat, Germany hers—he’llvisit the nephew, the namesake in Bostonwho drives a cab, sends a pittance each month to a wellhead in—we’ll call it Sudan. He explains how it works, this drip feedof cash to Sudan from the United States: cheap, fast. She’s not clear about this—he jots her a website: it’s a place she can go. So they won’t meet again...suddenlyCan you forgive me? he blurts—a classmate’s apartment, Upper West Side,the grown child’s room, bearsin tidy shrines, scrum of sloughed coats. In the kitchen friends wash up. Soundof laughter. Sound of water flowingout of a tap. Yes, she replies, shockedby the twinge, then ache, of remorse.She “forgot”? And him—thirty years—the place still hurts? It’s myself I can’t forgive,she knows later. Right now, vague shame. End of March. Maybe April. Street treesare trying to bloom. The irretrievablesits on the table, white as a plate. He holds herher coat.
One year a generalpacks the dead arithmetic in a drawer—all the subtractions, divisions.The next year, vines cover the bunkers.The brain resumes its starbursts of rehearsal.The heart leaps under the defibrillator.The bone eases into its socket.Skin grows back. Scars fade. Eyes clear.Look at the trees at the burn, six years later.Look at the sprout on a hay baleon a truck. Look at the woman who was raped,had her hands cut off in a creek:She’s getting married.The choir sings. The bride smiles.The groom slips a ring on her hook.
The girl was known for shitting in her yard. I did so little for her. She was small, a dandelion orb with ragged hair like an old woman’s burnt from dye. Her face showed little sign of poverty—it was her dusty shoes cut open at the top that told.A bone look she’d mastered young, yet the curve of her face was edible, like a rounded sparrow in hand. She wasn’t mean, but did what she wanted—quietly, with a lift to her chin, while I struggled to teach her anything. I’d like to say I brushed her brittle hair, called her beautiful, coaxed out sight words that dawdled on her tongue. I dream of her spinning like a fairy dervish in my failure. Consider this a prayer, a foolish one.
Make and be eaten, the poet says,Lie in the arms of nightlong fire,To celebrate the waking, wake.Burn in the daylong light; and praiseEven the mother unappeased,Even the fathers of desire.Blind go the days, but joy will see Agreements of music; they will wind The shaking of your dance; no more Will the ambiguous arm-waves spell Confusion of the blessing given. Only and finally declare Among the purest shapes of grace The waking of the face of fire, The body of waking and the skill To make your body such a shape That all the eyes of hope shall stare. That all the cries of fear shall know, Staring in their bird-pierced song; Lines of such penetration make That shall bind our loves at last. Then from the mountains of the lost, All the fantasies shall wake, Strong and real and speaking turn Wherever flickers your unreal. And my strong ghosts shall fade and pass My love start fiery as grass Wherever burn my fantasies, Wherever burn my fantasies.April 1955
We set great wreaths of brightness on the graves of the passionate who required tribute of hot July flowers— for you, O brittle-hearted, we bring offering remembering how your wrists were thin and your delicate bones not yet braced for conquering. The sharp cries of ghost-boys are keen above the meadows, and little girls continue graceful and wondering. Flickering evening on the lakes recalls those young heirs whose developing years have sunk to earth, their strength not tested, their praise unsung. Weave grasses for their childhood—who will never see love or disaster or take sides against decay balancing the choices of maturity. Silent and coffined in silence while we pass loud in defiance of death, the helpless lie. October 1935
loquitur the sparrow in the Zoo
Adorable images, Plaster of Paris Lilies of the field, You are not alive, therefore Pathos will be out of place. But I have learned A strange fact about your fate, And it is this: After you go out of fashion Beneath your many fashions, Or when your elbows and knees Have been bruised powdery white, So that you are no good to anybody— They will take away your gowns, Your sables and bathing suits, Leaving exposed before all men Your inaccessible bellies And pointless nubilities. Movers will come by night And load you all into trucksAnd take you away to the Camps, Where soldiers, or the State Police, Will use you as targets For small-arms practice, Leading me to inquire, Since pathos is out of place, What it is that they are practicing.November 1961
Her eyelids were painted blue.When she closed her eyes the searolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots,leaving behind silence above & belowa thousand years old. He stood beneatha high arched window, gazing outat fishing boats beyond the dikes, their netsunfurled, their offshore gesturesa dance of living in bluish entourage.He was only the court’s chief jester.What he said & did made them laugh,but lately what he sometimes thought he knewcould cost him his polished tongue & royal wig.He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor.Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea.He had seen the ravishing empress nakedin a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow.Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud. Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold,the great one would become a weeping boyslumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules.
From Baden, or what’s left of it,pursue a long, smooth curve of roadthat skirts the northern flood wallto parallel a palisadeof channel markers sunk in earth,the folly of a cement works.Its blank silos overlooka pit of argillaceous shale,the fine and fossilized remainsof bivalves, sponges, spines of shark,quarried and burnt with limestone chargeto alchemize a binder of brickand the city’s shallow, brittle crust.Around a bend, the riverbed swings wide to open a fetch of field.Shadows skim its mucky thawas juncos, whisked about by the windon courses neither fixed nor free,give but a quick metallic chink.Behind you, rain has wrapped the bluffsand scumbled limbs of sycamores.Ahead, each bend assumes the nameof a gaudy packet run aground,or snagged and sunk, or blown to bits:for one, the side-wheel Amazon,pluperfect wheelhouse painted green,that struck a honey-locust pikestill rooted deep in river mudand tore its hull from stem to stern.Down in minutes! Within the monthan island silted up behind.A flock of luggage floated south, remarked by those on Water Streetloafing before the trading postand the barbershop of Madame Krull.She can eternally be foundat work in her elaborate roomtoujours prêt to clip and coifor wield her razor with great skillfor those who favor her with their chins.The scent of ginger tonic blendswith that of borscht, its acrid tang,consumed behind a wooden screenas Illinois grows dark. In this,her second year since coming west.
1Tense and tenuousgrow from the same rootas does tenderin its several guises:the sour grass flower;the yellow moth.2I would not confusethe boguswith the spurious.The bogusis a sore thumbwhile the spuriouspours forthas fish and circuses.
Chandelier too full of brilliance to be indolent.  Your prisms enunciate the light and don’t need rain to break it into rainbows. Snow with six crutches in each crystal.  Your livery your glitter, your purring made visible. Only inanimate things can sparkle without sweat. My spinet, the threat of music  in its depths and miniature busts of men composers carved of time on top. The hollow bench held sheet music. Sing me  Charm Gets In Your Eyes. I hear you best when undistracted by your body. In headspace technology, where flowers are living  in glass globes, their fragrance vivisected. Anything that blooms that long will seem inanimate. Heaven. Grief  like the sea. Keeps going. Over the same wrought ground. The whole spent moan. Praise dies in my throat or in the spooky rift  between itself and its intended. Like a wish- bone breaking. The little crutch inside is not a toy. There is no night asylum.  A restless bed, a haunt preserve, a blanket rough as sailcloth. But sing me, was it kind snow sometimes? With true divided lights and nothing  flawed about it? If song goes wrong, be dancerly. Dance me, at what point does west turn to east as it spins?  I’ve never understood. Perspective. How charm gets to yes. Dance me Exile and the Queendom, by request.  It is a ferocious thing to have your body as your instrument. Glove over glove, let your dance express  what I’ve been creeping like a vein of sweat through a vastness of. This tune with mountains tied inside  and many silent letters can be read as trackers scan the spaces between toes and birders read the rustle  left by birds. As any mammal in its private purr hole knows, the little crutch inside  is not a crutch. More a sort of steeple. Neither silver to be chased nor gold to be beaten.  You were==you are more than ever like that too. Noon upon noon,  you customize this solitude with spires that want nothing from me  and rise with no objective as everything does when happy.
I wish I knew the contents and I wish the contentsJapanese —like hairpins made of tortoiseshell or bonethough my braid was lopped off long ago,like an overpowering pine incenseor a talisman from a Kyoto shrine,like a Hello Kitty diary-lock-and-key,Hello Kitty stickers or candies,a netsuke in the shape of an octopus,ticket stubs from the Bunraku —or am I wishing for Mother? searching for Sister?just hoping to give something Japanese to my daughters?then again, people can read anything into dreamsand I do as well. I wish I possessed my mother’s black lacquer boxthough in my dream it was red,though I wish my heart were content.
Without the sun filtered through closed eyelids,without the siren along the service road,without Grandpa’s ginger-colored hair,Mother’s lipstick, Daughter’s manicure, firecrackers, a monkey’s ass, a cherry, Rei’s lost elephant,without communist or past tense,or a character seeing her own chopped-off feet dancing in fairy slippers,or Mao’s favorite novel about a chamber —the scientist of sleep has claimed that without warm blood a creature cannot dream.
“To find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person,”researchers experimented with the neurons of a wormthen upgraded to mouse hoping “to unravel the millions of miles of wire in the [human] brain”that they liken to “untangling a bowl of spaghetti”of which I have an old photo: Rei in her high chair delicatelypicking out each strand to mash in her mouth.Was she two? Was that sailor dress from Mother?Did I cook from scratch? If so, there was a carrot in the sauceas Mother instructed and I’ll never forget since some strand determines infatuation as a daughter’s fate.
Bloody hell, the world’s turned upside downthe flame tree has becomegeraniummy coral bed has growninto a treethe hummingbird you hammeredto the wallthough tin, could any momentturn and flee.The yellow sky has goneall roundaboutand clover threes whereseaweed used to beand blood blossoms with fire,the powers below grow higher —if things turn right-way-upwill the falling fire stop?The wave is in the hillthe nest abandons meand all the reddened earth is still igniting
No surprise. Bills to pay, pain to obliterate,a favor to a friend desperate for more time before facing facts,or a reason less beholden to One-day-at-a-time or I-don’t-know-why or There-is-no-why-I-just-like-getting-high or Then-Jesus-spoke-to-meblather. Nothing’s enough, not even the moments when her voice — any voice, my voice —vanishes into the Voice the hymnwrenches from the throats of the spiritualpaupers up there swaying in black satin.The God of the Garden is the Godof Chemistry, too, a single sniffin a lifetime proof enough — nothingcan slough errands or heartbreakso fast into the metaphysical ditch where all of it belongs. Weren’t we made for better than the Fall, if Fall this is? We all see what the Flood keeps doing.A little while dry, please, a little whilewith no chattering chimp betweenthe ears & the Wizard once more in Oz.This is my mind, not hers. She’s a story I heard. I’m a story I can’t stop hearing. A plastic tarp in a monsoon may beher future. A plush ride home to havoc.A vision that delivers her from want,deserving or not.
In the barn demoted to garage,the ax in a cherry stump can’t be budged.Daylight perforates siding despitethe battered armor of license plates—corroded colors, same state: decay,their dates the only history of whoever tilled the soil and left, as a welcome, the skull of a possum nailed to the door, and the trailof lime to the torn sack in a corner where cobwebs festoon a scythe.Rusted sharp, it sings when he grips its splintery handle, swings, and crowns topple from Queen Anne’s lace.
prays for birds before an ancient icon— a stray cat. The inbred need to pray is what makes God necessary, and not, she says, the other way around; beyond that it’s all mystery, so don’t question why Man creates gods that demand sacrifice, condemning mortals to spend their lives trying to praise godhead into mercy. Better instead to ask the frog to bless the fly, and, once the cheese is in the trap, to beg forgiveness from the rat.
They were nearing the end of their story.The fire was dying, like the fire in the story.Each page turned was torn and fedto flames, until word by word the book burned down to an unmade bed of ash. Wet kindling from an orchard of wooden spoons, snow stewing, same old wind on the Gramophone,same old wounds. Turn up the blue dialunder the kettle until darkness boilswith fables, and mirrors defrost to the quickbefore fogging with steam, and dreamsrattle their armor of stovepipes and ladles.Boots in the corner kick in their sleep.A jacket hangs from a question mark.
How should I now recallthe icy lace of the panelike a sheet of cellophane,or the skies of alcoholpoured over the saltbox town?On that stony New England tableau,the halo of falling snowglared like a waxy crown.Through blue frozen lotsmy giant parents strolled,wrapped tight against the coldlike woolen Argonauts,searching for that tallperfection of Scotch pinefrom the hundreds laid in linelike the dead at Guadalcanal.The clapboard village aglowthat starry stark DecemberI barely now remember,or the brutish ache of snowburning my face like quicklime.Yet one thing was still missing.I saw my parents kissing,perhaps for the last time.
In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet.In goes the philosophy teacherexplaining the theory of eternalreturn, and Anton Stadler with his clarinet,still owing money to Mozart. Ingoes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creelof the happy fisherman, everyone eaten.Every river is Lethean,so why should we care if it’s not the same river? I hatehow everything changes, treeto failing term paper, chatelaineto beheaded plotter, drug dealer to narc.The heart softening faster than cerealbut then hardening to a relicwhich turns into another lineof depressed poetry to reciteto the next eager traineeanxious to be more than lint.Going up, you’re also going down, so eitherway, as your mother said, Be nice.When she went in, she was very thin.Earth, air, fire, water, mother.Fish pulse slowly under the river ice.
I’m thinking it’s time to go backto the peach farm or ratherthe peach farm seems to be wanting me backeven though the work of picking, sorting,the sticky perils and sudden swarms are done.Okay, full disclosure, I’ve neverbeen on a peach farm, just glimpsedfrom a car squat trees I assumedwere peach and knew a couple in schoolwho went off one summer, so they said, to work on a peach farm. She was pregnant,he didn’t have much intention, canvasesof crushed lightbulbs and screws in paste.He’d gotten fired from the lunch counterfor putting too much meaton the sandwiches of his friendsthen ended up in Macy’s in New Yorkselling caviar and she went homeI think to Scranton, two more versionsof never hearing from someone again.I’d like to say the most important fruitsare within but that’s the very sort of bullshitone goes to the peach farm to avoid,not just flight from quadratic equations,waiting for the plumber,finding out your insurance won’t pay.Everyone wants out of the spider’s stomach.Everyone wants to be part of some harvestand stop coughing to death and cursing at nothing and waking up nowhere nearan orchard. Look at these baskets,bashed about, nearly ruined with good employ.Often, after you’ve spent a day on a ladder,you dream of angels, the one with the trumpetand free subscriptions to the New Yorkeror the archer, the oink angel, angelof ten dollar bills found in the dryeror the one who welcomes you in work glovesand says if you’re caught eating a single peach,even windfall, you’ll be executed.Then laughs. It’s okay, kiddo,long as you’re here, you’re one of us.
The world has certified itself rid of all but the argument: to eradicate or not the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a dormancy it has refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile lens, her glass slide a clearest, most becoming pane. How could it resist slipping away with her, that discrete first pock?
The word itself: prim, retired, its artifact her portrait above the fireplace, on her face the boredom she abhorred, then perfected, her hands held upward—their emptiness a revision, cigarette and brandy snifter painted, intolerably, out, to leave her this lesser gesture: What next? or shrugged Whatever.From the waist down she was never there.
For Barry Silesky Catalpas blooming up and down Catalpa Street, car alarms blooming up and down Waveland Avenue—an instant of nature without the narrative. O face-in-your-morning-juice, swimmer-in-an-old-wool-suit, we sit side by side on the steps smoking the same cigarette, watching children who live alone, women married to the wrong men. Here is your little dog roaming the alley. What will he do for love this time? The gauchos sing: “The silver lights of stars hurl themselves against the open pampas of Clark Street” O tomato-in-a-woman’s-palm, one millisecond following the next millisecond, “Heal thyself,” the poem says, “Pick up your beggar’s mat and walk.” You hurl yourself into traffic. You talk to cops and street thugs;they smile at their smartphones. They strut in the sun like jackals after a kill. And the gauchos sing: “Everyone will finally leave you, fugitive.” A cloud of pigeons cuts through the smog. Everyone will finally leave you.When the bus comes we sing like sailors. A red sky presses you to its lips. I tell you that everything has already been written. You say on a long, difficult pilgrimage Basho wrote on his hat.
There’s no description in the braided stone,the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark,bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth.The dog of work gnaws the day’s short bone,snarls a mountainside into lavender and green.In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all.Element of pitcher, sky, rockface, blank canvasplastic and vast in one off-center patch.To copy what’s invisible, to improvisea soul of things and remake solid lifeinto fresh anxious unlifelike form.
She visits still too much, dressed in aromasof fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lostknowing she’s close, me not getting youngeror more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticateI’m broad awake: her witchy presence waitsfor me to jump into her arms, but then she’s justan incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes.I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wristsvaporing nooses around my head and feetand genitals, conjuring my drab hairinto a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.She makes me nervous, but what would I dowithout her? So long as I can’t have her,I want her and this alarming manic frequency.Then again, who wants to wake to change,its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies?My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom,let me get just one night’s sleep without regret,released from your foxy ticklish fondlings,your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.
A high school mash note’s stammering lust.Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare,and somehow graphed into that aira young man’s foolscap poem when a just,loose joinery of words was all that mattered.But then in last night’s dream, she (mother, wife,mash note’s love?) tells me a box holding secret lifehas been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven’t heard:a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves,fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes.And things: a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave,the heart-hollows, the cannot-do-withouts, the whensand whos, the frayed veils between death and here...I packed this box myself. I packed it full of fear.
My aunts mentioned her just once,calling her my aunt, their sister,though she wasn’t. They mentionedthe vinyl recliner in the kitchen,the “I Like Ike” poster, the Sacred Heart,cabbage smells, sulfur, and shame.Before jolted by the gift that calledthrough but never really for her,she became unpleasantly calm.Moments later, after she said“I don’t want this please,” God’s loveraced down the pulse into her look.It was as if her things spoke back:a table leg scraped the floor, a forkwobbled in a drawer, knickknacks fell.She nearly died each time it happened.They said her mind just wasn’t there,or she wasn’t in it anymore.She sat helpless afterward,papery when they lifted herfrom vision seat to bed. The mightto move what her eye fell uponis the image of her I keep,her iridescent readiness.
He put the spirit essencethe light pip not onlyin each eye’s albumenconcentrate of starlightbut must have been taughthow to do that by firstfinding it in the pearlhe posed then correctedin dusty studio lightthat pounced on the windowbehind which sits the cheeky girlpear- and apple-blossom cheeksa fake description naturallyof their plain fleshinessdrably golden and her lipsfrom Haight Street’s darlingsnose studs jacket studsgirls with that kind of eyeone by the atm machinecasual juicy and so faira Netherlandish typepanhandling strangerspomegranate seed ballbearings agleam in her nosepearls not sea-harvestedbut imagined seen put thereby a certain need and fancybecause love says it’s sopicture that picture this.
Use meAbuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheadsSing meSour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skinRise and shineIn puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheadsWake usSpeak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politicsCrawl on us Fall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrockBeat our browsFlee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seepsyour gorgeous color-chart container shipsand cab-top numbers squinting in the mist
rumdumb from last night’s shrubbery trystexhales soot, fernseed, shoots and vines,brings his hot breath from the city park’s wood,saying a song we don’t understandthrough the briar and bay leaves of his beard.And in Philadelphia, 1954,out of late autumn’s darkening he came,a junkman lugging a Penn Fruit cart,straw bristling his face, crying a name.Or from manholes in other cities,his holographic ectoplasm greets uswhen traffic lights turn green.Uncover and there he is, membranousCaliban alone with sewer rats,or stumblebum Puck, unnameable solidscrusting nails and toes, bringing us his dark.Or our neighborhood’s soused John-John,cobra down-at-heel boots skiddingat my feet among the maddening jasmine,when I grab too late to save him growls:“I can save you darling pigs.Behold, behold, and maybe I’ll help.”
It seems to head from its last stop too fast,my transbay train’s strung-out hoo, deepinside the tunnel, and starts to bleedinto the baritone wail of that guyat platform’s end, a sort of lullabyrubbed against the wall then caught in a squallof wind darkening toward us, his whippy voiceskinning its tired song off the tiled dome:he’s determined, the silky lyric says,to be independently blue, while we allwait to be chuted to car lot or home,closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss,our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed,every plural presence now some thing alone,thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train,patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.
Silent, about-to-be-parted-from house.Wood creaking, trying to sigh, impatient.Clicking of squirrel-teeth in the attic.Denuded beds, couches stripped of serapes.Deep snow shall block all entrancesand oppress the roof and darkenthe windows. O Lares,don’t leave.The house yawns like a bear.Guard its profound dreams for us,that it return to us when we return.November 1969
So populous the regionThat from the next regionThe crowing of children, barking of cars could be heard,So that a continuous linkageOf sounds of living ranIn the limber air,District to district, Woodlake to Montclair,Freestone to Smithfield, and one child’s cryWas not concealed from any trade route,Or passer by,Or upstairs island of thought withdrawn, Or basement of submerged magnificence.One crowWelkened the evening sky,Bark blasted the dark,Like an assertion in a time of assent,Or an increase to astonishment.June 1958
When with the skin you do acknowledge drought, The dry in the voice, the lightness of feet, the fine Flake of the heat at every level line; When with the hand you learn to touch without Surprise the spine for the leaf, the prickled petal, The stone scorched in the shine, and the wood brittle; Then where the pipe drips and the fronds sprout And the foot-square forest of clover blooms in sand, You will lean and watch, but never touch with your hand.September 1934
There hangs this bellied pear, let no rake doubt,Meat for the tongue and febrile to the skin,Wasting for the mildew and the rot, A tallow rump slow rounded, a pelt thinAnd for the quickest bite; so, orchard bred,Heaviest downward from the shaking stem.Whose fingers curve around the ripened headLust to split so fine a diadem.There is the picker, stretches for the knife,There are the ravening who claw the fruit,More, those adjuring wax that lasts a life,And foxes, freak for cunning, after loot.For that sweet suck the hornet whines his wits, But husbandman will dry her for the pits.December 1951
Here where the rooms are dryly stillWho is this dustily asleepWhile juicy children run the field?Where is her ever deepening wellWhose buckets to a fullness dipFor needs compassion must fulfill?Like freshets they themselves may yieldA little to the turned up cup,But death is in the long dry spell.Run children, run, the light grows dull,And she who keeps the well must sleep,And rain is unpredictable.December 1951
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, she thinks, a map laid down to memorize because she might be walking it, it shows ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert here and there a sign of aquifers and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map it would be the map of the last age of her life, not a map of choices but a map of variations on the one great choice. It would be the map by which she could see the end of touristic choices, of distances blued and purpled by romance, by which she would recognize that poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co., mass-produced yet durable, being here now, is what it is yet a dream-map so obdurate, so plain, she thinks, the material and the dream can join and that is the poem and that is the late report.October/November 1987
Snow would be the easyway out—that softeningsky like a sigh of reliefat finally being allowedto yield. No dice.We stack twigs for burningin glistening patchesbut the rain won’t give.So we wait, breedingmood, making musicof decline. We sit downin the smell of the pastand rise in a lightthat is already leaving.We ache in secret,memorizinga gloomy lineor two of German.When spring comeswe promise to actthe fool. Pour,rain! Sail, wind,with your cargo of zithers!November 1981
Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knickknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael— something finer. Each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to the stove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before Father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean Promise, then Desert-in-Peace. Long before the shadow and sun’s accomplice, the tree. Maurice.November 1981
Now that I knowThat passion warms littleOf flesh in the mold, And treasure is brittle,I’ll lie here and learnHow, over their ground,Trees make a long shadowAnd a light sound.August 1922
Miss Snooks was really awfully niceAnd never wrote a poemThat was not really awfully niceAnd fitted to a woman,She therefore made no enemiesAnd gave no sad surprisesBut went on being awfully niceAnd took a lot of prizes.November 1964
I was always a thoughtful youngster,Said the lady on the omnibus,I remember Father used to say,You are more thoughtful than us.I was sensitive too, the least thingUpset me so much,I used to cry if a flyStuck in the hatch.Mother always said,Elsie is too good,There’ll never be another like Elsie,Touch wood. I liked to be alone,Sitting on the garden path,My brother said he’d never seen aPicture more like Faith in the Arena.They were kindly people, my people,I could not help being different,And I think it was good for meMixing in a different element.The poor lady now burst out cryingAnd I saw her friend was not a friend but a nurseFor she said, Cheer up duckie the next stop is ours,They got off at Northumberland House.This great House of the PerciesIs now a lunatic asylum,But over the gate there still standsThe great Northumberland Lion.This family animal’s tailIs peculiar in that it is absolutely straight,And straight as a bar it stood out to drop after themAs they went through the gate.November 1964
The gooseberry’s no doubt an oddity,an outlaw or pariah even—thornyand tart as anykindergarten martinet, it can harborlike a fernseed, on its leaves’ under-side, bad news for pine trees,whereas the spruceresists the blister rustit’s host to. That veiny Chineselantern, its stolid jellyof a fruit, not only has no aroma but is twice as tediousas the wild strawberry’s sunburststem-end appendage: each one mustbe between-nail-snipped at both extremities.Altogether, gooseberry virtuestake some gettingused to, as does trepang,tripe à la mode de Caen,or having turned thirteen.The acerbity of all things greenand adolescent lingers in it—the arrogant, shrinking,prickling-in-every-direction thorn-iness that loves no company except its,or anyhow that’s what it gets:bristling up through gooseberry ghetto sprawlare braced thistles’ silvery, militantly symmetricaldefense machineries. Likewise inseparably en-tangled in the disarray of anuncultivated childhood, where gooseberry bushes (sincerooted out) once flourished, isthe squandered volupté of lemon-yellow-petaled roses’ luscious flimflam—an inkling of the mingling into one experienceof suave and sharp, whose supremely im-probable and far-fetched culinaryembodiment is a gooseberry fool.Tomorrow, having stumbled intothis trove of chief ingredients(the other being very thickest cream)I’ll demonstrate it for you. Ever since,four summers ago, I first brought you,a gleeful Ariel, the trophyof a small sour handful,I’ve wondered what not quite articulated thingcould render magical the green globe of an unripe berry.I think now it was simplythe great globe itself’s too much to carry.December 1981
Smaller than pollen-grain, smaller than seedOf bitter berry red—Do not look for the small,The door has no size at all.Some of sorrow have made a wellAnd deep have seenIn daylight far stars glimmer paleIn a nether heaven.April 1963
What’s there to say? We didn’t care for him much,and you can’t exactly commiseratewith someone you don’t just not lovebut almost (admit it) hate.So the news just hung over uslike the dud summer weather we’d had—rain since June, the lawn sodden,garden a bog, all slugs, late blight so badour sickened Beefsteak vines, our Sweet One Hundreds,San Marzanos, the lot,yellowed half black before the fruit had set,which, when it did, began to bloat and rotbefore it ripened—but like I say(and not to speak ill of the dead)we just didn’t care for him,which is probably all there is to be said.
My stylistcalls me darling,says Hi I’m Dee, and asks what I’d like today, smiling.My hair back, I tell her, my precious locks,thick and unruly and glossy as they werebefore I was fleeced.Her laughteras she switchesthe clippers on, brings back that sweet-throated witch’swho comforted me as only your enemy canin the days of my strength, when I smotehip and thigh in a great slaughter.Her nice eyesby and by reston mine in the mirror. She leans in, letting her breastbrush against me. She knows her middle-aged man;playing me like some trailer Delilah,and I feel it rise;the old bluntwant-instrumentthat always and only wanted what it shouldn’t;Gaza, Timna, my Valley girlwho spilled me in broad daylight. I must have reckonedthe sun shone out of her cunt.Too long nowbereft of it,a woman’s hands in my hair, or what’s left of it,is all I seem to require of love, and all I’ll spill is a tip, Dee; big as my straitenedcircumstances allow,for Dee, once my head wasn’t bareas that cornfield after the foxes I set on firerampaged through it, or the orchards and olive grovesI flattened with my slat-armored D9 ’dozer,but maned like a lion’s.
Startled from snow-day slumber by a neighbor’s mutt, it banged its buzzard’s head then couldn’t solve the problem of the white pine’s limbs with wings nearly too broad for a planned descent. Somewhere an awkward angel knows whether it was dead before it hit the ground.Any sinner could tell it was dead after—eyes unseen beneath bare and wrinkled lids,feet drawn up almost as high as hands.I loved to watch thistle and millet disappear beneath it in the yard.As snow covers feathers that will still be iridescent in the spring I remember seeing a businessman take a dripping handful of pocket change and throw it down a subway grate beside a homeless man. The coins bounced and clattered, vanishing in the humid dark. The rich man said now you’re having a shitty day too. But it’s not a shitty day and won’t be when I retrieve the bird and walk it—toes curling stiff from a shopping bag—to a houseless scrap of oak savannah birdseed drew it from and dig it into deeper snow so what was hoarded by a man may by the thaw be doled.
I had just hung up from talking to youand we had been so immersed in the difficultyyou were facing, and forgive me,I was thinking that as long as we kept talking,you in your car in the parking lot of the boys’ schoolas the afternoon deepened into early evening,and me in the study, all the books aroundthat had been sources of beauty to us,as long as we stayed in the conversationpadded with history like the floor of the pine forest, as long as I thought out loud, made a jokeat my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange, but the boys were leaving the trackand after we hung up I looked out the window to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red, massive but made from the thinnesttwigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbsthey were waving and shining in a lightlike no other and left only to them.
Because you used to leaf through the dictionary, Casually, as someone might in a barber shop, and Devotedly, as someone might in a sanctuary, Each letter would still have your attention if not For the responsibilities life has tightly fit, like Gears around the cog of you, like so many petals Hinged on a daisy. That’s why I’ll just use your Initial. Do you know that in one treasured story, a Jewish ancestor, horseback in the woods at Yom Kippur, and stranded without a prayer book, Looked into the darkness and realized he had Merely to name the alphabet to ask forgiveness— No congregation of figures needed, he could speak One letter at a time because all of creation Proceeded from those. He fed his horse, and then Quietly, because it was from his heart, he Recited them slowly, from aleph to tav. Within those Sounds, all others were born, all manner of Trials, actions, emotions, everything needed to Understand who he was, had been, how flaws Venerate the human being, how aspirations return Without spite. Now for you, may your wife’s X-ray return with good news, may we raise our Zarfs to both your names in the Great Book of Life.
Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper,but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the dailyherald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come: thwash,the next day another, an example of everything that gets donein the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case,the strange October weather warming them. There were theconclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There waspain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was myambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being aliveat the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring outagainst each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.
The day turned into the city and the city turned into the mindand the moving trucks trumbled along like loud worries speaking overthe bicycle’s ideawhich wove between the more armored vehicles of expressionand over planks left by the construction workerson a holiday morning when no work was being donebecause no matter the day, we tend towards remaking parts of it—what we said or did, or how we looked—and the buildings were like faceslining the banks of a paradeobstructing and highlighting each otherdefining height and width for each otheroffsetting grace and functionlike Audrey Hepburn from Jesse Owens, and the hearty pigeons collaborate with wrought iron fencesand become recurring choruses of memoryreassembling around bencheswe sat in once, while seagulls wheel like immigrating thoughts, and never-leavingchickadees hop bared hedges and low treeslike commas and semicolons, landingwhere needed, separating subjects from adjectives, stringing alongthe long ideas, showing how the cagehas no door, and the lights changedso the tide of sound ebbed and returnedlike our own breathand when I knew everythingwas going to look the same as the mindI stopped at a lively cornerwhere the signs themselves were likeperpendicular dialects in conversation andI put both my feet on the groundtook the bag from the basketso pleased it had not been crushedby the mightiness of all elsethat goes on and gave you the sentence inside.
The mind mustset itself upwherever it goesand it would bemost convenientto impose itsold rooms—justtack them uplike an interiortent. Oh butthe new holes aren’t where the windowswent.
Miser time growsprofligate near the end: unpinching and unplanning,abandoning thewhole idea ofsavings. It’s hardto understandbut time apparentlyexpands with itsdiminishing. The door thrown wideon sliding hills of high-denomination bills and nothing much to buy.
There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery storewith a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers—so that before you are even out the dooryou feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thinplastic handles longer and longerand you know it’s only a matter of time untilbottom suddenly splits. There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of somethingmoving away from youas it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the wordI would like to use to describe standing on the streetchatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he isno longer a friend, but only an acquaintance, a person with whom I never made the effort—until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reachedthe end of a pretense, though to tell the truth what I already am thinking aboutis my gratitude for language—how it will stretch just so much and no farther;how there are some holes it will not cover up;how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything—how, over the years, it has given meback all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all themisunderstandings and secretsI have willingly poured into it.
Without even knowing it, I have believed in you for a long time.When I looked at my blood under a microscope I could see truth multiplying over and over.—Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma persuaded mebut your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass thrust up above the January snow. Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse, from the museum series on European masters. When my friend died on the way to the hospital it was not his death that so amazed mebut that the driver of the cab did not insist upon the fare.Quotation marks: what should we put inside them? Shall I say “I” “have been hurt” “by” “you,” you neglectful monster?I speak now because experience has shown me that my mind will never be clear for long.I am more thick-skinned and male, more selfish, jealous, and afraid than ever in my life.“For my heart is tangled in thy nets; my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time...”The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites.The parade for the slain police officergoes past the bakeryand the smell of fresh bread makes the mourners salivate against their will.
We had been married for six or seven years when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told methat she screams underwater when she swims—that, in fact, she has been screaming for yearsinto the blue chlorinated water of the community poolwhere she does laps every other day. Buttering her toast, not as if she had been concealing anything, not as if I should consider myselfpersonally the cause of her screaming,nor as if we should perform an act of therapy right that minute on the kitchen table,—casually, she told me, and I could see her turn her square face up to take a gulp of oxygen,then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently,politely keeping the big secret that it is not all funto be ripped by the crooked beakof something called psychology,to be dipped down again and again into time;that the truest, most intimate pleasure you can sometimes findis the wet kiss of your own pain.There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two lapsback and forth in the community pool; —what discipline she has!Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages, that will never be read by anyone.
Mossy and thumping, bare of logic, red: why do they say your other head and not your other heart? The snack cakes of Smut Wonderlandturn Alice smaller than her dress. She stirs,nude in the folds of so much baby blue. To think, they called this lesser art.I ate mostly orders then, and you—you were thinking with your other heart. I took in a dog the way some might take in a dress (I had become just skin). It coughed. I cried for itto stop, I fed it meat, its maladyrecurrent and untreatable. I had to give it up, like some bum body part whose incidental benefitthe human form has out-evolved. Don’t start.That dog: I called it Help, and I cried for it.
For my daughter
Are you of or not of brain, matter’s boss or its crevasse, are you the body itself, or more than that, immortal you, crouched in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat? Are you housed in me or not? The tenant or the landlord of my skin? Am I your avatar? Are you my East Berlin? Are we an I or each other’s synonym? Last night, the train I was on dimmed then re-electrified, and I thought again that we are conscious a lot less often than we suppose, that half the time in us you’re half reposed. I was in South Orange again, city of my former self’s last stand. Do you remember him, your swallowed twin, the child king whom you deposed? Oh, I know: you think you’re the buried light, the jeweled glow, the sunlight falling through the falling snow. But I’ve seen the uranium laced through your walls: you’re an equation only destruction solves. Who else but youstarts each day with masturbation and ends each night with gin? And so how should I begin? Four years ago, you rose in me like a fin. It started as an overflow, a drop of go, some royal beast in me, all gasoline and yeast, unhinging its own jaw to accelerate the feast, the rails of thought so greased that the outer world began to skew, as in that moment on a train when the view becomes a wash of hues. There were clues. Phantom music in the air. At times, I’d look down at my body and think, “How’d you get there?” One day, I de-napped to find myself entrapped within the tangled logic of a subway map. All day, I’d refrain, I’d double-track. I’d talk to myself and myself talked back. Was it you? That tick I felt within the trick of thought? That wick that curled itself around me, not exploding, just making a constant tick-tick-tick that finally convinced me that I was sick, that there was a cascade of toxins in the air, that there was something queer about the neighbor’s stare, that charade of signals everywhere, an air raid in the brain, something in me left unpaid, a cosmic debt in arrears. Some nights, I’d hear the voices of my parents coming near, like waves that overlapped—she’d slap him, he’d slap her back—their rage a single note that climbed its staff for years, my siblings and I in the closet with our fingers in our ears, though still I heard one night the knife drawer heaved back, as if they really might slice each other or the house in half, and then my thoughts unweaved and I began to laugh. And it is funny, isn’t it,the way that which starts as confession ends
A car’s backfire rifles the ear with skeleton clatter, the crowd’s walla walladraws near, caterwaul evaporating in thin air. Silence is dead. (Long live silence.)Let’s observe a moment of it, call it what it’s not: splatter of rain that can’t soothethe window’s pane, dog barking up the wrong tree. Which tree, which air apparent is there to hear a word at its worth? Hammer that drums its water-logged warning against the side of the submarine: I’m buried to the hiltlike the knife, after it’s thrown, continues to bowto the appleit’s split.
A Schwinn-ride away: Eagledale Plaza. Shopping strip of busted walkways, crooked parking spaces nicked like the lines on the sides of somebody’s mom-barbered head. Anchored by the Piccadilly disco, where a shootout was guaranteed every weekend, those gun claps: coughing stars shot from sidewaysguns shiny enough to light the way for anyone willing to keep a head up long enough to see. Not me. I bought the Star Map Shirt for 15¢ at the Value Village next to the Piccadilly duringthe daytime. The shirt was polyester with flyaway collars, outlined in the forgotten astronomies of disco. The shirt’s washed-out points of light: arranged in horse & hero shapes & I rocked it in places neither horse nor hero hung out. Polyester is made from polyethylene & catches fire easily like wings near a thrift store sun. Polyethylene, used in shampoo bottles, gun cases, & those grocery sacks skidding like upended stars across the parking lot. There are more kinds of stars in this universe than salt granules on drive-thru fries. Too many stars, lessening & swelling with each pedal pump away from the Value Village as the electric billboard above flashes first one dui attorney, then another who speaks Spanish so the sky above is constantly chattering, like the biggest disco ball ever.
It ends because the beginning won’t jumpstart again: red smudge of a mouth, lipstick everywherethe afterthought a comet leaves on its way out. What makes this moment unfold like a fine woman raising herself up from the bathroom floor? Honky-tonk in the honeyed brown of an eyeball? Perfume & its circus of heart-shaped introductions? It ends because the needle always winds up in the lead-out, like a man pawing around for broken spectacles after he wakes in the world’s rubble. Hand over hand he paws, through stilted guitar picks & abandoned stilettos, raised skirts & rocks, glasses as chipped & smudged as the topography of a skipping record. He could be Albright himself, foraging the still-life swish of low-rise tutus & skyscrapers cracked in the twisted aftermath of a smile. Even without glasses, he remembers her in high style: magnanimously coming down the blue & violet threads of night, her green dress clashing with the bathroom tile.
I had a calling.I took the call.It was all I could do to follow the voice streaming into meLike traffic on the runway where I layDown to gather.I had a calling. I heard the geese bleatIn the firmament as they migratedInto the jet’s jets.And could I have foreseen that fallingI could have fallen tooRather than being sutured to the bottomlessFreeze-out lake.For it is fine to lie within one’s borrowed blanketsLooking up at the Dropped ceiling coming down.For at the moment I am employed counting the holesIn the sound absorbing tilesKeeping a running record of the interlocutor’s Chides.I feel at one with extinctionBy my own hand(Inner hand)Though once there were many of my kindFlocking inland, or perhapsIt felt that way.
Full of light and music, the beating air. Light like a bird, Calvino says, not a feather. Over the water the shags come in to landAll wings, uh-ohing over the cliffs.Rock, their nests, and bare the rookeries. Blue eye, blue eye, the wind plays fast and sharp.They lift and ride and do not pick their fights. Oh, blue sky, blue day. HeartOf muscle, thrumming down, and swift.
Another day come, add it To the list, theNot to do list.Son of mine,I was rambling across the undercarpetingStrewn with imperceptible tacksIn one shapeless slip-onWhen a pain rang out in my flankAnd I fell to,Braying,But who should answer but no one.I lost good cause that day, don’t ask,Let us sit a bit in this ill-starredSuit in the form-fillingChamber of subtraction,Listing.I haven’t another trip around the sun Left in me. Speak to meSon, vague one. For this is where it thickens,Me here and it there and me there and them hereAnd you with the soul.I’ll cross that gravid boneyard All the day poking Radishes for remembrance.For this is a private matter Between a man and his scaffoldingAnd it shall remain so Privation permitting.
Out of cash, out of well-fitting trousers,Out of soap and apples,Out of pencils, out of my keeper’sReach. I wish to set myself afireBut may not. This morning(Last night) in the common room I watched the administrationOf oxygen to one who had noneAnd I would not sit down, demandingTo do so.Later I happened on a manAt the piano, and though I have happened five or six times On men at the piano,None moved his hand like thisWithin the keys.I sat beside him, looking for a soundA chest sound. Not listening; I don’t listenAnymore. I make musicBut I don’t listen.
I passed through, I should have paused,there were a hundred doors. One opened. In there, someone whose name is not yet known to me lived out his middle years in simple terms, two chairs, one place laid for early breakfast, one plate with dry toast and butter softening. There his mind raced through writings he had memorized long ago while he tried to get hold of himself. Once in his youth he had studied with love in the corners of old paintings matrices of fields and towns, passages intricate and particular, wheat, columns, figures and ground,classically proportioned in lines that were meant to meet, eventually,at vanishing point. They continued,nevertheless; they troubled the eye.He collected sets of books printedin the nineteenth century, unyieldingpages, memoirs of the poets,engravings of rurified private subjects in times of public sector unhappiness,frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing.Why does it continueto chasten me, he says to no one. It does. It is a painful mistaking,this setting something down,saying aloud, “it is nothing yet”when he’d meant, not anything— but then nothing peered through the keyhole, nothingtook possession. Snow on the roofs,snow in traces on the ground, passersby with wet trouser-cuffs looking to the pavement as the hill rises,light gathering in the river and gradually spreading.
I slept before a wall of books and theycalmed everything in the room, eventheir contents, even me, wokenby the cold and thrill, and stillthey said, like the Dutch verb for falling silent that English has no accommodation forin the attics and rafters of its intimacies.
When the collie saw the childbreak from the crowd,he gave chase, and since they bothwere border-crossers,they left this world. We were then made of—affronted by—silence.The train passed Poste 5, Paris,late arrival, no luck, noenlarging commentarymagnified in any glass.“The ineffableis everywhere in language”the speaker had said in the huge hall where I sat amongst coughers, students, in the late February of that year,at the end of a sinuous inquiry on sense and sound—“and very close to the ground,” he’d said. Like mist risen abovethe feet of animalsin a far field north of here.
Who could have dreamed them up? At least snailshave shells, but all these have is—nothing.Small black antennae like fat pins waveas if they could take in enough to get them through.Turn them over, they’re the soles of new shoes,pale and unmarked as babies. They flow,the soil itself learning how to move and, moving,almost staying still, their silver monorailthe only evidence of where they’d been.And they die quiet, or at least (thankfully)out of the human ear’s range, between two stones,under heels, shriveling in salt or piss, at the tipsof sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear myself say,do something. Don’t just take it. But they dieas they had lived, exuding slime, likethe smaller boys, who’d juststand there, miserable in short pants,school socks down to their ankles,school tie unknotted and askew, and flowingfrom noses slow cauls of snot thatfrom time to time they’d lick or sniff back uppart way, until it flowed again, coatingthe upper lip, falling into the mouth, mixingwith tears before anything had been done,the fear itself enough, so even if we wantedwe couldn’t let them off. Sometimes it wasthe knee “where you daren’t show your mother,”other times the kick in the shins, the stick overthe head, the punch in the mouth, while theyjust stood there, or double up, gaspingfor breath, and we did it again.
A man reaches closeand lifts a quarter from inside a girl’s ear,from her hands takes a doveshe didn’t know was there.Which amazes more,you may wonder:the quarter’s serrated murmuragainst the thumbor the dove’s knuckled silence?That he found them, or that she never had,or that in Portugal,this same half-stopped moment,it’s almost dawn, and a woman in a wheelchairis singing a fado that puts every life in the roomon one pan of a scale, itself on the other, and the copper bowls balance.
Lie down, you are horizontal. Stand up, you are not.I wanted my fate to be human.Like a perfume that does not choose the direction it travels,that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.Yes, No, Or—a day, a life, slips through them,taking off the third skin, taking off the fourth.And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,an animal question, scuffing.Old shoes, old roads—the questions keep being new ones.Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain into oranges and olives.
Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,restless, stunned, relieved.Does a tree also?A mountain?A cup holds sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.I hold these.
Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,in me are lives I do not know the names of,nor the fates of,nor the hungers of or what they eat.They eat of me.Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.And in my streets—the narrow ones, unlabeled on the self-map—they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,in hours uncounted by the self-clock,they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves. There too have been the hard extinctions, missing birds once feasted on and feasting.There too must be machines like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.A few escape. A mercy.They leave behind small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.
I’m talking about Mount Street.Jackhammers give it the staggers.They’re tearing up dear Mount Street.It’s got a torn-up face like Mick Jagger’s.I mean, this is Mount Street!Scott’s restaurant, the choicest oysters, brilliant fish;Purdey, the great shotgun maker—the street is completePosh plush and (except for Marc Jacobs) so English.Remember the old Mount Street,The quiet that perfumed the airLike a flowering tree and smelled sweetAs only money can smell, because after all this was Mayfair?One used to stay at the ConnaughtTill they closed it for a makeover.One was distraughtTo see the dark wood brightened and sleekness take over.Designer greaseWill help guests slide right into the zone.Prince Charles and his design policeAre tickled pink because it doesn’t threaten the throne.I exaggerate for effect—But isn’t it grand, the stink of the stank,That no sooner had the redone hotel just about got itself perfectThan the local council decided: new street, new sidewalk, relocate the taxi rank!Turn away from your life—away from the noise!—Leaving the Connaught and Carlos Place behind.Hidden away behind those redbrick buildings across the street are serious joys:Green grandeur on a small enough scale to soothe your mind,And birdsong as liquid as life was before you were born.Whenever I’m in London I stop by this delightful garden to hearThe breeze in the palatial trees blow its shepherd’s horn.I sit on a bench in Mount Street Gardens and London is nowhere near.
For Ann Forsythe Irwin Bourgois Remembering AnnWhose beauty beganAt the crown of her headAnd ran to the deep underneathOf her feet—Never aware of her own élan.Now, half mad with pain, She crawls through her rooms,Calling for doctors,Falling,Forgetting,Consumed,Trepanned.Ever since the world began—Star fallNightfallBomb fallDownfall...Read the scan:Every woman and every man,Once a flowered Palestine,Falls blindly toward the Nakba—Bald catastrophe,Prescription—According to thePlan.
A dinosaur egg opens in a labAnd out steps my paternal grandfather, Sam,Already taller than a man,And on his way to becoming a stomping mile-high predator, so I ran.I never knew my mother’s father, who may have been a suicide.He was buried in a pauper’s grave my mother triedTo find, without success. Jews grabThe thing they love unless it’s ham,And hold it tightly to them lest it die—Or like my mother tryTo find the ham they couldn’t hold.A hot ham does get cold.Grampa, monster of malevolence,I’m told was actually a rare old-fashioned gentleman of courtly benevolence.At night the thing to do was drive to Pevely DairyAnd park and watch the fountain shooting up and changing colors.The child sat in the back, finishing his ice-cream soda,Sucking the straw in the empty glass as a noisy coda.Sometimes on Sunday they drove to the Green Parrot.There was the sideways-staring parrot to stare at.The chickens running around were delicious fried, but nothing was sanitary.B.O. was the scourge of the age—and polio—and bathroom odors.If you didn’t wash your hands,It contributed—as did your glands!His father always had gas for their cars from his royal rationing cards.The little boy went to see the king at one of the king’s coal yards.The two of them took a trip and toured the dad’s wartime coal mine.It was fun. It was fine.The smell of rain about to fall,A sudden coolness in the air,Sweetness wider than the Mississippi at its muddy brownest.I didn’t steal his crayon, Mrs. Marshall, honest!It’s captain midnight...brought to you by ovaltine!I travel backwards in a time machineAnd step inside a boy who’s three feet tall.How dare he have such curly hair!A boy and his dog go rafting down the Mississippi River.They have a message to deliverTo the gold-toothed king.Sire, we have a message that we bring.Little boy, approach the throne.Ow! I hit my funny bone.The British consul was paid extra because it was a hardship post.The weather was Antarctica/equatorial extreme.Surely summer was in error.Winter was terror.White snowflakes the size of dinosaur eggsVersus humidity that walked across your face on housefly legs.I loved both the most.Radio made women dreamOf freedom from oppression and the daily nonsense.Hairy tarantulas in boatloads of bananas made the lazy heat immenseIn the heart. Blizzards didn’t stop my father’s big blue coal trucks so why bother.Why bother, father?Billie Holiday was inside.I thought I had gone to heaven and died.
Shrugging shallowly down, burrowingin beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallow-brown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle bean-dripping locust and the still so innocent fruit trees—bare-boughed and newly blossoming—skinnilyshadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my “now” [in this pictured perfect] four-year-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lielow. I remember hiding in the forttoo: bedtimes once how snug among books and the plush beasts we spoke the speech of angels. Now the world is huge-ly hushed. The winter sky is hard, kiln-firedblue. The cherry wood retouched with buds. And small,untimely flowers like blood-drops on the snow. • Time lapsed. Time dwelt. There was nothing apparently to those rumors of rescue or reprisals. Absence onlyemptied the mind. The fond heart feltlight—likewise lifted right and justly upto praise the day as it was to highheaven. You were a “find”: rare, rose-lipped, hennaed, ochred, kohled, long black-stockinged O like one of Schiele’s urewiggirls, flashing a shy semaphore—spelling eloquently out the f-word, tenderly revisiting its history.Lust—like love lost—was the catalyst:exquisitely expedient, unchanged.
Three mini ciabattini for breakfastwhere demand for persnickety breadis small, hence its expense, hence my steadfastrecalculation of my overhead,which soars, and as you might expectthe ciabattini stand in for my fantasyof myself in a sea-limned prospect,on a terrace, with a lemon tree...Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late.Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book.Better never lose track of the date.Oversleep, and you’re on the hook.It’s the margin for error: shrinking.It’s life ground down to recurrence.It’s fewer books read for the thinkingthe hospital didn’t rebill the insurance;the school misplaced the kids’ paperwork.Here’s our sweet pup, a rescuewhich we nonetheless paid for, and look:he gets more grooming than I do.When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowagerwho ground gems on ham for her guests; the queen who ground out two cups of flour on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress;I think of a “great rock-eating bird” grinding out a sandy beach, the foam said to be particulate matter of minute crustaceans, eachbrilliantly spooning up Aphrodite to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes,and plain living which might beshaken by infinitesimal tattoos.
The day upturned, flooded with sunlight, nota single cloud. I squint into the glare,cautious even then of bright emptiness.We sit under shade, Tía Luciashowing me how white folks dine, the high life.I am about to try my first oyster,Tía spending her winnings from the slotson a whole dozen, the glistening valveswet and private as a cheek’s other side, broken open before us. Don’t be shy.Take it all in at once. Flesh and sea grit,sweet meat and brine, a taste I must acquire. In every split shell, the coast’s silhouette: bodies floating in what was once their home.
—spring wind with its train of spoons, kidney-bean shaped pools, Floridianhumus, cicadas with their electric appliance hum, cricket pulse of dusk under the pixilate gold of the trees, fall’s finish, snow’s white afterlife, death’s breath finishing the monologue Phenomena, The Most Beautiful Girl you carved the word because you craved the world—
When I painted, everybody saw.When I played piano, everybody heard. I ate your raspberries.The sign no trespassing applied to me.Now, the hemlocks have grown higher than the house.There’s moss on my stoop, a little mildew In the shower but you’ve never seen my shower. I can undress by the window, I can sleep in the barn.The sky, which is cloudy, Suits the earth to which it belongs.
I get there early and I find a chair.I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod.I maladroitly eat a pretzel rodand second an opinion I don’t share.I think: whatever else I am, I’m there.Afterwards, I escape across the quadinto fresh air, alone again, thank god.Nobody cares. They’re quite right not to care.I can’t go home. Even my family is thoroughly contemptuous of me.I look bad. I’m exactly how I look.These days I never read, but no one does,and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was.Everything I know is from a book.
For G A small thing crawling toward meacross this dark lawn. Brighteyes the only thing I’m sure I see.You’ve come back to me,haven’t you, my sweet? Fromlong ago, and very far. Through crawling dark, my sweet, you’vecome back to me, have you? Even smaller this time than the stars.
The last two sherpas were the strongest,faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled,streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfieldbelow the summit where we stopped to rest.The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx-fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt,agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered,alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx.The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty, furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brainsearching for some cairn or chasm to explainmy decision to send them back without me.Looking down from the next, ax-cleft serac I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid. Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied,whatever I was then, there was no turning back.
on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horseophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system—not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existenceexcite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthewwho said that the light of the body is the eye, and that ifthe eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybein this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes ofcorrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darknessby which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive, correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities andnightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see. The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper? Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.
Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying.The past is a fox the hunters are flaying.Nothing unspoken goes without saying.Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing.The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying.The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing.Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing.Love is a marriage of feeling and being.The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing.Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.Nothing gets cloven except by dividing.The future is chosen by atoms colliding.The past’s an elision forever eliding.Today is a fog bank in which I am hiding.Love is a burn forever debriding.Love’s an ascent forever plateauing.Nothing is granted except by bestowing.Today is an anthem the cuckoos are crowing.The future’s a convolute river onflowing.The past is a lawn the neighbor is mowing.The past is an answer not worth pursuing,Nothing gets done except by the doing.The future’s a climax forever ensuing.Love is only won by wooing.Today is a truce between reaping and rueing.
If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly,if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion,if the wind can learn to read our minds and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket,surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreamingunimaginable dreams in hollow trees,even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame uswith their stoicism, their radiant resolve. Listen to me now: think of something you love but not too dearly, so the night will steal from usonly what we can afford to lose.
From the old bridge we’d been stopped on, a little below us, it looked like a diving board.When the girl switched her sign from Stop to SlowI saw across the river three men standing like old-fashioned divers at its base, newsreels we’d seenof men in swim caps. “Hard hats,” you literal you.You agreed with “like a diving board,” but no spring to it. Something below was holding it up, somethingconcrete. It was the business of your life. Concrete—but for me the men were waiting their turn over there,each to compete for the best two-and-a-half gainerto knife the Tye River. They’d die, you said.“That’s a fine span,” I learned, “a very long one—they didn’t make ’em like that back then.” Or useither, I thought as I almost saw the Hard Hat bounceat the tip, his one knee up to his waist.“Inspectors,” you said as we drove across, “lolly-gagging.” Whichever. Our span is ready.
It keeps on happening again and it willbe forgotten again until it’s September.We’re in the tall building paying the billoverdue to the city for gas to fuel our furnace. We’re thinking November—it keeps on happening again—and we’llneed heat. Now it’s still summer, too hot untilfall to turn off the AC. Considerthat other cloudless day, paying the billin City Hall. It’s way too high now, stillwe pay it. Look at the line, at him, her—it keeps on happening again and it will.Energy’s costly. We forget it can kill.Though some of our children can’t remember,we in the building paying the billlook at the date, at the window sill,think of their choice between jump and tinder.It keeps on happening again and it will.We’re in the tall building, paying the bill.
Last night, when the moon slipped into my attic room as an oblong of light, I sensed she’d come to commiserate. It was August. She traveled with a small valise of darkness, and the first few stars returning to the northern sky, and my room, it seemed, had missed her. She pretended an interest in the bookcase while other objects stirred, as in a rock pool, with unexpected life: strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed, the paper-crowded desk; the books, too, appeared inclined to open and confess. Being sure the moon harbored some intention, I waited; watched for an age her cool gaze shift first toward a flower sketch pinned on the far wall then glide down to recline along the pinewood floor, before I’d had enough. Moon, I said, We’re both scarred now. Are they quite beyond you, the simple words of love? Say them. You are not my mother; with my mother, I waited unto death.
This is the multitude, the beasts you wanted to show me, drawing me upstream, all morning up through wind-scoured heather to the hillcrest. Below us, in the next glen, is the grave calm brotherhood, descended out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling like the signatories of a covenant; their weighty, antique-polished antlers rising above the vegetation like masts in a harbor, or city spires. We lie close together, and though the windwhips away our man-and-woman smell, everystag-face seems to look toward us, toward, but not to us: we’re held, and hold them, in civil regard. I suspect you’d hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight our shared country, lead me deeper into what you know, but loathto cause fear you’re already moving quietly away, sure I’ll go with you, as I would now, almost anywhere.
“Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance...”—Djuna Barnes Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watchThe sly very old woman wile away from her piousAnd stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin.She pours big drinks. We think of whatHas crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh inAnd muddied her once tumbling blood that, young,Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower,Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite,Collapsed to this keen dame moving amongHerself. She hums, she plays with used brightGhosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come hereMy child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking fingerShows how hot the oven is.(Also she is alive with hate.Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wishWe might, illiberal, uncompassionate,Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.)Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock stillThough aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles.We manage to mean well. We endure, and more.We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure.We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kinTo any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us,Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure. March 1958
I must have passed the crest a while ago And now I am going down.Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know— But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.All the morning I thought how proud it would be To stand there straight as a queen—Wrapped in the wind and the sun, with the world under me. But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.It was nearly level along the beaten track And the brambles caught in my gown—But it’s no use now to think of turning back, The rest of the way will be only going down. September 1919
For Wade Hall is to become a footnotein a learned work of the22nd century not just a“cf” or a “see” but a sol-id note such as Raby givesWalafrid Straho in Christ-ian Latin Poetry
So like the slow moss encroaching, this dark anxiety. In the bricks by nowand all along the shaded left side of the house. And the statue, behind her knee. Her ankle, in the cool space between her breasts, spreading in the earliest hours of the morning. Between her fingers.Her parted lips.That black-green whispering.
1. HELLYou’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down, the infernal hatreds. Shoot them. Shoot them where they live and then skip town.Or stay and re-engineer the decrepit social contraptionto distill the 200-proofelixir of fearand torture the...the what from the what? And didn’t I promise,under threat of self-intubation,not to envision thiscorridor, coal-tar black,that narrows down and into a shattering claustrophobia attackbefore opening outto the lake of frozen shitwhere the gruesome figure is discerned?Turn around, go home.Just to look at it is to become it. 2. PURGATORY, THE FILM He was chronically out of work, why we don’t know. She was the second born of a set of estranged identical twins. They met,hooked up, and moved in with her mother,who managed a motel on Skyline Drive. But always it was the other,the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway, he imagined in the shadowof the “Vacancy” signor watching through the windowbelow the dripping eaveswhile they made love or slept.The body is relaxed and at rest,the mind is relaxed in its nest,so the self that is and is not itself rises and leavesto peek over the horizon, where it seesall its psychokinetic possibilitiesresolving into shapely fictions.She was brave, nurturing, kind.She was evil. She was out of her mind.She was a junkie trading sex for a fix,a chief executive, an aviatrix.She was an angelto the blinded and the lamed,the less-than-upright, the infra dig.And she was even a failure.She went to L.A. to make it big and crept back home injured and ashamed.3. PURGATORY, THE SEQUELThey put him in jail, why we don’t know. They stamped him “Postponed.”But he didn’t mind.The screws were almost kind.He had leisure to get his muscles toned,mental space to regret his crimes,and when he wasn’t fabricating license plateshe was freeto remember the beautythat not once but a thousand timesescaped him forever, and escapes me, too:ghosts of a mist driftingacross the face of the stars,Jupiter triangulating with the crescent moon and Mars, prismatic fracturings in a drop of dew... 4. HEAVENThere’s drought on the mountain. Wildfires scour the hills.So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rillssearching for the fountain,which it finds, believe it or not,or sort of finds. A thin silver sliverrises from an underground riverand makes a few of the hotrocks steam and the pebbles hiss.Soon the mammal will drink,but it has first to stop and thinkits reflexive, impeccable thought:that thinking comes down to this—mystery, longing, thirst.
Does no dishes, dribbles sauce across the floor. Is more dragon than spaniel, more flammable than fluid. Is the loosening in the knit of me, the mixed-fruit marmalade in the kitchen of me. Wakes my disco and inner hibiscus, the Hector in the ever-mess of my Troy. All wet mattress to my analysis,he’s stayed the loudest and longestof any houseguest, is calling now as I write this, tiny B who brings the joy.
It disappeared. It reappearedas chimney smoke that burnt through carcassesof swallows stilled,and that it portrayed no willwas why I followed that smokewith this pair of eyes.It was that it didn’t needor require my beliefthat I leant upon it as a tired workerupon a gate.
For all of my years, I’ve read only living signs—bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle, bodies growing disease like mushroom coral.It is tiresome, tiresome, describing fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs into some slow, future forest.My beloved, he tires of me, and he should—my complaints the same, his recourse the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapesover the living freeze of heart after heart, and never by that heart’s fault—the heart did not make itself,the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone to wail across the plains or beg the bare city. I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans, the figs that outlived summer or the tedious mineral angles and their suction of light. Have you died? Then speak. You must see the living are too small as they are, lonesome for more and in varieties of pain only you can bring into right view.
The cost of flight is landing.On this warm winter day in the southwest,down here on the edge of the border I wantto go to France where we all came fromwhere the Occident was born near the ancientcaves near Lascaux. At home I’m onlysitting on the lip of this black hole, a wellthat descends to the center of the earth.With a big telescope aimed straight downI see a red dot of fire and hear the beast howling.My back is suppurating with disease,the heart lurches left and right,the brain sings its ditties.Everywhere blank white movies wait to be seen.The skylark dove within inches of the rocksbefore it stopped and rose again.God’s toes are buried deep in the earth.He’s ready to run. But where?
Toward what island-home am I moving,not wanting to marry, not wanting too much of that emptiness at evening, as when I walked through a field at duskand felt wide in the night.And it was again the evening that drew meback to the field where I was most alone,compassed by stems and ruts, no light of the fixed stars, no flashing in the eyes, only heather pared by dry air, shedding a small feathered radiance when I looked away,an expanse whose deep sleep seemed an unending warren I had been given, to carry out such tasks—that I might find nothing dead. And it was again the evening that drew meback to the field where I could sense no boundary—the smell of dry earth, cool arch of my neck, the darkness entirely within myself. And when I shut my eyes there was no one.Only weeds in drifts of stillness, only stalks and gliding sky.Come, black anchor, let us not be harmed.The deer leafing in the dark.The old man at the table, unable to remember.The children whose hunger is just hunger, and never desire.
when I beheld a fire win out against a hemisphere of shadows. —Inferno, Dante (tr. by Allen Mandelbaum) If I could hold a fire againsta hemisphere of shadows, hold itclose, not so that damagefinds my hands, but so fire scattersgalvanizing strands, my pupilsresponsive to the flames’ unbridled tutelage as they tell menothing but these little jumpsout of your definitions, smallor large or leaping, sinking, slumped
Just north of town, a quaint Sargasso Sea for bric-a-brac: the barn, itself antique,spills over with a grab-bag panoplyof outworn stock revalued as “unique.”Typewriters tall as headstones fill the loftwhere they’ve been ricked away like sacks of grain;a coffer yawns the must of oak—gone soft—when one man, squinting, lifts the lid to feignintrigue. Nearby, his wife surveys the smalls:art deco bangles bright as harpsichords,a glut of iron trivets, Christmas balls,Depression glass and warping Ouija boards.One man’s junk is another’s all the same.They don’t buy much, but that’s not why they came.
About the dead having available to themall breeds of knowledge,some pure, others wicked, especially what isfuture, and the history that remains once the waters recede, revealing the land that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived, simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences silences: sometimes a boy will slip from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why,sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.
We aren’t the solid men. We bend like the number seven. Dig at corners, eat cobwebs, we are barefoot and bare-legged. We hang like leaves in autumn.We aren’t the stolid men. We scribble in familiar inkabout sunfalls and night. We see the white in the sky, and sigh. We lie with penciled grins.We aren’t the men, any men. We rip at the neck and wonder why while rattlers roll in. Bent as a number, crooked, sundered, we aren’t the idle lightning if black thunder.
New Orleans, Louisiana For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinctalone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing outa need to know. You only feel you need to live.That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chestfills with a strange new air, you will not ask what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb that keeps it kicking. Let it.
Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him. With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it. Also directives from our  DNA.The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down. He wound down.July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxesOf   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell. Barges of coal bloomed in heat. It was when the catfish were the only fish left living In the Monongahela River. Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in By the slink from the strap Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast. In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews leftLiving may have been still at supper while he died.That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle Tinsel color, washingTo the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west, Ohio-bound. This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.
On abandon, uncalled for but called forth. The hydrangeaOf   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself. Pallid. Injured, wildly capable. A throat to come home to, tupelo. Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear. Wistful, woke most every afternoon In the green rooms of the Abandonarium. Beautiful cage, asylum in.Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not Have been there.So few wild raspberries, they were countable, Triaged out by hand.Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles, Scarlet fevers; Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths. Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence, In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such. Wisteria, extreme.There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.
For David Freedman I read somewhere that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,  
the whole city would stop, it would stop. Cars would back up to Rhode Island, an epic gridlock not even a cat could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved the unprecedented gall of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm. They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical as any day laborers. They knew what was coming, the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant it burst. A downpour like a fire hose. For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled, paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato. And it was my pleasure to witness a not insignificant miracle: in one instant every black umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera, the sails of some vast armada. And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress to accompany the piano movers. each holding what might have once been lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled under the corner awning, in line for an open call — stork-limbed, ankles zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette around. The city feeds on beauty, starves for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight, to my deserted block with its famously high subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon opened its mouth to drink from on high ...
Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quoteall last night’s infomercials — an anorectic sonwho bought with Daddy’s Amex black cardthe Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,plus a steak knife that doth slicethe inner skin of   his starving arms.Poor broken child of   Eve myself,to me, the flightless fly,the listing, blistered, scalded.I am the rod to their lightning.Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.At my altar the blouse is torn openand the buttons sailed across the incensed air space of the nave,that I may witness the mastectomy scars crisscrossed like barbed wire, like bandoliers.To me, the mother carries the ash contentsof   the long-ago incinerated girl.She begs me for comfort since my own sonwas worse tortured. Justice,they wail for — mercy?Each prostrate body I hold my arms out foris a cross my son is nailed to.
Our falter, whose art is Heavy,Halloween be thy name.Your kingdom’s numbyour children dumb on earthmoldy bread unleavened.Give us this day ourwayward dead.And give us ourasses as we forgive thosewho ass against us.And speed us notinto wimp nationnor bequiver us with needles, for thineis the flimflam and the sour,and the same fuckingstory in leather for never and ever. Ah: gin.
For Phil Jackson The gym opened out before us like a vast arena, the bleached floorboardsyawned toward a vanishing point, staggered seats highas the Mayan temple I once saw devoured by vines.Each of us was eaten up inside — all citizens of   lost and unmapped cities.Frank hugged the pimply ballover his belly like an unborn child. Clairedressed for daycare in daffodil yellow and jelly shoes.David’s gaze was an emperor’s surveying a desiccatedbattlefield. Since he viewed everything that way, we all saw him the same.The psych techs in Cloroxed whitewere giant angels who set us running drills, at whichwe sucked. The zones we set out to defend were wateryat every edge. We missed close chest passes, easy combos. Our metronomes run different tempos, John proclaimed. Then Claire started seeing dashes stutter through the air behind the ball.Then speed lines on our backs, and then her own head went wobbly as a spinning egg. She’d once trackedplanetary orbits for NASA and now sat sidelined by her eyes’ projections. Only Bill had game.Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlubdays in a tub chair — his pudding face scarredwith chicken pox — using his hand for an ashtray,belly for an armrest. Now all that peeled away, and he emerged, clean as an egg. He was a litheand licorice boy, eeling past all comers, each shotsheer net. He faked both ways, went left. Beneath the orange rim his midair pirouettes defied the gravity that Icould barely sludge through. He scored beyond what even Claire could count,then he bent panting,hands on knees as the orderlies held out water cups,and the rest of us reached to pat his back or slaphis sweaty hand, no one minding about the stench or his breath like old pennies. Then as quick as that he went.Inside his headsome inner winch did reel him back from the frontof   his face bones where he’d been ablaze. He went back and back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathehis air. Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self   I’d come inwanting to kill, and I left him there.
Sky a shook poncho.Roof   wrung. Mind a luna mothCaught in a banjo. This weather’s wittyPeek-a-boo. A study inInsincerity. Blues! Blooms! The yodelOf   the chimney in night wind.That flat daffodil.With absurd hauteurNew tulips dab their shadowsIn water-mutter.Boys are such oxen.Girls! — sepal-shudder, shadow-Waver. Equinox.Plums on the Quad didBlossom all at once, takingDown the power grid.
Touch swollen tonsils:gill slits.Inside eyelid: slimelight.Cheek: shark.Here foreknownI’ve diveddown dawnlessmicrobial snows,phosphor blue to blue-black, to black. I fendfish. I findthe saffron curbof   the sulfur vent,veering voiceless again into the segmented,swaying, white, toothed tube-worm, Time.
1 As so-called quarks, so atoms before and throughAnd after molecules, which tooConstitute us awhile, plumingThrough our slowly changing shapesLike beachscapesThrough a duneless sandglass, say(I said, once) — all theseSo utterly forgetful, wiped cleanAs numbers with each new use, lint-free.How not so words, which pass our mindsAnd mouths and ears from hind-Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — whySo?Words are the sum of their histories: roseAnd roke and no and blanketing snow. 2 So much less LEGO-like, click-Click together than like slickTentacularColonial hydrozoans tossedTogether in the copper potsOf   predication — all cross-Shock and shimmery tangle —How canAnyone calculate semanticSets so dervishly complex?How can we not expect not less but hellishMuch more than to mean what we say? Then guess:How can we better butHope to become in sum whatWe say when we say again love?
For Don (1958–2011) My skiff is made of spicewood my oars are Cassia bractMusic flows from bow to starboard Early Mozart cool side of  Coltrane and miles and miles of   Miles Cheap Californian Merlot and my young boyfriend • If   I could master the nine doors of my bodyAnd close my heart to the cries of   sufferingPerhaps I could love you like no otherFloat my mind toward the other side of   hate• The shanty towns of   Tijuana sing for youThe slums of   Little Sudan hold evening prayerOne dead brown boy is a tragedy Ten thousand is a statistic So let’s fuck my love until the dogs pass• All beautiful boyfriends are transitoryThey have no souls they’re shiny brown fleshTomorrow they’ll turn into purple festering corpsesFissured gored by a myriad flies• Down the Irrawaddy River you lay yourself   to sleepNo sun no moon no coming no goingNo causality no personalityNo hunger no thirst• Malarial deltas typhoidal caysTsunamis don’t judge Calamity grieves no oneThe poor will be submerged the rich won’t be savedPurge the innocent sink the depraved• What do I smell but the perfume of   transienceCrushed calyxes rotting phloemsLet’s write pretty poems pretty poems pretty poemsMasque stale pogroms with a sweet whiff of oblivion
REVERSALS There are graves under the houses and houses under the graves and linking the three a broad stone staircase where the deadgo up and the living go down. They pass one anotherwordlessly which might mean they don’t know, or elsethey’re pretending not to know. You can smellthe orange grove on the hill; you can hearchildren bowling barrel hoops down the street. Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring.Their secrets cloud the water. Later they walk back through an avenue of   cypresses, carrying the jug like a bastard child.TRAPPED In the house across the street, in a roomdirectly opposite his, was a long mirror. When he looked out of   his window, he would see himself   in the roomlike a thief caught in a trap. He threw a stone.His neighbor ran in to the sound of   breaking glass,then came to the window and shouted across: “Thank God for that: whenever I looked in my mirror there you were, doing something shifty behind my back.” The first man turned away. The long mirror in his room brought him face to face with his neighbor, knife in hand.THE ACCUSED Just as he locked the door, as he pocketed the key, as he glanced over his shoulder, they arrested him. They tortured him until they tired of   it. “Look,” they said, “the key is your key, the house is your house, we accept that now; but why did you put the key in your pocket as if to hide it from us?”They let him go, but his name is still on a list.
1 Out the barred window sandbags in a sagging wall surround the guard post where a soldier half-hidden by the flag holds his rifle on his knees and looks a little lost. It’s Sunday and quiet, the traffic noise off aways, the sea behind the post flat as the tarps pulled tight over the troop trucks. Somewhere down the hall soldiers are being boys, telling some joke in Arabic in which I’m pretty sure I hear the word “zubrak”: I walk between shelves loaded with canned rations, the cool expiring slowly in the high-ceilinged roomwhile a pinned-up PSYOPS leaflet declares,If you sleep in a cemetery, you’re bound to have nightmares. 2 No one sees the doll’s decapitated head small and neat in rubble. Never tired or sleepy, the head is its own country obstinately surviving, the pupil of   its one eye peering through the glass’s pure transparency. And a few feet away lie its slim, plastic, long-legged thighs almost like an obscenity the eye watches over —no one in the street, nothing but bolt-marksfrom tank-treads scarring the concrete to give any of   it drama — and what about the way the lips’ frozen smirk keeps daring me to touch the sexless V between the thighs staring up at me? 3 The barracks dissolve into a reef   of   rubble in the fog.On either side of the road, crater after craterflashes with glints of glass, plastic bags,a chair leg clinging to a dismembered chair. The TV station, the power stacks thrusting up through mist, the black-bearded postersand banners strung across the streets lead to an absolute nowhere:all that’s left in the emptied town after the army pulled out are PSYOPS leaflets fluttering up around the car that winds down the coast road deeper into mist, headlightsprobing like instruments in a woundthey illuminate the more they violate.
1. FIELD Truck a passel (a poke) of wildling boys We call ourselves (our pack) the orphan-slaves
Based on Epictetus APPROACH LIFE AS IF IT WERE A BANQUET Your rightful portion averts your ireful potion:Caress what can’t be blessed, cup shadows under breasts.Let pass what’s out of   ken: lover, job, riches, a ripe peach until it reaches you.Bring salt for your honey, lime for your grenadine.Money’s not your fault. You’re a feathered peahen preening for marzipan men.Impeccable models, often peccable, drop their pants at inopportune instants.Implore no more for what is, is no more. EVERYTHING HAS TWO HANDLES Whether to grapple the hurt or hold the calm: Can reason spread where ire infests the mind?The handle you refuse to grasp proclaims you more than one you lurch to reach.Why mire in the right/wrong amphora song.No vigilance in this choir of one. No fast hook in the urn’s broken-off arm. Vie with hot verities.The pie is getting cold. OUR DUTIES ARE IN RELATION TO ONE ANOTHER Feel unique in roiling solitude? Oh, you are not alonethough you may feel fallen, snow up your nose. Join with others in your dank reclusion.How do you find something worth saying?How do you find desire to find desire to find something worth saying?And yes. That is where you might be: twice —or is it thrice — removed in a receding mirror of acedia. Finding a way to find a way to want to find a way back into conversation. This is what negative numbers (a negative soul) feel like: You want to want to want ...If   you go back far enough — lateral excavation —will you hit bone? So many converging lines yakking to themselves over a haywire switchboardyou used to find out who you were through cookie crumbs tossed down your own path. Now that you have no crumbs, don’teven have pockets to turn out—only the memoryof such acts, such things. How weary, stale, and profligate it seems to be to plasticize theselines. You’re in a hamless state of mind. Now get out and talk to anyone your age: Like you they’ve all got Death studded on the tongue, which livelies up the talk they walk.
Bastard, the other boys teased him,till Phaethon unleashed the steeds of Armageddon. He couldn’t hold their reins. Driving the sun too close to earth, the boy withered rivers, torched Eucalyptus groves, until the hills burst into flame, and the people’s blood boiled through the skin. Ethiopia,land of   burnt faces. In a boy’s rage for a name, the myth of race begins.
A spring day oozes through Trastevere. A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs. Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimples pushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun. Every hard bulb stirs. The fossilized egg in my chest cracks open against my will. I was so proud not to feel my heart.Waking means being angry.The dead man on the Congo road was missing an ear, which had either been eaten or someone was wearing it around his neck. The dead man looked like this. No, that. Here’s a flock of touristsin matching canvas hats. This year will take from methe hardened person who I longed to be. I am healing by mistake. Rome is also built on ruins.
The naked man in the caravan has peace of mind. He whose covering belongs to others is uncovered. He who has luck will have the winds blow him his firewood.He whose trousers are made of dry grass should not warm himself at  the fire.He howled before going mad. He led the lion by the ear. Like the sparrow, he wanted to imitate the pigeon’s walk but lost his own. Walk with sandals till you get good shoes. Where the turban moves, there moves the territory. Men meet but mountains don’t. Always taking out without giving back, even the mountains will be broken down. Penny piled on penny will make a heap. Only the unlucky coin is left in the purse. As long as a human being lives he will learn. Learn to shave by shaving orphans. He who is to be hanged can insult the Pasha. In the house of a man who has been hanged don’t talk of rope. The small donkey is the one that everybody rides. Fish eat fish and he who has no might dies. My belly before my children.
I here I’m here I’m here I’mhere here here here
The girl from Scarborough liked being slappedDown the hall from where her mother slept.A big, hard-working hand, anybody’sTo come medicinally down, antibodyTo the slow infection of   her Western face(what sucked the most was that it wasn’t fast).Some birds don’t migrate. Above, two lonely fowlScream across the sky their only vowel. This river I step in is not the riverI stand in. We’ll drive to Leslieville, wherever, Park in the Guildwood GO lot and get stoned.Who’s there? Nay, answer me. StandAnd unfold yourself. Her heart begins to pound.No geese go winging to the rooky pondNo goslings disappear their small and speckled. If we endure this, it will make us special.
Well I guess that’s all locked up tight Says Sam who guards the mall at night. Sam’s a puppet! He can’t use his eyes.His body is an excellent disguise. I’m Muffy the Mouse! I’m condemned to rhymeUntil the Christmas special end of time. That’s Jodi, my human friend.The world goes on and on and will not endHiya there Jodi. Oh hi Sam. Jodi straightens Jeffrey’s magic tam. Everything’s safe here let’s go upstairsSam says through a moustache Props repairs. Jodi is so pretty. I hate her. She carries Jeffrey up the escalatorTo the kid’s department every nightWhere he turns into space and starlight When I say the magic rhyme. Jeff’s a mannequin Until the mall goes dark. Then he’s a man again.
Make them say yes before you even ask,L’essence de charme, c’est ça. The mind’s a damselLocked in a tower with her fathom of   hair.Coax the braid and it’ll all be over. The rooms are plain where I am interviewed,Abstract and clinical, and so I glory Like a corpse plant, perfume the marble-facedWith the reek and prodigy of my tomorrows. Dying is so boring as the soulRummages the liquidation saleFor a final bargain —But time outbids all comers, and we dieExpensively in Princess MargaretWho was herself once so beautiful.
An old man on Grace Street is going madIn a Canadian T-shirt he won’t changeAnd red unwrinkling pants I thought had madeHim stylish when I met him in the spring —Five or six times a day I see him walkDown Grace Street to St. Francis church, and knockAnd pull its wooden doors, always shockedThat his entitled holy place is locked. Undreams Damascus from a baffled Paul,Rolls back the road where some unstricken SaulRises up, as bubbles through a beerTo a surface where we disappear And wake in some uncalendared forever,An unwelcome Elijah passing over.
The evidence was in and it went to the contrary.The contrary wound around us rather like a river.The river reacted, spider-like, tangling up its legswith other wet parts we thought we knew,such as creeks and fjords and deltas and such.A beaver sits on the riverbank watching all of this unfold.He doesn’t know what a fjord is, and he doesn’t carefor other waters, or even other beavers, or the meresthint of other business, so he removes this evidence.Then he builds a structure which for years he is rehabbing.Inside it is hollow and there is his nest.He is a dark little bastard, all the same.The water had a fine way of   being, now it is torturedby these nests and their vassal.Yet the river doesn’t overthrow the beaver.Quite the contrary. The river goes around polite as a snake.It argues a tiny bit at the edges of the lodge,where young beavers could be napping.You and I would let loose a flood of tears. Not the river.You and I would seep hotly into our darkest places.Not the river. It is a long way from homeand has that on its mind, the day of rising,when the temples will all be cleansedand the whole unfathomable truth will out.According to the waters. According to their book.
Two women on a trainsit beside me.I am young and the worldis flying and I am watching.One of them is frosty.The other turns like a leafto hand me something —it looked for all the world like a page.I thought at the timethat it needed me and I was right.The letters fell into placeand simple flowers grew.Now it talks unceasinglyin long white versesas if at a wedding,something women understandand gently want and then regift.I myself agree with Herbert,who in a dark mood conjuredthe mushrooms underfootunseen by bride or groomand with him I say, Perhapsthe world is unimportantafter all, though this is notwhat one discusses withwomen on a train, no matterhow long the journey,or untroubled the land.
The overweight, overnight partsthat came to me in a dream.Their clothes no longer fit,it was this that brought themto me crying, their faces twitching.That had to end. No, they said,it didn’t. So I rolled over to ghosts that couldn’t dent a pillow.The clock shed. Night pulled itsburdens into harbor and I woke,glad for the day, its telltale light,its flying minute, that genie work,and the everlasting perturbationsof my people, their glories,their heavy last words,and for these, I rose.
I wish I could keep my thoughts in orderand my ducks in a row.I wish I could keep my ducks in a thoughtor my thoughts in a duck.My point is that we all exist, wetly, in the hunt.The ducks are aware of thisin their own way, which is floating.The way of the mind is brevity.There may be other thoughts on other daysin the minds of other and better menand their constant companions, the women,but these same tidy capsules — never.This is just one of the thingsI noticed about my thoughtsas they passed easefully by.
Had to come in out of the people,they blew me about so.Was told of the life taking placeelsewhere. Went to check on that,flying late and low over the west.Saw no house, no shade.Sat down on the damp bankon the far shore at the leftedge of the world, against whichthe sea endlessly lapped.So now there were two of us,who beat the world byday and caressed it by nightand the world didn’t sayyea and she didn’t say nay.
Last night in bedI mouthed a prayerof my own composition.It sounded offhand, it was carelesslyaddressed, it twisted my meaningentirely, it left an ache,I didn’t know what I was doing.So I took down my yellowed copyof French With Picturesby the late literary critic I.A. Richardsand I put my petitioninto soft French words.I.A. Richards believed that ironywas the language of redemption.He wrote and lectured famously on this,but his masterpiece was French With Pictures.“The chapeau is on the table.”“The man with the beard stands before the window.”“She comes from a village by the sea.”There is no improving the old traditions.They are already mortal, partial, and wrong.The woman at the table by the windowputs her head into her hands.“Into your hands,” she said.
There was a vasethat held the world’s riches, but it wasn’t cheap.It cost a dime — and this in a time and placewhen dimes were sizable, especially fora girl of eight whose construction-worker fatherwas unemployed. The old metaphorwas literal in this case and shecounted her pennies till there were ten — then embarked on a mission of great secrecy,a purchase whose joys ran so deep,seventy years later, as she told the tale again,her face flushed. It was a birthday gift for her mother. There was a raceof people heretofore glimpsed only on hanging scrollsin library books. They were on the vase —  the smallest whole figures imaginable,purposeful and industriousas they fished or planted rice or hiked a hill whose spiral trail led to a temple perched upona crag between cloud and waterfall.They were a vision exported from Japan — a country far as the moon, and far more beautiful,whose artists grasped an eight-year-old girl’s soul’sneed for the minutely amplitudinous.There was a place(Detroit, the thirties) now slipped from sight,though here and there I’ll catch some holdover trace — maybe the grille on an old apartment door, or a slumped block of  houses, drapedin torn sheets of rain, apparently posing for black-and-white photographs. Even the out-of-a-job, men like my grandfather, donned hats back thenbefore leaving the house — to circle endlessly about,as if a lost job were a lost coin that might yet be found on the street where it had been dropped, making them whole again.There was a face,rucked with care, that would dreamily softenif  talk floated off toward some remote someplacebeyond the seas. My grandmother had a yen for the faraway(which she imparted to her daughter),even as her life was tethered between a grayicy motionless Midwestern city — stalled like a car with a frozen ignition — and a Tennessee farm without electricity. (She did once see Washington — cherry season — and often spoke of  those long pink walkways beside the water that were  Japan’s gift to a grateful nation.)There is a vase — a piece of gimcrack that somehow made its way to a crowded curio casein a small souvenir shopin Detroit, seventy-plus years ago — which today stands atop the mantel in the apartment in DCwhere my fading mother is now living.When she was eight, in 1933,she gave it to my grandmother, who for all her poverty bequeathed her daughter so rich a bounty, including a taste for giving:the gift of grace. It seems a little miraclealmost — that it’s intact, the little vase,conveying what its makers set out to convey:an inward island spared by Time,by the times. These days, she can scarcely saywho she gave it to, or on what occasion.A — birthday? The pilgrim climbs the winding hillforever, station by station,and “Isn’t it beautiful?”she asks. “You bought it for a dime,”I tell her. It holds the world’s riches still.
There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened between us, like ostyt, which can be usedfor a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet, which is to want something so much over months and even years that when you get it, you have lost the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky, “It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.” What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has leftthe station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men,who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wroteall night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, bookseverywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné, so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia,I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves, feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins,neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’,and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin, a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.
The fields are infertileas far as I can tell.Their winter systemssparkle like the diamondsthat pelt Neptune.Limpid silversreflect in the darkmuseums and theaters back in town.To them we runto elevate our eyes to a well-shaped ethics.Colors are suppliedby our nervous minds.•Towards a justand invisible imagebehind each substanceand its place in a sentenceyou must have been walking.Well-defended, bestwhen lost from wanting.Be like grass, she told me,lie flat, spring up.•We drop the shadows where they are then return to themwhen the light has grown heavy.You’ll take your time lugging the weight into our room.Or stand over there in the shade.We’ve never been too sure that we exist as the earth does.We’re most at home in water that soaks up the letters in our brains.It could be we have been dry too long.A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it. •I see them through the slatsand crack of the open window.A cold rain. Leaves flippedand palsied.The river is brown nearthe sand, loose banks and twigsstick at the edge and a lilac’ssilhouette of a child I love.How in the dark hole can I hideif   I can’t get outside?Then I won’t rememberwhat I did to deserve it.That arch and bridgewill form a shape of repentance. If  I’m hanging,then judgment has been passed.And I am hangingupside downhead swinging towards the moon.Years of  inversion.A face in a mirror displaced by its position outside silver.And so?Next will come muscle,a little grief   but no shoulder.•You’re learning how to be a unitwith an infinite in its attic.It’s not difficult. Light is the last message.White streaks like oil paintare the first to appear along the wet railing. Next similar colors correspond by chance.We would rather be (die) with total strangers than with partial ones we realized in the elevator going down. It was the only time that day that we were as alone as we were awake.Sensing a justand impartial ghostclose to each living thingI could see the geniusof  institutional religion.Examine your conscience.Confess in darknessand take away a task.Soon you’ll wash off fleshscented by its parallel past.What were your feet thinking in their hurryto connect the parts?Get the children to the other side!What children? You were the one running.There was never any other.
We were at the Edison Hotel on West 47th Streetfor the annual muffin beauty contest — I can’t tell you how pumped up we were.Times Square was having another psychotic judder.The bellhop was all thumbs up: Sir, have a nice day and get one gratis. All those avenues of doorsand the Hispanic chambermaid who couldn’t speak English.Spider-Man was doing all that Spider-Man shit just to get a bird’s eye view. Donna Summerwas almost dead and we were barely into spring.I want to dance to “Love to Love You Baby,” I want to groan.I’ve never seen so many high-quality muffins.If  I wasn’t a religious man, and maybe I wasn’tI would have said the muffins were walking on water:I’ve never felt so half-and-half. Have you read the Bible? The bellhop said: You ain’t seen muffin yet. They were drifting in from Queens, Brooklyn, Harlem, The Bronx, Manhattan muffins too and that weird cute coke-faced muffin who’d taken the subway from Coney Island. If only I were a betting man, but hey I am a betting man, it’s Coney Island every time. Lou Reed isn’t getting any younger. Zappa said,Girl you thought he was a man but he was a muffin,he hung around till you found he didn’t know nuthin’.In the lobby Nina Simone was singing, I Loves You Muffinand in the restroom they piped in “Mack the Knife”: Hey Suky Tawdry, Jenny Diver, Polly Peachumand old Miss Lulu Brown. Muffin The Romance was the biggest show in town. We were hurtling backto the 1970s and sometimes the 1970s are almost as good as the 1930s. I want my muffins to be ahistorical: shit just to say ahistorical makes me joyful. I saw Leonard Cohen crooning with a couple of octogenarian muffins and I’m telling you now the lobby was pleasantly disturbing. You may find yourself   behind the wheel of a large automobile.You may find yourself  in another part of  the world.You may find yourself  at the gargantuan muffin beauty contestand you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?Times Square was having another psychotic judder.Love is in the air, it’s in the whisper of the trees.This is not America, this is the cover version:sun, sex, sin, divine intervention, death and destruction,welcome to The Sodom and Gomorrah Show.All those white muffins trying to be black muffins!Give us our daily muffin, save us from temptation.Jimmy Buffett was singing, Why don’t we get drunkand screw? In Times Square the most beautiful muffinsin the world were hanging on a thousand screens.Where are my singing Tibetan balls? Am I dead?
The belt kicks on with a whir & the whirlicks the end grain of the offcut with a hintof  hesitation. A small wind of ochre dustsweeps off the belt before the belt comes backto where it was. The whole room swellswith the scent of cinnamon & desire.How imprecise the smell of desire.The wood takes on a sheen, a glossthe grain can live behind without worryof  being forgotten. A single knot blinksout of the small block and becomesthe eye of a hummingbird, its beakbending around the edge of the wood,its small song captured in the annular rings. To think, this block was tossed inwith the scraps. That the birdcould have been lost. Or burned.
gain — a bevel cut into plank ends in traditional lapstrake boat construction that allows otherwise lapped planks to lay flush at stem and transom. There’s the paring chisel’s purpose in the steamed cedar strake, its long warp laid strong against the bench,whose pocked surface is the book of what has already been made,or marred in learning’s wake — & clamped now in the jaws one is waiting for its match, for the chisel to elaboratethe pencil’s scribed hypothesis, under whichlies another path, & through a tilting eyethe curving bevel’s made, the chisel rollingback tight scrolls of thinnest grain & what bright sleeves begin to fleece the floor; there is a lackgiven to the wood, some short song cut loosefrom the lignin’s name, that a longer &more buoyant melody be made.
The steam box is used for bending   frames and planks in traditional boatbuilding. With a match I became a man who summoned dieselfrom the yellow cavernsof a ten-gallon jug, called the flamenow hissing out the hose at the small house of  water, thatrusted drum from which travelsan excruciating wetness — thisis what makes the body otherwise, what makes itsing. To take that which has decided on a shape, and bend, without breaking, the lengthening fibers. To give the straight thing curve. To make of  the tree a song grown long in a linseed skin,the slick hot strake waiting to become parcel of  the round world again.
is an opening, is all we can see of  the longstrands that makethe pathways for rays, bisecting annular rings, the mostvulnerable doorof  what makesthe holiest ofthings.
When is the smell of a blackberry treea harbinger of  violent movementrather than simply the recollection ofa childhood Sunday dress hem-dippedin mud, handprinted with juice and seeds?Hard to say. A mind, when playing tricksis at its most sincere — at home rakingthrough the body’s history, repeatingthe strange and nostalgic. The taste ofdirty copper, the imagined cockroachin the corner, the sluggish slow of  the clock — doctors call these strange little prophetswarning signs of a seizure, synaptic misfireslooming like a song discordant, until the body — an unplucked string — is finally strummed.
Your hand on my jaw but gentlyand that picture of youpunching through snow to bring two deer, a gopher,and a magpie to the old Highwalker womanwho spoke only Cheyenne and traced our footprintson leather she later chewed to soften. We need to know in America there is still bloodfor forgiveness. Dead things for the new day.
My four-year-old daughter handed me a card. To Daddy written on the frontand inside a rough field of  five-pointed lights, and the wordsYou’re my favorite Daddy in the stars.In this western night we all light the skylike Vega, Deneb, Altair, Albireo, the Summer Triangle, Cygnus the Swan, our hair tangled with wood and gravel, our eyes like vacant docksthat beckon every boat.Tell me about the wordstars, I said.Oh, she said. Sorry. I didn’t knowhow to spell world.
I don’t buy it, saysthe scientist.Replies the frailand faithful heart,it’s not for sale.
Full of strength and lacedwith fragility:the thoroughbred,the hummingbird,and all thingscursedwith agility.
If  you’re crowish and you know itgive a cawCaaawIf  you’re weighted and you bear itsend a mooMooooIf  you’re owl and you dreamed it,give a hooHooooIf  you’re thirsty and you mean itbreathe an ahhhAhhhhYou are putty in my handssaid the wind to the stone said the dawn to the bloom said the dark to the moon.
It’s always darkest before the leopard’s kiss.Where there’s smoke there is emphasis. A bird in the hand is bound for the stove.The pen is no mightier than the soul. Never underestimate the nib of corruption. Better late than suffer the long introduction.All work and no play is the way of  the sloth.If  you can dream it bring the child the moth. He is not wise that parrots the wise.All that glitters has been revised. An idle mind is a sign of  the time.The less things change the more we doubt design.
A lizard does not make a sound,it has no song,it does not share my love affairswith flannel sheets,bearded men, interlockingsilver rings, the moon, the sea, or ink.But sitting here the afternoon,I’ve come to believewe do share a love affairand a belief —in wink, blink, stone,and heat. Also, air.This is not a fable,nor is it bliss. Impatience,remember this.
Their long stares mark them apart; eyes gone to sea-colors: gray, foam-flecked and black in the undertow, blue as the blue banners of  the mackerel, whipping west.On land, they are smoke-walkers, where each stone is a standing stone, every circle a stone circle.They would be rumor if they could, in this frozenlandscape like a stopped sea, from the great stone keelsof  Callanish to the walls of  Dunnottar and Drum. They would be less even than rumor: to be ocean-stealers, to never throw a shadow — to dream the blank horizon and dread the sight of  land.The drink storms through these men, uncompasses them, till they’re all at sea again.Their houses, heeled over in the sand: each ruin now a cairn for kites.And down by the quaypast empty pots, unmended nets, and boats:this tiny bar, where men sleep uprightin their own element, as seals.
They pluck my sleeve, tug my hand, pullmy hair. They do not kneel to kiss my hem.No, it’s not like that but they want tokens.Again, not souvenirs but something smalland useful, something that will help them outafter life, maybe in an underworld.They need a sighted guide to lead them tothe river, and they need a remnant ofthe old world as they embark for the older world,the one that has existed since the firstgrievous death. They need to feel they stillcan touch and still be touched, as once they didand were, and one would have to be a cold,uncaring woman to deny their pleas:a woman with a bulletproof  heart,without a memory of life on earth.
The clear orange bottle was empty. It had been empty a day.It suddenly seemed so costlyand uncalled for anyway. Two years had passed. They had passedmore or less the way years should.Maybe he’d changed. Or maybethe doctors had misunderstood. It was June. The enormous elm treewas green again, and the scentof   hyacinth reached through the windowand followed wherever he went. And the sky was the firmament!His life was never better.Each small white spotless cloud that passedwas like a long-wished-for letter. But then he remembered his promise.It came like a mild cramp,and it sat there all day in the back of   his mindlike a gas bill awaiting a stamp. He saw three faces that Sunday,mother, sister, niece,all with the same kind, brown, scared eyesthat brought him no peace. The sidewalk sparrows were peeping.His whole house smelled like a flower.But he remembered his promise.The drugstore said one hour. Back home again, he was tired.The label said caution, said warning.He left the clear orange bottleon the lip of   the sink till morning. The insert said warning, said caution.The insert said constipation.It said insomnia, vivid dreams,and hypersalivation, and increased urination, and a spinning sensation. It also said night sweats, andagranulocytosis,and strongly suggested a full glass of   waterbe drunk with all doses. The insert said all this,the insert he never read.But he didn’t have to read itto know what it said. The bedroom was calm with moonlightand the breeze through the screen was cooling.Through the elm leaves the shivery light on the wallcame like quicksilver pooling.But   just before five, something woke him —a close whisper — or maybe a far cry —and the bedroom was queasy with light the colorof   lapis lazuli.He lay there listening hardtill six, till seven, till eight    ...At nine he remembered the bottle.But nine, nine was too late. “Don’t take me!” cried the Clozapine.“Don’t take me!” cried the pill. By ten he was feeling restless,with a whole day left to kill.“Don’t take me!” cried the Clozapine.“Yes, don’t!” cried the medication. And the bright yellow morning seemed suddenly edgedwith a shady fascination. Why should he go to his workplace?Who was his supervisor?He had a sickening feelingthat he was becoming wiser.His room filled up with interest.He had begun to think!He thought of the knives in the kitchenand the bottles under the sink.He thought as he switched the stove onor stood at his shaving mirror,or reached for his belt in the wardrobe. Thinking made things clearer. Even the bedroom window,the open window full of sun,continually hintedat something that should be done.But he was crooked and useless. He was a piece of shit. And so, as everyone knew he would, he failed to go through with it. “Don’t take me!” cried the Clozapine. “Don’t take me!” cried the drug. Just then, the telephone rang. Just then, he ripped out the plug. “Don’t take me!” cried the Clozapine. “Don’t take me!” cried the poison. And the door of   the house creaked open, and the cellar door lilted and murmured, and the garden gate groaned and yawned and let a little noise in. There, just outside his window, lurked life like a cheap cartoon. He shut the sash, locked it, and checked it, and checked it all afternoon. He lowered the blinds on that world, no longer an agent of   it, but then, with one finger, pulled down a slat and set his eye above it. At first it was grimly amusing,at last it was grimly grim,to watch all those hunched, hurried people,who made like they weren’t watching him. The neighbors were thinking out loud.They knew he was no fucking good.So he slumped on a stool in the cornerlike a bad little snaggletooth should. They called him a dirty pig, and laughed,and said he shouldn’t exist.Sometimes they made a tsking sound,or oinked at him, or hissed. They hissed that he was to blamefor everything, and everyone knew it,and that if   he weren’t such a pussyhe’d know what to do, and he’d do it. He lay on his side on the rug unable to move at allexcept for his big right toe, which dug and dug at the wall, which dug at the wall, which dug. “Don’t take me!” cried the Clozapine.“Don’t take me!” cried the cure.And they begged him to sew his mouth shutjust to make goddamn sure. “Don’t take me!” cried the Clozapine.“Don’t take me!” cried the poison.And the gate to the wicked city gaped,and the gates of the temple screamed and screamed,and the gates of the garden groaned and yawned,and the gates of the ziggurat gabbled in grief,and sucked all life’s sorrows and joys in. His thoughts were advancing like wolves.He lay still for an hour and a half,then reared up onto his rickety legslike a newborn calf.Then rug hall stairsporch stoop streetand the blacktop humanly warmon the soles of   his naked feet.His walk was stiffened by fear, but it took him where he was going,into the terrible world of children and daffodils growing, and friendly people helloing, and the Super out doing the mowing, and the two old sisters out in wool sweaters with their wrinkled cheeks pinkly glowing, and the pretty lady who would give birth by Christmas barely showing but showing, and the policeman helping to keep the lazy afternoon traffic 
 flowing, and time itself slowing, and none of them, none of them knowingthat an odious axis was forming,that it would not be controlled,that schemes were afoot, that a footwas a thing for a jackboot to hold,that the street was a movie set,that it was not warm and sunny,that a creditor was callingwho could not be paid with money, that the world was like a sliverof   iron held in the hand,and his mind the lodestone above itthat made it stir or stand,that the air was slowly changingto a color they didn’t know,that he was a famous doctoron a television show.But what could he do? Even friendswould take these facts for lies,and he couldn’t tell who the enemies were,though he felt the hot breath of their eyes,so he kept his big mouth shut and tried to play along,and plowed down the street toward the coffeeshopas if nothing at all were wrong.He tried not to notice the numbers painted on garbage cans.He tried and he tried not to lookat the black unmarked sedans.The coffeeshop smelled like coffee,but it felt different inside.A new waitress went by. She winked. He kept his eyes open wide.Everything screamed “Run away!”But he wasn’t really there!So he stood by the gumball machinesand smiled and tried not to stare.“The power is yours!” said a T-shirt.“Look for lightning!” reported the weather.And the stranger who offered the Sports section said,“It’s all there, Chief. Just put it together.”Then wild-eyed out of the kitchenstormed a small, hard old man,shouting in a strange languageand waving a frying pan,shoving him out the doorand into the chattering street,shoving him, waving, shouting, and pointing at his feet, at his bare, gray feet.Then came the dark blue uniform,the badge glinting in the sun,and the belt jangling like a storm trooper’sas the boots broke into a run.“Take that!” cried the patrolman.“Take that!” cried Johnny Law.Street, knee, neck —cuffs, curb, jaw.And the flatfoot pushed him, bleeding, into the sleek cruiser,and he heard all the gawkers thinkingthat he was a pig and a loser,and his chin throbbed,and the handcuffs ate at his wrist,and he would be hacked into pieces soonand would not be missed. “Don’t take me!” cried the victim.“Don’t take me!” cried the threat.But the angry back of a headwas the only response he could get.Lying on his side like a child at the end of a big day,he gazed up through the windowand watched it all slip away.The little pen where they put himhad a toilet but no stall.Here and there a messagescarred the gloss-white wall.Time passed. But you couldn’t tell iton the trapped fly ticking the ceiling,or the flickering light overhead,or the sore on his chin congealing, or on the sound of the other pigs in the other pens, squealing.When the men came, he was ready.He talked. They took it all down.And soon they were back in the cruiser,on their way across town.Then, into the mirrored building,over the waxed lobby floors,down miles of echoing hallways,through the heavy brown doors,into a humming beige roomwith a bed and a river view,and an outside lock, and jailerswho wore white instead of blue.“Take that,” smiled the doctor. “Take that,” smiled the nurse. He pressed his lips still tighter,and things got worse and worse.“Please!” threatened the nurse.“Please!” growled the doctor.He raised his fists to cover his mouth,but the nurse was too close, and he clocked her.Now into the room came the big men,who did not clamor or shout,but pinned him with ease to the bed,strapped him down, and went out.And the doctor was there again, trailinga spider web of cologne,and the doctor told what would happen next,in an expert monotone,and the nurse took a needleand emptied it into his arm,and they both left, content that he could do no more harm,and he fought, and the straps cut his shoulders, and he gnawed at his lip, and it bled,and he held his bladder for three long hours,then shivered and pissed the bed.When the doctor came a fifth time,it was long past dawn.They’d found him a room, said the doctor,gently restraining a yawn.The next two days were sleep, and words through a fine white mist.Then he woke inside a machinewhose motion he couldn’t resist: “Tick-tock,” said the clock. “Creak, creak,” said the bed. “Drip, drip,” said the sink. “Throb, throb,” went his head. “Ho-hum,” sighed the night nurse. “Heh-heh,” said the sicko. “Why? Why?” screamed the patient. “Howl, howl!” cried the psycho. “Wolf! Wolf!” cried the boy. “Gobble, gobble!” sang the freaks. “Sa, sa!” cried the king. “Tick-tock,” went the weeks. “Bang, bang,” said the tv. “Teeter-totter,” went his brain. “Click, click,” went the checkers. “Pitter-patter,” went the rain. “Bring-bring,” said the pay phone. “Snip, snip,” went Fate. “Jangle-jingle,” went the keys. “Clank-clink,” went the gate. “Bye-bye,” said the nurse. “Bye-bye,” said the guard. “Bar-bar,” said the doctor. “Baa-baa,” said the lamb. “My, my,” said his mother. “Boohoo!” cried Bo Peep. “Bow-wow,” said the wolf. “Baa-baa,” said the sheep.In the car away from that place, the family had a pleasant chat.He seemed fine again, and humble, though his speech was oddly flat.He said that the halfway housewhere he would be residingwas located on a quiet block and hadgreen vinyl siding.There he met new peopleand watched the television,which did not watch him backor speak to him with derision,and he performed certain tasks,meant to teach certain skills,and he got small checks from the governmentto pay his enormous bills.Each night he fell asleep, and each morning he got up,and he washed down his medicineand squashed the paper cup, feeling, in all, much better, more in touch with common sense, and also slightly boredby the lack of consequence.And the church bells rangand a dinner bell tinkledand the school bell tolledand called all the good girls and boys in.And all of them brought all their toys in.And all of them swallowed their poison.
As a boy he had trouble speaking,past three before a real word preenedfrom his lips. And for the longest time,malaprops haunted him. His older sisterdid what she could to train the bitten sealof   his brain to twirl the red ball on the nose of eloquence, and his grandmothertired of   insisting he utter the namesof   toys or foods — for every desirewas coded — and gave him whateverhe grunted and pointed to. O, the man then a boythought, when I tower among themI should invent my own speechand leave others empty and afraidthat they did not know it, could not askor plead their case in the one tonguethat mattered. I shall have themlook upon the simplest things,the man then a boy thought, and fill up with stolen awe,and point with their faces,their pupils wide as blackened coins,and hope with all the revenueshattered heart-glass can musterthat someone had graspedtheir need as need and notas the monstrous couplingof   sounds in a trance of whims.Then, the grind of   his teethvowed, then the plazas of my citywill fill with my name,and their blood will matter as little to them as to me.
What is mysterious about loss, flush of arm pulled from a wilted sleeve,summer’s urine-tang in autumn leaves?Let   John Keats light another fag.Or Brontë refuse the doctoron her black sateen settee.For whatever part of   you may be taken away, you said,is the scar I will visit firstwith my mouth, each time, as gold visits the thieved till, sun the obliterated sill, saying praise you for leavingme this you, this living still.
When this day returns to meI will value your heart, long hurt in long division,over mine. Mouth above mine too —say you love me, truth never moremeant, say you are angry.Words, words we net with our mouths.Soul is an old thirst but not as firstas the body’s perhaps,though on bad nights its melancholyeats us out, to a person.True, time is undigressing.Yet true is all we can be:rhyming you, rhyming me.
Turning to watch you leave,I see we must always walk towardother loves, river of   heavenbetween two office buildings. Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling,book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light.I think it is all right.Or do tonight, garden toada speaking stone,young sound in an old heart.Annul the self? I float it,a day lily in my wine. Oblivion?I love our lives,keeping me from it.
I am walking through water with one of my sisters, the river banked with tiger lilies, the sunlike having a lemon juiced into your eye, our senile dogecstatic behind us, and I am yammeringabout my discovery —a chest deep pool, sentried by trees that caterpillars were killingwith their yearly carnival tents.We reach then ruin the pool with oils and shampoos. We scrub too much skinfrom our heels, then debatewhether to sunbathe naked: that is, who is hiding in the woods.We joke so long and roughthe joke morphs, till we’re practicing for our future rapes:we both have numbers that we know are up.My sister’s ears are speared with porcupine quills and steel,but she’s placed her straw hat carefully over her stomach.As she talks I watch while dragonflies and otherless showy insects landon her burning shoulders. The dragonflies present their stenciled wings.I can’t remember what the others do. My sister spits to clean each sunglass mirror. She wants me to hear how, when it happens, she’ll do this scream — but when the scream comes it’s just like she’s opened a shaken bottle of sparkling water: I am speechless only for the view of   her throat’s cushioned corridor. But when the scream ends her eyes have broken off from the rest of   her face. She takes our green net bag full of oranges, and slams it down on the baking rocks, beating the ground till the oranges soften and streak the air with the smell of   their breaking.
The senseless leaf   in the fevered handGrows hot, near blood-heat, but never growsGreen. Weeks ago the dove’s last cooing strainSettled silent in the nest to brood slowAbsence from song. The dropped leaf coolsOn the uncut grass, supple still, still green,Twining still these fingers as they listless pullThe tangle straight until the tangle tightensAnd the hand is caught, another fallen leaf. The poetry of the earth never ceases Ceasing — one blade of grass denies beliefUntil its mere thread bears the grasshopper’sWhole weight, and the black cricket sings unseen,Desire living in a hole beneath the tangle’s green.
You have a beautiful mouth,Luigi, the man-boy says. The rubber rafthas floated far from shore. The choiceis this:medusa sea,a boil of   jellied lashes,or face the kiss.
Do I still long for my virginity?— Fragment 107 I never longed for my virginity.I heard it on the radio after the hurricane. There, in the aftermath, was the voice of a man —once the sweet, screwed-up boy whose hooded, jessed spirit I tried to possess with the ruthlessness I mistook for power. Here he was on NPR, so gentle, so familiar with devastation, his timbre woke the teenage falconer in me who once saw his kindness as weakness, saw a boy as an unfledged goshawk —a creature to trap and be trapped within darkened mews. I knew the rules: neither of us could sleep until the molting bird grew ravenous enough to take the raw mouse from my hand. Breaking the falconbroke us both, left us scared and less aware of  love than fear.
I’m through! I’m through!she says and resays.The years pass.Her feathers gray.Her eggs lay themselvesless frequently. The sky falls.
I was involved in the serious businessof ripping apart my own body.I’d run my fingers over it,seeking but never findingthe right point of entry,so having to tear one myself,though midway throughI’d always tire,and let night enterlike a silver needle,sewing my eyelids shut.This was not an original practice,but thinking, for a time, that it wasfelt like being able to choosewhen spring would arrive:engineering an Aprilthat opened like a parasol,even in thoroughest winter.
Mortal oddment, there’s no wish in the bloodBut beat, but stay gift-strong, but make demandsTo keep within veins this ore’s diffuse gold,These voices that know without being known —These voices that riddle thought with herself,Ridicule thought in her flimsy eternalGowns a child can tear in half   with a breath —That chorus arterial, unbribable,Blowing song through self as a child blowsA dandelion apart — All those weeds? —Thistle’s down and thistle’s thorn, dumb yellowGlobes below that bind grass to their hollow creed,Wind’s meager flute, sere song, the whole field’s lateDoom? Heart-blood? Voices, you? That’s my portrait? —I kept repeating, repeating, kept re —To repair, to repair my, or not my — theMind’s bower, but whose — who mines urgency —Or whose mind regrets all those violets rootedIn violence — or I only mean thought, in thought,Not violence, thinking, and the stupid leafUnfolding, mine, mine, mind. Here’s the plotAll untended: Psyche and, and — some thiefUnnamed — no, some unnamed leaf, and the sun,Yes, only the sun that through open eyesTurns the livid leaf green. Not leaf. Meant wound —Or is it wind, is it wind that split in half   byA gnat, by a blade of grass, always heals its gale —What is the wound that is being healed, healed —
The rusty leaves crunch and crackle, Blue haze hangs from the dimmed sky, The fields are matted with sun-tanned stalks — Wind rushes by. The last red berries hang from the thorn-tree, The last red leaves fall to the ground. Bleakness, through the trees and bushes, Comes without sound.
Annihilating all that’s made  To a green thought in a green shade. — Andrew Marvell These are all thoughts — of course. At the edge of the ocean with nowhere to go,the nearest land three thousand miles away and under different management, the diving sun another thirty thousand times that, there is no reality, only these parlous notions, messages, statements, stylings on the edge of extinction. Little petillas. A kind of spontaneous zoo of   human recency and arrival and promontory variorum. Imprudent comb-over thoughts, rigid and proud eye-catching false thoughts, little jiggling thoughts, intricate braided-beard thoughts the product of much misplaced patience, product placement thoughts (which are rather elementary, and are almost a contradiction in terms), unlike myriad highly-evolved dog thoughts (no mutts here), pushing a baby in a three-wheeled stroller whilst running very hard in no shirt and six-pack thoughts, this a development on the now-obsolete egg and paddle (what it does to the infant to be impelled at such a rate into the future whilst facing backwards like an Aeroflot passenger is not recorded —not that forward is necessarily better), high-concept silky-swishing Afghan hound thoughts, intrusive bum thoughts, hapless and homeless panhandler thoughts(a smarte carte loaded with undesirables never far to seek),low-slung belly-dragging beagle thoughts little better than the serpent in the Bible, holding hands Adam and Eve thoughts,foot-shuffling Zimmer frame thoughts, “revolution in mobility” wheelchair and gravel thoughts, pushed by most likely an illegal attendant borderline thoughts,candy-striped T-shirt and shorts thoughts, cut-off thoughts, paired with sometimes nothing more than a bikini top, those three-quarter length thin and probably amphibious trousers, worn without socks, that men go in for,suggestive of adaptability and resourcefulness thoughts,standard over-loud mobile thoughts, (“our relationship is...    ”),lying immobile on the grass on your back mobile thoughts (these are different), tourist thoughts, an unexpected preponderance of  Russian thoughts (though with residential qualifications), borscht belt leopard skin thoughts dripping with gold and eccentric lamentations, dog and baby both thoughts (these last thought to be ideally-balanced), high-stepping poodle thoughtslike a four-wheel drive with little intelligence in rough country, furiously texting in the glare with all thumbs to the pump thoughts, being at least half elsewhere, baseball cap thoughts rife with determination, slightly dated straw hat thoughts, reverse baseball cap also thoughts.
The luncheon voucher years (the bus pass and digitized medical record always in the inside pocket come later, and the constant orientation to the nearest hospital). The years of “sir” (long past “mate,” much less “dearie”), of invisibility, of woozy pacifism,of the preemptive smile of the hard-of-hearing,of stiff joints and the small painsthat will do me in. The ninth complementof fresh — stale — cells, the Late Middle Years (say, 1400 AD — on the geological calendar),the years of the incalculable spreading middle, the years of speculatively counting down from an unknown terminus, because the whole long stack —shale, vertebrae, pancakes, platelets, plates —won’t balance anymore, and doesn’t correspond anyway to the thing behind the eyes that says “I”and feels uncertain green and trebleand wants its kilt as it climbs up to the lectern to blush and read “thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb.” The years of taking the stairs two at a time (though not at weekends) a bizarre debt to Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe, the years of a deliberate lightness of tread,perceived as a nod to Franz   Josefthinking with his knees and rubber-tired Viennese Fiaker. The years when the dead are starting to stack up. The years of incuriosity and novarum rerum incupidissimus, the years of cheap acquisitionand irresponsible postponement, or cheappostponement and irresponsible acquisition,of   listlessness, of   miniaturism, of irascibility, of   being soft on myself, of   being hard on myself,and neither knowing nor especially caring which.The years of   re-reading (at arm’s length).The fiercely objected-to professional years, the appalling indulgent years, the years of no challenge and comfort zone and safely within my borders.The years of   no impressions and little memory.The years of standing in elevatorsunder the elevator lights in the elevator mirror, feeling and looking like leathered frizz,an old cheese-topped dish under an infrared hot plate.The years of one over the thirst and another one over the hunger, of   insomniaand sleeping in, of creases and pouches and heavinessand the hairdresser offering to trim my eyebrows.The years of the unbeautiful corpse in preparation. The years to choose: sild, or flamber ...?
Inward lush unpetaling purpose in pink blooms of sleep, and I no longer needed to be separate. I was living there then, at the edge of the sea. And my friends came to visit, trying for a baby, not sure how to read me on that island of dozy sunlight. And there it was: familiarity edged with fear, the way we’d feed each other sandwiches and wonder if we should have wanted something other. We walked the folded cliffs over conifer fronds and mud runneling rocks slick with dropped fruit and rotting camellias to pause at the first ridge. We looked through high pines at the blue moving tides, then his finger caught a snag in the water and another and we saw — glinting fins wheeling the sheen, thousands playing in pods coming closer like the souls slippering into our bodies, attaching to matter as flippers angle into a ferrying strand. We too are a species, I realized. We too could know that as joy.
We’ve come back to the site of   herconception. She calls it why and cries all night, sleepless, wild.It seems the way is alwaysfloating and the goal — to live so the ghosts we were don’t trail us and echo.I think we are inside a flower,under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.The air pulses with perfume,flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.I am thinking, maybe even coming into the soul is a difficult birth, squeezed by the body’s vise.My bent legs like pincersor the vegetable petals of some tropical flower.Even my mind gripped by the folds of   the flesh, how the cells keep twinning themselves out toward complexity.The tulip trees of   the valleyspread their bone canopies into slick green leaves and fire flowers deep as cups.Their cups fill with rain, rain drinks the leaves drinking rain.I can’t begin to explain.How on this porous peak of stone in the seaour daughter came into me.Little flick of a fish I could not see.I was just learning to be human and upright among all that life.And what was real was strangerthan night with its dust of unnamed suns.It was the beyond in us. And she was.
pigs prey to piggishnesses. get ate from the rooter to the tooter. I’m a hog for you baby, I can’t get enough go the wolfish crooner. the gust buffeted porker roll in the hay or laid down in twig rapine. let me in, let me in. no drum-gut, Stagger’s stomach a tenement: his deadeye bigger than his brick house. Stagger Lee live by the want and die by the noose, whose greedy void like a whorehouse full of empties getting full. can’t get enough! rumored Stagger would root through pussy to plumb a fat boy. here piggy! what Lee see he seize. manful, ham-fisted. sorry Billy, your name mud and who love dirt like swine? they get in it like a straw house. it’ll be cold out before Lee admit his squeals weren’t howls. he got down. he get dirty.
In the years I’ve been at this(Lots, not to be precise)You’d think that once or twiceAt least I would have seenSome anomalies. I meanSome major ones. As inNot feet but little wheels,Or crests like cockatiels’.Where are they keeping the girlsWith a chrome exterior,Or an extra derriere?Apparently nowhere.Assuming my sample’s valid,The pool is limited To the standard types I’ve tallied;Such variance as there isIn the usual congeriesOf   physiognomies —And yet enough of   it To be worth the looking at. The walking by, for that,Of   the same girl over and overWould be no cross to bearIf   it were that one there.
I.e., the kind of   verseThat doesn’t try to forcePeople to their knees(Seeing as it seesTo people’s being thrownBy forces of   their own).
Not that I lacked an eye entirely,But give me an oblique enough kissTo visualize, and my eye said “See ya later.”A little practice might have sharpened it,But what was needed here was not as muchA sharper as a higher order eye,A whole other orb altogether.
An unexpected consequenceOf mine (and one that shows how wellIt really went, in a scary sense)Is at its most perceptibleWhen I happen to observe a noseWith the hump of  which my nose is rid(Though not my psyche, you’d suppose)And feel the sighting visitedBy what a lord might call a kindOf  pity: distant, tinged with scorn...A thing you’d more expect to findIn someone to his beauty born.
you have lipstick on your collar I sayto my father the priest that’s just the Bloodof   Christ my son he replies by and by(the milky thigh of   Mary in my mind)William Blake’s eyes aligning in the snowa statue outside London simply called“The Heretic” where birds sit and shit andlive out their days in unconscious praise of that third space between language and themute object as sunlight pours through the stained glass at the Lincoln Park Zoowhere I saw the lions pacing and you told me to always remember that the cageis for the protection of   the captor
Why are the woods so alluring? A forest appears to a young girl one morning as she combs the dreams out of   her hair. The trees rustle and whisper, shimmer and hiss. The forest opens and closes, a door loose on its hinges, banging in a strong wind. Everything in the dim kitchen: the basin, the jug, the skillet, the churn, snickers scornfully. In this way a maiden is driven toward the dangers of a forest, but the forest is our subject, not this young girl.She’s glad to lie down with trees towering all around.A certain euphoria sets in. She feels molecular, bedeviled, senses someone gently pulling her hair, tingles with kisses she won’t receive for years. Three felled trees, a sort of chorus, narrate her thoughts, or rather channel theirs through her, or rather subject her to their peculiar verbal restlessness ...    our deepening need for non-being intones the largest and most decayed tree, mid-sentence. I’m not one of you squeaks the shattered sapling,blackened by lightning. Their words become metallic spangles shivering the air. Will I forget the way home?the third blurts. Why do I feel like I’m hiding in a giant’s nostril?the oldest prone pine wants to know. Are we being   freed from matter?
He fancies his chances are good with her, unaware that in the years since the war she has come to prefer women whose cunts taste like mustard. To pin one’s hopes on a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled like crepe paper, a moth affixed high on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where it will likely die in noble clinging modejust under the cobwebby heating vent, is to confirm your need for more friends and a greater daily quota of sunlight. To raise C.’s hopes that T. can stop drinking and then to liken those hopes to fields of undulating grain, alfalfa perhaps, is to wish C. hip deep in acres of unscythed denial. The blind typist hopes she’ll be hired tonight without her disability becoming an issue. L. said he felt hope’s rhizomes race throughout his body, radiating in all directions, like some incipient disease he’d been fighting since childhood. Hope, he said, it’s as insidious as bitterness. If mother earth only knew how much we loved one another she would creak, shudder, and split like a macheted melon, releasing the fiery ball of molten hope at her core.
(Bubbling and spumingas if trying to talk underwater, I address you thus:)Must I pretend not to love you (in your present bloom, your present perfection — soul encased in fleshly relevance)so you won’t believe me just another seabed denizen vying for your blessed attention? Some of us (but not you) are so loosely moored to our bodies we can barely walk a straight line, remaining (most days) only marginally conscious. We stagger and shudder as buckets of   blood or spermor chocolate mousse or spittle or lymph or sludge sluice continually through us... I love the way you wear your face, how you ride this life. I delight in the sight of you,your nervous, inquisitive eyes,though I try to act otherwise.Being stoned out of thy mindonly amps up thy fearsome brain wattage. Pardon my frontal offensive, dear chum. Forgive my word-churn, my drift, the ways this text message has gotten all frothy. How was it you became holy to me? Should I resist, furiously? Is this your true visage, shaken free, flashing glimpses of what underlies the world we can see? Do not forget me murmurs something nibbled by fish under the sea.After dark you’re quick-silvery, wet /slick /glistening. Don’t make me chase you, dragging my heavy caresses, a pair ofawkward, serrated claws, hither and yon. Give me a swig of   whatever you’re drinking, to put me in tune with the cosmos’srelentless melt, with the rhythms of dish-washing, corn-shucking, hard-fucking, bed-wetting, and the folding of   bones of other loves into well-dug graves...    may we never become lost to the world.
Every tripod-toting birderknows it nevernests on urbangirders. Even fences set itsscalded-crimsonhead askew, itswaddle swinging,wings akimbo.Few have got iton their lists andfewer still havecaught it singing,this endangeredNorth Americancandor, cousinof the done-in dodo, big-eyedBig Sur tremor-tenor — onlyten or twentyhang glide overModoc County,humbly numbered(as their days are)for us crazycrown- and throat- andbelly-gazers.Any niche asfragile as acandor’s rendersits extinctioncertain. We can sabotage itshabitat withhalf a laugh orquarter murmur,fluster coveysworth of candorsoff their branches,which, abandoned,soon are littlemore than snarking-grounds for minorbirds, the common snipe, the yellow-bellied bittern.
What if   it were possible to vanquishAll this shame with a wash of   varnishInstead of wishing the stain would vanish?What if   you gave it a glossy finish?What if   there were a way to burnishAll this foolishness, all the anguish?What if   you gave yourself   leave to ravishAll these ravages with famished relish?What if   this were your way to flourish?What if   the self   you love to punish —Knavish, peevish, wolfish, sheepish —Were all slicked up in something lavish?Why so squeamish? Why make a fetishOut of everything you must relinquish?Why not embellish what you can’t abolish?What would be left if   you couldn’t brandishAll the slavishness you’ve failed to banish?What would you be without this gibberish?What if   the true worth of the varnishWere to replenish your resolve to vanquishEvery vain wish before you vanish?
Here is where You can get nowhere Faster than everAs you go underDeeper and deeperIn the fertile smotherOf another acreLike any otherYou can’t peer overAnd then anotherAnd everywhereYou veer or hareThere you areFarther and fartherAfield than beforeBut on you blunderIn the verdant meanderAs if   the answerTo looking for coverWere to bewilderYour inner minotaurAnd near and far wereNeither here nor thereAnd where you areIs where you were
Were there a tear To spare, where betterTo be sure the gestureWould linger than hereIn its own little bottleBlown from a hot bubbleTo mirror a tear.And were there moreThan one could bear,So much the betterIn the hereafter forThe begetter, a littleVessel to stopperSorrow beyond measure.And were there a tearToo few, far better to hireA weeper, for whereBut in a tearful littleJigger does it figureNo one need settle forLess than a fair share.
If   love is like a doll’s shoe —the color of nascent snowthat laces over the ankle or the polychromatic beaded baby moccasins we saw lying in the museum drawerthat belonged to an infant from a sea tribe of seal hunters.Or the rutilant pink blossoms of the locust tree that bloomed in the dark while I slept dreaming of my arrival on a red-eye wearing a long to the floor skirt —not of a postulant, but of a flower vendoror a woman covering disfigurement. Freud believed that religious faith is a wish-fulfilling illusion.I can’t locate faith in a carved or uncarved pew.I’m more focused on the altar boy’s shoes. Under his white robe he’s wearing a man’s black loafers vastly oversized for his small feet withsufficient spare space for a coyote den in each toe.I want to buy him a kite.If   love is a mezzanine floor we will not fall from, a hand holding back my hair from my face as I’m sick on the side of the bus. The mouth so at home in the vicinity of pavement.Pew also means to enclose, as in men who were as willingly pewed in the parish church
1 Nothing passes, Lord, but what you allow.Mornings the milky sap on my knucklesburns. Last night the piglets fought then suckled in the barn. Still no word. Our one cowgrazes but won’t come in. The pamphlets say: Patience is required. I say, let’s try againbut John blames the state, the neighbors, the way we wrote our bios, filling out the forms.Across the road our neighbor starts his truckwhile God, feather by feather, downs a wren —swollen, its black eyes shiny, small dark tongue.In the drainpipe, something slithers wet and stuck. A race runner? A ground skink shedding skin?Lizards, John tells me, can’t bear live young.2 John tells me: lizards can’t bear live young.Another of   God’s mysteries: hard rainmuddying the corn. The kind woman at the agency said, it takes longer for certaintypes of couples
Curled up in bed, I’m young in the old way. • One continuous stroke without lifting the pen as if“stem, tendril, stem tendril” were the words of a commandment. • My next elliptical loops read “Praise.” Word deciphered at a snail’s pace.
These brown pilesof stubblehillshave failed.They should be more •It should be difficultbut not impossibleto transmutelatitudeinto a thoughta god couldhold. •Barred light:dunes coming onand on. •The eye, yes,must moveto prevent blank spotsfrom making themselvesknown.
There are fewer introductionsIn plague years,Hands held back, jocularityNo longer bellicose,Even among men. Breathing’s generally wary,Labored, as they say, whenThe end is at hand.But this is the everyday intakeOf   the imperceptible life force,Willed now, slow —Well, just cautiousIn inhabited air.As for ongoing dialogue,No longer an exuberant plosiveTo make a point,But a new squirreling of air space,A new sense of   boundary.Genghis Khan said the handIs the first thing one man givesTo another. Not in this war.A gesture of   limited distanceNow suffices, a nod,A minor smile or a handSlightly raised,Not in search of   its counterpart,Just a warning withinThe acknowledgment to stand back.Each beautiful stranger a barbarianBreathing on the other side of the gate.
No more lines on the luminescence of   light, of   whatever variation.No more elegies of youth or age, no polyglottal ventriloquism.No more songs of raw emotion, forever overcooked.No more the wisdom of   banality, which should stay overlooked.No more verbs of embroidery.No more unintentional phallacy.No more metaphor, no more simile. Let the thing be, concretely.No more politics put politically: let the thing be concretely.No more conditional set conditionally — let the thing be already.No more children pimped out to prove some pouting mortality.No more death without dying — immediately.No more poet-subject speaking into the poem-mirror, watching the mouth move, fixing the thinning hair.No more superiority of the interiority of that unnatural trinity — 
you, me, we — our teeth touch only our tongues. No more Gobstoppers: an epic isn’t an epic for its fingerprints.No more reversals of grammar if as emphasis.No more nature less natural; no more impiety on bended knee.No more jeu de mot, no more mot juste. No more retinal poetry.
I know that rarity precedes extinction,Like that of the purple orchid in my garden,Whose sudden disappearance rattled me.Jane, in her way, is also beautiful.And therefore near extinction, I suppose.She is certainly rare and fragile of  bone.She insists she is dying, day by dubious day,And spends her evenings looking at photographsOf  her mother, who never believed in love.Rare Jane, I worship you. But I can’t denyYou access to the endlessWith its river of cold stars.
Revolutionaries [Alois Lindner, Erich Mühsam, Guido Kopp], 1929 by August Sander Twelve years on, the beard that Lenin woreStill sharpens revolutionary chinsTo dagger-points held ready for the warIn which the outgunned proletariansWill triumph thanks to these, their generals,Whose rounded shoulders and round glasses sayThat sedentary intellectualsRaised in the bosom of the bourgeoisieCan also learn to work — if not with hands,Then with the liberated consciousnessThat shrinks from nothing since it understandsWhat’s coming has to come. The monumentsTo which the future genuflects will bearThese faces, so intelligently stern,Under whose revolutionary stareEverything that is burnable must burn.
The Butcher’s Apprentice, 1911–1914 by August Sander The high white collar and the bowler hat,The black coat of respectability,The starched cuff and the brandished cigaretteAre what he has decided we will see,Though in the closet hangs an apron fleckedWith bits of  brain beside the rubber bootsStained brown from wading through the bloody slickThat by the end of every workday coatsThe killing floor he stands on. He declinesTo illustrate as in a children’s bookThe work he does, although it will defineHim every time the photograph he tookIs shown and captioned for posterity —Even as his proud eyes and carriage sayThat what he is is not what he would be,In a just world where no one had to slay.
Professional Middle-class Couple, 1927 by August Sander What justifies the inequalityThat issues her a tastefully square-cutRuby for her finger, him a suitWhose rumpled, unemphatic dignityDeclares a life of working sitting down,While someone in a sweatshop has to squintAnd palsy sewing, and a continentSheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground,Could not be justice. Nothing but the useTo which they put prosperity can speakIn their defense: the faces money makes,They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse,Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong;Only among the burghers do you findA glance so frank, engaging, and refined,So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.
Fiddle no further, Führer. Rome is built.It took all day. Now let us solove the world. I’m just thinking out loud.My stigmata bring out my eyes.The smallpox uses every part of  the blanket,and the forest is a lady’s purse.The Indian is a pink Chihuahua peeking his head from the designer zipper.Out here it’s mostly light from the fifteenthcentury slamming into the planet.I can’t see the forest for the burn unit.All the planet does is bitch bitch bitch.I know it’s last minute but could you putout my eyes? At the subatomic level, helmeted gods help themselves to gold.Up here? The body’s an isolation ward.
I will pull an airplane with my teethand I will pull an airplane with my hair.I write about cats. Cats, when you read this, write about me. Be the change you want to see.I’ve legally changed my name to Whites Only.Changed it back, I should say.DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME made me the man I am today.That, and the University of  Phoenix.Old man, take a look at my life.Charles Simic, in the gloaming, with a roach,take a look at my life. I’m a lot like you.A man stands up and says I will catcha bullet in my teeth! That’s incredible!He eats a sword, hilt first, and spits up a million people persons.A dolphin pulls an airplane with its blowholeand keeps the black box for itself.Bottleneck dolphins don’t even have bones, yet here we are, giving them medals ...    This is my ass. And that is a holein ground zero. I know which is which.It’s the one with the smoke pouring out.This is my handle; this is my spout.
I took back the night. Wrested itfrom the Chinese, many of  whomwere shorter than me. Two billion outstretched Chinesehands, give or take a fewthousand amputees.A cheap knockoff, the nightproved to be — Noklanot Nokia on the touchscreen.Well, even Old Peng gotta eat,Confucius say. Or maybe thatwas Cassius Clay. In me, folks, a movable objectmeets a resistible force. I haven’t worked a day since the accidentof   birth. Born of  woman,my father the same. Make lovethen war. I’ll bring round the car.These children that I spit onare immune to my consultations.I’ll have none myself. It isn’t (Write it!) a fiasco. I am small, I contain platitudes.
After the first sex, there is no other.I stick my gender in a blenderand click send. Voilà! Your new ex-girlfriend.You cuckold me with your husband.I move a box with Ludacris.The captain turns on, we begin our descent.Be gentle with me, I’m new to this.I say the wrong thing. I have OCD.My obsessive compulsions are disorderly.I say the wrong thing, did I already say?I drive my dominatrix away.The coyote drives her in a false-bottomed van.He drops her in the desert. The bluffs are tan.She’ll get a job at Chili’s picking up butts.I feel ya, Ophelia, I say to my nuts.And there is pansies. That’s for thoughts.
And to the curious I say, Don’t be naïve.The soul, like a trinket, is a she.I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night.I did not like the wool of  him.You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat.They can take you down for that.Did I forget to mention that when you’re deadYou’re dead a long time.My uncle, dying, told me this when asked, Why stay here for such suffering.A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium. I long for one last Blue democracy, Which has broke my heart a while.How many minutes have I left, the lover asked, To still be beautiful?I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondly On his mouth.
What makes you think I’m an eccentric, he said, in LondonTo the rag of the reporters who had gathered to report On his eccentricities — the tin sink light enough for traveling, but Deep enough to swallow his exquisite hands in water filled with ice.A budgerigar accompanies, perched atop the fugue of Hindemith. You are trembling now like the librarian reading To herself out loud in her Arctic roomComposed entirely of snow.A broadcast (high fidelity) bound by the quiet of the land andThe Mennonite who told him We are in this world, but are not of this world,You see. From the notebook of  your partial list of symptoms, phobias:Fever, paranoia, polio (subclinical), ankle-foot phenomenon, The possibility of  bluish spots. Everything one does is fearNot being of this world or in this world enough. There is no world I know, without some word of   it.
to challenge sleep to go againstthe one-eyed god of  victimhood:Polyphemus by way of  Redon rising, open eye ripe with stupid gazing.How dare you look at me? plural tense: now and then, to bed and back again andone more war.The oral rinse of moral sense can lift the fenceof expectation, expand the domeof  tolerance. I, too, arose fromthe unthinkable, used to Nobodyresponding loud as circumstance.
Purveyor of  rot and whatnot, entrepreneur of  I forgot, with wrists hard as hammers — that birthmark a slot — grip it, strip it, flip it hard — ramp my shard.If  fear be sexy, a synch & a match — Gone the way of  wax & worms — gone like November 2011 — sweet by nature, mean by culture — “Goodbye, luck, you idiot,” said the Fox to the Grapes. “I love you,” replied the Grapes.
Fireplace blocked,sealed withcardboard, and taped.Furniture trashed,paneling smashed.On the second floormid-corridor, a rotting catfurry and feyin a nap of  gore glued flatto a spoton the floor, ether-sweet in a frieze of decay,up-staring, popeyed,pissed.The screens I installedbelled out, belled in.Every windowcracked, broken,or forgotten, left open. The in-gusting Atlantic left smelling sick. A shade softly crashedon a sash, finish nails and a bare molly bolt fanfaredme from the gloom.Google the address:from outer space it’s a bare green blot, treeless, erased,terns where we made love,gulls where we fought.
Once, Iwas seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,sleepy and nameless. As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.Light on the neck-napeof timeas two wings of one starling, or lovers so happy neither needs think of the other.
A chair in snow should belike any other object whited& roundedand yet a chair in snow is always sadmore than a bed more than a hat or housea chair is shaped for just one thing to hold a soul its quick and few bendable hoursperhaps a king not to hold snow not to hold flowers
An hour is not a house,a life is not a house,you do not go through them as if they were doors to another.Yet an hour can have shape and proportion, four walls, a ceiling.An hour can be dropped like a glass.Some want quiet as others want bread.Some want sleep.My eyes went to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
I moved my chair into sunI sat in the sunthe way hunger is moved when called fasting.
I have a word for it —the way the surface waited all dayto be a silvery pause between sky and city —which is elver.And another one for howthe bay shelved cirrus cloudspiled up at the edge of the Irish Sea, which is elver too.The old Blackrock baths have been neglected now for fifty years,fine cracks in the tiles visible as they never were whenI can I can I canshouted Harry Vernon as he dived from the highest board curving down into salt and urinehis cry fading out through the half century it took to hear as a child that a glass eelhad been seen entering the seawater baths at twilight —also known as elver —and immediatelythe word beginsa delicate migration —a fine crazing healing in the tiles —the sky deepening above a city that has always beenunsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea to which there now comes at duska translucent visitoryearning for the estuary.
In a precisely lighted room, the CFO speaksof  start-to-start dependencies.Says let me loop back with you.Says please cascade as appropriate.It’s that time of morning, so we all can smellthe doughnut factory. If scent were whitenoise, doughnuts would be that scent.The factory won’t sell at any price.The building next to it burns the animalswe experiment on. I have workedon a few preclinical reports in my time. The rhesus monkeys becomeso desperate that they attempt suicide,over and over again. I am legally obligatedto spare you the particulars.How could things be any different?Here many choice molecules have been born.Here. This pill will dissolve like sugar.Your last five months will be good ones.
For once, he was just my father.We drove to the Computing Centerin a Monte Carlo Landaunot technically ours. Lexington,1977. That fall. The colorhad settled, too, undoneorange-brown and dull yellow,crimson. And it was something,yet not, the pile of  leavesjust a pile of  leaves. Sorry to thinkwhat thinking has done to landscape:He loved punched cards,program decks and subroutines,assembly languagesand keypunch machines.Even my father looked smallnext to a mainframe.The sound of order;the space between us.We almost laughed, but not for years —we almost laughed. But not. For years,the space between us,the sound of ordernext to a mainframe.Even my father looked small.And keypunch machines,assembly languages,program decks and subroutines.He loved punched cards,what thinking has done to landscape —just a pile of leaves. Sorry to think,yet not, the pile of leavescrimson. And it was. Something orange-brown and dull yellow had settled, too, undone 1977, that fall, the color not technically ours, Lexington in a Monte Carlo Landau. We drove to the Computing Center. For once he was just, my father.
My poor students, all I ask of themis to grow antennae, lie down with lavaand rise with snow, grow tongues fromtheir math assignments and no, Melissa,your mother won’t approve of the bioluminescentsmear on your communion dress. The world fidgetsin uneasy relationship to our statementsabout it nevertheless producing silverbuds from ragged limbs like the lusterin late Frank Sinatra songs. Finally,when I got off the sixth floor, I feltlike I was walking out into the skyand aren’t we all pedestrians of air?Doesn’t it feel all wrong to turn our backson the ocean? On an ant? On those Chagallwindows you have to go through a gauntletof ancient armor to get to? What was her name,that night nurse so deft her blood drawsdidn’t wake me up? Don’t get me wrong, I wantto wake up. I want my old dog to show meall that wolf-light she hides insideeven though she thinks I won’t understand,even though her vet and I conspireto keep her alive forever.
Imagine, not even or really ever tastinga peach until well over 50, not oncesympathizing with Blake naked in his gardeninsisting on angels until getting off the tableand coming home with my new heart. How absurdto still have a body in this rainbow-gored,crickety world and how ridiculous to be given onein the first place, to be an objectlike an orchid is an object, or a stone,so bruisable and plummeting, armswaving from the evening-ignited lake,heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet,tears that make the face grotesque,tears that make it pure. How easyit is now to get drunk on a single whiff like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughterof one woman and who knew how much I’d missthat inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.
peach of a grape in his fingertips like holding home he noses its muskTaste, he says and parts my lips with a globe and a thumb I lick I bite the thick skin His Arkansas aches sweet on my tongue His hand vines my chin my throatMy face flames To the lady on the bus he brags Her blush comes from my touch.
(there’ll be days like this.)  — The Shirelles These folks ’bout to respect me into the grave.At eighty Mama said, (mama said)   “People think you change when you’re old but you still got a girl inside.” And men could see her, too — that pink silk dress —soothe that hotel bellboy “Boy, I’m old enough to be your mama.”He coy “well, you ain’t.”But seventy is prime time for me to own what “elder” brings.I reap myself with the respect they sow.They don’t know I got the road wide open in me.
It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or soof the next closest thing to water to the touch,or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm. But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure of this town, it is the flash that arrives and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want to be in this moment, in this doorway, because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer against the curve of anyone’s arm, as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing compared to that moment when I eat the dark,draw shadows in quick strokes across walland start a tongue counting down to thunder. That counting that says, I am this far. I am this close.
You made me cry in cruel stations,So I missed many trains. You married others In plausible buildings. The subsequent sonBecame my boss. You promised me nothingBut blamed me for doubting when who wouldn’t.If  I knew how to please you — who have found Out my faults. In dreams I’m wild with guilt. Have pityKill it. Then, when I’ve lost all hope,Kiss me again, your mouth so open — I’d give anything for one more night — That I go without thought. Don’t bite. No,Mark me. My husband already knowsExactly what owns me.
Re-reading him in Bouchon past noon, it is mobbed midtown, like an ant farm seen through painkillers. God, what a bust it’s all been, capitalism, communism, feminism, this lust to liberate. Che should have stayed in medicine. The girls here admit they can’t wait to marry and get to the alimony, before they hit thirty. The men, heads skinned like Lager inmates, know only the revolutions in diets and spinning classes. Still, one table away, these two, with gnarled empretzled hands, seem unhappy in the old way.
My mother was married by the water. She wore a gray coat and a winter rose.She said her vows beside a cold seam of the Irish coast.She said her vows near the shore wherethe emigrants set down their consonantal n:on afternoon, on the end of everything, at the start of ever.Yellow vestments took in light.A chalice hid underneath its veil.Her hands were full of calla and cold-weather lilies.The mail packet dropped anchor.A black-headed gull swerved across the harbor.Icy promises rose beside a crosshatch of ocean and horizon.I am waiting for the words of the service. I am waiting for keep thee only and all my earthly. All I hear is an afternoon’s worth of never.
In a hotel, even prayer feels adulterous,the skyline smudged in light, a distraction just before dusk. In the lobbya woman tells a stranger what she will dofor three hundred dollars, whatshe will do for four. Some have the custom of opening a book randomly with a question in mind. Some have the custom of  forgetting. At six my friend beat his father at chess, beat his father’s friends so easily he wondered if  they tried.At seven he shook the governor’s hand.Don’t call it a failure; call it knowledge:the peculiar taste that filled his mouth as if   he had bitten his cheek.Whatever he risked did not matter, whatever he could imagine was already lost. Bored, the other boy coughed into his hands.
Night. Or what they have of  it at altitudelike this, and filtered air, what wasin my lungs just an hour ago is now in yours, there’s only so much air to go around. They’re makingmore people
As sometimes, in the gentler months, the sunwill return before the rain has altogether stopped and throughthis lightest of curtains the curve of it shineswith a thousand inclinations and so close is the one to theone adjacent that you cannot tell where magentafor instance begins and where the all-but-magenta has ended and yetyou’d never mistake the blues for red, so these two,the girl and the goddess, with their earth-bred, grass- fed, kettle-dyedwools, devised on their loomstransitions so subtle no hand could trace nor eye discern their increments,yet the stories they told were perfectly clear.The gods in their heaven, the one proposed. The gods in heat, said the other.And ludicrous too, with their pinions and swansdown,fins and hooves, their shepherds’ crooks and pizzles. Till minglingwith their darlings-for-a-day they madea progeny so motley it defied all sorting-out. It wasn’t the boastingbrought Arachne all her sorrownor even the knowing her craft so well. Once trueand twice attested.It was simply the logic she’d already taught us how to read.
Blacksmithing demonstration, mountain arts and crafts fair, Monteagle, TN “But can you forge a nail?” the blond boy asks,And the blacksmith shoves a length of  iron rodDeep in the coal fire cherished by the bellowsUntil it glows volcanic. He was a godBefore anachronism, before the tasksThat had been craft were jobbed out to machine.By dint of   hammer-song he makes his keen,Raw point, and crowns utility with rose:Quincunx of facets petaling its head.The breeze-made-visible sidewinds. The boy’sBlonde mother shifts and coughs. Once Work was wedTo Loveliness — sweat-faced, swarthy from soot, heReminds us with the old saw he employs(And doesn’t miss a beat): “Smoke follows beauty.”
The animal of winter is dying, its white body everywhere in collapse and stabbed atby straws of   light, a leaving to believe in as the air slowly fills with darkness and water drains from the tub where my daughter, watching it lower around her, feeling it go, says about the only thing she can as if it were a long-kept breath going with her blessing of dribble and fleck.Down it swirls a living drillvanishing toward a landwhere tomorrow already fixes its bright eye on a manmuttering his way into a crowd,saying about the only thinghe can before his bodygoes boom. And tomorrow, I will count more dark shapes tumbling from the sky, birds returning to scarcity, offering in their seesawing songs a kind of   liquidity.
Either the world is coming together,or else the world is falling apart — here — now — along these letters, against the walls of every heart. Today, tomorrow, within its weather,the end or beginning’s about to start — the world impossibly coming together or very possibly falling apart.Now the lovers’ mouths are open —maybe the miracle’s about to start: the world within us coming together, because all around us it’s falling apart. Even as they speak, he wonders,even as the fear departs: Is that the world coming together? Can they keep it from falling apart?The image, gradually, is growing sharper;now the sound is like a dart: It seemed their world was coming together, but in fact it was falling apart.That’s the nightmare, that’s the terror,that’s the Isaac of this art — which sees that the world might come together if only we’re willing to take it apart. The dream, the lure, is the prayer’s answer,which can’t be plotted on any chart — as we know the world that’s coming together without our knowing is falling apart.
After César Vallejo The fury that breaks a grown-up into kids,a kid into scattered birdsand a bird into limp eggs,the fury of the poortakes one part oil to two parts vinegar.The fury that breaks a tree into leaves,a leaf into deranged flowersand a flower into wilting telescopes,the fury of the poorgushes two rivers against a hundred seas.The fury that breaks the true into doubts,doubt into three matching archesand the arch into instant tombs,the fury of the poordraws a sharpening stone against two knives.The fury that breaks the soul into bodies,the body into warped organs,and the organ into eight doctrines,the fury of the poorburns with one fire in two thousand craters.
Freud could never be certain, he said,in view of   his wide and early reading,whether what seemed like a new creationmight not be the work insteadof   hidden channels of memory leadingback to the notions of others absorbed, coming now anew into formhe’d almost known within him was growing. He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia. So we own and owe what we know.
Why are you here?Who have you come forand what would you gain?Where is your fear?Why are you here?You’ve come so near,or so it would seem;you can see the grainin the paper — that’s clear.But why are you herewhen you could be elsewhere,earning a livingor actually learning?Why should we carewhy you’re here?Is that a tear?Yes, there’s pressure behind the eyes —and there are peers.But why are you here?At times it sears.The pressure and shameand the echoing pain.What do you hearnow that you’re here?The air’s so severe.It calls for equipment,which comes at a price.And you’ve volunteered.Why? Are you here?What will you wear?What will you doif it turns out you’ve failed?How will you fare?Why are you herewhen it could take yearsto find out — what?It’s all so slippery,and may not cohere.And yet, you’re here    ...Is it what you revere?How deep does that go?How do you know?Do you think you’re a seer?Is that why you’re here?Do you have a good ear?For praise or for verse?Can you handle a curse?Define persevere.Why are you here?It could be a career.
To the Metropolitan Police Force, London:the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undoneby wandering thoughts and the close study of maps.So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps,I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucesterby several million strides, having walked on water.City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats,of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes,city of pelicans, fish bones and flaking paint,of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point    ...I eat little — a beard of grass, a pinch of oats — let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out,but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikesand I straddle each earthquake, one foot either sideof the fault line, rocking the world’s seesaw.At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven’s seashore:I watch boats heading home with the day’s catch or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz,or I face west and let the Pacific slipin bloodshot glory over the planet’s lip,sense the waterfall at the end of the journey.I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.
It hangs on its stem like a plumat the edge of a darkening thicket.It’s swelling and blushing and ripeand I reach out a hand to pick itbut flesh moves slow through timeand evening comes on fastand just when I think my fingersmight seize that sweetness at lastthe gentlest of breezes risesand the plum lets go of   the stem.And now it’s my fingers ripeningand evening that’s reaching for them.
Compiling this landmark anthology of poetry in English about dogs and musical instruments is like swimming through bricks. To date, I have only, “On the Death of Mrs. McTuesday’s Pug, Killed by a Falling Piano,” a somewhat obvious choice. True, an Aeolian harp whispers alluringly in the background of the anonymous sonnet, “The Huntsman’s Hound,” but beyond that — silence. I should resist this degrading donkey-work in favor of my own writing, wherein contentment surely lies. But A. Smith stares smugly from the reverse of the twenty pound note, and when my bank manager guffaws, small particles of saliva stream like a meteor shower through the infinity of dark space between his world and mine.
A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work:the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmerhad slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son,who in turn had bulldozed both farm and familyover the cliff, except for the girl, who lived nowby the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach.There was some plan to use the door as a jettyor landing-stage, but it was all bullshit, the usual idle talk.That’s when he left and never returned. Him I won’t name — not known for his big ideas or carpentry skills,a famous non-swimmer, but last seen sailing out,riding the current and rounding the point in a small boatwith tell-tale flashes of almost certainly purple paint.
I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpetsunder the trees, catching the rainof  olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightnessof   the one covering the bad roofof  a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color inside the winter’s weeks. Another onetook the shape of   the pile of   bricks underneath.Another flew off the back of a truck,black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.I have seen the ones under bridges,the forms they make of sleep. I could go onthis way until the end of the page, even though what I have in my mind isn’t the thingitself, but the category of   belief that sees the thing as a shelter for what is beneath it.There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp overa wave. You cannot put a tarpover a war. You cannot put a tarp over the brokenoil well miles under the ocean. There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mindthat sits in a corner and shreds receiptsand newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,whose only recourse is languageso approximate it hardly means what it means:He is not here. She is sick. She cannot rememberher name. He is old. He is ashamed.
When I read about the gardendesigned to bloom only white flowers,I think about the Spanish friar who saw oneof my grandmothers, two hundred years removed, and fucked her. If you look at the word colony far enough, you see ittraveling back to the Latinof  inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words that would have meant somethingto the friar, walking among the village girlsas though in a field of flowers, knowingthat fucking was one way of   havinga foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snowfalling, which means that everyangry thought is as short-lived as a match.The night is its own white garden:snow on the fence, snow on the treestump, snow on the azalea bushes,their leaves hanging down like greenbats from the branches. I know it’s not fairto see qualities of injustice in the aestheticsof a garden, but somewhere betweenwhat the eye sees and what the mind thinks is the world, landscapes mangledinto sentences, one color read into rage.When the neighbors complainedthe roots of our cypress were bucklingtheir lot, my landlord cut the tree down.I didn’t know a living thing three stories highcould be so silent, until it was gone.Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the lightin the windows, as though every sheetof glass was having a migraine.When I think about that grandmother whose name I don’t even know, I think ofwhat it would mean to make a gardenthat blooms black: peonies and gladiolasof deepest purple, tulips like ravens.Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rockspoised on clean gravel. When the snow stops,I walk to see the quiet that has colonizedeverything. The main street is asleep, exceptfor the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship. There are sheet cakes of  snow on topof cars. In front of   houses, each lawnis as clean as paper, except where the first cator raccoon has walked across, each tracklike a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.
The plastic Great Horned Owl, stuck with glueon the stamped tin, corbelled cornice lipimpresses no one — not the starlings that dipand stitch, nor pigeons as they fluff and cooaround its feet. And vinyl siding’s tooregular — each molded, faux-grained stripidentical, but for dents, and that dripof   bird shit from a sill. What if all youmight say speaks like crafted, ersatz things:mimicry in a tongue you barely know?Your owl signs death, the cornice stone, the fakeclapboard conjures farmhouse. While just belowthe ledge, a wren’s mindless gestures makean altar of twigs, in veneration of wings.
There’s a clever thing, stabs at her handon every corner now, revising the screed. Watch her huff at the tiny screens that sendher chimpish copy up the line, to speedthe raising of the giddy, pixelled hall: cornerless, mirror-tiled, the gorging spherea fast-receding shell enclosing allwe say or see, never to disappear,bigger with each second, and the next,its facets auto-replicant, untilthe Record of  what was — each fingered textand pic, the starry shards the hours distill —impounds what is, slaves us in its spell,sorting the diamonds in our dazzling cell.
You are aland I can’t stand leavingand can’t not.My party shipis pulling out.We all havehats. I try totoot some notesyou’ll understandbut this was notour instrumentor plan.
As the storm-struck oak leaned closer to the house —The remaining six-story half of the tree listing toward the glass box Of  the kitchen like someone in the first tilt of stumbling —The other half crashed into the neighbors’ yards, a massiveDiagonal for which we had no visual cue save for An antler dropped by a constellation —As the ragged half   leaned nearer, the second storm of cloying snow Began pulling on the shocked, still-looming splitting, and its branches dragged Lower like ripped hems it was tripping overUntil they rustled on the roof under which IQuickly made dinner, each noise a threat from a body under which we so recently Said, Thank goodness for our tree, how it has accompanied us all these years,Thank goodness for its recitation of the seasons out our windows and overThe little lot of our yard, thank goodness for the birdsong and 
squirrel games Which keep us from living alone, and for its proffered shade, the crack of the batResounding through September when its dime-sized acorns Land on the tin awning next door. HaveMercy on us, you, the massively beautiful, now ravaged and chargedWith destruction.We did speak like that. As if from a book of psalmsBecause it took up the sky
As if engineparts could bewrenched outat random andthe car would still start andsound even,hearts can gowith chambersbroken open.
Death has a lifeof  its own. Seehow its albumhas grown ina year and howthe sharp blot of ithas softened till those couldalmost be shadowsbehind thecherry blossomsin this shot.In fact youcouldn’t provethey’re not.
Perhaps you covet something of its emptiness, its uselessness in matters of  yearning or feeling another’s yearn, that it can’t know a damn thing, yet damns everything it touches: the water it gathers along its passage, the air it pushes through,swallow-like. It is no bird, though you envy the song you hear only after it’s gone, even if  it sings through paper, a goat, the neck of a man wearing a scarf that tufts just as the rest of   him flies out of his shoes and collapses in dirt.Or, how it is like the dirt receiving him, the privilege of not knowing if   he was kind or unkind, as youchamber another, waiting for someone to come for his shoes.
With a nod to Jonah Winter Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like, A semi-demi goddess, something like A reality-TV star look-alike, Named Simile or Me Two. So we like In order to be liked. It isn’t like There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike” Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like Is something you can quantify: each “like” You gather’s almost something money-like, Token of virtual support. “Please like This page to stamp out hunger.” And you’d like To end hunger and climate change alike, But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like- Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like,So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like, He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... ” Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alike Flounder, agape, gesticulating like A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike With other crutches, um, when we use “like,” We’re not just buying time on credit: Like Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like, Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click “like” If you’re against extinction!) Like is like Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike Redundant fast food franchises, each like (More like) the next. Those poets who dislike Inversions, archaisms, who just like Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t “like” Their (literally) every other word? I’d like Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like. But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike, How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.
A new embroidery of flowers, canary color, dots the grass already dotty with aster-white and clover.I warn, “They won’t last, out of water.”The children pick some anyway.In or out of  waterchildren don’t last either.I watch them as they pick.Still free of  what’s next and what was yesterdaythey pick today.
On reading Susanne K. Langer’s Mind If  leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed,reach for rock-bottom as you rakethe muck out. Let it slump dank,and dry fading, flat above the bank.Stand back. Watch the water vault ahead.Its thrust sweeps the surface clean, shores the debris,as it debrides its stone path to the lake,clarity carrying clarity.To see clear, resist the drag of  images.Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind.Act in events; touch what you name. Abhoreasy obverts of natural metaphor.Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridgesfrom mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush: In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-clean like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock) says she witnessed an August bird in shock when a hawk snatched its mate. It perched, rushed notes fluting two life-quotas in one flood, its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the keen calls, pumped out as the heart pumps blood, not in twilight or warning but noon & wrong, its old notes whistled too fast but accurate.I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine-fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mineawash in unanswered unanswered song.And I cannot claim we are not desolate.
All he undertookgoes under, underthe undergrowth he rose fromfly-boy, lovelyin his day. All his clothes— spruce suit & tie —are underclothesagainst ungrounded gray.All his studies understudyan unstudied play. Under the under of what I remember we are both twenty and except with each other underemployed.
Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance   ...  — Djuna Barnes Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch The sly very old woman wile away from her pious And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin. She pours big drinks. We think of what Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young, Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower, Now Babel, then of  ivory, of  the Shulamite, Collapsed to this keen dame moving among Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here My child, and feel it, dear. A crooking finger Shows how hot the oven is. (Also she is alive with hate. Also she is afraid of  hell. Also, we wish We might, illiberal, uncompassionate, Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.) Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles. We manage to mean well. We endure, and more. We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure. We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin To any after this of  those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us, Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure.    Originally appeared in the March 1958 issue of Poetry magazine.
Two sisters of ancient Greece both laid claimTo the finest, fairest rear of their time.Which tail forged ahead? Which bottom’s true fameTopped? Which back was in front, which terce most prime?A judge chose the elder girl’s back matter;Her finish was more fine and far matter.She got the prize, and his heart; soon they wed.“But the younger’s sitter’s not a smatterLess meet; I’ll marry her,” his brother said.It went so well, their joys were so perfected,That after them a temple was erectedIn honor of  Venus Callipygus.No other church — though I don’t know its rite —Could so, from head to epididymis,Move me with deep devotion to its site. Translated from the French of  Jean de La Fontaine, Contes, Part I, 6.
I’d like to assume from my April birthday, I quickened the womb on the 4th of July. If you suffered as I a sternly fought tendency to endless dependency you’d know why.
“Saturday’s child must work for a living.” “I’m moving from Grief  Street.Taxes are high herethough the mortgage’s cheap.The house is well built.With stuff to protect, thatmattered to me,the security.These things that I mind,you know, aren’t mine.I mind minding them.They weigh on my mind.I don’t mind them well.I haven’t got the knackof  kindly minding.I say Take them backbut you never do.When I throw them outit may frighten youand maybe me too. Maybeit will empty metoo emptilyand keep me hereasleep, at seaunder the guilt quilt,under the you tree.”
A moral tale, for Sauternes, the fungus cenaria, and the wild old Never prophesy.You can’t. So don’t try.Lust, pride, and lethargymay cause us miseryor bliss.The meanest mistakehas a point to make.Hear this — what his vintner d’Eyquem saidonce the lord d’Eyquem was dead: “The wine that year promised bad or none. He’d let it go too late. Rot had crawled through all the vines, greasy scum on every cluster dangling at the crotches of the leaves. Should have been long picked but he’d said, ‘No. Wait for me,’ off to wait on a new woman, grapes on the verge of ripe when he left. Coupling kept him till rot wrapped the grapes like lace & by the time she’d kicked him out the sun had got them, they hung shriveled in the blast. Well, he rode home cocky & bullied the grapes into the vats rot & all, spoiled grapes, too old, too soon squeezed dry. The wine makes. The wine makes thick, gold-colored, & pours like honey. We try it. Fantastic! not like honey, punchy, you’ve never drunk anything like it — refreshing, in a rush over a heat that slows your throat — wanting to keep that flavor stuck to the edge of your tongue where your taste is, keep it like the best bouquet you can remember of sundown summer & someone coming to you smiling. The taste has odor like a new country, so fine at first you can’t take it in it’s so strange. It’s beautiful & believe me you love to go slow.”moral:Age is notall dry rot.It’s never too late.Sweet is your real estate.
From loss of  the old and lack of  the new From failure to make the right thing do Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  From words not the word, from a feckless voice  From poetic distress and from careless choice  Exclude our intellects,  James Joyce. From genteel angels and apostles unappalled From Hollywood visions as virgins shawled Guard our seeing, Grünewald.  From calling a kettle an existential pot,  From bodying the ghost of  whatever is not,  John save us, O most subtle Scot. From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod From eating the pease and rejecting the pod Wolfgang keep us, lover of God.  Couperin come with your duple measure  Alter our minds against banal pleasure. Dürer direct with strictness our vision; Steady this flesh toward your made precision.  Mistress of accurate minor pain,  Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane. From pretending to own what we secretly seek, From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek, Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek.  From ignorance of structural line and bone  From passion not pointed on truth alone  Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone.  From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son;  From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One;  From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne. That zeal for free will get us in deep, That the chance to choose be the one we keep That free will steel self  in us against self-defense That free will repeal in us our last pretense That free will heal us  Jeanne d’Arc, Job,  Johnnie Skelton,  Jehan de Beauce, composer  Johann,  Dark  John Milton, Charter Oak  John, Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt; Leap, leap between us and the easy out; Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go; Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.    Originally appeared in the June 1957 issue of Poetry magazine.
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimerNorthampton-style, on the porch out back.Its voice touches and parts the air of summer,as if  it swam to time us down a riverwhere we dive and leave a single trackas evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimerthat lets us wash our mix of dreams together.Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act;its voice touches and parts the air of summer.When we disentangle you are not with herI am not with him. Redress calls for tact.Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimerstill. A small breeze rises and the leaves stiras uneasy as we, while the woods go black;its voice touches and parts the air of summerand lets darkness enter us; our strings go slackthough the player keeps up his plangent attack.Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer;its voice touches and parts the air of summer.
What women wander? Not many. All. A few. Most would, now & then, & no wonder. Some, and I’m one, Wander sitting still. My small grandmother Bought from every peddler Less for the ribbons and lace Than for their scent Of sleep where you will, Walk out when you want, choose Your bread and your company. She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.” She looked fragile but had High blood, runner’s ankles, Could endure, endure. She loved her rooted garden, her Grand children, her once Wild once young man. Women wander As best they can.
Yellow goblinsand a god I can swallow:Eyes in the evergreensunder ice.Interior monologueand some voice.Weary fears, theusual trials anda place to surmiseblessedness.
1 Because he, because she,in so far asshe (in so far as he) existsis on the wayto battle.Not what is your name,but whatthe battle?2 “Each one of us has comehere and changed” —is the battle. Borna loved one,borne a loved one. 3 My father fought in this war, thus I can speak of it.My mother fought in this, thus I can speak.My friends, my lovers have fought, have worn(like the tree) their several directions at once. And I,in so far as I can say “I”have fought to be related to these —we strive and strainbut also try to ripen the entityof the Other. 4 We kiss on lips, where the tenses attach.We enter the conundrum of another’s becoming.We look for someone who can raise us up again to feet, or near to standing.We tend in our terrors to forget (we do not store them) felicities.I try each day to stay near beings, mornings when I am most mild. And may I nothing harm, in case it is them.
That the dead are real to usCannot be denied, That the living are more realWhen they are deadTerrifies, that the dead can riseAs the living do is possibleIs possible to surmise, But all the stars cannot come nearAll we meet in an eye.Flee from me, fear, as sootFlies in a breeze, do not burn Or settle in my sight, I’ve tasted you long enough,Let me savorSomething otherwise.Who wakes beside me nowSuits my soul, so I turn to wordsOnly to say he changesInto his robe, rustles a page,He raises the lid of the pianoTo release what’s born in its cage.If   words come back To say they compromise Or swear again they have died,There’s no news in that, I reply,But a music without notesThese notes comprise, stillAs spring beneath us lies, Already something otherwise.
The damp had got its grip years agobut gone unnoticed. The heads of the joistsfeathered slowly in the cavity walland the room’s wet belly had begun to bow.Once we’d ripped the boards up, it all came out:the smell, at first, then the crumbling woodgone to seed, all its muscles wasted.You pottered back and to with tea, soda bread,eighty years shaking on a plastic tray.One by one we looked up, nodded, then slippedunder the floor. We moved down there like fishin moonlight, or divers round an old ship.
When did I learn the word “I”?What a mistake. For some, it may be a placeholder, for me it’s a contagion.For some, it’s a thin line, a bare wisp, just enough to be somewhere among the gorgeous troublesome you’s.For me, it’s a thorn, a spike, its slimness a deceit, camouflaged like a stick insect: touch it and it becomes what it is:ravenous slit, vertical cut, little boy standing upright in his white communion suit and black secret.
What kind of delusion are you under?The life he hid just knocked you flat.You see the lightning but not the thunder.What God hath joined let no man put asunder.Did God know you’d marry a rat?What kind of delusion are you under?His online persona simply stunned heras it did you when you started to chat.You see the lightning but not the thunder.To the victors go the plunder:you should crown them with a baseball bat.What kind of delusion are you under?The kind that causes blunder after blunder.Is there any other kind than that?You see the lightning but not the thunder,and for one second the world’s a wonder.Just keep it thrilling under your hat.What kind of delusion are you under?You see the lightning but not the thunder.
For John Skoyles My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent, line drawings that suggest the things they represent, different from any drawings she — at ten — had done, closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in. For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem; for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one. She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card, and wrote I must be brave even when it’s hard. Such love is healing — as you know, my friend, especially when it comes unbidden from our children despite the flaws they see so vividly in us. Who can love you as your child does? Your son so ill, the brutal chemo, his looming loss owning you now — yet you would be this generous to think of my child. With the pens you sent she has made I hope a healing instrument.
All those poems I wroteAbout living in the skyWere wrong. I live on a leafOf   a fern of   frost growingUp your bedroom windowIn forty below.I live on a needle of   a branchOf   a cedar tree, hard-bitten,Striving in six directions,Rooted in rock, a cedarTree made of other trees,Not cedar but fir,Lodgepole, and blue spruce,Metastasizing likeBacteria to the fan-Lip of a draw to drawWater as soon as it slipsFrom the snowdrift’s gripAnd flows downward fromBranch to root — a treeRunning in reverse.Or I live on a thorn on a trellis —Trained, restrained, maybeCut back, to hold upThose flowers I’ve only heard ofTo whatever there is and isn’tAbove.
No one can draw fast enoughTo capture the cutIris before its form fallsFrom its former self.But when we passed a patchIn the ditch,She told me to stop and she steppedDown, opening her claspKnife. She spared one irisWith an impressionisticCocoon on its stemAnd cut the flower beside it.Once homeShe rendered in a careful hurry.She drew into the night as the iris died.I woke grafted to herIn a vague, translucent hammock of dread.
1 In the Forest of    Wearisome Sadness,Where one day I found myself wandering alone,I met my heart, who called to me, asking me where I was going.The path was long and straight, row after row of conifers recedingTo a horizon that because of   the geometrySeemed farther than it really was,Like the door at the top of a staircase in Versailles.But as if   the forest’s maker had been offended by elegance,A pile of rocks disrupted the rows: the forest onceHad been a field. I remember that field. I was carried there by my father, beside him My grandfather, who planted the trees. Until they were tall enough to survive,He mowed the field, piling up rocks, taking down brush with a scythe.How, since I’ve known the forest almost since birth, could I have been lost?Why, since the forest is beautiful, is it not a place of delight? Repeatedly I asked these questions of my heart, But like a good physician, he elected To keep silent, leaving me to answer for myself.2 Late at night, when I’m lying in bed and cannot sleep,My heart reads to me from the Romance of   Pleasant Thought. Always I’ve heard the story before, and typically, Since the stories are true, I am their hero.I’m riding my tricycle on the sidewalk near the house where I was born.Because I am unsupervised, I indulge in what seems at the moment A daring wish: I ride the tricycle beneath a sprinkler.Immediately I am overcome with remorse.The evidence of my trespass is everywhere to be seen,And for the first time in my life I contemplate a lie. Would my shirt dry faster if I stood in the sun, where it’s hot,Or in the shade, where cool breezes rustle the leaves?In the version of this story that appears nowIn the Romance of Pleasant Thought,I admire not so much my ingenuityAs the evidence of my early devotion to empiricism,The way I manage terror by examining how things work. 3 It’s done, there’s nothing more to say.My heart is gone from me.Because he has fallen in loveHe has abandoned me.It’s pointless making myself uncomfortable over thisBy being mournful or sad.It’s done, there’s nothing more to say.My heart is gone from me.He does nothing but mock me.When I tell him pitifullyThat I cannot live on my own,He does not listen.It’s done, there’s nothing more to say.After Charles d’Orleans
The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 907 The exhibition opened on a rainy Thursday, with cello suite. They hung the paintings to be viewed from both front and back. Luna moths flapped their great green sail-wings.Stingrays flapped their great gray sail-wings. Those visiting the exhibition were encouraged to touch. Captions were available in Braille and audio. The exhibition tasted like cherries. A critic asked if the exhibition was a “facile juxtaposition of   ideals.”The mother of the exhibition calls constantly and the father, never.The exhibition has taken to pouring a little scotch in the coffee. When designing layout, remember it is crucial how a bias cut fits at the exhibition’s hipsand foot traffic turns to the right, not the left. They hung the sculptures to be viewed from both above and below.They painted the walls a shade of “eggshell, minus calcium.”The exhibition did not consider itself an exhibitionistuntil the incident at the east window.The exhibition is very sorry and will refund upon request.Stingrays flapped their great gray sail-wings. Luna moths flapped their great green sail-wings.No matter how short a trip, the exhibition packs two pairs of shoes. The exhibition never knows when it is coming home again.
The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 4234 Baking two parts flour to one part water could stop a bullet. So good soldiers carried their hardtack over their hearts. Break it down with a rifle butt, flood it, fry it in pig fat to make hellfire stew.Gnaw it raw and praise the juice.Does wheat prepare for this as it grows,seeking the light in a half-thawed field?Do stalks know their strength is merely in their number? What is ground downwe name flour in promise that it will be made useful. Otherwise, it’s just dust. Sheet iron crackers. Teeth-dullers.Would you call it starving, if a man dieswith hardtack still tucked in his pocket?Can you call it food, if the bullet comes onlyat the moment he gives in and swallows?
When I got the box home from the gun shop, I let it sit on my kitchen tablein its wax wrapping for hours before I opened it.Safe from the elements. Protected from rustand more esoteric forms of corrosion.My father gave me a rosewood chess set when I turned twelve.I’d never felt so loved through and through, almost literally, as if 
I were transparent —and it probably wasn’t love, just a lucky, last-minute guessat the toy store, which is probably what most love is, anyway.I took the set into my room, shut the door,determined to master every fork and zugzwang,that strange position where you’d be safeif only you didn’t have to make a move.Now I’d given myself a perfect gift. I imagined the gun at restin a velvet sack next to its dainty box of   bullets. I wouldn’t need many.And no sequined wrapping paper could have been more beautifulthan the brown waxed sheet the clerk had unrolledand cut along the steel edge in one long, smooth stroke.When I finally slit through the layers to open it,the paper was as delicate and rich as sheets of pastryin baklava, with a mass of dark chocolate in the center.I’d never touched a gun. I loved how perfectly its handle fitmy hand: centuries of engineering and designcoming together in the “unit,” and I knew it would work.Unlike toys, religious rituals, erotic techniques, and works of art,I could depend on it. The only other device I ownthat fulfills its function so well is my reading glasses,and I used a soft gray cloth just like the one I clean them withto wipe the oil from my fingertipsas I dropped the bullets one by oneinto the somber chambers. I just need to know it’s there,like the extra purse I keep hidden in the closetwith a money clip and a neatly folded change of clothes.I don’t need a class in safety or marksmanship.If I ever use it, it will be at close range.It may be the only way to get rid of the stranger inside.It may be the only wayto get inside someone I lovewhen every other route has been systematically barred.
It’s not just this. Every written word is a suicide note.And a love letter, too.There may be no one to talk to who would get it,but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you’ve left the room,or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star,will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausenclaimed he was born on Sirius. You remember him:the genius who said the crashing of planesinto the World Trade Center was the greatest concert ever held,although he later conceded the audience had not been given the optionto not attendand that somewhat diminished its perfection.I heard Stockhausen interviewed at Davies Symphony Hallbefore the orchestra played one of   his worksthat sounded to me like the voices of   the parentsin A Charlie Brown Christmas if they’d been arguing about real estate.No, I was not impressed by Karlheinz.His daughter Christel was a flautist in the orchestra,and she joined him for the interviewand said her father would take her and her brother out on the lawnof their summer house outside Cologne(this was years before he was on the cover of   Sgt. Pepper)and teach them to read each constellationas notes on a stave and to singthe words of their favorite nursery rhymes to the stars’melody: “The dog ran away in the snow” and“Go get the sleigh in the cellar.” It was a gamebut it was hard: work and play at once.Their father explained to them,“God does not write catchy tunes.”You could tell she meant it to be a charming story,but the audience sat in silence.Suffer the little children.
If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore.You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.There are laws of   heaven and those of   placeand those who see the sky in the water,angels in ashes that are the delta’s now. They say if you sweep the trash from your houseafter dark, you sweep away your luck.If you are going by foot, bring a stick,a third leg, and honor the great disorder,the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds.Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can,knowing there is a little water in thingsyou take for granted, a little charityand squalor for the smallest forms of life. Voodoo was always mostly charity.People forget. If you shake a tableclothoutside at night, someone in your familydies. There are laws we make thinkingit was us who made them. We are not us.We are a floodplain by the Mississippithat once poured slaves upriver to the fields.We are a hurricane in the making.We could use a magus who knows somethingabout suffering, who knows a delta’s needs.We understand if   you want a widow to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes.He is not himself anyway and walksbarefoot across a landscape that has no north.Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog,a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind,a girl with a stick, who is more at home, being homeless, than you will ever be.
At Waffle House, they fired her on the spot:“You talk too much!” She’d told her customersThat “made” gets “mad” and “poet” goes to “pot”Without the letter e. The “amateurs,”She’d said, “inherit everything: the sand,The stars, the world that only God possesses.”While washing dishes with a bleeding hand,She’d told them, “through ‘possession’s’ double ‘esses’There’s a line that cleaves; things come apart;‘Refrain’ means both ‘hold back’ and ‘go again’;Things join in wholes of which they are a part.”She “touched” the people. Was it such a sin?Her broken pencil left a double lineOn my tab, both legible as one design.
All afternoon I walk behind the mower,Imagining, though paradoxically,That even though the grass is getting lower,What I have cut is like a rising sea;The parts I haven’t cut, with every pass,Resemble real geography, a map,A shrinking island continent of grassWhere shoreline vanishes with every lap.At last, the noise and smell of gasolineDispel my dream. What sea? Peninsulas?They were the lands my inner child had seen,Their little Yucatáns and Floridas.But when I’m finished, and Yard goes back to Lawn,I can’t help thinking that a world is gone.
For A.B. She said God. He seems to be there when I call on Him but callinghas been difficult too. Painful.
Agion Oros, 2006 The air is cool and is right thick with birdsongas our bleary crew files out, of a sudden disinterred from three sepulchral hours of prayerinto an amber brilliance riotingoutside the cemetery chapel. With bitsof   Greek and English intermixed, the monksinvite us to the portico for coffee, παξιμάδια, a shot of cold ρακί.As I say, the air is cool, animate and lit, and in such light the road already beckons, so I skip the coffee, pound the shot, and pocket two hard biscuits. And yes, the way is broad at first, but narrows soon enough. παξιμάδια — pahximáthia — Greek biscotti; ρακί — rahkeé — Greek grappa
A psalm of Isaak, amid uncommon darkness O Being both far distant and most near, O Lover embracing all unlovable, O Tender Tether binding us together, and binding, yea and tenderly, Your Person to ourselves,Being both beyond our ken, and kindred, One whose dire energies invest such clay as ours with patent animation, O Secret One secreting life anew into our every tissue moribund, afresh unto our stale and stalling craft, grant in this obscurity a little light.
Like fossil shells embedded in a stone,you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy,a mouthing out of silence, a way to seebeyond the bedroom where you lie alone.So why not be the vast, antipodal cloudyou soloed under, riven by cold gales?And why not be the song of diving whales,why not the plosive surf   below the road?The others are one thing. They know they are.One compass needle. They have found their way and navigate by perfect cynosure.Go wreck yourself once more against the dayand wash up like a bottle on the shore,lucidity and salt in all you say.
Snake walks with that old squiggly stick,walks slow down by the waterfall,from stone to stone down by the waterfall,shuffling on his bare feetwhile dancing on the edge of it.Now shimmer that, now shimmer this,while now just one,an Old One steps the beat of it.How may he walk with that old squirmy stick?Soft, soft he goes,and gathers sun.Soft, soft he goes,he has no bones.Soft, soft he goes, and gathers wind.About his neck, a bone flute hums the flux of it.Something congeals and flows.Snake says, just spirit matters.
The King asks, “Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?”The Seer answers, “Emptiness, without holiness.”The King is a restless seeker.The Seer is a ruler and thief.I am seriously watching how trees are always missing some leaves.They sweep the air looking for them. Nothing distracts them. Nothing.Where leaves are missing between the branches, beautiful sun porches, which disappear when the tree reaches them.“Who are you?” the King asks.“It is not like that,” the Seer says.The Seer leaves the King alone in his throne roomand starts walking to China, kicking up gravel,hurrying to find the next king.On the road between country houses, he stops to listen to trees digging the air for crickets.He wonders whether the King is mad now like the trees,or dancing and recounting the story without an end.
The tour has only started whenI’m ambushed by that flat-lined verdigris I’d know evenas a stumbling sleepwalker: landschapwith tin river, cleaver of sodden pastures — marvelous for painters, says the docent, was the enormityof the sky, rarely cloudless, and she’s already turning to an Italian hillscape when I say wait! this is my bloodstream, as my finger makes briefunintended contact with the canvas,and then my voice an ambulance I tell her there should be a diagram to indicate the grazing motion, how the grinding molars of the Holsteinsmake the river go — or else, self-portrait in the glassing-over eyeof a stickleback caged in a jam jar, left too long in the sun — but now the river is across the room because the docent has ushered me toward an upholstered benchand is murmuring, sit, sit, I have here from the staff rooma coffee, here you are — and I’m making the gesture for no, those fields I ate and was made of live in me, uncloseable parentheses
P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. — General Jeffery Amherst in a letter dated  July 16, 1763 Over the warming ground, swings toll like clock tower bells.Squirrels spiral the trunk of a pine.We fill a pail with sand. The day is robin’s eggshell fine.My mother’s shoulder had three shallow scars.Shining archipelago.The quiet theaters of our lives. Immune is a sung word, skirting sorrow.Kneeling at no registry of toddlers with amorphous voices.Night sweats without monument.The lake has the sea on its breath.One man has an island.
From the dim hallway, walls swollen with summer damp.Concave threshold to the morning’s livid light.When my father said Gerrard Street East, his voice.The passing subway tremors upwards, into me, reverberates in 
ligaments and membranes. On canvas shoes through minor parks, a pinball in a rudderless machine.My father, transiently animate. Funny in the ebbing language, 
bantering with shopkeepers.A lifeguard pours bleach in the fractured blue wading pool, sloshes it out with her legs.If  I could, I’d view a produce stand as he did, fill a paper bag with dillweed, bitter melon, ladyfingers.Miraculous reversal poster in the window of the Portuguese 
apothecary.Who lived where he never resembled somebody. Belled, metal restaurant elephant. They’re barely open. The woman fills and seals samosas in the uproar of a standing fan.I have tea. Father, dayflower, I keep arriving at this dead end where the menu says exotic, stamped with sickle chilis. The fan blades clatter frantically in their cage. A ghetto blaster spools ghazals. Her husband, over the counter, shouts: The pavements here are very bad. You must take your walks on the pitch, in circles. This is what all of us do.
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians    ...    for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. — Plutarch, Vita Thesel The answer of course is that the shipdoesn’t exist, that “ship”is an abstraction, a conception,an imaginary tarp thrownacross the garden of the real.The answer is that the cheappeasantry of things toils all dayin the kingdom of  language,every ship like a casketof words: bulkhead, transom,mast steps
My ocean town struggles to pick up leaves, offer summer school, and keep our library open. Every day now more men stand at the railroad station, waiting to be chosen for work. Because it’s thought the Hispanics will work for less they get picked first, while the whites and blacks avoid the terror in one another’s eyes.Our handyman, Santos, who expects onlywhat his hands earn, is proud of   his half acre in Guatemala, where he plans to retire. His desire to proceed with dignity is admirable, but he knowsthat now no one retires, everyone works harder. My father imagined a life more satisfying than the one he managed to lead. He didn’t see himself as uneducated, thwarted, or bitter,but soon-to-be rich. Being rich was his right, he believed. Happiness, I used to think, was a necessary illusion. Now I think it’s just precious moments of relief, like dreams of Guatemala.Sometimes, at night,in winter, surrounded by the significant silenceof empty mansions, which once were cottages, where people lived their lives, and now are owned by banksand the absent rich, I like to stand at my window, looking for a tv’s futile flickering, always surprised to see insteadthe quaint, porous faceof my reflection,immersed in its one abundance.
Sometimes, mystified by the behaviorof one of my sons, my wife will point out if   it’s age-appropriate, making me wonder why I still shout at ballplayers on tv and argue with the dead. Last week, my oldest son,with a wild pitch, turned my left ankle into an eggplant. I didn’t yell at the doctors who refused my insurance, or get angry with a friend who told me to soak it in bourbon and garlic. No,I read Montaigne who said self-revelation is the purpose of discourse, which, in his day, meant knowing whether to be flattered if a friend didn’t use a food-taster, or amused if a witch cast a spell of   weeping on an in-law. Blaise Monluc, the king’s lieutenant general during the civil wars, Montaigne says,threw so many hanged Protestantsdown a well you could reach in and touch the top one’s head. Yes,Monluc, who was fond of saying “When the scaffolds are full, use trees,” knew what was appropriate. On occasion I’ll run into a lobbyto avoid greeting a friend, not because my mind vanishes and I can’t remember his name, which is true, but because I must flee what is darkest in me. In other words, when evicted from a strange lobby into a stranger street, where every scaffold is full and bodies dangle in the long blue sorrow of the afternoon, without context, explanation, or sympathy,it’s good to know, even momentarily, how to live, among the relevant, the passionate, and the confused.
i (feoh) Wealth is a comfort to every man yet every man must divide it mightily If   he wishes to have the measurer’s mercyii (ur) The ox is steady-hearted and over-horned A fierce and famous beast it fights with horns Glorious moor-stepper that is a noble creature v (rad) Riding is mild for warriors at their hearthsides and strong-bold for he mounted on the back of a mighty horse over a distance measured in milesvii (gyfu) A gift is the grace and praise of men and warmth and worthship to all exiles sustenance for him who is stripped of all elseviii (wyn) Joy is won by whoever knows little of woe sourness or sorrow and who has for himself breath and bliss and fullness and a fortified placex (nyd) Need is bound in the breast yet nonetheless becomes for the  sons of men a help and healing both if   they heed in timexv (eolxh) Elk-sedge is found most often in a fen it waxes in water and wounds severely burns in the blood of each man’s body who with his hand takes hold of itxx (man) Man in mirth is dear to his kin yet must every one betray the other for that reason the Lord dooms wretched flesh be taken by the earth
At last we decoded the terminal message,Only to find the pattern we had expectedWas false — a false trail of false bread crumbsDesigned to leave pitfalls undetected.We found a new pattern. We found a handMoving pieces we had thought were onlyPart of  the board, and shifting them to vantage pointsWe had ignored. We rewrote the battle planAnd reconfigured the satellite arrayTo show our progress from the very beginning.The fault should be traceable — and hence correctable — And once we found it, we’d be winning.We found a new pattern. We followed its trackTo a forest beside an abandoned tunnelDiving wide as a boxcar into the rock.A stale breeze blew over rusting shovelsAnd all of our instruments confirmed a hit.We set a perimeter. We sent in a scout.From the interior, nothing looked back at us.No tracks indicated a force had come out.But we had a pattern. At dawn, we dispatchedA team of our best, our trackers and stone killers,To see if  the signals were finally a matchAnd if so, to counterattack. And now we wait.And now we wait. The tunnel gives nothing back.The trees are revealing the first signs of goldBut the air is unmoving. The air is still.It is quiet here, and getting cold.
For a birth The fact of the harp swells into the air,Alien and familiar and entirely too large,An elephant lost in the suburbs,And opens with its cry a strange passageBetween the harp itself, the fragile harp,And the almost guilty knowledgeOf   the stroke of   luck that brought it hereAnd the care with which it must depart.
Like hopeit springseternal,existing indiscrete butsphericalunits, amist of totalbut encapsulatedsalvationalevents. Ifany two ofthese bubblesbang againsteach other nowalls collapseor double toa larger chamberunlike the hallsof soap.
Where are you now,my poems, my sleepwalkers?No mumbles tonight?Where are you, thirst,fever, humming tedium?The sodium streetlights burr outside my window, steadfast, unreachable, little astonishments lighting the way uphill.Where are you now,when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias.
In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor, pulled off   his shoes, granted audience to us, his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet. He smiled, our brother, at the story he told of   deliverance at the hand of   Master Tombo, lord and creator, whose round energylives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk our butter our eggs: see Him there,in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case? In that elder by the yogurt shelves?I believed his happiness and coveted a tidy universe. He picked his feetwhile a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s mango aura made the cold blown airtouch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body and felt my silly bones collapse again.I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save this faint believer and the indifferent worldthat rivers through and past me. Down my aisle lavender respired from the flower stalland Security spoke kind words to our prophet. Oh I love and hate the fickle messy washof speech and flowers and winds and the tides and crave plain rotund storiesto justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god, spilled blood made corn grow,the blood gods shed watered needy ground and became People who worshipped the corn.Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one inarticulate incoherent moment to the next.Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh. Orion turns, burning, unchanged again.Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees. My poor belief   lives in the only and allof   the slur of   what these are, and what these are streams toward loss in moments we live through.As children we were lost in our opaque acts but fresh and full in time. I rememberhow I touched a girlish knee, how one boy broke another’s face, how we all stoodin hard gray summer rain so it would run down the tips of noses to our tongues.
Where i-95 meets the Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered;stewed a minute, then flippedlike a flash card, tatterededges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright
Something blurred, warmedin the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke becoming tears;but when you turned to lookthe stoop was still, the pumpkinand tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk —just a rattleat the gutter and a senseof curtains, somewhere, pulled.Five of   them later, scarfing the oak’sblack bole, laying a dream of snakes.Needy and reticentat once, these squirrels in charred Novemberrecall, in Virgil, what it is to feel: moods, half-moods, swarming, then darting loose; obscurehunches that refuseto speak, but still expectin some flash of   luckto be revealed. The less you tryto notice them,the more they will know of  you.
Not seeing me, not even looking, K. on her silver cruiser charms her waythrough the last long moment of   the changing light: snow boots and a Seychelles Warbler’s old blue tights,a rolled-up yoga mat in her basketwobbling like a wild tiller as she pedals. It feels illicit and somewhat right to stand across the intersection without shouting her name, or even waving.According to the internettutorial, the fact that photons turn into tiny loyal billiard ballsas soon as we start watching suggestsno error of method or measurement, but rather, as far as anyone can tell, an invisibly unstable world, a shaking everywhere that seeing must pin down and fix.So, that morning I stumbled on youout, alone, bending throughthe traffic at Orange and Edwards Streets:a someone else then whom I, alone, can never otherwise see —there has to be a kind of   speechbeyond naming, or even praise,a discipline that locates light and lets it go.
We come gnawed by need on hands and knees.As a creature (nosing) grubble-seeks a spring.As bendy-spined as bandy snakes through saltshrub yaupon needle-brake.For darkling green;for thorn-surround.This absorbingquaggycrample-ground.Of   briar-canes (intervolved with kudzu-mesh) and mold.Of   these convoluted vines we grasp to suck.To taste the pith —the lumen the cell-sap pulse.To try to knowsome (soursharp) something about something.Lumen is as lumen does.‘A little room for turmoil to grow lucid in.’
How much of everything is pureGetting ready. Dressing, pushing the buttonAsquint through its machined furlOnly to unbutton, the eyes-open momentRevealed. Ask any animal: nudity isn’tThe same as nakedness. Once you’ve seenA dangling, you can’t unsee it, andFrom that anything might ensue.There’s the rub. Taking the long viewYou could say the future is romanticI suppose. Also something youCould never do without, though its bric-a-brac is purely theoretical, untilIt’s arranged. Or not. Then, a miracle?
Footnotes to the tower. For “He spends the summerThere, in a state of violent agitation,”Read: “It’s there, in his agitation’s most violentState that Hölderlin suspends the summer” —Like a yellow pear above the untroubled water.For the lost, disheveled decades of derangement,Translate I was struck by Apollo as youMust change your life. For sonnets that sing their ownSpontaneous, Orphic necessity to praise,Think naked as a lightning rod he waited.For necessity insert Anangke. But forAnangke, “Lord, just one more summer, please.”For summer, the lyre. Hölderlin in his tower.Until autumn, when the leaves start falling. WhoeverHas nowhere to go will never get home now.
Recalcitrant elephantsbegin to attack.The angry young malesof murdered mothers.Any Martian could see ithow we did itThe historian of   the futureis amazed. So much feelingonce in so many bodies. But maybe they were differentdidn’t think or feel that much
it’s clear the windwon’t let up and a swim’s out — what you plannedis scotched.forget the calls,errands at the mall —yr resolve’ssuperfluousas a clitoris.how miraculousthe gratuitous —spandrels,cathedrals. on a seaof necessitylet’s floatwholly unnecessary& callthat free
it’s good not to drinkit’s good not to pissin the sink & it’s goodnot to thinkthe clarion ringof   a glass clinkingwith ice good to hear itfade into a pastyou can’t singyour dumb bluesis over. admitit was alwaysborrowed. you paidno dues you didno timebut the time spentsodden. what you thoughtI think. your higher power’sdrunk. god’sthe biggest alkyin the skythe clouds are whiskeysours passing by
1 I tried to live that way for a while, amongthe trees, the green breeze, chewing Bubblicious and by the edge of the pool spitting it out. The book open on my chest, a towelat my back the diving board thwoking,and leaving never arrived Cut it outmy mother said my brother clowning around with a water gun Cut it out.The planes arrowed into silence, fourteen,fifteen, sixteen, always coming home from summer over the bridge to Brooklyn.The father stabbed on Orange Street,the Betamax in the trash, the Sasha doll the dog chewed up, hollow plastic arms gaping. Powdered pink lemonade, tonguing the sweet grains liquid-thick. I could stand in that self   for yearswondering is it better to anticipate than to age Imagining children with five different men,a great flood that would destroy your possessions and free you to wander. Bathing suits and apples and suntan oiland a mother bending over youshadow of   her face on yours. It’s gone,that way, the breeze, the permanent pool.A father saying “ghost” and the sheetsslipping off   the oak tree’s bough.When I wake, leaves in the water. You could say greenforever and not be lying. 2 The pond near the house in Mainewhere we lived for one year to “get away” from the city the pondwhere the skaters on Saturdays came,red scarves through white snow,voices drawing near and pullingaway, trees against the clouds. Trying to liveoff   the land for a while. Too hardin the end my father said. What did he say? Forget it you weren’t listening He worefishing overalls most days and stank of   guts.Our shouts slipping, the green garbage cansedging the white scar pond,so many days like secrets about to bedivulged . . . White snow;to stink of   fish guts but to be tryingto live: the pond near the houseand the sound of   voices drawing near.As you aged you got distracted, indebted. In the hospital around my motherthe machines beeped,the long leads of   the heart monitor,drooping parabolas. It’s not worth dying for she said. Whatwas it she meant? Swollen shells, the desiccated brown seedpods we used to pinch onto our noses and skate about putting on airs. Then the books openedtheir pages and with our red woolenscarves flying and the Freezy Freakies’ once-invisible hearts reddening into the cold we disappeared. Evian bottles skitter against the chain-link fence.It’s gone that way the green planes arrowing into silence gum wrappersslipping to the ground.O wild West Wind be thou our friend and blow away the trash. Salvage us from the heap of our making andCut it out my mother said Stop worryingabout the future, it doesn’tbelong to us and we don’t belong to it.3 The surface more slippery, slickand white the ice. I stand at the pond’s edge gather the information darkening there hello algae hello fish pond my mind in the depths going. On the beach I dig, tunnel to the hands of   the woman who stitched this red shirt holes all the way to China.It got so easy to get used to it, the orchestration of meaning against the night, life a tower you could climb onnot a junk heap pale picture booksyellowing on the shelves. It got so I close my eyes and walk along the hospital hall.The iris quivering in the March light,a nurse taking my mother’s pulsenot paid enough to help us as we wished to be helped. And your hope left behind turning the pages of   magazines, the models in Prada. As a girlit was a quest, to feel exploded every second,pudding pops and Vietnam vets standing on the corner shaking their Styrofoamcups. Holding her cup my mother stands, petting the dog,it’s 1982 the sun tunneling in she drinks her coffeeCut it out or Forget it or Hello. Look, I’ve made a telephone for us.Put that cup to your ear, and I’ll put it to mine,and listen I just need to findone of those Styrofoam cups and what about you where did yougo what kind of night is it there electric synthetic blackened or burnt.4 At night they come to youdistorted and bright, like an old print on a light box, present, present, not quite. Are we inventing them as we sleep, or are they still happeningin a time we can’t touch?The hockey game on the bluetv glowing and slowing I come home to a man slumped on the couch not-quite-sayinga greeting all the gone ones there the slap of skates all goneand the commentator it’s going on foreverthe blade moving along rinksays What a slapshot what a shot.You make a life, it is made of days anddays, ordinary and subvocal, not busy becoming what they could be, dark furlings of tiny church feelings, mysterious, I mean,and intricate like that high-windowed light —intricate and mysterious I come home. Near our house we hung out on the Promenade after school the boys smokingthe security systems in the Center blinking a disco party blue red / blue red the East Riverreflecting scraped sky cornices and cloudswe could hear the roar of cars across it and taste the chemical airof   the offices the fathers worked inwe’d been there to pick them up for the long weekend in the Catskillsthe hum-gray computers, the ibm Selectrics massive on the desks, eleven, twelve, thirteen, riding the graffitied subways,flirting, the boys grabbing us calling hey hey.Changeable one day to the next.Jon talking of atheismblond hair in strips At night the bomb mushroomingover the Statue of   Liberty, white blinding everywhere. Oh, she said, don’t worryjust a dream just a dream.Everyone is scared of   Russia. Imagine she laughed We used to have to hide under our desks! Forget it you weren’t listening I was tryingDon’t worry it gets you nothingto tell you something the air cold the maples bare your mother pregnantCome on the horses are past the windowwith a son much younger than youof   the house she rode them pastthe river where all the Catholic kids sailed ice boatsuncles taking cash to wire home to Ireland.The future isn’t here yet, it’s alwaysgoing to be, but I’m holding you,walking the Promenade, thirty-six,the ferry crossing the river again.5 and for a while rain on the dirt road and the pastured gray horse holding Chex Mixup to its fuzzed mouth pockets of   time all summer eating  ghosts in the arcade Pac-Man alive quarter after quarter I keep trying Cut it out she said and forget it I was trying to tell you my father cooking fish in the kitchenlicking his thumb to turn the page.In the meantime you try not to go into a kind of exile —Oh, you read too many books, says my friendDan Here’s the tv. And the small voicesof children enter the room, they soundso narrow and light and possible. Butdon’t you think we’re always making the samestanding at the car rentalkind of mistake we began by makingat the last minute, rushing to callour fathers before setting off for vacation. It’s warmer this August than it has been for decades.Still the sun bathing us isn’t preposterousor cold. Grace: imagine itand all the afterworld fathers sleepingwith their hair perfectly combedfaces mortician-clean unlike the ones they wore.In the motel Reagan on tv his hair in that parted wave the milk prices up,my mother says, inflation. Key Food on Montague, the linoleum tiles dirty and cracked,the dairy case goose-pimpling my skin.Those tiles are still there.She is dead now and so is he.I know it seems bare to say itbare to bare linoleum tiles.You who come after meI will be underfoot but Oh, come off it, start again. We all live amid surfaces and and I wish I had the Start over Come on thouStep into the street, amidst the lightly turning trash,your hair lifting in the wind RememberI have thought of   you the lines of our skates convergingin a future etc. etc., the past the repository of   what can be salvaged, gracewatering the basil on the windowsill, until the day comes of   looking back at it all, like a projectionist at a movieslipping through the reel, the stripped sound of   time — I tried to live that way for a whileBubblicious and spitting it outOnly forget it you wereif   I could hear your voice again I could pretend Rise and shine she called in themorning Rise and shineleaves in the water intricate andthe dying Dutch elms the cool blue pool pockets of    time Sun-In bleaching our hair the faces they wore arcade ghosts and lilacs by the door in Mainewhere she leaned close to me said smellthe planes buzzed a purple light fingers sticky if   I could only hear itagain you could say forever tonguingthe sweet grains you could say forever and not be
My earliest wish was not to exist,to burst in the backyard without violence, no blood, no fleshy bits, mute button pressedalone behind the rectory where no one would see me.This wasn’t a plea to be found or mourned for, but to be unborn into the atmosphere. To hang in the humid air, as ponds vent upward from the overheated earth,rise until they freezeand crystallize, then drop into the aquifer.
The pack is filing from my nowheresvillesfilling the halfway hotels, braving the ruts and calling one another via satellite. A dollar says hello.At home I try growinga new life, one of many women bored by my womb’s mystery. Who has time to run a thumb between her legsand calculate the temperature —chipper and bitternetherworld weathergirl.
When you said no, I went for your dresser, opened the top drawer, broke the paper seals on the two sterile cups, and wiped my dirty thumbs inside. Because our stubborn love won’t die, I have to kill it, will it dead. Or so I thought until I passed a cycle on my own. You’ve no idea what’s grown inside me since I bled.
We meet midway to walk white cobbles under a fish-flesh gray sky. Europe is collapsing; we are collapsingalways and again no matter how hardwe love one another. I don’t understand our failure, where the feed loops back and spits us into another country, another junior suite reenacting this same,same beat of   a scene that begins, rises,never ends, always ends —Our intentions don’t meet, their courses set differently by a force you don’t believe in,could be as simple as life. I want to be the wife you don’t want. You won’t let go of my wrist. I resist, threaten, bully, acquiesce. We write the next act of The Alchemistin New York, Lisbon, a beach, a bar, star-crossed maybe from different galaxies. You approach, I retreat. You retreat, I reproach.The manic two-step jitters over North Africa’s dunes farther than our hero, Santiago, can see. I rise in the night to find the sharp knifethat came with the pears as a courtesy.
My transgressions pile against the garden wall(built when Rome began to weaken, scarred by a cannonball.) I gossiped; I snubbed a dinner guest. I watch until the wall writhes with awful feral cats fed by shrunken widows and the odd librarian. I’ve begun to be depleted by your absence; one of  love’s worst symptoms. For years, I’d had the sense to hold myself apart. I’ve been here long enough to kill two mint plants and a lavender, then resurrect their better part.I’d like to let you die on the vine. Not you, the You I Dream, who follows through on waking. See how the watcher sees the storm but doesn’t get wet. Be that. Be what? Be wiser than the heart.
Knocks on the door.Who?I sweep the dust of my lonelinessunder the rug.I arrange a smileand open.
An open door says, “Come in.”A shut door says, “Who are you?”Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors.If   a door is shut and you want it shut, why open it?If   a door is open and you want it open, why shut it?Doors forget but only doors know what it is doors forget.
You are food.You are here for meto eat. Fatten up,and I will like you better.Your brother will be first,you must wait your turn.Feed him yourself, you willlearn to do it. You will take himeggs with yellow sauce, muffinstorn apart and leaking butter, fried meatslate in the morning, and always sweetsin a sticky parade from the kitchen.His vigilance, an ice pick of   hungerpricking his insides, will meltin the unctuous cream fillings.He will forget. He will thank youfor it. His little finger stuck every daythrough cracks in the barswill grow sleek and round,his hollow face swelllike the moon. He will stop dreamingabout fear in the woods without food.He will lean toward the mawof   the oven as it opensevery afternoon, sighingbetter and better smells.
Yes, I live inside the piano,but there is no need for youto come and visit me.
I’m in the house.It’s nice out: warmsun on cold snow.First day of   springor last of   winter.My legs run downthe stairs and outthe door, my tophalf   here typing
If   I would be walking down the roadyou told me to imagine and I would and finda diner kind of   teacup sitting on its saucerin the middle then I would feel so goodin my life that is just like mineI would walk right up and look into my faceeclipsing the sky in the tea in the cupand say, “Thank you, I have enjoyedimagining all this.”
They are building a shipin a fieldmuch bigger than I should have thoughtsensible.When it is finishedthere will never be enough of themto carry it to the seaand already it is turningrusty.
For Burn Construction Company When you were building the i-10 bypass, one of   your dozers, moving earth at the center of a great pit, slipped its thick blade beneath the water table, slicing into the earth’s wet palm, and the silt moistened beneath the huge thing’s tires, and the crew was sent home for the day. Next morning, water filled the pit. Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming. It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep green, there between the interstate and the sewage treatment plant. When nothing else worked, you called it a lake and opened it to the public. And we were the public.
My hatwas run overby a trolleyyesterday.This morningmy coat took a walkto some placefar away.This afternoonmy shoeshappened to get assassinated.— I’m still here?that’s justi t.
O beautiful was the werewolf in his evil forest. We took him to the carnival and he started  crying when he saw the Ferris wheel. Electric green and red tears flowed down his furry cheeks. He looked like a boat out on the dark water.
My mother sends me a black-and-whitephotograph of   her and my father, circa1968, posing with two Indian men.“Who are those Indian guys?” I ask heron the phone.“I don’t know,” she says.The next obvious question: “Then whydid you send me this photo?” But I don’task it.One of those strange Indian men ispointing up toward the sky.Above them, a bird shaped like aquestion mark.
You tell me a joke about two robbers who hide from the police. One robber hides as a sack of cats and the other robber hides as a sack of potatoes. That is the punch line somehow, the sack of potatoes, but all I can think about is how my dad used to throw me over his shoulder when I was very small and call me his sack of potatoes. I’ve got a sack of potatoes he would yell, spinning around in a circle, the arm not holding me reaching out for a sale. Does anyone want to buy my sack of potatoes? No one ever wanted to buy me. We were always the only two people in the room.
Think of   a sheepknitting a sweater;think of   your lifegetting better and better.Think of   your catasleep in a tree;think of   that spotwhere you once skinned your knee.Think of   a birdthat stands in your palm.Try to rememberthe Twenty-first Psalm.Think of   a big pink horsegalloping south;think of   a fly, andclose your mouth.If   you feel thirsty, thendrink from your cup.The birds will keep singinguntil they wake up.
This is a world where there are monsters There are monsters everywhere, racoons and skunks There are possums outside, there are monsters in my bed. There is one monster. He is my little one. I talk to my little monster. I give my little monster some bacon but that does not satisfy him. I tell him, ssh ssh, don’t growl little monster! And he growls, oh boy does he growl! And he wants something from me, He wants my soul. And finally giving in, I give him my gleaming soul And as he eats my gleaming soul, I am one with him And stare out his eyepits and I see nothing but white And then I see nothing but fog and the white I had seen before was nothing but fog And there is nothing but fog out the eyes of monsters.
A monster owlout on the fenceflew away. Whatis it the signof? The sign ofan owl.
5am: the frogsask what is it, what is it?It is what it is.
they own everything
The room I entered was a dream of   this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of   a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.
Roads around mountainscause we can’t drivethroughThat’s Poetryto Me.
After D.H.L. Your first thought when the light snaps on and the black wings clatter about the kitchen is a batthe clear part of  your mind considers rabies the other part does not consider knows only to startleand cower away from the slap of  its wings though it is soon clearly not a bat but a moth and harmlessstill you are shy of it it clings to the hood of the stove not black but brown its orange eyes sparklelike televisions its leg  joints are large enough to count how could you kill it where would you hide the bodya creature so solid must have room for a soul and if  this is so why not in a creaturehalf  its size or half its size again and so on down to the ants clearly it must be savedcaught in a shopping bag and rushed to the front door afraid to crush it feeling the plastic rattleloosened into the night air it batters the porch light throwing fitful shadows around the landingThat was a really big moth is all you can say to the doorman who has watched your whole performance with a smilethe half-compassion and half-horror we feel for the creatures we want not to hurt and prefer not to touch
For Rebecca You are the kind of  person who buys exotic fruits leaves them out on the counter until they rotYou always mean to eat them sometimes you rearrange them rousing over the bowl a cloud of tiny flies &How do they balance the parrot who chews a walnut  sideways holding it up in his right footthe owl perched on a just-lit lamppost scratching behind its ear like a big dog &Your pencil eraser wears down long before the point for every word you write you rub out two &Where the slice of  toast rested the plate is still warm a film of fog little points of dew &Love is like velocity we feel the speeding up and the slowing down otherwise not at allthe more steady the more it feels like going nowhere my love I want to go nowhere with you &I cannot bring myself  to toss the cup of cold coffee you set down by the door on your way to the taxiall day I have sipped it each time forgetting your two tablets of fake sugar too sweet &Running down the street dodging between raindrops plump as cherries &The ground was feathered with wild strawberries I picked seven as many as I could bearI ate two I saved the rest for you here hold out your hand take them taste how sweet &Please hold me the forgotten way the wall pleads spray-paint face and voice of a damned poetthe darling damned poets save them from themselves maybe it is us they need saving from
Teach me a fruit of  yourcountry I asked and so you dippedinto a shop and in your handheld me a thick yellow pineconeno knife between usyou put it to your teethsideways like a bird and bitand peeled away the fleshyscales or were they petalscrisp white at the corepeppered with black seedssweet and light like a cold cloudlike some exotic sherbet carriedhand over hand from a mountaintopby a relay of runners straightwayto the Inca’s high tablewe sat on metal chairsstill pebbled with rain the seatof my pants damp we passed itback and forth no matter howcarefully we could not helpspilling the juice makingour cheeks sticky our fingersgetting sticky our fingers nonot even once touching
You have towered hereleaning half over the wallall my awarenessyears before I knewwhat silkworm was or ChinaI felt your berriespulp under my feettracked your purple all overgrandmother’s carpeta sapling plantedby some sea captain to makeshade for a futureThis winter you lostone of  your long low branchesto a backed-up carand the old womanwho has known you all her lifewept at the split woodYour bark is wrinkledmore deeply than any faceyou live so slowlydo our voices soundto you like the flutteringof  paper moth wingsdo we seem rootlessholding fast to the anchorof  the saddest things
There are many opportunities here for unrequited friendship, the offer letter said. All you need is a chain saw and die grinder. In this spirit I force my eyes across your message, revisiting that due diligence tone you do so well. I’m searching for some whispered twist or shout, but all emotion’s leveled, the way a child will draw a snowman and a mansion the same size. What is a dedicated icemaker dedicated to? Do you really think those shades you wear above your head will keep the sun out of  your mind? Rainbows stick to any abject object. That’s why I’m wearing that same old funky dress. When you kissed my forehead it felt like the priest’s thumbscrew touch rubbing in the dust- thou-art Ash Wednesday smudge. I’ve learned the dance instructor’s expository gestures. Now I’m learning tangos to be danced alone. While comrades buff officious cases barfed from their brains — eight parts moon venom one part nose waste — I ask can mine be personally engraved? I’m living in a please state, smarming how I’ve long admired your hardscape of artists morphed to small appliances. That being said, I’m having issues. Do you really think that scarf  will keep your snowman warm?
I find it helpful to imagine writing in a blizzard  with every inscription designed to prevent snow  crystals from drifting in. Avoid the hive mind. Go fly a kite, raise a stained glass window in the sky. It’s the opposite of making love to drudgery,  what I do for a dying.  Remove the bitter sediment trapped in the brewer. It will be new whether you make it new or not. It will be full of neo- shadows. Full of then — both past and next, iridescent with suspense. Remember  time is not the treasure revealer. More a midge larva creeping through a waterfall releasing suction feet. The curiosity rover  lands on Mars! New is a hooligan. It breaks the reckoning frame and rests in pieces. Let me collect its dna from the tears on your desk.
For your birthday, I’m learning to pop champagne corks with a cossack sword when all you asked for was world peace. I’m actioning the deliverables to wish you many happy returns of the ecstasies that are imminent when all you requested was a contentment so quiet it’s inaudible. Remember when I gave you a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle? When all you desired was to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. And when you said I gave you what I wanted myself  I gave you what I didn’t want: gift certificates to spas that wax hearts, a blind date with the inventor of friction. Today I bring an actual-size sunrise and many glow words from the inmates of  this late-stage civilization who navigate in your slipstream and to whom you say keep rowing. When you were born you were placed on a small throne on castors while the Stop Shopping Choir sang hosannas, a defining moment. People noticed something nascent about you that persists in your fondness for the first person primordial. You own it. You know why voices die in throats and trees struggle in silence: the deepest trauma cannot spare a sound. If you meet a mystery you do not disturb it with little picks and suction things. You say the shape of  happiness is too fine for capture spray, and it is well to remember the days when plastic boxes snapping shut were all that women had to celebrate. Yet it is not seditious to rebel against a culture like circus music, so cheerful we’d need a cadaver tendon to fix it. That’s what you say. You are hard to fathom as a guttering compass that is neither hush nor howl. I’m thinking of  the time you placed an Aeolian harp in the window, took me by the notebook, and asked me to consider why turkeys bob their heads when they walk and geese don’t though they both waddle. You watched my ethereality show and commiserated when they adorned my rival in a deconsecrated rosary bead bikini and send her to St. Barts while I was remaindered to an orange jumpsuit organ-swiping plot. That century I was betrayed by a dedicated icemaker, you burned a feather pen to revive me. You tried my device that prevents accidental workplace nudity, vetted its magnetic veils, and at Christmas sent fruitcake privacy filters. Remember when I was dismissed as overness consultant? How you resigned in solidarity and grew a sky-colored flower since I could not be satisfied with the sky itself? You gave me a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle and advised me to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. If  I critiqued the treasure revealer you said do not test its softness against your cheek. Today I raise my glass of wheat grass and atmospheric information to wish you every beyond of  thought in which to consider all that is majorly good. I won’t sing Happy Birthday, a song so overdetermined it sounds bereaved. I’ll sing of  passions that persist in the Elysian Fields. Though shackled to a boulder at the moment, I’m unpacking boxes from your last move, wrapping the contents in recycled moonlight and presenting them to you as objects exactly forgotten and largely what you wanted. I nerve myself  for the encounter.
Shouldn’t it ache, this slit into the sweetand salt mix of  waters comprising the mussel, its labial meats winged open: yellow- fleshed, black and grayaround the toughadductor? It hurtsto imagine it, regardlessof the harvester’sdenials, swiveling his knife to make the incision: onedull cyst nickedfrom the oyster’s mantle — its thread of red gland no biggerthan a seed of  trout roe — pressed inside the tenderedflesh. Both hosts easedopen with a knife (as if anythingcould be said to be easedwith a knife): so that one pearlafter another can be harvested, polished, added to others until a single rope is strung on silk. Linked by what you thinkis pain. Nothing could be so roughly handled and yet feel so little, your pity turned into part of this production: you with your small,four-chambered heart, shyness, hungers, envy: whatcould be so precious you’d cleave another to keep itclose? Imagine the weeks it takes to wind nacre over the redseed placed at the other heart’s mantle. The mussel become what no one wants to:vessel, caisson, wounded into making us the thing we wantto call beautiful.
Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips on a vert ramp. The camera pans to anotherpocket of  the room where six kids rocking holeyT-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse wallsin words I cannot comprehend. All of thishappening in a time no older than your lastheartbeat. I’ve been told the internet isan unholy place — an endless intangiblestumbling ground of false deities dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shitin a world without flies. My loneliness exists in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watcheda neighbor braid intricate waves of cornrowsinto her son’s tiny head and could have lived in her focus-wrinkled brow for a living. TodayI think I practice the religion of  blinking too much.Today, I know no neighbor’s name and won’tknow if  I like it or not. O holy streaming screen of counterculture punks, linger my lit mindon landing strips — through fog, rain, hail — without care for time or density. O worldwide web, o viral video, o god of excrement thought. Befriend me. Be fucking infectious.Move my eyes from one sight to the next.
Today you find yourself guiltyas the rim you splitan egg againstYou press chargesYou spell out your namelike the letters are medalsfor good conduct in a bad warThe night moves in with youinto your roomuntil even your sleepis not your ownThrough the windowthe grass tells youto give upand you are tryingbut on the other handthings keep you:the moon, the cars, carsYou undress yourselfmore deeply downlike this is the wayto get to the futureYou let the darknessmedically examine youSo much can’t beput back togetherTo burn the house downto burn the house upIt’s the same problemin any directionYou’re matterYou turn on the light
It is not that you wantto be the one to make printsin the untrampled snowIt is that you wantto be in the snowwithout having touched itto be of  the snownot beginningEverywhere commercedictates the shapesthat move you alongthat seat you at the tablefar from the snowfar from the actof not touching It only gets worseA girl’s gotta eatAnd your hunger’s not even your own
I can’t swim because I can’t fitinto the water I am two million feet tallbut thank you for inviting meI am standing in lineinside my giant shirtIf someone wanted to weaponize methey would tell me to lie down on New Yorkand the city I destroyedwould hurt me backI eat stars It’s a riotI know my big mouthfull of  their light
Mama said it only existed in storybooks with its soft surface of  bluebells but there it was spinning so close to the earth that it bentevery weather vane in Omaha it was prom nightand I thought I’d pluck a few trumpetsto bring your Grandma so I pulled our red ladder out of  the garage and climbed to the roof I stood up and imagined I was balancing the moon on my head the narrow windows of  Union Station gleamed like ice chips and the thin faces of the clock tower told me it was almost eight I was going to be late picking Nancy up if  I didn’t get a move on so I snipped off the best stems and hurried back down to my Ford I sped through every stop sign on my way to her parents’ house she was waiting with her arms crossed trying not to look upset I think she thought she was going to get stood up so when I popped open the door and told her to get in she couldn’t help smiling a bit she asked what’d taken me so longand I figured I should go ahead and give her the flowersI’d brought her I’d set themback behind the steering wheel to not ruin the surprise I told her she was the princess and I was the knightwho rode into the starsso he could flare their notes to her on a blue horn
praise the Hennessy, the brown shine, the dull burn. praise the dare, the take it, the no face you’re supposed to make. praise the house, its many rooms, hardwood and butter leather couches; its richness. praise the rich, their friendship. praise the friends: the child of the well off, the child of the well off, the child of  well, the child of welfare, the child of welfare. praise the diversity but praise the Hennessy, and again, and again. praise the new year upon us. praise my stumble, the shaky eye, the fluid arm, but the steady hand. praise my hand, the burning it has. praise the dive into the gut of a friend; the dousing of my hand in his ribs. praise the softness of skin, the way it always gives. praise the pulling, the calming down. praise the fuck that, the jump back into all five of my friends fist first. praise all five of my friends pinning me into the thick carpet, knees in my back. praise my back, how it hurts and raises anyway, how it flips, how it’s the best friend of my fists. praise the swinging pool cue, how it whips air like a disobedient child, praise the disobedient and all the chilling i won’t do. praise the child smile on my face, the fun plunging a knee into a cheek of my best friend. praise his blood, the brightness of it, a sun i bask in. praise my blood, the nose flowing wild with effort, the mess and taste of it, praise the swallowing, salt and its sweetness. praise the morning, the impossible blue, Midwestern  January above us. praise the blues dulled in my denim by all the brown. praise the brown shine, the dull burn. praise all six in my jeans, our salt and life sitting dry on my thighs mixing, refusing to wash away.
A lapwing somersaults springflips over winter and back.After a fast walk up long hills, my limbsthe engine of  thought, where burnbubbles into beck and clough to gill,beneath a sandstone cliff  balanced on a bed of shaleand held from hurtling by Scots pinethat brush a scrubby sky with cloud snow scutters,I found a place to sit by snapping watta smacking rocksand wondered — how would it be for you?And so, alone, un-alone even, in my anger,bring you here.
When my lover became my enemy I made my bed amongst winds and drove the old road ’till my heart crashed.Where’s the bypass?Washing my shirts, wringing them out.Hung in the breeze. Water skips undressed over outcrops.What it says is.Wind,roots in rock. Lying on Long Tongue,sun diffused in mist.Easy sleep without waking.Edge of displaced echoes air aroundand sound of  bird and ’planeA swallow’s glittering chitter.
at first they recce, easy, around the edge of  breaththen gathered gangs unleashand breach but the wind has no objective,riding the slope of my roof
Most people would rather not,but I indulge, every few weeks,the thought of it. Sometimesthe oily smell of an evening flower appearsand hangs in the air, a slightly browner spot.I think most people had it wrong when they saidforget about it and find a fresh patch of  grass to lie down in. There are prayers, though,about that kind of peace. I have to admit, sometimesI want nothing more than to be lying on the bottomof an unimpressive river. I can watch all the leaves and sticks skim over my head,and no one will bother me because they’re swimmingin the more impressive rivers.The water’s not too cold. It doesn’t feellike being dead.It also doesn’t feel like being oldor fetal.I came to the humble water to lie down.I did what I set out to do.Now I don’t have to tell youanything more about it.
Growing a bear — a midnight occupation, the need for which you perhaps first realizedwhen you saw the wrong kind of shadow under your chin — a convex when you expectedconcave, so now it’s clearyou’re getting older. Your wife was in the showerand you wanted to step insideand soap her up like you did in college when she said“I’ll shower with you, but I’m leavingmy underwear on,” and you enjoyed herin every way you could enjoy a person with soap.You didn’t join your wife in the shower.She’s gotten funny about letting you see hershave her legs or wash herself anywhere.You think she read it somewhere — that letting your husband see you pluck anything,trim anything, apply medicine to anything,will make him feel like he’s furniture.It’s exactly on cold nights like these that the basementis not as forbidding as it should be, despite the factthat you have to put gloves on in what is part of  your own home.Downstairs, a large bathtub, kept, for some reason,after remodeling. It is there that your bear will be grown,by you, though you have no idea how. Probably wishingis most of it; fertilizer, chunks of raw stew meat,handfuls of  blackberries, two metal rakes, and a thick rugmake up the rest. Then water.You get an e-mail from a friend late at night saying he can’t sleep. You write back “I hope you feel sleepy soon” and think how childish the word “sleepy” is. And you’re a man,older than most of  the people you see on television.You haven’t even considered how your wife will feelwhen you have finished growing your bear. You could write a letter to her tonight, explaining how your lifewas just so lacking in bear: “Janet, it’s nothing you’ve done — clearly you have no possible way of supplying me with a bearor any of the activities I might be able to enjoy after acquiring the bear.” It might just be best to keep the two worlds separate. Janet clearly prefers things to be comfortableand unchallenging. Janet soaps herself up. Janet puts herselfto bed, and you just happen to be next to her. You go on your weekly bike ride with Mark and tell himthat you’ve been growing a bear. An eighteen-wheeler flies by and he doesn’t seem to hear you — plus he’s focused on the hill. You think about how not all friends knowwhat each other sounds like when struggling andbreathing heavy. Past the age of college athletics,most friends don’t even know what each others’ bodieslook like, flushed, tired, showering, cold.
The stems of  the sun bent over the eye The sleeping manThe whole of  the earth And this head heavy with fearIn the nightThis complete hole VastAnd even so streaming with waterThe noise The peals of  little bells mingled with the Clinking of glasses And bursts of laughterThe head movesOn the carpet the body shiftsAnd turns over the warm spot At the slipping feet of  the animalIt’s that they’re waiting For the summons of the shockAnd the signal of  the eyelidThe ray relaxes Sleep LightAnd what is left shines at the edge of  the white rock
In the morning that comes up behind the roof, in the shelter of the bridge, in the corner of  the cypresses that rise above the wall, a rooster 
has crowed. In the bell tower that rips the air with its shining point, the notes ring out and already the morning din can be heard in the street; the only street that goes from the river to the mountain 
dividing the woods. One looks for some other words but the ideas are always just as dark, just as simple and singularly painful. There is hardly more than the eyes, the open air, the grass and the water in the distance with, around every bend, a well or a cool basin. In the right-hand corner the last house with a larger head at the window. The trees are extremely alive and all those familiar companions walk along the demolished wall that is crushed into the thorns with bursts of laughter. Above the ravine the din augments, swells, and if the car passes on the upper road one no longer knows if it is the flowers or the little bells that are chiming. Under the blazing sun, when the landscape is on fire, the traveler crosses the stream on a very narrow bridge, before a dark hole where the trees line the water that falls asleep in the afternoon. And, against the trembling background of the woods, the motionless man.
In the warm air of the ceiling the footlights of dreams are illuminated.  The white walls have curved. The burdened chest breathes confused words. In the mirror, the wind from the south spins, 
carrying leaves and feathers. The window is blocked. The heart is 
almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon — the hands are without shelter ­­­­— as all the trees lying down. In the wind from the desert the needles bend and my hour is past.
Stand up carcass and walkNothing new under the yellow sunThe last of  the last of  the louis d’orThe light that separatesunder the skins of  timeThe lock in the heart that shattersA thread of  silkA thread of  leadA thread of  bloodAfter these waves of  silenceThese tokens of  love in black horsehairThe sky smoother than your eyeThe neck twisted with prideMy life in the corridorFrom which I see the undulating harvests of deathAll those greedy hands kneading loaves of smokeHeavier than the pillars of  the universeHeads empty Hearts bareHands scentedTentacles of  the monkeys who aim at the cloudsAmong the wrinkles of  these grimacesA straight line tightensA nerve twistsThe sea satedLoveThe bitter smile of  death
Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of?Where are your mother’s parlor portieres, her slip-covered days, her petticoats?In the orchard at the other end of  time, you were just a child in ballet slippers,Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs.Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood, The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river, You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the endOf the world. Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of coldThe color of a turtle’s hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.
Tell the truth I told me When I couldn’t speak.Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a childWho rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio.According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched. The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautifulBlubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice.I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.For whom left am I first? We have come to terms with our SelfLike a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.
hearing all bells at once instructs the final exhale  Camelot in thimble of  the gods  Marilyn Monroe’s ambulance lost on the way to the palace of  temperament a branch of government for the magical arts  punch wall of forest for  an oaken  desk  another dream we  needed agitating the  sentence as it rows across a  newly destroyed heart folding  following tormenting one another  we were all once young and  beautiful squandering everything  it’s what we came here to do  cut off engines to the child  registering disposition of the  cat in the dark as the  size of the darkness
make you aching upwards of a  teenage broken phone come to hear underwater libraries up the side of the dinner plate a little too fast not ungrateful like some of  these bastards around here can’t tap out a tune with you looking away genies of not enough sleep a happier location for the war not the easiest thing you realize beautiful architecture refreshing beverages our signs read hello love us for
years of  practice for a soft landing in the slaughter we looked far off to a flag sewn into fleshdear enemy come down the hill I have taken a title outof  the love for you jumping down the clear shaft of  your eye you would not know how long I paused when writing this unless I said so in the poem half an hour staring at the pencil having written of  my enemy with love and fight to maintain the ascension voices from a room no one exits we pry genocide out of  the museum but meant to remove the museum from genocide
My throat is full of sparklers making me a lighthouse for a loveship that can flyOur mother monarchy sweet land paternityI’ll eat their offspring’s money and let you have a bite In wilder colors I can love the copy of  you which is great when we have breastsHe will breathe through contractions and she will heal the faceless and use her eyes to steel his legs You must see that I’m eating for two sexesMinimalism means nothing making more of  what isn’t there a green preconception divining a baby gender for which I qualified with braids ablaze and stuck to my back We are going to win then make extra babies yes we make enough to make a country Text unto the winged baby the tiny pill of  mystery that makes me want to tickle the world until it starts barfing cloudsMake it free is not the advice we paid for but a long song about the flavor of nowhere and how we never fill it and how I shave my buzzardy wings to offend the sublimeWhile I’m quick to swallow the heaviest business and quicker yet to modify that trash you have a poultice for sudden holes you have a knife in ten minutes you will marry a parent and make it do whatever you tell itThe raptor you were does an end-run around sorrow but I’m right here sweetness out of  the glass closet voilà voilà so what do you make of my babyTonight we bomb Tonight we blitz Tonight we barrage Tonight we make the greater migrationTonight our fabulous flock shits napalm on the criminal dadsFor I am a figure first of girls in orbit the best reason I have to eat your bedI am spangled breasts I am shaved like any birdboy only huger than babies or ladybugs one of each is precious a million a menace My inside is a live mine and I’m after the light that sustains the skin of  women scooping the spectacle where everyone freaks everyone They will say how do you do Mister Ms. Thunderbride and I will say I do it distorted and you will marry a million of  you in your twisted gown of  flames
A husband puts an afghan over the dead goat’s torso, combs the knots out of  her beard. The goat smells chalk, wonders when the riders will come in their wool pakols red from walnuts, spurs chirring like castanets. The buzkashi whips will grow damp in their mouths, their rope belts slowly twisting in place. She knows not to be devoured is a perfect sentiment because she has thoughts to gather, faces to grow, hunger this morning and no throat, only the song in her teeth that goes on indefinitely as he saws off each hoof, just above the ankle, her knees bent for praying. Her head is axed. Her collar falls to the ground, its circle unbroken. She looks to see how deep is the pool of  blood is a river of  no one becoming her. With salt in her heart she’ll stay good for days. He’s been to her like her father he killed. He’s been to her like the father he killed. He turns her face to the window: mountains oddly still in the milk broth of oblivion. Intercourse: the sun drove a man in the ground like a stake.
The poor have the best views,Views sloping down to sea.A green and yellow planet,A blue band, rung with stars.The poor have the best views.You have to walk to get there.Up three flights, narrow paths,Houses rising steeply side to side.No, no space for a car.When the flag lifts, you see the coast:Yellow curve of sand,Framed by reaching branches.Little humpbacked islands,Soon they will drill for oil there,Deep underwater. Once microscopicDiatoms swarmed in salt, danced, died.Fell to the bottom of fathoms, became black Slick hid in shale. They drill down miles...(Police arriving at the edgeOf   the mind.)Are you thirsty? Something to drink?Please sit down. Yes, the game is on.We built that room by hand. I lieIn bed at night dreaming of a new room,One jutting into sky. The eldestDaughter’s in university. Economics,But she switched to Environment.Out the door, the flag lifts, reveals.(Curve of   Rio.) Ordem e progresso. The poor have the best views,Samba in the sky.
The woman is daft.Invented her own sect.Has upside-down sex.With alternate species.You see her on the street.Corner of   Sansome and Pine:Morning rev up of sf financial types.Instead, there she is, beneath a gigantic hat.Hair wild, in coils, like a rattle-Snake. Smiles like she’s got the shakes.Every cell in her seems to vibrate.Psst! Could you turn that to low ?The gray-suited, heads bent to cement, pass.Edges of  her sleeves are threads;Her clothes mismatch. The shoesAre not a pair. She stands as you stare,Or better yet, ignore. You askHer if she’s fine, and she replies, Fan-Tastic! As if  this were the dayShe’d finally learned to levitate,And her eyes are the doorsTo a holographic universe,And she looks right through you,As if  you too had won the lottery of the soul.And you look down at your shiny, perfectly symmetrical shoes,Like, Man, that’s more than I wanted to know.And — Didn’t anyone tell you you need a reason — A  house you own, matching clothes,Translucent skin, sheen of fashion,A pulsing bank account, like our galaxy always expanding — To feel so friggin’ over the moon?Who are you? How do you justify you?What made you you? What context gave you you?And on the curb you kick, swing, scuff your shoes.The woman is daft.Invented her own sect.Probably has no sex, or too much.With any species.She hasn’t yet learnedThat happiness is contingent — It depends upon The things aforelisted. She’s just riding on the being of   being.Hedonist. On her hand, a rockAs if, eons ago, the glacier had swung by and depositedA boulder on her finger. The elemental pinned to her.The woman is daft, I tell you.Adrift. Steer clear. The glintIn her — shield your eyes. Downcast.Don’t let it get to you. She will dieAlone — while you, you’ll have — Have — Resist. Do not, I say, do notLong for that magic.
Poor thing, she holds him on her lap,the godless hidden god,causing the lipsof   those that sleep to speak.Cold shadow of   the whiteacanthus in its tiptoe dance.Buy the truthand sell it not.A lion is in the streets,there is a lion in the way.My niece, the little siren, taught her the slang:mad   married   fiancée.Dido has a quiver,she wears a spotted lynxskin and a belt. My undefiled is not herselftonight, but one thing’s forever:I just saw the video explainingthe neighborhood applause,a book of anthems where sirensplunge into the gold of the initialsat that karaoke party for her boyfriend. We cooked up all the goodies and faunscome through the windows.That’s her thing.“I like this path to darkness”she keeps saying.Whatever party fame's doing to herchances for a quick trial. Barbarella can’t touch her Goldilocks.That dog don't birdfor she coming back or not.
Like all great riversThe Elbe is familiar at first sight.The barges spic & span as the front parlorsOf model homes in Saxony —The steam paddle-wheelers & other vessels,No less impeccable — all runWith a near soporific efficiency.You lean out & the land starts up:The parcels of pastures & castlesBearing with them trees & cows & cattle-grids the crowned heads of daisiesLittle knots of   human habitations,Cigarette factory & garrisonsFloodplains, sheet pilingsRun All run,As if   by an engine,Some cement breaker from under the river torn turfs allBob up & down,Brown like bears in bear gardensThe cupolas, cavaliersTheir ruinous sandstone reflections alongside.Whether this is the famous effect Of   the Balcony of   EuropeCork coasters chasing gilt coronets Maps loosely adrift on a mapSo many teacups clicking,Large balconies colliding Breaking up into smaller onesValley & vineyardsMines, bridges, sugar-beet fields, villas,Museum corridorsA Procession of   PrincesChimera of   Chinese porcelain palacesCargoes of   homeland & meadows,OtherMunicipalities, the beer & beer mats,Coal, forestry,History atop Geography atop HistoryFlags roll unroll — coalesceBlack — red — yellowYellow BlackRedRunsWhiteSunk trains with passengersTrains sunk April ’45 Bergen-BelsenRun Elbe RunI pulled away.I have come this day to the bank of the ElbeTo write a few postcardsIn a tearoom. On the steps upFrom street level to the Old Albertinum Museum some way from the tearoomA man too is minding his businessOn his lap a glass caseFor keyboard2 rows of colored sand in test tubesRaspberry /burnt sienna /turquoise /Prussian blue /lavender /ochreOr neutral — just sand.Into a beer bottle he tips a little color & before you knowOur man has tossed one up in the air like a baby& caught it roundly by the heels too,Le voilà, not one grain escapesIt is shockproof, waterproof,A world like a Swiss watch,& time-proof —You count three camelsIt looks like 4, — any number could have been packed in the bottleWhich, when turned slowly in the palm An orderly procession,: Camels against a horizon of   low sunAn irradiated sky,Palm tree, undulating dunes A strata of deep watermelon subsiding to honey halvaThe silhouette of a tent, hint ofA sandstorm in the air. Grit under eyelids& should you preferFrom the array of   bottles you could take home one withA full sun, an Egyptian sun-disk& you have his word, — no fear, each hermetically sealed,Will travel. As if   to say not all the grainsAre sand, our man also worksWith rice.He’s a jeweler.He will encryptOn a grain of rice a word,Enclosed in a colored phial of water again hermeticallyFor all time Like the camels.A jewel, he said,The word a ruby, an emeraldOf   waterShould you forget, here his English broke offBut you understandYes, there is closure.As I watched, a lady at my elbow Like one at a séance, askedFor the name “Christine,” her grand daughter, she said.& he, our scribe, answered he was from Iran, — not that anyone inquired.Iranian, then— Hence the camelsThough here in DresdenHe had looked MexicanA second before.I looked again & saw that he could be from anywhere,It depends on where you stand.This man has for good or ill the face of the world,Which he bears sadlyWith some mirth.I pulled away. Another moment I would haveTo come up with a name, a word,Another world.I was happy with my purchase of camelsOn the Elbe.Back home it holds Dresden & the Elbe for me in a bottle.It runs for so long as anyone would care to look,Not a drop more.I would have liked to write a card to the bottlerAddressing sands sands of the world thereofMy migrant, errant friendI wish you all the grains whatever you had set out for,& alwaysSands enough to take you, just where you standWaiting for your No. 28 sunsets, No. 20,The watermelon sunrise& no end of camels.
They staunched the wound with a stone.They drew blue venom from his blood until there was none.When his veins ran true his face remained lifeless and all the mothers of the village wept and pounded their chests until the sky had little choice but to grant their supplications. God made the boy breathe again.God breathes life into us, it is said,only once. But this case was an exception. God drew back in a giant gust and blew life into the boyand like a stranded fish, he shuddered, oceanless.It was true: the boy lived. He lived for a very long time. The toxins were an oil slick: contaminated, cleaned.But just as soon as the womenkissed redness back into his cheeksthe boy began to die again.He continued to die for the rest of   his life.The dying took place slowly, sweetly.The dying took a very long time.
On the platter set out in the center of the Matyó-embroidered tableclothwas the syringe. And around it was silence. My fathergazed at my mother, and she back at him. Slowly,faltering, he began to speak. I was seized byan unusual shuddering. I recall that he used the word fate,and that if   I consented to the injected dose,we could all fall asleep. We would stay togetherfor all time. And evade the uncertainty in mortifying desperation. A fifteen-year-old’s desire to live cried out in me: “No!” To whichmy father stated: “If you want to live, thenwe too must keep on living, because we can’t leave youby yourself.” My father was the village doctor. I grew upwith no siblings. My mother’s sister lived next door,with her husband and two children, Nelly and Gyurika.In the evenings I prayed: “Merciful Lord of mine,My eyes have closed, but thine, yet still are open, father mine,Watch over me as I recline.” Then this: “In one God I believe, in one homeland I believe, in the eternal divine truth I believe, in Hungary’s re-surrection I believe. Amen.” Gyuri could not study in Pest,he went to Brünn. Later, not even there. Then the familysent him to Toulouse. My mind could not comprehend. Thenone of uncle Vilmos’s servants murdered him with six ax-blows.He screamed crazed into the courtyard: “That’s whatthe stinking   Jew deserved!” I found him, his head smashed open.I ran to my father, who didn’t even believe it. And one afterthe other, the horrors came. Nelly lived in Újvidék with her husband. Uncle Ernő was in the middle of shaving whenHungarians broke into the flat. They were looking for the family. The nanny quickly threw a quilt onto six-month-old Tomika,they didn’t notice him. Peterke was out with Nelly. Uncle Ernőwas executed on the ice of   the Danube. Nelly did not recover.She knitted pullovers, each more beautiful than the next, so as notto feel the pain. She went to Pest to learn a trade,so she could support her children. That’s how it was whennineteen-forty-four came. On March 15, one of my teachers said,“You remain seated,” while the class sang the Anthem,“and be quiet.” On the day of the nineteenth, the Germansinvaded. From then on, it was obligatory to wear the star.Through the intervention of the medical officer and the Lord Lieutenant, my fathercould have stayed out. I had to move to the ghetto with my mother. Myfather said “The family should stay together.” All up and downour street they stood, to bid farewell. Father acknowledgedthem, but already he was just waitingfor the end. He had aged by decades. Then the injection,the one I already spoke of, turned up on the table with theMatyó embroidery. We sat in the evening underneath the open skybefore being loaded onto the freight cars. The doctor from the next villagedrank mercury chloride with his wife. Despite my father’s stomach lavage,they succumbed by the morning. There were eighty of us in the wagon.An expectant mother gave birth on the way. But with no water, my fathercould not save them. There were those who went mad in the freight cars.My father taught me always to say “Ich willarbeiten.” On the seventh of   July the train stopped. Father read the plaque, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and said, “We arelost!” Megaphones blared, “Leave your packagesin the wagons, they will be brought to you later. Special vehiclesare coming for the sick and the elderly, just remain sitting,”they repeated, “everything will be fine. Men exitthe wagon to the left, women to the right.” As farewell, my papa said, “Always be my clever, my obedient, my good little girl...    ” That is how we parted for eternity. Tomika and Peterkewere squeezing my hand tightly, but my mother said, “Don’tyou want to sit down? We can walk. Come...    ”We moved forward in a column of five rows. The bulbs of the searchlightsblinded us in the eyes. A German officer, legs wide apart. He stood theresomewhere far away. Sent us to the right. Had to get undressedin a room. Then they sent us into another, and the iron door slammed,bolted shut. Screaming, I pounded on it again and again. We truly were lost, as last I understood.... Turning around, the othersalready shaved bald. I didn’t recognize anyone.They stood there like sheep. Upon their skin, the writing of gooseflesh.
Despite that you wrote your name and numberon its fuselage in magic markerneither your quiet hours at the kitchentable assemblingit with gluenor your choice ofpaint and lacquernor your seeminglyequally perfect choice of a seemingly breezeless dayfor the launch ofyour ambitionnor the thrill of its swift ignitionnor the heightsit streaksnor the dancingway you chasebeneath its dotacross thatseemingly endlesschildhood fieldwill ever be restored to you by the peoplein the topmostbranches of whose treesunseenit may yet from its plastic chuteon thin white stringstill swing.
A rung’s come broken in the ladder to the mowand so one hesitates to clamber up therejust to bomb a cowwith dung or bother swallows from their rafter cakes. It takesa new footing some-where in the ribs’ treads, about heart- height, to climb it now. A new gap’s inthe smile that smilesfrom the limed barn floor. There seems to come a break in the war. But soon, oneof a neighbor’s sons, too young to know it was otherwise once, braves it, and soon, even with a sweater-swaddled kitten or a BB gun, all the kids can do it again, nearly at a run, like pros, andso it goes, as before.
For Ghassan Zaqtan 1 I now release from my blood the bird of   thirty she wastedthat’s how wars crumble usI now tell those who are exhausted from the expense of children the secret of   happiness and happiness itselffrom what is arrived at but doesn’t come from the language of   balancedefeat has the taste of    being shrouded with another’s bannerwhile your enemies chant your namesSome music some shelling will strike our dead who flew off in the early raidshave you seen them return from their flying?They stayed behind hanging by the thread of their surprise and by their women’s hairWe will dance in the wreckage drink the coffee our dead left brewing we will open our tombs to windows for the sea in order for the sea to remain besiegedRight here right here a corpse shook its trunk in the earth a corpse snapped God’s ropes houses gathered then hidwhat’s easy to interpret of   people’s speechWhich mourners ebbed and turned the sea to tombstones for our dead which poem was said and revived us?And that huge rose of ours our only bewilderment our offense on earth our balcony on the kingdom of   heaven the grandfather’s housea hand that gestures farewellin the roar of   the massacre a white hand like old timea free hand like death after deathTell my love space has been pluckedtell her to sleep on disaffection’s stone2 Two raids three raids a whole morninga year of   long bombardment over your goingDid you forget a newspaper of   palm fronds a time of   white dawn some hay from last season’s siegea brief greeting like a mumbling on mornings of   slow advancea suitcase a rug a palm with which you touched the evening of shelling into a meaning for a people kind and assured and silent?Whenever glass shook you would shriekkid I pluck your death’s anemone and eat it Each land has its people each time has its folks and time for a while now has been standing on our throats As if   we don’t love or hate as if we’ve seen the land only as a bracelet a house a dress a poem left filled with those who were killed without war3 Memory shrinks until it fits in a fistmemory shrinks without forgettinga boy in a farm a chicken on a roofa dot on the planet mysterious and intuitive like parentsor a tree for a hat with prairiesfor a dictionary and days like sleevesshort in summer cotton in winter they resist when squeezed between our kneesA not so First World rains on a calm boytorn apart like a tattered tentThe lily of words enters his heart takes a wedding by the horns a well-trained bulbul by the scandalous fruit rush of the riverHis return will be washed shroudeda field’s first flower guarded by dirtCoffee coffee for the beautiful onewhose heart’s a tambourine this morningwhile war shouts cold on slopes4 In the saddles grass grows warmth matures in oleander the river pours in your absence everything will happenI exchanged half of my books to sit near you flung my hand so that it may see youthen retrieved it to touch what it sawWe slept like sponges near the river butterflies descendedfrom the ribs of shadow then left behind a mirror pitched like a house of   jinn 5 It’ll be difficult that you gobefore you choose a grave fit for sleep It’ll be difficult that you diebefore you choose a grave fit for running for flood swimming for dense reeds by irrigation channels for bird snares for the lettuce garden in the backyard for old dry thatch on mud roofsfor jujube shrubs for climbing on trucks and holding onto vegetable boxes for the diffusion of secrets loading and unloading in the big marketA grave fit for you to see Jericho light up through the windows as a neon garden the refugee camps by the marshes touch A grave fit for you to see Jericho’s convent tossgrass liquor our way fir for some arches where oleander wilts near Bedouin tents And their watchdogs will dig and dig and dig and dig and you won’t come6 And the mules in the junkyardsdoes anyone feed their loneliness when they cry?Or has anyone quenched their oneness or washedtheir dead necks or visited them to remember how they blackened in their sleep?The mules the movie extras who fold their torsos in the packed air as lineage floats on light an icon of wondrous dust and riddles7 And our neighbor the one whose voice fenced us with reeds all day and all nightShe would forget her rings in our handstwo boys who used to dance for her
The asking was askance.And the tell all told. So then, in tandem,Anathema, and anthem.The truth was on hold,Seeking too tasking.And the wool was pulledOver as cover.No eyes were kept peeled.My iris I missedThe truth, now mistrustAll things seen, and thisDistrust, the sounded distress signalCalled and called and culled from your damsel.
The glassy hill I clomb for thee For surefooted step, hooves behoove the haver. The sky redid blue, the woman wavered,and the black bull (the vanquisher), vanished.She called out to nothing, and in vain shed tears until she reached the glass hill’s impasse. Served her standard fairy tale penance, passim,served her seven to be given ironshoes to — at last — scale the hill, the earnedneared end. Each step conquered territory,at last, the sleeping prince-once-bull, torrid tearing of clothes, tearing on one’s clothes, three nights of thisuntil the prince awakes. How she, exhausted,must have felt in the at long last, the ever after.Happily, I guess, but a long time until laughter.
The kiss is, strictly speaking, a passingof of   twice: a bead from her mouth to his,then back, ad nauseam, and the boys who livedand died for it. The lovely girl amassingninety-nine spirits, and in high spiritsfor consuming her highest amount. Oncethe hundredth boy arrived she starts her huntin her haunt, a hill’s field filled with fittingArtemisia absinthium.
Who can face the sea and not inherit its loneliness? — Olin Ivory I Gray sky, gray sea — gray mind, the man thinks. He thinks:To grow old with it and kicks a stone into the water.He mucks at the seam and it crumbles below him.A sea gull beaks a crab, flights vertically and dropsit to the rocks. The man cracks with laughter,tossing a stone to a stone.II Working alone means the voice must grow louder,for who can stand to think quietly all through the day’s calculations?I cannot. I let the voice grow loud. I let the voicehum outside my body in distinguishable phrasings, and countthe increments as I set the fence according to the blade. All dayI stand before a blade and push things into its path.I stand aside as what is removed is whisked alongside me.The smallest particles of   what is removed thicken the air,making a dream inside which one cannot live. All daythe voice is learning how to be outside of   the body.III A man is not a beach, nor is he stone, though he collects their entiretyin a single thought. He works alone and his thoughts begin tosmack of stone. His teeth clatter with their collection.IV A man can hold a secret between his teeth,and it will never leave his mouth, for who would listento his wavering tune of so sad and how hard and hearanything original? He is that he is — the errand and the foolrunning to himself over and over only to find that even heis tired of telling about it. To grow old with itwas the task, and the question always: would he last?A man can believe in the body and have no one,as though he were ghostor stone, nothing to speak at or be heard from.V All work, no pay makes a body bray.Though he may bray —Though he may bray and bray,forgive him the bit. If he tells you his secret,he will have no secret.This is how one sings a sentence into stone.
I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stakemy spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the icebucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring,to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick,the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmeringwith the scales of the dead while the line whined freefrom the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal currenton a point in view of   the town where I lived,where I had become a man with no money,suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouthsand I had helped to make them —The eddy swirled, kept my line taut, mywhole body taut though a man a few down the rowlaughed, sitting back on his bucket while he pulled in more fishthan he could take.I hated the other men, hated the ones who caught nothing,who crossed lines or hooked gulls, who plucked even birds from the skyand slowly drew them in while they struggled and looked away, even,finally, in the hands of the man who only wanted them free.I climbed the breakwater and fished and spoke to no one.I baited my line and thought of a womanwho would carry my body over the thresholdof our small white house simply with her eyesbecause I had brought something home,for her, for us, our boys at my sidewhile one fish was divided and indeed did feed many —(Now to sift the facts for truth):I reeked of   the sea and had nothing to show for it.Darkling saltwater for a dreamand no other place to be.
A storm and so a gift. Its swift approach lifts gravel from the road. A fence is flattened in the course of   the storm’s worse attempt at language — thunder’s umbrage. A tree is torn apart, blown upward through a bedroom window. A boy winnows through the pile of shards for the sharpest partsfrom the blown-apart glass. He has a bag that holds found edges jagged as a stag’s horns or smooth as a single pane smashed into smaller panes that he sticks his hand into to make blood web across his ache-less skin flexing like fish gills O-lipped for a screamit cannot make. He wants to feel what his friends have felt, the slant of fear on their faces he could never recreate, his body configured without pain. When his skin’s pouting welts don’t rake a whimper from his mouth, he runs outside, arms up for the storm, aluminum baseball bat held out to the sky until lightning with an electric tongue makes his viscera luminescent; the boy’s first word for pain is the light’s new word for home.
O darling, the moon did not disrobe you.You fell asleep that way, nudeand capsized by our wine, our Bump‘n’ Grind shenanigans. Blame iton whatever you like; my bed welcomes whomever you decide to be: thug-mistress, poinsettia, John Doe in the alcove of my dreams. Youcan quote verbatim an entire albumof Bone Thugs-n-Harmonywith your ass in the air. There’s nothingwrong with that. They mince syllablesas you call me yours. You don’t like me but still invite me to your homewhen your homies aren’t nearenough to hear us crash into each other like hours. Some men have killed their lovers because they loved themso much in secret that the secret kept coming out: wife gouging her husband with suspicion, churches sneeringwhen an usher enters. Never mind that.The sickle moon turns the sky into a man’s mouth slapped sideways to keep him from spilling what no one wouldunderstand: you call me God when it gets good though I do not exist to you outside this room. Be yourself or no one else here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned and stuffed into my mouth.
Cross the blood that quilts your busted lip with the tender tip of   your tongue. That lip’s blood is brackish and white meat flares from the black swell. You crossed your mama’s mind so call her sometimes. She dreams your dead daddy still puts his hands on her waist. She calls his name then crosses herself, calls the police then crosses her fingers. Cross me and get cut across your cheek, its fat bag full of   bad words and cheap liquor you hide from your badass kids. Make a wish for bad weather when the hoodlums get to shooting in a good summer’s heat. Cross the territory between two gangs and feel eyes stare and cross in a blur of crosshairs. When a shot man lands in the garden of trash the block flares up like an appetite spurred on by the sight of prey, by the slurred prayer of a man so death-close he sees buzzards burrow their bladed beaks into his entry wound. Tune the trumpets. Make way through dusk’s clutter. After death the dead cross over into song, their bones tuning-forked into vibrancy. Cross your lips, mutiny against all speech when a corpse starts singing despite its leaded larynx. Don’t say miracle when butterflies break from a death-gaped skull, rout the sky, and scatter.
After “E. 1999 Eternal” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Dear god of armed robberies and puff-puff-pass,a chalk outline unpeels from the street, smashes every windshield, and leaves florid temples of crack on porches. Burnt-black pleats of   joint-pressed lipsprophesied your return. Please accept these nickel bags as offerings. Brick bastions of piss-stench thresholds and boarded windows require a weekly sacrifice.Is there a Tarot card called “The Corner,” a shrike shown lifting a corpse from the pike of a middle finger?Children speak to their murdered brothers with a cereal box and construction paper cut into a Ouija’s tongue that licks yes when asked if   liquor could polish a skull in a way pleasing to the dead, licks no when asked for a name.
on seventeen, I come from hearty straw.My grandpa wore a gallonhat. My grandma, like a shogun,bun and shawl. For their honeymoon,they went to the movies. No oneknows what they saw.You arrive with licorice, cigarettes,the documentary on Woody Allen.Don’t feign a passion for his startin tv, or his clarinets,or Love and Death. Just skip to the Soon-Yi part.
Dirt on my chin and I wonder: am I alreadyin the ground? Like a toy turned real, I cannot shedthe sense that I have died. The German wordfor Heaven’s the sameas the German word for sky. On hearing a cruelprince was in danger, I prayed for him to thrive,not for his own sake, but for the concubines,sure to end up buriedalong. To my real face, a man once crowedi ruined you, and though he did, the joke’son him: he ruined me only for this world,and this world is not longfor itself. The Earth, that ever-lovingbut distrustful kin, keeps leaving us just a littlepocket money when it dies, never the land —
What I adore is not horses, with their moderndomestic life span of 25 years. What I adoreis a bug that lives only one day, especially ifit’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment orchemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a daywhen no one thinks of anything else, least of allthat bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve beeninto these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’sbusy, so distraught they forget to kill me,and even that won’t keep me alive. I sharemy home not with horses, but with a little dogwho sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps,makes her muscle known to every statue.I wish she could have a single day of   language,so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid —our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.
I saw you painted on a ghetto wall last summer and thought don’t submit to this medium    ...    everybody’s running into the wall or running into each other and plagiarizing our future like mummies and nukes, I watched you hug the Mona Lisa. I wanna use the word pariah until it shrugs for us and even their disguises go limp as a fire tumbling down a hillside into the playfulness in my heart, acres and acres of a lean, almost spiritual vibe afraid of  its own momentum and then not afraid again
Even alleged militants blame the vanishing of the summer sea ice on “Ghosts” (short version) by Albert Ayler. He disappeared while he was getting his sound together. No one knows what happened but the water high in increments like a crown around his cries and glass is a liquid and you have to forgive your parents for whatever it is and they have to forgive themselves I would like to use this craft to fly with him I feel that saddle the morning after and try — again — warm in the habit of our warning and yearning for more of  them until We finally need to see this reckoning But when it’s time I’m not ready and when I’m ready it’s not time — that’s fate. And blind in the halo of so-what, so-what, we make it a future I say, I don’t know who you are. I say, It don’t matter at this point, I do it all for you anyways (long run) — gorgeous photographs of industrial ruins so lush you want to lick them, be them, become a trend. Crushed under the debris, an instrument is so tender it breaks and mends in the same note. Becoming men is like that, degrading, uplifting, denial, lazily caving in Isis and ice until all of our guesses are obsolete we can’t see nobody who isn’t disappearing
We’re all pagans and shamans and clap your hands now we won’t stop the beatWe believe in divine healing and we hate to see that evening sun go downWe know when the sight of our women dressed in white each ritual night, is touching, hypnotizesThe animals blush and split for us as revival, as revealed to themselvesThese are triumphant women.Even Sister Fame hiding out in the alley turning tricks and singing verses from the undid scripture, is touchingThank you jesus, thank you jesus, that you jesus, baby, is that you, she mutters up high between rocks and lace — his eagerness — it was all night longSometimes he’d interrupt a recording session to tell us about his early Motown days or expand on his views of   Heaven and HellOne time he was saying how important it was to love one’s father.Do you love yours? I asked himWhy don’t you tell himWhy don’t you tell your father, he saidI will if you doYou go first
And that other time after we got carjacked in L.A. on the way home from Spago. Like a scene outta that movie I don’t like about those hoes I don’t love. It is hard out there for a pimp. A white woman and her brown babies /brown babies in a fancy car with unlocked doors. Most everything is semi-automatic. Two black men hopped into the front row seats and started waving guns like pom-poms. 
We made it! We made it! Right against the rim of her porcelain brain. All they wanted was the car and the color. The car was white like her. She saved our lives. Then the penguins came over with a book full of photos of black men, so serious like kings in their mugging, and they asked us to pick which two it was. I was five but I could feel the shrugged evil of it so true and impossible to touch as I pretended to recognize us. We closed our eyes and pointed at you, and said, I don’t know that man. Je ne connais pas cet homme. We saved our lives. We tugged at the flashlight looking for bruises and found you awake, and found a way.
It’s you I’d like to see Greece again withYou I’d like to take to bed of cyclamenYou know I nurse a certain mythabout myself that I descendde tribus d’origine asiatiqueand am part Thracian or Macedoniancleaving to a Hellenic mystiqueafter centuries’ migration inlanda full moon rising over the AcropolisI can repeat the scene this time à deuxas then I had no one to kissslicing halloumi amid the hullabalooof a rooftop taverna in   JulyThe doors that opened to loverspulled like tree roots from darkness Iclose upon us now like book coversThe alcove in which we embraceis cool with brilliant tileand weirded by a dove’s note chaseof ouzo with Uzi junta-styleHistory makes its noise we ducktill it passes Love we think is our dueNot we think like the epochthe unchosen thing we’re wedded to
They sang Green, Green Grass of Home sailing west from New Orleans.They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquitewhile digging graves in Matagorda.Pelican soup was a vile, greasy potage.They sang Green, Green Grass of  Homewhere alligator was a luxury (the meat)down at the Turtle Bayou Turnaround.They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite.Near the Old and Lost River they surmisedSpanish moss strains coffee pretty good.They sang Green, Green Grass of Home.They were whingeing Stuck in Lodi,forty Slavonians in the Big Thicket.They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite.They cut down the trees, they sawed the blocks,split the blocks into billets, split the billets into boards.They sang Green, Green Grass of Home.They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite. • Frederick Olmsted was right when he wroteG.T.T. (Gone to Texas) was appended“to every man’s name who had disappearedbefore the discovery of some rascality.”Brands were a language: Shanghai M, Running W.Frederick Olmsted was right when he wrote,or rode upright, through “a sort of Brobdingnag grass.” Bradded L, Walking R, Swinging   J.Every man’s name who had disappearedsinged like needles off a cactus, whiskers off rope(this was a practice). Rocking T, Tumbling K —Frederick Olmsted was right when he wrotein the alphabet we got from the Canaanites.Oxhead A. Camel G. If it doesn’t brand, it bites.To every man’s name who had disappeared,someone added: Sent to heaven to hunt for a harp. Or maybe it was another case of slow.Olmsted slowed so he could write while he rodeamong men whose names had disappeared.
Mother died last night,Mother who never dies.Winter was in the air,many months awaybut in the air nevertheless.It was the tenth of May.Hyacinth and apple blossombloomed in the back garden.We could hearMaria singing songs from Czechoslovakia —How alone I am —songs of that kind.How alone I am,no mother, no father —
1 Sometime after I had enteredthat time of   lifepeople prefer to allude to in othersbut not in themselves, in the middle of the nightthe phone rang. It rang and rangas though the world needed me,though really it was the reverse.I lay in bed, trying to analyzethe ring. It hadmy mother’s persistence and my father’spained embarrassment.When I picked it up, the line was dead.Or was the phone working and the caller dead?Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps?2 My mother and father stood in the coldon the front steps. My mother stared at me,a daughter, a fellow female.You never think of us, she said.We read your books when they reach heaven.Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of  your sister.And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger,tightly wrapped in my mother’s arms.But for us, she said, you wouldn’t exist.And your sister — you have your sister’s soul.After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries.3 The street was white again,all the bushes covered with heavy snowand the trees glittering, encased with ice.I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.It seemed the longest night I had ever known,longer than the night I was born.I write about you all the time, I said aloud.Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.4 Outside the street was silent.The receiver lay on its side among the tangled sheets,its peevish throbbing had ceased some hours before.I left it as it was;its long cord drifting under the furniture.I watched the snow falling,not so much obscuring thingsas making them seem larger than they were.Who would call in the middle of the night?Trouble calls, despair calls.Joy is sleeping like a baby.
You’re stepping on your father, my mother said,and indeed I was standing exactly in the centerof a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have beenmy father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so.You’re stepping on your father, she repeated,louder this time, which began to be strange to me,since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it.I moved slightly to the side, to wheremy father ended and my mother began.The cemetery was silent. Wind blew through the trees;I could hear, very faintly, sounds of  weeping several rows away,and beyond that, a dog wailing. At length these sounds abated. It crossed my mindI had no memory of   being driven here,to what now seemed a cemetery, though it could have beena cemetery in my mind only; perhaps it was a park, or if not a park,a garden or bower, perfumed, I now realized, with the scent of roses — douceur de vivre filling the air, the sweetness of  living,as the saying goes. At some point,it occurred to me I was alone.Where had the others gone,my cousins and sister, Caitlin and Abigail?By now the light was fading. Where was the carwaiting to take us home?I then began seeking for some alternative. I feltan impatience growing in me, approaching, I would say, anxiety.Finally, in the distance, I made out a small train,stopped, it seemed, behind some foliage, the conductorlingering against a doorframe, smoking a cigarette.Do not forget me, I cried, running nowover many plots, many mothers and fathers —
Close to thedoor inmy dream thesmall signsI saw a brownsign with wisdomon itI saw a brownone leaningwith wisdomon itfringe of a mirrormy mother leaning over a pondcupping waterleaning againstthe mouldingcardboard or wood which materials do youdoes your wisdom preferwhich a-partment in a summerwith someone I felt brave tohave touched her love the screendoor and the dogsand the cats alwaysgetting out. Thatwas the feartwo signsfading but recallingthey had faded like wordsfade in stone becauseof the rain and the daysand waking and the dreamis leaving with everystep leaning over the meatbecause I do not want you to have died in vainkissing the turkey and the neck of  my dogall animals am I. all dreams, all stoneall message am I.
the car had a cover over itand it was over the wheelsand it hurt my ass and I couldn’t sleep. It seems I should move, go forward nowI was wandering through the jungleanywhere on earth but I was a womanin bed in New York and how many people have died in wild placesdreaming you were still in bedwould you know. Travel wellI said to my dog when shewent on her journey thinkingof a cheap movieI’ve thought this was an urnturning this was on waterthis was flatbut now I see light betweenthe trees I see water tricklingthrough stone this is not made of   language but energythat will stop when I diethe dream dies tooone bolt
I’m playing with the devil’s cockit’s like a crayonit’s like a fat burnt crayonI’m writing a poem with itI’m writing that downall that rattling heat in this roomI’m using thatI’m using that tingling rattlethat light in the middle of the roomit’s my hostI’ve always been afraid of youscared you’re god and something elseI’m afraid when you’re yellowtawnywhite it’s okay. Transparent coolyou don’t look like homemy belly is homelessflopping over the waist of my jeans like an omelettethere better be something about feeling fatwhat there really is is a lack of emptinessI’m aiming for that empty feelinggoing to get some of thatand then I’ll be back
I opened the window so I could hear people.Last night we were together and by ourselves.You. You look and look at Diver for Crane by  Johns and want to say something.In the water you are a child without eyes. Yesterday there was nothing on the beachand no one knows where it came from.There’s a small animal lodged somewhere inside us. There are minutes of peace.Just the feel.   Just this once. Where does the past,where should the period go? What is under the earth followed them home. The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James.We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command.Slow — in black — on an orange street sign. Missing everywhere and unwritten — suddenly — all at once.Him. He misses a person and he is still living.I haven’t missed you for long and you are so gone.Then he stepped away from the poem midsentence    . . .we must have been lonely people to say those things then.But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at.In the perfect field someone has left everything including themselves. You. You should stay here.It’s a brutal and beautiful autumn.With his hands in the sand, on the earth, under timehe touched something else.People are mostly what they can’t keep and keeps them.And inside the circular cage of the Ferris wheel you saw the world.In the steam, on the mirror: you wrote so so so    . . .so if   you’re looking for answers you’re looking at every water tower around here.Why does the sea hold what it loves most below?Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news.How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make?And the leather of   your chair   . . .    it has me markedso good luck forgetting. The world was a home. It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic.Make sure you date and sign here then save all the soft things.Because everyone wants to know when it was, how it happened — say something about it. How the night hail made imprints all over. Our things. Our charming and singular things.
amy winehouse All song is formal, and youMaybe felt this and decidedYou’d be formal too. (The eyeliner, the beehive: formal.)When a desire to escape becomes formal,It’s dangerous. Then escape requiresNullity, rather than a walk in the park or a movie.Eventually, nullity gets harder andHarder to achieve. After surgery, I hadOpiates. I pushed the button as often as I could.Understood by music was how I felt. An escapeSo complete it became a song. After that,Elegy’s the only necessary form. steve jobs Say you lost all your money, or turned against your ambition. Then you would be at peace, or Else why does the mind punish the body? Vengeance is mind, says the body.Ever after, you’re a mirror, “silver and exact.”Just like the bug in a string of code, the body defies the mind Or looks in the mirror of the mind and shudders. Better instruments are better because they’re Silverish but intact. troy davis The clock is obdurate, Random, and definite. Obdurate the calendar. You thump on the cot: another signature.Did it didn’t do it would do it again. And if a deferred dream dies? Please sign the petition. Very good. Let’s hunt for a pen. If you thump, there’s another signature and Signatures are given freely by the signer’s hand. lucian freud Lingering over Unlovely bodies, Couldn’t help Intuitively rendering A wholeNother angel.Facts are Relics — an Effect worth Undertaking: yes, Dear daylight? donna summer Discourse that night concerned the warm-blooded love we felt. On the divan and in the ballroom and on the terrace, we felt it. Now virtue meant liking the look of the face we lay next to. Never mind the sting of the winter solstice.All discourse that night concerned the warm-blooded love we felt.Something lifted us higher. Her little finger told her so, Untangling, with careless skill, the flora of the sexual grove. Master physician with a masterly joy in wrapping up Mud-spattered, coke-dusted wounds at midnight, when it’s too Early to stop dancing and go home. Our lily-minds soothed by her Royalty concealed in the synthesizers in the flora of the sexual grove.
And whenever they couldn’t speak they looked at each other.How long should I look at the world before I go home?It’s a moody life like Debussy on a weekendand all the appointments and money and drinks they do go.So with our beautiful coats we went back to that mess and what happened? Someone found what they wanted by night, by mistake. In the car it felt like summer and we lived with no sun    . . .    just metals and leather.A lot of   Mondays. A lot of you in the grass I go to and touch.Oh and Los Angeles for its slow light. Rome for when it gets late.You. Not you, but you who are reading   . . .what won’t you ask for and want?Of course I remember it differently because I was brokeand it feels like I’m broke still.The cabs lined up but no one took himwhere he wanted to go. Those months shared a face and the face of a dog on a street was the only thing that really saw you (for a long time).Then I heard you were traveling, I heard you were somewhere,I heard you were nowhere anyone looked for at all.French stationery. Construction. Sent then deleted. Missed you so sorry next time press yes to continue press now.And I stood on Barrow then Greenwich then Allen then all streets, every street, all the time, everyone.There was a check you used just to drive out there.There was a storm that brought a gold door in front of their shoes.You know, it doesn’t get easier with the lights on. It doesn’t get easier to watch the play with an end.On the way out someone said, what a terrible way to portray life.But about us. Hide all week then some place we go empty the dark in. In the dark with our vices and best shirts and history’s dress. Then you could find me anytime. And then there’s right now. Where wouldn’t we go to be no one and those people again?
The boy and the girl were mostly gesture,a clouded outline, the pencil lifting, loweringto get at the idea of childhood, not the sour milkand scraped knee of it. Her skirt was a swoopof ink, his hand invisible in an undrawn pocket.Circles make up the majority of the face. We are all circlesand planar suggestion. If  the girl wants to be a horseshe need only walk into the outline of oneand line up her body with the chest. We’ll fill inthe rest, and before you know it, she’s a natural.Who will ride her? The boy doesn’t know how.He has a hankering to sketch in a saddle.When she tosses her head, he mocks up a bridle.He mocks her. A bridle for a bride, he says,which doesn’t seem like what little boys say,but he wasn’t so little, and she didn’t run away.
Roy Halston Frowick, 1932–1990 He kept his middle name, the pick of   the lot, he thought, and mispronounced himself: Hall-stun. At Bergdorf’s he acquired an accent and referred to himself   in the third person, every bird he flayed wrapped in Ultrasuede. He lit a True with a True, smeared his hirsute muse with sequins. There were air- kisses, Capote’s new-cut face at Studio 54, that Baccarat flute of ejaculate. Never too late, he ordered in meat and potatoes, and a trick. He called it “dial-a-steak, dial-a-dick.” He appeared on The Love Boat, Halstonettes in tow, maybe the high, maybe the low, watermark. When his pupils betrayed him at work, on came the shades. And a well-cut blazer, paranoia. He had signed away the rights to his name, for options. When he tried to reclaim them from the conglomerate, he excused himself to the toilet, just a sec — white dust on a black turtleneck. His block started to look a lot like sickness. Even his beloved orchids, the sickness. Just like that, the eighties were gone. New York, New York, the eighties were no one.
There was a time we had functional alignment. I was your individual contributor, you my associate director. On Monday I said Happy Monday, rolling my rimshot grin. Ring-fenced by cool molecules, like cattle, I battled biosimilars, sipped local gin; I tried my luck at affairs and trade fairs, optimistic as a fantasy suite. I inked the deal, the ink slick and permanent, like President Reagan. I didn’t sleep unless I felt sick. Something was always gated on a fragile something. Everything on the critical path. The whiteboard, cruel as conceptual math, scope creep like a disease. Some of those days, our parent showed up, bespoke shoes bearing Leckerli. I felt like a starlet on a cruisy backlot, an outpost of opportunity. I took on a new role, went through the motions and the typing pool. But the bonus was no bonus, any more than the bay. Like tender, it started to fray. My admin booked a good weekend of atrocity. I winced. I slid the To-Hurt folder below a molecule’s Package Insert. Then came the Efficiency Report, my resignation. I packed up the brood for Orlando, a last resort. I cut off my khaki pants at the knee, traded in the wife — this is the Epcot Center of my life! I want to thank you in advance. I’d fallen out of favor, like a nation.
Like a cloud above a ravine is the hell you already know:That sublime work of the imagination by Dante Alighieri. But the rain that falls from that cloud is not made up of human souls. It rains, and the rain funnels down into the something-other-than-human sewer.Look how a Chinese writing brush ends in a cone of rigid horsehair. Loaded with ink, the cone will flex, will leave a wet trench in the rice paper.It will leave an attractive trench, and the daylight sucked into the ink Will give it a reflective “shine dot” — like looking into an animal’s eye.Which of you has looked into the looking-up eyes of a hair-trigger fox? A backyard fox or a campsite coyote: Daoist, unintelligible, brave  . . .Which of you knows how not to part the pebble on the beach from its colors? The songbird from its social network? the fruit from its multifaceted peel?Oh, that sugary piece of phosphorus in its form-fitted velvet casing! That unappreciated Egyptian sarcophagus meant | to be opened from the inside.And each seed-bearing fruit has an atmosphere. Each has its several moons,Has tides (subject to gravity), changing weather, lunar eclipses . . .But should an arrow suddenly snatch the waiting pomegranate out of your hand, If it snatches the cap off your head, recall: its circuit has only begun . . .For the arrow of the luckless archer returns to the middle of his or her back. There, between athletic shoulder blades, is a diploma tube full of arrows.Is a diploma tube full of arrows, and so | it is time for graduation. The genie’s gone back to his bottle; the devils to their fallow hells.And the Chinese writing brush, and the cloud above the ravine (wherein The charged particles have sorted themselves along their up-and-down axis),And the looking-up eyes of the fox, and the sarcophagus, and the campsiteAre irreducible to a system, are each of them floating over a void.Truly: “All hells and hierarchies are works of the imagination.” And equally: “It is not the part of the Daoist sage to conjure meaningless hells.”
I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares. To make, you first have to create materials. Re: man, we knowthe rib removed. But, before — ? Forget ash to ash, dust &c. Stick a floating rib (i.e. thoracic11–12, y’know — “Edenic”) in a glass of  water with the promise it’ll grow roots like leek or fur like chia. The joke’s Crusoe astride the bone or   Jim & Huck paddlingrustic as a ballpoint pen will go. — Nn-o. (That’s not a plank
I scarcely dared to lookto see what it was I was. No one else with a book, the slick weeklies gossip amongst themselves on the side tables as the ticker rolls the Dow Jones down down down under a profile of the marathonbombers (the older, a boxer). Joveargues for the removal of a race of   peoples that do not please him: What is pastremedy calls for the surgeon’sknife
If I had enough cages to keep all the birds I’ve collected over the years then I would have to open a shop because there’s only so much room in a two-bedroom walk-up for 48 birds, not to mention the dancing bears and the frogs, or the different varieties of fish, the one species of flea, and I almost forgot the proud dogs and the lone mule, the profane one who entered my life to curse at scribes and pharisees; and maybe he’d let the mouse I found forever dying at the end of a poemride on his back like a whiskered Christ and if not, maybe my yeti could do it when he’s not downtown working security at the store or teaching the parrots how to say brotherhood in grunt and how to comb out the tangles and mud from his hair whose sweat reminds me of that bearded collector of  beasts with the ark who would have no doubt understood how I feel, that prophet of change under whose spell I want to confess that I’m a Christian of   the Old Testament, that my grandfather hung all his goats upside down, their throats over a bucket, and slapped their chests like that other Nature Boy who strutted around the ring like a peacock with his feathered hair that stayed immaculate even on the nights he lost to our hero Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel, he who hailed from the lost tribes of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs so much we wore pigeon feathers and circled each other inside a green square of water hose until someone finally rang the bell that was never there and we sprung toward each other like animals in love or at war.
For D’Andra My bowl brimming with pretzels, the snack you wanted least, I slid open the door of our sleeping car where we had been enjoying the country rushing by, as if   we were the first two people to look down into the valleys and see bright necks of pines stretch across farms and streams to the groves they once cradled. You had asked for Earl Grey cookies sandwiched around buttercream or marshmallows made of chocolate, but all the tea bags had been dunked and the chocolate melted over biscotti. When I came bearing the salted and twisted news, the room was empty but for a heel. It was black as a bunting, and wound with zippers, and every time the car rocked it looked ready to fly and escape into the cold, tangled air of   travel that always feels heavy with joy and desire, and a little sadness, always a little sadness, because of the leaving, which is what I do when I realize I’m in the wrong room and that numbers have betrayed me again while I was hunting and gathering, foraging like Homo habilis who probably never lost his cave. Out of patience, I opened every door marked with threes and eights, those conjoined twins disastrously separated at birth, and roused the scabbed eyes of sleepers like a beggar, no, an angel, a begging angel who has written on his heart will work for love. Having not found our room, not heard the sharp swing of   your voice, I descended upon the passenger cars and row upon row of couples asleep or staring out the windows like zombies trying to remember what happens next once the newspaper is well-thumbed, the tea has gone cold, and the conversation is dead. I called for you, in vain, even using your secret names, the ones only the night knows: wind-kiss, brilliant-fruit, dervish-moon    . . . Over and over, I said your names, over and over until they filled the wounded air of  the car and when there was no more room for another sound, they caught and hooked the ring of   the brakes hugging the rails. Just when I thought I wouldn’t find you, you were there, the train was pulling away, and I was watching you slowly eat a dish of whipped cream and bananas— the house special — in a cafe in a city we didn’t know. When you finished, we started walking down a road that bent like a smile, a shy smile, like the one the Japanese cat wore on your purse. The road, we were told, would take us to the end of   the line where all lovers in search of   joy packed on bullet trains — they’re the fastest on two continents — arrive every hour.
A collector of   walks, I was practicing my llamastep when one of   those white geese with the knob of cheddar on its bill honked at the goslings ignoring the art of the rank and file so adored by Mussolini and other assorted lunatics who I have trouble believing could ever raise one leg parallel to the earth they scorched without falling prey to gravity that was given a special kind of dominion over the fascist paunch, a shabby thing I have never seen hang around the waist of a goose, though who can say for sure under all that heavenly down where the hips of a goose begin and end; and even if   tomorrow some budding scholar published a treatise titled The Mystery of Goose Hips to fanfare, it would be an exaggeration of   the grossest kind to equate a goose’s trumpet with the barking from the balcony by the sad bullies whose love of   the locked leg I will never understand since the knee was so obviously made to flex, which means locking one is most likely a kind of sin against Darwin or God, both of whom I think would disapprove of anything so unnatural as even twenty people moving in stiff unison to music unless the brass and strings were just about to sway and bend to the hot version of  “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Because in medieval Italian it meant “room” I tied the curtains at their elbows with what could have been honor cords or worse yet, a belt from the 60s, so hideous were the tassels that were dancing a little tarantella after I had propped the windows and the wind had carried in the song the rubbing trees were making, without any accompaniment, mind you, from a tambourine, although the bells of   the occasional sleigh played that part, while I waited for the vixen and their shameless yelping to follow the music and the cold and the night inside where I sat half man, half snow, to investigate my squeaking pencil and the flapping of the bird-white page I couldn’t seem to catch in those years when I lugged around a frozen heart and was infatuated with whiteness, since I had read somewhere it was the absence of color, which could not be true since I had once loved a pure white duck with a white bill and feet and I had even torn its white flesh with my teeth that were still then white, which should have been all the proof anyone needed to debunk our outdated theories of absence.
For John Guare I used to live in a mother now I livein a sunflowerBlinded by the silverwareBlinded by the refrigeratorI sit on a sidewalk in the sunflower and its yellow downpourThe light of  the worldbeads up on one perfect green leafIt scribbles its name on every living thing then erases it so what’s left is more of a whisper than a motherHere it’s spring Over and over and over again • I used to livein a cloud now I livein a crowIt’s tiny and crippled in there but I can find my way to the bathroom in the dark if   I need toAll the windows in the crow are left open and let the clouds inBack inThey float past my bed and have nothing to sayHello it’s nice to meet you!From a telephone pole tongues slide out singing welcome home Welcome home they sing• I used to live in a tree now I livein a kingHe waves his arms in front of   him and endless migrations of   birds disappear into his coatI like to sit up inside his crown eating sandwiches and watching tvHills shake in the distance when he shuffles his feetFloods when he snaps his fingersI bow inside his brow and the afternoon stretches outOrders more sandwichesAnd sells the slavesand sets the slaves freeand sells the slaves
The redbreast killsand kills itself againstthe windowSooner or later the blood in the breast will break the window into hundreds of pieces you can swallow wholeKeep swallowingThe redbreastloves you and wants youto remember the loveSo it makes you puke into the toilet blindI was blinded by loveAnd drowned in an empty bathtubspitting up birdshitCovered in red feathers • Sometimes the redbreast likes anting with lit cigarettes safety pins paper cuts God that feels goodIt wraps everything in pretty pink gauze the colorof fake sunset Look it is a pink soul!It wants to get naked and it wants it to hurtRed teeth red toesOpen mouthsWho keeps pressingmy head into the sidewalkinside the bathroomWho keeps the lights on the lights stay onWho dissolves on my tongueWho flies from my finger• The redbreast sits insidebehind your left eyebehind your right and cleansits babies with its beakScrubs its babies cleanShakes its tail feathers to scour the floor behind your forehead and scours the floor redMy brain is a cutterMy initials are beats per second Scrubbed down to zeroby the rubiesin the haloI whispered your name into the red air and you answered
The government spent a Patricia on me,“a huge waste,” it lamented, “when we couldhave been spending it on another Nixon,”the government spent all its beautyon the great light leap on the deer-crossing sign — there was hardly anybeauty left for anything else in America,and looking around them the governmentsaid, “Is there none left? Print more,”you are born, you barely contain yourself,you grow, inside you, someone spendsa billion to make prison more luxurious;inside you, someone spends a billionto keep libraries open one hour later;then oh god, you feel wonderful, you must be on welfare,the government spent its whole educationon me, at least that is how it feels right now,I am bursting with educational dollars,I am bursting with other dollars as well,I’m rounded up, I’m one long row of ohs,I get so many commas that the sentence doesn’t stop,the dollars in me are a map of  Missourimy mother can’t fold back up, oh no the mapis everywhere, but I know the way, I am hoton a trail, I am bursting with the dollarsthat put that knowing breath in drug dogs,all the spending of  the space program is in me,the stars seem especially close, this is becausethey are a government handout, they are spendingmillions on moonlight research, when I am PresidentI will cut the arts and let my right arm flow downhill,I am ready, there is nothing trivial about me left,I am eliminating the penny every second,a dollar is peeled off a roll of  thousands,it is the day, the mint of  it is in my mouth,I open it, completely fresh.
I was born as a woman, I talk you to death, or else your ear off,or else you to sleep. What do I have, all the timein the world, and a voice that swings brass backand forth, you can hear it, and a focal point wheremy face should be. What do I have, I have absolutepower, and what I want is your money, your drool,and your mind, and the sense of myself as a snake,and a garter in the grass. Every bone in the snakeis the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips.The first sound I make is silence, then sssssshhh, the first word I say is listen. Sheep shearers and accountants hypnotize the hardest,and lookout sailors who watch the sea, and the boyswho cut and cut and cut and cut and cut the grass.The writers who write page-turners, and the writerswho repeat themselves. The diamond-cutter kneelsdown before me and asks me to hypnotize him, andI glisten at him and glisten hard, and listen to me andlisten, I tell him. Count your age backward, I tell him.Become aware of your breathing, and aware of mine which will go on longer. Believe you are a baby till I tell you otherwise, then believeyou’re a man till I tell you you’re dirt. When a gunshotrings out you’ll lie down like you’re dead. When you hear, “He is breathing,” you’ll stand up again.The best dog of the language is Yes and protects you.The best black-and-white dog of the language is Yesand goes wherever you go, and you go where I say,you go anywhere. Why do I do it is easy, I am workingmy way through school. Give me the money for Modernism, and give me the moneyfor what comes next. When you wake to the fact that youhave a body, you will wake to the fact that not for long.When you wake you will come when you read the wordhard, or hard to understand me, or impenetrable poetry.When you put down the book you will come when youhear the words put down the book, you will come when you hear.
my mouth a cunt in reverse and my guts, nuts. I nose the dark nursery, belly for my dick spurting ink at shit. Fire. Arrow. Water. Shadow.
there was a remember when the mama was my girlthe mama was in my girl biding to turnmy girl turn mama when what I got turn to girl in hermy girl in my girl make my girl mama they both mineall three I remember a when when I only dreamed dreams but my dreams are remembers nowthey a whenthat when was when the girl I made of mama I made a mama with what I got I tell what I tell but I know what I know only a man make his dream a remember and ain’t I a manwhat’s mine is mine to turn to what I dream what I make mine to make mine I won’t ’bide what won’t turn

1 Touch each chakrain turn and say,“Nothing shocks me.” 2 Watching bombs fallon Syria,we feel serious,occupied,not preoccupiedas we werepreviously. 3 “Makes me end,where I begun,”wrote   John Donne,turning loveinto geometry.
As onemay be relievedby the myriadmarigold facesheld aloftbeside the freeway — their articulation — and, too,by the rushof notesfollowing their ownlikenessesin these headlongphrasesRelieved of what?Relieved of what?
Stiff stilts of   herself.Silver bag of   herselfwith turquoise giltmidriff.(Shake it butno more will fit.)Red lipstick linebetween the folds — precise — opposite baby’s softgurgling.Have you lost yourpasses?Greeks pictured the afterlifeas an insipid versionof  the world they knew.But they couldn’tsee this.Two women,with red mesh crestsatop white hair,enter the lounge area;one laughs, “I feellike we shouldsay something.”
1 The subject will claimthat she has been takento the wrong place.That the roomshe is brought back tois not the room she left.That these comings and goingsare happeningto someone else,are gathering momentumcontrolled by a secretmechanism.That she needs to tellsomeone. 2 I walk out the doorto the stone benchwithout meaning to(without meaning it?),each stepjarring my frameas it would anyone’s

Game of Thrones A man is only worth what people say he isand those Starks are good stock. They’ll knee-deep it.They famish the craving they are fathered by.Manning the forestry of life, they are steadfast and sturdy.When pungent or cruel, they sauce the ache.Light folds them in two. What I want to say is, I would meet you upon this.Let me, too, carry the token of the world. Tell me the secret of what comes next,and then take meriver river river
That was the week it didn’t stop snowing. That was the week five-fingered trees fell on houses & power lines broke like somebody waiting for payday in a snowstorm. That snow week, my daughter & I trudged over the broken branches fidgeting through snow like hungry fingers through an empty pocket. Over the termite-hollowed stump as squat as a flat tire. Over the hollow the fox dives into when we open the back door at night. That was the week of snow & it glittered like every Christmas card we could remember while my daughter poked around for the best place to stand a snowman. One with a pinecone nose. One with thumb-pressed eyes to see the whole picture once things warm up.
This sunlight on snow. This decrescendoof covered stumps & brush —stop for it. Stop before the sled end- over-ends down the chin of the hill —the way it always will at the rock ⅔ of the way down. Stop & shiver in it: the ring of snow inside gloves, the cusp of red forehead like a sun just waiting to top the hill. Every ill-built snowball waiting to be thrown, every bell-shaped angel stamped over the brown leaves. When my daughter ranges in winter, she works every dazzling angle — the crestfallen pinecones, the grizzled beards of bushes in the morning, a furnace’s windup huffing in this throat- clearing of snow.
Game of Thrones In this story, she is fire-born:knee-deep in the shuddering world.In this story, she knows no fear,for what is fractured is a near-bitten star,a false-bearing tree,or a dishonest wind.In this story, fear is a house gone dry.Fear is not being a woman. I’m no ordinary woman, she says.My dreams come true.And she says and she is and I say, yes, give me that.
Game of Thrones Follow where all is. / Follow the transfused. / Follow what is still and what is still-attracting.That light / That beauty / That love / That, that is massy-borne and rising up, like a drifting star.Like stars lift. / Like lifting stars. / Like the lifting of stars, I rose. I rise. Rose. Rose. Like a thing beyond words: satiated.Let lie in the ravage. / Let lie in what is ravaged-wrought.Why fear what hasn’t become?I beckon, like light. / Like a star, I will beckon. / You will oblige. / You will lend the want. You will eclipse my blinding. You will know nothing. Nothing. You will know nothing of what has been dark.
In nyc, we stalked fishes in filets of sounds: delivery engines & ashy doors clapping shut, vendorsknuckling fin & silhouette- shaped words into salty expectations. My daughter & I walked down a couple of  slim-bricked blocks that smelled like snapper & afro sheen with no afros in sight. On snaggletoothed streets, we double-took the wet alleys where things jumped off the hook like smart seafood before lunch. We parted the perfect & abundantly wintered streets. My daughter said, I knowthese parts
This is what it sounds like outside, fat geese and guinea hens holding hands.I am 31, which is very young for my age.That is enough to realize I’m a pencil that has learnedhow to draw the Internet. I explain squigglesdiagramming exactly how I feel and you are drawn to readin ways you cannot yet. Slow goes the drag of creation, how what’s within comes to be without,which is the rhythmic erection of essence. Life’s little deaths, petite orgasms, as the French nearly saidbut never came to. Feathers outstrip the weatheras we stand with binoculars inquiring how winged creatures can hold their blood to warmthwithout a proper insulation system overlaying circulation.That is, sans fat and simple wooden bones with hair glued on.Mostly though they pulsate on the horizons of backlit vision,where we only meet the subways with handshakes, the rainbow filters of downloaded electronica,the telephone poles as archaic checkpoints to past cultures.They don’t have screens to seek their cues in.We drift from one culture to another and fight the stitcheries of racism, classism, anti-Muslim terrorists among us, with overlaps in the complete dis-ease our bodiessettle into for next to no resistance.So we create something else. As in, roughshod moments of fake hatewill position a fluid hello of death rattlesthat settle for the injunction of existence and state: Here am I made manifest by not being you, by not going in the same unsteady destination, by not asking the questions or repeating the paintings that came before me, by not singing in the register of  your bubble bathsas you hug that person close in a wish to outlast bullets, even as the light leaves your eyes just a little next time we overlap paths.So the hens and geese make us think in terms of helpoutside, how they flap and move with fat ease in front of trains,across the chopping block, to the hungry winters of final leviathans,even as they land just so on the wires above us, and we go on complaining, murderous, too far out, unspoken.
We liked to stick it in a bb gun and shoot it. We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah, the poor man’s tanning lotion. Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die. We got funny at Clarion, flung each other’s underwear into the trees. Why was it we got naked there and nowhere else? Maybe we knew we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water. Maybe we knew we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we’d go under, and there would be nothing of return.
Even the gun shows are gone now, even the scrapyards, the darkest, farthest barns. The strip mall half empty since my elementary years abides only chemicals now, the lot sequestered behind fences, its metal tanks checked each September for leaks in the seals. I lost my virginity in a basement here, lostmy balance on a backhoe, had to pick the gravel out of my knees. For the prom, my date was the tank man just vaporizedin the heat storm, his data screen open to augmented porn. This morningin my Honda pedi-plane, I flew over where we used to sled, old hills oranged nowfor warning, only the edges still brown. I saw a denier sitting outside in a lawn chair, her hair so long it met the ground. There’s no idling inthe skyways now, which is why I can’t tell you if she was dying.
That we go back to life one day, the next,Some other century where we were alive,When music spelled itself out to us, oftenIncomplete, and nothing was more vagueThan the banality of  whom to love and loseIn line, the doppelgangers in rimless snow,Or even now, in summer, at day, by night,When something oblivious, replete, turnsBack at us in idolatrous quiet, so we seeWho in nullified particulars we really areAt a desk of our own making, filling in forSomeone else’s life sentence, blots dryingOn a silk tie having no meaning but today’s,When the loner puts his insomnia to rest.
You were my gym buddy ferreting along spotty florescent ramps.Misbegotten signals blinked out bumpkin lanes over sable grass.We passed through many things. Peach sirens, entryway orderlies.Mangled disposition-stations. Chief in disbelief was concrete love.Firmer still, a melee awkwardness that showed all registrants justhow we managed to pickpocket night. Then came dark crowds.Some doodled for the pad, debriefed what pumiced eyes meantin multi-dotted foreign rows. Buildings like a spider’s clothes.Later, we sped backward. A maw orchard, windless in the mind,boomed electronic lifts. I spied you at the prow of some sensation.I declined to call another name. Pelting noise flew off fairy citadels.Clocks, first thought abducted, were switched. Dialogues dispelled.My love heard a mug crash on the countertop of Long Island Sound.Our people became as ones lost. Not many rebounded with pledge,not many fetched familiars, stretched legs, reread white meetings.O stream, ring your ears. Handsome tubers, go ahead and wig out.Modern territories click like a mouse. Body becomes human body.On a skinny avenue I hushed up pyramidal steps older than sorcery.You know how I want to share a dust ball with misty partner.Dance one fabled evening and hear the skylark do something.Picnics bended over, they happen below. Swings parks rung.I inject chlorine into my memory-parts with lady satisfaction.Are you gay? A political campaign sanctioned a quart of moose.So stars soon quarreled back to the travel section of the North.I ignored that and opened my lips for a job to crunch and pushat me, seeing the flat spacey wherewithal of disconnected items.I want a second act. What can I say but this was my second act.Must wrangle a look-see. The sign revenging its timely lazinessin the ruffled strut of an accusing pillow. I hibernate in phraseas perfect as the mood of the blue lotus flower. Public aspects.The last shipment of vhs tapes left its factory on this day in 2008or 2009. Meanwhile, delis around town don’t go like they used to.Who cares if I can’t hose you down my you, my Newfoundland.And George Washington, someone we can’t really know, rowsover famed waters, wondering what his face will be, not inthe future, not for the monthly book clubs. But as sovereign:as beast with dunce cap. I will dress you down in fresh lettuceand gobble your ear off with smutty keys principled as music.The marching saints won’t bother in battalion to much know.We make of him so much hackneyed affection, dress woundsas if equivocal all need. Hunger passes through to the other side.Entertaining pals you wouldn’t call but couldn’t not think to.A disfigured face’s humiliated psychic debris sprawls on gussy rug.It talks you into needing solace while cup passes from sleep to sleep.The positional plot warps but is the same. The deluxe mattress driftson gravitational subtleties like the rest of us, practicing the gut’s banjo.No, in fact, I don’t know how he ever crossed the channels or canalsfrom that stout city. I don’t really know if I ever really need to know.One thing we share is worshipping the image of a person we never knew.
After Cyndi Lauper I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Autumn encircles a confusion that’s nothing new.Flash back to warring eyes almost letting me drown.Out of which, a picture of me walking in a foreign head. I can’t hear what you said. Then you say: Cold room,the second that life unwinds. A tinctured vase returnsto grass. Secrets doled out deep inside a drum beat out of time. Whatever you said was ghostly slow likea second hand unwinding by match light. Lying backto the wheel, I shirked confusion. You already knew. Suitcases surround me. You picture me too far ahead.Yet I can’t hear what you’ve said. You say: Doldrums,some secondhand wine. Love, you knew my precincts. The stone house turned out black, the scenic tunicswere deep inside. Who said home? Oh, I fall behind.That very secret height blinds. Lying like a diamond, the cock-thickening of you: hunchbacked arms, eyesleft behind. You’ll picture me walking far, far ahead.I hear what you’ve done. You said: Go slow. I feebly bleed out. Matthew’s sermon turned out to be glass.I wander in windows soft as Sour Patch. No rewind.But something is out of touch and you, you’re Sinbad. That second date totally mine. Lying in a vacuum,the thickening plot thinks of you. The future’s not new.touchdown. Lights. All those celebrity behinds. A suitcase full of weeds. You picture me coming to.You: too close to me to hear what you’ve already said.Then you say: The second wind unwinds. Doves whistle, halving their dovely backs, watching out windows to seeif I’m okay. See it, the dulcet moment? I’m like thickettinkering for you. Fusion nothing you knew. Flash back to seagull-beguiled eyes. Sometimes talking to a barrenlad. Such music so unbearably droll. The hand is mine.Random picture frames off the darkness. A Turing machine? Scotch-taping through windows, stolen from deep insiderum-beaded thyme. You say also: Behind sequins & hinds . . .And I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Clematis enclosures, walking with news, pollinated by a secondary grief, while something reminds you of our love.
In our house we live with Arlene. My little sister has a plan.She has what they call a beginner’s mind. She sees everything from an un-given-up perspective. I’m frightened; I know Arlene better than anyone; she knows me better. Esme says if I’m scared we can’t win. But I am scared. Arlene drags me over to the window where the black mould has made a map of Australia. Australia gives me trouble breathing,it’s so far away. Arlene points it out and I get the feeling in my chest, my whole life in there twisted up like a snake. It could bite me or her. She puts a hand on my breastbone. You’re not strong. I want to tell her we can look after ourselves. I want to tell her I’m in charge now, but I can still see the dark blur at the edges. I don’t sleep anymore, my head is full of this insomniac light. I lie awake watching over my sisters and I listen to them breathe. Esme whispers that I should wake her if I need to. I say I will, but I never do. Even when I sleep I dream I can’t sleep and I’m standing there looking down at them, the night pouring from my hands. Esme has a future in mind. She’s always laughing. She gets up early and makes buttermilk pancakes using normal milk soured with lemon juice. She tries things out. Arlene tells us to stay away from sharp things or we’ll cut ourselves. Esme does what she likes. She grates apple for a new recipe and cuts her knuckle and laughs. I don’t know if I can live my life. I don’t know if I can look after someone as unafraid as Esme. I don’t know how to change what I do, the way someone eating soup will, out of habit, bite down. Esme laughs; she’s serving up apple pancakes with banana and maple syrupand she says, You are a whole person. A row of mornings fan out.And the pancakes are sweet and slightly gummy with a salt edge.
Is this mountain all rock, or are there any villages on it?These are some of the things I said to her.We bake because it is a way of overcoming.In the journey of zest, I see myself.On the news every day people are standing up screamingor lying down screaming while others remain calm.She pointed out that I had not made eye contactwith her at all. Then I cried properly in a short burst.This is the worst example of any circumstance ever,noted a journalist in his notebook.Let butter and chocolate be a wish not to die!I implored the bain-marie. She likened me to a sieve.I clutch all my poems to my chest and count themagain and again. I am kneeling like a small dog.What’s going on with this modern worldand the right wife not even knowingwhat the left wife is doing? Now all you have to dois cut off the legs. After an absence, after a hard task,after the way the hand turns, like this —There was so much I couldn’t contain.She asked me how I was feeling in my bodyat this moment; I said tense in my whole trunk area.A strong smell of white wine. She said it came froman impulse that she often used to have when she firststarted practicing. She said she believed feelingsare held in the body. She asked me what was going onwith my breath and I realized I was sort of holding it.Like the boxes in the cupboard. “Enough” can get bigger.How much bigger, though? When I sayI’ve had enough, how will you know when to stop?
Just seen, running, and silver-grayalong the top tube of a fence between myrtles and me,too slinky for a bird and even at this distanceunmistakably a quadruped andnimble, some sort of unspoiled animal, but which?It ran as if awayfrom a threat, peril was everywhere,a footsole crunches it, it is mangledby a tire’s treads, hawk scoops it, turkey buzzardpecks at it, no speech mitigates its pains,even the cat fools with it, until, inedible,it is kicked into the gutter. There she goes,the slinky silver-gray Atalanta of reptilesvanishes in no time, for the windwhisks from her feet such tenuous gusts of air —brisk now where turnpikes stretch their webs,and not forever can an earthinessso sweet as this propel such grace.She’ll have got to the mantis eggs by now,at each gulp of hatchlingshe slowly blinks with satisfaction.
I got a letter from the government.It said let there be night.I went through your trash.There was night, all right.I consider how your light is spent.I have butterflies a little bit.I have some pills I take for it.I’ve been up since four the day before.Agony’s a cinch to sham.Don’t worry about the environment.Let it kill us if  it can.I give a tiny tinker’s damn.I put the ox behind the cart.Consume away my snow-blind heart.Fastened to a service animalit is waiting for the beep.It is waiting for the right to change.Hello, I know you’re there, pick up.
Half of the Beatles have fallenand half are yet to fall.Keith Moon has set. Hank Williamshasn’t answered yet.Children sing for Alex Chilton.Whitney Houston’s left the Hilton.Hendrix, Guru, Bonham, Janis.They have a tendency to vanish.Bolan, Bell, and Boon by car.How I wonder where they are.Hell is now Jeff Hanneman’s.Adam Yauch and three Ramones.[This space held in reservefor Zimmerman and Osterberg,for Bruce and Neil and Keith,that sere and yellow leaf.]Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings,Stinson, Sterling, Otis Redding.Johnny Thunders and Joe Strummer,Ronnie Dio, Donna Summer.Randy Rhoads and Kurt Cobain,Patsy Cline and Ronnie Lane.Poly Styrene, Teena Marie.Timor mortis conturbat me.
were some quite creepy men — one used to lie downon the dayroom floor, then get us all to pile on top of him — and a basilisk-eyed matron in a blue uniform with a watch dangling beneath her rightcollarbone. Thump thumpthump went her footsteps, making the asbestos ceiling tiles quiver, and mewant to hide, or run like a rabbitin a fire . . . What we lost, we lostforever. A minor devil played at chess with us, forcing the pieces to levitate and hover, flourishing swords, in midair. I’d grasp them now, the orotund bishop, the stealthyknight, the all-knowing queen, but they dissolvein my fingers, refuse to return to the board, to their squares.
. . . I drank and was surprised to see what looked like tea leaves at the bottom of the cup . . . minuteslater a great warm green wave or cloud began advancing towards me. “Look at the boats on his shirt,” I felt myself tryingto say, in Spanish, or Moroccan, yet knowing I knewnone of the words . . .   it was bright morning, and the train had arrivedand emptied at Chamartín before I finally pried open my eyes, and sawon the carriage floornothing but an unfamiliar pair of trainers: crackedwhite leather, with three green stripes. “Mister — or rather Herr — Adolf Dassler made these,” I thought. But whichof the two friendly men with whom I’d shared the carriage, and some wine,had been wearing them? I ponderedthis awhile, then fellasleep again . . . and did Herr Dassler visit, personally, all the cities inscribedon his trainers? Koln, Dublin, Paris, Montreal, Kopenhagen, Bern, Amsterdam . . . and fit the trainer to the city? Rom, like these, Vienna, London . . .     Señor Dassler, I am dreaming of youon a bench on a platform in a train station in Madrid, unableto wake up, a pair of your trainers, that weren’t mine, but now are,on my feet . . .     I am swimming, Herr Dassler, in your wake, though I fearyou are dead, a corpse washed clean by the numbing tides with three slanting stripes emblazoned on your chest, your passport and your wallet drifting to the ocean floor . . .     I discoveredin a pocket — oh! the kindness of strangers! — about forty pesetas; but casting around for a joke or silver lining, I found nada — or niente, as I put itto my shoes . . . closing my eyes, I imagined fingers untying and easing off my Reeboks, as the train hurtled through the darkness, the men trying them on in turn, the ex-owner of these flexing his toes, padding up and down, nodding approval. They must have whispered like parents, as they lifted my shirt and unfastenedmy money belt, or perhaps, more like surgeons, they usedscissors, or a knife . . .     snicker-snack! I watchedthe vorpal blade tracearabesques across my breastbone, hover, then slidebetween two ribs. Chug-chugwent the trains. The heat was building, the potionat last wearing off. How light I’d be, I now began to reason, as quick and canny as a lizard, a perfectly camouflaged lizard, who’d shed a skin and acquired a new way of walking.
A film is always like a book and not like a conversation. — Christian Metz As I saw your face nearingmy face, snow fell througha keyhole and opened the door.We went inside and watchedwindows wax green and gold.Spring, we decided, was moreoppressive than winter withits alyssum and cloverand the sheer weight of lifecrowding us off the page.We stayed in bed for yearsand took our cures patientlyfrom each other’s cups.We read Bleak House andstored our money in socks.Nothing opened as we did.
The cinema is a specific language. — Christian Metz What the body might guess,what the hand requests,what language assumesbecomes amulet,which is to sayI am carrying your facein a locket in a boxto a virtual locationguarded by kestrels,suggesting the scene’sgeography of love and dirt,trees ripe with darknessand bones’ white luster.In the moonlit blue house,where snow won’t fallunless called upon,grace enters as requested,lands next to you, grasped,as if love were a reflexsimple as weather.
The shed behind the barn behind the red cottage I waitfor her in the fescue grass the rye I hear it grow over meWait for my friends in the distance on fire their full headsof rust (I love how the clothing drips off them I hear myself say)If the beekeeper doesn’t come chasing behind with a hatchetI’ll wait behind Cobb’s barn watching the distant housesShe will come down this road my shadow is paving for hera stalk of honey and the rye grass grows from her arms(She was raised in these hills looking down on Elk Creek)and behind her the bluegrass it’s reaching to touch her ankle
1 Rain fell as a glass breaks,something suddenly everywhere at the same time. 2 To live like a painting looked into from more than one angle at once —eye to eye with the doorway,down at the hair,up at your own dusty feet. 3 “This is your house,”said my bird heart to my heart of the cricket, and I entered. 4 The happy see only happiness,the living see only life,the young see only the young,as lovers believethey wake always beside one also in love. 5 However often I turned its pages,I kept ending up as the same two sentences of the book:The being of some is: to be. Of others: to be without.Then I fell back asleep, in Swedish. 6 A sheep grazing is unimpressed by the mountainbut not by its flies. 7 The griefof what hasn’t yet happened —a door closed from inside.The weight of the grass dividingan ant’s five-legged silencewalking through it. 8 What is the towel, what is the water, changes,though of we three, only the towel can be held upside down in the sun. 9 “I was once.”Said not in self-pity or praise.This dignity we allow barn owl, ego, oyster.
I have been known to birth a mountain whole,a range of them in my belly,I popped them out one by one.The blood-cut son born black,I could not believe the wholeness of him,the crushed diamond of his face.And then the other,who flew from me, a shooting star;a twin mirror girl, whose orchid faceopened and opened and opened.There were more of them,one born of water, one of fire,one for every element.But now my mountain days are done.The red night clouds, the afterbirth,the snail shell whorls of them.The unborns we named:Beinn Narnain, Ben Vane, Beinn Ime,Ben Vorlich, and Beinn Bhuidhe
There is no escaping the storm of rosescrisscrossed on the split-cracked wallof a dead fountain arch.There is no escaping their uterine balls,expanding as a reminder of the children I never had.If you listen carefully you can hear the vibrations,the heart drone of their petal jaw-harps.And there’s no going back,no indiscovery of Marsor these red planets brooding before me,light predators, sun-hatchedand bloodening like the fists of womenwho have gone to war.
And how do you survive? Your long throat, your red-rag-to-a-bull head?You rise heavy in the night, stars drinkingfrom your poppy neck.Your henna silks serenade me under the breadth of the Pyrenees.You move like an opera,open like sea anemones.You are earth’s first blood. How the birds love you,I envy your lipstick dress.You are urgent as airmail, animal red,Ash Wednesday crosses tattooed on your head.Your butterfly breath releases your scents, your secrets, bees blackening your mouthas your dirty red laundryall hangs out.
After Alfred Noyes  unmountUmber tail mount, Seven bubbles, sad Balk of night,Red tulip lunges. Incandescent felt tips,Small ochre wavesIn the napeOf greening brick.Simile-clad branchesVascular, the leatherCusp of AprilOr glass leaves: Nest of pagesIn a sweep. woofCoil helix rain. Congregation gully up.Cold steel compressHer rosy ways.Rattle a cocoon,Three twins fallingCombat lost napWool in Woolf. Brittle sheep tossed,Biotic petrol lagoon:Morning sex lyric Ever after umber:Where the knobby Moose pins glisten. perroquetHooked rug orGursky’s 99 cent.By the thousandField, bunch, vase,Swooped pink necklineTailored as crinolineFringed, parrot, RembrandtOvoid domesticated bowl.Swivel in redArmless white linen,Visualization of unnatural Interactive selection bias:What the daffodilCould not accomplish. swivelOwls curtain his Future, a violent Wave rumbling beneathThe brown floorboards.I’m a bad Mother, impatient, tiny-Fisted body crumpledAgainst my chest,Aquatic gulps ofAir, the owls,Prickling our chests.The bad fingerPoints back, pointsAt the pointer. chiselAfter Steve McCaffery’s “Tyrolean Night”Suddenness is other,A numerical chillSphere machine, aTall Bashō bathes.Pond jumps in To frog, insults Are all sex, Is mute sagas, Is daylight upended, Drunken, you sang The totem up:The wind did What shrewd words So rarely do.
If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death, norWill you feel the tulip’s skin, nor the soft gravel Of childhood under cheek. You will have writhed Across the page for a hard couplet, a firm rhyme, assHigh as any downward dog, and cutlass arms Lashing any mother who tries to pass: Let’s be frank About the cost of spurs, mothers like peonies Whirling in storm drains, families sunk before Reaching open water. The empty boudoir Will haunt, but not how you imagine it will. Nothing, not even death frees mothers From the cutting board, the balloons, their Lack of resistance, thoughts, he said, quickAs tulips staggering across the quad.She heard, I like my women splayed Out, red. Read swollen, domesticated,Wanting out. The tulips were never warm My loves, they never smelled of spring, They never marked the path out of loneliness, Never led me home, nor to me, nor away From what spring, or red, or tulips Could never be.
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,So that in his spine a memory of wingsWill make his shoulders tense & bendLike a thing already flownWhen the bracelets of another school of loveAre fastened to his wrists,Make a law that doesn’t have to waitLong until someone comes along to break it.So that in jail he will have the time to readHow the king was beheaded & the hawk that rodeThe king’s wrist died of a common cold,And learn that chivalry persists,And what first felt like an insult to the fleshWas the blank ‘o’ of love.Put the fun back into punishment.Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.So that no empty court will make a  judge recallIce fishing on some overcast bay,Shivering in the cold beside his father, it oughtTo be an interesting law,The kind of thing that no one can obey,A law that whispers “Break me.”Let the crows roost & caw.A good judge is an example to us all.So that the patrolman can still whistle“The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teethAnd even show some faint gesture of respectWhile he cuffs the suspect,Not ungently, & says things like ok,That’s it
What I remember is a carhop on Pico hurryingToward a blue Chevy,A crucifix dangling from its rearview mirrorThat jiggled as the driver brushedA revolver against it, in passing, before tucking itBehind his back & beginning to joke with her.What I rememberIs the smooth arc the gun made & the wayJesus shimmied to the rhythm. • Someday I’ll go back to the place depictedBy the painting, boarded over by the layers of paintAnd abandoned,And beneath the pastel yellows I’ll findThe Bayside Motel & the little roomWith the thin, rumpled coverlet,And sit down, drinking nothing but the night airBy the window, & wait for her to finishDressing, one earring, then another,And wait until the objects in the room take backTheir shapes in the dawn,And wait untilEach rumpled crease in the sheets & pillowcaseIs as clear as a gift again, & wait — At a certain moment, that room, then all the roomsOf the empty Bayside,Will turn completely into light.• I place a cup on the sill & listen for the faintTock of china on wood, & ...That moment of light is already this one — Sweet, fickle, oblivious, & gone:My hand hurrying across the page to get thereOn time, that placeOf  undoing — • Where the shriek of  the carhop’s laugh,And the complete faith of the martyr, as he spins & shimmies in the light,And the inextricable candor of doubt by which Diebenkorn,One afternoon, made his presence knownIn the yellow pastels, then wiped his knuckles with a rag —  Are one — are the salt, the nowhere & the cold — The entwined limbs of  lovers & the cold wave’s sprawl.
The rain is haunted;I had forgotten.My children are two hours abedAnd yet I riseHearing behind the typing of the rain,Its abacus and digits,A voice calling me again,Softer, clearer.The kids lie buried under duvets, soundAsleep. It isn’t them I hear, it’sSomething formless that fidgetsBeyond the window’s benighted mirror,Where a negative develops, where reflectionHolds up a glass of spirits.White noisePrecipitates.Rain is a kind of recollection.Much has been shed,Hissing indignantly into the ground.It is the listeningBelates,Haunted by these fingertaps and sighsBehind the beaded-curtain glistening,As though by choices that we didn’t make and never wanted,As though by the dead and misbegotten.
So, I thought,as the door was unlocked and the landlord disappeared (no,he actually disappeared)and I got to examine the room unobserved. Thereit stoodin its gray corner: the narrow bed, sheetsthe color of old aspirin.Maybe all this had occurredsomewhere inside mealready, orwas just about to.Is there a choice?Is there even a difference? Familiar,familiar but notyet remembered ...The small narrow bed.I had often wonderedwhere I would find it, andwhat it would look like.Don’t you?It was so awfulI couldn’t speak. Thenmaybe you ought to lie down for a minute, I heard myselfthinking. I meanif  you are having that much troublefunctioning. And whenwas the last timewith genuine sorrowand longing to changeyou got on your knees?I could get some work donehere, I shrugged;I had done it before.I would work without cease.Oh, I would stay awakeif only from horrorat the thought of wakingup here. Ma,a voice spoke from the darknessin the back seat wherea long thin man lay,arms crossedon his chest,while they cruised slowly up and downstraining to make out the numbersover unlighted doors,the midnight doctor’s;in his hurt mindhe was already mergingwith a black Mississippiof mercy, the sweat pouring off himas though he’d been dousedwith a bucket of ice wateras he lay sleeping. “I saw the light,”they kept screaming. “DoI saw the light!”Ma — there ain’t no lightI don’t see no light.
Then he stoppeddead on the sidewalkastoundedto overhear himselfsay quite distinctlyI quit,in his own words — be glad you weren’t there.Pandemoniumin the cerebralcombs, unprecedentedmass desertions, solarflare-ups.It saiditselfactually;the lips moved not, no thought wastaken. With massive finalityand apropos of absolutelynothing it came,a cruel blessing,the ultimate lownote of an organmade of ice or a passingnight trainof black holes. Hekept lying there — what else was hesupposed to do? — with watchpressed to one ear, emittinga molecular hum. (Ever wonderhow they fit a wholehive inside oneof them?) Minutehand starting to disappear,such was its speedby now; on his facean expressionof guarded rapture.No one could do a thingfor him now. They’d stop,gaze downin disgustand concern, a moment beforethey hurried on or,without looking,adroitly movedaround him, the way you woulddog shit. Invariablyin such cases there is a linethat no one crosses.You know whatI’m getting at. Mainlyeveryone just stands aroundand waits for the arrivalof the ambulance; the mind simply stops, nothing,silence. Thenthe most silver,the tiniestsoundof a fracturelike that of an ice cubedropped in vodkacan be heardaround the world;people freezeat whatever they’re doing, and bowtheir minds, those persistentillusions in pain,or shame. But allis soon forgotten,the sunlight appearsall at once likea great shadowand floats with the gas-like hushthroughout the twelve spokes,the brilliant yellow darknessof the twelve candlelithallways foreverabandoned, foreveremanating out fromthe one centralhexagonal chamberso much larger than allthe rest, in whichthe young queen liesdreaming, amazed,eyes open wideinsideher lead-lined matchboxrocking bed,tits updead, immovablesow, maggotin color.
On one occasion Yūgen of Ise Province was offering to share, for a night or two, the comforts of his home with me when a distant, 
bemused expression came over his face as though at the recollection of a joke told him earlier that day; then, to a degree I would not have thought possible in one whose normal manner was so formal, that studiedly dour professorial expression gave way for an instant to one that positively beamed, illuminated from within by the sound of a beloved voice. So worn out, not even sure I was on the right road, 
I forgot myself awhile watching in weary amazement as his wife came and went, the two of them giving the impression of having long perfected some grave and complex dance known only to them, one of accord and the affection of two people moving hand-in-hand in the same direction, both possessed by desire while knowing themselves to be the source of that desire. But I am so tired, I heard my own voice say, one of them, that startlingly cruel, intrusive voice I hate, darkening everything, how sick I am of listening to it, and of having to go on! But after some time had passed once again I forgot all about it as I sat there, the witness of this marvel that brought peace to my heart or, perhaps, a hidden joy of my own, one I had so long considered extinct. When Yūgen fell on hard times and was dragged down into the most humiliating poverty, his wife made up her mind one day to have her long beautiful hair cut short so that she could sell it and he could afford to invite all their friends to an evening of laughter and drinking, renga competitions, and the conversation of those who have known one another for a long time, the kind look and humorous word that make it seem possible to live again. I think of her sometimes. Moon, come down andcome alone. I have to tell you allabout Akechi’s wife. — Bashō, translated by Franz Wright
Schliemann is outside, digging. He’s notnot calling a spade a spade.The stadium where the Greeks once playedused to stand on this very spot. Each night, Penelope, operatingin mythical time, unspools the light gray orb Schliemann has just unearthed. Come daylight, her hands will restitch it. The suitors sigh, waiting. And each night I’d watch as my hero curledhimself round home plate, as if he were going to bat for me. And I’d hold my breath, knowinga strong enough shot might be heard round the world. One must imagine Penelope. One must imagine Penelope happy.One must imagine Schliemann excavatingthe dugouts and outfields of Troy, carbon-dating the box score stats and the ticket stubshe pulls from the lurid dirt. He rubsthe remains of Achilles’s rage on his shirt.What does not kill you can still hurt.Penelope’s suitors are striking out,one after another. Their sad swings and misses. They can’t even get to first base. She’ll cutthe stitches once more, then blow them all kisses.Odysseus won’t care that the orb is undone.He’ll take a swing at it with all his might.The ball takes flight. Odysseus takes flight.It feels to Penelope like he’s been gonesince the dawn of mankind, but he’s already zoomed round third and flies like an arrow toward home, as the unearthly orb trails its guts in the air — the yarn fanning out like Penelope’s hair — not knowing yet whether to fall foul or fair.
found pinsby the millionswhile meticulouslystrippinga portionof Manhattanworked overby women whomended betweenappointments:the harlot’sartifacts includeextracts ofold waxpaper wrappersfilled with pinafter pin,— imagineall sixteenthsspilledfrom the inchruler;imagine eacha singularspokeof tin,each one fell strokein a ledger;less thana centof metaltotal,a dowry. Hernicks of time,dropped stitches,poke-throughstaken in,how eachman mayhave fitagainstthe satin hemof her memory.
For Detroit There are birds here, so many birds here is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girl’s hands tear and toss like confetti. No, I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can’t stop smiling about and no his smile isn’t much like a skeleton at all. And no his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-dance as anything else, but they won’t stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in that birdless city.
The rat traps emptied, the grain troughs filled.The distance between sheep shed and my own ice-melt dripping on the matequals the diameter of moonlight squaredon his face as he looks upand finds me again. Sayshe’s sure I’d been swallowedby the elements, says he’d beenabout to come looking. I step intothe warm. Two baas from out backwhere I’d worked. Two tufts of woolhe lifts from my hair. In just such a manner are sleek blue wordsslyly acquired by a wispywhiter-than-snow page. He’s seen ithappen. Seen a tear of mine, then two,well up and slip loose as the little boat of orgasmveers into the vortex.
(through smoke) My mother became an ornithologistwhen the grackle tumbled through barbecue smokeand fell at her feet. Soon she learnedwhy singers cage birds; it can take weeksto memorize a melody — the first days lost as they mopeand warble a friendless note,the same tone every animal memorizeshours into breathing. It’s a notea cologne would emit if the bottle was struckwhile something mystical was alignedwith something even more mysticalbut farther away. My father was an astronomerfor forty minutes in a rowthe first time a bus took us so farfrom streetlights he could point out constellationsthat may or may not have been Draco,Orion, Aquila, or Crux.When they faded I resented the sun’s excess,a combination of fires I couldn’t smell.The first chemist was a perfumerwhose combinations, brushedagainst pulse points, were unlockedby quickening blood. From stolen perfumesI concocted my personal toxin.It was no more deadly than as much waterto any creature the size of a roach. I grew suspiciousof my plate and lighter Bunsen burner,the tiny vials accumulating in my closet.I was a chemist for monthsbefore I learned the differencebetween poisoned and drowned.When my bed caught fireit smelled like a garden.
on thoth’s tits From Sonnet 75 (“So are you to my thoughts as food to life”) A groovy day, a fish fillet, an elf hair,A cosmonaut, a microdot, a hoedown,A trusty door, the finest whore on welfare,A neocon who’s keeping on the lowdown,A purple fist, a Federalist, a sunspot,A bird that’s got a big big butt to study,A guy named Toots, ten dumb galoots, a gunshot,Die Fledermaus by good ol’ Strauss (my buddy),A grinning troll, a real a-hole, a smiler,A dude who knows a gushing hose is funny,An underdressed (no tie, no vest) John Tyler,A sexy flirt, a cowboy shirt — oh honey!I’ll flip you for a dinosaur, my sweeties,When Uncle Pete lets Usher eat our Wheaties.uh huh: hi, hula tooth From Sonnet 135 (“Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will”) Will refried catnip addicts find a cure? Will daytime televangelists go broke? Will Algorithmic Horses go on tour? Will nineteen shekels buy one thin, thin Coke?Will innovative inverts be reported? Will weasel-human hybrids rent a maid? Will hesitating oxen get aborted? Will analysts of real estate get laid?Will hoochie-coochie nuns remove their mink? Will enemies of hotness shut it down? Will tame aphasic mynahs learn to think? Will Hi-Ho hunt the hound in Ho-Ho town?Will Willy Loman eat a thousand ants? Will Willa Cather do that nasty dance?
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?It’s the bomb saying here is your father.Now here is your father insideyour lungs. Look how lighterthe earth is — afterward.To even write the word fatheris to carve a portion of the dayout of a bomb-bright page.There’s enough light to drown inbut never enough to enter the bones& stay. Don’t stay here, he said, my boybroken by the names of flowers. Don’t cryanymore. So I ran into the night.The night: my shadow growingtoward my father.
South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.  Milkflower petals on the street like pieces of a girl’s dress.May your days be merry and bright ...He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips. Open, he says. She opens. Outside, a soldier spits out his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all
Recall the carousel. Its round and round.Its pink lights blinking off and on. The children’s faces painted garish colors againstan institutional wall. And the genetics. The We won’t be here too long  ...    Do not step off  ...The carousel? Do you recall? As ifwe were our own young parents suffering againafter so many hundreds of hours of bliss. And even the startling fact that what had always been feared might come to pass: A familiar sweater in a garbage can.A surgeon bent over our baby, wearing a mask. But surely you recall how happily and for how longwe watched our pretty hostages go round. They waved at us too many times to count.Their dancing foals. Their lacquered mares. Even a blue-eyed hunting hound was still allowed back then.
First Architect of the jungle & Author of pastel slums,Patron Saint of rust,You have become too famous to be read.I let the book fall behind me until it becomesA book again. Cloth, thread, & the infinite wood.Don’t worry. Don’t worry.In the future, everyone, simply everyone,Will be hung in effigy.The crepe paper in the high school gym will beBlack & pink & feathery,Rainbow trout & a dog’s tongue. In effigy. This,For example, was written in memory of ...But of whom? Brecht gasping for air in the street?Truman dancing alone with his daughter?Goodbye, little century.Goodbye, riderless black horse that trotsFrom one side of  the street to the other,Trying to find its wayOut of  the parade.Forgive me for saluting youWith a hand still cold, sweating,And resembling, as I hold it up & a heavy sleepFills it, the body of someoneCurled in sleep as the procession passes.Excuse me, but at the end of our complete belief,Which is what you required of us, don’t we deserveA good belly laugh? Don’t we deserveA shout in the street?And this confetti on which our history is being written,Smaller & smaller, less clear every moment,And subject to endless revision?Under the circumstances, & becauseIt can imagine no other life, doesn’t the hand,Held up there for hours,Deserve it?No? No hunh? No.
After Seferis Since we still had a littleOf the rusk left, what foolsTo eat, against the rules,The Sun’s slow-moving cattle,Each ox huge as a tank — A wall you’d have to siegeFor forty years to reachA star, a hero’s rank.We starved on the back of the earth,But when we’d stuffed ourselves,We tumbled to these delves,Numbskulls, fed up with dearth.
In the frozen square, the student asks me if I will sell him the books from my backpack. He hides them under his winter coat. Steam rises from the whole wheat rolls we break open at the breakfast table. We drink hot apple tea and pronounce the skyline “charming.” In a jail a man counts the visible bones, and recounts them in the blaze of morning. To turn a self to light proves painful — each piece must be dissected in turn; you pass through every feeling imaginable, so many you might make a dictionary —  dread to disgust, delight to degradation. The prisoner remembers wanting only to read as if in a fever —  running fingers over pyramids of words as if he might translate himself from this life to a more vivid existence in which he cuts open the pages with a knife in plain sight of everyone like a man eating meat and potatoes at the dinner table. Not that world; this one where blue light and sharpened files, where identikit and stamps on passports, where the book in his back- pack is a crime, and I have sold him down the river for ideas I barely value — the volumes flung carelessly across my hotel room, while he picks mushrooms on the edge of dread, pallid ghosts of what won’t speak or be spoken. Or where I remember what it is to be present in the world, and I turn away, unable to bear it — so much light and dread, so much in the darkness growing or simply how hard to ever remain in place.
Someone buried red slippers under the floorboardsand the mice nested in them. The floors splintered no matterhow many cans of deck paint we used. And one nightat the Embajada I broke a tooth, and the very nextnight three teenagers were shot dead as they sat ata booth by the window eating mofongo. The neighborwoman used to sing a funny song from the fortiesabout a “road” and “clear day,” a fast car and a womanwith a pistol. You could see her back had been broken,and she dragged her left foot behind her down thestairs to the mail room. And Junior began smoking crack after his church on Columbus failed and startedgoing by his birth name which was  Jesus, until hefell in love with Irma of the hideous rabbit-fur-and-white-leather jacket, who stopped the cars by wavingher watery hands, smoothing her moth-bitten hairfrom her moon-pale face, the violet lipstick she always wore, until she wound up drowned in the EastRiver, and no one would say if it was suicide ormurder. But Junior said there were eels inside her andbegan preaching again, doped on the corner. Mr.Rodriguez fired him, though he didn’t want to, and afterMr. Rodriguez often looked sweaty and pale as he labored to move stuff to the basement, which he had once done with Junior to help him. We painted our rooms cinnamon, Aegean blue, repainted them eggshell, gris-perle.We fought, and you tore all my letters and diaries andsprinkled them out the window where they landed onthe roof of your car, plastered there by a violent summer storm. It took hours to scrape them off; I weptand Mr. Rodriguez gave me a small plastic-wrappedpacket of Kleenex and a month later you wound up in St.Luke’s on lockdown and Junior caught pneumonia, died that November. He was thirty-eight, though wehad believed him older. They buried him in CalvaryCemetery in Queens. Once I rode a cab out that way — we got lost, so many ticking minutes among theslender white spikes of the graves. The red slippers — they must have been for dancing, thin soled as if withmouse skin, a powder inside that might have been talc,rosin, or years of plaster dust, a piece of   broken ribbon,black at the edges as if   burned off or torn and smeared withshoe polish. Or the mice had gnawed it. And yousaid “The name of the film,” and I said I thought it was astory older by far, a girl who puts on the shoes and cannotget them off, who skips down a road, then another andacross the world, until her feet fall off, and her handsand they make her wooden ones.
They came as Congo, Guinea, & Angola, feet tuned to rhythms of a thumb piano. They came to work fields of barley & flax,livestock, stone & slab, brick & mortar, to make wooden barrels, some going from slave to servant & half-freeman.They built tongue & groove — wedged into their place in New Amsterdam. Decades of seasons changed the cityfrom Dutch to York, & dream-footed hard work rattled their bones. They danced Ashanti. They lived& died. Shrouded in cloth, in cedar & pine coffins, Trinity Church owned them in six & a half acresof sloping soil. Before speculators arrived grass & weeds overtook what was most easily forgotten,& tannery shops drained there. Did descendants & newcomers shoulder rock & heave loose gravelinto the landfill before building crews came, their guitars & harmonicas chasing away ghosts at lunch break?Soon, footsteps of lower Manhattan strutted overhead, back & forth between old denials & new arrivals,going from major to minor pieties, always on the go. The click of heels the tap of a drum awaking the dead.
I’ve come to this one grassy hillin Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,to place a few red anemones& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave.A borrowed line transported me beneatha Babylonian moon & I found myselflucky to have the shadow of a coatas warmth, listening to a poet’s songof Jerusalem, the hum of a red stringCaesar stole off Gilgamesh’s lute.I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.The land I come from they also dreamtbefore they arrived in towering shipsbattered by the hard Atlantic winds.Crows followed me from my home.My coyote heart is an old runagateredskin, a noble savage, still Lakota,& I knew the bow before the arch.I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses& insects singing to me. My sacred deadis the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouthtelling me of the roads behind & ahead.I go back to broken treaties & smallpox,the irony of barbed wire. Your envoycould be a reprobate whose inheritanceis no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bonesof my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed& extinct animals live in your nightmaressharp as shark teeth from my mountainsstrung into this brave necklace aroundmy neck. I hear Chief Standing Bearsaying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,”& now I know why I’d rather die a poetthan a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.
I only recognized your hair: short,neatly combed. Our motherwould’ve been proud. In the Sonoran desertyour body became a slaughter-house where faith and want were stunned,hung upside down, gutted. We were taughtto bring roses, to aim for the bush. Remember?You tried to porka girl’s armpit. In Border Patrol jargon, the wordfor border crossers is the same whether they’re alive or dead.When I read his flesh felloff the bones, my stomach rumbled, my mouthwatered. Yesterday, our mother said, “My high heels are killing me.Let’s go back to the funeral.” You were alwaysher favorite. Slow cooking a roastmelts the tough tissue between the muscle fibers;tender meat remains. Remember the timeI caught you pissing on a dog? You turnedaway from me. In the small of your backI thought I saw a face. Split lip,broken nose. It was a mask. I yanked it from your flesh. I wear it often.
He was calling in the bulls from the street.They came like a dark river — a blur of chest and hoof — everything moving, under, splinter — hookedtheir horns through the walls. Light hummedthe holes like yellow jackets. My mouthwas a nest torn empty.Then, he was at the table.Then, in the pig’s jaws — he was not hungry. He was stop.He was bad apple. He was choking.So I punched my fists against his stomach.Mars flew outand broke open or bloomed — how many small red eyes shut in that husk?He said, Look. Look. And they did.He said, Lift up your shirt. And I did.He slid his fork beneath my ribs — Yes, he sang. A Jesus side wound.It wouldn’t stop bleeding.He reached insideand turned on the lamp — I never knew I was also a lamp — until the lightfell out of me, dripped down my thigh, flew up in me,caught in my throat like a canary.Canaries really means dogs, he said.He put on his shoes.You started this with your mouth, he pointed.Where are you going? I asked.To ride the Ferris wheel, he answered,and climbed inside me like a window.
Today my brother brought over a piece of the arkwrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.He took a step back and gestured toward itwith his arms and open palms —  It’s the ark, he said. You mean Noah’s ark? I asked. What other ark is there? he answered. Read the inscription, he told me, it tells what’s going to happen at the end. What end? I wanted to know. He laughed, What do you mean, “what end”? The end end.Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.He set it on the table the way people on televisionset things when they’re afraid those things might blow-upor go-off — he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.It was no ark — it was the broken end of a picture framewith a floral design carved into its surface.He put his head in his hands —  I shouldn’t show you this —  God, why did I show her this? It’s ancient — O, God, this is so old. Fine, I gave in, Where did you get it? The girl, he said. O, the girl. What girl? I asked. You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.I watched him drag his wrecked fingersover the chipped flower-work of the wood —  You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it —  no matter how many books you’ve read.He was wrong. I could take the ark.I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.The way they almost glittered.It was the animals — the animals I could not take — they came up the walkway into my house,cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,tails snaking across my feet before disappearinglike retracting vacuum cords into the hollowsof my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,reaching out for him — wildebeests, pigs,the oryxes with their black matching horns,javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelotswith their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.So many kinds of creature.I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,but my brother stopped me —  This is serious, he said. You have to understand. It can save you.So I sat down, with my brother wrecked open like that,and two-by-two the fantastical beastsparading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,built itself up around me, filled my coffee cupbefore floating it away from the table.My brother — teeming with shadows — a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk,lifting his ark high in the air.
Other-lips whispering between my legs.What they called black hole not-thingis really packed full of secrets. A rebel mouthtestifying from the underside. Carefulnot to let it speak too loudly. Only humdemure in polite company — never laughor spit on the sidewalk or complain lest we both be dragged under the wheels ofone of those. Or worse coddledsmiled at as at a lapdog acting wolf.Or worse called ugly a cruel joke. Or — there are always worse things.Too many messengers shot. But thenwho wouldn’t fear an eyeless facewhose ghost stories always come true?
Pretty soon we’ll have the talk.She’ll ask me where babies come fromAnd I will lie to her:“Babies come from the chance meeting of sperm and eggSee the man deposits his sssperm which is like a pudding into the woman’s vvagina and it travels up this tube-y thingand only one of them gets the prize and bing! A cell becomesa fetus becomes baby becomes you.Go do your homework.”She will wait for me to calm down,her eyes patient requiring the truthand I will tell her:“Babies come from Friday nights melted into Saturday mornings;the Isley Brothers and 3 or 4 glasses of white zin; miniskirtsand aching zippers; sofa cushions sweaty and 
ogodthecondombroke;Babies come from blue lights and e.p.t. tests and the wet spot on clean sheets;Lonely knees that bump beneath the table; love letters sealedwith a miss and $758 phone bills; eyeliner and lips to match; muscledThighs and a sweet, milky quarter of yes in the center of pink panties.You came from this: a separated daddy and a desperate mama; A ripped sonogram and hours spent on hardwood floors asking 
girlfriends:Should I go through with this?Grandma’s washboard and the dust tracks Grandaddy made when heleft her with five girls to maimYou came from this: Maryland rain, nights of shag carpet lovin’ and daysJust $2 short of the rent;And one afternoon you cameI wanted your father so badly it hurtEven took his last name and flung it behind yours like a spare tireWhatever he gave me was never enoughIt was like his love was a sieveAnd my desire for himWaterI was insanePacked my dreams in a U-Haul and moved them to MDNothing better to do30 and scaredYou came from this:Collision of longingTongue kissing and shameThe emptiness at the corner of GA AvenueAnd the fullness of swollen ankles and readjusted dreamsYou came from:A poet and a singerFists and car keysPeach cobbler and gumboLoveAnd that last dirty fight on the BeltwayYou came babyYou came, here”And she’ll say:“Mama, babies come from peach cobbler?”and I’ll sayyes.
In the United terminal in Chicago at five on a Friday afternoonThe sky is breaking with rain and wind and all the flightsAre delayed forever. We will never get to where we are goingAnd there’s no way back to where we’ve been.The sun and the moon have disappeared to an island far from 
anywhere.Everybody has a heartache — The immense gatekeeper of Gate Z–100 keeps his cool.This guardian of the sky teases me and makes me smile through the mess,Building up his airline by stacking it against the company I usually travel:Come on over to our side, we’ll treat you nice.I laugh as he hands me back my ticket, then he turns to charmThe next customer, his feet tired in his minimum wage shoes.Everybody has a heartache — The man with his head bobbing to music no one else can hear has that satisfiedFeel — a full belly of sweet and a wife who sings heartache to sleep.In his luggage (that will be lost and never found) is a musty dream of flyingSolo to Africa, with a stop on the return to let go the stories too difficult toCarry home. He’ll take off his shoes to walk in a warm, tropical sea.He’ll sing to the ancestors:Take me home to mama. No one cooks like her.But all the mamas worked to the bone gone too young. Broken by The Man.Everybody has a heartache —  Everyone’s mouthing fried, sweet, soft and fat,While we wait for word in the heart of the scrambled beast.The sparkle of soda wets the dream core.That woman over there the color of broth did what she was told.It’s worked out well as can be expected in a worldWhere she was no beauty queen and was never seen,Always in the back of someplace in the back — She holds the newest baby. He has croup.Shush, shush. Go to sleep, my little baby sheepie.He sits up front of her with his new crop of teeth.Everybody has a heartache — This man speaks to no one, but his body does.Half his liver is swollen with anger; the other half is tryingTo apologize — What a mess I’ve made of history, he thinks without thinking.Mother coming through the screen door, her clothes torn,Whimpering: It’s okay baby, please don’t cry.Don’t cry. Baby don’t cry.
The Indiscriminate Citizenry of Earth are out to arrest my sense of being a misfit. “Open up!” they bellow, hands quiet before my door that’s only wind and juniper needles, anyway. You can’t do it, I squeak from inside. You can’t make me feel at home here in this time of siege for me and mine, mi raza. Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy is now a permanent resident in my gut. “Fruit of the prickly pear!” they swear, striding up to my table to juice me a glass of pink nectar. They’ve brought welcome baskets stuffed with proof I’m earthling. From under a gingham cover, I tug a dark feather iridescing green — cohering to “magpie” thought, to memory’s chatter, to mind. Mine. And here they have my mind translated into a slate-surfaced pond, which vibrates in the shape of a cottonwood’s autumn molt, which trees me to dirt, which soils me heat & freeze — But you’ll always be one definitive document short! I complain. Doubts can forever outstrip your geo-logic. For which they produce a lock of my natal dust, bronzed to the fluttering fiber of lacebark pine. Where’d they get that stuff? The baskets are bottomless, and it’s useless for me to insist on being distinct. Undergoing re-portation, I’m awakened to a Center, where walls between all beings are dreamt to dissolve.
1 She pressed her ear against the shell:she wanted to hear everythinghe never told her.2 A single inchseparates their two bodiesfacing one anotherin the picture:a framed smileburied beneath the rubble.3 Whenever you throw stonesinto the seait sends ripples through me. 4 My heart’s quite small:that’s why it fills so quickly.5 Water needs no warsto mix with waterand fill up spaces.6 The tree doesn’t ask why it’s not movingto some other forestnor any other pointless questions.7 He watches tvwhile she holds a novel.On the novel’s coverthere’s a man watching tvand a woman holding a novel.8 On the first morningof the new yearall of us will look upat the same sun.9 She raised his head to her chest.He did not respond:he was dead.10 The person who gazed at me for so long,and whose gaze I returned for just as long . . .    That man who never once embraced me,and whom I never once embraced  . . .    The rain wrecked the colors around himon that old canvas.11 He was not with the husbandswho were lost and then found;he did not come with the prisoners of war,nor with the kite that took her,in her dream,to some other place,while she stood before the camerato have her smileglued into the passport.12 Dates piled highbeside the road:your wayof  kissing me.13 Rapunzel’s hairreaching downfrom the windowto the earthis how we wait.14 The shadowsthe prisoners lefton the wallsurrounded the jailerand cast lighton his loneliness.15 Homeland, I am not your mother,so why do you weep in my lap like thisevery timesomething hurts you?16 Never mind this bird:it comes every dayand stops at the branch’s edgeto sing for an houror two.That’s all it does:nothing makes it happier.17 House keys, identity cards,faded pictures among the bones . . .    All of these are scatteredin a single mass grave.18 The Arabic languageloves long sentencesand long wars.It loves never-ending songsand late nightsand weeping over ruins.It loves workingfor a long lifeand a long death.19 Far away from home — that’s all that changed in us.20 Cinderella left her slipper in Iraqalong with the smell of cardamomwafting from the teapot,and that huge flower,its mouth gaping like death.21 Instant messagesignite revolutions.They spark new liveswaiting for a country to download,a land that’s little morethan a handful of dustwhen faced with these words:“There are no results that match your search.”22 The dog’s excitementas she brings the stick to her owneris the moment of opening the letter.23 We cross borders lightlylike clouds.Nothing carries us,but as we move onwe carry rain,and an accent,and a memoryof another place.24 How thrilling to appear in his eyes.She can’t understand what he’s saying:she’s too busy chewing his voice.She looks at the mouth she’ll never kiss,at the shoulder she’ll never cry on,at the hand she’ll never hold,and at the ground where their shadows meet.
Jesus, I want my sins back.My prattle, pride, and private prices — climbing, clinching, clocking — I might loan you a few for the evening, so you don’t show up at your own crucifixionnaked of all purpose.But for God’s sake, don’t spill anyredemption on them! They’re mysignature looks. Body by Envy.Make up & wardrobe provided by Avarice. Lord,if you take away my inordinate cravings,what the hell’s left? Do you knowhow much I paid for my best rages?I want them all back if they’reso To Die For. Else shred my palms,wash my face with spit, let the whip unlace my flesh and free the naked blood, let me be tumbled to immortalitywith the stew of flood debristhat is my life.
was it so I could never say across a courtroomthat man, the onestanding therewas it so you couldwalk among us againafteras if you had shedthe body that didthose thingswas it because you couldnot bear my pupils so hugethey would have swallowed youmy whites like flayed kneecapswhen you pressed down to singe them backinto my skull they were softerthan you expectedyou had thought themdiamond hardweapons turned on youwas it so you couldimagine a timewhen you would be humanagain among humansthat you had to leavesome of us alive?
I doubt . . . this is where I find it extremely difficult . . . no government worth its salt plans to massacre its people. No. What could have happened is something went wrong when they were on the ground. — Bethuel Kiplagat, Chair of  Kenya’s Truth,  Justice and Reconciliation Commission, indicted for involvement in the 1984 Wagalla Massacre of 5,000 Somali Kenyans by the Kenyan government Wagallaa howl the wind stoleWagallatongues torn out at rootswagallawagallawagallawaa swallowing of childrenthrust under thorn busheschoked on dustWagallaa city of silencerisen out of desertbuilt of bodies
Have I spent too much time worrying about the boyskilling each other to pray for the ones who do itwith their own hands?Is that not black on black violence?Is that not a mother who has to bury her boy?Is it not the same play?The same plot & characters? The curtain rises, then: a womb a boy a night emptied of music a trigger a finger a bullet then: lights.It always drives the crowd to their feet.An encoreof boy after boyafter sweet boy   — their endless, bloody bow.They throw dirt on the actors like rosesuntil the boys are drowned by the earth& the audience doesn’t rememberwhat they’re standing for.
1. smoke above the burning bush2. archnemesis of summer night3. first son of soil4. coal awaiting spark & wind5. guilty until proven dead6. oil heavy starlight7. monster until proven ghost8. gone9. phoenix who forgets to un-ash10. going, going, gone11. gods of shovels & black veils12. what once passed for kindling13. fireworks at dawn14. brilliant, shadow hued coral15. (I thought to leave this blank but who am I to name us nothing?)16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath
For Adrienne Rich [Our burden to carry as she did shift the weight of song, heft and gnosis “body poetics” as a total event her fullness rare in the amnesiac Kulchur awake, awareness & urgency when poetry serves] name appearseverywhere and in dreambody armor removedwhat now, legacy, archivumwe female archons preserve ofintensity a durance a hand you recognize(sounds sound)assurance as lives ondrank of thatdrank of thisalmost suffocated, then drowneddowned but neverwhat only she could only knowas herself living in the brute timespeak of a syntax of rendition?the politics of Empire chip awayas poetry attests, give it upcurve of a water-starved globeto follow and be following?racism, sexism, struggleeverything in intense grasp ofconsciousness — cut in crystal observationfor her rapid and perched intellectusprivacy opens to vibrant lightthis is stuff of Eros, of empathypassionate edge of Adriennethe American SkepticI feel you consociational in this lighta term of anthropology, to studyintersections in the annals we shareintergenerational, interspecies, interlanguagemove in parallelogramsgetting it right as she did Solstice, Boulder, Colorado 2012 High Park fires distress
After Brion Gysin / William S. Burroughs All writing around the sides the persons a galaxy all writing resounds a hot history. All writing is in fact cut-ups history will decide games heated and heated economic behavior. To rise up scene all sounds of Tahrir and inside supply side threatened. A long delineation. Longer than I would be counting. This, a whisper, this the end of whisper time. Rise up and wiser this the streets of the world. Commission overheard in spin a soldiering one. What streets of the world to spin rubric’s yes yes commerce, no, a no, no. Tanks of the blown-off world. He is my beautiful offshore a caw caw of major spills and elsewhere no, no. Cut the dialect the binary the dear word so precious and forbidden. They use the machines to take the streets of the world. Horizon my headwater cut cut the cable my beignets my else an appetite “poor politics, poor poor pols.” Waters of the world in media cut cut the lines manipulate desire and show the word show the Man show the tablets a Paleolithic grab all the twilight fields of discontent that shadow governments rise up people of the world of many wounded galaxies of discontent. And hear you, people of the word. What room? The gray we reach to. Assume that the worst has happened deporting Rom explicit in the gypsy purge meeting with Popes in the streets of the world. Subject to strategy poor poor pol a scrutiny. Its link its drill its Bandars. Condemn Salazar and the interior ministry of fisheries and assume the worst in writing cuts his exterior of life the glib industry, the selves behind the tyrants. My loaves and fishes in deep deep water. Is at some point classical prose, my no, Bulgaria my no Romania my Haiti my Egypt, and gypsy environment come to this coastline America ruptured pipeline to awe caw Gulf Stream is seated cut cut to other fields ripple effect and your domino will fall. And the bomb fall down. Cutting and rearranging factor your opponent your domino history will gain introducing a new parity binary Assange dimension your strategy. Will history decide “caw caw caw.” How many Rom yes yes discoveries sound to kinesthetic a gulf of everyone. She wanted to soldier a gulf of anyone. She wanted to soldier out of here her long delineation longer than would be counting. Cut through this leak of revolution the future will come out. We can deport Rimbaud now produce accident to his color “Voyelles.” Exit the colors you drain me of. And new dimension to films cut cut Sarkozy cut Hollande the senses the place of sands, gambling Rom scene all sounds all colors tasting sounds, France, France smell all streets of the world. Wake up, all colors of all the burqas tasting sounds of the shadow world. Cut cut when you can have the best all: Anthropocene. Welcome to the Anthropocene. Rom the gypsy in everyone. In a collage of words read heard decipher, Rom arise outbreak of military strategy, sound of voice a pitching wail will sear the wall will wall the sound will break the word will suck the variation clear and act accordingly history will decide the streets of the world. Caw caw introduced the cut-up scissored remembered gulf renders the aroma in memory of my despotic elders. Aroma of Rom. Let the dolphins in and act accordingly. If you posed entirely of prearranged cut cut determined by random leaders no Merkel cut cut G-20. A page of written words no advantage to leak from circular Salazar. Interior from knowing into writer predict the move the mood, no go back will step down will will step down. Circumpolar water and denizens within arise. Streets of the world arise. The cut variation images shift Rom sense advantage in processing to sound sight cut cut sound to arise. Visit of memories New Orleans Florida have been made by accidents is where Rimbaud was going with order could live could systematic derangement of the gambling scene, cut cut in with a tea party lullaby then hallucination: seeing and places that arise the streets of the word. A long line’s delineation to random future streets of the world. And they our nuclear future to deny deny. Our man in rendition and cut cut the torture oh streets of the world arise to cut back forms else mammals suffer a dead Mubarak. Rearrange blunt the word and image to other fields Rom, no France France rise to streets the USA the USA of the soldiering world. We’ll see how calm politics will become. G-20 outbreak of temper Germany. Of temper BP. Condemn the masters UK France corpse or carp on it but no longer predict the move, cut cut other fields than cuts your writing Egypt your Yemen your Syria your Libya your Mali.
April 3, 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained at the Beijing Airport .......................    hello hello hello    ...    Weiwei    ...    where have you been?    ...    I see you in dreams    ...    bleeding    ...    in the darkness of the sun    ...    81 spots in the flame    ...    each a nightmare one cannot wake up from    ...    Weiwei    ...    the last son    ...    you told me as we said goodbye    ...    your last night on the Lower East Side    ...    未未    ...    the last child of your Mother and Father    ...    born in the labor camp    ...    exiled from Beijing to the far desert    ...    watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth    ...    beaten cursed spat upon at every street corner    ...    why did you want to return?    ...    I asked    ...    did nyc streets no longer stir your blood?    ...    or the blackjack in Atlantic City get stale?    ...    you smiled    ...    as you flung dumpling skins out of my 13th floor window    ...    I need to go home    ...    to my father    ...    I need to speak    ...    speak indeed    ...    Weiwei    ...    with your big mouth that earned whips and bricks ever since you learned to talk    ...    and love from the people    ...    the small    ...    the poor    ...    the nameless    ...    babies poisoned by fake milk who had no time to cry mama    ...    children crushed under 
schools    ...    their bags flew across the sky like a dragon    ...    seeking their names    ...    you raked through the rubble    ...    through government files    ...    hide-and-seek with cops    ...    beaten until your brain hemorrhaged    ...    and you speak    ...    in Germany    ...    Tiananmen Square    ...    you speak    ...    watching your studio ransacked    ...    bulldozed    ...    and you speak    ...    threatened    ...    under house arrest    ...    and you speak    ...    inviting the guards into your studio for a cup of tea    ...    and you speak    ...    I’m used to pain    ...    you say    ...    and I’m ready to die suddenly or to disappear    ...    I’m the last son    ...    you say    ...    to your tormentors’ eyes    ...    I’m here for you    ...    so your babies will never again have to drink milk laced with poison    ...    so your daughter will never wonder when the classroom ceiling will drop on her    ...    so your parents will have shelter medicine food    ...    so you will never have to work at this job    ...    avoiding my eyes as you burn cigarettes into my chest    ...    push my face under the water    ...    I’m here for you    ...    all of you who speak the truth    ...    for China    ...    hello hello hello    ...    未未    ...    I mean why can’t you keep your mouth shut and enjoy what you have    ...    I mean you got money    ...    I mean you got fame    ...    I mean you got a beautiful wife and a two-year-old son    ...    don’t you want him to grow up like a normal child?    ...    but I am the son    ...    the last son of China    ...    
I have to speak as long as I have breath    ...    no matter how thin    ...    even if  you tear out my tongue    ...    I’ll still have my teeth    ...    even if you pull out my teeth    ...    I’ll still have my eyes    ...    even if you gouge out my eyes    ...    I’ll still have my ears    ...    even if you pierce my eardrums    ...    I’ll still have my hands    ...    even if you chop off my hands    ...    I’ll still have my guts    ...    even if you grind up my guts    ...    I’ll still have my heart that won’t stop beating    ...    even if you smash my heart into a million pieces    ...    they will turn into a billion sunflower seeds    ...    I mean how can you stop a sunflower from facing the sun    ...    how can you stop the sun from lighting up the earth    ...    hello hello hello    ...    Ai Weiwei    ...    
11 weeks have passed    ...    81 days and nights    ...    1,944 hours    ...    that’s 6,998,400 heartbeats from each of us    ...    whose heartstrings are tied to yours    ...    未未    ...    the last son of China    ...    艾未未    ...    pulse of the earth    ................
The skin of sleepis thin. It will not hold.Its contents stumble out.A nub of bonelodged in earthat the bottom of a pit.A stranger staringdown from the rim.The skin of sleep is thin.It cannot hold.Lost names spill out.Children engravedin ash. A sea of blood.Only you, tenderness,stillborn, beneaththe skin of sleep.
/    You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.   You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.   Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.   As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens 
and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.   /   When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in 
silence you are bucking the trend.   /   When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.   He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.   Now there you go, he responds.   The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.   /   A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.   The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.   /   The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.   At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?   It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.   I am so sorry, so, so sorry. /
I’m a’kickin’ but not high,and I’m a’flappin’ but I can’t fly. — Florence Church A carpet of light, theocean alive < half a moonmuting the stars.I tell myselfdespair is justa bad attitude: Get up,I say. Look — and the shimmerspends its namein my head._____These days midlifeholds the jagged edge:my nephew in prison,a prisoner > friends insanewith work or sickof trying to be loved,my parents handing over their liveslike evidence: my good mother,her mind a trail of crumbsin a woods flocked with birds. --/-- To raise a child break itlike a wild horse — bend the will: get up,get dressed.I remember Emlen Schoolstaring me down, my lunch box,September:the spiked fence freshly painted.Then, the goodbye from my motherwho’d fought my hard hair,lipstick like mist on my cheek. --/--That instant when eyes meetand slide away — even loveblinks, looks offlike a stranger.With: Who are youwith? --/--I suspect everything.Outside the air movesa giant bird I cannot see.Still laced in thisbrown body: my aging heart — a-loom a-loomdoom —  still minds my thoughts,but rolls his eyes._____To see >< to be seen: the lifeof the visible. Don’t be shy.Glances pick my face.Once, I was a sperm and an egg,but they didn’t see me. --/--Too small to walkalone: I heldmy father’s indexfinger. Philadelphia policecaped in their blackjackets — big badges almosthungry — looking at us. --/--In a mall: say a food courton Saturday or a stadiumjust before the game.There’s this drone, thissteady, muttering thrumpunctured bypackages — plastic this,paper that — torn and torn.“It’s hard not to be hungry.” --/--Time for bed: mymother reading TheThree Little Pigs
you want to eat meout. right. what does it taste like
From the Mithridatic Wars,  first century BC Our general was elsewhere, but we drowned.While he rested, he shipped us homewith the bulk of  his spoilsthat had weighed his army down.The thrashing stormthat caught us cracked the hullsand made us offerings to the sea floor — a rain of statues, gold, and men.Released from service,done with war,the crash and hiss muted,we fell through streams of creatureswhose lives were their purpose.We settled with treasure lootedfrom temples of rubbled Athenian Greece;among us, bronze and marble gods and goddessesmoored without grace,dodged by incurious fish.Their power was never meant to buoy us — our pleasures were incidental gifts — but, shaken by their radiance in our dust,we had given them our voices.Their faces, wings, and limbslie here with our sanded bonesand motionless devices. Little crabs attempt to don ringsset with agate and amethyst,and many an octopus,seeking an hour of rest,finds shelter in our brain-cases.So we are still of use.
Themiscyra, 72 BC While Lucullus raided cherry orchards,he left us to besiege, grudgingly, this outlander fortress,named for an Amazon queen,while thinking of food and home.Not one of us has seena single horse-borne warrior woman.Meanwhile, we dug a tomb.We intended it as the tunnelthrough which we’d claim the fort.We shored up the sifting roofand dug by lamps that shed more shadows than light.At last we formed up undergroundto attack with sword and fire,but the enemy tossed in hives,and in a cloud of stinging beesour torches jerked and swung or fellso we could hardly tellwhere to strike, or what, for nextour enemy sent weasels in, and foxes,which seemed to be done in jestuntil we felt their teethand heard, more than saw, the larger beasts.A wolf  began my death.I lay in men’s and weasels’ bloodand heard the bodythat dropped at my sideask, What barbarian thought to makeof thoughtless creatures weapons of war?
Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary cornersof second life the hospital light ravened solsticeblessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurriedup Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stonein the flask and wild asterisks hissing; Thursdays, fallingat noon, at Cathedral Street, blackbirds falling quietly at Biddle Street.
Lesson of the day: Syria and Styria.For Syria, read: His conquering banner shook from Syria.And for Styria: Look at this harp of  blood, mapping.Now I am tuned. I am going to go abovemy voice for the sake of the forest shakenon the bitumen. You can see stars in the skulls,winking, synapses, intermittent, on edgeof shriek — perhaps a cluster of fir, birches? — Anyways. Don’t get too hung upon the terms; they have entropyin common, bad for the public weal,those obtuse centurions in the flareof the bougainvillea, their patent-seekinggift kindled. Divers speech. Cruelty.Justice. Never mind, but dopay attention to the skirmish — the whitepanther that flitters up the pole — its shade grows large on the ground.
A furnace in my father’s voice; I prayed for the coal stove’sroses, a cruise ship lit like a castleon fire in the harbor we never walked,father and son, father drifting downthe ferned hell his shanty shone, where,inside, in my head, the lamp was the lamp.The market, the park, the library not a soulbut grandmother’s morning wash lifting toward heaven,the barrister sun punished my sister, I stared at my handin a book, the horizon declined in my mouth.My little earthshaker, visored in placenta,wonder of wonders, tremulous in amnioticshield, ensouled already, father in the veritablenight, without house or harbor, soon sea in a voice will harrowa scorpion’s blaze in me, to the marrow.
At nights birds hammered my unbornchild’s heart to strength, each strike bringingbones and spine to glow, her lungs pestledloud as the sea I was raised a sea anemoneamong women who cursed their heartsout, soured themselves, never-brides,into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistenedtheir quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurledfrom Colchis and I rejoiced like a brokenasylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulband light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a pouitree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.
Over the growing shadows fell the dead weight of  light.With a long bark mules metered the distance and turned back.Dust rose like columns of unpaid debt.Spit dried before it could reach the ground.Then the thin-barked orange trees disowned their thick-skinned fruit.Then mosquitoes spat out bad blood into the gutters and were gone. Fish was opened like a two-page book,its skeleton, caught aflame like an asp,inscribed with fire along the bone lines,then slapped on a stone face of a plate next to a Coca-Cola bottle as cold as hell.In the market fruit prices jumped up so high — the seller women turned into hawks.With a gibbous peacock brushing by their feet,in the woods where each leaf  hides a face, and each trunk a spine, and each tree a crime, where owls and angels,a man and three women were contesting an apple.The winner’s body itself was an apple with skin chewed off.Inside her breasts milk circled like a growling animallocked behind two heavy nipples.It was both day and night.Her moon-white hand on the sun-gold fruit.In her hair more stones than in a graveyard. So I followed the woman as she ate hoping if not for a bite then at least a spit in my direction. But she left nothing of that apple. Not even the memory of eating it ever.
I would try to do it in my way, forgetting Velázquez . . . . So, little by little, I would paint my Meninas . . . they would be “my” Meninas.  — Pablo Picasso My meninas are as changeable as the moon.Black and white and in color.Happy, sad, and how many words there arefor red enough and the pallor of skin.Their moments of verisimilitude do not outweightheir flashes of pathos. Whole days go bywhen they cannot appreciate the humorof which the dog is one manner, the dwarf another.My meninas are not puppets, but puppet theaters.That it is the puppet master who draws the curtainin the stairwell is pure whimsy on my part.A minuet of despair, andante of foolhardiness.How many times have I tried to explain these differences,the sting of  joy, a lilt of crimson,the dark and the light of the moon not the moon,the soul but a sphere predisposed to rotation?The man in the doorway. The dog who lies sleeping.These are my meninas. The sun in the mirror.The sun and the moon and the man behind the easel,mostly invisible, like the pictures on the wall.The moon is not more changeable, however,than they, my meninas, who never stop changingand waiting on the children of the sunand of the moon, for they will always bemy meninas, their eyes of every minim on the palette,blue and tragical, white on white againsta black ground, until the moon sings every shapeand shade of gray from hope to ample. And again.
It would never be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation.   — Martin Heidegger The dragonflies again; the last time seeing them skim the river close to forgotten — their singing, their shimmer — now remembered, becoming so much flame; as tongues over the heads of the chosen in the child’s picture book of Christ I learned by heart, descent and weight of after the fact, the gift the fork between hope and vanity, the river that eatsitself  turned mirror broken into light; the corpse between the beloved’s good word and the beloved who having spoken was ever spokeninto being, lies, unspeaking, and as with any heaviness that lowersthen hovers, remains inconceivable; so the letter given in stone, perfection in fire;love; all love’s failures; the winged animaldrops to the earth and is there buried in a hole where it digs in the grit like the blade we left in the riverbed, adrift and cry-shaped in the memory, both that dim and that loud; though no accosting why itseems that way, everything ghost of itself or everything made of mythic proportion, the walkersinking from the face of the waters, the dragon Ibecome when I talk to myself, what a belief is, terrifyingand relentless; I’ve never been able to tell the difference; the brute and the apparitionin reflection speak at once — the rock and the rock’s light — so that now the insect thrums and it is surelya kind of tenderness, an ODing in secret, turning into while turningfrom the soul the animal raised and devoured in dream; imagine, the child’s wished-for surface gives and ripples up to mouththe perfect imprint, saying “aircraft” and there are aircraft, amen,the walker is surrounded by flight on all sides; the walker walks without wings; see,the recollection is flawless, turning wings of  jewels; the recollection is absolute, swallows whole; echoes;and the dragon feasts; and the dragon flies again;
To perform death is something only humans would doNo animal would sit thereWith a blank look on its faceJust because the camera is thereNo no an animal would look directly in itOr cover its face, like the overweightWoman in the picture in the magazineBy the room where I keep my bedWhat people don’t understand about beautyIs that after all it is not fleetingAfter all it is so gross to be that wayThat someone sees among youAfter all, to call into questionI painted my lips, my eyesOnly our scholars know thatTo perform is to be malleableTo perform in languageOr was itThe large purple insect I let in the roomOr was it the furred face — the hippo or the gorgeThat I was the devil in the woodIn my own bones that I knew the faceThat I took that faceWas it midnight blue skyNo, were my wings iridescentEven in these linesThe voice moves youWhat sense of exquisite causeThought Moves you past these linesInto conversation With the undeadI don’t knowThat is somethingYou will have to answer for yourselfI came back to this place to help youAnd that I didShoot sparks of green and grayThrough timeWhat skin sackI put myself  inI mean for what, why,Or whoDid I manage to do this for if not youLilaced thingThe soft rustle of  beetle wingsIn air that is warm and grayAnd is not strongBut there, is there to carry us past it
Focus on the shapes. Cirrus, a curl,stratus, a layer, cumulus, a heap.Humilis, a small cloud,cumulus humilis, a fine day to fly.Incus, the anvil, stay grounded.Nimbus, rain, be careful,don’t take off near nimbostratus,a shapeless layerof  rain, hail, ice, or snow.Ice weighs on the blades of  your propeller,weighs on the entering edge of your wings.Read a cloud,decode it,a dense, chilly masscan shift, flood with light.Watch for clouds closing under you,the sky opens in a breath,shuts in a heartbeat.
Promising myself  I would not do this againIs what kept me goingA friend told me toAnd I listenedTaking a thing to the end of its lifeIs what I was made to doI think I am not attunedTo the things that breatheWell that’s not trueI am in tune to breath and lifeAnd little falls of  flowersWhen the moon was highI went out to the streamAnd brought in the waterFor my folks, my kin, my brethrenI brought in the greenish milkTo feed the ones who were already dyingOh did they goOh I do not know
Exuberance sips bootleg gin from a garter flaskwith a ruby monogram “E.”She wears a red dress one size too small,eyes wide, she flirts with everyone, daresLincoln Beachey to fly until he runs out of gas,rides a dead engine all the way down.She watches Ormer Locklear climbout of the cockpit two hundred feet up,tap dance on his upper wingas the houses of  honest familieswith their square-fenced yardsslide below his shuffle. An oval pondwinks in the sun, like a zero.Exuberance challenges pilotsto master the Falling Leaf, perfect the Tailspin,ignore the Graveyard Spiral, the Doom Loop.These aviators predict every American will fly.Exuberance believes Everybody Oughtto Be Rich
Outside the igloo he waitedfor an invitation to come inside.There was no knocker, no doorbell.He coughed, there was no reply.He crouched down and peered in.He felt the warm air from a firepat his cheeks and ruffle his hair.Hello he said quietly and repeated it.The frost in his toes urged him in,so did the pain in his gut. His kneesone by one welcomed the snow and brought him into the warmth.He stood up and breathed deeply.He held a foot up to the flamesthen swapped it for the other foot.He lay down on the polar bear rugbut a smell yanked him upright againand led him to a dresser of  bonewhere a bowl sat with a cover on it.He lifted this to reveal dried meat.He grabbed a chunk and tore at itwith his teeth. It was reindeer.He devoured all that was in the bowland went looking for some more.He found none, but there was a bottleof firewater which he swigged.He swigged again and left it down.He lay on the bearskin and fell asleep.
After the murder, I called a meetingto see if we were happy. I declaredI was not — I said I liked the manwe shot. You all disagreed with this.I asked if you knew him, his wife,none of you did. “Kill me, then,”I said. You all stared at me. “Why,Bernard? Of course we won’t.”“Why not?” I said. “He was a goodman, a better man than me. Andlook at what I’ve brought you — rubbish, dodgy tales, dross.”“Easy to dismiss that,” you said.“We appreciated it all. And youwandered the wild paths to bringit back to us — your songs, yourlegends, magic stories, your gold.”I thanked you, but shook my head.The good man was dead. I didn’t carewhat I’d brought you. I needed to go.I packed up my sagas, my song lyrics,my alchemy potions, my gold, andI disappeared.
Words fall out of my coat pocket,soak in bleach water. I touch everyone’sdirty dollars. Maslow’s got everything on me.Fourteen hours on my feet. No breaks.No smokes or lunch. Blank-eyed movements:trash bags, coffee burner, fingers numb.I am hourly protestations and false smiles.The clock clicks its slow slowing.Faces blur in a stream of  hurried soccer games,sunlight, and church certainty. I have nopoem to carry, no material illusions.Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered,I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians,refineries, and a border’s barbed wire,but I am unlearning America’s languageswith a mop. In a summer-hot redpolyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gasbillowing black. Killing time has new meaning.A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globespirals, and at night black space has me dizzy.Visionaries off their meds and wacked outmeth heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robberyand humiliation drips with my sweat.Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise.I am drawn to dramas, the couple arguing, the manheadbutting his wife in the parking lot.911: no metered aubade, and nobody butmyself to blame.
Tightened jaw, I did not love.Flashback of myself  jerked about,legs high above my head, menlaughing, I came to sea drifts,movement and crashing. I found I amnot so far from God exploding.Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live.Seven storks still and white on a gold lake.My lazy eye glances back to that originalsplit, myself  high above myself.Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’t knowhours from minutes. I was hypervigilant forcatastrophes. My head raging then numb.The early garden bare, and now,shocked with sudden memory,I return to changing sky hues,blooms of lilac bursting along sidewalks.Lazy in the grass, I free myself of guilt,imagine musicians in the park, us overcomingourselves. My eyes open before stars.Holy these leaves, these skies.What is torn opens for the light.
One stood among the violetslistening to a bird. One went to the toiletand was struck by the moon. One felt hopelessuntil a trumpet crash, and then lo,he became a diamond. I have a shovel.Can I turn it into a poem? On my stoveI’m boiling some milk thistle.I hope it will turn into a winged thesis before you stop reading. Look, I’m topless!Listen: approaching hooves!One drowned in a swimming pool.One removed his shoesand yearned off a bridge. One liveswith Alzheimer’s in a state facility, spittlein his white beard. Itturns out words are no help.But here I am with my shoveldigging like a foolbeside the spilth and sploshof the ungirdled sea. I can’t stop.The horses are coming, the thieves.I still haven’t found lasting love.I still want to hear violsin the little beach hotelthat’s torn down and gone.I want to see again the fishschooling and glittering like a veilwhere the waves shoveagainst the breakwater. Goneis the girl in her white sliptesting the chill with one bare foot.It’s too cold, but she goes in, socarefully, oh.
Only sometimes does homegrown bedrock glow moneygreen. Sometimes rock whines mommy. Sometimes rock coos baby. Sometimes rock calls late with the mortgage. Sometimes rock knits shoulder blades right where you can’t pluck.Early mornings something doesn’t sit right over the sink. Sits crooked. Slumps askew. Body doesn’t lay the way you left it. Squinting gets you nowhere. You squat to the floor and feel around. Stop. Smell for it. Shrug. Still some dangling something modifies you. Smackdab midchest you feel lumpy empty. Sniff. Sniff.Shrug.Like those days we grab our own pickaxes and head down to the mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymns. We chip worry stone. We gather moss. We lie flat. We scratch at the mineshaft. Not toward exit but deeper to the core.
When Albert Murray saidthe second law adds up tothe blues that in other wordsain’t nothing nothing he meant itnot quite the way my pops saysnomads don’t show emotionsbut more how my grandmotherwarned that men like womenwith soft hands blood rednails like how Mingus meanttruth if  you had time for itfacts if  you got no time thatyears pass. Zeroone two three andthe man you usedto flirt with you canno longer flirt withthank goodness.He’s now a manyou can’t wearyour  jaw out onabout weathernews or worka perfectstrawberryburiedbeneatha peck.
In memory of  Vic Chesnutt when I walkto the mailboxholding the letterthat fails to sayhow sorry I amyou feel your callor any words at allon that daywould have stoppedthe great singerwho long agodecided morequickly throughto moveI notice probablybecause you wrotethat strangeword funeralthe constant blackfabric I thinkis taffetaalways drapedover the scaffoldsthe figuresscraping paintare wearing dustyprotective suitsand to each othersaying nothingI move invisiblylike a breezearound three menwearing advancedpractically weightlessjackets imperviousto all possibleweather evena hurricaneI hear them saysomething Germanthen photographthe pale blueturrets that floating up in fogseem nobleheads fullof important thoughtslike what revolutioncould make us happyfrom some windowwandering hornshe was threewhen I was bornfor a long timeI had no ideasmy father workedin a private officefull of quietpeople workingI came to visitit seemed correctI went to collegestudied thingsdyed my hairfelt a ragedisguised as lovekept escapingsuffering onlya few broken boneseverything healednow I livein Californiawhere in somered and goldentheater I sawhim howlsuch unfathomableforce from onlyone lungit was oneof  his last showsin Athens oncemany yearsago we shareda cigarettea little smokefrom our facesI can’t rememberso many thingsbut see himin his wheelchairhis folded bodyit’s all gonebut for electronsI can still pushinto my earsI choose the songthe perfect onehear his wordsand seethe mirrorin the ancientlighthouse blinkingbrave shipssomehowyou crossedthe water carryingwhat we needyou can restlight as nothingin the harborwe will take itand go on
I wish I wouldlike a shipthat all night carriesits beloved captainsleeping throughno weatherslip past dawnand wake with nothingbut strange thingsthat did not happento reportbut I get upin the darkand parachutequietly downto the kitchento beginthe purely mentalritual pluggingin of the uselessworry machineabove meshe sleepslike the innocentstill dreaming oldersister to allgentle thingsthe white screenimpassively asksme to say whatdoes not matterdoes so I shutit down and thinkabout the lakenear where I liveit’s a lagoongetting lighterlike an old bluejust switched ontelevisionmaybe a Zenithit has two armsthey stretchwithout feelingeast to embracean empty parka little lightthen everythinghas a shadowI almost heara silent belllow voicesI brought usto this old citythe port connectsto the worldwhere everyonepretends to knowthey liveon an islandwaiting forthe giant wavein some formmaybe radiationin the yardthe wind blowsthe whole blacksky looks downfor an instantthrough my sleepyisolate framea complex childhologram flickersangrily holdinga green plastic shovelthen disappearsleaving an emptycolumn waitingBill who I knewwas so angryis deadwhatever he wasgoing throughI kept awayI never didanythingI love his poemhe was really goodI keep forgettinghis last nameI always leavehis handmade bookon my desknot to rememberbut because for hoursafter everythingeveryone sayssounds like a languageI never knewbut now speakspirit I knowyou would have hatedhow I thinkyou would have likedthis musicin another roompushing the alienvoice intothe millenniumthe one you leftso earlyspirityou were rightall noblethings are goneexcept to struggleand be loved
He can say it was a paintingHe can say we were the paintingOr that the painting wasn’t paintingAnd that we only happen to ourselvesWe can say we kept things runningby distracting ourselves from the hideous truth of  how things runThat we were brokenThat we lingered near a broken factoryThat we had brokenWe can say that the disappointment of slicing into a leek and not finding the requisite layersbut a thick white inedible core is not the disappointment of approaching a sleeping animal only to learn that it is deadbut it does nudge one slightly further into despair We said despair We meant the strings of impossible instruments that they made in the factoryThat we had seenThat were brokenThat there were different paintingsThat could be played as songsWe had seen other thingsThat we had seenThat had come unstrungand blown between adjacent bridgeswhose river had presented us a cityThat was brokenThat we had beenThat we were brokenThat was our cityThis was our citythat was a song replaying itself in the dark
Dad calls her the Dowager but I call her Aunt G.Aunt G. at the Polo Lounge. Aunt G. drinking gimletsby the pool. Aunt G. asking about Babe eventhough she’s the only one who sees her that muchanymore. She wears ten rings. Seven on herright hand, which Dad calls the Seven Stars.They make the glass seem like it’s going to crack.She doesn’t like me very much. I know it.I’m not her kind of girl. I won’t wear dressesand when she placed the ring inside my handI just said, “No, thank you.” Not even thinkinghow rude that might sound. What would I dowith a ring like that? I’ve got my own starsand she doesn’t really want to giveme presents anyway. She gave Babe a car,her dark brown Aston Martin. And she gaveDavid a watch to “remember home by.”She gave my Dad a look when he said, “David’sa good soldier.” Like he gave her something badto eat. She just shook her head and said,“I’ll never understand what kind of man you are.”And then she said Dad would have that young boy’sblood on his hands. Which I don’t understand.Or why she said, “You’ve gone and lost the bothof them. You’re your very own Pol Pot,” while lookingthrough her purse. It shone so bright it blindedme. For a second I saw spots and couldn’t focuson the thing. One clear stone that caught the lightand made reflections on my glasses. I didn’t wantit. I don’t wear things like that. “Who are you?”she asked, not in a mean way but like she trulydidn’t know. And didn’t really care. She took it backand asked me if  I’d talked to Babe and I saidI had not and no one else had either.I said, “She’s living in the hills.”And she looked at the ring for a minuteand put it back in her purse.
Shakey Eyes Horton had nystagmus too.That’s what my father said and took meto the record store so we could buy himand take him home to listen. Babe sayshe’s so square but we go all over. We listento music for hours and dance aroundthe house like crazy skeletons: loosewith all our bones knocking, we go,“click click click” and wave our armsand shake until we rattle all the chinain mom’s cabinet. He turns the volumeup and we spin like planets round the sun.Babe says he’s no fun but I know differentbecause I see him laughing and I try,which she just never does. She walksinto the house with Jasper waiting in the car.She grabs some clothes or asks for money,though she doesn’t even come to do thatanymore. They don’t even talk. Last timewe had the music on loud and we were dancing.I was letting my head swing back and forthand she just stood and watched us with the strangestlook and I said, “I’m Shakey Eyes! Come dance,”and moved my arms around. I followed her upthe stairs, swinging like a satellite and going,“Ooh ooh ooooohhhhh,” just like a low-down good-for-nothing so and so. I know she thinks I’m funnybut she didn’t laugh and I said, “Come dance!You know you’ve got the blues.” Then I said, “You’reno fun.” She said, “You don’t know him like I do.”
My eyes are shaky and glimmer like the stars.My head turns to the left and it movesjust like a pendulum. The kids laugh and shakeit back to me, all the ways I’m stupid,not like them. But I know how the grass soundswhen the locusts come, like a spaceshiptaking off and how it makes the air shake.Captain Lovell, I heard it in the branchesand the leaves. I heard the rocket leaving.My teacher said it wasn’t so, that you’repast hearing but my father said I could.He puts his hands hard on my shouldersfrom behind and holds my head stillwith his looking. But I can feel how muchI want to shake and let myself go looseand double like a cloud of mayflies on the lake,you know just how they rise so you couldn’tsee just one of them, not even with your thumbheld up to catch one with your eyes. It’s somethingI can’t do that Babe and David can, can’t sightthe stars or use a telescope or ever fire a gun.Dr. Lovell, I like to think you’re spinningand can’t feel it like I can’t feel the world shakeunless I’m really tired and then it’s like a giftto let it go and just stop trying so hard. I liketo think you let go too and when the kidsrun at me and move their heads from leftto right and call me “Zigzag” I look upand wish myself up there with youjust calm and swinging through the stars.
One example of hierophany is the apparition of angels. This is a new word I overheard this morning. It occurswhen the divine realm manifests — or the word intrudes —  into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profaneis another way to say this. I asked whether it is a hernia, and the answer was no. A herniated condition is viscera on viscera — a disc, organs, the skin, or nerves. Besides, such a comparison would be profane. A figure of speech already exists, I said, in a hieratic silence of cursive writing long ago dead. Not long ago, those two phrases dwelled in separate worlds. I dare you to use the word hernia in a poem, said a friend. So I not only usedthe word, I invited God into language. Or God existed before language, while God is also the word. Remember, all theophanies are forms of  hierophany. However,the converse is not always true — not all hierophaniesare theophanies — or God visible in our world.
This night nurse is different.She walks into my room and does not turn the light on.She thinks I am sleeping.I have just barely opened my left eye,am looking through the slightest slit,as moonlight exposes the roomfor what it really is — a collectionof surfaces; lines and planes, mostly.The night nurse puts a foot up on the radiatorand braces her clipboard on her kneeas she appears to take down a few notes.I imagine she is working on a sonnet,and that her ankle looks like polished walnut.You imagine she is working on a crossword,and that her feet are killing her.The slightest slit is like an old gateat a Japanese tea garden at night,in the rain, that is supposed to be closed,that is supposed to be locked.“Someone has locked up poorly,” you’d say.“Incorrectly.” But no one has asked you.
When trying to catch a horse it helps if you look away.Eye contact just pisses them off.But you can’t fake looking away, horsesknow when you are doing this.You have to really look away.Some horsemen never come out of  this.
Kurosawa was a moralist.It is said he took and gently bentAkutagawa’s grove.Akutagawa was trying to showus something. It is said he worecold wet gloves when he wrote.
My mother is obsessed with reading about Jesus these days. I see books piled by her bed, most of them borrowed from my library: novels, handbooks, sectarian polemics, writers coming to blows. Sometimes when I’m passing by her room she calls on me to step between them and resolve their disputes. (A little while ago I came to the aid of a historian called Kamal Salibi, whose forehead had been split open by a Catholic stone.) What a diligent reader she is when she’s searching for Jesus, this woman I never failed to disappoint: I was not martyred in the first intifada, nor in the second, nor in the third. And just between you and me, I won’t be martyred in any future intifada either, nor will 
I be killed by some booby-trapped stork. As she reads, her orthodox imagination crucifies me with every page.... while I do nothing but supply it with more books and nails.
I need a strict managerand an energetic secretaryand a correspondent to make my coffeeand my teaI need an intellectualand a poetand a mafia godfatherto divide my life among themAnd I’ll announce, after a whilemy bankruptcylike the companies doI need a servantand a traitora lover to have me murderedbeaten to deathby sandals in the bath:I need a queento betray me with the king
And what did the Armenians say?An Umayyad monkspins wheat and wool above usTime is a scarecrow • That’s what the Armenians said
[facsimile] He awoke, fully charged. You can bring water to a horse but you can’tmake it ride. All poetry is conceptual but some is more conceptual than others. Ambient difficulty leads to poetic license. Poetry has no purpose & that is not its pur- pose. You have to get over be-in- g over. April is the cruelest month for poetry. And May is not much better, is it? Why write in prose what you could write as easily as poetry? The poem is a crutch that allows us to think with and throu- g- h it.Every poem must have 13 distinct frames, devices, motifs, styles, forms, or concepts. Poetry emasculates prose. The body: can’t live with it, can’t live without i-t.I want to be understood, just not by you. Last week’s weather is worth a pound of salt, just like the lot of  wives or the snowy pillars of  Danton. There’s not a crowd in the sky. Familiarity breeds content. Yesterday’s weather is as beyond reach as tomorrow’s dreams. The move away from close reading often got drowned in thebathwater, even if   we could never find the baby. I wouldn’t  join a poetic tradition that would recognize me as a member. The wheel needs to be reinvented because we’re stillstuck. I am for almost new art (gently used forms) — easier on the pocketbook and on the b- rain (undergarments not accepted). The only true innovation is God’s. Others pay cash. This is a lie and that’s the truth. Better truth in the shade than a lie in the sun. The taste of madeleine ain’t what it used to be. (taint what it used to be)      ...     all alone and feeling      ...     Operators are on duty. Call now.As dry as a bubble, as expectant as the dead of night. Without product placement, poetry as we know it cannot sur- vive. Poetry should not be in the service of art any more than religion, ideology, or morality. Poetry should be in the service of nothing — and not even that. If  you can identify someone as gnostic they are probably notgnostic enough, for my money. I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason. The sacred in a poem is nowhere seen and everywhere felt. There’s more to transgression than ritual, but not enoughmore. There is more to liturgy than doctrine, once in a blue m- oo- n.I left my purpose in my other pants. You’re not the only paddle in the ocean, shadow in the dark, line in the poem, lobster in the trap, pot on the stove, wheel on the truck, letter on the keypad, scythe in the field, lever on the controls, cloud in the sky, fruit in the tree, rat in the lab. Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original is an echo of what is yet to be. Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental. Beauty is the memory of the loss of time. Memory is the reflection of the loss of beauty. American poetry suffers from its lack of uncreativity. I have no faith in faith, or hope for hope, no belief  in belief, no doubt of doubt. They say God is in the details. That’s because the Devil has the rest covered.God is weak and imaginary — a flickering possibility. The dogma of an omniscient and omnipotent God maligns hope and denies the sacred, as it turns its back on the world. God has no doctrine, no morality, no responsibility. To sin against God is to use that name to justify any action or prohibition, whether murder or martyrdom.I’ve got authenticity, you’ve got dogma  ...    proclaimeth the Lord. Saying one more time: It’s true but I don’t believe it I believe it but it’s not so. “My logic is all in the melting pot.” [wittgenstein]Better an old cow than a dead horse. Alzheimer’s: What’s that again? So it turns out I’m not a bull in a china shop but china in a bulls’ shop. Sometimes a penis is just a s- y- m- b- ol.In their gloom, the Jews go and comeTalking of Bergen-Belsen. (I saw time but it didn’t return my gaze.) My heart is like a water bucket that returns from the river seven times full eighth empty. Zeno and Heraklitus are my father’s milk. I think with the poem not thr- ou- g-h it. Turns of phrase / my stock in trade. Negative capability: sure. But also positive incapacity. I always hear echoes and reverseswhen I am listening to language. It’s the field of my consciousness. When we stop making — manufacturing, imposing — sense then we have a chance to find it.A professional poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and the coffee grounds. I think the idea is to be unoriginal but in as original a way a- s possible. Poets are the Pershings of the imaginary: piercing themselves as they perish in spite of native ground. I wish I was still in my pajamas.The unironized life is not worth living. When people tell that joke, three Jews four opinions, what they don’t say is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third ...    Ouzo something to me and it ain’t pretty. Absinthe makes the heart gro- w foreigner.“Throughout this prospectus, ‘object’ refers to the digitized file.”Yesterday is a stone’s throw from tomorrow & each new year a vast canvas of impossibility. Kalip in North Folk, you’re on the air. Stand clear of the clo- sing doors.• Too much is stillnot enough.• Blameless as a sheep at slaughter, am I Guileless as the toll of tidal tug There are no absolutes except this. It was a veritable bow across the shot. “Sacred means saturated with being.” [berssenbrugge] So does scared. So does scarred.
I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story,about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine,their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candidportraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen,all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I wastheir son’s girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneathmy braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinnerI would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladnessof the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood,the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchinilined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, theirminions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction.And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself,having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the familyto arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-highin the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of   June’s afternoon lightas I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman withcropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no oneto gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me,and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left,and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then,and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?
The fair rolled into town surprisingly intact, like a plate unbreakable because it has been dropped and glued so many timesthat it is all glue and no plate. The fair was no fair. But, oh, it was a thrill!The fair slid into town just as a clown slides into pants. The fit was loose but right.The sheriff  had a job directing traffic.The barber was the sheriff  for a night,and people paid to see a human ape.They frowned to find her happy and alive.The fair spilled into town like a box of tacks.Later that month, in with the rest at church, were people no one knew,though none could tell exactly who was who.
Of  that string of memories about our lost friendship I rememberbeing invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and afterone party, our self-parody of our own stammeringspeechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish godauto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuitsfrom Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our samenessand differences; our dual waitressing shifts across town,and the long phone calls that followed with their emphaticreiteration of every stingy six-top ordering candy-flavoredalcoholic drinks; the after-work visit where we brayed,stomped, then blinked stupidly (while the needle hitthe LP’s end) at the empty fifth of gin left on the coffee table,prompting a dim: Uh oh; your imitation of your mother’shabitual and by-the-way inexplicable confession about youto shoe salesmen: She has a  funny foot; the apartments,the Olivettis, the boyfriends, all the thoughts exchangedunedited like an experiment of the big, walk-in consciousness,which we might have assumed the verbal equivalentof sex for friends, and whatever closeness meant, we wantedas much as we could have, it was our post-graduate workin The Humanities. Even now, I can’t resist striking upa conversation while standing on line, any line, or introducingmyself enthusiastically to whomever I am introduced,but the truth is I am not looking for new friends at this point;I am trying to locate the lost ones, the ones who leftthrough the hole of an argument decades ago,a time more panicked and carefree than any other, except maybethe early years of motherhood, which I missed sharingwith you on playground benches. But surely I will see youon the bus someday, and your greeting will packageour jokes, advice, tears, book talk, our years of reliance.And so I will expect you will tell me how much I havemisunderstood and wrongly assumed in these descriptions,because I never expect those people who have matteredto remain completely gone, even through death, or rebuke.And of course I have to remember what parted us,that I found faults with your other friends, that I spokeas critically and crassly about them as I did about my own person,and to this day I have to be careful of that trait, my junkyarddog of expression, safe only with me on a too-long leash. Here,again, telling you everything with no reason but formemory’s insistence that I string an apology from what I see.
Eros scrabbles to rose and rageto gear or gare, as in Gare du Nord,where I trained in to Paris from notsmoking pot in Master Mad, I’m sorry,Amsterdam, with its canalscalled grachts and clocksthat bonged my homesick hoursat different times. Which is smitefor you violet types, a flowerthat says “love it” if you listen. Me, I doand don’t feel it matters that evil thrivesin live, that we tinker and smasheverything down to bits and thentry to patch a path back home, it’s our lottoin life, to have no cluewhat a natural disaster iswhen that disaster is us. That’s what I loveabout the shrug, it says zilchsans le mouth and becomesmore aerobic the more you admitthe less you know, you know? It’s a jumbleout there, kids, with slips and slidesand elide’s eally ool, dependingwhat’s lopped off, as in light of   handor slight of and, but I better spotbefore you pots how sparsethis parsing is. Besides, what can I sayabout language other than it’s an anal eggin need of one glorious u. Wordsor sword — pick your poisson. Every timeI try to peak into speaking, the bagof gab to learn what our noodlesare really up to, I get flummoxedthat the tools I useare the stool I stand onto see a way in or out. I can’t even tellif  I’m more trapped or rapt,if meaning’s mean or play’sa dumb waiter riding numblyup and down. But have you noticedread becomes dearif you ignore the worldas you find it and find it in youto swirl the word, in the waysolve and loves are the samebones, different skeletons.
intensity and height I want to write, but only foam comes out,I want to say so much but it’s all crap — there aren’t any numbers left that can’t be added up,nobody writes down pyramids without meaning it.I want to write, but I’ve got a puma’s brains;I want to crown myself with laurel, but it stinks of onions.There’s no word spoken that doesn’t dissolve in mist,there’s no god and no son of god, only progress.So come on, to hell with it, let’s go eat weeds,eat the flesh and fruit of our stupidtears and moans, of our pickled melancholy souls.Come on! Let’s go! So what if   I’m wounded — let’s godrink what’s already been drunk,let’s go, crow, and find another crow to fuck.hat, coat, gloves Right in front of the Comédie-Française is the Regency Cafe; and right inside it, there’s this room, hidden, with a table and an easy chair. When I go in, house dust, already on its feet, stands motionless. Between my lips made of rubber, a cigarette butt smolders, and in the smoke you can see two intensive smokes, the cafe’s thorax, and in that thorax an oxide of elemental grief. It matters that autumn grafts itself into other autumns, it matters that autumn merges into young shoots, the cloud into half-years, cheekbones into a wrinkle. It’s crucial to smell like a madman who spouts theories about how hot snow is, how fugitive the turtle, the “how” how easy, how deadly the “when.” best case Look, at the very best, I’m someone other — some guy who walks around marble statues, who enters his adult clay into indexes of blood, and feels the rage and fear of the fox chased to its hole — and if someone anoints my shoulders with indigos of mercy, I’ll declare to my absent soul that there’s no hellishly paradisal elsewhere for me to go. And if they try to choke me on the sea’s wafer, telling me it tastes like His flesh, more acid than sweet, like Kant’s notions of truth, I’ll cough it all up: No, never! I’m other as a germ, a satanic tubercle, a moral ache in a plesiosaur’s molar: in my posthumous suspicions, all bets are off! another day of life I’ll die in my apartment on a cold bright day, with nobody around, the apartment next door gone dead still while wind whistles through the balcony, though the branches somehow aren’t moving, just as the sun doesn’t move, everything’s so quiet, so frozen. Parked cars, plastic bags bleached in the bare trees, a couple of those Mylar balloons tied to a chair on the balcony next door, celebrating something, maybe? ... now sagging listless on the floor, as if every last molecule had been pierced by a needle — Tom Sleigh is dead, he stared up into the air, the sky was pale blue as usual and he couldn’t feel the cold coming through the window, and there wasn’t much to say or not say — and nobody, anyway, to say or not say it. my jailer won’t weep to be my liberator My cell’s four walls, whitening in the sun, keep counting one another — but their number never changes, despite my jailer’s innumerable keys to chains wrenching the nerves to their extremities. The two longer walls hurt me more — who knows why — their salt-stained cracks like two mothers who die after labor, but give birth to twin boys whose hands they still hold. And here I am, all alone, with just my right hand to make do for both hands, raising it high into the air to search for the third arm that between my where and my when will father this crippled coming-of-age of a man. insomnia is the only prayer left How childish is the spectacle of the stained glass’s holiness: the night doesn’t give a shit what goes on inside human beings, the night has its own web of dendrites refuting the inane prayers prayed for the dying, for the confessions going on between earthworms and earth, between the way a man argues with his own shoulder bones. All the while, barracudas in a coral canyon, a sea turtle flying, swim through fathoms and fathoms of images that keep crashing on the shore of the eye that never shuts — and smarts in its sleeplessness staring up into the dark shadowed by stingrays, gas stations, the slow flapping wing of a lottery ticket.
Looking at the lion behind the plate glassI wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,but he seemed to come apart, not literallyI mean, but I couldn’t see him whole:Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumpingas he panted and began to roar. His ballssheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuftjerking in an arc like an old-time pump handlerusted in midair. Somebody or somethingI read once said that when Jesus had his visionof what his father, God, would do to him,that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross,pieces of a body appearing through flashesof sun, as if the body in his visionwas hands looking for feet, a head for a torso,everything come unmagnetized from the soul:the lion caught me in his stare not ator through me but fixated on the great chainof being that Jesus couldn’t see and thata zebra might gallop in — black and white stripesmarking longitudes of this world turningto meat, bloody meat — this vision of an inmatethat Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate bymaking a cageless cage with glass insteadof bars — though the lion didn’t seem to care,he was roaring for his keepers to bringhim food, so everything’s what it should beif you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lionseem concerned about having gone a littlecrazy, barking incessantly so I could seethe plush, hot pink insides of its throat,though like the lion through the glassthere’s this distortion, my reflectionI’m looking through that makes me float abovethe zoo: and now this silence at closing timepours like a waterfall in different zonesof silences that, pouring through my head,surround roaring, barking, human muttering — is any of that what being sounds like?Or is it just animal gasping like whatJesus must have heard from the thieveshanging beside him, one damned, one saved?What was in his heart when his visionclarified and he saw it was a hand herecognized that the nail was driving through?
Today I became Kingof the Court w/out a diamond-encrusted crown thrust upon my sweaty head. Insteadmy markings of royaltywere the t-shirt draping my body like a robe soaked in champagne & the painin my right knee — a sign of a battle endured, my will tested & bested by none as the ball flew off my handsas swift as an arrow towardthe heart of a target — my fingers ringless yet feeling like gold.
My brother wore bags over his boots to keep the grease & grime from his time at the steel mill off the carpet & stepshe mounted, heaving each foot like a monster born of the grave -yard shift — stiff & awkward,his arms smeared w/dark matter, the lather of machine & industry bathing his clothes & face in a glazeof sweat & smoke, oil & the dirt of what’s been done before — the work of uncles & cousins who wore the samejumpsuit, goggles & gloves to grab hold of cold finished bars using their backs & shoulders to move the weight aroundw/the help of machines, the knobs to control the two-ton bundles held by a buckle above the headsof hard-hatted men that could snap & let loose the mass of all that metal meant to weld into a foundation,a beginning to build upon when it was his time to work, to clock in clean & leavefeeling filthy no matter the shift or stiffness in the bones creaking like the wooden stairs he climbed
He lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world.— John FreemanThrillers like The Da Vinci Code are one of the key indicators of 
contemporary ideological shifts.— Slavoj Žižek For what might break a writer’s block that gripsmy pen as if King Arthur’s sword, I questthrough bookshops of My Lady Charityin Urbs Leodiensis Mystica,completely outside Freeman’s (as most) worlds,where locals speak blank verse (says Harrison);Back-to-Front Inside-Out Upside-Down Leeds,according to the Nuttgens book I baggedalong with authors promising keys to opensecrets of iambic pentameter,how it’s a ball and chain, a waltz — but best,in Žižek’s wind sock for the New World Order,Gnostic code imprinted by five feetthat lead us to a Grail Brown liquefiesas Shakespeare melts to decasyllabicslike congealed saint’s blood in a Naples shrine.Brown quotes from Philip’s Gospel where it suitsto build on Rosslyn Chapel’s premisesvast hypophetic labyrinths in the airyet blind to masons’ mysteries below,who carved among the seven virtues greedwith charity being made a deadly sin    ...    The world was made in error, Philip wrote — Savonarola, in The Rule of Four(another blockbuster from Oxfam’s shelves)is made to quote “the Gospel of Paul” — does error here disguise some secret truth?What if  Paul’s Gospel were real, a Gnostic textthrown on the Bonfire of the Vanitiesso seen there by our zealot’s burning eyes,its road map to the true Grail turning to ash?My back-to-back looks on a blind man’s roadto Wilfred’s city, where he came from Rometo blitz our monks for “Simon Magus” tonsuresafter that Gnostic heresiarcha dog denounces in St. Peter’s Acts,while Peter raised smoked tuna from the dead,explained his crucifixion upside down,then how God’s Kingdom might be found on Earth:make right your left, back forwards, low your high    ...
Shiraishi called upon the great sky cock,wanted an explanation, wondered, whythe echo of form without the wisdom,why the bent wit without the timing.Wondered, as I have, how a man, bareupon the bed may rise as if in praisebut fail to be grateful for the gift at hand.O dick of questionable devise.O schlong of longing, as presentbut ultimately unknowable as yourmaker, I would worship at the fountif I had more faith, if I knew yourweeping eye was on me alone.
Lucretius grabbed my arm and led me to the spot where he went nuts. I watered little drums right away and entangled the Sava River with knitting needles. I putrefied a small soup, dismembered seven towels. There, He — The Terrible — burnt on the stake, squatted, too. My god, I beat him up his ass. Puff, puff, but no one had heard a thing. Now here, I’m flooded with flowers by cumin. Even Tarkovsky appears. Now I will suck you with my thumbs, mold you like clay with my horns, till he’d vaporize and see into what and where I’ve traveled to. Into honor. Into white birch trees. Into the pouch used for bread. I hung around the world a lot, frothily crushing the mountain range. With no avail, with no day’s pay, sticky are my laws. I protected an elephant as much as I could, stared at the back of the horse. Joshed the others now, too, tested spring mattresses. Kept gulping nirvana. Loosened feathery leaves, wrapped the emperor into a roll. To not let my senses perish, to gallop without a break.
The insane devotee throbs with his small legs, I don’t dare more. The insane devotee throbs with his small legs, I cannot do more. Bricks are yellow, made of polyvinyl, fattish. We people die. Lemme aks you, no l’s nor’s from the Japanese and Chinese, only the white mushroom, a cataract. Animals are prolific. You come from the valley, from your spine. From something more? From the risen sun. To smoke oneself on the roof. To change clothes and dry one’s hair in water lily.
The rise of the zebra hurts the zebra. As if she would breathe fire. If  we put natural gold and the black blue into the loaf of  bread it bursts. Find and shove, open and wound. The oars when kneaded in and then stretched, row. How they bump into wheat on the white surface again. Mašenka! There are three corpses in Gravel Cave. One keeps silent. One snowballs. One conceals.
God and Mrs. God in watercolor blue skirt desolate. — David Schubert I am not a woman, Iam a man. Made in His image.I keep the house, a gray Cape Cod,and broom it well. I wear a skirt to becomfortable. I build the fire.When my husband comes home I don’t pester Him with questions.He knows where to find His slippers and His pipe.Out our kitchen back door I see the prophets freight-hoppingthe long bad Western in ancient Englishthat no one need read to know. Everyone speaks his part:the women keep their heads downwhile the men are losing theirs. Children?How often I’ve prayed for a child, which meansslipping meaning looks to my husband as we rocktogether on the porch of an evening, drinking lemonadeand playing Scrabble. If He lets me winit’s a sign. I haven’t won yet.But the neighbor children come and goand take the pies cooling on the windowsillwithout thanks. Sometimes terrible thingshappen to them — some manspills the bloodcradled so carefully in every hand. I acceptno blame. The pies were there to leave alone,or not. God says nothingbut taps out His pipe, stands, with a handto ease His aching back. Time for bed.Our bed is a rolling ocean that I tread alonejust a head bobbing above the ash-colored waveswhile the moon waits for me and everythingto drown, to know again the peacethe moon knows, the silence interrupted by astronauts,little green men, the spectacle a mothercan’t help but make of  herself. Godcomes to bedand I clutch a spar, a barrel, an oar,and ride out the night with it. When He fucks mestill He doesn’t speak, for speech is creationbut I rock with him, I roll insidewhat cannot be comprehended, in force. I forgetthat I’m a man, I forget the wild sea, I let slipmy grasp and the colors I havethat cover me. Once I dreamedof the morning: we left the house togetherin identical sober suits, we stood in the streetand beheld the sad little town, wreathed in black crepefor its children. As though the morningcould show me His face. He coughed.And when I awokein our ordinary bed, streaked by sun through leaded windows, I heldmy baby to my breast and watched the roof  beamand whispered to her, It’s all right,we are safe only and always from our dreams.
As the extinguished.As creatures, coming out to playin the twilight of creationhuman faces intelligent and suffering,turned upward entering the trees.The charismatic megafauna:polar bears, moose, rippling massive flanksto shake loose biting flies.The fox and the vixen. The leoparddazzling in his camouflage, breakingthe urgent glass. In the underlayerof  humus and moss and broken claythe cryptogams, the earthworms turningbetween the wizardly fingersof the forest, managed growthof the second order, the third, steeredtoward what shoal, a historyfor the benefit of imaginary extrinsic persons.In the branches snowy owlsand ravens, or the rock pigeons we callpigeons, that can’t perch in trees, that swarm citieslike the flying rats they are, hungry,iridescent at the neck like therats themselves shining like a collarat the base of a public sculpturemonument to the fundamental flightthrough corridors of power, mathematics,heat death rippling like an invisible wavedown State Street, paralleling Michigan,pushed by the restless concinnationsof  the El, cutting longitudes across the lake itself,desert of watermeeting the migrations of alien carp andcosmic rays, diving deep for the wreckof the Edmund Fitzgeraldor swimming invisible lines, boundariespoliced by radar, from Canadaa mass of air launched by minute variationsin temperature, push and pull over heatislands, carbon dioxide absorption,ozone exhaustion invisible and interveninglike a god: that which manifeststhrough its action on substance, not itselfsubstance: weak forces, atmospheres,unnamed unmet animal speciesgone extinct, whole genuses, phyla,unknowable kingdoms and principalities,coral reefs burned black likethe crouched and burdened angels,muscular sketches of our vacancyas in an etching by Blake, horizontal,the spiritual body dividing like a hyphen the upper from the lower,phatic messenger of  betweenness,inhuman round eyes fixed on nothing, on suffering,folly, sporting events, on Gaza — wings outstretched to bandage the eyes of  Heaven,our eyesas they would bandage the wound of a headless child or conceal the strength of a peoplefrom their weakness, the mortalsmasquerading as their own fates, individualsslashed open by solitude, acts of mourningand revenge, writing themselvesinto the text of righteousness. The messengersreveal nothing, like the animalsmarching slowly toward me now, two by two,tongues lolling, eyes lit from within hollow and sparklingas a cave concealed from light for thirty thousand yearsbut concealed no longer. Grace have I nonebut what can be inferredby arms opening, palms, head tilting backto catch rain in my jaws:what is born, now, what wrests its wayout of the eternal feminine, the bodymy only warrant, against monuments my pledgeto the immaculate moment. What is bornis not of me, or the we, or of god, or animals.It is a wing. It is bleeding.It masks my eyes until the thunder comesto open the openness over all.
We keep trying to kill it, split it, hackIt to itsy bits. We suspend itOn the wall where we can see itPassing. We hang it around our necksOr wrists, laying pulse next toPulse as if each might like Company. Ba-bump, etc. Rising And setting has everything to doWith it. In the afternoon we feel soLazy we try not to close our eyesAnd jerk awake, wondering what hasPassed, and where did we goFor that suspended hour,And could anything keep us here.
Hildegard believedA woman’s brain drewHeat to itself, drew seedFrom a man all the way upThe spine’s long stairThe stake bracing the spineLicking all the way orange,Red, blue — shut it — And why not? My brain has beenHungry all this time.
You are smaller than I rememberAnd so is the house, set downhillAfloat in a sea of scrub oak. From up hereIt’s an ordinary box with gravelSpread over its lid, weighting it, butInside it’s full of shadows and sky.Clouds pull themselves over dryGrass, which, if  I’m not mistaken, will eruptAny minute in flame. Only A spark, a sunbeam focused. From up Here, enjoying the view, I can finally Take you in. Will you wave back? I keepSlingshotting around. There’s gravityFor you, but all I ever wanted was to fly.
I don’t have to outrun the elephant,I just have to outrun you.I don’t have to race with a belligerent ten-point buck, outpace an elephantin musth. I don’t need to flee a wrathful firmamentor dance with a choleric jackboot.I don’t have to outrun the elephant.I only have to outrun you.
A lot more of than thought, unsought, come out white.Lemurs of Madagascar, and leopards sans spots.Brilliant, I think, to spurn pigment and burnin December light, a December filament.No one would know if there’s snow in your hair,or whether or not, when they knock, you are there.
Metaphor metaphor my pestilential aesthetic A tsunami powers through my mother’s ruinsDelta delta moist loins of the republic Succumb to the low-lying succubus do!Flagpole flagpole my father’s polemics A bouquet of fuck-u-bastard flowersFist me embrace me with your phantom limbs Slay me with your slumlord panegyricsFlip over so I can see your pastoral mounts Your sword slightly parting from the scabbardGirl skulls piled like fresh-baked loaves A foul wind scours my mother’s cadaverOrnamental Oriental techno impresarios I am your parlor rug your chamber baubleLove me stone me I am all yours Pound Pound my father’s EzraFreedom freedom flageolet-tooting girlsDancing on the roof of the maquiladoras
At the airport, we all take a shot of aguardientebecause we all had each other’s facesWhen I saw my brother I saw my faceI saw my grandmother I saw my faceI saw my aunt I saw my stupid faceOn the way up the mountain I saw my face in a pile of trashI saw my face in the mule’s assI saw my lover I saw my face but it was white & wearyI saw my brother again and there was my face; my other brother, my other faceI saw my face in the American Apparel ivory chiffon blouseI brought for this occasionIn the occasion I saw my face, I didI saw my face in the pankekes the next morningMy face was in the talk of deathMy face was in her teeth, the pavement, etc.,There was a jail cell at the Museo Nacional, I saw my faceA woman flowercunted & crosslegged, my face & my faceEverywhere my face like I didn’t have oneBotero’s asses all my facesI took down notes when it came to torture& the inquisition and saw my face in the leather swing setClavicle spikerest & eye ruptrestFaces, I suppose, are a type of tortureto look like one but never be one
Tha’ vahnahnah go-een to keel joo.Excuse me?Tha’ vahnahnah    ...    go-een to keel joo.I’m sorry, I don’t understand.O’ káy. Sô    ...    vahnahnah haf sostahnence, nô?Uh — O’ káy. Ees troo if  joo haf sostahnence, joo problee leev anothe’ thay?I suppose so, look — Alrigh. If  joo ee tha’ vahnahnah, joo weel be leeving ôp a-hed, righ?Yeah alright, so?O’ káy. Are joo thy-een now?What?Are joo thy-een now — a’ thees momen?I hope not.O’ káy. Ees troo    ...    ôp a-hed — joo thy some poin?Of course.Alrigh, sô, vahnahnah poosh you there.Um.Tha’ vahnahnah go-een to keel joo, baby.
People walk through you, the wind steals your voice,  you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,forerunner of a new race,half and half — both woman and man, neither — a new gender. —Gloria Anzaldúa Jasmine garlands thin for the rib’s cartilage ring.The heart shudders with pure mission. She spreads & knows herself as Adam, Ometéotl, but through himself, Omecíhuatl, he is Eve. He knows but what the garden gives: the garden’s soot awakened tongueless in root. Cerise chrysantha coils around his leg. Gathering the tides of the seas to his side, she conceives where impossibilities seed. Clarity burning coal, he takes two knots of grass & strings four birds-of-paradise through the ceiba’s rotted leaves: she fashions the sorrows from winter’s purse, sea & sun sifted for sum. Entrammeled, Ometéotl rises one among one body stitched in strange altar.
In reality my lovesare the strange box of a Polish dollThe blonde’s eyes appearingfixed to her hips long after midnightthe garret always singular to loosena massive mane across her back, its strandsthick and fine drapingher otter-like chinDeliberately she’d peer out from the wall and nothing could be seen but the shadow of  her breastshidden beneath marmots of  hairAnd lovely was her skin’s radianceat that unusual hourHer waist’s digressionseasily discernedas bees through grassthe window neither open nor closedWhat I saw, yellow like crystal,rose from sleepy thighsamassed in unseemly tourniquetsEverything before me, a pale shimmerof  hairs fanning delicatelyto reveal the pink or green skin I no longer knowof  hips a million centimetersfrom my gaze.
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes    ...    Yo no sé! — César Vallejo They sniffed us out of the holes with the animalsthey had programmed and there are blows in life sopowerful we just don’t know and there were trenchesand there was water and it poured in through our mouthsand out of our ears and there were things we saw in thesand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisiesand tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people wehad been and the bodies of the people we had lovedand we felt hooks coming through the trenches and wefelt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks comingthrough my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that theywould never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of courseit wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and ourmouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’redead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouthswere empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain andit was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and Jand we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for Jand S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved werehiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some littleworm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolvinginto the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy
They took my body to the forestThey asked me to climb a ladderI did not want to climb a ladderBut they forced me to climb the ladderIf you don’t climb the ladderwe will bury you in the foamy mudI had to decide: should I dieby hanging or by burialI climbed the ladder and they wrappeda belt around the thick limb of a treeAnd then when I could no longer breathethey tossed me into a streamAnd I floated to the edge of the villagewhere someone prayed for my soulIt’s like this in a lullabyfor the end of the world:The options for the endare endlessBut this is not really a lullabyfor the end of the worldIt’s about the beginningwhat happens when we start to rotin the daylightThe way the light shines onthe ants and worms and parasitesmauling our bodiesIt’s about the swarms of dogsgnawing our skin and bonesDo you know what it’s likewhen a ghost licks your intestinesDo you know what it’s likewhen a rat devours your brainTo avoid the holethe children must sing sweetly, softlyTo avoid the holethey must fill their songs with love
In the middle of the night, fatherBrought me a falcon.By morning, it ripped the wire and flew the hillInto the highway.When they found me in that carMy sleeve stemmed in blood,I didn’t know what it wasI was trying to kill.I saw a craft of orphans steaming down the river.They were dressed in white and silent as a séance.It was then I spoke to the bird.Already God is shaking his black seedBack into me.
Then, the police arrive — they don’t find me.I’m disguised as a boy in a champagne wigAnd hid inside the gold rattle of a warm Appalachia wind.Beneath the trash of willow, I am. The sorrowOf  trailer parks and carnie uncles. The poorGirl’s underworld, a weedy thing. The night,With its kingdom of  lanterns and awful blue lark.How we waited, how we hidLike wolves, in the revolving question of a field.
With razorblade eyes The Filipina is most sincereWith too much water And will make a very good wife.With animal teeth The Filipina is a loyal partner,We sometimes kill Deserving of all your love.With splintered hands The Filipina is the total package,With too much life Much more than meets the eye.With ribcage unlocked The Filipina is not for you,We wither your roots If  you cannot handle her claws.
Bubblegum lip gloss kissed, Our lifelines, our mirrors,I was never a singkil princess These are Luminous Mysteries — Knuckle cracking, polished toes, Our notebooks, our language,I was never a Santacruzan queen To witness, to make way,Black eyeliner, push up bra Our thirst and our wedding bands —I was never a curtsying debutante To fill stone jars with water, to wed,Loud, gum-smacking babygirl Our glamour and our armor.I was never a tiaraed Miss Fil Am To transfigure, dazzling as the sun.
After Herman Melville Glad, ontime penniesclick hardat your teetheveryone is throwing themGathered about you in a circleon the deckeveryone is catching thema blue flame about their heads cocked back over the railingGlassyou thinkin the middleand wheat stands from which timeis madeon the upper decks’passing of the banksThat’s not the brittlemoment above youOn shore, leaves turntheir graysunless sidesevery which wayThe riverboatis very smallit will never get here
The fair wind failed. The wind dropped. Winds were unfavourable straightaway. The favourable wind dropped and they were beset by storms so that they made little progress. Then the wind dropped and they were beset by winds from the north and fog; for many days they did not know where they were sailing. The fair wind failed and they wholly lost their reckoning. They did not know from what direction. Driven here and there. The fog was so dense that they lost all sense of direction and lost their course at sea. There was much fog and the winds were light and unfavourable. They drifted far and wide on the high sea. Most of those on board completely lost their reckoning. The crew had no idea in which direction they were steering. A thick fog which did not lift for days. The ship was driven off course to land. They were tossed about at sea for a long time and failed to reach their destination. We embarked and sailed but a fog so thick covered us that we could scarcely see the poop or the prow of the boatThen the wind ddroppe and they were beset by w inds from then orth and fog for manyd ays they did not know where they were sailing Thef air wind f ailed and they wholly l ost their reck their reckoning did not not know from what direction D riven here and there The f og was sodense that they l ost all ss ense of dirrrtion and l ost thr course at sea There was much fog and the w inds were light and unf and unfavourable They driftedf ar and wide on the high sea Mo stof those onboard completly l ost l ost l ost their reckoning Th ec rew had no idea in which direction they were ststeering A thick fo g which d i d n ot l ift for days The sh ip was driven offf course tol and They were ossted about astea for a longt ime and f iled tor each their destination We mbarkt and sailed but a fog so th but a fog so th but a fog so th th th th thik k overed us that we could scarcely see the poop or the prow of the boa t str ght w Th f r w nd f l d Th w nd dr pp d Th f v r bl w nd dr pp d nd th w r b s t b st rms s th t th m d l ttl pr gr ss Th n th w nd dr pp d nd th w r b s t by w nds fr m the n rth nd f g f r m ny d ys th y d d n t kn w wh r th y w r s l ng Th f r w nd f l d nd th y wh ll l st th r r ck th r r ck n ng Th y d d n t kn w fr m wh t d r ct n D r v n h r nd th r Th f g w s s d ns th t th y l st ll ss ns f d rrrt n nd l st thr c rs t s Th r w s m ch f g nd th w nds w r l ght nd unf nd nf v r bl They dr ft df r nd w d n th h gh s M st f th se nb rd c mpl tly l st l st l st th r r ck n ng Th c r w h d n d n wh ch d r ct n th y w r stst ring th ck f g wh ch d d n t l ft f r d ys The sh p w s dr ven fff c rse t l nd Th y w r sst d b t st f r l ngt me and f led t r ch th r d st n tion W mb rkt nd s l d b t f g s th b t f g s th b t f g s th th th th th k k v r d s th t w c ld sc rc ly s th p p r th pr w f th b t f theb t of the b t the b b s t b st rms s th t th m d l ttl pr gr ss Th n th w nd dr pp d nd th w r b s t by w The sh p w s dr ven fff c rse t l nd Th y w r sst d b t st f r l ngt me and f led t r ch th r d st n tion W mb rkt nd s l d b t f g s th b t f g s th b t f g s th th th th th k k v r d s th t w c ld sc rc ly s th p p r th pr w f th b t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t tt t t t t t t go t go off t go off course t go off course hafville t be lost forvillet hafville Ache come off course hafville Did not go where I was knowing hafville Had fear wildering hafville For a minute there I lost myself Totally at sea lost myway tossed misted lost mywill in the fog hafville hafville my love Major Tom hafville Li Bai hafville Rimbaud hafville Shelley hafville Amelia Earhart hafville Jeff Buckley hafville Spalding Gray hafville Virginia Woolf hafville Albert Ayler hafville Reinaldo Arenas hafville Hart Crane hafville Ingeborg Bachmann hafville When you rise from the dead, when I rise from the dead, the hangman will hang at the gate the hammer will sink into the sea Kom ut av kursen hafville Secgan at come hafvillur ok darkens ok myrkr ok hafvillur ok þokur ok hafvillur Cannot pokker see through this þokur Hwær hwanon never knew hu how to steer out of this rook this moss droomly wetter stoutair mattersea thick dank shadoway Lost lost all reckoning the sea coagulated All wats not-light all wats not-dark Déadlockit Beat bells! Blow foghorns! Storm the ceiling! Set my head on fire! Lightup! this d arkness for a bearing thour pis halla Beat bells blow foghorns! Gebangbang for rumbly lowe! When will the wind come? Where will the wind from come? Will it come from the naught, bringing phobias and rationing? Will it come from the soot, bringing droughts and epidemics? Will it come from the feast, fleeding crops and arteries? Will it come from the waste, bringing seizures and military uprisings? When will the wind come? Where will the wind from come? Will it come from the clog, causing jellyfish fission shutdown? Will it come from the leak, bringing mass dispersion radiation? When will the wind come? Where will the wind from come? Will it be an empty confusing windup? Will it be a tempestuous hooley? Will it be a blippy huff ’n puff ? Will it be a good proper piner? Heigh Ho and up she rises! Heigh Ho and up she goes! Beat bells! Blow foghorns! Loud metal gebangbang for rumbly love!
But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at?Who wants to write a poem without the letter e,Especially for Thee, where the flourished vowel lends such panache to your carnet de bal
Men around a submarinemoored in Sydney Harbourclose to the end of wartimeshowed us below, down into their oily, mesh-lit gangwayof bunks atop machines.In from the country, weweren’t to know our shillingsbought them cigars and threadfor what remained of Holland’s Glory:uniforms, odd, rescued aircraft,and a clutch of undersea boatspatrolling from Fremantle. The men’scountry was still captive, their greatIndies had seen them ousted,their slaves from centuries backwere still black, and their queenwas in English exile.The only ripostes still opento them were torpedoesand their throaty half-American-sounding language.Speaking a luckier one we set off home then. Homeand all that word would meanin the age of rebirthing nationswhich would be my time.
Last time I fell in a shower roomI bled like a tumbril dandyand the hotel longed to be rid of me.Taken to the town clinic, Idescribed how I tripped on a steel rimand found my head in the wardrobe.Scalp-sewn and knotted and flaggedI thanked the Frau Doktor and fled,wishing the grab-bar of age mightbe bolted to all civilizationand thinking of Rome’s eighth hillheaped up out of broken amphorae.When, anytime after sixty,or anytime before, you stumbleover two stairs and club your foreheadon rake or hoe, bricks or fuel-drums,that’s the time to call the purveyorof steel pipe and indoor railings,and soon you’ll be grasping up landingshaving left your balance in the carfrom which please God you’ll neversee the launchway of tires off a brink.Later comes the sunny day whenstreet detail whitens blindly to mauveand people hurry you, or wait, quiet.
There is the torch and the only thingThat will prevent us from using itIs whether or not we can allow Jellyfish in the otherwiseCrystalline surf. It would be easyTo dismiss this view as beautiful and walk awayBecause it is buggy and we forgotThe spray, to cancel the conversationBecause its ease is perilous with conjunctions,To not touch because the sky would Separate from the sky and the mothershipWould fall through with a bannerWaving in a language we wouldn’tUnderstand though the meaning isAs clear as these intercontinentalContrails hatching mackerel skySaying we are full we are full Of sound and fury, we are signifyingNothing. Damned universal law.Damned categorical imperativeElbowing its way between my handsAnd your face. The sparrows againExploding against windowsAs a circle of men sitting outsideThe cafe while away their intentionsWith invisible motor tics they can’tEven feel unless the right empire of light Covers every last inch of themAnd brings to the surface the names — Those loves they choseTo stable. And there it is:The choice — if only the metaphorWere more complex if I could onlyAdverb away my existenceAnd say what a remarkable SundayThis is a perfect Sunday And turn my breath to stone.I’ve done it before, I spokeThe language of sweating cavern wallsAnd electric light. But I won’t go there again.We are all and only our distancesAnd when we touch that is what we touch.Our messy shelves. Our sullen privationsAnd overabundance of lemons.Our grief, our mountains and fieldsAnd rivers of grief. Our dismissalsAnd the love we ignore when we don’t runAfter the sparrows because the sparrowsWill fly away. My sparrow, fly away if you have toBut know that I am coming.I am low in the grass. I am burningWith patience. I am every song.I know all the math in the shoreSays you shouldn’t but my distance Is yours if you want it. And it is yoursIf you don’t. Dandelions and honeysuckleSurround me, the world’s ineluctable fireIs looking right at me, and I am making my stand.
There is magic in decay.A dance to be doneFor the rotting, the maggot strewnPiles of flesh which pileUpon the dung-ridden earthAnd the damp that gathersAnd rusts and defiles. There is a bit of thisIn even the most zoetic soul — The dancing child’s armsFlailing to an old ska songConduct the day-old fliesAway to whatever rankNative is closest. Just todayI was walking along the riverWith my daughter in my backpackAnd I opened my email On my phone and DuffieHad sent me a poem Called “Compost.” I read itTo my little girl and startedTo explain before I was threeWords in Selma startedYelling, Daddy, Daddy, snake!In the path was a snake,Belly up and still nerve-twitchingThe ghost of some passingBicycle or horse. Pretty, Selma said.Yes, I said. And underneath my yesAnother yes, the yes to my body,Just beginning to show signsOf slack, and another, my graspingIn the dark for affirming fleshThat in turn says yes, yesLet’s rot together but not untilWe’ve drained what sapIs left in these trees.And I wake in the morningAnd think of the coronerCalling to ask what colorMy father’s eyes were,And I asked, Why? Why can’tYou just look — and the coroner,Matter-of-factly says, Decay.Do you want some eggs, my love?I have a new way of preparing them.And look, look outside, I think this weatherHas the chance of holding.
Note who’s got to gotoday, don’t fussabout the means,just go ahead behead,impale, starve, strappado,the sheer assortmentof choices enoughto make a crowncrow. They neverloved me enough.It must be said: Theywere a disappointment.When divine motherlove wears out, I justreverse the robefrom blue to red.I like a flat groundto build the next town,city, empire of disgust.All the waste you see,that’s what I did,none of that happenedto me. I did that.I made that. I killed that. I.

I When in a farmhouse kitchen that smelledof old rinds and wet cigarette butts I hoisted the shotgun to my shoulderand aimed but did not fire it at the man who had just taken my virginity like a snack, with my collusion, but still — When I sat in a conference room in an inquisitionat the “newspaper of record,”across from the one slurping his pipe,the one arching her eyebrow,and I felt the heat like a wet brand in my chest,repaid insult for insult and left their fancy joblike a squashed bug on the floor — When I was twelve, too old, the last time my father spanked me, pants down, because I had “distressed” my motherand my vision went red-black andI did not forgive — When, during my travels along the Gulf Coast, the intruder returned in the nightand I did not call the cops again but stoodwith a butcher knife facing the door, yelling, “Come in!”although this time it was just the wind flapping and banging the screen door — When across a skating-rink-sized glistening tableI told the committee chair and her brooch I was a fan of Marxand lost the fellowship — When I threw a pot of hot coffeeand it just missed a man’s head, and the black-brown spatter stainswere still there four years later long after he’d left me when I finally moved out of that East Village hole — II I would have had to be thinkingin order to have thought — loaded, not loaded? — and I was not thinking, I was only dripping hotand oh the pleasure, I can still feel its prickling,crackle over the furnace of my rage,to see his face go pale, his eyes widen,his “put it down, put it down” — and Iput it down and allowed my life as well as histo go on.III I miss my anger. Decades go bywhen all I can muster is absent-minded invective,you know, directed at the news;or a brief fantasy of shoving someone in front of a bus. YesterdayI slammed my fist on my deskand then apologized, to the desk.Consider the tapestry of the seven deadly sins, at Saint-Denis:Anger, wild-haired and half-dressed,picked out in blue and silver thread bunched against the crimson,rough against the fingertips, sherides a black boar dappled with bloodand waves her double-headed axe — Yes, I remember her.I always lie when I always sayI didn’t know the gun was loaded.

your face turning from mineto keep from cumming8 strawberries in a wet blue bowlbaba holding his pantsup at the checkpointa newlywed securing her updowith grenade pinsa wall cleared of nailsfor the ghosts to walk through
When no one else would listen, Saint Anthonypreached seaward, his words fishnet for the lostsouls of the heretics. Caught up in despair, we pleato the one who will listen: Saint Anthony,please return Tía’s teeth or the misplaced key to our bolted hopes. Patron retriever of all we’ve tossed when no one else would. Listen, Saint Anthony,teach us to steward this world, all our netted loss.
You’re flush with hearts and I’m forced to fold this hand and swear off another luckless match.How we’ve found ways to love each other, cajoledour cindered hearts, flushed and forced to fold upon themselves like Saint Valentine ensouledwith seizure, skin a whirring bee swarm, a hatched flush of doves. My heart, how I’m forced to fold my hands in prayer for another struck match.
All morning my daughter pleading, outsideoutside. By noon I kneel to button hercoat, tie the scarf to keep her hood in place.This is her first snow so she strains againstthe ritual, spooked silent then whining, restless under each buffeting layer,uncertain how to settle into thisleashing. I manage at last to tunnelher hands into mittens and she barks andwon’t stop barking, her hands suddenly paws.She is reduced to another being,barking, barking all day in these restraints.For days after, she howls into her hands,the only way she tells me she wants out.
Beneath all this I’m carving a cathedralof salt. I keepthe entrance hidden, no one seems to noticethe hours I’m missing  ...    I’llbring you one night, it’s whereI go when Ihang up the phone  ...     Neither younor your soul is waiting for me atthe end of this, I know that, the saltnearly clear after Ichisel out the pews, the see-throughaltar, the opaquepanes of glass that depict the stations ofour cross — Here is the daywe met, here is the day we remember wemet
It was a matter of wearing gloves wellwhile lunching, while conquering Dubrovnik;of, no one would care how, evading Hell.Diverse employments made gentlemen tick:Christmas turkeys; circulating trophies;pedestal stacked upon pedestal. Todaysilence has come to see what no one sees,it’s always grim at the start of the play.Fellows, who wait à propos their introsclawing at the panels, such shrill tigers,thrive unthreading the hems of the heroes.Friends of our late friend are minor-leaguersnever to be called up but good as types,people who will hook bras to the flagpole,bake chocolate for a gray stranger  ...    She wipesaway red records of the stocks you stole  ...    Yesterday, books were thrown from the third floor,out the window, they sank in pairs like shoes,and I watch violet swords on a white shore,blade-tip laid across blade-tip, where it snows.
A sycamore grove, and in its limbsthe orchestra played Má vlast, so I sawboughs bouncing and tuxedo legsswinging sap-spotted above the splayedblades of the ground feathered blackin moss, in the sweat of the set sun,and the players’ faces where moths roosted,where leaf-points drew water-stripeson brows and eyelids, their handsthat stirred in pollen like a fog, were maskedby birds’ nests and bows and flaking vines.That you were last to climb down,trumpet tied to your back with blue twine,is the only thing I believe in,and after you landed, driftingthrough a stream, in a mat of orange needles,you whistled to what light could floatthrough the leaves’ screen and canopy, diffuselike tracing tissue, a scrum of benday dots, and not much at that,now that more than the concert has ended, my musician.
To keep anxiety at bay, my friend called chemo dragonfly love. Those insects — christened, in places, the devil’s darning needles — hover as they contort their joined bodies into a heart, the male with pincers. Finger cutter, horse killer, ear stick, eye pisser. Look closely at the eyes of a female darner and you may well see dark puncture marks. As a slow drip through an IV. As a pill. Through a port into a vein. She called nausea erotica. Just the same, we name our storms to lessen them — 
not a tropical cyclone, but Arabella, with ballet shoes and bun. Tumors, too, were friends, waiting at the bus stop with backpacks in the morning. Cindy French braids Carrie’s hair, yanking at the scalp to form the tight crisscross. Not hair loss, but deep conditioning. She gave us the new lexicon on stationery embossed with a red rose speckled by raindrops. The stem still had its thorns. Ring-around-the-rosy, red rover, red rover, send her right over. She called death the world of 10,000 things: the dragon courting its damsel, catheter tubing in the wastebin, video of a toddler biting his brother, pas de deux, full-
sugar ice cream, Crimson Queen, Trumpeter, Red Knockout, Tuscany Superb  ...    I knew her as Rose Shapiro. At the funeral I learned she was born Passalacqua: to cross the river, to pass a glass of water.
All hail the crumbling stone monument to the Battle of Bad Axe, the wooden helvelong rotted and burned, the short walk to the river,where we can bathe in its brown,where a steamboat ghost huffs out a stream of bullets. We are invulnerableto their spectral lead, descendants of fur traders (beaver, ermine,skunk). Our lungs are clean and pink. Let’s visitthe saw shop, the greenhouse with bluff views,the pines and stacks of firewood,the Blackhawk general store, named forthe warrior who waved a chalky,misunderstood flag and eluded capturefor weeks. In winter, eaglesdive here, gathering lift when the windhits the bluffs: all hail the migratingraptor, its piercing talon and yellow cere.
Miep managed to snap them up for 27.50 guilders. Burgundy-colored 
suede and leather  ...      — Anne Frank, Tuesday, August 10, 1943 When Miep took us home with herShe held us up in the air,Eye-level with those eyesYou may know, eyes spellingSorrow-girl, wait-for-me,Happiness-around-a-corner-One-day, hurry-back, don’t-tell.Two new hands took us in,Skin cradling skin.How empty we had been,Only a little bit worn —Not a penny, not a pebbleDwelling within.We became an altar,An offering red as wine,A wishing well.She was made to carry usNear and far,We were made to bearThe pressure of her feetIn darkness, in light,Their sweetness, their heat.We were getting used to her.Miep calls us a handsome pair.
“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe,“Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negativetone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s partof the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.We spend a long time interested in which way the car wouldbest go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer?Some way to say who we are?Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitationsof structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some musesand invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animusto get us going. And what was it Michael said yesterday? Thatthe committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all theseother things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation,so then we have this difficulty. It just gets to you sometimes. We havea table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks youabout apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve madeseveral distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors.How can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game,how, for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulnessby saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too.On the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside,a garbage truck passes right to left. They intersect. And so the world continuesaround two corners. The table gets turned over, with several peoplestanding around seemingly not sure of what comes next. Look at thempolitely as you can, they’re beginners too. And they say the right questionis far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good,anyway, in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, somethingyou can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way as well. Looking back at the alternatives, we never had childrenor we had more children. And what were their names? As the living room partsinto halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant,a filing cabinet or two  ...    because some of these questionsyou have with others, and some you have only with yourself.
“Ghosts are people who think they’re ghosts,”my daughter Natalie said, starting off the periodwe will refer to later as A Little Bit Further Along. Since then(which was last night, November 3rd, 2009), I’ve been thinkingabout where I am more, as a kind of goal,and somewhat less about where I’m not. It’s a pleasure to bewhere one is, given that someoneisn’t somewhere lethal. This is Pleasure One.And now this is Pleasure Two, thinking about it,so that this place, which was Place One, and a pleasure,as we were there where we were and it was not a lethal place,but a place where we were, is now this place againas we’re here thinking about it, like America or a popsicle.“Open the house and the house is empty,” Natalie also said, meaning her dollhouse, as she’s seven, but when she said it, I had thisvision of all of us suddenly disappearing, maybe thinkingourselves ghosts, even, or getting somewhere, outand around her bedroom and then down the hall and stairs.I’ll tell you how it happened. Natalie and I were looking out the windowat the backyard, and she asked me if I liked our house. It’s a themewith her. The other night she asked me if I liked life. I said, “Yeah,a lot.” And she looked at me a second and then said, “Me too.”You don’t hear that every day, I think, until the accumulationsbegin to remind me of every day: Carla, who donated a kidneyto her brother-in-law (Robin’s uncle), has just been diagnosedwith cancer, two months later. She sends hopeful updatesfrom the hospital, on Facebook. Like fountains, the footnotesgo on. My footnote or yours. The big questions can’t be decidedin this way. They demand coins or laws. And this ismuch too important to be a big question.
It appears that we’re living (which isn’t always the case), dependingon how one defines such things, in a “now you see it / now you see it” kind of way. We can say we’re working on our age,as well, listening to Bob Dylan songs where people can agein whatever direction supports the theme. “Too bad life doesn’tget themes,” Robin says, and yes, that’s right, and then we can all go do whatever it was we were going to do anyway. “It’s either that,or pay off the kidnapper,” as Neil Young had it, back in the mid-70s.There’s always an analogue, and someone to tell us about it,how, no matter how fast you run, you can’t run fast enoughto get away from yourself. You could even call it a theme.For instance, I was the first one to an eighteen-wheeler accidenton the highway once, in the early 90s. I didn’t know whatI was going to find. It was just tossed there on its side, acrossboth lanes. So I got out of the car and walked around to the front,only to see the driver standing inside the cab that was restingon the driver-side door. He was simply standing there behind the glass,parallel with the dashboard, a little blood on his forehead, lookingas lost as I felt, looking back at him. All his things (magazinesand maps and cigarettes and pens and snacks) in a little pile at his feet.When I left, a guy was hitting the windshield with a baseball bat.You go to the room, and the place you like to sitis missing. This is an opportunity to trust, I suppose, or perhapsfor blind panic, if one were to consider this a metaphorfor something. But say it’s not, say there are no such thingsas metaphors for a moment, and where does that get you?Presently, it gets me to a row of green and yellow plastic chairs,those 1950s-looking ones I imagine Kenton would liketo collect. They’re joined together by shiny metal clasps, chrome,and the whole thing is full of sunlight through the plate glasswindow. It’s the kind of scene I think of as lickable, how everything looks like cheerful candy, and I wonder if there might be a wayto be there or here without a beginning, or without an ending,or if perhaps there might be a concept for no middle.
Drown on all foursPennies from a box flood the frump marketBlasts of nacre, triage under weather’s speckled poolThe idée fixe never happens yet can’t be ignoredStill the moon is half full?Speak for yourself with your hands upThe search is onSearch and destroy, if you willElimination starting with a lit fuseVacuumed anonYour pleasure is the lee shoreThunder smites the tundra’s pawThis should be memorableLegs whited outThe runners advance
...  cantered light-heartedly downstream to their doom.  — Patrick Leigh Fermor Somebody down there hates us deeply,Has planted a thorn where slightest woe may overrun.Disorderly and youthful sorrow, many divots picked at sinceAcross the thrice-hounded comfort zone.Can’t cut it, sees permanent cronesEncroaching aside likely lanes of executive tarAll spread skyward.You got the picture, Bub:This world is ours no more,And those other euphemisms for grimly twisting wrath,A wire-mesh semblance bedeckedWith twilight’s steamy regard.Look at the wind out here.Delete imperative.Hours where money rinses life like sex,Whichever nowadays serves as its signifier.
Opposite him at this table againand through the windows the city glittering, surreal as a scale model, the city in miniature — only it moves in a real way, because it is real.One of the windows is open, some construction down on the streetdrones like a distant vacuum. It’s warm for January.Still, his apartment has that dreamlike qualityof feeling like home though I know it’s not. Not mine anymore — but how many people get to visit the past without hurting anything? To come back and drink the same coffeefrom the same never-quite-clean cup?
For Bernadette Mayer Just one more vintage movie,Batwings tonight at the Bal Masqué — Another creature stuffedBy distinguished pedigree.I get a lot of madcap ideas about sentience,How knowing has you put down in the book Forbidden speech recognition — Else why make such a face?And now it’s luck no longer mouth that movesWhen fastidious rummage whispersTo divulge a surplusA clue if not the key.Prospect my question laps up for good — I lean to it. Knowing you,First-person dwindle.Tweet-tweet. Prick.
Up — or out? — here:a problem of preposition,my uneasy relationwith the world. Whether I’mabove it or apart. On the other sideof the latched glass door, a manloves me. Worries. Calls my name. • Where — for art — thou-sands of windows go darkin slow succession. On Essexand Ludlow and Orchard.A thousand times goodnight. • A boy throwing stones at a window.Right window, wrong boy. • Love goes toward love — And the place death, down therewaving its white kerchief —
Yes, I was jealous when you threw the glass.I wanted the shattering against the wood-paneled floor for myself,to be the sudden diaspora of its pieces across the apartment — and last nightwhen we fought, I wanted you to hit me so badly I begged.And the other day walking past Renewal-on-the-Bowery,when one of the men smoking unsteadily outsidecalled me a faggot, I thought: Good. People get what they deserve.Then I wished I were more like Jesus — capable of lovingall people and all things always, capable of nothingbut love. I waste half my wishes this way,wishing to be virtuous. The rest, well,I don’t have to tell you, do I?
When we gathered at the house, while the men all looked at their shoes and the women whispered, baby, baby, baby, she sat down with a fist full of paper napkins and folded them into birds. When she filled her hands, she crossed the room to the hearth and threw a bird into the flames, then another, then another until she had destroyed all she created. Years later when I asked her what she meant, she couldn’t remember. The worst has already happened, she said. What good is metaphor to us now?
A comped piano lifted the leaves in  Low Forest, a blanket of shade pulled up, a sheet of glass put in place, free  pros-  pect all around I thought. I wanted my allegoric lapse, I wanted my whatsaid  companions. Alone looking out under  house  arrest, I wanted them back, less myself  than before, unbeset...    An exquisite jewel  it all was, no explanation, no equation,  a  time-lapse excursion it was. High John  from High Point was on the box, the box blown roofless, hacked wood scattered  what  light there was...    A low trombone could  be heard asking, “What have they done to my beautiful boy?” A tree limb cracked in  the  distance, the all-of-us the horns had be-  come. All of us there to notice, all of us there  to see, “Blue Train” our wounded anthem, hacked wood the woods we walked...    I was  im-  agining Sophia’s dreamt-about blue truck,  dreamt arrival, Trane’s loud announcement  a blur, train truck, wished-for congress come  nigh.  There was the sun’s late equation, the moon’s ludic blush, truck equaling train equaling train  equaling truck, soon’s blue transport, soon  soon come...    It was the muse’s blue lips the all-of-  us the horns had become came thru, blue  rebuked kiss, blue-blent reconnoiter. It was  the  muse’s gray canopy covered us, the we I’d  otherwise be the trees fell free of, cries loud  and low we’d have heard had we been there, wood equaling would equaling we...    I lay  like  Anuncio busted up contemplating the book  of it, last leg’s no-exit announcement no way to run. I stood like Itamar, sat like Huff. A  sweet  smile captured my lips like Netsanet’s, Zeno  and  Zenette’s re- pair  •  Zeno and Zenette’s last anything. Zeno and  Zenette’s last kiss. I saw them come back from afar, saw them bisect every step. Friend  and  familiar, affine, foe, they walked in smelling  of salt, the reek of  Lone Coast on their hair,  their skin, sand a kind of coat they wore...      Some-  thing I saw it seemed I dreamt I saw, some-  thing seen exteriority reneged on, stand up wide  awake though I did. Did I see what I saw I  won-  dered, the closer the coast was the less I felt  located, water opening out onto everywhere,  was what I saw what I saw I wanted to know...     A versionary recital it seemed or so I thought,  so  abreast of it only the book of it remained, a finger dipped in butterfly dust, a foot gone print-  less, what of it I glimpsed gone out on tiptoe,  wuh  we’d have been whose escorts, wuh we, once  there, drew thru the woods...    So it was or so  it went, going so, soon gone, a blip no screen accounted for, blink, as I did, all I could. The  box  had fallen away, sound itself an overt bed of  scree, roughed underbody I fell and felt heir  to, a chestnut sense were there any sense left, a  new  scrub sense of my- self  ________________  “Let it play on you,” Huff had said, “let it have its way.” I wasn’t clear what “it”  was but my ears perked up. Mu, I knew,  had  gone into hiding and it might have been  Mu. I wondered was it Mu he spoke about...  In front of us the waves rolled in. They  gave  his eyes a glassy look... To see was to see  oneself suspended, round Insofarian bliss  at the foot of Mount Ida, Huff ’s ythmic  what-  say, a smiling spider’s bite  ________________  A sort of cartoon the sun had a face and  grew limbs in, round and round of re- birth, death unacceptable, what I saw  was  too much. I saw a tiptoe ghost prome- nade, a sorcerer’s apprentice parade,  Mr. and Mrs. P’s reminiscent lament...  Some-  thing seen in a face no straddling of legs  lived up to. An epiphany or an epistrophe,  no way of knowing which. Press there’d  be  no end of any- more
— “mu” one hundred sixteenth part —  Again that closer walk, legless though they’d be. Low Insofarian sun I cut my  teeth on, theirs to be better to bite with,  me  theirs the closer we walked. They were  insisting time seeds grievance, crooned it the  closer I got, Zeno and Zenette moment’s  nurs- es, Nunca Anuncia’s net...    Thus it was they  were there again, thus they walked legless,  noses thumbed at the sun. Unlay’s avatar  said  to’ve become caricature, sacred clown of  late’s late awakening, laughed having thought  it so...    So it was I saw what I saw was too much. So it was I sewed my mouth shut,  they  who’d have heard me gone again, what-  say’s entourage. “So it was” were the  words they’d gone away muttering, unlay’s  non- chalance...    Everything was leaving itself, eve-  ryone himself, herself, all of them, all of  it, moving. It was as though they were each  an-  other. Outmost urge met indrawn joust, pe- yote-pod baritone tap. They were saying they’d  gotten back from this or that place. Where  was  the honey we’d heard about I wanted to know...      In the realm of whatsay it all bore consequence. They did a slack-legged shuffle, legless though  they were, quick-switch imbroglio the cost of it,  rum- ble in the house of who knew. It was my own most  inward step, my heart itself, closer than close  could be. I had a go at it but fell, my legs were in  the  way, no way could legless grace come again...    I thought about walking. I had to think about walk-  ing, Nunca’s pelvic sway. Though what I saw  I  couldn’t say, it made me say things, realm in whose wood I hung in love with her hard look,  walk  in whose wake I lay  ________________  I was whistling when my lips fell off. Lip- less was to legless in some way I couldn’t  say, the closer walk words got in the way  of...  What it was lay on the tip of my tongue,  say to unlay already in some way, unsay’s  day begun. We were of more than one mind  Huff  had it. Sophia said the same... I wanted rele-  vance, trust, I whistled even so, wind in  the  gaps in my teeth  •  A new lady named Ahdja joined our group,  slight of limb, loose tomboy body, smile so broad we blushed. The Egyptian spring was  up  in smoke in back of us, we trudged on, far  from all that, even far from Lone Coast, a  former life stalked us it seemed... We took  tiny steps, unsure what lay under us, unlay’s realm  the sweet precinct we sought, unsure what  would get us there... To say we was too much  my  head told me. Not so my second head said. To  say we was all I wanted my third head said, sec-  ond head said to’ve lost itself, third head always  at  odds with itself, want wanting more of itself...  It was Ahdja’s dream we were in, the we I went  on about, unlay’s adumbration. When would  its  day begin we wondered, the we I so insisted on,  the we we’d eventually be, when would lay’s day be done. It was my dream of Ahdja we were  in  said my third head, we the one risk I took, one  wish, flat rhapsodic stitch... I walked haunted  by the we she made us, Nunca’s promenade be- hind us now. We’d seen Egypt in flames and we  kept  walking. Huff said, “I told you so,” and we kept walking, unlay’s late promenade all there was  left... I dreamt a dream of moving on, I dreamt  a dream of standing pat, first head and second head  and third head’s agreement, a dream I let my true  self  slide  •  Unlay was no simple stand, this or that mystic  hustle, this or that bodily rebuke. In the end it will have been all there was we grew to expect,  no  soul’s captivity some book had called Egypt, a  book we no longer read... In the realm of whatsay  we tramped along, there no matter spun by the  swirl of it, there no matter where we were. Moment’s  notice moment’s gnosis, the moment brought bad  and good. Ahdja’s ka was Layla, Itamar’s Majnun,  our  crew caught up in the old way, the old way’s day  redone... “Madness be our name,” we chimed in  unison, incensed, Majnun’s dream of a just world just dreaming, Majnun’s each and all we were. So  it  was and so we sang, snuffed Egyptian spring an-  acrustic, uncuffed auspice there’d be. Thus it was, so it went, unlay unlike what it was we expected,  sanc-  tified feet where voices met water, far from cause and consequence we stumped... We were relishing being  together for a time, something seen in a face peering  out  from inside we saw was what soul was. “This is how  it is,” I was telling myself, some spectral aspect it had  somehow. “This is how it is,” I said, “this is how it is,” voice eaten at by the bay we stood in front of, cold  ad-  vent of water, cold commiseration, ythmic arrival,  salt... If not what wet our hems anointment was nothing, nothing if not what tugged our feet. “Froth be  what we’ll be,” we chimed, indignant, high falsetto  in- sistence, deep gubgubi thrum. There was a sense there  was a core to be gotten to, cloth drawn aside or  gone under, frills fallen away at the water’s edge...  If  not it, albeit illusory it might have been, instigation  was nothing  ________________  The advance I wanted lay at Ahdja’s feet, scruffy thought’s nubbly dispatch. That all  bow down and be at rest, unlay’s un- soon  come...  Chill water, careening bus, what Egypt was...  World  under glass wraps, flat
Anuncio drifted in a well of sound, unlay’s  ward, late orphan, a wry erotics had its way. He called himself Antonio now, Ahdja  having  joined our group...    Dunelike hip and thigh he stipulated, the desert he insisted we see. We  understood there was occult stuff going on  un-  derneath, telling ourselves get used to it,  close to the bone so close it lay inside, the  closer walk we all went on about...    We were in Port of  Spain thinking about India,  bored  outside the Red House, shimmering side street, pan exactitude bruited elsewhere, pan’s  light water, floating light. The light hung as  though it were buffed, embroidered, sound’s amanuensis,  griff...    There they were at the well again, the  we he’d been told would be there, whatsaid  en-  semble the air disinterred, hit by affliction  in each their own way, beset by some other  where there might’ve been, beset by some other when there might’ve been, beset by some nether  light...      If not bodily light’s late day there was nothing,  the not-all-there there’d always been come into its own. Wind affliction was all, all there was,  rent,  a mere liplike wrinkle at least. “Back when we were alive,” it said...    Literal sigil. Sage regret.  A way of  looking. Something we saw. “Sealed  lips  wheeled in the air,” we translated it. The point  was  to look past it we saw  •  He wanted Ahdja’s poise, Antonio’s aplomb,  namesake demur, name notwithstanding. So it was he blinked and his eyes bled, wry erotics’  haunched interstice bloodstruck, never again  be- fit, Mr. In-Between... A kaiso chorale, we sang  “Namaste,” a voice inside the voice inside the  box, tongue in cheek, box buried somewhere  east...  It wasn’t singing we were there for, chant  though we did sotto voce, an agonized aplomb of  some sort... An Ibibio go-head we each turned into, not meaning to... Go-heads one and all we  were,  snide choir... To sing wasn’t why we were there... What it was was names tore loose, took wing, what  world had been ours theirs now, sound itself,  A- nuncio’s well’s regress... So that what we sought  was more tone, mock sonance, science an a-  malgam of huh, wuh, huh, knowing’s new toll,  wuh huh... We were where the songs had been beckon-  ing from. This was as it always was. This was  always it no matter what it was. All the things it  was  lay nameless. Roots drew loose with no tonic,  it whether or not it was... An aroused incumbency  surrounded us, unlay’s fallaway terrain’s intan- gibility, Antonio’s adjunct address. We were down  to  the it of it it seemed... Was it the shimmer of last  things we wondered, queasiness come and gone  come again. There the very it so what it was our knees  gave,  so close we could taste it, nonce elixir, lapse, ellipse... All of which Ahdja made light of, unsure what of it  fit or if any of it fit. “You can’t come on with all  that  new-name talk, that no-name stuff. All that evac- uation stuff,” she said, “gets old, got old,” as Antonio  carried on, kept on, Anuncio to some of us, even  so...  All as if the quality of standing there shifted, a new  cast  of soul come down  •  Some common body to adduce it would some-  day come to. We stood on the dock, white clouds, blue sky all around, spiked Antillean  salt  in the air. Big ships loomed as we talked... Each of us with our well of sound, a sense of  quest and of brute inconsequence, Anuncio’s  mys- tic pretense. “Promises, promises,” we said suck-  ing our teeth, said sucking wind thru the gaps  between our teeth, a taunt song serenading Mr.  In-  Between... We stood looking out, disconsolate,  nothing if not words for recompense, what if not  words none of us knew. Words more whistle than words we admonished, Anuncio going on  a-  bout Antonio and Ahdja, the he and she of  lore they’d have been had they been able, each  the other’s butterfly twin... Each the other’s  but-  terfly friend if not all that, paperweight, open,  flown. Second-, third-, nth-hand innuendo all there was, word more whistle, mere whistle we  let  loose, echo degree zero, choric sough... Black  wheeze, occult burr, we susurrated. “Este mundo  tan extraño,” she intoned, we as well. Ahdja  was  meat and bones on the spirit of place he con-  vinced us existed, an impromptu polity exhumed...  The feeling we were futureless went away. Wuh  huh  went as well  •  An inwardly repeated tableau. We sat on the  dock, reluctant witnesses it seemed, more story to the story than we could see. What  we  thought real got a gossamer look, soon to  tear thru it seemed. Lytic remit what we’d been told was real, brute reconnoiter, non-  sonant lament it seemed... There we stood,  toll-  ing bone in the air, no tone. Huff called it  skeletone. There we sat though we stood,  stood though we sat, stark Trinidadian light  a  new life, shoal of an earlier life... I wanted  Anuncio’s ythmic pivot, Ahdja’s mystic sa-  shay, Antonio’s pirate swag rolled into one  but  no one was asking me. No one was noticing  anything, I thought, the difference Ahdja made  no matter, an order of self-containment ob- tained. So I thought or would’ve said I thought  had  anyone asked. No one did, said or saw... An  illusion of place or an allusion to it, Mu was  all there was, unmoored abstract integument,  im-  manent commemorative lament. Something known as la-la crowded my throat, clung to  the roof of my mouth. La-la meant I loved it,  torn  but tucked away, the versionary company of  love I’d fallen in with, first unfallen fallen, unre-  formed... No time soon will I be done with it I thought. La-la mentored my disarray. No way  can  I be done with it I thought, Ahdja and Antonio  Anuncio’s boon constituency, each the other’s  go-head eminence, each the other’s glancing  re- lay... Late that day we sat in a small boat on the  other side of the island. Scarlet ibises got their  color eating shrimp Ahdja pointed out. Anuncio,  not  knowing what to say, said, “So my heart...” Mu  was not knowing. Mu meant shutting up. Mu was  me and Ahdja, Mr. and Ms. In-Between. Mu meant no filler. “Promises, promises” resounded  all  day... Something we saw in Ahdja’s face wanted  out it seemed. She was the one we had by not having lore had it, love’s adamant outskirts, love’s  dog-  matic heart. I made untimeliness a foregone future, something-seen-in-a-face a new order to restore. I  saw gold where there maybe wasn’t, beer cans lined  on  the rail we leaned against, aught if not imagined im-  pact, we the presumption of one... A long sus-  tention of hum it came down to, Om the Vedic nu  we  reminisced, Om the seed-syllabic gist and embel-  lishment, Om the intuitist Mu. “Greek to me,” each of us admitted, thrum we were ambushed by,  glum subterranean drone strung under it, mosquito  buzz  athwart it  all  ________________  I dreamt I died and I went into an isolation booth, a quiz box I dug my breath up in. “Please  call me Antonio,” I whispered, head against  the  hardness of the bone beneath her breast, an  anacrustic psalm, a new “Dearly Beloved.”  What to say but there was nothing to, wag as  much  we might... Something of which we had a name  if nothing else. Something for which we had  the name if nothing else. Something for which  we  had a name if nothing else. Something of which  we  had the name if nothing  else
— “mu” one hundred eighteenth part —  Heaved our bags and headed out again. Again  the ground that was to’ve been there wasn’t. Bits of ripcord crowded the box my head had  be-  come, the sense we were a band was back, the sense we were a band or in a band...    The  rotating gate time turned out to be creaked,  we  pulled away. Lord Invader’s Reform School  Band it was we were in, the Pseudo-Dionysian Fife Corps, the Muvian Wind Xtet...    The sense  we were a band or were in a band had come  back,  names’ wicked sense we called timbre, num- bers’ crooked sense our bequest. Clasp it tee-  tered near to, abstraction, band was what to  be there was...    Band was what it was to be there  we shouted, band all we thought it would  be. Band was a chant, that we chanted, what  we  chanted, chant said it all would be alright...     A new band, our new name was the Abandoned  Ones, no surprise. We dwelt in the well-being  that  awaited us, never not sure we’d get there, what  way we were yet to know. I stood pat, a rickety  sixty-six, tapped out a scarecrow jig in waltz time, big toe blunt inside my shoe...    Who was I to  so  rhapsodize I chided myself, who to so mark my-  self, chill teeth suddenly forming reforming,  who to let my heart out so...    To be at odds with  my-  self resounded, sound’s own City the wall I hit  my head against, polis was to be and to be so hit...  We heard clamor, clash, blue consonance, noise’s  low  sibling  sense  ________________  We pumped our arms as though they were  pistons, elbows in and out. We nicked our name to Abandon. Abandon was our name  now...  Thus was our music no music. Music too  we left behind. Everything beside the point  that there was no point, everything thus the point... Thus was being there sibling sense  gone  treble, the balm to be a band the true amen-  ity music was, the fact of having been there  new  to its Buddha-nature, the fact of having been  there  moot  • To have been there wasn’t dasein. No Hei-  degger told my horse. Trussed up to  the side it sat, pressed and preponderant,  sov-  ereign, self-contained, were it music the  music we sloughed... Slipped accompa-  niment, surrogate cloud, rapt adjournment. Agitant. Surrogate cue... I kept clear of it,  caught  up at arm’s length, all but caught out I came to see... Thus was our music no music it seemed  I said, mujic more than music I might’ve said,  might  as well have said, no matter I mumbled other-  wise under my breath... The Freedmen’s Debate  Society our name now was, the Ox Tongue Speaker Exchange. Fractal scratch. Nominative  ser-  ration. Cutaway run, cutaway arrest... Thus was  our music no music I did say, say’s default on sing such as it was... We called it history even  so,  insisted it, the it crowding the corner of eve- ryone’s eye. None of us were not crept up on,  none not required we sing it, say it. Thus was  our  say not so  ________________  Beginning again for the muleteenth time,  we counted off. It was our muleteenth breakdown, muleteenth new beginning...  Brass  rubbed off on our lips, reed rubbed off as  well, string steel left on our fingertips, stick  wood  left on our  thumbs
Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat.Then I realized my friend had lied to me.Then I realized my dog was goneno matter how much I called in the rain.All was change.Then I realized I was surrounded by aliensdisguised as orthodontists having a conventionat the hotel breakfast bar.Then I could see into the life of things,that systems seek only to reproducethe conditions of their own reproduction.If I had to pick between shadowsand essences, I’d pick shadows.They’re better dancers.They always sing their telegrams.Their old gods do not die.Then I realized the very futility was salvationin this greeny entanglement of  breaths.Yeah, as if.Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism,the trick still works.Then I came to in Texasand realized rockabilly would never go away.Then I realized I’d been drugged.We were all chasing nothingwhich left no choice but to intensify the chase.I came to handcuffed and gagged.I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam.This too is how ash moves through water.And all this time the side doors unlocked.Then I realized repetition could be an ending.Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
How could I not?Have seen a man walk up to a pianoand both survive.Have turned the exterminator away.Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine.Seen rainbows in puddles.Been recognized by stray dogs.I believe reality is approximately 65% if.All rivers are full of sky.Waterfalls are in the mind.We all come from slime.Even alpacas.I believe we’re surrounded by crystals.Not just Alexander Vvedensky.Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in.Nonetheless.NeverthelessI believe there are many kingdoms left.The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole lifeeven thougheven though this is my second heart.Because the first failed,such was its opportunity.Was cut out in pieces and incinerated.I asked.And so was denied the chance to regard my own heartin a jar.Strange tangled imp.Wee sleekit in red brambles.You know what it feels like to holda burning piece of paper, maybe eventrying to read it as the flames get closeto your fingers until all you’re holdingis a curl of ash by its white ear tipyet the words still hover in the air?That’s how I feel now.
It’s a little-known fact that God’s headgear — A magician’s collapsible silk top hat,When viewed from Earth, from the bottom up — Is, sub specie aeternitatis,A pluperfect halo, both circle and square,And a premonition of this truthSpurred on an ancient philosopher,Anaxagoras, to make numerous vainAttempts to approximate the circleOf his concerns with the square of the cellHe was jailed in for impiety.Doomed calculations which God acknowledgedBy doffing then pancaking his topper.He was still bareheaded millennia later,When he learned of von Lindemann’s proof that piIs not the root of a polynomialWith rational coefficients, henceSquaring the circle’s impossible.God un-collapsed, re-donned his hat!But — it was 1882,Progress was a juggernautAnd the public had no patience for “proof.”From below, God’s gesture looked like a signalFor all hat- and cap-wearing men,Proper in their headgear, for nations,Well-stocked with helmets for delicate brainwork,To take up “the compass and straightedge”And prepare for a singular all-out attackOn this seductive conundrum, so men Enlisted en masse in Geometry’s army,Tossing up and away all hatsOf cloth, opaque haloes, hurray!
Home, then, where the past was.Then, where cold pastorals repeatedtheir entreaties, where a portrait of Christhung in every bedroom. Then was a differentcountry in a different climate in a time whensouls were won and lost in prairie tents. It was.It was. Then it was a dream. I had no will there.Then the new continent and the new wifeand the new language for no, for unsaved,for communion on credit. Then the daughterwho should’ve been mine, and the hour a shadowoutgrew its body. She was all of my failures,my sermon on the tender comforts of hatredin the shape of a girl. Then the knowledgeof God like an apple in the mouth. I facedmy temptation. I touched its breasts withas much restraint as my need allowed,and I woke with its left hand traced againand again on my chest like a cave walldisfigured by right-handed gods who triedto escape the stone. It was holy. It was fading.My ring, then, on my finger like an ambush,as alive as fire. Then the trees offered me a cityin the shape of a word followed by a wordfollowed by a blue madonna swinging fromthe branches. A choir filed out of the junglesinging hallelujah like a victory march and it was.
We hadn’t got color up till then. And if I had a nickel, why, that was for milk. Milk money: the money a body gained.Was just me on that hillside and the kite, red & white waked up into the wind. Hardly anybody knew me then.Oh, Lord how quickly the things of this world came and went. Practically the first thing I notice when I get back.Wind, and I am lifted. Wind and I am hauled ahead by string and air. The bows sinuate the air, I hear them tatter.A certain kindness to that hill, its slope gone gaily green against the eve and oh, the tail dipped; the string slipped.Uppity huff and drag of hawk air plundering eggs in the sparrow’s nest. You left this fragment, this bit of shell behind.
A mockingbirdperched on the hoodof a pay phonehalf-buried in a hedgeof wild roseand heard it ringThe clapper balltrilled betweenbrass gongsfor two secondsthen windand then againWith head cockedthe bird took noteabsorbed the ringingdeep in its throatand frothedan ebullient songThe leitmotifof bright alarmrecurred in a runfrom hawkto meadowlarkfrom May to early JuneThe ringing spreadfrom syrinx to syrinxfrom Kiowato Comanche to Clark till someonefinally picked upand heard a voiceon the other endsay Konzaor Consez or Kansawhich the French trappersheard as Kawwhich is only the soundof a word for windthen only the sound of wind
A pair of Orpingtons,one blue, the other black,with iridescent necksand fine, ashen fluffcackle through the dark,their damp calls close enoughto chafe, a friction with no spark.They settle down to roost,two rests along a stave.Each curls into itself,comb tucked beneath a wing,as the days grow long enoughto kindle in each a yolk,the smallest flame of spring.
A rail, buff-banded rail,weaves among the legsof picnickers who loll at easeon the buttress roots of fig trees.It queries fallen fruitwith manners so refinedas to be indeterminate,its herringbone immaculate.Aloof though underfoot,the rail extracts a crustof pie from picnic residue — no seediness, no traceof table-scrap solicitudefor any human hand or face.
Kitty Goes Kommando and the Goldman Rats — Phooey!That blue scaffolding holds up the sky. Who did we thinkwe were padlocking in, or out? Give me that hugelooping black script no one can read, a secret glyph,and just where someone has smashed the window, Jesusthe Way the Truth the Life and a dented aluminum frame.He bent down, we know, and wrote something illegible on the ground.A toothy black-and-white dinosaur gapes. I like the crackin this wall of monsters where skylines topple and ogrestwiddle train tracks in their claws like pipe cleaners.Down the long, semi-abandoned street in Queenscalligraphy gallops toward the shop displaying,like guitar strings, seven different iron rodsfor gates. Hole in the wall, rose sound-hole,ribbed sounding board — always from fissures and gapsmelody strains as trains thunderclank acrossthe girdered overpass, a siren keens, and a solitary manambles past amputated acacias fisting out with leaves.
The whole trick of this thing    ...    is to get out of your own light.  — Marianne Faithfull She said she sang very close to the miketo change the space. And I changed the spaceby striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeansuntil an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket.As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there.He came from the desert, I camefrom green suburbs. We understoodnothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine.I was playing Girl. He playedMan. Several plots were afoot, allmisfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirtand light hair, his broad shoulders and hungerafter months on an oil rig. Anotherwas untranslatable. Apollinaireburned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyrebut I had lost my pen. The engineerread only construction manuals. His roomwas dim and narrow and no,the story didn’t slide that way though there are many waysto throw oneself away.One singer did it by living by a broken walluntil she shredded her voice but still she offered each song,she said, like an Appalachian artifact.Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quayplastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dollsthrough which the current chortles an intimate tune.
You want to touch big animals,animals not touched by your peersWoe is not youYou have the polar bear in FranzJosef Land, the white whale in the Seaof Okhotsk,You have the brown bear, leopard& Amur tiger in Ussuri, the FarEast, so east, like a talonit hooks Heilongjiang, claimsthat edge of Pacific, that swath ofmaritime lands & a maritime state — Primorsky Krai, hometo Vladivostok, the ancient Manchurianforest, its corresponding duck,a short North Korean river-border changing course, redrawnwhen the bank sloughs off,its markers slipping, washingaway — Tumen, sputteringinto the Sea of JapanThere is an awareness of islands — Oshima, Okushiri, Hokkaido — tucked into the brain of every organismVolcanics, large to small,they perforate the waters northeastto Kamchatka (& that is so faryour countrymen sendtheir misbehaved childrento so-called corners in their houses) Perhaps you can standon that shore facing inland & gazeout over the spray of those white whales of yours, the expansethat comprises your jurisdiction Now, what’s the first thing you knowis there, but can’t see for mist, et al:Khabarovsk Krai, whose coat of armsis a bear holding a coat of armsof a bear & a tiger holdinga blue & yellow coat of arms,inverted Y, tiny crown afloat, big bearpinching his canoe-shaped tonguebetween his teeth — & what tumbles from there butBlack Dragon, scrawling from InnerMongolia to Tartar Strait, true,for all its bordermaking, to its roots From it & all its names, names for everything: for islands, for fables,the provinces it traces, forgruesome late-Mongol conquerors& the surrounding biologyYou think about itnow & again, thumbinga leatherbound natural history,gift from a pandering South American delegation ripewith stories about their jaguar, the earlyexplorers who called it tigreIn the world, there are 9 subspeciesof tiger, all eastern, 3 of them extinctAmur is classified as merely endangered& concentrated in Ussuri StateNature Reserve, where you are knownbecause you shot oneIt is somewhat a farceThere is no state — not since Bolshevikword set foot there — only a riverbearing the name & youcommissioned the research: to study everyonewith a name on the Red Listof Threatened Species, to housedata online at programmes.putin.kremlin.ru,to visit them all & each visitto carry an air gun & a satchelof tranquilizer darts, to shoot, to topple,to affix the GPS collar, to caressthe fur (in the case of the whalethe skin) & muse to scientists about the big, sleepy oaf:Would she remember, or eat you, or both?
One way to draw France is in scallops:Dunkirk to Brest,Brest to Saint-Jean-de-Luz,The imperceptible stone sagof certain dolmensover the Pyrenees between Saint-Jean& Banyuls-sur-MerThen, to NiceNice, skirting the Alps to LauterbourgFrom Lauterbourg backto where you beganFor the meticulous, the additions of Cherbourg, Toulon, &even Le Havre,Maybe GivetYours is a green dioramaIt contains several kilowatts of sun,a superabundance of flowersMen dress like they are perpetuallyon their way to a funeralWhite people,their splotch-parchment cheeksAll those roast chickens, none with the fat trimmed from the rump
for Amiri Baraka  Old Ark,how funky it was, all those animals, two of every kind,and all that waste, the human shit somebody had to clean up.Somebody, some love you hugged before fear,the fear of an in-sani-nation, the No Blues, ruined your bowels.Go devil.Public programslikeRace.Dems a Repub of Dumpster Molesters,Congressionalwhole-part bidders on your ugliest clown.Left wing, right,the missing moderatesof flightless fight.Privatelikethe Runs.God evil.Somebody had to clean that shit up.Somebody, some love who raised you, wise.Feathered razors for eyebrows,alto,tenor.Wasn’t no branch.Somesaya tree,notfor rest either.For change. When was we a wild life, long-eared and short. Prey, some prayed for the flood. And were struck by floating, corporate quintets of Rocks and Roths, assets bond Prestige.First Organizerevercalled aNigga, Noah,but not the lastOccupier of Ararat ... got thickonGenesisand electric cello, cell-phone-shaped UFOsfueled by the damp, murdered clayof divinity-basedRacialMountainDirt. Somebody had to clean that shit up.Some native body,beside the smooth water, like abrook Gwen say,“I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.”Chaser if you straight. Ark OldArk NewArk NowOnly Only Sidney P Simple JessB would would____ Spencer T ____ Dizzy G to turn to accentthe dinner the p’scheek. not the “ ... nuts.”Change the record, Record Changer.Name Changethe changing same. Something only you could Art Messenger & dig in any chord.High water, like the woods of secrecy,always a trail a ways a coming. God evil. Move the “d.”Go devil. The Mosque watchers know.Also de wind, de wind and de Word, spoken and written, hidden in love with the intestines of  Testament. Eyes like a woman’s fist,her hard facts — not the crying, domestic consonants “of non being.”Soprano,piano,or the cultural cowardice of class,in any chord of standardized “sheeit” music, lowcoup risks slit. Though flawed, too,by penetrable flesh,some blue kind. Unlike a pretty shield,loaded free. Wasn’t just Winter or lonely. Those. Wasn’t just Sundays the living did not return. Crouch if you a bum or one of  Mumbo Jumbo’s reckless, poisonous reeds. A neck crow man ser vant n a jes’ grew suit.Us am, an unfit second Constitution. Us am, an ambulance full of ... broke-down, as round as we bald. Obeyinghawkish eagles. Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin’,why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white-skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, the domestic oil of death and klansweat, who blew them up, doctored, who pickin’ them off like darkcotton, make them make themselves a fashion of profitable, softmuscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up. All us, us animals,on one floating stagewe knewwas a toilet,the third oldest in the nation, unreserved.Wasn’t no bankor branch. Yes we Vatican, despite Alighieri’s medium rare, rate of interest.It wasconfirmation. Some sayblack firewood. Some love that changed our screaming Atlantic bottomswhen all we could be was thin olive sticks with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech. Flushed, too, every time the Yew Norker or one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbilliesfresh prince’d us    ...    The real religion, our “individual expressiveness” wasn’t dehuman-u-factured by a Greek HAARP in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity. Where we Away our Steel, “flood” means “flow.” Where we Tenure our Ammo, “podium” means “drum.” Flood,flow.Podium,drum.Flood,drum.Podium,flow.Drum,podium.Flood,flow. Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark,then anger, then angels, their wings made of fried white dust,fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and namedafter a stranger or rich crook, an anti-in immigrant-can’tameterstretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of classwhere we clapped the erasers, fifty snows old, like we were the first Abraham, where we clapped the Race Erasers and drove away from K  James V and K Leo PB in shiny Lincolns, sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky, their powdery absolute Rule. Just add oil-water. Belongs to humanity. Just add sugar-rubber. Belongs to civilization. Gold. Days. Nights. Ounces. A forty. Mules move. A forty. Move. Move. Move mule. Whatchamacall “how we here,” and get no response ... howwe ... where we fear, how we hear how we sound and how sometimestime is some even our own sound fears us, and remembers the first us, confronting Columbus with thunderbolts, when “was-we” not good-citizen sober, “was-we”voting and drowning, and rotting like “we-was” the armed guts of our young?Now a daze, tribe-be-known, the devil the best historian we got. Anyhow.
It was a partyBuilt for the minuscule eliteLost amid acres of scuffed marble, wanderersNewspapers & schoolworkPeople knewTo speak in surreal, mechanical hyperboleGovernment, of courseMonuments, behemothsOf relative luxuryI know what you want to askI want you to take the truth to the worldDown in the city, loudspeakersDisappearing into a hidden gulagCenturies agoThe monks appearedEvery morning in the lobbies of our hotelsA minder was beside themThe monks followed us out into the parking lot
Tu Fu, “Thoughts While Traveling at Night”  There’s a wind in the grass —  Is there here a boat’s mast claiming my lonely night too? I see the stars can’t be called hanged, exactly,just hanging down, not over emptiness, but honest ground,the moon trying the black skin of this river, black corpse    ...     But, even plainer —  I wonder if these words, my words,will ever bring me fame. I have my age, my injuries. They limit me. I’m like some spook birdI know, solo and roped between where rotting happens and a sky.
But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador’sblack beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped,his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away. If not for his lust, his sickness to chase, to claim her;if not for that Native woman’s quick intelligence, out-climbing
I saw I dreamtTwo men hoisted hung up not American the ropeNot closed on their breathingBut this rope tied them spine to spine somehowSuspendedFrom the mood of a tree not American they wereAfrican Ugandan NigerianWithout a license a right to touchThe sin their touching incitesAnd I heard their names called out RevisionOr Die and You Must RepentAnd Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you FaggotsCalled up from the mobOf their mothers their fathersWith Christ in the blood who had Christ in the bloodWho sung out “Abide with Me”This was my eyes’ closed-eyed visionThis is what a darkness makesAnd how did I move from that distance to intimacySo close I could seeThe four soles of their feet so close I was kneeledCould lickThose feet as if I was because I becameThe fire who abidedI saw that I dreamtTheir black skin made blacker by my feedingI thought ChristWhy did I thinkTheir black skin tipped blacker by this AmericanFeeding but just one shot upA cry African it wasAmerican O Lord abide with meIt was human lusty flatYou had to be in the hollow of it to taste itYou had to see how in such lackInvention takes holdThey say some dreams come in the momentOf wakingStitched because daylight likes a storyThat some dreams are extensionsOf an itchThief-walking the coral of the brainI sayBut I did feel that one blue mouth blow outAs I feltThe mood of that treeAs I saw the other turn away apart stay with silenceI stayed with southern silence
O fly away home, fly away. — Robert Hayden There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’t see what the world sees seeing him. They know an image of him they themselves created.He knows his own: fine-lined from foot to finger, each limb adjusted, because it’s had to, to achieve finally flight —  though what’s believed in him is a flightlessness, a sinking-down, as any swamp-mess of water I’m always thinking ofmight draw down again the washed-up body of a boy, as any mouth I’ve yearned for would take down, wrestler-style, the boy’s tongue with its own    ...     What an eye can’t imagineit can’t find: not in blood, swollen in the stiff knees of a cypress, not definitely in some dreaming man’s dream —  Let’s have his nature speak.What will the incredible night of  him say here, to his thousand moons, now that he can rise up to any tree, rope or none, but not fear it?
There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths leftor giant short-faced bears, which towered over ten feet highwhen rearing up on their haunches. There were no stout-legged llamas, stilt-legged llamas, no single Yukon horse. The lastof the teratorns, its wingspan broader than the room inwhich I’m writing now, had long since landed on a tar pit’ssurface and was lost. There might be other things to think ofstrobing in the fume or sometimes poking through the thick of itlike the tiny golden toads once so prevalent in the cloudforests north of Monteverde, only none of them were livinganywhere anymore. The last was seen on May 15, 1989, the weekBon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” topped Billboard’s Hot 100.Then it dropped to three. A teratorn might have fit in herethe long way come to think of it. A study claims it wasn’tclimate change that killed the golden toad but a fungal epidemicprovoked by cyclical weather patterns. Little things like thathad a way of disappearing: thimbles, the Rocky Mountaingrasshopper, half the hearing in my patient ear. There wereno Eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens, a distinctsubspecies of the prairie chicken. Once common to the coastalbarrens of New Hampshire down to Virginia, they’re often thoughtto have been eaten in favor of wild turkey at the inauguralThanksgiving feast. To work on my character I pretend to betraveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first,then backwards into costumes of the past: tee shirt and shorts,gray flannel suit, a cutaway jacket and matching breechestucked into boots, taupe velvet getup with ruffles and ribbonsstreaming into Delaware till I’m buckled like a Puritan, musketin hand, not half-famished, and there’s plenty of heath henseverywhere I look. But there were still no Carolina parakeetsand no Smith Island cottontails, a long contested subspeciesof the Eastern cottontail. These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggierthan their mainland cousins, were named for the barrierisland off the tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale,deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a salt worksback in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Islandup in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state’sonly official dessert — a venerable confection whose pencil-thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie dividedby a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making itsuitable for local oystermen to take with them on the longautumn harvest. Smith Island in Washington offers nestingsites for tufted puffins on its rocky cliff faces as well as reststations for migrant sea lions. Situated in Long Island Sound, Connecticut’s Smith Island is among that state’s famed ThimbleIslands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry,cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War,the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hidingplaces for British ships. Alabama boasts no fewer than threeSmith Islands. Little can be said about the one in Minnesota’sVoyageurs National Park. Its neighboring islands includeRabbit, Snake, Wolf, Wigwam, Sweetnose, and Twin Alligatordown here on the American side, and Little Dry, Big, and Big Dryup on the Canadian. Tomorrow should be 82° and sunnybut it won’t be. The blue pike cavorted through the watersof the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco.Overfishing, pollution, and the introduction of nonnativespecies did both fish in as early as 1960 and ’70, respectively.There were no spectacled cormorants, no Goff’s pocket gophers, and no Ainsworth’s salamanders, a species known to us onlythrough two specimens found on Ainsworth family propertyin Mississippi on June 12, 1964. That same day Nelson Mandelawas sentenced to life in prison. I remember the feeling ofanother kind, the way they alternately lay limp in my handsthen pleaded to be free. They took naps in the dampness of softened logs. There’s a fine dirt, a dust I guess, that collectsunder the rug I’m sitting on. I think the rough weave of itacts as rasp to our foot-bottoms then sieve to what it loosens.There were no Caribbean monk seals, eight of which no lessthan Christopher Columbus killed for food in 1494, and thereforeno Caribbean monk seal nasal mites, an objectively hideousarachnoid parasite that resided nowhere but in the respiratorypassages of the Monachus tropicalis. When it occurs to me Isweep it up. Back in the day they used to darken our skiesin flocks a mile wide and 300 miles in length, enough to featherthe air from Fall River down to Philadelphia, their peakpopulation hovering above five billion, or 40% of the totalroll of  birds in North America, but there were no remainingpassenger pigeons, the last of their red eyes having shutin Cincinnati on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha.Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoonwas Nosey. Cozumel Island’s pygmy raccoon is actually a distinctspecies and not, like the Barbados raccoon, a subspeciesof the common. There might be as few as 250 of the formerhidden in the mangroves or prowling the wetlands for ghostcrabs and lizards, whereas the latter was last seen in ’64when one was struck dead by a car in Bathsheba, a fishing villagebuilt on Barbados’s eastern shore, magnet for hurricanesand pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mindthe milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon’s mother soperilously beautiful. First the milk’s lactic acid would haveacted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead,dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artworkin Dunkirk underneath, then the milk’s natural fat contentwould restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphereof biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew, yireh shalem,means “will see peace.” Most versions of the story make herinto an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest,was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizingopportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksurewith projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the birdbut hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and therebyrevealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the timebut not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysteriousfrom a distance, held together it has felt by nothing strongerthan momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a patternin the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whetherit’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or elsethreaten to is debatable. Attempts to stem the vast mosquitopopulation in salt marshes abutting Kennedy Space Centeron Florida’s Merritt Island, technically a peninsula but more likea question mark of land flopped into the Atlantic, devastatedthe dusky seaside sparrow. Its last known specimen diedon June 17, 1987, when the ballad “Always” by Atlantic Starrdominated radio. Mosquitoes would have taken to the nastyOlduvai water hole around which two clans of hominids battleat the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is afterthe first monolith shows up. The film’s monoliths are artifactsof alien origin, identical in ratio but varying in size, designedto provoke large-scale changes in human life. As when it dawnson the wiry leader of the clan the first monolith appears toto bludgeon the other to death with a leg bone. Later on he hurls itinto the air to celebrate his power, the image of its tumblingweaponhood at half-speed match-cutting to that of a longwhite nuclear satellite angled in orbit against the scintillantanthracite of space. Pan right to the Earth, a quarter of it silveryblue in the corner, aloofly beautiful for sure but only a paleidea of a planet when set beside photographs taken years laterby the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972, annus finalisfor the Lake Pedder earthworm, bush wren, and possiblythe Toolache wallaby as well, long considered among kangaroosto have been the most elegant. The sapphire blue, the ochreof Africa, the chalk-white spirals convolving as if an ice cap’s wispy tentacles. They were killed for fur, sport, and frequentlywith the aid of greyhounds, who hunt mostly by way of sightas opposed to scent. Then the Earth is at the left as the satelliteapproaches it almost dozily to the opening bars of Strauss’sBlue Danube, first performed on February 15, 1867, in the nowdefunct Diana Ballroom. In my own Diana Ballroom, namednot for the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and chastitydirectly, but by way of the two-kilometer lunar crater christenedin her honor in 1979, declivity in whose embrace my ballroomtrembles comfortably, I boost my chi by remembering to breathedeep, to eat oatmeal, ginger, and figs, and to commit myselfto a custody of wildflowers, up to and including the maroonperfume of the chocolate cosmos, a non-self-pollinating specieswhose every plant now in bloom is a clone of the selfsamespecimen uprooted from a cubic foot of Mexico back in 1902.Likewise the last known Rocky Mountain locust ever to appearappeared alone that year on a prairie up in Canada, whereasdecades before a glistering storm of them blanketed an areavast as California, matter-of-factly devouring buckwheat, barley,strawberries, apple trees, fence posts, and even the laundrywildly flapping away on the line, the sound of “millions of jawsbiting and chewing” setting a nation’s nerves on edge, or at leastLaura Ingalls Wilder’s, if we’re to believe her On the Banksof Plum Creek
it befalls us. an exchanged glance, reflective spasm.  Is it a fantastically unlaminated question set in flesh or valentine that wears the air as its apparel? If you cut a heart from parchment, is it still a heart? A nontrivial knot, where turns of every gradient may kiss and tell. Does the vessel have edges? Or is it all connectedness, an embedding to be stretched or bent. Imagine being simultaneously alive, bound in both directions with a bow! Is it diachronic, a phenomenon that changes over time? Without ardor theory suffers. That’s why I’m stuck on you with wanton glue, per- severing, styling something blobbish and macabre into something pointed, neat. Love is a gift that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue. Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you.    say it quivers rather than contracts, fluttery with ruptions.  Doctors call it holiday heart. Valentine’s Day —  named for a saint whose head is venerated in Rome —  is also National Organ Donor Day, okay? Give anatomical dark chocolates infused with true invariance. With smoked salt pepper and beau- jolais in a plain brown box embellished with praises in a romance language in your hand. Please none cosseted in plush like the stuff inside a coffin. I’m just praying. Can you find a pulse or dry needle trigger point? Just saying this fudge has tears in it. Someone’s been sweating over this. Listen, Mr. Stethoscope, I’m at the end of my hope. Still, I’ll grow another blossom for that blossom-crowned skull.     some give vinegar valentines. no pillow words.  Just floppy organ thistleburr. Froot Loops and craft wire fashioned on a snarky jig: “To My Pocket Prince.” “By Bitch Possessed.” Tough tits, isn’t it? Some call it a day marked by commodified flowers, obligation chocolate. Some live on clinical sprinkles, asking where’s the feast. The carnelian pin with openwork components that let you see its self-pleasuring mechanism, storm hormones, and single pulsing vein. What even is it? Here’s the thing. A gift cannot be cynical unless the giver is. I will pay you to test this for me. Its closets vast with steadfastness at best at least for me surpass all other closets in the flesh. I’m sending this from my memory foam head. Valentines intensify the surface, heart the depths.
are all that’s left of Gray’s Papaya on 8th St.
cheerful stoic epic cozy corporate convalescence hollow gold-brick rhetoric almighty and sleek
Look deep into the blueberry eyes of  breakfast.
even if we won’t admit it. Getting off the subway at Canal St. —  I wonder if the author is a man or a woman? A teen? A team?
Leave it to the street vendors of NYC to improvise a shrine from whatever they find, setting a place at their table for animal and divine nature symbolically joined with color-coded floral candelabras.
How much greener is paint than grass, especially in winter.
An arty feline couple parodies bourgeois gender roles and literary values before the days of  YouTube.
To all events I squirted youknowing this not to be this came to passwhen we were out and it looked good.Why wouldn’t you want a fresh pieceof outlook to stand in down the years?See, your house, a former human energy construction,crashed with us for a few days in Mayand sure enough, the polar inscapebrought about some easier poems,which I guessed was a good thing. At leastsome of us were relaxed, Steamboat Bill included.He didn’t drink nothing.It was one thingto be ready for their challenge, quite another to accept it.And if I had a piece of advice for you, this is it:Poke fun at balm, then suffer lethargyto irradiate its shallow flood in the new packagingour enemies processed. They should know.The Gold Dust Twins never stopped supplicating Hoosiersto limn the trail. There’s no Shakespeare.Through the window, Casanova.Couldn’t get to sleep in the dumb incidentof those days, crimping the frozen feet of Lincoln.
O awaken with methe inquiring goodbyes.Ooh what a messy businessa tangle and a muddle(and made it seem quite interesting).He ticks them off:leisure top,a different ride home,whispering, in a way,whispered whiskers,so many of the things you have to share.But I was getting on,and that’s what you don’t need.I’m certainly sorry about scaring your king,if indeed that’s what happened to him.You get Peanuts and War and Peace,some in rags, some in jags, some invelvet gown. They wantthe other side of the printing plant.There were concerns.Say hi to jock itch, leadership principles,urinary incompetence.Take that, perfect pitch.And say a word for the president,for the scholar magazines, papers, a streaming.Then you are interested in poetry.
He makes better errors that way.Pass it around at breakfast:the family and all, down there with a proximate sense of power,lawyering up. Less log-heavy, your text-strategybeat out other options, is languid.Duets in the dust start up,begin. Again.He entered the firm at night.The 26th is a Monday.
The man across the street seems happy,or pleased. Sometimes a porter evades the grounds.After you play a lot with the militaryyou are my own best customer.I’ve done five of that.Make my halloween. Ask me not to say it.The old man wants to see you — now.That’s all right, but find your own.Do you want to stop using these?Last winning people told me to sit on the urinal.Do not put on others what you can put on yourself.How to be in the city my loved one.Men in underwear    ...    A biography fieldlike where we live in the mountains,a falling. Yes I know you have.Troves of merchandise, you know, “boomer buzz.”Hillbilly sculptures of the outside.(They won’t see anybody.)
Things I left on your paper:one of the craziest episodes that ever overtook me.Do you like espionage? A watered charm?My pod cast aside, I’ll walk in the human street,protect the old jib from new miniseries.I could swear it movedin incomplete back yardsto endorse the conversation, request to be strapped in.Then it will be time to take the stepgiving fragile responses,and finally he wrote the day.It happened in the waterso that was nice.It comes ready conflated:vanilla for get lost, flavor of the timeof his sponsor’s destiny. Be on that sofa.I was crossing the state line as they were reburying the stuff.You break the time lock, the bride’s canister    ...    but we did say that we’d be back.
He drewthese dandelionsduring oneof the days when the only solacewas derivedfrom the laborof getting the white stemsand blurry seed headsjust right. “Nobody there,”the new diseaseannounced,with black-tie gloom,“nobody there,”after he’d succumbed.Sometimes, sleeping soundly is almost unbearable.Please take care of me,he asked,as they puthis crayonswith his walletin a boxby the stove.In the distance,beyond the tulips,an insect chorus droned:we beat you up;we beat you up.
Yes, I’ll haul your ashesback to Oklahoma,the Lord G-d of Abrahamriding shotgun.I got the coffee sweats already,just Him and me on I-55,you in a box on the seat between.We aim for that dent in the dustwhere your pa was bornin a sod stableand your ma minced a snakewith a garden hoe;that place the trappers namedBeaver, not thinking, for once,of women.Reminded too much of Texas,G-d and I both hatethe cottonwoodsstuck to a high sky.We share a drink,swap our lies,and sift out what we canfrom the radio.Your name comes upand G-d’s eyes get dusty.When Gene Pitney singsthe “Sh’ma Yisrael,”G-d stares out,that box of ashes inside His jacket,as close as He can hold it.There’s Beaver at nightfall,and bean burritosto wash down the beer.We scatter your asheswhere we stop to pee,the Lord G-d’s laughsteady as a train blows,soft as lightning across the panhandle.
Both guitars run trebly. One noodlesOver a groove. The other slushes chords.Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A hornBlares its inner air to brass. A girl shakesHer ass. Some dude does the same. The music’sGone moot. Who doesn’t love it when the bassDoesn’t hide? When you can feel the trumpet peelOld oil and spit from deep down the emptyPit of a note or none or few? So don’tGive up on it yet: the scenario.You know that it’s just as tired of youAs you are of it. Still, there’s much more to itThan that. It does not not get you quite wrong.
After Leonardo da Vinci 1 The long incision. The incipient voyage from aortic arch to thoracic inlet. Small-particled is the corpuscled city. (Bustling opuscula.) A city of animal electricity. A lowing cycling mass. Calm the cowed heart. Still the browbeating heart. Cool the controversial hearthstone. Let the blade intervene where the divine intersects bovinity. 2 Pour wax into the gate of an ox’s heart. Close the small doors of the heart via a template of hardened wax, a 
temple of vital gases, water with grass seed suspension, glass blown through a cast of calcined gypsum, plaster of Santo Spirito. Spiritous dissection, blood-sooty vapors, the dense dance of the Renaissance counts down a Galenic pulse. Musculo vivicare. Transit the venous. Bypass the 
arterial. Underscore the two-part cantus firmus in heat and motion. (The fixed heart burns slow, spurns fervor.)
i Walking across the PCH, we lookedUp and saw, big as the butt of a pen,Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted.I looked back at the waiting traffic stalledAt the seaside road’s salt-rimmed traffic lightsAs they swayed to the Pacific’s not-quite-Anapestic song of sea and air — The raw and sudden crick of crickets — The cars, suddenly silent as cows — And blue Malibu blackening like a bee.ii A poem is a view of the PacificAnd the Pacific, and the PacificTaking in its view of the Pacific,And the Pacific as the Pacific(Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific)Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean,Closing. It or she or he is merely,Which means it or she or he is a mar.But a mar made up of  temperament andTempo — the red weather in the heart.iii I’m about to get this all wrong, I know:Santa Monica behind me, the oceanTo my left, Jupiter high above me,And Malibu somewhere in my mind, fleckedWith mist and dusk and Dylan and strange graysIn the sunsets that stripe the seaside hillsLike the tricolor of a country madeOf  beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog.Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing;Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here.iv Along the thin pedestrian passageBeside the PCH, just off Sunset,Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and endsAnd lies and facts — Jews and Blacks beingBoth the lies and facts. His face is ruddyLike bruschetta. He storms at the policeBecause fuck them. He’s wearing his T-shirtLike a toga. He schools them his togaWisdom from toga times. He offers themHis toga. They offer him a ride — .v Arun’s car carried us like metaphorIn a poem or painting; moving meaning;Moving the current; being the current;The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour;Still, even as we speed on the 110,The music in my head, the JupiterOf the mind’s unstemmed Pacific OceanAs it unfurls in the vapor trail ofMalibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents,Like a nocturnal flower calling you.vi Then, Downtown LA and LA Live surgedUp, like marginalia on a newlyTurned page, spangled with bland suggestions,Fiery accusations of its ownBrilliance that descend into indifference.We speed nearer and it grows. We veer andIt grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes.Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero.But I should know better, if just becauseYou can smell the injustice in the air.vii The Pacific encircles me. Slowly.As though it doesn’t trust me. Or, betterSaid, I only understand it this way:By feeling like a stranger at its blueDoor. The poet with the sea stuck in hisEnjambments can’t call out to some CathayAs though some Cathay exists and be glad.No, the differences we have should be feltAnd made, through that feeling, an eclipsed lack;A power to take in what you can’t take back.viii The old hocus of this ocean’s focusOn pulling its waves over the soft surfLike a skin pulled down tight over the topOf a drum was, to her, a new hocus.We stared out with her, out toward Hokusai’sTiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swellsNo chunk of haiku could think to charter.It was like the eighth day of creationIn the eighth line of a poem — she sang,She didn’t sing, the sea sang, then stopped.
I used to like being young, and I still do,Because I think I still am. There are physicalObjections to that thought, and yet whatFascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-fiveWith feeling older than I was: it seemed so smartAnd worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so muchOn time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels.And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all:A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on myLife to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listeningTo the music floating through my living room each night.It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long afterEverything that used to fill those years has disappearedAnd they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you aloneIn a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began.You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably fromHome to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;The wilderness they led through is the space behind a doorThrough which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.Along the way the self that you were born with turns intoThe self that you created, but they come together at the end,United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bellOn a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nailIn a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia — Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I lovedAt thirty-five that move me now, but particular momentsWhen my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the yearsBetween them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story,Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego,Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the countryWhere I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through theMotions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing,Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again — Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors,And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,As though the years were pages. I keep living in the lightUnder the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating inAnd out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs.In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan,Linger on a bench and read Contre Sainte-Beuve and Time Reborn,A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life — It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetailWith each other, as the private world of my experience takes its placeWithin a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live.It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything,And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care.It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by itStarts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universeThat flows around them and dissolves them in the end,But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark,A small backyard beneath a boring California sky.I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that meansEludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presenceOf the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — A long estrangement and a private singularity, intactWithin a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood,Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”
The dad. body has just enough gravy on his plate  to sop up one piece of bread. So, enough for one supper, says the mom. She comes back to him, says don’t argue with mom, you’re a ghost. There’s enough water around to drown a cob in its husk. in a dad. He puts up weather stripping all night. to keep out the mom. He says I should have cooked for you more. She thinks she could make her own insulin. to keep from going into dad. She says I should have married a ghost. says: You have a little raisin on your lip. a little. The mom says stop all that quiet, it’s foolish. Come on now, dad. come to ghost. says the ghost. I won’t even warn the mom. I won’t even flinch if the ghost tries to hold her mom. After all, a good séance starts with enough food and a mom. The ghost with a biscuit in meat. The mom with the smell of cracked dad. sucked out of oxygen. The mom is a smell of wrecked vines. You, the dad. with no teeth. And no, (the mom) is a garden full of ghost. No. says the dad: lost in ashes. No city is complete. its own worst ghost. who can’t remember the ghost now, the ghost says: All your selves know, now. They ghost like the bushel of a snowflower. Everyone is dead. now. says, the ghost. The mom is a yard of blackening petals. At night, I have really long dads. Without the ghosts, I wake in a puddle of ghost. But you’ll be mom one day. to know I am alive. We are all sappy dad, aren’t we. Tell the ghost, it’s ok. Let the bodies lie ghost for a while. I mom of you. I mom of you a lot.
Death is comingand you must build a starshipto take you to Venus.Make it from a catsup bottle,a flashlight coil,a penny, the cat’s bell,Mom’s charm bracelet.They say that planet is torment,whipped by circular wind,choked in vitriol clouds.But no. When you get thereit is a light in the skyand I am with you.If you find nothing else,borrow the pleated wingof a winter moth,lighter than dust.
Sound of the rain so I knowthere’s constraintsound of  the trainso I know commercehas not come to a standstillnow they raise the barriernow they set it back in placeWhat coats the bottomof  the surface of  the soundwhen the swifts come inwhen the clerks come homewho will bathe the childrenwho will bake the breadwhen the luff is tightwhen the mainsheetstarts the boat underwaywhatever you do don’tlet the tongue slipfrom its mooringswhat’s that song?love lift us up where we belongI ate the pilland the pill was real
Guards demand we waltzthe teeming hedgesoldiers spreadbut can’t quellwhat wellsworthwhile’s a made shapewafting aboutin the night so greenall bright ornamentand creamy delayI take off my hatI get off and walkO skin be strongexpand rewardable rangebuild steady wealthof shared playdon’t end at lendingnouns to propertyconsult the earconsult the airclaim common rightto lick up excessas a lock’s for friskinga gale’s gaping gatethey say the submarinewhich waves no flagis a violator vesselhow soft its coaxhow smooth its thick white headadorned and anointedthe bodies of my lovesthe fear grinsof great apes
If  you give money to an animalHe or she gets cloying and aggressiveBut when arrested for that behaviorSays, “I didn’t know anything, my repsDid it. Well they did. These humansCommitted their tiny crimes in the mail,” it says,“Knowing animals are photogenic. You can holdOne in your lap or hold a sheaf of  photosIn which a feline looks like you yourself  tearing off a legOf a springbok antelope, which prey looks like youConcentrating on the flee instinct,” it says.I tend to agree with it. It andAll of them have expressions on their faces, four limbs,Two eyes, noses, ears, etcetera, how close can you get to youOr me, and then there’s the same insides. If  it is a cheetahDo not put it in your lap. If  it’sA black rhino it weighs 2,250 lbs.And has two! sharp horns about 24 in. ea.!Let’s suppose nothing about that one and not sayIt has a facial expression. My own opinionIs it will have one in a matter of time.There are ten other scenes in which I look like the animalsIn them so don’t argue I’m writing yet another check this weekAnd as a matter of fact I’d like to smack something,Bite it, and cook it. You do that, tonightFor instance. If one of us eats the otherIt’s a very big crimeNot tiny like the revolutionary revelation in a solicitationThat we are like the animals, no, are them,Which is bigger in evolution and spirituality,Sure, and in the final accountingMuch more important, but todayDon’t put a cheetah in your lap and don’t eat other humans.
Slow the voice goes slower.Slow the slow rain down.Slow the narrow fellow in the grass stiffens.Now the slow blood stirs.Slow the voice goes slower:Soft lead, soft enough to eat.We dine on soft lead with lampreys.Slow the voice goes down to harden.Slow the silt reaches the bottom,And Davy Jones eatsHis slow meal of rubber and clay.Slow the slow rain down can rain.Slow the dead is dead.Slow the light, light.Slow the spirit is a bone,Toy from a child’s coffin.
Melt the fat around the heart;Leave only muscle.For usSpectatorsLeaveOnly muscle;Only trim the fatTo depth.And, even if youNick the heart,If you tear itOr scratch it,If you slice a petal off it,Don’t sweat it.Be mindful onlyThat you leave the muscleClean,Sheared of  fat.Or you canChar the heart,Melt down the fat,Then eat itWith fuckingFava beans.Whatever you do,Be sureTo leave the heartMuscled: thick and delicious.For we, citizens, have comeTo both see and to beThe god and the heart;We have come to becomeThe horns of the heartSplintered intoTheir plumpest sections.
You wanted to be a butcherbut they made you be a lawyer.You brought home presentswhen it was nobody’s birthday.Smashed platters of meatshe cut against the grain.Were a kind  of portable shrine —  I was supposed to cultivate a field of  bliss, then return to my ordinary mind. You burned the filesand moved the office.Made your children feara different school.Liked your butter hardand your candy frozen.Were a kind of diamond drill, drilling a hole right through my skull —  quality sleep, late November. What did it mean, “field of bliss” — A sky alive “with your greatest mentor” — I wore your shoes, big as boats, flopped through the house —  while you made garlic eggs with garlic salt, what “represents the living teaching” —  Sausages on toasted rye with a pickle, and a smother of cheese, and frosting right out of  the can without the cake —  You ruled with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, you raged at my stony mother, while I banged from my high chair, waving the bloodied bone of something slaughtered — I was a butcher’s daughter. So all hail to me —  Os Gurges, Vortex Mouth, I gap my craw and the bakeries of the cities fall, I stomp the docks — spew out a bullet stream of oyster shells, I’ll drain the seas — the silos on every farm, the rice from the paddy fields, the fruit from all the orchard trees, and then I’ll eat the trees —  I’ll eat with money and I’ll eat with my teeth until the rocks and the mountains curl and my blood sings —  I’m such a good girl to eat the world.
I want you to knowhow it felt to hold it,  deep in the well of my eye. You, future person: star of one of mycomplicated dooms — This one’s called Back to the Dark.Scene 1: Death stampedes through the server-cities.Somehow we all end up living in caves, foraging in civic ruin.Banana Palace — the last of the last of my kind who can read breathes it hot into your doom-rimed ear. She’s a dowser of spine-broken books and loose paper the rest of your famishing band thinks mad.  • Mine was the eraof spending your time in town squares made out of air. You invented a face and moved it around, visited briefly with other faces. Thus we streamed down lit screens sharing pictures of animals looking ridiculous —  trading portals to shoes, love, songs, news, somebody’s latest rabid cause: bosses, gluten, bacon, God —  Information about information was the pollen we deposited —  while in the real fields bees starved. Into this noise sailed Banana Palace.  • It was a mother ship of gold.Shining out between happy bday katie! and a photo of someone’s broken toe —  Like luminous pillows cocked on a hinge,like a house with a heavy lid, a round house of platelets and honey —  It was open, like a box that holds a ring. And inside, where the ring would be:  • I think about you a lot, future person.How you will needall the books that were ever read when the screens and wires go dumb. Whatever you haven’t used for kindling or bedding. Whatever made it through the fuckcluster of bombs we launched accidentally, at the end of the era of feeling like no one was doing a thing about our complicated dooms —  Helpless and braced we sat in dark spacessubmerged in pools of projected images, trying to disappear into light —  Light! There was so much light! It was hard to sleep.  • Anyway. Banana Palace.Even now when I say it, cymbals shiver out in spheres. It starts to turn its yellow gears and opens like a clam. Revealing a fetal curl on its temple floor, bagged and sleeping —  a white cocoon under lit strings that stretch from floor to ceiling —  a harp made of glass incubating a covered  • pearl —  We broke the world you’re living in,future person. Maybe that was always our end:to break the jungles to get at the sugar, leave behind a waste of cane —  There came a time I couldn’t look at trees without feeling elegiac — as if nature were already over, if you know what I mean. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. Cross-section of a banana under a microscope the caption read. I hunched around my little screen sharing a fruit no one could eat.
First they pulled from the burning a miracle, then a mistake.The Lord will lift them the priest with the griefin his eyes cried. Lord, what blue eyes bound there,what hurling, diving, shining, burning — reason surfaces and sinks, sinks and surfaces.Dawn without sunrise. Gray. Purple.Her Majesty in mourning. Her Majesty the warring. In the doublehouse of  life all this was repeating itself,Naneferkaptah had already himself lived Setne’s story.When the rains began the teams with two-by-foursfound the going treacherous as those in the desert foundthe food wretched. They prayed to the golden serpent on the staffto save them. And the serpent stretched itself tap, tap and became a hymn, white-throated, rising to giveitself up for the good of the chosen ones.Mother I remember the buttons on your dressing gown. So blue and beady-eyed and true, when did I begin To fear them. The world nownot so round with us. Velocitythreatening to meet, to marrydensity at every corner carrying carrying Who can see the writing on our foreheads almost wet still Who can see tap, tap algae bloom beneath the board smoke from the sky Tell me if that is a handif it is human whatwill itspeak
The great house birch with its girth he never quitecould get his arms around, long felled, at lastonly its bark like a larva’s husk in grassleaning neck-high, hollow below mansards.He does not live in the peeling mansion, buta more-than-ample keeper’s cottage beyondrolled lawns and relics of Victorian elmswhere he muses in his study alcove. Touchesthe ancient coins, silver or bronze, their gleamon the baize-topped writing table — proud Athenahelmeted; her owl agog beneath. Eternityglimpsed in the boy ruler Gordian’s profile,copper green. Trees on guard in broweddignity now the seething barrack of bees.Nearby a maple twisted by wind for decadesspirals, a stair winding above the coneof shade. In his covert the son, reading Herodotus,Suetonius — staggering run of drachmas,staters, tetradrachms, glinting in rows.
A longish poem about wallpaper.A short lyric about discouragement in white.A medium-length thesis of uncertain importance.Another sonnet, about scholarship.A couplet of olives.A long narrative about the exaggeration of your absence.Several quatrains about candle stubs.That old sestina on Isaiah.Palindromes about Scots presbyters of the 18th century.Some rock lyrics from Benares.A nature poem about committees.Seven heroic couplets about Art Murphy.Several more heroic couplets on Murphy’s Law.A ballad about studying Latin in Latium.A masque for Mercedes and her Benz.
True, my office is a gold Camino nineteen eighty-two & front-work’s on a laptop, but there are older tricks:this knack I have to spy a sham address: figures pried off siding or the silhouette that’s leftwhen eight is changed to three; my talent to discern the perp who hides behind the car or ducks amongthe bins or sidles, slams the screen & tries for silence then behind his gutted door. Somewill wave a gun or summon dogs. Once a rooster. Once an alderman who menaced with a mallet(croquet) when his trucking company was sued & there’s still this lucent bruise on my right heel — long story: swan shot, tree house, veteran. Though no one wants this dachshund’s weight of papercompiled by some paralegal underpaid in Phoenix, I assure you I will always serve. I am the envoy(a ball cap hides my third eye). Put me in swift shoes or wings, at some cosmic door with only sky behind — black-clad, the Prophet of Xerox, steadfast bearer of a clerk court’s smeared truncated seal.I know these streets: the houses boarded up, the other heralds driving slow on fractured blacktop;the sidewalks’ glass & fenders scattered; vacant quarter acres returning now to palm & pampas, trees of heaven.I am waiting at the crossroads, here at your broken gate where barbed acacias stoop to shade my trespass.
Born into each seedis a small anti-seeduseful in case of somecomplete reversal:a tiny but powerfulkit for adapting itto the unimaginable.If we could crack thefineness of the shellwe’d see thebundled minuses stacked as in a safe,ready for useif things don’tgo well.
Say when raincannot makeyou more wetor a certainthought can’tdeepen and yetyou think it again:you have lostcount. A largeramount isno longer alarger amount.There has beena collapse; perhapsin the night.Like a rupturein water (whichcan’t ruptureof course). Allyour horsesbroken out withall your horses.

After Lauren Halsey and Mike Demps

let us go then let us go then I said  and the band was I lone every which way way my spit slicked the sax’s brass chitlins. I said  such wet would mud dust and soil red rock. I said doors to some room blown out the out blown in. let us go then let us go then. I said  check the spit’s phlegm tenements. I said its slow typhoon syrup. it blooms the axe up and loams gypsum I said  earths marblebaster. let us go then let us go then I said. preference of red or white I said my spit. where I was was where to be when I was there and what I made was it since it was where it waswasn’t it I said.  but the body mustn’t be there I said. but the shapes are there I said here’s what we’ll do. let us go then let us go then wailing and whaling till one was off the chain I said fuck it. keeping time in a gorilla suit for the mud to come on uh i uh ii uh iii    ...    uh cxvii andtook it to the bridge to throw down wet    wet   wet I said. mold on that alabarble a salad a crop gainin on yuh in a gorilla suit I said. gaining on you I said I’ll take my time and yours and the bandstand gardened out let us go then letus go then and then we  we we
The Constellations are a harmoniously composed series of 23 gouaches that Miró painted to escape the trauma of the war years.— The Joan Miró Foundation We’ve all gouached.Haven’t we? Pollock lashedstretched canvas that was Nude.Was said to call his Ruth prudeand he spat chew in a coffee canand shat bloodily in the can.When I was twenty I spent threehours in a room with the Free-Spirited Types moving fromone inviting orifice to the welcomeof another. I was lost in my wood,savage and stern. But also I understoodthat when it was later and I was wiserI could never forgive Herr Pfizer.My father said we’ve all got an East River.He had a tenuous web of veins for a liver.His loss. Literally. Mom’s impatient artwas proved to be the most effective partof her mothering: you should see her rich greenswell up in the power of the middle and grow leanas they colonize the crusted edges.My love for her is impregnable.Pity Miró, moonblind, weary on the rocky coastof Portugal, walking cliff paths and getting lost.His quest for childish wonder has bent himand riddled his skin before its time.Put this together with that! Paint it yellow!Murk the sky with banks of Periwinkle and Snow.Gouache a widened eye low on the right,so it can behold the left and the night.
Do you remember when you began to travel?It lent you this astonishing lens and you kept a journalThat rode in your breast pocket like a stone,There you wrote “Limoges — ” and “Altenkirchen”;And when you saw a peasant, kissed, or passed out — Died for twenty seconds — in the heat on the hill aboveMarseille you would rush out the notebook and make a note — Sometimes just an x in the top right corner — And ideally you would brood about that later.Which led slowly to the dark hot barWhere you enjoy a glass of beer across from the Winter Palace in summer.In the rose-and-blue windows of the basilicaToday radiant burghers stood and learned Mercy in a circleAround Stephen, recognizedBy the pebble enthroned in his skull and the scarlet ooze.While in your system the amphetamines progress.The idea is they’ll give you heart to haul yourself up and crossThe limestone plaza. And when at the gate of the placeYou pay you can enter the Palace.
At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father— tender, abstracted — would exercise the rightto revert to type. That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would ratherwe did not so bandy the good Jesuit’s name aboutin talk of “gay this” and “gay that” — just as he would rathermy sister did not, from the library, request “sick” Lolita.Like tars on a stage deck, yo ho, we roll our eyes.Somebody snaps on the poisonous gas-fired heater— and I put off a year or two the hypothesisI’ll form, with a wave, to provoke him to these wobblersthat all in such matters swing from pole to pole;as Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s])to swing from joy’s heights, alas, to the abyssand for whom the mind had “mountains; cliffs of fall.” • “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheapMay who ne’er hung there....    ” Who’s not known the hellthat fashions itself from the third night without sleep — the third or the fourth — in whose black margins crawlshrill horrors, and where breathless, poleaxed, pinned — as though in the teeth of an outrageous gale — the mind — sick — preys upon the stricken mind.And “worst, there is none” — no none — than this wild grief:Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed.Oh, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”as Hopkins wrote — but, far gone, at its worstit’s her first form I want. Please stroke my hair.It’s alright now. I’m here, I’m here. There, there.
The baby sleeps.Sunlight plays upon my lap, through doily leaves a black lab comes,a scotty goes, the day wears on, the baby wakes.The good birds sing,invisible or seldom seen, in hidden kingdoms, grateful for the in-between. The baby sleeps. Elsewhere the Queen rolls byon gusts of cheer — ladies wave and bless her reign. The baby frets. The baby feeds.The end of lunch, a daytime moon. The leavesare lightly tinkered with.It’s spring? No, autumn? Afternoon? We’ve sat so long, we’ve walkedso far. The woods in shade, the woods in sun, the singing birds,the noble trees.The child is grown. The child is gone. The black lab comes,his circuit done. His mistress coils his scarlet lead.
We wash up side by sideto find each otherin the speakable world,and, lulled into sense,inhabit our landscape; the curveof that chair drapedwith your shirt;my glass of  waterseeded overnight with air.After this bedthere’ll be another,so we’ll rolland keep rollinguntil one of  uswill roll alone and try to rollthe other back — a trickno one’s yet pulled off — and it’ll beas if   I dreamed you, dear,as if   I dreamed this bed,our touching limbs,this room, the tree outside alivewith new wet light.Not now. Not yet.
Over time, you picture themafter dark, in searchesfocusing on streets and housesclose above the churchesor balancingon narrow wands of light.And find so much depends uponthe way you chooseto look at them:high in the nighttheir minor flares confusedamong the stars, therealmost beautiful.Or from way backover the mapfrom where they might resemblea business of fliesaround the head wound of an animal.
Only this boy movesbetween the runes of treeson his tricyclewhen an eagle swoops,releases two arrowsfrom its silver wings, and meltsaway faster than lightning.Then a loud whistleand a bang like dry thunder.In a blink the boy seeshis house roof sink.Feels his ears ripped off.The blast puffs up a fawn smokebigger than a mountain cloud.The slow begonias rattletheir scarlet like confetti.Metal slashesthe trees and ricochets.Wires and pipes snapat the roots, quiver.The whirling smoke packedwith bricks and cement,chicken feathers and nigella seeds.When the cloud beginsto settle on the ground,the boy makes out buckled iron rods.White soot descendsand he finds himself dressedlike an apprentice baker.
She said the cornflake cake made her day,she said a man cannot be blamed for beingunfaithful: his heart is not in tune with hisextremities and it’s just the way his bodychemistry is. She said all sorts of things.We saw a duck pond and a man with a tubof maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we sawthe walled garden and the old-fashioned libraryin the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafewhere we had the cornflake cake cut into halveswith the handle of a plastic fork. We saw yellowcrocuses growing in a ring around a naked tree,the sky showing in purple triangles betweenthe branches. We looked in the windowof Butterworth’s at the bikes: they were beautiful,all of them. Gorgeous, she said. The sun waspushing through the iced air and landing on uson our heads and our shoulders and the backsof our legs. We bought nail varnish removerfrom Wilko’s, a bath sheet, and two Diet Cokes.She said she’d been talking to Jesus and Godbecause she didn’t want to go to hell, although,she said, correctly, we’ve been through hellalready, haven’t we. She said a woman shouldknow her place, should wait. She lit a cigarette.
There is an ash tree behind this house. Youcan see it from our bedroom window.If you stare at it for long enough, you’ll seeit drop a leaf. Stare at it now, you said,and notice the moment a leaf strips awayfrom its branch, giving a twirl. Consider this.The ash tree unclothes itself Octoberly.From beside our bed, fingering the curtain,observe the dark candles at the top ofthat tree, naked and alert, tending to the breeze.A sheet of ice between the rooftopsand this noiseless sky has turned the airinside out. Black veins of branchesshake against the blue screen on which theyhang. Small mammals are hibernatingin pellets of warm air under ground. But,in spite of the cold, this ash tree does not shyfrom shrugging off its coat, sloping its nudeshoulders to the night. So, you said, undo,unbutton, unclasp, slowly remove. Let down yourhair, breathe out. Stand stark in this room untilwe remember how not to feel the chill.Stand at the window, lift your arms right up like a tree. Yes — like that. Watch leaves drop.
After Robert Hooke All afternoon a reddish trickle  out of the roots of the beech and across the lawn, a sort of  rust that shines and dances. Close up, it proves to be ant, each droplet a horned traveler finicking its way round the crooked geometry of a grass forest. A finger felled in their path rocks them, amazed, back on their haunches. I see them tasting the air for subtle intelligence, till one ventures to scale it, and others follow. They are fidgety subjects to draw. If you sink the feet in glue the rest twists and writhes; kill one, the juices evaporate in seconds, leaving only the shriveled casing. I dunked one in brandy. It struggled till the air rose from its mouth in pinprick bubbles. I let it soak an hour, then dried it, observed the spherical head, the hairlike feelers, the grinning vice of its sideways jaw, the coppery armor plate with its scattered spines. Some draft stirred it then. It rose to all its feet, and set off across the rough miles of desk.
The boat was beating across the bay,we had our backs to Vesuvius,the wind smacked our faces.Naples was an enormous packet of cigarettesyou could smoke till you conked out:the cigarettes were never going to run outand nor was the coffee, the drugs,the prostitutes, the locked churches,the scooters, the rice cakes, the evil eye,the boys called Gennaro, the funiculars,the shrines to Madonna, the shrinesto Maradona, the bullet holes, the heat,the permanent state of crucifixion.Anyone could be crucified two thousandyears ago but to be crucified now,to be crucified in Napoli — lift me up!
I’m being carried downthe Burlington Arcadeby Beadles in top hats,jewelers on both sidesholding out their handsand wrapped in cashmere.When people speak ofnear-death experiencesthey’re always going throughtunnels, they’re happy,they’re never going throughthe Burlington Arcade.Eric says, It’s goodto see you wearing clothesand I have to admit he’swearing the most beautifultrousers and I say, Ericyou’re not supposed to bein this poem. Get backinto your shop! I can seea light at the end of the tunnel.The Head Beadle’s saying“Burlington Gardens!”Should I tip him?Am I dead?What happens next?
the fields beneath (st pancras old church) I make my tourof the garden waiting roomwhere the tall treeswander among the corpses.I might go pastthe last resting placeof Sir John Soanein his stone telephone kiosk,or the wooden benchwhere the Beatles saton their “Mad Day Out”July 28th, 1968.The body of J.C. Bach,“The English Bach,”lies somewhere near here,lost to the Railway in 1865.A plaque remembers himas Queen Charlotte’s music tutor,who collaborated with someoneand died young.Perhaps Jerry Cruncher got him,or perhaps he survivedand is strolling with his friendin the fields beneath.I drag my feetthrough the backsliding seasonstowards a gate in the wallwith its timetable of opening hours.the song of the needles Needles have the sudden beautyof a first line.They’re always new and surprisingas they burst from their paper covering.They sing as they hit the air.You catch sight of themout of the corner of your eye,glinting softly to themselvesas they contemplate their next move.What they’re suggesting is inspired,but a certain sadnessattends their descriptionof what is going on.You don’t know whether to look away,or accept what they’re saying.If you’re lucky you’ll feel a popas one of them enters your fistulaand a cool feeling of recognitionspreads up through your arm.grand canyon suite Every few minutes someone’s alarm goes offbecause of a blood clotor a sudden fall in pressure,then the first two notes of Ferde Grofé’s“On the Trail” goes clip-cloppingdown the Grand Canyon of the ward.Now the first two notes of the songare joined by the same two notesfrom a neighboring machine,then another two, and another,till the whole hopeless blind herdis clip-clopping off into the sunset.
There is an alleywhere you can go,where you can kisssomeone’s mouthuntil you climbinside them, forceyour way in, pushyour cells into their cellsand become onecreature — angelic.It isn’t the wayyou’d dream it.There is piss,dew-damp moss crawlingacross the brick.Some nights it is so darkyou must enter onlyby touch.Walk by in the lightand it will seemlike nothing.The scriptureis written by wenches:4eva, L+ J, I.T.A.L.Y.A heart jagged in two.But what you’ll make thereit’s not love,it’s not weigheddown with that,it’s feather, air,an at-once exultationof being notof this time, this alley,this shittygood for no one,shut-down town.I never went there,I promise you.I never knewsuch sweet violence.Though there are morningsnow, miles from that place,when I wakewith the thought of it:wet and bitten, half-winged.
Deep reaches of sleep until the unforeseenmoment, like fugue, like petit mal, some kind of sign,a touch from a joker’s finger, to let him know what’s right,what’s wrong with the dream-within-a-dream. A sudden, slightshift in the order of things and all the past undone.He left what was left of himself in her care that night. • They went to the river and dropped their clothes on the bank.She struck out. He followed in the long, slow vee of her wake.She could sound and surface, bringing back with her whatother lovers had dumped: hotel bill, gimcrack ring, a four-square shotfrom the photo booth. Later, they dipped their bottles and drank.She looked at him and laughed. “You think you’re safe? You’re not.”• In this, her fool is deaf and dumb and twirling a pink parasol. In thishe’s doing a chicken dance. He turns away and puckers up for a kiss.He’s their stalker, familiar, spy, his slippy grin is alllipstick and green teeth. Words to the wise, or coffin-laugh, or catcall.In this, he watches from cover, maestro of the deadfall.He goose-steps them out of the tunnel of love and into the house of glass.
Behind the Fauverie a crawl of quayside trafficwhile Aramis roars for his food, the airturbulent as he opens his jaws in a hugeyawn. If I hold my breath, half-close my eyesand listen hard — there at the tongue’s root,in the voicebox of night, I might hearthe almost-vanished. He’s summoning his prey,this lord of thunderbolts, calling to ghostsof the Lost World, with this evening chantto scarlet macaw, tapir, golden lion tamarin.Until everything goes slow and the rush-hourqueue of scale-to-scale cars is one giant caimanbasking on the bank. The jaguar’s allswimming stealth now — no sound — a stalkercamouflaged by floating hyacinths, sensestuned only to the reptile of the road. Then, withone bound, spray scatters like glass, as Aramislands on the brute’s back and bites its neck.
Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds rooston the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight.The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spilland the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost,yourself  in memory perhaps, might well set foot up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and stillexcept you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight. • Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.
Rough music in the lane,the love child lapped in bloodand safe at her breast, the painechoed in wood on wood,steel on steel, as they come,the women in their blacks,to hound her from house and home,bands of bitches and claquesof crones with their pots and pans,their hooks and ladles and bowls,to beat outside in the street,to stand at her window and howl,while the child takes a taste of greenmilk and “the dead of night”is all she has of her ownand the music goes on and on.
They found a man in the shrub that shields our lane — one fat white hand not tucked in the pit — and cordoned off a patch. We had nothing to explain itbut The Post. And now the ground’s restrewn with tinsand crisp bags; sleet jiggles the ivy; the blackbirdsbob from floor to bole as each dull dusk settles in.And coming back at night we get on too,quickening to the safety lights, throughshadows of  gates that thrust across the grit.
The halotolerant crocodileidles in brackish water like a tow truck.Salt glands meter in its diapsid skull;smug fucker that the epochs couldn’t kill.How easy “kill” then closes onto “smile,”the lockjaw of a life that rides its luck,knowing from hindmost teeth to jackknifed tailLeviathan is neither fish nor mammal.
The truck grinds by and pumps out grit; the road glints and goes still. The barn owl that had not finished herereturns. But withits fill of scavenges, face ruffled in mulch, the vole is lost and safe so the silent specter flits away, its moon face tothe moonand rears unknown against a copse, claws tipped for the strafe and something diestoo soon.
It lists beneath a sycamoreswashing in high summer leaf,and takes a hit from underneath:a root knuckle bulges along the floor.Its eight loopholes have fissures, sproutingthistles; through each the wheat is fattening.“What’s this thing   for?” A starling singsits wind-up song. The sun slides out.And this taste of piss, that Fetherliteslumped in the corner, those Holsten cans,the markered slogan do not try to answer. Might.
I encountered a scaffoldoutside the Holy Trinity Church in Vladimir, Russia.At first I didn’t notice herslumped against the side of the church — she was pretty small for a scaffold, pretty un-assuming. Her safety meshwas torn in places and sun-bleached all overand threatened to dislodgedue to a forceful wind that was typicalof the season. She was shaking.She was fundamentally insecure.She told me that good foundations are essentialand that the men who had put her togetherhadn’t taken advantage of the right opportunities.Now, each day, someone came bycalled her “unsafe” and also “a liability”then left, failing to initiate the dismantling processthat yes would have been painfuland slow, but kinder.International visitors to the churchblamed her for the mess of tools and ragson the grounds and for the factthat they could no longer seethe church’s celebrated muraldepicting Saint Artemy of Verkolaunusually pioushighly veneratedchild saint killed by lightning.His dead body radiated lightnever showed signs of decayand was in fact said to have effectedmultiple miracles of healing.I said comforting things to the scaffoldbut she only seemed to lean more heavilyagainst the side of the church.We are rarely independent structures she saidbefore she dropped a bolt pinwhich released a long section of tubewhich released another bolt pinwhich released several wooden boardsthat scraped another tubeand made an unbearable sound.
Who ever thinks this is impossibleshall only have a look on the glass, which is similar to you — Monk of the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas at Arnstein, 
 late twelfth century, tr. by Roger Rosewell 1 In the high left light there’s a bombast figureof the iconoclast Harley — titledChairman of the Committee for theDemolition of Monuments of Superstitionand Idolatry — in operation mid 1600s.In forgiveness is lightly engraved in the grisaille glass near the base.His jig-on-coals is illumined to the foot:in the light below, skin-fierce shardsof thousanded glass are oblite against an anvil roadblack as a telly that’s off.2 Here the sanctity of the inextinct is vitrified.(There is in this, of course, the trick of the numinous,which apertures the mind then shuttersit with a captured click.)The second window is abstractedinto a green / yellow / redthat’s near tessellated at points,yet at its edges approaching random generationlike a screen saver projected. It is infernal.This color chart dispersal, that’s disordering orreordering.3 Then a spurt of leading leads out of the plaster tracery,these cames a cooled ore rootingLowhampton’s industry to a silica-limed wall — and the metal hid within a retraceof all the city’s greatnessthat’s gone before. Though nowis lost. There is at last the movingoff from the abstract; a tilting to the concrete:it seems, right here, that a hundredbuildings are storied in stone-thrown perspective.A city reinvented.4 In four: a clear-paned gemmailconnecting like-to-like, with no change of  tintor shape, no supporting leadlight.It’s as if it were a house window.Or something from an office block.It does not create or stain but gives an outsidefalling past Sainsbury’s and the Sander Towerlooming, then the ring road communionedtraffic forming. An open roompupiled towards rain in its rain-tone,the study of an unaltared sun.
I think I always liked the gamebecause it sounded like my namecombined with the concept of alone.(My name really does mean “alone”in Slovenian!) We don’t actually careif it’s true, but we want to knowthe person telling us is telling usthe truth. Say his name is “Hank,”as in, “of hair.” (It’s not.) My upbringingwas classically smooth/chaotic, apartfrom traumatic events I’ve never detailed,even to myself. Traumatic but methodical.But why say what happened even.In the tech block the blinds were downand I cleared my way to the final marbleunder the indistinct gaze of an indistinctmaster. My success had allowed meto become the bastard I always knewI could be. What did it mean, to cleanthe board like this, counting down to one?By these gradual and orderly subtractionsmy persona was configured. The goalwas to remain single. Sometimes telling youthe truth wouldn’t be telling you anythingmuch. For a while I’ve felt torpid and detuned,as if I want to share a view with you,so we can both be absent in one place.Look, the sky is beautiful and sour.I’m not here, too. I’m staring out of this cloudlike an anagram whose solutionis probably itself. I am only the methodthat this stupid game was invented to explain.
For Sam Donsky The airport where all movies end:the scenery’s mobile, the people too(the people want to be moved),and the rounded stairways join set pieceslike farewells in a series arc. I don’tunderstand how you write good scriptswithout knowing there are gods. I’velearned the same things we’ve all learned:when a man runs through my hotel suiteI can expect another half a second later.Also, tell me why I keep two keys,one of which unlocks something.Also, I know, we know, that you (hell-o)will have vanished before I finish saying thisand turn around. “You’ll do that,” I’ll mention to the night, and spin my swivel chair,perusing the moment’s sunkenness. Meanwhilemy antivirus angel is checking every file.We both know there’s a place you touchwhen your plane lifts off (I won’t say where),a little bolt that takes the plot apart,so closure is dismantled, because from hereyou can admit that nothing’s ever ended well.You have queued to show your documents.You have left behind your possessionsfor the kind scientists. The stairs have spunaway and sunk, and in losing your itineraryyour position is confirmed. Like, the first timea woman sees a diamond she just knows.
I felt suddenly convinced that I had feelings for the wallpaper.I was especially captivated by its blonde hair and bad dreams.I had the impression the wallpaper needed longer to properly 
respond.By the time I left, my affections had produced this abrasion on my cheek.People looked on the abrasion as unquestionable proof of my sincerity.The abrasion was produced by rubbing my face on the paper’s smooth surface.It only occurred to me later that it might have found this sensation disagreeable.But by then I had become known for my abrasion, and I seldom thought of,discussed, or in any way depended upon the wallpaper for anything.My affections, though, had produced upon the paper their own mark.To my irritation and gradual dismay, interest in the paper’s abrasionbegan to outweigh interest in my own; indeed, mine was starting to fadewhile the mark upon the paper had deepened with the passing of time.People liked to visit the paper in its room and probe their fingersinto the widening tear, by now a gruesome black-edged wound.The silence of the paper during these incursions suggested to somecondemnation of their curiosity, but to others implied approval.Some even speculated that the paper “enjoyed” the infringementof its surfaces, while most agreed it was a question of the paperenduring this indignity, having little or no opportunity to protest.Some visitors could not contain their enthusiasm, and over timeother recesses were opened in the paper without its consent.The earliest admirers of the paper’s abrasion were heard lamentingthe gulf between the paper’s current state and its previous appearance.They opined that to experience the abrasion now was to encountera kind of mockery of the gentle and informal gesture it had once been.Others contended that while the paper’s condition was certainly different,it couldn’t be in any way “better” or “worse” than it had been 
originally;on the contrary, the paper, exhibiting as it did the marks of the affectionsspent upon it, was in every way a true record of the destruction this attentionhad wrought, and had become if anything a more moving testament,charting as it did the changing and accelerated passions of the times.In later phases of the paper’s deterioration some expressed admirationfor the stoical indifference with which the paper withstood its abusersand wondered if such an attitude might not improve the willingand reciprocal style with which they and their contemporarieswere accustomed to receiving each other’s gazes and caresses.Against the odds, this view seemed timely and took root in the populace,and to this day in all the estimations of historians and critics of cultureit is widely held accountable for the period of dormancy and inertiaamong the youngest of our people, whose silence and reposehas replaced the humors and rages of those whose desires had flown unchecked, who had coupled for so long with such energy and frequency.
frangelico It slops from coppery glass Dominican cassocks thicker than water, thinned syrup crackling and smoking over ice, pale as hearts of  hazelnuts half-caramelized or relics lit in cabinets. Angelic alcoholic for kids, all quickening sweetness without the burnt palate, it’s praline, gilt, milk chocolate. Don’t knock it. Also, don’t drink a lot of it. Handy mnemonic for nuts and Alps, the Piedmont and Languedoc, Our Father, fluent Occitan, Orthodox baroque brass fixtures, all the schmaltzy terror of Christmas    ...     Bright liqueur, maple sap, throat’s lacquer, misnomer, namesake — couldn’t quench a thirst, of course, but gives occasion for it. lametta Fuck me, I love that stuff — tinsel stripped like a tarragon stalk of its million radial tines, nervy with static in shredded cascades, angle-confounding and biddable as a fistful of grasshoppers. It implicates itself perpetually in socks, hell-bent as Japanese knotweed on travel, and infiltrates the kitchenette, which seems, beside its disco stooks, too much of a muchness, too matter-of-fact. Could we dress all utilities in spangles of lametta, revel in the vulgar Italian TV indestructible attention-splatter, the cat-bewitching twitch and dangle, the dross? Would things be worse or better? periptero Apparently peripatetic, it pops up wherever I go, glistening on my shoulder, a gold epaulette, a stuffed piñata albatross of bubble-gum, filter tips, and lottery tickets, glossy cascades of laminated sleaze difficult to care about, much harder to reject. Less explicably there are sewing patterns, puzzle books, and tiny plastic helicopters bearing stigmata from the molds where they were cast. The proprietor slams the shutters up and locks himself inside like a djinn in a lamp, a night-busy, helping-hand kobold in a kitchen, utterly invested in the enterprise, inseparable from it. What is the epicenter everyone reports but the staple through the nipple of a centerfold?
I dated mostly police.I hated coastal solace.In navy posts I flourished.I inflate the cost of polish.I restrained my nest-egg worries.On planes I tested patience.I prayed for lusty follies.I betrayed my foster family.In ways I lost my malice.I craved a cloistered palace.I dared say the feast was ghoulish.I became a tourist: boorish.Unswayed by mystic knowledge,I raised a frosty chalice.I was upstaged and roasted: English.I obeyed a ghost who’s tall-ish.The play was close to flawless.I stayed and missed her no less.Then one day the fester wasn’t.I cried: the taste was more-ish.
patricia beer O Lord thou draggest me out From the deep harbor άρτταγησόμεθα: we shall be caught up.Plymouth as it was, the Hoe laid out above Goemagotchary with scattered primrose, a stand of tulipsthat court the sun as glacially as girls beneath rayon doll hatsand parasols inclining to passersby on the promenade.Beyond the breakwater, Warspite between Grenville and Hood.Narrow-eyed gulls with heartrending mews like paramours.Then Padua, balanced upon its own rubble. Raw colorsreturning with the first days of spring unkempt and ravenousto the faculty, students linking arms with practiced easein giro through a stream of bicycles trilling in sweet voices.Kisses desired in full view returned, the elegant cafesaudible from the river where the sky wanders through its city.Austen and Gaskell. Coffee, a stroll. Austen again. Brontë.I met her. The gray, lavish eyes. A ruthless stare softenedby an accent. She was gracious, even to my callow posturing — called one windy effort that ended O Lord thou draggest me outa most faithful homage to Eliot, grave with kindly mockery.I drank my bitter tea. But consider this: her calves in sheer silkstill a girl’s, her polished tan half-heels set against them:magnificent. That Italian air, the strict bob ordering her face.And driving back with Pinkie at his schoolmasterly pace,I picked my nails and watched myself in the dark wing when“The King in Thule” suddenly swelled with falling cadencethrough the speakers, its pure aurality heraldingthe shattering white late snow of April, the road a veinof black ore exhausting itself slowly to the north,the fields at Rogationtide émpty, innocent of all things, even life. i ii iii fay pomerance Beneath the shadow of hís wings, the scales stand baited against us.Maddox, charming predator, robustly mustachioed, vividbehind thick lenses condemning that discredited iconography —towers collapsing through quicksand, pavanes of anguish,the bodies of the lost ransacked by hobgoblins —reclines, his hatred virtue, its vital purity and strength,all his outrage told against those humiliating genuflections.Since there is no model for her features, conceive of herblanched as the Cabbage White, each brushstroke the dramaof a tiny kenosis, the bright clatter of ferrules over-heard as conversation at a distant table, queasy and isolating —Babel. Tower of teacups at ominous angles in the studio,rings indelibly stamped in the watercolor paper’s grain.Stretched in membranes of fat: passover, Lamb. Burning leaven.Head ringing with psilocybin and gin, I kneel in the foregroundof my own life quarter-sized, self-consciously humbled,like the donor in Altdorfer’s Crucifixion peering throughthe shadow of the cross to the city emptied of day laborersthat rides at ease in the sun, bay deliciously windswept,the curdled blue of high summer fadingout beyond the spruce where she stands in her living robes —and still I cannot comprehend how incidental we areto our own redemption, though the sacrifice remains intimatein violence, the half-accepting flinch of the faceas if breasting the parapet or tensed into the impactof a tube train, the rapt mother in the privacy of her distress.Here is the gate of horn, the hacked boughof ash that even dying shivers forth gaily its barrowloads of leaves.jack clemo Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes Not that I forget, but that, increasingly, the objects of my memorybecome ripe for disparagement: irrational or petit bourgeois,complicit in imperial power, conjurors of airslapped down by wolfish lecturers with gestures of ennui,pared nails and implacable smiles, vicious with piety.Little traitor, I defend them with a wounded stare and no more —perhaps, I find my place among them, being so cold and all.Bone-white pits of china clay gouged throughthat vision, the extravagant gaze of grace balanced upon us,its soteriology divorced from nature — something terrifyingin declaration, his unforgiving line like being hunted.From the steeply-banked clay tips new dumps of refuse clatterto extend the protectorate of sand, sparse pricklesof mica like fields in snow — above all, the dogma never thaws.And nothing. The day we climbed slowly out of Antequerathrough the cloud base stippled in dew, the lightly slung bluebells of nazarenes blazed between karst and darkness,wild rose and orchid, the unaccountable blood of the peonyaching toward a sound that was both forsakenness and longing —wolves baying somewhere deep in the park —and I turned to you and wanted to know what next?Lost, we turned and turned and turned about among the stacks.Wings drilling the invisible host from cover to coveralerted us, the cramped and sullen thorns in anguish loomed.Until, picking our way down a gully deepening into spate,the fog whitened, glared alarmingly, then lifted in one sweepfrom the sheer drop-off of the cliff — we sawas if through glass the road receding among gray rocks | the citadel.
Moisturizer is important to me like a car is important.I’ll never own a car and skin is incidentally mine.Truth is, skin seems to manage pretty well on its own.I only travel in cars to sing to the radio.My skin is such a brute! It needs a regime!I need a drink. My car and my skin need a drink. I want to sayain’t you a cool glass of water. My skin is so dulland I have no car. My eyes, however, are ritzy.I favor the non-abrasive. My cult productis an anti-aging self-emollient. More oftenthis is new pajamas. But pajamas need multi-talents!I’m not yet old-old. Thinking of crystal decantersmakes me feel young, they are inscrutable adulthood.My skin can’t be so bad — sleep is like a drinkand my controls are set to bed. This is my mitigationagainst stress, stern weather, assorted irritations.Being ravaged is my own fault! Proper livingrequires routine, tiny adjustments that make life better.I’m making plans with no muscle to them.Sleep is no artificial skin, despite its gauzy potential.Rose water — by the by I’d rather drink itas the hokey pendulum swings.I’m looking for something foolproof, aplombthat withstands the interrogating nude.
In the absence of anything as definitive as blood typeor maths, I am delighted to declareI found the back to the earring, alsothe mildew is banished, albeit temporarily.I want to share this news with you,a check against the inventory of living.Personalized necklaces point to living.Customizable anything suggests it’s all worth it.Sometimes it’s “oh this iced finger bun”others it’s “put something in the diary to look forward to.”This is an elaborate mural in an ill-frequented part of the city.My diary is full and the bakery is out of buns.Indoors there needs to be a swap from idle teaselsto cacti. (Some sort of permanence that works in the way I work — water, light, a finger touch confirming my edges.)I only have cats to verify I’m there. • I am building up evidence. Some bodily. Some constructed.On balance, perhaps I am more a person who racks upindicators of taste as proof of living. There are condiments,playlists, preferred linens. I first got drunkon Cinzano. There was no one taking notes. I used to dreamof sex in a fully upholstered room with no windows or doors.This idea of rabbit fur rugs and buttoned velvet cushions,immaculately conceived. Always snagged on the detailof things — how even did I come to be inside,nevermind out. The sex wasn’t the point. What I seekis magic like an intact lipstick mirror in an antique handbag,my own nifty (crackerjack?) endurance. Or to discovera gulping heart within a privet hedge. Or the druzy quartzof someone’s eyes long gone and to say it!• I am dying to be written about in your diaryand my self-involvement extends to endlessphotographs of my eye makeup, which might be describedas “signature.” FYI I prefer a fine brush to a pen.What can be said about slush, about the corners cut when cleaningthe fridge. What can be said about what is consideredto be ordinary. Crucially, love is a desireto be a witness and be witnessed, how you might skatepast the provisional. If the house were burning downI would rescue all the photographs
Given the existence of plagues of eels and bloodsuckers in Lake Léman,cursed by the Bishop of Lausanne and the learned doctors of Heidelberg,the homicidal bees condemned at the Council of Worms, the petitionof the inhabitants of Beaune for a decree of excommunication against certainnoxious insects called hurebers, a kind of locust or harvest fly —given, further, the trial of the weevils of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne lastingover eight months, with due attention to the protocol of cases broughtagainst caterpillars, to the custom of writing letters of advice to rats, the writs of ejectment served on them, and the rhyming rats of Ireland;and, further, Egbert, Archbishop of Trier, having previously 
anathematizedthe swallows which disturbed the devotions of the faithful and sacrilegiouslydefiled his head and vestments with their droppings, and exultedin scandalous unchastity during his sermons; in spite of the 
vermifugal efficacyof St. Magnus’s crosier and accompanying papal execratories, all sorts of animals, a cock burned at the stake for the unnatural crime of layingan egg, an ox decapitated for its demerits, all manner of sweetand stenchy beasts, are observed to persist in their heretical obduracy,irrational and imperfect creatures, though notified, admonished and commandedto depart from the habitations of man, notices to this effect being postedon trees that all guilty parties may read; and whereas it has beenurged that brute beasts that they are, the field mouse, locust, mole,ass, mule, mare, goat, snail, slug, weevil, turtledove, pig, cow and bull,are lacking immortal souls (that they might be damned), they lack notindwelling spirits, otherwise demons and imps of Satan, of whichthey are the visible form, so that it is the demon and not the beastthat suffers in the beaten dog and squeals in the butchered pig;a vile and lowly specimen of which genus art thou, the accused,standing trotters against the dock before me now, that did willfullylast Tuesday fortnight throw the swineherd’s son to the ground,mangling his ears and cheeks, for which crime having first been dressed in a velveteen waistcoat as is our custom and the executioner 
furnishedwith a fresh pair of gloves, you will be conveyed to the town squareand there without benefit of clergy be hanged by the neck until dead and your body thereafter displayed for the improvement of your fellowfilth-dwelling sinners. Do you have anything to say for yourself?
His superpower was that his testicles manufactured spermwith exclusively X chromosomes & that was ironic becausenot only was he a beast to women but his 40 baby girls grewup seeking men like the father they barely saw unless they wentto his studio to be painted which wasn’t OK with their motherswho were not only jealous but guilty of giving birth to girlswho were products of an X-chromosome-making monster& would soon suffer at the hands of other monsters with X-type sperm thereby assuring the continuation of suffering& meanwhile all the girls became writers who slouchedfrom sitting at desks & being daughters & lovers of beasts.
It was a singles cruise but it wasn’t a singles cruise:each participant simulated detachment but nonewas actually single. Some, like the recently widowed,were attached to ghosts. Others were legally attachedto a living person they once but no longer loved.A surprising number loved their partners profoundlywhile fearing said partners inhabited the categoryof those who loved them no longer. These participants,whose fears may or may not have been founded,attempted to self-protect by labeling themselves single.Soon a pattern emerged: those who feared abandonmentdeveloped around them a planetary-like orbitof potential new partners to whom they could not attachbecause they were already attached. Such orbits lasted,sometimes, for years. The orbiters went to self-help groupsand/or analysts and/or wrote letters to advice columnists.Because they could not detach from their objects of unrequitedaffection, they became the predominant clientele for futuresingles cruises, unilaterally sustaining the singles cruise business.
Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikesand kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires,point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their headsat the sky’s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance.Quicken your pace. Ask for Belfont, Bedfound, Bedefunde, Beda’s spring,however the changes ring, where he dispatched his woman each morningfrom their heap of  halfsmart, crosswort, bloodcup, from under their thatch, to fetcheven in such storms, even when she had reached nine months    ...When will it end, this barrenness, these waves of agony, barefootthrough lynchet, dyke, furze, thistle, the gusts and groans, waterbreaking overhead? Beda’s woman lies back in the heather bedof history; you press on. At your feet is a baby, and another,heads like mushrooms, crowning, crying, put out for the Heathto take care of. Their mewings pierce the air. But there is no milk.Do not pick them. Leave them to the Dama dama who gather round.Consider instead the oaks, each ring another year that thesemight have suffered. Pass on through Hag Lane into Bedfont. Springwith a drinking vessel. Old English byden, a tub or container,funta, on loan from Rome (whose roots and tesserae lie scattered beneath your modern tread),  fons or fontus. That distant rumblingis just a farmer bringing home grain. They are far behind you now between dead oaks and dark enclosing deer, exposed, yet silent.Thunder has paused. Head for the church, the fighting cocks (or peacocks) of St. Mary the Virgin, East Bedfont, and hurry on through its topiarynonsense, past the tombs of those who died on February the 31st,or aged three hundred and sixty-one. Enter the pudding stone.At the font like a cowled servant presenting the first and final course, is a Friar, sworn to poverty, chastity, his vessel raised, fending off storms.
A translator who has a phobia of mothsspent three years translating a book with a moth motif.It’s ironic, she has said, that she knew more about the mothsthan the author of the original, who was merely fascinated.The translation contained a greater variety of moths than the original,drawn from suggestions she had made, some of which were in facttoo perfect and changed back before it went to print.Her moths, the ones that were too aptly named,meant too much, her moths that she hated, where are they now?The same place as all the versions of peoplethat have been undressed and slept with, in lieu of the peoplethemselves, by others. That must include a versionof almost everyone, lots of versions of some people,some only a flutter, animated then decided against.
I carry you, a fleck, to Jamaica At the Chinese temple in KingstonI am sick daily Victor leads me upstairs, says this floor was onceNights, I hold the bed’s edges full of beds where men off the boat
For Jack the Ripper walking tours Comeye learned,ye loquacious,ye lost.Walk a pentagramaround ego,erudition,experience.Our shuls,mosques,and homesbe yours.Our murderedlaid bare,our slums still teem,our souls sold.As for us,we marvel asour own effluviaswirlswiddershins.
After James Merrill One evening, tired of games and each other,we spent watching our reflections on a screen— four in a two-seater, angling like sardines.For a dog’s hair I’d milked the wine, utteredwords like, “that’s the cure!” swiveledthe puckering glass like a mock-dandy,blood slushing at my temples, until the spill,a fatal expression on the white and navy,ruined the smoothness past salvation. A coughof salt, the patting of the fabric, perhaps enough.
There are those for whom moving house is all so many pennies in a jar. It’ll all amount to something. I am more the alchemist; slowly, but not surely, making the mundane something precious. Just as it is several floors above the street, my new flat is in nearly every way better than my old ground-floor one, all except for the cheap plastic toilet seat that wasn’t even bolted to the bowl. I took a dislike to it even before I’d started sliding left, right, and front and back every time I eased myself; sat there a-flipping and a-flopping in some kinda kooky Pan’s People routine. No big deal; I now live amidst a jangle of pound shops and determined to purchase and attach a brand new model. I spotted a real bobby dazzler; clear resin filled with silver glitter. I liked it, it had a certain 1974 “gay bloke in a glam rock band” quality but, on reflection, did it give the message that I wanted to send, to ladies especially so? So I got plain wood. No mistaking that. However, this soon broke; too much cheesecake too soon? Of course there’d been second thoughts, and my framed portraits of Ingrid Pitt and the sheer amount of reggae singles would surely choke any doubts about my dance moves raised by this, admittedly, exuberant toilet seat. I returned and purchased the glitter that could, perhaps, handle the weight of my pretensions. The bathroom is the one place where we truly relax, it hangs out, baby. We are confronted with the true selves we love, loathe, or try to avoid. Both seat and lid molded stardust! My life has plopped into the plush. I’ve taken to hot, foamy baths with Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits pumping on the stereo. Lathered with scented foam, I wonder about Bryan Ferry looking through an old picture frame. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Thane of Bathwater. Us skinhead types aren’t known for our decadence, Desmond excluded that is. Even now I’m more coal tar than Imperial Leather. Citrus mouthwash has appeared on my bathroom cabinet. I’ve even started using it twice daily, according to directions. Outside, Ermine Street walks backwards to the gilt and butchery of Londinium, then as now, my manor blinged up vermin. My street is a busy one, a dirty one, a loud one. Police cars freeequently scream past, sirens forcing themselves in. It’s not the noise I object to. It’s the urgency. I’m all for the fight against crime but surely it can be done in a more Sherlock Holmes and gentlemanly languid manner? Iniquity is a mire, into which we are sinking, or a briar catching at us with thorns. I forget which, although I note that these encompass both descent and ascension. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions but the road to Whitechapel, is laid far less savory. The Commercial Tavern, once a trysting place for East End homosexualists, is now frequented by “artists” and the like. I work around the corner and am there for the lock in. For all its bustling traffic, Commercial Street crawls slower than most of London. Painters whine, beer flows, brasses ply their trade; much the same as in the Ripper’s heyday. I am introduced to and shake hands with the new landlord; tall, louche, pastel open-necked yet masculine shirt, sovereigns all heads, blond flipped hair    ...    no less than Bryan Ferry in negative! The police speed past, the prostitutes splash.
In memory of Sara Wilkinson and for Liz Miles Eyelids, fall softly, from their gritted corners  chalk, let it drizzle, let the streams flow thick with a waste glaze, let imagery run off   its surplus of kaolin, choke feed of sediment plumed into the blue, tulipping its stem. Cress bunches thickening in shallows, flukes  stinging flank heifers in their shove and jostle down a bank, drinking, mud caking lips. Eyelids, fall softly, let me linger interrupted  behind the curtains billowing with images, how the unseeable sill even so snags, how the very point lights from behind, thoughts  dispersing into folds slung aloft in sea mist, impermissible point breaks every motive falling back behind the eyelids that then fall.  I breathe, I look, I carry forward, I can sense the last of you, taking walks of air thick with waste breath your form displaces. O curtain!  O rail! I hate the thick floor beneath, breathe over a market quarrel, rise over the bass sawing at its stems to crash down the vault,  let the vault branch recklessly, light-streams maze, air’s stirring carry song back and forth; I hear your recorder pipe, long for its repeats  giving what-for to earth seeming to attenuate, rock is marked with your aeolian flow. Eyelids, fall softly, the cast of their fluttering  fans across the inlet a white shadow, writes over deep-set floor captivated ripples. World, gaze out! Rise from a shrouded point.
Errol drives me to Treasure Beach It’s an old story, the terrible stormswerving the dark country roads the ship going down, half the sailorsI think about what you will be, your mix drowned, half swimming thewhite, black, Chinese, and your father’s slate waves, spat hard onto shoreScottish-Englishness. We cross the Black River Smashed crates, bodieswhere they shipped cane sugar and molasses choking on the black sandupstream past a sign One man stands — What is this place? A womanfor Lover’s Leap. The air stinks of sulphur in the trees, one hand raisedErrol drops me at a blue gate. Be safe This is how the Scotsmen camebehind the house, the thin beach why the black people here have red hairof black sand, the water warm and gray Or the other story, no stormI am deep before I know it, groundless no wrecked ship. Just the milesthe swell stops the sickness of cane fields and mulatto children namedunder a crooked tree, perched on sea rocks McDonald or McArthur fortwo fishermen in torn denims, smoking their fathers, who owned themI dry in the sun. They pass, turn, come close Nothing grows at Lover’s Leapthey have rust afros, gold faces splashed with freckles where two runawaysone ripped with muscle, one with eyes cornered by their master, held handslike razors. What you want here they say and jumped down into the clouds
O mer!O mœurs!O merde contemporaine! What’s left of my battles and my turmoilis in my seaside cabin: this roiling air.And yet it’s what’s outside that makes me shiver.Not the ocean coldness — something heavier.Hot black tea might help — it revives.Two kinds of glass are at hand for my thirst:that windowpane, this tumbler for my tea.If  I stare through the faceted clear sidesof   the second at the first,I’ll see the darkness squinting back at me.I can’t deny that even though my eye — clairvoyant as a crystal ball — clinks like it can seesomething, I don’t know what comes next    ...    (Zek — zek — whetstones on knives    ...    a nickering    ...    Here comes a horse, it whinniesand the rider — Stick him!, thieves shoutas they leap down from a tree and stab,then they lead the horse awaydown the long snowbound shore.)Windswept snow and sand are sorrel: tea leavesscalded by sunset. Sea foam rushes up these shoresto decorate some fir trees but not others.And on the withers of a wave  a gull-equestrian comes riding in —  Haie! Here they both are!Snow explodes like sugarthat someone is stabbing with a spoonin a glass of chai.And the tea-air sweetens, the snow-sand dissolves,the light of  it switched off, spent, an omen:now look — from deep within the firmamentTime has bobbed up like the moon: the clock face of  a slice of   lemon. I clink the teaspoon in the glass — what’s that about?And even though each hourly radiusof   the lemon slice is fixed in the white rind,between these translucencies pressed pulp spills out.Like lime or lemon, the taste of  Time is sour — and yet it has no odor, color, hour.My clinking teaspoon’s yet another ofmy self-delusions, since it’s only the glassthat answers it, and Timesays nothing in reply — like all the other governingsthat invite us to believethey have their power over us.In every object, quick or dead, there’s Time,yet Time itself  is unaware of   Time — the way a gull (such a polyglotof  fish-tongues), soaring in the dark,unknowingly glows at ten to two,her wings the phosphorescent hands of a clock.No people in this region. But — do peopleexist at all? And the so-called base and superstructureget, at best, a grade of  C (in Russian, “three,”troika — a kind of carriage — in which the Uriah Heepsare riding toward our “bright new future”    ...    ).Oh, plenty of   hearty pink-faced people (gray-faced, too)here    ...    but are they that real? There’s only sea and tidesand more of the same. Sea air throws bombastat my cabin and makes it talk.My window’s blinded by a heavy foamy sea-pulp blast.At the bottom of my tea glass — sweetest sweet.But sugar specks are stuck to the sides,scarcely rinsed by waves of tea,whether attacked or not by my spoon.Now come the many stars that the sky is, or was —  like the American flag on the moon —  but under such a sky, who feels he needs Kant’s categorical imperative? So Time is always empty, a negative,and doesn’t bother us the way this landscape does. I could have sparkled like a Cicero!But even out here all words are turned into a gameof  ping-pong, which makes my silenced braincome bubbling out my throat — it’s just one more white foam    ...    And only an insatiable gull’s scream of dissentmarks this deaf   land not as the island of a castaway but as a massive continent. Translated from the Russian
Mr. President! The monsoon season is approaching.This raises the question: What steps are plannedto ensure the timely gathering of the harvestand to prevent farms from being inundatedalong the floodplains of the Amazon river?Mr. President! I just wanted to express how grateful I am.Never have I been so proud of my country.Under your presidency everything’s finally been made right.Allow me just to say a simple, heartfelt thank you.Mr. President! I have received my veteran’s pension.I am returning it to you, and thank you for your concern.Where were you, where was your human feeling,when my fingernails were being torn out?Mr. President! How long will our schools keeptaking bribes for passing gym class?Mr. President! I’ve received a messagethat I must deliver to you. I’ve been ordered to do it.“Government of  Earth! We, the representatives of the Delta Orionstar system, inform you that ifyou do not renounce atomic weaponryand psychic intervention, we will annihilate you.”Mr. President! I wish to express my concern.It seems to me that there isn’t enough freedom of speech in our country.I await your response.Mr. President! We are two belle ragazzeand we want to have your children! And if that isn’t possible,we want our future mento be just like you and no one else! Ciao! xoxoxo.Mr. President! Mikey’s cursing again!Mr. President! How do you patchKDE2 under FreeBSD?Mr. President! Yesterday I had a dream.There was nobody around. The entire planet Earth was empty.Tell me, can that be done? Or where can I goto dream that again and so it would never end? Translated from the Russian
Skywind, skillful disorder, Strong tumult walking over there, Wondrous man, rowdy-sounding, World hero, with neither foot nor wing. Yeast in cloud loaves, you were thrown out Of sky’s pantry, with not one foot, How swiftly you run, and so well This moment above the high hill. Tell me, north wind of the cwm, Your route, reliable hymn. Over the lengths of the world you fly, Tonight, hill weather, please stay high, Ah man, go over Upper Aeron Be lovely and cool, stay in clear tune. Don’t hang about or let that maniac, Litigious Little Bow, hold you back, He’s poisonous. Society And its goods are closed to me. Thief of nests, though you winnow leaves No one accuses you, nor impedes You, no band of men, nor magistrate’s hand, Nor blue blade, nor flood, nor rain. Indeed, no son of man can kill you, Fire won’t burn nor treason harm you. You shall not drown, as you’re aware, You’re never stuck, you’re angle-less air. No need of swift horse to get about, Nor bridge over water, nor any boat. No officer or force will hand you over To court for fingering treetop feathers. Sight cannot see you, wide-open den, But thousands hear you, nest of great rain. You are God’s grace across the world, The roar when breaking tops of oaks are hurled, You hang clouds’ notes in heavens’ score And dance athletically over moors Dry-humored, clever creature, Over clouds’ stepping-stones you travel far, Archer on fields of snow up high, Disperser of rubbish piles in loud cries. Storm that’s stirring up the sea Randy surfer where land meets sea. Bold poet, rhyming snowdrifts you are, Sower, scatterer of leaves you are, Clown of peaks, you get off scot-free, Hurler of mad-masted, foaming sea. I was lost once I felt desire For Morfudd of the golden hair. A girl has caused my disgrace, Run up to her father’s house, Knock on the door, make him open To my messenger before the dawn, Find her if there’s any way, Give song to the voice of my sigh. You come from unsullied stars, Tell my noble, generous her: For as long as I’m alive I will be her loyal slave. My face without her’s a mess If it’s true she’s not been faithless. Go up high, see the one who’s white, Go down below, sky’s favorite. Go to Morfudd Llwyd the fair, Come back safe, wealth of the air.    Translated from the Welsh
The wind’s tongue. The always clear cobalt sky bit at your painting. In a prehistoric poster words doze like pebbles. A gallop of  feathers kidnaps the conversation between coarse ropes and wild beasts. You paint within a blinking birthmark the marriage of  heaven and hell faster than tying a ribbon in a mirror. Children’s playground. From some rolling balls one transparent ball flies off. I call it Miró.    Translated from the Japanese
The Augsburger walks with Dante through the hell of the departed. He addresses the inconsolable and reports to them that on earth some things have changed. When I’d reported to the couple, thusThat up there no one murders now for gainSince no one owns a thing, the faithless spouseWho’d beguiled that woman so improperlyLifted his hand, now tied to hers by chainsAnd looked at her and turned perplexed to meSo no one steals, if  there’s no property?I shook my head. And as their hands just touchedI saw a blush suffuse the woman’s cheeks.He saw it too and cried, She hasn’t onceShown so much since the day she was seduced!And murmuring, Then there’s no abstinence?They moved off swiftly. And the ties that fusedThem tight were of no weight or consequence. Translated from the German
Released silhouettes flow incessantly like water, flow between mountains swiftly like a kaleidoscope. The solitude of  the North Pole bustles with human silhouettes. Endless transmission of  ABC. On the shredded shore a silk hat burns like a mirror trick, like a human echo burns a silk hat endlessly. Then the flames were received like ABC. On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse the silhouettes smiled.    Translated from the Japanese
Is it a weightless pistol — your hand. The tail of smoke like a limitless conversation risks blooming and death. The head of a desert. A blank crawls parallel to lines of combed hair. A barometer pursued its dream without even blinking. A released piglet pricked up its rose petal ears and vanished like a star. Everyone waits for everyone on an unknown but familiar infinite chessboard.    Translated from the Japanese
You have a strange pet —  one eye is a cat’s, the other a sheep’s. Yet, it won’t socialize with felines, will attack any flock. On moonlit nights, it wanders on the roof. When you’re alone it will lie in your lap preoccupied, slowly studying you until — on its face — a challenge.    Translated from the Chinese
Empty empty empty so many empty chairs everywhere. They look charming in van Gogh’s paintings. I quietly sit on them and try to rock but they don’t move — they are frozen by what’s breathing inside them. Van Gogh waves his paintbrush — leave leave leave there’s no funeral tonight. He looks straight through me, and I sit down in the flames of   his sunflower like a piece of clay to be fired.    Translated from the Chinese
In memory of   Janusz Korczak What did the Old Doctor do in a cattle car riding to Treblinka on the 5th of August over a few hours of   blood flow over the dirty river of time I do not know What did Charon the volunteer do ferryman without an oar did he give the children the remains of   his breath and leave for himself just the shiver in the bones I do not know Did he lie to them for instance in small numbing doses picking from their sweaty heads the skittish lice of   fear I do not know but for that but later but there in Treblinka all their terror all the tears were against him oh it was only so many minutes a whole life is that a lot or a little I was not there I don’t know suddenly the Old Doctor saw the children become old like him older and older they had to catch up to the grayness of  ash then when he was hit by an Askar or SS man they saw how the Doctor became a child like them smaller and smaller until he was not born since then together with the Old Doctor there are plenty of  them nowhere I know    Translated from the Polish
After I.F. Annensky First the sky was yellowthen white snow followed.On a handwas an amethyst: a cube of  lilac in hospital light. • Whose fault is it when no one visits?• Last night I dreamedI was in a peaceful placebut woke upfreezing and ashamed.On a side street (on my sheets)one I loved passedas a shadow.Maddish, reddish, his fistclenched for a fight.• I recalledhis body colorbeing soft like a child.The drunken nipples.• Honey I called.We were too late.God and the gods have movedoutside the jeweled airand sun motes   ...    to where a star is:an amethyst minus a poet.
1 the weeds thick between sugar mill drumswithout batting an eyethe moon strungthrough the smokestack’s pupilthe connecting rod and pistonshameless before the cane gone to seedrust scuffles with greasethe toadstool atop the heap of  filingsin the smoke box to be shieldedfrom the abysmal ribbinginfinite nuts to throwat the rustproof   head of the enemyAgabama spoon lunchlessoxidation’s honor2 you know by nameevery tool in the museumof wood within reach of the wavesclamp brace brush set squareboathouse in Coconut Grovewithstood fourteen hurricaneslike the soul transpireslike the body transcendseven the seagull recognizes youwhen you piss the sea three sheets to the windrasp box of miter joints socket chiselthe old cushionless rocking chairsrising up in piecesso you can spy on your childhood3 they yell out but you don’t answeryou’re in the yolk of a marabu patchno one looks for you where nothing can gonot even the guinea hens running wildin secret you cleared a pathone evening with your plaid shirtthe only thing to get past the thornsis the voice of your mothermeticulous like a hurricaneyou spread out over the dry corollasbelow a sky stripped of leaves by the cloudslike a string of antsand you undress only for youto await the Indians5 at the crossroads there’s a smell of mothercrystallized sweat shadows in simple syrup an irrefutable knifebetween encrusted cans for coffee and lard there’s a taste of mother at the crossroadsmolasses in its lightrice pudding soul a knife to cut everything but essencePeruvian guavaripened by flies the sharp destiny of a motherthat can be wrapped in banana leaves7 a dog facing a bookcasein the middle of see-through ruinsthe bookcase was the work of asthmathere was a spot for the old oilcanthe bunch of basil the goat tallowstill the house curdled with booksthe dust’s bad temperthe prompt unforeseeable water leakthe dog was the work of no onea good swimmerdid it all ’til its dying breathhis ear bitten in the backwoodsworms ate him alivenow you do whatever you can to stop from howlingTranslated from the Spanish
A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beatingdown, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering.A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What heknows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almostunderstand!I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed withwater reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes.In each painting, I think, it’s as if  God were giving up on finishingthe world. Translated from the French
They said to me no, don’t take any, no, don’t touch, that is burninghot. No, don’t try to touch, to hold, that weighs too much, thathurts.They said to me: Read, write. And I tried, I took up a word, but itstruggled, it clucked like a frightened hen, wounded, in a cage ofblack straw, spotted with old traces of   blood. Translated from the French
Frères humains qui après nous vivez,Soon they’ll have the speed freak twistingOn a scaffold, soon the birdsWill come to peck out his eyes, & whenHe’s too weak & exhausted to turnHis head away, they’ll do it, too,They’ll peck his eyes right out.You’ll want to watch it happen, you’ll wantTo witness it. You’ll want to see PaoloAnd Francesca almost touch beforeThey’re swept away again, him in one lineWaiting for rations, her in another one,Both of  them naked, standing there,Cock & nipples shriveled in the cold.Frères humains qui après nous vivez,N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis.
Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: the emptiness there. Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert at seventy-five, leaving all words behind: the cry of the emptiness there. Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: I can no longer stand the world’s greed or mine. There, in the Taklamakan Desert, the silence of a thousand-year-old skull.    Translated from the Korean
Someone’s coming from the other world. Hiss of night rain. Someone’s going there now. The two are sure to meet.    Translated from the Korean
After Ko Un In the village it’s the season of dried grass,the smell of   burned dirt,gaslight glinting through blackened stubble.I walk home across the rice-fields,brushing insects away from my face,remembering old Namdong who was buried yesterday.What does death ask of us?I must change whatever it was I waswhen the old man was alive.I keep looking at the rice-fields, glinting in the dark.Blasted by mildew, more withered than last year —how much work and love it must have taken.In autumn, no matter how bad the harvest,how big the debts —no thought of   leaving here, no thought of rest.As life goes on, time isn’t the largest thing to think of,it’s the smallest.Growing, goingin drought or monsoon, mold or blight —what is the rice if  not alive? With Sunja Kim Kwock
You fools who ask what god is should ask what life is instead. Find a port where lemon trees bloom. Ask about places to drink in the port. Ask about the drinkers. Ask about the lemon trees. Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask.    Translated from the Korean
In a minuteamong the river reedsI will debut my compositiona urine-stained quiltis the flag ofearly summer rainand when I open my mouthnot even a bird singingcontains all my ideasfor rising and falling all daymy phone vibratesits tiny mouthin the mountain’s shadow
The sound of the water jarempties in the open graveswhere the refugees live.Because it does not touch menear my pillowI can sleep and dream of  the clean linesof  summer. What I thoughtwere faces turn outto be elaborate plates of sweetsnot this human sadness.One or two inches abovemy head until the mosquitosticks his snoutinto my dream.
The whole countryin a courtly danceits tiny mouth openI pour another cup of wineand falling, risingthe children remove their toysaround the small apartmentto their bunk bedsnot quite dark yetearly spring with snowon the windthe woman across the streetbent like a sicklecollecting bottles and cansknocks, goes onI wonder where she livesand the stars shiningon her greasy clothes
How long and thinshe seems todaya field of mustardsmiling up at the sunit draws her eyebrowstogether in a little painI don’t think I eversaw calligraphy of geeselike this overseasoaks and pinespretending to be asleepnot quite dark yetas it is at homepoor people, midnight
A friend e-mailshow much are youenjoying yourself?a dripping faucetloose cat litterno doubt about ita good worldis difficult I sayas if I weretilling a fieldashamed of myselfI apologizeto the sleeping child
The kids fightingover 4 or 5 penniesmy ears ringingbent to the shapeof   the spring moon Iam a crybaby
A photographon the back of a hand mirrorresembles someone you knewwho sang themselves utterly away.It cannot touch youor the sound of the rapids.Leave it, and walk farthercrawling up my legto find me all smilesattached to nothing.You and I can stayin the morning dew.My little telephonein the mulberry fieldsgoing unansweredon that blade of grass.
In my dreamhis voice began to fadeI had to call himthe next dayI feel about averagehe saidI’m going outto buy some juicea huge frogwas in the drivewaya small boat driftingthe river flowed in silence
“Gwawnowwdat,” said Turnbull, “and take a good look  at the pain in a horse’s eyes. If you’d a pair of dragging hooves on you, it’s short work they’d make of the smile on your face.” You could see that he understood, and his fellow-feeling for the pain in the horse’s eyes; and that dwelling on it so long he’d finally stolen into the innermost space of   the horse’s pain that I saw, too, trying to plumb the depths of  pain that it felt; until it was Turnbull’s eyes I saw starting out from that suffering horse’s pelt. I looked at Turnbull and saw set under his brow as I looked him up and down twice the two, too-big eyes that were speechless with sorrow: the horse’s eyes. Translated from the Irish
The night approaches. Dusk drafts on buildingstheir future ruins. Dusk deepens windowsand apertures. It hollows stoneswith shadows like with water. It foretellsthe near death of a hundred clouds to the shining host. A thin layer of dust,the seer leaves his footprints on the roofsas he walks home from the future not his own, swallowing his voice —in its rays, fat blood flows down the golden armor. Wetblue entrails. Large headshave rolled down the shoulders. Speech has grown silent in deep mouths.  .................................................The signs of a life without past will emerge like lies through the lines of an old page,emptiness will turn into loss,foreign sand into Ithaca.Ithaca is the time when there’s nowhere to go. If it’s night, it means the night is the end of the voyage. A sackcloth hiding the shoulders of the stranger is truer thanspeeches about past and futurehe won’t make. Nobodywill. On the streets rain readies hollows for the funeral, already overgrown with grass. In a long puddle he sees:a pauper, a random victim of the skieshangs with his head down. In height, he is a cloud, the sizeof a lost faithin returning home.  .......................So should I, a pauper sitting by a stranger’s door, declare: I’m Odysseus,and I’m back. Should I say: I’m recognized. After the mourning songstears are still rolling down my face. I have beensummoned to clothe the pastin the shining ice.
I am gut sad. I am flirting with the green waves, wandering the sand, feeding reflection into the seaweed foam. That Shaker’s moon is up. Crested by corn-colored stars and traced by those witchy scribblers who read the bone-smoke. No wind at all —  no flutter for foxglove or elm. There is a church door. In the time when the people of  my hut lived, there was eating and thinking dished out to the poor and the soul-sick in this place. I am in my remembering. By the frame of  the door is a crooked black bench. It is oily with history of the rumps of sages, and the foot-sore who lingered in the storm. I am bent with weeping. This blue dream chucks the salt from me. I remember the walls god-bright with the king’s theology, the slow chorus of  the low bell, the full hymn of  the byre and field. Pathetic hut. Rain-cracked and wind-straddled. Your walls bare-nubbed by chill flagons of ocean spit. The saints are scattered. The high gable is an ivy tangle. The stink of fox is the only swinging incense. There is no stew for this arriving prodigal, no candled bed. My kin lie under the ground of this place. My shape is sloughed with grief. No more red tree between my thighs. My eyes are milk. Rage my pony. My face has earnt the grim mask. My heart a husky gore. But my hand. My hand reaches through this sour air and touches the splendid darkness of my deliverer.    Translated from the Irish
Who will stay behind, and what? A wind.Blindness from the blind man disappearing.A token of the sea: a strand of foam.A cloud stuck in a tree.Who will stay behind, and what? A single soundas genesis regrasses its creation.Like the violin rose that honors just itself.Seven grasses of that grass do understand.More than all the stars hence and northward,that star will stay that sinks into a tear.Forever in its jug, a drop of  wine remains.What will be left here? God. Not enough for you? Translated from the Yiddish
What potion should I give the night so she’ll always wonder?Her pounding heart’s a rider galloping from the burning wood.Maybe my pharmacist is awake the next street over?In a crucible of  bone, snake tears mixed with herbs.Should I hurry? Call the doctor? A heart like hers is rare.And to tell the truth, if it shattered, what would I do? Translated from the Yiddish
I kept a letter from my hometown in Lithuania, from onewho still holds a dominion somewhere with her youthful charm.In it she placed her sorrow and her affection:A blade of grass from Ponar.This blade of grass with a flickering puff of dying cloudignited, letter by letter, the faces of the letters.And over letter-faces in murmuring smolder:The blade of grass from Ponar.This blade of grass is now my world, my miniature home,where children play the fiddle in a line on fire.They play the fiddle and legendary is their conductor:The blade of grass from Ponar.I will not separate from my hometown’s blade of grass.My good, longed-for earth will make room for both.And then I will bring a gift to the Lord:The blade of grass from Ponar. Translated from the Yiddish
In Sweden, they whispered all winter,counting the frozen minutes.In France, they branched out. Tips of experience.In England, they dreamed of Ireland.In Ireland they seemed to be lonely. Germany was Belgium then was Spain.Italy was something else again.Portugal, Portugal, Portugal:they said that a lot because they never went back.Later in Hungary, he lay on his backand watched the clouds — so few of thembut each one big and fluffy. In the first dreamthe angel was having a dream; in the next dreamthe angel still clung to his story.
Evening: the nervous suburbs levitate.Height does us no harm, now we are high above the mineral pools,above the flash hotel whose only use is treachery.Someone knocks on a door and you crouch behind the bed.Down in the bar, the small girls toast their parents,the brother breaks a large bone for its marrow.I’m thinking of a challenge for us all. The star in the skyhas traveled all the way from home. Now follow that!
Cold cry from the last page of  the dictionary,name with a knife in it, and the knifeitalic against the throattill you fall into so heavy a sleep — sleep made of asterisks and cattle,the herd just a black scarfagainst snow — you can’t begin to guesswhere the old world went. Now there are only two choices, says the tale, and neither is good.Hence an axe above each separate entranceas the hero becomes hardly a voiceand the sad dogs appear on the screen.Then there is a thin, high scraping.Then no noise of any sort at all.
When my grandmother diedI thought, “She can’t die again.”Everything in her life happened once and forever:her bed on our roof,the battle of good and evil in her tales, her black clothes,her mourning for her daughter who“was killed by headaches,”the rosary beads and her murmur, “Forgive us our sins,”her empty vase from the Ottoman time,her braid, each hair a history —First were the Sumerians,their dreams inscribed in clay tablets.They drew palms, so dates ripen before their sorrows.They drew an eye to chase evil away from their city.They drew circles and prayed for them:a drop of watera suna moona wheel spinning faster than Earth.They begged: “Oh gods, don’t die and leave us alone.”Over the Tower of Babel, light is exile,blurred,its codes crumbs of songs leftover for the birds.More naked emperorspassed by the Tigrisand more ships . . . The river fullof crownshelmetsbooksdead fish,and on the Euphrates, corpse-lilies floating.Every minute a new hole in the body of the ship.The clouds descended on us war by war,picked up our years,our hanging gardens,and flew away like storks.We said there isn’t any worse to come.Then the barbarians cameto the mother of two springs.They broke my grandmother’s grave: my clay tablet.They smashed the winged bulls whose eyeswere sunflowerswidely openwatching the fragments of our first dreamsfor a lifetime.My hand on the mapas if on an old scar.
For Marshall “Major” Taylor A hoot is a hilarious person. Perhaps trainscream or owl, jeer. Often done by mouth.A man may widen owl wide and give one away.Hoots may result in bans, as in, “the crowd ‘hooted’the track star clean out of the sport.”Sometimes a hoot may be kept and savedfor later. For instance, “They didn’t give a hoot.”A woman may sharpen a hootin the toolshed with the bread knives. So theremay be a toolshed, and this may be where the knives are keptand the hoots. They come from chambers — come at you with those wings. So when waiting in the tool-shed hoot runs its owl talon over the knives. Elseit comes at you, other it stares. • In 1890, George “Little Chocolate” Dixon put hisfoot on the world and held it there, waiting for the Majorto come. These were the days when extra layersof name were glazed on — a way of saying both moreand less and not at all. In the case of the two-term moniker,permit either/or — you may grab from the bag “Little.” In France,Marshall “Major” Taylor was le Nègre Volant — you may grab from the bag “Flying.”• Sometimes it’s a bad investment to self-publishautobiography — what a hoot. As in, pauperismmay wait for you with its long needlesreadying to blow you out. Under the pauper’s empty tona man gets baby-bird gaping with hunger. The Majorputs his wings inside and dies in Cook County Hospitalwhere it’s too late. Hoot given, hoot held back. Ice-white nursescome warm in their linens to fold back the wings besidethemselves, like any good cook come to shut a mouth.This case of hoot has called for leg and wing and swoop.Rise up, Major. Ghost-man old Birdie Munger’s bike — take back the front, it’s time to owl.
The news, descriptive. Rhetoric, void. It’s finally here: inarticulate brachiopods have no matching teeth and socketsand their valves are held together only by muscles —
He was trying to teach me to economize with my language. Strindberg grayhe said, instead of and I thought, sad stuff; plays. Okay: born, rented room, to Dad & Mom business & bar, how could you not? Or thought,I cannot be your Lithuania nor her other Armenia,emptied into river if not skein-tangled senseless. He won’t say her nameand not a word of the thitherings. Only that she was lost. Don’t speakthe heavy hinges, the crushed-bud breaking of tastefrom language. That sort of excess has no place in the new economy. Strindberg gray, say, when one thinks only January, January, January.Of the Occurrence as recurrent. A single gunshotin Dempster’s cistern, the echo chambers of sleep. The gray lotof days in low-light hospitals, Strindberg.I’ll call him gray, his sitting heavy. And her so Strindberg with veil and rose,her poised in shadow at the door. Funereal nails sunkinto knees would be dripping were they not so goddamn gray.Excess was for days when my mother sat turning grape leaveswith three sets of pockets: Turkish, English, & Armenian, plus lemon to dry it all out.By ten, they’d sewn up two; said one is more than enough.“English, only, Sanossian.You will speak what we speak.”I don’t know what it’s like to losea language. Instead,Strindberg gray, I say, when I want to bring his lost girl back. Strindberg gray,though I cannot take from him January, July, or the months of coping between.When my mother leafs through me in her memory banks, bits of face are missing;sometimes I’m limbless or smear. Gray even scentless, and still all Strindberg.I tell him, I raise her: be darlings and come scream with mefrom all the pockets sewn over. Maybe by late summer we’ll be humming:Tennessee yellow; Tennessee, Tennessee.
ephemeral as tinkerbellunmoored yet not unmovedtossed cloudward, flipped sans volition into the flowgoing but not wanting to gowithout the other flotsam
Then it was alwaysfor now, laterfor later.And then years of nowpassed, and it grew laterand later. Trappedin the shrinkingchocolate boxthe confused sardinewas unhappy. Itleapt, and banged its headagain. And afterwardthey said shall werepeat the experiment.And it saidlater for that.
I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head,Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbowBut nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiralFrom her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrilsAnd any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circleIs a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circlesRests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subjectWithout observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connectedBy a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snakeSwallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away.I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curvesAs there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teethIn the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding,The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the faceAnd the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one travelingTo the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness.The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carriedOn the news into the future where it will distract the eyes workingLines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shapedLike a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel,A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a fieldThe lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the bodyLowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers,The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in yearsDo a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy.I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plateUpon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.An assailant is a man with history. His mother strugglesTo cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stingsThe slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they seeWhat someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness,All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open,They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victimAnd his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeralAppeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gunIn the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriverBeneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed.I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the OdysseyPink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after OdysseusDrives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone couldBegin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased,Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazyI am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shoutEvery fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murderOr make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holesIn the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runsWith no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loopsShaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitasMeaning unboundedness. The way you get to anythingIs context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subjectA disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eyeBegins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onionCould fit into it. Separated from the body the eye beginsIts own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposedIt becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the modelPull a button loose on her jeans and step out of themAs one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myselfIn the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shellOr soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquidUntil the drawing is complete.
I remember a performanceof Antigone in which shethrew herself on the floor ofthe universe and picked upa piece of dust. Is thatthe particle? It startled me.Was it Scripted? Directed?Driven? I am a girl, Antigone.I have a sister. We loveeach other terribly. I am a womanof property. The milk of the footlights.The folds of the curtain. I remembera performance of Antigone. She stooped.There was a wild particle.It was glorified by my distance.I heard the hooves of the dust.The ticking of the scriptcalibrating oblivion. I sawthe particle hangingand Antigone needed somethingto do with her handsand she did it.
There’s blue, and then there’s blue.A number, not a hue, this blueis not the undertone of any onebut there it is, primary.I held the bouquetin shock and cut the stems at a deadly angle.I opened the toxic sachet of flower foodwith my canine and rinsed my mouth.I used to wash my hands and daydream.I dreamed of myself and washedmy hands of everything. Easy math.Now I can’t get their procedureat the florist off my mind.The white flowers arrived! They overnightedin a chemical bathand now they have a fake laughthat catches like a matchthat starts the kind of kitchen firethat is fanned by water.They won’t even look at me.Happy Anniversary.
I’m counting cash in the backseatOf the Taurus. To Pop’sRepeated question, “Am I evenNeeded?” Mabel says, “I know the sceneI want! Older cats are cool, Pop,I love you on those terms!”Toby thinks he ownsThe squeegee because his nameIs on it, but he can’tEven hold a melody. Toby greenStupid shirt (and his embroideryIs shit). He strokes Mabel’sNeck, but she don’t wantHis Latin! Over plates of freezer-Burned cactus, Pop says, “TomorrowI ink embarrassed koi, or at leastThe tiny stags!” “What is it,”Mother asks, “that will finallyRelieve you of  this obsession?”After dinner I’m smashingGlass bottles, my hands vibrating — Exquisitely-timed palsy — Over beads that drop like hailInto the furnace where I round themFor mother to arrangeInto waterfall scenes on fabric.But she’s still in the H&MFilling her bags with beads soVenetian they cannot meet the eye.Meanwhile some teensWant to buy a glitter T with VISA.“Shit no plastic here!” I say.“How can I convince these kidsTo pay with cash?” “Not my problem,Bud!” Pop says from his deskWhere he’s busy sketchingTeams nutting in the orchard.Toby puts his beanie on,But it’s only August 3rd! Mabel’s tossingGourds in fields destroyedBy another mall, one bigMeditation, soft, and already made.
I want the hole in my ear to be quietAnd inside the hole in my ear to be quietAnd I want it to tell me what to doOr I will go to my lover’s mouthAnd say oh my quietI am comingAnd tell the quiet how its kingdom should be madeThough the quiet has already eaten meBecause the quiet loves meBut does the lover love meAnd why must the quiet be so quietAnd why can’t the quiet have a cockAnd where is its violet mouthIts ten fingers with which to fix meAnd where is its belly breathingAnd O I want to be fixedBut I am already fixedWhy don’t I feel it
How can you go swimming in another human being?I am swimming and asking for light.Once I paddled into dust and fuckingand the horsemen and ruinand the poisonous hollows of a projected blue eyeand cracked my skull on all and caught more diseasein my already dread mind and entered the medicinesof no human power, the forests of disappearing moans,which were rich in sap but lacked dissolvefertilized against my own swimming nature, AlephI am swimming for you now and I don’t care.When you leave the forest you do not become the oceanand I have become the desert trying to swim in the oceanand knowing this, carrying the forest floor in a sweet wood coffinand the blackbrush and rocks, the yucca and cacti of receded oceans,which were never oceans at all or there would have been shells on the sand,they only looked like oceans in my thirst, I cut the old horizonwith a sword you have given and I gut the heavensand bleed their light and swim in that.
I came into the world a young man Then I broke me off Still the sea and clouds are Pegasus colors My heart is Pegasus colors but to get there I must go back Back to the time before I was a woman Before I broke me off to make a flattened lap And placed thereon a young man Where I myself could have dangled And how I begged him enter there My broken young man parts And how I let the mystery collapse With rugged young man puncture And how I begged him turn me Pegasus colors And please to put a sunset there And gone forever was my feeling snake And in its place dark letters And me the softest of all And me so skinless I could no longer be naked And me I had to de-banshee And me I dressed myself I made a poison suit I darned it out of myths Some of the myths were beautiful Some turned ugly in the making The myth of the slender girl The myth of the fat one The myth of rescue The myth of young men The myth of the hair in their eyes The myth of how beauty would save them The myth of me and who I must become The myth of what I am not And the horses who are no myth How they do not need to turn Pegasus They are winged in their un-myth They holy up the ground I must holy up the ground I sanctify the ground and say fuck it I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death I say fuck it and fall down no new holes And I ride an unwinged horse And I unbecome myself And I strip my poison suit And wear my crown of fuck its
yours is not the majestic Gypsythe Codling Luna Wax or granderAtlas with the appetiteof a plague entire fieldssuccumbing to them wholegenerations of bees this isthe unseen closeted unassuminggray that seeks out last winter’scloth another season drawnto the body’s scent what was its heat to consume early that scantmuch of you fragile lace-likethe constellate erasures of the coatit makes for you to wear
Everything that was young went quickly,the way his eyes met mine as soon as wewoke together in a room outside Nanjing,feeling as if all the things that were fallingwould fall and make their thunder, leaveus with the challenge of being happy,all the things that felt given when giftswere not just surprises, but what weknew, what we hoped to take with usto heaven, unbound by faults and sins,not deceived the way we were whenthe end came to what we knew of China,landing me here. I am a wish in the skiesspun out from celestial space to be poor,to be covered with black skin, a feltquilt of a map with only one way to China — through pain as big as hogs squealingat killing time on black farms in Alabama — the noise of death, the shrill needlethat turns clouds over to rip the airabove the cities where people are youngand all that is given is never taken away.
As P strolled the path around the pond, he sniffed the humid air. His kimono brushed the parched ground. The metals of the earth rose up in traces of dust and hints of lightning: a waft of petrichor, the smell before the rain. Beyond the pale hills of his peaceful land, scores of horse soldiers prepared their armor. Soon the soldiers would sweep across the plains, and the dry politics of princely maneuverings would be as rice paper soaked with blood. Instead of petty policies — immensity. Peaceful farmers would be impaled, paltry officials imprisoned — twisted, screaming, then praying. There on the dusty path the young poet P was just perceiving the beforeness of it all, the pre-. From his masters he had learned that immensity makes the small crucial. A little poem before a big war becomes a necessity. And like a small poem on a long scroll, a lily pad appeared on the pond. P stopped to peer. He puzzled through its pattern of green inside green on water. A poem began to perfuse. It was inside P, but it was also on the lily pad. At    ...    On    ...    At first only prepositions came to him. He stared into the water, seeing the silvery clouds reflected. Then he leaned at an extreme angle and noticed the pattern of his gown wavering in the reeds. A pinpoint of a poem stabbed him, like the sharp scent of earth before the rain. Petrichor: before, before. • Then drops pelted the pond, pipped at the pond, plunged toward it, plummeted into it, driving P to take refuge beneath the deep tiled eaves of his house. Inside the sliding paper doors were a desk and a futon. On the desk lay a brush. On the futon lay a lover in uneasy sleep on petal-printed silk. He chose the desk. He lifted the brush while looking down at the restive slumberer. In a mere matter of stopped time he had his poem, written from the very tissues of an arm and hand that could plunge a sword. Silver soldiers masson far horizons, but here,silk pools on the bed. The rain rained; moisture curled the edges of the paper. Seventeen syllables, an epic of energy, made him drowsy and hungry. His lover still asleep, he rose, ate leftover peaches poached in soy sauce and ginger, and, with the rain a drizzle, thought again of his poem. How could he have loved it in the instant after he wrote it, but now be so unsure? He sat at his desk again. Another one? This time he drafted: Poppy? Penis up.Prow into periwinkle.Peony behind. After he calligraphed the puzzle of passion across the page, he woke the one in the pond of pink silk, and they proved it on the futon. He heard the pluvial patter on the eaves, while they angled and slipped, perspiring on silk. The stamping and snorting of the horses sweating in their armor was far too far away to be sensed by P, but he heard. He felt the pond muddied and the roof cracked and the poems scattered. How far was he now from this picture in his mind? He worked to make his pleasure stay, pitiable and small against the portents rising, for P was afraid this afternoon would never be remembered after the bloody conquering. But later the barbarians would bivouac in this house, the pond saved for drinking water, the path roughened by horses, and the 
reverse of P’s scroll used for another man’s military diary, his afternoon’s foreboding and pleasure a preparation for the future, and in the future, a stay against another’s view of the past. “P from Alphabetique,” 2013 by Kara Kosaka
Some quests begin before a person ever learns to walk. Q’s began at the foundling home, when he was still in diapers. They’d kept anything pointed from the Quonset hut where they housed the orphaned newbies, and later the house mothers forbade the children all but scissors with round edges, even table knives. “Mind, now stay in the queue,” they said, when his fingers reached for a safety pin or a paring knife or, once, one of the razors they kept (usually under lock and key) for the older boys. Q slipped back in line. Only the blunt was available to him, nothing to question, naught with an edge. Best pretend to be dull (though that was hard with a high IQ) and never query: Why hide the scissors? Why hide the razor? Why speak so sharply? Why no mums? No dads? At night in his bed, listening to the breathing of all the other boys in the long room, he also asked himself, Why me? When the house mothers changed shifts, there were always some unsupervised minutes, and that’s when the boys sprang into swashbuckling. Q loved leaping from bed to bed with an imaginary sword in hand. En garde! • At sixteen, with a razor cut on his chin from the new trial of shaving himself, Q stood at the doors of the Royal Flower Hall. He was quaking. This was the very first day of work in his life. He’d been supposed to be a shop assistant, a quotidian job like those of the other orphans who were all sent out to live as apprentices — to return only if found unsuitable. However, the Royal Flower Keeper had stepped in and demanded to know the name of the boy meant to be sent to the local florist, and now young Q was called to prep flowers for the Queen. “Can’t someone else do it?” he quailed as the Flower Keeper 
handed him a quilloned silver thorn knife. Q didn’t want to be found unsuitable. He quivered as thousands of roses arrived — he was supposed to separate their long, tangled stems, cut off the thorns, and queue them up straight on the tables for the arrangers. “But I’m new!” Q cried. He couldn’t quell his horror at the prospect of lifting a real blade to cut the thorns. “Look, dear, no quibbling. If you work here, you’re qualified,” the Flower Keeper said. Her knuckles bloomed out of the crooked stems of her hands. “Hold the knife with two fingers behind this little crossbar, that’s the quillon, and snip under the thorn.” She did it with elegant speed. One thorn gone. “It’s like swordsmanship,” the Flower Keeper joked, wielding her knife, fencing in miniature mime. In Q’s head rang the orders of the house mothers, “don’t touch!” But in his fingers lay his imaginary weapon come alive. “No time to be quiescent,” she said. “Equipoise is all.” Don’t quit now, Q said to himself. If he quit, he’d have to slink back to the orphanage, a failed apprentice, instead of going home to his newly found haven, a cold-water flat with a coin-operated heater, all his own. There he’d store the new paring knife his paycheck would buy, the pointed scissors    ...    So Q quashed his fear and set to work. • He began to duel through the roses. “En garde!” he whispered, lunging toward his petaled quarry. Soon there were thorns everywhere (some a bit bloody), but he did not make any big mistakes. He wasn’t perfect, like the Flower Keeper, but he was catching on. Like quicksilver she flashed her knife, each stem quickening with the sharpest cut. Instinctively Q used the quartata maneuver, a quarter turn to the inside, protecting himself as he flicked each thorn into the quagmire of floral detritus on the floor. With each toss of the thorn he added to what appeared to the Flower Keeper to be his nascent gift. As the lorries loaded with rose baskets and vases and bowls roared off to the palace, he quietly pocketed a thorn. Then the first question he’d ever spoken aloud curlicued to his lips. And because he’d had to save up this query for sixteen years, he posed the essential one, previously mouthed only to himself at night in bed: Pourquoi? “Why,” said the Flower Keeper, “for the Equerry, of course. And he for the Queen. You know who she is.” “Just a flower of a figurehead,” Q quipped. The boy’s quick-witted, the Flower Keeper thought, and said, “We’ll require you tomorrow.” And for quadruple tomorrows after that and after that, until Q began to accumulate expertise. Know-how defines a person, especially someone who’s grown up watching his Ps and Qs. He no longer 
quavered, quadrillions of roses now quasi-ordinary, royal waste a quiddity.  I’m not a quitter, he’d said to himself, and each night went back to his cold-water flat where he had enshrined that little thorn in a matchbox. • Well, he didn’t live in a cold-water flat now. Now he lived in a sunlit house with a stash of razors in the marble bathroom and, in the drawers of his magnificent kitchen, a motherlode of paring knives, bread knives, steak knives, bird’s beak parers, boning knives, cheese knives, chef’s, clam, and carving knives, filleters, and mincers. Now Q was Senior Keeper of the Royal Flower Hall, walking across a stage toward the Queen herself. He had kept the talisman thorn from his very first day with the roses. Just that afternoon he had taken it out and dropped it in the pocket of his tuxedo, anticipating touching it for luck before he received his award from Her Majesty. But when the Queen posed her standard question, “Have you come a long way?” Q was quite bewildered as to how to answer. Sometimes a simple question cuts into an aromatic world of mysteries. But we must learn to answer, to cut. Q, his distinguished silver hair perfectly trimmed, his neck properly shaved, looked down at the curls on the Queen’s forehead and remembered his first unspoken word, Why. A quixotic word, an essential thorn. It had pricked him awake, into manhood. Arrangements of roses passed through his mind — how those magnificats of magentas quenched his imagination. How the choral crooning of pale pinks calmed his qualms. Among roses he had reached his quintessence. Yet, is it a large enough life, to arrange roses for a Queen? When the whole world out there hurtled toward famine and war? He hadn’t intended to stay, to make a future in flowers, taking people’s breath away with something so spectacularly unnecessary as his rose floats. He had been a thorn in someone’s side, spectacularly unnecessary himself. He’d been sent out into the world alone, blunted by the unknown facts of his identity — his search for his parents rewarded only by locked doors, locked cabinets, and, later, graveyards. Patiently Her Majesty waited for his answer. In physical distance he had come a short way, but he’d swashbuckled miles to reach the end of his quest. “Only from Kew Gardens, Your Highness,” Q answered simply at last. Then she put into his palm the royal thank-you, in a quilted sleeve: a silver rose wreath made from an ancient mold that gave it stylized petals, prickly leaves, and, cut in at the bottom of the circle, a thorn. “Q from Alphabetique,” 2013 by Kara Kosaka
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Much better than a goat it was to dropan anarchist from a Park Row windowbecause he wouldn’t confess to federal agents.He fell to his death while sitting on the windowsillholding a pamphlet close to his eyes and maybewaving his arm in appreciation, and no oneheard him screaming — they were wearing earmuffsor just they forgot to bring their earpiecesbut it was nothing, he was a fiend and a cutthroatand he would have murdered Rockefeller if he had the chance,for which reason I have locked my front doorfor I can’t find a rat trap big enough.
Speaking of blindness, the man told his one-eyed fiancée,have you heard about the ortolans? Fig-peckers of yellowhammerdescent. Thumb-sized or tongue-sized. Kings used to catch themat summer’s end, knife-blind them so that in their darknessthey’d feast on millet all day, all night, a break from beetles and seeds,until they grew from one ounce to four. Drownedin Armagnac, plucked, placed in a saucepan, roasted,you eat them whole, so the head dangles between your lips,crunch bones like hazelnuts, underneath the linen napkinyou must place over your head to create a scent tentor, so God won’t see your shame. (Proust pairedthem with sips of Yquem, a sauterne born of noblerot — grapes like ashes, their wet driedin the nick of time, so honeysuckle turns to bitterfinish.) Mediterranean salt emerges as flight burstsin your mouth. Imagine yourself a memory, a body fullof meal, as Mitterrand must have, eating ortolanseight days before dying, his last illegal act. Fifteen minutesof savoring a supple, burning ball of fat until you exhaustits roast juices. When you finally swallow, you will regretthe end of a sensual experience. At least once in your life,you must pay the price for this princely folly.
Dear Aleph,Like Ovid: I’ll have no last words.This is what it means to die among barbarians. Bar bar barwas how the Greeks heard our speech —sheep, beasts — and so we becamebarbarians. We make them revealthe brutes they are, Aleph, by the thingswe make them name. David,they tell me, is the oneone should aspire to, but ever sinceI first heard them say PhilistineI’ve known I am Goliathif I am anything.
this mangy plot whereby nowonly mothers still come,only mothers guard the nameless plots • and then sparingly• Peepholes burnt through the metal doorsof their solitary cells,• just large enoughfor three fingers to curl outfor a lemon to pass throughfor an ear to be held againstfor one eye then the otherto regard the hallwayto regard the cell and inmate• peepholes without a lensso when the guard comes to inspect me,I inspect him.Touch me, he said.• And through that openingI did.
Distrust this season breedsin me wholeblue worlds, am secondto leafy nouns,pinned back darkening lipof the night,untrustworthy sidewalk glazedand sleeping there,peachy trees, a line drawn from onebrow of a star downand planted, each pillowlittle shimmer, little wilt startledfrom out the arranging fieldmoonlit pale behindno foxes, in me finding the fragrantnew crisis, not dead stillwhere I love you in feastand pledge, worlds rolling firston crookedlyand on.
Stilled as in image, at dawn sliding into blue harbor, boats clang, where does hethe man I imagine gripping several ropesreturn from. Is he conflicted, does heperceive the sky oscillating like a dimmer machine, a mouth, a war, languagenot declaring its mosteffective self, bellum grazing evernearer to beauty, a possible apotheosis how what is left of senseis comfort. Not inebriated much anymore,I rented a lawn to stand in with you, crueler was always singing to our mutual forks,knives. Our translation of a subject droneson unblinking, something black for himreturning, his forearms there laidthemselves down, ships gone out another pale-plated night.
I wanted to make myself like the ravineso that all good thingswould flow into me.Because the ravine is lowly,it receives an abundance.This sounds wonderfulto everyonewho suffers from lacking,but consider, too, that a ravinekeeps nothing out:in flows a peachwith only one bite taken out of it,but in flows, too,the body of a stiff mousehalf cooked by the heat of the stoveit was toughening under.I have an easygoing way about me.I’ve been an inviting host —meaning to, not meaning to.Oops — he’s approaching with his tonguealready out and moving.Analyze the risksof becoming a ravine.Compare those with the risksof becoming a wellwith a well-bolted lid.Which I’d preferdepends largely on which kindsof animals were inside mewhen the lid went onand how likely they’d beto enjoy the water,vs. drown, freeze, or starve.The lesson: close yourself offat exactly the right time.On the day that you wake upunder some yellow curtainswith a smile on your face,lock the door. Live out your daysuntroubled like that.
Let’s make a movie called Dinosaurs in the Hood.Jurassic Park meets Friday meets The Pursuit of Happyness. There should be a scene where a little black boy is playing with a toy dinosaur on the bus, then looks out the window & sees the T. Rex, because there has to be a T. Rex. Don’t let Tarantino direct this. In his version, the boy plays with a gun, the metaphor: black boys toy with their own lives, the foreshadow to his end, the spitting image of his father. Fuck that, the kid has a plastic Brontosaurus or Triceratops & this is his proof of magic or God or Santa. I want a scene where a cop car gets pooped on by a pterodactyl, a scene where the corner store turns into a battle ground. Don’t let the Wayans brothers in this movie. I don’t want any racist shit about Asian people or overused Latino stereotypes. This movie is about a neighborhood of royal folks — children of slaves & immigrants & addicts & exiles — saving their town from real-ass dinosaurs. I don’t want some cheesy yet progressive Hmong sexy hot dude hero with a funny yet strong commanding black girl buddy-cop film. This is not a vehicle for Will Smith & Sofia Vergara. I want grandmas on the front porch taking out raptors with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses. I want those little spitty, screamy dinosaurs. I want Cicely Tyson to make a speech, maybe two. I want Viola Davis to save the city in the last scene with a black fist afro pick through the last dinosaur’s long, cold-blood neck. But this can’t be a black movie. This can’t be a black movie. This movie can’t be dismissed because of its cast or its audience. This movie can’t be a metaphor for black people & extinction. This movie can’t be about race. This movie can’t be about black pain or cause black people pain. This movie can’t be about a long history of having a long history with hurt. This movie can’t be about race. Nobody can say nigga in this movie who can’t say it to my face in public. No chicken jokes in this movie. No bullets in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. Besides, the only reason I want to make this is for that first scene anyway: the little black boy on the bus with a toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless    his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.
i Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. i You, drowningbetween my arms — stay. You, pushing your body into the river only to be left with yourself — stay. i I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender. i Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with falling.i Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining. i I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once. i Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway. i In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed. i In the life before this one, you could tell two people were in love because when they drove the pickup over the bridge, their wings would grow back just in time. Some days I am still inside the pickup. Some days I keep waiting. i It’s not too late. Our heads haloed with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks. Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio. Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver to the sky. Stars falling one by one in the cross hairs. This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already here. Already more than skin can hold. That a body beside a body must make a field full of ticking. That your name is only the sound of clocks being set back another hour & morning finds our clothes on your mother’s front porch, shed like week-old lilies.
Where ever something breathesHeart beating the rise and fallOf mountains, the waves upon the skyOf seas, the terror is our ignorance, that’sWhy it is named after our home, earthWhere art is locked betweenGone and DestinationThe destiny of some other where and feelingThe ape knew this, when his old lady pulled him upOff the ground. Was he grateful, ask him he’s still sitting up thereWatching the sky’s adventures, leaving two holes for his own. Oh singGigantic burp past the insects, swifter than the ugly Stanleys on the groundCatching monkey meat for Hyenagators, absolute boss of what does notArrive in time to say anything. We hear that eating, that doo dooing, thatBurping, we had a nigro mayor used to burp like poison zapaloteWaddled into the cave of his lust. We got a Spring Jasper now, ifyou don’t like thatwoid, what about courtesan, dreamed out his own replacement sprawledAcross the velvet cash register of belching and farting, his knick names when theylet him be played with. Some call him Puck, was love, we thought, now a rubberFlat blackie banged across the ice, to get past our Goli, the Africannibus of memory.Here. We have so many wedged between death and passivity. Like eyes that collideWith reality and cannot see anything but the inner abstraction of flatus, abiography, a car, a walk to the guillotine, James the First, Giuliani the SecondWhen he tries to go national, senators will stab him, Ides of March or Not. MaybeBoth will die, James 1 and Caesar 2, as they did in the past, where we can read aboutThe justness of their assassinationsAs we swig a little brew and laugh at the perseveranceOf disease at higher and higher levels of its elimination.We could see anything we wanted to. Be anything we knew how to be. Buildanything we needed. Arrive anywhere we should have to go. But time is as stubbornas space, and they compose us with definition, time place and 
condition.The howlees the yowlees the yankees the super left streamlined post racial ideationalchauvinists creeep at the mouth of the venal cava. They are protesting 
fire andLooking askance at the giblets we have learned to eat. “It’s nobody’s heart,” theysay, and we agree. It’s the rest of some thing’s insides. Along with the flowers, thegrass, the tubers, the river, pieces of the sky, earth, our seasoning, bakedthroughout. What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks,Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained language.
The first Technicolor feature in Hollywood, a retelling of  Madame Butterfly,
 starring Anna May Wong green means go, so run — now — green the color of the siren sea, whose favors are a mortgage upon the soul
Perhaps it was just another break-in some years back. Or the charm that suddenly seduces out of nowhere, long rehearsedtill you’ve realized too latethat half your living life went walking straightway out the doorinto the noonday glare of some Sunday godforsaken place­ — somewhere down in central Florida,the so-called Widow State you thought was safe­ — which at the time still remained obscure,so obscure, in fact,it was almost dark when you awoke, and so unlike yourselfas in a manic haze rifling through those drawersfor letters, tchotchkes, so much else. So you’d suddenly been had.There are times when the human frailties let down their guard.There is a ring of fire Dante so numbered, namedfor those who prey upon the old.The kids all grown up and living somewhere else,and you’re left alone stumbling down the hall.It could’ve been a friendly callat first. A friendly knock. A slight accent adding to the charm.A friend of a friend of a so-called friend no time to trace.That noonday glare of sunlight as a halo for that added touch.Have you forgotten anything? Anything?
How tired are you? How benevolent the cause for those slim, aching moments of blinding obscurity,and the blinds drawn and the sunlight louvereduntil even the knickknacks cling to their dust as to Timepassing passing, if even that. The yearningto be not bothered, to be passed on the street,the rehab, the food mart, the many shoppe window reflections. So manytimes, the eyes averted in fear,so many times you remain obscure, even to your more obscured self.A silence charting your whereaboutsat the many roundabouts,the Tenderloins forever unnamed.Even the sounds of the half-painted trams remain silentin passing. Their wheels grinding yet silent. The rainsilent. The accusations even more silent,or the “friends” who never talk back, clouded in darkness.The landscapes drifting.The equestrian trots drifting.All the genres mixed up or simply misplaced.The memories gone blank.The mundane measured in hours, minutes, or decades, intervening, descending.




Ida and Isidor Straus sleep side by sideeternally in an Egyptian galleyfronting their Woodlawn mausoleum.Symbolically they lie. Their boat is small;nor was her body recovered from the Titanic.And yet the image of the voyage holds.Why not embark? A river runs behind meon the other side of this dark window.A dream called Night Boatarranged us side by side in a black craft,sailing the river of forgetfulnessuntil the stars went out.It was poetic license. I didn’t dream that boat.The boat was dream, and we were passengersbalanced on the slippery cusp of daylight,unless you had already disembarkedin some shadowy port,leaving me to sail along alone.
You love apples So let’s speak Of applesSay I were to hold you in my hand like an apple round and redAnd kiss you in bites on the table orUnder the tree where you dropped tumpAnd you reached up in cool shadow on the grassAnd bit back crunch: GodI’d laugh knowing dreamsAsk like this swallow by swallow
Stivenson Magloire Amidst the glossy dark green foliageof trees around the hotel pool,I spy a low-hanging golden fruit.So many trees whose names I do not knowand for the first time do not care to learn.The overwhelming now in its countless inflectionscancels vocabulary: eyes lips skininstead of words. Still in the pool,floating on my back as the sun gets low,I look at the mango, if that is what it is(I think it is some wholly other fruit),and suddenly smell garlic sautéed in butter.Chefs in the kitchen under the treesare getting the hors d’oeuvres ready.Yesterday in a dim, airless gallery,following your lead,I hunted down an iconographywritten in a grisly alphabetyet full of life, the haunting gaze direct,transcending death. Death had in winning lost.Art trumped death and life trumped art. Last night(our third together — sleepa whole new texture in a bed with you)I gave you space and found myself at the borderof a far province in the king-sized bed,a dimly lit hinterland where paintings ruled,a region wholly devoted to the workof the same painter, mysteriously killed,stoned to death (“lapidated” was one word),assassinated — why? A mysteryto be solved by iconography?Death had won but also death had lost.Garlic and butter. Glossy dark green leaves.Voices across the pool. A hanging fruit.An azure splash. And as the sun goes down,you sit by the window in our room,drawing pictures of this this this time.What to call it? Colors in your handstrump words. Like the fruit,like the solution to the mystery,something I am at a loss to name.
When the townspeoplegave the teenaged Buddhaa glass of wineso delicious he grewto an unthinkable sizeand froze into a blue statuethat shielded the townfrom a wave that brokeupon his backand would have swept awaythe town if he’d not tastedthe wine and afterward the peoplewere overjoyed and saidthey would do good deedslike carpool their children to schoolmore often and plant lettuceeverywhere while the Buddhamelted into water and recededinto the calm sane sea.
The brook is this mix of roar & hiss as if Godhas managed to scalpel a section of tempest & clothespin it inthe woods Over There Always draped in the treeswhile we eat white summer peaches from celadon bowlswhile the sun bleaches & blue jay squawks score the maple, oakbirch and apple-treed sky with their oblique Scriabin musics.Fifteen years since I have seen a real Fallher deciduous burlesque, her glistering things siftingon the old cider mill. A holy show.I hold a wooden fragrance & a sodden mush of crushedflowing apples in a cache and will never give it up.The cardinal is the best bird because it is a red markon the blank snow amid the charcoal Twombly of maple, oakbirch and apple branches. Pines are green & faraway, don’t figure.My sister in spring is even prettier, her smilethe genuine quality of it undiminished in the many monthssince I have been in Happy Valley. It roars and is constantlyin spate because it has its reasons spring being spring plus my visiting.
We take more than our share,Several dozen from the star-Flecked cove of a red maplePond, fins tapered like steeples,Gill to gill in the bucketAnd bilge, drawn from a thicketOf drowned rootsInto the night’s cool garrotes.Sorrowful brothersChoking on strange ethers,Striving, eager, bentToward the sky by want:It was not to be, this breathing,Though not for nothing.
The mower alonesaw from the medianthe cloud come overthe mountain down to trawlthe valley like a whaleand the swifts like waterpassing through her white baleen.The mower alone patrollingthe haw with the hawkssaw from the medianthe cloud come overthe mountain to swallowwhere the sky had beenand where the town had beenpinned by steeplesand hummed electric hubris.For everyone elseon either side of the narrowthe cloud was only a minuteof a single versebecause the highway treats the bluesas all the same as if Bentoniawere Sunflower Countybut the land between the laneseven while under the bladessees the power in every cloudand hears each song spiral outof an old familiar tune just soto devour our hearts.
Insects are small, they already know how to fly, and — best of all — they power themselves.— Emily Anthes In an air-conditioned trailer, three geeksbarely beyond boyhood fist-bump and high-fiveat a job well done. With the click of a key a dozensoundless screens flutter. Now in the shallowof a cave near the Khyber Pass, a stack of glow sticksactivated in the blast steeps the darkness green:two cans of pineapple; a mangled can of beetsbleeding juice; some boy streaked black, his burnswrapped in torn canvas tent ­flaps. He must hear thecyborg beetle’s brains buzz like a circuit-­bent keyboardabove his Pashto prayers. But we know enough toleave the live feed low, audio is for the analysts.Our weapon : witnessing — : wired that way.Somewhere in Texas or California or KentuckyTaco Bell is on the table where too the kill list restsquietly satisfied, and so its discord folds inwardlike an origami acorn nestled sharply in the heart.
1  finger family father the most used mother obscene i lift her up married sister well fed brother no common stem   2  bunker show shoes touch and stand behind others place hands take them off come right in here is the cure learning how to hide from planes helicopters turning ships falling to the ground   4  drawing from the lamp hangs sister swings frightens mother in the pot dumplings drop blue is kitchen furniture the table we cannot reach even from the chair she leaps from the lamp   5  sunny and fence huge gate mother angry head father over him swollen crows black magpies and 2 humps her face furrowed grind and bars   6  party in a spotted costume dancing to the big butterfly his end part dribbles juice lady cleans up the slippery floor do the twist   35  world’s favorite the african story our group’s as well i will also tell them a story but they will shake their heads and my remained mates leave because i won’t fit neither here nor there i’m like the snails but not sticky and even stringy mostly herma-and-phrodite i did not decide yet hesitating the rainbow comes after the rain so i also come out i’m like the snail spine freely chosen to imprint myself or someone else but i’m also hosting i don’t think i’m stringy and my trace is discrete the rainbow comes after the rain i also come out   43  black marked brush staining kit in sandpit unstriped monkey wet the sand and lie down cut shiny skin   Translated from the Hungarian
Though I can’t recall your last name now, Howie, I’ve been penciling myself in  to your way back then, way back when, in your gangbangland, she was loose and gone, struggling up on a limb to raise herself off from your bed, but lost, fell back, let the all of you in again. Said just trying to get out your room was no use since she’d got her own self in. Curbside-mind, I venture you are still alive. Wondering what she’d  think of that, but, then, I don’t know, can a ghost think when its body’s shot itself in the head? Hell, just thinking about it makes me wish I were dead. Just some girl, you, then you letting your friends shovel their coal-selves up into her, just some person. I knew. Her mother’s now offering a twenty-percent discount for crystal healing therapy on her website. In high school, she was a calm mother, dull job as telephone operator, back in that town her dead daughter and I always swore we would leave, back in that town dead to me, and me, I marry a man who mocks me for crying. We-we-we, he calls out, snickering in the gloom. Yet still I wear the dead girl’s perfume. And I’ve got an accident to report. Because it was all our centers, uninvited, you rucked up inside, then bade your friends park their reeking selves in the garage of her feminine. What did you call it back then? You balding fuck, you’ve forgot. Sloppy seconds. Forgot her slippage, eyes dead drunk spirals, face some fluid spilling down your sheets. I’ve been where she’s been, and I can be where you are now, switch my hips, sashay into your office to see you any day now, wearing her perfume. What pack animal would you choose to be in your next life? Every day, the marsupial clouds grow hungrier for our reunion, the reunion I’ve been packing for all my life. There is a swing set and a girl in a dress who doesn’t know about this next. First, she’s pretty. Finally, she’s done for. So I took some pills to forget I knew you last as friend. Then I learned the ways of your wiles, how you did my girl who’s now dead in.
Such as there was in the littleness of that dawncould not be this. Not, certainly, the hoveof an invasion fleet from Angleterre,flotilla wrought of shipwright, chandler, armoreras if Ice Age breeding stocks were on the move.The Planners had their weather oracles,haruspices their entrails. All divinedthe red planet aligned, full-moonvisibility, high tides to clearthe beachhead obstacles — but iffy weather.
He could not, no, he could not, no, althoughHe wheedled and cajoled, begged and promised,But they would not, no, they would notTake him to see The Curse of Frankenstein.Then his uncle called and offered and they caved.  So next it was the matinee then home And nothing said, until he sat through dinner likeSome little diplomat, and after that excused himselfAnd took his plate and headed up to bed.Still nothing said. No, but midnight he woke up screaming.Morning, his father cleared the plates then turned, “That’s that,” he summarized, “too anatomical.”“What’s anatomical?” the boy asked back. This was summer 1957. Monarchs foraged flowers, working colorsWith their yes-now-no-now light arrhythmias.By afternoon leaves shimmered in the heat,And in the evening intermittent waves Of fireflies telegraphed their kindWhile in the little deeps of darkened housesWindow units swallowed oceans of air,Until the boy, deep in his house, slept hard enoughThat when he woke he couldn’t close his hands.“But what was anatomical?” he asked again. His father climbed a ladder to the attic where He bumped around then climbed back down Carrying an old foxed Gray’s AnatomyPacked full with illustrations, what seeing these The boy felt certain were the pictures of mixed meats. That night the windows purred, and nothing budged, Till breakfast brought another book, this time One on pathology, which meant more pictures plus Diseases, where the worst were bestAnd came from “intimate contact.” “But what was intimate?” he later pestered, Till his father downed his drink and said,“That’s how you made your way into this world.”Mother rose and left the room. The boy sat silent;He sat there calmer than the noggin of a cat,Until he stretched and, yawning, mentioned that He might just go on up and get to bed. But secretly he understood; he knew For good-and-always that in fact His father wasn’t a serious manSo he was on his own and had to make Sense out of things himself, even if Some sense went wrong, like Frankenstein’s,Who wasn’t a serious man either —And that was really that, even if it meant You’d sink one day without so much as SOS. Some nights that summer, sleepless, eyes pinned wide, He’d slip outdoors to watch his parents on the porch,Their cigarettes, their quiet talk, and then,For nothing he could tell, their laughter as His father fixed another round of drinks.And after that more laughter, like cicadas. The boy watched this, as now he sometimes drives The five miles out-of-way to see that house again.And, never-you-mind his knowing better,Sometimes just his doing this sets off Imaginings that he is standing in the kitchenSaying, “Oh my dear animal family,How I loved you. How richly we purred.” And sometimes too it sweeps back over him, His thinking that his father wasn’t a serious man.Those times, slowing the car, he says to himself,“Well then, you are not a serious man either.”
I Should I take this time, while the children are in school,to untrim the tree? Standing in the dish we let go dry,it looks well-preserved, as if Christmas were stillin our future; would it spare their feelings if I dismantlepiece by piece its grandeur, or will I amplifytheir sense of loss, to de-jewel it without ritual?Epiphany, we drove by a painted camel on a church lawn— or what, after hard freeze, is lawn’s avatar.No magus, Jefferson Davis brought camel brawnto Texas to aid in the Civil War. Now they’re goneexcept in these tableaux where Balthazar,with all his diamonds, kneels before the Paragon.We were coming back from a weekend getawaybefore the holiday’s official end. I took the dog,went out on the beach, but the length of South Padrewas swept by a long wind; dunes went astray;thin snakes of sand grains slithered; I couldn’t jog;the Gulf went from glaucous to cauldron gray.As in a Bedouin poem a gown of white sandeternally receded before me; the snakes raced.The profile of the island was changing, anddespite the fury in my heart this tempest fanned,the beloved’s encampment can never be retraced:all texts are unwritten by the same hand.Boxes of baubles for yearly display we haulfaithfully from house to house no nomad, I realize,could conscion. Your hem’s circumference allyou know of enclosure. The open stall.Patterns are starting to emerge to my wondering eyes — on my skin, even. Up close, the epidermalAlhambra of triangles, stars. Back of wrist. Kneecap.Gypsies that named the lines on palms don’t lookat soles, like yours, that close the lovelorn gapbetween the territory and (yes, yes) the map.Our tree is still in its vise. The road we took(don’t turn) is riddled with needles. Dried sap.II The boys are lighting fireworks on the ground.(Recall, this is a country called Illyria;even stars are upside down.)Toby and Andrew name the kinds of deliria:jumping jack, blooming flower, black cat    ...    What rose-green shower — or umbrella — is that?The empty lot Toby and Andrew bring us towhere crab-like diggers squatinertly in the champagne-cold, is impromptubeach, with all the night sky for sea. Juiced-up Roman candles discharge into it. Loosed,frantic, spinners change color like salamanders:spry Viola jumps back, goosed;but Feste jokes about motley, and gandersat the tracers that shroud us in gunsmoke.(Perhaps it’s just another carnival joke — your hand on the small of my back? Like bloomsin the sky?) The New Year spokeby spoke nears, but with a breath of tombsthe moment Feste, feeling insolently gay,heckles a rather elderly personage: “Prayyou go out on your toes — or comatose.”I hear Malvolio sayto Olivia holding her sparkler overly close,“Back off — you’re wearing too much hairspray.”III Speaking of ground flowers:Epiphany. The resorts are deadbut for the foreign powersthat raise pistils in a yellow headcrouching on a Cypriot beach.A rough, hairy pod — surprise!— jumps at my touchand squirts seed at my eyes.Because I hear the wind rushagainst the palm-palmswith which our balcony is flush;sky cloud over with qualms;memories blur. Psyche’s actuariesbeg to take the measureof our folded white Januarieswith sleep’s ruled erasure.IV Do I have to be mailed in bubbles ortoiling over bouillabaisse,frisées, port glaze for Sir Omnivore;protagonist of a page-turner, Hazemére or fille; people-pleaser, cocktease,she-bear, in niqab, in getup, in stays;having taken St. Paul’s advice to seizethe gold ring: Who groks the paradox?Though one would sooner burn than freeze    ...    I’ve taken to the dark stuff since you left:a stovetop espresso maker with the heftof a campfire kettleto express more strongly my mettle.
The spell is a mouth’sperilous-o as they dark circle the boats intheir most resplendent pliable armor.The concept fish aligning with girlor love with deathto bring down men at sea, temptationconfused into offering,the mismatch of like plus unlikereally likes, straight to rock bottom.No equation has ever been this badass.It’s the men who will enter the spellso far into exhaustion as weather, as waves,the tide pulling toward if, letting go thenover the whale road in the company ofthe dolphin, the only other animal, I’m told,who can do it solely for pleasure. It.You know what I mean. The lower halfaglitter, the top half brainy as beautifulis sometimes, murderous lovelies, their plottingand resolve and why notget these guys good, the lechers.To see at all in the whirling, to hearwhat anyone mightin wind roar and faint whistle — don’t worry about girls shrewdas whimsy, legend-toughto the core. Don’t. But it’stheir spell too, isn’t it? Locked there.Aligned with singing, dazzlerazor-blackened green. Not that theymiss what human is like or know any endto waters half born to, from wherethey look up.Men in boats, so sick of the journey.Men gone stupid with blue,with vast, with gazing over and awaythe whole time until same to same-old tonow they’re mean. After that, small.Out there, the expanse. In here,the expanse. The men look down. Achingmisalignment — gorgeouslure that hides its hook steely sweetto o my god, little fool’s breathtriumphant, all the way under and am Inot deserving?
They wore out the ain the letterpress case only aftera few thousand hits under the inked rollers,pulling the crank, turningthe giant wheel.Must have been 1820. Thereabouts.Wanderer, glory-run of letters: thereabouts.Hunger took its due fromthe belly of the a.So? All kept reading itas a — those who could read — and anyway,a bite out of that apple provesour kind mortal. Rare good paperinto page until most everything about the awas shot. Practically prayer, humility,a great foreboding not justbare-bones frugal.Simple aaaa from that a — First letter loved, to hear it ache and filleven at half breath.Look, it’s standard. No one buta divine being or two makes perfect copy.Real case in point: my now and again body sopoorly echoed off my mother, my fatherout of a broken skull simmeringin a bog, BC probably, long before ADpretended anything in order. Earlier, our whole dark hole of a planet copiedunto itself via earthquake, flood, star shard,raging molten ball in the middle, somebig bang’s ideaof a flawed, proper start.For a while there, the tiny awounded. What it does.Doing, to heraldevery human sentence.
It’s mostly someonelong dead who gets curiousall over again, who once tolda book, the bookpicked clean to glowon a website now, an addresswith double slashes in it.Suddenly I loveone detail: the way they harnessedhorses or hammeredcopper, what seed — cardamom, rye — kept its small heart aloftfor a millennium.Voices in thatdark ago when I opento room light, lampor window on book — old friend — or the new computer screen.It’s not technology, either way.It’s somethingin the brain first, an inkling. Not yetyours to know.
Give me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the magic of a talking burning bush. I am the queen of sleight of hand wandering the forest of motives, armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters & an X-Acto knife. My right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton, my left eye is prism of Wild Style, gold grills, lowriders, black dahlias, blunts & back alleys. At twenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell & Here, evil peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself with the memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the strawberry fields I roamed with my mother & aunts in the summer,  & the sightings of UFO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio nightsky. I am a weapon. I believe in hoodoo, voodoo, root workers, Dead Presidents, Black Tail, Black Inches & Banjees. I believe in the ghosts of 60 million or more & black bones disintegrating at the bottom of the Atlantic, below sea level, Not Just Knee Deep. I believe that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a hornet’s nest later. Your choice. Black, still, in the hour of chaos, I believe in Royal Crown, Afro-Sheen,  Vaseline, Jergens & baby powder on breasts, the collective conscious, cellular memory, Public Enemies, outlaws, Outkast, elevations, “Elevators” & Encyclopedia Britannica. Under my knife, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz laughs with Muhammad Ali, a Lady named Day cuddles  with a Boxer named Mister after traumatically stumbling on strange fruit dangling from one of the most beautiful Sycamores evah. Under my knife, Marilyn Monroe enjoys an evening out with Ella Fitzgerald, meanwhile, Life shows me a gigantic photo. I am a weapon. I chart voyages of unlove, high on a man called crazy who turns nigger into prince. I believe in Jong, Clifton, “Dirty Diana” & Dilla, paper, scrilla, green, gumbo, coins, Batty Bois & Video Vixens. I believe that beads at the ends of braids are percussive instruments in double Dutch.  In the reflection of my knife, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington & Thelonious Monk argue in a Basquiat heroin nod. I am a weapon. I believe in goo-gobs of deep brown apple butter, alphabets, Alaga Syrup, Affrilachians, A-salaam Alaikum, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, & African Hebrew Israelites. I believe in Octoroons, Quadroons, Culluds, Cooley High, Commodores, Krumpin, Krunk & Burn,Hollywood, Burn. I am Sethe crawling a field toward freedom with a whitegirl talking about velvet. I believe in tumbleweaves, hot combs & hair lyes, Chaka Khan, Shaka Zulu, Mau Mau, Slum Village & Buhloone Mindstate: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless. Like water.” I believe in water. My body is pulp. I bleed ink. I believe in the Fantastic, Vol. 2, The Low End Theory, Space Is the Place & The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Tucked in the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of Knowledge, lives a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest for the Marvelous. My face is a mask of malehood, malevolence, one big masquerade. Metaphysically niggerish, I am a weapon wandering the forest of motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other, searching for the nearest body of water.
pick the big bitch:the chick who look likeshe chew screwdrivers.hunched at the lunch table copying homework,shredding syllables with a mouthful of metal.shush the rebelin your throat, that ghost of punk funkingdark circles in the pits of your polo.resist the impulse to shittalk your waythrough ranch dressing and lunchroom throng.bumrush: snatchsong from her ears, tangle of headphonewires and tracks of mangled weave.nevermind uglying her facewith nails or an armful of bangles.she already a jigsaw puzzleof scratch and scar, every exposed partcaked in vaseline. every fold of fatfortified with that free-free — french fries,chickenshit shaped like tenders, cheese sticks.she will slip’n slide youif you don’t come correct.pick you up by your bookbagtill you feel fly, camera phone red eyeswinking your punkass almost famous.but that ain’t your fame to claim.pitbull her ankles till she drop,till ketchup and corn splatter,scatter abstract like techniquefrom our 5th period art class.as she knuckles herself upfrom chickenfeed, ain’t no need to run.instead smile for the video,that soul-clap in your chestis your heart.
August is the cruelest month: never enough daylight, too muchheat, no holidays and nothing matters except September’sdawning responsibilities, but the August of 1994 I was HoldenCaulfield, summer camp senior counselor for the junior trailblazers, black and brown children two weeks shy of first, second,and third grade. Nothing is as positive, as motivating a force withinone’s life as a school bus full of kids singing along to the localradio station blazing hip-hop and R&B. (Imagine this cherubicchorus riding upstate to Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper.”[“Muuur-derah!”]) My workday is filled with hazards like chocolatemelted sticky swim trunk pockets, insistent sunburn, and the assortedrah rah of parental unsupervision, but those bus rides back fromupstate water parks and pools were my favorite times working.Have you ever ridden in a cheesebus with ashy children asleepagainst you, staring at sudden trees — more numerous than projectwindows — blurring along the highways like confusion giving wayto doubt, the heady smell of dried chlorine and musty towelslulling you into the soft timbre of a Midwest falsetto? Tell mewhat it is to fall in love with a lightskin girl covering the IsleyBrothers. I was not two weeks into 21 years old. I had yetto wear a box cutter in my fifth pocket, or see a semi-automaticaimed at my center mass, to feel its dumbness against my spine.My life was uncertain, save for its unlikely length under my control,like the pilot who falls short of what he says, what he sayshe’s all about, all about. All my homeboys were still alive, justlike Aaliyah Dana Haughton, not yet an angel of the cruelest August,begging a boy, who may not be in the mood to learn what he thinkshe knows, to look beyond his world and try to find a place for her.
Took me awhile to learn the good wordsmake the rain on my window grownand sexy now I’m in the tub holding downthat on-sale Bordeaux pretendingto be well adjusted I am on that realjazz shit sometimes I run the streetssometimes they run me I’m the bodyof the queen of my hood filled upwith bad wine bad drugs mu shu porksick beats what more can I say to youI open my stylish legs I get my swaggerback let men with gold teeth bow to my titsand the blisters on my feet I become electricI’m a patch of grass the stringy rootsyou call home or sister if you wantI could scratch your eyes make hip-hop die againI’m on that grown woman shit before I breakthe bottle’s neck I pour a little out: I am fallen
My Daddy’s forehead is so big, we don’t need a dining roomtable. My Daddy’s forehead so big, his hat size is equator. Sobig, it’s a five-head. Tyra Banks burst into tears when she seenmy Daddy’s forehead. My Daddy’s forehead got its own area code.My Daddy baseball cap got stretch marks. My Daddy pillowcasegot craters. His eyebrows need GPS to find each other. My Daddyforehead lives in two time zones. Planets confuse my Daddy foreheadfor the sun. Couch cushions lose quarters in the wrinkles in my Daddyforehead. My Daddy so smart, he fall asleep with the movie on andwake up soon as the credits start to roll. My Daddy so smart, heperform surgery on his own ingrown toenail. Momma was notimpressed, but my Daddy got brains. My Daddy know exactlyhow to drive me to my friend’s house without lookin at no map.My Daddy born here, he so smart, he know the highways likethe wrinkles in his forehead. He know the free clinics like the grayhairs on his big ass head. My Daddy so smart, he wear a stethoscopeand a white coat. My Daddy drive to work in a minivan only slightlybigger than his forehead, that’s just how my Daddy rolls. My Daddygot swag. My Daddy dance to “Single Ladies” in the hallway.My Daddy drink a small coffee cream and sugar. My Daddydrink a whole can of Red Bull. My Daddy eat a whole packof sour Skittles and never had a cavity. My Daddy so smart,he got a pullout couch in his office. Got a mini fridge there too.Got a cell phone, and a pager, and a email address where I can leavehim messages when he’s not at home. My Daddy’s not home.Momma saves a plate that turns cold.But when my Daddy does come home, he got a officein his bedroom too. Computer screen night light,Momma says she can’t sleep right, but my Daddygot work, my Daddy at work, at home, in the attic,with the TV on, in the dark, from the front yard,through the windows, you can see him working, glassflickering, my house got its own forehead, glinting, sweaty,in the evening, while my Daddy at work, at home,in his own area code,a whole other time zone.
After Miguel and Erykah Badu If you be the needle  I be the LP. If you be the buffed wall,  I be the Krylon. If you be the backspin,  I be the break. If you be the head nod,  I be the bass line. If you be a Phillie,  I be the razor. If you be microphone,  then I be palm. If you be cipher,  then I be beatbox. If you be hands thrown up,  then I be yes, yes, y’all. If you be throwback,  then I be remix. If you be footwork,  then I be uprock. If you be turntable,  then I be crossfader. If you be downtown C train,  then I be southbound Red Line. If you be shell toes,  then I be hoodie. If you be freestyle,  then I be piece book. If you be Sharpie,  then I be tag. If you be boy,  then I be girl  who wants to  sync samples  into classic.
After Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Kitchen Table Series”  I. THE STRAWCan you throw this away Maybe you should hire more Black staffWhere are you
Badu: This cyclone of good fortune. You handling? Kendrick: Happy blessing myself. graduated , struggle come big far a blur . Problem is my bubble. Tell me “You’re crazy by yourself,” “Kendrick” I’m in my own world. let everything consume me. The other end, has a conception of whowhat comes from me, from within no matter passing or playing ball. Was a hole building up for this pen, I wanted to be the best so I’m taking it.
I Out of scarcity,—
No one knew why horses were dying — two from two farms over,one in town, three at the poor farm (not in great shape,anyway, so noconcern at first), then the mayor’s son’s pony,then three stalls in a rowat the local sulky track. The vet sent blood to the State Police,who sent it to Boston for “further analysis.”Meanwhile, two more died.One so old it was no surprise,and another mistaken for a deer and shot.Some people wanted to make a connection,but the errant hunter was cousin to the sheriffand was known as too dim to pull offa string of horse poisonings.There were no more suspicious deathsin the county for two months. Then three, lying downnext to each other, seen first by my cousin Freddyat dawn in the town square.He delivered newspapers.Horses rarely lie down flatunless they’re sick, or dead.Test results came backfrom Boston and, Freddy said, also the Feds.Inconclusive, though each necropsyshowed that the poisonwas delivered with the aid of a carrotor a sugar cube in a carrot.
One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic skyeast-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia.Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water, evenbacklit by a devouring glare that whitened its edges,bent the bars. Waters apart from society by choice, their living room the aftermath of accident or crime. When the storm comes,we will see into it, there will be no near and no far. In sixty-five-foot 
seasfor the Ocean Ranger, green turned to black then white as moleculeschanged places in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, the way wood passes intoflame, and communication errors into catastrophic failurefor the Piper Alpha offshore from Aberdeen.It burned freely. If I don’t come home, is my house in order?Big fear travels in the Sikorsky. Twelve-hour shifts travel with them, the deluge system, aqueous foam. Machinery’s one notehammering the heart, identity compressed with intentions, drenched,the tired body performs delicately timed, brutal tasks no trainingadequately represents and which consume the perceivable world.In beds on the drilling platform in suspended disbelief,identified by the unlovely sea’s aggression, no sleep aids,should a directive come. Underwater welders deeply unconscious.Survival suits profane in lockers. By dreams of marine flaresand inflatables, buoyant smoke, percolating fret,one is weakened. Violence enters the imagination.Clouds previously unrecorded. Unlocked, the gates of lightand technology of capture in bitumen oozing from fracturesin the earth or afloat like other fatty bodies, condensedby sun and internal salts, harassing snakes with its fumes.Light-sensitive bitumen of Judea upon which Joseph-Nicéphore Niépcerecorded the view from his bedroom. It looked nice. A new kindof evidence developed from the camera obscura of experienceand memory, love-object to dote on and ignore. Collectible photochrome postcards. Storm surge as weather segment,tornados on YouTube relieve us of our boredom. In the rain, drizzle, intermittent showers, unseasonable hurricane threatening our flight plans, against a sea heaving photogenically, straining at its chains like a monster in the flashbulbs, on wet stones astonishingly slick, we take selfies, post them, and can’t undo it.Meaning takes place in time. By elevated circumstance of Burtynsky’s drone helicopters, revolutionary lenses pester Alberta’s tar sands, sulphur ponds’ rhapsodic upturned faces, photographs that happen in our name and in the name of composition. Foreground entered at distance, the eye surveils the McMurray Formation’s freestanding ruin mid-aspect to an infinity of abstraction. A physical symptom assails our vocabulary and things acquire a literal feeling from which one does not recover. Mineral dissolution, complete. Accommodation space, low. Confinement, relatively broad, extremely complex stratigraphy, reservoirs stacked and composite. An area roughly the sizeof England stripped of boreal forest and muskeg, unburdened by hydraulic rope shovels of its overburden. Humiliated,blinded, walking in circles. Cycle of soak and dry and residue. The will creates effects no will can overturn, and that seem, with the passage of time, necessary, as the past assumes a pattern. Thought approaches the future and the future, like a heavy unconventional oil, advances. Hello infrastructure, Dodge Ram 1500, no one else wants to get killed on Highway 63, the all-weather road by the Wandering River where earthmovers remain unmoved by our schedules. White crosses in the ditches, white crosses in the glove box. The west stands for relocation, the east for lost causes. Would you conspire to serve tourists in a fish restaurant the rest of your life? I thought not. Drinks are on us bushpigs now, though this camp is no place for a tradesman. Devon’s Jackfish is five-star, an obvious exception. But Mackenzie, Voyageur, Millennium, Borealis —years ago we would have burned them to the ground. Suncor Firebag has Wi-Fi, but will track usage. Guard towers and turnstiles at Wapasu —we’re guests, after all, not prisoners, right? Efficiently squalid, briskly producing raw sewage, black mold, botulism, fleas, remorse, madness, lethargy, mud, it’s not a spiritual home, this bleach taste in the waterglass, layered garments, fried food, bitter complaint in plywood drop-ceiling bedrooms strung outon whatever and general offense and why doesn’t anyone smoke anymore. Dealers and prostitutes cultivate their terms organically, as demand matures. The Athabasca River’s color isn’t good.Should we not encourage a healthy dread of the wild places?Consider the operator crushed by a slab of ice, our electrician mauled by a bear at the front lines of project expansioninto the inhumane forest. Fear not, we are worth more than many sparrows.They pay for insignificance with their lives. It’s the structure.Jackpine Mine photographs beautifully on the shoulders of the day,in the minutes before sunset it’s still legal to hunt. One might,like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, at a certain removefrom principal events, cut a sensitive figure in the presenceof the sublime. Except you can smell it down here. Corrosivevapors unexpectedly distributed, caustic particulate infiltratesyour mood. As does the tar sands beetle whose bite scars, from whomgrown men run. Attracted by the same sorrowful chemical compoundemitted by damaged trees on which it feeds, its aural signatureapproximates the rasp of causatum rubbing its parts together.The only other living thing in situ, in the open pit where swims the bitumen, extra brilliant, dense, massive, in the Greek asphaltos,“to make stable,” “to secure.” Pharmacist’s earth that resists decay,resolves and attenuates, cleanses wounds. Once used to burnthe houses of our enemies, upgraded now to refinery-ready feedstock,raw crude flowing through channels of production and distribution. Combustion is our style. It steers all things from the black graveof Athabasca-Wabiskaw. Cold Lake. Rail lines ofLac-Mégantic. The optics are bad. We’re all downstream now.Action resembles waiting for a decision madeon our behalf, then despair after the fact. Despair which,like bitumen itself, applied to render darker tones or an emphatictenebrism, imparts a velvety lustrous disposition,but eventually discolors to a black treacle that degradesany pigment it contacts. Details in sections of Raft of the Medusacan no longer be discerned. In 1816, the Medusa’s captain,in a spasm of flamboyant incompetence, ran agroundon the African coast, and fearing the ire of his constituents,refused to sacrifice the cannons. They turned on each other,147 low souls herded onto a makeshift raft cut loose from lifeboatsof the wealthy and well-connected. The signs were there,risk/reward coefficient alive in the wind, the locomotive,small tragic towns left for work, where the only thing manufactured is the need for work. Foreshortening and a receding horizoninclude the viewer in the scene, should the viewer wishto be included in the scene. One can’t be sure if the brig, Argus,is racing to the rescue or departing. It hesitates in the distance,in its nimbus of fairer weather, the courage and compassionof a new age onboard. Géricault’s pyramidical composition —dead and dying in the foreground from which the strong succeed upwardtoward an emotional peak —an influence for Turner’s Disaster at Sea, the vortex structure ofThe Slave Ship: all those abandoned, where is thy market now?It’s difficult to imagine everyone saved, it’s unaffordable. Wavesdisproportionate, organized in depth, panic modulatingthe speaking voice. The situation so harshly primary and not beautifulwhen you don’t go to visit the seaside, but the seaside visits you,rudely, breaks in through the basement, ascends stairsto your bedroom, you can’t think of it generally then. The 
constitutionof things is accustomed to hiding. Rearrangement will not suit us.Certain low-lying river deltas. Island states, coastal regions —floodwaters receding in measures like all we haven’t seen the last ofreveal in stagnancies and bloat what’s altered, as avernal exhalationsof mines and flares are altered but don’t disappear. Still,iceberg season is spectacular this year, worth the tripto photograph in evening ourselves before the abundance when, aflamein light that dissolves what it illuminates, water climbs its own red walls, vermilion in the furnaces.
Complex amaryllis — two-faced,multiflorus, wrath-spathed ball ofire — grows flagrantly unfragrant.Pulp-fiery the take-no-prisonersHaemanthus. Bully! Bully!Bully the bloodflower! (Blood-thirsty suffice it to suffuse.)Transfuse the lily-livered,the raging un-aromatic, thearrogant blood-rivering spleen.
Unblacken the holy mallow,the incorrupt, the foregutinconclusion. St. Cuthbert’s cole,a stalky stand-up, the deadpanpeevish. Splenetic, the maroonedfascicles, the testy watchman-hockleaf-clock. Ad hoc the anti-antibodies, the ripped-openopen-pollinating poultice,the self-sowing aggrievement.
The girl grew and grew, her mother couldn’t stop it; it terrorized. What would the finger-dance do? Kindergarten art a buffet of 
markers,gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer’s pools drying clear. A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubesfor kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper into paper-bag dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too smalland trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers. And silver rain. And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, coloredin reverse rainbow. Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles. A bird. Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane,and knowledge: that the sky’s full of black-struck Ms and Ws, drifting clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn’t reachdown to meet the earth; mother shrinks to the size of a penis.
One finger is the tundra,one finger is the Bodhisattva,one finger is mother Slovenia.Two fingers still remain, beckoningand with awful force feeding me seventeen hands with this arrangement.Alone,I’m alone on the roof of the world and drawingso stars are created.I’m spurting through the nose so the Milky Way is createdand I’m eating so shit is created, and falling on youand it is music.I am God.I am God and I’m dancing.This table is a gift, this house is a gift,this garden is a gift, these squirrels are a gift.These human legs are murmuring mantras.Alone,alone.Glug glug glug I drink gulps of lightand I brush.So I shower and put myself back, alone.I alone am the center of the world’s light, the Lord’s lamb.I alone am all animals: a tiger, an ant, a deer,a rabbit, a porcupine (a hedgehog), a butterfly, an insect,a piranha, a baby rabbit, a daddy rabbit, the god of ferrets, the straw hat of a sketched puppy and his paws.I alone am all plants: strawberries, birch, hazel,pumpkin, fern, dandelion, juves (juves is a plantwith thin roots, resembling the rootsof parsley, but it has a nose and head like a porcini cap and one birch’s hand,sitting all day in a race car like a liana),maple, oak, corn, alone.I alone am all the people named in this bookand all the others: Joe, Janet, Agatha, Veronika, Boris, Ivan, Italo, Pierre, alone.I alone am the air, smoothly, the lining, two parallel tracks,pot (to sweat), pot (the road), the cause, the forceps, Lope de Vega, the streak,the dot on the forehead, the dot in the air, alone.Alone,I alone am the air and the golden butter,linden bark, the king, the sickle and hammer,the Dalmatian, the saw, Armenia, the key,alone. Translated from the Slovenian
I’m religious.As religious as the wind or scissors.It’s an ant, she’s religious, the flowers are red.I don’t want to die. I don’t care if I die now.I’m more religious than the dust in the desert.The mouth of a child is round. My eyes are syrup, dripping cold.Sometimes I think I baked nettles, but I didn’t. Sometimes I think I’m miserable, butI’m not. I’m religious.I will throw a barrel into the river.If bees rushed into my face, I’d scratch at them with my hand and would seeagain.I don’t get upset.The soul presses like the crowds at the door.When I die, oxen will graze the grass just like this.Houses will glimmer just like this. Translated from the Slovenian
Historical brutality,you are a poppy.With a black scepter, silkwings.I see everything: the fieldof dew and castles’wedding parties.Enchant me then, rabble,the leaves are opening.Drink me like wine,say moooo. Translated from the Slovenian
Yeah. It’s only a matterof environment if I’m a genius.A genius iskohlrabi in a turnip inkale incellophanein the freezer.Infiles they descend onthe white skin andconverge in the corner’sfollicles. The ants are illuminated.Basta. Translated from the Slovenian
To stop the blood of flowers and to reverse harmony.To die in the river, to die in the river.To hear the heart of a rat. There is no differencebetween the silver of the moon and the silver of my tribe.To clear the field and to run to the edge of the earth.To bear a crystal in the chest: the word. Soap evaporates at the door, fire illuminates the day.To look back, to look back one more time.And to remove the robe. The poppy has bitten the sky.To walk empty roads and drink shadows.To feel the oak at the mouth of the well.To stop the blood of flowers, to stop the blood of flowers.Altars watch each other face to face.To lie down on a blue cabbage. Translated from the Slovenian
Three flies, woken by the sunon a white, illuminated wall,leap like the hands of a florist wrapping bouquets. They remind me of a knife thrower, who performs with five in the air.Is the quantity restricted?Catch and don’t think. Weigh me.I’ll run away from you like water and press youlike ice if you sizzle too much.Look at them on the white wall.Three trees from the new shoots of a cedar. From the corner of a cube.And, if you look closely, from a gully. Translated from the Slovenian

I went into one room and then I went into another.I was in a room inside a room.There I felt safe.
A cento I have some sad news for youI am but a symbol, a shadow cast on paperIf only you knew how things look within me at the momentTrees covered in white blossomThe remains of my physical selfDo you really find my appearance so attractive?Darling, I have been telling an awful lot of lies latelyIf only I knew what you are doing now?Standing in the garden and gazing out into the deserted street?Not a mermaid, but a lovely human beingThe whole thing reminds me of the man trying to rescue a birdcage from the burning house(I feel compelled to express myself poetically) I am not normally a hunter of relics, but ...It was this childhood scene ...(My mother ... )All the while I kept thinking: her face has such a wild look... as though she had never existedThe fact is I have not yet seen her in daylightDistance must remain distanceA few proud buildings; your lovely photographI find this loss very hard to bearThe bells are ringing, I don’t quite know whyWhat makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacityYesterday and today have been bad daysThis oceanic feeling, continuous inner monologuesI said, “All the beautiful things I still have to say will have to remain unsaid,” and the writing table flooded
A cento I became a therapist against my willA strange feeling of forlornness, a feeling I could not have stoodPainful isolation, quite steep and slantingA beautiful forest which had the one drawback of seeming never to endI have had to struggle so longI have always been frank with you, haven’t I?I wanted to explain the reason for my inaccessibilityI am lying here on a short leash in this filthy holeSo far I haven’t been locked upSeveral people point to gaps in my face where the little girl has been cut outShe screams and screams without any self-controlRavaged by the heat and the blood-&-thunder melodramaNeither describable nor bearableI felt I had known her all my life
Highway of Death — the indifferenceof snakes. Sky is ripe and everywherethe colors are breaking. ¿Quién es el jefemás jefe?
At family gatherings,a Family Friend liked gatheringthe girls to make us sing rounds.We always wanted the spooky one,Have you seen the ghost of Tom?Long white bones with the rest all gone
Sonnet 19 (On His Blindness) by John Milton 1. spent In Sonnet 19, Milton makes the seemingly deliberate choice to avoid “the” and “a” — respectively, the most common and the sixth most common words in English usage. Instead of these articles — 
definite and indefinite — the poem stages a territorial dispute between 
possessives: the octave is “my” land, the sestet is “his” land, with the occasional “this” or “that” flagging no man’s land. We come to understand Milton’s mistake — the professed regret of the poem — as this act of claiming. It is only through his taking possession that the universal light is divided up, apportioned into “my light” — a finite commodity that by being subjected to ownership becomes capable of being “spent.” “Spent” — a word like a flapping sack.My mistake was similar. I came to consider my body — its tug-of-war of tautnesses and slacknesses — to be entirely my own, an appliance for generating various textures and temperatures of friction. Should I have known, then, that by this act of self-claiming, I was cutting 
myself off from the eternal, the infinite, that I had fashioned myself into a resource that was bounded and, therefore, exhaustible? 2. wide The “wide” is always haunted by surprise. In a dark world, the “wide” is the sudden door that opens on unfurling blackness, the void pooling at the bottom of the unlit stairs. To be bounded is our usual condition; to be open is anomalous, even excessive.  A wide-eyed girl is extreme in her unliddedness, her bare membranes flinching at any contact, vulnerable to motes, to smuts, to dryness. A wide-hipped girl extends the splayed arches of her body to bridge the generational divide. A wide-legged girl unseals a portal between persons; she is disturbing to the extent that she is open to all comers, a trapdoor that must be shut for safety’s sake. A wide-eyed girl is often thought desirable; a wide-hipped girl is often thought eligible; a wide-legged girl is often thought deplorable. A wide-legged girl is rarely wide-eyed, though she may have started out that way. We can understand why Milton, in the narrowing orbit of his blindness, would have considered wideness, unboundedness to be threatening. What’s less clear is why the wideness of the wide-legged girl is also considered threatening. Does the wideness of the wide-legged girl evoke a kind of blindness, a dark room where one might blunder into strangers, the way two men once met each other in me? 3. hide “But why hide it in a hole?” asks the Master, returning from his long absence, sparks of bewilderment flaring into rage.  An unanswered question worries at the Parable of the Talents: why is the Master so terribly angry? It is not as if the servant had stolen the money, or spent it—his sin is one of omission, of overly risk-averse investing. A talent was a unit of weight in ancient Greece: in monetary terms, it was worth eighty pounds of silver, or 6,000 denarii—nearly twenty years’ wages for the average worker. But Milton uses the word in its more modern sense, dating from the fifteenth century: a natural ability or skill. How did a word for a deadweight of metal come to mean something inborn, innate? Confusion between the inorganic and the natural trickles into the parable and the poem. The Master prides himself on being a man who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he did not scatter seed. Was the servant’s fault to confuse coins for seeds, did he think he was planting when he was merely burying, did he mistake for viable what had no chance of living, what had never been alive? 4. bent And what about the hole, which for so long had held treasure? Did it wonder why — despite all the moistness and richness it could muster — those cold, glinting seeds never sprouted? Did it understand that, if released into the wider world, the coins could have quickened, multiplied? That instead of an incubator, the hole had become an oubliette, a place where otherwise fruitful things were sent to languish, to become lodged, useless? “Useless” — a word like a capped lead pipe, like the extra bone in my foot I will never pass down to my daughter. A thing becomes useless if it is bent out of shape. To “get bent” is to be put to another kind of use, a use my therapist considered tantamount to rape. To bend is to be bound, to bow down without breaking, with perhaps just the head tilted at an angle so as to peer upward. 5. present The Master has become the Maker. The servile body wholly “his,” splayed wide in a welcome-home, bound up in a beribboned bow.  But the reader will object. This is all wrong. First of all, in the sonnet, “bent” doesn’t mean to bow down as if in submission to an outside force, but instead denotes an innate or internalized tendency or inclination. Second, a “present” is not a gift, but a verb meaning to offer openly, full-faced, the sun beaming down on a clean page. Third, the body never comes into it at all. “Therewith” — a safe word, a strongbox to be buried.6. chide Is a “true account” a story or a sum? Is the Maker an audience or an auditor?  The page scoured white by little grains of fear. A story has an ending. A sum has a bottom line. There was no accounting for me because my allotment leaked out of me, month after month, I scrubbed the sheets as if effacing the marks of a crime. Then one day the fear reversed itself. Like a photo negative but in higher contrast—its whites more glaring and its darks more glossy, as if a whisper-thin suspicion had come unzipped. “Chide” is an enormous understatement. The servant isn’t merely scolded, he is cast into “the outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” If the “outer darkness” is deemed to be a punishment, then does that lustrous inner darkness count as a reward? 7. denied It seems unfair, is Milton’s point. To be assigned a task, but not provided sufficient materials to complete it, is to be placed in a situation of contrived scarcity, like a lab rat or like the youngest sister in a fairy tale. The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins—which prefaces the Parable of the Talents — centers on this scarcity. The virgins wait for the bridegroom, to greet him with lamps alight. Five virgins have brought extra flasks of oil, but five virgins have let their lamps burn out and must go lampless into the night to look for oil. That much we are told, but questions hover around the shadowed margins of the story. Why isn’t the bridegroom with the bride? Why is he so delayed? Why is the bridegroom met in the middle of the night by a phalanx of lamp-bearing virgins, like a troupe of pom-pom girls or like a sacrificial rite? The virginity of the virgins renders them piquant, memorable. Adorning gothic portals, evoking thresholds, entrances, they are a particular feature of French cathedrals—much more so, one suspects, than if the parable had called them “maidservants” or even “bridesmaids.” The presumed desideratum of the story does not interest us much: the sated bridegroom at the midnight feast, the smug, unctuous faces of the wise virgins. Instead, the imagination pursues the foolish virgins rushing into the night, their desperation making them vulnerable, their vulnerability making them erotic, the fill-holes of their useless lamps dark and slick with oil. Is this how I was taught to sexualize insufficiency, the lack that set me wandering night after night, my body too early emptied out? 8. prevent “Prevent” — a word like a white sheet folded back to cover the mouth. A white egg bursts from the ovary and falls away, leaving a star-shaped scar. Corpus albicans, the whitening body. Such starbursts, at first, are scattered constellations, frost embroidering a dark field. But at what point does this white lacework shift over from intricacy to impossibility, opacity, obstacle—the ice disc clogging the round pond, the grid of proteins baffling the eye? “Prevent” — a word that slams shut, a portcullis (Latin: cataracta). Letter to Leonard Philaras, September 28, 1654: “the dimness which I experience by night and day, seems to incline more to white than to black.” 9. need Has Patience been looming in the background all along, silent, so as not to intrude upon a blind man’s consciousness? Patience, whose garment is “white and close-fitting so that it is not blown about or disturbed by the wind.” At the turn of the sonnet, Patience pries open its sculpted lips, its stiff tongue like a weaver’s shuttle drawing woolly strands through the warp and weft of Milton’s blindness, a white monologue that admits neither interruption nor rejoinder. Milton’s little murmur stitched back into his mouth. Woven tight enough to repel need — a liquid beading on the surface, the blood the needles drew from me week after week, hundreds of stoppered vials consigned to the biohazard bin, en route to the incinerator. “Need,” from the High German, for danger. “Murmur,” from the Sanskrit, a crackling fire. 10. best The best beam in contentment, ranging themselves in rows. Erect as test tubes but forswearing undue pride in such uprightness, mustering shoulder-to-shoulder with the fellow-elect. The best arrayed in regimental ranks, in refrigerated racks, white hymn of the unneeded, white hum of the unneeding. “Best,” originally superlative of bot (Old English: remedy, reparation). The best affect a pious pose, mouths held taut in tongueless Os. Sotto voce chorus of that soft, subjunctive song: if you were complete ... if you were replete ... Superlative. The most remediated. The most repaired. 11. state To be scooped out, emptied of need and rinsed clean of its greasy smears, pristine as a petri dish on a stainless lab table. Enucleated, the white of the egg awaiting an unknown yolk. “Yolk” from geolu (Old English: yellow). Not to be confused with “yoke” from geocian (Old English: to be joined together). A yoke is an implement, meant to be used, to fill a need. But where there is no field to be plowed, no wagon to be pulled, why demand a yoke that is useless, needless? One day the Romans sent for Cincinnatus to lead the republic against the invading Aequian army. He laid down his plow in the field and went to war. When the Aequians surrendered, Cincinnatus spared their lives but decreed that they must “pass under the yoke.” The Romans fashioned a yoke from three spears, two fixed in the ground, and one tied across the tops of the two verticals. Since the horizontal spear was only a few feet off the ground, the Aequians were made to crouch down like animals in order to complete the surrender. This is thought to be the origin of the word “subjugate,” to be brought under the yoke. To bear a yoke is to be bowed down, oxbowed, cowed. One day they laid me down on a gurney, my feet strapped in stirrups, my legs bent and splayed like the horns of a white bull. 12. speed But why would Milton, of all people, use the word “Kingly” as a compliment? Roundheaded Milton, who wrote tract after tract in defense of regicide, who would later be detained for opposing the Restoration? At this point, our suspicions are confirmed: Milton has disappeared entirely from the poem. We haven’t heard from him since the turn of the sonnet. We’ve been lulled by the cadenced voice of Patience, its dusty tongue self-lubricating, its pallid breath clouding the room, precipitating frangible chains of hydrocarbons, their branchings barbed like fluffs of eiderdown. Through the faint reticulations, we discern no dark stoop-shouldered figure, but only white-robed forms, upright as if hung from hooks, their faces unyielding as lanterns, shuttered as if once aflame. 13. rest Rest — a word like a gauze bandage, a ropy weave of collagen knitting its way across a wound. Outspread as if fingered, gelid gestures suggesting solace: to stanch, to shield, to seal, to shut off. Rest — the rind of the best, a contoured pod that cradles the shape of what it doesn’t hold. Rest — those who are left when thousands have sped away, the bereft, who litter the land, with husks for hands, vacant-eyed, vacant faces raised like basins under a contrail-scarred sky. 14. wait To stand and wait is a task far weightier than simply to wait. It is to permit the distractible body neither ease nor action, nor food nor drink nor any such reprieve; it is to pit the body in enmity against its own heaviness. To abide in readiness as in a winter orchard, the lacerated land bandaged in snow. To exist inert as if limbless, skin seamless as if reknit over what had been pruned away, knotted rootstock fit for no other service: no branch, no leaf, no fruit. To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip. To stand and wait for the one who reaps where he has not sown. Mercy sugars the starving soil with nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. Mercy captures rain in silver beads and stitches them through the threadbare weave of cloud. Mercy wields a scalpel cutting a cleft in the lopped-off stump, mercy forces home the rootless wand, mercy seals the join with tar and tape. To foster the raw scion as if it were a son, to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own.


October–November 1975 Autobus on Paseo de la Reforma with destination signs: bellas artes insurgentes. Exactamente. Just what’s needed: Insurgent Arts. Poesía Insurgente. This is not it ... 1 Bus to Veracruz via Puebla + Xalapa ... Adobe house by highway, with no roof and one wall, covered with words: la luz del mundo. 2 Passing through Puebla late Sunday afternoon. A band concert in a plaza next to a Ferris wheel — I have passed through many places like this, I have seen the toy trains in many amusement parks. When you’ve seen them all you’ve seen One. 3 Halfway to Xalapa a great white volcano snow peak looms up above the hot altiplano — White god haunting Indian dreams. 4 A boy and three burros run across a stubble field, away from the white mountain. He holds a stick. There is no other way. 5 Deep yellow flowers in the dusk by the road, beds of them stretching away into darkness. A moon the same color comes up. 6 As the bus turns + turns down the winding hill, moon swings wildly from side to side. It has had too many pathetic phallusies written about it to stand still for one more. 7 In Xalapa I am a head taller than anyone else in town — A foot of flesh and two languages separate us. 8 At a stand in the park at the center of Xalapa I eat white corn on the cob with a stick in the end, sprinkled with salt, butter, grated cheese + hot sauce. The dark stone Indian who hands it to me has been standing there three thousand years. 9 I’m taking this trip from Mexico City to the Gulf of Mexico and back without any bag or person — only what I can carry in my pockets. The need for baggage is a form of insecurity. 10 Two hours in this town and I feel I might live forever (foreign places affect me that way). The tall church tower tolls its antique sign: pray. 11 In early morning in the great garden of Xalapa, with its terraces and immense jacaranda trees, pines + palms, there are black birds with cries like bells, and others with hollow wooden voices like gourds knocked together. The great white volcano shimmers far off, unreached by the rising sun. 12 Brown men in white palmetto cowboy hats stand about the fountains in groups of three or four, their voices lost to the hollow-sounding birds. Along a sunlit white stone balustrade, student lovers are studying each other, novios awaiting the day. The sun beats down hot and melts not the mountain. 13 On the bus again to Veracruz, dropping down fast to flat coast. A tropical feeling — suddenly coffee plantation + palms — everything small except the landscape, horses the size of burros, small black avocados, small strong men with machetes — each still saying to himself Me llamo yo.
I never much likedforsythia, neverliked yellow, butliked the sounds:for syth i afor Kythera for sightfor sky for Sylvia.Forsythia made anokay divider betweenour place and hers.Sylvia used to trodthrough it to see ustoo often so we letall of it grow massiveand dense hopingshe’d go blind init then hop aboarda bumblebee who’dfollow his lovely greatqueen as she flew to herdream isle of Kythera.
God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only inLemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties, unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending supervague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me. This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attendingchurch except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God isnot a good listener. I said Stop it please, I’ll give you wedding cake, money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians,children, reality TV stars. I’ll even set up a booth for you,then everyone who wants to talk to you can do sowithout the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen,& the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayerson their way to heaven. I’ll keep the booth decorations simplebut attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I’m not religiousbut didn’t people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint. My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinnerso she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I ama good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one. It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon. We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence.He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm.I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them.Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.
Ito ran to a window. He danced.He howled. He cursed the moon,interned in a camp before he wascarted on a ship back to Tokyo.Hadn’t he almost died for artthe evenings he ate bread soup?If he wished to forget those days& nights dancing in drawing roomsin London, or translating Fenollosa’snotes on Noh, he’d have to unbraidhimself from At the Hawk’s Well,& then let go of the Egyptianmask Dulac painted him into —claws, beak, feathers, & legend.Why did that silly boy tell a storyabout his grandmother weepingwhen she first saw him dressedin his grandfather’s samurai armorto hold the gaze of Lady Cunard?He was again studying the foxholding a biscuit in his hand,saying, “I went to a great hillin Hampstead & I made my soulinto the soul of a fox.” Finally,he would let go of his Europe,& not think of those he loved& taught, Isadora lost. Now,powerless & alone, he danceshis ten steps again & again,wanting to know if a hawkcould peck the eyes out of a fox.
Oh. Sorry. Hello. Are you on your way to work, too?I was just taken aback by how you also have a briefcase,also small & brown. I was taken by how you seem, secretly,to love everything. Are you my new coworker? Oh. I see. No.Still, good to meet you. I’m trying out this thing where it’s goodto meet people. Maybe, beyond briefcases, we have some thingsin common. I like jelly beans. I’m afraid of death. I’m afraidof farting, even around people I love. Do you think your motherloves you when you fart? Does your mother love youall the time? Have you ever doubted?I like that the street we’re on is named after a tree,when there are none, poplar or otherwise. I wonder if a treehas ever been named after a street, whether that worked out.If I were a street, I hope I’d get a good name, not Mainor One-Way. One night I ran out of an apartment,down North Pleasant Street — it was soft & neighborlywith pines & oaks, it felt too hopeful,after what happened. After my mother’s lovebecame doubtful. After I told her I liked a boy & she wishedI had never been born. After she said she was afraidof me, terrified I might infect my brotherswith my abnormality. Sometimes, parents & childrenbecome the most common strangers. Eventually,a street appears where they can meet again.Or not. I’ve doubted my own love for my mother. I doubt.Do I have to forgive in order to love? Or do I have to lovefor forgiveness to even be possible? What do you think?I’m trying out this thing where questions about love & forgivenessare a form of work I’d rather not do alone. I’m trying to say,Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain,& continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names.
Who was the woman who lived in the kingdom behind the barrier.There are those who will tell you she was the wife of every man in the village.And one night while her husbands were finishing their day at the gasworks,the woman was boiling oats for her only child,a young girl who’d amassed a beautiful collection of spoons in her life,each one given to her by one of her mother’s husbands.And this same night the young daughter died.And the woman buried the daughter with her spoons in her pockets.Come daybreak the hostiles appeared at the barrier with ice in their beards.“To hell with Pax Americana,” they said.And they camped outside the wall that night chanting war cries.You say you want to know the names of the war cries that survived history.“Wheel the gun carriages up to the barrier of the empire of husbands.”“Our first word is ruin and our next word is value.”There are those who will tell you the hostiles carried on like this for some weeks.Until one night the dead daughter led them behind the barrier,through a tunnel she’d dug in the earth with her spoons.It was thus the hostiles made it their business to burn everything.They burned the village crops and the distillery.They burned the apothecary, the potash mine.Black soot fell on the livery and they burned the livery too.And there’s another war cry that’s since survived history:“Tonight like god’s scalp in your kingdom behind the barrierour burning makes snow and ends nowhere.”You say, where were the village husbands while all of this was 
happening.There are those who will tell you they were working their jobs at the gasworks,and when they heard the bullhorn roar in the watchtowerthey were smoking cigarillos and pacing the floor of the gasworks. And the roar of the bullhorn had a strange effect on the husbands,who each began daydreaming of his wife at home in the village.The first husband thought: “The taste of the breath of my wife,it’s like saying the word houndstooth to myself in the dark.”The next husband thought of her letting her hair down in front of a vanity,and smearing her blue eye shadow onto her fingers,and plucking the stray hairs and flyaways off her head.The next husband thought of her saying, “I’m correcting god’s blunders,”when he asked her why she wears all this foundation on her face. Another husband thought: “Quitting time is worthless to meso long as the work I do in the gasworks makes me think of my wife’s jawbone.”And all together the husbands said: “The jawbones of my wife,they beat both the same, like when I watch a train leave the 
kingdom,and all I can see is the pistons beating away in the smoke.”And when the hostiles entered the gasworks the husbands were dancing.And you say you want to know the words the hostiles spoke when they entered.There are those who will tell you they said this: “Don’t quit dancing.”“There’s a penalty for an empire that believes it can survive itself,” they said.And so they pointed their war clubs at the husbands,and they said don’t quit, don’t quit dancing on the floor of the gasworks,and they bludgeoned to death the husbands who refused to keep dancing,and one by one the husbands fell dead on the floor of the gasworks,each one dancing himself to death at the hands of the hostiles.And this dancing took many deaths.But you say where was the wife who lost all her husbands this day.There are those who will tell you she was hiding the last of the cheese in a boot.She was rolling up the deed to her house in the village.She was picking up her daughter’s violin and stuffing the scroll in the violin’s f-hole.She was fleeing for the wall when she was stopped by the hostiles.Dance, said the hostiles, and they pointed their war clubs at her skull.And these war clubs had a strange effect on the wife,who began daydreaming about a man who wasn’t her husband.She thought of cutting his hair in a sunflower patch in the village.The time should be dusk, she thought, and the shears,they should flash once in her hands like a scythe.She thought there should be two swarms of no-see-ums,one smoldering around each of her hands.And she’d tilt back the head of the man who wasn’t her husband.And she’d oil his throat with the badger brush in her hand.And he’d smell the sandalwood lather she worked in the bristles.And he’d smell the eau de cologne on her neck when she leaned in close.And she’d shave his throat with the blade of a balisong.And the woman thought each time he moaned when she stroked hima dragonfly should dance from his mouth.And he’ll moan until the dragonfly quits dancing, she thought.And I’ll dance around his throat all night like a lantern.“Because a war club doesn’t taste like a war club,” she said.“It tastes like my husbands all breathing at once.”She spoke these words with a hole in her skull in the snow.And the smoke coming out of the hole was her thoughts.And her body lying there in the village square was so beautifulthe hostiles began to dance on either side of the body.And they danced, and they danced, until they too fell dead in the snow beside her.
In the end she just wanted the house and a horse not much more what if  he didn’t own the house or worse not even a horse how do weseparate the things from a man the man from the things is a man still the same without his reins here it rains every fifteen minutes it would be foolish tomarry a man without an umbrella did Cinderella really love the prince or just the prints on the curtains in the ballroom once I went window-shopping but I didn’t want a window when do you know it’s time to get a new man one who can win more things at the fair I already have four stuffedpandas from the fair I won fair and square is it time to be less square to wear something more revealing in North and South
Who needs a scary movie when there’s scary life.Icy days pile up like empty pill bottles.One craves hot soup and bear sex. I can’t hibernateabove the Kum & Go when there’s Smokey lightsall night. It isn’t easy making change for a twentyon a Tuesday night, when they’re filling the tanksbeneath the pumps and the manager’s on break.All underage kids must come here. And go here?The world rhymes with itself. Earth is earthand row is row, whether to pull a set of oars and scullor a line of cornstalks completing the farmer’s math. Up above the Kum & Go I’m reading Maya AngelouAnd there’s a head shop open 24 hrsthey do not sell head but you might think itthe way the patrons come and go all nightall fall all night all fall.I lived behind a sex club called The Power Exchange.All words have been charged with electric bodiesever since I wandered into my first poem.It was surely the Road Not Taken.Or maybe The Body Electric ... I’m easily mistaken.An alder is reptilian in its body, litheleaves at night and such vocal things.It is a sexy tongue the world speaks.So many licks to get to the polished moon.Tell me a story then. How did you come to betrampled or new or high where the warblers landand recklessly shit where they eat.The universe I fear to be crashing.No painkillers for Doug. Ugh.It’s just autumn come. Electrical storms.The brave fire of the leaves and everything.The pawpaw, along with the huckleberry,the chokecherry, cranberry, Concord grape, and persimmonis one of the indigenous fruits. I usually only get it here,and only this time of year. Fearis real. Especially that most unholy fearthat we will be forgotten. Fruit, when it’s rotten,opens a door to memory from other lives. Is it wrongto wish for another life? My hand can barelywrite the thought. My eye can barelysee, my soul, translate the fire into autumn’s sweet flush,persimmons taste like semen, pawpaw tastes like flesh,large hard seeds like date pits I spit off the balconyin summer into the parking lot belowwhere none are sure to be hit nor anything grow.A spider would not lower himself to touch suchconcrete ground. I would not live to see a treegrow to fruition, and yet each year I’d like to try.Well, Midwest, here I am. It’s pumpkin time.The cicadas have stopped singing.It’s just the crickets now along the river.But above the Kum & Go, it’s wind and machinery.Why do they all take the same path, and whydo these undergrads shout against the fall wind.The rebel angels’ cries are but the check-incries of birds, “hey Mike, hey Mike.” It mustbe hard to be Mike, your name reducedin the ears of others to a syllable of grief.And then it seems that Mike is gone. Relief.
I wept in a stable.I found money in the dirt.I reenacted a car accident in the tack room.I asked a horse van driver to let me off where the bridle path stopped.I looked at the jockey for what he was dreaming.I told him he was wrong about making things happen.He couldn’t make things happen.I couldn’t make things happen anymore.There is exactly not enough money in the world.Magical thinking got me where I am today.Animals are warriors of time.I stopped keeping things hidden.That wasn’t a horse we saw in the winner’s circle.I can’t stop horses as much as you can’t stop horses.
On the threshold of half a house in the Land of Israel my father stoodpointing to the sides and saying:Upon these ruinsone day we will build a kitchento cook in it a Leviathan’s tailand a wild bull,upon these ruinswe will build a corner for prayerto make room for a bit of holiness.My father remained on the thresholdand I, my entire life,have been erecting scaffoldingreaching up to the sky. Translated from the Hebrew
No longer interested in evil,the soul turns on its backat the watering hole, kicks its muscled legs.Everything goes neon pinkand green in the noonday sunwhen I press my thumbsto my little black eyes. My snout,wet with its own abundant grease,smells nothing of threat,of consequence. I put my handsbehind my head, I have nobidding to do. My feet go upon the desk, a woman appearsat my side. This is what I’ve earnedin Eden. The right to close my eyeswhen the camouflage trouserscome wading throughthe apple blossom’s slough —and the dream of myself as a babyemerging from the mortalbody, hoof by gleaming hoof.
Here, I am blowing this little streamof blue vapor into your parted lips.Here, I am placing my hands on your chestin an X while my red nails distractthe crowd of impostor lifeguardsclosing in. Here is the place to raisethe tent, I can feel it in my bones.The snake has perfected his skin, he isready to be lifted and passed. Howdid I do it? The process was messy,I’d rather not share it, but look, lookat us now. Lemon drops and cherry bombs.It’s the eye of the tiger, went the songI used to sing in the basement alone.
Sometimes it’s the shoes, the tying and untying,the bending of the heart to put them on,take them off, the rush of bloodbetween the head and feet, my face,sometimes, if I could see it, astonished.Other times the stairs, three, four stagesat the most, “flights” we call them,in honor of the wings we’ll never have,the fifth floor the one that kills the breath,where the bird in the building flies to first.Love, too, a leveler, a dying all its own,the parts left behind not to be replaced,a loss ongoing, and every day increased,like rising in the night, at 3:00 am,to watch the snow or the dead leaf fall,the rings around the streetlight in the rain,and then the rain, the red fist in the heartopening and closing almost without me.“ — Yesterday brought to today so lightly!”The morning, more and more, like evening.When I bend to tie my shoes and the bloodfills the cup, it’s as if I see into the hidden earth,see the sunburned path on which I passin shoes that look like sandalsand arrive at a house where my feetare washed and wiped with my mother’s hairand anointed with the autumn oils of wildflowers.
After “Exile’s Letter” by Ezra Pound To Tom S. of Missouri, possum friend, clerk at Lloyd’s.Now I remember that you rang a silent bellBy the foot of the bridge at the River “Thames.”With dull roots and dried tubers, you wrote poems and lamentsAnd grew more English month on month, bowing to kings and princes.Americans came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,And with them, and with me especiallyEverything was pig-headed,And I made hay from poppycock and painted adjectives,Just so we could start a new fellowship,And we all escaped our personalities, without expressing them.And then I was sent off to Rapallo, trailed by children,And you to your desk at Faber-Faber,Till we had nothing but China and silence in common.And then, when modernism had come to its worst,We wrote, and published in Po-Etry,Through all the one hundred kinds of shy and whispering silence,Into a poem of a thousand blank pages,That was the first heave;And into ten thousand poems full of Chinese reticence.And with chafing saddle and the bit in his mouthOut from the East came Confucius and his philosophy,And there came also the “True-man” Ben-it-o to awe me,Playing in the death-mask of Jefferson.In the botched houses of Europe they gave us more foetid music,Clanging instruments, like the sound of a myriad dying.My forefather Confucius got me drunk and I danced because my savage mind wouldn’t keep stillWithout his music playing,And I, wrapped in silence, woke up with my head on his lap,And my voice returning to me from every radio,And before the end of the broadcast we scattered like cards, or bombs,I had to be off to China, so far across my desktop,You back to your London-bridge.And our Roosevelt, who was brave as a rodent,Was president in Washing Town, and let in the usurious rabble.And one May he sent the soldiers for me, despite the long distance.And what with broken idols and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going,Over roads twisted like my brain’s folds.And I was still going, late in the war, with defeat blowing in from the North,Not guessing how little I knew of the cost, and how soon I would be paying it.And what a reception:Steel cages, two books set on a packing-crate table,And I was caught, and had no hope of escaping.And you would walk out with me to the northeast corner of my cell,Toward the Alpine peak, with clouds about it as foul as London air,With you whispering, and with a bang, not a whimper,With glasses like dinner plates, glowing grass-green in the darkness,Pleasure-fasting, with women, coming and going without speech,With the dandruff-flakes falling like snow,And the hyacinth girls eating lunch in silence,And the sea, knee-deep, reflecting white eyebrows —Eyebrows turned white are an awful sight in the sunlight,Hideously aged —And the sea-girls singing back at us,Drowning in seaweed brocade,And the wind twisting the song, and desiccating it,Covering our eyes with dust. And this is the way the world ends. With a bang, not with a whimper.I went up to the court for prosecution,Tried standing mute, offered a madman’s song,And got no conviction, and went back to Saint Elizabeths Committed.And once again, later, you stood at the foot of my bed,And then the visit ended, you went back to Bloomsbury,And if you ask if I recall that parting:It is like the hair falling from my hieratic head, Confused ... Whirl! Centripetal! Mate!What is the use of talking, until I end my song,I end my song in the dark.I call in the nurse,Hold the pill in my hand As she says, “Take this,”And swallow it down, silent.
This time I came to the starting placewith my best running shoes, and pure speedheld back for the finish, came with only loveof the clock and the underfootingand the other runners. Each of us would be testing excellence and endurancein the other, though in the past I’d oftenveer off to follow some feral distractiondown a side path, allowing myselfto pursue something odd or beautiful,becoming acquainted with a few of the waysnot to blame myself for failing to succeed.I had come to believe what’s beautifulhad more to do with daringto take yourself seriously, to staythe course, whatever the course might be.The person in front seemed ready to fade,his long, graceful stride shorteningas I came up along his side. I was sure nowI’d at least exceed my best time.But the man with the famous final kickalready had begun his move. Beautiful, I hearda spectator say, as if something inevitableabout to come from nowhere was again on its way.

It could have been a car door leaving that bruise,as any mom knows,almost anything could take an eye out,and almost anybody could get their tongue frozen to a pole,which is kind of funny to the point of tears plus a knee slap or twothat an eye can be made blue, pinkby a baby’s fist, it fitsperfectly in the socket. It’s happened to me. Get it?Any scenario is better,beats sitting in a car and hearing someone you love sob,which I have donewith a black eye.For me, a woman’s tearsare IKEA instructionson the European side.I’m sure for Laius, Oedipus’s father, it was the same. Think of him sleepingafter having held a crying Jocastabecause they had fought for hoursbecause she was stronger. Who knew better the anger of young Jocasta?Knew that when the oracle, or the police, come, they are taking someone with them.I’m sure Laius looked at the crib and thought better youthan me, kid.
Born of the sun, we traveled a short while toward the sun.Where there were seasons and sky. Where there were monuments.Like a single engine plane in a July haze.Or our nights that pile up like shoes in a guest room.I would talk about the weather when I’m in the right weather but when.At the Stanhope Hotel, just hours before, they were people.The Navy divers found them lying under one hundred and sixteen feet of waves.Or a small body of water meeting a new, larger body.Healthy body. Nobody. We just couldn’t decide.Spatial disorientation occurs when you don’t refer to your 
instrumentsand begin to believe the whatever inside you.When I punished the Austrian roses by forgetting about themI knew that they couldn’t keep beauty and they couldn’t keep time.The day of his father’s funeral: November 25, 1963, was also his third birthday.Then — sometimes: the urge for new windows.A color other than black for the best days.In fourteen seconds plummeting at a rate beyond the safe maximum. The safe maximum at the office, bedroom, or bar.On the way there, somewhere between floors, no velocity could recover us.And again. Sometimes the right music,sometimes lucky to be in good light.Once a week I go into a room and pretend to have similar interests.Every day I wake up and brush to the left.We’re the good people, the bad people, and the people we aren’t.Socialite, journalist, lawyer. Americans. These Americans.They always button their coats when they see luck.Dear Johnny boy, thanks for asking me to be your motherbut I’m afraid I could never do her justice.My eyebrows aren’t thick enough, for one.
The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way,something got crossed, or didn’t. Who’s to say, abouthappiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivablewas a word like any other lies far behind me now. I’velearned to spare what’s failing, if it can keep what’s livingalive still, maybe just awhile longer. Ghost bamboo thatthe birds nest in, for example, not noticing the leaves, colorof surrender, color of poverty as I used to imagine it whenI myself was poor but had no idea of it. I’ve always thoughtgratitude’s the one correct response to having been made,however painfully, to see this life more up close. The highergods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesserdo the best they can
The last dog I owned, or — more humanely put, soI’m told — that I used to live with, she’d follow meeverywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’smore the truth. It is the truth. And now this dog — thatI mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty,like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’staken me, just to half-understand that. Pretty much mywhole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably, gets stripped away: what hope, otherwise, for suffering? When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay inside of, I’m not saying forever, I could last a fair time on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loosecommand through a summer garden. Let those plantsthat can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.
Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry riverthe day we met. Puddles, more or less, was whatwas left. But what could live wanted to and tried,treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle fins.He wore those rubber boots, though the sun wasan anvil, and very little wet; he smiled, I rememberthat, his nickel smile right at me, his fingersletting fall the small fish muscles into a bag filledwith yellow tap. I didn’t ask his name, or whatit was he thought he was doing, but we talked,I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough.They can smell, he said, the oils our pores releasewhen we tense to catch. You have to believe it,he said. You don’t mean any harm.
I follow locusts. I think they’re loyal, but it’s a story.In morning’s bleached streets and nightsof tungsten glinting, their fretted steel legsticker the minutes. What do I know, except I needa thing to walk behind. The lot tagged The Devil,red spray paint, two concrete steps. This is where I gowhen the heat comes, when no one alive can tell mehow to make the day move on. She lies there, the bitch,in a bed convex from her weight. Though it’s dusk,I see she is the color of dirt. Though fleas opennew roads through her hair, she is asleep. I hear thunder.Some days it rumbles dry, no rain. I’m tired. The air here,it’s like breathing gasoline. I lie down, too. A razor,a latex glove turned inside out. I curl my body closeto hers, my lips, nose to her spine. I close my eyes.I want the mites to leave without me, but they don’t.
An idea is sometimes sweetened by refusing to be expressed,if it attends, solicitously, to this failure, and urges us on todiscover the true impediment to its adaptation. In thatspirit, and bearing that intention within us, we note here, aselsewhere, there are generally three alternative courses. Thefirst is simply to accept without question an explanationsomeone in our proximity, and whom we know, proffers andthen elects to modify out of concern that small details areescaping to set up camp opposite what is being said. Thesecond is to surrender one’s reluctance to withdraw from thepresence of an unsolved problem by grabbing crudely atvacant affirmations that nothing further need be done, thateverything to be accomplished was accomplished well beforecurrent advocates approached the threshold, coaxed forwardby the desire to indulge their own vanity. The third is toremain absolutely uncommitted to any specific course, andto insist that the process begin anew each time, contendingthat no information will ever be adequate to the task ofjudgment, that the requirements, as they evolve, will makeeach element moot, or at a minimum place the likelihoodof resolution in ever greater doubt over time, with theparadoxical effect that the impulse to continue is notthereby diminished, only channeled into a narrower, moredetermined form. Although no benefits are likely to accruefrom this last course, it’s unquestionably the one most oftenfollowed, owing perhaps to people’s need to test the strengthof a membrane designed to repel assault, or their perennialenchantment with kaleidoscopic complications spreadingover the earth, as time walks through the sky.

do you remember the first time you were called annoying?how your breath stopped short in your chestthe way the light drained from your eyes, though you knew your cheeks were ablazethe way your throat tightened as you tried to form an argument that got lost on your tongue?your eyes never left the floor that day.you were 13.you’re 20 now, and i still see the light fade from your eyes when you talk about your interests for “too long,”apologies littering every other sentence,words trailing off a cliff you haven’t jumped from in 7 years.i could listen to you forever, though i know speaking for more than 3 uninterrupted minutes makes you anxious.all i want you to know is that you deserve to be heardfor 3 minutesfor 10 minutesfor 2 hours forever.there will be people who cannot handle your grace, your beauty, your wisdom, your heart;mostly because they can’t handle their own. but you will never beand have never been“too much.”
most of my regrets have to do with water, light filtered through shower curtain, your skin like yellowed paper. i sat on bathroom tiles cold like clammy hands i didn’t want to hold and waited for you. i didn’t think to be embarrassed then. neither of us could sleep that night. the floorboards creaked and only now do i feel guilty about sneaking into bed with you. but that was months ago. in a room i’ll never see again parts of us have begun to die. they say that every seven years your body replaces each cell it has ever known. soon i will be new again. some nights in my dorm room i wake up crying and there’s nothing humble about it. when moonlight spills across my bed like ilfosol-3, gets caught in my throat like a soreness, it isn’t because i miss you. rather, the dark room at my old high school where i used tongs to move your picture from one chemical bath to another. in a room i’ll never see again your face develops right in front of me. stop bath, 2014 by Allegra Lockstadt
i thought you had a summer home in barcelona because i had seen pictures of you in front of la sagrada família and knew your father had money. so maybe that’s why when i first met you i didn’t know what to say, someone too worldly to have anything to learn from me. then there was your halloween party where i managed not to be in any of the photos. perhaps it was for the best. upstairs, on a couch i’ll never sit on again, an image of us has started to yellow: me, blushing because jamie lee curtis’s breasts are on screen, and you, nervous because all your other guests left us alone. nothing happened. at least for another year or so. sometimes it’s hard to guess how long film needs to be exposed. i wanted to get the colors right.
1 When I spoke the words I am gayI had let them fester like blood on a prison cell wall.I hadn’t known that they would free themselves.They scaled the swollen gutter of my throat, and shotthemselves right through Uncle Andy’sdiaphragm, holding the air in lungs hostage so hehad no words left of his own. He could only unfurl hisvinegar lips to sputter silent thank yous across my brow.I kissed the darkness three times, because it stolethose three merciless words from mebefore my Mother could.She told me that I would neversurvive a New York winter:Mother, painted face and gossamer cheeks. It wasn’t youwalking down the hall to Economics, when you hearda familiar voice, a voice that told jokes you alwayslaughed at in class, and he said: I cantolerate faggots,but if they flirt with me, I wouldn’thesitateto beat them down.
On our first trip to the beach together I cut my foot on sharp rocks lining the shore and watched the ocean lick the crimson clean off, the salt on my tongue a slight distraction from the deep blue, the wide open, the playground sting. I’m sorry my flesh is softer than it has to be, my skin thinner than yours. I’m sorry there are parts of me I have scrubbed raw, hurt; I only wanted to be polished, untainted, good as new. I’m sorry I didn’t see the waves crashing, didn’t see any of this coming; I’m sorry I wasn’t careful, or strong. When the sea soaked up my blood that day I thought maybe it needed to drink too, needed to kiss, needed to need. I thought maybe you had always been right — when you drain my body of tears you also drain it of salt and dust so that you can shrink me down two sizes smaller and I can fit neatly into your life without taking up too much space, so that you can carry me with you wherever you go, to cities and mountains and valleys and all the oceans you’ve never explored. Tell me, please, if you find something. Tell me if you need me to search, too. Tell me if there are places you still have to visit, things you still have to unearth. Tell me if there’s any way to love you, deep blue and wide open, soft and scrubbed and thin, flesh and skin, shrinking bones, raw parts, any way at all, without letting myself bleed. shallow body, 2014 by Caitlin Hazell
I give a piece quite near away,then another, one and two to threeand say good-bye with some dismay.We might have been twins, I born in Mayand she of the blistered Januarycolored like the vibrant cray-on, clinging on to toys of the day,as mine become that of history.“Again,” she cries and I obey.I hold the script of the gone by matinee:before I ever found a scar, a yawn, a he;past the years I’ve spun to macramé.Soon I must go, and she will stay,dwelling under the apple tree,never to wander blind in first foray.Sentient air, lead her not to disarray.She flails. I walk. We are matching memory.I have things she never will, a little say.So I pull away and board the last ferry. Treasures, 2014 by Leanna Wright
No one loves you more ... more ... more ...    There were sincere lies everywhere placed directly beforethe next step. Does everyone pretend, part of aliveI am proposing words — All structures have crumbled in earliest death. I’m crossing the yellow sandsIt’s so hard to know without relating it, to youshaping a heart, take hold of me and someone saysI don’t get it! You don’t have to have love,or you do, which? I don’t think you do; beforethe explosion? I was here without it and have been inmany places loveless. I don’t want youto know what I’m really thinking or do I, beforecreation when there might be no “I knew”Everything one’s ever said not quite true. He or she be-trays you; why you want to hurt me ... badWant to, or just do? Treason was provokedeverywhere even here, by knowing one was one andI was alone, a pale hue. The sky of deathis milky green today, like a poison pool near adesert mine. Picked prickly pear fruit and Itasted it, then we drove on, maybe to Yarnell.These outposts where I grew up; I didn’t do thatI have no ... identity, and the love is an objectto kick as you walk on the blazing bare ground, where ...    sentimental, when what I love, I ... don’t have that oneword. This fire all there is ... to find ... I find itYou have to find it. It isn’t love, it’s what?
The light so thick nothing’s visible, cognoscentiI knew them, stupid apes. Real apes know moreBefore we said apes. I know how to be you bet-ter — a stupid voice. You must find a mind to respect — why? There was someone with earbuds, speaking gibberish who wouldn’tstop walking beside me; freckle-spattered. Ihad to ask the métro attendant for help;she extricated him from me ... I respect his chaoticspeech, mild adhesive force because it makes no sense.I am back on the alley, discovering adults are un-trustworthy: someone’s lying ... about afight between a teenage girl and boy — he pushedher hard — first she badly scratched him, she’s worse, hismother says. I’m back at pre-beginning, I don’twant to go through that again. There is nosexuality in chaos, there’s no style, norhope. I want style — apes have style, peoplehave machines. Show me something to respectThis bleuet growing out of a wall on rue d’Hauteville.I picked it and pressed it in a diary. Every oncein a while I respect a moment. I am back atpre-beginning: I don’t want to care beyondthis ... sudden hue in the sand, yellow or spotted with anhallucinated iridescence. The one who isstalking me ... there has often been someone stalk-ing me. My destiny. He’s gone, stay herein this, I can’t be harmed if I’m the only one who’sthought of being here. Aren’t you lonely? I don’t know.
What I lose you let me, accusationalways gets one in. But I want to talk like the deadremember that town where we went orhow do I know when I’m just a soul — not when I’m leading?A soul can lead, fight and kill; in the sketchy rainthere, but you can’t kill where we’re dead. That’sthe best thing — no one has any power. How can I lead you without power? We want to findout ... Drop everything? — there’s no gravity. Are you grave? There’s no bravery. I’m going to lead you into a you you don’t know ... Most people wantto go. There we risked being wrong but that was a linguistic quality, or you could have brought us to hell. Outsideof gravity, instead, is the house. It wasn’tbuilt with raisins. The light there, but what’s it for? For eyes. He called me “Four Eyes”now I have billions. It’s a house on the coastIs it the House of Answers? I will continue to reason for you, living on no particular incomedeep in my soul. The house has a basement I didn’t know aboutconnecting to My Sea, Mare Meum. The answersbreak with foam and wild pearls. The windis me too — you know who you are — where’sthe desert? The sea came back to this land,to the abandoned its lover. The kind of sea you can’t drown in. You can want to coincide with mefor I am the soul your leader the clear rock of kind mind,senseless. Senseless free will — the only thing here.
None of it’s there that you cared for, so familiarfurniture and paintings. The medals aren’t there eitherI’m still there but it isn’t; I’m here; sword,I have sword — imagine — and disguising protect-ive the ancient helmet. Her head was cut offnonetheless. The man brought the head alongto the doctor: the head said to. Shouldn’t webring the body I asked in case he wants to re-attach them Oh, the head hadn’t thought of that.What do you have instead of a body, there?We have a wholeness of perception what we areasking you to do for us, write down our poemscreates a body. Otherwise our body ... isn’tthat we aren’t sensuous ... but we decohere,you must understand that the universe is always developing or changing its face — body — whatever; we have always been itbut it’s never quite right ... pilot’s license;my pilot’s license is a fossil, you said. Weneed yours. We need your license.When Momma first, the very first hallucinationthat the decompression tube in her stomach was black ...    It isn’t black I said over the phone well I thoughtit was she said, not being fanciful, and I was in a motel in Colorado at the time. Whose headwas it really I repeat. For we never leave hereand nothing fossilizes but stonelike mossypatterns might be made, colors transformedwalk to the hospital, everyone’s mad at me, who cares?It was my whole soul transported and all its certaintiesthat I existed, beneath all the legends, otherwiseas joy.
Somewhere out of antiquity someone work with me.When transferring a thought, the connectors and clausesrecede: you get it. I got it — The rest of the language, beauty and playI am your master, the thought says —  I disagreeI’m thinking about the church where weheld my brother’s funeral. He says, I was there:it hurt me; you cried too much; I don’t mindlater. I just want to be with you, the thought saysYou mean thee thought or his thought?The rocks are like stars, gully full of stars.If I go with anyone anywhere, if they’dthink sweetly to me. No one hears. Relax your shoulders.I’m singing to you over and over “to a new sex.”Sometimes it seems like there’s a lizard for each rocknecklaces of lives,  there’s room for an infinity of minds. Thoughts. Anywhere. Enter my headif you wish. No ends or purposesPrevailed fortunes. I have a destiny. My deathwill not complete it.
More than ample a deadfall of one meter eighty to split my temple apart on the herringbone parquet and crash the operating system, tripping an automated shutdown in the casing and halting all external workings of the moist robot I inhabit at the moment: I am out cold and when my eyes roll in again I sit on the edge of the bed and tell you just how taken I am with the place I’d been, had been compelled to leave, airlifted mid-gesture, mid-sentence, risen of a sudden like a bubble or its glisten or a victim snatched and bundled out, helplessly, from sunlight, the usual day, and all particulars of life there fled except the sense that stays with me for hours and hours that I was valuable and needed there.
Castaways, we hit the forest — our camping stoveturned low, I gripped my tent close for its trialin virgin attitudes of stiffness whilelamps fluttered on the dark. My roof sank waveon wave accordion-like, the only sinwe knew; and soon the Jameson appeared.I’d burned one back and by the thirdshe laid her hand on mine, like a napkin ...Later, I caught those tiny gasps from Joanand Michael’s tent where he slipped into herlike (this I thought) a frog à la Bashō;those dark rippling walls where she kept center,held her breath, so I had to puzzle howone could leave and neither be alone.
To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth,the sky must seem a miracle. I’d commit the sceneto black and white if I could, the sky brightand bottomless, trees gnarled as the knees of elephants.Helpless in his Biltrite pram, Ansel Adams is watchingthe clouds roll in. Then the clouds would gather speed,roll out again, and the camera pan down to Ansel Adamsthe man kneeling on granite, choosing one filterover another. It’s as though more and greater apparatuswere needed to recapture that first exposure, saysthe voice-over: as though Ansel Adams were a pioneertoiling after the spirit, not just the body, of America.To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth,the sky must seem a matter of fact. It’s the mindbeneath he wants to grasp, stowed in its smart blackenclosure. I’d have his pram gather speed and transform,a cartoon robot against the heavens, wheels spinning,into Ansel Adams’ camera. Now the bright black skyis Ansel Adams and Ansel Adams the filter;light renders each tree a bouquet of paper;the Great Depression gathers like so much weather.To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth,the sky is what it is, taut with its isness.Some time before dawn, the section framedby interior blackens and brightens and each tree out thereglows with itself, with the certainty of all Ansel Adams’aspens. No one is watching but this one bewilderedimmigrant, toiling after sleep, saturated in monochrome.Sometimes it’s all you’ll find in the wilderness: AnselAdams, tiny in his pram, composing the day just gone.
After Alice Maher’s “Andromeda” Kind bolus of hair, we who have shoehorned ourselvesinto dream dresses, spooled Louis heels down fettled stepsto grooms, or steeled ourselves in suits for the clinch, counter-signatures gripped in fists; we who have lain on carpetsbeside infants, parched for clear shocks of blue, feculencecollecting in our drains, do not forsake us. Domesticated chyme,damp hank slap-lavished on pillow, pray for us.We who have fetched home inventing storage solutions,breaking up space, who feed you and braid you,scratch compact plans on compact days, give us thole to bear up.We’d bindle paradise and stow it where the dust bunnies futz,given leave. Swindle us, please, some less dear salvation.Croon of nootropics, caffeine, tacit utopia, game feel.How the way we live days is the means to live lives. Chevyus through. Tonight, in the kitchens where we make obstaclesof each other, we’ll fiddle with the knobs of electrical cookers.Hobs simulacra for hobs, pixelating heat, steam, spall;tumble from above as if from nowhere.Let one of us fright, dash a palm too near. Let flesh char,hair. Give us our brimstone. Be in our waking.
When it became my turn to speak all that my tongue produced was dust. I hold my cat to this. I wear finery. in moments of clarity there is no grace
I’ll choose for myself next time who I’ll reach out and take as mine, in the way I might stand at a fruit stall having decided to ignore the apples the mangoes and the kiwis but hold my hands above a pile of oranges as if to warm my skin before a fire. Not only have I chosen oranges, but I’ll also choose which orange — I’ll test a few for firmness scrape some rind off with my fingernail so that a citrus scent will linger there all day. I won’t be happy with the first one I pick but will try different ones until I know you. How will I know you? You’ll feel warm between my palms and I’ll cup you like a handful of holy water. A vision will come to me of your exotic land: the sun you swelled under the tree you grew from. A drift of white blossoms from the orange tree will settle in my hair and I’ll know. This is how I will choose you: by feeling you smelling you, by slipping you into my coat. Maybe then I’ll climb the hill, look down on the town we live in with sunlight on my face and a miniature sun burning a hole in my pocket. Thirsty, I’ll suck the juice from it. From you. When I walk away I’ll leave behind a trail of lamp-bright rind.
The minute the fiddler takes to the stagebetwixt the rapper and the organistI dive out through a slit in the rear ofthe reggae tent, meaning to take a slash and chill.But there’s a rave throbbing in the woods beyond.Bonfires radiating inside holly, spruce, and ash.Canvas banners thrashing in the storm.Chinese lanterns chase across the speckled dusklike molten bloodhounds packed against the moon.I’m twisted, I’m a little bit skagged. Can’t recallwho I tagged along to the festival with,what o’clock or eve it is, precisely    ...How the trout am I gonna get home?    ...    Did I bringa tent    ...    Yo! What the sugar’s the hun withthe glow sticks, the yokes, the coloredy fleececalled again?    ...    If you fly with the crows you’ll be shot withthe crows    ...    my Dad said. Could be doing with a suckon a spliff    ...    a dab    ...    so scanning fore, then midgroundfor someone to tap, I sketch three paralyticsat a tipped-over shitehouse, legless, claspingwire fence to hold upright. Never piss on electric wire.In Tipperary Gah shirts. Tall guys. Hurlers.Sinewy bastards. Dude in the middle bendingdouble belching steam and spittle like a hot bogin Iceland, chucking up loads. Distressed he is.Heavyweight retching bout. Losing control.Nearly throwing the towel in, collallapsing.I see him stretched out to dissolvein the land and its zillions of ants, trillionsof carcasses. What a banquet he’d makefor the jackdaws. If ya lie down withthe dogs ya’ll rise up with the fleas. Small urgein me for calling an ambulance. Smallbut rapidly growing. ’Til the others startegging him on. G’wan Jamey! Fucking championcraic man! Jamey swims with the general will —hauls himself rigid and warrior-tall,drawing gallon-swills of boosting oxygen,then arches crablike at the waist to balancebackwards on his massive palms, stallingas the constellations eddy, the cosmos rearrangesaround him, ’til his whistling tongue-tipcomes aligned with the prong of The Ploughand he launches like Polaris through the murk,propelling himself straight, hurling bilious floodsof intermingled crackers, croutons, crisps,sausage rolls, Diarmuid’s Special Offer Salsa Dips,Guinness, Smirnoff Ice, Devil’s Bit, roasted nutsand Dubonnet and effervescent codeine foam and fizzupupupup over the fenceup over the flagsup over the maizedown into the pinesdown into the flamesdown into the rave.
Nothing for days, then a message:“I want to see a fight. An old one,”so I bring a fight to you.You know nothing of these men;even the most famousget to slink in their youth again —for you Foreman is Leviathan, unstoppable;Ali just past his primeflown “home” to muscle back his title.Not sure how you’ll react to violencewe lie down again together —your feet in woollen stockingskneadable across my thighs,your mouth close to my ribsand their inmate: a pouting lifer.I fidget and you scold.As Ali opens up with right-hand leadsyou flinchbut soon you’re lost to the screenwhere he waits it out along the ropes,takes everything Foreman throws.You don’t believe he can soak upall this pain and go on standing;we cheer him on,winter softened in the tropic of his strength.When Ali comes alive to put Foreman on the groundI see a hallelujah look as you turn to face me.“He won,” you say into my cheek.“He did,” I say.
walking to the hospital How the autumn dawn burned throughthe misty broods and settled down in fire;how quickly the sun glittered my shadow,how my shadow cried, a moment, with joy.A light frost, a vision of light cracklingdown the maples, down the tinder ash.I was the good thief. I held my Love’ssweet breath, his beautiful, intelligent gaze.I closed my eyes and he woke inside me.When I saw, he saw the inflamed world.A bird sang deeply from the gutter eaves.When I closed my eyes I was elsewhere.I walked through the fire of his sleep.leaving early My Love, tonight Fionnuala is your nurse. You’ll hear her voice sing-song around the ward lifting a wing at the shore of your darkness. I heard that, in another life, she too journeyed through a storm, a kind of curse, with the ocean rising darkly around her, fierce with cold, and no resting place, only the frozen rocks that tore her feet, the light on her shoulders. And no cure there but to wait it out. If, while I’m gone, your fever comes down— if the small, salt-laden shapes of her song appear as a first glimmer of earth-light, follow the sweet, hopeful voice of that landing. She will keep you safe beneath her wing.in your sleep After “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams The moment the lark finally vanishes into the spread green sky of the forest is the moment you suddenly lift your bruised arm up, over your body, as though to show me the wing’s eclipse, or the wing, or the season of your dream. And even as your hand lapses silent onto your chest, and your breath goes sluggish, I am already watching your feet prepare their slow first step under the sheet as the last notes of sunlight fall quiet, and you do not move again. My love, are you a bird reviving in a summer field? Was it the lark ascending that you heard, a ghost among its shy-hearted tunes? Yes. I heard the lark escaping, too.
In a vintage boutique on Sullivan’s Quay,I lift a winter coat with narrow bodice, neat lapels,a fallen hem. It is far too expensive for me,but the handwritten label [1915] brings it to my chest in armfuls of red.In that year, someone drew a bladethrough a bolt of fabric and stitchedthis coat into being. I carry itto the dressing room, slip my arms in.Silk lining spills against my skin. I clasp the beltand draw a slow breath as a cramp curls again,where blood stirs and melts. In glass,I am wrapped in the weight of old red:red pinched into girl cheeks and smeared from torn knees, lipstick blotted on tissue, bitten lips, a rough kiss, all the red bled into pads and rags, the weight of red, the wait for red, that we share. In the mirror, the old coat blushes.This pocket may once have sheltered somethingprecious — a necklace, a love letter, ora fresh egg, feather-warm, its shell brittlearound a hidden inner glow, held looselyso it couldn’t crack, couldn’t leak through seams,so it couldn’t stain the dress within.
Blushing in a manner out of keeping with my age(my graying hair, my falling face)I entered Greyfriar’s Inn.I was blushing, and out of keeping with my age.In I went, making my foolish entrance,folding down my umbrella self-consciously — aware of the locals at the bar with their ginand their small talk — and walked right up to the barmaid,somewhat brazenly, I thought. One glass of beer,I said to her, and she, smiling kindly,pulled it. I stood and waited.I waited for them all to stop their fond,drunken reminiscences,for them to stop putting forth their opinions,and to turn to me and say — in an accusatory way — What are you doing here? On a Wednesday night?Unaccompanied?With an accent we can’t quite identify?I waited ready:Why am I here? I would say.I am here as an imposter, an outsider,a reluctant admirer of your lovely daughter Jane — I am here for my Lecture in the Picturesque,to learn of sidescreens and perspectives,to learn of window tax and syntax — and “ha-has” — for harmless gambling in the parlor,wearing mittens and handworked collars and a pretty amber cross — I am here to steal a pistol and a spoon found underground,to rob the peacock feathers streaming from the silly boy’s crown — I am here, I would say, for sensation — For sensation? they would say, and I would say:Yes! Painful sensation of restraint or alarm!Oh ye patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn, I would exclaim,I am here to meet your high-waisted Jane,to embrace her as my comrade; as my brother-in-arms!I stood and waited. But the good patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn,they never said a thing; just continued talking amongst themselves,quietly reminiscing. I paid the barmaid and turned my head.I looked out at the wet; I looked out at the southwest rain,and the redbrick houses. I watched the famous silhouette,gently swinging back and forth above the gate.I raised the glass to her impassive, sideways face.Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.
Do Keara [For Keara] stuaimBa cheart bhur gcur ó aithne,tá an tír róbheag, teanganíos stuama a chleachtadhnó seasamh siar ón tús.Ach anois thar aon am eile,níl teacht ná dul ón tosach.Ag cóisir daoibh in íoslach tí,thug tú úll dó in áit osclóra.Bíonn dúil agus dúil ann,a shonc féin, ba mheidhreach:Bíonn diúltú agus diúltú ann — No thanks, I’ve read the Bible.cant Wipe your memory: the country’s too small, practice holding your tongue or stand back from the thing. As much as ever now there’s no getting past how she slid with aplomb not a corkscrew but an apple into his palm. There’s come-ons, and come-ons and then some. His comeback was winsome. There’s no thanks, and no-thanks-but-frisky— If that makes me Adam, then you must be ... an chéad phlaic I seile an sciatháin leathair, tá ceimiceán a choisceann an fhuil ar théachtadh: De nádúr an ainmhí é gur luaithe tál ná téarnamh.the first mouthful There’s a chemical in bats’ saliva that stops our blood congealing. The animal in us puts giving before healing. an dara plaic Ba gheall le moladh an dara priocadh: gur chaith tú uait gan chothrom fola crúbáil na hoíche faoi sholas obann: tabhairt na doraidh go glé, dá dtabharfaíthe second mouthful Praise be, you thought, when you gave up the ghost. But where’s the glory with no blood lost? The nails of the night beneath a bare bulb: your challenge spotlit. Now take it up. an tríú plaic, nó ath-quoof i Aithníonn sé faoin am seo, an fear i do theannta, nach ligtear as do cheann iad, na cuimhní cinn a roinntear, go mbíodh colúir theachtaireachta aige féin is a athair is go ndéanaidís blaoscanna uibhe a théamh chun gob an éin a neartú. Thug is tugann leat, an taom a bhuail an buachaill, é ag fanacht in oirchill is na blaoscáin á róstadh, gur fhág sé faoin teas rófhada iad—d’aon turas—a chroí ina bhéal aige— le teann spóirt, b’fhéidir, féachaint, dá ainneoin féin, mar a bheadh acu dá bpléascadh blaosc san oigheann air.the third mouthful (quoof: slight return i) Pillow-talker, as you’d be the first to admit, a cat let out of the bag won’t go back in. Now she’s up to speed on how you and your dad used eggshells to harden the beaks of your pigeons, noddingoff over them, billing and cooing, waiting for the shells to roast. Once you left them under the heat on purpose, for devilment maybe—come on, come on—curious what might happen if left in too long. an ceathrú plaic nó ath-quoof ii Aithníodh sé thairis— leathchéile na cuilte, nach slogadh gan chogaint í, an chuimhne cinn leathoilte. Súil siar is túisce a bhuaileann an sprioc: an buachaill nach gcodlaíodh nuair ba thrúig oilc an tost. Níorbh fhéidir a shuaimhniú go gcloiseadh fead na traenach: má bhí tiománaí ina dhúiseacht, ní raibh sé ina aonar.the fourth mouthful (quoof: slight return ii) Something else to chew on besides the tales he’s spun: he should recognize, no matter where, his duvet twin. For the boy keeping watch when sleep would be nobler, the place to look may be over his shoulder. Who can’t rest until the train whistle blows: if the driver is out there he can’t be alone. iarfhocal Bhí a fhios aici, an bhean sin, nárbh ionann súil is éisteacht. Is d’admhódh de chogar claon gur fhadaigh tost an béaldath. Sop préacháin a deirtí le bean a chaitheadh fear uaidh, píosa tuí a d’ardaigh an ghaoth nuair nár oir go beacht don éinín.afterword Well she knew that holding an eye isn’t having an ear; and beyond that she knew how silence improves lipstick. A woman a man drops is called a crow’s wisp: something the wind takes when a bird lets it slip. Translated from the Irish
Forget about it for you’ll never win, never hit the jackpot,move in to a solar-powered eco mansion and modestphilanthropy, become a panjandrum of diaphanous pleasuresbut must sink or swim beneath mood-mutable skies, coconut milk clouds, in the shadow of high flats,low sales, bright fronts, strung crowds of literally miraculouspeople in expensive skin like bed sheetsyou would wrap yourself in and which you now touch lightly as you enterthis café past a clutch of mitching schoolgirlswith pierced noses and Tintin hairdos who lookat you as if to say is it dial-a-dickhead day in here?or maybe that’s aimed instead at the guy eating flatbread with five thousandfriends on his phone who types with a grin all is well with the world,when all is not well with the world — the burden of debtas your granny might say heavy as sin —  although who would begrudgethis incense of crushed coffee in steam this clatter and chatterlatex flowers under halogen lights and who’d demean that womanwith her small child wiping the small child’s chin to the delight of a lonelywell-off older person or w.o.o.p. —  I believe they call themwoopies — at the next table over who scoops two shaking spoonsof sugar into a steaming cup then begins to call her sonOh my lost Son asking after her granddaughter while the mitching girlsswagger out the door — look, one forgot her phone — ah good,someone caught her —  and who would begrudge the yin and yang of this momentsitting here coming or going anyone and no onehere or somewhere else stuck nowhere and flowing in the mix like everyonefor you are blurring below indigo and ink-dim skies as time passesby like steam vapors into the run-of-the-mill gray coat you put onpausing, before leaving to meet this falling day which as your grannymight say is the only day you’re in.
Someone in an accent of seduction whispered salmon.Then someone filled a bucket up with sleep.Mermaidism in the Donnelly housewas five sisters deep.
The girl from the satellitetown holds berries in the fast streamsupermarket queue.She carries her longing like a stream of song,her melodya body over the boundaryof what is solid and what flows.The guys in the depression-hit town are tripping in the fruitaisle. Falling for herberry lightness they slip outfrom their outlines. One guy saysshe takes the form of a dream,or the dream of a form.On the page of the regionalnight berriespulse like the notes of a songin the stream. The girlwho sheds the skin of her longingescapes into morelonging.In a dream on the marginsof town one of the guyshears a girl sing, her voicelike strings,a basket of ripe berriesfloating into the nighton a stream.The girl, the guy, in derelictbedrooms hear lucent songsundressing,streaming from their outlinesthrough the boundariesof town wrapping around themthe scent of fresh berries.And I was the guy and the girlwas withinthe page of the townever, over, after, never, the songlong, long, long, long.The stream is slipped as the groundyou stand on.Build houses out of song.The berries are undressing.The stream is long, gone, long.The girl dreams a form of dream,or forms a dream of form:the boundaries of song in the nightundressed as a stream in the morning.
Emptied, precious, querulous, frail,a box of butter biscuits by the bedside,dun pills in a pale plastic tray,your grandmother lies in her tiny bonesand mumbles, mysterious, while you say nothing,barely thirteen, blank as the day.You were to keep an eye on herbreathing, her little bones heaving,and your eyes scan figurines, mementoson the windowsill — Little Bo Peep has losther head — and green fields through the window:hay barns, small farms, a chicken battery shed.Bwwaaakk! Buck-back-bock-buckaaaakk!Rows upon rows of chickens.There was a funnel hung from a gibbetthat swung like a big steel conical conundrumabove their dun feathers — the colorof your grandmother’s tights scrumpled on the floor.Even a year before, she would have swoonedfor shame at the sight of those tights half-trailedunder her bed, their crinkled wee anklesjouking out, as if they had crawled underand tipped their wrinkled cargo into the void — your grandmother in bed, waiting for the spoon.Her weak breath does not reach heavenbut hazes among the chipped figurines,the dull color television’s black screen,fading flesh-colored flowers on the wall-paper, dun as the wings of those dirt-crustedrows upon rows of throbbing chickens.When you dropped one into the funnelits head pushed through that blood-rimmed Oto stare chicken-eyed at the other side,blackened numbles and gibletsupon which it would soon streamlike warm port, its feet still in a fidget.What gets passed on, through generations?Your grandmother tries to speak. Her bonyfingers clutch your hand — and you bendyour head down. But you’d get more sensefrom the sea in a seashell as your fatherenters the room beaming, Well! Well?
Because this song’s made of the airwavesa time machine, you start to play the airguitar of memory, making a countryso you can walk back into it, like a manon rewind in a silent film, his whiskey tumblerfilling up again as he rises from his stooland steps backwards towards the avenue, wherethe cars, cabs, trucks reverse away from him,and the lights, for once, turn amber to green;where the two hands on his watch unravel time,like a maiden aunt unpicking a whole evening’s worthof knitting over the dropped stitch that meansshe must go back before she can go on.You raise the record from its sleeve again,hold it grail-like into the wayward lightto read the liner notes on a life you’ve livedall wrong. Wind in the sycamores outside,rain coming down in a town you left behindand not this one, where the backward longingcan strike you anytime — breath on the napeof your neck when you’re the only one in line,cat with a broken spine dragging itself offinto the undergrowth to die. Where the silencemight give way to a high-hat or snare drum,the lub-dub of the bass, a brass section.After a long absence, you take up the thread again,take up the line, what you listen for,try not to listen for, stirring the tiny hairswithin your inner ear, weighting the wet tipof your tongue, like the scuff and fumbleof the blind needle finding its way from silenceto the first track on side one. You nodyour head “yes.” You sing along. You tapthe steering wheel of the car in which you passunder a strobe of stars, a quarter moon,until, despite yourself, you are sixteenagain and walking home in a downpourwith your Ken Dodd quiff, your flowers of sulfur,toward the box of records from which you’ll picka tune to name the afternoon. Its scatteredshowers with a chance of sunny spells later,its gust and bluster from Rathlin to Cape Clear.This one would sound good in a stadium.It’s all guitar shimmer, tremolo arm,a chorus that staggers smitten towardthe open bar. This one’s a plea, a paeanon just six strings until the horns cut in,like the bully at a prom. It recalls the tasteof cigarettes and bubblegum on the tongueof the first girl you ever kissed. All broken glassand bruised finger, its swoon circles foreverthe turntable in that blue room where youfed and watered every slight and scar. And soyou’d like to thank the engineer, his assistantwho provides the harmonies and made the tea;the trumpet player, his spit still wet in the mouthof a solo that the vinyl keeps pristine,black box recorder to your submerged plane.The singer with a bone stuck in her throat,which is another way to say “longing.”The producer, who fills in on Hammond organ.You could go on like this, lost in the noiseagain, in your baroque joy at what wasand is, and what the words become, talkingto yourself in the second person, as ifyou’re fooling anyone, reading the liner noteson a life you measure song by song.
This lip, too, used to curl a little easier,and we, all of us, must enter our Vegas years.Blessed the pacemakers, blessed the painkillers,blessed our famed quiffs grown flyaway, grown thin,the gray starting to sprout under the dye.So much to hide beneath the spit and mascara.So much to powder puff and trim. Nose hairs,for instance, and sideburns, the skin seasickas we’re made to play dress-up one final time.A daughter’s bracelet slipped over a wrist,and, for the ring finger, a lightning bolt ring.How far we venture from a love of peanut butterand Wonder Bread, how far from a Stutz Bearcatand Kahlil Gibran. From codeine, meperidine,diazepam, the room with the teddy bearsand the empty syringe. How farfrom the last book we dived into to learnabout sexual positions and astrological signs.And far, too, from the myth of our baritonescoming alive in Tupelo, of how we could turn onand off the rain. “That’s the way the mop flops,”I think he’d say, as they lay him out flatunder the chandelier, then in the limousine.“That’s the way the mop flops,” as five menenter his mausoleum with water, cement,and a wheelbarrow full of sand,the instruments set down, the stage lights dimmed,“Thank you very much! Goodnight, Graceland.”
We drink too much pineapple rum, straight from the bottle,bitch about the red-haired girl, the fetish model,a preacher’s daughter with a thing for unreasonable shoes.From her faded patchwork quilt, bleedinghearts, we watched her mutate into a PVC Alice Liddell.How did she manage in seven-inch patent heels?She was tall as wheat — or the ceiling was low.Cradling a mewing ginger-ball, she kissed the mirrorwhere their confederate-blue eyesmatched. Three scars began to scab on her arm,deep big-cat scrawls she told us she cut herselfbecause it’s art and her clients like herthat way. We followed her clip-clop downthe rabbit hole; me, to hear tales of her running trackin those shoes; you, to see her white skin even palerunder lights. Back in your dorm room, I am static.You pay to watch her pixelated Snow White online;complain her constant chatter ruined it, or her, for you.
The Eiffel Tower erected itself in my head,we couldn’t find the lifts, climbed the stairs.Of course there were fireworks.We stared at each other, rare exhibits in the Louvre —you licked my Mona Lisa smile right off.Of course we were both in imaginary Chanel.We drank warm cider and ate pancakes, yours flambéed.I got drunk, my tights laddered on both legs.Of course we experienced tachycardia at the Moulin Rouge.Our hotel, a boxed macaron on a navy boulevard —we spun around in the dark outside, rain-dizzy.Of course we slept at the Ritz.Our little room tucked into the corner, a pinkpocket you slipped into that night.Of course our fingers hunted for change.In the mirrored elevator I couldn’t meet your eye, Icrushed you into the laminated sample menu and died.Of course it was only la petite mort.
swans The arc of the driveway is what’s left,where someone built a house and tended a laketo walk beside, discussing politicsand how a tree moves in the wind. Its music is a jetty drifting away from the boathousewhose rolled-shut metal door tricksvisitors into thinking it holds a life raft.The house drifts beyond its purpose, is demolished for a car park and picnics and returns in a special room, small, sturdy,becoming anonymous as its windows empty,enormous insects swanning around — they own the place — occasionally stunning themselves on the glass.secretarial The country, sometimes, still appears to ask to just be taken down, even by a tourist, on no one’s side, a tourist lost at home, blue book open, ticking off each task. But when old Colin, in pajamas, explained how I could evade the barbed and electric wire that fenced off fields and the bull let loose to scare the stranger off (I’d stopped to ask for directions), I was ready to wade through cowshit and knee-high grass to see if the poet, long abroad, was written in the ruin’s native life. Colin stopped me then, leaning on the open door of the Renault— noting first the English registration I’d parked outside his roadside bungalow, and said his father hated that his mother called him Colin, but he’s the one who stuck it out. No one, it seems he had to tell me this, no one belonging to them ever had to go over to England, a sally he follows up with a question about where I live, before naming the man on whose land the castle rested:we do nothing, he says, but damage what we inherited, bulldozing the medieval church and causing the collapse of the foxhole the settler and his family used, legend has it, to make, under a smoldering fire, their escape. This new heir has his eye on the castle, no doubt. It will soon be more literature than history. We are not all the same, he said. I recall, at the edge of the clearing, the grant’s nice clause saying the poet had a right to possess new areas discovered by his survey ... To belong, a moment’s authority is nothing.
From a microlight, the Owens River,cut and siphoned to an aqueduct:a corridor through banks of trees, into scuffed desert dunes, mountainsscaling to the right, to the left dry veinsin the valley, saline and pink, the waterchanneled slowly through scatch grass,under dirt tracks and fences, twenty miles,thirty — black line turning silver in midday sun,dipping beneath the roar of Route 395into the shade of the alkaline hills.It zigzags past farms, arcs around quarries,swipes the bar code of a glinting new town,the alien discs of pivot irrigationgrowing sunflowers, roses, and corn.Then follows the highway, just after Big Pine,rejoins the river north of Fish Springs,is diverted again, south of the reservoir — And does water care, if it’s riveror aqueduct? Its vessel curved concrete,but the same constant flow, gunneling south,hugging the contours of eastern Sierra,past Independence, the airport,the golf course, along the right hand of Owens’dry lake bed, red swirling dust clouds kept downby sprinklers. From up in the airthe twin Haiwee Reservoir is knuckleand knee joint where the line disappears — becomes pipeline and conduitunder the desert, punching for groundwater,surfacing riveted over Mojave,two hundred miles on from its native cradle,gray zombie spring tracing through forestto Santa Clarita, the treatment plant:the last reserve and loud cascadesabove the lights and life of Los Angeles.
To Norbert Valath To render the ocean one needs a whole yearwith Zoom in freezing fingers on a quarter-mile of coast.Sound is the one true vocabulary of natureand not the peacock-palette painters swearhe uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes.To render the ocean one needs a whole yearon the quayside tracking the tide’s increasing stature,its drones and climaxes, the diminuendo when it showssound is the one true vocabulary of nature.Nature plays bass clarinet in a Barcelona pop-up theatre.In a polo neck he solos the ocean. He tongues, he blowsto render the ocean. One needs a whole yearor centuries to capture even its least-most feature:like the boat-cove’s lapping, backwashed contraflows.Sound is the one true vocabulary of Nature,who’s lost in his MacBook, applying filter after filterto this day-long rock-pool’s jazz, its stadium of echoes.To render its ocean one needs a whole year:sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.
From the platform, iron iterates way into time.The tracks are staples intervaled along my father’s spine.Before me might be somebody’s father, waited for — whitechoker of a condor, dry lips of lifelong acolyte.I barely brush his arm, so as not to make him start.Who knows how he might play out: cave in, tear apart?He deeds toward me, wet wood breakable. All in allof direst bark. This is how it starts, at last, I recall.“I thought you were someone, otherwise.”The rail lines rattle like beetle files.He frowns. Establishes his palms.“Tell me. Does that happen often, lamb?”
I gcead do Kobus Moolman Poor deleted Tarragona, our city of bonfires. Our city of casual drug use and vinyl that’s been consigned to the archive of snow. What what what’s missing, what’s conspicuous by its absence from the main square and its tributaries: the future perfect or future continuous? I can’t find that beautiful thing you asked me for. I can’t find my memory of making it. When that device was triggered in Placa del Pi at first no one noticed anything. But then the different parts of speech began to shrivel and petrify, to disappear completely; interjections, measure words gone within a fortnight. We’d open our mouths to utter them but nothing. Shortly after that came the battalions, marching in ebony lockstep across a border we’d misplaced, had long ago forgotten ever existed. They just appeared one Sunday in their expressionless squadrons, they appeared like chimes solidifying in their obsidian fatigues. They occupied Jew Hill, the barracks, the Generality. By then all the hard-edged abstract words had rotted, had grown 
incontinent and squelching, as the canker advanced with terminal 
facility from diamantine epidermis to pulpy interior. No plums anymore. When they come they come in the predawn to confiscate recollection, targeting random apartments in the sour-milk light, each wears a helmet. No sausages. No . None of those lavender-remembering pears I’d bring in baskets for you every October. They’re unscrewing the street signs on and  Your clean, cedar-hinting scent, your scent of   I can’t find my memory of   they can’t
In September 1607 the village of Fianaise Bhréagach was hit by an unidentified disease, taking the lives of all the villagers. The village was razed and official records expunged. In 2007 an account written by the local undertaker was found buried in the roots of a tree in the quarantined village’s square which unearthed details of this disaster. They sent a horse along the roads to say our town had been closed in,its bloodied hooves had been unshod. The shoes were kept to save the ironor bless the fate of those who stayed across the glens or down the coast.This horse’s message came our way while sentries occupied their posts,the note was tied around its neck declaring death was soon to reachwhere all would feel its fevered knock: the butcher’s shop, the mill, the church.The hardest village men played tough until the store of ale ran dry;the women stopped their mouths with cloth and held their husbands as they died.Disease took hold with sudden force. We thought that we could hush the moansso skinned and burned the flagging horse and let the fire consume its bones.My children’s skin turned cold and flushed. Acquainted as I was with deathI saw their end and held their trust so cut their throats and sucked their breath.I dug their graves and then some more.
Cloiseann sé fós é: díoscán an oighir,tormáil i bhfad uaidh,ciúnas an tsneachta.Is cuimhin leis go fóillan t-aer úr a shlogadh,an dá scamhóg aige glanta,fuacht naofa ag beannú a chnis.Thug sé grá a chroídon ghoimh gheal,don díseart tostachdon tírdhreach glan.Ach b’éigean dó filleadh ar an taiseacht is ar an mbaile.Bhí air cúl a thabhairt don mbáine.Is iomaí oíche a iarrann a bhean air go caoinan chistin a fhágaint is dul léi a luí.Is aoibhinn leis uaigneas an tsileáin ón sconna.Is ceol aige srannán an reoiteora: Nótaí doimhne á seimint go mall,Gliúscáil ochlánacha labhair le gach ball dá bheo. He can still hear it:the glaciers rasping,their ratcheting in the distance,the snow-quiet.And still he remembersgulping unsullied freshnessto clarify his lungs,the holy coldness blessing his skin.He gave his heartto that stinging brightness,that taciturn redoubt,that uncluttered country.But no choice except a returnto dampness and home.He had to turnhis back on blankness.On so many nightshis wife asks him tentativelyto abandon the kitchenand join her upstairs.He loves the irregular lonelinessof each tap-dripand it’s music to himthe refrigerator’s drone:basso profundoslow in the recital,grinding sighs that call outto his being’s every melting element.Translated from the Irish
Chonac smólach marbh sa choillé seargtha ar an screablach.Bhíos ag déanamh trua denuair a tháinig madraí de rúidis thugadar ruathar fúmag snapadh, ag glamadh agus drant orthu. Uaimse do tháinig liúbhéic,gach bagairt is buille coise:Bhí ina bhúirchath eadrainn.Chorraigh na ba sna goirtis chuireadar leis an gcór allta.Theith lucha is dallóga fraoighisteach faoin doire donn,sheas madra rua ar shiolpa,a cholainn iomlán righin.Chuimhníos ar mo choisíocht;bhí ceithre chrúb fúm. I saw a thrush-corpse shrivelingon the woodland’s scrabbly floor.I was busy pitying itwhen there came a harrying packof strays that set about me;they bayed and snapped,growling bare-toothed.From my throat such roaring;my every curse and foot-swingmade a bellow-war between us.Fields of agitated cattleaugmented that wild choir.Mice and shrewmice shrunk backinto the oakleaf brown interioras a fox reared upward on a stony ridge,its stance utterly rigid.I remembered to run,felt the four paws under me.Translated from the Irish by Billy Ramsell
Early April and there’s a light-footed feel.Nothing troubles from the darkened underbrush,and the sun’s late beauty daubsthe green wood with yellows.As if for you, a thrush rills, blue pieces of silverthat will dry like watermarks. Almost delicate,the hour around seven, a blown-glass bowl,edgeless and honed, made bespoke.Yet somewhere inside this evening hour,a man refutes: his fistwill not burden the kitchen table.A wintered heart, hard as a knot of holly.
Down, unequal weight on his haunchesand the rain driving his shirt sideways,his legs are as rigid as the stone and timberthat props him up. Ears, half-opened lipsslurred to bits; a head no longer ableto troubleshoot the broken glass inside him. • Wiry treetops are blacker. The after-rain lightdiffused to near neon-gray. There was a boyseen by neighbors running the width of the field.One said he disappeared — as if he fell headlonginto the horizon. Another said it wasn’t a boy,but a hart. Next to nothing left where Evanswas found, but there was a sound box,some thing in which his soul made itself felt.
October and the rain is warmthe light moving across the water’s surfaceis there and not therelike a voice you remembersay your mother’syouthful as once she wason a day like thisembracing the sunshine breaking throughor watching it tracebetween her fingertips so realyou can almost believe again in the silencebetween you, her breath on your cheekwhile you lay ill in bedand in only a momenta bell is ringing or your fatheris singing in the kitchen about strangersand without even an echo or the echoof an echo all of this is gone andwe’re walking again to the Hellfire Clubor the Sugar Loaf, it’s Sundaythere’s not much traffic, and on the hillsas you run twigs, and small black pelletsare vanishing beneath your feet
The memory of sun, it is what they subsist upondown where the jaws snap blindlyat whatever passes, where drifter is a meaningless termand to hunt is to proffer teeth and tongueand ghost-lit lanterninto a sea like liquid wind,without prior compassof the way the wind is blowing.Should they be gifted with a corpsewhose half-spoilt flesh holds distillateeternal summersspent glittering in the euphotic zone,they will give gross thanks and, in their way, be holy.In the cartography of sea,they are kin not to dragons nor the Stella Marisbut to your own bright band —yes, you there, eating your sunlight secondhandfrom a long-gone grocery display,drinking it from the guts of lazy lemons.
In the field — shepherd’s purse:to be seen even in the dark.Think on it — after the gravel paths,after the roads — uneven and achingly long,across the cold promise the border makesto a sloping field, to a ditch.A ditch like any other.A ditch I have known — since.Imagine them: green, slender, from crown to root,a rosette of radical leaves, smooth,arrow-shaped and above them numerous small,white, inconspicuous flowers.There was no need to askthe man to kneel but he did,as if he were going to beg forgiveness,which he did not, nor did he ask for his life.He named his children and his wife,murmured to his own private God.Overhead, there was the sound of pine shifting,the moon winnowing in the distance.So, nothing terrible about the night then,if you do not count the earth tilting,or the sound in the undergrowthof a passage from this world to the next.More than that I remember the flat-seed pouch:weed some call it, as if to flourish and seedin the poorest soil is to be just that.They are everywhere now — it seems to me,populating my field of visionlike a generative disease, an affliction.Look:a man walks into a field.A field with shepherd’s purse.He falls.He falls again.Every day, from this day until kingdom come,he falls into the embrace of a field of flowers,into shepherd’s purse.
What stopped her bawling was the doorbellringing, and a man standing there with fiveyellow roses, bulked up with green frondsand tied in a dinky knot with olive twine.There was no card to say who the flowerscame from. The man’s uniform was bluewith a brown insignia of a spider on his righttop pocket that she saw he kept unbuttoned.As he waltzed down the path to the gatethe Siamese cat that frequented the gardenraised its back and hissed. The man laughedand flounced out to his waiting white van.Oh, the shit-faced side streets of life! OK,she’d been born in Madras, in a flowery tea shopwhile an albino conjurer magicked a hareto leap from his heavily-ringed brown fingers.Five yellow roses? Enough to encourage herto cook saffron rice, with turmeric-tinged prawnsand sautéed yellow courgettes. She didn’t playthe Ry Cooder where yellow roses say goodbye.
the lonely Incorporating the words of L.S. Lowry I used to paint the sea, but never a shore,and nobody was sailing on it. It wasn’t eventhe sea, it was just my own loneliness.It’s all there, you know. It’s all in the sea.The battle is there, the inevitability of it all,the purpose. When I switched to peoplethey were all lonely. Crowds are theloneliest thing of all, I say. Every individualin them is a stranger to everyone else.I would stand for hours in one spotand scores of little kids who hadn’t hada wash for weeks would group round me.Had I not been lonely, none of my workwould have happened. I should not havedone what I’ve done, or seen what I’ve seen.There’s something grotesque in me and Ican’t help it. I’m drawn to others who arelike that. They’re very real people. It’s justI’m attracted to sadness and there are somevery sad things. These people are ghostlyfigures. They’re my mood, they’re myself.Lately, I started a big self-portrait. I thoughtI won’t want this thing, no one will, soI went and turned it into a grotesque head.memo to lowry You’re right, there are grotesques who shine a dark light that lures us like how the sirens tried to lure Odysseus, and yes, maybe we ourselves are among the grotesques, but there are also the beautiful who, if we’re lucky, save us from ourselves, and validate the sun’s light, and maybe also the moon’s.
It was a blessèd time we were at the beachGo out early in the morning no shoes no hats no tiesAnd quick as a toad’s tongue can reachLove wounded the hearts of the mad and the wise Did you know Guy when he galloped along When he was a military man Did you know Guy when he galloped along When he was an artiman In the war It was a blessèd time At mail callWe are squeezed in tighter than on a busAnd the stars passing by were mimicked by the shellsIn the night when the cannons came rolling upDid you know Guy when he galloped along When he was a military man Did you know Guy when he galloped along When he was an artiman In the war It was a blessèd time Days and nights blendingThe stew-pot shells gave our trench dugoutAluminum shrapnel that you set aboutSmoothing all day into an unlikely ringDid you know Guy when he galloped along When he was a military man Did you know Guy when he galloped along When he was an artiman In the war It was a blessèd time The war goes onThe Gunners have filed for part of a yearSafe in the woods the Driver can hearAn unknown star repeating a songDid you know Guy when he galloped along When he was a military man Did you know Guy when he galloped along When he was an artiman In the war Translated from the French
Knock knock He has closed his doorThe garden’s lilies have started to rotSo who is the corpse being carried from the houseYou just knocked on his door And trot trot Trot goes little lady mouseTranslated from the French
To G. de Chirico I have built a house in the middle of the OceanIts windows are the rivers flowing from my eyesOctopi are crawling all over where the walls areHear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against 
the windowpanes House of dampness House of burning Season’s fastness Season singing The airplanes are laying eggs Watch out for the dropping of the anchor Watch out for the shooting black ichor It would be good if you were to come from the skyThe sky’s honeysuckle is climbingThe earthly octopi are throbbingAnd so very many of us have become our own gravediggersPale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaksAround the house is this ocean that you know well And is never still Translated from the French
Since we nailwings to the dead,she calls ravensfrom the skyto inspect our work. “For flight,”they say, “first remove their boots.”She leans in,inspects a fresh hex behind my eyes,takes my feetand lays them on the fire,to burn it out, roots first.We’re the last,babička and me.We’ve survived on chance and breadbaked from the last store of grain.And as we’re out of both,we will die soon.They are gatheringin the well.We disrobe.She hums whilst I nail her wings,she tells me a tale, her last gift —“This dark stain,passed kiss to kiss-stainedfevered mouth,blights love, is pulsedby death-watch beetle’stick, timing our decay.They know this.They wait by water,gulping despair.The ravens keep watch,they say the contagion’s here,they promise to take us first.”Her tale done,we go winged and nakedto the well.We hear themclimbing the walls, caterwauling,but ravens are swift, and swoop.
Adapted from the original notebook fragment written by Rainer Maria Rilke in Spain in 1913. Evidently, this was needed. Because people needto be screamed at with proof.But he knew his friends. Before they werehe knew them. And they knewthat he would never leave themthere, desolate. So he let his exhausted eyes closeat first glimpse of the village fringed with tall figtrees — immediately he found himself in their midst:here was Martha, sister of the deadboy. He knewshe would not stray,as he knew which would;he knew that he would always find herat his right hand, and beside herher sister Mary, the onea whole world of whoresstill stood in a vast circle pointing at. Yes,all were gathered around him. And once againhe began to explainto bewildered upturned faceswhere it was he had to go, and why.He called them “my friends.” The Logos, God’screating word, — the same voice that saidLet there be light.Yetwhen he opened his eyes,he found himself standing apart.Even the twoslowly backing away, as thoughfrom concern for their good name.Then he began to hear voices;whisperingquite distinctly,or thinking:Lord,if you had been hereour friend might not have died
I’m thinking about you and you’re humming while cutting a piece of wood.I’m positive you aren’t thinking about me which is fine as long as youaren’t thinking about yourself. I know and love the way you inhabitthis house and the occasions we mutually create. But I don’t knowthe man you picture when you see yourself walking aroundthe world inside your head and I’m jealousof the attention you pay that personwhom I suspectof being devious.
Let the light stand for nothingbut illumination. Letthe naked man and womanout for air. Let the curtain hideonly another side of thecurtain. Let the food consumedbe consummated. Let theconsommé be a dish. Let thedish into the bedroombecause she is there for thecat. Let the cat be cool as Miles.Let it all happen againif you can. Let it happen againif you can. Let the first wordspoken during intercourse be theonly definition you require. Letneed be need. Let love be needalso, if need be. And letit all happen again because it can.
1 There’s a lot going on in“the”zombie apocalypse.But wouldn’t she recognizethat her motherwas a zombie?I mean zombiesare a thing.2 The last thing she didwas pointto one corner of the ceilingwith a horrified stare.The nurse called this “a seizure.”As if wordsdrained experienceof content and continuedto accumulate.As if wordswere sealed containersstored for safe keeping.3 The backgroundis everythingthat, for now,can be safelyignored
1 That a memory,caught and mountedfor permanent display,is not muchlike anything that happenscan’t be surprising.But where does that leave us?Night at the Museum,the set piecesin their comicignorance of one anothertake the stage.2 In this series,he tosses heron the bedlike laundryas she strugglesirrelevantlyagainst the stickinessof tapeand it’s just this:the blind persistenceof her struggleand his (feigned?)indifference,the way each proceeds,blinkered and mechanical,into whateverthis recreates
I wanted to be seen. But who would see me? I couldn’tthink of the name for anything but a flower. The governmentmakes coins that size and shape so your hand can feelsafe holding them. The pictures stamped remindus where we are, or how the landscapewe live in connects itself, through common value,to a different place. On this one, a spinnakersails past a bridge. On that, a diamond shines like a child’sstilled top over a bird, as if the diamond made the naturalworld — bird, forest, state flower, sheaf of healthy corn, shiningwater — out of proportion in relation to itself. I love this. My own statehas a bear, so small and out of proportion to me that my life-line can cross behind it. At last I do not fearthat but feel proud the animal can sit in my palm so silentlyuntil I spend it. And if I lose it, then it becomeseven more quiet. Most still just have an eagle,so it is as if 30 eagles were passed overfrom one hand to another when the onecharged with arranging things for his Savior’s dinnerarranged his Savior’s death. Heavier the yokeof heat in solitude. A walk uphill does notfeel manageable. Who will see me?
In those days I began to see light under everybushel basket, light nearly splittingthe sides of the bushel basket. Light camethrough the rafters of the dairy where the gracklescongregated like well-taxed citizensuntransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the oneunderneath the basket. I was certain I had nothing to say.When I grew restless in the interior,the exterior gave.
For Nate Pritts The friend lives half in the grassand half in the chocolate cake,walks over to your house in the bashful lightof November, or the forceful light of summer.You put your hand on her shoulder,or you put your hand on his shoulder.The friend is indefinite. You are bothso tired, no one ever notices the sleeping bagsinside you and under your eyes when you’re talkingtogether about the glue of this life, the stickysaturation of bodies into darkness. The friend’s crisisof faith about faith is unnerving in its powerto influence belief, not in or toward some otherhigher power, but away from all power in the grassor the lake with your hand on her shoulder, your handon his shoulder. You tell the friend the best thingsyou can imagine, and every single one of them hasalready happened, so you recount themof great necessity with nostalgic, atomic ferocity,and one by one by one until many. The eggbirds whistlethe gargantuan trees. The noiserocks fall twistedinto each other’s dreams, their colorful paratrooping,their skinny dark jeans, little black walnutsto the surface of this earth. You and the friendremain twisted together, thinking your simultaneousand inarticulate thoughts in physical lawlessness,in chemical awkwardness. It is too muchto be so many different things at once. The friendbrings black hole candy to your lips, and jumpingoff the rooftops of your city, the experience.So much confusion — the several layers of exhaustion,and being a friend with your hands in your pockets,and the friend’s hands in your pockets.O bitter black walnuts of this parachuted earth!O gongbirds and appleflocks! The friendputs her hand on your shoulder. The friendputs his hand on your shoulder. You finda higher power when you look.
One last meal, family-style — no family, and with suspect style. November first, my almost-groomfresh off his flasher costume discharge at the office. Harris tweed.I read it on his antisocial feed. The motel life is all a dream —we were, as they say, living the dream. I appreciate our quandary, hot-plate dates and frowsy laundry. Face tattoos are never a good sign.I hope his tumor is benign. I won’t forget the time he lentme Inches, which I gave up for Lent. Our love was threat, like phantom pain.An almost-plan for a bullet train. I’m weaning myself off graphic tees,not taking on any new disease. I walk along Pier 5 to kill the myth,of course another stab at myth. I pull my output from the shelfand wildly anthologize myself. I’ve adopted another yellow lab.I hope to die inside this cab. My lack of faith is punctuation —no wait, the lack of punctuation. Every intonation, one more pactwith injury; my latest one-act: “Flossing in Public.”In the spattered glass of the republic.
Like eelgrass through a glass-bottom boat on the Silver River, I see the state, obscured yet pure. Derision,a tattooed flame cracklingunderneath the lewd, uncoolkhaki of an amused park worker.I was the sometimes boy on a leash, my sliver of assent in 1984 —as if it were my decision.The I-75 signage, more than metaphor. As if I had the right to vote.The slumber parties then were hidden wood;the tea so sweet, the saccharinpink and artificial, like intelligence.The science sponsored in part by chance.I made my acting debut with the reddilettante down the street, “Rusty” Counts,in Rusty Counts Presents: Suburbs of the Dead,straight to VHS. My parents phoned a counselor.A palmetto bug read Megatrends on the fold-ing chair by our above-ground swimming pool ...The pool shark lurked, but not to fear.The end unknowable, blue, inmost, and cold, like the comfort of a diplomatic war.
In homage to Osip Mandelshtam I am sure I donot believe we canmove a pencil througha white field, pulled bya team of upside-down ox-head letterAs, and in real factfurrow it. Poor oldpage-earth — sized, cut, scraped, ploughed with mule-pencilsor impressed by ink,illuminated,printed, obscurelyinscribed, and reveredor destroyed, reveredand destroyed, and herecomes yet anotherwalled-garden crop foreye, ear, lungs, legs, mind. • The cranium domehangs from its own silkconceptual threadof thought, conceivingits infinite in-complete perfection:its Zeno, its Zeus,its Dante, its TeDeums and freak shows,frescoes, twine theory,money, bread, bricks andwine, six-syllableabstractions, axesand facts, its everyvariation ofcustom, includingvertical graves ofmen buried upsidedown without their heads.• (In dusk-lit, telling ways, tell me, little swallow, Tuscan or T’ang or wrung somehow from time: since I have neither feather nor wing, how I too cango into a gravemade only of air.)• “For your sweet joy, take“from my cupped hands a“little glittering“of sun, a little“honey — for this is“what Persephone’s“bees have commanded.“A boat can’t cast off“if it isn’t moored;“no one can hear a“shadow that wears fur“boots; we can’t best our“fright in this dark wood.“Our kisses — these are“all that we can save,“velvety as bees“that die if they are“exiled from the hive.“They’re murmuring in“the transparent groves “of the night; the wilds“of mountain Greece are“their motherland; their“diet is time, lung-“wort, pale meadowsweet.“For joy, please take this“pagan gift: this rude,“rustling necklace of“the bees that died, for“these had transmuted“honey into sun.”
The child is not dead. She is sleeping. Gone from this world Which is broken. The angel of Michael Outside the garden His circle of fire Maddening around the tree. He put the word Back into her: A heavy kind of music. Then she was free. As we all are. All night I stood in the icy wind, Praying for the storm to destroy me. But the wind blew through me Like I was a hologram. If you say I am a mystic, Then fine: I’m a mystic. The trees are not trees, anyway.
When Claude says blessed is he who has seen and believes, you know he is about to tell the one about bees. His father told him which kind of sting was worst, but you have to see some things for yourself, and when you ask how on earth do you catch a bee to see anything, he tells how you hunker down next to a sweet potato blossom and watch until one lands on the ruffled cuff and then ambles down into the sweeter sleeve. You lean over and pinch the blossom shut, and there you have it, ready to sting yourself so you can decide on your own, and he wants for you not to doubt this: even more blessed, you will be, you have heard — and not seen.
We are of one mindand too much has not been saidabout all the quiet afternoons childhood offered us, lit gray like a cat, or blue, and cursed with an early moon. When father wore an apron or crept like a bear, we screamed.Nothing is so gone. Where is his record player or the channel that forked a distant year toward us,kind, slow magnet?There was a song we sharedwithout your listening, you widowed soul crawling away on your elbows.I sing it to my child, with a full hand Iflick its rapeseeds everywhere,clear, and slow,with all the sincerity its author indeed feltin his ten-gallon hatand his thin, whisky-soaked shirt.
The my becomes a the, becomes the state’s the coroner’s, a law’s, something assignable, by me, alone, though it will not be the I I am on leaving it, no longer to be designated human or corpse: cadaver it will be, nameless patient stored in the deep hold of the hospital as in the storage of a ghost ship run aground —the secret in it that will, perhaps, stir again the wind that failed. It will be preserved, kept like larva, like a bullet sealed gleaming in its chamber. They will gather around it, probe and sample, argue — then return it to its between- world, remove their aprons and gloves and stroll, some evenings, a city block for a beer, a glass of chilled white wine. Even there, they will continue to speak of it, what they glean from beneath the narrative of scars, surgical cavities, the wondrous mess it became before I left it to them with what’s left of me, this name, a signature, a neatened suture, perfect, this last, selfish stitch.
The town’s trees, roomy with winter, have begun of late to fill with them, a settling that commences with dusk. The widows complain —claim they can smell them, can hear them shuffling in the trees, a wing hitting a branch a sound sharp, they say, as ice cracking. They cannot sleep. And so you form a committee, convening with shotguns to fire every night into the darkling congregation. Every night, the air resounds with that resolve, and every dusk they return with theirs, circle, a lazy familiar vortex around a drain, an old appointment they keep with an inescapable place; this argument no way, Claude says, to be any less afraid.
1 Claude says he, too, was given the tracks and not the train, the way — and not the way out, not the beyond beyond that bend, or the next. The place they call Drybridge — for the waterless bed of rails — where on the banks, you grow up learning more news from hoboes than from the mailman.But you know nothing of the train as it passes behind the backs of grander houses, gutted warehouses, chained dogs, as it grazes an alien grid of fences — of stone, metal, and chain-link. Or that when it passes beneath the underside of a bridge, a boy your own age waves the way you do, and that there is a horse doesn’t lift its head, and one that does, only to lower it again.2 You are a grown man when the train comes to a scalding stop, and a lantern swings down the road. A man has been killed, they call out from behind the light’s aura, and would you come see what you can tell of him by what’s left. You do know his hat, and that burn scar on the back of his hand. What you know of his wifeyou do not say and will not even the next night when you sit up with the body in the house he wanted that much shut of, her voice rigid as its walls while the train you hear out there in the darkness passes by the way it always does, as though the same, the very same, and, again, on the time it will this night be able to keep.
1 Just as there were reeds along the riverbank,Just as there were cloudsAbove my head, my lute was lying beside me on the grass.I placed the little finger of my right hand on the soundboard,Just below the strings.Not the tip of the finger, the side.I curled the palm of my right hand towards me,Covering the strings, so that I playedThe bass note with the thumb,The next with the index,And the top note with the third.The sun retreated, the night turned cold.Rain began to fall, softly at first,Though surely rain had fallen here before, as rain falls everywhere.With my left hand, I positioned my thumb and index fingerOpposite each other, bearing no weight,As if the neck of the lute were not there.2  At this they all laughed.Then the Count began afresh: My lords, he said, I am not pleased with the young man if he is not also a musician, and if, besides his cunning upon the book, he have not skill in like manner on sundry instruments. There is no ease of labor more honest and more praiseworthy, especially at court, where many things are taken in hand to please women, whose tender breasts are soon pierced with melody. Then the Lord Gasper: I believe music, he said, together with other vanities, is mete for women, also for them that have the likeness of men, but not for them that be men indeed, who ought not with such delicacies womanize their minds and so bring themselves to dread death.  — The First Booke of the Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio 3 For many years I lived apart, in happy oblivion. In retrospect, I understand I’d been a child, Though lacking comparisons I couldn’t have said so. I learned things, things no child, left to himself, could possibly know. My head, which had been empty, now was full. My head would grow larger. How could it not? At night, standing in the shower, I closed my eyes. The water trickled down my forehead To my nose, from my nose to my lips, my chin, then disappeared. But some of what stayed in my head Should not have been there.4  Listen, said the reeds along the riverbank: the nymphs Are weeping for Daphnis. His mother embraces his body, railing against the stars. Nobody drives his cattle to the cool stream, no one could drink; The mountains echo with the beasts of the desert. Daphnis, it was you who yoked them to the chariot, Who led us in the dance, weaving Together vine leaves with reeds. The vine exceeds the tree on which it climbs. The grape exceeds the vine, The calf the herd, the corn the field. Now, where we planted barley, thistles grow. Where once were violets, hyacinths — nothing but weeds. Scatter the ground with flowers, shepherds, Set out two bowls, One of milk and one of oil. Then carve these lines from Virgil on his tomb:I was Daphnis in these woods. The stars knew my name. Beautiful the flock, more beautiful the shepherd.
Do you see current events differently because you were raised by a black father and are married to a black man? I am surprised they haven’t left already —  things have gotten downright frosty, nearly unbearable.A mob of them is apparently mouthing off outsidewhen I put down my newspaper and we all gatherto stand beside my daughter in the bay of kitchen windows. Quiscalus quiscula: this name sounds like a spell which, after its casting,will make things crumble into a complement of unanswerable questions. Though, if you need me to tell you God’s honest truth, I know nothing but their common name the morning we watch them attackour feeder. I complain about the mess they leave. HullsI’ll have to sweep up or ignore. My father —  who I am thankful is still alive — says We could usea different kind of seed
Who knows more of gods than I?Deities defied, not the first time.I scan scraps of Abraxas,Rap along to Pac; rip Big’s Faith,My skin infection scratched, an itchWith which I cannot live. I prayFor nightmares — Dana Dane — to stopEffluvial rainfall. Oh, here comesThe wet stuff. Here come I.Up the train, off the 7, upThe stairs to Vernon. The church?St. Mary’s. 49th, 49th, 49th.El ay si mac and cheese. IPA.A walk across Pulaski Hump toGreenpoint. It’s post-popHipster, so my jeans pressJust one plum to my leg.The Dionysus to the other,The Apollo orbiting right, left.In the middle, Bazooka Joe.It is, after all, so cold (the plum).Baller status. Church bells chime,The chimera within. A right on Driggs,Parallel to Bedford.Ratty chains, skulls patch a pylonMaze of bubblegum dusk.Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant,The livest one.
Sestina Jackson met Text-Deft James on 09/09/09.A Red Hook, BK dock party celebrated Otis Redding’sBirthday. Sestina mouthed along to “The Happy Song,”And TDJ smiled, baring his Cornel West-esqueTeeth. Text-Deft’s chops whiter, but same gap.Cigs and java, then shake, as Battery ParkGleamed across the East River. Text-Deft parkedHis literary, rusty Lincoln Continental nineBlocks from the new IKEA, a small gap Between rusty bumpers scuffed with dingsAnd marker tags. Sestina Solange-esque,Perhaps Solange times ten. All poet, songLyrics fly from Sestina. She sang songsIn Jackson Heights with Granny J parkedBy her side. This bash? Carnival masque.Now, they swayed to “6-3-4-5-7-8-9,”That’s my number! TD leadingSestina before long. No gapIn the music. All Otis — no stopgap.The moon moved, drifted. The songsKicked. TD whispered over fadingBass: “You wanna walk through the park?Talk about Zadie and Roth and (and and) nineOther scribes?” A nod. SJ: “I’m A. Rich-esque.Gimme Duhamel, Dove, a Clifton-esqueOde. Poetry owns me. I scan tales as a gapBetween ghazals and villanelles. B. Collins’s NineHorses, Espada’s Alabanza. Cathy SongPreaches to perceive heaven. Poet’s Walk ParkIn the other Red Hook, upstate — riding Up the Metro North — let’s go.” TDJ: “Send tidingsMy way. We’ll plan a soiree. A rom-com-esque Romp. As we travel to this Norse poet park,We’ll laugh and say ‘mind the gap,’In droll Brit brogues. What will our songBe? An Otis classic? A dirge to survey Odin’s ninthWorld?” Nine times the voice and dingSing, as monotone noises, robot-esque,Order them: watch the gap. Then? The park. Oh! Hucklebuck! Treat her right! Yes, you, Text-Deft James. He says, “I swear by the mud below my feet. When I read, I don’t grind. A great text has great beauty. A great horse, too, has great beauty. Horses, equine, all this Alan from Equus-esque worship at the altar, but then comes the eye spike. Like Odin. I guess we always come back to the eyes. They beat the horse to flies, above, inside, around. They write papers that grind horses into dog grub ... ”  Sestina: “My rugged poetic sensibilities allow me to embrace 
extended metaphorical diction of disturbing, lurid carnage. But please, please. Spare your doggish death rattle. First dates occur once. Among the dates’ participants, that is; e.g, me, you. So, if you will, ax the horse talk. I prefer rubbery arms, Espada’s cockroaches, axes on frozen pond sludge. Sibilant rush. Gimme Yusef’s Orpheus. Or Ferlinghetti from Coney Island to North Beach. Gimme Wisława Szymborska (a name I can pronounce, FYI. RIP.) Please. Please, Text-Deft James. Not equinicide. I’ve seen bearded ladies whisper acclaim, whimper shame. Devil nuns. I whisper a clipped utterance of the ineffable. The untied united. Not only ineffable, but tangible ... ” (unsaid: I take my tongue, propelled by chemical soul, and I have a dirty, nasty, downright raunchy time with it. I’m talking sheets off the bed, candles tipped over, shower flooding the bathroom tile. T-shirt grimy from fun crust. That type of night. I, Sestina, won’t share such thoughts. Instead —) “ ... know my resurrected heart beats brick red. Know that I seek poetry in moose lodges, in homeless shelters, in candy shops. I do remember walking down Northern Blvd. with Granny J, begging for sour candy. Bears dipped in sugar: cherry, orange, lime mixed. Let’s hover above this grass. As a kid, I went to Shea Stadium, waved a foam finger, and I was sure I’d marry a Met, maybe Al Leiter. As we stand here in front of this rustic pavilion, I’d like to ask you on another date. The Mets have few home games left, and I’d love some BBQ.”
To thwart? To abet? To mete?Quixotic cobbler, spread apocryphalmendacity from Styx to Mt. Dix.Yoke check to bank, broadcastflaccid gospel. Raze it! Scorch it!It’s summertime in Mendocino.Ah, poke stigmatized feet-stank.Quotidian Stygian, pack funk-stuffedrucksacks into boats of dope(d) diction.Fuck Friday. Yes, you, Freya. Be fazed.
As in green, vert, a royal demesnestocked with deer. Invert as in tippedas a snow globe, going nowhere in circlesbut not lost, not bereft as the woodwithout deer, waiting for the white antleredbuck, or his does, or any slim yearlingto step along the berm, return. Vertigoas in whirling round, swimming in the head,unanchored by the long spring,the horse cantering, the meadow droppinglike an elevator into the earth, fallinglike Persephone through a crevice, a swivelingcrack, a loose screw, a lost way. Disorderedas in death lasts, my brother’s not coming back.The spin of it continuous as in looking downfrom height, and then it stops, the spinningjust slows, a chariot wheel stilled in grass.The world is the same, but it isn’t. The tippedviews of trees when hanging from your knees.The deer in twos and threes watching.
Out-of-focus photographs in front of equestrian monuments. The fog of the drug, low-impact anecdotes and scenes from badly dubbed films. With this we arrive at our 40s and we shouldn’t be ungrateful. It could be worse.   • The year ending with the month of parakeets who didn’t let anyone sleep with their demented squawking. The day we lowered our arms believing we were raising them.   • An arm, a fragment of an arm congealed on the left margin: the photograph in which we’re posing like tourists in the ugliest city in the world. An extremity outside the frame pointing toward a place without historical value. That photograph, the mechanics of a smile set in motion by a signal from the stranger who took it.   • To keep from dwelling on the imminent let’s speculate about the fate of a friend from elementary school who always covered his notebooks in pink. Or let’s be practical and calculate our taxes.   • May God keep you, she thinks. Blessings, she says.   • Every four months, with technical precision, Mom asks if I’m gay.   • Son (leaving the table): See you tomorrow. Mother (under her breath): God willing.   • Vacation of ’91, before nightfall, downloading the catalogue of bootlegs.The Exorcist on repeat for weeks to commit the dialogue to memory: 15 years later, nothing remains. A vacation’s useless exercise. The crisis of our 40s at 22.   • The weeds grow when we’re not watching them. Years accumulate while we worry about the weeds. Learning this took longer than we would have liked.   • “See you tomorrow.” “If that’s God’s will,” she corrects me.   • From the sun, surpassed again by rotation and refraction, a few minutes of orange light are left flattering the silhouettes of the park’s elderly, unmoving. This is how it is or this is how I see it through the extenuating filter of 10mg of Klonopin.   • The fog of the drug, low-impact anecdotes and scenes from badly dubbed films. At that hour of the morning when the transvestites begin to grow a beard.   • Vices explain the glassy stare of someone who saw someone else ironing the old bills first on the cleared section of a table cluttered with stolen appliances to later, meticulously, restore each one with Scotch tape.   • Jorge (the gardener) is weeding. “See you tomorrow.” “God be with you.”   • Parents’ house a gluttonous Sunday (pants unbuttoned), every idea is a capital sin on the sofa in front of the TV. They show the movie about someone with the heart of a baboon or that’s what he’d been tricked into believing since he was a child: the weak muscle substituted by a fantasy.   • Succumbing to the interruption, he writes this: “Above the bar where joy had been they built a cathedral out of everything that doesn’t belong to me.”   • Succumbing to the interruption, he recites this:“Kyrie, rex genitor ingenite, vera essentia, eleyson.”   • Statistic: “I have photographs that used to be ours.” A weak heart. No fantasy.   • Years and years, hours and hours dedicated to exercising the brain which responds solely to the superficial. An autonomous organ dictates the heart’s — not at all metaphorical — ache.   •   In my head there’s a homunculus who skips stones, also a cripple who drags his dead leg through the sand of the Pacific and the trail that he’s leaving behind looks like the handwriting of someone who’s hurt you, and the waves come and the waves erase it.   • Conversations you can’t participate in. Piles of overdue books. Keychains without working flashlights. The line of ants looks like a crack in the wall. To write on one’s own forearm with the sharp edge of a bitten-off fingernail. Supermarket: rice, mustard, toothpaste, Scotch tape, Tylenol. Jorge (the gardener): 224-5678. Supermarket: salt. Conversations you can’t participate in.   • Off-center photographs in front of equestrian monuments. León Cortés’s arm, the shadow of León Cortés’s arm, cast on our 30-year-old biology. Apart from the extras behind us, everything looks like a Photoshopped montage.   • The children of the Second Republic reproduced without thinking, fed those who shave heads and chests and armpits. Secretly they know it’s Independence Day, August 2nd.   • Every four months, like an auditor, his mother asks if he is an addict.   • May God keep you, she thinks. Bless, she says.   • Out-of-focus photographs, photographs of people who consume anxiolytics rolled-up in a candy wrapper while they watch badly dubbed films. A cinema in the suburbs, one afternoon, a screening for the unemployed.   • I have these photographs that used to be ours. If we superimpose the faces, Linda Blair appears, that transvestite appears, the one we’ve known since elementary school.   • In place of the heart, a stone in the shape of La Virgen Criolla who liberated us from the Spanish, from your mother, from your brothers, from obesity, from understanding the mystery of the Trinity.   • On the coast of the Pacific we’d watch the fire attentively as if it were an intelligent TV. The glitter of gel in your hair was a host of mortal stars, diminutive, extinguishing themselves.   • It could be worse. This is how we arrive at our 40s. By the grace of God, the fog will soon disperse, so that we can take a photograph of the group, of the country, so that we can begin again where the cripple left off.   • Off-center photographs every four months, damaged bills in a pants pocket, the sun as seen from a flat planet, the parakeets that month when we lowered our arms believing we were raising them.   Translated from the Spanish
O, Benjamin P. Lovell, 19from Oneonta, New York Statewho appears in the police blotterin Thursday’s Daily Star forunlawful possession of marijuana.The police blotter hangs justbelow the cast of Hairpsrayrehearsing at the suny oneontagoodrich theaterwhere the girl playing TracyTurnblad looks as if she’s beenhelping herself to donuts:maybe the donuts we were eatingat Barlow’s General Store, Treadwell.Do you ever get an upstate rush?I’ve never been crazy about donutsbut these are the aristocratsof the donut world and I salute them.And I hope, Benjamin, your momisn’t going to be too mad as she castsher eye down the police blotterand sees your name there, You little shit!and I hope the authorities rememberbeing young when the whole worldsometimes seemed somehow likea gargantuan donut that either pulledyou to its bosom (O Tracy!) or kickeddown — somewhere — to the bloodstream.Sweet donut, do I love thee? I haven’tmentioned Brando K. Goodluck, 18,from Manhattan, charged with seventh-degreecriminal possession of a controlledsubstance. O Brando, O Brandowhat were you thinking?As I put a donut in my mouthI’m thinking I wouldn’t minda joint, and, in any case, maybeall these donuts are pretty dangerousand I wonder what would happenif the rules got jumbled upand the girl playing Tracy Turnbladslid down the pageand found herself in the police blottercharged with unlawful possessionof a donut. Suddenly America feelsdifferent and I like it.Police blotters throughout the nationpacked with donutheads and half the countryon the run as college girls makesecret calls and meet their dealersin dusty ghost towns, sweetvapors drifting through the trees.O America, where even the robinsare bigger, where every car thatslides into the forecourt of Barlow’sGeneral Store is a Dodge, wherehalf the population is chasingthe perfect donut. Let’s imaginethat Benjamin P. Lovell andBrando K. Goodluck, nice slim boys,who never touched a donutin their lives, wander into Barlow’sand roll a joint and talk about thoselosers who kneel down before “the big one.”They know the girl who was playingTracy Turnblad. She was sweet, they say,who went and threw it all awayfor a sleazy bun with a hole in it.They pass the joint to me and I canfeel the donuts I stuffed in hastesomewhere down my slacks. I blush.Real shame, I say. Mrs. Barlow saysYou boys want more coffee?The donuts on her shelves have gone.
For Micah Ruelle We were not green in judgment or coldin blood like Cleopatra in her youthwho still was ordering chopped radishin her bowls back then,the hearts all gone to piecesnext to the winter greensthat in our days we never had use forso smitten were we with fireand ovens that I was gravy in judgment,which might not mean muchunless you’ve taken a spoonof it and poured it back over a dumplingshaped like your heartso that it became even softer,something you could not have thought possible.It’s all happening now,you liked to say, and I agreed,though it was not the newsfrom the outside I relished,but the daily Extra! Extra! the lightof the morning brought to my attentionevery time we woke in your houseor my house and my heart— salty, risen — was warmagain in a way it hadn’t been for years.Organ of passion, organ of righteousnessthat has never had a single flavor cross its lips,how could you knowhow much I would miss the honey of those days,her drizzle of it on the turkey bacon,my cracking pepper up and down the pan,the sweet meat of happiness I would no longer let pass between our teeth.
As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversationsso often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring intothe darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went downinto your father’s basement workroom to look for the rightsize screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the frontdoor lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine, you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you seethe pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools,the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets, the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold themlike the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves,their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes andtapered gothic towers. The room’s order had been disturbed by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standingmachines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes,gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts,the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words, and for you they were part of your father’s speech, or maybemore like your mother’s now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence.With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes, still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a schoolof dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smoothand rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had nochoice but to understand the power of creation running throughthe mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked aroundfor the right size screws and came upon a small box markedGreen Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubesof paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding boththe power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.
At the stables, each stall was labeled with a name.Biscuit stood aloof — I faced, always, invariably, his clockwork tail.Crab knew the salt lick too well.Trapezoid mastered stillness: a midnight mare, she was sternest and tallest, her chest stretched against the edges of her stall.I was not afraid of Never, the chestnut gelding, so rode his iron haunches as far as Panther Gap.Never and I lived in Virginia then.We could neither flee nor be kept.Seldom did I reach the little mountain without him, the easy crests making valleys of indifferent grasses.What was that low sound I heard, alone with Never?A lone horse, a lodestar, a habit of fear.We think of a horse less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time.Why I chose Never I’ll never know.I fed him odd lettuce, abundant bitterness.Who wore the bit and harness, who was the ready steed.Never took the carrot, words by my own reckoning, an account of creeks and oystercatchers.Our hoof-house rested at the foot of the mountain, on which rested another house more brazen than statuary.Let it be known: I first mistook gelding for gilding.I am the fool that has faith in Never.Somewhere, a gold door burdened with apology refuses all mint from the yard.
Sir, please accept my resignationAs of next month,And, if it seems right, plan on replacing me.I’m leaving much unfinished work,Whether out of laziness or actual problems.I was supposed to tell someone something,But I no longer know what and to whom: I’ve forgotten.I was also supposed to donate something — A wise word, a gift, a kiss;I put it off from one day to the next. I’m sorry.I’ll do it in the short time that remains.I’m afraid I’ve neglected important clients.I was meant to visitDistant cities, islands, desert lands;You’ll have to cut them from the programOr entrust them to my successor.I was supposed to plant trees and I didn’t;To build myself a house,Maybe not beautiful, but based on plans.Mainly, I had in mindA marvelous book, kind sir,Which would have revealed many secrets,Alleviated pains and fears,Eased doubts, given manyThe gift of tears and laughter.You’ll find its outline in my drawer,Down below, with the unfinished business;I didn’t have the time to write it out, which is a shame,It would have been a fundamental work. Translated from the Italian
The heart of a bear is a cloud-shuttered mountain. The heart of a mountain’s a kiln. The white heart of a moth has nineteen white chambers. The heart of a swan is a swan. The heart of a wasp is a prick of plush. The heart of a skunk is a mink. The heart of an owl is part blood and part chalice. The fey mouse heart rides a dawdy dust-cart. The heart of a kestrel hides a house wren at nest. The heart of lark is a czar. The heart of a scorpion is swidden and spark. The heart of a shark is a gear.Listen and tell, thrums the grave heart of humans.Listen well love, for it’s pitch dark down here.
A comfort common to Southwest desertparking lots, a familiar, a messenger,an overlooked angel oiled by asphalt,consolation of the casino, supermarketspiritual guide picking at a free-todayhot dog, a dropped grape or lentil,its purple-green head iridescent,its long keel of a tail.Black birds but not blackbirdswith their showy epaulettes blood-redas a war field. Grackles glintlike lacquered ebony, the females brunhildas,if by brunhilda you mean “brown-headed,”not the German “ready for battle.” Blindto centuries of borders, of battles, they waddlestiff-legged at your feet, a janitorial sweepto their tails, checking cart tires and light polesfor moths, beetles, singing their seven songs —slides, whistles, wheezes, catcalls, chirps,murmurs, clucks — to console youfor your losses: stolen cars, mortgagepayments spun to mist at a roulette table,the beloved who breathed fire and scorchedyour wedding clothes. Folly, wreckage,they mutter, down among the packsof backerboard and spackle. We’ve fallenfrom Mayan temples. In a past life
the seven songs After joy raises you into the stratosphere,ride earth’s colors as you wheel down.Fear backs you into a cave,only then do you cackle and hiss.Curse at a tornado and it might curse back.Why kick pebbles on your enemy?You will die without burying him.The ascent out of despairmust be steady, slow, or your lungswill explode, your blood boil.Which is wisest: to endure hungeror waddle among wolves?Warn those you love when the predatorapproaches. Screech loudest when youare the predator.
we were riding out to an abandoned farmhouseon his pearl black Triumphdeaf to the sound of bleating sheepthat was when he told me it was the same modelJames Dean had swapped forthree days afterthey’d finished filming East of EdenI tried to tell him that was cool but he didn’t actlike he’d heard meso I hugged him tightand set my head on his shoulderand watched how the yellow moon was shiftingbehind the pineslike the face of a jailbirdhe’d told me before that his wife knew he didn’tswing her waybut she was keeping quiet about itfor their kid’s sakewe rumbled into the dry grass and started cuttingthrough the cornstalksinto a big clearing where he kickedthe bike standand told me to get offhe tossed his chrome aviators and then we startedour hike to the farmhousewhich was sagging in the fieldopposite of uswe were quiet on the way like a couple of thievesabout to rob someone blindI stood back as he tore a warped dooroff the barnand flung it into the gravelinside the air was dusty and thick and the moonwas still with uscocked behind a streaked windowlike we’d traded placesand now we were the jailbirds serving a lifetimesentence without paroleJohn pulled off his steel-toe bootsand told me to wait for himup in the hayloftI left my loafers there and climbed a wood ladderuntil I was looking into the eyesof a great horned owlhe kept shaking his headlike he couldn’t believe what was about to happenI was going to be John’s firstbut while I was gathering the wet strawI smelled smokeand slid back down the ladderthat was when I saw the fire licking the crossbeamsand ran outsideJohn was passing through the wheatlike a final judgmenthis figure was muscled with flame and I kept silentas he reached for a head of grainand burned it to the ground
In the story of my life there is a fieldfilled with chicory, daisies, and mayflowers.It’s the field behind my childhood house.In summer, I used to spend hours lying in it looking at cloudsbefore my mother brought us to the town poolwhere I spent some more hours swimming.In the other seasons I went to school.In the school there was a library. In the story of my life there is a book.The book was bound in rough green cloth.Its glossy pages smelled oddly like puke. The book told the story of two children,Johnnie and Jill, I think.They got lost in a deep forest,drawn in thick dark ink. They were brother-and-sister orphans.They met fantastical creatures.One was the goddess of spring, or was that in Botticelli’s picturethat I saw in the same libraryin a book of art history for kids,old European art of course. The other kinds they did not want us to know about.The picture was magicand so was Johnnie and Jillthough not a children’s classic.I don’t really remember the title.In the book the goddess of springrescues the children in troubleand then — I can’t remember a thing.I’m sure there was a villainin the book, probably a woman, who practiced dark arts on a dark hill,so evil she wasn’t human. In the story of my life there is a hillthat tamely rises above the field.We sledded there in winter.In spring our bikes wheeleddown the hill dangerously.I walked on the hill this summertamely, carefully, slowly,alongside my mother.It isn’t hard to saywhat had brought us there. We were old and middle-agedin the knife-like summer air.Slowly and tamely we walkedand I remembered the book.It was called — Julie and John?I wanted another look.So what was the title?And was it an allegory?A Catholic one? (It was a Catholic school.)That would ruin the story.A story is only good if it’s made upbut convinces you it’s true.Even better if one of the charactersis someone who could be you.How else do you know who you are?I once asked an old strange friend:You only know you’re the person who’s withthe people you love, in the end.
May I ask you whoyour grandmother diedHer blacknessyou pretended we’d assumea servant’s in the photographMay I askdid she die herself?I know you all lightunder an umbrella don’t tanand she could be seenas she had been made toodark for what the son do.I saw her years ago after she diedAnd again today in the marketI asked her I had toknow if she was who I knew    ...    “Only two things you really has to —tha’s to stay black and die.”Black, yes, but if black leads some to pretendthat you have diedexcept you’re black and alivewho are you?She is as hundreds of years old asthe stories of the liesof grandmothers in the cellar    ...    May I ask whoyour grandmother died if she diedherself?
She would post herself in the wayin lines headed to transfer stops, to change,or haunt intersections with four way fullscarecrow indecision, stopon the corners of streets, and in the aislesof buses, preaching only thatwhich has never left these crossings for road,for choice  — the angry fear. She seatsat the feasts  — Thanksgiving, anyholiday, any family placesetting   — the hunger of others’satisfaction for herself, she seeks itsaid this is what she deserves, if onlyof herself. What she thinks she thinksneeds to be said whatever anyone else thinks to be honest. So thereshe sings from that part of the doorshe’s never got through, the eyewhich requires it all taken off downall blown away to get through tothat still naked-ness of clear againeven if she’s not still, the voice comes throughthat if we could listen as she is equallyraw hear with meat and gut below the skin,beyond the last violence,to the silence just beforethe bone if we could still hear therewe’d hear 2 What hand can you offer one wanting just to get even for what it doesn’t know what, just to take out what it feels on someone else to hurt because it can’t get at where it hurts itself to have to see to clear like a movie fakes done seeing sharper than thought can cut to it; what hand can you offer one that doesn’t know even as a balance any other than more as my half and who counts itself that much more and that more proofless multiple unanswerably human hurts because it can’t figure out a figure to answer how it wants so count doesn’t count higher than want and want also falls short enough to take someone down for it but there is no size for another to be cut down to but none but death this is so frustrating3 You see me get the hell away from her don’t you quick as I can and I bein nice she act all girlfriend but that bitch dangerous she pull so much rotten shit on peoples she due to get her ass killed anytime and I don’t tend to be nowhere near round I ain’t getting cut down just for standin next to her I ain’t all that innocent but I don’t be lookin for nothing I don’t deserve
To Iretha A textbook photograph most likelyled me to think the Rosetta Stone the sizeof a library’s old Webster’s Third Editionor two loaves of bread on a side board,but here it stands, three tongues, or one mindthat can say three ways we say the one thing,the breaths and sights of each way in rock,a milestone in intangibles between them.Reflected light from outside through the entrance,duplicating on the glass case the doorimage that the stone itself is openswhen you walk around behind it exhibitthe inhibition of letters, and I see you,not a translation, step through from beyond all descriptioninto the calling of flesh in black skin:beauty. Beauty. Beauty.
Now the passenger pigeons flock across the sky,Plunging the Central Valley grasshopper into darknessAs the Snake River sucker pushes upstreamAnd the golden toad relaxes. A passing skiffStartles a lone gravenche in Switzerland,Just as a pair of blue pike swerveTo avoid an anchor. The harelip suckerStays on course. A phantom shinerMight have swerved to snap up a three-tooth caddisfly,Or even Blackburn’s weevil, but it’s hard to tellWhy the white-winged sandpiper wheelsAt the distant warble of a black-footed parakeet.Gould’s emerald has a tiny, ferocious heart.Domed Mauritius tortoises are clannish,Often clashing with saddle-backed Mauritius tortoises,Though the saddle-backed Rodrigues tortoiseEnjoys friendly relations with the domed Rodrigues tortoise.The Santa Fe Island tortoise keeps to itself, broodingOver its sufferings. The Japanese wolf sniffs the air.The Tasmanian wolf bursts into a sprint,The Arabian ostrich could outpace a sprinting bicyclist,And the legs of the sprinting red gazelle blur beneath it,Like the rapidly beating wings of the Kosrae crake.The Kosrae starling is nesting. In one treeThe Cascade funnel-web spider lays a trap,While in another, the American chestnut mothSleeps fitfully. The dodo is too trusting.The laughing owl can be heard across the island.The roar of the Caspian tiger resounds in a canyon.Children shudder at the sound of the Bombay lion.But not even the Caribbean monk sealHears the Caribbean monk seal mite silently makeIts home in the manner of the passenger pigeon mite,Burrowing into the ear canal. The warm river water Through which the Durango shiner dartsReflects a spectacled cormorant. On drafts of airA dusky seaside sparrow rises. Its shadow fallsOn a school of stumptooth minnows. The sunlightBarely filters down to a Bodensee-kilch,But a red-headed green macaw glimmers.The Kona grosbeak filches fruit from volcanoesSloping down to the shore where Galápagos damselsFrolic and spawn. The bezoule makes a rareAppearance. Heath hens gather by the pond.Only when the North Island giant moa starts to wonderAbout what happened to the South Island giant moaDoes the upland moa give any thoughtTo the whereabouts of the eastern moa. Meanwhile,The coastal moa seems to have gone offAfter the heavy-footed moa, which followsIn its turn the tracks of the crested moa,Wandering the islands looking for Mantell’s moa.None of them have seen a bush moa in a while.Even as the quagga poses for its photograph,The St. Croix racer is slithering out of the frameIn eager pursuit of a big-eared hopping mouse.This may be the moment the Queen of Sheba’s gazelleTakes its leave, along with the Atlas bear,The Palestinian painted frog, and several others.The aurochs left long ago. The lapping wavesEcho the strokes of the sea mink, but likeThe Japanese river otter, it’s nowhereTo be seen. What will the confused moth do?The same as Darwin’s rice rat. Years go by,And the Martinique macaw flies through none of them.Melville might have encountered a Nuka Hiva monarch,But Nabokov never pinned a Xerces blue.Cloned, the Pyrenean ibex livedA few seconds more. The paradise parrotSported the spectrum on its plumage. BluebucksOnly looked blue while alive. The Miller’s railSurvives in a painting. Labrador ducks ate mussels.The crescent nail-tail wallaby once was common.The thylacine appeared four million years ago.Rats killed off the mysterious starling.
The barnacle is rather odd — It’s not related to the clam Or limpet. It’s an arthropod, Though one that doesn’t give a damn. Cousin to the crab and shrimp, When larval, it can twitch and swim, And make decisions — tiny imp That flits according to its whim. Once grown, with nothing more to prove It hunkers down, and will remain Stuck fast. And once it does not move, Has no more purpose for a brain. Its one boast is, it will not budge, Cemented where it chanced to sink, Sclerotic, stubborn as a grudge. Settled, it does not need to think.
Selvakumar had waked too often to the shoutsof dogs — come home too many timesto an empty chicken coop, stray featherswhere dinner was supposed to roost. Finding two dogs in his house one night, he slammed his door to trap them, gathered stones and — the flinging done —  gibbeted the bodies from a tree. A week later, he woke in darkness, feelinghimself swept down a black, stinking holethe way in Kansas City, Missouri,Inspector Daniel Collins, smacked by a surgeof sewer-water, slipped from his safety line and clattered down a 28-inch pipe dark as the grave it seemed about to be. Waking from sound sleep that morning, wolfing a breakfast of high-fibertoast and raisin bran, Dan never dreameda real nightmare would swallow him.Selvakumar — squeezed by his nightmare — screamed. One ear was deaf; both hands were numb; his legs, too weak to hold his weight, tongue lolling like a dead fish in his mouth the way Dan’s did as liquid filth shoved his head under,while — first thrashing and battering,then not — he rolled/banged/slitheredthrough earth’s bowels in darkness worsethan what seized Irmgard Holm’s left eye when, after cataract surgery, she groped for eye drops in the night, grabbed a Super Glue tube, and sealed her lid tight. Doctors took Selvakumar’s cash, and shooktheir heads. A village healer diagnosed,“The dogs cursed you.” To break the curse,friends caught a stray, named her Selvi — Repentance — wrapped her in an orange sari, and hung a purple garland on her neck. Selvakumar — all in white, but for a purple garland like his bride’s — felt his dead legs quiver as she edged toward him.Even as he pledged eternal love, he plannedto wed a woman when his health returned.Unlike a two-legged wife, though, Selvi didn’thound him about the marital act, didn’t demand a better sari or a bigger home, or nag as he grew more helpless every day. Easy to laugh, invoking Brad & Angelina, Pyramus & Thisbe. Still, on the nightSelvakumar found himself rushing againdown the dark hole, who can say that Selvididn’t guide him — as Irmgard’s husbandled her to the doctor who dissolved the glue and saved her eye — as Daniel’s cries led rescuers to him, twelve feet underground, two miles from where he began —  as the son of Marjorie Potts Gaffrey(dead in her sleep at 99), by sprinklinghis mother’s ashes in her favorite flower pot, led Marjorie to wake as an African violet,sun bright on her leaves as it was in Daniel’s and Irmgard’s eyes, the dew of morning like the feel, as Selvakumar lay dying in his bed, of Selvi’s tongue.
My story’s told in the mis-dial’s hesitance & anonyms of crank calls, in the wires’ electric elegy & glass expanded by the moth flicker of filament. I call a past that believes I’m dead. On the concrete here, you can see where I stood in rust, lashed to the grid. On the corner of Pine & Idlewood, I’ve seen a virgin on her knees before the angel of a streetlight & Moses stealing the Times to build a fire. I’ve seen the city fly right through a memory & not break its neck. But the street still needs a shrine, so return my ringing heart & no one to answer it, a traveler whose only destination is waywardness. Forgive us our apologies, the bees in our bells, the receiver’s grease, days horizoned into words. If we stand monument to anything, it’s that only some voices belong to men.
When I sleep I see a child hidden between the legs of a scarred man, their sunburnt backs breathe cold air, the child faces me and the pier’s roof swallows the mooncut by the clouds behind them. Sometimes, they’re on the same roofwearing handkerchiefs and uniformed men surround them.I mistake bullet casings for cormorant beaks divingtill water churns the color of sunsets, stained barnacles line the pierand I can’t see who’s facedown on boats lulled by crimson ripples.Once, I heard the man — alive and still on the roof — say today for you, tomorrow for me. There’s a village where men train cormorantsto fish: rope-end tied to sterns, another to necks, so their beakswon’t swallow the fish they catch. My father is one of those birds.He’s the scarred man.
They were travelers, plotting river courses,writing the genesis of unknown people,fugitives with a revolver in one hand, reins in another,merchants among the olive trees, euphorbias, mimosas,emissaries, deserters. Some knew the native tongues;they called themselves by new namesin the eastern twilight, different parts of their soulnever having learned to live together.Skies burned. Dust covered the palmsand minarets as they arrived by the incandescent shoreof our city, each with his own little dreams and disasters.Some remained, never to be heard of again.Some left with caravans, wearing native dress — ephemerids.Where are they? What are they used to?The only preserved interview — concerning an artist and explorer. Did he ever speak of his friends in X? Never. The only thing he liked in X was his sister. But did you know that he painted? Oh yes! — some fine things: stemware, a series of watercolors of shoebills and Abdim’s stork.
among thirty dusty men the only wet thing the mouth of the coyote is a mini zoo we are from many countriesin which there are many coyotes 500 bucks and we’re off think about itis the shortest verse of a corrido a gila monster and a coyote are onea gila monster and a coyote and a gringo are one strewn bottles melt dirtthe coyote’s tongue fills them we don’t know which to swat the coyote or the froththe mosquitoes or the flies gringos why do you see us illegal don’t you thinkwe are the workers around you we speak different accents yours included and we knowtambién the coyote is suspect of what we say when the coyote hears helicopters in Nike shoes he trots Arizona Nogales whores close their doorsthe coyote trots Arizona in Nike shoes the desert is still the coyote must be tiredin his shadow he sees searchlights it’s day all night it’s dusting and it’s going to dustthe coyote rests under yuccas
Calláte. Don’t say it out loud: the color of his hair,the sour odor of his skin, the way they sayhis stomach rose when he slept. I havedone nothing, said nothing. I piss in the cornerof the room, the outhouse is far, I thinkorange blossoms call me to eat them. I fling rocksat bats hanging midway up almond trees.I’ve skinned lizards. I’ve been bored. It’s likethat time I told my friend Luz to rub her liceagainst my hair. I wanted to wear a plastic bag,to smell of gasoline, to shave my hair, to feelsomething like his hands on my head.When I clutch pillows, I think of him. If he sleepsfacedown like I do. If he can tie stringsto the backs of dragonflies. I’ve heardof how I used to run to him. His hair stillsmelling of fish, gasoline, and seaweed. It’s howI learned to walk they say. Calláte. If I stepout this door, I want to know nothing will take me.Not the van he ran to. Not the man he paid to take him.Mamá Pati was asleep when he left. People saysomehow I walked across our cornfieldat dawn, a few steps behind. I must have seen himget in that van. I was two. I sat behind a ceiba tree,waiting. No one could find me.
In the earthquake days I could not hear you over the din or it might have beenthe dinner bell but that’s oddbecause I’m usually the onecooking if not dinner thena plan to build new fault lines through the dangerous valley.I can’t give you an answer right now because I’m late for my 
resurrection,the one where I step into my angel offices and fuckthe sun senseless.That eclipse last week? Because of me. You’re welcome.The postman rattles up with your counter offer and I’m offto a yoga class avoiding your call yes like the plaguebecause son you can readin the dark and I have nohiding place left.You know me too well and you know it.We walk hand in hand down the hill into the Castroavoiding the nudist protest not because we are afraid butbecause we already know all about this city, its engineered 
foundations,the earthquake-proofed buildings, the sea walls.No tempest will catch us unawarewhile we claim our share ofthe province of penumbral affections.You have no reason to trust me but I swear I liedown in this metal box as it thunders and looksinside my brain. I am terrified nothingis wrong because otherwisehow will I rewrite the maps unmooreda deep sea a moor a cosmonautWho needs saving morethan the one who forgothow the lazy cartographer mislabeledhis birthplace as Loss?Riding the bus out to the end of the lines and backI collect trash for art, oil spill, spent forest, the mindis at work and everything is at stake. I demandstatehood for my states of mind, senatorsfor my failure, my disappointment, the slanderand my brain unmapped reveals noexplanation for danger the ground untamed.I make paintings of nothing andstand before them like mirrors.I recently became a man but I do not want to let go of my weakness,instead want to meet God in heaven and in long psychotropic odeshave Him send me again digging in the dirt to unleashtantric animal governors to lay down the orgasmic law twice skewered and miserablein the old photographs, miserable in my body, huddlednext to my mother, recently permed and aglow so unawareof what is about to hit her. I am the answer to Bhanu’s question: “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” and so sickI considered that sicknesscould bring us closer and Shahid and Allen in heavenslap me silly because they want me to know thatthis world is worth itstrembling. At the next table over a mothertries to reconcile her bickering sons. I haveno brother but the oneI invent has always got my back, he drownsout the mullahs so my mother canhear me finally. In a different book Jesusnever suffered, never was flogged or diedwent whole into heaven without passion.Shall I then deny myself passport through the stark placesunsalvageable, imagine it, the Motherof Sorrows did never grieve in the new seasontrees smell of semen and the tectonic platesmake their latest explosive move:to transubstantiate my claimby unveiling this city down to its stone.Everyone I know wants to dousethe hungry flames, flee the endless aftershocks,unravel every vexing question.You owe me this witness.I owe you the fire.
Before it disappearson the sand his long white beard before it disappearsThe face of the manin the waves I ask her does she see it ask her doesThe old man in the waves as the waves crest she see it doesshe see the old man hisWhite his face crumbling face it looksas old as he’s as old asThe ocean looksand for a moment almost looksHis face like it’s all the way himAs never such old skinlooks my / Daughter age fourShe thinks it might he might be real she shouts HelloAnd after there’s no answer answers No
Considering the frequencywith which I take people’s wordsout of context, lie through my teeth and smearanyone who doesn’t hew to my philosophyof division and contempt,I’d prefer my candidate of choice to stayon the high road, but there’s a certain elementof fighting fire with dilemmas,not just for me, but for any candidate.Is it more important to lose honorably,or to get into the gutter with your own particularitywhen so much is the answer?I love the pumpkin idea.I will definitely use that and I also planon making the “kielbasa launcher.”I already have a guacamole rifleand it’s the same thing, I just needto figure out how to do it.If you have ideas for that please help.Also on the splitting heads thing theyhave that hydraulic wrench thatrips the brain chunks out of thehead you can do that so mucheasier just get the fishing line attachedto the fragments and then fill a two to three liter soda bottlewith sand and throw it in the oppositedirection your life is going.To see the results of this oscillatory combustionphenomenon between the acoustics of thecavity and the pyrolysis of the propellantswhich were used in irreproducible ignitionwhich I never liked much anyway.I couldn’t decipher myself.Too bad. I have typed out some abbreviated remainswhere my old life used to be, but I’m stillliving in them as if they were a book.I spent the afternoon revelingand wondering whatI need to do to get my own sheep.I saw sheep herding and shearing,admired the baby lambs, and followedthe “from sheep to sweater” interpretive trail.
One way to erase an island is to inventa second island absolved of all the soundsthe first one ever made. We don’t knowwho concocted this one, where the triggerfishand clowns fade to inky neon dashes undera fisherman’s skiff. A few plastic pontoonsknock around makeshift slips. Dusk coaxesfrom the shore the small, dull chimeof a spoon against a pot. And TV voicesflash slow across a cliff where two pink loversin matching swimwear kiss their glassesat the edge of a blue pool built just low enoughinto the hill so the couple can gaze into the seaand think of infinity. Many, many years ago,a great emperor wiggled his fingerand commanded his army to corral all the lepersin his domain then pack them into a sailing shipto be delivered to the missions on this clusterof verdant volcanic rock. The emperor’s ordersto his captain were clear: if the monks refusedthe ship’s freight, the skipper was to simplydump the whole sick cargo far from any shore.Other incurables followed in lots over time,or trickled in, hiding from nearby tribes,or banished from other lands to live among theselush slopes of mahogany, papaya, and weeds.Two women, Filomena and Josefa, arrivedwithin days of one another. By then, each had lostmost their toes, though they had tenfull fingers between them, each womanwith one hand still intact. No one is surehow it began, but once a week the pairwould knock on the door of the scowlingMadre Clementina to borrow the hospital’sonly guitar, carved from jackfruit and crackedpretty bad along the back. To these women —no big deal, for Filomena once transcribed the early moonlight serenades of the horny friarsin the Royal South for the brats of an Andalusian duke. Josefa was the daughter of a carpenter, a maker of tables to be exact. She learned to play a harana’s tremulous melodies on her mother’s bandurria at the age of three. The pair of outcasts would stifle laughs, thrilled to earn the crusty nun’s grudging Yes, then amble out to low tide and find a flat rock to shareso they could prop the old guitar on both their laps, the one bad wrist of each woman unwrapped to their stumps, pulled for now behind their backs as they looked past the bay toward the violent waters that first carried them here. And they jammed. Filomena with the five deft hammers of her left and Josefa with her right,thick-muscled — both blue-veined and furious, scrubbing from the instrument all those wicked rhythms from Castile to Nowhere on a fragile scrap of furniture that could barely hold its tune. They sat shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, their good hands brushing from time to time. What they couldn’t remember, they made up, and everything they made up disappeared over the lagoon and over the ocean, every note in every run, every lie and desire, every nick and crack in the jackfruit, the fat harmonics plucked from the old nun’s grunts, six taut strandsof gut whose chords skimmed the water like night locusts in bursts of low clouds and which bore everything in front of them and behind,the brine of the women’s necks mixed with the saltof the lagoon, the cliffs, the spoons, the bright nimbus of the West dipping like a noose, the future of pontoons and fake tits, the historyof nifty crowns pried loose of their jewels, the jiggle of a little finger gone still. One way to erase an island is to invent the watersthat surround it. You can name the watersthat will turn all the sounds the island makes into salt.It will teach you to listen to everything you love disappear    ...    or you can invent a song so big it will hold the entire ocean. Josefa and Filomena rocked in the dark, hip to hip, joined by that third body of wood, which made sure there was nothing left in the unbroken world to possibly make them whole.
Angelfish perturb the area around pink gauze, are the details of a threaded diamond string and its fake catachrestic applause. Like that of the angelheaded beast spreading its wings, as if to swim under the light of the glowworm and hyacinth, the fish are oratory and not. The pulchritude of bombazine on a shattering geoidal mid-afternoon, dribbling from sea rock to splint, the wing tips are hardly bleak accoutrements, their own swinging by the bay of a chest and a previous rock. Here we are stranded, pelagic with clot, and the fish burble with oratory and I kind of like them a lot.
Words from a leaf on the shell of a snail?Tendency as reciprocity etched in shale.Cider vinegar wrapped in sealskin?Accept it, so little is genuine.A box on a meteor compelled by earth?Lies, emptiness, grief: it’s not a first.Frost on the dock at Penetanguishene?Tears from Lake Huron, Erie, and Michigan.Not a moment to yourself? Don’t let love put you on a shelf.A preponderance of errors? The soft one sucks her rivers.Love, love, needs no reason.Yes, yes, yes, is my season.
i.m. Marty Crickard I came to light a candle for a friendbut Jesus had a really bad mustacheand those were only pinpricks in his palmsso I passed on.I came to light a candle for a friendbut Joseph’s hands were manicuredand soft as Fairy Liquid handsI could not light one there so I passed on.In the corner was a fellow with a cowled robeand a tonsure like a saucer — he palmeda young and curly blonde Adonis — so Ipassed on then to Benoît-Joseph Labre,a tattered man whose wide eyes blazed,he looked quite mad, had beggar’s hands,I liked him. I lit two dozen candles, didn’t pay,and nicked this book on him before I left.I did all this in honor of my matchless absent friend,whose honest calloused workman’s handsmaintained the half of Belfast,and nothing’s been the same since he passed on.
It wasn’t a man That knocked me down With the thrill of a sliceOf my will. She was mannish, Chilled, flungHer will acrossMine then laughedAt my shock, when sheGripped my neck whileLingering over a requestFor the evening meal. Later I sliced a tomatoClose to my wrist. The door was open. She had warned me: Never shut it againstHer. Otherwise I was free to come And go. Maybe she wasRight: I was zero To the bone. Meanwhile,I had left the hose In the pond. The goldfishCowered in the reeds. Whose side were they on?I am ill, I thought, Slogging acrossSoggy green.If I bow any lowerI will be looking upAt moss.
Not that I understand things.Angels don’t walk toward the ship, old engravingwhere moon throwsa river of light, how angels would walk the oceanif they wanted to walk.They don’t. They hover. A lot of spacebetween them and whatshines like waves. Which can’tbe a choice, for angels orthe engraver who was in factGustave Doré after sleeping offthe ancient mariner Coleridge left behind underguilt and regret and an albatross’s weight.Which isn’t much, but they arebig animals, four feet across countingthe wind involvedand rain. Doré waking to a room notreally of wings. I guessa stirring, something in the black expansehe hoped to razor intothe copper plate — no, a graver,not a razor at all.Beauty does terrify, a bare nothingbut stop. As in angels. Abrupt.Still, to cut them their flight on metaltakes a while. His hands stiff,Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small endlessly later rest of us do what we do and do until it’s not what we do. Nevertheless, angels. Why did they keep coming, one by one radiant dark of a mind paused to this most desolate given: water at night. That it floods a future not even in the picture.
“Are they real?” We have pages of kitchen utensils and books and candlesticks and nibs, but the charcoal pencil and new sketchpadare squat as aubergines in her hands in front of this display.With bad weather forecast and light silting up in cramped windows,we are the only visitors. The year settles in a corner of the room,has removed its white gloves, tip by tip, and set to one sideits summer purse of bibelots and sheen. Half-term of her final year,we are sightseers intent on moors. In the morning, her windcheaterand red wellies will bestow the dust of summer festivals uponsullen, wind-soaked sheep. We will park, and walk ourselves into the final, cutting rain between pages of her favorite book.She wants to go all the way to Top Withens, or the house they saymust have been Top Withens, given its loneliness and set. But now is artifacts and souvenirs: a perfume with too much musk in it,a jar of damson jam which we probably won’t open until pastits sell-by date. We are buying the word “damson.” And we are buyingtime. “Are they real?” she asks me, and I watch her reckon the distancebetween what should and should never be seen. We have fallen short.She draws, and what she draws is rain falling slant inside the bedroom;the bed as a box of leaves and stones and, within the display case, she hangs from the clothes rail, little moons. On the mannequin, water lilies stand in for morning dress, and the backdrop is marbled in what looks to me like veins and arteries. But when I flick through the sketchpad in the B&B, all the pages, what is left of them, are clean. Next day, she leaves it in the car. When she moves away, she will leaveit again, a sketchpad with no name on it and only the faintest traces of where she made skies of darned linen, and unfastened every stitch.
Routines of decaying timefade, and your waking lifegets laborious as science.You huddle in, becomingthe deathless younger selfwho will survive your dreamsand vanish in surviving.Dream brings on its storyat the pace of driftin twilight, sunless color,its settings are believed,a library of wood shingles,plain mythic furniturevivid drone of talk,yet few loves return:trysts seem unkeepable.Urgencies from your timejoin with the browner suitswalking those arcades with youbut then you are apart,aghast, beside the numberlessdefiling down steep fenceinto an imminence —as in the ancient burrowyou, with an ever-changing cast,survive deciding episodestill you are dismissedand a restart of tensesummons your waking sizeout through shreds of story.
There were seven colors of mourning, one was lilac. That kind of blossomalways has its crowd, fanned out, surroundedby crushing likeness, smell of itself. Fabric has to breathe, at least 2%, like skin. A little milkfat, elastane even in the gravest print. Not knowing how to grieve can poisonlike a directionless dart. And although fabric has been known to swirl and clasp, be clasped —  without mother there’s only art. To hug the body: a swath, anathema, magical, seventies lace and spacedust, all too far gone to truly love. But to twist it, to learn to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow, be borrowed, everybody’s animal. To float like water seeking its own,stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide.Face painted on torso on horsehairon chesty silk it’s a deathmaskfor the stigmata slash of the model’s body. • I don’t think I understand what studying is. I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb. I let myself be moved and changed. Is that “studying?” Never five-fingered, you never use them all, gloves will be like hooves, split-footed, hand-stitched. When concept perceived — a womanly gist, let’s say,or a curve of mind — is more than itself (surpassing,all maw) I make it part of me. I take it in, drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me, change everything it can, lip to tip to rim. My eyes just drink the fabric that coverseach surface of this world. Suck up the plastic through a polished straw. Everything’s inspiration: trees reflected in windows on buildings, distorted busesendless frames, all too glass, so much lens, textures so tall, and once you start to see things this way,vision’s a performance, shocking and true after all these centuries, a Shakespearean volta, like nectar is poison to the occasional queen bee. Everything actually is blurred, not just how you see. Glasses and shoes are solutionsto problems that are real problems, that of blurred world, that of touching the ground. A glass corset for the heart to see out its chest. For without glasses, the eye better seesthe wind, by feeling it and closing against its grains, its grasses. For without shoes, my feet become shoes. When I am really feeling,I get very tired, I fall asleep for the seventeenth timeon the unfinished skirt of glass eyes and lemon zest hemmed first, grown last. I experience the world as infiniteinvertedness: no wholes broken, just potential fragments straining, skull-like,at the seams. Anything could give.But no, just takes and takes and takes. • I’ve been trying to write the words, “I cried. Cried reallyand wetly, and for good.” Old-fashionedwriting with intense excitement:the spell of quill and ink spill, quelled. What is beautiful, what is terrifying,what is absurd in me? Every possibility that colors are believable, various, not that mirage I thought I’d seen and can be held apart as unreal,too exterior, distinct from each other wildly as sparks to seaweedor flower to meteor. It collapsed, can’t draw it can’t cut it out of itself. There is no color but what’s alreadyinside the eye, no power or invention or new way to wake up in the morning outside the seeing mechanism, our own orbs. Yet I can’t see myself.I can never see you again. I can only see from inside my skulland when I look down I close everything not just my eyes. I wrap my own tender nether flesh in calfskin leather so buttery, melted back together like so: a newborn softenedin its own mother’s milk.• I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet.I dreamed I alreadydreamed all the dreams I’d get. This morning I dressed in my last dress’s last dress, fit only for a genteel gothic murder, covered up well — airtight,would only fit the stabbed one, after bloodlet.Then, like a glove. Who wears it and where?I will, from the bed to the chair. Headrest, clotheshorse.Designer and model: mutually orbiting the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral, immortal. Red is dead, said blue, to you too? Hindquarter-gauze with silver face clampand sickened ears pulled, unskulled. Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible by other than sight. To smell a shadow.To strike it. To trace it later, to measure a body by its line. Light’s so quiet. You’d think its cuttings, its edge-hole,those mousy children, would squeakat least a bit. They run like a stockingdown the leg of the mind. Why not quieter then? There is no body without life.There is no mind without body.There is no without.


Certain words give him trouble: cannibals, puzzles, sob,bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode    ...    These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese.Ravish means cướp đoạt; shits is like when you have to đi ỉa;mourners are those whom we say are full of buồn rầu.For “even the like precurse of feared events” think báo trước.Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia, graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound just like him: “All depend on how look at thing,” he pencilsafter “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity —”His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear.His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi-Liter, arctic blue.I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analysis.He identifies the “turning point” of “The Short and Happy Lifeof Francis Macomber”; underlines the simile in “Both the old manand the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.”My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passagesand to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts outhis ideas in English, shaking off those Vietnamese glosses.1981 was the same year we vượt biển and came to America,where my father took Intro Lit (“for fun”), Comp Sci (“for job”).“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he murmurssomething about the “dark side of life how awful it can be”as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source.Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes,how could he not have been “vexed at her brown study / Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed(I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake. Lấy làm ngạc nhiên về is what it means to be astonished.Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe.“There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightnessin her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ houseshe is always fourteen months old and staring into the future. In “reeducation camp” he had to believe she was alivebecause my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.” Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf stormfrom the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins, I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading. But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies.Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk.Then between pp. 896-97, opened to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,”I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read: For current job opportunities dial (612) 297-3180. Answered 24 hrs.When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end tells me I have reached a non-working number.
“But there were times when you offered your consent with older men. You chose them, & you were not afraid. Why not?” You don’t know the true success of survival till you’ve experienced the adrenaline of a too-close death. What is there to fear when you’ve licked the edge? It is going to be an oppressively hot summer, the New York Post says, but I’ve got a few of my own stowed away, enough to occupy a foreign desert. There was one summer, his name was Tito and my sisters still say his name just like that, “Tee-toww,” the O a benchmark in the bottom of the jaw. I was just 12 but the gaze itself made me a flame, so no one could tell, I guess, or no one would tell. He was the kind of heavy swelter that had the whole block at mercy, everyone’s connect to whatever they needed, which was much and in bulk. Power is a switch that yokes me up at the waist — I was young & enamored by this pattern of men who shouldn’t want me but would risk day to touch the stark chant of me. Each time, I imagined a witchcraft enveloping the bone. I remember, once, at some low hour in the trough* of that summer — my mouth a voyaging boat, Tito’s spine a current of illicit knots, his hand a spindle on the back of my coarse head — he looks down at me, & moans out “Who the fuck are you?” I say, and the answer is always the same thereafter: nobody, who are you? *Okay, in any event, Elizabeth and I were in the pool, swimming and playing.
In the energy crisis my city has turned to burning angel skins. I read by their light, a book of elegies. A fruit fly lands on Amichai, I slap him flat Against the page. Now it is an elegy for him, as well, And his tomb. And I am a terrible, toothless god,Stringing blades of grass between the tongues of sheep.Ash of angel fire drifts over my head, falls in my coffee. O Holy, Holy, Holy indigestion.I bribe the coming day with open windowsAnd freshly washed underwearHung out on the clothesline,Slipping hastily over the hips of winds.The winds know, all you have to do isOpen your mouth, the flies will come.
All we know of historywe learn from scenes in the mosaic of boneon the Senate floor:The Flood makes graves of the fields,and the angels harvest enough sufferingto live for another thousand years.Moses pulls off his beard and lights a cigarette,I’m tired of pretending.He pushes his box of spare commandments under his bed,and as he drifts to sleep, his eyes, like caves,fill with paintings of woolly rhinos.Sailing ships forest a small island.One light shines from a caravel — captain’s quarters.It’s Christopher Columbus.All night he’s been sewing shroudsas arrival gifts for the natives.Little Chris presses his bleeding fingers to his mouthand cries quietly, No one appreciates me.God and the devil tuck him into bed.It’ll get better, they say.Together they complete the shrouds for him,while he dreams of golden nipples.As it was, it is now.Spring translates the earth into hope — tongues of grass taste the sea salt on the west windand the blood on soldiers’ boots.This morning, one of the old poets — unkillable cockroach — cycled past me, yelling,You have the brightest light in America! Ha ha!On my dresser, a spider makes a webalong the contours of my bra.We lie on the bed together;I run my hand up the muscles of your legand feel its eons of evolution,now outlawed by the Senate.
Was it like lifting a veilAnd was the grass treacherous, the green grassDid you think of your own motherWas it like a virusDid the software flickerAnd was this the beginningWas it like thatWas there gas station food and was it a long trip And is there sun thereor drones or punishment or growth Was it a blackoutAnd did you still create me And what was I like on the first day of my life Were we two from the startAnd was our time an entranceor an ending Did we stand in the heated roomDid we look at the paintingDid the snow appear coldWere our feet red with it, with the wet snowAnd then what were our namesDid you love me or did I misunderstandIs it terrible Do you intend to come backDo you hear the world’s keeningWill you stay the night
No chain link fences leapt in a single bound. No juke move Nike commercial, speeding bullet Skittles-huedCross Trainers. No brown skin Adonis weaving trails of industrial Vaseline down a cobblestone street. Heisman-shuckingtrash receptacles. Grand jeté over the little blue recycling bin, a prism of clouds rising beneath his feet. Nobody all-fuckedin boot cuffs wide enough to cloak court appointed tethers. Or slumped over, hoodie-shrouded — sheepishly scary according toone eye witness. Definitely not going to be your Louis V Sweat Suit red carpet fashion review, coming at you live from E! & Fox News outside of the morgue. No chance for homeboy in the peekaboo boxer shorts. Homeboy with the frozenwrists. Iced. Homeslice with the paisley, Pretty Flacko Flag flying by the seat of low-slung denim — no defenseattorney gets to call me Gang Related. Tupac in a mock leather bomber. No statement takenfrom the Clint Eastwood of your particular planned community, saying he had the right to stand his groundat the Super Target. Because my flat-billed, fitted cap cast a shady shadow over his shoulder in the checkout line. No, siree.See, I practice self target practice. There is no sight of me in my wears. I bedecked in No Wrinkle Dockers. Sensiblenavy blazer. Barack Obama tie, Double Consciousness- knotted. Stock dandelion pinned to the skin of an Americanlapel with his head blown off.
Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joyand call it art. We were piloted by Auden who becameUnbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into thesteamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and antswere waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The cloudswere as cool as a dog’s nose pressed against our cheeks. Inotice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion’s armpit as wecross the horizon on strands of Yeats’ silver hair. There is alight coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish housecleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie.Yeats’ lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry withhis youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanishthe sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger.There was nothing left after that. We cross the equatorheading north following Emily Dickinson’s black bag containingstems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memorylike wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanishpirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child’saquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across thewaxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge.Whitman’s past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth centuryin the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head wasset on fire by God’s little hands. The hands that circumcisedthe world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a youngwoman’s pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen. We crossthe green Atlantic into World War One. We are met by Rilkedressed in his Orpheus uniform wearing white sonnet glovesthat once belonged to a stone angel. Rilke offers us a glass ofamontillado made from Lorca’s private stock of gypsy tears.The sherry is not quite as dry as Wallace Stevens’ lush mangometaphors of familiar objects. Although Stevens’ poems arefragrant, there is a lingering afterthought of Pound on thetongue. Pound collected his misty feelings to make raindropsinto European and American poetry. Vagueness became assharp as a pencil. Our blue box is not allowed to attendApollinaire’s birthday party held by the august Académiefrançaise
My father wasA blossom,And I was his fragileEpiphyte on hisDays off.The purpleDogs of yearsGone byWatch him smileAt the horizon.His feretoryCatches theRain from theSmoldering sky.These fields areFallow and driedGullies where ginSparkledIn the morning.My father’s remainsAre smooth like theStarlight thatMakes my lifeSlightly yellow.
These empty words are so remote. They are stories someone wantsTo believe at the end of the century. Everyone gathers their sea of telluricPain to greet the beginning of the new world.Cars stop and watch the deck chairs limp across the street to awaitThe coming of the new year. It is the end of summer and autumn andWinters and springs, and panzer infatuation.After four hundred eighty-one years, I cannot pull out the Spanish arrowIn my eye. Suddenly everything I knew was inhuman:The oceans, the tadpoles in their new cars. The clams becameCheerleaders. The palm trees, strippers, and everyone forgot,Deer are the shapes of God.His official language became Latin, when he ceased to be a Jew,Biting his nails and collecting cans like a cheap minister with sunny gold teeth.The tender years that once wore oysters would never speak to Him again.The female spider became a lesbian, devouring our new long legs,That would never again climb the toy steps our fathers left us. AlthoughOur legs are hairy and the lilies of a theater, the gentle lips ofOur pyramids rest on our souls like a lover’s fingers.How many aspirins will we take to reach the surface of truth?My existence is for sale. The dawn is learning English.The waves of the sea are unionizing.The stones that were once our troubled hearts are eating chocolate.I come to sell you fish, the bread in my blood and my existence.
I put my handInto the dreamThat falls uponThe air. ItTouches me a little,But I don’t complain.I’m almost asleepWhen I get there.Where ByronLost the scent of hisLife, over there,Where the dreams are.It’s alwaysHot, likeThe eyes of theDream. SometimesThe dream isOn the dunesWatching the moltenOcean burn the sun.The dream scours theSand in your fishTank for the plasticMermaid who is gainingweight. Nevertheless,We go to the edgeTo watch the dreamAnd the repetition beingHurled ashore likeA drop of blue,You wrote in a poem,In a languageYou aloneUnderstandIn the dream.
Crows see us as another invention. Like summer and beauty, They shimmer at sunrise in their new cars,Change their names and color when they see us. When they fly, they’re the bite marks on the sun,And nail-scratches of black against the sky. We matter little to them as we are.They prefer hamburger, youth, Oxygen and mineral water.And, of course, we sell our souls to a passing crow, Because we’re shiny things they take to heaven.Crows are always polite to humans.They have lots of money And live at a party that never ends.We’re the junk genes they left behind, That play Aztec football with our heads,When we dream and lose. Crows have relatives everywhere.Human warfare moves across the sky Making more room for them to fly.We’re just a meal in the next world. We’re the hole in the sky.Crows are legends and instructors of grace.They are the dots in the fog, And the flight of the uterus.Crows are the printed warningsOf a wasted life. They will never leave or abandon us.When we take our last breath,Navigating through our mistakes and lies, The crows will take our last word.We are the last citizens of a pale race of crows,Rearranging the furniture in the mind of God. Crows turn the planet on its axis when we die,And do nothing to the body we’ll remember. Our souls are their meal of the day.And the blue marble in its beak, As it flies away,Is the world leaving you.
I need more time, a simple day in Paris hotels and window shopping.The croissants will not bake themselves and the Tower of London wouldLike to spend a night in the tropics with gray sassy paint. It has manyWounds and historic serial dreams under contract to Hollywood.Who will play the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, and who will braid herHair? Was it she who left her lips on the block for the executioner,Whose hands would never find ablution, who would never touch a womanAgain or eat the flesh of a red animal? Blood pudding would repulse himUntil joining Anne. That is the way of history written for Marlow andShakespear. They are with us now that we are sober and wiser,Not taking the horrors of poetry too seriously. Why am I telling you thisNonsense, when I have never seen you sip your coffee or tea,In the morning? Not to mention,Never heard you sing, although some claim it is quite grand.Will you teach me to sing like Chaliapin? Will I impress you with myCartoon Russian accent? I like sour cream and borsht;We went to school together. My minor was caviar and blinis.This is what it means to listen to Boris Godunov late at night.Cool mornings are for Lakmé and songs of flowers for misplaced lovers.But why should we speak in a foreign language to each other,We are not birds. I have other stories too strange and beautiful to beTold. They have no sound or memory. They will rest on your lips whenYou bring your hands to your mouth to stop their gush of air against yourFace. We should go back and meet again at the street fair of cufflinks.Our hearts teach us how to fly with wings of pain.That is the price of the disarticulated lessons we should not abstain fromPlaying. The accumulated misdemeanors add up to the most egregiousFelony: ignoring the demands of the heart. We remain in abeyance toThe muses who are only interested in their outcomes,We are just the worms on their hooks of selfishness.What do they care, we are not Greek. We are just a dream of pleasantComic arias that suffice as whims in the morning.We are small enemies to them with strange large hearts that control theWeather in the heavens. They cannot change or unteach us not toTrespass their quarters of endowment. Perhaps, after all, you are anAffable spirit bubbling over with your own deductions to minimize thePointed dots in your beautiful endeavors.Although I feel like a bird with a broken wing,Each day I think of you I fumble an attempt to fly to impress you withThe color of my paper wings.
I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes withRapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinctionBetween night and day or love and hate.No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed toWork. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted themOr know any more than you do where they are or in what country theyStill exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and FrenchKisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitatethe forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becomingFeathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? ThereAre no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is theLittle red schoolhouse where all this began.Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have.I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since IAlways felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teenYears, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west.Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too,With its self-descriptions of poetic justice,The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the mossWe leave behind.
I am not saying “mark my words,”as the thief says early each winter.He leaves nothing of value. He too wants.A brute with language, he has a fondnessfor preaching. I am bathed to luster.Memories move musically through my bones.He sings above, vaults off a horse with feignedkindness, lands so fancy. Letting go of this, sitting with tropical leaves the size of menin a terrarium, I am beautiful. He means well, admonishing women. He is lucky with the show of crankiness.What does it mean to let go the envy?I sometimes hope stars don’t spread themselvesover New York’s lights. Performing for himself,glasses glittering, he reads stories of poverty,claims them all as his own. Here in Colorado irises of all colors unfoldoutwards to the half-hidden sun. On the cracked cement, chilly before rain, I see perpetual beginnings. I’m going to forget him:lock him in a box in my head,lock him in the haunt of violins, let go what’s his in the hurl of breath of my groans.
— Candy’s Stop, up Hwy. 52 I been ‘Candy’ since I came here young. My born name keeps but I don’t say. To her who my mama was I was pure millstone, cumbrance. Child ain’t but a towsack full of bane. Well I lit out right quick. Hitched, and so forth. Legged it. Was rid. Accabee at first (then, thicket-hid) then Wadmalaw; out to Nash’s meat-yard, Obie’s jook. At County Home they had this jazzhorn drumbeat orphan-band ‘them lambs’ they —  They let me bide and listen. This gristly man he came he buttered me then took me off (swore I was surely something) let me ride in back. Some thing —  (snared) (spat-on) Thing being morelike moresoever what he meant. No I’d never sound what brunts he called me what he done had I a hundred mouths. How his mouth. Repeats on me down the years. Everlastingly riveled-looking, like rotfruit. Wasn’t it runched up like a grub. First chance I inched off (back through bindweed) I was gone. Nothing wrong with gone as a place for living. Whereby a spore eats air when she has to; where I’ve fairly much clung for peace. Came the day I came here young I mothed my self. I cleaved apart. A soul can hide like moth on bark.My born name keeps but I don’t say.
What are my friends? Mouths, not eyes forBitterest underflesh of the farewell.I was a man and suffered like a girl.I spoke underneath to where the lights arePretty, pretty, pretty whence they came to tellOne God gets another. My friends areMouths for God, tearing me. In such a worldBroken only daughter opens to splendor.My first thought was that dying is a deep wellInto the image of death, a many of one girl.Later it meant to smile with no face, whereMirrors are mouths. Cupid and Psyche woreBlindfolds made of glass, which explains why girlsGet to heaven early mornings Adam fell.Gods after gods we go. Still later,Friends shouldered high mountains to the lee shore.Gashed, and the gash a fountain of waters,The landscape defames a single flower:Amaranth. Magic hides an island worldOf boys and one daughter. I buried a pearlIn God’s eye. And yet He sees her,Defames her, considers His time wellSpent imagining a continent of flowersWhose final climate is a broken girl.Bells of a Cretan woman in laborHurled from a tower, flesh realerThan the ground she somehow upwards curledInto the bloom of her groin where bellsAre bees. I am an old man with a new beard.I am the offspring of my child sprung from hell.Shipwreck makes peninsular metaphorOut of my hatred, her rape, and one bell tower.Confusion suicides the poems, heaven I heardWhere the juice runs from stone-struck flowers.At the end of the world I must use properViolence. Nothing is more true to tell.Tell the taut-strung higher calendarsI’ve a margent in mind and new wordsHope to say, catastrophe to hear, Old confederates and inwood applesWhere apples never shone. Also tellOf mountains shouldered underneath one flowerCalled amaranth. They tired of the worldWho made the world this way. God neverDid, never will. If you were to callFrom the bottom of the ocean, the words,Every one to me a living daughter,Would shout wild mercy as never was before.
Here, the brightest constellation is Hydra, the Water Snake, namedfor the half-woman, half-reptile whom Hercules slew with the helpof  Iolaus, his charioteer. Imagine the sound of so many heads screaming — the long, shrill bays of an angry woman times twenty — and the smell of birth, of all origins, that followed Hydra as she rose from her fetid swamp. Iolauswas strategic, went straight for the bowels instead of the mouth, burned her centerbefore the head. When her fundament was reduced to ash, only then couldHydra be silenced. Hera, enraged that Hercules was able to slay the creatureshe had raised in order to destroy him, flung the corpse of the decapitated,maimed Hydra into the sky, lest she be forgotten. Hydra’s blood, unstoppable,became hot gas; her screams rose and fell until they were radio waves;and her wild flailing was fixed into points of radiance. Hera was rightto hurl those stars here, above this bay, so close to where the earth is bisected,a place where Hydra’s mirror image glosses the water, where dense bloomsof  algae flourish on the nitrogen surface, thousands of wild heads and armsdevouring ammonia, cyanide, and sewage as fast as we can produce them,this hydra, emblem of insatiable desire.
At the Mind Museum, you can walk to the back,step on several large buttons on the ground,and watch parts of the brain light up: the frontal lobefor decision and memory, the temporal lobefor smell and sound, the occipital for sight. I tryto make my toddler son laugh by hoppingfrom one button to the next, watching each lobelight up along the way, but he will not leave the prisonof his melancholy. My son: how he loves to revisitthe most difficult point of conflict in a picture book,or the moment at which his favorite car heavesa difficult sigh at the pinnacle of a movie’s emotionalarc, or the promise of injury if I take a fall. My son,so distant from other children in his sadness.Just the other day, at the pool, he gazedat the boys and girls splashing and shriekingand said, Look. The children are having fun,as if he were an anthropologist in a foreign land.If these are his musings at age two, one can onlyimagine the life that must follow. Through a dark channelhe was born; to darkness he is most drawn. Easierto write than say the guilt I feel for giving himthe sharp pain of melancholy. My son, alwaysin the world without husk or shell, it is as if his heartthrobs on the outside of his body, as if his brainhas no skull to absorb the assaults that strike it.Today, I watch him writhe in the pain of a tantrum —a typical kid, this is what they do, everyone assures me — and usually I rush in, unwittingly increasinghis sense of emergency. Instead, today, I stand back,relinquish the role of skull and skin, watch his mindunfurl like a medieval tapestry. In that momentof my feigned disinterest, his head is no longer headbut battlefield where Wrath wages a fierce waragainst Patience. He is no longer a little boyscreaming on the ground and throwing plastic trucks;instead he is a creature engaged in a struggleto free his enslaved heart from the monsterswhose foaming mouths and hot fumesand clots of foul blood besiege himas he gathers his thoughts from the unraveling of his universe. Prudentius says that fiery Wrathin her frenzy slays herself and diesby her own weapons


You would expect an uncountable number, Acres and acres of books in rows Like wheat or gold bullion. Or that the words just Appear in the mind, like banner headlines. In fact there is one shelf Holding a modest number, ten or twelve volumes. No dust jackets, because — no dust. Covers made of gold or skin Or golden skin, or creosote or rain- Soaked macadam, or some Mix of salt & glass. You turn a page & mountains rise, clouds drawn by children Bubble in the sky, you are twenty Again, trying to read a map Dissolving in your hands. I say You & meanMe, say God & mean Librarian — who after long research Offers you a glass of water and an apple — You, grateful to discover your name, A footnote in that book.
Well, friend, we’re here again —  sauntering the last half-mile to the land’s frayed endto find what’s laid on for us, strewn across the turf — gull feathers, bleached shells, a whole bull seal, bone-dry,knackered from the rut(we knock on his leathern head, but no one’s home).Change, change — that’s what the terns scream down at their seaward rocks;fleet clouds and salt kiss — everything else is provisional, us and all our works.I guess that’s why we like it here: listen — a brief lull, a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.
Meaning “homeland” — mulk(in Kashmir) — exactly how my son demands milk. • Full-rhyme with Jhelum,the river nearest his home — my father’s “realm.”• You can’t put a leafbetween written and oral;that first A, or alif.• Letters. West to eastMum’s hand would write; Dad’s script goeseast to west. Received.• Invader, to some — neither here, nor there, with me — our rhododendron.• Where migrating geesepause to sleep — somewhere, halfwayis this pillow’s crease.• Now we separatefor the first time, on our walk,at the kissing gate.• Old English “Deor” — an exile’s lament, the past’sdark, half-opened door.• Yes, I know. Empty.But there’s just something betweenthe p and the t.• At home in Grasmere — thin mountain paths have me back,a boy in Kashmir.
For I will consider my Star Sol.For I am the servant of this Living God and daily serve her.For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East I worship in my way.For this is done by fixing espresso and watching the pinkening light on The Shard.For then she waves her warmth across the scene and lifts the hearts of those who took a Night Bus at 4 a.m. to clean HQs.For she tickles the orbitals of foxes in their stride and hies them home.For having risen and settled into her groove she begins to consider herself.For this she performs in eleven degrees.For first she does the Planck to strengthen core stability.For secondly she runs a malware scan for comets closing in.For thirdly she completes the paperwork for eclipses total, annular, and partial.For fourthly: flares.For fifthly she sorts her sunspots into pairs.For sixthly she gives neutrinos Priority Boarding.For seventhly she referees the arm-wrestling match between the upstart fusion and gravity.For eighthly she weaves flux ropes and thinks up skipping games.For ninthly she degausses her plasma screens.For tenthly she is profligate with her photons. For eleventhly: star jumps.For having considered herself she will consider her neighbors.For she runs a cloth around the ecliptic to make it gleam.For she oils the wheels of any planets gliding there.For she sends invites out to wallflowers in the Oort cloud.For she issues shadows for children to dodge as they make their way to school.For she shakes out her blankets for devotees of helioseismology.For when she takes her prey she plays with it to give it a chance.For one planet in nine escapes by her dallying.For in her morning orisons she loves the Earth and the Earth loves her.For she is of the tribe of Tyger! Tyger!For she hands out coloring books to chameleons in the morning.For when it is time to rise she blushes to be seen at so intimate an hour.For when it is time to set she is crimson ashamed to run out on us.For though she neither rises nor sets she thinks it best that we believe so, so that we can take our rest and fuel our waking with anticipation.For she lifts oceans over mountains without thinking.For she tries to solve the puzzle of the weather, placing this here and that there and attempts to even out the air.For she is a mixture of gravity and waggery.For she’s a stickler for solstices.For she booms like a woofer for those that can hear.For she cares not what lives as long as all live.For she takes her time.For she lenses the light from distant stars to swerve it into our sockets.For sometimes in the winter haze she’s as pale as a lemon drop and lets us watch her bathe unpunished.For she never calls in sick.For her colors are open source.For every raindrop’s an excuse for Mardi Gras.For she will work on her drafts for a million years and release them typo-free. For she will lash out and then regret the hurt.For she promises radio hams jam tomorrow.For your power grid is a cobweb she walks into when she steps off her porch.For she kept mum through the Maunder Minimum.For her behavior is definitely “on the spectrum.”For she keeps dark about dark matter but she definitely knows something.For she plays Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Furnaced.For she offers board and lodging to Turner’s angel in the Sun.For she made a great figure in Egypt for her signal services.For she can fuse the wounded parts of a broken heart and release the lost mass as hope.For she spins plates to create auroras.For she leaves clues all over the place: some cryptic, some quick, some general knowledge-based.For she is hands-off.For she tends to micromanage.For she lays down squares of light for your pets to sleep in.For she turns a blind eye to all the creeping, swooping killers of the night but leaves a Moon-faced night-light on.For her sunquakes flatten no buildings, gridlock no cities, disgorge no refugees.For she is not too proud to dry your smalls.For she gives us heliopause and time to rethink disastrous decisions. For Ray-Bans.For she polarizes opinion.For her secrets are waiting to free us.For she appreciates Stonehenge and visits every day.For she sets herself by the grid of Manhattan.For she will kill you with the loving of you.For she can shine.
Sees him at the far end of the strand,squamous in rubbery weed, his knees bobbingurchins, his lean trunk leaning, sea-treasure for her.After it all (they mate, like carapaces, in parentheses)Dora feels coolness in new places, lifts a reusedrazor shell, mother-of-pearly and straightand signals out to the swell of moldering green.Dora is electric, in love, and deep water.Dora, Dora, Dora, in which dread is.People people the beach, peeringthrough splayed hands, appealing:DAW-RAAaargh. A boat sees her passing.Sea-scribbler’s chest bucklesin aftershock:his quill is primed: squid-inked and witful.
Who I am’s child’s play,a cry in a kindergarten;though I pun on Latin,my Yorkshire kin’s laik,a whole lexical rainbowunweaving in no code,no Mason’s Mahabonenor Horseman’s Word — but I’m caltrops at nightto the bare feet of adultsinspiring their languageto such colors as I am,Kulla, Mondrian plasticpixelating Mies blocks;the Ephesian Artemisin each cubist bust;the Song of Amerginby a Turing machine:name me or you’ll bethicker than any brick.
My weight is four whippets, two Chinese gymnasts, half a shot-putter. It can be measured in bags of sugar, jam jars, enough feathers for sixty pillows, or a flock of dead birds but some days it’s more than the house, the span of Blair Athol Road. I’m the Crooked Spire warping itself, doubled up over town. I measure myself against the sky in its winter coat, peat traces in water, air locked in the radiators at night, against my own held breath, or your unfinished sentences, your hand on my back like a passenger touching the dashboard when a driver brakes, as if they could slow things down. I measure myself against love — heavier, lighter than both of us.
Mugoo was a sweeper boy and the cleanestof the sweeper caste. He would leap at the blushof dawn to clean the paths and the steps spotless.Gugoo was a bootmaker girl who made boots.Gugoo was higher caste than Mugoo. By rightshe was the floor and she was the foot that trod.Yet after work, while the boys and girls playedat tug of war, wrestling, or archery, shy boy Mugooand shy girl Gugoo would draw the boys and girls.The children smiling at the shining visions would hugMugoo and Gugoo. Then that couple would burythe drawings for fear their elders feel scandalized.In manhood for Mugoo and womanhood for Gugoo,how hard that Gugoo thread boots for her fatherwhen she had no golden stitch for the gaping holein her soul. How hard that Mugoo scrub the lanes!Who dare be swept away from the law of casteby the foul stamp and passport of besotted love?Yet the hairs at their ears, their nipples, bompedby a mere sultana breeze. Then the swirling nightwhen they’d escape for Arabia than stay near-far    ...    In Mugoo and Gugoo Love was a rabbit leaping ona radish when they became runaway lovers! Like haresunder the sketched moon they bobbed in the grunch wind before the tossed river. Timorous Gugooto timorous Mugoo, “Is it not said the pure of heartare able to turn water into solid crystal orbs?”“I have heard it Gugoo. Let us swim till the watersturn dot by dot into crystal orbs, slowly mountingup for us a solid path so we can bobble across.”That cub-like couple held on a first-ever daredevilcuddle. Then snuck a parched kiss! And fell intotheir dive across Punjab’s muggur of an ogre — theriver Ravi! They were soon to learn the blunderouswater was bigger than they; they were dabbing onwardson the spot; directionless comical pups; pawdawdling    ...    Only Death was woken by their swallowed screams.At the sight of a cutesome pair brinked for his mawDeath’s thin lips aah’d and coo’d. To tickle himselfDeath tipped a witching shriek in the eardrumsof the ferryman, Charan, who was rank in a dream.Charan swore at Death, “What bastard panchodis unheroing my dream? I was the River Godriding the turmeric sea when the fisher king’sred bill fished me up a buxom masala mermaid!”Death hushed Charan. Bundled him into the boat.Charan, still swearing, fished for a scream-trail, for bunny-like feet in the sudden dead-stop river    ...    Next morning, by the prophecy of the snake-priest,the villagers arrived at the shame-faced riverbank.Charan, in his guzzy saffron turban, was blaringat the crowd about a passion crime. Huffing toohad arrived the muscly cobbler and sweeper fathers.All heard Charan, “I am my own King of the Sticks!I row two weeks that way to the flowers of Kashmirthe gold-haired men with their bloated bags of honey,and one week that way for the spices of Samarkandwith the red-fingered sellers of kalonji, saffron, jeera.Today I catch by the feet a fresh parable of a kutcha-pucka business. I sing it for only one rupee each!”All looked down by Charan’s sandal’d feet.Dared to be rolled in the same shivering blanket(like a chapati rolled around saag paneer)yet fearing to be parted, yet tenuously panting wereMugoo and Gugoo! The frail couple like shy redsquirrels, “O father, we love you. But. Most we are    ...    loving this: this that is my soul’s mirror. Mugoo is my Gugoo: Gugoo is my Mugoo.” The bony youthsclung sauced together. Stiffed for the glooping apart.The bootmaker father been crunching his own fists,the sweeper father been hurling daggers from his eyes,as the crowd fell silent, the fathers spoke as one,“What draws them out of caste, their underhandidle drawings. Such fancy is inking good for nothing.”Gugoo and Mugoo raised their necks, “If all heartswere good for nothing, could love from each for eachblow as one?” The apricot breeze blew a soft cadencebut could it push the dominion of the communal mindpast its bound and daily utility? Could sweet nothingsclear the world free of blood fear? Of sweet-faced Mugoo and Gugoo in a threadbare pleading, “Do notpart us.” From their mild rhetoric and politic of Lovethe hills and valleys had swooned into blossoms ofheaven, and had set the scene with gaudiest cheeks.So who dare part them? O Love, be roused, take armsand wound for the cause of love! Or at least shacklethe shadows that deepened into that tinsy couple.
When two sane persons are together one expects that A will recognize B to be more or less the person B takes himself to be, and vice versa.— R.D. Laing, “The Divided Self” The woman in the attic did not have visitors.The man in the basement gave parties that were popular.The woman in the attic had mononucleosis.The man in the basement had type 1 diabetes.The woman in the attic listened to audiobooks which the man in the basement held in disdain.The door to the attic swelled in some weathers; in order to shut, it had to be slammed.“There is a way in which” was a way in which the man opened sentences, as in “There is a way in which to close a door so it doesn’t slam.”The woman in the attic took cautious walks to build her strength.The man in the basement pointedly said, “Some of us have ailments which are not manufactured.”The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin.The woman in the attic read stories with heroines.The woman in the attic noticed a bruise that ran from the top to the base of her thigh.The bruise looked like Europe.The man in the basement was in love with the sister of the secretive man who loved him more.He whooped at the woman, “You killed your student?”To himself he wept, “I killed my father.”The man in the basement, recently divorced, was left with literally two possessions.The woman in the attic purchased books on psychopathology.The man in the basement produced fecal matterthat blocked the pipes in both attic and basement.The woman in the attic produced nothing at all.The woman in the attic was a waste of space.The man in the basement had sex almost daily.The woman in the attic had panic attacks.The man in the basement had only one rule:the woman in the attic was banned from his bedroom.But once she stole in and lay on his bedin his absence (or perhaps he was absent because she was there).The man in the basement moved to the West Coast;the woman in the attic crossed the Atlantic,whereas the house with the attic and basement saw statesof fumigation, exorcism, detoxification, and rehabitation.
Eight-year-old sitting in Bramhall’s field,shoes scuffed from kicking a stone,too young for a key but old enough nowto walk the short mile back from school.You’ve spied your mother down in the villagecrossing the street, purse in her fist.In her other hand her shopping bag nursesfour ugly potatoes caked in mud,a boiling of peas, rags of meat, or a tail of fishin grease-proof paper, the price totted upin penciled columns of shillings and pence.How warm must she be in that winter coat?On Old Mount Road the nearer she getsthe smaller she shrinks, until you reach outto carry her home on the flat of your handor your fingertip, and she doesn’t exist.
He walks through a cloud of blue moths —  one for each apostle — into a round towerwith a peaked chapeau of tiles, the oak door rotted, wasps fierce in the vine, limestonesteps hollowed. Rows of nesting boxes dark as the eyes of city whores; pigeons sleeping;a wedge of sun chiseling mica through dusky air. Now the quiet clamor of roosting birdskept for the eggs he candles in the sacristy; for the sweet meat of their breasts and dungdug into the Abbé’s onion beds; for music of a sort: the crooning of forbidden sex, bloodbubbling from a man’s cut throat. The boy reaches to their stink, peering at novicesworking the pump below: their creamy thighs and sleek-dipped heads, their oxter hair andsideways looks; soapy laughter, stiff nipples, wide eyes, and slender hands. Now this back-plumage black as smeared soot; iridescent necks; this underwing down dense with heatand lice and suffocating dark. Their amber eyes stare incuriously as he kills, wringingout last sobs of life, lining them up neat as martyrs cut down from a cross of air.
1 Delphine is snug in the corruptible quiet, her heart all lurgy.She is vigorous with postures and slackening her jaw.The vogue memory is how when she was ten she stuckher tongue out really far and her friend said,“That makes you a lemon.” Retrospectively,what she wanted was a permand a dad that gave money for the arcade.2 Delphine lies down in the corner and gets up and lies down again, etc.This is so she knows she’s lain down on every bit of the floor.3 There’s no one to see, so makeup is taken very seriously.If she French kisses the window her hair starts to curl — it is all very boudoir. Delphine expected to be bored.What she needs to say aloud is smooch.4 Delphine’s heart is more woolen than sure.She nipped off the fur budsfrom the pussy willow and strung theminto a necklace — a means of clustering wants.In the faraway land, her old milk glassholds other people’s toothbrushes and curdling water.5 Precision here is superfluous as cut flowers. On the seafrontthe shrubs are meek in the blossoming wind.Delphine has worked on her complexion.Bestowed with peaches, she’s personal limelight.6 At night her cruelties sneak up the ladder of her throat.Its delphinedelphinedelphine on steamed-up mirrors,always in joined-up finger-writing.7 Singing is only permitted in the dark. Delphine is judgingher own obedience. Look at me being strict! But she hasto remind herself of the rules, hourly. Deceit is its own discipline.8 Today the shrubs are insolent, waiting for adults to prepare a new game.Delphine considers ceremonial magic, but how to practicewithout a little magic escaping?9 Wish yourself into a lovely place, she thinks. Lovelinesswould include shrubs without such expressions!10 Wisdom may well have been squandered on seafrontsand lipstick. So many years afraid of waste is its ownwaste
1pavloslooking outto seaexplains:son costa,20, will becoming homewent with asponge caiquito nearbyislanda stormcame up:the boatwas smashed& sunkthe boysall gotashore& will becoming homein another caiqui 2 late at night i saw them costa & the others they’d saved the sponges too unloaded them first in burlap bags then hoisted them onto their backs trotted up the stone steps plodded up a steep hill at mid-night mid-night to the store-house 3 at 5 in the morning at the cafeneion the captain described the wreck: the boat had turned over & over in the water churning it like a propell-er 4 costa went by later on his motor-cycle (tall & sombre) riding like an indian 5 spiro (young gypsy) fishes off the dock when he isn’t climbing hills & selling blankets 6 what can you do? i get bored around the house the children crying fighting can’t sit all day in the cafeneion so i fish 7 after an hour he rolls in his lines teaches me two words in the romany tongue for ‘no fish’ (in the plural) 8 pat mos pat mos an gels an gels kaly mnos kaly mnos men kaly mnos kaly mnos men pat mos pat mos an gels an gels kaly mnos kaly mnos men 9 stergo has a tired eye bright but weary when he looks at you he looks into you his eye takes the place of what-ever you were think-ing 10 his café is near the customs house (& the pier) he keeps it open till late at night & opens again at 5 in the morn-ing if ever his cus-tomers find it closed they walk right by (& won’t drink coffee anyplace else) 11 in the endless city the end-less city the beg-gars are in one place the cops in an-other the fine people here & the poor people there (each has his parish each his precinct) in the endless endless endless city
we’re trying to eliminate the shack.  — Kristen Pierce, Harold’s CEO & daughter of founder Harold Pierce when i went to summer camp the white kids had a tendency to shorten names of important institutions. make Northwestern University into NU. international relations into IR. everybody started calling me Nate. before this i imagined myselfNathaniel A. maybe even N. Armstead to big up my granddad. i wrote my whole name on everything. eventually i started unintentionally introducing myself as Nate. it never occurred to me that they could escape the knowing of my name’s real length. as a shorty most the kids in my neighborhood couldn’t say my name.Mick-daniel, Nick-thaniel, MacDonnel shot across the courts like wild heaves toward the basket. the subconscious visual of a chicken shack seems a poor fit for national expansion. Harold’s Chicken is easier, sounds like Columbus’s flag stuck into a cup of cole slaw. shack sounds too much like home of poor people, like haven for weary  like building our own.
For my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks my first venture west was in Windows 98or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab& we were supposed to be playing some typing gameor another. the one i remember had a haunted theme.ghosts instructing us on the finer points of where to put our fingers. these were the last days before keyboards as appendage, when typing was not nature. i should’ve been letting an apparition coach me through QWERTY but rather i was at the general store deciding between ammo & axles,considering the merits of being a banker or carpenter.too young to know what profession would get me to the Willamette Valley in the space of a 40-minute period. i aimed my rifle with the arrow keys, tapped the spacebar with a prayer for meat to haul back to the wagon.this game came difficult as breathing underwater aftertrying to ford a river. i was no good at survival.somebody always fell ill or out into the river.each new day scurvy or a raid was the fate of a characternamed for my crush or my baby sister.this loss i know, how to measure what it meansto die premature before a school period ends.i can’t understand the game coming to a late end. an elderly daughter grieving her elderly mother. reading the expansive obit in a suburban Detroit church is a confusing newness.when the old do the thing the world expectsi retreat into my former self. focus on beatingvideo games I’ve always sucked at, brush upon Chicago Bulls history, re-memorizethe Backstreet Boys catalog, push away whatever woman is foolhardy enough to be on any road with me. i pioneer my way awayfrom all the known world. i look at homicide rates & wish we all expired the way i know best. i prayfor a senseless, poetic departure. i pray for my familyto not be around to miss me while i’m still here.i want a short obituary, a life brief & unfulfilled,the introductory melody before a beat’s crescendo into song,the game over somewhere in the Great Plains.i want to spare my descendants the confusionof watching a flame flicker slow. keep them from beingat a funeral thumbing the faded family pictures like worn keys,observing the journey done, the game won, the westconquered.
This is where you leave me.Filling of old salt and ponderous,what’s left of your voice in the air.Blue honeycreeper thrashed outto a ragged wind, whole monthsspent crawling this white beachraked like a thumb, shucking, swallowingthe sea’s benediction, pearled oxides.Out here I am the body invented naked,woman emerging from cold seas, herselfthe raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles,who must believe with all her puckeringholes. What wounds the Poinciana slitsforth, what must turn red eventually.The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-clingbird scratching its one message; the armyou broke reset and broke again. Caribbean.Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn newas a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex.I let every stranger in. Watch men change faceswith the run-down sun, count firesin the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot,studying their scarred window-plagues,nightshade my own throat closed tightagainst a hard hand. Then all comes mutein my glittering eye. All is knocked back,slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramictiles approaching, the blur of a beard.The white tusk of his ocean goring me.This world unforgiving in its boundaries.The day’s owl and its omenslipping a bright hookinto my cheek —
beverly be the only south side you don’t fit ineverybody in your neighborhood color of white henbrown bag tupperware lunch don’t fill youafter school cross the street, count quarters with white friendsyou love 25¢ zebra cakes mom would never let you eatyou learn to white lie through white teeth at white henoreos in your palm, perm in your haireveryone’s irish in beverly, you just missin’ the white skinpray they don’t notice your burnt toast, unwondered breadyou be the brownest egg ever born from the white henpantry in your chest where you stuff all the Black indistract from the syllables in your name with a white grinkeep your consonants crisp, coffee milked, hands visiblenever touch the holiday-painted windows of white henyou made that mistake, scratched your initials in the paintan unmarked crown victoria pulled up, full of white menthey grabbed your wrist & wouldn’t show you a badgethe manager clucked behind the counter, thick as a white henthey told your friends to run home, but called the principal on you& you learned Black sins cost much more than white ones
Your voice crawls across the dashboard of Grandma’s Dodge Dynasty on the way home from Lilydale First Baptist. You sing a cocktail of static and bass. Sound like you dressed to the nines: cowboy hat, fur coat & alligator boots. Sound like you lotion every tooth. You a walking discography, South Side griot, keeper of crackle & dust in the grooves. You fell in love with a handmade box of wires at 16 and been behind the booth ever since. From wbez to V103, you be the Coolest Gent, King of the Dusties. Your voice wafts down from the ceiling at the Hair Lab. You supply the beat for Kym to tap her comb to. Her brown fingers paint my scalp with white grease to the tunes of Al & Barry & Luther. Your voice: an inside-out yawn, the sizzle of hot iron on fresh perm, the song inside the blackest seashell washed up on a sidewalk in Bronzeville. You soundtrack the church picnic, trunk party, Cynthia’s 50th birthday bash, the car ride to school, choir, Checkers. Your voice stretch across our eardrums like Daddy asleep on the couch. Sound like Grandma’s sweet potato pie, sound like the cigarettes she hide in her purse for rough days. You showed us what our mommas’ mommas must’ve moved to. When the West Side rioted the day MLK died, you were audio salve to the burning city, people. Your voice a soft sermon soothing the masses, speaking coolly to flames, spinning black records across the airwaves, spreading the gospel of soul in a time of fire. Joycetta says she bruised her thumbs snappin’ to Marvin’s “Got to Give It Up” and I believe her.
you must bemade of money.your parentsmust have grownon trees.bet you’re blacktinged with green.bet you sleepon bags of it.bet your barbiesclimb it.bet you neverwanted.bet you neverhad to ask.bet you golf.bet you tennis.bet you got a summer house.bet you got a credit cardfor your 5th birthday. bet you playedwith bills for toys.bet you chew them up for dinner.bet you spit your black out like tobaccothat’s why you talk sobet you listen to green day.bet you ain’t never heard of al.bet your daddy wears a robearound the house.bet his hands are soft as a frog’s belly.bet your house is on a hill.bet the grass is freshly cut.bet you feel like a princess.bet the police protect your house.bet you know their first names. bet your house has a hundred rooms.bet a black lady comes to clean them.
Admit it — you wanted the end with a serpentine greed. How to negotiatethat strangling mist, the fibrouswhisper?To cease to exist and to dieare two different things entirely.But you knew this, didn’t you?Some days you knelt on coins in those yellow hours. You lit a flameto your shadow and atescorpions with your naked fingers.So touched by the sadness of hairin a dirty sink.The malevolent smell of soap.When instead of swallowing a fistfulof white pills,you decided to shower,the palm treesnodded in agreement,a choir of crickets singing behind your swollen eyes.The masked bird turned to you with a shred of paper hangingfrom its beak.At dusk, hair wet and fragrant,you cupped a goat’s faceand kissed his trembling horns. The ghost? It fell prostrate,passed through you like a swift and generous storm.
According to a report from the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico project, 138,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2006. They call it the corner of heaven:a laboratory, a foot at the throatof an empire. Before the holydirt, the woman with the feline gaitwaits with tangled hair, mouth agape — the letter X marked on what’s left of her breasts and face. Nuestra Belleza Mexicana
It was the thought that — if you could watch, if I could leak to the public the film of when I needed to reach you — that would be one way. • From a little-known bluff overgrown last summer with wildflowers,if you could watch a family of turkeys,a mother and 162 poults,if you could watch them abandon their roost on the lowest branch of a cottonwood tree,and lugging 163 tow cables behind them when they departed,if you could watch them dragging the tree through a field overgrown last summer withtanglehead grass.And discarding the yellow tree pitilessly across the rails of the Sunset Limited, which was carrying that day exactly 162 passengers west to their sentencings.It could be one way, I kept telling myself, to awake in summer when everyone’s sentencedand film myself shut of those dead to me.If the lights came up on my train in a field overgrown last summer with tanglehead.If we could slow to a halt in front of the yellow tree obstructing our path.There could be a smash cut,an establishing shot of the bluff where you knelt cutting wildflowers,and off-camera if the cottonwood started hemorrhaging yellow termites,if you could see the mites glowing yellow having drunk the yellow blood of the tree.If I could leak to you what the camera work couldn’t — in a hand-me-down suitan unsavory manhe’s inside a renaissance cherry casket,and the casket’s buried eight feet beneath the Sunset Limited’s engine room,and the casket’s rigged on the inside with a hand-crank generator,with Christmas lights in five colors,if we leaked red first then blue,if we leaked green before we leaked orange,last yellow,the light of which illuminates the interior of the casket enough for the man(he’s alive)to watch his face decompose in the mirror that’s rigged to the ceiling,if we could cut to the sentence handed down to the man many years ago,that any unsavory man is a man who should watch himself die.If there was a slow zoom on a woman’s hands typing eight words in first class,a slow dissolve to a child in coach,if he fingers a text that says don’t change for you,don’t change for me
The meek inherit nothing.God in his tattered coatthis morning, a quiet tonguein my ear, begging for alms,cold hands reaching up my skirt.Little lamb, paupered flock,bless my black tea with tears.I have shorn your goldenfleece, worn vast spoolsof white lace, glittering jacquard,gilded fig leaves, jeweled duston my skin. Cornsilk hairin my hems. I have milkedthe stout beast of what you call America;and wear your men across my chestlike furs. Stickpin fox and snowblue chinchilla: they too cameto nibble at my door,the soft pink tangles I trapthem in. Dear watchers in the shadows,dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease,please. Tell the hounds who undressme with their eyes — I have nothingto hide. I will spread myselfwide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here,some blood in the hunt. Now the centerof the world: my incandescent cunt.All hail the dark blooms of amaryllisand the wild pink Damascus,my sweet Aphrodite unfoldingin the kink. All hail hot jasminein the night; thick syrupin your mouth, forked daggeron my tongue. Legions at my heel.Here at the world’s red mecca,kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem,here in the cradle of Thebes,a towering sphinx roams the garden,her wet dawn devouring.
In icy fields. Is water flowing in the tank? Will they huddle together, warm bodies pressing? (Is it the year of the goat or the sheep? Scholars debating Chinese zodiac, follower or leader.) O lead them to a warm corner, little ones toward bulkier bodies. Lead them to the brush, which cuts the icy wind. Another frigid night swooping down —  Aren’t you worried about them? I ask my friend, who lives by herself on the ranch of goats, far from here near the town of Ozona. She shrugs, “Not really, they know what to do. They’re goats.”
Where do you suppose they’ve gone the bees now that you don’t see themanymore four-winged among flowers lowsparks in the clover even at nightfallare they fanning have they gone anotherplace blued with pollen stuck to their bristleswaiting beyond us spring dwindle is whatwe call it collapsing neonicotinoids“high levels in pneu- matic corn exhaust”loss of habitat or disappearing disease in the way of our kind so to speakwhat do you think they would call it language older than our ears were theysaying it all along even at daybreak —
Housed in a boom of blubber& bone, harpooned six times,the giant grew into a dynamohitched to six taut rope-linesskipping the boat across wavestoward the blurry lighthouse.It bled out a long silencebut men in oilskins laboredwith hydraulics of lighton water, walked its flank,& tore it down to a storeroomof Nantucket scrimshaw.Ballast stone or sledge? They bashed in the skull& lowered down the boyto haul up buckets of oilfor candles that burneda slow, clean, white glow.At ten, he was almost a manwhose feet sank into the waxymuck of ambergris. His sweatdripped into a long hour.Big as a barrel, the headechoed a temple nave.
The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask the approaching day hides behind & from, the coyote nosing forth, the muscles of something ahead, & a fiery blaze of eighteen-wheelers zoom out of the curved night trees, along the rim of absolute chance. A question hangs in the oily air. She knows he will follow her scent left in the poisoned grass & buzz of chainsaws, if he can unweave a circle of traps around the subdivision. For a breathy moment, she stops on the world’s edge, & then quick as that masters the stars & again slips the noose & darts straight between sedans & SUVs. Don’t try to hide from her kind of blues or the dead nomads who walked trails now paved by wanderlust, an epoch somewhere between tamed & wild. If it were Monday instead of Sunday the outcome may be different, but she’s now in Central Park searching for a Seneca village among painted stones & shrubs, where she’s never been, & lucky she hasn’t forgotten how to jig & kill her way home.
Stairs: a rushed flight down thirty-eight; French doors unlocked always.Always: a lie; an argument.Argument: two buck hunters circle a meadow’s edge.Edge: one of us outside bleeding.Bleeding: shards of glass; doors locked.Locked: carpet awash with blood.Blood: lift and drop; a sudden breeze.Breeze: its whistle through bone.Bone: the other was looking at —Bone: cradled to catch drips.Drips: quiet as a meadow fawn.Fawn: faces down each hunter each gun.Gun: again.Again: somebody call someone.Someone: almost always prefers forgetting.Forgetting: an argument; a lie.Lie: a meadow; a casement; a stair.
The neighbor calls the Siberian Elma “weed” tree, demands we hackit down, says the leaves overwhelmhis property, the square backyard.He’s collar-and-tie. A weed tree?Branches screen buildings, subway tracks,his patch of yard. We disagree,claim back the sap, heartwood, wild bark.He declares the tree “hazardous.”We shelter under leaf-hoard, crosswayfor squirrels, branch house for sparrows, jays.The balcony soaks up the shade.Chatter-song drowns out cars below.Sun branches down. Leaves overwhelm.The tree will stay. We tell him “no.”Root deep through pavement, Elm.
We buried the problem. We planted a tree over the problem. We regretted our actions toward the problem. We declined to comment on the problem. We carved a memorial to the problem, dedicated it. Forgot our handkerchief. We removed all “unnatural” ingredients, handcrafted a locally-grown tincture for the problem. But nobody bought it. We freshly-laundered, bleached, deodorized the problem. We built a wall around the problem, tagged it with pictures of children, birds in trees. We renamed the problem, and denounced those who used the old name. We wrote a law for the problem, but it died in committee. We drove the problem out with loud noises from homemade 
instruments. We marched, leafleted, sang hymns, linked arms with the problem, got dragged to jail, got spat on by the problem and let out. We elected an official who Finally Gets the problem. We raised an army to corral and question the problem. They went door to door but could never ID. We made www.problem.com so You Can Find Out About the 
problem, and www.problem.org so You Can Help. We created 1-800-Problem, so you could Report On the problem, and 1-900-Problem so you could Be the Only Daddy That Really Turns That problem On. We drove the wheels offa that problem. We rocked the shit out of that problem. We amplified the problem, turned it on up, and blew it out. We drank to forget the problem. We inhaled the problem, exhaled the problem, crushed its ember under our shoe. We put a title on the problem, took out all the articles, conjunctions, and verbs. Called it “Exprmntl Prblm.” We shot the problem, and put it out of its misery. We swallowed daily pills for the problem, followed a problem fast, drank problem tea. We read daily problem horoscopes. Had our problem palms read by a seer. We prayed. Burned problem incense. Formed a problem task force. Got a problem degree. Got on the problem tenure track. Got a problem retirement plan. We gutted and renovated the problem. We joined the Neighborhood Problem Development Corp. We listened and communicated with the problem, only to find out that it had gone for the day. We mutually empowered the problem. We kissed and stroked the problem, we fucked the problem all night. Woke up to an empty bed. We watched carefully for the problem, but our flashlight died. We had dreams of the problem. In which we could no longer 
recognize ourselves. We reformed. We transformed. Turned over a new leaf. Turned a corner, found ourselves near a scent that somehow reminded us of the problem, In ways we could never Put into words. That Little I-can’t-explain-it That makes it hard to think. That Rings like a siren inside.
In the age of the fish, cobblestones shift through a square & in hand turnold weapon — beyond the city an ocean swings in pelicans & spinner dolphins,leaves them on the Peruvian shore, orin a small town two thousand blackbirds fallfrom the Arkansas sky “just like last year” — but far off in the silence of the rural plains this cow wallows on a grassy moundtill a muzzle merges from another world, onlookers gawk along a picket fenceas she pushes the head & two hooves& then stands to open for the calfthat makes way with a message — a woman in the shape of a cloud sayingreturn to your people & tell them I am coming.
After Ed Sanders We’d been squatting near the worms in the White House lawn, protesting the Keystone Pipeline =$=$=$=$=$=$=>>; i could sense the dear worms through the grillwork fence, twists & coils of flexi-script, remakingthe soil by resisting it    ...     After the ride in the police van telling jokes, our ziplocked handcuffspretty tight, when the presiding officer asked: — Do you have any tattoos? — Yes, officer, i have two. — What are they? — Well, i have a black heart on my inner thigh & an alchemical sign on my ankle. — Please spell that? — Alchemical. A-L-C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L. — What is that? — It’s basically a moon, a lily, a star & a flame. He started printing in the little square MOON, LILY, STAR Young white guy, seemed scared. One blurry tattoo on his inner wrist    ...     i should have asked about his, but couldn’t cross that chasm. Outside, AshWednesday in our nation’s capital. Dead grass, spring trees about to burst, two officers beside the newish van. Inside, alchemical notes for the next time —
for my pregnant wife, nālani, during her second trimester nālani andi walkto our small community garden plot in mānoa — the seedpackets inmy pocketsound likea baby’stoy rattle — when do they sprayglyphosate alongthe sidewalks?from kuniato waimea,fifty thousandacres ofgmo fields — how willopen airpesticide driftaffect ourunborn daughter,whose nerveendings arejust beginning to root? — we plantseeds inrows, soil gathers underour fingernails — syngenta, dupont,dow, pioneer,basf, monsanto
In the early contact period, New England Indian wampum consisted of small tubular-shaped shells drilled and strung as beads.— Alfred A. Cave The breaking of clouds begins with seizure. A man grabs another, reasons ransom. A murder averted in the thing’s scheme.A cape’s shell transformed, more than one supposed. What stands behind this? Enemy or friend?(Yes, they can be both. Don’t you think I know?) List: Dutch. Indian. Pequot. Puritan.List: Then. War. Event. Now. History. List. The shell buys glories of iron and pelt.Wampum is dismissed. Joke. Sneer. Currency of the disappeared whose children live still.List: Blessing. Curse. Wife. Slave. Savior. Savage. The shells make their noise. The robbed graves cradle.He who brings food to the starving gets cooked.
A lot of it lives in the trachea, you know. But not so much that you won’t need more muscle: the diaphragm, a fist clenching at the bottom. Inhale. So many of us are breathless, you know, like me kneeling to collect the pottery shards of a house plant my elbow has nudged into oblivion. What if I sigh, and the black earth beneath me scatters like insects running from my breath? Am I a god then? Am I insane because I worry about the disassembling of earth regularly? I walk more softly now into gardens or up the steps of old houses with impatiens stuffed in their window boxes. When it’s you standing there with a letter or voice or face full of solemn news, will you hold your breath before you knock?
Spout of a leaf,listen out for the screamsof your relentless audience:the applause of a waterfallin the distance,a hurricane looting a Miami shopping mall.How careful you are with the rain-cradlingcurve of your back.Near your forest,all are ready to swimand happy to drownin me: this lake of firethat moats the edges. From my mouth,they come to peel the flames and drink their slick throatsinto the most silent of ashes.
Do you know what whole fields are?They are fields with a dog and a moon.Do you know the answer — for the many?Except there would be vineyards.Meaning there would, as usual, be commerce.Money, and a game of sorts to play it.Meanwhile — Emma lost in the cover-crop.Top of her head bobbing through mustard-flower.It is, after all, still here — The real world, the outstretched earth,Rain, soil, copper for pennies.
The war was over. We sutured the wounded, buried the dead, sat at the bar with the enemy, near the blue throat of the sea. A sushi chef slivered salmon into orchids, etched clouds from oysters, as they rose snowing pearls. From shrimp and seaweed he shaped hummingbirds, which hovered above our heads. With the world’s smallest blade he carved from yellowfin, miniature flanks of horses. They cantered around our hands.
somewhere, a sun. below, boys brownas rye play the dozens & ball, jumpin the air & stay there. boys become newmoons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least spit back a father or two. I won’t get started.history is what it is. it knows what it did.bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boycolor of a July well spent. but here, not earthnot heaven, boys can’t recall their white shirtturned a ruby gown. here, there is no languagefor officer or law, no color to call white.if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t callus dead, call us alive someplace better.we say our own names when we pray.we go out for sweets & come back. • this is how we are born: come morningafter we cypher/feast/hoop, we diga new boy from the ground, takehim out his treebox, shake wormsfrom his braids. sometimes they’ll singa trapgod hymn (what a first breath!)sometimes it’s they eyes who leadscanning for bonefleshed men in blue.we say congrats, you’re a boy again! we give him a durag, a bowl, a second chance.we send him off to wander for a dayor ever, let him pick his new name.that boy was Trayvon, now called RainKing.that man Sean named himself I do, I do.O, the imagination of a new reborn boybut most of us settle on alive. • sometimes a boy is bornright out the sky, dropped froma bridge between starshine & clay.one boy showed up pulled behinda truck, a parade for himself& his wet red gown. years agowe plucked brothers from branchesunpeeled their naps from bark.sometimes a boy walks into his roomthen walks out into his new worldstill clutching wicked metals. some boyswaded here through their own blood. does it matter how he got here if we’re all hereto dance? grab a boy, spin him around.if he asks for a kiss, kiss him.if he asks where he is, say gone. • no need for geographynow that we’re safe everywhere.point to whatever you please& call it church, home, or sweet love.paradise is a world where everythingis a sanctuary & nothing is a gun. here, if it grows it knows its placein history. yesterday, a poplar told me of old forestheavy with fruits I’d call unclebursting red pulp & set afire, harvest of dark wind chimes. after I fell from its limbit kissed sap into my wound.do you know what it’s like to livesomeplace that loves you back?• here, everybody wanna be black & is. look — the forest is a flock of boyswho never got to grow up, bloominginto forever, afros like maple crowns reaching sap-slow toward sky. watchForest run in the rain, branchesmelting into paper-soft curls, duckunder the mountain for shelter. watchthe mountain reveal itself a boy. watch Mountain & Forest playingin the rain, watch the rain melt everythinginto a boy with brown eyes & wet naps — the lake turns into a boy in the rainthe swamp — a boy in the rainthe fields of lavender — brothersdancing between the storm. • if you press your ear to the dirtyou can hear it hum, not like it’s filledwith beetles & other low godsbut like a mouth rot with gospel& other glories. listen to the dirtcrescendo a boy back. come. celebrate. this is everyday. every day holy. everyday high holiday. everyday new year. every year, days get longer. time clogged with boys. the boysO the boys. they still comein droves. the old world keeps choking them. our new one can’t stop spitting them out. • ask the mountain-boy to put you onhis shoulders if you want to seethe old world, ask him for some lean-in & you’ll be home. step off him& walk around your block.grow wings & fly above your city.all the guns fire toward heaven.warning shots mince your feathers.fall back to the metal-less sideof the mountain, cry if you need to.that world of laws rendered us into dark matter. we asked for nothing but our namesin a mouth we’ve known for decades. some were blessed to know the mouth.our decades betrayed us. • there, I drowned, back before, once. there, I knew how to swim but couldn’t.there, men stood by shore & watched me blue.there, I was a dead fish, the river’s prince. there, I had a face & then I didn’t.there, my mother cried over mebut I wasn’t there. I was here, by my ownwater, singing a song I learned somewheresouth of somewhere worse. that was whendirection mattered. now, everywhere I am is the center of everything.I must be the lord of something. what was I before? a boy? a son?a warning? a myth? I whistlednow I’m the God of whistling.I built my Olympia downstream. • you are not welcome here. trustthe trip will kill you. go home.we earned this paradise by a death we didn’t deserve.I am sure there are other heres.a somewhere for every kindof somebody, a heaven of brown girls braiding on golden stoopsbut here — how could I ever explain to you —  someone prayed we’d rest in peace & here we are in peace whole all summer
An eater, or swallowhole, is a reach of stream or a tidal area given to violent currents and waves that often upset and/or suck under boats and kayaks and the like as they are attempting passage.— William Kittredge The eater, my birthmother, was speaking: I can’t tell you his name.
My chicken pox hotel your machine gun pointillism My bamboo branch severed but nimble namein the air of two alphabets Picassos in bull-light routine Your mantis welded on a pole with a spiral staircasemy romance between pillager and villagertimed & timely intensity inversely proportional to frequency the chickadees in my voicethe thrush in your mouth our polymers of I skipping their archipelago stonesYour touchscreen my ringtone heartYour mahogany gift bag puffed with confettimy songs to appear as gauze for a new island
Ode’iminibaashkiminasiganke She makes strawberry jam ginagawinad wiishko’aanimad, waaseyaagami mixing sweet wind and shining water miinawaa gipagaa nibwaakaa, with thick wisdom bigishkada’ad, dibaabiiginad pounding, measuring gakina gaa zhawenimangidwa everything we’ve cared for gakina gaa waniangidwa everything we’ve lost nagamowinan waa nagamoyaang the songs we have not yet sung miigwanag waa wawezhi’angidwa the feathers yet to decorate ezhi-zhoomiingweyaangoba and all the ways we’ve smiled mooshkine moodayaabikoong into jars filled to the brim ji-baakaakonid pii bakadeyaang. to be opened when we are thin.
Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes. You know that Mama loves you lollipops and Daddy still has a job to lose. So put on a party hat. We’ll play the kazoos loud and louder from the mountaintop. Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes and dance the polka with pink kangaroos, dolphin choirs singing “flip-flop, flip-flop.” Hey, Daddy still has a job to lose —  don’t be afraid. Close your eyes, snooze, because today our suns have flared and dropped. Tomorrow when you wake, put on your blue shoes. Eat a good breakfast. Be good in school. Good boys go to college goody gumdrops so someday too you’ll have a job to lose. Waste trucks clatter by as the gray bird coos. Flames pour forth when the faucet’s unstopped. Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes. For now, Daddy still has a job to lose.
it is hallelujah time,the swallows tracing an arcof praise just off our balcony,the mountains snow-sparklingin gratitude.Here is our real life — a handful of possible peoniesfrom the market — the life we always intended,swallow life threadingthe city air withour weaving joy.Are we this simple, then,to sing all day — country songs,old hymns, camp tunes?We even believethe swallows, keeping time.
carnegie hall, october 19, 2014 beauty eludes me, usually. i soak up the lush red, violet, indigo bloomsabdullah ibrahim’s cool fingers pluck from the keyboard’s bed, but bring to these ‘rooms’(stanzas forged from replayed past as today’s not-news) no solacing bouquets. my weeds?i conjure rough green to rupture from seeds so furious they bleed — or, grieving, raisecrabgrass and blue notes, peppered with rust, where he grows flowers. yes, i tend my plantsincisively : no phrase that droops or wants out of the sun survives long. but the restrun wild, flush vivid, throw shade, deluge fruit, lavishly express their dissonant root.
Butane, propane and lungful of diesel.I did not stand a chance.Always with poisonbreath, bill, responsibility:a man with rote hands.Everything in exchange,rain in a frozen season.Our roof, roofs strung with hot wire. Our love,what was, an impressionof light, gaunt: there is nothing to get.
No one would burn your namefor not seeingthe ant’s careful antennaetesting the airnext to your shoe, six legsalmost rowing it along. Whowould be upsetif you brushed oneoff-handedly offyour arm, undoneby the tiny steps: what do they want
To grasp, like Prometheus, the fire — withoutthe power to give it away ...— Betty Adcock At first a silhouette on the horizon, thenturning solid, like Schiller coming up the path to meetthe adorable sisters, and they, pretending not to watch, their hearts, all the time, pounding, driven by the same spring force (that would tear them apart), the same force that drivesthe salmon upriver, against the current, the odds,back to the home pool, even as the autumn mind, in spite of itself, turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumngives to the summer’s leaves, a deceptive glamour,warming the past with an amber light, like brandy held up to the fire, or the sun sinking at duskinto the water, into the Baltic Sea each night, where, in the mythical depths of Lithuanian folktale, lies the amber castleof the female sun, burning in the dark water,a globe the color of harvest, aglowthere in the depths of the past, thoughthe amber, congealed sap of a once living force, is broken into bits, and the mythiccastle with it — strung now as beads, and hung,a charm, around the neck of a daughter,like the one in a Greek dream, picking flowers when the earth opened, and in a swirl of violet cape and the pounding of hoofs,the dark god broke out of the earthdriven by the same spring force, consequentialand mortal,and up there, hanging over the mythic fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same,and never to be reconciled) — what is that? A hot air balloon filled with passengers who paid to be raisedin a basket, to be up there looking down onthe ground where they live, a place shrunken nowbeneath their gaze, while their bloated shadow floats like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures below,the trace of their passage less than a breath of smoke from a coal-fired engine — a blast of tarnished airfrom the actual past, heavy metal delivered from memory.Useless to warn the girl, whose hand will always be reaching out for the flowers, orthe sisters inflamed with Schiller, as he with the tricolordream of a world he could never inhabit ... useless to comfort the eyeless Tiresias who knew how terrible waswisdom when it knew itself useless, and useless to read the names on the shining black wall of the VietnamMemorial, the text of exactly what war has accomplished — and look, there, standing high above the tragic scene, not the little figures of the wise ancients that Yeats sawcarved into the deep blue stone — but there, standing highabove Arlington, against the blank lapis of the sky:a horse with the torso and head of a man, yes, it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids, the wise and terribly woundedcentaur for whom immortality was a curse, and he gave it away to Prometheus, who stole the god’s fire and gave it away,as art gives the power to give it away,for that fire is the gift that cannot be held,for it will burn to an ash those (born and born again, war without end) who would hold it.
Oh my, oh my, I lose myselfI study atlases and cirrus pathsin search of traces of it, of you of that thing, of that song I keep pressing my ear to the current of air to hear ... I hear it and it disappears It was all I wanted to do in this life to sense that phantom tap on my nerves, to allow myselfto be hit by it, attacked, arouseduntil, as if someone else, I ariseI dance my part in paradise ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I read that bees who’ve drunkimidaclopridcan’t waggle to indicate to others where the best nectar is located (you and I also long to map for each other the sweetest suck of sap)Workers carry far less food back to the waiting hive. They wander, wobble can’t bring their way home alive The imidacloprid-imbibedcan’t bring it backto the colony.Some hives collapse entirely. I desire to say that I, I would do it differently I would be the bee, bloomed with pesticide that still would shake out a wigglelike the finger’s signatureon the iPad at checkout: not quite you, but still identity more like a wave than solid you yet enough to signify: There, there, in the far off field spiked acanthus, trumpets of datura in the abandoned lot on the corner of International and High the mystic assignation the golden throat of light: gorge, gorge, take your fill, I would cry before I too failed and my bumbling body lay down to die I’d dance my last danceto rescue the hiveyes, I’d carry the amber whirrersout alive ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Or not. Perhaps I too would succumb to the corn syrup, chemical piped into our supply.(I, too, longing to find my way to you, would go off course.) Alas. There is still melody, rhythm, someone is streaking out in air, droning around the phonograph, which is the grooved heart valve of the black vinyl divine who is winding this universe. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Someone is dancing us.Will it be you? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Dance, dance, as the hive collapses Dance, dance, while the colony disassembles Dance the occasion Dance the gorgeous design ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ inside the honeyof our lit up veins ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~between the stripes and streams of these swift rays
It was dusk for kilometers and bats in the lavender sky,  like spiders when a fly is caught, began to appear.  And there, not the promised land, but barbwire and barbwire   with nothing growing under it. I tried to fly that dusk  after a bat said la sangre del saguaro nos seduce. Sometimes I wake and my throat is dry, so I drive to botanical gardens  to search for red fruit clutched to saguaros, the ones at dusk I threw rocks at for the sake of slashing hunger.  But I never find them here. These bats say speak English only. Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup  clings to my throat, and it’s a tender seed toward my survival:   I also scraped needles first, then carved those tall torsos  for water, then spotlights drove me and thirty others dashing into palos verdes, green-striped trucks surrounded us,  our empty bottles rattled and our breath spoke with rust. When the trucks left, a cold cell swallowed us.
Stoned by no Rosetta,merchants allowed through the fencelearn to misspeak “black speak,”in Edgar’s harbor village,at HipHop Fish & Chickenon Route number 4 × 10.“Baby Girl” becomes XX.“My Man” assumes all XY.For salt & pepper curls,& baby stroller crowds,their broadcast is the same:“Baby Girl, your diabetesis ready.” “Main Man, yourstroke order is up.”They know their audience:french fried lives, french friedluck, french fried us.They know corner marketsof cornered markets, seldomscale the wall. Their shitis always hot. Their shit isalways cheap. Their shit isalways landmark of poisonin pens, along with: windowswearing boards, hubcapsleaning curbs, the sound of“bitch,” the sound of “mother-fucker,” the sound of “niggah” sounding off, projectile vomitingfrom children’s lips — our hushpuppy young, made beastsbehind these bars. Some daysyou will see them, dirt bike knights, riding Edmondson Avenue, armor-less. They arewheelies, jousting against traffic,wheelies, jousting against stop-lights, gas tanks bleeding outon stretchers, as sirens serenade,metal flies hover. There areskeletons of chickens scattered onthe ground. There are meeting bonesof children fractured in the street,cordoned off.This is urban warming. This isunderwear in exhibition, pantssaddened to sag, hanging off asscracks, like wet clothes on a line.This is the ecology of locks, sinceour country is locks, since ourcolor is locks, since this block islocked. When your order is up,you will eat anything tossed insidethe cage.
Satao, Kenya’s last great tusker, was poached in 2014 Cowards, let us sing in dead Elmolohow the elephants have died.We thank the cavemen, that they drew them,that zoologists described them,for the photos of them herdingwhich the tourists left behind,for who would ever, fools, believe us?Teeth from heaven to the ground!?I stretch my arm out like a trunkto palm the graveyard of its cranium;it’s how, I hear, they mourned.The brain within worked tools and language.I have none: a useless pen(it’s only good for drafting elegies)and even then, no words.We once had tuskers. Tell the birds!
how to explain brazil to an extraterrestrial:your face on a flag. they’d recognizeyou as leaderand knock you off. dirty part of the conquest.but it already happened, in another shape: aerialview of the amazon,a hundred-oddhydroelectric plantsto fry your eggs in the microwave.and they’d finish you off: just part of the conquest.and what if they cameto tour the waterfalls?or to be taught by the elitehow to make a democracy?the spaceships cover the skycompletely.all the offices and fast food joints declarean end to the working day.cockroaches and ratsfled first.it’s christmas, carnival, easter,our lady of aparecida, and the final judgmentall at once.lovers fuck for the last time.atms dry heave.the supermarket was a cemetery!the malls, the freeways!to explain civil unionsto an iguana, to explainpolitical alliances to a cat, to explainclimate changeto an aquarium turtle.it’s done, already. now, wait.eat an activia.dwell in philosophy. imagine!in our tropical country ... disastrous!not one river more. tragic!worse than locusts,your marvelous hydroelectric plants will beseen, in flames, from sirius:“my country was a sweet corn pamonhathat a starving alien put in the microwave.”watch us burn:possible epitaph. Translated from the Portuguese
Ashen face, wool hat bobbing, the young boy’s eyes dart to me, then up at the man pulling a rolling suitcase, whose hand he holds, then back at me. His legs move as if without gravity. The man asks: Do you know a church on this street that serves free food? I want to say I know. That the names of churches on an Avenue called Americas roll out of me. I want to tell you it is temporary, their condition: suitcase, darting eyes, seeking free food at 9 pm in a big city on a school night. I want to tell you I don’t for a moment wonder if that is really the boy’s father or uncle or legitimate caretaker —  something in the handholding and eyes, having watched too many episodes of Law and Order. I want to tell you I take them to a restaurant and pay for a warm meal or empty my wallet not worrying how offensive that might be because in the end hunger is hunger. I want to tell you I call someone who loves them — that there is someone —  and say your guys are lost, can you come? I want to tell you I sit down on the sidewalk at the corner of Waverly and pray — that all passing by, anonymous shoes marking the pavement, join in a chorus of prayer humming like cicadas in the Delta. I want to tell you the boy and the man eat food encircled by the warmth of bodies. I want to turn the cold night into a feast. I will tell you I am praying.
On Tyrone Geter’s “The Basket Maker #2” Weave me closer to you with hands dyed indigo that rake oyster beds awake Smell you long before I see you Vanilla sweet Sweetgrass weaving wares that keep Yankees coming on ferries, no bridge Waters been troubled Makes you wonder who put the root on whom first with doors dyed indigo Pray the evil spirits away at the praise house Make John Hop to stave off John Deere We migrants fighting to stay put Even nomads come home for a Lowcountry boil a feast for hungry prodigal sons and daughters with hearts dyed indigo Dying for you to weave us closer
It was the week of asking. Asking to watch her eat. Asking if she understood the doctors’ questions. Asking her to explain the difference between wanting to die right now, and dying later. The tumor making certain answers unquestionable. I watched her point to the incense dish from which someone swept all the ashes up. Asking if she recognized us. Because that is what the living want: thinking it is a sign we have been loved. But the answer was a summer drive, a mountain, piles of leaves beneath which a wolf slept, suckling her cubs. Some deaths are good and it makes them hard to grieve. She was, at times, in great pain. We wanted her to die, too. That was important. But first we wanted her to remember. From the bed, a finger pressed into a pile of leaves. Gray haunch, unmovable ashes. I didn’t want to disturb their tableau
abide with me don’t ever abide gimme anytime a pile of leaf-hay across the field underneath the bright new blue tractor pulling the tedder which is the waffler or fluffer
1. brett returns my mother to the wilderness I slipped them into my friend’s palm —  the tiny crucifix, and dove, from off my mother’s pendant watch —  and I asked her to walk them up through the brush toward timberline, and find a place to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now, she writes, “I walked up the canyon at dusk, warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon, came to an outcrop, above a steep drop — far below, a seasonal creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the love in the world, and I sent the talismans flying off the cliff. They were so small, and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or heard them land.” My mother is where I cannot find her, she is gone beyond recall, she lies in her sterling shapes light as the most weightless bone in the body, her stirrup bone, which was ground up and sown into the sea. I do not know what a soul is, I think of it as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she is wild now with it, she touches and is touched by no one knows — down, or droppings of a common nighthawk, root of bird’s foot fern, antenna of Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was something deeply right about the physical elements — atoms, and cells, and marrow — of my mother’s body, when I was young, and now her delicate insignias receive the direct touch of the sun, and scatter it, unseen, all over her home.    2. cross and dove  I had not wanted them, and I hadn’t known what to do with them, the minuscule symbols of my mother’s religion, I looked for a crack in the stone floor of the cathedral but could not find one. Then I thought of the wilderness near Desolation, and asked my friend to carry them up to a peak of granite, and let the wind take them. Since then, it has been as if my mother’s spirit matter has been returned into the great bank of matter, as her marrow had been sifted down into the ocean. It doesn’t matter, now, if I ever wanted to disassemble my mother. The sixteenth-of-an-inch- across cross, and the silver line drawing of a dove are cached, somewhere, that is nowhere to be found. Now I think of the nature of metal, and how long the soul-dolls of her trust will last in their spider-egg-sac of roots, needles, quartz, feathers, dust, snow, shed claw. Her belief she would have an eternal life was absolute, I think. It would not be good to think of my mother without her God — like a hermit howling in the moonscape of a desert. Once, when she was old — like an exquisite child playing a crone in the school play — we talked about heaven. She wasn’t sure exactly how, but she knew her father would be there, and her elder brother, and her second husband — maybe it was a heaven for four, the three men and her. It was so easy to make my mother happy in her last years, to tell her that I could just see her, as a kitten, in God’s lap, being petted. Her eyes sparkled with more beams than any other eyes I have seen. I have sent the tokens of her everlasting being into the high altitude. They will shine long after I can sing her — sing what I perceived through the distorted prisms of my vision. I don’t know if I saw my mother or did not see her. Day and night, her charms will gleam in the brush or stream, will reflect the mountain light in little pieces of unreadable language.
Some see a dove And think Pigeon Others see pigeons And think Dove Some know that all pigeons are doves Some angry as if pigeons were not doves But the city lover knows And I try to reconstruct The tattoo on one of your many branches The more arms the more power I think of you, O pale tattoo All pigeons, all doves You friendly cliff-dwellers
three times the snake appeared before me & like a gun said follow when you hear fire keep your body close to the ground the snake said point blank I am here for your protection I don’t have a trigger but I have a tongue to your neck to your ear to your temple follow me down the barrel three shots to steady ready the gray-­eyed snake spit warming its body along the crack you can’t go back from where you are unarmed handle the snake the way you handle a gun at your belt with a glove spirit guide the gun away from the body follow each bone as it moves up & down the back
There is a man who circles the perimeter with a baby in his arms unmoving. Locusts burn with the silhouettes of saints at dusk. Saints are in the cloud. We are in a dry storm. The man extends his circles pulling the baby through the cactus scrub. Look at his melting trainers in the heat, they aren’t what he asked for. There are black leather skids on the dry stone wall. People in black cloaks run out of the corner of your eye. A pig turns on a spit. The prairie is a terrarium for the blaze but the edge is dry of fire. It is the height of one season, bushes burn. A burnt five-year-old without eyelids turns quick cartwheels through the heat wave under the big pale sky, black and blue.
Now that the theoretical physicist slash cosmologist has explained to me, has laid out in clean even rows of logic how every atom in my body arrived from a star, a star that blasted apart,  and the atoms of my left hand  originated from a different sun than my right, I can shine. I can go dark recalling how my grandfather made the vertical blinds rattle when he shoved my grandmother into them.  Startled in the yard, I turned to that sound, from the flower bed my eyes were held by the swaying blinds. It took a while for each to line up   perfectly straight again, to tell myself  she slipped. Only then could I return to stalking the butterflies. My right hand was quick: reach and pinch. I had so many soft wings that summer between my thumb and index, so many of them skewered on cactus needles. I was a kid. I was cruel slash gentle. He was cruel slash gentle. He had witnessed my destroying and I saw  across his creased face empathy for them. After his scolding I placed one dead one inside the white envelope of a flower. Under the sun it glowed. Under the moon, more glowing.
Ad libitum I sing this body ad libitum, Europe scraped raw between my teeth until, presto, “Ave Maria” floats to the surface from a Tituba 
tributary of “Swanee.” Until I’m a legato darkling whole note, my voice shimmering up from the Atlantic’s hold; until I’m a coda of sail song whipped in salted wind; until my chorus swells like a lynched tongue; until the nocturnes boiling beneath the roof of my mouth extinguish each burning cross. I sing this life in testimony to tempo rubato, to time stolen body by body by body by body from one passage to another; I sing tremolo to the opus of loss. I sing this story staccato and stretto, a fugue of blackface and blued-up arias. 
I sing with one hand smoldering in the steely canon, the other lento, slow, languorous: lingered in the fields of “Babylon’s Falling” ...
Or is it a poor trait I am a parasite I lift off the wings of others
People can ... read Braille with their lips and their tongue ...  — David J. Linden, The Kojo Nnamdi Show Whitman is a foot-long sub of grass-fed beef, Falstaff, a fat onion ring, Ophelia, a wailing wine. Judas Iscariot’s kiss turns my lips against themselves. Emily D makes my tongue want to fly a kite. The tongues of angels, I cannot swallow.
a mass of moth-eaten cloud threadbare and spun across a bullish moon an animal wakes when I walk in winter, wrapped against a withering wind, solitary, on a Solway flat       winter migrants gather in long black lines along a silver sleek heads held back, throats  thrust toward  an onshore rush occasionally cruciform, static  in a flying wind as though in obeisance to the sea       retracing steps washed out  by whimpering silt each tide a season in the pecking mall       they call as I approach, an upright spelk  on their shelf,   gathering my notes  and theirs we scavenge ahead of our shadows  waiting for what the tide brings in or leaves out       purple, hedged cloud  edged gold  hung on silver slates of sand  diverted leaps of light  surrender water risen from rivulets  roughed from rage  repealing waves repeat  a curlew’s estuary echo  who, but you   and the wind’s wake?
A monstrosity in the alley. A many-bodied movement grouped for terror, their flights’ brief shadows on the kitchen curtains, on the street’s reliquaries of loose squares and hustle. Some minds are groomed for defiance. The youngest calls out his territory with muscular vowels where street light spills peculiar, his hand a chorus of heat and recoil. “Could have been a doctor” say those who knew and did not know him, though he never wanted to know what gargles endlessly in a body — wet hives, planets unspooled from their throbbing shapes. There are many ways to look at this. He got what he wished against. He got wings on his shoes for a sacrifice. The postulate that stars turn a blind eye to the cobalt corners of rooms is incorrect. Light only helps or ruins sight. Daylight does cruel things to a boy’s face.
Someone else’s child, not you, is running and running down the beach. Both feet dig into the burning sand. Two others heave one yellow bucket full of sugar-brown  seaweed, their twin suits flowering  a conflation of pink over blue behind the water. So landmark cactus and landmine rock battlefield uphill toward the early moon’s white horse head and each wave collapses to your right, unsettles, shouting every half minute: have me, shhhh, have me, shhhh, halve me, shhhh
At the end of the story, When the plague has arrived, The performance can begin. Displacing flimsy heaven And its contraptions, now Come practical urgencies: Getting the price of salvation, Divined from the guts of birds Or from cruciform insects. Like The savior Oedipus, kittens Are histrionic: defiant swagger Then ritual flight in terror. “The soul of the cat is the form Of its body.” In Christendom, Civic mourners were hired To walk the stricken city ways Chanting: “I am sick, I must Die
Los Angeles Across from the gorgeous dog park, men dream against poodle-pissed trees —  their pillows made from breath captured in milk cartons. Only arid, temperate climate offers respite. Let us suppose they have tales, here in this city where filmed stories turn a mint. All around, one wide screen — the dark hills due north pixel-pocked with villa lights. Below, streets hemmed with haggard brown men — jack-in-the-box bodies ever unfolding. Who is pitching this script? Title: “The Child of 1968.” Voiceover: After the Integration Apocalypse, one man must find his way in a land where the sole survivors who look or speak like him are those rendered disturbed and indigent
Why waste away in a box when you could be a nurse tree? That’s what they call dead logs:mushroomeries of the woods. Your living room’s a wood of couches, books, and chairs. You’re dead not at all, but could you be preparing for things to grow inside the chest of the log you plan to become: cherished compost heap where heat turns the brown mess of feelings, sorry, that’s peelings, into comp-o- sition? For we who love our hands in dirt, a leaf skirtdecomposing seems an ideal station between this life and next: I visit your room as on a forest walk. Passing a fallen log — is that you? —  I see a scarlet fungus cap pop up from friable bark.
I think first of two sparrows I met when walking home, late night years ago, in another city, not unlike this — the one bird frantic, attacking I thought, the way she swooped down, circled my head, and flailed her wings in my face; how she seemed to scream each time I swung; how she dashed back and forth between me and a blood-red Corolla parked near the opposite curb; how, finally, I understood: I spied another bird, also calling, its foot inexplicably caught in the car’s closed door, beating its whole bird body against it. Trying, it appeared, to bang himself free. And who knows how long he’d been there, wailing. Who knows — he and the other I mistook, at first, for a bat. They called to me — something between squawk and chirp, something between song and prayer — to do something, anything. And, like any good god, I disappeared. Not indifferent, exactly. But with things to do. And, most likely, on my way home from another heartbreak. Call it 1997, and say I’m several thousand miles from home. By which I mean those were the days I made of everyone a love song. By which I mean I was lonely and unrequited. But that’s not quite it either. Truth is, I did manage to find a few to love me, but couldn’t always love them back. The Rasta law professor. The firefighter’s wife. The burlesque dancer whose daughter blackened drawings with ms to mean the sky was full of birds the day her daddy died. I think his widow said he drowned one morning on a fishing trip. Anyway, I’m digressing. But if you asked that night —  did I mention it was night? — why I didn’t even try to jimmy the lock to spring the sparrow, I couldn’t say, truthfully, that it had anything to do with envy, with wanting a woman to plead as deeply for me as these sparrows did, one for the other. No. I’d have said something, instead, about the neighborhood itself, the car thief shot a block and a half east the week before. Or about the men I came across nights prior, sweat-slicked and shirtless, grappling in the middle of the street, the larger one’s chest pressed to the back of the smaller, bruised and bleeding both. I know you thought this was about birds, but stay with me. I left them both in the street —  the same street where I’d leave the sparrows — the men embracing and, for all one knows (especially one not from around there), they could have been lovers —  the one whispering an old, old tune into the ear of the other — Baby, baby, don’t leave me this way. I left the men where I’d leave the sparrows and their song. And as I walked away, I heard one of the men call to me,please or help or brother or some such. And I didn’t break stride, not one bit. It’s how I’ve learned to save myself. Let me try this another way. Call it 1977. And say I’m back west, South Central Los Angeles. My mother and father at it again. But this time in the street, broad daylight, and all the neighbors watching. One, I think his name was Sonny, runs out from his duplex to pull my father off. You see where I’m going with this? My mother crying out, fragile as a sparrow. Sonny fighting my father, fragile as a sparrow. And me, years later, trying to get it all down. As much for you —  I’m saying — as for me. Sonny catches a left, lies flat on his back, blood starting to pool and his own wife wailing. My mother wailing, and traffic backed, now, half a block. Horns, whistles, and soon sirens. 1977. Summer. And all the trees full of birds. Hundreds, I swear. And since I’m the one writing it, I’ll tell you they were crying. Which brings me back to Dolphy and his transcribing. The jazzman, I think, wanted only to get it down pure. To get it down exact — the animal racking itself against a car’s steel door, the animals in the trees reporting, the animals we make of ourselves and one another. Stay with me now. Don’t leave me. Days after the dustup, my parents took me to the park. And in this park was a pond, and in this pond were birds. Not sparrows, but swans. And my father spread a blanket and brought from a basket some apples and a paring knife. Summertime. My mother wore sunglasses. And long sleeves. My father, now sober, cursed himself for leaving the radio. But my mother forgave him, and said, as she caressed the back of his hand, that we could just listen to the swans. And we listened. And I watched. Two birds coupling, one beating its wings as it mounted the other. Summer, 1977. I listened. And watched. When my parents made love late into that night, I covered my ears in the next room, scanning the encyclopedia for swans. It meant nothing to me —  then, at least — but did you know the collective noun for swans is a lamentation? And is a lamentation not its own species of song? What a woman wails, punch drunk in the street? Or what a widow might sing, learning her man was drowned by swans? A lamentation of them? Imagine the capsized boat, the panicked man, struck about the eyes, nose, and mouth each time he comes up for air. Imagine the birds coasting away and the waters suddenly calm. Either trumpet swans or mutes. The dead man’s wife running for help, crying to any who’d listen. A lamentation. And a city busy saving itself. I’m digressing, sure. But did you know that to digress means to stray from the flock? When I left my parents’ house, I never looked back. By which I mean I made like a god and disappeared. As when I left the sparrows. And the copulating swans. As when someday I’ll leave this city. Its every flailing, its every animal song.
When he speaks of deserved and undeserved as more than terms — how they can matter, suddenly — I can tell he believes it. Sometimes a thing can seem star-like when it’s just a star, stripped of whatever small form of joy likeness equals. Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed to fail — that the body is — keeps me almost steady, if steadiness is what a gift for a while brings — feathers, burst- at-last pods of milkweed, October — before it all fades away. Before the drugs and the loud music, before tears and restraining orders and the eventual go fuck yourself get your ass out of here don’t go
About what’s past, Hold on when you can, I used to say,And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge —  metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un- knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously, a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child whom I gave some money to and told no one about, having promised ... You must keep what you’ve promised very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget
When I was twelve, I wanted a macaw  but they cost hundreds of dollars. If we win the lottery? I asked. Macaws weren’t known to be great talkers,  but they were affectionate.  Yes, my mother said. If we win the lottery.  I was satisfied, so long as it wasn’t impossible. The macaw would be blue.
Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence.Why aren’t I your wife? You swerved around a turtle sunning itself. I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass. We were late for dinner.One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said. Claws in tar. You turned the car around. Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace, crushed roman dome, the surprise of red blood. I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm.I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt. The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know. Driving that road next winter, you remembered that place in the road. Your turtle. During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes. It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.
from locusts and wild honey  On a lesser diet than that of the wretched rests a prophecy: some of us come to prepare. I stood before my god, at a foreign altar, and promised to guide you; me, with my heretic theology. I practice the ways passed to me by descendants of followers of a wild man: followers in the desert downwind of his musk, listening to him confess himself unfit to loose latchets on shoes; they believed his words holy, ignored bits of insect wing in his beard. And then, he told them of a dove that no one else could see. I have learned to retain my head while speaking truth.rite of the baptism of children Do I reject the glamor of evil? I do. You are creation — the same after water and after the Holy Spirit, only now you see the door to life and unto the Kingdom of God. Do not feel the need of any claimant to royal priesthood. Some ancient, calling himself Peter, must have been in his cups when he wrote that ish. The nerve! You were cleansed with water by power of the Word. Sign of the Cross? Phooey! There is no miracle in an instrument of death. See: Martin Luther, theses 5, 16, 28, and 95. God made no symbols; people did, et cetera.some thoughts on caterina benincasa Not much older than you when she first saw the Christ — seated in glory with few of His disciples — who gave her many gifts: a consummate marriage by way of His foreskin; the blesséd stigmata; and her head as a bag of rose petals. To “build a cell inside your mind,” a cell of self-knowledge, is good advice, my child. The Christ commanded her to open the eye of her intellect and gaze into Him. This made her secularly gifted, a power broker. Read her correspondence, yes, the letters of a lunatic diplomat but heeded, virtuous sweet amorous Word of God.ephphatha riteHe sighed. All power in heaven and in earth is. Be opened. Hear and speak the truth but tell no one how. Superior to the purifications of Old Law was that water. Be opened, daughter. All power in heaven and earth is. No questions. Be opened. Hold fast to my teachings, not those of stewards but my words. Seek you first, girl, the kingdom of my love, with all your mind. All your mind. Do not forget your mind. You are mine. Be opened. Power! Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness. All power in heaven and in earth is given me. Be opened.coda patrinalis In the land of mama there is a cathedral, the cathedral of the Holy Spirit. Inside is an icon, an image of Theotokos. Once old enough to go solo, after an age of discernment is reached, perhaps in passing by, go there. Make your way up the nave and to the right; there you will find her looking at you, babe in arm, tired and anemic as usual. Bless her with a kiss and make her holy. Bless the babe, too, if feeling generous. Use a chair if needed. It is a painting. Simple miracles were made on a lesser diet than that of the wretched.
a netless somersault, the trapeze swing disappears in disheveled clouds among cumulus sheep, birds, rowboat   the feather on the Joseph Cornell narrow shelf, unruffled as the one we pocketed from the grass in a nearby park to share week by week her house mine but soon forgot and it sat on her dresser maybe sits there still   elsewhere, heat, light, a shut-eye bat hangs, a limp cyclamen stem straightens, an avocado ripens, a grapefruit tree in a winter kitchen leafs out of season. Wednesday is a calendar X, Thursday, Friday, the impulse: turn inward   start with near then far. narrow then broad. wayward then homebound, that, too, is near then far, inward. rate the prospects 1 to 10, Yelp the day 1- to 4-star: accommodations, host, did it match the advertised expectation   the box on your lap, open it up. open your lap, open it up and your arms, a is for arm. b is for box, c connection, go on, break the seal, unfold the replacement net
to worship   tininess of a  martyr  observe  shrinking  church in  rearview  mirror  the black deer  it turns out was  beige a tan doe  covered in flies  flesh of shame  is nearly the  shame of flesh  pressing an unstable  clock to cactus with one,  two, three counts of recalibration  fuck you who ask for  forgiveness instead of permission all  clocks are precarious inscrutable windows
to be  gone a  constant desire  embarrassed for the   giant leaning in for love  we had enough of  the dance number but the whirling begins  it just starts silos full of air no more corn no more wheat watching myself for full details in a strange man’s pants we let  the soldier board the plane  shot in head three days later  why are you angry you said  why are you not I said
+ This is a poured-truth dressed in memory and cut down; this is a matter ruff; a gray middle the world is in flight and many things circle.    What world do you want me in? I ask.  But I am confronted with touch, the work of hand and eye, and a kept-remark roaming ...      When in Rome, I think.  +A dressed-memory: never did more frill mean curtained-silence.   Hello? We’re here, they say.  I remember the moment first-harvested: no possible brimming is ever frank. At that age, who knew filth could be forward. I thought I could cut it down. + Look, the leaping is possible, I think. I watch the way evening attaches to us. See its starting point? It banded, uncontrolled and gleaming. Our jewel. Not all worlds see the darkness. Remember: the world is good, that leaping center is a tuned heart. I want that melody. +What world do you want me in, now? I ask I feel broad-throated, and slippy. I say, tell me the times the chronicle mentions me.    56, she says. Let me be clear: I knew. I said, I knew. I wanted to have my own grown romance. Plant me another. Do it now.
What is flat and nothing but skin, What lolls in a shallow world, What is watched for its surface, Between long episodes of water the color of a dead screen’s 
sea-green glass, What has but a few hairs in the snapshot? A bit of muzzle, No more than a pug’s worth for a rented red kayak, For this sailor swallowed by enormous wax lips, What is gray and aporial, Once mistaken for half girl, Half monster, Disappointingly naked and slipping under the hull.    —Lido Beach, Fla., November 2013
metaphor waits at the foot of his name on thursday he’ll cancel experience metaphor waits for him to shovel the snow on thursday he’ll crush experience
1. homilies from home You’ve got to put your pants on in the house of fact. And in the house of fact, when you take off your shirt, you can hear your shirt cry out, Facts are the floor, facts are how you make the right side talk to the left.
Before the war leaned in and blew out the candles, there were many long days where lovers called themselves lovers and a house was a dream but also four walls, a roof. A father called to his daughter to see the monarch butterflies, pausing in their migration to fan the goldenrod, a tiger in each coy disclosure. A young man reached for a blackberry and found draped on a branch a green snake the color of matcha. A snake the color of matcha sighed in the sun. People drove in cars. There were jobs and someone had to work every morning. A man quit his job but it was no tragedy. He didn’t like the work. Another man slid in and found it comfortable enough, and just as easily slid in beside the man’s wife and into the everyday rhythms of his life and that was no tragedy either. After rains, a ring of mushrooms would delicately crack the earth. Spanish moss harbored red mites. The sky wasn’t interesting. No one looked up.
In every crowd, there is the one with horns, casually moving through the bodies as if this is the living room of a creature with horns, a long cloak and the song of tongues on the lips of the body. To see the horns, one’s heart rate must reach one hundred and seventy five beats per minute, at a rate faster than the blink of an eye, for the body with horns lives in the space between the blink and light — slow down the blink and somewhere in the white space between sight and sightlessness is twilight, and in that place, that gap, the stop-time, the horn- headed creatures appear, spinning, dancing, strolling through the crowd; and in the fever of revelation, you will understand why the shaman is filled with the hubris of creation, why the healer forgets herself and feels like angels about to take flight. My head throbs under the mosquito mesh, the drums do not stop through the night, the one with horns feeds me sour porridge and nuts and sways, Welcome, welcome.
culture is richest where there’s the greatest ratio  land : coast   — After Barry Cunliffe   •  this patch of the western ocean’s coruscating garden recalls my favorite song (mishearing) the sea’s very hum- drum
The girl in the green ski chasuble hasn’t yet graduated from radio school. Let’s pay attention. Looking ahead, why, he waved his mouth along. Doesn’t life get difficult in the summer? The divine medicine for it collapsed in front of the shortstop, who took off like a battalion. Crowds of older people who would read this happily, willingly, then walking into night’s embrace, then kiss. “To turn you out, to turn you out!” Sometimes an arm is accused: You could have felt it, the blue shirts, phlegm central, four times a night. But what does that get me? Light refreshments. When the suburban demonstration kind of shrunk you put your foot out, leave it or kiss it or even two years ago, Charmaine here tells us. I think I should stay ...     Cross-eyed sonofabitch ...     He liked him, he could tell. A de-happening. The gangster no longer wanted to sleep with him, but what the heck. With time off for actual fuzz collected ... All right, boys. Cheap murders, peach driven ... I seen enough of those samples along the way.
Whether the harborline or the east shoreline consummated it was nobody’s biz until you got there, eyelids ashimmer, content with one more dispensation from blue above. And just like we were saying, the people began to show some interest in the mud-choked harbor. It could be summer again for all anyone in our class knew. Yeah, that’s right. Bumped from our dog-perch, we’d had to roil with the last of them. It’s taken a while since I’ve been here, but I’m resolved. What, didn’t I print, little piles of notes, slopes almost Sicilian? Here is my friend: Socks for comfort (now boys) will see later. Did they come? The inner grocery had to take three sets of clips away. Speaking to him of intricate family affairs. I’m not what you think. Stay preconscious. It’s just the “flooding of the council.” No need to feel afraid.
Aggressive panhandling, public urination, verbal threats, public nudity and violation of the open container law followed us down the days, for why are we here much longer, or even this long? I ask you to be civil and not interrupt night’s business. It was fun getting used to you, who couldn’t have been more nicer. This was as modern as it had ever been. They were influenced by him: some dirty magazine on the air tonight. (Amid the chaos, reports of survivors.) Didn’t the flowers’ restoration cat fugue keep spilling, and like that? It wouldn’t be the first time, either. The pro-taffeta get up and laugh, investigate or communicate. The night you were going to stay up late, others will kiss, and he talks about you, and I don’t know what. Come in, anyway, and don’t lack for tales of the Assertion. We’re talking civilian unrest. Yes, well, maybe you should take one. (Do not bite or chew.)
Sometimes something like a second washes the base of this street. The father and his two assistants are given permission to go. One of them, a woman, asks, “Why did we come here in the first place, to this citadel of dampness?” Some days are worse than others, even if we can’t believe in them. But that was never a concern of mine, reasoned the patient. Sing, scroll, or never be blasted by us into marmoreal meaning, or the fist for it. Kudos to the prince who journeyed here to negotiate our release, if you can believe it. You’re right. The ballads are retreating back into the atmosphere. They won’t be coming round again. Make your peace.
Night Magic (Blue Jester), 1988, by Carlos Almaraz   After Federico García Lorca  Blue that I love you Blue that I hate you Fat blue in the face Disgraced blue that I erase You lone blue Blue of an alien race Strong blue eternally graced Blue that I know you Blue that I choose you Crust blue Chunky blue Moon blue glows that despise You — idolize you Blue and the band disappears Blue of the single left dog Blue of the eminent red fog Blue that I glue you to me You again and again blue Blue blue of the helium Bubble of  loveloss Blue of  the whirlwind The blue being again Blue of the endless rain Blue that I paint you Blue that I knew you Blue of  the blinking lights Blue of  the landing at full tilt Blue of  the wilt Flower of  nightfall Blue of  the shadow In yellowed windows Blue of the blown And broken glass Blue of the Blue Line Underlines in blue Blue of the ascending nude Blue before the blackness Of  new blue of our winsome Bedlam Blue of the blue Bed alone: blue of the one Who looks on blue of what Remains of cement fall Blue of the vague crescent Ship sailing blue of the rainbow Of  wait blue that I whore You — blue that I adore you Blue of the bluest door Blue my painted city In blue (it blew.)
Nocturnal (Horizon Line), 2010, by Teresita Fernández  I’d come to help settle your mother’s affairs. On the last night, we ate where she worked all her life. Now that she’s gone, you said, I’ll never come back. Looking out over the dark, you saw a light in the distance, a boat crossing the bay, and told the story of the fisherman cursed to float adrift forever. You hadn’t thought of it since you were a child, and held your hand across the table to show me how it trembled. I didn’t understand until, alone, years later, wandering the city where I was born, I stood before a black wall, polished to shimmer, and it looked to me like the sea at night, hard and endless.
Platanal, 1974, by Myrna Báez    Considering Myrna Báez’s painting Platanal, E. Carmen Ramos explains, “When Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony, artists like Francisco Oller depicted the plantain as both a key accoutrement to the jibaro (rural peasant) and a metaphor for the island’s independent cultural identity.”  Plantain trees gather at the edge of the orchard, clamor for light in the foreground. They seem to grow as one, as if they’d fill the field and the mountains behind them, leaves large and frayed. We stood there, once, or someplace like it, so here we are again, it seems, years later, branches leaning over the road, you in your long skirt, looking out as if to recall something you meant to do. My country, I hear you say still. But if that’s dusk in the hills, you know what’s coming to the field. You’ll stand among them till there’s nothing left to see. I’ll wait beside you, though I don’t know what we’re waiting for.
Radiante, 1967, by Olga Albizu    Jestered ochre yellow my umber Rothko divisions my Brooklyns with Jerry Stern black then oranged gold leaf & tiny skulls perforations Dada sugar bread of Oaxacan ecstasy Lorca’s green horse the daffodil head corruptions of the State in tenor exhalation saxophonics blossomings rouged monkey Dalí roll down the keys the high G’s underStreets of the undeRealms my hair. Throttle up into hyper-city correlations = compassion compassion the void extends
Placa/Rollcall, 1980, by Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez   If the city was a body, graffiti would tell us where it hurts.— Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez   And this block would shout, “Nos diste un chingaso, cabrón. Mira esta cara rota, these baton-cracked ribs, this black and blue street dizzy con gente: blades, kiki, larry, snow, enrique, connie, 
elton, king, david, kelly, jeff, ratón, chaz, los de aquí, los de abajo. This roll call won’t be silenced, not by glock, not by chokehold. This is our temple of runes, our tomb — its glyphic curve and flow, calligraphic code writ acrylic. This, our relic, our scroll unrolled in catacombs, our flecks of subtext still buzzing después de que vayamos con La Pelona. ¡qué lucha, loco! Ven, baile con nosotros to the aerosol’s maraca y hiss, al punk en español’s furious sweat. Hang your head out the window y dale un grito tan lleno de duende that it cracks the pavement, summons our dead to dinner. Turn the tonal kaleidoscope. Then pause, catch your breath, so you don’t miss the illegible moment where all the mystery lives. There, de-cypher that!”
Untitled, from the Silueta series, 1980, by Ana Mendieta  has appeared to the mountain dwellers, her grief  engraved  where stone softens to clay. Keep your eyes sharp for a dagger.  In its hilt, you’ll find her face pressed to the earth’s cheek. Kiss  this sacred spot before the rains wash it away like her orphaned  feet. Notched heart cradles a planet heavy with night-  mares flying into empty mouths. Listen for their thirsty murmurs.  She’ll push her ponderous child into the dew of  a San Felipe dawn,  name him Salvador. They’ll rest beneath a web spun umbilical,  eclipsed from our human eyes.   •  Our Lady   stone clay    earth rain orphaned heart  eclipsed
Untitled, from the Silueta series, 1980, by Ana Mendieta   For Ana Mendieta  Mud learns to live with mites, worms, beetles, and ticks. And Lioness digs up the earth where a warthog cowers in his den. You know you are loved when she tears you to bits, brittle thing. The lioness tongue softens you up all the way to her bottom. Roots, straw, weeds, rain your crown, hija de Ochun. Even Earth’s suffering arises from pangs of  love. When Lioness fangs diffuse the blood we call it liberation. Wax hisses from the smoldering wick, curtains you draw go shoosh. The last earth imprint you ever left on asphalt from thirty floors up. A shoe curved from the work your instep leaves behind. The breath of the lioness heats up your shoulders and your neck. A genetic photograph of every cell that ever lives exists in a lioness mouth. She tears into the riverbed and root hairs clog her claws. Ancient bacteria get all up in you. Control the fire and it burns deeper, flashing life into sleeping embers.
Man on Fire, 1969, by Luis Jiménez  Because the facial features burn fastest. Because the sun sets in Tibet before it ever rises in the West. Because Tsering Tashi’s mother told him to dress in the thickest, 
finest, llama wool chuba. For I find no flattering explanation for the murder of everyone. Flames consume the head, hands, and feet in the mural by Orozco. Because monks don’t even eat meat. His clothes made him torch; still Thích Quảng Đức’s heart would not fire. Because his remains stiffened when they tried to place him in a tomb. Because what is the point of murdering everyone in the world? Since the sun sets in Vietnam before it reaches the West. Because aren’t the faceless Mexicans always the ones we martyr? Why do heretic Indians hurry to incinerate themselves at the stake? Are you awake enough to remember how we clarify the skin of our slaves? To feel the fingers of the children of thread flame stitching your voluminous rugs? The candles in the basilica flicker when they channel the nightmares of the dead. Because Jiménez wept when the mammoth blue mustang leg fell from heaven, rupturing the artery in his leg. Because of Chinese soldiers armed to protect Tiananmen Square from monks burning to set themselves ablaze. Luis says he’s sorry for the pain he caused you having to finish his stallion.
Larry Levan (snake), 2006, by Elia Alba  Hip hip hip hip hip makes the man as the conga, serpentine, slides across the frame  and the disco dub — tilt and sway —  sewing pelves in the room, as if  Larry, still,  were levitating streetwise Blacks, Drags, Latinos, Punks: Saturday Mass, 1985,  in the Paradise Garage — Evelyn “Champagne” King, Kraftwerk, Ashra.  No. He’s black-and-white, a head shot, one two three four five,  on this S curve of 21st-century revelers, mask on the one body down,  shimmer slant of a hoop earring under the ten-leg- hop-and-pulsate —   glide on through. And Larry, Dour Father, bubble pop-popped, afloat,  asking repeatedly: Who, My Friends, is fronting? Who is not? You, Velvet Valance, over the sequined drag of curtain. Black is Black, Brown is Brown, Gay is Gay disco pulsing up and through seventeen years of not-forbidding bodies. Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui lætificat  juventutem meam. Gather you to me and to one another. Grind.
Granite Weaving, 1988, by Jesús Moroles  To climb, in this instance, upon a horizon Shadow-shadow. Lip-to-lip rock. Ziggurat. Ah, from the base to the top. Sideways. Upwards. Again, in succession. Sprung and sprung Frozen idiom. Barre. Pietrasanta. Mouth and mouth. Sung. Granite. Stitching The way fabric gathers — pinch, scrunch. Not in dreams alone. Not the knot. Step, step, step, step, step. 35 up. As if into clouds Ur, Aqar Quf, Chogha Zanbil, Tikal. Kin. Plank upon plank upon plank upon Little Blocks: ahem. don’t you forget us.a, of, or, but, if, la, and Close and closer to flattened. Rock, Water, Bone: Noisy Pilgrim.
Granite Weaving, 1988, by Jesús Moroles  “He” grates across the throat, the “h” a dry abrasion on the tongue — Across the throat, the “h” in “she” is tucked behind the folded muscle. In “she” is tucked the “e” the lips unpurse to say, same as saying “we.” My lips unpurse to say the names of  God, of    Love, and they are “She.” The names of   God, of   Love are, too, old explosions coded into granite. Too, old explosions cooled to stone warm to the touch of  light, as she, Stone-warmed and glowing, let my lips brush velvet shadows onto hers. Let my lips brush the story soft, forget that “he” was scrape and struggle. The story soft forgets that “he” was heavy, wrestled into “we,” and weaving “He” heavy, wrestled (strands of  granite yarned like fabric) into “we,” Strands of granite halt their dry abrasion, interlock, and become “She.”
À La Mode, 1976, by Asco (photographer: Harry Gamboa, Jr.)  I dare you to hear me tell just which and what sort of girl I was, always had been, and why. You may as well yes-yes me. You’ll get no chance to cut in. This is No Movie and I’m the leading gal, the femme fatale in cork platform sandals, mis- taking Woolworth’s plastic earrings for glam, mis-american, which and what sort? The kind who never introduces the top six buttons of  her dress to their holes, whose legs always cross when she sits on a table, who pats vanilla pancake over her rich, theatrical skin to lift dark hair, dark eyes, dark lips from the level of   East Los Common to revelation, and you’re all in my made-up fairy tale now, you & these suave muchachos, we’re all queasy in the where is it 40s  50s  60s 70s brown beautiful people pronouncing our perfect English, accorded zero-to-slivers of silver screen glory. I dare you, looking in from the tangled reel of the future, say out loud what I’m sitting on. Kitten-posed on a table top in Philippe’s Original Sandwich Shop, Los Angeles, ’76, next to the napkins and sugar shaker, I’m not afraid of the cleaning rag wiping me out of the frame, I take in the unedited numbers that tumble in one continuous shot from my Now to yours, and there’s a mestiza born every minute, I know where I sit: right on top of a pretty warm piece of sweet American pie.
Untitled, 1965, by Alberto Valdés  I’m not easily mesmerized. But how can you not be drawn in by swirls, angles and whorls brought together to obey a field of moving colors layered, muted    ...     others bright that make you linger there? Just look at those Carpaccio reds. Right then my mind leaps to Cezanne: his dark-blue vest in Self-Portrait (1879–1880); the Seven Bathers (ca. 1900) wallowing in blue; his blue beyond in Château Noir (1904). Consider now the three, or is it four figures in Alberto Valdés’s Untitled (ca. 1965). They are wayward energy, moving right to left (the right one more sensuous than the rest) about to dive into the deep-blue waiting — call it the unknown. I’d like to be there when they meet that blue abyss head on. Will they keep their shape, I wonder, or break up and rearrange themselves into a brighter, more memorable pose ...    into a bigger elemental thing? I’m really asking this: When they run into the landscape of  blue, will these figures lose their logic of  luster? Will they lose their lucid argument of color, their accumulated wealth of geometry? Will they still engage the entire me, hold me, keep me mesmerized?
Humane Borders Water Station, 2004, by Delilah Montoya  Far from highways I flicker gold the whispering gasoline  if  I pinch her nipples too hard no joy for her  no joy for me so I practice on ticks press them  just so so they give but do not burst beneath  my boots thistle & puncture vine a wild horse  asleep on all fours its shadow still grazing my lips  black meat my tongue black meat  in my backpack sardine tins saltines  & a few cough drops the moon is my library there’s a glacier  inside a grain of salt do you understand I’m sorry  my Albanian isn’t very good tremble  if  God forgets you tremble if  God  remembers you out of clay I shape sparrows  I glaze their bills & claws I give them names like gossamer  inglenook lagoon she bathed a trumpet  in milk her tenderness acoustic & plural  her pupils perched in all that green there’s nudity  around the corner bones cracked & iridescent  sometimes it rains so hard even the moon puts on  a raincoat zinc razz zinc jazz I notch my arms  I notch my thighs five six days I score  my skin but not the back of my knees two ovals  two portraits my son at ten his eyes ablaze  my son at one his eyes shut once  I dressed him in burlap once bicycles & marbles  once I tore rain out of a parable to strike down  his thirst
El Patio de Mi Casa, 1990, by María Brito   My patio was once a schoolyard, or maybe a barracoon, perhaps both, & the ghosts of children nest under the pink sink, mouths agape for flakes of rust, or they creep to the ceiling, sucking on the five taps of blue water, their little lips abuzz like cicadas. In the moonlight I see them bounce on my feather bed, bowed like an old donkey’s back, or they teeter-totter in my wicker chair darned with burlap string. Leave them alone, I say to my mother, who wants to cleanse the house with carvacrol, trapping these children’s souls in beehives, then stringing them up with kites so they fly to the moon. Let them drum our dented pots, let them screech happy carols, let them dance with tin spurs on their little feet. Mother, I don’t care if they nibble our family photos, soil your heirlooms of lace, or steal what few grains of rice (more like gypsum ants) you hoard in the pink pantry. Let them play cat’s cradle with spiderwebs, let them rummage in your armoire of moths, let them lurk in your shadows of ill will & tease you to laughter. Ghosts are unruly, free to be fickle, unlike me, the pig-tailed girl you kept strapped to the sewing machine in the shed of planks by the mango tree too old to fruit. Work & sweat will set you free, you said, just like Fidel on the radio. Cut me out of those sepia photos on the wall, burn those baby braids you keep in porcelain, toss my first communion gown into the sea. I wish I’d been born into a brood of mice, quick to grow, quick to breed, quick to die among the kapok trees.
Sin Título, from the series The Tempest, 1998, by Arturo Rodríguez   I am the altar boy with feet flattened by the catechist’s paddle, my skin toasted like stalks of sugarcane at Lent, my shorts baptized in the salt pans of saints. I don’t wear a mask (God hates carnival) but a wool hood, Holy Week’s, that Sister Rose knitted by the charcoal altar, her wooden teeth clacking as she hymned in Latin, the moles on her jowl like prickly pears for penance. My own teeth are those grates that grilled the martyrs, & my little lamb’s ears quiver each afternoon when the wind coughs in fits and pale skies smoke with incense from a clandestine Mass, perhaps on a runaway shallop with sails sewn from stolen cassocks, perhaps on a newborn isle with a thatched church, novices crawling like iguanas around stations of the cross. There’s no home for orphans like us raised in a convent by the wharf where the footless angel blows his trumpet for vesper, and the abbess marches us to the clapboard altar when the cock crows. We sleep in straw cubbies, our sheets those crinkled newspapers that swaddled us like groupers in the foundling’s basket. Hey, you, girl with the twisted neck, your dollhouse will keep on shrinking between your dirty legs. Not even holy water can make you clean. Hey, boy, the more you pull on the kite, the more your house of dreams will get lost in summer’s wayward clouds. Let us live in the meadow, our true home, every bush a hearth, every pond a font: O blessed loam of nettles whose fireflies light the shrine at night, whose blue brooks spread out like veins of  Calvary.
Decoy Gang War Victim, 1974, by Asco (photographer: Harry Gamboa, Jr.)   For Harry Gamboa,   Jr.  Just a tick ago, the actor was a Roman candle shot to the sky, smudged by rain’s helter- skelter. His motivation was: he’s a stooge on L.A.’s sodden turnpike, so we have “to make” art. Got to rezone and react. The world the bare wall to his bullet. Got to rile up the populace, to fortify the arsenal. Once in a while, repopulate and penetrate, paint a list of incitement onto the walls. An elder told him that to overturn the city, one must surrender body/belongings to the one explosive spectacle of truth, making it ongoing. Pay attention. To overturn the city, not just the scraps but fervor itself. Not just the wan broadcast of indignation but IRL incursions into the workhouses and poorhouses to inflame the thousand points of  light. A lean surge, departure pinks both ends of  him. He’s the nth layer folded into the stand’s nerve.
¿Sólo una sombra?/Only a Shadow (Ester IV)?, from the series Santos y sombras/ Saints and Shadows, 1993–1994, by Muriel Hasbun  My daughter gathers the seeds she finds in our desert, calls them spirits — the spirits are us, she says when I worry those orbs in my fingers to conjure her birth. The wind’s first thought is to craft those seeds: vessels when the tree worries she’s not enough of a multiplicity, that she will burn into the cosmos. The cosmos is no thought, no worry, more than us, but less than wind, and the wind is only the infinite, not the body’s death, which is, after all, only a particle, but time formless as space. This is only if the wind worries at all. The seed doesn’t think — she is the doubling ambition of a vessel. In the wind, the idea of the copy is translated by time. We were once that idea. My daughter collects me in a box marked for spirits where I unsettle the other seeds begging for wind so that my sound will echo a thousand miles away. My daughter was the pulse I toss into the wind with the seeds. Particles of us pass over like whispers from the cosmos, the clatter the wind makes. I worry birds will take her into themselves, that she’ll become a fleck of their transience, but this is how we furrow ourselves into the cosmos, the twine of our breaths into wind, into carbon, into the tree’s colossal fingers reaching back from under the earth.
Humanscape 62, 1970, by Melesio Casas  Three years before I’d hear the word / beaner / from the / white boys / who’d spit first in my broccoli, then in my hair, / my mother / dressed me each Wednesday in that / brown / sheath: I was seven. It’d be the only time I’d wear a sash —  Miss / America, / she said. Twenty Miss / Americas, we made / kitsch from clothespins, pipe cleaners —  our / brown / socks / banded and complicated / with orange tassels just below the / brown / / rosettes / of our knees, little / skulls / knocking together in our elementary / school / cafeteria. How we jumped the day / we heard / voices raising there instead of / at home, / when Tracy’s mom slapped our / troop / leader / and Tracy cried. And Tracy’s / mom was white / and only her / dad was brown / and Tracy was a little / prettier than the rest of us. / At the lunch tables, / white bitch / stuck to our fingers like glue; / fucking Mexicans / landed like glitter onto the sashes laid across our / small / hearts. / With Tracy, / we watched / manifest between us / a line, / risen from the tiled floor where / we shared / meals as tears clung to the eye-rims of my seven-year-old / compañeras. / Lorena chewed her nails till blood / bloomed / on her ring finger. Andrea peed quietly / on her brown knee / socks. None of us knew where to hide. This was not / home, / where / we could run / to the / broom / closet or to the / feet / of our big / brothers. /
Breakfast Tacos, from the series Seven Days, 2003, by Chuck Ramirez  Let me be your last meal. Let me harvest the notes I took from your mother’s watery hands, street vendors in Rome, Ms. Rosie from our taquería, you: in the sun, in the open air, let me give you zucchini and their elusive blossoms — my arms, my hands. Pumpkiny empanadas of my feet, pulpy as a newborn’s. Guisada’d loin of my calf muscle. On a plate white and crisp as the ocean, lemoned eyeballs like two scallops. The red, ripe plum of my mouth. Perhaps with coffee, you’d have the little lobe of my ear sugared as a wedding cookie. The skin of my belly, my best chicharrón, scrambled with the egg of my brain for your breakfast tacos. My lengua like lengua. Mi pescuezo, el mejor hueso. Let me be your last meal: mouthfuls of my never-to-be-digested face, my immovable femur caught in your throat like a fish bone. Let my body be what could never leave your body.
For Tamir Rice yellow plastic black sea eye-shaped shard on a darkened map no shores now to arrive — or depart no wind but this waiting which moves you as if  the seconds could be entered & never left toy boat — oarless each wave a green lamp outlasted toy boat toy leaf  dropped from a toy tree waiting waiting as if the sp- arrows thinning above you are not already pierced by their own names
Young enough to believe nothing will change them, they step, hand-in-hand, into the bomb crater. The night full of  black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks from shattering against her cheek, now dims like a miniature moon behind her hair. In this version the snake is headless — stilled like a cord unraveled from the lovers’ ankles. He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press into her — as the field shreds itself with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home out of  hip bones. O mother, O minutehand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season. Where apples thunder the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.
If they would only just beat or shoot me, but they wanted soul substance, to harbor that like that, so I could never move from this place. So they reach crackled hands inside and hold it open for raking ...     We in a shit rustle, the way in ramble and camaraderie, brown hand of whose mother makes its smooth noise over my mouth? The burden of saying some thing, a head- nodding, and I want to be in- side of your knowing. Who laid their head on the disappeared’s pillow?   One minute a person licks your ear, the next, you cannot see your own white breath. We gotta head on over to the party way out in Bushwick because we’re lost, and our flesh is on fire. There’s a man walking behind us. And growing. This is what I tell him:   I am not a boy in anyone’s body.   I am not a black in a black body. I will not kowtow inside your opposites. How the world blisters you. How hunger left you statued.   • One falls past the lip of some black unknown, where time, they say, ends. We got us a sugar- mouth, a bit feeding, walk in circles in circular rooms built so precisely for our shapes, hold the figure that is the body that is, of course, me. I stroke the feather that feeds me, that lines my cage floor with minor luxuries, I say “mama” in its wanting sugary mouth. What is the difference between ash and coal, between dark and darkened, between love and addiction on Dekalb at 2 am, and I fall drunk from a ruinous taxi, already ruined from before before, the absent weight screams into your breath, you are no good, no good ...     The space between I and It. Lolling. The Ibibio man was not born in his cowboy hat. Even his throat must ache like tired teeth.   • Look what I am holding! Not desire, but infinite multiplicity, the mouth of existence.   To sing the blue song of longing, its webbed feet along jungle floor. What of our mechanical arm, our off-melody? Purpose in the gathering, I know, dear self. It rains and we think, God, or we think Universe. I say, portent across the wind. When wind is wrought, whole song fallen from its lip, some black unknown, where they say, time ends. What speech into hard God breath just as night park is godless? What of a silver cube in the mouth? This is our wandering.
Jennifer had a tendency to stop in the street and listen to the neighbors’ problems. She was consoling to them. Jennifer would look for people in trouble and offer help, even though her body was relatively weak, and she could not carry groceries for the old people, really. When the young mothers had issues they would come to Jennifer because they knew that Jennifer also had had issues as a young mother and would listen to them. Now Jennifer had middle mother issues.    •  Everything can be illuminated by water or most things. The two women in the black of mourning knelt by the river in exact tandem, and they spoke softly. The film, like life itself, had minimal plot and extraordinary beauty. The film, like life itself, was slow and maniacal. And when we walked the village afterwards in search of just the right martini I thought of the same steps I had taken years earlier in preparation for mourning, and I was not unhappy.
We’re sitting in Uncle Sam’s Subs, splitting a cheesesteak, when Shelley says:I think I should buy a gun. I look up at her puffy face, and she’s staring, her hands shaking. On medication for schizophrenia, she’s serious. I say, Tell me why you need a gun. Her voice getting louder: You know why.No, no I don’t, I say.In case I need it. I might need it to shoot somebody. I give her a hard look — You don’t need a gun. No one is after you.
After Roselia Foundling Asylum and Maternity Hospital, 
corner of Cliff and Manilla This is the house I was born in. Look at it. Asylum. Narrate it: Notice the sloping cornice, look at the curved windows, etc. This is the house I was born in. The cast-iron balconies / not wide enough for bodies. Look at the photos: 3 stories, 8 front windows and a wide door. Dark red brick / inlaid with brown stone. Women’s bodies / expelling  / banishing  /  Leaving the babies there. Look at the photos, include the photos.
in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t like, not what I fear, because sometimes I think of  Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping all another insignificance, all another way to avoid saying what should be said: the Second Amendment is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance that says my arms should be heavy with the weight of a pistol when forced to confront death like this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play in the backseat while the video of  Tamir dying plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar of poetry, the moment when a black father drives his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death of a black boy that the father cannot mention, because to mention the death is to invite discussion of  taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson that touches the concrete must belong, at some point, to you, the police officer who justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets because his mind would not accept the narrative of  your child’s dignity, of  his right to life, of  his humanity, and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed; the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me, the black people who march, the white people who cheer, the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of   humanity that we erase in this American dance around death, as we are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood, and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away, the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right& justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.
The giant Slinky of  Spring approaches& I have nothing to sport after spending a fortune on hooded sweaters that make me look like I’m searching for the Holy Grail. Struggling with granola & soy milk, dental bills accumulate like snow & the potatoes I forgot have rotted. I’m broke & broke& broke & broke& broke, a bowling ball spiraling down a middle-aged staircase of doubt. The night I crazily fled for the gentrified grids of  14th Street. A pinball, I landed in Playbill. I left Brooklyn tossing televisions & futons like bombs in the bowels of  hipster bohemia. In the piano karaoke bar, I met Kevin, a Peter Pan Tennessee man who spun quips & wit like pixie dust about me. A puckish chariot fueled by moxie, this lean tambourine of charms leaned over me, a hot flamingo in the midnight light& admitted his once-upon-a-time fetish for Laotian men in his youth. I wanted him to fall for me as if  he stumbled into the inside of an Oriental mansion shaking the tchotchkes in my heart, steeping my crush into sweet green tea. Kevin would be my model of elegance, unabashed confidence, a dragon fierceness. He said, There’s more to Rainbow Pride than RuPaul& Stonewall kickball& I finally felt I belonged in DC. November, Kevin’s jaw ached. He showed up at The Black Fox mumbling  jumble garble through tears. His feature canceled. After the first break from winter gray to blue, Facebook alerts Kevin’s wheeled to hospice, liver cancer. I teach Donmike how to make pancit noodles. We become the curse of gossiping Filipina spinster aunts. How have we become giggling little lily pad princesses behind invisible hand fans, waiting for our potential suitors to make the first move? I wonder whether you’re afraid my hug lingers a little too long after I rub your feet or maybe you’re just a Scorpio expressing affection & I know I have 3rd world Daddy issues but I don’t want to bring up hopes& fuck ups. Maybe I’m in love with you like that baby weasel riding the flying woodpecker’s back. It’s an Avatar magical, sci-fi, unexpected flash of  bliss when really, the woodpecker is fighting for his life. The weasel doesn’t know what it’s gotten itself into but a thrill that will never come again, something better than a feathered Baby Jane din-din. Tomorrow, you’ll want to go to Rehoboth& kite surf at the beach house of the guy who lusts after you. The priest’s sermon makes no sense: Forest Fires in the Bay, Water Well Maidens& “Let It Go” from Frozen. It’s not that I hate white people or that we’re soul mates. It’s that you’re beginning to wash off me like ashes in holy water.
This song is not a language, Not a thing to be remembered, The field-holler tradition of Teeth and knees Cursing wind, A concert hall of   bloody hands Spilling the earth, Strangling dirt, Sledgehammer curses Of  men busted open. On Parchman Farm You could hear it coming Up through the trees, The hammering pulpit of Crooning men and sweat, The tender meat of palms Pulped like plums. Them men gulped down the Dawn dew air, Let it catch in their throats, Broke the sunrise up and Sang hymns like hexes:Be my woman gal, I’ll beeee your maaaaaaan    ...     And the killing fields of  Mississippi Fizzled down to juke joints and The hothouse music of illegal clubs With thick women they loved outright and Played cards with and Gave bourbon to when their hands Didn’t hold sorrow like Pickaxes and the railroad was Just a railroad, A way to ride north if  you could Get your money right. Redbone gals with rosewater sweat, When they lifted their knees Sunflower County was a heaven They believed in.Stick to the promise, gal, that you maaaaaade meeeeee    ...     Steady now, They turned back the clock on Their hard, hard hands, Let the memory of fresh linen and Ladies’ slips like gossamer Wings, a parade of  plump thighs, The juju thrust of  furious bones Spread like grease Across starched-white sheets, Midwife them out of ol’ Parchman Farm And back to the cockfights and gambling, Back when they had ambition, Back when they had a sweet woman To hold, her fat wrists Soft as butter, Limp as rain.When she walk, she reel and rock beeeeeehind Ain’t that enough to make a convict smiiiiiiiiile.
November 2015  1 Open up for close out soul-clothes every- thing has to go closing down time call them all saints souls my own gone ones: Andy Marcia Mary Alice Mary Anne cloud of all carried out   2  outside my window: locust, cloth of gold   on the ground: its yellow tabs linden hearts sweetgum stars like cut-outs from the same ...     paper-napkin ghosts in a tree near the house where a year ago my friend —  rust-colored chrysanthemums rust-colored door   3  door to door the angel no the Lord passed or did not pass —  the angel opened the prison door doors to pass through, out or in: our millions, more than any —  in the other story the Lord said: to put a difference between   4  between one and another a gun: at one end it’s a good gun because at the other’s a cell phone pill bottle toy gun nothing a Trayvon Tamir Dontre Michael Laquan Eric Rekia John: call them out and the others, black and many   5 many thousand gone no more auction block
When the body wishes to speak, she will reach into the night and pull back the rapture of  this growing root which has little faith in the other planets of the universe, knowing only one, by the bulbs of the feet, their branching of toes. But the feet have walked with the bones of their ancestors over long trails leaving behind the roots of forests. They walk on the ghosts of all that has gone before them, not just plant, but animal, human, the bones of even the ones who left their horses to drink at the spring running through earth’s mortal body which has much to tell about what happened that day. When the body wishes to speak from the hands, it tells of  how it pulled children back from death and remembered every detail, washing the children’s bodies, legs, bellies, the delicate lips of the girl, the vulnerable testicles of  the son, the future of my people who brought themselves out of the river in a spring freeze. That is only part of  the story of  hands that touched the future. This all started so simply, just a body with so much to say, one with the hum of  her own life in a quiet room, one of the root growing, finding a way through stone, one not remembering nights with men and guns nor the ragged clothing and broken bones of my body. I must go back to the hands, the thumb that makes us human, but then don’t other creatures use tools and lift what they need, intelligent all, like the crows here, one making a cast of earth clay for the broken wing of  the other, remaining until it healed, then broke the clay and flew away together. I would do that one day, but a human can make no claims better than any other, especially without wings, only hands that don’t know these lessons. Still, think of  the willows made into a fence that began to root and leaf, then tore off the wires as they grew. A human does throw off   bonds if  she can, if  she tries, if  it’s possible, the body so finely a miracle of  its own, created of  the elements and anything that lived on earth where everything that was still is.
Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain as if prepared for the path of  the spirit’s journey to the world of all souls. It is not an easy path. A dog stands at the opening constellation past the great helping hand. The dog wants to know, did you ever harm an animal, hurt any creature, did you take a life you didn’t eat? This is the first on your map. There is another my people made of  the great beyond that lies farther away than this galaxy. It is a world that can’t be imagined by ordinary means. After this first one, the next could be a map of  forever. It could be a cartography shining only at some times of  the year like a great web of finery some spider pulled from herself to help you recall your true following your first white breath in the cold. The next door opens and Old Woman counts your scars. She is interested in how you have been hurt and not in anything akin to sin. From between stars are the words we now refuse; loneliness, longing, whatever suffering might follow your life into the sky. Once those are gone, the life you had against your own will, the hope, even the prayers take you one more bend around the river of sky.
Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume. The moon reflects bleached coral. Tonight, let us praise the sacrificed. Praise the souls of  black boys, enslaved by supply chains, who carry bags of cacao under West African heat. “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat,” sings a girl dressed as a Disney princess. Let us praise the souls of   brown girls who sew our clothes as fire unthreads sweatshops into smoke and ash. “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good,” whisper kids disguised as ninjas. Tonight, let us praise the souls of Asian children who manufacture toys and tech until gravity sharpens their bodies enough to cut through suicide nets. “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me,” shout boys camouflaged as soldiers. Let us praise the souls of  veterans who salute with their guns because only triggers will pull God into their ruined temples. “Trick or treat, smell my feet,” chant kids masquerading as cowboys and Indians. Tonight, let us praise the souls of native youth, whose eyes are open-pit uranium mines, veins are poisoned rivers, hearts are tar sands tailings ponds. “Trick or treat,” says a boy dressed as the sun. Let us praise El Niño, his growing pains, praise his mother, Ocean, who is dying in a warming bath among dead fish and refugee children. Let us praise our mothers of  asthma, mothers of  cancer clusters, mothers of miscarriage — pray for us — because our costumes won’t hide the true cost of our greed. Praise our mothers of  lost habitats, mothers of  fallout, mothers of extinction — pray for us — because even tomorrow will be haunted — leave them, leave us, leave —
You who cannot hear or cannot know the terrible intricacies of our species, our minds, the extent to which we have done what we have done, & yet the depth to which we have loved what we have loved —  the hillside at dawn, dark eyes outlined with the dark sentences of  kohl, the fūl we shared beneath the lime tree at the general’s house after visiting Goitom in prison for trying to leave the country (the first time), the apricot color of camels racing on the floor of  the world as the fires blazed in celebration of  Independence. How dare I move into the dark space of  your body carrying my dreams, without an invitation, my dreams wandering in ellipses, pet goats or chickens devouring your yard & shirts. Sea, my oblivious afterworld, grant us entry, please, when we knock, but do not keep us there, deliver our flowers & himbasha bread. Though we can’t imagine, now, what our dead might need,& above all can’t imagine it is over& that they are, in fact, askless, are needless, in fact, still hold somewhere the smell of coffee smoking in the house, please, the memory of joy fluttering like a curtain in an open window somewhere inside the brain’s secret luster where a woman, hands red with henna, beats the carpet clean with the stick of a broom& the children, in the distance, choose stones for the competition of stones, & the summer wears a crown of  beles in her green hair & the tigadelti’s white teeth & the beautiful bones of Massawa, the gaping eyes & mouths of its arches worn clean by the sea, your breath & your salt.  Please, you, being water too, find a way into the air & then the river & the spring so that your waters can wash the elders, with the medicine of the dreaming of their children, cold & clean.
The body, bearing something ordinary as light Opens as in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns & bears the child — out. When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking of it all, the push & head not moving, not an inch until, when he flew from me, it was the night who came flying through me with all its hair, the immense terror of his face & noise. I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed a love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be split me down, with the axe, to two. How true, the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here. The fight, first, to open, then to breathe, & then to close. Each of us entering the world & entering the world like this. Soft. Unlikely. Then —  the idiosyncratic minds & verbs.  Beloveds, making your ways to & away from us, always, across the centuries, inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this 
iteration of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear, Body of laughing — & even last a second. This fact should make us fall all to our knees with awe, the beauty of it against these odds, the stacks & stacks of near misses & slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next. Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see. & so to tenderness I add my action.
the afterworld sea there was a water song that we sang when we were going to fetch river from the river, it was filled with water sounds& pebbles. here, in the after-wind, with the other girls, we trade words like special things. one girl tells me “mai” was her sister’s name, the word for “flower.” she has been saving this one for a special trade. I understand& am quiet awhile, respecting, then give her my word “mai,” for “water,”& another girl tells me “mai” is “mother” in her language, & another says it meant, to her, “what belongs to me,” then “belonging,” suddenly, is a strange word, or a way of  feeling, like “to be longing for,”& you, brother, are the only one, the only one I think of  to finish that thought, to be longing for  mai brother, my brother
Never were knuckle-men. Choked up on planks of smoke, they haul towards the peplum: stabbing back at time, splinters of it flip like cars. Rolled sleeves, knees cooked, the rousie is flirting with her broom, a blonde with criminal simplicity with historical truth we can detoxify a poisoned planet. Now they’re descending the spirit heap; dribbling pinkies along fair knotty thighs. Children are returning to pick up the butts. Still the brunette is caving in the face of time, is making herself a living treasure from this surplus hour the minutes fly
Dense night is a needs thing. You were lured  in a luminous canoe said to have once ruled a lunar ocean. The 2 am soda pour of stars is all but silent; only listen —   sedater than a sauropod in the bone epics it spills all the moon spice, releasing a sap odour  that laces  us to a vaster scale of road opus. A carousel of oral cues, these spinning sonic coins. A slide show of old wishes.
Ripeness was a semitone below the bone clef of the elbow keying the rain-slicked cyclone fence: the firm, saclike rind of a warped minim, golden drupe note for which we longed. Stone fruit are fine tutors. This one unseals a sensual nose hit. At dusk they go lambent like chunks of bent gloam. Sucked, their fibrous pith is birth-pouf —  punk oblong pits belonging in a goblin’s pot, infused with rich static and the fresh electric scratchiti of summer lightning. It’s fortune gave us this softer unit, surely. Edgewise the frangipani made a rain-gap fin for heads rife with fire in the shade of the mango belt.
I have known these estuaries —  the channels and canals, the backwaters that flush and eddy to the Pacific, I have skimmed that muddied slurry, felt the nip in the throat where the salt in the air is the salt of the coast, I have tacked where the tide is incomplete: no rollers and breakers, only an ebb that rocks the wayfarers —  a rush of silver, the gavel-smack of mullet in the night, mud crabs elbowing denwards under concrete slabs of boat ramps —  I have stalked where herons stilt and spear baitfish in green afternoons, cast crab pots in loose analemmas to watch the black sonar spread, tracked prawn trawlers on the broadwater crawling back in the lavender dawn then sat at the jetty’s edge and shucked those tiger shells, cast sucked heads back into the dark, crushed mussel shell underfoot for the burn of sharpened chitin, stepped where stingrays wallow and idle, shuffling their barbs, waiting to strike. I have spent half my life in low tide —  nights where I have not known if I am contracting or dragging out again, where the movement of the water is the movement of my mind —  unending comings and goings of sounds and narrows, those entry points to my two continents — and my history is the history of currents: a canal small enough to catch a childhood in its net, water vast enough to divide a life.
’Cause it’s alright, alright to see a ghost.  — The National Rock quartz next to a fence with upturned faces. On the hill, on the other side a storm, or plausibly, you. Time keeps its footsteps regular until it is clapped upwards: a falcon glides into view. Dissolving into the pool in a splash of white, I saw you. In summer, the town goes to the drive-in. The edges of the coin keep moving as I stare at images through goggles, they fog out. Rooms go to pieces, sometimes, quietly. Curtains are no longer red, now they’re dusty. The cat moves. The room turns ocher and shifts, as wind blows through. O Brecht’s sky of streaming blue. It’s been days since I opened the book my face is watching. Cupboards slam in another part of the flat. The room reassembles, but it’s different now — outdated.
Focus on the taxidermied light, the quarked vehemence of splayed negation, to rags, your britches, seeping glib intent, sight catastrophic, given to seizures. The curlicue scent has not the mother in it. The fall of romance, the hold of the tender new, programs aloft, every nerve to shudder: ghosting monitions of the incomplete. Either will the aching swells, apart from bliss. Coordinates of favor, hip neath fiber strip follicle sheath of slip chord parent display. Sensitized gift wagon fern entrenched, the halo of the nation is the caul-throated blood of hench, rosella’d to the peak of taxonomied childless. Where your mottled hologram, the feathered monster of the throttled. Quizzical with the world, am to console, the hope for saplings edifice disjunction. The dissociated fanfare of motivated loss entrees the ingredient of dining undertaken. Your teeth the grinder, your lips the sensitive house. The beds’ laments’ the reindeers’ horses’ dreams’ in halves’ cameo’d sighs.
Emotion scoops the footpath’s velvet edges, estate agents’ bluster calibrates the street’s livability, treeless, ajar with fridges bunked out. Investors wave sheets of sums to air, a tiny computer chalked on glass, loving the artist’s marble noose in adjacent pop-up gallery they might’ve forked out for, but didn’t. It was no use crying now though her vale of tears candies a conquest, with stuck name tag and good insurance that barely cost a sou. A countdown into space echoes, blue lorikeets flit the race and pigeons chew the eaves for reassurance over suckling locals and tourist dandies.
His sorceries are boo-hooing a teller, what’s spare’s on the local trots better than breakfast. A win’s the Seychelles or the gurgling Maldives. Going fast. Where the pig-footed bandicoot, the broad-faced potoroo, the gumnut numbat? spooked, bespoke, honor’s in a trapdoor. He stumped up, but crime befell kismet pardon repelled mores coin begat loss.
exploring the farm as a child I would part the tall grasses, moving through the dirt beneath the thick rushes. consisting mainly of overgrown clover and clusters of foliage, I’d map the distance that made up our property. it seemed endless, that innocent drive to run further beneath the ceiling of leaves, expanses of earth shifting beneath a child’s slight weight. I would imagine how far the landscape stretched. one afternoon when my parents were at the races I followed the pasture floor to the fenceline at the back of the property. wanting to go further, I hovered a blade of grass over the ticking wire as I had watched Dad do so many times, to test if it was safe to cross. feeling nothing, I wrapped my hands around one of the copper threads — struck by that first surge through the body, electricity running like a vein of blood beneath the skin as though a voice screamed through a haze, blinding my eyes and rattling my mind with panic. no longer wishing to know more, to understand, I stood startled at the trapped earth and wires that had run a painful electric current through my body. it would have been foolish to even attempt climbing over into the neighboring paddock. all I could do then was give up.
My darling turns to poetry at night. What began as flirtation, an aside Between abstract expression and first light Now finds form as a silent, startled flight Of commas on her face — a breath, a word ...     My darling turns to poetry at night. When rain inspires the night birds to create Rhyme and formal verse, stanzas can be made Between abstract expression and first light. Her heartbeat is a metaphor, a late Bloom of red flowers that refuse to fade. My darling turns to poetry at night. I watch her turn. I do not sleep. I wait For symbols, for a sign that fear has died Between abstract expression and first light. Her dreams have night vision, and in her sight Our bodies leave ghostprints on the bed. My darling turns to poetry at night Between abstract expression and first light.
Northern hemisphere it’s almost Christmas. Sunlight withdrawing into its darkest shell of green coils ring by ring like a yellow snake in a tight burrow. The snake’s sleep maps an origin pinpoints the start of where morning lies — its polished skin a simple clock turning every so often leaving a scaled topography behind. But just as rain can fall sideways and eyes look aslant might a northern winter not widen light in the same way a snake exceeds its skin? Last summer I stood over a sheath of snake in the bush. The tail tapered the head was marked with the shape and angle of invisible eyes. It could have been a hairnet or a ghost but it was quieter than that. It could have been laid out across a plate of vine leaves. A seamstress could have used it as tulle a fisherman as netting the desert salt as cracks. Trees are empty on the sidewalk their fallen leaves layered and overlapping like shelves of ancient papyruses. One tree casts a long shadow two arms striking upwards as though piqued by pavement light. Between the shadow lying flat and still and the tree standing long and tall there is an angle of forty-five degrees. There is Icarus falling from blue to decimal to amber. The distance between north and south is mapped with the shape and angle of his eyes. The snake’s skin is colorless his eye invincible. The winter light is warm piercing darkness radiating a trajectory that points in all directions.
How slow an approach when viewed from a distance. How more likely the encounter if the ground is clear A voice saying always “go ahead” calls it freedom Above the 27th parallel is the heat I know as home, in my bones always untouched by city’s cool centrifuge that refracts a kind of light which bursts and vanishes on the spot Heading North, I escape the fray Green hem of the outskirts, roadside façade of forest, hiding a casement of burnt earth, silent as myself Outside, a poet ghosts a window Writing back into life his night parrots. I drive lines from water to water, guzzle roadhouse coffee Warming up, there is a conflict of appetite, a suburban tree, black with cockatoos shucking almonds A dolphin trapped in a rock pool Cane toads storming the Kimberley in wet, find it planted with sugar An olive python curled under a van belly beaded with feral kittens After three days of seated travel I lunge from the car, sprint the length of jetty, deaf to the man screaming warning. Only in midair do I look down to the sea, the time it takes to panic Two yellow-and-black krait, vivid bandwidth of danger, turning on the turquoise surface, and all I can do, is fall
Madness “hath builded her house in the high places of the city.” — Guy Debord Men are hanging themselves unaccompanied by sound in the dark hours before the bottle shop opens Rope snaking a branch of pepper tree at the lodging house Empty tenement. Dark windows bruised by sky lighting rookeries of collapse and fire crumbling out until the whole street is vacant and mud caked In ragged brown of summer verticordia I peed near a midden of fleshy arils heaped at an anthill entrance watched them drag seed deep instilling acacia in dirt Withering of certainty spits hisses The swamps filling with drillholes guarded by adders Air churned with a fierce screaming warra! Warra. Dumbbell of yield and sequence Through years of discipline I learned containment or vice versa as natural as speechlike Upward spiral of spell A nested equivalence this woundedness Pinned fury petering in honeyeater as a falcon plucks its way to the warm core, feathers wafting down to soft eremophila Sentences in the Bible begin with And God As if starting was difficult and well populated An excess of tangle and downcast in need of name The roof rats went quietly once the python escaped to ceiling rafters of my father’s house its coagulation of coils echoing shapes of a nearby bogong moth
There was terror already in her love even before she knew for sure her lover was the god. Her forehead skidded a little on the sweat of his chest and close to his ear Semele begged again for proof. And it didn’t feel like a myth or a metaphor to her as she burned up with the brightness she saw.
Any, every, thing that was exposed goes underground and is washed into the Tiber. This is what some people do with faces, burying. You see them, the heavy ones, chests like rivers, their heads bowed down with great antlers of thought invisible. After many seasons, the fronts of their bodies terribly developed to carry them. Venus of the Drains, the woman with the scum at the corners of her mouth who talked for a long time, scarred by burning, perilous thin, then told us we had made her day. It is seen, what should not be seen. It is I sees it. Shameful, to feel so heavily the shame of others — to hear and echo that note always waiting in the voice to be sung. Do I make it happen to her by having face and chest that wash with red?
So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded. — Ezekiel 24:18 She is approaching him, God, he sees her in his eye-edge, a tiny gold speck getting bigger, scintillating. Her beauty lashes him with its sword — but she has heard all this before. She approaches him, the one who killed her, and she reeks of life. He waits for her to dissolve in him, but her grit encircles his teeth. He waits for her to become what he has made her, an angel, passionate and cold as the dawn, quietly encased in power, churning out neutral love and fastened to eternity, backwards and forwards all the days. But the world is tangled in her hair. She is getting closer and her gold beauty is greening, her face is turning furious, fury-like, her death opens around him and he feels a human fear. He cannot match her, she has the reins of creation in her slim white paws, he feels the world creeping away from him. He makes to shove her from heaven, let her slip and slumber through the world. But he cannot grip her. She gleams through him like heaven through a needle.    the stroll  God takes Ezekiel for many walks. He talks about all the things he will do to the people, this and this and this, and then they will know who I am. One day they chance upon a valley of bones splintering and whitening in the sun. Shall these bones live? These bones? Oh Lord. God flings sinew on the bones, liver, spleen, gristle. The bodies rise. Rise without breath, wet clay glistens in the sun. He gives breath, as if an afterthought. Ezekiel tries to see in their eyes, one at a time. The men not moving but lunging forward like warriors, eyes ice cold mud seen through mist, waiting for their souls to snap back in. They are bruised with an ache made not by the world. Their forgotten stories rift their faces, their deaths now a hole they can walk through. Home a space that closed after them, rinsed of the mourning that ran its course. They glimmer in new reality, still speechless, as if they were really the miracle ... But already God has taken Ezekiel by the elbow.
He wants to take her where birds grew legs long as rodeos, and a reimagined giant wombat tends to disappoint. He wants to drive her to a desert where they ghosted her in ochre, buried her, standing upright by a milky singing lake. He wants to walk with her along a curve of shattered moon, where human memory unmade her long ago. He wants to wake where sand blows yesterday from her face — where there is nothing but the terror of  his faith.
despite the cost a new gaol has been built it seems the incarceration rates are trebling I only came here in the role of a Deaths In Custody inspector all the cells are stark and spotless blank screens watch from the corner the offices have the highest technology the faces of the staff still look the same when I walk down this wing and peer into this filthy room the door closes behind me the feeling in my heart is changing from a proud strength of duty to fear all the stories I have ever heard stand silent in the space beside me —  a coil of rope is being pushed under the door of this cell
a whisper arrives. two thousand. two thousand or more. did you hear it? that bomb. the torture of red sand turning green the anguish of earth turned to glass did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more yams cremated inside the earth. poison trapped in glass like a museum. did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more tears we cried for our Land for the fear you gave us, for the sickness and the dying two thousand years of memory here two thousand. two thousand or more peaceful place this place. happy place till you come with your bombs you stole our happiness with your poison ways you stole our stories two thousand. two thousand or more our people gone missing. did you hear it? where’s my grandfather? you seen him? where’s my daughter? you seen her? Mummy! you seen my mum? Dad! two thousand. two thousand or more times I asked for truth. do you know where they are? two thousand. two thousand or more trees dead with arms to the sky. all the birds missing. no birdsong here just stillness. like a funeral. two thousand or more a whisper arrives. did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more it sounds like glass. our hearts breaking. but we are stronger than that we always rise us mob. two thousand. two thousand or more you can’t break us. we not glass. we are people! two thousand. two thousand or more our Spirit comes together. we make a heart did you see it? in the fragments. it’s there in the glass two thousand. two thousand or more our hearts grow as we mourn for our Land it’s part of us. we love it. poisoned and all
Friends in a field, their shadows running long into the untilled ground, and I’m busy trying to catch up, calling for them to hold on a moment, the voice unfamiliar and the words not my own, and when 
I wake I realize the last thing I called to them might have been the name of the town we were all looking for, but now it’s a summer morning, the light coming in urgent with day, sheets strewn at the end of the bed, and by the time my mind reaches out for it, that name or word or thought, it’s gone, perhaps lying there up ahead, with them in the town beyond the old shed at the edge of the field, with its collection of discarded tools, hoes and picks and shovels still caked in loam and soil, the old two-furrow plough and an empty feedbag. There’s a persimmon tree, with its thin covering of leaves and its branches weighed by tightly packed, hard orange orbs, dense and 
ripening, and a thicket of rosemary sprawling about in the autumn sun, gone wild, looking like it might take over the world with its thick rough tines, the heavy scent that rubs off onto skin and lasts all day even after you wake. But thinking of that town my friends have gone on to, looking out the window at the summer light, the raging open blue of the sky outside, I cross past the old shed to where the harrowed ground forms the first hint of a path between the cherry trees lining the field, to where a pair of jackdaws come in from the north, creamy white throats quiet as the flat slate sky above, flit 
between some memory of spring, the one gone or the one up ahead.
For Daniel Morden Athena, coming onto me (verbatim transcription):Every step you take will be the right one. Women encouraged me like that:Avoiding void, no one goes nameless in this world. Power? I was the son of a king:Hacking the armor from the limbs of the dying. In the path of the blade of the plough I met God my foe:Oh blight his voyage with trial and calamity. All he needed was a taste of his own medicine:The water was white with the blades of our oars. Long-limbed Circe, the troubled, could only bring trouble:Sure enough that month became a year. Then Demodocus struck his lyre, and sang for me:In that soft song I led one hundred lives. I was young, singing such distance, when I set out:The meters were my cloak, my map, my axe. Declensions of the beasts defined my travels:I made the lions purr; the lions licked my hands. When gulls cry over rough water, home is close:I remembered Charybdis the Swallower, in her magnificence. Horizon-soaked, I sat and sobbed. Sunset. Shoulders shaking.This was the liver’s dying, the world’s waking.
Every construction is temporary, including the fire altar.  — Roberto Calasso Accommodate the action in your life to wrest the deep perspective of the real from cubic content realms of atmosphere at play beyond the bank and shoal of time. Then resonance begins, and all vibrates. The syntax of position no more sculpts this world of interpenetrative forms than syntaxes of motion render grace. Yet syntax is the caul on all our births; and mothers claw the membrane from our eyes to fret us into life, in losing theirs. From there, each choice engraves a different choice. The decades pass. One needle for one groove. The canticles flare chaos from the spin. The gyre to crackly zero stays the same. (You’ve got to love the Hindus more than most.) We saw grand sweeps of swells from tiny arcs. We sliced the wave face, tumbling into light. My mother hugged me good-bye at seventy-three, knowing, just then, her strength may outlive mine. Accommodate the action in your life, she said, to aeronautical exhausts of every plane and cab I ever caught (my own arcs more elaborate than most). Accommodate the action of your life, she seemed to say: make past and future fuse. I felt her fingers dig into my back: That strength I had is yours. Things die. Not love.
Do not a civilization make. Do they? Cozy up to the fleece of a sheep, take the lid off Elizabeth Bishop’s head and get a spoon. Do not eat yet; do not swoon. There will be hours for that. First there is a long war march. Then there are other animals to press into the barn before the lightning storm comes to cook the grass and rinse it and make a mess. But this is all outside and you need never go there. Can you ride a tin? Yes, you can, says the child detective. The poet lies under the sheep, reading of Robert Menzies, his wife Pattie, and their pets. “We had a lovely weekend,” they tell reporters. Just months later their cat’s dead. Robert turns from the golden syrup, while deciding whether to use a knife or a spoon, the television on though it’s only 8 am. Elizabeth was reading her poetry aloud into a woolly microphone. She thought she saw the top of Robert’s head pass by the window.   She was thinking of the story “Marmosets” she was translating, by Clarice Lispector. A spirit moved out of the shadows and found an unopened tin in the cupboard and threw it at the window, causing the monkeys on the verandah to flee from the glass. You can hear it on the recording at PennSound. A shearer found glass in a sheep’s fleece months later. “Lucky.” “Why lucky?” “Lucky it didn’t take your thumb off.” That was what Bishop heard about it. She wanted something to give to Clarice. Something in wool or a painting. She saw the earth tipping up, as if she was falling over while looking out the window, and she was traveling to Australia via a flying tin of golden syrup, where there were sheep all ready to cushion her, but it wasn’t necessary for she fell into the arms of the Prime Minister. “Tilted space age pastoral,” she thought, but “marmoset” was what she murmured up at him. He could hear his wife crying that their cat was dead. “It was bloody ASIO!” she bawled. Saying sorry, he dropped the unexpected visitor on the lawn and went to his wife’s aid. He spread one of the scones he’d baked earlier and made a fresh pot. “I don’t want any of that ASIO muck,” Pattie grizzled. Robert turned to Elizabeth to see if she could hear, ready to explain how upset his wife was. Elizabeth had found a curious black spread in the cupboard and was helping herself. “That’s not food,” baa’d the sheep detective. Lightning struck where they’d been sitting just minutes before. “Life is not flat, that’s for sure,” Elizabeth thought to herself, remembering the sheep in the window back home, and starting to write a poem. It would be about flying through the air, and strange food, and the floury arms of a patriarch.
A concrete table and chairs set back from the road at the edge of a playing field — vacant, wide with light —  where I step into the background of my imagery, this place in which it is all still to happen, the table set —  plates and side plates, ranked cutlery, napkins in their rings, long-stemmed glasses under a hanging lamp —  the same vine wreathes around its shade as is enchased in the lion-foot salt cellars, turret pepper pots —  Landscape with torsos sunk into mahogany —  pictures by the window, half-drawn blinds, a centerpiece grapes of wire and jade-colored glass, their bloom of dust —  soon I will sit and eat — Now strangers wake in their houses. One by one they have vanished into that blank behind their names, this place in which the room rebuilds itself furnished each time with more of my unreality —  The stone heaps lie around me and nothing is mine —  A concrete table and chairs and gray-green weeds persisting here and out of cracks in bitumen along the fence line where a warehouse backs onto the street, self-seeding at the verge of what the mind makes scenes as if to say what the future will keep of this place will be its innocence, a hunger as undeliberate as rain —
Every sand rushes the beaches are first people’s museum ample by laughter original (overseers) things must change where names are forgiven ports shores bays renamed won’t hurt the truth for children histories futures. The mouth who named mountains for brainwave oversea shook weekage house living, stay by a dead cold rotten lie. Whitefellas must derigetter their conzinerices atturies. Beach have turn not by your Scotland bream them down under sir Scot cos you’ve stole Blackfellas alots. Homestead will fall again for huppy Yumbas, gaining restored trust to not live in past. Telegraphic Aborigines were always in first port worlds. Aquarium birds mammals sing now, tell us substantial ramps up on the banks that flanked the dreamers times occupants. Nature rates over new buildings. New names for the city towns not virgin bush inkeep as the real keeper are watching every development. Renames IDs of all needs domain pleasant rebirth to grow majority. First houses were here by natives nice and right to season changing by dreaming winds rain hot people’s names ...     Dromana man reclaim names first foremost.
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.  — Leonardo da Vinci An hourglass constricted, the whore inside of me who is watching the clock, monitoring the time, this wasted time to get off, get going, lunar cycle gauge of tide and meridian. How I can hear the sand slip downward in my body clock? I need to be here, could be there, and not long ago the only place you wanted me to be was by your side ... maybe? I am a pencil that cannot sharpen,  ink that slides off paper,  outside of our time, I am lost,    a one ended boomerang.
For Anthony Lawrence A large gray jumped, what I can only imagine is a dingo fence last night and made it at least 5 feet off the ground, under a full moon a million miles away, granite rocks and pine trees sealing a Cormac McCarthy evening. Wire song on cold wind musing low, tension wang and resonance, the land and ghosts play along and now and then a sheep bleets, but it hardly makes a bar onto these wire songs ...   Small spinifex spin down from a spirit circle; the writers cottage ...    (A pact made above the cottage by local artisans … winds rest for the time being ... )   No ghosting to report on this tour but aplenty haunting of words, sentences prematurely entertained that have the capacity to poltergeist and a writer’s biting off; too much in a spell! To only want that wire song later to floss with, when civilized nights of too much consumer discount become morose, head aching to be left alone and 
everyone thinks you need to be alone when you only want to sing aloud and be heard in the ides of a full moon over pine trees and granite boulders, simple, wire song ...
i came close to his WET dog’s eye & a FAT tear shared animal PAIN sloshed & seeped in between us — “darling I’m sorry you were born a dog & people notice it” ,  2 COME ON IN, WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU like a clue we found PEOPLE in the KITCHEN in the SUICIDE VEST with the KALASHNIKOV such beautiful, desperate weapons their faces had to be covered so we didn’t fall in love piteously with the self-same wretchedness we see in mirrors a worryingly familiar scene we’ve lived in will live in the carnage going on behind closed doors being told, regurgitatingly, “you only get one shot!” but is it true you only get one shot when you get a loaded magazine & plenty more where that came from in the MUNITIONS DEPOT which I picture in Arizona, right beside a render farm and to the left THE CLOUD that backs up and up and up up to where are there edges, Bobby? INTELLIGENCE tells us to test the power of names by naming things, for one thing to name is to guarantee the end like a starting pistol BANG  you name  it it’s  !  smithereens 4 I am so indifferent to the limits of feelings I can’t tell the difference every time someone lifts my flap the unwashed salad the unheated leftovers the sanitary products are standard but bear no relation to what I expected to feel overlaid with various forms of filth don’t you sometimes feel like getting wrapped in a dog towel and buried in the hardening ground under the Canadian maple? Do dogs need to approach death and back away from it like I did when the vet injected deep pentobarbital & his bowels ejected across the floor tiles I was there to inhale his fur and weep for my benefit I am not independent of my feelings this way of talking about feelings has fooled each one of us  I’d rather be given CBT  by a border collie when there are fewer words around my arms around his only adored and stinking neck  dead up my nostrils throw me in there with him everything is in the cold awful and I’m not OK and without good reason still here and             feelings       6 JUST A GENTLE REMINDER A LOT OF WORK goes into making sex alluring sex is just this and that but it seemed, for a moment, that a new climax had been won when even the sky fingered me with a slobbery insistence when we were retching with so much desire we created a whole new atmosphere grabbing at sex things / using the sick bag to be actually sick in now the shower curtain is transparent it’s a way of saying, “I want you too to have this experience so that we are more alike like a sign that life struck once in a slippy-bits marathon that began when our eyes were magnets yanked to each other’s fully-charged crotches at a picnic when it was essential to make every enhancement to our ‘connection’ by getting seriously indecent beside the Bluetooth wireless speaker system until even the trees had to dash inside to pour ice in their underpants” while I choked up playing the scene, as we lived it, united by our pursuit of arrhythmia or satisfying itches to that catchy bridge section in Chopin (I couldn’t wait to come with Chopin through his melancholic meadow (not that I approve of background music (I prefer to foreground the piano by massaging it loud and all over until the top layer comes off in my hand and the pedal squeaks for humanity (I like to FEEL a piano as an instrument of interruption and consciousness (though I also like to take light swims, to get away from what I FEEL (today I felt jelly beans resemble kidneys)))))) which throbs like everyone grieving           7 HERE, HAVE A NEW PUPPY said the Russians to the French to soften the dog-loss but mostly the dog’s image the image is the greater likeness except we never seem to run out of images sometimes something in an image runs through me and that is very common as is reading about something that’s happening to someone outside of me until I know someone outside of me without any knowledge it is a test for my knowledge to hang around until morning practically all mornings are news to me practically all knowledge is news to me practically all news is images going very fast around the world so we have to guzzle them like wrapped food — hot and on the run — in one end and squitted out the other [pics or it didn’t happen] until I’m fat with implications and containing not a sausage   9 I love a good weepy dog-meme as much as the next crybaby and nauseate irregularly when the gifs load automatically his hairy body into my hairy body unfairly the dog becomes the shape of 2:13 p.m. in me on a Tuesday if we accept the world as totally fucked there’s a lot worse coming than dog hairs in macaroni cheese dog hairs on pillows dog hairs in rented flats in bathtubs in my hair in my dog’s hair in your short & curlies between my teeth in coagulant soap bars some people are revolted by dogs and dogs are not up for revolting I am revolted when dogs are lacking what if he did lick my cheeks by which I mean “buttocks” which were coated in whipped shea butter and heavily comestible it’s obvious he’s related to a father he never knew because we found all his needs and perverted them into a kind of inter-species loyalty or the usual master-slave hierarchy before laying down the crisp breakfast bowl of the rest of his days which gave us carte blanche to rush in anytime and smother him with kisses without getting socked in the eye (unlike when I tried the same on Johnny (who spat my tongue out  (& no one blamed him))) when maybe all he wants is just to go on being less and less subtle and alive the way life becomes very well known after its termination     12 If rigor mortis sets in it means there’s somebody who needs it. It means that somebody is drained and not awake and deems any speckles of life unusable and he is dead and dead all dead in the humus of trashed bodies shoved down there dressed in made-up relationships. What’s your favorite part? Mine’s every part with a maggot in it. Maggots mean that life’s still leaking. It’s like magic when his dead voice is nauseating and I can’t see him so he might as well be invisible. It’s like magic when he isn’t and doesn’t have anything to say and I can’t bear to listen anyway so I just recognize my fingers / all the injuries they’ve inflicted while my skin drops off. What’s worse than a maggot in the EAT ME GLOVE-BOX DATES? Does the 5-second rule apply to something that drops dead? Is it true he might come back and crack open a piñata blue alcopops, bombay mix, karaoke, and a pint of nostalgia which is like thinking in another language, I mean, how it feels, not what it means. Half a maggot, the memory of mange marching across his fur describes a lot of other feelings the feeling that someone else is taking up the whole room the feeling that no one could help me now or ever whether I was on several edges my hot core and noggin facing this hammering world of brainlessness and sweetbreads was always a favorite word. I don’t know what it tastes like but I know it’s terrible. a:ldskjfa:lkdgjsa meaning I’m so overcharged that all I can do is literally slam my hands / head / breasts against the keyboard. Wherever there are corpses there are maggots. If we dig him up will he be wearing a jacket? LOOK OUT for the milkier, gentler solaces which for all we know for all we know could be the wind or Chopin’s noise (still hammering the background) — who’s seen it? Only its aftermath is visible what’s not visible is the aftermath of my screaming     20 you can catch me on the  FLOOR / DOG / SYRINGE periphery of the dying and dead scene  FACE (FEMALE) maybe my whole life carting sensations to the center mopping shit up with towels  SKULL / COFFIN (there are feelings for these things) while public petting  CAR / PLANE / ROCKET bodies leak it’s no surprise what I give away  ONE DROPLET you can have when the vet twirls off to deal with some bloody business in a kitchen  KNIFE / GUN the hug-a-corpse scene gets deep in the hold of what I am  PARTY POPPER / WASTEBIN is what I’ve not yet been     30 Who concocts the smell of dogs which smells like an extreme close-up of the world oozing in at the edges. Full as an ice cube is full of liquid. I mistook it for solidity. The world is too full of smells. Though it’s impossible to see the top of it they crawl between my legs in the shimmering fuzz on top of the plant stickers of evenings tongues held out pocket-friendly air fresheners strikes on our nostrils. They come at me streaming. Why the dog? Why not the dog? Was it only a dream of soil heating held and stimulated for his unique aroma. It’s not a way in but it places you somewhere that smells strong and looks strong leaving behind us. Hi.
is a woman burying bread beneath her lawn. praying for summer to make whole loaves break in their plastic shells through dirt like so many hands. worry is how i thumb a groove in the stolen jewel case in my back pocket at tower records, the man puts his hands on me & i’m cooked, i’m crooked, red handed, red thumbed. had enough money in my pocket for music & who really needs that bad? all my father’s overtime stocked in our pantry. all my mother’s edges worried smooth below the river of her boss’s hands. who am i who steals music who sells drugs because i love how it sounds. who sold my own good mouth for gold. a man puts his hands on me & i’m his & i’m paid. in the old country women buried what little we had in the dirt & hoped it would make more better on earth. in this country all food is unzipped from its plastic & passes clean through us. my grandmother’s panic is a relic, is bread unearthed from some forgotten dust bowl still dark & moldy & whole. why not eat the hand that feeds you, i think, why not eat the arm, the elbow, the shoulder? why not eat the whole damned body alive
while he lives here’s a list of images light in a filthy glass pigeon dead on the high spiked window clear plastic bag above him full of water if water could kill everything that lives in you & it can —  i sit in a corner of the cancer ward fingering the app that shows me other faggots in this hospital chat with one i might meet in radiology but don’t instead make the sick man laugh while he’s conscious compliment his gown his new brutal cheekbones that appeared with the chemo if only it were simple as a magnet sucking the bad metals out of him if only i could make a better list more magic less language periphrastic & restorative if only i met that stranger in the basement & our pleasure rose through the hospital bliss poultice for the sorrow-skinned who sit half-conscious & half-machinery while the sick man lives all i can do is recount the vast pastoral of his illness when he is gone i’m counting on all the good flooding back his beard a collapsed country i’ll refuge inside his laugh a memory so liquid i’ll hear it when anyone opens a window to scare the birds
The thing written is a sexual thing, may bite, tell a truth some have died for, even the most casual initialing is a touch of love and what love goes for. A sometime thing, it smiles or has an ugly grin, on the page or wall may be holy and a sin. Writing wants, must have, must know, is flesh, blood, and bone, proof we are not made to be alone. Beneath a dove and rainbow some bank their fire, wrap their erogenous zones in barbed wire. Writing may dance in ink flamenco, kneel before the cross, right wrongs, fall in love at first sight, honor the naked languages it holds tight, kidnap, suck or be sucked for hire, may look and look or sneak a look, it has eyes, can read, is remarkable. From the tower of sexual babble, when dreams were the beginning of writing, the angel of dreams descended, stair by stair, the stone watchtower became the first stone book. Writing never speaks word, may ache to talk, and yet each letter of any alphabet is a fragment of desire, like half and quarter notes on a staff, or a hawk, may swoop down, fly higher and higher to catch a word, and then another word. The sexual thing may be all love or malice, eunuchs writing in the Forbidden Palace where poets dressed in rags, or silk and lace. The thing written touches, kisses, cuddles, may be democratic, autocratic, medieval in the 21st century, feudal, imperial, animal, sexually digital, a Serf, a King, a Queen,la chose écrite est une chose sexuelle. I had a woman beautiful as the letter  l. There is the passion of letters, each may mean another thing, be defaced, after a while. Writing leans forward, there is a certain optimism in the written word, a sexual sunrise that is not daybreak. Words, words, a carnival of wordplay on St. Nobody’s Day. Reader, look, there is an S, a snake on the cross of the letter T. The letter of love is still the open-legged V. How can I dot the i with humanity?
In fresh snow that fell on old snow I see wild roses in bloom, springtime, an orchard of apple and peach trees in bloom, lovers of different preferences walking naked in new snow, not shivering, no illusion, no delusion, no bluebells. Why should I live by reality that murders? I wear a coat of hope and desire. I follow fallen maple leaves abducted by the wind. I declare I am a Not Quite, almost a nonentity. I fought for that “almost.” I lift up and button my collar of hope. I simply refuse to leave the universe. I’m all the aunts in my father’s house and all my uncles too. I had fifty great-great-grand-grandmothers who got to Paradise, like Enoch, without dying. Once my friends and I went out in deep paradise snow with Saint Bernards and Great Pyrenees to find those lost in the blizzard that God made for Himself because He prefers not seeing what happens on earth. With touch He can hear, taste, smell, see, and He has fourteen other senses there are no words for. Memory, He said, is a sense, not a power. Who am I to disagree with Him? There are some vegetarians among you, so I will tell you what He eats. It’s green, and cows and sheep eat it too. He picks His teeth. I think I heard Him say, “Gentlemen don’t void in swimming pools or the ocean. I like your dirty jokes, I prefer them in meter.” He told me to carry on. I thought “On” was a Norse god. He said, “No, it’s just a burden that gets heavier, the burden makes you stronger.” “Isn’t on the Japanese debt to ancestors?” I countered. He resents hearing the prayers and praise of sycophants. “How come you are speaking to me?” I asked. He speaks Silence, languages I call “Night” and “Day.” His politics? “Nations” to Him are “a form of masturbation.” Original blasphemy amuses Him, describes His coitus with living creatures, mothers, His self, a whale, a male praying mantis dying to mate. He likes to hear, “do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” Instead of a prayer rug, I stitch Him a pillow of false proverbs: “in the house of the hangman talk of rope.” I asked Him if I ever did anything he liked. “You planted eggplant too close to the cucumbers and they married. I blessed that wedding, sent roses by another name.” “How come you speak to me?” I asked. He said He was not speaking to me, “Consult Coleridge on the Imagination.” He waved, He did not say goodbye.
If it hadn’t rained, we would’ve gone to the beach. — Phuc Tran If we were in infinity, we would be everywhere, even inside ourselves, as taste resides in the walnut, and the walnut resides in the shell. Then we would thrive inside the subjunctive, where nothing happens but dreams of being, as paradise dreams of its inferno, the inferno of cotton candy. If only the world had ripened, like a pear, it might have melted the mirror in me, delivering its softness to the hard road of the mind, sixty miles from town.  And if our grammar were even to our heat, comma, conditional phrase, comma, we’d be addicted to the sentence, sentenced to an exile that sees, hears, and thinks, and is often mistaken for love.  Trees are chronologies; every leaf shines, and in turning over it winks an eye:if, if, and then. The world is possible meaning; the world is possible, meaning: I might have been an elf, had I been elfin. But I am not an elf. I am a giant with tiny hands:would, could, and should. Had I been winged, I might have flown from industrial field to pastoral alley on great woolen wings, with the blue face of a bee. Then it would have been said, “He is repairing to his persona,” or “He is retiring to his future.” I’ll copy this by way of the stars, reflective. Get back to me by facsimile or dream of climbing a night ladder to the place of ideal size, near a town of simple affection. If we had been born, lived our lives, and died, we might have existed. On the side of darkness, infinity; on the other, a sixty watt bulb.
It never looks warm or properly daytime in black-and-white photographs the sheer cliff- face of the ship still enveloped in its scaffolding backside against the launching cradle ladies lining the quay in their layered drapery touching their gloves to their lips and just asThey That Go Down to the Sea in Ships rises from choirboys’ mouths in wisps and snatches and evil skitters off and looks askance for now a switch is flicked at a distance and the moment swollen with catgut- about-to-snap with ice picks hawks’ wings pine needles eggshells bursts and it starts grandstand of iron palace of rivets starts moving starts slippery-sliding down slow as a snail at first in its viscous passage taking on slither and speed gathering in the Atlas-capable weight of its own momentum tonnage of grease beneath to get it waterborne tallow soft soap train oil a rendered whale this last the only millihelen her beauty slathered all over the slipway faster than a boy with a ticket in his pocket might run alongside it the bright sheet of the Lough advancing faster than a tram heavy chains and anchors kicking in lest it outdoes itself straining up to a riot of squeals and sparks lest it capsizes before its beginning lest it drenches the aldermen and the ship sits back in the sea as though it were ordinary and wobbles ever so slightly and then it and the sun-splashed tilted hills the railings the pin-striped awning in fact everything regains its equilibrium.
Some of us are chum. Some of us are the come-hither honeycomb gleamy in the middle of the trap’s busted smile. Though I let myself a little off this hook, petard by which I flail, and fancy myself more flattered —  no ugly worm! Humor me as hapless nymph, straight outta Bullfinch, minding my own beeswax, gamboling, or picking flowers (say daffodils), doing that unspecified stuff nymphs do with their hours, until spied by a layabout youth, or rapey God who leaps unerring, staglike, quicker than smoke, to the wrong idea. Or maybe the right? For didn’t I supply the tippy box, too? Notch the stick on which to prop it? Didn’t I fumble the clove hitch for the rope? Leave the trip lying obvious in the tall, buggy grass? Ever it was. Duh. Be the mat, and the left foot finds you welcome. Though there’s always a subject, a him or herself. But to name it calls it down, like Betelgeuse, or the IRS. It must be swell to have both deed and the entitlement, for leaners who hold our lien, consumers who consume like red tide ripping through a coastal lake? Who find themselves so very well when gazing in that kiddie pool, or any skinny inch of water. That guy, remember? How tell this tale without him? A story so hoary, his name’s Pre-Greek. What brought Narcissus down? A spotty case of the disdains, I think, a one-man performance where the actor hates his audience.
My brother is dying and I am not. I drag him behind me like a spiritless balloon, like the first robot, like the last clown-car clown, his ridiculous Fiat, his lot to be crushed, left for dead, covered in snot, his puffy hands, his outsized shoes, his flower pot, like Virgil Earp, Clanton-ganged, at the Not OK Corral, un-brothered, gutshot, like the night without sleep in Turandot. From the get-go I have always sought to know (what, what?) if this is all I’ve got, to show up in a vestibule, all bothered and hot, like silver-fingered Iscariot, like the smiling highwayman, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, while all about me are consigned to slather and rot. I drink to my faith, to what I am not, to all who’ve come before me, every rutty Lancelot, every Huguenot, every hotsy-totsy hot to trot, every Dylan, besot, who doesn’t have the strength to get up and take another shot. I know my Morse, code blue, dot-dot-dot, dit-dit-dit, dot-dot-dot. I know what God hath wrought.
After she left the first thing Ahmad Jamal played was a bridge: he fingered water falling over a cantilever & made a dark blue truth transparent. I try to suspend belief across a span of hand- written notes. At noon, I cross myself over a painted bridge in Pittsburgh, sauntering from Station Square to Smithfield St haunted by a smell along the Monongahela. These streets cobble stone memories, work overtime in my olfactories. Once, my piano-playing girlfriend fingered daisies waving in a breeze. Then in love with her Noes I began sniffing everything. But the florid truth is that I gave her a ring of rust on her windowsill. A heart broken like a line in a poem. My girl left me, & Ahmad Jamal was playing “Wave” on my iPod. It’s probably not smart to admit this, but what he didn’t play came across loudest. I only saw her hands say goodbye because of the beauty in my earbuds. Then I nosed a wine- bottle blue scarf she’d left on the right arm of a chair. Be honest, would you have sniffed it? What song doesn’t long for the long fingers of a pianist? A cantilever here only holds up meaning. I smelled farewell in a coffee shop as she high-heeled east. Sunlight buttered loafing pedestrians, shadowed crossing things as I wondered whether Jamal’s main fault was living too long and weathering, if his main technique was to cleave themes or to refrain. As he plays, the heart gives out a rapid repeat. A piano bench pines to be dusted with notes, can it buckle up such wont? Maybe there are facets of bridges one will always truss, something phonic and unforgettable about how they allow us to cross. A wave of daisies in a vase —  how they ravel aromatic in the mind. Ahmad Jamal waving across the room: me damned, & roiling underneath like a river. Maybe I dreamt this. But when I licked my fingertips to turn the page, they became daisies pushing between bricks on a twilit bridge.
Old and blind and in love with light, he’d reach for the hands of writers to guide him back to the landscape, once the subject of his photo- graphs. Often he’d see just how hard it was to render it right, and would feel free of such burdens. A last cloud on a lake he’d let carry him into night. Breaking sounds of autumn he’d leave a pond to compose, rustling the stream of images. The panicked flight of the hunted he’d let the dry grasses capture, their golden yield his release. Even in the crimson cusp of an evening he’d wedge himself, curling into a ball without twilight ever sinking him. The man swam with the fog and its very touch of resolve. Further than any writer his shadows lapped up the sand. All this in the ebb and flow of a ninth decade by the tide, an inlet mapped by its egress to the sky. And when moonlight would come to wash his window, a heavy tome floating lost worlds on his lap, often his other hand would read the apertures of old cameras, an author’s intent the subject of his alignments. But when the milky skies would dip the hand of a writer in the milky seas, to the light- house he’d ascend, dreaming of being a writer who was blind, tracing a horizon.
When death stands in your doorway, you must show no weakness. If he points at his watch, answer “in five minutes.” If he insists, murmur “just a minute.” When he bridles, whisper “half a minute,” 
“a second,” “half a sec,” “one moment.” You mustn’t look him in the eye. But don’t avert your gaze. Glance decisively at the bridge of the nose or the moist place right below 
the lips. If he unfolds a map, please don’t express a preference for the seashore or the mountains. Betray no longing or anxiety. You might tap the margin nonchalantly, if there is a margin. There’s an old superstition that death is a healer, he brings peace, 
escape from corruption. On the contrary: he is not a person, an animal, an insect, not even a pebble. Not even a name. Not an event. Not a whiff of night air. So why, ask yourself, does he fidget there, with that peevish “can’t we meet each other halfway” expression, in those absurd Goodwill clothes, baggy corduroy suit, pants and jacket the same color but different wales, so often folded the seams are white as chalk lines, fat two-tone white-and-beige golf shoes with cleats, nylon argyle socks, like someone’s idea of an encyclopedia salesman from the nineteen thirties? And why is the street behind him so fascinating, empty as a stage set, a few vans double-parked, a cat hiding under one, sometimes the flicker of the tip of a tail, sometimes the glint of the eye itself, 
voracious, ecstatic?
I like when the form is kind of stuck-up  even though I’ve got a Southern accent and my place looks like a graduate student’s. 1. I enjoy  high art but realism swamps me.  2. The material world swamps me.  3. I came to understand  the forms of realism,  the aesthetic phenomenon.  4. You take a random person  from daily life.  5. You take their dependence  on their historical circumstances.  6. You make them  the subject.  7. You see, they operate  the modern.  Things happen ... minutes, hours, days.  The order of life  coming from life itself.  Back to life /  Back to reality (like Soul II Soul).  It is sublime  and grotesque.  8. They make rich forms.  Something steady.  Less manic.  Something real  like a bell  inside the Golden Seahorse Gift Shop.  Don’t take me  on that ride.  I don’t want  to go down.  9. To what degree  are the subjects  taken seriously?  They naturally swim  beneath the icy sheets  and find breathing holes.  They may remember  their arctic homes.  They are one of the park’s  most sociable creatures. I said  enter the water with them.  Graceful imitation of strange  palms and seaflowers. A seaflower  of a thousand colors, aquarium  pigmented. It is my violent  passion for seaflowers, Molly. I want the entire  underwater palace  built of roaring seaflowers!  Beluga! Beluga! Wither and mow.  The child’s song.  Emerald kayak  and the femme fatale  who sleeps in it, Victorian,  long, frothy hair  and the death drive,  flesh like the statement, “I lost a friend  in the sea garden.”  The notes, staccato, vortex,  paradisiacal, gold bell in a coffin  just in case I wake up. And the way  darkness tunnels  inside a car on its way  to its pinpoint destination. No one tells you  the moon’s going  to end up like this.  No one. So you just move towards it.  That’s all the moon  ever was. Ding. Ding.
All master narratives of the mind in a rowboat and the rowboat as beautiful as the swamp  glowing the dungeon-state lily pads, unfolding like riddles of water, the Plasticine   heads of amphibians, speckled skin of religious fervor, and the razor-blade weeds. All master narratives of the body in a rowboat at the bottom of the swamp that has no hands. All master narratives of the spirit in the rowboat sky reflecting the infant swamp, clouds of filth, soil knotted like tupelos and toppled alphabets. All master narratives of the skin in a rowboat inside a pine coffin of swamp water.  All master narratives of thinking like a woman who says, 
“I choose inappropriate relationships.” All master narratives of dramatic structure in the soggy swamp, against the humid flags beating the wind. All master narratives of mythology like my son saying, “and then he turned into a very big wolf.” “I think he was very sad.” “He has feelings too, you know.” “I think he was sad because he got trapped inside the doors.” “Oh my god, there are different Fenrirs.” “Loki’s Fenrir met a different Fenrir.” “Are wolves part of the cat family?” “Hey, look up on your phone if they can change forms because these guys look different from the real Fenrir.” “See that white picture where he’s up on top? He turns huge and tries to eat the sun.”  “Oh, that’s a tough Fenrir.”  “I think he obeys the serpent.”  “Now that’s sad Fenrir.”  “Or maybe Loki turns into the serpent.”  “Oh, Loki, are you a master of evil?” “I think they can change forms.”
Swaggering like rain like rain like rain  and swaggering the day the day the day and swaggering it raineth all day all day  and swaggering I claimed I claimed I claimed and swaggering the dog the dog the dog  and swaggering anew anew anew and swaggering  for you for you for you and swaggering I felt I felt I felt and swaggering at night in spite in spite  and swaggering inside I died I died
B.D. was a decent poet but difficult to define or for himself to self-divine, a follower, a “gift” the way one seeker, loose but selective, identified himself to an intoxication reading obnubilating poems in a brick-and-river town: a generous, ecstatic overnight. A present, or an absence needing to be present, who tailed me, who mailed women years ago when he was free with his attention, a fixation that he felt attended him.  Sometimes several times a week then several times a day he’d write me, for he was free to borrow books, go to the mailbox at 3 a.m., for it was urgent that he send a bride issue of Vogue, Bazaar, (not Seventeen, but Glamour, but not Ms.) from the Heartland where (Don’t forget our wedding date!) he bubble wrapped some trinkets, snapshots —  poses of his parakeet beside his own long head  meeting at an angle in a steely mirror. His wife, from her wheelchair, had made their camera flash.He tried to kill his wife with a little hammer
I was making a new friend, blonde-gray, a living opal, pellucid, also reminding me of a green apple napping underneath its tree, where I have tumbled too, being of an age, “elderly” but undepressed, she tall enough to change the smoke alarm — sharing a ripeness that we liked comparing, bosses who couldn’t see us, perforation by divorce, retirement, and stairs. One lunch that I was looking forward to, the first thing on her mind —  “Do you believe in the Occult?” —  “Merline! No, I don’t think so.” She was in an auditorium —  her older, deader sister sat right down beside her with a message — a large figure not her body but a sum —  what did it mean? I’d thought one of us leaned forward at the lectern but a ghost was there, holding sway, or forth. Well, it came true —  she’s richer by that sum —  and urges making sure to be attentive to my dreams. She knows that it will happen —  I’m her friend, as the Occult has been so far. I didn’t want my brother appearing in a dream to bring me news of unexpected income — if only I would pray about it first — to the God who had my brother die after all. And certainly not my sister prophesying ill on my behalf. I guess I’d stand up, put on a mike, look out at all the empty faces, make them look alive, and even cheer. Had I remembered a firsthand poltergeist, a temptatious legend ...  I guess I’d accept a sleek Angora bunny in a mohair hat, or magic like a two-dollar bill, ask for a life my brother could have back.
Fire ran horrified from its ashes. In the afterglow, cinematic shadows fled from flesh and blood. Scars appeared, followed years later by their wounds. Blinks of red dinged relentlessly, but there was nowhere to stop for the train pulling its wreckage.
What if the ability to capture emblems in the wild won’t validate us? What if displaying our embarrassing flaws won’t save us —  say being dead but kittenish?    •  I can’t show you anything new, not even an empty room behind a velvet rope. Least of all that! There’s a Lexus spinning in a parking lot because a mountain road is “so cliché.” It’s throwing up dust, then more, but you know the car’s still in there somewhere, still voguing
If not being (something) is the same as being, then I will live forever.    •  Round shadow inside the sunflower’s corona.   •  If I lived forever would the present’s noose be looser?   •  Moon shadow made of angry bees, confined. Come in.
We is gator teeth hanging from the rear- view mirror as sickle cells suckle at Big Momma’s teats. We is dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond. We is spinal cords shedding like the skin of a cottonmouth. We is Psalm 23 and the Pastor’s chattering chicklets. We isa good problem to have. We is throats constricting and the grape juice of Jesus. We is Roach and Mingus in Birdland. We is body electric, eyes watering with moonshine, glossy lips sticky with lard. We is half brothers in headlock, arm-wrestling in the dirt. We is Vaseline rubbed into knocked knees and cracked elbows. We is ham hocks making love to kidney beans. We is Orpheus, lute in hand, asking do we have a problem
Doesn’t that shining line Of ocean, broken Suggest a ship at sea, Or something? Ah, if to be “At sea” is to be lost, Left out, or just un- Certain of the meaning, Someone else chimes in. Nevermind, I’m sure it’s Nothing, someone else insists Of this impossible vessel —  Crafted of affect and lack Of glasses, the sail a conceit Of low clouds, the bow A row of breakers, sun Glinting off the port- Hole (imagined) of the cabin Below whose bed is also, As we say, the sea-Bed or floor (as if it were A dwelling down there, Where the restless sleepers Are scattered bone). A ship At sea is only a figure Of speech somebody else Claims: a quick shape —  Suggested by the passage Of a cloud and the tug Of  the current; a thin dream Already almost forgotten ...  If you can forget the cargo, Another adds, which was Human: though that fact Was somehow less visible To the traders than the trade Routes traced out across The dissolving paper Map, under a spill of silver Coins poured out. Life Is brief, one might sigh At this point: a matter Of water in water Moving, each of us Carefully bearing The bags we packed With cherished flotsam And jetsam, clutching A one-way ticket Printed on a spume Of wind-blown white ...   A pretty image, used To excuse too much: As if the lives enslaved Were worthless as this Sudden welling up Of what is mostly self- Pity (salt at my lips, You say, my vision Swimming). Nothing. It’s nothing but ...  It’s nothing. To beAt sea is also to be, As we say, astray or In the dark, hoping For terra firma, and To be enlightened, Soon, as to just what Was meant by that sad Laugh and last remark.
Whose voice to have called you And brought you to breathing So mute as you tarry, Enclosed in career? Whose thoughts aren’t like your thoughts But strips of bright Silver, bringing you constants On dead twisting paths Till words couldn’t keep you Collected in hours Advanced in a body Confused with the grass To show us by falling More reasons for leaving Thought’s office to leave you Asleep without fear
The bug’s psalm: don’t get crushed. Afterlives feel meaningless but spring will come, push out the nubs the kids braid into pallets. Take up your pallet from lawns noon’s hardly touched. The small think gods just loll on clouds. Bugs think gods just crush.
Blood to babe to father’s laden table. Dance, said the father, show us your grace. Whose tattered cotton whose weary gristle, heads duly shriven, wrenched in complaint? Cleft so a heart works without wanting, summoned to pleasure, free to pick dates. Curve into cursive, praxis to ashes. What reveler considers the number of plates?
Simonides, whose bitterness yoked art to memory  stayed unimpressed with host and god alike. Suppose the dropped crust had occurred at your table, the tremor  floored your rowdy hall of praise. Loss provokes economy: sound to scale, word to fee. Ghosts  learn death from threnody.
Little Box talks back With a new set of teeth And pink gums A fake nose and a wax mustache She disguises her voice To sound like Groucho    •  Little Box opens up And cries to her psychiatristI don’t know why they hate me I’m such a sweetheart I volunteer at the zoo And teach Mandarin To their bratty children
A half-view of greenery, cut off by blinds. Pinecones hanging in pairs, like testicles. Brain balls, someone once said at a pool. We were in it, looking up at a guy getting out. This angle replicates that one, but the view is more animated, less peopled. The sky’s changeups are reminders that this will not drag on forever, despite the ergonomic ease afforded by the seat first devised for geriatric care, then stripped down. It’d seem rational: if the elderly spent their days in recliners, so could others, dot-commers, say, properly incentivized. And at least there is no symbolic logic, with eliminands and retinends. No lasting premises either; we will be priced out of any area. No sooner than the conclusion is accepted as consequent and part and parcel of this universe of discourse, we’ll come to realize the sense in having new places to leave. This is the chair’s democracy. Particularly this one, with its form-fitting mesh forsaking foam and padding, which cause overheating and cloud the sitter’s judgment. It’s recyclable, and that matters. Still, the office chair’s revolution is an oxymoron.
A mutable shape stating that downtime hasn’t gone the way of the dodo. Yet the days of sitting around seem extinct. Now it’s all go-go. No need to go into it; who doesn’t know the feeling? The dodo, maybe? Its temporality is other. Its inability to adapt rendered it obsolete. And so this prop here is adaptable as if to right evolutionary wrongs. It encourages a certain flight, of the sitter’s focus inward, when tilting back, and when sitting straight, to one’s surroundings, an outrospection. English? Both ways must be had, or else ...  All hinging on a lever and a handle, not as foolproof as the nod to Alice might lead you to believe. Some groping under the seatback and trial and error is required. And there’s no how-to either. “The best way to explain it is to do it.” Feet on the ground, it’s the drama of everyday living. Feet up, it’s the island of the mind, the dwelling place for other dodos whose existence only pictures and written accounts 
corroborate. Change or die. Who wants to go back to zero again?
In my end is my beginning prologue With a sharp comb dipped in ink I’ve tattooed my life story all over my body. I’ve tattooed the footprints of my children — this way 
I carry their walking with me; the footprints of my twins who died before their feet touched the ground. And the footprints of my one-year-old son, James, whom I pray for daily.     i: dent-de-lion Because I bore the lion of my father’s country my Maries and I picked dandelions —  lion’s teeth. All our childhood we picked them — blowball, cankerwort, doon-head-clock, witch’s gowan, monk’s head, priest’s crown, worm roseMary Queen of Scots Mary Queen of Scots I held their gold beneath my chin; imagined the lion rampant — its tongue, its claws on my skin. When I find the tallest stalk I know how much I’ll grow. I weave their sun bells into my wedding bouquet. When I blow seeds from the puffball and three remain — three children will I bear.Mary Queen of Scots Mary Queen of Scots     ii: the caulbearer When he was born a shimmer of womb-skin stretched across his face —  I knew then he would always be with me. I carried the caul through all my years in captivity. I imagined the membrane attached to his plump baby face like a coral headdress;  I spoke to it, willed it to carry my letters, my messages into the drowning depths of his night sleeping head.     iii: daffadowndilly Despite the westerly gales, despite the persistence of snowfall the daffodils are opening. They are opening the way tapestries, labored at one stitch at a time, suddenly arrive at something whole. Mary is stitching her name over and over, pulling the threads through her long fingers. For nineteen years her name has been a plaything. The ends of her fingers weave puns and anagrams. She is a woman of many names — she has woven a self to match each name — Tu te Marieras Veritas Armata Sa Vertue M’attire Tu as Martyre And the daffodils, they too have many names — Daffadowndilly, Narcissus, Lenten lily, Easter bell. How they weave themselves out of the grass, out of the green shoots and sheathed leaves; heads hung, necks waiting to be snapped.     iv: the mermaid and the hare Though all my life I’ve worn dresses of mohair, damask, or serge, stiffened in the neck  with buckram; though I wear breeding layers of petticoats, farthingales expanded with hoops of whalebone; they’ve removed my heart-shaped cap, my mourning veil, stripped me bare to the waist, replaced my silver hose-covered legs with the wet mucus of a fish tail. Two husbands dead — they visit me nightly. In dreams my hands turn into gudgeons, chubs, loaches; the white magic of a hare biting at my heels.     v: snowdrops When they are ready they send for her. There are so many of them — men who must watch her die. The snowdrops outside her window change color in the sunrise. She is tired. She has lain awake all night. She is dressed in black with a long white veil — a caul to keep her son close to her. She counts the pearl acorn buttons on her satin dress; she counts the double string of rosary hanging from her waist. Her God is ready for her; his body hangs above her and she carries his cross into the great hall. Pearl queen — she imagines the hall is filled with pearls and the pearls are snowdrops. Into the sheer purity of it she will fall. She is going into the arms of her mother. In blood she came, in blood she will go — stripped to red petticoat, red bodice, red sleeves. She feels herself glowing in the center of the hall — sister to the fireplace; curls burning around her pale face, her auburn eyes. Hunkering for final prayer she commits herself, kneels to the block; hot fur, breath, the pounding heart of her lapdog pressing against her leg. She gasps as the phoenix in her chest breaks apart her body with two blows — one from each wing as it rose.     vi: red and white Though it was the color of mourning, for my wedding I wanted to wear white — The color of fresh snow and milk The color of Isis and for wrapping the dead The color cloaking the early monks The color of the sacrificial lamb The color of the transfiguration of our Lord The color of the unicorn My colors are red and white — a white veil flows from my pale face and tight red curls. When I walk in the garden I scatter sunlight. I am titanium white I am Sirius I am an Arctic fox My heart is ermine I am a white horse ridden by Conquest; you will remember my name.
1  I wanted out of the past so I ate the air,  it took me further into air. It cut me, an iridescent chord  of geometric light. I breathed deep, it lit me up, it was good. All these years, lightning, rain, the sky,  its little daisies. Memento mori and lux.   2  And you can’t blame me. This daisy-feeling. I was a poet with a death-style of my own  waking. I occupy the rest of it. A blue-green leaving feeling. To no longer belong to a body sometimes  open to air. In rain, in early morning rain.   3  Today was the day of the amphitheater in mind. The day of a dreaming speech where the light is dope  and that’s all you can say. When a feeling degrades and evolves into thought like  2 a.m. dilated, revealed a star. It will say this long agony is great being awake. It is being lovely now.   4  All the stars are here that belonged to whatever  was speaking. I built my life out of what was left of me. Sky and its procedures. A romanticism of clouds, trees, pale crenellations,  and poetry. A musical joybang. Touching everything.   5  When the words come back their fictions remain. Thunderheads and rain, lexical waters raking gutters,  carving a world. The stylus will live in the flash. A daring light from pewter to whatever. Now discrete observations produce undramatic sound,  like I am a bubble, make me the sea. O, make me the sea.   6  For a long time the names of things and things unnamed. For a long time hawks and their chicks, fox and their cubs,  mice and their mice. For a long time bunnies and boojum, and a name  for every bird in me. I am native to feathers — their netherside.   7  The sun was a goldish wave taped to a book. A wavy diagram in a fusty book. Foxed old wave. A soft electro-fuzz enters the head. A soft fuzzy opiate lightness. What could be the message in this  pointillist masquerade. What use memory.   8  I came from a different world. I will die in it. Someone saw it, I love them for seeing it. I love seeing it with them. Love watching it die in me. It wasn’t behind or beside me. Finding it wasn’t it. Being it was everything. That was the thing I thought as I fell.   9  I am that thing in morning, whatever motors in the skull,  something is claimed. Sudden rain keeps it real. Rooftops from the window look stunned.  Cleansed. Looking out over the day, the pale performing day. I always consult the air before composing air.   10  And what have you been given, the blue nothing asks,  who are you under clanging brass? Who are you, Saturday; sing to me. See the crows thread summerismus. Afternoon shade mirrors an issuelessness. A perfection of beetle slowly treading summer’s blade. The leaves broadcast color. I was born in summer, my conqueror,  breaking into wisteria.   11  The sun was a golden rag nailed to a ladder. And here the marigolds grow down to the banks. The mayflies drowse above water. How then the dazzling surface and its dictions  under piled clouds, and clouds sitting there by place and sound. One thing. This thing and sound glitters. Indicative transitive particular battles the void. All afternoon a green-gold silent light  on the spotted grass, sprung.   12  I know it’s summer even if I can’t decipher the call. I believe in the birds haunting me. I held on. I’m full of bluster but also full of vision. I’m not ready to put the book down. To stop singing bright spots thrilling the quicksilver  over my torrent. I make sounds, forget to die. I call it living,  this inhuman conch in the ear. A pewter sensation and wind.   13  The sun remains a yellow sail tacked to the sky. I am climbing air here. I am here  in the open. The kestrel swerves. Its silent kerning. A stunning calibration of nothing. I’m left to see.
Naked or not, I’m a costume that moves, figurine with a face that changes. You could call me a mood. I begin cheerful but sometimes turn solemn when confronted with my own mythology (wolf in a cape, cat scratch on a cupboard door, mouse tail in the hand of a bland farmer’s wife, a drop of blood on her shoe). Today’s beginning ended in a dream. In a fantastical bed, a lover leaned in to kiss me just as I realized I was part machine, part primitive urge. I left the bed and said, You know, don’t you, not everyone is so disposed. And then I heard from inside my head, You should say, not everyone is so disposed to your utopia. Only then did I realize I’d been inexact. Even here there are scolds that tell you how to be. Sometimes they live inside. Naked or not, I am trying to tuck my arms invisibly behind my back so that all you can see are my breasts and my highly simplified head.
Three items in an envelope. A photograph of two, four, six, eight, nine boys boarding a bus. Not boys, men. Dressed in the long wool coat of winter. Something “based on the life of.” What can a moment outlast? That question becomes a theory, theorem, mechanism. Three boys, one girl, a tree brushing back air off her forehead. Paper, six clean sheets, a monogrammed envelope. An index. The physical bias to existence becomes some wedge, the inexact value of an empire of ether. Tick-tick. The amphibian emerges from water, walks off stage. It’s as if evolution is embodied in absence. Someone is lying on her back. She turns over. Her breath is in the air. Or in the idea of atmosphere.
This is the day the flies fall awake mid-sentence and lie stunned on the windowsill shaking with speeches only it isn’t speech it is trembling sections of puzzlement which break off suddenly as if the questioner had been shot this is one of those wordy days when they drop from their winter quarters in the curtains and sizzle as they fall feeling like old cigarette butts called back to life blown from the surface of some charred world and somehow their wings which are little more than flakes of dead skin have carried them to this blackened disembodied question what dirt shall we visit today? what dirt shall we re-visit? they lift their faces to the past and walk about a bit trying out their broken thought-machines coming back with their used-up words there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly it’s going to be impossible to think clearly now until next winter what should we what dirt should we
This is what happened the dead were settling in under their mud roof and something was shuffling overhead it was a badger treading on the thin partition bewildered were the dead going about their days and nights in the dark putting their feet down carefully and finding themselves floating but that badger still with the simple heavy box of his body needing to be lifted was shuffling away alive hard at work with the living shovel of himself into the lane he dropped  not once looking up and missed the sight of his own corpse falling like a suitcase towards him with the grin like an opened zip  (as I found it this morning) and went on running with that bindweed will of his went on running along the hedge and into the earth again trembling as if in a broken jug for one backwards moment  water might keep its shape
Three people in the snow getting rid of  themselves  breath by breath and every six seconds a blackbird three people in raincoats losing their tracks in the snow walking as far as the edge and back again with the trees exhausted  tapping at the sky and every six seconds a blackbird first three then two passing one eye between them and the eye is a white eraser rubbing them away and on the edge a blackbird trying over and over its broken line trying over and over its broken line
Nothing by or for itself, the sound of eggs hard-boiling in the hot water echoed by the heavy rain that pours down the broken spout, the cowardly lion’s roar answered by the moos of the buffalo the bloody mouth of the one by the sharp and polished horns of the other, even Nelson Eddy could hear someone else singing in his bathtub the songs from his dumb movies though when I once drove up the vertical highway in Colorado to visit Elaine the Gnostic and take her to the stone mountain where her husband fell we drove back without talking though she touched my knee in gratitude and when we reached the very top there were no trees only flowers grew there accompanied by nothing the name of which was loneliness which Shelley the poet himself suffered from among his beleaguered women you’ll die remembering.
And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.   Genesis 4:9–12
Cain tended to break rules and saving the introduction of a principal character for episode 3 was the most signifcant early decision. Previously associated with both Cain and Fr. K, Adah had been away on a busi- ness trip for three months, returning to find diplomatic relations between her country and its bellicose neighbor in tatters. Staff writer James Ingram recalls the atmosphere in the room when they realized that the letters b, i, t, c, h, d, i, t, t, o were left over after Fr. K’s feverish definitions. “We just started opening windows and whooping at the world,” he says. “It was character defining. This was Adah in her own words wresting control idiot with her Whatever I’ve I’m probably that.” Not unlike accident” of later (punctuation free-for-all), we that the writers signifcance of a coincidence. charged with a hysterical joint the male leads, desires for Adah, name her with back from the first breath. worked on since proudest of the famous “B- season favorite is naturally a may reflect now overlooked the so terrifying The episode is sexual tension, chorus from their hopes and their need to many names, <Doorbell.> Adah in Burberry, bathed in hall light. Adah, rosebud torturer, co-author of overset thermometers. Adah, outshining hydrogen trinketry. Soothe their wrathful orphanhood then come hither, nutrient. Heavyweight statuette. Handbook for esh data & VAT theft; the lighthouse den where redemption inducts honey. Brunette A.D.D., ol’ mouthwash. Adahhhh! Tetchy demon & conventional Frenchwoman. Death, wishbone, horse- shoe. “Ditto, bitch.” to take ownership of her in some way or in one very specific way. Indeed there is an unabashed eroticism to the episode, albeit entirely set in the corridor, which saw early accusations of gratuity. The show would grow accustomed to courting controversy in this way, occasionally falling foul of the Bechdel test (a scene cut from episode 12 featured Adah in conversation with herself about the two male leads for half an hour). Halberg remains impenitent. “Adah isn’t just the love interest — that’s exactly what we wanted to send up in this show. She’s supposed to be the rudder, the only one with a handle on the situation who might do something about it. Of course Cain and Father K just spend the whole time drooling and lusting after her: they’re imbeciles.”
It is generally believed that the writers had to make the most of a low budget and that this led to the grim determination of writing through restriction, bottle episodes, and constraints. In reality the show was generously bankrolled by Thud, but several costly set pieces had been planned which depleted the kitty. Nevertheless, episode 4, comprising solely an intimate kitchen dialogue between Fr. K and Adah, remains a fan favorite. “It was one of the last things we shot,” recalls Halberg. “Kitty [Beaulieu, who plays Adah], had really got into the role by then which was important as we wanted to imply years of previous talk between them. They mics and I got every line so most completely gives the scene personal you’re overhear- neighbors wall.” Adah find that in the she has been no longer has and privileges a cleric. To be be excessively alcohol which points out, for Father K’s within their probes further. to fob her off both had contact them to whisper that it was al- inaudible. It that indecently atmosphere, as if ing your own through the is dismayed to three months away, Father K the obligations to function as bibulous is to fond of drinking is, as Adah hardly unusual line of work culture. She Father K tries by talking about — Tell me again how you were defrocked. — Overnight. — That’s half. — Bibulously. — That’s hardly uncharacteristic. — Alright. There are things we don’t fathom: the “noumenon.” — That’s better. Humor me. — March 5th, The Hour of Botheration: the invertebrates trashed the transept, uprooted the boutonniere ... This vermivorous, backhanded ordination... — Wood! — Bonded, drowned hobo. — Oh, Eden! Oh, heeded ode! — And faith? —N- No, th- th... H- h- h- h- h- h- h- —You’re crying. Why? — It’s all that’s left. Kantian philosophy (the noumenon is a posited thing, object, or event which is known, if it is known at all, without the use of the senses), but it soon emerges that a violent overthrow of the church has taken place, the transept vandalized, Father K (and, we suppose, his ilk) booted out and replaced by patsies during The Hour of Botheration. Its having been titled shows that the recent event has already passed into myth — a further indication that there is no planned resistance. This augurs very ill, and the look on Adah’s face as Father K sobs in her lap really says it all. She realizes that she will have to act as leader, as cheerleader, as mother, as father to the household.
But not before several undisputed stone-cold classics. This is why we keep writing about Cain: for all its self-indulgent flaws it just gets it so right sometimes. Every standard element is here: the gang is still drinking far too many cocktails in one sitting, Cain is a hypocrite, Adah exists only to be interpreted by the men, Father K is so borderline incoherent you almost wonder if he’s a malfunctioning robot. So what’s changed? I think it’s the widening of the lens, the micro to the macro. By this point they’ve all pretty much given up on their evening away from the overthrew and ing it in ruins puppet-board of means we can at what is hap- city, and it’s not demilitarized, to confirm the word as bond. grinding their with the recog- cial authorities is classes, walking university they took over, leav- with a useless directors. This look, once again, pening to their good. Officially this only stands emptiness of Everyone is teeth. Reasoning nized or unoffi- like attempting Cain, though broadsheet in dialogue, harbors tabloid thoughts. A doughnut of prurience. I had Adah misconstrued (5th/6th Manhattan). T/K: Her worth, her “no tent” theme. The red toothbrush threshing deconsecrated earth, boycotted labyrinths. Hot thin chef, overworked an- tihero of the bathysphere, I need you to be yourself today. Thoth went, font-born, on farmland. The mortar swiveled on the hill. Demilitarized, huh? Oh how vehe- ment, Heavenward. to plough a field with a toothbrush. The overworked chef had finally produced something delicious and, this week at least, it was a labyrinth we didn’t want to boycott. T/K is journalistic shorthand for “to come,” indicating a forthcoming addition to the text. (TK is a rare formation of letters and therefore would not be confused with continuous language as “to come” might). Thoth, one of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon, has either an ibis or a baboon head. Arbitrator of disputes between other gods and the system of writing.
One of Halberg’s more whimsical decisions: just when the action is coming to a head, attempt to pull off something formally innovative. “Underwritten? Lithe!” could have been a note to his detractors in this metaphorical on-screen corrections list. Each one of its 23 scenes was followed by a “what really happened” reveal, until the audience ran out even of false hope. “It was a bold decision, and by bold I mean stupid,” says Ingram. “I tried to reason with him: if you go to pull the rug out from under somebody’s feet 23 times they’re just go- and step off the he had that kind trick in mind the table cloth cutlery, crockery, undisturbed. over and over until the very smashes hell.” The whole an unrealized them share a captors and K, and Cain are together as the ing to get bored rug. But I think of conjuring where you pull out and leave the and glassware Only you do it again 22 times last tablecloth everything to episode was sneeze. We see joke with their Adah, Father allowed to stay sun rises. But Erratum: For blubber, read brother. Compassion; shoeshine. Authoritative; whiten. Hard; daft. Veldt; thought. Inertia; in- herit. Mothered; afterthought. Work; ho ho ho. Schoolteacher; orthodontist. Enlightened; muddy. Horny; hyphen- ated. Underwritten; lithe. Theft; fuddle. Honorable; anaesthetist. Handbag; ow. Thud; ahhhhh. Huh?; entertainment. Sainthood; elf. Revolution; neology. Dad; backbencher. Bosom; overstay. Watchmen; wretches. Hydrate; shoot. no, we jump-cut to their separation and Father K weeps hoarsely as their hands are tied behind their backs. After an inappropriate remark about Adah, Cain kicks an AK-47 from the weaker-looking patrolman’s skinny arms and scatters the rest in a hail of bullets. But no, we jump-cut to Cain being repeatedly pistol- whipped by the same patrolman. It seems unnecessary to list the others. This is now a world where honor is an anaesthetic and the saint is as fictional as the elf. They beg for water. Cain takes a bullet to the knee.
Injured, sleep-deprived, sorely tested, Adah, Cain, and Father K are falsely imprisoned in a shallow cave with other unfortunates seeking refuge from their war-torn homeland. It is hard to blame the writers’ room if “Unlike All Other Empires” felt as cynical and world-weary as its protagonists. Cain, in need of medical attention he will never receive for his infected gunshot wound, entertains the children with parables of the less than K and Adah fragments of cheese and dried a side pocket rucksack in rendition of the five thousand. lost and the only view comes from talkative guard, sunstroke, who plight as the of humanity. human. Father portion out tiny dehydrated goat bread found in of K’s deflated some worn out feeding of the All hope seems external point of an unusually half mad with regards their normal situation And yet there Holed up in a bothy, Adah and Fr. K share dried curd and stone bread with the yet breathing. Hew, chew, survive. Cain: foulmouthed & hedgehoggy; not mint. The children have an illustrated book called Dehumainze! He reads to them. Afternoon: hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Ohhh. Life hobbled, un- ornamented, unnoteworty runoff. As Westerners-by-birthright it's hard to ha- bituate to horror, huh? We try to leave some permanent scrathes in the dirt. is a will to live, an ember which has not quite been scotched. Those lines in the dust could be as nihilistic as any ephemeral gesture, or they could be the most hopeful, the most human impulse we possess. “Posterity is bullshit. This is where we always planned to end it,” says Halberg, well aware that there were still a full nine episodes to go in the projected 31-episode run, and that many shows could complete an entire plot cycle without much more screen time than that which he’d set aside for the denouement. “It was discussed at the outset, so don’t listen to Lin or James or any of the other whiners I should have let go at the halfway point.” A toast to the not rescued. The Edward Said quotation in full: “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”
A much-needed swan song from Cain, blasting Father K’s bien-pensant ideology and everyone else in his path. A neoliberal trying to ingratiate himself with the construction worker and trustafarian alike, his argu- ments lighter performed as a he’s right, you Ingram. “You them, but it’s particularly good they? There’s take the side well-presented Otto Thud (who Dr. in spite of nomenology) is unsought cameo fornicator (a on an anecdote I one to tell me). than air and spectacle. “And know?” says feel sorry for not like they’re or anything, are a tendency to of the most suffering.” Poor never went by his PhD in phe- given another as the moonlight monicker based cannot get any- Furthermore, B– “Fr. K, you hater! The standard liberal monotony: thinking all that is persecuted must be the truth. Hah! But no. Some things are only persecuted. Oh Fido, thitherward, round the houses — hold the hard hat, hold the standby ban- danna — you launch the featherweight countercharge, the mere badminton, the waterfront hotbed. Neon Ivy Federation! The moonlight fornicator: he had more worth. (Hi, Dr. Otto, where’s the hooch?) This is how behavior devolved. “neon ivy federation” was generally taken to be a sideswipe at his beloved alma mater, [redacted], which Halberg considered one of the lesser liberal arts schools in the Ivy League. The last straw, by all accounts.
An extremely hubristic, unflattering, and accurate self-portrait, this episode saw Halberg in direct conversa- tion with Cain, questioning his own methods. The passing allusion to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin appears to reference Chapter 4, stanza XXXV: “But I myself read my bedizened /fancies, my rhythmic search for truth, /to nobody except a wizened /nanny, companion of my youth; /or, after some dull dinner’s labour, / I buttonhole a wandering neighbour /and in a corner make him choke /on tragedy; but it’s no joke, /when, utterly worn out hausted and I take /a beside my get up; with ing/alarmed by lay,/they leave fly away.” There able system of the show, which not discuss, appears to be the is a geometric to Euclidean by rhyming,/ex- done up, rambling walk lake,/and duck instant tim- my melodious their shores and is an unfathom- numbers within Halberg will but episode 25 key. An orthant term referringn-dimensional I could close the deal with my brattish coauthor, harry reputation’s toreador, or detonate the whole trenchant, un- fathomable bandwidth. Thumb-horned orthant. (The bits where Pushkin’s like: UGHHHH! RHYMES! and goes for a beer.) Can’t unread the footnote: Is this worthwhile? Am I? Oh shanghaied heart- throb, thirteenth dandy havoc-hound. Gentrify the favela runt or defend the loon; sod the chrome T-totum. Ever the bodybuilder, even in ghosthood. space, the analogue of a quadrant (2D) or an octant (3D). Thumb-horned has the feel of an order of mockery /cuckoldry but may also be a reference to Cain’s mark, according to some scholars, being the gradual protrusion of horns. A T-totum (or teetotum) is a little metal Roman spinning top used for gambling. William Ernest Henley’s “The Double Ballade on the Nothingness of Things” opens with the lines: “The big teetotum twirls, /And epochs wax and wane /As chance subsides or swirls ... ” Triskaidekaphobia can be traced back to the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia where the 13th day of each new year is considered evil, or a day when the power of evil is particularly intense and can cause trouble, thus to this day people leave cities and camp overnight in the countryside. God has thirteen attributes of mercy according to rabbinic commentary on the Torah, and thirteen is also the number of nodes which make up Metatron’s Cube in Kabbalistic account. Metatron is an extraordinarily important angel in the apocryphal Book of the Palaces; it is suggested that Metatron is the only reason the human race was given knowledge of God and the cube forms a kind of “map of creation.” This appears to relate back to the “rhombohedral monolith” of the early episodes, the college’s strange obelisks. It is worth mentioning that Euclidean spaces generalize to higher dimensions. I feel really weird.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ The show remains, unshot. Adah rants. Cain bares his teeth. Starvation: a state without border. World without means. Haha. Who’d have thought. Total inter- regnum. Theogony. Thrombotic idea. (Debt flogs verb.) A retro daydream: I hid under the hollyhock. The prohibition-era nut cuffed me. Shoddy fate, old horse. To genuflect? Ohhhhhhhhh no ... Vulture count: Then. Then. Then. Then. Noon throbbed resplendently. Baby ... I ... tried ... to ... make ... the ... word ... I reached for her. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ Oh, that Thou teach even me. I who abhor truth, the stubborn bloodhound. Worth three hairbrushes, if that. No: hydrogenated fats. No: enhanced form- aldehyde. What shorthand thunderbolt could halt my hibernation & dog thirsts? The unabridged refrigerator, the unnoted cheese board. Heh. Shortlist me with the redundant heathen, half my covenant with toothache. Foot the noun. Whatever it takes. Lord, have mercy. Gospodi po- miliu. Kyrie eleison. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
After Otto Piene How does beginning go how does remembering without forgetting go in front of me in the snow a man his back lonesome somber how does beginning go not remembering flashes of light that showed him images when he was a boy quick and blinding see the shadows in the light how does not-remembering go listen to the hissing see the light and Germany’s lightness how bright Germany is like soot like images quick and blinding how does beginning go smell the snow it’s new it fell in the night in the dark gets forgotten in images quick listen to the snow it lies light like linen something’s burning a hissing somber like images at night on walls listen to the hissing smell the smell of burning look at the soot on a white background    Translated from the German
We are not sitting in the train anymore as passengers with different destinations you pulled me off at your station and I pulled you off at mine here we stand each in the other’s light and are mistakable    Translated from the German
And then when you stand where it is quiet so that you notice when thought ends and listening begins when listening ends and seeing begins when a bird flies when you glide as a black bird and scream when you start to speak in the clear air and can speak of nothing but the light as if it were the first light when you cast a shadow on the rock and say my shadow stays and the rock passes away when at this moment it is true that it is good to attempt the entire mission you can call the desert by its name    Translated from the German
Halfway between crib and cage the French language puts crate, a simple slatted box for transporting those fruits that fall ill at the least lack of air. Built in such a way that it can be broken down effortlessly after use, it is never used twice. It is really more perishable than the deliquescing foodstuffs that it carries. On the corners of streets that lead to the markets, it gleams like white wood without wood’s vanity. Still very new, and slightly surprised to find itself in this awkward position, having been thrown into the gutter without hope of retrieval, it remains a most likable object on whose fate we will not dwell for long.   Translated from the French
The rain, in the backyard where I watch it fall, comes down at different 
rates. In the center a fine discontinuous curtain — or network — falls implacably and yet gently in drops that are probably quite light; a strengthless sempiternal precipitation, an intense fraction of the atmosphere at its purest. A little distance from the walls to the right and left plunk heavier drops, one by one. Here they seem about the size of grains of wheat, the size of a pea, while elsewhere they are big as marbles. Along gutters and window frames the rain runs horizontally, while depending from the same obstacles it hangs like individually wrapped candies. Along the entire surface of a little zinc roof under my eyes it trickles in a very thin sheet, a moiré pattern formed by the varying currents created by the imperceptible bumps and undulations of the surface. From the gutter it flows with the restraint of a shallow creek until it tumbles out into a perfectly vertical net, rather imperfectly braided, all the way to the ground where it breaks and sparkles into brilliant needles. Each of its forms has its particular allure and corresponds to a particular patter. Together they share the intensity of a complex mechanism 
as precise as it is dangerous, like a steam-powered clock whose spring is wound by the force of the precipitation. The ringing on the ground of the vertical trickles, the glug-glug of the gutters, the miniscule strikes of the gong multiply and resonate all at once in a concert without monotony, and not without a certain delicacy. Once the spring unwinds itself certain wheels go on turning for a while, more and more slowly, until the whole mechanism comes to a stop. It all vanishes with the sun: when it finally reappears, the brilliant apparatus evaporates. It has rained.   Translated from the French
Unlike the ashes that make their home with hot coals, snails prefer moist earth. Go on: they advance while gluing themselves to it with their entire bodies. They carry it, they eat it, they shit it. They go through it, it goes through them. It’s the best kind of interpenetration, as between tones, one passive and one active. The passive bathes and nourishes the active, which overturns the other while it eats. (There is more to be said about snails. First of all their immaculate clamminess. Their sangfroid. Their stretchiness.) One can scarcely conceive of a snail outside its shell and unmoving. The moment it rests it sinks down deep into itself. In fact, its modesty obliges it to move as soon as it has shown its nakedness and 
revealed its vulnerable shape. The moment it’s exposed, it moves on. During periods of dryness they withdraw into ditches where it seems their bodies are enough to maintain their dampness. No doubt their neighbors there are toads and frogs and other ectothermic animals. But when they come out again they don’t move as quickly. You have to admire their willingness to go into the ditch, given how hard it is for them to come out again. Note also that though snails like moist soil, they have no affection for places that are too wet such as marshes or ponds. Most assuredly they prefer firm earth, as long as it’s fertile and damp. They are fond as well of moisture-rich vegetables and green leafy plants. They know how to feed on them leaving only the veins, cutting free the most tender leaves. They are hell on salads. What are these beings from the depths of the ditches? Though snails love many of their trenches’ qualities they have every intention of leaving. They are in their element but they are also wanderers. And when they emerge into the daylight onto firm ground their shells will preserve their vagabond’s hauteur. It must be a pain to have to haul that trailer around with them everywhere, but they never complain and in the end they are happy about it. How valuable, after all, to be able to go home any time, no matter where you may find yourself, eluding all intruders. It must be worth it. They are a little vain about this convenient ability: “Look at me, a vulnerable and sensitive being, who is nevertheless protected from unwanted guests, and so always in possession of happiness and peace of mind!” It’s not surprising the snail holds his head so high. “At the same time I am glued to the earth, always touching it, always progressing, though slowly, and always capable of pulling loose from the soil into myself. Après moi le déluge, I don’t care, the slightest kick may roll me anywhere. I can always get up again onto my single foot and reglue myself to the dirt where fate has planted me, and that’s my pantry: the earth, the most common of foods.” Joy to the snail! But they leave their proud slime on everything they touch. A silvery trail follows them. And maybe this points the way for the beaks of birds that love to eat them. Ay, there’s the rub: “To be or not to be, that is the question!” Such vanity! But that’s the danger they face. Alone? Yes, the snail is quite alone. He has few friends. But he needs no friends to be happy. He sticks to Nature, he enjoys his perfect nearness, he is the friend of the soil which he kisses with his whole body. And he befriends the leaves, and the heavens toward which he proudly stretches his head, with eyes sensitive enough to signify nobility, slowness, wisdom, pride, vanity, fire. No, he is nothing like the pig. He lacks those pitiful little scurrying anxious feet. That needful flight from shame. The stoic snail is tougher than that. He is more methodical, more proud, and without 
a doubt less gluttonous than any pig — pigs after all are capricious, leaving behind one bit of food to chase after something else. That 
panicky, hurried gluttony, that fear of missing out on something — that’s not for the snail. Nothing could be more beautiful than that deliberate and discreet advance. What it must cost them to glide so perfectly along the earth they honor with their presence! Each is like a ship trailing its silver wake. They proceed with a majesty that is all the more complete when you consider again the vulnerability of those highly sensitive eyeballs. Is the anger of snails perceptible? What examples can be found? As it makes no other gestures, the snail’s passion can probably only be discovered by a more profuse and rapid effusion of slime. The slime of pride. So one can see the expression of their rage is identical with that of their egotism. So they rule the world in their rich and silvery fashion. The expression of their anger, like that of their pride, shines as it dries. But it also makes the trail that reveals them to predators. What’s more, this trail is ephemeral and lasts only until the next rain. That’s how it is with everyone who speaks in an entirely subjective way, in verses and lines only, without taking care to build their phrases 
into a solid dwelling with more than two dimensions. Something more durable than themselves. But undoubtedly they don’t feel this need. They are heroes, that is to say beings whose existence alone is a work of art — not artists who merely make masterpieces. Here I touch on one of the main points of their lesson, something they have in common with all shelled beings: that shell, part of their essence, is at the same time a work of art, a monument. It lasts longer than they do. That is the example that snails offer us: saints who make masterpieces 
of their lives, works of art of their own perfection. They secrete form. Nothing outside themselves, their necessity, or their needs is their work. Nothing is out of proportion with their physical being. Nothing that is unnecessary or obligatory. And so they delineate the duties of humanity: great thoughts come from the heart. Live a better life and make better verses. Morality and rhetoric combine in the ambition and desire of the wise. How are they saints? Precisely by obedience to their nature. So: know yourself. And accept yourself for what you are. In agreement with your vices. In proportion with your measure. What is most appropriate to the human being? Words. Decency. Our humanism.   Translated from the French
I’m going to say what love signifies My grandfather said it was the desire of  the I for another I And since then I began to search for you My father said the number of  love was seven Because creation lasted seven days Seven days making love to its seven nights I looked for you in each seven that ciphered my life And I found you slipping away to other numbers One confuses oneself with one’s other self When two bodies intertwine in bed, three loves have been in my life, four it will be when you have left five days that I cannot stand you, six kisses in La Paz Centro seven years of not finding you, love, show me from one to a thousand your nights What is your philosophy of love you ask me in bed: and I respond It’s not a flower but maybe it is a number. Here, I gift it to you Hide it between your legs. At the count of two Make sure that it does not fall: One Open Sesame. Two Loves have stepped into your kingdom.    Translated from the Spanish
The Friend wriggled out and stood, a smiling tree, his shimmering head turning left and right. A person came along and looked up and said, “Who are you?” The Friend said, “Come on, get a buzz. It’s awesome!” The person said, “I don’t need that,” and walked off. “Wait!” The Friend caught up and tickled him, his fingers hooking him and reeling him in. The Friend promised he would be popular. The person said, “Really?” He wasn’t convinced. The Friend poured it on, slathering him until he reeled. The Friend slathered and slathered until his head bubbled. Reeling in circles, he fell down. “Hey!” The Friend tried to wake him up. “Oh no! He’s dead!” He scooped up dirt, dropped the person in, and patted it down. He acted as if nothing had happened. Then came along another person. The Friend perked up and waved.   Translated from the American Sign Language
That night the moon rose in the window. Its light touched the pane and spread over the floor. The girls climbed out of their beds and gathered in the glow, where their hands came alive. Their chatter filled their chests with such gladness it flowed out past the sentry girl at the door and down the corridor until it struck the matron’s ears. She rocked forward, enraged, and thundered up the corridor. The sentry girl gave the alarm. They flew for their beds. The matron burst in. Her arm swung and connected. A girl dropped. The hand of the moon went to the girl, tapping her on the shoulder, tapping to no avail. It withdrew, gliding back to the window and out. When the sun came up, its blaze seething into the floor, the girls gathered again at the window. They watched as the gardener dug a hole. His shovel thrust firmly in the ground, he lifted a covered figure and let drop. Its arms were crossed as it tumbled to the bottom. The gardener grimaced and covered the hole. That night the moon rose in the window. Its light touched the pane and spread over the floor. The girls climbed out of their beds and gathered in the glow, where their hands came alive.    Translated from the American Sign Language
1  An Ireland, as of chalk, the sky standing in for the sea, the beach a reach of blue, the vineyards’ green scooped out in cirque, in cove, a subtlety of air laps the eyes, abob like barques come from afar, and the viator standing there, poised to dis- embark, the undercurrent of air escaping him, tossed to & fro, gaze wrenched from its angle of purchase upon the world, capsized, head now careened against the suddenness of rock, eyes whiplashed into new prospects, he drowns in fire, enflamed, fine silk aquiver at the singe of brazier, he burns: would Hell be as blue, or the sun the obverse of God?   2  Now at Laon, the Lugdunum of the North, deposited on this citadel of chalk, white arx, former temple of Lug, the light- god of the Gauls, & he, this Celt from Hibernia, setting foot on this podium, this puy, this platform afloat at cloud & wind height, blown in from the septentrion, breathes in the quintessence of rains, alevel the briar’s pinks, zone where water, at first cold snap, turns to snow. Fallen from fire. Autumn’s pure light whitens the mount, the tufa reverberating the radiance of a Cyclades isle, here mis- placed, high above these plains, by some error in translation.   3  At Lindisfarne, let us suppose — even if Alcuin’s letters to the island’s monks exhorting them to combat the Viking may be evidence to the contrary — that he studied Greek, that Charles the Bald, offshoot of the Pippinids, summoned him here to Laon to translate Dionysus. Between the king’s vineyards & the blue sky, a whisper of the North Sea in the channel of Île Sainte when the seals bark at ebb tide, Johannes the Hibernian cocks an ear despite finding his coracle of Latin too frail a craft to explore the peninsulas of Greek, & carries with him the long-lapping waves of Scotland & seaweed’s tang where kingfisher nests beside nugget of amber.   4  That which lies out of reach taking the shape of this white & shadowy rock on which he is now beached & whose slope he now climbs, blind beneath the sun, fallen from the same height he ascends, would Satan be extending him his welcome with the same dark radiance of stone between his eyes & the same fine peppering of pinks that spice his senses on either side of the stairs, against this, what whiteness, what candor? The sky’s rarified air, there to calculate the distances between the things he climbs or descends, the divisions of the world now extended, now illuminated between the lines, the borders of the intangible now flaring up with darkness, the granular opacities now brightening, the sun biting into the margins of the real, the image dying.   5  Denys, foundation of all cathedrals to come, mentor of naves, stained glass rosettes, of all the gossamer shadow spiderwebbing the light from the East as it rises, Lord of Ionia, oriental Ionas, Denys, Dionysos, your Greek sailing the great hill of Lugdunum, your darkness raining down its alphas, its Alphei, the dawn uncorking the fizz of its dations. John Scotus comments, his violet ink relighting, igniting the world according to Plato, filtering the grit of the flower through the sieve of the eye, the bran, the curds of light, sifting out the clots of theology, in this shadowy cave, the locals burning every log in sight, hoc lignum, a bonfire of stones held in common, lapis iste.   6  And if some hick might askQuomodo omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt?
The woman who cannot bring forth her child: go to a dead man’s grave and then step three times over the grave, and then say these words three times: This is my cure for the loathsome late-birth This is my cure for the bitter black-birth This is my cure for the loathsome imperfect-birth   And when that woman is with child and she goes to her lord in his bed, then let her say: Up I go, over you I step, with a quick child, not a quelled one, with a full-born one, not a doomed one.   And when the mother feels the child is quick, go then to a church, and when she comes before the altar say then: Christ, I said it. This has been uttered.   The woman who cannot bring forth her child: grasp a handful of her own child’s grave, and after that, bind it in black wool and sell it to peddlers, and say then: I sell it, you sell it. This blackened wool, this sorrow seed.   Translated from the Old English
The 3-D printer worked overtime sculpting lemon trees complete with bees on budding flowers. The overheated machine filled the cardboard orchard with the scent of hot plastic. The 12th nightingale arrived like a prophet in a cloud of smoke, considering the same hand that pushed “print” remained destined to strike a single match and wave goodbye to a paradise of paper.    Translated from the Persian
I have never needed God as a personal savior in my practical life syllogisms about His existence were never music to my ears but always seemed vague missing a dimension although I didn’t know how to say this. Neither a philosophical God nor a biblical God suddenly appears among His creations amid revelations of wisdom in Jerusalem, His city. And certainly not in disclosures of pious inner principles and also not among poets, unfortunately. Astronomical bodies at night and mystical landscapes in Sharafat for example and Beit Jala bear His between-the-lines existence, His inklings. The expression of an ultra-Orthodox man’s eyes in Mea She’arim —  this too —  and even the purifying surrender of a sly and seasoned merchant, irreligious now in Geula, when you reproach him. Something like “Reprove a wise man and he will love you.” And you, when you cleanse yourself of anxious constraints about your environment after taking hash or grass. Springs of purity whose origins you’re unaware of bubble in coursing blood, in glands, in milk and some paradisiacal primeval revelation, and your almost subconscious innerness your being suddenly revealed —  Is this clear enough to you, heredity? Genes? Or existential uniqueness, a maintained infancy that knocks you out with a sense of a refreshing genesis. Everything becomes clear in a great light. You shed revulsion and resistance, a great love germinates within you —  this gloriousness this wonder comprised of absolutes of —  objective truth, complete justice, decency honor internalized honesty and complex wisdom enhanced down to the last detail. Ho, complete, divine purity. Suddenly you polish a syllogism of your own for decisive proof of His existence: God is an idea —  ideas don’t have material existence but they exist nonetheless so God exists definitively as the spirit of an idea, the biblical assertion “He has no body and no bodily form” is clear to me now as an exegesis that sits well with philosophy.    Translated from the Hebrew
He was led to be hanged. How to write this scene? Was it winter? Summer? From behind the fence across the street his mother watched. What should I call her? Let’s say, Antanina. And he is Maxim. Why Maxim, and not Basil or Yanak? The stones tucked themselves under his feet, two magpies stalked him, poplar to poplar. You’ve ever been hanged? Me, never yet. And that’s the problem. So are the magpies. Why should there be two, not one? The gutters silver with spring waters. So was it spring? Alright. By the courthouse, gray soldiers, lined up in a row. In the park — ladies. And ladies’ men. And where’s mother? “It’s best without her,” he thought. Do change her name. How’s then? A truck with sides already dropped —  above it — a noose. Above a noose —  a cloud. Who’s sitting at the wheel? His brother? Son? No, a son is pushing it. A brother then. And from behind the curtain in a palace next to the courthouse she watches. Marysya? Alright, Marysya. Those magpies. Soldiers. Water. Park. That cloud again. And glances from the crowd. “It’s him ...  Not you ... Not me ... For that, thank God ... ” Bells ringing. Will he hear the bells? Behind Marysya stands the one who shares her bed. With blazing epaulets. And profile. And a hand around her waist. A river embraces the park. A river jammed with ice. Life blazes, rings. To sum it up, considering all mentioned: “He was led to be hanged.” Alone.    Translated from the Belarusian
From a ways, the sky and your hands come to my eyes, from some distant part of you; it’s snowing out, you’re all in the white of the snow every track in the candor a wound and the field beyond the window is a body a glance that becomes a pronouncement, the heat of breath, your head adrift in sleeplessness; that’s where it returns, in a word translated into silence where the sparrows tie loose knots your palms on your eyes, chest on your knees forehead in the snow.    Translated from the Italian
My eyes turned to salt in looking back, my thoughts stood still in gestures, in the silence of what’s been done; I gathered the crumbs of another lunch and shook them into the garden’s vitreous air where the sun’s just cracked and spilled. Here, even a flutter of blackbird beyond the hedge stands still, as my words stand still, like ships in bottles. Your language is mine but mine is not yours. At home, I could feel myself thinking while the television glowed in shadow and a film score spread like smoke in a saloon. I keep to myself what it means to tend a fire, the thick scent of soaked wood, a match between my fingers, the way a day resides in what’s to do, in another light split by the clouds, a different sunset tied to the tallest trees flush in the eyes of houses, on the poor man’s livestock; a touch here, a touch there — the way loneliness comes, today, a day like this, one day more alone.    Translated from the Italian
the porcelain cup is similar to my skull. when i grasp the cup firmly with my hand an arm out of nowhere sprouts on my arm like a graft and the hand on that arm raises the porcelain cup high and hurls it to the wooden floor. since that arm is safeguarding the porcelain cup the thing that is broken into pieces then is my skull that is similar to the porcelain cup. even if my arm had moved before the graft-arm slid into my arm like a snake the white paper that warded off flood would have ripped. yet my arm continues to safeguard the porcelain cup.   Translated from the Korean
Say what you like about Charaxos, that’s a fellow with a fat-bellied ship always in some port or other. What does Zeus care, or the rest of his gang? Now you’d like me on my knees, crying out to Hera, “Blah, blah, blah, bring him home safe and free of warts,” or blubbering, “Wah, wah, wah, thank you, thank you, for curing my liver condition.” Good grief, gods do what they like. They call down hurricanes with a whisper or send off a tsunami the way you would a love letter. If they have a whim, they make some henchmen fix it up, like those idiots in the Iliad. A puff of smoke, a little fog, away goes the hero, it’s happily ever after. As for Larichos, that lay-a-bed lives for the pillow. If for once he’d get off his ass, he might make something of himself. Then from that reeking sewer of my life I might haul up a bucket of spring water.    Translated from the Greek
rilke’s separation the unusual rilke and the usual rilke are stuck in their sameness the unusual rilke and the usual rilke would have stayed together the unusual rilke and the usual rilke would have to separate the unusual rilke and the usual rilke both knew it rilke’s breath  1 rilke breathed the air the good air  2 rilke breathed without pause rilke’s nose entrance and exit of the air it knew stench scent aroma handkerchief sniffles rilke’s name rilke said he when asked for his name rilke one said when asked for his name or never heard of him rilke, unrhymed rilke said he then he said cuke then quietly cloud rilke’s boat taking a stroke sitting there sitting there taking a stroke rilke’s drawer  1 he pulled out the drawer he put something in something was in there he pushed in the drawer  2 he pulled out the drawer something was in there he took something out he pushed in the drawer  3 he pulled out the drawer nothing was in there he put nothing in he left the drawer open rilke’s chest  1 he lifted up the lid he put something in something was in there he shut the lid  2 he lifted up the lid something was in there he took something out he shut the lid  3 he lifted up the lid nothing was in there he put nothing in he left the chest open rilke’s shoe rilke’s shoe was one of two each shoe of rilke’s was one of two rilke in shoes always wore two calf to calf stood rilke jutting up from his shoes rilke’s window he opened the window stuck his head out pulled his head in closed it he opened the window morning air rushed in evening air night air he closed the window rilke’s glass rilke took a glass filled it with water lifted it to his mouth drank rilke’s hand rilke’s hand and rilke’s hand hanging by his side rilke’s hand in rilke’s hand the one in the other rilke’s hand in the hand of another greeting him rilke’s hand at rilke’s mouth sensing it there rilke in conversation someone asks rilke answers rilke asks someone answers neither is very happy about it neither is very sad rilke’s reward this now was his reward nobody was certain what he meant rilke wept rilke’s contradiction and yet small and white and yet big and black and yet small and black and yet big and white and yet small and big and yet white and black and yet small and black and yet big and small and black rilke’s eyes rilke opened his eyes everything was visible nothing was invisible rilke shut his eyes nothing was visible everything was invisible rilke opened his eyes nothing was invisible everything was visible rilke shut his eyes nothing was visible nothing was invisible rilke’s weight rilke is being relieved of his weight so roughly does the earth raise her son   Translated from the German
Let the relentless fist be kissed. The salt cannot be cooked; the past is overlooked. Full once they nibble, fleas quibble. Teeth in a hyena’s face always slide into place. No donkey can cart what weighs down your heart. Outside a man is respected; at home that man is neglected. The strangers weep and leave; family members grieve. Even half-blind men hope to see again. True words end; lies extend.    Translated from the Oromo
iFor Laurita, my sister’s friend The moon is dead dead — it will come back to life in the spring when a south wind ruffles the brow of the poplars when our hearts yield their harvest of sighs when the roofs wear their grass hats The moon is dead dead — it will come back to life in the spring iiFor Isabelita, my sister The evening sings a lullaby to the oranges My little sister sings “the earth is an orange” The moon weeping says “I want to be an orange” You can’t be — my dear —  even if you turn pink or a little bit lemon How sad!   Translated from the Spanish
For Claudio Guillén In the branches of the laurel tree I saw two dark doves One was the sun and one the moon Little neighbors I said where is my grave —  In my tail said the sun On my throat said the moon And I who was walking with the land around my waist saw two snow eagles and a naked girl One was the other and the girl was none Little eagles I said where is my grave — In my tail said the sun On my throat said the moon In the branches of the laurel tree I saw two naked doves One was the other and both were none    Translated from the Spanish
For Conchita García Lorca Moon came to the forge in her petticoat of nard The boy looks and looks the boy looks at the Moon In the turbulent air Moon lifts up her arms showing — pure and sexy —  her beaten-tin breasts Run Moon run Moon Moon If the gypsies came white rings and white necklaces they would beat from your heart Boy will you let me dance —  when the gypsies come they’ll find you on the anvil with your little eyes shut Run Moon run Moon Moon I hear the horses’ hoofs Leave me boy! Don’t walk on my lane of white starch The horseman came beating the drum of the plains The boy at the forge has his little eyes shut Through the olive groves in bronze and in dreams here the gypsies come their heads riding high their eyelids hanging low How the night heron sings how it sings in the tree Moon crosses the sky with a boy by the hand At the forge the gypsies cry and then scream The wind watches watches the wind watches the Moon    Translated from the Spanish
My mother spoke perfectly well, and I understood.Fabi andá faser los deber, and I’d do my chores.Fabi traseme meio litro de leite, I brought her half a liter of milk.Desí pra doña Cora que amañá le pago —  I told Doña Cora she’d get paid tomorrow.Deya iso gurí — stop that, child — and I would stop. But my teacher didn’t understand. She’d send home letters in my notebook all in red, like her face, and signed at the bottom. But my mother didn’t understand.Le iso pra mim, ijo, and I’d read them to her. But my mother didn’t understand.Qué fiseste meu fío — what did you do, child — te dise a que portaras bien, and I did behave myself. The story repeated itself for months. My teacher wrote, but my mother didn’t understand. My teacher wrote, but my mother didn’t understand. Then one day my mother understood. She said, Meu fío, tu terás que deiyá la iscuela —  so I quit that school.    Translated from the Portuñol
The huge scar-pocked palm leaf outside the papeterie in Papeete. The bikini billboard at the bus station of a busy mining town in Bohemia. That moment’s hesitation in the photo studio: how did I come to appear in this light? The philologist’s pink index card, his commentary on a line from the Iliad. Letters that the lazy postman left behind in a sack labeled “Destination: The Azores.” Now it’s turned out different after all, so different from what we imagined in our evening courses. No idea who it is will one day give the speech to summon up an army of heroes. Fighting machines were the latest hit when our children’s children still went to the movies. What now? How should I pass my days, with the world exposition long since over? Discovered by divers, far from the coast, a yellow pianola at the bottom of the sea. The calm of images thick with dreams in the banana republic of the real.    Translated from the German
The floor, moonlit, the moon behind you, is not enclosed by walls; a patch of sky is hidden by distant trees. But a patch of floor is 
itself hidden by the sky’s legs, standing on it, and this cannot be the 
opportunity for useless thoughts.   Translated from the French
A few companions had been doing too much talking beside the purple water. The troupe, panic-stricken, ran away, and I found I was incapable of following them. I stepped into the water and the depths turned luminous; faraway ferns could just be seen. The reflections of other dark plants stopped them rising to the surface. Red threads took on all sorts of shapes, caught in the invisible and doubtless powerful currents. A plaster-cast woman advancing caused me to make a gesture which was to take me far.   Translated from the French
Beauty exists, la ermozura egziste and paradises are not artificial, yet how can one have fans of ginkgo, green right next to yellow, and human faces in the sunshine, pearls of architecture and thoughts about the dust that we become? Two days later I remember only theory, what we said concerning the mathematics of the Alhambra and the fragments of poems, so I undress quickly, to catch life red-handed, to relish the goodness of your home amid the hills encircled by a wedding party where I seek and find, seek and do not find, seek and disappear and —     Translated from the Polish
I maaku You told me ba ko tangirai I maaku I maaku My arms were awkward so ko taua baiu I maaku I maaku The dancer trembles because te ruoia is a kind of sorcery I maaku I maaku The frigate birds fly high above us and I’m afraid of falling I maaku
is a fairy-tale queendom  with monsters whom I don’t know  I only know my friends the fairies  of Alaska, the Yupik, I mean  fairies and white mountains  that disappear into the sky  bonfire at Drew’s when  Jerrod said, Dan is  lovely, except when  he bitch-slapped  me, which I  didn’t, so I said,  With my cock!  and he said,  Well, it’s good  it’s small, so  I said, Then  it was pure  pleasure,  yes  .  .  .  ?
The sky is bright with stars After a hot day The coolness of my body Leaving finger by toe in the heat of the spa Looking through the garden lights At tall houses around me I thought, No, just happy The night is bright with stars, She told me She no longer missed her parents But you loved them, I said I did, said she, more than myself And now I’m free That was my friend Pipi Such a whore, I said to myself Like me, such a whore like me As I hear the roosters of Samoa In the laughing of coyotes
There was a ship went into the sea over the body of my brother I am just a boy he was not much older than me the goddess is good and cruel wants her share of life, like us sparkling dust of birds far away whom we follow, the stars the blood red dust of life as my brother’s face disappeared beneath us beneath the ship which carried us and the goddess to where we do not know leaving the war of my grandfather the smell of smoke following us our keel, my brother, knocking down the doors of the sea the tall, and the wild waves coming, crashing under the keel of my brother’s name far from the sound of places we were leaving the roads we followed marching past my uncle’s crooked mountain forts while his men called out at us with our long hair on our shoulders first by my brother’s name who was this girl with him, leave her with us she is my brother, he said not glancing at me our songs we sang in the warm rain for the goddess blessed be her name her cloak the wild wood pigeons turning her crown the lone plover’s crying where now are you brother?
It’s not so easy to smash the compass. To rely on the winds the golden hum of Herb Kane clouds navigating the tips of these mountains. It’s not so easy to modify the compass. To apologize when your brothers are spreading the sashimi and churning the shoyu mustard. It’s not so easy to ignore the compass because it seems to have always been here in all its sextant glory pointing distracting you from Wākea’s blue teeth nibbling Papa’s chest. It’s not so easy but it’s possible to say “aloha, for now” to family and friends pouring bags of ice into clean coolers before the big show. To walk past uncle’s squid lū‘au bubbling green, to get in that car and drive, with nothing but a fistful of quarters for the library Xerox machine. It’s possible because when those books slide across the counter and you walk to an empty table the compass begins to shake and the needle is never the same again. With every turn of a Pacific page you realize pukas are being filled or new ones uncovered. And the art of listening brings with it memories, of the physics of his hips and hands when you first saw him cast that net slicing the horizon. The needle doesn’t like it when you flatten the cube to discover your kūpuna were always just around the corner from where you sit now. And the halftime show hasn’t even started, yet. The time it takes to get from the third million-dollar commercial to the fifth is equal to the time it takes to find the Kānaka Maoli name of the land that raised you buried under the pavements under the brand new two-lane fast food drive-thru. But what the compass really hates what it’s really afraid of is when you see the lo‘i in the same way that you see that empty Sunday afternoon library when you finally see the moana in your kūpuna’s eye. So now when you return home and the cooler is empty and the sashimi spiral is nearly gone unfurl those Xerox copies across the dining table consoling the cousins who lost money on the spread. And as the compass repairs itself as it always does it will feel the sting when it finds you tomorrow with your back being warmed by the morning sun.
For my grandmother I am water, only because you are the ocean. We are here, only because old leaves have been falling. A mulching of memories folding into buried hands. The cliffs we learn to edge. The tree trunk hollowed, humming. I am a tongue, only because you are the body planting stories with thumb. Soil crumbs cling to your knees. Small stacks of empty clay pots dreaming. I am an air plant suspended, only because you are the trunk I cling to. I am the milky fish eye, only because it’s your favorite. Even the sound you make when your lips kiss the opelu socket is a mo‘olelo. A slipper is lost in the yard. A haku lei is chilling in the icebox. I am a cup for feathers, only because you want to fill the hours. I am a turning wrist, only because you left the hose on. Heliconias are singing underwater. Beetles are floating across the yard.
your black inscriptions cite a kino lau, whose feathered wingspan, nighttime eyes & pun- ishing beak comprise mo‘okū‘auhau. w/my oiled hands, I greet her, w/hun- gering for mo‘opuna. “mai,” she says, reciting from your thigh. “mai, mai e ‘ai.” I have traveled from Maui a lizard, mes- merized by dreams of ‘ōhi‘a & ai- kāne, lizard filled w/smoke. arrived, I eat transforming in the forest of your grand- mother’s memory: from lizard: woman dreaming: licking tattoo: permission land: skin. traveling the night of your kino to sleep your thighs, ho‘āo, ho‘āo, and wake.
my old friend I wonder how far north you travel?  The road goes west starting two doors up from the Dog’s Bollocks ending at sunset.  So many sunsets Facebook and Instagram couldn’t contain them. So many yellow lines, white stripes there’s hardly a Valiant left to defy them.  Now the years overtake us. Visits as a boy to Uncle Bruce and Aunty Lindy in their K’Rd council flat led me to the greatness of  the great north whipping its dusty tail up to the skyline of  Reinga.  Yet why do I see your darkness as silence my friend? You’re a sleek black eel pumping blood all the way to Karekare, to Muriwai, to Bethells, to Piha, and our vehicles surf the surges back to K’Rd, back and forth, LOL, rocking up our shock absorbers and surfboards.  Keep bringing the waves Great North Road. Keep saving the whales! Keep the toheroas shining tucked away from spades in sandy bolt-holes. Smile in your cars and honk honk honk on the Great North Road.
ke pwoahn Pohnpei I told him as we kissedis that a good thing? he askedhell yea I wanted to say replaced it with another kiss inhaling the mix of last night’s sakau en Pohnpei  seir en wai, sweat rain intoxicating taking me home he left that smell behind it would barely linger by the time he reached his destination I was headed for it so the smell stayed bittersweet and blue on my skin, in my hair I carried it with me there where it grew mixed with mangoes, coughs, handshakes, pigs, babies, and old people I’m back it now reeks won’t wash away with the other smells get in my car it hits me pungent remnants of the mwaramwar he left behind.
For my wife, Nālani, and our daughter, Kaikainali‘i, on her first birthday nālani clips kaikainali‘i’s tiny fingernails while she sleeps — “the rape of oceania began with guam” — soldiers invade okinawa, hawai‘i, the philippines, and south korea — #yesallwomen how do [we] stop kaikainali‘i’s body from becoming target practice — bullets fragment and ricochet —
They look Like Big Strong hands Don’t they? But for some They are eerily reminiscent Of drunken stepfathers who didn’t listen Abusive lovers Who didn’t ask permission Of bullies Who never got to see the gold within ’Cause they were too busyfracking the aether out of Innocents These Bronze Hands Give people flashbacks of Brass Knuckles Tall, dark, and sinister Skip across their eyelids Wary of their trinkets These hands Look like they would snatch their children out of the night Fright In the eyes of a stranger Is hard to chisel away So I choose to dispel the myths and preconceived notions Not all giants from the ocean are created violent Some of us Dream of violin solos While fumbling with a lack of nimble Sometimes These Big, Strong hands Are too small to cradle all these broken dreams I hold them too close, I suppose The pitter-patter of shattered hopes on tattered heart-strings Are a practiced tune These fingers sing Sometimes They make me a target So many Napoléons Want their volley to knock the nose off the sphinx So I meandered to the metamorphosis of these metacarpals into mandible munchers and it made me malignant They look Like big ol’ meat mashers don’t they These boulders Used to reduce mountains into molehills But though they Once Were Warriors These old soldiers gather moss now They’ve seen enough violence for two lifetimes and have since retired They beg forgiveness For sinning against their brothers And taking up arms against them Nobody ever asks me what I see ’Cause to me They look like blame the big kid For defending himself against the antagonistic little shit with the chip on his shoulder They look like These big digits won’t fit fingertip thimble kisses They look like high-roller scapegoats And tactile regret I know What they look like But they are Grandpa’s fissures filled with pride in combing my hair They’re Grandma’s amethyst veins helping me cross cracked pavement They’re dad’s throwing discus My Uncle’s shooting hoops My brothers playing music Regardless of what they look like My hands are Large And Powerful From a long line of love With no time for the presumptionsOf Mice and Men My hands Were trained by Earth mothers Who let ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i roll thunder ’cross the valleys and echo from the Cliffs My granite palms Are diamonds in the rough Smooth enough to wipe away little streams from Northern Springs And put pressure on cuts To stop rivulets from leaking My hands Massage Caress Intertwine And Heal Move nimbly with knot work They tremble and quake They help me stand up straight My hands can stand the heat So that even while it’s still molten They will help shape The golden heart Within the next Mountain
The Seneca carry stories in satchels. They are made of  pounded corn and a grandmother’s throat. The right boy will approach the dampness of a forest with a sling, a modest twining wreath for the bodies of  birds. A liquid eye. When ruffed from leaves, the breath of  flight is dissolute. What else, the moment of  weightlessness before a great plunge? In a lost place, a stone will find the boy. Give me your birds, she will say, and I will tell you a story. A stone, too, admits hunger. The boy is willing. Loses all his beaks. What necklace will his grandmother make now. The sun has given the stone a mouth. With it, she sings of what has been lost. She sings and sings and sings. The boy listens, forgets, remembers. Becomes distracted. The necklace will be heavy, impossible to wear.
I’m so tired of pretending each gesture is meaningless, that the clattering of niu leaves and the guttural call of birds overhead say nothing. There are reasons why the lichen and moss kākau the niu’s bark, why this tree has worn an ahu of ua and lā since birth. Scars were carved into its trunk to record the mo‘olelo of its being by the passage of insects becoming one to move the earth, speck by speck. Try to tell them to let go of the niu rings marking each passing year, to abandon their only home and move on. I can’t pretend there is no memory held in the dried coconut hat, the star ornament, the midribs bent and dangling away from their roots, no thought behind the kāwelewele that continues to hold us steady. There was a time before they were bent under their need to make an honest living, when each frond was bound by its life to another like a long, erect fin skimming the surface of a sea of grass and sand. Eventually, it knew it would rise higher, its flower would emerge gold, then darken in the sun, that its fruit would fall, only to ripen before its brown fronds bent naturally under the weight of such memory, back toward the trunk to drop to the sand, back to its beginnings, again. Let this be enough to feed us, to remember: ka wailewa i loko, that our own bodies are buoyant when they bend and fall, and that the ocean shall carry us and weave us back into the sand’s fabric, that the mo‘opuna taste our sweet.
Pepper blacks the pan so never shake it near me. Wait for the flagrant animation in my bedroom, in my bed base. In mountaineering situations sleep swaddled, wake ecstatic my frantic menus in your mind. I taste of them all. Refuse to refuse me. Waste your time on my errands. Squeeze your lime on my lemons. Turn up wearing the whole bird not just the feathers.
Coconut Milk, 2015
Fake Hula for Alien Tiki, 2014
Dancing Queen, 2012
Manatu, 2013
The guardian angel sits in the tree above the black lip of street the man walks down. He calls the man Cargo. The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man, and the street he walks is a boat, the hull like a coal crater. Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box. The angels call these overlays dreams, and believe they crop up because angels can’t sleep but want to —  space falls apart when you have unlimited time.    •  The cargo is rattling in the boat. Maybe it’s just the waves, maybe it’s rats. What’s the difference? Either way: it’s the box. The angel sends the man a happy vision from his past — the time he fed birthday cake to his goldfish after an unsuccessful party. The angel thinks he’s applying lemon oil to the creaky, wounded wood of the box. He knows it’s palliative, but it’s beautiful.   •  The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man and he starts to ponder death as he often does these days: All of death is right here — the gods, the dark, a moon. Where was I expecting death to take me if everywhere it is is on earth? At life’s close, you’re like the child whose parents step out for a drive —  everyone else out on a trip, but the child remains in the familiar bed, feeling old lumps like new in the mattress — the lights off —  not sleeping, for who can sleep with the promise of a world beyond the door?   •  That night the child dreams he’s inside the box. It’s burning hot, the heat coming from bugs and worms raping and devouring one another. He starts the hard work of the imagination, learning to minister to the new dream. Perhaps all that’s needed is a little rain —  for everyone to drink and have a bath. Outside: a car humming, somewhere, his mother’s singing.
After the cocoon I was in a human body instead of a butterfly’s. All along my back there was great pain — I groped to my feet where I felt wings behind me, trying to tilt me back. They succeeded in doing so after a day of exertion. I called that time, overwhelmed with the ghosts of my wings, sleep. My thoughts remained those of a caterpillar —  I took pleasure in climbing trees. I snuck food into all my pains. My mouth produced language which I attempted to spin over myself and rip through happier and healthier. I’d do this every few minutes. I’d think to myselfWhat made me such a failure? It’s all a little touchingly pathetic. To live like this, a grown creature telling ghost stories, staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours. And even over dinner or in bed —  still hearing the stories, seeing the pictures —  an undertow sucking me back into myself. I’m told to set myself goals. But my mind doesn’t work that way. I, instead, have wishes for myself. Wishes aren’t afraid to take on their own color and life —  like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet puffs out his cheeks and strips them bloody.
the first trees were felled and sailed in, wrecked, then slept an age in the northern sun, blackening to iron were found by horsemen leading their horses and raised as cloud’s axles, rafters of night, a god’s gates  were passed through, seen from miles off, rolled the sun and moon along their lintels, rooted, put out leaves for a second time creaked, tasted the rain, held the wind to their hearts while the horsemen streamed like their horses’ manes into the dark, their fires black smudge in the subsoil, their bridles of gold underground  lived long, grew great  were a second time felled, dressed were sharpened to stakes and raised as a fort by farmers who’d followed their ploughs to the treeline for fuel to bake the pots their ashes were buried in with a scattering of grain like stars each small clay heaven still hangs in the earth  were overgrown, steered clear of  called dragon’s ribs  devil’s cot were nested among, rotted down beside  harbored foxglove, eggshell owl pellet, primrose, honeycomb  were glazed, split  put out buds of malachite, blossoms of salt, grew again, put out small translucent fruits named by the women who prized them teardrops, ice apples, clarities  were offered bread, dolls of woven grass, plaits of hair, coins with the obverse ground smooth, beads of  turquoise  twisted, straightened, filled with rooks, held again the wind to their hearts, creaked, scraped off the sunlight’s scales with their leaves, were a grove, grew manes of lichen, were murmured under, gave counsel on still nights of open doorways the dead came through on horseback or shouldering flails or bearing chimes of ice apples gave shelter  were felled for it, their roots ripped up by a legion’s engineers and left like brainstems rucked on the earth  were timber but the pit saws snarled in their rings of iron  broke teeth on the flints that welted their sapwood  were good for nothing, stacked, fired, marched away from, sucked up the flames, hissed, smoked, glowed blood- black, were tempered, twice- forged bided on site as battle-stain, in story as Head Wood  lay half-buried, grown over, still hot  were stumbled upon by navigators, hit with hammers and rang until they were made lock gates to slam shut on the slow wet  grew green, slime- faced, knew runoff, weird particulates, held fast against drizzle’s tonnage, the nudge and bonk of a bloater were left stinking when the water died  stood strange in currents of deep grass, open wide  flexed, hungered once more for the light, bulged, branched, rived out of their lacquer, unfurled leaves of oilskin, shook down clots of blossom lived long, grew great  weren’t felled but walled in, roofed over, giving span to a farmhouse, hanging a hall from their outstretch, bracing floor after floor on their inosculating joists, which sang to a barefoot tread and were called home of shadows heart of the wind  Lamanby
For Francisco X. Alarcón, RIP It considers those men that ambled & Flushed their swords & cut off the neck Of the blue horses & scraped off death Dust from the carcass — rape of women Tresses in boilers — the tin-colored animals On the viridian grasses in particular the Howler Monkey let the word shoot up To the spheres — later we charged our Blood with these accounts we hid the arms Unforgiving texts & designs sewn into Our tiny alabaster lockets. We visited The last ridge where Victor Jara Denounced the paramilitary — from La Obrera in the heights of  Tijuana we Sketched the reddish moon & scratched Poems those things that could carry The letters we hauled on our backs. We were separated from something we Could not describe yet we were in The totality in the long winding turquoise That broke us & put us back together Again. What was that totality? It could Not be written — Green moon, green blood —  We wrote. We marched to the ends of Lacanjá Chansayab & the heights Of El Colorín Central México. We were too Late — the waters in which people bathed Were cloudy & malignant — bellies Bloated children leaned on the twig House women stood up some sat cross- Legged under the fire rays of noon —  We knew they knew the rubble land Was not theirs or ours it was stuffed into The cigarette packs of the Ladino Hacendados who kicked up their short Boots in the City of Bones below. With our faces in new faces we rolled Back to LA. Do you change it? Do you Leave it the same? Words — what are they? A new cognition was required — then With the ecstasy of the unleashed Other things pulled us apart. Other things Reassembled us. Now we are here.
I bring you a hummingbird’s nest, woven from seed-down, thistle head, bound with lichen and spidersilk, shaped by a mother who presses her breast against the cup, uses her rump, chin, the curve of her wing, who stomps her claws on the base to check it’s windproof under this leaf porch. The male gone, she works alone, hurrying back and forth thirty times an hour, before the eggs come. She lays them in a home small as a nutshell, the rim turned in, the sides pliant so they’ll stretch as the chicks grow. Little mother, I’ve read your file filled with letters to the mairie, begging for a place where we could live together. I know now how hard you fought the powers, like a jeweled dart stabbing at their door, before you fell prey to the jungle mantis. Instead of flowers, I leave you this nest on your grave, in case you make it from your migration — only a wisp of feathers, no flesh left on your bones.
After Don McKay I crawl back he unpacks his tools oils the wooden handles rinses the metal fragrant his thighs fragrant his sneer koi & eternity inked on his skin an ecstatic blue a bewildered green some wounds are ovals some wounds are opals the ears of a white wolf pivot toward the moon I flee now & then alone in the desert for months a nomad in a kimono of pressed-together dust beautiful his throat his words even more beautiful “it’s my turn to ask for a bit more from you” he likes it when I bleed strangers once gently he hammers gold into a sentence gently the sentence enters me
All zodiac all  radar your voice I carried it across the Atlantic to Barcelona I photographed cathedrals cacti mosaic salamanders I even photo- graphed my lust always your voice skimming a woman’s skin mattress springs so noisy so birdlike you filled her room with cages camera bright in my pocket map unfolding in my mind I explored a park leaves notched & enormous graffitied boulders then three men   tall & clean closed in they broke open my body with their fists insufferable your red wool cap insufferable the way you walked away from me come back please the buttons on your jacket are finches I wanted to yell as you vanished into a hotel to drink with your friends there was nothing more you could do after my attackers left before I got up I touched my face almost tenderly
He never saw a violin. But he saw a lifetime of violence. This is not to presume That if he had simply seen A violin he would have seen Less violence. Or that living among Violins, as though they were Boulangeries or toppling stacks Of other glazed goods like young adult Fiction, would have made the violence Less crack and more cocaine, Less of course and more why god oh why. More of one thing Doesn’t rhyme with one thing. A swill of stars doesn’t rhyme With star. A posse of poets doesn’t rhyme With poet. We are all in prison. This is the brutal lesson of the 21st century, Swilled like a sour stone Through the vein of the beast Who watches you while you eat; Our eternal host, the chummed fiddler, The better tomorrow, MMXVI.
Genus II. Lichen. On a scale of Lustrous to Sockeye, Fishscale to Fire-Dot. Not Ichthyosis: Lichen. Fruiting bodies in a calcareous spot. Goldspeck. Blushing. O the diffuse eruption of dazzling papulæ! Usher the Wild Lichen. Usher spring and the furfuraceous scurf recurs. The Brain-Scaled (the hairline cracked). The Blue-Blistered, the Earth-Wrinkled. Neither Strophulus nor stoppable. Like wildfire rash the crustose rush of successive crops. Tundra Sulphur, circumpolar, the snowy excoriations. So squats the Dog Lichen, the Freckle Pelt. Cobblestoned, chronic, the not contagious.
... and we remarked on how piranhas, in uncounted numbers, are capable of consuming an entire ampersand in such-and-such a time frame. The sun was up, and below, and was somewhere overhead. And I thought....     ... and we shared thick and hearty laughs, and continued into the very dense jungle. And thick. Preceding us on the trailsides were ruins overgrown, boots stuck in mud, and heads of sunken ampersands. Which made sense to us, for....     ... and the rainy seasons came, and went, and came. And day, and further day. And February was unusually warm, and this, in a zone renowned for unusually warm Februaries. We cooled our hands on ampersands, which warmed again when....     ... and you took my hand, and clasped it, tighter than I could stand it, tighter than mud clasping ampersands still. And so I fell, and you held me as I, unstanding, looked up at lianas in trees —  the monkey skyways that    ....     ... and the language we used with each other became thicker. We looked together at some ludicrous, large leaf — larger than us both, and thicker even than several large ampersands, together. We used thick language to describe it, then....     ... and we grew ravenous and set camp. And established a village. Built huts with cots, and plots of land for farms. We grew ampersands there and ate them, and when through with their husks, threw them into our yards, where....     ... and you took me, deeper into jungle, with the wild dogs and boars, and cackling beasts, and beasts that swung in silence. Dangling from the tufts, saliva strands from ampersands obscured us in the roughs. We toweled and traveled and tired and....     ... and the birds became aware of our presence, though we desired to blend in. We made tangible feathers from intangible thoughts, stuck beaks to our mouths using ampersand glue. We sat in our colors, without motion for days, until....     ... and you communed with insensible arrangements: changeable organizations; shapeless distractions; puffs of dimension; ampersands; the dead. I pulled you close and kissed you, but all I could taste was vortex, and sweet guava, and the distances to....     ... and we grew thicker together, for I too could perceive, in the dry expanses, forms of invisible logos made thick — the un-wet language of communicable waves. We washed ourselves in it, but our feet, touching ampersands, touched not the....     ... and you dipped your foot, from the riverbank into the river, where the piranhas began eating. And I sat, looking at my hands. Sat, for there was nothing I could say. On the riverbank, alone. There, with whatever remained. &....
As Walter settled in to finish his coffee, he was struck by a phantom, peripheral visage, white as pins in flight, or bunny white, in haze — a visit from “The Agent,” in the nominal parlance of chemical memory, calling from a distant muddied element. Or was it merely the milk he’d spilled in a fatuous fit, hooking out to the Brooklyn back of his cup? All he could abide, he put his face down in the muck, and made off for The Dude’s abode. “These are purple times,” he thought, “when pseudo-pious cliques strike polyester poses while jockeying for pockets. And mocking fatuous Donny? That sweet prince, that palsied, hiccuping flake of bunny fluff?” Not for this aggression would he stand — not for that element. It required satisfaction, and of superior sort to parlance. Oh, but he would have his ear! Though for this spar: lance and blade, tooth and trigger — less to mind, and more, would he abide, in body to this immodest plum-clad receptacle. He popped a Velemint, and rang His Dudeness’s door. “Bolted,” Duder’s hand had struck in ink, “Out of cream. Gone to market. 8pm practice.” His buddy was benumbed: “Dash this dairy! You’ve become fat to us with cordials of coffee and curds. Oh, uncareful beverage! Such fatuous froth and foam will be your undoing!” Yet not undone, but in parlay with his special lady, laid up in zesty enterprise, coital as bunnies, making maudlin moan. The story is ludicrous. Though if one abides that one must “feed one’s monkey,” in manner most gutter-struck, and not with precious prandials, “Brie pour lui. Et pour elle, 
emmental,” one can dig El Duderino’s doings. All others are cowards — elements without sentiment, without Johnsons or ethos, foreign and fatuous, with lingonberries on leashes, and marmot marmalades struck onto pancakes. Neither good men nor thorough, poor in parlance and in practice, unable to fix cable or walk on water — though may abide it when seated, in slumber, in summer, with clouds above, as Bunny puffs on polish. The poor woman, helpless as a frail fawn beneath a nude sun. A trophy wife, atrophied, fallen in with the wrong element: known pornographers; sycophants; Aimee Mann. Difficult to abide, and not exactly lightweights, is she herself to blame for her fatuous caprices? Her husband’s lost legs? The Dude’s stained parlor rug — his only tether, the life and memory of it, dimmed when stricken? Oh, the little for which we are compensated. About the size of our abidance, and theirs: some Credence tapes; a can of ashes, released to the 
elements; specklike Brandt, crisp and shivering. A yet-to-be-dismantled toe, Bunny’s.
All this tall grass has ruined my gold acrylic nails & I know something’s dead just beyond my window. I grew up with rats running my floorboards & know the smell straining from a body once caught in a trap. In the city what little I have of an ass is always out, a simple wind blow from Marilyn Monroe-ing the street. Here, in all this nature, there is nobody but me & my 5 friends for a week & I promised myself I’d be naked but the first day I found a tick clinging to my arm hair for dear life & decided no way I’m exposing my pussy to the elements. My love for nature is like my love for most things: fickle & theoretical. Too many bugs & I want a divorce. Last week, before I was here my uncle drove me from our city to the suburbs & sang “Project Chick” in the car. When we parked he asked me to take off my shoes & there we walked, silent, barefoot circling the lake, trying to not step in goose shit. He walked in front & I trailed behind both our hands clasped behind our backs. When you were my daughter,  those were the happiest days of my life.  I wish you would come home.
To Adam Z You asked me last summer: “What is a doily?” Sometimes, at lunch, I walk on the beach. Today I was coatless. A storm cloud threatened, Dark as a spaceship. Should it pour, A sister ship down in the water Would throw up grappling nets to the surface, Rain rise to soak me. Behind a sandbank, Waves touched the shore, no more than a shimmer. Less rare than its cousin, the antimacassar, A doily’s placed between sweet thing and china. Both survive where vicars arrive For tea, are given thin cup and saucer Instead of a mug. If your cake’s so rich That it’s leaking syrup, you’ll need a doily. Held up, its paper’s the filigree Of snowflake, or fingers looked through in fear. The shower holds off. My shoe’s a doily. Without it, where would I be on these shells That crunch underfoot, like contact lenses, As I gingerly walk, on my mermaid way Back to my husband in his human dwelling? Someone is pulling a blue toy trawler Along the horizon to port, so smoothly It looks realistic. Sea’s partly doily. Surfers ride its lace to their downfall, After all, we’re nothing but froth. Like a carpet salesman, the indolent tide Flops a wave over, showing samples: “Madam, This one is durable, has a fringe.” Under Its breath the sea sighs, “Has it come To this? Must everything always end in ... doily?” It must. Broad afternoon. The rain-cloud barges Have passed and here’s a cumulonimbus parade Of imperial busts, the Roman rulers In historical order which, I think, would please you. Their vapor curls and noble foreheads Are lit up in lilac because they’re invading The west. Next come the philosophers and, last of all, The poets. Pulleys draw them delicately on. Here comes Lucretius, then Ovid, then Horace In lines, saying relentlessly, “Doily,” “Doily,” Till stars take over and do the same.
A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. — Henry David Thoreau i  I didn’t choose the word —  it came pouring out of my throat like the water inside a drowned man. I didn’t even push on my stomach. I just lay there, dead (like he told me) & “I” came out. (I’m sorry, Father. “I” wasn’t my fault.)   ii  (How did “I” feel?) Felt almost alive when I’d get in, like the Trojan horse. I’d sit on the bench (I didn’t look out of the eyeholes so I wouldn’t see the carnage).   iii  (Is “I” speaking another language?) I said, “I” is dangerous. But at the time I couldn’t tell which one of us was speaking.   iv  (Why “I”?) “I” was the closest I could get to the one I loved (who I believe was smothered in her playpen). Perhaps she gave birth to “I” before she died.   v  I deny “I,” & the closer I get, the more “I” keeps receding.   vi  I found “I” in the bulrushes raised by a dirtiness beyond imagination. I loved “I” like a stinky bed. While I hid in a sentence with a bunch of other words.   vii  (What is “I”?) A transmission through space? A dismemberment of the spirit? More like opening the chest & throwing the heart out with the gizzards.   viii  (Translation) Years later “I” came back wanting to be known. Like the unspeakable name of God, I tried my 2 letters, leaving the “O” for breath, like in the Bible, missing.   ix  I am not the “I” in my poems. “I” is the net I try to pull me in with.   x  I try to talk with “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust me. “I” says I am slippery by nature.   xi  I made “I” do what I wasn’t supposed to do, what I didn’t want to do —  defend me, stand as an example, stand in for what I was hiding. I treated “I” as if “I” wasn’t human.   xii  They say that what I write belongs to me, that it is my true experience. They think it validates my endurance. But why pretend? “I” is a kind of terminal survival.   xiii  I didn’t promise “I” anything & in that way “I” is the one I was most true to.
I’m queer for nouns or verbs that end in -ickle, For bouncy trampolines, for trust and bluff. We’re told by those downtown that La Morbid’s dull Renouncing didn’t rustle up enough Bling to dazzle more than a few of them. Turn on a dime, a channel. Those we flip Ring truer than the frilly stratagem Fern bars used to unfurl, and we know zip About karate or brass knucks. To battle The meltdown blues, lay out your Cups and Swords. Don’t doubt the Duke will hop down from the saddle, His belt slung low. Check out the storyboards: Next year he trades his roan for a motorcycle.
In a room more chicken coop than room, I rent a fan that feels on my face like sound. Low traffic from San Fernando, named for a king who became a city, a valley, a saint. We are meant to repeat his name. Instead I say prickly pear, a cactus which spreads its many-paddled hands into the space around itself. No pears. I call Mom to ask what the latest austerity measures mean. Some ants on the wall make their way from one unseeable point to another; the banks have closed. I tell her to barter; barter what, she says. An acquaintance posts “Tourism: The Best Way to Be an Ally to Greece” as if in each tourist’s pleasure bloomed a charity. Mules clabber down the stone paths loaded with grapes to make next year’s wine, if the tourists come back next year, and we hope they will. I say we, but I’m closer to they. Living temporarily in a neighborhood named for the happy, who were who exactly? I grow a little stiff with, a little lean with, a little faint with, a little worn with seeming. I must need to conquer my mind. The roses dead because of drought because whoever lives here cares enough to let their roses die. I must need to conquer the notion anything needs conquering. Something in me can’t tell what belongs. The ants for whom anything is a street. What sounded like a gate opening was eucalyptus branches dragging themselves along the tin roof. A yellow butterfly that has no interest in me. I have no interest in kings.
I saw then the white-eyed man leaning in to see if I was ready yet to go where he has been waiting to take me. I saw then the gnawing sounds my faith has been making and I saw too that the shape it sings in is the color of cast-iron mountains I drove so long to find I forgot I had been looking for them, for the you I once knew and the you that was born waiting for me to find you. I have been twisting and turning across these lifetimes where forgetting me is what you do so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw that I would drown in a creek carved out of a field our incarnations forged the first path through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll with me there again for the first time, to pause and sprawl in the grass while I read to you the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting to hear. I read until you finally slept and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest. You’re always driving so far from me towards the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there, awake, keeping watch while you snored. I waited, as I always seem to, for you to wake up and come back to me.
Chimerical, the rhinoceros egret, its keratin dehorned in South Africa and container-shipped to Vietnam or China where it’s ground by aphrodisiasts and snorted by affluent boneheads, metamorphs into the hippopotamus egret, the elephant, Cape buffalo, zebra, giraffe, the ostrich, and the camel egret, the deep-domed tortoise, and in the Americas the cow heron or cattle egret. Ranging like wildfire over the last century, a migration prodded by the transmutation of forests into ranches, the cattle egret writhes and champs and tilts and plods and darts in cursive at grasshoppers. And where its livestock gets concentrated, decapitated, tenderized, charred, whatever, the Bubulcus ibis or cattleman wader, capitalizing on a field without cattle, reinvents itself as the tractor egret though the unattached bird is emblem enough of the other end of extinction, ignition, when not just its shaggy breeding crest and breast plumage go up in flame but its legs, beak, lores, and irises catch color.
The maggot dreams of the ear and the wound, that welcome dark between gauze and knee, cheek and skull, and any open moment in the body that will have it. The child- fly wants a mouth to grow into, a burn to salve, a heart to feed on. It calls for sugar and Job and marrow. The maggot loves St. Lazarus, though he walked away, loves the warm cutbanks of the chest. When the maggot asks for wings, we will answer with painted hands, eyes beneath coins, a promise of graves.
Anyone who begins a sentence with, “In all honesty ... ” is about to tell a lie. Anyone who says, “This is how I feel” had better love form more than disclosure. Same for anyone who thinks he thinks well because he had a thought. If  you say, “You’re ugly” to an ugly person — no credit for honesty, which must always be a discovery, an act that qualifies as an achievement. If  you persist you’re just a cruel bastard, a pig without a mirror, somebody who hasn’t examined himself enough. A hesitation hints at an attempt to be honest, suggests a difficulty is present. A good sentence needs a clause or two, interruptions, set off  by commas, evidence of a slowing down, a rethinking. Before I asked my wife to marry me, I told her I’d never be fully honest. No one, she said, had ever said that to her. I was trying to be radically honest, I said, but in fact had another motive. A claim without a “but” in it is, at best, only half  true. In all honesty, I was asking in advance to be forgiven.
On the way home, Klansmen handed out pamphlets on the corner. At the convenience store, taxidermied alligator heads framed red red lips, black black skin, white wild white wide eyes, and teeth grinning (gritting). Mammy, Sambo, savages and jockeys shaped cookie jars, figurines, gravy boats, piggy banks, and salt and pepper shakers. I hold evidence in the shape of entrails, two scales stuck to the side of the sink. Bodies decapitated and soaked in milk and butter. Breaded in crumbs. Tender, the results of freeing the little ones. Mount that big one there. I have lived with the reduction of noise and the number of warnings. I have lived under July’s blankets and February’s ill-fitting sleeves. I have lived with the proof of the Susquehanna’s existence, in the shadow of the shadow of the outline of a bubble’s refracted edge.
At a certain point I stopped and asked what poems I could write, which were different from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they were impossible. What I could do was different from what I wanted. To see this was the beginning of work that could be work, not simply pursuit after pursuit that was bound to fail, yearning for qualities that were not mine and could not be mine. Aiming for a muscular logic that could be followed by a reader’s mind like an old stone wall running along a landscape, I got nothing so solid or continuous. The authority I wanted dissolved always into restlessness, into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate seemed like things that had come to settle inside a glove compartment. I had no faith in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith in the particular. There was the actual stone wall, its mongrel irregular blocks harmonized into use, rich and ordinary as a soul. There was the flea that landed on my forearm one night as I sat reading. The black speck of it, then the outsize sting. The flea that is an insect, has no wings, can jump vertically seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches. The flea that looks, through the magnifier, like the villain spaceship from a science-fiction movie, that can live for years in good conditions, and lives by drinking the blood of animals and birds, in a practice that is called, by science, hematophagy.
Miles of them grow in my carry-on and travel with me across continents but the customs officers are suspicious they eye my old suitcase and ask me to open it Pickles? they ask sniffing deeply prodding a packet or two say Sure ma’am you’ve got no jeera or chilies? (now they’ve learned the Hindi word for cumin so the new trick is to joke with us) And one time  I saw three burly officers question an elderly couple disheveled as I was from 20-plus hours of travel from Kolkata and as disoriented (and yes as usual all the usual “foreign” suspects are sent along to “Agriculture”) and they poked around in their overstuffed bags (where some rice fields appeared but they couldn’t see them of course) and  one officer said Duck? Bombay Duck? It’s a fish?? Dried fish your son wanted? Sorry no fish allowed or birds
They weighed the human soul — twenty-one grams — a tremor on the air becoming trance, becoming nimbus. No. It is a deadweight, a plummet, drawing down to its harbor beside the heart. It is Breath and Word, they said. No. It is pig-iron and salt. The dying feel its slow lift as riddance, a bar of darkness hoisting against the light. Something shifted under his skin, it puckered, as might a worm going slither-and-tuck close to the nape of his neck, then up past the cheekbone and onto the sill of his eye to gorge on the image trapped there, the last of her, the last lost thing before the sky grew dark and all the windows closed. The dead are given permission to walk among us. They smile dead smiles, they have no need for speech. The familiar goes for nothing. Each evening they hold up to our windows their silent, smiling children. Salt flats of dream of memory of dream ... limitless horizons and out on the utmost rim (can you see?) a house white-on-white abstract except for the room-within-a-room which can’t be seen but can be known, white being one thing in sunlight another under moonlight, not oblivion, not revival, and the soul’s song across that windless landscape, unheard; by night the heart-stopped silence, by day the rising glare. Graves under bramble and a wet light through the trees. A quietness something like stealth or sudden absence; it seemed to gather and disperse. Rat-run, ground for stray dogs, a place where lovers come to be swallowed whole by half-light. You could lie down here on thorn, on stone, and find your match. Wind-driven salt in the crevice of the rock is how memory works: image, invention, regret. It maddens with its ersatz colors, unknowable language, sudden reversals, shoreline, skyline, cityscape, landscape ... There are those who wake with the whole thing fixed at the forefront of their minds: a stage-set, people held in a frozen moment who will break to action soon, one fearful, one laughing, one clawing at her eyes. He was wearing a dead man’s coat: knee-length, snug, the lining rich shot silk in midnight blue. “As I thought,” she said, “a perfect fit. Of course, you look nothing like him, nor do you have that rangy, loose-limbed stride or straightness of back.” One side-pocket was sewn up, in the other, a letter. He threw it away as he left. Music at every turn, music by accident, a voice between the phrases, between the notes, calling, calling, and this not song but touchstone, blind bargain, last chance. Dust-devil, derecho, twister, cyclone, clean sweep, she is locked-off in this and the place is dark the way a pebble is dark at its center ... then her prophecy-in-song, eyes wide open in sleep, his hand across her mouth. What they did to him was unwatchable; what they did lay far beyond belief — daytime terrors, waking dreamtime, the lock-up, breeze-block walls, chain-drag, the Black & Decker kicking in: winged creatures, they sing as they work. Dust and shadow, come back to that, come back with a heavy heart. Is there nothing more: is that what you heard yourself say? Children in the garden, the headlong rush, the wolf pack between trees and snowfall under moonlight: the story you told is the story you were told: snow and a frost-moon, as clear, as pitiless. He untangled the thing that had snagged in her hair, his hand through a spectrum, spectral, blurring, a rail of fingers, to lift the thing in her hair. It would rain that day: cloud low to the hills, morning as nightfall, her window open to that. Slow sacrament of cheese and olive oil and bread, the creep of sundown-sunlight on the wall. “How safe do you feel at times like this?” Laughing, he bared his teeth. A thing flew in at the open window, bird or bat. “It’s like looking at clear water through clouded glass.” They were far off from anywhere. A salted seam, just fool’s gold, leavings of a dream wherein you give a true report of who you were, of what you could become. In rainfall you’re invisible, in sunlight the same, that’s all the dream gives up: a sense of place and sudden banishment.
For Michael Coyle and Donna Frieze 1  You said anyone could walk in with a pack of explosives as we passed through the crowds of tourists and school kids —  under the glass-grid ceiling lit with sun. I was saying: She’s our earth, our body, our sex, as we drifted down the halls of statues and colonnades and hunks of facades of Greek temples until we found room 22, “The Hellenistic World,” where a bronze face in a glass box on the wall stared back at us.Head from a bronze cult statue of Anahita, a local goddess in the guise of Aphrodite (
“Now, tell me one difference,” my sister says, “between Old English and New English.” Well, Old English has a word for our kind of people: ofermod, literally “overmind,” or “overheart,” or “overspirit,” often translated “overproud.” When the warrior Byrhtnoth, overfool, invited the Vikings across the ford at Maldon to fight his smaller troop at closer range, his overpride proved deadlier than the gold-hilted and file-hard swords the poet gleefully describes —  and aren’t we like that, high-strung and ofermod as our daddy and granddaddies and everybody else in our stiff-necked mountain town, always with something stupid to prove, doing 80 all the way to the head of the holler, weaving through the double lines; splinting a door-slammed finger with popsicle sticks and electrical tape; not filling out the forms for food stamps though we know we qualify. Sister, I’ve seen you cuss rivals, teachers, doctors, bill collectors, lawyers, cousins, strangers at the red light or the Walmart; you start it, you finish it, you everything-in-between-it, whether it’s with your fists, or a two-by-four, or a car door, and it doesn’t matter that your foe’s stronger, taller, better armed. I don’t tell a soul when I’m down to flour and tuna and a half-bag of beans, so you’ve not seen me do without just to do without, just for spite at them who told us, “It’s a sin to be beholden.” If you’re Byrhtnoth lying gutted on the ground, speechifying at the troops he’s doomed, then I’m the idiot campaigner fighting beside his hacked-up lord instead of turning tail, insisting, “Mind must be the harder, heart the keener, spirit the greater, as our strength lessens.” Now, don’t that sound familiar? We’ve bought it all our lives as it’s been sold by drunkards, bruisers, goaders, soldiers, braggers with a single code: you might be undermined, girl, but don’t you never be undermod.

For Marilyn who died in January april 1  found on our driveway  like a feather dropped by a crow    8 of spades, a playing card /    we played Crazy Eights, slapping cards or holding them as if they were birds that might fly out of our hands  decades ago, in our childhood  like the translucent, whirling image I imagine, prismatic and phosphorescent —  a murmuration of starlings swooping and iridescent  but it dissolved onto a gray wall, undecorated  / glimpses of us wearing our velvet Sunday best dresses, yours usually crimson, mine blue    we never had nice shoes.  Now you have returned to water  thanks to the Neptune Society spreading your ashes over the Pacific      april 2   Ceylon tea — that amber cup  from Sri Lanka, popularly known here, before  Americans became tea drinkers, as  Orange Pekoe;  our mother hated  so many things —   tea was  rattlesnake venom to  her  I embraced it  ///  What did you drink, Marilyn? I saw you only with a Coke or a glass of wine in your hand? Our mother whom you felt damaged you / your life spirals, the twisting iridescent birds  fly at me now scintillating, spinning  I blink (Our mother drank many cups of coffee with cream a day.) Our sad mother  I blink  and tell it to go back to our childhood  of muddy little shoes from walking in  the spider-filled orange groves. There, the damaging must have Begun  / she  loving me so much  more  than you. I wish there had been more stories like the one about the origin of her disliking tea  at 17, she went to celebrate being made teacher  of the one-room school she had attended and  graduated from at her retiring teacher’s  home, she was served for the first time — tea, she  being from a German coffee-drinking family.  Our mother hated it but politely choked it down.  Would never again touch a drop of the  poisonous beverage. From that story, we learned that our mother ritualized hating something — expected us to admire her for it.  I took  that negative pattern  and spun it until I could have cloth enough for an eloquent garment. Perhaps the lesson simply made you feel yourself helpless ragged torn I never saw you that way, Marilyn, though perhaps incomplete. I pour a cup of Assam. Take a sip,  let it wash through my mouth,  down my age-damaged throat, think of you sitting with me in your Southern California  backyard one May morning next to the camellia bush. I, as always with a cup of tea in my hand. You, smoking. I left all my family — you were part of it —  left California and reinvented myself, even mythologized myself as a tan “California Girl.” You did not become an artist or a poet. I suppose that’s why you felt damaged. If only you knew how much imagination and sacrifice it took for me to get away.  So many small things  can save us  from the damage you talked of. For me, drinking that first cup of Orange Pekoe and making tea my drink risking rattlesnake poison with every steaming cup, a tiny emblem of a rebellion I still try to practice. You left us so quickly, Marilyn, and without any warning this January, your house full of cancelled aspirations — glass bowls, and cylinders, and huge globes filled with sea scallop shells  you combed the California seashores to   find, collecting these empty shells, washed free of their biological life. Out of the ocean: we two different daughters of a sailor.   april 3  The spinning the scissors the measuring and thus our lives are given out from the heavens, with unfair allotments and varied, unaccountable fates, born when we are, and to whom you would have prevailed in an age where women had to spin, weave the material, cut it into britches and dresses, undergarments and sheets, sew and keep clean, warm, and comfortable a household full or a castle full / men children, hired hands, maidservants — you would have done it so well. But you would have died young in such a world —  diabetes, asthma, chronic bronchial infections even in the 21st century where you lived to be 76 a world where all your skills were plied as  substitute for being an artist.  When I asked you a year ago, not knowing that you would die this January, what you would most like to have, if money were not the object   — since clearly all your measuring, cutting, and sewing  had been for economical reasons,  not art —  you thought for a bit, raising your chin. “A swimming pool in my backyard. One I could step into every morning, swim, float — maybe in the afternoon I’d go for a dip. Many evenings, I think,” she said to me. Longing for some ocean?  In our portrait, if someone paints it, she will be  sitting in a scallop shell, her many jars of seashells behind her head. I will be invisible, except for the spinning  murmuration of birds that radiates  past me.  They read at her funeral, a poem from her journal about lying on the beach, the sand embracing her. How much she loved it / felt safe, felt released. Oh, Marilyn, all those seashells emptied of their living fleshy occupants. (the ugly parts that die and rot) now glorious empty rooms  in which to live an imaginary life,  to decorate, to create beauty,   spaces to live  a different life. What is left but your desires, locked in glass, and an image of you walking your beloved beaches, hands  full of seashells, your footprints measured, then quickly filled  with the tidal flow.   april 4  my spinning,   a whirlpool of faceted moving lights  Everything is Numbers! down into a vortical glare that replaces  my own mind’s desire   Everything is Numbers! Everything is Numbers! floating down  like the crow’s  onyx feather the 8  of spades  random card appearing  last week  over gravel 8 legs on a spider,  the arachnid so many people seem to  fear, yet I lose track of time, stare into the wall  or any space to replace real images with my imaginary  ones, some random spider, who spins my fate Crazy Eights, the child card game Marilyn and I played pieces of eight, the dollar of  pirate Spain — our childhood in Orange County 8, a vertical infinity sign  everything is numbers / your  fire opal that Daddy brought to you from India, and our mother paid a jeweler to set it into a ring. You wore the ring more than sixty years. I suppose it was on your finger at death spinning, spinning to scintillate and iridesce  We never had nice shoes.   april 5  Easter Sunday. You and I always dyed Easter eggs together, our mother busy at her forty-hour-a-week bookkeeper’s job. I  was intrigued with the colors, but they never turned out so bright when coloring the eggs. You, the artist, were interested in the designs to transfer onto the eggs, cartoons, bunnies, chicks. We kept our eggs separated from each other, put them in separate bowls, neither caring for the other’s creation. Still we felt connected, even joyful, on those few holiday projects. Not enough to make us friends. My unwillingness to be like our classmates embarrassed you. You chose invisibility in school, rather than being known as “Diane’s Sister.”  That unwillingness to be like others  was what made me a poet. So many little things, but that early decision of yours, not to understand why I wanted to be weird, is what made you make so  many other small choices, preventing you  from becoming an artist. “Look away,” our mother said to us, when there were ugly things confronting us.  I could not do that. You blame our mother, yet it was you who decided to look away, even though it meant not seeing the whole world, even if meant you didn’t become an artist. Poverty, of course, was the reason we never had nice shoes.   april 6  All numbers have disappeared  instead  there are mushrooms  fungi that has always seemed  more artful than tasty  Sipping a cup of tea / soothes me  as the mushrooms in a veloute sauce  never could.  I feel stymied / a rider  with no horse. I want only to watch  the stories unfold / the secret stories about why  you chose to marry and have children / why  I did not / the stories  I try to banish  blot out, replace with the diamond  dog. A murmuration of iridescent starlings,   and the spider of eight,   twirling on its silk line, projecting infinity art  is made when you subject yourself  to the unacceptable, then dredge  yourself out,  find a mineral replacement:  infinity  iridescer  irised feather  scintillater  a crystalline body whirls  releasing me from  the history, the stories it’s  so hard to tell. Until recent years, my sister and I either ignored or disliked each other. We fought continuously as children. I have in my wrist a black bump that protrudes near a vein.  It’s the point of a pencil that broke off and penetrated my wrist as we struggled for the long yellow weapon. A pencil, the weapon of a writer. But there was  no bleeding, no seeming-wound to be dressed.  We never told our Mother, both too ashamed of our brutality. I’ve never asked a doctor about it, the pencil lead encapsulated in my wrist. Nor ever spoken of it to anyone. I always wonder that so much must remain a secret? Why  we never had nice shoes.   april 7  Young Marilyn, Old Marilyn. there are places on this planet where I find it hard to detect any beauty therefore, silence  No nice shoes.   april 8  there is silence   april 9  Drinking a blend of traditional Darjeeling with a touch of Ceylon / this tea takes me back to a Viennese visit, drinking this very tea in the afternoon while my friend, Jonathan, ate their famous Sacher torte. The tea seemed particularly aromatic —   “lightly scented with oil of bergamot  and a hint of genuine Bourbon vanilla.” Wishing for the moment in the past to reappear. I didn’t know the tea from the Sacher Hotel was as famous as the cake  until I found in my Upton Tea catalogue  a listing for “Scented Darjeeling”  under the heading “Earl Grey Blends” This tea, any cup of tea! Hard to believe. no! Sad to think my Mother almost spat out her first taste of tea. What worldly thing must I touch to bring Marilyn back into my sedate life, my sister Marilyn who died in January?  Her hand — I’d like to imagine timidly touching her  hand — Marilyn’s hand.  Her right hand on which she wore the fire opal ring.  In that hand she’d be holding a cigarette. Smoke and fire makes me think of her —   not water, though it was that Pacific ocean   filled with seashells  that she was in touch with. My old hands, not really like hers at all. She had big hands for shaping things,  while mine are small, like birds.
i early morning  The rain, gray god with its huge hands has shredded the roses, and clapping, kept us up all night, the bridge washed out, the troll waiting to gobble a goat. How long has he been there, wet and cold,impatient, starving, his coat rent with welts and matted with mist?Father, thundering, his voice full of  bracken and leaves, leaves that in the autumn clogged the gutters. Who goes over the bridge? Who goes there?
A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea, blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove. As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup, listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet, as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines, whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces clear of night, putting the music out with morning light, and for the breath of an hour it is possible to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember that there was no word for blue among the ancients, but there was the whirring sound before the oars of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world, through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens, troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought —  then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts, the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there: not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme, a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain, then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears in the writings of Herodotus:I love and do not love, I am mad and I am not mad. Like you he thought himself not better, nor worse than anyone else.
We were thirty-one souls all, he said, on the gray-sick of sea in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth. By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight, all were soaked to the bone, living and dead. We could still float, we said, from war to war. What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone? City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers, with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah. If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone. There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you. But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face- down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us. After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where? We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive but with no safe place. Leave, yes, we obey the leaflets, but go where? To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged? To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where? You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same. I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world. I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
I was listening to a book on tape while driving and when the author said, “Those days I delighted in everything,” I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub because surely there was a passage of life where I thought “These days I delight in everything,” right there in the present, because they almost all feel like that now, memory having markered only the outline while evaporating the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian? And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator in hindsight, had only been an overboard character —  but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live only with the sunlight through the blinds, just prey caught betwixt and between, and also heartbreak, and again, heartbreak. I didn’t have whatever that time of life then demanded — a book, a wedding band, a baby —  but the present, like the lie of “fair and balanced” news reporting where creationists are granted air time with the scientists, the present might have me believe that “in those days I delighted in everything.” But to be ... fair and balanced ... I do trust the strict part of memory, the only archivist to have savored a passage of time and have preserved it with the translucent green hinges licked by stamp collectors, attaching it without hurting it, so I wanted the quote exactly, and go back to hunt and tag those months where I delighted in everything — then I couldn’t find the ticket stub. I rummaged through the recycling but no luck, and I couldn’t go back to find the passage on tape, and then I realized I had bought the book for my husband, so I started leafing through it, not wanting to start too far back, and not wanting my eyes to fall on a passage in the future, the one where she realizes that “Those days I delighted in everything,” but it was never to happen again, just the present, from here on in.
in Fort Wayne I drank the seniors Old Milwaukee Old Crow in Indianapolis I stopped now I regret every drink I never took all around coffee grounds and eggshells this sweating a mouthful of  lime as a boy I stole a mint green bra from a laundromat I took it home to try on while my parents slept filled its cups with the smallest turnips in our pantry the underwire grew into me like a strangler fig my blood roiled then as now back on earth frogspit is dripping down wild aloe spikes salmon are bullying their way upstream there is a pond I leapt into once with a lonely blonde boy when we scampered out one of us was in love I could not be held responsible for desire he could not be held at all I wonder where he is now if he looked up he might see me a sparkling I always hoped that when I died I would know why my brother will be so sad he will tell his daughter I was better than I was he will leave out my crueldrunk nights the wet mattresses my driving alone into cornfields unsure whether I’d drive out I wish he were here now he could be here this cave is big enough for everyone look at all the diamonds
which regenerate their tails and also eat only the tails of other electric eels, presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat ...  Without consulting an ichthyologist — eels are fish — I defer to biology’s genius. I know little of their numbers and habitat, other than they are river dwellers. Guess which river. I have only a note, a note taken in reading or fever — I can’t tell, from my handwriting, which. All I know is it seems sensible, sustainable: no fish dies, nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more than a tail; the sting, the trauma keeps the bitten fish lean and alert. The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile. They’ll eat smaller tails for a while. These eels, these eels themselves are odes!
bear with me it wasn’t long ago I was brainless lazily pulling fireflies into my teeth chewing them into pure light so much of me then was nothing I could have fit into a sugar cube my body burned like a barnful of feathers nothing was on fire but fire was on everything the wild mustard the rotting porch chair a box of birth records eventually even scorched earth goes green though beneath it the dead might still luxuriate in their rage my ancestor was a dervish saint said to control a thick river of dark milk under his town his people believed he could have spared them a drought they ripped him to pieces like eagles tearing apart a snake immediately they were filled with remorse instead of burying him they buried a bag of goat bones and azalea my hair still carries that scent my eyes black milk and a snake’s flicking tongue does this confuse you there are so many ways to be deceived a butcher’s thumb pressed into the scale a strange blue dress in a bathtub the slowly lengthening night I apologize I never aimed at eloquence I told my mother I wouldn’t live through the year then waited for a disaster sitting cheerfully on cinder blocks pulled from a drained pond tossing peanuts to squirrels this is not the story she tells hers filled with happy myths fizzy pistons and plummy ghosts it’s true I suppose you grow to love the creatures you create some of them come out with pupils swirling others with teeth
The owner smiles as if she knows me and pulls out a chair. Beside the doorway a copper basin lies on its side. Nana Ross had one just like it, in the kitchen, behind the grocery shop. As a child I imagined my soul was that color and sanctifying grace was red, dripping rosary-like, a kind of divine sweat that smelt of frankincense, myrrh, milk and straw. By age nine I had committed a mortal sin, let Nicki Walshe touch me there and didn’t tell, made a bad confession, took communion paper thin and white on my black-spotted tongue. Nana sprinkled us with holy water, gave me a blessed rosary from Lourdes, all blue and purple it was, but I lost it like I lost the library book, sins mounting up; the row over contraception with a priest in the confessional box in Stillorgan. Sister Anne, white musty face, those thin lips “How dare you, a girl, question holy men.” Lying bare-breasted in the long grass with Ciarán, drinking Guinness followed by Harvey Wallbangers, vomiting it all up on Pearse Street, a guy from Tuam holding my forehead. Walking away from my father’s house, my marriage, my job, to dance barefoot in a circle of women who prayed with wrists, hips, feet and drums, bellies painted gold, Magdalene red. In the Duomo di Firenze the air stinks of old blood, paintings heavy with pigment and suffering. I rinse my mouth with the Signora’s wine and that copper basin is only a basin, a thing.
When I think of the dead, it meansthey’re thinking of me,
There were scruffy local prophets just beyond cannon-range in every hamlet. Door-Hinge Guillem, say, in Lebanon, OH — gets no respect — or Josh the Carpenter, for example, out on a limb in Galilee, RI. Him they tend to snub, until winter cracks the mast off the yacht, & the tub starts to founder petrified in flounder- nets (Ocean’s cold reprimand). Time gets old, echoes grow faint; the statue in the park steps into evening dark, amnesia puts on war-paint. Your icon, buried in the garden sank like a thousand ships into the grass. Those lips still graze my ear, sheep-warden —  whispering forgotten words out of a lichen-book. Words of the sea. Look, their wave-trace in the woods —  a cedar replica. Her milky kingdom was a salt-spray splinter, Noah’s rudder-stump — her shuddering Shaker-wheel spelled freedom.
Day after day of rain. A ticket straight to the mild-mannered hell of rethinking whatever, the drive to EconoFoods: not a lot of grief in that. You need staples — bread, rice, eggs. Here’s a list: almonds, yogurt, all the little anti-griefs add up. Did I tell you? my grandfather sings from the grave. They have my old Philco here. I know all about your world of godawful and too bad. I keep driving. In rain. Some luck required. Stop light. Flashy cars on both sides playing radios too loud. Ear damage! I used to shout out the window, my boy in the front seat trying hard to shrink, not to know who is that crazy at the wheel. Grandfather likes saying: what? Half-deaf even now. Half a lot of things, anytime. Half, what gives? giving way. If there is a we or a you or an I finally. He’d cup an ear if he had an ear. So it is, the first anti-grief, a feather he picked up. My childhood, walking with the oldest man I ever, 1874 his start date. Alarm and Should Have, two roads he would not cross, and Consequence a street over, he ignored completely. Always an eye out for the great small peculiar. A feather. Sometimes handed to me. Or he’d oil a clock with it right off the curb. Into a pocket.
Carnations are best. Or roses, tight, before they go blowsy. Daffodils last. Tulips are no good —  go limp soon as you look at ’em. Lilies are OK, but mark us with rust you can’t shift. Mam asks too many questions. We leave the lilies. Doug and me — we’re quick. When the earth is fresh we circle in to harvest. This is our meadow. Stem first into plaggy bags we ribbon from our pockets, then off, running the back way to the village. To the florist, past wreaths and In Memoriams, where the old lady will peer at our haul, sniff, mebbe give us change from her pouch. Her sleeve is more snot-streaked than mine. And nails blacker. Some days Mam says she don’t understand why I leave me tea but other times I’ve hollow legs. I shrug. Tongue the toffee in a back tooth.
The parrot, Einstein of birds, who can count and reason calmly in our tongue while outliving us, disdains the ostrich. For all its sprint records, the ostrich will be remembered for hiding from the truth. You can’t outrun stupid. We the people hold some truths to be self-evident: our magnificent brain in a body that can’t flee, can’t smell fear, can’t hear death, can’t see straight. Even so, our retinas, with rods and cones as intricate as any telescope array, evolved to see a predator slide out of oblique shadow and give us time to bolt. We survey our closed dominion until we look up in August to find comet dust flaring in the night. This vastness, this vertiginous awareness mocking gravity on our speck of now, wakes us with a recalibrating jolt. But soon our familiar star will claw toward us in seven-league boots from the east, drawing its Valium thread across our planet as if to cloak a birdcage to muffle questions that blink through dark matter and would pour over us until we drowned, dreaming of amnesia.
Ruffs are optional for trebles in Anglican church choirs. — Wikipedia Bored in the balcony reading your novel hoping it will keep me awake —  religion was always a blind spot —  with my Sunday headache waiting for the service to finish so I can retrieve my little chorister, no god in us but song, while pale important teenage Sophia in blue head chorister ribbon, face dumpy as a Flemish burgomaster, bosses littler kids and loves leading them expressionless in paired rows from the choir stalls, holding the processional cross high, shushing and huffily eyeing them for babyish disregard of cleanly neatness, my own chorister dripping orts of tissues she stows in her sleeves for sniffles, in the choir room struggles out of her ruff ringed dark brown inside from years of child chorister sweat, hair oil, dead skin. Me: Your other ruff was white and clean! Her: Sophia said it was too big. She gave me this one instead. I showed her it was dirty and tight. She said “deal with it.”
Now is before he was born. Days of air shaken by bees, crow song probing eaves and quays. Maker of the future a perfect terra-cotta tense, a tense which sings. The absence of push in his education was unpresaged by the door’s lack of wired Sesame. He waits and waits for egress. The door needs only his touch. Its only desire is to swing. He waits for it to open itself, as the cloud opens for the melting press of the sun. He is ready to rot where he leans, leaving a breeze-blown blemish long after he has arrived. Long before he has come into being.
We piled planks, sheets of tin, & sandbags across the creek till the bright water rose & splayed both sides, swelling into our hoorah. Our hard work brought July thrashers & fat June bugs in decades of dead leaves. Water moccasins hid in holes at the brim of the clay bank as the creek eased up pelvic bones, hips, navel, & chest, to eye level. When the boys dove into our swim hole we pumped our balled fists to fire up their rebel yells. The Jim Crow birds sang of persimmon & mayhaw after a 12-gauge shotgun sounded in the deep woods. If we ruled the day an hour the boys would call girl cousins & sisters, & they came running half-naked into a white splash, but we could outrun the sunset through sage & rabbit tobacco, born to hide each other’s alibis beneath the drowned sky.
He came home with his right leg made a bit shorter but they didn’t notice. A landmine did it, he said to himself, and I was the only one who heard him because I followed him everywhere like a son. He hobbled when no one was looking, and I hobbled behind him. When he plucked an iris, I plucked the one next to it, and we thought of purple evening clouds. When he killed a butterfly, he’d take off the wings first, then crush it with his fingers and smell it. I tried to catch one, but it flitted away. He wanted to build a huge power plant to keep us from disappearing. I nodded and pointed out all the recent deaths, how quick they were, tomatoes not as plump as they used to be, the maple trees discolored, their branches like veins with no fat around them. All this, he decided, meant we needed new things. But I disagreed on this: why new, why not old me, I who have lived here for many years even before he was born, but he didn’t listen. Mosquitoes come and go, full and happy. Outside the window, the plant looms over the village. It looks prettier than I thought, which makes me want to kiss it, but I know it will burn my lips and I won’t be able to speak to anyone with my charred mouth. I saw him dressed up for a meeting, and they shouted, blaming him for his empty head, for wanting too much. The next time I saw him he was in bed, old and delirious. He opened his eyes, and held my hand for the first time, and said, Don’t push yourself, come back alive. He was buried in his ever-vanishing land, and I flew off into my friendless life.
I was here before the blackamoors  were photographed & cataloged,  when they first ran up to me & then receded into their poses,  descendants of archival Hamites  destined to serve their brothers & sisters in a red baroque room,  each silent as an iron doorstop.  Some peered out of perches askance, shining lanterns & sconces,  ready to please, or eager to cast  a guiding light among centuries of shadows, a patina of mystery  lost in Tuscan dusk. At least  their attire isn’t stitched rags. If ebony & alabaster could talk,  Lord, the volumes of gossip  among  gold-leafed tributes we would hear as vinegar turns  back to wine, driftwood to bread.  They’ve been perfectly arranged, & almost reveal whose sweat  glosses their smooth skin  in these rooms of rehearsal. I saw one shift slightly & blink,  or maybe it was a dark hum  coming from the olive grove, a feeling brought across the sea.  They are not claw-footed props  & furniture for drunken nights posed to grab a hat or fur coat,  dressed in skeins of filigree  & false gems, offering a bowl of  black grapes to each envoy  or a guest holding a dagger  behind his upright back.
All winter she’s been growing more powerful. Radiant, says the man at the bar. Voluptuous, says the docent. Nervy, says God. All winter her soul has been juddering. It feels like drinking gold flakes! The word sleeps inside the stone. The wind tongues the underside of the lake. Inside the rifle scope of time, God teaches her Grounding Techniques through his emissary, a Certified Therapist. Beetles bore their dirty traffic into pine trees. God says, You cling to deixis like a life raft. Here, you say. Now, you say. All winter, you say, like it means something, days crossed off your compulsive calendar, wind tied to your wrist like a pet. This dumb hunger for fixity! I made your cells to shed, says God. See them everywhere, everywhere. She bites her lip till it bleeds. Who wouldn’t immanentize the eschaton, if they could, build heaven on earth in the backyard? She wouldn’t, is who. Day a slit-throated ewe. She wears a prayer around her neck in another language, no clue what it says. Who will translate the prayer? Listen: she loved a happy libertine and thought that was heaven. To ground herself she strips berries from the juniper bushes. Well, says God, Alexander the Great dyed his hair saffron. We are all made fools in this world.
For 1995 It was the dead center of summer, & anyone but us would’ve been outside hours ago, flailing like a system of larks against the hydrant’s icy spray. But a girl had her orders, & to disobey our mother was, in a sense, to invite one’s own destruction, cause to pray that a god of mercy might strike first. So we lay, still as stars on the living room floor, poring over algorithms: divisors & dividends, quotient the first synonym for resolution I ever learned, & would later come to love for its sound alone, how it reminded me, even then, of words like quantum & quotationmark, both ways of saying nothing means what you think it means all the time. The observable universe hides behind its smooth obsidian dress, & all we can do is grasp at it in myths & figures, see what sticks, give all our best language to the void. What dark irony, these coy, child philosophers, theorizing how things break from the floor of a house where everything is more or less in flux, indeterminate as the color of the blood in a body. Or the speed at which I learned to obliterate the distance between myself & any given boy on the block, the optimal angle of the swing most likely to drop another kid cold in front of his crew, to square up, square off, & this too was a kind of education, the way my sister held both fists semi-adjacent, each an inch or so from her switchblade eyes, showed me the stance you take when the math doesn’t quite shake out, so it’s just you & the unknowns & the unknowns never win.
After BIGBANG’s “Fantastic Baby” Matarose never comes home She’s hungry like a wolf She’s rosa de mota in lacroix all the girls hail on queens boulevard All the views she’s killed in the name of iman & yasmin le bon Mata’s quite meta Mata means kill Rose a curve from the real meat of it all She’s part my little pony into bronies she has loved & loved not by astro-pony compatibility chart She’s the queerest part of me What’s left after the clubs close & has yet to go home she never goes when she writes I always write in bed just woofed down a 3 musketeers mata’s on a mission which is to say I’m my most queer my most mata-rose when she& I don’t need all the girlsin the yarddon’t needall the girls in the yardby which I meanthe one who’s not the one whose blocked texts & torn up wish you wells flicker still That riddle get you killed kindof a woman for whom matarose almost cut off a foot Went to the end of twobuck ghosting railsMy man is a little afraid of mata he accepts her tho Lets her come & go because I stay I am always with him because mata just wants every 7 train to dissolve into g-dragon sound wants you to howlboom mata mataboom mata matawowg-mata dragonrose The most pony of them allg-mata 7 dragontrainroseDon’t wait upNever last stop never comesboom mata mataboom mata mata home
I act like I know it all. But you, you act like you know it all. We can’t both be wrong. Still, neither of us should have children. Your head’s in a sack. In a sack with a snake with two heads. And my head is even older than our initial calculations implied. I know many names for sitting cross-legged, none for never getting up again. You, you speak as if you just checked, but it’s not even up to you. Fox pulls a rabbit out of a duck and keeps the wound-up hounds upwind. Hedgehog carries one trick around like a small booth atop an elephant. And both of us, elephant and booth, carry from birth what can’t be cast off by dying. How can we corrupt the young? The young don’t even know we exist.
If this is a fracture across time and place, where past and future hold each other’s gaze, then should the world not call a moment’s halt, not hang like a fly-cloud at head-height when a downpour ends? Should it not let fireworks burst, then hold their sculpted light? Then we will see the glory of this wild, this liberated city, where everyone is held in green, red, gold of roman-candle arcs and rocket seed-heads. We walk among the rescued in their newly crowded bars. A couple caught mid-kiss across their table, waiter balanced on one foot with eyes of steel and arms of plates. A self-appointed prophet in a shirt and tie gapes, fish-like, caught halfway through a lie. I could lean and wet my fingertip in stilled champagne, tilted on a singer’s lip. You could grab a smoke ring from the ether between punters and the pole dancer, pocket it as proof, then we could take the air beside the float-glass river, where a busker rests her bow on a string, and you ask what are all these flesh-ghosts thinking? Far from a cheap trick, this city-wide hiatus, the cost per minute is prohibitive. We barely linger in this midnight space before words rush back, before kiss meets kiss.
Essay #1 Mrs. Goldberg’s AP Intro to Lit Shakespeare understood the blues. He knew parting was such sweet sorrow. Mr. Shakespeare was the main MC Of the Elizabethan scene and so I figure To be or not to be (similar to how you be?) Be as timeless as hell and as universal Since such questions never go out of style. I only wish Othello had sussed out Iago And taken Iago down to the crossroads And asked Iago the devil’s true-true name. Juliet is like Lady Gaga (in my HBO rewrite) And Romeo lives in Harlem with his moms — Though that’s only his nom-de-plume. He wants to be the first rapper with a PhD. And Robert Burns smiles to keep from crying And when he penned the best-made plans Of mice and men (not rats) often go astray What he really meant was shit happens. Dead Old White Men they knew the blues Though they didn’t always know what They knew okay maybe not even in 1619 By which time Shakespeare was Auld Lang Syne and Burns was not yet in this world But the blues isn’t stuck on color or CP time.
A fourth was needed so one of the three Invited a friend and I came along as a spare In case a chair was empty since I could fill In as easily as I could shout out a rhyme. As the jive flowed like the River Jordan And Joshua and his trumpets sounded the alarm The winning cards slam damned on the table And I laughed along with morning noon and night. My three big brothers: bold smart handsome. One slim as a stick of dynamite, the second solid As a line backer and the third crazy enough To fight them both if they let it roll beyond talk. Treated me like a child even after I had my first. The three of them (ace king and a wild card) Improbably born within four years as if Daddy And Momma were trying to break a record Or win a bet about how many diapers a woman Could change in a single day without cursing The hand God had dealt her; the odds were even Until I came along years later to tell their story.
Standing at the glass-paneled wall of Liza’s kitchen  at the old house half-hidden Over a mile up Canyon Road in Joshua’s gated compound I’m just smoking a joint & looking down at the dusk dusting the Malibu lights as they flare Along the coastline below & I can hear the ripped-up Buick fenders & Caddy bumpers slammed around out in the barn studio as they’re slowly Torched into art as Joshua moves the spitting arc-welder Over armatures of rebar shaping a dozen abstract guitars or mandolins while its Acetylene tongue ticks in the black shade of his visor Once in a while his back-in-the-day transistor radio hooked on a nail bent in the wall Cuts through the sizzle with a hit of his that’s slipped Lately back into fashion & I’ve watched him slowly lift  the head of that torch until it angles Against the turquoise plastic moon of the radio dial As if he might melt it all back to a few black platters  — those times as lost as song
12 foxes thumping; rechristened people. The Elizabethan Underworld as a precursor to the furnished. In the year of the calm fox, girls. The heavyweight watch just to see the mechanics of victory, that is, as above, a precursor to a tradition, changed into a cartoon. The furry, soon to be protected from insults, or humor at their expense, in law. The drawn fox, the heavy hippo. Ambush, false witness, poor translation. In the pressure going down, blood, bicep cuff. Correction, the neighbor is ill, a shame about the lion but there remain frequent accounts of premature burials and lack of perspective so unforgivable to transform.
Barbie Chang’s tears are the lights of  the city that go off on off on the men walking around the city move but Barbie Chang doesn’t she cannot promote herself if she had legs she would stop begging if she had a head she would stop her own wedding but the city has no extra bedding it is not ready yet the maids are still making beds Barbie Chang is still making things up there are always storms long arms drinks with pink umbrellas because they know she is confused like a seahorse light avoids her town on the map B2 C4 she wants to be used she doesn’t want to be with you it is morning again and Barbie Chang is already mourning the men the night men who are always right who never write back she prefers to sleep on her back so she can see the eyes of her attackers in the morning a bed with questions with her depression on each side two small holes from knees
The palms are psalms. The nail salons, manicured lawns. This is some phase. The park has been razed. I miss the hip, hours at a clip, their dopey glazed Dolores haze (sorry). I worry about basic stuff: my graying scruff, Ambien addiction. Eviction ... — But there’s another story: this site was once a cemetery. In 1888, the late were stirred, disinterred, carted somewhere calm, a nothing place called Colma. By then the dead prohibited in city light. They thought this was all right: the dead have nothing to lose; the dead were Jews. Hills of Eternity, Home of Peace: the dead were put in their place.
... if thou shouldst not be glad, I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, Sepulch’ring an adult’ress. — William Shakespeare, King Lear He faked my death, set up this ranch far from my three daughters. Suburban hellhole. With bracelet on ankle, house- arrest. At noon the bully sun shoulders a ripe moon. In the dark soaps reign. The anchors will often flash their glitterati weddings. Not one daughter has birthed an heir. In vitro — be damned. I hose the lawn and count the cars like fish slipping their shiny chrome along asphalt. Which sparrow missed? Cordelia — my gutted heart.
Cinder blocks ripple. A hard lot is suddenly glammed up by an illusion. Cats will slip under chain-link and lap this dirty pool. I want to go there, be gone there, be anything liquid or even topped with barbed tape. But the sky is swept away and I am stuck in a parked car, all limbs attached to the idea of being human. As if sketched by da Vinci. As if stretched across a piece of parchment, I am drawn. Fear circles flesh boxed in by so many tawdry corners: disease, grocery lists, and suchnot. Even my thighs face Vitruvian quandaries: whether to stay together or fall apart. The mental ward is not unappealing: I check my calendar. What’s a lesion in the temporal lobe except an opportunity for time to fall into a black hole? These are clinical terms,time and black hole, words even this century’s doctors will recognize as problematic: both should help me forget but don’t. Heal, deaden. Either way I am a woman who wants to be rid of memory, past and future. Today I desire nothing more than to sit stilled. What’s so rotten about this willing suspension of all inclinations to engage anything other than stasis, brow furrowed, body puddled, hollow? Earlier, I watched a shiny black millipede on turned dirt make progress that could be measured in inches. Perhaps the art of letters is as insubstantial, as oddly disconcerting, and as unwavering. Nothing can be mistaken for resolution, yet the allure of metamorphosis, the way hard things buckle under the line, ameliorates something, at least encourages the generalized slurry of bad thinking to flow into the next available trough. Slop has purpose. This much I know.
I was reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s new piece In The Atlantic — it was the one about President Obama’s decision not To be persuaded by a commonplace That our credibility hinges on the use Of swift and massive lethal force despite Pressure even from his own Cabinet Appalled that Assad shelled Ghouta with sarin gas —  When I thought of your poem on the way Of denial, “Via Negativa,” whose lines Celebrated their (your rhyme) reticence. Why am I even talking this way to you? I watched you being buried, yet in the end I wonder if I had ever been your friend.
Lash everything irredeemable to the ficus with muscle. Use the flexor digitorum brevis from the arch of my right foot. This is how what’s grounded gets hitched to the rooted, everything cramped into place and contemplative. Tight striations might as well be bindings to Bodhi as body. Why not dump this tired mind at the foot of a tree, aerial roots less caustic than an unanswered calling —  or perhaps this is it, to sit, to ponder, to ask: what violated cunt, what unhappy gasp, what sad spat, and toppling building left us blooming untoward? Who puts flowers on the inside of a fig except the injured or the bereft? The ones who hankered hard and failed to do anything but live lush and fallible? What regret is: bark or bitch. The world succumbs to beauty even now, in the throes. The sky is dark and hidden behind branches, cephalic veins clotted with grief. Hush now, finally. All the face can do is flush, sympathetic nervous system, visible horror of wounded and wounding. All inflorescence remains safe inside that place the mind opens up pear-­shaped and vast: the body of every lover is unattached to hurt or hope, falls in its own field of daffodils, to curl fetal with singular prowess or glut.
i   Marionette means little Mary. Think of Mary Shelley, a jointed doll lifted from her mother’s unstitched interior, that fist-shaped hole, the future mother of three dead children and Frankenstein’s monstrous electric baby, hater of creators. Think of all the porn-dollies moving their mouths up and down on wood and the way the men jerk, responding as they’re made to, and the clear wires. The men who make up cyborgs, beautiful and silver-skulled with wet mouths that might deliver quick blue shocks. Think of Eve’s small teeth kinking apple flesh and who put it there and who suggested and who lifted her wrist. Think of shadow puppets with enormous penises. Think of little boys shot for holding up toy guns. Think of animals compared to puppets by Aristotle — how levers are released and strike the twisted sinews against one another. Think of people compared to animals. Think of men on a bus forcing instruments so far inside a girl they puppet the girl to death and puppet means pulled by tendons. Think of if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. Think of the grace of a marionette as it glances the earth, as its limbs shake and float. Think of how its mind is elsewhere.   ii Fox and Cat hang Pinocchio from the tree, a noose of string around his throat. Hoist by what he’s made of, the merciless weather swings him to clatter like a wedding bell that rings out atrocious spasms to a shuddered stop. His maker is not here for this unmaking. They should make him watch.
1 Sometimes I feel like Jonah fleeing Nineveh. Who wants to hear what is evil? Every day we make this earth less alive, various or legal. What is this diminishment but sin against god which is a program to generate complexity? I should go to Nineveh and cry against wickedness which halts love which wants the other’s different self to stay itself.2 They say if you’re fair or moneyed or live on a mountain you won the lottery, everyone else, apologies —  storms aren’t going away so play the game nicely. Lots are cast, blame allotted, men tossed to the ocean’s torsion, seaweed’s cage, foreclosing depths and then the blue whale’s curdled belly digesting everything we’ve done.3 I visited a branch of Sea Life in an ex-county hall. Mops in corridors, half-empty vending machines. They took photos of us pretending to look scared in front of green screens. Rays took titbits from stinking cups. The sharks were gilled glide, ravenous for outside. We were vomited onto dry land by the Coca-Cola London Eye.4 I must warn Nineveh. But who wants to hear me say what is evil? It is dominion. It is the law that makes goodness impossible, fasting in sackcloth the only option. But god will not say must only relent or sorrow as the whale does when her calf is taken —  a harrowed sound that does not bear description.
If you can command these elements to silence … origin: No soul could have spoken of the universe’s origin since no one could have existed to witness it. Origin is ellipsis. We believe the universe began, because we exist and because we can hear the sounds of its origin. Activating radio telescopes, gazing at the far corners of existence so dark and distant that the mewling universe can still be heard and seen cooling in cosmic antiquity, we hear. We hear the origin’s cold weak light journey to us. From our center, we can see nothing beyond the cosmic background radiation’s feeble crackle. Beyond this dark margin, we can hear no more origin. We have run out of the sound of the past. We have used up all our past we may know. Beyond this past, there is only the silence that marks the edge of the infinite. When we deploy a fantasy such as “The West,” what we often mean is specifically that transatlantic network of capitalism that formed our experience of modernity, the economic system that catalyzed the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the British and American orders. The West in this sense possessed its own Big Bang, its own founding from sublime trauma: the expropriation of land from those who lived in the New World and the expropriation of body and labor from those who lived on the African west coast, and the plunder that laid waste to peoples and nations of three continents. And here are also sublime silences. The silent images of the Aztecs’ death, which José Rabasa shows were painted by an artist asked to document their own world’s demise by the Spanish. The silence of the encomienda, blazing silence of Diego de Landa, crackling light of Maya codices and icons arsoned and non-silence of confessions, screams elicited from those he hoisted into air by their wrists and he pelted hot wax at them and he lashed their bodies with whips and they grew non-silent and then silent. And so a continent bared for those moaning boats that stole across ocean stole people across continent crammed in dark belly of ships, these captured people of many tongues who could not speak to each other and who we struck in the lungs with death by drowning people who we abducted to our country people we commanded not to read or write or speak. Such events suggest other silences: first, the silence against appropriation (How can one speak of a suffering that is not one’s own, a suffering whose responsibility one might also own?) and second, the silence of sublime inadequacy (How can one write poetry after the killing of three continents?). One can lodge many answers to these questions, the first of them being   moratorium: When early evening came, the Stars descended into the parking lot of the 7-11 where they held congress and declared embargo on speaking of the dead. And dawn came and what we had said about him became sky-silent.dark matter: Because my father had died into an object, I fled my work, my friends, my art, New York. I fled my life so I could also become object. Youmna followed, but these memories are fictional (performance) and so we will drape her with a white cloth. Having fled my life, I am sitting on my bed, operating this memory indoors, underground, in basements, in locked bedrooms, in any indoor container that might further package me away from the fact and still did they pursue, still did they strike the darting arrows of the Death Star, that black radiance of leeches that flung itself down from the hot surfaces of the griefsun. The famishing lines tracked me inside, tracked me around corners, lassoing me into the air. “Where does this black sun come from?” Julia Kristeva asked. “Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?” And this is when Youmna lifted the sheet that had been cast over my body. “Why did you cover yourself like this, like an object at the morgue? What were you thinking?” I said, “I thought what I had covered was the world.”the unsayable: One of the traditional paradoxes of the dead is how they do not emit information. Because the dead do not emit light, which cannot escape the event horizon of the deceased, they can only be detected by the symptoms they leave on the surrounding matter, the haloed matter burning at their corona, the white marks scarring the X-rays. A person can survive within the dead once it has gravitationally collapsed. This happens for only a second from the observer’s eye, but, because of gravitational time dilation, grief 
occurs a nearly infinitely long time for the person who chooses to live inside the dead.tlacuilo, graphic novelist at the world’s end: In those California days after my dad died, I felt the life began to seep out of me into the ground and so I brought my sneakers to the cobbler for resoling, which strangely enough did not mitigate my newfound grief. Sometimes I would find myself gazing out the window at the garden my mom cultivated behind her house, often while performing an Edwardian pose of wan melancholy, and as I approached, the glass would immediately darken as though saturated with an egglike blue shadow. (I later realized this shadow was caused by my head blocking the lamplight and decided to simply lean back.) I found myself stricken with headaches for some reason when I neglected to eat for days. I began laying my head on the carpet as though listening for footsteps, which I did often in those days, perhaps I believed the sun would itself walk inside and incite me, when I saw a woman in my mother’s backyard. I did not recognize her. She crouched on the ground holding what I thought was a knife. 
I thought I saw her carving the earth into sections. As I came closer, 
I saw that what she grasped in her hand was a quill, though she held it with such authority that she looked as though she held the earth by its handle. All the cracks that scrawled between the grass—I saw that these were not cracks. They were sketches. And what a strange thing, looking back on it, how I never wondered what this woman was doing in my mother’s backyard. She glanced up at me as I approached and said, “Everyone I know is dead. I am also dead, but someone must stay behind and document my death. I am the only archivist, so I remain suspended between death and history.” I realized what was occurring and asked, selfishly, “So it’s possible to talk to someone who is dead?” “You do it all the time. It’s like what Youmna told you to write into your eulogy.” “Yeah, okay.” I paused. “But he never remembers to talk back to me.” She took out two cubes, possibly carved from bone, and threw them at my feet. “What’s that for?” I kneeled closer to her. “Is this fortune telling?” “It’s your stats and hit points.” I laughed. “You’re sending me into a dungeon?” “No,” she said. “You are going on a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage to hell.”initiation: To prepare for your descent (for there was no question of which direction you would eventually end up), you began your initiation into three domains of sorcery: the silent vows of grief; the generative magics obtained through meditation upon the colonial archive; and apprenticeship into all manner of low-level 
magics, including wonder-making, liberating demons, clairvoyance of the past, fierce activities, special jumping abilities, control over the three worlds, abridgment of one’s own lifespan through nicotine inhalation, research methods, the augmentation of merit and pleasure by generating poetry using your body, red optic blasts, melancholy of the spleen, a frequent customer stamp card for Woorijip Korean deli. Your first prophesied guru was the Tlacuilo, the woman historian who had ventured to the underworld by standing witness at the end of the Mexica and the cosmogony of the New World. She had painted omens of the future that now served you as diagrams of the past: the two-headed man who presented his body to Moctezuma, the comet whose banner waved across the sky and heralded the origin of the next kingdom, and the pale ghosts in steel skins who came as gods and guests, the ghosts who at the Festival of  Toxcatl came to kill us. One of them sawed off a man’s head, another speared the eye of a warrior who was betrothed to your sister. The Tlacuilo led you to the black lake that Mexico City had become. You did not know if you were in a fantasy or the past. You were in a fantasy and the past. Small skiffs wobbled by, as did wounded bodies that dyed the waters red. Surrounded by corpses levitating upon the waters, she taught you the first sorcery, that of death’s erasure. She cut off the hole of your mouth so you could say nothing, nothing commensurate with death, nothing can be commensurate to that dark infinity, and so you lost no breaths and so you followed her from the shores (sores) and the waterline slowly became the horizon line of the sky and you could breathe. White fish flew by, gliding without effort. You looked one in the eye and it sucked its cow lips silently at you. She said that this was Atlantis or one of many Atlantises and you saw yourself walking beside her on a road towards an underwater city that you could see only as a speck in the far distance. You tripped on the body of a dead man, seemingly Chinese, his body weighed down with rock-filled bags. The Tlacuilo, who by this time walked far in front of you, came back and told you this man’s name but asked you to stay silent. She led you about a mile further down the road towards the first station set aside for pilgrims such as yourself. Here she transmitted another teaching. There will also be other ages after this one, she said. Other suns will rise and fall. I will instruct you towards the attainment of a new title: The Cowerer from the Sun. She taught you how to crawl on the seabed, a weeping hog crawling on hands and knees. My final teaching is this: Go in fear of the sun. Having said this, she set her own body down in a fetal position and waited for the seaweed to smother her.liberating the sun demon spell: Moneyed sun of vampiric Western powers Lift up enclosures, colonies, and bowers The civilizing light of the Atlantic state’s sun Radiance of iPhones and global financialization I shun you in this wrathful manifestation Glutton sun, I call your name of power Call you out from enclosure, colony, and bower Sun I name you: Radioactive Liquid Ocean of interests and incentives Shipping lanes for slave and spice and coolie Inescapable moisture of air and the body Marinating us all complicitquandary spell: If we are all complicit in the sun’s radiance or if the sun is too sublime to be rolled from its central solar spot, then what is the objective of being revolting to that star?middle fantasy flight of passage: You served as sentry incompetent, standing watch standing for pre-American seabeds for centuries, so slow did you live below the waters, you saw the ocean as simply a second more infinite air. The water’s lip became that line that separates sky from celestial space. One day you spied a person flying, prone. He wafted down and you saw a man starved to skull sick and struggling in the sky, descending through the red gulps of sharks. You saw him fall five fathoms, an ariel who found his free wings stripped and him imagined into caliban. Shining anglerfish for flashlight, you saw that he died silently before he touched down upon the seabed. Of course he had not flown. He had drowned. Your mouth stricken. You could say nothing. You could think nothing commensurate with these absolutes.   Poor souls, they perished.Had I been any god of power, I wouldHave sunk the sea within the earth   Engraving by Gustave Doré for the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. influence: If influence spoken by Spenser portends the star’s fateful persuasion, flowing and fluctuating, does influenza mean the disease of fate? the stars: Migrant to death’s second nation, Dante / emerges into the purging state and gazes up / at a supernal cross: four stars joyous, / isomorphs to the four cardinal virtues. “Dante is no bookkeeper of the literal ... [The] constellations are best taken as allegorical.” Although one of the largest star radii observed belongs to the glowering red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, that terrible and sublime throne whose dominion could swallow our own sun nine billion times, poor yellow pebble celestial, and whose own death slain by nova during that final day shall illumine our infinite interior caverns of night — we might also regard Canis Majoris’s gigantism as hypothetical: though massive, this hypergiant is a thousand times more diffuse than air. The size of this terrorful star depends on what words we wield to define its stellar radius (e.g., whether by density or optical-depth). You can shrink the most sublime of stars using only your language. Vaporware star, luminosity leached of borders, you are all fictions. human song: Perhaps it is the case that you never get over things. You decide you will no longer engage with them. You answer with 
silence until you are reminded once again of the wound and requested 
to be human. poem written after slingshotting around the sun to the future when you too are a father: Perfect baby perched on high chair, washed and newly diapered, photogenic but on Facebook unshared, I wonder the purpose of the personal in death or politics, the former displacing one’s personality into a mute purgatory perpetual, the latter being a plural affair, more systemic and dispersed than private feelings — but do these secret fruits grow and burrow inside your grief, growing riper until they burst into black sweetness? Is the point not the immolation of the person but their muteness, their non-divulgence? You point to the window. You show your child the snow outside. The snow’s white war against the world. The snow that has so superbly coated only the tops of branches with erasure. Sometimes it is through the hidden underside that we find ourselves most bare.
Magic Wayne with flowers; Wanye West; Box-of-Tricks Wayne; Wayne sad on Facebook, proving he loves his daughter; the sporty Wayne — loves himself skinny; Bald Wayne, head like a rocking chair; Amy Waynehouse; Wayne the ironic; Fat Wayne — tits pushed beneath a Fred Perry Wayne; Wayne from near Slough; Ugly Wayne — the unlikely mess of his wife Wayne — canned laughter; Wayne who renamed another Wayne Fleabag; Track-suited Wayne — your hubcaps, his pockets; Home and A-Wayne; Randy Wayne; Wayne, fountains of him, every drop snug to someone’s mum; Wayne, boyfriend of Stacey; Wayne-ker; Wayne the rap star, gold teeth, grime; Wayne the Superhero, Wayne the Cowboy; Dancing Wayne — in tights; It’s-Wayning-Men; a cavalcade of Waynes fucking each other up in a Geoff Hattersley poem — in a pub, in Barnsley; Purple Wayne; Wayne’s World Wayne; Wayne “Sleng Teng” Smith; A-Wayne in a Manger; all of them have stopped what they’re doing, all of them divided in two rows and facing each other, all of them, arms raised, they are linking fingers, all of them: an architrave through which 
I celebrate, marching like I am the bridegroom, grinning like I am the bride
There is no radical shift of light or redwings calling areas of marsh their territories yet, nor plovers probing for copepods. Only a yellow front-end loader laying out a new berm on the beach, from tubes too heavy to be called hoses, its audience one man and his protesting dog. No frosted wedding cake on tour, no Cap’n Beauregard hailing us from the Texas deck, no Texas deck, just an unshaven crew launching zodiacs from the county dredge, its twin stacks staining itself and the air with smoke, as battered an emblem of hope as any other. So spring comes to Egg Island, squealing and unwilling. Sulfur and diesel, flywheel, gear and grind until one morning the equinox dawns and silences the whole shebang.
Where can the dead hope to stash some part of themselves, if not in the living? And so when I had a daughter, I gave her your name. She does not use it. She goes by a silly, other thing she was called once in fun, and then often enough that it stuck. But oh her hideous pill- eyed toys — to them each, she has given her given name, and so it is you I hear her again and again calling to. It is your name she shrieks to the bale-head farmer, the woven goat, the cop made of buttons and rags. Your name, to the squat gray dog on wheels, tipping on its side as she drags it by a red string. That dog, always prone and pulled along, as though constantly being killed and paraded through town to make an example. What did it do —  Whatever it did, don’t do it.
i Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson breached, millions of gallons of it north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site, East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South, Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl, Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately in hurricane sky.ii Perhaps I make too much of it, that time, Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped in some sort of liquid to protect them from dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused — that time, night shift, press-machine shop on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in, fixed up, because the work you do is around fire your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right.iii When the mind is clear, to hear the sound of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude of syllables pronounced. When the mind is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio, at a holy water font, a mother washes her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident so that they’ll heal.iv So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted, Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole.v Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels, in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity the greatest number of children in United States history are, now, incarcerated, having been sentenced by law.vi A comic dimension to it, on this F train to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you, but, see, he was stabbed in the face with an ice pick, he lost his left eye —  lid pried open with thumb and forefinger —  here, look, he’ll show you —  a white-and-pink-colored iris.
Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay, from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets I take to work. The front yard of roses —  did I write their names down correctly? —  Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale. Q31 bus, among the words I hear are Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated, Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not physically well, a poor man, arrested on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose, on the street, held, choked, left unconscious, still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death, according to the autopsy report, a homicide —  rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins, by employees of the Agency’s contractor, isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence explains, but, merely, legally justified means of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house. He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace, the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual. In what place, the Federal Reserve’s monetary spigots and banks’ access to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce the market’s decline — in what places, violations of which forms of which eternal laws? Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place? On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike, in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.
To push and push with raw pink claws like hands of shin. To tunnel my love through wet earth, wet stars — no one needs the underneath like me. I give you permission to grip me. To patrol the worm-drench of my thinking. To bite a worm’s head and cure the rest as cache. Your flesh, my flesh, your dead as dead, buried like a feeling. To push through that wet, a scrum of worms whittling my skin like a premonition. To have pushed mountains into hills, ragged sooth from the slid wall of healing. “Nothing,” said the suicide, “is as sad as recovery.” To work myself forward like a noun or an entry.
Complete in ourselves, we look like scraps of paper anyway:left alone, we could tell our mothers and one another our owners’flimsiest secrets and play together all dayuntil we became intertwined, which is why you tryto keep us permanently apart. One of us is a gossamer pirate ship,a frigate whose rigging the industrialsunset highlights, sail by oblong sail. Another resembles a Greek letter — gamma,or lambda; others still a ligature, a propeller, a fat lip.Our will is not exactly the wind’s will. Underlined by sand,whose modes of coagulation and cohabitation none of the human pedestrians understand, we take off on our almost arbitrarilylengthy singletons of stringtowards the unattainable, scarily lofty realm of hawk and albatrossand stay, backlit by cirrocumulus.It seems to be up to you to keep usup in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross.
I got a letter through the post decreeing my sainthood. Beatified, I sat down, because this was big news for me. Bless the television, bless this chair of four wooden legs. I felt like calling my parents, but thought, in a saintly way, to do so would be immodest, so instead I opened the curtains. Rain was washing everything that seemed in need of washing. A bird landed on a bush and shook water from its wings and I closed my eyes briefly, acknowledging its small, hardworking soul, like a microchip destined for heaven. The cat came in, little devil, and I forgave her, touching under her chin, sweet child. We watched the news together and reflected that this was how the world churns its butter of beginnings and endings in front of the sun. What good, I wondered laterally, might befall an ancient tree today? Perhaps merely nothing much. Perhaps a tree will carry on just as it was. What minerals will develop unseen in the earth, deep beneath a human tragedy? Some minerals. Some salty, bright minerals in the dark. I spent that morning cutting white paper into triangles. I spent that afternoon staring at my bits, enamored. I spent that evening clapping loudly in the garden, and come bedtime I was ready to write my long email to the President of the United States of America.
Our mascot was the bulldog. Bulldogs chased me across playgrounds until I dreamed them. In class, I finished mazes with a green crayon. Hedges grew skyward from pages, and I ran. My dad once called this kind of thing my day-head. When my day-head happened, they called him at his office. I learned the name Daedalus from an article I read for science class. It meant a plane with leg-powered wings —  carbon tubing, plastic skin. A man with a long name flew a longer way across the sea from Crete. At recess, I reread the same book of illustrated myths and cryptids. I dreamed of bulldogs with bulls’ heads. My day-head was a zoo where gods slept. Daedalus sounded like dad, so I loved him. Class was an enclosure made of cinder block and twelve weeks without winter. Behind the glass, my day-head paced. Daedalus was a zookeeper. I dreamed of a god with a bull’s body and a hood sewn from my face. The article said I weighed the same as the Daedalus. I traced flight plans and crash sites on my desk. My teacher asked us to draw self-portraits. The trees were hydras. On the paper, I drew an outline of my face. I cut my eyes out with scissors. They called me to the office, and Daedalus was waiting. I found a bulldog in a magazine and drew a maze inside each iris. We played tug-of-war in gym. My day-head was a knotted rope dangling from steel rafters. I pushed my thumb into the sun. I fell once. I cut the bulldog from the page, then ripped his head in two. I glued one half over the left side of my face. I left the right side blank. The article said the Daedalus crashed twenty-one feet from the black sand of a beach on Santorini. My day-head was a Kevlar fuselage belly-down in the sea. They called home. I ran home. On the right side of my face, I drew a sunny day. I signed my name.
I put an animal on an animal which I put onto the animal I had already stacked on top of my first animal and stood back to appraise my work only it looked much too short despite the number of animals I had gathered, and I felt tired and silly and disappointed, slumping to my knees, rocking back onto my bum, then lying down to stare into the hoary sky until my eyeballs softened and I was forced by the consistent light to close them and listen to the animals taking a surprisingly long time to disorganize themselves.
I’m gently rowing and the birds look sewn to the surface of the water as it undulates to the sound of Sean talking beautifully about something I don’t really understand. But all I’m picturing are brown paper bags with little grease spots near the bottom seams that have recorded the way sausage rolls have touched them, or the thin waists of dogs as depicted in medieval hunting frescos, or a cherub’s fat little hand gesturing to a vista where smiling families are meeting to picnic with the animals that God has also saved, or I’m thinking about the mechanics of bagpipes, the legs and arms and the fat belly and the long neck with its holes. This has been the best day ever. Sean smiles. He’s wearing shorts, and so am I. It’s sunny! Mine are so short they may as well be underpants, and I still don’t understand a word that he is saying.
His blue guitar is lacquered so brightly when he leans a certain way into his song I can see my head in my hands reflected. And when he leans back into the emotion of another chorus his guitar returns to blue: the blue of unboiled lobsters fading to a general Biro-lid blue and with a patina of fine tiger stripes the color of sky midway towards a springtime horizon. I’ve had a long time to consider this. The man with the blue guitar has a little tin for his plectrums, with a cartoon pelican on its lid, standing on top of the words “Pelican Throat Lozenges.” Between songs he tells me that he found it in the abandoned house from the song. Which song? My next song. It’s called “The Abandoned House.” The man with the blue guitar reads his lyrics from a special leather book where he has written all his lyrics. Sometimes he forgets the words and searches the page as he plays, his face scrunching as he sings new noises in their place. I prefer the noises. This song is called Halloween Moon this song is called Lovesick Bougainvillea this song is called Bourbon Canal this song is called St. Michael’s Boots My Cousin’s Old Coat The Wrestler’s Arm The Old Arm Wrestler Dead Man’s Stetson Panama Morning The Skulls of the Cathedral Lawn Shadow in the Gully in the Foothills of My Youth My Heart Is a Love Letter the Folds Are Worn Through.
Tarrargon, are you a wild boar? My friend, lemon zest, has not been that Thyme, Cognac, falooda glass noodle These things prowl the night without cape Gooseberries or bacalao Tarragon, are you a wild boar? Each time I eat you, I stop breathing Little owl, where is your happiness? Wake up + make people believe In you, gastrique + steaklette Is that chive embarrassed? To be with the savoy cabbage? Tarragon, are you a wild boar? I was born female, hyper-focused Let me trim your skirt, halibut It’s dragging salt against my oregano Buttered by butter in no butter Tarragon, are you a wild boar? It’s too bad the caper isn’t wearing A cape when the Peruvian potatoes Are sitting on a bed of coals while Floating down a river coconut On the verge of falling off A truffle, which is a Shadow floating inside of a shadow
Herodotus says the king made a bowl to leave behind the memory of a number. We don’t know the number. We don’t know if it was divisible by two or three. I want, at the moment, the number to indicate a ratio, part of a proportion, because the measurement of the earth depends on this, the balance among things, the snow at the bottom of the hill, the gold garage light caged in a tree, my love for my friend and the distance between us, which I can’t bear. I made a pinhole camera to demonstrate proportion, and everything bright hovers on its milky eye, and here is the catalogue of what hovers there smaller than itself: the blue horizon and the dash at the stoplight, a shell night-light, the gazing ball of the sun going down against the white back fence, which made it look like night in the woods lit from underneath on the wax. I held these things yesterday, along with two pearls that are spheres hanging from my living room ceiling. My friend is smaller now, and if I held my camera up to her, she would give off enough light to hover pocket-sized in my hand, and grand in the world.
fish carcass say hello to pork rind + arborio rice while castaway caraway puree returns home to deconstruct wilted carrot from its butter + herb remnants fish carcass say goodbye to a knife fight between under-marinated onion slice + wasted redbor kale amidst a gun battle between grilled salmon + paprika fish carcass say goodnight to electrolytes + magnesium as a chemical imbalance takes place inside the borderline cod meat fish carcass say good morning to anti-griddle + orange liqueur whose pre-conditional love for salt + bitterness reminiscent of caviar + pancetta vinaigrette has put quail eggs under the cloche fish carcass say midday to emu eggs while the sun twirls inside a decadent basket of fish sauce without making the plastic mattress, walk-in refrigerator, + bacon sabayon feel left out fish carcass say cloud nine say egginess say shell-shocked say cornichon say it angelo say italian meringue say calf liver say republic of georgia say lavash say turnpike turnips say succotash say yuzu marmalade say overcooked quail say chef teah evans say fish head say into a barrel say bacon fat say baby corn say flavor profile say with victory say the gods are with me say no guts no glory say did not materialize say story on a plate
How does one grow the cojones to celebrate a Fudgsicle? I’ll tell you, and won’t begin by mentioning trellises forsooth. The items on the register are mechanisms inscrutable, yes. But they sway in the doubled-up air with a sense of lucidity, A kind of gong affect that chiggers as it steamrolls forth, Appraisals for unchintziest bling. Time for a sea change. Your turn, and this means you Come with me. Agreeable and mute, like the original Doppelgänger, or as we in my neighborhood called it The Doppler Radar. On school mornings, a trust fund in my teeth, High yacht vanilla swilled my parents’ bed. I would be multiple and exact. From that vantage, a windpipe brought forth On invisible horseback to the sick child’s bed. I’m sure you can’t quite imagine it, ember In the tabby lobby. But I could. I arrested it. Gershwin and American Airlines and I could always Tell the voice without the face, God’s gift to me For being lame in phlegmatic tissue. O parabola. Look at the ashtrays! There they are. Swinging, roiling, Ocean-choppy, a gauntlet of remote controls, Paint supplies all stacked up with nowhere to go In the corner of a grave illness — like pink paint. This forecast of centenarians in Florida, and Burbank. All my life I wanted a fractal tie and strawberry apron. Now I’m a Church lady, no hint of arthritic condition. My name isn’t Sallie or Mae, it’s Sallie Mae. Millions of tiny pendants, Waterford crystal, bubbling From local tree-fort where boys grope one another. Will you come with me for Pilates at Fort Ticonderoga? Denise Austin is here. Stretch in the sun. Champagne woods, lakes chasms, dismounts. Then you say: You have no idea what I lived through. The Green Mountain Boys were like a second dad to me.
Till the gold fields of stiff wheat Cry “We are ripe, reap us!” —Ted Hughes I begin to think Actaeon never changed. The words that followed him, the poems That leapt upon him and left him for dead Were difficult exactly to the extent They were rational. It makes perfect sense For nakedness to give way to frenzy. And the poems, let’s be clear, were naked. Time was, questions were put, clear as water. The Goddess bathed, and time was the soft smile Of water catching the sunlight on her. And the sunlight, let’s be clear, was sheer murder. Into the same creature, no human word Leaps twice. Given to frenzy, nakedness Smiles upon the breaking of men and dogs. How easy to lose all patience with chaste things! Christ, I am hoping to hear from you Before the hunters and suicides make off with me. Christ, I am hoping to take your weapons To a tarn freezing in the death of me. I shall harry the moon there. I shall halloo. Bayed in the cross-tree is a lion too. In 1969 a red stag made A cobweb of moonlight in his antlers. For once in your life, pray without ceasing, Pray the stag safely by the lion’s tree. Actaeon never changed. Predator Is simply prey to nakedness and reason. The poems have been out hunting all the time. Then it is Friday. Frisk. You might as well. Seeing as the rapeweed, you might as well. The lion is no stranger. The belling Stag is as familiar as the moon, but a strange Suicide. Taken by legs, taken By sinews, kissing the cobwebs of moonlight, He prays the prayer I was not quick to say. Berries and hoardings, ermine horseplay short Of the new, short of poems no longer old As I knew them, leaving the small schools For the main campus rapeweed climbing, pale. It is Friday. Stars won’t cross. Actaeon Never imagined the frail, sheer speed Of meat. Christ, eat me. Nothing else makes sense. On the far Safe side of becoming, Metaphor Is all love, The pure being of each Nude above Perfect sense. I begin to hunt words. The tension The soft smile Of the Goddess eases A short while Reappears In a red stag’s terror. Metaphor Leaps and eats. It is not difficult. Love is meat. The dogs leap on Actaeon. He is human. I begin to think of Time as anything In the gift of humans or as sacrifice To the long uplift of lions in the blood. Now dogs tear deeply into the living flesh. Each moment is a visible agony, And still the godly human nature remains Unharmed. I never imagined the sheer frail Of fear so powerful. Legs and sinews turn Into flowers. Between her breasts, the Goddess Shelters one such, one blood violet alive. The porch of heaven is littered with color. As familiar as the moon, our humanness Crosses into heaven as the new poem. On the far side of becoming, a life’s work Begins another kind of work, but naked Of change. There are animals, water and trees. Nothing is recognizable in its old Skin, yet everything shimmers. I am afraid, Shrinking from the teeth of the cold water And from the howling trees. I perish at this point Down among dogs and upwards beside lion. The pieces of me are carried fast away By plot and rhyme. See Artemis bathing. The moonlight on her body is the mother Of God. It makes perfect sense. I am eaten And fed changeless into her breast, blood Violet alive. I remain your friend.
Figured marry for money the stainlessness of it thermostatic shower simulates but isn’t rain I simulate rain too. I do lines off a photo of the lunar landing he says is make-believe I don’t know the difference most of the things most of the time are as if our Brooklyn Bridge selfies aren’t faked to goad our favorite exes as if my diet of carrots and cayenne is ’cause nothing tastes as good as skinny makes money makes the bed and stands beside us like a parent with poor boundaries who just wants us to be happy. Mommy’s money takes her to Key West where she sends pictures of a cat on king-sized everything says Hemingway had money, honey!
The train moved me, clothes kept me seated. I watched the tunnel walls blur and my face appear, nicer on black plexiglass. The people carried off like I almost was in the old childhood dream, my mother’s hand, the tornado in the parking lot. Flooring soda and rain, a humble poser, a composed consumer. Come back to me, I whispered to the purifying wind in a country I’d visited years earlier. Come get me, I said to imaginary John Lennon in the passenger seat of my 1984 Volvo. Nothing grows anywhere, I noted in the slick urine grime connecting two underground stations. As for my wallet, it was light in my hand, fictitious, I didn’t deserve it —  I held it up in the crowded terminal like a magician’s pigeon. Or I hid it between my knees on the jerking seat. Nobody wanted to touch me, or nobody who wanted to could reach me here, shaken like a screaming child under wet stairs.
like a single branch of ash honed to the handle of an axe and made to take the hand of a woodsman as he throws his body weight to fell all the ash has sown, I turn your words although the line you spoke was simple
Isn’t it shocking how he speaks for her? His thin voice wavering across the restaurant — she’ll have the cod artichoke bake. A giggle of  bubbles comes from behind them: a fish tank curtained with seagrass where a seahorse is tying itself to one of those slim, tweedy forms like a hand shaping itself  inside another’s the way my hand tucks into his like a difference pretending it’s not.
See, it’s a kind of crime scene, as if the mind were a dime novel, a scrim of need and semen, all cinder and siren, a dim prison where the miser dines on rinds of desire, and the sinner, sincere as denim, repeats Eden’s demise — that luckless toss of dice. Yet here at the rim of this demesne a mitigating mise-en-scène: a close-up of her mother stirring rice, a glass of sparkling cider, a mince pie spliced in — not to rescind or mend: what mind denies mercies mine in the end.
Toggle me up on one last vanity flight half drunk on a screw-top frizzante. It takes a hell of a lot more to get me here than it did when I had beauty, boys when bedding me was the easy way to know me. Don’t tuck me in so tight. I’m not your grandma. This rough blanket its green red yellow indigo stripes I traded for a perfectly warm beaver pelt. Fly me once more over my disloyal youth and its hangdog slavering over men whom age has de-sexed right along with me. They broadcast impotent outrage from aluminum tablets. I collect speculums with Bakelite handles arranging them by size though it no longer matters.
My wife went into the pantry for peaches but came out with a baby — I hadn’t noticed the house was pregnant, she said —  it was crying, so I cried back —  then she cried, the woman I barely know after sixteen years — why just the other day, she told me she’d always been afraid #2 pencils might be made of what they’re named — but even crying it was cute — pink and scrunchy-eyed —  like a newt balloon someone had blown up until puffy and ready to pop —  it was as if the universe decided it was time to act our age — that’s when we threw all our heroin out —  took the high-wire down and stopped skeet shooting in the living room —  and as much as I miss yelling Pull while stoned and standing on the edge of the air, looking into the abyssal fall I sorta desperately want, someone’s gotta change the diapers and burp the thing when it fills with swamp-gas or whatever that is — the miracle, you know, of birth is that my wife and I gave up hang gliding for making the nummy sound against the belly of the beast who showed up and took over —  just as once, I shot the rapids, popped out, squirmed against my mother and destroyed every other future she might have lived but one — long before I could speak, I was cruel — for a few seconds, I let my mother believe I was everything she ever wanted — and even now, decades after my few perfect seconds as a baby, if I called, at the first unexpected brush of Hey, ma against her ear, she’d still be hoodwinked by the tidal pull of my voice on the ghost of a womb they long ago ripped out, that she was holding a full moon in her arms
A cento Is there no when where this dream will rest?Blue smoke, wings, a plague of  walls, the city motionless, massof mind and angst rising in the brilliance of a cloudless light[le ciel, c’est mauve comme la lavande]. Everything turns in the quiet leisure of disaster:a kind of innocence now supernatural darkness floating,trees shaking, waterways swollen under a livid sky, storm cloudsforming in the blink of an eye. The thought of you is performative: blondehair, pale complexion, downcast jewels for eyes. Your dreadful martyrdomruns its course, written in mud and butter: the human instant, in whichyou sing yourself full-throated. Honey, ginger, flared saffron, graywhitemomentous rhythm of sea, barbarous smell of wet earth, ransackingor ravaged flowers, the landfill site, shit-hole, killing ground from which we supas shaking, hiccuping drunks. To forfeit wisdom, atone for sins undone:the allegorical hand thrust into torture, noise, shadowsof men. Between the lines, against the clock, this does not make,does not make a difference to them. This age [our age] demands an image of itsaccelerated grimace —  an old bitch gone in the teeth, the ultimatecunt — our botched civilization, our grave in the sky: last jizzof consciousness. I could have, now, blown my fucking brains out,but for a sweet shimmer of reason, blood, lone bells in gritty belfries, the shallowsof the sea, the surprise of days which slide under sunlight, the soulgathered up, exhaled as rings of smoke. Clay is the word and clay is the flesh. Youdrape your body against my body, like a sheet of mirrored glass;you remain, comme le ditFlaubert, melancholique devant son rêve accompli. — The word “red” is not. Forever in lust, forever in heat of fire and flood.Mule-bray, pig-grunt, bawdy cackle and the stomping of feet to the beatof some undone family portrait — bad teeth, bad eyes, beer and paint cans — the name and date split in soft slate. Money makes an inverse differenceto distance, when I lift her back to me now: nothing there but that palecurly head, working a machine up and down, an ochreautumn merging into twilight. I read much of the night. Guns click and spitand split up timber, until the river’s tent is broken: old kettles, oldbottles, a broken can, old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slutwho kept the till. Dreams nourished with tears, the sweet kinksof fists, light rain falling as mist. The hours after you are gone are a leadwhite morning of  hard, new ice, the snow drift of that which is left unspoken.Care and great sadness are both a burden. No gods, but a black swastika and no skybut grinding water, gasping wind, the wares of carthage, girlswith peacock eyes. The churn of stale words staining the heart again:bleached wood massed as bones. Your body is white as anemone petals,your skin is stone smooth, we [as cold as the dead they loadlike a pile of  baskets, mound of refuse, the sweepings of a street]are pressed close together, swaying. Merely the despaired occasion of wordshedmade keener by blessed rage. Scrape away the prison coating, the itchysea; drink from this glass of pure, real, resplendent blood, itsmalediction, freshly soiled and snug. It’s a question of altitude, probably, walkingalong your eyelid again, towards your tear duct. This dance of firethat touches our lips, scorches our tongues and pulls out the thinbeaten tin of my squally voice. O technosociety, where memory is tolerated,barely, as real estate on which to mount steeples of rust, layfresh mowed grass, burn gasoline: anything so long as there’s a marginand little but commerce between us. We never have pure space in front of us, rather:slight bondage, the world’s halter, this fashion for dressing or setting our hairablaze until we’re ash and ash in the heat of a blank but infinitely scrollingscreen, flared back to scratch. We begin and end with a groan, the tongue’scomfortable wetness, sureness of soul and fluttering lips. Then:lords of unquiet, quiet sojourn, each atom which belongs to youbelongs to me. All abandoned, the last rig broken, the staggeringshadows of trees, fence posts, gutted cars, faces blurred and Sienese grave.I wish that I could speak only of  it all, the voices of children singing.A chapel, in spite of  it all.
the stars The nights midweek are secrets kept. No soul on site, no signal/bars, and zilch for company except a zillion bright disarming stars. I’ll flit through ambers, quicker, higher. I’ll break each hamlet’s stop or yield. I’ll fix some noodles, start a fire and climb up to the topmost field. The stars at first are sparse, unclear. They surface in that drag between the darkened grass and stratosphere, of powder blue and bottle green. They blossom, thick and fast, in droves. They pulse, in clusters, magnify. The smoke that’s my potbelly stove’s frays outwards through each needle eye. I’ll head below. I’ll char till dawn some apple logs down to their core. By pewter light when stars have gone, I’ll do a bit, a little more.the rain You live inside its sound effects whole weeks on end: its pin machine, its cardboard drum, its soft-boiled eggs, its silent running submarine. It’s like the god of liquid rub- ber stirred at dawn to slip downstairs and sip a cigarette, to drub his fingertips on solid layers you poured across last summer’s drought. You love it, learn to, as it slows, and even as you come to doubt its dribs and drabs and pigeon toes. Forget the welcome rain outstayed. For days the leaves are parchment sheet and wind hangs chimeless in the shade. Still rain remains the point of heat. The rain is near. Like everything, it’s best those seconds just before: the broadleaf ’s backwards canvas sling, the fly strip flapping through the door.the wind The wind’s this ancient bloke below who chunters “we,” who wheezes “us,” though no one else will come or go. You want to ask the wind “Who’s us?” but hold your tongue till, in your head, the wind and him have somehow mixed, the type of wind that loves a shed and banging on of things not fixed: a belt-and-braces year-round wind, a kiln-dried cobwebbed hardwood wind, a greenhouse wind, a treebound wind, an end-of-season car-boot wind, a padlocked shower unit wind, an upturned wheelie dumpster wind, a channel not quite tuned-in wind, a hollow flight-path thunder wind, a dog-eared wind, a knocked-sign wind, a spouseless phantom ocean-blown autumnal graveyard Scots pine wind who speaks in plurals, moves alone.the grass One night last June, in cups, in love with pickled gin from bubbly flutes, our clothes in coils about the stove, we climbed the dark in birthday suits. It’s true! The grass was mown that day. Like hippies chained in meadow flowers, we tripped above the cut and lay in blades of petrol suede for hours. We listened to the lowing black. We giggled, kissed. We possumed dead. We woke as flesh and straggled back like beasts for parlor, dressed, then read. We trafficked grass in bedspreads, shoes, and never spoke of that again through winter’s interregnum blues, of being spooked by skin, of when the only care we had was grass, the only stir for miles around our freezing bones, our clinking glass, our dying to be rumbled, found.
The Linguisticator meets you at Carrefour.Un vrai galant, he buys you rouge à lèvres. Teaches socially accepted forms of extrication. If someone gropes you, say Arrête tes bêtises. If someone wonders why your hair is mussed, say C’est le mistral. If someone asks you to admire their ugly baby, say Je me sauve 
and leave. The Linguisticator is a veritable language experience. You programmed him in Oregon but he caught a virus. Now his Frenchness is cent fois off the spectrum. Sings Aznavour as you tour the centre historique and Piaf on the tram;Padam, Padam, when it clangs. The Linguisticator can stop a tram with one raised eyebrow, one soi-disant eyebrow. A fatalist, he has abandoned caution with certain potent liquors of the region. Ask him if he’s OK, 
he’ll sayLe silence éternel de ces vastes espaces m’effraie. Ask him what irony means, he saysTout pour le mieux dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles. But if his ennui peaks, he suspends all conversation. Broods for hours muttering Putain,je suis rien qu’un two-bit trompe l’œil. Malaise on a loop. It never fades.
The first thing I did against my will is see light. Older, in my mother’s belly with a good mind, I sometimes dreamed different kinds of darkness. I kicked, had sweet dreams and nightmares something like death, unborn happiness, blind hallucinations, memories I can’t name that still push me to act with unborn hands, all before breathing. What last thing will cross my mind after last rights and wrongs? They say the grand finale is like sleep, I may feel love’s nuts and bolts unscrewing —  it’s best to be held tight. A pillow does not kiss. May I never waver in peaceful unmindfulness. I’ve seen passionate suffocation, I’ve felt exquisite pain. Far better doggerel: “Nurse, nurse, I’m getting worse!” Undone, I’d like my last thoughts to rhyme:  I did not lend you my love. The end.
Day is carved in marble, a man reclining, a naked giant suffering. Preoccupied Day faces Night, who is a woman, huge, naked, Herculean, both pillowed on their uncarved rough marble bed. They need light to be seen, neither has anything to do with the sun or moon. Art is not astronomy, but the heavens are useful as gardening to poets, not useful as love or loneliness. If I write out of arrogance and ignorance a poem called Day, my chisel and mallet, words and pen, paper my marble, I must not confuse sunlight and Day, petals with hours. I could rhyme, perhaps by reason and chance describe the nature of Day. I might discover Nature is surprisingly sometimes moral, unexpected, a principle over which the lovers Night and Day quarrel. In my poem, faithful Night and faithful Day quarreled; rhyme told me they quarreled because Day is gold, Night hates the thought of celestial money, rages at the starless differences between cost and price. Michelangelo did not choose to make a sculpturePrezzo, or put the finger of God on a coin. Day and Night saw Danaë’s legs spread apart for Zeus to enter as a shower of gold. They are not household gods or saints. Better I write about things nearby, a chair, a stool, the principle I’m sitting on. Day is my dictionary. If my Day were animal, he might be a baby elephant who eats leaves. My good Day stays close to his mother, who is murdered for her ivory tusks. My Day is an endangered specie. I whisper into elephant ears, peace, my darling little Day. An owl hoots, your Day has no given name! True, I refuse names useful to many others: Sabbath, Sunday, Friday, Saturday. My Day is not baptized, circumcised, or blessed. I pick him up and hold Day in my arms. I put my head in Day’s open mouth. I tongue Day, and Day tongues me. Yes, although my Day loves Night, he tongues me in and out of bed. My Day knows Night carnally, lets Night know me. So I love Day today. And I love Night tonight.
There’s wondering, idle thoughts, thinking over what was last said, some poetry in my head like traffic outside the window. In my forgetful marrow, I consider often lying words, like everything and all.Nothing is another matter. Nothing comes of everything and all. Something comes of nothing. I know the word no means no,yes, yes, except when they mean each other. There’s water, which means water,dishwater, that may mean worthless. It’s often better to say worthless when you mean it. I’ve come to meaning, that can meanreason for or reason to live, words I might say outright without first saying meaning. Then there is a mean man. How did mean come to have two meanings? Take a dictionary of homonyms and tell me how words got to sound alike with different meanings and spellings, a Sea of  Words which is a Chinese dictionary. Language has its ways, its altitude and latitude ...     Stanley, baby, quit jerking on and off. I’m simply talking to myself. I am more familiar with the dark night and bright day of the body than the dark night of the soul. Light has an exaggerated reputation. Goethe’s last words were, “Mehr Licht!” Faust was dragged off to hell when he was content. Goethe preferred discontent, which needed light. The seed is contained discontent.
They put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph Except he wasn’t dead at first they put Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s after Joseph Died and I used to call him Joe they put Me in   Joe’s clothes at first before he died Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him I Was seven I was seven when he died Still but a whole year bigger then but I Wore his clothes still and the whole year I lived with Momma Varina and with daddy Jeff I never lived so good as when I lived with Them and especially it was daddy Jeff Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes Until they fit as tight as bandages
Each time the babies came I knew they would be gone by morning. Bright as bulbs turned out of beds, hard and full of promise. Bodies on the brink of unfolding. I could not hold them and I could not hold them long enough. It was a sin to let them in. I did not expect them to stay. I did not expect their forgiveness when I turned away.


You might make a choice between what descends with these tiles lined before you, or arcing forward through a history that is constant against us. A bridge to block out the dawn. Or monoxide that passes like breath. My breath. I know all about what’s underground, and I keep my searches for the invisible there. In the park above, you’ve got your bike locked and the chain cut. The stubborn part doesn’t say anything, doesn’t need to to start marching home, ugly block, block of shouting, block syrupy with flies. I would like to hear about it, but I am backed into an argument myself on a coil of cool fall breeze, backed through seasons into the past, home or near it, in the moment when I’m as right as I’ll ever be bled into I’ll be this right forever. There’s no out available for this character, just a decade producing the present, warm, and then warmer around him. It was as if I hadn’t seen the harbor, didn’t want to admit it by doing so now. Something like a pile of books falls over inside me or the room I’m in breaks off from the house, slides almost out of view. All things didn’t happen or did. You might’ve routed a highway so it crashes through the seventh floor of a skyscraper, and the moment for that passes by us still. You can live like a column of light pours over you, but that’s not all you’ll see.
i   thees wite skirtes / & orang  sweters  / i wont / inn the feedynge marte / wile mye vegetable partes bloome / inn the commen waye /   a grackel  inn the guarden rooste / the tall  wymon wasching handes /  or eyeing turnups  / the sadened powres wee rub / so economicalie / inn 1 virsion off thynges / alarum is mye nayme  / unkempt & handeld i am hors / i am sadeld /   i am a brokn hors  ii  the bit provydes  its hors / the rocke  provyded a boye blessynge gode / i wantd 1  secrete but fore the rod  inn this / mye longish throte / i kno  no new waye / 2 speech  this / the powre off lyons  iii    tonite i wuld luv to rite the mothe inn the guarden / 2 greev it / & as a mater off forme / did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye / just shye off 27 / its such a plesure to b alive / inn this trembled soot / u lent / shock is a struktured responce / a whord lost inn the mouthe off keepers / & u thum at the mothe / a dozen bes / i tetherred thees nites / i gathred so manie treees
Before Gilgamesh invented the kaleidoscope and Galileo the Rubik’s cube, before the scimitar-horned oryx went missing, before the tamarind trees went bare, before the stars’ eyelids were wrapped in tinfoil, before the leaves could gnaw on water, before electrons made donations, before the owl wore a mask, before the wind had a sound, before the moon had a name and the smoke a spine, before the tulips crossed their legs, before the tongue was armored, before the ghosts rode centaurs to riots, before cyberspace was culled and belly buttons sown to wombs, before the taste had an after, before intellect became property and thunder premeditated, before the New, New World, before a stone wished to be more than a stone, before we had a change of clothes, before the grass was color-blind, before the rivers lost their fingers, and the rain stopped teething, before the kings were all beheaded, the gravedigger neither young nor old, before a lion was still a lion, before the girls were all killed, before the trapeze gave way. We hung suspended in time by the arches of our curved feet and this tickled the gods, tickled them to death. & I think our silence cut us loose, let us go falling from the doubt, secretly thrilled at the hems and ever so eager to break.
In ancient Greece, for all her heroes, for Medea    ...    water meant death. — Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones i poured a bowl of cereal, threw the empty box in the trash can. granddaddy pulled the box from the trash, poured the crumbs into a bowl, then doused the sand in milk. he looked down at the bowl, murmuring about how he had survived the depression. told a story about asking for hot water at colored diners, how he would pour ketchup in cups to make soup. this was how i first learned i am  wasteful.  • i would stand in the bathroom with my mother. would ask her why the water in the bowl was red. she would tell me she had eaten beets. i suppose i was too young to learn the truth, milkflowers spill petals red.  • in my catholic school of fish, we took a beautifully wrapped box, passed it around the class, unwrapping it piece by piece. afterwards it was cleverly explained that the box is a girl’s virginity the gift we give our husbands. & who wants a toy that has already been opened? half the joy is in untying the string. this is how i was taught that at my very core, i am  ungrateful.  • i met someone recently, in an irish bar, who told me it’s about knowing what i need. he said laterwhat you need is a wife
there are fat wet vines creeping into myhouse through the pipes and throughthe walls gentle as blue flames they curl into my living there is ice in my attic sugar on mytile I am present and useless like a nose tornfrom a face and set in a bowl whenI saw God I used the wrong pronounsGod bricked up my mouthholehis fists were white as gold there wereroaches in my beard now I live like a widow every day a heave of knitting patternsand sex toys my family speaks of mewith such pride noonesh to roghane they sayhis bread is in oil I thank them for that andfor their chromosomes most of whichhave been lovely I am lovely too my bodyis hard and choked with juice like a plasticthroat stuffed with real grapes my turn-onsinclude Ovid and fake leather my turn-offs have all been ushered into the base- ment I’ll drink to them and to any victorythe vines are all growing toward the footof my bed I am waiting for them to come under the covers I am the only person still inthis house there is no one here to look away
It’s common to live properly, to pretendyou don’t feel heat or grief: wave nightly at Miss Fugue and Mister Goggles before divinginto your nightcap, before reading yourself a bedtime story or watching your beloved sinkto the bottom of a lake and noting his absence in your log. The next day you drop his clothes offat Goodwill like a sack of mail from a warplane then hobble back to your hovel like a knight movingonly in Ls. It is comfortable to be alive this way, especially now, but it makes you so vulnerable to shock — you ignore the mortgage and find a falconer’s glove in your yard, whole hand still inside. Or you arrive homeafter a long day to discover your children have grown suddenly hideous and unlovable. What I’m tryingto say is I think it’s okay to accelerate around corners, to grunt back at the mailman and swallow allyour laundry quarters. So much of everything is dumb baffle: water puts out fire, my diseases can becomeyour diseases, and two hounds will fight over a feather because feathers are strange. All I want is to finallytake off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tugon them but secretly I will want that very much.
Holy father I can’t pretend I’m not afraid to see you again but I’ll say that when the time comes I believe my courage will expand like a sponge cowboy in water. My earth- father was far braver than me —  coming to America he knew no English save Rolling Stones lyrics and how to say thanks God
After Monica McClure Ms. Nafis underwent a repeat pelvic ultrasound today the final report is not available Preliminary reports suggest a normal right ovary The left is enlarged and contains 2 separate complex cysts one measuring 3.6 centimeters the second measuring 1.8 centimeters B — Black or African-American
After Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s “Self Stones Country” photographs Know what the almost-gone dandelion knows. Piece by piece The body prayers home. Its whole head a veil, a wind-blown bride. When all the mothers gone, frame the portraits. Wood spoon over Boiling pot, test the milk on your own wrist. You soil, sand, and mud grown bride. If you miss your stop. Or lose love. If even the medicine hurts too. Even when your side-eye, your face stank, still, your heart moans bride. Fuck the fog back off the mirror. Trust the road in your name. Ride Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride. Burn the honey. Write the letters. What address could hold you? Nectar arms, nectar hands. Old tire sound against the gravel. Baritone bride. Goodest grief is an orchard you know. But you have not been killed Once. Angel, put that on everything. Self. Country. Stone. Bride.
For Chino In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sandand sand only, in the middle of those acacias, whiptails, and coyotes, someone yelled“¡La Migra!” and everyone ran. In that dried creek where 40 of us slept, we turned to each otherand you flew from my side in the dirt. Black-throated sparrows and dawnhitting the tops of mesquites, beautifully. Against the herd of legs,you sprinted back toward me, I jumped on your shoulders,and we ran from the white trucks. It was then the gun ready to press its index.I said, “freeze, Chino, ¡pará por favor!” So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you,you pushed me under your chest, and I’ve never thanked you. Beautiful Chino —  the only name I know to call you by — farewell your tattooed chest: the M, the S, the 13. Farewellthe phone number you gave me when you went east to Virginia,and I went west to San Francisco. You called twice a month,then your cousin said the gang you ran from in San Salvadorfound you in Alexandria. Farewell your brown arms that shielded me then,that shield me now, from La Migra.
Salvador, if I return on a summer day, so humid my thumbwill clean your beard of  salt, and if  I touch your volcanic face, kiss your pumice breath, please don’t let cops say: he’s gangster.Don’t let gangsters say: he’s wrong barrio. Your barrios stain you with pollen, red liquid pollen. Every day copsand gangsters pick at you with their metallic beaks, and presidents, guilty. Dad swears he’ll never return,Mom wants to see her mom, and in the news: every day black bags, more and more of us leave. Parents say:don’t go; you have tattoos. It’s the law; you don’t knowwhat law means there. ¿But what do they know? We don’thave greencards. Grandparents say: nothing happens here. Cousin says: here, it’s worse. Don’t come, you could be    ...    Stupid Salvador, you see our black bags, our empty homes, our fear to say: the war has never stopped,and still you lie and say: I’m fine, I’m fine, but if  I don’t brush Abuelita’s hair, wash her pots and pans,I cry. Like tonight, when I wish you made it easier to love you, Salvador. Make it easierto never have to risk our lives.
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit. —1 Corinthians 12:13 If in his image made am I, then make me a miracle. Make my shrine a copper faucet leaking everlasting Evian to the masses. Make this empty water glass a goblet of long-legged French wine. Make mine a Prince-purple body bag designed by Crown Royal for tax collectors to spill over & tithe into just before I rise. If in his image made am I, then make my vessel a pearl Coupe de Ville. Make mine the body of a 28-year-old black woman in a blue patterned maxi dress cruising through Hell on Earth, TX again alive. If in his image made are we, then why the endless string of effigies? Why so many mortal blasphemes? Why crucify me in HD across a scrolling news ticker, tied to a clothesline of broken necks long as Time? Is this thing on? Jesus on the ground. Jesus in the margins. Of hurricane & sea. Jesus of busted levees in chocolate cities. Jesus of the Middle East (Africa) & crows flying backwards. Of blood, on the leaves, inside diamond mines, in under- developed mineral-rich countries. If in your image made are we, the proliferation of your tie-dyed hippie doppelgänger makes you easier to daily see. & in this image didn’t we make the godhead, slightly stony, high enough to surf a cloud? & didn’t we leave you there, where, surely, paradise or justice must be meted out? Couldn’t we see where water takes the form of whatever most holds it upright? If then this is what it’s come down to. My faith, in rifle shells. In Glock 22 magazine sleeves. Isn’t it also then how, why, in a bucket shot full of holes, I’ve been made to believe?
I’ve tracked myself from day to day how many steps through a field of snow how many hours have I slept what have I eaten what did I burn calories or cigarettes what birds have poured through Bellefontaine where mausoleums bear the names of Busch and Brown Lemp and Spink on marble white as winter endivewhen I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies
Even city planning. Yesterday, for example, with its unexpected view of posterity draped loosely between high-rises  — unlike the composed street raised to stoop level like a stroller. No moon but clearly under some pressure to form one in quick stages, while being careful to avoid what intervenes with commas, speech tags, etc. Architraves pre-everything. So that time, or what’s left of it, prior to displaying its secret life (which wasn’t so secret to begin with) waves everyone and everything away, including the burnished sills and their plants lithographed with evening plus the host of secondary qualities that rush in on the least pretext, a new unit of space, some jazz below, mouths to feed ... wrinkles alchemy prints on studious foreheads. Or indeterminacy. What did Rimbaud know about ageing anyway? — More than you think. Leaving (you might say) a colorful flag without a flagpole, the parade route all but painted over like the history of unopposed takeovers and the real wrinkle is that nothing is there for the taking no matter how it appears. Shuffling off to Buffalo or wherever they go to fill the intemperate, intermediate needs, while the wisps of grass that inevitably push up between cracks look digital and the buses squeeze their passengers to left and right like shifts in basic economic priorities. Have I mentioned noodling, as opposed to “raptures of attention”? The effect without a cause — unless you’re one of those who find that notion empty of meaning —  not only in connection to instrumental music (“I wasn’t playing anything I was just noodling”) but phenomena in general, potential as well as kinetic, from Y. Zowl singing “to a small guitar” to our near-absorption in textures, weathers, (invasive) ellipses, sublimation, etc.? To sum up: it’s not that the telegram to Elizabeth Bishop was 
undelivered but that the dead — if not busy licking their wounds —  are absorbed with themselves, as we must appear to the perceptive hawks. Dark gray, dark green, beet red all over, but also (hence the notion of collateral damage when it applies) thickness tout court.
Demain! Not much of a glass. So-called legerdemain padded by you know who in the direction of Argentina: a #3 pencil implacable as a first aid kit. War or pine trees. Thus nothing is spotted with Futurism and hillsides, the idiom we skulk in in honor of which differential diagnoses take a nap in November worrisomeness. Reliquary dreams. Frangipani! If you leave without controlled faddishness, shoulder to shoulder like butter, the truculence is on the stargazer side. What godsend fiddles with sadness. Careful about cheekbones, songs including the Atlantic.
I mean, who isn’t heating up for the next life on the order of Antoine Doinel, or a pot of unsweetened chocolate. Beginning with a single window and the sense that what we know outgrows everything except a headache or the desk dreaming on its own. It doesn’t matter if being upright brings living beings closer to the lives they lead (one’s 26-year-old self smokes a cigar but isn’t a desperado) nor is beginning a poem with someone’s wrath a means of stepping outside the Self as though volume equalled flesh tones — any more than the Epic of the Roast Chicken with Lyonnaise Potatoes and Greens takes over the above-ground, colors and smells aside.
spare us your burial rites spare us the first rib the flood, the resurrection spare us your dairy & meats your belief in a life after this one heaven’s a city we’ve been priced out of our mothers fled for more affordable children for the price of liver heaven wants nothing to do with pleasure on earth on this the occasion of my brother’s wedding i need something awful done to my body heaven’s a boy who wants me to crawl through his mother’s midnight-window heaven’s the condom splitting into light heaven’s not a place more a wound i make & pass through when we’re done he asks how many men i’ve fucked this month & not loved spare me the quilt & blankets spare me the look in his eyes when he takes me careful as a poison inside him spare me the lecture on the survival of my body & i will spare you my body
when i say pre-exposure prophylaxis you thinkeasy fix. greek in origin. an act of guarding.east of here a small temple.inside parishioners strip nudeas armless statues, their stonegenitals hardening under a chemist’s glare.the garden out front fecund & tended.the garden inside bare. when i say tenofovir disoproxil you thinkchemical names. saint names. names without origin.an unpronounceable string of letters. the generic namesof petty angels. the drug’s molecular makeup applied in& around the eyes & lips. the names of viruses & blind trials.the kept-vial of love. the unknowable side effects of blood. when i say oral emtricitabine you thinkonce a day swallow a small sun& all hymn in you comes undonethe way a lit match deads the smellof a public bathroom when i say nucleotide analog reverse transcriptase inhibitor you thinkthirsty epidemicyou push the blue pill through its foilyou know each new medicine trailsour dead behind it like wedding canslistenyou can hear them now can’t you?
While the Doormat asks neurotic questions about his ex, the Dream Girl looks at her watch if her man brings up the ex, and if the man ever says, “Everyone was in love with my ex,” a Dream Girl won’t ask for a photo, but if a photo of the ex is provided, the Dream Girl won’t demean the appearance of the ex because her man will likely rush to his ex’s defense. The lesson is that when a man considers his ex a prize looks have little to do with it, for when a woman acts like a prize a man can forget he’s with a battle axe. What should you say when he asks questions about your ex? Remember you’re a prize, so you needn’t report that your ex stole appliances or defaulted on child support or that your ex has a Mafioso brother doing time for racketeering or that your ex is “still stalking you” — because your man will not find these ex stories charming, if he’s classy, so what you say about your ex is simply, “We wanted different things,” or, alternatively, “My ex and I went separate ways.” It’s none of his business: your ex and all the vicissitudes of your past, like the jewelry your ex gave you which you pawned, or your violent fantasies about your ex because inquiring minds don’t need to know. Did you know that exes are a common conversation topic among men: “You remember my ex, the one who snapped ... ?” they might say, referring to the “terrible” ex who was “possessed by demons,” thus causing the inevitable ex- tramarital affair? Of course he never had anything to do with his ex’s transformation, he was a perfect angel, but lo and behold, the ex- orcist was suddenly required! Women believe these narratives and ex- coriate themselves if they’re Doormats, but love is beset by variables, and Dream Girls must take control in this world of unknowns.
If your house is a dress it’ll fit like Los Angeles red sun burning west, deserts, fields, for certain it will drape even a boy no less boy in disrepair wandering from shore to crest, others mistake his searching for despair, no, never, but for thirst, cloaked as he is, warm, radiant in a house dress.
Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled in their symptoms to represent not merely their own experiences, but the experiences of a great number of other persons, and can suffer, as it were, for a whole mass of people, and fill all the parts of a drama by means of their own personalities alone. — Sigmund Freud Anne identified with Cate until it became a bona fide illness, for Boris had left Cate, resulting not only in psychic estrangement but an unconscious stream of hostility directed not at Boris, but at his new woman, Anne, whom Cate viewed as her rival. Cate remained excessively tender with Boris, though Cate, for him, had been a “totem animal” from which he gained power by “eating.” Whereas Boris was the patriarch, Anne was the ego alien; and whereas Cate was Anne’s fixation, Anne was no one’s obsession, so she was admitted to a psychiatric ward with the unbidden associations she could not be induced to abandon. On the rare occasions she slept, the manifest and latent content of her dreams was the dance of abandonment between Boris and Cate, which Anne, in her waking hours, projected onto the walls, as though screening a silent film. She could not be induced to abandon this footage; she could not be induced to abandon her object love of Boris (whose own object choice was his ego-libido); or her identification with Cate, who felt no friendship towards Anne. Soon Anne drew a mental triangle on every surface she saw, be it phallic or concave, and sometimes this triangle was isosceles, sometimes it was equilateral, and often it was right.
1 			mudstone crumbs 			shell 			fragments 			finest sand 			tidal 			grind 			every day 			every 			night 			a medium of 			crawling 			life 			compressed 			baked 			lifted 			blown away 			salt 			marsh 			shallow 			soil 			shingle 			marram 			grass 			fescue 			grass 			tidal 			path 			creek 			of 			pollen 			falls 			in whispers in the clay in the loam in the top of  the soil in the sand in the molt of  the sea in the light sand the light sound of shift in the swash zone waves burrow for release in the bend of  the body I balance my current only takes me back when seawards seawards is the call of my curve & no turning   2   Two large cormorants flew rapidly and very low across the water heading directly towards Langstone Rock, where Dawlish Warren joins the coast just beyond the western edge of the Exe estuary. Their wing tips were almost touching the choppy water. This must have been about 7:45 on Friday morning; I was thirty yards or so out in the sea, only my head visible between the waves that the cormorants flew in among as they powered along one behind the other. I had come down the concrete lifeboat ramp and taken just a few steps on wet sand scattered with various shells, little gleaming stones, and scraps of seaweed, getting quickly into the cool water. The sky was piled up with dark gray cloud overhead but clear and bright at the horizon. The two birds passed close by and continued on their way indifferent to me watching them from the water and they gave no indication if they saw anything unusual.  she swam  only at night  on the spring tides in the silk light of water slipping her over the mud flats when they studied why she did it drifted far beyond her limits though it made her vulnerable to prey several theories came but none swam at night in a spring tide in the silk light unsure of itself becoming only what is left after breaking   3   herring gull black-headed gull arctic tern oystercatcher turnstone sanderling carrion crow jackdaw white wagtail rock pipit peregrine kestrel buzzard brent goose cormorant kingfisher farther out gannet stomach of fur coughed up at low tide stranded snowfall of fur dusting the mouth sanded out of this worms fall soft as whispers coiling into faun- ing “Aphrodita” & out of her hair come the corpses of a swallowed sea   4   mussel shell oyster shell clam shell cockle shell whelk shell limpet shell winkle shell razor shell crab shell lobster shell prawn shell sea lettuce she  windblown sand  seashell sand  shifting sand she  sea sandwort  sea rocket  sea holly she  half sand she both sea  she half sea she both sand she is a both-formed thing she  wool sand  cotton sand  wood sand she  sea leather  sea crystal  sea skin she  half wool she both skin  she half skin she both wool she is a woollen skin she  asphalt soil  nylon soil  sandy soil she  landscape  escape  seascape she half soil  she both scape she half scape  she both soil she escapes   5   And swimming my slow breast stroke out to the channel I saw a darkwinged butterfly come flying in above the waves, moving with the breeze, heading for the dunes. Was this a migrant painted lady, third generation, from Africa? drifter on the surface upside down dead  water  floater upper sheltered  on the littoral fringe  lower very sheltered  swimmer upward of hundreds of thousands  of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds  of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of houses of hundreds of houses of of hundreds of houses of hundreds of houses of of sands of houses of sand of houses of of sand of hums of sand of hums of sand of hum of sand of humming
An apple tree bent double with fruit grew in the middle of the living room shaking gently as the average family pootled by with plates or devices in their hands The room was almost all tree everyone edged round it Curiously no one picked a single apple nor did the ripe fruit ever fall The full tree stood there a daemon to behold Who lives in that house now I can’t tell you My childhood lives on there and my parent shadows and all my days and nights that will never bear fruit The apple tree I speak of roots itself partly in truth and partly in lies Those roots are splinters of the true cross They alone know why miracles are best avoided
After Richard Siken comes wave after wave after wave the derivative & harvest, the myrtle tops of sandstorms & milk glasses, apple, horse & song, list, listen, light leaks from the spaces between the bubbles — call it foam — tender pocket of yes yes yes call it flesh — eat tonight & you’ll still have to eat tomorrow, eat tonight & it still won’t be over — eat tonight: peaches bloom even in the dark, as wet as a girl — hands & feet, horse & song, the same hole bandaged over & over, not a wound but its absence — a sum of histories — the nights colliding like marbles, & if there is an end then it’s too dark to see, if there is an end then it’s too bright to see, hands folding, unfolding, & you, Scheherazade!, milky goddess of recursion, best DJ in the city, you spin records, spin heads, cross legs & cross deserts, & always pause just moments before he
The gods do not interest him, nor their debris, nor their terrible storms: he already knows how a body is made to glow, precursor to neon lights —  how hunger is hereditary. Sons should not be haunted except by the dead, and his father is sober now, accepts tribute in silence and Coca-Cola. He is thankful for strong knees, for momentum that lives in the mouth and the hands. Here is the fish with the filigree scales, here is the pot of rice — here, here: the grain of rice that makes the bowl a bowl. Tuna’s blood hardening in the water. Here is the night through which he runs, realizing the floor has turned to tissue paper, tearing into morning. No, the gods do not compel him: he cannot bear the sight of the sun, an open sore —  prefers the colors of its setting, how they reflect the ocean’s currents, always giving rise to something new or something he has forgotten. The sky as a table, mounds of rice glazed with soy, gleaming like a display of mackerel, like snow general upon the island’s winter spine. Days parade in their uniform; hearts attack, close markets, open new ones. He teaches his sons to gut fish, does not despair his own hands’ speed: salt bandaging a cut, memory fraying at the edges. Reaching, always —  the top of the ladder, buried in light —
Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would sayscreen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry. In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would ride it up onto his forehead for brief intervals, then down, pulled by hand that still worked. A bit. Sometimes shaking too much so just cried eyes. Cried now now. Once cried out light — more like a hiss — was there for that. Yanked it quick. Needed it so badly, the bandage, the world is a short place, wanted the illustration of it gone, wanted to not see out, wanted no out. But I am guessing. The vineyards down the slope, each latent bud beginning to plump. In the distance, mountains. Beyond sea. All of it distraction, but from what. A waste of what. The red sleepmask. I should have burned it with the rest but kept it. The pane made trees look painted on. Silky. Not good silky. In the next valley once, hammering. Thought it human at first. The woodpeckers went on for days. A carnival of searching for void. How full void is. Small tufts of grass growing so that I can keep track. Taking root is not an easy way to go about finding a place to stay
Dropping napkins, corks, and non-compostables into the trash, I see that friends have mistaken my everyday chopsticks for disposables, helpfully discarding them alongside inedibles: pork bones, shrimp shells, bitter melon. Among napkins and corks, they do look compostable: off-white, wooden, warped from continual washing — no lacquer, no ornament. But anyone who thinks these chopsticks are disposable doesn’t live with chopsticks in the comfortable way of a favorite robe, oversized, a bit broken. Thin paper napkins, plastic forks, and non-compostable takeout boxes constitute the chopstick’s natural habitat to many I hold dear. With family or alone, I’ll maintain that chopsticks aren’t disposable, but if I can make peace with the loss of utensils when breaking bao with guests, I’ll be one of them, not digging in the napkins and corks. Compostable chopsticks are the answer: everyday and disposable.
Dying only mother’s hands continue undying, blading into air, impersonal, forced, curving it down — drought incessant rain revolution and the organs shutting down but not these extremities, here since I first opened my first eyes first day and there they were, delicate, pointing, will not back off, cannot be remembered. Mother, dying — mother not wanting to die — mother scared awakening each night thinking she’s dead — crying out — mother not remembering who I am as I run in — who am I — mother we must take away the phone because who will you call next — now saying I dreamt I have to get this dress on, if I get this dress on I will not die — mother who cannot get the dress on because of broken hip and broken arm and tubes and coils and pan and everywhere pain, wandering delirium, in the fetid shadow- world — geotrauma — trans- natural — what is this message you have been scribbling all your life to me, what is this you drag again today into non-being. Draw it. The me who is not here. Who is the ghost in this room. What am I that is now drawn. Where are we heading. Into what do you throw me with your quick eye — up onto me then down onto the blank of the page. You rip the face off. I see my elbow there where now you bend it with the pen, you fill it in, you slough it off me onto more just-now making of more future. You look back up, you take my strangeness from me, you machine me, you hatch me in. To make what, mother, here in this eternity this second this million years where I watch as each thing is seen and cancelled-out and re- produced — multiplying aspects of light in the morning air — the fingers dipping frantic into the bag of pens, pencils, then here they are — the images — and the hands move — they are making a line now, it is our world, it horizons, we ghost, we sleepwalk, everything around us is leveled, canceled, we background, we are barely remains, we remain, but for what, the fingers are deepening curling, bringing it round, the mind does not — I don’t think — know this but the fingers, oh, for all my life scribbling open the unseen, done with mere things, not interested in appraisal, just seizure — what is meant by seizure — all energy, business- serious, about direction, tracing things that dissolve from thingness into in-betweens — here firm lines, here powdery lift off — hunger, fear — the study begins — all is not lost — the thought a few seconds wide — the perusal having gone from here to here, aggregates, thicket, this spot could be where we came in, or where we are saved, could be a mistake, looks across room through me, me not here then, me trying to rise in the beam, nothing I do will make it happen, rock-face, work that excludes everything that is not itself, all urge in the process of becoming all effect, how can I touch that hand like snow moving, when is it time again as here there is no time, or time has been loaded but not cocked, so is held in reserve, all wound up, I was also made but not like this, I look for reluctance, expectation, but those are not the temperatures — if only I could be in the scene — my time is not passing — whose is the time that is passing — the hands rushing across the paper, cloudy with a sun outside also rushing scribbling — wisdom turning itself away from wisdom to be — what — a thing that would gold-up but cannot, a patch of blue outside suddenly like the cessation of language when lips cease to move — sun — self- pronouncing — I want this to not be my writing of it, want my hands not to be here also, mingling with hers who will not take my hand ever into hers, no matter how late we are, no matter that we have to run so fast through all these people and I need the hand, somewhere a radiant clearing, are we heading for it, head down towards the wide page, hand full of high feeling, cannot tell if it takes or gives, cannot tell what it is that is generating the line, it comes from the long fingers but is not them, all is being spent, the feeling that all — all that we need or have — would be spent for this next thing this capture, actually loud though all you can hear is the small scratching, and I feel dusk approaching though it is still early afternoon, just slipping, no one here to see this but me, told loud in silence by arcs, contours, swell of wind, billowing, fluent — ink chalk charcoal — sweeps, spirals, the river that goes nowhere, that has survived the astonishments and will never venture close to that heat again, is cool here, looking up at what, looking back down, how is it possible the world still exists, as it begins to take form there, in the not being, there is once then there is the big vocabulary, loosed, like a jay’s song thrown down when the bird goes away, cold mornings, hauling dawn away with it, leaving grackle and crow in sun — they have known what to find in the unmade undrawn unseen unmarked and dragged it into here — that it be visible.
Can you imagine waking up every morning on a different planet, each with its own gravity? Slogging, wobbling, wavering. Atilt and out-of-sync with all that moves and doesn’t. Through years of trial and mostly error did I study this unsteady way —  changing pills, adjusting the dosage, never settling. A long time we were separate, O Earth, but now you have returned to me.
O slow. O so low solo. Indigo lasso. Pell-mell the palomino snow falls in a disheveled manner.
Lots of time, lots of cars, Lots of money, so much love, Very cold and very hot. But now it’s freezing out, The director Lanzmann is giving us an interview, Without, it must be said, Much passion. This man was intimate with Simone de Beauvoir And worked alongside Sartre. But that’s later. For now Channel One Is filming him en face In the next room And we can make out A few scattered remarks. His nine-hour film About the Holocaust Played in every Country —  People nodded off, And in their dreams They saw the horrors And the voice of our famous guest Faded in and faded out. It fades in, fades out, In the hall The beautiful Camilla comes and goes. She perches on the sofa Then she walks away. The assistant to the cultural attaché Of the French Embassy Is also here. She’s the one Who signed up me and Kolya For this interview with Lanzmann. She’s also beautiful and young. A little older than us But she looks younger. Whereas me and Kolya, We don’t want to look younger. One of us is thirty-three, The other’s thirty-four. Not yet at the peak Of our powers, We’re gathering force And preparing to strike. We’re like Lanzmann Who at the age of eighteen Joined the French Communist Party. He joined not because He read Marx or Lenin But because he was asked By his friends In the Resistance. We are like Lanzmann Who cried when he learned Of the death of Stalin. He cried not because He loved Stalin But because he was Sentimental: He saw Soviet Sailors Lowering their flags to half-mast, And thought about how The Soviet people Had absorbed, During the war, The most terrible And frightful blows. We are like Lanzmann Who in 1949 Made the acquaintance Of Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. He began to work with them On the magazineLes Tempes modernes. And today he is That publication’s Editor in chief. We are like Lanzmann Who in 1972 Made the filmIsrael, Why, Which, in the words Of the online encyclopedia, “Did not shy away from Difficult questions.” We discussed all our questions In advance of the interview. Inside us it was as if Some keys, cold and hot, Were rattling. It’s nearly freezing out. Meanwhile I was thinking about how Kolya is a rude artist. In the sense that There are radical artists Everywhere you look, But not so many Genuinely rude artists. The rudeness of an artist, I thought, Is an interesting quality. But now Channel One is leaving, Kolya takes off his jacket with its skulls And sets up our cameras. “We are the representatives of the left,” we say. Lanzmann lowers his gaze wearily: Now they’re going to start in about Israel. But Kolya, having explained a bit About his art collective, Asks Lanzmann instead About monumental Art: “Monumental Art. What might it look like Right now?” “How should I know?” Says Lanzmann. “There could be no Monumental Art Today. The world is scattered. For A monumental Work you need A unified sense Of the world.” “But you yourself Filmed a monumental Work. Surely you have Some ideas on this score?” “I didn’t think about That. I’m an artist, Understand? I don’t Think in such Categories. What are you, Communists? Your task is The Revolution. Why are you asking Me about Monumental Art?” We’re the ones asking the questions We’re the ones asking the questions We  here  are the ones  asking the questions. In the iron air Of Moscow. Edelman, Markelov, Pechersky are with us. Medvedev the Bear Jew and Jeff “The Snowman” Monson —  That’s what they call us Around town. “In what capacity Did you make that film —  As a Frenchman, a Jew, An intellectual? Or as a member Of the Resistance?” “I repeat, I wanted    ...    ”    •  “Does the term The ‘Holocaust Industry’ Mean anything to you?” “What’s that?” Asks Lanzmann. (I warned Kolya That Lanzmann wouldn’t Understand Or would pretend Not to understand What that means.) “The Holocaust Industry Usually means The use of the memory Of the destruction of the Jews During World War II To legitimate, in part, The State of Israel.” The translator starts To worry. She suspects us Of anti-Semitism. But we are like Lanzmann Who came  to Moscow To do this strange interview, Without revealing his secrets. He won’t talk, He’s hard as a rock, This man whose youth Is reflected In our cocky Faces. Lanzmann himself has conducted Many interviews: With Franz Suchomel, The SS Unterscharführer, With  Jan Karski, And others. He knows very well How to walk His subjects Into this or that Confession Or experience, All while leveraging His moral authority. And here, gradually, In the words of this master Of the interview, We begin to detect The artistic position Which we so oppose. “I, you know, just Slapped together this Thing. I was interested In the human aspect. As for ideas And theories That’s not my bag.”   •  Of course, many artists Take this stand. They don’t interest us at all. But Lanzmann, on the one hand, Enjoys this status As an artist who works with Emotions, memories, His own and other people’s Experiences, that is, more with Emotions than with documents. On the other hand, he knew Full well that his film Would be received As a political proclamation, That it would quickly occupy the heart Of intellectual and socio- Political debates. To work on people’s feelings, As an artist, while at the same time Refusing to engage in rational Explanations, of the sort Demanded of intellectuals — really This is the same stuff as using the “Incomprehensibility” of Hitler Or the destruction of the Jews As a form of political argument —  And this is the shameful Hypocrisy of our friend Lanzmann. How to save himself From this disgrace The old man Lanzmann Does not know. But we know, and we’ll tell: You need to speak about Israel You need to speak about Israel In this is the key to immortality This is the burning wound And it is Lanzmann who understands this He knows that politics is the wound On the body of history. An unnecessary, unwanted wound That will not heal. To refuse to forget politics To refuse to tear Israel From one’s heart —  Because politics is Always here, And Palestine is a bloody wound that says: Politics is Always here. You can’t hide from it At the supermarket, You can’t run from it With beautiful words. And old man Lanzmann Understands this, He knows that Politics is the wound On the body of history. In its inability to process its own Information, A rejection of politics Leads to senility. (Only later would I find This passage In an interview Lanzmann gave To Der Spiegel:Spiegel: You write That the Israeli military doctor Who gave you a check-up Before you flew in a fighter plane Said you could live Until a hundred and twenty. Are you worried about Death right now, At your age? Lanzmann: I have no age. I constantly think Of death, including My own. At the same time This remains totally Unreal. As I said Earlier, only life Has any meaning.)   •  “Does the term The ‘Holocaust Industry’ Mean anything to you?” “I don’t want To talk About Israel. I repeat: You are thinking In abstract Categories.” “Yes, but your film Became the center Of intellectual Debate —  About the uniqueness Of the Holocaust, About the supposed Anti-Semitism Of the Poles. Many Thought that your movie Made the Poles out To be Anti-Semites.” “Israel exists Under impossible Pressure. Its army must be judged According to different measures. The Israeli Merkava tank Was created In impossible conditions. Israeli tank officers Love their Merkavas, They are obliged To have them always At the ready. And you, instead of Building up Abstract Theories, Should try harder To create artistic works ...     An artist has his own Way of seeing.” And so on. The director is tired. It’s time for a rest. “Communists? I know your path. First, revolution; then firing squads.” A warning from the attaché —  Our time Is almost up. This will be Our last question And our judgment of the gray Old man Will be simple. He has just one moment left To die young. But what did the fog of those eyes Communicate? Vague sentence fragments, A dry, unpleasant refusal?   •  “Hang in there, boys. Be strong just one more time. Communists never surrender.”   Translated from the Russian










Lit with strange carpentry magic —  they build time-shares in her head. They carve names deep in wood, erect beams of metal to hold up the invincible defense of a bad history. They mourn what’s subjective. They are shutters closed. Sometimes I imagine such men in flip-flops with fat towels draped over confident shoulders. I imagine they all live in Texas, and find South Padre too hot, and then I imagine them blaming diversity for everything. Here, in the middle of grief, we pout to the rhythm of their sentences. Suns hiss in their dreams. Soon such critics will meet daily for prayers. The Pharisees identify the guilty woman. They are gathering sticks for a witch burning. Curandera lit with the fire of sighs, casts spells, burns sage, sweats in a lodge, her own prayers flaming.
For Erna Brodber Be ye my fictions; But her story. — Richard Crashaw I can bring a halo into the night cave, quiet with music (do not ask the music), to her shaded there in the moon; her fine spectacles steam their pond rings; her animal eyes fix on the lintel of the door as the wax owl glances back at me. I am her little cotton tree the breeze combs white into a final note, her diminuendo poco a poco ...     Moon-afro, myself outpaces me in wonder of her. She goes off and I seep under the black sprout of her house, to rise a salmon bell on the hill dissolving mild cloud fractals, without grief or malice.
They flared on the sea green of the Subaru that seemed netted under the unleafing maple, a limestone moulage cut from a quarry and cast in immemorial arrest behindPete’s Absolute Asphalt truck, throttling still when I alighted and said, besides, in Aleppo once — to nothing but the wind photographed in sunlight; the pavement’s watery brier and children and their ghosts and the air-raid screams of mothers, once, in Aleppo, altered that moment in history when titihihihihi titihihihihi those white houses, stiffened with silence, broke the private change, the public good to dive into pits of leaves.
Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch water from wells in buckets, then pour it out for those animals that, long domesticated, would likely perish before figuring out how to get for themselves. That dog, for example, whose refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child, for loyalty — when all along it was just blind ... What is it about vulnerability that can make the hand draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force, destructive? Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost all of it, all the tenderness, away
Wherever we go, needs feed and I find it harder and harder to believe benevolence is the thing Thousands of Yazidi girls missing and plastic fills the ocean’s mouth and the cursive of yr name still occupies the canopy of my throat Fuel, the under- pinning What fires your gd engine Rigor, mortis Cold as unmoving or unmoved The opposite of music Warm in the cold universe Molten, forming A rock becoming magma becoming lava becoming land Land, the trauma of lava Lava the lamp of the ancestors and later a cheeky find in the Junk shop and rising in our living room Livin groom Just bc nothingcares doesn’t mean it lacks meaning What’s the point of curiosity but a train rolling past the spot where the Donner Party feasted n then go on a four hour Wikipedia downward spiral I’m the closest thing to a mime parade I whisper, home late tiptoeing down the creaky hallway tryin not to wake my roommates Nice chicken parm, sluts, I say to my fingers at lunch Dissociation is evacuating from the inside I just know we’ll have a good time
She arrived at the country mansion in a silver limousine. She’d sent out invitations and everything: her name written twice with “&” in the middle, the calligraphy of coupling. She strode down the aisle to “At Last” by Etta James, faced the celebrant like a keen soldier reporting for duty, her voice shaky yet sure. I do. I do. “You may now kiss the mirror.” Applause. Confetti. Every single one of the hundred and forty guests deemed the service “unimprovable.” Especially the vows. So “from the heart.” Her wedding gown was ivory; pointedly off-white, “After all, we’ve shared a bed for thirty-two years,” she quipped in her first speech, “I’m hardly virginal if you know what I mean.” (No one knew exactly what she meant.) Not a soul questioned their devotion. You only had to look at them. Hand cupped in hand. Smiling out of the same eyes. You could sense their secret language, bone-deep, blended blood. Toasts were frequent, tearful. One guest eyed his wife — hovering harmlessly at the bar — and imagined what his life might’ve been if he’d responded, years ago, to that offer in his head:“I’m the only one who will ever truly understand you. Marry me, Derek. I love you. Marry me.”
“What can or ought the public care about the identity of the portrait?” said James McNeill. Did he look down from neutral heaven on the dealer wearing flannel plaid, adjusting to my denim chair, to make the arrangement, pocket my check in black and smudge and white? The agents said they could easily find it if I had no carbon. FBI with their silk knots and sober suiting just like the famous oil though on different body parts. I could be Mrs. Whistler, but I was the dupe, eyes lowered, the menswear pair noble shadows, tracking down the evil and clever eBay forger (not the original cormorant-tousled Martinez I thought I was purchasing with his true (M) mark from his 19th-century hand). Inspectors with their pointed interrogations — they were way beyond clues —  who when they left would form, and be, long shadows at each end of day. Make shapes you might assume would fall from mountain goats in frightening terrain. They reported answers they knew all along. Thigh-high in paintings, I thought to wade out with my honest eyes so little notorious, from mistaken tonalists, expressionists, Society of Six ...     The crook posed in tartan, I fine-tuned to the agents; he talked ordinary — that was my best judgment. So what? He warmed, and got richer in, my denim wingback. I thought of Anna’s stern profile; and were they profilers? And as they shook my hand good-bye, I said,Do your wives collect anything? What do you think? they implied.
They so liked breast milk; Joanne fell asleep & leaked, the ants woke up, made the sweet climb. Others were surprised to find acidophilus, Soledad cleansing her inside sex — they made their way across her ivory sheets while she napped. Ah, the little guys were rejected by our sisters. But still, I feel sad that in my new lodgings there are no more glossy arrowheads to follow, sprinkle with baking powder, make a pretty cayenne path for over the once-food-strewn sill (they scent our past). They can carry their groceries bag-free: & ants shop in the honey cupboard, thirst like black hair being washed in a sink. Car-waxed black traffic jam — that’s actual jam, strawberry. Once my curatorial staff. But let them go on strike. Those embodiments of intention; they don’t sit around playing cards; perhaps they never play, never horse around. Hard-to-see-in-the-dark jet numbers on the radio dial. Perhaps there is no laughter in their chasm. Serious: but they’re able to stand up on hind legs —  a darling trick. I want to give them a little inkwell. A beachball. The number of communal legs alone exceeds the stars underground. They could be an orchestra. A single one looks in the mirror & sees a note. A quarter note. So many instincts massing as one. If I miss one little lover, do I miss them all?
Walking at El Pulguero, a tarp shines next to the dog track. The dog track a bowl similar to the Colosseum, but with steel poles subdividing the voyeurs and attending bidders, tickets yellow and flapping in their hands. Greyhounds on the billboards    ...     I walk under the stands. Bracelets in a jumble under the black- marker-scribbled advertisement brown board. It exemplifies the innocent rebuttal to being cultured by my particular country —  the country of my birth, though not quite my teaching. The Cuba of the womb, of the in-walking-distance- of-the-beach land in my memory, with shouts beside our houses at the corner belonging to the distribution agency. Fruits, mangoes, milk, soy beef, when that traveled our way, divided and partitioned by an old minibus with a man in an apron and a smudged baby blue shirt. I remember soda bottles being carried off up our streets, but by who I don’t remember. Too vintage a memory to properly retell. Orangey glued to the burn of sunset on time that young inside —  I as well draw from that very same exclusion, a pleasure from this participating memory. My childhood was a happy one, albeit the pangs existed, sharp like a battery, violent, sorrowful, but elastic, coming back at night home, be it dark inside the house. This indictment, the personal exclusion goes timid up my skin and neck.  At the Pulguero  or not, I’ll find something to bother about. It is that time, turbulent and worrisome until later. It is just not only this place. And so I reap  from the crystalline sky,  the mangled trees,  the faux marble and jet  furniture with gold  filigree forming a subtle  Chinese dragon what I can. The gold iron floor lamps. The off-brand running shoes —  Fila, but not really. Always apart from what includes me. Vaguely includes me, is chummy enough, falling out of the tether when more incisive probing corners along. And so in my cooperation- less demeanor, I shuffle further into the flea market, never benefitting from the seductive resignation of allowing everything a true potential buying power.    •  The baby marmoset gurgles when belly-rubbed. Deserted by its mother, the video lector tells us. The YouTube bubble incarnadine in the corner. A hibiscus, a bee dropping from its flight. One dreams it could be okay to keep the little monkey for an alarm clock in the a.m.  A gang of marmosets  intertwines among the branches.  The ground heaves an ash coloring.  I bogey my apprehensions  on the little primates flinging.  Bug-eyed, I read  their spastic jerking  as uncohesive  with my stock of reality.   •  The stony wheel gurgling in its solar pickling. Moss underhand, the water running its cataracts of limpid murk. The wheel has cracks in the stony center.   •  A frittata offered to us by a resident. He’s a culinary student. It was surplus practice. And oats on the bread loaves also in the offer. He’s a kind gentleman, toughened by who knows what. He’s staying here at the shelter and I’m too coward to ask about his life. Like a scouter of fumy  billows, we all happen upon the hits which we must report to someone. And god knows how they’ll take it.   •  I listen in on the praxis applied to the nexus in accelerating, intimate make-out fondling. I feel it with every go at the mouth and lips, teeth testing their courtship at submittal, effusive biting.   •  The phone shelly, an onyx coat  warm in the jacket pocket. A regulator’s annual finish like a yearling passerine flickering on the computer  screen.
Come in, come in. The water’s fine! You can’t get lost here. Even if you want to hide behind a clutch  of spiny oysters — I’ll find you. If you ever leave me  at night, by boat, you’ll see the arrangement of red-gold sun stars in a sea of milk. And though it’s tempting to visit them — stay. I’ve been trained  to gaze up all my life, no matter the rumble  on earth, but I learned it’s okay to glance down into the sea. So many lessons bubble up if you know where to look. Clouds of plankton churning  in open whale mouths might send you east  and chewy urchins will slide you west. Squid know how to be rich when you have ten empty arms. Can you believe there are humans who don’t value  the feel of a good bite and embrace at least once a day?  Underneath you, narwhals spin upside down while their singular tooth needles you like a compass pointed towards home. If you dive  deep enough where imperial volutes and hatchetfish  swim, you will find all the colors humans have not yet named, and wide caves of black coral and clamshell. A giant squid finally let itself be captured  in a photograph, and the paper nautilus ripple-flashes  scarlet and two kinds of violet when it silvers you near. Who knows what will happen next? And if you still want to look up, I hope you see the dark sky as oceanic —   boundless, limitless — like all the shades of blue in a glacier.  Listen how this planet spins with so much fin, wing, and fur.
What half-blind is like: like two microscopes in my head each with differently stuck objectives. They enable the small and the very small and reduce everything else to blur and shade. Yet you can train even this. Train it to spot the shape of sharks’ teeth, of which there are many samples and many shapes but not as many as flecks of sand, pieces of shell. I have hundreds plucked from the shore. But in the same beach I buried a toy and never found it again. A tiny toy: articulate, a translucent man, a smallness to whom the world was an unbounded wonder. Blemished and damaged I would hold him up and say He is broken and anyone who could see would say He looks fine to me. But they can see well, not finely. Look at his face, etched and serrated by that gargantuan saw. The cracked shell of his translucent skin, buried in rubble now, and those teeth, all that remain of terrible and invisible jaws.
If time is an arrow, what is its target If a Flexible Flyer is the sled I had as a child, when may I become a child again Do you need help digging the potatoes out of your garden of insults Do you plan to vote in the next election Is our country headed in the right direction or the wrong direction  and what did the bulldozer tell the yellow helmet’s ear Which part of your body is like biting into a ripe peach  which part shames you like a rotten banana Would you like to find out how to lower your interest rate When you go to heaven how old will you choose to be  will you have cocktails on the well-watered lawn  where Bach conducts Bach Will you still chase after the Grateful Dead Is your life like air leaking out of a balloon, or like rain falling on a pond  dot dot dot dear pocks pocking the surface dot dot dot Can it be like snow falling on the ocean Can desire drown you like syrup over pancakes When an ambulance siren wakes you at 3 a.m. do you feel relieved  not to be strapped to that stretcher  speeding toward the grim unknown  do you then snuggle next to someone Are you satisfied with your detergent Can you name a more perfect irony than the new world trade center, sacred icon of  capitalism, revered lingam of profit, soaring above the 
memorial pools  of people killed when the first towers fell Can you describe the scent of dried blood What about the smell of iron chains in your cell  can you sing the threnody of the maggots When I removed my mask did I frighten you  like a drone crossing your sky Are you satisfied with your auto insurance When ecstasy approaches why do you resist  What are you afraid of  Can you please unbutton your shirt now
With acknowledgments to “Rain” by Cynthia Barnett Whether the rain on Mars was delicate or brutal  whether it was blue or gray whether it fell on bare rocks  that remained bare  or on fertile ground  that raised large forests of leafing trees it could not last.  Mars froze eventually in the same duration  that Venus by contrast  bowed her burning head  in noxious vapors and gas clouds.    •  On planet Earth meanwhile  after half a billion years  of continuous volcano-havoc  meteor storms  earthquakes and lightning strikes vapor stored in the atmosphere  eventually began falling.  It soothed the fires. When the fires died  it fell silently on the first outcrops of moss.  On the tender grass with a sizzle.  With more strenuous drumming  on the resilient fronds of ferns. It became an orchestra of millions  across the luxurious expanse of the tree canopy.   •  Then the sun wiped its forehead  with long filmy fingers and beamed afresh. It worked through to creatures  flourishing beneath the canopy  and persuaded them to  interrupt their work of scouring on all fours  for delectable roots and berries. In the clarified light  they stared at their hands. They saw the wrinkled fingertips  that gave them a firm grip  on slippery branches and vines gradually smooth and soften. They rose in amazement  onto their hind legs and crept from shelter  across the dazzling savannah.   •  After a summer of twelve thousand years after the interruptions of ice after one particular inundation  and the shadow of an ark  darkening fish-shoals as they scooted over hills and valleys after the blaze of one civilization  then another after the destruction of several experiments  with law and order after the extinction  of many beautiful languages rain by and large  found its place in the scheme of things. It began to defeat its purpose  on the private sky of umbrellas. It babbled through long green fields  and melted into the seams of poetry. It larked in the puddle of its many names. Cobblers and chair legs and pipe stems.  Frogs and jugs and beards.  Cats and dogs. Men.   •  Although they are shaped like a parachute  thanks to the air pressure beneath them raindrops explode on landing. Then the sun bears down again  fitting his monocle into his eye.  The glass flashes and burns.  The rain sweats and evaporates into the ocean of its air.  The ocean continues on its way  continually overflowing here and there in quick little splashes  or reckless floods and drenching. It is delicate or brutal. It is blue sometimes and sometimes gray. Sometimes it falls on bare rocks  at others it raises  large forests of leafing trees.
Costa Rica The bus arrives in the orchid heat, in the place where coffee grows like rubies in the valley’s black soil. We disembark, walk in twos so we don’t slip on the genesis mud. The woman next to me carries three cellphones as gifts for cousins and a bucket of chicken to share. How is it that I have come this far with nothing, that I am empty- handed in this country of blessings? A procession of rust-colored macaws glides above us. Their ashy shadows draw crosses onto all of our heads.
Costa Rica I finally find the witch. She is branch- boned, old, with knowing fingers. She says nothing. Walks me to a tall tree, a gourd hanging from a long line of jute. She pulls out a phone, asks me to type a note to my family. I do it, but can’t see how it can be sent from somewhere so deep. She scolds me, says that only tourists think the world can be escaped. The jungle’s green is the wild mind of God. The witch puts the phone into the gourd. Hand-over-hand, she raises this cradle to the top of the holy canopy.
Owl small be enough The child for all his feathers was a cold. Oh wow the owl. The poem the vowels The owl, look its vowels That branch for you Owl, are you an armature vector And a large step for mankind? Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift You give to me give to you Terrible other things happen. We stay on our branch. A hundred eyes Two will do
The trees have sex, Teach, Focus. Tohu Bohu Chaos in a green light. Alone again. How alone I twist at the end of thought when illness is forgot and the speaker is punched on the bark on the soft models. The old abbot looked at us and laughed. He loved electronic gadgets for his tomb. You were as beautiful as six almonds as beautiful as the naked foot of the messenger of peace. You sat in a corner of the page.
Standing in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly says the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her back to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice she used to say no woman could love you & I watch her pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast. My disappointing shape. She asks for a bowl of plain broth & it becomes the cup of vinegar she would pour down my throat. Everyday after school, I would kneel before her. I would remove my clothes & ask her to mark the progress. It’s important that I mention, I truly wanted to be beautiful for her. In my dreams I am thin & if not thin, something better. I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs. The room fills with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.
In a movie I have never seen: a small-town drunk stumbles into a beam of light & wakes up convinced he was abducted by aliens, convinced a hole opened in the sky & swallowed him — said they did something strange to his body some kind of experiment, said a hole opened, said cold light cauterized him shut, redefined that red theory, chrome instrument turned him into a skinless puzzle, a scrambled egg sealed back into its shell. Madness, too, can be accumulative. When my blood seemed uncontrollable, ran messy with pulp down their fingers, my cousins finally left the room, laughing closing the basement door behind them.
I once carried my mollusk tune All the way to the lottery of gods. Rain was the old funeral choir That keened of a hemisphere Moored under lampwings. Clouds never left. I knew The lights would shine clearer If I closed my eyes, just as I knew the Pacific would teach Me to sleep before tying my Name to the flaming. Here I Am now at the end of amethyst, Drizzling another lost sunrise Inside the quilt of your hand.
I can’t leave my hurting skull Or the rose apple opening inside me. I’ll count the weeks, months, Unfurling each numbered day in my hair. Frost ribbons inside my brain, Canals push up my leg. I’m moving on To what the world needs me to know. I am the angel trapped inside the bullet. I am the exit wound trapped inside the angel. Am I the scarecrow Perched at the end of the human trail. I’ll palm cotton between my prayers Until the universe has passed, Waving down jellyfish To volcano hours. What force propels a bullet From its chamber. Is it sourced by water Trickling in a karst cave, Or is it an angel’s gasp as she flees. I can’t answer it all, But my mask grows taller every year.
You swear the twin spirits taught you to write. At night, you climbed the leaves to hear the gods. Catch in the throat. Hollow breath. Paj is not pam is not pab.  Blossom is not blanket is not help. Ntug is not ntuj is not ntub.  Edge is not sky is not wet. On sheet of bamboo with indigo branch.  To txiav is not the txias.  To scissor is not the cold. The obsidian mask will make its own sleep, leave behind the silver your body won’t shed. Now you are Niam Ntawv who was once a young farmer scrawling in secret toward the triggering day. When they could take no more, when all that you had was given, you lined your grave with paper.
For John Ashbery “Good Barber of the Pea!” I exhumed, high into the vag where the barber keeps his pea —  “Good Sprout!” His mouth, his gray, hunted tongue, always in the distance —  “No use denying we master the particular service we deny ourselves. In the shade of this pea (the sum of his shade and the gavel flexing above his head) I will become a milliner to cover what work I’ve done. Or else, I’ll begin anew at the infant chin, where nothing grows but chins! Outside, snails, vines, surpass me and must — gaining pews upon pews. But don’t think for a sec I don’t know the way out of here, that release is one hair — spiral stair — top of which cleavage evaporates”
A snail sank — grand in puss and rime, on three coils (equals one tea-wheel) white. The wheel brings the bill, the bill — bald. Everyone goes in for the table, the tablecloth is of water. One says huh — one morning high on a grape I dropped off — a dunce —  and exacted my height, and rightly so: it is a height I won’t have made alone. It is a height erring on all sides. The bride slip’n slides on her back to us — then on her head (a ball-point pen), quicksand in her hair. A man beside her, his mouth is like a dark arch for her. My mouth is death to you! In this new rhythm how can I say, how can I thank you, for I feel a blessing running through my tale now, it shines —  intestines — that I will can.
and it was political. I made coffee and the coffee was political. I took a shower and the water was. I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses and later, on the train, that was political, when I studied every handsome man in the car. Who I thought was handsome was political. I went to work at the university and everything was very obviously political, the department and the institution. All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political, where I threw them when I was through. I was blond and it was political. So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.” I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was. That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America was political, and it was political when America killed another person, who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation. I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political. My mother read to me almost every night and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political. That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something. Someone called me faggot and it was political. I called myself a faggot and it was political. How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was was political. I thought I could become a writer and it was political that I could imagine it. I thought I was not a political poet and still my imagination was political. It had been, this whole time I was asleep.
Oh, I said, this is going to be. And it was. Oh, I said, this will never happen. But it did. And a purple fog descended upon the land. The roots of trees curled up. The world was divided into two countries. Every photograph taken in the first was of people. Every photograph taken in the second showed none. All of the girl children were named And. All of the boy children named Then.
I was born in Speckled Eggs Garden. I will die on Broken Egg Farm. I’m hopping between them now, I consider everything to be friendly and nothing dubbed. I am a chick with legs and yellow hair. Oh Lord Almighty, creator of all things beautiful and sick, who prefers another life on top of this, who are you to judge? When Adam and Eve vanished solemnly into the dark, shrouding themselves in the forest, I was timid and nibbling and stayed behind, betrayed only by the plucking of my beak upon the ground you so graciously provided (thanks). I did noth with the best, I am nothing now, do ye noth with me or not? Hear me now before I break O Lord of the Margent, Lord of noth and straw and all things sent far, cheerio, sincerely, I sleep on one leg too!
Who won? I said. The game’s tomorrow, he said. And I became the snail I always was, crossing the field in my helmet. But I’d given it my all, while the plane arced on its way to a landing, when I overheard the woman behind us sayI was gathering wildflowers to make a wreath to lay on my mother’s grave when my son fell off a mountain in Italy
As I walked up the Rue des Martyrs with my bag of small, perfect, waxy potatoes I doffed my imaginary hat to Monsieur Parmentier. Well, I do have a hat and wore it a lot not so long ago to cover a healing wound on my forehead but this wasn’t necessary anymore, and anyway the hat wasn’t with me now in Paris. Nor was Monsieur Parmentier, though any remains of him lie in a plot in Père Lachaise ringed by potato plants. I would not be intending to cook my potatoes if not for the duplicitous actions of Parmentier back in the late years of the 18th century. After he’d realized that this odd-shaped tuber looted from the Incas in Peru (along with their gold and silver) was extremely nutritious, and no one would believe him, he’d come up with a ruse. Using money given to him by King Louis XVI, he purchased a plot of impoverished ground outside Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and planted it with potatoes. When the time to dig them came, he built a fence around them and put armed guards outside it. These men wore uniforms the color of potatoes. They were told to leak the news that they were guarding an extremely precious food. Then, one night, they left their post. Thieves arrived within a couple of hours and stole the entire crop. Over the next few days the potatoes were sold in the city’s markets as the food of kings. So my guests wouldn’t know they would be eating the food of kings. Nor would I tell them, though I might well concoct a story about the breed of pigs their pork chops had come from. And the posh wine that had yielded the wine vinegar I’d used in the salad dressing. I could try telling them I’d climbed over the fence of Père Lachaise the previous night, armed with a phone-torch, a troweling spade, and a canvas bag, and dug the potatoes from Monsieur Parmentier’s plot — only taking the small ones that were right for pommes sautées, of course — but I know they wouldn’t believe me. I was distracted from these smug reveries by my mobile phone ringing. I dug it out of my pocket and answered it, thinking one advantage of being in France was that nobody rang me. The voice at the other end was not one I recognized. It said, at first quietly, “Are you OK?” then in a louder voice, “Please tell me you’re OK over there,” and that was it. When I went to check the number, it had been withheld. What had I landed myself in, I wondered? I went home to deal with my 19th-century French meal.
This is an old apartment and therefore the mirrors are huge and ornate. They go with the high ornate ceilings. There’s one such mirror in the living room and another in the bedroom. Both have intricately carved borders and a leafy crest on top. In the living room these have been painted over in white, but in the bedroom it’s still the original gilt rococo. Both mirrors sit on top of fireplaces and are as big as tombs. I think the descriptive term for them is French Regency Baroque. The mirror in the bathroom is pretty big too, and again somewhat ornate. And there are two other mirrors here as well. Not bad for a small, one-bedroom flat. The problem is I’ve never been too fond of mirrors. I rarely look into them, and only then to make sure my hair isn’t sticking up, or there’s no toothpaste showing, or when I’m fine-trimming the beard, to make sure I’ve missed no section. Oh, there are exceptional other occasions. Once when I got a red eye on a transatlantic flight, for example, I kept checking on the progress of the red’s disappearance. Or when I fell on gravel and got an ugly friction wound on my forehead, I had to first deal with applying the dressing, then keep an eye on how that healing was coming along. Very slowly, as it happened. As for gazing into the mirror to see if  I look OK enough to go out into the world, or — perish the thought — if I look attractive today, the answer is no way! Que sera, sera, as the song goes. Tiny children love the mirror and it’s very pleasant to watch them gazing into it. Dogs don’t understand it and bark fiercely at the rival dog that’s their reflection. I once gave a woman a full-length mirror as an Xmas present. It wasn’t ornate or gilded, and it got smashed soon afterwards, and seven years of bad luck followed. But if   I want to look at myself in the mirror regularly or for lengthy periods there’s plenty opportunity for it in this apartment. I could even stand naked and see everything. And as Monsieur Baudelaire reminds us, according to the immortal principles of 1789, everyone has equal rights; therefore I have the right to behold myself with pleasure or distaste. It is between me and my conscience.
“Bottle gatherer, what do you hope to gain from this gathering of the discards of other people’s merrymaking, beyond the few cents you’ll accrue?” “I will enjoy the echo of their celebrating. And besides, the giant snake-head of the bottle bank is at least a block away. I am helping them.” “And does that offer you a pleasure in these days of random mass shootings in bars and music venues?” “Any bottle that has drops of wine in it and no drops of blood pleases me.” “Do you believe in God, my friend?” “I am not your friend, good Sir, although I wish you well. And I’ll need at least a year to answer your question.” “Fine then, tell me, do you differentiate between green, brown, and colorless bottles?” “No more than the skin colors or hair colors of our citizens.” “Can I help you, for no recompense, to bring the bottles to the big metal snake? “Ah, kind sir, I thank you, but some journeys are better taken alone."
I was walking from the Louvre to Place Saint-Michel along the Seine when I noticed a crowd gathered under a large linden tree. As I approached I thought how much I’d liked to walk down Unter den Linden when I’d lived in Berlin, and now I saw again how attractive the light green seeds of the linden tree were against the darker green of the leaves. I was also agog to see what had caused the crowd to gather. As I neared I heard a mother say to her little boy, “Regardez, Sébastien, les saltimbanques.” Saltimbanques? This was a new word to me. I had a quick look on my iPhone and came up with the translation “mountebank.” 
I pushed my way as politely as possible through the crowd until I had a good view. It was a family of street performers. They had improvised a small stage on the wide pavement, and a father, mother, and ten-year-old or so boy were up there. The man was dressed in a striking yellow and blue outfit with white leggings and black shoes, and was banging a little drum rhythmically while the boy in a checked black-and-white jumpsuit capered about, playing thumb rolls on a tambourine, with a black-and-white dog dancing in perfect step alongside him. The woman dressed all in white sat on a stool playing quick dance music on a red tin whistle. On her head was a white floppy hat, sitting on which was a snowy owl who periodically flew in a circle over the heads of the crowd, coming back to land on the white hat. It was a scene worthy of being painted by the young Picasso, or the old Chagall. Or maybe by Gustave Doré. The boy on stage didn’t look in the best of health, but I hoped I was wrong. The effect of the whole performance was strange and utterly charming. And the little troupe seemed to have emerged from another era — from that of Baudelaire, even. I was puzzled by the translation offered by my iPhone, however. 
What I understood by the English word “mountebank” (which seemed very archaic) was either a person who sold quack medicines in public places, or a charlatan. These performers were no fakes. And yet, the English word, like the French, seemed to suggest the jumping up onto a stage. I’d have to revisit my Shakespeare plays — I seemed to remember that he’d liked using that word. When the white hat came round I put a €20 note into it, took a quick photograph of les saltimbanques and made my way to the nearest metro. I was almost surprised to see cars and motorbikes clogging the road.
Was it Pascal who said “Almost all our misery has come from not being able to remain alone in our rooms”? Baudelaire thought it might have been, but was not sure. And let’s take a look at that “almost” which I’m very glad is there. I can think of lots of misery that had nothing to do with my not having been alone in my room. When I get a rejection email on a train for a piece of work I had high hopes for is one example. Or to go way back, when I returned home to find my white mouse dead when I was eleven or twelve. Or to take a mundane example, when a plane I’m booked on is twelve hours delayed, while I hang about the airport. I have never had a huge problem with solitude, it is true. As a child I read voraciously, and would find some hidden corner to lurk with my book. The game of golf is one where one can enjoy being alone, especially very early on a beautiful morning. The time when I most felt alone was when the missionaries came to my school and we all had to endure a silent retreat for three days. At the end of that time 
I felt like one of those astronauts in films who have to stay on the moon for months. Baudelaire claimed his friend the Devil loved bleak, solitary places where the spirit of murder and lust was more likely to ignite. He decided that this was not really a danger for most of us, though, only for those idle, fanciful folk prone to enigmas and dreaming. The type of person who should most avoid being alone is a chatterbox or maybe a television pundit. But what’s to stop these people being verbose in their own company? Did Crusoe, for example, stay quiet on his island before Friday came? According to Elizabeth Bishop in her great poem, “Crusoe in England,” he did not. And in order to write that poem, Ms. Bishop needed to be alone. This did not stop her from cooking meals and inviting friends to help her eat the food and drink wine with her. After this, probably the next morning, she went back to the poem and her solitude. I feel the French maybe exaggerate the benefits of  being alone. That philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre for example, his play Huis-clos with its famous line “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Yes, we all know how annoying other people often are, and how strong the urge to escape from them can be. But the two characters Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot show that even in an absurdist setting companionship has its importance. It’s said Beckett got his inspiration for this play from one or other of two versions of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon which he saw on a trip to Germany in 1936 or ’37. In both versions of the painting one of the men has his hand on the other man’s shoulder, a sign of companionship if ever there was one. Baudelaire quotes the French philosopher and moralist Jean de la Bruyère (or Delabruyère, as the man signed himself), “What a great misfortune we cannot be alone,” as if to chastise anyone who wants to plunge into a crowd or go into a busy bar. What about the great French word fraternité, the third of the three words that were the rallying cry of the Revolution? I want to close this by giving another quote from de la Bruyère: “Out of difficulties grow miracles.” I prefer this one. Anyone in an awkward social situation should dwell on that.
I walked along Rue du Faubourg du Temple on the way to Belleville and I stopped at a shop selling rat poison. To my astonishment and my amusement they had a window full of stuffed rats, including four small rats standing round a table, playing cards. I liked that very much. Paris was full of weird turnarounds, it seemed — poisoning and elevating the rats to art at the same time. I nearly went in and asked how much the four rats and the tiny table would cost, but I remembered I’d be going back to Ireland pretty soon, and the people at airport security might not see the joke. It was not the first time I’d seen rat poison on sale here. Paris seemed to have a problem with rats. Someone I’d met for lunch recently had said she’d seen them running around the Métro platform when she was coming home once around midnight. I remembered a rat had made a dramatic appearance in one of Baudelaire’s little poems in prose. A rich boy had lost interest in his expensive toy because he’d seen a poor boy poking a rat in an improvised cage. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an invention on Baudelaire’s part — lots of poor parents probably thought of giving their children (or at least, their sons) rats as pets. Hadn’t I had a pet mouse myself? The rich boy who’d seen the rat certainly was delighted at the idea of having the creature as a pet. Many years ago a friend of mine who worked as a chef gave me his original copy of Larousse Gastronomique — an edition first published in the 1920s or 30s. In there, I think, was a recipe called Cassoulet de Grand Souris. This was basically rat meat given the coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon treatment, i.e. cooked in red wine with mushrooms and tiny onions. I can’t remember which top Parisian restaurant introduced the dish onto their menu during the Siege of Paris in 1870–71, but apparently it proved very popular. It made sense too, as the Siege lasted for more than four months, and no meat was getting in, while rats were plentiful, then as now. I seem to recall the menus of the time sometimes also included rat salami, and a rat sauce called Sauce Robert. It’s no use looking in a current edition of Larousse as the book has been cleaned up — all mention of rats have been removed. I had some experience of rats when I was a child in Donegal. 
I commonly saw water rats swimming in the stream or small river that flowed behind my primary school. The house I grew up in had rats under the floorboards. I used to love spending time under the stairs, and sometimes the rats would come in through a hole in the back. I don’t remember ever having been afraid of them but I never touched them or wanted them to walk on top of me. And I certainly never thought of capturing one and making it my pet. My little pink-eyed albino mouse was rodent enough for me, and even that was a trial for my mother.
I used to be a dog. What kind? Oh, a mongrel. Nothing poncy like the black cocker spaniel called Bonzo I had as a child. And certainly not one of those four-footed, aloof snakes that go by the name of greyhound. I remember each and every one of the lice that lived on me. Where did I live? In Sicily, where the sun shines like a fried egg every day of the year. I had the nose of an angel — I could smell porcini fifty trees away. I knew the man who would start a fight with my master the moment he walked in the bar door. I drank a saucer of red wine every day. I loved eating the butterflies that floated past me — one pounce and they were gone. And they were delicious. Better than the bones of a donkey whose meat provided salami for my master and his family. The boy was very good to me — he used to take me down to the sea and let me splash in the waves; then I’d come out onto the sand, barking, and I’d shake all the seawater onto him, wetting his clothes. He loved laughing, and I loved barking. Those were the days. I never saw a kennel. My home was an old blanket under a gnarled vine that had been there since Dante wrote his only sestina, in homage to the troubadours. The heat was often scorching. The boy found it funny to put a straw hat on my head, one dyed in the colors of the Italian flag. I was up early, out scouting for rats to frighten away. 
I once peed on a hedgehog to see what it would do. I ran along the clifftop, barking at the wheeling seagulls, and at the fishing boats they flew above. I sometimes ate my master’s leftover spaghetti bolognese in the taverna. My tail would wag like a fan revolving from the ceiling. I was taught party tricks that I’d be asked to do when the grappa was being downed. I’d lie down on the floor and die, to great applause. I’d sit up and beg, to coos and laughter, and I’d be rewarded with a sausage, and those were sausages to swim the Adriatic for. I’d sometimes go down to the harbor to look for an attractive gray bitch I liked the smell of. I’d have to fight off other dogs, but I was good at that. I ate one of their ears. Once I followed her onto a boat that was heading out to fill up with fish. I had to swim back and I lay on the sand and slept. When I got home my master whipped me. I ran to my blanket, whimpering. I was once brought to a circus, and into the tent of a one-eyed woman with black hair who had a pet parrot. I barked at it, and the parrot expertly returned my bark. I lay on the multi-colored mat and observed the strange bird who observed me. I was glad to leave that tent. I enjoyed hearing the boy play his flute in the evenings. I heard those notes flutter up into the air, and I tried to see them, but never could. I never stopped trying, though. The one thing I couldn’t eat was cheese. The few times I tried it I vomited. On the first occasion that happened I tried to eat it again. If I got the chance now I’d manage it, I’m sure. Who would not like to be a dog in the sun? A dog in the sun, like I used to be, long ago. It was an honor.
WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he enters the discussion; Whereas his wrist loose at the bottleneck to come across as candid “Well at least there was an Apology that’s all I can say” he offers to the circle each of them scholarly; Whereas under starlight the fireflies wink across East Coast grass and me I sit there painful in my silence glued to a bench in the midst of the American casual; Whereas a subtle electricity in that low purple light I felt their eyes on my face gauging a reaction and someone’s discomfort leaks out in a well-stated “Hmmm”; Whereas like a bird darting from an oncoming semi my mind races to the Apology’s assertion “While the establishment of permanent European settlements in North America did stir conflict with nearby Indian tribes, peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions also took place”; Whereas I cross my arms and raise a curled hand to my mouth as if thinking as if  taking it in I allow a static quiet then choose to stand up excusing myself  I leave them to unease; Whereas I drive down the road replaying the get-together how the man and his beer bottle stated their piece and I reel at what I could have said or done better; Whereas I could’ve but didn’t broach the subject of “genocide” the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as “conflict” for example; Whereas since the moment had passed I accept what’s done and the knife of my conscience pierces with bone-clean self-honesty; Whereas in a stirred conflict between settlers and an Indian that night in a circle; Whereas I struggle to confess that I didn’t want to explain anything; Whereas truthfully I wished most to kick the legs of that man’s chair out from under him; Whereas to watch him fall backward legs flailing beer stench across his chest; Whereas I pictured it happening in cinematic slow-motion delightful; Whereas the curled hand I raised to my mouth was a sign of indecision; Whereas I could’ve done it but I didn’t; Whereas I can admit this also took place, yes, at least;   WHEREAS we ride to the airport in a van they swivel their necks and shoulders around to speak to me sugar and lilt in their voices something like nurses their nursely kindness through my hair then engage me as comrades in a fight together. Well what we want to know one lady asks is why they don’t have schools there? Her outrage empathy her furrowed brow. There are schools there I reply. Grade schools high schools colleges. But why aren’t there any stores there? There are stores there. Grocery stores convenience stores trading posts whatever what-have-you I explain but it’s here I recognize the break. It’s here we roll along the pavement into hills of conversation we share a ride we share a country but live in alternate nations and here I must tell them what they don’t know or, should I? Should I is the moment to seize and before I know it I say Well you know Native people as in tribes as in “people” living over there are people with their own nations each with its own government and flag they rise to their own national songs and sing in their own languages, even. And by there I mean here all around us I remind them. Drifting in side-glances to whirring trees through the van windows then back to me they dig in they unearth the golden question My God how come we were never taught this in our schools? The concern and furrow. But God the slowing wheels and we lurch forward in the van’s downshift and brake. Together we reach a full-stop. Trapped in a helix of traffic we’re late for check-in security flights our shoulders flex forward into panicked outward gazes nerves and fingers cradle our wristwatches so to answer their question now would be untimely because to really speak to it ever is, untimely. But there Comrades there there Nurses. I will remember the swing of your gold earrings. There your perfume around me as a fresh blanket. There you checked my pulse kindly. There the boundary of bedside manners;   WHEREAS a woman I know says she watched a news program a reporter detailed the fire a house in which five children burned perhaps their father too she doesn’t recall exactly but remembers the camera on the mother’s face the mother’s blubbering her hiccuping and wail she leans to me she says she never knew then in those times that year this country the northern state she grew up in she was so young you see she’d never seen it before nobody talked about them she means Indians she tells me and so on and so on but that moment in front of the TV she says was like opening a box left at her door opening to see the thing inside whereas to say she learned through that mother’s face can you believe it and I let her finish wanting someone to say it but she hated saying it or so she said admitting how she never knew until then they could feel;   WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and plates. Whereas calls me to the table because Whereas precedes and invites. I have come now. I’m seated across from a Whereas smile. Under pressure of formalities, I fidget I shake my legs. I’m not one for these smiles, Whereas I have spent my life in unholding. What do you mean by unholding? Whereas asks and since Whereas rarely asks, I am moved to respond, Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat;
walking up John Street thinking of you I saw a slash of sea between houses and felt — as always, no matter mood, its or mine —  as though it was the source of language and language the source of itself
what we have is what there is and who we are and who we is is love
I forgot forget amnesia was lost to me then a smooth fur-free fruit unnamed for days until I found it ripe on my tongue
Tremendous orange things are happening somewhere. I lay a wooden stick for stirring on the white note on the desk. I lay a stain on the clean note. Somewhere things are happening. Marvelous orange and purple things. Flooding rivers at dusk, wheels threading roads in the desert. Strangers. Strangers. Sea. Somewhere you are lying in a white bed. The clock on your thigh is ticking. Somewhere a human form is being lifted from the ground. Somewhere, yes, and I am counting. The clean note with its numbers has changed. I will remember. You are a location, with a bed. The road ends somewhere in the flooding river at dusk. Why here, strangers. A cartwheel in the stow hold of a ship. A stranger who wheels it on the ice. Somewhere the ship has frozen. The ship has frozen in the ice. A frozen form. The ship cannot be lifted from the purple sky at dusk. Stain in the somewhere. You are lying in a white bed. Why here is the river. On the thigh. Remember what we did with clocks. Orange and purple. Lovely trees in the frozen sky. Holding somewhere and threading thighs. Strangers. I lay a stain on the white bed. Remembering what tremendous purple things we did. The mind ends every thing stirring. Somewhere the ship is being lifted from the desert. Marvelous. You will change from the river location to the sea. Somewhere, things are happening. You are lying in the white bed beside the sea with coffee. I am lying in the white bed. Tremendous strangers. Blind roads in the sea.
Feeling rich for one moment for using money as a bookmark Feeling deceitful for making public some opinions while neglecting others Feeling disordered at the sight of three statues conspiring in a row Feeling insufficient for having a lukewarm reaction to news Feeling important for having been offered a seat at the table Feeling apologetic for nonetheless tuning out an argument Feeling blue for identifying some people who don’t respect you Feeling like a knife slipping into a pool of water for bearing 
disagreement Feeling redundant for moving in a similar direction as others Feeling angry for imagining the opening of the passage yet 
unopened for you Feeling antisocial for declining further missives from home
It is a tragedy, yes, but a confusing one. What happened to the wrestlers and where have they gone? Loulou the Pomeranian would love to know. Outdoors the hills are buried in snow, but inside a rose, a rose full-blown, a roomful of rose. The bloom and its shadow overtaking the space. The bloom proposing an impossible tomb. Of the Tachists, the master said to his friend Harry, “They paint white on white, and they believe that this is an achievement.” Harry said, 
“I dare you to paint a white rose in a white room with a window looking onto a landscape covered with snow.” Now this — which even Loulou, color-blindish, can tell is red — is the master’s grandiose response to an intoxicating challenge. Synesthetically, the rose fills Loulou’s pom ears with the echoes of torch songs, longing for the wrong. Loulou is practically drunk from the smell: a heady pink, and juicy, and almost obscene. Like crushed up candies, lingering and sweet, but with an adult musk at the core: a powerful flower. In looking, Loulou’s heart becomes a house at dusk about to force 
something to happen.
The Angry God of  This World & His Throne in Purgatory Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate hangover from Stuttgart’s bad days obscures. The weather of modernity. The lady’s tattooed musculature is what comes of getting too close to the angry father. Decode. He’d been left behind. We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust, iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before dawn to catch the sun’s origins I realized I was looking into the core of purgatory. The house would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill, the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good and bad. Who is to choose? I don’t mind the walk, negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking potshots at you, it makes it impossible. I don’t use a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense. But this is Tübingen and we’re nearing our time: the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans, the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes. I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will rewrite “Half of Life” upside down. The inversions of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn’t rained today but the Ammer River is still swift outside this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout. Behind the glissade of faces the goings home. Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth. Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship. I apologize for the distractions. Wondering while I write.
These brown discolorations on a faded black- and-white photograph are not at all like a defect In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of “Crystallization” as Stendhal described it, in One of his more eccentric books about love. In truth, my childhood was cast down like a twig Into an abandoned salt mine near Salzburg From where it emerged, of this I’m certain, As something much richer than my own life, A jeweled branch of living history, now Retrieved by my mother from the well at Twig Bog Lane. I’ll never know who it was, and anyway Why would I want to know who it was, Who slid the black hard plastic button to On One late summer afternoon in nineteen fifty-seven, So that not only did some kind of shutter flick open In my head, but the full force of color saturation Hit my brain. The effect was high-speed Ektachrome And life as it is now, that studio of constant poems —  It’s just that as my mother hauled the metallic Home Assistance milk gallon from the deep well In Twig Bog Lane, the light of deprivation reflected Back from her face and got lost in me, and I knew How biography is the steadying of only one kind Of lens, how memory offers different iterations; How, somewhere, a paper was being coated with Such chemicals that even deeper colors would form Over time. During that summer, a world away, The first International Color Salon was organized In Hong Kong and, while restrictions on dollar Imports meant that Ireland couldn’t reach a speed Of 100 ASA, faster colors kept rushing in. There Was no holding life back once it swarmed; biography Was ready for color, our brains were marked That year for realities more personal, realities brighter Than a boxed-in lens. Huge Blackwater river rats That knawed through the doors of our dry toilets in Twig Bog Lane were as ignorant of color as me; and Could not have known that their multi-layered bristles Would soon be seen in more subtle shades of brown.
from the 4 corners of this tower lumped on a map the best magician wins the day  / thinks he’s invisible / white rabbits hide in cupboards in boxes in hats  / a peaceful contradiction exists  / a plan for a park a plantation for immaculate thoughts  for flower beds which eat fragrances all  year round  / from this  monolithic  inheritance avenues spoke outwards to capture returning prodigals  / ancestral dropouts  / the multiple births of children the sun’s last sentence of the day
They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the Vs of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la-ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn’t throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her.
The future is one of place devoid of race. A jawbone under a sock is a geological clock. The plunking of rain on the termite-riddled windowpane: reading a Bible on that ledge is a tiny college. A Galápagos tortoise is killed (or, simply, unwilled). The Ebola virus weeps, or retires, because, like us, it tires. Meanwhile, below the subbasement, a Suede Revolution: the phlegmatic skill of the cryptographersoixante-huitards the teleprompter. The id in facsimile is suspended on a leash, twisting in the rain above that goddammed windowpane. Being is slightly corrupted by the Thinking that’s one-upped it (like the pun on pain) and will never love again.
In the Egyptian café in London, I drank coffee with men smoking hookah. Draw in, breathe out. The cup was small, the coffee harsh. I had to catch a train from Marble Arch. A still point, Byzantine, one star in a galaxy of trillions, I had to find my friends. Who cares what happened? I moved like a bat, darted, skittered towards the river. An old lady inching towards her complex screamed when I tried to help her with her walker. It was my life. The rooftops fracture. If I hadn’t jostled the mosaic maybe I could stop the picture. Buildings of stirred beach glass. Cresting sunsets comb the face, refine the land. The world goes sad. Like now? Like now. Even the ancients felt slips, skips in experience plotted as mathematical fact.
Around the pool the hippos drool as if the chloride wouldn’t kill them. In fact, they like to play the fool, the harbinger, the pilgrim. The bird that plops into the glass makes a sound, then isn’t there. Spiders toss, in oleaginous mass, Goo Gone into the air. The ants that drag a beat-up car onto the lawn are emissaries of some forgotten prince or tsar from an HBO miniseries. The cheetah, panther, jaguar, and lynx (some of these might be the same) conjure images of Sphinx and other trademarked names. The dynamited hole now teems with insects shiny and obscene, crawling, dying, though it dreams an ectoplasm of green. My own two cats stiffen, confused at this profusion past the door. They bat at things they’ve often used for sound therapy before. I tell you this out of principle: that spiraling around a theme (while naming lots of animals) can supercharge a meme. My own skin founders in the rush of allergenic, if cautious, beasts. Eyes eye darkness, ears hear hush —  the assassin’s humor feasts.
Little soul, you have wandered lost a long time. The woods all dark now, birded and eyed. Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open. The fairy tales warn you: Do not go in, you who would eat will be eaten. You go in. You quicken. You want to have feet. You want to have eyes. You want to have fears.
We opened the door to the fairy house & took our tea on matching pebble seats. Somehow we got out of there alive though something crystalline of us remains in that dark, growing its facets. We opened the door to the fairy house at the oak’s black ankle. You askedWhat could happen? as you disappeared somehow. We got out of there alive the strange tea still warm in our bellies. Inside, our hosts gave damn few answers.Who built that door? Is this a fairy house? They had no faces yet. We spoke into their quince-bud ears. You wept. Somehow we got out of there alive though we didn’t quite return. Our life is different now we’ve drunk the tea. They’re alive somehow. I got us out. Why did you open the door to the fairy house?
Little soul, do you remember? You once walked over wooden boards to a house that sat on stilts in the sea. It was early. The sun painted brightness onto the water, and wherever you sat that path led directly to you. Some mornings the sea-road was muted scratched tin, some mornings blinding. Then it would leave. Little soul, it is strange —  even now it is early.
Little soul, you and I will become the memory of a memory of a memory. A horse released of the traces forgets the weight of the wagon.
He can’t stop putting the dead flowers, the deadhead nails, the deadweight sacks of flour in his mouth. He can’t stop writing about the mouth. The way he woke up to his mouth full of bees, their dead crunch still stinging his gums. He writes: There’s something beautiful in the way a mouth can be broken by saliva and cold air
id   Two ids walk into one body & fight over whether to break melon on the kitchen counter & eat it by the fistful or to throw the melon out a shut window & watch it break on the pavement, stabbed by shards of glass.   ego   Sorry, for yelling through the speaker at the McDonald’s drive thru. Sorry, for not letting you through the door first. Sorry, I ate the dozen donuts in fifteen minutes over the sink. Sorry, I sound shrill, sound dumb, sound ditzy, sound spacey. Sorry, mom. I mean, mamá. 
I mean, miss. I mean, nevermind.   superego   Dear body: Cut the melon into slices with the sharpest knife you can find & enjoy the pain you are causing this melon. Stop saying you’re sorry, instead feel guilty for being shrill, being dumb, being ditzy, 
being spacey. Feel guilty because your mom is your mamá is your miss is the one who is guilty for giving you this body with two ids, 
& one ego, & one superego who hush-hushes you whole.

You flinch. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. My Heart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongue To turn it down. Too late. The something climbs, leaps, is Falling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainy Lord. I chose the wrong word. I am wrong for not choosing Merely to smile, to pull you toward me and away from What you think of as that other me, who wanders lost among ...     Among whom? The many? The rare? I wish you didn’t care. I watch you watching her. Her very shadow is a rage That trashes the rooms of your eyes. Do you claim surprise At what she wants, the poor girl, pelted with despair, Who flits from grief to grief? Isn’t it you she seeks? And If you blame her, know that she blames you for choosing Not her, but me. Love is never fair. But do we — should we — care?
Since it’s just me here I’ve found the back and stayed there most of the time, in rain and snow and the no-moon nights, dodging the front I used to put up like a yard gussied and groomed, all edged and flower-lined, my bottled life. Uncorked, I had a thought: I want the want I dreamed of wanting once, a quarter cup of sneak-peek at what prowls in the back, at what sings in the wet rag space behind the garage, back where the rabbits nest, where I smell something soupish, sour and dank and it’s filled with weeds like rough cat tongues and the wind is unfostered, untended, now that it’s just me here and I am so hungry for the song that grows tall like a weed grows, and grows. When I was a little girl my ma said a woman gets tired and sick of the front yard, of kissing the backside of a rose.
If my fingers could twang the guitar as before they would not be what they are and neither would I. I would be back in young-time. Incline towards me, Gwendolyn, this Monday, and lend me your ear while I loll on my pillows to turn your songs from strings into tin.
Again the day begins, only no one wants its sanity or its blinding clarity. Daylight is not what we came all this way for. A pinch of salt, a drop of schnapps in our cup of tears, the ticket to the life to come, a short life of long nights & absent dawns & a little mercy in the tea.
this gin-heavy heaven, blessed ground to think gay & mean we. bless the fake id & the bouncer who knew this need to be needed, to belong, to know how a man taste full on vodka & free of sin. i know not which god to pray to. i look to christ, i look to every mouth on the dance floor, i order a whiskey coke, name it the blood of my new savior. he is just. he begs me to dance, to marvel men with the  dash of hips i brought, he deems my mouth in some stranger’s mouth necessary. bless that man’s mouth, the song we sway sloppy to, the beat, the bridge, the length of his hand on my thigh & back & i know not which country i am of. i want to live on his tongue, build a home of gospel & gayety i want to raise a city behind his teeth for all boys of choirs & closets to refuge in. i want my new god to look at the mecca i built him & call it damn good or maybe i’m just tipsy & free for the first time, willing to worship anything i can taste.
Just tell me who the hell am I? What powers did I, do I hold? What right have I to say “my” or “mine” or “me” — all honey- glazed, all bullet-proofed and worshipful of any gangster “I”? The key to the Dollar Store hangs on my belt. Yes, “my” again. And what of roof, of bread, of loving laughter? What’s in? My vinyl favorite Booker Little, vintage, soothes me. He jars our ears with trumpet joy and stuff freed folks stash in cabinets. Never one to make too much of why we love and what, I love my powers. I might put you in my will.
It seems I have always sat here watching men like you —  who turn heads, whose gaze is always either a kiss or a slap or the whiplash of pure disregard. Why fret? All you’re doing is walking. You’re this year’s It, the one righteous integer of cool cruising down a great-lipped channel of hushed adoration, women turned girls again, brightening in spite of themselves. That brave, wilting smile — you don’t see it, do you? How she tells herself to move on; blinks until she can.
Good gracious. You again. And it is always you asking to borrow cigarettes and time. We are exhaling on the curb. Mouths heating with a debate. Yellow town lights bleed desperate wings against our faces. Testimonies of a good man tonight. The “Jesus Camp” story, stoicism and smoke smiles. My mother shot a man. The ember pinches your fingertips with a desperate kiss. Does that make her a bad woman? We all die. Does it matter?
a harvest gold & avocado green leisure suit with fm radio, it was their, well, daddy’s, mansion, his james brown conk cool, his funky country on radials, power windows and doors a working class music. here is our block-long plush, envy of uncles and teenage dolemite dreams. a ms. cleopatra jones ride, showing yankees, john denver, the hippie nation and everyone except texas the middle finger. kept the 25 gallon tank on full. we drove to kentucky for my sister’s wedding on hot back roads, no cracker corn farmer’s rifle loud enough to make daddy use a map.
My father is a nod, a jilt. Bop. Insists that 90s music is the jams they will drop when I have children. Cancel the station with rap-crap, the cure for stiff-skin is the blunk of funk and lilt of lips that pickles like sound-curry.
Perhaps, this morning, we’re there, normal and soon forgotten, as news is when it’s passed over breakfast, like love, something that’s always cast, too heavy to hold for long. We breathe it in, the bacon, the coffee. We listen to the little quavers as the local tongues, water over rock, rise and fall, like stones skipping soft into the white that smoothed them. The women speak like grandmothers, softly opening their mouths, opening and drawing advice from themselves, like biscuits, and offering in kindness a little more than anyone could ask, more than anyone can take. I know their pitying. It looks like patience, the look on everyone’s faces as the peddler shuffles in his blindness, black hand held open, everyone awaiting the hiss of door, the whisper in everyone’s throats, breaking from patience into pleasure.
I lied when Pops asked, but I’ll admit it now. I did touch the blue egg to see if, somehow, it felt as much like the sky as it looked. The egg: speckled in its twiggy nest, eye level to 8-year-olds, perfect & off-limits like the Baoding balls on Pops’ desk. We tried to find its mom, but the finches scattered when we came near. One twittered the alarm from a maple. Others balanced on wires, flapped wings at us like we were gravity. I can still see how carefully Garrett scooped the egg from the nest, then headed out to find a spot on the March concrete to drop it. I want to see if these things break into pieces or in half like on TV
We need a preacher who’ll say up in here instead of herein. Our vows should reference calla lilies and the snowy pistils they jab ardently at our faces. Let’s place their linty, foul-mouthed kiss at the center of satin table cloths white as bee boxes and us buzzing like the ichthyic insects we’ll invent: “coddle- fish” finning the air, murmuring for words beyond civil andceremony, beyond moderation, all our senses under assault.
what about those nosegays?! If you were to return I would give you more, for all you have given us, for your going first. Those posies might have a peony, a freesia, a tulip — an eye snack and nostril snack, I could not get enough of giving you coronation bundles, handing them and almost bowing, tongue-tied with respectful adoring, with gobbling the sight of you the sound, the bouquets saying mother- — we would not be here, without your song, your eye.
But the truth is, I am Thursday on a Monday. I Am the walking calendar alive of mixed-up days and dim hours. I have A week inside of me, a week or a year, time out of order. I have contracted With the world to behave, to try, hard, to be Monday on a Monday. I Look like I am happiness, don’t you think? On Monday, to you I have The right laugh, and seem always to be even-keeled and at-eased.
We danced to rancorous tunes on spiked ground and our knees sang with each puncture, so that several agouti colonies, melanic in our russet strengths, learned as wild rats to scurry or guard ourselves from skin-spite. Immune from nocturnal drowsiness we strong-bellied creatures assembled, campaigned; gyrated to blowed trumpets and cradled songs, but, us black rats with our rogue swagger that spoke of foreign ports, pranced our survival shuffle in night’s murky dance halls. Each step our single prayer, each jab our benediction. This tart sermon containered our septic hurts and lean swaggers. On the strike of dawn, we skittered from shadows, the redeemed walking day’s straight-road into warpland.
She’s got a hundred & two temperature, delivery room nurses said. You’re gonna live, though — long enough to know you’re going to go as quickly as you came, gonna make your mother swear by you, going to shake your Bible with red-tipped nails before you vanish into Chicago South Side skies that bleed — not like watercolor, not like a wound, not like a fat, bitten plum — not necessarily. No, not necessarily. Nothing that precious or predictable. Speak nicely to others & they will nicelyspeak to you, your mother said. No, not so, you said fairly close to the end. No time to wait for mother’s ride home or for saviors, coming soon.
We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike. It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight. Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We made plans to be professional — and did. And some of us could sing so we drummed a fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them — thin chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little gin will clarify the dark and make us all feel like dancing. We had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz I argued with a Pueblo as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June, forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die soon.
After Lucille Clifton Vulture, follow me up: here is the arm my mother held me aloft with (as well as she could, until she couldn’t), it is cut free of her body now, pulled away from her shoulder, away from her breath, as you, Vulture, point your wing toward her offered heart, toward me —  let’s pound her fingers into paste, pound the hand open, come down, I chant, each word opens the sky, the clouds need to be warned — once she was hand & now she is wing, once she was dirt & now she is air, she was food & now she is bird, she was lifted & now she is gone.
After Les Murray
 Inside the sandpit you are playing for your life. Your bucket and spade that smiled all day long, like family in your satchel, now work hard. Your material is sand. It weaves a universe where you are huge, the cellar behind you, eclipsed by twelve chestnut trees and their pigeon gods. On and on you burrow, into your sanctuary, devotion’s priest. There are rituals to do, like counting leaves on the sky’s loom. Any lapse and you tumble back into the brain’s forks, rick-racking the minutes for the lock that unclicks, the coffining dark, the hooded stranger with Papa’s voice, the makeshift bed.
Prairie winds blaze through her tumbled belly, and Emmett’s red yesterdays refuse to rename her any kind of mother. A pudge-cheeked otherwise, sugar whistler, her boy is (through the fierce clenching mouth of her memory) a grays-and-shadows child. Listen. Once she was pretty. Windy hues goldened her skin. She was pert, brown-faced, in every wide way the opposite of the raw, screeching thing chaos has crafted. Now, threaded awkwardly, she tires of thesorries, the Lawd have mercies. Grief’s damnable tint is everywhere, darkening days she is no longer aware of. She is gospel revolving, repeatedly emptied of light, pulled and caressed, cooed upon by strangers, offered pork and taffy. Boys in the street stare at her, then avert their eyes, as if she killed them all, shipped every one into the grips of Delta. She sits, her chair carefully balanced on hell’s edge, and pays for sanity in kisses upon the conjured forehead of her son. Beginning with A, she recites (angry, away, awful) the alphabet of a world gone red. Coffee scorches her throat as church ladies drift about her room, black garb sweating their hips, filling cups with tap water, drinking, drinking in glimpses of her steep undoing. The absence of a black roomful of boy is measured, again, again. In the clutches of coffee, red-eyed, Mamie knows their well-meaning murmur. One says She a mama, still. Once you have a chile, you always a mama.
After Piranesi The faded remains of ancient advertising —  captives on parade in native costume. Now the whangam, that imaginary animal led by Wharfinger, keeper of the wharf. And you, my puce, sitting between the paws of the mechanical lion, his brittle heart of glass. The regiments of holiday shoppers, in formations two-by-two, are borne along the sliding pavements between displays into the Pavilion of the Encrusted Compass. O hub of panopticon, each moment on display, from the central monitor there is no escape. This is all accomplished, even the symphonic wrecking of the antique locomotive, in silence. I have misplaced my whipcat and whinstone. I try to recall something that I know. A westing is a space of distance westward. Wheep: the sound of steel drawn from a sheath. What was the name of the Babylonian sidekick of Sir Thomas More’s lead warren? Time for the steam-driven, slow reckoning, for the chains and block and tackle dangling from the eternally unfinished dome, the chrome- plated waterfall and the ascension into the arcades, the arcades and their broken promises.
these are my people & I find them on the street & shadow through any wild all wild my people my people a dance of strangers in my blood the old woman’s sari dissolving to wind bindi a new moon on her forehead I claim her my kin & sew the star of her to my breast the toddler dangling from stroller hair a fountain of dandelion seed at the bakery I claim them too the sikh uncle at the airport who apologizes for the pat down the muslim man who abandons his car at the traffic light drops to his knees at the call of the azan & the muslim man who sips good whiskey at the start of maghrib the lone khala at the park pairing her kurta with crocs my people my people I can’t be lost when I see you my compass is brown & gold & blood my compass a muslim teenager snapback & high-tops gracing the subway platform mashallah I claim them all my country is made in my people’s image if they come for you they come for me too in the dead of winter a flock of aunties step out on the sand their dupattas turn to ocean a colony of uncles grind their palms & a thousand jasmines bell the air my people I follow you like constellations we hear the glass smashing the street & the nights opening their dark our names this country’s wood for the fire my people my people the long years we’ve survived the long years yet to come I see you map my sky the light your lantern long ahead & I follow I follow
1  My ear amps whistle like they are singing to Echo, goddess of noise, the raveled knot of tongues, of blaring birds, consonant crumbs of dull doorbells, sounds swamped in my misty hearing aid tubes. Gaudí believed in holy sound and built a cathedral to contain it, pulling hearing men from their knees as though atheism is a kind of deafness. Who would turn down God? Even though I have not heard the golden decibels of angels, I have been living in a noiseless palace where the doorbell is pulsating light and I am able to answer.  2What? a word that keeps looking in mirrors like it is in love with its own volume.What? I am a one-word question, a one-man patience test.What? What language would we speak without ears?What? Is paradise a world where I hear everything?What? How will my brain know what to hold if it has too many arms?  3 The day I clear out my dead father’s flat, I throw away boxes of molding LPs, Garvey, Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl. I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf, smudged green label Raymond Speaking. I play the tape in his vintage cassette player and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name Antrob and dad’s laughter crackling in the background not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus” and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids. Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness — Antrob Antrob Antrob  4 And no one knew what I was missing until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos and said to put a brick on the table every time I heard a sound. After the test I still held enough bricks in my hand to build a house and call it my sanctuary, call it the reason I sat in saintly silence during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached the good news, I only heard as Babylon’s babbling echoes.  5  And if you don’t catch nothing  then something wrong with your ears —  they been tuned to de wrong frequency — Kei Miller
Stefan Zweig, come back, come back. Do not be afraid. Do not look the other way, but on all sides. Come take the road with me into those dark woods where eerie sounds of nature coalesce, where fledglings kiss you on the head and talk to you. Come fly with me, come be my friend in those darkest hours, in those darkest woods where even dreams are not permitted, but they move in nonetheless, because their darkest hours share with yours and mine to light the light, where our angels lead us on with whisperings . . .      and they look on. Stefan, it’s safe now. Come hold my hand. We circle home. The light is in the window. The dance is picking up. The dance is done. Can’t you feel it now? Can’t you . . . can’t you . . . ?
I am as guilty as many. No one speaks of David Ignatow anymore. No one speaks of  your lonesome time in the New York boonies, those outer reaches of Jamaica, where the Z & J Lines go no more. No one speaks of your sparsely furnished rooms, the low-slung Danish sofa where you sit and muse and daydream out the grimed window on rainy days. Even in the warmth of spring, there is no spring. You don’t go out much, I would imagine. I imagine much for the both of us. All those darknesses at noon. Those woodlands filled with songbirds twittering. Even scribblings on the morning Times are but a momentary respite. Words we’ve been blessed with, still blessed, even in our nightly dreams unfinished. Where art thou now, dear David? Where is the love for my desperation that I may fight your fears?
Is she still Faith Franckenstein? Is she still the past somewhere between Frankfort, Kansas, and LA? Le Moulin du Soleil Ermenonville; her mom’s haunt with Harry Crosby, winter ’29, also haunted, still haunted. Those open fields haunted. The Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Faubourg darknesses and weeping willows, the drizzled cul-de-sacs. Is she still of memories thus deleted, giving her a certain absent aura, tall-shouldered? An uncertain world of make-believe made more believable, I wanna say. Those whims and glossy chance encounters, tossing caution to the wind. As such, a darkened moonless night, down by South Beach sans the Verrazzano, c. ’61. We plunged headlong, skinny-dipping in the languid surf with dreams of no tomorrows, no eternities. None but those decades lessened, disappeared. Those moments becoming one less and less. The near-to-next impossibility. The careless and carefree. The half-remembered face. The voice also half-remembered. Her hair way past shoulder-length, soft, satiny. Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility” tout passé. The midnight skinny-dip.
I would imagine underneath those warming bear hugs was a kinda kind of soul as your many poems attest. Those summer breezes. Those many hazy sunsets nature’s voices echoing afar. A life continually fulfilled bordering on the empty and those inexplicable tragedies, those bad timings unreconciled, then reconciled with time. You had no answer that would satisfy your curiosity and the why, the wherewithal just round the bend. The morning mists descending in an angled quietude. A birdcall here and there. A rising wind unfurled and furling at the top-most branches of a conifer. Those wetlands mysterioso. A last-known address unknown at last.
It will be a while before recollections in tranquility set in, as time in its adversary mode of darker days ticks on transfixing you in newsprint. It will be a while before those sudden winds descend upon the Po. A while before the laughter echoes in the dark; before the sounds of seagulls and accordions, harmonicas mix in those parting shots of long-forgotten flicks with names like La notte brava, I Pugni in tasca, L’oro di Napoli. Your show-offy had intelligence; not the “unconscious” your friend Calvino claims you lacked. Ha-ha. It will be a while before the tranquility comes round again. A while before you’re able to get up and move about; stare out from your Swallow’s Nest on those dappled waters of Salerno’s Gulf, almost fable-like. “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?” your buddy Howard once sweetly asked. It will be a while and sometimes more and not your last.
I never really knew if Johanna Hirshhorn was actually Joe’s only daughter. Jim Brodey made the match and claimed as much, and then he left. It was my last weekend in Labor Day New York before boarding a one-way Milan Alitalia flight where I disembarked with less than 10 bucks to my name and this sense of wonder  what would unfold and take me far. It was a blinding day, September, almost still, when Flavio Lucchini came to fetch me. It would be Giangiacomo, Montale, the irascible Nanda, Ettore Sottsass when he was still taking pictures, when he hugged me when he could. In Olga Hirshhorn’s obit in the Times, no mention of Johanna. Where art thou? Dove? Dove? Perhaps she wasn’t Joe’s daughter after all. Perhaps I’d been mistaken, misheard, misremembered. Perhaps she was a long-lost grandchild dangling on that family tree. Perhaps Jim misled me. Perhaps, perhaps my memory is faulty after all, as when I woke to the abrupt jolting of the Rome Express.  All else is but a blur, a flight from memory, a future without one, far from home.
“Café-Concert at Les Ambassadeurs,” 1876–77 by Edgar Degas i have a red dress and no eyes. i have a dress that is blood red and i have eyes that don’t blink when the balcony sucks in. my dress is a beet swollen with thought, and hangs like a body on my body. i have eyes that don’t blink at being seen. i was halfway finished before i saw i’d begun. my dress drips down the center. my eyes are needle holes and my dress is an over-red thread. i hang my words in the air by their feet, limp and damp, and my dress is my only laugh that is actually red. my eyes are the backs of moons and afterwards men jest us like children, and smoke, and women who have been my dress circle their stomachs with their hands. i’m an actress. this is not my mother tongue. i have a dress that is yellow. my lines are written by a parisian man. we met in london. i came dancing out like god upon a crimson wave. my dress hung like a question or a suddenness. he wrote me coming out this way, he says, to make me like a lioness. the constellations are full of dead women, he says. he says my dress is the coat of a great lion. i turn like the blood inside a rose. the crowd is a great gasp. i can feel myself become a pear. it’s as if you haven’t taken pills, he says. i still have that dress. it’s not too blonde or red. you can grasp it with your eyes, he said, the way you wear it.
Large green-tailed lizard, zucchini-mottled flicks and swirls. But, no! It’s not some random lizard: that’s the snake! A rill of water falling up the stone, he’d heard my light, quick foot as human-hard. And the dream? that wildly handsome man who had no wife, his wife had “gone away” (but where?) so he wanted to meet more women he needed help with his decor, his place was encumbered with little ceramic, clay- kitsch banalities —  I did not see the snake’s head, since it faced away. I could not fix it being vipera or serpente. That question hinged on poison in his mix. From what I saw, though, ’twas a very handsome snake.  • Options:“scaled to the human boy” or was it “scaled to the human body”? Which did I write?Options:Desire? temptation? yearning for danger? thralldom? lust? You can add to the list yourself. You can add yourself to the list.Options:Teasing enchantment. “How still the Riddle lies.”Options:Insistent “Shaft” “a tighter Breathing”The sibyl’s many leaves are laurel made for wreathing.
Looking up, “The purple now,” she dips her brush and finishes the day. The flag descends. She draws the fire with a marker on fax paper uncurling from its spool. Inventory of glasses, the handblown ones blue-edged could hold a sunset neat, the new regime is softball-sized and etched with tigers. In town they’re pulling draughts for every swinging door. Don’t get angry, don’t get angry. The soaker’s washed and left to dry. Iron Hessians oversee the fire gone to bed beside the harbor, geese calling each to each triangulate the dark. Passing through or are they wintering over? In chevron resolve. Like waking to the rain and walking anyway. She thinking of what to do with pawpaw  jelly, he of mildew and of marrow, while their youngest bouncing gums the leather dice cup, sister rolls, counts, and makes a point. Get even says the horizon like the sun, democratic and unsparing.
When the puppy snarfles for breakfast I wake to the radiator gurgling then feet crunching the reticent snow. Before I was born, Mother sewed her own suits. What do her ashes know?  • Father shoved snow off the supine roof. Mother crafted Christmas ornaments: glue and glitter and red balls. No tinsel, no angels. Her death started in the living room.  • For bonsai, pliers the size of a nail clipper, spools of wire and a fist-sized rock. One bore a petite pomegranate, never to eat, not to touch. Her death began with a baseball bat.  • In the vineyard, he secured the strongest cane from training stake to fruiting wire. Pruning with handsaw and lopper. He’d leave a spur for the next season. He shoved her away with direct objects.  • In a cold snap if one pipe freezes, the rest may freeze as well. Even before the puppy snarfles. Even before a baby brother arrived in the misleading car in Mother’s arms.   • After the war, after she met Father, she smoked cigarettes but didn’t cha-cha anymore. She’d light up and blow smoke out the apoplectic window. He found the ashes on the sill.  • Fireflies blinked for mates or prey outside the savvy window of my own first home. On the stereo, a bluesman cried,I need my ashes hauled! The dress was too smart to wear.  • I tucked away our baby’s pink layette in circumspect mothballs for a christening that never took place. As well, a doll that Auntie crocheted. More than anything, I love tidal pools.  • I know her ashes are at Father’s, lost in his charnel of junk mail. He claims that thieves have stolen that box, his knob cutter and root hook. He says, remains aren’t ashes anyways.  • Winter stripped everything to the limb and dejected nest. No angels, no crèche. I don’t know whose recollections are suspect: after leaving Maui, Mother learned to swim. She loved tidal pools more than anything.  • In my kitchen, the logs blink in the fire — through blinds, the wind blusters and the browbeaten trees creak in the orchard. The rain pours then stops for sun. If he lost Mother’s ashes what more could I stand?  •Omusubi tastes best on black beaches. Since Mother never learned to swim, did she watch her five brothers from a blanket? On the intransigent subway, I don’t know if I’ve passed my station. (His mother said yes —) Iron: I bit my lip again.  • Mother showed our baby how to sift flour and how to crank an eggbeater. After Father lost her, he barred everyone from the rooms and the yard where at night long red worms slither up from the ground.  • Her ashes know: before the puppy snarfles, Father shoves snow off the supine roof; for bonsai, use pliers the size of a nail clipper; in the vineyard, the strongest canes; in a cold snap, a hair dryer on frozen pipes; fireflies blinked for mates or prey outside while I tucked away my baby’s pink layette. Her ashes know their box is in the living room where she didn’t cha-cha anymore. Where has winter stripped everything to the nest? In my kitchen, the logs blink in the fire and I knowomusubi tastes best on black beaches. She knew to show her granddaughter how to sift flour.
When I was laughed at for my clumsy English, I touched my throat. Which said ear when my ear said year and year after year I pronounced a new thing wrong and other throats laughed.Elevator. Library. Vibrating bells in their mouths. How to say azalea. How to say forsythia. Say instead golden bells. Say I’m in ESL. In French class a boy whose last name is Kring called me belle. Called me by my Korean name, pronouncing it wrong. Called it loudly, called attention to my alien. (I touched the globe moving in my throat, a hemisphere sinking.) Called me across the field lined with golden bells. I wanted to run and be loved at the same time. By Kring. As in ring of people. Where are you going? We’re laughing with you. The bell in our throat that rings with laughter is called uvula. From uva: grape. A theory: special to our species, this grape-bell has to do with speech. Which separates us from animals. Kring looked at me and saidJust curious, do you eat dogs? and I wanted to end my small life. Be reborn a golden retriever of North America. Lie on a field lined with golden bells, loved. Today, in a country where dogs are more cherished than a foreign child, an Oregon Senate candidate says no to refugees. Says, years ago, Vietnamese refugees ate dogs,harvested other people’s pets. Harvest as in harvest grapes.Harvest as in harvest a field of golden rice. As do people from rice countries. As in people-eat-dog worlds. Years ago, 1923 Japan, the phrase jūgoen gojissen was used to set apart Koreans: say 15 yen 50 sen. The colonized who used the chaos of the Kanto Earthquake to poison waters, set fire: a cruelty special to our species. A cruelty special to our species — how to say jūgo, how to say gojit, how jūgo sounds like die in Korean, how gojit sounds like lie — lie, lie, library, azalea, library.I’m going to the library, I lied, years ago, on a field lined with forsythia.
The woman in the documentary reaches her hands to the fence touches her child through an opening De mis manos dolor When I was a child my mama drove me to the swap meet on the other side for a white dress & flowered wreath my first Holy Communion the mamas nursing on the roadside selling chicle con sus manos libres Abuelo once rode in the casket of a trunk He rose again on our side of the border which crossed Bisabuela’s family Look from my balcony the sleeping sister volcanoes shaped like breasts I’ve thought about leaving Shoving a duffel bag & laptop into the car taking the dog But these babies I’ve wanted since I was a child That’s what girls do where I grew up down the road from a landfill in the humid stench of a beef plant & sugar beets hulled & boiled for their sweet white meat I found an animal in a trap who’d fought her way through high grasses wasting to carcass in my own backyard & I believe you know what a merciful act means  I don’t know the words for the shame I’ve carried The woman in the documentary needs papers to get back to her children They’d found her in the hospital without insurance la migra Mama nursed women who’d run through asparagus fields’ crackling heat bellies full against the barbed wire they’re still burying like umbilicals roots on a battlefield if the child’s a boy or the place where tortillas are made for a girl Don’t you dare say desert The heat is unbearable & I’ve seen them pulling anchors from legs cursing bullet shells In the hospital facing pig barns & a graveyard Mama in her scrubs & gloves pulling newborns bloodied like suicide wrists Jars of coins for the ferryman & La Virgen burning an altar on my nightstand Mis manos Mis hijos  Whatever fence I’ve erected from that salted curse in my family’s blood Release us The woman on the screen whispers a prayer Fly usfree as birds Sin vergüenza I admit the darkness I’ve swallowed the hollow inside Now who will unpin our hands & toward sky upraise them
At the podium measured and grave as a metronome the (white, male) poet with bald- gleaming head broods in gnom- ic syllables on the death of 12-year-old (black, male) Tamir Rice shot in a park by a Cleveland police officer claiming to believe the boy’s plastic pistol was a “real gun” like his own eager to discharge and slay    while twelve feet away at the edge of the bright-lit stage the (white, female) interpreter signing for the deaf is stricken with emotion — horror, pity, disbelief — outrage, sorrow — young-woman face contorted and eyes spilling tears like Tamir Rice’s mother perhaps, or the sister made to witness the child’s bleeding out in the Cleveland park. We stare as the interpreter’s fingers pluck the poet’s words out of the air like bullets, break open stanzas tight as conches with the deft ferocity of a cormo- rant and render gnome-speech raw as hurt, as harm, as human terror wet-eyed and mouth-grimaced in horror’s perfect O.
So grateful the process is clean and faithful. Does not cheat like a disenchanted spouse dozing on a haggard couch. Take heart: the process is always right —  is automatic, phlegmatic. Clean, cold, and always refreshing. Brewed to perfection some say. Guaranteed to satisfy you might say. Give thanks the process is organized. Synchronized and sterilized. Optimized but not disguised, like the grown man at my door long after trick-or-treaters have gone, hand outstretched, mask covering his eyes. Thankful, too, for the oversight: no boogeyman standing over the drain pipe, clogging it with debris when no one sees so he can charge you your life for the cleaning; name your price. And how shall we praise the instruments of investigation? So shiny, so new, gleaming with silver and glass? No traces of fingerprints or funders. No whispered voices softly requesting, of the results, a first glance. There’s no need to come clean. We know the process won’t fall prey to steak and wine and then slink upstairs to spend some time, just a little. The process doesn’t. The process wouldn’t. The process isn’t that kind.
For this you may see no need, You may think my aim Dead set on something Devoid of conceivable value: An Anthology of  Rain, A collection of voices Telling someone somewhere What it means to follow a drop Traveling to its final place of rest. But do consider this request If you have pressed your nose Of any shape against a window, Odor of metal faint, persistent, While a storm cast its cloak Over the shoulder of every cloud In sight. You are free to say Whatever crosses your mind When you look at the face of time In the passing of one drop Gathering speed, one drop Chasing another, racing to reach A fork in the path, lingering Before making a detour to join Another, fattening on the way Until entering a rivulet Running to the sill. So please accept this invitation: You are welcome to submit, There is no limit to its limit, Even the instructions are a breeze As long as you include Nothing about yourself Except your name. Your address Remains unnecessary, for the rain Will find you — if you receive it It receives you (whether or not You contribute, a volume Is sent). And when you lift The collection you may hear, By opening anywhere, a drop And its story reappear As air turns to water, water to air.
If I die, you say you will let your hair turn silver, grow long, and you will go into the dark place, for you’ve already begun to forget what Mecca means. Where we come from, you and I,maqam means home, means music; the Qur’an can only be read as a song; a sheikh recites the Fatiha as if he has built a house among the lines, the ayas. We’ve both called our daughters Aya, and when they ask about their name, we play holy verses for them, listen to how the sheikh lingers long enough on each letter, how the audience claps and whistles — Is it Umm Kulthum? our daughters ask. He knows all his maqamat, this sheikh, says God is greater, and Allah, Allah, reply the faithful and the unfaithful alike, for the earth is such a small planet, and look, there is Ithaca, almost always on the horizon —  float, my friend. Ithaca — It is rough, but raises goodmen, says Homer, but oh, the women, the women know how to house the bodies of the drowned. They sing,In the Name of the Cross, of God, the Merciful. A child in Syria has amputated legs because he has ventured into a minefield to eat grass. He still has two eyes, two arms, a mouth. God is greater, is greater, stay with me in the light a little longer. You light two cigarettes at the same time, give me one. Tomorrow you will fly to Lesbos to translate. The refugees will say shai, and you will saytea, home, Mecca, Ithaca, maqam, maqam, maqam.
For Joseph Flum When he got to the farmhouse, he rifled through the cabinets, drawers, and cupboards, and his buddies did too. The place was abandoned, or so he thought, and his buddies did too. He tried to talk to people in town, and his buddies did too, but he was the only one whose Yiddish made it across into German. They took his meaning. He, in the farmhouse, took a camera and a gun, but his buddies, who knows. About the gun, it’s also hard to say, but after the war he took up photography, why not, and shot beautiful women for years. Got pretty good at it, and how. Won prizes and engraved plates, put them in a drawer, forgot the war, forgot his buddies, forgot the women, forgot the drawer.
Standing at a desk of cranberries a small triumph of jumps I wait longer than the rescue of rains I send prayers to the terror walking north I do a pantomime on the edge of the cliff overreacting to the sea and the creatures in back of the house if  you had just looked out I would have said this is my little resonance The guile of parrots a carnival a killing a crusade the final 
pursuit either a panorama or a demon The fan click refuses to stop or to cancel its insistence stubborn in the face of carnage the once famous once child fortunes the fifty days of posters all the field deaths all the cries of Jimmy! Caddie! Victor! Are you coming? Today not to beard but to wear black today not to trace the creases on my face today caught in parts today to bicep toward justice but not to beard as if that were even a possibility even with lasers and goats an ocean of black dogs and boats searching for better swells a more favorable forecast a mast out of water I want what the pelican sees An answer comes in the smell of woodsmoke as he passes by a personal note at the slope of his neck trials of bridges and the moon alongside Pont Marie I follow that smell with the O of sails and sorted shoes with brushes and the corners of candles a firm clap then the rubber stickiness of stones I follow the tremble with the white noise of busses and a can of coins surrounded by Joyce and daughter blind on a broken chair hearing cobbles I’m just like you some dying some grief some scotch my final please unhooked from fire and earrings knees in the grass sinking into the sorted dirt my beach a tree pleading with the summer surf walking or chased a finned orange fish that sucks at my sleep a morning trail in lavender musk preacher mounds a human fever a corner room settled in blue plaid a pot of red bowls a curtain of frames a pitted eye a hill a chimney a pear Where would these words be without a subject? little carvings of mosquitoes landing on my hands headaches digging an elision of craters a great empty blow of air that follows my feet the big lumber of my dog’s no longer here his hair an excursion still fluttering on the tile slush and whispered breath where the naked man on the street washes his back with purple flowers You keep saying boy like it’s the belt that was used to tie you to the bed you keep saying bull like you were forced to fight you keep saying dragon as if courage had no sound you keep saying hair and crib like babies come out of shells From button to button what spunky rope what cold claustrophobe what caravan of pack dogs what kink and rocky tunnels do I have to sliver through every exhausted moon batteries dwindling toward unnameable and permanent night my knees pray the floor will open to a new city A door to my back the molding cheesy and rectal I run with the horses across the field the town wiped off the track and left behind you curl up at the back of my neck and we go bucking over the whole knot of trails the whole veiny land
The body wicks away its nest, leaves sediment. In salt the silhouette of a wolf or a sheepshead. Who knows who steals bones if  not the connoisseur of  bones, and who drops a crank behind the body if  not the one who drains the river bed? In unrest, buzzards. Or a flat line. The probability of  sparrows a spark between two enemy pistons. A dirigible built solely for the grave.
By way of my mother, the deacon with the slick gray hair and money clip in his pocket can claim a percentage of my body like tithe rights. And on this Sunday, as with every other Sunday, he is a slender ebony panel in the fence of faith, one man in the company of men standing shoulder to shoulder in suits, tapping their toes, clapping their hands, putting muscle to work in the making of praise music. We Baptists call this devotion, my working definition of which is faithfulness to the light. To the extent that God is as white as the clouds of heaven, this theory holds. To the extent these particular men are dark, I must consider other possibilities: that God remade himself in my image so that we could be closer or that devotion means the commitment of black men to stand with one another
His father told him never start writing or reading in the middle of a book. There’s a title, don’t go on without one. And he didn’t go on without one — he had the title Private. This was life’s taproot — the obedient boy began always at the beginning. Books start out with what the boy calls Beauty — the boat’s still in port. The cat’s alive. Pantry’s packed. Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, what with all the present tense left to go. Usually, by the first page or second, a relationship emerges between text and title. Some of the words blur on the page and the key ones glow, as does the title, and a fat red arrow with two heads connects them. Yum. It was like owning something. The way when he paid for a fine hat and put it on, he felt a circuit through the rim and top and sides, swilling gray hat blood. And he felt like his heart controlled this circuit remotely, via microchip. If a book could not service him with this truth, which was all the pleasure in the world, he would usually stop reading. He saw the end of very few books anyway —  who needs two climaxes? After that intense sensation the book always changed. It was like looking at a plate of food he’d half-eaten and had rendered him bloated and nauseous. Now he is on marches. Now his gun makes a nest in his arm crook with nasty red welts for straw. Now his rear leaks smelly water all day. His whole life he has balanced himself on an absurdly slender proscenium and as he continues to edge out he can’t tell if it isn’t maybe a gangplank. He doesn’t like the switch-up. What’s out there? he wonders, in what he’ll call ocean for now. To his right is an alligator. But the head-ridge has no bone. It’s propped up instead by fumes: rich, dark, and pungent. Far off, men are cradling cracked dolphins. Arrows of fire shoot out the blowholes. The wounds bleed silver. Perhaps they are connecting to a title in the sky. But he’s not seeing any of these things. The world is mostly brown and black, and smells like a rotting fridge. What is it? What is it? Is it a hand? Is it an eye? Is it a hat? It is time.
Two bedtimes ago, through my window, I heard a cat get eaten. As the cat split, it sounded like a balloon string put to scissors to make curls so the birthday boy would smile extra wide. Last night, by the same window, I heard mostly my breath, inside of which was a small baby suckling my air for his milk. When I bolted upright, the baby grew up into a carpenter, nailing his brains into the side of my lung to babyproof the light switch. Flip the switch and it lights a picture of my emaciated, sore-ridden bum for my breath to laugh at. Why is my breath so unlike yours? My ears? Why do I only hear such unnatural things? Although, come to think of it, death is completely natural. I’m just exasperated. Everywhere life-sounds swarm this, our shared pond, like mating turtles. Cars whoosh, schmoozers hum, snakes spit poison, Martin and Martina say yes and sob and hold, but my ears fill up instead with eggshells cracked by the bumbling parents. I cleaned my left ear out, but my nail cut the drum. It filled with water and is deaf for now. I’m leaving the right one dirty. No sudden changes. Keep everything dry. Let it figure out a way to heal itself. And me:  just practice living with yourself  deaf. Sometimes your brain is as unwelcome as muscles or guns. It’s obvious to others. Maybe even everyone. Don’t wish for anything. Don’t get organized. Don’t buy a book. Don’t go to bed early. Seek out beige, in foodstuffs and landscapes. Chew gum if  you’re overwhelmed. You’re in this alone. That means there’s nobody to stop you. You’re almost at the finish line. But first, you have to pick a finish line.
When I close my eyes there’s a white key. But maybe it’s a box, so I can’t press it. The sides are shell blue, but I can’t check without turning the box. The musician told me his sister and he would say Morgem and expose the teeth and flare the nostrils to express a particular affection. The white box won’t say Morgem. Or Corbemsalad. It must be a heartbreaking desk. It says to be in on a secret just means to know you’re in a secret —  the pleasure’s like two people beheld by a third in the act of making meaning. It says on one hospital floor the humans die. Another they give birth. A third they grow new chins. At a fourth they’re lopped. When the floors mix by mistake, it’s usually in the middle where the desk rasps under husks of  ink, and the nostrils grow for air. We talk, never sing, because music gives the god room to stretch and the god kills by growing in the head.
A lavender fog breeds with our children. Our girls are dying on the roadsides, their wombs pried open by the scramble that grows inside. Save us from the lavender fog —  it’s the ghosts of your dead people, who have never bothered our village before. Their shapes convulse in our water sources. When we get close enough to hear their ghostly voices, they say yum-yum pleadingly and shout out better better as in I’ll get better. Some of our children have taken these as lyrics. Your ghosts are corrupting the youth. Stop using us as musical instruments, this is a great taboo you have violated! Go back to making tubes of wood vibrate and scraping your goat gut.
There is a white stone cliff over a dropping slope sliced along with bare trees. In the center of the cliff is a round dry fountain of polished stone. By seizing my whole body up as I clench my hand I am able to open the fountain into a drain, revealing below it the sky, the trees, a brown and uncertain ground. This is how my heart works, you see? This is how love works? Have some sympathy for the great spasms with which I must open myself to love and close again, and open. And if I leapt into the fountain, there is just no telling: I might sever myself clean, or crack the gold bloom of my head, and I don’t know onto what uncertain ground I might fold like a sack.
Come our one great bushfire pigs, sty-released, declined to quit their pavements of gravel and shit. Other beasts ran headlong, whipping off with genitals pinched high. Human mothers taught their infants creek-dipping. Fathers galloped, gale-blown blaze stripping grass at their heels and on by too swift to ignite any houses. One horse baked in a tin shed, naked poultry lay about dead having been plucked in mid flight but where pigs had huddled only fuzzy white hoofprints led upwind over black, B B B and none stayed feral in our region.
look like birds. Scrawny winter birds balanced by two sarong  tail feathers. Some look west,  others north- east toward the  mountain. Stiff in the cold & remote. They haven’t been loved  enough. They grow  thinner and thinner in their woody streaked feathers, held together only by the exposed spiral of internal  organs. After a while , the sun comes out and all o f the birds, clutching wire, turn  an electric silver. This is hopeful,, but doesn’t last. Clouds  take a break from one another , ,  re-  convene. A half-inch of snow is rolled out with perfect evenness  across the picnic table, as though  someone made a blank  for what was  coming. The nice thing about clothespin birds is they don’t “excrete.”  Jays & grosbeaks & finches & mourning doves + ravens leave  their paintings  everywhere , on benches & limbs ,, , on fallen pine needle fascicles \|/ feldspar & quartz _ __ though all has now become gesso beneath snow. After a certain amount of  feeling  hopelessly under-  accomplished, you look at your nails and want to  paint them. Is this how birds  feel? No. Birds fly and don’t look  down. Or, they sit `’’ amid branches  and peck at the brittle waffled bark  & tiny bugs buried  in the marrow. .< sszt sszt sszt .< You, too, peck. Familiar letters on t he keys have lost their definition and resemble finger-  tip-size daubs of bird paint on back-  lit platforms. You recall the s e & m only via entrenched neural pathways ,  while the l and c continue to morph into tiny archaic  symbols. As though, the unconscious is forming a message. ( Always “it” has something  unearthly to say. ) Except the unconscious is  the earth , it’s just we don’t know how she does it.  St. Thomas of Aquinas got a delirium  hit of t hat at the end  and decided to marry it. Each day your thumbs grow paler, nails coarser, evolving  toward the ptero-  dactyl: part reptile, part bird. As a child  pterodactyls scared you, which meant  they had your attention. Refusing to stay  in the lineage, they became  their own form.  They had an iguana for a father and a pelican for a mom, crispy and dipped in molasses. If you were big enough  you could eat them  the way some people eat grass-  hoppers. Compulsive hole-  punchers, if less manic could be sculptors,  though it requires d-e-t-a-c-h-m-e-n-t to see it that way , , if you are  a lilac leaf sketching outside the library window. What are those books  doing in there together ?! Nothing ! When a new one arrives, they fall in  love,, one by one. Inside their covers,  a million leaves, each w/ black growth. A pattern of fungus ,  the shed skin of snakes & dna traces. Like bird poop, but more orderly and the message is see-  through. Don’t you  wish you could lift the letters  and release them halfway  back to the liquid state ,, , before they got connected to the circuitry? It might be kind of  relaxing. You might be  as good of a  painter  as a cuckoo bird. A few nights ago you dreamt you were very pregnant & in need of a place to give birth. Your boyfriend  had left you and 2 therapists  let you live w/ them because you resembled their daughter  —  though they were suspicious. Who can blame them?  As for your nails,  find a mani- curist, someone who knows what they are  doing. Druids never lived here,  that was Europe, but you and the sage- brush  are distantly related via microbial ancestors; in spite of yourself, you are  surrounded by family. \\|/
He slips on ice near a mailbox —  no gemsbok leaps across the road —  a singer tapped an eagle feather on his shoulders —  women washed indigo-dyed yarn in this river, but today gallium and germanium particles are washed downstream —  once they dynamited dikes to slow advancing troops —  picking psilocybin mushrooms and hearing cowbells in the mist —  as a child, he was tied to a sheep and escaped marauding soldiers —  an apple blossom opens to five petals —  as he hikes up a switchback, he remembers undressing her —  from the train window, he saw they were on ladders cutting fruit off cacti —  in the desert, a crater of radioactive glass —  assembling shards, he starts to repair a gray bowl with gold lacquer —  they ate psilocybin mushrooms, gazed at the pond, undressed —  hunting a turkey in the brush, he stops —  from the ponderosa pines: whoo-ah, whoo whoo whoo —
A circle. What was needed was a circuit, and a good operating system. What’s within is without being seen to be so. Optical anomaly as unexceptional. Four left’s a square. One way turning system until it becomes its other way. A passive insistence on multiples until that divorces itself, becomes single. A single pitch made up of the sounds of multiples. Conduction, instrumental absence. Fundamentals establish separate planets. Similarity wars upon their lines, planes. Said well, here opens, his, sits at its bottom. The bodies. Spoke well, agreed in kind, general. But the way of its expression requires hurt and then, treatment of skin for leather clothes or whatever, it’s old, sometimes, often. Depending on the question, it can be the answer. One shouldn’t be proud to not have it. A knee, an elbow, three arms up. Then a last one, a fourth. Last and happiest, willing, fully skin end. The whey, foam, on the head of the safest society in human civilization. Amnesia to people who will actually harm and hurt.
Imagine that — my last words might have been spoken to the dog, she who saved my life, it has been said, spoken with no thought of reply nor of understanding, a genial insult maybe, a philosophical conundrum posed aeons before any household pet ever turned an ear. In the ambulance I made no remark about trees nor how tired I was of them, and in the second ambulance our dog’s heart beat hard with terror.
She sits there on that high hill just sits there and lets things pass through her until one snags and she fits it into the pattern of this fine mesh of what spirit? But, ah, there’s a cowboy hat and a cherry bomb tattoo and it snags and what she lets through may, 
I say, may be caught second time around like that oil pan off an old Hudson or that artificial leg toward morning she’s collected some radio signals from a dead ship and a janitor’s song and some folderol from a church picnic with iced tea fried chicken collards and a whole lot of stentorian god-speak with apple pie and ice cream. I’ll be damned if all those things aren’t moving around in one another’s magnetic fields, some kind of counterpoint that happens each time she breathes it’s a mobile only no wires there’s a piece of mirror turning on a spider web and now she’s a signal beacon says come on up I’ve got something to read and somehow it all works. Then she pulls this silk thread and it becomes a form.
Fresh out of the icebox, this brain looks the wrong way from time to time, and misses the cat stepping by, Gerry on the screen laboring to tell the nuances his pink matter almost notices, he’s not my brother, not really my close friend, just my necessary neighbor on a bicycle going by like a whistle from the lips of someone I trust. He has a peculiar skeleton arranged his own way in the mind’s pasture. We were as they say “of an age” and so inter- twine somehow, though I wanted to work when he wanted to play. That long nose is in my life and in my writing and so is the Okanagan River. I sometimes get to the river when I am at work, the sun on my back not the ink in my pen. There was, when I was last in the Okanagan Valley, a cat with big paws in the neighborhood, I was told, fires I could see along the hillside, stunning heat from the sky, enough to thaw any brain.
Being in a coma can play havoc with your sense of time. It can turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost between bedroom and office. If you are to live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners, step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time, you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake to a busy underground world, where people in body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where. Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving your sense of time, which was never supposed to have an end.
Mother Dear, never apologize for nettles I yanked in fury from Lottie Shoop’s side yard —  they stung me into seeing fairy mosses lilypad her middened juniper, the quivering gobble of her chin, teacup clicking dentures as she sprang up into her wattle hut and broke a rib of aloe vera —  gel belling the top of that claw goblet. It didn’t cool the sting, and yet, noticing sunshine thumbing plums in a string catch-all —  I was already well.
Would you rather hear the louche pun drawn  from glory hole, lip wrap or fingering  or hear a tiny hammer striking wire? Would you rather see the molten birthing glass?  Seat Eros next to Kronos, for the banter. I heard she’s yet unplowed — I heard your quiver dangled down —  I heard you dwell in borrowed forms — love’s nothing but glimmer-to-wither, dawn’s fireflies expired.  In this place we sift & bounce the words like dice thrice dip a pipe into the magma, o my stars.  Lear & Gloucester walk into a bar debating again the color of bluffs or moors  or cormorants: like craquelure like damp tea leaf driftwood no, peat steam no, brined sand-apple ink  Were all your letters in fact suns? Forgotten, after all that trouble —   Are those bellows blowing some? A field of broken bottles, fragments blue.  A tune invented to divert a girl.
Bouteloua blackgrama grass red chino side- oats blue grama grasshairy buffalo-grass toboso three-awn land’s dawn 旦 sun over sand, tumble wind-mill witch- cup- saltgrass plains love- indiangrass, prairie cordgrass, pink pappusgrass, sprangle-top green knotrootbristle, bluestem, tangle- head, sacaton paniclesopen, golden drop- seed blooms desert winter-grass, awns twist, un- twist, suchsyllables flickerout of grass: Nanissáanah thirst, ghost dancenative spirits, active roots, footstalks to soil as to site, stemsbend, range-lands wave, seiche fields sway, clouds pass over-grazed grass staked, fenceddries, weakens, dies, fallencrowns, the grasslands whatcomes to pass, ranch- hand lands, live-stock livelihood wildlife gone, displaced, migrations impeded, scales im- balancedthe yearsspread, each itselfhitched to everything elsein the universenodeshollowed, drought- land years, dropson the hardpannature is endlessregeneration trichloris, muhly, switch- grass, wind misses沙 沙 shasha through the pass- es, whispering seedswill pass, will passwithin leaves listeninggrasses, not onlythe revelation but the nature behind
And as to the poets — it is those straying in Evil that follow them: Do you not see that they wander about bewildered in every valley? And that they say what they practice not? — Qur’an 26:224–226 The man I confused Allah for speaks into the microphone while the angels on my shoulders chew a mouthful of my hair. I wake up to a severed goat head and look at it hard enough to remember the animal in its entirety, a functional thing. The Saudis have built skyscrapers taller than the mountains in Makkah. This is a sign of the apocalypse; we worry with our backs to each other and look for Isa in the faces of men who appear to spin gold straight from the guttural source. 
I repeat the word mustaqbil like a new prayer; when the dog barks at a brick wall mustaqbil, when anemones collapse back into gothic buds mustaqbil, when I wet my arms to my elbows in the sink mustaqbil. All while Israfil kicks his feet against a stone wall and cleans his trumpet with each utterance. In the village, three men dragged a boy into our orchards and beat him to a pulp. The woman who eloped was strangled and thrown into the river. Pickpockets robbed the mourners at my uncle’s funeral — mustaqbil mustaqbil mustaq — my throat is infected by the thick-tongued promise; each night diluted into its prior belly. I use language to build the gardens I’m destined to be expelled from, each imagined rose rendered true.
Though I am more Che than Chavez,I am still a dove. I do not apologizeto you. Or to the state of California. The IRS. New York. That administrator I bitin the third grade,who was deliciousand sweet.I, oh, so cold. In the mind, the Dionysian defiles wallsthe Apollonian protects.I am always lookingto take something down. Usually it’s me. Two bulls stand on a hill. The younger says,Father, let’s run down and fuck a cow.The father, wiser, longer in the horn,higher on the grass, reminds his son how Moses was also horned, beamed with light,that to handle a massive snake, to charm Pharaoh, to steal fire, to fly, to unzipthe sea, is to speakand not tap vanity.Moses descended Mount Sinai with cracked slabs and saw a golden calf. The father said to the young bull,No son, let’s strut down and fuck them all.Thus begins the beef  between bird and bee,the isthmus isolatingorder from chaos. My mind is made upof so many different cutsof meat. My marbles stayas mixedas my metaphors. As my myths.As myself. At parties my favoriteicebreaker involves asking strangers to describe themselveswith three words. Their descriptions are a slipping away to change clothes. Identity and ironyneatly knit in an ugly Christmas sweater. Sometimes I feel so Socratic: oft-laureled, poison-palmed, toga-partied, exasperated by the masses:I wouldn’t have guessed ambitious.Free-spirited, you don’t say.Other times I feel like the womanrambling among the vapors escaping the ground in Iceland’s volcanic canyon,making a busan em dashin a rest stop, where some fifty-odd persons searching for themselvesin true existentialismare yellow lupines growingon the side of the road. An epiphany cannot be achieved,as a cedar waxwing cannot be more cedarqua waxwing. Eventually what we’re looking for appears. Sometimes incitation opens at the bottom of a straw, a spoon, a barrel of wine,the windfall happens while eating farfalle,while flipping throughThe Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. At the moonme the animal roofsatop brownstones, sin vergüenza.Upwards our eyes scamper,a reflex action,when inserting an objectin the mouth, even when the object is a gun. Over hills a road erodes the way home.Only after the Coast Guard has readied a helicopter, do wedescend the cold volcano in Eldg já to realize we are the womanin the search party lookingfor ourselves.to poetry.In moments of ecstasywe are lifted     At the shore of the Aegean Seaor at the banksof the river Evros, he loosened his sandalswhile Pegasus stamped the soil,crushing reedsand hoofing awaystray wood. The sun bandagedlight on a sky that would not heal.Perseus,with eyes heavenward,formed the shapes of gods into clouds,slipped his handinto the woven sack,and felt the flintof primped snakes. He thought,But it is the cold weight of scales that protects.As sure as a child, he lined leaves rockedto sleep by saltwater wavesfor a bed,so as not to,with sand,or with hubris,bruise Medusa’sdisunited head. One day,like a beam through skylight,we realizelife is a puddle jumper of  tragedy.Some stones sink fastyet still hold light. So phantom are a statue’sbusted arms and toes. Everything must go. And yet I still hanger hopewhen shopping the racks of discountstores. Veni vidi vici when I see Vince, freeze when I see the coiled coifof Versace’s emblem. Like Sisyphus, errybody thinkthey headed for the top.Sing, started from the bottom,to my reflectionin the dressing room mirror,now we here boywhen I rememberthatOh my god Becky, look at her buttpasses the Bechdel test. I have eaten from the tree the fig that sullies and seenthat the meat’s not alwaysfair.I was,like Perseusand Sir Mix-a-Lot, born by a rivof water,felled by pride whena brown boy, tattooed with age, obsessed with fame, took his talentsto Vermont to kiss trees and tapsyrup from the sap.There and thereand there, he kissed. Here and here he drank.So drunk he hugged an oldwhite womanoff the ground. None of the godsI love love me. To be tipsyis to leverage one’s self.Or so I’m told. The pulley is considered civilization’shighest achievement.Icaruskilled himselfbeing lifted.
Where there’s smoke there are mirrors and a dry ice machine, industrial quality fans. If I’ve learned anything about the present moment    •  But who doesn’t love a flame, the way one leaps into being full-fledged, then leans over to chat   •  Already the light is retrospective, sourceless, is losing itself though the trees are clearly limned.
So you see why it could not have been a more humble moment. If there was any outward sign of regalia It might have been the twilight crowning of the day, just then, A perfect moment of dusk, but changing, as a wave does Even as you admire it. Because the southbound stop Mirrors the one northbound where we so often find ourselves At the beginning, southbound’s return holds the memory Of northbound’s setting-out, and the grassy median between With its undisturbed trees defines an elusive strip of the present Where no one lives. After twenty-eight years of the trip, It’s like two beakers of colored water — one green, one blue —  Have poured themselves back and forth, because On one side we are tinted by remembering the other. But this aspect of the journey, at least, we know we will repeat. As dusk cohered that moment — aquas, pinks, violets —  Just at that moment as I was returning to the car A woman came the other way, her two young daughters Holding her hands, and the gloaming sparkled around them So that I froze, as they were backlit, starry, They were the southbound reminder of who I had been beginning The trip. She didn’t look like me, but what I did recognize Was her clarity of purpose, in what Sharon Olds calledthe days of great usefulness, making life as nice As she could for them, always writing the best story, And also, beneath her skin, living with delight as quiet As the shoots anchoring grass beneath the earth. I walked back to my car. My husband sat in the driver’s seat, Our weekend’s luggage thrown in back.Tell me we really had those girls, I said,and that they held my hands like that. When I got home I pictured her helping them each into bed — I knew it was Later than she had hoped — then reading Each section of the paper’s terrible news, finally alone.
Strand. String. In this dream, the paths cross and cross again. They are spelling a real boy out of repetition.    •  Each one is the one real boy. Each knows he must be wrong about this, but he can’t feel how.   •  The fish and the fisherman, the pilot, the princess, the fireman and the ones on fire.
1  Since the irrational “because I said so” start, they’d had their differences: color that isn’t really color, spin that isn’t spin because attitude’s best when it has no content. Ask a physicist what “charge” is; he’ll say your question makes no sense.   2  Word had it that if they surrendered their feckless ways and their lives with no end, if they joined up, they would get a head, something to speak for them: The head says, “I don’t want to die.” Says, “I am all alone here.”
Everything is made of everything. — Leonardo da Vinci I found Rome in the woods. Fair to admit it’s mostly tundra to the west in the park, past Toklat the Denali I revised, low grasslands engineered to freeze deep by October — this being Alaska — the great  Tabularium close to the Temple of  Castor and Pollux I rebuilt that same summer —   not superimposed, exact as any scheme in secret — the Arch of Septimius Severus at the gravel bar  where fox drank from a river turned stream,  a Theater of Marcellus near  the ranger station where one raven,  such a brat,  complained of  my Circus Maximus, Trajan’s Column,  my Baths of Diocletian, too many spots soaked in unpronounceable Latin.  I really did, I shouldered bits of it,  a ruin-hushed haunted business, my brain  a truck bed, a lift, pulleys big as a whale’s heart, expletives of cheap wonder all over  my woodlot and expanse.  One self-anoints to embellish day, years, life thus far, and think oneself so ...      Then busted —  by a raven! Well, that’s memory for you, that’s so-called  civilization for you, to layer up,  to redo the already done. I mean it’s a fact, the puny life span we’re allotted.  And proof — Denali in August, fireweed, spunky scrawny first Latinate — Erechtites hieracifolia —   giving off flowers to mark  what weeks left, little  time bomber, time traveler, ancient  slips red-flagging the countdown to winter  by climbing its own stalk. Something perverse about that. Something perfectly fiendishly self-conscious about that.    •  From the start perverse, any premise.  Ask ... We can’t know. To be compelled  makes an occasion. Rome’s grand  past horrific, fire and ash, swamp into bog, lust  and bloodlust —  The Alaska Range dreams lurid as Rome,  the worst way below being fire, summer snow at night  off the highest peaks by noon  as distant from our cabin as the size of a hand if I  held up the one with  an eye in the middle to know how this works. Some have the power to raise from the dead a before, before scary and beautiful  back to mystery cults, in caves, rubble far under a Roman street, the altar to Mithras still slaying his bull, crumbling the stonework. All things being equal. But they’re not.  Agony, it’s older.  Ask the moose at Denali,  the snowshoe hare, the lynx, such a wily courtly lot.  Ask Ovid  banished to his hovel on the Black Sea, aching  for Rome’s exalted rude cacophony, each  exiled month a big thick X down Februarius, Aprilis to home-shattered sick enough for an undersong. Look it up! Undersong: a strain; a droning; the burden of a song —
One son plays monster rage. His brother plays ship crashed in a maze. We are reading Hulk. We are reading Theseus. White sails, green men, bright women who give everything and get nothing. The monster son would never sail a ship into a maze, but brothers are not the same. They hear the same stories and make different toys of them, muscled figures in their fists, walls of wood and magnets. Who knows why a part of me always departs this place, glides out the window to rain and falling leaves, dresses of wetness and gold. She floats there, blessed by air, but when she tries to slip back in, she can’t; she hangs beyond the glass, panicked, then bulging with fury. Days later another part of me flies, into a maple the color of platelets, and another into bareness and sky. I’ve lost count of how many fists are now pounding my house, how many mouths are braying how many cries, but here inside, for now, my dear sons call to me for their fallen castles, built again, to find all the missing arrows.
This is the sound of the bell. It rings, full of brass and the end it brings: once for the children, once for the child who sits alone. His eyes hurt and mild, he waits, holding his things. Time should hold no meaning for him yet. You don’t learn how to play; you forget. But he knows a while well, and longs for the clang of the bell. A bell is a room of nothing. No, a dome with a hidden swing —  a will, a sway, a tone, a peal, the beginning of song. The wild crowd nears, passes, laughing. Here is the sound of the bell.
paint over thedead end sign  are police writers?  yes they are writing into  books our  little cherub of  misunderstanding  a thinking to push us  back into body of the  wholelove yourself more next time  their reports read stones sink as they please everything expands at the very end a lit cigarette into our dark hello
refuge temple 254 Purdy Street, Buffalo, NY, childhood home of Lucille Clifton There will be another storm always on the air Or in the air or are you the air Cold unrecognizable following The inside road This vessel bears one through Snow or time to find the house Paint peeling and maybe unfamiliar but the address Is to a place that doesn’t exist anymore An empty lot Now owned by the woman Next door who leases it to a Storefront church that needs the space for parking I take a selfie with the snowbank 254 Purdy Street Sunday morning they will plow and cars will fill the place Worshippers filing next door Names of the family who lived here forgottenSayles their name was Sayles Well there’s Miss Bowden says the neighbor Who lives over there Ninety years old Lived here her whole life If anyone’d remember she would Though if the house don’t hold against the world And the body don’t hold against the world Snow falling down What can hold The church house the neighbor next door The snow Old Miss Bowden This empty lot We empty now Everybody drive home Song done over Snow river hover House is gone Stormsent era That Miss Bowden may remember The twelve-fingered girl who lived here We tell the neighbor: her name was Lucille Playing in the street Afraid of the dark Bringing the light   salon des refusés East Side, Cleveland, OH, apartment building of Julie Patton In the house of Julie Patton Bumblebees do sing pollen In the cave of ears Every thing listens Jimi, Barack, and Marilyn Buck The saints of the place In vigil of excellent beings Light poles hold typical beasts Though here they empty themselves Into me Orange spaces do make A world again for though the gods are mythic The goddesses spin Dear Julie sing Me through the long hallway The dark one sleeved in your mother’s States of mind State of mine is the one that opens my body In heat through dark and salted moments Body is a book House does quiver Unwritten the way of how to find you House is the book In the language of feathers that launch Whose heart could race Winter air winter season that rushes How we in dark are slung The dark that opens its hallways Time mastered by Shiva and Hanuman I did stand in the empty space Filled by snow Then here in the sun-flirted front room Watched by Saint Nina Simone and Saint Joan Baez and Saint 
Buffy Sainte-Marie I wonder forward in Sapphic tongue Who is remember me Who is open me with their tongue Who languages the space of a house that don’t exist Better thought sun see Julie sing sanctified Sing swung sing one and one and one and one   school house Barrington, Rhode Island, right near the Bay, home of C.D. Wright 
and Forrest Gander When she gives me directions and describes it to me I expect a red-room schoolhouse Driving across the water from Providence Into the stream-laced far shore Far shore where a boat unlands To determine the shape of what isn’t There I drive past wrong streets Wrong houses places whose bells I ring Stranger in the forest and dark-skinned too Where do I belong From the bathhouse I came Where I worshiped at all manner of strange altars Does this make me more or less human Tongue makes you human And how it translates the body into language To find the door as it was described to me Frosted glass and Japanese characters lining it School saying the language of the sun No sums add up here But she calls me in And I frown to know long to know What holds the house against the world How will words survive the dissolution of the body Of the planet’s core Sore and soar it came down through the cloud cover Gray-white curtains House of a dozen languages At the cold lake the far away lake She grabbed me post-lecture where I told about how I could not translate the words of the poet until I came to her own sun-loved city She begged me to always love all manner of strangers I thought she meant the regions of the body I’d have promised her anything though years later in Rhode Island Named for an island no one can find Lover I love you forever House that disappeared Books that live in the air Island that no one knows While on Purdy Street good people park their cars in the snow Go inside and sing We don’t have nothing more than this anymore No planet no lover no words no nothing no more
There’s a spirit in me that admits no weakness. Is it the best of me or worst? Cow daisies burn their stars into the stalled air of pastures. No one else cares whether they’ll last. I shirk the sick and go out to pick flowers, Bushels of the tough and prickly-legged, Whichever I can pull out of the gulch, And push them into thunder-pitchers. An invalid in a peignoir pulls the covers over her head In the high cherry bed great-grandmother had made To match the chest of drawers. Solitudes gather under the Beau D’arc. I ache for the meanness, the glorious meanness That knocked croquet balls into its soft meal trunk, To hear the thwack of that mallet, To be it, as it cleanly cracks and lets the other ball be gone. Acquisitive gall made my people call themselves victorious. They thought they won the Mexican War, among others. One ancestor drove his bayonet into the dirt when he returned —  This tree is what took root and bloomed, Though Beau D’arcs grow complex in illness. The locusts have chewed its thatch into fretwork, Its leaves fluted crisp, poxed yellowish, kissed by the worm. Huptemugs believed that train rides to the capital to hear Charlemagne singing Franz would cure the soul (As venison is cured) against life’s turmoil —  They could not tolerate complaints of the feet, Corns and hammertoes, evidence of rot. If generous you might have called us committed to transcendence, Though who that ever fought her way into an opera box Ever let the arias consign her to a fate of constant care? There is a spirit in me that admits no weakness. When it sings, the rest of me despairs.
After Robert Hayden’s “Bone-Flower Elegy” In the dream I enter him I the eater of numbers the black-lipped barcode of cost have come for him because he owes me. He owes me the broken machine the bone structure gone limp over leg of time. I irreverent as safe sex breathlessly whispering this is not a threat but a promise
b-boy Wordsworth beatbox vocal cord code switching through the wheat fields at daybreak clicking his teeth against the corn’s high yellow thighs prying open like the sunlight’s tear ducts on the morning the moon forgot how to speak Twi the cicadas having screeched all night in Old English like a man who has forgotten his name calling out the leaves of grass as though stalks of letters at right angles have meaning a way of theorizing the rhetoric of beauty a fig tree trembling at the rain’s hungry lick a finch weaving myth into a nested crown of logic the wildflowers’ arms on dial-up internet a virgin using the petals as her service providerhe loves me, he loves me not, with every flick of her wrist the wind knowing the typeface her lips are set in pockmark cheeks peppered with salt the politics of resentment seasoning the spittletrue poems flee like a slave in Mississippi Googling “home” with no filter or cookies the tuning fork having shorted in the eardrum’s mouth the devil was in the details when he read the star’s hands prongs of a serpent’s embrace, steam dancing on a cloud’s rolled tongue, wet and pregnant with words so soft the dirt could swallow the sound what must we remember, to forget how we were born? when we ask for advice it is rather for permission for we know not what we do when we do it in free will a robot puts a conch shell to its lips and blows a man puts a seashell to his ear and hears the ocean tell a lie long enough and it will surely turn to truth
It is Hermes stepping off his winged sandal.... I saw the Writing Spider sitting with aplomb Even his caduceus, despite the scandaldead center her creation, above the compost of its forfeiture, lies abandoned(sage location); what I wondered most like an Android or iPad on a nightstandwas whether the sweetgum burrs and dried leaves grown footed for the purpose of bearing awaywere ornaments or accidents she interweaves any such device or gadget as mayin the clearly golden silk, whose subwebs distract him from a more pressing matter.are occupied by diminutive male sub-celebs Herse is perched on the precipice of the mattressholding down the fort (as she holds court) with its luxurious bedspread, where tapestrylong after she vanishes, stopping short vis-à-vis itself interleaves the allegory.of the epiphany or apotheosis Real gold thread weighs the coverswe expect from genteel arts, or a goddess a cherub heaves to turn down for the lovers.“Who thereupon did rende the cloth in pieces every whit, Would that the same in his wings might tip the scales,Bicause the lewdnesse of the Gods was biased so in it. and with tears, put salt in these mythical talesAnd with an Arras weavers combe of Box she fiercely smit by sinking level with us l’enfant in the room ...Arachne on the forehead full a dozen times and more.”
Terrible are the rose names ...     Stakeholders in a tradition of “Grande Amore” and “True Love” (one carmine, the other blush ... ), their aims are, for the most part, scattershot. “Mothersday” and “Playboy,” “Senior Prom” and “Let’s Enjoy” vie with a lyrical “Lady of Shalott,” while a flyweight “Pink Knockout” comes “Outta the Blue” to mock “Honey Perfume,” “Pillow Talk” — jock Cupid wielding clout. Then maybe a puckish curator pairs “Las Vegas” with “Nearly Wild,” “Buttercream” with “Julia Child,” “Aloha” with “Hello, Neighbor ... ”    •  Misenus, son of Aeolus, god of the wind, don’t you think it’s bad form to practice trumpet on this platform, what with the dentistry squeal at construction site decibel levels of braking blade shaving molar steel, dropped-in blare of delays and arrivals squelched against granite, at close intervals, while you riff on “Over the Rainbow” — ? You received some negative attention from Triton, after blowing his conch so loud you inadvertently entered yourself in an unwinnable contest; now, stuck in a twenty-first-century translation of hell, you press the stops, and for an obol prepare our burial in an infinite axial scroll with a tinier and tinier turning radius, as if we were those hordes, the unsanctified, who shoved one another along the Cocytus, none led on to the golden bough by Venus’s semaphore, the unloved rock doves, whom Virgil treats so gently in the Aeneid.
Where we’d recently lain, exchanging a kiss, stork consorted with crane,  limpkin with ibis.  Was this as much wedding as there would ever be, the fowls’ foot-webbing, the identificatory  ring around a throat? Exchange of earth and air: not a vow but a vote of confidence a feather  might tip by a single scale ...     That one’s a raconteur, so much salt in his tale; this one’s a countertenor,  lilting above the feast. The archon of his hectare  — spotted — spotted least. Here’s a little heckler ...      penciled seagull in the margin. Following line by line the path you took, I imagine no print so fine.
Child. We are done for in the most remarkable ways. — Brigit Pegeen Kelly It would be winter, with a thin snow. An aged sunbeam would fall on me, then on a nearby summit, until a mass of ice would come upon me like a crown of master diamonds in shades of gold and pink. The base of the mountains would be still in darkness. The snow would melt, making the mountain uglier. The ice would undertake a journey toward dying. My iliacus, from which orchids bloom, would learn to take an infant’s shape, some premature creature weaned too soon. My femoral nerve, from which lichen grows in many shades, would learn to take breaths of its own and would issue a moan so labored it could have issued from two women carrying a full-length wooden casket, with dirt made from a girl inside. The dirt would have been buried with all of the girl’s celestial possessions. Bearing the casket would demand more muscles than earthbound horses have. The girl would have been twenty-four. This was my visio. Sometimes I think of it as prophecy. Other times, history. For years it was akin to some specific land, with a vessel that would come for me, able to cross land, sea, the spaces of the universe, able to burrow deep into the ground. Anything could summon it — a breaking in cloud cover, wind chimes catching salt outside my mother’s window, a corner of a painting. And I learned how to call it, too. This is the only skill of which I have ever been proud. When my sister died, from the head of my visio came offspring in the thousands, armed to the teeth, each its own vessel. My first, their mother, lived on. For itself and its hoard it found a permanent home in a cave at the bottom of a lake. And it waited until I was standing on a mountain to sing to me:You will call this mountain home until I tell you to move again. There will always be more of it underground than you
this is  exactly  the kind  of space  I want to  follow you into  holding your little mute worm on a twig make it marble make it touch like tough winter in the next life we will have longer love better places with extended embraces now we leave the song to return to the front  leaf closing on closeness of  mothers in the next worldoverseeing premiumwaste of the planetreincarnateanywherebut here  land on a different rim
Out of the deep and the dark, A sparkling mystery, a shape, Something perfect, Comes like the stir of the day: One whose breath is an odor, Whose eyes show the road to stars, The breeze in his face, The glory of heaven on his back. He steps like a vision hung in air, Diffusing the passion of eternity; His abode is the sunlight of morn, The music of eve his speech: In his sight, One shall turn from the dust of the grave, And move upward to the woodland.
II Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand. In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing. I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast. Make my life glad with nothing. The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.
VII Sing the song of the moment in careless carols, in the transient light of the day; Sing of the fleeting smiles that vanish and never look back; Sing of the flowers that bloom and fade without regret. Weave not in memory’s thread the days that would glide into nights. To the guests that must go bid God-speed, and wipe away all traces of their steps. Let the moments end in moments with their cargo of fugitive songs. With both hands snap the fetters you made with your own heart chords; Take to your breast with a smile what is easy and simple and near. Today is the festival of phantoms that know not when they die. Let your laughter flush in meaningless mirth like twinkles of light on the ripples; Let your life lightly dance on the verge of Time like a dew on the tip of a leaf. Strike in the chords of your harp the fitful murmurs of moments.

They live alone together, she with her wide hind and bird face, he with his hung belly and crewcut. They never talk but keep busy. Today they are washing windows (each window together) she on the inside, he on the outside. He squirts Windex at her face, she squirts Windex at his face. Now they are waving to each other with rags, not smiling.
As Death often sidelines us it is good to contribute even if so little as to shovel some earth into earth.
Rosebud, So. Dak., 1960 we all went to town one day went to a store bought you new shoes red high heels aint seen you since
Once you saw a drove of young pigs crossing the highway. One of them pulling his body by the front feet, the hind legs dragging flat. Without thinking, you called the Humane Society. They came with a net and went for him. They were matter of fact, uniformed; there were two of them, their truck ominous, with a cage. He was hiding in the weeds. It was then you saw his eyes. He understood. He was trembling. After they took him, you began to suffer regret. Years later, you remember his misfit body scrambling to reach the others. Even at this moment, your heart is going too fast; your hands sweat.
All afternoon his tractor pulls a flat wagon with bales to the barn, then back to the waiting chopped field. It trails a feather of smoke. Down the block we bend with the season: shoes to polish for a big game, storm windows to batten or patch. And how like a field is the whole sky now that the maples have shed their leaves, too. It makes us believers—stationed in groups, leaning on rakes, looking into space. We rub blisters over billows of leaf smoke. Or stand alone, bagging gold for the cold days to come.
Farewell to the starlight in whiskey, So long to the sunshine in beer. The booze made me cocky and frisky But worried the man in the mirror. Goodnight to the moonlight in brandy, Adieu to the warmth of the wine. I think I can finally stand me Without a glass or a stein. Bye-bye to the balm in the vodka, Ta-ta to the menthol in gin. I'm trying to do what I ought to, Rejecting that snake medicine. I won't miss the blackouts and vomit, The accidents and regret. If I can stay off the rotgut, There might be a chance for me yet. So so long to God in a bottle, To the lies of rum and vermouth. Let me slake my thirst with water And the sweet, transparent truth.
Sometimes, the naked taste of potato reminds me of being poor. The first bites are gratitude, the rest, contented boredom. The little kitchen still flickers like a candle-lit room in a folktale. Never again was my father so angry, my mother so still as she set the table, or I so much at home.
Milly Sorensen, January 16, 1922 - February 19, 2004 It was the moonflowers that surprised us. Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage. She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden. Never knew what she did with them. Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers. I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe, a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling. A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night, that manicured lawns don't surround me. Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door, sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored. Gaudy and awkward by day, by night they were huge, soft, luminous. Only this year, this year of her death did they break free of their huge, prickly husks and brighten the darkness she left.
One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nail above the door, still losing its luck, and a work-collar swings, an empty old noose. The silence waits, wild to be broken by hoofbeat and heavy harness slap, will founder but remain; while, outside, above the stable, eight, nine, now ten buzzards swing low in lazy loops, a loose black warp of patience, bearing the blank sky like a pall of wind on mourning wings. But the bones of this place are long picked clean. Only the hayrake's ribs still rise from the rampant grasses.
He approaches her, trailing his whole fortune, Perfectly cocksure, and suddenly spreads The huge fan of his tail for her amazement. Each turquoise and purple, black-horned, walleyed quill Comes quivering forward, an amphitheatric shell For his most fortunate audience: her alone. He plumes himself. He shakes his brassily gold Wings and rump in a dance, lifting his claws Stiff-legged under the great bulge of his breast. And she strolls calmly away, pecking and pausing, Not watching him, astonished to discover All these seeds spread just for her in the dirt.
An old woman in a floor-length housecoat had become sunset to me, west-facing. Turquoise, sage, or rose, she leans out of her second floor window, chin slumped in her palm, and gazes at the fenced property line between us, the cars beached in the driveway, the creeping slide of light across shingles. When the window shuts, dusk becomes blush and bruises, projected on vinyl siding. Housecoats breathe across the sky like frail clouds.
Dead before I came into this world, grandfather, I carry your name, yet I've never met you. I hear my name, and know that somehow they refer to you. When I scribble those six letters fast, to sign some document or print them neatly in a box, I feel your presence flow with the ink stain and burn through the paper, forever imprinted in my mind. Late summer nights gathered around the dinner table, leftovers being cleared away, faces clouded in cigarette smoke, I hear voices pass the word back and forth in reverence. Somehow I know it's not me the little one grabbing for attention. They speak of you, Andrei, the one I've never met, whose name I carry.
At times it's like there is a small planet inside me. And on this planet, there are many small wars, yet none big enough to make a real difference. The major countries—mind and heart—have called a truce for now. If this planet had a ruler, no one remembers him well. All decisions are made by committee. Yet there are a few pictures of the old dictator— how youthful he looked on his big horse, how bright his eyes. He was ready to conquer the world.
The first lily of June opens its red mouth. All over the sand road where we walk multiflora rose climbs trees cascading white or pink blossoms, simple, intense the scene drifting like colored mist. The arrowhead is spreading its creamy clumps of flower and the blackberries are blooming in the thickets. Season of joy for the bee. The green will never again be so green, so purely and lushly new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads into the wind. Rich fresh wine of June, we stagger into you smeared with pollen, overcome as the turtle laying her eggs in roadside sand.
Has them in every room of her house, wall hangings, statues, paintings, quilts and blankets, ark lampshades, mobiles, Christmas tree ornaments, t-shirts, sweaters, necklaces, books, comics, a creamer, a sugar bowl, candles, napkins, tea-towels and tea-tray, nightgown, pillow, lamp. Animals two-by-two in plaster, wood, fabric, oil paint, copper, glass, plastic, paper, tinfoil, leather, mother-of-pearl, styrofoam, clay, steel, rubber, wax, soap. Why I cannot ask, though I would like to know, the answer has to be simply because. Because at night when she lies with her husband in bed, the house rocks out into the bay, the one that cuts in here to the flatlands at the center of Texas. Because the whole wood structure drifts off, out under the stars, beyond the last lights, the two of them pitching and rolling as it all heads seaward. Because they hear trumpets and bellows from the farther rooms. Because the sky blackens, but morning finds them always safe on the raindrenched land, bird on the windowsill.
It lies in our hands in crystals too intricate to decipher It goes into the skillet without being given a second thought It spills on the floor so fine we step all over it We carry a pinch behind each eyeball It breaks out on our foreheads We store it inside our bodies in secret wineskins At supper, we pass it around the table talking of holidays and the sea.
My mother weeping in the dark hallway, in the arms of a man, not my father, as I sat at the top of the stairs unnoticed— my mother weeping and pleading for what I didn't know then and can still only imagine— for things to be somehow other than they were, not knowing what I would change, for, or to, or why, only that my mother was weeping in the arms of a man not me, and the rain brought down the winter sky and hid me in the walls that looked on, indifferent to my mother's weeping, or mine, in the rain that brought down the dark afternoon.
While clearing the west quarter for more cropland, the Cat quarried a porcelain doorknob oystered in earth, grained and crazed like an historic egg, with a screwless stem of rusted and pitted iron. I turn its cold white roundness with my palm and open the oak door fitted with oval glass, fretted with wood ivy, and call my frontier neighbor. Her voice comes distant but clear, scolding children in overalls and highbutton shoes. A bucket of fresh eggs and a clutch of rhubarb rest on her daisied oil-cloth. She knew I would knock someday, wanting in.
The woodpecker keeps returning to drill the house wall. Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another. There is nothing good to eat there: he has found in the house a resonant billboard to post his intentions, his voluble strength as provider. But where is the female he drums for? Where? I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding, the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate.
You were carried here by hands and now the wind has you, gritty as incense, dark sparkles borne in the shape of blowing, this great atmospheric bloom, spinning under the bridge and expanding— shape of wind and its pattern of shattering. Having sloughed off the urn's temporary shape, there is another of you now— tell me which to speak to: the one you were, or are, the one who waited in the ashes for this scattering, or the one now added to the already haunted woods, the woods that sigh and shift their leaves— where your mystery billows, then breathes.
For some time now, I have lived anonymously. No one appears to think it odd. They think the old are, well, what they seem. Yet see that great egret at the marsh's edge, solitary, still? Mere pretense that stillness. His silence is a lie. In his own pond he is of some renown, a stalker, a catcher of fish. Watch him.
I watched the nesting redstart when we camped by Lake Winnepesaukee. The tent pegs pulled out in soft soil. Rain made pawprints on the canvas. So much clings to the shoes, the old shoes must be discarded, but we're fools to think that does it: burning the scraps. I listened for the rain at Mt. Monadnock, for the barred owl on a tent peak among scrub pines in Michigan. I can hear my father stir and the cot creak. The flap opens. He goes out and never returns though the coffee steams on the grill and the redstart sings in the alders.
Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin, As though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of   titanium; They chime like freight wheels on a Norfolk Southern   slowing into town. But all you ever see is the silence. Husks, glued to the underside of maple leaves. With their nineteen fifties Bakelite lines they'd do  just as well hanging from the ceiling of a space  museum — What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory; The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turned The color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk  in the bottom of a mug. Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with  lineman's pliers. A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper's pantry  in Brighton.
A birdbath ministers to the lawn chairs, all toppled: a recliner on its face, metal arms trying to push it up; an overturned rocker, curvature of the spine. Armchairs on their sides, webbing unraveled. One faces the flowers. A director's chair folded, as if prepared to be taken up.
marches in uniform down the traffic stripe at the center of the street, counts time to the unseen web that has rearranged the air around him, his left hand stiff as a leather strap along his side, the other saluting right through the decades as if they weren't there, as if everyone under ninety were pervasive fog the morning would dispel in its own good time, as if the high school band all flapping thighs and cuffs behind him were as ghostly as the tumbleweed on every road dead-ended in the present, all the ancient infantry shoulder right, through a skein of bone, presenting arms across the drift, nothing but empty graves now to round off another century, the sweet honey of the old cadence, the streets going by at attention, the banners glistening with dew, the wives and children blowing kisses.
From the tawny light from the rainy nights from the imagination finding itself and more than itself alone and more than alone at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,  can you pull me into December? a lowland of space, perception of space towering of shadows of clouds blown upon clouds over  new ground, new made under heavy December footsteps? the only way to live?
The clouds as I see them, rising  urgently, roseate in the  mounting of somber power surging in evening haste over  roofs and hermetic  grim walls—  Last night as if death had lit a pale light in your flesh, your flesh was cold to my touch, or not cold  but cool, cooling, as if the last traces  of warmth were still fading in you. My thigh burned in cold fear where  yours touched it. But I forced to mind my vision of a sky  close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move— a sky of gray mist it appeared— and how looking intently at it we saw its gray was not gray but a milky white in which radiant traces of opal greens, fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again, and how only then, seeing the color in the gray,  a field sprang into sight, extending between where we stood and the horizon, a field of freshest deep spiring grass  starred with dandelions, green and gold gold and green alternating in closewoven  chords, madrigal field. Is death’s chill that visited our bed  other than what it seemed, is it  a gray to be watched keenly? Wiping my glasses and leaning westward,  clearing my mind of the day’s mist and leaning  into myself to see the colors of truth I watch the clouds as I see them  in pomp advancing, pursuing  the fallen sun.
Though the road turn at last  to death’s ordinary door,  and we knock there, ready  to enter and it opens easily for us,  yet all the long journey we shall have gone in chains,  fed on knowledge-apples  acrid and riddled with grubs. We taste other food that life,  like a charitable farm-girl,  holds out to us as we pass— but our mouths are puckered,  a taint of ash on the tongue. It’s not joy that we’ve lost— wildfire, it flares in dark or shine as it will. What’s gone is common happiness, plain bread we could eat with the old apple of knowledge. That old one—it griped us sometimes,  but it was firm, tart,  sometimes delectable ... The ashen apple of these days grew from poisoned soil. We are prisoners  and must eat our ration. All the long road in chains, even if, after all, we come to death’s ordinary door, with time smiling its ordinary long-ago smile.
As the stores close, a winter light  opens air to iris blue,  glint of frost through the smoke  grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk. As the buildings close, released autonomous   feet pattern the streets  in hurry and stroll; balloon heads  drift and dive above them; the bodies   aren't really there. As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,  a woman with crooked heels says to another woman   while they step along at a fair pace,  "You know, I'm telling you, what I love best   is life. I love life! Even if I ever get  to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know?   Limping along?—I'd still ... "
The old wooden steps to the front door  where I was sitting that fall morning  when you came downstairs, just awake,  and my joy at sight of you (emerging  into golden day—  the dew almost frost) pulled me to my feet to tell you  how much I loved you: those wooden steps are gone now, decayed replaced with granite, hard, gray, and handsome.  The old steps live only in me: my feet and thighs remember them, and my hands  still feel their splinters. Everything else about and around that house brings memories of others—of marriage, of my son. And the steps do too: I recall sitting there with my friend and her little son who died,  or was it the second one who lives and thrives? And sitting there ‘in my life,’ often, alone or with my husband. Yet that one instant, your cheerful, unafraid, youthful, ‘I love you too,’  the quiet broken by no bird, no cricket, gold leaves  spinning in silence down without any breeze to blow them,  is what twines itself in my head and body across those slabs of wood  that were warm, ancient, and now wait somewhere to be burnt.
Genial poets, pink-faced  earnest wits— you have given the world  some choice morsels, gobbets of language presented as one presents T-bone steak and Cherries Jubilee.  Goodbye, goodbye,  I don’t care if I never taste your fine food again,  neutral fellows, seers of every side.  Tolerance, what crimes are committed in your name. And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,  blood donors. Your crumbs choke me, I would not want a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped  by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never  falter: irresponsive to nightmare reality. It is my brothers, my sisters, whose blood spurts out and stops forever because you choose to believe it is not your business. Goodbye, goodbye, your poems shut their little mouths,  your loaves grow moldy,  a gulf has split  the ground between us, and you won’t wave, you’re looking another way. We shan’t meet again— unless you leap it, leaving  behind you the cherished  worms of your dispassion,  your pallid ironies, your jovial, murderous,  wry-humored balanced judgment, leap over, un- balanced? ... then how our fanatic tears would flow and mingle  for joy ...
for Robert Lowell We smile at each other and I lean back against the wicker couch.  How does it feel to be dead? I say. You touch my knees with your blue fingers.  And when you open your mouth, a ball of yellow light falls to the floor  and burns a hole through it. Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.  Did you ever, you start, wear a certain kind of silk dress and just by accident, so inconsequential you barely notice it,  your fingers graze that dress and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,  you see it too and you realize how that image is simply the extension of another image,  that your own life is a chain of words that one day will snap. Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,  and beginning to rise heavenward in their confirmation dresses, like white helium balloons, the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning, and above all that, that’s where I’m floating,  and that’s what it’s like only ten times clearer, ten times more horrible.  Could anyone alive survive it?
When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill  and spreads his red-gold wings, I wake, thinking it is the sun and call Juanita, hearing her answer, but only in my mind. I know she is already outside, breaking the cane off at ground level, using only her big hands. I get the machete and walk among the cane,  until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt. Juanita, dead in the morning like this.  I raise the machete— what I take from the earth, I give back— and cut off her feet. I lift the body and carry it to the wagon,  where I load the cane to sell in the village.  Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake,  tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;  it is grief. If you eat too much of it, you want more,  you can never get enough.
Three people come where no people belong any more. They are a woman who would be young And good-looking if these now seemed Real qualities, a child with yellow hair, a man Hardened in desperate humanity. But here are only Dry cistern, adobe flaking, a lizard. And now this Disagreeable feeling that they were summoned. Sun On the corrugated roof is a horse treading, A horse with wide wings and heavy hoofs. The lizard Is splayed head down on the wall, pulsing. They do not Bother to lift their binoculars to the shimmering distance. From this dead center the desert spirals away, Traveling outward and inward, pulsing. Summoned From half across the world, from snow and rock, From chaos, they arrived a moment ago, they thought, In perfect fortuity. There is a presence emerging here in Sun dance and clicking metal, where the lizard blinks With eyes whetted for extinction; then swirling Outward again, outward and upward through the sky's White-hot funnel. Again and again among the dry Wailing voices of displaced Yankee ghosts This ranch is abandoned to terror and the sublime. The man turns to the woman and child. He has never Said what he meant. They give him The steady cool mercy of their unreproachful eyes.
(For Blues People) In the south, sleeping against the drugstore, growling under  the trucks and stoves, stumbling  through and over the cluttered eyes  of early mysterious night. Frowning  drunk waving moving a hand or lash.  Dancing kneeling reaching out, letting  a hand rest in shadows. Squatting  to drink or pee. Stretching to climb  pulling themselves onto horses near  where there was sea (the old songs  lead you to believe). Riding out  from this town, to another, where  it is also black. Down a road where people are asleep. Towards  the moon or the shadows of houses.  Towards the songs’ pretended sea.
The gaunt thing  with no organs creeps along the streets of Europe, she will commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown with no organs with sores on her insides even her head a vast puschamber  of pus(sy) memories with no organs nothing to make babies she will be the great witch of euro-american legend who sucked the life from some unknown nigger whose name will be known but whose substance will not ever  not even by him who is dead in a pile of dopeskin This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson  a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced to a pitiful imitation faggot full of American holes and a monkey on his back  slapped airplanes from the empire state building May this bitch and her sisters, all of them,  receive my words in all their orifices like lye mixed with  cocola and alaga syrup feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your  hysterectic laughs while your flesh burns and your eyes peel to red mud
Liebe, meine liebe, I had not hoped to be so poor  The night winds reach like the blind breath of the world in a rhythm without mind, gusting and beating as if to destroy us, battering our poverty and all the land’s flat and cold and dark under iron snow  the dog leaps in the wind barking, maddened with winter, and his voice claps again and again down the valley like tatters of revolutionary pennants  birches cry and hemlocks by the brook stand hunched and downcast with their hands in their pockets Liebe, the world is wild and without intention  how far this might be from the night of Christmas if it were not for you. Down the reaching wind shrieks of starlight bear broken messages among mountains where shadows plunge  yet our brightness is unwavering  Kennst du das land wo die zitronen blühn, im dunkeln laub die goldorangen ... liebe
My mother had two faces and a frying pot  where she cooked up her daughters into girls before she fixed our dinner. My mother had two faces and a broken pot where she hid out a perfect daughter  who was not me I am the sun and moon and forever hungry  for her eyes. I bear two women upon my back  one dark and rich and hidden in the ivory hungers of the other  mother pale as a witch yet steady and familiar brings me bread and terror in my sleep her breasts are huge exciting anchors  in the midnight storm. All this has been before in my mother's bed time has no sense I have no brothers and my sisters are cruel. Mother I need mother I need mother I need your blackness now  as the august earth needs rain.  I am the sun and moon and forever hungry  the sharpened edge where day and night shall meet and not be one.
I am fourteen and my skin has betrayed me  the boy I cannot live without  still sucks his thumb in secret how come my knees are always so ashy what if I die before morning and momma's in the bedroom  with the door closed. I have to learn how to dance  in time for the next party  my room is too small for me  suppose I die before graduation  they will sing sad melodies  but finally tell the truth about me There is nothing I want to do  and too much that has to be done and momma's in the bedroom  with the door closed. Nobody even stops to think  about my side of it I should have been on Math Team  my marks were better than his  why do I have to be the one wearing braces I have nothing to wear tomorrow  will I live long enough to grow up and momma's in the bedroom  with the door closed.
I However the image enters its force remains within my eyes rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve  wild for life, relentless and acquisitive  learning to survive where there is no food my eyes are always hungry and remembering however the image enters its force remains. A white woman stands bereft and empty a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson  recalled in me forever like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep  etched into my visions food for dragonfish that learn to live upon whatever they must eat fused images beneath my pain.  II The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson  A Mississippi summer televised. Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat  her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney  now awash tearless and no longer young, she holds  a tattered baby's blanket in her arms. In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain  a microphone thrust up against her flat bewildered words  “we jest come from the bank yestiddy   borrowing money to pay the income tax   now everything's gone. I never knew   it could be so hard.” Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud  caked around the edges her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation unanswered she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed   “hard, but not this hard.” Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her  hanging upon her coat like mirrors until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside  snarling “She ain't got nothing more to say!” and that lie hangs in his mouth like a shred of rotting meat.  III I inherited Jackson, Mississippi. For my majority it gave me Emmett Till  his 15 years puffed out like bruises  on plump boy-cheeks his only Mississippi summer whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie as a white girl passed him in the street  and he was baptized my son forever  in the midnight waters of the Pearl. His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year when I walked through a northern summer my eyes averted from each corner's photographies  newspapers protest posters magazines  Police Story, Confidential, True  the avid insistence of detail pretending insight or information the length of gash across the dead boy's loins his grieving mother's lamentation  the severed lips, how many burns  his gouged out eyes sewed shut upon the screaming covers  louder than life all over the veiled warning, the secret relish  of a black child's mutilated body  fingered by street-corner eyes  bruise upon livid bruise and wherever I looked that summer I learned to be at home with children's blood with savored violence with pictures of black broken flesh  used, crumpled, and discarded  lying amid the sidewalk refuse  like a raped woman's face. A black boy from Chicago whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do his teachers ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone in the name of white womanhood they took their aroused honor back to Jackson and celebrated in a whorehouse the double ritual of white manhood confirmed.  IV  “If earth and air and water do not judge them who are  we to refuse a crust of bread?”
When the medication she was taking caused tiny vessels in her face to break, leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,  my sister said she knew she would never be beautiful again. After all those years of watching her reflection in the mirror,  sucking in her stomach and standing straight,  she said it was a relief, being done with beauty, but I could see her pause inside that moment  as the knowledge spread across her face  with a fine distress, sucking the peach out of her lips, making her cute nose seem, for the first time,  a little knobby. I’m probably the only one in the whole world  who actually remembers the year in high school  she perfected the art of being a dumb blond, spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,  tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill  which was her specialty, while some football player named Johnny  with a pained expression in his eyes wrapped his thick finger over and over again  in the bedspring of one of those pale curls. Or how she spent the next decade of her life  auditioning a series of tall men, looking for just one with the kind of attention span she could count on. Then one day her time of prettiness  was over, done, finito, and all those other beautiful women  in the magazines and on the streets  just kept on being beautiful everywhere you looked, walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance in which you sense they always seem to have one hand  touching the secret place that keeps their beauty safe, inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it— It was spring. Season when the young  buttercups and daisies climb up on the  mulched bodies of their forebears  to wave their flags in the parade. My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,  amazed by what was happening, then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head  as if she was throwing something out, something she had carried a long ways, but had no use for anymore, now that it had no use for her. That, too, was beautiful.
Cold wind comes out of the white hills and rubs itself against the walls of the condominium  with an esophogeal vowel sound, and a loneliness creeps into the conversation by the hot tub. We don’t deserve pleasure just as we don’t deserve pain, but it’s pure sorcery the way the feathers of warm mist  keep rising from the surface of the water to wrap themselves around a sculpted clavicle or wrist. It’s not just that we are on the eighth story of the world looking out through glass and steel with a clarity of vision in which imported coffee and a knowledge of French painting  are combined, but that we are atop a pyramid of all the facts that make this possible:  the furnace that heats the water,  the truck that hauled the fuel, the artery of highway blasted through the mountains, the heart attack of the previous owner,  the history of Western medicine  that failed to save him, the successful development of tourism, the snow white lotions that counteract the chemistry  of chlorine upon skin—our skin. Down inside history’s body, the slaves are still singing in the dark;  the roads continue to be built; the wind blows and the building grips itself  in anticipation of the next strong gust. So an enormous act of forgetting is required  simply to kiss someone or to open your mouth for the fork of high-calorie paté someone is raising to your lips, which, considering the price,  it would be a sin  not to enjoy.
When a beautiful woman wakes up, she checks to see if her beauty is still there.  When a sick person wakes up, he checks to see if he continues to be sick. He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day,  looks out the window at a sky where a time-release sun is crawling  through the milky X ray of a cloud.  * * * * * I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box,  the wires crossed, the panel lit by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing  out of sequence, the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls, and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam,  the message doesn’t reach its destination,  the angel falls down into the body of a dog  and is speechless, tearing at itself with fast white teeth;  and the consciousness twists evasively,  like a sheet of paper,  traveled by blue tongues of flame.  * * * * * In the famous painting, the saint  looks steadfastly heavenward,  away from the physical indignity below, the fascinating spectacle  of his own body  bristling with arrows; he looks up as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,   exerting that power of denial  the soul is famous for, that ability to say, “None of this is real: Nothing that happened here on earth and who I thought I was, and nothing that I did or that was done to me,  was ever real.”
Fear. Three bears are not fear, mother and cubs come berrying in our neighborhood like any other family. I want to see them, or any distraction. Flashlight poking across the brook into briary darkness, but they have gone, noisily. I go to bed. Fear. Unwritten books already titled. Some idiot will shoot the bears soon, it always happens, they’ll be strung up by the paws in someone’s frontyard maple to be admired and measured, and I'll be paid for work yet to be done— with a broken imagination. At last I dream. Our plum tree, little, black, twisted, gaunt in the orchard: how for a moment last spring it flowered serenely, translucently before yielding its usual summer crop of withered leaves. I waken, late, go to the window, look down to the orchard. Is middle age what makes even dreams factual? The plum is serene and bright in new moonlight, dressed in silver leaves, and nearby, in the waste of rough grass strewn in moonlight like diamond dust, what is it?—a dark shape moves, and then another. Are they ... I can’t be sure. The dark house nuzzles my knee mutely, pleading for meaty dollars. Fear. Wouldn’t it be great to write nothing at all except poems about bears?
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud  Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes  Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials, And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,  He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them  Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds  Of the thick satin quilt of America And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,  or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade, And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,  It was not blood but money That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills  Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—, He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were  Clogging up my heart— And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”— Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad  Would never speak in rhymed couplets, And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes And I think, “I am asleep in America too, And I don’t know how to wake myself either,” And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life: “I was listening to the cries of the past, When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.” But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable Or what kind of nightmare it might be When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river Even while others are drowning underneath you And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters And yet it seems to be your own hand Which turns the volume higher?
after Po Chü-i, for Robert Creeley We don’t lack people here on the Northern coast, But they are people one meets, not people one cares for. So I bundle my daughters into the car And with my brother poets, go to visit you, brother. Here come your guests! A swarm of strangers and children; But the strangers write verses, the children are daughters like yours. We bed down on mattresses, cots, roll up on the floor: Outside, burly old fruit trees in mist and rain; In every room, bundles asleep like larvae. We waken and count our daughters. Otherwise, nothing happens. You feed them sweet rolls and melon, drive them all to the zoo; Patiently, patiently, ever the father, you answer their questions. Later, we eat again, drink, listen to poems. Nothing occurs, though we are aware you have three daughters Who last year had four. But even death becomes part of our ease: Poems, parenthood, sorrow, all we have learned From these of tenderness, holds us together In the center of life, entertaining daughters By firelight, with cake and songs. You, my brother, are a good and violent drinker, Good at reciting short-line or long-line poems. In time we will lose all our daughters, you and I, Be temperate, venerable, content to stay in one place, Sending our messages over the mountains and waters.
I just had the old Dodge in the shop with that same damned front-end problem,  and I was out, so to speak, for a test run, loafing along, maybe 35 m.p.h.,  down the old Corvallis road, holding her out of the ruts and potholes. That’s out in Montana, the Bitterroot Valley.  Long ways from home is how they say it. Long ways from home, boys, long long ways from home. Might as well not put this clunker in the shop  and keep my hard-earned in my pocket,  she wobbles and humps like a scared rabbit. But it’s a real fine summer day in Corvallis,  and I’m loafing along watching the sprayers  do their slow drag on the fields of alfalfa, and I come to a side road with a little green sign  says “Kurtz Lane” and I said to myself out loud,  “Mistah Kurtz—he alive. Him doing just fine,” because of the sign, you see, and because I’m lonesome  and maybe kind of bitter in spite of the sunshine.  It’s still a goddamn long ways from home. That’s one thing, though, that Heart of Darkness,  I read that story every year, I never forget  that crazy old son-of-a-bitch, that Kurtz. And the next thing I see about a quarter-mile  down the road is somebody small on the shoulder,  a kid looking for a ride home, I figure. And he’s a kid all right, maybe ten or eleven,  but no Montana boy, he’s an Oriental,  one of those Laotians that got resettled. Can’t figure why they brought them to Montana.  He’s got those big eyes and caved-in cheeks  like the pictures on the TV during Vietnam, and his mouth is open a little. I say to myself,  I’ll give him a ride if he wants, and I even  begin to slow down, but he didn’t put up his thumb. Just when I went by, he waved,  real quick and shy, but still like he was trying  to reach me. I drove on. Then I bust out crying.
Part Four of “Pro Femina” At Samoa, hardly unpacked, I commenced planting, When I’d opened the chicken crates, built the Cochins a coop.  The Reverend Mr. Claxton called, found me covered with mud,  My clothes torn, my hair in a wad, my bare feet bleeding.  I had started the buffalo grass in the new-made clearing.  The next day the priest paid a visit. Civil but restless,  I was dying to plant the alfalfa seed—gave him a packet. That evening I paced up and down, dropping melon seeds,  Tomatoes and bush lima beans here and there Where I thought they would grow. We were short of food now,  So I cooked up a mess of fat little parrots, disturbed  At the way they suggested cages and swings and stands ...  An excellent meal. I have been told the dodo survived here,  And yearn for a pet on a string. And I built the pig-house. I had brought sweet coconut seed from Savage Island.  I planted kidney potatoes in small earthen hills.  Sowed seeds of eggplant in numerous boxes of soil,  Tomato and artichoke too; half-a-dozen fine pineapple  Sent over by Mr. Carruthers, the island solicitor.  As fast as we eat them, we plant the tops. The kitchen a shack near the house. I made bread in the rain. October, 1890. I have been here nearly a month; Put in corn, peas, onions, radishes, lettuce. Lima beans Are already coming up. The ripening cantaloupe were stolen.  Carruthers gave me mint root and grenadilla Like a bouquet; he delivered a load of trees, Two mangoes among them. I set them out in a heavy rain,  Then rounded off the afternoon sowing Indian corn. Louis has called me a peasant. How I brooded!  Confided it to you, diary, then crossed it out.  Peasant because I delve in the earth, the earth I own.  Confiding my seed and root—I too a creator?  My heart melts over a bed of young peas. A blossom  On the rose tree is like a poem by my son.  My hurt healed by its cause, I go on planting. No one else works much. The natives take it easy; The colonials keep their shops, and a shortage of customers.  The mail comes four times a month, and the gossip all day.  The bars are crowded with amateur politicians,  Office-seekers I named the earwig consul and king:  Big talkers, with small-time conspirators drinking them in.  Mr. Carruthers and I picked a site for the kitchen garden. I was planting a new lot of corn and pumpkin When a young chief arrived, laden with pineapple plants.  I set them out as I talked to him on the way home. Rats and a wild hen ate the corn. Lettuce got too much sun.  So I dug a new patch up the road; in the fragrant evening  I confided to Louis, a puff of the sweetest scent Blows back as I cast away a handful of so-called weeds! It still hurts, his remark that I have the soul of a peasant.  My vanity, like a newly felled tree, lies prone and bleeding.  I clear the weeds near the house for planting maize.  Sweet corn and peas are showing. I send for more seeds.  I clean out the potatoes, which had rotted in their hills. Of course, RLS is not idle; he is writing A Footnote to History: How the great powers combine to carve up these islands. I discovered the ylang-ylang tree: a base for perfume, Though it suggested to me the odor of boots. Another tree is scented like pepper and spice, And one terrible tree, I am forced to say, Smells like ordure ... It nearly made me ill. Breadfruit is plentiful. I found a banana grove, Began clearing it instantly, and worked till I was dizzy. The garden looks like a graveyard: beds shaped like tombs. I plant cabbage which I loathe, so the British won’t tease me  For not growing it. But behold! in the hedge Among citron and lime, many lemon trees, in full bearing.  Still, I will fall to brooding before the mirror, Though Louis says he finds the peasant class “interesting.” He is forty today. I am ten years his senior. On the cleared land, the green mummy-apple, Male and female, is springing up everywhere. I discover wild ginger, turmeric, something like sugar.  Roots of orange, breadfruit and mango, seeds of cacao  Came with a shipment from Sydney; also eleven Young navel orange trees. The strawberry plants are rotten.  I am given a handful of bees. I plant more pineapple.  All fall I am cursed with asthma, rheumatics, a painful ear. Christmas. A hurricane. And the New Year begins.  Louis describes it divinely to Henry James. Mr. Carruthers’ gift pineapple starts to fruit. I set out one precious rhubarb plant, pause to gloat At the ripe tomatoes, the flourishing long-podded beans.  But the neighbors’ horses break in and trample the corn.  Sometimes, when planting, a strange subterranean rumble  —Volcanic?—vexes the earth beneath this peasant haunch. I rise up from my furrow, knuckle smooth my brow As I sniff the air, suddenly chemical, a sulphurous fume.  Louis insisted on going to Sydney, fell ill again. His mother comes back with him, finds me on my knees.  The old lady’s heart leaps! Alas, I am planting, not praying. We both rise at five-thirty, after dreaming of weeds.  Louis describes to me endless vivid deeps: Dreams of nettle-stings, stabs from the citron’s thorns,  The ants’ fiery bites, the resistance of mud and slime,  The evasions of wormy roots, the dead weight of heat  In the sudden puffs of air ... Louis writes till nine,  Then if he’s well enough, he helps with the weeding. He writes Colvin, keeper of prints at the British Museum,  “I know pleasure still ... with a thousand faces, None perfect, a thousand tongues, all broken, A thousand hands, all with scratching nails ... High among joys, I place this delight of weeding, Out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence  Of the high wind, broken by sounds of birds.” The shock of bird-calls, laughing and whistling!  They mimic his name till it seems, he says, “The birds re-live the business of my day.” But the rain continues to fall on birds and weeds. The new servants fooled around with the ice machine  As the house leaked and listed. Mildew spread its failure.  Mrs. S. gave me some nuts, and went back to Australia. Green peppers, eggplant, tomatoes are flourishing,  Asparagus also. The celery does to season soup.  Avocados grow at a rate that is almost frightening. Coconuts too. I read about Stanley and Livingstone. I cured my five ulcers with calomel, wished I could tell  Stanley the remedy. Instead, I made perfume. The servants feared devils, so I planted the orange grove alone. For two months I misplaced this diary ... War is in the air, talk of killing all whites. I bought coffee trees, rose trees, and Indian beans,  Then went to Fiji to rest, and to get more seeds  From a former Kew gardener. An Indian in a shop  Told me how to raise Persian melon and cauliflower  And a radish that turns into a turnip when it grows up. I came home to a burgeoning world: cacao, custard squash.  The new house was finished, and painted peacock blue.  The jealous old cat bit off the new cat’s toes. My mother-in-law returned with her Bible and lady’s maid;  My daughter, her family, and my son Lloyd came too.  The relatives had a terrible row. Mrs. S. refused To pray with the servants. I threw up my hands! My diary entries grow farther and farther apart. I wrote life was a strain. Later, someone crossed it out.  In pain again, from an aneurysm inside my head ... I planted more and more cacao, and a form of cherry tree,  Tobacco and rubber, taught how by Mr. Sketchley.  I planted more cacao through an epidemic of ’flu. Three hundred seeds in baskets broke through the ground. I get almost no time to write. I have been planting ...  Four kinds of cabbage are doing very well. Mr. Haggard, the land commissioner, come to dine,  Points out a weed which makes excellent eating Cooked like asparagus. I shall try it very soon. Now, when the Reverend Mr. Claxton comes to call,  I refuse to see him. I am tired of the Claxtons. The political situation grows grim. I rage at Louis Who toasts, “Her Blessed Majesty the Queen,” then aggressively  Throbbing, turns to my American son To say he may drink to the President afterward If he likes. I am writing this down Hoping Louis will see it later, and be ashamed Of his childishness and bad taste. (This will be erased.) Because war is near, the Germans stop growing cacao.  Captain Hufnagel offers me all the seeds I can use.  So now we are blazing with cacao fever, The whole family infected. Six hundred plants set out!  The verandah tracked with mud, and the cacao litter. Mrs. S. upset by the mess. Twelve hundred cacaos planted.  Joe, my son-in-law, planted his thousandth tree today. The tree onions make large bulbs but don’t want to seed.  Most vigorous: sunflower, watermelon—weeds! The jelly from berries out of the bush is delicious; Lovely perfume from massoi, citron, vanilla, and gum.  The peanuts are weeded while Joe plays on his flute.  I plant cabbage by moonlight, set out more cacao. The heart of a death’s-head moth beats a tattoo in my hand. Planted coffee all day, and breadfruit, five beauties ...  Planted coffee the better part of the day, eight plants.  In the nursery, three times that many. Planted coffee ...  Painted the storm shutters. Planted coffee all morning.  I found a heap of old bones in a bush near the sty; Two heads and a body: a warrior died with his prize.  Louis gave the bones a funeral and a burial. A series of hurricanes: Louis writes to The Times Of “the foul colonial politics.” I send to New York for seeds:  Southern Cross cabbage, eggplant, sweet potato And two thousand custard apples. Louis’ own seed, David Balfour, is growing. I wrote nothing From June till the end of this year; too busy planting.  The Samoan princes are getting nearer to war. It pains me to write this: my son-in-law has gone native  In a spectacular way. Belle is divorcing him. Austin, my grandson, is in school in Monterey. I have not, I believe, mentioned Mrs. Stevenson recently.  She has gone back to Scotland. The first breadfruit bore.  Belle and I go on sketching expeditions To the hostile Samoan camps, stop in town for ginger beer. Mr. Haggard begged us to stay in town Because he bitterly wanted women to protect. I suggested to him that I and my daughter Could hide under his table and hand him cartridges  At the window, to complete the romantic effect.  It is clear that Mr. Haggard is Ryder’s brother! He said, “You’d sell your life for a bunch of banana trees.” I’ve given permission to most of the “boys” To go to the races. Lloyd has put up the lawn tennis things.  Mr. Gurr, the neighbor, rushes in to say war has begun.  We all race to the mission. Eleven heads have been taken.  Later: Mr. Dine’s cousin received a head smeared with black  (The custom is to return them to the bereaved). He washed it off and discovered it was his brother. He sat there, holding his brother’s head in his hands, Kissing it, bathing it with his tears. A scandal arose Because the heads of three girls have been taken as well (Unheard of before in Samoa), returned wrapped in silk to their kin. At Malie, the warriors danced a head-hunter’s pantomime;  The men who had taken heads carried great lumps of raw pork  Between their teeth, cut in the semblance of heads. I stopped writing this. Too hysterical with migraine. Also, people find where I hide it, and strike things out.  Our favorite chief is exiled for life. The war winds down.  Louis works on his masterpiece, The Weir of Hermiston. Well, I’ve kept him alive for eight more years, While his dear friends would have condemned him to fog and rain  So they might enjoy his glorious talk in London, Though it be the end of him. Fine friends! except for James.  Later: At six, Louis helped with the mayonnaise, When he put both hands to his head, said, “Oh, what a pain!  Do I look strange?” I said no, not wanting to frighten him.  He was never conscious again. In two hours he died.  Tonight, the chiefs with their axes are digging a path  To the top of the mountain. They will dig his grave. I will leave here as soon as I can, and never return,  Except to be buried beside him. I will live like a gipsy  In my wild, ragged clothes, until I am old, old.  I will have pretty gardens wherever I am, But never breadfruit, custard apples, grenadilla, cacao,  Pineapple, ylang-ylang, citron, mango, cacao,  Never again succumb to the fever of planting.
It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine. And finding him, as always, newly minted From when I first encountered him in school. Today I’m overcome with astonishment At the way we girls denied all that was mean In those revered philosophers we studied; Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive; Irrelevant, at best, to noble discourse Among the sex, the only sex that counted. Wounded, we pretended not to mind it And wore tight sweaters to tease our shy professor. We sat in autumn sunshine “as the clouds arose From slimy desires of the flesh, and from Youth’s seething spring.” Thank you, Augustine. Attempting to seem blasé, our cheeks on fire, It didn’t occur to us to rush from the room. Instead we brushed aside “the briars of unclean desire” And struggled on through mires of misogyny Till we arrived at Kierkegaard, and began to see That though Saint A. and Søren had much in common Including fear and trembling before women, The Saint scared himself, while Søren was scared of us. Had we, poor girls, been flattered by their thralldom? Yes, it was always us, the rejected feminine From whom temptation came. It was our flesh With its deadly sweetness that led them on. Yet how could we not treasure Augustine, “Stuck fast in the bird-lime of pleasure”? That roomful of adolescent poets manqué Assuaged, bemused by music, let the meaning go. Swept by those psalmic cadences, we were seduced! Some of us tried for a while to be well-trained souls And pious seekers, enmeshed in the Saint’s dialectic:Responsible for our actions, yet utterly helpless. A sensible girl would have barked like a dog before God. We students, children still, were shocked to learn The children these men desired were younger than we! Augustine fancied a girl about eleven, The age of Adeodatus, Augustine’s son. Søren, like Poe, eyed his girl before she was sixteen, To impose his will on a malleable child, when She was not equipped to withstand or understand him. Ah, the Pygmalion instinct! Mold the clay! Create the compliant doll that can only obey, Expecting to be abandoned, minute by minute. It was then I abandoned philosophy, A minor loss, although I majored in it. But we were a group of sunny innocents. I don’t believe we knew what evil meant. Now I live with a well-trained soul who deals with evil, Including error, material or spiritual, Easily, like changing a lock on the kitchen door. He prays at set times and in chosen places (At meals, in church), while I Pray without thinking how or when to pray, In a low mumble, several times a day, Like running a continuous low fever; The sexual impulse for the most part being over. Believing I believe. Not banking on it ever. It’s afternoon. I sit here drinking kir And reading Kierkegaard: “All sin begins with fear.” (True. We lie first from terror of our parents.) In, I believe, an oblique crack at Augustine, Søren said by denying the erotic It was brought to the attention of the world. The rainbow curtain rises on the sensual: Christians must admit it before they can deny it. He reflected on his father’s fierce repression Of the sexual, which had bent him out of shape; Yet he had to pay obeisance to that power: He chose his father when he broke with his Regina.Søren said by denying the erotic It is brought to the attention of the world. You must admit it before you can deny it.
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing. We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh. But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house, We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners, We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme. We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh. For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance, The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut, Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day, We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability. No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine, Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town, May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment. Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.
Both of us had been close to Joel, and at Joel’s death my friend had gone to the wake and the memorial service and more recently he had visited Joel’s grave, there at the back of the grassy cemetery among the trees, “a quiet, gentle place,” he said, “befitting Joel.” And I said, “What’s the point of going to look at graves?” I went into one of my celebrated tirades. “People go to look at the grave of Keats or Hart Crane, they go traveling just to do it, what a waste of time. What do they find there? Hell, I wouldn’t go look at the grave of Shakespeare if it was just down the street. I wouldn’t look at—” And I stopped. I was about to say the grave of God until I realized I’m looking at it all the time....
To tell the truth, those brick Housing Authority buildings For whose loveliness no soul had planned, Like random dominoes stood, worn out and facing each other, Creating the enclosure that was our home. Long basement corridors connected one house to another And had a special smell, from old bicycles and baby carriages In the storage rooms. The elevators Were used by kissing teenagers. The playground—iron swingchains, fences, iron monkey bars, Iron seesaw handles, doubtless now rusted— Left a strong iron smell on my hands and in the autumn air And rang with cries. To me it is even precious Where they chased the local Mongoloid, yelling “Stupid Joey! Stupid Joey!” Now I’ve said everything nice I can about this.
They remember the dead who died in the resistance.  It is in sweet tones that they speak of them.  They shake their heads, still, after the dinner Walking back to the car, while an evening snow  That has started windlessly, white from pearl-gray,  Falls into streets that are already slushy. They shake their heads, as we do when there is something  Too strange to believe, Or as a beast does, stunned by a blow. “To die in the resistance,” they say, “is to fail  To turn into slush, to escape this ugliness.  It is at once to leap, a creamy swan, Upward.” Three voices: oboe, piano, cello. The high one wishes to be pleasing, the middle  To be practical, the deep to persevere. A movie theater lobby in front of them Throws its light on the sidewalk, like a woman  Swiftly emptying a bucket of water: The flakes are falling in its yellow light.  Then they pass a café, its light red neon,  Then a closed pharmacy.  —They pull sharp air Into their lungs, a pain that is a pleasure.  “Try to live as if there were no God,”  They don’t say, but they mean. A recollection of purity, a clean Handkerchief each man feels in his own pocket, Perturbs them, slows their pace down. Now they have seen A yellow stain on a pile of old snow Between two parked cars, where a man has peed:  The resistance. The falling flakes, falling On the men’s hats. And now The snow grows heavier, falls on their stooping shoulders.
Boil over—it’s what the nerves do,  Watch them seethe when stimulated, Murmurs the man at the stove  To the one at the fridge— Watch that electric impulse that finally makes them  Fume and fizz at either Frayed end. If you could grasp a bundle Of nerves in your fist like a jumper cable, and sense that Python’s writhe, or a garden hose when the pressure’s  High and it wilfully weaves about Trying its best to get away from you— You’d see how nothing is passive, We’re all—I mean from our elephant sun, ejaculant  Great-grandfather, cascading down To weightless  Unstoppable neutrinos Leaving their silvery trace  In vacuum chambers, in Effervescent lines, twisted  Madly in our madhouse jackets, Rules, laws, which we are seething to break  Though to rupture them might be of course to die, Or, possibly,  To change: Boil, it’s what water And everything else teaches.
In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave, Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,  Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,  Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,  A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,  Their freights covered, as usual. The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram  Slid slowly forth.  Hearing the milkman’s chop,  His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink,  I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. The stony street  Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,  The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience.  The winter sky’s pure capital Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes. Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose  Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls,  Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.  A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly  Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair  From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,  Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.  The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,  Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet  With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,  O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail  Of early morning, the mystery of beginning  Again and again,  while History is unforgiven.
Calmly we walk through this April’s day,  Metropolitan poetry here and there,  In the park sit pauper and rentier,  The screaming children, the motor-car  Fugitive about us, running away,  Between the worker and the millionaire  Number provides all distances,  It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,  Many great dears are taken away,  What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...)  Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.) (This is the school in which we learn ...)  What is the self amid this blaze? What am I now that I was then Which I shall suffer and act again, The theodicy I wrote in my high school days  Restored all life from infancy, The children shouting are bright as they run  (This is the school in which they learn ...)  Ravished entirely in their passing play! (... that time is the fire in which they burn.) Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years,  But what they were then?  No more? No more? From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,  Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume Not where they are now (where are they now?)  But what they were then, both beautiful; Each minute bursts in the burning room,  The great globe reels in the solar fire,  Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!)  What am I now that I was then?  May memory restore again and again  The smallest color of the smallest day:  Time is the school in which we learn,  Time is the fire in which we burn.
Beside the highway, the Giant Slide with its rusty undulations lifts out of the weeds. It hasn’t been used for a generation. The ticket booth tilts to that side where the nickels shifted over the years. A chain link fence keeps out the children and drunks. Blue morning glories climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters of laughter. Call it a passing fancy, this slide that nobody slides down now. Those screams have all gone east on a wind that will never stop blowing down from the Rockies and over the plains, where things catch on for a little while, bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.
When I wake now it’s below ocherous, saw-ridged pine beams. Haze streaks all three windows. I look up at the dog-eared, glossy magazine photo I’ve taken with me for years. It gets tacked like a claim to some new wall in the next place— Bill Russell & Wilt Chamberlain, one on one the final game of the 1969 NBA championship, two hard men snapped elbowing & snatching at a basketball as if it were a moment one of them might stay inside forever. I was with my father the night that game played on a fuzzy color television, in a jammed Fall River bar. Seagram & beer chasers for hoarse ex-jocks, smoke rifting the air. A drunk called him “Tiger” and asked about the year he’d made all-state guard— point man, ball-hawk, pacer. Something he rarely spoke of, & almost always with a gruff mix of impatience and shyness. Each year, days painting suburban tract houses & fighting with contractors followed by night shifts at the fire station followed by his kids swarming at breakfast and my mother trying to stay out of his way, each of the many stone-hard moments between 1941 & 1969— they made up a city of granite mills by a slate & blue river. That town was my father’s life, & still is. If he felt cheated by it, by its fate for him, to bear that disappointment, he kept it secret. That night, when he stared deep into a drunk’s memory, he frowned. He said nothing. He twisted on the stool, and ordered this guy a beer. Whatever my father & I have in common is mostly silence. And anger that keeps twisting back on itself, though not before it ruins, often, even something simple as a walk in the dunes at a warm beach. But what we share too is a love so awkward that it explains, with unreasoning perfection, why we still can’t speak easily to each other, about the past or anything else, and why I wake this far from the place where I grew up, while the wall above me claims now nothing has changed & all is different.
“the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me,  A manifold honey to smear his face,  Clumsy and lumbering here and there,  The central ton of every place,  The hungry beating brutish one  In love with candy, anger, and sleep,  Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,  Climbs the building, kicks the football,  Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,  That heavy bear who sleeps with me,  Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,  A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,  Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope  Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.  —The strutting show-off is terrified,  Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,  Trembles to think that his quivering meat  Must finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held,  Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,  A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,  Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,  The secret life of belly and bone, Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,  Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near,  Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear,  Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed  Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,  Amid the hundred million of his kind,  The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
1 The children of the Czar  Played with a bouncing ball In the May morning, in the Czar’s garden,  Tossing it back and forth. It fell among the flowerbeds  Or fled to the north gate. A daylight moon hung up In the Western sky, bald white. Like Papa’s face, said Sister,  Hurling the white ball forth.  2 While I ate a baked potato  Six thousand miles apart, In Brooklyn, in 1916,  Aged two, irrational. When Franklin D. Roosevelt  Was an Arrow Collar ad. O Nicholas! Alas! Alas! My grandfather coughed in your army, Hid in a wine-stinking barrel,  For three days in Bucharest Then left for America To become a king himself.  3 I am my father’s father, You are your children’s guilt. In history’s pity and terror  The child is Aeneas again; Troy is in the nursery, The rocking horse is on fire. Child labor! The child must carry  His fathers on his back. But seeing that so much is past  And that history has no ruth For the individual, Who drinks tea, who catches cold, Let anger be general: I hate an abstract thing.  4 Brother and sister bounced  The bounding, unbroken ball, The shattering sun fell down  Like swords upon their play, Moving eastward among the stars  Toward February and October. But the Maywind brushed their cheeks  Like a mother watching sleep, And if for a moment they fight  Over the bouncing ball And sister pinches brother  And brother kicks her shins, Well! The heart of man is known:  It is a cactus bloom.  5 The ground on which the ball bounces  Is another bouncing ball. The wheeling, whirling world  Makes no will glad. Spinning in its spotlight darkness,  It is too big for their hands. A pitiless, purposeless Thing,  Arbitrary and unspent, Made for no play, for no children,  But chasing only itself. The innocent are overtaken,  They are not innocent. They are their father’s fathers, The past is inevitable.  6 Now, in another October  Of this tragic star, I see my second year,  I eat my baked potato. It is my buttered world, But, poked by my unlearned hand, It falls from the highchair down  And I begin to howl. And I see the ball roll under  The iron gate which is locked. Sister is screaming, brother is howling,  The ball has evaded their will. Even a bouncing ball  Is uncontrollable, And is under the garden wall.  I am overtaken by terror Thinking of my father’s fathers,  And of my own will.
When I fall asleep, and even during sleep, I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,  Having no relation to my affairs.  Dear Mother, is any time left to us In which to be happy? My debts are immense. My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment. I know nothing. I cannot know anything.  I have lost the ability to make an effort. But now as before my love for you increases.  You are always armed to stone me, always:  It is true. It dates from childhood. For the first time in my long life I am almost happy. The book, almost finished,  Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.  Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me.  Satan glides before me, saying sweetly: “Rest for a day! You can rest and play today.  Tonight you will work.” When night comes,  My mind, terrified by the arrears, Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence,  Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.” Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself  With the same resolution, the same weakness.  I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.  I am sick of having colds and headaches:  You know my strange life. Every day brings Its quota of wrath. You little know A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems,  The most fatiguing of occupations. I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me. I write from a café near the post office, Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes,  The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write  “A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write  “A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart? Although it costs you countless agony, Although you cannot believe it necessary, And doubt that the sum is accurate, Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.
When I was a young man, I loved to write poems   And I called a spade a spade And the only only thing that made me sing   Was to lift the masks at the masquerade.  I took them off my own face,  I took them off others too And the only only wrong in all my song  Was the view that I knew what was true. Now I am older and tireder too  And the tasks with the masks are quite trying.  I’d gladly gladly stop if I only only knew  A better way to keep from lying,  And not get nervous and blue  When I said something quite untrue:  I looked all around and all over  To find something else to do:  I tried to be less romantic  I tried to be less starry-eyed too:  But I only got mixed up and frantic  Forgetting what was false and what was true. But tonight I am going to the masked ball,  Because it has occurred to me That the masks are more true than the faces:  —Perhaps this too is poetry? I no longer yearn to be naïve and stern  And masked balls fascinate me: Now that I know that most falsehoods are true  Perhaps I can join the charade?  This is, at any rate, my new and true view:  Let live and believe, I say. The only only thing is to believe in everything:  It’s more fun and safer that way!
She had turned her face up into a rain of light, and came on smiling. The light trickled down her forehead and into her eyes. It ran down into the neck of her sweatshirt and wet the white tops of her breasts. Her brown shoes splashed on into the light. The moment was like a circus wagon rolling before her through puddles of light, a cage on wheels, and she walked fast behind it, exuberant, curious, pushing her cane through the bars, poking and prodding, while the world cowered back in a corner.
“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” FRANZ KAFKA Father:  On these occasions, the feelings surprise,  Spontaneous as rain, and they compel  Explicitness, embarrassed eyes——Son:  Father, you’re not Polonius, you’re reticent,  But sure. I can already tell The unction and falsetto of the sentiment  Which gratifies the facile mouth, but springs  From no felt, had, and wholly known things.Father:  You must let me tell you what you fear When you wake up from sleep, still drunk with sleep:  You are afraid of time and its slow drip, Like melting ice, like smoke upon the air In February’s glittering sunny day. Your guilt is nameless, because its name is time,  Because its name is death. But you can stop Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop.Son:  But I thought time was full of promises,  Even as now, the emotion of going away——Father:  That is the first of all its menaces, The lure of a future different from today;  All of us always are turning away To the cinema and Asia. All of us go  To one indeterminate nothing.Son:  Must it be so? I question the sentiment you give to me, As premature, not to be given, learned alone  When experience shrinks upon the chilling bone.  I would be sudden now and rash in joy, As if I lived forever, the future my toy. Time is a dancing fire at twenty-one, Singing and shouting and drinking to the sun,  Powerful at the wheel of a motor-car, Not thinking of death which is foreign and far.Father:  If time flowed from your will and were a feast  I would be wrong to question your zest.  But each age betrays the same weak shape.  Each moment is dying. You will try to escape  From melting time and your dissipating soul  By hiding your head in a warm and dark hole.  See the evasions which so many don, To flee the guilt of time they become one,  That is, the one number among masses,  The one anonymous in the audience, The one expressionless in the subway, In the subway evening among so many faces,  The one who reads the daily newspaper,  Separate from actor and act, a member Of public opinion, never involved. Integrated in the revery of a fine cigar,  Fleeing to childhood at the symphony concert,  Buying sleep at the drugstore, grandeur  At the band concert, Hawaii On the screen, and everywhere a specious splendor:  One, when he is sad, has something to eat,  An ice cream soda, a toasted sandwich,  Or has his teeth fixed, but can always retreat  From the actual pain, and dream of the rich.  This is what one does, what one becomes  Because one is afraid to be alone, Each with his own death in the lonely room.  But there is a stay. You can stop Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop.Son:  Now I am afraid. What is there to be known?Father:  Guilt, guilt of time, nameless guilt. Grasp firmly your fear, thus grasping your self,  Your actual will. Stand in mastery, Keeping time in you, its terrifying mystery. Face yourself, constantly go back To what you were, your own history. You are always in debt. Do not forget The dream postponed which would not quickly get  Pleasure immediate as drink, but takes The travail of building, patience with means. See the wart on your face and on your friend’s face,  On your friend’s face and indeed on your own face.  The loveliest woman sweats, the animal stains  The ideal which is with us like the sky ...Son:  Because of that, some laugh, and others cry.Father:  Do not look past and turn away your face.  You cannot depart and take another name,  Nor go to sleep with lies. Always the same,  Always the same self from the ashes of sleep  Returns with its memories, always, always, The phoenix with eight hundred thousand memories!Son:  What must I do that is most difficult?Father:  You must meet your death face to face,  You must, like one in an old play, Decide, once for all, your heart’s place.  Love, power, and fame stand on an absolute  Under the formless night and the brilliant day,  The searching violin, the piercing flute.  Absolute! Venus and Caesar fade at that edge,  Hanging from the fiftieth-story ledge, Or diminished in bed when the nurse presses  Her sickening unguents and her cold compresses.  When the news is certain, surpassing fear, You touch the wound, the priceless, the most dear.  There in death’s shadow, you comprehend  The irreducible wish, world without end.Son:  I begin to understand the reason for evasion,  I cannot partake of your difficult vision.Father:  Begin to understand the first decision.  Hamlet is the example; only dying Did he take up his manhood, the dead’s burden,  Done with evasion, done with sighing,  Done with revery.  Decide that you are dying  Because time is in you, ineluctable  As shadow, named by no syllable.  Act in that shadow, as if death were now:  Your own self acts then, then you know.Son:  My father has taught me to be serious.Father:  Be guilty of yourself in the full looking-glass.
I have seen the Brown Recluse Spider run with a net in her hand, or rather, what resembled a net, what resembled a hand. She ran down the gleaming white floor of the bathtub, trailing a frail swirl of hair, and in it the hull of a beetle lay woven. The hair was my wife’s, long and dark, a few loose strands, a curl she might idly have turned on a finger, she might idly have twisted, speaking to me, and the legs of the beetle were broken.
Written on clapboard or asbestos siding, the cartoony  spray-paint signatures of Apollo and Zeus, two home boys out bombing last night in thick fog. Fog near the shade of pearls. Except they didn’t see the mist  that way, glad for their thin leather gloves. Wind raw at the wide avenue, so they cut from there to here.  Even if this is in the past tense, tense of the totally chilled-out, even if they argued here over Krylon blue or candy-apple red,  that doesn’t mean they knocked-off and streaked home then.  And if I saw fog the shade of pearls it doesn’t mean my heart in its own corrosive and healing fog  can’t tug on thin leather gloves and stand in front of a wall, pissing off the Fates and whoever else owns that wall. Whoever owns it  means less than the dry, fallen leaves of eucalyptus  blown crackling over tar and concrete and sounding, when you shut your eyes, like every tree  bursting into leaf for the first time, speeded-up like the first minute of the world.
Each could picture probably with great care his brother drawing  the corded string of a watered silk bag and mumbling to Basho above the keepsake pay your respects to mother's white hair  now your eyebrows look a little white too
They have set aside their black tin boxes,  scratched and dented, spattered with drops of pink and blue;  and their dried-up, rolled-up tubes  of alizarin crimson, chrome green,  zinc white, and ultramarine; their vials half full of gold powder;  stubs of wax pencils; frayed brushes with tooth-bitten shafts;  and have gone in fashion and with grace  into the clouds of loose, lush roses,  narcissus, pansies, columbine,  on teapots, chocolate pots, saucers and cups, the good Haviland dishes  spread like a garden on the white lace Sunday cloth,  as if their souls were bees and the world had been nothing but flowers.
It seemed those rose-pink dishes  she kept for special company  were always cold, brought down  from the shelf in jingling stacks,  the plates like the panes of ice  she broke from the water bucket  winter mornings, the flaring cups  like tulips that opened too early and got bitten by frost. They chilled  the coffee no matter how quickly  you drank, while a heavy everyday mug would have kept  a splash hot for the better part of a conversation. It was hard  to hold up your end of the gossip  with your coffee cold, but it was  a special occasion, just the same,  to sit at her kitchen table and sip the bitter percolation of the past week’s rumors from cups  it had taken a year to collect  at the grocery, with one piece free  for each five pounds of flour.
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton  at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun  and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets  in Ghana are doing these days  I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)  doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life  and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine  for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do  think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or  Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and  then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue  and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and  casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Sunlight fades the storefront full of magazines. Month to month they boss us—the covers, they tell us that if we want to get happy & alluring  (real happy, alluring sexually) we must for goddamn sure take up the breeding of Jack Russell terriers,  or else dig ourselves a little backyard fishpond. Days of fish, days of dog, days of sex— in that order, necessarily. In the sun all the titles are trying to vanish—phrases like trout pond diluted, the 20-point sans serif, inked-red passion bleached now, apathetic, ghostly— words that want my attention  like movers on the street lugging mirrors, a moment when I seem to  come toward myself & then  I’m gone too. I am not a greedy man. All I want is to be a visitor to this life.
From the tower window the moon draws a silver maple’s shadow across a spangled lawn;  horses rear, manes lashing the air, front legs floating.  Half monarch, half shadow, the tree aspires to the sky; one branch, cracked by lightning, scrapes the earth.  Reflected on the grass, bent twigs are curved hooves, galloping as the moon rises. Divided it stands in wholeness, mourning its victories, praising the god of trees, the king of horses. The tree holds souls in a bark prison poised like a runner at the starting line— and bolts free, wildly pawing the ground those roots lie under.
It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored  cabs. First, down the sidewalk  where laborers feed their dirty  glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets  on. They protect them from falling  bricks, I guess. Then onto the  avenue where skirts are flipping  above heels and blow up over  grates. The sun is hot, but the  cabs stir up the air. I look  at bargains in wristwatches. There  are cats playing in sawdust.  On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher  the waterfall pours lightly. A  Negro stands in a doorway with a  toothpick, languorously agitating.  A blonde chorus girl clicks: he  smiles and rubs his chin. Everything  suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of  a Thursday.  Neon in daylight is a  great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would  write, as are light bulbs in daylight.  I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S  CORNER
In Legends of the Jews, Lewis Ginzberg writes that an Egyptian princess hung a tapestry woven with diamonds and pearls above King Solomon’s bed. When the king wanted to rise, he thought he saw stars and, believing it was night, slept on. Scaling ladders with buckets of white enamel, I painted the stars and the moon on my windowpanes  to hold back days and nights. I yanked the telephone and stopped the wooden clock. The weeks a lightning stroke,  desire turned to love. With my blue diamond, I sliced minutes in half and made days vanish, fooling the hours.  I became so skillful  at firmaments that miracles occurred: a bearded comet moved across the room  breeding no omens, tearing no major kingdoms  into small provinces, but there it was,  reminding us that rock may spin and flare,  lifting the senses, burning into sight. You eased pale hands away; I saw your shoulders  recede through doorways, watched your image fail  with your famished smile. I left our room with dream-filled eyes, and standing in the sun,  I gazed at bricks and glass and saw, suddenly,  flashing in stony light, the stars and the moon.
Squinting through eye-slits in our balaclavas, we lurch across Washington Square Park hunched against the wind, two hooded figures caught in the monochrome, carrying sacks of fruit, as we’ve done for years. The frosted, starch- stiff sycamores make a lean Christmas tree seem to bulk larger, tilted under the arch and still lit in three colors. Once in January, we found a feather here and stuffed the quill in twigs to recall that jay. The musical fountain is here, its water gone, a limestone circle now. Though rap succeeds the bluegrass strains we’ve played in it, new praise evokes old sounds. White branches mimic visions of past storms; some say they’ve heard ghosts moan above this ground, once a potter’s field. No two stones are the same, of course: the drums, the tawny pears we hold, are old masks for new things. Still, in a world where fretted houses with façades are leveled for condominiums, not much has altered here. At least it’s faithful to imagined views. And, after all, we know the sycamore will screen the sky in a receding wind. Now, trekking home through grit that’s mounting higher, faces upturned to test the whirling snow, in new masks, we whistle to make breath-clouds form and disappear, and form again, and O, my love, there’s sun in the crook of your arm.
Pardon us for uttering a handful of words in any language, so cut loose are we from homes, and from His name that is still  nameless, blessed be He. We raised a prayer house— that is, we broke new wood for one, but some tough burned it, snarling: “Carve only stones for the dead.” Damp ground, no fire, no psalm we all remember.  But tall ships anchor here, and at low tide, people with wheat-colored hair look out to sea,  just as we’d searched for land. “Pray if you must,” my father said, “and when prayer fails, a story,  if it is all you have, will do.” Months past, we left Recife’s forced-worship laws in the year of their Lord sixteen hundred and fifty-four, for our new  world, old-country Amsterdam. Leagues seaward,  Spanish pirates slaughtered our scant crew, and all that was left of us (friends wheezed their last while they ragged us on) rose up on deck  and tossed our bags in the sea. We watched the wake  turn silver: kiddish wine cups, hanging bowls, a candelabrum for the promised altar, carved pointers. Books’ pages curled and sank, prayer shawls ballooned and, soaking, spiraled downward.  Just as we stared, again we heard swords clank— a French ship, the Ste. Catherine (her prow had shone  gold on a gray horizon), came to our port side and rescued us. In that commotion on deck, we crouched below—not out of fear, I swear, but stunned by luminous words that echoed oddly—beautifully—like lightning  flickering through palls of thickset clouds.  A jaunty captain rasped to us in hiding: “Where are you bound?”  “Amsterdam. Old country.” “Where?”  “Amsterdam.”  “Antilles?”  “No, Amsterdam.” “Yes, yes. Nieuw Amsterdam. I’ll see you get there safely.” He meant well, bless him.Ste. Catherine sailed to land at its tip no larger  than a meadow, fanned out at its sides: Manhattan Island. Our new master, Stuyvesant, lashed us with phrases, wheffs, guzzads, that stung but were not fathomed, mercifully,  when we came on a Sabbath, more than twenty  men, women, a baby born at sea. Still cursing, he let us land, and heard our praise, then disappeared among lank citizens with faded skin who stride to the bay and brood  on water that we trust and dread, and listen  to tales unstamped by laws and never sacred.
“Is there no balm in Gilead?” So cries dour Jeremiah in granite tones. “There is a balm in Gilead,” replies a Negro spiritual. The baritone who chants it, leaning forward on the platform, looks up, not knowing his voice is a rainstorm that rinses air to reveal earth’s surprises. Today, the summer gone, four monarch butterflies, their breed’s survivors, sucked a flower’s last blooms, opened their wings, orange-and-black stained glass, and printed on the sky in zigzag lines, watch bright things rise: winter moons, the white undersides of a California condor, once thought doomed, now flapping wide like the first bird from ashes.
“The cure for loneliness is solitude.” —Marianne Moore Hopper never painted this, but here  on a snaky path his vision lingers: three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces  and meters for eyes, grim mouths, flat noses, lean forward on a platform, like strangers  with identical frowns scanning a blur, far off, that might be their train. Gas tanks broken for decades face Parson’s smithy, planked shut now. Both relics must stay.  The pumps have roots in gas pools, and the smithy stores memories of hammers forging scythes  to cut spartina grass for dry salt hay. The tanks have the remove of local clammers  who sink buckets and stand, never in pairs, but one and one and one, blank-eyed, alone,  more serene than lonely. Today a woman rakes in the shallows, then bends to receive  last rays in shimmering water, her long shadow knifing the bay. She slides into her truck to watch the sky flame over sand flats, a hawk’s wind arabesque, an island risen, brown  Atlantis, at low tide; she probes the shoreline and beyond grassy dunes for where the land  might slope off into night. Hers is no common emptiness, but a vaster silence filled  with terns’ cries, an abundant solitude. Nearby, the three dry gas pumps, worn  survivors of clam-digging generations, are luminous, and have an exile’s grandeur  that says: In perfect solitude, there’s fire. One day I approached the vessels and wanted to drive on, the road ablaze with dogwood in full bloom, but the contraptions  outdazzled the road’s white, even outshone a bleached shirt flapping alone on a laundry line, arms pointed down. High noon. Three urns, ironic in their outcast  dignity—as though, like some pine chests, they might be prized in disuse—cast rays, spun leaf—covered numbers, clanked, then wheezed and stopped again. Shadows cut the road  before I drove off into the dark woods.
Mothers of America  let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to  it’s true that fresh air is good for the body  but what about the soul  that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images and when you grow old as grow old you must  they won’t hate you  they won’t criticize you they won’t know  they’ll be in some glamorous country  they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey they may even be grateful to you  for their first sexual experience  which only cost you a quarter  and didn’t upset the peaceful home  they will know where candy bars come from  and gratuitous bags of popcorn  as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg  near the Williamsburg Bridge  oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies  they won’t know the difference  and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy  and they’ll have been truly entertained either way instead of hanging around the yard  or up in their room  hating you prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean yet  except keeping them from the darker joys  it’s unforgivable the latter  so don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice  and the family breaks up  and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set  seeing  movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young
He lives, who last night flopped from a log Into the creek, and all night by an ankle Lay pinned to the flood, dead as a nail But for the skin of the teeth of his dog. I brought him boiled eggs and broth. He coughed and waved his spoon And sat up saying he would dine alone, Being fatigue itself after that bath. I sat without in the sun with the dog. Wearing a stocking on the ailing foot, In monster crutches, he hobbled out, And addressed the dog in bitter rage. He told the yellow hound, his rescuer, Its heart was bad, and it ought Not wander by the creek at night; If all his dogs got drowned he would be poor. He stroked its head and disappeared in the shed And came out with a stone mallet in his hands And lifted that rocky weight of many pounds And let it lapse on top of the dog's head. I carted off the carcass, dug it deep. Then he came too with what a thing to lug, Or pour on a dog’s grave, his thundermug, And poured it out and went indoors to sleep. I saw him sleepless in the pane of glass Looking wild-eyed at sunset, then the glare Blinded the glass—only a red square Burning a house burning in the wilderness.
1 In the evening haze darkening on the hills, purple of the eternal, a last bird crosses over, ‘flop flop,’ adoring only the instant.  2 Nine years ago, in a plane that rumbled all night above the Atlantic, I could see, lit up by lightning bolts jumping out of it, a thunderhead formed like the face of my brother, looking down on blue, lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.  3 He used to tell me, “What good is the day? On some hill of despair the bonfire you kindle can light the great sky— though it’s true, of course, to make it burn you have to throw yourself in ...”  4 Wind tears itself hollow in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute of snowdrifts that build out there in the dark: upside-down ravines into which night sweeps our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.  5 I listen. I hear nothing. Only the cow, the cow of such hollowness, mooing down the bones.  6 Is that a rooster? He thrashes in the snow for a grain. Finds it. Rips it into flames. Flaps. Crows. Flames bursting out of his brow.  7 How many nights must it take one such as me to learn that we aren’t, after all, made from that bird that flies out of its ashes, that for us as we go up in flames, our one work is to open ourselves, to be the flames?
(for Saul Chessler, 1953-1974) I walked from my house down Coolidge Street last night And air, beginning movement in the trees, Shook down a hushing from the branches. On either side of me the houses Like solid shadow, blocks of silence In the violet light, so dim without dimming. And I saw you, Saul, my old friend, waiting For me at the corner where our two streets met. I wanted to ask you what it was like to die But you said first, as if you didn’t want to tell me, ‘The doctors made me better. We can run again.’ You ran behind me (the way you always did), Your slow strides lunging; though they never could keep up This time they stayed right there at my heels. Turning, I saw one pocket inside out Clapping on your coat front like a white hand. Your breath quickened, scrawled in the chilling air Like mine, and vanishing. We ran on a field of snow. Our footsteps pattered the smooth crust, Each one feeling like it might break through. Around us the pure white kindled under violet. And we returned by train. Sitting next to you, Staring through the window, I saw your body Lying like a dark slash in the snow, Your arms flung up, your legs crossed, Even as I heard you next to me Still struggling to catch your breath. You were just Pretending to be alive—remembering to breathe. Lumbering under living weight, saying you were cured, Your flushed cheeks—all just to put me at my ease, Afraid that your death might embarrass me, even then Saul, you were more a friend to me than you were dead. But in my mind the question was still circling: What is it like to die? But how could I catch you In a lie which you intended as a kindness? Beside you on the train, hurtling back Into the strange familiarity of Coolidge Street, Remaining silent, I returned the courtesy.
1 In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam  coming up from some fault in the old snow and bend close and see it is lung-colored  and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear.  2 I take a wolf’s rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out  on the fairway of the bears. And when it has vanished I move out on the bear tracks, roaming in circles until I come to the first, tentative, dark  splash on the earth. And I set out running, following the splashes of blood wandering over the world. At the cut, gashed resting places I stop and rest, at the crawl-marks where he lay out on his belly to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice I lie out dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.  3 On the third day I begin to starve, at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would  at a turd sopped in blood, and hesitate, and pick it up, and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,  and rise and go on running.  4 On the seventh day, living by now on bear blood alone, I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,  steamy hulk, the heavy fur riffling in the wind. I come up to him and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,  the dismayed face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils flared, catching perhaps the first taint of me as he died. I hack a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,  and tear him down his whole length and open him and climb in and close him up after me, against the wind, and sleep.  5 And dream of lumbering flatfooted over the tundra, stabbed twice from within, splattering a trail behind me, splattering it out no matter which way I lurch, no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,  which dance of solitude I attempt, which gravity-clutched leap, which trudge, which groan.  6 Until one day I totter and fall— fall on this stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,  to digest the blood as it leaked in, to break up and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze  blows over me, blows off the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood  and rotted stomach and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear, blows across my sore, lolled tongue a song or screech, until I think I must rise up  and dance. And I lie still.  7 I awaken I think. Marshlights reappear, geese come trailing again up the flyway. In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear lies, licking lumps of smeared fur and drizzly eyes into shapes with her tongue. And one hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me, the next groaned out, the next, the next, the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,  but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,  familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on— and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child. In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body— this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.
The two boys lean out on the railing  of the front porch, looking up. Behind them they can hear their mother  in one room watching “Name That Tune,”  their father in another watching  a Walter Cronkite Special, the TVs  turned up high and higher till they  each can’t hear the other’s show.  The older boy is saying that no matter  how many stars you counted there were  always more stars beyond them  and beyond the stars black space  going on forever in all directions,  so that even if you flew up millions and millions of years  you’d be no closer to the end  of it than they were now here on the porch on Tuesday night  in the middle of summer. The younger boy can think somehow  only of his mother’s closet,  how he likes to crawl in back  behind the heavy drapery of shirts, nightgowns and dresses,  into the sheer black where no matter how close he holds  his hand up to his face there’s no hand ever, no face to hold it to. A woman from another street is calling to her stray cat or dog,  clapping and whistling it in, and farther away deep in the city  sirens now and again veer in and out of hearing. The boys edge closer, shoulder  to shoulder now, sad Ptolemies, the older looking up, the younger as he thinks back straight ahead into the black leaves of the maple where the street lights flicker like another watery skein of stars. “Name That Tune” and Walter Cronkite struggle like rough water to rise above each other. And the woman now comes walking in a nightgown down the middle of the street, clapping and whistling, while the older boy goes on about what light years are, and solar winds, black holes, and how the sun is cooling and what will happen to them all when it is cold.
1 I can support it no longer. Laughing ruefully at myself For all I claim to have suffered I get up. Damned nightmarer! It is New Hampshire out here, It is nearly the dawn. The song of the whippoorwill stops And the dimension of depth seizes everything. 2 The whistles of a peabody bird go overhead Like a needle pushed five times through the air, They enter the leaves, and come out little changed. The air is so still That as they go off through the trees The love songs of birds do not get any fainter. 3 The last memory I have Is of a flower that cannot be touched, Through the bloom of which, all day, Fly crazed, missing bees. 4 As I climb sweat gets up my nostrils, For an instant I think I am at the sea, One summer off Cap Ferrat we watched a black seagull Straining for the dawn, we stood in the surf, Grasshoppers splash up where I step, The mountain laurel crashes at my thighs. 5 There is something joyous in the elegies Of birds. They seem Caught up in a formal delight, Though the mourning dove whistles of despair. But at last in the thousand elegies The dead rise in our hearts, On the brink of our happiness we stop Like someone on a drunk starting to weep. 6 I kneel at a pool, I look through my face At the bacteria I think I see crawling through the moss. My face sees me, The water stirs, the face, Looking preoccupied, Gets knocked from its bones. 7 I weighed eleven pounds At birth, having stayed on Two extra weeks in the womb. Tempted by room and fresh air I came out big as a policeman Blue-faced, with narrow red eyes. It was eight days before the doctor Would scare my mother with me. Turning and craning in the vines I can make out through the leaves The old, shimmering nothingness, the sky. 8 Green, scaly moosewoods ascend, Tenants of the shaken paradise, At every wind last night’s rain Comes splattering from the leaves, It drops in flurries and lies there, The footsteps of some running start. 9 From a rock A waterfall, A single trickle like a strand of wire, Breaks into beads halfway down. I know The birds fly off But the hug of the earth wraps With moss their graves and the giant boulders. 10 In the forest I discover a flower. The invisible life of the thing Goes up in flames that are invisible, Like cellophane burning in the sunlight. It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing. In its covertness it has a way Of uttering itself in place of itself, Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean, A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground. The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
I tell you that I see her still At the dark entrance of the hall. One gas lamp burning near her shoulder Shone also from her other side Where hung the long inaccurate glass Whose pictures were as troubled water. An immense shadow had its hand Between us on the floor, and seemed To hump the knuckles nervously, A giant crab readying to walk, Or a blanket moving in its sleep. You will remember, with a smile Instructed by movies to reminisce, How strict her corsets must have been, How the huge arrangements of her hair Would certainly betray the least Impassionate displacement there. It was no rig for dallying, And maybe only marriage could Derange that queenly scaffolding— As when a great ship, coming home, Coasts in the harbor, dropping sail And loosing all the tackle that had laced Her in the long lanes ....  I know We need not draw this figure out. But all that whalebone came from whales. And all the whales lived in the sea, In calm beneath the troubled glass, Until the needle drew their blood. I see her standing in the hall, Where the mirror’s lashed to blood and foam, And the black flukes of agony Beat at the air till the light blows out.
The gregarious dark is shifting when she puts her second drink, the free one, half on the coaster. The tipped wine poised at the brim is the beginning of the bad girl she’ll promise never to be again tomorrow, who can taunt him now to prove he doesn’t love her and never could: her hand slides up his thigh until he tenses— ‘My little prig, don’t you want to fuck me?’ the bad girl she couldn’t be at home, his wife on ice. All he can do is smile back as though she’s made a harmless good-natured joke, and struggle not to look around to see who’s heard, who’s watching. He wants to smash the wine glass in her face so he can know for once exactly what he’s done wrong; but he places it instead back safely on the coaster quickly before she sees. Never cautious enough, he is prepared even if she knocks it over to go down on his hands and knees and wipe it up, kind and forgiving. In all ways careful to acquit himself so that tomorrow when she says she doesn’t deserve him, he’s too good, he can believe her. Tomorrow will be his happy hour. There won’t be anything she wouldn’t do for him.
Old court. Old chain net hanging in frayed links from the rim,  the metal blackboard dented, darker where the ball  for over thirty years has kissed it, the blacktop buckling,  the white lines nearly worn away. Old common ground  where none of the black men warming up before the basket  will answer or even look in my direction when I ask  if I can run too, the chill a mutual understanding,  one of the last we share, letting me join them here,  if nowhere else, by not letting me forget I don’t belong. Old court. Old courtesy, handshake, exchange of names,  in the early days of bussing, between assassinations,  before our quaint welcoming of them had come to seem,  even to ourselves, the haughty overflow of wealth  so thoroughly our own we didn’t need to see it.  Old beautiful delusion in those courtly gestures  that everything now beyond our wanting just to play was out of bounds, and we were free between the white lines  of whatever we assumed we each of us assumed. Old court, old dream dreamed by the weave, the trap,  the backdoor pass. Old fluid legacy, among the others, that conjures even now within our bodies and between them  such a useless, such an intimate forgetting, as in the moment  when you get a step on your defender and can tell exactly by how another man comes at you where your own man is and, without looking, lob the ball  up in the air so perfectly as he arrives that in a single motion he can catch and finger roll it in. Old court. Old dwindling cease fire, with no hope of peace,  that we silently turn away from when the game is over,  hurrying back (as if believing contact meant contagion)  to our separate tribes, to the cleansing fires of what,  despite ourselves, we momentarily forgot: old lore, old news, old burning certitudes we can’t  stoke high or hot enough, yet won’t stop ever stoking  until whatever it is we think we are anneals and toughens into an impenetrable shield.
an introductory lecture This morning we shall spend a few minutes Upon the study of symbolism, which is basic To the nature of money. I show you this nickel. Icons and cryptograms are written all over The nickel: one side shows a hunchbacked bison Bending his head and curling his tail to accommodate The circular nature of money. Over him archesUNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and, squinched in Between that and his rump, E PLURIBUS UNUM, A Roman reminiscence that appears to mean An indeterminately large number of things All of which are the same. Under the bison A straight line giving him a ground to stand on Reads FIVE CENTS. And on the other side of our nickel There is the profile of a man with long hair And a couple of feathers in the hair; we know Somehow that he is an American Indian, and He wears the number nineteen-thirty-six. Right in front of his eyes the word LIBERTY, bent To conform with the curve of the rim, appears To be falling out of the sky Y first; the Indian Keeps his eyes downcast and does not notice this; To notice it, indeed, would be shortsighted of him. So much for the iconography of one of our nickels, Which is now becoming a rarity and something of A collectors’ item: for as a matter of fact There is almost nothing you can buy with a nickel, The representative American Indian was destroyed A hundred years or so ago, and his descendants’ Relations with liberty are maintained with reservations, Or primitive concentration camps; while the bison, Except for a few examples kept in cages, Is now extinct. Something like that, I think, Is what Keats must have meant in his celebrated Ode on a Grecian Urn.  Notice, in conclusion, A number of circumstances sometimes overlooked Even by experts: (a) Indian and bison, Confined to obverse and reverse of the coin, Can never see each other; (b) they are looking In opposite directions, the bison past The Indian’s feathers, the Indian past The bison’s tail; (c) they are upside down To one another; (d) the bison has a human face Somewhat resembling that of Jupiter Ammon. I hope that our studies today will have shown you Something of the import of symbolism With respect to the understanding of what is symbolized.
This morning, between two branches of a tree Beside the door, epeira once again Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap. I test his early-warning system and It works, he scrambles forth in sable with The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows The meaning of. And I remember now How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came Back as they do about this time each year, Grey squadrons with the slashes white on wings Cruising for bugs beneath the bellied cloud. Now soon the monarchs will be drifting south, And then the geese will go, and then one day The little garden birds will not be here. See how many leaves already have Withered and turned; a few have fallen, too. Change is continuous on the seamless web, Yet moments come like this one, when you feel Upon your heart a signal to attend The definite announcement of an end Where one thing ceases and another starts; When like the spider waiting on the web You know the intricate dependencies Spreading in secret through the fabric vast Of heaven and earth, sending their messages Ciphered in chemistry to all the kinds, The whisper down the bloodstream: it is time.
By the dry road the fathers cough and spit, This is their room. They are the ones who hung That bloody sun upon the southern wall And crushed the armored beetle to the floor. The father’s skin is seamed and dry, the map Of that wild region where they drained the swamp And set provision out that they might sit, Of history the cracked precipitate, Until the glass be shattered and the sun Descend to burn the prosperous flesh away Of the filthy world, so vilely fathered on The fathers, such black cinders, sitting there. Old pioneers, what lecheries remain? When schoolgirls pass, what whispers of their skirts, Cold gleams of flesh, solicit in your veined And gemlike eyes the custom of desire? None now. Their eyes are sunk in ancient flesh, And the sarcastic triumph of the mind They now enjoy, letting their lust alone Who may have kin but have no longer kind. Neither tomorrow’s monstrous tumor nor The reformation of the past they wish, Who hold in silent colloquy the world A shrivelled apple in the hand of God. They hang at night their somber flags aloft, And through the amorous dark pursue their theme Of common images, that sleep may show Them done with all disasters but the one.
On the long shore, lit by the moon  To show them properly alone,  Two lovers suddenly embraced  So that their shadows were as one.  The ordinary night was graced For them by the swift tide of blood  That silently they took at flood,  And for a little time they prized  Themselves emparadised. Then, as if shaken by stage-fright  Beneath the hard moon’s bony light,  They stood together on the sand  Embarrassed in each other’s sight  But still conspiring hand in hand,  Until they saw, there underfoot, As though the world had found them out,  The goose fish turning up, though dead,  His hugely grinning head. There in the china light he lay,  Most ancient and corrupt and grey.  They hesitated at his smile, Wondering what it seemed to say To lovers who a little while Before had thought to understand,  By violence upon the sand, The only way that could be known   To make a world their own. It was a wide and moony grin Together peaceful and obscene; They knew not what he would express,  So finished a comedian He might mean failure or success,  But took it for an emblem of Their sudden, new and guilty love To be observed by, when they kissed,   That rigid optimist. So he became their patriarch, Dreadfully mild in the half-dark. His throat that the sand seemed to choke,  His picket teeth, these left their mark  But never did explain the joke That so amused him, lying there While the moon went down to disappear  Along the still and tilted track  That bears the zodiac.
Unwitting accomplice in the scheme of law she thought to violate, man-set as it was, and, here, inconsequential as the sun at midnight, drought at flood-time— when she heard a baby in the tall reeds at the river’s brink, she was nobody’s daughter, subject of no rule but the one his need for her established as she knelt down to quell his crying with a little tune just seeing him there had taught her how to hum.  Now as then, it is the same tune, timelessly in time, your mother hums as she kneels down beside your little barge of foam, smiling to see you smile when she wrings out from the sponge a ragged string of water over the chest and belly, the dimpled loins, the bud so far from flowering, and the foot slick as a fish your hand tries to hold up till it slips back splashing with such mild turbulence that she laughs, and you laugh to see her laugh. Here now, as it was then, it is still so many years before the blood’s smeared over doorposts, before the Nile clots with the first-born, and the women wailing,wailing throughout the city; here now again is the kingdom of pleasure, where they are safe still, mother and child, from the chartered rod of the Fathers, and where a father can still pray, Lord, Jealous Chooser, Devouring Law, keep away from them, just keep away.
This admirable gadget, when it is Wound on a string and spun with steady force, Maintains its balance on most any smooth Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes. It is whirled not on a constant course, but still Stands in unshivering integrity For quite some time, meaning nothing perhaps But being something agreeable to watch, A silver nearly silence gleaning a still- ness out of speed, composing unity From spin, so that its hollow spaces seem Solids of light, until it wobbles and Begins to whine, and then with an odd lunge Eccentric and reckless, it skids away And drops dead into its own skeleton.
The oldest sister, her two hands on the table, about to push herself up, stares with grim determination at the affronting dishes, waiting, it seems, until the middle sister finishes her story, so she can clear them away. Her gaze so tense with purpose she can almost see germs spawning in the mess of white fish flaking from the spines, the smear of egg yolk and the torn rolls disfiguring the china; as if the meal, the moment it is over, the meal she made a point of telling them she shopped for, got up early to prepare, were now inedible, because uneaten. It’s no great comfort either that her brother sitting opposite holds up a flared match over the pipe from which smoke rolls away across the table like a phantom mold in and around the open tub of butter, the gouged block of cream cheese and the coffee cups; so in a moment when she finally does stand she’ll say again, as always, For love or money in my mouth I’d never put such filth, and he’ll say, winking at the middle sister, That’s what she said on her honeymoon. The youngest sister is sitting on the couch behind the table; her face—sheer disengagement, toneless and still—appears to hang suspended beyond the oldest sister’s shoulder, far enough away for no one yet to notice as her legs cross that the ashtray in her lap spills ash over the sunflowers of her housedress. Or that the cigarette between her fingers sags loosely and is dangling while the hand lifts like a puppet’s on a string of smoke. Her death is just three months away. Even though it’s summer (otherwise the brother and middle sister would be home, in Florida), summer and late morning— with sunlight only just now catching on a corner of the window shut behind them, shut against the smog, the steady traffic and the panicked blare and drawn-out whining fade of sirens—the apartment is still quiet, still cool enough, right now, to keep the body in the wavering frail zone of what it needs to be forgotten, so they can sit like this together, with the oldest sister’s sharp eye on the wrecked meal, the brother and sister talking: Listen, she would be saying, listen, Charlie, her elbows on the table, both hands open, the body fashioned to the voice’s weary What can you do? What are ya gonna do? in answer to some story of a cousin’s sudden illness (And he was my age, just like that one day he’s shaving with the toothpaste), or a friend’s death (That one, she didn’t care how sick she got, she always had her hair done), his back pain, her arthritis, or the daughter who won’t diet (And she’d be such a beauty!); after his joke about the nurse, and hers about the bedpan, Listen, they each say, Listen, what are ya gonna do?  “The Schmo, he never should’ve married her, for Christ sake, until he told her that he had a problem, that was his first mistake, then he goes throwing away his pills, because he’s happy he doesn’t need them anymore, the schmo, so of course what happens is she wakes up and finds him weeping at the kitchen table, just weeping, he doesn’t know why, he won’t eat, won’t get dressed, says he’s quittin’ his job, you know, nuts, nuts, so naturally she leaves him, the poor schmo, and he’s such a good boy . . . ” All of the harm that’s imperceptibly but surely coming for them (the way the sun burns brick by brick all morning toward the window like a slow fuse)—all of the bad news now is in the body only enough to hold the middle sister’s two hands open, shrug her shoulders in a way they recognize as hers, the way their mother did; as if all trouble were, for now, no heavier than the familiar voice repeating, Listen, Listen it could be worse; So who’s to say?; What was, was; When your number’s up—like old charms woven around each story till they’ve made what happens what was only meant to happen, coherent with fate, fated as family. After the funeral three months from now, they’ll have to listen to the oldest sister tell them they had no business moving away to Florida, and Irene sick as she was. And selfish. She was selfish, that one. After all those years of living with that bum, her husband, may his cheap soul rest in peace, didn’t she deserve a little pleasure? And anyway, what could be done for her? Didn’t the stroke just make it easier for her to sit all day, and smoke, and not care ashes were falling on the couch, the carpet; her bathrobe filthy, filthy? Oh it was terrible— and now they will hear the old unfairnesses, old feuds and resentments come to her voice like consolation, like a mother helping her recite the story of that last bad day— all that smoke, and running in with nothing but the dishtowel to beat down the flames, and Irene, just Irene, just sitting there, the queen of Sheba—What difference did it make since she was there, she was always there, her big sister, to clean up the mess? Only three months, and yet it could be years, or decades, for the sun has only just now caught in the window, and its bright plaque warms the air so gradually that none of them can know it’s warming, or that soon someone, distracted by a faint sheen prickling the skin, will break the story, look up toward the window and, startled by the full glare, check the time. Right now, though, the future is a luxury of instances in which the cigarette, raised halfway to the lips, will go on rising. Nothing bad, right now, can happen here except as news, bad news the brother and sister mull and rehearse, puzzle and fret until it seems the very telling of it is what keeps them safe. And safe, too, the oldest sister, dreaming of all the perishables sealed, wrapped up and hurried back into the fridge’s uncontaminated airlessness, dreaming of how the soapsuds curdle and slide over the dishes in a soothing fury, not minding that it scalds her hands to hold each plate and cup and bowl under the hot, hard jet of water, if it gets them clean.
“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.” —The Insight Lady Dear old equivocal and closest friend, Grand Vizier to a weak bewildered king, Now we approach The Ecclesiastean Age Where the heart is like to go off inside your chest Like a party favor, or the brain blow a fuse And the comic-book light-bulb of Idea black out Forever, the idiot balloon of speech Go blank, and we shall know, if it be knowing, The world as it was before language once again; Mighty Fortress, maybe already mined And readying to blow up grievances About the lifetime of your servitude, The body of this death one talkative saint Wanted to be delivered of (not yet!), Aggressively asserting your ancient right To our humiliation by the bowel Or the rough justice of the elderly lecher’s Retiring from this incontinence to that; Dark horse, it’s you we’ve put the money on Regardless, the parody and satire and The nevertheless forgiveness of the soul Or mind, self, spirit, will or whatever else The ever-unknowable unknown is calling itself This time around—shall we renew our vows? How should we know by now how we might do Divorced? Homely animal, in sickness and health, For the duration; buddy, you know the drill.
What never comes when called.  What hides when held. Guest  most at home where least  expected. Vagrant balm of Gilead.  What, soon as here,  becomes the body’s native ground and,  soon as not, its banishment.  Coming and going,  indifferent, magisterial.  My lovely daughter— walking me to the car  to say goodbye the day I left  to keep watch at my brother’s bedside—  suddenly  singing “I feel pretty, oh so  pretty”  as she raised her arms up in a loose oval  over her head and pirouetted all along the walk. Savage  and magisterial—  the joy of it, the animal candor of  each arabesque, each leaping turn and counterturn,  her voice now wobbly  with laughter,  “And I pity any girl  who isn’t me  tonight.” Savagely beautiful,  not so much like the lion that the camera  freezes  in mid- pounce, claws  outstretched for the stumbling  antelope, as like the herd  escaping  that the camera pans to, zig-  zagging,  swerving as one, their leaping strides now  leaping higher,  faster, even after,  it seems,  the fear subsides— after the fear and  the relief  they keep on running  for nothing but  the joy of running, though  it could be  any one of them is running  from its fallen  mother or father, sister or brother,  across the wide  savanna, under a bright sun  into fresher grass.
Off Highway 106 At Cherrylog Road I entered  The ’34 Ford without wheels,  Smothered in kudzu, With a seat pulled out to run Corn whiskey down from the hills, And then from the other side  Crept into an Essex With a rumble seat of red leather  And then out again, aboard  A blue Chevrolet, releasing  The rust from its other color, Reared up on three building blocks.  None had the same body heat; I changed with them inward, toward  The weedy heart of the junkyard,  For I knew that Doris Holbrook  Would escape from her father at noon And would come from the farm  To seek parts owned by the sun  Among the abandoned chassis,  Sitting in each in turn As I did, leaning forward As in a wild stock-car race In the parking lot of the dead.  Time after time, I climbed in  And out the other side, like  An envoy or movie star Met at the station by crickets.  A radiator cap raised its head, Become a real toad or a kingsnake  As I neared the hub of the yard,  Passing through many states,  Many lives, to reach Some grandmother’s long Pierce-Arrow  Sending platters of blindness forth From its nickel hubcaps And spilling its tender upholstery On sleepy roaches, The glass panel in between  Lady and colored driver  Not all the way broken out, The back-seat phone Still on its hook. I got in as though to exclaim,  “Let us go to the orphan asylum,  John; I have some old toys For children who say their prayers.” I popped with sweat as I thought  I heard Doris Holbrook scrape Like a mouse in the southern-state sun  That was eating the paint in blisters  From a hundred car tops and hoods.  She was tapping like code, Loosening the screws,  Carrying off headlights,  Sparkplugs, bumpers, Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs,  Getting ready, already, To go back with something to show Other than her lips’ new trembling  I would hold to me soon, soon,  Where I sat in the ripped back seat Talking over the interphone,  Praying for Doris Holbrook  To come from her father’s farm And to get back there With no trace of me on her face To be seen by her red-haired father Who would change, in the squalling barn,  Her back’s pale skin with a strop, Then lay for me In a bootlegger’s roasting car With a string-triggered I2-gauge shotgun  To blast the breath from the air. Not cut by the jagged windshields,  Through the acres of wrecks she came  With a wrench in her hand, Through dust where the blacksnake dies  Of boredom, and the beetle knows  The compost has no more life. Someone outside would have seen  The oldest car's door inexplicably  Close from within: I held her and held her and held her,  Convoyed at terrific speed By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us,  So the blacksnake, stiff With inaction, curved back Into life, and hunted the mouse With deadly overexcitement,  The beetles reclaimed their field  As we clung, glued together, With the hooks of the seat springs  Working through to catch us red-handed  Amidst the gray breathless batting That burst from the seat at our backs.  We left by separate doors Into the changed, other bodies Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road  And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106, continually  Drunk on the wind in my mouth,  Wringing the handlebar for speed,  Wild to be wreckage forever.
Farm boys wild to couple With anything with soft-wooded trees  With mounds of earth mounds  Of pinestraw will keep themselves off  Animals by legends of their own:  In the hay-tunnel dark And dung of barns, they will  Say I have heard tell That in a museum in Atlanta  Way back in a corner somewhere  There’s this thing that’s only half  Sheep like a woolly baby Pickled in alcohol because  Those things can’t live. his eyes Are open but you can’t stand to look  I heard from somebody who ... But this is now almost all  Gone. The boys have taken  Their own true wives in the city, The sheep are safe in the west hill Pasture but we who were born there Still are not sure. Are we, Because we remember, remembered In the terrible dust of museums? Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may  Be saying saying  I am here, in my father’s house.  I who am half of your world, came deeply  To my mother in the long grass  Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight  Listening for foxes. It was something like love  From another world that seized her  From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head   Out of dew, without ever looking, her best  Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face   Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound   Of sobbing of something stumbling  Away, began, as she must do,  To carry me. I woke, dying,  In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes  Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment   The great grassy world from both sides,  Man and beast in the round of their need,  And the hill wind stirred in my wool,  My hoof and my hand clasped each other,  I ate my one meal  Of milk, and died  Staring. From dark grass I came straight    To my father’s house, whose dust  Whirls up in the halls for no reason  When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,   And, through my immortal waters,  I meet the sun’s grains eye  To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.  Dead, I am most surely living  In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives  Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf  And from the chaste ewe in the wind.  They go into woods into bean fields they go  Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,   They groan they wait they suffer  Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.
... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return ...  Van Gennep: Rites de Passage  Moth-force a small town always has,   Given the night.  What field-forms can be,  Outlying the small civic light-decisions over  A man walking near home?  Men are not where he is   Exactly now, but they are around him around him like the strength Of fields. The solar system floats on  Above him in town-moths.  Tell me, train-sound,  With all your long-lost grief,  what I can give.   Dear Lord of all the fields  what am I going to do?  Street-lights, blue-force and frail As the homes of men, tell me how to do it how  To withdraw how to penetrate and find the source   Of the power you always had  light as a moth, and rising  With the level and moonlit expansion  Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.  You? I? What difference is there? We can all be saved  By a secret blooming. Now as I walk The night and you walk with me we know simplicity   Is close to the source that sleeping men  Search for in their home-deep beds.  We know that the sun is away we know that the sun can be conquered   By moths, in blue home-town air.  The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under The pastures. They look on and help. Tell me, freight-train,  When there is no one else  To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea  Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,  Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar  Like the profound, unstoppable craving  Of nations for their wish.  Hunger, time and the moon:  The moon lying on the brain  as on the excited sea as on  The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   With purpose. Wild hope can always spring   From tended strength. Everything is in that.  That and nothing but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord Of the renewing green. That is where it all has to start:  With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less  Than save every sleeping one  And night-walking one  Of us.  My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.
So I would hear out those lungs,  The air split into nine levels, Some gift of tongues of the whistler In the invalid’s bed: my mother,  Warbling all day to herself The thousand variations of one song; It is called Buckdancer’s Choice.  For years, they have all been dying  Out, the classic buck-and-wing men Of traveling minstrel shows;  With them also an old woman  Was dying of breathless angina, Yet still found breath enough  To whistle up in my head  A sight like a one-man band, Freed black, with cymbals at heel,  An ex-slave who thrivingly danced  To the ring of his own clashing light Through the thousand variations of one song  All day to my mother’s prone music,  The invalid’s warbler’s note, While I crept close to the wall  Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter,  Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break Through stratum after stratum of a tone  Proclaiming what choices there are  For the last dancers of their kind, For ill women and for all slaves Of death, and children enchanted at walls  With a brass-beating glow underfoot, Not dancing but nearly risen  Through barnlike, theatrelike houses  On the wings of the buck and wing.
A 29-year-old stewardess fell ... to her death tonight when she was swept through an emergency door that sud- denly sprang open ... The body ... was found ... three hours after the accident.   —New York Times The states when they black out and lie there rolling when they turn To something transcontinental move by drawing moonlight out of the great One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip some sleeper next to An engine is groaning for coffee and there is faintly coming in Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks Of trays she rummages for a blanket and moves in her slim tailored Uniform to pin it over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew The door down with a silent blast from her lungs frozen she is black Out finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taken by the throat The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air Still neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation her hat Still on her arms and legs in no world and yet spaced also strangely With utter placid rightness on thin air taking her time she holds it In many places and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems To slow she develops interest she turns in her maneuverable body To watch it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her Self in low body-whistling wrapped intensely in all her dark dance-weight Coming down from a marvellous leap with the delaying, dumfounding ease Of a dream of being drawn like endless moonlight to the harvest soil Of a central state of one’s country with a great gradual warmth coming Over her floating finding more and more breath in what she has been using For breath as the levels become more human seeing clouds placed honestly Below her left and right riding slowly toward them she clasps it all To her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways and Her eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide wider and suck All the heat from the cornfields can go down on her back with a feeling Of stupendous pillows stacked under her and can turn turn as to someone In bed smile, understood in darkness can go away slant slide Off tumbling into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread Or whirl madly on herself in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth Of wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon. There is time to live In superhuman health seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it arriving In a square town and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches The moon by its one shaken side scaled, roaming silver My God it is good And evil lying in one after another of all the positions for love Making dancing sleeping and now cloud wisps at her no Raincoat no matter all small towns brokenly brighter from inside Cloud she walks over them like rain bursts out to behold a Greyhound Bus shooting light through its sides it is the signal to go straight Down like a glorious diver then feet first her skirt stripped beautifully Up her face in fear-scented cloths her legs deliriously bare then Arms out she slow-rolls over steadies out waits for something great To take control of her trembles near feathers planes head-down The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head gold eyes the insight- eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops a taste for chicken overwhelming Her the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars Freight trains looped bridges enlarging the moon racing slowly Through all the curves of a river all the darks of the midwest blazing From above. A rabbit in a bush turns white the smothering chickens Huddle for over them there is still time for something to live With the streaming half-idea of a long stoop a hurtling a fall That is controlled that plummets as it wills turns gravity Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon shining New Powers there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing But the whole night time for her to remember to arrange her skirt Like a diagram of a bat tightly it guides her she has this flying-skin Made of garments and there are also those sky-divers on tv sailing In sunlight smiling under their goggles swapping batons back and forth And He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving Buddy. She looks for her grinning companion white teeth nowhere She is screaming singing hymns her thin human wings spread out From her neat shoulders the air beast-crooning to her warbling And she can no longer behold the huge partial form of the world now She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs if she fell Into water she might live like a diver cleaving perfect plunge Into another heavy silver unbreathable slowing saving Element: there is water there is time to perfect all the fine Points of diving feet together toes pointed hands shaped right To insert her into water like a needle to come out healthily dripping And be handed a Coca-Cola there they are there are the waters Of life the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir so let me beginTo plane across the night air of Kansas opening my eyes superhumanly Bright to the damned moon opening the natural wings of my jacket By Don Loper moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water One cannot
In a stable of boats I lie still, From all sleeping children hidden.  The leap of a fish from its shadow  Makes the whole lake instantly tremble.  With my foot on the water, I feel  The moon outside Take on the utmost of its power. I rise and go out through the boats.  I set my broad sole upon silver, On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,  Stepping outward from earth onto water  In quest of the miracle This village of children believed  That I could perform as I dived For one who had sunk from my sight.  I saw his cropped haircut go under.  I leapt, and my steep body flashed  Once, in the sun. Dark drew all the light from my eyes.  Like a man who explores his death By the pull of his slow-moving shoulders,  I hung head down in the cold, Wide-eyed, contained, and alone Among the weeds, And my fingertips turned into stone  From clutching immovable blackness.  Time after time I leapt upward Exploding in breath, and fell back  From the change in the children’s faces  At my defeat. Beneath them I swam to the boathouse  With only my life in my arms To wait for the lake to shine back At the risen moon with such power  That my steps on the light of the ripples  Might be sustained. Beneath me is nothing but brightness  Like the ghost of a snowfield in summer.  As I move toward the center of the lake,  Which is also the center of the moon,  I am thinking of how I may be The savior of one Who has already died in my care.  The dark trees fade from around me.  The moon’s dust hovers together.  I call softly out, and the child’s Voice answers through blinding water.  Patiently, slowly, He rises, dilating to break The surface of stone with his forehead.  He is one I do not remember Having ever seen in his life. The ground I stand on is trembling  Upon his smile. I wash the black mud from my hands.  On a light given off by the grave  I kneel in the quick of the moon  At the heart of a distant forest  And hold in my arms a child  Of water, water, water.
And now the green household is dark.  The half-moon completely is shining  On the earth-lighted tops of the trees.  To be dead, a house must be still. The floor and the walls wave me slowly;  I am deep in them over my head.  The needles and pine cones about me Are full of small birds at their roundest,  Their fists without mercy gripping Hard down through the tree to the roots  To sing back at light when they feel it.  We lie here like angels in bodies, My brothers and I, one dead, The other asleep from much living, In mid-air huddled beside me. Dark climbed to us here as we climbed Up the nails I have hammered all day Through the sprained, comic rungs of the ladder  Of broom handles, crate slats, and laths Foot by foot up the trunk to the branches  Where we came out at last over lakes Of leaves, of fields disencumbered of earth  That move with the moves of the spirit.  Each nail that sustains us I set here; Each nail in the house is now steadied By my dead brother’s huge, freckled hand.  Through the years, he has pointed his hammer  Up into these limbs, and told us That we must ascend, and all lie here.  Step after step he has brought me,  Embracing the trunk as his body, Shaking its limbs with my heartbeat,  Till the pine cones danced without wind  And fell from the branches like apples.  In the arm-slender forks of our dwelling I breathe my live brother’s light hair.  The blanket around us becomes As solid as stone, and it sways. With all my heart, I close The blue, timeless eye of my mind.  Wind springs, as my dead brother smiles  And touches the tree at the root; A shudder of joy runs up The trunk; the needles tingle;  One bird uncontrollably cries. The wind changes round, and I stir  Within another’s life. Whose life? Who is dead? Whose presence is living?  When may I fall strangely to earth, Who am nailed to this branch by a spirit?  Can two bodies make up a third? To sing, must I feel the world’s light?  My green, graceful bones fill the air  With sleeping birds. Alone, alone And with them I move gently. I move at the heart of the world.
They will soon be down To one, but he still will be For a little while still will be stopping The flakes in the air with a look, Surrounding himself with the silence Of whitening snarls. Let him eat The last red meal of the condemned To extinction, tearing the guts From an elk. Yet that is not enough For me. I would have him eat The heart, and from it, have an idea Stream into his gnarling head That he no longer has a thing To lose, and so can walk Out into the open, in the full Pale of the sub-Arctic sun Where a single spruce tree is dying Higher and higher. Let him climb it With all his meanness and strength. Lord, we have come to the end Of this kind of vision of heaven, As the sky breaks open Its fans around him and shimmers And into its northern gates he rises Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach Looking straight into the eternal Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all My way: at the top of that tree I place The New World’s last eagle Hunched in mangy feathers giving Up on the theory of flight. Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate To the death in the rotten branches, Let the tree sway and burst into flame And mingle them, crackling with feathers, In crownfire. Let something come Of it something gigantic legendary Rise beyond reason over hills Of ice screaming that it cannot die, That it has come back, this time On wings, and will spare no earthly thing: That it will hover, made purely of northern Lights, at dusk and fall On men building roads: will perch On the moose’s horn like a falcon Riding into battle into holy war against Screaming railroad crews: will pull Whole traplines like fibres from the snow In the long-jawed night of fur trappers. But, small, filthy, unwinged, You will soon be crouching Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion Of being the last, but none of how much Your unnoticed going will mean: How much the timid poem needs The mindless explosion of your rage, The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s Heart in the belly, sprouting wings, The pact of the “blind swallowing Thing,” with himself, to eat The world, and not to be driven off it Until it is gone, even if it takes Forever. I take you as you are And make of you what I will, Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty Non-survivor.  Lord, let me die but not dieOut.
Beginning to dangle beneath The wind that blows from the undermined wood,   I feel the great pulley grind,  The thread I cling to lengthen  And let me soaring and spinning down into marble,  Hooked and weightlessly happy  Where the squared sun shines Back equally from all four sides, out of stone   And years of dazzling labor,  To land at last among men Who cut with power saws a Parian whiteness  And, chewing slow tobacco,  Their eyebrows like frost, Shunt house-sized blocks and lash them to cables   And send them heavenward  Into small-town banks, Into the columns and statues of government buildings,   But mostly graves.  I mount my monument and rise Slowly and spinningly from the white-gloved men   Toward the hewn sky  Out of the basement of light, Sadly, lifted through time’s blinding layers   On perhaps my tombstone  In which the original shape Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth   Is heavily stirring,  Surprised to be an angel, To be waked in North Georgia by the ponderous play   Of men with ten-ton blocks  But no more surprised than I To feel sadness fall off as though I myself   Were rising from stone  Held by a thread in midair, Badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired,   Not a masterwork  Or even worth seeing at all But the spirit of this place just the same,   Felt here as joy.
I have just come down from my father. Higher and higher he lies Above me in a blue light Shed by a tinted window. I drop through six white floors And then step out onto pavement. Still feeling my father ascend, I start to cross the firm street, My shoulder blades shining with all The glass the huge building can raise. Now I must turn round and face it, And know his one pane from the others. Each window possesses the sun As though it burned there on a wick. I wave, like a man catching fire. All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash, And, behind them, all the white rooms They turn to the color of Heaven. Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly, Dozens of pale hands are waving Back, from inside their flames. Yet one pure pane among these Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing. I know that my father is there, In the shape of his death still living. The traffic increases around me Like a madness called down on my head. The horns blast at me like shotguns, And drivers lean out, driven crazy— But now my propped-up father Lifts his arm out of stillness at last. The light from the window strikes me And I turn as blue as a soul, As the moment when I was born. I am not afraid for my father— Look! He is grinning; he is not Afraid for my life, either, As the wild engines stand at my knees Shredding their gears and roaring, And I hold each car in its place For miles, inciting its horn To blow down the walls of the world That the dying may float without fear In the bold blue gaze of my father. Slowly I move to the sidewalk With my pin-tingling hand half dead At the end of my bloodless arm. I carry it off in amazement, High, still higher, still waving, My recognized face fully mortal, Yet not; not at all, in the pale, Drained, otherworldly, stricken, Created hue of stained glass. I have just come down from my father.
How time reverses The proud in heart! I now make verses Who aimed at art. But I sleep well. Ambitious boys Whose big lines swell With spiritual noise, Despise me not! And be not queasy To praise somewhat: Verse is not easy. But rage who will. Time that procured me Good sense and skill Of madness cured me.
Allegiance is assigned Forever when the mind Chooses and stamps the will. Thus, I must love you still Through good and ill. But though we cannot part We may retract the heart And build such privacies As self-regard agrees Conduce to ease. So manners will repair The ravage of despair Which generous love invites, Preferring quiet nights To vain delights.
Speak to her heart!  That manic force  When wits depart  Forbids remorse. Dream with her dreaming  Until her lust Seems to her seeming  An act of trust! Do without doing!  Love’s wilful potion  Veils the ensuing, And brief, commotion.
If wisdom, as it seems it is, Be the recovery of some bliss From the conditions of disaster— Terror the servant, man the master— It does not follow we should seek Crises to prove ourselves unweak. Much of our lives, God knows, is error, But who will trifle with unrest? These fools who would solicit terror, Obsessed with being unobsessed; Professionals of experience Who have disasters to withstand them As if fear never had unmanned them, Flaunt a presumptuous innocence. I have preferred indifference.
After some years Bohemian came to this— This Maenad with hair down and gaping kiss Wild on the barren edge of under fifty. She would finance his art if he were thrifty.
This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.
In a morning coat, hands locked behind your back, you walk gravely along the lines in your head. These others stand with you,  squinting the city into place,  yet cannot see what you see,  what you would see —a vision of these paths,  laid out like a star, or like a body, the seed vibrating within itself,  breaking into the open, dancing up to stop at the end of the universe. I say your vision goes as far as this,  the egg of the world, where everything remains, and moves, holding what is most against it against itself, moving, as though it knew its end, against death. In that order, the smallest life, the small event take shape. Yes, even here at this point,  Amma's plan consumes you, the prefigured man, Nommo, the son of God. I call you into this time, back to that spot and read these prefigurations  into your mind, and know it could not be strange to you  to stand in the dark and emptiness  of a city not your vision alone. Now, I have searched the texts and forms of cities that burned, that decayed, or gave their children away,  have been picking at my skin, watching my hand move, feeling the weight and shuttle of my body,  listening with an ear as large as God's  to catch some familiar tone in my voice.  Now, I am here in your city, trying to find that spot where the vibration starts. There must be some mistake. Over the earth,  in an open space, you and I step to the time of another ceremony.  These people, changed, but still ours, shake another myth  from that egg. Some will tell you that beginnings are only possible here, that only the clamor of these drums could bring our God to earth. A city, like a life, must be made in purity. So they call you, knowing you are intimate with stars, to create this city, this body. So they call you, knowing you must purge the ground. “Sir, suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the arms and tyranny of the British crown were exerted, with every powerful effort in order to reduce you to a state of servitude: look back, I entreat you, on the variety of dangers to which you were exposed; reflect on that time, in which every human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a serious and grateful sense of your miraculous and providential preservation; you cannot but acknowledge, that the present freedom and tranquility which you enjoy you have mercifully received, and that it is the peculiar blessing of Heaven.”
Old now, your eyes nearly blank from plotting the light's movement over the years, you clean your Almanac and place it next to the heart of this letter. I have you in mind, giving a final brush and twist to the difficult pages, staring down the shape of the numbers as though you would find a flaw in their forms. Solid, these calculations verify your body on God's earth. At night, the stars submit themselves to the remembered way you turn them; the moon gloats under your attention. I, who know so little of stars, whose only acquaintance with the moon is to read a myth, or to listen to the surge of songs the women know, sit in your marvelous reading of all movement, of all relations. So you look into what we see yet cannot see, and shape and take a language to give form to one or the other, believing no form will escape, no movement appear, nor stop, without explanation, believing no reason is only reason, nor without reason. I read all of this into your task, all of this into the uneasy reproof of your letter. Surely, there must be a flaw. These perfect calculations fall apart. There are silences that no perfect number can retrieve, omissions no perfect line could catch. How could a man but challenge God's impartial distributions? How could a man sit among the free and ordered movements of stars, and waters, beasts and birds, each movement seen or accounted for, and not know God jealous, and not know that he himself must be? So you go over the pages again, looking for the one thing that will not reveal itself, judging what you have received, what you have shaped, believing it cannot be strange to the man you address. But you are strange to him —your skin, your tongue, the movement of your body, even your mysterious ways with stars. You argue here with the man and God, and know that no man can be right, and know that no God will argue right. Your letter turns on what the man knows, on what God, you think, would have us know. All stars will forever move under your gaze, truthfully, leading you from line to line, from number to number, from truth to truth, while the man will read your soul's desire, searcher, searching yourself, losing the relations.
En mi país el Otoño nace de una flor seca, de algunos pajaros; . . . o del vaho penetrante de ciertos rios de la llanura. —Molinari, “Oda a una larga tristeza”  Each instant comes with a price, the blue-edged bill on the draft of a bird almost incarnadine, the shanked ochre of an inn that sits as still as the beavertail cactus it guards (the fine rose of that flower gone as bronze as sand), the river's chalky white insistence as it moves past the gray afternoon toward sunset. Autumn feels the chill of a late summer lit only by goldenrod and a misplaced strand of blackberries; deplores all such sleight of hand; turns sullen, selfish, envious, full of regret. Someone more adept would mute its voice. The spill of its truncated experience would shine less bravely and, out of the dust and dunghill of this existence (call it hope, in decline), as here the blue light of autumn falls, command what is left of exhilaration and fit this season's unfolding to the alphabet of turn and counterturn, all that implicit arc of a heart searching for a place to stand. Yet even that diminished voice can withstand the currying of its spirit. Here lies—not yet. If, and only if, the leafless rose he sees, or thinks he sees, flowered a moment ago, this endangered heart flows with the river that flees the plain, and listens with eye raised to the slow revelation of cloud, hoping to approve himself, or to admonish the rose for slight transgressions of the past, this the ecstatic ethos, a logic that seems set to reprove his facility with unsettling delight. Autumn might be only desire, a Twelfth Night gone awry, a gift almost too emphatic. Logic in a faithful light somehow appeases the rose, and stirs the hummingbird's vibrato. By moving, I can stand where the light eases me into the river's feathered arms, and, so, with the heat of my devotion, again prove devotion, if not this moment, pure, finite. Autumn cradles me with idiomatic certainty, leaves me nothing to disapprove. I now acknowledge this red moon, to requite the heart alone given power to recite its faith, what a cradled life finds emblematic.
If you undo your do you would be strange. Hair has been on my mind. I used to lean in the doorway and watch my stony woman wind the copper through the black, and play with my understanding, show me she cóuld take a cup of river water, and watch it shimmy, watch it change, turn around and become ash bone. Wind in the cottonwoods wakes me to a day so thin its breastbone shows, so paid out it shakes me free of its blue dust. I will arrange that river water, bottom juice. I conjure my head in the stream and ride with the silk feel of it as my woman bathes me, and shaves away the scorn, sponges the grit of solitude from my skin, laves the salt water of self-esteem over my feathering body. How like joy to come upon me in remembering a head of hair and the way water would caress it, and stress beauty in the flair and cut of the only witness to my dance under sorrow's tree. This swift darkness is spring's first hour. I carried my life, like a stone, in a ragged pocket, but I had a true weaving song, a sly way with rhythm, a healing tone.
Cigarettes in my mouth to puncture blisters in my brain. My bass a fine piece of furniture. My fingers soft, too soft to rattle rafters in second-rate halls. The harmonies I could never learn stick in Ayler's screams. An African chant chokes us. My image shot. If you look off over the Hudson, the dark cooperatives spit at the dinghies floating up the night.  A young boy pisses on lovers rolling against each other under a trackless el.  This could have been my town, with light strings that could stand a tempo.  Now,  it's the end  of an ethnic dream. I've grown intellectual, go on accumulating furniture and books, damning literature, writing “for myself,” calculating the possibilities that someone will love me, or sleep with me. Eighteen-year-old girls come back from the Southern leers and make me cry.  Here, there are  coffee shops, bars,  natural tonsorial parlors,  plays, streets,  pamphlets, days, sun,  heat, love, anger,  politics, days, and sun. Here, we shoot off every day to new horizons, coffee shops, bars, natural tonsorial parlors, plays, streets, pamphlets, days, sun, heat, love, anger, politics, days, and sun.  It is the end of an ethnic dream.  My bass a fine piece of furniture.  My brain blistered.
Yo ave del agua floreciente duro en fiesta. —“Deseo de persistencia,” Poesía Náhuatl 1 In the region of rain and cloud, I live in shade, under the moss mat of days bruised  purple with desire. My dominion is a song in the wide ring of water. There, I run to and fro, braiding the logical act  in the birth of an Ear of Corn, polychromatic story I will now tell in the weaving, power's form in motion, a devotion to the unstressed. Once, I wreathed around a king, became a fishing net, a maze  “a deadly wealth of robe.” Mothers who have heard me sing take heart; I always prick them into power. 2Y vengo alzando al viento la roja flor de invierno. (I lift the red flower of winter into the wind.)  —Poesía Náhuatl
Extravagant sweep  of clear sky  darkening in the big picture window  beside the bed, lights here and there  already flashing all across the city down below us—  Ellen and the girls out somewhere,  you and I alone, you with your eyes closed,  I with a drink in hand: you suddenly in character,  your voice a wraith’s voice,  faint, stumbling,  slurry with morphine,  and yet  still artful  as ever, even if the art  was obvious, the dying brother  playing the dying brother—Do you think  you have a problem  with that?
Did you ever have a family?   Dark dining room,  bright kitchen,  white steam from the big pot my mother’s stirring reaching in wavy tendrils to her face, around her face, all the way around to me at the table, then beyond me into the darkness where my brother is.Were you ever a child?  I’m hungry but I know we’ll  eat soon,   so even the hunger’s sweet.Did you ever really have a brother?  He’s singing there in the dark  corner  beside the stereo, the volume turned down so low all we hear is him, his voice, and his eyes are closed so that there’s nothing around him anywhere that might reveal he isn’t who the song insists he is.And that is?  Irresistible, unforgettable,   someone   to whom as in imaginary gardens where “the nectarine and curious peach into my hands themselves do reach,” love comes as soon as called, comes just as dreamed.Did any of this ever happen?  The hunger’s sweet,  it’s as if  the song weaves through the fragrance of the braiding steam from him to me to her to me to him because her eyes are closed now too; her slippered feet tap, caper a soft shoe while the ladle sways in her hand as she stirs.Were you ever a child?  I know I’ll eat soon.   Did you ever really have a brother? You should have   heard him,   his voice was unforgettable, irresistible, his voice was an imaginary garden woven through with fragrance.Did you ever have a family?  Their eyes are closed. That’s how I know   we’re there   inside it, it’s made of sound and steam that weaves between dark dining room, bright kitchen. We’re there because I’m hungry, and we’ll all be eating soon together, and the hunger’s sweet.
When he was my age and I was already a boy my father made a machine in the garage. A wired piece of steel with many small and beautiful welds ground so smooth they resembled rows of pearls. He went broke with whatever it was. He held it so carefully in his arms. He carried it foundry to foundry. I think it was his harp, I think it was what he longed to make with his hands for the world. He moved it finally from the locked closet to the bedroom to the garage again where he hung it on the wall until I climbed and pulled it down and rubbed it clean and tried to make it work.
(CALLIOPE ↔ SAHU) Night enters the Plaza, step by step, in the singular flaring of lamps on churro carts, taco stands, benches set with deep bowls of pozole, on rugs embroidered with relics, crosses, bones,  pamphlets, dream books. Around this Cathedral, there is an order never shaken; all our eyes and postures speak of the certainty  of being forever in place. These are the ones who always hear the veiled day fall, the street tile's serpentine hiss under the evening's drone. Compadre, not all have come from Reforma, along Madero. There are those whose spotless white manta tells me they are not from here—as now, you see, a village wedding party come to engage the virgin's peace. This evening, in the Zócalo, lanterns become candles, or starlight, whatever recalls a woman, beating her clothes on rocks in a village stream. At her side, a man buckets the muddy water for his stove. What does the spirit say, in its seating, when such impurity can console, and the slipped vowels of an unfamiliar name  rise from the shallows? Lovers meet here, and carry consummation's black weed into dawn, and meet again when the full moon,  on its flamboyant feet, surges over the mud floor of a barrio Saturday night. She, of the rock, has offered the water man beans, flour tortillas, cebollas encurtidas and atole, a hand for the bell dance that rings all night, the surprise of knowing the name of the horse that waits in the shadows when the dance has gone. She knows this room, where every saint has danced, revolves on its own foundation, and that the noon heat ache beneath her hair guides her through a love's lost steps. Her love lies deeper than a heart's desire, far beyond even her hand's intention, when midnight at the feast sings with the singular arrow that flies by day,  a sagitta mortis. Now, in her presence, I always return to hands, parts of that “unwieldly flesh about our souls,” where the life of Fridays, the year of Lent, the wilderness, lies and invites another danger. I sit at the mass, and mark the quail movement of the priests' hands, as they draw submission from us. The long night of atonement that burrs our knees  feeds those hands. But there are other hands—our own, yet another's— in the mortar, in the glass,  tight with blood and innocence. A cathedral moment may last for centuries, given to us as a day, and a day, and half a day, as a baroque insistence lying over classic form, as the womb from which the nation rises whole. Inside there, the nation walks the Chinese rail, arrives at the Altar of Pardon,  lingers, goes on, to the grotto where the kings stand in holy elation. Perhaps, this reticent man and woman will find that moment of exhilaration in marriage, born on the mud floor when they entered each other for the good hidden in each, in flesh that needs  no propitiation. There must be a “Canticle, a love-song, an Epithalamion, a marriage song of God, to our souls, wrapped up, if we would open it, and read it.”  Adorar es dar para recibir. How much we have given to this Cathedral's life. How often we have heard prophecies of famine, or war, or pestilence, advocacies of labor and fortune that have failed to sustain. Compadre, I wish I were clever enough to sleep in a room of saints, and close my senses to the gaming, the burl of grilled meat and pulque, the sweet talk of political murders, the corrido laughter that follows a jefe to his bed, all these silences, all these intimations of something still to be constructed. But forgive me for knowing this,  that I have been touched by fire, and that, even in spiritual things, nothing is perfect. And this I understand, in the Cathedral grotto, where the kings have buckled on their customary deeds, the darkest lady has entered. Be still, and hear the singing, while Calliope encounters  the saints. The wedding party, austerely figured in this man and woman, advances to the spot where the virgin  once sat to receive us.
There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended. From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.
Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen sat down with me in the small tiled room of her family house I am unable to sleep. We shared a glass of cold and sweet water.  On a blue plate her mother brought us cake and smiled her betel-black teeth at me  but I did not feel strange in the house my country had tried to bomb into dust.  In English thick and dazed as blood she told me how she watched our planes  cross her childhood’s sky, all the children of Hanoi carried in darkness to mountain hamlets, Nixon’s  Christmas bombing. She let me hold her hand,  her shy unmoving fingers, and told me how afraid she was those days and how this fear  had dug inside her like a worm and lives  inside her still, won’t die or go away. And because she’s stronger, she comforted me,  said I’m not to blame, the million sorrows alive in her gaze. With the dead we share no common rooms. With the frightened we can’t think straight;  no words can bring the burning city back.  Outside on Hung Dao Street I tried to say good-bye and held her hand  too long so she looked back through traffic  towards her house and with her eyes  she told me I should leave. All night I ached for her and for myself  and nothing I could think or pray would make it stop. Some birds sang morning  home across the lake. In small reed boats  the lotus gatherers sailed out among their resuming white blossoms.  Hanoi, 1990
A boy who knew enough to save for something like the whim that took me downtown on the bus one lost Saturday morning of my mother’s birthday, I sat in the back where the gasoline smell made me dizzy and I closed my eyes but didn’t think of her, only of myself, basking in the light and love that would fall down on me when I handed her the box and she untied the bow to save and lifted something shining out and held it up before us like a promise taking shape for once in her hands, though I didn’t know what to buy, the bus door hissing behind me because I’m in some kind of state now, a trance that comes when you pull at the cords of light that connect the mother to the boy, the 1959 department store opening up before me like a jeweled city. In lingerie I found myself surrounded by those torsos sheened in silk, dreaming my mother, feeling the silk against me, the two of us moving through a cloudy room in a dance I can’t remember until shame comes. From out of nowhere the matron frowned, asked what I wanted, hovered over me. Confused and afraid I whispered, without thinking, The black hose with rhinestones down the seams please and pointed to the pair across the room stretched over legs on the glass counter as if about to step off and I saw her in my mind slip them on, her skirt hiked above the garters, the sun catching in her tangled hair until the matron made a sound in her throat and looked at me with eyes that said What’s wrong with you dirty boy. All the way home a sweet ache rocked me, the silver package riding my lap like a heavy wrong thing I couldn’t give up no matter how it dragged me down to a place where I could barely breathe or see or feel. Whatever happened that spinning afternoon— she ran her fingers over the rhinestone seams or she didn’t, she wore them out into an evening or kept them forever in her drawer of impossible things— doesn’t matter. I would find my way into the light of another woman into whose arms I fall nights my fingers can’t tear through the dark that eats me, the silk stretched across her breasts, the need for something womanly to raise me up pounding in my head until I curl in sleep away from those longings, ancient and blue.
That night we drank warm whiskey  in our parked car beyond woods now lost to the suburbs,  I fell in love with you. What waited was the war  like a bloody curtain,  and a righteous moment  when the lovely boy’s spine was snapped, then the long falling into hell. But lately, you’ve been calling me back through the years of bitter silence to tell me of another river of blood  and of the highland’s howl at dusk of human voices  blasted into ecstasy. That night in sweet Lorain  we drank so long and hard  we raised ourselves above the broken places, mill fires burning red against the sky. Why  is there no end  to this unraveling.
O hideous little bat, the size of snot, With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes, To populate the stinking cat you walk The promontory of the dead man’s nose, Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe The smoking mountains of my food And in a comic mood In mid-air take to bed a wife. Riding and riding with your filth of hair On gluey foot or wing, forever coy, Hot from the compost and green sweet decay, Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy— You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool, In the tight belly of the dead Burrow with hungry head And inlay maggots like a jewel. At your approach the great horse stomps and paws Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail; Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand Which sweeps against you like an angry flail; Still you return, return, trusting your wing To draw you from the hunter’s reach That learns to kill to teach Disorder to the tinier thing. My peace is your disaster. For your death Children like spiders cup their pretty hands And wives resort to chemistry of war. In fens of sticky paper and quicksands You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck You struggle hideously and beg, You amputate your leg Imbedded in the amber muck. But I, a man, must swat you with my hate, Slap you across the air and crush your flight, Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood, Expose your little guts pasty and white, Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard’s hat, Pin your wings under like a crow’s, Tear off your flimsy clothes And beat you as one beats a rat. Then like Gargantua I stride among The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust, The broken bodies of the narrow dead That catch the throat with fingers of disgust. I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls And stunned, stone blind, and deaf Buzzes its frightful F And dies between three cannibals.
The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be  condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple  in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes.  Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues  to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling  out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run  for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues  like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this  slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does “earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No,  yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard,  hammering winter? When my father was buried, the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play  the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that  lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . . Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened, mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers  sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But they have their validity, don't they, yes? their sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time  alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . . questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal,  and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics. What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm  to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue  quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if  I wept? What if I simply put the page down,  rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot  the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into  the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising  light, and walked back up to his stone a final time,  just that, no drama, and it was so cold, and the air was so brittle, metal buckled out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me,  where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s  heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.
Mail-day, and over the world in a thousand drag-nets The bundles of letters are dumped on the docks and beaches, And all that is dear to the personal conscious reaches Around us again like filings around iron magnets, And war stands aside for an hour and looks at our faces Of total absorption that seem to have lost their places. O demobilized for a moment, a world is made human, Returns to a time that is neither the present or then, But a garland of clippings and wishes of who-knows-when, A time of its own creation, a thing of acumen That keeps us, like movies, alive with a purpose, aside From the play-acting truth of the newsreel in which we have died. And aside from the candy and pictures and books we receive, As if we were patients whose speedy recovery were certain, There is proof of the End and the lights and the bow at the curtain, After which we shall smile at each other and get up to leave. Aside from the play in the play there is all that is fact, These letters, the battle in progress, the place of the act. And the optimal joy of the conflict, the tears of the ads May move us or not, and the movies at night in the palms May recall us or not to the kiss, and on Sunday the psalms May remind us of Sunday or not, but aside from the lads Who arrive like our letters still fresh from the kiss and the tear, There are mouths that are dusty and eyes that are wider than fear. Say no more of the dead than a prayer, say no more of the land Where the body is laid in the coral than that it is far; Take your finger away from the map of wherever-we-are, For we lie in the map of the chart of your elderly hand; Do not hasten the future; in agony too there is time For the growth of the rose of the spirit astir in the slime. For aside from ourselves as we are there is nothing alive Except as it keeps us alive, not tomorrow but now, Our mail-day, today of the blood of the sweat of our brow, The year of our war to the end. When and where we arrive Is no matter, but how is the question we urgently need, How to love and to hate, how to die, how to write and to read.
The gates clanged and they walked you into jail More tense than felons but relieved to find The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped From every mother’s windowpane, obscene The bloodlust sweating from the public heart, The dog authority slavering at your throat. A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean. The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew Troubling the captains for plain decencies, A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out To establish new theocracies to west, A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas Ten miles above the sodomites and fish. These inmates loved the only living doves. Like all men hunted from the world you made A good community, voyaging the storm To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat; Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed, The gaunt politicals construed our hate. The opposite of all armies, you were best Opposing uniformity and yourselves; Prison and personality were your fate. You suffered not so physically but knew Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind. Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach Erupting in his face damn all your kind. Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us Are equally with those who shed the blood The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is What we come back to in the armistice.
Fire isn’t allowed, for the sake of the books. The lean monk-copyist who scribes the books is slate-blue at his fingertips this steely late-November day in the year 1000. Brother Ambrosio huffs some perfunctory warmth on his stiffening hands, then bends again to his goat’s-horn of ink. For every line, he believes, he’s forgiven a sin. And now he’s at his heavy uncial letters, and will be for nine hours more, until a slab of bread and a beet relieve his transcriptual ardor. What he copies?—psalter, missal, hagiography: the predetermined and sanctioned community passions of a religious culture. Nothing like the twentieth century’s prevalent kneejerk “self-expression.” Nothing like the priest, excuse me: former priest, and former nun, on daytime talk TV, who live, she tells us, in a “trinity of love” with the former creator-of-tourist-ashtrays-out-of-catfish-heads. This is, she insists, the final and jubilant stage of a lifelong “quest to feel belongingness” initiated thirty years before by parents skittering cross-country with the military: they were wholly rootless, and so she grew up “unable to commit.” The following day, a man confesses to pedophilia because of a lesbian aunt. A woman says she robbed the Sack-N-Save of $13.42 “because of what they’re dumping in the water supply, it makes me go all freaky.” Steve was bounced out from The Chicken Shack “because I’m Scandinavian.” The culture of blame is so completely exterior in its search for cause, some days I wake to think I’ll find most people laboring under the weight of sci-fi-style mind parasites, like fleshy turbans spewing in, and feeding off, their brain blood. This (by “this” I mean of course a recognition of the magic of objective correlative boppin’ about in the spotlight) is, to some length, understandable: you can’t beat the miniscule carry-along convenience of a silicon chip invisibly set in something, BUT for sheer persuasive visual power, that can’t touch a 1940s generating plant, its giant Alcatrazian shape against the sky, and the enormous wrestling electrical crackles snaking its rooftop pylon. In the scriptorium, even —such an isolated unit of human endeavor, its limited range of reactions surely is pure—when Brother Ambrosio nods off, sleepy in his long day’s long eighth hour of thickly nibbed and careful letters, he knows it’s imps in league with Satan that keep pulling down his eyelids. If in scratching his flea-measled thigh he spills a hand’s-expanse of ink across the vellum page, the fleas are tiny devils on a guerilla mission from Hell. And once a devilkin took lodging in his belly, and there created “rumbling noises like a toad, and which, for hours, spoiled the concentration of all of the other Brothers.” We find parchment scraps with appropriate exorcisms: “Away! you flaming sow, you poisoned udder, you arse of the arch-fiend, shit-fly, stinking he-goat, out out out, away, back into thine infernal kitchen, you bestial puke!” We also find those charming marginal doodles (sprigs in flower, unicorns, seemingly every songbird in Creation): such diminutive external bodies given to the longings of these cooped-up men. And when they came to drag my friend Jess screaming to the ward, because he was beating his head on the lawyer’s steps, it was clear to us all that the chemicals in his mind had turned against him. It was clear to Jess that he was being hunted like prey by hounds from the moon.
1862: Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried his young wife Elizabeth Rossetti with a sheaf of his unpublished poems.   . . . and then of course the weeping: some demurely, some flamboyantly. Those elegiac tears, if shed enough, will alter a face and the person behind the face. We all know that erosion is a mighty thing, and even—for example— the seemingly permanent, hard-black Mississippi banks undo and slip south. In a sense, the delta at New Orleans—the land gone silt, and rebuilt— is the Mississippi’s second thought. “My pet, your wiles have altered my earlier obstinacy, and the vision of you in your luxury stateroom beckons; I shall join you for your voyage on the Gigantic —what? oh. Titanic”—is a tragic second thought. A happy one: when Skyler and I decided to try again to “save the marriage.” Now we’re lazing in a pour of Sunday morning light as orangely voluptuous as marmalade. A simile’s a first thought, then an equaled next. She slips back into sleep, and now I’m reading about the night that shady London dandy Charles Augustus Howell (1869) unshoveled the grave at Highgate, broke the coffin, and looted her bone breast of “the book in question, bound in rough gray calf, and with red edges to the leaves,” on eager orders from Rossetti —who’d had second thoughts in seven years, desiring to publish now a volume of his verses (1870, Poems). Lizzie’s death-stenched pages were saturated with disinfectant by a medical practitioner “who is drying them leaf by leaf”—and then they joined the world of woven radish baskets, bobbered fishing skeins, and god dolls in their second life as art on a museum wall; a world where the “conversion pool” saw swimmers step in white robes from its farther end, reborn to new religion; and the lumbering land animals said no, and gave up legs, and so their legs rolled up like stored-away and useless rugs inside them, and they returned to the waters, and birthed and breached in the waters, and made the waters their orchestral glory, and spouted out their great Ionic columns of air and water in the touch of the changing mind of Earth, that’s sunlit at times and at other times darkened.
The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.” —Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer  When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire, one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer! Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen” into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation is very easy. The allurements of a local siren, whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure, evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen. Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’ today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”—her share of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for- eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation, both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer in the first set and then, for a twofer, (very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation, mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for- tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer, Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen- sucking cyberwired ninja-kicking shitheel (or, translation: call him Sir). It makes one pine for a land where the birds all choir in sweetly trilling melodies on a flower-scented shore, and a translation sings all night. Row gen- tly toward it. The tender forests sigh, and the soft whirr of the hygrometer promises oxidation of iron.
As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans, Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride, You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye, Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss. As my foot suggests that you leap in the air with your hips of a girl, My finger that praises your wheel and announces your voices of song, Flouncing your skirts, you blueness of joy, you flirt of politeness, You leap, you intelligence, essence of wheelness with silvery nose, And your platinum clocks of excitement stir like the hairs of a fern. But how alien you are from the booming belts of your birth and the smoke Where you turned on the stinging lathes of Detroit and Lansing at night And shrieked at the torch in your secret parts and the amorous tests, But now with your eyes that enter the future of roads you forget; You are all instinct with your phosphorous glow and your streaking hair. And now when we stop it is not as the bird from the shell that I leave Or the leathery pilot who steps from his bird with a sneer of delight, And not as the ignorant beast do you squat and watch me depart, But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.
Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners with an arc of piss, and then—until he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,” incanting a doggerel prayer about God the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and she, if loose in the halls, would join him, squatting in the center of the room and masturbating with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why they were sent to the madhouse: this is what they needed to do once in the madhouse: this is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion there, created from the few, make-do materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago: her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers (for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session), nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom; the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet; endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose, in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise. One dusk, one vividly contusion-color dusk, with my fists in my pockets and a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window (Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in: a full-grown pig was splayed on the table, stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife, and then they both scooped out a tumble of many dozens of wasps, preserved by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I see it? From inside this, over their wrists in the tripes, they carefully removed the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun and matching brass coin of a moon, and then a child’s-third-grade-version of a house made out of pallid wax: a square of walls, a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.
Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with “It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ...” etc., etc. —Charles Dickens  There might be a planet. Before that, though, there would have been a gas that coalesced into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux and energy that hadn’t yet declared themselves in concert. There’s always “before”: there's more each minute, more each person, yes and every one of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name the “beforeon”—is exerting force on us that’s surely time’s own version of gravity: its purpose is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages, it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised they never would: one night while she’s asleep, he snoops her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr. Number One. And why, or even what he hopes to find, he couldn’t clearly say: a letter? photo? sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment when our neural linkage first began to form, as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we’re all amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe’s earliest being, is a “phantom limb” with the faintest mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, althoughher search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars, of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes, one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody else is waking up this morning with the need to be detached from any history, to stand here like a person in a play who enters onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then, of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero, unbesmirched. We could have told him that he’d be this anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (whodoesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but illusory. We can’t unmoor ourselves from linearity, no more than any one of us can be a human being unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own twelve million years of Big Bang “background radiation” so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere. No; there isn’t any “elsewhere.” When we sleep or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur, a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . . a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers, knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather, D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers’ shifts in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens, union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He’s walking through the tobacco aroma; he’s setting his text on his easel; and the story—the only story we know, the story of Before—is recited.
The renewal project is doomed: because its funding board’s vice-president resigned: because the acids of divorce were eating day-long at her stomach, at her thoughts: because her husband was neglecting her, in favor of his daughter, who was dying: because her husband, bi and edgy, bore an AIDS sore that was ripe enough with fear and woe to throw this whole thick network of connections off its balance and down a hole of human misery. Haven’t we seen it happen? —when a crowded room at a party was tilted perilously askew by the weight of two wept tears that weren’t as large as a housefly’s wings, that couldn’t have filled a pistachio shell. _________ It’s like this: because because because, Sawyer was drunk when he delivered his opening remarks onstage at Stardome Planetarium. He stood below a slide show of “The Emptiness of Outer Space” —stars and planets, scattered like the scantest motes of dust in unimaginable void—and was about to make the leap to what percent of us, our dearly thumping bodies, is a corresponding emptiness . . . when one foot met a wire that had strayed outside the curtain, and a wild arc of hand undid the podium, which canted off its casters sidelong into the 3-D galaxy props, and you could say whatever thimble or pustule or hackle of grief was his, it had toppled the whole damn universe. _________ Was she a ghost? Sometimes she thought she was a ghost, transparent, stealing through the lives of people untouched and untouching. And so she carried a bucket of burning coals (we’ll call it that for now) against her breasts; and then she knew she was alive. And he. . . ?—was just the rusty foxing that an antique book exhales into dim air, wasn’t that what he was, oh it was, yes it was, and so one afternoon he strapped a meteorite to his back, and now he walks the streets like anybody else. An ageless tribal saying:If you aren’t given a burden, you must carve your own.  An eye will do, if it’s ill. One word, if it’s cruel. And don’t be fooled by breath: the throat holds up some old-time blues the way a hod holds bricks. _________ But she didn’t die of full-blown AIDS —Sawyer’s daughter. Even so, her twisted legs and limp are enough to sometimes send him a little over the blotto line. Tonight, though, after show time, he’s just soused enough to wander through the mock-up stage-set milky ways agog with child-wonder: all those luminescent islands! all that vacuum! Look: a planet floats, there’s that much cosmos all around it. A planet! While we . . . we couldn’t squint and levitate a half inch, not the guru-most among us. Well, we could: if the laws of the universe changed. It’s only the Earth that makes us so heavy. It’s only our lives that keep our lives from floating off into the nothing.
Sometimes up out of this land  a legend begins to move. Is it a coming near of something under love? Love is of the earth only,  the surface, a map of roads  leading wherever go miles  or little bushes nod. Not so the legend under,  fixed, inexorable, deep as the darkest mine  the thick rocks won't tell. As fire burns the leaf and out of the green appears  the vein in the center line and the legend veins under there, So, the world happens twice— once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
Ours are the streets where Bess first met her  cancer. She went to work every day past the  secure houses. At her job in the library she arranged better and better flowers, and when  students asked for books her hand went out  to help. In the last year of her life she had to keep her friends from knowing  how happy they were. She listened while they complained about food or work or the weather.  And the great national events danced  their grotesque, fake importance. Always Pain moved where she moved. She walked  ahead; it came. She hid; it found her.  No one ever served another so truly;  no enemy ever meant so strong a hate.  It was almost as if there was no room  left for her on earth. But she remembered where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers;  she did not weep when she passed its houses;  and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner  and slipped from pain, her hand opened again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.
Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their  haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow,  their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well  as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town  that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few  stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing  but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait:  Denver, Cheyenne. Hibernating in the library of the school on the hill  a few pieces by Thomas Aquinas or Saint Teresa and the fragmentary explorations of people like Alfred  North Whitehead crouch and wait amid research folders  on energy and military recruitment posters glimpsed  by the hard stars. The school bus by the door, a yellow  mound, clangs open and shut as the wind finds a loose  door and worries it all night, letting the hollow  students count off and break up and blow away  over the frozen ground.
The green catalpa tree has turned All white; the cherry blooms once more.  In one whole year I haven’t learned  A blessed thing they pay you for.  The blossoms snow down in my hair;  The trees and I will soon be bare. The trees have more than I to spare.  The sleek, expensive girls I teach,  Younger and pinker every year,  Bloom gradually out of reach. The pear tree lets its petals drop  Like dandruff on a tabletop. The girls have grown so young by now  I have to nudge myself to stare. This year they smile and mind me how  My teeth are falling with my hair.  In thirty years I may not get Younger, shrewder, or out of debt. The tenth time, just a year ago,  I made myself a little list Of all the things I’d ought to know,  Then told my parents, analyst,  And everyone who’s trusted me  I’d be substantial, presently. I haven’t read one book about A book or memorized one plot.  Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot.  And one by one the solid scholars  Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars. And smile above their starchy collars. I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;  One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.  Lacking a source-book or promotions,  I showed one child the colors of  A luna moth and how to love. I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying;  To ease my woman so she came,  To ease an old man who was dying.  I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die. I have not learned there is a lie Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;  That my equivocating eye Loves only by my body’s hunger; That I have forces, true to feel, Or that the lovely world is real. While scholars speak authority And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,  My eyes in spectacles shall see These trees procure and spend their leaves.  There is a value underneath The gold and silver in my teeth. Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,  We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons.  There is a loveliness exists, Preserves us, not for specialists.
Up the reputable walks of old established trees They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing:  “I don't wanna play at your house; I don't like you any more.” My house stands opposite, on the other hill, Among meadows, with the orchard fences down and falling;  Deer come almost to the door. You cannot see it, even in this clearest morning. White birds hang in the air between Over the garbage landfill and those homes thereto adjacent,  Hovering slowly, turning, settling down Like the flakes sifting imperceptibly onto the little town  In a waterball of glass. And yet, this morning, beyond this quiet scene, The floating birds, the backyards of the poor, Beyond the shopping plaza, the dead canal, the hillside lying tilted in the air, Tomorrow has broken out today: Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama; Aged in wrong, the empires are declining, And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence. What shall I say to the young on such a morning?— Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?— No; my little ones lean not toward revolt. They Are the Whites, the vaguely furiously driven, who resist  Their souls with such passivity As would make Quakers swear. All day, dear Lord, all day  They wear their godhead lightly. They look out from their hill and say, To themselves, “We have nowhere to go but down;  The great destination is to stay.” Surely the nations will be reasonable; They look at the world—don't they?—the world's way?  The clock just now has nothing more to say.
For Cynthia When he would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, “Your father is dead.” “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Your mother is dead,” said the lad. “All pity for me has gone out of the world.” “Your sister, too, is dead.” “The mild sun rests on every ditch,” he said; “a sister loves even though not loved.” “Suibhne, your daughter is dead.” “And an only daughter is the needle of the heart.” “And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you “Daddy”—he is dead.” “Aye,” said Suibhne, “that’s the drop that brings a man to the ground.” He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles. —AFTER THE MIDDLE-IRISH ROMANCE, THE MADNESS OF SUIBHNE 1 Child of my winter, born When the new fallen soldiers froze In Asia’s steep ravines and fouled the snows,  When I was torn By love I could not still, By fear that silenced my cramped mind To that cold war where, lost, I could not find  My peace in my will, All those days we could keep Your mind a landscape of new snow Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,  His fields asleep In their smooth covering, white As quilts to warm the resting bed Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread  For me to write, And thinks: Here lies my land Unmarked by agony, the lean foot Of the weasel tracking, the thick trapper’s boot;  And I have planned My chances to restrain The torments of demented summer or  Increase the deepening harvest here before  It snows again. 2  Late April and you are three; today  We dug your garden in the yard.  To curb the damage of your play, Strange dogs at night and the moles tunneling,   Four slender sticks of lath stand guard   Uplifting their thin string.  So you were the first to tramp it down.  And after the earth was sifted close   You brought your watering can to drown All earth and us. But these mixed seeds are pressed   With light loam in their steadfast rows.  Child, we’ve done our best.  Someone will have to weed and spread  The young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour   When shadow falls across their bed. You should try to look at them every day   Because when they come to full flower  I will be away. 3 The child between them on the street  Comes to a puddle, lifts his feet  And hangs on their hands. They start  At the live weight and lurch together,  Recoil to swing him through the weather,  Stiffen and pull apart. We read of cold war soldiers that Never gained ground, gave none, but sat   Tight in their chill trenches. Pain seeps up from some cavity Through the ranked teeth in sympathy;   The whole jaw grinds and clenches Till something somewhere has to give.  It’s better the poor soldiers live  In someone else’s hands Than drop where helpless powers fall  On crops and barns, on towns where all   Will burn. And no man stands. For good, they sever and divide Their won and lost land. On each side   Prisoners are returned Excepting a few unknown names.  The peasant plods back and reclaims   His fields that strangers burned And nobody seems very pleased. It’s best. Still, what must not be seized   Clenches the empty fist. I tugged your hand, once, when I hated  Things less: a mere game dislocated   The radius of your wrist. Love’s wishbone, child, although I’ve gone  As men must and let you be drawn   Off to appease another, It may help that a Chinese play Or Solomon himself might say  I am your real mother. 4  No one can tell you why   the season will not wait;  the night I told you I must leave, you wept a fearful rate   to stay up late.  Now that it’s turning Fall,   we go to take our walk  among municipal flowers, to steal one off its stalk,   to try and talk.  We huff like windy giants  scattering with our breath   gray-headed dandelions; Spring is the cold wind's aftermath.  The poet saith.  But the asters, too, are gray,  ghost-gray. Last night’s cold   is sending on their way petunias and dwarf marigold,  hunched sick and old.  Like nerves caught in a graph,   the morning-glory vines  frost has erased by half still scrawl across their rigid twines.   Like broken lines  of verses I can’t make.  In its unraveling loom  we find a flower to take, with some late buds that might still bloom,   back to your room.  Night comes and the stiff dew.   I’m told a friend’s child cried   because a cricket, who had minstreled every night outside   her window, died. 5 Winter again and it is snowing;  Although you are still three,  You are already growing Strange to me. You chatter about new playmates, sing  Strange songs; you do not know Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding  Or where I go Or when I sang for bedtime, FoxWent out on a chilly night, Before I went for walks And did not write; You never mind the squalls and storms  That are renewed long since; Outside the thick snow swarms Into my prints And swirls out by warehouses, sealed,  Dark cowbarns, huddled, still, Beyond to the blank field, The fox’s hill Where he backtracks and sees the paw,  Gnawed off, he cannot feel; Conceded to the jaw Of toothed, blue steel. 6  Easter has come around  again; the river is rising  over the thawed ground  and the banksides. When you come you bring   an egg dyed lavender.  We shout along our bank to hear our voices returning from the hills to meet us.   We need the landscape to repeat us.  You lived on this bank first.  While nine months filled your term, we knew  how your lungs, immersed  in the womb, miraculously grew  their useless folds till  the fierce, cold air rushed in to fill them out like bushes thick with leaves. You took your hour,   caught breath, and cried with your full lung power.  Over the stagnant bight  we see the hungry bank swallow  flaunting his free flight  still; we sink in mud to follow  the killdeer from the grass  that hides her nest. That March there was rain; the rivers rose; you could hear killdeers flying   all night over the mudflats crying.  You bring back how the red-  winged blackbird shrieked, slapping frail wings,   diving at my head—  I saw where her tough nest, cradled, swings   in tall reeds that must sway  with the winds blowing every way. If you recall much, you recall this place. You still   live nearby—on the opposite hill.  After the sharp windstorm  of July Fourth, all that summer  through the gentle, warm  afternoons, we heard great chain saws chirr  like iron locusts. Crews  of roughneck boys swarmed to cut loose branches wrenched in the shattering wind, to hack free   all the torn limbs that could sap the tree.  In the debris lay  starlings, dead. Near the park’s birdrun  we surprised one day  a proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon.  In my hands she flapped so  fearfully that I let her go. Her keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net.   You bring things I’d as soon forget.  You raise into my head  a Fall night that I came once more  to sit on your bed;  sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore-  head and you wheezed for breath,  for help, like some child caught beneath its comfortable woolly blankets, drowning there.   Your lungs caught and would not take the air.  Of all things, only we  have power to choose that we should die;   nothing else is free  in this world to refuse it. Yet I,  who say this, could not raise   myself from bed how many days to the thieving world. Child, I have another wife,   another child. We try to choose our life. 7 Here in the scuffled dust  is our ground of play. I lift you on your swing and must   shove you away, see you return again,  drive you off again, then stand quiet till you come.  You, though you climb  higher, farther from me, longer,  will fall back to me stronger.  Bad penny, pendulum,  you keep my constant time to bob in blue July  where fat goldfinches fly over the glittering, fecund   reach of our growing lands. Once more now, this second,  I hold you in my hands. 8 I thumped on you the best I could   which was no use; you would not tolerate your food  until the sweet, fresh milk was soured   with lemon juice. That puffed you up like a fine yeast.  The first June in your yard like some squat Nero at a feast you sat and chewed on white, sweet clover.   That is over. When you were old enough to walk   we went to feed the rabbits in the park milkweed;  saw the paired monkeys, under lock,   consume each other's salt. Going home we watched the slow  stars follow us down Heaven’s vault. You said, let’s catch one that comes low,  pull off its skin  and cook it for our dinner.  As absentee bread-winner, I seldom got you such cuisine; we ate in local restaurants or bought what lunches we could pack   in a brown sack with stale, dry bread to toss for ducks   on the green-scummed lagoons,  crackers for porcupine and fox, life-savers for the footpad coons   to scour and rinse, snatch after in their muddy pail   and stare into their paws. When I moved next door to the jail   I learned to fry omelettes and griddlecakes so I could set you supper at my table.  As I built back from helplessness,   when I grew able, the only possible answer was   you had to come here less. This Hallowe’en you come one week.   You masquerade  as a vermilion, sleek, fat, crosseyed fox in the parade  or, where grim jackolanterns leer, go with your bag from door to door  foraging for treats. How queer:  when you take off your mask my neighbors must forget and ask  whose child you are. Of course you lose your appetite,   whine and won’t touch your plate;   as local law I set your place on an orange crate  in your own room for days. At night you lie asleep there on the bed   and grate your jaw. Assuredly your father’s crimes   are visited on you. You visit me sometimes. The time’s up. Now our pumpkin sees   me bringing your suitcase.  He holds his grin; the forehead shrivels, sinking in. You break this year’s first crust of snow off the runningboard to eat.  We manage, though for days I crave sweets when you leave and know  they rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet  foods leave us cavities. 9  I get numb and go in though the dry ground will not hold  the few dry swirls of snow  and it must not be very cold.  A friend asks how you’ve been  and I don’t know  or see much right to ask. Or what use it could be to know.  In three months since you came  the leaves have fallen and the snow;  your pictures pinned above my desk  seem much the same.  Somehow I come to find myself upstairs in the third floor   museum’s halls, walking to kill my time once more  among the enduring and resigned   stuffed animals,  where, through a century’s caprice, displacement and  known treachery between its wars, they hear some old command  and in their peaceable kingdoms freeze   to this still scene,  Nature Morte. Here by the door, its guardian,  the patchwork dodo stands where you and your stepsister ran  laughing and pointing. Here, last year,   you pulled my hands  and had your first, worst quarrel,  so toys were put up on your shelves.   Here in the first glass cage the little bobcats arch themselves,  still practicing their snarl  of constant rage.  The bison, here, immense,  shoves at his calf, brow to brow,   and looks it in the eye to see what is it thinking now.  I forced you to obedience;  I don’t know why.  Still the lean lioness beyond them, on her jutting ledge   of shale and desert shrub, stands watching always at the edge,  stands hard and tanned and envious   above her cub;  with horns locked in tall heather,  two great Olympian Elk stand bound,   fixed in their lasting hate till hunger brings them both to ground.  Whom equal weakness binds together   none shall separate.  Yet separate in the ocean of broken ice, the white bear reels  beyond the leathery groups  of scattered, drab Arctic seals  arrested here in violent motion  like Napoleon’s troops.  Our states have stood so long at war, shaken with hate and dread,   they are paralyzed at bay; once we were out of reach, we said,  we would grow reasonable and strong.   Some other day.  Like the cold men of Rome, we have won costly fields to sow  in salt, our only seed.  Nothing but injury will grow. I write you only the bitter poems  that you can’t read.  Onan who would not breed a child to take his brother’s bread   and be his brother’s birth, rose up and left his lawful bed,  went out and spilled his seed   in the cold earth.  I stand by the unborn, by putty-colored children curled  in jars of alcohol, that waken to no other world,  unchanging, where no eye shall mourn.   I see the caul  that wrapped a kitten, dead. I see the branching, doubled throat   of a two-headed foal; I see the hydrocephalic goat; here is the curled and swollen head,   there, the burst skull;  skin of a limbless calf; a horse’s foetus, mummified;  mounted and joined forever,  the Siamese twin dogs that ride  belly to belly, half and half,  that none shall sever.  I walk among the growths, by gangrenous tissue, goiter, cysts,   by fistulas and cancers, where the malignancy man loathes  is held suspended and persists.  And I don’t know the answers.  The window’s turning white. The world moves like a diseased heart   packed with ice and snow. Three months now we have been apart  less than a mile. I cannot fight  or let you go. 10 The vicious winter finally yields   the green winter wheat; the farmer, tired in the tired fields   he dare not leave, will eat. Once more the runs come fresh; prevailing   piglets, stout as jugs, harry their old sow to the railing  to ease her swollen dugs and game colts trail the herded mares  that circle the pasture courses;  our seasons bring us back once more  like merry-go-round horses. With crocus mouths, perennial hungers,   into the park Spring comes; we roast hot dogs on old coat hangers  and feed the swan bread crumbs, pay our respects to the peacocks, rabbits,   and leathery Canada goose who took, last Fall, our tame white habits   and now will not turn loose. In full regalia, the pheasant cocks  march past their dubious hens; the porcupine and the lean, red fox  trot around bachelor pens and the miniature painted train   wails on its oval track: you said, I’m going to Pennsylvania!   and waved. And you’ve come back. If I loved you, they said I’d leave   and find my own affairs. Well, once again this April, we’ve   come around to the bears; punished and cared for, behind bars,  the coons on bread and water stretch thin black fingers after ours.  And you are still my daughter.
(On this date, Goebbels moved into the lowest level of the bunker, taking a room opposite Hitler’s.) Stand back, make way, you mindless scum,  Squire Voland the Seducer’s come— Old Bock from Babelsberg whose tower  Falls silent now, whose shrunken power  For lies or lays comes hobbling home  Into this concrete catacomb. Here’s Runty Joe, the cunt collector  Who grew to greatness, first erector  Of myths and missions, fibs and fables, Who pulled the wool then turned the tables:  He piped the tunes and called the dance  Where shirtless countries lost their pants. Goatfooted Pan, the nation’s gander To whom Pan-Germans all played pander,  The jovial cob-swan quick to cover  Lida Baarova, his check-list lover;  Swellfoot the Tyrant, he could riddle  Men’s minds away, hi-diddle-diddle. Our little Doctor, Joe the Gimp  Comes back to limpness and his limp:  Hephaistos, Vulcan the lame smith  Whose net of lies caught one true myth:  His wife, the famous beauty, whored  By numbskull Mars, the dull warlord. What if I took my little fling  At conquest, at adventuring. Pried the lid of Pandora’s box off— There’s nothing there to bring your rocks off.  I never saw one fucking day  So fine I courted it to stay. If I got snarled in my own mesh Of thighs and bellies, who wants flesh?  I never hankered after matter. Let Hermann swell up, grosser, fatter,  Weighed down by medals, houses, clothing;  They leave me lean, secured in loathing. As a young man, I pricked the bubble  Of every creed; I saw that rubble And offered myself the realms of earth  Just to say Yes. But what’s it worth?  No thank you, Ma’am. Behold the Ram  Of God: I doubt, therefore I am. Here I forsake that long pricktease  Of histories, hopes, lusts, luxuries.  I come back to my first Ideal— The vacancy that’s always real.  I sniffed out all life’s openings:  I loved only the holes in things. So strip down one bare cell for this  Lay Brother of the last abyss. To me, still, all abstractions smell;  My head and nose clear in this cell  Of concrete, this confession booth  Where liars face up to blank truth. My tongue lashed millions to the knife;  Here, I’ll hold hands with my soiled wife.  My lies piped men out, hot to slaughter;  Here, I’ll read stories to my daughter  Then hack off all relations, choose  Only the Nothing you can’t lose, Send back this body, fixed in its  Infantile paralysis. I was born small; I shall grow less  Till I burst into Nothingness, That slot in time where only pure  Spirit extends, absent and sure. I am that spirit that denies, High Priest of Laymen, Prince of Lies.  Your house is founded on my rock;  Truth crows; now I deny my cock.  Jock of this walk, I turn down all,  Robbing my Peter to play Paul. I give up all goods I possess To build my faith on faithlessness. Black Peter, I belie my Lord— You’ve got to die to spread the Word.  Now the last act; there’s no sequel. Soon, once more, all things shall be equal.
The summer of nineteen eighteen  I read The Jungle and TheResearch Magnificent. That fall  My father died and my aunt  Took me to Chicago to live.  The first thing I did was to take  A streetcar to the stockyards.  In the winter afternoon,  Gritty and fetid, I walked Through the filthy snow, through the  Squalid streets, looking shyly  Into the people’s faces, Those who were home in the daytime.  Debauched and exhausted faces,  Starved and looted brains, faces  Like the faces in the senile  And insane wards of charity  Hospitals. Predatory Faces of little children. Then as the soiled twilight darkened,  Under the green gas lamps, and the  Sputtering purple arc lamps,  The faces of the men coming Home from work, some still alive with  The last pulse of hope or courage,  Some sly and bitter, some smart and  Silly, most of them already  Broken and empty, no life,  Only blinding tiredness, worse  Than any tired animal.  The sour smells of a thousand  Suppers of fried potatoes and  Fried cabbage bled into the street.  I was giddy and sick, and out  Of my misery I felt rising  A terrible anger and out Of the anger, an absolute vow.  Today the evil is clean And prosperous, but it is  Everywhere, you don’t have to  Take a streetcar to find it, And it is the same evil. And the misery, and the Anger, and the vow are the same.
For a month now, wandering over the Sierras,  A poem had been gathering in my mind,  Details of significance and rhythm, The way poems do, but still lacking a focus.  Last night I remembered the date and it all  Began to grow together and take on purpose.  We sat up late while Deneb moved over the zenith  And I told Marie all about Boston, how it looked  That last terrible week, how hundreds stood weeping  Impotent in the streets that last midnight. I told her how those hours changed the lives of thousands, How America was forever a different place  Afterwards for many.  In the morning We swam in the cold transparent lake, the blue  Damsel flies on all the reeds like millions  Of narrow metallic flowers, and I thought  Of you behind the grille in Dedham, Vanzetti, Saying, “Who would ever have thought we would make this history?” Crossing the brilliant mile-square meadow  Illuminated with asters and cyclamen,  The pollen of the lodgepole pines drifting  With the shifting wind over it and the blue  And sulphur butterflies drifting with the wind,  I saw you in the sour prison light, saying,  “Goodbye comrade.”  In the basin under the crest Where the pines end and the Sierra primrose begins,  A party of lawyers was shooting at a whiskey bottle.  The bottle stayed on its rock, nobody could hit it. Looking back over the peaks and canyons from the last lake,  The pattern of human beings seemed simpler  Than the diagonals of water and stone.  Climbing the chute, up the melting snow and broken rock, I remembered what you said about Sacco, How it slipped your mind and you demanded it be read into the record. Traversing below the ragged arête, One cheek pressed against the rock The wind slapping the other, I saw you both marching in an army You with the red and black flag, Sacco with the rattlesnake banner. I kicked steps up the last snow bank and came  To the indescribably blue and fragrant Polemonium and the dead sky and the sterile Crystalline granite and final monolith of the summit.  These are the things that will last a long time, Vanzetti, I am glad that once on your day I have stood among them.  Some day mountains will be named after you and Sacco.  They will be here and your name with them, “When these days are but a dim remembering of the time  When man was wolf to man.” I think men will be remembering you a long time  Standing on the mountains Many men, a long time, comrade.
Trees in the old days used to stand And shape a shady lane Where lovers wandered hand in hand Who came from Carentan. This was the shining green canal Where we came two by two Walking at combat-interval. Such trees we never knew. The day was early June, the ground Was soft and bright with dew. Far away the guns did sound, But here the sky was blue. The sky was blue, but there a smoke Hung still above the sea Where the ships together spoke To towns we could not see. Could you have seen us through a glass You would have said a walk Of farmers out to turn the grass, Each with his own hay-fork. The watchers in their leopard suits Waited till it was time, And aimed between the belt and boot And let the barrel climb. I must lie down at once, there is A hammer at my knee. And call it death or cowardice, Don’t count again on me. Everything’s all right, Mother, Everyone gets the same At one time or another. It’s all in the game. I never strolled, nor ever shall, Down such a leafy lane. I never drank in a canal, Nor ever shall again. There is a whistling in the leaves And it is not the wind, The twigs are falling from the knives That cut men to the ground. Tell me, Master-Sergeant, The way to turn and shoot. But the Sergeant’s silent That taught me how to do it. O Captain, show us quickly Our place upon the map. But the Captain’s sickly And taking a long nap. Lieutenant, what’s my duty, My place in the platoon? He too’s a sleeping beauty, Charmed by that strange tune. Carentan O Carentan Before we met with you We never yet had lost a man Or known what death could do.
The dark streets are deserted, With only a drugstore glowing Softly, like a sleeping body; With one white, naked bulb In the back, that shines On suicides and abortions. Who lives in these dark houses? I am suddenly aware I might live here myself. The garage man returns And puts the change in my hand, Counting the singles carefully.
Vandergast to his neighbors— the grinding of a garage door and hiss of gravel in the driveway. He worked for the insurance company whose talisman is a phoenix rising in flames ... non omnis moriar. From his desk he had a view of the street— translucent raincoats, and umbrellas, fluorescent plate-glass windows. A girl knelt down, arranging underwear on a female dummy— sea waves and, on the gale, Venus, these busy days, poised in her garter belt and stockings.  * The next day he saw her eating in the restaurant where he usually ate. Soon they were having lunch together elsewhere.  She came from Dallas. This was only a start, she was ambitious, twenty-five and still unmarried. Green eyes with silver spiricles ... red hair ...  When he held the car door open her legs were smooth and slender. “I was wondering,” she said, “when you'd get round to it,” and laughed.  * Vandergast says he never intended having an affair.  And was that what this was? The names that people give to things ... What do definitions and divorce-court proceedings have to do with the breathless reality? O little lamp at the bedside with views of Venice and the Bay of Naples, you understood! Lactona toothbrush and suitcase bought in a hurry, you were the witnesses of the love we made in bed together.Schrafft's Chocolate Cherries, surely you remember when she said she'd be true forever, and, watching “Dark Storm,” we decided there is something to be said, after all, for soap opera, “if it makes people happy.”  * The Vandergasts are having some trouble finding a buyer for their house. When I go for a walk with Tippy I pass the unweeded tennis court, the empty garage, windows heavily shuttered. Mrs. Vandergast took the children and went back to her family. And Vandergast moved to New Jersey, where he works for an insurance company whose emblem is the Rock of Gibraltar— the rest of his life laid out with the child-support and alimony payments. As for the girl, she vanished. Was it worth it? Ask Vandergast. You'd have to be Vandergast, looking through his eyes at the house across the street, in Orange, New Jersey. Maybe on wet days umbrellas and raincoats set his heart thudding.  Maybe he talks to his pillow, and it whispers, moving red hair. In any case, he will soon be forty.
In 1915 my grandfather’s neighbors surrounded his house near the dayline he ran on the Hudson in Catskill, NY and thought they’d burn his family out in a movie they’d just seen and be rid of his kind: the death of a lone black family is the Birthof a Nation, or so they thought. His 5’4” waiter gait quenched the white jacket smile he’d brought back from watered polish of my father on the turning seats, and he asked his neighbors up on his thatched porch for the first blossom of fire that would bring him down. They went away, his nation, spittooning their torched necks in the shadows of the riverboat they’d seen, posse decomposing; and I see him on Sutter with white bag from your restaurant, challenged by his first grandson to a foot-race he will win in white clothes. I see him as he buys galoshes for his railed yard near Mineo’s metal shop, where roses jump as the el circles his house toward Brooklyn, where his rain fell; and I see cigar smoke in his eyes, chocolate Madison Square Garden chews he breaks on his set teeth, stitched up after cancer, the great white nation immovable as his weight wilts and he is on a porch that won’t hold my arms, or the legs of the race run forwards, or the film played backwards on his grandson’s eyes.
Those four black girls blown up in that Alabama church remind me of five hundred middle passage blacks, in a net, under water in Charleston harborso redcoats wouldn't find them. Can't find what you can't see can you?
We reconstruct lives in the intensive care unit, pieced together in a buffet dinner: two widows with cancerous breasts in their balled hands; a 30-year-old man in a three-month coma from a Buick and a brick wall; a woman who bleeds off and on from her gullet; a prominent socialite, our own nurse, shrieking for twins, “her bump gone”; the gallery of veterans, succored, awake, without valves, some lungs gone. Splicing the meats with fluids seasoned on the dressing room table, she sings “the bump gone” refrain in this 69-degree oven, unstuffing her twin yolks carved from the breast, the dark meat wrapped in tinfoil and clean newspaper; the half black registered nurse hums her six years in an orphanage, her adopted white family, breaded and primed in a posse, rising in clan for their dinner. We reload our brains as the cameras, the film overexposed in the x-ray light, locked with our double door light meters: race and sex spooled and rungs in a hobby; we take our bundle and go home.
Whatever city or country road  you two are on there are nettles, and the dark invisible elements cling to your skin though you do not cry and you do not scratch your arms at forty-five degree angles  as the landing point of a swan in the Ohio, the Detroit River; at the Paradise Theatre you named the cellist with the fanatical fingers of the plumber, the exorcist, and though the gimmicky at wrist  and kneecaps could lift the seance  table, your voice was real in the gait and laughter of Uncle  Henry, who could dance on either  leg, wooden or real, to the sound  of the troop train, megaphone,  catching the fine pitch of a singer  on the athletic fields of Virginia. At the Radisson Hotel, we once took a fine angel of the law to the convention center,  and put her down as an egret in the subzero platform of a friend— this is Minneapolis, the movies are all of strangers, holding themselves  in the delicacy of treading water,  while they wait for the trumpet  of the 20th Century Limited over the bluff or cranny. You two men like to confront. the craters of history and spillage,  our natural infections of you  innoculating blankets and fur,  ethos of cadaver and sunflower. I hold the dogwood blossom, eat the pear, and watch the nettle  swim up in the pools of the completed song of Leadbelly and Little Crow  crooning the buffalo and horse  to the changes and the bridge  of a twelve-string guitar, the melody of “Irene”; this is really goodbye— I can see the precious stones of embolism and consumption on the platinum wires of the mouth: in the flowing rivers, in the public baths  of Ohio and Michigan.
My embarrassment at his nakedness,  at the pool’s edge, and my wife, with his, standing, watching— this was a freedom  not given me who am  more naked, less contained by my own white flesh and the ability  to take quietly  what comes to me. The sense of myself  separate, grew a white mirror in the quiet water he breaks with his hands  and feet, kicking, pulls up to land on the edge by the feet of these women  who must know  that for each man is a speech describes him, makes the day grow white and sure, a quietness of water  in the mind, lets hang, descriptive  as a risk, something for which he cannot find  a means or time.
As I sd to my  friend, because I am  always talking,—John, I sd, which was not his  name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for  christ’s sake, look  out where yr going.
The man sits in a timelessness  with the horse under him in time  to a movement of legs and hooves  upon a timeless sand. Distance comes in from the foreground  present in the picture as time he reads outward from and comes from that beginning. A wind blows in and out and all about the man  as the horse ran and runs to come in time. A house is burning in the sand.  A man and horse are burning.  The wind is burning. They are running to arrive.
The first retainer  he gave to her  was a golden wedding ring. The second—late at night  he woke up, leaned over on an elbow,  and kissed her. The third and the last— he died with and gave up loving and lived with her.
The galloping collection of boards  are the house which I afforded  one evening to walk into just as the night came down. Dark inside, the candle lit of its own free will, the attic  groaned then, the stairs led me up into the air. From outside, it must have seemed  a wonder that it was the inside he as me saw in the dark there.
He wants to be a brutal old man, an aggressive old man, as dull, as brutal as the emptiness around him, He doesn’t want compromise,  nor to be ever nice to anyone. Just mean, and final in his brutal, his total, rejection of it all. He tried the sweet,  the gentle, the “oh, let’s hold hands together” and it was awful, dull, brutally inconsequential. Now he’ll stand on his own dwindling legs.  His arms, his skin,  shrink daily. And he loves, but hates equally.
I dreamt last night the fright was over, that the dust came, and then water,  and women and men, together  again, and all was quiet in the dim moon’s light. A paean of such patience— laughing, laughing at me,  and the days extend over the earth’s great cover, grass, trees, and flower- ing season, for no clear reason.
for Anselm Hollo Go out into brightened  space out there the fainter  yellowish place it makes for eye to enter out  to greyed penumbra all the  way to thoughtful searching  sight of all beyond that solid red both brick and seeming  metal roof or higher black  beyond the genial slope I  look at daily house top on  my own way up to heaven.  * Same roof, light’s gone  down back of it, behind  the crying end of day, “I  need something to do,” it’s  been again those other  things, what’s out there,  sodden edge of sea’s  bay, city’s graveyard, park  deserted, flattened aspect,  leaves gone colored fall  to sidewalk, street, the end  of all these days but  still this regal light.  * Trees stripped, rather shed of leaves, the black solid trunks up to fibrous mesh of smaller  branches, it is weather’s window,  weather’s particular echo, here  as if this place had been once,  now vacant, a door that had had  hinges swung in air’s peculiar  emptiness, greyed, slumped elsewhere,  asphalt blank of sidewalks, line of  linearly absolute black metal fence.  * Old sky freshened with cloud bulk  slides over frame of window the  shadings of softened greys a light  of air up out of this dense high  structured enclosure of buildings  top or pushed up flat of bricked roof  frame I love I love the safety of  small world this door frame back  of me the panes of simple glass yet  airy up sweep of birch trees sit in  flat below all designation declaration  here as clouds move so simply away.  * Windows now lit close out the  upper dark the night’s a face  three eyes far fainter than  the day all faced with light  inside the room makes eye re- flective see the common world  as one again no outside coming  in no more than walls and post- card pictures place faces across  that cautious dark the tree no  longer seen more than black edge  close branches somehow still between.  * He was at the edge of this reflective echo the words blown  back in air a bubble of suddenly  apparent person who walked to sit down by the familiar brook and  thought about his fading life all “fading life” in tremulous airy  perspect saw it hover in the surface  of that moving darkness at the edge  of sun’s passing water’s sudden depth  his own hands’ knotted surface the  sounding in himself of some other.  * One forty five afternoon red  car parked left hand side  of street no distinguishing  feature still wet day a bicycle  across the way a green door- way with arched upper window  a backyard edge of back wall to enclosed alley low down small  windows and two other cars green  and blue parked too and miles  and more miles still to go.  * This early still sunless morning when a chair’s  creak translates to cat’s cry a blackness still out the window might be apparent night when the house still sleeping behind me seems a bag of  immense empty silence and I feel the children  still breathing still shifting their dreams an  enigma will soon arrive here and the loved one  centers all in her heavy sleeping arm out the  leg pushed down bedclothes this body unseen un- known placed out there in night I can feel all  about me still sitting in this small spare pool of  light watching the letters the words try to speak.  * Classic emptiness it sits out there edge of  hierarchic roof top it marks with acid fine edge  of apparent difference it  is there here here that sky so up and out and where  it wants to be no birds no  other thing can for a  moment distract it be  beyond its simple space.
loop Down the road Up the hill Into the house Over the wall Under the bed After the fact By the way Out of the woods Behind the times In front of the door Between the lines Along the pathecho In the way it was in the street  it was in the back it was in the house it was in the room it was in the dark it wasfat fate Be at That this Come as If when  Stay or Soon then  Ever happen It willlook Particular pleasures weather measures or  Dimestore delights faced with such sights.here Outstretched innocence  Implacable distance Lend me a hand See if it reachestime Of right Of wrong Of up Of down  Of who Of how Of when Of one  Of then Of if Of in Of out Of feel Of friend Of it Of nowmoral Now the inevitable  As in tales of woe  The inexorable toll  It takes, it takes.eat Head on backwards  Face front neck’s Pivot bunched flesh  Drops jowled brunch.toffee Little bit patted pulled  Stretched set let cool.case Whenas To for If where From in Past place Stated want  Gain granted Planned orhave a heart Have heart Find head  Feel pattern Be wed  Smell water See sand  Oh boy Ain’t life grandoh oh Now and then  Here and there  Everywhere On and onwinter Season’s upon us  Weather alarms us  Snow riot peace  Leaves struck fist.duty Let little Linda allow litigation Foster faith’s fantasy famously And answer all apt allegations Handmake Harold’s homework handsomelygotcha Passion’s particulars  Steamy hands Unwashed warmth  One night standswest acton summer Cat’s rats, Mother’s brother  Vacation’s patience, loud clouds  Fields far, seize trees School’s rules, friends tend  Lawn’s form, barn’s beams  Hay’s daze, swallows follow  Sun’s sunk, moon mends  Echo’s ending, begin againfar“Far be it from Harry to alter the sense of drama inherent in the almighty tuxedo ...” “Far be it from Harry”  Sit next to Mary, See how the Other  Follows your Motherpat’s Pat’s place Pattern’s face  Aberrant fact  Changes thatfour’s Four’s forms Back and forth Feel way Hindside Paper route Final chutesentences Indefatigably alert when hit still hurt.  Whenever he significantly alters he falters.  Wondrous weather murmured mother.  Unforgettable twist in all such synthesis.  Impeccably particular you always were.  Laboriously enfeebled he still loved people.words Driving to the expected  Place in mind in Place of mind in Driving to the expectedhere You have to reach  Out more it’s Farther away from  You it’s heredata Exoneration’s face Echoed distaste Privileged repetition  Makeshift’s decision—  • Now and then Behind time’s Emptied scene and  Memory’s mistakes—  • You are here  And there too  Being but one  Of you—scatter All that’s left of coherence.echo again Statement keep talking Train round bend over river into distancedoor Everything’s before you  were here.summer ’38 Nubble’s Light a sort  of bump I thought— a round insistent small place not like this— it was a bluff,  tip on the edge  of the sea.air Lift up so you’re  Floating out Of your skin at The edge but Mostly up seeming  Free of the ground.echoes Think of the Dance you could do  One legged man Two legged woman.there Hard to be unaddressed— Empty to reflection— Take the road east— Be where it is.echoes Sunrise always first— That light—is it Round the earth—what  Simple mindedness.star Where  It is There You are  • Out there  In here  Now it is  Was also  • Up where  It will be  And down  Again  • No one  Point  To it  Ever
Creo que si ... I believe it will rain tomorrow ...
for M.H. Friend, remember how you showed us beasts love beauty? We were wading in your lake with bluegills and you said, Be careful, you will lose your beauty marks To their little jaws. We were a delicacy. From us they purchased The darkest part of the skin, only what contrasts on us. And it was more than a pinch or sting, It’s a sensation of hunger That makes us spring off the bottom and swim out deep And safe. “No blue stripes on cheeks; no red on fins; Old individual’s belly coppery red or brassy.” As others see you, I think these indicate, Who would have you all one shade then wouldn’t have you. At your full table later, over muskellunge and lemon, We read in the book the fish that liked us Has certain maxillaries “wholly wanting.” Your gourmet bluegill: It lives in the eye of the beholder, it swims the vitreous Humor, would eat even your blind spot! But we think we can paddle out there until all Goes dark, and we are wholly desirable, and too much.
The child I left your class to have  Later had a habit of sleeping  With her arms around a globe She’d unscrewed, dropped, and dented. I always felt she could possess it,  The pink countries and the mauve And the ocean which got to keep its blue. Coming from the Southern Hemisphere to teach,  Which you had never had to do, you took A bare-walled room, alone, its northern  Windowscapes as gray as walls. To decorate, you’d only brought a black madonna. I thought you must have skipped summer that year,  Southern winter, southern spring, then north For winter over again. Still, it pleased you To take credit for introducing us, And later to bring our daughter a small flipbook Of partners dancing, and a ring  With a secret whistle. —All are Broken now like her globe, but she remembers  Them as I recall the black madonna  Facing you across the room so that  In a way you had the dark fertile life  You were always giving gifts to.  Your smaller admirer off to school,  I take the globe and roll it away: where  On it now is someone like you?
The names of things—sparks! I ran on them like a component:  Henries, microhenries, Blue  Beavers, wee wee ductors:  Biographer of small lives, Of a plug and his girl named Jack,  Of Utopian colonies which worked— Steel, germanium, brass, aluminum, Replaceables.  Outside, afloat, my words Swung an arm charting the woman Who was the river bottom. We tried, beyond work, at work,  To keep what we loved. Near Christmas I remember the office Women trimming their desperately  Glittering holy day trees. And, Just as I left, the company Talent show, the oils and sentiment  Thick on still lifes and seacoasts, The brush strokes tortured as a child’s  First script. Someone Had studied driftwood; another man,  The spray of a wave, the mania Of waters above torpedoes.
Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons   walking their dogs  in Central Park West  (or their cats on leashes—  the cats themselves old highwire artists)  The ballerinas  leap and pirouette  through Columbus Circle   while winos on park benches  (laid back like drunken Goudonovs)   hear the taxis trumpet together  like horsemen of the apocalypse   in the dusk of the gods  It is the final witching hour  when swains are full of swan songs   And all return through the dark dusk   to their bright cells  in glass highrises  or sit down to oval cigarettes and cakes   in the Russian Tea Room   or climb four flights to back rooms  in Westside brownstones   where faded playbill photos  fall peeling from their frames   like last year’s autumn leaves
People getting divorced  riding around with their clothes in the car   and wondering what happened  to everyone and everything   including their other  pair of shoes  And if you spy one  then who knows what happened  to the other  with tongue alack   and years later not even knowing  if the other ever  found a mate  without splitting the seams   or remained intact  unlaced   and the sole  ah the soul  a curious conception   hanging on somehow  to walk again  in the free air   once the heel  has been replaced
Sometime during eternity  some guys show up  and one of them  who shows up real late  is a kind of carpenter   from some square-type place  like Galilee  and he starts wailing  and claiming he is hip  to who made heaven  and earth  and that the cat  who really laid it on us  is his Dad  And moreover  he adds  It’s all writ down  on some scroll-type parchments   which some henchmen  leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres   a long time ago  and which you won’t even find   for a coupla thousand years or so  or at least for  nineteen hundred and fortyseven  of them  to be exact  and even then  nobody really believes them  or me  for that matter  You’re hot  they tell him  And they cool him  They stretch him on the Tree to cool  And everybody after that  is always making models   of this Tree  with Him hung up   and always crooning His name  and calling Him to come down   and sit in  on their combo  as if he is the king cat  who’s got to blow   or they can’t quite make it  Only he don’t come down  from His Tree  Him just hang there  on His Tree  looking real Petered out  and real cool  and also  according to a roundup  of late world news   from the usual unreliable sources  real dead
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see  the people of the world   exactly at the moment when  they first attained the title of  ‘suffering humanity’   They writhe upon the page  in a veritable rage  of adversity   Heaped up  groaning with babies and bayonets  under cement skies   in an abstract landscape of blasted trees  bent statues bats wings and beaks  slippery gibbets  cadavers and carnivorous cocks  and all the final hollering monsters  of the  ‘imagination of disaster’  they are so bloody real  it is as if they really still existed  And they do  Only the landscape is changed They still are ranged along the roads   plagued by legionnaires  false windmills and demented roosters They are the same people  only further from home  on freeways fifty lanes wide  on a concrete continent  spaced with bland billboards   illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness    The scene shows fewer tumbrils  but more strung-out citizens  in painted cars  and they have strange license plates   and engines  that devour America
Don’t let that horse  eat that violin  cried Chagall’s mother  But he   kept right on  painting And became famous And kept on painting  The Horse With Violin In Mouth And when he finally finished it he jumped up upon the horse  and rode away   waving the violin And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across And there were no strings   attached
In Golden Gate Park that day  a man and his wife were coming along   thru the enormous meadow  which was the meadow of the world  He was wearing green suspenders  and carrying an old beat-up flute  in one hand   while his wife had a bunch of grapes  which she kept handing out  individually   to various squirrels  as if each   were a little joke  And then the two of them came on  thru the enormous meadow  which was the meadow of the world  and then  at a very still spot where the trees dreamed  and seemed to have been waiting thru all time  for them   they sat down together on the grass  without looking at each other   and ate oranges  without looking at each other  and put the peels   in a basket which they seemed  to have brought for that purpose   without looking at each other  And then  he took his shirt and undershirt off   but kept his hat on  sideways  and without saying anything   fell asleep under it  And his wife just sat there looking  at the birds which flew about  calling to each other  in the stilly air  as if they were questioning existence  or trying to recall something forgotten But then finally  she too lay down flat  and just lay there looking up   at nothing   yet fingering the old flute  which nobody played  and finally looking over  at him  without any particular expression  except a certain awful look   of terrible depression
Away above a harborful  of caulkless houses  among the charley noble chimneypots  of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines   a woman pastes up sails  upon the wind hanging out her morning sheets  with wooden pins  O lovely mammal  her nearly naked breasts   throw taut shadows  when she stretches up  to hang at last the last of her  so white washed sins   but it is wetly amorous  and winds itself about her   clinging to her skin  So caught with arms   upraised   she tosses back her head  in voiceless laughter   and in choiceless gesture then  shakes out gold hair while in the reachless seascape spaces  between the blown white shrouds   stand out the bright steamers  to kingdom come
London  crossfigured   creeping with trams  and the artists on sundays  in the summer   all ‘tracking Nature’  in the suburbs  It  could have been anyplace   but it wasn’t  It was  London  and when someone shouted over that they had got a model  I ran out across the court  but then  when the model started taking off  her clothes  there was nothing underneath  I mean to say   she took off her shoes  and found no feet   took off her top  and found no tit  under it  and I must say she did look  a bit  ASTOUNDED  just standing there  looking down  at where her legs were  not  But so very carefully then  she put her clothes back on  and as soon as she was dressed again  completely  she was completely  all right  Do it again! cried someone  rushing for his easel  But she was afraid to    and gave up modelling   and forever after    slept in her clothes
I am leading a quiet life  in Mike’s Place every day  watching the champs of the Dante Billiard Parlor  and the French pinball addicts.  I am leading a quiet life  on lower East Broadway.  I am an American. I was an American boy. I read the American Boy Magazine  and became a boy scout  in the suburbs. I thought I was Tom Sawyer  catching crayfish in the Bronx River and imagining the Mississippi.  I had a baseball mit and an American Flyer bike. I delivered the Woman’s Home Companion  at five in the afternoon or the Herald Trib at five in the morning. I still can hear the paper thump  on lost porches. I had an unhappy childhood.  I saw Lindbergh land. I looked homeward and saw no angel. I got caught stealing pencils from the Five and Ten Cent Store  the same month I made Eagle Scout. I chopped trees for the CCC  and sat on them. I landed in Normandy in a rowboat that turned over. I have seen the educated armies on the beach at Dover. I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds  shopkeepers rolling up their blinds  at midday potato salad and dandelions at anarchist picnics. I am reading ‘Lorna Doone’ and a life of John Most terror of the industrialist a bomb on his desk at all times. I have seen the garbagemen parade  in the Columbus Day Parade behind the glib farting trumpeters. I have not been out to the Cloisters  in a long time nor to the Tuileries but I still keep thinking of going. I have seen the garbagemen parade  when it was snowing. I have eaten hotdogs in ballparks. I have heard the Gettysburg Address  and the Ginsberg Address. I like it here and I won’t go back where I came from. I too have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars.  I have travelled among unknown men.  I have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark. I was in India when Rome was built. I have been in the Manger with an Ass. I have seen the Eternal Distributor  from a White Hill in South San Francisco and the Laughing Woman at Loona Park  outside the Fun House in a great rainstorm still laughing. I have heard the sound of revelry  by night. I have wandered lonely as a crowd. I am leading a quiet life outside of Mike’s Place every day  watching the world walk by in its curious shoes. I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn. That Bridge was too much for me.  I have engaged in silence exile and cunning. I flew too near the sun and my wax wings fell off. I am looking for my Old Man  whom I never knew. I am looking for the Lost Leader  with whom I flew. Young men should be explorers.  Home is where one starts from.  But Mother never told me there’d be scenes like this. Womb-weary I rest I have travelled. I have seen goof city. I have seen the mass mess. I have heard Kid Ory cry. I have heard a trombone preach.  I have heard Debussy strained thru a sheet. I have slept in a hundred islands where books were trees.  I have heard the birds  that sound like bells. I have worn grey flannel trousers and walked upon the beach of hell. I have dwelt in a hundred cities where trees were books. What subways what taxis what cafes! What women with blind breasts limbs lost among skyscrapers! I have seen the statues of heroes at carrefours. Danton weeping at a metro entrance Columbus in Barcelona pointing Westward up the Ramblas toward the American Express  Lincoln in his stony chair  And a great Stone Face  in North Dakota. I know that Columbus  did not invent America. I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds.  They should all be freed.  It is long since I was a herdsman. I am leading a quiet life  in Mike’s Place every day  reading the Classified columns. I have read the Reader’s Digest from cover to cover and noted the close identification of the United States and the Promised Land where every coin is marked  In God We Trust but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves.  I read the Want Ads daily  looking for a stone a leaf  an unfound door. I hear America singing in the Yellow Pages. One could never tell the soul has its rages. I read the papers every day  and hear humanity amiss in the sad plethora of print. I see where Walden Pond has been drained  to make an amusement park.  I see they’re making Melville  eat his whale. I see another war is coming  but I won’t be there to fight it.  I have read the writing on the outhouse wall. I helped Kilroy write it. I marched up Fifth Avenue blowing on a bugle in a tight platoon  but hurried back to the Casbah  looking for my dog. I see a similarity between dogs and me. Dogs are the true observers  walking up and down the world  thru the Molloy country. I have walked down alleys  too narrow for Chryslers. I have seen a hundred horseless milkwagons  in a vacant lot in Astoria. Ben Shahn never painted them  but they’re there askew in Astoria. I have heard the junkman’s obbligato.  I have ridden superhighways  and believed the billboard’s promises  Crossed the Jersey Flats and seen the Cities of the Plain And wallowed in the wilds of Westchester with its roving bands of natives in stationwagons. I have seen them. I am the man.  I was there.  I suffered somewhat. I am an American. I have a passport. I did not suffer in public. And I’m too young to die. I am a selfmade man. And I have plans for the future. I am in line  for a top job. I may be moving on to Detroit. I am only temporarily a tie salesman. I am a good Joe. I am an open book to my boss. I am a complete mystery to my closest friends. I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day  contemplating my navel. I am a part of the body’s long madness. I have wandered in various nightwoods.  I have leaned in drunken doorways. I have written wild stories without punctuation. I am the man. I was there.  I suffered  somewhat. I have sat in an uneasy chair. I am a tear of the sun.  I am a hill where poets run. I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes  who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain.  I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry.  I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out  but my tongue lived  to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song.  I am a playerpiano in an abandoned casino  on a seaside esplanade  in a dense fog still playing. I see a similarity between the Laughing Woman and myself. I have heard the sound of summer  in the rain. I have seen girls on boardwalks  have complicated sensations.  I understand their hesitations. I am a gatherer of fruit.  I have seen how kisses  cause euphoria. I have risked enchantment.  I have seen the Virgin  in an appletree at Chartres And Saint Joan burn at the Bella Union. I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances  of the world. I have seen the Venus Aphrodite  armless in her drafty corridor.  I have heard a siren sing  at One Fifth Avenue. I have seen the White Goddess dancing  in the Rue des Beaux Arts  on the Fourteenth of July  and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy  picking her nose in Chumley’s.  She did not speak English.  She had yellow hair and a hoarse voice I am leading a quiet life  in Mike’s Place every day  watching the pocket pool players  making the minestrone scene  wolfing the macaronis  and I have read somewhere  the Meaning of Existence  yet have forgotten just exactly where. But I am the man And I’ll be there. And I may cause the lips  of those who are asleep  to speak. And I may make my notebooks  into sheaves of grass.  And I may write my own  eponymous epitaph instructing the horsemen  to pass.
My mother was not impressed with her beauty; once a year she put it on like a costume, plaited her black hair, slick as cornsilk, down past her hips, in one rope-thick braid, turned it, carefully, hand over hand, and fixed it at the nape of her neck, stiff and elegant as a crown, with tortoise pins, like huge insects, some belonging to her dead mother, some to my living grandmother. Sitting on the stool at the mirror, she applied a peachy foundation that seemed to hold her down, to trap her, as if we never would have noticed what flew among us unless it was weighted and bound in its mask. Vaseline shined her eyebrows, mascara blackened her lashes until they swept down like feathers; her eyes deepened until they shone from far away. Now I remember her hands, her poor hands, which, even then were old from scrubbing, whiter on the inside than they should have been, and hard, the first joints of her fingers, little fattened pads, the nails filed to sharp points like old-fashioned ink pens, painted a jolly color. Her hands stood next to her face and wanted to be put away, prayed for the scrub bucket and brush to make them useful. And, as I write, I forget the years I watched her pull hairs like a witch from her chin, magnify every blotch—as if acid were thrown from the inside. But once a year my mother rose in her white silk slip, not the slave of the house, the woman, took the ironed dress from the hanger— allowing me to stand on the bed, so that my face looked directly into her face, and hold the garment away from her as she pulled it down.
The most popular “act” in Penn Station is the three black kids in ratty sneakers & T-shirts playing two violins and a cello—Brahms. White men in business suits have already dug into their pockets as they pass and they toss in a dollar or two without stopping. Brown men in work-soiled khakis stand with their mouths open, arms crossed on their bellies as if they themselves have always wanted to attempt those bars. One white boy, three, sits cross-legged in front of his idols—in ecstasy— their slick, dark faces, their thin, wiry arms, who must begin to look like angels! Why does this trembling pull us? A: Beneath the surface we are one. B: Amazing! I did not think that they could speak this tongue.
I had a little brother And I brought him to my mother And I said I want another Little brother for a change. But she said don’t be a bother So I took him to my father And I said this little bother Of a brother’s very strange. But he said one little brother Is exactly like another And every little brother Misbehaves a bit he said. So I took the little bother From my mother and my father And I put the little bother Of a brother back to bed.
No day is right for the apocalypse, if you ask a housewife in Talking Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River, Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag. A grotesque parody of the primeval muck starts oozing out. And behold, the plastic bag is magic; there is no closing it. Soap in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos coiled like vermicelli, Masonite shavings, a liquefied lifetime subscription to The New York Times delivered all at once. Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn, like collapsed lungs. A blithering slur of face creams, an army of photocopies travelling on its stomach of acronyms, tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry. Also, two hundred and one tons of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings, industrial excrementa. Lake Erie is returning our gifts.  At first she thought she had won something. Now it slithers through the house, out windows, down the street, spreading everywhere but heading, mostly, west. Maybe heading is the wrong word, implying shape and choice. It took the shape of the landscape it rippled across like the last blanket. And it went west because the way lay open once again: not the same fecund rug the earth grew when white people scraped their first paths to the Pacific across the waves of the inland grasses. Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia, abandoned cars shine in the sun like beetlebacks. The ore it took to make the iron it took to make the steel it took to make the cars, that ore would remember the glaciers if it could. Now comes another grinding, but not— thanks to our new techniques—so slow. The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture. Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner like bishops of a ruined church. There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow, a choir of silenced Chevrolets. And, showing their lapsed trademarks and proud grilles to a new westward expansion, two Hudsons, a LaSalle and a DeSoto.  I was hoping to describe the colors of this industrial autumn— rust, a faded purple like the dusty skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss- green paint with primer peeking blandly through, the garish macho reds insurance companies punish, the greys (opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors (e.g. British Racing Green), the two-tone combinations time will spurn like roadkill (1957: pink and grey), cornflower blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true blue, the blacker blue the diver sees beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet— but now they are all covered, rolling and churning in the last accident, like bubbles in lava. And now my Cincinnati—the hills above the river, the lawn that drained toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles, the sultry river musk that slid like a compromising note through my bedroom window— and indeed all Cincinnati seethes. The vats at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick congealing, and my beloved birthplace is but another whorl of dirt. Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood, the corn I skulked in as a boy lays back its ears like a shamed dog. Hair along the sow’s spine rises. The Holstein pivots his massive head toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain he sees is his new owner. What we imagined was the fire-storm, or, failing that, the glacier. Or we hoped we’d get off easy, losing only California. With the seismologists and mystics we say the last California ridge crumble into the ocean. And we were read with elegies: O California, sportswear and defense contracts, gasses that induce deference, high school girls with their own cars, we wanted to love you without pain. O California, when you were moored to us like a vast splinter of melon, like a huge and garish gondola, then we were happier, although we showed it by easy contempt. But now you are lost at sea, your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays lost, the prints of the old movies lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor they lie like hands of a broken clock. O California, here we come, quoting Ecclesiastes, ruinous with self-knowledge. Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop for lamentation, Kansas succumbs. Drawn down by anklets of DDT, the jayhawk circles lower and lower while the sludge moils and crests. Now we are about to lose our voices we remember that tomorrow is our echo. O the old songs, the good days: bad faith and civil disobedience, sloppy scholarship and tooth decay. Now the age of footnotes is ours. Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid. While the rivers thickened and fish rose like vomit, the students of water stamped each fish with its death date. Don’t let a chance like this go by, they thought, though it went by as everything went by—towers of water flecked by a confetti of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug prayers. What we paid too much for and too little attention to, our very lives, all jumbled now and far too big in aggregate to understand or mourn, goes by, and all our eloquence places its weight on the spare word goodbye.
the only parts of the body the same  size at birth as they’ll always be.  “That’s why all babies are beautiful,”  Thurber used to say as he grew  blind—not dark, he’d go on  to explain, but floating in a pale  light always, a kind of candlelit  murk from a sourceless light.  He needed dark to see: for a while he drew on black  paper with white pastel chalk  but it grew worse. Light bored  into his eyes but where did it go?  Into a sea of phosphenes, along the wet fuse of some dead  nerve, it hid everywhere and couldn’t  be found. I’ve used up three guesses, all of them right. It’s like scuba diving, going down  into the black cone-tip that dives  farther than I can, though I dive  closer all the time.
Amidst the too much that we buy and throw  away and the far too much we wrap it in,  the bear found a few items of special interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon,  the bone from a leg of lamb. He’d rock back  lightly onto his rear paws and slash open a plastic bag, and then his nose— jammed almost with a surfeit of rank and likely information, for he would pause— and then his whole dowsing snout would  insinuate itself a little way inside. By now he’d have hunched his weight  forward slightly, and then he’d snatch it back,  trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He’d look  around. What a good boy am he. The guardian of the dump was used to this and not amused. “He’ll drag that shit  every which damn way,” he grumbled who’d dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit  where the town paid to contain it. The others of us looked and looked. “City  folks like you don’t get to see this often,”  one year-round resident accused me. Some winter I’ll bring him down to learn  to love a rat working a length of subway  track. “Nope,” I replied. Just then the bear  decamped for the woods with a marl of grease  and slather in his mouth and on his snout,  picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been  cute before, slavering with greed, his weight  all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck  up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped  like a huge, furry pear), but richly fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone  into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.
The best game the fairies play,  The best game of all, Is sliding down steeples—  (You know they’re very tall). You fly to the weathercock,  And when you hear it crow, You fold your wings and clutch your things  And then let go! They have a million other games—  Cloud-catching’s one, And mud-mixing after rain  Is heaps and heaps of fun; But when you go and stay with them  Never mind the rest, Take my advice—they’re very nice,  But steeple-sliding’s best!
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.  They will place my hands like this.  It will look as though I am flying into myself.
(to JK) Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went Waterier and waterier. For days on end or Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth. —Then you explained your DNA calls for Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely So to speak its external expression etcet Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be ... Ah that movie was so faraway the stars melting Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you Over which you have no say says no to me.
(...after my Mother’s death) Here not long enough after the hospital happened  I find her closet lying empty and stop my play  And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers  Which quiver, airy, released. They appear to enjoy Their new distance, cognizance born of the absence  Of anything else. The closet has been cleaned out  Full-flush as surgeries where the hangers could be  Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri  But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their  Range is enlarged by loss. They’d leave buzzards Measly as moths: and the hatshelf is even higher!— As the sky over a prairie, an undotted desert where  Nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret. I’ve fled  At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the  Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it? Only  The hangers are at home here. Come heir to this  Rare element, fluent, their skeletal grace sings Of the ease with which they let go the dress, slip,  Housecoat or blouse, so absolvingly. Free, they fly Trim, triangular, augurs leapt ahead from some geometric  God who soars stripped (of flesh, it is said): catnip To a brat placated by model airplane kits kids My size lack motorskills for, I wind up glue-scabbed,  Pawing goo-goo fingernails, glaze skins fun to peer in as Frost-i-glass doors ... But the closet has no windows, Opaque or sheer: I must shut my eyes, shrink within  To peep into this wall. Soliciting sleep I’ll dream  Mother spilled and cold, unpillowed, the operating- Table cracked to goad delivery: its stirrups slack, Its forceps closed: by it I’ll see mobs of obstetrical  Personnel kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead  Woman’s face as if for approval, the prompted Beholding, tears, a zoomshot kiss. White-masked  Doctors and nurses patting each other on the back,  Which is how in the Old West a hangman, if He was good, could gauge the heft of his intended ... Awake, the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump  Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear,  Mis-shape them whole, sail them across the small air  Space of the closet. I shall find room enough here By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.
is thought to be a confession, won by endless torture, but which our interrogators must hate to record—all those old code names, dates, the standard narrative of sandpaper throats, even its remorse, fall ignored. Far away, a late (not lost) messenger stares, struck by window bargains or is it the gift of a sudden solicitude: is she going to lift up her shadow’s weight, shift hers onto it? She knows who bears whom. In that momentary museum where memory occurs more accrue of those torturers’ pincers than lessened fingernails, eyes teased to a pulp, we beg for closeups. Ormolus, objets d’art!  A satyr drains an hourglass with one gulp.
(homage Jacob van Hoddis) The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards A blade snaps in two during an autopsy The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois’ pointy head A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship God’s hand descends into a glove held steady by the police At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone The peace night makes according to the world comes
The children are hiding among the raspberry canes. They look big to one another, the garden small. Already in their mouths this soft fruit That lasts so briefly in the supermarket Tastes like the past. The gritty wall, Behind the veil of leaves, is hollow. There are yellow wasps inside it. The children know. They know the wall is hard, although it hums. They know a lot and will not forget it soon. When did we forget? But we were never Children, never found where they were hiding And hid with them, never followed The wasp down into its nest With a fingertip that still tingles. We lie in bed at night, thinking about The future, always the future, always forgetting That it will be the past, hard and hollow, Veiled and humming, soon enough.
One girl a full head taller Than the other—into their Sunday dresses. First, the slip, hardly a piece of fabric, Softly stitched and printed with a bud. I’m not their mother, and tangle, then untangle The whole cloth—on backwards, have to grab it Round their necks. But they know how to pull Arms in, a reflex of being dressed, And also, a child’s faith. The mass of stuff That makes the Sunday frocks collapses In my hands and finds its shape, only because They understand the drape of it— These skinny keys to intricate locks. The buttons are a problem For a surgeon. How would she connect These bony valves and stubborn eyelets? The filmy dress revolves in my blind fingers. The slots work one by one. And when they’re put together, Not like puppets or those doll-saints That bring tears to true believers, But living children, somebody’s real daughters, They do become more real. They say, “Stop it!” and “Give it back!” And “I don’t want to!” They’ll kiss A doll’s hard features, whispering, “I’m sorry.” I know just why my mother Used to worry. Your clothes don’t keep You close—it’s nakedness. Clad in my boots and holster, I would roam with my six-gun buddies. We dealt fake death to one another, Fell and rolled in filth and rose, Grimy with wounds, then headed home. But Sunday ... what was that tired explanation Given for wearing clothes that Scratched and shone and weighed like a slow hour? That we should shine—in gratitude. So, I give that explanation, undressing them, And wait for the result. After a day like Sunday, such a long one, When they lie down, half-dead, To be undone, they won’t help me. They cry, “It’s not my fault.”
for Jim Hendrix, hoodoo from his natural born He frightens all the witches and the dragons in their lair He cues the clear blue daylight and He gives the night its dare He flaps His wings for warning and He struts atop a mare for when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee In His coal black plumage and His bright red crown and His golden beaked fury and His calculated frown in His webbed footed glory He sends Jehovah down for when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee O they dance around the fire and they boil the gall of wolves and they sing their strange crude melodies and play their weirder tunes and the villagers close their windows and the grave- yard starts to heave and the cross wont help their victims and the screaming fills the night and the young girls die with open eyes and the skies are lavender light but when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee Well the sheriff is getting desperate as they go their nature’s way killing cattle smothering infants slaughtering those who block their way and the countryside swarms with numbness as their magic circle grows but when He crows they tremble and when He comes they flee Posting hex-signs on their wagons simple worried farmers pray passing laws and faking justice only feed the witches brew violet stones are rendered helpless drunken priests are helpless too but when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee We have seen them in their ritual we have catalogued their crimes we are weary of their torture but we cannot bring them down their ancient hoodoo enemy who does the work, the trick, strikes peril in their dead fiend’s hearts and pecks their flesh to quick love Him feed Him He will never let you down for when He crows they quiver and when He comes they frown
put yr cup on my tray the stewardess said 40,000 feet up. (well i’ve never done it that way. what have i got to lose.) i climb into a cab & the woman driver is singing along with Frank Sinatra “how was your flight coming in?” (another one. these americans, only one thing on their minds).
for Joe Overstreet, David Henderson, Albert Ayler & d mysterious ‘H’ who cut up d Rembrandts i u worry me whoever u are i know u didnt want me to come here but here i am just d same; hi-jacking yr stagecoach, hauling in yr pocket watches & mak ing u hoof it all d way to town. black bard, a robber w/ an art: i left some curses in d cash box so ull know its me listen man, i cant help it if yr thing is over, kaput,  finis no matter how u slice it dick u are done. a dead duck all out of quacks. d nagging hiccup dat goes on & on w/out a simple glass  of water for reliefii uve been teaching shakespeare for 20 years only to find d joke  on u d eavesdropping rascal who got it in d shins because he didnt know enough to keep his feet behind d cur tains: a sad-sacked head served on a platter in titus andronicus or falstaff  too fat to make a go of it  anymoreiii its not my fault dat yr tradition was knocked off wop style & left in d alley w/ pricks in its mouth. i read abt it in d papers but it was no  skin off my nose wasnt me who opened d gates & allowed d rustlers to slip thru unnoticed. u ought to do something abt yr security or  mend yr fences partner dont look at me if all dese niggers are ripping it up like deadwood dick; doing art d way its never been done. mak ing wurlitzer sorry he made d piano dat will drive mozart to d tennis  courts making smith-corona feel like d red faced university dat has just delivered china  some 50 e-leben h bomb experts i didnt deliver d blow dat drove d abstract expressionists to my ladies linoleum where dey sleep beneath tons of wax & dogshit & d muddy feet of children or because some badassed blackpainter done sent french impressionism to d walls of highrise  lobbies where dey belong is not my fault martha graham will never do d jerk shes a sweet ol soul but her hips cant roll; as stiff as d greek statues she loves so muchiv dese are d reasons u did me nasty j alfred prufrock, d trick u pull d in d bookstore today; stand in d corner no peaches for a week, u lemon u must blame me because yr wife is ugly. 86-d by a thousand discriminating saunas. dats why u did dat sneaky thing i wont tell d townsfolk because u hv to live here and im just passing thruv u got one thing right tho. i did say dat everytime i read william faulkner i go to sleep. fitzgerald wdnt hv known a gangster if one had snatched zelda & made her a moll tho  she wd hv been grateful i bet bonnie of clyde wrote d saga of suicide sal just as d feds were closing in. it is worth more than d collected works of ts elliot a trembling anglican whose address is now d hell dat thrilld him so last word from down there he was open ing a publishing co dat will bore d devil back to paradisevi & by d way did u hear abt grammar? cut to ribbons in a photo finish by stevie wonder, a blindboy who dances on a heel. he just came out of d slang & broke it down before millions.  it was bloody murdervii to make a long poem shorter—3 things  moleheaded lame w/4 or 5 eyes 1) yr world is riding off into d sunset 2) d chips are down & nobody will chance yr i.o.u.s. 3) d last wish was a fluke so now u hv to re turn to being a fish p.s. d enchantment has worn off dats why u didnt like my reading list—right? it didnt include anyone on it dat u cd in vite to a cocktail party & shoot a lot of  bull—right? so u want to take it out on my hide—right? well i got news for u professor nothing—i am my own brand while u must be d fantasy of  a japanese cartoonist a strangekind of dinosaurmouse i can see it all now. d leaves are running low. its d eve of extinction & dere are no holes to accept yr behind. u wander abt yr long neck probing a tree. u think its a tree but its really a trap. a cry of victory goes up in d kitchen of d world. a pest is dead. a prehis toric pest at dat. a really funnytime prehistoric pest whom we will lug into a museum to show everyone how really funny u are  yr fate wd make a good scenario but d plot is between u & charles darwin. as i said, im passing thru, just sing ing my song. get along little doggie & jazz like dat. word has it dat a big gold shipment is coming to californy. i by to ride all night if im to meet my pardners dey want me to help score d ambush
1 Some say that Chattanooga is the Old name for Lookout Mountain To others it is an uncouth name Used only by the uncivilised Our a-historical period sees it As merely a town in Tennessee To old timers of the Volunteer State Chattanooga is “The Pittsburgh of The South” According to the Cherokee Chattanooga is a rock that Comes to a point They’re all right Chattanooga is something you Can have anyway you want it The summit of what you are I’ve paid my fare on that Mountain Incline #2, Chattanooga I want my ride up I want Chattanooga2 Like Nickajack a plucky Blood I’ve escaped my battle near Clover Bottom, braved the Jolly Roger raising pirates Had my near miss at Moccasin Bend To reach your summit so Give into me Chattanooga I’ve dodged the Grey Confederate sharpshooters Escaped my brother’s tomahawks with only Some minor burns Traversed a Chickamauga of my own Making, so You belong to me Chattanooga3 I take your East Ninth Street to my Heart, pay court on your Market Street of rubboard players and organ Grinders of Haitian colors rioting And old Zip Coon Dancers I want to hear Bessie Smith belt out I’m wild about that thing in Your Ivory Theatre Chattanooga Coca-Cola’s homebase City on my mind4 My 6th grade teacher asked me to Name the highest mountain in the world I didn’t even hesitate, “Lookout Mountain” I shouted. They laughed Eastern nitpickers, putting on the Ritz laughed at my Chattanooga ways Which means you’re always up to it To get to Chattanooga you must Have your Tennessee “She has as many lives as a cat. As to killing her, even the floods have failed you may knock the breath out of her that’s all. She will re- fill her lungs and draw a longer breath than ever” From a Knoxville editorial— 1870s5 Chattanooga is a woman to me too I want to run my hands through her Hair of New Jersey tea and redroot Aint no harm in that Be caressed and showered in Her Ruby Falls That’s only natural Heal myself in her Minnehaha Springs 58 degrees F. all year Around. Climb all over her Ridges and hills I wear a sign on my chest “Chattanooga or bust”6 “HOLD CHATTANOOGA AT ALL HAZARDS”—Grant to Thomas When I tasted your big juicy Black berries ignoring the rattle- Snakes they said came to Cameron Hill after the rain, I knew I Had to have you Chattanooga When I swam in Lincoln Park Listening to Fats Domino sing I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill on the loudspeaker I knew you were mine Chattanooga Chattanooga whose Howard Negro School taught my mother Latin Tennyson and Dunbar Whose Miller Bros. Department Store cheated my Uncle out of What was coming to him A pension, he only had 6 Months to go Chattanoooooooooooooooooga Chattanoooooooooooooooooga “WE WILL HOLD THIS TOWN TILL WE STARVE”-Thomas to Grant7 To get to Chattanooga you must Go through your Tennessee I’ve taken all the scotsboros One state can dish out Made Dr. Shockley’s “Monkey Trials” The laughing stock of the Nation Capt. Marvel Dr. Sylvanias shazam Scientists running from light- ning, so Open your borders. Tennessee Hide your TVA DeSota determined, this Serpent handler is coming Through Are you ready Lookout Mountain? “Give all of my Generals what he’s drinking,” Lincoln said, when the Potomac crowd called Grant a lush8 I’m going to strut all over your Point like Old Sam Grant did My belly full of good Tennessee Whiskey, puffing on A.05 cigar The campaign for Chattanooga Behind me Breathing a spell Ponying up for Appomattox!
35? I have been looking forward To you for many years now So much so that I feel you and I are old Friends and so on this day, 35 I propose a toast to Me and You 35? From this day on I swear before the bountiful Osiris that If I ever If I EVER Try to bring out the Best in folks again I Want somebody to take me Outside and kick me up and Down the sidewalk or Sit me in a corner with a Funnel on my head Make me as hard as a rock 35, like the fellow in The story about the Big one that got away Let me laugh my head off With Moby Dick as we reminisce About them suckers who went Down with the Pequod 35? I ain’t been mean enough Make me real real mean Mean as old Marie rolling her eyes Mean as the town Bessie sings about “Where all the birds sing bass” 35? Make me Tennessee mean Cobra mean Cuckoo mean Injun mean Dracula mean Beethovenian-brows mean Miles Davis mean Don’t-offer-assistance-when Quicksand-is-tugging-some-poor Dope-under-mean Pawnbroker mean Pharaoh mean That’s it, 35 Make me Pharaoh mean Mean as can be Mean as the dickens Meaner than mean When I walk down the street I want them to whisper There goes Mr. Mean “He’s double mean He even turned the skeletons In his closet out into The cold” And 35? Don’t let me trust anybody Over Reed but Just in case Put a tail on that Negro too  February 22, 1973
The grocery had provided him with boxes of rotten lettuce He was loading them onto a yellow pick-up truck He was a frail white man and wore a plaid woolen shirt and frayed dungarees I was sitting in a gray chevrolet rent-a-dent “I have eight adult geese and twenty-six ducks,” he said and i said “I’ll bet you have a big management problem,” and he said “They’re no trouble at all. My wife raised two of them in the house. When she goes near their pen the geese waddle towards her and nibble the lettuce out of her hand” “I'd never think of killing them” he said “They keep me out of the bars”
With only his dim lantern  To tell him where he is And every time a mountain  Of fresh corpses to load up Take them to the other side Where there are plenty more I’d say by now he must be confused  As to which side is which I’d say it doesn’t matter No one complains he’s got Their pockets to go through In one a crust of bread in another a sausage Once in a long while a mirror  Or a book which he throws  Overboard into the dark river  Swift and cold and deep
This strange thing must have crept Right out of hell. It resembles a bird’s foot Worn around the cannibal’s neck. As you hold it in your hand, As you stab with it into a piece of meat, It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird: Its head which like your fist Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
How much death works, No one knows what a long Day he puts in. The little Wife always alone Ironing death’s laundry. The beautiful daughters Setting death’s supper table. The neighbors playing Pinochle in the backyard Or just sitting on the steps Drinking beer. Death, Meanwhile, in a strange Part of town looking for Someone with a bad cough, But the address is somehow wrong, Even death can’t figure it out Among all the locked doors ...  And the rain beginning to fall. Long windy night ahead. Death with not even a newspaper To cover his head, not even A dime to call the one pining away, Undressing slowly, sleepily, And stretching naked On death’s side of the bed.
Great are the Hittites. Their ears have mice and mice have holes. Their dogs bury themselves and leave the bones To guard the house. A single weed holds all their storms Until the spiderwebs spread over the heavens. There are bits of straw in their lakes and rivers Looking for drowned men. When a camel won’t pass Through the eye of one of their needles, They tie a house to its tail. Great are the Hittites. Their fathers are in cradles, their newborn make war. To them lead floats, a leaf sinks. Their god is the size Of a mustard seed so that he can be quickly eaten. They also piss against the wind, Pour water in a leaky bucket. Strike two tears to make fire, And have tongues with bones in them, Bones of a wolf gnawed by lambs.  * They are also called mound builders, They are called Asiatic horses That will drink on the Rhine, they are called My grandmother’s fortune-telling, they are called You can’t take it to the grave with you. It’s that hum in your left ear, A sigh coming from deep within you, A dream in which you keep falling forever, The hour in which you sit up in bed As though someone has shouted your name. No one knows why the Hittites exist, Still, when two are whispering One of them is listening. Did they catch the falling knife? They caught it like a fly with closed mouths. Did they balance the last egg? They struck the egg with a bone so it won’t howl. Did they wait for dead man’s shoes? The shoes went in at one ear and out the other. Did they wipe the blood from their mousetraps? They burnt the blood to warm themselves. Are they cold with no pockets in their shrouds? If the sky falls, they shall have clouds for supper. What do they have for us To put in our pipes and smoke? They have the braid of a beautiful girl That drew a team of cattle And the engraving of him who slept With dogs and rose with fleas Searching for its trace in the sky.  * And so there are fewer and fewer of them now. Who wrote their name on paper And burnt the paper? Who put snake bones In their pillows? Who threw nail parings In their soup? Who made them walk Under the ladder? Who stuck pins In their snapshots? The wart of warts and his brother evil eye. Bone-lazy and her sister rabbit’s-foot. Cross-your-fingers and their father dog star. Knock-on-wood and his mother hellfire. Because the tail can’t wag the cow. Because the woods can’t fly to the dove. Because the stones haven’t said their last word. Because dunghills rise and empires fall.  * They are leaving behind All the silver spoons Found inside their throats at birth, A hand they bit because it fed them, Two rats from a ship that is still sinking, A collection of various split hairs, The leaf they turned over too late.  * All that salt cast over the shoulder, All that bloody meat traveling under the saddles of nomads ... Here comes a forest in wolf’s clothing, The wise hen bows to the umbrella. When the bloodshot evening meets the bloodshot night, They tell each other bloodshot tales. That bare branch over them speaks louder than words. The moon is worn threadbare. I repeat: lean days don’t come singly, It takes all kinds to make the sun rise. The night is each man’s castle. Don’t let the castle out of the bag. Wind in the valley, wind in the high hills, Practice will make this body fit this bed.  * May all roads lead Out of a sow’s ear To what’s worth Two in the bush.
It hangs from heaven to earth. There are trees in it, cities, rivers,  small pigs and moons. In one corner the snow falling over a charging cavalry,  in another women are planting rice. You can also see: a chicken carried off by a fox, a naked couple on their wedding night, a column of smoke, an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk. What is behind it? —Space, plenty of empty space. And who is talking now? —A man asleep under his hat. What happens when he wakes up? —He’ll go into a barbershop. They’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair,  To make him look like everyone else.
On the first page of my dreambook It’s always evening In an occupied country. Hour before the curfew. A small provincial city. The houses all dark. The storefronts gutted. I am on a street corner Where I shouldn’t be. Alone and coatless I have gone out to look For a black dog who answers to my whistle. I have a kind of Halloween mask Which I am afraid to put on.
A small wheel Incandescent, Shivering like A pinned butterfly. Hands thrown up In all directions: The crossroads One arrives at In a nightmare. Higher than that Number 12 presides Like a beekeeper Over the swarming honeycomb Of the open watch. Other wheels That could fit Inside a raindrop. Tools That must be splinters Of arctic starlight. Tiny golden mills Grinding invisible Coffee beans. When the coffee’s boiling Cautiously, So it doesn’t burn us, We raise it To the lips Of the nearest Ear.
The messenger runs, not carrying the news of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting,  has always been running, the wind before and behind him,  across the turning back of earth, leaving  his tracks across the plains, his ropes  hanging from the ledges of mountains;  for centuries, millennia, he has been running  carrying whatever it is that cannot be  put down: it is rolled in a tube  made of hide, carefully, to keep it dry  as he runs, through storms and monsoons, sometimes on foot, sometimes poling a boat through a flooded mangrove swamp, or  setting stiff sails to cross from island to island  running before the wind. In some ages, peasants  have helped him—bringing him small cakes  of rice wrapped in the weeds of the sea and  new sandals woven of hemp for his torn  bleeding feet; sometimes in the heat of noon  they would offer a drink of rosewater, sometimes  a coat of fur against the winter snows; and sometimes at night, he would rest by a fire where voices wove with the music  of gut-strings, or with mountain pipes whose  sound was like wind through the bones  of creation—and he would be cheered  by the company of others, the firelit glow  of their faces like a bright raft afloat in the dark;  at times, rumors spread of his death, scholars  analyzed his obsession, dated his bones, his prayer bundle;  but at dawn, he always arose, in the mists, in the blur of so many mornings, so many shoes worn into scraps and discarded, so many  the cities that burned as he passed  them, so many the skulls abandoned  by armies, so many whose blood  stained the threads of their prayer rugs,  so many, so many, so many—  oh,  and that green, sunlit hill that kept  rising from the dark waters of flood, outlined bright against the sky, the odds, the evidence— and he, the messenger, running through history, carries this small tube,  its durable hide—carries it, not like  a torch, no, nothing so blazing;  not like the brass lamp that summons  a genie, no magic wishes;  not like the candles that hope sets aflame  and a breath can extinguish ... no. He carried it like  what has no likeness,  what is curled up inside and  he swore he could feel it, though  perhaps he had dreamed it, still  at times, stopping under some tree  or other, when the night was warm,  so close the stars seemed to breathe in  the branches, he would lie quiet, then it would seem that whatever it was in there would pulse softly with light, a code  only the heart could break  (but of course he couldn’t say  for he was only the messenger)—  and at sunrise, wearily, he would rise  to his feet and trudge on, sometimes  running, sometimes stumbling,  carrying whatever it was that could not  be put down, would not be cast aside—  and besides, he would chide himself,  weren’t they all as tired as he,  and hadn’t they helped him, time  and again, on his way?
All around the altar, huge lianas curled, unfurled the dark green of their leaves to complement the red of blood spilled there—a kind of Christmas decoration, overhung with heavy vines and over them, the stars. When the angels came, messengers like birds but with the oiled flesh of men, they hung over the scene with smoldering swords, splashing the world when they beat their rain-soaked wings against the turning sky. The child was bright in his basket as a lemon, with a bitter smell from his wet swaddling clothes. His mother bent above him, singing a lullaby in the liquid tongue invented for the very young—short syllables like dripping from an eave mixed with the first big drops of rain that fell, like tiny silver pears, from the glistening fronds of palm. The three who gathered there—old kings uncrowned: the cockroach, condor, and the leopard, lords of the cracks below the ground, the mountain pass and the grass-grown plain—were not adorned, did not bear gifts, had not come to adore; they were simply drawn to gawk at this recurrent, awkward son whom the wind had said would spell the end of earth as it had been. Somewhere north of this familiar scene the polar caps were melting, the water was advancing in its slow, relentless lines, swallowing the old landmarks, swelling the seas that pulled the flowers and the great steel cities down. The dolphins sport in the rising sea, anemones wave their many arms like hair on a drowned gorgon’s head, her features softened by the sea beyond all recognition. On the desert’s edge where the oasis dies in a wash of sand, the sphinx seems to shift on her haunches of stone, and the rain, as it runs down, completes the ruin of her face. The Nile merges with the sea, the waters rise and drown the noise of earth. At the forest’s edge, where the child sleeps, the waters gather— as if a hand were reaching for the curtain to drop across the glowing, lit tableau. When the waves closed over, completing the green sweep of ocean, there was no time for mourning. No final trump, no thunder to announce the silent steal of waters; how soundlessly it all went under: the little family and the scene so easily mistaken for an adoration. Above, more clouds poured in and closed their ranks across the skies; the angels, who had seemed so solid, turned quicksilver in the rain.  Now, nothing but the wind moves on the rain-pocked face of the swollen waters, though far below where giant squid lie hidden in shy tangles, the whales, heavy-bodied as the angels, their fins like vestiges of wings, sing some mighty epic of their own— a great day when the ships would all withdraw, the harpoons fail of their aim, the land dissolve into the waters, and they would swim among the peaks of mountains, like eagles of the deep, while far below them, the old nightmares of earth would settle into silt among the broken cities, the empty basket of the child would float abandoned in the seaweed until the work of water unraveled it in filaments of straw, till even that straw rotted in the planetary thaw the whales prayed for, sending their jets of water skyward in the clear conviction they’d spill back to ocean with their will accomplished in the miracle of rain: And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit moved upon the face of the waters.
for Vivian Schatz Here, in our familiar streets, the day is brisk with winter’s business. The reassuring rows of brick façades, litter baskets overflowing with the harvest of the streets and, when the light turns, the people move in unison, the cars miraculously slide to a stop, no one is killed, the streets, for some reason, do not show the blood that is pouring like a tide, on other shores.  Martinez, the last peasant left alive  in his village, refuses to run, hopes  that God, El Salvador,  will let him get the harvest in.  “Can a fish live out of water?” he says  for why he stays, and weeds  another row, ignoring the fins  of sharks that push up  through the furrows. Here, it is said, we live in the belly of the beast. Ahab sits forever at the helm, his skin white wax, an effigy. The whale carries him, lashed to its side by the ropes from his own harpoon. His eyes are dead. His ivory leg juts from the flank of Leviathan like a useless tooth.  One more time, the distant sail appears,  a cloud forms, an old icon for mercy  turned up in a dusty corner  of the sky, preparing rain  for the parched land, Rachel  weeping for her children. “Can a fish  live out of water?” he asks  and the rain answers, in Spanish,  manitas de plata  little hands of silver on his brow.
By the stream, where the ground is soft and gives, under the slightest pressure—even  the fly would leave its footprint here  and the paw of the shrew the crescent  of its claws like the strokes of a chisel  in clay; where the lightest chill, lighter  than the least rumor of winter, sets the reeds  to a kind of speaking, and a single drop of rain  leaves a crater to catch the first silver  glint of sun when the clouds slide away  from each other like two tired lovers,  and the light returns, pale, though brightened  by the last chapter of late autumn:  copper, rusted oak, gold aspen, and the red pages of maple, the wind leafing through to the end  the annals of beech, the slim volumes  of birch, the elegant script of the ferns ... for the birds, it is all notations for a coda, for the otter  an invitation to the river, and for the deer—a dream in which to disappear, light-footed  on the still open book of earth,  adding the marks of their passage,  adding it all in, waiting only for the first thick flurry of snowflakes  for cover, soft cover that carries  no title, no name.
Whose woods these are I think I know ... The landings had gone wrong; white silk, like shrouds, covered the woods. The trees had trapped the flimsy fabric in their web—everywhere the harnessed bodies hung—helpless, treading air like water.  We thought to float down easily—a simple thing like coming home: feet first, a welcome from the waiting fields, a gentle fall in clover. We hadn’t counted on this wilderness, the gusts of wind that took us over; we were surprised by the tenacity of branching wood, its reach, and how impenetrable the place we left, and thought we knew, could be.  Sometimes now, as we sway, unwilling pendulums that mark the time, we still can dream someone will come and cut us down. There is nothing here but words, the calls we try the dark with—hoping for a human ear, response, a rescue party. But all we hear is other voices like our own, other bodies tangled in the lines, the repetition of a cry from every tree:I can’t help you, help me.
The cave looked much like any other from a little distance but as we approached, came almost to its mouth, we saw its walls within that slanted up into a dome were beating like a wild black lung— it was plastered and hung with the pulsing bodies of bats, the organ music of the body’s deep interior, alive, the sacred cave with its ten thousand gleaming eyes near the clustered rocks where the sea beat with the leather wings of its own dark waves. Below the bat-hung, throbbing walls, an altar stood, glittering with guano, a stucco sculpture like a Gaudi church, berserk Baroque, stone translated into flux—murk and mud and the floral extravagance of wet sand dripped from a giant hand, giving back blessing, excrement—return for the first fruits offered to the gods. We stayed outside, superior with fear, like tourists peering through a door, whose hanging beads rattle in the air from one who disappeared into the dim interior; we thought of the caves of Marabar, of a writer who entered and never quite emerged— the caves’ echoing black emptiness a tunnel in the English soul where he is wandering still. So the bat cave on the Bali coast, not far from Denpasar, holds us off, and beckons ... Standing there now, at the mouth of the cave—this time we enter, feel inside the flutter of those many hearts, the radiant heat of pumping veins, the stretch of wing on bone like a benediction, and the familiar faces of this many-headed god, benevolent as night is to the weary—the way at dark the cave releases them all, how they must lift like the foam on a wave breaking, how many they are as they enter the starlit air, and scatter in wild wide arcs in search of fruit, the sweet bites of mosquito ... while the great domes of our own kind slide open, the eye that watches, tracks the skies, and the huge doors roll slowly back on the hangars, the planes push out their noses of steel, their wings a bright alloy of aluminum and death, they roar down the runways, tear into the night, their heavy bodies fueled from sucking at the hidden veins of earth; they leave a trail of fire behind them as they scar the air, filling the dreams of children, sleeping—anywhere, Chicago, Baghdad—with blood, as the bombs drop, as the world splits open, as the mothers reach for their own in the night of the falling sky, madness in method, nature gone into reverse ... here, nearly unperturbed, the bats from the sacred cave fill the night with their calls, high-pitched, tuned to the solid world as eyes to the spectrum of light, gnats to the glow of a lamp—the bats circle, the clouds wheel, the earth turns pulling the dome of stars among the spinning trees, blurring the sweet globes of fruit, shaped exactly to desire—dizzy, we swing back to the cave on our stiff dark wings, the sweet juice of papaya drying on our jaws, home to the cave, to attach ourselves back to the pulsing dome, until, hanging there, sated and sleepy, we can see what was once our world upside down as it is and wonder whose altars those are, white, encrusted with shit.
Is made up of reservoirs, Birds flying South, mailmen Snow falling or rain falling, Railmen, Howard Johnson and airmen Birds of Paradise Silk lined caskets Prize poems and guitars, Beatitudes and bestiaries, Children taught contemporary manners, Time taking time away With a haymaker or a sleigh, Hope always belaboring despair. Form is a jostle, a throstle, Life a slice of sleight, Indians are looking out from the Cheekbones of Connecticut Yankees, Poltergeists deploy northward To tinderboxes in cupboards in Maine, The last chock knocked, the vessel Would not go down the Damariscotta Until the sick captain’s four-poster, Moved to the window by four oldsters Gave him a sight of her, and He gave her a beautiful sign, And there was the witch of Nobleboro Who confounded the native farmers Who, having lost the plow-bolt Right at their feet, found it Concealed in her apron: she laughed, And made the earth fecund again. The hard structure of the world, The world structure of illusion. From seeing too much of the world We do not understand it. There is something unknown in knowing. Unfaith is what keeps faith going.
In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture; I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
You would think the fury of aerial bombardment Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces. History, even, does not know what is meant. You would feel that after so many centuries God would give man to repent; yet he can kill As Cain could, but with multitudinous will, No farther advanced than in his ancient furies. Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity? Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all? Is the eternal truth man’s fighting soul Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity? Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill, Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall But they are gone to early death, who late in school Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.
Pale, with the blue of high zeniths, shimmered over with silver, brocaded In smooth, running patterns, a soft stuff, with dark knotted fringes, it lies there, Warm from a woman’s soft shoulders, and my fingers close on it, caressing. Where is she, the woman who wore it? The scent of her lingers and drugs me. A languor, fire-shotted, runs through me, and I crush the scarf down on my face, And gulp in the warmth and the blueness, and my eyes swim in cool-tinted heavens. Around me are columns of marble, and a diapered, sun-flickered pavement. Rose-leaves blow and patter against it. Below the stone steps a lute tinkles. A jar of green jade throws its shadow half over the floor. A big-bellied Frog hops through the sunlight, and plops in the gold-bubbled water of a basin, Sunk in the black and white marble. The west wind has lifted a scarf On the seat close beside me; the blue of it is a violent outrage of colour. She draws it more closely about her, and it ripples beneath her slight stirring. Her kisses are sharp buds of fire; and I burn back against her, a jewel Hard and white, a stalked, flaming flower; till I break to a handful of cinders, And open my eyes to the scarf, shining blue in the afternoon sunshine. How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!
for César Chávez Field The wind sprays pale dirt into my mouth The small, almost invisible scars On my hands. The pores in my throat and elbows Have taken in a seed of dirt of their own. After a day in the grape fields near Rolinda A fine silt, washed by sweat, Has settled into the lines On my wrists and palms. Already I am becoming the valley, A soil that sprouts nothing. For any of us.Wind A dry wind over the valley Peeled mountains, grain by grain, To small slopes, loose dirt Where red ants tunnel. The wind strokes The skulls and spines of cattle To white dust, to nothing, Covers the spiked tracks of beetles, Of tumbleweed, of sparrows That pecked the ground for insects. Evenings, when I am in the yard weeding, The wind picks up the breath of my armpits Like dust, swirls it Miles away And drops it On the ear of a rabid dog, And I take on another life.Wind When you got up this morning the sun Blazed an hour in the sky, A lizard hid Under the curled leaves of manzanita And winked its dark lids. Later, the sky grayed, And the cold wind you breathed Was moving under your skin and already far From the small hives of your lungs.Stars At dusk the first stars appear. Not one eager finger points toward them. A little later the stars spread with the night And an orange moon rises To lead them, like a shepherd, toward dawn.Sun In June the sun is a bonnet of light Coming up, Little by little, From behind a skyline of pine. The pastures sway with fiddle-neck, Tassels of foxtail. At Piedra A couple fish on the river’s edge, Their shadows deep against the water. Above, in the stubbled slopes, Cows climb down As the heat rises In a mist of blond locusts, Returning to the valley.Rain When autumn rains flatten sycamore leaves, The tiny volcanos of dirt Ants raised around their holes, I should be out of work. My silverware and stack of plates will go unused Like the old, my two good slacks Will smother under a growth of lint And smell of the old dust That rises When the closet door opens or closes. The skin of my belly will tighten like a belt And there will be no reason for pockets.Harvest East of the sun’s slant, in the vineyard that never failed, A wind crossed my face, moving the dust And a portion of my voice a step closer to a new year. The sky went black in the ninth hour of rolling trays, And in the distance ropes of rain dropped to pull me From the thick harvest that was not mine.Fog If you go to your window You will notice a fog drifting in. The sun is no stronger than a flashlight. Not all the sweaters Hung in closets all summer Could soak up this mist. The fog: A mouth nibbling everything to its origin, Pomegranate trees, stolen bicycles, The string of lights at a used-car lot, A Pontiac with scorched valves. In Fresno the fog is passing The young thief prying a window screen, Graying my hair that falls And goes unfound, my fingerprints Slowly growing a fur of dust— One hundred years from now There should be no reason to believe I lived.Daybreak In this moment when the light starts up In the east and rubs The horizon until it catches fire, We enter the fields to hoe, Row after row, among the small flags of onion, Waving off the dragonflies That ladder the air. And tears the onions raise Do not begin in your eyes but in ours, In the salt blown From one blister into another; They begin in knowing You will never waken to bear The hour timed to a heart beat, The wind pressing us closer to the ground. When the season ends, And the onions are unplugged from their sleep, We won’t forget what you failed to see, And nothing will heal Under the rain’s broken fingers.
Because there are avenues Of traffic lights, a phone book Of brothers and lawyers, Why should you think your purse Will not be tugged from your arm Or the screen door Will remain latched Against the man Who hugs and kisses His pillow In the corridor of loneliness? There is a window of light A sprinkler turning As the earth turns, And you do not think of the hills And of the splintered wrists it takes To give you The heat rising toward the ceiling. You expect your daughter To be at the door any moment And your husband to arrive With the night That is suddenly all around. You expect the stove to burst A collar of fire When you want it, The siamese cats To move against your legs, purring. But remember this: Because blood revolves from one lung to the next, Why think it will After tonight?
When the sun’s whiteness closes around us Like a noose, It is noon, and Molina squats In the uneven shade of an oleander. He unfolds a map and, with a pencil, Blackens Panama Into a bruise; He dots rain over Bogotá, the city of spiders, And x’s in a mountain range that climbs Like a thermometer Above the stone fence The old never thought to look over. A fog presses over Lima. Brazil is untangled of its rivers. Where there is a smudge, Snow has stitched its cold into the field. Where the river Orinoco cuts east, A new river rises nameless From the open grasses, And Molina calls it his place of birth.
Wedding night Graciela bled lightly— But enough to stain his thighs— And left an alphabet Of teeth marks on his arm. At this, he was happy. They drank mescal In bed like the rich And smoked cigarettes. She asleep And the bottle empty, he hid A few coins in her left shoe, Earrings in the right. They worked long hours Hoeing crooked rows of maize. Evenings she wove rugs And embroidered curtains To market in Taxco. In short they lived well. However in the seventh month With child, her belly Rising like a portion of the sun, Something knotted inside her. The ribs ached. A fever climbed. Manuel summoned the Partera And though she burned pepper, And tied belts around The stretched belly, The child did not ease out. Days later she turned Onto her belly And between her legs Unraveled a spine of blood.
Listen, nephew. When I opened the cantina At noon A triangle of sunlight Was stretched out On the floor Like a rug Like a tired cat. It flared in From the window Through a small hole Shaped like a yawn. Strange I thought And placed my hand Before the opening, But the sunlight Did not vanish. I pulled back The shutters And the room glowed, But this pyramid Of whiteness Was simply brighter. The sunlight around it Appeared soiled Like the bed sheet Of a borracho. Amazed, I locked the door, Closed the windows. Workers, in from The fields, knocked To be let in, Children peeked Through the shutters, But I remained silent. I poured a beer, At a table Shuffled a pack Of old cards, And watched it Cross the floor, Hang on the wall Like a portrait Like a calendar Without numbers. When a fly settled In the sunlight And disappeared In a wreath of smoke, I tapped it with the broom, Spat on it. The broom vanished. The spit sizzled. It is the truth, little one. I stood eye to blank eye And by misfortune This finger This pink stump Entered the sunlight, Snapped off With a dry sneeze, And fell to the floor As a gift To the ants Who know me For what I gave.
“It’s a ’49,” Rhinehardt said, and slammed The screen door, then worked his way around The dog turds in the yard To the Buick gutted from fire—the gears Teething rust, the fenders sloped Like the shoulders of a fired worker Out of beer. He circled the car Kicking the tires, eyeing The grille that still grinned the ribbed wings Of a sparrow. He looked inside and flies Lifted like patted dust, settling Into a loose knot on the visor. “Yeh, you’re right as right ... it’s a ’50,” Rhinehardt spat, his tongue rolling A false tooth into place. “It’s got no Running board.” He pressed a buck Into his son’s hand and retired to the porch Where he towel-flicked His wife from a chair And as evening came on watched beyond The street, a kennel of trees, Where—as he had dreamed—a plane would drop And bloom fire. Two bucks on that one.
Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book, A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls, Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin. We’re completing our task. The tip I left For the waitress filters down Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat. As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this: You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples From a fruit stand, and what coins Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue, Tickets to a movie in which laughter Is thrown into their faces. If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat. If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom. A tip, a small purchase here and there, And things just keep going. I guess.
My chalk is no longer than a chip of fingernail, Chip by which I must explain this Monday Night the verbs “to get;” “to wear,” “to cut.” I’m not given much, these tired students, Knuckle-wrapped from work as roofers, Sour from scrubbing toilets and pedestal sinks. I’m given this room with five windows, A coffee machine, a piano with busted strings, The music of how we feel as the sun falls, Exhausted from keeping up.  I stand at The blackboard. The chalk is worn to a hangnail, Nearly gone, the dust of some educational bone. By and by I’m Cantiflas, the comic Busybody in front. I say, “I get the coffee.” I pick up a coffee cup and sip. I click my heels and say, “I wear my shoes.” I bring an invisible fork to my mouth And say, “I eat the chicken.” Suddenly the class is alive— Each one putting on hats and shoes, Drinking sodas and beers, cutting flowers And steaks—a pantomime of sumptuous living. At break I pass out cookies. Augustine, the Guatemalan, asks in Spanish, “Teacher, what is ‘tally-ho’?” I look at the word in the composition book. I raise my face to the bare bulb for a blind answer. I stutter, then say, “Es como adelante.” Augustine smiles, then nudges a friend In the next desk, now smarter by one word. After the cookies are eaten, We move ahead to prepositions— “Under,” “over,” and “between,” Useful words when la migra opens the doors Of their idling vans. At ten to nine, I’m tired of acting, And they’re tired of their roles. When class ends, I clap my hands of chalk dust, And two students applaud, thinking it’s a new verb. I tell them adelante, And they pick up their old books. They smile and, in return, cry, “Tally-ho.” As they head for the door.
The incoherent rushing of the train Dulls like a drugged pain Numbs To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums Unfolds Hush within hush until the night withholds Only its darkness.  From the deep Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue. Among The sleeping listeners a sound As leaves stir faintly on the ground When snow falls from a windless sky— A stir A sigh
The star dissolved in evening—the one star The silently  and night O soon now, soon And still the light now  and still now the large Relinquishing  and through the pools of blue Still, still the swallows  and a wind now  and the tree Gathering darkness:  I was small. I lay Beside my mother on the grass, and sleep Came—  slow hooves and dripping with the dark The velvet muzzles, the white feet that move In a dream water  and O soon now soon Sleep and the night.  And I was not afraid. Her hand lay over mine. Her fingers knew Darkness,—and sleep—the silent lands, the far Far off of morning where I should awake.
I speak this poem now with grave and level voice  In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall. I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall  Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise. I praise the fall: it is the human season.  Now No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,  Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,  Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough, But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows  Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:  There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn  Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes. Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves  And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow  We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know  The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves. It is the human season. On this sterile air Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.  I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone. I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.
First there is the wind but not like the familiar wind but long and without lapses or falling away or surges of air as is usual but rather like the persistent pressure of a river or a running tide.  This wind is from the other side and has an odor unlike the odor of the winds with us but like time if time had odor and were cold and carried a bitter and sharp taste like rust on the taste of snow or the fragrance of thunder.  When the air has this taste of time the frontiers are not far from us.  Then too there are the animals. There are always animals under the small trees. They belong neither to our side nor to theirs but are wild and because they are animals of such kind that wildness is unfamiliar in them as the horse for example or the goat and often sheep and dogs and like creatures their wandering there is strange and even terrifying signaling as it does the violation of custom and the subversion of order.  There are also the unnatural lovers the distortion of images the penetration of mirrors and the inarticulate meanings of the dreams. The dreams are in turmoil like a squall of birds.  Finally there is the evasion of those with whom we have come. It is at the frontiers that the companions desert us—that the girl returns to the old country  that we are alone.
To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand. Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think,Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry,Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.
From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward  signs painted Peaches. From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into  the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
1. Through the night  the apples outside my window  one by one let go  their branches and  drop to the lawn. I can’t see, but hear the stem-snap, the plummet through leaves, then the final thump against the ground. Sometimes two  at once, or one  right after another. During long moments of silence I wait and wonder about the bruised bodies,  the terror of diving through air, and  think I’ll go tomorrow to find the newly fallen, but they all look alike lying there dewsoaked, disappearing before me. 2. I lie beneath my window listening  to the sound of apples dropping in the yard, a syncopated code I long to know, which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know the meaning of what I hear, each dull  thud of unseen apple- body, the earth  falling to earth once and forever, over  and over.
In the steamer is the trout  seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.  We shall eat it with rice for lunch,  brothers, sister, my mother who will  taste the sweetest meat of the head,  holding it between her fingers  deftly, the way my father did  weeks ago. Then he lay down  to sleep like a snow-covered road  winding through pines older than him,  without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then.  We walk among carved names that go with photographs on top of the piano at the farm: Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck. We pause at the new grave of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s sister. Last summer we called on her at the nursing home, eighty-seven, and nodding in a blue housedress. We cannot find my grandfather’s grave.  Back at the house where no one lives, we potter and explore the back chamber where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels, pretty boxes, quilts, bottles, books, albums of postcards. Then with a flashlight we descend firm steps to the root cellar—black, cobwebby, huge, with dirt floors and fieldstone walls, and above the walls, holding the hewn sills of the house, enormous granite foundation stones. Past the empty bins for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes, we discover the shelves for canning, a few pale pints of tomato left, and—what is this?—syrup, maple syrup in a quart jar, syrup my grandfather made twenty-five years ago for the last time.  I remember coming to the farm in March in sugaring time, as a small boy. He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart buckets, dangling from each end of a wooden yoke that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them into a vat in the saphouse where fire burned day and night for a week.  Now the saphouse tilts, nearly to the ground, like someone exhausted to the point of death, and next winter when snow piles three feet thick on the roofs of the cold farm, the saphouse will shudder and slide with the snow to the ground.  Today we take my grandfather’s last quart of syrup upstairs, holding it gingerly, and we wash off twenty-five years of dirt, and we pull and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff, dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers in, you and I both, and taste the sweetness, you for the first time, the sweetness preserved, of a dead man in the kitchen he left when his body slid like anyone’s into the ground.
Twelve people, most of us strangers, stand in a room in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari from jars. Then two young men, who cooked him, carry him to the table on a large square of plywood: his body striped, like a tiger cat’s, from the basting, his legs long, much longer than a cat’s, and the striped hide as shiny as vinyl. Now I see his head, as he takes his place at the center of the table, his wide pig’s head; and he looks like the javelina that ran in front of the car, in the desert outside Tucson, and I am drawn to him, my brother the pig, with his large ears cocked forward, with his tight snout, with his small ferocious teeth in a jaw propped open by an apple. How bizarre, this raw apple clenched in a cooked face! Then I see his eyes, his eyes cramped shut, his no-eyes, his eyes like X’s in a comic strip, when the character gets knocked out. This afternoon they read directions from a book: The eyeballs must be removed or they will burst during roasting.
Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders! If one of you found a gap in a stone wall, the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs; mothers and daughters, old grandfather-father, cousins and aunts, small bleating sons— followed onward, stupid as sheep, wherever your leader’s sheep-brain wandered to. My grandfather spent all day searching the valley and edges of Ragged Mountain, calling “Ke-day!” as if he brought you salt, “Ke-day! Ke-day!” * * * When the shirt wore out, and darns in the woolen shirt needed darning, a woman in a white collar cut the shirt into strips and braided it, as she braided her hair every morning. In a hundred years the knees of her great-granddaughter crawled on a rug made from the wool of sheep whose bones were mud, like the bones of the woman, who stares from an oval in the parlor. * * * I forked the brambly hay down to you in nineteen-fifty. I delved my hands deep in the winter grass of your hair. When the shearer cut to your nakedness in April and you dropped black eyes in shame, hiding in barnyard corners, unable to hide, I brought grain to raise your spirits, and ten thousand years wound us through pasture and hayfield together, threads of us woven together, three hundred generations from Africa’s hills to New Hampshire’s. * * * You were not shrewd like the pig. You were not strong like the horse. You were not brave like the rooster. Yet none of the others looked like a lump of granite that grew hair, and none of the others carried white fleece as soft as dandelion seed around a black face, and none of them sang such a flat and sociable song. * * * Now the black-faced sheep have wandered and will not return, even if I should search the valleys and call “Ke-day,” as if I brought them salt. Now the railroad draws a line of rust through the valley. Birch, pine, and maple lean from cellarholes and cover the dead pastures of Ragged Mountain except where machines make snow and cables pull money up hill, to slide back down. * * * At South Danbury Church twelve of us sit— cousins and aunts, sons— where the great-grandfathers of the forty-acre farms filled every pew. I look out the window at summer places, at Boston lawyers’ houses with swimming pools cunningly added to cowsheds, and we read an old poem aloud, about Israel’s sheep, old lumps of wool, and we read that the rich farmer, though he names his farm for himself, takes nothing into his grave; that even if people praise us, because we are successful, we will go under the ground to meet our ancestors collected there in the darkness; that we are all of us sheep, and death is our shepherd, and we die as the animals die.
Between pond and sheepbarn, by maples and watery birches, Rebecca paces a double line of rust in a sandy trench, striding on black creosoted eight-by-eights.  In nineteen-forty-three, wartrains skidded tanks, airframes, dynamos, searchlights, and troops to Montreal. She counted cars from the stopped hayrack at the endless crossing: ninety-nine, one hundred; and her grandfather Ben’s voice shaking with rage and oratory told how the mighty Boston and Maine kept the Statehouse in its pocket.  Today Rebecca walks a line that vanishes, in solitude bypassed by wars and commerce. She remembers the story of the bunting’d day her great-great-great- grandmother watched the first train roll and smoke from Potter Place to Gale with fireworks, cider, and speeches. Then the long rail drove west, buzzing and humming; the hive of rolling stock extended a thousand-car’d perspective from Ohio to Oregon, where men who left stone farms rode rails toward gold.  On this blue day she walks under a high jet’s glint of swooped aluminum pulling its feathery contrail westward. She sees ahead how the jet dies into junk, and highway wastes like railroad. Beside her the old creation retires, hayrack sunk like a rowboat under its fields of hay. She closes her eyes to glimpse the vertical track that rises from the underworld of graves, soul’s ascension connecting dead to unborn, rails that hum with a hymn of continual vanishing where tracks cross.  For she opens her eyes to read on a solitary gravestone next to the rails the familiar names of Ruth and Matthew Bott, born in a Norfolk parish, who ventured the immigrant’s passionate Exodus westward to labor on their own land. Here love builds its mortal house, where today’s wind carries a double scent of heaven and cut hay.
I am the Smoke King I am black! I am swinging in the sky, I am wringing worlds awry; I am the thought of the throbbing mills, I am the soul of the soul-toil kills, Wraith of the ripple of trading rills; Up I’m curling from the sod, I am whirling home to God; I am the Smoke King I am black. I am the Smoke King, I am black! I am wreathing broken hearts, I am sheathing love’s light darts; Inspiration of iron times Wedding the toil of toiling climes, Shedding the blood of bloodless crimes— Lurid lowering ’mid the blue, Torrid towering toward the true, I am the Smoke King, I am black. I am the Smoke King, I am black! I am darkening with song, I am hearkening to wrong! I will be black as blackness can— The blacker the mantle, the mightier the man! For blackness was ancient ere whiteness began. I am daubing God in night, I am swabbing Hell in white: I am the Smoke King I am black. I am the Smoke King I am black! I am cursing ruddy morn, I am hearsing hearts unborn: Souls unto me are as stars in a night, I whiten my black men—I blacken my white! What’s the hue of a hide to a man in his might? Hail! great, gritty, grimy hands— Sweet Christ, pity toiling lands! I am the Smoke King I am black.
Of course you have faced the dilemma: it is announced, they all smirk and rise. If they are ultra, they remove their hats and look ecstatic; then they look at you. What shall you do? Noblesse oblige; you cannot be boorish, or ungracious; and too, after all it is your country and you do love its ideals if not all of its realities. Now, then, I have thought of a way out: Arise, gracefully remove your hat, and tilt your head. Then sing as follows, powerfully and with deep unction. They’ll hardly note the little changes and their feelings and your conscience will thus be saved: My country tis of thee, Late land of slavery,  Of thee I sing. Land where my father’s pride Slept where my mother died, From every mountain side  Let freedom ring! My native country thee Land of the slave set free,  Thy fame I love. I love thy rocks and rills And o’er thy hate which chills, My heart with purpose thrills,  To rise above. Let laments swell the breeze And wring from all the trees  Sweet freedom’s song. Let laggard tongues awake, Let all who hear partake, Let Southern silence quake,  The sound prolong. Our fathers’ God to thee Author of Liberty,  To thee we sing Soon may our land be bright, With Freedom’s happy light Protect us by Thy might,  Great God our King.
Dedicated to Kwame Nkrumah I was a little boy, at home with strangers.  I liked my playmates, and knew well,  Whence all their parents came; From England, Scotland, royal France  From Germany and oft by chance The humble Emerald Isle. But my brown skin and close-curled hair Was alien, and how it grew, none knew; Few tried to say, some dropped a wonderful word or stray; Some laughed and stared. And then it came: I dreamed.  I placed together all I knew All hints and slurs together drew.  I dreamed. I made one picture of what nothing seemed  I shuddered in dumb terror In silence screamed, For now it seemed this I had dreamed; How up from Hell, a land had leaped A wretched land, all scorched and seamed  Covered with ashes, chained with pain  Streaming with blood, in horror lain  Its very air a shriek of death And agony of hurt. Anon I woke, but in one corner of my soul  I stayed asleep. Forget I could not, But never would I remember  That hell-hoist ghost  Of slavery and woe. I lived and grew, I worked and hoped I planned and wandered, gripped and coped  With every doubt but one that slept  Yet clamoured to awaken. I became old; old, worn and gray;  Along my hard and weary way Rolled war and pestilence, war again;  I looked on Poverty and foul Disease  I walked with Death and yet I knew There stirred a doubt: Were all dreams true?  And what in truth was Africa? One cloud-swept day a Seer appeared,  All closed and veiled as me he hailed And bid me make three journeys to the world  Seeking all through their lengthened links  The endless Riddle of the Sphinx. I went to Moscow; Ignorance grown wise taught me Wisdom; I went to Peking: Poverty grown rich Showed me the wealth of Work I came to Accra. Here at last, I looked back on my Dream;  I heard the Voice that loosed The Long-looked dungeons of my soul I sensed that Africa had come Not up from Hell, but from the sum of Heaven’s glory. I lifted up mine eyes to Ghana And swept the hills with high Hosanna; Above the sun my sight took flight  Till from that pinnacle of light I saw dropped down this earth of crimson, green and gold Roaring with color, drums and song. Happy with dreams and deeds worth more than doing  Around me velvet faces loomed  Burnt by the kiss of everlasting suns Under great stars of midnight glory  Trees danced, and foliage sang; The lilies hallelujah rang Where robed with rule on Golden Stool  The gold-crowned Priests with duty done  Pour high libations to the sun And danced to gods. Red blood flowed rare ’neath close-clung hair  While subtle perfume filled the air  And whirls and whirls of tiny curls  Crowned heads. Yet Ghana shows its might and power  Not in its color nor its flower  But in its wondrous breadth of soul  Its Joy of Life Its selfless role Of giving. School and clinic, home and hall  Road and garden bloom and call  Socialism blossoms bold On Communism centuries old. I lifted my last voice and cried  I cried to heaven as I died: O turn me to the Golden Horde  Summon all western nations  Toward the Rising Sun. From reeking West whose day is done,  Who stink and stagger in their dung  Toward Africa, China, India’s strand  Where Kenya and Himalaya stand  And Nile and Yang-tze roll: Turn every yearning face of man. Come with us, dark America: The scum of Europe battened here  And drowned a dream Made fetid swamp a refuge seem: Enslaved the Black and killed the Red  And armed the Rich to loot the Dead;  Worshipped the whores of Hollywood  Where once the Virgin Mary stood And lynched the Christ. Awake, awake, O sleeping world  Honor the sun; Worship the stars, those vaster suns  Who rule the night Where black is bright And all unselfish work is right  And Greed is Sin. And Africa leads on:  Pan Africa!
Spooky summer on the horizon I’m gazing at from my window into the streets That’s where it’s going to be where everyone is walking around, looking around out in the open suspecting each other’s heart to open fire all over the streets  like streets you read about every day who are the network we travel through on the way to the center which is energy filling life and bursting with joy all over the screen  I can’t sit still any longer! I want to go where I’m not feeling so bad Get off this little island before the bridges break (my heart is a sore thing too) No I want to sit in the middle watching movies then go to bed in my head Someone is banging on it with a heavy stick like the enemy who is he going to be turns into a face you can’t recognize then vanishes behind a window behind a gun Like the lonely hero stalking the main street cries out Where are you? I just want to know all the angles of death possible under the American sky! I can hardly see for all the buildings polluting the sky until it changes into a barrage of bottles then clears up for a second while you breathe and you realize you’e still as alive as ever and want to be but would like to be somewhere else perhaps Africa Start all over again as the race gets darker and darker and the world goes on the way I always thought it would For the winner is someone we recognize out of our collective past which is turning over again in the grave  It is so important when one dies you replace her  and never waste a minute
eviction people arrive to haunt me  with descriptions of summer’s wildflowers  how they are carpet of fierce colors I bet you hate to see us they say and yes  I do hate to have to move again especially from here  destruction brought to place of love the uneven smiles that win she’s a business woman  blond tints that glow at sunset as profits rise  alas what labor I employ but to ensure a moment’s joy  sets branches trembling & arms chilled  dear one long returning home, come to clammy feverish details, muffed sorrow  I turn to throw a tear of rage in the pot  never remorse but hint of scruples I’d hope for it is error it is speculation it is real estate  it is the villain and comic slippery words  the work of despotic wills to make money I scream take it take your money! make your money  go on it’s only money, here’s a wall of dry rot  here’s an unfinished ceiling, just a little sunlight peeks through this (lark, no luminance! exquisite St. Etienne  stove doesn’t work icebox either too hot or frozen  firescreen tumbling down kitchen insulation droops is ugly & a mess  ah but love it here, only surface appearances  to complain of, nothing does justice to shape of actual events I love  but a fight against artificiality  its inherent antagonism, bald hatred of moving and problem of thirsty fig tree in Burroughs  apartment wakes me I don’t want to go down there yet  & how to orchestrate the summer properly the problem of distress & not denying pride from it  too atomized to make pleasure of melancholy  & an uncontrollable enthusiasm for throne & altar I want to sit high want simple phalanx  of power independent of everything but free will  & one long hymn in praise of the cabin! it is a confession in me impenetrably walled in  like aesthetics like cosmos an organ of  metaphysics and O this book gives me a headache dear Weston La Barre let’s have an argument  because I see too clearly how rational I must be &  the kernel of my faith corrupted because you have no reliance on the shaman & outlaw  or how depth of mind might be staggering  everywhere except in how important science is science? no he won’t he fooled by visions  whereas I wait for dazzling UFOs they announce  will arrive high in these mountains I repair the portal even invite stray horses in  have a little toy receiving station  that sits by the bed at the edge of night all thoughts to place of love  all worries to this place of love  all gestures to the place of love all agonies to place of love, thaws to place  of love, swarthy valley sealed  in wood, log burst into flame in home of love, all heart’s dints  and machinations, all bellows & pungency  antemundane thoughts to palace of love all liberties, singularity, all imaginings  I weep for, Jack’s sweet almond-eyed daughter to  place of love, & heavy blankets and terracing & yard work & patch work  & tenacity & the best in you  surround me work in me to place my love dear cirques, clear constraint, dissenting  inclinations of a man and a woman, Metonic cycle  all that sweats in rooms, lives in nature requiems & momentum & trimmings of bushes  dried hibiscus & hawks & shyness  brought to this place of love trees rooted fear rooted all roots brought  to place of love, mystery to heart of love  & fibers and fibers in sphere of love a whole world makes  spectators of slow flowering of spring  & summer when you walk to town for eggs and continuous hammerings as new people  arrive & today we notice for first time  a white-crowned sparrow out by the feeder with the chickadees & juncos & I missed  that airplane-dinosaur in dream nervous  to travel again, miss buds pop open to shudder in breeze, their tractability  makes sudden rise of sensibility you are  shuddering too & your boy laugh comes less frequent now you’re drawn into  accountability, will I return to find all  stuff tidy in silver truck ready to go? it’s you in this place I lose  most because it’s here in you I forget  where I am, this place for supernaturals perched high in sky & wind, held by wind in stationary  motion as bluebird we observe over meadow or caught  up with jetstream dipping in valley’s soft cradle power & light & heat & radiance of head it takes  power & light & heat & radiance of head it takes to  make it work while down there someone building replicas of what  it feels like to be a human multitude, fantasy  molded clumsily, spare my loves and love of glorious architecture when you really put  outside in, the feeling of cloud or mountain  or stone having developed an idea of idyllic private life  & sovereignty of spirit over common  empirical demand I tell you about renunciation, I tell you holy  isolation like a river nears ocean to  dissolve and cabin becomes someone’s idea of a good place  discretion you pay for it wasn’t mine either  but sits on me imprints on me forever splendor of fog, snow shut strangers out  gradual turn of season, ground stir, pine  needle tickle your shoulder, peak curve, fresh air.
Art begins with a lie  The separation is you plus me plus what we make  Look into lightbulb, blink, sun’s in your eye I want a rare sky  vantage point free from misconception  Art begins with a lie Nothing to lose, spontaneous rise  of reflection, paint the picture  of a lightbulb, or eye the sun How to fuel the world, then die  Distance yourself from artfulness  How? Art begins with a lie The audience wants to cry  when the actors are real & passionate  Look into footlight, then feed back to eye You fluctuate in an artful body  You try to imitate the world’s glory  Art begins with a lie  That’s the story, sharp speck in the eye.
After the clash of elevator gates And the long sinking, she emerges where, A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare, She looks up toward the window where he waits, Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest Of the huge traffic bound forever west. On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye— Even this other pair whose high romance Had only the duration of a dance, And who, now taking leave with stricken eye, See each in each a whole new life forgone. For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn, Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief And baggage, yet with something like relief, It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas To cancel out their crossing, and unmake The amorous rough and tumble of their wake. We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share The frequent vistas of their large despair, Where love and all are swept to nothingness; Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love Which constant spirits are the keepers of, And which, though taken to be tame and staid, Is a wild sostenuto of the heart, A passion joined to courtesy and art Which has the quality of something made, Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent, Like a rose window or the firmament.
Huru Welandes worc ne geswiceσ? monna ænigum σara σe Mimming can heardne gehealdan. —Waldere An axe angles  from my neighbor’s ashcan; It is hell’s handiwork,  the wood not hickory, The flow of the grain  not faithfully followed. The shivered shaft  rises from a shellheap Of plastic playthings,  paper plates, And the sheer shards  of shattered tumblers That were not annealed  for the time needful. At the same curbside,  a cast-off cabinet Of wavily warped  unseasoned wood Waits to be trundled  in the trash-man’s truck. Haul them off! Hide them!  The heart winces For junk and gimcrack,  for jerrybuilt things And the men who make them  for a little money,  Bartering pride  like the bought boxer Who pulls his punches,  or the paid-off jockey  Who in the home stretch  holds in his horse.  Yet the things themselves  in thoughtless honor Have kept composure,  like captives who would not Talk under torture.  Tossed from a tailgate Where the dump displays  its random dolmens, Its black barrows  and blazing valleys, They shall waste in the weather  toward what they were. The sun shall glory  in the glitter of glass-chips, Foreseeing the salvage  of the prisoned sand,  And the blistering paint  peel off in patches, That the good grain  be discovered again. Then burnt, bulldozed,  they shall all be buried  To the depth of diamonds,  in the making dark Where halt Hephaestus  keeps his hammer And Wayland’s work  is worn away.
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul  Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple  As false dawn.  Outside the open window  The morning air is all awash with angels.  Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,  Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.  Now they are rising together in calm swells  Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear  With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;  Now they are flying in place, conveying The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving  And staying like white water; and now of a sudden  They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there.  The soul shrinks  From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessèd day, And cries,  “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,  Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”  Yet, as the sun acknowledges With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,  The soul descends once more in bitter love  To accept the waking body, saying now In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;  Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,  And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating  Of dark habits,  keeping their difficult balance.”
I. Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye  Stand in a land subdued beyond belief.  Belief might lend them life again. I try Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief To see my spellbound fathers in these men  Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere,  Show but the postures men affected then  And the hermit faces of a finished year. The guns and gear and all are strange until  Beyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees  Verging a road that struggles up a hill.  They’re sycamores.  The long-abated breeze Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound  Of guns and a great forest in distress. Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound  Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness.  II. But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think  How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees  Rode on the back of Simois to sink In the wide waters. Reflect how history’s Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls  Its salvage of the world in shifty waves, Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls And yielding views of its confounded graves To the new moon, the sun, or any eye  That in its shallow shoreward version sees The pebbles charging with a deathless cry  And carageen memorials of trees.  III. Now, old man of the sea,  I start to understand: The will will find no stillness Back in a stilled land. The dead give no command  And shall not find their voice  Till they be mustered by  Some present fatal choice. Let me now rejoice In all impostures, take The shape of lion or leopard, Boar, or watery snake, Or like the comber break,  Yet in the end stand fast  And by some fervent fraud  Father the waiting past, Resembling at the last The self-established tree That draws all waters toward  Its live formality.
for Dore and Adja Under the bronze crown Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet   A serpent has begun to eat, Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down  Past spattered mosses, breaks On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills   The massive third below. It spills In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes  A scrim or summery tent For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose.   Happy in all that ragged, loose Collapse of water, its effortless descent  And flatteries of spray, The stocky god upholds the shell with ease,  Watching, about his shaggy knees, The goatish innocence of his babes at play;  His fauness all the while Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh   Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile  Bent on the sand floor Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come  And go in swift reticulum, More addling to the eye than wine, and more  Interminable to thought Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all   Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall,  Must it not be too simple? Are we not  More intricately expressed In the plain fountains that Maderna set  Before St. Peter’s—the main jet  Struggling aloft until it seems at rest  In the act of rising, until  The very wish of water is reversed,  That heaviness borne up to burst  In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill  With blaze, and then in gauze  Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine  Illumined version of itself, decline, And patter on the stones its own applause?  If that is what men are Or should be, if those water-saints display   The pattern of our areté, What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,  Spangled, and plunging house? They are at rest in fulness of desire  For what is given, they do not tire Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse  And riddled pool below, Reproving our disgust and our ennui   With humble insatiety. Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow  Before the wealthy gate Freezing and praising, might have seen in this   No trifle, but a shade of bliss— That land of tolerable flowers, that state  As near and far as grass Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand   Is worthy of water: the dreamt land Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides  The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies On water; it glides So from the walker, it turns Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you  Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes. The beautiful changes as a forest is changed  By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;  As a mantis, arranged On a green leaf, grows Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves  Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. Your hands hold roses always in a way that says  They are not only yours; the beautiful changes  In such kind ways,  Wishing ever to sunder Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose  For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
(Lord Egremont speaks) It was a way of punishing the house, setting it ablaze in ruddy, golden flames; smoke in billows up the front stairs; walls cringing like leaves.  I say, I am afraid in my own house. Do not believeI started this, it was that man, who was to portray the park alone, mind you, but then became enamored of the music room. And now what have we: floods of fire rolling from room to room, furniture wrecked in seethe, my wife  Lady Amelia turned wraith, God knows what fish and drowning slaves cast up in the tide along with pocket Bibles, snuffboxes, antimacassars, the  familiar bric-a-brac of the well-kept house. Where are Edward, Lavinia, Jane? Why is no one crying, “Fire! Fire!”? Am I alone?  The man has no sense of proportion. He had himself lashed to the mast, once, it is said, on a steamboat off the harbor mouth in full blizzard: sailors blinded by snow, the boat crippled, led by the lead, they damn near died to a man, and he— he was observing “the light at sea,” he said. The painting? “Soapsuds and whitewash,”  the critics described it so. But here, in our house, it is catastrophe  of flame, not weather, he loosed. He is a man in love with last things, clearly,the last things, but never understood the first, it seems to me,  and certainly not the genial medias res of decorous, daily life. What tea-times we’ve known in these chambers, what sonatinas,lieder of an evening, whist, Emmeline embroidering, the hounds calm at the hearth, now all dissolved.  Perhaps there are no flames.  A bloody haze arises, it could be my own eyes that fail. I hear nothing, but fear the upstairs rooms, cramped rooms I have not entered in ages, only remember the draughts, creakings, grime in closet corners,  windows too tight to lean from, the smell  of antique damp. And now, who knows  what acts unroll on narrow beds, on floorboards warped askew? As steam is rising, rising? As heat buoys the house up into an atmosphere  all of its own creation? Who are the participants? Where has Amelia gone?  Why, in this furnace, can I hear no sound,  or feel my own skin begin to peel?
The last string quartet (Leoš Janáček and Kamila Stösslová) She reads romances, she spells poorly, she’s full-breasted,  broad in the beam, matron in a cloche hat, bulky knee-length skirt, apron, thick calves, white stockings, Mary Janes. Her heels go click click on the pavement. She has those dark Gypsy eyes and the wide laugh. He loves it when she tosses her head like that. And here she is in long skirt and embroidered blouse, posing  by her dwarf ornamental orange tree on the balcony: high pale forehead, stacked dark hair, heavy jaw, bust cleaving forward like a prow.  And here she is on holiday with her husband the businessman the perpetual traveller  with the commanding walk and striped tie and blunt mustache. “Two decidedly Jewish types,” writes Zdenka Janáčková, J’s wife: they send her, in the last year of the war,  bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese  from the husband’s military contacts. * “My dear dark dove,” J calls Kamila, “My little one.”  * He has taken dictation from every fountain in Hukvaldy,  where he was born to endless mumbled rosaries of water.  He notes the gush and prattle of the Fox’s Well as the beech tree flashes its sleight of leaf, and fox kits hide in the rocks;  the public fountain, “a fine of ten crowns on those who fail to replace the cover”: and when the cover is replaced the fountain closes her eyes; the castle fountain, handsome, broad and brimming, but scuttled into pipes for manor farm, brewery and slaughterhouse where the stream blurts out in blood; and the little well hidden through tall grass at Kazničov,  springing up through the roots of three lime trees, “Helisov’s Well,” chants the little girl, and he notes that too, the quavering fall  of the name; and watches water bugs skitter and green moss, darkling, at the bottom, and shards of sky.  * Bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese. Kamila knows nothing of music, she worries about her dress  for the première of Jenůfa in Vienna. She has two little boys, Rudi and Otto. Otto the baby swims on her hand and she leans over him, soft as night, one eyebrow tilted up  as at a dream of which she is hardly aware.  * “She was of medium height, dark, curly-haired like a Gypsy woman,”  writes Zdenka, “with great, black bulging eyes. The voice was unpleasant, shrill.”  * —That once again he saw “her raven hair, all loose,” and she was barefoot in the house and she climbed a ladder to pick apricots from the tree  and she refused the gift of the knitted silver bag “And your eye has a strange depth, it’s so deep it doesn’t shine.”  * Night leans hugely. He sleeps alone, in his study, upstairs at the Organ School.  Zdenka sleeps in their villa across the yard.  * He who had scrawled on his cuffs, on envelope scraps, on market paper, in his little pad,  robins’ trills, girls’ chatter at the railway station, fox bark, thrush whistle, hen cackle, kitten mew, bee hum, “the chord of stalagmites covered with hoarfrost,”  the airy, bell-like patter of fountain spray,  scored  in a notebook  years before Kamila  in a notebook  2 A.M. 24 February 1903  his daughter’s dying   words—  Olga—  dying, age 21—  in a notebook—  “Now I remember that I’m supposed to die”  (a little string of quarter notes, B and middle C)—  “What walks we took on the corso”—“We  should say so much—”  He tells her,  “You are the most beautiful among them,” and she smiles,   in his notebook she smiles.  And, down to a G,  “Something gets lost so well, no one can find it.”  In a notebook—  2:45 A.M. 25 February 1903, Olga,  her light hair spread across the pillow,  sighs  “A-y-a,” two drawn out B’s, scrupulously noted by her father,   and in the margin,  “God be with you, my soul.”  * What can be assimilated into song?  * The rivers of Lachia: the River Lubina falls from a ridge of the Radhošť Mountain into an abyss, to seethe of silver, crash of dark; the Ondřejnice dabbles through the village of Mĕrkovice, past mossy banks, shallow, beery-blonde, tepid, where goslings swim dunking for weeds and bugs; and the River Ostravice  is the color of steel, and smites the wrist with cold: and all the Lachian rivers run through cello depths, horn hurtle, foam-spray of glockenspiel,  clash of cymbals at the smoky inn where Sofie Harabisová flies from arm to arm in the glare, smoke, sweat and stamp of feet: “Where is the poet Šťastný or Professor Batĕk or Mrs. Marie Jungova now? Gone, all gone, those who took part that wild summer night, forty-five years ago!”  * Kamila reads romances. “There’s no love just innocent  friendship. My husband’s  away all the time he’s always  got things to do.”  * “Your raven hair— I write these lines so they’ll be read, and yet unread  because unanswered. So it’s like a stone falling into water—” “You’re the star I look for in evening—”  “I was your shadow—”  “Even thoughts become flesh—” in the fountain bubbling up among the lime tree roots,  mumbling its prayers over and over, tonguing the stones.  * Now after the war, no need for bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese delivered  by special connection and Czechoslovakia is free in the Sinfonietta, in the razzle of brass: “I’m really an ordinary woman Your heart would stop  aching if you saw me more.” There’s Rudi, there’s Otto, and her husband always dealing in his antiques. No we cannot attend the première in Prague no we cannot.  Now after the war. For that cold: boil three onions with marjoram and lemon peel  and drink it like tea with sugar. Your raven hair. I was your shadow, when you reached for the apricots.  * Gut scrapings: the bow scrapes sunlight from that summer day at the spa at Luhačovice  where she sat on the grass “like an exhausted little bird”: “Dear Madam, Accept these few roses as a token” where she sat on the grass, scrape sunlight  from the inner petals, scrape the dark from  her pupil, so deep it doesn’t shine. Madam: “Silence goes to sleep under every tree.”  Under the tilt of her shadowed brow.  His baby son died those years ago  and Olga’s hair  spreads wide across the pillow where she sighs. He sleeps alone  it’s like a stone  falling.  * Lullaby, bee swarms, gut scraping, fracture, a waltz falters, the schmaltzy tune with raven hair  whispers, breaks off, and the hand she lets him  touch, for the first time, she does not draw away  the first time, “your little hand,” in eleven years, under the linden boughs. “That dark Jewess,” writes Zdenka, “I rather  liked her at first, but I held my position.  You know how artists are. They have to be  handled. I would not   let him go.”  * “These letters were written in fire.” Zdenka must   understand:  Kamila is the Gypsy girl, Káťa Kabanová, the Vixen, Aljeja, the little hidden well by the lime trees at Kazničov,  the military fanfare on the promenade, trumpet, oboe, piccolo squeal when the Austrians march out, the Empire crashes, and the country is,  like the high-wire flute notes, finally, free. Zdenka must acknowledge this:   These letters  were written in fire.  * By now Kamila’s boys have been stuffed into trousers, stiff collars, and neckties.  They’ve grown leggy, their faces are plump. It’s a question of tempi slightly retarded, a vertigo  the viola suffers, following the violins. Silence goes to sleep under every tree. The cello drags gusts of confetti, repetition, emotion is all repetition pulled by twisted horsehair  out of gut. My dear dark dove, a form of mourning, that too is a form  of repetition. Why don’t you write. So when, those last days, she has come  at last, with little Otto, respectably to visit the upstairs room he has built and furnished for her in his summer cottage in Hukvaldy, furnished according to his dream— “I want to have the painting of those two cherubs, a writing desk, a communal table, a comfortable bed, perhaps of brass, a wardrobe with mirrored doors, a marble wash-stand, and four chairs, each from a different part of the world—”   (the question is, what can be assimilated   into song) she peels oranges, makes tea, they shop in the market and play and walk and August 8, on the walk up the Babí hůra Hill, Otto gets lost in the woods and ravines— Something gets lost so well, no one can find it— and Leoš seeks and seeks the child in drenching rain  as if searching for his own son in the woods and ravines under the wing of her darkly tilting brow and returns  fevered. In a notebook no one writes, no one scores his cough.  10 August 1928 J consents to go  to the hospital in Ostrava pneumonia—deterioration—sedative  What walks we took on the corso   Something gets lost so well   So it’s like a stone  Silence goes to sleep under every tree   I was your shadow   I burned your letters but I keep   the ash No one scored the sleep rattle in Ostrava 12 August 10 A.M. Sunday Kamila at his side, a heavy woman who spells poorly, broad in the beam,  with thick knees and white stockings, who reads romances, who will die of cancer seven years later at 43 and be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Písek.  “And I kissed you  And you are sitting beside me and I am happy and at peace   In such a way do the days pass for the angels.” No one scored the sleep rattle Sunday 12 August.  Only then, by his order, Zdenka  is told and arrives by train.  These letters were written in fire.
I. When his dogs leapt on Actaeon, he  cried (did he cry out?)—He flung his arm to command, they tore his hand  from the wrist stump, tore guts from his belly through the tunic, ripped  the cry from his throat. That’s how we know a god, when the facts  leap at the tenderest innards, and we know the god is what we can’t change. You stood over me as I woke, I opened my eyes, I saw that I’d seen and that it was too  late: the seeing of you in the doorway with weak electric light fanning behind you in the hall, and my room and narrow pallet steeped in shadow were what I couldn’t change, and distantly  I wanted you, and, as distantly, I heard the dogs, baying.  II. And yet the fountain spends itself, and it is  in the clear light of its losing that we seem  to take delight: you dipped your hand in its running braid  to sprinkle my forehead, my lips. Garden deities observed us: three nymphs with moss staining their haunches, a pug-nosed faun. The wound in water closed perfectly around your gesture, erasing it, so that only the glimmer, swiftly  drying, on my face recalled our interruption of the faultless, cold, passionate, perpetual idea of the stream’s descent— which, unlike ours, would always be renewed.  III. I kissed a flame, what did I expect. Those days, you painted in fire. Tangerine, gold:  one would have had to be a pilgrim to walk  through that wall of molten glass. And purification could be conceived, if not  attained, only after many years, in autumn, in a fire greater than yours, though menstrual blood still tinged the threshold and our ex-votos were sordid—scraps of blistered flesh taped to kitsch prayer cards—and neither of us knew  the object of this exercise, except  having, inadvertently, each of us, burned we recognized the smell of wood smoke, the slow swirl flakes of wood ash make in heavy air; and we were ready, each in a private way, to make  the gifts the season required.  Mine was the scene of my young self in your arms, eyes in your eyes, clutched in the effort to give each other away—when I glimpsed behind your pleasure, fear; behind  fear, anger; and knew  in a bolt some gifts conceal a greater gift. I have kept it. Now I am ready to give it back  into darker flame in this season of goldenrod, the ardent weed,  and Queen Anne’s lace in its mantilla of ash.  And yet, how lumpishly, how stupidly I stand. How much that is human will never burn.  IV. And if you should answer? I listened, years before I knew you, to the whine of wind through the high stony pastures above my childhood village; I breathed lavender and thyme and burned my bare legs  on nettles, scraped them on thistles, and rubbed  the sore skin till it reddened all the more. When we walked the uplands together, you burned your hand and I kissed the crimsoning nettle-rash. “We are the Lords of need,” you said Hafiz said, and I believed you, and we were. In the rugs of your country, carmine is crushed  from insects, cochineal; saffron gold is boiled from crocus stamens; and indigo of heaven and fountain pools is soaked, hours upon hours,  from indigo leaves. “Like the angel Harut,” you said, “We are in the calamity of love-desire.” The angel is chained by neck and knees, head down, in the pit of Babel for falling in love. Your carpets told a different story: scarlet and saffron  blush as in Paradise, and God reveals himself in wine, flame, tulips, and the light in a mortal eye. All night you held me, sleepless, on my childhood cot in the stone house; all night the wind seethed through crags and twisted olive trees,  high on the scents of thyme and goat droppings. “All night,” Hafiz sang, “I hope the breeze of dawn will cherish the lovers.”  But the breeze of dawn is the angel of death.  You are in your far landscape now, I am in mine: the wind complains and I can’t understand the words.  And if you should answer?  You, ten years away, in a different wind. “We are in the calamity,” Hafiz sang. “But tell the tale  of the minstrel and of wine, and leave time alone. Time  is a mystery no skill will solve.” We should thread words like pearls, you said, and the grateful sky  would scatter the Pleiades upon us  though we couldn’t see, and that was long ago.  V. The carpet is not a story. It is a place,  garden of crisscrossed pathways, labyrinth,  fountain, pool, and stream. As though the fabric had ripped at the vanishing point  at the top of the street of ashen façades and slate-sloped roofs, you stepped through the gap, out of your own world.  I had already lost my world.  We met in a torn design which we tore further, pulling the tall warp, thread wrapped tightly around our fingers until it bit the flesh  and the rue de Lille unravelled. I know about design: it’s my job, arranging other people’s letters in star charts that phosphoresce in the dark between the closed covers of books. You knew about design from the holes  blown through your country. We spoke in a language of no country on earth. You moved slowly, in shadow, teaching the shadows  to echo my name. You ripped my shirt at the neck.  Was it The Beloved I held, holding you? Down the middle of the carpet the river weaves a thousand gray glimmers into the deeper green.  The river knows about mourning; that’s its job. How many years has it practiced? With such fleet fingers. A man  woke me at dawn this morning, sobbing and cursing in the street,  reeling from sidewalk to gutter and back again. On my long gray street, the rue de Lille, where I still live.
In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour, two figures emerge from their scalloped house carrying sledges that they clap, in turn, against the surface of the bell. By legend they are summer and winter, youth and age, as though the forces of plenty and of loss played equally on the human soul, extracted easily the same low bronze note spreading upward from the encumbrance of the village, past alluvial fields to the pocked highland where cattle shift their massive heads at this dissonance, this faint redundant pressure in the ears, in the air. From the village, the mountain seems a single stone, a single blank completion. Seeing the summit pierce the abstract heavens, we reconstruct the valley on the mountain— a shepherd propped against his crook, birds enthralled on a branch, the branch feathering the edge of the canvas—transposing such forms as can extend the flawed earth and embody us, intact, unaltering, among the soft surprising trees of childhood, mimosa, honey locust and willow. Wood in the midst of woods, the village houses are allied in a formal shape beside a stream, the streets concluding at the monument. Again the ravishing moment of the bell: the townspeople, curious or accustomed, stop to count the strokes, odd or even—the confectioner counting out the lavendar candies for his customer, the butcher, the greengrocer, the surgeon and the constable—as the housewife stands on the stoop, shaking her mop, and sees the dust briefly veil the air, an algebra of swirling particles.
Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves  are strung along a stick, the women standing in the August heat for hours—since first light— under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet  the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt. The older children hand the leaves from the slide,  three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides  waiting in what little shade there is: it’s ten o’clock,  almost dinnertime. They pull the pails of cold lunch  and Mason jars of tea out of the spring when they see the farmer coming from the field, their men  stripped to the waist, polished by sweat and tired as mules.  By afternoon, the loose cotton dresses, even  the headrags are dark with sweat. Still their fingers never miss a stitch, though they’re paid not by the stick but by the day, and the talk—unbroken news of cousins and acquaintances— unwinding with the ball of twine, a frayed snuff-twig  bouncing on one lip, the string paying out through their calluses, the piles of wide green leaves  diminishing, until the men appear with the last slide  and clamber up the rafters of the barn to line the loaded sticks along the tiers. It’s Friday: the farmer pays with a wad of ones and fives,  having turned the mule out to its feed and water,  hung up the stiffened traces and the bit. He checks  again the other barns, already fired, crude ovens  of log and mud where the crop is cured; in that hot dry acrid air, spreads a yellowing leaf  across his palm, rolls an edge in his fingers,  gauging by its texture and its smell how high to drive the fire. His crew is quiet in the pickup truck—did you think they were singing? They are much too tired to even speak,  can barely lick salt from the back of a hand, brush at flies,  hush a baby with a sugartit. And the man who owns this land is also tired. Everyday this week he’s meant to bring home pears  from the old tree by the barn, but now he sees the fruit has fallen, sees the yellow jackets feeding there.  He lights a Lucky, frames a joke for his wife—he’ll say  their banker raised a piss-poor field this year. And she will lean against the doorjamb while he talks, while he scrubs his hands at the tin basin  with a split lemon and a pumice stone, rubs them raw  trying to cut the gummy resin, that stubborn black stain within the green.
... mindful of the unhonored dead —Thomas Gray Here they stood, whom the Kecoughtan first believed gods from another world, one pair of longjohns each, bad-yellow, knotted with lice,  the godless, bandy-legged runts  with ear bit off, or eye gouged,  who killed and prayed over whatever flew, squatted, or swam. In huts hacked from mulberry, pine, and swamp cyprus,  they huddled ripe as hounds. At cockcrow scratched, shuffled marsh paths,  took skiffs and ferried to dead-rise scows,  twenty-footers dutifully designed and of right draft  for oysters, crabs, and croakers.  They were seaworthy. According to diaries hand-scrawled, and terse court records,  our ancestors: barbarous, habitual, Virginians. Some would not sail, came ashore, walked on the land,  kept faces clenched, lay seed and family, moved often, and are gone. Of them this harbor says nothing. Of the sea’s workmen, not much, no brass plate of honor, no monument in the square,  no square, merely the wreckage of a place.  But they stood— proud, black and white, surly in mist at the hovel of the boatwright, arm pointed:  Build me one like that yonder!  Meaning the gray hull I see across a cove, bottom up, canting, nameless now as the hard,  long arm, daddy’s or granddaddy’s, that points, but  known to the one said to crush clams in his palms, thus  got paid, always, who built the derelicts, and who,  barring feud, took stick in hand here, made that grave gouged line of a keel,  then his broad brow lifted seaward, in silence, sometimes summoning a shape in memory, and it hove up, and was  changed some, they whined, but God knows all they wanted, all he made for them was to be a little unlike the drab hulls of the dead ones, but not too much.  Like that one yonder! This was the image he gave them to dream of change,  tomorrow only a guess, the sea’s story their life-stink and bow-slam and stillness, and they  saw how the fair ones grew, quick riddle-riders  our fathers feared, schools that gave us a message sewn on chest, Bible, slate, and this worm-holed future entered blindly as I now have entered his place, feeling  for log-char, back-flung gates of light,  and the builder.  Like that one ... the lies begin, each inventing why he should rise up, he should hack out the joy they dream, his pitch boiled, black  as mud seaming their legs.  Suddenly, I see and take up a cap left as worthless on a stump, its  stained round fitting my head like water. Merely to wait where the builder heaved shards and chips  and abortive clots to the tide’s tongue-lap is to feel the unconceived shape pulse down his arm, into fingers that took up that stick to let loose the ingathered wilderness of dreams: loon, crow, osprey, gull, the man who cannot believe what he sees, but still sees it.  An immense shadow  making over water.  Stick in hand, eyes squint. And  there it is,   the wind cradling of an Eagle, wing-sails, unfurled, bow-chopping white water head on, a creature now there, now gone.  A man, I have to hold my face up, study how  air heats, builds a rising push until the high circle of sight skids out everywhere.  Dreaming change, I understand, almost, the problem: is he not harnessed,  himself, this light flyer, this father designed to sail like a small god, to screech down upon pine-huddled, hungry chicks he must  send off with his lethal, air-buoyed shape? Nothing in him asks what is  over the wave-edge  where our brothers float and sink,  lovely shadows, by the millions. Putting my back to the sea-worn trunk they have left me, I pull the stick through the dirt, and remember the long line, man-weight in it, and dark-buoyed.  It grows with freckling light, with the answering of birds  crying out the only speech we all have above our unfinished country  that looms still in the soul,  that would bear us hence,  out of the water that beats in, out of the water that bore us all here.
In her hand the knife, brisk, brilliant as moon-claw, shaves the flesh. It grazes the white belly just over the heart. Underneath, the coiled fingers are cradling a soft flesh as if it were the jowls of the aged man propped for a while on the bench in the park. The head is not severed, the eyes not out. Blue, they appear to flash odd ways where a tree makes a live shadow. Mostly the eyes are dead. Nothing is in them except the intense blue of sky the tree allows. There is no conspiring of nerves, no least event recalled by a limb’s high arching, or even a girl’s ascension from a forgotten distance of water. But there is something as she lifts the meat. It is enough to draw down her gaze. Now her arm rises against yellow hair fallen white in a childish face. She is still as a leaf barely clinging. I come to her like a cat in the stunned grass and touch her to see the startled, upthrusted gleam of her face. At brow and each cheek like gathered beads of mist scales leap with the sun, and are dead. No word passes between us, but something electric as a flash of steel makes her cry out just once. Squatting at the yard’s edge, she sings beyond any thought. Her knife flies as lethal as love and cuts quickly in like a hurried kiss.
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea, then turned right along  the surf  rounded a naked headland  and returned  along the inlet shore: it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,  crisp in the running sand,  some breakthroughs of sun  but after a bit continuous overcast: the walk liberating, I was released from forms,  from the perpendiculars,  straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends   of sight:  I allow myself eddies of meaning:  yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work:   you can find in my sayings  swerves of action  like the inlet’s cutting edge:  there are dunes of motion, organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance  in the overall wandering of mirroring mind: but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting beyond the account: in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of  primrose  more or less dispersed; disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows of dunes, irregular swamps of reeds, though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ... predominantly reeds: I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,  shutting out and shutting in, separating inside  from outside: I have  drawn no lines:  as manifold events of sand change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape  tomorrow, so I am willing to go along, to accept  the becoming thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish   no walls: by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek  to undercreek: but there are no lines, though  change in that transition is clear  as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,  allowed to occur over a wider range than mental lines can keep: the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:  black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk of air and, earlier, of sun, waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,  caught always in the event of change:   a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals  and ate to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,  picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits: risk is full: every living thing in siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears  the shallows, darts to shore  to stab—what? I couldn’t  see against the black mudflats—a frightened  fiddler crab?  the news to my left over the dunes and reeds and bayberry clumps was  fall: thousands of tree swallows  gathering for flight:  an order held  in constant change: a congregation rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable  as one event,  not chaos: preparations for flight from winter, cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps, beaks at the bayberries  a perception full of wind, flight, curve,  sound:  the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness: the “field” of action with moving, incalculable center: in the smaller view, order tight with shape: blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab: snail shell:  pulsations of order  in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,  broken down, transferred through membranes to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together   and against, of millions of events: this,  so that I make  no form of  formlessness: orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override  or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain  the top of a dune, the swallows could take flight—some other fields of bayberry   could enter fall  berryless) and there is serenity:  no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan, or thought: no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept: terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities  of escape open: no route shut, except in   the sudden loss of all routes:  I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will  not run to that easy victory:  still around the looser, wider forces work:  I will try  to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening  scope, but enjoying the freedom that Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,  that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
Then fled, O brethren, the wicked juba  and wandered wandered far from curfew joys in the Dismal’s night.   Fool of St. Elmo’s fire In scary night I wandered, praying,  Lord God my harshener,  speak to me now or let me die;  speak, Lord, to this mourner. And came at length to livid trees   where Ibo warriors hung shadowless, turning in wind   that moaned like Africa, Their belltongue bodies dead, their eyes   alive with the anger deep in my own heart. Is this the sign,   the sign forepromised me? The spirits vanished. Afraid and lonely   I wandered on in blackness.  Speak to me now or let me die.  Die, whispered the blackness. And wild things gasped and scuffled in   the night; seething shapes of evil frolicked upon the air.  I reeled with fear, I prayed. Sudden brightness clove the preying  darkness, brightness that was  itself a golden darkness, brightness  so bright that it was darkness. And there were angels, their faces hidden   from me, angels at war with one another, angels in dazzling   combat. And oh the splendor, The fearful splendor of that warring.  Hide me, I cried to rock and bramble.  Hide me, the rock, the bramble cried. . . .   How tell you of that holy battle? The shock of wing on wing and sword   on sword was the tumult of  a taken city burning. I cannot  say how long they strove, For the wheel in a turning wheel which is time   in eternity had ceased its whirling, and owl and moccasin,  panther and nameless beast And I were held like creatures fixed   in flaming, in fiery amber. But I saw I saw oh many of   those mighty beings waver, Waver and fall, go streaking down  into swamp water, and the water  hissed and steamed and bubbled and locked   shuddering shuddering over The fallen and soon was motionless.   Then that massive light began a-folding slowly in  upon itself, and I Beheld the conqueror faces and, lo,   they were like mine, I saw they were like mine and in joy and terror   wept, praising praising Jehovah. Oh praised my honer, harshener  till a sleep came over me, a sleep heavy as death. And when  I awoke at last free And purified, I rose and prayed  and returned after a time to the blazing fields, to the humbleness.   And bided my time.
IJesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:  Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,  sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;   horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage:  voyage through death  to life upon these shores.  “10 April 1800—  Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says   their moaning is a prayer for death,  ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.   Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter   to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.”Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:  Standing to America, bringing home   black gold, black ivory, black seed.  Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,   of his bones New England pews are made,   those are altar lights that were his eyes.
Ray’s third new car in half as many years. Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer as I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud.  All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again. Somewhere in the bush near Saint John there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities. One week Ray is crocked. We’ve been through this before.  Even, as a little girl, hands in my dress,Ah punka, you’s my Debby, come and ki me.  Then the road ends in a yard full of dogs. Them’s Indian dogs, Ray says, lookit how they know me.  And they do seem to know him, like I do. His odor— rank beef of fierce turtle pulled dripping from Metagoshe,  and the inflammable mansmell: hair tonic, ashes, alcohol.  Ray dances an old woman up in his arms. Fiddles reel in the phonograph and I sink apart in a corner, start knocking the Blue Ribbons down.  Four generations of people live here. No one remembers Raymond Twobears. So what. The walls shiver, the old house caulked with mud  sails back into the middle of Metagoshe. A three-foot-long snapper is hooked on a fishline,  so mean that we do not dare wrestle him in but tow him to shore, heavy as an old engine. Then somehow Ray pries the beak open and shoves  down a cherry bomb. Lights the string tongue. Headless and clenched in its armor, the snapper is lugged home in the trunk for tomorrow’s soup. Ray rolls it beneath a bush in the backyard and goes in  to sleep his own head off. Tomorrow I find that the animal has dragged itself off. I follow torn tracks up a slight hill and over into a small stream that deepens and widens into a marsh. Ray finds his way back through the room into his arms.  When the phonograph stops, he slumps hard in his hands  and the boys and their old man fold him into the car where he curls around his bad heart, hearing how it knocks  and rattles at the bars of his ribs to break out. Somehow we find our way back. Uncle Ray  sings an old song to the body that pulls him toward home. The gray fins that his hands have become  screw their bones in the dashboard. His face  has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived  for a long time underwater. And the angels come  lowering their slings and litters.
Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.  Boxcars stumbling north in dreams don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.  The rails, old lacerations that we love,  shoot parallel across the face and break  just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross. The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark  less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards  as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts  to be here, cold in regulation clothes. We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun to take us back. His car is dumb and warm. The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts  of ancient punishments lead back and forth. All runaways wear dresses, long green ones, the color you would think shame was. We scrub  the sidewalks down because it's shameful work.  Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs  and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark  face before it hardened, pale, remembering delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.
We watched from the house as the river grew, helpless and terrible in its unfamiliar body.  Wrestling everything into it, the water wrapped around trees until their life-hold was broken. They went down, one by one, and the river dragged off their covering. Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,  snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:  a whole forest pulled through the teeth  of the spillway. Trees surfacing singly, where the river poured off into arteries for fields below the reservation. When at last it was over, the long removal,  they had all become the same dry wood.  We walked among them, the branches  whitening in the raw sun. Above us drifted herons, alone, hoarse-voiced, broken, settling their beaks among the hollows. Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people  moving among us, unable to take their rest.
The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads. —Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows transcribed and edited by Frank Linderman (1932) All night I am the doe, breathing  his name in a frozen field, the small mist of the word drifting always before me. And again he has heard it  and I have gone burning  to meet him, the jacklight  fills my eyes with blue fire;  the heart in my chest explodes like a hot stone. Then slung like a sack in the back of his pickup, I wipe the death scum from my mouth, sit up laughing  and shriek in my speeding grave. Safely shut in the garage, when he sharpens his knife and thinks to have me, like that, I come toward him, a lean gray witch through the bullets that enter and dissolve. I sit in his house drinking coffee till dawn and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps, crawling back into my shadowy body. All day, asleep in clean grasses, I dream of the one who could really wound me.  Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.  Not even with his goodness. If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me. I swear I would never leave him.
Butch once remarked to me how sinister it was  alone, after hours, in the dark of the shop to find me there hunched over two weeks’ accounts  probably smoked like a bacon from all those Pall-Malls. Odd comfort when the light goes, the case lights left on  and the rings of baloney, the herring, the parsley,  arranged in the strict, familiar ways. Whatever intactness holds animals up has been carefully taken, what’s left are the parts.  Just look in the cases, all counted and stacked. Step-and-a-Half Waleski used to come to the shop and ask for the cheap cut, she would thump, sniff, and finger.  This one too old. This one here for my supper.  Two days and you do notice change in the texture. I have seen them the day before slaughter. Knowing the outcome from the moment they enter  the chute, the eye rolls, blood is smeared on the lintel.  Mallet or bullet they lunge toward their darkness. But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.  When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger.  You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there.  That is the knowledge in the hand of a butcher that adds to its weight. Otto Kröger could fell a dray horse with one well-placed punch to the jaw,  and yet it is well known how thorough he was. He never sat down without washing his hands,  and he was a maker, his sausage was echt so that even Waleski had little complaint.  Butch once remarked there was no one so deft  as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved  in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves. How we cling to the bones. Each joint is a web of small tendons and fibers. He knew what I meant  when I told him I felt something pull from the left,  and how often it clouded the day before slaughter. Something queer happens when the heart is delivered.
This is Tarsus, one place like anyplace else.  And this is my circuit, the rodeo, fair. The farmboys blow through here in pickups, wild as horses in their oat sacks.  The women wear spurs. In the trailers the cattle are pounding for air. My room is the same as last year. They always give me  end of the corridor, left, the top floor.  Privacy. Why not. I’ve been through here before. I’m the town’s best customer. A minor attraction. I buy from their stores. Remember this bureau— battered wood, the fake drawer and split mirror?  And even the glass marks, ring within ring  of spilled drinks. When I sit here the widest warped links have a center. Strung out they’re a year’s worth of slack, a tether  that swings around the spine’s dark pole and swings back. Each time I return something’s different, although there’s a few I can always expect. The cracks in the mirror: always more, never less.  The stains in the bedspread have spread. And the rip in the window shade lets through more light,  strange light, since I come here to be in the dark.  Should be taped. A few things can be saved anyhow.  But I don’t want to get into that. I set up my pictures. Mother and Father,  stiffer, more blurred every year. I turn them to the walls when there’s customers, that is the least I can do. What mending there is  occurs in small acts, and after the fact of the damage,  when nothing is ever enough. There is always the scar to remind me  that things were once perfect, at least they were new. I first came here when I was a girl.  It surprised me, the things that two people could do  left alone in a room. Not long and I learned.  I learned what the selves are a man can disown  till he lets them to life in a room. It’s the region’s hard winters, snowed in with the snow  half the year. I’d expect them to think up a few.  But nothing surprises me, not anymore. The plumbing can only get worse with the cold.  It’s true, even summers the water is foul  and flows slowly, a thin brown trickle by noon. Heat pours in the west, freak waves of dry lightning  soak the whole town in a feverish light. Beneath me, the tables of water have dropped  to unheard-of levels. It’s been a long drought. I bend my whole arm to the handle, the valve yawns open but nothing comes out. What else should I  expect. Wrung cloth. The body washing in dust.
You might come here Sunday on a whim.  Say your life broke down. The last good kiss  you had was years ago. You walk these streets  laid out by the insane, past hotels  that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try  of local drivers to accelerate their lives.  Only churches are kept up. The jail  turned 70 this year. The only prisoner  is always in, not knowing what he’s done. The principal supporting business now  is rage. Hatred of the various grays  the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,  The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls  who leave each year for Butte. One good  restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.  The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,  a dance floor built on springs— all memory resolves itself in gaze, in panoramic green you know the cattle eat  or two stacks high above the town,  two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse  for fifty years that won’t fall finally down. Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat so accurate, the church bell simply seems a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?  Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium  and scorn sufficient to support a town,  not just Philipsburg, but towns of towering blondes, good jazz and booze  the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside? Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty  when the jail was built, still laughs  although his lips collapse. Someday soon,  he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.  You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.  The car that brought you here still runs.  The money you buy lunch with, no matter where it’s mined, is silver  and the girl who serves your food is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
The dim boy claps because the others clap. The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.  Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A. Union Station, ’46, sweating through last night.  The dim boy claps because the others clap. Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat.  Isn’t it wrong to be or not be spastic?  Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. I’m laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream  by a savage father and I’m ashamed to look.  The dim boy claps because the others clap. The score is always close, the rally always short.  I’ve left more wreckage than a quake.  Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. The afflicted never cheer in unison. Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.  The dim boy claps because the others clap.
Do not embrace your mind’s new negro friend Or embarrass the blackballed jew with memberships: There must be years of atonement first, and even then You may still be the blundering raconteur With the wrong story, and they may still be free. If you are with them, if even mind is friend, There will be plenty to do: give the liars lessons Who have heard no rumors of truth for a long time But have whatever they hear on good authority, Whether it concerns Chinese women or the arts. Expose the patrons, some of whose best friends Are brothers, and who are never now anonymous: What kind of credit do they expect for that, Ask them, or better, ask their protested brothers, The grateful tenants who can’t get their curtsies right. Finally the injured, who think they have no friend, Who have been convinced by the repeated names That they are jews or negroes or some dark thing: They must be courted with the lover’s touch And as guiltily as if yourself had turned them inward. If you complete this program, you will have friends From all the rich races of your human blood: Meantime, engage in the often friendless struggle. A long war, a pygmy war in ways, But island by island we must go across.
Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over again, like the rented animals in Aïda. In the late morning the land breeze turns and now the extras are driving all the white elephants the other way. What language are these children shouting in? He is lying on the beach listening. The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels. He tries to remember snow noise. Would powder snow ping like that? But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow. Why doesn’t the girl who takes care of the children, a Yale girl without flaw, know the difference between lay and lie? He tries to remember snow, his season. The mind is in charge of things then. Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic, all that openness and swaying. No matter how often you make love in August you’re always aware of genitalia, your own and the half-naked others’. Even with the gracefulest bathers you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises, mammals disporting themselves in a blue element, smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard watches himself awhile, like a blue movie. In the other hemisphere now people are standing up, at work at their easels. There they think about love at night when they take off their serious clothes and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets. Today the children, his own among them, are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese, using the colonial dialect of Brazil. It is just as well, they have all been changed into small shrill marginal animals, he would not want to understand them again until after Labor Day. He just lays there.
Outside the hotel window, unenlightened pigeons weave and dive like Stukas on their prey, apparently some tiny insect brother. (In India, the attainment of nonviolence is considered a proper goal for human beings.) If one of the pigeons should fly into the illusion of my window and survive (the body is no illusion when it’s hurt) he could be taken across town to the bird hospital where Jains, skilled medical men, repair the feathery sick and broken victims. There, in reproof of violence and of nothing else, live Mahavira’s brothers and sisters. To this small, gentle order of monks and nuns it is bright Vishnu and dark Shiva who are illusion. They trust in faith, cognition, and nonviolence to release them from rebirth. They think that birds and animals—like us, some predators, some prey— should be ministered to no less than men and women. The Jains who deal with creatures (and with laymen) wear white, while their more enterprising hermit brothers walk naked and are called the sky-clad. Jains pray to no deity, human kindness being their sole illusion. Mahavira and those twenty-three other airy creatures who turned to saints with him, preached the doctrine of ahimsa, which in our belligerent tongue becomes nonviolence. It’s not a doctrine congenial to snarers and poultrymen, who every day bring to market maimed pheasants. Numbers of these are brought in by the Jain brothers and brought, to grow back wing-tips and illusions, to one of the hospitals succoring such small quarry. When strong and feathered again, the lucky victims get reborn on Sunday mornings to the world’s violence, released from the roofs of these temples to illusion. It is hard for a westerner to speak about men and women like these, who call the birds of the air brothers. We recall the embarrassed fanfare for Francis and his flock. We’re poor forked sky-clad things ourselves and God knows prey to illusion—e.g., I claim these brothers and sisters in India, stemming a little violence, among birds.
Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone. His uncle could have left the farm to him, Or his parents died before he sent them word, Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved. Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. What would you call his feeling for the words That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit. —Pascal, Pensées sur la religion The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here? —Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House Spared by a car or airplane crash or cured of malignancy, people look around with new eyes at a newly praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these. For I’ve been brought back again from the fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie down for long naps. And I’ve also been pardoned miraculously for years by the lava of chance which runs down the world’s gullies, silting us back. Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet happened away. But it’s not this random life only, throwing its sensual astonishments upside down on the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs, not just me being here again, old needer, looking for someone to need, but you, up from the clay yourself, as luck would have it, and inching over the same little segment of earth- ball, in the same little eon, to meet in a room, alive in our skins, and the whole galaxy gaping there and the centuries whining like gnats— you, to teach me to see it, to see it with you, and to offer somebody uncomprehending, impudent thanks.
(In Plaster, with a Bronze Wash) A person is very self-conscious about his head. It makes one nervous just to know it is cast In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last. We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is, Than to the interesting and involute interior: The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria. The things that go on there! Erotic movies are shown To anyone not accompanied by an adult. The marquee out front maintains a superior tone: Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea Cult. The fronts of some heads are extravagantly pretty. These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city. The female head is mounted on rococo props. Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning; This is the first place everybody comes With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning. This particular head, to my certain knowledge Has been taught to read and write, make love and money, Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college, And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny. It was further taught to know and to eschew Error and sin, which it does erratically. This is the place the soul calls home just now. One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.
I. Of Choice Despair is big with friends I love, Hydrogen and burning jews. I give them all the grief I have But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose, Don’t make me say against my glands Or how the world has treated me. Though gay and modest give offense And people grieve pretentiously, More than I hoped to do, I do And more than I deserve I get; What little I attend, I know And it argues order more than not. My desperate friends, I want to tell Them, you take too delicate offense At the stench of time and man’s own smell, It is only the smell of consequence. II. Of Love People love each other and the light Of love gilds but doesn’t alter, People don’t change one another, can scarcely By taking will and thought add a little Now and then to their own statures Which, praise them, they do, So that here we are in all our sizes Flooded in the impartial daylight sometimes, Spotted sometimes in a light we make ourselves, Human, the beams of attention Of social animals at their work Which is loving; and sometimes all dark. The only correction is By you of you, by me of me. People are worth looking at in this light And if you listen what they are saying is, Love me sun out there whoever you are, Chasing me from bed in the morning, Spooking me all day with shadow, Surprising me whenever you fall; Make me conspicuous as I go here, Spotted by however many beams, Now light, finally dark. I fear There is meant to be a lot of darkness,
We need the ceremony of one another,  meals served, more love,  more handling of one another with love, less   casting out of those who are not  of our own household.  ‘This turkey is either not cooked   enough or it’s tough.’ The culture is in late imperial decline.   The children don’t like dark meat or   pepper. They say the mother sometimes   deliberately puts pepper on the things   the grown-ups like better.  Less casting out of those in our own   household with whom we disagree. The cat will not hear of cat food,   he waves it away. He has seen  the big thrush taken from the cold   box, dressed and put in the hot.  ‘If I set the alarm clock, will you turn   on the oven when it goes off?’ then   she went off to see the profane  dancers of the afternoon. It was done. The fact that I don’t like his pictures   should not obscure the facts   that he is a good man  that many admire his work (his canvases   threaten my existence and I hope   mine his, the intolerant bastard)   that we are brothers in humanity   & the art. Often it does, though. The cat has followed Hazard from his studio,   he looks mean. He upbraids  the innocent dog and  all of us, he casts us out.  ‘There’s pepper in this gravy. We’re   supposed to eat dry turkey and you’ve   put pepper in the gravy.’ The meal is served, nevertheless  with felt love, some godless benediction. The grown ones have wine after the other  bottle. They cast out a lot. ‘The dancers  this afternoon were, well, thinky,’  she says. She toys with her glass. ‘He is strictly a one-joke painter,’  he replies, ‘painted that one twenty  years ago and is still putting pepper  on it, ha hah. Finish your turkey  you two and leave a little gravy for someone else.’ The cat is taking notes against  his own household. He watches.  Hazard would like once to see  things with the cat’s eyes, flat. Now it is time to go to bed. Hungry   and alone most go to bed in this   decline and in all others, yet Someone has fed us again and blessed us  with the manners of bohemia. Among barbarians,   a lot is expected of us, ceremony-wise.  We rise to that expectation.
Tonight Hazard’s father and stepmother are having jazz for McGovern. In the old game-room the old liberals listen as the quintet builds crazy houses out of skin and brass, crumbling the house of decorum, everybody likes that. For decades they have paid for the refurbishing of America and they have not got their money’s worth. Now they listen, hopeful, to the hard rock for McGovern. The ceiling in this palace needs fixing, the chalky blue paint is like an old heaven but there are holes and flaking. They had movies here when grandpa was solvent. Hazard desires his wife, the way people on the trains to the death camps were seized by irrational lust. She is the youngest woman in the room, he would like to be in bed with her now, he would like to be president. He has not been to his studio in four days, he asks the bartender, a college boy with a ponytail, for more gin. He stands in the doorway. Forsythia and lilac have overgrown the porch, there is the rich smell of wood-rot. What twenty years will do to untended shrubbery and America and Hazard.
The alternative to flying is cowardice, And what is said against it excuses, excuses; Its want was always heavy in those men’s bodies Who foresaw it in some detail; and failing that, The rest were shown through its skyey heats and eases In sleep, awoke uncertain whether their waking cry Had been falling fear only, or love and falling fear. When the sudden way was shown, its possibility In terms of the familiar at last shown, (How absurdly simple the principle after all!) Any tyrant should have sensed it was controversial: Instrument of freedom; rights, not Wrights; Danger should never be given out publicly. The men could easily have been disposed of, They and their fragile vehicle. Then the sky Would perhaps have darkened, earth shaken, nothing more. In practice the martyrdom has been quiet, statistical, A fair price. This is what airmen believe. The transition to battle was smooth from here. Who resents one bond resents another, And who has unshouldered earth-restraining hand Is not likely to hear out more reasonable tyrannies. The woods where he died were dark even at sunup, Oak and long-needle pine that had come together Earlier, and waited for the event at the field’s edge. At sunset when the sky behind was gay One had seen the lugubrious shapes of the trees, Bronze and terrible, but had never known the reason, Never thought they were waiting for someone in particular. They took him at night, when they were at their darkest. How they at last convinced him is not known: The crafty engine would not fall for their softness, (Oh, where were you then, six hundred cunning horses?) In the end it had torn hungrily through the brush To lie alone in the desired clearing. Nor the wings; (And you, with your wide silver margin of safety?) They were for the field, surely, where they so often Had eased their load to ground. No, the invitation Must have been sent to the aviator in person: Perhaps a sly suggestion of carelessness, A whispered invitation perhaps to death. He was not badly disfigured compared to some, But even a little stream of blood where death is Will whimper across a forest floor, Run through that whole forest shouting. Him now unpersoned, warm, and quite informal, Dead as alive, raise softly sober interns; Lift gently, God, this wholly airborne one. Leads out all his life to this violent wood. Note that he had not fought one public battle, Met any fascist with his skill, but died As it were in bed, the waste conspicuous; This is a costly wreck and costly to happen on: Praise and humility sound through its siren shrieks, And dedication follows in car. The morning came up foolish with pink clouds To say that God counts ours a cunning time, Our losses part of an old secret, somehow no loss.
(Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963) I stand on the ledge where rock runs into the river As the night turns brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned. Here the sea is diluted with river; I watch it slaver Like a dog curing of rabies. Its ravening over, Lickspittle ocean nuzzles the dry ground. (But the dream that woke me was worse than the sea’s gray Slip-slap; there are no such sounds by day.) This crushing of people is something we live with. Daily, by unaccountable whim Or caught up in some harebrained scheme of death, Tangled in cars, dropped from the sky, in flame, Men and women break the pledge of breath: And now under water, gone all jetsam and small In the pressure of oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull. (Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts? The only animal cursed with responsible sleep, We trace disaster always to our own acts. I met a monstrous self trapped in the black deep:All these years, he smiled, I’ve drilled at sea For this crush of water. Then he saved only me.) We invest ships with life. Look at a harbor At first light: with better grace than men In their movements the vessels run to their labors Working the fields that the tide has made green again; Their beauty is womanly, they are named for ladies and queens, Although by a wise superstition these are called After fish, the finned boats, silent and submarine. The crushing of any ship has always been held In dread, like a house burned or a great tree felled. I think of how sailors laugh, as if cold and wet And dark and lost were their private, funny derision And I can judge then what dark compression Astonishes them now, their sunken faces set Unsmiling, where the currents sluice to and fro And without humor, somewhere northeast of here and below. (Sea-brothers, I lower to you the ingenuity of dreams, Strange lungs and bells to escape in; let me stay aboard last—
Limped out of the hot sky a hurt plane, Held off, held off, whirring pretty pigeon, Hit then and scuttled to a crooked stop. The stranger pilot who emerged—this was the seashore, War came suddenly here—talked to the still mechanics Who nodded gravely. Flak had done it, he said, From an enemy ship attacked.  They wheeled it with love Into the dark hangar’s mouth and tended it. Coffee and cake for the pilot then who sat alone In the restaurant, reading the numbered sheets That tell about weather.  After, toward dusk, Mended the stranger plane went back to the sky. His curly-headed picture, and mother’s and medal’s pictures Were all we knew of him after he rose again, Those few electric jewels against the moth and whining sky.
He that had come that morning,  One after the other, Over seven hills, Each of a new color, Came now by the last tree,  By the red-colored valley,  To a gray river Wide as the sea. There at the shingle A listing wherry Awash with dark water;  What should it carry? There on the shelving,  Three dark gentlemen.  Might they direct him?  Three gentlemen. “Cable, friend John, John Cable,”  When they saw him they said,  “Come and be company As far as the far side.” “Come follow the feet,” they said,  “Of your family, Of your old father That came already this way.” But Cable said, “First I must go  Once to my sister again; What will she do come spring  And no man on her garden? She will say ‘Weeds are alive  From here to the Stream of Friday;  I grieve for my brother’s plowing,’ Then break and cry.” “Lose no sleep,” they said, “for that fallow:  She will say before summer, ‘I can get me a daylong man, Do better than a brother.’ ” Cable said, “I think of my wife:  Dearly she needs consoling;  I must go back for a little For fear she die of grieving.” “Cable,” they said, “John Cable,  Ask no such wild favor; Still, if you fear she die soon,  The boat might wait for her.” But Cable said, “I remember:  Out of charity let me Go shore up my poorly mother,  Cries all afternoon.” They said, “She is old and far,  Far and rheumy with years,  And, if you like, we shall take  No note of her tears.” But Cable said, “I am neither  Your hired man nor maid,  Your dog nor shadow Nor your ape to be led.” He said, “I must go back: Once I heard someone say That the hollow Stream of Friday  Is a rank place to lie; And this word, now I remember,  Makes me sorry: have you  Thought of my own body  I was always good to? The frame that was my devotion  And my blessing was, The straight bole whose limbs  Were long as stories— Now, poor thing, left in the dirt  By the Stream of Friday Might not remember me Half tenderly.” They let him nurse no worry; They said, “We give you our word:  Poor thing is made of patience;  Will not say a word.” “Cable, friend John, John Cable,”  After this they said, “Come with no company To the far side. To a populous place, A dense city That shall not be changed  Before much sorrow dry.” Over shaking water Toward the feet of his father,  Leaving the hills’ color And his poorly mother And his wife at grieving  And his sister’s fallow  And his body lying  In the rank hollow, Now Cable is carried  On the dark river;  Nor even a shadow  Followed him over. On the wide river  Gray as the sea Flags of white water  Are his company.
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains The ash the great walker follows the possessors Forever Nothing they will come to is real Nor for long Over the watercourses Like ducks in the time of the ducks The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky Making a new twilight Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead Again again with its pointless sound When the moon finds them they are the color of everything The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed The dead go away like bruises The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands Pain the horizon Remains Overhead the seasons rock They are paper bells Calling to nothing living The possessors move everywhere under Death their star Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows Like thin flames with no light They with no past And fire their only future
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day  When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what
for Wendell Berry Each face in the street is a slice of bread wandering on searching somewhere in the light the true hunger appears to be passing them by they clutch have they forgotten the pale caves they dreamed of hiding in their own caves full of the waiting of their footprints hung with the hollow marks of their groping full of their sleep and their hiding have they forgotten the ragged tunnels they dreamed of following in out of the light to hear step after step the heart of bread to be sustained by its dark breath and emerge to find themselves alone before a wheat field raising its radiance to the moon
All these years behind windows With blind crosses sweeping the tables And myself tracking over empty ground Animals I never saw I with no voice Remembering names to invent for them Will any come back will one Saying yes Saying look carefully yes We will meet again
Matches among other things that were not allowed never would be lying high in a cool blue box that opened in other hands and there they all were bodies clean and smooth blue heads white crowns white sandpaper on the sides of the box scoring fire after fire gone before I could hear the scratch and flare when they were over and catch the smell of the striking I knew what the match would feel like lighting when I was very young a fire engine came and parked in the shadow of the big poplar tree on Fourth Street one night keeping its engine running pumping oxygen to the old woman in the basement when she died the red lights went on burning
Back when it took all day to come up from the curving broad ponds on the plains where the green-winged jaçanas ran on the lily pads easing past tracks at the mouths of gorges crossing villages silted in hollows in the foothills each with its lime-washed church by the baked square of red earth and its talkers eating fruit under trees turning a corner and catching sight at last of inky forests far above steep as faces with the clouds stroking them and the glimmering airy valleys opening out of them waterfalls still roared from the folds of the mountain white and thundering and spray drifted around us swirling into the broad leaves and the waiting boughs once I took a tin cup and climbed the sluiced rocks and mossy branches beside one of the high falls looking up step by step into the green sky from which rain was falling when I looked back from a ledge there were only dripping leaves below me and flowers beside me the hissing cataract plunged into the trees holding on I moved closer left foot on a rock in the water right foot on a rock in deeper water at the edge of the fall then from under the weight of my right foot came a voice like a small bell singing over and over one clear treble syllable I could feel it move I could feel it ring in my foot in my skin everywhere in my ears in my hair I could feel it in my tongue and in the hand holding the cup as long as I stood there it went on without changing when I moved the cup still it went on when I filled the cup in the falling column still it went on when I drank it rang in my eyes through the thunder curtain when I filled the cup again when I raised my foot still it went on and all the way down from wet rock to wet rock green branch to green branch it came with me until I stood looking up and we drank the light water and when we went on we could still hear the sound as far as the next turn on the way over
The housework, the factory work, the work that takes from the body and does not put back. The white-collar work and the dirt of its profits, the terrible politeness of the office worker, the work that robs the viscera to pay the cool surfaces of the brain. All the work that makes love difficult, brings on sleep, drops the body off at the liquor cabinet. All the work that reaches the intestines and sprawls. And the compulsive work after the work is done, those unfillable spaces of the Calvinist, or certain marriage beds.
Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance. —Henry Miller  The back roads I’ve traveled late  at night, alone, a little drunk,  wishing I were someone on whom nothing is lost, are the roads by day I take to the car wash in Hammonton  or to Blue Anchor’s lawnmower repair shop when the self-propel mechanism goes. Fascinating how the lamplight  that’s beckoned from solitary windows gives way to white shutters and occasionally a woman in her yard, bending over something conspicuously in bloom. So much then is duty, duty, duty,  and so much with the sun visor tilted and destination known can be endured. But at night . . . no, even at night  so much can be endured. I’ve known only one man  who left the road, followed an intriguing light  to its source. He told me that he knocked many times  before it became clear to him  he must break down the door.
The Devil’s tour of hell did not include  a factory line where molten lead  spilled into mouths held wide, no electric drill spiraling screws into hands and feet, nor giant pliers  to lower you into simmering vats. Instead, a circle of light opened on your stuffed armchair, whose chintz orchids did not boil and change, and the Devil adjusted  your new spiked antennae almost delicately, with claws curled and lacquered black, before he spread  his leather wings to leap  into the acid-green sky. So your head became a tv hull, a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger  sloppy at the mouth and swollen at the joints  enacted your days in sinuous  slow motion, your lines delivered with a mocking sneer. Sometimes  the frame froze, reversed, began  again: the red eyes of a friend you cursed, your girl child cowered  behind the drapes, parents alive again  and puzzled by this new form. That’s why you clawed your way back to this life.
Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,  and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say  the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love  Lucy
for John Holohan Jesus wound up with his body nailed to a tree— a torment he practically begged for,  or at least did nothing to stop. Pilate watched the crowd go thumbs down  and weary, signed the order.  So centurions laid Jesus flat on a long beam, arms run along the crosspiece.  In each palm a long spike was centered,  a stone chosen to drive it. (Skin tears; the bones start to split.)  Once the cross got propped up,  the body hung heavy, a carcass— in carne, the Latin poets say, in meat.  (—The breastbone a ship’s prow . . .)  At the end the man cried out as men cry. (Tears that fill the eyes  grow dark drop and by drop: One  cries out.) On the third day, the stone rolled back, to reveal  no corpse. History is rife with such hoaxes. (Look at Herodotus.) As to whether he multiplied loaves and fishes, that’s common enough.  Poke seed-corn in a hole and see if more corn doesn’t grow. Two fish in a pond  make more fishes. The altar of reason supports such extravagance. (I don’t even know how electricity works, but put trust  in light switches.) And the prospect  of love cheers me up, as gospel. That some creator might strap on an animal mask to travel our path between birth  and ignominious death—now that makes me less lonely. And the rising up at the end into glory—the white circle of bread  on the meat of each tongue that God might enter us. For 2000-near years  my tribe has lined up at various altars, so dumbly I open this mouth for bread and song.
On the mudroad of plodding American bodies,  my son wove like an antelope from stall  to stall and want to want. I no’ed it all: the wind-up  killer robot and winged alien; knives  hierarchical in a glass case; the blow-up vinyl wolf  bobbing from a pilgrim’s staff. Lured as I was by the bar-b-que’s black smoke,  I got in line. A hog carcass, blistered pink on a spit, made its agonized slow roll,   a metaphor, I thought, for anyone ahead of me—the pasty-faced and broad. I half-longed   for the titanium blade I’d just seen curved like a falcon’s claw. Some truth wanted cutting   in my neighbors’ impermanent flesh. Or so my poisoned soul announced, as if scorn   for the body politic weren’t some outward form of inner scorn,  as if I were fit judge. Lucky my son found the bumper cars. Once I’d hoped   only to stand tall enough to drive my own. Now when the master switch got thrown   and sparks skittered overhead in a lightning web, I felt like Frankenstein or some   newly powered monster. Plus the floor was glossy as ice. Even rammed head-on,  the rubber bumper bounced you off unhurt and into other folks who didn’t mind the jolt, whose faces  all broke smiles, in fact, till the perfect figure-eight I’d started out to execute  became itself an interruption. One face  after another wheeled shining at me from the dark,  each bearing the weight of a whole self.  What pure vessels we are, I thought, once our skulls  shut up their nasty talk. We drove home past corn at full tassel, colossal silos,   a windmill sentinel. Summer was starting. My son’s body slumped like a grain sack against mine.   My chest was all thunder. On the purple sky in rear view, fireworks unpacked—silver   chrysanthemum, another in fuchsia, then plum. Each staccato boom shook the night. My son  jerked in his sleep. I prayed hard to keep  the frail peace we hurtled through, to want no more  than what we had. The road rushed under us. Our lush planet heaved toward day.   Inside my hand’s flesh, anybody’s skeleton gripped the wheel.
for Elizabeth Ryle Immediately cries were heard. These were the loud wailing of infant souls weeping at the very entrance-way; never had they had their share of life’s sweetness for the dark day had stolen them from their mothers’ breasts and plunged them to a death before their time.  —Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI   And then the dark fell and ‘there has never’  I said ‘been a poem to an antibiotic:  never a word to compare with the odes on  the flower of the raw sloe for fever ‘or the devious Africa-seeking tern or the protein treasures of the sea-bed.  Depend on it, somewhere a poet is wasting  his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious ‘emblem instead of the real thing. Instead of sulpha we shall have hyssop dipped  in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb,  so every day the language gets less ‘for the task and we are less with the language.’  I finished speaking and the anger faded  and dark fell and the book beside me lay open at the page Aphrodite comforts Sappho in her love’s duress. The poplars shifted their music in the garden,  a child startled in a dream, my room was a mess— the usual hardcovers, half-finished cups,  clothes piled up on an old chair— and I was listening out but in my head was  a loosening and sweetening heaviness, not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming really  but as ready to believe and still unfevered, calm and unsurprised when she came and stood beside me and I would have known her anywhere  and I would have gone with her anywhere  and she came wordlessly and without a word I went with her down down down without so much as  ever touching down but always, always  with a sense of mulch beneath us, the way of stairs winding down to a river and as we went on the light went on  failing and I looked sideways to be certain  it was she, misshapen, musical— Sappho—the scholiast’s nightingale and down we went, again down  until we came to a sudden rest  beside a river in what seemed to be  an oppressive suburb of the dawn. My eyes got slowly used to the bad light.  At first I saw shadows, only shadows. Then I could make out women and children  and, in the way they were, the grace of love. ‘Cholera, typhus, croup, diptheria’ she said, ‘in those days they racketed in every backstreet and alley of old Europe.  Behold the children of the plague.’ Then to my horror I could see to each nipple some had clipped a limpet shape— suckling darknesses—while others had their arms  weighed down, making terrible pietàs. She took my sleeve and said to me, ‘be careful.  Do not define these women by their work: not as washerwomen trussed in dust and sweating,  muscling water into linen by the river’s edge ‘nor as court ladies brailled in silk on wool and woven with an ivory unicorn  and hung, nor as laundresses tossing cotton,  brisking daylight with lavender and gossip. ‘But these are women who went out like you when dusk became a dark sweet with leaves,  recovering the day, stooping, picking up teddy bears and rag dolls and tricycles and buckets— ‘love’s archaeology—and they too like you  stood boot deep in flowers once in summer  or saw winter come in with a single magpie  in a caul of haws, a solo harlequin.’ I stood fixed. I could not reach or speak to them.  Between us was the melancholy river, the dream water, the narcotic crossing and they had passed over it, its cold persuasions. I whispered, ‘let me be let me at least be their witness,’ but she said  ‘what you have seen is beyond speech,  beyond song, only not beyond love; ‘remember it, you will remember it’ and I heard her say but she was fading fast  as we emerged under the stars of heaven,  ‘there are not many of us; you are dear ‘and stand beside me as my own daughter. I have brought you here so you will know forever  the silences in which are our beginnings,  in which we have an origin like water,’ and the wind shifted and the window clasp  opened, banged and I woke up to find the poetry books stacked higgledy piggledy,  my skirt spread out where I had laid it— nothing was changed; nothing was more clear  but it was wet and the year was late. The rain was grief in arrears; my children  slept the last dark out safely and I wept.
"Yesterday the bird of night did sit, Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace, Hooting and shrieking." —William Shakespeare 1. Imagine waking to a scene of snow so new  not even memories of other snow can mar its silken surface. What other innocence  is quite like this, and who can blame me for refusing to violate such whiteness with the booted cruelty of tracks? 2. Though I cannot leave this house,  I have memorized the view from every window— 23 framed landscapes, containing  each nuance of weather and light.  And I know the measure of every room, not as a prisoner  pacing a cell but as the embryo knows the walls of the womb, free to swim as its body tells it, to nudge  the softly fleshed walls, dreading only the moment of contraction when it will be forced  into the gaudy world. 3. Sometimes I travel as far as the last stone of the path, but every step, as in the children's story, pricks that tender place on the bottom of the foot, and like an ebbing tide with all the obsession of the moon behind it,  I am dragged back. 4. I have noticed in windy fall how leaves are torn from the trees,  each leaf waving goodbye to the oak  or the poplar that housed it; how the moon, pinned to the very center of the window, is like a moth wanting only to break in.  What I mean is this house follows all the laws of lintel and ridgepole,  obeys the commandments of broom  and of needle, custom and grace. It is not fear that holds me here but passion  and the uncrossable moat of moonlight  outside the bolted doors.
An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow  glimmered in the deeper reaches where my son and I could hear the slub  of water riddling through the muck. We’d stumbled on it following a stream,  his first cave made stranger still by a chill that closes on the goblined heart  of a boy inflamed by stories where gnome-clans hoarded underground  bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland,  and eel. And so, grave Hansel paying out his last scraps of bread, he inched inward looking back and gathering himself as he devolved  step by step along the wet-ribbed walls,  the omphalos seepage of a subterranea that dreamed us into its kingdom come,  where like some secret dreams make known the burnt-punk smell  of marijuana cluttered up the air, and just beyond, just close enough to see,  a spur of light that like a dwindling  eyemote disappeared. Then the sound  a human soul makes as it slips out from the throat. Composed in darkness,  my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent  to whisper we could turn back now, but his voice was there before me saying, “Something’s here.” And something was,  something that in that instant rose, and moved off from us, or drew up close.  In either case, my son came to me almost weightlessly at first, then hungry  for what was filling up my arms, the startled, upriding bodyweight  of a boy I’d never before felt rock so solidly into the place I was, blind and hunkered in the earthen air.  I held him only a moment there. We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears,  for weeks to come, settling him back  to sleep at night, or waking him from some troubling dream, I’d hear the soft concussion of an outsized heart- beat I could not decide was mine, or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to.  Or if what happened would happen again, years from now, when he is grown, and I have grown newly strange to him.
24. In the last photograph of my sister, she is  sprawling in the shade, or what shade’s left, on the converted toolshed’s whitewashed steps.  It appears that she has finished for the day,  an oil color of some tall sea pines, backlit  by twilight off the water behind, her lifelong  childlike forest-fear subdued for the moment  by a filtered-through, delaminating blue  loosening the fretwork of branch and crown.  The oversized sweater she always wore is stippled with paint, and her face has the slightly  moonstruck look (backlit, as well, by a thin  gilt wash too finely filtered for the camera’s lens)  of someone who’s stayed up reading late a novel  whose story could be her own.  Moments before, she’d lifted the painting toward the sun, squinting  as she did, imagining—what? we’ll never know— the fading context into which she stared. Then,  unpinning her hair, and leaning back against  the shed, she yawns once and closes her eyes  as if nothing weighed on her thoughts that day,  her shoes kicked off, and an unlit cigarette cupped  in her hand. And at just the instant the shutter  clicks, the shadow of a dog (or a child?) appears  at the far right edge of the picture. To think:  how once she might’ve been amused by this, this perspective from which we’d frame her life  (the perspective from which our own deaths hide)  with who she’d been, was, and was tempted to be.25. And so it continues, day after day, this endless succession of  moments culled haphazard from the staticky dark as though each  were an event unto itself, as though each inscribed some legible  scratch on the frail wax cylinder that kept alive a voice from the  ever-receding past ....  My sister at thirty or thirty-one: stripping off table varnish   while her daughters nap on a folded towel beside her.  In the archangel section of the plaster cast gallery, she holds   her breath until the security guard stops looking her way.  Standing beside the photomat, staring at a strip of pictures,  her look of puzzlement slowly gives way to a look of recognition.  In the middle of the night—I was eight or nine at the time—I wake   to find her patting my head, because she has just had a bad dream.  Visiting hours over, she returns down the hall to her hospital room:   head down, shoulders stooped, her hands clasped behind her neck.  (That same morning, when she started to cry, she somehow managed   to distract herself by repeatedly crossing and uncrossing her legs.)  Overjoyed to be finally going home, then, mid-sentence, falling silent   at the thought of it, as though her mouth had been covered by a hand.  A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open window.   Beneath the sill: a girl’s hushed voice exhorting itself in whispers.  One morning, she leaves the house before dawn. She doesn’t take the car.   By noon she finds herself in the business district of the city—  a taxi is waiting, the driver is holding the door, and she sees that now,   after all these years, she’s about to take the great journey of her life.
Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.  In the great hour of destiny they stand, Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.  Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win  Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives. Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives. I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,  Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats, And mocked by hopeless longing to regain  Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats, And going to the office in the train.
Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,  Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;  Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,  He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain; ‘He was the grandest of them all—was Cain!  ‘A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire;  ‘Swift as a stag; a stallion of the plain, ‘Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’ Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair— A lover with disaster in his face, And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.  ‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace? ...‘God always hated Cain’ ... He bowed his head— The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.
When I have heard small talk about great men I climb to bed; light my two candles; then Consider what was said; and put aside What Such-a-one remarked and Someone-else replied. They have spoken lightly of my deathless friends, (Lamps for my gloom, hands guiding where I stumble,) Quoting, for shallow conversational ends, What Shelley shrilled, what Blake once wildly muttered .... How can they use such names and be not humble? I have sat silent; angry at what they uttered. The dead bequeathed them life; the dead have said What these can only memorize and mumble.
Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon, Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue, Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June. Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year, While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew. Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron’s drone I hear From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip’d rampart seems More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred. I walk the fosse, once manned by bronze and flint-head spear; On war’s imperious wing the shafted sun-ray gleams: One with the warm sweet air of summer stoops the bird. Cloud shadows, drifting slow like heedless daylight dreams, Dwell and dissolve; uncircumstanced they pause and pass. I watch them go. My horse, contented, crops the grass.
Go your seeking, soul. Mine the proven path of time’s foretelling. Yours accordance with some mysteried whole. I am but your passion-haunted dwelling. Bring what news you can, Stranger, loved of body’s humbled heart. Say one whispered word to mortal man From that peace whereof he claims you part. Hither-hence, my guest, Blood and bone befriend, where you abide Till withdrawn to share some timeless quest. I am but the brain that dreamed and died.
Hurt, hurtful, snake-charmed, struck white together half an hour we tear through the half-dark after some sweet core, under, over gravity, some white shore ...spin, hidden one, spin, trusted to me! laugh sore tooth sucked warm, sweet; sweet wine running cool through new dry shrewd turnings of my soul, opening veins. Gull-feathers beating, beating! Gliding. Still, sidelong eye ... wings beating like words against my eyes. And your eyes— o brother-animal, mild, terrible!—your eyes wait, have been waiting, knowing, unknowable, on that sky shore. A life is waiting. Its webbed hand reached out ...Trust me! truth- telling fish of the sky! your hand beyond my hand, your phosphorous trail broken, lost.
In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and see The birds still hopping on the tree, Or hear the grown-up people's feet Still going past me in the street. And does it not seem hard to you, When all the sky is clear and blue, And I should like so much to play, To have to go to bed by day?
When I was down beside the sea A wooden spade they gave to me  To dig the sandy shore. My holes were empty like a cup. In every hole the sea came up  Till it could come no more.
Love is no more. It died as the mind dies: the pure desire Relinquishing the blissful form it wore, The ample joy and clarity expire. Regret is vain. Then do not grieve for what you would efface, The sudden failure of the past, the pain Of its unwilling change, and the disgrace. Leave innocence, And modify your nature by the grief Which poses to the will indifference That no desire is permanent in sense. Take leave of me. What recompense, or pity, or deceit Can cure, or what assumed serenity Conceal the mortal loss which we repeat? The mind will change, and change shall be relief.
1 The autumn shade is thin. Grey leaves lie faint Where they will lie, and, where the thick green was, Light stands up, like a presence, to the sky. The trees seem merely shadows of its age. From off the hill, I hear the logging crew, The furious and indifferent saw, the slow Response of heavy pine; and I recall That goddesses have died when their trees died. Often in summer, drinking from the spring, I sensed in its cool breath and in its voice A living form, darker than any shade And without feature, passionate, yet chill With lust to fix in ice the buoyant rim— Ancient of days, the mother of us all. Now, toward his destined passion there, the strong, Vivid young man, reluctant, may return From suffering in his own experience To lie down in the darkness. In this time, I stay in doors. I do my work. I sleep. Each morning, when I wake, I assent to wake. The shadow of my fist moves on this page, Though, even now, in the wood, beneath a bank, Coiled in the leaves and cooling rocks, the snake Does as it must, and sinks into the cold. 2 Nights grow colder. The Hunter and the Bear Follow their tranquil course outside my window. I feel the gentian waiting in the wood, Blossoms waxy and blue, and blue-green stems Of the amaryllis waiting in the garden. I know, as though I waited what they wait, The cold that fastens ice about the root, A heavenly form, the same in all its changes, Inimitable, terrible, and still, And beautiful as frost. Fire warms my room. Its light declares my books and pictures. Gently, A dead soprano sings Mozart and Bach. I drink bourbon, then go to bed, and sleep In the Promethean heat of summer’s essence. 3 Awakened by some fear, I watch the sky. Compelled as though by purposes they know, The stars, in their blue distance, still affirm The bond of heaven and earth, the ancient way. This old assurance haunts small creatures, dazed In icy mud, though cold may freeze them there And leave them as they are all summer long. I cannot sleep. Passion and consequence, The brutal given, and all I have desired Evade me, and the lucid majesty That warmed the dull barbarian to life. So I lie here, left with self-consciousness, Enemy whom I love but whom his change And his forgetfulness again compel, Impassioned, toward my lost indifference, Faithful, but to an absence. Who shares my bed? Who lies beside me, certain of his waking, Led sleeping, by his own dream, to the day? 4 If I ask you, angel, will you come and lead This ache to speech, or carry me, like a child, To riot? Ever young, you come of age Remote, a pledge of distances, this pang I notice at dusk, watching you subside From tree-tops and from fields. Mysterious self, Image of the fabulous alien, Even in sleep you summon me, even there, When, under his native tree, Odysseus hears His own incredible past and future, whispered By wisdom, but by wisdom in disguise. 5 Thinking of a bravura deed, a place Sacred to a divinity, an old Verse that seems new, I postulate a man Mastered by his own image of himself. Who is it says, I am? Sensuous angel, Vessel of nerve and blood, the impoverished heir Of an awareness other than his own? Not these, but one to come? For there he is, In a steel helmet, raging, fearing his death, Carrying bread and water to a quiet, Placing ten sounds together in one sound: Confirming his election, or merely still, Sleeping, or in a colloquy with the sun. 6 Snow and then rain. The roads are wet. A car Slips and strains in the mire, and I remember Driving in France: weapons-carriers and jeeps; Our clothes and bodies stiffened by mud; our minds Diverted from fear. We labor. Overhead, A plane, Berlin or Frankfurt, now New York. The car pulls clear. My neighbor smiles. He is old. Was this our wisdom, simply, in a chance, In danger, to be mastered by a task, Like groping round a chair, through a door, to bed? 7 A dormant season, and, under the dripping tree, Not sovereign, ordering nothing, letting the past Do with me as it will, I savor place And weather, air and sun. Though Hercules Confronts his nature in his deed, repeats His purposes, and is his will, intact, Magnificent, and memorable, I try The simplest forms of our old poverty. I seek no end appointed in my absence Beyond the silence I already share. 8 I drive home with the books that I will read. The streets are harsh with traffic. Where I once Played as a boy amid old stands of pine, Row after row of houses. Lined by the new Debris of wealth and power, the broken road. Then miles of red clay bank and frugal ground. At last, in the minor hills, my father’s place, Where I can find my way as in a thought— Gardens, the trees we planted, all we share. A Cherokee trail runs north to summer hunting. I see it, when I look up from the page. 9 In nameless warmth, sun light in every corner, Bending my body over my glowing book, I share the room. Is it with a voice or touch Or look, as of an absence, learned by love, Now, merely mine? Annunciation, specter Of the worn out, lost, or broken, telling what future. What vivid loss to come, you change the room And him who reads here. Restless, he will stir, Look round, and see the room renewed and line, Color, and shape as, in desire, they are, Not shadows but substantial light, explicit, Bright as glass, inexhaustible, and true. 1O My shadow moves, until, at noon, I stand Within its seal, as in the finished past. But in the place where effect and cause are joined, In the warmth or cold of my remembering, Of love, of partial freedom, the time to be Trembles and glitters again in windy light. For nothing is disposed. The slow soft wind Tilting the blood-root keeps its gentle edge. The intimate cry, both sinister and tender, Once heard, is heard confined in its reserve. My image of myself, apart, informed By many deaths, resists me, and I stay Almost as I have been, intact, aware, Alive, though proud and cautious, even afraid.
“Who is Apollo?” College student How shall a generation know its story If it will know no other? When, among The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever, Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard, For all to see, the Streptococcus chain. His mind was like Odysseus and Plato Exploring a new cosmos in the old As if he wrote a poem—his enemy Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground His introspection. “Science and peace,” he said, “Will win out over ignorance and war,” But then, the virus mutant in his vein, “Death to the Prussian!” and “revenge, revenge!” How shall my generation tell its story? Their fathers jobless, boys for the CCC And NYA, the future like a stairwell To floors without a window or a door, And then the army: bayonet drill and foxhole; Bombing to rubble cities with textbook names Later to bulldoze streets for; their green bodies Drowned in the greener surfs of rumored France. My childhood friend, George Humphreys, whom I still see Still ten years old, his uncombed hair and grin Moment by moment in the Hürtgen dark Until the one step full in the sniper’s sight, His pastor father emptied by the grief. Clark Harrison, at nineteen a survivor, Never to walk or have a child or be A senator or governor. Herr Wegner, Who led his little troop, their standards high And sabers drawn, against a panzer corps, Emerging from among the shades at Dachau Stacked like firewood for someone else to burn; And Gerd Radomski, listening to broadcasts Of names, a yearlong babel of the missing, To find his wife and children. Then they came home, Near middle age at twenty-two, to find A new reunion of the church and state, Cynical Constantines who need no name, Domestic tranquility beaten to a sword, Sons wasted by another lie in Asia, Or Strangeloves they had feared that August day; And they like runners, stung, behind a flag, Running within a circle, bereft of joy. Hearing of the disaster at Sedan And the retreat worse than the one from Moscow, Their son among the missing or the dead, Pasteur and his wife Mary hired a carriage And, traveling to the east where he might try His way to Paris, stopping to ask each youth And comfort every orphan of the state’s Irascibility, found him at last And, unsurprised, embraced and took him in. Two wars later, the Prussian, once again The son of Mars, in Paris, Joseph Meister— The first boy cured of rabies, now the keeper Of Pasteur’s mausoleum—when commanded To open it for them, though over seventy, Lest he betray the master, took his life. I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies, Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight, Teaching his daughter to use a microscope And musing through a wonder—sacred passion, Practice and metaphysic all the same. And, each year, honor three births: Valéry, Humbling his pride by trying to write well, Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention Repeatedly outside the reach of pride, And him whose mark I witness as a trust. Others he saves but could not save himself— Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates—the spirit Fastened by love upon the human cross.
Goya drew a pig on a wall. The five-year-old hairdresser’s son Saw, graved on a silver tray, The lion; and sunsets were begun. Goya smelt the bull-fight blood. The pupil of the Carmelite Gave his hands to a goldsmith, learned To gild an aureole aright. Goya saw the Puzzel’s eyes: Sang in the street (with a guitar) And climbed the balcony; but Keats (Under the halyards) wrote ‘Bright star.’ Goya saw the Great Slut pick The chirping human puppets up, And laugh, with pendulous mountain lip, And drown them in a coffee cup; Or squeeze their little juices out In arid hands, insensitive, To make them gibber . . . Goya went Among the catacombs to live. He saw gross Ronyons of the air, Harelipped and goitered, raped in flight By hairless pimps, umbrella-winged: Tumult above Madrid at night. He heard the seconds in his clock Crack like seeds, divulge, and pour Abysmal filth of Nothingness Between the pendulum and the floor: Torrents of dead veins, rotted cells, Tonsils decayed, and fingernails: Dead hair, dead fur, dead claws, dead skin: Nostrils and lids; and cauls and veils; And eyes that still, in death, remained (Unlidded and unlashed) aware Of the foul core, and, fouler yet, The region worm that ravins there. Stench flowed out of the second’s tick. And Goya swam with it through Space, Sweating the fetor from his limbs, And stared upon the unfeatured face That did not see, and sheltered naught, But was, and is. The second gone, Goya returned, and drew the face; And scrawled beneath it, ‘This I have known’ . . . And drew four slatterns, in an attic, Heavy, with heads on arms, asleep: And underscribed it, ‘Let them slumber, Who, if they woke, could only weep’ . . .
The house in Broad Street, red brick, with nine rooms the weedgrown graveyard with its rows of tombs the jail from which imprisoned faces grinned at stiff palmettos flashing in the wind the engine-house, with engines, and a tank in which young alligators swam and stank, the bell-tower, of red iron, where the bell gonged of the fires in a tone from hell magnolia trees with whitehot torch of bud the yellow river between banks of mud the tall striped lighthouse like a barber’s pole snake in the bog and locust in the hole worn cigarette cards, of white battleships, or flags, or chorus girls with scarlet lips, jackstones of copper, peach tree in the yard splashing ripe peaches on an earth baked hard children beneath the arc-light in a romp with Run sheep Run, and rice-birds in the swamp, the organ-grinder’s monkey, dancing bears, okras in baskets, Psyche on the stairs— and then the north star nearer, and the snow silent between the now and long ago time like a train that roared from place to place new crowds, new faces, for a single face no longer then the chinaberry tree nor the dark mockingbird to sing his glee nor prawns nor catfish; icicles instead and Indian-pipes, and cider in the shed arbutus under pinewoods in the spring and death remembered as a tropic thing with picture postcard angels to upraise it and trumpet vines and hummingbirds to phrase it then wisdom come, and Shakspere’s voice far off, to be or not, upon the teacher’s cough, the latent heat of melting ice, the brief hypotenuse from ecstasy to griefamo amas, and then the cras amet, the new-found eyes no slumber could forget, Vivien, the affliction of the senses, and conjugation of historic tenses and Shakspere nearer come, and louder heard, and the disparateness of flesh and word, time growing swifter, and the pendulums in shorter savage arcs that beat like drums— hands held, relinquished, faces come and gone, kissed and forgotten, and become but one, old shoes worn out, and new ones bought, the gloves soiled, and so lost in limbo, like the loves— then Shakspere in the heart, the instant speech parting the conscious terrors each from each— wisdom’s dishevelment, the purpose lamed, and purposeless the footsteps eastward aimed the bloodstream always slower, while the clock followed the tired heart with louder knock, fatigue upon the eye, the tardy springs inviting to no longer longed-for things— the birdsong nearer now than Shakspere’s voice, whispers of comfort—Death is near, rejoice!— remember now the red house with nine rooms the graveyard with its trumpetvines and tombs— play jackstones now and let your jackstones be the stars that make Orion’s galaxy so to deceive yourself until you move into that house whose tenants do not love.
Absolute zero: the locust sings: summer’s caught in eternity’s rings: the rock explodes, the planet dies, we shovel up our verities. The razor rasps across the face and in the glass our fleeting race lit by infinity’s lightning wink under the thunder tries to think. In this frail gourd the granite pours the timeless howls like all outdoors the sensuous moment builds a wall open as wind, no wall at all: while still obedient to valves and knobs the vascular jukebox throbs and sobs expounding hope propounding yearning proposing love, but never learning or only learning at zero’s gate like summer’s locust the final hate formless ice on a formless plain that was and is and comes again.
My mind’s a map. A mad sea-captain drew it  Under a flowing moon until he knew it; Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,  And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.  “Here there be tygers.” “Here we buried Jim.”  Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim  About their buried idol, drowned so cold  He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.  A country like the dark side of the moon,  A cider-apple country, harsh and boon,  A country savage as a chestnut-rind, A land of hungry sorcerers.  Your mind? —Your mind is water through an April night, A cherry-branch, plume-feathery with its white,  A lavender as fragrant as your words,  A room where Peace and Honor talk like birds,  Sewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth  Of heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth,  Flutters and beats about those lovely things.  You are the soul, enchanted with its wings,  The single voice that raises up the dead  To shake the pride of angels.  I have said.
All male Quincys are now dead, excepting one. John Wheelwright, “Gestures to the Dead”  1 Vast oblong space dwindled to one solitary rock. On it I saw a heap of hay  impressed with the form  of a man. Beleaguered Captain Stork  with his cane on some quixotic skirmish. Deserters arrived from Fort Necessity  All hope was gone. Howe carrying a white flag of truce  went toward the water. 2 An Apostle in white stood on a pavement of scarlet Around him stretched in deep sleep lay the dark forms of warriors. He was turned away  gazing on a wide waste. His cry of alarm  astonished everyone. 3 A Council of War  in battle array after some siege. I ran to them  shouting as I ran  “Victory!” Night closed in  weedy with flies. The Moon slid between moaning pines  and tangled vines. 4 Neutrals collected bones or journeyed behind on foot shouting at invisible doors  to open. There were guards who approached  stealthy as linxes Always fresh footprints in the forest We closed a chasm then trod the ground firm I carried your name like a huge shield. 5 Because dreams were oracles  agile as wild-cats we leapt on a raft of ice. Children began a wail of despair  we carried them on our shoulders. A wave thrust our raft of ice  against a northern shore. An Indian trail led through wood and thicket Light broke on the forest The hostile town  was close at hand. We screamed our war-cry  and rushed in. 6 It was Him Power of the Clouds  Judge of the Dead The sheep on his right  The goats on his left  And all the angels. But from the book backward on their knees crawled neolithic adventurers known only to themselves.  They blazed with artifice no pin, or kernel, or grain too small to pick up. A baby with a broken face lay on the leaves Hannibal—a rough looking man rushed by with a bundle of sticks. “Ah, this is fortunate,” cried Forebear and helped himself to me. 7 God is an animal figure  Clearly headless. He bewitches his quarry  with ambiguous wounds  The wolf or poor ass  had only stolen straw. O sullen Silence Nail two sticks together and tell resurrection stories. 8 There on the deck, child in her arms  was the girl I had been before She waved then threw her child to me  and jumped But she missed the edge and swirled away. I left you in a group of grownup children and went in search  wandered sandhills snowy nights  calling “Mother, Father” A Dauphin sat down to dine on dust  alone in his field of wheat One war-whoop toppled a State. I thought we were in the right country  but the mountains were gone. We saw five or six people coming toward us  who were savages. Alhough my pen was leaky as a sieve  I scribbled “Arm, Arm!” “Ear.” Barked the Moon. We paddled with hands, planks, and a pencil “Listen—The people surrender” I don’t remember the rest but it was beautiful. We were led ashore by Captain Snow  “I’ll meet you soon—” he said  and vanished in the fog. 9 We cooked trout and perch on forked sticks.  Fire crackled in the forest stillness Fire forms stood out against the gloom  Ancient trunks with wens and deformities  Moss bearded ancients—and thin saplings  The strong, the weak, the old, the young— Now and then some sleeper would get up Warm her hands at the fire and listen to the whisper of a leaf  or the footfall of an animal I kept my gun-match burning when it rained— 10 Holding hands with my skin  I walked the wintry strand.  “Tickle yourself with my stroke” ticked the wiseacre clock. The river sang— “Pelucid dark and deep my waters— come and cross me alone.” The final ruins ahead revealed two figures timidly engraved on one another. 11 I built a house that faced the east I never ventured west  for fear of murder. Eternity dawned. Solitary watcher  of what rose and set I saw only  a Golgotha  of corpses. 12 Experience teaches  the savage revenge an enemy always takes  on forerunners who follow. You were a little army  of unarmed children— A newborn infant sat in the hollow of my pillow. 13 The house was a model of harmony. Children coiled like hedgehogs  or lay on their backs. A doll uttered mysterious oracles  “Put on the kettle.”  “Get up and go home.” The clock was alive  I asked what it ate. “A Cross large enough to crucify us all.”  and so on. Blankets congealed  into icicles We practiced trips, falls, dives into snowdrifts. With a snowshoe for a shovel  I opened the clock and we searched for peace in its deep and private present.  Outside, the world swarmed with sorcerers.
The past will overtake  alien force  our house  formed of my mind  to enter explorer in a forest  of myself for all my learning  Solitude quiet and quieter  fringe of trees by a river bridges black  on the deep  the heaving sea  a watcher stands to see her ship  winging away  Thick noises merge in moonlight  dark ripples  dissolving and defining spheres and snares  Place of importance as in the old days stood on the ramparts of the fort  the open sea outside  alone with water-birds and cattle  knee-deep in a stream grove of reeds  herons watching from the bank henges  whole fields honeycombed with souterrains  human  bones through the gloom  whose sudden mouth surrounded my face  a thread of blue around the coast   feathery moon  eternity swallows up time  peaceable as foam  O cabbage gardens summer’s elegy  sunset survived
II. Conversion I like to be stationary. —Bartleby Who is not a wild Enthusiast  in a green meadow  furious and fell Arriving on the stage of history  I saw madness of the world Stripped of falsification  and corruption anthems were singing in Authorem Father and the Father by my words will I be justified Autobiography I saw Legal righteousness makes us servants  All good hearers Opposers or despisers Night page torn word missing The family silence  gave up the ghost I feared the fall of my child  resting quietly with some hopes  as a bird before any Election—Vocation— Justification— Cape of Wind wreathe  fame out laughing  Seated on a cloud  Seacret drift seacretly behest  the dear She comes to all Guilty  all circling Eye window soul body  Pride cannot bow  Ariadne’s diadem  zodiac helmet belt
We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets. For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts. We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise! And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on. The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty— Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes  As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; —Till elevators drop us from our day ... I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene Never disclosed, but hastened to again, Foretold to other eyes on the same screen; And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced As though the sun took step of thee yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene; All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn ... Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still. And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry, Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path—condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. Under thy shadow by the piers I waited Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City’s fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year ... O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,  Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”  Serge told me in New York one December night. “So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”  “Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” On January 19, 1987, as I very early in the morning drove my sister to Tucson International, suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street  the sliding doors of the fog were opened, and the snow, which had fallen all night, now  sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants,  its mineral-hard colors extinguished,  wine frozen in the veins of the cactus.  * * *The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read:  The syrup from which sacred wine is made is extracted from the saguaros each  summer. The Papagos place it in jars, where the last of it softens, then darkens  into a color of blood though it tastes strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine.  As I tell Sameetah this, we are still seven miles away. “And you know the flowers  of the saguaros bloom only at night?” We are driving slowly, the road is glass.  “Imagine where we are was a sea once. Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly  sapphire, and the past is happening quickly: the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched  out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of the planet’s  origin, the rays hurting each cactus into memory, a human memory for they are human, the Papagos say: not only because they have arms and veins  and secrets. But because they too are a tribe, vulnerable to massacre. “It is like the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,” Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved  arms. And we are driving by the ocean that evaporated here, by its shores, the past now happening so quickly that each stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky  taking rapid notes on us as we turn at Tucson Boulevard and drive into  the airport, and I realize that the earth is thawing from longing into longing and  that we are being forgotten by those arms.  * * * At the airport I stared after her plane  till the window was  again a mirror. As I drove back to the foothills, the fog shut its doors behind me on Alvernon,  and I breathed the dried seas  the earth had lost, their forsaken shores. And I remembered another moment that refers only  to itself:  in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,  perhaps there were sirens,  air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on  singing, and her voice  was coming from far  away, as if she had already died. And just before the lights did flood her  again, melting the frost  of her diamond into rays, it was, like this turning dark of fog, a moment when only a lost sea  can be heard, a time  to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth  and I had lost, of all  that I would lose,  of all that I was losing.
Those intervals between the day’s five calls to prayer the women of the house pulling thick threads through vegetables rosaries of ginger of rustling peppers in autumn drying for winter in those intervals this rug part of Grandma’s dowry folded so the Devil’s shadow would not desecrate Mecca scarlet-woven with minarets of gold but then the sunset call to prayer the servants their straw mats unrolled praying or in the garden in summer on grass the children wanting the prayers to end the women’s foreheads touching Abraham’s silk stone of sacrifice black stone descended from Heaven the pilgrims in white circling it this year my grandmother also a pilgrim in Mecca she weeps as the stone is unveiled she weeps holding on to the pillars (for Begum Zafar Ali)
1 Efficient as Fate, each eye a storm trooper, the cleaners wipe my smile with Comet fingers and tear the plaster off my suicide note. They learn everything from the walls’ eloquent tongues. Now, quick as genocide, they powder my ghost for a cinnamon jar. They burn my posters (India and Heaven in flames), whitewash my voicestains, make everything new, clean as Death. 2 When the landlord brings new tenants, even Memory is a stranger. The woman, her womb solid with the future, instructs her husband’s eyes to clutch insurance policies. They ignore my love affair with the furniture, the corner table that memorized my crossed-out lines. Oh, she’s beautiful, a hard-nippled Madonna. The landlord gives them my autopsy; they sign the lease. The room is beating with bottled infants, and I’ve stopped beating. I’m moving out holding tombstones in my hands.
Feel the patient’s heart Pounding—oh please, this once— —JAMES MERRILL I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.  A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time. Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire?  A former existence untold in real time ... The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?  What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time? Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth— The funeral love comes to hold in real time! They left him alive so that he could be lonely— The god of small things is not consoled in real time. Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys— It’s hell in the city of gold in real time. God’s angels again are—for Satan!—forlorn.  Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time. And who is the terrorist, who the victim? We’ll know if the country is polled in real time. “Behind a door marked DANGER” are being unwound the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time. The throat of the rearview and sliding down it  the Street of Farewell’s now unrolled in real time. I heard the incessant dissolving of silk— I felt my heart growing so old in real time. Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned.  What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time? Now Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words— Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time. (for Daniel Hall)
The jester walked in the garden: The garden had fallen still; He bade his soul rise upward And stand on her window-sill. It rose in a straight blue garment, When owls began to call: It had grown wise-tongued by thinking Of a quiet and light footfall; But the young queen would not listen; She rose in her pale night-gown; She drew in the heavy casement And pushed the latches down. He bade his heart go to her, When the owls called out no more; In a red and quivering garment It sang to her through the door. It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming Of a flutter of flower-like hair; But she took up her fan from the table And waved it off on the air. 'I have cap and bells,’ he pondered, 'I will send them to her and die’; And when the morning whitened He left them where she went by. She laid them upon her bosom, Under a cloud of her hair, And her red lips sang them a love-song Till stars grew out of the air. She opened her door and her window, And the heart and the soul came through, To her right hand came the red one, To her left hand came the blue. They set up a noise like crickets, A chattering wise and sweet, And her hair was a folded flower And the quiet of love in her feet.
We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,  And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,  Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.  Better go down upon your marrow-bones  And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones  Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;  For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet  Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen  The martyrs call the world.’  And thereupon That beautiful mild woman for whose sake  There’s many a one shall find out all heartache  On finding that her voice is sweet and low  Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know— Although they do not talk of it at school— That we must labour to be beautiful.’ I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing  Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring. There have been lovers who thought love should be  So much compounded of high courtesy  That they would sigh and quote with learned looks  Precedents out of beautiful old books;  Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’ We sat grown quiet at the name of love;  We saw the last embers of daylight die,  And in the trembling blue-green of the sky  A moon, worn as if it had been a shell  Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell  About the stars and broke in days and years. I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:  That you were beautiful, and that I strove  To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown  As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men. I swear before the dawn comes round again I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
I have met them at close of day  Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey  Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head  Or polite meaningless words,  Or have lingered awhile and said  Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done  Of a mocking tale or a gibe  To please a companion Around the fire at the club,  Being certain that they and I  But lived where motley is worn:  All changed, changed utterly:  A terrible beauty is born. That woman's days were spent  In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers  When, young and beautiful,  She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school  And rode our wingèd horse;  This other his helper and friend  Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end,  So sensitive his nature seemed,  So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart,  Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn,  Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone  Through summer and winter seem  Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road,  The rider, the birds that range  From cloud to tumbling cloud,  Minute by minute they change;  A shadow of cloud on the stream  Changes minute by minute;  A horse-hoof slides on the brim,  And a horse plashes within it;  The long-legged moor-hens dive,  And hens to moor-cocks call;  Minute by minute they live:  The stone's in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart.  O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part  To murmur name upon name,  As a mother names her child  When sleep at last has come  On limbs that had run wild.  What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death;  Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith  For all that is done and said.  We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead;  And what if excess of love  Bewildered them till they died?  I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride  And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly:  A terrible beauty is born.
I. Daily, the kindergarteners  passed my porch. I loved  their likeness and variety,  their selves in line like little  monosyllables, but huggable— I wasn't meant to grab them, ever, up into actual besmooches or down  into grubbiest tumbles, my lot was not  to have them, in the flesh. Was it better or worse to let their lovability go by untouched, and just  watch over their river of ever- inbraiding relations? I wouldn't mother them or teach. We couldn't be  each other's others; maybe, at removes, each other's each.  II. Each toddler had a hand-hold on a loop of rope, designed to haul the whole school onward  in the sidewalk stream— like pickerel through freshets, at the pull of something else's will, the children spun and bobbled, three years old and four (or were they little drunken Buddhas, buoyant, plump?). They looked now to the right, now to the sky, and now toward nothing (nothing was too small)— they followed a thread of destination, chain of command, order of actual rope that led to what? Who knew? For here and now in one child's eye there was a yellow truck, and in another's was a burning star; but from my own perspective, overhead, adult, where trucks and suns had lost their luster,  they were one whole baby-rush toward a target, toward the law of targets, fledge in the wake of an arrowhead; a bull's-eye bloomed, a red  eight-sided sign. What  did I wish them? Nothing I foresaw.
I owe you an explanation. My first memory isn’t your own of an empty box. My babyhood cabinets held a countlessness of cakes, my backyard rotted into apple glut, windfalls of money-tree, mouthfuls of fib. At puberty I liked the locks, I was the one who made them fast. The yelling in our hallways was about lost money, or lost love, but not lost life. Or so I see it now: in those days I romanticized a risk (I thought I’d die in the alcoholic automobile, die at the hands of nerveless dentistry). Small hearts were printed in the checkbook; when my parents called me dear, they meant expensive. Where were you in all that time? Out looking for your father’s body? Making for your mother’s room? I got my A’s in English, civics, sweetness and light; you got black eyes, and F’s, and nowhere fast. By 1967 when we met (if you could call it making an acquaintance, rape) I was a mal-adjusted gush, a sucker for placebos. Walking home from Central Square, I came to have the good girl’s petty dread: the woman to whose yard you dragged me might detect us, and be furious. More than anything else I wanted no one mad at me. (Propriety, or was it property, I thought to guard: myself I gave away.) And as for you, you had the shakes, were barely seventeen yourself, too raw to get it up (I said don’t be afraid, afraid of what might happen if you failed). And afterwards, in one of those moments it’s hard to tell (funny from fatal) you did a terrible civility: you told me thanks. I’ll never forget that moment all my life. It wasn’t until then, as you were sheathing it to run, I saw the knife.
You take a rock, your hand is hard. You raise your eyes, and there's a pair of small beloveds, caught in pails. The monocle and eyepatch correspond. You take a glove, your hand is soft. The ocean floor was done in lizardskin. Around a log or snag the surface currents run like lumber about a knot. A boat is bent to sea—we favor the medium we're in, our shape's around us. It takes time. At night, the bed alive, what teller of truth could tell the two apart? Lover, beloved, hope is command. Your hand is given, when you take a hand.
Inamoratas, with an approbation, Bestowed his title. Blessed his inclination. He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed. He waits a moment, he designs his reign, That no performance may be plain or vain. Then rises in a clear delirium. He sheds, with his pajamas, shabby days. And his desertedness, his intricate fear, the Postponed resentments and the prim precautions. Now, at his bath, would you deny him lavender Or take away the power of his pine? What smelly substitute, heady as wine, Would you provide? life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some. Would you have flowers in his life? suggest Asters? a Really Good geranium? A white carnation? would you prescribe a Show With the cold lilies, formal chrysanthemum Magnificence, poinsettias, and emphatic Red of prize roses? might his happiest Alternative (you muse) be, after all, A bit of gentle garden in the best Of taste and straight tradition? Maybe so. But you forget, or did you ever know, His heritage of cabbage and pigtails, Old intimacy with alleys, garbage pails, Down in the deep (but always beautiful) South Where roses blush their blithest (it is said) And sweet magnolias put Chanel to shame. No! He has not a flower to his name. Except a feather one, for his lapel. Apart from that, if he should think of flowers It is in terms of dandelions or death. Ah, there is little hope. You might as well— Unless you care to set the world a-boil And do a lot of equalizing things, Remove a little ermine, say, from kings, Shake hands with paupers and appoint them men, For instance—certainly you might as well Leave him his lotion, lavender and oil. Let us proceed. Let us inspect, together With his meticulous and serious love, The innards of this closet. Which is a vault Whose glory is not diamonds, not pearls, Not silver plate with just enough dull shine. But wonder-suits in yellow and in wine, Sarcastic green and zebra-striped cobalt. With shoulder padding that is wide And cocky and determined as his pride; Ballooning pants that taper off to ends Scheduled to choke precisely.  Here are hats Like bright umbrellas; and hysterical ties Like narrow banners for some gathering war. People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know. Below the tinkling trade of little coins The gold impulse not possible to show Or spend. Promise piled over and betrayed. These kneaded limbs receive the kiss of silk. Then they receive the brave and beautiful Embrace of some of that equivocal wool. He looks into his mirror, loves himself— The neat curve here; the angularity That is appropriate at just its place; The technique of a variegated grace. Here is all his sculpture and his art And all his architectural design. Perhaps you would prefer to this a fine Value of marble, complicated stone. Would have him think with horror of baroque, Rococo. You forget and you forget. He dances down the hotel steps that keep Remnants of last night’s high life and distress. As spat-out purchased kisses and spilled beer. He swallows sunshine with a secret yelp. Passes to coffee and a roll or two. Has breakfasted.  Out. Sounds about him smear, Become a unit. He hears and does not hear The alarm clock meddling in somebody’s sleep; Children’s governed Sunday happiness; The dry tone of a plane; a woman’s oath; Consumption’s spiritless expectoration; An indignant robin’s resolute donation Pinching a track through apathy and din; Restaurant vendors weeping; and the L That comes on like a slightly horrible thought. Pictures, too, as usual, are blurred. He sees and does not see the broken windows Hiding their shame with newsprint; little girl With ribbons decking wornness, little boy Wearing the trousers with the decentest patch, To honor Sunday; women on their way From “service,” temperate holiness arranged Ably on asking faces; men estranged From music and from wonder and from joy But far familiar with the guiding awe Of foodlessness.  He loiters.  Restaurant vendors Weep, or out of them rolls a restless glee. The Lonesome Blues, the Long-lost Blues, I Want A Big Fat Mama. Down these sore avenues Comes no Saint-Saëns, no piquant elusive Grieg, And not Tschaikovsky’s wayward eloquence And not the shapely tender drift of Brahms. But could he love them? Since a man must bring To music what his mother spanked him for When he was two: bits of forgotten hate, Devotion: whether or not his mattress hurts: The little dream his father humored: the thing His sister did for money: what he ate For breakfast—and for dinner twenty years Ago last autumn: all his skipped desserts. The pasts of his ancestors lean against Him. Crowd him. Fog out his identity. Hundreds of hungers mingle with his own, Hundreds of voices advise so dexterously He quite considers his reactions his, Judges he walks most powerfully alone, That everything is—simply what it is. But movie-time approaches, time to boo The hero’s kiss, and boo the heroine Whose ivory and yellow it is sin For his eye to eat of. The Mickey Mouse, However, is for everyone in the house. Squires his lady to dinner at Joe’s Eats. His lady alters as to leg and eye, Thickness and height, such minor points as these, From Sunday to Sunday. But no matter what Her name or body positively she’s In Queen Lace stockings with ambitious heels That strain to kiss the calves, and vivid shoes Frontless and backless, Chinese fingernails, Earrings, three layers of lipstick, intense hat Dripping with the most voluble of veils. Her affable extremes are like sweet bombs About him, whom no middle grace or good Could gratify. He had no education In quiet arts of compromise. He would Not understand your counsels on control, nor Thank you for your late trouble.  At Joe’s Eats You get your fish or chicken on meat platters. With coleslaw, macaroni, candied sweets, Coffee and apple pie. You go out full. (The end is—isn’t it?—all that really matters.)  And even and intrepid come  The tender boots of night to home.  Her body is like new brown bread  Under the Woolworth mignonette.  Her body is a honey bowl  Whose waiting honey is deep and hot,  Her body is like summer earth,  Receptive, soft, and absolute ...
Rudolph Reed was oaken. His wife was oaken too. And his two good girls and his good little man Oakened as they grew. “I am not hungry for berries. I am not hungry for bread. But hungry hungry for a house Where at night a man in bed ”May never hear the plaster Stir as if in pain. May never hear the roaches Falling like fat rain. “Where never wife and children need Go blinking through the gloom. Where every room of many rooms Will be full of room. ”Oh my home may have its east or west Or north or south behind it. All I know is I shall know it, And fight for it when I find it.“ It was in a street of bitter white That he made his application. For Rudolph Reed was oakener Than others in the nation. The agent’s steep and steady stare Corroded to a grin.Why, you black old, tough old hell of a man, Move your family in!
To Marc Crawford from whom the commission Whose broken window is a cry of art  (success, that winks aware as elegance, as a treasonable faith) is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première. Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.  Our barbarous and metal little man. “I shall create! If not a note, a hole.  If not an overture, a desecration.” Full of pepper and light and Salt and night and cargoes. “Don’t go down the plank if you see there’s no extension.  Each to his grief, each to his loneliness and fidgety revenge. Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.” The only sanity is a cup of tea.  The music is in minors. Each one other is having different weather. “It was you, it was you who threw away my name!  And this is everything I have for me.” Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,  the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,  runs. A sloppy amalgamation. A mistake. A cliff. A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.
I AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES There they are. Thirty at the corner.  Black, raw, ready. Sores in the city that do not want to heal.II THE LEADERS Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop. They cancel, cure and curry. Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing  the cold bonbon, the rhinestone thing. And hardly in a hurry. Hardly Belafonte, King, Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap.  Bungled trophies. Their country is a Nation on no map. Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop in the passionate noon, in bewitching night are the detailed men, the copious men. They curry, cure, they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts  are not divine, vivacious; the different tins  are intense last entries; pagan argument; translations of the night. The Blackstone bitter bureaus (bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse unfashionable damnations and descent; and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand,  construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.III GANG GIRLSA Rangerette Gang Girls are sweet exotics. Mary Ann uses the nutrients of her orient, but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel  beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove.  (Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will  dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.) Mary is a rose in a whiskey glass. Mary’s Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils  fret frankly, lilac hurries on. Summer is a hard irregular ridge. October looks away. And that’s the Year!  Save for her bugle-love.  Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion. Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger  bringing an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag.  “Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask:  but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask  and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips and help him clutch you. Love’s another departure. Will there be any arrivals, confirmations?  Will there be gleaning? Mary, the Shakedancer’s child from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at  her laboring lover ....  Mary! Mary Ann! Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps!  for sudden blood, aborted carnival, the props and niceties of non-loneliness— the rhymes of Leaning.
It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts that brushed my face and I opened my eyes to see from a cleft in rock His backside; it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep my eyes closed and stand perfectly still in the garden till it leaves me alone, not to contemplate how this century ends and the next begins with no one I know having seen God, but to wonder why I get through most days unscathed, though I live in a time when it might be otherwise, and I grow more fatherless each day. For years now I have come to conclusions without my father’s help, discovering on my own what I know, what I don’t know, and seeing how one cancels the other. I've become a scholar of cancellations. Here, I stand among my father’s roses and see that what punctures outnumbers what consoles, the cruel and the tender never make peace, though one climbs, though one descends petal by petal to the hidden ground no one owns. I see that which is taken away by violence or persuasion. The rose announces on earth the kingdom of gravity. A bird cancels it. My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war. My father said, Never take your both eyes off of the world
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;  Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:  The shapes a bright container can contain! Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek). How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,  She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;  She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;  I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;  She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, Coming behind her for her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing we did make). Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize; She played it quick, she played it light and loose;  My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;  Her several parts could keep a pure repose,  Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose (She moved in circles, and those circles moved). Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:  I’m martyr to a motion not my own; What’s freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.  But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:  (I measure time by how a body sways).
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.  I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.  I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know?  I hear my being dance from ear to ear.  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside me, which are you?  God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,  And learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?  The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do  To you and me; so take the lively air,  And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.  What falls away is always. And is near.  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.  I learn by going where I have to go.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;  I hear my echo in the echoing wood— A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren,  Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!  I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.  That place among the rocks—is it a cave,  Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,  And in broad day the midnight come again!  A man goes far to find out what he is— Death of the self in a long, tearless night,  All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.  My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,  Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.  The mind enters itself, and God the mind,  And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness  as she paused just inside the double glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape  billowing dramatically behind her. What’s this, I thought, lifting a hand until she nodded and started across the parquet;  that’s when I saw she was dressed all in gray,  from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl down to the graphite signature of her shoes.  “Sorry I’m late,” she panted, though  she wasn’t, sliding into the chair, her cape tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel.  We kissed. Then I leaned back to peruse my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole. “How’s business?” I asked, and hazarded  a motherly smile to keep from crying out:  Are you content to conduct your life  as a cliché and, what’s worse, an anachronism, the brooding artist’s demimonde?  Near the rue Princesse they had opened a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt, plus bearded African drums and the occasional miniature  gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had  carved at breakfast with a pocket knife. “Tourists love us. The Parisians, of course”— she blushed—“are amused, though not without  a certain admiration ...”  The Chateaubriand arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute  in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy;  one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming. “Admiration for what?” Wine, a bloody Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks. “Why,  the aplomb with which we’ve managed to support our Art”—meaning he’d convinced her to pose nude for his appalling canvases,  faintly futuristic landscapes strewn  with carwrecks and bodies being chewed by rabid cocker spaniels. “I’d like to come by the studio,” I ventured, “and see the new stuff.”  “Yes, if you wish ...” A delicate rebuff before the warning: “He dresses all in black now. Me, he drapes in blues and carmine— and even though I think it’s kinda cute, in company I tend toward more muted shades.” She paused and had the grace to drop her eyes. She did look ravishing,  spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue,  or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace peering through a fringe of rain at Paris’  dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue  wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral. “And he never thinks of food. I wish I didn’t have to plead with him to eat ....” Fruit  and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes. I stuck with café crème. “This Camembert’s so ripe,” she joked, “it’s practically grown hair,”  mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig  onto a heel of bread. Nothing seemed to fill her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear, speared each tear-shaped lavaliere and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth.  Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted vines and sun poured down out of the south.  “But are you happy?” Fearing, I whispered it  quickly. “What? You know, Mother”— she bit into the starry rose of a fig— “one really should try the fruit here.”I’ve lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.
Safety First. Never point your weapon, keep your finger  off the trigger. Assume a loaded barrel, even when it isn’t, especially when you know it isn’t.  Glocks are lightweight but sensitive; the Keltec has a long pull and a kick. Rifles have penetrating power, viz.: if the projectile doesn’t lodge in its mark, it will travel some distance until it finds shelter; it will certainly pierce your ordinary drywall partition. You could wound the burglar and kill your child  sleeping in the next room, all with one shot.Open Air. Fear, of course. Then the sudden  pleasure of heft—as if the hand  had always yearned for this solemn  fit, this gravitas, and now had found  its true repose. Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it— squeeze between heartbeats.  Look down the sights. Don’t  hold your breath. Don’t hold  anything, just stop breathing. Level the scene with your eyes. Listen. Soft, now: squeeze.Gender Politics. Guys like noise: rapid fire, thunk-and-slide of a blunt-nose silver Mossberg, or double-handed Colts, slugging it out from the hips.  Rambo or cowboy, they’ll whoop it up. Women are fewer, more elegant. They prefer precision: tin cans swing-dancing in the trees, the paper bull’s-eye’s tidy rupture at fifty yards.  (Question: If you were being pursued,  how would you prefer to go down—  ripped through a blanket of fire  or plucked by one incandescent   fingertip?)The Bullet. dark dark no wind no heaven i am not anything not borne on air i bear  myself i can slice the air no wind can hold me let me let me go i can see yes o aperture o light let me off go off straight is my verb straight  my glory road yes now i can feel it the light i am flame velocity o beautiful body i am coming i am yours  before you know it i am home
After IVAN ALBRIGHT’s Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida She arrived as near to virginal as girls got in those days—i.e., young, the requisite dewy cheek flushed at its own daring. He had hoped for a little more edge. But she held the newspaper rolled like a scepter, his advertisement turned up to prove she was there solely at his bidding—and yet the gold band, the photographs ... a mother, then. He placed her in the old garden chair, the same one he went to evenings when the first tug on the cord sent the bulb swinging like the lamps in the medic’s tent over the wounded, swaddled shapes that moaned each time the Screaming Meemies let loose, their calculated shrieks so far away he thought of crickets—while all around him matted gauze and ether pricked up an itch so bad he could hardly sketch each clean curve of tissue opening.I shut my eyes, walk straight to it. Nothing special but it’s there, wicker fraying under my calming fingers.
What did he do except lie under a pear tree, wrapped in a great cloak, and meditate on the heavenly bodies?Venerable, the good people of Baltimore whispered, shocked and more than a little afraid. After all it was said he took to strong drink. Why else would he stay out under the stars all night and why hadn’t he married? But who would want him! Neither Ethiopian nor English, neither lucky nor crazy, a capacious bird humming as he penned in his mind another enflamed letter to President Jefferson—he imagined the reply, polite and rhetorical. Those who had been to Philadelphia reported the statue of Benjamin Franklin before the library his very size and likeness. A wife? No, thank you. At dawn he milked the cows, then went inside and put on a pot to stew while he slept. The clock he whittled as a boy still ran. Neighbors woke him up with warm bread and quilts. At nightfall he took out his rifle—a white-maned figure stalking the darkened breast of the Union—and shot at the stars, and by chance one went out. Had he killed?I assure thee, my dear Sir!  Lowering his eyes to fields sweet with the rot of spring, he could see a government’s domed city rising from the morass and spreading in a spiral of lights....
Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting. Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert. Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips. Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines. They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl, One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door. “Can you feel it yet?” they whisper. I don’t know what to say, again. They chuckle, Patting their sleek bodies with their hands. “Well, maybe next time.” And they rise, Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight, And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.
In the old neighborhood, each funeral parlor is more elaborate than the last. The alleys smell of cops, pistols bumping their thighs, each chamber steeled with a slim blue bullet. Low-rent balconies stacked to the sky. A boy plays tic-tac-toe on a moon crossed by TV antennae, dreams he has swallowed a blue bean. It takes root in his gut, sprouts and twines upward, the vines curling around the sockets and locking them shut. And this sky, knotting like a dark tie? The patroller, disinterested, holds all the beans. August. The mums nod past, each a prickly heart on a sleeve.
I was ill, lying on my bed of old papers, when you came with white rabbits in your arms; and the doves scattered upwards, flying to mothers, and the snails sighed under their baggage of stone . . . Now your tongue grows like celery between us: Because of our love-cries, cabbage darkens in its nest; the cauliflower thinks of her pale, plump children and turns greenish-white in a light like the ocean’s. I was sick, fainting in the smell of teabags, when you came with tomatoes, a good poetry. I am being wooed. I am being conquered by a cliff of limestone that leaves chalk on my breasts.
for Michael S. Harper Billie Holiday’s burned voice had as many shadows as lights, a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, the gardenia her signature under that ruined face. (Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,  magic spoon, magic needle. Take all day if you have to with your mirror and your bracelet of song.) Fact is, the invention of women under siege  has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can’t be free, be a mystery.
(Independence Day, 1964) On her 36th birthday, Thomas had shown her her first swimming pool. It had been his favorite color, exactly—just so much of it, the swimmers’ white arms jutting into the chevrons of high society. She had rolled up her window and told him to drive on, fast. Now this act of mercy: four daughters dragging her to their husbands’ company picnic, white families on one side and them on the other, unpacking the same squeeze bottles of Heinz, the same waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip bags. So he was dead for the first time on Fourth of July—ten years ago had been harder, waiting for something to happen, and ten years before that, the girls like young horses eyeing the track. Last August she stood alone for hours in front of the T.V. set as a crow’s wing moved slowly through the white streets of government. That brave swimming scared her, like Joanna sayingMother, we’re Afro-Americans now! What did she know about Africa? Were there lakes like this one with a rowboat pushed under the pier? Or Thomas’ Great Mississippi with its sullen silks? (There was the Nile but the Nile belonged to God.) Where she came from was the past, 12 miles into town where nobody had locked their back door, and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park under the company symbol, a white foot sprouting two small wings.
Nothing nastier than a white person!  She mutters as she irons alterations in the backroom of Charlotte’s Dress Shoppe.  The steam rising from a cranberry wool  comes alive with perspiration and stale Evening of Paris.Swamp she born from, swamp she swallow, swamp she got to sink again.
He thinks when we die we’ll go to China. Think of it—a Chinese heaven  where, except for his blond hair,  the part that belongs to his father,  everyone will look like him. China, that blue flower on the map,  bluer than the sea his hand must span like a bridge  to reach it. An octave away. I’ve never seen it. It’s as if I can’t sing that far. But look— on the map, this black dot. Here is where we live, on the pancake plains just east of the Rockies, on the other side of the clouds. A mile above the sea, the air is so thin, you can starve on it.  No bamboo trees but the alpine equivalent, reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves.  Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this  as his last stop? I’ve heard the trains at night whistling past our yards, what we’ve come to own, the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars.  It’s still the wild west, mean and grubby, the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley.  With my son the dreamer and my daughter, who is too young to walk,  I’ve sat in this spot and wondered why here? Why in this short life, this town, this creek they call a river? He had never planned to stay,  the boy who helped to build  the railroads for a dollar a day.  He had always meant to go back.  When did he finally know that each mile of track led him further away,  that he would die in his sleep,  dispossessed, having seen Gold Mountain, the icy wind tunneling through it, these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns? It must be in the blood,  this notion of returning. It skipped two generations, lay fallow, the garden an unmarked grave. On a spring sweater day  it’s as if we remember him.  I call to the children.  We can see the mountains  shimmering blue above the air. If you look really hard says my son the dreamer, leaning out from the laundry’s rigging,  the work shirts fluttering like sails,  you can see all the way to heaven.
The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smudged, breathed upon by small children and large animals flicking out hope as she whirls by, flap of tongue, scratch of paw, sweetly reminding her. The man moves earth, the woman sweeps air. Together they pull water out of the other, pull with the muscular ache of the living, hauling from the deep well of the body the rain-swollen, the flame-tipped, the milk-fed— all that cycles through lives moving, lives sweeping, water circulating between them like breath, drawn out of leaves by light.
I set out now  in a box upon the sea.
to Pete Foss, God give him good berth! Shipped deckhand June of ’fifty-one  aboard the freighter Willis Kerrigan,
So there’s a cabbie in Cairo named Deif. So he found 5,000 bucks in the back seat. So meanwhile his daughter was very sick. So he needed the money for medicine bad. So never mind. So he looked for the fare and gave it back. So then the kid died. So they fired him for doing good deeds on company time.  So the President heard it on the radio. So he gave him a locally built Fiat. So I read it in the papers. So you read it here. A poor man has less than weight, has negative gravity, his life a slow explosion. Barely he makes the days meet. Like doors they burst open. Money, job, daughter fly away from him. Irony, injustice, bits of horror come close, cohere. They are with us, the poor, like the inner life which is wantless too; our souls’ white globes float somehow in the blue, levitating and bobbing gently at middle height over the bubbling fleshpots. Our effort to remake the found world as the lost reverie is desire. So, little Yasmin was sick, sick to the point of dying.  She was like a garden coughing and drying. And suddenly her salvation was there, a sheepskin, yes,  a satchel of money meekly baaing from the rear.  A miracle in the offing? That famous retired philanthropist named God  was back in business? was starting to take a hand?  directing things maybe from the back seat? Maybe. Restored to its rich owner (he tipped a fig and a fart, a raspberry of plump nil), lying safely on his lap, the money was mute again, was superfluity, and root and sum and symbol, both lettuce and lump, of all evil. She too approaching that state, Yasmin, a flower, meantime, dying. For the locally assembled daughter a locally assembled Fiat. Too wantless to imagine the money his? Spurned the miracle and thwarted the grace? So loved the law he gave it his only begotten daughter?  Effed and offed his own kid? Saint and monster, poor man and fool, slowly exploding, Deif all this. Yes, one melts at his meekness, scoffs at the folly, trembles for his stupor of bliss of obedience, gasps at his pride, weeps for his wantlessness, grunts when irony that twists the mouth jabs the gut.  Then horror—the dark miracle—roaring, leaps into the front seat, grabs the wheel and runs you down in the street —while you sit on a café terrace innocently reading the paper or, bent above a radio, feel the news waves break against your teeth. Deif in grief. Deif in mourning. Deif bereaved.  Deif in the driver’s seat. Deif without a beef. And daily in four editions and every hour on  the hour, the media heap your dish with images  of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death.  (Our real griefs in their imaginary jargons.)  And you cannot touch a single sufferer, comfort  one victim, or stay any murderous hand.  Consumer of woes, the news confirms you  in guilt, your guilt becomes complicity,  your complicity paralysis, paralysis your guilt; elsewhere always, your life becomes  an alibi, your best innocence a shrug,  your shrug an unacknowledged rage, your rage  is for reality, nothing less. Yes, you feel, murder would be better than hanging around; if only your fist could penetrate the print,  you too might enter the reality of news ....  You switch the radio on, hungrily turn the page  of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. Pasha, President, playboy swing masterfully above our heads—what style! what heroes!—fling themselves  over the headlines into the empyrean beyond our lowly weather—ah, there all the news is blue and blank, those soarings, those mock descents  are them writing their own tickets in heaven. Fortune, true, is spiteful and fickle, and glamour itself must stalk them—but cannot shoot so high as impotence dreams, as resentment wishes. Gorgeous, limber, and free, like our consciences, a law unto themselves, a darker law to us —in their suntans our shadow. And where they fly, the lines of force accompany,  the patterns of deference continue to comfort,  a maggotism distracting irony. Their rods flatten others, their staffs flatter them
Carpenters whose wives have run off Are sometimes discovered weeping on the job.  But even then they don’t complain of their work. Whitman’s father was a carpenter. He was so happy hammering houses That he jumped with a shout from the roof beam  And rolled with a yawp in the timothy. This led his son to conclude wrongly That all workmen are singers. Whitman’s father was weak. He had trouble holding a job. He hoped that the house he was working on  Would be lived in by a man more steady  Than he was, who would earn his sleep,  Dreaming easy under a sound roof With no rain in his face. Of course, there are bad carpenters everywhere.  They don’t care if the walls don’t meet. “After all,” they argue, “We’re not building airplanes.” But Whitman’s father measured his nails.  Many mornings, clacking his plane, He crooned a song to the corners, Urging them on to a snug fit. No needles of heat will escape through a crack  If he can help it, no threads of light.
It must be troubling for the god who loves you  To ponder how much happier you’d be today  Had you been able to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings  Driving home from the office, content with your week— Three fine houses sold to deserving families— Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened  Had you gone to your second choice for college,  Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted  Whose ardent opinions on painting and music  Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.  A life thirty points above the life you’re living  On any scale of satisfaction. And every point  A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.  You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments  So she can save her empathy for the children.  And would you want this god to compare your wife  With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?  It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation  You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight  Than the conversation you’re used to. And think how this loving god would feel  Knowing that the man next in line for your wife  Would have pleased her more than you ever will  Even on your best days, when you really try.  Can you sleep at night believing a god like that Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives  You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is And what could have been will remain alive for him  Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill  Running out in the snow for the morning paper, Losing eleven years that the god who loves you  Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene  Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him  No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend  No closer than the actual friend you made at college, The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight  And write him about the life you can talk about  With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,  Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.
I steal your mailbox, leave gum on your sidewalk. I seduce your sister, ignore your wife. I tear one page from each of your books. I convince you that I am your friend. * When people ask about you, I shake my head. When they tell about you, I nod. * Today, I hang myself from a greased flagpole outside your picture window. Yesterday, I stole your curtains.
It is an afternoon toward the end of August: Autumnal weather, cool following on, And riding in, after the heat of summer, Into the empty afternoon shade and light, The shade full of light without any thickness at all; You can see right through and right down into the depth Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’t Any weight of the summer pressing down. In the backyard of the house next door there’s a kid, Maybe eleven or twelve, and a young man, Visitors at the house whom I don’t know, The house in which the sound of some kind of party, Perhaps even a wedding, is going on. Somehow you can tell from the tone of their voices That they don’t know each other very well— Two guests at the party, one of them, maybe, A friend of the bride or groom, the other the son Or the younger brother, maybe, of somebody there. A couple of blocks away the wash of traffic Dimly sounds, as if we were near the ocean. They’re shooting baskets, amiably and mildly. The noise of the basketball, though startlingly louder Than the voices of the two of them as they play, Is peaceable as can be, something like meter. The earnest voice of the kid, girlish and manly, And the voice of the young man, carefully playing the game Of having a grown-up conversation with him: I can tell the young man is teaching the boy by example, The easy way he dribbles the ball and passes it Back with a single gesture of wrist to make it Easy for the kid to be in synch; Giving and taking, perfectly understood.
The face looking into the room; Behind it light, shaking, like heat Lightning; the face calm and knowing; Seeing, but not seeing who I am; The mouth may be telling something. Something about our helplessness; Something about the confusions of beasts; The consequence of error; systems Haywire, or working; the stars gone All wrong in the body’s courses. Out on the plain of Mars, brilliantly Played under the lights, searched out Beyond any answer, the game went on Far into the night; the bloodiest came Home from the battle seeking the prize. The women were disgraced; hair streaming, Pleading into the staring: buy, buy—; Was it my daughter I was seeing?— The humiliation was pleasing: tears, Laughter, smiles, all mingled together. The light swallowed itself, a balloon Deflating; somewhere in the darkness A murmuring let itself go.
I have a twin who bears my name; Bears it about with him in shame; Who goes a way I would not go; Has knowledge of things I would not know; When I was brave he was afraid; He told the truth, I lied; What’s sweet to me tastes bitter to him; My friends, my friends, he doesn’t love them; I walk the daylight in his dream; He breathes the air of my nightmare.
The unclean spirits cry out in the body Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment— Nobody witnessing could possibly know the event That cast upon her the spell of this enchantment. Almost all the guests are under some kind of enchantment: Of being poor day after day in the same body; Of being witness still to some obscene event; Of listening all the time to somebody’s voice Whispering in the ear things divine or unclean, In the quotidian of unending torment. One has to keep thinking there was some source of torment, Something that happened someplace else, unclean. One has to keep talking in a reasonable voice About things done, say, by a father’s body To or upon the body of Ellen, in enchantment Helpless, still by the unforgotten event Enchanted, still in the old forgotten event A prisoner of love, filthy Ellen in her torment, Guest Ellen in the dining hall in her body, Hands beating the air in her enchantment, Sitting alone, gabbling in her garbled voice The narrative of the spirits of the unclean. She is wholly the possessed one of the unclean. Maybe the spirits came from the river. The enchantment Entered her, maybe, in the Northeast Kingdom. The torment, A thing of the waters, gratuitous event, Came up out of the waters and entered her body And lived in her in torment and cried out in her voice. It speaks itself over and over again in her voice, Cursing maybe or not a familiar obscene event Or only the pure event of original enchantment From the birth of the river waters, the pure unclean Rising from the source of things, in a figure of torment Seeking out Ellen, finding its home in her poor body. Her body witness is, so also is her voice, Of torment coming from unknown event; Unclean is the nature and name of the enchantment.
Lying in bed and waiting to find out Whatever is going to happen: the window shade Making its slightest sound as the night wind, Outside, in the night, breathes quietly on it; It is parental hovering over the infantile; Something like that; it is like being a baby, And over the sleep of the baby there is a father, Or mother, breathing, hovering; the streetlight light In the nighttime branches breathing quietly too; Altering; realtering; it is the body breathing; The crib of knowing: something about what the day Will bring; and something about what the night will hold, Safely, at least for the rest of the night, I pray.
The dark that’s gathering strength these days is submissive, kinky, silken, willing; stretched taut as a trampoline. World events rattle by like circus trains we wave at occasionally, as striped, homed and spotted heads poke out their windows. Feels like I’m wearing a corset, though I haven’t a stitch on. Burn the place setting I ate from, OK? and destroy the easy chair I languished in. Let birds unravel my lingerie for nesting materials. Fingers poised on the piano keys, I can’t think what to play. A dirge, a fugue? What, exactly, are crimes against nature
Whatever we do, whether we light strangers’ cigarettes—it may turn out to be a detective wanting to know who is free  with a light on a lonely street nights— or whether we turn away and get a knife planted between our shoulders for our discourtesy;  whatever we do—whether we marry for love  and wake up to find love is a task, or whether for convenience to find love  must be won over, or we are desperate— whatever we do; save by dying, and there too we are caught, by being planted too close to our parents.
I am looking for a past I can rely on in order to look to death with equanimity. What was given me: my mother’s largeness to protect me, my father’s regularity in coming home from work at night, his opening the door silently and smiling, pleased to be back and the lights on in all the rooms through which I could run freely or sit at ease at table and do my homework undisturbed: love arranged as order directed at the next day. Going to bed was a journey.
For Harvey Shapiro I stand and listen, head bowed, to my inner complaint. Persons passing by think I am searching for a lost coin. You’re fired, I yell inside after an especially bad episode. I’m letting you go without notice or terminal pay. You just lost another chance to make good. But then I watch myself standing at the exit, depressed and about to leave, and wave myself back in wearily, for who else could I get in my place to do the job in dark, airless conditions?
As I reach to close each book lying open on my desk, it leaps up  to snap at my fingers. My legs won’t hold me, I must sit down. My fingers pain me where the thick leaves snapped together  at my touch.  All my life I’ve held books in my hands like children, carefully turning their pages and straightening out  their creases. I use books almost apologetically. I believe I often think their thoughts for them.  Reading, I never know where theirs leave off  and mine begin. I am so much alone  in the world, I can observe the stars  or study the breeze, I can count the steps  on a stair on the way up or down,  and I can look at another human being  and get a smile, knowing it is for the sake of politeness. Nothing must be said of estrangement  among the human race and yet nothing is said at all because of that. But no book will help either. I stroke my desk, its wood so smooth, so patient and still.  I set a typewriter on its surface and begin to type to tell myself my troubles. Against the evidence, I live by choice.
This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing. They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too. We could swap information.
I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body—the fly that tried to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am the one who brought it to an end. Tired of the day and with night coming on I lay my body down beside the fly.
Wind whistling, as it does  in winter, and I think  nothing of it until it snaps a shutter off her bedroom window, spins  it over the roof and down to crash on the deck in back,  like something out of Oz. We look up, stunned—then glad to be safe and have a story,  characters in a fable  we only half-believe. Look, in my surprise I somehow split a wall,  the last one in the house we’re making of gingerbread.  We’ll have to improvise:  prop the two halves forward like an open double door  and with a tube of icing  cement them to the floor. Five days until Christmas, and the house cannot be closed.  When she peers into the cold interior we’ve exposed,  she half-expects to find  three magi in the manger, a mother and her child.  She half-expects to read  on tablets of gingerbread a line or two of Scripture,  as she has every morning  inside a dated shutter on her Advent calendar.  She takes it from the mantel  and coaxes one fingertip under the perforation,  as if her future hinges on not tearing off the flap under which a thumbnail picture  by Raphael or Giorgione,  Hans Memling or David of apses, niches, archways,  cradles a smaller scene  of a mother and her child, of the lidded jewel-box  of Mary’s downcast eyes. Flee into Egypt, cries the angel of the Lord  to Joseph in a dream,for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. While  she works to tile the roof  with shingled peppermints, I wash my sugared hands  and step out to the deck  to lug the shutter in, a page torn from a book  still blank for the two of us,  a mother and her child.
6:48 a.m., and leaden  little jokes about what heroes  we are for getting up at this hour. Quiet. The surf and sandpipers running. T minus ten and counting, the sun  mounting over Canaveral a swollen coral, a color bright as camera lights. We’re blind-  sided by a flash:  shot from the unseen  launching pad, and so from nowhere,  a flame-tipped arrow—no, an airborne pen on fire, its ink a plume of smoke which, even while zooming  upward, stays as oddly solid as the braided tail of a tornado, and lingers there as lightning would  if it could steal its own thunder.  —Which, when it rumbles in, leaves  under or within it a million  firecrackers going off, a thrill of distant pops and rips in delayed reaction, hitting the beach in fading  waves as the last glint of shuttle receives our hands’ eye-shade salute: the giant point of all the fuss soon  smaller than a star.  Only now does a steady, low  sputter above us, a lawn mower  cutting a corner of the sky, grow audible. Look, it’s a biplane!— some pilot’s long-planned, funny tribute  to wonder’s always-dated orbit and the itch of afterthought. I swat my ankle, bitten by a sand gnat:  what the locals call no-see-’ums.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.  The water never formed to mind or voice,  Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion  Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,  That was not ours although we understood,  Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. The sea was not a mask. No more was she.  The song and water were not medleyed sound  Even if what she sang was what she heard,  Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred  The grinding water and the gasping wind;  But it was she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang.  The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.  Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew  It was the spirit that we sought and knew  That we should ask this often as she sang. If it was only the dark voice of the sea  That rose, or even colored by many waves;  If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,  However clear, it would have been deep air,  The heaving speech of air, a summer sound  Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that,  More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,  Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped  On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres  Of sky and sea.  It was her voice that made  The sky acutest at its vanishing.  She measured to the hour its solitude.  She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,  Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,  As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her  Except the one she sang and, singing, made. Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,  Why, when the singing ended and we turned  Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,  The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,  As the night descended, tilting in the air,  Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,  Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,  Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,  The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,  Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,  And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up. The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche  Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ... The dump is full  Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.  The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,  And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems  Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,  The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea. The freshness of night has been fresh a long time. The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says  That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs  More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.  The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green  Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew  For buttons, how many women have covered themselves With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads  Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.  One grows to hate these things except on the dump. Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,  Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),  Between that disgust and this, between the things  That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)  And those that will be (azaleas and so on),  One feels the purifying change. One rejects  The trash.  That’s the moment when the moon creeps up  To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.  Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon  (All its images are in the dump) and you see As a man (not like an image of a man), You see the moon rise in the empty sky. One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes.  That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,  Peck the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear  Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,  Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:  Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and sayInvisible priest; is it to eject, to pull The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone? Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.
The poem of the mind in the act of finding  What will suffice. It has not always had  To find: the scene was set; it repeated what  Was in the script.  Then the theatre was changed  To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.  It has to face the men of the time and to meet  The women of the time. It has to think about war  And it has to find what will suffice. It has  To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage  And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear,  In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound  Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two  Emotions becoming one. The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives  Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly  Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,  Beyond which it has no will to rise.  It must Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman  Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
(Sonata for an Orchestra) Chicago is an overgrown woman  wearing her skyscrapers  like a necklace ... Chicago’s blood is kaleidoscopic Chicago’s heart has a hundred auricles * * *  From the Congo  to Chicago  is a long trek  —as the crow flies
I would be A painter with words Creating sharp portraits On the wide canvas of your mind Images of those things Shaped through my eyes That interest me; But being a Tenth American In this democracy I sometimes sketch a miniature Though I contract for a mural. Of course You understand this democracy; One man as good as another, From log cabin to White House, Poor boy to corporation president, Hoover and Browder with one vote each, A free country, Complete equality— Yeah— And the rich get tax refunds, The poor get relief checks. As for myself I pay five cents for a daily synopsis of current history, Two bits and the late lowdown on Hollywood, Twist a dial for Stardust or Shostakovich, And with each bleacher stub I reserve the right to shout “kill the bum” at the umpire— Wherefore am I different From nine other Americans? But listen, you Don’t worry about me I rate! I’m Convert 4711 at Beulah Baptist Church, I’m Social Security No. 337-16-3458 in Washington, Thank you Mister God and Mister Roosevelt! And another thing:— No matter what happens I too can always call in a policeman!
Fawns in the winter wood Who feel their horns, and leap, Swans whom the bleakening mood Of evening stirs from sleep, Tall flowers that unfurl As a moth, driven, flies, Flowers with the breasts of a girl And sea-cold eyes. The bare bright mirrors glow For their enchanted shapes. Each is a flame, and so, Like flame, escapes.
Content that now the bleeding bone be swept Out of her reach, she lay upon her side. In a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept Bland as a child, slept, breathing like a bride. Color of noons that shimmer as they sing Above the dunes, her sandy flanks heaved slow. Between her paws curled inward, billowing Waves of desert silence seemed to flow. The crowd was gone, the bars were gone, the cage Thinned into air, the sawdust and the fleas Winnowed by sleep to nothing. After food, Absence possessed her: bliss keener than rage, If slumber’s prisoner at a bound could seize This ghostly freedom, lapping it like blood.
What do we need for love—a midnight fire Flinging itself by fistfuls up the chimney In soft bright snatches? Do we need the snow, Gentle as silence, covering the scars Of weeks of hunger, years of shabby having? Summer or winter? A heaven of stars? A room? The smiling mouth, the sadness of desire Are everywhere the same. If lovers go Along an unknown road, they find no less What is familiar. Let them stay at home, And all will still be strange. This they know Who with each heartbeat fight the fear of change.
Then was the grown-up world of tall decision, Its beauty of late nights denied a child; World of bewildering gifts, and strange derision, Alien alike whether it frowned or smiled, Yet your least wish was governed by its laws. The landscape and the weather both were odd, Exploding with effects that hid a cause Serene and lonely as the Will of God. Recall it: peopled by an august race, Immune to the passions that attack the young, And knowing all. There every commonplace Must be translated from a marvellous tongue. Now is the world of grandeur dwindled, shrunk To what the stupidest can understand. The shabby treasures of an exile’s trunk Include no passport to that wonderland, Though you are told you are a citizen. The scenery is changed, the climate dull; The fateful masks are faces, gods are men; Most nights are long and few are magical. But there are strangers even here: their speech Is rich in barbarous mystery, their ways Are private, who live wholly beyond reach, Admired and feared, though none of us obeys Their foreign rule. No dictators, and yet Strong utterly. While we, with pity wrung For what they must do, suffer, learn, forget, Feel shy when we approach them. They are young.
If you press a stone with your finger, Sir Isaac Newton observed, The finger is also Pressed by the stone. But can a woman, pressed by memory’s finger, In the deep night, alone, Of her softness move The airy thing That presses upon her With the whole weight of love? This Sir Isaac said nothing of.
These are the streets where we walked with war and childhood Like our two shadows behind us, or Before us like one shadow.  River walks Threaded by park rats, flanked by battleships, Flickering of a grey tail on the bank, Motionless hulls Enormous under a dead grey sky. Farther, the harbor and the miscolored waters Rocking their flotsam under the blank round eye At the masthead staring down the rats to come, Beyond the fisher gulls. And the windows full of ropes and hardware, Doorways, barreled, yawning on the dark, Wall-eyed alleys, coils of husky smells, The breath of journeys strong there. Streets whose sordid beauty  joked readily with hope. The taller avenues, And walls that smiled like unpurchased horizons, Swung intimate views out of a foreign room, Hung a gate upon a garden's fable, Walls that frowned With aged remorseless eyes Or the gloom of thunderlit landscapes, opening A door into that placeless country Where the sad animal is blithe, free and at home. Too, those halls Where we stepped lightly among the creatures Whom death had tamed, who yet crouched, sprang, or flew, Fierce as hunger, graceful as joy, Until we knew, as in a half silvered mirror, the half Captive image of immortality. These are the old places, and walking there As then with war and childhood, I look into the shadows' faces. They appal.  Yet often I will see (The marvels floating alive upon that stream, The breathing of delight like purest air) Another place: that you contrived Between midnight and morning In your dream, and in the morning Took me there.  We greeted it, who could not stay. But it is there, Surviving disbelief, surviving even what the malign years prepare.
I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me  ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands  it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched  where the westerly winds and the traveler’s checks the evensong of salesmen the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases  where no one speaks English. I go separately It is the wind, the rubber wind when we brush our teeth in the way station  a climate to beard. What forks these roads? Who clammers o’er the twain? What murmurs and rustles in the distance in the white branches where the light is whipped  piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer  and toss ourselves awhile the motor pants like a forest  where owls from their bandaged eyes send messages  to the Indian couple. Peaks have you heard?  I go separately We have reached the arithmetics, are partially quenched  while it growls and hints in the lost trapper’s voice  She is coming toward us like a session of pines  in the wild wooden air where rabbits are frozen,  O mother of lakes and glaciers, save us gamblers  whose wagon is perilously rapt.
There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals?  Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers,  apt at the essential such as rearranging  languages. They occur from route to route  like savages who wear shells. “I cannot place him.” Yet I do. He must ascend indefinitely as airs he must regard his image as plastic, adhering to the easeful carpet that needs  footprints and cares for them as is their wont in houses, the ones we pass by. Such a day/or such a night  reeling from cabin to cabin looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing. These adventures in broad/or slim lamplight,  Yet the cars do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm.  We never feel the scratch, they do. When lightning strikes it’s safer to ride on rubber going down a mountain, safer than trees, or sand, more preventive  to be hid in a cloud we sing, remembering The old manse and robins. One tear, a salty one knowing we have escaped the charm of being native. Even as your glance  through the windshield tells me you’ve seen  another mishap of nature  you would willingly forget,  prefer to be like him near the hearth where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs  where the bedstead it’s not so foreign as this lake.  The plateau, excursionist, is ahead. After that twenty volumes  of farmland. Then I must guide us to the wood garage someone has whitened  where the light enters through one window  like a novel. You must peer at it  without weakening, without feeling  hero, or heroine,  Understanding the distances  between characters, their wakeful or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring  the slow sunset, the quick dark.
Unreasonable lenses refract the sensitive rabbit holes, mole dwellings and snake  climes where twist burrow and sneeze a native species into houses corresponding to hemispheric requests  of flatness euphemistically, sentimentally  termed prairie. On the earth exerting a willful pressure something like a stethoscope against the breast only permanent. Selective engineering architectural submissiveness  and rendering of necessity in regard to height,  eschewment of climate exposure, elemental understandings, constructive adjustments to vale and storm historical reconstruction of early earthworks  and admiration for later even oriental modelling for a glimpse of baronial burdening we see it in the rafters and the staircase heaviness  a surprise yet acting as ballast surely the heavens strike hard on prairies. Regard its hard-mouthed houses with their  robust nipples the gossamer hair.
1 On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in the room where the screen waits suspended like the frame of a girder the worker will place upon an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage nature into his building and the tree leaning against it, the tree casting language upon the screen. 2 The telephone is Flaubert’s parrot and it flitters from perch to perch across the city. Or someone is holding the dead thing in her hand in a remote hotel. A sensitive person with a disability who speaks to the inanimate. She may even resemble Louise Colet or the helpful niece. She hasn’t sent her meaning and I am absent in these reminiscences of her. The telephone is the guignol of messages. It may have been cold moving down from roofs, a continental wind caught between buildings. Leaves and pollen blowing onto fire escapes. Windstruck hambones lying in a gutter. Equinoc- tial changes the body knows, the hand feels, the truck passes without notice and buildings con- tinue their nervous commitments. The earth may have been moaning underneath this junk. I am caught in the wind’s draft. 3 At night viewing the screen of distance with shadowy icons framed by light I understood the rasping interior was rearing other icons, No longer gentle they flashed ripened clauses, or images raised formidable projections of ice, the wall was placed in a temporary position where words glittered from a dark cover, Narcissism lived in a silver hut. 4 In the lighter time of year words arrived concealed in branches. Flaubert exchanged himself for words, night became a night of words and a journey a journey of words, and so on. Words became “a superior joke”, I trembled under a revolutionary weight, a coward fleeing from a cloud. The ego of words stretched to the room’s borders assuming the sonorous movement of a poem. 5 I entice this novice poem with a mineral, Beryl. The dictionary bestows on Beryl a skittish description,  like a sequence in which a car  moves over ruptured roads and slices  into ghost veins of color—  a camera follows each turn,  examines the exits where rock protects  a visionary tool that prods it:— “A light greenish blue that is bluer  and deeper than average aqua,  greener than robin’s eggs blue,  bluer and paler than turquoise  blue and greener and deeper than beryl  blue—a light greenish blue that is bluer  and paler than beryl or average turquoise blue—  bluer and slightly paler than aqua.”
The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word  recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced  as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where  patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased  eyes curled outside themes to search the paper  now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word  entered its continent eager to find another as  capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would  house them both, they being then two might glide  into this house and presently create a rather larger  mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious as a newly laid table where related objects might gather  to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints,  the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle  of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved  knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might  choose and savor before swallowing so much was the  sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words  placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent  percipient as elder branches in the night where words  gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.
At sunset from the top of the stair watching the castle mallets wrenched from their socket fell from ambush into flame flew into hiding; above the stoneware a latch like muscle hid the green; he stood waist high under the rapt ceiling and hanged the sparrow; where the kitchen had been a mirror of eggs served in a tumbler he saw the ring when a lancet pierced and threw it. In a basket and lowered it where sails enter the harbor over a parchment like dominoes; the petrel-like eyelash. To the sun and its rites were pulled the dried banners; they flew past the ruins the tower and window where ivory guided the mist on his back; he rubbed his eyes and counted them kneeling wrinkled as grass.A ghost in their nostrils put a heel at their forehead; they saw only the moon as it fasted.
Echo that loved hid within a wood Would to herself rehearse her weary woe: O, she cried, and all the rest unsaid Identical came back in sorry echo. Echo for the fix that she was in Invisible, distraught by mocking passion, Passionate, ignored, as good as dumb, Employed that O unchanged in repetition. Shun love if you suspect that he shuns you, Use with him no reproaches whatsoever. Ever you knew, supposing him to know No melody from which you might recover- Cover your ears, dear Echo, do not hear. Here is no supplication but your own, Only your sighs return upon the air Ere their music from the mouth be gone.
“e to allor li prega Per quell' amor the i mena, e quei verranno.” INFERNO V This also is a place that love is known in, This hollow land beneath a lifeless sea Opposite to the place that he was born in, How far it is impossible to say.  The brackish water as I crossed  A bridge was delicately creased And stained and stale, like love-disordered linen. Lovers here must meet on unsure ground Like strangers in a circumspect hotel Which, although luxurious and grand, Trembles beneath their feet like earth in hell.  Lifted on concentric gales  Scraps of paper, leaves and gulls Fluttered dismally aloft and groaned. Here darkness grows and light itself decays; Rain falls from time to time and night falls too Upon earth’s civil centre that decoys The eternal with the promise that is now.  There were no corners, every street  Ran on infinite and straight, There is no gate, no warning and no keys. I hear a step approaching and refuse To look aside, a while your silhouette Persists, the fire illuminates your face From under as you light a cigarette;  All-knowing, arch-angelic eyes,  Human features cut in ice— The spark you struck at once attained the fuse. I recognize the vanity and scorn, The fear, the greed, in short the mask of love, Familiar and disdainful, and I turn About. Like children sharing what they have  We learned in that experiment  What the spirit’s weakness meant, The nature of the torment to be borne. What shall I give you? What will be your price? Your body’s mine, the rich, fantastic horde Of your embracements—angels live on praise, Take it, it is all I can afford.  Outside a centrifugal wind  Sustained a freight of souls that whined And wept along the terrible canals. And when I close my eyes I see a ship At anchor in the water of a bay. I cling to that imaginary shape Capable of taking me away  To I do not know what ports.  Perhaps tomorrow it departs, Anonymous, invulnerable, free.
It is half past ten in Stonington. The trees droop apprehensive of the heat And the sky has turned that pale suspicious colour That means that it cannot support more light. Here on the terrace I and a companion Each pretends to read. The papers say That it is 90 in New York today. Across the street work is going forward On the abominable house that once I fancied, Half, might be mine, and which was in fact the home Of the anonymous couple I used to hear At night arguing in their unhappy bedroom. Now they are throwing out another wing And the site of overlooked love is changed beyond recognition. What will the day, what will the summer bring? Psychic storms or calm productive doldrums? Our neighbours are no saner than ourselves. Perhaps it is time to give the Stones a ring Or to complain of the view from the gallery tower Falling like a shadow across the calm veranda Rich with malice and the threat of accidental meeting. This is not a house but a collection (The largest in private hands?) of sacred objects, A spiritual boutique where anyone, Even the wrecker who had come to spoil, May find himself spending more than he expected On something he cannot quite identify. Here the little horrors become the household gods. For the work of love requires a rule of thumb, Not no laws in particular but its own Whose pseudonym, at least here and now, is pleasure: The morning wasted in work and misquotation, A light but leisurely lunch, then reading Walking or just watching the sun all afternoon Till, hungry, we draw to evening and ombre. Who are we to thank for all of this? The greatest favours are conferred in absence Sometimes, as a syllable gives comfort Dependent on the time and place and person. When pleasure and reality occur Is there room for extra contemplation Or the lyrical promenade? It is enough To know (and this is surely recognition) That the world is spherical and perfect. Now I wish to introduce the copper beech We saw on our walk, English and native here as I am, Whose shade is not the green of contemplation But the imagination’s rich metallic colour Wherein, under libido, we live.
Key West In the Cubano diner, tiny cups of black, black coffee, hot and sweet, and chipped blue china plates of black beans and yellowtail, fished by the fishermen as the sun came up this morning. Yesterday out on the reef, we looked through the floor of the boat, through layers of clear, clean water— windows looking into other windows— down to the floor of the world, shallow, pliant, and shifting. There, schools of yellowtail swam through the living coral, bright as stained glass, cast into underwater constellations both strange and familiar: a flower, a brain, a cathedral. Suddenly a shadow parted the school— as if a cloud had just blotted the sun— a barracuda swerving as they swerved, and nothing they could do. After it fed, the two halves joined, the missing ones unmourned, all as it was before. If I could live for a thousand years, ten thousand, would ever I see the great family of men, women, and children, both preying and preyed-upon, swimming as freely as the yellowtail? Would that be heaven or hell? Each naked human face a candle joining other candles in a procession spanning many centuries, entering the cathedral of live stone whose heavy doors are cast with scenes from our own lives, moving as moving pictures move, until the reel runs out. In that world-without-end hour, will the future read us in relief, blindly touching each raised and burnished scene with fingertips, the ejaculate word forming on their lips, an O! and then again an O! of terror and astonishment? O how will they sing knowing what they know? Streaming through time, they see our approach, we are plotted in space, our light outlives our lives and sends a signal far into the future: the past is alive! Dead and dark for a long time, we are as stars to them, stars wishing to be wished on.
Here, in the half-dark of the sauna,  the bodies of the women glisten ... Naked, disproportionate, lush, hung and burdened with flesh, they open slowly, like orchids blooming out of season. Sweat beads my forehead. Heat rings my breasts, like circlets, and I am my body, all shimmering flesh. Secrets are whispered here. Stories told. The bodies, alabaster, abalone, relax, give up their pose, to ask, How shall we be joined? How shall we know each other? By doors, by chains and linkages through which we shall be  entered, touched, possessed. I see them, row upon row, the rank and file of generations moving without pause: —the bodies of the young girls, the willows, complete unto themselves, androgynous; —the great bodies of the mothers, circled by their little moons, adoring; —the mothers of the mothers, the old wise ones, ponderous and slow. And in another room, not far from this one, the restless bodies of men, searching without knowing what it is they search for. Body of the world! Body of flesh! Leaving this room, I leave the orbit of women. I dress and walk into the snowy night, into the great body of the world, cold, still, and expectant. Bodying forth, I am taken by the dark. What am I? Asked, shall I say:  Struck by a spark, I quickened  and was born to flashing  days and nights, a small significance  of one. I did not wish to change,  but changed, feeling desire and fear  and love, failing many times.  My meaning made, I died,  the windows darkening for the last time.
The brain forgets but the blood will remember. There, when the play of sense is over, The last, low spark in the darkest chamber Will hold all there is of love and lover. The war of words, the life-long quarrel Of self against self will resolve into nothing; Less than the chain of berry-red coral Crying against the dead black of her clothing. What has the brain that it hopes to last longer? The blood will take from forgotten violence, The groping, the break of her voice in anger. There will be left only color and silence. These will remain, these will go searching Your veins for life when the flame of life smolders; The night that you two saw the mountains marching Up against dawn with the stars on their shoulders; The jetting poplars’ arrested fountains As you drew her under them, easing her pain; The notes, not the words, of a half-finished sentence; The music, the silence. . . . These will remain.
(Vienna)   I  Shut out the light or let it filter through These frowning aisles as penitentially As though it walked in sackcloth. Let it be Laid at the feet of all that ever grew Twisted and false, like this rococo shrine Where cupids smirk from candy clouds and where The Lord, with polished nails and perfumed hair, Performs a parody of the divine. The candles hiss; the organ-pedals storm; Writhing and dark, the columns leave the earth To find a lonelier and darker height. The church grows dingy while the human swarm Struggles against the impenitent body’s mirth. Ashes to ashes. . . . Go. . . . Shut out the light.   (Hinterbrühl)   II  And so the light runs laughing from the town, Pulling the sun with him along the roads That shed their muddy rivers as he goads Each blade of grass the ice had flattened down. At every empty bush he stops to fling Handfuls of birds with green and yellow throats; While even the hens, uncertain of their notes, Stir rusty vowels in attempts to sing. He daubs the chestnut-tips with sudden reds And throws an olive blush on naked hills That hoped, somehow, to keep themselves in white. Who calls for sackcloth now? He leaps and spreads A carnival of color, gladly spills His blood: the resurrection—and the light.
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot, Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off Before it has a chance to go two blocks, At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage Is on the corner facing west, and there, Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out. Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps— Five on a side, the old bubble-head style, Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low. One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes An E and O. And one is squat, without A head at all—more of a football type. Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards. He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46 He bucketed three hundred ninety points, A county record still. The ball loved Flick. I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty In one home game. His hands were like wild birds. He never learned a trade, he just sells gas, Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while, As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube, But most of us remember anyway. His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench. It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though. Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette. Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball, Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates. Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.
If it please God,  let less happen.  Even out Earth's  rondure, flatten  Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher,  widen fissures  to arable land,  remand your terrible glaciers  and silence their calving,  halving or doubling all geographical features  toward the mean. Unlean against our hearts.  Withdraw your grandeur  from these parts.
Hark! the herald Angels sing, Glory to the new-born King, Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinner reconcil’d.  Hark! the herald Angels sing,  Glory to the new-born King. Joyful all ye nations rise, Join the triumph of the skies, With the angelic host proclaim, Christ is born in Bethlehem.  Hark! the herald Angels sing,  Glory to the new-born King. Christ by highest Heaven ador’d, Christ the everlasting Lord! Late in time behold him come, Offspring of a virgin’s womb.  Hark! the herald Angels sing,  Glory to the new-born King. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail, the incarnate Deity, Pleased as Man with man to dwell, Jesus our Immanuel!  Hark! the herald Angels sing,  Glory to the new-born King. Hail the Heaven-born Prince of Peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and life to all he brings, Risen with healing in his wings.  Hark! the herald Angels sing,  Glory to the new-born King. Mild he lays his glory by, Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth.  Hark! the herald Angels sing,  Glory to the new-born King.
Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts, Thick breaks the red flame; All Etna heaves fiercely Her forest-clothed frame. Not here, O Apollo! Are haunts meet for thee. But, where Helicon breaks down In cliff to the sea, Where the moon-silver'd inlets Send far their light voice Up the still vale of Thisbe, O speed, and rejoice! On the sward at the cliff-top Lie strewn the white flocks, On the cliff-side the pigeons Roost deep in the rocks. In the moonlight the shepherds, Soft lull'd by the rills, Lie wrapped in their blankets Asleep on the hills. —What forms are these coming So white through the gloom? What garments out-glistening The gold-flower'd broom? What sweet-breathing presence Out-perfumes the thyme? What voices enrapture The night's balmy prime? 'Tis Apollo comes leading His choir, the Nine. —The leader is fairest, But all are divine. They are lost in the hollows! They stream up again! What seeks on this mountain The glorified train?— They bathe on this mountain, In the spring by their road; Then on to Olympus, Their endless abode. —Whose proase do they mention? Of what is it told?— What will be for ever; What was from of old. First hymn they the Father Of all things; and then, The rest of immortals, The action of men. The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm.
I The evening comes, the fields are still. The tinkle of the thirsty rill, Unheard all day, ascends again; Deserted is the half-mown plain, Silent the swaths! the ringing wain, The mower's cry, the dog's alarms, All housed within the sleeping farms! The business of the day is done, The last-left haymaker is gone. And from the thyme upon the height, And from the elder-blossom white And pale dog-roses in the hedge, And from the mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night-air blows The perfume which the day forgoes. And on the pure horizon far, See, pulsing with the first-born star, The liquid sky above the hill! The evening comes, the fields are still. Loitering and leaping, With saunter, with bounds— Flickering and circling In files and in rounds— Gaily their pine-staff green Tossing in air, Loose o'er their shoulders white Showering their hair— See! the wild Maenads Break from the wood, Youth and Iacchus Maddening their blood. See! through the quiet land Rioting they pass— Fling the fresh heaps about, Trample the grass. Tear from the rifled hedge Garlands, their prize; Fill with their sports the field, Fill with their cries. Shepherd, what ails thee, then? Shepherd, why mute? Forth with thy joyous song! Forth with thy flute! Tempts not the revel blithe? Lure not their cries? Glow not their shoulders smooth? Melt not their eyes? Is not, on cheeks like those, Lovely the flush? —Ah, so the quiet was! So was the hush! II The epoch ends, the world is still. The age has talk'd and work'd its fill— The famous orators have shone, The famous poets sung and gone, The famous men of war have fought, The famous speculators thought, The famous players, sculptors, wrought, The famous painters fill'd their wall, The famous critics judged it all. The combatants are parted now— Uphung the spear, unbent the bow, The puissant crown'd, the weak laid low. And in the after-silence sweet, Now strifes are hush'd, our ears doth meet, Ascending pure, the bell-like fame Of this or that down-trodden name, Delicate spirits, push'd away In the hot press of the noon-day. And o'er the plain, where the dead age Did its now silent warfare wage— O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom, Where many a splendour finds its tomb, Many spent fames and fallen mights— The one or two immortal lights Rise slowly up into the sky To shine there everlastingly, Like stars over the bounding hill. The epoch ends, the world is still. Thundering and bursting In torrents, in waves— Carolling and shouting Over tombs, amid graves— See! on the cumber'd plain Clearing a stage, Scattering the past about, Comes the new age. Bards make new poems, Thinkers new schools, Statesmen new systems, Critics new rules. All things begin again; Life is their prize; Earth with their deeds they fill, Fill with their cries. Poet, what ails thee, then? Say, why so mute? Forth with thy praising voice! Forth with thy flute! Loiterer! why sittest thou Sunk in thy dream? Tempts not the bright new age? Shines not its stream? Look, ah, what genius, Art, science, wit! Soldiers like Caesar, Statesmen like Pitt! Sculptors like Phidias, Raphaels in shoals, Poets like Shakespeare— Beautiful souls! See, on their glowing cheeks Heavenly the flush! —Ah, so the silence was! So was the hush! The world but feels the present's spell, The poet feels the past as well; Whatever men have done, might do, Whatever thought, might think it too.
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet, Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet! I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll. Yes, yes, we know that we can jest, We know, we know that we can smile! But there's a something in this breast, To which thy light words bring no rest, And thy gay smiles no anodyne. Give me thy hand, and hush awhile, And turn those limpid eyes on mine, And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul. Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet The same heart beats in every human breast! But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb? Ah! well for us, if even we, Even for a moment, can get free Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd; For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd! Fate, which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would be— By what distractions he would be possess'd, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity— That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being's law, Bade through the deep recesses of our breast The unregarded river of our life Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see The buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, Though driving on with it eternally. But often, in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves— Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on for ever unexpress'd. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well—but 't is not true! And then we will no more be rack'd With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. Only—but this is rare— When a belovèd hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafen'd ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.
Far, far from here, The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay Among the green Illyrian hills; and there The sunshine in the happy glens is fair, And by the sea, and in the brakes. The grass is cool, the sea-side air Buoyant and fresh, the mountain flowers More virginal and sweet than ours. And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes, Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia, Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore, In breathless quiet, after all their ills; Nor do they see their country, nor the place Where the Sphinx lived among the frowning hills, Nor the unhappy palace of their race, Nor Thebes, nor the Ismenus, any more. There those two live, far in the Illyrian brakes! They had stay'd long enough to see, In Thebes, the billow of calamity Over their own dear children roll'd, Curse upon curse, pang upon pang, For years, they sitting helpless in their home, A grey old man and woman; yet of old The Gods had to their marriage come, And at the banquet all the Muses sang. Therefore they did not end their days In sight of blood, but were rapt, far away, To where the west-wind plays, And murmurs of the Adriatic come To those untrodden mountain-lawns; and there Placed safely in changed forms, the pair Wholly forgot their first sad life, and home, And all that Theban woe, and stray For ever through the glens, placid and dumb.
Mist clogs the sunshine. Smoky dwarf houses Hem me round everywhere; A vague dejection Weighs down my soul. Yet, while I languish, Everywhere countless Prospects unroll themselves, And countless beings Pass countless moods. Far hence, in Asia, On the smooth convent-roofs, On the gilt terraces, Of holy Lassa, Bright shines the sun. Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses; In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair. Strange unloved uproar Shrills round their portal; Yet not on Helicon Kept they more cloudless Their noble calm. Through sun-proof alleys In a lone, sand-hemm'd City of Africa, A blind, led beggar, Age-bow'd, asks alms. No bolder robber Erst abode ambush'd Deep in the sandy waste; No clearer eyesight Spied prey afar. Saharan sand-winds Sear'd his keen eyeballs; Spent is the spoil he won. For him the present Holds only pain. Two young, fair lovers, Where the warm June-wind, Fresh from the summer fields Plays fondly round them, Stand, tranced in joy. With sweet, join'd voices, And with eyes brimming: "Ah," they cry, "Destiny, Prolong the present! Time, stand still here!" The prompt stern Goddess Shakes her head, frowning; Time gives his hour-glass Its due reversal; Their hour is gone. With weak indulgence Did the just Goddess Lengthen their happiness, She lengthen'd also Distress elsewhere. The hour, whose happy Unalloy'd moments I would eternalise, Ten thousand mourners Well pleased see end. The bleak, stern hour, Whose severe moments I would annihilate, Is pass'd by others In warmth, light, joy. Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours.
The sea is calm tonight.  The tide is full, the moon lies fair  Upon the straits; on the French coast the light  Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.  Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!  Only, from the long line of spray  Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,  Listen! you hear the grating roar  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,  At their return, up the high strand,  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring  The eternal note of sadness in.  Sophocles long ago  Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow  Of human misery; we  Find also in the sound a thought,  Hearing it by this distant northern sea.  The Sea of Faith  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.  But now I only hear  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,  Retreating, to the breath  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear  And naked shingles of the world.  Ah, love, let us be true  To one another! for the world, which seems  To lie before us like a land of dreams,  So various, so beautiful, so new,  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;  And we are here as on a darkling plain  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,  Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below! Now my brothers call from the bay, Now the great winds shoreward blow, Now the salt tides seaward flow; Now the wild white horses play, Champ and chafe and toss in the spray. Children dear, let us away! This way, this way! Call her once before you go— Call once yet! In a voice that she will know: "Margaret! Margaret!" Children's voices should be dear (Call once more) to a mother's ear; Children's voices, wild with pain— Surely she will come again! Call her once and come away; This way, this way! "Mother dear, we cannot stay! The wild white horses foam and fret." Margaret! Margaret! Come, dear children, come away down; Call no more! One last look at the white-wall'd town And the little grey church on the windy shore, Then come down! She will not come though you call all day; Come away, come away! Children dear, was it yesterday We heard the sweet bells over the bay? In the caverns where we lay, Through the surf and through the swell, The far-off sound of a silver bell? Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, Where the salt weed sways in the stream, Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round, Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground; Where the sea-snakes coil and twine, Dry their mail and bask in the brine; Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye? When did music come this way? Children dear, was it yesterday? Children dear, was it yesterday (Call yet once) that she went away? Once she sate with you and me, On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea, And the youngest sate on her knee. She comb'd its bright hair, and she tended it well, When down swung the sound of a far-off bell. She sigh'd, she look'd up through the clear green sea; She said: "I must go, to my kinsfolk pray In the little grey church on the shore to-day. 'T will be Easter-time in the world—ah me! And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee." I said: "Go up, dear heart, through the waves; Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves!" She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay. Children dear, was it yesterday? Children dear, were we long alone? "The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan; Long prayers," I said, "in the world they say; Come!" I said; and we rose through the surf in the bay. We went up the beach, by the sandy down Where the sea-stocks bloom, to the white-wall'd town; Through the narrow paved streets, where all was still, To the little grey church on the windy hill. From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers, But we stood without in the cold blowing airs. We climb'd on the graves, on the stones worn with rains, And we gazed up the aisle through the small leaded panes. She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear: "Margaret, hist! come quick, we are here! Dear heart," I said, "we are long alone; The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan." But, ah, she gave me never a look, For her eyes were seal'd to the holy book! Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door. Come away, children, call no more! Come away, come down, call no more! Down, down, down! Down to the depths of the sea! She sits at her wheel in the humming town, Singing most joyfully. Hark what she sings: "O joy, O joy, For the humming street, and the child with its toy! For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well; For the wheel where I spun, And the blessed light of the sun!" And so she sings her fill, Singing most joyfully, Till the spindle drops from her hand, And the whizzing wheel stands still. She steals to the window, and looks at the sand, And over the sand at the sea; And her eyes are set in a stare; And anon there breaks a sigh, And anon there drops a tear, From a sorrow-clouded eye, And a heart sorrow-laden, A long, long sigh; For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden And the gleam of her golden hair. Come away, away children Come children, come down! The hoarse wind blows coldly; Lights shine in the town. She will start from her slumber When gusts shake the door; She will hear the winds howling, Will hear the waves roar. We shall see, while above us The waves roar and whirl, A ceiling of amber, A pavement of pearl. Singing: "Here came a mortal, But faithless was she! And alone dwell for ever The kings of the sea." But, children, at midnight, When soft the winds blow, When clear falls the moonlight, When spring-tides are low; When sweet airs come seaward From heaths starr'd with broom, And high rocks throw mildly On the blanch'd sands a gloom; Up the still, glistening beaches, Up the creeks we will hie, Over banks of bright seaweed The ebb-tide leaves dry. We will gaze, from the sand-hills, At the white, sleeping town; At the church on the hill-side— And then come back down. Singing: "There dwells a loved one, But cruel is she! She left lonely for ever The kings of the sea."
A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time; Brimming with wonder and joy He spreads out his arms to the light, Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream. As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes, Where the snowy mountainous pass, Echoing the screams of the eagles, Hems in its gorges the bed Of the new-born clear-flowing stream; Whether he first sees light Where the river in gleaming rings Sluggishly winds through the plain; Whether in sound of the swallowing sea— As is the world on the banks, So is the mind of the man.  Vainly does each, as he glides, Fable and dream Of the lands which the river of Time Had left ere he woke on its breast, Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed. Only the tract where he sails He wots of; only the thoughts, Raised by the objects he passes, are his. Who can see the green earth any more As she was by the sources of Time? Who imagines her fields as they lay In the sunshine, unworn by the plough? Who thinks as they thought, The tribes who then roam'd on her breast, Her vigorous, primitive sons? What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well? Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?  What bard, At the height of his vision, can deem Of God, of the world, of the soul, With a plainness as near, As flashing as Moses felt When he lay in the night by his flock On the starlit Arabian waste? Can rise and obey The beck of the Spirit like him? This tract which the river of Time Now flows through with us, is the plain. Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. Border'd by cities and hoarse With a thousand cries is its stream. And we on its breast, our minds Are confused as the cries which we hear, Changing and shot as the sights which we see. And we say that repose has fled For ever the course of the river of Time. That cities will crowd to its edge In a blacker, incessanter line; That the din will be more on its banks, Denser the trade on its stream, Flatter the plain where it flows, Fiercer the sun overhead. That never will those on its breast See an ennobling sight, Drink of the feeling of quiet again. But what was before us we know not, And we know not what shall succeed. Haply, the river of Time— As it grows, as the towns on its marge Fling their wavering lights On a wider, statelier stream— May acquire, if not the calm Of its early mountainous shore, Yet a solemn peace of its own. And the width of the waters, the hush Of the grey expanse where he floats, Freshening its current and spotted with foam As it draws to the Ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast— As the pale waste widens around him, As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night-wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right! Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest; O born to rule in partial Law's despite, Resume thy native empire o'er the breast! Go forth arrayed in panoply divine; That angel pureness which admits no stain; Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign, And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign. Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy store Of bright artillery glancing from afar; Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon's roar, Blushes and fears thy magazine of war. Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim,— Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost; Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame, Shunning discussion, are revered the most. Try all that wit and art suggest to bend Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee; Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend; Thou mayst command, but never canst be free. Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude; Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow: Be, more than princes' gifts, thy favours sued;— She hazards all, who will the least allow. But hope not, courted idol of mankind, On this proud eminence secure to stay; Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt find Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way. Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought, Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move, In Nature's school, by her soft maxims taught, That separate rights are lost in mutual love.
Germ of new life, whose powers expanding slow For many a moon their full perfection wait,— Haste, precious pledge of happy love, to go Auspicious borne through life's mysterious gate. What powers lie folded in thy curious frame,— Senses from objects locked, and mind from thought! How little canst thou guess thy lofty claim To grasp at all the worlds the Almighty wrought! And see, the genial season's warmth to share, Fresh younglings shoot, and opening roses glow! Swarms of new life exulting fill the air,— Haste, infant bud of being, haste to blow! For thee the nurse prepares her lulling songs, The eager matrons count the lingering day; But far the most thy anxious parent longs On thy soft cheek a mother's kiss to lay. She only asks to lay her burden down, That her glad arms that burden may resume; And nature's sharpest pangs her wishes crown, That free thee living from thy living tomb. She longs to fold to her maternal breast Part of herself, yet to herself unknown; To see and to salute the stranger guest, Fed with her life through many a tedious moon. Come, reap thy rich inheritance of love! Bask in the fondness of a Mother's eye! Nor wit nor eloquence her heart shall move Like the first accents of thy feeble cry. Haste, little captive, burst thy prison doors! Launch on the living world, and spring to light! Nature for thee displays her various stores, Opens her thousand inlets of delight. If charmed verse or muttered prayers had power, With favouring spells to speed thee on thy way, Anxious I'd bid my beads each passing hour, Till thy wished smile thy mother's pangs o'erpay.
This Little, Silent, Gloomy Monument,Contains all that was sweet and innocent ;The softest pratler that e'er found a Tongue,His Voice was Musick and his Words a Song ;Which now each List'ning Angel smiling hears,Such pretty Harmonies compose the Spheres;Wanton as unfledg'd Cupids, ere their CharmsHas learn'd the little arts of doing harms ;Fair as young Cherubins, as soft and kind,And tho translated could not be refin'd ;The Seventh dear pledge the Nuptial Joys had given,Toil'd here on Earth, retir'd to rest in Heaven ;Where they the shining Host of Angels fill,Spread their gay wings before the Throne, and smile.
Day of Satan's painful duty! Earth shall vanish, hot and sooty; So says Virtue, so says Beauty. Ah! what terror shall be shaping When the Judge the truth's undraping— Cats from every bag escaping! Now the trumpet's invocation Calls the dead to condemnation; All receive an invitation. Death and Nature now are quaking, And the late lamented, waking, In their breezy shrouds are shaking. Lo! the Ledger's leaves are stirring, And the Clerk, to them referring, Makes it awkward for the erring. When the Judge appears in session, We shall all attend confession, Loudly preaching non-suppression. How shall I then make romances Mitigating circumstances? Even the just must take their chances. King whose majesty amazes, Save thou him who sings thy praises; Fountain, quench my private blazes. Pray remember, sacred Saviour, Mine the playful hand that gave your Death-blow. Pardon such behavior. Seeking me, fatigue assailed thee, Calvary's outlook naught availed thee; Now 'twere cruel if I failed thee. Righteous judge and learnèd brother, Pray thy prejudices smother Ere we meet to try each other. Sighs of guilt my conscience gushes, And my face vermilion flushes; Spare me for my pretty blushes. Thief and harlot, when repenting, Thou forgavest—complimenting Me with sign of like relenting. If too bold is my petition I'll receive with due submission My dismissal—from perdition. When thy sheep thou hast selected From the goats, may I, respected, Stand amongst them undetected. When offenders are indited, And with trial-flames ignited, Elsewhere I'll attend if cited. Ashen-hearted, prone and prayerful, When of death I see the air full, Lest I perish too be careful. On that day of lamentation, When, to enjoy the conflagration, Men come forth, O be not cruel: Spare me, Lord—make them thy fuel.
For a Statue of Napoleon A conqueror as provident as brave, He robbed the cradle to supply the grave. His reign laid quantities of human dust: He fell upon the just and the unjust.
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done. Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hourA Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons Shudders Hell thr' all its regions A dog starvd at his Masters Gate Predicts the ruin of the State A Horse misusd upon the Road Calls to Heaven for Human blood Each outcry of the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain does tear A Skylark wounded in the wing A Cherubim does cease to sing The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight Does the Rising Sun affright Every Wolfs & Lions howl Raises from Hell a Human Soul The wild deer, wandring here & there Keeps the Human Soul from Care The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife And yet forgives the Butchers knife The Bat that flits at close of Eve Has left the Brain that wont BelieveThe Owl that calls upon the Night Speaks the Unbelievers frightHe who shall hurt the little Wren Shall never be belovd by Men He who the Ox to wrath has movd Shall never be by Woman lovdThe wanton Boy that kills the Fly Shall feel the Spiders enmity He who torments the Chafers Sprite Weaves a Bower in endless Night The Catterpiller on the Leaf Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly For the Last Judgment draweth nigh He who shall train the Horse to War Shall never pass the Polar Bar The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat Feed them & thou wilt grow fat The Gnat that sings his Summers Song Poison gets from Slanders tongue The poison of the Snake & Newt Is the sweat of Envys Foot The poison of the Honey Bee Is the Artists JealousyThe Princes Robes & Beggars Rags Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags A Truth thats told with bad intent Beats all the Lies you can invent It is right it should be so Man was made for Joy & Woe And when this we rightly know Thro the World we safely go Joy & Woe are woven fine A Clothing for the soul divine Under every grief & pine Runs a joy with silken twine The Babe is more than swadling BandsThroughout all these Human Lands Tools were made & Born were hands Every Farmer UnderstandsEvery Tear from Every Eye Becomes a Babe in Eternity This is caught by Females bright And returnd to its own delight The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath Writes Revenge in realms of Death The Beggars Rags fluttering in AirDoes to Rags the Heavens tear The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun Palsied strikes the Summers SunThe poor Mans Farthing is worth more Than all the Gold on Africs ShoreOne Mite wrung from the Labrers hands Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands Or if protected from on high Does that whole Nation sell & buy He who mocks the Infants Faith Shall be mockd in Age & Death He who shall teach the Child to Doubt The rotting Grave shall neer get out He who respects the Infants faith Triumphs over Hell & Death The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons Are the Fruits of the Two seasons The Questioner who sits so sly Shall never know how to Reply He who replies to words of Doubt Doth put the Light of Knowledge out The Strongest Poison ever known Came from Caesars Laurel Crown Nought can Deform the Human Race Like to the Armours iron brace When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow A Riddle or the Crickets Cry Is to Doubt a fit Reply The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile Make Lame Philosophy to smile He who Doubts from what he sees Will neer Believe do what you Please If the Sun & Moon should Doubt Theyd immediately Go out To be in a Passion you Good may Do But no Good if a Passion is in you The Whore & Gambler by the State Licencd build that Nations Fate The Harlots cry from Street to Street Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet The Winners Shout the Losers Curse Dance before dead Englands Hearse Every Night & every Morn Some to Misery are Born Every Morn and every Night Some are Born to sweet delight Some are Born to sweet delight Some are Born to Endless Night We are led to Believe a Lie When we see not Thro the Eye Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light God Appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day
THEL'S MOTTO Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole: Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl? I The daughters of Mne Seraphim led round their sunny flocks.All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air. To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day: Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard: And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew. O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water? Why fade these children of the spring? born but to smile & fall. Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud. Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water. Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face, Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the air; Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head, And gentle sleep the sleep of death. and gentle hear the voice Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.The Lilly of the valley breathing in the humble grass Answer'd the lovely maid and said: I am a watry weed, And I am very small, and love to dwell in lowly vales; So weak, the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head. Yet I am visited from heaven and he that smiles on all. Walks in the valley. and each morn over me spreads his hand Saying, rejoice thou humble grass, thou new-born lilly flower, Thou gentle maid of silent valleys. and of modest brooks; For thou shalt be clothed in light, and fed with morning manna: Till summers heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs To flourish in eternal vales: then why should Thel complain, Why should the mistress of the vales of Har, utter a sigh. She ceasd & smild in tears, then sat down in her silver shrine. Thel answered. O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley. Giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o'ertired. Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb, he smells thy milky garments, He crops thy flowers. while thou sittest smiling in his face, Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints. Thy wine doth purify the golden honey, thy perfume, Which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass that springs, Revives the milked cow, & tames the fire-breathing steed. But Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun: I vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place?" "Queen of the vales," the Lily answered, "ask the tender cloud, And it shall tell thee why it glitters in the morning sky, And why it scatters its bright beauty thro' the humid air. Descend, O little cloud, & hover before the eyes of Thel." The Cloud descended, and the Lily bowd her modest head, And went to mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass. II "O little Cloud," the virgin said, "I charge thee tell to me, Why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away: Then we shall seek thee but not find; ah, Thel is like to Thee. I pass away, yet I complain, and no one hears my voice." The Cloud then shew'd his golden head & his bright form emerg'd, Hovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel. "O virgin, know'st thou not our steeds drink of the golden springs Where Luvah doth renew his horses? Look'st thou on my youth, And fearest thou because I vanish and am seen no more, Nothing remains? O maid, I tell thee, when I pass away, It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace, and raptures holy: Unseen descending, weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers, And court the fair eyed dew, to take me to her shining tent: The weeping virgin trembling kneels before the risen sun, Till we arise link'd in a golden band, and never part, But walk united, bearing food to all our tender flowers." "Dost thou O little Cloud? I fear that I am not like thee; For I walk through the vales of Har and smell the sweetest flowers, But I feed not the little flowers; I hear the warbling birds, But I feed not the warbling birds; they fly and seek their food; But Thel delights in these no more, because I fade away, And all shall say, 'Without a use this shining woman liv'd, Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms?'" The Cloud reclind upon his airy throne and answer'd thus: "Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies, How great thy use, how great thy blessing! Every thing that lives Lives not alone, nor for itself; fear not, and I will call The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice. Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen." The helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lily's leaf, And the bright Cloud saild on, to find his partner in the vale. III Then Thel astonish'd view'd the Worm upon its dewy bed. "Art thou a Worm? Image of weakness, art thou but a Worm? I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lily's leaf; Ah, weep not, little voice, thou can'st not speak, but thou can'st weep. Is this a Worm? I see thee lay helpless & naked, weeping, And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother's smiles." The Clod of Clay heard the Worm's voice, & raisd her pitying head; She bow'd over the weeping infant, and her life exhal'd In milky fondness; then on Thel she fix'd her humble eyes. "O beauty of the vales of Har! we live not for ourselves; Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed; My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark, But he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head, And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast, And says: 'Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.' But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know; I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love." The daughter of beauty wip'd her pitying tears with her white veil, And said: "Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep. That God would love a Worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot That, wilful, bruis'd its helpless form; but that he cherish'd it With milk and oil I never knew; and therefore did I weep, And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away, And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot." "Queen of the vales," the matron Clay answered, "I heard thy sighs, And all thy moans flew o'er my roof, but I have call'd them down. Wilt thou, O Queen, enter my house? 'tis given thee to enter And to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet." IV The eternal gates' terrific porter lifted the northern bar: Thel enter'd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown. She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists: A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen. She wanderd in the land of clouds thro' valleys dark, listning Dolours & lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave, She stood in silence, listning to the voices of the ground, Till to her own grave plot she came, & there she sat down, And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit: "Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile? Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn, Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie? Or an Eye of gifts & graces, show'ring fruits and coined gold? Why a Tongue impress'd with honey from every wind? Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in? Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling, and affright? Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy? Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?" The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har.
A little black thing among the snow, Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe! "Where are thy father and mother? say?" "They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil'd among the winter's snow, They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, Who make up a heaven of our misery."
When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said, "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." And so he was quiet, & that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black; And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins & set them all free; Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father & never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm; So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
Earth rais'd up her head, From the darkness dread & drear. Her light fled: Stony dread! And her locks cover'd with grey despair. Prison'd on watry shore Starry Jealousy does keep my den Cold and hoar Weeping o'er I hear the Father of the ancient men Selfish father of men Cruel, jealous, selfish fear Can delight Chain'd in night The virgins of youth and morning bear. Does spring hide its joy When buds and blossoms grow? Does the sower? Sow by night? Or the plowman in darkness plow? Break this heavy chain, That does freeze my bones around Selfish! vain! Eternal bane! That free Love with bondage bound.
She has attained the permanence She dreamed of, where old stones lie sunning. Untended stalks blow over her Even and swift, like young men running. Always in the heart she loved Others had lived,—she heard their laughter. She lies where none has lain before, Where certainly none will follow after.
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, Facing a sheer sky. Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike, Sun and reflection wheeled by. When the bare eyes were before me And the hissing hair, Held up at a window, seen through a door. The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead Formed in the air. This is a dead scene forever now. Nothing will ever stir. The end will never brighten it more than this, Nor the rain blur. The water will always fall, and will not fall, And the tipped bell make no sound. The grass will always be growing for hay Deep on the ground. And I shall stand here like a shadow Under the great balanced day, My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind, And does not drift away.
Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under culverts Shallow and clear. They wait, when they should turn to journeys, They stiffen, when they should bend. They use against themselves that benevolence To which no man is friend. They cannot think of so many crops to a field Or of clean wood cleft by an axe. Their love is an eager meaninglessness Too tense, or too lax. They hear in every whisper that speaks to them A shout and a cry. As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills They should let it go by.
Whose was that gentle voice, that, whispering sweet, Promised methought long days of bliss sincere! Soothing it stole on my deluded ear, Most like soft music, that might sometimes cheat Thoughts dark and drooping! ’Twas the voice of Hope. Of love and social scenes, it seemed to speak, Of truth, of friendship, of affection meek; That, oh! poor friend, might to life’s downward slope Lead us in peace, and bless our latest hours. Ah me! the prospect saddened as she sung; Loud on my startled ear the death-bell rung; Chill darkness wrapt the pleasurable bowers, Whilst Horror, pointing to yon breathless clay, “No peace be thine,” exclaimed, “away, away!”
Evening! as slow thy placid shades descend, Veiling with gentlest hush the landscape still, The lonely battlement, the farthest hill And wood, I think of those who have no friend; Who now, perhaps, by melancholy led, From the broad blaze of day, where pleasure flaunts, Retiring, wander to the ring-dove’s haunts Unseen; and watch the tints that o’er thy bed Hang lovely; oft to musing Fancy’s eye Presenting fairy vales, where the tir’d mind Might rest beyond the murmurs of mankind, Nor hear the hourly moans of misery! Alas for man! that Hope’s fair views the while Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!
The castle clock had tolled midnight:  With mattock and with spade, And silent, by the torches’ light,  His corse in earth we laid.  The coffin bore his name, that those  Of other years might know, When earth its secrets should disclose,  Whose bones were laid below.  “Peace to the dead” no children sung,  Slow pacing up the nave,— No prayers were read, no knell was rung,  As deep we dug his grave.  We only heard the winter's wind,  In many a sullen gust, As, o’er the open grave inclined,  We murmured, “Dust to dust!”  A moonbeam from the arch’s height  Streamed, as we placed the stone; The long aisles started into light,  And all the windows shone.  We thought we saw the banners then,  That shook along the walls, Whilst the sad shades of mailèd men  Were gazing on the stalls.  ’Tis gone! again on tombs defaced  Sits darkness more profound; And only by the torch we traced  The shadows on the ground.  And now the chilling, freezing air  Without blew long and loud; Upon our knees we breathed one prayer,  Where he slept in his shroud.  We laid the broken marble floor,—  No name, no trace appears,— And when we closed the sounding door,  We thought of him with tears.
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain, Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view, Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judg). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, I cast thee by as one unfit for light, Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could: I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run’st more hobling then is meet; In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find. In this array ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam. In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come; And take thy way where yet thou art not known, If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none: And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.
1 By night when others soundly slept And hath at once both ease and Rest, My waking eyes were open kept And so to lie I found it best. 2 I sought him whom my Soul did Love, With tears I sought him earnestly. He bow’d his ear down from Above. In vain I did not seek or cry. 3 My hungry Soul he fill’d with Good; He in his Bottle put my tears, My smarting wounds washt in his blood, And banisht thence my Doubts and fears. 4 What to my Saviour shall I give Who freely hath done this for me? I’ll serve him here whilst I shall live And Loue him to Eternity.
1 Sometime now past in the Autumnal Tide, When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed, The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride, Were gilded o’re by his rich golden head. Their leaves and fruits seem’d painted but was true Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hew, Rapt were my senses at this delectable view. 2 I wist not what to wish, yet sure thought I, If so much excellence abide below, How excellent is he that dwells on high? Whose power and beauty by his works we know. Sure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light, That hath this under world so richly dight. More Heaven than Earth was here, no winter and no night. 3 Then on a stately Oak I cast mine Eye, Whose ruffling top the Clouds seem’d to aspire; How long since thou wast in thine Infancy? Thy strength and stature, more thy years admire, Hath hundred winters past since thou wast born? Or thousand since thou brakest thy shell of horn, If so, all these as nought, Eternity doth scorn. 4 Then higher on the glistering Sun I gaz’d, Whose beams was shaded by the leafy Tree. The more I look’d, the more I grew amaz’d And softly said, what glory’s like to thee? Soul of this world, this Universe’s Eye, No wonder some made thee a Deity: Had I not better known (alas) the same had I. 5 Thou as a Bridegroom from thy Chamber rushes And as a strong man joys to run a race. The morn doth usher thee with smiles and blushes. The Earth reflects her glances in thy face. Birds, insects, Animals with Vegative, Thy heat from death and dullness doth revive: And in the darksome womb of fruitful nature dive. 6 Thy swift Annual and diurnal Course, Thy daily straight and yearly oblique path, Thy pleasing fervour, and thy scorching force, All mortals here the feeling knowledge hath. Thy presence makes it day, thy absence night, Quaternal seasons caused by thy might: Hail Creature, full of sweetness, beauty, and delight. 7 Art thou so full of glory that no Eye Hath strength thy shining Rays once to behold? And is thy splendid Throne erect so high? As, to approach it, can no earthly mould. How full of glory then must thy Creator be? Who gave this bright light luster unto thee: Admir’d, ador’d for ever be that Majesty. 8 Silent alone where none or saw, or heard, In pathless paths I lead my wand’ring feet. My humble Eyes to lofty Skies I rear’d To sing some Song my mazed Muse thought meet. My great Creator I would magnifie, That nature had thus decked liberally: But Ah and Ah again, my imbecility! 9 I heard the merry grasshopper then sing, The black clad Cricket bear a second part. They kept one tune and played on the same string, Seeming to glory in their little Art. Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise? And in their kind resound their maker’s praise: Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher layes. 10 When present times look back to Ages past And men in being fancy those are dead, It makes things gone perpetually to last And calls back months and years that long since fled It makes a man more aged in conceit, Than was Methuselah or’s grand-sire great: While of their persons and their acts his mind doth treat. 11 Sometimes in Eden fair he seems to be, See glorious Adam there made Lord of all, Fancies the Apple, dangle on the Tree, That turn’d his Sovereign to a naked thrall, Who like a miscreant’s driven from that place To get his bread with pain and sweat of face: A penalty impos’d on his backsliding Race. 12 Here sits our Grandame in retired place, And in her lap her bloody Cain new born, The weeping Imp oft looks her in the face, Bewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn; His Mother sighs to think of Paradise, And how she lost her bliss, to be more wise, Believing him that was, and is, Father of lyes. 13 Here Cain and Abel come to sacrifice, Fruits of the Earth and Fatlings each do bring, On Abels gift the fire descends from Skies, But no such sign on false Cain’s offering; With sullen hateful looks he goes his wayes. Hath thousand thoughts to end his brothers dayes, Upon whose blood his future good he hopes to raise. 14 There Abel keeps his sheep, no ill he thinks, His brother comes, then acts his fratricide. The Virgin Earth of blood her first draught drinks, But since that time she often hath been cloy’d; The wretch with ghastly face and dreadful mind, Thinks each he sees will serve him in his kind, Though none on Earth but kindred near then could he find. 15 Who fancies not his looks now at the Barr, His face like death, his heart with horror fraught, Nor Male-factor ever felt like warr, When deep despair with wish of life hath fought, Branded with guilt, and crusht with treble woes, A Vagabond to Land of Nod he goes. A City builds, that wals might him secure from foes. 16 Who thinks not oft upon the Fathers ages. Their long descent, how nephews sons they saw, The starry observations of those Sages, And how their precepts to their sons were law, How Adam sigh’d to see his Progeny, Cloath’d all in his black, sinful Livery, Who neither guilt not yet the punishment could fly. 17 Our Life compare we with their length of dayes Who to the tenth of theirs doth now arrive? And though thus short, we shorten many wayes, Living so little while we are alive; In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delight So unawares comes on perpetual night, And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight. 18 When I behold the heavens as in their prime, And then the earth (though old) still clad in green, The stones and trees, insensible of time, Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen; If winter come, and greenness then do fade, A Spring returns, and they more youthfull made; But Man grows old, lies down, remains where once he’s laid. 19 By birth more noble than those creatures all, Yet seems by nature and by custom curs’d, No sooner born, but grief and care makes fall That state obliterate he had at first: Nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again Nor habitations long their names retain, But in oblivion to the final day remain. 20 Shall I then praise the heavens, the trees, the earth Because their beauty and their strength last longer Shall I wish there, or never to had birth, Because they’re bigger and their bodyes stronger? Nay, they shall darken, perish, fade and dye, And when unmade, so ever shall they lye, But man was made for endless immortality. 21 Under the cooling shadow of a stately Elm Close sate I by a goodly Rivers side, Where gliding streams the Rocks did overwhelm; A lonely place, with pleasures dignifi’d. I once that lov’d the shady woods so well, Now thought the rivers did the trees excel, And if the sun would ever shine, there would I dwell. 22 While on the stealing stream I fixt mine eye, Which to the long’d-for Ocean held its course, I markt, nor crooks, nor rubs that there did lye Could hinder ought but still augment its force: O happy Flood, quoth I, that holds thy race Till thou arrive at thy beloved place, Nor is it rocks or shoals that can obstruct thy pace. 23 Nor is’t enough that thou alone may’st slide, But hundred brooks in thy cleer waves do meet, So hand in hand along with thee they glide To Thetis house, where all imbrace and greet: Thou Emblem true of what I count the best, O could I lead my Rivolets to rest, So may we press to that vast mansion, ever blest. 24 Ye Fish which in this liquid Region ’bide That for each season have your habitation, Now salt, now fresh where you think best to glide To unknown coasts to give a visitation, In Lakes and ponds, you leave your numerous fry, So Nature taught, and yet you know not why, You watry folk that know not your felicity. 25 Look how the wantons frisk to tast the air, Then to the colder bottome streight they dive, Eftsoon to Neptun’s glassy Hall repair To see what trade they, great ones, there do drive, Who forrage o’re the spacious sea-green field, And take the trembling prey before it yield, Whose armour is their scales, their spreading fins their shield. 26 While musing thus with contemplation fed, And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain, The sweet-tongu’d Philomel percht ore my head, And chanted forth a most melodious strain Which rapt me so with wonder and delight, I judg’d my hearing better than my sight, And wisht me wings with her a while to take my flight. 27 O merry Bird (said I) that fears no snares, That neither toyles nor hoards up in thy barn, Feels no sad thoughts, nor cruciating cares To gain more good, or shun what might thee harm Thy clothes ne’re wear, thy meat is every where, Thy bed a bough, thy drink the water cleer, Reminds not what is past, nor whats to come dost fear. 28 The dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent, Sets hundred notes unto thy feathered crew, So each one tunes his pretty instrument, And warbling out the old, begin anew, And thus they pass their youth in summer season, Then follow thee into a better Region, Where winter’s never felt by that sweet airy legion. 29 Man at the best a creature frail and vain, In knowledge ignorant, in strength but weak, Subject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain, Each storm his state, his mind, his body break, From some of these he never finds cessation, But day or night, within, without, vexation, Troubles from foes, from friends, from dearest, near’st Relation. 30 And yet this sinfull creature, frail and vain, This lump of wretchedness, of sin and sorrow, This weather-beaten vessel wrackt with pain, Joys not in hope of an eternal morrow; Nor all his losses, crosses and vexation, In weight, in frequency and long duration Can make him deeply groan for that divine Translation. 31 The Mariner that on smooth waves doth glide, Sings merrily and steers his Barque with ease, As if he had command of wind and tide, And now becomes great Master of the seas; But suddenly a storm spoils all the sport, And makes him long for a more quiet port, Which ’gainst all adverse winds may serve for fort. 32 So he that faileth in this world of pleasure, Feeding on sweets, that never bit of th’ sowre, That’s full of friends, of honour and of treasure, Fond fool, he takes this earth ev’n for heav’ns bower, But sad affliction comes and makes him see Here’s neither honour, wealth, nor safety; Only above is found all with security. 33 O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things, That draws oblivions curtains over kings, Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not, Their names without a Record are forgot, Their parts, their ports, their pomp’s all laid in th’ dust. Nor wit, nor gold, nor buildings scape times rust; But he whose name is grav’d in the white stone Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.
New England. Alas, dear Mother, fairest Queen and best, With honour, wealth, and peace happy and blest, What ails thee hang thy head, and cross thine arms, And sit i’ the dust to sigh these sad alarms? What deluge of new woes thus over-whelm The glories of thy ever famous Realm? What means this wailing tone, this mournful guise? Ah, tell thy Daughter; she may sympathize. Old England. Art ignorant indeed of these my woes, Or must my forced tongue these griefs disclose, And must my self dissect my tatter’d state, Which Amazed Christendom stands wondering at? And thou a child, a Limb, and dost not feel My weak’ned fainting body now to reel? This physic-purging-potion I have taken Will bring Consumption or an Ague quaking, Unless some Cordial thou fetch from high, Which present help may ease my malady. If I decease, dost think thou shalt survive? Or by my wasting state dost think to thrive? Then weigh our case, if ‘t be not justly sad. Let me lament alone, while thou art glad. New England. And thus, alas, your state you much deplore In general terms, but will not say wherefore. What Medicine shall I seek to cure this woe, If th’ wound’s so dangerous, I may not know? But you, perhaps, would have me guess it out. What, hath some Hengist like that Saxon stout By fraud and force usurp’d thy flow’ring crown, Or by tempestuous Wars thy fields trod down? Or hath Canutus, that brave valiant Dane, The regal peaceful Sceptre from thee ta’en? Or is 't a Norman whose victorious hand With English blood bedews thy conquered Land? Or is ‘t intestine Wars that thus offend? Do Maud and Stephen for the Crown contend? Do Barons rise and side against their King, And call in Foreign aid to help the thing? Must Edward be depos’d? Or is ‘t the hour That second Richard must be clapp’d i’ th’ Tower? Or is it the fatal jar, again begun, That from the red, white pricking Roses sprung? Must Richmond’s aid the Nobles now implore To come and break the tushes of the Boar? If none of these, dear Mother, what’s your woe? Pray, do not fear Spain’s bragging Armado. Doth your Ally, fair France, conspire your wrack, Or doth the Scots play false behind your back? Doth Holland quit you ill for all your love? Whence is this storm, from Earth or Heaven above? Is ‘t drought, is ‘t Famine, or is ‘t Pestilence? Dost feel the smart, or fear the consequence? Your humble Child entreats you shew your grief. Though Arms nor Purse she hath for your relief— Such is her poverty,—yet shall be found A suppliant for your help, as she is bound. Old England. I must confess some of those Sores you name My beauteous Body at this present maim, But foreign Foe nor feigned friend I fear, For they have work enough, thou knowest, elsewhere. Nor is it Alcie’s son and Henry’s Daughter Whose proud contention cause this slaughter; Nor Nobles siding to make John no King, French Louis unjustly to the Crown to bring; No Edward, Richard, to lose rule and life, Nor no Lancastrians to renew old strife; No Crook-backt Tyrant now usurps the Seat, Whose tearing tusks did wound, and kill, and threat. No Duke of York nor Earl of March to soil Their hands in Kindred’s blood whom they did foil; No need of Tudor Roses to unite: None knows which is the Red or which the White. Spain’s braving Fleet a second time is sunk. France knows how of my fury she hath drunk By Edward third and Henry fifth of fame; Her Lilies in my Arms avouch the same. My Sister Scotland hurts me now no more, Though she hath been injurious heretofore. What Holland is, I am in some suspense, But trust not much unto his Excellence. For wants, sure some I feel, but more I fear; And for the Pestilence, who knows how near? Famine and Plague, two sisters of the Sword, Destruction to a Land doth soon afford. They’re for my punishments ordain'd on high, Unless thy tears prevent it speedily. But yet I answer not what you demand To shew the grievance of my troubled Land. Before I tell the effect I’ll shew the cause, Which are my sins—the breach of sacred Laws: Idolatry, supplanter of a Nation, With foolish superstitious adoration, Are lik’d and countenanc’d by men of might, The Gospel is trod down and hath no right. Church Offices are sold and bought for gain That Pope had hope to find Rome here again. For Oaths and Blasphemies did ever ear From Beelzebub himself such language hear? What scorning of the Saints of the most high! What injuries did daily on them lie! What false reports, what nick-names did they take, Not for their own, but for their Master’s sake! And thou, poor soul, wast jeer’d among the rest; Thy flying for the Truth I made a jest. For Sabbath-breaking and for Drunkenness Did ever Land profaneness more express? From crying bloods yet cleansed am not I, Martyrs and others dying causelessly. How many Princely heads on blocks laid down For nought but title to a fading Crown! ‘Mongst all the cruelties which I have done, Oh, Edward’s Babes, and Clarence’s hapless Son, O Jane, why didst thou die in flow’ring prime?— Because of Royal Stem, that was thy crime. For Bribery, Adultery, for Thefts, and Lies Where is the Nation I can’t paralyze? With Usury, Extortion, and Oppression, These be the Hydras of my stout transgression; These be the bitter fountains, heads, and roots Whence flow’d the source, the sprigs, the boughs, and fruits. Of more than thou canst hear or I relate, That with high hand I still did perpetrate, For these were threat’ned the woeful day I mocked the Preachers, put it fair away. The Sermons yet upon record do stand That cried destruction to my wicked Land. These Prophets’ mouths (all the while) was stopt, Unworthily, some backs whipt, and ears crept; Their reverent cheeks bear the glorious marks Of stinking, stigmatizing Romish Clerks; Some lost their livings, some in prison pent, Some grossly fined, from friends to exile went: Their silent tongues to heaven did vengeance cry, Who heard their cause, and wrongs judg’d righteously, And will repay it sevenfold in my lap. This is fore-runner of my after-clap. Nor took I warning by my neighbors’ falls. I saw sad Germany’s dismantled walls, I saw her people famish’d, Nobles slain, Her fruitful land a barren heath remain. I saw (unmov’d) her Armies foil’d and fled, Wives forc’d, babes toss’d, her houses calcined. I saw strong Rochelle yield’d to her foe, Thousands of starved Christians there also. I saw poor Ireland bleeding out her last, Such cruelty as all reports have past. Mine heart obdurate stood not yet aghast. Now sip I of that cup, and just ‘t may be The bottom dregs reserved are for me. New England. To all you’ve said, sad mother, I assent. Your fearful sins great cause there ‘s to lament. My guilty hands (in part) hold up with you, A sharer in your punishment’s my due. But all you say amounts to this effect, Not what you feel, but what you do expect. Pray, in plain terms, what is your present grief? Then let’s join heads and hands for your relief. Old England. Well, to the matter, then. There’s grown of late ‘Twixt King and Peers a question of state: Which is the chief, the law, or else the King? One saith, it’s he; the other, no such thing. My better part in Court of Parliament To ease my groaning land shew their intent To crush the proud, and right to each man deal, To help the Church, and stay the Common-Weal. So many obstacles comes in their way As puts me to a stand what I should say. Old customs, new Prerogatives stood on. Had they not held law fast, all had been gone, Which by their prudence stood them in such stead They took high Strafford lower by the head, And to their Laud be ‘t spoke they held ‘n th’ Tower All England’s metropolitan that hour. This done, an Act they would have passed fain No prelate should his Bishopric retain. Here tugg’d they hard indeed, for all men saw This must be done by Gospel, not by law. Next the Militia they urged sore. This was denied, I need not say wherefore. The King, displeased, at York himself absents. They humbly beg return, shew their intents. The writing, printing, posting to and fro, Shews all was done; I’ll therefore let it go. But now I come to speak of my disaster. Contention’s grown ‘twixt Subjects and their Master, They worded it so long they fell to blows, That thousands lay on heaps. Here bleeds my woes. I that no wars so many years have known Am now destroy’d and slaughter’d by mine own. But could the field alone this strife decide, One battle, two, or three I might abide, But these may be beginnings of more woe— Who knows, the worst, the best may overthrow! Religion, Gospel, here lies at the stake, Pray now, dear child, for sacred Zion’s sake, Oh, pity me in this sad perturbation, My plundered Towns, my houses’ devastation, My ravisht virgins, and my young men slain, My wealthy trading fallen, my dearth of grain. The seedtime’s come, but Ploughman hath no hope Because he knows not who shall inn his crop. The poor they want their pay, their children bread, Their woful mothers’ tears unpitied. If any pity in thy heart remain, Or any child-like love thou dost retain, For my relief now use thy utmost skill, And recompense me good for all my ill. New England. Dear mother, cease complaints, and wipe your eyes, Shake off your dust, cheer up, and now arise. You are my mother, nurse, I once your flesh, Your sunken bowels gladly would refresh. Your griefs I pity much but should do wrong, To weep for that we both have pray’d for long, To see these latter days of hop’d-for good, That Right may have its right, though ‘t be with blood. After dark Popery the day did clear; But now the Sun in’s brightness shall appear. Blest be the Nobles of thy Noble Land With (ventur’d lives) for truth’s defence that stand. Blest be thy Commons, who for Common good And thy infringed Laws have boldly stood. Blest be thy Counties, who do aid thee still With hearts and states to testify their will. Blest be thy Preachers, who do cheer thee on. Oh, cry: the sword of God and Gideon! And shall I not on them wish Mero’s curse That help thee not with prayers, arms, and purse? And for my self, let miseries abound If mindless of thy state I e’er be found. These are the days the Church’s foes to crush, To root out Prelates, head, tail, branch, and rush. Let’s bring Baal’s vestments out, to make a fire, Their Mitres, Surplices, and all their tire, Copes, Rochets, Croziers, and such trash, And let their names consume, but let the flash Light Christendom, and all the world to see We hate Rome’s Whore, with all her trumpery. Go on, brave Essex, shew whose son thou art, Not false to King, nor Country in thy heart, But those that hurt his people and his Crown, By force expel, destroy, and tread them down. Let Gaols be fill’d with th’ remnant of that pack, And sturdy Tyburn loaded till it crack. And ye brave Nobles, chase away all fear, And to this blessed Cause closely adhere. O mother, can you weep and have such Peers? When they are gone, then drown your self in tears, If now you weep so much, that then no more The briny Ocean will o’erflow your shore. These, these are they (I trust) with Charles our king, Out of all mists such glorious days will bring That dazzled eyes, beholding, much shall wonder At that thy settled Peace, thy wealth, and splendour, Thy Church and Weal establish’d in such manner That all shall joy that thou display’dst thy banner, And discipline erected so, I trust, That nursing Kings shall come and lick thy dust. Then Justice shall in all thy Courts take place Without respect of persons or of case. Then bribes shall cease, and suits shall not stick long, Patience and purse of Clients for to wrong. Then High Commissions shall fall to decay, And Pursuivants and Catchpoles want their pay. So shall thy happy Nation ever flourish, When truth and righteousness they thus shall nourish. When thus in Peace, thine Armies brave send out To sack proud Rome, and all her vassals rout. There let thy name, thy fame, and valour shine, As did thine Ancestors’ in Palestine, And let her spoils full pay with int’rest be Of what unjustly once she poll’d from thee. Of all the woes thou canst let her be sped, Execute to th’ full the vengeance threatened. Bring forth the beast that rul’d the world with’s beck, And tear his flesh, and set your feet on’s neck, And make his filthy den so desolate To th’ ‘stonishment of all that knew his state. This done, with brandish’d swords to Turkey go,— (For then what is it but English blades dare do?) And lay her waste, for so’s the sacred doom, And do to Gog as thou hast done to Rome. Oh Abraham’s seed, lift up your heads on high, For sure the day of your redemption’s nigh. The scales shall fall from your long blinded eyes, And him you shall adore who now despise. Then fullness of the Nations in shall flow, And Jew and Gentile to one worship go. Then follows days of happiness and rest. Whose lot doth fall to live therein is blest. No Canaanite shall then be found ‘n th’ land, And holiness on horses’ bells shall stand. If this make way thereto, then sigh no more, But if at all thou didst not see ‘t before. Farewell, dear mother; Parliament, prevail, And in a while you’ll tell another tale.
[Introduction] Lo now! four other acts upon the stage, Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age. The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water, Unstable, supple, moist, and cold’s his Nature. The second: frolic claims his pedigree; From blood and air, for hot and moist is he. The third of fire and choler is compos’d, Vindicative, and quarrelsome dispos’d. The last, of earth and heavy melancholy, Solid, hating all lightness, and all folly. Childhood was cloth’d in white, and given to show, His spring was intermixed with some snow. Upon his head a Garland Nature set: Of Daisy, Primrose, and the Violet. Such cold mean flowers (as these) blossom betime, Before the Sun hath throughly warm’d the clime. His hobby striding, did not ride, but run, And in his hand an hour-glass new begun, In dangers every moment of a fall, And when ‘tis broke, then ends his life and all. But if he held till it have run its last, Then may he live till threescore years or past. Next, youth came up in gorgeous attire (As that fond age, doth most of all desire), His Suit of Crimson, and his Scarf of Green. In’s countenance, his pride quickly was seen. Garland of Roses, Pinks, and Gillyflowers Seemed to grow on’s head (bedew’d with showers). His face as fresh, as is Aurora fair, When blushing first, she ‘gins to red the Air. No wooden horse, but one of metal try’d: He seems to fly, or swim, and not to ride. Then prancing on the Stage, about he wheels; But as he went, death waited at his heels. The next came up, in a more graver sort, As one that cared for a good report. His Sword by’s side, and choler in his eyes, But neither us’d (as yet) for he was wise, Of Autumn fruits a basket on his arm, His golden rod in’s purse, which was his charm. And last of all, to act upon this Stage, Leaning upon his staff, comes up old age. Under his arm a Sheaf of wheat he bore, A Harvest of the best: what needs he more? In’s other hand a glass, ev’n almost run, This writ about: This out, then I am done. His hoary hairs and grave aspect made way, And all gave ear to what he had to say. These being met, each in his equipage Intend to speak, according to their age, But wise Old-age did with all gravity To childish childhood give precedency, And to the rest, his reason mildly told: That he was young, before he grew so old. To do as he, the rest full soon assents, Their method was that of the Elements, That each should tell what of himself he knew, Both good and bad, but yet no more then’s true. With heed now stood, three ages of frail man, To hear the child, who crying, thus began. Childhood Ah me! conceiv’d in sin, and born in sorrow, A nothing, here to day, but gone to morrow, Whose mean beginning, blushing can’t reveal, But night and darkness must with shame conceal. My mother’s breeding sickness, I will spare, Her nine months’ weary burden not declare. To shew her bearing pangs, I should do wrong, To tell that pain, which can’t be told by tongue. With tears into this world I did arrive; My mother still did waste, as I did thrive, Who yet with love and all alacity, Spending was willing to be spent for me. With wayward cries, I did disturb her rest, Who sought still to appease me with her breast; With weary arms, she danc’d, and By, By, sung, When wretched I (ungrate) had done the wrong. When Infancy was past, my Childishness Did act all folly that it could express. My silliness did only take delight, In that which riper age did scorn and slight, In Rattles, Bables, and such toyish stuff. My then ambitious thoughts were low enough. My high-born soul so straitly was confin’d That its own worth it did not know nor mind. This little house of flesh did spacious count, Through ignorance, all troubles did surmount, Yet this advantage had mine ignorance, Freedom from Envy and from Arrogance. How to be rich, or great, I did not cark, A Baron or a Duke ne’r made my mark, Nor studious was, Kings favours how to buy, With costly presents, or base flattery; No office coveted, wherein I might Make strong my self and turn aside weak right. No malice bare to this or that great Peer, Nor unto buzzing whisperers gave ear. I gave no hand, nor vote, for death, of life. I’d nought to do, ‘twixt Prince, and peoples’ strife. No Statist I: nor Marti’list i’ th’ field. Where e’re I went, mine innocence was shield. My quarrels, not for Diadems, did rise, But for an Apple, Plumb, or some such prize. My strokes did cause no death, nor wounds, nor scars. My little wrath did cease soon as my wars. My duel was no challenge, nor did seek. My foe should weltering, with his bowels reek. I had no Suits at law, neighbours to vex, Nor evidence for land did me perplex. I fear’d no storms, nor all the winds that blows. I had no ships at Sea, no fraughts to loose. I fear’d no drought, nor wet; I had no crop, Nor yet on future things did place my hope. This was mine innocence, but oh the seeds Lay raked up of all the cursed weeds, Which sprouted forth in my insuing age, As he can tell, that next comes on the stage. But yet me let me relate, before I go, The sins and dangers I am subject to: From birth stained, with Adam’s sinful fact, From thence I ‘gan to sin, as soon as act; A perverse will, a love to what’s forbid; A serpent’s sting in pleasing face lay hid; A lying tongue as soon as it could speak And fifth Commandment do daily break; Oft stubborn, peevish, sullen, pout, and cry; Then nought can please, and yet I know not why. As many was my sins, so dangers too, For sin brings sorrow, sickness, death, and woe, And though I miss the tossings of the mind, Yet griefs in my frail flesh I still do find. What gripes of wind, mine infancy did pain? What tortures I, in breeding teeth sustain? What crudities my cold stomach hath bred? Whence vomits, worms, and flux have issued? What breaches, knocks, and falls I daily have? And some perhaps, I carry to my grave. Sometimes in fire, sometimes in water fall: Strangely preserv’d, yet mind it not at all. At home, abroad, my danger’s manifold That wonder ‘tis, my glass till now doth hold. I’ve done: unto my elders I give way, For ‘tis but little that a child can say. Youth My goodly clothing and beauteous skin Declare some greater riches are within, But what is best I‘ll first present to view, And then the worst, in a more ugly hue, For thus to do we on this Stage assemble, Then let not him, which hath most craft dissemble. Mine education, and my learning‘s such, As might my self, and others, profit much: With nurture trained up in virtue‘s Schools; Of Science, Arts, and Tongues, I know the rules; The manners of the Court, I likewise know, Nor ignorant what they in Country do. The brave attempts of valiant Knights I prize That dare climb Battlements, rear‘d to the skies. The snorting Horse, the Trumpet, Drum I like, The glist‘ring Sword, and well advanced Pike. I cannot lie in trench before a Town, Nor wait til good advice our hopes do crown. I scorn the heavy Corslet, Musket-proof; I fly to catch the Bullet that‘s aloof. Though thus in field, at home, to all most kind, So affable that I do suit each mind, I can insinuate into the breast And by my mirth can raise the heart deprest. Sweet Music rapteth my harmonious Soul, And elevates my thoughts above the Pole. My wit, my bounty, and my courtesy Makes all to place their future hopes on me. This is my best, but youth (is known) alas, To be as wild as is the snuffing Ass, As vain as froth, as vanity can be, That who would see vain man may look on me: My gifts abus‘d, my education lost, My woful Parents‘ longing hopes all crost; My wit evaporates in merriment; My valour in some beastly quarrel‘s spent; Martial deeds I love not, ‘cause they’re virtuous, But doing so, might seem magnanimous. My Lust doth hurry me to all that’s ill, I know no Law, nor reason, but my will; Sometimes lay wait to take a wealthy purse Or stab the man in’s own defence, that’s worse. Sometimes I cheat (unkind) a female Heir Of all at once, who not so wise, as fair, Trusteth my loving looks and glozing tongue Until her friends, treasure, and honour’s gone. Sometimes I sit carousing others’ health Until mine own be gone, my wit, and wealth. From pipe to pot, from pot to words and blows, For he that loveth Wine wanteth no woes. Days, nights, with Ruffins, Roarers, Fiddlers spend, To all obscenity my ears I bend, All counsel hate which tends to make me wise, And dearest friends count for mine enemies. If any care I take, ‘tis to be fine, For sure my suit more than my virtues shine. If any time from company I spare, ‘Tis spent in curling, frisling up my hair, Some young Adonais I do strive to be. Sardana Pallas now survives in me. Cards, Dice, and Oaths, concomitant, I love; To Masques, to Plays, to Taverns still I move; And in a word, if what I am you’d hear, Seek out a British, bruitish Cavalier. Such wretch, such monster am I; but yet more I want a heart all this for to deplore. Thus, thus alas! I have mispent my time, My youth, my best, my strength, my bud, and prime, Remembring not the dreadful day of Doom, Nor yet the heavy reckoning for to come, Though dangers do attend me every hour And ghastly death oft threats me with her power: Sometimes by wounds in idle combats taken, Sometimes by Agues all my body shaken; Sometimes by Fevers, all my moisture drinking, My heart lies frying, and my eyes are sinking. Sometimes the Cough, Stitch, painful Pleurisy, With sad affrights of death, do menace me. Sometimes the loathsome Pox my face be-mars With ugly marks of his eternal scars. Sometimes the Frenzy strangely mads my Brain That oft for it in Bedlam I remain. Too many’s my Diseases to recite, That wonder ‘tis I yet behold the light, That yet my bed in darkness is not made, And I in black oblivion’s den long laid. Of Marrow full my bones, of Milk my breasts, Ceas’d by the gripes of Serjeant Death's Arrests: Thus I have said, and what I’ve said you see, Childhood and youth is vain, yea vanity. Middle Age Childhood and youth forgot, sometimes I’ve seen, And now am grown more staid that have been green, What they have done, the same was done by me: As was their praise, or shame, so mine must be. Now age is more, more good ye do expect; But more my age, the more is my defect. But what’s of worth, your eyes shall first behold, And then a world of dross among my gold. When my Wild Oats were sown, and ripe, and mown, I then receiv’d a harvest of mine own. My reason, then bad judge, how little hope Such empty seed should yield a better crop. I then with both hands graspt the world together, Thus out of one extreme into another, But yet laid hold on virtue seemingly: Who climbs without hold, climbs dangerously. Be my condition mean, I then take pains My family to keep, but not for gains. If rich, I’m urged then to gather more To bear me out i’ th’ world and feed the poor; If a father, then for children must provide, But if none, then for kindred near ally’d; If Noble, then mine honour to maintain; If not, yet wealth, Nobility can gain. For time, for place, likewise for each relation, I wanted not my ready allegation. Yet all my powers for self-ends are not spent, For hundreds bless me for my bounty sent, Whose loins I’ve cloth’d, and bellies I have fed, With mine own fleece, and with my household bread. Yea, justice I have done, was I in place, To cheer the good and wicked to deface. The proud I crush’d, th’oppressed I set free, The liars curb’d but nourisht verity. Was I a pastor, I my flock did feed And gently lead the lambs, as they had need. A Captain I, with skill I train’d my band And shew’d them how in face of foes to stand. If a Soldier, with speed I did obey As readily as could my Leader say. Was I a laborer, I wrought all day As cheerfully as ere I took my pay. Thus hath mine age (in all) sometimes done well; Sometimes mine age (in all) been worse than hell. In meanness, greatness, riches, poverty Did toil, did broil; oppress’d, did steal and lie. Was I as poor as poverty could be, Then baseness was companion unto me. Such scum as Hedges and High-ways do yield, As neither sow, nor reap, nor plant, nor build. If to Agriculture I was ordain’d, Great labours, sorrows, crosses I sustain’d. The early Cock did summon, but in vain, My wakeful thoughts up to my painful gain. For restless day and night, I’m robb’d of sleep By cankered care, who sentinel doth keep. My weary breast rest from his toil can find, But if I rest, the more distrest my mind. If happiness my sordidness hath found, ‘Twas in the crop of my manured ground: My fatted Ox, and my exuberous Cow, My fleeced Ewe, and ever farrowing Sow. To greater things I never did aspire, My dunghill thoughts or hopes could reach no higher. If to be rich, or great, it was my fate. How was I broil’d with envy, and with hate? Greater than was the great’st was my desire, And greater still, did set my heart on fire. If honour was the point to which I steer’d, To run my hull upon disgrace I fear’d, But by ambitious sails I was so carried That over flats, and sands, and rocks I hurried, Opprest, and sunk, and sack’d, all in my way That did oppose me to my longed bay. My thirst was higher than Nobility And oft long’d sore to taste on Royalty, Whence poison, Pistols, and dread instruments Have been curst furtherers of mine intents. Nor Brothers, Nephews, Sons, nor Sires I’ve spar’d. When to a Monarchy my way they barr'’d, There set, I rid my self straight out of hand Of such as might my son, or his withstand, Then heapt up gold and riches as the clay, Which others scatter like the dew in May. Sometimes vain-glory is the only bait Whereby my empty school is lur’d and caught. Be I of worth, of learning, or of parts, I judge I should have room in all men’s hearts; And envy gnaws if any do surmount. I hate for to be had in small account. If Bias like, I’m stript unto my skin; I glory in my wealth I have within. Thus good, and bad, and what I am, you see, Now in a word, what my diseases be: The vexing Stone, in bladder and in reins, Torments me with intolerable pains; The windy cholic oft my bowels rend, To break the darksome prison, where it’s penn’d; The knotty Gout doth sadly torture me, And the restraining lame Sciatica; The Quinsy and the Fevers often distaste me, And the Consumption to the bones doth waste me, Subject to all Diseases, that’s the truth, Though some more incident to age, or youth; And to conclude, I may not tedious be, Man at his best estate is vanity. Old Age What you have been, ev’n such have I before, And all you say, say I, and something more. Babe's innocence, Youth’s wildness I have seen, And in perplexed Middle-age have been, Sickness, dangers, and anxieties have past, And on this Stage am come to act my last. I have been young, and strong, and wise as you But now, Bis pueri senes is too true. In every Age I’ve found much vanity. An end of all perfection now I see. It’s not my valour, honour, nor my gold, My ruin’d house, now falling can uphold; It’s not my Learning, Rhetoric, wit so large, Now hath the power, Death’s Warfare, to discharge. It’s not my goodly house, nor bed of down, That can refresh, or ease, if Conscience frown; Nor from alliance now can I have hope, But what I have done well, that is my prop. He that in youth is godly, wise, and sage Provides a staff for to support his age. Great mutations, some joyful, and some sad, In this short Pilgrimage I oft have had. Sometimes the Heavens with plenty smil’d on me, Sometimes, again, rain’d all adversity; Sometimes in honour, sometimes in disgrace, Sometime an abject, then again in place: Such private changes oft mine eyes have seen. In various times of state I’ve also been. I’ve seen a Kingdom flourish like a tree When it was rul’d by that Celestial she, And like a Cedar others so surmount That but for shrubs they did themselves account. Then saw I France, and Holland sav’d, Calais won, And Philip and Albertus half undone. I saw all peace at home, terror to foes, But ah, I saw at last those eyes to close, And then, me thought, the world at noon grew dark When it had lost that radiant Sun-like spark. In midst of griefs, I saw some hopes revive (For ‘twas our hopes then kept our hearts alive); I saw hopes dash’t, our forwardness was shent, And silenc’d we, by Act of Parliament. I’ve seen from Rome, an execrable thing, A plot to blow up Nobles and their King. I’ve seen designs at Ree and Cades cross’t, And poor Palatinate for every lost. I’ve seen a Prince to live on others’ lands, A Royal one, by alms from Subjects’ hands. I’ve seen base men, advanc’d to great degree, And worthy ones, put to extremity, But not their Prince’s love, nor state so high, Could once reverse, their shameful destiny. I’ve seen one stabb’d, another lose his head, And others fly their Country through their dread. I’ve seen, and so have ye, for ‘tis but late, The desolation of a goodly State. Plotted and acted so that none can tell Who gave the counsell, but the Prince of hell. I’ve seen a land unmoulded with great pain, But yet may live to see’t made up again. I’ve seen it shaken, rent, and soak’d in blood, But out of troubles ye may see much good. These are no old wives’ tales, but this is truth. We old men love to tell, what’s done in youth. But I return from whence I stept awry; My memory is short and brain is dry. My Almond-tree (gray hairs) doth flourish now, And back, once straight, begins apace to bow. My grinders now are few, my sight doth fail, My skin is wrinkled, and my cheeks are pale. No more rejoice, at music’s pleasant noise, But do awake at the cock’s clanging voice. I cannot scent savours of pleasant meat, Nor sapors find in what I drink or eat. My hands and arms, once strong, have lost their might. I cannot labour, nor I cannot fight: My comely legs, as nimble as the Roe, Now stiff and numb, can hardly creep or go. My heart sometimes as fierce, as Lion bold, Now trembling, and fearful, sad, and cold. My golden Bowl and silver Cord, e’re long, Shall both be broke, by wracking death so strong. I then shall go whence I shall come no more. Sons, Nephews, leave, my death for to deplore. In pleasures, and in labours, I have found That earth can give no consolation sound To great, to rich, to poor, to young, or old, To mean, to noble, fearful, or to bold. From King to beggar, all degrees shall find But vanity, vexation of the mind. Yea, knowing much, the pleasant’st life of all Hath yet amongst that sweet, some bitter gall. Though reading others’ Works doth much refresh, Yet studying much brings weariness to th’ flesh. My studies, labours, readings all are done, And my last period can e’en elmost run. Corruption, my Father, I do call, Mother, and sisters both; the worms that crawl In my dark house, such kindred I have store. There I shall rest till heavens shall be no more; And when this flesh shall rot and be consum’d, This body, by this soul, shall be assum’d; And I shall see with these same very eyes My strong Redeemer coming in the skies. Triumph I shall, o’re Sin, o’re Death, o’re Hell, And in that hope, I bid you all farewell.
Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights. Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon! Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures, Settled at Balham by the end of June. Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures, And in Antofagastas. Still he went Cityward daily; still she did abide At home. And both were really quite content With work and social pleasures. Then they died. They left three children (besides George, who drank): The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell, William, the head-clerk in the County Bank, And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.
"Pheu pheu, ti prosderkesthe m ommasin, tekna;" [[Alas, alas, why do you gaze at me with your eyes, my children.]]—Medea. Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years ? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, — And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows ; The young birds are chirping in the nest ; The young fawns are playing with the shadows ; The young flowers are blowing toward the west— But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly ! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free. Do you question the young children in the sorrow, Why their tears are falling so ? The old man may weep for his to-morrow Which is lost in Long Ago — The old tree is leafless in the forest — The old year is ending in the frost — The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest — The old hope is hardest to be lost : But the young, young children, O my brothers, Do you ask them why they stand Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, In our happy Fatherland ? They look up with their pale and sunken faces, And their looks are sad to see, For the man's grief abhorrent, draws and presses Down the cheeks of infancy — "Your old earth," they say, "is very dreary;" "Our young feet," they say, "are very weak !" Few paces have we taken, yet are weary— Our grave-rest is very far to seek ! Ask the old why they weep, and not the children, For the outside earth is cold — And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering, And the graves are for the old !" "True," say the children, "it may happen That we die before our time ! Little Alice died last year her grave is shapen Like a snowball, in the rime. We looked into the pit prepared to take her — Was no room for any work in the close clay : From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her, Crying, 'Get up, little Alice ! it is day.' If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower, With your ear down, little Alice never cries ; Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her, For the smile has time for growing in her eyes ,— And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in The shroud, by the kirk-chime ! It is good when it happens," say the children, "That we die before our time !" Alas, the wretched children ! they are seeking Death in life, as best to have ! They are binding up their hearts away from breaking, With a cerement from the grave. Go out, children, from the mine and from the city — Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do — Pluck you handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through ! But they answer, " Are your cowslips of the meadows Like our weeds anear the mine ? Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows, From your pleasures fair and fine! "For oh," say the children, "we are weary, And we cannot run or leap — If we cared for any meadows, it were merely To drop down in them and sleep. Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping — We fall upon our faces, trying to go ; And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping, The reddest flower would look as pale as snow. For, all day, we drag our burden tiring, Through the coal-dark, underground — Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron In the factories, round and round. "For all day, the wheels are droning, turning, — Their wind comes in our faces, — Till our hearts turn, — our heads, with pulses burning, And the walls turn in their places Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling — Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall, — Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling — All are turning, all the day, and we with all ! — And all day, the iron wheels are droning ; And sometimes we could pray, 'O ye wheels,' (breaking out in a mad moaning) 'Stop ! be silent for to-day ! ' " Ay ! be silent ! Let them hear each other breathing For a moment, mouth to mouth — Let them touch each other's hands, in a fresh wreathing Of their tender human youth ! Let them feel that this cold metallic motion Is not all the life God fashions or reveals — Let them prove their inward souls against the notion That they live in you, or under you, O wheels ! — Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward, As if Fate in each were stark ; And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward, Spin on blindly in the dark. Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers, To look up to Him and pray — So the blessed One, who blesseth all the others, Will bless them another day. They answer, " Who is God that He should hear us, While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred ? When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word ! And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding) Strangers speaking at the door : Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him, Hears our weeping any more ? " Two words, indeed, of praying we remember ; And at midnight's hour of harm, — 'Our Father,' looking upward in the chamber, We say softly for a charm. We know no other words, except 'Our Father,' And we think that, in some pause of angels' song, God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather, And hold both within His right hand which is strong. 'Our Father !' If He heard us, He would surely (For they call Him good and mild) Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely, 'Come and rest with me, my child.' "But, no !" say the children, weeping faster, " He is speechless as a stone ; And they tell us, of His image is the master Who commands us to work on. Go to ! " say the children,—"up in Heaven, Dark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find ! Do not mock us ; grief has made us unbelieving — We look up for God, but tears have made us blind." Do ye hear the children weeping and disproving, O my brothers, what ye preach ? For God's possible is taught by His world's loving — And the children doubt of each. And well may the children weep before you ; They are weary ere they run ; They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory Which is brighter than the sun : They know the grief of man, without its wisdom ; They sink in the despair, without its calm — Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom, — Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm, — Are worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly No dear remembrance keep,— Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly : Let them weep ! let them weep ! They look up, with their pale and sunken faces, And their look is dread to see, For they think you see their angels in their places, With eyes meant for Deity ;— "How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation, Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart, — Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, And tread onward to your throne amid the mart ? Our blood splashes upward, O our tyrants, And your purple shews your path ; But the child's sob curseth deeper in the silence Than the strong man in his wrath !"
Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,  Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work, Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed  Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk, Man, brute, reptile, fly,—alien of end and of aim,  Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,— Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,  And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!  Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,  This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise! Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,  Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise! And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,  Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things, Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,  Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.  And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,  Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest, Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,  Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest: For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,  When a great illumination surprises a festal night— Outlining round and round Rome's dome from space to spire)  Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.  In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's birth,  Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I; And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,  As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky: Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,  Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star; Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,  For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.  Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,  Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast, Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,  Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last; Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,  But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new: What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;  And what is,—shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.  All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,  All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,  Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth: Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause,  Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told; It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,  Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:—  But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,  Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are! And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,  That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;  It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said: Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:  And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!  Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;  Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow; For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,  That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go. Never to be again! But many more of the kind  As good, nay, better, perchance: is this your comfort to me? To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind  To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.  Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?  Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands! What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?  Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands? There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;  The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;  On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.  All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;  Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist  When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,  The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;  Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.  And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence  For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized? Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?  Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized? Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,  Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;  The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know.  Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:  I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce. Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,  Sliding by semitones till I sink to the minor,—yes, And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,  Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,  The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.
Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,  This autumn morning! How he sets his bones To bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet For the ripple to run over in its mirth;  Listening the while, where on the heap of stones The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet. That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true;  Such is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows. If you loved only what were worth your love, Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:  Make the low nature better by your throes! Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!
But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once: Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. You turn your face, but does it bring your heart? I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, Treat his own subject after his own way, Fix his own time, accept too his own price, And shut the money into this small hand When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly? Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love! I often am much wearier than you think, This evening more than usual, and it seems As if—forgive now—should you let me sit Here by the window with your hand in mine And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole, Both of one mind, as married people use, Quietly, quietly the evening through, I might get up to-morrow to my work Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this! Your soft hand is a woman of itself, And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve For each of the five pictures we require: It saves a model. So! keep looking so— My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds! —How could you ever prick those perfect ears, Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet— My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, Which everybody looks on and calls his, And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks—no one's: very dear, no less. You smile? why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony! A common greyness silvers everything,— All in a twilight, you and I alike —You, at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone you know),—but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; That length of convent-wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, And autumn grows, autumn in everything. Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand. How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are! I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie! This chamber for example—turn your head— All that's behind us! You don't understand Nor care to understand about my art, But you can hear at least when people speak: And that cartoon, the second from the door —It is the thing, Love! so such things should be— Behold Madonna!—I am bold to say. I can do with my pencil what I know, What I see, what at bottom of my heart I wish for, if I ever wish so deep— Do easily, too—when I say, perfectly, I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, Who listened to the Legate's talk last week, And just as much they used to say in France. At any rate 'tis easy, all of it! No sketches first, no studies, that's long past: I do what many dream of, all their lives, —Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive—you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,— Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter)—so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, Enter and take their place there sure enough, Though they come back and cannot tell the world. My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. The sudden blood of these men! at a word— Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. I, painting from myself and to myself, Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame Or their praise either. Somebody remarks Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey, Placid and perfect with my art: the worse! I know both what I want and what might gain, And yet how profitless to know, to sigh "Had I been two, another and myself, "Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No doubt. Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth The Urbinate who died five years ago. ('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.) Well, I can fancy how he did it all, Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, Above and through his art—for it gives way; That arm is wrongly put—and there again— A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, Its body, so to speak: its soul is right, He means right—that, a child may understand. Still, what an arm! and I could alter it: But all the play, the insight and the stretch— (Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out? Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, We might have risen to Rafael, I and you! Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think— More than I merit, yes, by many times. But had you—oh, with the same perfect brow, And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare — Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind! Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged "God and the glory! never care for gain. "The present by the future, what is that? "Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo! "Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!" I might have done it for you. So it seems: Perhaps not. All is as God over-rules. Beside, incentives come from the soul's self; The rest avail not. Why do I need you? What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo? In this world, who can do a thing, will not; And who would do it, cannot, I perceive: Yet the will's somewhat—somewhat, too, the power— And thus we half-men struggle. At the end, God, I conclude, compensates, punishes. 'Tis safer for me, if the award be strict, That I am something underrated here, Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth. I dared not, do you know, leave home all day, For fear of chancing on the Paris lords. The best is when they pass and look aside; But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all. Well may they speak! That Francis, that first time, And that long festal year at Fontainebleau! I surely then could sometimes leave the ground, Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear, In that humane great monarch's golden look,— One finger in his beard or twisted curl Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, One arm about my shoulder, round my neck, The jingle of his gold chain in my ear, I painting proudly with his breath on me, All his court round him, seeing with his eyes, Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts,— And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, This in the background, waiting on my work, To crown the issue with a last reward! A good time, was it not, my kingly days? And had you not grown restless... but I know— 'Tis done and past: 'twas right, my instinct said: Too live the life grew, golden and not grey, And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt Out of the grange whose four walls make his world. How could it end in any other way? You called me, and I came home to your heart. The triumph was—to reach and stay there; since I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost? Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine! "Rafael did this, Andrea painted that; "The Roman's is the better when you pray, "But still the other's Virgin was his wife—" Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows My better fortune, I resolve to think. For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives, Said one day Agnolo, his very self, To Rafael . . . I have known it all these years . . . (When the young man was flaming out his thoughts Upon a palace-wall for Rome to see, Too lifted up in heart because of it) "Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub "Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how, "Who, were he set to plan and execute "As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings, "Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!" To Rafael's!—And indeed the arm is wrong. I hardly dare . . . yet, only you to see, Give the chalk here—quick, thus, the line should go! Ay, but the soul! he's Rafael! rub it out! Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth, (What he? why, who but Michel Agnolo? Do you forget already words like those?) If really there was such a chance, so lost,— Is, whether you're—not grateful—but more pleased. Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed! This hour has been an hour! Another smile? If you would sit thus by me every night I should work better, do you comprehend? I mean that I should earn more, give you more. See, it is settled dusk now; there's a star; Morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall, The cue-owls speak the name we call them by. Come from the window, love,—come in, at last, Inside the melancholy little house We built to be so gay with. God is just. King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, The walls become illumined, brick from brick Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, That gold of his I did cement them with! Let us but love each other. Must you go? That Cousin here again? he waits outside? Must see you—you, and not with me? Those loans? More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that? Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend? While hand and eye and something of a heart Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth? I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit The grey remainder of the evening out, Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly How I could paint, were I but back in France, One picture, just one more—the Virgin's face, Not yours this time! I want you at my side To hear them—that is, Michel Agnolo— Judge all I do and tell you of its worth. Will you? To-morrow, satisfy your friend. I take the subjects for his corridor, Finish the portrait out of hand—there, there, And throw him in another thing or two If he demurs; the whole should prove enough To pay for this same Cousin's freak. Beside, What's better and what's all I care about, Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff! Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, The Cousin! what does he to please you more? I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. I regret little, I would change still less. Since there my past life lies, why alter it? The very wrong to Francis!—it is true I took his coin, was tempted and complied, And built this house and sinned, and all is said. My father and my mother died of want. Well, had I riches of my own? you see How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot. They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died: And I have laboured somewhat in my time And not been paid profusely. Some good son Paint my two hundred pictures—let him try! No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes, You loved me quite enough. it seems to-night. This must suffice me here. What would one have? In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance— Four great walls in the New Jerusalem, Meted on each side by the angel's reed, For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me To cover—the three first without a wife, While I have mine! So—still they overcome Because there's still Lucrezia,—as I choose. Again the Cousin's whistle! Go, my Love.
Rome, 15— Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back? Nephews—sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well— She, men would have to be your mother once, Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was! What's done is done, and she is dead beside, Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since, And as she died so must we die ourselves, And thence ye may perceive the world's a dream. Life, how and what is it? As here I lie In this state-chamber, dying by degrees, Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask "Do I live, am I dead?" Peace, peace seems all. Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace; And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: —Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care; Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, And up into the aery dome where live The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, With those nine columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. —Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, Put me where I may look at him! True peach, Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! Draw close: that conflagration of my church —What then? So much was saved if aught were missed! My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, Drop water gently till the surface sink, And if ye find . . . Ah God, I know not, I! ... Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, And corded up in a tight olive-frail, Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli, Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast ... Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all, That brave Frascati villa with its bath, So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, Like God the Father's globe on both His hands Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay, For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: Man goeth to the grave, and where is he? Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black— 'Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, The Saviour at his sermon on the mount, Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off, And Moses with the tables . . . but I know Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee, Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope To revel down my villas while I gasp Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! Nay, boys, ye love me—all of jasper, then! 'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve. My bath must needs be left behind, alas! One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world— And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? —That's if ye carve my epitaph aright, Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word, No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line— Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need! And then how I shall lie through centuries, And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long, And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop Into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work: And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, About the life before I lived this life, And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests, Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount, Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, And new-found agate urns as fresh as day, And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet, —Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend? No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage. All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart? Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick, They glitter like your mother's for my soul, Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze, Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term, And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, To comfort me on my entablature Whereon I am to lie till I must ask "Do I live, am I dead?" There, leave me, there! For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude To death—ye wish it—God, ye wish it! Stone— Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat As if the corpse they keep were oozing through— And no more lapis to delight the world! Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there, But in a row: and, going, turn your backs —Ay, like departing altar-ministrants, And leave me in my church, the church for peace, That I may watch at leisure if he leers— Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone, As still he envied me, so fair she was!
"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself." (David, Psalms 50.21) ['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above his head a pompion-plant, Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, And now a flower drops with a bee inside, And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,— He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider-web (Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times) And talks to his own self, howe'er he please, Touching that other, whom his dam called God. Because to talk about Him, vexes—ha, Could He but know! and time to vex is now, When talk is safer than in winter-time. Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep In confidence he drudges at their task, And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe, Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.] Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! 'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon. 'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, But not the stars; the stars came otherwise; Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same. 'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth alike: so He. 'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle, Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm, And says a plain word when she finds her prize, But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks About their hole—He made all these and more, Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else? He could not, Himself, make a second self To be His mate; as well have made Himself: He would not make what He mislikes or slights, An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains: But did, in envy, listlessness or sport, Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be— Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while, Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it. Because, so brave, so better though they be, It nothing skills if He begin to plague. Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash, Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived, Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,— Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all, Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain; Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme, And wanton, wishing I were born a bird. Put case, unable to be what I wish, I yet could make a live bird out of clay: Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban Able to fly?—for, there, see, he hath wings, And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire, And there, a sting to do his foes offence, There, and I will that he begin to live, Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns Of grigs high up that make the merry din, Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not. In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, And he lay stupid-like,—why, I should laugh; And if he, spying me, should fall to weep, Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,— Well, as the chance were, this might take or else Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry, And give the mankin three sound legs for one, Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg And lessoned he was mine and merely clay. Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme, Drinking the mash, with brain become alive, Making and marring clay at will? So He. 'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him, Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. 'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs That march now from the mountain to the sea; 'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; 'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, And two worms he whose nippers end in red; As it likes me each time, I do: so He. Well then, 'supposeth He is good i' the main, Placable if His mind and ways were guessed, But rougher than His handiwork, be sure! Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself, And envieth that, so helped, such things do more Than He who made them! What consoles but this? That they, unless through Him, do nought at all, And must submit: what other use in things? 'Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue: Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt: Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth "I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing, I make the cry my maker cannot make With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!' Would not I smash it with my foot? So He. But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease? Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that, What knows,—the something over Setebos That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought, Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance. There may be something quiet o'er His head, Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief, Since both derive from weakness in some way. I joy because the quails come; would not joy Could I bring quails here when I have a mind: This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth. 'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch, But never spends much thought nor care that way. It may look up, work up,—the worse for those It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos The many-handed as a cuttle-fish, Who, making Himself feared through what He does, Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar To what is quiet and hath happy life; Next looks down here, and out of very spite Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real, These good things to match those as hips do grapes. 'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport. Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle: Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; Has peeled a wand and called it by a name; Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe The eyed skin of a supple oncelot; And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole, A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye, And saith she is Miranda and my wife: 'Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge; Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared, Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame, And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge In a hole o' the rock and calls him Caliban; A bitter heart that bides its time and bites. 'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way, Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He. His dam held that the Quiet made all things Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so. Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex. Had He meant other, while His hand was in, Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow, Or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint Like an orc's armour? Ay,—so spoil His sport! He is the One now: only He doth all. 'Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him. Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why? 'Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose, But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes. Also it pleaseth Setebos to work, Use all His hands, and exercise much craft, By no means for the love of what is worked. 'Tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world When all goes right, in this safe summer-time, And he wants little, hungers, aches not much, Than trying what to do with wit and strength. 'Falls to make something: 'piled yon pile of turfs, And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each, And set up endwise certain spikes of tree, And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top, Found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill. No use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake; 'Shall some day knock it down again: so He. 'Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof! One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope. He hath a spite against me, that I know, Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why? So it is, all the same, as well I find. 'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave, Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck, Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue, And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite. 'Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies) Where, half an hour before, I slept i' the shade: Often they scatter sparkles: there is force! 'Dug up a newt He may have envied once And turned to stone, shut up Inside a stone. Please Him and hinder this?—What Prosper does? Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He! There is the sport: discover how or die! All need not die, for of the things o' the isle Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees; Those at His mercy,—why, they please Him most When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice! Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth. You must not know His ways, and play Him off, Sure of the issue. 'Doth the like himself: 'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears But steals the nut from underneath my thumb, And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence: 'Spareth an urchin that contrariwise, Curls up into a ball, pretending death For fright at my approach: the two ways please. But what would move my choler more than this, That either creature counted on its life To-morrow and next day and all days to come, Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart, "Because he did so yesterday with me, And otherwise with such another brute, So must he do henceforth and always."—Ay? Would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means! 'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He. 'Conceiveth all things will continue thus, And we shall have to live in fear of Him So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change, If He have done His best, make no new world To please Him more, so leave off watching this,— If He surprise not even the Quiet's self Some strange day,—or, suppose, grow into it As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we, And there is He, and nowhere help at all. 'Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop. His dam held different, that after death He both plagued enemies and feasted friends: Idly! He doth His worst in this our life, Giving just respite lest we die through pain, Saving last pain for worst,—with which, an end. Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too happy. 'Sees, himself, Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink, Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both. 'Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball On head and tail as if to save their lives: Moves them the stick away they strive to clear. Even so, 'would have Him misconceive, suppose This Caliban strives hard and ails no less, And always, above all else, envies Him; Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights, Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh, And never speaks his mind save housed as now: Outside, 'groans, curses. If He caught me here, O'erheard this speech, and asked "What chucklest at?" 'Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off, Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best, Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree, Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste: While myself lit a fire, and made a song And sung it, "What I hate, be consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?" Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend, Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier He Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die. [What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once! Crickets stop hissing: not a bird—or, yes, There scuds His raven that has told Him all! It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, And fast invading fires begin! White blaze— A tree's head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him! Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos! 'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!]
What is he buzzing in my ears?  "Now that I come to die, Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"  Ah, reverend sir, not I!  What I viewed there once, what I view again  Where the physic bottles stand On the table's edge,—is a suburb lane,  With a wall to my bedside hand.  That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,  From a house you could descry O'er the garden-wall; is the curtain blue  Or green to a healthy eye?  To mine, it serves for the old June weather  Blue above lane and wall; And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether"  Is the house o'ertopping all.  At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,  There watched for me, one June, A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,  My poor mind's out of tune.  Only, there was a way... you crept  Close by the side, to dodge Eyes in the house, two eyes except:  They styled their house "The Lodge."  What right had a lounger up their lane?  But, by creeping very close, With the good wall's help,—their eyes might strain  And stretch themselves to Oes,  Yet never catch her and me together,  As she left the attic, there, By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether,"  And stole from stair to stair,  And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,  We loved, sir—used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was—  But then, how it was sweet!
Christ God who savest man, save most  Of men Count Gismond who saved me! Count Gauthier, when he chose his post,  Chose time and place and company To suit it; when he struck at length My honour, 't was with all his strength. And doubtlessly, ere he could draw  All points to one, he must have schemed! That miserable morning saw  Few half so happy as I seemed, While being dressed in queen's array To give our tourney prize away. I thought they loved me, did me grace  To please themselves; 't was all their deed; God makes, or fair or foul, our face;  If showing mine so caused to bleed My cousins' hearts, they should have dropped A word, and straight the play had stopped. They, too, so beauteous! Each a queen  By virtue of her brow and breast; Not needing to be crowned, I mean,  As I do. E'en when I was dressed, Had either of them spoke, instead Of glancing sideways with still head! But no: they let me laugh, and sing  My birthday song quite through, adjust The last rose in my garland, fling  A last look on the mirror, trust My arms to each an arm of theirs, And so descend the castle-stairs- And come out on the morning troop  Of merry friends who kissed my cheek, And called me queen, and made me stoop  Under the canopy-(a streak That pierced it, of the outside sun, Powdered with gold its gloom's soft dun)- And they could let me take my state  And foolish throne amid applause Of all come there to celebrate  My queen's-day-Oh I think the cause Of much was, they forgot no crowd Makes up for parents in their shroud! However that be, all eyes were bent  Upon me, when my cousins cast Theirs down; 't was time I should present  The victor's crown, but ... there, 't will last No long time ... the old mist again Blinds me as then it did. How vain! See! Gismond's at the gate, in talk  With his two boys: I can proceed. Well, at that moment, who should stalk  Forth boldly-to my face, indeed- But Gauthier? and he thundered "Stay!" And all stayed. "Bring no crowns, I say! "Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet  "About her! Let her shun the chaste, "Or lay herself before their feet!  "Shall she, whose body I embraced "A night long, queen it in the day? "For honour's sake no crowns, I say!" I? What I answered? As I live,  I never fancied such a thing As answer possible to give.  What says the body when they spring Some monstrous torture-engine's whole Strength on it? No more says the soul. Till out strode Gismond; then I knew  That I was saved. I never met His face before, but, at first view,  I felt quite sure that God had set Himself to Satan; would who spend A minute's mistrust on the end? He strode to Gauthier, in his throat  Gave him the lie, then struck his mouth With one back-handed blow that wrote  In blood men's verdict there. North, South, East, West, I looked. The lie was dead, And damned, and truth stood up instead. This glads me most, that I enjoyed  The heart o' the joy, with my content In watching Gismond unalloyed  By any doubt of the event: God took that on him-I was bid Watch Gismond for my part: I did. Did I not watch him while he let  His armourer just brace his greaves, Rivet his hauberk, on the fret  The while! His foot ... my memory leaves No least stamp out nor how anon He pulled his ringing gauntlets on. And e'en before the trumpet's sound  Was finished, prone lay the false knight, Prone as his lie, upon the ground:  Gismond flew at him, used no sleight O' the sword, but open-breasted drove, Cleaving till out the truth he clove. Which done, he dragged him to my feet  And said, "Here die, but end thy breath "In full confession, lest thou fleet  "From my first, to God's second death! "Say, hast thou lied? "And, "I have lied "To God and her,"he said, and died. Then Gismond, kneeling to me, asked  -What safe my heart holds, though no word Could I repeat now, if I tasked  My powers for ever, to a third Dear even as you are. Pass the rest Until I sank upon his breast. Over my head his arm he flung  Against the world; and scarce I felt His sword (that dripped by me and swung)  A little shifted in its belt: For he began to say the while How South our home lay many a mile. So, 'mid the shouting multitude  We two walked forth to never more Return. My cousins have pursued  Their life, untroubled as before I vexed them. Gauthier's dwelling-place God lighten! May his soul find grace! Our elder boy has got the clear  Great brow, tho' when his brother's black Full eye shows scorn, it ... Gismond here?  And have you brought my tercel back? I was just telling Adela How many birds it struck since May.
At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,  When you set your fancies free, Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned— Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,  —Pity me?  Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!  What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel  —Being—who?  One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,  Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,  Sleep to wake.  No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time  Greet the unseen with a cheer! Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed,—fight on, fare ever  There as here!"
Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, The not-incurious in God's handiwork (This man's-flesh he hath admirably made, Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, To coop up and keep down on earth a space That puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul) —To Abib, all-sagacious in our art, Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast, Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, Whereby the wily vapour fain would slip Back and rejoin its source before the term,— And aptest in contrivance (under God) To baffle it by deftly stopping such:— The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) Three samples of true snakestone—rarer still, One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, (But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) And writeth now the twenty-second time. My journeyings were brought to Jericho; Thus I resume. Who studious in our art Shall count a little labour unrepaid? I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone On many a flinty furlong of this land. Also, the country-side is all on fire With rumours of a marching hitherward: Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son. A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear; Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls: I cried and threw my staff and he was gone. Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me, And once a town declared me for a spy; But at the end, I reach Jerusalem, Since this poor covert where I pass the night, This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence A man with plague-sores at the third degree Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here! 'Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe, To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip And share with thee whatever Jewry yields A viscid choler is observable In tertians, I was nearly bold to say; And falling-sickness hath a happier cure Than our school wots of: there's a spider here Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back; Take five and drop them . . . but who knows his mind, The Syrian runagate I trust this to? His service payeth me a sublimate Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye. Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn, There set in order my experiences, Gather what most deserves, and give thee all— Or I might add, Judea's gum-tragacanth Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained, Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry, In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy— Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar— But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end. Yet stay: my Syrian blinketh gratefully, Protesteth his devotion is my price— Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal? I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush, What set me off a-writing first of all. An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang! For, be it this town's barrenness—or else The Man had something in the look of him— His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. So, pardon if—(lest presently I lose In the great press of novelty at hand The care and pains this somehow stole from me) I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind, Almost in sight—for, wilt thou have the truth? The very man is gone from me but now, Whose ailment is the subject of discourse. Thus then, and let thy better wit help all! 'Tis but a case of mania—subinduced By epilepsy, at the turning-point Of trance prolonged unduly some three days: When, by the exhibition of some drug Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art Unknown to me and which 'twere well to know, The evil thing out-breaking all at once Left the man whole and sound of body indeed,— But, flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide, Making a clear house of it too suddenly, The first conceit that entered might inscribe Whatever it was minded on the wall So plainly at that vantage, as it were, (First come, first served) that nothing subsequent Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls The just-returned and new-established soul Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart That henceforth she will read or these or none. And first—the man's own firm conviction rests That he was dead (in fact they buried him) —That he was dead and then restored to life By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: —'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise," and he did rise. "Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume, Instead of giving way to time and health, Should eat itself into the life of life, As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all! For see, how he takes up the after-life. The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew, Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age, The body's habit wholly laudable, As much, indeed, beyond the common health As he were made and put aside to show. Think, could we penetrate by any drug And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh, And bring it clear and fair, by three days' sleep! Whence has the man the balm that brightens all? This grown man eyes the world now like a child. Some elders of his tribe, I should premise, Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep, To bear my inquisition. While they spoke, Now sharply, now with sorrow,—told the case,— He listened not except I spoke to him, But folded his two hands and let them talk, Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool. And that's a sample how his years must go. Look, if a beggar, in fixed middle-life, Should find a treasure,—can he use the same With straitened habits and with tastes starved small, And take at once to his impoverished brain The sudden element that changes things, That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust? Is he not such an one as moves to mirth— Warily parsimonious, when no need, Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times? All prudent counsel as to what befits The golden mean, is lost on such an one The man's fantastic will is the man's law. So here—we call the treasure knowledge, say, Increased beyond the fleshly faculty— Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: The man is witless of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things, Or whether it be little or be much. Discourse to him of prodigious armaments Assembled to besiege his city now, And of the passing of a mule with gourds— 'Tis one! Then take it on the other side, Speak of some trifling fact—he will gaze rapt With stupor at its very littleness, (Far as I see) as if in that indeed He caught prodigious import, whole results; And so will turn to us the bystanders In ever the same stupor (note this point) That we too see not with his opened eyes. Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, Preposterously, at cross purposes. Should his child sicken unto death,—why, look For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, Or pretermission of the daily craft! While a word, gesture, glance, from that same child At play or in the school or laid asleep, Will startle him to an agony of fear, Exasperation, just as like. Demand The reason why—" tis but a word," object— "A gesture"—he regards thee as our lord Who lived there in the pyramid alone Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young, We both would unadvisedly recite Some charm's beginning, from that book of his, Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst All into stars, as suns grown old are wont. Thou and the child have each a veil alike Thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know! He holds on firmly to some thread of life— (It is the life to lead perforcedly) Which runs across some vast distracting orb Of glory on either side that meagre thread, Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet— The spiritual life around the earthly life: The law of that is known to him as this, His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. So is the man perplext with impulses Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, Proclaiming what is right and wrong across, And not along, this black thread through the blaze— "It should be" baulked by "here it cannot be." And oft the man's soul springs into his face As if he saw again and heard again His sage that bade him "Rise" and he did rise. Something, a word, a tick of the blood within Admonishes: then back he sinks at once To ashes, who was very fire before, In sedulous recurrence to his trade Whereby he earneth him the daily bread; And studiously the humbler for that pride, Professedly the faultier that he knows God's secret, while he holds the thread of life. Indeed the especial marking of the man Is prone submission to the heavenly will— Seeing it, what it is, and why it is. 'Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last For that same death which must restore his being To equilibrium, body loosening soul Divorced even now by premature full growth: He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live So long as God please, and just how God please. He even seeketh not to please God more (Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please. Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach The doctrine of his sect whate'er it be, Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do: How can he give his neighbour the real ground, His own conviction? Ardent as he is— Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old "Be it as God please" reassureth him. I probed the sore as thy disciple should: "How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march To stamp out like a little spark thy town, Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?" He merely looked with his large eyes on me. The man is apathetic, you deduce? Contrariwise, he loves both old and young, Able and weak, affects the very brutes And birds—how say I? flowers of the field— As a wise workman recognizes tools In a master's workshop, loving what they make. Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb: Only impatient, let him do his best, At ignorance and carelessness and sin— An indignation which is promptly curbed: As when in certain travels I have feigned To be an ignoramus in our art According to some preconceived design, And happed to hear the land's practitioners, Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, Prattle fantastically on disease, Its cause and cure—and I must hold my peace! Thou wilt object—why have I not ere this Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source, Conferring with the frankness that befits? Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech Perished in a tumult many years ago, Accused,—our learning's fate,—of wizardry, Rebellion, to the setting up a rule And creed prodigious as described to me. His death, which happened when the earthquake fell (Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss To occult learning in our lord the sage Who lived there in the pyramid alone) Was wrought by the mad people—that's their wont! On vain recourse, as I conjecture it, To his tried virtue, for miraculous help— How could he stop the earthquake? That's their way! The other imputations must be lies: But take one, though I loathe to give it thee, In mere respect for any good man's fame. (And after all, our patient Lazarus Is stark mad; should we count on what he says? Perhaps not: though in writing to a leech 'Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.) This man so cured regards the curer, then As—God forgive me! who but God himself, Creator and sustainer of the world, That came and dwelt in flesh on 't awhile! —'Sayeth that such an one was born and lived, Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know, And yet was . . . what I said nor choose repeat, And must have so avouched himself, in fact, In hearing of this very Lazarus Who saith—but why all this of what he saith? Why write of trivial matters, things of price Calling at every moment for remark? I noticed on the margin of a pool Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort, Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange! Thy pardon for this long and tedious case, Which, now that I review it, needs must seem Unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth! Nor I myself discern in what is writ Good cause for the peculiar interest And awe indeed this man has touched me with. Perhaps the journey's end, the weariness Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus: I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came A moon made like a face with certain spots Multiform, manifold, and menacing: Then a wind rose behind me. So we met In this old sleepy town at unaware, The man and I. I send thee what is writ. Regard it as a chance, a matter risked To this ambiguous Syrian—he may lose, Or steal, or give it thee with equal good. Jerusalem's repose shall make amends For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine; Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell! The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too— So, through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here! Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love me who have died for thee!" The madman saith He said so: it is strange.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations [Florentine painter, 1412-69] I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! You need not clap your torches to my face.Zooks,Zooks! word of emphasis, from “Gadzooks”, as in “God’s hooks” – referring to the nails that held Christ to the Cross what's to blame? you think you see a monk! What, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds, And here you catch me at an alley's end Where sportivesportive amorous in nature, wanton ladies leave their doors ajar? The Carmine'sCarmine’s Convent of the Carmine, where Lippi was placed at the age of eight. my cloister: hunt it up, Do,—harry outharry out drive off, if you must show your zeal, Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole, And nip each softlingsoftling “a soft little hand” [OED] of a wee white mouse,Weke, weke, that's crept to keep him company! Aha, you know your betters! Then, you'll take Your hand away that's fiddling on my throat, And please to know me likewise. Who am I? Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend Three streets off—he's a certain . . . how d'ye call? Master—a ...Cosimo of the MediciCosimo of the Medici 1389-1464, Florentine politician and patron of the arts, who supported Lippi , I' the house that caps the corner. Boh! you were best! Remember and tell me, the day you're hanged, How you affected such a gullet's-gripe! But you, sir, it concerns you that your knaves Pick up a manner nor discredit you: Zooks, are we pilchardspilchards small sea fish, that they sweep the streets And count fair price what comes into their net? He's Judas to a tittleto a tittle to a T, that man is! Just such a face! Why, sir, you make amends. Lord, I'm not angry! Bid your hang-dogshang-dogs despicable people go Drink out this quarter-florin to the health Of the munificent House that harbours me (And many more beside, lads! more beside!) And all's come square again. I'd like his face— His, elbowing on his comrade in the door With the pike and lantern,—for the slave that holdsJohn Baptist's head a-dangle by the hairWith one hand ("Look you, now," as who should say)And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!John Baptist’s head a-dangle … unwiped John the Baptist was a New Testament prophet who baptized Jesus; see Matthew 3. The “Beheading of the Baptist” and “Banquet of Herod” are two works by Lippi (both in Prato) on the theme of John the Baptist’s end at Herod’s hands. It's not your chance to have a bit of chalk, A wood-coal or the like? or you should see! Yes, I'm the painter, since you style me so. What, brother Lippo's doings, up and down, You know them and they take you? like enough! I saw the proper twinkle in your eye— 'Tell you, I liked your looks at very first. Let's sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch. Here's spring come, and the nights one makes up bands To roam the town and sing out carnivalcarnival riotous season prior to the austerity of Lent, And I've been three weeks shut within my mewmew figuratively speaking, a cage, A-painting for the great man, saints and saints And saints again. I could not paint all night— Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air. There came a hurry of feet and little feet, A sweep of lute strings, laughs, and whiftswhifts bits of a song of song, —Flower o' the broom,Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!Flower o' the quince,I let Lisa go, and what good in life since?Flower o' the thyme—and so on. Round they went. Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight,—three slim shapes, And a face that looked up . . . zooks, sir, flesh and blood, That's all I'm made of! Into shreds it went, Curtain and counterpane and coverlet, All the bed-furniture—a dozen knots, There was a ladder! Down I let myself, Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped, And after them. I came up with the fun Hard by Saint LaurenceSaint Laurence a church in Florence: S. Lorenzo in Vasari. Lippi painted an Annunciation scene here, hail fellow, well met,—Flower o' the rose,If I've been merry, what matter who knows? And so as I was stealing back again To get to bed and have a bit of sleep Ere I rise up to-morrow and go work On Jerome knocking at his poor old breastWith his great round stone to subdue the flesh,Jerome …flesh St. Jerome (c.340-420), a Doctor of the Latin Church, noted for an ascetic life and writings You snap me of the sudden. Ah, I see! Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head— Mine's shaved—a monk, you say—the sting 's in that! If Master Cosimo announced himself, Mum's the word naturally; but a monk! Come, what am I a beast for? tell us, now! I was a baby when my mother died And father died and left me in the street. I starved there, God knows how, a year or two On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks, Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day, My stomach being empty as your hat, The wind doubled me up and down I went. Old Aunt LapacciaAunt Lapaccia Filippo’s aunt, who cared for him after his father died trussed me with one hand, (Its fellow was a stinger as I knew) And so along the wall, over the bridge, By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there, While I stood munching my first bread that month: "So, boy, you're minded," quoth the good fat father Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time,— "To quit this very miserable world? Will you renounce" . . . "the mouthful of bread?" thought I; By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me; I did renounce the world, its pride and greed, Palace, farm, villa, shop, and banking-house, Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici Have given their hearts to—all at eight years old. Well, sir, I found in time, you may be sure, 'Twas not for nothing—the good bellyful, The warm serge and the rope that goes all round, And day-long blessed idleness beside! "Let's see what the urchin's fit for"—that came next. Not overmuch their way, I must confess. Such a to-do! They tried me with their books: Lord, they'd have taught me Latin in pure waste!Flower o' the clove.All the Latin I construe is, "amo" I love! But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets Eight years together, as my fortune was, Watching folk's faces to know who will fling The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires, And who will curse or kick him for his pains,— Which gentleman processional and fine, Holding a candle to the Sacrament, Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch The droppings of the wax to sell again, Or holla for the Eightthe Eight “the magistrates of Florence” [Ian Jack] and have him whipped,— How say I?—nay, which dog bites, which lets drop His bone from the heap of offal in the street,— Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike, He learns the look of things, and none the less For admonition from the hunger-pinch. I had a store of such remarks, be sure, Which, after I found leisure, turned to use. I drew men's faces on my copy-books, Scrawled them within the antiphonary's margeantiphonary’s marge margin of an antiphon (a book of chants used during Mass), Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes, Found eyes and nose and chin for A's and B's, And made a string of pictures of the world Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun, On the wall, the bench, the door. The monks looked black. "Nay," quoth the Prior, "turn him out, d'ye say? In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark. What if at last we get our man of parts, We CarmelitesCarmelites an order of mendicant friars, founded at Mount Carmel in the 12th Century; also called White Friars, like those CamaldoleseCamaldolese member of the religious order founded in the 11th Century also called Camaldolites And Preaching FriarsPreaching Friars Dominicans, an order of mendicant friars, founded by St. Dominic in the 13th Century, to do our church up fine And put the front on it that ought to be!" And hereupon he bade me daub away. Thank you! my head being crammed, the walls a blank, Never was such prompt disemburdeningdisemburdening disburdening. First, every sort of monk, the black and whitethe black and the white Black Friars are Dominicans; White Friars are Carmelites, I drew them, fat and lean: then, folk at church, From good old gossips waiting to confess Their cribscribs minor thefts of barrel-droppings, candle-ends,— To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot, Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there With the little children round him in a row Of admiration, half for his beard and half For that white anger of his victim's son Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm, Signing himself with the other because of Christ (Whose sad face on the cross sees only this After the passion of a thousand years) Till some poor girl, her apron o'er her head, (Which the intense eyes looked through) came at eve On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf, Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers (The brute took growling), prayed, and so was gone. I painted all, then cried "'Tis ask and have; Choose, for more's ready!"—laid the ladder flat, And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall. The monks closed in a circle and praised loud Till checked, taught what to see and not to see, Being simple bodies,—"That's the very man! Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog! That woman's like the Prior's niecePrior’s niece euphemism for an intimate of the Prior who comes To care about his asthma: it's the life!'' But there my triumph's straw-fire flared and funkedfunked went out, smoked; Their betters took their turn to see and say: The Prior and the learned pulled a face And stopped all that in no time. "How? what's here? Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all! Faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true As much as pea and pea! it's devil's-game! Your business is not to catch men with show, With homage to the perishable clay, But lift them over it, ignore it all, Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh. Your business is to paint the souls of men— Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . . no, it's not . . . It's vapour done up like a new-born babe— (In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth) It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul! Give us no more of body than shows soul! Here's GiottoGiotto Florentine painter, Giotto di Bondone (1266/67-1337) [Metropolitan Museum site] (For an example of his work, see here.), with his Saint a-praising God, That sets us praising—why not stop with him? Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head With wonder at lines, colours, and what not? Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms! Rub all out, try at it a second time. Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts, She's just my niece . . . HerodiasHerodias Herod’s second wife, see Matthew 14:1-12. Her daughter Salome dances before Herod, who afterwards grants her whatever she will wish. At the suggestion of Herodias, Salome asks for John the Baptist’s head. Lippi’s “Banquet of Herod” (in Prato) shows this scene of the Baptist’s head on a platter., I would say,— Who went and danced and got men's heads cut off! Have it all out!" Now, is this sense, I ask? A fine way to paint soul, by painting body So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further And can't fare worse! Thus, yellow does for white When what you put for yellow's simply black, And any sort of meaning looks intense When all beside itself means and looks nought. Why can't a painter lift each foot in turn, Left foot and right foot, go a double step, Make his flesh liker and his soul more like, Both in their order? Take the prettiest face, The Prior's niece . . . patron-saint—is it so pretty You can't discover if it means hope, fear, Sorrow or joy? won't beauty go with these? Suppose I've made her eyes all right and blue, Can't I take breath and try to add life's flash, And then add soul and heighten them three-fold? Or say there's beauty with no soul at all— (I never saw it—put the case the same—) If you get simple beauty and nought else, You get about the best thing God invents: That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed, Within yourself, when you return him thanks. "Rub all out!" Well, well, there's my life, in short, And so the thing has gone on ever since. I'm grown a man no doubt, I've broken bounds: You should not take a fellow eight years old And make him swear to never kiss the girls. I'm my own master, paint now as I please— Having a friend, you see, in the Corner-house! Lord, it's fast holding by the rings in front— Those great rings serve more purposes than just To plant a flag in, or tie up a horse! And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes Are peeping o'er my shoulder as I work, The heads shake still—"It's art's decline, my son! You're not of the true painters, great and old;Brother Angelico'sBrother Angelico Fra Angelico (1387-1455), Florentine painter, who was also a Dominican. For examples of the work of Fra Angelico, search the Metropolitan Museum website. the man, you'll find;Brother LorenzoBrother Lorenzo Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni), active 1390-1423, Florentine painter who was a Camaldoli monk. For examples of the work of Fra Lorenzo, search the Metropolitan Museum website. stands his single peer:Fag onfag on labor at at flesh, you'll never make the third!"Flower o' the pine,You keep your mistr ... manners, and I'll stick to mine! I'm not the third, then: bless us, they must know! Don't you think they're the likeliest to know, They with their Latin? So, I swallow my rage, Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint To please them—sometimes do and sometimes don't; For, doing most, there's pretty sure to come A turn, some warm eve finds me at my saints— A laugh, a cry, the business of the world—(Flower o' the peachDeath for us all, and his own life for each!) And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs overcup runs over Compare to Psalms 23:5 : “my cup runneth over.”, The world and life's too big to pass for a dream, And I do these wild things in sheer despite, And play the fooleries you catch me at, In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so, Although the miller does not preach to him The only good of grass is to make chaff. What would men have? Do they like grass or no— May they or mayn't they? all I want's the thing Settled for ever one way. As it is, You tell too many lies and hurt yourself: You don't like what you only like too much, You do like what, if given you at your word, You find abundantly detestable. For me, I think I speak as I was taught;I always see the garden and God thereA-making man's wifeI always see the garden and God there … wife See Genesis 2:18-23.: and, my lesson learned, The value and significance of flesh, I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards. You understand me: I'm a beast, I know. But see, now—why, I see as certainly As that the morning-star's about to shine, What will hap some day. We've a youngster here Comes to our convent, studies what I do, Slouches and stares and lets no atom drop: His name is Guidi—he'll not mind the monks—They call him Hulking TomGuidi; Hulking Tom Tommaso Guidi, painter better known as Masaccio (1401-28), that is “Careless Tom, or Hulking Tom (not necessarily in disapproval)” (Vasari, 1.318)., he lets them talk— He picks my practice up—he'll paint apace. I hope so—though I never live so long, I know what's sure to follow. You be judge! You speak no Latin more than I, belike; However, you're my man, you've seen the world —The beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, Changes, surprises,—and God made it all! —For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no, For this fair town's face, yonder river's line, The mountain round it and the sky above, Much more the figures of man, woman, child, These are the frame to? What's it all about? To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon, Wondered at? oh, this last of course!—you say. But why not do as well as say,—paint these Just as they are, careless what comes of it? God's works—paint any one, and count it crime To let a truth slip. Don't object, "His works Are here already; nature is complete: Suppose you reproduce her—(which you can't) There's no advantage! you must beat her, then." For, don't you mark? we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted—better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now, Your cullion'scullion term of contempt: a rascal hanging face? A bit of chalk, And trust me but you should, though! How much more, If I drew higher things with the same truth! That were to take the Prior's pulpit-place, Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh, It makes me mad to see what men shall do And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink. "Ay, but you don't so instigate to prayer!" Strikes in the Prior: "when your meaning's plain It does not say to folk—remember matinsmatins a set time for morning prayers, Or, mind you fast next Friday!" Why, for this What need of art at all? A skull and bones, Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what's best, A bell to chime the hour with, does as well. I painted a Saint Laurence six months since At PratoPrato the cathedral in Florence; Lippo made frescoes there from 1452-66, splashed the fresco in fine style: "How looks my painting, now the scaffold's down?" I ask a brother: "Hugely," he returns— "Already not one phizphiz face, physiognomy of your three slaves Who turn the Deacon off his toasted sideDeacon . . . toasted side St. Laurence (d. 258), who was a deacon and martyr; he was roasted to death, But's scratched and prodded to our heart's content, The pious people have so eased their own With coming to say prayers there in a rage: We get on fast to see the bricks beneath. Expect another job this time next year, For pity and religion grow i' the crowd— Your painting serves its purpose!" Hang the fools! —That is—you'll not mistake an idle word Spoke in a huff by a poor monk, God wotGod wot God knows, Tasting the air this spicy night which turns The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine! Oh, the church knows! don't misreport me, now! It's natural a poor monk out of bounds Should have his apt word to excuse himself: And hearken how I plot to make amends. I have bethought me: I shall paint a piece ... There's for you! Give me six months, then go, see Something in Sant' Ambrogio'sSant’ Ambrogio’s Vasari: “There [Florence] he wrought a very beautiful panel for the high-altar of the Nuns of S. Ambrogio, which made him very dear to Cosimo de’ Medici, who became very much his friend for this reason.” [Giorgio Vasari Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, New York: Alfred A. Knopf (Everyman’s Library), 1:437]! Bless the nuns! They want a cast o' my office. I shall paint God in the midst, Madonna and her babe, Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood, Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet As puff on puff of grated orris-rootorris-root an iris, used in powdered form in perfumes and medicine When ladies crowd to Church at midsummer. And then i' the front, of course a saint or two—Saint John' because he saves the FlorentinesSaint John … Florentines John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus; see Matthew 3. Also see earlier note.,Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and whiteThe convent's friends and gives them a long daySaint Ambrose … day Either Saint Ambrose (c. 339-97) a Doctor of the Latin Church, who was the bishop of Milan, or Saint Ambrose of Camaldoli, also known as Fra Ambrogio (c. 1386-1439), who was in the Camaldolensian Order in Florence., And Job, I must have him there past mistake,The man of UzJob; man of Uz Job main character of The Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible, focusing on Job’s suffering, and by extension, human suffering. Job 1.1 begins “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” (and Us without the z, Painters who need his patience). Well, all these Secured at their devotion, up shall come Out of a corner when you least expect, As one by a dark stair into a great light, Music and talking, who but Lippo! I!—MazedMazed stupefied, motionless, and moonstruck—I'm the man! Back I shrink—what is this I see and hear? I, caught up with my monk's-things by mistake, My old serge gown and rope that goes all round, I, in this presence, this pure company! Where's a hole, where's a corner for escape? Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing Forward, puts out a soft palm—"Not so fast!" —Addresses the celestial presence, "nay— He made you and devised you, after all, Though he's none of you! Could Saint John there draw— His camel-hair make up a painting brush? We come to brother Lippo for all that,Iste perfecit opus!Iste perfecit opus From the Latin, “ ‘This man made the work.’ In this painting, as later completed, these words appear beside a figure which Browning took to be Lippi’s self-portrait.” [Norton The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors Edition. Ed. M. H. Abrams et al., 1962] So, all smile— I shuffle sideways with my blushing face Under the cover of a hundred wings Thrown like a spread of kirtleskirtles a man’s tunic or a woman’s gown when you're gay And play hot cocklesplay hot cockles a euphemism, based on the name of a children’s game, for having sex, all the doors being shut, Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops The hothead husband! Thus I scuttle off To some safe bench behind, not letting go The palm of her, the little lily thing That spoke the good word for me in the nick, Like the Prior's niece . . . Saint LucySaint Lucy a virgin and martyr who died in Syracuse, Sicily, in the early 4th Century; she is a patron saint for those with eye diseases, I would say. And so all's saved for me, and for the church A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence! Your hand, sir, and good-bye: no lights, no lights! The street's hushed, and I know my own way back, Don't fear me! There's the grey beginning. Zooks!
Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe Let us begin and carry up this corpse, Singing together. Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes Each in its tether Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, Cared-for till cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's Circling its summit. Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: Wait ye the warning? Our low life was the level's and the night's; He's for the morning. Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, 'Ware the beholders! This is our master, famous, calm and dead, Borne on our shoulders. Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo! Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note Winter would follow? Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone! Cramped and diminished, Moaned he, "New measures, other feet anon! My dance is finished"? No, that's the world's way: (keep the mountain-side, Make for the city!) He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride Over men's pity; Left play for work, and grappled with the world Bent on escaping: "What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled Show me their shaping, Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage, Give!" So, he gowned him, Straight got by heart that book to its last page: Learned, we found him. Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, Accents uncertain: "Time to taste life," another would have said, "Up with the curtain!" This man said rather, "Actual life comes next? Patience a moment! Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text, Still there's the comment. Let me know all! Prate not of most or least, Painful or easy! Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast, Ay, nor feel queasy." Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, When he had learned it, When he had gathered all books had to give! Sooner, he spurned it. Image the whole, then execute the parts Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz, Ere mortar dab brick! (Here's the town-gate reached: there's the market-place Gaping before us.) Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace (Hearten our chorus!) That before living he'd learn how to live No end to learning: Earn the means first God surely will contrive Use for our earning. Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes: Live now or never!" He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever." Back to his book then: deeper drooped his head: Calculus racked him: Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead: Tussis attacked him. "Now, master, take a little rest!" not he! (Caution redoubled Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!) Not a whit troubled, Back to his studies, fresher than at first, Fierce as a dragon He (soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst) Sucked at the flagon. Oh, if we draw a circle premature, Heedless of far gain, Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure Bad is our bargain! Was it not great? did not he throw on God, (He loves the burthen) God's task to make the heavenly period Perfect the earthen? Did not he magnify the mind, show clear Just what it all meant? He would not discount life, as fools do here, Paid by instalment. He ventured neck or nothing heaven's success Found, or earth's failure: "Wilt thou trust death or not?" He answered "Yes: Hence with life's pale lure!" That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred's soon hit: This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit. That, has the world here should he need the next, Let the world mind him! This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed Seeking shall find him. So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, Ground he at grammar; Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife: While he could stammer He settled Hoti's business let it be! Properly based Oun Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, Dead from the waist down. Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: Hail to your purlieus, All ye highfliers of the feathered race, Swallows and curlews! Here's the top-peak; the multitude below Live, for they can, there: This man decided not to Live but Know Bury this man there? Here here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send! Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying.
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise; My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream. Thou stock-dove, whose echo resounds thro' the glen, Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den, Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear, I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair. How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills, Far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills; There daily I wander as noon rises high, My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye. How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow; There oft, as mild Ev'ning sweeps over the lea, The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me. Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides, And winds by the cot where my Mary resides, How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave, As gathering sweet flowrets she stems thy clear wave. Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
Chorus Ca' the yowes to the knowes, Ca' them where the heather grows Ca' them where the burnie rows, My bonie dearie. Hark! the mavis' evening sang Sounding Cluden's woods amang, Then a-fauldin let us gang, My bonie dearie. We'll gae down by Cluden side, Thro' the hazels spreading wide, O'er the waves that sweetly glide To the moon sae clearly. Yonder Cluden's silent towers, Where at moonshine midnight hours, O'er the dewy-bending flowers, Fairies dance sae cheery. Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear; Thou 'rt to love and Heaven sae dear, Nocht of ill may come thee near, My bonie dearie. Fair and lovely as thou art, Thou hast stown my very heart; I can die—but canna part, My bonie dearie.
Duncan Gray came here to woo, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! On blythe Yule night when we were fou, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Maggie coost her head fu high, Look'd asklent and unco skeigh, Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh; Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan fleech'd, and Duncan pray'd, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan sigh'd baith out and in, Grat his een baith bleer't and blin', Spak o' lowpin owre a linn; Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Time and chance are but a tide, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Slighted love is sair to bide, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! "Shall I, like a fool," quoth he, "For a haughty hizzie die? She may gae to—France for me!"— Ha, ha, the wooin o't! How it comes let doctors tell, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Meg grew sick as he grew hale, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Something in her bosom wrings, For relief a sigh she brings; And O! her een, they spak sic things Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan was a lad o' grace, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Maggie's was a piteous case, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan could na be her death, Swelling pity smoor'd his wrath; Now they're crouse and cantie baith; Ha, ha, the wooin o't!
Is there, for honest poverty, That hings his head, an' a' that? The coward slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a' that! For a' that, an' a' that, Our toils obscure, an' a' that; The rank is but the guinea's stamp; The man's the gowd for a' that, What tho' on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin-gray, an' a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that. For a' that, an' a' that, Their tinsel show an' a' that; The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is king o' men for a' that. Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that; Tho' hundreds worship at his word, He's but a coof for a' that: For a' that, an' a' that, His riband, star, an' a' that, The man o' independent mind, He looks and laughs at a' that. A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, an' a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might, Guid faith he mauna fa' that! For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities, an' a' that, The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, Are higher rank than a' that. Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a' that, That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, May bear the gree, an' a' that. For a' that, an' a' that, It's coming yet, for a' that, That man to man, the warld o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that.
Auld Coila now may fidge fu' fain, She's gotten poets o' her ain— Chiels wha their chanters winna hain, But tune their lays, Till echoes a' resound again Her weel-sung praise. Nae poet thought her worth his while To set her name in measur'd style: She lay like some unken'd-of isle Beside New Holland, Or whare wild-meeting oceans boil Besouth Magellan. Ramsay and famous Fergusson Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon; Yarrow and Tweed to mony a tune Owre Scotland rings; While Irvin, Lugar, Ayr an' Doon Naebody sings. Th' Ilissus, Tiber, Thames, an' Seine Glide sweet in mony a tunefu' line; But, Willie, set your fit to mine And cock your crest, We'll gar our streams and burnies shine Up wi' the best! We'll sing auld Coila's plains an' fells, Her moors red-brown wi' heather bells, Her banks an' braes, her dens an' dells, Where glorious Wallace Aft bure the gree, as story tells, Frae Southron billies. At Wallace' name what Scottish blood But boils up in a spring-tide flood! Oft have our fearless fathers strode By Wallace' side, Still pressing onward red-wat-shod, Or glorious dy'd. O sweet are Coila's haughs an' woods,. When lintwhites chant amang the buds, And jinkin hares in amorous whids Their loves enjoy, While thro' the braes the cushat croods Wi' wailfu' cry! Ev'n winter bleak has charms to me, When winds rave thro' the naked tree; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree Are hoary gray; Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, Dark'ning the day! O Nature! a' thy shews an' forms To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms! Whether the summer kindly warms Wi' life an' light, Or winter howls in gusty storms The lang, dark night! The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himsel he learn'd to wander Adoun some trottin burn's meander, And no think lang; O sweet to stray and pensive ponder A heart-felt sang! The warly race may drudge and drive, Hog-shouther, jundie, stretch an' strive: Let me fair nature's face descrive, And I wi' pleasure Shall let the busy, grumbling hive Bum owre their treasure.
And thou art dead, as young and fair  As aught of mortal birth; And form so soft, and charms so rare,  Too soon return'd to Earth! Though Earth receiv'd them in her bed, And o'er the spot the crowd may tread  In carelessness or mirth, There is an eye which could not brook A moment on that grave to look. I will not ask where thou liest low,  Nor gaze upon the spot; There flowers or weeds at will may grow,  So I behold them not: It is enough for me to prove That what I lov'd, and long must love,  Like common earth can rot; To me there needs no stone to tell, 'T is Nothing that I lov'd so well. Yet did I love thee to the last  As fervently as thou, Who didst not change through all the past,  And canst not alter now. The love where Death has set his seal, Nor age can chill, nor rival steal,  Nor falsehood disavow: And, what were worse, thou canst not see Or wrong, or change, or fault in me. The better days of life were ours;  The worst can be but mine: The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,  Shall never more be thine. The silence of that dreamless sleep I envy now too much to weep;  Nor need I to repine That all those charms have pass'd away, I might have watch'd through long decay. The flower in ripen'd bloom unmatch'd  Must fall the earliest prey; Though by no hand untimely snatch'd,  The leaves must drop away: And yet it were a greater grief To watch it withering, leaf by leaf,  Than see it pluck'd to-day; Since earthly eye but ill can bear To trace the change to foul from fair. I know not if I could have borne  To see thy beauties fade; The night that follow'd such a morn  Had worn a deeper shade: Thy day without a cloud hath pass'd, And thou wert lovely to the last,  Extinguish'd, not decay'd; As stars that shoot along the sky Shine brightest as they fall from high. As once I wept, if I could weep,  My tears might well be shed, To think I was not near to keep  One vigil o'er thy bed; To gaze, how fondly! on thy face, To fold thee in a faint embrace,  Uphold thy drooping head; And show that love, however vain, Nor thou nor I can feel again. Yet how much less it were to gain,  Though thou hast left me free, The loveliest things that still remain,  Than thus remember thee! The all of thine that cannot die Through dark and dread Eternity  Returns again to me, And more thy buried love endears Than aught except its living years.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light: And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, The palaces of crowned kings—the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd, And men were gather'd round their blazing homes To look once more into each other's face; Happy were those who dwelt within the eye Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: A fearful hope was all the world contain'd; Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd And twin'd themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food. And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again: a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought—and that was death Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails—men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devour'd, Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one, And he was faithful to a corse, and kept The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay, Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan, And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answer'd not with a caress—he died. The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things  For an unholy usage; they rak'd up, And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died— Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless— A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd They slept on the abyss without a surge— The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before; The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.  Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.  For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!  And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride; And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.  And there lay the rider distorted and pale, With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail: And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.  And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal; And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
My sister! my sweet sister! if a name  Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.  Mountains and seas divide us, but I claim  No tears, but tenderness to answer mine:  Go where I will, to me thou art the same  A lov'd regret which I would not resign.  There yet are two things in my destiny— A world to roam through, and a home with thee.  The first were nothing—had I still the last,  It were the haven of my happiness;  But other claims and other ties thou hast,  And mine is not the wish to make them less.  A strange doom is thy father's son's, and past  Recalling, as it lies beyond redress;  Revers'd for him our grandsire's fate of yore— He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.  If my inheritance of storms hath been  In other elements, and on the rocks  Of perils, overlook'd or unforeseen,  I have sustain'd my share of worldly shocks,  The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen  My errors with defensive paradox;  I have been cunning in mine overthrow, The careful pilot of my proper woe.  Mine were my faults, and mine be their reward.  My whole life was a contest, since the day  That gave me being, gave me that which marr'd  The gift—a fate, or will, that walk'd astray;  And I at times have found the struggle hard,  And thought of shaking off my bonds of clay:  But now I fain would for a time survive, If but to see what next can well arrive.  Kingdoms and empires in my little day  I have outliv'd, and yet I am not old;  And when I look on this, the petty spray  Of my own years of trouble, which have roll'd  Like a wild bay of breakers, melts away:  Something—I know not what—does still uphold  A spirit of slight patience; not in vain, Even for its own sake, do we purchase pain.  Perhaps the workings of defiance stir  Within me—or perhaps a cold despair,  Brought on when ills habitually recur,  Perhaps a kinder clime, or purer air  (For even to this may change of soul refer,  And with light armour we may learn to bear),  Have taught me a strange quiet, which was not The chief companion of a calmer lot.  I feel almost at times as I have felt  In happy childhood; trees, and flowers, and brooks,  Which do remember me of where I dwelt  Ere my young mind was sacrific'd to books,  Come as of yore upon me, and can melt  My heart with recognition of their looks;  And even at moments I could think I see Some living thing to love—but none like thee.  Here are the Alpine landscapes which create  A fund for contemplation; to admire  Is a brief feeling of a trivial date;  But something worthier do such scenes inspire:  Here to be lonely is not desolate,  For much I view which I could most desire,  And, above all, a lake I can behold Lovelier, not dearer, than our own of old.  Oh that thou wert but with me!—but I grow  The fool of my own wishes, and forget  The solitude which I have vaunted so  Has lost its praise in this but one regret;  There may be others which I less may show;  I am not of the plaintive mood, and yet  I feel an ebb in my philosophy, And the tide rising in my alter'd eye.  I did remind thee of our own dear Lake,  By the old Hall which may be mine no more.  Leman's is fair; but think not I forsake  The sweet remembrance of a dearer shore:  Sad havoc Time must with my memory make  Ere that or thou can fade these eyes before;  Though, like all things which I have lov'd, they are Resign'd for ever, or divided far.  The world is all before me; I but ask  Of Nature that with which she will comply—  It is but in her summer's sun to bask,  To mingle with the quiet of her sky,  To see her gentle face without a mask,  And never gaze on it with apathy.  She was my early friend, and now shall be My sister—till I look again on thee.  I can reduce all feelings but this one;  And that I would not; for at length I see  Such scenes as those wherein my life begun,  The earliest—even the only paths for me—  Had I but sooner learnt the crowd to shun,  I had been better than I now can be;  The passions which have torn me would have slept; I had not suffer'd, and thou hadst not wept.  With false Ambition what had I to do?  Little with Love, and least of all with Fame;  And yet they came unsought, and with me grew,  And made me all which they can make—a name,  Yet this was not the end I did pursue;  Surely I once beheld a nobler aim.  But all is over—I am one the more To baffled millions which have gone before.  And for the future, this world's future may  From me demand but little of my care;  I have outliv'd myself by many a day,  Having surviv'd so many things that were;  My years have been no slumber, but the prey  Of ceaseless vigils; for I had the share  Of life which might have fill'd a century,  Before its fourth in time had pass'd me by.  And for the remnant which may be to come  I am content; and for the past I feel  Not thankless, for within the crowded sum  Of struggles, happiness at times would steal,  And for the present, I would not benumb  My feelings further. Nor shall I conceal  That with all this I still can look around, And worship Nature with a thought profound.  For thee, my own sweet sister, in thy heart  I know myself secure, as thou in mine;  We were and are—I am, even as thou art—  Beings who ne'er each other can resign;  It is the same, together or apart,  From life's commencement to its slow decline  We are entwin'd—let death come slow or fast, The tie which bound the first endures the last!
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, Though thou be black as night And she made all of light, Yet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow. Follow her whose light thy light depriveth, Though here thou liv’st disgraced, And she in heaven is placed, Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth. Follow those pure beams whose beauty burneth, That so have scorched thee, As thou still black must be, Till Her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth. Follow her while yet her glory shineth, There comes a luckless night, That will dim all her light, And this the black unhappy shade divineth. Follow still since so thy fates ordained, The Sun must have his shade, Till both at once do fade, The Sun still proved, the shadow still disdained.Poetry Out Loud Note: In the print anthology, this poem is titled "Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow." The student may give either title during the recitation.
Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet. There, wrapp'd in cloud of sorrow, pity move, And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love: But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain, Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again.  All that I sung still to her praise did tend, Still she was first; still she my songs did end; Yet she my love and music both doth fly, The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy. Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight: It shall suffice that they were breath'd and died for her delight.
Can we not force from widow'd poetry, Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust, Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust, Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flower Of fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour, Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day? Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense Through all our language, both the words and sense? 'Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain And sober Christian precepts still retain, Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses, frame, Grave homilies and lectures, but the flame Of thy brave soul (that shot such heat and light As burnt our earth and made our darkness bright, Committed holy rapes upon our will, Did through the eye the melting heart distil, And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach As sense might judge what fancy could not reach) Must be desir'd forever. So the fire That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic quire, Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath, Glow'd here a while, lies quench'd now in thy death. The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds O'erspread, was purg'd by thee; the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted; thou didst pay The debts of our penurious bankrupt age; Licentious thefts, that make poetic rage A mimic fury, when our souls must be Possess'd, or with Anacreon's ecstasy, Or Pindar's, not their own; the subtle cheat Of sly exchanges, and the juggling feat Of two-edg'd words, or whatsoever wrong By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue, Thou hast redeem'd, and open'd us a mine Of rich and pregnant fancy; drawn a line Of masculine expression, which had good Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood Our superstitious fools admire, and hold Their lead more precious than thy burnish'd gold, Thou hadst been their exchequer, and no more They each in other's dust had rak'd for ore. Thou shalt yield no precedence, but of time, And the blind fate of language, whose tun'd chime More charms the outward sense; yet thou mayst claim From so great disadvantage greater fame, Since to the awe of thy imperious wit Our stubborn language bends, made only fit With her tough thick-ribb'd hoops to gird about Thy giant fancy, which had prov'd too stout For their soft melting phrases. As in time They had the start, so did they cull the prime Buds of invention many a hundred year, And left the rifled fields, besides the fear To touch their harvest; yet from those bare lands Of what is purely thine, thy only hands, (And that thy smallest work) have gleaned more Than all those times and tongues could reap before. But thou art gone, and thy strict laws will be Too hard for libertines in poetry; They will repeal the goodly exil'd train Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just reign Were banish'd nobler poems; now with these, The silenc'd tales o' th' Metamorphoses Shall stuff their lines, and swell the windy page, Till verse, refin'd by thee, in this last age Turn ballad rhyme, or those old idols be Ador'd again, with new apostasy. Oh, pardon me, that break with untun'd verse The reverend silence that attends thy hearse, Whose awful solemn murmurs were to thee, More than these faint lines, a loud elegy, That did proclaim in a dumb eloquence The death of all the arts; whose influence, Grown feeble, in these panting numbers lies, Gasping short-winded accents, and so dies. So doth the swiftly turning wheel not stand In th' instant we withdraw the moving hand, But some small time maintain a faint weak course, By virtue of the first impulsive force; And so, whilst I cast on thy funeral pile Thy crown of bays, oh, let it crack awhile, And spit disdain, till the devouring flashes Suck all the moisture up, then turn to ashes. I will not draw the envy to engross All thy perfections, or weep all our loss; Those are too numerous for an elegy, And this too great to be express'd by me. Though every pen should share a distinct part, Yet art thou theme enough to tire all art; Let others carve the rest, it shall suffice I on thy tomb this epitaph incise: Here lies a king, that rul'd as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit; Here lie two flamens, and both those, the best, Apollo's first, at last, the true God's priest.
This little vault, this narrow room, Of Love, and Beauty, is the tomb; The dawning beam that gan to clear Our clouded sky, lies darken'd here, Forever set to us, by death Sent to inflame the world beneath. 'Twas but a bud, yet did contain More sweetness than shall spring again; A budding star that might have grown Into a sun, when it had blown. This hopeful beauty did create New life in Love's declining state; But now his empire ends, and we From fire and wounding darts are free; His brand, his bow, let no man fear, The flames, the arrows, all lie here.
The ARGUMENT. A Vulgar Error having long prevailed among many Persons, who imagine Sally Salisbury the Subject of this Ballad, the Author begs leave to undeceive and assure them it has not the least allusion to her, he being a stranger to her very Name at the time this Song was composed. For as Innocence and Virtue were ever the Boundaries of his Muse, so in this little Poem he had no other view than to set forth the Beauty of a chaste and disinterested Passion, even in the lowest Class of human Life. The real Occasion was this: A Shoemaker’s ’Prentice making Holiday with his Sweet-heart, treated her with a sight of Bedlam, the Puppet-shews, the Flying-chairs, and all the Elegancies of the Moorfields: From whence proceeding to the Farthing Pye-house, he gave her a Collation of Buns, Cheesecakes, Gammon of Bacon, Stuff’d-beef, and Bottled-ale; through all which Scenes the Author dodged them (charm’d with the Simplicity of their Courtship), from whence he drew this little Sketch of Nature; but being then young and obscure, he was very much ridicul’d by some of his Acquaintance for this Performance; which nevertheless made its way into the polite World, and amply recompenced him by the Applause of the divine Addison, who was pleased (more than once) to mention it with Approbation. Of all the Girls that are so smart  There’s none like pretty SALLY, She is the Darling of my Heart,  And she lives in our Alley. There is no Lady in the Land  Is half so sweet as SALLY, She is the Darling of my Heart,  And she lives in our Alley. Her Father he makes Cabbage-nets,  And through the Streets does cry ’em; Her Mother she sells Laces long,  To such as please to buy ’em: But sure such Folks could ne’er beget  So sweet a Girl as SALLY! She is the Darling of my Heart,  And she lives in our Alley. When she is by I leave my Work,  (I love her so sincerely) My Master comes like any Turk,  And bangs me most severely; But, let him bang his Belly full,  I’ll bear it all for SALLY; She is the Darling of my Heart,  And she lives in our Alley. Of all the Days that’s in the Week,  I dearly love but one Day, And that’s the Day that comes betwixt  A Saturday and Monday; For then I’m drest, all in my best,  To walk abroad with SALLY; She is the Darling of my Heart,  And she lives in our Alley. My Master carries me to Church,  And often am I blamed, Because I leave him in the lurch,  As soon as Text is named: I leave the Church in Sermon time,  And slink away to SALLY; She is the Darling of my Heart,  And she lives in our Alley. When Christmas comes about again,  O then I shall have Money; I’ll hoard it up, and Box and all  I’ll give it to my Honey: And, would it were ten thousand Pounds;  I’d give it all to SALLY; She is the Darling of my Heart,  And she lives in our Alley. My Master and the Neighbours all,  Make game of me and SALLY; And (but for her) I’d better be  A Slave and row a Galley: But when my seven long Years are out,  O then I’ll marry SALLY! O then we’ll wed and then we’ll bed,  But not in our Alley.
What is Hope? A smiling rainbow Children follow through the wet; ’Tis not here, still yonder, yonder: Never urchin found it yet. What is Life? A thawing iceboard On a sea with sunny shore;— Gay we sail; it melts beneath us; We are sunk, and seen no more. What is Man? A foolish baby, Vainly strives, and fights, and frets; Demanding all, deserving nothing;— One small grave is what he gets.
The wind blows east, the wind blows west, And the frost falls and the rain: A weary heart went thankful to rest, And must rise to toil again, ’gain, And must rise to toil again. The wind blows east, the wind blows west, And there comes good luck and bad; The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest; ’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad, ’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad. The wind blows east, the wind blows west; Ye shall know a tree by its fruit: This world, they say, is worst to the best;— But a dastard has evil to boot, boot, But a dastard has evil to boot. The wind blows east, the wind blows west; What skills it to mourn or to talk? A journey I have, and far ere I rest; I must bundle my wallets and walk, walk, I must bundle my wallets and walk. The wind does blow as it lists alway; Canst thou change this world to thy mind? The world will wander its own wise way; I also will wander mine, mine, I also will wander mine.
So here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away. Out of Eternity This new Day is born; Into Eternity, At night, will return. Behold it aforetime No eye ever did: So soon it forever From all eyes is hid. Here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away.
A boat beneath a sunny sky, Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July — Children three that nestle near, Eager eye and willing ear, Pleased a simple tale to hear — Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July. Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes. Children yet, the tale to hear, Eager eye and willing ear, Lovingly shall nestle near. In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream — Lingering in the golden gleam — Life, what is it but a dream?
Fit the First  The Landing "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,  As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide  By a finger entwined in his hair. "Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:  That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:  What I tell you three times is true." The crew was complete: it included a Boots—  A maker of Bonnets and Hoods— A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes—  And a Broker, to value their goods. A Billiard-marker, whose skill was immense,  Might perhaps have won more than his share— But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,  Had the whole of their cash in his care. There was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck,  Or would sit making lace in the bow: And had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck,  Though none of the sailors knew how. There was one who was famed for the number of things  He forgot when he entered the ship: His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,  And the clothes he had bought for the trip. He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,  With his name painted clearly on each: But, since he omitted to mention the fact,  They were all left behind on the beach. The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because  He had seven coats on when he came, With three pair of boots—but the worst of it was,  He had wholly forgotten his name. He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry,  Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!" To "What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!"  But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!" While, for those who preferred a more forcible word,  He had different names from these: His intimate friends called him "Candle-ends,"  And his enemies "Toasted-cheese." "His form is ungainly—his intellect small—"  (So the Bellman would often remark) "But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,  Is the thing that one needs with a Snark." He would joke with hænas, returning their stare  With an impudent wag of the head: And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,  "Just to keep up its spirits," he said. He came as a Baker: but owned, when too late—  And it drove the poor Bellman half-mad— He could only bake Bride-cake—for which, I may state,  No materials were to be had. The last of the crew needs especial remark,  Though he looked an incredible dunce: He had just one idea—but, that one being "Snark,"  The good Bellman engaged him at once. He came as a Butcher: but gravely declared,  When the ship had been sailing a week, He could only kill Beavers. The Bellman looked scared,  And was almost too frightened to speak: But at length he explained, in a tremulous tone,  There was only one Beaver on board; And that was a tame one he had of his own,  Whose death would be deeply deplored. The Beaver, who happened to hear the remark,  Protested, with tears in its eyes, That not even the rapture of hunting the Snark  Could atone for that dismal surprise! It strongly advised that the Butcher should be  Conveyed in a separate ship: But the Bellman declared that would never agree  With the plans he had made for the trip: Navigation was always a difficult art,  Though with only one ship and one bell: And he feared he must really decline, for his part,  Undertaking another as well. The Beaver's best course was, no doubt, to procure  A second-hand dagger-proof coat— So the Baker advised it—and next, to insure  Its life in some Office of note: This the Banker suggested, and offered for hire  (On moderate terms), or for sale, Two excellent Policies, one Against Fire,  And one Against Damage From Hail. Yet still, ever after that sorrowful day,  Whenever the Butcher was by, The Beaver kept looking the opposite way,  And appeared unaccountably shy.  Fit the Second  The Bellman's Speech The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies—  Such a carriage, such ease and such grace! Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,  The moment one looked in his face! He had bought a large map representing the sea,  Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be  A map they could all understand. "What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,  Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply  "They are merely conventional signs! "Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!  But we've got our brave Captain to thank (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—  A perfect and absolute blank!" This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out  That the Captain they trusted so well Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,  And that was to tingle his bell. He was thoughtful and grave—but the orders he gave  Were enough to bewilder a crew. When he cried "Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!"  What on earth was the helmsman to do? Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:  A thing, as the Bellman remarked, That frequently happens in tropical climes,  When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked." But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,  And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed, Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,  That the ship would not travel due West! But the danger was past—they had landed at last,  With their boxes, portmanteaus, and bags: Yet at first sight the crew were not pleased with the view,  Which consisted to chasms and crags. The Bellman perceived that their spirits were low,  And repeated in musical tone Some jokes he had kept for a season of woe—  But the crew would do nothing but groan. He served out some grog with a liberal hand,  And bade them sit down on the beach: And they could not but own that their Captain looked grand,  As he stood and delivered his speech. "Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears!"  (They were all of them fond of quotations: So they drank to his health, and they gave him three cheers,  While he served out additional rations). "We have sailed many months, we have sailed many weeks,  (Four weeks to the month you may mark), But never as yet ('tis your Captain who speaks)  Have we caught the least glimpse of a Snark! "We have sailed many weeks, we have sailed many days,  (Seven days to the week I allow), But a Snark, on the which we might lovingly gaze,  We have never beheld till now! "Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again  The five unmistakable marks By which you may know, wheresoever you go,  The warranted genuine Snarks. "Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,  Which is meagre and hollow, but crisp: Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,  With a flavour of Will-o'-the-wisp. "Its habit of getting up late you'll agree  That it carries too far, when I say That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea,  And dines on the following day. "The third is its slowness in taking a jest.  Should you happen to venture on one, It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:  And it always looks grave at a pun. "The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,  Which it constantly carries about, And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes—  A sentiment open to doubt. "The fifth is ambition. It next will be right  To describe each particular batch: Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,  From those that have whiskers, and scratch. "For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm,  Yet, I feel it my duty to say, Some are Boojums—" The Bellman broke off in alarm,  For the Baker had fainted away.  Fit the Third  The Baker's Tale They roused him with muffins—they roused him with ice—  They roused him with mustard and cress— They roused him with jam and judicious advice—  They set him conundrums to guess. When at length he sat up and was able to speak,  His sad story he offered to tell; And the Bellman cried "Silence! Not even a shriek!"  And excitedly tingled his bell. There was silence supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream,  Scarcely even a howl or a groan, As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe  In an antediluvian tone. "My father and mother were honest, though poor—"  "Skip all that!" cried the Bellman in haste. "If it once becomes dark, there's no chance of a Snark—  We have hardly a minute to waste!" "I skip forty years," said the Baker, in tears,  "And proceed without further remark To the day when you took me aboard of your ship  To help you in hunting the Snark. "A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named)  Remarked, when I bade him farewell—" "Oh, skip your dear uncle!" the Bellman exclaimed,  As he angrily tingled his bell. "He remarked to me then," said that mildest of men,  "'If your Snark be a Snark, that is right: Fetch it home by all means—you may serve it with greens,  And it's handy for striking a light. "'You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;  You may hunt it with forks and hope; You may threaten its life with a railway-share;  You may charm it with smiles and soap—'" ("That's exactly the method," the Bellman bold  In a hasty parenthesis cried, "That's exactly the way I have always been told  That the capture of Snarks should be tried!") "'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,  If your Snark be a Boojum! For then You will softly and suddenly vanish away,  And never be met with again!' "It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul,  When I think of my uncle's last words: And my heart is like nothing so much as a bowl  Brimming over with quivering curds! "It is this, it is this—" "We have had that before!"  The Bellman indignantly said. And the Baker replied "Let me say it once more.  It is this, it is this that I dread! "I engage with the Snark—every night after dark—  In a dreamy delirious fight: I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,  And I use it for striking a light: "But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day,  In a moment (of this I am sure), I shall softly and suddenly vanish away—  And the notion I cannot endure!"  Fit the Fourth  The Hunting The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.  "If only you'd spoken before! It's excessively awkward to mention it now,  With the Snark, so to speak, at the door! "We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,  If you never were met with again— But surely, my man, when the voyage began,  You might have suggested it then? "It's excessively awkward to mention it now—  As I think I've already remarked." And the man they called "Hi!" replied, with a sigh,  "I informed you the day we embarked. "You may charge me with murder—or want of sense—  (We are all of us weak at times): But the slightest approach to a false pretence  Was never among my crimes! "I said it in Hebrew—I said it in Dutch—  I said it in German and Greek: But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much)  That English is what you speak!" "'Tis a pitiful tale," said the Bellman, whose face  Had grown longer at every word: "But, now that you've stated the whole of your case,  More debate would be simply absurd. "The rest of my speech" (he explained to his men)  "You shall hear when I've leisure to speak it. But the Snark is at hand, let me tell you again!  'Tis your glorious duty to seek it! "To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care;  To pursue it with forks and hope; To threaten its life with a railway-share;  To charm it with smiles and soap! "For the Snark's a peculiar creature, that won't  Be caught in a commonplace way. Do all that you know, and try all that you don't:  Not a chance must be wasted to-day! "For England expects—I forbear to proceed:  'Tis a maxim tremendous, but trite: And you'd best be unpacking the things that you need  To rig yourselves out for the fight." Then the Banker endorsed a blank check (which he crossed),  And changed his loose silver for notes. The Baker with care combed his whiskers and hair,  And shook the dust out of his coats. The Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade—  Each working the grindstone in turn: But the Beaver went on making lace, and displayed  No interest in the concern: Though the Barrister tried to appeal to its pride,  And vainly proceeded to cite A number of cases, in which making laces  Had been proved an infringement of right. The maker of Bonnets ferociously planned  A novel arrangement of bows: While the Billiard-marker with quivering hand  Was chalking the tip of his nose. But the Butcher turned nervous, and dressed himself fine,  With yellow kid gloves and a ruff— Said he felt it exactly like going to dine,  Which the Bellman declared was all "stuff." "Introduce me, now there's a good fellow," he said,  "If we happen to meet it together!" And the Bellman, sagaciously nodding his head,  Said "That must depend on the weather." The Beaver went simply galumphing about,  At seeing the Butcher so shy: And even the Baker, though stupid and stout,  Made an effort to wink with one eye. "Be a man!" said the Bellman in wrath, as he heard  The Butcher beginning to sob. "Should we meet with a Jubjub, that desperate bird,  We shall need all our strength for the job!"  Fit the Fifth  The Beaver's Lesson They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;  They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway-share;  They charmed it with smiles and soap. Then the Butcher contrived an ingenious plan  For making a separate sally; And had fixed on a spot unfrequented by man,  A dismal and desolate valley. But the very same plan to the Beaver occurred:  It had chosen the very same place: Yet neither betrayed, by a sign or a word,  The disgust that appeared in his face. Each thought he was thinking of nothing but "Snark"  And the glorious work of the day; And each tried to pretend that he did not remark  That the other was going that way. But the valley grew narrow and narrower still,  And the evening got darker and colder, Till (merely from nervousness, not from good will)  They marched along shoulder to shoulder. Then a scream, shrill and high, rent the shuddering sky,  And they knew that some danger was near: The Beaver turned pale to the tip of its tail,  And even the Butcher felt queer. He thought of his childhood, left far far behind—  That blissful and innocent state— The sound so exactly recalled to his mind  A pencil that squeaks on a slate! "'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!" he suddenly cried.  (This man, that they used to call "Dunce.") "As the Bellman would tell you," he added with pride,  "I have uttered that sentiment once. "'Tis the note of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat;  You will find I have told it you twice. Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete,  If only I've stated it thrice." The Beaver had counted with scrupulous care,  Attending to every word: But it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair,  When the third repetition occurred. It felt that, in spite of all possible pains,  It had somehow contrived to lose count, And the only thing now was to rack its poor brains  By reckoning up the amount. "Two added to one—if that could but be done,"  It said, "with one's fingers and thumbs!" Recollecting with tears how, in earlier years,  It had taken no pains with its sums. "The thing can be done," said the Butcher, "I think.  The thing must be done, I am sure. The thing shall be done! Bring me paper and ink,  The best there is time to procure." The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens,  And ink in unfailing supplies: While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens,  And watched them with wondering eyes. So engrossed was the Butcher, he heeded them not,  As he wrote with a pen in each hand, And explained all the while in a popular style  Which the Beaver could well understand. "Taking Three as the subject to reason about—  A convenient number to state— We add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out  By One Thousand diminished by Eight. "The result we proceed to divide, as you see,  By Nine Hundred and Ninety and Two: Then subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be  Exactly and perfectly true. "The method employed I would gladly explain,  While I have it so clear in my head, If I had but the time and you had but the brain—  But much yet remains to be said. "In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been  Enveloped in absolute mystery, And without extra charge I will give you at large  A Lesson in Natural History." In his genial way he proceeded to say  (Forgetting all laws of propriety, And that giving instruction, without introduction,  Would have caused quite a thrill in Society), "As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird,  Since it lives in perpetual passion: Its taste in costume is entirely absurd—  It is ages ahead of the fashion: "But it knows any friend it has met once before:  It never will look at a bribe: And in charity-meetings it stands at the door,  And collects—though it does not subscribe. "Its flavour when cooked is more exquisite far  Than mutton, or oysters, or eggs: (Some think it keeps best in an ivory jar,  And some, in mahogany kegs:) "You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue:  You condense it with locusts and tape: Still keeping one principal object in view—  To preserve its symmetrical shape." The Butcher would gladly have talked till next day,  But he felt that the Lesson must end, And he wept with delight in attempting to say  He considered the Beaver his friend. While the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks  More eloquent even than tears, It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books  Would have taught it in seventy years. They returned hand-in-hand, and the Bellman, unmanned  (For a moment) with noble emotion, Said "This amply repays all the wearisome days  We have spent on the billowy ocean!" Such friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became,  Have seldom if ever been known; In winter or summer, 'twas always the same—  You could never meet either alone. And when quarrels arose—as one frequently finds  Quarrels will, spite of every endeavour— The song of the Jubjub recurred to their minds,  And cemented their friendship for ever!  Fit the Sixth  The Barrister's Dream They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;  They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway-share;  They charmed it with smiles and soap. But the Barrister, weary of proving in vain  That the Beaver's lace-making was wrong, Fell asleep, and in dreams saw the creature quite plain  That his fancy had dwelt on so long. He dreamed that he stood in a shadowy Court,  Where the Snark, with a glass in its eye, Dressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending a pig  On the charge of deserting its sty. The Witnesses proved, without error or flaw,  That the sty was deserted when found: And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law  In a soft under-current of sound. The indictment had never been clearly expressed,  And it seemed that the Snark had begun, And had spoken three hours, before any one guessed  What the pig was supposed to have done. The Jury had each formed a different view  (Long before the indictment was read), And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew  One word that the others had said. "You must know—" said the Judge: but the Snark exclaimed "Fudge!"  That statute is obsolete quite! Let me tell you, my friends, the whole question depends  On an ancient manorial right. "In the matter of Treason the pig would appear  To have aided, but scarcely abetted: While the charge of Insolvency fails, it is clear,  If you grant the plea 'never indebted.' "The fact of Desertion I will not dispute;  But its guilt, as I trust, is removed (So far as relates to the costs of this suit)  By the Alibi which has been proved. "My poor client's fate now depends on your votes."  Here the speaker sat down in his place, And directed the Judge to refer to his notes  And briefly to sum up the case. But the Judge said he never had summed up before;  So the Snark undertook it instead, And summed it so well that it came to far more  Than the Witnesses ever had said! When the verdict was called for, the Jury declined,  As the word was so puzzling to spell; But they ventured to hope that the Snark wouldn't mind  Undertaking that duty as well. So the Snark found the verdict, although, as it owned,  It was spent with the toils of the day: When it said the word "GUILTY!" the Jury all groaned,  And some of them fainted away. Then the Snark pronounced sentence, the Judge being quite  Too nervous to utter a word: When it rose to its feet, there was silence like night,  And the fall of a pin might be heard. "Transportation for life" was the sentence it gave,  "And then to be fined forty pound." The Jury all cheered, though the Judge said he feared  That the phrase was not legally sound. But their wild exultation was suddenly checked  When the jailer informed them, with tears, Such a sentence would have not the slightest effect,  As the pig had been dead for some years. The Judge left the Court, looking deeply disgusted:  But the Snark, though a little aghast, As the lawyer to whom the defence was intrusted,  Went bellowing on to the last. Thus the Barrister dreamed, while the bellowing seemed  To grow every moment more clear: Till he woke to the knell of a furious bell,  Which the Bellman rang close at his ear.  Fit the Seventh  The Banker's Fate They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;  They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway-share;  They charmed it with smiles and soap. And the Banker, inspired with a courage so new  It was matter for general remark, Rushed madly ahead and was lost to their view  In his zeal to discover the Snark But while he was seeking with thimbles and care,  A Bandersnatch swiftly drew nigh And grabbed at the Banker, who shrieked in despair,  For he knew it was useless to fly. He offered large discount—he offered a cheque  (Drawn "to bearer") for seven-pounds-ten: But the Bandersnatch merely extended its neck  And grabbed at the Banker again. Without rest or pause—while those frumious jaws  Went savagely snapping around— He skipped and he hopped, and he floundered and flopped,  Till fainting he fell to the ground. The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared  Led on by that fear-stricken yell: And the Bellman remarked "It is just as I feared!"  And solemnly tolled on his bell. He was black in the face, and they scarcely could trace  The least likeness to what he had been: While so great was his fright that his waistcoat turned white—  A wonderful thing to be seen! To the horror of all who were present that day,  He uprose in full evening dress, And with senseless grimaces endeavoured to say  What his tongue could no longer express. Down he sank in a chair—ran his hands through his hair—  And chanted in mimsiest tones Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity,  While he rattled a couple of bones. "Leave him here to his fate—it is getting so late!"  The Bellman exclaimed in a fright. "We have lost half the day. Any further delay,  And we sha'n't catch a Snark before night!"  Fit the Eighth  The Vanishing They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;  They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway-share;  They charmed it with smiles and soap. They shuddered to think that the chase might fail,  And the Beaver, excited at last, Went bounding along on the tip of its tail,  For the daylight was nearly past. "There is Thingumbob shouting!" the Bellman said,  "He is shouting like mad, only hark! He is waving his hands, he is wagging his head,  He has certainly found a Snark!" They gazed in delight, while the Butcher exclaimed  "He was always a desperate wag!" They beheld him—their Baker—their hero unnamed—  On the top of a neighbouring crag, Erect and sublime, for one moment of time,  In the next, that wild figure they saw (As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,  While they waited and listened in awe. "It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,  And seemed almost too good to be true. Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:  Then the ominous words "It's a Boo—" Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air  A weary and wandering sigh That sounded like "-jum!" but the others declare  It was only a breeze that went by. They hunted till darkness came on, but they found  Not a button, or feather, or mark, By which they could tell that they stood on the ground  Where the Baker had met with the Snark. In the midst of the word he was trying to say,  In the midst of his laughter and glee, He had softly and suddenly vanished away—  For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
He dwelt among “apartments let,” About five stories high; A man I thought that none would get, And very few would try. A boulder, by a larger stone Half hidden in the mud, Fair as a man when only one Is in the neighborhood. He lived unknown, and few could tell When Jacob was not free; But he has got a wife,—and O! The difference to me!
A Story of Holland The good dame looked from her cottage At the close of the pleasant day, And cheerily called to her little son Outside the door at play: “Come, Peter, come! I want you to go, While there is light to see, To the hut of the blind old man who lives Across the dike, for me; And take these cakes I made for him— They are hot and smoking yet; You have time enough to go and come Before the sun is set.” Then the good-wife turned to her labor, Humming a simple song, And thought of her husband, working hard At the sluices all day long; And set the turf a-blazing, And brought the coarse black bread; That he might find a fire at night, And find the table spread. And Peter left the brother, With whom all day he had played, And the sister who had watched their sports In the willow’s tender shade; And told them they ’d see him back before They saw a star in sight, Though he would n’t be afraid to go In the very darkest night! For he was a brave, bright fellow, With eye and conscience clear; He could do whatever a boy might do, And he had not learned to fear. Why, he would n’t have robbed a bird’s nest, Nor brought a stork to harm, Though never a law in Holland Had stood to stay his arm! And now, with his face all glowing, And eyes as bright as the day With the thoughts of his pleasant errand, He trudged along the way; And soon his joyous prattle Made glad a lonesome place— Alas! if only the blind old man Could have seen that happy face! Yet he somehow caught the brightness Which his voice and presence lent; And he felt the sunshine come and go As Peter came and went. And now, as the day was sinking, And the winds began to rise, The mother looked from her door again, Shading her anxious eyes; And saw the shadows deepen And birds to their homes come back, But never a sign of Peter Along the level track. But she said: “He will come at morning, So I need not fret or grieve— Though it is n’t like my boy at all To stay without my leave.” But where was the child delaying? On the homeward way was he, And across the dike while the sun was up An hour above the sea. He was stopping now to gather flowers, Now listening to the sound, As the angry waters dashed themselves Against their narrow bound. “Ah! well for us,” said Peter, “That the gates are good and strong, And my father tends them carefully, Or they would not hold you long! You ’re a wicked sea,” said Peter; “I know why you fret and chafe; You would like to spoil our lands and homes; But our sluices keep you safe!” But hark! Through the noise of waters Comes a low, clear, trickling sound; And the child’s face pales with terror, And his blossoms drop to the ground. He is up the bank in a moment, And, stealing through the sand, He sees a stream not yet so large As his slender, childish hand. ’T is a leak in the dike! He is but a boy, Unused to fearful scenes; But, young as he is, he has learned to know The dreadful thing that means. A leak in the dike! The stoutest heart Grows faint that cry to hear, And the bravest man in all the land Turns white with mortal fear. For he knows the smallest leak may grow To a flood in a single night; And he knows the strength of the cruel sea When loosed in its angry might. And the boy! He has seen the danger, And, shouting a wild alarm, He forces back the weight of the sea With the strength of his single arm! He listens for the joyful sound Of a footstep passing nigh; And lays his ear to the ground, to catch The answer to his cry. And he hears the rough winds blowing, And the waters rise and fall, But never an answer comes to him, Save the echo of his call. He sees no hope, no succor, His feeble voice is lost; Yet what shall he do but watch and wait, Though he perish at his post! So, faintly calling and crying Till the sun is under the sea; Crying and moaning till the stars Come out for company; He thinks of his brother and sister, Asleep in their safe warm bed; He thinks of his father and mother, Of himself as dying—and dead; And of how, when the night is over, They must come and find him at last: But he never thinks he can leave the place Where duty holds him fast. The good dame in the cottage Is up and astir with the light, For the thought of her little Peter Has been with her all night. And now she watches the pathway, As yester eve she had done; But what does she see so strange and black Against the rising sun? Her neighbors are bearing between them Something straight to her door; Her child is coming home, but not As he ever came before! “He is dead!” she cries; “my darling!” And the startled father hears, And comes and looks the way she looks, And fears the thing she fears: Till a glad shout from the bearers Thrills the stricken man and wife— “Give thanks, for your son has saved our land, And God has saved his life!” So, there in the morning sunshine They knelt about the boy; And every head was bared and bent In tearful, reverent joy. ’T is many a year since then; but still, When the sea roars like a flood, Their boys are taught what a boy can do Who is brave and true and good. For every man in that country Takes his son by the hand, And tells him of little Peter, Whose courage saved the land. They have many a valiant hero, Remembered through the years: But never one whose name so oft Is named with loving tears. And his deed shall be sung by the cradle, And told to the child on the knee, So long as the dikes of Holland Divide the land from the sea!
Oh, but to fade, and live we know not where, To be a cold obstruction and to groan! This sensible, warm woman to become A prudish clod; and the delighted spirit To live and die alone, or to reside With married sisters, and to have the care Of half a dozen children, not your own; And driven, for no one wants you, Round the pendant world; or worse than worse Of those that disappointment and pure spite Have driven to madness: ’Tis too horrible! The weariest and most troubled married life That age, ache, penury, or jealousy Can lay on nature, is a paradise To being an old maid. That very time I saw, (but thou couldst not,) Walking between the garden and the barn, Reuben, all armed; a certain aim he took At a young chicken standing by a post, And loosed his bullet smartly from his gun, As he would kill a hundred thousand hens. But I might see young Reuben’s fiery shot Lodged in the chaste board of the garden fence, And the domesticated fowl passed on, In henly meditation, bullet free. My father had a daughter got a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I good-looking, I should, your lordship. And what’s her residence? A hut my lord, she never owned a house, But let her husband, like a graceless scamp, Spend all her little means,—she thought she ought,— And in a wretched chamber, on an alley, She worked like masons on a monument, Earning their bread. Was not this love indeed?
Suppose, my little lady, Your doll should break her head, Could you make it whole by crying Till your eyes and nose are red? And would n’t it be pleasanter To treat it as a joke; And say you ’re glad “’T was Dolly’s And not your head that broke?” Suppose you ’re dressed for walking, And the rain comes pouring down, Will it clear off any sooner Because you scold and frown? And would n’t it be nicer For you to smile than pout, And so make sunshine in the house When there is none without? Suppose your task, my little man, Is very hard to get, Will it make it any easier For you to sit and fret? And would n’t it be wiser Than waiting like a dunce, To go to work in earnest And learn the thing at once? Suppose that some boys have a horse, And some a coach and pair, Will it tire you less while walking To say, “It is n’t fair?” And would n’t it be nobler To keep your temper sweet, And in your heart be thankful You can walk upon your feet? And suppose the world don’t please you, Nor the way some people do, Do you think the whole creation Will be altered just for you? And is n’t it, my boy or girl, The wisest, bravest plan, Whatever comes, or does n’t come, To do the best you can?
Muses that sing love's sensual empery, And lovers kindling your enraged fires At Cupid's bonfires burning in the eye, Blown with the empty breath of vain desires; You that prefer the painted cabinet Before the wealthy jewels it doth store ye, That all your joys in dying figures set, And stain the living substance of your glory; Abjure those joys, abhor their memory, And let my love the honour'd subject be Of love, and honour's complete history. Your eyes were never yet let in to see  The majesty and riches of the mind,  But dwell in darkness; for your god is blind.
FYRSTE MYNSTRELLE ...  The boddynge flourettes bloshes atte the lyghte;  The mees be sprenged wyth the yellowe hue;  Ynn daiseyd mantels ys the mountayne dyghte;  The nesh yonge coweslepe bendethe wyth the dewe;  The trees enlefed, yntoe Heavenne straughte, Whenn gentle wyndes doe blowe to whestlyng dynne ys broughte.  The evenynge commes, and brynges the dewe alonge;  The roddie welkynne sheeneth to the eyne;  Arounde the alestake Mynstrells synge the songe;  Yonge ivie rounde the doore poste do entwyne;  I laie mee onn the grasse; yette, to mie wylle, Albeytte alle ys fayre, there lackethe somethynge stylle. SECONDE MYNSTRELLE So Adam thoughtenne, whann, ynn Paradyse,  All Heavenn and Erthe dyd hommage to hys mynde;  Ynn Womman alleyne mannes pleasaunce lyes;  As Instruments of joie were made the kynde.  Go, take a wyfe untoe thie armes, and see Wynter and brownie hylles wyll have a charme for thee. THYRDE MYNSTRELLE Whanne Autumpne blake and sonne-brente doe appere,  With hys goulde honde guylteynge the falleynge lefe,  Bryngeynge oppe Wynterr to folfylle the yere,  Beerynge uponne hys backe the riped shefe;  Whan al the hyls wythe woddie sede ys whyte; Whanne levynne-fyres and lemes do mete from far the syghte;  Whann the fayre apple, rudde as even skie,  Do bende the tree unto the fructyle grounde;  When joicie peres, and berries of blacke die,  Doe daunce yn ayre, and call the eyne arounde;  Thann, bee the even foule or even fayre, Meethynckes mie hartys joie ys steynced wyth somme care.  ... MYNSTRELLE’S SONGE O! synge untoe mie roundelaie, O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee, Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie, Lycke a reynynge ryver bee;  Mie love ys dedde,  Gon to hys death-bedde,  Al under the wyllowe tree.  Black hys cryne as the wyntere nyghte, Whyte hys rode as the sommer snowe, Rodde hys face as the mornynge lyghte, Cale he lyes ynne the grave belowe;  Mie love ys dedde,  Gon to hys deathe-bedde,  Al under the wyllowe tree.  Swote hys tyngue as the throstles note, Quycke ynn daunce as thoughte canne bee, Defte hys taboure, codgelle stote, O! hee lyes bie the wyllowe tree:  Mie love ys dedde,  Gone to hys deathe-bedde,  Alle underre the wyllowe tree.  Harke! the ravenne flappes hys wynge, In the briered delle belowe; Harke! the dethe-owle loude dothe synge, To the nyghte-mares as heie goe;  Mie love ys dedde,  Gon to hys deathe-bedde,  Al under the wyllowe tree.  See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie; Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude; Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie, Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude;  Mie love ys dedde,  Gon to hys deathe-bedde,  Al under the wyllowe tree.  Heere, uponne mie true loves grave, Schalle the baren fleurs be layde, Nee one hallie Seyncte to save Al the celness of a mayde.  Mie love ys dedde,  Gonne to hys death-bedde,  Alle under the wyllowe tree.  Wythe mie hondes I’lle dente the brieres Rounde his hallie corse to gre, Ouphante fairie, lyghte youre fyres, Heere mie boddie stylle schall bee.  Mie love ys dedde,  Gon to hys deathe-bedde,  Al under the wyllowe tree.  Comme, wythe acorne-coppe and thorne, Drayne mie hartys blodde awaie; Lyfe and all yttes goode I scorne, Daunce bie nete, or feaste by daie.  Mie love ys dedde,  Gon to hys death-bedde,  Al under the wyllowe tree.  Waterre wytches, crownede wythe reytes, Bere mee to yer leathalle tyde. I die; I comme; mie true love waytes. Thos the damselle spake, and dyed.
In Virgynë the sweltrie sun gan sheene, And hotte upon the mees did caste his raie; The apple rodded from its palie greene, And the mole peare did bende the leafy spraie; The peede chelandri sunge the livelong daie; ’Twas nowe the pride, the manhode of the yeare, And eke the grounde was dighte in its moste defte aumere. The sun was glemeing in the midde of daie, Deadde still the aire, and eke the welken blue, When from the sea arist in drear arraie A hepe of cloudes of sable sullen hue, The which full fast unto the woodlande drewe, Hiltring attenes the sunnis fetive face, And the blacke tempeste swolne and gatherd up apace. Beneathe an holme, faste by a pathwaie side, Which dide unto Seyncte Godwine’s covent lede, A hapless pilgrim moneynge did abide. Pore in his newe, ungentle in his weede, Longe bretful of the miseries of neede, Where from the hail-stone coulde the almer flie? He had no housen theere, ne anie covent nie. Look in his glommed face, his sprighte there scanne; Howe woe-be-gone, how withered, forwynd, deade! Haste to thie church-glebe-house, asshrewed manne! Haste to thie kiste, thie onlie dortoure bedde. Cale, as the claie whiche will gre on thie hedde, Is Charitie and Love aminge highe elves; Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves. The gatherd storme is rype; the bigge drops falle; The forswat meadowes smethe, and drenche the raine; The comyng ghastness do the cattle pall, And the full flockes are drivynge ore the plaine; Dashde from the cloudes the waters flott againe; The welkin opes; the yellow levynne flies; And the hot fierie smothe in the wide lowings dies. Liste! now the thunder’s rattling clymmynge sound Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs, Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown’d, Still on the gallard eare of terroure hanges; The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges; Again the levynne and the thunder poures, And the full cloudes are braste attenes in stonen showers. Spurreynge his palfrie oere the watrie plaine, The Abbote of Seyncte Godwynes convente came; His chapournette was drented with the reine, And his pencte gyrdle met with mickle shame; He aynewarde tolde his bederoll at the same; The storme encreasen, and he drew aside, With the mist almes craver neere to the holme to bide. His cope was all of Lyncolne clothe so fyne, With a gold button fasten’d neere his chynne; His autremete was edged with golden twynne, And his shoone pyke a loverds mighte have binne; Full well it shewn he thoughten coste no sinne: The trammels of the palfrye pleasde his sighte, For the horse-millanare his head with roses dighte. “An almes, sir prieste!” the droppynge pilgrim saide, “O! let me waite within your covente dore, Till the sunne sheneth hie above our heade, And the loude tempeste of the aire is oer; Helpless and ould am I alas! and poor; No house, ne friend, ne moneie in my pouche; All yatte I call my owne is this my silver crouche.” “Varlet,” replyd the Abbatte, “cease your dinne; This is no season almes and prayers to give; Mie porter never lets a faitour in; None touch mie rynge who not in honour live.” And now the sonne with the blacke cloudes did stryve, And shettynge on the grounde his glairie raie, The Abbatte spurrde his steede, and eftsoones roadde awaie. Once moe the skie was blacke, the thunder rolde; Faste reyneynge oer the plaine a prieste was seen; Ne dighte full proude, ne buttoned up in golde; His cope and jape were graie, and eke were clene; A Limitoure he was of order seene; And from the pathwaie side then turned hee, Where the pore almer laie binethe the holmen tree. “An almes, sir priest!” the droppynge pilgrim sayde, “For sweete Seyncte Marie and your order sake.” The Limitoure then loosen’d his pouche threade, And did thereoute a groate of silver take; The mister pilgrim dyd for halline shake. “Here take this silver, it maie eathe thie care; We are Goddes stewards all, nete of oure owne we bare. “But ah! unhailie pilgrim, lerne of me, Scathe anie give a rentrolle to their Lorde. Here take my semecope, thou arte bare I see; Tis thyne; the Seynctes will give me mie rewarde.” He left the pilgrim, and his waie aborde. Virgynne and hallie Seyncte, who sitte yn gloure, Or give the mittee will, or give the gode man power.
Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. Bifil that in that seson on a day, In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay, Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage To Caunterbury with ful devout corage, At nyght were come into that hostelrye Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye Of sondry folk, by áventure y-falle In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle, That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde. The chambres and the stables weren wyde, And wel we weren esed atte beste. And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste, So hadde I spoken with hem everychon, That I was of hir felaweshipe anon, And made forward erly for to ryse, To take oure wey, ther as I yow devyse. But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space, Er that I ferther in this tale pace, Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun To telle yow al the condicioun Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, And whiche they weren and of what degree, And eek in what array that they were inne; And at a Knyght than wol I first bigynne. A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, That fro the tyme that he first bigan To riden out, he loved chivalrie, Trouthe and honóur, fredom and curteisie. Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre, And thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre, As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse, And evere honóured for his worthynesse. At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne; Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne Aboven alle nacions in Pruce. In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,— No cristen man so ofte of his degree. In Gernade at the seege eek hadde he be Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye. At Lyeys was he, and at Satalye, Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See At many a noble armee hadde he be. At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene, And foughten for oure feith at Tramyssene In lyste thries, and ay slayn his foo. This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also Somtyme with the lord of Palatye Agayn another hethen in Turkye; And evermoore he hadde a sovereyn prys. And though that he were worthy, he was wys, And of his port as meeke as is a mayde. He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde, In al his lyf, unto no maner wight. He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght. But for to tellen yow of his array, His hors weren goode, but he was nat gay; Of fustian he wered a gypon Al bismótered with his habergeon; For he was late y-come from his viage, And wente for to doon his pilgrymage. With hym ther was his sone, a yong Squiér, A lovyere and a lusty bacheler, With lokkes crulle as they were leyd in presse. Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse. Of his statúre he was of evene lengthe, And wonderly delyvere and of greet strengthe. And he hadde been somtyme in chyvachie In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Pycardie, And born hym weel, as of so litel space, In hope to stonden in his lady grace. Embrouded was he, as it were a meede Al ful of fresshe floures whyte and reede. Syngynge he was, or floytynge, al the day; He was as fressh as is the month of May. Short was his gowne, with sleves longe and wyde; Wel koude he sitte on hors and faire ryde; He koude songes make and wel endite, Juste and eek daunce, and weel purtreye and write. So hoote he lovede that by nyghtertale He sleep namoore than dooth a nyghtyngale. Curteis he was, lowely and servysáble, And carf biforn his fader at the table. A Yeman hadde he and servántz namo At that tyme, for hym liste ride soo; And he was clad in cote and hood of grene. A sheef of pecock arwes bright and kene, Under his belt he bar ful thriftily— Wel koude he dresse his takel yemanly; His arwes drouped noght with fetheres lowe— And in his hand he baar a myghty bowe. A not-heed hadde he, with a broun viságe. Of woodecraft wel koude he al the uságe. Upon his arm he baar a gay bracér, And by his syde a swerd and a bokeler, And on that oother syde a gay daggere, Harneised wel and sharp as point of spere; A Cristophere on his brest of silver sheene. An horn he bar, the bawdryk was of grene. A forster was he, soothly as I gesse. Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse, That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy; Hire gretteste ooth was but by seinte Loy, And she was cleped madame Eglentyne. Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely; And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe. At mete wel y-taught was she with-alle: She leet no morsel from hir lippes falle, Ne wette hir fyngres in hir sauce depe. Wel koude she carie a morsel and wel kepe Thát no drope ne fille upon hire brist; In curteisie was set ful muchel hir list. Hire over-lippe wyped she so clene That in hir coppe ther was no ferthyng sene Of grece, whan she dronken hadde hir draughte. Ful semely after hir mete she raughte. And sikerly she was of greet desport, And ful plesáunt and amyable of port, And peyned hire to countrefete cheere Of court, and been estatlich of manere, And to ben holden digne of reverence. But for to speken of hire conscience, She was so charitable and so pitous She wolde wepe if that she saugh a mous Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel breed; But soore wepte she if oon of hem were deed, Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte; And al was conscience and tendre herte. Ful semyly hir wympul pynched was; Hire nose tretys, her eyen greye as glas, Hir mouth ful smal and ther-to softe and reed; But sikerly she hadde a fair forheed; It was almoost a spanne brood, I trowe; For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe. Ful fetys was hir cloke, as I was war; Of smal coral aboute hire arm she bar A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene, And ther-on heng a brooch of gold ful sheene, On which ther was first write a crowned A, And after, Amor vincit omnia. Another Nonne with hire hadde she, That was hire chapeleyne, and Preestes thre. A Monk ther was, a fair for the maistrie, An outridere, that lovede venerie; A manly man, to been an abbot able. Ful many a deyntee hors hadde he in stable; And whan he rood, men myghte his brydel heere Gýnglen in a whistlynge wynd als cleere, And eek as loude, as dooth the chapel belle, Ther as this lord was kepere of the celle. The reule of seint Maure or of seint Beneit, By-cause that it was old and som-del streit,— This ilke Monk leet olde thynges pace, And heeld after the newe world the space. He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men, Ne that a monk, whan he is recchelees, Is likned til a fissh that is waterlees,— This is to seyn, a monk out of his cloystre. But thilke text heeld he nat worth an oystre; And I seyde his opinioun was good. What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood, Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure, Or swynken with his handes and labóure, As Austyn bit? How shal the world be served? Lat Austyn have his swynk to him reserved. Therfore he was a prikasour aright: Grehoundes he hadde, as swift as fowel in flight; Of prikyng and of huntyng for the hare Was al his lust, for no cost wolde he spare. I seigh his sleves y-púrfiled at the hond With grys, and that the fyneste of a lond; And for to festne his hood under his chyn He hadde of gold y-wroght a curious pyn; A love-knotte in the gretter ende ther was. His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas, And eek his face, as he hadde been enoynt. He was a lord ful fat and in good poynt; His eyen stepe, and rollynge in his heed, That stemed as a forneys of a leed; His bootes souple, his hors in greet estaat. Now certeinly he was a fair prelaat. He was nat pale, as a forpyned goost: A fat swan loved he best of any roost. His palfrey was as broun as is a berye. A Frere ther was, a wantowne and a merye, A lymytour, a ful solémpne man. In alle the ordres foure is noon that kan So muchel of daliaunce and fair langage. He hadde maad ful many a mariage Of yonge wommen at his owene cost. Unto his ordre he was a noble post. Ful wel biloved and famulier was he With frankeleyns over al in his contree, And eek with worthy wommen of the toun; For he hadde power of confessioun, As seyde hym-self, moore than a curát, For of his ordre he was licenciat. Ful swetely herde he confessioun, And plesaunt was his absolucioun. He was an esy man to yeve penaunce There as he wiste to have a good pitaunce; For unto a povre ordre for to yive Is signe that a man is wel y-shryve; For, if he yaf, he dorste make avaunt He wiste that a man was répentaunt; For many a man so hard is of his herte He may nat wepe al-thogh hym soore smerte. Therfore in stede of wepynge and preyéres Men moote yeve silver to the povre freres. His typet was ay farsed full of knyves And pynnes, for to yeven faire wyves. And certeinly he hadde a murye note: Wel koude he synge and pleyen on a rote; Of yeddynges he baar outrely the pris. His nekke whit was as the flour-de-lys; Ther-to he strong was as a champioun. He knew the tavernes wel in every toun, And everich hostiler and tappestere Bet than a lazar or a beggestere; For unto swich a worthy man as he Acorded nat, as by his facultee, To have with sike lazars aqueyntaunce; It is nat honest, it may nat avaunce Fór to deelen with no swich poraille, But al with riche and selleres of vitaille. And over-al, ther as profit sholde arise, Curteis he was and lowely of servyse. Ther nas no man nowher so vertuous. He was the beste beggere in his hous; [And yaf a certeyn ferme for the graunt, Noon of his brethren cam ther in his haunt;] For thogh a wydwe hadde noght a sho, So plesaunt was his In principio, Yet wolde he have a ferthyng er he wente: His purchas was wel bettre than his rente. And rage he koude, as it were right a whelpe. In love-dayes ther koude he muchel helpe, For there he was nat lyk a cloysterer With a thredbare cope, as is a povre scolér, But he was lyk a maister, or a pope; Of double worstede was his semycope, That rounded as a belle, out of the presse. Somwhat he lipsed for his wantownesse, To make his Englissh sweete upon his tonge; And in his harpyng, whan that he hadde songe, His eyen twynkled in his heed aryght As doon the sterres in the frosty nyght. This worthy lymytour was cleped Hubérd. A Marchant was ther with a forked berd, In motteleye, and hye on horse he sat; Upon his heed a Flaundryssh bevere hat; His bootes clasped faire and fetisly. His resons he spak ful solémpnely, Sownynge alway thencrees of his wynnyng. He wolde the see were kept for any thing Bitwixe Middelburgh and Orewelle. Wel koude he in eschaunge sheeldes selle. This worthy man ful wel his wit bisette; Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette, So estatly was he of his gouvernaunce, With his bargaynes and with his chevyssaunce. For sothe he was a worthy man with-alle, But, sooth to seyn, I noot how men hym calle. A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also, That unto logyk hadde longe y-go. As leene was his hors as is a rake, And he nas nat right fat, I undertake, But looked holwe, and ther-to sobrely. Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy; For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice, Ne was so worldly for to have office; For hym was lévere háve at his beddes heed Twénty bookes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes riche, or fíthele, or gay sautrie. But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre; But al that he myghte of his freendes hente On bookes and on lernynge he it spente, And bisily gan for the soules preye Of hem that yaf hym wher-with to scoleye. Of studie took he moost cure and moost heede. Noght o word spak he moore than was neede; And that was seyd in forme and reverence, And short and quyk and ful of hy senténce. Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche; And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche. A Sergeant of the Lawe, war and wys, That often hadde been at the Parvys, Ther was also, ful riche of excellence. Discreet he was, and of greet reverence— He semed swich, his wordes weren so wise. Justice he was ful often in assise, By patente, and by pleyn commissioun. For his science and for his heigh renoun, Of fees and robes hadde he many oon. So greet a purchasour was nowher noon: Al was fee symple to hym in effect; His purchasyng myghte nat been infect. Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was. In termes hadde he caas and doomes alle That from the tyme of kyng William were falle. Ther-to he koude endite and make a thyng, Ther koude no wight pynche at his writyng; And every statut koude he pleyn by rote. He rood but hoomly in a medlee cote, Girt with a ceint of silk, with barres smale; Of his array telle I no lenger tale. A Frankeleyn was in his compaignye. Whit was his berd as is the dayesye; Of his complexioun he was sangwyn. Wel loved he by the morwe a sop in wyn; To lyven in delit was evere his wone, For he was Epicurus owene sone, That heeld opinioun that pleyn delit Was verraily felicitee parfit. An housholdere, and that a greet, was he; Seint Julian he was in his contree. His breed, his ale, was alweys after oon; A bettre envyned man was nowher noon. Withoute bake mete was nevere his hous, Of fissh and flessh, and that so plentevous, It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke, Of alle deyntees that men koude thynke, After the sondry sesons of the yeer; So chaunged he his mete and his soper. Ful many a fat partrich hadde he in muwe, And many a breem and many a luce in stuwe. Wo was his cook but if his sauce were Poynaunt and sharp, and redy al his geere. His table dormant in his halle alway Stood redy covered al the longe day. At sessiouns ther was he lord and sire; Ful ofte tyme he was knyght of the shire. An anlaas, and a gipser al of silk, Heeng at his girdel, whit as morne milk. A shirreve hadde he been, and a countour; Was nowher such a worthy vavasour. An Haberdasshere, and a Carpenter, A Webbe, a Dyere, and a Tapycer,— And they were clothed alle in o lyveree Of a solémpne and a greet fraternitee. Ful fressh and newe hir geere apiked was; Hir knyves were chaped noght with bras, But al with silver; wroght ful clene and weel Hire girdles and hir pouches everydeel. Wel semed ech of hem a fair burgeys To sitten in a yeldehalle, on a deys. Éverich, for the wisdom that he kan, Was shaply for to been an alderman; For catel hadde they ynogh and rente, And eek hir wyves wolde it wel assente, And elles certeyn were they to blame. It is ful fair to been y-cleped Madame, And goon to vigilies al bifore, And have a mantel roialliche y-bore. A Cook they hadde with hem for the nones, To boille the chiknes with the marybones, And poudre-marchant tart, and galyngale. Wel koude he knowe a draughte of Londoun ale. He koude rooste, and sethe, and broille, and frye, Máken mortreux, and wel bake a pye. But greet harm was it, as it thoughte me, That on his shyne a mormal hadde he; For blankmanger, that made he with the beste. A Shipman was ther, wonynge fer by weste; For aught I woot he was of Dertemouthe. He rood upon a rouncy, as he kouthe, In a gowne of faldyng to the knee. A daggere hangynge on a laas hadde he Aboute his nekke, under his arm adoun. The hoote somer hadde maad his hewe al broun; And certeinly he was a good felawe. Ful many a draughte of wyn hadde he y-drawe Fro Burdeux-ward, whil that the chapman sleep. Of nyce conscience took he no keep. If that he faught and hadde the hyer hond, By water he sente hem hoom to every lond. But of his craft to rekene wel his tydes, His stremes, and his daungers hym bisides, His herberwe and his moone, his lode-menage, Ther nas noon swich from Hulle to Cartage. Hardy he was and wys to undertake; With many a tempest hadde his berd been shake. He knew alle the havenes, as they were, From Gootlond to the Cape of Fynystere, And every cryke in Britaigne and in Spayne. His barge y-cleped was the Maudelayne. With us ther was a Doctour of Phisik; In all this world ne was ther noon hym lik, To speke of phisik and of surgerye; For he was grounded in astronomye. He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel In houres, by his magyk natureel. Wel koude he fortunen the ascendent Of his ymáges for his pacient. He knew the cause of everich maladye, Were it of hoot, or cold, or moyste, or drye, And where they engendred and of what humour. He was a verray, parfit praktisour; The cause y-knowe, and of his harm the roote, Anon he yaf the sike man his boote. Ful redy hadde he his apothecaries To sende him drogges and his letuaries; For ech of hem made oother for to wynne, Hir frendshipe nas nat newe to bigynne. Wel knew he the olde Esculapius, And De{"y}scorides, and eek Rufus, Old Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen, Serapion, Razis, and Avycen, Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn, Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn. Of his diete mesurable was he, For it was of no superfluitee, But of greet norissyng and digestíble. His studie was but litel on the Bible. In sangwyn and in pers he clad was al, Lyned with taffata and with sendal. And yet he was but esy of dispence; He kepte that he wan in pestilence. For gold in phisik is a cordial; Therfore he lovede gold in special. A Good Wif was ther of biside Bathe, But she was som-del deef, and that was scathe. Of clooth-makyng she hadde swich an haunt She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt. In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon; And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she That she was out of alle charitee. Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground; I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed. Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed, Ful streite y-teyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe. Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe. She was a worthy womman al hir lyve; Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve, Withouten oother compaignye in youthe; But ther-of nedeth nat to speke as nowthe. And thries hadde she been at Jérusalem; She hadde passed many a straunge strem; At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne, In Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne. She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye. Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye. Upon an amblere esily she sat, Y-wympled wel, and on hir heed an hat As brood as is a bokeler or a targe; A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large, And on hire feet a paire of spores sharpe. In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe; Of remedies of love she knew per chauncé, For she koude of that art the olde daunce. A good man was ther of religioun, And was a povre Person of a Toun; But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk. He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Cristes Gospel trewely wolde preche; His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche. Benygne he was, and wonder diligent, And in adversitee ful pacient; And swich he was y-preved ofte sithes. Ful looth were hym to cursen for his tithes, But rather wolde he yeven, out of doute, Unto his povre parisshens aboute, Of his offrýng and eek of his substaunce; He koude in litel thyng have suffisaunce. Wyd was his parisshe, and houses fer asonder, But he ne lafte nat, for reyn ne thonder, In siknesse nor in meschief to visíte The ferreste in his parisshe, muche and lite, Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf. This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf, That first he wroghte and afterward he taughte. Out of the gospel he tho wordes caughte; And this figure he added eek therto, That if gold ruste, what shal iren doo? For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste, No wonder is a lewed man to ruste; And shame it is, if a prest take keep, A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep. Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive By his clennesse how that his sheep sholde lyve. He sette nat his benefice to hyre And leet his sheep encombred in the myre, And ran to Londoun, unto Seinte Poules, To seken hym a chaunterie for soules, Or with a bretherhed to been withholde; But dwelte at hoom and kepte wel his folde, So that the wolf ne made it nat myscarie; He was a shepherde, and noght a mercenarie. And though he hooly were and vertuous, He was to synful man nat despitous, Ne of his speche daungerous ne digne, But in his techyng díscreet and benygne. To drawen folk to hevene by fairnesse, By good ensample, this was his bisynesse. But it were any persone obstinat, What so he were, of heigh or lough estat, Hym wolde he snybben sharply for the nonys. A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys. He waited after no pompe and reverence, Ne maked him a spiced conscience; But Cristes loore and his apostles twelve He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve. With hym ther was a Plowman, was his brother, That hadde y-lad of dong ful many a fother; A trewe swynkere and a good was he, Lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee. God loved he best, with al his hoole herte, At alle tymes, thogh him gamed or smerte. And thanne his neighebor right as hymselve. He wolde thresshe, and therto dyke and delve, For Cristes sake, for every povre wight, Withouten hire, if it lay in his myght. His tithes payede he ful faire and wel, Bothe of his propre swynk and his catel. In a tabard he rood upon a mere. Ther was also a Reve and a Millere, A Somnour and a Pardoner also, A Maunciple, and myself,—ther were namo. The Millere was a stout carl for the nones; Ful byg he was of brawn and eek of bones. That proved wel, for over-al, ther he cam, At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram. He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre; Ther nas no dore that he nolde heve of harre, Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed. His berd as any sowe or fox was reed, And therto brood, as though it were a spade. Upon the cop right of his nose he hade A werte, and thereon stood a toft of herys, Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys; His nosethirles blake were and wyde. A swerd and a bokeler bar he by his syde. His mouth as greet was as a greet forneys; He was a janglere and a goliardeys, And that was moost of synne and harlotries. Wel koude he stelen corn and tollen thries; And yet he hadde a thombe of gold, pardee. A whit cote and a blew hood wered he. A baggepipe wel koude he blowe and sowne, And therwithal he broghte us out of towne. A gentil Maunciple was ther of a temple, Of which achátours myghte take exemple For to be wise in byynge of vitaille; For, wheither that he payde or took by taille, Algate he wayted so in his achaat That he was ay biforn and in good staat. Now is nat that of God a ful fair grace, That swich a lewed mannes wit shal pace The wisdom of an heep of lerned men? Of maistres hadde he mo than thries ten, That weren of lawe expert and curious, Of whiche ther weren a duszeyne in that hous Worthy to been stywardes of rente and lond Of any lord that is in Engelond, To maken hym lyve by his propre good, In honour dettelees, but if he were wood, Or lyve as scarsly as hym list desire; And able for to helpen al a shire In any caas that myghte falle or happe; And yet this Manciple sette hir aller cappe The Reve was a sclendre colerik man. His berd was shave as ny as ever he kan; His heer was by his erys round y-shorn; His top was dokked lyk a preest biforn. Ful longe were his legges and ful lene, Y-lyk a staf, ther was no calf y-sene. Wel koude he kepe a gerner and a bynne; Ther was noon auditour koude on him wynne. Wel wiste he, by the droghte and by the reyn, The yeldynge of his seed and of his greyn. His lordes sheep, his neet, his dayerye, His swyn, his hors, his stoor, and his pultrye, Was hoolly in this reves governyng; And by his covenant yaf the rekenyng Syn that his lord was twenty yeer of age; There koude no man brynge hym in arrerage. There nas baillif, ne hierde, nor oother hyne, That he ne knew his sleighte and his covyne; They were adrad of hym as of the deeth. His wonyng was ful fair upon an heeth; With grene trees shadwed was his place. He koude bettre than his lord purchace; Ful riche he was a-stored pryvely. His lord wel koude he plesen subtilly, To yeve and lene hym of his owene good, And have a thank, and yet a cote and hood. In youthe he hadde lerned a good myster; He was a wel good wrighte, a carpenter. This Reve sat upon a ful good stot, That was al pomely grey, and highte Scot. A long surcote of pers upon he hade, And by his syde he baar a rusty blade. Of Northfolk was this Reve of which I telle, Biside a toun men clepen Baldeswelle. Tukked he was as is a frere, aboute. And evere he rood the hyndreste of oure route. A Somonour was ther with us in that place, That hadde a fyr-reed cherubynnes face, For sawcefleem he was, with eyen narwe. As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe, With scaled browes blake and piled berd,— Of his visage children were aferd. Ther nas quyk-silver, lytarge, ne brymstoon, Boras, ceruce, ne oille of tartre noon, Ne oynement that wolde clense and byte, That hym myghte helpen of his whelkes white, Nor of the knobbes sittynge on his chekes. Wel loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes, And for to drynken strong wyn, reed as blood. Thanne wolde he speke, and crie as he were wood. And whan that he wel dronken hadde the wyn, Than wolde he speke no word but Latyn. A fewe termes hadde he, two or thre, That he had lerned out of som decree,— No wonder is, he herde it al the day; And eek ye knowen wel how that a jay Kan clepen "Watte" as wel as kan the pope. But whoso koude in oother thyng hym grope, Thanne hadde he spent al his philosophie; Ay "Questio quid juris" wolde he crie. He was a gentil harlot and a kynde; A bettre felawe sholde men noght fynde. He wolde suffre for a quart of wyn A good felawe to have his concubyn A twelf month, and excuse hym atte fulle; And prively a fynch eek koude he pulle. And if he foond owher a good felawe, He wolde techen him to have noon awe, In swich caas, of the erchedekenes curs, But if a mannes soule were in his purs; For in his purs he sholde y-punysshed be: "Purs is the erchedekenes helle," seyde he. But wel I woot he lyed right in dede. Of cursyng oghte ech gilty man him drede, For curs wol slee, right as assoillyng savith; And also war him of a Significavit. In daunger hadde he at his owene gise The yonge girles of the diocise, And knew hir conseil, and was al hir reed. A gerland hadde he set upon his heed, As greet as it were for an ale-stake; A bokeleer hadde he maad him of a cake. With hym ther rood a gentil Pardoner Of Rouncivale, his freend and his compeer, That streight was comen fro the court of Rome. Ful loude he soong, "Com hider, love, to me!" This Somonour bar to hym a stif burdoun; Was nevere trompe of half so greet a soun. This Pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex, But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex; By ounces henge his lokkes that he hadde, And therwith he his shuldres overspradde. But thynne it lay, by colpons, oon and oon; But hood, for jolitee, wered he noon, For it was trussed up in his walét. Hym thoughte he rood al of the newe jet; Dischevelee, save his cappe, he rood al bare. Swiche glarynge eyen hadde he as an hare. A vernycle hadde he sowed upon his cappe. His walet lay biforn hym in his lappe, Bret-ful of pardoun, comen from Rome al hoot. A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot. No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have, As smothe it was as it were late y-shave; I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare. But of his craft, fro Berwyk into Ware, Ne was ther swich another pardoner; For in his male he hadde a pilwe-beer, Which that, he seyde, was Oure Lady veyl; He seyde he hadde a gobet of the seyl That Seinte Peter hadde, whan that he wente Upon the see, til Jesu Crist hym hente. He hadde a croys of latoun, ful of stones, And in a glas he hadde pigges bones. But with thise relikes, whan that he fond A povre person dwellynge upon lond, Upon a day he gat hym moore moneye Than that the person gat in monthes tweye; And thus with feyned flaterye and japes He made the person and the peple his apes. But trewely to tellen atte laste, He was in chirche a noble ecclesiaste; Wel koude he rede a lessoun or a storie, But alderbest he song an offertorie; For wel he wiste, whan that song was songe, He moste preche, and wel affile his tonge To wynne silver, as he ful wel koude; Therefore he song the murierly and loude. Now have I toold you shortly, in a clause, Thestaat, tharray, the nombre, and eek the cause Why that assembled was this compaignye In Southwerk, at this gentil hostelrye That highte the Tabard, faste by the Belle. But now is tyme to yow for to telle How that we baren us that ilke nyght, Whan we were in that hostelrie alyght; And after wol I telle of our viage And al the remenaunt of oure pilgrimage. But first, I pray yow, of youre curteisye, That ye narette it nat my vileynye, Thogh that I pleynly speke in this mateere, To telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere, Ne thogh I speke hir wordes proprely. For this ye knowen al-so wel as I, Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce, as ny as evere he kan, Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large; Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe. He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother; He moot as wel seye o word as another. Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ, And wel ye woot no vileynye is it. Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, "The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede." Also I prey yow to foryeve it me, Al have I nat set folk in hir degree Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde; My wit is short, ye may wel understonde. Greet chiere made oure Hoost us everichon, And to the soper sette he us anon, And served us with vitaille at the beste: Strong was the wyn and wel to drynke us leste. A semely man Oure Hooste was with-alle For to been a marchal in an halle. A large man he was with eyen stepe, A fairer burgeys was ther noon in Chepe; Boold of his speche, and wys, and well y-taught, And of manhod hym lakkede right naught. Eek thereto he was right a myrie man, And after soper pleyen he bigan, And spak of myrthe amonges othere thynges, Whan that we hadde maad our rekenynges; And seyde thus: "Now, lordynges, trewely, Ye been to me right welcome, hertely; For by my trouthe, if that I shal nat lye, I saugh nat this yeer so myrie a compaignye At ones in this herberwe as is now. Fayn wolde I doon yow myrthe, wiste I how; And of a myrthe I am right now bythoght, To doon yow ese, and it shal coste noght. "Ye goon to Canterbury—God yow speede, The blisful martir quite yow youre meede! And wel I woot, as ye goon by the weye, Ye shapen yow to talen and to pleye; For trewely confort ne myrthe is noon To ride by the weye doumb as a stoon; And therfore wol I maken yow disport, As I seyde erst, and doon yow som confort. And if you liketh alle, by oon assent, For to stonden at my juggement, And for to werken as I shal yow seye, To-morwe, whan ye riden by the weye, Now, by my fader soule, that is deed, But ye be myrie, I wol yeve yow myn heed! Hoold up youre hond, withouten moore speche." Oure conseil was nat longe for to seche; Us thoughte it was noght worth to make it wys, And graunted hym withouten moore avys, And bad him seye his verdit, as hym leste. "Lordynges," quod he, "now herkneth for the beste; But taak it nought, I prey yow, in desdeyn; This is the poynt, to speken short and pleyn, That ech of yow, to shorte with oure weye In this viage, shal telle tales tweye, To Caunterbury-ward, I mene it so, And homward he shal tellen othere two, Of aventúres that whilom han bifalle. And which of yow that bereth hym beste of alle, That is to seyn, that telleth in this caas Tales of best sentence and moost solaas, Shal have a soper at oure aller cost, Heere in this place, sittynge by this post, Whan that we come agayn fro Caunterbury. And, for to make yow the moore mury, I wol myselven gladly with yow ryde, Right at myn owene cost, and be youre gyde; And whoso wole my juggement withseye Shal paye al that we spenden by the weye. And if ye vouche-sauf that it be so, Tel me anon, withouten wordes mo, And I wol erly shape me therfore." This thyng was graunted, and oure othes swore With ful glad herte, and preyden hym also That he wolde vouche-sauf for to do so, And that he wolde been oure governour, And of our tales juge and réportour, And sette a soper at a certeyn pris; And we wol reuled been at his devys In heigh and lough; and thus, by oon assent, We been acorded to his juggement. And therupon the wyn was fet anon; We dronken, and to reste wente echon, Withouten any lenger taryynge. Amorwe, whan that day gan for to sprynge, Up roos oure Hoost and was oure aller cok, And gadrede us togidre alle in a flok; And forth we riden, a litel moore than paas, Unto the wateryng of Seint Thomas; And there oure Hoost bigan his hors areste, And seyde, "Lordynges, herkneth, if yow leste: Ye woot youre foreward and I it yow recorde. If even-song and morwe-song accorde, Lat se now who shal telle the firste tale. As ever mote I drynke wyn or ale, Whoso be rebel to my juggement Shal paye for all that by the wey is spent. Now draweth cut, er that we ferrer twynne; He which that hath the shorteste shal bigynne. Sire Knyght," quod he, "my mayster and my lord Now draweth cut, for that is myn accord. Cometh neer," quod he, "my lady Prioresse. And ye, sire Clerk, lat be your shamefastnesse, Ne studieth noght. Ley hond to, every man." Anon to drawen every wight bigan, And, shortly for to tellen as it was, Were it by áventúre, or sort, or cas, The sothe is this, the cut fil to the Knyght, Of which ful blithe and glad was every wyght; And telle he moste his tale, as was resoun, By foreward and by composicioun, As ye han herd; what nedeth wordes mo? And whan this goode man saugh that it was so, As he that wys was and obedient To kepe his foreward by his free assent, He seyde, "Syn I shal bigynne the game, What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name! Now lat us ryde, and herkneth what I seye." And with that word we ryden forth oure weye; And he bigan with right a myrie cheere His tale anon, and seyde in this manére.
Wife and servant are the same, But only differ in the name: For when that fatal knot is tied, Which nothing, nothing can divide: When she the word obey has said, And man by law supreme has made, Then all that’s kind is laid aside, And nothing left but state and pride: Fierce as an Eastern prince he grows, And all his innate rigour shows: Then but to look, to laugh, or speak, Will the nuptial contract break. Like mutes she signs alone must make, And never any freedom take: But still be governed by a nod, And fear her husband as a God: Him still must serve, him still obey, And nothing act, and nothing say, But what her haughty lord thinks fit, Who with the power, has all the wit. Then shun, oh! shun that wretched state, And all the fawning flatt’rers hate: Value your selves, and men despise, You must be proud, if you’ll be wise.
The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still, On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill, The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot; Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot. The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread, The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead. The fallow fields glitter like water indeed, And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed. Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun, And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run; Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air; Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
He could not die when trees were green, For he loved the time too well. His little hands, when flowers were seen, Were held for the bluebell, As he was carried o'er the green. His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee; He knew those children of the spring: When he was well and on the lea He held one in his hands to sing, Which filled his heart with glee. Infants, the children of the spring! How can an infant die When butterflies are on the wing, Green grass, and such a sky? How can they die at spring? He held his hands for daisies white, And then for violets blue, And took them all to bed at night That in the green fields grew, As childhood's sweet delight. And then he shut his little eyes, And flowers would notice not; Birds' nests and eggs caused no surprise, He now no blossoms got; They met with plaintive sighs. When winter came and blasts did sigh, And bare were plain and tree, As he for ease in bed did lie His soul seemed with the free, He died so quietly.
Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.
PART I 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; Tu—whit! Tu—whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 'Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, What makes her in the wood so late, A furlong from the castle gate? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothèd knight; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that's far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak But moss and rarest misletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, The lovely lady Christabel! It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is she cannot tell.— On the other side it seems to be, Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. Hush, beating heart of Christabel! Jesu, Maria, shield her well! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees she there? There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare; Her blue-veined feet unsandl'd were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair. I guess, 'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she— Beautiful exceedingly! Mary mother, save me now! (Said Christabel) And who art thou? The lady strange made answer meet, And her voice was faint and sweet:— Have pity on my sore distress, I scarce can speak for weariness: Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear! Said Christabel, How camest thou here? And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet, Did thus pursue her answer meet:— My sire is of a noble line, And my name is Geraldine: Five warriors seized me yestermorn, Me, even me, a maid forlorn: They choked my cries with force and fright, And tied me on a palfrey white. The palfrey was as fleet as wind, And they rode furiously behind. They spurred amain, their steeds were white: And once we crossed the shade of night. As sure as Heaven shall rescue me, I have no thought what men they be; Nor do I know how long it is (For I have lain entranced I wis) Since one, the tallest of the five, Took me from the palfrey's back, A weary woman, scarce alive. Some muttered words his comrades spoke: He placed me underneath this oak; He swore they would return with haste; Whither they went I cannot tell— I thought I heard, some minutes past, Sounds as of a castle bell. Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she). And help a wretched maid to flee. Then Christabel stretched forth her hand, And comforted fair Geraldine: O well, bright dame! may you command The service of Sir Leoline; And gladly our stout chivalry Will he send forth and friends withal To guide and guard you safe and free Home to your noble father's hall. She rose: and forth with steps they passed That strove to be, and were not, fast. Her gracious stars the lady blest, And thus spake on sweet Christabel: All our household are at rest, The hall as silent as the cell; Sir Leoline is weak in health, And may not well awakened be, But we will move as if in stealth, And I beseech your courtesy, This night, to share your couch with me. They crossed the moat, and Christabel Took the key that fitted well; A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main Lifted her up, a weary weight, Over the threshold of the gate: Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she were not in pain. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. And Christabel devoutly cried To the lady by her side, Praise we the Virgin all divine Who hath rescued thee from thy distress! Alas, alas! said Geraldine, I cannot speak for weariness. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. Outside her kennel, the mastiff old Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold. The mastiff old did not awake, Yet she an angry moan did make! And what can ail the mastiff bitch? Never till now she uttered yell Beneath the eye of Christabel. Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch: For what can ail the mastiff bitch? They passed the hall, that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will! The brands were flat, the brands were dying, Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed, there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame; And Christabel saw the lady's eye, And nothing else saw she thereby, Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. O softly tread, said Christabel, My father seldom sleepeth well. Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare, And jealous of the listening air They steal their way from stair to stair, Now in glimmer, and now in gloom, And now they pass the Baron's room, As still as death, with stifled breath! And now have reached her chamber door; And now doth Geraldine press down The rushes of the chamber floor. The moon shines dim in the open air, And not a moonbeam enters here. But they without its light can see The chamber carved so curiously, Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain, For a lady's chamber meet: The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fastened to an angel's feet. The silver lamp burns dead and dim; But Christabel the lamp will trim. She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright, And left it swinging to and fro, While Geraldine, in wretched plight, Sank down upon the floor below. O weary lady, Geraldine, I pray you, drink this cordial wine! It is a wine of virtuous powers; My mother made it of wild flowers. And will your mother pity me, Who am a maiden most forlorn? Christabel answered—Woe is me! She died the hour that I was born. I have heard the grey-haired friar tell How on her death-bed she did say, That she should hear the castle-bell Strike twelve upon my wedding-day. O mother dear! that thou wert here! I would, said Geraldine, she were! But soon with altered voice, said she— 'Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! I have power to bid thee flee.' Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye? Can she the bodiless dead espy? And why with hollow voice cries she, 'Off, woman, off! this hour is mine— Though thou her guardian spirit be, Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me.' Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side, And raised to heaven her eyes so blue— Alas! said she, this ghastly ride— Dear lady! it hath wildered you! The lady wiped her moist cold brow, And faintly said, ' 'tis over now!' Again the wild-flower wine she drank: Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright, And from the floor whereon she sank, The lofty lady stood upright: She was most beautiful to see, Like a lady of a far countrèe. And thus the lofty lady spake— 'All they who live in the upper sky, Do love you, holy Christabel! And you love them, and for their sake And for the good which me befel, Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden, to requite you well. But now unrobe yourself; for I Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie.' Quoth Christabel, So let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness. But through her brain of weal and woe So many thoughts moved to and fro, That vain it were her lids to close; So half-way from the bed she rose, And on her elbow did recline To look at the lady Geraldine. Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, And slowly rolled her eyes around; Then drawing in her breath aloud, Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast: Her silken robe, and inner vest, Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side— A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her! shield sweet Christabel! Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs; Ah! what a stricken look was hers! Deep from within she seems half-way To lift some weight with sick assay, And eyes the maid and seeks delay; Then suddenly, as one defied, Collects herself in scorn and pride, And lay down by the Maiden's side!— And in her arms the maid she took, Ah wel-a-day! And with low voice and doleful look These words did say: 'In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell, Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel! Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow; But vainly thou warrest, For this is alone in Thy power to declare, That in the dim forest Thou heard'st a low moaning, And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair; And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity, To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.' THE CONCLUSION TO PART I It was a lovely sight to see The lady Christabel, when she Was praying at the old oak tree. Amid the jaggèd shadows Of mossy leafless boughs, Kneeling in the moonlight, To make her gentle vows; Her slender palms together prest, Heaving sometimes on her breast; Her face resigned to bliss or bale— Her face, oh call it fair not pale, And both blue eyes more bright than clear, Each about to have a tear. With open eyes (ah woe is me!) Asleep, and dreaming fearfully, Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis, Dreaming that alone, which is— O sorrow and shame! Can this be she, The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree? And lo! the worker of these harms, That holds the maiden in her arms, Seems to slumber still and mild, As a mother with her child. A star hath set, a star hath risen, O Geraldine! since arms of thine Have been the lovely lady's prison. O Geraldine! one hour was thine— Thou'st had thy will! By tairn and rill, The night-birds all that hour were still. But now they are jubilant anew, From cliffand tower, tu—whoo! tu—whoo! Tu—whoo! tu—whoo! from wood and fell! And see! the lady Christabel Gathers herself from out her trance; Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids Close o'er her eyes; and tears she sheds— Large tears that leave the lashes bright! And oft the while she seems to smile As infants at a sudden light! Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep, Like a youthful hermitess, Beauteous in a wilderness, Who, praying always, prays in sleep. And, if she move unquietly, Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free Comes back and tingles in her feet. No doubt, she hath a vision sweet. What if her guardian spirit 'twere, What if she knew her mother near? But this she knows, in joys and woes, That saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all! PART II Each matin bell, the Baron saith, Knells us back to a world of death. These words Sir Leoline first said, When he rose and found his lady dead: These words Sir Leoline will say Many a morn to his dying day! And hence the custom and law began That still at dawn the sacristan, Who duly pulls the heavy bell, Five and forty beads must tell Between each stroke—a warning knell, Which not a soul can choose but hear From Bratha Head to Wyndermere. Saith Bracy the bard, So let it knell! And let the drowsy sacristan Still count as slowly as he can! There is no lack of such, I ween, As well fill up the space between. In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent, With ropes of rock and bells of air Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent, Who all give back, one after t'other, The death-note to their living brother; And oft too, by the knell offended, Just as their one! two! three! is ended, The devil mocks the doleful tale With a merry peal from Borodale. The air is still! through mist and cloud That merry peal comes ringing loud; And Geraldine shakes off her dread, And rises lightly from the bed; Puts on her silken vestments white, And tricks her hair in lovely plight, And nothing doubting of her spell Awakens the lady Christabel. 'Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel? I trust that you have rested well.' And Christabel awoke and spied The same who lay down by her side— O rather say, the same whom she Raised up beneath the old oak tree! Nay, fairer yet! and yet more fair! For she belike hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep! And while she spake, her looks, her air Such gentle thankfulness declare, That (so it seemed) her girded vests Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts. 'Sure I have sinn'd!' said Christabel, 'Now heaven be praised if all be well!' And in low faltering tones, yet sweet, Did she the lofty lady greet With such perplexity of mind As dreams too lively leave behind. So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed Her maiden limbs, and having prayed That He, who on the cross did groan, Might wash away her sins unknown, She forthwith led fair Geraldine To meet her sire, Sir Leoline. The lovely maid and the lady tall Are pacing both into the hall, And pacing on through page and groom, Enter the Baron's presence-room. The Baron rose, and while he prest His gentle daughter to his breast, With cheerful wonder in his eyes The lady Geraldine espies, And gave such welcome to the same, As might beseem so bright a dame! But when he heard the lady's tale, And when she told her father's name, Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, Murmuring o'er the name again, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine? Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: They parted—ne'er to meet again! But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining— They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between;— But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been. Sir Leoline, a moment's space, Stood gazing on the damsel's face: And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine Came back upon his heart again. O then the Baron forgot his age, His noble heart swelled high with rage; He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side He would proclaim it far and wide, With trump and solemn heraldry, That they, who thus had wronged the dame, Were base as spotted infamy! 'And if they dare deny the same, My herald shall appoint a week, And let the recreant traitors seek My tourney court—that there and then I may dislodge their reptile souls From the bodies and forms of men!' He spake: his eye in lightning rolls! For the lady was ruthlessly seized; and he kenned In the beautiful lady the child of his friend! And now the tears were on his face, And fondly in his arms he took Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace, Prolonging it with joyous look. Which when she viewed, a vision fell Upon the soul of Christabel, The vision of fear, the touch and pain! She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again— (Ah, woe is me! Was it for thee, Thou gentle maid! such sights to see?) Again she saw that bosom old, Again she felt that bosom cold, And drew in her breath with a hissing sound: Whereat the Knight turned wildly round, And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid With eyes upraised, as one that prayed. The touch, the sight, had passed away, And in its stead that vision blest, Which comforted her after-rest While in the lady's arms she lay, Had put a rapture in her breast, And on her lips and o'er her eyes Spread smiles like light! With new surprise, 'What ails then my belovèd child? The Baron said—His daughter mild Made answer, 'All will yet be well!' I ween, she had no power to tell Aught else: so mighty was the spell. Yet he, who saw this Geraldine, Had deemed her sure a thing divine: Such sorrow with such grace she blended, As if she feared she had offended Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid! And with such lowly tones she prayed She might be sent without delay Home to her father's mansion. 'Nay! Nay, by my soul!' said Leoline. 'Ho! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine! Go thou, with sweet music and loud, And take two steeds with trappings proud, And take the youth whom thou lov'st best To bear thy harp, and learn thy song, And clothe you both in solemn vest, And over the mountains haste along, Lest wandering folk, that are abroad, Detain you on the valley road. 'And when he has crossed the Irthing flood, My merry bard! he hastes, he hastes Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood, And reaches soon that castle good Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes. 'Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet, Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet, More loud than your horses' echoing feet! And loud and loud to Lord Roland call, Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall! Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free— Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me! He bids thee come without delay With all thy numerous array And take thy lovely daughter home: And he will meet thee on the way With all his numerous array White with their panting palfreys' foam: And, by mine honour! I will say, That I repent me of the day When I spake words of fierce disdain To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine!— —For since that evil hour hath flown, Many a summer's sun hath shone; Yet ne'er found I a friend again Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine. The lady fell, and clasped his knees, Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing; And Bracy replied, with faltering voice, His gracious Hail on all bestowing!— 'Thy words, thou sire of Christabel, Are sweeter than my harp can tell; Yet might I gain a boon of thee, This day my journey should not be, So strange a dream hath come to me, That I had vowed with music loud To clear yon wood from thing unblest. Warned by a vision in my rest! For in my sleep I saw that dove, That gentle bird, whom thou dost love, And call'st by thy own daughter's name— Sir Leoline! I saw the same Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan, Among the green herbs in the forest alone. Which when I saw and when I heard, I wonder'd what might ail the bird; For nothing near it could I see Save the grass and green herbs underneath the old tree. 'And in my dream methought I went To search out what might there be found; And what the sweet bird's trouble meant, That thus lay fluttering on the ground. I went and peered, and could descry No cause for her distressful cry; But yet for her dear lady's sake I stooped, methought, the dove to take, When lo! I saw a bright green snake Coiled around its wings and neck. Green as the herbs on which it couched, Close by the dove's its head it crouched; And with the dove it heaves and stirs, Swelling its neck as she swelled hers! I woke; it was the midnight hour, The clock was echoing in the tower; But though my slumber was gone by, This dream it would not pass away— It seems to live upon my eye! And thence I vowed this self-same day With music strong and saintly song To wander through the forest bare, Lest aught unholy loiter there.' Thus Bracy said: the Baron, the while, Half-listening heard him with a smile; Then turned to Lady Geraldine, His eyes made up of wonder and love; And said in courtly accents fine, 'Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove, With arms more strong than harp or song, Thy sire and I will crush the snake!' He kissed her forehead as he spake, And Geraldine in maiden wise Casting down her large bright eyes, With blushing cheek and courtesy fine She turned her from Sir Leoline; Softly gathering up her train, That o'er her right arm fell again; And folded her arms across her chest, And couched her head upon her breast, And looked askance at Christabel Jesu, Maria, shield her well! A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy; And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread, At Christabel she looked askance!— One moment—and the sight was fled! But Christabel in dizzy trance Stumbling on the unsteady ground Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound; And Geraldine again turned round, And like a thing, that sought relief, Full of wonder and full of grief, She rolled her large bright eyes divine Wildly on Sir Leoline. The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone, She nothing sees—no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, So deeply she had drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate! And thus she stood, in dizzy trance; Still picturing that look askance With forced unconscious sympathy Full before her father's view— As far as such a look could be In eyes so innocent and blue! And when the trance was o'er, the maid Paused awhile, and inly prayed: Then falling at the Baron's feet, 'By my mother's soul do I entreat That thou this woman send away!' She said: and more she could not say: For what she knew she could not tell, O'er-mastered by the mighty spell. Why is thy cheek so wan and wild, Sir Leoline? Thy only child Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride, So fair, so innocent, so mild; The same, for whom thy lady died! O by the pangs of her dear mother Think thou no evil of thy child! For her, and thee, and for no other, She prayed the moment ere she died: Prayed that the babe for whom she died, Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride! That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled, Sir Leoline! And wouldst thou wrong thy only child, Her child and thine? Within the Baron's heart and brain If thoughts, like these, had any share, They only swelled his rage and pain, And did but work confusion there. His heart was cleft with pain and rage, His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild, Dishonoured thus in his old age; Dishonoured by his only child, And all his hospitality To the wronged daughter of his friend By more than woman's jealousy Brought thus to a disgraceful end— He rolled his eye with stern regard Upon the gentle minstrel bard, And said in tones abrupt, austere— 'Why, Bracy! dost thou loiter here? I bade thee hence!' The bard obeyed; And turning from his own sweet maid, The agèd knight, Sir Leoline, Led forth the lady Geraldine! THE CONCLUSION TO PART II A little child, a limber elf, Singing, dancing to itself, A fairy thing with red round cheeks, That always finds, and never seeks, Makes such a vision to the sight As fills a father's eyes with light; And pleasures flow in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love's excess With words of unmeant bitterness. Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm. Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity. And what, if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it 's most used to do.
Since all that beat about in Nature's range, Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain The only constant in a world of change, O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain? Call to the Hours, that in the distance play, The faery people of the future day— Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath, Till when, like strangers shelt'ring from a storm, Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death! Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see, She is not thou, and only thou are she, Still, still as though some dear embodied Good, Some living Love before my eyes there stood With answering look a ready ear to lend, I mourn to thee and say—'Ah! loveliest friend! That this the meed of all my toils might be, To have a home, an English home, and thee!' Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one. The peacefull'st cot, the moon shall shine upon, Lulled by the thrush and wakened by the lark, Without thee were but a becalméd bark, Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside. And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm. (Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence)  I Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of this Æolian lute, Which better far were mute. For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light, (With swimming phantom light o'erspread But rimmed and circled by a silver thread) I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling The coming-on of rain and squally blast. And oh! that even now the gust were swelling, And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast! Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live! II A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear— O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! III My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. IV O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! V O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light. VI There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth; But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man— This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. VII Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches' home, Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers, Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wintry song, The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among. Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold! What tell'st thou now about? 'Tis of the rushing of an host in rout, With groans, of trampled men, with smarting wounds— At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence! And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, With groans, and tremulous shudderings—all is over— It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of less affright, And tempered with delight, As Otway's self had framed the tender lay,— 'Tis of a little child Upon a lonesome wild, Nor far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low in bitter grief and fear, And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear. VIII 'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing, And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth! With light heart may she rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul! O simple spirit, guided from above, Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.
Sea-ward, white gleaming thro' the busy scudWith arching Wings, the sea-mew o'er my headPosts on, as bent on speed, now passagingEdges the stiffer Breeze, now, yielding, drifts,Now floats upon the air, and sends from farA wildly-wailing Note.
I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish Than if 'twere Truth. It has been often so: Must I die under it? Is no one near? Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?
Come, come thou bleak December wind, And blow the dry leaves from the tree! Flash, like a Love-thought, thro' me, Death And take a Life that wearies me.
As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood,That crests its Head with clouds, beneath the floodFeeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flankOf its wide base controls the fronting bank,(By the slant current's pressure scoop'd awayThe fronting bank becomes a foam-piled bay)High in the Fork the uncouth Idol knitsHis channel'd Brows; low murmurs stir by fitsAnd dark below the horrid Faquir sits;An Horror from its broad Head's branchy wreathBroods o'er the rude Idolatry beneath—
Whom should I choose for my Judge? the earnest, impersonal reader, Who, in the work, forgets me and the world and himself! Ye who have eyes to detect, and Gall to Chastise the imperfect, Have you the heart, too, that loves, feels and rewards the Compleat? What is the meed of thy Song? 'Tis the ceaseless, the thousandfold Echo Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure repeats and prolongs it, Each with a different Tone, compleat or in musical fragments.
The Moon, how definite its orb!Yet gaze again, and with a steady gaze—'Tis there indeed,—but where is it not?—It is suffused o'er all the sapphire Heaven,Trees, herbage, snake-like stream, unwrinkled Lake,Whose very murmur does of it partakeAnd low and close the broad smooth mountainIs more a thing of Heaven than whenDistinct by one dim shade and yet undivided from the universal cloudIn which it towers, finite in height.
When Hope but made Tranquillity be felt—A Flight of Hopes for ever on the wingBut made Tranquillity a conscious Thing—And wheeling round and round in sportive coilFann'd the calm air upon the brow of Toil—
Water and windmills, greenness, Islets green;—Willows whose Trunks beside the shadows stoodOf their own higher half, and willowy swamp:—Farmhouses that at anchor seem'd—in the inland skyThe fog-transfixing Spires—Water, wide water, greenness and green banks,And water seen—
Though friendships differ endless in degree , The sorts , methinks, may be reduced to three. Ac quaintance many, and Con quaintance few; But for In quaintance I know only two— The friend I've mourned with, and the maid I woo!
I Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause,  Whose pathless march no mortal may control!  Ye Ocean-Waves! that, wheresoe'er ye roll, Yield homage only to eternal laws! Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds singing,  Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined. Save when your own imperious branches swinging,  Have made a solemn music of the wind! Where, like a man beloved of God, Through glooms, which never woodman trod,  How oft, pursuing fancies holy, My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,  Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound! O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high!  And O ye Clouds that far above me soared! Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!  Yea, every thing that is and will be free!  Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be,  With what deep worship I have still adored  The spirit of divinest Liberty. II When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared,  And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea,  Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free, Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared! With what a joy my lofty gratulation  Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band: And when to whelm the disenchanted nation,  Like fiends embattled by a wizard's wand,  The Monarchs marched in evil day,  And Britain joined the dire array;  Though dear her shores and circling ocean, Though many friendships, many youthful loves  Had swoln the patriot emotion And flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves; Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat  To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, And shame too long delayed and vain retreat! For ne'er, O Liberty! with partial aim I dimmed thy light or damped thy holy flame;  But blessed the paeans of delivered France, And hung my head and wept at Britain's name. III "And what," I said, "though Blasphemy's loud scream  With that sweet music of deliverance strove!  Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream!  Ye storms, that round the dawning East assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!"  And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright;  When France her front deep-scarr'd and gory  Concealed with clustering wreaths of glory;  When, insupportably advancing,  Her arm made mockery of the warrior's ramp;  While timid looks of fury glancing,  Domestic treason, crushed beneath her fatal stamp, Writhed like a wounded dragon in his gore;  Then I reproached my fears that would not flee; "And soon," I said, "shall Wisdom teach her lore In the low huts of them that toil and groan! And, conquering by her happiness alone,  Shall France compel the nations to be free, Till Love and Joy look round, and call the Earth their own." IV Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams!  I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament,  From bleak Helvetia's icy caverns sent— I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams!  Heroes, that for your peaceful country perished, And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain-snows  With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherished One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes!  To scatter rage, and traitorous guilt,  Where Peace her jealous home had built;  A patriot-race to disinherit Of all that made their stormy wilds so dear;  And with inexpiable spirit To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer— O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind,  And patriot only in pernicious toils! Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind?  To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway, Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey; To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils  From freemen torn; to tempt and to betray? V The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,  Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game  They burst their manacles and wear the name  Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain!  O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour;  But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.  Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee,  (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee)  Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions,  And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves,  Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff's verge,  Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, Had made one murmur with the distant surge! Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,  Possessing all things with intensest love,  O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.
The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought. But O! how oft, How oft, at school, with most believing mind, Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear Most like articulate sounds of things to come! So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! And so I brooded all the following morn, Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: Save if the door half opened, and I snatched A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, For still I hoped to see the stranger's face, Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the intersperséd vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, And in far other scenes! For I was reared In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
"How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits  Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits If any man obtain that which he merits  Or any merit that which he obtains." REPLY TO THE ABOVE For shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain! What would'st thou have a good great man obtain? Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain? Or throne of corses which his sword had slain? Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? three treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT,  And CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant's breath: And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,  HIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH!
Argument How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. PART I It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. 'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din.' He holds him with his skinny hand, 'There was a ship,' quoth he. 'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!' Eftsoons his hand dropt he. He holds him with his glittering eye— The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years' child: The Mariner hath his will. The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: He cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. 'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top. The Sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea. Higher and higher every day, Till over the mast at noon—' The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon. The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy. The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, And chased us south along. With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled. And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken— The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound! At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it ne'er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through! And a good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow, And every day, for food or play, Came to the mariner's hollo! In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white Moon-shine.' 'God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS. PART II The Sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea. And the good south wind still blew behind, But no sweet bird did follow, Nor any day for food or play Came to the mariner's hollo! And I had done a hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow! Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, The glorious Sun uprist: Then all averred, I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist. 'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay, That bring the fog and mist. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch's oils, Burnt green, and blue and white. And some in dreams assurèd were Of the Spirit that plagued us so; Nine fathom deep he had followed us From the land of mist and snow. And every tongue, through utter drought, Was withered at the root; We could not speak, no more than if We had been choked with soot. Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. PART III There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! a weary time! How glazed each weary eye, When looking westward, I beheld A something in the sky. At first it seemed a little speck, And then it seemed a mist; It moved and moved, and took at last A certain shape, I wist. A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! And still it neared and neared: As if it dodged a water-sprite, It plunged and tacked and veered. With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could nor laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood! I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail! a sail! With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call: Gramercy! they for joy did grin, And all at once their breath drew in. As they were drinking all. See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more! Hither to work us weal; Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel! The western wave was all a-flame. The day was well nigh done! Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun. And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered With broad and burning face. Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, Like restless gossameres? Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a DEATH? and are there two? Is DEATH that woman's mate? Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold. The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; 'The game is done! I've won! I've won!' Quoth she, and whistles thrice. The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out; At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. We listened and looked sideways up! Fear at my heart, as at a cup, My life-blood seemed to sip! The stars were dim, and thick the night, The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip— Till clomb above the eastern bar The hornèd Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip. One after one, by the star-dogged Moon, Too quick for groan or sigh, Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye. Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one. The souls did from their bodies fly,— They fled to bliss or woe! And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my cross-bow! PART IV 'I fear thee, ancient Mariner! I fear thy skinny hand! And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand. I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand, so brown.'— Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! This body dropt not down. Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I. I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay. I looked to heaven, and tried to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came, and made My heart as dry as dust. I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay dead like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet. The cold sweat melted from their limbs, Nor rot nor reek did they: The look with which they looked on me Had never passed away. An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die. The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside— Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoar-frost spread; But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmèd water burnt alway A still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. PART V Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul. The silly buckets on the deck, That had so long remained, I dreamt that they were filled with dew; And when I awoke, it rained. My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my body drank. I moved, and could not feel my limbs: I was so light—almost I thought that I had died in sleep, And was a blessed ghost. And soon I heard a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-flags sheen, To and fro they were hurried about! And to and fro, and in and out, The wan stars danced between. And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge, And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The Moon was at its edge. The thick black cloud was cleft, and still The Moon was at its side: Like waters shot from some high crag, The lightning fell with never a jag, A river steep and wide. The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on! Beneath the lightning and the Moon The dead men gave a groan. They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; Yet never a breeze up-blew; The mariners all 'gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools— We were a ghastly crew. The body of my brother's son Stood by me, knee to knee: The body and I pulled at one rope, But he said nought to me. 'I fear thee, ancient Mariner!' Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest! 'Twas not those souls that fled in pain, Which to their corses came again, But a troop of spirits blest: For when it dawned—they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast; Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths, And from their bodies passed. Around, around, flew each sweet sound, Then darted to the Sun; Slowly the sounds came back again, Now mixed, now one by one. Sometimes a-dropping from the sky I heard the sky-lark sing; Sometimes all little birds that are, How they seemed to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning! And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's song, That makes the heavens be mute. It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. Till noon we quietly sailed on, Yet never a breeze did breathe: Slowly and smoothly went the ship, Moved onward from beneath. Under the keel nine fathom deep, From the land of mist and snow, The spirit slid: and it was he That made the ship to go. The sails at noon left off their tune, And the ship stood still also. The Sun, right up above the mast, Had fixed her to the ocean: But in a minute she 'gan stir, With a short uneasy motion— Backwards and forwards half her length With a short uneasy motion. Then like a pawing horse let go, She made a sudden bound: It flung the blood into my head, And I fell down in a swound. How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned Two voices in the air. 'Is it he?' quoth one, 'Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low The harmless Albatross. The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow.' The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, 'The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.' PART VI
I As once, if not with light regard I read aright that gifted bard (Him whose school above the rest His loveliest Elfin Queen has blest), One, only one unrivaled fair Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn tourney hung on high, The wish of each love-darting eye; Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, As if, in air unseen, some hov'ring hand, Some chaste and angel-friend to virgin-fame, With whispered spell had burst the starting band, It left unblessed her loathed dishonoured side; Happier, hopeless fair, if never Her baffled hand with vain endeavour Had touched that fatal zone to her denied! Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name, To whom, prepared and bathed in Heav'n, The cest of amplest power is giv'n, To few the godlike gift assigns, To gird their blessed, prophetic loins, And gaze her visions wild, and feel unmixed her flame! II The band, as fairy legends say, Was wove on that creating day, When He, who called with thought to birth Yon tented sky, this laughing earth, And dressed with springs, and forests tall, And poured the main engirting all, Long by the loved enthusiast wooed, Himself in some diviner mood, Retiring, sate with her alone, And placed her on his sapphire throne; The whiles, the vaulted shrine around, Seraphic wires were heard to sound; Now sublimest triumph swelling, Now on love and mercy dwelling; And she, from out the veiling cloud, Breathed her magic notes aloud: And thou, thou rich-haired youth of morn, And all thy subject life was born! The dang'rous Passions kept aloof, Far from the sainted growing woof; But near it sate ecstatic Wonder, List'ning the deep applauding thunder; And Truth, in sunny vest arrayed, By whose the tarsel's eyes were made; All the shad'wy tribes of Mind, In braided dance their murmurs joined; And all the bright uncounted powers Who feed on Heav'n's ambrosial flowers. Where is the bard, whose soul can now Its high presuming hopes avow? Where he who thinks, with rapture blind, This hallowed work for him designed? III High on some cliff, to Heav'n up-piled, Of rude access, of prospect wild, Where, tangled round the jealous steep, Strange shades o'erbrow the valleys deep, And holy Genii guard the rock, Its glooms embrown, its springs unlock, While on its rich ambitious head, An Eden, like his own, lies spread: I view that oak the fancied glades among, By which as Milton lay, his evening ear, From many a cloud that dropped ethereal dew, Nigh sphered in Heav'n its native strains could hear: On which that ancient trump he reached was hung; Thither oft, his glory greeting, From Waller's myrtle shades retreating, With many a vow from Hope's aspiring tongue, My trembling feet his guiding steps pursue; In vain— such bliss to one alone Of all the sons of soul was known, And Heav'n and Fancy, kindred powers, Have now o'erturn'd th'inspiring bowers, Or curtained close such scene from every future view.
Home, thou return'st from Thames, whose Naiads long Have seen thee ling'ring, with a fond delay, Mid those soft friends, whose hearts, some future day, Shall melt, perhaps, to hear thy tragic song. Go, not unmindful of that cordial youth, Whom, long endear'd, thou leav'st by Lavant's side; Together let us wish him lasting truth, And joy untainted with his destined bride. Go! nor regardless, while these numbers boast My short-lived bliss, forget my social name; But think far off how, on the southern coast, I met thy friendship with an equal flame! Fresh to that soil thou turn'st, whose ev'ry vale Shall prompt the poet, and his song demand: To thee thy copious subjects ne'er shall fail; Thou need'st but take the pencil to thy hand, And paint what all believe who own thy genial land. There must thou wake perforce thy Doric quill, 'Tis Fancy's land to which thou sett'st thy feet; Where still, 'tis said, the fairy people meet Beneath each birken shade, on mead or hill. There each trim lass that skims the milky store To the swart tribes their creamy bowl allots; By night they sip it round the cottage-door, While airy minstrels warble jocund notes. There ev'ry herd, by sad experience, knows How, winged with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly, When the sick ewe her summer food forgoes, Or, stretched on earth, the heart-smit heifers lie. Such airy beings awe th' untutored swain: Nor thou, though learned, his homelier thoughts neglect; Let thy sweet muse the rural faith sustain; These are the themes of simple, sure effect, That add new conquests to her boundless reign. And fill with double force her heart-commanding strain. Ev'n yet preserv'd, how often may'st thou hear, Where to the pole the Boreal mountains run, Taught by the father to his list'ning son Strange lays, whose pow'r had charmed a Spenser's ear. At ev'ry pause, before thy mind possessed, Old Runic bards shall seem to rise around, With uncouth lyres, in many-coloured vest, Their matted hair with boughs fantastic crowned: Whether thou bidd'st the well-taught hind repeat The choral dirge that mourns some chieftain brave, When ev'ry shrieking maid her bosom beat, And strewed with choicest herbs his scented grave; Or whether, sitting in the shepherd's shiel, Thou hear'st some sounding tale of war's alarms; When, at the bugle's call, with fire and steel, The sturdy clans pour'd forth their bonny swarms, And hostile brothers met to prove each other's arms. 'Tis thine to sing how, framing hideous spells, In Skye's lone isle the gifted wizard seer, Lodged in the wintry cave with [ ] Or in the depth of Uist's dark forest dwells: How they, whose sight such dreary dreams engross, With their own visions oft astonished droop, When o'er the wat'ry strath or quaggy moss They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop. Or if in sports, or on the festive green, Their [ ] glance some fated youth descry, Who, now perhaps in lusty vigour seen And rosy health, shall soon lamented die. For them the viewless forms of air obey, Their bidding heed, and at their beck repair. They know what spirit brews the stormful day, And heartless, oft like moody madness stare To see the phantom train their secret work prepare. [Stanza 5 and the first eight lines of stanza 6 are missing] What though far off, from some dark dell espied, His glimm'ring mazes cheer th' excursive sight, Yet turn, ye wand'rers, turn your steps aside, Nor trust the guidance of that faithless light! For watchful, lurking mid th' unrustling reed, At those mirk hours the wily monster lies, And listens oft to hear the passing steed, And frequent round him rolls his sullen eyes, If chance his savage wrath may some weak wretch surprise. Ah, luckless swain, o'er all unblest indeed! Whom late bewildered in the dank, dark fen, Far from his flocks and smoking hamlet then! To that sad spot [ ]: On him, enraged, the fiend, in angry mood, Shall never look with pity's kind concern, But instant, furious, raise the whelming flood O'er its drowned banks, forbidding all return. Or, if he meditate his wished escape To some dim hill that seems uprising near, To his faint eye the grim and grisly shape, In all its terrors clad, shall wild appear. Meantime, the wat'ry surge shall round him rise, Poured sudden forth from ev'ry swelling source. What now remains but tears and hopeless sighs? His fear-shook limbs have lost their youthly force, And down the waves he floats, a pale and breathless corse. For him in vain his anxious wife shall wait, Or wander forth to meet him on his way; For him in vain, at to-fall of the day, His bairns shall linger at th' unclosing gate. Ah, ne'er shall he return! Alone, if night Her travell'd limbs in broken slumbers steep, With drooping willows dressed, his mournful sprite Shall visit sad, perhaps, her silent sleep: Then he, perhaps, with moist and watry hand, Shall fondly seem to press her shudd'ring cheek, And with his blue swoll'n face before her stand, And, shiv'ring cold, these piteous accents speak: 'Pursue, dear wife, thy daily toils pursue At dawn or dusk, industrious as before; Nor e'er of me one hapless thought renew, While I lie welt'ring on the osiered shore, Drown'd by the kaelpie's wrath, nor e'er shall aid thee more!' Unbounded is thy range; with varied style Thy Muse may, like those feath'ry tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile which still its ruin shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy-folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wond'ring, from the hallowed ground! Or thither, where beneath the show'ry west The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest. No slaves revere them, and no wars invade: Yet frequent now, at midnight's solemn hour, The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, And forth the monarchs stalk with sov'reign pow'r, In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold, And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold. But, O! o'er all, forget not Kilda's race, On whose bleak rocks, which brave the wasting tides, Fair Nature's daughter, Virtue, yet abides! Go, just as they, their blameless manners trace! Then to my ear transmit some gentle song, Of those whose lives are yet sincere and plain, Their bounded walks the rugged cliffs along, And all their prospect but the wintry main. With sparing temp'rance, at the needful time, They drain the sainted spring, or, hunger-pressed, Along th' Atlantic rock undreading climb, And of its eggs despoil the solan's nest. Thus blest in primal innocence they live, Sufficed and happy with that frugal fare Which tasteful toil and hourly danger give. Hard is their shallow soil, [ ] and bare; Nor ever vernal bee was heard to murmur there! Nor need'st thou blush, that such false themes engage Thy gentle mind, of fairer stores possessed; For not alone they touch the village breast, But filled in elder time th' historic page. There Shakespeare's self, with ev'ry garland crowned, In musing hour, his Wayward Sisters found, And with their terrors dressed the magic scene. From them he sung, when mid his bold design, Before the Scot afflicted and aghast, The shadowy kings of Banquo's fated line Through the dark cave in gleamy pageant passed. Proceed, nor quit the tales which, simply told, Could once so well my answ'ring bosom pierce; Proceed, in forceful sounds and colours bold The native legends of thy land rehearse; To such adapt thy lyre and suit thy pow'rful verse. In scenes like these, which, daring to depart From sober truth, are still to nature true, And call forth fresh delight to Fancy's view, Th' heroic Muse employed her Tasso's art! How have I trembled when, at Tancred's stroke, Its gushing blood the gaping cypress poured; When each live plant with mortal accents spoke, And the wild blast up-heaved the vanished sword! How have I sat, where piped the pensive wind, To hear his harp, by British Fairfax strung, Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders which he sung! Hence at each sound imagination glows; Hence his warm lay with softest sweetness flows; Melting it flows, pure, num'rous, strong, and clear, And fills th' impassioned heart, and lulls th' harmonious ear. All hail, ye scenes that o'er my soul prevail, Ye [ ] friths and lakes which, far away, Are by smooth Annan filled or past'ral Tay, Or Don's romantic springs, at distance, hail! The time shall come when I, perhaps, may tread Your lowly glens, o'erhung with spreading broom, Or, o'er your stretching heaths by Fancy led: Then will I dress once more the faded bow'r, Where Jonson sat in Drummond's [ ] shade; Or crop from Tiviot's dale each [ ] And mourn on Yarrow's banks [ ] Meantime, ye pow'rs, that on the plains which bore The cordial youth, on Lothian's plains attend, Where'er he dwell, on hill or lowly muir, To him I lose, your kind protection lend, And, touched with love like mine, preserve my absent friend
If aught of oaten stop, or past'ral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,  Like thy own solemn springs,  Thy springs and dying gales, O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,  With brede ethereal wove,  O'erhang his wavy bed; Now air is hushed, save where the weak-ey'd bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,  Or where the beetle winds  His small but sullen horn As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path Against the pilgrim, borne in heedless hum:  Now teach me, maid composed,  To breathe some softened strain, Whose numbers stealing through thy dark'ning vale May not unseemly with its stillness suit,  As musing slow, I hail  Thy genial loved return. For when thy folding star arising shows His paly circlet, at his warning lamp  The fragrant Hours, and elves  Who slept in flowers the day, And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and lovelier still,  The pensive pleasures sweet  Prepare thy shad'wy car. Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile  Or upland fallows grey  Reflect its last cool gleam. But when chill blust'ring winds, or driving rain, Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut  That from the mountain's side  Views wilds, and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all  Thy dewy fingers draw  The gradual dusky veil. While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont, And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve;  While Summer loves to sport  Beneath thy ling'ring light; While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves; Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air,  Affrights thy shrinking train  And rudely rends thy robes; So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipp'd Health,  Thy gentlest influence own,  And hymn thy fav'rite name!
Obscurest night involv'd the sky, Th' Atlantic billows roar'd, When such a destin'd wretch as I, Wash'd headlong from on board, Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, His floating home for ever left. No braver chief could Albion boast Than he with whom he went, Nor ever ship left Albion's coast, With warmer wishes sent. He lov'd them both, but both in vain, Nor him beheld, nor her again. Not long beneath the whelming brine, Expert to swim, he lay; Nor soon he felt his strength decline, Or courage die away; But wag'd with death a lasting strife, Supported by despair of life. He shouted: nor his friends had fail'd To check the vessel's course, But so the furious blast prevail'd, That, pitiless perforce, They left their outcast mate behind, And scudded still before the wind. Some succour yet they could afford; And, such as storms allow, The cask, the coop, the floated cord, Delay'd not to bestow. But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore, Whate'er they gave, should visit more. Nor, cruel as it seem'd, could he Their haste himself condemn, Aware that flight, in such a sea, Alone could rescue them; Yet bitter felt it still to die Deserted, and his friends so nigh. He long survives, who lives an hour In ocean, self-upheld; And so long he, with unspent pow'r, His destiny repell'd; And ever, as the minutes flew, Entreated help, or cried—Adieu! At length, his transient respite past, His comrades, who before Had heard his voice in ev'ry blast, Could catch the sound no more. For then, by toil subdued, he drank The stifling wave, and then he sank. No poet wept him: but the page Of narrative sincere; That tells his name, his worth, his age, Is wet with Anson's tear. And tears by bards or heroes shed Alike immortalize the dead. I therefore purpose not, or dream, Descanting on his fate, To give the melancholy theme A more enduring date: But misery still delights to trace Its semblance in another's case. No voice divine the storm allay'd, No light propitious shone; When, snatch'd from all effectual aid, We perish'd, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.
1 God moves in a mysterious way,  His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea,  And rides upon the storm. 2 Deep in unfathomable mines  Of never-failing skill, He treasures up his bright designs,  And works his sov'reign will. 3 Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,  The clouds ye so much dread Are big with mercy, and shall break  In blessings on your head. 4 Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,  But trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning providence  He hides a smiling face. 5 His purposes will ripen fast,  Unfolding ev'ry hour; The bud may have a bitter taste,  But sweet will be the flow'r. 6 Blind unbelief is sure to err,  And scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter,  And he will make it plain.
(excerpt) Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere, And that my raptures are not conjur’d up To serve occasions of poetic pomp, But genuine, and art partner of them all. How oft upon yon eminence our pace Has slacken’d to a pause, and we have borne The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew, While admiration, feeding at the eye, And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene. Thence with what pleasure have we just discern’d The distant plough slow-moving, and beside His lab’ring team, that swerv’d not from the track, The sturdy swain diminish’d to a boy! Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er, Conducts the eye along its sinuous course Delighted. There, fast rooted in his bank, Stand, never overlook’d, our fav’rite elms, That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut; While far beyond, and overthwart the stream That as with molten glass inlays the vale, The sloping land recedes into the clouds; Displaying on its varied side the grace Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tow’r, Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells Just undulates upon the list’ning ear, Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote. Scenes must be beautiful which daily view’d Please daily, and whose novelty survives Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years. Praise justly due to those that I describe. . . . But though true worth and virtue, in the mild And genial soil of cultivated life Thrive most, and may perhaps thrive only there, Yet not in cities oft. In proud and gay And gain-devoted cities; thither flow, As to a common and most noisome sewer, The dregs and fæculence of ev’ry land. In cities foul example on most minds Begets its likeness. Rank abundance breeds In gross and pamper’d cities sloth and lust, And wantonness and gluttonous excess. In cities, vice is hidden with most ease, Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there Beyond th’ atchievement of successful flight. I do confess them nurs’ries of the arts, In which they flourish most: where, in the beams Of warm encouragement, and in the eye Of public note, they reach their perfect size. Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaim’d The fairest capital of all the world, By riot and incontinence the worst. There, touch’d by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes A lucid mirror, in which Nature sees All her reflected features. Bacon there Gives more than female beauty to a stone, And Chatham’s eloquence to marble lips. . . . God made the country, and man made the town: What wonder then, that health and virtue, gifts That can alone make sweet the bitter draught That life holds out to all, should most abound And least be threaten’d in the fields and groves? Possess ye therefore, ye who, borne about In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue But that of idleness, and taste no scenes But such as art contrives, possess ye still Your element; there only ye can shine, There only minds like yours can do no harm. Our groves were planted to console at noon The pensive wand’rer in their shades. At eve The moon-beam, sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish, Birds warbling all the music. We can spare The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse Our softer satellite. Your songs confound Our more harmonious notes: the thrush departs Scar’d, and th’ offended nightingale is mute. There is a public mischief in your mirth, It plagues your country. Folly such as your’s, Grac’d with a sword, and worthier of a fan, Has made, which enemies could ne’er have done, Our arch of empire, steadfast but for you, A mutilated structure, soon to fall.
The village life, and every care that reigns O'er youthful peasants and declining swains; What labour yields, and what, that labour past, Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last; What forms the real picture of the poor, Demands a song—the Muse can give no more. Fled are those times, if e'er such times were seen,  When rustic poets praised their native green; No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse, Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse; Yet still for these we frame the tender strain, Still in our lays fond Corydons complain, And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal, The only pains, alas! they never feel.  On Mincio's banks, in Caesar's bounteous reign, If Tityrus found the Golden Age again, Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong, Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song? From truth and nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?  Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains, Because the Muses never knew their pains. They boast their peasants' pipes, but peasants now Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough; And few amid the rural tribe have time To number syllables and play with rhyme; Save honest Duck, what son of verse could share The poet's rapture and the peasant's care? Or the great labours of the field degrade With the new peril of a poorer trade?  From one chief cause these idle praises spring, That themes so easy few forbear to sing; They ask no thought, require no deep design, But swell the song and liquefy the line; The gentle lover takes the rural strain, A nymph his mistress and himself a swain; With no sad scenes he clouds his tuneful prayer, But all, to look like her, is painted fair. I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms For him that gazes or for him that farms; But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace The poor laborious natives of the place, And see the mid-day sun, with fervid ray, On their bare heads and dewy temples play; While some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts, Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts: Then shall I dare these real ills to hide In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?  No, cast by Fortune on a frowning coast, Which can no groves nor happy valleys boast; Where other cares than those the Muse relates, And other shepherds dwell with other mates; By such examples taught, I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not: Nor you, ye poor, of lettered scorn complain, To you the smoothest song is smooth in vain; O'ercome by labour and bowed down by time, Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtles round your ruined shed? Can their light tales your weighty griefs o'erpower, Or glad with airy mirth the toilsome hour?  Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighboring poor; From thence a length of burning sand appears, Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o'er the land and rob the blighted rye: There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infant threaten war; There poppies, nodding, mock the hope of toil, There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil; Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf, The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf; O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, And the wild tare clings round the sickly blade; With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, And a sad splendor vainly shines around.  So looks the nymph whom wretched arts adorn, Betrayed by man, then left for man to scorn; Whose cheek in vain assumes the mimic rose While her sad eyes the troubled breast disclose; Whose outward splendour is but folly's dress, Exposing most, when most it gilds distress.  Here joyless roam a wild amphibious race, With sullen woe displayed in every face; Who far from civil arts and social fly, And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.  Here too the lawless merchant of the main Draws from his plough th' intoxicated swain; Want only claimed the labor of the day, But vice now steals his nightly rest away.  Where are the swains, who, daily labor done, With rural games played down the setting sun; Who struck with matchless force the bounding ball, Or made the pond'rous quoit obliquely fall; While some huge Ajax, terrible and strong, Engaged some artful stripling of the throng, And, foiled, beneath the young Ulysses fell, When peals of praise the merry mischief tell? Where now are these?—Beneath yon cliff they stand, To show the freighted pinnace where to land; To load the ready steed with guilty haste; To fly in terror o'er the pathless waste, Or, when detected in their straggling course, To foil their foes by cunning or by force; Or, yielding part (when equal knaves contest), To gain a lawless passport for the rest.  Here, wand'ring long amid these frowning fields, I sought the simple life that Nature yields; Rapine and Wrong and Fear usurped her place, And a bold, artful, surly, savage race; Who, only skilled to take the finny tribe, The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe Wait on the shore and, as the waves run high, On the tossed vessel bend their eager eye, Which to their coast directs its vent'rous way, Theirs, or the ocean's, miserable prey.  As on their neighbouring beach yon swallows stand, And wait for favoring winds to leave the land; While still for flight the ready wing is spread: So waited I the favouring hour, and fled; Fled from these shores where guilt and famine reign, And cried, Ah! hapless they who still remain; Who still remain to hear the ocean roar, Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore; Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway, Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away; When the sad tenant weeps from door to door, And begs a poor protection from the poor!  But these are scenes where Nature's niggard hand Gave a spare portion to the famished land; Hers is the fault, if here mankind complain Of fruitless toil and labor spent in vain; But yet in other scenes, more fair in view, Where Plenty smiles—alas! she smiles for few And those who taste not, yet behold her store, Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore, The wealth around them makes them doubly poor. Or will you deem them amply paid in health, Labor's fair child, that languishes with wealth? Go then! and see them rising with the sun, Through a long course of daily toil to run; Like him to make the plenteous harvest grow, And yet not shard the plenty they bestow; See them beneath the dog-star's raging heat, When the knees tremble and the temples beat; Behold them, leaning on their scythes, look o'er The labour past, and toils to come explore; See them alternate suns and showers engage, And hoard up aches and anguish for their age; Through fens and marshy moors their steps pursue, When their warm pores imbibe the evening dew; Then own that labour may as fatal be To these thy slaves, as luxury to thee.  Amid this tribe too oft a manly pride Strives in strong toil the fainting heart to hide; There may you see the youth of slender frame Contend with weakness, weariness, and shame: Yet urged along, and proudly loth to yield, He strives to join his fellows of the field; Till long-contending nature droops at last, Declining health rejects his poor repast, His cheerless spouse the coming danger sees, And mutual murmurs urge the slow disease. Yet grant them health, 'tis not for us to tell, Though the head droops not, that the heart is well; Or will you urge their homely, plenteous fare, Healthy and plain and still the poor man's share! Oh! trifle not with wants you cannot feel, Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal; Homely not wholesome, plain not plenteous, such As you who envy would disdain to touch.  Ye gentle souls, who dream of rural ease, Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please; Go! if the peaceful cot your praises share, Go, look within, and ask if peace be there: If peace be his—that drooping weary sire, Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire, Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand Turns on the wretched hearth th' expiring brand. Nor yet can time itself obtain for these Life's latest comforts, due respect and ease; For yonder see that hoary swain, whose age Can with no cares except his own engage; Who, propped on that rude staff, looks up to see The bare arms broken from the withering tree, On which, a boy, he climbed the loftiest bough, Then his first joy, but his sad emblem now.  He once was chief in all the rustic trade, His steady hand the straightest furrow made; Full many a prize he won, and still is proud To find the triumphs of his youth allowed. A transient pleasure sparkles in his eyes, He hears and smiles, then thinks again and sighs: For now he journeys to his grave in pain; The rich disdain him, nay, the poor disdain; Alternate masters now their slave command, And urge the efforts of his feeble hand; Who, when his age attempts its task in vain, With ruthless taunts of lazy poor complain.  Oft may you see him, when he tends the sheep, His winter-charge, beneath the hillock weep; Oft hear him murmur to the winds that blow O'er his white locks and bury them in snow; When, roused by rage and muttering in the morn, He mends the broken hedge with icy thorn:  "Why do I live, when I desire to be At once from life and life's long labour free? Like leaves in spring, the young are blown away, Without the sorrows of a slow decay; I, like yon withered leaf, remain behind, Nipped by the frost, and shivering in the wind; There it abides till younger buds come on, As I, now all my fellow-swains are gone; Then, from the rising generation thrust, It falls, like me, unnoticed to the dust.  "These fruitful fields, these numerous flocks I see, Are others' gain, but killing cares to me; To me the children of my youth are lords, Slow in their gifts but hasty in their words: Wants of their own demand their care, and who Feels his own want and succors others too? A lonely, wretched man, in pain I go, None need my help and none relieve my woe; Then let my bones beneath the turf be laid, And men forget the wretch they would not aid."  Thus groan the old, till, by disease oppressed, They taste a final woe, and then they rest. Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day; There children dwell, who know no parents' care, Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there; Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed; Dejected widows with unheeded tears, And crippled age with more than childhood-fears; The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they! The moping idiot and the madman gay.  Here too the sick their final doom receive, Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve, Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow, Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below; Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan, And the cold charities of man to man: Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide, And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride; But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh, And pride embitters what it can't deny.  Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes, Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose; Who press the downy couch, while slaves advance With timid eye to read the distant glance; Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease To name the nameless ever-new disease; Who with mock patience dire complaints endure, Which real pain, and that alone, can cure; How would ye bear in real pain to lie, Despised, neglected, left alone to die? How would ye bear to draw your latest breath, Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?  Such is that room which one rude beam divides, And naked rafters form the sloping sides; Where the vile bands that bind the thatch are seen, And lath and mud is all that lie between; Save one dull pane, that, coarsely patched, gives way To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day. Here, on a matted flock, with dust o'erspread, The drooping wretch reclines his languid head; For him no hand the cordial cup applies, Nor wipes the tear that stagnates in his eyes; No friends with soft discourse his pain beguile, Nor promise hope till sickness wears a smile.  But soon a loud and hasty summons calls, Shakes the thin roof, and echoes round the walls. Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat, All pride and business, bustle and conceit; With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe, With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go, He bids the gazing throng around him fly, And carries fate and physic in his eye; A potent quack, long versed in human ills, Who first insults the victim whom he kills; Whose murd'rous hand a drowsy bench protect, And whose most tender mercy is neglect.  Paid by the parish for attendance here, He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer; In haste he seeks the bed where misery lies, Impatience marked in his averted eyes; And, some habitual queries hurried o'er, Without reply, he rushes on the door: His drooping patient, long inured to pain, And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain; He ceases now the feeble help to crave Of man, and mutely hastens to the grave.  But ere his death some pious doubts arise, Some simple fears, which "bold bad" men despise; Fain would he ask the parish priest to prove His title certain to the joys above; For this he sends the murmuring nurse, who calls The holy stranger to these dismal walls; And doth not he, the pious man, appear, He, "passing rich with forty pounds a year"? Ah! no; a shepherd of a different stock, And far unlike him, feeds this little flock: A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task As much as God or man can fairly ask; The rest he gives to loves and labors light, To fields the morning and to feasts the night; None better skilled the noisy pack to guide, To urge their chase, to cheer them or to chide; Sure in his shot, his game he seldom missed, And seldom failed to win his game at whist; Then, while such honors bloom around his head, Shall he sit sadly by the sick man's bed To raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal To combat fears that ev'n the pious feel  Now once again the gloomy scene explore, Less gloomy now; the bitter hour is o'er, The man of many sorrows sighs no more.  Up yonder hill, behold how sadly slow The bier moves winding from the vale below; There lie the happy dead, from trouble free, And the glad parish pays the frugal fee. No more, oh Death! thy victim starts to hear Churchwarden stern, or kingly overseer; No more the farmer gets his humble bow, Thou art his lord, the best of tyrants thou!  Now to the church behold the mourners come, Sedately torpid and devoutly dumb; The village children now their games suspend, To see the bier that bears their ancient friend: For he was one in all their idle sport, And like a monarch ruled their little court; The pliant bow he formed, the flying ball, The bat, the wicket, were his labours all; Him now they follow to his grave, and stand Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand; While bending low, their eager eyes explore The mingled relics of the parish poor. The bell tolls late, the moping owl flies round, Fear marks the flight and magnifies the sound; The busy priest, detained by weightier care, Defers his duty till the day of prayer; And, waiting long, the crowd retire distressed, To think a poor man's bones should lie unblessed.
XVIII In Heaven, Some little blades of grass Stood before God. “What did you do?” Then all save one of the little blades Began eagerly to relate The merits of their lives. This one stayed a small way behind Ashamed. Presently God said: “And what did you do?” The little blade answered: “Oh, my lord, “Memory is bitter to me “For if I did good deeds “I know not of them.” Then God in all His splendor Arose from His throne. “Oh, best little blade of grass,” He said.
A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!”“However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”
X Should the wide world roll away Leaving black terror Limitless night, Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential If thou and thy white arms were there And the fall to doom a long way.
The world’s light shines, shine as it will, The world will love its darkness still. I doubt though when the world’s in hell, It will not love its darkness half so well.
Let it no longer be a forlorn hope To wash an Ethiope; He’s wash’d, his gloomy skin a peaceful shade, For his white soul is made; And now, I doubt not, the Eternal Dove A black-fac’d house will love.
See here an easy feast that knows no wound,  That under hunger’s teeth will needs be sound; A subtle harvest of unbounded bread,  What would ye more? Here food itself is fed.
Could not once blinding me, cruel, suffice? When first I look’d on thee, I lost mine eyes.
Thou water turn’st to wine, fair friend of life,  Thy foe, to cross the sweet arts of thy reign, Distils from thence the tears of wrath and strife,  And so turns wine to water back again.
(excerpt) .... O heart, the equal poise of love’s both parts, Big alike with wounds and darts, Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same, And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart, and love and die and kill, And bleed and wound, and yield and conquer still. Let this immortal life, where’er it comes, Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms; Let mystic deaths wait on ’t, and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcass of a hard cold heart, Let all thy scatter’d shafts of light, that play Among the leaves of thy large books of day, Combin’d against this breast, at once break in And take away from me my self and sin; This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be, And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me. O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dow’r of lights and fires, By all the eagle in thee, all the dove, By all thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they, By all thy brim-fill’d bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire, By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seiz’d thy parting soul and seal’d thee his, By all the heav’ns thou hast in him, Fair sister of the seraphim! By all of him we have in thee, Leave nothing of my self in me: Let me so read thy life that I Unto all life of mine may die.
CHORUS Come we shepherds whose blest sight Hath met love’s noon in nature’s night; Come lift we up our loftier song And wake the sun that lies too long. To all our world of well-stol’n joy He slept, and dreamt of no such thing, While we found out heav’n’s fairer eye, And kiss’d the cradle of our King. Tell him he rises now too late To show us aught worth looking at. Tell him we now can show him more Than he e’er show’d to mortal sight, Than he himself e’er saw before, Which to be seen needs not his light. Tell him, Tityrus, where th’ hast been; Tell him, Thyrsis, what th’ hast seen. TITYRUS Gloomy night embrac’d the place Where the Noble Infant lay; The Babe look’d up and show’d his face, In spite of darkness, it was day. It was thy day, Sweet! and did rise Not from the east, but from thine eyes. CHORUS It was thy day, Sweet! and did rise Not from the east, but from thine eyes. THYRSIS Winter chid aloud, and sent The angry North to wage his wars; The North forgot his fierce intent, And left perfumes instead of scars. By those sweet eyes’ persuasive pow’rs, Where he meant frost, he scatter’d flow’rs. CHORUS By those sweet eyes’ persuasive pow’rs, Where he meant frost, he scatter’d flow’rs. BOTH We saw thee in thy balmy nest, Young dawn of our eternal day! We saw thine eyes break from their east And chase the trembling shades away. We saw thee, and we bless’d the sight, We saw thee by thine own sweet light. TITYRUS Poor World, said I, what wilt thou do To entertain this starry stranger? Is this the best thou canst bestow, A cold, and not too cleanly, manger? Contend, ye powers of heav’n and earth, To fit a bed for this huge birth. CHORUS Contend, ye powers of heav’n and earth, To fit a bed for this huge birth. THYRSIS Proud World, said I, cease your contest, And let the Mighty Babe alone; The phoenix builds the phoenix’ nest, Love’s architecture is his own; The Babe whose birth embraves this morn, Made his own bed ere he was born. CHORUS The Babe whose birth embraves this morn, Made his own bed ere he was born. TITYRUS I saw the curl’d drops, soft and slow, Come hovering o’er the place’s head, Off’ring their whitest sheets of snow To furnish the fair Infant’s bed. Forbear, said I, be not too bold; Your fleece is white, but ’tis too cold. CHORUS Forbear, said I, be not too bold; Your fleece is white, but ’tis too cold. THYRSIS I saw the obsequious Seraphims Their rosy fleece of fire bestow; For well they now can spare their wings, Since Heav’n itself lies here below. Well done, said I, but are you sure Your down so warm will pass for pure? CHORUS Well done, said I, but are you sure Your down so warm will pass for pure? TITYRUS No no, your King’s not yet to seek Where to repose his royal head; See see, how soon his new-bloom’d cheek ’Twixt’s mother’s breasts is gone to bed. Sweet choice, said we! no way but so, Not to lie cold, yet sleep in snow. CHORUS Sweet choice, said we! no way but so, Not to lie cold, yet sleep in snow. BOTH We saw thee in thy balmy nest, Bright dawn of our eternal day! We saw thine eyes break from their east, And chase the trembling shades away. We saw thee, and we bless’d the sight, We saw thee, by thine own sweet light. CHORUS We saw thee, and we bless’d the sight, We saw thee, by thine own sweet light. FULL CHORUS Welcome, all wonders in one sight! Eternity shut in a span; Summer in winter; day in night; Heaven in earth, and God in man. Great little one, whose all-embracing birth Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth. Welcome; though nor to gold nor silk, To more than Caesar’s birthright is; Two sister seas of virgin-milk, With many a rarely temper’d kiss, That breathes at once both maid and mother, Warms in the one, cools in the other. Welcome, though not to those gay flies Gilded i’ th’ beams of earthly kings, Slippery souls in smiling eyes; But to poor shepherds, homespun things, Whose wealth’s their flock, whose wit, to be Well read in their simplicity. Yet when young April’s husband-show’rs Shall bless the fruitful Maia’s bed, We’ll bring the first-born of her flow’rs To kiss thy feet and crown thy head. To thee, dread Lamb! whose love must keep The shepherds more than they the sheep. To thee, meek Majesty! soft King Of simple graces and sweet loves, Each of us his lamb will bring, Each his pair of silver doves; Till burnt at last in fire of thy fair eyes, Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.
Know you fair, on what you look; Divinest love lies in this book, Expecting fire from your eyes, To kindle this his sacrifice. When your hands untie these strings, Think you’have an angel by th’ wings. One that gladly will be nigh, To wait upon each morning sigh. To flutter in the balmy air Of your well-perfumed prayer. These white plumes of his he’ll lend you, Which every day to heaven will send you, To take acquaintance of the sphere, And all the smooth-fac’d kindred there. And though Herbert’s name do owe These devotions, fairest, know That while I lay them on the shrine Of your white hand, they are mine.
Who e’er she be That not impossible she That shall command my heart and me; Wher e’er she lie, Lock’d up from mortal eye In shady leaves of destiny; Till that ripe birth Of studied fate stand forth And teach her fair steps to our earth; Till that divine Idea take a shrine Of crystal flesh, through which to shine; Meet you her, my wishes, Bespeak her to my blisses, And be ye call’d my absent kisses. I wish her beauty That owes not all his duty To gaudy tire, or glist’ring shoe-ty. Something more than Taffeta or tissue can, Or rampant feather, or rich fan. More than the spoil Of shop, or silkworm’s toil, Or a bought blush, or a set smile. A face that’s best By its own beauty drest, And can alone command the rest. A face made up Out of no other shop Than what nature’s white hand sets ope. A cheek where youth, And blood, with pen of truth Write, what the reader sweetly ru’th. A cheek where grows More than a morning rose, Which to no box his being owes. Lips, where all day A lover’s kiss may play, Yet carry nothing thence away. Looks that oppress Their richest tires, but dress And clothe their simplest nakedness. Eyes, that displaces The neighbour diamond, and outfaces That sunshine, by their own sweet graces. Tresses, that wear Jewels but to declare How much themselves more precious are. Whose native ray Can tame the wanton day Of gems, that in their bright shades play. Each ruby there, Or pearl that dare appear, Be its own blush, be its own tear. A well-tam’d heart, For whose more noble smart Love may be long choosing a dart. Eyes, that bestow Full quivers on Love’s bow, Yet pay less arrows than they owe. Smiles, that can warm The blood, yet teach a charm, That chastity shall take no harm. Blushes, that bin The burnish of no sin, Nor flames of aught too hot within. Joys, that confess Virtue their mistress, And have no other head to dress. Fears, fond and flight As the coy bride’s when night First does the longing lover right. Tears, quickly fled, And vain, as those are shed For a dying maidenhead. Days, that need borrow No part of their good morrow From a forespent night of sorrow. Days, that in spite Of darkness, by the light Of a clear mind are day all night. Nights, sweet as they, Made short by lovers’ play, Yet long by th’ absence of the day. Life, that dares send A challenge to his end, And when it comes say, “Welcome friend.” Sidneian showers Of sweet discourse, whose powers Can crown old Winter’s head with flowers. Soft silken hours, Open suns, shady bowers, ’Bove all, nothing within that lours. Whate’er delight Can make Day’s forehead bright, Or give down to the wings of Night. In her whole frame Have nature all the name, Art and ornament the shame. Her flattery, Picture and poesy, Her counsel her own virtue be. I wish, her store Of worth may leave her poor Of wishes, and I wish—no more. Now if time knows That her whose radiant brows Weave them a garland of my vows, Her whose just bays My future hopes can raise, A trophy to her present praise; Her that dares be What these lines wish to see: I seek no further, it is she. ’Tis she, and here, Lo, I unclothe and clear My wishes’ cloudy character. May she enjoy it, Whose merit dare apply it, But modesty dares still deny it. Such worth as this is Shall fix my flying wishes, And determine them to kisses. Let her full glory, My fancies, fly before ye; Be ye my fictions; but her story.
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman: In eager rapes, and furious lust begot, Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot. Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow, And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough: From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame. In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran, Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane. While their rank daughters, to their parents just, Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust. This nauseous brood directly did contain The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.  Which medly canton’d in a heptarchy, A rhapsody of nations to supply, Among themselves maintain’d eternal wars, And still the ladies lov’d the conquerors.  The western Angles all the rest subdu’d; A bloody nation, barbarous and rude: Who by the tenure of the sword possest One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest And as great things denominate the small, The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole. The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit, And with the English-Saxon all unite: And these the mixture have so close pursu’d, The very name and memory’s subdu’d: No Roman now, no Britain does remain; Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain: The silent nations undistinguish’d fall, And Englishman’s the common name for all. Fate jumbled them together, God knows how; What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.  The wonder which remains is at our pride, To value that which all wise men deride. For Englishmen to boast of generation, Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation. A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction. A banter made to be a test of fools, Which those that use it justly ridicules. A metaphor invented to express A man a-kin to all the universe.  For as the Scots, as learned men ha’ said, Throughout the world their wand’ring seed ha’ spread; So open-handed England, ’tis believ’d, Has all the gleanings of the world receiv’d.  Some think of England ’twas our Saviour meant, The Gospel should to all the world be sent: Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach, They to all nations might be said to preach.  ’Tis well that virtue gives nobility, How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply? Since scarce one family is left alive, Which does not from some foreigner derive.
The Bustle in a House The Morning after Death Is solemnest of industries Enacted opon Earth – The Sweeping up the Heart And putting Love away We shall not want to use again Until Eternity –
Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see. But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtle than the parent is Love must not be, but take a body too; And therefore what thou wert, and who, I bid Love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow, And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow. Whilst thus to ballast love I thought, And so more steadily to have gone, With wares which would sink admiration, I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught; Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon Is much too much, some fitter must be sought; For, nor in nothing, nor in things Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere; Then, as an angel, face, and wings Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear, So thy love may be my love's sphere; Just such disparity As is 'twixt air and angels' purity, 'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
(excerpt) AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD Wherein, by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY When that rich soul which to her heaven is gone, Whom all do celebrate, who know they have one (For who is sure he hath a soul, unless It see, and judge, and follow worthiness, And by deeds praise it? He who doth not this, May lodge an inmate soul, but 'tis not his) When that queen ended here her progress time, And, as t'her standing house, to heaven did climb, Where loath to make the saints attend her long, She's now a part both of the choir, and song; This world, in that great earthquake languished; For in a common bath of tears it bled, Which drew the strongest vital spirits out; But succour'd then with a perplexed doubt, Whether the world did lose, or gain in this, (Because since now no other way there is, But goodness, to see her, whom all would see, All must endeavour to be good as she) This great consumption to a fever turn'd, And so the world had fits; it joy'd, it mourn'd; And, as men think, that agues physic are, And th' ague being spent, give over care, So thou, sick world, mistak'st thy self to be Well, when alas, thou'rt in a lethargy. Her death did wound and tame thee then, and then Thou might'st have better spar'd the sun, or man. That wound was deep, but 'tis more misery That thou hast lost thy sense and memory. 'Twas heavy then to hear thy voice of moan, But this is worse, that thou art speechless grown. Thou hast forgot thy name thou hadst; thou wast Nothing but she, and her thou hast o'erpast. For, as a child kept from the font until A prince, expected long, come to fulfill The ceremonies, thou unnam'd had'st laid, Had not her coming, thee her palace made; Her name defin'd thee, gave thee form, and frame, And thou forget'st to celebrate thy name. Some months she hath been dead (but being dead, Measures of times are all determined) But long she'ath been away, long, long, yet none Offers to tell us who it is that's gone. But as in states doubtful of future heirs, When sickness without remedy impairs The present prince, they're loath it should be said, "The prince doth languish," or "The prince is dead;" So mankind feeling now a general thaw, A strong example gone, equal to law, The cement which did faithfully compact And glue all virtues, now resolv'd, and slack'd, Thought it some blasphemy to say sh'was dead, Or that our weakness was discovered In that confession; therefore spoke no more Than tongues, the soul being gone, the loss deplore. But though it be too late to succour thee, Sick world, yea dead, yea putrified, since she Thy' intrinsic balm, and thy preservative, Can never be renew'd, thou never live, I (since no man can make thee live) will try, What we may gain by thy anatomy. Her death hath taught us dearly that thou art Corrupt and mortal in thy purest part. Let no man say, the world itself being dead, 'Tis labour lost to have discovered The world's infirmities, since there is none Alive to study this dissection; For there's a kind of world remaining still, Though she which did inanimate and fill The world, be gone, yet in this last long night, Her ghost doth walk; that is a glimmering light, A faint weak love of virtue, and of good, Reflects from her on them which understood Her worth; and though she have shut in all day, The twilight of her memory doth stay, Which, from the carcass of the old world free, Creates a new world, and new creatures be Produc'd. The matter and the stuff of this, Her virtue, and the form our practice is. And though to be thus elemented, arm These creatures from home-born intrinsic harm, (For all assum'd unto this dignity So many weedless paradises be, Which of themselves produce no venomous sin, Except some foreign serpent bring it in) Yet, because outward storms the strongest break, And strength itself by confidence grows weak, This new world may be safer, being told The dangers and diseases of the old; For with due temper men do then forgo, Or covet things, when they their true worth know. There is no health; physicians say that we At best enjoy but a neutrality. And can there be worse sickness than to know That we are never well, nor can be so? We are born ruinous: poor mothers cry That children come not right, nor orderly; Except they headlong come and fall upon An ominous precipitation. How witty's ruin! how importunate Upon mankind! It labour'd to frustrate Even God's purpose; and made woman, sent For man's relief, cause of his languishment. They were to good ends, and they are so still, But accessory, and principal in ill, For that first marriage was our funeral; One woman at one blow, then kill'd us all, And singly, one by one, they kill us now. We do delightfully our selves allow To that consumption; and profusely blind, We kill our selves to propagate our kind. And yet we do not that; we are not men; There is not now that mankind, which was then, When as the sun and man did seem to strive, (Joint tenants of the world) who should survive; When stag, and raven, and the long-liv'd tree, Compar'd with man, died in minority; When, if a slow-pac'd star had stol'n away From the observer's marking, he might stay Two or three hundred years to see't again, And then make up his observation plain; When, as the age was long, the size was great (Man's growth confess'd, and recompens'd the meat), So spacious and large, that every soul Did a fair kingdom, and large realm control; And when the very stature, thus erect, Did that soul a good way towards heaven direct. Where is this mankind now? Who lives to age, Fit to be made Methusalem his page? Alas, we scarce live long enough to try Whether a true-made clock run right, or lie. Old grandsires talk of yesterday with sorrow, And for our children we reserve tomorrow. So short is life, that every peasant strives, In a torn house, or field, to have three lives. And as in lasting, so in length is man Contracted to an inch, who was a span; For had a man at first in forests stray'd, Or shipwrack'd in the sea, one would have laid A wager, that an elephant, or whale, That met him, would not hastily assail A thing so equall to him; now alas, The fairies, and the pigmies well may pass As credible; mankind decays so soon, We'are scarce our fathers' shadows cast at noon, Only death adds t'our length: nor are we grown In stature to be men, till we are none. But this were light, did our less volume hold All the old text; or had we chang'd to gold Their silver; or dispos'd into less glass Spirits of virtue, which then scatter'd was. But 'tis not so; w'are not retir'd, but damp'd; And as our bodies, so our minds are cramp'd; 'Tis shrinking, not close weaving, that hath thus In mind and body both bedwarfed us. We seem ambitious, God's whole work t'undo; Of nothing he made us, and we strive too, To bring our selves to nothing back; and we Do what we can, to do't so soon as he. With new diseases on our selves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far. Thus man, this world's vice-emperor, in whom All faculties, all graces are at home (And if in other creatures they appear, They're but man's ministers and legates there To work on their rebellions, and reduce Them to civility, and to man's use); This man, whom God did woo, and loath t'attend Till man came up, did down to man descend, This man, so great, that all that is, is his, O what a trifle, and poor thing he is! If man were anything, he's nothing now; Help, or at least some time to waste, allow T'his other wants, yet when he did depart With her whom we lament, he lost his heart. She, of whom th'ancients seem'd to prophesy, When they call'd virtues by the name of she; She in whom virtue was so much refin'd, That for alloy unto so pure a mind She took the weaker sex; she that could drive The poisonous tincture, and the stain of Eve, Out of her thoughts, and deeds, and purify All, by a true religious alchemy, She, she is dead; she's dead: when thou knowest this, Thou knowest how poor a trifling thing man is, And learn'st thus much by our anatomy, The heart being perish'd, no part can be free, And that except thou feed (not banquet) on The supernatural food, religion, Thy better growth grows withered, and scant; Be more than man, or thou'rt less than an ant. Then, as mankind, so is the world's whole frame Quite out of joint, almost created lame, For, before God had made up all the rest, Corruption ent'red, and deprav'd the best; It seiz'd the angels, and then first of all The world did in her cradle take a fall, And turn'd her brains, and took a general maim, Wronging each joint of th'universal frame. The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then Both beasts and plants, curs'd in the curse of man. So did the world from the first hour decay, That evening was beginning of the day, And now the springs and summers which we see, Like sons of women after fifty be. And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out, The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he. This is the world's condition now, and now She that should all parts to reunion bow, She that had all magnetic force alone, To draw, and fasten sund'red parts in one; She whom wise nature had invented then When she observ'd that every sort of men Did in their voyage in this world's sea stray, And needed a new compass for their way; She that was best and first original Of all fair copies, and the general Steward to fate; she whose rich eyes and breast Gilt the West Indies, and perfum'd the East; Whose having breath'd in this world, did bestow Spice on those Isles, and bade them still smell so, And that rich India which doth gold inter, Is but as single money, coin'd from her; She to whom this world must it self refer, As suburbs or the microcosm of her, She, she is dead; she's dead: when thou know'st this, Thou know'st how lame a cripple this world is
When by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead And that thou think'st thee free From all solicitation from me, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see; Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tir'd before, Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call'st for more, And in false sleep will from thee shrink; And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou Bath'd in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie A verier ghost than I. What I will say, I will not tell thee now, Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, I'had rather thou shouldst painfully repent, Than by my threat'nings rest still innocent.
Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks. There will the river whispering run Warm'd by thy eyes, more than the sun; And there the 'enamour'd fish will stay, Begging themselves they may betray. When thou wilt swim in that live bath, Each fish, which every channel hath, Will amorously to thee swim, Gladder to catch thee, than thou him. If thou, to be so seen, be'st loth, By sun or moon, thou dark'nest both, And if myself have leave to see, I need not their light having thee. Let others freeze with angling reeds, And cut their legs with shells and weeds, Or treacherously poor fish beset, With strangling snare, or windowy net. Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest; Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies, Bewitch poor fishes' wand'ring eyes. For thee, thou need'st no such deceit, For thou thyself art thine own bait: That fish, that is not catch'd thereby, Alas, is wiser far than I.
Out of a fired ship, which by no way But drowning could be rescued from the flame, Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came Near the foes' ships, did by their shot decay; So all were lost, which in the ship were found, They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown'd.
Our storm is past, and that storm's tyrannous rage, A stupid calm, but nothing it, doth 'suage. The fable is inverted, and far more A block afflicts, now, than a stork before. Storms chafe, and soon wear out themselves, or us; In calms, Heaven laughs to see us languish thus. As steady'as I can wish that my thoughts were, Smooth as thy mistress' glass, or what shines there, The sea is now; and, as the isles which we Seek, when we can move, our ships rooted be. As water did in storms, now pitch runs out; As lead, when a fir'd church becomes one spout. And all our beauty, and our trim, decays, Like courts removing, or like ended plays. The fighting-place now seamen's rags supply; And all the tackling is a frippery. No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday. Earth's hollownesses, which the world's lungs are, Have no more wind than the upper vault of air. We can nor lost friends nor sought foes recover, But meteor-like, save that we move not, hover. Only the calenture together draws Dear friends, which meet dead in great fishes' jaws; And on the hatches, as on altars, lies Each one, his own priest, and own sacrifice. Who live, that miracle do multiply, Where walkers in hot ovens do not die. If in despite of these we swim, that hath No more refreshing than our brimstone bath; But from the sea into the ship we turn, Like parboil'd wretches, on the coals to burn. Like Bajazet encag'd, the shepherds' scoff, Or like slack-sinew'd Samson, his hair off, Languish our ships. Now as a myriad Of ants durst th' emperor's lov'd snake invade, The crawling gallies, sea-gaols, finny chips, Might brave our pinnaces, now bed-rid ships. Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain, Or to disuse me from the queasy pain Of being belov'd and loving, or the thirst Of honour, or fair death, out-push'd me first, I lose my end; for here, as well as I, A desperate may live, and a coward die. Stag, dog, and all which from or towards flies, Is paid with life or prey, or doing dies. Fate grudges us all, and doth subtly lay A scourge, 'gainst which we all forget to pray. He that at sea prays for more wind, as well Under the poles may beg cold, heat in hell. What are we then? How little more, alas, Is man now, than before he was? He was Nothing; for us, we are for nothing fit; Chance, or ourselves, still disproportion it. We have no power, no will, no sense; I lie, I should not then thus feel this misery.
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honor, or his grace, Or the king's real, or his stampèd face Contemplate; what you will, approve, So you will let me love. Alas, alas, who's injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? Who says my tears have overflowed his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill Add one more to the plaguy bill? Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still Litigious men, which quarrels move, Though she and I do love. Call us what you will, we are made such by love; Call her one, me another fly, We're tapers too, and at our own cost die, And we in us find the eagle and the dove. The phœnix riddle hath more wit By us; we two being one, are it.So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit. We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearseOur legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomesThe greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, And by these hymns, all shall approve Us canonized for Love.And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love Made one another's hermitage;You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors, and such spies,That they did all to you epitomize) Countries, towns, courts: beg from above A pattern of your love!"
Dear love, for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy, Therefore thou wak'd'st me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it. Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths, and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best, Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest. As lightning, or a taper's light, Thine eyes, and not thy noise wak'd me; Yet I thought thee (For thou lovest truth) an angel, at first sight; But when I saw thou sawest my heart, And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an angel's art, When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then, I must confess, it could not choose but be Profane, to think thee any thing but thee. Coming and staying show'd thee, thee, But rising makes me doubt, that now Thou art not thou. That love is weak where fear's as strong as he; 'Tis not all spirit, pure and brave, If mixture it of fear, shame, honour have; Perchance as torches, which must ready be, Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with me; Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come; then I Will dream that hope again, but else would die.
Where, like a pillow on a bed A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest The violet's reclining head, Sat we two, one another's best. Our hands were firmly cemented With a fast balm, which thence did spring; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string; So to'intergraft our hands, as yet Was all the means to make us one, And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation. As 'twixt two equal armies fate Suspends uncertain victory, Our souls (which to advance their state Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me. And whilst our souls negotiate there, We like sepulchral statues lay; All day, the same our postures were, And we said nothing, all the day. If any, so by love refin'd That he soul's language understood, And by good love were grown all mind, Within convenient distance stood, He (though he knew not which soul spake, Because both meant, both spake the same) Might thence a new concoction take And part far purer than he came. This ecstasy doth unperplex, We said, and tell us what we love; We see by this it was not sex, We see we saw not what did move; But as all several souls contain Mixture of things, they know not what, Love these mix'd souls doth mix again And makes both one, each this and that. A single violet transplant, The strength, the colour, and the size, (All which before was poor and scant) Redoubles still, and multiplies. When love with one another so Interinanimates two souls, That abler soul, which thence doth flow, Defects of loneliness controls. We then, who are this new soul, know Of what we are compos'd and made, For th' atomies of which we grow Are souls, whom no change can invade. But oh alas, so long, so far, Our bodies why do we forbear? They'are ours, though they'are not we; we are The intelligences, they the spheres. We owe them thanks, because they thus Did us, to us, at first convey, Yielded their senses' force to us, Nor are dross to us, but allay. On man heaven's influence works not so, But that it first imprints the air; So soul into the soul may flow, Though it to body first repair. As our blood labors to beget Spirits, as like souls as it can, Because such fingers need to knit That subtle knot which makes us man, So must pure lovers' souls descend T' affections, and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great prince in prison lies. To'our bodies turn we then, that so Weak men on love reveal'd may look; Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book. And if some lover, such as we, Have heard this dialogue of one, Let him still mark us, he shall see Small change, when we'are to bodies gone.
Here take my picture; though I bid farewell Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell. 'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more When we are shadows both, than 'twas before. When weather-beaten I come back, my hand Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun beams tann'd, My face and breast of haircloth, and my head With care's rash sudden storms being o'erspread, My body'a sack of bones, broken within, And powder's blue stains scatter'd on my skin; If rival fools tax thee to'have lov'd a man So foul and coarse as, oh, I may seem then, This shall say what I was, and thou shalt say, "Do his hurts reach me? doth my worth decay? Or do they reach his judging mind, that he Should now love less, what he did love to see? That which in him was fair and delicate, Was but the milk which in love's childish state Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough To feed on that, which to disus'd tastes seems tough."
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face. Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape, This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape. If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame; Affection here takes reverence's name. Were her first years the golden age? That's true, But now she's gold oft tried and ever new. That was her torrid and inflaming time, This is her tolerable tropic clime. Fair eyes, who asks more heat than comes from hence, He in a fever wishes pestilence. Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they were, They were Love's graves, for else he is no where. Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorit; And here till hers, which must be his death, come, He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb. Here dwells he; though he sojourn ev'rywhere In progress, yet his standing house is here: Here where still evening is, not noon nor night, Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight. In all her words, unto all hearers fit, You may at revels, you at council, sit. This is Love's timber, youth his underwood; There he, as wine in June, enrages blood, Which then comes seasonabliest when our taste And appetite to other things is past. Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platan tree, Was lov'd for age, none being so large as she, Or else because, being young, nature did bless Her youth with age's glory, barrenness. If we love things long sought, age is a thing Which we are fifty years in compassing; If transitory things, which soon decay, Age must be loveliest at the latest day. But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack, Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack; Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade; Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out than made; Whose every tooth to a several place is gone, To vex their souls at resurrection: Name not these living death's-heads unto me, For these, not ancient, but antique be. I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day. Since such love's natural lation is, may still My love descend, and journey down the hill, Not panting after growing beauties. So, I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.
Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign, you must not touch, For 'tis my outward soul, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to control And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution. For if the sinewy thread my brain lets fall Through every part Can tie those parts, and make me one of all, Those hairs which upward grew, and strength and art Have from a better brain, Can better do'it; except she meant that I By this should know my pain, As prisoners then are manacled, when they'are condemn'd to die. Whate'er she meant by'it, bury it with me, For since I am Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry, If into other hands these relics came; As 'twas humility To afford to it all that a soul can do, So, 'tis some bravery, That since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.
Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is, And as the other Spheares, by being growne Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, And being by others hurried every day, Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit For their first mover, and are whirld by it. Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, And by that setting endlesse day beget; But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, Sinne had eternally benighted all. Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see That spectacle of too much weight for mee. Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; What a death were it then to see God dye? It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes? Could I behold that endlesse height which is Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, Humbled below us? or that blood which is The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne? If on these things I durst not looke, durst I Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us? Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, They'are present yet unto my memory, For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee, O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree; I turne my backe to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den? ’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee. And now good-morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we find two better hemispheres, Without sharp north, without declining west? Whatever dies, was not mixed equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part. Nay, I have done, you get no more of me; And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart, That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath, When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies; When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes— Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!
You brave Heroique Minds, Worthy your countries name,  That honour still pursue,  Goe, and subdue, Whilst loyt'ring Hinds Lurke here at home, with shame. Britans, you stay too long, Quickly aboord bestow you,  And with a merry Gale  Swell your stretch'd Sayle, With Vowes as strong, As the Winds that blow you. Your Course securely steere, West and by South forth keepe,  Rocks, Lee-shores, nor Sholes,  When Eolus scowles, You need not feare, So absolute the Deepe. And cheerfully at Sea, Successe you still intice,  To get the Pearle and Gold,  And ours to hold, Virginia, Earth's onely Paradise. Where nature hath in store Fowle, Venison, and Fish,  And the fruitfull'st Soyle,  Without your Toyle, Three Harvests more, All greater than your wish. And the ambitious Vine Crownes with his purple Masse,  The Cedar reaching hie  To kisse the Sky, The Cypresse, Pine And use-full Sassafras. To whose, the golden Age Still Natures lawes doth give,  No other Cares that tend,  But Them to defend From Winters age, That long there doth not live. When as the Lushious smell Of that delicious Land,  Above the Seas that flowes,  The cleere Wind throwes, Your Hearts to swell Approching the deare Strand. In kenning of the Shore, (Thanks to God first given,)  O you, the happy'st men,  Be Frolike then, Let Cannons roare, Frighting the wide Heaven. And in Regions farre Such Heroes bring yee foorth,  As those from whom We came,  And plant Our name, Under that Starre Not knowne unto our North. And as there Plenty growes Of Lawrell every where, Apollo's Sacred tree,  You it may see, A Poets Browes To crowne, that may sing there. Thy Voyage attend, Industrious Whose Reading shall inflame  Men to seeke Fame, And much commend To after-times thy Wit.
In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin; When man, on many, multipli'd his kind, Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd: When Nature prompted, and no Law deni'd Promiscuous use of concubine and bride; Then, Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart, His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command, Scatter'd his Maker's image through the land. Michal, of royal blood, the crown did wear; A soil ungrateful to the tiller's care: Not so the rest; for several mothers bore To god-like David, several sons before. But since like slaves his bed they did ascend, No true succession could their seed attend. Of all this numerous progeny was none So beautiful, so brave, as Absalom: Whether, inspir'd by some diviner lust, His father got him with a greater gust; Or that his conscious destiny made way, By manly beauty to imperial sway. Early in foreign fields he won renown, With kings and states alli'd to Israel's crown: In peace the thoughts of war he could remove, And seem'd as he were only born for love. Whate'er he did, was done with so much ease, In him alone, 'twas natural to please: His motions all accompani'd with grace; And Paradise was open'd in his face. With secret joy, indulgent David view'd His youthful image in his son renew'd: To all his wishes nothing he deni'd; And made the charming Annabel his bride. What faults he had (for who from faults is free?) His father could not, or he would not see. Some warm excesses, which the Law forbore, Were constru'd youth that purged by boiling o'er: And Amnon's murther, by a specious name, Was call'd a just revenge for injur'd fame. Thus prais'd, and lov'd, the noble youth remain'd, While David, undisturb'd, in Sion reign'd. But life can never be sincerely blest: Heav'n punishes the bad, and proves the best. The Jews, a headstrong, moody, murm'ring race, As ever tri'd th'extent and stretch of grace; God's pamper'd people whom, debauch'd with ease, No king could govern, nor no God could please; (Gods they had tri'd of every shape and size, That god-smiths could produce, or priests devise:) These Adam-wits, too fortunately free, Began to dream they wanted liberty: And when no rule, no precedent, was found Of men, by laws less circumscrib'd and bound, They led their wild desires to woods and caves, And thought that all but savages were slaves. They who, when Saul was dead, without a blow, Made foolish Ishbosheth the crown forego; Who banisht David did from Hebron bring, And, with a general shout, proclaim'd him king: Those very Jews, who, at their very best, Their Humour more than loyalty exprest, Now, wonder'd why, so long, they had obey'd An idol-monarch which their hands had made: Thought they might ruin him they could create; Or melt him to that golden calf, a state. But these were random bolts: no form'd design, Nor interest made the factious crowd to join: The sober part of Israel, free from stain, Well knew the value of a peaceful reign: And, looking backward with a wise afright, Saw seams of wounds, dishonest to the sight: In contemplation of whose ugly scars, They curst the memory of civil wars. The moderate sort of men, thus qualifi'd, Inclin'd the balance to the better side: And, David's mildness manag'd it so well, The bad found no occasion to rebel. But, when to sin our bias'd nature leans, The careful Devil is still at hand with means; And providently pimps for ill desires: The good old cause reviv'd, a plot requires. Plots, true or false, are necessary things, To raise up common-wealths, and ruin kings.  Th' inhabitants of old Jerusalem Were Jebusites: the town so call'd from them; And theirs the native right— But when the chosen people grew more strong, The rightful cause at length became the wrong: And every loss the men of Jebus bore, They still were thought God's enemies the more. Thus, worn and weaken'd, well or ill content, Submit they must to David's government: Impoverish'd and depriv'd of all command, Their taxes doubled as they lost their land; And, what was harder yet to flesh and blood, Their gods disgrac'd, and burnt like common wood. This set the heathen priesthood in a flame; For priests of all religions are the same: Of whatsoe'er descent their godhead be, Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree, In his defence his servants are as bold, As if he had been born of beaten gold. The Jewish Rabbins though their Enemies, In this conclude them honest men and wise: For 'twas their duty, all the learned think, T'espouse his cause by whom they eat and drink. From hence began that plot, the nation's curse, Bad in itself, but represented worse. Rais'd in extremes, and in extremes decri'd; With oaths affirm'd, with dying vows deni'd. Not weigh'd, or winnow'd by the multitude; But swallow'd in the mass, unchew'd and crude. Some truth there was, but dash'd and brew'd with lies; To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise. Succeeding times did equal folly call, Believing nothing, or believing all. Th' Egyptian rites the Jebusites embrac'd; Where gods were recommended by their taste. Such sav'ry deities must needs be good, As serv'd at once for worship and for food. By force they could not introduce these gods; For ten to one, in former days was odds. So fraud was us'd, (the sacrificers' trade,) Fools are more hard to conquer than persuade. Their busy teachers mingled with the Jews; And rak'd, for converts, even the court and stews: Which Hebrew priests the more unkindly took, Because the fleece accompanies the flock. Some thought they God's anointed meant to slay By guns, invented since full many a day: Our author swears it not; but who can know How far the Devil and Jebusites may go? This plot, which fail'd for want of common sense, Had yet a deep and dangerous consequence: For, as when raging fevers boil the blood, The standing lake soon floats into a flood; And ev'ry hostile humour, which before Slept quiet in its channels, bubbles o'er: So, several factions from this first ferment, Work up to foam, and threat the government. Some by their friends, more by themselves thought wise, Oppos'd the pow'r, to which they could not rise. Some had in courts been great, and thrown from thence, Like fiends, were harden'd in impenitence. Some by their monarch's fatal mercy grown, From pardon'd rebels, kinsmen to the throne; Were rais'd in pow'r and public office high; Strong bands, if bands ungrateful men could tie.  Of these the false Achitophel was first: A name to all succeeding ages curst. For close designs, and crooked counsels fit; Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit: Restless, unfixt in principles and place; In pow'r unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace. A fiery soul, which working out its way, Fretted the pigmy-body to decay: And o'er inform'd the tenement of clay. A daring pilot in extremity; Pleas'd with the danger, when the waves went high He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit, Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit. Great wits are sure to madness near alli'd; And thin partitions do their bounds divide: Else, why should he, with wealth and honour blest, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? Punish a body which he could not please; Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease? And all to leave, what with his toil he won To that unfeather'd, two-legg'd thing, a son: Got, while his soul did huddled notions try; And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy. In friendship false, implacable in hate: Resolv'd to ruin or to rule the state. To compass this, the triple bond he broke; The pillars of the public safety shook: And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke. Then, seiz'd with fear, yet still affecting fame, Usurp'd a patriot's all-atoning name. So easy still it proves in factious times, With public zeal to cancel private crimes: How safe is treason, and how sacred ill, Where none can sin against the people's will: Where crowds can wink; and no offence be known, Since in another's guilt they find their own. Yet, fame deserv'd, no enemy can grudge; The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge. In Jewish courts ne'er sat an Abbethdin With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean: Unbrib'd, unsought, the wretched to redress; Swift of dispatch, and easy of access. Oh, had he been content to serve the crown, With virtues only proper to the gown; Or, had the rankness of the soil been freed From cockle, that opprest the noble seed: David, for him his tuneful harp had strung, And heav'n had wanted one immortal song. But wild ambition loves to slide, not stand; And fortune's ice prefers to virtue's land: Achitophel, grown weary to possess A lawful fame, and lazy happiness; Disdain'd the golden fruit to gather free, And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree. Now, manifest of crimes, contriv'd long since, He stood at bold defiance with his prince: Held up the buckler of the people's cause, Against the crown; and skulk'd behind the laws. The wish'd occasion of the plot he takes; Some circumstances finds, but more he makes. By buzzing emissaries, fills the ears Of list'ning crowds, with jealousies and fears Of arbitrary counsels brought to light, And proves the king himself a Jebusite. Weak arguments! which yet he knew full well, Were strong with people easy to rebel. For, govern'd by the moon, the giddy Jews Tread the same track when she the prime renews: And once in twenty years, their scribes record, By natural instinct they change their lord. Achitophel still wants a chief, and none Was found so fit as warlike Absalom: Not, that he wish'd his greatness to create, (For politicians neither love nor hate:) But, for he knew, his title not allow'd, Would keep him still depending on the crowd: That kingly pow'r, thus ebbing out, might be Drawn to the dregs of a democracy. Him he attempts, with studied arts to please, And sheds his venom, in such words as these.  Auspicious Prince! at whose nativity Some royal planet rul'd the southern sky; Thy longing country's darling and desire; Their cloudy pillar, and their guardian fire: Their second Moses, whose extended wand Divides the seas, and shows the promis'd land: Whose dawning day, in very distant age, Has exercis'd the sacred prophet's rage: The people's pray'r, the glad diviner's theme, The young men's vision, and the old men's dream! Thee, Saviour, thee, the nation's vows confess; And, never satisfi'd with seeing, bless: Swift, unbespoken pomps, thy steps proclaim, And stammering babes are taught to lisp thy name. How long wilt thou the general joy detain; Starve, and defraud the people of thy reign? Content ingloriously to pass thy days Like one of virtue's fools that feeds on praise; Till thy fresh glories, which now shine so bright, Grow stale and tarnish with our daily sight. Believe me, royal youth, thy fruit must be, Or gather'd ripe, or rot upon the tree. Heav'n has to all allotted, soon or late, Some lucky revolution of their fate: Whose motions if we watch and guide with skill, (For human good depends on human will,) Our fortune rolls, as from a smooth descent, And, from the first impression, takes the bent: But, if unseiz'd, she glides away like wind; And leaves repenting folly far behind. Now, now she meets you, with a glorious prize, And spreads her locks before her as she flies. Had thus Old David, from whose loins you spring, Not dar'd, when fortune call'd him, to be king. At Gath an exile he might still remain; And Heaven's anointing oil had been in vain. Let his successful youth your hopes engage; But shun th'example of declining age: Behold him setting in his western skies, The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise. He is not now, as when on Jordan's sand The joyful people throng'd to see him land, Cov'ring the beach, and black'ning all the strand: But, like the Prince of Angels from his height, Comes tumbling downward with diminish'd light: Betray'd by one poor plot to public scorn: (Our only blessing since his curst return:) Those heaps of people which one sheaf did bind, Blown off, and scatter'd by a puff of wind. What strength can he to your designs oppose, Naked of friends and round beset with foes? If Pharaoh's doubtful succour he should use, A foreign aid would more incense the Jews: Proud Egypt would dissembled friendship bring; Foment the war, but not support the king: Nor would the royal party e'er unite With Pharaoh's arms, t'assist the Jebusite; Or if they should, their interest soon would break, And with such odious aid, make David weak. All sorts of men, by my successful arts, Abhorring kings, estrange their alter'd hearts From David's rule: And 'tis the general Cry, Religion, Common-wealth, and Liberty. If, you, as champion of the public good, Add to their arms a chief of royal blood; What may not Israel hope, and what applause Might such a general gain by such a cause? Not barren praise alone, that gaudy flow'r, Fair only to the sight, but solid pow'r: And nobler is a limited command, Giv'n by the love of all your native land, Than a successive title, long, and dark, Drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah's Ark.  What cannot praise effect in mighty minds, When flattery soothes, and when ambition blinds! Desire of pow'r, on earth a vicious weed, Yet, sprung from high, is of celestial seed: In God 'tis glory: And when men aspire, 'Tis but a spark too much of heavenly fire. Th' ambitious youth, too covetous of fame, Too full of angel's metal in his frame; Unwarily was led from virtue's ways; Made drunk with honour, and debauch'd with praise. Half loath, and half consenting to the ill, (For loyal blood within him struggled still) He thus repli'd.—And what pretence have I To take up arms for public liberty? My Father governs with unquestion'd right; The Faith's defender, and mankind's delight: Good, gracious, just, observant of the laws; And Heav'n by wonders has espous'd his cause. Whom has he wrong'd in all his peaceful reign? Who sues for justice to his throne in vain? What millions has he pardon'd of his foes, Whom just revenge did to his wrath expose? Mild, easy, humble, studious of our good; Inclin'd to mercy, and averse from blood. If mildness ill with stubborn Israel suit, His crime is God's beloved attribute. What could he gain, his people to betray, Or change his right, for arbitrary sway? Let haughty Pharaoh curse with such a reign, His fruitful Nile, and yoke a servile train. If David's rule Jerusalem displease, The Dog-star heats their brains to this disease. Why then should I, encouraging the bad, Turn rebel, and run popularly mad? Were he a tyrant who, by lawless might, Oppress'd the Jews, and rais'd the Jebusite, Well might I mourn; but nature's holy bands Would curb my spirits, and restrain my hands: The people might assert their liberty; But what was right in them, were crime in me. His favour leaves me nothing to require; Prevents my wishes, and out-runs desire. What more can I expect while David lives? All but his kingly diadem he gives: And that: but there he paus'd; then sighing, said, Is justly destin'd for a worthier head. For when my father from his toils shall rest, And late augment the number of the blest: His lawful issue shall the throne ascend; Or the collat'ral line where that shall end. His brother, though oppress'd with vulgar spite, Yet dauntless and secure of native right, Of every royal virtue stands possess'd; Still dear to all the bravest, and the best. His courage foes, his friends his truth proclaim; His loyalty the king, the world his fame. His mercy ev'n th'offending crowd will find: For sure he comes of a forgiving kind. Why should I then repine at Heaven's decree; Which gives me no pretence to royalty? Yet oh that Fate, propitiously inclin'd, Had rais'd my birth, or had debas'd my mind; To my large soul, not all her treasure lent, And then betray'd it to a mean descent. I find, I find my mounting spirits bold, And David's part disdains my mother's mold. Why am I scanted by a niggard-birth? My soul disclaims the kindred of her earth: And made for empire, whispers me within; Desire of greatness is a god-like sin.  Him staggering so when Hell's dire agent found, While fainting virtue scarce maintain'd her ground, He pours fresh forces in, and thus replies:  Th'eternal God, supremely good and wise, Imparts not these prodigious gifts in vain; What wonders are reserv'd to bless your reign? Against your will your arguments have shown, Such virtue's only giv'n to guide a throne. Not that your father's mildness I contemn; But manly force becomes the diadem. 'Tis true, he grants the people all they crave; And more perhaps than subjects ought to have: For lavish grants suppose a monarch tame, And more his goodness than his wit proclaim. But when should people strive their bonds to break, If not when kings are negligent or weak? Let him give on till he can give no more, The thrifty Sanhedrin shall keep him poor: And every shekel which he can receive, Shall cost a limb of his prerogative. To ply him with new plots, shall be my care; Or plunge him deep in some expensive war; Which, when his treasure can no more supply, He must, with the remains of kingship, buy. His faithful friends, our jealousies and fears Call Jebusites; and Pharaoh's pensioners: Whom, when our fury from his aid has torn, He shall be naked left to public scorn. The next successor, whom I fear and hate, My arts have made obnoxious to the state; Turn'd all his virtues to his overthrow, And gain'd our elders to pronounce a foe. His right, for sums of necessary gold, Shall first be pawn'd, and afterwards be sold: Till time shall ever-wanting David draw, To pass your doubtful title into law: If not; the people have a right supreme To make their kings; for kings are made for them. All empire is no more than pow'r in trust: Which when resum'd, can be no longer just. Succession, for the general good design'd, In its own wrong a nation cannot bind: If altering that, the people can relieve, Better one suffer, than a nation grieve. The Jews well know their pow'r: ere Saul they chose, God was their king, and God they durst depose. Urge now your piety, your filial name, A father's right, and fear of future fame; The public good, the universal call, To which even Heav'n submitted, answers all. Nor let his love enchant your generous mind; 'Tis Nature's trick to propagate her kind. Our fond begetters, who would never die, Love but themselves in their posterity. Or let his kindness by th'effects be tri'd, Or let him lay his vain pretence aside. God said he lov'd your father; could he bring A better proof, than to anoint him king? It surely show'd he lov'd the shepherd well, Who gave so fair a flock as Israel. Would David have you thought his darling son? What means he then, to alienate the crown? The name of godly he may blush to bear: 'Tis after God's own heart to cheat his heir. He to his brother gives supreme command; To you a legacy of barren land: Perhaps th'old harp, on which he thrums his lays: Or some dull Hebrew ballad in your praise. Then the next heir, a prince, severe and wise Already looks on you with jealous eyes; Sees through the thin disguises of your arts, And marks your progress in the people's hearts. Though now his mighty soul in grief contains, He meditates revenge who least complains; And like a lion, slumb'ring in the way, Or sleep-dissembling, while he waits his prey, His fearless foes within his distance draws; Constrains his roaring and contracts his paws: Till at the last, his time for fury found, He shoots with sudden vengeance from the ground: The prostrate vulgar, passes o'er, and spares; But with a lordly rage, his hunters tears. Your case no tame expedients will afford; Resolve on death, or conquest by the sword, Which for no less a stake than life, you draw; And self-defence is Nature's eldest law. Leave the warm people no considering time; For then rebellion may be thought a crime. Prevail yourself of what occasion gives, But try your title while your father lives: And that your arms may have a fair pretence, Proclaim, you take them in the king's defence: Whose sacred life each minute would expose To plots from seeming friends and secret foes. And who can sound the depth of David's soul? Perhaps his fear, his kindness may control. He fears his brother, though he loves his son, For plighted vows too late to be undone. If so, by force he wishes to be gain'd; Like women's lechery, to seem constrain'd: Doubt not; but when he most affects the frown, Commit a pleasing rape upon the crown. Secure his person to secure your cause; They who possess the prince, possess the laws.  He said, and this advice above the rest With Absalom's mild nature suited best; Unblam'd of life, (ambition set aside,) Not stain'd with cruelty, nor puff'd with pride. How happy had he been, if destiny Had higher plac'd his birth, or not so high! His kingly virtues might have claim'd a throne; And blest all other countries but his own: But charming greatness since so few refuse, 'Tis juster to lament him, than accuse. Strong were his hopes a rival to remove, With blandishments to gain the public love; To head the faction while their zeal was hot, And popularly prosecute the plot. To farther this Achitophel unites The malcontents of all the Israelites: Whose differing parties he could wisely join, For several ends, to serve the same design. The best, and of the princes some were such, Who thought the pow'r of monarchy too much: Mistaken men, and patriots in their hearts; Not wicked, but seduc'd by impious arts. By these the springs of property were bent, And wound so high, they crack'd the government. The next for interest sought t'embroil the state, To sell their duty at a dearer rate; And make their Jewish markets of the throne; Pretending public good, to serve their own. Others thought kings an useless heavy load, Who cost too much, and did too little good. These were for laying honest David by, On principles of pure good husbandry. With them join'd all th'haranguers of the throng, That thought to get preferment by the tongue. Who follow next, a double danger bring, Not only hating David, but the king; The Solymaean rout; well vers'd of old In godly faction, and in treason bold; Cow'ring and quaking at a conqu'ror's sword, But lofty to a lawful prince restor'd; Saw with disdain an Ethnic plot begun, And scorn'd by Jebusites to be out-done. Hot Levites headed these; who pull'd before From th'Ark, which in the Judges' days they bore, Resum'd their Cant, and with a zealous cry, Pursu'd their old belov'd Theocracy. Where Sanhedrin and Priest enslav'd the nation, And justifi'd their spoils by inspiration: For who so fit for reign as Aaron's race, If once dominion they could found in Grace? These led the pack; though not of surest scent, Yet deepest mouth'd against the government. A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed; Of the true old enthusiastic breed: 'Gainst form and order they their pow'r employ; Nothing to build, and all things to destroy. But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much. These, out of mere instinct, they knew not why, Ador'd their father's God, and property: And by the same blind benefit of fate, The Devil and the Jebusite did hate: Born to be saved even in their own despite; Because they could not help believing right. Such were the tools; but a whole Hydra more Remains, of sprouting heads too long, to score. Some of their chiefs were princes of the land: In the first rank of these did Zimri stand: A man so various, that he seem'd to be Not one, but all Mankind's Epitome. Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long: But in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon: Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking; Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman, who could every hour employ, With something new to wish, or to enjoy! Railing and praising were his usual themes; And both (to show his judgment) in extremes: So over violent, or over civil, That every man, with him, was god or devil. In squandering wealth was his peculiar art: Nothing went unrewarded, but desert. Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late: He had his jest, and they had his estate. He laugh'd himself from court; then sought relief By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief: For, spite of him, the weight of business fell On Absalom and wise Achitophel: Thus, wicked but in will, of means bereft, He left not faction, but of that was left.  Titles and names 'twere tedious to rehearse Of lords, below the dignity of verse. Wits, warriors, commonwealths-men, were the best: Kind husbands and mere nobles all the rest. And, therefore in the name of dullness, be The well-hung Balaam and cold Caleb free. And canting Nadab let oblivion damn, Who made new porridge for the Paschal Lamb. Let friendship's holy band some names assure: Some their own worth, and some let scorn secure. Nor shall the rascal rabble here have place, Whom kings no titles gave, and God no grace: Not bull-faced Jonas, who could statutes draw To mean rebellion, and make treason law. But he, though bad, is follow'd by a worse, The wretch, who Heav'n's Anointed dar'd to curse. Shimei, whose youth did early promise bring Of zeal to God, and hatred to his king; Did wisely from expensive sins refrain, And never broke the Sabbath, but for gain: Nor ever was he known an oath to vent, Or curse, unless against the government. Thus, heaping wealth, by the most ready way Among the Jews, which was to cheat and pray; The city, to reward his pious hate Against his master, chose him magistrate: His hand a vare of justice did uphold; His neck was loaded with a chain of gold. During his office, treason was no crime. The sons of Belial had a glorious time: For Shimei, though not prodigal of pelf, Yet lov'd his wicked neighbour as himself: When two or three were gather'd to declaim Against the monarch of Jerusalem, Shimei was always in the midst of them. And, if they curst the king when he was by, Would rather curse, than break good company. If any durst his factious friends accuse, He pack'd a jury of dissenting Jews: Whose fellow-feeling, in the godly cause, Would free the suff'ring saint from human laws. For laws are only made to punish those Who serve the king, and to protect his foes. If any leisure time he had from pow'r, (Because 'tis sin to mis-employ an hour;) His bus'ness was, by writing, to persuade, That kings were useless, and a clog to trade: And, that his noble style he might refine, No Rechabite more shunn'd the fumes of wine. Chaste were his cellars; and his shrieval board The grossness of a city feast abhorr'd: His cooks, with long disuse, their trade forgot; Cool was his kitchen, though his brains were hot. Such frugal virtue malice may accuse; But sure 'twas necessary to the Jews: For towns once burnt, such magistrates require As dare not tempt God's providence by fire. With spiritual food he fed his servants well, But free from flesh, that made the Jews rebel: And Moses' laws he held in more account For forty days of fasting in the mount. To speak the rest, who better are forgot, Would tire a well-breath'd witness of the plot: Yet, Corah, thou shalt from oblivion pass; Erect thyself thou monumental brass: High as the serpent of thy metal made, While nations stand secure beneath thy shade. What though his birth were base, yet comets rise From earthy vapours e'er they shine in skies. Prodigious actions may as well be done By weaver's issue, as by prince's son. This arch-attestor, for the public good, By that one deed ennobles all his blood. Who ever ask'd the witnesses' high race, Whose oath with martyrdom did Stephen grace? Ours was a Levite, and as times went then, His tribe were God-almighty's gentlemen. Sunk were his eyes, his voice was harsh and loud, Sure signs he neither choleric was, nor proud: His long chin prov'd his wit; his saint-like grace A church vermilion, and a Moses' face. His memory, miraculously great, Could plots exceeding man's belief, repeat; Which therefore cannot be accounted lies, For human wit could never such devise. Some future truths are mingled in his book; But, where the witness fail'd, the Prophet spoke: Some things like visionary flights appear; The spirit caught him up, the Lord knows where: And gave him his rabbinical degree, Unknown to foreign university. His judgment yet his mem'ry did excel: Which piec'd his wondrous evidence so well: And suited to the temper of the times; Then groaning under Jebusitic crimes. Let Israel's foes suspect his Heav'nly call, And rashly judge his writ apocryphal; Our laws for such affronts have forfeits made: He takes his life, who takes away his trade. Were I myself in witness Corah's place, The wretch who did me such a dire disgrace, Should whet my memory, though once forgot, To make him an appendix of my plot. His zeal to Heav'n made him his prince despise, And load his person with indignities: But Zeal peculiar privilege affords, Indulging latitude to deeds and words. And Corah might for Agag's murther call, In terms as coarse as Samuel us'd to Saul. What others in his evidence did join, (The best that could be had for love or coin,) In Corah's own predicament will fall: For Witness is a common name to all.  Surrounded thus with friends of every sort, Deluded Absalom forsakes the court: Impatient of high hopes, urg'd with renown, And fir'd with near possession of a crown: Th' admiring crowd are dazzled with surprise, And on his goodly person feed their eyes: His joy conceal'd, he sets himself to show; On each side bowing popularly low: His looks, his gestures, and his words he frames, And with familiar ease repeats their names. Thus, form'd by Nature, furnish'd out with arts, He glides unfelt into their secret hearts: Then, with a kind compassionating look, And sighs, bespeaking pity e'er he spoke: Few words he said; but easy those and fit: More slow than Hybla drops, and far more sweet.  I mourn, my country-men, your lost estate; Though far unable to prevent your fate: Behold a banish'd man, for your dear cause Expos'd a prey to arbitrary laws! Yet oh! that I alone could be undone, Cut off from empire, and no more a son! Now all your liberties a spoil are made; Egypt and Tyrus intercept your trade, And Jebusites your sacred rites invade. My father, whom with reverence yet I name, Charm'd into ease, is careless of his fame: And, brib'd with petty sums of foreign gold, Is grown in Bathsheba's embraces old: Exalts his enemies, his friends destroys: And all his pow'r against himself employs. He gives, and let him give my right away: But why should he his own, and yours betray? He, only he can make the nation bleed, And he alone from my revenge is freed. Take then my tears (with that he wip'd his eyes) 'Tis all the aid my present pow'r supplies: No court-informer can these arms accuse; These arms may sons against their fathers use; And, 'tis my wish, the next successor's reign May make no other Israelite complain.  Youth, beauty, graceful action, seldom fail: But common interest always will prevail: And pity never ceases to be shown To him, who makes the people's wrongs his own. The crowd, (that still believe their kings oppress,) With lifted hands their young Messiah bless: Who now begins his progress to ordain; With chariots, horsemen, and a num'rous train: From East to West his glories he displays: And, like the sun, the Promis'd Land surveys. Fame runs before him, as the Morning-Star; And shouts of joy salute him from afar: Each house receives him as a guardian God; And consecrates the place of his abode: But hospitable treats did most commend Wise Issachar, his wealthy western friend. This moving court, that caught the people's eyes, And seem'd but pomp, did other ends disguise: Achitophel had form'd it, with intent To sound the depths, and fathom where it went, The people's hearts; distinguish friends from foes; And try their strength, before they came to blows. Yet all was colour'd with a smooth pretence Of specious love, and duty to their prince. Religion, and redress of grievances, Two names, that always cheat and always please, Are often urg'd; and good King David's life Endanger'd by a brother and a wife. Thus, in a pageant show, a plot is made; And peace itself is war in masquerade. Oh foolish Israel! never warn'd by ill: Still the same bait, and circumvented still! Did ever men forsake their present ease, In midst of health imagine a disease; Take pains contingent mischiefs to foresee, Make heirs for monarchs, and for God decree? What shall we think! Can people give away Both for themselves and sons, their native sway? Then they are left defenceless to the sword Of each unbounded arbitrary lord: And laws are vain, by which we right enjoy, If kings unquestion'd can those laws destroy. Yet, if the crowd be judge of fit and just, And kings are only officers in trust, Then this resuming cov'nant was declar'd When Kings were made, or is for ever bar'd: If those who gave the sceptre could not tie By their own deed their own posterity, How then could Adam bind his future race? How could his forfeit on mankind take place? Or how could heavenly justice damn us all, Who ne'er consented to our father's fall? Then kings are slaves to those whom they command, And tenants to their people's pleasure stand. Add, that the pow'r for property allow'd, Is mischievously seated in the crowd: For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolv'd by might? Nor is the people's judgment always true: The most may err as grossly as the few. And faultless kings run down, by common cry, For vice, oppression and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds, but Sanhedrins may be Infected with this public lunacy: And share the madness of rebellious times, To murther monarchs for imagin'd crimes. If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, (the godhead's images,) But government itself at length must fall To nature's state, where all have right to all. Yet, grant our lords the people kings can make, What prudent men a settled throne would shake? For whatsoe'er their sufferings were before, That change they covet makes them suffer more. All other errors but disturb a state; But innovation is the blow of fate. If ancient fabrics nod, and threat to fall, To patch the flaws, and buttress up the wall, Thus far 'tis duty; but here fix the mark: For all beyond it is to touch our Ark. To change foundations, cast the frame anew, Is work for rebels who base ends pursue: At once divine and human laws control; And mend the parts by ruin of the whole. The tamp'ring world is subject to this curse, To physic their disease into a worse.  Now what relief can righteous David bring? How fatal 'tis to be too good a king! Friends he has few, so high the madness grows; Who dare be such, must be the people's foes: Yet some there were, ev'n in the worst of days; Some let me name, and naming is to praise.  In this short file Barzillai first appears; Barzillai crown'd with honour and with years: Long since, the rising rebels he withstood In regions waste, beyond the Jordan's flood: Unfortunately brave to buoy the state; But sinking underneath his master's fate: In exile with his god-like prince he mourn'd: For him he suffer'd, and with him return'd. The court he practis'd, not the courtier's art: Large was his wealth, but larger was his heart: Which well the noblest objects knew to choose, The fighting warrior, and recording Muse. His bed could once a fruitful issue boast: Now more than half a father's name is lost. His eldest hope, with every grace adorn'd, By me (so Heav'n will have it) always mourn'd, And always honour'd, snatch'd in manhood's prime B' unequal Fates, and Providence's crime: Yet not before the goal of honour won, All parts fulfill'd, of subject and of son; Swift was the race, but short the time to run. Oh narrow circle, but of pow'r divine, Scanted in space, but perfect in thy line! By sea, by land, thy matchless worth was known; Arms thy delight, and war was all thy own: Thy force infus'd, the fainting Tyrians propp'd: And haughty Pharaoh found his fortune stopp'd. Oh ancient honour, Oh unconquer'd Hand, Whom foes unpunish'd never could withstand! But Israel was unworthy of thy name: Short is the date of all immoderate fame. It looks as Heav'n our ruin had design'd, And durst not trust thy fortune and thy mind. Now, free from earth, thy disencumber'd Soul Mounts up, and leaves behind the clouds and starry pole: From thence thy kindred legions may'st thou bring, To aid the Guardian Angel of thy king. Here stop my Muse, here cease thy painful flight; No pinions can pursue immortal height: Tell good Barzillai thou canst sing no more, And tell thy soul she should have fled before; Or fled she with his life, and left this verse To hang on her departed patron's hearse? Now take thy steepy flight from Heav'n, and see If thou canst find on earth another he; Another he would be too hard to find, See then whom thou canst see not far behind. Zadoc the priest whom, shunning, pow'r and place, His lowly mind advanc'd to David's grace: With him the Sagan of Jerusalem, Of hospitable soul and noble stem; Him of the western dome, whose weighty sense Flows in fit words and heavenly eloquence. The Prophet's sons by such example led, To learning and to loyalty were bred: For colleges on bounteous kings depend, And never rebel was to arts a friend. To these succeed the pillars of the laws, Who best could plead, and best can judge a cause. Next them a train of loyal peers ascend: Sharp judging Adriel, the Muse's friend, Himself a Muse:—in Sanhedrin's debate True to his prince; but not a slave of state. Whom David's love with honours did adorn, That from his disobedient son were torn. Jotham of piercing wit and pregnant thought, Endow'd by Nature, and by learning taught To move assemblies, who but only tri'd The worse awhile, then chose the better side; Nor chose alone, but turn'd the balance too; So much the weight of one brave man can do. Hushai, the friend of David in distress, In public storms of manly steadfastness; By foreign treaties he inform'd his youth; And join'd experience to his native truth. His frugal care suppli'd the wanting throne; Frugal for that, but bounteous of his own: 'Tis easy conduct when exchequers flow; But hard the task to manage well the low: For sovereign power is too depress'd or high, When kings are forc'd to sell, or crowds to buy. Indulge one labour more, my weary Muse, For Amiel, who can Amiel's praise refuse? Of ancient race by birth, but nobler yet In his own worth, and without title great: The Sanhedrin long time as chief he rul'd, Their reason guided, and their passion cool'd; So dext'rous was he in the crown's defence, So form'd to speak a loyal nation's sense, That as their band was Israel's tribes in small, So fit was he to represent them all. Now rasher charioteers the seat ascend, Whose loose careers his steady skill commend: They, like th'unequal ruler of the day, Misguide the seasons and mistake the way; While he withdrawn at their mad labour smiles, And safe enjoys the sabbath of his toils.  These were the chief; a small but faithful band Of worthies, in the breach who dar'd to stand, And tempt th'united fury of the land. With grief they view'd such powerful engines bent, To batter down the lawful government. A numerous faction with pretended frights, In Sanhedrins to plume the regal rights. The true successor from the court remov'd: The plot, by hireling witnesses, improv'd. These ills they saw, and as their duty bound, They show'd the king the danger of the wound: That no concessions from the throne would please; But lenitives fomented the disease: That Absalom, ambitious of the crown, Was made the lure to draw the people down: That false Achitophel's pernicious hate, Had turn'd the plot to ruin church and state: The Council violent, the rabble worse: That Shimei taught Jerusalem to curse.  With all these loads of injuries opprest, And long revolving in his careful breast Th'event of things; at last his patience tir'd, Thus from his royal throne, by Heav'n inspir'd, The god-like David spoke; and awful fear His train their Maker in their Master hear.  Thus long have I by native mercy sway'd, My wrongs dissembl'd, my revenge delay'd: So willing to forgive th'offending age; So much the father did the king assuage. But now so far my clemency they slight, Th' offenders question my forgiving right. That one was made for many, they contend: But 'tis to rule, for that's a monarch's end. They call my tenderness of blood, my fear: Though manly tempers can the longest bear. Yet, since they will divert my native course, 'Tis time to shew I am not good by force. Those heap'd affronts that haughty subjects bring, Are burdens for a camel, not a king: Kings are the public pillars of the state, Born to sustain and prop the nation's weight: If my young Sampson will pretend a call To shake the column, let him share the fall: But oh that yet he would repent and live! How easy 'tis for parents to forgive! With how few tears a pardon might be won From Nature, pleading for a darling son! Poor pitied youth, by my paternal care, Rais'd up to all the heights his frame could bear: Had God ordain'd his fate for empire born, He would have giv'n his soul another turn: Gull'd with a patriot's name, whose modern sense Is one that would by law supplant his prince: The people's brave, the politician's tool; Never was patriot yet, but was a fool. Whence comes it that religion and the laws Should more be Absalom's than David's cause? His old instructor, e'er he lost his place, Was never thought endued with so much grace. Good heav'ns, how faction can a patriot paint! My rebel ever proves my people's saint; Would they impose an heir upon the throne? Let Sanhedrins be taught to give their own. A king's at least a part of government; And mine as requisite as their consent: Without my leave a future king to choose, Infers a right the present to depose; True, they petition me t'approve their choice: But Esau's hands suit ill with Jacob's voice. My pious subjects for my safety pray, Which to secure they take my pow'r away. From plots and treasons Heav'n preserve my years But save me most from my petitioners. Unsatiate as the barren womb or grave; God cannot grant so much as they can crave. What then is left but with a jealous eye To guard the small remains of royalty? The law shall still direct my peaceful sway, And the same law teach rebels to obey: Votes shall no more establish'd pow'r control, Such votes as make a part exceed the whole: No groundless clamours shall my friends remove, Nor crowds have pow'r to punish ere they prove: For gods, and god-like kings their care express, Still to defend their servants in distress. Oh that my pow'r to saving were confin'd: Why am I forc'd, like Heav'n, against my mind, To make examples of another kind? Must I at length the sword of justice draw? Oh curst effects of necessary law! How ill my fear they by my mercy scan, Beware the fury of a patient man. Law they require, let law then show her face; They could not be content to look on grace, Her hinder parts, but with a daring eye To tempt the terror of her front, and die. By their own arts 'tis righteously decreed, Those dire artificers of death shall bleed. Against themselves their witnesses will swear, Till viper-like their mother plot they tear: And suck for nutriment that bloody gore Which was their principle of life before. Their Belial with the Belzebub will fight; Thus on my foes, my foes shall do me right: Nor doubt th'event: for factious crowds engage In their first onset, all their brutal rage; Then, let 'em take an unresisted course: Retire and traverse, and delude their force: But when they stand all breathless, urge the fight, And rise upon 'em with redoubled might: For lawful pow'r is still superior found, When long driv'n back, at length it stands the ground.  He said. Th' Almighty, nodding, gave consent; And peals of thunder shook the firmament. Henceforth a series of new time began, The mighty years in long procession ran: Once more the god-like David was restor'd, And willing nations knew their lawful lord.
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,  Oh, bough of the old oak-tree; And why, when I go through the shade you throw,  Runs a shudder over me? My leaves were green as the best, I trow,  And sap ran free in my veins, But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird  A guiltless victim's pains. I bent me down to hear his sigh;  I shook with his gurgling moan, And I trembled sore when they rode away,  And left him here alone. They'd charged him with the old, old crime,  And set him fast in jail: Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,  And why does the night wind wail? He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,  And he raised his hand to the sky; But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,  And the steady tread drew nigh. Who is it rides by night, by night,  Over the moonlit road? And what is the spur that keeps the pace,  What is the galling goad? And now they beat at the prison door,  "Ho, keeper, do not stay! We are friends of him whom you hold within,  And we fain would take him away "From those who ride fast on our heels  With mind to do him wrong; They have no care for his innocence,  And the rope they bear is long." They have fooled the jailer with lying words,  They have fooled the man with lies; The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,  And the great door open flies. Now they have taken him from the jail,  And hard and fast they ride, And the leader laughs low down in his throat,  As they halt my trunk beside. Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,  And the doctor one of white, And the minister, with his oldest son,  Was curiously bedight. Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?  'Tis but a little space, And the time will come when these shall dread  The mem'ry of your face. I feel the rope against my bark,  And the weight of him in my grain, I feel in the throe of his final woe  The touch of my own last pain. And never more shall leaves come forth  On the bough that bears the ban; I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,  From the curse of a guiltless man. And ever the judge rides by, rides by,  And goes to hunt the deer, And ever another rides his soul  In the guise of a mortal fear. And ever the man he rides me hard,  And never a night stays he; For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,  On the trunk of a haunted tree.
Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,And lived in a small house near a fashionable squareCared for by servants to the number of four.Now when she died there was silence in heavenAnd silence at her end of the street.The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet —He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.The dogs were handsomely provided for,But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,And the footman sat upon the dining-tableHolding the second housemaid on his knees —Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.
The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn. When evening quickens faintly in the street, Wakening the appetites of life in some And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript, I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he at the end of the street, And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."
Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them, Rode across the hills and broke them — The barren New England hills — Riding to hounds Over the cow-pasture. Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked And danced all the modern dances; And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it, But they knew that it was modern. Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law.
Much suspected by me, Nothing proved can be, Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.
Oh Fortune, thy wresting wavering state Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit, Whose witness this present prison late Could bear, where once was joy’s loan quit. Thou causedst the guilty to be loosed From bands where innocents were inclosed, And caused the guiltless to be reserved, And freed those that death had well deserved. But all herein can be nothing wrought, So God send to my foes all they have thought.
No crooked leg, no bleared eye, No part deformed out of kind, Nor yet so ugly half can be As is the inward suspicious mind.
The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy; For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb, Which should not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web. But clouds of joys untried do cloak aspiring minds, Which turn to rain of late repent by changed course of winds. The top of hope supposed the root upreared shall be, And fruitless all their grafted guile, as shortly ye shall see. The dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds. The daughter of debate that discord aye doth sow Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know. No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port; Our realm brooks not seditious sects, let them elsewhere resort. My rusty sword through rest shall first his edge employ To poll their tops that seek such change or gape for future joy.
Never think you fortune can bear the sway Where virtue’s force can cause her to obey.
I grieve and dare not show my discontent, I love and yet am forced to seem to hate, I do, yet dare not say I ever meant, I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate. I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned, Since from myself another self I turned. My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done. His too familiar care doth make me rue it. No means I find to rid him from my breast, Till by the end of things it be supprest. Some gentler passion slide into my mind, For I am soft and made of melting snow; Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind. Let me or float or sink, be high or low. Or let me live with some more sweet content, Or die and so forget what love ere meant.
I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair, Borne, like a vapor, on the summer air; I see her tripping where the bright streams play, Happy as the daisies that dance on her way. Many were the wild notes her merry voice would pour. Many were the blithe birds that warbled them o’er: Oh! I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair, Floating, like a vapor, on the soft summer air. I long for Jeanie with the daydawn smile, Radiant in gladness, warm with winning guile; I hear her melodies, like joys gone by, Sighing round my heart o’er the fond hopes that die:— Sighing like the night wind and sobbing like the rain,— Wailing for the lost one that comes not again: Oh! I long for Jeanie, and my heart bows low, Never more to find her where the bright waters flow. I sigh for Jeanie, but her light form strayed Far from the fond hearts round her native glade; Her smiles have vanished and her sweet songs flown, Flitting like the dreams that have cheered us and gone. Now the nodding wild flowers may wither on the shore While her gentle fingers will cull them no more: Oh! I sigh for Jeanie with the light brown hair, Floating, like a vapor, on the soft summer air.
I came from Alabama wid my ban jo on my knee, I’m g’wan to Louisiana, My true love for to see, It raind all night the day I left The weather it was dry, The sun so hot I frose to death Susanna dont you cry. Oh! Susanna Oh! dont you cry for me I’ve come from Alabama wid mi ban jo on my knee. I jumped aboard de telegraph, And trabbelled down de riber, De Lectric fluid magnified, And Killed five Hundred Nigger De bullgine buste, de horse run off, I realy thought I’d die; I shut my eyes to hold my breath, Susana, dont you cry. Oh! Susana Oh! dont you cry for me I’ve come from Alabama wid mi ban jo on my knee. I had a dream de odder night, When ebery ting was still; I thought I saw Susana, A coming down de hill. The buckwheat cake war in her mouth, The tear was in her eye, Says I, im coming from de South, Susana, dont you cry. Oh! Susana Oh! dont you cry for me I’ve come from Alabama wid mi ban jo on my knee. I soon will be in New Orleans, And den I’ll look all round, And when I find Susana, I’ll fall upon the ground. But if I do not find her, Dis darkie ’l surely die, And when I’m dead and buried, Susana, dont you cry. Oh! Susana Oh! dont you cry for me I’ve come from Alabama wid mi ban jo on my knee.
Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay, Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away, Gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low: I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.” Why do I weep when my heart should feel no pain Why do I sigh that my friends come not again, Grieving for forms Now departed long a go? I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low: I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.” Where are the hearts once so happy and so free? The children so dear that I held upon my knee, Gone to the shore where my soul has longed to go. I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low: I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.”
Way down upon de Swanee ribber, Far, far away, Dere’s wha my heart is turning ebber, Dere’s wha de old folks stay. All up and down de whole creation, Sadly I roam, Still longing for de old plantation, And for de old folks at home. All de world am sad and dreary, Ebry where I roam, Oh! darkeys how my heart grows weary, Far from de old folks at home. All round de little farm I wandered When I was young, Den many happy days I squandered, Many de songs I sung. When I was playing wid my brudder Happy was I—. Oh! take me to my kind old mudder, Dere let me live and die. All de world am sad and dreary, Ebry where I roam, Oh! darkeys how my heart grows weary, Far from de old folks at home. One little hut among de bushes, One dat I love, Still sadly to my mem’ry rushes, No matter where I rove When will I see de bees a humming All round de comb? When will I hear de banjo tumming Down in my good old home? All de world am sad and dreary, Ebry where I roam, Oh! darkeys how my heart grows weary, Far from de old folks at home.
When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy's been swinging them. But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. But I was going to say when Truth broke in With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm I should prefer to have some boy bend them As he went out and in to fetch the cows— Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father's trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be. It's when I'm weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig's having lashed across it open. I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better. I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
This saying good-by on the edge of the dark And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse. (If certain it wouldn't be idle to call I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall And warn them away with a stick for a gun.) I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm. "How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below." I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an ax— Maples and birches and tamaracks. I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard's arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God.
“And if I did, what then? Are you aggriev’d therefore? The sea hath fish for every man, And what would you have more?” Thus did my mistress once, Amaze my mind with doubt; And popp’d a question for the nonce To beat my brains about. Whereto I thus replied: “Each fisherman can wish That all the seas at every tide Were his alone to fish. “And so did I (in vain) But since it may not be, Let such fish there as find the gain, And leave the loss for me. “And with such luck and loss I will content myself, Till tides of turning time may toss Such fishers on the shelf. “And when they stick on sands, That every man may see, Then will I laugh and clap my hands, As they do now at me.”
Fie pleasure, fie! thou cloyest me with delight, Thou fill’st my mouth with sweetmeats overmuch; I wallow still in joy both day and night: I deem, I dream, I do, I taste, I touch, No thing but all that smells of perfect bliss; Fie pleasure, fie! I cannot like of this. To taste (sometimes) a bait of bitter gall, To drink a draught of soür ale (some season) To eat brown bread with homely hands in hall, Doth much increase men’s appetites, by reason, And makes the sweet more sugar’d that ensues, Since minds of men do still seek after news. The pamper’d horse is seldom seen in breath, Whose manger makes his grace (oftimes) to melt; The crammed fowl comes quickly to his death; Such colds they catch in hottest haps that swelt; And I (much like) in pleasure scawled still, Do fear to starve although I feed my fill. It might suffice that Love hath built his bower Between my lady’s lively shining eyes; It were enough that beauty’s fading flower Grows ever fresh with her in heavenly wise; It had been well that she were fair of face, And yet not rob all other dames of grace. To muse in mind, how wise, how fair, how good, How brave, how frank, how courteous, and how true My lady is, doth but inflame my blood With humours such as bid my health adieu; Since hap always when it is clomb on high, Doth fall full low, though erst it reach’d the sky. Lo, pleasure, lo! lo thus I lead a life That laughs for joy, and trembleth oft for dread; Thy pangs are such as call for change’s knife To cut the twist, or else to stretch the thread, Which holds yfeer the bundle of my bliss: Fie, pleasure, fie! I dare not trust to this.
(excerpt) O knights, O squires, O gentle bloods yborn, You were not born all only for yourselves: Your country claims some part of all your pains. There should you live, and therein should you toil To hold up right and banish cruel wrong, To help the poor, to bridle back the rich, To punish vice, and virtue to advance, To see God serv’d and Belzebub suppres’d. You should not trust lieutenants in your room, And let them sway the sceptre of your charge, Whiles you, meanwhile, know scarcely what is done, Nor yet can yield accompt if you were call’d. The stately lord, which wonted was to keep A court at home, is now come up to court, And leaves the country for a common prey To pilling, polling, bribing, and deceit (All which his presence might have pacified, Or else have made offenders smell the smoke). And now the youth which might have served him In comely wise, with country clothes yclad, And yet thereby been able to prefer Unto the prince, and there to seek advance, Is fain to sell his lands for courtly clouts, Or else sits still, and liveth like a lout (Yet of these two the last fault is the less). And so those imps which might in time have sprung Aloft, good lord, and serv’d to shield the state, Are either nipp’d with such untimely frosts, Or else grow crook’d, because they be not proynd.  ... EPILOGUS Alas, my lord, my haste was all too hot, I shut my glass before you gaz’d your fill, And, at a glimpse, my silly self have spied A stranger troop than any yet were seen. Behold, my lord, what monsters muster here, With angel’s face, and harmful hellish hearts, With smiling looks, and deep deceitful thoughts, With tender skins, and stony cruel minds, With stealing steps, yet forward feet to fraud. Behold, behold, they never stand content, With God, with kind, with any help of art, But curl their locks with bodkins and with braids, But dye their hair with sundry subtle sleights, But paint and slick till fairest face be foul, But bumbast, bolster, frizzle, and perfume. They mar with musk the balm which nature made And dig for death in delicatest dishes. The younger sort come piping on apace, In whistles made of fine enticing wood, Till they have caught the birds for whom they birded. The elder sort go stately stalking on, And on their backs they bear both land and fee, Castles and towers, revenues and receipts, Lordships and manors, fines, yea, farms and all. What should these be? Speak you, my lovely lord. They be not men: for why? they have no beards. They be no boys, which wear such side long gowns. They be no gods, for all their gallant gloss. They be no devils, I trow, which seem so saintish. What be they? women? masking in men’s weeds? With Dutchkin doublets, and with jerkins jagg’d? With Spanish spangs, and ruffs fet out of France, With high-copp’d hats, and feathers flaunt-a-flaunt? They be so sure, even wo to men indeed. Nay then, my lord, let shut the glass apace, High time it were for my poor muse to wink, Since all the hands, all paper, pen, and ink, Which ever yet this wretched world possess’d Cannot describe this sex in colours due! No, no, my lord, we gazed have enough; And I too much, God pardon me therefore. Better look off, than look an ace too far; And better mum, than meddle overmuch. But if my glass do like my lovely lord, We will espy, some sunny summer’s day, To look again, and see some seemly sights. Meanwhile, my Muse right humbly doth beseech, That my good lord accept this vent’rous verse, Until my brains may better stuff devise.
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain, Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid, And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed, Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease, Seats of my youth, when every sport could please, How often have I loitered o'er thy green, Where humble happiness endeared each scene! How often have I paused on every charm, The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm, The never-failing brook, the busy mill, The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill, The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade, For talking age and whispering lovers made! How often have I blest the coming day, When toil remitting lent its turn to play, And all the village train, from labour free, Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree, While many a pastime circled in the shade, The young contending as the old surveyed; And many a gambol frolicked o'er the ground, And slights of art and feats of strength went round; And still as each repeated pleasure tired, Succeeding sports the mirthful band inspired; The dancing pair that simply sought renown By holding out to tire each other down; The swain mistrustless of his smutted face, While secret laughter tittered round the place; The bashful virgin's side-long looks of love, The matron's glance that would those looks reprove! These were thy charms, sweet village; sports like these, With sweet succession, taught even toil to please; These round thy bowers their chearful influence shed, These were thy charms—But all these charms are fled.  Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green: One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain; No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But, choaked with sedges, works its weedy way; Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest; Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies, And tires their echoes with unvaried cries. Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all, And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall; And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand, Far, far away, thy children leave the land.  Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay: Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.  A time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man; For him light labour spread her wholesome store, Just gave what life required, but gave no more: His best companions, innocence and health; And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.  But times are altered; trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose; And every want to oppulence allied, And every pang that folly pays to pride. Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom, Those calm desires that asked but little room, Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene, Lived in each look, and brightened all the green; These, far departing seek a kinder shore, And rural mirth and manners are no more.  Sweet Auburn! parent of the blissful hour, Thy glades forlorn confess the tyrant's power. Here as I take my solitary rounds, Amidst thy tangling walks, and ruined grounds, And, many a year elapsed, return to view Where once the cottage stood, the hawthorn grew, Remembrance wakes with all her busy train, Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.  In all my wanderings round this world of care, In all my griefs—and God has given my share— I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown, Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down; To husband out life's taper at the close, And keep the flame from wasting by repose. I still had hopes, for pride attends us still, Amidst the swains to shew my book-learned skill, Around my fire an evening groupe to draw, And tell of all I felt, and all I saw; And, as an hare whom hounds and horns pursue, Pants to the place from whence at first she flew, I still had hopes, my long vexations past, Here to return—and die at home at last.  O blest retirement, friend to life's decline, Retreats from care that never must be mine, How happy he who crowns, in shades like these A youth of labour with an age of ease; Who quits a world where strong temptations try, And, since 'tis hard to combat, learns to fly! For him no wretches, born to work and weep, Explore the mine, or tempt the dangerous deep; No surly porter stands in guilty state To spurn imploring famine from the gate, But on he moves to meet his latter end, Angels around befriending virtue's friend; Bends to the grave with unperceived decay, While resignation gently slopes the way; And, all his prospects brightening to the last, His Heaven commences ere the world be past!  Sweet was the sound, when oft at evening's close, Up yonder hill the village murmur rose; There, as I past with careless steps and slow, The mingling notes came soften'd from below; The swain responsive as the milk-maid sung, The sober herd that lowed to meet their young, The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool, The playful children just let loose from school, The watch-dog's voice that bayed the whispering wind, And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind, These all in sweet confusion sought the shade, And filled each pause the nightingale had made. But now the sounds of population fail, No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale, No busy steps the grass-grown foot-way tread, For all the bloomy flush of life is fled. All but yon widowed, solitary thing That feebly bends beside the plashy spring; She, wretched matron, forced in age, for bread, To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread, To pick her wintry faggot from the thorn, To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn; She only left of all the harmless train, The sad historian of the pensive plain.  Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled, And still where many a garden-flower grows wild; There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose, The village preacher's modest mansion rose. A man he was, to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year; Remote from towns he ran his godly race, Nor e'er had changed, nor wished to change his place; Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power, By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour; Far other aims his heart had learned to prize, More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise. His house was known to all the vagrant train, He chid their wanderings but relieved their pain; The long-remembered beggar was his guest, Whose beard descending swept his aged breast; The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allowed; The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, Sate by his fire, and talked the night away; Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done, Shouldered his crutch, and shewed how fields were won. Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow, And quite forgot their vices in their woe; Careless their merits, or their faults to scan, His pity gave ere charity began.  Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride, And even his failings leaned to Virtue's side; But in his duty prompt at every call, He watched and wept, he prayed and felt, for all. And, as a bird each fond endearment tries, To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies; He tried each art, reproved each dull delay, Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.  Beside the bed where parting life was layed, And sorrow, guilt, and pain, by turns, dismayed The reverend champion stood. At his control Despair and anguish fled the struggling soul; Comfort came down the trembling wretch to raise, And his last faltering accents whispered praise.  At church, with meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorned the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray. The service past, around the pious man, With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran; Even children followed, with endearing wile, And plucked his gown, to share the good man's smile. His ready smile a parent's warmth exprest, Their welfare pleased him, and their cares distrest: To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given, But all his serious thoughts had rest in Heaven. As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form, Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm, Tho' round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.  Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way, With blossomed furze unprofitably gay, There, in his noisy mansion, skill'd to rule, The village master taught his little school; A man severe he was, and stern to view, I knew him well, and every truant knew; Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace The day's disasters in his morning face; Full well they laughed, with counterfeited glee, At all his jokes, for many a joke had he: Full well the busy whisper circling round, Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned; Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault; The village all declared how much he knew; 'Twas certain he could write, and cypher too; Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage, And ev'n the story ran that he could gauge. In arguing too, the parson owned his skill, For even tho' vanquished, he could argue still; While words of learned length and thundering sound, Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around; And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew.  But past is all his fame. The very spot Where many a time he triumphed, is forgot. Near yonder thorn, that lifts its head on high, Where once the sign-post caught the passing eye, Low lies that house where nut-brown draughts inspired, Where grey-beard mirth and smiling toil retired, Where village statesmen talked with looks profound, And news much older than their ale went round. Imagination fondly stoops to trace The parlour splendours of that festive place; The white-washed wall, the nicely sanded floor, The varnished clock that clicked behind the door; The chest contrived a double debt to pay, A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day; The pictures placed for ornament and use, The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose; The hearth, except when winter chill'd the day, With aspen boughs, and flowers, and fennel gay; While broken tea-cups, wisely kept for shew, Ranged o'er the chimney, glistened in a row.  Vain transitory splendours! Could not all Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall! Obscure it sinks, nor shall it more impart An hour's importance to the poor man's heart; Thither no more the peasant shall repair To sweet oblivion of his daily care; No more the farmer's news, the barber's tale, No more the woodman's ballad shall prevail; No more the smith his dusky brow shall clear, Relax his ponderous strength, and lean to hear; The host himself no longer shall be found Careful to see the mantling bliss go round; Nor the coy maid, half willing to be prest, Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the rest.  Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain, These simple blessings of the lowly train; To me more dear, congenial to my heart, One native charm, than all the gloss of art; Spontaneous joys, where Nature has its play, The soul adopts, and owns their first-born sway; Lightly they frolic o'er the vacant mind, Unenvied, unmolested, unconfined. But the long pomp, the midnight masquerade, With all the freaks of wanton wealth arrayed, In these, ere triflers half their wish obtain, The toiling pleasure sickens into pain; And, even while fashion's brightest arts decoy, The heart distrusting asks, if this be joy.  Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen who survey The rich man's joys encrease, the poor's decay, 'Tis yours to judge, how wide the limits stand Between a splendid and a happy land. Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore, And shouting Folly hails them from her shore; Hoards even beyond the miser's wish abound, And rich men flock from all the world around. Yet count our gains. This wealth is but a name That leaves our useful products still the same. Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride Takes up a space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds: The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth, Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth; His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green: Around the world each needful product flies, For all the luxuries the world supplies. While thus the land adorned for pleasure, all In barren splendour feebly waits the fall.  As some fair female unadorned and plain, Secure to please while youth confirms her reign, Slights every borrowed charm that dress supplies, Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes. But when those charms are past, for charms are frail, When time advances, and when lovers fail, She then shines forth, solicitous to bless, In all the glaring impotence of dress. Thus fares the land, by luxury betrayed: In nature's simplest charms at first arrayed; But verging to decline, its splendours rise, Its vistas strike, its palaces surprize; While, scourged by famine from the smiling land, The mournful peasant leads his humble band; And while he sinks, without one arm to save, The country blooms—a garden, and a grave.  Where then, ah where, shall poverty reside, To scape the pressure of contiguous pride? If to some common's fenceless limits strayed, He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade, Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide, And ev'n the bare-worn common is denied.  If to the city sped—What waits him there? To see profusion that he must not share; To see ten thousand baneful arts combined To pamper luxury, and thin mankind; To see those joys the sons of pleasure know, Extorted from his fellow-creature's woe. Here while the courtier glitters in brocade, There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign, Here, richly deckt, admits the gorgeous train; Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy! Sure these denote one universal joy! Are these thy serious thoughts?—Ah, turn thine eyes Where the poor houseless shivering female lies. She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest, Has wept at tales of innocence distrest; Her modest looks the cottage might adorn Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn: Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled, Near her betrayer's door she lays her head, And, pinch'd with cold, and shrinking from the shower, With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour When idly first, ambitious of the town, She left her wheel and robes of country brown.  Do thine, sweet Auburn, thine, the loveliest train, Do thy fair tribes participate her pain? Even now, perhaps, by cold and hunger led, At proud men's doors they ask a little bread!  Ah, no. To distant climes, a dreary scene, Where half the convex world intrudes between, Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go, Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe. Far different there from all that charm'd before, The various terrors of that horrid shore; Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray, And fiercely shed intolerable day; Those matted woods where birds forget to sing, But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling; Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned, Where the dark scorpion gathers death around; Where at each step the stranger fears to wake The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake; Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey, And savage men, more murderous still than they; While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies, Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies. Far different these from every former scene, The cooling brook, the grassy vested green, The breezy covert of the warbling grove, That only shelter'd thefts of harmless love.  Good Heaven! what sorrows gloom'd that parting day, That called them from their native walks away; When the poor exiles, every pleasure past, Hung round their bowers, and fondly looked their last, And took a long farewell, and wished in vain For seats like these beyond the western main; And shuddering still to face the distant deep, Returned and wept, and still returned to weep. The good old sire the first prepared to go To new found worlds, and wept for others woe. But for himself, in conscious virtue brave, He only wished for worlds beyond the grave. His lovely daughter, lovelier in her tears, The fond companion of his helpless years, Silent went next, neglectful of her charms, And left a lover's for a father's arms. With louder plaints the mother spoke her woes, And blessed the cot where every pleasure rose; And kist her thoughtless babes with many a tear, And claspt them close, in sorrow doubly dear; Whilst her fond husband strove to lend relief In all the silent manliness of grief.  O luxury! thou curst by Heaven's decree, How ill exchanged are things like these for thee! How do thy potions, with insidious joy, Diffuse their pleasures only to destroy! Kingdoms, by thee, to sickly greatness grown, Boast of a florid vigour not their own; At every draught more large and large they grow, A bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe; Till sapped their strength, and every part unsound, Down, down they sink, and spread a ruin round.  Even now the devastation is begun, And half the business of destruction done; Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand, I see the rural virtues leave the land: Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail, That idly waiting flaps with every gale, Downward they move, a melancholy band, Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand. Contented toil, and hospitable care, And kind connubial tenderness, are there; And piety with wishes placed above, And steady loyalty, and faithful love. And thou, sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid, Still first to fly where sensual joys invade; Unfit in these degenerate times of shame, To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame; Dear charming nymph, neglected and decried, My shame in crowds, my solitary pride; Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe, That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st me so; Thou guide by which the nobler arts excell, Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well! Farewell, and O where'er thy voice be tried, On Torno's cliffs, or Pambamarca's side, Whether were equinoctial fervours glow, Or winter wraps the polar world in snow, Still let thy voice, prevailing over time, Redress the rigours of the inclement clime; Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain, Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain; Teach him, that states of native strength possest, Tho' very poor, may still be very blest; That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweeps the labour'd mole away; While self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the billows and the sky.
I.1. "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait, Tho' fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing They mock the air with idle state. Helm, nor hauberk's twisted mail, Nor even thy virtues, tyrant, shall avail To save thy secret soul from nightly fears, From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!"  Such were the sounds, that o'er the crested pride Of the first Edward scatter'd wild dismay, As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side He wound with toilsome march his long array. Stout Glo'ster stood aghast in speechless trance; To arms! cried Mortimer, and couch'd his quiv'ring lance. I.2. On a rock, whose haughty brow Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood, Rob'd in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the poet stood; (Loose his beard, and hoary hair Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air) And with a master's hand, and prophet's fire, Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre;  "Hark, how each giant-oak, and desert cave, Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath! O'er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave, Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe; Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal day, To high-born Hoel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay. I.3. "Cold is Cadwallo's tongue, That hush'd the stormy main; Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed: Mountains, ye mourn in vain Modred, whose magic song Made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topp'd head. On dreary Arvon's shore they lie, Smear'd with gore, and ghastly pale: Far, far aloof th' affrighted ravens sail; The famish'd eagle screams, and passes by.  Dear lost companions of my tuneful art, Dear, as the light that visits these sad eyes, Dear, as the ruddy drops that warm my heart, Ye died amidst your dying country's cries—  No more I weep. They do not sleep. On yonder cliffs, a griesly band, I see them sit, they linger yet, Avengers of their native land: With me in dreadful harmony they join, And weave with bloody hands the tissue of thy line:— II.1. "'Weave the warp, and weave the woof, The winding sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room, and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death, thro' Berkley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonising King! She-Wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee be born, who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of Heav'n. What terrors round him wait! Amazement in his van, with Flight combin'd, And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind. II.2. "'Mighty victor, mighty lord, Low on his funeral couch he lies! No pitying heart, no eye, afford A tear to grace his obsequies.  Is the Sable Warrior fled? Thy son is gone. He rests among the dead. The swarm, that in thy noon-tide beam were born? Gone to salute the rising Morn. Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows, While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind's sway, That, hush'd in grim repose, expects his evening prey. II.3. "'Fill high the sparkling bowl, The rich repast prepare; Reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast. Close by the regal chair Fell Thirst and Famine scowl A baleful smile upon their baffled guest.  Heard ye the din of battle bray, Lance to lance, and horse to horse? Long years of havoc urge their destin'd course And thro' the kindred squadrons mow their way. Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, With many a foul and midnight murther fed, Revere his consort's faith, his father's fame, And spare the meek usurper's holy head. Above, below, the rose of snow, Twined with her blushing foe, we spread: The bristled Boar in infant-gore Wallows beneath the thorny shade. Now, brothers, bending o'er th' accursed loom Stamp we our vengeance deep, and ratify his doom. III.1. "'Edward, lo! to sudden fate (Weave we the woof. The thread is spun) Half of thy heart we consecrate. (The web is wove. The work is done.)'  Stay, oh stay! nor thus forlorn Leave me unbless'd, unpitied, here to mourn! In yon bright track, that fires the western skies! They melt, they vanish from my eyes.  But oh! what solemn scenes on Snowdon's height Descending slow their glitt'ring skirts unroll? Visions of glory, spare my aching sight, Ye unborn Ages, crowd not on my soul! No more our long-lost Arthur we bewail. All-hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia's issue, hail! III.2. "Girt with many a baron bold Sublime their starry fronts they rear; And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old In bearded majesty appear. In the midst a form divine! Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line; Her lion-port, her awe-commanding face, Attemper'd sweet to virgin-grace. What strings symphonious tremble in the air, What strings of vocal transport round her play! Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear; They breathe a soul to animate thy clay. Bright Rapture calls, and soaring, as she sings, Waves in the eye of Heav'n her many-colour'd wings. III.3. "The verse adorn again Fierce War, and faithful Love, And Truth severe, by fairy Fiction drest. In buskin'd measures move Pale Grief, and pleasing Pain, With Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast. A voice, as of the cherub-choir, Gales from blooming Eden bear; And distant warblings lessen on my ear, That lost in long futurity expire.  Fond impious man, think'st thou, yon sanguine cloud, Rais'd by thy breath, has quench'd the orb of day? To-morrow he repairs the golden flood, And warms the nations with redoubled ray.  Enough for me: with joy I see The different doom our Fates assign. Be thine Despair, and scept'red Care, To triumph, and to die, are mine."  He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height  Deep in the roaring tide he plung'd to endless night.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r, Molest her ancient solitary reign. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke! Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise, Where thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death? Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd, Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre. But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. Th' applause of list'ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes, Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind, The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame. Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind? On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires. For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, "Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn. "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by. "Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love. "One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill, Along the heath and near his fav'rite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he; "The next with dirges due in sad array Slow thro' the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay, Grav'd on the stone beneath yon aged thorn." THE EPITAPH Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heav'n did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear, He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God.
(FROM THE NORSE TONGUE) Now the storm begins to lower, (Haste, the loom of Hell prepare.) Iron-sleet of arrowy shower Hurtles in the darken'd air. Glitt'ring lances are the loom, Where the dusky warp we strain, Weaving many a soldier's doom, Orkney's woe, and Randver's bane. See the grisly texture grow, ('Tis of human entrails made,) And the weights, that play below, Each a gasping warrior's head. Shafts for shuttles, dipt in gore, Shoot the trembling cords along. Sword, that once a monarch bore, Keep the tissue close and strong. Mista black, terrific maid, Sangrida, and Hilda see, Join the wayward work to aid: Tis the woof of victory. Ere the ruddy sun be set, Pikes must shiver, javelins sing, Blade with clatt'ring buckler meet, Hauberk crash, and helmet ring. (Weave the crimson web of war) Let us go, and let us fly, Where our friends the conflict share, Where they triumph, where they die. As the paths of fate we tread, Wading thro' th' ensanguin'd field: Gondula, and Geira, spread O'er the youthful king your shield. We the reins to slaughter give, Ours to kill, and ours to spare: Spite of danger he shall live. (Weave the crimson web of war.) They, whom once the desert-beach Pent within its bleak domain, Soon their ample sway shall stretch O'er the plenty of the plain. Low the dauntless earl is laid Gor'd with many a gaping wound: Fate demands a nobler head; Soon a king shall bite the ground. Long his loss shall Erin weep, Ne'er again his likeness see; Long her strains in sorrow steep, Strains of immortality. Horror covers all the heath, Clouds of carnage blot the sun. Sisters, weave the web of death; Sisters, cease, the work is done. Hail the task, and hail the hands! Songs of joy and triumph sing! Joy to the victorious bands; Triumph to the younger king. Mortal, thou that hear'st the tale, Learn the tenor of our song. Scotland thro' each winding vale  Far and wide the notes prolong. Sisters, hence with spurs of speed: Each her thund'ring falchion wield; Each bestride her sable steed. Hurry, hurry to the field.
I, with whose colours Myra dress’d her head, I, that ware posies of her own hand-making, I, that mine own name in the chimneys read By Myra finely wrought ere I was waking: Must I look on, in hope time coming may With change bring back my turn again to play? I, that on Sunday at the church-stile found A garland sweet, with true-love knots in flowers, Which I to wear about mine arm was bound, That each of us might know that all was ours: Must I now lead an idle life in wishes, And follow Cupid for his loaves and fishes? I, that did wear the ring her mother left, I, for whose love she gloried to be blamed, I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft, I, who did make her blush when I was named: Must I lose ring, flowers, blush, theft, and go naked, Watching with sighs till dead love be awaked? I, that, when drowsy Argus fell asleep, Like jealousy o’erwatched with desire, Was even warned modesty to keep, While her breath, speaking, kindled Nature’s fire: Must I look on a-cold, while others warm them? Do Vulcan’s brothers in such fine nets arm them? Was it for this that I might Myra see Washing the water with her beauties white? Yet would she never write her love to me. Thinks wit of change, while thoughts are in delight? Mad girls must safely love as they may leave; No man can print a kiss: lines may deceive.
It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home, A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind, An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind. It don’t make any differunce how rich ye get t’ be, How much yer chairs an’ tables cost, how great yer luxury; It ain’t home t’ ye, though it be the palace of a king, Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything. Home ain’t a place that gold can buy or get up in a minute; Afore it’s home there’s got t’ be a heap o’ livin’ in it; Within the walls there’s got t’ be some babies born, and then Right there ye’ve got t’ bring ‘em up t’ women good, an’ men; And gradjerly, as time goes on, ye find ye wouldn’t part With anything they ever used—they’ve grown into yer heart: The old high chairs, the playthings, too, the little shoes they wore Ye hoard; an’ if ye could ye’d keep the thumbmarks on the door. Ye’ve got t’ weep t’ make it home, ye’ve got t’ sit an’ sigh An’ watch beside a loved one’s bed, an’ know that Death is nigh; An’ in the stillness o’ the night t’ see Death’s angel come, An’ close the eyes o’ her that smiled, an’ leave her sweet voice dumb. Fer these are scenes that grip the heart, an’ when yer tears are dried, Ye find the home is dearer than it was, an’ sanctified; An’ tuggin’ at ye always are the pleasant memories O’ her that was an’ is no more—ye can’t escape from these. Ye’ve got t’ sing an’ dance fer years, ye’ve got t’ romp an’ play, An’ learn t’ love the things ye have by usin’ ’em each day; Even the roses ’round the porch must blossom year by year Afore they ’come a part o’ ye, suggestin’ someone dear Who used t’ love ’em long ago, an’ trained ’em jes’ t’ run The way they do, so’s they would get the early mornin’ sun; Ye’ve got t’ love each brick an’ stone from cellar up t’ dome: It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done  But he with a chuckle replied That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one  Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried. So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin  On his face. If he worried he hid it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing  That couldn’t be done, and he did it! Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;  At least no one ever has done it;” But he took off his coat and he took off his hat  And the first thing we knew he’d begun it. With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,  Without any doubting or quiddit, He started to sing as he tackled the thing  That couldn’t be done, and he did it. There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,  There are thousands to prophesy failure, There are thousands to point out to you one by one,  The dangers that wait to assail you. But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,  Just take off your coat and go to it; Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing  That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
His eye was wild and his face was taut with anger and hate and rage, And the things he muttered were much too strong for the ink of the printed page. I found him there when the dusk came down, in his golf clothes still was he, And his clubs were strewn around his feet as he told his grief to me: “I’d an easy five for a seventy-nine—in sight of the golden goal— An easy five and I took an eight—an eight on the eighteenth hole! “I’ve dreamed my dreams of the ‘seventy men,’ and I’ve worked year after year, I have vowed I would stand with the chosen few ere the end of my golf career; I’ve cherished the thought of a seventy score, and the days have come and gone And I’ve never been close to the golden goal my heart was set upon. But today I stood on the eighteenth tee and counted that score of mine, And my pulses raced with the thrill of joy—I’d a five for seventy-nine! “I can kick the ball from the eighteenth tee and get this hole in five, Bit I took the wood and I tried to cross that ditch with a mighty drive—” Let us end the quotes, it is best for all to imagine his language rich, But he topped that ball, as we often do, and the pill stopped in the ditch. His third was short and his fourth was bad and his fifth was off the line, And he took an eight on the eighteenth hole with a five for a seventy-nine. I gathered his clubs and I took his arm and alone in the locker room I left him sitting upon the bench, a picture of grief and gloom; And the last man came and took his shower and hurried upon his way, But still he sat with his head bowed down like one with a mind astray, And he counted his score card o’er and o’er and muttered this doleful whine: “I took an eight on the eighteenth hole, with a five for a seventy-nine!”
How much grit do you think you’ve got? Can you quit a thing that you like a lot? You may talk of pluck; it’s an easy word, And where’er you go it is often heard; But can you tell to a jot or guess Just how much courage you now possess? You may stand to trouble and keep your grin, But have you tackled self-discipline? Have you ever issued commands to you To quit the things that you like to do, And then, when tempted and sorely swayed, Those rigid orders have you obeyed? Don’t boast of your grit till you’ve tried it out, Nor prate to men of your courage stout, For it’s easy enough to retain a grin In the face of a fight there’s a chance to win, But the sort of grit that is good to own Is the stuff you need when you’re all alone. How much grit do you think you’ve got? Can you turn from joys that you like a lot? Have you ever tested yourself to know How far with yourself your will can go? If you want to know if you have grit, Just pick out a joy that you like, and quit. It’s bully sport and it’s open fight; It will keep you busy both day and night; For the toughest kind of a game you’ll find Is to make your body obey your mind. And you never will know what is meant by grit Unless there’s something you’ve tried to quit.
Only a dad, with a tired face, Coming home from the daily race, Bringing little of gold or fame, To show how well he has played the game, But glad in his heart that his own rejoice To see him come, and to hear his voice. Only a dad, with a brood of four, One of ten million men or more. Plodding along in the daily strife, Bearing the whips and the scorns of life, With never a whimper of pain or hate, For the sake of those who at home await. Only a dad, neither rich nor proud, Merely one of the surging crowdToiling, striving from day to day, Facing whatever may come his way, Silent, whenever the harsh condemn, And bearing it all for the love of them. Only a dad, but he gives his allTo smooth the way for his children small, Doing, with courage stern and grim, The deeds that his father did for him. This is the line that for him I pen, Only a dad, but the best of men.
When you’re up against a trouble, Meet it squarely, face to face; Lift your chin and set your shoulders, Plant your feet and take a brace. When it’s vain to try to dodge it, Do the best that you can do; You may fail, but you may conquer, See it through! Black may be the clouds about you And your future may seem grim, But don’t let your nerve desert you; Keep yourself in fighting trim. If the worst is bound to happen, Spite of all that you can do, Running from it will not save you, See it through! Even hope may seem but futile, When with troubles you’re beset, But remember you are facing Just what other men have met. You may fail, but fall still fighting; Don’t give up, whate’er you do; Eyes front, head high to the finish. See it through!
Gettin’ together to smile an’ rejoice, An’ eatin’ an’ laughin’ with folks of your choice; An’ kissin’ the girls an’ declarin’ that they Are growin’ more beautiful day after day; Chattin’ an’ braggin’ a bit with the men, Buildin’ the old family circle again; Livin’ the wholesome an’ old-fashioned cheer, Just for awhile at the end of the year. Greetings fly fast as we crowd through the door And under the old roof we gather once more Just as we did when the youngsters were small; Mother’s a little bit grayer, that’s all. Father’s a little bit older, but still Ready to romp an’ to laugh with a will. Here we are back at the table again Tellin’ our stories as women an’ men. Bowed are our heads for a moment in prayer; Oh, but we’re grateful an’ glad to be there. Home from the east land an’ home from the west, Home with the folks that are dearest an’ best. Out of the sham of the cities afar We’ve come for a time to be just what we are. Here we can talk of ourselves an’ be frank, Forgettin’ position an’ station an’ rank. Give me the end of the year an’ its fun When most of the plannin’ an’ toilin’ is done; Bring all the wanderers home to the nest, Let me sit down with the ones I love best, Hear the old voices still ringin’ with song, See the old faces unblemished by wrong, See the old table with all of its chairs An’ I’ll put soul in my Thanksgivin’ prayers.
I’ve trod the links with many a man, And played him club for club; ’Tis scarce a year since I began And I am still a dub. But this I’ve noticed as we strayed Along the bunkered way, No one with me has ever played As he did yesterday. It makes no difference what the drive, Together as we walk, Till we up to the ball arrive, I get the same old talk: “To-day there’s something wrong with me, Just what I cannot say. Would you believe I got a three For this hole—yesterday?” I see them top and slice a shot, And fail to follow through, And with their brassies plough the lot, The very way I do. To six and seven their figures run, And then they sadly say: “I neither dubbed nor foozled one When I played—yesterday!” I have no yesterdays to count, No good work to recall; Each morning sees hope proudly mount, Each evening sees it fall. And in the locker room at night, When men discuss their play, I hear them and I wish I might Have seen them—yesterday. Oh, dear old yesterday! What store Of joys for men you hold! I’m sure there is no day that’s more Remembered or extolled. I’m off my task myself a bit, My mind has run astray; I think, perhaps, I should have writ These verses—yesterday.
I leant upon a coppice gate  When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter's dregs made desolate  The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky  Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh  Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be  The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy,  The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth  Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth  Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among  The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong  Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,  In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul  Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings  Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things  Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through  His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew  And I was unaware.
At last I entered a long dark gallery,  Catacomb-lined; and ranged at the side  Were the bodies of men from far and wide Who, motion past, were nevertheless not dead.  "The sense of waiting here strikes strong; Everyone's waiting, waiting, it seems to me;  What are you waiting for so long? —  What is to happen?" I said. "O we are waiting for one called God," said they,  "(Though by some the Will, or Force, or Laws;  And, vaguely, by some, the Ultimate Cause;) Waiting for him to see us before we are clay.  Yes; waiting, waiting, for God to know it." ...  "To know what?" questioned I. "To know how things have been going on earth and below it:  It is clear he must know some day."  I thereon asked them why. "Since he made us humble pioneers Of himself in consciousness of Life's tears, It needs no mighty prophecy To tell that what he could mindlessly show His creatures, he himself will know. "By some still close-cowled mystery We have reached feeling faster than he, But he will overtake us anon,  If the world goes on."
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not  want him for long.
Green groweth the holly, So doth the ivy. Though winter blasts blow never so high, Green groweth the holly. As the holly groweth green And never changeth hue, So I am, ever hath been, Unto my lady true. As the holly groweth green With ivy all alone When flowers cannot be seen And greenwood leaves be gone, Now unto my lady Promise to her I make, From all other only To her I me betake. Adieu, mine own lady, Adieu, my special Who hath my heart truly Be sure, and ever shall.
If love now reigned as it hath been And were rewarded as it hath sin, Noble men then would sure ensearch All ways whereby they might it reach, But envy reigneth with such disdain And causeth lovers outwardly to refrain, Which puts them to more and more Inwardly most grievous and sore. The fault in whom I cannot set, But let them tell which love doth get— To lovers I put now sure this case: Which of their loves doth get them grace? And unto them which doth it know Better than do I, I think it so.
Lusty Youth should us ensue, His merry heart shall sure all rue. For whatsoever they do him tell, It is not for him, we know it well. For they would have him his Liberty refrain And all merry company for to disdain, But I will not so whatsoever they say, But follow his mind in all that we may. How should Youth himself best use But all disdainers for to refuse? Youth has, as chief assurance, Honest Mirth with Virtue's pastance. For in them consisteth great honour, Though that disdainers would therein put error, For they do sue to get them grace All only riches to purchase. With Good Order, Counsel, and Equity, Good Lord, grant us our mansion to be! For without their good guidance Youth should fall in great mischance. For Youth is frail and prompt to do, As well vices as virtues to ensue. Wherefore by these he must be guided And Virtue's pastance must be therein used. Now unto God this prayer we make, That this rude play may well be take, And that we may our faults amend, An bliss obtain at our last end.
Though some saith that youth ruleth me,  I trust in age to tarry. God and my right and my duty,  From them I shall never vary,  Though some say that youth ruleth me. I pray you all that aged be,  How well did ye your youth carry? I think some worse, of each degree:  Therein a wager lay dare I,  Though some saith that youth ruleth me. Pastimes of youth sometime among,  None can say but necessary. I hurt no man, I do no wrong,  I love true where I did marry,  Though some saith that youth ruleth me. Then soon discuss that hence we must.  Pray we to God and Saint Mary That all amend, and here an end,  Thus saith the king, the eighth Harry,  Though some saith that youth ruleth me.
Though that men do call it dotage, Who loveth not wanteth courage; And whosoever may love get, From Venus sure he must it fet Or else from her which is her heir, And she to him must seem most fair. With eye and mind doth both agree. There is no boot: there must it be. The eye doth look and represent, But mind afformeth with full consent. Thus am I fixed without grudge: Mine eye with heart doth me so judge. Love maintaineth all noble courage. Who love disdaineth is all of the village: Such lovers—though they take pain— It were pity they should obtain, For often times where they do sue They hinder lovers that would be true. For whoso loveth should love but once. Change whoso will, I will be none.
The time of youth is to be spent But vice in it should be forfent. Pastimes there be, I nought truly, Which one may use and vice deny. And they be pleasant to God and man, Those should we covet, win who can, As feats of arms and such other Whereby activeness one may utter. Comparisons in them may lawfully be set, For thereby courage is surely out fet. Virtue it is then youth for to spend In good disports which it doth fend.
Holiness on the head, Light and perfections on the breast, Harmonious bells below, raising the dead To lead them unto life and rest: Thus are true Aarons drest. Profaneness in my head, Defects and darkness in my breast, A noise of passions ringing me for dead Unto a place where is no rest: Poor priest, thus am I drest. Only another head I have, another heart and breast, Another music, making live, not dead, Without whom I could have no rest: In him I am well drest. Christ is my only head, My alone-only heart and breast, My only music, striking me ev'n dead, That to the old man I may rest, And be in him new-drest. So, holy in my head, Perfect and light in my dear breast, My doctrine tun'd by Christ (who is not dead, But lives in me while I do rest), Come people; Aaron's drest.
A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart and cemented with tears;  Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;  No workman's tool hath touch'd the same.  A HEART alone  Is such a stone,  As nothing but  Thy pow'r doth cut.  Wherefore each part  Of my hard heart  Meets in this frame  To praise thy name.  That if I chance to hold my peace,  These stones to praise thee may not cease. Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.
I joy, dear mother, when I view Thy perfect lineaments, and hue  Both sweet and bright. Beauty in thee takes up her place, And dates her letters from thy face,  When she doth write.  A fine aspect in fit array, Neither too mean nor yet too gay,  Shows who is best. Outlandish looks may not compare, For all they either painted are,  Or else undress'd.  She on the hills which wantonly Allureth all, in hope to be  By her preferr'd, Hath kiss'd so long her painted shrines, That ev'n her face by kissing shines,  For her reward.  She in the valley is so shy Of dressing, that her hair doth lie  About her ears; While she avoids her neighbour's pride, She wholly goes on th' other side,  And nothing wears.  But, dearest mother, what those miss, The mean, thy praise and glory is  And long may be. Blessed be God, whose love it was To double-moat thee with his grace,  And none but thee.
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee O let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me. My tender age in sorrow did beginne And still with sicknesses and shame. Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine, And feel thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine, Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
Teach me, my God and King, In all things Thee to see, And what I do in anything To do it as for Thee. Not rudely, as a beast, To run into an action; But still to make Thee prepossest, And give it his perfection. A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heav'n espy. All may of Thee partake: Nothing can be so mean, Which with his tincture—"for Thy sake"— Will not grow bright and clean. A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, Makes that and th' action fine. This is the famous stone That turneth all to gold; For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for less be told.
If all the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth's living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for ten thousand ages, day and night, The human race should write, and write, and write, Till all the pens and paper were used up, And the huge inkstand was an empty cup, Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,  Sails the unshadowed main,—  The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,  And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;  Wrecked is the ship of pearl!  And every chambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,  Before thee lies revealed,— Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! Year after year beheld the silent toil  That spread his lustrous coil;  Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through,  Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,  Child of the wandering sea,  Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!  While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:— Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,  As the swift seasons roll!  Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,  Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
“Man wants but little here below” Little I ask; my wants are few;  I only wish a hut of stone, (A very plain brown stone will do,)  That I may call my own;— And close at hand is such a one, In yonder street that fronts the sun. Plain food is quite enough for me;  Three courses are as good as ten;— If Nature can subsist on three,  Thank Heaven for three. Amen! I always thought cold victual nice;— My choice would be vanilla-ice. I care not much for gold or land;—  Give me a mortgage here and there,— Some good bank-stock, some note of hand,  Or trifling railroad share,— I only ask that Fortune send A little more than I shall spend. Honors are silly toys, I know,  And titles are but empty names; I would, perhaps, be Plenipo,—  But only near St. James; I’m very sure I should not care To fill our Gubernator’s chair. Jewels are baubles; ’t is a sin  To care for such unfruitful things;— One good-sized diamond in a pin,—  Some, not so large, in rings,— A ruby, and a pearl, or so, Will do for me;—I laugh at show. My dame should dress in cheap attire;  (Good, heavy silks are never dear;)— I own perhaps I might desire  Some shawls of true Cashmere,— Some marrowy crapes of China silk, Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk. I would not have the horse I drive  So fast that folks must stop and stare; An easy gait—two forty-five—  Suits me; I do not care;— Perhaps, for just a single spurt, Some seconds less would do no hurt. Of pictures, I should like to own  Titians and Raphaels three or four,— I love so much their style and tone,  One Turner, and no more, (A landscape,—foreground golden dirt,— The sunshine painted with a squirt.) Of books but few,—some fifty score  For daily use, and bound for wear; The rest upon an upper floor;—  Some little luxury there Of red morocco’s gilded gleam And vellum rich as country cream. Busts, cameos, gems,—such things as these,  Which others often show for pride, I value for their power to please,  And selfish churls deride;— One Stradivarius, I confess, Two Meerschaums, I would fain possess. Wealth’s wasteful tricks I will not learn,  Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;— Shall not carved tables serve my turn,  But all must be of buhl? Give grasping pomp its double share,— I ask but one recumbent chair. Thus humble let me live and die,  Nor long for Midas’ golden touch; If Heaven more generous gifts deny,  I shall not miss them much,— Too grateful for the blessing lent Of simple tastes and mind content!
Oh, there are times When all this fret and tumult that we hear Do seem more stale than to the sexton’s ear  His own dull chimes.  Ding dong! ding dong! The world is in a simmer like a sea Over a pent volcano,—woe is me  All the day long!  From crib to shroud! Nurse o’er our cradles screameth lullaby, And friends in boots tramp round us as we die,  Snuffling aloud.  At morning’s call The small-voiced pug-dog welcomes in the sun, And flea-bit mongrels, wakening one by one,  Give answer all.  When evening dim Draws round us, then the lonely caterwaul, Tart solo, sour duet, and general squall,—  These are our hymn.  Women, with tongues Like polar needles, ever on the jar; Men, plugless word-spouts, whose deep fountains are  Within their lungs.  Children, with drums Strapped round them by the fond paternal ass; Peripatetics with a blade of grass  Between their thumbs.  Vagrants, whose arts Have caged some devil in their mad machine, Which grinding, squeaks, with husky groans between,  Come out by starts.  Cockneys that kill Thin horses of a Sunday,—men, with clams, Hoarse as young bisons roaring for their dams  From hill to hill.  Soldiers, with guns, Making a nuisance of the blessed air, Child-crying bellman, children in despair,  Screeching for buns.  Storms, thunders, waves! Howl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill; Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still  But in their graves.
Boston Common, December 6, 1882 during the Transit of Venus I love all sights of earth and skies, From flowers that glow to stars that shine; The comet and the penny show, All curious things, above, below, Hold each in turn my wandering eyes: I claim the Christian Pagan’s line, Humani nihil,—even so,— And is not human life divine? When soft the western breezes blow, And strolling youths meet sauntering maids, I love to watch the stirring trades Beneath the Vallombrosa shades Our much-enduring elms bestow; The vender and his rhetoric’s flow, That lambent stream of liquid lies; The bait he dangles from his line, The gudgeon and his gold-washed prize. I halt before the blazoned sign That bids me linger to admire The drama time can never tire, The little hero of the hunch, With iron arm and soul of fire, And will that works his fierce desire,— Untamed, unscared, unconquered Punch! My ear a pleasing torture finds In tones the withered sibyl grinds,— The dame sans merci’s broken strain, Whom I erewhile, perchance, have known, When Orleans filled the Bourbon throne, A siren singing by the Seine. But most I love the tube that spies The orbs celestial in their march; That shows the comet as it whisks Its tail across the planets’ disks, As if to blind their blood-shot eyes; Or wheels so close against the sun We tremble at the thought of risks Our little spinning ball may run, To pop like corn that children parch, From summer something overdone, And roll, a cinder, through the skies. Grudge not to-day the scanty fee To him who farms the firmament, To whom the Milky Way is free; Who holds the wondrous crystal key, The silent Open Sesame That Science to her sons has lent; Who takes his toll, and lifts the bar That shuts the road to sun and star. If Venus only comes to time, (And prophets say she must and shall,) To-day will hear the tinkling chime Of many a ringing silver dime, For him whose optic glass supplies The crowd with astronomic eyes,— The Galileo of the Mall. Dimly the transit morning broke; The sun seemed doubting what to do, As one who questions how to dress, And takes his doublets from the press, And halts between the old and new. Please Heaven he wear his suit of blue, Or don, at least, his ragged cloak, With rents that show the azure through! I go the patient crowd to join That round the tube my eyes discern, The last new-comer of the file, And wait, and wait, a weary while, And gape, and stretch, and shrug, and smile, (For each his place must fairly earn, Hindmost and foremost, in his turn,) Till hitching onward, pace by pace, I gain at last the envied place, And pay the white exiguous coin: The sun and I are face to face; He glares at me, I stare at him; And lo! my straining eye has found A little spot that, black and round, Lies near the crimsoned fire-orb’s rim. O blessed, beauteous evening star, Well named for her whom earth adores,— The Lady of the dove-drawn car,— I know thee in thy white simar; But veiled in black, a rayless spot, Blank as a careless scribbler’s blot, Stripped of thy robe of silvery flame,— The stolen robe that Night restores When Day has shut his golden doors,— I see thee, yet I know thee not; And canst thou call thyself the same? A black, round spot,—and that is all; And such a speck our earth would be If he who looks upon the stars Through the red atmosphere of Mars Could see our little creeping ball Across the disk of crimson crawl As I our sister planet see. And art thou, then, a world like ours, Flung from the orb that whirled our own A molten pebble from its zone? How must thy burning sands absorb The fire-waves of the blazing orb, Thy chain so short, thy path so near, Thy flame-defying creatures hear The maelstroms of the photosphere! And is thy bosom decked with flowers That steal their bloom from scalding showers? And hast thou cities, domes, and towers, And life, and love that makes it dear, And death that fills thy tribes with fear? Lost in my dream, my spirit soars Through paths the wandering angels know; My all-pervading thought explores The azure ocean’s lucent shores; I leave my mortal self below, As up the star-lit stairs I climb, And still the widening view reveals In endless rounds the circling wheels That build the horologe of time. New spheres, new suns, new systems gleam; The voice no earth-born echo hears Steals softly on my ravished ears: I hear them “singing as they shine”— A mortal’s voice dissolves my dream: My patient neighbor, next in line, Hints gently there are those who wait. O guardian of the starry gate, What coin shall pay this debt of mine? Too slight thy claim, too small the fee That bids thee turn the potent key The Tuscan’s hand has placed in thine. Forgive my own the small affront, The insult of the proffered dime; Take it, O friend, since this thy wont, But still shall faithful memory be A bankrupt debtor unto thee, And pay thee with a grateful rhyme.
I saw him once before, As he passed by the door,  And again The pavement stones resound, As he totters o’er the ground  With his cane. They say that in his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of Time  Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the Crier on his round  Through the town. But now he walks the streets, And looks at all he meets  Sad and wan, And he shakes his feeble head, That it seems as if he said,  “They are gone.” The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest  In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year  On the tomb. My grandmamma has said— Poor old lady, she is dead  Long ago— That he had a Roman nose, And his cheek was like a rose  In the snow; But now his nose is thin, And it rests upon his chin  Like a staff, And a crook is in his back, And a melancholy crack  In his laugh. I know it is a sin For me to sit and grin  At him here; But the old three-cornered hat, And the breeches, and all that,  Are so queer! And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree  In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough  Where I cling.
Not in the world of light alone, Where God has built his blazing throne, Nor yet alone in earth below, With belted seas that come and go, And endless isles of sunlit green, Is all thy Maker’s glory seen: Look in upon thy wondrous frame,— Eternal wisdom still the same! The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves Flows murmuring through its hidden caves, Whose streams of brightening purple rush, Fired with a new and livelier blush, While all their burden of decay The ebbing current steals away, And red with Nature’s flame they start From the warm fountains of the heart. No rest that throbbing slave may ask, Forever quivering o’er his task, While far and wide a crimson jet Leaps forth to fill the woven net Which in unnumbered crossing tides The flood of burning life divides, Then, kindling each decaying part, Creeps back to find the throbbing heart. But warmed with that unchanging flame Behold the outward moving frame, Its living marbles jointed strong With glistening band and silvery thong, And linked to reason’s guiding reins By myriad rings in trembling chains, Each graven with the threaded zone Which claims it as the master’s own. See how yon beam of seeming white Is braided out of seven-hued light, Yet in those lucid globes no ray By any chance shall break astray. Hark how the rolling surge of sound, Arches and spirals circling round, Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear With music it is heaven to hear. Then mark the cloven sphere that holds All thought in its mysterious folds; That feels sensation’s faintest thrill, And flashes forth the sovereign will; Think on the stormy world that dwells Locked in its dim and clustering cells! The lightning gleams of power it sheds Along its hollow glassy threads! O Father! grant thy love divine To make these mystic temples thine! When wasting age and wearying strife Have sapped the leaning walls of life, When darkness gathers over all, And the last tottering pillars fall, Take the poor dust thy mercy warms, And mould it into heavenly forms!
I remember, I remember, The house where I was born, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn; He never came a wink too soon, Nor brought too long a day, But now, I often wish the night Had borne my breath away! I remember, I remember, The roses, red and white, The vi'lets, and the lily-cups, Those flowers made of light! The lilacs where the robin built, And where my brother set The laburnum on his birthday,— The tree is living yet! I remember, I remember, Where I was used to swing, And thought the air must rush as fresh To swallows on the wing; My spirit flew in feathers then, That is so heavy now, And summer pools could hardly cool The fever on my brow! I remember, I remember, The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky: It was a childish ignorance, But now 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heav'n Than when I was a boy.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.
felled 1879 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage, Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells — That bird beyond the remembering his free fells; This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age. Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells, Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage. Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest — Why, hear him, hear him babble & drop down to his nest, But his own nest, wild nest, no prison. Man's spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best, But uncumberèd: meadow-down is not distressed For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped & poisèd powers; Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural, rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers. Yet ah! this air I gather and I release He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fired France for Mary without spot.
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended! This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal; How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years, When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;  And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent;  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875 I  Thou mastering me  God! giver of breath and bread;  World's strand, sway of the sea;  Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread,  Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.  I did say yes  O at lightning and lashed rod;  Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess  Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod  Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.  The frown of his face  Before me, the hurtle of hell  Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?  I whirled out wings that spell And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host. My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,  Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast, To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.  I am soft sift  In an hourglass—at the wall  Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,  And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall  Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift.  I kiss my hand  To the stars, lovely-asunder  Starlight, wafting him out of it; and  Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west: Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder,  His mystery must be instressed, stressed; For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.  Not out of his bliss  Springs the stress felt  Nor first from heaven (and few know this)  Swings the stroke dealt— Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver, That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt—  But it rides time like riding a river (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).  It dates from day  Of his going in Galilee;  Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;  Manger, maiden's knee; The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat; Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,  Though felt before, though in high flood yet— What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,  Is out with it! Oh,  We lash with the best or worst  Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe  Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet, Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither then, last or first,  To hero of Calvary, Christ,'s feet— Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go.  Be adored among men,  God, three-numberéd form;  Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,  Man's malice, with wrecking and storm. Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue, Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;  Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.  With an anvil-ding  And with fire in him forge thy will  Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring  Through him, melt him but master him still: Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul, Or as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll,  Make mercy in all of us, out of us all Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.  II  "Some find me a sword; some  The flange and the rail; flame,  Fang, or flood" goes Death on drum,  And storms bugle his fame. But wé dréam we are rooted in earth—Dust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,  Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.  On Saturday sailed from Bremen,  American-outward-bound,  Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,  Two hundred souls in the round— O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;  Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?  Into the snows she sweeps,  Hurling the haven behind,  The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,  For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;  Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.  She drove in the dark to leeward,  She struck—not a reef or a rock  But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her  Dead to the Kentish Knock; And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel: The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;  And canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheel Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.  Hope had grown grey hairs,  Hope had mourning on,  Trenched with tears, carved with cares,  Hope was twelve hours gone; And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,  And lives at last were washing away: To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.  One stirred from the rigging to save  The wild woman-kind below,  With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave—  He was pitched to his death at a blow, For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew: They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro  Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?  They fought with God's cold—  And they could not and fell to the deck  (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled  With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check—  Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.  Ah, touched in your bower of bone  Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,  Have you! make words break from me here all alone,  Do you!—mother of being in me, heart. O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth, Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!  Never-eldering revel and river of youth, What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?  Sister, a sister calling  A master, her master and mine!—  And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;  The rash smart sloggering brine Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one; Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine  Ears, and the call of the tall nun To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling.  She was first of a five and came  Of a coifèd sisterhood.  (O Deutschland, double a desperate name!  O world wide of its good! But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town, Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood:  From life's dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)  Loathed for a love men knew in them,  Banned by the land of their birth,  Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them;  Surf, snow, river and earth Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,  Thou martyr-master: in thy sight Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.  Five! the finding and sake  And cipher of suffering Christ.  Mark, the mark is of man's make  And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced—  Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.  Joy fall to thee, father Francis,  Drawn to the Life that died;  With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his  Lovescape crucified And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,  Are sisterly sealed in wild waters, To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.  Away in the loveable west,  On a pastoral forehead of Wales,  I was under a roof here, I was at rest,  And they the prey of the gales; She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails  Was calling "O Christ, Christ, come quickly": The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best.  The majesty! what did she mean?  Breathe, arch and original Breath.  Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?  Breathe, body of lovely Death. They were else-minded then, altogether, the men Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth.  Or ís it that she cried for the crown then, The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?  For how to the heart's cheering  The down-dugged ground-hugged grey  Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing  Of pied and peeled May! Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher, With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way,  What by your measure is the heaven of desire, The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?  No, but it was not these.  The jading and jar of the cart,  Time's tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease  Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart, Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart:  Other, I gather, in measure her mind's Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragonèd seas.  But how shall I . . . make me room there:  Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster—  Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,  Thing that she ... there then! the Master, Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;  Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.  Ah! there was a heart right  There was single eye!  Read the unshapeable shock night  And knew the who and the why; Wording it how but by him that present and past, Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?—  The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.  Jesu, heart's light,  Jesu, maid's son,  What was the feast followed the night  Thou hadst glory of this nun?— Feast of the one woman without stain. For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done;  But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.  Well, she has thee for the pain, for the  Patience; but pity of the rest of them!  Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the  Comfortless unconfessed of them— No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the  Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?  I admire thee, master of the tides,  Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall;  The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides,  The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all  Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;  With a mercy that outrides  The all of water, an ark  For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides  Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark  Our passion-plungèd giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.  Now burn, new born to the world,  Doubled-naturèd name,  The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled  Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne! Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;  Kind, but royally reclaiming his own; A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.  Dame, at our door  Drowned, and among our shoals,  Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:  Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,  Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fatal lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps. His Day is marching on. I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel: “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.” He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat: Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.
What is thy thought of me? What is thy feeling? Lov'st thou the veil of sense, Or its revealing? Leav'st thou the maiden rose Drooping and blushing, Or rend'st its bosom with Kissing and crushing? I would be beautiful That thou should'st woo me, Gentle, delightsome, but To draw thee to me. Yet should thy longing eye Ever caress me, And quickened Fantasy Only, possess me, Thus thy heart's highest need Long would I cherish, Lest its more trivial wish Pall, and then perish. Would that Love's fond pursuit Were crownèd never, Or that his virgin kiss Lasted for ever!
A touch of cold in the Autumn night— I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.
(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.) Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy, In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement. Now see I That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy. Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw, within the moonlight in his room, Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom, An angel writing in a book of gold:— Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, And to the presence in the room he said, "What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head, And with a look made of all sweet accord, Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord." "And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so," Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low, But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then, Write me as one that loves his fellow men."  The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night It came again with a great wakening light, And showed the names whom love of God had blest, And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport, And one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court; The nobles filled the benches, and the ladies in their pride, And 'mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he sighed: And truly 'twas a gallant thing to see that crowning show, Valour and love, and a king above, and the royal beasts below. Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws; They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws; With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another; Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thunderous smother; The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air; Said Francis then, "Faith, gentlemen, we're better here than there." De Lorge's love o'erheard the King, a beauteous lively dame With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same; She thought, the Count my lover is brave as brave can be; He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me; King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine; I'll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine. She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled; He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild: The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place, Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face. "By God!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat: "No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that."
When Learning’s triumph o’er her barb’rous foes First rear’d the stage, immortal Shakespear rose; Each change of many-colour’d life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin’d new: Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, And panting Time toil’d after him in vain: His pow’rful strokes presiding Truth impress’d, And unresisted Passion storm’d the breast. Then Jonson came, instructed from the school, To please in method, and invent by rule; His studious patience, and laborious art, By regular approach essay’d the heart; Cold Approbation gave the ling’ring bays, For those who durst not censure, scarce could praise. A mortal born he met the general doom, But left, like Egypt’s kings, a lasting tomb. The Wits of Charles found easier ways to fame, Nor wish’d for Jonson’s art, or Shakespear’s flame, Themselves they studied, as they felt, they writ, Intrigue was plot, obscenity was wit. Vice always found a sympathetic friend; They pleas’d their age, and did not aim to mend. Yet bards like these aspir’d to lasting praise, And proudly hop’d to pimp in future days. Their cause was gen’ral, their supports were strong, Their slaves were willing, and their reign was long; Till Shame regain’d the post that Sense betray’d, And Virtue call’d Oblivion to her aid. Then crush’d by rules, and weaken’d as refin’d, For years the pow’r of tragedy declin’d; From bard, to bard, the frigid caution crept, Till Declamation roar’d, while Passion slept. Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread, Philosophy remain’d, though Nature fled. But forc’d at length her ancient reign to quit, She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of wit: Exulting Folly hail’d the joyful day, And pantomime, and song, confirm’d her sway. But who the coming changes can presage, And mark the future periods of the stage?— Perhaps if skill could distant times explore, New Behns, new Durfoys, yet remain in store. Perhaps, where Lear has rav’d, and Hamlet died, On flying cars new sorcerers may ride. Perhaps, for who can guess th’ effects of chance? Here Hunt may box, or Mahomet may dance. Hard is his lot, that here by Fortune plac’d, Must watch the wild vicissitudes of taste; With ev’ry meteor of caprice must play, And chase the new-blown bubbles of the day. Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice, The stage but echoes back the public voice. The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live. Then prompt no more the follies you decry, As tyrants doom their tools of guilt to die; ’Tis yours this night to bid the reign commence Of rescu’d Nature, and reviving Sense; To chase the charms of Sound, the pomp of Show, For useful Mirth, and salutary Woe; Bid scenic Virtue form the rising age, And Truth diffuse her radiance from the stage.
The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, Imitated Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate, Where wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride To tread the dreary paths without a guide, As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude, Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good. How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice, How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress’d, When vengeance listens to the fool’s request. Fate wings with ev’ry wish th’ afflictive dart, Each gift of nature, and each grace of art, With fatal heat impetuous courage glows, With fatal sweetness elocution flows, Impeachment stops the speaker’s pow’rful breath, And restless fire precipitates on death.  But scarce observ’d the knowing and the bold, Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold; Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin’d, And crowds with crimes the records of mankind, For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws, For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws; Wealth heap’d on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, The dangers gather as the treasures rise.  Let hist’ry tell where rival kings command, And dubious title shakes the madded land, When statutes glean the refuse of the sword, How much more safe the vassal than the lord, Low sculks the hind beneath the rage of pow’r, And leaves the wealthy traitor in the Tow’r, Untouch’d his cottage, and his slumbers sound, Tho’ confiscation’s vultures hover round.  The needy traveller, serene and gay, Walks the wild heath, and sings his toil away. Does envy seize thee? crush th’ upbraiding joy, Increase his riches and his peace destroy, New fears in dire vicissitude invade, The rustling brake alarms, and quiv’ring shade, Nor light nor darkness bring his pain relief. One shews the plunder, and one hides the thief.  Yet still one gen’ral cry the skies assails, And gain and grandeur load the tainted gales, Few know the toiling statesman’s fear or care, Th’ insidious rival and the gaping heir.  Once more, Democritus, arise on earth, With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth, See motley life in modern trappings dress’d, And feed with varied fools th’ eternal jest: Thou who couldst laugh where want enchain’d caprice, Toil crush’d conceit, and man was of a piece; Where wealth unlov’d without a mourner died; And scarce a sycophant was fed by pride; Where ne’er was known the form of mock debate, Or seen a new-made mayor’s unwieldy state; Where change of fav’rites made no change of laws, And senates heard before they judg’d a cause; How wouldst thou shake at Britain’s modish tribe, Dart the quick taunt, and edge the piercing gibe? Attentive truth and nature to decry, And pierce each scene with philosophic eye. To thee were solemn toys or empty show, The robes of pleasure and the veils of woe: All aid the farce, and all thy mirth maintain, Whose joys are causeless, or whose griefs are vain.  Such was the scorn that fill’d the sage’s mind, Renew’d at ev’ry glance on humankind; How just that scorn ere yet thy voice declare, Search every state, and canvas ev’ry pray’r.  Unnumber’d suppliants crowd Preferment’s gate, Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great; Delusive Fortune hears th’ incessant call, They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall. On ev’ry stage the foes of peace attend, Hate dogs their flight, and insult mocks their end. Love ends with hope, the sinking statesman’s door Pours in the morning worshiper no more; For growing names the weekly scribbler lies, To growing wealth the dedicator flies, From every room descends the painted face, That hung the bright Palladium of the place, And smok’d in kitchens, or in auctions sold, To better features yields the frame of gold; For now no more we trace in ev’ry line Heroic worth, benevolence divine: The form distorted justifies the fall, And detestation rids th’ indignant wall.  ...  When first the college rolls receive his name, The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame; Through all his veins the fever of renown Spreads from the strong contagion of the gown; O’er Bodley’s dome his future labours spread, And Bacon’s mansion trembles o’er his head. Are these thy views? proceed, illustrious youth, And virtue guard thee to the throne of Truth! Yet should thy soul indulge the gen’rous heat, Till captive Science yields her last retreat; Should Reason guide thee with her brightest ray, And pour on misty Doubt resistless day; Should no false Kindness lure to loose delight, Nor Praise relax, nor Difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy cell refrain, And Sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should Beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter’d heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy’s phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers’d for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from letters, to be wise; There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. See nations slowly wise, and meanly just, To buried merit raise the tardy bust. If dreams yet flatter, once again attend, Hear Lydiat’s life, and Galileo’s end.  Nor deem, when learning her last prize bestows The glitt’ring eminence exempt from foes; See when the vulgar ‘scape, despis’d or aw’d, Rebellion’s vengeful talons seize on Laud. From meaner minds, tho’ smaller fines content The plunder’d palace or sequester’d rent; Mark’d out by dangerous parts he meets the shock, And fatal Learning leads him to the block: Around his tomb let Art and Genius weep, But hear his death, ye blockheads, hear and sleep.  ...  Enlarge my life with multitude of days, In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays; Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, That life protracted is protracted woe. Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy: In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow’r, With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tasteless meats, and joyless wines, And Luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, And yield the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds alas would touch th’ impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness’d Orpheus near; Nor lute nor lyre his feeble pow’rs attend, Nor sweeter music of a virtuous friend, But everlasting dictates crowd his tongue, Perversely grave, or positively wrong. The still returning tale, and ling’ring jest, Perplex the fawning niece and pamper’d guest, While growing hopes scarce awe the gath’ring sneer, And scarce a legacy can bribe to hear; The watchful guests still hint the last offence, The daughter’s petulance, the son’s expense, Improve his heady rage with treach’rous skill, And mould his passions till they make his will.  Unnumber’d maladies his joints invade, Lay siege to life and press the dire blockade; But unextinguish’d Av’rice still remains, And dreaded losses aggravate his pains; He turns, with anxious heart and crippled hands, His bonds of debt, and mortgages of lands; Or views his coffers with suspicious eyes, Unlocks his gold, and counts it till he dies.  But grant, the virtues of a temp’rate prime Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime; An age that melts in unperceiv’d decay, And glides in modest innocence away; Whose peaceful day Benevolence endears, Whose night congratulating Conscience cheers; The gen’ral fav’rite as the gen’ral friend: Such age there is, and who could wish its end?  Yet ev’n on this her load Misfortune flings, To press the weary minutes’ flagging wings: New sorrow rises as the day returns, A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns. Now kindred Merit fills the sable bier, Now lacerated Friendship claims a tear. Year chases year, decay pursues decay, Still drops some joy from with’ring life away; New forms arise, and diff’rent views engage, Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage, Till pitying Nature signs the last release, And bids afflicted worth retire to peace.  But few there are whom hours like these await, Who set unclouded in the gulfs of fate. From Lydia’s monarch should the search descend, By Solon caution’d to regard his end, In life’s last scene what prodigies surprise, Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise? From Marlb’rough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow, And Swift expires a driv’ler and a show.  The teeming mother, anxious for her race, Begs for each birth the fortune of a face: Yet Vane could tell what ills from beauty spring; And Sedley curs’d the form that pleas’d a king. Ye nymphs of rosy lips and radiant eyes, Whom Pleasure keeps too busy to be wise, Whom Joys with soft varieties invite, By day the frolic, and the dance by night, Who frown with vanity, who smile with art, And ask the latest fashion of the heart, What care, what rules your heedless charms shall save, Each nymph your rival, and each youth your slave? Against your fame with fondness hate combines, The rival batters and the lover mines. With distant voice neglected Virtue calls, Less heard and less, the faint remonstrance falls; Tir’d with contempt, she quits the slipp’ry reign, And Pride and Prudence take her seat in vain. In crowd at once, where none the pass defend, The harmless freedom, and the private friend. The guardians yield, by force superior plied; By Int’rest, Prudence; and by Flatt’ry, Pride. Now Beauty falls betray’d, despis’d, distress’d, And hissing Infamy proclaims the rest.  Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find? Must dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant mind? Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate? Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise, No cries attempt the mercies of the skies? Enquirer, cease, petitions yet remain, Which Heav’n may hear, nor deem religion vain. Still raise for good the supplicating voice, But leave to Heav’n the measure and the choice. Safe in his pow’r, whose eyes discern afar The secret ambush of a specious pray’r. Implore his aid, in his decisions rest, Secure whate’er he gives, he gives the best. Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires, And strong devotion to the skies aspires, Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind, Obedient passions, and a will resign’d; For love, which scarce collective man can fill; For patience, sov’reign o’er transmuted ill; For faith, that panting for a happier seat, Counts death kind Nature’s signal of retreat: These goods for man the laws of Heav’n ordain, These goods he grants, who grants the pow’r to gain; With these celestial wisdom calms the mind, And makes the happiness she does not find.
Let it not your wonder move, Less your laughter, that I love. Though I now write fifty years, I have had, and have, my peers; Poets, though divine, are men, Some have lov'd as old again. And it is not always face, Clothes, or fortune, gives the grace; Or the feature, or the youth. But the language and the truth, With the ardour and the passion, Gives the lover weight and fashion. If you then will read the story, First prepare you to be sorry That you never knew till now Either whom to love or how; But be glad, as soon with me, When you know that this is she Of whose beauty it was sung; She shall make the old man young, Keep the middle age at stay, And let nothing high decay, Till she be the reason why All the world for love may die.
See the chariot at hand here of Love,  Wherein my lady rideth! Each that draws is a swan or a dove,  And well the car Love guideth. As she goes, all hearts do duty  Unto her beauty; And enamour'd, do wish, so they might  But enjoy such a sight, That they still were to run by her side, Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride. Do but look on her eyes, they do light  All that Love's world compriseth! Do but look on her hair, it is bright  As Love's star when it riseth! Do but mark, her forehead's smoother  Than words that soothe her; And from her arched brows, such a grace  Sheds itself through the face As alone there triumphs to the life All the gain, all the good, of the elements' strife. Have you seen but a bright lily grow,  Before rude hands have touch'd it? Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the snow  Before the soil hath smutch'd it? Ha' you felt the wool o' the beaver?  Or swan's down ever? Or have smelt o' the bud o' the briar?  Or the nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? Oh so white! Oh so soft! Oh so sweet is she!
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair State in wonted manner keep:  Hesperus entreats thy light,  Goddess excellently bright. Earth, let not thy envious shade Dare itself to interpose; Cynthia's shining orb was made Heaven to clear when day did close:  Bless us then with wished sight,  Goddess excellently bright. Lay thy bow of pearl apart And thy crystal-shining quiver; Give unto the flying hart Space to breathe, how short soever:  Thou that mak'st a day of night,  Goddess excellently bright.
A Child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel Weep with me, all you that read  This little story: And know, for whom a tear you shed  Death's self is sorry. 'Twas a child, that so did thrive  In grace and feature, As heaven and nature seem'd to strive  Which own'd the creature. Years he number'd scarce thirteen  When fates turn'd cruel, Yet three fill'd zodiacs had he been  The stage's jewel; And did act (what now we moan)  Old men so duly, As, sooth, the Parcæ thought him one,  He play'd so truly. So, by error, to his fate  They all consented; But viewing him since (alas, too late)  They have repented; And have sought (to give new birth)  In baths to steep him; But being so much too good for earth,  Heaven vows to keep him.
Wouldst thou hear what man can say In a little? Reader, stay. Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die; Which in life did harbour give To more virtue than doth live. If at all she had a fault, Leave it buried in this vault. One name was Elizabeth, Th' other let it sleep with death: Fitter, where it died to tell, Than that it liv'd at all. Farewell.
Where dost thou careless lie, Buried in ease and sloth? Knowledge that sleeps doth die; And this security, It is the common moth That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both. Are all th' Aonian springs Dried up? lies Thespia waste? Doth Clarius' harp want strings, That not a nymph now sings? Or droop they as disgrac'd, To see their seats and bowers by chatt'ring pies defac'd? If hence thy silence be, As 'tis too just a cause, Let this thought quicken thee: Minds that are great and free Should not on fortune pause; 'Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause. What though the greedy fry Be taken with false baites Of worded balladry, And think it poesy? They die with their conceits, And only piteous scorn upon their folly waits. Then take in hand thy lyre, Strike in thy proper strain, With Japhet's line aspire Sol's chariot for new fire, To give the world again; Who aided him will thee, the issue of Jove's brain. And since our dainty age Cannot endure reproof, Make not thyself a page To that strumpet, the stage, But sing high and aloof, Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
A Poetic Romance (excerpt) BOOK I A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make 'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: And such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead; All lovely tales that we have heard or read: An endless fountain of immortal drink, Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. Nor do we merely feel these essences For one short hour; no, even as the trees That whisper round a temple become soon Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast, That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast; They always must be with us, or we die. Therefore, 'tis with full happiness that I Will trace the story of Endymion. The very music of the name has gone Into my being, and each pleasant scene Is growing fresh before me as the green Of our own valleys: so I will begin Now while I cannot hear the city's din; Now while the early budders are just new, And run in mazes of the youngest hue About old forests; while the willow trails Its delicate amber; and the dairy pails Bring home increase of milk. And, as the year Grows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steer My little boat, for many quiet hours, With streams that deepen freshly into bowers. Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, I must be near the middle of my story. O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold, With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end. And now, at once adventuresome, I send My herald thought into a wilderness: There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress My uncertain path with green, that I may speed Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed.
St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith. His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man; Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees, And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan, Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees: The sculptur'd dead, on each side, seem to freeze, Emprison'd in black, purgatorial rails: Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails. Northward he turneth through a little door, And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor; But no—already had his deathbell rung; The joys of all his life were said and sung: His was harsh penance on St. Agnes' Eve: Another way he went, and soon among Rough ashes sat he for his soul's reprieve, And all night kept awake, for sinners' sake to grieve. That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft; And so it chanc'd, for many a door was wide, From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft, The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide: The level chambers, ready with their pride, Were glowing to receive a thousand guests: The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Star'd, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts. At length burst in the argent revelry, With plume, tiara, and all rich array, Numerous as shadows haunting faerily The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay Of old romance. These let us wish away, And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there, Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day, On love, and wing'd St. Agnes' saintly care, As she had heard old dames full many times declare. They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve, Young virgins might have visions of delight, And soft adorings from their loves receive Upon the honey'd middle of the night, If ceremonies due they did aright; As, supperless to bed they must retire, And couch supine their beauties, lily white; Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire. Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline: The music, yearning like a God in pain, She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine, Fix'd on the floor, saw many a sweeping train Pass by—she heeded not at all: in vain Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier, And back retir'd; not cool'd by high disdain, But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere: She sigh'd for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year. She danc'd along with vague, regardless eyes, Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short: The hallow'd hour was near at hand: she sighs Amid the timbrels, and the throng'd resort Of whisperers in anger, or in sport; 'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn, Hoodwink'd with faery fancy; all amort, Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn, And all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn. So, purposing each moment to retire, She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors, Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire For Madeline. Beside the portal doors, Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores All saints to give him sight of Madeline, But for one moment in the tedious hours, That he might gaze and worship all unseen; Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—in sooth such things have been. He ventures in: let no buzz'd whisper tell: All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel: For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes, Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords, Whose very dogs would execrations howl Against his lineage: not one breast affords Him any mercy, in that mansion foul, Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul. Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came, Shuffling along with ivory-headed wand, To where he stood, hid from the torch's flame, Behind a broad half-pillar, far beyond The sound of merriment and chorus bland: He startled her; but soon she knew his face, And grasp'd his fingers in her palsied hand, Saying, "Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place; They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race! "Get hence! get hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand; He had a fever late, and in the fit He cursed thee and thine, both house and land: Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit More tame for his gray hairs—Alas me! flit! Flit like a ghost away."—"Ah, Gossip dear, We're safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit, And tell me how"—"Good Saints! not here, not here; Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier." He follow'd through a lowly arched way, Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume, And as she mutter'd "Well-a—well-a-day!" He found him in a little moonlight room, Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb. "Now tell me where is Madeline," said he, "O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom Which none but secret sisterhood may see, When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously." "St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes' Eve— Yet men will murder upon holy days: Thou must hold water in a witch's sieve, And be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays, To venture so: it fills me with amaze To see thee, Porphyro!—St. Agnes' Eve! God's help! my lady fair the conjuror plays This very night: good angels her deceive! But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve." Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon, While Porphyro upon her face doth look, Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone Who keepeth clos'd a wond'rous riddle-book, As spectacled she sits in chimney nook. But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told His lady's purpose; and he scarce could brook Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold, And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old. Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart Made purple riot: then doth he propose A stratagem, that makes the beldame start: "A cruel man and impious thou art: Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream Alone with her good angels, far apart From wicked men like thee. Go, go!—I deem Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem." "I will not harm her, by all saints I swear," Quoth Porphyro: "O may I ne'er find grace When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer, If one of her soft ringlets I displace, Or look with ruffian passion in her face: Good Angela, believe me by these tears; Or I will, even in a moment's space, Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen's ears, And beard them, though they be more fang'd than wolves and bears." "Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul? A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll; Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening, Were never miss'd."—Thus plaining, doth she bring A gentler speech from burning Porphyro; So woful, and of such deep sorrowing, That Angela gives promise she will do Whatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe. Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy, Even to Madeline's chamber, and there hide Him in a closet, of such privacy That he might see her beauty unespy'd, And win perhaps that night a peerless bride, While legion'd faeries pac'd the coverlet, And pale enchantment held her sleepy-ey'd. Never on such a night have lovers met, Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt. "It shall be as thou wishest," said the Dame: "All cates and dainties shall be stored there Quickly on this feast-night: by the tambour frame Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare, For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare On such a catering trust my dizzy head. Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed, Or may I never leave my grave among the dead." So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear. The lover's endless minutes slowly pass'd; The dame return'd, and whisper'd in his ear To follow her; with aged eyes aghast From fright of dim espial. Safe at last, Through many a dusky gallery, they gain The maiden's chamber, silken, hush'd, and chaste; Where Porphyro took covert, pleas'd amain. His poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain. Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade, Old Angela was feeling for the stair, When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid, Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware: With silver taper's light, and pious care, She turn'd, and down the aged gossip led To a safe level matting. Now prepare, Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed; She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled. Out went the taper as she hurried in; Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died: She clos'd the door, she panted, all akin To spirits of the air, and visions wide: No uttered syllable, or, woe betide! But to her heart, her heart was voluble, Paining with eloquence her balmy side; As though a tongueless nightingale should swell Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell. A casement high and triple-arch'd there was, All garlanded with carven imag'ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings; And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings. Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Anon his heart revives: her vespers done, Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed, Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees, In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed, But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled. Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest, In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay, Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away; Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day; Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain; Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray; Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again. Stol'n to this paradise, and so entranced, Porphyro gaz'd upon her empty dress, And listen'd to her breathing, if it chanced To wake into a slumberous tenderness; Which when he heard, that minute did he bless, And breath'd himself: then from the closet crept, Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness, And over the hush'd carpet, silent, stept, And 'tween the curtains peep'd, where, lo!—how fast she slept. Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set A table, and, half anguish'd, threw thereon A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:— O for some drowsy Morphean amulet! The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion, The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet, Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:— The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone. And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd, While he forth from the closet brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; With jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon. These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand On golden dishes and in baskets bright Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand In the retired quiet of the night, Filling the chilly room with perfume light.— "And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake! Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite: Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake, Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache." Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream By the dusk curtains:—'twas a midnight charm Impossible to melt as iced stream: The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam; Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies: It seem'd he never, never could redeem From such a stedfast spell his lady's eyes; So mus'd awhile, entoil'd in woofed phantasies. Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,— Tumultuous,—and, in chords that tenderest be, He play'd an ancient ditty, long since mute, In Provence call'd, "La belle dame sans mercy": Close to her ear touching the melody;— Wherewith disturb'd, she utter'd a soft moan: He ceas'd—she panted quick—and suddenly Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone: Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone. Her eyes were open, but she still beheld, Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep: There was a painful change, that nigh expell'd The blisses of her dream so pure and deep At which fair Madeline began to weep, And moan forth witless words with many a sigh; While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep; Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye, Fearing to move or speak, she look'd so dreamingly. "Ah, Porphyro!" said she, "but even now Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear, Made tuneable with every sweetest vow; And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear: How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear! Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear! Oh leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go." Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far At these voluptuous accents, he arose Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose; Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odour with the violet,— Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet Against the window-panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set. 'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet: "This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!" 'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat: "No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine! Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.— Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring? I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine, Though thou forsakest a deceived thing;— A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing." "My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride! Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest? Thy beauty's shield, heart-shap'd and vermeil dyed? Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest After so many hours of toil and quest, A famish'd pilgrim,—sav'd by miracle. Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel. "Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land, Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed: Arise—arise! the morning is at hand;— The bloated wassaillers will never heed:— Let us away, my love, with happy speed; There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,— Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead: Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be, For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee." She hurried at his words, beset with fears, For there were sleeping dragons all around, At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears— Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.— In all the house was heard no human sound. A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door; The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound, Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flaggon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:— The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;— The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans. And they are gone: ay, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm. That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm, Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform; The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.
Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain pelteth; Then let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind's cage-door, She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar. O sweet Fancy! let her loose; Summer's joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming; Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too, Blushing through the mist and dew, Cloys with tasting: What do then? Sit thee by the ingle, when The sear faggot blazes bright, Spirit of a winter's night; When the soundless earth is muffled, And the caked snow is shuffled From the ploughboy's heavy shoon; When the Night doth meet the Noon In a dark conspiracy To banish Even from her sky. Sit thee there, and send abroad, With a mind self-overaw'd, Fancy, high-commission'd:—send her! She has vassals to attend her: She will bring, in spite of frost, Beauties that the earth hath lost; She will bring thee, all together, All delights of summer weather; All the buds and bells of May, From dewy sward or thorny spray; All the heaped Autumn's wealth, With a still, mysterious stealth: She will mix these pleasures up Like three fit wines in a cup, And thou shalt quaff it:—thou shalt hear Distant harvest-carols clear; Rustle of the reaped corn; Sweet birds antheming the morn: And, in the same moment, hark! 'Tis the early April lark, Or the rooks, with busy caw, Foraging for sticks and straw. Thou shalt, at one glance, behold The daisy and the marigold; White-plum'd lillies, and the first Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst; Shaded hyacinth, alway Sapphire queen of the mid-May; And every leaf, and every flower Pearled with the self-same shower. Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep Meagre from its celled sleep; And the snake all winter-thin Cast on sunny bank its skin; Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see Hatching in the hawthorn-tree, When the hen-bird's wing doth rest Quiet on her mossy nest; Then the hurry and alarm When the bee-hive casts its swarm; Acorns ripe down-pattering, While the autumn breezes sing.  Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose; Every thing is spoilt by use: Where's the cheek that doth not fade, Too much gaz'd at? Where's the maid Whose lip mature is ever new? Where's the eye, however blue, Doth not weary? Where's the face One would meet in every place? Where's the voice, however soft, One would hear so very oft? At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth Like to bubbles when rain pelteth. Let, then, winged Fancy find Thee a mistress to thy mind: Dulcet-ey'd as Ceres' daughter, Ere the God of Torment taught her How to frown and how to chide; With a waist and with a side White as Hebe's, when her zone Slipt its golden clasp, and down Fell her kirtle to her feet, While she held the goblet sweet And Jove grew languid.—Break the mesh Of the Fancy's silken leash; Quickly break her prison-string And such joys as these she'll bring.— Let the winged Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedgesedge Grasslike or rushlike plant that grows in wet areas. has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggardhaggard Wild looking and so woe-begonebegone To happen, occur, transpire ? The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew, And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meadsmeads Meadow , Full beautiful—a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moanmade sweet moan Compare "virgin-choir to make delicious moan" from Ode to Psyche (30), written between April 21 and 30, 1819. Noted by John Barnard in John Keats: The Complete Poems (Penguin, 2003). I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery’s song. She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dewhoney wild, and manna-dew Echoes manna in the Bible, first described in Exodus, 16:14-21, 31. The Israelites eat the manna, a food miraculously supplied in the wilderness after the dew has lifted, in the morning: “The house of Israel called it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31, NRSV)., And sure in language strange she said— ‘I love thee true’. She took me to her Elfin grotElfin grot An elf’s grotto , And there she wept and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four. And there she lullèd me asleep, And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— The latest dream I ever dreamt On the cold hill side. I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans MerciLa Belle Dame sans Merci This phrase—and the poem’s title—is from Alain Chartier’s courtly French ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1424). Keats wrote the poem in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, April 21, 1819. Thee hathThee hath The version of this poem has “Thee hath” (see The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 1958); though other versions of this poem reads “Hath thee” in thrall!’ I saw their starved lips in the gloamgloam Twilight; Keats coined the word from “gloaming”, With horrid warning gapèd wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side. And this is why I sojournsojourn To stay or visit temporarily here, Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; ConspiringConspiring Working together; literally, to conspire is “to breathe together” (OED) with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-evesthatch-eves Thatch-eaves, the edge of thatched roofs run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowingwinnowing Separating the wheat from the chaff, the heavy from the light wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hookhook Scythe Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleanergleaner One who gathers the remaining food after the reaper has harvested the field thou dost keep Steady thy ladenladen Loaded down head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?Where are they? Rhetorical convention known as ubi sunt, often appearing in poems that meditate on the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death. Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloombloom “to colour with a soft warm tint or glow” (OED) the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plainsstubble-plains Fields made up of stubble, the remaining stumps of grain left after reaping with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallowssallows Willow trees, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croftgarden-croft A croft is a small enclosed field; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
(In memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett) ("Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.")
Come my little Robert near—  Fie! what filthy hands are here! Who that e'er could understand The rare structure of a hand, With its branching fingers fine, Work itself of hands divine, Strong, yet delicately knit, For ten thousand uses fit, Overlaid with so clear skin You may see the blood within, And the curious palm, disposed In such lines, some have supposed You may read the fortunes there By the figures that appear— Who this hand would chuse to cover With a crust of dirt all over, Till it look'd in hue and shape Like the fore-foot of an Ape? Man or boy that works or plays In the fields or the highways May, without offence or hurt, From the soil contract a dirt, Which the next clear spring or river Washes out and out for ever— But to cherish stains impure, Soil deliberate to endure, On the skin to fix a stain Till it works into the grain, Argues a degenerate mind, Sordid, slothful, ill inclin'd, Wanting in that self-respect Which does virtue best protect.  All-endearing Cleanliness, Virtue next to Godliness, Easiest, cheapest, needful'st duty, To the body health and beauty, Who that's human would refuse it, When a little water does it?
May the Babylonish curse,Strait confound my stammering verse,If I can a passage seeIn this word-perplexity,Or a fit expression find,Or a language to my mind,(Still the phrase is wide or scant)To take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT!Or in any terms relateHalf my love, or half my hate:For I hate, yet love, thee so,That, whichever thing I shew,The plain truth will seem to beA constrained hyperbole,And the passion to proceedMore from a mistress than a weed.Sooty retainer to the vine,Bacchus' black servant, negro fine;Sorcerer, that mak'st us dote uponThy begrimed complexion,And, for thy pernicious sake,More and greater oaths to breakThan reclaimed lovers take'Gainst women: thou thy siege dost layMuch too in the female way,While thou suck'st the laboring breathFaster than kisses or than death.Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,That our worst foes cannot find us,And ill fortune, that would thwart us,Shoots at rovers, shooting at us;While each man, thro' thy heightening steam,Does like a smoking Etna seem,And all about us does express(Fancy and wit in richest dress)A Sicilian fruitfulness.Thou through such a mist dost shew us,That our best friends do not know us,And, for those allowed features,Due to reasonable creatures,Liken'st us to fell Chimeras,Monsters that, who see us, fear usWorse than Cerberus or Geryon,Or, who first lov'd a cloud, Ixion.Bacchus we know, and we allowHis tipsy rites. But what art thou,That but by reflex can'st shewWhat his deity can do,As the false Egyptian spellAped the true Hebrew miracle?Some few vapours thou may'st raise,The weak brain may serve to amaze,But to the reigns and nobler heartCan'st nor life nor heat impart.Brother of Bacchus, later born,The old world was sure forlorn,Wanting thee, that aidest moreThe god's victories than beforeAll his panthers, and the brawlsOf his piping Bacchanals.These, as stale, we disallow,Or judge of thee meant - only thouHis true Indian conquest artAnd, for ivy round his dart,The reformed god now weavesA finer thyrsus of thy leaves.Scent to match thy rich perfumeChemic art did ne'er presumeThrough her quaint alembic strain,None so sov'reign to the brain.Nature, that did in thee excel,Fram'd again no second smell.Roses, violets, but toysFor the smaller sort of boys,Or for greener damsels meant;Thou art the only manly scent.Stinking'st of the stinking kind,Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind,Africa, that brags her foyson,Breeds no such prodigious poison,Henbane, nightshade, both together,Hemlock, aconite —Nay, rather, Plant divine, of rarest virtue;Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.'Twas but in a sort I blam'd thee;None e'er prosper'd who defam'd thee;Irony all, and feign'd abuse,Such as perplext lovers use,At a need, when, in despairTo paint forth their fairest fair,Or in part but to expressThat exceeding comelinessWhich their fancies doth so strike,They borrow language of dislike;And, instead of Dearest Miss,Jewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss,And those forms of old admiring,Call her Cockatrice and Siren,Basilisk, and all that's evil,Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil,Ethiop, Wench, and Blackamoor,Monkey, Ape, and twenty more;Friendly Trait'ress, loving Foe, —Not that she is truly so,But no other way they knowA contentment to express,Borders so upon excess,That they do not rightly wotWhether it be pain or not.Or, as men, constrained to partWith what's nearest to their heart,While their sorrow's at the height,Lose discrimination quite,And their hasty wrath let fall,To appease their frantic gall,On the darling thing whateverWhence they feel it death to sever,Though it be, as they, perforce,Guiltless of the sad divorce.For I must (nor let it grieve thee,Friendliest of plants, that I must) leave the.For thy sake, TOBACCO, IWould do any thing but die,And but seek to extend my daysLong enough to sing thy praise.But, as she, who once hath beenA king's consort, is a queenEver after, nor will bateAny tittle of her state,Though a widow, or divorced,So I, from thy converse forced,The old name and style retain,A right Katherine of Spain;And a seat, too, 'mongst the joysOf the blest Tobacco Boys;Where, though I, by sour physician,Am debarr'd the full fruitionOf thy favours, I may catchSome collateral sweets, and snatchSidelong odours, that give lifeLike glances from a neighbour's wife;And still live in the by-placesAnd the suburbs of thy graces;And in thy borders take delight,An unconquer'd Canaanite.
Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair, And gaze upon her smile; Seem as you drank the very air Her breath perfumed the while: And wake for her the gifted line, That wild and witching lay, And swear your heart is as a shrine, That only owns her sway. ’Tis well: I am revenged at last,— Mark you that scornful cheek,— The eye averted as you pass’d, Spoke more than words could speak. Ay, now by all the bitter tears That I have shed for thee,— The racking doubts, the burning fears,— Avenged they well may be— By the nights pass’d in sleepless care, The days of endless woe; All that you taught my heart to bear, All that yourself will know. I would not wish to see you laid Within an early tomb; I should forget how you betray’d, And only weep your doom: But this is fitting punishment, To live and love in vain,— Oh my wrung heart, be thou content, And feed upon his pain. Go thou and watch her lightest sigh,— Thine own it will not be; And bask beneath her sunny eye,— It will not turn on thee. ’Tis well: the rack, the chain, the wheel, Far better hadst thou proved; Ev’n I could almost pity feel, For thou art not beloved.
The Year’s twelve daughters had in turn gone by, Of measured pace tho’ varying mien all twelve, Some froward, some sedater, some adorn’d For festival, some reckless of attire. The snow had left the mountain-top; fresh flowers Had withered in the meadow; fig and prune Hung wrinkling; the last apple glow’d amid Its freckled leaves; and weary oxen blinkt Between the trodden corn and twisted vine, Under whose bunches stood the empty crate, To creak ere long beneath them carried home. This was the season when twelve months before, O gentle Hamadryad, true to love! Thy mansion, thy dim mansion in the wood Was blasted and laid desolate: but none Dared violate its precincts, none dared pluck The moss beneath it, which alone remain’d Of what was thine. Old Thallinos sat mute In solitary sadness. The strange tale (Not until Rhaicos died, but then the whole) Echion had related, whom no force Could ever make look back upon the oaks. The father said “Echion! thou must weigh, Carefully, and with steady hand, enough (Although no longer comes the store as once!) Of wax to burn all day and night upon That hollow stone where milk and honey lie: So may the Gods, so may the dead, be pleas’d!” Thallinos bore it thither in the morn, And lighted it and left it. First of those Who visited upon this solemn day The Hamadryad’s oak, were Rhodope And Acon; of one age, one hope, one trust. Graceful was she as was the nymph whose fate She sorrowed for: he slender, pale, and first Lapt by the flame of love: his father’s lands Were fertile, herds lowed over them afar. Now stood the two aside the hollow stone And lookt with stedfast eyes toward the oak Shivered and black and bare. “May never we Love as they loved!” said Acon. She at this Smiled, for he said not what he meant to say, And thought not of its bliss, but of its end. He caught the flying smile, and blusht, and vow’d Nor time nor other power, whereto the might Of love hath yielded and may yield again, Should alter his. The father of the youth Wanted not beauty for him, wanted not Song, that could lift earth’s weight from off his heart, Discretion, that could guide him thro’ the world, Innocence, that could clear his way to heaven; Silver and gold and land, not green before The ancestral gate, but purple under skies Bending far off, he wanted for his heir. Fathers have given life, but virgin heart They never gave; and dare they then control Or check it harshly? dare they break a bond Girt round it by the holiest Power on high? Acon was grieved, he said, grieved bitterly, But Acon had complied . . ’twas dutiful! Crush thy own heart, Man! Man! but fear to wound The gentler, that relies on thee alone, By thee created, weak or strong by thee; Touch it not but for worship; watch before Its sanctuary; nor leave it till are closed The temple-doors and the last lamp is spent. Rhodope, in her soul’s waste solitude, Sate mournful by the dull-resounding sea, Often not hearing it, and many tears Had the cold breezes hardened on her cheek. Meanwhile he sauntered in the wood of oaks, Nor shun’d to look upon the hollow stone That held the milk and honey, nor to lay His plighted hand where recently ’twas laid Opposite hers, when finger playfully Advanced and pusht back finger, on each side. He did not think of this, as she would do If she were there alone. The day was hot; The moss invited him; it cool’d his cheek, It cool’d his hands; he thrust them into it And sank to slumber. Never was there dream Divine as his. He saw the Hamadryad. She took him by the arm and led him on Along a valley, where profusely grew The smaller lilies with their pendent bells, And, hiding under mint, chill drosera, The violet shy of butting cyclamen, The feathery fern, and, browser of moist banks, Her offspring round her, the soft strawberry; The quivering spray of ruddy tamarisk, The oleander’s light-hair’d progeny Breathing bright freshness in each other’s face, And graceful rose, bending her brow, with cup Of fragrance and of beauty, boon for Gods. The fragrance fill’d his breast with such delight His senses were bewildered, and he thought He saw again the face he most had loved. He stopt: the Hamadryad at his side Now stood between; then drew him farther off: He went, compliant as before: but soon Verdure had ceast: altho’ the ground was smooth, Nothing was there delightful. At this change He would have spoken, but his guide represt All questioning, and said, “Weak youth! what brought Thy footstep to this wood, my native haunt, My life-long residence? this bank, where first I sate with him . . the faithful (now I know, Too late!) the faithful Rhaicos. Haste thee home; Be happy, if thou canst; but come no more Where those whom death alone could sever, died.” He started up: the moss whereon he slept Was dried and withered: deadlier paleness spread Over his cheek; he sickened: and the sire Had land enough; it held his only son.
Child of a day, thou knowest not  The tears that overflow thy urn, The gushing eyes that read thy lot,  Nor, if thou knewest, couldst return! And why the wish! the pure and blest  Watch like thy mother o'er thy sleep. O peaceful night! O envied rest!  Thou wilt not ever see her weep.
Stand close around, ye Stygian set, With Dirce in one boat conveyed! Or Charon, seeing, may forget That he is old and she a shade.
“Do you remember me? or are you proud?” Lightly advancing thro’ her star-trimm’d crowd, Ianthe said, and lookt into my eyes, “A yes, a yes, to both: for Memory Where you but once have been must ever be, And at your voice Pride from his throne must rise.”
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:  Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;  It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
Here, where precipitate Spring with one light bound Into hot Summer’s lusty arms expires; And where go forth at morn, at eve, at night, Soft airs, that want the lute to play with them, And softer sighs, that know not what they want; Under a wall, beneath an orange-tree Whose tallest flowers could tell the lowlier ones Of sights in Fiesole right up above, While I was gazing a few paces off At what they seemed to show me with their nods, Their frequent whispers and their pointing shoots, A gentle maid came down the garden-steps And gathered the pure treasure in her lap. I heard the branches rustle, and stept forth To drive the ox away, or mule, or goat, (Such I believed it must be); for sweet scents Are the swift vehicles of still sweeter thoughts, And nurse and pillow the dull memory That would let drop without them her best stores. They bring me tales of youth and tones of love, And ’tis and ever was my wish and way To let all flowers live freely, and all die, Whene’er their Genius bids their souls depart, Among their kindred in their native place. I never pluck the rose; the violet’s head Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank And not reproacht me; the ever-sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoil’d, nor lost one grain of gold. I saw the light that made the glossy leaves More glossy; the fair arm, the fairer cheek Warmed by the eye intent on its pursuit; I saw the foot, that, altho half-erect From its grey slipper, could not lift her up To what she wanted: I held down a branch And gather’d her some blossoms, since their hour Was come, and bees had wounded them, and flies Of harder wing were working their way thro And scattering them in fragments under foot. So crisp were some, they rattled unevolved, Others, ere broken off, fell into shells, For such appear the petals when detacht, Unbending, brittle, lucid, white like snow, And like snow not seen thro, by eye or sun: Yet every one her gown received from me Was fairer than the first . . I thought not so, But so she praised them to reward my care. I said: you find the largest. This indeed, Cried she, is large and sweet. She held one forth, Whether for me to look at or to take She knew not, nor did I; but taking it Would best have solved (and this she felt) her doubts. I dared not touch it; for it seemed a part Of her own self; fresh, full, the most mature Of blossoms, yet a blossom; with a touch To fall, and yet unfallen.  She drew back The boon she tendered, and then, finding not The ribbon at her waist to fix it in, Dropt it, as loth to drop it, on the rest.
Ianthe! you are call’d to cross the sea! A path forbidden me! Remember, while the Sun his blessing sheds Upon the mountain-heads, How often we have watcht him laying down His brow, and dropt our own Against each other’s, and how faint and short And sliding the support! What will succeed it now? Mine is unblest, Ianthe! nor will rest But on the very thought that swells with pain. O bid me hope again! O give me back what Earth, what (without you) Not Heaven itself can do— One of the golden days that we have past, And let it be my last! Or else the gift would be, however sweet, Fragile and incomplete.
Mild is the parting year, and sweet  The odour of the falling spray; Life passes on more rudely fleet,  And balmless is its closing day. I wait its close, I court its gloom,  But mourn that never must there fall Or on my breast or on my tomb  The tear that would have soothed it all.
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;  My fingers ache, my lips are dry: Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!  But Oh, who ever felt as I! No longer could I doubt him true;  All other men may use deceit: He always said my eyes were blue,  And often swore my lips were sweet.
Ah what avails the sceptred race,  Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace!  Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes  May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs  I consecrate to thee.
Soon, O Ianthe! life is o’er,  And sooner beauty’s heavenly smile: Grant only (and I ask no more),  Let love remain that little while.
I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone, I feel I am alone. I check’d him while he spoke; yet, could he speak, Alas! I would not check. For reasons not to love him once I sought, And wearied all my thought To vex myself and him: I now would give My love could he but live Who lately lived for me, and, when he found ’Twas vain, in holy ground He hid his face amid the shades of death. I waste for him my breath Who wasted his for me! but mine returns, And this lorn bosom burns With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep, And waking me to weep Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years Wept he as bitter tears. Merciful God! such was his latest prayer, These may she never share. Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold, Than daisies in the mould, Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate, His name and life’s brief date. Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe’er you be, And oh! pray too for me!
You smiled, you spoke, and I believed, By every word and smile deceived. Another man would hope no more; Nor hope I what I hoped before: But let not this last wish be vain; Deceive, deceive me once again!
Even iron can put forth, Even iron. This is the iron age, But let us take heart Seeing iron break and bud, Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom. The almond-tree, December's bare iron hooks sticking out of earth. The almond-tree, That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake In supreme bitterness. Upon the iron, and upon the steel, Odd flakes as if of snow, odd bits of snow, Odd crumbs of melting snow. But you mistake, it is not from the sky; From out the iron, and from out the steel, Flying not down from heaven, but storming up, Strange storming up from the dense under-earth Along the iron, to the living steel In rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow Setting supreme annunciation to the world. Nay, what a heart of delicate super-faith, Iron-breaking, The rusty swords of almond-trees. Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages. They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black, The alien trees in alien lands: and yet The heart of blossom, The unquenchable heart of blossom! Look at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred and frail, Yet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon From the small wound-stump. Even the wilful, obstinate, gummy fig-tree Can be kept down, but he'll burst like a polyp into prolixity. And the almond-tree, in exile, in the iron age! This is the ancient southern earth whence the vases were baked, amphoras, craters, cantharus, oenochoe, and open-hearted cylix, Bristling now with the iron of almond-trees Iron, but unforgotten, Iron, dawn-hearted, Ever-beating dawn-heart, enveloped in iron against the exile, against the ages. See it come forth in blossom From the snow-remembering heart In long-nighted January, In the long dark nights of the evening star, and Sirius, and the Etna snow-wind through the long night. Sweating his drops of blood through the long-nighted Gethsemane Into blossom, into pride, into honey-triumph, into most exquisite splendour. Oh, give me the tree of life in blossom And the Cross sprouting its superb and fearless flowers! Something must be reassuring to the almond, in the evening star, and the snow-wind, and the long, long, nights, Some memory of far, sun-gentler lands, So that the faith in his heart smiles again And his blood ripples with that untenable delight of once-more-vindicated faith, And the Gethsemane blood at the iron pores unfolds, unfolds, Pearls itself into tenderness of bud And in a great and sacred forthcoming steps forth, steps out in one stride A naked tree of blossom, like a bridegroom bathing in dew, divested of cover, Frail-naked, utterly uncovered To the green night-baying of the dog-star, Etna's snow-edged wind And January's loud-seeming sun. Think of it, from the iron fastness Suddenly to dare to come out naked, in perfection of blossom, beyond the sword-rust. Think, to stand there in full-unfolded nudity, smiling, With all the snow-wind, and the sun-glare, and the dog-star baying epithalamion. Oh, honey-bodied beautiful one, Come forth from iron, Red your heart is. Fragile-tender, fragile-tender life-body, More fearless than iron all the time, And so much prouder, so disdainful of reluctances. In the distance like hoar-frost, like silvery ghosts communing on a green hill, Hoar-frost-like and mysterious. In the garden raying out With a body like spray, dawn-tender, and looking about With such insuperable, subtly-smiling assurance, Sword-blade-born. Unpromised, No bounds being set. Flaked out and come unpromised, The tree being life-divine, Fearing nothing, life-blissful at the core Within iron and earth. Knots of pink, fish-silvery In heaven, in blue, blue heaven, Soundless, bliss-full, wide-rayed, honey-bodied, Red at the core, Red at the core, Knotted in heaven upon the fine light. Open, Open, Five times wide open, Six times wide open, And given, and perfect; And red at the core with the last sore-heartedness, Sore-hearted-looking.
At evening, sitting on this terrace, When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ... When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing Brown hills surrounding ... When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio A green light enters against stream, flush from the west, Against the current of obscure Arno ... Look up, and you see things flying Between the day and the night; Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together. A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches Where light pushes through; A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air. A dip to the water. And you think: "The swallows are flying so late!" Swallows? Dark air-life looping Yet missing the pure loop ... A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight And serrated wings against the sky, Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light, And falling back. Never swallows!Bats! The swallows are gone. At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats By the Ponte Vecchio ... Changing guard. Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp As the bats swoop overhead! Flying madly. Pipistrello! Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe. Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive; Wings like bits of umbrella. Bats! Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep; And disgustingly upside down. Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags And grinning in their sleep. Bats! In China the bat is symbol for happiness. Not for me!
My love looks like a girl to-night, But she is old. The plaits that lie along her pillow Are not gold, But threaded with filigree silver, And uncanny cold. She looks like a young maiden, since her brow Is smooth and fair, Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed. She sleeps a rare Still winsome sleep, so still, and so composed. Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams Of perfect things. She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream, And her dead mouth sings By its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings.
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze. And I, what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.
When awful darkness and silence reign Over the great Gromboolian plain, Through the long, long wintry nights; — When the angry breakers roar As they beat on the rocky shore; — When Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore: — Then, through the vast and gloomy dark, There moves what seems a fiery spark, A lonely spark with silvery rays Piercing the coal-black night, — A Meteor strange and bright: — Hither and thither the vision strays, A single lurid light. Slowly it wander, — pauses, — creeps, — Anon it sparkles, — flashes and leaps; And ever as onward it gleaming goes A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws. And those who watch at that midnight hour From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as the wild light passes along, — "The Dong! — the Dong! "The wandering Dong through the forest goes! "The Dong! the Dong! "The Dong with a luminous Nose!" Long years ago The Dong was happy and gay, Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl Who came to those shores one day. For the Jumblies came in a sieve, they did, — Landing at eve near the Zemmery Fidd Where the Oblong Oysters grow, And the rocks are smooth and gray. And all the woods and the valleys rang With the Chorus they daily and nightly sang, — "Far and few, far and few,Are the lands where the Jumblies live;Their heads are green, and the hands are blueAnd they went to sea in a sieve. Happily, happily passed those days! While the cheerful Jumblies staid; They danced in circlets all night long, To the plaintive pipe of the lively Dong, In moonlight, shine, or shade. For day and night he was always there By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair, With her sky-blue hands, and her sea-green hair. Till the morning came of that hateful day When the Jumblies sailed in their sieve away, And the Dong was left on the cruel shore Gazing — gazing for evermore, — Ever keeping his weary eyes on That pea-green sail on the far horizon, — Singing the Jumbly Chorus still As he sate all day on the grassy hill, — "Far and few, far and few,Are the lands where the Jumblies live;Their heads are green, and the hands are blueAnd they went to sea in a sieve. But when the sun was low in the West, The Dong arose and said; — "What little sense I once possessed Has quite gone out of my head!" — And since that day he wanders still By lake and forest, marsh and hills, Singing — "O somewhere, in valley or plain "Might I find my Jumbly Girl again! "For ever I'll seek by lake and shore "Till I find my Jumbly Girl once more!" Playing a pipe with silvery squeaks, Since then his Jumbly Girl he seeks, And because by night he could not see, He gathered the bark of the Twangum Tree On the flowery plain that grows. And he wove him a wondrous Nose, — A Nose as strange as a Nose could be! Of vast proportions and painted red, And tied with cords to the back of his head. — In a hollow rounded space it ended With a luminous Lamp within suspended, All fenced about With a bandage stout To prevent the wind from blowing it out; — And with holes all round to send the light, In gleaming rays on the dismal night. And now each night, and all night long, Over those plains still roams the Dong; And above the wail of the Chimp and Snipe You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain To meet with his Jumbly Girl again; Lonely and wild — all night he goes, — The Dong with a luminous Nose! And all who watch at the midnight hour, From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright, Moving along through the dreary night, — "This is the hour when forth he goes, "The Dong with a luminous Nose! "Yonder — over the plain he goes; "He goes! "He goes; "The Dong with a luminous Nose!"
Once I loved a spider When I was born a fly, A velvet-footed spider With a gown of rainbow-dye. She ate my wings and gloated. She bound me with a hair. She drove me to her parlor Above her winding stair. To educate young spiders She took me all apart. My ghost came back to haunt her. I saw her eat my heart.
When the summer fields are mown, When the birds are fledged and flown, And the dry leaves strew the path; With the falling of the snow, With the cawing of the crow, Once again the fields we mow And gather in the aftermath. Not the sweet, new grass with flowers Is this harvesting of ours; Not the upland clover bloom; But the rowen mixed with weeds, Tangled tufts from marsh and meads, Where the poppy drops its seeds In the silence and the gloom.
I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.
This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms; But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing Startles the villages with strange alarms. Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, When the death-angel touches those swift keys! What loud lament and dismal Miserere Will mingle with their awful symphonies! I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus, The cries of agony, the endless groan, Which, through the ages that have gone before us, In long reverberations reach our own. On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer, Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman's song, And loud, amid the universal clamor, O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong. I hear the Florentine, who from his palace Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din, And Aztec priests upon their teocallis Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent's skin; The tumult of each sacked and burning village; The shout that every prayer for mercy drowns; The soldiers' revels in the midst of pillage; The wail of famine in beleaguered towns; The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder, The rattling musketry, the clashing blade; And ever and anon, in tones of thunder The diapason of the cannonade. Is it, O man, with such discordant noises, With such accursed instruments as these, Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices, And jarrest the celestial harmonies? Were half the power, that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts: The warrior's name would be a name abhorred! And every nation, that should lift again Its hand against a brother, on its forehead Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain! Down the dark future, through long generations, The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease; And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations, I hear once more the voice of Christ say, "Peace!" Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies! But beautiful as songs of the immortals, The holy melodies of love arise.
"Build me straight, O worthy Master! Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel, That shall laugh at all disaster, And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!" The merchant's word Delighted the Master heard; For his heart was in his work, and the heart Giveth grace unto every Art. A quiet smile played round his lips, As the eddies and dimples of the tide Play round the bows of ships, That steadily at anchor ride. And with a voice that was full of glee, He answered, "Erelong we will launch A vessel as goodly, and strong, and stanch, As ever weathered a wintry sea!" And first with nicest skill and art, Perfect and finished in every part, A little model the Master wrought, Which should be to the larger plan What the child is to the man, Its counterpart in miniature; That with a hand more swift and sure The greater labor might be brought To answer to his inward thought. And as he labored, his mind ran o'er The various ships that were built of yore, And above them all, and strangest of all Towered the Great Harry, crank and tall, Whose picture was hanging on the wall, With bows and stern raised high in air, And balconies hanging here and there, And signal lanterns and flags afloat, And eight round towers, like those that frown From some old castle, looking down Upon the drawbridge and the moat. And he said with a smile, "Our ship, I wis, Shall be of another form than this!" It was of another form, indeed; Built for freight, and yet for speed, A beautiful and gallant craft; Broad in the beam, that the stress of the blast, Pressing down upon sail and mast, Might not the sharp bows overwhelm; Broad in the beam, but sloping aft With graceful curve and slow degrees, That she might be docile to the helm, And that the currents of parted seas, Closing behind, with mighty force, Might aid and not impede her course. In the ship-yard stood the Master, With the model of the vessel, That should laugh at all disaster, And with wave and whirlwind wrestle! Covering many a rood of ground, Lay the timber piled around; Timber of chestnut, and elm, and oak, And scattered here and there, with these, The knarred and crooked cedar knees; Brought from regions far away, From Pascagoula's sunny bay, And the banks of the roaring Roanoke! Ah! what a wondrous thing it is To note how many wheels of toil One thought, one word, can set in motion! There 's not a ship that sails the ocean, But every climate, every soil, Must bring its tribute, great or small, And help to build the wooden wall! The sun was rising o'er the sea, And long the level shadows lay, As if they, too, the beams would be Of some great, airy argosy, Framed and launched in a single day. That silent architect, the sun, Had hewn and laid them every one, Ere the work of man was yet begun. Beside the Master, when he spoke, A youth, against an anchor leaning, Listened, to catch his slightest meaning. Only the long waves, as they broke In ripples on the pebbly beach, Interrupted the old man's speech. Beautiful they were, in sooth, The old man and the fiery youth! The old man, in whose busy brain Many a ship that sailed the main Was modelled o'er and o'er again; — The fiery youth, who was to be The heir of his dexterity, The heir of his house, and his daughter's hand, When he had built and launched from land What the elder head had planned. "Thus," said he, "will we build this ship! Lay square the blocks upon the slip, And follow well this plan of mine. Choose the timbers with greatest care; Of all that is unsound beware; For only what is sound and strong To this vessel shall belong. Cedar of Maine and Georgia pine Here together shall combine. A goodly frame, and a goodly fame, And the Union be her name! For the day that gives her to the sea Shall give my daughter unto thee!" The Master's word Enraptured the young man heard; And as he turned his face aside, With a look of joy and a thrill of pride Standing before Her father's door, He saw the form of his promised bride. The sun shone on her golden hair, And her cheek was glowing fresh and fair, With the breath of morn and the soft sea air. Like a beauteous barge was she, Still at rest on the sandy beach, Just beyond the billow's reach; But he Was the restless, seething, stormy sea! Ah, how skilful grows the hand That obeyeth Love's command! It is the heart, and not the brain, That to the highest doth attain, And he who followeth Love's behest Far excelleth all the rest! Thus with the rising of the sun Was the noble task begun, And soon throughout the ship-yard's bounds Were heard the intermingled sounds Of axes and of mallets, plied With vigorous arms on every side; Plied so deftly and so well, That, ere the shadows of evening fell, The keel of oak for a noble ship, Scarfed and bolted, straight and strong, Was lying ready, and stretched along The blocks, well placed upon the slip. Happy, thrice happy, every one Who sees his labor well begun, And not perplexed and multiplied, By idly waiting for time and tide! And when the hot, long day was o'er, The young man at the Master's door Sat with the maiden calm and still, And within the porch, a little more Removed beyond the evening chill, The father sat, and told them tales Of wrecks in the great September gales, Of pirates coasting the Spanish Main, And ships that never came back again, The chance and change of a sailor's life, Want and plenty, rest and strife, His roving fancy, like the wind, That nothing can stay and nothing can bind, And the magic charm of foreign lands, With shadows of palms, and shining sands, Where the tumbling surf, O'er the coral reefs of Madagascar, Washes the feet of the swarthy Lascar, As he lies alone and asleep on the turf. And the trembling maiden held her breath At the tales of that awful, pitiless sea, With all its terror and mystery, The dim, dark sea, so like unto Death, That divides and yet unites mankind! And whenever the old man paused, a gleam From the bowl of his pipe would awhile illume The silent group in the twilight gloom, And thoughtful faces, as in a dream; And for a moment one might mark What had been hidden by the dark, That the head of the maiden lay at rest, Tenderly, on the young man's breast! Day by day the vessel grew, With timbers fashioned strong and true, Stemson and keelson and sternson-knee, Till, framed with perfect symmetry, A skeleton ship rose up to view! And around the bows and along the side The heavy hammers and mallets plied, Till after many a week, at length, Wonderful for form and strength, Sublime in its enormous bulk, Loomed aloft the shadowy hulk! And around it columns of smoke, upwreathing, Rose from the boiling, bubbling, seething Caldron, that glowed, And overflowed With the black tar, heated for the sheathing. And amid the clamors Of clattering hammers, He who listened heard now and then The song of the Master and his men: — "Build me straight, O worthy Master, Staunch and strong, a goodly vessel, That shall laugh at all disaster, And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!" With oaken brace and copper band, Lay the rudder on the sand, That, like a thought, should have control Over the movement of the whole; And near it the anchor, whose giant hand Would reach down and grapple with the land, And immovable and fast Hold the great ship against the bellowing blast! And at the bows an image stood, By a cunning artist carved in wood, With robes of white, that far behind Seemed to be fluttering in the wind. It was not shaped in a classic mould, Not like a Nymph or Goddess of old, Or Naiad rising from the water, But modelled from the Master's daughter! On many a dreary and misty night, 'T will be seen by the rays of the signal light, Speeding along through the rain and the dark, Like a ghost in its snow-white sark, The pilot of some phantom bark, Guiding the vessel, in its flight, By a path none other knows aright! Behold, at last, Each tall and tapering mast Is swung into its place; Shrouds and stays Holding it firm and fast! Long ago, In the deer-haunted forests of Maine, When upon mountain and plain Lay the snow, They fell, — those lordly pines! Those grand, majestic pines! 'Mid shouts and cheers The jaded steers, Panting beneath the goad, Dragged down the weary, winding road Those captive kings so straight and tall, To be shorn of their streaming hair, And naked and bare, To feel the stress and the strain Of the wind and the reeling main, Whose roar Would remind them forevermore Of their native forests they should not see again. And everywhere The slender, graceful spars Poise aloft in the air, And at the mast-head, White, blue, and red, A flag unrolls the stripes and stars. Ah! when the wanderer, lonely, friendless, In foreign harbors shall behold That flag unrolled, 'T will be as a friendly hand Stretched out from his native land, Filling his heart with memories sweet and endless! All is finished! and at length Has come the bridal day Of beauty and of strength. To-day the vessel shall be launched! With fleecy clouds the sky is blanched, And o'er the bay, Slowly, in all his splendors dight, The great sun rises to behold the sight. The ocean old, Centuries old, Strong as youth, and as uncontrolled, Paces restless to and fro, Up and down the sands of gold. His beating heart is not at rest; And far and wide, With ceaseless flow, His beard of snow Heaves with the heaving of his breast. He waits impatient for his bride. There she stands, With her foot upon the sands, Decked with flags and streamers gay, In honor of her marriage day, Her snow-white signals fluttering, blending, Round her like a veil descending, Ready to be The bride of the gray old sea. On the deck another bride Is standing by her lover's side. Shadows from the flags and shrouds, Like the shadows cast by clouds, Broken by many a sunny fleck, Fall around them on the deck. The prayer is said, The service read, The joyous bridegroom bows his head; And in tears the good old Master Shakes the brown hand of his son, Kisses his daughter's glowing cheek In silence, for he cannot speak, And ever faster Down his own the tears begin to run. The worthy pastor — The shepherd of that wandering flock, That has the ocean for its wold, That has the vessel for its fold, Leaping ever from rock to rock — Spake, with accents mild and clear, Words of warning, words of cheer, But tedious to the bridegroom's ear. He knew the chart Of the sailor's heart, All its pleasures and its griefs, All its shallows and rocky reefs, All those secret currents, that flow With such resistless undertow, And lift and drift, with terrible force, The will from its moorings and its course. Therefore he spake, and thus said he: — "Like unto ships far off at sea, Outward or homeward bound, are we. Before, behind, and all around, Floats and swings the horizon's bound, Seems at its distant rim to rise And climb the crystal wall of the skies, And then again to turn and sink, As if we could slide from its outer brink. Ah! it is not the sea, It is not the sea that sinks and shelves, But ourselves That rock and rise With endless and uneasy motion, Now touching the very skies, Now sinking into the depths of ocean. Ah! if our souls but poise and swing Like the compass in its brazen ring, Ever level and ever true To the toil and the task we have to do, We shall sail securely, and safely reach The Fortunate Isles, on whose shining beach The sights we see, and the sounds we hear, Will be those of joy and not of fear!" Then the Master, With a gesture of command, Waved his hand; And at the word, Loud and sudden there was heard, All around them and below, The sound of hammers, blow on blow, Knocking away the shores and spurs. And see! she stirs! She starts, — she moves, — she seems to feel The thrill of life along her keel, And, spurning with her foot the ground, With one exulting, joyous bound, She leaps into the ocean's arms! And lo! from the assembled crowd There rose a shout, prolonged and loud, That to the ocean seemed to say, "Take her, O bridegroom, old and gray, Take her to thy protecting arms, With all her youth and all her charms!" How beautiful she is! How fair She lies within those arms, that press Her form with many a soft caress Of tenderness and watchful care! Sail forth into the sea, O ship! Through wind and wave, right onward steer! The moistened eye, the trembling lip, Are not the signs of doubt or fear. Sail forth into the sea of life, O gentle, loving, trusting wife, And safe from all adversity Upon the bosom of that sea Thy comings and thy goings be! For gentleness and love and trust Prevail o'er angry wave and gust; And in the wreck of noble lives Something immortal still survives! Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'T is of the wave and not the rock; 'T is but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee, — are all with thee!
An old man in a lodge within a park; The chamber walls depicted all around With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound; He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.
Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour. I hear in the chamber above me The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened, And voices soft and sweet. From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair. A whisper, and then a silence: Yet I know by their merry eyes They are plotting and planning together To take me by surprise. A sudden rush from the stairway, A sudden raid from the hall! By three doors left unguarded They enter my castle wall! They climb up into my turret O'er the arms and back of my chair; If I try to escape, they surround me; They seem to be everywhere. They almost devour me with kisses, Their arms about me entwine, Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine! Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti, Because you have scaled the wall, Such an old mustache as I am Is not a match for you all! I have you fast in my fortress, And will not let you depart, But put you down into the dungeon In the round-tower of my heart. And there will I keep you forever, Yes, forever and a day, Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, And moulder in dust away!
In the long, sleepless watches of the night, A gentle face — the face of one long dead — Looks at me from the wall, where round its head The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light. Here in this room she died; and soul more white Never through martyrdom of fire was led To its repose; nor can in books be read The legend of a life more benedight. There is a mountain in the distant West That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines Displays a cross of snow upon its side. Such is the cross I wear upon my breast These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er; Far off the noises of the world retreat; The loud vociferations of the street Become an undistinguishable roar. So, as I enter here from day to day, And leave my burden at this minster gate, Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, The tumult of the time disconsolate To inarticulate murmurs dies away, While the eternal ages watch and wait. II How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers! But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves, And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers! Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain, What exultations trampling on despair, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, Uprose this poem of the earth and air, This mediæval miracle of song! I enter, and I see thee in the gloom Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine! And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. The air is filled with some unknown perfume; The congregation of the dead make room For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine; Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. From the confessionals I hear arise Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies, And lamentations from the crypts below; And then a voice celestial that begins With the pathetic words, "Although your sins As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow." With snow-white veil and garments as of flame, She stands before thee, who so long ago Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe From which thy song and all its splendors came; And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name, The ice about thy heart melts as the snow On mountain heights, and in swift overflow Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame. Thou makest full confession; and a gleam, As of the dawn on some dark forest cast, Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase; Lethe and Eunoë — the remembered dream And the forgotten sorrow — bring at last That perfect pardon which is perfect peace. I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze With forms of Saints and holy men who died, Here martyred and hereafter glorified; And the great Rose upon its leaves displays Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, With splendor upon splendor multiplied; And Beatrice again at Dante's side No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise. And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love And benedictions of the Holy Ghost; And the melodious bells among the spires O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above Proclaim the elevation of the Host! O star of morning and of liberty! O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines Above the darkness of the Apennines, Forerunner of the day that is to be! The voices of the city and the sea, The voices of the mountains and the pines, Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines Are footpaths for the thought of Italy! Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights, Through all the nations, and a sound is heard, As of a mighty wind, and men devout, Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes, In their own language hear thy wondrous word, And many are amazed and many doubt.
The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device, Excelsior! His brow was sad; his eye beneath, Flashed like a falchion from its sheath, And like a silver clarion rung The accents of that unknown tongue, Excelsior! In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright; Above, the spectral glaciers shone, And from his lips escaped a groan, Excelsior! "Try not the Pass!" the old man said; "Dark lowers the tempest overhead, The roaring torrent is deep and wide!" And loud that clarion voice replied, Excelsior! "Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest Thy weary head upon this breast! " A tear stood in his bright blue eye, But still he answered, with a sigh, Excelsior! "Beware the pine-tree's withered branch! Beware the awful avalanche!" This was the peasant's last Good-night, A voice replied, far up the height, Excelsior! At break of day, as heavenward The pious monks of Saint Bernard Uttered the oft-repeated prayer, A voice cried through the startled air, Excelsior! A traveller, by the faithful hound, Half-buried in the snow was found, Still grasping in his hand of ice That banner with the strange device, Excelsior! There in the twilight cold and gray, Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky, serene and far, A voice fell like a falling star, Excelsior!
Wise emblem of our politic world, Sage snail, within thine own self curl’d; Instruct me softly to make haste, Whilst these my feet go slowly fast.  Compendious snail! thou seem’st to me, Large Euclid’s strict epitome; And in each diagram dost fling Thee from the point unto the ring; A figure now triangular, An oval now, and now a square; And then a serpentine dost crawl, Now a straight line, now crook’d, now all.  Preventing rival of the day, Th’art up and openest thy ray, And ere the morn cradles the moon Th’art broke into a beauteous noon. Then when the sun sups in the deep, Thy silver horns ere Cynthia’s peep; And thou from thine own liquid bed New Phoebus heav’st thy pleasant head.  Who shall a name for thee create, Deep riddle of mysterious state? Bold Nature that gives common birth To all products of seas and earth, Of thee, as earthquakes, is afraid, Nor will thy dire deliv’ry aid.  Thou thine own daughter then, and sire, That son and mother art entire, That big still with thy self dost go, And liv’st an aged embryo; That like the cubs of India, Thou from thyself a while dost play; But frighted with a dog or gun, In thine own belly thou dost run, And as thy house was thine own womb, So thine own womb concludes thy tomb.  But now I must (analyz’d king) Thy economic virtues sing; Thou great stay’d husband still within, Thou, thee, that’s thine dost discipline; And when thou art to progress bent, Thou mov’st thy self and tenement, As warlike Scythians travell’d, you Remove your men and city too; Then after a sad dearth and rain, Thou scatterest thy silver train; And when the trees grow nak’d and old, Thou clothest them with cloth of gold, Which from thy bowels thou dost spin, And draw from the rich mines within.  Now hast thou chang’d thee saint; and made Thy self a fane that’s cupola’d; And in thy wreathed cloister thou Walkest thine own grey friar too; Strict, and lock’d up, th’art hood all o’er, And ne’er eliminat’st thy door. On salads thou dost feed severe, And ’stead of beads thou dropp’st a tear; And when to rest, each calls the bell, Thou sleep’st within thy marble cell, Where in dark contemplation plac’d, The sweets of nature thou dost taste; Who now with time thy days resolve, And in a jelly thee dissolve, Like a shot star, which doth repair Upward, and rarify the air.
Amarantha sweet and fair Ah braid no more that shining hair!  As my curious hand or eye Hovering round thee let it fly.  Let it fly as unconfin’d As its calm ravisher, the wind,  Who hath left his darling th’East, To wanton o’er that spicy nest.  Ev’ry tress must be confest But neatly tangled at the best;  Like a clue of golden thread, Most excellently ravelled.  Do not then wind up that light In ribands, and o’er-cloud in night;  Like the sun in’s early ray, But shake your head and scatter day.  See ’tis broke! Within this grove The bower, and the walks of love,  Weary lie we down and rest, And fan each other’s panting breast.  Here we’ll strip and cool our fire In cream below, in milk-baths higher:  And when all wells are drawn dry, I’ll drink a tear out of thine eye,  Which our very joys shall leave That sorrows thus we can deceive;  Or our very sorrows weep, That joys so ripe, so little keep.
When Love with unconfinèd wings  Hovers within my Gates, And my divine Althea brings  To whisper at the Grates; When I lie tangled in her hair,  And fettered to her eye, The Gods that wanton in the Air,  Know no such Liberty. When flowing Cups run swiftly round  With no allaying Thames, Our careless heads with Roses bound,  Our hearts with Loyal Flames; When thirsty grief in Wine we steep,  When Healths and draughts go free, Fishes that tipple in the Deep  Know no such Liberty. When (like committed linnets) I  With shriller throat shall sing The sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,  And glories of my King; When I shall voice aloud how good  He is, how Great should be, Enlargèd Winds, that curl the Flood,  Know no such Liberty. Stone Walls do not a Prison make,  Nor Iron bars a Cage; Minds innocent and quiet take  That for an Hermitage. If I have freedom in my Love,  And in my soul am free, Angels alone that soar above,  Enjoy such Liberty.
Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly. True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield. Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee (Dear) so much, Lov’d I not Honour more.
Beholde, o man! lyft up thyn eye and see What mortall peyne I suffre for thi trespace. With pietous voys I crye and sey to the: Beholde my woundes, behold my blody face, Beholde the rebukes that do me so manace, Beholde my enemyes that do me so despice, And how that I, to reforme the to grace, Was like a lambe offred in sacryfice. ... And geyn thi pryde behold my gret mekenesse; Geyn thyn envie behold my charité; Geyn thi leccherye behold my chast clennesse; Geyn thi covetyse behold my poverté. Atweene too thevys nayled to a tree, Rayled with reed blood, they lyst me so desguyse, Behold, O man! all this I did for the, Meke as a lambe offred in sacryfice. Behold my love, and gyf me thyn ageyn; Behold, I deyde thy raunsom for to paye. Se howe myn herte is open brode and pleyn, Thy gostly enemyes onely to affraye. An hardere batayle no man myght assaye, Of all tryumphes the grettest hye empryse. Wher-for, O man! no lenger to dismaye, I gaf for the my blood in sacryfice. Turne home ageyn, thy synne do forsake. Behold and se yf ought be left behynde, How I to mercy am redy the to take. Gyf me thyn herte and be no more unkynde; Thy love and myn, togedyr do hem bynde, And late hem never departe in any wyse. Whan thou were lost, thy sowle ageyn to fynde, My blod I offred for the in sacryfice. Emprente thes thynges in thyn inward thought, And grave hem depe in thy remembraunce; Thynke on hem, and forgete hem nowght. Al this I suffred to do the allegeaunce, And with my seyntes to yeve the suffisaunce, In the hevenly court for the I do devyse A place eternall, a place of all plesaunce; For which my blood I gaf in sacryfice. And more my mercy to putte att a preef, To every synnere that non ne shal it mysse, Remembre how I gaf mercy to the theef Which hadde so longe trespaced and doon amys; Went he not frely with me to paradise? Have this in mende, how it is my guyse All repentaunt to bryng hem to my blysse, For whom my blood I gaf in sacryfice. Tarye no lenger toward thyn herytage; Hast on thy weye and be of ryght good chere. Go eche day onward on thy pylgrymage; Thynke howe short tyme thou hast abyden here. Thy place is bygged above the sterres clere,— Noon erthly palys wrought in so statly wyse. Kome on, my frend, my brother most entere! For the I offered my blood in sacryfice!
Where the remote Bermudas ride In th’ ocean’s bosom unespy’d, From a small boat, that row’d along, The list’ning winds receiv’d this song.  What should we do but sing his praise That led us through the wat’ry maze Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own? Where he the huge sea-monsters wracks, That lift the deep upon their backs, He lands us on a grassy stage, Safe from the storm’s and prelates’ rage. He gave us this eternal spring Which here enamels everything, And sends the fowls to us in care, On daily visits through the air. He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night; And does in the pomegranates close Jewels more rich than Ormus shows. He makes the figs our mouths to meet And throws the melons at our feet, But apples plants of such a price, No tree could ever bear them twice. With cedars, chosen by his hand, From Lebanon, he stores the land, And makes the hollow seas that roar Proclaim the ambergris on shore. He cast (of which we rather boast) The Gospel’s pearl upon our coast, And in these rocks for us did frame A temple, where to sound his name. Oh let our voice his praise exalt, Till it arrive at heaven’s vault; Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may Echo beyond the Mexic Bay.  Thus sung they in the English boat An holy and a cheerful note, And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept the time.
(excerpt) Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but th’ off-scouring of the British sand; And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heav’d the lead; Or what by th’ ocean’s slow alluvion fell, Of shipwrack’d cockle and the mussel-shell; This indigested vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety. Glad then, as miners that have found the ore, They with mad labour fish’d the land to shore; And div’d as desperately for each piece Of earth, as if’t had been of ambergris; Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, Less than what building swallows bear away; Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll, Transfusing into them their dunghill soul. How did they rivet, with gigantic piles, Thorough the centre their new-catched miles; And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground; Building their watry Babel far more high To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky. Yet still his claim the injur’d ocean laid, And oft at leap-frog ore their steeples play’d: As if on purpose it on land had come To show them what’s their mare liberum. A daily deluge over them does boil; The earth and water play at level-coil; The fish oft-times the burgher dispossest, And sat not as a meat but as a guest; And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs saw Whole sholes of Dutch serv’d up for cabillau; Or as they over the new level rang’d For pickled herring, pickled heeren chang’d. Nature, it seem’d, asham’d of her mistake, Would throw their land away at duck and drake.
My love is of a birth as rare As ’tis for object strange and high; It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility. Magnanimous Despair alone Could show me so divine a thing Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown, But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing. And yet I quickly might arrive Where my extended soul is fixt, But Fate does iron wedges drive, And always crowds itself betwixt. For Fate with jealous eye does see Two perfect loves, nor lets them close; Their union would her ruin be, And her tyrannic pow’r depose. And therefore her decrees of steel Us as the distant poles have plac’d, (Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel) Not by themselves to be embrac’d; Unless the giddy heaven fall, And earth some new convulsion tear; And, us to join, the world should all Be cramp’d into a planisphere. As lines, so loves oblique may well Themselves in every angle greet; But ours so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet. Therefore the love which us doth bind, But Fate so enviously debars, Is the conjunction of the mind, And opposition of the stars.
SOUL O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslav’d so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins; Tortur’d, besides each other part, In a vain head, and double heart. BODY O who shall me deliver whole From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretch’d upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go; And warms and moves this needless frame, (A fever could but do the same) And, wanting where its spite to try, Has made me live to let me die. A body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possest. SOUL What magic could me thus confine Within another’s grief to pine? Where whatsoever it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain; And all my care itself employs; That to preserve which me destroys; Constrain’d not only to endure Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure; And ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwreck’d into health again. BODY But physic yet could never reach The maladies thou me dost teach; Whom first the cramp of hope does tear, And then the palsy shakes of fear; The pestilence of love does heat, Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat; Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex, Or sorrow’s other madness vex; Which knowledge forces me to know, And memory will not forego. What but a soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit? So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew.
To make a final conquest of all me, Love did compose so sweet an enemy, In whom both beauties to my death agree, Joining themselves in fatal harmony; That while she with her eyes my heart does bind, She with her voice might captivate my mind. I could have fled from one but singly fair, My disentangled soul itself might save, Breaking the curled trammels of her hair. But how should I avoid to be her slave, Whose subtle art invisibly can wreath My fetters of the very air I breathe? It had been easy fighting in some plain, Where victory might hang in equal choice, But all resistance against her is vain, Who has th’advantage both of eyes and voice, And all my forces needs must be undone, She having gained both the wind and sun.
How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays, And their uncessant labours see Crown’d from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flow’rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men; Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude. No white nor red was ever seen So am’rous as this lovely green. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, Cut in these trees their mistress’ name; Little, alas, they know or heed How far these beauties hers exceed! Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, No name shall but your own be found. When we have run our passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race: Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow; And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed. What wond’rous life in this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pass, Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide; There like a bird it sits and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepar’d for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. Such was that happy garden-state, While man there walk’d without a mate; After a place so pure and sweet,  What other help could yet be meet! But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two paradises ’twere in one To live in paradise alone. How well the skillful gard’ner drew Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new, Where from above the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run; And as it works, th’ industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!
The forward youth that would appear Must now forsake his Muses dear,  Nor in the shadows sing  His numbers languishing. ’Tis time to leave the books in dust, And oil th’ unused armour’s rust,  Removing from the wall  The corslet of the hall. So restless Cromwell could not cease In the inglorious arts of peace,  But thorough advent’rous war  Urged his active star. And like the three-fork’d lightning, first Breaking the clouds where it was nurst,  Did through his own side  His fiery way divide. For ’tis all one to courage high, The emulous or enemy;  And with such to enclose  Is more than to oppose. Then burning through the air he went, And palaces and temples rent;  And Cæsar’s head at last  Did through his laurels blast. ’Tis madness to resist or blame The force of angry Heaven’s flame;  And, if we would speak true,  Much to the man is due, Who from his private gardens where He liv’d reserved and austere,  As if his highest plot  To plant the bergamot, Could by industrious valour climb To ruin the great work of time,  And cast the kingdom old  Into another mould. Though justice against fate complain, And plead the ancient rights in vain;  But those do hold or break  As men are strong or weak. Nature that hateth emptiness Allows of penetration less,  And therefore must make room  Where greater spirits come. What field of all the civil wars Where his were not the deepest scars?  And Hampton shows what part  He had of wiser art, Where, twining subtle fears with hope, He wove a net of such a scope  That Charles himself might chase  To Carisbrooke’s narrow case, That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn,  While round the armed bands  Did clap their bloody hands. He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene,  But with his keener eye  The axe’s edge did try; Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right,  But bowed his comely head  Down as upon a bed. This was that memorable hour Which first assur’d the forced pow’r.  So when they did design  The Capitol’s first line, A bleeding head, where they begun, Did fright the architects to run;  And yet in that the state  Foresaw its happy fate. And now the Irish are asham’d To see themselves in one year tam’d;  So much one man can do  That does both act and know. They can affirm his praises best, And have, though overcome, confest  How good he is, how just,  And fit for highest trust; Nor yet grown stiffer with command, But still in the republic’s hand;  How fit he is to sway  That can so well obey. He to the Commons’ feet presents A kingdom for his first year’s rents;  And, what he may, forbears  His fame, to make it theirs, And has his sword and spoils ungirt, To lay them at the public’s skirt.  So when the falcon high  Falls heavy from the sky, She, having kill’d, no more does search But on the next green bough to perch,  Where, when he first does lure,  The falc’ner has her sure. What may not then our isle presume While victory his crest does plume!  What may not others fear  If thus he crown each year! A Cæsar he ere long to Gaul, To Italy an Hannibal,  And to all states not free,  Shall climacteric be. The Pict no shelter now shall find Within his parti-colour’d mind;  But from this valour sad  Shrink underneath the plaid, Happy if in the tufted brake The English hunter him mistake,  Nor lay his hounds in near  The Caledonian deer. But thou, the war’s and fortune’s son, March indefatigably on;  And for the last effect  Still keep thy sword erect; Besides the force it has to fright The spirits of the shady night,  The same arts that did gain  A pow’r, must it maintain.
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
I hear the halting footsteps of a lass  In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass  To bend and barter at desire's call. Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet Go prowling through the night from street to street! Through the long night until the silver break  Of day the little gray feet know no rest; Through the lone night until the last snow-flake  Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast, The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street. Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way  Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace, Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,  The sacred brown feet of my fallen race! Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet In Harlem wandering from street to street.
Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;  Eat I must, and sleep I will, — and would that night were here! But ah! — to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!  Would that it were day again! — with twilight near! Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do;  This or that or what you will is all the same to me; But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through, —  There's little use in anything as far as I can see. Love has gone and left me, — and the neighbors knock and borrow,  And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse, — And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow  There's this little street and this little house.
Oh, come, my lad, or go, my lad, And love me if you like! I hardly hear the door shut Or the knocker strike. Oh, bring me gifts or beg me gifts, And wed me if you will! I'd make a man a good wife, Sensible and still. And why should I be cold, my lad, And why should you repine, Because I love a dark head That never will be mine? I might as well be easing you As lie alone in bed And waste the night in wanting A cruel dark head! You might as well be calling yours What never will be his, And one of us be happy; There's few enough as is.
It's little I care what path I take, And where it leads it's little I care, But out of this house, lest my heart break, I must go, and off somewhere! It's little I know what's in my heart, What's in my mind it's little I know, But there's that in me must up and start, And it's little I care where my feet go! I wish I could walk for a day and a night, And find me at dawn in a desolate place, With never the rut of a road in sight, Or the roof of a house, or the eyes of a face. I wish I could walk till my blood should spout, And drop me, never to stir again, On a shore that is wide, for the tide is out, And the weedy rocks are bare to the rain. But dump or dock, where the path I take Brings up, it's little enough I care, And it's little I'd mind the fuss they'll make, Huddled dead in a ditch somewhere. "Is something the matter, dear," she said, "That you sit at your work so silently?" "No, mother, no—'twas a knot in my thread. There goes the kettle—I'll make the tea."
I know what my heart is like Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool Left there by the tide, A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge.
I Love, though for this you riddle me with darts, And drag me at your chariot till I die, — Oh, heavy prince! Oh, panderer of hearts! — Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair, Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr, Who still am free, unto no querulous care A fool, and in no temple worshiper! I, that have bared me to your quiver's fire, Lifted my face into its puny rain, Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain! (Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave, Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!) II I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest words I flung in jest; And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways. I, that had been to you, had you remained, But one more waking from a recurrent dream, Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained, And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme, A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two. III Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! Faithless am I save to love's self alone. Were you not lovely I would leave you now: After the feet of beauty fly my own. Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, And water ever to my wildest thirst, I would desert you — think not but I would! — And seek another as I sought you first. But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithless when I most am true. IV I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far, — Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.
Written January 1718 in the Chiosk at Pera overlooking Constantinople Give me Great God (said I) a Little Farm in Summer shady, & in Winter warm where a cool spring gives birth to a clear brook by Nature slideing down a mossy Rock Not artfully in Leaden Pipes convey'd Or greatly falling in a forc'd Cascade Pure & unsully'd winding throu' ye Shade. All bounteous Heaven has added to my Praier a softer Climate and a purer Air. Our Frozen Isle now chilling Winter binds Deform'd by Rains, & rough wth blasting Winds ye wither'd Woods grown white wth hoary Frost by driving storms their scatter'd beautys lost The Trembling birds their leaveless coverts shun And seek in distant Climes a warmer Sun The Water Nymphs their silenced Urns deplore Even Thames benumb'd a River now no more The barren Meadows give no more delight by Glist'ning Snows made painfull to ye Sight. Here Summer reigns wth one Eternal Smile And double Harvests bless ye happy Soil. Fair, fertile Fields to warm Indulgent Heaven Has every Charm of every Season given! No Killing Cold deforms ye Beauteous Year The springing Flowers no coming Winter Fear But as ye Parent Rose decays & dies ye Infant Buds wth brighter Colours rise And with fresh sweets ye Mother-scent supplys Near them the Vi'let glows wth odours blest And blooms in more than Tyrian Purple drest The rich Jonquils their golden gleam display And shine in glorys emulateing day. These chearfull Groves their living Leaves retain The Streams still murmur undefil'd by Rain And growing Green adorns ye Fruitfull Plain The warbling Kind uninterrupted Sing, Warm'd wth Enjoyment of perpetual Spring. Here from my Window I at once survey The crouded City, & resounding Sea In distant Views see Assian Mountains rise And Lose their Snowy Summits in ye Skies. Above those Mountains high Olympus Tow'rs The Parliamental Seat of Heavenly Powers. New to ye Sight my ravish'd Eyes admire Each guilded Crescent & each Antique Spire The Fair Serail where sunk in Idle ease The Lazy Monarch melts his thoughtless days The Marble Mosques beneath whose Ample Domes Fierce Warlike Sultans sleep in peacefull Tombs Those lofty Structures once the Christian boast Their Names, their Honnours, & their Beautys lost Those Altars bright wth Gold, wth Sculpture grac'd By barbarous Zeal of savage Foes defac'd Convents where Emperors profess'd of old The Labour'd Pillars that their Triumphs told. Vain Monuments of Men that once were great! Sunk, undistinguish'd, by one Common Fate! How art thou falln Imperial City, Low! Where are thy Hopes of Roman Glory now? Where are thy Palaces by Prelates rais'd Where preistly Pomp in Purple Lustre blaz'd? So vast, that Youthfull Kings might there reside So Splendid; to content a Patriarchs pride Where Grecian Artists all their skill displayd Before ye happy Sciences decay'd; So vast, that Youthfull Kings might there reside So Splendid; to content a Patriarchs Pride; Convents where Emperors proffess'd of Old, The Labour'd Pillars that their Triumphs told, Vain Monuments of Men that once were great! Sunk, undistinguish'd in one common Fate! One Little Spot, the small Fenar contains, Of Greek Nobillity, the poor Remains, Where other Helens show like powerfull Charms As once engag'd the Warring World in Arms: Those Names that Roial Auncestry can boast In mean Mechanic Arts obscurely lost Those Eyes a second Homer might inspire, fix'd at the Loom, destroy their useless Fire. Greiv'd at a view which strikes vpon my Mind The short liv'd Vanity of Human kind In Gaudy Objects I indulge my Sight, And turn where Eastern Pomp gives gay delight. See; the vast Train in various Habits dress'd! By the Bright Seymetar and Sable Vest; The Vizier proud, distinguish'd o're the rest! Six slaves in gay Attire his Bridle hold; His Bridle rough with Gems, his Stirups Gold; His Snowy Steed adorn'd with lavish Pride Whole Troops of Soldiers mounted by his Side, These toss the Plumy Crest, Arabian Coursers guide. With awfull Duty all decline their Eyes, No bellowing Shouts of noisy Crouds arise; Silence in solemn State the march attends Till at the dread Divan the slow processions ends. Yet not these Objects all profusely Gay, The Gilded Navy that adorns the Sea, The riseing City in Confusion fair; Magnificently form'd irregular Where Woods and Palaces at once surprise Gardens, on Gardens, Domes on Domes arise And endless Beauties tire the wandering Eyes, So sooths my Wishes, or so charms my Mind, As this Retreat, secure from Human kind. No Knaves successfull Craft does Spleen excite No Coxcombs tawdry Splendour shocks my Sight; No Mob Alarm awakes my Female Fears, No unrewarded Merit asks my Tears; Nor Praise my Mind, nor Envy hurts my Ear, Even Fame it selfe can hardly reach me here, Impertinence with all her Tattling Train Fair-sounding Flatterys delicious Bane Censorious Folly; Noisy Party Rage; The Thousand with which she must engage Who dare have Virtue in a Vicious Age.
To all you ladies now at Bath,  And eke, ye beaux, to you, With aching heart, and wat'ry eyes,  I bid my last adieu.  Farewell ye nymphs, who waters sip  Hot reeking from the pumps, While music lends her friendly aid,  To cheer you from the dumps.  Farewell ye wits, who prating stand,  And criticise the fair; Yourselves the joke of men of sense,  Who hate a coxcomb's air.  Farewell to Deard's, and all her toys,  Which glitter in her shop, Deluding traps to girls and boys,  The warehouse of the fop.  Lindsay's and Hayes's both farewell,  Where in the spacious hall, With bounding steps, and sprightly air,  I've led up many a ball.  Where Somerville of courteous mien,  Was partner in the dance, With swimming Haws, and Brownlow blithe,  And Britton pink of France.  Poor Nash, farewell! may fortune smile,  Thy drooping soul revive, My heart is full I can no more—  John, bid the coachman drive.
’Tis merry to hear, at evening time, By the blazing hearth the sleigh-bells chime; To know the bounding steeds bring near The loved one to our bosoms dear. Ah, lightly we spring the fire to raise, Till the rafters glow with the ruddy blaze; Those merry sleigh-bells, our hearts keep time Responsive to their fairy chime. Ding-dong, ding-dong, o’er vale and hill, Their welcome notes are trembling still. ’Tis he, and blithely the gay bells sound, As his sleigh glides over the frozen ground; Hark! He has pass’d the dark pine wood, He crosses now the ice-bound flood, And hails the light at the open door That tells his toilsome journey’s o’er. The merry sleigh-bells! My fond heart swells And trobs to hear the welcome bells; Ding-dong, ding-dong, o’er ice and snow, A voice of gladness, on they go. Our hut is small, and rude our cheer, But love has spread the banquet here; And childhood springs to be caress’d By our beloved and welcome guest. With a smiling brow his tale he tells, The urchins ring the merry sleigh-bells; The merry sleigh-bells, with shout and song They drag the noisy string along; Ding-dong, ding-dong, the father’s come The gay bells ring his welcome home. From the cedar swamp the gaunt wolves howl, From the oak loud whoops the felon owl; The snow-storm sweeps in thunder past, The forest creaks beneath the blast; No more I list, with boding fear, The sleigh-bells distant chime to hear. The merry sleigh-bells with soothing power Shed gladness on the evening hour. Ding-dong, ding-dong, what rapture swells The music of those joyous bells!
Written at Norfolk, in Virginia “They made her a grave, too cold and damp For a soul so warm and true; And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe. “And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear; Long and loving our life shall be, And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree, When the footstep of death is near.” Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man never trod before. And when on the earth he sunk to sleep, If slumber his eyelids knew, He lay where the deadly vine doth weep Its venomous tear and nightly steep The flesh with blistering dew! And near him the she-wolf stirr’d the brake, And the copper-snake breath’d in his ear, Till he starting cried, from his dream awake, “Oh! when shall I see the dusky Lake, And the white canoe of my dear?” He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright Quick over its surface play’d— “Welcome,” he said, “my dear one’s light!” And the dim shore echoed for many a night The name of the death-cold maid. Till he hollow’d a boat of the birchen bark, Which carried him off from shore; Far, far he follow’d the meteor spark, The wind was high and the clouds were dark, And the boat return’d no more. But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp, This lover and maid so true Are seen at the hour of midnight damp To cross the Lake by a fire-fly lamp, And paddle their white canoe!
Oft, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood’s years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone, Now dimm’d and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me. When I remember all The friends, so link’d together, I’ve seen around me fall, Like leaves in wintry weather; I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me.
The time I’ve lost in wooing, In watching and pursuing The light, that lies In woman’s eyes, Has been my heart’s undoing. Though Wisdom oft has sought me, I scorn’d the lore she brought me, My only books Were woman’s looks, And folly’s all they’ve taught me. Her smile when Beauty granted, I hung with gaze enchanted, Like him the Sprite, Whom maids by night Oft meet in glen that’s haunted. Like him, too, Beauty won me, But while her eyes were on me, If once their ray Was turn’d away, Oh! winds could not outrun me. And are those follies going? And is my proud heart growing Too cold or wise For brilliant eyes Again to set it glowing? No, vain, alas! th’ endeavour From bonds so sweet to sever; Poor Wisdom’s chance Against a glance Is now as weak as ever.
Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king, Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing: Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! The palm and may make country houses gay, Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day, And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay: Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet, Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit, In every street these tunes our ears do greet: Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo! Spring, the sweet spring!
The ladies men admire, I’ve heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light; They’d rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints ... So far, I’ve had no complaints.
My own dear love, he is strong and bold  And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,  And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—  Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world,—  And I wish I’d never met him. My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,  And a wild young wood-thing bore him! The ways are fair to his roaming feet,  And the skies are sunlit for him. As sharply sweet to my heart he seems  As the fragrance of acacia. My own dear love, he is all my dreams,—  And I wish he were in Asia. My love runs by like a day in June,  And he makes no friends of sorrows. He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon  In the pathway of the morrows. He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,  Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart,—  And I wish somebody’d shoot him.
Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyesAnd moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,I struck him, and dismiss'dWith hard words and unkiss'd,His Mother, who was patient, being dead.Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,I visited his bed,But found him slumbering deep,With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yetFrom his late sobbing wet.And I, with moan,Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;For, on a table drawn beside his head,He had put, within his reach,A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,A piece of glass abraded by the beachAnd six or seven shells,A bottle with bluebellsAnd two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,To comfort his sad heart.So when that night I pray'dTo God, I wept, and said:Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,Not vexing Thee in death,And Thou rememberest of what toysWe made our joys,How weakly understoodThy great commanded good,Then, fatherly not lessThan I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,"I will be sorry for their childishness."